Guido Mazzoni, Theory of The Novel

THEORY OF THE NOVEL
Theory of the Novel
GUIDO MA Z ZONI
Translated by
Z A K I YA H A N A F I
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2 017
Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published as Teoria del Romanzo, © 2011 by Società

editrice Il Mulino, Bologna.
First printing
The diagram on page 12 is reprinted from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a

Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson, page 21 (Routledge Classics Edition) and
page 36 (Cornell University Press Edition). Copyright © 1981 by Cornell University. Used
by permission of the publishers, Routledge in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, and
Cornell University Press throughout North America and the rest of the world.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mazzoni, Guido, 1967– author.
Title: Theory of the novel / Guido Mazzoni; translated by Zakiya Hanafi.
Other titles: Teoria del romanzo English
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008613 | ISBN 9780674333727 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | Literature—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC PN3331 .M2813 2016 | DDC 809.3—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008613
Contents
Translator’s Note ix
I N T RO D U C T I O N : Truth and Literature 1
Why the Novel Matters 1

Books of Life 3
Games of Truth 5
Literature and Reality 9
What Is the Novel? 13
ONE: A Theory of Narrative 20
People and Leaves 20

Mimesis and Concept 25
The Hidden Contents of Mimesis 31
The Confines of Mimesis 33
Between Nothingness and Ideas: The Mimetic
Discontinuity 37
Stories 40
Narrative and Existential Analytics 47
Narrators 51
Levels of Reality 54
Being in the World 57
vi CONTENTS
T WO : The Origin of the Novel 60
Historical Semantics 60
The Question of Origins 64
The First Corpus 67
Symbolic Thresholds: 1550 75
Symbolic Thresholds: 1670 79
The Territory of the Romance 85
The Territory of the Novel 87
The Rise of the Novel 92
THREE: The Novel and the Literature of the Ancien Régime 95
The Dialectic of Continuity and Change 95

A Cohesive Epoch 96
Classicism and the Separation of Styles 100
Aesthetic Platonism 111
Moralism and Allegory 121
Moralistic Apparatuses, Poetic Justice, Exemplary Heroes 125
The Legitimization of the Romance 131
The Legitimization of the Novel 134
FOUR: The Book of Particular Life 138
The Romance and Private Aims 138

Suspense, Entrelacement, and the Romanesque 143
The History of Private Lives 148
A Discursive Gap 150
The Pathos of Proximity 156
The Interesting 159
The Novel’s Readership 161
Particular Life 163
National Differences: France and England 176
FIVE: The Birth of the Modern Novel 180
Freedom from the Rules of Style 181

Freedom from Allegory and Morality 185
Moralism, Empathy, and Observation 189
A New Conceptual Ether 200
The Weight of Novels 206
CONTENTS vii
The Expansion of the Narratable World 214

The Middle Station of Life 217
The Serious Mimesis of Everyday Life 220
The World of Prose 224
Center and Periphery 226
Narrative Democracy 228
SIX: The Nineteenth-Century Paradigm 230
Abstractions 230
Realisms 232
The Frameworks of the Nineteenth-Century Paradigm 236
The Figurative Novel and Its Theatrical Model 241
The Discovery of the Environment 251
Dependent Individuals 254
The Melodramatic Model 257
The Significance of the Melodramatic Novel 261
The Romance in the Novel, Special Characters 266
The Novel of Personal Destinies 267
A Map of the Nineteenth-Century Paradigm 270
SEVEN: The Transition to Modernism 272
The Second Phase of Nineteenth-Century Realism 272

Realism without Melodrama 274
Historical Stations 287
New Narrators 290
New Plots 297
New Characters 301
Three Turning Points 314
Short Stories and Epiphanies 319
Worlds Apart 323
The Modern Forms of the Romance 328
The Sense of a Transformation 330
EIGHT: On Contemporary Fiction 333

After Modernism 333
The Decline of the New 334
A Multiple Archipelago 337
viii CONTENTS
CONCLUSION: A Theory of the Novel 343
The Genre of Particularity 343

Relativism and Perspectivism 346
An Analytics of Existence 350
Discursive Transformations 352
The Design of This Book 360
On the Present State of Things 366
Acknowledgments 379
Index 381
Translator’s Note
Unless otherwise stated, all citations from foreign literary works are taken
from the standard English editions. Where no English version exists, or
when the English version is either partial or too old to be reliable, citations
have been translated directly from the originals. In these cases, the punc-
tuation and the use of capital letters have been modernized. The titles are
shown in English if the translated version has entered into common use (for
example, the Republic, War and Peace, The Man without Qualities) and
in the original language if the translated version has not entered into
common use. The original title in both cases is shown in the note along with
the original publication date if it is known and if the information serves to
provide a historical context for the text. When passages from secondary
literature are quoted, the English-language version is used whenever pos-
sible. When this is not available, they have been translated directly from
the originals. In certain cases, some changes have been made to ensure that
the critical passages accurately reflect the literary work under discussion.
Some foreign-language titles and expressions have been translated into En-
glish to aid understanding.
I realize that, despite my precautions, nothing is easier
than to criticize this book should anyone ever think of
doing so. Those who wish to take a closer look will, I think,
discover a dominant thought which binds together, so to
speak, the various sections of the whole book. But the range
of the topics which I have had to deal with is very wide and
anyone attempting to single out one fact to challenge the body
of facts, to quote one idea wrenched from the main body of
ideas, will manage to do so with ease. I should, therefore, like
people to do me the favor of reading my work in the same
spirit that has guided my efforts and to judge this book by the
overall impression it leaves, just as I myself have come to my
opinions not for a particular reason, but through the mass of
evidence.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
And suddenly a long-forgotten, meek old teacher, who had

taught him geography in Switzerland, emerged in Pierre’s
mind as if alive. “Wait!” said the old man. And he showed
Pierre a globe. This globe was a living, wavering ball of no
dimensions. The entire surface of the ball consisted of drops
tightly packed together. And these drops all moved and
shifted, and now merged from several into one, now divided
from one into many. Each drop strove to spread and take up the
most space, but the others, striving to do the same, pressed it,
sometimes destroying, sometimes merging with it.
“This is life,” said the old teacher.
“How simple and clear it is,” thought Pierre. “How could I
not have known before?”
—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Introduction
Truth and Literature
Why the Novel Matters
Nothing is important but life. . . . For this reason I am a novelist. And

being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the
philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of
man alive, but never get the whole hog.
The novel is the one bright book of life. . . . In this sense, the Bible is
a great confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about
man alive. Adam, Eve, Sara, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bath-
Sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul,
Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to finish? Man alive, not mere
bits. Even the Lord is another man alive, in a burning bush, throwing the
tablets of stone at Moses’s head.
This is the most important passage in “Why the Novel Matters,” an essay
written by D. H. Lawrence in 1925 and published posthumously in
1936.1 Here we find a theory of the novel expressed in bold, elementary
formulas—one that circulated widely among the writers of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. More sophisticated versions of the same ideas can
be found in the works of Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Henry James,
Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster.2 A few years before “Why the Novel
1. David Herbert Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” in Phoenix: The Posthumous
Papers (New York: Viking Press, 1936); reprinted in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays,
ed. Bruce Steel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 191–198. Regarding the
dating of the essay, see Steel’s introduction,” p. L.
2. Honoré de Balzac, “Avant-propos” (1842) to La Comédie humaine; English translation
“Author’s Introduction” to The Human Comedy, trans. Ellen Marriage in The Works of
2 INTRODUCTION
Matters,” in speaking about literature in general but thinking about the

novel he was working on at the time, the greatest of Lawrence’s contempo-
raries had written that “real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the
only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature.”3 Most likely, over
the coming decades, novelists of the twenty-first century will continue to
repeat the same ideas.
What makes Lawrence’s essay interesting is precisely its crudeness: by
simplifying the thought process and removing any nuances, it unabashedly
presents an opinion that many writers and readers have shared over the
past two centuries, thereby making it easily recognizable. The superficial
intentions of “Why the Novel Matters” are easy to decipher: Lawrence
wants to make himself important, to endow his works with an absolute
value and challenge anyone with the same ambitions who might threaten
his supremacy. And yet, if we reflect on the assumptions that make a
piece like this possible, we understand that what lies hidden behind the
mediocrity of his claims is an entire epochal landscape. Today we take
his words for granted: we might agree or disagree with him, but what we
read strikes us as plausible. When we compare Lawrence’s ideas to other
ways of viewing how the various human sciences relate to each other,
though, some of his judgments no longer seem obvious. Asserting that
the novel is the only book of life, placing it ahead of religion, philosophy,
and science, is hardly a gesture to be taken for granted. In order for a state-
ment like this to be even conceivable, the European cultural horizon had to
have already gone through two of the most profound metamorphoses in
its history. The first, more limited one transformed literature; the second,
which was more extensive, transformed the relations between literature
and other forms of knowledge, and, ultimately, those between literature
and truth.
Honoré de Balzac, ed. by George Saintsbury (Boston: Dana Estes, 1901) vol. 1, pp. liii-lxix;
Émile Zola, “Le Naturalisme au théâtre” (1879–1880); English translation “Naturalism on the
Stage” in The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York:
Cassell, 1893), 123–125; Virginia Woolf, “Life and the Novelist” (1926), in The Essays of
Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, 1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994),
400–412; Edward Morgan Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927) (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
3. Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé; English translation Finding Time Again, trans. Ian
Patterson, in In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols, general editor Christopher Prendergast, vol. 6
(London: Penguin Press, 2002), 204.
INTRODUCTION 3
Between the mid-sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,

a genre long considered an unpretentious form of entertainment—the
novel—became the primary art practiced in the West, the art that por-
trays the extensive totality of life,4 or, as a contemporary novelist put it,
the flagship that literature ranges against systematic thought, against sci-
ence and philosophy.5 No other aesthetic language has inspired so many
critical texts and so much thought over the past two hundred years. Writers
who were once accused of ruining the canons of taste and morality have
been introduced into school curricula; works intended for quick consump-
tion have received the kind of attention philology reserves for safeguarding
cultural monuments for posterity. Three centuries ago, an interest of this
sort would have been unimaginable: in 1740, at the beginning of a decisive
decade for the history of the novel in Lawrence’s homeland, no one in
England or elsewhere would have ranked the novelist ahead of the saint,
the philosopher, or the scientist.6 The metaphor of the novel as the book of
life appeared in the mid-1700s but began to be used the way Lawrence did
only toward the end of that century; and only over the course of the nine-
teenth century did the prestige of the novel become consolidated. The most
striking premise of “Why the Novel Matters” thus represents a geological
change in the system of literary genres starting from the second half of the
eighteenth century. The first question this book explores lies within the
confines of literature: Chapters 2 to 8 describe the birth of the novel, its
rocky rise, and its modern evolution.
Books of Life
But this discontinuity in the sphere of literature was part of a broader

transformation. To illustrate it, I offer a genealogy of the metaphor with
which we began. The book of life is an image charged with history: over
the course of time many works, many genres, and many disciplines have
claimed to be the book of life.7 The most distant example, that of the Bible,
4. György Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans (1920); English translation The Theory of the
Novel, trans. Anna Bostick (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971).
5. Walter Siti, “L’orgoglio del romanzo,” in L’asino d’oro 10 (1994): 67.
6. See Jerry C. Beasley, Novels of the 1740s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 1.
7. See Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1981).
4 INTRODUCTION
is also the one Lawrence refers to. But it is not hard to come up with other
precedents: for Galileo the book of nature was written in the language of
mathematics;8 more than a century later, Voltaire used the same image to
talk about philosophy,9 giving metaphorical shape to an idea that has ex-
isted ever since Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle made abstract thought the
highest form of human discourse.10
Lawrence is replicating a venerable intellectual move. He is reusing an
age-old critical genre: the paragone. In its Renaissance form, the paragone
compared the merits of two arts (poetry and painting, for example), but its
archetype has a wider scope and a more extensive genealogy.11 The first
comparison between families of discourses developed in Greece between
the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, when a set of practices and texts that
slowly acquired the name of philosophy broke off from the practices and
texts of the epic poets. The first major example of a paragone is found in
the Republic, where Plato endorses the superiority of concepts over mi-
mesis, and the primacy of philosophy over the imitative arts. This line of
thought gave rise to an opposition between the irrational languages of the
poets and the rational languages of the philosophers and scientists, namely,
the cornerstone of European metaphysics—the assumption that in the self-
representation of our culture is said to distinguish “the path of Western
thought . . . from all Oriental wisdom.”12
But while the genre of the paragone was formed in a Platonic mold, Law-
rence spoke from a completely different historical perspective. Between the
end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a
8. Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore (1623); English translation The Assayer, in The Contro-
versy on the Comets of 1618, trans. Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley (Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1960).
9. Voltaire, Zadig ou la Destinée (1747); English translation Candide, Zadig and Selected
Stories, trans. Donald M. Frame (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), chap. 3,
p. 109.
10. See Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948);
English translation European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), chap. 11.
11. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, chap. 11; Paul Oskar Kristeller,
“The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics,” part 1, Journal of the
History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951): 496–527, and part 2, 13, no. 1 (1952): 17–46.
12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Philosophie und Poesie,” in Gadamer, Kleine Schriften IV
(1977); English translation “Philosophy and Poetry,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful, trans.
Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 131.
INTRODUCTION 5
cultural transformation redefined the relations between the books of life.

During the eighteenth century there arose the discursive formation of
modern aesthetics, which investigated and prior to that recognized the con-
tent of truth crystallized in the discourses of the arts. Between the end of
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, many
writers and philosophers celebrated the force of art with new insistence.
This current of thought toppled ancient hierarchies. If it is true that the
texts grouped today under the category of mimesis have always been
important, it is equally true that only in the past two centuries have they
been so for the reason cited in “Why the Novel Matters.” The idea that a
narrative form could be superior to science, religion, and philosophy—
because only fiction grasps “life”—is recent. It is an idea that can exist
only once the aesthetic sphere is no longer conceived of as entertainment,
decoration, or the allegorical rewriting of already known moral, historical,
cosmological, and theological truths, but rather as an alternative model of
knowledge to the world-picture propagated by philosophy, science, and re-
ligion. It can exist only once we begin to think that life, or its innermost
core, eludes conceptual language.
In the past two centuries, mimesis and fiction have acquired a new
status. Whether or not we agree with Lawrence, there is no denying that
the art of storytelling holds truths that are vital to us: the claims stated in
“Why the Novel Matters” could be made only after the order of discourses
had undergone a metamorphosis. The significance of the novel and the
reason a species of entertainment gained so much importance over a period
of two and a half centuries is incomprehensible unless one understands
that its rise is the sign of a ground-shifting transformation in the rela-
tions between literature and truth, between literature and philosophy,
and between mimesis and truth that took place on the thresholds of the
modern age.
Games of Truth
There does exist a third way of expressing the relationship between books
of life, however, that differs from and comes later than the ones we find in
Plato’s Republic and “Why the Novel Matters.” I will explain it starting
from the end—from when the theoretical folds that this threshold contains
had been entirely unfurled.
6 INTRODUCTION
At the beginning of the 1980s, having agreed to write the “Michel Fou-
cault” entry in a dictionary of philosophers slated for publication in 1984,
Michel Foucault, under a pseudonym, attempted to explain the meaning
of his work in a few short pages. He states that what he pursued, book
after book, was an extended inquiry into “games of truth”: the discursive
practices that define what is true and what is false, what form the discourse
of truth must take, and who and what the subject and object of knowledge
are.13 Through these mobile structures, situated in and exposed to becoming,
he explains, being is constituted as experience and reality enters into lan-
guage as something that can be thought or represented.14 The expression
“games of truth” is a new term for what a decade and a half earlier, at
the height of The Archaeology of Knowledge, he had called “discursive
formations.”15 Most likely, during the years separating The Archaeology
of Knowledge (1969) from the dictionary entry, Foucault had been influ-
enced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his concept of “language games.”16 The
two formulas describe objects that differ in part, because Wittgenstein’s
idea applies to common, fluid practices (giving orders, describing objects,
reporting events),17 while Foucault’s notions designate knowledges codified
by centuries-old history (medicine, grammar, psychiatry, political economy).18
Still, the affinities are more interesting than the differences. For Wittgen-
stein as for Foucault, language and culture do not form coherent wholes
that can be talked about in the singular; instead, they compose hereto-
clite, fractured territories that are born, die, transform themselves, overlap,
clash, and interweave following the unpredictable, impossible-to-deduce
13. Michel Foucault, “Foucault, Michel 1926–” (1984); English translation by Catherine
Porter, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 314–319.
14. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, II. L’Usage des plaisirs (1984); English
translation The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1990), 6ff.
15. Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (1969); English translation The Archae-
ology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 31.
16. On the similarities between Wittgenstein and Foucault, see Arnold I. Davidson, The
Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), chap. 7.
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953); English translation
Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986), §§23ff.
18. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 31; Foucault, “Foucault, Michel 1926–,” 314.
INTRODUCTION 7
transformations of a prelinguistic entity that Wittgenstein calls “forms of

life” and Foucault “historical a prioris.” The discourses that form a part of
these complex volumes are not bound by unchanging norms, but by con-
stantly moving regularities subject to transformations.19 Both linguistic
games and games of truth are transcendental structures marked by a his-
torical and geographic origin. Culture as a whole is the sum of all the
discursive regions. Between the various provinces there is no rational hier-
archy, like what joined the forms of Absolute Spirit together in Hegel’s
philosophy, since no language can claim to have a privileged access to
truth.
Now: to compare games of truth and books of life without presupposing
that one of these codes has a theoretical privilege over the other means to
conceive of knowledge as a constantly changing sum of incommensurable
language games that follow a very different paradigm than what prevailed
after the clashes between philosophy and rhetoric, and between philosophy
and poetry, out of which Western metaphysics arose. The latter is founded
on the idea that only a certain use of language, that of thought, is able to
grasp the thing-in-itself. The act of thinking shared by everyone is devel-
oped rigorously by philosophy or science, which is to say, by the discourses
that encircle, reformulate, and put into order all other types of discourses.
Whoever compares games of truth without granting any theoretical privi-
leges effectively destroys the Platonic hierarchies. An overturning of this sort
was made possible over the past few centuries by two decisive transforma-
tions. Subsequent to these, other ways of understanding the genre of the
paragone arose that were very different from the one on which the edifice of
Platonism had been founded. The first coincided with the Romantic conse-
cration of the arts and the development of modern aesthetics, which is to
say, with the recognition that truth can reside in a medium other than the
concept. But the truly crucial threshold, the one that undermined Platonism,
emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century.
For the history of culture, the names of philosophers are primarily me-
tonymies: they indicate the collective flows of thought that certain authors
intercept, refine, and transmit to following generations. Nietzsche is the
name we use to demarcate the beginning of this new epoch. According to
the cultural perspective signified by this metonymy, every one of our affir-
19. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 37–38.

8 INTRODUCTION
mations comes out marked by a prioris that cannot be established, and all
the disciplines that strive to express the truth are a preunderstanding among
preunderstandings, a genre among genres, starting with philosophy—the
form of knowledge that has accredited itself with the power to dismantle
all presuppositions and to craft discourses free of blind spots. A century
later, the intellectual attitude that Nietzsche inaugurated was dubbed the
linguistic turn, and it spread throughout contemporary culture, reviving,
in a completely different historical landscape, some of the assumptions im-
plicit in the theories of language and knowledge that Plato had fought
against, namely, rhetoric and sophistry.20 This third way of understanding
the genre of the paragone, corresponding to a later historical phase than
modern aesthetics or the stances defended by Lawrence, constitutes the most
deeply rooted premise of this book. Every discourse we have about the
world (philosophy, science, religion, poetry, fiction) comes into being marked
by a blind a priori and bears an image of the content sedimented in its form.
This image is latent and prior to the manifest content that the individual
work strives to communicate. To think abstractly, to tell with words, to tell
with images, to paint, to calculate, to experiment in laboratories—none of
these are neutral activities. Rather, they constitute the core of a discipline,
they give a face to an idea of reality that each discipline constructs. The form
of the discourse imposes an order on the world: it creates an ontology. In
this sense, the prime content of every philosophical work is sedimented in
the medium of thought; the prime content of film lies in the use of motion-
images and time-images; the prime content of every narrative is crystal-
lized in the form of the story, and so on.
During ordinary communication, the assumptions on which games of
truth are based remain implicit: indeed, if ordinary communication exists
at all, if we can speak to each other with a reasonable expectation of being
understood, this is precisely due to the fact that the rules of speech are re-
moved from analytical processes and assumed to be valid. Etymologically,
that which is “implicit” is what remains folded away. In order to unfold it
we rely on thought, on the linguistic game to which we assign the task of
bringing to the surface the levels of meaning that, like the geological layers
hidden under the visible crust of the earth, remain crushed in the assump-
tions of our utterances. The act of thinking is made up of many movements
20. See Barbara Cassin, L’Effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

INTRODUCTION 9
that become possible or impossible, conceivable or inconceivable, depending

on the planes of the discourse that are opened up by a form of life and a
cultural model. To unearth these assumptions, the philosophical paradigm
that we associate with Nietzsche’s name makes use of the methods of de-
construction and genealogy. To know ourselves, to state the foundations
of our own identity, means taking our discourses apart and locating them
in the historical and geographic ground from which they emerged and to
which they will one day return. Ever since cracks appeared in the edifice of
Platonism; ever since the disciplines that for centuries or millennia claimed
direct access to the nature of things discovered themselves to be marked
by partial preunderstandings and by a contingent origin; ever since the
historicist, perspectivist, and multicultural idea that thought is born situ-
ated and that transcendentals change over time and space refused to be
subordinated to abstract thought; ever since truth was conceived as an
unconscious, collective illusio, and the will to truth itself became problem-
atic, genealogy and deconstruction have become the starting point of every
philosophy—or, better yet, they have become the starting point of every phi-
losophy seeking to repeat the Kantian critical act in our epoch, staying true
to the founding idea of European speculation, namely, that one must com-
mence from the foundations, begin from the beginning. In this kind of cul-
tural landscape, a discipline like literary theory, which is historically ac-
customed to comparing discourse genres and explicating what is implicit
in their structures, possesses a weight comparable to what formal logic
might have had when metaphysics was still untouched by the linguistic
turn. Naturally, neither morphological analysis nor historical-geographic
anamneses are removed from the vicious circle: their internal forms and
histories are thoroughly contingent and remain subject to other analyses and
anamneses. Still, they do have the logical and chronological advantage of
disclosing what normally remains closed from view: they possess the privi-
lege of belonging to a later phase.
Literature and Reality
There are two ways of understanding the practice of genealogy. In the Ho-
meric poems and in the Bible, genealogies set out family and intraspecific
lineages that link each individual to his or her ancestry; in the work of
Nietzsche, genealogies restore ideas to layers of reality existing before ideas
10 INTRODUCTION
and—to take up the expression used earlier and transform it into a

metaphor—they adopt an extraspecific look. On the Genealogy of Morals,
for example, does not limit itself to tracing the entire history of prejudices
on good and evil: it also unmasks the relations of power from which eth-
ical rules are said to derive. This book adopts a primarily intraspecific ap-
proach: I reconstruct the family history of the novel, beginning from its
rootedness in the language games of fiction and mimesis, and only at the
end do I tie the internal history of the texts to history tout court. Taking
this approach means putting forward a model of the relationship between
literature and reality. Let me clarify this by turning to the book on literary
theory that most clearly explains it.
In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson reflects on the par-
adigms that the critic employs to think about the connections between cul-
ture and the world. He refers to a passage by Louis Althusser that sets out
three ways of imagining the relationship between the totality of social life
and its parts.21 The first views reality as a network of small local events,
of precise relations that a certain minimal cause entertains with its effect.
Althusser defines this paradigm as transitive, Jameson as mechanical.
Homologous to the schemas of modern natural sciences, the mechanical
schema abounds in positivist-style histories of culture, which focus on
the molecular relations that constitute the kernel of every historical nar-
rative: the influence of one writer on another, of a historical event on a
cultural circle, of a milieu on an artistic form, of a publishing choice on
a literary genre.
The second paradigm, called expressive, conceives of the parts in con-
nection to a whole endowed with an inner essence. It separates the areas of
the real that express the core of the totality from the sectors that are pe-
ripheral and derivative. Appearing in the metaphysics of Leibniz, perfected
by the metaphysics of Hegel, a model of this sort gives form to the histo-
ries of culture and arts that descend from the tradition of Geistesgeschichte
but also from the Marxist sociology of culture in its popularized version.
Reality is divided into levels, and the levels are arranged according to a
21. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Lire “Le Capital” (1965); English translation
Reading “Capital,” trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2009), chap. 9; Frederic Jameson,
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1981), chap. 1.
INTRODUCTION 11
hierarchy that leads from the inner essence, or structure (“the ultimately
determining instance of economic organization”), to superstructural phe-
nomena (the history of culture), passing via the intermediate planes (poli-
tics, ideology, the history of intellectuals). Because the movements of the
structure and the movements of the superstructure are believed to be ho-
mologous, the latter are interpreted as reflections or consequences of the
former.22 The theory of layers is not an exclusively Marxist schema of
thought: every “school of suspicion” identifies a plane that is “the ultimately
determining instance” (the mode of production, the will to power, the
unconscious) on which the others are dependent, just as phenomena are
on their essence.23
The third, structural paradigm comes from the metaphysics of Spinoza,
and, according to Althusser, it represents the great theoretical novelty of
Marx’s Capital. In the expressive model, the essence of the whole is present
in a single, deep dimension that imprints its mark on the layers situated on
the surface. In the new model, the whole is inherent in each of its modes of
being: “the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects.”24 Ac-
cording to Jameson, this paradigm reworks the Marxist theory of levels
while reinstating Marx’s original insight:
Where the latter either conceived or, in the absence of a rigorous concep-
tualization, perpetuated the impression of “the ultimately determining
instance” or mode of production as the narrowly economic—that is, as
one level within the social system which, however, “determines” the
others—Althusser’s conception of mode of production identifies this con-
cept with the structure as a whole. For Althusser, then, the more narrowly
economic . . . is however privileged, not identical with the mode of pro-
duction as a whole, which assigns this narrowly “economic” level its par-
ticular function and efficiency as it does all the others. . . . This is the sense
in which this “structure” is an absent cause, since it is nowhere empirically
present as an element, it is not part of the whole or one of the levels, but
rather the entire system of relationships among those levels.25
22. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 92ff.

23. See Paul Ricœur, De l’interprétation: essai sur Freud (1965); English translation Freud
and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1977), 32ff.
24. Althusser and Balibar, Reading “Capital,” 189.
25. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 35–36.
12 INTRODUCTION
Jameson illustrates this paradigm with the accompanying diagram:
E
UR
Y
LT
OG
OL
CU
E
ID
MODE OF PRODUCTION, THE JURIDICAL

OR STRUCTURE
TH
EP
OL
TH
IT ICA
E
L
EC
ON
OM
IC
RELATIONS OF
PRODUCTION
FO
PR RCE
OD S O
UC F
TIO
N
It is important to understand that these mechanical, expressive, and

structural causalities do not exclude each other; rather, they describe dif-
ferent planes of being, each having a validity of its own in a multiplanar
world in which complex systems of causes are at work. The studies that
stem from the mechanical model, for example, plausibly explain why there
exists a relationship between the development of the novel and the growth
in the number of readers that took place during the eighteenth century, or
between the evolution of literary genres and the publishers’ decisions. It is
undeniable that Samuel Richardson’s success was partly due to the rise of a
new readership, and that the architecture of Dostoevsky’s works—his way
of dividing the text into chapters or building dramatically styled scenes—
also stems from the fact that his works were published as serials. In the
same way, the expressive paradigm captures real processes: often mocked,
the thesis of Marxist literary sociology that the birth of the modern novel
was a reflection of the capitalist economy and middle-class individualism
continues to return because it has a solid foundation in reality. However,
while it is true that each of the paradigms dwells on a legitimate layer of
causes, the perspective that this book adopts is inspired above all by the
third schema of thought and by its ontological decision. In keeping with
INTRODUCTION 13
Capital, Jameson defines “mode of production” as the totality of things and

relations. Still, this philosophical vocabulary does not necessarily have to
be applied to the structural model: the paradigm that Althusser and
Jameson describe maintains its essential traits even when a different meta-
physics and a different language are used to give a name to the whole. The
metaphysics and language that I will adopt descend from historicism and
from the Lebensphilosophie of the late nineteenth century: I will talk about
“forms of life” and “epochs.” Obviously, a choice of this sort can hardly be
justified in the space of a few pages. In the sectorial perspective of this study,
what will make it legitimate or illegitimate is the effectiveness or ineffec-
tiveness of the book you are now reading.
A form of life in an epoch of its history is composed of regional systems:
practices, social relations, institutions, linguistic games, and disciplines.
Although the parts of the whole are linked by mechanical and expressive
relations of causality, there is no “ultimately determining instance” that
combines all the others together, like an essence that sums up all the phe-
nomena. Instead, there are causal relations moving between the systems into
which reality is divided, each of which expresses an aspect of the whole that
partly or wholly escapes the other systems. While vulgar Marxist sociology
interprets the aesthetic sphere as a secondary outgrowth of an underlying
primary structure, this book starts from the conviction that an essential
aspect of the Western form of life takes shape and becomes an object of
knowledge only through mimesis and fiction. The reason for this, as we will
see, is because only in mimesis and fiction do human beings become aware
of themselves as individual, particular beings, thrown into time, located in a
world, and placed among others. To retrace the intraspecific history of the
ways in which people’s lives have been narrated means to reassess the history
of the ways in which this dimension of the real was anchored in language
and transformed into experience. I will therefore reconstruct a sectorial ge-
nealogy, and at the end I will attempt to understand if and how our form of
life comes out of this regional perspective illuminated.
What Is the Novel?
In its common sense meaning, as conveyed by contemporary dictionaries,

the novel is a narrative of a certain length, mainly fictional and mainly in
prose. The limitations of this formula are obvious: most novels are written
14 INTRODUCTION
in prose, but prose is not a necessary characteristic; most novels tell fic-
tional stories, but some describe real events; the length allows us to distin-
guish the novel from what we define as a short story or novella, but it turns
out to be impossible to establish precise criteria.
Let us give up on dictionaries, then, and turn to the genre theories that
have appeared during the past few centuries. One of the most influential
came out of the writings of Friedrich Schlegel. His critical fragments and
Dialogue on Poetry contain ideas that became widespread throughout the
1800s and were further developed in the 1920s and 1930s by Mikhail
Bakhtin. The novel, writes Schlegel, is the first important literary form to
be born outside the age-old norms, both written and nonwritten, that gov-
erned ancient and classicist poetics: it is devoid of rules, changes con-
stantly, and absorbs the other genres. Over the course of the nineteenth
century, these theories would lead to celebrated, eloquent reformulations:
Thus the critic who, after reading Manon Lescaut, Paul et Virginie, Don
Quixote, Les Liaisons dangereuses, Werther, Elective Affinities, Clarissa
Harlowe, Émile, Candide, Cinq-Mars, René, Les Trois Mousquetaires,
Mauprat, Le Père Goriot, La Cousine Bette, Colomba, La Rouge et le
Noir, Mademoiselle de Maupin, Notre-Dame de Paris, Salammbô, Ma-
dame Bovary, Adolphe, M. de Camors, L’Assommoir, Sapho, etc., still
dares to write “This is a novel, that is not” seems to me to be endowed
with a perspicacity remarkably like incompetence. . . . Is there a set of
rules for writing a novel, any deviation from which would require a story
to bear a different name?
If Don Quixote is a novel, is Le Rouge et le Noir one as well? If Monte
Cristo is a novel, what about L’Assommoir? Is it possible to make a com-
parison between Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Dumas’s Les Trois Mousqu-
etaires, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Monsieur O. Feuillet’s M. de Camors
and Zola’s Germinal? Which of these works is a novel? What are these
famous rules? Where do they originate from? Who made them? By virtue
of what principle, whose authority, and what reasoning?26
For Bakhtin, the changeability of the novel descends from its supposedly
comic and popular origins; for Schlegel, it represents instead the literary
correlative of the right to creative freedom and personal idiosyncrasy, the
26. Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean (1887–1888); English translation Pierre et Jean,
trans. Julie Mead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–4.
INTRODUCTION 15
cult of the particular on which was founded the epoch that Schlegel called
Romantic and we call modern.27 This anarchy presents itself in many
ways. According to the normative poetics that Antonio, the character in the
Dialogue on Poetry, expounds, the best novels are those that give them-
selves over to autobiographical confession or play with subjective humor:
“What is best in the best novels is nothing but a more or less veiled con-
fession of the author, the profit of his experience, the quintessence of his
originality.”28
What Schlegel has in mind is the autobiographical and humorous fic-
tion of Sterne and Jean Paul and Jacques the Fatalist by Diderot.29 But the
novel takes another characteristic form as well, which we find in the works
of Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Fanny Burney, and which clashes
with Antonio’s theory:
Yet I appreciate all the so-called novels to which my idea of romantic
form is altogether inapplicable, according to the amount of self-reflection
and represented life they contain. And in this respect even the followers
of Richardson, however much they are on the wrong track, are welcome.
From a novel like Cecilia Beverley, we at least learn how they lived there
in London in boredom, since it was the fashion, and also how a British
lady for all her daintiness finally tumbles to the ground and knocks her-
self bloody. The cursing, the squires, and the like in Fielding are as if
stolen from life, and Wakefield grants us a deep insight into the world
view of a country preacher.30
There are thus two ways of telling stories about individuals: by focusing
on the subjective angle of particularities, confessions, and idiosyncrasies; or
by dwelling on the objective angle, on the multiplicity of the outer world, on
the variety of everything that exists. About twenty years later, in reflecting
on the evolution of painting and the novel, Hegel expressed a similar idea
when talking about the freedom enjoyed by contemporary artists:
27. See Friedrich Schlegel, Fragmente; English translation Lucinde and the Fragments, ed.
Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971).
28. Friedrich Schlegel, Gespräch über die Poesie (1800); English translation, Dialogue on
Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, ed. Ernst Behler (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 1968), 103.
29. Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, fragment 78, p. 152: “Many of the very best
novels are compendia, encyclopedias of the whole spiritual life of a brilliant individual.”
30. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 103.
16 INTRODUCTION
Bondage to a particular subject-matter and a mode of portrayal suitable

for this material alone are for artists today something past, and art has
therefore become a free instrument which the artist can wield in propor-
tion to his subjective skill in relation to any material of whatever kind. . . .
In this way every form and every material is now at the service and com-
mand of the artist.31
The first volume of the Aesthetics ends with extraordinary predictive

lucidity by tracing out the two long roads mimesis would take from that
moment on: “the imitation of external objectivity in all its contingent shapes”
and “the liberation of subjectivity, in accordance with its inner contingency.”32
What he means by this is the desire to portray contingent lives and forms of
life in their objective particularity, as happens in the novels that the nine-
teenth century would call “realistic”; and the impulse of modern individuals
to express themselves and their individual difference, as happens in the intro-
spective genres and mimetic forms that overlay the things they represent with
the patina of subjectivity.
What is the novel today? If we were looking for a concise formulation
that belonged to neither Schlegel nor Hegel nor Bakhtin but that neatly
encapsulated an idea central to their theories, we might say this: Starting
from a certain date, the novel became the genre in which one can tell ab-
solutely any story in any way whatsoever. The boundless multiplicity of
forms of life, whether real or possible, can be narrated from inside or out-
side consciousness, and at the same time any style can be adopted, allowing
the variety of the subjective imagination to be revealed. Whoever goes into
a bookstore and browses the shelves where novels are stacked expects to
find a bit of everything: long and relatively short texts, stories about ordi-
nary lives and invented worlds, fictional stories and true stories, adventure
and the everyday, plausible and implausible plots, realism and estrange-
ment, self and world, seriousness and contingency, highs and lows, prose
but also verse. The fluidity of the boundaries is reflected in the fluidity of
the terms that designate the form. Rarely do contemporary bookstores
have a specific shelf dedicated to something called “novels,” while we often
31. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik; English translation
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975), 605–6.
32. Ibid., 801.
INTRODUCTION 17
come across a section dedicated to the genre called fiction by French and
English speakers, and narrativa by Italian speakers. Publishers reproduce
the same division: novels, autobiographies written for artistic purposes,
and short stories are grouped under the same series, almost as if they were a
subspecies of a wider species. This means that our culture conceives of every
narrative written with aesthetic intentions as part of a single family, inside of
which the differences matter less than the similarities. The same anarchic
fluidity is at work in the conscious and unconscious minds of writers: faced
with the empty page, modern storytellers know that they have absolute
freedom, at least in principle. In theory, the poets and playwrights of our
times also move in a realm of abstractly unlimited possibilities, but then, in
the practice of writing, only the writer who uses the narrative form is able to
encompass all the other genres. In the past couple of centuries, there con-
tinue to appear novels written in verse (from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to
Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate), novels written in dialogical and theat-
rical forms (Requiem for a Nun by Faulkner), and novels that contain lyric
poetry (from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago to Scuola di nudo by Walter Siti).
Few boundary lines are discernible in this apparently formless space. Rules
that dictionaries incorporate into their definitions (prose and length) are
the most uncertain and least relevant. Starting from a certain date, novels
began to primarily use prose, but this has yet to completely triumph; novels
are longer than novellas and short stories, but a rigid criterion is impos-
sible to establish. Moreover, the boundary that separates a long narrative
from a short one is hardly insurmountable: many of the things that can be
said about the modern novel are equally true for the modern short story,
because the two genres belong to the same species. The structural bound-
aries are other than these.
The first is the narrative form: in more or less straightforward or unusual
ways the novel tells a story. Although some works shift the barycenter of
the text toward nonnarrative elements, the language game of storytelling
remains implicit in the family resemblance we think about when talking
about the novel. The second is the possibility to make free use of any
content and any style. This is why the novel clearly distinguishes itself
from the narrative forms that premodern literary theory rigidly codified,
namely, the ancient epos and historiography. While these narrate defined
topics in a defined style, the novel remains changeable and multiform. To
ask what the novel is, what image of the world lies deposited in its structure,
18 INTRODUCTION
why this way of representing people and things has become so important,
means to answer two questions: What does it mean to tell a story? What does
it mean to tell a story about absolutely anything in any way whatsoever?
In Chapter 1, I attempt to answer the first question through a theory of
narrative and, more generally, through a theory of mimesis. Normally, lit-
erary criticism tackles a question of this sort from a timeless point of view,
according to a method first put into practice by the Russian Formalists
during the 1910s and 1920s, later picked up on by the discipline that Tz-
vetan Todorov, in 1969, called “narratology.”33 The discursive formations
of the story and mimesis became truly definable when they came up against
a real boundary. In the West, the borders that today still separate mimesis
from concept and literature from philosophy have a birth date: they were
fixed during the discursive battle that took place between the sixth and
fourth centuries BCE in ancient Greek culture. At the conclusion of these
conflicts there arose the theoretical boundaries that still shape our ways of
conceiving reality. Theory of the Novel takes its point of departure from
this original split.
The clash retraced in the first chapter is fundamental for other reasons
as well. As we shall see, fiction did not have the capability of telling any
story in any way whatsoever. This became a reality because the linguistic
institutions emerging between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE generated
forms of censorship and control over stories that maintained their hege-
mony for thousands of years, until modern literature swept them away.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 recount the birth of the novel, according to the modern
meaning of the term, along with how this took place between the mid-
sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the conclu-
sion of a dialectical, tortuous process, Western narrative was emancipated
from the two structures of sense that had hindered the anarchic mimesis of
particularities. The first was the Platonic-Christian subordination of the
arts to a normative morality and to disciplines that come to know reality
through the medium of the concept; the second was the classical and clas-
sicist poetics on the separation of styles, which broadly influenced Euro-
pean literature until the late eighteenth century. These a prioris bound the
narrative of ordinary lives to an apparatus of ideas and principles that came
prior to the disorder of ordinary lives. Instead, the novel allowed stories to
33. See Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du “Décaméron” (The Hague: Mouton, 1969), 10.
INTRODUCTION 19
be told about beings and the contingent circumstances that surround

them with a richness, plasticity, and new importance, introducing a de-
finitive break in the ways we represent reality and construct invented worlds.
When this transformation wielded its effects, the existence of private,
common individuals secured an unprecedented linguistic space in European
culture and the novel entered into the modern epoch of its history, as we
shall see in Chapter 5. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 trace out a historical morphology
of the modern novel, from the birth of the nineteenth-century paradigm
to the emergence of modernist and postmodernist fiction. The Conclusion
reflects on the global meaning of the novel as a game of truth and on the
aspects of contemporary life that narrative forms allow us to understand.
Every page in this book leads to this epilogue.
CHAPTER ONE
A Theory of Narrative
People and Leaves
In the ninth book of the Iliad Agamemnon sends Odysseus, Ajax, and
Phoenix to appease Achilles’s wrath. The three ambassadors arrive at the
camp of the Myrmidons while the hero is beginning to sing an epic song ac-
companied by a lyre he has won in the war. Patroclus listens, seated in front
of him. The song is interrupted by the arrival of the guests; taken by sur-
prise, with lyre still in hand, Achilles gets up to welcome them.
Now they came beside the shelters and ships of the Myrmidons
and they found Achilleus delighting his heart in a lyre, clear-sounding,
splendid and carefully wrought, with a bridge of silver upon it,
which he won out of the spoils when he ruined Eetion’s city.
With this he was pleasuring his heart, and singing of men’s fame,
as Patroklos was sitting over against him, alone, in silence,
watching Aiakides and the time he would leave off singing.
Now these two came forward, as brilliant Odysseus led them,
and stood in his presence. Achilleus rose to his feet in amazement
holding the lyre as it was, leaving the place where he was sitting.
In the same way Patroklos, when he saw the men come, stood up . . .1
This is the most ancient Western representation of storytelling, the prac-

tice that Plato would later identify using the inclusive term of mimesis.
1. Homer, Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967;
first ed. 1951), 9.185–95.
A THEORY OF NARR ATIVE 21
What he means by this in the Republic is the wider set of practices that
includes the more limited subset of storytelling, according to a taxonomic
schema that has come down to us through the ages. There are two other
similar scenes in the Odyssey, in the first and eighth books. One takes place
during a banquet, when the Proci force Phemius the bard to sing a poem
on the return of the Achaeans to their homeland; the other is when Odys-
seus, as a guest at the table of Alcinous, asks Demodocus to recount the fall
of Troy.2 The function of the epic song is hedonistic, commemorative, cel-
ebratory, and pedagogic. For nonprofessional singers, it is a pleasurable
pastime; for the bards, who perform during banquets, it is their job to sing
stories that hold a symbolic weight in the life of the community, about the
deeds of gods and heroes.
For the culture that the ancient Greek epos bequeathed to us, the origin
of stories is memory. The daughters of Mnemosyne, the Muses, confer on
the singer a power that seemed prodigious to archaic Greek culture: to
show parts of reality that elude the present because they no longer exist or
have yet to occur. Those who dedicate themselves to the storytelling in-
spired by the Muses acquire the power to describe beings and events be-
longing to a world that has disappeared or has yet to appear, “as if you
were there yourself or heard from one who was,” to use Odysseus’s words
in praise of Demodocus’s art.3 Hesiod explains the powers of Mnemosyne
using the formula that Homer employs to describe the powers of Calchas,
the diviner: to know all things of the present, the past, and the future.4 In
the Neo-Latin tongues and in English, a linguistic equivalent for the ability to
recall a fragment of life that is removed from the present or has yet to ar-
rive is found in the etymology of one of the terms used to translate mi-
mesis: representation. In theory, all beings and events can escape from the
cyclical continuity of occurrences to take on a symbolic existence through
2. Homer, Odyssey 1.150–154, 1.325–327, 8.487ff.

3. Homer, Odyssey 8.491.
4. Homer, Iliad 1.70; Hesiod, Theogony, lines 32, 38. For more on this comparison, see,
among others, Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Aspects mythiques de la mémoire en Grèce” (1959);
English translation “Mythic Aspects of Memory,” in Myth and Thought among the Greeks,
trans. Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2006), 115–138; and Marcel
Detienne, Les Maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (1967); English translation The Mas-
ters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1996), 39ff.
22 A THEORY OF NARR ATIVE
stories. If so, it would be possible to know all that comes to pass on the
earth, as the Sirens promised Odysseus in their bid to tempt him.5 Never-
theless, only a superhuman memory, like what the Sirens claim to possess
or like that of the gods, would have the capacity to remember the past in
its entirety. Human memory, limited like all mortal things, discriminates
and erases: lacking the capacity to remember everything, the bard chooses
a restricted canon of events and condemns a virtually infinite number of
beings and actions to oblivion. This is why the Greek epos defines itself
by naming its own content, that is, the events worthy of being safeguarded
in the story: “the glorious deeds of heroes,”6 the “works of the gods and
men.”7
To the culture that produced the Iliad and the Odyssey it seemed ob-
vious that the deeds of the gods should be brought back into the present:
in the Homeric poems it is taken for granted that divine actions are worthy
of being passed down. But when it comes to telling the stories of human
beings, the difference between memorable events and unmemorable ones
becomes problematic and charged with significance. Unlike the gods,
human beings are legion, they are born in obscurity, and they are subject
to the cyclic movement of nature, which replaces particular individuals
with other equivalent ones. This is the brutal law governing the condition of
all ephemeral beings. One of the most well-known similes in the Iliad offers
a visual expression of it:
As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another
dies.8
There does exist an afterlife in the Homeric world, but it offers no con-
solation for death: the shades who crowd Hades wander around as a mass
of spent individuals drained of vitality and painfully inclined to sigh for

6. Homer, Iliad 9.189.
8. Homer, Iliad 6.146–149.
life.9 The only form of true survival known to this ancient world is the
memory of human actions preserved in stories.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are studded with nomoi and ethe—general
observations that transform the poems into a community encyclopedia de-
signed to offer ethical, legal, political, and technical precepts. The simile of
the leaves contains one of these universals. These four lines, crystallized
into a comparison, state a law that governs the existence of finite beings;
they present a condensed ontology. If we were to translate it into a lan-
guage that would become possible only many centuries later, after the
development of philosophy, the thought being expressed would sound
like this: “Like all finite beings, living and dead, human beings are caught
in a dialectic between difference and repetition. This is because each indi-
vidual is threatened by the seriality implicit in the structure of being (one
lineage of people succeeds another; after one leaf comes another) and in the
structure of thought (language dissolves the differences between particular
individuals in the identity of common names, seeing that beings are unlim-
ited but words are few). The specific fates of Achilles or Odysseus are swal-
lowed up in the indistinguishable fate of ‘human beings’ in general, just as
the uniqueness of each leaf is swallowed up in the fate of ‘leaves’ in general.”
An assumption of this sort is what sustains the ethics of warrior glory and
legitimizes the commemorative and celebratory activity of the bards: each
with his own weapon does battle against the seriality of finite beings. He-
roic acts and the stories sung about heroic feats arise from the other side of
an opposite, complementary destiny: the fate of those who see their exis-
tence disappearing into a mass of equivalent lives, unable to impress a sign
of their difference in the fabric of the world, and destined to be lost in the
infinite cycle of endlessly similar beings.
In archaic Greek culture, the contradiction between biological life and
symbolic survival was expressed by the conflict between the parts that
9. In book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus goes down into Hades and, seeing Achilles, calls
out to him as a happy man—a seemingly appropriate epithet for someone who received the
honors of a god when alive and who is treated like a king in the land of the dead. But Achilles
replies that he would exchange his condition with that of a plowman or a slave, even, just to
be able to return to life and be something more than the lord of the washed-out shades. See
Odyssey 11.478–491.
compose human identity: the body and the proper name.10 The body be-
longs to the order of nature, the proper name to the order of culture. While
animals possess a body but have no name, there is no human being who
lacks a name, as Alcinous remarks to Odysseus.11 Proper bodies and proper
names are subject to the same destiny: the former lose their specific fea-
tures after death; the latter can vanish into the universality of common
names, as in the simile of the leaves, which refers to people in general but
not to a particular individual. However, there is one fundamental differ-
ence: while the biological existence of bodies puts individuals on an equal
footing by condemning them to death, the cultural existence of names has
the capacity to give a different weight to each being, bringing differences
into relief in the memory. Common people leave few narrative traces and
they are lost in a panoply of individuals who, like the dead, are nonymnoi,
or “nameless.” The less valiant warriors preserve a trace of their own iden-
tity, but only in the form of pure sound, a sign without an aura, dispersed
in the midst of countless other, similar signs that make up the long lists of
warriors fallen in battle. Only those who accomplish exceptional feats
propagate the glory of their proper name and are able to survive symboli-
cally in storytelling.12 The attempt to resist death and the will to distinguish
oneself in life ultimately respond to the same desire: to stand out from the
obscure background of the mortal condition, to push back against the
limits that imprison beings who are subject to physis, to escape the threat
that hangs over the living.
The singers are primarily concerned with one side of this twofold on-
tology: their focus is on particular beings, not on general laws; their works
offer a chain of stories, not a reflection on the constants that govern lives.
10. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Mortels et immortels: le corps divin” (1986), in L’Individu,
la mort, l’amour (1989); English translation “Mortals and Immortals: The Body of the Di-
vine,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), 27ff.
11. Homer, Odyssey 8.550–554.
12. Hesiod calls the dead nonymnoi, “without name” (The Works and Days, line 154).
On the antithesis between the dead and heroes, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Le Mythe hésiodique
des races: essai d’analyse structurale” (1960), and “Le Mythe hésiodique des races: sur un
essai de mise au point” (1966); English translation “Hesiod’s Myth of the Races: An Essay in
Structural Analysis” and “Hesiod’s Myth of Races: A Reassessment,” in Myth and Thought
among the Greeks, 25–87. Also by Vernant, “La Belle Mort et le cadavre outragé” and “Mort
grecque, mort à deux faces,” in L’Individu, la mort, l’amour, 76.
Although the gods are immortal, they cause or undergo transformations

similar to those that afflict humans. Although the universal maxims run-
ning through the poem are eternal, they are preserved in memory only with
regard to particular events.13 Although it is possible to formulate laws and
concepts in the form of nomoi and ethe, the logic of the poems is suited for
dwelling on the singular, the accidental, and the ephemeral. About twenty-
eight centuries later, we perfectly understand this short-sightedness: we find
exactly the same thing in the stories that crop up all around us—because
the outlook on the world adopted by the Homeric poems is still implicit
today in the language game of storytelling as it has been passed down to
us. What image of reality is communicated when telling a story? What lies
hidden in the act of narration?
Mimesis and Concept
The gesture of beginning with the ancient Greeks has often accompanied
philosophies of history based on the idea that culture develops organically
and the end is contained in the beginning. This is not my intention. I turn to
genealogy only because I want to pinpoint when the structures of sense that
still shape our discourses today first came to be established. Mimesis and
narrative were defined only when they came up against fines, that is, real
boundaries. For a long time, ancient Greek culture relied on the works of
Homer and Hesiod as its primary discourse of truth: they transmitted
mythical tales, historical memory, cosmologies, moral philosophies, nomoi,
and ethe. Between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, this apparatus of
knowledge was shaken by violent criticisms, and the authority of story-
tellers began to come under fire in the name of another idea of knowledge
that was confusedly in the process of forming. The attacks that Pythagoras,
Xenophon, Hecate of Miletus, Heraclitus, and others directed against the
mythical tales and works of Homer and Hesiod, the allegorical readings of
the Iliad and the Odyssey that spread from the third decade of the sixth
century BCE,14 are the sign of a slow transformation that changed the idea
13. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1982).
14. On this period of change, see, among others, Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: les ori-
gines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1958), 95ff.; Jesper
Svenbro, La Parole et le Marbre: aux origines de la poétique grecque (Lund: N.p., 1976),
of knowledge and culminated at the beginning of the fourth century BCE

in one of the texts that was crucial for the history of games of truth in the
West: Plato’s Republic.
Plato was the first to use the term mimesis as a unitary category for
grouping together all the imitative arts.15 The field was defined precisely
101ff.; Marcel Detienne, L’Invention de la mythologie (1981); English translation The Cre-
ation of Mythology, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),
82ff.; Silvia Gastaldi, Paideia/mythologia, in Plato, La Repubblica, trans. and ed. with com-
mentary by Mario Vegetti, vol. 2 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1998), bks. 2 and 3, pp. 348ff. On the
competition between forms of knowledge as a basic characteristic of archaic Greek culture,
see Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd, Magic, Reason, and Experience: Studies in the Origin
and the Development of Greek Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); also
by Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Sci-
ence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and The Ambitions of Curiosity: Un-
derstanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
15. The words mimos (mime as genre and the mime as an actor), mimeisthai (to mimic),
mimema (the result of the act of mimicking), and mimetes (he who mimics) can be found
starting in the fifth century, especially in reference to the genre of mime and dance. Initially
the act of mimeisthai signified the effects of a performance that was more than an aesthetic
representation. It denoted primarily the deception practiced by the mimetes vis-à-vis those
who watched, in other words, the relationship that is established between the imitator, the
person imitated, and the removal of identity that imitation entails. In the first half of the fifth
century BCE, this set of words could denote poetic-musical works as well as visual ones, but
as early as the end of the sixth century BCE, Simonides had associated painting and poetry.
See Hermann Koller, Die Mimesis in der Antike: Nachahmung, Darstellung, Ausdruck (Bern:
Francke, 1954); Gerald F. Else, “Imitation in the Fifth Century,” Classical Philology 53, no. 2
(April 1958): 73–90; Göran Sörbom, Mimesis and Art: Studies in the Origin and Early De-
velopment of an Aesthetic Vocabulary (Stockholm: Svenska Bokforlaget, 1966); Jean-Pierre
Vernant, “Naissance d’images,” in Religions, histoires, raisons (1978); English translation “The
Birth of Images,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 164–185; Gregory Nagy, “Early Greek Views of
Poets and Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Classical Criti-
cism, ed. George A. Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1–77; and es-
pecially Stephen Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15ff. In works by Plato, the term mimesis
has many meanings, and the imitative activity is judged in different, sometimes contradictory
ways (a detailed analysis can be found in Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mimesis, chaps. 1–4, in
Stefan Büttner, Die Literaturtheorie bei Platon und ihre anthropologische Begründung
[Tübingen: Francke, 2000], and in Daniele Guastini, Prima dell’estetica: Poetica e filosofia
nell’antichità [Rome: Laterza, 2003], chap. 2). I will focus on the most important meaning
for the history of effects, namely, the mimesis that Plato explains in several passages in the
Republic and that make him “the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced” (Friedrich
Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift [1887]; English translation On the
because it came up against an objective limit.16 The author of the Republic

was actually refining a knowledge that during the millennia to come would
put into question the value of the imitative arts, one that, when juxtaposed
with the activities of poets and painters, made these seem similar enough to
be called by the same name. The frontier Plato traced out between the
new paradigm and the old games of truth arose out of a retrospective, te-
leological narrative, because the cultural spaces the Republic distinguished
between so peremptorily were only clearly separated from each other in
the fourth century BCE.17 Plato talks about a “quarrel from of old”18 that
divided poetry and philosophy, but in reality, this conflict only became con-
ceivable in the years of his youth—only at the end of the fifth century were
the terms poiesis and philosophia applied to genres that were distinguish-
able by form and content.19 But while it may be true that some aspects of
the story told by the Republic are skewed, it is equally true that it was le-
gitimized a posteriori by subsequent history. Plato’s work gives a name to
the process that led European culture to exacerbate the tension between
poetry and thought and to separate out two different cultural platforms:
knowledge that mimics versus knowledge that reasons, imitation versus
abstract thought, mimesis versus concept. Despite the criticisms that Western
metaphysics and Platonism have endured over the past century and a
half, still today, one hundred and forty years after Nietzsche and forty
years after the linguistic turn, these discursive families continue to trace
out the boundaries of the disciplines through which we come to know the
world. Although challenged by theory, in practice the antithesis remains
impregnable: the disciplines of arts and philosophy or arts and sciences re-
main separated by institutional and, therefore, objective borders. To receive
Genealogy of Morals, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007], 114).
16. See Lloyd, Magic, Reason, and Experience, 100ff.; Andrea Wilson Nightingale,
Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1995).
17. Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue, 60ff.; Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Lit-
erary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2002), 46ff.
18. Plato, Republic 10.607b, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vols. 5 and 6, trans. Paul Shorey
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
19. Maria Michela Sassi, Gli inizi della filosofia: in Grecia (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,
2009), chap. 5.
a salary as a bearer of legitimate knowledge on any subject whatsoever,

one’s knowledge must have been expressed in a reasoned form: imitators
are compensated only inasmuch as they are experts of an art, as specialists
in “creative writing.”
Instead, at the beginning of the fourth century, stories were still a direct
source of knowledge and the architrave of Greek paideia. The Republic
reexamines the role this tradition should have in the pedagogic system of
an ideal state. In Plato’s opinion, imitators should be either censored or
expelled from the city. Some of his arguments are motivated by the way
mimesis appeared in the first half of the fourth century BCE. The Repub-
lic’s condemnation was provoked in part by the bodily and musical nature
of the contemporary epic and dramatic recitation: the forms of cultivated
mimesis that we moderns are accustomed to are much less visceral than the
ones Plato was alluding to. In this regard, some of the criticisms we find in the
Republic belong to the past. Others, however, are fixed forever in the cogni-
tive habits of the West.
Plato deploys multiple arguments in his attack against mimesis, but the
most important and lasting objections are two. The first, which had been
around for a long time,20 was moralistic in nature: poets corrupt customs.
They describe the gods in the process of performing unworthy actions; they
show us that just people may end up unhappy and unjust people happy;
they invent characters and plots that are different from how the world
should appear if it were governed according to the idea of the good. Sto-
ries like this, says the character of Socrates, are likely to incite the “tender
and impressionable” young to immoral actions and thoughts. Furthermore,
poets have the capacity—a disturbing one for Plato—to imitate anything:
they tell stories about good and evil with equal ease; they give themselves
over to a protean changeability that is at odds with the stability that vir-
tuous men should demonstrate.21
20. Svenbro, La Parole et le Marbre, chap. 3 and following; Detienne, The Creation of
Mythology, 82ff.; Gastaldi, Paideia/mythologia, 349.
21. Plato, Republic 3.395c–396e. The assumption implicit in these stances, traces of
which are found in Xenophon as well, is that the effect of a mimetic act does not depend on
the effectiveness of the representation, but on the moral quality of the object represented.
Imitating unworthy objects, or appreciating the imitations of unworthy objects, means taking
on the reprehensible qualities of those things. As we shall see later, a trace of this idea remains
in the aesthetics of European classicism.
The second criticism, concentrated primarily in the tenth book, is theo-

retical in nature and largely new. Imitators, says the character of Socrates,
are incapable of teaching the truth, because the act of representing itself is
what leads them so far astray from the truth. Because knowing means to
penetrate beneath the surface of phenomena to capture their unchanging
essences—the Ideas that lie under particular appearances—whoever imi-
tates will never go beyond the ephemeral aspect of people and things.22
Socrates explains this using an example that would become famous. The
true bed is the Idea, the eternal form of the bed created by god; what we
find in the real world are instead determinate, individual beds built by
carpenters who are inspired by the general idea of “bed.” Not only is a
painting the imitation of an individual bed, it is seen from a limited per-
spective and painted by a painter who has no authentic knowledge of
what he is depicting. The behavior of poets is no different. They re-
main obtusely attached to the singular, the phenomenal, the momentary,
and the superficial; they do not represent people as they should be but
rather show them burdened with particularities and emotions; they pro-
duce “inferior things” (phaula) with respect to the truth, ones best suited
only to seduce the lower region of the soul, the changeable part stirred by
the passions.23
These moralistic and theoretical criticisms cleared the way for the emer-
gence of a position that exerted considerable influence on European cul-
ture. Although the moral and theoretical stances both derived from the same
origin, they had different outcomes. To know that which is, a reasoning
thought is required to discern principles: norms, regularities, and essences
need to be established just as much to identify vices and virtues as to deci-
pher natural laws. Here we have the first expression of a conflict between
the two language games that would vie for hegemony over legitimate knowl-
edge for the next two thousand years: imitation versus abstract thought,
mimesis versus concept. Out of this original clash there arose local disputes
between discursive formations built on these foundations: literature versus
philosophy, the imitative arts versus science. After remaining latent for
centuries, the conflict surfaced in the work of Plato and became rooted in
European culture. With the completion of this process, “the history of Western
22. Plato, Republic 10.598b–601c.

23. Plato, Republic 10.603a–605c.
literary theory can be summed up as a continuous debate on the classical

dictum that poets are liars.”24
Plato expressed himself through the form of his works as well as through
theory. It is true that certain devices (the use of myths and the dialogue
genre) arose during a phase in history when the border between philos-
ophy and poetry had not yet been demarcated, but it is equally true that
Plato made every effort to mark this boundary, by separating mimesis
from thought and creating a division between them. While poets speak of
particular, visible beings, philosophers relate particularities to the univer-
sality of abstract, invisible ideas. While poets recount singular episodes that
stand out from the serial foundation of life, philosophers ponder regulari-
ties. While the syntax of the poets is made to tell of deeds happening in
time and space, philosophers bind the parts of reality together through
analytical, atemporal turns of phrase. While mimesis speaks of beings and
appearances, philosophy speaks of being and essences. While poets take
their authority from the Muse and speak without intermediaries, philoso-
phers discuss other people’s doxa, the mechanism of abstract thought re-
ferring to the presence of a second person, whether overt or introjected.25
This division between games of truth is what made a discourse on the a
priori assumptions of discourses possible. It is no coincidence that the
Republic reflects on the processes of rational thought as well as attempting
to pin down the presuppositions of mimesis and narrative. A process of
this sort had to take place before it became possible to challenge the lin-
guistic foundations of knowledge and ask the question that concerns us
now: What implicit content, what image of the world, lies sedimented in
the act of telling a story? I will start with mimesis to make our way to
narrative.
24. See Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in

Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. Hans Robert Jauss (Munich: Fink, 1969); English translation
“The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” in New Perspectives in German
Literary Criticism, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1979), 29–48, quote from 29.
25. “A silent inner conversation of the soul with itself has been given the special name of
thought.” Plato, Sophist 263e.
The Hidden Contents of Mimesis
The main content sedimented in mimesis is the adoption of an ontology.

Mimesis moves in a specific territory of being: it inhabits the realm of
particularities; it addresses the sublunar world. Gods, abstractions, super-
human or subhuman beings, fantastic characters, universal laws, relation-
ships, causes, categories, logical classes become objects of representation
only if they take on a sensible and episodic appearance or serve as a back-
ground to a work focused on the imitation of finite beings. When abstract
entities are central to the text and take the form of ideas, the public living
in an epoch whose culture is already familiar with other discursive formations
and other models of truth perceives the occurrence of a code-switching,
the advent of a different language game.
We can translate the preunderstanding immanent in mimesis into con-
temporary philosophical vocabulary. The culture of the twentieth century
offers two lexicons well suited for this purpose: the reflection of phe-
nomenology on the concept of the lifeworld and that of Anglophone an-
alytic philosophy on the vision of the world said to be implicit in the common
sense of human beings. The ontology that mimesis presupposes resem-
bles the general structures of the Lebenswelt as it is imagined by Husserl
or the set of beliefs—“commonplaces of the least refined thinking”—that
the descriptive metaphysics of P. F. Strawson tries to identify.26 The Leb-
enswelt presupposes that reality is composed of objects and beings included
in a horizon;27 naive realism imagines that the world is made of “partic-
ular things, some of which are independent from ourselves,” that history is
made of “episodes in which we may or may not have a part,” and that the
constitutive elements of the real are bodies and persons.28 Husserl is not
always unequivocal on this point, but his philosophy seems to assume that
26. See Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzen-
dentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (1936); En-
glish translation Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans.
David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §37; and Peter Fredrick
Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 1959),
10ff.
27. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §§37 and 38.
28. Strawson, Individuals, 15.
the lifeworld is relatively atemporal;29 Strawson, on the other hand, is

explicit in saying that naive realism is a fixed core “which has no his-
tory—or none recorded in histories of thought.”30 A comparative look at
the discursive formations of our culture shows the frameworks of the
Lebenswelt or naive realism to be everywhere, but not as much in the
language game of abstract thought as in the parallel and concurrent one
of mimesis. We are capable of deciphering the rocky images on cave walls
or the epic stories of extinct peoples. When faced with a painting coming
from a distant time and space, with marks traced out using conventions that
vary widely from our own, we still understand that certain figures mean a
person or an animal, a woman or a man, a seated or standing character, a
warrior or a farmer. When reading a story written thousands of years ago in
a culture we know nothing about, we are still able to get a rough sense of
what is happening. The continuity that the structures of imitation show
throughout the ages suggests that the elementary forms of the Lebenswelt,
the foundations of naive realism, really can transcend times and places. It
would almost seem as if mimesis contained a supratemporal grammar of
the finite experience. In the case of figurative arts, these primary forms
are implicit in the bond with what E. H. Gombrich called “the message
from the visible world;”31 in the case of mimesis in general, the common
element is a link with particularity. The arts that are entirely detached
from these minimum common bonds, such as abstract painting or pure
poetry, cease to appear mimetic.32 When images do not portray objects
or people, figurative art no longer appears figurative; when words ignore
finite beings, there arise nonimitative genres and discourses. If the lower
boundary of mimesis is the sign that becomes sound or pure form, as it
does in music or abstract painting, the upper boundary is the sign which,
by refraining from representing the finite, becomes pure concept or pure
abstraction.
29. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, §36.

30. Strawson, Individuals, 10.
31. Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Represen-
tation (1960) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 181.
32. On the minimum common bonds that appear to remain despite the perpetual
changeability of mimetic styles, see also Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Pourquoi la fiction? (1999);
English translation Why Fiction? trans. Dorrit Cohn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2010), 95.
The skeleton that lies beneath mimesis is thus an ontology whose pri-
mary structures are unchanging. On the surface of representation, mimetic
works depict the world in its mutability; because if it is true that the imita-
tors operate in a specific ontological realm, each being is particular only
thanks to the distinctive traits that make it this entity and not another. Mi-
mesis is the only language game capable of portraying the real or possible
modes that particularities can assume. Between the second half of the sev-
enteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, in order to
make the novel more noble, critics resorted to an argument that was re-
markably successful: they said that the new genre filled a vacuum in tradi-
tional historiography. Because novels recount the history of private lives
and manners, they preserve the traces of things too fugitive and ephemeral
to have a place in official discourses. This observation applies to more than
just the novel: much of what we know about forms of life that have dis-
appeared, or about forms of life that are contemporary but unknown,
comes to us thanks to the language game of mimesis as it functions in the
writing of history, chronicles, news reports, and in the arts. Imitation thus
stands at the center of a double movement: on the one hand, it suggests the
fixed persistence of a Lebenswelt that traverses all ages and cultures; on the
other, it shows us the forms that particular life has assumed in different
epochs and cultures. It does so by revealing the modes that cover the onto-
logical skeleton of naive realism and by dwelling on transient aspects:
appearances, features, gestures, characters, customs, morals, environments,
ways of thinking. Of course, imitative works are an interpretation of the
surface, not a copy: the image of the modes of being that reaches us is fil-
tered by the techniques artists use, by the perceptual schemas of a given
culture, and by the aesthetic fashions of a certain epoch. That said, the docu-
mentary and memorial value of the arts is crucial: without mimesis, we
would lose the traces of an entire ontological realm, the most fragile and
fugitive one. While other language games leave out the changing forms of
life, mimesis acts as a storehouse or repository of the contingent.
The Confines of Mimesis
A metaphysics that conceives of reality as a jumble of beings and particular

events; a system of signs that seeks to convey the multiplicity of life and life
forms: these are the premises of what I shall call the mimetic relationship
with the world, the precondition and rule of the genre we are talking about.
But to understand its meaning we need to reflect on a crucial problem
posed with immediacy by the Homeric poems and the Republic: it is not
obvious that the mimetic relationship with the world should always exist or
that it should always be considered valuable. Mimesis is bounded by a lower
limit and an upper limit beyond which different language games come into
play.
Other ways of interpreting reality are implicit in the simile of the
leaves—ones that, if taken literally, would make the discourse of the bards
impossible. If beings succeed each other, generation after generation, al-
ways different but always the same, then individuals and individual forms
of life may or may not be: their existence is similar to other existences; their
life is ephemeral and replaceable. They are pure contingency. Like inessen-
tial slivers of a totality that looms over them, they mean something only as
fleeting moments of a cyclical motion or as interchangeable tokens of a law
or concept. The tautological individual and the particular case of a uni-
versal law are two sides of one and the same way of regarding life. For those
who adopt an outlook of this kind, the only seat of truth—of meaning and
value—if it exists, is the history of the species, conceived as a sequence of
perpetually equal beings who follow one another according to the logic of
repetition. Anyone who took literally the ontology expressed by the simile
of the leaves would be incapable of telling stories: in his or her eyes, there
would never be any deeds worthy of telling; the differences between in-
dividuals would be insignificant. An image of this vacuum in the Homeric
poems is the lot to which the minor heroes are consigned: those who are
incapable of countering the seriality of life with their deeds are accord-
ingly excluded from epic song or mentioned fleetingly in the lists of dead
warriors.
The lower limit of mimesis is revealed in contemplating the idea that
there is nothing to say, that nothing deserves to be represented, because
every fragment of finitude is too banal to break free from interchange-
ability and come back into the present. Dostoevsky opens the fourth part
of The Idiot (1868–1869) with a question vital to our inquiry. Since so-
ciety is mostly composed of normal individuals who are devoid of dra-
matic traits, how can we tell the life stories of “ordinary, completely ‘usual’
people”? “How can [a novelist] present them to the reader so as to make
them at least somewhat interesting?”33 For the narrator of The Idiot, the
nature of the subject matter would appear to be equally difficult: he takes
it for granted that there are more adventurous lives or more representative
existences worthier of appearing in a story. By lending the question an
absolute—which is to say, theoretical—meaning, we soon realize that the
issue is more complicated. What counts is not the intrinsic quality of the
story, but the attitude of the imitator, the willingness to capture a differ-
ence where another type of gaze would see only dull, annihilating same-
ness. During the same period Dostoevsky was writing his novel, Tolstoy
was finishing War and Peace—a work featuring the lives of many people
whom the narrator of The Idiot would have judged too common to deserve
attention. And yet the theoretical problem remains: potentially, the things
that a narrator talks about are always tautological, closed up in their own
individuality, irrelevant for the universal, because the material of stories is
not the generality of an idea but rather the particularities of contingent
lives and forms of life. Any attempt to excite interest in this level of the real
comes up against an objection that can always be raised: “Why should I
care about certain occurrences?” “What is it to me?” Ever since official
truths took the form of abstract thought, the interest that stories arouse is
always a precarious outcome and never an unquestionable premise. Only
language games operating within the domain of the concept can say, with
aggressive assurance, de te fabula narratur; people who tell stories can never
be so sure. This lack of concern for the fate of particular beings, or for the
sensible appearance of finite things, is the lower boundary of mimesis: it
is the white light that cancels out all the other colors that make the repre-
sentation of finitude possible.
The upper boundary of mimesis is implicit in the comparison with the
leaves. What do these few lines tell us? Like what happens in passages that
stop the narrative flow to describe laws, the simile breaks the rules of a
discursive formation whose aim is to represent the singularity of finite be-
ings. It interrupts the way of portraying reality that the listeners of the epos
are used to and introduces a new language game. What we are witnessing
is a reversal of the direct relation between the concrete and the abstract,
33. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Idiot (1868–1869); English translation The Idiot, trans. Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Random House, 2002), 462.
the particular and the universal, the visible and the invisible. The compar-
ison exploits the possibilities inherent in the morphology and syntax of
natural languages, because they are sedimented in the existence of common
names and in the ability to make judgments in the form of atemporal ex-
pressions governed by the verb “to be.” Instead of focusing on singular
events—on the fate of this person or this leaf—the simile states the timeless,
spaceless law that governs a class of entities, depriving each individual of
his or her difference and refraining from situating the event in space and
time. Although the degree of abstraction remains very low, these four lines—
as well as other passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey where nomoi and
ethe are introduced—briefly interrupt the game of mimesis to arrive at a type
of knowledge that grasps laws and ideas above or below singular beings. In
1873, a classical philologist who had recently abandoned the restricted
field of his discipline revisited the image of the leaves to reflect on the nature
of concepts:
Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf
ever wholly equals another, and the concept “leaf” is formed through an
arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forget-
ting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there
might be something besides the leaves which would be “leaf”—some
kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked,
copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no
copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the orig-
inal form.34
It was precisely in those years that Nietzsche began to deconstruct the

idea of truth that Plato had transmitted to the West over two thousand
years earlier, separating abstract thought from mimesis and postulating a
necessary correspondence between the structures of being and the struc-
tures of thought. Thanks to the new doxa for which Nietzsche stands as
the origin and metonymy, today we can reflect on games of truth, on the
content hidden in linguistic acts and discursive formations. This is the case
even for philosophy and the sciences, which have claimed and continue to
claim a link between their languages and things in themselves. The preun-
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn” (1873);
English translation “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 46.
derstanding implicit in philosophy is opposed to the one implicit in mi-

mesis: the former imagines the world as a territory that converges, the
second as a territory that proliferates.
Between Nothingness and Ideas:

The Mimetic Discontinuity
The gaze of the imitator thus appears to stand midway between nothing-
ness and ideas, between the attitude of those who view no phenomena as
worthy of being separated out from the flow of occurrences and that of
those who take a reflective, abstractive stance, seeking out the laws hidden
in the flow of singularities. In both cases, mimesis opposes the serial nulli-
fication threatening all finite beings. The decision to represent something is
an act charged with meaning: it signifies a belief that particular actions,
people, or things, whether real or possible, deserve to be isolated from the
limitless expanse of equivalent entities. They deserve to capture our atten-
tion and—to use the term that accompanied the rise of the modern novel
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—to be “interesting.”
The issue of selection is thus central to the mimetic relationship with the
world. By distinguishing between narratable events and unnarratable
events, between what deserves to be brought back into the present and
what does not, the Homeric bards made explicit a question that the epochs
of mimetic abundance and democracy conceal or ignore. In the eyes of
modern readers, interest in the events of particular beings is seemingly an
unquestionable fact. At a time when our current horizon of expectations
was still in the process of being formed, Sir Walter Scott used a famous line
from Terence: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am a
human being, I consider nothing that is human as alien to me).35 Living in
an egalitarian and expressivist epoch, we contemporaries believe it to be
obvious that stories about our fellow human beings, about all of them, are
in theory worthy of attention. The Homeric bards believed instead that to
represent the lives of some mortals, to bring them back into the present,
was never an act to be taken for granted. While it may be true that imitation
35. Sir Walter Scott, Alain-René Le Sage (1822), in Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fic-
tion, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 125; Terence, Heauton-
timorumenos 1.1.77.
is inherent in human beings from infancy, as we read at the beginning of

Aristotle’s Poetics, not every event is necessarily worthy of narrative
interest. When viewed from the higher perspective of the gods or in terms
of the vast movement of nature, the exploits of human beings can even ap-
pear uninteresting, because irrelevancy threatens all particular beings (as
the simile of the leaves clearly states and as Apollo repeats in answer to
Poseidon36) and because particular beings are potentially infinite in number,
and therefore all the same in their uncontrollable multiplicity. In the eyes of
those who accept the mimetic relationship, the world presents itself as a
dispersed totality of events, individuals, and particular forms of life that
come into existence, mature, cross paths, die, and, in the end, are easily con-
fused due to their very number. To restore the totality of what is happening
or could happen, imitators must surrender themselves to what Hegel called
the “bad infinity,” which is to say, the unlimited sum of multiple small, sin-
gular stories. It is a condition that the most ambitious projects of nineteenth-
century narrative approached when the novel form began to compete with
philosophical systems in representing the extensive totality of life: in the
comprehensive, multivolume collection of Balzac’s Human Comedy and
Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquarts37 or in the architecture of the great polyhis-
torical novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Tolstoy’s War
and Peace to Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers, from George Eliot’s Middle-
march to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. In the twentieth century, litera-
ture discovered other lines of flight, shifting attention to the complexity of
the inner life38 or to the inexhaustibility of small, everyday experiences.39
The bad mimetic infinity has been the object of a literary representation in
a story by Danilo Kiš, “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” (1983). A woman
who speaks in the first person imagines coming across a work entitled The
Encyclopedia of the Dead, which tells the life story of every person who
ever existed, with an extraordinary wealth of details. Written by a religious
sect or by an organization that promotes an egalitarian vision of the world,
the encyclopedia seeks to rectify the injustice of history by giving each
36. Homer, Iliad 21.463–466.

37. See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 109ff.
38. Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction (1919–25),” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4,
1925–1928, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1994), 160.
39. Georges Perec, L’Infra-ordinaire (Paris: Seuil, 1989).
human being a place in the collective memory. Not surprisingly, the only
prerequisite for a person to be included is that his or her name cannot
have appeared in any other encyclopedia. This monumental work, begun
shortly after 1789, is fascinating. It is written in a style that pauses on every
action and every detail, as if every single thing were worthy of interest:
This is what I consider the compilers’ central message—nothing in the

history of mankind is ever repeated, things that at first glance seem the
same are scarcely even similar; each individual is a star unto himself,
everything happens always and never, all things repeat themselves ad
infinitum yet are unique. (That is why the authors of the majestic monu-
ment to diversity that is The Encyclopedia of the Dead stress the partic-
ular; that is why every human being is sacred to them.)40
The spirit that animates the Encyclopedia is diametrically opposed to the

ruthless mimetic selection that governs the Homeric poems: instead of the
story of a few glorious deeds and a few extraordinary heroes, we have nar-
rative commemoration democratically extended to include all beings de-
prived of fame. Kiš is well aware that a work of this sort is only possible in
a culture that has made each and every person valuable, as in Europe
starting in 1789, when the Christian idea of the sacredness of the indi-
vidual became secularized in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen.41 But what the story does not say—or says only indirectly,
through its form—is that a work like The Encyclopedia of the Dead cannot
exist, or can exist only in a tale inspired by Borges, because in the real
world mimesis leads inevitably to a violent discrimination between discon-
tinuities worthy of being told and the vast pool of uninteresting stories.
For these reasons, the choice of subject to be represented is crucial: it

distinguishes the few living beings who deserve to leave a trace behind from
the infinite mass of beings who remain unnoticed. The act of separating the
narratable from the unnarratable is given all the importance it deserves by
40. Danilo Kiš, Enciklopedija mrtvih (1983); English translation The Encyclopedia of the
Dead, trans. Michael Henry Heim (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 51.
41. The Encyclopedia project also recalls the project of the Tower Society in Wilhelm Meis-
ters Lehrjahre: to collect the autobiographical confessions of its members in an archive. See
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–1796); English translation
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Eric A. Blackall in cooperation with Victor Lange
(New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), bk. 8, chap. 5.
the Homeric bards. For them a work is defined first and foremost because
it represents certain stories and not others, because it creates a disconti-
nuity among continuities of irrelevant actions that are always the same,
because it opens up a difference in the isonomy to which finite beings are
subject. In our language game, the choice of topic occupies the same place that
the object choice occupies in the psychic life described by Freud: it is the cor-
nerstone of the edifice, the original decision that gives form to the region
of possibilities. A simple list of the discontinuities imitators have extracted
from the flow of real or imaginary phenomena says a great deal about a
historical period: it shows which parts of the collective and personal life
are deemed worthy of an emotional investment; it identifies the experiences,
desires, and ways of life considered interesting. To understand epochal
movements, it is enough to reflect on the mere content of their literature,
figurative arts, or cinema.
Stories
These are the main features of mimesis, and verbal narrative is a subset of
mimesis. How should this subset be defined?
Literary criticism of the twentieth century was thoroughly preoccupied
with, and even obsessed by, understanding the a prioris of narrative. These
efforts engendered a family of theories whose results, although incommen-
surable, do agree on a basic definition. I will present it in the words of what
was for many years the most widely used introductory book on narrative
studies in English-speaking countries: “by narrative we mean all those lit-
erary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the presence
of a story and a story-teller.”42 The term story, in this case, is intended to
signify a series of episodes arranged in a form, what Aristotle in his Poetics
called mythos: the assemblage of incidents (synthesis ton pragmaton), the
structure that holds together the disparate elements that make up the nar-
rated event.43 What is a story?
42. Robert Scholes, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative: Revised
and Expanded (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4. The first edition of The Nature of
Narrative, published in 1966, was written by Scholes and Kellogg alone.
43. Aristotle, Poetics 6.1450a, trans. Anthony Kenny, Oxford World Classics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013). For more on mythos as synthesis ton pragmaton, see Aris-
One of the main objectives of twentieth-century narratology was the at-

tempt to answer this question by formulating “the minimal story” or “the
minimal complete plot”—in other words, a statement that would express
the degree zero of all stories:
The minimal complete plot consists in the passage from one equilibrium
to another. An “ideal” narrative begins with a stable situation which is
disturbed by some power or force. There results a state of disequilibrium;
by the action or a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilib-
rium is re-established; the second equilibrium is similar to the first, but
the two are never identical.44
It seems to us that the credit of an absolute generalizability can be granted

at the point of departure (position of a proper name-subject, possibility
of a process of modification or preservation that predicates the becoming
of this subject).45
A minimal story consists of three conjoined events. The first and third
events are stative, the second is active. Furthermore, the third event is the
inverse of the first. Finally, the three events are conjoined by three con-
junctive features in such a way that (a) the first event precedes the second
in time and the second precedes the third, and (b) the second event causes
the third.46
But the first attempts to isolate the minimal story actually date back to
ancient times. In book 10 of Plato’s Republic, in one sentence, Socrates’s
character defines the content of mimetic poetry (mimetike). This is a rela-
tively abstract term, but Socrates talks concretely about Homer, Hesiod,
and the tragedians—all authors who tell stories. The definition of mime-
tike thus coincides in actuality with the definition of a minimal story:
Mimetic poetry . . . imitates human beings acting under compulsion or
voluntarily, and as a result of their actions supposing themselves to have
fared well or ill and in all this feeling either grief or joy.47
totle, La Poétique, Greek text with a French translation and notes, by Roselyne Dupont-Roc
and Jean Lallot (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 198.
44. Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de la prose (1971); English translation The Poetics of
Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 111.
45. Claude Bremond, Logique du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 328.
46. Gerald Prince, A Grammar of Stories: An Introduction (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 31.
47. Plato, Republic 10:603c.
The second attempt is to be found in Aristotle’s Poetics, in a controver-

sial passage in which mythos is said to be synthesis ton pragmaton and the
minimal tragic plot is described:
Tragedy is mimesis of action (mimesis praxeos) and is acted by living
persons, who must of necessity have certain qualities of character and
thought—for it is these which determine the quality of an action; indeed
thought [dianoia] and character [ethos] are the natural causes of any action
and it is in virtue of these that all men succeed or fail—it follows then
that it is the plot [mythos] which is the mimesis of action. By “plot” I
mean here the arrangement of the incidents.48
Beneath the superficial differences, the formulations by Plato, Aristotle,

and the twentieth-century narratologists resemble each other. What they
have in common is an original insight: every story imagines reality in a cer-
tain way simply because it is a story and not some other type of discourse
(a work of science or philosophy, for example). Along with the plot form,
crystallized in its structures, there comes a preunderstanding of life. I will
isolate a few of the pivotal points.
1. Particular beings. Mimetike, we read in the Republic, talks about human

beings. Narratology made short work of the rigidity of this idea;49 and yet
the protagonists of narrative do retain an ontological characteristic of
people: they are particular beings. Since human beings will inevitably con-
ceive the world starting from themselves, most stories use anthropomor-
phic heroes even when talking about gods, animals, cells, or allegories. This
applies both to stories that use the medium of words and to those that use
the medium of images.
2. Plurality. In his description of the heroes involved in plots, Plato uses

the plural (“human beings acting”). Narratives tend to exhibit the consti-
tutive plurality of particular beings: first and foremost, they assume that there
are many people, that their life paths cross each other, that they experience
continuously the presence of others, inside and outside themselves. The ex-
treme examples of solipsism, from Robinson Crusoe to the novels by Beckett,
48. Aristotle, Poetics 6.1449b–1450a.

49. Bremond cites biology articles describing the first phase of cell division in a thor-
oughly narrative form: Bremond, Logique du récit, 111, 328.
always presuppose the physical or interior existence of second and third

persons. A plot presupposes that there are many individuals whose paths
interweave.
3. Individuation. As particular beings, the protagonists of plots must nec-

essarily possess distinctive traits that identify them. There are three identi-
fying marks: a body, a name (or any sign in place of a name: “K.,” “the
Unnamed”), and the set of qualities that makes each of them a specific in-
dividual. Aristotle condensed all this into the word ethos.50 Modern culture
tends to separate out two families of elements and to distinguish between
character and manners—along the lines of an opposition between inside
and outside, personal and collective, the domain of psychology and the
domain of sociology that was invented on a precise date, acquiring rigor
over the past few centuries, and a questionable philosophical legitimacy,
considering its founding premises would be easy to deconstruct. However
that may be, the particular beings that enter into plots are marked by dis-
tinguishing characteristics. And it does not matter whether the character-
ization refers to a single being or to a universal type: mimesis, as we have
said, is the linguistic game that preserves the memory of contingent forms
of life, whether real or imaginary, like a gigantic inventory of accidental
existences.
4. Imbalance. For Plato as for Aristotle, the human beings described by

mimetike and mimesis engage in action. The centrality of action is an essen-
tial feature of the ancient literary aesthetic, which insists on the public,
visible, and sensible nature of the life imitated by the poets, to the detriment
of the life that is lived in the semi-invisible regions of thought and the pas-
sions. In the text of the Poetics as it has come down to us, Aristotle re-
turns several times to this point: poetry is the representation of what
human beings do and what they say in the external world. True mimesis
has as its object actions, and not characters; the primary goal of the poet
is the creation of a mythos, of a plot, and not the static description of an
ethos. But the insistence on action, as well as reflecting the underlying
logic of the ancient poetics, is also what allows Plato and Aristotle to ex-
press in the philosophical vocabulary of their epochs an insight that would
50. See Frédérique Woerther, L’Èthos aristotelicien (Paris: Vrin, 2007).

run through the Western theory of narrative art: for there to be a plot, the
particular beings described must undergo transformations; there is no
story without metamorphosis.
From a theoretical point of view, the premise of plots does not neces-
sarily require that there be public action—only that there be a change in
state. Visible action was actually the way ancient culture identified the phe-
nomenon of change. Classicist poetics that arose during the sixteenth
century used phrases from Aristotle and Plato to refute the verbatim texts
of the Republic and the Poetics in order to argue that, since even the inner
life undergoes becoming, there may exist a mimesis and a mythos of the
affects. But the essential element remains unchanged: the syntax of
the story line is not made to represent static situations; the beings repre-
sented in plots are ontologically restless and out of balance: “and does
not the fretful part of us present many and varied occasions for imitation,
while the intelligent and temperate disposition, always remaining approx-
imately the same, is neither easy to imitate nor to be understood when
imitated.”51 This is the sense of one of the most famous incipits of the
modern novel: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way.”52
5. Time and space. In plots, the first vehicle of imbalance is mere becoming:
“between the activity of narrating a story and the temporal character of
human experience there exists a correlation that is not merely accidental
but that presents a transcultural form of necessity.”53
A celebrated passage from The Man without Qualities illustrates the con-
sequences of this correlation. In chapter 122 of volume 1, Ulrich is walking
around the streets of Vienna. He is restless and unhappy: his affair with
51. Plato, Republic 10.604e.

52. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1875–1877); English translation Anna Karenina, trans.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Books), 1. In “Berenice” (1835) by
Edgar Allan Poe we read: “Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.” The
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches, ed. Thomas Mabbott (Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 209.
53. Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, vol. 1 (1983); English translation Time and Narrative,
vol. 1 (1983), trans. Katherine McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1984), 52.
Gerda has ended badly; the Parallel Action proved to be a failure. All
around him, in contrast to the restlessness that he feels running through
him, the city transmits an impression of peacefulness. Suddenly, with a shift
from the lived experience to reflection that is typical of Musil’s style, Ul-
rich begins to ponder the essence of happiness. In his view, happiness orig-
inates from a “foreshortening of the mind’s perspective” (perspektivische
Verkürzung des Verstandes) that brings close things into sharp focus and
allows distant things to fade, creating a world where one feels at home.
This form of simplification, which Ulrich has lost forever, is also the law of
stories:
It struck him that when one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying

one’s life, the basic law of this life, the law one longs for, is nothing
other than that of narrative order, the simple order than enables one to
say: “First this happened and then that happened . . .” It is the simple
sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of
things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician
would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single
thread, which calms us; that celebrated “thread of the story,” which is,
it seems, the thread of life itself. Lucky the man who can say “when,”
“before,” and “after” [“als,” “ehe” und “nachdem”]! Terrible things
may have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but as soon as
he can tell what happened in chronological order, he feels as contented
as if the sun were warming his belly. This is the trick the novel artifi-
cially turns to account: Whether the wanderer is riding on the highway
in pouring rain or crunching through snow and ice at ten below zero,
the reader feels a cozy glow, and this would be hard to understand if
this eternally dependable narrative device, which even nursemaids can
rely on to keep their little charges quiet, this tried-and-true “foreshort-
ening of the mind’s perspective,” were not already part and parcel of
life itself. Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually
have no use for poems, and although the occasional “because” [weil] or
“in order that” [damit] gets knotted into the thread of life, they gener-
ally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly
sequence of facts because it has the look of necessity, and the impres-
sion that their life has a “course” [Lauf] is somehow their refuge from
chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost this elementary, narrative
mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though every-
thing in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer
follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven

surface.54
Musil nicely captures a crucial element of plot as form: his observations

on the thread of the story can apply to all types of mythos. Human beings
connect what happens in space and time using syntactic links of a logical
or historical type. While the causal or final linkages (“because,” “in order
that”) expand the dimensions of reality, associate different planes with one
another, and lengthen the intelligence, narrators are limited to saying
“when,” “before,” and “after”: they foreshorten the intelligence and de-
lude themselves into thinking that life has a “course” and follows a single
thread, the thread of the story. Theoretical knowledge, governed by the
medium of thought and “concerned with the primary causes and princi-
ples,”55 runs endlessly along the chains of reflection that transform life into
an immense surface of cross-references. Instead, those who tell stories
narrow their understanding of reality and introduce a simple order into
chaos, surrendering themselves to the myopic and reassuring dimension of
chronology. If the dominant links were not temporal, the language game
of stories and the genre of narrative would transform into other games and
other genres. Incidentally, this is why The Man without Qualities is con-
sidered an experimental novel: the anomalous role Musil’s book assigns to
the essayistic search for causes and principles makes it unusual for narra-
tive fiction.
While the primary connections governing plots are chronological in na-

ture, time presupposes a diametrically opposed dimension that this pas-
sage from The Man without Qualities does not take into consideration. In
addition to being subject to becoming, the particular beings that narrative
tells about are also located in space: Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon are
found camped around Troy; Ulrich, Gerda, Arnheim, Section Chief Tuzzi
exist in Vienna in 1913. Stories never talk about dislocated human beings,
about humankind-in-itself or about a general human type, as do the ab-
stract discursive formations (philosophy, theology, natural sciences, the
54. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, vol. 1 (1930); English translation The
Man without Qualities, vol. 1, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York: Knopf,
1995), chap. 122, pp. 708–709.
55. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.981b.
human sciences); and even when the character is an everyman, the generic
subject is always treated as a being located in a place. The concept of “chro-
notope” that Bakhtin develops in the most beautiful of his essays on the
novel admirably expresses the unbreakable link between time and space
that every story establishes.56
6. Desire. The first of the dynamic forces that stirs up plots is the mere pres-
ence of time as a manifestation of an imbalance to which finite beings are
ontologically exposed simply by becoming. But this subjugation to the
chronological chain is not the only vehicle of change at work in plots: next
to the pure succession of instants we find another force that acts in time
but does not coincide with chronology. When defining the degree zero of
mimetike, Plato explicitly dwells on this point: “Mimetic poetry . . . imi-
tates human beings acting under compulsion or voluntarily, and as a result
of their actions supposing themselves to have fared well or ill and in all
this feeling either grief or joy.” In other words, anthropomorphic beings are
subject to a perpetual instability of the passions, between the extremes of
joy and grief. In seeking the ontological element that lies behind this phe-
nomenal observation, we can say that we are happy or unhappy, we feel
joy or grief, because a primordial lack runs through us, an essential imbal-
ance that we call by the name of need, desire, or longing; when this force
comes to a stop, we might declare ourselves to be happy, fortunate, or
simply content. It is difficult to imagine a plot that does not include this
potential restlessness and use it as a secondary driving force for stories
along with the mere presence of time. A mythos begins because a character
is looking for something or loses something and ends when the imbalance
is righted: people enter into the plot as needy and desiring entities.
Narrative and Existential Analytics
Particular beings subject to time and located in a space, identified by a

proper name, a body, a character, and manners; restless beings, because
56. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Formy vremeni i chronotopa v romane” (1937–1938); English

translation “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagina-
tion: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), 84–258.
they are vulnerable to becoming and to desire; beings whose lives intersect
with the lives of others, acting, speaking, and formulating thoughts, expe-
riencing passions, living in a social system, until the imbalance is righted
and the story reaches its end: this is the matter of stories. Now: when you
try to put a complete, minimum plot down on paper, you arrive at a sen-
tence that corresponds to a theory of human action.57 This is a crucial
point. Minimal stories produce what Martin Heidegger called an “existen-
tial analytic,”58 or a concise description of the mode of being of human
beings. This is the case because only plots incorporate into their form the
basic scaffolding of our lives qua existences that are finite, identified, situ-
ated, and off balance. All other language games have a relationship of pure
exteriority with these a prioris, starting with abstract thought, which ban-
ishes from its processes the singular, temporal, spatial, intersubjective, an-
ecdotal, and circumstantial nature of what individuals do and think. In the
process, abstract thought transforms the particular life into the content of
a discourse whose style produces statements divorced from particularity. It
is important to understand that the image of the world sedimented in plots
is not the life of finite beings, but an interpretation of this life. Some of the
most perceptive criticisms that the plot form received in the twentieth
century allow certain aspects of the preunderstanding crystallized in plots
to be captured, as if in a mirror image. The protagonist of Jean-Paul Sar-
tre’s Nausea (1938), Antoine Roquentin, reflects on the transfiguration of
experience that takes place in stories:
For the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is
enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a
teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others,
he sees everything that happens through them; and he tries to live his
own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell. . . . Nothing happens while you
live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There
are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason,
an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a
semi-total: you say: I’ve been travelling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville
57. See Todorov, Grammaire du “Décaméron,” 10.

58. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927); English translation Being and Time, trans.
John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), §4 and
following.
for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a
friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai,
Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. . . .
That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a
change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories.
As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we
tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the beginning:
“It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a notary’s clerk in Ma-
rommes.” And in reality you have started at the end. It was there, invis-
ible and present, it is the one which gives to words the pomp and value
of a beginning. “I was out walking, I had left the town without real-
izing it, I was thinking about my money troubles.” This sentence, taken
simply for what it is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hun-
dred leagues from an adventure, exactly in the mood to let things happen
without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For
us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money
troubles are more precious than ours, they are gilded by the light of future
passions.59
Forty years later, in Georges Perec’s writings on the notion of the “infra-
ordinary,” we find another frontal attack on the presuppositions of plots.
According to Perec, “official discourses,” starting with canonical narrative
forms, never capture the gray, static background of our existence:
My “sociology” of everyday life isn’t an analysis. It’s just an attempt at
description, or more precisely, a description of what no one ever looks
at—because you’re there, or you think you’re there, they’re too familiar
and normally there’s no language for them. Like enumerating the cars
that go through the Mabillon intersection, or the gestures that a driver
makes when he gets out of his car, or the different ways passers-by hold
the newspapers they’ve just bought. It’s a deconditioning: it’s not about
trying to capture what the official (institutional) discourses call an event
or important, but what lies below that—the infra-ordinary, the back-
ground noise that fills every minute of our daily lives.60
59. Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (1938); English translation Nausea, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: New Directions, 1964), 39–40.
60. Georges Perec, Entretien avec Jean-Marie Le Sidaner (1979), in Entretiens et con-
férences, critical edition ed. Dominique Bertelli and Mirielle Ribière (Nantes: Joseph K., 2003),
93–94.
For the logic of plots, what is essential are the stories of particular be-
ings, with their paths, their turning points, their denouements identified
from the perspective of the ending. What happens thus takes on a retro-
spective order and the elements that fail to fit into this preunderstanding
are cut out of the text. While the day-to-day perception of life ignores the
temporality and hierarchies by which plots organize reality, mythos sepa-
rates the essential from the contingent. It introduces a telos into the dis-
order and creates the ordered, contrived areas of intensity that Sartre called
“adventures.” Viewed from the perspective of the infra-ordinary, the syntax
of plots is unrealistic. It is no coincidence that authors such as Sartre and
Perec have attempted to sabotage the canonic narrative form: while the
author of Nausea used the genre of the diary, Perec employed the schema
of the list, which arranges events according to a different logic than that of
the story line.
Hence, plots are not a copy but an interpretation of the human world:
they attach importance to certain dimensions of being and leave out others.
Furthermore, they are synthesis ton pragmaton—a posteriori synthetic
constructions. The inventor of plots possesses a breadth of vision that is
lacking in the protagonists. Particular beings do not grasp the totality in
which they are immersed, because the whole that contains them eludes
them in two respects. In the first place, with respect to time: finite beings
are suspended between a beginning and an end; stories make complete
sense only when they end, while the living have no knowledge of what will
become of them.61 In second place, with respect to the world: finite beings
do not grasp the synchronic totality in which they are immersed because
their perspective is limited. They do not see everything that others are
doing; they do not properly perceive the suprapersonal forces that influ-
ence life; they cannot understand in advance what will prove to be essen-
tial in the expanse of perceptions, passions, and microevents that make up
every instant. But while finite beings are ontologically short-sighted with
respect to the whole, the creator of plots can see the whole network of
61. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London:
Oxford University Press, 1967), chap. 1; Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit, vol. 2 (1984); English
translation Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19ff. See also Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot:
Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), espe-
cially chap. 4.
causes and relations. Plots arise out of a vision of the whole: like Homer’s
Muses, the person who creates them knows all things of the present, the
past, and the future.
When considered from the point of view of the infra-ordinary, plots are
not realistic, but they are when considered from the perspective of their
basic ontological grammar. Although the mythos to which we belong es-
capes our ordinary perception, we are objectively part of a plot. According to
Frank Kermode, the degree zero of every plot is the tick-tock of a clock—the
pair of sounds that give form to occurrences by marking in mere succession
a beginning and an end.62 However, there does exist an example of an ele-
mentary plot that is even closer to our experience and to the stuff of sto-
ries. It is the sequence we find in vital records and on tombstones: a proper
name, a place and date of birth, a place and date of death. In the formless
expanse of all that exists, this series of signs isolates a particular indi-
vidual; it situates him or her in a space and a time; it imagines the individual
as being in an original state of imbalance that, in the end, is destined to
be objectively righted. The plot is the hyphen connecting the two dates
and the two places. This line encapsulates what is essential for us, the
living.
Narrators
By narrative, therefore, we mean literary works distinguished by the pres-

ence of a story and a narrator. So far we have discussed what is implicit in
stories; now we need to reflect on the figure of the narrator, especially those
who tell stories using words. This is the specific difference between verbal
narrative and other genres with a plot.
Every story has four categories of interpreters: the author (or authors),
the narrator (or narrators), the hero (or heroes), and the reader (or readers).
The first and fourth remain outside the work; the second and third enter
into the text connected by a relationship that is at the same time symmet-
rical and asymmetrical. Both express points of view and generate an inter-
pretation of reality in which they are seen as protagonists or spectators. In
every story, even in the most monologic, there is an element of relativism
and prospectivism waiting to be activated: anyone’s desires, values, and
62. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 44ff.

words can become our own, even those of an enemy; even Hector and
Priam can elicit our compassion and fear. For the same reason, the narrator
holds only one of many possible points of view; his or her word is partial.
While concepts tend to establish immutable truths, narratives leave open
the theoretical possibility that the story can be told from a different per-
spective. But to this symmetry of position there corresponds an asym-
metry: the narrator and the protagonist both have a right to speak, but
their accounts lie on different planes. Bakhtin refers to this imbalance as
the concept of extralocality or extralocation (vnenachodimost’).63 The sto-
ryteller is located in another sphere of reality that is external to the one
inhabited by the characters: the narrator transcends the characters, views
them from outside, knows more about them, and introduces them into a
context.64 The roles can be reversed, and the same individual may act at
times as a narrator and at others as a character, but this does not change
the nature of the two roles. As an intermediate figure between the author
and the protagonist, the narrator gives tangible form to the presence of a
mediation in the text.
A comparison with the theater is helpful in understanding this point. In

their classic form, texts of dramatic literature reproduce speeches and
human gestures without the filter of an intermediate voice. The illusion-
istic idea behind this convention is the principle of the transparent fourth
wall, as it is called in modern theater theory.65 Narrative, instead, presup-
63. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroj v èstetičeskoj dejatel’nosti”; English translation “Au-
thor and Hero in Aestheric Activity,” in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays,
ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1990), 12–14 and fn. 28. Bakhtin uses the concept of extralocality to describe
the relationship between author and hero, but clearly this concept has a broader scope and
can also shed light on the relationship between the author and the narrator and between the
narrator and the hero.
64. In the same way, the author’s sphere of reality is even further removed than the one
occupied by the narrator. The author can take away the authority of whoever is telling the
story, for example, when there are multiple narrators, or when the narrator’s unreliability is
suggested.
65. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, “Über epische und dramatische
Dichtung” (1797); English translation “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry,” in Correspondence
between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805, trans. George H. Calvert, vol. 1 (New York:
Wiley, 1845), 379–392; Bertolt Brecht’s notes and essays on the topic of “non-Aristotelian
drama,” in Schriften zum Theater. Über eine nicht-aristotelische Dramatik (1957), partly
poses a filter: the appearance and actions of the protagonists, the physical
and cultural space that surrounds them, the thoughts and passions that ani-
mate them, do not exist in sensible form in front of the viewer—they come
to life only by means of an interpreter’s words. Although there is no lack
of exceptions, hybrid cases, and pioneering texts, this distinction is abso-
lutely clear. Indeed, ever since the tripartite division of modern literary
genres was declared, the expedients to which theatrical works resort in
order to introduce forms of narration or commentary external to the events
being acted out on stage are said to be epic or lyric, as if the theory recog-
nized that they do not belong to the main core of dramatic art.66 The works
of classic modern drama written for the stage are tranches de vie, slices of
life that unfold before the eyes of the viewers. In these types of texts, the
mediation of the form has ideally taken place before the play that the audi-
ence sees being acted out on stage: when the work gets to the spectators,
the story seems inseparable from how it is presented. Narrative, on the
contrary, disconnects the story from its telling. It separates the plot events
from the voice that gives form to them and displays the act of narrating
along with what is being narrated. While the language game of theater in-
volves three figures (the author who creates the plot, the characters who
give substance to it, and the spectator who watches it staged), the language
game of stories interjects a fourth figure between the author, the protago-
nists, and the readers.
Narrative mediation shows that the mimetic activity is a reading, not a

copy, of the world. The hermeneutic nature of mimesis, which is implicit in
all arts, is made explicit in stories because the narrator makes the subjec-
tive, interpreting aspect of mimesis into something substantial: he or she
embodies the synthetic, a posteriori gaze that is inherent in the plot form.
Because the narrator has a view of the ending and the plot in its entirety,
translated in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang,
1964), especially 46–47 and 57–60; Peter Szondi, Die Theorie des modernen Dramas (1956),
English translation Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Michael
Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), especially “Introduction: Histor-
ical Aesthetics and Genre-Based Poetics.”
66. See Goethe and Schiller, “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry”; Brecht, Brecht on Theatre;
and Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama.
he or she sees what remains hidden to the protagonists—the entire course

of a fate or a story line, the sense of a life.67
Levels of Reality
While the figure of the narrator embodies the hermeneutic nature of mi-
mesis, the narrator who uses words gains an understanding of the world
modeled on the possibilities afforded by language. In one way, any sensible
immediacy is evacuated. What the Greeks called poiesis, what for two and
a half centuries we have called “literature,” can aspire to an illusionistic
copy of reality only when the text transmits words spoken in public, as
happens in the theater;68 in all other cases, literary mimesis translates sen-
sory data into the medium of language. The image-based arts are spared
the challenges of such abrupt code switches. But this loss of immediacy is
accompanied by a parallel gain: precisely because literature exceeds the
realm of the sensible, it appropriates the territories our culture comes to
know through the medium of language, starting with levels of reality that
transcend the senses. In most of the stories told in words, beings move
between two ontological layers. There is the realm of visible action, audible
speeches, events, and objects that are perceived through the senses and that
the narrator translates into words. And then there is the silent space oc-
cupied by entities that do not take a public form, except through signs or
symptoms: thoughts, passions, invisible regularities that we resort to in
order to explain lives and behaviors, in the same way we saw at work in
the simile of the leaves. To represent the invisible and the inaudible, the
theater is forced to adopt epic expedients: for example, when the chorus of
a tragedy explains the events that took place before the play begins or the
moral of the story; or when a character speaks his or her thoughts out loud
67. In 1797, Goethe and Schiller reflected on this aspect of narrative in their correspon-
dence on the differences between epic and drama. Drama is an art of pure presence, an art in
which the action takes place in front of the viewer; instead, the epic form assumes that the
story being told is in the past and that the narrator already knows the ending. While theater
spectators are carried along by the action as it unfolds before their eyes, in the present and
without any visible mediation, the narrator introduces a form of distance between his or her
words and the story being told. See Goethe and Schiller, “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry,”
379–392.
68. This is the sense of the distinction between mimesis (in the narrow sense) and diegesis
found in the Republic. Plato, Republic 3.392d.
and lapses into a soliloquy that is unlikely to happen in real life. Film-
makers are granted more freedom, but the devices they have at their
disposal (the interior monologue, the voice-over) fall outside the normal
medium of the art, which partly explains why they are rarely used. The
verbal narrator can instead interpret the invisible parts of the real through
words, because the supersensible abstractness of language allows her or
him to reveal characters’ thoughts, to show the superpersonal mecha-
nisms that drive them, and to comment on the vicissitudes of their fates.
Narrative mediation discloses two levels of reality.
1. In the early decades of the twentieth century, at the same time that
Western narrative assigned a new value to the life of the psyche, a critical
topos took hold. The conviction spread that verbal narratives alone are
capable of entering into the intimate sphere of someone different from us
(another character or another period of our I). Verbal narratives, it was
said, can show what no other discursive formations have the capacity to
reveal. A similar sentiment is expressed in Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913),69
in Alain’s Systeme des beaux-arts (System of Fine Arts) (1920),70 and
in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927).71 Revisited on a number
of occasions over the past few decades,72 the idea achieved its final form
in The Logic of Literature (1957) by Käte Hamburger: “Epic fiction is the
sole epistemological instance where the I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a
69. Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (1913); English translation Swann’s Way,
trans. Lydia Davis, in In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 2002).
70. Alain, Système des beaux-arts (1920, 1926) (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 319ff. (“Du
roman.”)
71. “It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source”; “[the charac-
ters in novels] are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people
whose secret lives are invisible.” Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 56, 70.
72. Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung (1957); English translation The Logic of
Literature, trans. Marilynn J. Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Dorrit
Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 5ff.; also by Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 19ff.; Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sen-
tences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1982), 260 and passim; Belinda Cannone, Narrations de la vie intérieure (Paris:
PUF, 2001), 3ff.; Jean Louis Chrétien, Conscience et roman I: la conscience au grand jour
(Paris: Minuit, 2009).
third-person qua third person can be portrayed.”73 While conceptual

types of knowledge, from the premodern “sciences of the soul” to the psy-
choanalyses of the twentieth century, reveal the hidden dimensions only by
reifying their content—by translating thoughts and passions into an object
that the analytical gaze breaks down—narrative gains access to the inner
world of third persons while continuing to treat individuals as subjects.
What abstract thought tends to deprive of autonomy, narrative allows to
come to the surface: the point of view of the other as a being who is dif-
ferent but equivalent to the I.
While it may be true that not all epochs and cultures interpret thoughts
and passions as processes belonging solely to our interior world, there is
no doubt that our thoughts and passions are the locus of an ontological
asymmetry. When it comes to this aspect of our existence, each of us knows
different things from other people, because when speaking about ourselves,
each of us has access to levels of reality inaccessible to others, or at least
not to the same extent. Written narrative can penetrate beyond the opacity
of second and third persons without taking away their subjectivity. It is the
only language game capable of doing so, because the sciences of the soul,
the various schools of psychology and psychoanalysis, treat the psychic life
of others as a thing, because the theater remains an “art of the silhouette”74
as far as the mimesis of the interior life is concerned, and because the
cinema relies on the interpretation of visible signs. Much of what our cul-
ture knows about the “treasure of the psyche” is “the fruit of the explora-
tion of the soul by storytellers.”75 This possibility for introspection is what
distinguishes narrative fiction from historical narrative based on sources
and evidence. Mythos split into stories about historical events and stories
that were invented during the same epoch when philosophers began to crit-
icize the knowledge transmitted by poets. This division of duties and obli-
gations led to different rules and possibilities: historians make it their task
to report only things we can be certain about and they claim the right to
occupy the domain of truth; storytellers agree to occupy the domain of fic-
73. Hamburger, The Logic of Literature, 83.

74. Thomas Mann, “Versuch über das Theater” (1908), in Essays I 1893–1914, ed. Her-
mann Kurzke and Stefan Stachorski (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2002), 130.
75. Paul Ricœur, “L’Identité narrative,” Revue des sciences humaines 95, no. 221
(January–March 1991): 43–44. See also Cohn, Transparent Minds, 5ff., 58ff.; Cohn, The Dis-
tinction of Fiction, 19ff.; Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences, 260.
tion, but in exchange retain the capacity (implicit in diegesis) to enter into
people’s hidden lives.
2. In addition to gazing into the invisible region of the inner life, storytellers
have access to another realm that is barred to the senses: they can explain
people’s behavior through concepts, revealing the invisible regularities that
abstract thought grasps in the realm of the visible. To a greater or lesser
extent, every narrative made of words is enveloped in a conceptual ether
composed of vocabularies that change over the course of the centuries. The
simile of the leaves in Homer, the historical and sociological parts of Bal-
zac’s novels, and the essayistic parts of The Man without Qualities refer to
completely different lexicons. What does not change, though, is the act of
transcending the space of sensible appearance and interpreting actions in
the light of laws. It does not matter whether the space of ideas is introduced
by a first or a third person, whether it occupies long digressions or is con-
centrated into a word, or whether it is serious or ironic. Even the simplest
act of describing a character by a concise adjective (“good,” “bad,” “tran-
quil,” “upset”), even the use of a causal or final association, refers implicitly
to the same concepts with which ethics, rhetoric, the human sciences, and
common sense have attempted over the centuries to interpret behaviors.
One of the most famous aphorisms nestled in Proust’s In Search of Lost
Time says that a work of art in which theories are expounded is like an
object with its price tag still attached.76 Apart from the fact that few works
of art contain as many theories as Proust’s novels, almost never do we come
across narratives that entirely eschew concepts. Stories are emerged lands
surrounded by the ideas with which we make sense of what happens.
Being in the World
What, in summary, is the basic preunderstanding crystallized in narrative?

There is a page in Hegel’s Aesthetics in which he talks about this very
question:
In drama, he [the character] creates his fate himself, whereas an epic
character has his fate made for him, and this power of circumstances
76. Proust, Finding Time Again, 109.

[diese Macht der Umstände], which gives his deed the imprint of an indi-
vidual form, allocates his lot to him, and determines the outcome of his
actions, is the proper dominion of fate. . . . This destiny is the great jus-
tice and it becomes tragic not in the dramatic sense of the word in which
the individual is judged as a person, but in the epic sense in which the
individual is judged in his whole situation; and the tragic nemesis is that
the greatness of the situation is too great for the individuals.77
Hegel is reflecting on the difference between drama and epos, but what
he says holds true for all other types of stories. Like any art that incorpo-
rates a plot, narrative represents particular individuals in their dependence
on time; but unlike the theater, it has the capacity to capture the dialectic
between the hero or heroine and die Macht der Umstände, the power of
circumstances. While theatrical tragedy judges individuals as persons, in
the legal sense of the term—considering the actions for which individuals
are subjectively or objectively responsible—stories do not make personal
fortune or misfortune depend solely on the intrinsic value of subjective ac-
tions, but on the relationship between human action and the force fields in
which individuals find themselves enmeshed. The verbal story encompasses
in its structures both the subjection of individuals to time and their be-
longing in a world. In this way, it shows the objective tragedy of the human
condition: it shows that happiness or unhappiness do not stem only from
the merits or demerits of the individual, but also and above all from the
power of circumstances.
As a genre of contingencies, narrative allows endless stories to exist by
carving open an ontological region from the brutally changeable surface.
Beneath the surface, however, one encounters an immovable structure,
the same one that has been tapped for thousands of years in the attempt
to establish the minimal story. “There are countless forms of narrative in
the world,” we read in the opening to a famous essay that was decisive
in the development of narratology.78 But whatever the subject matter, the
telling of stories signifies a concern with the ontological realm populated
by contingent lives and forms of life. It means that we are attending to the
77. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, pp. 1158–1181; pp. 1093–1100; quote from pp. 1070–1071.

78. Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits” (1966); English
translation “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” New Literary History
6, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 237–272; quote from 237.
stories of finite beings, whether real or possible, showing the interweaving

of their destinies, the happiness or unhappiness that awaits them as they
exist in the midst of others and circumstances. It means that we accept a
discourse that incorporates into its basic grammar the minimal scaffoldings
of the human condition qua accidental existence, differentiated by disposi-
tions, cast into a time and a space, bound to others, and located in a world.
This is what narrative is.
CHAPTER TWO
The Origin of the Novel
Historical Semantics
The first defining characteristic of the novel as we understand the term

today is its narrative form. The second is its capacity to tell all sorts of sto-
ries in all sorts of ways. This unprecedented mimetic anarchy, the genre’s
distinguishing trait, is inscribed in the history of the words that define it.
In the major European languages, the names used to refer to the novel be-
long to two completely different families of terms: one group includes
le roman, der Roman, and il romanzo; the other, the novel and la novela.
The first group is the most ancient.1 It descends from the expression ro-
manice loqui, which in medieval Latin meant “to speak like those who
live in the lands of the former Roman empire,” that is, in a language derived
from Latin. Originally, the old French romanz indicated any one of the
Neo-Latin language varieties. Starting from the twelfth century, through a
metonymic drift, romanz began to signify speech or written text in a Ro-
mance language, especially when talking about a vernacularization and a
narrative. In the second half of the twelfth century, romanz could refer to a
narrative work of a certain length written in a vernacular and in verse that
was intended to be read rather than sung and that was centered around
1. On the historical semantics of this family of terms, see Curtius, European Literature
and the Latin Middle Ages, 30ff; Aurelio Roncaglia, Tristano e Anti-Tristano. Dialettica di
temi e d’ideologie nella narrativa medievale (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), 92–115, republished in Il
romanzo, ed. Maria Luisa Meneghetti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988).
THE ORIGIN OF THE NOVEL 61
content taken from the cultures of antiquity (the “matter of Greece and
Rome”), from Celtic legends (the “matter of Britain”), from Byzantine and
Oriental subject matter, and from contemporary histories. Understood in
this sense, the term was distinct from estoire, conte, fable, and chanson de
geste. However, the boundaries were not always clear. For example, the
chanson de geste could be called a romanz but never the other way around,
because chanson de geste had a more specific meaning, primarily indicating
an epic genre that was sung. Through a mechanism of symmetry and op-
position, romanz (later roman) subsequently referred to narratives in verse
that, unlike the chanson de geste, were intended to be read privately and
not sung. In the thirteenth century, the term expanded to include narrative
works in vernacular prose that told stories similar to those in the verse ro-
mances. In Italian, the word romanzo was used exclusively for the literary
genre from the outset, seeing as the Neo-Latin language was always referred
to as the “vulgar tongue” (volgare). In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
romanzo referred to chivalric or pastoral narratives written in prose or
verse. The German “Roman” is a Gallicism that was acquired during the
1500s.2
What French, Italian, and German indicated using words derived from
romanice loqui was referred to in English and Spanish using words that
derived, primarily, from the Italian literary genre of the novella and, sec-
ondarily, from the Latin adjectives novellus and novus. The English word
novel, appearing for the first time in the fifteenth century, originally meant
“something new,” “a novelty.” The adjective novel preserved this meaning
until the beginning of the eighteenth century. However, as early as the mid-
sixteenth century, the noun novel referred to the Italian genre of the no-
vella, following a usage that was solidified during the seventeenth century.3
In the late 1600s, novel primarily indicated works inspired by the French
nouvelle, a term that arose in its turn from the Spanish novela and the
Italian novella.
2. Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 22nd ed. (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 1989), 604–605.
3. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, Burton speaks about “Bocace Novells.”
See Richard Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 2, ed. Nicholas K. Kiessling, Thomas
C. Faulkner, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), part 2, sec. 2, memb. 4,
subsection 1, p. 79.
62 THE ORIGIN OF THE NOVEL
During the same years when novel became the English translation of
nouvelle, French literary criticism was galvanized by a battle between the
defenders of the nouvelle and the defenders of the genre that the nouvelle
had supplanted in the taste of cultured readers—the Baroque roman. The
French opposition between nouvelle and roman gave rise to the English op-
position between novel and romance that sparked discussion in British
literary circles throughout the eighteenth century. For a long time the
meaning of the two terms continued to fluctuate: novel and romance often
overlapped and were confused until the oscillation gradually subsided be-
tween the last decades of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth.4 From that moment on, novel signified stories set in the world of
everyday life, while romance indicated love or adventure stories set in a time
and space other than those of the ordinary world. Over time, the opposition
proved to be asymmetrical, because the word novel acquired a narrow sense
and a wide sense: it came to define a work in a realistic, everyday setting as
well as the great mixed genre that arose out of a combination between the
novel in the narrow sense and the romance. In other words, it became equiv-
alent to what in France and Italy was called the roman or romanzo.5 From
this point on, if strictly necessary, I will use the word novel in italics when
referring to the narrow sense of the term, and, when necessary, I will use the
word romance in italics when it is directly opposed to the novel.
4. See the essays collected in Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: A Documentary Record,
ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970); Homer Obed Brown, Institu-
tions of the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997), passim; William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel
Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 8ff.
5. Today this use is entirely common, as can be seen from the titles of English-language
critical writings on subgenres that at one time were romances par excellence, namely, the
Hellenistic novel and the heroic Baroque novel (for example, Thomas Hägg, The Novel in
Antiquity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983]). It is significant that Showalter
and DiPiero chose to use the word “novel” in their monographs on the early modern French
prose narrative: English Showalter, The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641–1782
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Thomas DiPiero, Dangerous Truths and
Criminal Passions: The Evolution of the French Novel, 1569–1791 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1992). In The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1996) by Margaret Doody, “novel” refers to all types of the genre. On the
widespread use of the word “novel” in recent decades, see Thomas Pavel, La Pensée du
roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 45. (Translator’s note: An expanded English version, entitled
The Lives of the Novel: A History, is now available from Princeton University Press [2015].)
In Spain, romanz and romance ultimately referred to a very precise genre,

namely, a short composition on a chivalrous topic in a lyric-narrative style,
usually written in verse. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century,
the semantic spectrum of the term novela was similar to that of the Italian
novella from which it derived. When Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels
(1613) altered the basic framework of the genre, extending the length of
the texts and making them more complex, the word novela adapted to
these changes.6 But until the 1760s, historia remained the most common
term for indicating long stories in prose, although novela also took on
this meaning from time to time.7 In the second half of the eighteenth
century, Spanish literary critics used the terms novela and romance syn-
onymously, just as novel and romance continued to be used interchange-
ably in English. In Spain at the height of the nineteenth century, the word
romance could still be applied to the prose narratives of Sir Walter Scott.8
Novela assumed the meaning it has today beginning mostly from the nine-
teenth century on, when it occupied the semantic spectrum that the term
romanzo had in Italian.
The words used by European cultures to designate the genre of the novel
thus have two different genealogies and a similar history: both refer, origi-
nally, to medieval forms (the courtly romance and the novella); both ac-
quired their current meanings as a result of a semantic expansion. At the
beginning, they signified narrative forms with fairly well-defined bound-
aries; in the end, they indicated a corpus of protean texts, an aggregate of
works that can effectively tell stories about absolutely anything in any way
whatsoever. It should be noted that the medieval categories already lent
6. See Guiomar Hautcoeur Pérez-Espejo, Parentés franco-espagnoles au XVIIe siècle: poé-

tique de la nouvelle de Cervantès à Challe (Paris: Champion, 2005), 28.
7. In 1637 Andrés Sanchéz de Espejo’s Rélacion alluded to the “novela de don Quijote.”
In 1722 the translator of a Byzantine novel wrote in the preface that “Heliodoro . . . ideó una
novela, que llamó Historia de l’Etiopía.” (Heliodorus invented a novel that he called History
of Ethopia). See Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos, La novela del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Júcar,
1991), 26–27.
8. Russell P. Sebold, La novela romántica en España: Entre libro de caballerías y novela
moderna (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2002), chap. 1. This fluctuation
was also affected by the uncertain history and origin of the words in English, which at the
beginning of the nineteenth century were still unsettled: the subtitle of Ivanhoe (1820), like
other novels by Scott, is A Romance.
themselves to a more narrow use and a wider one: roman could indicate
a courtly romance or a general narrative in prose; novella could indi-
cate a short story that was related to the new forms emerging thanks to the
Novellino or The Decameron, or a short story on a general topic.9 Although
the initial terms may have been elastic ab origine, the crucial semantic ex-
pansion that transformed the categories of romanzo, roman, novel, or
novela into what they are now occurred between the mid-sixteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth. It was this transformation alone that
made it possible to retrospectively include in the same literary family narra-
tive in Latin prose from the first century CE, narrative in Greek prose from
the third century CE, medieval narrative in verse and prose, and narrative
prose written in the modern epoch. Only thanks to this transformation
could such diverse works as Satyricon, Aethiopica, Yvain, Orlando furioso,
Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Princesse de Clèves, Robinson Crusoe, and
The Sorrows of Young Werther end up in a single genre and take on a name
that, in many cases, is entirely antihistorical. Later, when the terms romanzo,
roman, Roman, novel, or novela evolved to signify a long narrative with
indefinite characteristics, the category broke away from its contingent geo-
graphical origin to become a general type: at that point, we began to talk
about Chinese novels, Japanese novels, or Indian novels.
The Question of Origins
Research into the origin of the novel, an unavoidable topos of modern criti-
cism, has produced conflicting results: the novel began with the Odyssey;
the novel began with Socratic dialogue and the seriocomic genres of ancient
literature; the novel developed in ancient Greek culture from Oriental prece-
dents; the novel has a medieval origin; the novel emerged in the mid-
9. The polysemic nature that the term novella had in Boccaccio’s time is captured well in
the prologue to The Decameron: “I intend to present a hundred tales or fables or parables or
histories (call them what you like) [intendo di raccontare cento novelle, o favole o parabole o
istorie che dire le vogliamo].” However one interprets the “or” that comes after “tales” (as a
synonym of “namely” or as a synonym of “or”), as a book of novelle, The Decameron is
presented as a mixed work. This is a sign that the word novella had a variety of uses and that
the genre could accommodate various types of materials taken from fables, parables, and
histories, but also from romances. See Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca
(Turin: Einaudi, 1987), “Proemio,” 8–9; English translation Decameron, trans. John Gordon
Nichols (New York, Alfred A. Knopf), “Prologue,” 4.
sixteenth century with Spanish picaresque narrative; the novel emerged in

the mid-sixteenth century with the rediscovery of ancient prose narrative;
the novel arose in the 1700s in England. These strikingly divergent theo-
ries often stem from a shared attitude. Hans Robert Jauss likens discussions
on the nature of literary genres to the disputes of medieval philosophy on
the nature of universals. He distinguishes among three stances: for some,
genres are essences ante rem, pure forms that precede the texts, like Ideas:
for others, they represent taxonomic categories post rem that readers
apply to a magmatic, dispersed reality; for others still, they record an ob-
jective, historical continuity between works belonging to one and the
same family, like universals in re.10 Almost all theories on the origin of
the novel depart, intentionally or unintentionally, from the idea that the
genre has its own essence. Even when the changeability of the genre is em-
phasized, these theories never give up on the conviction that the novel is
bound by an identity ante rem and that any texts unrelated to the defini-
tion are in some way spurious. Bakhtin can serve as a typical example of this
ambiguity. On the one hand, he resumes and develops Schlegel’s idea of the
novel as a genre under continuous change; on the other, he identifies a
privileged lineage that supposedly embodies the entelechy of the novel. By
this he means the pluridiscursive and polyphonic tradition that arose out
of Socratic dialogue, the seriocomic genres of ancient literature, and the
anthropological substrate of popular humor.11 This same attitude can be
found in many critics, even though the theories they put forward differ
from Bakhtin’s. Ian Watt locates the origin of the novel in eighteenth-
century England, because the true novel, in his view, is based on “formal
realism.”12 Margaret Doody opens the chronological table prefacing her
True Story of the Novel with Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, because the true
novel, in her opinion, must “includ[e] the idea of length (preferably forty or
more pages), and . . . it should be in prose.”13
10. Hans Robert Jauss, “Theorie der Gattungen und Literatur des Mittelalters” (1972);
English translation “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” in Toward an Aesthetic of
Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), chap. 3.
11. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane” (1934–1935); English translation “Discourse
in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, 259–422.
12. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957) (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), chap. 1.
13. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 10.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, all these theories end up mod-

eling an unstable aggregate of works in the same way common sense
models things: as a fixed given, as a simple presence. But the entities studied
by the history of culture (“the novel” or “secularization,” “the middle ages”
or “modernism”) are not things: rather, they are universals in re, or to use
another philosophical vocabulary, they are language games. They exist qua
clusters of heterogeneous texts held together by a shared family resem-
blance, by a public web of terms, expectations, habits, and examples that
create a field of works and then trace out its boundary lines. When this web
has yet to form or has ceased to exist, the literary territory takes on an-
other form or disappears. This means that the history of presuppositions
and the history of objects are tied together by an inextricable, ontological
knot: things make an appearance in the human world only when practices
and words provide them with an identity. This is why it makes no sense to
recount the history of a literary institution as if we were talking about a res.
What we need to do instead is reconstruct the dialectic between the object
and the words that enabled the object to be defined in the first place. The
Aethiopica were not always considered a novel: they became such when
we started to locate them in the same class of medieval texts that already
bore the name of roman. This sort of retrospective identification, which is
neither obvious nor necessary, should be the point of departure for all crit-
ical inquiries.
When did the novel come into being? As we recognize it today, the genre
emerged at the end of a transformation that took place between the mid-
sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth. Around 1550, the word
“novel” referred for the most part to a narrowly defined, specific literary
form. Around 1800, it referred to what it does today—a polymorphic space
providing a home for stories of a certain length that do not fall within the
confines of more rigidly codified narrative genres (epic poems, works of
history, and the chanson de geste). The same expansion took place in all
the European lexicons for all terms related to the genre: le roman, der
Roman, la novela, il romanzo.14 In 1550 the family resemblance linking
14. The history and origin of the English names are more intricate because during the
eighteenth century, instead of just one word for the territory we are describing, there were
two. The meaning of novel and romance, as we were saying, became gradually more specific.
They never referred to separate genres, but rather to variants of a single whole—different
modes of a single narrative space. This space was referred to using the dittology novel and
the texts we now call by the name of novel was only vaguely perceived; in
1800 the terms novel, roman, Roman, novela, romanzo already meant what
they mean today.
The First Corpus

As the word transformed, so did the object: between the middle of the six-
teenth century and the end of the eighteenth century many strains of
written narrative proliferated that, despite their dissimilarities, ultimately
ended up forming a family—their differences were less important than their
similarities. I will briefly list the subgenres that merged into the territory of
the novel. This list is likely incomplete: readers who are familiar with the
literature from these centuries will be able to fill in the gaps. My interest
lies less in tracing out the exact confines of a literary space with shifting
boundaries than in identifying the main families of works that compose it.
The first group of texts to take the name of romance was medieval and Re-
naissance courtly narrative in verse and prose on the matters of Britain,
France, and Rome. The first attempts to codify the cultural object named
romanzo—by Fórnari, Giraldi, and Pigna15—refer to this tradition, which
romance, as it appears in Defoe’s preface to Moll Flanders (“The World is so taken up of late
with novels and romances”). Or one of the two terms was used, as in one of the most impor-
tant eighteenth-century treatises on the novel, The Progress of Romance (1785) by Clara
Reeve. In this case, the word romance sometimes had a restricted meaning, indicating a sub-
genre that was juxtaposed to the novel, and at other times it had a wider meaning, indicating
the genre that came out of combining the novel and the romance—the equivalent of the
French roman. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was abundantly clear that novel
and romance were species of a single genus: “the word novel is a generical term; of which
romances, histories, memoirs, letters, tales, lives, and adventures are the species” (Edward
Mangin, An Essay on Light Reading, as It May Be Supposed to Influence Moral Conduct on
Literary Taste [London: James Carpenter, 1808], 5). See Brown, Institutions of the English
Novel; Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 8ff.; James Raven, “Britain, 1750–1830,” in The
Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006), 429–444.
15. Simone Fórnari, La Sposizione di M. Simon Fórnari di Rheggio sopra l’ “Orlando
furioso” di M. Ludovico Ariosto, 2 vols. (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1549–1550);
Giovan Battista Pigna, I romanzi (1554), critical edition by Salvatore Ritrovato (Bologna:
Commissione per i testi in lingua, 1997); Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio, Discorso dei ro-
manzi (1554), ed. Laura Benedetti, Giuseppe Monorchio, and Enrico Musacchio (Bologna:
Millennium, 1999).
had been revitalized during the early decades of the sixteenth century by
two books destined for enormous success in Europe: Amadis of Gaul (the
work predates the sixteenth century, but the first printed edition is from
1508) and Orlando furioso (1516–1532).
In the mid-sixteenth century, modern European literatures rediscovered

the ancient Greek novels. Longus was translated into English in 1537–1539,
into French in 1559, into English in 1587, and into German in 1615. Achilles
Tatius was translated into French in 1545, into Italian in 1546, into English
in 1597, into Spanish in 1617, and into German in 1626. Heliodorus
was translated into French in 1547, into German and Spanish in 1554,
into Italian in 1556, and into English in 1567.16 The Greek works, usually
called histories, were compared to chivalric narrative, in verse and in prose,
which took the name of roman, romanzo, or romance. This is because
readers recognized the similarities in structure, and because the plots origi-
nating in antiquity had already appeared in the genre called the roman
during the Middle Ages (the so-called matter of Rome). Ancient Greek narra-
tive would have a decisive influence on the European Baroque novel: from
Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), to the French
heroic novels by Gomberville, la Calprenède, and the Scudéry brother and
sister, to the most famous of the Italian novels of the seventeenth century,
Calloandro fedele (1640–1641) by Giovanni Ambrogio Marini.
The pastoral narrative in verse and prose was directly or indirectly de-
scended from ancient times. Sannazaro’s Arcadia had revived pastoral
themes between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the
sixteenth (the first printed edition was in 1504), but the genre experienced
its greatest popularity after the first modern translations of Longus’s
Daphnis and Chloe (Annibal Caro, 1537–1539; Amyot, 1559) and after
Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (1559).17 The tradition continued with a
profusion of important works like Cervantes’s Galatea (1585), Sidney’s
Arcadia (the first printed editions are from 1590–1593), Lope de Vega’s
16. See Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1970), appendix: “A Bibliographic Survey,” 145–162; Laurence
Plazenet, L’Ébahissement et la Délectation: réception comparée et poétique du roman grec en
France et en Angleterre au XVIe et au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1997), 13.
17. See Françoise Lavocat, Arcadies malheureuses: aux origines du roman moderne (Paris:
Champion, 1998).
Arcadia (1598), and Urfé’s Astrée (1607–1627). The chivalric narrative,

the pastoral narrative, and the Greek novel formed the area that English-
language literary criticism called the romance in opposition to the novel.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the distinction between

novel and romance was still in the process of stabilizing, Sir Walter Scott
presented the work of Alain-René Lesage in Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library.
To illustrate the genealogy from which the author of Gil Blas (1715–1735)
descended, Scott invented an intelligent category that was destined for
success: the comic romance.18 In the mid-twentieth century, in a work
that changed the interpretation of the English novel, Ian Watt arrived at
this category independently when he spoke of the inverted romance.19
Scott argued that the comic romance had developed mainly in Spain, citing
Lazarillo de Tormes. In reality, the origin of this family of texts is more
remote. Works like Petronius’s Satyricon (first century CE), The Golden
Ass (second century CE), Lucian’s A True Story (second century CE),
Luigi Pulci’s Morgante (1478–1483), Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel
(1532–1564), the picaresque narrative in its comic variant, Le Berger ex-
travagant (1627–1628) by Charles Sorel, and Le Roman bourgeois (1666)
by Antoine Furetière all share a resemblance: they are pluristylistic narra-
tives, but dominated by a lower register; they include adventurous elements;
and they can be read as the comic reverse of the serious romance. Indeed,
the parody is often quite explicit. It was in this context that the expression
anti-roman arose: Charles Sorel used it in Le Berger extravagant.20 The tra-
dition of the mock-heroic comic narrative, which especially influenced
the work of Fielding, also contributed to the birth of the comic romance.21
18. Scott, “Alain-René Le Sage,” 125. The expression has a precedent in Scarron’s Roman
comique.
19. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 11.
20. Sartre used the term anti-novel (anti-roman) again in his preface to Nathalie Sar-
raute’s Portrait of a Man Unknown to refer to twentieth-century experimental narrative that
deconstructs the rules of plot and character: Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait d’un inconnu (1957);
English translation Portrait of a Man Unknown, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: George Bra-
ziller, 1965), vii–xiv.
21. See Clotilde Bertoni, Percorsi europei dell’eroicomico (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1997), 208ff.;
and by the same author, “Guizzi parodici e storie senza eroi. Il romanzo sette-ottocentesco e la
tradizione eroicomica,” in various authors, Gli “irregolari” della letteratura: Eterodossi, paro-
disti, funamboli della parola (Rome: Salerno, 2007).
Even an unclassifiable text like Don Quixote (1605–1615) falls into the
category of the comic romance. According to a well-known interpretation,
Cervantes’s masterpiece is said to stage the death of the romance, which
is swallowed up by the prose of the world. Leaving aside opinions on the
genre of this indefinable work, there is no doubt that up until the Romantic
period the predominant reading of the text was as a parody: even Don
Quixote was interpreted as a comic romance.22
The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and Adversities

(the first surviving printed edition dates from 1554) ushered in the pica-
resque narrative. The genre was revived fifty years later with Guzmán de
Alfarache (1599–1604) by Mateo Alemán and was enormously popular in
Spain and Europe. But while Lazarillo and Guzmán were fueled by a se-
rious moral intention, at the beginning of the seventeenth century the pica-
resque genre was pulled back into the comic romance tradition.23 Widely
translated, the Spanish stories influenced French writers, especially Charles
Sorel (Histoire comique de Francion, 1623–1633), Paul Scarron (Le Roman
comique, 1651–1657), and Lesage (Gil Blas, 1715–1735). One of the most
important narrative works in seventeenth-century Germany, Simplicissimus
(1668–1669), by Grimmelshausen, descends from the picaresque tradition.
Many eighteenth-century novels that were retrospectively classed in the
novel genre are connected to this family, starting with Tobias Smollett’s The
Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).
Another corpus of texts in the comic romance tradition, related to the

picaresque novel but with its own specific identity, is the humorous novel
of the eighteenth century: from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–1767), to
Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (written between 1765 and 1784, but not pub-
lished until 1796), to the works of Jean Paul. This literary lineage would
22. Angel Flores and M. J. Bernadete, eds., Cervantes across the Centuries (New York:
Gordian Press, 1969); Peter E. Russell, “ ‘Don Quixote’ as a Funny Book,” Modern Language
Review 64 (1969): 312–326; Anthony J. Close, The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote”:
A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in “Quixote” Criticism (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1978); Horst Weich, “ ‘Don Quichotte’ et le roman comique français
du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle,” Cahiers de l’association internationale des études françaises 48
(May 1996): 241–261.
23. See Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (1970); English translation
The Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Point of View, trans. Charles Davis (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984).
become an essential landmark for the first theorists of the truly modern
novel, especially for Friedrich Schlegel. The freedom with which the hu-
morous tradition mixed its contents and forms also contributed to the
novel becoming perceived at a certain point as the genre that can be used to
tell about anything in any way whatsoever.
One part of the texts later integrated into the literary space of the novel
is related in various ways to the medieval genre of the novella and its six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century transformations. In the mid-sixteenth
century, short narrative enjoyed renewed popularity thanks to Matteo Ban-
dello’s Novelle (1554–1573) and Margaret of Navarre’s Heptaméron
(1558). Passing from Italy into Spain, the genre underwent a crucial trans-
formation with Cervantes. In the preface to his Exemplary Novels (1613),
the author of Don Quixote credits himself with being the first person to
write novelas in the Castilian language.24 But his interpretation of the genre
transcended the boundaries set by the Italians. Cervantes lengthened the
plot, introduced narrative techniques from the Greek romances, imbued the
events with hidden moral senses, and to all intents and purposes inaugu-
rated a new form that was remarkably successful in Spain and later ex-
ported to France.25 In addition to these changes, he also introduced the
publishing practice of circulating the novellas autonomously, detached
from a unifying frame and presented as “comic stories” or “tragic stories.”
During the seventeenth century, novelas and tragic stories became codi-
fied, meeting with considerable success throughout Europe and changing
people’s perception of the genre. Out of this metamorphosis came the
French nouvelle of the second half of the seventeenth century: a type of
book that, in the print types of our time, filled about a hundred or a hun-
dred and fifty pages and told a love story between people of high rank, in
a nonromance setting. The success of Madame de La Fayette’s The Prin-
cesse de Clèves and the theoretical debate it set off during the last two de-
cades of the seventeenth century solidified the features of the genre.26
24. Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares (1613); English translation Exemplary Sto-
ries, trans., with introduction and notes, by Lesley Lipson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 5.
25. See Frédéric Deloffre, La Nouvelle en France à l’âge classique (Paris: Didier, 1967),
chap. 2; Hautcoeur Pérez-Espejo, Parentés franco-espagnoles au XVIIe siècle, 27ff.
26. See Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 94ff.; Camille Esmein, “Le tournant histo-
Many of the most important narrative works from the eighteenth

century are epistolary novels with a love theme. The genre began with
Ovid’s Heroides and continued to be practiced during the Hellenistic pe-
riod. It made its way through the Middle Ages (the letters of Abelard and
Heloise and Boccaccio’s The Elegy of Madame Fiammetta) and then flour-
ished again during the age of Renaissance humanism, thanks mainly to
the success of The Tale of Two Lovers (1444) by Aeneas Silvius Piccolo-
mini and the development of a women’s epistolary literature during the
sixteenth century.27 Practiced continuously in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, epistolary fiction produced works that would prove to be
remarkably influential, such as Gabriel de Guilleragues’s Letters of a Por-
tuguese Nun (1669). During the eighteenth century, the genre met with
enormous success and contributed significantly to the development of the
novel: this was the form charged with the mimesis of passions.28 Some of the
texts that were decisive for the history of the eighteenth-century novel had
an epistolary structure: Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748),
Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761), Burney’s Evelina (1778), and
Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782). The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
also belongs in some respects to the tradition of the romantic epistolary
novel, although Goethe interpreted the genre in a completely new way.
The territory of the novel also covers works that resist any exact clas-
sification. We might call them stories of individuals29 or writings about
personal experience. From 1550 on, these stories gained in prestige and
number, aided by the cultural atmosphere of the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation as well as the rebirth of Pauline and Augustinian
thought, all of which played different roles in fostering autobiographical
rique comme construction théorique: l’exemple du ‘tournant’ de 1660 dans l’histoire du

roman,” Théorie et histoire littéraire, Fabula LHT (littérature, histoire, théorie), June 16,
2005, http://www.fabula.org/lht/0/esmein.html; also by the same author, L’Essor du roman:
discours théorique et constitution d’un genre littéraire au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion,
2008), 11ff.
27. Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 108ff.
28. See Jean Rousset, “Une forme littéraire: le roman par lettres,” in Forme et significa-
tion: essai sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel (Paris: Corti, 1962).
29. The expression appears in Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel,
1600–1740 (1987) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 95ff.
writing. In Protestant countries, the sacrament of confession was replaced

by the practice of keeping a private journal. In Catholic countries, the spir-
itual exercises and example of Ignatius of Loyola transmitted models for
writing about oneself. Protestant and Catholic Augustinianism transformed
Augustine’s Confessions into the archetype of sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century introspective literature.30 In addition to promoting the spread of
spiritual autobiographies, religious culture reinforced the tradition of bi-
ographies, generating lives of the saints, lives of converted sinners, and ex-
emplary lives of good Christians.
But writings about experience and stories of individuals also developed
outside the religious sphere, through the secular genre of the letter, for ex-
ample, which Petrarch had transformed into a vital component of literary
humanism. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the authority of
Erasmus contributed to propagating a new model of epistolary writing that
was open to the multiplicity of life and to the subjectivity of the author,
based on a flexible, interiorized application of the rules of rhetoric.31 The
letter proved to be important for the development of fiction in general. It
provided a rhetorical framework for the romantic epistolary novel. It also
lent itself to telling about experiences, voyages with realistic pretensions,
or imaginary journeys based on the device of estrangement, as in the genre
introduced by Giovanni Paolo Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy
(1684) and consolidated by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721). The
second half of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century also wit-
nessed an extraordinary outpouring of secular biography (the Plutarchian
tradition, biographies of artists, writers, and scholars) and secular autobi-
ography (from an anomalous work like Michel de Montaigne’s Essays to
the rebirth of the classic genre of commentarii, which in French culture was
called mémoires).32
30. See Andrea Battistini, Lo specchio di Dedalo. Autobiografia e biografia (Bologna: Il

Mulino, 1990), 33ff.
31. Marc Fumaroli, “Genèse de l’épistolographie classique: rhétorique humaniste de la
lettre, de Pétrarque à Juste Lipse,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 88 (1978): 886–905.
32. See Beasley, Novels of the 1740s, chaps. 3–5; Franco D’Intino, L’autobiografia mod-
erna. Storia forme problemi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1998), 29–37; J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels:
The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990),
chaps. 12–14; Marc Fumaroli, “Les Mémoires du XVIIe siècle au carrefour des genres en
prose,” XVIIe siècle 94–95 (1971): 7–37; René Démoris, Le Roman à la première personne:
du classicisme aux Lumières (1975) (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 59ff.
Courtly, pastoral, and Greek romances, novelle, novelas, and nouvelles,

romantic epistolary novels, and writings about personal experience all took
their place on the genealogical tree of the novel. There were also literary or
paraliterary forms that, although not belonging to the genre, had a pro-
found influence on it.
Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries two forms appeared that
were related to secular biography, but with a more static and analytical
bent: the character and the prose portrait. Both descended from classical
rhetoric. The character sketch experienced a second vogue after Casau-
bon’s publication of The Characters of Theophrastus (1592 and 1599),
first in England and then throughout Europe.33 The prose portrait had a po-
etic prehistory,34 developing mainly in French literature of the âge classique.35
Both had an influence on how characters were represented in novels.36
Midway between writings about experience and pure invention, travel

literature remained popular throughout the Middle Ages and the early
modern period. While some of the stories presented themselves as reports
of real-world experiences, others were described as works of the imagina-
tion or utopias. Regardless of their realistic status, this form influenced
some of the works that entered the canon of the European novel, from
33. Benjamin Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1947); John William Smeed, The Theophrastan “Character”: The
History of a Literary Genre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).
34. Lina Bolzoni, Poesia e ritratto nel Rinascimento, ed. Federica Pich (Rome: Laterza,
2008).
35. Gisela Ruth Köhler, Das literarische Porträt: Eine Untersuchung zur geschlossenen
Personendarstellung in der französischen Erzählliteratur vom Mittelalter bis zum Ende des
19. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Romanistischer Verlag, 1991), 141ff.; Jacqueline Plantié, La Mode
du portrait littéraire en France 1641–1681 (Paris: Champion, 1994).
36. See Peter Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon, Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 57ff. and passim; Smeed, The Theophrastan
“Character,” chap. 10; Barbara Carnevali, “L’Observatoire des moeurs: les coutumes et les
caractères, entre littérature et morale,” in Pensée morale et genres littéraires, ed. Jean-Charles
Darmon and Philippe Desan (Paris: PUF, 2009), 159–178; and by the same author, “Mimesis
littéraire et connaissance morale: la tradition de l’ ‘éthopée,’ ” Annales 45, no. 2 (2010):
291–322.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

(1726–1735).37
The development of the novel has to be considered in relation to the

mass of popular writings that occupied the same market segment later
occupied by the novel and the romance: miraculous or edifying anecdotes,
stories of wonders or monsters, secret histories, scandal sheets, letters, ser-
mons, treatises of popular theology, devotional manuals, catechisms, moral
debates on the events of the day, exempla, observations on contemporary
customs, books of jests and manners, and guides to the duties of Christians,
men, women, mothers, fathers, gentlemen, merchants, servants, shopkeepers,
innkeepers, soldiers, and sailors.38 With the spread of printing, this jumble
of writings expanded throughout Europe. Some of the subgenres that formed
one part were of medieval origin and therefore had a well-established his-
tory. The picaresque novel, for example, developed on the back of popular
narrative forms like criminal biographies and jest books: the story of Ginés
de Pasamonte in Don Quixote is a good illustration of how important and
pervasive bandit tales were in the popular imagination, in Spain as in other
countries. It is no coincidence that the first English translation of Lazarillo
de Tormes was by David Rowland, who had previously been known for
his stories about criminals.
Symbolic Thresholds: 1550
Here, then, is a concise list of the subgenres that shaped the space of the
literary novel between the second half of the sixteenth century and the
second half of the seventeenth. There are many reasons why the year 1550
can serve as the first historical threshold.
1. In the mid-sixteenth century, European literatures rediscovered the Greek

novel. Between 1553 and 1554 the first picaresque narrative appeared.
During the same timespan, the first treatises on the genre called the romanzo
37. Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: Univer-
sity Press of Kentucky, 1983); Riccardo Capoferro, Frontiere del racconto. Letteratura di vi-
aggio e romanzo in Inghilterra, 1680–1750 (Rome: Meltemi, 2007).
38. See Hunter, Before Novels, chaps. 10 and 11.
appeared: Simone Fòrnari’s Sposizione sopra l’ “Orlando furioso” di M.

Ludovico Ariosto (1549–1550), Giraldi Cinzio’s Discorso intorno al com-
porre dei romanzi (first print edition 1554), and Giovan Battista Pigna’s I
romanzi (1554).39
2. Around 1550, the categories indicating the genre we are exploring began
to be used in a more extended sense. This took place when some of the new
narrative texts, or those that had been recently rediscovered, were intro-
duced into the same literary territory occupied by courtly literature. Amyot’s
preface to his translation of Heliodorus (1547) is an emblematic text in this
respect. Following antihistorical, typological lines of reasoning, he compares
Aethiopica to medieval romances as if they were the same type of books:
And, on the contrary, the majority of books of this sort (livres de ceste
sorte) that were anciently written in our language—in addition to pos-
sessing no learning, no knowledge of antiquity, or anything (in a word)
from which one might derive some utility—are also often so ill-conceived
and so far removed from any probable appearance that they seem more
akin to the fevered deliriums of a sick person than to the inventions of
any man of wit and judgment.40
The crucial semantic expansion for the words derived from novus-
novella began over half a century later, when the Spanish novelas length-
ened and complicated the plots of the Italian novelle.
3. Around 1550, the new literary territory that was gradually taking shape
around terms deriving from romanice loqui and from novus-novella began
to bifurcate, following a schema that, through a few intermediate steps,
punctuated the history of the novel during the following centuries. The di-
viding line rested on a cornerstone of classical literary theory, patterned on
the opposition between poetry and history that Aristotle had laid out in
the ninth chapter of his Poetics:
39. On the date of composition of Giraldi’s and Pigna’s works, and on the controversy
that divided them, see the introduction, remarks, and appendixes to Giraldi Cinzio, Discorso
dei romanzi, esp. 12–25.
40. Jacques Amyot, “Le Proësme du translateur,” in L’Histoire aethiopique de Heliodorus,
contenant dix livres, traitant des loyales et pudiques amours de Théagènes thessalien et Char-
iclea aethiopienne, nouvellement traduite de grec en françoys (Paris: Longis, 1547), not
paginated.
A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and
would happen either probably or inevitably (kata to eikos e to anan-
kaion). The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one
writes in prose and the other in verse. . . . The real difference is this, that
one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this
reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history,
because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular
facts. By a “general truth” I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of
man will do or say either probably or necessarily. That is what poetry
aims at in giving names to the characters. A “particular” fact is what Al-
cibiades did or what was done to him.41
History shows us what a particular individual did or what was done to

him or her and tells the “truth”—meaning a real event in all its singularity.
Poetry shows us what a certain type of person would normally do or say
and tells what might well have taken place “probably or inevitably.” The idea
of probability that premodern classicism drew from Aristotle, Horace, and
Plato stemmed from the intersection of two different elements. The first—
empirical observation—unites the classical concept of probability to the
modern one. By studying people’s behavior we can formulate general laws
that become sedimented in the discursive formations that serve us to clas-
sify characters, passions, and customs. In the culture of antiquity, these
disciplines were primarily ethics and rhetoric. When Aristotle described the
behavior of the young, the old, the man in his prime, the noble, the rich,
and the powerful in book 2 of Rhetoric and in the Nicomachean Ethics, he
made use of anthropological and sociological abstractions that we are still
able to understand today, because they record empirical constants that
have remained stable over time.42 The second is foreign to modern common
sense, because instead of coming from observation, it derives from norma-
tive ethics—from the idea that the task of poetry is to show things and
people as they should be and not as they are. A noble hero must behave
nobly: although we know from experience that the opposite occurs at
times, the task of the poet is to portray the ideal essence of aristocratic
characters and not their empirical imperfection. Conversely, the historian
disregards the probable to tell the truth, which grants him license to describe
41. Aristotle, Poetics 9.1451a–1451b.

42. Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.12–17; Nicomachean Ethics 3 and 4 and passim.
life in all its contingent, imperfect, and centrifugal particularity.43 As the

keystone of classicist poetics between the second half of the sixteenth
century and the first half of the eighteenth, the opposition between the
universality of poetry and the particularity of history did not serve to dis-
tinguish works of fiction from works of historiography (the differences
between the two genres are obvious). It primarily created a boundary
inside the literature of invention, defining two different models of mimesis:
the first was oriented to showing reality how it should be in its ideal
perfection, while the second was oriented to showing reality as it truly is,
in the contingency of its particular way of being. This opposition guided
perception about narrative until the system established by premodern and
early modern classicism dissolved during the Romantic period. We find it
in Italian writers in the mid-sixteenth century44 and in Don Quixote,45 in
French writers of the âge classique,46 and in English literati of the mid-
eighteenth century.47 The critical vocabulary of Friedrich Schlegel and Gia-
43. René Bray, La Formation de la doctrine classique en France (Paris: Nizet, 1945), part 3,
chap. 1; Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531–
1555 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1946), chaps. 5 and 7; Bernard Weinberg, A History
of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961),
passim; Gérard Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” in Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969),
71–99; Áron Kibédi Varga, “La Vraisemblance: problèmes de terminologie, problèmes de
poétique,” in Critique et création littéraires en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 1977),
325–332; Anne Duprat, Vraisemblances: poétiques et théorie de la fiction, du Cinquecento à
Jean Chapelain (1500–1670) (Paris: Champion, 2009), 136ff., 327ff.
44. See Pigna, I romanzi, 93ff. and passim; Giraldi Cinzio, Discorso sui romanzi, 47ff.,
88ff., and passim.
45. See Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605–1615); English transla-
tion Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. Charles Jarvis; edited with an introduction and notes
by Edward C. Riley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
46. See Pierre-Daniel Huet, Traité de l’origine des romans; English translation The History
of Romances, trans. Stephen Lewis (London: J. Hooke, at the Flower-de-luce, and T. Calde-
cott, at the Sun; both against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet, 1715), 3.
47. See Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), ed. Fredson Bowers
and Martin Carey Battestin, Wesleyan Edition of the Complete Works of Henry Fielding
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 1, pp. 75ff. and bk. 8, chap. 1, p. 400;
Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no. 4 (Saturday, March 31, 1750); also by Johnson, Essays from the
Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, ed. Walter Jackson Bate (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1968), 14. Fielding defines the uniqueness of his work by appealing to the Aristotelian
opposition between history and poetry: Tom Jones is a history, but it deals with a subject that
has no unanimous testimonies or verifiable documentation. It is therefore forced to remain
within the limits of the probable. Johnson maintains that the best novels should not pursue
como Leopardi still bears traces of this opposition.48 The theory was used
to impose order on the profusion of unorthodox narrative writings that
were being gathered into one group under the artificial names roman, ro-
manzo, novel-and-romance, and novela.
Symbolic Thresholds: 1670

If 1550 marks a first frontier, a second symbolic threshold can be seen to
fall around 1670, for at least two reasons.
1. In 1670 Pierre-Daniel Huet published a Lettre sur l’origine des romans

(Letter on the Origin of Novels) as a preface to Zayde, written by Madame
de La Fayette and appearing under the name of Segrais. Revised and pub-
lished a year later in the form of a treatise, and continuously rewritten until
1711, the Traité de l’origine des romans became the standard reference for
anyone writing about the novel until at least the mid-eighteenth century.49
While Italian theorists of the 1500s identified the romanzo with the chi-
valric poem, Huet broadened its historical framework. He did so almost
despite himself: his treatise actually sought to restrict the field of legitimate
writings and transform the Greek novel into the perfect example of what
the genre should be. And yet, regardless of his intentions, Huet traced out
a hybrid history. He wrote that Greek narratives are the standard, but rec-
ognized that the word roman derives from medieval narrative literature.
He talked about the works of Heliodorus as a model, but also reflected
the imperfections of life, as do works of history, but depict life as it should be, exhibiting “the
most perfect idea of virtue,” as do works of poetry.
48. When Friedrich Schlegel writes that romantic poetry “is based entirely on a historical
foundation,” or that The Decameron “is almost entirely true history,” what he means is that
these works tell contingent stories about particular individuals rather than offering exem-
plary characters and plots drawn from myths or other literature. When Leopardi writes that his
Idylls express “situations, affections, historic adventures of my soul,” what he means is that
these poems arise out of contingent biographical anecdotes, and not out of generic literary situ-
ations. The concept of “historical” that Schlegel and Leopardi refer to is still the classical notion
deriving from Aristotle’s Poetics. See Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 100; Giacomo Leopardi,
Disegni letterari, in Prose e poesie, vol. 2, Prose, ed. Rolando Damiani (Milan: Mondadori,
1988), 1218.
49. For more on the publication history of this work, see Camille Esmein, Poétiques du
roman: Scudéry, Huet, Du Plaisir et autres textes théoriques et critiques du XVIIe siècle sur le
genre romanesque (Paris: Champion, 2004), 359ff.
on irregular works like Petronius’s Satyricon and the courtly romance. In

a word: Huet ultimately lumped together under the same name texts that
were extremely diverse. What he treated as a single, unified thing would
appear to be a confused, heterogeneous mass when grouped together under
other categories. Later treatise writers repeated this same aggregating ma-
neuver: from Gotthard Heidegger (Mythoscopia romantica, 1698), Lenglet
du Fresnoy (De l’usage des romans [On the Use of Novels], 1734), and
Blanckenburg (Versuch über den Roman [Essay on the Novel], 1774) to
Clara Reeve (The Progress of Romance, 1785).
2. But 1670 marks a symbolic frontier for another, more important reason.
Around this date an opposition began to circulate that would prove decisive
in creating the novel as a genre. In response to a change in public taste,
French writers began to distinguish between the roman and the nouvelle.
The first term referred to the heroic Baroque novel, the second to a story of
about a hundred or a hundred and fifty pages that, like Madame de La
Fayette’s The Princesse de Clèves (1678), told about the private, ro-
mantic affairs of characters, most of whom were aristocrats. In critical
discussion, the meanings of the two words tended to multiply entropically;50
however, taking into account the semantic chaos ensuing from all intel-
lectual debates, it can be seen that the boundary line very often followed
the Aristotelian opposition between poetry and history.51 This critical
schema is one that we come across continually: in Segrais’s Nouvelles fran-
çaises (1656–1657);52 in the preface to Nouvelles galantes, comiques et
50. Esmein-Sarrazin, L’Essor du roman, 18ff., 59ff.

51. Robin Howells, “Statut du romanesque: l’opposition roman/histoire dans la pratique
signifiante de 1635 à 1785,” in Folies romanesques au siècle des Lumières, ed. René Démoris
and Henri Lafon (Paris: Desjonquères, 1998), 19–39.
52. The character Aurélie says: “We began to tell things as they are, and not how they
should be; after all, it seems to me that this is the difference between the roman and the nou-
velle: the roman writes things as dictated by literary decorum [bienséance] and as poets do;
the nouvelle must stay somewhat closer to history and try to present the images of things as
we see them ordinarily rather than how they are fashioned by our imagination.” Jean Reg-
nault de Segrais, Les Nouvelles françaises, ou les Divertissements de la princesse Aurelie
(1656–1657), edited, introduced, and annotated by Roger Guichemerre, vol. 1 (Paris: Société
des textes français modernes, 1990–1992), 99.
tragiques (1669) by Jean Donneau de Visé;53 in the preface to Les Annales

galantes (1670) by Madame de Villedieu;54 in the preface to Marie Stuart
(1674) by Boisguilbert;55 in the Illustre Parisienne (1679) by Jean de
Préchac;56 in the most important seventeenth-century theory on the nou-
velle, Du Plaisir’s Sentiments sur l’histoire [Reflections on ‘History’]
(1683);57 and in the preface to Les Illustres Françaises (1713) by Robert
Challe.58 The roman claims to follow the rules of Aristotelian probability
and tells exemplary stories. The nouvelle follows the rules of the true
within the limits permitted by good taste and presents itself as the history
53. “I do not doubt that in some of my nouvelles there are things that seem somewhat
improbable; but the reader will reflect, if he might, on the fact that I am not a poet in this
work but a historian. The poet must conform to probability and correct the truth, which is
not probable. The historian, on the contrary, must not write anything untrue; and, assuming
he is sure that what he tells is the truth, he need not concern himself about probability. Cer-
tainly, improbable things have often occurred: if not, we’d never see anything extraordi-
nary or surprising happen. Being a faithful historian, I have not wanted to weigh in on
incidents of this nature that I have come across, even though in many points, with two or
three words, I could have made certain adventures more probable.” Jean Donneau de Visé,
Les Nouvelles galantes, comiques et tragiques (1669) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979),
preface, not paginated.
54. “The century boasts of so much subtlety and the license to write living plots has be-
come so common [an allusion to Nouvelles galantes, comiques et tragiques by Donneau de
Visé, which reported contemporary, often scandalous faits divers], that I felt I should forestall
the public’s errors with this note. I therefore declare that Les Annales galantes are historical
truths, and I have marked the sources in the Table affixed for this purpose at the end of this
first volume. These are not clever tales dressed up with real names. . . . They are faithful traits
of General History.” Madame de Villedieu, Les Annales galantes (1670) (Paris: Société des
textes français modernes, 2004), 47–48 (“Avant propos”).
55. Pierre le Pesant de Boisguilbert, Marie Stuard, reine d’Écosse: nouvelle historique,
part 1 (Paris: C. Barbin, 1674), “Avis.”
56. “Because what I write is a true history, I was obliged to take my heroine as I found
her.” Jean de Préchac, L’Illustre Parisienne: histoire galante et veritable (Paris: Chez la Veuve
Olivier de Varennes, 1679), 2–3.
57. “Probability consists in saying only that which is morally credible. . . . The truth is not
always probable, and yet he who writes a true history is not obliged to tone things down to
make them believable. It is no guarantee of their probability, because they must be told as
they happened and because they are known by many.” Du Plaisir, Sentiments sur les lettres et
sur l’histoire, avec des scupules sur le style, critical edition by Philippe Hourcade (Geneva:
Droz, 1975), 46–47.
58. “If I had written fables, I would have been in control of the incidents, which I would
have shaped as I pleased. But these are truths whose rules are completely contrary to those of
romans.” Robert Challe, Les Illustres Françaises (1713), new edition by Frédéric Deloffre and
Jacques Cormier (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 4–5.
of a private life, according to a definition to which we will return. The

roman was a “poetic” genre: it recounted the adventures of ideal heroes,
set in times and spaces far removed from ordinary experience; its story line
usually followed the ordo artificialis, and its archetypes were the Greek
novel and pastoral narrative; its most recent expression was the heroic
Baroque novel. The nouvelle tended instead to present itself as a “histor-
ical” narrative: it had a simple story line, and it recounted “particular ac-
tions of private individuals or those considered to be private,”59 who were
situated in an imperfect, contingent world, similar to the one experienced
by readers.
In the French debate on roman and nouvelle this wider, metaphoric use of
the categories of poetry and history that were common as early as the mid-
sixteenth century became explicit. Indeed, the expression “true history” was
used to define texts in which we find obviously invented episodes or charac-
ters, and in which expressions such as nouvelle historique, nouvelle galante,
and histoire véritable are used as synonyms,60 or about which the authors
admit to having embellished the historical fact with fictional parts: “I confess
that I have added a few embellishments to the simplicity of the history. . . . I
have added some secret encounters and amorous conversations to the his-
tory. If they are not exactly those uttered by the characters, they are in any
case what they should have said.”61
A few decades later, the nouvelle was exported to Great Britain and
the roman-nouvelle opposition generated the dichotomy between romance
and novel.62 The English opposition also initially bore the mark of the
Aristotelian dialectic between history and poetry, as we see in reading
the preface to The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705) by Delarivier
59. Jean-Antoine de Charnes, Conversations sur la critique de la Princesse de Clèves

(1679) (Tours: Publication du groupe d’étude du XVIIe siècle de l’Université François-
Rabelais, 1973), 135.
60. Esmein, “Le tournant historique comme construction théorique,” §2.
61. Madame de Villedieu, Les Annales galantes, 48–49.
62. Williams, Novel and Romance, 1700–1800. William Congreve was probably the first
to introduce the opposition between novel and romance in the preface to his Incognita
(1692). See Irene Simon, “Early Theories of Prose Fiction: Congreve and Fielding,” in
Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed.
Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London: Methuen, 1968), 19.
Manley,63 Defoe’s preface to Roxana (1724),64 or Fielding’s Tom Jones.65

The meanings of the terms novel and romance wavered greatly during the
eighteenth century: the two categories overlapped and were confused for a
long period of time. Only between the end of the eighteenth century and
the beginning of the nineteenth did their respective spheres begin to gradu-
ally stabilize. An important contribution in this regard comes from the dia-
logue by Clara Reeve called The Progress of Romance (1785), in which the
two words are used with the meanings they acquired in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: romances tell adventurous, improbable stories about
exceptional or unreal people; novels tell stories about relatively common
people in relatively ordinary contexts:
The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and
things.—The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times
in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language,
describes what never happened nor is likely to happen.—The Novel
gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes,
such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of
it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to
make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at
63. “[The authors of Historical Novels] ought with great Care to observe the Probability
of Truth, which consists in Saying nothing but what may Morally be believed. | For there are
Truths that are not always probable; as for Example, ’tis an allowed Truth in the Roman His-
tory that Nero put his Mother to Death, but ’tis a Thing against all Reason and Probability
that a Son shou’d embrue his Hand in the Blood of his own Mother. . . . He that writes a True
History ought to place the Accidents as they Naturally happen, without endeavouring to
sweeten them for to procure a greater Credit, because he is not obliged to answer for their
Probability; but he that composes a History to his Fancy gives his Heroes what Characters he
pleases; and places the Accidents as he thinks fit without believing he shall be contradicted by
other Historians, therefore, he is obliged to Write nothing that is improbable.” Delarivier
Manley, The Secret History of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians, in The Selected Works of
Delarivier Manley, vol. 1, ed. Rachel Carnell (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), 86.
64. In the preface to Roxana, Defoe clarifies that “the Work is not a Story, but a History”
founded in “Truth of Fact.” See Daniel Defoe, Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724), ed.
John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), no page numbers.
65. In Tom Jones, Fielding says that he applied the method of the historian to private life. See
Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, bk. 2, chap. 1, pp. 75ff.; bk. 8, chap. 1, pp. 395ff.
least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the
joys or distresses, or the persons in the story, as if they were our own.66
The opposition shows that the genre of the novel is composed of two
different narrative paradigms, but at the same time it indicates that these
paradigms belong to a unified whole. In France the awareness that the two
forms belonged to the same category never faded. This was the case even
during the last decades of the seventeenth century when the supporters of
the nouvelle quarreled ferociously with the supporters of the roman; or
in the early decades of the eighteenth century, when writers preferred to
avoid the term roman because it was considered to be discredited.67 Roman
and nouvelle always remained subgroups of the larger group called roman
in the broad sense.68 In Great Britain the opposition between novels and
romances is rooted in the literary lexicon, but the uncertainty in tracing out
a clear boundary is a sign that the two groups were perceived as a single
class. It comes as no surprise that Clara Reeve, who also sharply distin-
66. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2. vols (Colchester: Keymer, 1785), vol. 1,
“Evening 7,” 111.
67. Georges May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle: étude sur les rapports du
roman et de la critique (1715–1761) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Paris: PUF,
1963), chap. 5; Jean Sgard, “Le Mot ‘roman,’ ” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13, nos. 2–3
(2001): 181–195.
68. Not by chance, nouvelles were also called romans or petits romans during the last de-
cades of the seventeenth century (see for example Pierre Bayle, Nouvelles de la République
des Lettres, March 1686, in Catalogue de livres nouveaux, accompagné de quelques re-
marques, 2nd ed. [Amsterdam: H. Desbordes, 1686], 350–351), as well as in the 1730s (for
example in Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy, De l’usage des romans [Amsterdam: Chez la Veuve
de Poilras à la Vérité sans fard, 1734], 200–203). It must also be pointed out that eighteenth-
century French poetics retained the idea of an internal division within the literary space of
the novel. In Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité Prévost calls The Princesse de
Clèves a roman, but then compares “heroic novels [romans], like Cassandras, Cleopatra, the
great Cyrus, Polexander” to “histoires amoureuses et nouvelles galantes (romantic histories
and galant novels)” (Antoine François Prévost, Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité
qui s’est retiré du monde, ed. Pierre Berthiaume and Jean Sgard, in Œuvres de Prévost, vol. 1
[Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1978], 143). Lenglet du Fresnoy distinguishes
the “Historiettes ou . . . nouvelles historiques [short histories or . . . historical nouvelles]”
from “Romans réguliers [regular romans],” but interprets them as parts that have been sepa-
rated from regular novels, to the extent of calling them “romans.” The entry for “Roman” in
the Encyclopédie unifies the genre, but breaks it down into the two distinct subgenres of the
roman and the nouvelle.
guished the novel from the romance, considered them in reality to be two
provinces belonging to the same narrative region.
Nouvelle and roman, novel and romance belong to the same literary
space. Indeed: the birth of this dialectic is especially important because it
indicates that, starting from a certain date, the two big narrative families
deriving from novellus-novus and romanice loqui were perceived as dif-
ferent branches of a single genus. Today English-language literary criticism
tends to straddle the opposition between novel and romance by referring
to all fictional narratives as “novels.” This practice brings English-language
critical terminology into conformity with continental usage,69 but in doing
so it runs the risk of dissolving the last trace of a linguistic division that has
a profound reason for being. The theoretical and classificatory use of the
terms novel and romance to draw a boundary line inside the literary space
of modern fiction is historically legitimate. Its foundation is perfectly solid.
The border that it indicates is real. What converged in the romance and
the novel between 1550 and 1800?
The Territory of the Romance
The kernels of the romance are the Greek novels, the pastoral narrative,
and the chivalric narrative of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Ge-
nealogical kinships exist between these forms: the chivalric romance was
likely influenced by Greek narrative through the mediation of Byzantine
culture; the pastoral romance is a static, bucolic variant of the Hellenistic
love and adventure novel; the heroic Baroque novel superimposes elements
taken from the other two traditions onto the model of Heliodorus. But
these works are united more by obvious typological similarities than by
genetic relations: the events they tell about are exceptional states; the char-
acters live in a world very different from the one experienced by human
beings; the plots convey an image of what happens that is dominated by
what Bakhtin called the “adventure-time.”70 A series of unexpected events
temporarily diverts the characters’ fates and generates a sequence of epi-
sodes, but it does not introduce any significant transformation into the
heroes’ outer or inner worlds; the protagonists never grow old, and their
69. See, for example, Doody, The True Story of the Novel, xvii, 16.
70. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” 237ff.
identity never changes; what happens is ruled by chance; the plot can be
extended indefinitely and have continuations. The time and space sur-
rounding the heroes are also indefinite and abstract, given that the former
has no true historical or existential depth and the latter is multifaceted but
generic: entrance into a different country involves only a change of scenery,
but no encounter with another culture or another form of life. For these
reasons, the romance of adventure is the intermediate stage between epic
and romance. As in the epic poem, the characters act in a public dimension;
but unlike what normally happens in the epos, they devote themselves to
the private experiences of love and adventure.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, having recognized a typo-
logical resemblance between these subgenres and a group of narrative forms
that adopt a low register, Sir Walter Scott invented the category of the
comic romance. The comic romance also tells stories about out-of-the-
ordinary characters who have exceptional experiences in a very dif-
ferent world than the one inhabited by people like us, but it does so in a
humble or low register. The beautiful and chaste youth of the Greek novels,
the bucolic characters of the pastoral romance, and the knights of the
courtly romance are replaced by penniless or ingenuous students, inexpe-
rienced young people who set off on voyages, thieves, and picaros. What re-
mains unchanged is the idea that life is an adventure, a sequence of unfore-
seen events that transports the characters into unknown territories but that
does not change their identity. Although the two traditions are situated at
opposite points of the same literary space, they share this typological kin-
ship. If the Greek novel, the pastoral romance, and the chivalric romance
written in an elevated style represent the typical forms of the serious ro-
mance, then Petronius’s Satyricon, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Lucian’s A
True Story, the low-register romances (Pulci’s Morgante, Rabelais’s Gar-
gantua and Pantagruel), the parodies of serious romances, and the inter-
pretation of the picaresque novel that took root starting from the seven-
teenth century mark the confines of the comic romance. While the success
of the serious romance began to wane at the end of the seventeenth
century, the comic romance was widely diffused in the eighteenth century,
from Lesage to Smollett. Tom Jones can be read as the culmination of this
tradition and, at the same time, as superseding it.
The Territory of the Novel
Novel can be used in a restricted historical sense to indicate a genre that

arose in eighteenth-century England, or in a wider theoretical sense to in-
dicate a narrative form that exists in many literatures and that eighteenth-
century English literature consecrated. The most authoritative theory on
this subgenre remains that of Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957).
Watt’s theory has exerted a great deal of influence, and its authority re-
mains undisputed even today because it establishes with unparalleled lu-
cidity the place that the novel occupied in the long-term history of Euro-
pean literature. Although many critics have attempted to reexamine its
foundations over the past few decades,71 his work has retained remarkable
theoretical force.
For Watt, the two meanings of the word novel designate exactly the
same thing. In his view, the English novel is the beginning of the novel as
a form, and while it may be true that the genre extended out into every
European literature between the second half of the eighteenth century and
the beginning of the nineteenth, its original core developed in England
with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. I believe that the basic framework
of this interpretation still stands, but the historical and geographical pic-
ture it evokes is highly questionable. Let us examine the following idea, for
example.
The issue of individual identity is closely linked to the epistemological
status of proper names because, in the words of Hobbes, “Proper names
bring to mind one thing only; universals recall any one of many.” As the
verbal expression of the particular identity of each and every person,
proper names have exactly the same function in the social life. In litera-
ture, however, it was only with the novel that this function of proper
names became established.72
The novel is the genre of proper names: it tells stories about private per-
sons who are located in a space and time similar to those we experience
every day. The critical angle that Watt discovers is illuminating, but this is
not how literary history really happened. It is not a matter of pedantically
71. See various authors, “Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel,” special issue, Eighteenth-
Century Fiction 12, nos. 2–3 (2000).
72. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 18.
correcting a work that in many aspects remains unsurpassable; it is about

understanding that Watt’s interpretation grasps some crucial elements of
the novel, but that the philosophy of literary history on which it is based
suffers from insularity. We can retain the core of his interpretation and
place it in a more plausible historical narrative. Long before English narra-
tive made use of proper names, some genres of ancient Greek and Roman
literature (the Old Comedy, iambus, the epigram, satire, and certain forms
of subjective poetry) had already told stories about the lives of ordinary
people. Furthermore, the novel did not suddenly appear in England during
the eighteenth century. The first modern narrative form to tell about the
contingency of proper names was not the eighteenth-century English novel.
The medieval exemplum, the medieval and Renaissance novella, the Spanish
picaresque narrative, and the French nouvelle of the second half of the
seventeenth century told stories about private people. Andreuccio da Pe-
rugia, a horse broker who goes to Naples with five hundred gold florins in
his purse hoping to close a good deal, or Lazarillo de Tormes, the son of a
miller, have no less detailed identities and are no more vaguely situated
than Robinson Crusoe, the son of a merchant of Bremen who immigrated
to Hull. Certainly, the English novel represents a decisive moment in the
history of the novel as a form because it expands the number of contingen-
cies the texts are able to accommodate: what in The Decameron or in Laz-
arillo is conveyed with a few remarks occupies several pages in Robinson
Crusoe. However, the grasp of particularities that eighteenth-century En-
glish narrative displays is nothing but the development of a trait already
present in the exemplum, in the novella, in early picaresque narrative, in the
novela, in the nouvelle, and in mémoires, all of which are genres full of
proper names.
Therefore the literary space of the novel came prior to the English nar-
rative of the eighteenth century. It comprises three literary families: the third-
person novella, from its medieval archetypes to its seventeenth-century
variations; the tradition of the sacred and profane biography; and first-
person autobiographical writings (confessions, letters, epistolary novels,
and mémoires). The three genealogies differ for morphological and histor-
ical reasons: while the novella and the biography are written in the third
person, autobiographical-type works are written in the first person; while
biographies and autobiographies tend to be long and their plots not very co-
herent, the novella, the novela, and the nouvelle tend to be short and have
coherent plots. They do share a common characteristic, though: many of
the texts that fall under the category of the novel present themselves as ac-
counts of true histories or are told as if they were true. At the end of the sev-
enteenth century, the nouvelle or the histoire written in third person can be
confidently equated with the mémoire or the epistolary novel as “historical”
forms opposed to the “poetry” of the roman.73 However, the difference
between a mémoire in first person and a nouvelle historique in third person
follows the opposition typical of classical historiography between com-
mentaries and “true histories,” between the subjective narrative of the pro-
tagonist or of the witness, and the impartial, objective narrative written
according to the rules of the art.74 In any case, the two subgenres fall
under the same category.
During the eighteenth century, as we have said, a fourth family joined
up with the three original ones. This happened when it began to be ad-
mitted, without too many masks and without too many fears, that the
novel was a fiction and not a “true history.” At that point, the dialectic be-
tween historical genres and poetic genres no longer sufficed on its own to
trace out the boundaries between the novel and the romance. The dialectic
needed to be reworked, which Clara Reeve did. What distinguished the two
forms was no longer the opposition between the true and the probable: it
was the opposition between stories that are fictional but nevertheless “such
as pass every day before our eyes” (Reeve) and stories that are fictional but
improbable. It thus becomes possible to compare the novel to the genre that
in the literature of antiquity and the classical period had the task of relating
everyday life: comedy. After the flourishing of narrative texts that took place
in France between the end of the 1720s and 1730s when Prévost and
Marivaux were publishing their greatest works, the comparison between
73. Démoris, Le Roman à la première personne, 157ff. This is what happened, for ex-
ample, in Madame de La Fayette’s letter to Joseph-Marie de Lescheraine, in which she states
that The Princesse de Clèves is not a roman but rather des mémoires. In fact, initially mé-
moires was supposed to appear in the title of the book. Madame de La Fayette, “Lettre à
Lescheraine,” April 13, 1678, in Œuvres complètes, ed., introduction, and notes by Roger
Duchêne (Paris: Bourin, 1990), 622.
74. Fumaroli, “Les Mémoires du XVIIe siècle au carrefour des genres en prose.”
novels and comedies became a commonplace.75 A few years later, we come

across it again in the Encyclopédie under the entry for “Roman.”76
In the classical literary schema, comedy was “an imitation of life, a mirror
of customs, and an image of the truth” (imitatio vitae, speculum consuetu-
dinis, imago veritatis) according to a definition that Donatus attributed
to Cicero77 and that circulated widely from the sixteenth century on.78
Starting in the eighteenth century, the novel appropriated these formulas
and began to present itself as a mirror of life and customs. A significant
slippage took place during this transition: for the culture of the ancient
world, the New Comedy was a predominantly “poetic” genre focused on the
ideographic representation of the typical, not on the detailed representa-
tion of the singular.79 In the novel of the eighteenth century, however, the mi-
mesis of customs took increasingly “historical” forms. At the same time
some narrative forms with a comic tone, initially viewed as related to the
tradition of the romance, entered into the territory of the novel. Fielding’s
Tom Jones played a decisive role in mixing up the categories. The work
combines elements from different genres. The characters and the plot owed
a great deal to the New Comedy, to the classicist comedy that was revived
following the model of the New Comedy, and to the picaresque-type comic
75. May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle , 112ff.

76. “Roman,” in Encyclopédie, vol. 14 (Neuchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1755), 342. The ar-
ticle was penned by Louis de Jaucourt.
77. Aelius Donatus, Excerpta de comoedia, in Aeli Donati quod fertur commentum
Terenti, ed. Paul Wessner (Leipzig: Teubner, 1902), V, 1, 22.
78. See Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism.
79. According to Aristotle’s formula, unlike the writers of iambics, comic playwrights
construct their plots according to the probable and then add particular names taken at
random: their characters are not singular individuals but human types (Poetics 9.1451b.11–
15). This idea about comedies circulated widely during the time we are examining. In the
mid-seventeenth century, for example, we find it cited literally in the “Advertissement aux
lecteurs” that prefaces Polyandre, Histoire comique (1648) by Charles Sorel: “All of the char-
acters named here can be taken as Chimeras or ideas, or rather as Characters or Tableaux of
what is intended to be represented.” It comes as no surprise that the histoire comique stands
somewhere between the “poetic” and the “historical” genres: it is a comic romance in which
the representation of reality is subjected to an obvious genre filter. See Charles Sorel, Poly-
andre, Histoire comique (Paris: Chez la Veuve Nicolas Cercy, 1648), “Advertissement aux
lecteurs,” no pagination.
romance. In the preface to Joseph Andrews, Fielding argues that his prose
tales have the same relation to serious epic poems as comedy does to
tragedy. He goes on to distinguish between intermediate comic literature,
with which he associates himself, and burlesque literature. In doing so,
he draws a potential boundary line between his works and romances that
have a low, farcical tone.80 On the other hand, Fielding—who deliberately
recalls the Aristotelian distinction between history and poetry—includes
himself among the tellers of histories and not romances.81 His works intro-
duced into the space of the novel a narrative form that came into being as
comic romance and that was related to the genre of the comedy. They pro-
vide a different way of reading novels of the past, such as Lesage’s Gil Blas,
that in many respects were precursors of Tom Jones.
The territory of the novel is therefore extremely varied. Only between

the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth
did the category become definitively stabilized. What unites the four
families of texts that compose it is the interweaving between a theme
and a form: telling “such things, as pass every day before our eyes” and
doing so in a way that seems familiar82—that is, founded on common
sense. The image of the world transmitted by the intersection of these
four genealogies is very different from that conveyed by the tradition of
the romance. The novel aspires to tell “things in the manner in which
they occur in the ordinary course of the world.”83 The names its charac-
ters bear are plausible for individuals of their condition: they live in a
measurable time; they move around in a defined space, through an envi-
ronment subject to the same laws of probability that hold in ordinary
experience; their status of reality is the same as what is expected of “our
friend” or “ourselves.”84
80. Henry Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews, in the Wesleyan Edition of the Complete
Works of Henry Fielding, 4ff.
81. Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, bk. 2, chap. 1 and bk. 8, chap. 1.
82. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, “Evening 7,” 111.
83. Charnes, Conversations sur la critique de la Princesse de Clèves, 136.
84. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, “Evening 7,” 111.
The Rise of the Novel
We have seen how the birth of the opposition between roman and nou-
velle, and then between romance and novel, marked a decisive threshold in
the unification of the novel. When the groups of texts that came from
romanice loqui and novellus-novus converged, a struggle for literary hege-
mony broke out. Beginning in the last decades of the seventeenth century,
the debate on the novel and romance was relentlessly shot through with
comparison, and little by little the second family gained importance and
prestige over the first. Between 1670 and 1800 the power relations between
the two genealogies changed: the novel gradually occupied the center of the
literary space and became “the novel,” in the emphatic sense, while the ro-
mance was pushed to the periphery of the system.
This is easily seen in the cultures that refer to the novel using words de-
rived from romanice loqui. Huet’s treatise speaks purely about narrative
that developed from the Hellenistic and medieval models. How else could
it be? In 1670 the word roman referred to the tradition of the romance.
Instead, for those who were born between 1760 and 1780, and who
wrote between the last years of the eighteenth century and the early years
of the nineteenth—for the generation of Madame de Staël, Friedrich
Schlegel, Sir Walter Scott, or Ugo Foscolo—the novel was above all the
genre that spoke about relatively ordinary people while imitating the tech-
niques of historiography. At the end of the eighteenth century, the novel far
outweighed the romance.
In France, Italy, and Germany, which is to say, for the literatures in which
the term designating the genre derived from medieval romances, this trans-
formation involved a kind of linguistic theft: the family of the novella, the
nouvelle, mémoires, and the novel appropriated the words roman and ro-
manzo and transformed their meaning. In 1800, Schlegel argued that Boc-
caccio’s novelle, having introduced into literature the “true history” of
private cases, were essential for the birth of what the moderns called the
novel.85 Two years later, Madame de Staël, in the preface to Delphine
(1802), diminished the role of the medieval works that lent their name to
the genre. The roman, writes de Staël, is the only form that has allowed us

to depict the passions of the heart and to tell the story of private lives.
Unknown to the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, it emerged over the
course of the Middle Ages, but in a much different form from the one it
would subsequently take on. While medieval courtly narrative sought the
wonder of adventure rather than the truth of feelings, The Princesse de
Clèves combines the analysis of passion with the depiction of chivalric man-
ners. The English novel of the eighteenth century perfects the possibilities
that the genre bears with it.86 Madame de Staël writes at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, after Madame de La Fayette, Defoe, Marivaux,
Prévost, Richardson, Fielding, Rousseau, Voltaire, Goethe, Burney, Laclos,
Diderot, and Moritz. In her eyes, the courtly romance and other forms of
romance do not signal a discontinuity comparable to the one introduced
by The Princesse de Clèves or English fiction: the works that Madame de
Staël considers to be masterpieces of the roman all belong to the tradition
of the novel. A year later, in a review, Foscolo also condensed into a few
pages the centuries-old history of narrative. In his judgement, the Italian
novelle represent the medieval equivalent of the books that “we [mod-
erns] call romanzi.” In this case, too, what we are witnessing is a kind of
linguistic theft. The true romanzo is the tradition of the novel:
When Boccacci [sic], Sacchetti, Il Lasca, and Bandello wrote novelle,

they portrayed the customs of their times, anecdotes about their govern-
ments, manners, festivities, languages, and clothing typical of their cities.
Their books were similar to those we call romanzi, of which many re-
cent and excellent ones are read in England, many in France, in Germany
and in cultivated Europe. It comes as no surprise. . . . Writers of romanzi
depict people’s opinions, habits, and actions, so to speak, and physical ap-
pearances, where historians neither should nor can portray them because
they cannot always see them. In short, history portrays nations and their
forms, while the writer of romanzi portrays families and their affairs; his-
tory analyzes the mind of the few who govern, the writer of romanzi ana-
lyzes the heart of the many who serve.87
86. Madame de Staël, Delphine (1802), in Œuvres littéraires, vol. 2, ed. Lucia Omacini,
notes by Simone Balayé (Paris: Champion, 2004), 9.
87. Ugo Foscolo, “Saggio di novelle di Luigi Sanvitale parmigiano” (1803), in Scritti let-
terari e politici dal 1796 al 1808, ed. Giovanni Gambarin, National Edition of the works of
Ugo Foscolo, vol. 6 (Florence: Le Monnier, 1972), 263–264.
Between 1550 and 1800, then, a large literary space took form that
comprised two different territories: “poetic” narrative and “historic” nar-
rative, romance and novel. The two were species of the same genus and
not separate forms. In the course of the eighteenth century, the tradition of
the novel gained hegemony and pushed the romance to the outskirts of
the system, but the system remained cohesive. What held the space of the
novel together? Why did it happen that such different forms were viewed
as belonging to a single genre?
CHAPTER THREE
The Novel and the Literature

of the Ancien Régime
The Dialectic of Continuity and Change
For modern readers, texts that go by the name of novels are linked by their
narrative form, a certain length, and the possibility they offer to tell stories
about absolutely anything in any way whatsoever. For readers of the An-
cien Régime, texts that were called successively roman, romanzo, novela,
and novel-and-romance shared the narrative form, a certain length, and a
total or partial rejection of the rules that governed literary writing in Eu-
rope between the second half of the sixteenth century and the second half
of the eighteenth. If the first meaning of our genre resides in its narrative
form, the second lies buried in this conflict. To talk about the novel, we
have to first begin by reconstructing the apparatus of laws and habits to
which the genre reacted in defining itself as a locus for potentially trans-
gressive writings.
This backdrop, along with the characteristics of premodern and early
modern aesthetics, forces us to think about the narrative of this period
according to different mental schemas from the ones commonly adopted
by modern culture. In the form that the history of literature took as it
emerged out of the historicist culture of the nineteenth century, it tended
consciously or unconsciously to imagine series of works and cultural pe-
riods in terms of a perpetual metamorphosis or a permanent revolution. This
paradigm does not work, however, when attempting to interpret the litera-
ture of the Ancien Régime, because the disruptive elements are intertwined
96 LITER ATURE OF THE ANCIEN RÉGIME
with an underlying layer of constants. What we see is a double movement.

On the one hand, many of the new ways of telling stories that emerged
between 1550 and 1800 were transferred from one nation to another and
created discontinuities: the chivalric romance was hugely popular in the
1500s, only to decline in the next century; the rediscovery of Hellenistic
novels in the mid-sixteenth century influenced the heroic Baroque novel;
the short novella originating in Italy changed over the course of the
1600s, when the Spanish novela and then the French nouvelle created
what were effectively two new subgenres; religious and secular letters,
autobiographies, and the genre of the commentary influenced in various
ways the first-person writings that were immensely popular beginning in
the second half of the seventeenth century, thanks to the success of mé-
moires and epistolary novels. Through this current of invention, the ways
of telling stories were transformed and a new paradigm was born. How-
ever, as visible as these changes are, in many ways the works written in
this epoch remained bound together by a few common assumptions. The
history of the European novel between the second half of the sixteenth
century and the second half of the eighteenth can also be read as a closed
system that shifted within stable premises: a nonexplicit movement of in-
novation coexisted alongside an explicit attachment to ancient structures
of sense. In this chapter I will talk about the continuities that in many re-
spects made the period between 1550 and 1800 a unified one. In Chapter 4
I will talk about the discontinuities that emerged little by little and that,
at the end of a long and complicated process, caused these old structures
to collapse.
A Cohesive Epoch
We must begin by acknowledging a distance. A systematic reading of the

mass of prefaces and treatises accompanying the narrative fiction of this
period makes it clear that between the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-
eighteenth the reading and writing of stories involved habits and rules that
were very different from the ones that later took root beginning in the
second half of the eighteenth century. They took place at a faster or slower
rhythm depending on the various national literatures: “most modem
readers find it impossible to enjoy the narratives that early modern readers
LITER ATURE OF THE ANCIEN RÉGIME 97
consumed obsessively.”1 Often theorists of the novel do not perceive this

rift: those who study the narrative of the Ancien Régime view the distance
as a basic premise that hardly calls for reflection, while those who study
the genre as a whole tend to overlook the border dividing the epochs. This
is because almost all theorists of the novel are trained on the narrative
works of the past two centuries. For this reason they tend to read the works
of the Ancien Régime in the light of the present, seeking to pinpoint the
origin of forms that are recognized as familiar to the literature of the nine-
teenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Their attention is thus focused
on the modernity of a dozen or so texts (Gargantua et Pantagruel, Laz-
arillo, Don Quixote, The Portuguese Letters, The Princesse de Clèves, Gil
Blas, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, The Life of Marianne, Pamela, Cla-
rissa, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Dan-
gerous Liaisons, and a few others), neglecting both the undergrowth of
works that are today considered minor and the assumptions that guided
the writing and reading of narrative fiction in this period. This is why they
end up unaware of the fact that the novels written between the mid-
sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century obey a literary paradigm
that differs in many ways from our own—a paradigm we have to recon-
struct today as if it were a lost language.
But the theories, expectations, and concepts that informed the way nar-
ratives were conceived and judged between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-
eighteenth century, in addition to being different from our own, also had a
kinship. They maintained an extraordinary continuity for almost three cen-
turies. Such a long period will of course present differences when exam-
ined up close. Every literature has its national history, and every subgenre
has a different social readership. It would be naive to think that courtly
readers or members of Italian academies in 1550 read chivalric poems the
same way the Spanish pages described by Cervantes read Don Quixote in
the early decades of the seventeenth century;2 or that what the French ar-
istocracy of 1678 sought in The Princesse de Clèves were the same things
that the middle-class British public looked for in Fielding’s works around
1. Terence Cave, “Suspense and the Pre-history of the Novel,” Revue de littérature com-
parée 70, no. 4 (1996): 515.
2. Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, part 2, chap. 3.
1750. Although the differences are impossible to ignore, it is equally im-

possible to ignore the fact that the web of concepts, words, expectations,
needs, auctoritates, and implicit or explicit rules with which narrative works
were conceived and judged in Italy in 1550, in Spain in 1600, in France in
1670, in Germany in 1700, and in Great Britain in 1750 has a surprising
internal unity to it. It has a tangible continuity with habits of very long dura-
tion and a tangible otherness compared to the paradigm that would take
hold in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will demonstrate this with
an example.
In 1554 Giovan Battista Pigna published his treatise on romanzi. He wrote

to legitimize the existence of a new narrative form and to explain its rules.
What he meant by romanzo was the chivalrous tradition that in his judg-
ment culminated in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. He thought according to
the schemas of the classicist literary theory that began to spread in Italy in
the early 1500s. The canonical texts of ancient poetry had transmitted a
set of mutually coherent, eternal precepts (Plato’s Republic, Horace’s The
Art of Poetry, and especially Aristotle’s Poetics), thus to discuss poetry
meant either showing that a work conformed to these standards or using
the auctoritates to establish rules for judging works that were unknown to
the ancients. Texts that did not fit into the schemas drawn from the clas-
sics were considered imperfect. Pigna’s reasoning is woven through with
Aristotelian and Horatian topoi: the difference between history and poetry;
the division between genres and high, middle, and low styles; the distinc-
tion between historical plots, which follow the ordo naturalis, and poetic
plots, which begin in medias res; the idea that poetry should instruct and
delight; the conviction that stories have or could have an allegorical
meaning and that the hidden meaning explains the moral of the story.3
In 1670 Pierre Huet published the first version of his Lettre sur l’origin
des romans. He begins by proposing a prescriptive definition: “We esteem
nothing to be properly Romance but Fictions of Love Adventures, disposed
into an Elegant Style in Prose; for the delight and instruction of the Reader.”4
They are called “fictions” to distinguish them from true histories, according
to the opposition that Aristotle developed in the tenth chapter of his Po-
3. Pigna, I romanzi, 95.

4. Huet, The History of Romances, 3.
etics. They are written in “an elegant style” because they must follow the
rules of poetry, by adopting a certain register and arranging the plot in ac-
cordance with the ordo artificialis. They must mix delight with instruc-
tion, as Horace dictates, transmitting morality under the veil of fiction and
providing models for behavior.5 Like Pigna, Huet also blends historical
narrative with normative precepts; like Pigna, Huet also wants to teach us
how to write proper novels and how to ennoble the genre by following the
rules drawn from the poetics and models of antiquity.6
In 1742, in response to Richardson’s Pamela, Henry Fielding published
Joseph Andrews. In the preface, he claims to have invented a new genre
and comments on his own discovery. Citing Aristotle, he writes that the
epic is divided into tragedy and comedy: Homer gave us the models for
both, but the exemplary work of the second family, Margites, has been
lost. The epic can be written in verse or in prose, since meter, as Aristotle
says, is not essential to the definition of poetry. A work like Fénelon’s
Telemachus, for example, differs from the Odyssey only because it is not in
verse. This is precisely the reason that the new genre inaugurated by Joseph
Andrews can be defined as a comic epic poem in prose, which differs from
comedy as the serious epic does from tragedy. To describe his new genre,
Fielding continues to use Aristotle’s Poetics and its taxonomic categories. In
reflecting on the difference between comedy and burlesque, calling on the
principle that comedy exposes and rectifies foibles and vices, Fielding as-
sumes that the purpose of stories is to serve as moral orthopedics.
I chose Pigna, Huet, and Fielding because they disseminated ideas des-
tined to have significant effects, because they wrote centuries apart, because
they lived in different national cultures, and because they addressed them-
selves to readers of different social extractions. They are not even talking
about the same thing: what Pigna calls a romanzo is chivalric narrative in
verse; Huet argues that proper novels are written in prose; Fielding’s idea
is a comic epic poem in prose, but what he has in mind is a literary genre
that in many ways is opposite to what Huet had in mind. And yet their
critical gestures are similar. They inherit the same general intention, which
is half descriptive and half normative. They respond to the same need to
5. Ibid., 4–5.
6. Ibid., 144ff. and passim.
legitimize what ancient poetics would view as potentially unconventional

narrative forms. They refer to the same auctoritates, the same vocabu-
lary, and the same topics: Aristotle and Horace, the difference between
history and poetry, the separation of styles, the poetics of delectare et mo-
nere, and the link between literature and moral precepts. Beneath the dif-
ferences there can be glimpsed a continuity of medium duration—a shared
web of theories, terms, habits, and commonplaces. At the end of the eigh-
teenth century, avant-garde theoretical writings, those that anticipated ideas
on narrative that would predominate only a short time later, moved in a
completely different mental space. When we read Madame de Staël’s Essai
sur les fictions (1795) or Friedrich Schlegel’s Dialogue on Poetry (1800), for
example, no significant traces remain of the structures of sense that for
Pigna, Huet, and Fielding formed the necessary background for any literary
discourse. It is as if a completely new theoretical era had been ushered in.
We can make out the defining traits of the literary paradigms of long
duration that confronted the novel during its formation by examining the
fierce criticisms the genre received in institutional literary circles at least
until the beginning of the nineteenth century, using them as a term of con-
trast. The hostility that accompanied the new genre for nearly three centuries
is one of the most significant and symptomatic traits of its early modern his-
tory. Observed in retrospect, this atmosphere of mistrust serves as a sort of
photographic negative: it shows the reversed image of the written and un-
written rules that the novel ran up against. Between the middle of the six-
teenth century and the middle of the eighteenth, unconventional narrative
texts were targeted by two relentless criticisms: they were accused of vio-
lating the laws of poetry and spreading immorality—of destroying good taste
and corrupting morals.7 By making explicit what remains implicit in these at-
tacks, we discover the two main structures of sense with which our genre col-
lided: classicism and aesthetic Platonism in its Christian version.
Classicism and the Separation of Styles
Premodern and early modern classicism was a relatively cohesive system

of rules, models, habits, and topoi.8 It took form with Italian humanism
7. On this dual accusation, see May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle, 4ff.
8. For more on the dialectic between unity and multiplicity in European classicism of the
Ancien Régime, see various authors, Un classicisme ou des classicismes?, ed. Georges Fores-
and between the 1500s and the 1700s gradually spread in phases to France,
Spain, Great Britain, and the German-speaking countries. The two and a
half centuries during which this poetic established its hegemony over
European literature were concurrent with the rise of the novel. Classicism
became a unified force in the middle of the sixteenth century, when the
normative reading of ancient aesthetics generated an apparatus of rules and
models that was transmitted to the European literatures. One of the most
conspicuous effects of this process was the dissemination of a critical lexicon.
Pigna, Huet, and Fielding spoke three regional variations of the same language
in different phases of its development. When the author of Joseph Andrews
reflected on the difference between serious and comic epic poems, he con-
tinued to use a vocabulary that had emerged in the 1530s from the fusion of
Aristotelian and Horatian poetics.9
It was partly thanks to classicism that the novel became a unified genre.
What was shared by the works that contributed to shaping the new literary
space was actually an absence: they lacked precedents in ancient literature
and aesthetics because they could not be easily identified with the two
forms of narrative known to classicism, the epic poem and historiography
written according to the rules that also formed the basis for the construc-
tion of the classicist theory. The swarm of unconventional narrative texts
thus made up an empty class. It was for this reason, too, that a common
element became discernible in such diverse works, making it possible to
group the unconventional writings under the same name.
But this distance from Greek and Latin models was not the only point
of friction. Even more complicated and traumatic was the relationship that
the new family of works entertained with the cornerstone of ancient poetics:
the law of the separation of styles. One of the most important critical
tier and Jean-Pierre Néraudau (Pau: Publications de l’université de Pau, 1995), and Matteo
Residori, “Classicismi e invenzioni,” in Letteratura europea, ed. Piero Boitani and Massimo
Fusillo (Turin: UTET, 2014).
9. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531–1555. See
also Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 111ff.;
Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1962); Antonio García Berrio, Formación de la teoría literaria moderna:
La tópica horaciana en Europa (Madrid: Cupsa Editorial, 1977), 39ff.; Anne Duprat, “Mo-
rale et fiction en poétique: la combinaison des vraisemblances chez J. Chapelain,” in “Morale
et fiction aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” special issue, Revue des sciences humaines 254, no. 2
(1999): 45–61; Brigitte Kappl, Die Poetik des Aristoteles in der Dichtungstheorie des
Cinquecento (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 15–29.
works of the twentieth century, Mimesis by Erich Auerbach, traces out a

philosophy of Western literary history by following the transformations of
this law. In Auerbach’s view, the representation of reality in Greek and
Latin literature is governed by a principle that acts as a habit or codified
rule from one time to the next. We already find it in the Iliad and the Od-
yssey. The Homeric singers distinguished the narratable from the unnar-
ratable in a hierarchical and classicist way: significant deeds are per-
formed for the most part among the ruling and warrior class, while the
other parts of society have a secondary, servile function.10 During the fourth
century BCE, this tendency gave rise to a sort of law. The first illustrious
document to proclaim the separation of styles as a principle that was si-
multaneously descriptive and normative is the second chapter of Aristot-
le’s Poetics:
The things that representative artists represent are the actions of people,
and if people are represented they are necessarily either superior [spou-
daious] or inferior [phaulous], better or worse, than we are. (Differences
in character you see derive from these categories, since it is by virtue
[arete] or vice [kakia] that people are ethically distinct from each other.)
So too with painters: Polygnotus portrayed better people, Pauson worse
people, and Dionysius people just like us.11
The people that Aristotle called “better than we are,” meaning the demi-
gods or the aristocratic heroes of epos and tragedy, perform extraordinary
feats or encounter exceptional misadventures that the poets represent in a
serious, lofty style befitting the dignity of the deeds being represented. The
people who are “worse than we are,” meaning slaves or characters in com-
edies, perform ridiculous or trivial actions that the poets represent in a style
suited to the subject matter. In Greek culture the hierarchy between people
is sanctioned by criteria that are both social and moral: someone better
than us possesses arete and is spoudaios, meaning “worthwhile,” “serious,”
but also “noble”; someone worse than us is marked by a defect (kakia) or
by a lack (hamartema) and is phaulos, meaning “trivial,” “lightweight,” or
even “ignoble.” Classical rhetoric gave a systematic order to Aristotle’s cat-
10. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946); English translation Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 21.
11. Aristotle, Poetics, 2.1448a.1–5.
egories, by formulating a schema that grouped oratorical speeches and

texts into three genera elocutionis—lowly or humble, medium or interme-
diate, and sublime—and linked them to the type of subject matter, according
to a principle first formulated by Theophrastus. This idea, that each type
of content has a natural form, is what inspired ancient rhetoric to strictly
associate the qualities of the characters with the qualities of the story, the
style, and the interest demanded of the reader. It did this by establishing a
rule that mirrored the rigid social hierarchy, with only one possible excep-
tion, that of parody: a violation that overturned the rule without negating
its value. The medieval rota Vergilii gives us a perfect illustration of these
correspondences from a later period. Virgil’s wheel condenses the genera
of classical rhetoric into a unified schema, linking together the social class
of the hero, the type of action represented, and the type of ornatus. This
strict ordering principle allowed for styles to be alternated within the same
speech, but not for them to be completely mixed up.12
While there may have been three genres of rhetoric, the ancient separa-
tion of styles (Stiltrennung) proved to be asymmetric and binary, because
the boundaries between the humble and the intermediate were never
entirely certain. Indeed, the low style could include the comic, the satiric,
the playfully erotic, and the obscene, but also daily life, factual information,
sketches, and trivia. The mime, the iambic, and the satire all belonged to
the lowly genre as well, but so did the sections in a judicial oration that
referred to private or money matters.13 There is no doubt that Greek and
Latin cultures reserved much less attention to people “like us” than what
modern literature devotes to them, just as there is no doubt that a large
portion of reality that today we judge worthy of serious, tragic, or prob-
lematic mimesis was confined to the domain of the comic or the interme-
diate style:
12. See Erich Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike
und im Mittelalter (1958); English translation Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin
Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 43. The alternation of styles is widely used, for example, in the ancient
novel, where it often happens that the story changes style as it adapts to the twists and turns
of the plot. See Massimo Fusillo, Il romanzo greco (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), 20ff.
13. Auerbach, Literary Language, 37.
[For the rule of segregation of styles] everything commonly realistic (alles

gemein Realistische), everything pertaining to everyday life must not be
treated on any level except the comic, which admits no problematic
probing (ohne problematische Vertiefung) . . . We are forced to conclude
that there could be no serious literary treatment of everyday occupations
and social classes—merchants, artisans, peasants, slaves—of everyday
scenes and places—home, shop, field, store—of everyday customs and
institutions—marriage, children, work, earning a living.14
According to the principles of the Stiltrennung, practices associated with

private life, with the reproduction and production of life, with work,
family, or domestic happiness, are only worthy to be treated with slapstick,
satire, or, at most, in an intermediate style, exactly as they are handled in
bucolic-pastoral literature or in the New Comedy. However, they may not be
the theme of a completely serious work. Reading the Poetics in the light of
the Nicomachean Ethics, we understand that people “like us” are those
who live in the realm of common life, who perform activities that produce
the well-being required to accede to the higher realms of public action
and theoresis—but which grant no eminent virtue in themselves.
The Stiltrennung faded away with the end of paganism, the material
crisis of the ancient culture, and the rise of a Christian literature inspired
by the mix of styles that we find in the Bible, especially in the New Testa-
ment. These works ignored the ancient stylistic divisions and told about
private life in a serious way. Creating humankind in his own image and
likeness, incarnating himself in a mortal body to redeem humanity, sur-
rounding himself with fishermen and carpenters, lepers and prostitutes, the
Christian God gave a meaning to every aspect of reality inhabited by his
creatures. Common places and objects, absolutely private aspects of the
inner life, the imperfection of bodies, and all the aspects of the world that
for classical art held no interest, or were worthy at most of comic interest,
were redeemed by this new theological horizon, in which each individual
had a universal significance and the divine manifested itself in everyday
circumstances.15
14. Auerbach, Mimesis, 31.

15. Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929); English translation
Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961); Auerbach, Mimesis, chaps. 2, 3 and passim.
A new poetics of distinction arose in French courts of the twelfth century

and spread through the success of chivalric narrative and the courtly form
of life.16 Although we cannot speak of a separation of styles in the strict
sense, and although the influence of Greek and Roman models remained
marginal, the overall effect of the medieval romances was similar to that
created by the Stiltrennung of antiquity: an aristocratic class of represen-
tative characters had the right to serious mimesis, while the life of people
like us remained shut off in a marginal background. Over time, the bound-
aries of what was dignified and undignified were redrawn: when the chi-
valric ideal was welcomed by citizen classes of bourgeois origin, nobility
became widely interpreted as a quality of the soul and not of the blood.
However, the idea that “nobility, greatness, and intrinsic values have
nothing in common with everyday reality” remained unchanged.17 The
ancient type of separation of styles was revived with the fusion of Aristo-
telian and Horatian criticism in the mid-sixteenth century and became the
basic premise of premodern and early modern European classicism until
the second half of the eighteenth century. Although it was interpreted more
or less rigidly depending on national cultures and literary fashions, in no
other period of European history was the Stiltrennung applied with such
severity. And if it is true that the classicist culture was balanced by authors
and tendencies that maintained a bond with the Christian tradition of
creaturely realism,18 it is also true that the separation of styles permeated
this period like a sort of transcendental structure, generating unbending,
pervasive rules.
The Stiltrennung cast a hierarchical vision of society onto literature. To
arrive at what remains implicit in Auerbach’s theory, we can profitably
juxtapose Mimesis to another philosophy of history, the one that we find
presented in the works of Georges Dumézil. According to Dumézil, Indo-
European societies preserve the trace of an original tripartite social division
in their mythologies and value spheres: between a class that administers
the religion, a class that holds sovereignty and military force, and a class
that ensures the production and reproduction of life through labor, fertility,
16. Auerbach, Mimesis, chap. 6.

17. Ibid., 139.
18. Ibid., chaps. 11–12.
and family.19 At the beginning of the eleventh century, Adalberon of Laon

named these groups oratores, bellatores, and laboratores, encapsulating the
schema in a memorable formula and passing it down to posterity. Dumézil’s
theory has been the object of a debate that I lack the competence to weigh
in on; however, if we leave the field of philology and use a theory of this
sort for historical-philosophical purposes, these ideas shed light on the state
of affairs for which the Stiltrennung was the literary representation. The
tripartite separation of styles does not correspond at all to the threefold
division in the social realms: the boundaries are different, but the two sys-
tems highlight the same constant that runs deeply throughout European
history, namely, the subordinate role that the activities of laboratores played
for thousands of years in society and in the political unconscious of the
West. The Stiltrennung reflects an objective hierarchy: in ancient culture
just as in medieval culture, anything pertaining to the realm of work and
family did not deserve a serious, tragic, or problematic treatment. The ex-
traordinary political force of Christianity also arose out of its ability to
overturn this scale of values. But leaving behind the pagan culture did not
suffice to put an end to the separation of styles and to the lower status of
laboratores. There were few periods of European history when Dumézil’s
tripartite division of functions had such a presence and was so visible as
during the Ancien Régime. Similarly, in no other literary epoch was the
Stiltrennung so unyielding as during the centuries of premodern and early
modern classicism, when it acted as a sort of a priori crystallized in collec-
tive habits, influencing works in three ways.
1. The separation of styles imposed a hierarchy of subject matters, styles,

and genres. The stories of heroes, of great public figures, of mytholog-
ical or legendary characters counted more than what happened to
common people; tragedy was more important than comedy; serious epic
was more important than comic epic. The hierarchy could be inverted
only if private stories were introduced into a frame that gave them a
hidden moral sense: for example, when they were used as exempla of
moral or theological truths. We find the same principle for the academic
19. An overview of this theory, developed over the course of multiple works and multiple
decades, can be found in Georges Dumézil, Mythe et épopée I. L’idéologie des trois fonctions
dans les épopées des peuples indo-européens (1968) (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).
painting of the early modern age and in its scale of genres. This placed
public and distinguished entities at the top (scenes from sacred and pro-
fane history), assigned a lower rank to family and private subjects (por-
traits and genre scenes), and extended even less dignity to prehuman
subjects (landscapes and still lifes). In 1679 Jean de Préchac published
an histoire galante et véritable, entitled L’Illustre Parisienne, which be-
gins like this:
Everybody who has tried their hand at writing romans or petites histori-
ettes has been particularly attached to giving their Heroes and Heroines
a high birth; because it is certain that there is far more interest in the fate
of a Prince than in that of an ordinary person.20
Préchac takes it for granted that the importance of a story is propor-

tional to the characters’ rank: the fate of a prince or a hero counts for more
than the fate of an ordinary person. This idea was a basic assumption of
European literature at least until the second half of the eighteenth century:
even those who opposed it still moved in its shadow.
Few works more irritated classicist taste during the eighteenth century
than Richardson’s novels. They could not be dismissed as humorous,
coarse, and vulgar stories, but at the same time they conflicted with domi-
nant literary customs. In the prefatory writings to the second edition of
Pamela, which came out in February 1741, the author shows that he is
aware of the effect that his work has provoked. He knows that he is writing
counter to the tastes of the literary elite, and to defend himself, he presents
an epistolary dialogue between an anonymous “gentleman” and an anony-
mous admirer of Pamela, later revealed as the playwright Aaron Hill.
Although the playwright expresses ideas that in certain respects are
revolutionary, it is significant that he always takes for granted the exis-
tence of a strict hierarchy of subject matters:
Who could have dreamt, he should find, under the modest Disguise of a
Novel, all the Soul of Religion, Good-breeding, Discretion, Good-nature,
Wit, Fancy, Fine Thought, and Morality?21
20. Préchac, L’Illustre Parisienne, 1.

21. Samuel Richardson, “Introduction to Pamela, Second Edition,” in The Pamela Con-
troversy: Criticism and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” vol. 1, ed. Thomas
Keymer and Peter Sabor (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), 18.
[The author of Pamela] moves us, every where, with the Force of a
tragedy.22
These sorts of remarks run counter to an opposing, prevailing opinion

that viewed the novel as a minor genre. According to this view, the story of
a maid should be a comic subject, while at the top of the literary scale there
should stand epos and tragedy, the genre to which Hill compares Pamela.
In an even more eloquent passage, repeating a comment made by the
gentleman who felt that some of the scenes in Pamela were too low, the
playwright voices an idea that was in many respects revolutionary:
I wonder indeed, what it is, that the Gentlemen, who talk of Low Scenes,
wou’d desire should be understood by the Epithet? Nothing, properly
speaking, is low, that suits well with the Place it is rais’d to.—The Pas-
sions of Nature are the same, in the Lord, and his Coach-man.23
This ethically and aesthetically provocative idea (“the passions of na-

ture are the same in the Lord and his Coach-man”) appears in the midst of
a sentence that takes for granted that people have a natural place assigned
by God. In the end, they will be judged for what they did on the basis of
their respective ranks, as Pamela notes when commenting on Lady Dav-
ers’s letter:
This is a sad letter, my dear father and mother; and one may see how
poor people are despised by the proud and rich! and yet we were all on
a foot originally: . . . Surely these proud people never think what a short
stage life is; and that, with all their vanity, a time is coming, when they
shall be obliged to submit to be on a level with us: And true said the phi-
losopher, when he looked upon the skull of a king, and that of a poor
man, that he saw no difference between them. Besides, do they not know,
that the richest of princes, and the poorest of beggards, are to have one
great and tremendous Judge, at the last day; who will not distinguish
between them according to their circumstances in life?—But, on the con-
trary, may make their condemnations the greater, as their neglected op-
portunities were the greater?24
22. Ibid., 19.

23. Ibid., 25.
24. Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, edited with explanatory notes by
Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), part 2, p. 258.
For Hill, as for Richardson, it is still obvious that society is divided into
ranks, and that each rank has a different weight: the a prioris of this dis-
course are still those of the Ancien Régime.
2. Implicit in this hierarchy is the conviction that the type of content, the
type of style, the way of portraying the characters, the plot construction,
and the value of the work must all correspond. In other words, the form
does not express a personal way of seeing things, as the Romantic and
modern conception of style would have it. Instead, it obeys public customs
and ceremonial rules. At the core of the system lies the concept of decorum,
the Ciceronian translation of to prepon, the term that Aristotle used to
indicate the style appropriate to each character according to its social
class, temperament, age, and gender.25 In a long passage from The Art of
Poetry, Horace strengthens this idea and formulates the concept of conve-
nientia; in modern European languages decorum becomes bienséance, de-
cency, and decoro. For the Italian theorists of the sixteenth century who
picked up on this passage and commented on it, Horace had sought to es-
tablish a link among the status of the characters, the quality of their words,
the quality of their actions, and the style of the composition. Noble heroes
must think, act, and speak in accordance with their rank: a work that as-
pires to a high literary dignity cannot contain passages that are unsuitable
for high genres. The same thing applies to the other classes of characters
and texts.
Two of the major debates raised by narrative works in the early modern
age took place in France after the appearance of The Princesse de Clèves
and in Great Britain and France after the appearance of Pamela. In both,
the corollaries of Stiltrennung were invoked incessantly. According to many
commentators, the behavior of Madame de Clèves, especially in the epi-
sode when she confesses to her husband, is contrary to bienséances; in
other words, to the manners that a princess of her rank should never aban-
don.26 The letter prefacing the second edition of Pamela reports some of the
criticisms that the novel had received and to which Richardson intended
25. Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.7.1–2; Poetics, 15.1454a.22–24. On decorum as a translation

for to propon, see Cicero, Orator 21. In The Art of Poetry Horace talks about convenientia
(lines 89–127). In literary sixteenth-century theory, decorum and convenientia overlapped:
see Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, chap. 5.
26. See Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” 71–99.
to respond. One of the most interesting regards the form. The objection is
made that the style of Pamela’s letters should have become higher as soon
as the intentions of Mr. B became honorable, and especially after the mar-
riage, because at that point the heroine “should be equal to the Rank she is
rais’d to.”27 Many of the reactions to Pamela are marked by the Stiltrennung:
it is difficult to accept a maid becoming a heroine; it is difficult to accept
characters of aristocratic origin who adopt a vulgar habitus. These criticisms
were especially frequent in France, because the French literary system adopted
a particularly severe interpretation of the separation of styles: the reader was
expressly invited to take an interest in characters of humble condition “with
the promise that, in the end, the paysan would be parvenu, that he would rise
to a condition capable of touching people of quality.”28
3. The noble genres do not tell any kind of story whatsoever. Instead, they
draw from a repertoire of events endowed with a meaning and a public
value, backed by the great collective narratives that flowed through
premodern and early modern European culture: mythology, ancient litera-
ture, sacred history, and epic communal stories. These are immediately
readable events; they can be told again; they mean something to everyone;
they are archetypes to which the narrative can always return.29 Conversely,
stories that do not belong to this repertoire must find a form of legitimization
if they seek access to the serious style. From this perspective, the preface
to Robinson Crusoe and the dialogue that occupies the second preface to
Julie, or The New Heloise express a recurring problem in an era still marked
by the separation of styles:
If ever the Story of any private Man’s Adventures in the World were
worth making Publick, and were acceptable when Publish’d . . .30
27. Richardson, “Introduction to Pamela, Second Edition,” 23.

28. May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle , 163ff.
29. See Jean Starobinski, “Fable et mythologie aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles dans la littéra-
ture et la réflexion théorique” (1981); English translation “Fable and Mythology from the
17th to 18th Centuries,” in Blessings in Disguise; or, The Morality of Evil, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), 169–193.
30. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719), ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton,
1994), “The Preface,” 3.
Events so natural, so simple that they are too much so; nothing unex-
pected; no dramatic surprises. Everything is foreseen well in advance;
everything comes to pass as foreseen. Is it worth recording what anyone
can see every day in his own home or in his neighbor’s?31
Up until the second half of the eighteenth century, it was not obvious
that stories about private, common individuals were worthy of public at-
tention and problematic interest. Narrative democracy was achieved only
during the past two centuries.
Aesthetic Platonism
While the separation of styles massively influenced literary writing between

1550 and 1800, the most formidable apparatus of criticism facing the texts
that converged into the novel was moralistic and theoretical. Novelists
were accused of spreading illicit behaviors, of neglecting important things
to devote themselves to vain chimeras, of mixing truth with falsehood. The
allegations appeared almost identical in texts belonging to different na-
tional cultures, and they emerged in substantially the same form between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. They were so widespread that it is
difficult to find prefaces or treatises in which they do not appear, in more
or less direct form, only to be denied or confirmed.32 I cite some examples
from different periods and national cultures.
In Italian debates on the narrative poem that developed in the middle of

the sixteenth century, the heroes of romanzi were berated for roaming in
search of love or adventure—a true hero should appear exemplary in all
his behavior. Heroes should also pursue collective moral aims, like the
characters in the ancient epics or in the modern-type Christian heroic
poem.33 Even the romanzo plot itself, punctuated by the centrifugal motion
31. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761); English translation Julie,
or The New Heloise, trans. and annotated by Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 1997), 8.
32. See Walter Siti, “Il romanzo sotto accusa” (2001); English translation The Novel on
Trial, in The Novel, vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2006), 94ff.
33. See Sergio Zatti, L’ombra del Tasso. Epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento (Milan: Bruno
Mondadori, 1996), 14ff.; Stefano Jossa, Rappresentazione e scrittura. La crisi della forme
of adventures, was cause for suspicion because the narrative dispersion cor-
responded to the indulging in regio dissimilitudinis condemned by Saint
Paul and Augustine.
The misgivings grew, of course, when the reality in which the characters
wandered was steeped in fantastic elements, depicting a non-Christian,
supernatural world suspended between vanity and idolatry. In addition,
many romanzi talked about love—this choice of topic alone was enough
to make the genre suspect in every European country, Catholic or Protes-
tant, up to the second half of the eighteenth century. Teresa of Avila, in The
Book of My Life (1562–1565), describes how her morals were damaged in
her youth by reading books of chivalry.34 Malón de Chaide begins La con-
versión de la Magdalena (1588) with a prologue in which he denounces
the dangers of romances.35 Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, in Frawen-Zimmer
Gespräch-Spiel (1641), presents a sort of legal oration against tales of love
(Lustgedicht), with an accusation and a response to the accusation. In 1667
Pierre Nicole ignited a polemic with Racine by rewriting what we read in
the second, third, and tenth book of the Republic, using a lexicon that re-
calls Saint Paul, Augustine, Tertullian, and other Church Fathers.36 In 1670,
Huet devoted the last part of his treatise to the relationship between novels
and morality.37 In 1698 the Swiss Protestant pastor Gotthard Heidegger
published a treatise on narrative fiction entitled Mythoscopia romantica,
in which he methodically attacks the genre by calling on the auctoritates
from whom the condemnation of the novel originally descended: Saint
Paul, the Church Fathers, Seneca, some passages from the Scriptures and,
poetiche rinascimentali (1540–60) (Naples: Vivarium, 1996), 139ff.; by the same author, La
fondazione di un genere. Il poema eroico fra Ariosto e Tasso (Florence: Carocci, 2002), 17,
115, and passim.
34. Teresa of Avila, Libro de la vida (1562–1565); English translation The Book of My
Life, trans. Mirabai Starr (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2007), chap. 2, 20.
35. Pedro Malón de Chaide, La conversión de la Magdalena (1588), ed. Félix García
(Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1959), 24–25.
36. Pierre Nicole, Traité de la comédie et autres pièces d’un procès du théâtre (1667), ed.
Laurent Thirouin (Paris: Champion, 1998), chap. 20 and following. The Traité was published
for the first time in 1667; in 1675 Nicole included it, with numerous variations, in his Essais
de morale.
37. “I know what they are accused for: They exhaust our Devotion, and inspire us with
Irregular Passions, and corrupt our Manners.” Huet, The History of Romances, 142–143.
ultimately, Plato.38 In the debate on novels and romances that took place
in eighteenth-century England, the idea that these genres can easily slide
into immorality is a constant, so much so that it is easier to cite the texts
where this commonplace does not appear. Even a relatively late, and in
many respects new, theoretical work like The Progress of Romance by
Clara Reeve ends with a long disquisition on the dangers of narrative
fiction.39
Along with purely moral criticisms, others appeared that combined eth-
ical and theoretical components. Because they told invented stories, novels
exposed themselves to accusations of falsehood and futility. The inter-
weaving of documentary truth with imagination that certain fictional forms
presupposes, not to mention the very existence of a literature of invention,
was long perceived as a problem during the early modern period, when the
Reformation and the Council of Trent rekindled the ancient Platonic-
Christian mistrust of poetry and fiction.40 The translator’s proem with
which Amyot begins his version of Heliodorus, for example, starts by re-
calling Plato’s condemnation of the lies of the poets.41 In the second half
of the seventeenth century, this religiously inspired mistrust joined forces
with the suspicion that the new culture of pre-Enlightenment rationalism
nurtured for the fictions of literature.42 The issue of the credibility of ro-
mances and novels became more acute from the seventeenth century on-
ward. During the same period, more and more witness accounts or instances
of documentary evidence were exhibited in support of the claim that a novel
38. Gotthard Heidegger, Mythoscopia romantica: Oder Discours von den so benanten
Romans (Zürich: David Gessner, 1698), chaps. 12, 36, 51, and passim.
39. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, vol. 2, “Evening 12,” 77ff.
40. Adriano Prosperi, “Censurare le favole. Il protoromanzo e l’Europa cattolica,” in Il
romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), 71–106.
41. “As a great Philosopher [Plato] wisely warns wet-nurses not to indiscriminately tell
their children all sorts of fairy tales for fear that their souls might become inebriated with
madness from the outset, and that they might draw some vicious impression from them, so it
seems to me that one might with good reason advise those who have reached the age of
reason not to amuse themselves by reading without judgment all sorts of books, for fear that
their minds might become accustomed little by little to loving lies and to feeding on vanities,
in addition to the fact that it is a poor use of their time.” Amyot, “Le Proësme du translateur,”
no page numbers.
42. See Francesco Orlando, Illuminismo e retorica freudiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1982).
told a true history.43 In England, the phobia for poetic falsehood began to
spread especially in Bunyan’s time.44 A few years later, in France, someone
found it intolerable that invention and reality were intertwined as they
were implicitly in a genre like the nouvelle, which sets private individuals
steeped in fiction against a real historical background.45 Gotthard Hei-
degger begins his Mythoscopia romantica by citing a passage from Fran-
çois Charpentier in which an attack is made on all romances and works
that tell “masked lies.”46 This is the same accusation that Charles Gildon
leveled against Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe roughly twenty years later.47 Vex-
ation at the lies and vanitas of novels and romances frequently makes its
appearance in eighteenth-century England. In 1751, three years after the
publication of Clarissa and Tom Jones, Francis Coventry felt the need to
explain why wise men, metaphysicians, men of science and learning, and
politicians involved in the affairs of state should consider that the reading
of novels is worthy of a serious man.48 In 1767 a certain T. Row (a pseud-
onym for Samuel Pegge the elder) wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine, con-
cerned because the young people of both sexes were wasting their time on
romances, dissipating themselves in meaningless daydreams. He proposed
obligating young people to engage in more useful readings, such as general
history, English history, and natural history.49
The immediate cause of these accusations was the suspicious atmo-

sphere toward the arts and anything fictional that the Reformation, the
Counter-Reformation, and the pre-Enlightenment had introduced into Eu-
ropean culture; but the deeper source lay much further back. Just as pre-
43. Arthur J. Tieje, “A Peculiar Phase of the Theory of Realism in Pre-Richardsonian

Prose-Fiction,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 28 (1913):
213–252.
44. Joseph Bunn Heidler, The History, from 1700–1800, of English Criticism to Prose
Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1928); Beasley, Novels of the 1740s, 5ff.
45. Deloffre, La Nouvelle en France à l’âge classique, 57ff.
46. Heidegger, Mythoscopia romantica, chap. 62.
47. Charles Gildon, “From An Epistle to Daniel Defoe,” (1719) in Williams, Novel and
Romance, 57–63.
48. Francis Coventry, “Dedication to The History of Pompey the Little,” in Williams,
Novel and Romance, 176–179.
49. T. Row, “Evil Tendency of Reading Romances,” Gentleman’s Magazine 37 (December
1767); reprinted in Williams, Novel and Romance, 272–273.
modern and early modern classicism rested on the prior assumptions of the
ancient Stiltrennung, similarly the moralistic and theoretical criticisms that
novels received in these centuries revived a structure of sense of very long
duration, a presupposition that for thousands of years had marked the re-
ception of literature and mimesis in the West. What was this?
One of the most famous ideas that Hegel developed in his Aesthetics
regards the Vergangenheitscharakter, the “past character” of art:
Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art. . . .
However all this may be, it is certainly the case that art no longer affords
that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought
in it, and found in it alone. . . . The development of reflection in our life
today has made it a need of ours, in relation both to our will and judg-
ment, to cling to general considerations and to regulate the particular
by them, with the result that universal forms, laws, duties, rights,
maxims, prevail as determining reasons and are the chief regulator. In all
these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for
us a thing of the past.50
According to Hegel, the spiritual needs of contemporary individuals are

not entirely gratified by narratives, images, or music. When they want to know
truth or form an idea of the totality, modern individuals do not rely on sto-
ries, sounds, or painting but rather enter the realm of the concept: they think.
For the enlightened consciousness, the arts harbor a regressive, irrational,
infantile, and magical element. Hegelian philosophy of history melded this
transition with the advent of the Christian conception of truth as a super-
sensible, invisible entity. In point of fact, the first text of European culture
that attached a “past character” to the mimetically transmitted image of
the world preceded Christianity. It was Plato’s Republic that initiated a way
of conceiving, judging, disciplining, and underestimating the arts that would
continue to produce effects until the second half of the eighteenth century.
This is what we might call aesthetic Platonism, to use an expression coined
by Marc Fumaroli.51
50. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, pp. 10–11.

51. See Marc Fumaroli, “La Querelle de la moralité du théâtre au XVIIe siècle,” Bulletin
de la société française de philosophie 84, no. 3 (1990): 66; also by Fumaroli, “Sacerdos sive
rhetor, orator sive histrio: rhétorique, théologie, et ‘moralité du théâtre’ en France de Cor-
neille à Molière,” in Héros et orateurs: rhétorique et dramaturgie cornéliennes (Geneva:
Droz, 1990).
This attitude toward mimesis combines three forms of control.52 The

most radical is censorship: Socrates’s character wants to expel most of the
poets from the city, keeping only those who tell stories to the young that
“bring the fairest lessons of virtue to their ears,”53 “hymns to the gods and
the praises of good men.”54 The poets who are allowed to remain behind
are then subjected to another form of discipline, based on a normative
aesthetic of an allegorical and moralistic type:
“But if again someone should ask us to be specific and say what these
compositions may be and what are the tales, what could we name?” And
I replied, “Adeimantus, we are not poets, you and I at present, but
founders of a state. And to founders it pertains to know the patterns
(typoi) on which poets must compose their fables and from which their
poems must not be allowed to deviate.”55
The Republic fences off the figurative arts, confining them inside a pe-
ripheral cultural space. After censorship, what remains is divided into the
opposite and complementary domains of amusement and instruction.56
The first is a smaller territory that is separated from truth; the second
partakes in truth only to the extent that it conveys to those who cannot
access philosophy the typoi that the philosopher-founders of the ideal
city grasp in pure form. In other words, as Panofsky writes: “For since
Plato applied to the products of sculpture and painting the concept—
utterly foreign to their nature—of cognitive truth (i.e., correspondence to
the Ideas) as a measure of value, his philosophic system could have no
52. The concept of control (of the imaginary, mimesis, and narrative) was invented by
Luiz Costa Lima. See especially his O controle do imaginário (1984; English translation Con-
trol of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times, trans. Ronald W. Sousa
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988]), Sociedade e Discurso Ficcional (1986),
and O fingidor e o censor (1988), now collected in Trilogia do controle (Rio de Janeiro: Top-
books, 2007); as well as the book Costa Lima wrote on the origin of the novel: O controle do
imaginário e a afirmaçao do romance (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2009). The remarks
that follow take up the notion of control but develop it in a different direction.
53. Plato, Republic 2.378e.
54. Plato, Republic 10.607a.
55. Plato, Republic 2.378e–2.379a.
56. Plato, Statesman 288c.
room for an aesthetics of representational art as an intellectual realm sui

generis.”57
The measures announced by Socrates’s character to control the poets
would prove to be more than an idle threat. Already in evidence before
Plato’s time, the dialectic set out in the Republic would become a topos of
ancient poetry, medieval literary theory, and the classicist poetics that
emerged during the humanist era and the Renaissance. In the first century
BCE, Horace ensured its longevity by his memorable mottos: “Aut prodesse
volunt aut delectare poëtae” (Poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse);
“Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci | lectorem delectando parit-
erque monendo” (He has won every vote who has blended profit and
pleasure, at once delighting and instructing the reader).58 From one perspec-
tive, the literary field remained bound to instruction: “All Antiquity sees the
poet as sage, teacher, educator,”59 as a repository of moral, historical, and
geographical knowledge, defender of the collective memory, propagator of
sententiae and exempla, creator of allegorical tales, master of eloquence—
just as when Homer was the cornerstone of public education in Greece. Yet,
despite the survival of these topoi, the truths that the poets presented no
longer had the same value of those that archaic Greek culture used to dis-
cover in the works of Homer. To fully understand this difference we must
start from our time, adopt a form of retrospective estrangement, and allow
the epochs to collide.
In the mid-1700s a discipline formed that reflected on the logic and con-
tent of truth in the arts: aesthetics. If the development of new, specialized
fields is a sign of a physiological tendency of modern culture, the advent of
this discursive region reflected a profound transformation in the basic frame-
works of our culture. The main task that aesthetics has taken on during
the two and a half centuries of its history is the production of arguments
justifying the value of the arts in the face of other forms of knowledge. The
most popular among these legitimizing discourses says that the arts, through
their own languages, create an interpretation of reality that is different,
57. Erwin Panofsky, Idea (1924); English translation Idea: A Concept in Art Theory,
trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 4.
58. Horace, Epistles 2, lines 333, 343–344; English translation Satires, Epistles, Ars
Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 479.
59. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 203ff.
and in its own way more profound, than what knowledge arrives at when
passing through the medium of reflection and abstract thought. In other
words, the idea of truth to which aesthetics refers runs counter to the idea
of truth implicit in philosophy, the natural sciences, or the human sciences.
It thus becomes possible to claim what D. H. Lawrence writes in Why the
Novel Matters: only a form of mimesis—in this case, the novel—really cap-
tures life, and nothing is important but life.
Mimesis was always vitally important in the ancient world, but for rea-
sons different from those that have gained ground in recent centuries. It
was admired for its ability to instruct and entertain, for its enormous psy-
chagogical power, because it was able to convert the abstraction of concepts
into the figurative force that classical rhetoric called enargeia or evidentia,
generating emotion, pleasure, and persuasion. It was admired for its ability
to preserve the memory of gods and mortals: ancient culture entrusted the
memory of human actions to the two mimetic disciplines of history and
poetry. But an argument like the one used by modern aesthetics to legiti-
mize the learning power of art (mimesis preserves a primary knowledge,
linked to particular life and untranslatable into the form of the concept)
was unknown to classical culture. Up to the discursive transformation that
took place between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, poets were the
rightful masters of truth; after the effects of this conflict had been felt, the
relationship of mimesis to truth became problematic. Certainly, ancient
culture continued to view poets as sages, and ancient writers continued to
impart metaphysical, theological, political, moral, historical, scientific, and
technical truths in the form of sententiae, exempla, and allegories, even
perhaps retaining the invocation to the muses and appealing to the divine
origin of art—but ever since knowledge acquired a conceptual form, the role
of mimesis was irremediably transformed. Poetry transmits meanings because
it contains or allegorizes ideas, and not because it preserves a type of knowl-
edge that is refractory to concepts but essential to the understanding of life. It
assumes a nobly pedagogic, educational, and ornamental function; it serves
to disseminate, in figurative, pleasant, and memorable ways that are under-
standable to a wide audience, what other disciplines already know and ex-
press in ways that are appropriate to the thing-in-itself but which are elitist.
It is vulnerable to the ethical and theoretical judgments of philosophy and
theology. In response to Plato’s criticisms, Isocrates expressed an opinion that
ran throughout ancient pedagogy: poetry lies within the realm of knowledge
because it serves as a propedeutics for philosophy.60 Aristotle gave explicit
expression to the idea that the forms of knowledge are arranged in a hier-
archy culminating in the hard kernel of philosophy: that of metaphysics.61
The Platonic and Aristotelian scale of ranking between games of truth proved
to be decisive in the interpretation of Judeo-Christian sacred texts, which
were read through the medium of a theology—a discourse charged with the
task of explaining in the form of concepts what the sacred texts expressed in
the form of stories and metaphors.62 The Christian version of control over
mimesis picked up on and emphasized the moralistic gaze immanent to aes-
thetic Platonism: poets and artists were asked to not indulge in the mimesis
of imperfect contingency, unless the story of weakness and sin took place
within an allegorical and exemplary framework. After the Protestant Refor-
mation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the criticism that the Church
Fathers directed against mimesis spread far and wide.
The idea that fables instruct and entertain was transmitted to the
Middle Ages.63 However, from late antiquity to the advent of Scholasti-
cism, the perception of the boundaries between the fields of poetry and
abstract thought dissolved because the material crisis of the ancient cul-
ture and ancient world reduced the number of available texts and dimin-
ished the intellectual specialization. For almost a thousand years, poets
were also read as philosophical and scientific authorities, and the term
philosophia served to designate all forms of knowledge: poetry, rhetoric,
grammar, philology, engineering, the art of war.64 Of course, there was no
lack of opposing theories. A counter-discourse developed in the culture of
medieval Platonism between the ninth and thirteenth centuries that gave
new value to the knowledge transmitted by fables, symbols, myths, and
60. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 37.

61. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.982b.17–19.
62. Henri de Lubac, Éxégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l’Écriture (Paris: Aubier,
1959–1964); Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-
chrétiennes, 215ff; by the same author, La Tradition de l’allégorie de Philon d’Alexandrie à
Dante (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1987).
63. Edgar de Bruyne, Études d’esthétique médiévale (1946), vol. 2 (Geneva: Slatkine Re-
prints, 1975), 313ff.
64. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 203ff.
images.65 An interpretation of the doctrine of Ideas very distant from the

original Platonic one was essential for legitimizing the figurative arts in
the Renaissance,66 and its effects endured until the Romantic period.67
But these aesthetic alternatives did not ultimately break free from the
logic of the allegory, and, most importantly, they never engendered a cul-
tural transformation comparable to what led to the abandonment of the
Platonic hierarchy, the Romantic consecration of art, and the birth of modern
aesthetics.
A systematic reflection on the confines between disciplines arose in the
twelfth century with the development of Scholasticism, the spread of uni-
versities, and the growing division of intellectual labor. In his commentary
on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and in his own Summa theologiae, Thomas
Aquinas reestablished a rigid hierarchical relationship between the theo-
retical arts and poetry (“the least of all the sciences”), restoring the ancient
scale of ranking.68 Medieval literary theory justified its subject matter by
continuing to use the arguments of ancient aesthetics and by adding a new
discourse of legitimization—a discourse that was in the minority but impor-
tant nonetheless, because it involved the Bible. We find this explained in
an exemplary fashion in one of the most famous fourteenth-century de-
fenses of poetry, Albertino Mussato’s seventh epistle, which entwines Hor-
ace’s ideas with a new type of argument, namely, the idea that it was the
poets who heralded the divine. By virtue of its allegorical form and its con-
tent, writes Mussato, the Bible shows how poetry can become a second the-
ology as well as a second philosophy.69 In reality, one of the last poets to
act as the legitimate guardian of a primary knowledge was Dante, and the
appeal of his work derives partially from this anachronism. Already
during early humanism there reappeared the practice of the allegorical
commentary, which subordinated fictions to their exemplary hidden
65. Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism
(Leiden: Brill, 1974), chap. 1 and passim.
66. Panofsky, Idea; Teresa Chevrolet, L’Idée de fable: théories de la fiction poétique à la
Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2007), part 1, especially pp. 61ff.
67. Paolo Tortonese, L’Œil de Platon et le regard romantique (Paris: Kimé, 2006), 103ff.
68. Thomas Aquinas, In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio, ed. M.-R.
Cathala and Raimondo M. Spiazzi (Turin: Marietti, 1977), bk. 1, lesson 3, and Summa theo-
logicae 1.1.9.
69. See Giorgio Ronconi, Le origini delle dispute umanistiche sulla poesia (Mussato e
Petrarca) (Rome: Bulzoni, 1976), 17–59.
moral sense and made poetry an ancilla philosophiae—a handmaid to

philosophy.70
Moralism and Allegory
But the most intense period of control over mimesis began after the Prot-
estant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, in the mid-sixteenth
century. During this period, Christian aesthetic Platonism produced preven-
tive censorship and a body of implicit or explicit rules that influenced the
writing and reception of novels. The apparatus of rules was based on three
principles.
1. In the first place, a pedagogical and moralistic conception of art: mimesis

disseminates useful knowledge and virtuous schemas of behavior in addi-
tion to what Aristotle called phronesis: a changeable wisdom regarding
human affairs, a capacity to understand life and to act prudently in partic-
ular circumstances.71 The link between poetry, oratory, and instruction
became especially tight after the classicism in the mid-sixteenth century
became more rigid72 and Horace’s principle of delectare et monere became
the most obsessively repeated topos in prefaces to novels through to the
second half of the eighteenth century.73 Reading Huet’s treatise or looking
at the way the education of girls is described in the works of Jane Austen
a century and a half later, it is clear that novels were used to furnish models
of behavior to women and young people. Indeed, the formula that best de-
scribes the influence of aesthetic Platonism comes from Huet: novels are
“silent tutors.”
70. See Anne Duprat and Françoise Lavocat, “La Bataille des fables: conditions de
l’émergence d’une théorie de la fiction en Europe (XIVe–XVIIe siècles),” in Fiction et cultures,
ed. Françoise Lavocat and Anne Duprat (Paris: SFLGC, 2010), 243–248.
71. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 6.5, 6.8–13.
72. See Bray, La Formation de la doctrine classique en France, part 2, chap. 1; Marc Fu-
maroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence: rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de
l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980).
73. See Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, chap. 4;
García Berrio, Formación de la teoría literaria moderna, passim; Duprat, “Morale et fiction
en poétique,” 45ff.; Hunter, Before Novels, chap. 9.
2. This pedagogical element is united with the tendency to read texts as

allegories, as illustrations of human types, as collections of maxims, elo-
quent phrases, and concepts.
Amadis of Gaul, along with Orlando Furioso, was the most important
chivalric romance of the sixteenth century. Translated into all the major
European languages, it circulated widely and was reprinted countless
times. In 1559 in France, extracts from Amadis of Gaul were used to
create a Trésor de tous les livres d’Amadis de Gaule. The “treasure” con-
tained speeches, letters, orations, objections, and maxims “useful for in-
structing the French nobility in eloquence, grace, virtue, and generosity.”74
A year later, in Italy, a new edition of Bandello’s novels appeared with a
title that speaks for itself: First volume of the Novelle by Bandello, newly
reprinted and corrected with diligence. With the addition of some moral
meanings by Mr. Ascanio Centorio degli Ortensi composed for each no-
vella.75 Universal precepts and norms were extracted from works that con-
tained particular stories about particular individuals. We find the same
approach two centuries later in England. The “Preface of the Editor” that
introduces Pamela spells out the moral meanings implicit in the novel:
If to divert and entertain, and at the same time instruct and improve the
minds of the youth of both sexes,
If to inculcate religion and morality in so easy and agreeable a manner,
as shall render them equally delightful and profitable to the younger class
of readers, as well as worthy of the attention of persons of maturer years
and understandings;
If to set forth in the most exemplary lights, the parental, the filial and
the social duties, and that from low to high life:
If to paint vice in its proper colours, to make it deservedly odious; and
to set virtue in its own amiable light, to make it truly lovely, . . .
74. So reads the title page of one of the numerous reprints: Trésor de tous les livres
d’Amadis de Gaule contenant les harangues, épîtres, concions, lettres missives, demandes,
réponses, répliques, sentences, cartels, complaintes et autres choses plus excellentes, très utile
pour instruire la noblesse française à l’éloquence, grâce, vertu et générosité (Lyon: Rigaud
et J.-A. Huguetan, 1605).
75. Primo volume delle Novelle del Bandello, nuovamente ristampato e con diligenza cor-
retto. Con una aggiunta d’alcuni sensi morali dal S. Ascanio Centorio de gli Hortensii, a
ciascuna novella fatti (Milan: Giovanni Antonio degli Antonii, 1560).
If these (embellished with a great variety of entertaining incidents) be

laudable or worthy recommendations of any work, the Editor of the fol-
lowing Letters, which have their foundation in truth and nature, ventures
to assert, that all these desirable ends are achieved in these sheets.76
Fifteen years after the publication of Pamela, in 1755, Richardson

brought out A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims,
Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela and Clarissa,
and Sir Charles Grandison. We thus encounter two connected phenomena
that are repeated in identical ways at a distance of two centuries and in dif-
ferent national cultures. The meaning of narrative works was subjected to
moral control and transliterated into the medium of the concept77—a rep-
etition of what had happened in Greece when the commentators began to
pull allegories out of Homer’s and Hesiod’s tales.
3. The tendency toward allegory characteristic of aesthetic Platonism be-

came entwined with classicist poetics, engendering an idea of probability
76. Richardson, Pamela, 3–4.

77. It could be objected that books of maxims taken from narrative or theater works
continue to exist (for example, the publishing success of maxims taken from Oscar Wilde’s
plays), but this is a different phenomenon. The practice of prefacing and concluding novels,
dramatic works, or films with explanations that transcribe “the moral of our story” into the
form of ideas, as the narrator of Manzoni’s The Betrothed would put it, or the very convic-
tion that a story should have a moral that can be expressed in maxims and precepts, is com-
pletely foreign to the aesthetic horizon of the past few centuries. For modern readers, what a
work of fiction “really means” is the subject of endless, conflicting interpretations. The first
task of literary criticism is precisely this: to translate into ideas the image of the world that
lies sedimented inside the works. And yet this happens with the awareness that the language
of mimesis possesses a truth that is irreducible to the medium of the concept. For the past
two centuries now, interpretation has been an interminable practice: to expect to extract a
unique message from James Joyce’s Ulysses, from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or from
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is considered a naive pretense. Instead, in 1550 or in 1750 it was
normal for writers and readers of novels to condense the moral of the story into a maxim, or
to present the works as exempla, allegories, or representations of vices and virtues. Although
difficult to comprehend for a reader of today, these habits are crucial for understanding the
way narrative was written and interpreted in the Ancien Régime. The decline of allegorism is
one of the great historical thresholds separating this epoch from our contemporary literary
era. What declined was not a mere intellectual exercise practiced by a few scholars but rather
a psychology of writing and reading, a collective habitus. In this case, too, the literary culture
of the Ancien Régime revived a form of the subjection of mimesis to the concept that de-
scended from Plato. See Terence Cave, “Pour une pré-histoire du suspens,” in Pré-histoires
(Geneva: Droz, 1999), 138–139.
very different from the modern one, founded on a varying combination

between empirical observation and what ought to be. Literary imitation
does not have the task of portraying the particularities of lives and forms
of life; rather, it exemplifies already known universal concepts. What de-
termine universal actions and passions are the same principles that govern
classicism and Christian aesthetic Platonism: a hierarchical vision of so-
ciety (each character must think and act in accordance with its rank) and
a pedagogical and censorious conception of mimesis (immorality must be
banished even from effigies).
Allegorical probability establishes two forms of bonds between the sin-
gular event and its hidden moral sense that go in different directions but
have the same substance. The first joins the general idea to the particular
exemplum, such as when prefaces explain the meaning of the story; the
second creates the opposite movement. While the modern statistical concept
of probability leaves room for the exception qua exception, the concept of
probability that reigned in this epoch attached a potentially universal
meaning to every episode and to every character. If a god behaves immor-
ally, then the author’s intention was to say that all gods are immoral; if the
Princesse de Clèves confesses her love for another man to her husband, then
Madame de La Fayette violated probability, since it is not morally accept-
able for a princess to behave this way;78 if Robinson Crusoe shows us a
sailor who is shipwrecked, then Defoe wanted to both dissuade all people
from taking to the sea, and to destroy English prosperity, which depended
to a great extent on trade.79 Today we entrust narrative the task of showing
the different modes of finitude in all their dispersion. The idea that novels
should represent typical stories and characters is only one of many possible
poetics; with equally good arguments you could defend a contrary poetic,
open to the mimesis of the unusual. In the allegorical paradigm that Pla-
tonism and classicism contributed to creating, there was no space for cen-
trifugal movements, for the exception qua exception. The anomalous event
or character was the subject matter of “history,” not “poetry.”
European classicism developed innumerable variants of these sorts of
concepts. Italian and French literary theory of the second half of the six-
teenth century and the seventeenth century, for example, constructed its
78. Genette, “Vraisemblance et motivation,” 74ff.

79. See Gildon, “From An Epistle to Daniel Defoe,” 57–63.
vision of mimesis around an allegorical interpretation of plots and charac-

ters. But the influence of aesthetic Platonism lasted much longer: we find it
again in the essay on romance fiction that Samuel Johnson published in
The Rambler (1750), at the close of a decade that was decisive for the devel-
opment of the English novel.80 Evidently, the “new province of writing”
opened up by Fielding and Richardson had not yet transformed the
premodern idea of probability.
Moralistic Apparatuses, Poetic Justice, Exemplary Heroes
The moralistic imperative, the habit of devising plots and characters as al-
legories of something, and the influence of classicism explain some aspects
of the fiction of this period that modern readers find very difficult to
understand.
1. First and foremost, an outpouring of explanations in dedicatory epis-

tles, in prefaces, and in the titles of works. Between the second half of the
sixteenth century and the second half of the eighteenth century, most novels
were accompanied by preambles explaining the meaning of the text. Alle-
gory and moralism invaded the front matter:
Les Douze Livres d’Astrée où, par plusieurs Histoires et sous personnes
de Bergers et d’autres, sont déduits les effets de l’honneste amitié.81
Vitae humanae proscenium, in quo sub persona Guzmanii Alfaracii vir-

tutes et vitia, fraudes, cautiones, simplicitas, nequitia, divitiae, men-
dacitas, bona, mala, omnia denique quae hominibus cuiuscumque aetatis
aut ordinis evenire solent aut possunt, graphice ad vivum repraesentantur
omni aetatis et conditionis hominum tam instructioni quam delectationi
dicata.82
80. “It is therefore not a sufficient vindication of a character, that it is drawn as it appears;
for many characters ought never to be drawn. . . . In narratives where historical veracity has
no place, I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue.”
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 4 (Saturday, March 31, 1750), in Johnson, Essays from
the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, 11.
81. This is the title of the first edition of Honoré D’Urfé’s Astrée (Paris: T. Du Bray, 1607).
82. This is the title with which the first Latin edition of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de
Alfarache appeared (Coloniae Agrippinae, excudebat Petrus a Brachel, 1623).
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, etc., Who
was Born in newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Three-
score Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times
a Wife (whereof once to her own brother) Twelve Year a Thief, Eight
Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest,
and died a Penitent.83
Two-part titles, created to explain the sensus hidden in the narratio, pro-
liferated using a method descended from the rhetoric of medieval exempla,
which were immensely popular, especially in the eighteenth century: Pamela;
or, Virtue Rewarded; Les Liaisons dangereuses, ou Lettres recueillies dans
une société et publiées pour l’instruction de quelques autres; Justine, ou les
Malheurs de la vertu.
2. Another effect of allegorism was the insistence that poetic rules placed
on the unity of plot and characters. It was an obsession that dominated the
Italian debate on the romanzo in the 1550s. The detractors of the genre
associated chivalric literature with the risk of multiplicity and accused
romanzi of telling stories about characters who dissipated themselves in
adventures unworthy of a hero. This was made evident by the polyhistoric,
dispersive structure of the plots, based on the technique of entrelacement.
The normative poetics of the epos instead demanded unity of action and
character: the story should be organized around a great collective under-
taking and a great, exemplary hero; the characters’ actions should be moti-
vated by significant goals; they should not go astray, abandon themselves to
sinful passions, or, in any case, to passions that are irrelevant to the ethical
purpose for which they fight.84 In addition to obeying the principles that
the Renaissance theoreticians drew from Aristotle, this centripetal ten-
dency expressed a strong drive toward allegorism and the cultural ether of
the Counter-Reformation. If literature is to be judged using moral ortho-
pedics as its criterion of value, a unitary story and an exemplary hero are
reassuring. The unitary story and exemplary hero allow the raw material
83. This is the title with which Defoe’s Moll Flanders first appeared (London: Chetwood,
1722).
84. For a long-term history of the opposition between epic unity and romance multi-
plicity, see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 31ff.
of tales (which is always potentially ambiguous and polysemic, because it

is written in a language quite different from that of ideas) to be interpreted
as the unequivocal exemplum of something. The obsession with unity con-
tinued throughout the epoch of Christian aesthetic Platonism and classi-
cism. We find it everywhere: in the principles that a theoretician like Huet
expounds in his treatise and in the topoi that Manley, wishing to legiti-
mate herself as serious writer, sets out in the preface to Queen Zarah.
Moralism and allegory exerted their influence on plots and on characters.
The most marked effect was the tremendous success enjoyed by poetic
justice between the 1500s and the 1700s. Few devices point so accurately
to Christian aesthetic Platonism as this figure of dispositio. Poetic justice is
a normative principle: it requires that the plot be constructed in such a
way that by the end of the story vice is punished and virtue rewarded.
Formulated for the first time in 1588 by Leonardo Salviati, poetic justice
soon became a widespread norm. In 1677 Thomas Rymer gave a name to
it and invented the expression poetical justice.85 The rule is based on a pas-
sage from Aristotle’s Poetics86 and, more obliquely, on passages in which
Plato distinguishes between fictions that are morally acceptable and those
that are morally unacceptable depending on how the vices and virtues are
presented.87 Many works were interpreted in this light: the plots of the
Greek novels became examples of poetic justice; the prefaces of the English
novels (Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, Roxana, Pamela, Clarissa, Ferdinand
Count Fathom) methodically insist on punishing vice and rewarding virtue.
The more immoral episodes were included in the text, the more poetic jus-
tice was invoked as guidance on how it was to be read, so that the display
of immorality could be fit into a moralistic design.
If poetic justice acted on the plot, its counterpart in the representation
of the heroes was the tendency to construct and interpret characters as ex-
empla, and in particular as representations of vices and virtues. An appeal
to the exemplary nature of the hero often appeared in sixteenth-century
poetics of the epic poem and of the romance that sought to imitate the
forms of the epos. For sixteenth-century literary theory, for example, the
85. See Wolfgang Zach, Poetic Justice: Theorie und Geschichte einer literarischen Dok-
trin. Begriff-Idee-Komödienkonzeption (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986), 8ff.
86. Aristotle, Poetics 13.1452b.34–1453a.7.
87. Plato, Republic 3.392b.
heroines and heroes of the Greek novel were ideal characters because, even
in the most difficult or awkward of circumstances, they always (or almost
always) preserved their virtue.88 In many Baroque novels, but also in many
eighteenth-century novels, the heroes embody an abstract universal, ac-
cording to a process that Lydia Ginzburg defines as deductive:
For centuries a kind of deductive principle prevailed in literature, whereby
individual gestures and speech were characterized by an ideal relation to
the situations in which they occurred. Whatever the circumstances, the
literary hero’s physical behavior followed the precepts of the given style.89
A technique of this sort is moralistic and classicist at the same time.90 It

serves to create models of virtuous behavior, especially when the charac-
ters belong to groups of people who must be disciplined through the
reading of novels: women, young girls, and young boys. Pamela, Clarissa,
and Julie may make mistakes, they may wander in the realm of imperfection,
but in the end they never abandon the idea of virtue that they embody and
to which they return: their inner life is rigid and composed of principles
(Virtue, Courage, Ambition, Value, Liberality, Generosity, Vice, Honor).
The plot of their destiny is the unfolding of a moral project.
An example of this approach is a device that modern readers struggle to
understand, just like poetic justice. I call it the hero’s self-correction. It oc-
curs very frequently in first-person novels that describe themselves as true
histories: the characters may find themselves in risqué situations or give in
to temptations, but in the end they have to acknowledge their wrongdoing
and reaffirm their personal morality. A similar practice descends from spir-
itual autobiographies and their great archetype, Augustine’s Confessions,
where the years spent in the regio dissimilitudinis of error are narrated
from the point of view of someone who has repented and changed his way
of living. But the technique is also widespread in narratives that are not
spiritual autobiographies in the strict sense of the term. In Defoe’s Moll
Flanders and Roxana, or in Duclos’s Les Confessions du Comte de * * *
88. See Pavel, L’Art de l’éloignement: essai sur l’imagination classique (Paris: Gallimard,
1996), and La Pensée du roman, 58ff.
89. Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, trans. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 297ff.
90. See Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, chap. 7;
Pavel, La Pensée du roman, 142ff.
(1742), for example, we find the same device, although the proportion be-
tween the two parts is different: reflection on the years of error prevails by
far over the edifying passages. In Richardson’s novels, on the other hand,
the hero’s self-correction is applied in a more extremist fashion. Whenever
Pamela and Clarissa find themselves in indecent situations, they feel the
need to reaffirm their morality, and this almost always takes place in the
same letter in which the racy incident is being recounted.
A technique of this sort has no credibility in the eyes of modern readers,
who view the inner life as a set of changeable forces rather than embodied
ideas. Instead, the allegorical and moralistic paradigm legitimizes the he-
ro’s self-correction and in some way demands it. In reflecting on the image
of humankind and the world transmitted by Hellenistic novels and chi-
valric and pastoral romances, Thomas Pavel introduces a succinct concept
that can be fittingly applied to a wide variety of cases. In his opinion, the
regime of fiction adopted by these works is “ideographic” rather than
“inductive”:91 the stories and characters do not imitate the empirical reality
according to the criteria of probability that would be imposed in modern
times; rather, they act as allegories of an Idea established a priori. It is a
principle that applies to many novels written between the mid-sixteenth
century and the mid-eighteenth century: the heroes of the heroic Baroque
novel, for example, are models of moral exemplarity, far removed from any
empirical probability. Although finding themselves in the most difficult of
circumstances, Pamela and Clarissa remains models of virtue.92
Today we no longer ask our high-brow literature to perform this
ideographic task: our prevailing need is not for moral orthopedics but for
realism, however we might choose to define this term. This is one of the
reasons readers of our day tend to underestimate the importance that mor-
alism and allegorism held between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centu-
ries. For their part, nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of the novel
pass over these phenomena, or read them with modern eyes, as if they
were superstructures added a posteriori as a way to pass on transgressive
material. There is undoubtedly some truth to this view, considering that
even the pornographic novelists of the 1700s, from John Cleland to the
91. Pavel, La Pensée du roman, 111ff.

92. Ibid., 145ff.
Marquis de Sade, represented themselves as creators of exempla. In the fi-

nale to Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, we read:
If you do me then justice, you will esteem me perfectly consistent in the
incense I burn to virtue. If I have painted vice in all its gayest colours, if I
have deck’d it with flowers, it has been solely in order to make the wor-
thier, solemner sacrifice of it to virtue.93
In the dedication “To libertines” that precedes Philosophy in the Bou-

doir, in the introductory matter to Justine, or in the first chapter of the
Nouvelle Justine, we find a sort of upside-down moralism. The titles make
no secret of it, for that matter (Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu):
The aims of this fiction (which is not as fictional as some might think)
are doubtless new. The ascendancy of Virtue over Vice, good rewarded
and evil punished, such is the general trend of works of this nature. Shall
we ever tire of reading them! But everywhere to represent Vice as trium-
phant and Virtue a victim of its attacks; to show a wretched girl wan-
dering from one misfortune to another . . . with the sole aim of obtaining
from all of this one of the most sublime moral lessons that humanity has
ever been taught, was, I am sure you will agree, to reach this goal by a
road seldom trodden before.94
We shall give the public this history of the virtuous Justine to lend sup-
port to these systems (we no longer conceal it). It is essential for the fools
to stop showering this ridiculous idol of virtue with praise, which until
now has repaid them with nothing but ingratitude. . . . Without a doubt,
it is terrible to have to depict, on the one hand, the horrific misadven-
tures by which heaven plagues a sweet and sensitive woman who respects
virtue to her utmost, and, on the other, the affluence that rains down on
those who torment and mortify this same woman. But the man of letters,
who is enough a philosopher to tell the truth, manages to overcome these
unpleasantries.95
93. John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, vol. 2 (London: Fenton, 1749), 254.
94. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu; English
translation Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue, trans. John Philips (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2012).
95. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, La Nouvelle Justine, in Œuvres, vol. 2, ed. Mi-
chel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 129.
To dismiss these forms of reading and writing as cynical masquerades

or as forms of irony would be tantamount to misunderstanding an epoch.
Moral control and allegorism were two of the basic assumptions that gov-
erned mimesis and fiction during the early modern age: they formed the
mental landscape, the aesthetic environment, inhabited by writers and
readers of the time. Today we believe that an author’s task is primarily to
tell stories about the real world or about an invented world in a credible,
compelling manner. The readers of the early modern era were inclined more
than we are to submit characters and plots to an implicit or explicit moral
judgment and to an implicit or explicit conceptual interpretation. This su-
peregoic, allegorical need was part of their literary system, and it made its
way into the text like a sort of second nature.
The Legitimization of the Romance
How were romances and novels defended from the accusations directed
at them by classicism and Christian aesthetic Platonism? The arguments
that writers used to justify their works clearly reveal that the genre
arose out of two traditions: the lines of reasoning used for legitimiza-
tion tend to follow different strategies depending on whether the work
to be defended was “poetic” or “historic,” whether it was a romance or
a novel.
The romance of low style had no need to be ennobled. It could never be
a serious genre, and it fit perfectly into the poetics of the separation of
styles, occupying the place intended for works of this sort: farcical romances
were a form of light entertainment; romances written in an intermediate
comic tone employed the strategies invented for justifying the usefulness
of comedy and presented themselves as a description of manners. Those
who defended lofty-style romance from the accusation of violating the
rules of the art used other strategies of legitimization.
The first consisted in presenting the high romance as the modern counter-
part of the epic poem. This is an argument that passed from Italian treatises
of the mid-sixteenth century to French treatises of the later seventeenth
century. According to Giraldi, the first romanzi, the French medieval ones,
arose “in place of the heroic compositions of the Greeks and Romans.”96
Pigna and Fornari sought to establish the rules of the chivalric poem by
examining the rules of the epos. Orlando Furioso entered into the canon
of modern classics partly because its supporters endeavored to present it
as the sixteenth-century equivalent of the ancient heroic poem.97
As Aristotelianism became more unyielding over the course of the six-
teenth century, it became harder and harder to defend the chivalric poem
using an argument of this sort: clearly, the technique of entrelacement was
not in keeping with the precepts derived from Aristotle’s Poetics on the unity
of plot. It did remain possible to interpret the Greek novel in the light of the
epic poem, though. The difference depended more on the prestige that the
ancient authors enjoyed, precisely because of their antiquity, more than it
did on any formal criteria. Between the mid-sixteenth century and the seven-
teenth century, the Aethiopica became the model for the romance inspired
by the rules for the epic.98 This interpretation gained popularity mainly in
France—in the nation that, despite having invented the courtly medieval
romance, during the Renaissance lacked a work comparable to Amadis or
Orlando Furioso. The canonization of Heliodorus was decisive for the birth
of the heroic Baroque novel. In the first pages of Ibrahim (1641–1644), Scu-
déry writes that the modern roman must imitate the structure of the epic
poem, as did Heliodorus, who followed the unity of action principle.99 Huet
used the same strategy to establish a normative poetics for the genre.100
The second line of reasoning used for legitimization was based on a
classic Aristotelian argument. The Greek novels or chivalric romances, we
are told, are poetic, not historical, texts; therefore they should be read as
exempla of ideal behavior. Orlando Furioso is often subjected to this alle-
gorical, ennobling interpretation.101 Similar ways of conceiving romances
96. Giraldi Cinzio, Discorsi dei romanzi, 36.

97. Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of “Orlando Furioso”
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 160ff.
98. See Giorgetto Giorgi, introduction to Les Poétiques italiennes du “roman”: Simon
Fornari, Jean-Baptiste Giraldi Cinzio, Jean-Baptiste Pigna, ed. by Giorgetto Giorgi (Paris:
Champion, 2005); Esmein-Sarrazin, L’Essor du roman, 82ff.
99. Madame de Scudéry, Ibrahim, ou l’Illustre Bassa (Paris: Pour la Compagnie des Li-
braires du Palais, 1665), “Préface,” no page numbers.
100. “I call those [Romances] Regular, which are composed after the Rules of an Heroic
Poem.” Huet, The History of Romances, 83.
101. See Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, chap. 2, pp. 33ff.
spread widely across Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. This is partly because the hermeneutic founded on hidden moral senses
made it possible to respond to Platonic and Augustinian arguments against
mimesis using the same philosophical assumptions, but arriving at different
conclusions. If the purpose of good art is to represent reality as it should be
and not as it is, then works that create a “poetic” world, a world that is
therefore better than the imperfect one described by history, deserve to be
defended. Stated with clarity in a passage in Francis Bacon’s Of the Profi-
cience and Advancement of Learning (1605, 1623),102 this argument circu-
lated in countless versions between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
We find it in texts that vary in period, genre, and style: in Barclay’s Argenis
(1621)103 and Théophraste Renaudot’s Conférences du Bureau d’adresse
(1634–1641);104 in the Abbé de Pure’s dialogue La Prétieuse (1656)105 and
Huet’s treatise;106 in Charles Sorel107 and Père Rapin;108 and in the previ-
102. “The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the
mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in
proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a
more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be
found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not
that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and
more heroical: because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so
agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribu-
tions, and more according to revealed providence: because true history representeth actions
and events more ordinary, and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more
rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations: so as it appeareth that poesy ser-
veth and conferreth to magnamimity, morality, and to delectation.” Francis Bacon, Of the
Proficience and Advancement of Learning: Divine and Human (London: John W. Parker and
Son, West Strand, 1852), 80–81.
103. John Barclay, Argenis (1621), ed. and trans. Mark Riley and Dorothy Pritchard
Huber (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum / Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renais-
sance Studies, 2004), bk. 2, chap. 14, p. 336.
104. Thomas Renaudot, Recueil général des questions traitées ès conférences du bureau
d’adresse, sur toutes sortes de matières; par les plus beaux esprits de ce temps (Lyon: Va-
lançol, 1666), conférence 107, 2, pp. 107ff.
105. Michel de Pure, La Prétieuse, ou le Mystère des ruelles (1656), vol. 1, ed. Émile
Magne (Paris: Droz, 1938), 138.
106. Huet, The History of Romances, 144ff.
107. Charles Sorel, De la connoissance des bons livres, ou Examen de plusieurs auteurs
(1671), ed. Lucia Moretti Cenerini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 82ff.
108. René Rapin, Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes an-
ciens et modernes (Paris: François Muguet, 1674), 123.
ously cited passages from Lenglet Du Fresnoy and Samuel Johnson. In the
last decades of the eighteenth century, Clara Reeve repeated the argument
with a few variations.109
The Legitimization of the Novel
The defensive strategies for the texts that ended up as novels were com-
pletely different. While all the books that entered into the category of
novel came under, or might have come under, the fire of the accusations
we talked about in the preceding sections, there was a certain type of criti-
cism that was addressed exclusively to “historical” narratives. The romance
accentuated the poetical and exemplary nature of fiction, whereas novelle,
novelas, nouvelles, and autobiographical or biographical writings described
particularities: proper names, singular deeds, and potentially eccentric or
immoral actions. To justify this exposure to contingency and imperfection,
writers and critics attempted comparisons with the well-known genres of
comedy and tragedy;110 they especially drew on the arguments used by clas-
sical literature and Christian literature to defend the moral usefulness of
history. However, there was an obvious asymmetry between ancient history
and the works that converged into the novel: the former spoke of public
figures, the latter of private individuals. This asymmetry did not exist in
109. Lenglet Du Fresnoy argues that the novel should occupy itself with moral exemplari-
ness, honoring virtue, instilling respect for the integrity of princes, and rewarding wisdom,
while history may also represent the world in its imperfection (Lenglet du Fresnoy, De l’usage
des romans, vol. 1, chap. 3, pp. 204ff., especially 210–211, and then chap. 4). Resorting to the
same arguments, Samuel Johnson recommends that where historical veracity has no place, the
writers of narratives should show the most perfect idea of morality. At the end of The Progress
of Romance, the character Euphrasia cites a sentence from A Comparative View of the State
and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World by Gregory: “The old Romances pro-
duced more favorable moral effects than modern Novels because the former represented
models of courage, truth, generosity, humanity, virtue, while the latter have begun to represent
mankind as he is.” Reeve, The Progress of Romance, vol. 2, “Evening 12,” 86–87.
110. In the eighteenth century, as we have said, it was quite common to compare the tra-
dition of the novel with comedy: both genres talked about private individuals; both described
manners and, in theory, helped to improve them. In the same way, the novella or the nouvelle
could be compared to tragedy, perhaps based on the fact that the latter, according to Aris-
totle, could employ historical characters. This comparison is implicit in the choice to call
some of the novellas that circulated autonomously “tragic stories,” or in the way the plots of
The Portuguese Letters and The Princesse de Clèves were constructed, for example.
the Christian historiographical tradition, which instead attached an exem-

plary ethical value to what happened to all people. That is why the texts
that converged in the territory of the novel sought to legitimize themselves
by systematically resorting to arguments typical of spiritual autobiography,
spiritual biography, and especially the exemplum.
In classical rhetoric, the exemplum is one of three avenues to oratorical

persuasion, the other two being the signum and the argumentum, and it is
presented as a statement of true facts even when the events being told are
legendary.111 The genre underwent crucial changes with the rise of Chris-
tian culture and then the crisis of the classical tradition in the high Middle
Ages. While the authorities that the ancient exemplum drew on were the mos
maiorum, or the great figures of the mythical or historical past, the medieval
Christian exemplum referred primarily to sacred history and to stories
about common people. Read as narratio authentica and set against the
narratio ficta of the fabulae, it ended up including themes about daily life,
which were otherwise considered unworthy of being written about.112
To legitimize picaresque novels, novelle, novelas, nouvelles, mémoires,
and novels, writers appealed to the classical topos of the historia magistra
vitae and developed it into the Christian form of the exemplum. Rooted in
this line of reasoning is the idea that morality is conveyed better with an-
ecdotes than with rules, especially when the interlocutors are young or
simple people.113 Seneca expressed this in a widely cited maxim: “Longum
iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla (Teaching by precept is
a long road, but brief and effective is the way by example).”114 The orig-
inal source of this kind of thinking, as we know, was the Republic: the
111. See Manfred Fuhrmann, “Das Exemplum in der antiken Rhetorik,” in Geschichte—
Ereignis und Erzählung, ed. Von Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Munich: Fink,
1973), 449–452; Claude Bremond, Jacques le Goff, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, L’ “Exem-
plum” (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982); Carlo Delcorno, Exemplum e letteratura. Tra Medioevo e
Rinascimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989).
112. Bremond, Le Goff, and Schmitt, L’ “Exemplum,” chap. 3 and p. 79; Michel Zink,
“Le temps du récit et la mise en scène du narrateur dans le fabliau et dans l’exemplum,” in La
Nouvelle, Actes du colloque international de Montréal, McGill University, October 14–16,
1982, ed. Michelangelo Picone, Giuseppe Di Stefano, and Pamela D. Stewart (Montreal: Plato
Academic Press, 1983), 29; Delcorno, Exemplum e letteratura, 8.
113. See Plato, Republic 2.377a and following.
114. Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, vol. 1, letter 6, 5.
poets who write hymns to the gods and eulogies to good men are per-
forming a useful function, because mimesis is able to speak even to those
who lack the intellectual resources to arrive at truth through abstract
thought. In the 1600s and 1700s, ideas like these appeared frequently in
prefaces to “historical” kinds of narrative works, in Spain as in Italy, in
France as in Great Britain.115 The more unbelievable the plot and the he-
roes were in Aristotelian terms, the more the work had the right to claim
its historicity, and therefore its didactic usefulness: that which is strange,
that which goes against “poetic” probability, is more likely to be true and
useful.116 The moral of the work, writes Defoe in the preface to Moll Flan-
ders, justifies the “true” telling of some immoral acts.117 The anonymous
author of The Finish’d Rake; or Gallantry in Perfection: Being the Gen-
uine and Entertaining Adventures of a Young Gentleman of Fortune (1733)
writes that his adventures, remarkable but true, may serve as “a warning
to deter other People from following my Example.”118
A similar reasoning justifies the importance of private life: when it
comes to imparting moral paradigms, the affairs of unknown people are
just as effective as stories about famous heroes. In Segrais’s Nouvelles fran-
çaises, the character of Alpanice argues that since one writes to instruct or
to entertain, it is not necessary to tell stories about kings or emperors, as we
find in romances. In the Discours sur le roman that opens Theresa, histoire
italienne (1745), Baculard d’Arnaud writes that the works of Prévost,
Marivaux, and Crébillon fascinate the reader because they talk about fa-
miliar topics that readers can identify with, and from which they can
learn more than from reading history books.119 In the preface to Memoirs
of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope (1745), William Ayre writes
that the lives of private individuals provide examples of greatness and
115. See Hautcoeur Pérez-Espejo, Parentés franco-espagnoles au XVIIe siècle, 42; Al-
bert N. Mancini, Romanzi e romanzieri del Seicento (Naples: Società editrice napoletana,
1981); May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle, 106ff.; Hunter, Before Novels, 280ff.;
McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, 47ff. and passim.
116. See McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 47ff., and Hunter, Before Novels,
chap. 8.
117. Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. Edward Kelly (New York: Norton, 1973), 3.
118. Anonymous, The Finish’d Rake; or Gallantry in Perfection: Being the Genuine and
Entertaining Adventures of a Young Gentleman of Fortune (1733), in Williams, Novel and
Romance, 86.
119. Cited in May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle, 148–149.
power, just like the lives of princes, but they have the advantage of lending
themselves better to imitation.120 Once again, the source of this idea is the
medieval rhetoric of the exemplum, which abolished the distinction be-
tween public events and private anecdotes, even privileging the latter
because they stand closer to the world of those for whom the text is
intended.121
The novel took the form it has today between 1550 and 1800, when a
heterogeneous mass of narrative writings began to be grouped under the
same name. The genre was perceived as a unified whole because the works
that belonged to it took a narrative form and because they were partially
or totally removed from the dominant paradigms. From the outset, the ter-
ritory was divided into two parts: narratives of a poetic type were opposed
to narratives of a historical type; what would come to be called romance
was juxtaposed to what would come to be called novel. These two sub-
genres sought to justify themselves in the face of the official literature. Up
to the second half of the eighteenth century, novelists still took into ac-
count, often to a great extent, devices deriving from Christian aesthetic
Platonism and classicism. It is impossible to read the narrative of this pe-
riod without perceiving its underlying dual schema. But to the elements of
continuity there corresponded powerful elements of disruption: although
the genre did not openly proclaim its originality in this period, texts that
ended up in the novel-and-romance category introduced new and revolu-
tionary ways of telling stories. In this chapter we have seen how these texts
remained bound to the literary structures of the Ancien Régime. In
Chapter 4 we will focus on a paradigm leap that the genre brought with it.
120. Cited in Hunter, Before Novels, 350.

121. Bremond, Le Goff, and Schmitt, L’ “Exemplum,” 44.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Book of Particular Life
The Romance and Private Aims
During the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, many
writers gradually lost sight of the threshold that the romance had intro-
duced into the history of narrative fiction. When the novel’s dominance
became established, the romance may not have seemed like a revolutionary
genre because, fundamentally, like serious and comic epic poems, it talked
about events and heroes that were removed from everyday life. One might
think that the suspicion with which the chivalric romance, the Greek novel,
or the Baroque novel were received between the middle of the sixteenth
century and the end of the seventeenth was a passing phase—a temporary
effect of aesthetic Platonism and the classicist, normative inflexibility that
was destined to disappear. The truth is that this apparent continuity was
precisely what concealed the signs of a new paradigm.
The genre most disruptive to the dominant literary system was the se-
rious romance. Contrary to Bakhtin’s theories, as long as the poetics of the
separation of styles formed the backbone of European literature, the comic
genres occupied a specific, minor position in the system of forms and did
not present a problem for the prevailing canons. Its serious variant should
not have profoundly shaken up the Christian and classicist structures of
sense either, one might suppose, since the stories told by the subgenres be-
longing to this literary family were drawn from a canonized repertoire set in
a distant, aristocratic past. But although they conflicted with the rules de-
rived from Aristotle’s Poetics, they did not threaten the separation of styles—
THE BOOK OF PARTICULAR LIFE 139
because the characters they told about were better than us. They thus con-
firmed the foundational principle of the Stiltrennung, namely, the belief that
the noble, the great, and the important have nothing to do with common
reality.1 From a long-term perspective, then, what was the disruptive factor
implicit in the Greek novel, the chivalric romance, and Baroque novels?
As we have seen, like a photographic negative, problems of legitimiza-
tion bring into visibility the points of rupture that works introduce into a
literary system. Even though the spectrum of criticisms launched against
the serious romance was very wide, the traditions that converged into this
genre were vulnerable to a few accusations that cut across the entire range:
they corrupted manners, they had no precedents in the noble forms of
classic literature, they violated the rules of ancient poetics, they invited
readers to lose themselves in centrifugal adventures, and they praised a
dangerous passion like love. When viewed from the flip side, each of these
criticisms reveals a disruptive element.
However, among these evident innovations there circulated one that
was more abstract, more subtle, and more important. To grasp it, we have
to leave behind the centuries that witnessed the burgeoning polemic against
the novel and observe the narrative fiction of the period from the position
of those who wrote after the crisis of classicism, after the crisis of Chris-
tian Platonic aesthetics, and during the emergence of a new paradigm—like
Madame de Staël or Friedrich Schlegel. Hegel belonged to this generation.
In some of his lectures on aesthetics, he reflects on the place that chivalric
romances occupied in the overall arc of European literature:
The subject [of chivalry and chivalric romances] is only full of himself by
being inherently infinite individuality; he does not need the importance
or further concrete development of an inherently objective substantial
content of interests, aims, and actions.2
The actions achieved here [in chivalric romances], and the events, do not
affect any national interests; on the contrary, they are the actions of in-
dividuals with the individual himself as such as their substance; this I
have described already in dealing with romantic chivalry. It is true,
consequently, that the individuals stand there on their own feet, free and
2. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 553.
140 THE BOOK OF PARTICULAR LIFE
fully independent, and thus, within a surrounding world not yet consoli-
dated into a prosaic organization, they form a new group of heroes who
nevertheless in their interests, whether fantastically religious or, in mun-
dane matters, purely subjective and imaginary, lack that fundamental
realism which is the basis on which the Greek heroes fight either alone or
in company, and conquer and perish.3
Hegel reworks themes that circulated widely in the literary culture

during Goethe’s time. The idea that the novel was concerned with the sto-
ries and passions of private individuals, overshadowing all the enthusiasm
for collective causes that motivated the actions of the heroes of the epos,
had already appeared in Friedrich von Blanckenburg.4 The privilege granted
to the chivalric romance was also tied to a master narrative that was
popular in the culture of German idealism, which connected the birth of
modern subjectivity to the effect of Christianity.
We can accept the truth content of this passage without entering into its
historical and philosophical premises. The ability with which Hegel perceived
a number of fundamental evolutionary lines stems primarily from a posi-
tional advantage: whoever was born around 1770 was able to evaluate the
history of literary genres in the light of what narrative fiction had become
during the eighteenth century. Thanks to the historical perspective from
which he spoke, Hegel was able to establish a crucial point: the serious ro-
mance occupied a strategic place in the development of European literature
because its heroes were motivated by love and by the spirit of adventure
rather than by public aims. It was the first time that Western stories gave
so much weight to characters who were effectively driven by private aims
and passions. Hegel understood this partly because he knew something that
the theorists from the 1500s and 1600s could not have known: namely, that
“the actions of individuals,” detached from any collective goal or hidden po-
litical meaning, would become the main subject matter of modern narrative
fiction.
The noble genres of the culture of antiquity, the epos and the tragedy,
tell stories whose plots are focused on supraindividual conflicts; their he-
3. Ibid., vol. 2, 1104–1105.

4. See Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg, Versuch über den Roman (1774), ed. Von E.
Lämmert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Berlagsbuchhandlung, 1965), 7ff.
roes are not just any private beings; their world is governed by collective
goals and made universal by mythology or public history. Although some
of the works ultimately focus on the internal conflicts of the heroes, as in
Euripides or Virgil, the moral reality in which the characters move remains
governed by a solid community ethos. In the classicist literary system, the
mimesis of private persons who pursue private aims is relegated to the in-
herently lower genres of comedy and satire. The philosophy of history that
fueled Hegel’s work demanded that narrative individualism be attributed
to the chivalric romance—in other words, to a form that came into being
at the height of the Christian era. But if we leave aside this overarching vi-
sion, we realize that similar ideas also describe perfectly the Greek novel,
whose characters are driven by private aims no different from those ani-
mating the characters of courtly literature. Unlike comedy and satire, the
Greek novel and the medieval romance did not come into being marked to
be minor genres: Greek novels tell stories about noble characters and have
a serious register; medieval romances describe heroes who are in every way
similar to those of the chanson de geste. The worlds of the epos and the
serious romance are so close to each other that they sometimes overlap. In
both cases, the characters are not just any individuals: the purpose of the
recognition that furnishes the Hellenistic narrative plot with its telos is to
show that the hero or heroine whose story the reader has been following is
actually of noble birth. However, there was a slippage between the class of
texts that belonged to the family of the epos and the class of texts that be-
longed to the family of the novel. This was the transition that Hegel em-
phasized: epic heroes pursue collective, significant aims, while the heroes
of romance pursue private, trivial aims. Out of these theories there arose a
topos of nineteenth-century literary criticism: the idea that the difference
between epic and romance follows the same line that divides communal
closure and individualistic opening, public and private, unity and variety.
The comparison between the two genres that we find in Lukács’s The Theory
of the Novel or in Bakhtin’s “Epic and Novel” are new interpretations of
these issues, and a similar opposition, in multiple forms, still permeates
contemporary critical discourse.
Chivalric romances, and before them, Greek novels, contained an indi-
vidualistic, anarchic, dispersive, centrifugal element, rooted in the regio dis-
similitudinis. They signaled a significant step in the representation of the
private in literature not because they told stories about people like us, but
because they told stories about public or semipublic people in the act of
having private, irregular experiences of love and adventure. The fear aroused
in classicism and Christian aesthetic Platonism by the variety of romances,
by their wandering plots, by the anarchy of their passions, reflected this
slippage. The potentially subversive innovation came into being through a
blatant compromise, though, because the heroes of romance are “better
than us.” The same assumption on which the epic of antiquity and the
chanson de geste were founded continued to hold for the Greek novel and
the chivalric romance: the noble and the interesting had no relation with
common reality.
This transformation is also perceptible in the way of understanding
the opposition between the “poetic” narrative of the romance and the
“historical” narrative of the novel. Until the second half of the seventeenth
century, Hellenistic novels, courtly and pastoral romances, and Baroque
novels could be read according to an ideographic principle: their charac-
ters and unrealistic plots were allegories of general and collective values.
Nevertheless, if we take instead the general definition of romance that
Clara Reeve proposed in 1785, then the signs of a turning point become
perceptible: “The Romance is an heroic fable; . . . [it] describes what
never happened nor is likely to happen.”5 For classicist aesthetics, a “po-
etic” composition talks about universals, “what could and would happen
either probably or inevitably”; for Clara Reeve, the romance tells stories
about “what never happened nor is likely to happen.” At the end of the
seventeenth century a narrative fiction could be interpreted as an exem-
plum of general ideas and values, shared and expressed according to a
collective allegorical code; by the end of the eighteenth century, narra-
tive that kept a distance from ordinary life appeared to be primarily a
work of the subjective imagination. There are traces of the old interpre-
tation in Reeve’s dialogue,6 but the tendency to attribute the romance to
the personal imagination, to a taste for fabulous adventures, predomi-
nates. The new interpretation would prevail in the 1800s and 1900s.
Like the novel, the understanding of the romance also veered toward the
private.
5. Reeve, The Progress of Romance, vol. 1, “Evening 7,” 111.

6. Ibid., “Evening 7” and passim.
Suspense, Entrelacement, and the Romanesque
The romance was also a new genre because in a subtle fashion it renewed
the way stories were told. It was apparently far removed from common life,
but furnished Western fictions with Gestalten that were capable of mod-
eling and making interesting the regio dissimilitudinis and private passions.
The archetypes of what is called Romanesque in the critical lexicon—the set
of peripeteia, reversals, recognitions, projections of expectations, and twists
of fate that captured the attention of readers, drawing them into the charac-
ters’ stories—came into existence thanks to the serious romance.
The most conspicuous and widespread Gestalt was that of suspense.
Amyot ennobled Heliodorus by comparing his work to epic poems: as it
happens, the Aethiopica begins in medias res, exactly as the normative po-
etic rules of traditional epos demand. But Heliodorus’s ordo artificialis is
peculiar: the way he went about it, writes Amyot, causes our understanding
to remain suspended (l’entendement demeure suspendu), producing a
pleasurable effect on the reader.7 At the beginning of the Aethiopica, some
men armed as brigands are looking out onto the beach at the mouth of
the Nile, discovering it to be strewn with dead and mutilated bodies. They
see a vessel with no crew and no cargo on the shore; traces of the massacre
are mixed with the remains of a feast that took place before the slaughter.
In the midst of the bodies, a beautiful young woman sits on a rock, un-
scathed; at her feet lies a young man, equally beautiful and horribly wounded.
The description does not explain the meaning of what the characters
see: only in the fifth chapter will the reader be able to fully reconstruct the
prior events leading up to this scene. While the beginnings in medias res of
the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid do not create protracted puzzles to
be solved, the ordo artificialis of the Aethiopica keeps our attention sus-
pended for many pages. Widely imitated beginning in the second half of
the sixteenth century, this technique became a typical feature of the heroic
Baroque novel.8
To define the effect created by the first pages of the Aethiopica, Amyot
appealed to a formula put into circulation twenty years earlier by Marco
Gerolamo Vida: in book 2 of the Ars poetica (1527) we read that the incipit
7. Amyot, “Le Proësme du translateur,” no page numbers.

8. See Cave, “Suspense and the Pre-history of the Novel,” 507–516.
in medias res has the power to suspendere animos.9 We don’t know if Vida
was familiar with the Aethiopica, printed for the first time in Greek in Basel
in 1536, but he certainly knew the technique of sustentatio described by
Quintilian in the Institutio Oratoria.10 And he surely knew the medieval
technique of entrelacement, which alternately entwines and interrupts the
characters’ stories, usually at the point when the reader’s curiosity is at its
peak. Pigna observed that the story lines of chivalric romances wander just
like their characters, keeping the reader’s attention suspended.11 While the
concept of suspense is used today in a narrow sense to describe the effect
of a few literary and film subgenres, in the mid-sixteenth century suspen-
dere animos meant to inspire the kind of curiosity that would become
normal for all novel readers from the eighteenth century on. What innova-
tions are implicit in this writing technique?
First of all, the effect of suspense is difficult to create unless the person
to whom the story is addressed has a synoptic view of the plot attainable
only through the practice of reading. The informational delay of the Aethi-
opica or the virtuoso entrelacement of Orlando Furioso assumes a reader
more than a listener. As Terence Cave remarks, “With the Aethiopica in
Amyot’s version, the age of the individual reader, the individual purchaser
of discrete fictions, seems to have arrived.”12 Through the medium of the
book and the spread of silent reading, the historic phase in which ro-
mances would be addressed to solitary individuals was nigh.13
In addition to assuming a new relationship between an isolated reader
and heroes who pursue subjective aims, suspense introduces another dis-
ruptive factor. I will describe it in reference to the criticisms that Gotthard
9. Marco Girolamo Vida, De arte poetica libri III (Rome: L. Vincentium, 1527), bk. 2,
lines 59–76.
10. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 9.2.22. See Cave, “Pour une pré-histoire du suspens,”
129–141.
11. Pigna, I romanzi, 49.
12. See Cave, “Suspense and the Pre-history of the Novel,” 511.
13. See Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows”
(1936); English translation “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,” in
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 83–110. On the relationship between the
novel and the spread of silent reading, see Rosamaria Loretelli, L’invenzione del romanzo.
Dall’oralità alla lettura silenziosa (Rome: Laterza, 2010), which locates the decisive turning
point in the eighteenth century.
Heidegger launched in Mythoscopia romantica, directed against a certain

way of reading fiction:
Books of this type are constructed in such a way that they can’t be read
skipping from one spot to another; the entire drama has to be followed
in its order. It is based on the uncontrolled human appetite for curiosity.
The moment one starts (I’m talking about the simple-minded), one be-
comes greedy, one remains trapped in the net, one forgets about everything
else only to reach the end of the book.14
In Gotthard Heidegger’s view, narrative works should not arouse a

form of illusion that leads to forgetting about everything; they should be
read, instead, with the vigilance characteristic of readers who strive to
grasp the hidden moral sense and to exercise their moral judgment on every
page. This is a completely different habit of reading from what had been
established over the previous two and a half centuries. Gotthard Heidegger
asks what a certain action or a certain passion means when translated into
its conceptual form, he submits plots and characters to a judgment, and he
interprets works as exempla. In this extremist presentation, we find the trace
of a common behavior that vanished. Until the second half of the eighteenth
century, allegory was not an interpretive strategy for the learned: it was a
habitus, a way of approaching texts that had become second nature. Sus-
pense was the harbinger of new habits. Allegorical readers interpreted finite
beings and their plots as signs of something else; they preferred a slow
reading to allow the time to draw conclusions; they associated the meaning
of the story with concepts and judgments, and they asked themselves:
“What does this action mean?” “What general idea are the characters and
story alluding to?” Readers who focus on suspense are immersed in the
fictitious world created by the text. They identify with the heroes; they
are intensely involved in their fates, and they ask themselves: “What are
the past and future of this singular individual?” “What will become of him
or her?” “How will it end?”15 The polemic against the effects of the Greek
novel and the chivalric romance was the sign that an aesthetic alternative to
allegorism was beginning to emerge. Of course, identifying with the heroes
of a story and suspense existed before this turning point, but these habits

15. Cave, “Pour une pré-histoire du suspens,” 139.
were not the only ways of reading nor were they the most legitimate. More-
over, the transition was not a sudden one, as becomes clear when we con-
sider the strategies writers of romances and novels used while seeking to
justify their works. Nevertheless, there was a clear direction. The readership
of serious romances experimented with a form of reading, that, using
Goethe’s terms, would be called symbolic and not allegorical:
There is a great difference whether a poet is looking for the particular
that goes with the general, or sees the general in the particular. The first
gives rise to allegory where the particular only counts as an example, an
illustration of the particular; but the latter in fact constitutes the nature
of poetry, expressing something particular without any thought of the
general, and without indicating it. Now whoever has this living grasp of
the particular is at the same time in possession of the general, without
realizing it, or else only realizing it later on.16
It is significant that this reflection, published for the first time in the pe-
riodical Kunst und Altertum in 1825, appeared at a time when modern
literature was emancipating itself from moralism and the logic of the ex-
emplum. Narrative fiction participated in this transformation, abandoning
the web of codified hidden moral senses that until the second half of the
eighteenth century had enveloped the stories of individuals, and directing
readers’ interest toward particular stories. At this stage in its history, the
modern novel worked according to a symbolic logic, not an allegorical one.
Allegorism would resurface only later, and in a very different form from
the premodern one.
Heliodorus’s suspense and entrelacement had another function as
well, mirroring the one we have just discussed: they indicated a shift in
narrative focus toward immanence, and at the same time provided the Ge-
stalten, the schemata that enabled the stories of individuals inhabiting the
immanence to become narratable. As long as the characters represent an
idea, readers’ interest (at least their intellectual interest) is guaranteed a
priori, but when the characters signify only themselves, gaining the readers’
interest becomes problematic. The difficulties we talked about in Chapter 3,
which reached their mature expression in the preface to Robinson Crusoe or
in the second preface to The New Heloise, now come to the fore: Why
16. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen; English translation Maxims
and Reflections, trans. Elisabeth Stopp (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 34.
should we be concerned about the life of a simple, private person or about

everyday things we can all see?
One of the ways to make the world of particular life more attractive is
to resort to devices that captivate the reader. For a long period of time, the
Western novel reused the techniques that the Greek novel and the courtly
romance had made available. The technique of delaying information would
be integrated into the architecture of the nineteenth-century realistic novel,
constructed on a theatrical model. Take, for example, a scene that every
Italian reader is familiar with:
Two men were there, facing each other at the junction of the two paths.
One sat astride the low wall, with one foot dangling over its outer surface,
and the other resting on the solid ground of the track. His companion was
standing slouched against the other wall, with his arms crossed over
his chest. Their clothes, attitudes and what the curé could see of their
faces at that distance left no doubt about what they were. Each of them
wore a green hairnet, which hung down on his left shoulder, ending in a
large tassel, while a huge quiff emerged from it in front to hang over his
forehead. Each had long, pointed moustaches, a polished leather belt
bearing two pistols, a small powder-horn hanging down on his chest like
a pendant, a dagger the hilt of which stuck out of its special pocket in his
wide and well-padded breeches, and a heavy sword with a great pol-
ished glittering guard composed of a network of narrow strips of bronze
arranged in a sort of monogram. The first glance showed that they were
members of the species known as bravoes.17
The appearance of the bravoes in The Betrothed is seen before it is under-

stood. At the beginning of the twenty-first century we are rightly inclined to
consider this mode of description typical of nineteenth-century realism and
its pictorial-theatrical methods; nevertheless, the embryo of this technique
remains the Aethiopica. Another legacy of Heliodorus is to be found in plots
that play on the effect of delayed information. For example, only one-quarter
of the way into the book does a reader of Balzac’s Père Goriot (1835) under-
stand what happened before the story starts—only then do we find out that,
having been president of a section during the French Revolution, Goriot has
17. Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi (1827, 1840–1842); English translation The
Betrothed, trans. Bruce Penman (London: Penguin Classics, 1972), 28.
become an embarrassment to his daughters after the Restoration. Out of his

love for them, he has decided to sacrifice himself.
The technique of entrelacement proved to be equally vital. In its sim-
plest form, this device appears everywhere in the narrative tradition and
modern cinema: it is used to create tension, interrupting the story at the
moment of Spannung so as to leave readers anxious about the heroes’ fates.
However, entrelacement also lent itself to a less conspicuous but more
structural use. It was an indispensable device for the nineteenth-century
realistic novel and the modernist novel. It occupied a crucial place in the
structure of individual texts, in the works of Scott as in Manzoni, in those
of Tolstoy as in Hermann Broch. From Balzac on, it was used more exten-
sively in the architecture of the great novelistic cycles. The first writer to
apply this model of plot to the historical novel, Sir Walter Scott, explicitly
acknowledged his debt to Ariosto:
Like the digressive poet Ariosto, I find myself under the necessity of con-
necting the branches of my story.18
The occasion of this interruption we can only explain by resuming the

adventures of another set of our characters; for, like old Ariosto, we do
not pique ourselves upon continuing uniformly to keep company with
any one personage of our drama.19
There were intermediaries between Ariosto and Scott, the most impor-
tant of which was Tom Jones, but the basic connection remains. The modern
polyhistoric novel has a kinship with medieval entrelacement, based on a
genealogy of some significance to which we will return.
The History of Private Lives
The center of gravity of European narrative was thus shifted by serious

romance, which introduced heroes who fought for individual rather than
collective aims, and concerned itself with the immanent destiny of people
rather than with the universal meanings they were supposed to represent.
18. Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), vol. 2, ed. David Hewitt and
Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), chap. 3 [16], p. 143.
19. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820), vol. 2, ed. Graham Tulloch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1998), chap. 4 [17], p. 152. On the relationship between Scott and Ariosto,
see Roberto Bigazzi, Le risorse del romanzo (Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1996), 29ff.
However, this shift never fully manifested, because the characters of the
romance were never like us. The transition became conspicuous only with
the novel and its ordinary heroes.
Although mimesis is the discursive formation that expresses particular
life in all its breadth and depth, ancient literature always kept its distance
from pure particularity. Its detachment concerned both sides of this onto-
logical dimension. In French they are combined into the double meaning
of the word particulier—the equivalent of the English adjective particular
and the term that signifies the condition of the private individual. The two
planes are linked by a necessary dialectic: the more human life disappears
from the sphere of public visibility, the more its degree of particularity
increases.
The noble forms of Greek and Latin literature, epos and tragedy, tell
stories about public characters (heroes, kings, mythological figures) and
deeds that possess an evident general significance. For the rule of the sepa-
ration of styles, everyday private life, the existence of people like us, is a
topic reserved for the genres with a comic or intermediate register: the Old
Comedy, the New Comedy, the iambic, the epigram, and satire. It is true
that certain forms of the New Comedy and subjective poetry might em-
ploy serious registers. In this context, Pavel is right when he reproaches
Auerbach for having associated under the same name of Stiltrennung the
separation of styles in the proper sense and a corollary that should be treated
separately. If we adopt the serious mimesis of private life as the sole crite-
rion, then it could be said that Hellenistic novels and bucolic-pastoral
literature preceded the realism of Balzac and Stendhal by nearly two thou-
sand years. It could also be said that long before novels, plays, and modern
poems, the New Comedy and Horatian-style lyric poetry recounted the
private affairs of private individuals—in the intermediate or noble styles,
but in any case in a serious tone.20 What distinguishes the forms of
noncomic mimesis of everyday life that we encounter in Greek and Latin
literature from the forms that the realism of the past two centuries has made
familiar to us is not so much the dignity of the register as the tendency to
select the facts of reality through a filter that refines contingencies, idealizes
details, and introduces the anarchy of the real into the laws of a literary
genre. Up until a certain time, it seemed as if the conquest of a noncomic
20. See Pavel, L’Art de l’eloignement, 273–274.

tone in the representation of particuliers had caused a distance to be taken

from their actual particularity. Ancient lyric, epigrammatic, or elegiac po-
etry was able to give voice to an I that spoke seriously about itself, but
only on condition that the first person channeled the difference of its biog-
raphy into the collective conventions of the chosen genre.21 In the same
way, the literary form that ancient poetics delegated to represent the va-
riety of characters and manners in tones that might spill over the confines
of the comic, namely, the New Comedy, brought particular life back to
general, ahistorical types.22
While the classicism of the Ancien Régime had relegated serious story-
telling about particular individuals to historiography, in the second half of
the 1600s the idea spread that the tradition of the novel was a “history of
private life”: Charles Sorel used a similar formula with regard to novelle,
novelas, and nouvelles; Charnes applied it to The Princesse de Clèves.23
Seventy years later, this idea had become a topos and Fielding had trans-
formed it into a principle of poetics.24 Between the mid-sixteenth century
and the mid-eighteenth, the aggregate of texts that would be called novels
helped to introduce a multitude of private persons and accidental qualities
into European culture. This was a conspicuous and revolutionary innova-
tion, because it covered a relatively sparsely populated territory and because
the discursive gap into which the novel fit was not confined solely to
literature.
A Discursive Gap
For several centuries now our culture has possessed several types of con-
ceptual knowledge that accurately map the region of particularity: histori-
ography has opened itself to describing the private sphere; the “human
sciences” analyze, classify, and record ways of being individuals; reflection
21. I have spoken about this more extensively in Guido Mazzoni, Sulla poesia moderna
(Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005), 105ff.
23. Charles Sorel, La Bibliothèque françoise: seconde édition revue et augmentée (1667)
(Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 178ff.; Charnes, Conversations sur la critique de la Princesse de
Clèves.
24. Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, bk. 2, chap. 1 and bk. 8, chap. 1.
on the forms of everyday life has become a central theme of contemporary

philosophy. But although these disciplines have acquired tremendous im-
portance over the past two hundred years, the region of particularity long
occupied a smaller space in the official discourses of European culture.
The gray area encompassed both history and philosophy. Classical histori-
ography was divided by a clash between the model of Herodotus, focused
on geography and ethnography, and the model of Thucydides, focused on
reporting the great political events of his time.25 That of Thucydides pre-
vailed, and with it the conviction that the res gestae of public men were
more important than the cultural history of peoples. One of the phenomena
that cut across disciplines and changed modern philosophy is what Habermas
called the positioning (Situierung) of reason in circumstances, the idea that
a thought is not unconditional, but rather stems from forces external to it
that are rooted in the social or instinctual life.26 The “school of suspicion”
arose out of this process: out of the conviction that consciousness is not
what determines material conditions (or unconscious forces); rather, mate-
rial conditions (or unconscious forces) determine consciousness, according
to a schema of thought that attacks the foundations of Western meta-
physics, starting from its most important assumption—that abstract thought
can conquer truths that are independent from their circumstances. It is no
coincidence that contemporary philosophical discourse has become more
and more welcoming to other disciplines, such as the human sciences,
which are founded on the opposite assumption—on the systematic posi-
tioning of thought. Another effect of these discursive formations is the
analytical reflection on the changeability and multiplicity of life that they
introduce into the sphere of conceptual knowledge: to situate people
means to effectively replace the unitary, abstract subject of Western meta-
physics with a plurality of different subjects (social classes, psychological
types, cultural groups, genders), distinguished and described by the human
sciences.
25. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Il posto di Erodoto nella storia della storiografia” (1958), in La
storiografia greca (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 138–155; also by Momigliano, The Classical Foun-
dations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), chap. 2.
26. Jürgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken. Philosophische Aufsätze (1988); En-
glish translation Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), 6ff. and chap. 3.
Until the early modern age, reflection on the plurality of forms of life
was a peripheral topic for European philosophy, whose essential core
was occupied with “things that are forever in the same state, without
anything mixed in it.”27 Philosophers ignored the perpetual dislocation
that history and geography have introduced into thought during the last
few centuries. Even though reflection on characters and manners that
Aristotle introduced with his Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics,
continued by Theophrastus with his Characters, was a decisive factor for
the prehistory of contemporary human sciences,28 this approach never
had the weight that sociology, cultural anthropology, and ethnography
acquired in the modern era. Only during the sixteenth century did Euro-
pean culture begin with renewed attention to concern itself with particular
life. This was a profound, geological transformation that advanced slowly
for more than two hundred years. It accompanied the birth of the novel; it
changed the orography of the discursive space; it made its way through
every discipline, reaching maturity with the development of the nineteenth-
century “human sciences.” However, its beginnings date back to the 1500s,
when geographical discoveries and the first colonial empires changed the
horizon of the known world, and when historiography recovered the
model of Herodotus with its geographic and multicultural elements.29
Humanistic philology had already introduced an early form of cultural
anthropology, of ethnography, when it studied the Greek and Roman
culture as a vanished world to be brought back to life using antiquarian
methods.30 Montaigne reflected at length on the psychology, manners, and
protean changeability of particular life as well as on the rooting of thought
in circumstances. His legacy intersected with the rediscovery of Theo-
phrastus that took place between the end of the sixteenth century and
the beginning of the seventeenth, with Casaubon’s edition of Characters
and the development of the “character” as a literary genre, inaugurating
27. Plato, Philebus 59b–c.

28. See Carnevali, “L’Observatoire des moeurs: les coutumes et les caractères, entre litté-
rature et morale,” 159–178; and by the same author, “Mimesis littéraire et connaissance
morale: la tradition de l’ ‘éthopée,’ ” 291–322.
29. Momigliano, “Il posto di Erodoto nella storia della storiografia.”
30. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Les trois humanismes” (1956); English translation “Answers to
Some Investigations (The Three Humanisms),” in Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans. Mo-
nique Layton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 271–287.
a tradition of thought that continued until the French moralists.31 The

birth of the novel as the history of the private individual and the early de-
velopmental stages of the European human sciences were contemporary
phenomena.
But despite the emergence of conceptual forms of knowledge that reflect
on the plurality of forms of life, for a long time the novel maintained an
advantage in the mimesis of the particular. Up until 1890, writes Arnold
Gehlen, the gap between the psychological fertility of narrative and the in-
flexibility of scientific psychology still appeared to be insurmountable.32
Even if we tone down his opinion and adjust his dates, a similar observa-
tion can be extended to the rest of the human sciences. In 1800, to know
“how people were bored in London, when to be bored was the fashion,”
Friedrich Schlegel could not count on a work of history that could stand
up to comparison with the novels of Fanny Burney, or on the discipline that
a few decades later Auguste Comte would call “sociology.” Up until an in-
determinate moment in the nineteenth century, with a chronology that
varies from discipline to discipline, the gap between the mimetic accuracy
of the novel and the descriptive poverty of the other forms of knowledge
remained substantial. The authors of the first modern historical novels who
at the beginning of the nineteenth century proclaimed the originality of
their writing were not simply promoting themselves: when Scott, in the
first pages of Ivanhoe (1820), wrote that historians have only cursorily
dwelt on private life, or when Manzoni, in his Discorso sur alcuni punti
della storia longobardica in Italia (Discussion on some points concerning
the history of the Lombards in Italy) (1822), wrote that millions of ordi-
nary people have spent their lives on the earth without a historian recording
31. Boyce, The Theophrastan Character in England to 1642, chap. 2; Smeed, The
Theophrastan “Character”; Louis Van Delft, Le Moraliste classique: essai de définition et
de typologie (Geneva: Droz, 1982); also by Van Delft: Littérature et anthropologie: na-
ture humaine et caractère à l’âge classique (Paris: PUF, 1993), Frammento e anatomia.
Rivoluzione scientifica e creazione letteraria (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), and Les Specta-
teurs de la vie: généalogie du regard moraliste (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval,
2005); Carnevali, “L’Observatoire des moeurs” and “Mimesis littéraire et connaissance
morale.”
32. Arnold Gehlen, Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter: Sozialpsychologische Probleme in
den industriellen Gesellschaft (1957); English translation Man in the Age of Technology,
trans. Patricia Lipscomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), chap. 7.
their existence,33 the two novelists were expressing opinions that many
others in their epoch might have shared. A novelist of our times would not
feel as confident in voicing these ideas. In the early decades of the nine-
teenth century, the region of human particularities could still seem unex-
plored, or badly explored; today it is saturated with discourses. Between
the 1500s and the 1800s, the tradition of the novel filled a relatively empty
space.
The first subgenre to occupy this territory was the medieval novella: in
The Decameron we find “the first great, organic narrative representation
of contemporary society.”34 While it is true that many Italian novelle re-
mained confined within the boundaries of the comic, and therefore did not
violate the traditional hierarchies, it is equally true that some texts went
beyond the limits of the Stiltrennung. In the history of Lisabetta da Mes-
sina or in the “tragic histories” circulating autonomously between the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, the genre of the novella
went beyond the separation of styles to recount the history of private lives
in a serious manner. What made this rupture possible?
The first aspect to be considered is the dialectical relationship that no-
velle, novelas, and even nouvelles and the conte philosophique had with
the genres of Christian allegorism. Up until the second half of the eigh-
teenth century, as we have seen, the particular stories that the tradition of
the novel told referred to a framework of ideas and ethical rules that tran-
scended individual lives. We find them in titles, in frame tales, in prefaces, in
the way of constructing characters and the plot, in the act of extracting the
universal sensus from the narratio of the individual case. The balance be-
tween meaning and story changed over time: Boccaccio was an innovator
partly because he extended the autonomy of the story to the detriment of
the meaning. He did so by writing novelle that, thanks to the wealth of de-
tails and the autonomy of the characters, were able to describe bare pecu-
liarities.35 However, the narrative structures of The Decameron still remain
33. Alessandro Manzoni, Discorso sur alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia
(1822), in Tutte le opere, vol. 3, Opere morali e filosofiche, ed. Alberto Chiari and Fausto
Ghisalberti (Milan: Mondadori, 1963), chap. 2, pp. 194–211.
34. Vittore Branca, “Una chiave di lettura per il Decameron,” in Giovanni Boccaccio,
Decameron, ed. Vittore Branca (Turin: Einaudi, 1987).
35. See Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, Boccaccio und der Beginn der Novelle (Munich: Fink,
1969).
clearly linked to the rhetoric of the exemplum, which persists in the frame
tales, in the thematic organization of the material, in the titles of the sto-
ries, as well as in the habit of connecting the particular events to general
categories or maxims.
In addition to still depending on Christian allegorical rhetoric, the no-
vella was also a short narrative form. In this case, the length of the story is
not a marginal aspect: for a long time, private life could be recounted only
if it was captured in a momentary state of exception. If discontinuity is in-
scribed in the logic of narrative insomuch as narrative is a language game,
all the more reason for this to be true for the novella: the casus that is its
raison d’être is explicitly or implicitly surrounded by a long period of time
devoid of significant events. According to Goethe, die Novelle tells the story
of an “unprecedented event.”36 It is a genre that, like classical historiog-
raphy or modern event-based historiography, imagines reality as a static
surface interrupted by some ripples, which are then the only things worth
talking about.37 The events recounted jut out from the expanse of life, to
use an expression by Ernesto De Martino;38 they focus on the res gestae
that escape from the cyclic order. But because the ordinary existence of
common people does not jut out except in a few states of exception, no-
vellas tend to be short. Hence, instead of telling about ordinary life, the
genre reports on the casus—the moment when ordinary life escapes from
repetition and acquires a story. As we shall see, the modern novel would
go beyond the limits of the novella to eventually narrate the entire desti-
nies of people like us. In any case, private life began to enter the discursive
space in the West thanks to this genre. This was a crucial achievement, and
not for literature alone.
36. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens,
ed. Heinz Schlaffer (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1986), January 29, 1829, p. 203.
37. Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée” (1958); English
translation “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in On History, trans. Sarah
Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 25–54.
38. “What is history? An event that ‘juts out’; that reveals itself, that rises above routine,
and that in various ways also forces presence to rise above routine, to engage in a single
mental and practical behavior that is individual, completely adapted, and integrated.” Ernesto
De Martino, “I fondamenti di una teoria del sacro,” in Storia e metastoria, ed. Marcello Mas-
senzio (Lecce: Argo, 1995), 128–129.
The Pathos of Proximity
This shift in interest toward what lies close to us was accompanied by a

new outlook on life and a new idea of beauty. Well before Friedrich Schlegel
juxtaposed the “historical” subjects of Boccaccio to the mythical-legendary
subjects of ancient poetry, the works that belonged to the tradition of
the novel became filled with a commonplace that had already appeared
in the rhetoric of the exemplum. One of the first to reintroduce it was
Montaigne: “Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our
own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by every-
thing that can happen to a man.”39 For the purposes of moral reflection,
all lives are equally worthy: the biography of an emperor is just as valuable
as that of any other person. Observations of this kind proliferated at the
end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. There was growing
acknowledgment that reading about people who are similar to us is more
pleasurable; or it was argued that morality is better transmitted when sto-
ries tell about heroes with whom readers can identify:
You certainly have been more amused listening to a story that unfolded
in places you ordinarily frequent than to another in which all the events
were located in other places. Nevertheless, many who do not know this
secret offer you only the most faraway stories, which can never touch the
heart so deeply, and they are mistaken thinking they are doing right by
this, often disguising what has happened in our country and dressing it
up in foreign costume.40
The counselor said that nothing could be more diverting than our
modern romances; that the French alone knew how to write good
ones; however, that the Spaniards had a peculiar talent to compose little
stories, which they called novelas, which are more useful and more
probable patterns for us to follow than those imaginary heroes of
antiquity.41
39. Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1580–1595); English translation The Complete Essays,
trans. Michael A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), bk. 3, chap. 13, p. 1218
40. Charles Sorel, Les Nouvelles françaises (1623) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1972),
358–359.
41. Paul Scarron, Le Roman comique (1651–57); English translation The Comic Ro-
mance of Monsieur Scarron, trans. Oliver Goldsmith, 2 vols. (London: Printed for W. Griffin,
in Catharine Street, Strand, 1775), 1:230–231.
How many adventures, resumed Alpanice, have we come to know about

that, had they been written, would be anything but displeasing? . . . [S]ince
things are written either to entertain or to instruct, what need is there for
all the examples that are offered to be of kings or emperors, as they are
in all the Romans? Will a private individual who reads them perhaps
model his deeds on those who have armies at their bidding?42
This commonplace abounds during the 1700s: stories about people like
us are more instructive or more interesting than stories about the extraor-
dinary heroes of antiquity:
The lives of private men, though they afford not examples that fill the
mind with ideas of greatness and power like those of princes . . . , yet are
they such as are more open to common imitation.43
History is a relation of the most natural and important events: history

therefore gratifies curiosity, but it does not often excite either terror or
pity; nor is it so much alarmed at the migration of barbarians who mark
their way with desolation, and fill the world with violence and rapine,
as at the fury of a husband, who deceived into jealousy by false appear-
ances, stabs a faithful and affectionate wife, kneeling at his feet, and
pleading to be heard.44
The misfortune of those whose circumstances most resemble our own

must naturally penetrate most deeply into our hearts, and if we pity
kings, we pity them as human beings rather than as kings. Though their
position often renders their misfortunes more important, it does not
make them more interesting. Whole nations may be involved in them, but
our sympathy requires an individual object, and a state is far too much
an abstract conception to touch our feelings.45
The most applauded French romans generally represent only the illus-
trious actions of illustrious people; every detail of their private lives is
forbidden; those who speak are heroes, beings who have neither our
42. Segrais, Les Nouvelles françaises ou les Divertissements de la princesse Aurélie, 21.
43. William Ayre, preface to Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope (1750),
cited in Hunter, Before Novels, 350.
44. John Hawkesworth, in The Adventurer, no. 4 (Saturday, November 18, 1752), 20.
45. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767); English translation
Hamburg Dramaturgy, with a new introduction by Victor Lange, (New York: Dover, 1962),
vol. 1, chap. 14, 38–39.
needs, our way of living, our vices, nor our virtues. . . . [In Richardson’s
Clarissa] we see a virtuous person, but who comes from our same condi-
tions, suffer with an admirable purity and constancy. The misfortunes of
an Ariane do not move me; those of the Princesse de Clèves move me
only slightly. These heroes are too dissimilar from me; their misfortunes
have no relationship with those that might move me. I feel that it is a
fairy tale—and from that moment on it no longer moves me.46
The high and low, as they have the same faculties and the same senses,
have no less similitude in their pains and pleasures. The sensations are the
same in all, tho’ produced by very different occasions. The prince feels the
same pain when an invader seizes a province, as the farmer when a thief
drives away his cow. Men thus equal in themselves will appear equal in
honest and impartial biography; and those whom fortune or nature place
at the greatest distance may afford instruction to each other.47
This author does not send blood flowing down the walls, he does not
transport you to distant lands, he does not expose you to being eaten by
savages, he does not confine himself with the secret haunts of debauchery,
he never wanders off into the world of fantasy. The world we live in is
his scene of action, his drama is anchored in truth, his people are as real
as it is possible to be, his characters are taken from the world of society,
his events belong to the customs of all civilized nations; the passions he
portrays are those I feel within me.48
The pathos of proximity that fuels the new genres of modern literature
is a sign. The novel, the drame bourgeois, and modern poetry attach the
utmost importance to the experiences of individuals like us; the major
forms of ancient and classicist literature are instead shot through by an
equal and opposing pathos of distance. The Stiltrennung, as we have said,
implies three things: that there is a hierarchy of subject matters; that the
46. Albrecht von Haller, review of Clarissa by Samuel Richardson, Bibliothèque raisonnee
des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe, vol. 42 (January–March 1749), part 1, pp. 326–333.
47. Samuel Johnson, Idler, no. 84 (Saturday, November 24, 1759), in The Yale Edition
of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 2, The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. Walter Jackson
Bate, John Marshall Bullitt, and Lawrence Fitzroy Powell (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1963), 263.
48. Denis Diderot, Éloge de Richardson (1762); English translation “In Praise of Rich-
ardson,” in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. and with an introduction by Geof-
frey Bremner (London: Penguin, 1994), 80–97; quote from p. 83.
register of the style must correspond to the rank of the subject matter; that
the noble genres should tell stories about public heroes legitimated by com-
munal history, sacred history, mythology, or legend. In epos and tragedy,
the past and the repertoire are what counts; in modern poetry, theater, and
novels, what counts are the present and close experiences. A prince who
sees his province being invaded experiences the same pain as a farmer who
sees his cow being stolen: the tradition of the novel explores these passions
as if they were both of the utmost importance.
The Interesting
Along with the pathos of proximity, an aesthetic category that accompa-

nied the development of the modern novel began to gain ground: the inter-
esting. The concept took form in the debates that followed the appearance
of The Princesse de Clèves. In the most radical pamphlet, Du Plaisir’s Sen-
timents sur l’histoire, the concept appears in two crucial passages:
We are hardly curious about unknown centuries and countries; contrari-
wise, we are curious about those that are scarcely foreign to us; and un-
questionably, between two stories that are equally fashioned, one of
which contains all the events that happened in France in recent centu-
ries, and the other all the events that happened in Greece or during the
first lineage of our kings, the latter will be infinitely less interesting.49
The chief and natural goal of these types of works is to make known to us
the fortunes of the characters (acteurs) or to spark our interest in them.50
In reality, all the remarks on the pathos of proximity we have cited thus
far contain a similar idea, expressed implicitly or explicitly. In the mid-
eighteenth century, the interesting became the law governing the new
province of writing that Fielding claimed to have founded: “Nor do I doubt,
while I make their interest the great rule of my writings, [my readers] will
unanimously concur in supporting my dignity, and in rendering me all the
honour I shall deserve or desire.”51
49. Du Plaisir, Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’histoire, avec des scrupules sur le style, 65.
50. Ibid., 64.
51. Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, 78.
Diderot was one of the first to transform the category into a topic of
reflection.52 At the end of the eighteenth century, the interesting had be-
come a cornerstone of the Romantic aesthetic. In his essay On the Study
of Greek Poetry (1797), Friedrich Schlegel sought to establish the gen-
eral sense of the changes that European literature had undergone during
the previous two centuries. He contrasted ancient poetry, which he says
preserves a mythological core and pursues the ideal of eternal beauty, to
modern poetry, which deals with historical themes and attempts to make
itself interesting to the people who live in the present time, knowing that
it might not speak with the same intensity to those who will live in the
future.
While the task of reconstructing the history of the concept in all its eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century ramifications is beyond me, I would like to
reflect on its theoretical significance. The official literature of the Ancien
Régime requires the knowledge of a tradition in order to be understood. A
class of literary professionals or semiprofessionals kept alive the literature
of an era two thousand years distant; they published editions of ancient texts
and composed works inspired by Greek and Latin poetry. While the noble
genres of the Ancien Régime rested on the past, the pathos of proximity
and the concept of the interesting marked a rupture: some groups of writers
and readers, partially or totally unconnected to the repertoires and rules,
demanded a taste founded on the present, on contemporary topics, and on
the effect the work produced in the here and now. This was a sign that the
historicity of all things was penetrating into the domain of art, forever
weakening classical faith in the eternity of canons.53 The concept of the in-
teresting contained the most violent attack ever launched against the idea
of Beauty as conceived by Plato and as it had become incorporated into
ancient poetry. Aesthetic value became subject to time and circumstances;
shortly afterward, the ideas of the True and the Good would suffer the
same fate. Historicist relativism entered into European culture by way of
the artistic sphere.
52. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 13.
53. Ibid.; and Giovanna Rosa, Il patto narrativo. La fondazione della civiltà romanzesca
in Italia (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2008), 24ff.
The Novel’s Readership
So far I have avoided tackling the sociological theme, which is a recurring

one in studies on the origin of the novel. A commonplace of literary theory
links the development of the genre with the rise of a middle-class public.
We know that the novel grew along with the increase in books and readers,
but we also know that the new readers were in no way homogeneous. Each
national literature has its own history. In the two countries that most
contributed to the rise of the novel between the 1600s and the 1700s, France
and England, the revived readership was a much bigger factor for England
than it was for France:54 in French literature the appearance of the aristo-
cratic novel preceded the arrival of the bourgeois novel.55 Furthermore,
the subgenres making up the novel were addressed to different classes of
readers. Nouvelles and histoires secrètes, for example, came into being in
the aristocratic milieu during the time of Louis XIV: their subject matters
(amorous intrigues in the world of the court), their form (lacking any ex-
treme drops in register), their way of representing the interior life (marked
by a psychology of Augustinian origin) would have been inconceivable
outside of this society. This is the same group of readers that only a few de-
cades earlier had been avidly reading heroic Baroque novels.56 The novels
of Richardson and Fielding, on the contrary, were also intended for the
new readership created by the growth of literacy in England.57 And yet, when
54. There is an enormous bibliography on the social composition of readers of novels,

romances, and romans in France and England. The two best overviews, in my opinion, are by
Hunter, Before Novels, chap. 3, and Esmein-Sarrazin, L’Essor du roman, passim. For Italy,
the best source is by Alberto Cadioli, La storia finta. Il romanzo e i suoi lettori nei dibattiti di
primo Ottocento (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2001), “Introduzione.”
55. See DiPiero, Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions, chap. 1, “The Rise of Aris-
tocratic Fiction,” and passim. On the expansion of the French reading public during the
late eighteenth century, see François Furet and Mona Ozouf, Lire et écrire: l’alphabétisation
des Français, de Calvin à Jules Ferry, vol. 1 (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 46–57 and passim;
Daniel Roche, Le Peuple de Paris: essai sur la culture populaire au XVIIIe siècle (1981)
(Paris: Fayard, 1998), 271–320; Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds., Historie de
l’édition française, vol. 2 (Paris: Promodis, 1984), 218–230, 402–429; Reinhard Witt-
mann, “Une révolution de la lecture à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Histoire de la lecture
dans le monde occidental, ed. Giovanni Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Paris: Seuil, 1997),
331–364.
56. DiPiero, Introduction to Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions.
57. Hunter, Before Novels, chap. 3.
we contextualize these highly diverse groups by locating them in the cul-

tural spaces of their time, we come to realize that the readers of novels are
linked by a homology of position. Ugo Foscolo pinpointed this with great
clarity in 1803:
History, eloquence, sublime tragedy and poetry, and the epic poem are
commodities for this sort of men. Because they spend all their time com-
muning with the writings of the ancients and reading about the affairs of
past ages, they can only understand high literature and in a certain way
they divorce themselves from their own times. . . . But novelle and ro-
manzi were never written for men of letters, nor do these productions
gain literary prestige except for their antiquity. This is why Boccaccio
himself considered his least worthy production, which he says was
written in a completely vulgar tongue, the very Decameron that is vener-
ated by Italians as an example for all styles. . . . Novelle and romanzi are
made for that large number of people who occupy the space between
idiots and men of letters.58
The noble literary genres of the Ancien Régime were understandable as

long as there existed an audience that valued traditional stories and the
conventional forms. Although belonging to different social groups, readers
of novelle, novelas, nouvelles, mémoires, histoires, or English novels of
the early eighteenth century had no interest in the literary repertoire. They
were interested in the present, or in a recent past that resembled the present.
A princess who feels attracted to a man other than her husband and a
merchant who is shipwrecked on a deserted island live in different worlds;
but when we compare their stories to the adventures of Theagenes or
Chariclea, we realize that the internal logics of their microcosms resemble
each other: the adventures of Madame de Clèves and Robinson Crusoe
still maintain a relationship with the reality principle on which private
individuals base their lives, while those of Theagenes and Chariclea do
not. Although their customs and cultures were extremely different, the
readers of Madame de La Fayette and Defoe were attracted by fictional
worlds that reminded them of their own lifeworlds. Expressed in the terms
of art criticism, we might say that an ignorance of iconography is allowed
for readers of novels: the text can be understood without knowledge of
58. Foscolo, “Saggio di novelle di Luigi Sanvitale parmigiano,” 263–264.

the literary past. The readership of the new genre, wrote Foscolo, stood “be-
tween idiots and men of letters”: these readers were educated but nonspecial-
ists. They were equidistant from the mass of illiterate people and the
narrow circle of those who continued to face backward toward the clas-
sicist past.
Another commonplace of literary sociology ties the development of the
novel to a female readership. As we know, the novel was long associated
with women: in the literary debates of the Ancien Régime, the association
was so widespread that it became proverbial. There is some reality to this:
a substantial portion of the texts that ended up in the genre of the novel
(from medieval narrative to the epistolary narrative of the seventeenth
century, from The Decameron to Jane Austen) was written, in actuality or
in name, for women. In this case, too, what counts is the similarity of posi-
tion in the social space: female readers were unfamiliar with the literary
tradition or tended to ignore it, and they were relegated to living in the
existential sphere that the new genre explored—that of private life. The
bond between the novel and female readership is ideological before it is
sociological.
Particular Life
We have seen how the rise of the novel, in the broad theoretical sense of
the term, was part of a wider transformation between the 1500s and the
1700s that led European culture to pay renewed attention to forms of life
and their historical, social, and geographical mutability. We have also seen
that for a long time the novel maintained a sort of primacy in describing
private life. This happened for two reasons: private life was the main sub-
ject of the novel; and the novel took advantage of the organic connection
with the sphere of contingency that is immanent to narrative as a form.
Plots tell about finite beings endowed with qualities that identify them (a
proper name, a body, a character, manners), situated in an environment,
and subject to change: beings whose own lives intersect with the lives of
others through action, speech, thought, and passions until the imbalance
that drives this mechanism is righted and the story reaches its end. Each
one of the elements involved in the existential analytics implicit in a plot is
potentially charged with multiplicity.
1. The novel is the genre of proper names, stories, and personal destinies.
Thanks to the novel, the space that European culture dedicated to indi-
viduals experienced tremendous growth. The multiplicity of particulars
spilled over into the internal structure of the works. A symptom of this pro-
cess was the device of entrelacement. During the 1500s, as we have said,
the call to unity of action became filled with hidden moral senses: it meant
the possibility of interpreting mythos as an allegory for something else; it
meant that, instead of the story being broken up and dispersed into streams
of captivating, centrifugal stories, it was expected to remain faithful to a
single, large undertaking with an exemplary status. The plots of chivalric
romances went in the opposite direction, toward the dispersion of per-
sonal aims and destinies.59 Picked up again by Fielding and then by Scott,
entrelacement was transmitted to the historical and social novel of the
nineteenth century.
But the proliferation of individuals also had a subjective side. In addition
to multiplying the number of personal stories, the novel also increased the
variety of consciousnesses who revealed their worlds through writing. This
is what happened to humorous narrative of the eighteenth century: Fried-
rich Schlegel had this subgenre in mind when he defined the novel as “a
more or less veiled confession of the author, the profit of his experience,
the quintessence of his originality.”60 Humorous narrative had a critical
role in Hegel’s theory of modern art as well. One of the two lines of devel-
opment that the Aesthetics foresaw in contemporary works (to show “the
liberation of subjectivity, in accordance with its inner contingency”61) was
perfectly expressed in works like Tristram Shandy or Jacques the Fatalist.
2. The second type of multiplicity explored by the novel regarded the plu-
rality of environments and forms of life. The interest that noble genres from
the culture of antiquity reserved for the variety of characters, manners, and
contexts was very limited compared to what has occurred in the literature
of recent centuries.62 Tragedy enacts rituals taking place in a time and space
divorced from contingency; the epic poem depicts conflicts between peoples
59. Quint, Epic and Empire, 31ff.

61. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol.1, p. 608.
62. Auerbach, Mimesis, 319ff.
and cultures, but the specific difference between those peoples and cultures
is never explored in depth. Instead, many of the subgenres that converged
into the novel had a historical-ethnographic component, starting with Hel-
lenistic narrative. At the beginning of the Aethiopica, the mysterious young
woman and man who are found alive in the midst of a massacre are led by
a group of brigands into the region of Bucolia, which is briefly described
by the narrator:
The whole tract, called by the Egyptians The Pasturage [Bucolia], is a
sunken valley in which an influx from the overflow of the Nile forms a
lake. The middle of this lake is of unfathomable depth; around the edges
it shoals into a marsh. What shores are to the sea, marshes are to lakes.
Here the brigands of Egypt maintain their existence. One lives on a bit
of land that rises above the water, where he builds a hut; another spends
his life aboard a boat, which serves at once as transportation and living
quarters. On the boat the women work their wool and bear their babies.
After the babies are weaned from their mother’s milk they are fed on fish
from the lake which are roasted in the sun. When the baby shows signs
of creeping, they tie a thong to his ankle which permits him to go the
length of the boat or of the hut. The string on his ankle is a novel kind of
tutor.63
From here on, the movements of Theagenes and Chariclea are almost
always accompanied by short descriptions of the places they visit. The re-
gions that the characters pass through are not realistic, but what counts is
the intellectual gesture: the narrator recognizes that traveling the world
means encountering different forms of life. The Greek novel situates its
main subject matter—the love and adventure plot—before a hazy but per-
sistent historical, geographical, and ethnographic backdrop.
Arriving by its own route, the Italian novella also included this descrip-
tive element in its structure. Some of the novelle in The Decameron dwell
on differences between social classes: for example, in order for the story of
Cisti the baker to be told, the social distance separating a rich baker from
someone with the title of Messer must also be described, no matter how
fledgling the attempt. Arriving by its own route as well, the Spanish pica-
resque novel also went into the details of social conditions:
63. Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Romance, translated with an introduction by Moses Hadas

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 6.
My father, God rest his soul, was in charge of a windmill on the river-
bank. He worked for over fifteen years. My mother was pregnant
with me, ready to give birth, and one night I came onto this world
right there, so I can say I was truly born on the river.
Now when I was eight years old, my father was caught stealing
from the sacks belonging to the mill. He was arrested and confessed,
denying nothing. He was prosecuted and punished by law. . . . There
was a campaign against the Moors in those years and my father took
part in it, since he was already living away as part of the sentence. He
went as a mule driver for a gentleman that went to the campaign. His
life ended when he and this gentleman were killed.
My widowed mother, finding herself without a husband and without
shelter, opted to approach some wealthy patrons and thus came to
live in the city with one of them. She began to cook for certain stu-
dents and to wash clothes for the stable boys of the Comendador of
La Magdalena. So she hung about the stables.64
Cervantes was the first to combine the traditions of the Hellenistic novel,
the comic romance, the novella, and the picaresque novel. His works describe
forms of life: soldiers, literati, Turks, or actors in Don Quixote (1.38; 1.40;
2.11); gypsies in The Little Gypsy Girl; the Turks in The Generous Lover;
basket-carriers in Rinconete and Cortadillo; soldiers in The Licentiate Vid-
riera, and so on. Sometimes the descriptions are quite detailed; at other times
they create what in painterly terms would be called a sketch or a genre scene.
Regardless of how successful he was in these attempts, Cervantes understood
that a narrator could not ignore the fact that reality is divided into social
circles—the segmentation of the world into worlds. Thanks to the Spanish
picaresque novel and novelas, this sensibility was transmitted to the French
nouvelles (Les Illustres Françaises by Challe, for example), to the English
novel, and to the French roman of the eighteenth century.
3. The attention paid to the multiplicity of sceneries and objects was part
of the interest in the variety of environments. This lingering over back-
grounds and details is a recent phenomenon in the history of literature.
Classicist poetics discouraged the descriptive forms that took root with the
64. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Adversities, trans. and ed. Ilan
Stavans (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 5.
birth of the modern realistic novel. The reasons for this, in line with what
we read in Aristotle, is that mimesis was intended as an imitation of people
in action and not of the circumstances surrounding them. Furthermore,
classic poetics forbade the writer to dwell on minutiae that did not directly
contribute to plot development. Roland Barthes calls these details “reality
effects.”65 What he means by this are purely contingent notations extra-
neous to the economy of the story line that, precisely because of their gra-
tuitous contingency, seem to say to the reader, “The only reason we were
included in the text is our empirical truth”: “we are the real.”66
However, extended reflection on the invention of this device started
more than two centuries before Barthes. The first texts in praise of details
can be found in a historical type of narrative that converged into the novel:
in Don Quixote, for example, the narrator tells us that Cide Hamete
Benengeli is a careful, accurate historian because he also dwells on incon-
sequential things.67 But the event that triggered an out-and-out polemic on
the topic was the French translation of Pamela. The English novel with the
greatest wealth of detail clashed with the most classicist of European lit-
erary cultures. There may have been several reasons why Richardson did
not appeal to the French, but one of those most mentioned was the abun-
dance of minute details. The translation by Prévost, which simplified or cut
passages that were loaded with details, is the symptom of a difference in
taste. The Abbé Marquet, who contributed to the debate with his Lettre
sur Pamela (1742), found certain descriptions to be long-winded. The epi-
sode in which Pamela leaves Mrs. Jervis, for example, contains a boring
list that has “the air of an inventory.”68 Two decades later, Diderot over-
turned the arguments used by his fellow countrymen in reaction to Pamela,
writing that the illusion of truth created by the works of Richardson arises
precisely from the skill with which objects and surroundings are pre-
sented.69 This is one of the first times that the reality effect was theorized.
It would fall to the founder of the nineteenth-century historical novel,
65. Roland Barthes, “L’Effet de réel” (1968); English translation “The Reality Effect,” in
The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986),
141–148.
66. Ibid., 148.
67. Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, part 1, chap. 16.
68. Abbé Marquet, Lettre sur Pamela (London, 1742), 16.
69. Diderot, Éloge de Richardson, 133.
Scott, to illustrate the mimetic force of this device. He did so in essays

dedicated, not by chance, to Defoe, Swift, and Richardson.70 For Balzac,
the most important inheritor of Scott, “details alone will henceforth deter-
mine the merit of works improperly called romans.”71
4. The fourth form of variety our genre lays claim to is the realm of exis-
tence we usually locate in interiore homine: the changing folds of the life
that today we call psychic.
The appearance of The Princesse de Clèves in 1678 was accompanied
by a series of reactions that snowballed, generating one of the most impor-
tant literary quarrels of the âge classique. Readers were struck by the skill
with which Madame de La Fayette depicted passions:
All the movements [of the heart] could not be better known or expressed
more forcefully and with more delicacy. The way Madame de Clèves re-
turns to herself, these anxieties, these divergent thoughts that shatter
against each other, this difference we discover between what she is today
and what she was yesterday are things that happen inside us every day,
that everybody feels, but few are able to portray in the fashion we see
here.72
Du Plaisir comes up with a sort of theory: in his opinion, anyone who

reads books like The Princesse de Clèves admires the narrator not for his
or her ability to devise plots, but rather for the keenness with which the
movements of the heart are revealed—an intangible content that earlier lit-
erature had never represented with suitable words.73 Four years later, in
discussing Catherine Bernard in the literary magazine Le Mercure galant,
Fontenelle writes that he appreciates novels not so much for their plots or
for their capacity to create surprises as for their ability to pin down “cer-
70. Sir Walter Scott, “Life of Swift” (1814), “Works of Swift” (1814), “Clara Reeve”
(1823), “Samuel Richardson” (1824), “Defoe” (1827), in Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and
Fiction, 44, 154, 157, 172–173, 179.
71. Honoré de Balzac, “Scènes de la vie privée: notes de la première édition,” in La Co-
médie humaine, edition published under the direction of Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. 1 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1976), 1175.
72. Jean-Baptiste-Henri de Valincour, Lettres à Madame la Marquise * * * sur le sujet de
la Princesse de Clèves (1678) (Tours: Publication du groupe d’étude du XVIIe siècle de
l’Université François-Rabelais, 1972), 199–200.
73. Du Plaisir, Sentiments sur les lettres et sur l’histoire, 51.
tain movements of the heart that are almost imperceptible due to their deli-
cacy,” and, by way of example, he cites The Princesse de Clèves.74
In 1688, a few years after Du Plaisir and Fontenelle, Charles Perrault
began to publish his Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes. As we read in
the Parallèle, some of the progress made by the moderns compared to the
ancients involves knowledge of the passions. Our understanding of the in-
terior life has grown on par with the gains made in physics, astronomy, or
anatomy. The ideas that the ancients had on some topics were inaccurate:
their astronomy was familiar with the planets but ignorant of the satellites;
similarly, their knowledge of the heart included the main passions but
remained unaware of the small upheavals that the moderns have discovered
and which they now pour into treatises on morals, tragedies, works on elo-
quence, and novels.75 Perrault’s words recall those with which Descartes had
inaugurated a new era of reflection on the interior life some forty years ear-
lier. His treatise The Passions of the Soul (1649) begins by arguing that
nothing more clearly demonstrates the defectiveness of the learning inher-
ited from the ancients than what they wrote concerning the passions.76
According to Dorrit Cohn, there are three ways to represent the interior
life in fiction: “psycho-narration” (the omniscient analysis of the thoughts
of others), “quoted monologue” (the first-person, public expression of what
individuals are thinking or feeling), and “narrated monologue” (free indi-
rect discourse).77 However, if we leave the domain of fiction and extend
the taxonomy to all forms of Western discourse, it becomes clear that there
are two main types: psychological analysis and monologue. What we say
about the interior life issues from one of these primary forms: from the
gesture of someone who, starting from the outside, analyzes the psyche of
others; and from the gesture of someone who, starting from the inside, ex-
presses, or presses out, his or her hidden life and injects it into the public me-
dium of words. The literary and philosophical culture of antiquity—which
74. Cited in ibid.

75. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (2nd ed., 1692–1697) (Ge-
neva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979), 101.
76. René Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme (1649); English translation in Descartes, The
Passions of the Soul and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
77. Cohn, Transparent Minds, 11ff.
Descartes and Perrault speak about in the singular, opposing it to a new

culture—possessed both these devices.
Classical psychological analysis arose out of the multiform intersection
of two genealogies. First is the theory of the four humors and the four
temperaments introduced by Hippocrates, developed by Galen, and popu-
larized between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance through a schema of
correspondences between the human world and the larger cosmos.78
Second is theory of the characters and the passions introduced by Aristotle
in his Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics, developed by Theophrastus,
established in classical rhetoric and Scholastic theology, and then revived
between the end of the 1500s and the beginning of the 1600s thanks to
Casaubon’s edition of Theophrastus and the development of the “character”
as a literary genre, first in England and then throughout Europe. These fami-
lies were bound together by their theoretical gestures, both of which rested
on cornerstones that appeared to be far from stable in the eyes of modern
culture. We find an exemplary presentation of them in the main treatise on
descriptive psychology produced by ancient culture: book 2 of Aristotle’s
Rhetoric. The most important assumption was the conviction that an order
could be imposed on the magma of the interior life by identifying and giving
names to the forces that perturb it: an approach already present in Homer
and made systematic by classical ethics and oratory. The Greek and Latin
science of the passions was developed in the context of rhetoric, as an in-
strument that was vital for understanding the audience; and in the domain
of moral law, as the first stage of inner therapy that served as the foundation
for the ancient ethics focused on the care of the self.79 The practice of iden-
tifying interior movements was then transmitted to Christian theology.
This approach arose from the concept of character, from the belief that the
variety of individuals and the variability of their interior life can be traced
back to types: the ethe Aristotle talks about in his Rhetoric and the Nicoma-
chean Ethics, the thirty types of Theophrastus, and the temperaments of
Hippocrates and Galen. More so than ethos, the Greek word transmitted
78. Erich Schöner, Das Viererschema in der antiken Humoralpathologie (Wiesbaden:

Franz Steiner Verlag, 1964); Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Phi-
losophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973).
79. Michel Foucault, L’Herméneutique du sujet: cours au Collège de France. 1981-82;
English translation The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1981–82, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros (New York: Picador, 2003), 4ff.
to the modern European languages was charakter. It originated in charas-

sein, “to imprint,” and it carried with it the idea that character is a mark,
an imprint, a mold.80 Implicit in this concept is the other load-bearing
structure of the ancient introspective edifice, namely, the idea that an indi-
vidual’s actions and speech must be consistent with the mark imprinted on
his or her interior life. In classical poetry and classicist poetics, the necessary
link between ethos and behavior was expressed by the concept of conve-
nientia. It was on the basis of this principle that Aristotle criticized Euripid-
es’s Iphigenia and her inner crises.81 On the same basis, Horace advised
writers who wanted to invent new characters, unfettered by tradition, to
represent them as consistent with themselves from beginning to end.82 What
resulted from this was a “fixist psychology,”83 founded on the assumption
that the magma of passions and thoughts actually stemmed from stable
matrices—rendering idiosyncratic, anomalous details transient and unworthy
of interest. In this anthropological schema, inner movements can be traced
to stable passions (“wrath,” “serenity,” “friendship,” “enmity,” “fear”). People
are not singular, private individuals who resist classification: they are ex-
empla of a public, universal typology that repeats.84
Along with this fixist psychology, the ancient culture developed and
transmitted forms of monologue. Interestingly enough, there immediately
arose a division of labor: analyses specialized in outlining permanent traits,
monologues in expressing interior conflicts. While the soliloquies of Ho-
meric characters already show a divided psyche, in the monologues of
Sophocles and Euripides inner conflict takes on a more articulated form.
The tragic model influenced the epic genre, as we see in Medea’s words in
book 3 of the Argonautica, or in the words of Dido in book 4 of the Ae-
neid.85 In Latin lyric poetry between the first century BCE and the first
80. Van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie, chap. 1.

81. Aristotle, Poetics 15.1454a.32.
82. Horace, Epistles 2.3, lines 125–127.
83. Van Delft, Le Moraliste classique, 149.
84. Ibid., 139ff.; Van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie, 26. See also Étienne Gilson, “La
scolastique et l’esprit classique,” in Les Idées et les Lettres (Paris: Vrin, 1955), 243–261; and
Alexandre Cioranescu, El Barroco, or el descubrimiento del drama (La Laguna: Universidad
de la Laguna, 1957), 330ff.
85. Jacqueline de Romilly, “Patience, mon cœur!”: l’essor de la psychologie dans la litté-
rature grecque classique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984); Scholes, Phelan, and Kellogg, The
Nature of Narrative, chap. 5.
century CE, the modes of the passions that perturbed the soliloquies of di-
vision become increasingly intimate. While the forms tended toward
greater specialization, ancient analyses and monologues remained bound
together by one thing: their vocabulary, their syntax, and their point of
intonation were designed to translate the magma of the interior life into
ostentatiously public forms. The categories of classical psychological analysis
are exterior and aggregative: they relate the differences between individ-
uals and the multiplicity of internal movements to common matrices. But
the same thing can be said about the forms of monologue, which arose
from genres designed to be declaimed aloud in a public space, in front of a
crowd of people (the audience of a tragedy, the listeners of an oration, the
disciples of a teacher). The tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, which
were contemporary to the development of judicial rhetoric, imitated its
forms; the soliloqui of Apollonius of Rhodes, Virgil, and Ovid tended to
take the form of the dilemma. Even in the Christian era, when Augustine
inaugurated a new idea of the interior life and a new genre, the style of his
constructions remained externalized. The story about himself, which occu-
pies a substantial part of the Confessions, is constructed as a speech, in the
second person, with obvious rhetorical features: “to such an extent is the
spirit of the Greek public square still alive in it.”86
Although animated by currents in some respects running opposite to
each other, the models of psychological analysis and monologue that the
ancient culture transmitted to the classicism of the early modern age were
therefore bound by a shared attitude: they both try to express—to make
external—the motions of the psyche, to put them into forms that a group
of people gathered in a public space can see. To achieve this, they must make
common what may not be common: the psychological analyses assign a
single name to the forces that inhabit the interior life and a single character
to a plurality of individuals; monologues express thoughts and passions in
an audible form. Both analyses and monologues were influenced by exter-
nalized discursive formations like rhetoric and normative ethics. These are
the grammars that Descartes and Perrault might have had in mind when they
86. See Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,
259–422.
spoke of the ancient science of the passions and, in response, announced

the creation of a new paradigm.
The first signs of the transformation preceded the treatise The Passions
of the Soul by half a century and the Parallel between the Ancients and the
Moderns by a century: they can already be found in Montaigne’s Essays.87
One of the main innovations was without doubt the weakening of chara-
kter. In the previous few centuries, the unity of psychological molds and
the correspondence between the interior life and actions had become a
problem. This does not mean that they were systematically negated; it
means that they were no longer obvious, or that they had become less
obvious. A fixist psychology, which saw only the planets, was flanked by
a psychology that also attempted to discern the satellites. This is why the
tradition of the novel played an essential role in the creation of another
way of representing the interior life. In France, the nouvelle and the nar-
rative fiction of worldliness88 created a language of psychological analysis
akin to the Augustinian tradition and organic to the culture of the morali-
stes. In book 3 of The Princesse de Clèves, Madame de La Fayette de-
scribes how the Prince de Clèves reacts to his wife’s confession and to the
suspicion that his wife has expressed her feelings in public. For her part,
Madame de Clèves begins to suspect that the person responsible for
spreading certain rumors is actually the man she is in love with, the Duke
of Nemours:
M. de Clèves had exhausted all fortitude in supporting the misery of
seeing a wife whom he adored swayed by her passion for another man.
He had no further strength, and thought he should not even find it in
circumstances which were so damaging to his honour and his good name
[gloire]. He did not know what to think of his wife; he could not decide
what conduct he should prescribe for her, or how he should conduct him-
self; on all sides, he could see only gulfs and precipices. At length, after a
long period of fretting and perplexity, realizing that he had shortly to go
to Spain, he resolved to do nothing that might fuel suspicion or knowl-
edge of his wretched state. . . .
87. Van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie, 7ff.; Louis Van Delft, Frammento e anatomia,
chap. 2.
88. The definition comes from Peter Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness: Crébillon,
Marivaux, Laclos, Stendhal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).
[Mme. de Clèves] could not doubt that [the Duke of Nemours] had
told the story to the Vidame de Chartres: he had admitted as much; nor
could she doubt also, from the manner in which he had spoken of it, that
he knew the matter concerned her. How could she forgive such impru-
dence, and what had become of the prince’s unusual discretion, which
she had found so appealing? “He was discreet,” she thought, “so long as
he believed in his misfortune; but one glimpse of happiness, however un-
certain, put an end to discretion. He could not imagine himself to be
loved, without wishing to let it be known. . . . I was wrong to imagine
that any man could be found who was able to conceal something that
flattered his reputation [gloire]. And yet it is for the sake of this man,
whom I believed so different to other men, that I have become like others
of my sex, when I am so far from resembling them.89
Using the psychology of the moralistes, Madame de La Fayette gives a

name to the inner forces (“fortitude,” “misery,” “happiness,” gloire,
“honor”) and establishes some laws of action (“He could not imagine him-
self to be loved, without wishing to let it be known”; “I was wrong to
imagine that any man could be found who was able to conceal something
that flattered his reputation”). Underlying these expressions we glimpse the
tendency to bring the formlessness of the interior life back into a few de-
fined molds, and a device of classical fixist psychology: the maxim. And
yet these categories are not used to reduce the complexity of the psyche,
but to take it apart and probe it: the inner movements are now frag-
mented, the I is crisscrossed by a multitude of small subterranean forces
and counterforces, analysis is valued more than synthesis—the motion of
the satellites prevails over that of the planets. In France this introspective
model, as we shall see, passed through the centuries and wielded its effects
in Madame de La Fayette and Saint-Simon, in Crébillon and Marivaux, in
Rousseau and Laclos, in Constant and Stendhal, in Flaubert, Maupassant,
and Proust.
In England, on the other hand, the works of Richardson created a new
form of monologue. The letters and diaries that make up his novels give
voice to speech caught in the immediacy of passion, before the phrases take
89. Madame de La Fayette, La Princesse de Clèves (1678); English translation The Prin-
cesse de Clèves, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin, 2004), 130–132.
on a fully public form. This unprecedented point of intonation is expressed

in the fractured syntax and colloquial lexicon employed by Richardson’s
characters:
But then, thinks I, how do I know what I may be able to do? I have with-
stood his Anger; but may I not relent at his Kindness?—How shall I stand
that!—Well, I hope, thought I, by the same protecting Grace in which I
will always confide!—But then, what has he promised?—Why he will
make my poor Father and Mother’s Life comfortable. O, said I to myself,
that is a rich Thought; but let me not dwell upon it.90
First appearing with Ovid’s Heroides, and then revived in the Renais-
sance Humanist era, the narrative use of the letter contributed largely to
the development of a novelistic psychology with The Portuguese Letters,
Pamela, Clarissa, The New Heloise, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and
Dangerous Liaisons. Nothing so eloquently illustrates the passage from
public to private in the expression of self as the history of this genre. If the
antecedents of the Heroides were the rhetorical exercises associated with the
genres of suasoriae, ethopoeia, and prosopopoeia, Pamela and Clarissa
shortened the logical and chronological distances between states of mind
and their expression: the psychological movements are presented in their
initial disorder. While the literature of French origin tended toward psycho-
narration and objectivizing analysis, Richardson tended toward monologue
and subjective expressivism. The epistolary novel veered toward intimacy
and multiplicity. In fact, it ended up eliminating all traces of an interlocutor:
the letters were not written to make oneself understood in a pragmatic
fashion, but to allow the complex landscape of the psyche to emerge. Little
by little, the mediations to be found in real letters began to disappear, as did
the mediations found in diary entries. From this perspective, we see that the
twentieth-century extension of this type of form is stream of consciousness:
“the supreme culmination of the formal trend that Richardson initiated—
James Joyce’s Ulysses.”91
90. Richardson, Pamela, letter 30, p. 85.

91. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 206. See also Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel,
1900–1950 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955), 27.
National Differences: France and England
The development of the novel thus coincided with the eruption of particu-
larity: private stories, forms of life, backgrounds and things, the multiplicity
of our egos. The overall sense of the transformation is clear, but the local
movements were disconnected and followed different directions in line
with the different national cultures. The decisive period in the development
of the novel as an institution, the period between 1670 and 1800, also co-
incided with the development of a hierarchy between the literatures that
formed the European narrative space. Encamped at the center of the terri-
tory stood the literatures of France and England, which exported texts and
models to Europe at least until the first half of the twentieth century.92 The
two most influential cultures followed different paths from each other. Less
tied to classicism, English narrative fiction embraced the mimesis of social
classes, environments, and objects with a freedom unknown to its French
counterpart. For a long time French narrative fiction remained tied to a
small circle—the monde—composed of the aristocracy and the members
of the upper middle class who identified with the ideal of honnêteté.93 To
tell a serious story about a merchant, a former prostitute, or a maid, to de-
pict manners that fell outside the bienséances, to provide detailed descrip-
tions of a big city street or a maidservant’s room, to report a conversation
in the vernacular taking place in a tavern was more difficult for the French
roman than for the English novel. The effects of the Stiltrennung remained
alive much longer in France. The difference comes sharply into view when
we examine the criticisms launched against Fielding and Richardson be-
92. See Franco Moretti, Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800–1900 (1997); English trans-
lation Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1999), 171ff. Moretti iden-
tifies three circles: the core, a transitional area (the semi-periphery), and the periphery. The
first is occupied by French and English narrative fiction; the second by countries whose cul-
tures slide from the core to the periphery (Italy, Spain), or by countries whose fiction experi-
enced a period of great international success for a limited period of time (Germany, Russia);
the third one, by all the other national traditions. This landscape changed in the twentieth
century with the development of colonial literatures, starting with American literature. On
the dominance of the French and English novel, see also Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever,
eds., The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
93. Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness.
tween 1740 and 1755.94 French readers were simultaneously fascinated

and frightened by the English authors. Certain of their behaviors and words
were judged to be vulgar; the translators took it upon themselves to tone
down and censor the texts.95
But while the eighteenth-century French authors stylized environments
and languages much more than the English writers, French literature de-
veloped a vocabulary for introspection that had no equivalent in English-
language literature. And while British writers described the multiplicity of
the external world with a wealth of detail that the French writers would
only achieve many decades later, the language of French psychological
analysis strongly influenced European literature of the 1800s and 1900s,
continuing to show its effects at least until Proust.96 This asymmetry, too,
stemmed from the relationship with the monde. The culture that developed
in European court society, from Castiglione to the moralistes, engendered
ways of thinking about themselves and about being in the midst of others
that in the modern era would become hegemonic and disseminated to the
masses. Some of the cultural infrastructures associated with the form of life
that we inhabit did not arise out of the middle class world but out of court
society. The most important of these was an anthropology founded on the
idea that human beings are egocentric. A society that, in theory, still recog-
nized shared rules and unquestionable universal values produced the first
extended reflection on individualistic nonbelonging: “It was not only in the
sphere of bourgeois-capitalist competition that the idea of egoism as a motive
of human action was formed, but first of all in the competition at court, and
from the latter came the first unveiled descriptions of the human affects in
modern times. La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims are one example.”97
Philosophy inscribed this idea into its own languages with the political
thought and anthropology of Machiavelli and Hobbes,98 but the minute
94. See May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle, 163ff.

95. See Jacques Proust, “Les maîtres sont les maîtres,” Romanistische Zeitschrift für Lit-
eraturgeschichte 1, no. 1 (1977): 145–172.
96. Norbert Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft (1969), English translation The Court So-
ciety, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 104ff.; also by Elias, Über
den Prozess der Zivilisation, vol. 2 (1969), English translation The Civilizing Process, rev.
ed., trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 401–2; Brooks, The Novel of World-
liness, chap. 2 and passim.
97. Elias, The Court Society, 105.
98. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
analysis of amour propre was a product of the culture of France during

the second half of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth. Philosoph-
ical thought on the inherent worldliness of human beings, in both senses
of the word, arose out of this same environment.99 Although religion con-
tinued to dominate the public sphere, and although society remained
faithful to forms and institutions that postulated a continuity of collective
values over time, there emerged the idea that the battles from which human
beings derive meaning or futility, joy or sorrow, are waged in an entirely
earthly dimension. This immanence was conceived as a network of inter-
subjective relations that referred to a group, to a society. The monde was a
restricted circle of people who shared the same values and struggle for pres-
tige—to rise in the esteem of their superiors and peers—in a society that
had transformed uncontrolled, physical violence into regulated, psycho-
logical violence.100 In this world, where the rank of individuals depended
on the judgment of others, the ability to control oneself, analyze oneself,
and decipher others was a key resource.101 The literature of the moralistes
and Madame de La Fayette, the French novel of worldliness (Crébillon,
Marivaux, Laclos), and the autobiographical writing of Rousseau all op-
erate in this dimension, which they view as the medium of our being-in-the-
world. For this reason they represent human beings in their ontological
relationship with others. The language of introspection they refer to can
come into existence only in a closed circle, held together by homogeneous
values, composed of people who, living shoulder to shoulder in a regime
of latent symbolic competition, are used to observing each other and
being observed. The uniformity of the milieu was a necessary condition
for the refinement of psychological analysis. Equally important was an
autoptic tradition originating with Augustine that persisted in French
99. For more on mondanité as an integral component of French culture during the âge
classique and the Enlightenment period, see Roland Barthes, “La Bruyère,” (1963), English
translation in Critical Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 221–238;
Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness; Antoine Lilti, Le Monde des salons: sociabilité et mon-
danité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005); Barbara Carnevali, Romanticismo e ri-
conoscimento. Figure della coscienza in Rousseau (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004); also by Carne-
vali, “Salotti,” Storica 33 (2005): 133–141, and “Società e riconoscimento,” in Illuminismo,
ed. Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), 279–293.
100. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 397ff.
101. Elias, The Court Society, 104ff.; Elias, The Civilizing Process, 397ff.; Carnevali,
Romanticismo e riconoscimento, passim.
culture throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.102 This way

of expressing the mimesis of the interior life was fully introduced into En-
glish narrative fiction only between the end of the 1700s and the begin-
ning of the 1800s, with Fanny Burney and then with Jane Austen. The
works of George Eliot and Henry James would be inconceivable outside of
this current.
102. Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness, chap. 2; Philippe Seillier, Port-Royal et la littéra-
ture. II. Le siècle de Saint-Augustin, La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Lafayette, Sacy, Racine
(Paris: Champion, 2000).
CHAPTER FIVE
The Birth of the Modern Novel
In the previous chapters we saw that the emergence of the novel was punc-
tuated by three historical thresholds. The first occurred around 1550, when
a large territory of heterogeneous and unconventional narrative writings
began to form. Some of them originated in the ancient world and others in
the Middle Ages. Slowly they converged into a single genre. Within this
new territory, two distinct regions took shape that we are retrospectively
entitled to call by the names they acquired in England over the course of
the eighteenth century: novel and romance. A second threshold occurred
around 1670. From that moment on, during a process lasting over a century,
the two territories became better defined and, little by little, the novel be-
came the novel par excellence. As a consequence, the romance was gradu-
ally relegated to a peripheral position, and a new focus on contingent forms
of life was introduced into the discursive space of European culture. But
for over a century this transformation was not perceived as a threshold.
Up until the second half of the eighteenth century, writers and readers at-
tempted to fit this novelty into the structures of sense that had governed
early modern literature. It is almost as if this era were driven by two iden-
tical but opposing motions: a gradual shift toward the mimesis of contin-
gency (the tradition of the romance lost ground in favor of the novel, while
the novel specialized in the literary reproduction of particularities) was
balanced by the survival of premodern structures that hindered the unfet-
tered representation of particular life. Only around 1800 did these changes
completely overthrow all the ancient structures to engender a third, deci-
sive frontier. Many different aspects were affected by this transformation:
THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN NOVEL 181
style, the attitude toward stories, and the place of the novel in the literary
system.
Freedom from the Rules of Style
In the last decades of the seventeenth century, just when the pathos of prox-
imity began to spread rapidly, prefaces and treaties became filled with a
commonplace: novels, it was said, must be written in a plain, natural style
similar to what is used in conversation. This topos was propagated every-
where: in Donneau de Visé’s Nouvelles galantes, comiques et tragiques
(1669)1 and Manley’s The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705); in Chal-
le’s Les Illustres Françaises (1713)2 and Richardson’s Pamela (1740). It
was to be found in the arguments that Charnes used to praise Madame de
La Fayette in 16793 and in those William Owen used to recommend Fielding
in 1751.4 In the eighteenth century, comments of this sort were extremely
common; by the nineteenth century, the “simple style” had become the
backbone of nineteenth-century realism;5 in the twentieth century, this
supposed naturalness became problematic. When this happened, it be-
came possible to understand the place that the poetics of plain writing had
occupied in the history of narrative fiction.
In 1966, the collection The Experimental Novel came out in Italy. It
presented essays by young critics and writers who, influenced by the French
nouveau roman, avant-garde German fiction, and translations, discovered
or rediscovered the avant-garde movements of the past and modernism.
Today many of these essays strike us as extremist and reductionist because
they flatten out the dialectic between continuity and discontinuity linking
1. “I beg those who may find the style of my nouvelles to be insufficiently turgid to re-
member that, since works of this type are nothing more than stories of things more familiar
than lofty, the style must be as plain and as natural as that of a person of wit who is impro-
vising a story.” Donneau de Visé, Les Nouvelles galantes, comiques et tragiques, preface (no
page numbers).
2. “I wrote in the way I would have spoken to my friends, in a purely natural and familiar
style.” Challe, Les Illustres Françaises, 4.
3. Charnes, Conversations sur la critique de la Princesse de Clèves, 280.
4. William Owen, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding”
(1751), in Williams, Novel and Romance, 152.
5. On the concept of the simple style, see Enrico Testa, Lo stile semplice: Discorso e
romanzo (Turin: Einaudi, 1997).
182 THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN NOVEL
the novel of the late nineteenth century to the novel of the early twentieth
century. In doing so, they emphasize the rupture and pass over the aspects
that persisted. Moreover, unlike what happened in the great works of
modernist fiction, the model of the novel they promoted ran the risk of
losing any relationship with the lifeworld. And yet the unilateralism of their
perspectives does bring into focus a sharply delineated view of the tradition
that these writers sought to repudiate. Thanks to his extremism, Giorgio
Manganelli was able to clearly establish the meaning of “the simple style”
in the history of prose writing:
The novel appeared in European literature just when the taste for and
understanding of classical rhetoric was declining; that is, when the idea
of the literary work as artifice entered into crisis. More specifically, the
nineteenth-century explosion of the novel coincided with the defeat and
disappearance of classical rhetoric.6
Until the development of the novel, European literary prose was gov-
erned by the rules of rhetoric: even the genre tasked with representing the
particular—historiography—was opus oratorium maxime. The appeals to
naturalness that we find scattered throughout prefaces and treatises be-
tween 1650 and 1800 allude instead to another idea of form. In principle,
the simple style was a register codified by the rhetorical system originating
in the ancient world, as authors with a solid classicist culture knew very
well.7 More generally, the sermo humilis was well suited to some of the
great prose models that certain novelistic subgenres openly patterned
themselves on, namely, commentarii, the classic archetype of mémoires,
and epistles.8 Similarly, many of those who looked to the conversation of
honnêtes gens were aware of the fact that this practice followed a ritual
governed by implicit habits and explicit rules that had been codified by a
century and a half of treatises—from Castiglione to Guazzo to the French
6. Giorgio Manganelli, “Il romanzo” (1963), reprinted in Il rumore sottile della prosa
(Milan: Adelphi, 1994), 58.
7. See, for example, Fielding, preface to Joseph Andrews, 4ff., or Monboddo, The Origin
and Progress of Language (Edinburgh: Balfour, 1773–1792), vol. 3, part 2, bk. 4, chaps. 10
and 16.
8. See Fumaroli, “Genèse de l’épistolographie classique: rhétorique humaniste de la
lettre, de Pétrarque à Juste Lipse.”
literary circles of the âge classique.9 But even if mediocritas was a code
laid down by classicist writings, the significance of the call to naturalness
of expression was unprecedented and went against tradition. Writers of
novels were now making claims to a new model of prose, less regulated
than what the rules of eloquence dictated, or in any case, one altogether
more fluid and smooth. Those who were active in the subgenres that later
converged into the territory of the novel were searching for an informal
style—exactly what they were able to find in the stories of experience that
arose outside the oratorical tradition.10 The authors who wrote when rhe-
toric was losing or had already lost influence on narrative prose immedi-
ately grasped the significance of this process. Sir Walter Scott accurately
identified this transition in an essay on Defoe:
Defoe does not display much acquaintance with classic learning, neither
does it appear that his attendance on the Newington [Green] seminary
had led him deep into the study of ancient languages. His own language
is genuine English, often simple even to vulgarity, but always so distinctly
impressive, that its very vulgarity had . . . an efficacy in giving an air of
truth or probability to the facts and sentiments it conveys.11
Scott understood that the explosion of the novel coincided with the decline
of classical rhetoric: the novel carried European prose out of the age of elo-
quence. Its simple style was not the sermo humilis tradition of eloquence,
but a prose of experience severed from rhetorical art, which, while ap-
pearing “simple even to vulgarity,” was capable of making stories credible
with a force that classical literature did not possess.
This transition included an even more macroscopic phenomenon. With
the modern novel, prose became the ordinary medium of storytelling; the
development of the genre was contemporary with a slow but progressive
decline of narrative written in verse. Ever since ancient Greek culture had
9. See Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); Marc Fuma-
roli, “Préface” to L’Art de la conversation, ed. Jacqueline Hellegouarc’h (Paris: Classiques
Garnier, 1997), i–xxxix; Benedetta Craveri, La civiltà della conversazione (Milan: Adelphi,
2001).
10. See Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, “The Poetry of Mediocrity,” in The Novel, vol. 2, Forms
and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 64ff.; and
by the same author, Splendeurs de la médiocrité: une idée du roman (Geneva: Droz, 2008).
11. Scott, “Defoe,” p. 165.
begun to rely solely on sentences that were not broken into separate lines
for its discourses of truth, following in Anaximander’s lead, versification
became a trope—something different from the ordinary way of saying things.
The notion that prose is the most linear way of expressing oneself is already
implicit in the etymology of the words: versus is a “line,” a “row,” but also
“that which faces backwards”; oratio provorsa (or, in its contracted form,
oratio prosa) is “speech turned straight forward.” The opposition between
the two forms became an object of reflection in France in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, along with the idea that verse lies and only prose
tells the truth.12 The culture of modern rationalism would transform this
way of thinking into a commonplace. During the French âge classique,
writes Roland Barthes,
prose and poetry are quantities, their difference can be measured; they
are neither more nor less separated than two different numbers, contig-
uous like them, but dissimilar because of the very difference in their mag-
nitudes. If I use the word prose for a minimal form of speech, the most
economical vehicle for thought, and if I use the letters a, b, c for certain
attributes of languages, which are useless but decorative, such as metre,
rhyme or the ritual of images, all the linguistic surface will be accounted
for in M. Jourdin’s double equation:
Poetry = Prose + a + b + c
Prose = Poetry − a − b − c13
In Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics, as we shall see more clearly in Chapter 6,

he uses prose as a metaphor to indicate a social arrangement (“this world
of prose and everyday”) in which collective action is decided by supraper-
sonal entities (states and the mechanisms of civil society), while individuals
act in a restricted sphere of private interests.14 Abandoning verse for prose
and abandoning oratorical prose for a simple style borrowed from the
writings of experience are gestures that go together. Following the control
that aesthetic Platonism and the separation of styles had imposed on repre-
sentations, mimesis was transformed into an activity governed by public
12. Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
13. Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953); English translation Writing De-
gree Zero, trans. Annette Layers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 41.
14. On Hegel’s use of prose as a metaphor, see Michel Pelad Ginsburg and Lorri G. Dan-
drea, “The Prose of the World,” in Moretti, The Novel, 2:244–273.
rules. Implicit or explicit standards establish a ritual; the passage from

verse to prose and the development of the simple style confirmed the rise
of a nonritual mimesis. Stories told in verse strip life of its contingency;15
the rules that regimented prose during the age of eloquence gave rise to the
same effect. Only informal prose allows absolutely any story to be told in
any way whatsoever.
Freedom from Allegory and Morality
Thanks to the novel, in the second half of the eighteenth century literature
experienced particular life with a breadth and depth that would have
been inconceivable two and a half centuries earlier: such a thing had been
completely unknown to European culture. How was an innovation of this
sort justified at the time? Until the end of the 1700s many novels con-
tinued to present themselves as exemplary stories, almost as if the genre
were bringing to completion a line of development already discernible in
the medieval novella: narratio expanded to the detriment of the sensus, the
plots became more complicated and the characters less schematic, but the
work continued to legitimize itself as an exemplum. Novel writers used a
Christian structure of sense to justify their break with the ideographic po-
etics of classicism. By presenting their works as life stories intended for the
education and salvation of their readers, they were able to recount the
lives of people like us in a serious register, to linger on details, and to use a
simple style. The events they told about were anomalous and eccentric,
because ordinary life became worthy of description only when it broke
free from seriality and was transformed into a casus. But eccentricity was a
guarantee of realism, because in the Aristotelian and classicist sense of the
term, the real is almost never probable.16 On the other hand, this embracing
of imperfection had a moral purpose: officially, stories that are improb-
able—but for this very reason true—were presented as exempla to be medi-
tated on. In order to understand this dialectic, we need to avoid falling into
two opposite traps. We must not think that the moralistic apparatuses were
only a hypocritical conceit or the automatic prolongation of an outmoded
habit. It is true that some eighteenth-century texts played with poetic jus-
15. See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 57.

16. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, 47ff. and passim.
tice, with the exemplarity of the heroes, and with edifying prefaces: the
pornographic novel is an unequivocal example of this. But it is equally true
that a cultural institution does not remain alive for such a long period of
time only from inertia or because it has become the butt of irony. If novels
circulated until the end of the eighteenth century clad in moralistic armor,
this means that to a certain extent moralism and allegorism were still a cru-
cial part of the literary ether inhabited by writers and readers. On the other
hand, we should not think that the premodern structures of sense remained
unchanged. As we saw in Chapter 3, the pedagogical conception of art de-
fended by Christian aesthetic Platonism engendered two families of precepts:
the first disseminated a moral law through poetic justice and the creation of
exemplary heroes; the second disseminated phronesis, the practical wisdom
of human affairs. It was precisely by appealing to the usefulness of practical
knowledge that certain eighteenth-century novels portrayed passions and
manners without moralizing them, with the aim of teaching how to live. The
preface to Dangerous Liaisons is quite clear on this point: Laclos presents
the work as an exemplum, in line with the traditional approach, but he adds
that his novel is especially useful because it reveals the means used by the
depraved to corrupt the virtuous, and certainly not because it shows exam-
ples of virtue. Phronesis and the psychological-moral realism that followed
from it were more important than poetic justice or the self-correction of the
heroes:
The usefulness of the work, which will be perhaps even more disputed,
seems to me to be easier to establish. It seems to me at least that it is
doing a service to society to unveil the strategies used by the immorals to
corrupt the moral, and I believe these letters will make an effective contri-
bution to this end. In them are also to be found the proof and the example
of two important truths which one might suppose to be unacknowledged,
seeing how little they are practised. One, that any woman who consents
to receive into her circle of friends an unprincipled man ends up by be-
coming his victim; the other, that any mother who allows her daughter
to confide in anyone but herself is at the very best lacking in prudence.
Young people of both sexes might also learn from it that the friendship
that immoral persons seem to grant them so easily is only ever a dan-
gerous trap, and as fatal to their happiness as to their virtue. Moreover,
it seems to me that the harm which may so often follow closely upon the
benefits is greatly to be feared in this case and, far from advising young
people to read this book, I believe it is important to keep all such books
out of their way. The age when this one may cease to be dangerous, and
become useful, seems to me to have been very well understood, for her
own sex, by a mother who is not only intelligent but also sensible. “I
should believe,” she told me, after reading the manuscript of this corre-
spondence, “I was doing my daughter a great service if I gave it to her on
her wedding day.” If all mothers thought like that, I should congratulate
myself on publishing it for ever more.17
Fifty years earlier, after repeating the moralistic arguments against the
novel, Lenglet Du Fresnoy had dedicated a chapter of his treatise to the
wisdom that the genre transmits when it illustrates the manners and dan-
gers of the monde to readers, especially female ones.18 This appeal to the
practical value of the novel and the edifying rhetoric remained intertwined
for a long time in eighteenth-century commentaries and were interpreted
as two consequences of the same poetics. Nevertheless, they led in different
directions. Emphasizing phronesis over normative ethics actually meant
shifting the work’s center of gravity toward the disenchanted analysis of
human beings, diminishing the apparatuses of control to the benefit of
moral realism. Until the second half of the eighteenth century, the novel
lived off the dialectic between orthopedic devices and anarchic actions.
Over the course of time it became increasingly clear that the interest did
not lie in the transcendence of the sensus but in the immanence of the nar-
ratio. The story now expanded at the expense of the meaning and became
increasingly uncontrollable. In some cases, the sham nature of the moral-
istic infrastructure was obvious. In order to grasp this transformation, we
need not venture into eighteenth-century pornographic fiction: in the novels
of a writer deeply influenced by puritanism, like Defoe, for example, the
hidden moral sense did not prevent the represented world from brimming
over with indecent actions. The erratic character who takes center stage
and attracts readers started with Lazarillo de Tormes: edifying prefaces,
poetic justice, and the self-correction of the hero did nothing to dim the
allure of transgressive behavior.
17. Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782); En-
glish translation Dangerous Liaisons, trans. Helen Constantine (London: Penguin, 2007),
6–7.
18. Lenglet Du Fresnoy, De l’usage des romans, chap. 6, especially pp. 291–292.
At the end of the eighteenth century, though, we witness a radical trans-

formation: allegorism and moralism began to disappear from texts. This
was not a sudden transition but a slow process that took many decades to
complete. Moreover, the bipartite structure of the modern narrative
space—divided between works created for specialists and those for a wider
public—led to different escape velocities, because the novelists who wrote
for middle- or lower-class readers never relinquished moral control. In
France in the mid-nineteenth century, the literary field was split by a con-
flict between realistic art, founded on observation and intended for avant-
garde readers, and idealizing art, founded on clear ethical oppositions and
intended for a bourgeois public:19 the major intellectuals of the generation
born in the 1820s (Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Taine) still
battled fiercely against moralism. It took decades for vice and virtue to
become chemical products like vitriol and sugar—the remark by Taine
that Zola put as an epigraph to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin
(1868) with the provocative aim of subverting the doxa. The change trav-
eled at different speeds depending on the different national literatures. In
Victorian England, and in English-language literatures in general, censo-
rious stances were stronger than in France, especially in the sectors that
formed the rear guard, those who addressed themselves to Protestant
middle-class readers.20 In 1884, Henry James published “The Art of Fic-
tion” in response to an essay of the same name written by Walter Besant,
in which there still resounds the “old evangelical hostility” toward the
novel.21
The transformation was thus complex, gradual, and partially incom-
plete. Today, the elite public calls on literature to observe reality in a disen-
chanted, insightful way rather than expecting it to issue an ethical-
normative judgment on characters or plots. Writers must “paint [the facts]
as they are,”22 as Balzac wrote in his introduction (1842) to The Human
19. See Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art (1992, 1998); English translation The Rules of
Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 1996).
20. Richard Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850–1870 (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1959), 47ff.
21. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature,
American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), 44–65.
22. Balzac, “Author’s Introduction” to The Human Comedy, lxiv.
Comedy; the novelist must become “a registrar [enregistreur] of good and

evil,” even at the cost of “being stigmatized as immoral.”23 Today those
who criticize Walter Siti, Michel Houellebecq, or Jonathan Littell with
moralistic arguments position themselves in the intellectual rear guard.
And yet, edifying and allegorical paradigms are still effective in arts in-
tended for the masses, especially in movies and television. Sociological re-
alism would be appreciated instead in literature or films intended for a
restricted, sophisticated public: it would be considered an adult choice.
The historical threshold when this metamorphosis began took form near
the end of the eighteenth century: this is when moralism started to become
a conservative gesture. What were the effects of this transformation?
Moralism, Empathy, and Observation
1. The first effect was the disappearance of the allegorical devices that gov-
erned mimesis, starting with poetic justice. Dangerous Liaisons was pa-
tently inspired by The New Heloise; the epigraph of the book quotes from
the preface of the novel by Rousseau: “I have seen the morals of my times
and I have published these letters.” In 1802, forty-one years after The
New Heloise and twenty years after the work of Laclos, Madame de Staël
published Delphine. The unconventional behaviors of the characters, the
unresolved conflict between principles and desires, the asymmetry between
reciprocated love and adverse fate, the failures met by noble sentiments,
and the tragic finale scandalized readers, who struggled to find a reas-
suring hidden moral sense in the work. What ensued from it was a rather
harsh polemic, in which Benjamin Constant also participated. While
reviewing Delphine in The French Citizen, after comparing the novel to The
New Heloise, Constant defends Madame de Staël from accusations of
immorality:
Does the fact that virtue is shown to be superior to all seduction, to all
the energy of the passions, to all the force of circumstances, not there-
fore aim at a moral intent? We would have wished for the virtue of
Delphine and Léonce to be rewarded, for them to end up happy in-
stead of arriving at the extremes of misfortune. The critics say that this
means discouraging the practice of virtue. . . . Do these people not
23. Ibid., lviii

know perhaps that the way events occur is independent of virtue and
vice, and that, as a result, there is no way to ensure one and the other
the respective treatments they would seem to deserve? . . . It would be
entirely possible, then, . . . that there is some morality in this dangerous
work, unless one must conform to the dominant opinion and view all
works as immoral in which philosophy and reason are not positively
insulted.24
To demand that vice be punished and virtue rewarded is an insult to the

intelligence, because we know that in the real world vice is not necessarily
punished and virtue is not necessarily rewarded. The signs of a new narra-
tive paradigm and a new idea of probability were beginning to emerge. For
Constant, it was by now implicit that the task of the writer was primarily
to show things as they are: respect for the reality principle was more impor-
tant than moral orthopedics.
It would take many more decades to rid high-culture literature of poetic
justice. There are two antithetical statements in the introduction to The
Human Comedy, only pages away from each other. First Balzac writes that
the novelist should tell the truth even at the cost of being called immoral;
then he lets fall the idea that the plot of The Human Comedy punishes
blameworthy actions, albeit in a covert way.25 Four decades earlier, Ma-
dame de Staël was situated right in the midst of this process. Although the
plot of Delphine did not reward virtue, the protagonists of the novel, Del-
phine and Léonce, embodied a moral principle, as Constant wrote in his
review; although poetic justice was dissolving, the tendency to create he-
roes who were packed and imbued with an idea did not disappear. But the
transformation had already begun. Little by little the edifying characters
tended to play more minor roles in the literature of the elite, as did poetic
justice. Already by the end of the seventeenth century, French narrative fic-
tion had created a new way of representing people, showing the cracks
underlying the apparent unity of our egos. Constant would once again
ally himself with this genealogy, which by then was also that of Madame
de La Fayette, by writing Adolphe.
24. Benjamin Constant, “Compte rendu de Delphine de Madame de Staël,“ in Œuvres

complètes, ed. Paul Delbouille, vol. 3, Écrits littéraires (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995),
932–936.
25. Balzac, “Author’s Introduction” to The Human Comedy, lxiv and ff.
2. The second consequence was the disappearance of moralistic introduc-

tions. Eight years before Dangerous Liaisons, in 1774, there appeared the
most famous of the works created under the influence that The New Heloise
had exerted on European literature: The Sorrows of Young Werther. While
The New Heloise came out enveloped in a massive, edifying armature,
Werther appeared with brief prefatory remarks written in altogether new
tones:
I have diligently collected everything I have been able to discover con-
cerning the story of poor Werther, and here present it to you in the knowl-
edge that you will be grateful for it. You cannot deny your admiration
and love for his spirit and character, nor your tears at his fate.
And you, good soul, who feel a compulsive longing such as his, draw
consolation from his sorrow, and let this little book be your friend when-
ever through fate or through your own fault you can find no closer
companion.26
3. The preface to Werther is also significant because it shows that new

moral attitudes toward stories and people were emerging. Vice and virtue,
or what the work “means” in a conceptual form, stopped being crucial
issues; novels no longer presented themselves as secondary texts that gave
form to an exemplum of something already known, but rather as primary
texts recounting experiences irreducible to a preexisting truth. Attention
shifted from the transcendence of meanings to the immanence of finite be-
ings, following a path similar to what was implicit in the birth of suspense.
Richardson’s readers had already experienced a previously unknown
feeling of identification:
I still remember the first time Richardson’s work fell into my hands: I was
in the country. How delightfully moved I was by the reading! With every
moment I saw happiness growing shorter by the page. Soon I had the
same feeling experienced by men who get on extremely well together, and
having lived together for a long time, are about to separate. When it was
finished, I suddenly felt that I was left alone.27
26. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774); English trans-
lation The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Penguin Classics,
1989), 23.
27. Diderot, “In Praise of Richardson,” 84.
The aesthetic of identification subverted the habits that make an allegor-

ical interpretation possible. Gotthard Heidegger, as we have seen, feared the
“greedy” manners of those who immersed themselves in their books, thereby
losing the detachment that made it possible to express an allegorical-moral
judgment.28 Instead, the first page of Werther programmatically invited
readers to identify themselves with the sufferings of the characters.29 Imma-
nent in the mimesis of every period and location, this way of reading stories
conquered a new place in the modern era. Its spread was parallel to the mas-
sive growth in solitary, silent reading that took place over the course of the
eighteenth century.30
Today the aesthetics of empathy strike us as an obvious presupposition
of the novel. According to a commonplace inscribed in the unconscious of
readers who are our contemporaries, the main task of a writer is to create
empathy with the heroes, regardless of moral judgments. An exemplary
expression of a similar idea can be found in an interview with Orhan
Pamuk:
But the very strength of the art of the novel is that the writer identifies
with the character he creates with such great intensity that no moral
judgment should be passed on a character. The art of the novel is
based on the unique capacity of human beings to identify with the
Other.31
Compare this passage with a page out of Tom Jones. In the first chapter
of book 7, in developing the topos of the world as theater, the narrator
tries to imagine the reactions of the spectators to the episode concluding
book 6:

29. See Hans Robert Jauss, “Rousseaus Nouvelle Héloïse und Goethes Werther im Hori-
zontwandel zwischen französischer Aufklärung und deutschem Idealismus,” in Jauss, Ästhe-
tische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 589–
632; Anselm Haverkamp, “Illusion und Empathie: Die Struktur der teilnehmenden Lektüre
in den Leiden Werthers,” in Erzählforschung, ed. Eberhard Lämmert (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1983), 243–269.
30. See Loretelli, L’invenzione del romanzo, chap. 5 and passim.
31. Orhan Pamuk, interview with Paul Holdengraber, New York Public Library, Sep-
tember 17, 2007, http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/orhan-pamuk-conversation-paul-holdengräber.
Excerpts published in New Perspectives Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2014); available at http://www
.digitalnpq.org/archive/2014_spring/index.html.
Let us examine this in one example; for instance, in the behaviour of the
great audience on that scene which Nature was pleased to exhibit in the
twelfth chapter of the preceding book, where she introduced Black
George running away with the £500 from his friend and benefactor.
Those who sat in the world’s upper gallery treated that incident, I am
well convinced, with their usual vociferation; and every term of scurri-
lous reproach was most probably vented on that occasion.
If we had descended to the next order of spectators, we should have
found an equal degree of abhorrence, though less of noise and scurrility;
yet here the good women gave Black George to the devil, and many of
them expected every minute that the cloven-footed gentleman would
fetch his own.
The pit, as usual, was no doubt divided; those who delight in heroic
virtue and perfect character objected to the producing such instances of
villany, without punishing them very severely for the sake of example.
Some of the author’s friends cryed, “Look’e, gentlemen, the man is a vil-
lain, but it is nature for all that.” And all the young critics of the age . . .
called it low, and fell a groaning.
As for the boxes, they behaved with their accustomed politeness.
Most of them were attending to something else. Some of those few
who regarded the scene at all, declared he was a bad kind of man; while
others refused to give their opinion, till they had heard that of the best
judges.32
Tom Jones describes a public that still considers a moral judgment about
stories to be an essential, dominant part of the aesthetic experience. Most
of the spectators depicted by Fielding do not ask themselves whether the
scene was represented in such a way as to arouse an empathetic identifica-
tion with the characters, but whether the characters’ behavior was morally
acceptable. Only the author’s friends, who are probably also writers, re-
sort to the realism argument (“Look’e, gentlemen, the man is a villain, but
it is nature for all that”). Every page of Tom Jones is permeated by the
idea that one must instruct while entertaining, so that the narrator con-
tinually makes use of his sense of humor to judge the characters and issue
precepts: at certain points the density of these interjections creates true
32. Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, bk. 6, chap. 1, pp. 325–326.

moral quaestiones.33 These kinds of digressions signal that Fielding is

moving in a mental horizon quite different from that of Pamuk. And while
it may be true that his words often take on an ironic tone, it is also true
that problems which no longer concern us are never the object of irony.
Ever since aesthetic Platonism began to exert its influence on narrative, it
has been completely normal for stories and heroes to be evaluated in the
light of normative ethics; only after the collapse of these a prioris did opin-
ions like Pamuk’s become conceivable.
Alongside an attitude of this sort, there soon appeared another that was
different yet complementary. Both were already to be found in the tradi-
tion of the novel, but they gained strength during the eighteenth century.
Works like Pamela, Clarissa, or The New Heloise owe their success to the
capacity to arouse an identification extending beyond moral judgment. At
the same time, the interest in phronesis that spread in many novels in the
1700s led to the development of a purely descriptive eye with regard to
human imperfection. Influenced by this conception of narrative fiction, the
novel underwent a metamorphosis that had previously taken place in moral
philosophy. For centuries the science of the passions had kept a close bond
with normative ethics, but starting in the second half of the 1500s, a new
attitude developed:34 Montaigne invented two notions that would prove to
be decisive in the history of thought on the affects, those of “spectator of
life” (spectateur de la vie) and “natural philosopher” (naturaliste);35 Des-
cartes sought to study the passions with a contemplative outlook borrowed
from physics;36 Spinoza attacked those who disliked and derided the af-
33. The massive presence of quaestiones is a basic feature of Tom Jones: every action of
the characters is subject to the judgment of the narrator, the community, or the character it-
self. Throughout the novel, discussion is continuous. If we randomly open the work (to book
3, for example), we immediately find a series of moral problems: whether Tom, in wanting to
help the gamekeeper’s family, acted rightly or wrongly in selling the horse given to him by
Mr. Allworthy (bk. 3, chaps. 8 and 9); whether young Master Blifil did well or badly in allowing
Sophia’s bird to escape (bk. 4, chaps. 3 and 4); whether Tom behaved properly or improperly
toward Sophia (bk. 4, chap. 5).
34. See Remo Bodei, Geometria delle passioni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991); Denis Kam-
bouchner, “Passions,” in Dictionnaire d’éthique et de philosophie morale, ed. Monique
Canto-Sperber (Paris: PUF, 2004), 1397–1404.
35. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, bk. 1, chap. 18, p. 81; bk. 1, chap. 26, p. 177–178;
bk. 3, chap. 12, p.1197. See Van Delft, Les Spectateurs de la vie: généalogie du regard mo-
raliste, 5ff.
36. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul.
fects instead of trying to understand them as if they were lines, surfaces,

and bodies.37 Little by little, a form of scientific distance emerged that
would be called “anatomical” and, at the end of the eighteenth century,
“analytical.”38 It was a slow process (the Pauline and Augustinian legacy
remained alive for a long time), but it did make possible the works of the
French moralistes, among others. Over the course of the eighteenth century,
the narrators of fiction could proudly lay claim to the act of detached
observation.
The fact that the naturalist’s stance was late to make its entrance into the
world of the novel is not surprising, because it often happens that a genre
with dubious legitimacy adopts more conservative ideas than those with a
noble cultural genealogy. The transformation became visible in the meta-
phors that authors used to describe the act of storytelling, starting with the
most celebrated one—the mirror. The image has a long history: it appears
in book 10 of the Republic,39 passes through two thousand years of his-
tory, and takes a crucial turn in the modern era. For classicist poetics, a
work that mirrors the world reflects the ideas of things and not their mere
sensible appearances. Starting in the nineteenth century, the image was used
to express two different positions: to lay claim to contingency perceived
by the senses, but also to emphasize that all visions of reality arise out of
subjective mediation, since each mirror reflects things according to its own
specific curvature.40 Hence, in the modern era, the metaphor described the
presumptions of realism as well as its contradictions.
37. Baruch Spinoza, Ethica (1677), preface to part 3, trans. Samuel Shirley, in Complete
Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 277–278.
38. Van Delft, Littérature et anthropologie; by the same author, Frammento e anatomia:
Rivoluzione scientifica e creazione letteraria, chap. 1; Fernando Vidal, Les sciences de l’âme
XVIe -XVIIIe siècle (2006), English translation The Sciences of the Soul : The Early Modern
Origins of Psychology, trans. Saskia Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011),
chap. 1.
39. The first appearances are actually pre-Platonic: see Halliwell, The Aesthetics of Mi-
mesis, 171.
40. Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tra-
dition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). On the history of metaphor in the nineteenth
century, see Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), and
Federico Bertoni, Realismo e letteratura. Una storia possibile (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 90ff.
and passim.
Nevertheless, even prior to illustrating the dilemmas of mimesis, when

reference was made to the mirror, the aim was to proclaim a new attitude
toward the represented world. One of the oldest and most famous versions
of the metaphor is to be found in The Red and the Black (1830):
A novel is a mirror, taking a walk down a big road. Sometimes you’ll see
nothing but blue skies; sometimes you’ll see the muck in the mud piles
along the road. And you’ll accuse the highway where the mud is piled,
or, more strongly still, the street inspector who leaves water wallowing
in the roads, so the mud piles can come into being.41
Clearly, the original meaning of the image is ethical, not theoretical. In

addition to asserting his faithfulness to the true, what Stendhal is intending
to communicate through this visual image is the novelist’s neutrality toward
morality and the end of the era in which novels were silent tutors. Rather
than teaching normative ethics, the narrator now limits himself or herself
to observing. Two years after The Red and the Black appeared, George
Sand published Indiana (1832). In the foreword we read:
If, in the course of his task, he [the writer] has happened to express
cries of pain wrung from his characters by the social unease which af-
fects them; if he has not been afraid to record their aspirations towards
a better life, let society be blamed for its inequalities and fate for its
whims. The writer is only a mirror which reflects them, a machine which
traces their outline, and he has nothing for which to apologize if the
impressions are correct and the reflection is faithful.42
Once again, the metaphor of the mirror is used to assert autonomy from
morality during a period when the French literary world was gripped by a
debate between those who defended the premodern idea of the novel as a
didactic genre and those who attributed other than ethical-normative pur-
poses to the novelist.43 During the nineteenth century the metaphor took
on more complexity. In the preface to Cromwell (1827), Hugo talks about
a mirror that concentrates into a flame what in reality appears as a set of
41. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir (1830); English translation The Red and the Black,
trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Random House, 2004), 342.
42. George Sand, Indiana (1832); English translation Indiana, trans. Sylvia Raphael, with
an introduction by Naomi Schor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5.
43. See Marguerite Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France: The Critical Reaction,
1815–1848 (Geneva: Droz-Minard, 1961), 93ff.
scattered rays. In Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot talks about a mirror
that represents things as they are reflected in the mind of the author: the
writer seeks to be faithful to reality but cannot be entirely objective.44 The
image illustrates the dialectic between the pretense of representing things
as they are, and the awareness that every mimetic act reflects the world ac-
cording to a particular curvature. But what this divided metaphorical
world really has in common is the rejection of precepts in favor of obser-
vation, the birth of a new ethical attitude toward life and stories.
Parallel to the development of metaphors that signify neutrality toward

morality, writers adopted the stance of the spectator.
In the ninth chapter of Pride and Prejudice (1813), when Elizabeth Ben-
nett quotes a maxim on the differences between people, Bingley responds:
“I did not know . . . that you were a studier of character.”45 A studier of
character: the formula applies well to many of Austen’s heroines—but it is
clear that the author is also referring to herself. In the early nineteenth
century, many novelists laid claim to this kind of outlook: the gesture of
the observer recurs constantly in The Human Comedy;46 when Mérimée
asked Stendhal what his job was, he replied, “Observer of the human
heart.” The first reviews of Balzac and Stendhal return again and again to
the novelty of this attitude: “[The author of The Red and the Black] is a
cold observer, a cruel critic, an evil skeptic who is content to not believe
in anything”;47 “[Balzac] observes with a rare insight and reproduces
reality with precision”;48 “the sole object [of Stendhal’s] thought was a sci-
ence of observation.”49 Their contemporaries were immediately cognizant
of the rupture entailed by this approach.50 Interestingly enough, some
44. See Bertoni, Realismo e letteratura, 93.

45. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers, in The Cambridge Edition of the
Works of Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 1, chap. 9, p. 47.
46. See Anne-Marie Baron, “Statut et fonctions de l’observateur balzacien,” L’Année bal-
zacienne 10 (1989): 301–316.
47. Jules Janin, “Le Rouge et le Noir,” Journal des débats, December 26, 1830.
48. Eugène d’Izalguier, “La Vieille Fille,” Phalange, November 20, 1836, 1, col. 434.
49. Auguste Bussière, “Poètes et romanciers modernes de la France XLVIII: Henri Beyle
(M. de Stendhal),” Revue des deux mondes 1 (January 15, 1843): 254.
50. See Bernard Weinberg, French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830–1870 (1937;
repr., New York: Modern Language Association, 1937), chaps. 1 and 2.
times this perception of novelty was accompanied by moralistic criticisms:

limiting oneself to watching meant failing to issue an ethical judgment—
something that less audacious writers and readers in the first half of the
nineteenth century considered a duty.51 At least half a century before natu-
ralism transformed the observer stance into a poetic principle, it spread
among European novelists, taking its place alongside the stance of the
tutor, which it gradually replaced. Narratives presented as parables written
with the purpose of instructing and correcting gave way to narratives pre-
sented as “studies” or “documents” written in order to contemplate and
comprehend.
4. As we saw in Chapter 3, in 1741 Aaron Hill pinpointed Richardson’s

novelty with a trenchant turn of phrase: “[The author of Pamela] moves
us, every where, with the Force of a tragedy”; the story of a maidser-
vant is just as valuable as that of a queen. It was a revolutionary idea for
many reasons. The most obvious is social: Richardson heralded the time
in which every human being would gain what the Goncourt brothers, in
the preface to Germinie Lacerteux (1865), would call a “right to the
Novel.”52 The other reasons are less obvious but no less important. They
concern the principles of interpretation of individual lives and lie at the
deepest, archaeological level, so to speak.
It must first be said that Aaron Hill’s reasoning was less revolutionary
than it seems. In fact, it took its lead from the Christian logic of the ex-
emplum: like all human beings, even maidservants are creatures of God;
the battle between vice and virtue that must be fought inside them and
around them has an absolute value. This is why “under the modest Dis-
guise of a novel,” Pamela contained “all the Soul of Religion.” Richardson
chose a heroine of low standing so that every female reader could feel
potentially deserving of the reward that Pamela received for her virtue.
The true revolution came a century later when the religious harmonics
had faded out. In 1853, an essay by Louis Clément de Ris on Balzac
presented ideas very close to those expounded by Aaron Hill:
51. Ibid.
52. Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux (1865), ed. Nadine
Satiat (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), “Préface,” 55.
[Balzac] understood and made it understood that the drama lay on the
inside, not the outside, that he could find as much passion, rage, intoxi-
cation, and pain in the soul of a draper, a perfumer, a millionaire, a
duchess, and a dandy as in that of a bandit or a page boy.53
Just as for Hill, “the Passions of Nature are the same, in the Lord and in
his Coach-man,” but the ultimate aim of the mimesis of the human world,
officially, remained that of moral orthopedics. For Balzac and Clément de
Ris, on the other hand, the passions were intriguing in their pure imma-
nence: a perfumer was as worthy as a duchess because every life and inte-
rior landscape was becoming worthy of attention in itself, for no other
reason. The scale of public values that allowed disparities between people
to be created was less important than the subjective right to consider one’s
own life an absolute value.
The conceptual apparatuses constructed by the cultures of antiquity and
Christianity to impose a hidden moral sense and order on the proliferation
of the human world (allegorism, moralism, the hierarchy implied by the
separation of styles, and the repertoire of events) dissolved. In their place
there arose the pathos of proximity and a new interest in bare particular
life. Two forms of transcendence were implied in classicism and Christian
aesthetic Platonism: the transcendence of public stories from the past versus
private stories from the present; and the transcendence of universal signifi-
cance versus the immanence of singular events. While classicism took its
stories from the great ancient literary and mythological repertoire, Chris-
tian aesthetic Platonism looked to absolute metaphysical and moral truths
set out in the form of precepts or ideas. Both these structures of sense pre-
supposed that the singular life was valuable as an exemplum of a universal,
and that mimesis was an effective discursive formation for instruction and
entertainment but secondary with respect to the truth. Beginning with
the shift that took place between the end of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth century, individual stories broke free from the
ancient hidden moral senses and laid claim to an inherent value, in their
very contingency. A culture of subjective nonbelonging, to tradition as well
as to ideas, was beginning to take form. The contingent life proliferated far
from any center and was interesting in itself, and for no other reason. While
53. Louis Clément de Ris, “Honoré de Balzac,” in Portraits à la plume (Paris: Didier,
1853), 312–313.
it might be the object of empathy or analysis, it could not be read as the

allegory of an already-known truth.
A New Conceptual Ether
The transformation in attitudes toward the kinds of stories being told and
the rise of empathic or analytical observation were accompanied by a
change in the categories through which authors and narrators interpreted
reality. In Chapter 1 we saw how every story composed of words comes
into being surrounded by a conceptual ether that allows the narrator to
show the invisible dimensions implicit in the visible lives of people. One of
the frontiers that narrative crossed over between the second half of the
eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century involved
precisely this ether.
In Tom Jones, perhaps the more important third-person novel of the
eighteenth century, the narrator intervenes continuously by commenting on
the story. Here is a typical observation:
Molly was charmed with the first opportunity she ever had of showing
her beauty to advantage; for though she could very well bear to contem-
plate herself in the glass, even when dressed in rags; and though she had
in that dress conquered the heart of Jones, and perhaps of some others;
yet she thought the addition of finery would much improve her charms,
and extend her conquests.
Molly, therefore, having dressed herself out in this sack, with a new
laced cap, and some other ornaments which Tom had given her, repairs
to church with her fan in her hand the very next Sunday. The great are
deceived if they imagine they have appropriated ambition and vanity to
themselves. These noble qualities flourish as notably in a country church
and churchyard as in the drawing-room, or in the closet. Schemes have
indeed been laid in the vestry which would hardly disgrace the conclave.
Here is a ministry, and here is an opposition. Here are plots and circum-
ventions, parties and factions, equal to those which are to be found in
courts.
Nor are the women here less practised in the highest feminine arts
than their fair superiors in quality and fortune. Here are prudes and co-
quettes. Here are dressing and ogling, falsehood, envy, malice, scandal;
in short, everything which is common to the most splendid assembly, or
politest circle. Let those of high life, therefore, no longer despise the ig-
norance of their inferiors; nor the vulgar any longer rail at the vices of
their betters.54
A few months before Tom Jones, Richardson published Clarissa (1748):

The following History is given in a series of letters, written principally in
a double yet separate correspondence;
Between two young ladies of virtue and honour, bearing an inviolable
friendship for each other, and writing not merely for amusement, but
upon most interesting subjects; in which every private family, more or
less, may find itself concerned: and,
Between two gentlemen of free lives; one of them glorying in his tal-
ents for stratagem and invention, and communicating to the other, in
confidence, all the secret purposes of an intriguing head and resolute
heart.55
Almost seventy years later, in 1814, this is how Sir Walter Scott pre-
sented the setting and background for the story told in Waverley:
The ministry of George the First’s time were prudently anxious to di-
minish the phalanx of opposition. The Tory nobility, depending for their
reflected lustre upon the sunshine of a court, had for some time been
gradually reconciling themselves to the new dynasty. But the wealthy
country gentlemen of England, a rank which retained, with much of an-
cient manners and primitive integrity, a great proportion of obstinate and
unyielding prejudice, stood aloof in haughty and sullen opposition, and
cast many a look of mingled regret and hope to Bois le Due, Avignon,
and Italy.56
What contemporaries admired in Scott’s main disciple, Balzac, was the

novelty of his préparation; in other words, the parts in which the narrator
introduces the story’s characters and setting.57 Here is the préparation for
The Muse of the Department (1837):
54. Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, bk. 4, chap. 7, pp. 176–177.

55. Samuel Richardson, preface to Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus
Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 35.
56. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1981), chap. 2, p. 7.
57. Weinberg, French Realism, 53, 69.
The hill on which the houses of Sancerre are grouped is so far from the
river that the little river-port of Saint-Thibault thrives on the life of
Sancerre. There wine is shipped and oak staves are landed, with all the
produce brought from the upper and lower Loire. At the period when
this story begins the suspension bridges at Cosne and at Saint-Thibault
were already built. Travelers from Paris to Sancerre by the southern road
were no longer ferried across the river from Cosne to Saint-Thibault; and
this of itself is enough to show that the great cross-shuffle of 1830 was a
thing of the past, for the House of Orleans has always had a care for
substantial improvements, though somewhat after the fashion of a hus-
band who makes his wife presents out of her marriage portion.
Excepting that part of Sancerre which occupies the little plateau, the
streets are more or less steep, and the town is surrounded by slopes
known as the Great Ramparts, a name which shows that they are the
highroads of the place.
Outside the ramparts lies a belt of vineyards. Wine forms the chief
industry and the most important trade of the country, which yields
several vintages of high-class wine full of aroma, and so nearly resem-
bling the wines of Burgundy, that the vulgar palate is deceived. So
Sancerre finds in the wineshops of Paris the quick market indispens-
able for liquor that will not keep for more than seven or eight years. . . .
The town still bears much of its ancient aspect. . . . The citadel, a relic
of military power and feudal times, stood one of the most terrible
sieges of our religious wars. . . . The town of Sancerre, rich in its greater
past, but widowed now of its military importance, is doomed to an
even less glorious future, for the course of trade lies on the right bank
of the Loire. . . . Sancerre, the pride of the left bank, numbers three
thousand five hundred inhabitants at most, while at Cosne there are
now more than six thousand. Within half a century the part played by
these two towns standing opposite each other has been reversed. . . .
Under such conditions, though there are the usual disadvantages of life
in a small town, and each one lives under the officious eye which makes
private life almost a public concern, on the other hand, the spirit of
township—a sort of patriotism, which cannot indeed take the place of
a love of home—flourishes triumphantly.58
58. Honoré de Balzac, La Muse du département (1837); English translation The Muse of
the Department, trans. James Waring, in The Works of Honoré de Balzac, vol. 15 (Boston:
Dana Estes, 1901), 224–225.
Clearly, there is a caesura between the time of Fielding and Richardson

and that of Scott and Balzac. Fielding moves in a conceptual ether made of
ahistorical notions, using an approach inherited from the New Comedy
that presupposes a fixist conception of characters and manners (“the great”
and “their inferiors,” men and women, “prudes” and “coquettes”). Rich-
ardson is imbued with the same static categories that Fielding uses (“young
ladies of virtue and honor,” “gentlemen of free lives”) and, officially at
least, he writes with an explicit prescriptive intent. Instead, Scott and Balzac
use concepts of a different type: they talk about social classes, they illus-
trate power relations, they describe commercial trends. The background
events are explained using sociological, political, and economic categories:
the Tory nobility and English gentlemen; the development and decline of
the town of Sancerre in relation to the wine market and the trade flows
along the Loire. They are set in a thoroughly historical dimension—in Wa-
verley, the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745; in The Muse of the Department,
1830 in France.
One of the guiding ideas that provides the groundwork for the schema
Auerbach presents in Mimesis is his thought on the historical frameworks
to which texts refer. Every text presupposes a web of concepts that situ-
ates the particular stories told in each individual text within a general
context. Arguing from a perspective of long duration, Auerbach identifies
three of these frameworks. The first is the static, atemporal mode used by
the classicist culture of antiquity to observe characters and manners,
running from Theophrastus to La Bruyère: with this final branch of the
genealogy in mind, perhaps, Auerbach calls it “moralistic.”59 The second is
the theological framework that made Christian realism possible. In its most
complex forms, this type of apparatus generated the frame encompassing
Augustine’s Confessions, which opens with a prayer to God and ends with a
commentary on the book of Genesis, or the conceptual architecture that
made Dante’s journey possible by imposing an order on the afterlife. In its
most common forms, this type can be seen in the sense of impermanence,
vanity, and sin accompanying medieval stories on human life. The third
frame of reference places particular people into a political, economic, and
social totality that varies according to the times and places. Unknown to
59. Auerbach, Mimesis, 28; in the same book, see the appendix (pp. 559–574), “Epile-
gomena to Mimesis” (1953), p. 561.
ancient and Christian literature, this conceptual environment emerged in

the modern era thanks to the realistic novels of the nineteenth century. Au-
erbach defines it as having “a sense of historical dynamics.”
The vocabulary Fielding’s narrator draws on to comment on events is
“moralistic,” in the sense that Auerbach gives to the word. Richardson’s
lexicon belongs to the same family as Christian realism and the poetics of
the exemplum. Scott and Balzac, on the other hand, live and breathe in a
new philosophical ether. A critical dividing line falls between the middle of
the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, the same one that
marks the dawning of modern human sciences. The conceptual ether of
contemporary fiction writers who look to the tradition of the novel is
largely composed of notions endowed with a sense of historical dynamics.
In its banal and ordinary form, this philosophical vocabulary finds ex-
pression in the categories of common sense that we usually use to interpret
life. We contemporaries link biographies to time and space on the basis of
historical, sociological, psychological, and economic notions that have be-
come sedimented in our outlook and in our doxa: these are the same ones
the human sciences claim to transform into episteme. For us, Rastignac is
neither the timeless Theophrastian Man of Petty Ambition nor a sinner
to be set up as an exemplum of vice: he is a young man belonging to the
provincial nobility who, like many of his peers living in France under the
Restoration, threw himself into the competitive regime of modern civil
society in order to work his way up in life. Most contemporary novelists
still use this lexicon. If we were to cite three of the most significant works
to appear in the past fifteen years, we might say that the conceptual lan-
guage used to set the characters’ stories within a universal context by
Philip Roth in American Pastoral (1997), Michel Houellebecq in Elemen-
tary Particles (1998), and Jonathan Littell in The Kindly Ones (2006) be-
longs to the same strain as the one used by Scott and Balzac as well as
by Jane Austen, Alessandro Manzoni, and Stendhal. The two centuries
separating us from the early 1800s have changed the vocabulary by re-
placing certain words with others, but the fundamental grammar has re-
mained the same.
The philosophical ether revealed by the sociohistorical novels of the early
nineteenth century is not entirely lacking in precedents. Some eighteenth-
century narratives focusing on phronesis anticipated the type of per-
spective that the realism of the next century would develop. However, this
is primarily because in the novel of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

there was a tradition of analysis of the inner life that crossed completely
unscathed over the dividing line we are describing. In 1830 Stendhal
wrote an essay titled “Walter Scott and The Princesse de Clèves.”60 In it, he
contrasts two novelistic models that seemed feasible to him in his time:
that of Madame de La Fayette, which privileges the meticulous descrip-
tion of the passions; and that of Scott, which privileges the meticulous de-
scription of the context. Officially, Stendhal liked the first and did not
appreciate the second; in reality, he was influenced by Scott much more
than he was willing to admit. The surface of their novels is completely dif-
ferent (Scott is wordy and systematic, Stendhal is quick and fragmented),
but the logic that their works obey is in many respects the same: Stendhal,
like Scott, locates the particular plot events within a general sociopolitical
context; the period and place in which the characters are born and live are
essential, determining structures. The heroes can rebel against the laws of
the context, but they cannot ignore them, because their lives and destinies
are always run through by the environment. A passage like the following
one would never have been written had Scott not contributed to intro-
ducing historical dynamics into the novel:
On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the
head of the youthful army which had just crossed the bridge at Lodi and
let the world know that after all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander
had a successor. The miracles of valour and of genius of which Italy was
the witness within a few months reawoke a slumbering people; a week
before the arrival of the French, the Milanese still saw them only as a
bunch of brigands, used always to taking flight faced by the troops of
His Imperial and Royal Majesty: that anyway was what a small news-
paper the size of a human hand, printed on filthy paper, repeated to them
three times a week. . . . An entire people realized, on 15 May 1796, that
everything it had respected hitherto was supremely ridiculous and some-
times odious. The departure of the last Austrian regiment signalled the
fall of the old ideas: to risk one’s life became the fashion; they could see
that in order to be happy after centuries of increasingly lukewarm sensa-
tions one needed to feel a genuine love of their homeland and go in quest
of heroic deeds. They had been plunged into blackest night by the
60. Stendhal, “Walter Scott et la Princesse de Clèves” (1830), in Mélanges de littérature,

vol. 3, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Le Divan, 1933).
continuation of the jealous despotism of Charles V and Philip II; their

statues were thrown down and they suddenly found themselves flooded
with light.61
The interesting part of Stendhal’s essay is not, therefore, his attack against
Scott, but his defense of Madame de La Fayette. In this case, Stendhal was
right: the tradition born with The Princesse de Clèves was still alive in
the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it contributed to creating
introspective masterpieces like Constant’s Adolphe and, as we have been
saying, Stendhal’s novels themselves. The two human sciences we encounter
most often in the narrators’ vocabularies are psychology and sociology: a
division corresponding to the split rooted in modern common sense be-
tween the I and the world, between “character” and “manners.” This
threshold could easily be deconstructed using the methods of abstract
thought and genealogical history, but the deconstruction would not elimi-
nate the enduring presence of the opposition as well as its value as a symptom.
Now: while the tradition of psychological analysis descending from Ma-
dame de La Fayette steadily converged into the lexicon of modern fiction,
the sociological categories of eighteenth-century narrative were quite dis-
similar from those that would prevail with the novel of the early nineteenth
century. In other words, if modern narrative sociology is a recent inven-
tion, a part of modern narrative psychology arrived prior to the nineteenth
century.
The Weight of Novels

The last aspect of the paradigm leap we are describing concerns the
weight that the novel had in the literary system and, more generally, among
games of truth. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the first half
of the nineteenth, the status of the genre changed: “dans un roman frivole
aisément tout s’excuse; / c’est assez qu’en courant la fiction amuse; / trop
de rigueur serait hors de saison,” wrote Boileau in The Art of Poetry
(1674)62 (in the historic translation by Soames and Dryden: “In a romance
61. Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme (1839, 1841); English translation The Charter-
house of Parma, trans. John Sturrock (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 7–8.
62. Nicolas Boileau, L’Art poétique (1674); English translation The Art of Poetry, trans.
Sir William Soames, revised by Sir John Dryden (London, 1683), chant 3, lines 119–121.
those errors are excused: / There ’tis enough that, reading, we’re amused: /
Rules too severe would there be useless found”). Boileau gave expression
to an opinion shared by almost all European classicist writers between the
second half of the sixteenth century and the second half of the eighteenth:
novels and romances were minor works; a serious man of letters might de-
rive some amusement from reading them, but it would be absurd to judge
them according the rules of the art or to put one’s hopes for glory in them.
Being foreign to the conventions prescribed by ancient poetry, they must
not be taken too seriously; lacking distinguished ancestors, they are works
of entertainment that will be swept away by time. This is the same attitude
that intellectuals from the second half of the twentieth century had (and
still have) when judging Hollywood movies and television shows.63 One
hundred and twenty years later, a writer who belonged to the same national
culture as Boileau considered the novel to be “one of the most beautiful
inventions of the human spirit” and one of the most useful to public mor-
als.64 For the avant-garde authors born between 1760 and 1780, for Ma-
dame de Staël as for Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Scott, or Foscolo, the
novel was a legitimate and important art form.
The genre acquired prestige partly because the rise of the novel and the
decline of the romance redefined its position. Boileau associated the term
roman with heroic Baroque novels; Madame de Staël associated it with
completely different texts. In the time separating Boileau’s Art of Poetry
(1674) from Madame de Staël’s Essay on Fictions (1795), French nouvelles,
the works of Prevost, Crébillon, Marivaux, Richardson, Fielding, Rousseau,
Goethe, Diderot, Laclos, Moritz, and the roman personnel that began to
spread at the end of the eighteenth century thanks to the influence of Rous-
seau and The Sorrows of Young Werther had demonstrated that the novel
was no longer a minor genre. Similarly, Reitz’s Heimat (1984–2004),
Greenaway’s A TV Dante (1989–1991), Von Trier’s Medea (1988) and The
Kingdom (1994), Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990–1991), and a number of Amer-
ican television series from the past thirty years, from Hill Street Blues
(1981–1987) to The Wire (2002–2008) or Mad Men (2007–2015), made it
63. See Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 6; Siti, “The Novel on Trial,” 94.
64. Madame de Staël, Essai sur les fictions (1795), in Œuvres de jeunesse, ed. John Isbell
(Paris: Desjonquères, 1997), 146.
conceivable that the medium of television was capable of producing works

of art and not only degraded forms of entertainment.
The metaphor of the novel as a book of life already began to appear in
the first half of the eighteenth century. At the beginning, it did not have the
weight that it would acquire between the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, because it was a variant of the expressions used by ancient poetics to
define comedy, as we saw in Chapter 2. In his introduction to The Wander-
ings of the Heart and Mind (1735–1738), Crébillon wrote:
The novel [roman], so disdained by the judicious, and often with reason,
is of all literary forms the one which could perhaps be made the most
useful, if it were managed; if, instead of filling it with farfetched and
obscure situations, and heroes whose characters and adventures are
alike always incredible, we were to make it, like comedy, a picture of
human life [le tableau de la vie humaine], in which we censured vice
and folly.65
In the “Discours sur le roman” that opens Theresa, histoire italienne

(1745) by Baculard d’Arnaud, we read that the roman provides a natural
picture of society that is within everybody’s reach. These expressions of
praise were made possible by the transformation that the genre underwent
when the novel prevailed over the romance and the old romance tales were
pushed aside by “modern works”:
The roman is very different. I want to talk about these modern works,
like Cleveland, Les Mémoires d’un homme de qualité, Marianne, Le
Paysan parvenu, Les Égarements du cœur, Les Confessions du comte de
* * *, and not those pitiful productions born of an impoverished imagi-
nation known by the name of tales [fables]. The novel thus represents
man as he is, his virtues and vices. It is a natural picture of society [tab-
leau naturel de la société] within everybody’s reach. All readers can enjoy
the pleasure of recognizing themselves, of discovering themselves in them;
and as a consequence, the pleasure of being entertained and instructed at
the same time, in a much better way than slogging through history
books.66
65. Claude Crébillon, Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit (1735–1738); English trans-
lation The Wayward Head and Heart, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Oxford University Press
1963), xvi.
66. Cited in May, Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle, 148–149.
Four years later, in Tom Jones, the painting turned into a book: Fielding
talks about the novel as a “doomsday-book of nature,” a cadastre of human
nature. But these formulations by Crébillon, Baculard d’Arnaud, and
Fielding still show their kinship with the culture of classicism and aesthetic
Platonism, either because they apply the canonical definition of comedy to
the novel or because they continue to operate in a system of hierarchies
within which the comedy and the novel, although garnering value, can
never attain the symbolic weight of tragedy or epic poetry.
When Diderot published his “Éloge de Richardson” in 1762, his descrip-
tion of the novel included new emphases:
O Richardson! I dare say that the most truthful history is full of lies
and that your novel is full of truths. History depicts only a few indi-
viduals, while you depict the human race. History attributes to a few
individuals things they have neither said nor done; everything you attri-
bute to human beings, they have said and done. History encompasses
only one portion of time, only one point on the surface of the globe; you
encompass all places and all times. The model from which you copy is
the human heart, which was, is, and will always be the same. If we sub-
mitted the best historian to a harsh critique, would he be able to stand
up to it as you have? From this point of view, I dare say that history is
often a bad novel, and that the novel, as you have made it, is a good
history.67
A year earlier The New Heloise had appeared, meeting with as much suc-
cess as Pamela. It is not unlikely that Diderot wrote the Éloge de Rich-
ardson partly to restore the Englishman’s stature, diminishing Rousseau’s
role.68 But even if this were the case, the writers Diderot implicitly com-
pares were divided by a crucial sociological difference. Although he was
indebted to Richardson, the author of The New Heloise occupied a very
different position in the contemporary literary field from the one occu-
pied by the author of Pamela: in 1740 Richardson was a printer with no
reputation whatsoever; in 1761 Rousseau had already written the Dis-
course on the Arts and Sciences and the Discourse on the Origin of In-
equality; the following year he would publish the Social Contract. Although
notorious for being somewhat of a bizarre person, he was nonetheless one
67. Diderot, “In Praise of Richardson,” 90.

68. Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness, 163ff.
of the most talked-about philosophers of his time. In his Conversation

about Novels that prefaces the new editions of The New Heloise, Rous-
seau refers to novels using the expression “tableaux of humankind” (tab-
leaux de l’humanité).69
The passage from Pamela to The New Heloise also shows that, starting
in the 1760s, the novel was attracting a growing number of educated men
of letters. The Sorrows of Young Werther, the book that gave rise to a so-
cial phenomenon in the 1770s comparable to the one caused in 1740 by
the printer Samuel Richardson, was the work of a writer with a solid clas-
sicist culture. We begin to see the same dialectic that runs through our genre
today: one portion of the novel is aimed at readers of average or low edu-
cation, another at highly educated and specialized readers. It may happen
that some of the works from the second type are also successful with the
broader public, but the dividing line remains. Between the second half of
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, there arose
“pride in the novel,”70 the awareness that this art form can impart truths
about life and the world that escape philosophy, science, and religion. The
first traces of a now modern, postclassicist use of the book metaphor are
to be found in German aesthetics during the last half of the eighteenth
century, especially in Blanckenburg’s Versuch über den Roman (1774).71
At the end of the eighteenth century, when Novalis wrote that the novel is
a life in the form of a book,72 the image now meant what it would for D. H.
Lawrence in 1925. In Italian literature, one of the decisive symbolic events
was the choice Manzoni made around 1821 to stop writing tragedies in
order to devote himself instead to the first draft of The Betrothed. He re-
jected a traditional literary genre to make a high-culture use of a new, popular
form.73
Certainly, the number and variety of works that went by the name of
novels, as well as the dual literary regime divided between an elite public
and the general readership, enveloped the genre in an air of suspicion even
69. Rousseau, Julie, or The New Heloise, 8.

70. Siti, “L’orgoglio del romanzo.”
71. Blanckenburg, Versuch über den Roman, xv.
72. “Ein Roman ist ein Leben, als Buch.” Novalis, Teplitzer Fragmente, in Das
philosophisch-theoretische Werk, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978), 388.
73. See Daniela Brogi, Il genere proscritto. Manzoni dalla tragedia al romanzo (Pisa:
Giardini, 2005).
after 1800. The process leading to legitimacy was long, tortuous, and strati-
fied. For a large part of the nineteenth century, the novel continued to
receive criticism even within the predominant European narrative tradi-
tions. In France, the controversy about its prestige, value, and place in the
history of literature still raged during the Romantic period. Important
writers had dedicated themselves to the novel, but the production of enter-
tainment and the well-established critical topoi slowed its widespread
acceptance. The debate was resolved around 1830, when the birth of the
French social novel was accompanied by a critical discourse presenting
the works of Stendhal and Balzac as the intellectual redemption of a
form that until then had been intended for entertainment.74 Although
useful for purposes of self-promotion, this idea was actually controversial,
because, while the reputation of the French novel was still being con-
tested, the genre had already been dignified by authors like Rousseau,
Diderot, Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, and Constant.75 Interestingly
enough, in a review appearing in 1832 in the Revue de Paris, the choice
to abandon tragedy in favor of the novel is described as typical of the
latest generation of writers: “Only a few years ago, young people fresh out
of secondary schools wanted to write a tragedy, if they didn’t already have
one in hand. . . . Now that tragedy is dead . . . , every high-school student
begins with a novel, and as we’ve seen, many learned writers also end
with one.”76
The text that symbolically enshrined the consecration of the genre in
France was Balzac’s 1842 introduction to The Human Comedy. Here
Balzac presents the novel as a noble form of knowledge, as a game of truth
rivaling philosophy, history, and the sciences. The novelist will be the zo-
ologist of the human species, the historian of manners, the historian of the
human heart, a competitor to civil status. The novelist will rediscover the
spirit of laws fallen into disuse and explain the life of peoples. He or she will
primarily search for causes and principles,77 laying claim to the intellectual
gesture that had defined philosophy starting from the opening pages of
Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Balzac’s view was not an isolated case: in French
74. Margaret Cohen also reconstructs this discourse in The Sentimental Education of the
Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
75. See Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France, chap. 3.
76. Review of Sous les tilleuls by Alphonse Karr, in Revue de Paris 4, no. 41 (1832): 128.
77. Balzac, “Author’s Introduction” to The Human Comedy.
literary debates of the 1830s, sparked by the attacks Nisard launched

against the genre around 1833, many people treated the novel as an
important form of knowledge about life.78 The traditionalist fringes of the
literary field remained wary, however: until at least the middle of the nine-
teenth century, the French novel continued to be targeted by moralistic
attacks from the medical establishment, the Church, and the conservative
press.79
In Britain, Scott was a decisive author for many reasons, starting with
the fact that he turned to the novel after having already secured a reputa-
tion as a poet. This is how a reviewer of Waverley commented on this
choice in the Critical Review: “Why a poet of established fame should
dwindle into a scribbler of novels, we cannot tell.”80 In addition to
choosing a genre still considered to be risky, through his essays the au-
thor of Waverley consigned it to the history of literature by constructing
a critical discourse around the eighteenth-century novel, treating as a cul-
tural institution what many, until then, had considered a form of enter-
tainment.81 British debates on the value of the novel extended beyond
the mid-nineteenth century. In the essay “Criticism in Relation to Novels”
(1865), George Henry Lewes writes that “although the fame of a great
novelist is only something less than the fame of a great poet, and the
reputation of a clever novelist is far superior to that of a respectable
poet,” there remains something condescending in the way critics talk
about the novel, suggesting that, in spite of everything, the genre was still
a minor, facile form.82 As the nineteenth century progressed, those who
attacked the novel found themselves in the rear guard more often than
not: the new genre could still be criticized, but its legitimacy was con-
tinually gaining ground.83
78. See Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France, 64ff., and Judith Lyon-Caen, La Lec-
ture et la Vie: les usages du roman au temps de Balzac (Paris: Tallandier, 2006), 50ff.
79. See Lyon-Caen, La Lecture et la Vie, 56ff.
80. Cited in James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1936), 76.
81. Brown, Institutions of the English Novel, 176ff.
82. George Henry Lewes, “Criticism in Relation to Novels,” Fortnightly Review 3 (De-
cember 15, 1865–February 1, 1866): 352.
83. Stang, The Theory of the Novel in England, 3–46.
If we wanted to identify a threshold in this slow transformation that

took place in different layers, lasting almost a century, we would have to
choose the year 1800. The date serves as a frontier both because it marks
the midpoint between the time in which some avant-garde writers, such as
Rousseau and Goethe, began to devote themselves to the novel, and the
moment in which the rise of the genre became a fait accompli; also because
it indicates the symbolic boundary starting from which the new form
displayed its revolutionary character. We have seen that the early modern
history of the novel is the history of a dialectic: some of its elements con-
flicted with classicism and Christian aesthetic Platonism, while others were
completely permeated with them. For a long time, writers and critics sought
legitimacy by accentuating the continuous aspect. Friedrich Schlegel was
the first to openly insist on the breach that the novel introduced into Euro-
pean literary history. Many writers of his generation followed suit. Born
between two paradigms, Madame de Staël, Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis,
Scott, and Foscolo clearly perceived this historic threshold. The literature
that continued to operate within the structures of sense derived from clas-
sicist and Platonic sources possessed a ritual system of forms and content;
the new literature entered into the domain of particularity and proliferated
without rules. One might have thought that the metamorphosis began with
the advent of Christianity or the Middle Ages, according to a historical-
philosophical schema popular in the culture of German idealism; the first
signs of rupture might have been identified in Dante or Shakespeare. But in
the end, the genre that contributed to broadening the mimesis of particu-
larity more than any other, and to writing the inner and outer history of
private life, was unquestionably the novel.84
84. Friedrich Schlegel uses the word Roman in a narrow sense and in a broad sense, in the
first case to indicate the genre we are examining, and in the second to indicate “every ro-
mantic book,” such as Dante’s Divine Comedy or the works of Shakespeare. This juxtaposi-
tion contains a condensed philosophy of history: according to Schlegel, the search for the
individual, the characteristic, the interesting singularity that the novel makes manifest, al-
ready came to light in Dante or Shakespeare. See fragments V, 76, 86, 359 in Friedrich
Schlegel, Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur, part 1, ed. Hans Eichner (Munich: Paderborn;
Zürich: F. Schöningh Thomas-Verlag, 1981); see also his Dialogue on Poetry, 72.
The Expansion of the Narratable World
We have seen the two-thousand-year-old structures of sense that the

novel dissolved; we must now speak about the structures that came into
being during the new era. The first a priori of modern mimesis is its theo-
retical lack of rituality—its virtual absence of constraints. The literature
of the past two centuries can represent anything in any way whatsoever:
ahead of their time, Schlegel’s theories describe processes that attained
complete form only over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. The direct consequence of this transformation was an enormous
expansion of the narratable world. This broadening took place along
three directions: the first two correspond to “the liberation of subjec-
tivity, in accordance with its inner contingency” (individual imagination,
autobiography, introspection); the third to “the imitation of external ob-
jectivity in all its contingent shapes”85 (stories about the external world
or “realism”).
1. The English gothic novel and the narrative fiction of German Romanti-
cism expanded the territory of mimesis to imaginary universes that lay very
distant from common sense. They ushered in the modern period of fan-
tastic literature and created a new form of romance. Out of this there arose
a tradition that would traverse the entire nineteenth century: from the gothic
novel to Hoffmann, from Potocki to Mary Shelley, from Edgar Allan Poe
to Nerval and Théophile Gautier, from Bram Stoker to Wilkie Collins. It was
also practiced by the authors of novels who, starting from the 1830s, would
be called “realistic”: from Balzac and Flaubert to Maupassant and Henry
James. As heir to the premodern romance, the new unreal literature no
longer sought legitimacy by claiming to describe the world according to the
poetic order of the idea, namely, according to a public exemplarity given as
an a priori, but rather as a creation of the subjective imagination. On the
other hand, it also took up some of the descriptive traits that the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century novel had developed to create a reality effect. In this
way it revived the conception of the supernatural by rooting fantastic tales
in the concreteness of the sensible and the everyday.

2. During the same years, a new type of autobiographical narrative devel-

oped that at the beginning of the twentieth century Joachim Merlant would
call the roman personnel.86 It brought together the autobiographical tradi-
tion descending from Rousseau’s Confessions with the novel-diary that
arose out of the transformations that The New Heloise and The Sorrows
of Young Werther introduced into the epistolary genre.87 This is the group
of texts best corresponding to Schlegel’s idea that many novels are actually,
more or less covertly, confessions of the author.88 Moreover, the roman per-
sonnel expanded during the same period that Schlegel was writing his theory
of the novel: Foscolo’s The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798–1817), Cha-
teaubriand’s Atala (1801) and René (1802), Madame de Staël’s Delphine
(1802) and Corinne (1807), Senancour’s Obermann (1804), Madame de
Krüdener’s Valérie (1804), and Constant’s Adolphe (1816) came out
only a few years earlier or later than the Dialogue on Poetry and the
Athenaeum Fragments. While fantastic literature multiplied imaginary
worlds, the roman personnel collected together confessions from the au-
thor or sentimental stories, ushering into narrative fiction the multiform
contingency of personal life—the accidentality of private biography.
3. During the nineteenth century, the novel appropriated the objective

variety of life with a breadth of vision unknown to previous fiction. In
1795 Madame de Staël attested to the persistence of a topos with a centu-
ries-old history: at the end of the eighteenth century, writes the author of
the Essay on Fictions, the novel is still considered a genre in which one
speaks of love. To make use of the possibilities implicit in this literary
form, she suggests, we should instead talk about all the passions, even
those of adulthood: ambition, pride, avarice, vanity. This sort of tableau of
the inner life, writes de Staël, already exists in works of history; but while
historiography is limited to recounting the events of public figures, the
novel talks about private persons like us and therefore has a truly uni-
versal value.89 In 1795, this program was still largely hypothetical, because
86. See Joachim Merlant, Le Roman personnel de Rousseau à Fromentin (1905) (Geneva:
Slatkine, 1978).
87. On the transformation of the epistolary novel into the eighteenth-century novel-diary,
see Rousset, “Une forme littéraire: le roman par lettres.”
89. Madame de Staël, Essai sur les fictions, 146.
at the end of the eighteenth century the novel was still perceived by many
as a genre whose staple was love stories;90 about half a century later,
when Balzac proposed to describe every class, every character, every
custom of contemporary France, like a Buffon of the social life,91 the pro-
gram set out in the Essay on Fictions received a sort of symbolic crowning.
The Human Comedy fully accomplished a process that began with the
German Bildungsroman and the roman personnel, and continued with
Jane Austen and the historical novels of Scott and Stendhal. What Balzac
says about the innovations introduced by Scott into the history of narra-
tive fiction can be interpreted in this light: “The biggest criticism that
has been made about him is that he gave love a secondary role. . . . Envy,
hatred, false zeal, superstition, and fanaticism are the passions that come
naturally into his frame because of the importance and nature of the
subject.”92
A few decades later, the project of The Human Comedy—the utopia
of a fictional cycle mimicking the totality of social life—consecrated a
literary genre that openly defied the other language games, presenting
itself as the most important discursive formation of humankind, as the
true book of life. It was the first time this had happened in such explicit
terms.
We have seen that a revolutionary expansion of forms of life embedded
in the narrative had already taken place between the last decades of the
seventeenth century and the second half of the eighteenth. This was when
the novel shifted interest to stories about private people, when works were
invaded by a new mass of characters and things, and when heroes and ac-
tions that the classicist literary system had confined to the comic register
became the object of serious and problematic storytelling. But if we look
at the overall picture of the eighteenth-century novel from the perspective
of 1850, the year of Balzac’s death, it can clearly be seen that between
The Human Comedy and the narrative fiction of the eighteenth century
there falls another threshold. Expanding the narratable world did not
mean just making all its subject matters available; it also meant incorpo-
90. See Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel, 3ff.

91. Balzac, “Author’s Introduction” to The Human Comedy, lv.
92. Honoré de Balzac, “Les Eaux de Saint-Ronan par Sir Walter Scott” (1824), in Œuvres
diverses, vol. 2, ed. Roland Chollet, René Guise, and Christiane Guise (Paris: Gallimard,
1996), 107.
rating subject matters that the novel had not possessed until then and which
acquired a crucial value for the readers of the new epoch. The possibility
of telling stories about anything in any way whatsoever is the first charac-
teristic of modern narrative; the second involves the appropriation of these
new types of content. What were these all about?
The Middle Station of Life
At the beginning of Robinson Crusoe, the father of the protagonist has an

important talk with his son. Robinson would like to be a sailor; his father
would prefer him to study law and achieve a good position in life.
Mr. Crusoe is a merchant from Bremen who emigrated to Hull—the English
habit of mispronouncing words transformed his family surname from
Kreutznaer to Crusoe. Thanks to his business, Mr. Kreutznaer accumulates
a modest fortune: he retires from work, moves to York, and marries. Rob-
inson is his third son: the first, an officer in the infantry, died fighting
against the Spaniards in Dunkirk; Robinson knows nothing about the
second. Mr. Kreutznaer, now afflicted with gout, is very concerned about
the fate of his youngest son.
He called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by
the gout, and expostulated very warmly with me upon this subject. He
asked me what reasons, more than a mere wandering inclination, I had
for leaving my father’s house and my native country, where I might be
well introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortune by application
and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure. He told me it was men of
desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the
other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make
themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road;
that these things were all either too far above me or too far below me; that
mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of
low life, which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the
world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries
and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of man-
kind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of
the upper part of mankind.93
93. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 4–5.

This passage is fundamental to the history of the novel.94 Faced with a

son who seeks adventure, Robinson’s father lays out the advantages of the
middle state or, as he calls it a few lines later, the middle station of life: a
comfortable fate, with no adventures, miseries, or vicissitudes, with every-
thing needed to attain private happiness, to go “silently and smoothly
through the world, and comfortably out of it.”95
A hidden, literary moral sense could be picked up in Mr. Kreutznaer’s
words. “Undertakings of a nature out of the common road” also provided
the primary material for narrative fiction written up to this point: when
Robinson’s father talks about the instability that awaits those of aspiring,
superior fortunes or those of desperate fortunes, he is also tracing out a
history of epic art. The heroes of epos or serious romance are men of as-
piring, superior fortunes who go abroad in search of adventure; the heroes
of comic romance are men of desperate fortune who suffer the upheavals
of fate. For those who judge these lives from the perspective of the middle
class, the deeds of knights and the wanderings of picaros appear equally
alien.
The notion of the middle station of life emerged out of the interweaving
of three different strands. First, the medietas of social conditions, of be-
longing to a class that is neither too rich nor too poor. Second, the medietas
of experiences: while “men of desperate fortunes or of aspiring superior
fortunes” go in search of adventure, men of the middle state remain in the
world of bourgeois normalcy and pursue private happiness through quiet,
industrious lives. Finally, the rootedness in a stable, limiting environment:
adventures presuppose an abstract, dynamic world where anything can
happen; Robinson’s father is surrounded by an orderly, regular reality,
consisting of mechanisms, duties, work, family, money, and repetition.
Circumstances have little effect on epic heroes, on the heroes of chivalric
romance, or on picaros: the environment remains extraneous to the text, or
it is presented as a vague backdrop to the adventures, not as an a priori
that determines individual lives. Mr. Kreutznaer, however, enters into the
text marked by a place and a date of birth, by a family status and a social
94. See Gianni Celati, Finzioni occidentali (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 29–30. On mediocrity
as the specific sphere of the modern novel, see also Thorel-Cailleteau, Splendeurs de la
médiocrité.
95. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 10.
class: the world, for him, is a regulated and predictable horizon, a milieu
that weighs on people’s destinies, making them predictable in their turn. At
the same time that Robinson’s father is explaining the existential model of
the Puritan middle class between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
he is also describing the future: the middle state exists in every culture, but
the modern era extended, consolidated, and transformed it into a project
of life, thanks to the new ethics of bourgeois normalcy focused on work
and family. This is the sphere that Charles Taylor, unwittingly using an ex-
pression that recurred often in prefaces and reviews of English novels,
called ordinary life.96 The culture of antiquity had always neglected ordi-
nary life—what free men share with animals and slaves—subordinating it
to political action, to the contemplative life, or to the search for wisdom.
With the advent of bourgeois society, work and family became what they
had never been in previous cultures: absolute reasons for living.97 And yet
Robinson Crusoe does not tell the story of Mr. Kreutznaer’s middle state:
instead, it gives an account of the “strange surprizing adventures” of his
son, as the book title announces, because in order to capture readers’ in-
terest, Defoe still needed to transcend medietas. Three-quarters of a century
later, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796) also talked
about everyday life—it was one of the first novels to do so.98 However, the
architrave that holds up the novelistic edifice is not the destiny of Werner,
the merchant, but that of Wilhelm, the artist. In reflecting on his relationship
with Mariane, Wilhelm realizes that the reason the girl is so important to
him is because she can save him from the “stifling, draggle-tailed middle-class
existence.”99 Compared to Robinson Crusoe, the middle station of life
has gained ground to become the backdrop against which everyone’s sto-
ries stand out in relief. But the fulcrum of the narrative discontinuity is,
once again, a special character: bourgeois existence is not interesting.100
96. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 23–25 and part 3, “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life,”
211–304.
97. Ibid., 211ff.
98. Franco Moretti, “Prefazione 1999,” in Il romanzo di formazione (1986, 1999); En-
glish translation “Preface: Twenty Years Later,” in The Way of the World, trans. Alberto
Sbragia (London: Verso, 2000).
99. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, bk. 1, chap. 9, p. 16.
100. See Moretti, “Preface: Twenty Years Later.”
About thirty-five years later, however, Balzac embarked on the project of

The Human Comedy, which made every life seem charged with interest
and conflicts, even those of people similar in every respect to Robinson’s
father. Only a few years after Balzac’s death, Flaubert could have de-
scribed Kreutznaer’s existence in all its banality, while Tolstoy and George
Eliot could have imparted relative truths about it, juxtaposing it to the
parallel movement of other people, each enclosed inside his or her own
limited world, each locked into the unseeing movement of the whole. An-
other threshold thus lies between Robinson Crusoe and the nineteenth
century.
The Serious Mimesis of Everyday Life
The philosophy of literary history that Auerbach puts forward in Mimesis

culminates in the nineteenth century with the rise of an entirely modern
way of telling stories. As we have said, Auerbach identifies two mimetic
models that go back thousands of years: the first, of classical origin, is in-
formed by a hierarchical and “moralistic” vision of life; the second, of
Judeo-Christian origin, comes from an egalitarian and theological vision.
At the end of a process beginning in the sixteenth century and culminating
only with the realistic novel of the nineteenth century, both these para-
digms were replaced by a third form of mimesis. This form was also egali-
tarian, but independent of the theological model and entirely immanent: it
destroyed the hierarchy between classes, types of actions, and styles, and
made it possible to tell about the ordinary life of common people in a se-
rious way. Auerbach defines it in a number of ways: “modern tragic realism
based on the contemporary”;101 “the serious realism of modern times [that]
cannot represent man otherwise than as embedded in a total reality, po-
litical, social, and economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving—
as is the case today in any novel or film”;102 “atmospheric realism” (atmo-
sphärische Realistik) associated with atmospheric historicism.103 But the
clearest, most detailed account is the following:

102. Ibid., 463.
103. Ibid., 491.
The serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and
socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for
problematic-existential representation (problematisch-existentieller
Darstellung), on the one hand; on the other, the embedding of random
persons and events in the general course of contemporary history, the
fluid historical background (Hintergrund)—these, we believe, are the
foundations of modern realism.104
This definition is the best because it includes the two elements that make
up modern realism. We have already talked about the second definition: at
the beginning of the nineteenth century, novels endowed themselves with a
new conceptual ether and set their stories against a backdrop consisting of
ideas with a sense of historical dynamics. The first definition is a new way
of expressing what Auerbach called das Alltägliche, the everyday, which he
usually associates with the adjectives ernst, problematisch, tragisch (serious,
problematic, tragic). Sometimes he also uses existentiell: in the “Epilegomena
to Mimesis,” Auerbach writes that he had initially thought about calling
the set of themes and forms subsequently designated as “a mixture of seri-
ousness and the everyday” “existential realism,” but in the end he was re-
luctant to use such a modern expression for a phenomenon whose earliest
forms dated back to the distant past.105
What is the “everyday” for Auerbach? The most explicit passage in Mi-
mesis is the following: “There could be no serious literary treatment [in
antiquity] of everyday occupations and social classes—merchants, artisans,
peasants, slaves—of everyday scenes and places—home, shop, field, store—
of everyday customs and institutions—marriage, children, work, earning a
living.”106 The “everyday” thus refers to a social condition (the middle and
lower classes) and to a sphere of experience, fenced in by the institutional
practices of common life (work and family), understood in a broader sense
as well (the search for one’s place in the world through career or marriage),
and located in a historical context. What these various areas had in common
was a form of censorship: due to the rule of the separation of styles they
would have been unworthy of tragic or problematic interest. It must be
added that Alltägliche, in Auerbach, is not necessarily tied to uneventfulness,
104. Ibid.
105. Auerbach, “Epilegomena to Mimesis,” 560.
to average everydayness dominated by repetition: the first writers who

felt called on to represent the new tendency were Stendhal and Balzac, whose
ernste Nachahmung des Alltäglichen (serious imitation of the everyday) arose
out of exceptional states, out of adventures in the everyday. It was not a cat-
egory, therefore, that described the flatness of ordinary life.
Aristotle’s people like us, Defoe’s middle station of life, Auerbach’s
Alltägliche, and Taylor’s ordinary life are linked by a family resemblance.
The bond of this kinship is their referral to the same form of life—a form
that exists in all cultures, but that only modern bourgeois culture trans-
formed into an ethical and existential ideal. For the first time in European
history, certain experiences gained the right to serious, tragic, and problem-
atic mimesis, taking center stage on the literary scene. While the overall
direction of the transformation might be clear, when the transition took
place is not. A debate at a distance on this issue divides Auerbach from
some of his commentators. While the author of Mimesis attaches a deci-
sive role to the French social novel of the early nineteenth century, Ian Watt
attributes it to the works of Richardson,107 and Francisco Rico to Lazarillo
and Guzman—to the Spanish picaresque novels written before the sub-
genre of the picaresque slid into the comic.108 Uncertainty on this topic is
inevitable because the concepts around which Mimesis is constructed main-
tain an intentional air of vagueness, because the transformation was a
systemic process lasting centuries, punctuated by phases that varied de-
pending on the national literatures, and because Auerbach’s Alltägliche, like
the middle station of life, is a composite notion that weaves together
various aspects. Where should the break be situated in a process that, like
all great historical metamorphoses, developed slowly?
Let us consider some of the major texts in the rise of the novel. Lazarillo
seems to be partly unaffected by the Stiltrennung: the work can be viewed
as having a serious and problematic intent; the character comes from the
lower stratum of society. However, the entire story line is programmatically
adventurous, and it disregards the institutional normalcy of everyday life.
The Princesse de Clèves admirably reduces the number of exceptional
107. Watt, The Rise of the Novel.

108. Rico, The Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Point of View, 126ff. See also by the
same author, “Realtà e realismo,” paper delivered at the conference “Auerbach’s Mimesis: A
Critical Assessment 60 Years Later,” held in Pisa at the Scuola Normale Superiore, March 16,
2007.
states and tells of an intimate conflict almost completely devoid of melodra-

matic theatricality and adventure. Although the characters are aristocrats,
they act like private persons rather than members of a class that has, or may
have, a public function. Still, there is no mixing of styles and classes, and the
story remains confined to a social circle that does not engage in work and
has no practical responsibilities except to safeguard its honor and reputa-
tion. During the eighteenth century, the forms of narrative fiction describing
heroes theoretically like us were the autobiographies of private people,
whether real or fictitious, the epistolary novel, and the comic romance.
The form most closely linked to premodern literature is the latter, which
described particularity in many of its aspects. It also produced works like
Tom Jones, in which the legacy of the Stiltrennung can still be felt due to the
strong presence of the comic-intermediate register and the “moralistic”
categories. The other eighteenth-century subgenres I have mentioned went
beyond the separation of styles, but lacked the characteristics required to
seriously represent the ordinary life. The characters who won the right to
the memoir and autobiography, the heroes of Defoe, Marivaux, or Prévost,
might come from the middle state or pass through it in one stage of their
lives, but the experiences and adventures they encountered lie outside work-
and family-related spheres. The same holds for the protagonists of the
epistolary novel, a genre that describes the exceptional state induced by
love but only marginally takes into account the institutional and prosaic
aspects of this passion. Even when the heroines are maidservants or come
from a middle-class environment, the passions and adventures they are led
into maintain a certain distance from the mechanics of the common life.
Pamela and Clarissa want to preserve their honor and must do so: this is
the link between their personal history and society as an institutional order.
Nevertheless, it is sufficient to compare this substrate with the lingering
portrayals of the practical consequences of Lydia’s love for Wickham in
Pride and Prejudice in order to understand the sense and direction of this
metamorphosis.
Auerbach’s critics are right to point out that some elements of the seri-
ousness of the everyday appeared before the nineteenth century. However,
it was only in the 1800s that novels began to construct plots in which the
middle station of life was described, without resorting to exceptional states.
What is still missing in the works of Defoe but appears in various forms
in the works of Austen, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and George Eliot, is a
serious, profound lingering on a sphere of reality that the modern world

transformed into the symbolic center of every life.
The World of Prose
Theories of the novel of the past two centuries can be grouped into two
large families. So far we have looked extensively at the one descending
from the works of Friedrich Schlegel and culminating in the works of
Bakhtin. The second takes its lead from the thoughts developed by Hegel
in his Aesthetics. His ideas on the novel profoundly influenced twentieth-
century criticism: Lukács, for example, had them in mind both before and
after his adherence to Marxism.109 The Aesthetics left an equally visible
trace in the literary history produced by Auerbach.
For Hegel, the essential characteristic of the genre was not the creation
of subjective worlds, polyphony, or the protean capacity to narrate any-
thing in any way whatsoever, but rather the relationship the novel enter-
tains with a historic period of the objective spirit: the “world of prose and
everyday.” Hegel describes it by comparing it with the “heroic age” that
made epos and tragedy possible.110 Epic and tragic actions have a universal
meaning because they construct or symbolize collective destinies. They
evoke an epoch in which institutions have not yet hardened into supraper-
sonal mechanisms and the deeds of a single individual can have a cosmic-
historical significance, as they do in the Iliad, when the fight between Achilles
and Hector decides the fate of two peoples in a public duel. Instead, the
“prose of the world” arises when collective destinies are decided by states,
laws, and institutions, and when individual action has a limited value:
In the world of today the individual subject may of course act of himself
in this or that matter, but still every individual, wherever he may twist or
turn, belongs to an established social order and does not appear himself
109. The difference between epos and the novel as it is presented in The Theory of the
Novel, for example, derives from Hegelian theory: the epic hero acts as the representative of
a community in a world whose values still have a major significance; the acts of the novelistic
hero are motivated by private aims, by “demons” (i.e., by exiled, unrecognized gods), and in
a world ruled by mechanisms and conventions; see Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, chap. 3.
110. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, pp. 179ff.
as the independent, total, and at the same time individual living embodi-
ment of this society, but only as a restricted member of it. He acts, there-
fore, also as only involved in it, and interest in such a figure, like the
content of its aims and activity, is unendingly particular.111
The prose of the everyday is the condition of typical life in modern so-
ciety, where collective decisions are made by state policy, relations between
people are governed by the law, and division of labor funnels people into
specializations, separates the microcosms, and makes each individual a lim-
ited subject, closed up inside a restricted circle of particular interests. As
the “modern bourgeois epic,” the novel describes this condition: it tells the
stories of individuals who pursue their private aims in the midst of other
individuals who pursue other private aims, moving in a predictable reality
that is desacralized and organized according to the mechanisms of the state
and civil society.
The “world of prose and everyday” completes the family resemblance
we mentioned earlier, since it is the most acute way of conceiving the his-
torical phase that supports people like us, the existence of laboratores.
There is a clear relationship between the middle station of life and the
world of prose: they are two ways of thinking about the same form of
life—a form in which the space for heroic action and adventure has been
narrowed and people exist as isolated and situated individuals, provided
with a date of birth, a place of birth, a job, and a family status. Hegel’s
conception also brings together the two elements Auerbach identifies in
modern realism: the serious mimesis of people like us, and the presence of
a universal background with a sense of historical dynamics. In such a
world, individual paths are conditioned by suprapersonal forces: to tell the
story of a private matter also means telling about the collective circum-
stances surrounding it.
The first structures of sense underpinning the modern narrative space—its
virtual anarchy—corresponds perfectly to the theories of Schlegel and
Bakhtin. For an illustration of this, just browse the spines of novels stacked
on a bookstore shelf: there are all sorts. But if we based our understanding
on this a priori, we would get a distorted image: the ways of writing novels
111. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 194.

over the past two centuries are theoretically limitless, but they do not all
lie on the same plane. The reason the novel has proved to be such an
important game of truth is not solely and primarily because of its capacity
to tell any story in any way whatsoever. More important than this generic
flexibility was the dawning of a specific mimetic mode that did not exist
before a certain date and that became a deciding factor for the representa-
tion of the modern world. The novel became important mainly because it
told serious stories about the lives of people like us in the middle station of
life—private individuals immersed in the prose of the everyday who,
thanks to the bourgeois form of life, became a class that earned the right
to serious mimesis and the capacity to impose its values as absolute. While
Schlegel’s and Bakhtin’s theories describe the general morphology of the
modern narrative space, the dominant form appears to be Hegelian and
Auerbachian. This idea clashes with some of the critical topoi of our time
and begs for two clarifications.
Center and Periphery
1. The capacity to represent the world of prose in a problematic way did

not coincide with the realistic novel of the nineteenth century. The phenom-
enon must not be confused with its origin: the serious mimesis of everyday
life emerged in the course of the 1800s, but it extended into new forms
during the 1900s, maintaining a central position in the field of modern fic-
tion. We must not think about a restricted poetics, but about an expansive
structure of sense that took the place of classicism and Christian aesthetic
Platonism, that lives in the long duration, and, like the a prioris it replaced,
is traversed by a dialectic between continuity and change. One of the most
fundamental parts of the historical schema of Mimesis is precisely this in-
terweaving between persistence and transformations. In some respects, the
modernist novels Auerbach discusses subvert the architecture of the
nineteenth-century novel; in other respects, though, they prolong its legacy,
to the extent that they remain bound to the same fundamental premise—the
serious mimesis of everyday life placed against a background that pos-
sesses a sense of historical dynamics. What unites Flaubert to Proust, War
and Peace to Ulysses, or, to stay with texts commented on in Mimesis,
Stendhal to Virginia Woolf, is existential realism. When regarded from the
perspective of over two thousand years, these highly diverse works are
united by a way of representing reality that occurred only episodically

until the turning point we are discussing. They tell the stories of people like
us in a serious way and situate their characters in the world using histor-
ical and dynamic concepts. Neither of these possibilities existed before a
certain date. The themes of the stories can be the great twists of fate, as in
Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola; or they can be apparently insignifi-
cant ones that count only for those who experience them, as in Proust or
Virginia Woolf. The milieu can be the subject of sociological probing, as in
Balzac or Zola; it can remain in the background, as in Woolf; or it can af-
fect the intimate behavior of characters, as in Proust—but it always exists
as a basic assumption, as does the seriousness of the everyday.
2. “Center” and “periphery” are not aesthetic or quantitative categories:

they do not measure the spread or value of the works, but the hegemony
of tendencies. Compared to the romance, the novel was most likely a nu-
merically minor genre in all epochs of history.112 There is no doubt that a
considerable portion of the novels or stories that occupy a prominent position
in the literary canon of the past two centuries disregard existential realism or
engage with it only marginally: the masterpieces of Poe and Stevenson, Kafka
and Beckett, Guimarães Rosa and García Márquez, Pynchon and Bolaño
have no direct relationship with the seriousness of the everyday. But narra-
tive modes that reject or circumscribe existential realism continue to define
themselves in relation to this tradition—a clear sign that the problematic
mimesis of ordinary life occupies the center of modern narrative space.
When Breton opposes surrealism to nineteenth-century realism,113 when
Valéry accuses the novel of presenting an ordinary, superficial vision of the
world,114 when Alejo Carpentier opposes magic realism to “the return of
112. This is what can be deduced from several quantitative studies on novels published
during the period of the rise of the novel. See Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöw-
erling, eds., The English Novel, 1770–1829: A Biographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published
in the British Isles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); John Austin, “USA 1780–1850,”
in Moretti, The Novel, 1:455–465.
113. André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme (1924); English translation Manifesto of
Surrealism, in Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 6–7.
114. Paul Valéry, “Mauvaises pensées et autres” (1942), in Œuvres, vol. 2, ed. Jean Hytier
(Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 802.
the real,”115 when Robbe-Grillet opposes the nouveau roman to twentieth-

century novelists who continue to write like Stendhal or Balzac,116 or when
John Barth theorizes the ironic reuse of the realistic novel,117 the poetics
embodying the normalcy of the novel—the virtual center of the literary
genre—is always the one that tries to describe the world of prose in a se-
rious way.
Narrative Democracy
The problematic mimesis of the middle station of life brings to fulfillment the
attention for particular life that is immanent in the novel as a form: in this
sense, the seriousness of the everyday is the culmination of a process that
passes through the history of the novel. The primary meaning embedded in
the modern novel as a discursive formation is the conquest of particularities
of any kind or, in other words, the entrance of democracy into literature.
The genre of the novel is the literary equivalent of the declaration of
human rights: the Goncourt brothers used a similar terminology when they
credited themselves for having extended “a right to the Novel” to everyone,
even to the underclasses. This literary form has become one of the most
important games of truth in the modern era primarily because it recounts
the life of people like us in a serious, problematic, and, on occasion, tragic
way. The core of its literary space is occupied by works that remain true to
this project.
In addition to the social hierarchy, the transformation also affected
forms of experience. The possibility of giving a serious account of work,
the family, or the struggle to find a place in the world of prose represented
a decisive conquest in the history of culture. Up until the birth of existen-
tial realism, illustrious narrative was focused on the heroic actions of epic
poetry, on the adventures of the romance, on unprecedented events that
were the topic of novellas and exempla, on love as a pure state of excep-
tion, and not as a state of exception within an institutional context. After
115. A. Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, in Obras completas, vol. 2 (Mexico City:
Siglo Veintiuno editores, 1983), “Prólogo,” 13ff.
116. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (1963); English translation For a New
Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992).
117. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), in The Friday Book: Essays and
Other Non-fiction (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984), 63–79.
the birth of existential realism, the choice fell on the social classes and on
the spheres of experience that were the least suitable, in principle, for
anomalies. The everyday, in this sense, represents the heart of the private
condition. It is the life that barely juts out: it is particular existence in its
pure being-there. In the twentieth century there emerged the mimetic utopia
we find expressed in The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš: the
utopia of universal narratability. The simple existence, now free from hier-
archies (the separation of styles), from ethical control (moralism), and from
universal meanings (allegory), staked its claim to absolute attention.
To draw an overarching map of our territory, to grasp an image of the
whole, we must follow the historical morphology of this ridge. Although
the serious mimesis of everyday life did not coincide with the realistic novel
of the nineteenth century, the core of modern narrative space did emerge,
for the first time, precisely with the nineteenth-century realistic novel. It is
from here that we must begin.
CHAPTER SIX
The Nineteenth-Century
Paradigm
Abstractions
The “nineteenth-century novel” (or the “realistic nineteenth-century novel”)

is more than anything else an abstraction: first, because a substantial
portion of the narrative fiction written during the 1800s shunned any pre-
tense to realism; second, because there are wide divergences between
works labeled as realistic; and third, because the texts viewed as true to
reality by nineteenth-century culture were judged as implausible by
later literary periods. I will use this stereotype as if it had invisible quo-
tation marks around it, and to refer to the subject at hand, I will use the
more specific and less ambiguous expression “the nineteenth-century
paradigm.”
Nevertheless, it would be naive to stop at deconstructing commonplaces.
Shared topoi never appear by chance—they take form whenever a collective
intellectual subject seeks a concise expression to indicate a field of possibilities
that appears cohesive and unique when compared to other fields emerging
before or after it. Every doxa is a clue, a symptom: the fact that it exists is
more meaningful than the vagueness of its referent. Interestingly enough,
the stereotype we are discussing actually appeared during the twentieth
century, when third-person, realistic fiction had begun to be perceived as
the archetype of the “classic,” “traditional” novel.
This process is especially easy to perceive in national literatures with a

solid nineteenth-century narrative tradition. By the beginning of the
THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY PARADIGM 231
1900s in France and England, the nineteenth-century novel had already

become the archetype of the classic novel—an opinion shared equally by
those who supported the model and those who were critical of it. During the
debate that developed in France in the 1920s, nineteenth-century realism
from Balzac to the naturalists was explicitly or implicitly considered to be the
canonical form of the novel.1 In his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), for ex-
ample, André Breton cites Paul Valéry’s invention, the parody of nineteenth-
century, third-person narrative fiction (“la marquise sortit à cinq heures” [the
marquise went out at five]) and scoffs at a descriptive passage from Dosto-
evsky’s Crime and Punishment. Clearly, if a writer as revolutionary as Dosto-
evsky was in many ways can come to represent the norm to be demolished,
then when viewed from the perspective of the historical avant-gardes, differ-
ences internal to the model count for little.2 During the same years in England,
the essays of Virginia Woolf drew a sharp dividing line between “Edwardian”
writers, the last heirs of nineteenth-century forms, and “Georgian” writers,
whom she considered to be fully modernist.3 The direct targets of this attack
were H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy; the more distant
quarry was “the entire tradition of the novel as it had crystallized in
nineteenth-century British fiction.”4 In 1921 Percy Lubbock published The
Craft of Fiction.5 To his eyes as well, realistic narrative fiction of the 1800s—
especially works written in the third person (Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray,
Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Maupassant)—appears to be a
relatively uniform set that established the canonic devices of the classic novel.
These tools were refined and fully implemented by Henry James.
The family resemblance that Valéry, Breton, Woolf, and Lubbock implic-
itly refer to took root in the critical discourse. During the following de-
cades it influenced the first histories of the twentieth-century novel, such
1. Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman, des lendemains du Naturalisme aux années vingt
(Paris: Corti, 1966), 15, 162ff., 179.
2. Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 6–7.
3. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 157–165; by the same author, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
(1923) and “Character in Fiction” (1924), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 1919–1924,
ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), 384–389, 420–438.
4. See Baruch Hochman, The Test of Character: From the Victorian Novel to the Modern
(London: Associated University Presses, 1983), 11.
5. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1921).
232 THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY PARADIGM
as the one Joseph Warren Beach published in 1932.6 It also left its mark
on the first critical studies on the relationship between nineteenth- and
twentieth-century narrative fiction, such as the ideas we find in Axel’s
Castle (1931) by Edmund Wilson or in the essays that Giacomo Debene-
detti wrote between the 1920s and 1940s, from his first articles on Proust
(1925–1927) to Personaggi e destino (Characters and Fate) (1947). Three
decades later, during the second phase of the twentieth-century avant-
garde, we find the same interpretation in Michel Raimond’s La Crise du
roman (The Crisis of the Novel) (1966), which traces the history of French
narrative fiction between 1890 and 1930.7 La barriera del naturalismo
(The Barrier of Naturalism) (1964) by Renato Barilli applies a similar
schema to Italian narrative fiction.8
Realisms
What exactly is the family resemblance behind this stereotype? Jules Fran-
çois Félix Husson, known as Champfleury, was one of the first theorists of
the poetics that began in the 1830s to acquire the name “realism.” Between
1853 and 1857 he published his main critical works and sketched out an
overarching map of the narrative fiction of his time. As he saw it, writers
who wanted to talk about reality had two avenues: they could either tell
their story through inner analysis, as in Constant’s Adolphe, or they could
study others through objective observation, as in Balzac’s novels.9 The ex-
pansion of the narratable world that took place at the beginning of the
nineteenth century moved in three directions: toward the fantastic, toward
the autobiographical-introspective, and toward the mimesis of the common
world. The first of these territories, which was programmatically alien to
the ambition of describing the shared reality, created a new form of ro-
mance. The other two differed in the ways Champfleury described: the
roman personnel, egocentric and usually written in the first person, and the
social novel, outwardly focused and usually written in the third person,
6. Joseph Warren Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique (New York:
Century, 1932).
7. Raimond, La Crise du roman.
8. Renato Barilli, La barriera del naturalismo (Milan: Mursia, 1964).
9. On Champfleury’s theories, see Émile Bouvier, La Bataille réaliste (1844–1857) (1913)
(Geneva: Slatkine, 1973), 304ff.
were what gave form to existential realism. The border separating them
corresponded to a difference between narrative situations: at the beginning
of the 1800s, the third person was associated with the need to describe in
an objective fashion how people made their way in the world,10 while the
first person was associated with introspection. Stendhal states this clearly
in The Life of Henry Brulard: “It is true one might write using the third
person: he went, he said. Yes, but how to take account of the inner move-
ments of the soul?”11
This was not a rigid division: there certainly exist novels written in the
third person that are highly egocentric (Novalis’s Henry of Ofterdingen,
for example) and narratives in the first person that illustrate the relationship
between private stories and public histories (Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from
beyond the Tomb, for example). Moreover, the third-person novel is un-
doubtedly capable of introspection. The works of Jane Austen and Stendhal
represent the movements of the psyche with extraordinary clarity. In
1827, when The Betrothed appeared in print, Italian literature had never
seen anything comparable to the analytical force and wealth of detail con-
tained in the chapters on the story of Gertrude or on the conversion of the
Unnamed. However, in the system of genres as it was conceived in this
epoch, the division of roles was very clear: the first person was relied on
to express the interior life; the third person was used for objective
accounts.12
Between the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,
the opposition between “I” and “he/she”—the timeless foundation of every
narrative situation—took on new features. First of all, the narrators we find
in the Bildungsroman and in historical and sociohistorical novels are
clearly distinguishable from the narrators European literature had been
familiar with until then: they employ a serious tone (not a comic-intermediate
register, as in Don Quixote or Tom Jones), and they make use of historical
and social concepts (not “moralistic” ones, as in comic romances, novelle,
and novelas). The premodern third person that comes closest to the
10. See Weinberg, French Realism, passim, and Bouvier, La Bataille réaliste, 301ff.
11. Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard; English translation The Life of Henry Brulard, trans.
John Sturrock (New York: New York Review of Books, 2002), 7. On the bond between the
first person and introspection at the beginning of the nineteenth century, see Rousset, “Une
forme littéraire: le roman par lettres,” 73.
12. Cohn, Transparent Minds, 21.
nineteenth-century third person is the narrator in The Princesse de Clèves.

This is because Madame de La Fayette uses a serious, problematic, and,
when necessary, tragic tone, and because she shifts the focus from the visible
to the invisible—from public action to hidden motives—anticipating a lit-
erary gesture that the nineteenth-century paradigm would make its own.13
The difference is that the source of the events in the novels by Madame de
La Fayette resides in interiore homine—in other words, in the dialectic
between the satellites and planets that the Augustinian psychology of the
narrator deciphers and captures—while the nineteenth-century third person
further shifts causes into the new territories opened up by sociology and
modern historicism, namely, the moment and the milieu, the time and
place by which human beings are conditioned.
In addition to fostering the rise of a new kind of narrator, the nineteenth-
century novel split the division of labor between first and third persons in
a new way from the past. From the sixteenth century to the last decades of
the eighteenth century, the objective, public lives of heroes who came from
the lower or middle strata of society were mostly depicted in the first
person: Lazarillo, Guzmán, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana,
Marianne, Pamela, and Clarissa say “I.” The novel of manners written in a
noncomic tone almost always had an autobiographical slant. During the
last decades of the eighteenth century, after Rousseau’s Confessions and
Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the structure of first-person
narrative fiction changed, at least in works written for the elite. Instead
of heroes from humble or middle-class origins who tell about their ad-
ventures in the world, we now have characters with complicated inner
lives who tell inward-looking stories in which psychology and analysis
of the self and others are more important than public events. Twentieth-
century literary criticism came up with a concise name for these figures:
intellectual heroes.14 A personage similar to the one already present in
the theater (Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Molière’s Alceste) now found a home
in the novel. The archetype is probably Saint-Preux in The New Heloise,
13. On the shift of focus from the outside to the inside, see Jean Rousset, “La Princesse de
Clèves,” in Forme et signification.
14. Albert Thibaudet, “Le Roman de l’intellectuel” (1921), in Réflexions sur le roman
(Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 138–145; Victor Brombert, The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the
French Novel, 1880–1955 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961); Alfonso Berardinelli, “L’eroe che
pensa: Amleto, Alceste, Andrej,” in L’eroe che pensa (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 173–202.
but the new figure became especially popular with the roman personnel
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This took place during
a process that coincided with the internal transformation of a great first-
person narrative tradition: the epistolary novel. After The Sorrows of
Young Werther had altered the form of the genre, fiction based on letters
gradually lost the recipient that the messages were addressed to, at least
in theory, and morphed into the private diary. Thus, between the end of
the eighteenth and the first decades of the nineteenth centuries, the auto-
biographical novel specialized in the mimesis of the interior life, while
the third-person novel specialized in the mimesis of the exterior life, indi-
vidual destinies, manners, and large-scale public conflicts. Both occupy a
central place in the modern literary space, although the second is the
most prominent. This can be explained partly because a significant por-
tion of contemporary narrative fiction today is still structured around
the framework that descended from this model; and partly because the
renewal of themes and forms that took place over the past hundred and
fifty years has often been defined, perhaps polemically, in relation to this
literary paradigm.
The ideal type of the “realistic nineteenth-century novel” thus refers pri-
marily to narrative fiction written in the third person: in this regard, the
critical doxa that predominated at the beginning of the twentieth century
was right. However, it missed the mark on another fundamental point:
contrary to the topos that arose in the age of the avant-gardes and mod-
ernism, the “nineteenth-century novel” was not a uniform entity. Two widely
divergent literary periods can be distinguished within it. The first lasted until
about 1850: the works of Austen, Scott, Manzoni, Balzac, Stendhal, and
Dickens, although separated by differences, are united by several devices
that the criticism of the twentieth century would identify as “nineteenth-
century.” At midcentury a new phase began. The crucial generation was
the one born between the late 1810s and the early 1820s, which counts
among its members George Eliot (1819), Dostoevsky (1821), Flaubert
(1821), and Tolstoy (1828). The historical function of these writers was
instrumental and dialectical: on the one hand, they reused the “nineteenth-
century” structures that had appeared in the first half of the century; on the
other, they subjected these forms to an internal critique that foreshadowed
modernist novels. Reuse and critique often coexist within the same text. The
“nineteenth-century paradigm” primarily describes novels written in the
first half of the century: in the second half, this model was interwoven
with forms heralding a new literary epoch.
The Frameworks of the Nineteenth-Century Paradigm
As an ideal type and family resemblance, the nineteenth-century paradigm

is held together by a thematic choice (the seriousness of the everyday, exis-
tential realism) and by three technical devices.
1. Its stylistic foundation is the utopia of transparent writing. The novel

from 1650 to 1800 had patiently developed the concept of a natural style.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the metaphor of the mirror
began to be used to illustrate a certain idea of mimesis. The image alluded
to the relationship that writing sought to entertain with reality—the illu-
sion of a distortion-free mimesis.
2. The second cornerstone is a new type of narrator: detached from the

story being told, omniscient and objective like a historian, commentating
on the plot, but at the same time intent on creating a world that seems real
and autonomous, putting the protagonists on center stage and directing
interest toward them. This double movement corresponds to the stylistic
devices that the nineteenth-century paradigm perfected and transmitted
to later literature. First and foremost, there is the narrative aorist or pret-
erit tense, the verbal time of mimetic illusion. Although it already existed,
the use of the simple past in narrative fiction was refined in the 1800s:15
Valéry’s parody, quoted by Breton in order to ridicule the traditional novel
(“la marquise sortit à cinq heures”), alluded, among other things, to the
nineteenth-century patina that the preterit tense brings with it. Second,
there is the use of concepts with a sense of historical dynamics to comment
on events. In their sophisticated version, these categories appeal to con-
15. The nature of the preterit narrative is a classic theme of nineteenth-century theoretical
reflection on narrative fiction, starting from the essays by Benveniste and Weinrich. See Émile
Benveniste, “Les relations de temps dans le verbe français” (1959); English translation “The
Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary
Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1978), 205–216; Harald Wein-
rich, Tempus: Besprochene und erzählte Welt (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1964).
temporary human sciences and, in their popularized version, to the

common sense that established itself over the past two centuries.
3. The third foundation is the bond that the new narrative model enter-
tained with the arts of the public sphere: painting and especially theater.
The nineteenth-century paradigm was inspired by the dramatic form: this
is something Scott and Balzac theorized about openly. Talking about him-
self in the third person in the self-penned review of his Tales of My Land-
lord that appeared in the Quarterly Review, Scott explains the principles
of the technique:
He has avoided the common language of narrative, and thrown his
story, as much as possible, into a dramatic shape. In many cases this has
added greatly to the effect, by keeping both the actors and action con-
tinually before the reader, and placing him, in some measure, in the situ-
ation of the audience at a theatre, who are compelled to gather the
meaning of the scene from what the dramatis personae say to each
other, and not from any explanation addressed immediately to
themselves.16
Vanity was not the sole reason that Scott had a hard time naming his
precursors:17 the novel of the eighteenth century was inspired in some ways
by the theater arts, but no eighteenth-century author had ever perfected
such a technique. Balzac immediately grasped the innovation: “Sir Walter
Scott rarely used narrative forms. It was through lively, dramatic dialog
that he established the personality of his characters.”18
Around 1830, Balzac’s reflections on Scott were transformed into a
principle of poetics. One of the decisive documents in this process was his
review of the historical novel Samuel Bernard et Jacques Borgarelly by Rey-
Dussueil. Balzac criticizes it heavily: he writes that Rey-Dussueil lacks a
sense of history and that the parts of the plot are not linked together in
such a way as to produce a dramatic effect (“the author must choose be-
tween writing history or creating a drama. A novel is a written tragedy or
16. Sir Walter Scott, “Tales of My Landlord” (1817), in Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and
Fiction, 170.
17. The only precedent that he manages to cite is a passage in the History of the Church
of Scotland by Defoe. See Scott, “Tales of My Landlord,” 177.
18. Balzac, “Les Eaux de Saint-Ronan par Sir Walter Scott” (1824), 107.
comedy”).19 From that moment on, Sir Walter Scott became the technical
model for Balzac that all contemporary novelists were expected to follow,
while the theatrical form became the essential architectural element of The
Human Comedy.20
How does nineteenth-century theatricality work? Let us take chapter 7
of Ivanhoe, where Scott tells the story of the tournament of Ashby-de-la-
Zouch. The passage opens by presenting the historical scene that encom-
passes the particular events: the conditions in England, Richard the
Lionheart’s absence, Prince John’s plots to usurp the throne, the anarchy
created by the nobles and the bands of outlaws who defied feudal law.
Then we pass on to the local scene. The narrator talks about the tourna-
ment—an event that gathers nobles and common people around a
single, grand, symbolic spectacle. For several pages, the physical location
where the episode takes place is described, then the description is inter-
rupted to make way for the first scene. It describes a dispute over who will
occupy the best seat at the lists. An old Norman, poor but noble, insults the
Jew Isaac, the father of Rebecca.
“Dog of an unbeliever!” said an old man, whose threadbare tunic bore
witness to his poverty, as his sword, and dagger, and golden chain inti-
mated his pretensions to rank—“whelp of a she-wolf! darest though
press upon a Christian, and a Norman gentleman of the blood of
Montdidier?”
This rough expostulation was addressed to no other than our ac-
quaintance Isaac, who, richly and even magnificently dressed in a gabar-
dine, ornamented with lace and lined with fur, was endeavouring to make
place in the foremost row.21
The reader of narrative fiction is placed in the position of spectator: we

watch a scene unfold in front of us, described as if it were being seen for
the first time. In principle, the identity of the person who insults Isaac is
already known to the narrator, but the narrator presents the character as if
he were a stranger to be identified on the basis of physical and social signs.
19. Honoré de Balzac, Samuel Bernard et Jacques Borgarelly: histoire du temps de Louis
XIV par Rey-Dussueil, in Œuvres diverses, vol. 2, 692.
20. Elena Del Panta, “Balzac e la poetica del romanzo drammatico,” Rivista di Letterature
moderne e comparate 57, no. 4 (October–December 2004): 451–476.
21. Scott, Ivanhoe, chap. 7, p. 69.
An informational delay of this sort recalls the incipit of the Aethiopica, but
the effect of suspense that Scott creates is peculiar, because it transposes
into written narrative what happens in the theater. At the beginning of a
play the spectators reconstruct a general sense of the story by interpreting
the decor, costumes, gestures, and words they see and hear after the cur-
tain draws open—hence the importance of the sense of sight and its verbal
equivalent: description. This is the aspect that Italo Calvino stresses when
he reflects on the outdated impression that some parts of nineteenth-
century novels make on twentieth-century readers:
There is a history of visibility in the novel—of the novel as the art of
making persons and things visible—which coincides with some of the
phases of the history of the novel itself, though not with all of them.
From Madame de Lafayette to Benjamin Constant the novel explores the
human mind with prodigious accuracy, but these pages are like closed
shutters which prevent anything else from being seen. Visibility in the
novel begins with Stendhal and Balzac, and reaches in Flaubert the ideal
rapport between words and image (supreme economy with maximum
effect). The crisis of visibility in the novel will begin about half a century
later, coinciding with the advent of the cinema.22
In reality, the twentieth century did not lose “visibility” (Calvino’s narra-
tive work alone is enough to prove this point), but it was freed from a cer-
tain type of visibility, one that was implicit in the theatrical model. What
became anachronistic for the expectations of a modern reader is a passage
like the following:
[Lucia] saw a curiously shaped window, covered by two heavy, close-
barred gratings, with a hand’s breadth interval between them, beyond
which stood a nun. She looked about twenty-five years old, and the first
impression was one of beauty—a flawed beauty, however, which had lost
its bloom and was almost ready to fall into decay. The black veil which
was stretched across the top of her head fell on either side of her face,
clear of her cheeks; under a veil a band of the whitest linen covered half
her forehead, which was equally white in its different way. A second,
pleated band framed her face, ending under chin in a wimple, which hung
22. Italo Calvino, “Gustave Flaubert, Trois contes” (1980); English translation “Gustave
Flaubert, Trois contes” (1980), in Why Read the Classics? (New York: Vintage Books,
Random House, 2000), 151–153; quote from p. 152.
down a little over her chest, covering the top of her black dress. That
snowy forehead often wrinkled in an apparently painful spasm, and then
her black eyebrows twitched rapidly together. Her eyes were very black.
Sometimes they stared intently into your face, with arrogant inquiry;
sometimes their gaze was rapidly lowered, as if in search of somewhere
to hide. There were moments when an acute observer might have de-
tected in them an appeal for affection, understanding and compassion;
others when he might think he saw in them the instantaneous revelation
of an inveterate, suppressed hatred, something strangely threatening and
ferocious. Sometimes her eyes remained motionless, staring at nothing:
one observer might have thought her possessed by a proud and slothful
indifference, while another might suspect the affliction of a hidden
sorrow, a preoccupation of long standing which had more power over
her mind than the objects around her.
These things made no impression on the two women, who knew little
of the difference between one nun and another; and the Father Superior,
who had seen her a number of times before, was already accustomed, like
many others, to something strange in her appearance and manner.23
Manzoni presents the Nun of Monza with a long description that con-
tinues for another half page. A reader of today would most likely consider
such a slow, painterly, and theatrical use of sight as old-fashioned and
“nineteenth-centuryish.” It is imbued with the convictions of physiognomy:
that the inside should always be reflected on the outside, that signs are al-
ways meaningful, that the moral history of the character seeps out into
the expression of the eyes or into the wrinkles of the forehead. Above
all, the description is not from the point of view of the characters involved
(“These things made no impression on the two women, who knew little of
the difference between one nun and another”), but from the point of view
of an external, “acute observer” who behaves, in effect, as if he or she
were watching a play and trying to decipher the identity of a new char-
acter who had just appeared on the stage. The visual models condensed in
the aesthetic unconscious of educated readers today appeal to a different
visibility: one that is photographic and cinematographic in nature, quicker,
more allusive, and more fragmented.
23. Manzoni, The Betrothed, 170–171.

Another characteristic element of this paradigm is the general structure

that the plot takes. A narrative text can structure the relationship between
narrative time and story time using the movements of ellipsis, scene, sum-
mary, and pause.24 In the first situation, ellipsis, story time proceeds but
nothing is recorded in the narrative; in the second, scene, narrative time
coincides with story time; in the third, summary, stories taking place over
a long period of time are compressed into a few lines of narrative; in the
fourth, pause, story time comes to a halt while the narrator pauses to de-
scribe or reflect. According to the logic of the theatrical model, the essen-
tial events of the plot (turning points, recognitions, reversals) take place in
the form of a scene, or “before the reader,” as Scott puts it. The essential
aspect is contained in the characters’ words and actions, which generate a
progressive motion that advances the action forward until the moment of
Spannung. Summaries serve to reconstruct the previous events and create
a bridge between one dramatic episode and another. The descriptions of
the characters and the background precede and frame the events, forming
something like the two wings of a theater: one consists of invisible entities,
historical, social, psychological, and economic forces; the other of visible
entities, objects, and environments. The first chapter of The Betrothed, for
example, opens by describing the second of these wings, namely, the loca-
tion where the episode takes place. Although the official identity of the
character is immediately revealed, Don Abbondio is described through the
signs he conveys and the actions he performs; the same thing happens with
the bravoes. Later, when they appear on stage, the narrator opens up the
other wing, disclosing the historical-social background of the episode
taking place on the main stage, and reports on the history of Lombardy in
1628. The story of the characters is presented before the reader flanked by
two contexts.
The Figurative Novel and Its Theatrical Model
The dialectic between scenes taking place on stage and those in the wings
profoundly affected the early nineteenth-century novel. The success of Scott
24. I am using the terminology of Gérard Genette, Figures III (1972); English translation
Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1980), 86ff.
contributed to disseminating it into European literature; Balzac embraced

it and amplified its success. The theatrical model emerged primarily thanks
to realistic novels, but it was also transmitted in texts belonging to the ro-
mance tradition: we find it, in whole or in part, in the works of Poe and
Stevenson. What is implicit in this technique?
1. The first element is an inherent extroversion. In developing ideas that

date back to Goethe and Schiller’s correspondence on the differences
between epic and drama, Peter Szondi reflects on the importance that “in-
tersubjective action in the present tense” holds for classical theatrical
forms. What he means by this are the actions that take place in real time
on the stage and that bind one human being to other human beings,25 as if
the motives for decisions were contained in visible actions and audible
speeches. In the same way, the movements occurring in interiore homine,
the thoughts and passions, are presented out loud in an oratorical or con-
fessionary form. The theater lives in the public sphere and in the dimension
of appearances: it displays the region of being manifest to the senses, as
does painting. It is no coincidence that the nineteenth-century paradigm
drew inspiration from both these arts. The juxtaposition is not new: ut pic-
tura poësis belongs to classicist poetics; the lexicon of eighteenth-century
theater criticism employed figurative terms;26 the use of pictorial terms to
describe the tasks and techniques of the novel was shared by many eighteenth-
century prefaces. However, nineteenth-century narrative fiction interwove
figurative and theater vocabulary in a systematic, technical way. Phrases
like “At the same time, two additional personages appeared on the scene”27
or “Brigitte had the satisfaction of seeing her table surrounded by the prin-
cipal personages of this drama”28 became fixed formulas.
The nineteenth-century paradigm focuses on intersubjective action in
the present tense, just like the theater. The essential aspect concerns public
25. Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, 9ff.

26. Consider the way Diderot used the notion of the tableau in the first of his Entretiens
sur Le fils naturel (see Denis Diderot, “Dorval et moi, ou Entretiens sur Le fils naturel”
(1757), in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3 [Paris: Le Club français du Livre, 1970], 115–210).
27. Scott, Ivanhoe, vol. 1, chap. 40, p. 362.
28. Honoré de Balzac, Les Petits Bourgeois; English translation The Middle Classes,
trans. Clara Bell, in The Works of Honoré de Balzac (Boston: Dana Estes, 1901), vol. 14,
part 2, 95.
relationships between people, and it is composed of massive entities, both

visible and audible: scenes, actions, gestures, speeches. Although some of
the early nineteenth-century novels already contained the first examples of
the essayistic and introspective techniques that flourished in psychological
novels and modern novel-essays between the second half of the nineteenth
century and the first half of the twentieth, the narratives by Austen, Scott,
Manzoni, Balzac, and Stendhal were read primarily for what was hap-
pening in the public space. The passages filled with historical, sociological,
and philosophical observations or intimate analysis, although extended
and refined, never became the symbolic center of the text as they did in
Henry James, Woolf, Musil, and Proust. The invisible and the inaudible
counted for less than the visible and the audible, which were full of inter-
esting, macroscopic things: twists of fate, personal victories or defeats,
questions of happiness and unhappiness, matters of life and death.
This desire to believe that the intersubjective public life contains en-
gaging content may seem anachronistic today. The transformations the
novel went through after the crisis of the nineteenth-century paradigm have
accustomed us to believing that the deeds of people like us are almost al-
ways insignificant when they are reproduced without estrangement. More-
over, the daily life of modern individuals is disciplined and often dominated
by repetition, work, boredom, and banality. The art of the visible that took
the place of theater—namely, film—possesses devices to make stories mean-
ingful that superimpose the subjective filters of the framing, editing, and
soundtrack on top of events that take place in the public sphere. The charac-
ters in contemporary novels spend much less time on stage than nineteenth-
century characters did, as was also the case, for that matter, before the
theatrical model gained its hegemony over third-person narrative fiction:
in The Princesse de Clèves (1678) by Madame de La Fayette or in The
Elementary Particles (1998) by Michel Houellebecq, the scenes are much
shorter and there are fewer of them than in Waverley, The Betrothed, The
Red and the Black, or Lost Illusions. This does not mean that they do not
exist or that they are not important: far from it. The episode in which Ma-
dame de Clèves confesses to her husband her love for another man, or the
episode in which Christiane breaks her back in a swinger club, signal
peaks of intensity in these two plots. But these dense spaces are surrounded
by moments during which the intersubjective action in the present tense is
restricted to summaries, passed over in silence because it lacks interest, or
made the object of a nonfictional interpretation, as in Houellebecq. To find

a theatrical density comparable to that of nineteenth-century novels we
have to look in the subgenres of the contemporary romance: crime novels,
noir fiction, or the fantastic.
2. Along with the conviction that what is essential in life happens in the
public sphere, the theater model is also based on a principle of order that
was destined to vanish from the later novel. I will describe it borrowing
from the words of Jean Rousset. Speaking about Madame Bovary, Rousset
called Flaubert “the first of the nonfigurative writers of the modern novel.”
In other words, Flaubert was the first writer to have shifted interest from
the story line to the style or to the character’s introspective moments, stacking
up, one after another, fifty pages devoid of movement, action, and drama.29
We will come back to these ideas: for now my interest lies in the concept
proposed by Rousset. What is a figurative novel?
It is revealing to reflect on a semantic drift: the concept originated in
painting, but what it refers to came out of the crisis of the theatrical model.
Flaubert is a nonfigurative writer, above all, because he shifts interest from
the plot to the way of presenting it. He draws our attention to the contents
deposited in the style and in those great moments of suspension when anti-
theatrical, stagnating stretches of inaction and boredom are permitted to
emerge from the encounter between the words of the narrator and those of
the character.30 This semantic slippage is justified: theater and painting are
both arts of appearance; the metaphoric references to one or the other in
the critical vocabulary of the nineteenth-century narrators overlap. The
twists and turns taken by the category invented by Rousset are also worth
contemplating: a novel is “figurative” not particularly because it recalls
painting as such, but because it recalls a certain type of painting. But what
is figurative in an art made of words, an art in which, speaking literally,
figuration can never be avoided, seeing as words are always semantic? The
notion points to the existence of a hierarchy: painting is figurative when it
captures the cloud of details that fill up our visual field around a center
consisting of “figures.” These figures coincide in reality with the entities
that in Strawson’s view populate the world imagined by naive realism:
29. Jean Rousset, “Madame Bovary ou le livre sur rien,” in Forme et signification, 111.
30. Ibid., 132–133.
things and people. The nineteenth-century criticisms of the “traditional”

novel insisted on this aspect. To describe it, we can start with plot
analysis.
Constructing a story means putting events into a hierarchy. In applying
and developing the ideas of Roland Barthes, Seymour Chatman breaks
plots down into “kernels” and “satellites.”31 Kernels indicate twists of fate,
the changes that lead the plot in a certain direction; satellites are minor epi-
sodes that enrich the story without changing its course. While the romance
of adventure is constructed almost exclusively out of kernels (“les coups
de théâtre”), the nineteenth-century realistic novel multiplies the satellites,
the backdrop, and the “fillers.”32 What ends up in the background are both
the two presentations of the wings between which the action takes
place on center stage, and deviations from the main story. But if it is true
that the nineteenth-century novel multiplies the fillers, it is equally true
that these never blur the hierarchy between the essential and the contin-
gent, because the focus of the narrative remains concentrated on the fate
of the protagonists, namely, on “figures” that the figurative novel puts in
the foreground. The cloud of marginal actions taking place next to the
main events and the circumstances that affect the story line remain on the
edges of the picture; in the center we find the major, objective turning
points that alter the lives of the characters. Starting from the second half
of the century, as I will explain, this model of the plot dissolved little by
little, and novels appeared in which satellites eclipse kernels, details re-
place major events, and reflections on the circumstances accompany the
story, transforming the novel into a novel-essay.
3. Another figurative element is the connection between the parts of the

story. Chatman distinguishes between motivated and unmotivated elements,
31. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 53–56. Chatman reworks and modifies the dis-
tinction between noyau and catalyse proposed by Roland Barthes, which is indebted in its
turn to the distinction that Boris Tomashevsky made between dynamic and static motifs. But
the first extended reflection on this internal dialectic of plots is perhaps to be found in the
pages Goethe dedicates to the opposition between forward striding, backward striding, and
retarding motives in his correspondence with Schiller. See Goethe and Schiller, “On Epic and
Dramatic Poetry,” 380ff.
32. See Franco Moretti, The Way of the World, 233ff.; and by the same author, “The Se-
rious Century,” in The Novel, 1:364–400.
between the developments of the plot that depend on a cause and those
that depend on chance. In common language, and in the analysis of stories,
what we call chance has a double face. On the one hand, it designates the
coincidences that join up the lives of the protagonists, reinforcing their
bonds. In Père Goriot, for example, Rastignac discovers he is living in the
same pension as the father of a woman he just met at a dance; by chance,
Vautrin and Victorine Taillefer also live in the same place. These types of
coincidences help to concentrate the dramatic events, as if the world were
not extraneous to the destinies of the individuals who are the focus of the
narrative, but instead cooperated through the medium of chance encoun-
ters to draw out the characters’ passions and the intersubjective relation-
ships that bind them.
There does exist another type of chance, though. In the third chapter
of the second part of A Sentimental Education, Frédéric Moreau discovers
that Madame Arnoux is away from the city alone, without her husband, in
the town where Arnoux’s factory is located.33 Frédéric skips an appoint-
ment with Dambreuse to take advantage of the opportunity to declare his
love to her. In the one-page story of the trip, Flaubert’s paratactic writing
style becomes charged with an expectant atmosphere. Then Frédéric arrives
at Creil, sees a large factory, asks the woman at the gate to visit the estab-
lishment, and discovers that Arnoux’s factory is not in Creil. He sets off
again, extending his journey, until he finally finds the right town. He goes
into the Arnouxes’ house without making a sound. Madame Arnoux is
surprised and frightened; Frédéric’s sudden appearance makes her cry out,
and she realizes that she is poorly dressed. She goes back into the house to
change her clothes and then takes Frédéric to see the factory. In describing
the machinery, she says things that Frédéric finds grotesque. Every time the
conversation seems to be becoming more intimate, the noise, the workers,
and the presence of Sénécal prevent anything from happening. A movement
originating from inside and directed toward an objective (Frédéric wants
to declare himself) conflicts with a swarm of small, random events that
block his impulse. Indifferent to the aims of the protagonist, reality acts as
an inert background that follows a logic of its own: Madame Arnoux does
33. Gustave Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale (1869); English translation A Sentimental

Education, trans. Douglas Parmée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), part 2, chap. 3,
pp. 209ff.
not expect to receive a visit; Sénécal obtusely performs his job; the factory
is a factory. In Père Goriot, chance creates an anthropocentric world; in A
Sentimental Education, chance transcends individual desires: the first is sta-
tistically unlikely; the second is statistically common. In the theatrical
plots of the nineteenth-century paradigm, the first type of chance is very
popular, and the second plays a marginal role. Stories are held together by
a solid substrate of motivated events, or seemingly random events that in
the overall economy of the text are ultimately revealed to be motivated and
anthropocentric. Casual, time-wasting encounters, contingent details, and
trivial, gratuitous facts do not invade the text as they would later in mod-
ernist narrative.
If we were to cross the critical categories that define the relationships
between the events of a story, we might come up with a new opposition
between centripetal plots and centrifugal plots. The archetype of the cen-
tripetal mythos is the typical form of modern drama, which uses only a few
elements (the characters on the stage), establishes strong bonds of cause
and effect, limits digressions, and tends toward the denouement. The ar-
chetype of the centrifugal mythos is the journey without destination, which
uses a virtually unlimited number of elements (everything the traveler can
meet on his or her way), welcomes digressions, and may resolve itself in
unexpected ways. Between the two forms there are an infinite number of
intermediary ones, of course. The classic structure of the Bildungsroman,
what we find illustrated perfectly in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, is
the hero’s journey in the world—a journey that in Goethe’s novel follows
steps that are necessary and connected, so connected, in fact, that they turn
out to be part of a scheme organized by the Society of the Tower. Behind
the centrifugal motion on the surface, the plots of Austen, Scott, Manzoni,
and Balzac (Stendhal is a special case) always reveal an underlying centripetal
motion. The mythos remains cohesive: it expands to show the multiplicity of
the real or to depict the background, but it then establishes a link between
the parties through ordered sequences based on cause-and-effect relation-
ships and tends toward the motivated resolution of conflicts. These are
interweavings in the strong sense of the term: the strands of human ac-
tions, woven together, make up a whole that has a precise logic and pro-
ceeds toward a telos.
One of the harshest attacks ever launched against the nineteenth-century
paradigm is contained in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel (1963). It
is an interesting text, both because it helped to define the narrative aes-

thetics of the twentieth-century neo-avant-gardes, and because the author
describes the armature of the model that he intends to demolish in such a
brutally simplistic way that it becomes insightful for precisely this reason.
One of the “obsolete notions” that For a New Novel attacks is what Robbe-
Grillet calls “story.”34 A good novelist, say traditional critics, knows how
to tell a story, how to create thrilling, dramatic climaxes and denouements,
while the avant-garde novelists, writes Robbe-Grillet, do not possess the
shortsightedness (“the foreshortening of the mind’s perspective,” as Robert
Musil would have put it) required to construct a device of this sort. With its
bluntly defined categories, For a New Novel provides a good picture of the
infrastructure of the nineteenth-century paradigm: the essential element of
the construction is a hierarchical plot organized around a few major public
events—the “story.”
4. The same order connecting the parts of the mythos—the same hierarchy
between foreground and background, private matters and public back-
drop, narrative kernels and satellites, motivated and unmotivated ele-
ments—also governs the way the nineteenth-century paradigm represents
things and environments. Breton attacked traditional narrative fiction by
citing a description by Dostoevsky that might have appeared in any real-
istic nineteenth-century novel:
The little room into which the young man was shown was covered with
yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums and muslin curtains in the win-
dows; the setting sun cast a harsh light over all this . . . the room contained
nothing special. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa
with a tall back turned down, an oval table facing the sofa, a dressing
table and a mirror propped up in the recess, a few chairs along the walls,
two or three prints of no value representing some German girls with
birds in their hands—this is what the furnishings amounted to.35
34. Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, 29ff.

35. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime et Châtiment, French translation by Victor Dérely, cited
by Breton in “Manifeste du surréalisme” (André Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. M.
Bonnet [Paris: Gallimard, 1988, 314]): “La petite pièce dans laquelle le jeune homme fut in-
troduit était tapissée de papier jaune: il y avait des géraniums et des rideaux de mousseline
aux fenêtres; le soleil couchant jetait sur tout cela une lumière crue. . . . La chambre ne ren-
fermait rien de particulier. Les meubles, en bois jaune, étaient tous très vieux. Un divan avec
According to Breton, the passage that we have read is nothing but “su-
perimposed images taken from some stock catalogue,” “postcards,” “a
schoolboy description.” More simply, Dostoevsky follows a principle of
order that Breton judges to be uninteresting. In broadening the scope of
possibilities, the literature of the twentieth century showed that many
things can be included in the description of a room. This is because envi-
ronments exist in the medium of the subjective perception, and because a
place can be described according to criteria of objectivity that are very dif-
ferent from those applied during the nineteenth century. Based on these
differences of scale, Perec created a theory of perception as an alternative
to the one that became crystallized in the nineteenth-century plot. Dosto-
evsky’s narrator, like Scott’s or Balzac’s, does not show everything observ-
able in the room, but limits himself to the details that are meaningful in
relation to the human conflict that will fill up that space. On the one hand,
not wishing to project the inner life onto the outer, the narrator wants to
be objective; on the other hand, the environment is described so as to il-
lustrate the disposition of the person who lives there and to prepare for the
event that will take place, creating a theatrical wing for the next scene.
5. A similar ordering principle governs how the protagonists are described.

As we saw in Chapter 4, early readers of The Princesse de Clèves were
struck by the new psychology that the novel unveiled: Madame de La Fay-
ette described the minor upheavals of the interior life with unprecedented
analytical capacity. Ten years after the The Princesse de Clèves, in defining
the difference between the ancient and the modern “sciences of the heart,”
Charles Perrault used a metaphor from astronomy. While the ancients
knew only about the planets, the moderns also know about the satellites;
in the same way, while the ancient science of the heart was acquainted only
with the grand passions of the soul, the moderns also know about the mass
of small affects that revolve around them. The novel is one of the genres
that, in Perrault’s estimation, allows the astronomical complexity of the
interior life to be revealed.36 Three centuries after the Parallèle des anciens
un grand dossier renversé, une table de forme ovale vis-à-vis du divan, une toilette et une
glace adossées au trumeau, des chaises le long des murs, deux ou trois gravures sans valeur
qui représentaient des demoiselles allemandes avec des oiseaux dans les mains—voilà à quoi
se réduisait l’ameublement.” Translated into English from the French version by Derély.
36. Perrault, Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, 101.
et des modernes, Chatman uses a similar metaphor (kernels and satellites)

to describe plots.
In addition to the story, the other “obsolete notion” attacked by Robbe-
Grillet is that of “character.” According to traditional criticism, a novelist
is known for the characters he or she creates: Balzac gave us Père Goriot;
Dostoevsky created the Karamazovs. The concept grew out of the en-
counter between a proper name and a psychological continuity, between a
sign that identifies individuals and a principle of predictability that distin-
guishes the essential features of an individual from contingent ones. Robbe-
Grillet identifies a real phenomenon: some early nineteenth-century novelists
are experts in recounting the psychological satellites orbiting the planets
(Austen, Manzoni, and Stendhal have remarkable introspective talent), but
their protagonists, like those of Scott or Balzac, maintain a charakter, an
imprint, an internal coherence that is preserved over time and expressed in
the hierarchy between the dominant psychology and the minor pas-
sions. “The currents of life can appear to lift him up, roll him over, cast
him down,” wrote Breton; “he will still belong to this readymade human
type.”37 Stendhal was a precursor of the psychology that dissolves the
character, but his characters almost always stay united, which is to say,
they “are subject to the comments and appraisals—which are more or less
successful—made by that author,” as Breton put it. Immediately after-
wards he adds that “where we really find them again is at the point at
which Stendhal has lost them.”38 Sometimes Stendhal loses his characters,
allowing them to behave unpredictably and anticipating what will happen
twenty-five years after his death in the novels of Dostoevsky. Between the
second half of the nineteenth century and the age of modernism, the pre-
formed human type became complicated: it fragmented, became the sub-
ject of lengthy analysis, or dissolved. In some respects Stendhal was a
precursor of this process. But if we leave his novels aside and consider
the ideal type of the nineteenth-century novel, it can be seen that the
complication of the interior life never dissolved the principle of unity by
which we associate an internal hierarchy and a psychological coherence
with every proper name. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the
charakter was still cohesive.
37. André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 8.

38. Ibid., 9.
The Discovery of the Environment
The primary significance of figurative and theatrical novels is an interest in

the life of people like us considered in its public dimension, since mimesis
is organized according to an order that places the visible actions of indi-
viduals at the center of the world. However, this same anthropocentric de-
vice opens up another plane of reality—one that is revealed in the way
characters are presented and in the historically dynamic wings that sur-
round individuals. Let us take a closer look at this.
We have seen that starting from the end of the seventeenth century, the
tradition of the novel was partly legitimized by casting itself as the history
of private life. We also saw that the birth of the modern novel coincided
with increased attention on the part of European culture to forms of par-
ticular life. This transformation, so important in itself, worked its way
through historiography, philology, and moral philosophy to join forces
with an even more extensive metamorphosis. Between the 1500s and
the 1800s, during the period when the process of the disenchantment of
the world began, an ontological model gathered momentum in common
sense and in discursive formations that imagined the relationship between
individuals and the totality according to an environmental paradigm. This
served as a hidden backbone to very different discursive corpora: philo-
sophical systems, scientific systems, mimetic forms, and forms of thought.
Its essential points already existed, but starting in the sixteenth century
they were disseminated with a new pervasiveness. Another entire book
would be required to reconstruct its history, its internal logic, and its vari-
ants. We can find traces of the environmental paradigm in pictorial per-
spective and in the ontology that made possible modern physics, in modern
historicism and in Darwinism, in the existential analytic that Heidegger
developed in Being and Time, and in systems theory.
According to this way of thinking, the human is a being rooted in a local
world that transcends and determines individuals through external circum-
stances and circumstances introjected into the intimate disposition that
gives form to individual lives (ethos, hexis, habitus, customs, manners). The
foundations of this ontology are ancient: they date back to Greek thought
on to periechon, on “what surrounds” human beings,39 and to the notions
39. Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” in Essays in Historical Semantics (New York:
Vanni, 1947), 180ff.
of ethos and charakter, which we talked about in previous chapters. The

idea that the air, the sky, the climate, the cosmic environment, and man-
ners have an influence on the human being, acting within and all around
individuals, is a concept prevalent in many periods of Greek culture: in
Anaximenes as in Hippocrates, in Herodotus as in Polybius.40 Ethos is a
central concept in Aristotle’s thought on the human world. Thanks to the
rhetorical tradition and Theophrastus, the representation of charakter
became a literary genre.
The analysis of dispositions and circumstances met with renewed popu-
larity between the sixteenth century and the early nineteenth, in the Renais-
sance theory of celestial influences and in the rediscovery of Herodotus, in
Bodin and in Montaigne, in La Bruyère and in Montesquieu, in Vico and in
the philosophy of history of German idealism, becoming a central theme
of European culture. Modern localism and historicism reinterpreted to
periechon, redefining the category of significant circumstances, while the
secularization process reinterpreted the framework of forces, redefining the
factors that were believed to determine human actions. During the 1600s
the theory of celestial influences and astrology lost scientific credibility;
over the 1700s, theories that emphasized natural influences lost ground to
theories that insisted on cultural influences (manners, institutions). While
for Bodin and Montesquieu the physical environment still held great
weight, for the philosophies of history coming out of German idealism it
occupied a minor role.
One of the discursive formations that contributed most to the rise of the
environmental paradigm is modern narrative fiction, because at all times
the form of the story makes visible the bond between a given individual
and the world to which he or she belongs, acting on him or her as a set of
external circumstances and introjected dispositions. The first author to em-
blematically proclaim pride in the novel, Balzac, insisted precisely on this
point: narrative fiction can make understood what it means to be born in
a certain place at a certain time. Philosophy had never gone into specifics
regarding the relationship between individuals and the environment; his-
toriography had confined its examination to the tradition descending from
Herodotus, which for a long time remained secondary. Having stated that
Madame de Rênal was “one of those provincial women one might very
40. Ibid., 180.

well take for stupid, for the first fifteen days that one knew her,”41 because
they have no experience of life, the novel then shows us, in the concrete
circumstances of an existence, what it means to be one of those French
provincial women who lived around 1830 without having any experience
of life. Situation by situation, it shows us how such a person speaks, be-
haves, thinks, dresses, loves, and hates. The discipline that Comte would
subsequently call “sociology” was capable of doing this only decades
later.
In addition to creating a model that provided a detailed representation
of the relationship between individuals and the world, novelists invented
the words that gave a name to the ways to periechon is imagined by the
modern form of life. In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Goethe describes
the interaction between characters and microcosms using the concept of
Kreis, circle, which would become common in German sociology between
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; Jane
Austen talks about spheres in which individuals find themselves immersed;42
Comte and Balzac began to apply the concept of milieu to the human
world.43
During the same years when Scott’s model of the novel was making its
way throughout Europe, Hegel was reflecting on the epic as a form and
developed the notion that we commented on in Chapter 1. What is specific
to narrative fiction is its ability to illustrate the dialectic between personal
destinies and the force of circumstances. Hegel would likely never have
thought about the epic in this form if the novel of the eighteenth century
and the first decades of the nineteenth had not been devoting more attention
41. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 35.

42. Austen, Pride and Prejudice, vol. 3, chap. 14 (orig. chap. 56), p. 395.
43. Originally coming from the discipline of mechanics, milieu was introduced into
French biology between the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth. Initially the word milieu was synonymous with the concept of fluid with which
Newton had attempted to explain action at a distance between bodies. Although the term
continued to have a mechanical meaning in the Encyclopédie, Lamarck introduced it into the
lexicon of biology through the mediation of Buffon. Comte used the notion of milieu in his
Course in Positive Philosophy (1838) to explain the behavior of all bodies, including that of
human beings. Four years later, Balzac used the same concept in his introduction to The
Human Comedy. See Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance”; Georges Canguilhem, La Connais-
sance de la vie (2nd ed., 1965); English translation Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Gerou-
lanos and Daniela Ginsburg (Brooklyn, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008).
to the environment and to introjected dispositions. By doing so, it made

explicit a characteristic that is implicit in narrative as a language game,
but much less clearly discernible in the ancient epic. But why was it that
interest in to periechon and in the habitus of the characters became sys-
tematic only with the novel?
Dependent Individuals
It was actually Hegel who reflected on this metamorphosis in his lectures

on aesthetics. The heroes of epos and tragedy, he writes, are independent
and universal. They are independent because their action is a primum: it
does not tautologically express a web of habits, a law, or an order from
previous times, but creates new states of things. They are universal because
their action conveys collective values:44 they are subject to finitude (they
have a body, they live in space and time, and they must die), but they are
unaware of the limits that nonheroic individuals are subject to, walled up
in the world of prose. Nonheroic individuals are instead dependent and
particular. They are dependent because they are rooted: they exist in a
given culture, in an environment, in a network of pre-individual forces
that influence them and define them. More than anything, when com-
pared to the animal world, the world of human beings multiplies depen-
dencies, since people are unconsciously infused with the objective spirit—
the culture to which they belong—and they stay alive by participating in
the fabric of social life and its web of interdependencies.45 Nonheroic indi-
viduals are particular because the person who exists in the age of prose is
only an accidental fragment of the whole: his or her actions do not decide
the destiny of a community; at most they determine a small, private matter
of happiness or unhappiness. During the heroic age, a few extraordinary
individuals acted in the name of the entire community; in the prose world,
each person acts for personal aims, and life is governed by habits, laws, and
institutions that give an exclusively particular significance to the actions of
individuals:
44. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, pp. 179ff.

45. Ibid., p. 193ff.
The individual as he appears in this world of prose and everyday is not

active out of the entirety of his own self and his resources, and he is in-
telligible not from himself, but from something else. For the individual
man stands in dependence on external influences, laws, political institu-
tions, civil relationships, which he just finds confronting him, and he
must bow to them.46
The assembly of Homeric heroes presupposes an organic, communi-

tarian society whose history is marked by great sovereign deeds; the
heroes of modern novels move in a fragmented, controlled society whose
history is marked by conflicts between states or by suprapersonal, eco-
nomic rationales. Out of this arises the dialectic without resolution in
which contemporary human beings find themselves enmeshed. The tri-
umph of prose represents a remarkable achievement for universal history:
where once the few were free to act with absolute autonomy, now there is
the certainty of the law; where once individuals were absorbed into the
collectivity, now they have the right to subjective freedom, to pursue purely
personal interests, and to seek out private happiness.47 But the increase in
security, guarantees, and equality and the rise of a small sphere of au-
tonomy entail a restricted range of possible experiences and an objective
impoverishment of individual actions. The latter have a purely particular
value and appear to be conditioned by the web of bonds, both introjected
and external, that shape people’s identities and destinies.
The impersonal and invisible forces affecting individuals internally and
externally matter as little to the heroes of epic or tragedy as do the particu-
larities of character, manners, and the environment. Interest in the middle
station of life coincided with added attention to the chains of dependencies
binding individuals to the objective spirit and to the force of circumstances,
thereby limiting their sovereignty. Mr. Kreutznaer enters the narrative
endowed with a milieu (his social class) and a moment (his place and date
of birth). These a prioris act as identity-making sentinels, designating
the system of coordinates that define and erect boundaries around what
46. Ibid., 149.

47. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1820–1821);
English translation Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1967), §124, pp. 122–123.
a person can say or do. That is why the serious mimesis of the everyday
presupposes the development of a backdrop designed according to the cat-
egories that modern human beings use to probe to periechon. The novel
conceives of the relationship between the individual and the whole in a
different way from the genres of ancient literature: it is more environmental
and atmospheric;48 it has a less anthropocentric structure than tragedy and
epos, because it takes away a part of individuals’ sovereignty over them-
selves and assigns it to the context.
During the eighteenth century, as we know, there were efforts to legiti-
mize the novel by comparing it to the comedy. This was based on the fact
that both genres represented the consuetudo, the ethos, and moeurs. Along
with the idea that the novel is the history of private life, there spread the
notion of a “novel of manners.” But eighteenth-century narrative fiction,
just like the comedy, defined manners primarily based on a philosophical
vocabulary of a moralistic type, in the sense Auerbach gives to this adjec-
tive. Instead, the nineteenth-century novel conceived of circumstances ac-
cording to a vocabulary that possessed a sense of historical dynamics. Out
of this new conceptual ether, crystallized into themes and forms, an image
of the world emerged. The center of the reality created by the text is occu-
pied by people like us, and they find themselves caught up in interesting
stories; around them there opens a totality that acts as double theater
wings, made of nature and culture. A model of this sort brings together two
opposite movements: an anthropocentric gesture originating in the the-
ater that places the relationships between the characters in the fore-
ground; and the call to a new transcendence, a secularized, localized, and
historicized transcendence that precedes, traverses, and conditions individ-
uals. The two movements coexist without colliding. Balzac is the most
theatrical of the nineteenth-century writers, and his everyday heroes have
the stature of the great personages of tragedy and melodrama, but the edi-
fice of The Human Comedy also includes the Analytical Studies, namely,
some of the finest examples of the modern novel-essay. These two different
structural choices evaluate the weight of individuals in the world in op-
posing ways and run throughout the same work: the first grants people
48. José Ortega y Gasset, Ideas sobre la novela, in Obras completas (Madrid: Alianza
Editorial-Revista de West, 1983), 186ff.
sovereignty over their lives; the second shifts the location of ultimate causes
outside the human sphere, deprives individuals of their autonomy, and sub-
mits them to a bluntly ethnological gaze. This divide is internal to the
nineteenth-century paradigm: Balzac, the author who makes the most use of
theatrical devices to stage massive, absolute conflicts in ordinary contexts, is
also the writer who on several occasions assigns himself the task of revealing
the “reasons”—the universal, invisible “principles”—that lie hidden in the
particular actions of individuals.49 Although it may be true that a division of
this sort is inherent in the nineteenth-century novel, it must be added that in
the narrative of the first half of the nineteenth century the two movements
are always arranged in a hierarchy. The opposition is used to indicate the
representative and universal value of the events being described, and not to
stage a massive collision between people and the totality: individual actions
come before supraindividual powers; the reader’s interest stays focused on
individual lives; the narration remains anthropocentric.
The Melodramatic Model
Thus far we have talked about the nineteenth-century model as an ideal

type. Now we need to account for differences between the texts that com-
pose it. To construct a map of the possibilities, I will begin with a problem
that is crucial in all attempts to write serious stories of ordinary life. The
task of making everyday life interesting is a difficult one, because the
actions of private, common people always run the risk of lapsing into rou-
tine and tautology. Finitude is always varied and always the same, since it
is composed of so many differences that when viewed from a distance
prove to be ontologically indistinguishable, closed up in themselves, and
identical in their diversity. On the first page of Père Goriot, Balzac won-
ders whether the story he is about to tell will be understandable outside
Paris:
Will anyone understand it outside Paris? That is open to doubt. The spe-
cial features of this scene, full of local colour and observations, can only
be appreciated in the area lying between the heights of Montmartre and
49. Balzac, “Author’s Introduction” to The Human Comedy, lviii-lix.

the hills of Montrouge, in that illustrious valley of flaking plasterwork

and gutters black with mud; a valley full of suffering that is real, and of
joy that is often false, where life is so hectic that it takes something quite
extraordinary to produce feelings that last.50
Since the stories that stir the world of the novel enter into life burdened
by contingency, they run the risk of signifying only themselves. Over the
course of the nineteenth century, a sense of this limit appears often and
manifests in many ways: in the awareness that the vicissitudes of private
individuals closed within the sphere of their own personal desires might
be irrelevant (“Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in
human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small infer-
ences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?”51); or in the
awareness that individuals, in the end, all resemble each other (“she had
had, like anyone else, her love story”52). How does each novel try to make
everyday life interesting? What disruption does the novel bring to life in the
endless expanse of ordinary life, forever different and forever the same? By
tracing out the internal differences in the ideal type of the nineteenth-
century novel, the answers to these questions allow a map to be created.
In the first half of the 1800s, the serious mimesis of daily life appeared
primarily in a melodramatic form. Between the late eighteenth century and
the beginning of the nineteenth, what was called “melodrama” in French
theater was a popular genre composed of sensational incidents, violent con-
flicts, and pivotal scenes. Initially, the texts had musical parts, as in the
Italian genre of the same name; the music later disappeared. The genre was
related to the drame bourgeois, whose features it exaggerated,53 and to the
gothic novels of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis, some of whose techniques
and atmospheres it inherited.54 It had a direct influence on the French novel
50. Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835); English translation Père Goriot, trans. A. J.
Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1.
51. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), chap. 11, p. 109.
52. Gustave Flaubert, “Un Coeur simple,” in Trois contes (1877); English translation “A
Simple Heart,” in Three Tales, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 4.
53. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, chap. 4.
54. Christopher Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama (London: Edward Arnold,
1978), 3–6.
of the early nineteenth century: on Balzac, Eugene Sue, Dumas the Elder,
and, generally, on the whole tradition of the roman feuilleton from the
1830s and 1840s.
But even before its direct influence, melodrama was important as a
striking example of a way of representing reality that is implicit to theater
as a form.55 This approach arose conspicuously out of the plays of the late
eighteenth century and met with considerable success in the nineteenth-
century novel with writers who aimed at the general public (Sue, Dumas),
with writers who used popular expedients to create ambitious works (Scott,
Manzoni, Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens, Hugo), with a writer who defies
categorization, like Dostoevsky, and with a markedly highbrow writer like
Henry James.56 Similar approaches spread everywhere in the literature of
the early nineteenth century. Melodrama survived the disciplining of the
novel advocated by naturalism as well as by modernism and the avant-
garde: the works of Zola and Conrad would be unimaginable without
devices dating back to this mimetic mode. In the second half of the twen-
tieth century, works like Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago or Elsa Morante’s
History picked up on melodramatic techniques. Contemporary popular fic-
tion, midcult fiction, and mainstream film are still based on the melodrama
as well as on the romance. How does this form work?
Melodrama is the histrionic expression of theatricality that pervaded the
nineteenth-century paradigm, because it heightens scenic devices, starting
with the way human action in the present tense is represented. The public
sphere becomes the site of clashes between universal forces embodied in
individuals (good and evil, innocence and wickedness, adherence to ethical
constraints and personal ambition, class warfare); the conflicts are often
underpinned by the primary human bonds between the adversaries (fathers
against sons, brothers against brothers, friends against friends). Melo-
drama magnifies and turns outward: the protagonists are statuesque and
grandiose; the characters publicly express their inner life and behave un-
restrainedly; passions are expressed through eloquent signs, poses, and
confessions; the plot is dense, packed, crafted around stylistic gestures that
are clear and centripetal, full of momentous confrontations and pivotal
55. Eric Bentley, The Life of Drama (1964) (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 157, 215ff.
56. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, chap. 6 and “Conclusion”; Prendergast,
Balzac, 10–15.
scenes. Coincidences and recognitions abound, as if the world and chance

collaborated in weaving the characters’ destinies. In every domain of the
text, the planets crush the satellites: the protagonists are governed by a
dominant passion, character is always expressed in action, and the action
has no centrifugal movements—those arising from the segments of our
divided self, from changes of mind and trivial contingent facts. There are
nothing but unequivocal and defining gestures.
Let us take a novel like Père Goriot, which is well suited as a sample text.
This is partly because it offers a good intermediate model rather than an
extreme example of melodrama such as Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life. The
plot is punctuated by centripetal chance (Rastignac, Goriot, Vautrin, and
Victorine are all staying, by chance, at the same pension; by chance, the
person that Rastignac meets at the first ball he attends is Goriot’s daughter;
by chance, Bianchon names Death-Dodger in front of Vautrin, and just at
that moment, by chance, the police come into the pension and reveal that
Vautrin is Death-Dodger). Conflicts are framed in absolute terms (duty to
family versus personal interest) and amplified (Vautrin is the “Bonaparte
of thieves”; Goriot is the “Christ of fatherhood”). The characters’ pasts
hide “mysteries” and “secrets.” The story line is constructed theatrically:
conflicts arise and resolve in big, pivotal scenes; the background noise of
contingency never interrupts the dramatic action; the characters confess
openly in front of strangers, like Vautrin, Madame de Nucingen, and Goriot
before Rastignac. Gestures and words are always associated with the im-
prints of character and dominant passions that animate the protagonists.
There is a necessary link between inside and outside, between the life of the
psyche and physical features: when Rastignac speaks well of Goriot’s
daughter, whom he met at a ball, Goriot’s face is happy; when Vautrin ob-
serves that Goriot’s daughter is indebted to Gobseck, Goriot’s face becomes
sad. Moods, thoughts, and meanings are expressed in eloquent poses and
didactic judgments (“a father hiding himself to see his daughters! I have
given them my whole life and they won’t give me just one hour today!”57).
The characters compose pictorial-theatrical tableaux (“at that moment Vau-
trin came in very quietly, and looked at the picture of these two young
57. Balzac, Père Goriot, 247.

people in the lamplight, which seemed to play on them caressingly”58).

Everything is anthropocentric, externalized, and magnified.
The Significance of the Melodramatic Novel
Long before it was named by Peter Brooks (“the melodramatic imagina-

tion”), this mimetic mode had been unintentionally described by György
Lukács in the 1930s and 1940s. Lukács’s essays occupy a special place in
thought on nineteenth-century narrative fiction, because they define the in-
ternal mechanisms of the nineteenth-century novel with unparalleled crit-
ical force. And yet, they tie this description to a normative aesthetic that
quickly became anachronistic in the second half of the twentieth century,
when the political and philosophical foundations on which they were
based no longer had a place in our horizon. Lukács offers a plausible re-
construction of the history of the nineteenth-century novel, but he also
takes a stance in support of a specific mimetic model, juxtaposing the work
of Scott and Balzac to that of Flaubert and Zola. Lukács takes his start
from the problem of realism: How does one put the profound dynamics of
modern life into narrative form? How is one to represent a world in which
the distance between particular lives and the great universal forces has be-
come so disproportionally big?
Genuine realism, he believes, should not be limited to reproducing av-
erage everydayness by describing a slice of life chosen at random or on the
basis of a statistical average. Rather, it must be able to show “the typical”:
in any given narrative scene it must be able to embody the major collective
conflicts that lie behind small, private disputes. In ordinary life we do not
usually experience this symbolon of universal and particular that manifests
in the typical situation: “In day-by-day existence, major contradictions are
obscured in a whir of petty, disparate accidental events; they are exposed
only when purified and intensified to such an extreme that their potential
consequences are exposed and are readily perceived.”59 In other words, au-
thentic realism does not arise from a direct mimetic gesture, but from an
58. Ibid., 170.

59. György Lukács, “Die intellektuelle Physiognomie des künstlerischen Gestalten”
(1936); English translation “The Intellectual Physiognomy in Characterization,” in Writer
and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn (Lincoln, NB: iUniverse.com, 2005), 149–188;
quote from p. 158.
intellectual construction. While keeping stories in an everyday context, the

great realist writer invents special situations and heroes with which he or
she gives a plastic and tangible form to the forces at work in a society and
in an epoch. This effect is achieved by working on the plot and characters.
The plot has to condense, exacerbate, and bring to the stage conflicts that
do not normally take a public form; the characters have to plausibly em-
body large collective entities (social classes, for example, or historical dy-
namics). Compared to ordinary life, the typical is a state of exception:
It is obvious that an old French peasant in 1844 would not have used
such words as these. And yet, the whole character and everything Balzac
puts into his mouth are absolutely true to life, precisely because they go
beyond the limits of a pedestrian copying of reality. All that Balzac does
is to express on its potentially highest level what a peasant of the Four-
chon type would dimly feel but would not be able to express clearly.60
The success of great writers in creating typical characters and typical

situations requires far more than accurate observation of everyday reality.
Profound understanding of life is never restricted to the observation of
everyday existence. The writer first defines the basic issues and move-
ments of his time and then invents characters and situations not to be
found in ordinary life, possessing capacities and propensities which when
intensified illuminate the complex dialectic of the major contradictions,
motive forces and tendencies of an era.61
Incorporating concepts from Hegel and Marx, the normative aesthetics of

Lukács interpret and legitimize the techniques that Scott and Balzac took
from the theater of their time. In effect, the theory of the typical was the first
attempt to describe the melodramatic imagination. The foundational idea of
this system is that by making actions and characters more wooden and larger
than life, as they appear in a certain type of theater, universals can assume a
finite, human form: “every really great drama expresses . . . an affirmation of
life”;62 “melodramatic rhetoric implicitly insists that the world can be equal
60. György Lukács, “Balzac: Les Paysans” (1934); English translation “Balzac: The Peas-
ants,” in Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (London: Hillway, 1950), 42.
61. Lukács, “The Intellectual Physiognomy in Characterization,” 149–189; quote from
p. 158.
62. György Lukács, The Historical Novel (1937) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1983), 122.
to our most feverish expectations about it . . . , that reality properly repre-

sented will never fail to live up to our phantasmatic demands upon it.”63 For
a poetics of this sort the main problem of the modern realistic novel—to
make everyday life interesting—is solved a priori, since it is taken for granted
that cosmic, historical forces lie hidden in average, ordinary life, waiting to be
expressed by the intellectual construction of the typical.
Why melodrama? What made this device possible? Brooks interprets the
melodramatic imagination as the modern, secularized remnant of a sacred
myth telling the story of the clash between the universal powers of good
and evil.64 Lukács instead interprets the development of the novel using
categories drawn from the philosophy of history that the young Marx pro-
duced, drawing particularly on Marx’s theory of the role of the bourgeoisie,
the class that most of the nineteenth-century novelists belonged to and wrote
for. According to this grand narrative, the bourgeoisie and its culture played
a revolutionary role between 1789 and 1848, acting as the vanguard of his-
torical progress. Even when bourgeois writers express moderate views, as
Scott does, or are openly conservative, as in the case of Balzac, they are
described as regarding history with interest and engagement. Moreover,
between 1789 and 1814 the peoples of Europe went through more trans-
formations than they had experienced in previous centuries. This meta-
morphosis bolstered an idea that eighteenth-century historicism had
helped to spread—the belief that the fate of individual lives depends on
history, that great, changeable, collective life in which they are immersed.
“It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall
of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience, and
moreover on a European scale.”65 The process continued even after the
restoration of 1814, showing its effects in 1830, and more broadly in the
social and economic changes Europe underwent in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, especially in France and England. Until the middle of
the nineteenth century, bourgeois intellectuals viewed history as a form of
objective transcendence, acting around and within personal lives. Circum-
stances changed abruptly in 1848 when a new revolutionary class—the
proletariat—loomed on the political scene as the vanguard of progress. In
63. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 40.

64. Ibid., 32ff. and passim.
65. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 23.
the face of this social turmoil, the bourgeoisie became a conservative force.
This change was transferred into the cultural sphere and provoked distrust
or disinterest in public life on the part of middle-class intellectuals. The liter-
ature reflects this change: while Scott and Balzac were experts at showing
how the great collective history manifested itself in minor private histories,
the forms of realism that developed in the second half of the nineteenth
century lost the sense of the typical and divorced individual lives from col-
lective processes.
The interpretations put forward by Lukács and Brooks diverge widely
because the theories they draw from are incommensurately different, but
their approaches resemble each other through a stylistic trait, a gesture.
They both devote a great deal of space to analyzing plots and characters, but
in the end, between the detailed readings and the general explanations there
lies a gap. The general explanation derives from a philosophy of history that
preceded the literature and has no relationship with the logic of the works
being studied. Let us examine the same process but starting from a different
point.
During the eighteenth century, painting underwent a metamorphosis
similar to the one that transformed the literary sphere. A new public had
emerged that was a stranger to the rules of classicist and academic painting,
incapable of deciphering traditional iconography, and interested in ev-
eryday subjects. The first result of this transformation was the birth of an
art devoid of eloquence, depicting characters engaged in their activities, as
Chardin did.66 But later, after a few decades, the painters of everyday life
wound up reincorporating the theatrical, oratorical, and sentimental pa-
thos that was typical of historical or religious painting. The pictorial ap-
proach that Greuze took, for example, was similar in many respects to that
of Chardin, but with completely different results: by showing ostentatious,
mannered gestures, his domestic scenes created the pictorial counterpart of
melodrama. There is a sociological explanation for this development.
Because the viewers of these works were not schooled in iconography, they
had to understand the meaning of a painting purely on the basis of what
they saw; for this reason the image had to clearly communicate the meaning
66. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chap. 1.
of the scene, with no semantic fuzziness.67 Greuze emphasizes the theatri-

cality of gestures in part because the subjects he paints are bourgeois. While
the meaning of conventional paintings is guaranteed by tradition and by
the social hierarchy embedded in it, everyday environments and characters
are potentially devoid of value. Until they are infused with meaning by art,
they signify only themselves: instead of great scenes of sacred or profane
history, they offer trivial anecdotes about unknown people. Eloquence and
theatricality serve to cover this void: the intent is to show that the great
universal passions, with their grandiloquent gestures, occur even in ordi-
nary contexts. The melodramatic model works the same way: rather than
being a remnant of sacred myth, melodrama is a vestige of tragedy, from
which it inherits its techniques and tones. But while histories and tragic
heroes are grand and important by definition, the stories and protagonists
of a novel are not. To hide this lacuna, melodrama creates a pathetic-
sentimental version of the noble genres, shifting interest from the objective
importance of the stories to the subjective intensity of the passions. The aim
is to show that the protagonists’ feelings are universal, in spite of the work
describing or portraying people in private situations. To this end, novelists
and painters exaggerated gestures and intensified their tones. But the ques-
tion remains why they came to think that this genre was suited to repre-
sent everyday life.
Melodrama transported the anthropocentrism of tragedy and epic—the
idea that the struggles internal to a small group of individuals have a col-
lective meaning—to the world inhabited by average or middle-class char-
acters: it transferred the mimetic mechanisms that held sway in the heroic
age to the age of prose. But while tradition, public history, and mythology
justified the status of the epos and tragedy, the novel could not rely on this
legitimacy. The idea that Père Goriot’s vicissitudes are valuable took hold
at a certain point in literary history for several reasons. On the one hand,
this is because the private lives of ordinary people had acquired an abso-
lute value and commanded unbounded attention. Melodrama expresses in
its histrionic fashion the typically modern idea that private life is the only
absolute and that its conflicts deserve to be told with unbounded passion.
It is no coincidence that the genre has maintained its hegemony in main-
stream literature and film for the past two centuries. On the other hand,
67. Ibid., chaps. 1 and 2.

this is because in some historical periods, institutions and manners are af-
fected by sudden changes that disrupt the everyday existence of people like
us, normally governed by repetition. Everyday life becomes transformed
along with the great collective changes: during times like these, anthropo-
centric narrative forms seem more plausible. From this perspective, Lukács’s
theory may be valid even beyond the scope of its legitimizing philosophy.
Between the French Revolution and the first half of the nineteenth century,
history became an experience lived by the European masses: in periods of
such turmoil and change, personal life can become the place of interesting
collective conflicts, or at least it becomes easier to believe that this is the
case. These decades coincided with the growth of the melodramatic novel.
The Romance in the Novel, Special Characters
During the early 1800s, the novel that would be called “realistic” made ev-
eryday life especially narratable because it introduced an element of romance
into the world of the novel. In addition to taking a melodramatic form, the
exceptional state was able to take on a more canonically adventurous ap-
pearance. The theatrical system of The Betrothed is constructed around
the staging of obvious oppositions,68 and a melodramatic structure is
easily discernible in many episodes, but the primary disruption, the one
holding up the armature of the text, comes prior to this theatricality and is
genuinely romantic: in rewriting the topos of the innocent heroine kid-
napped by an evil character, Manzoni constructs a novel based on an ad-
venture from Greek romance. Even Stendhal’s novels have no dearth of
melodramatic features, but the current of romance is entrusted to the sin-
gular personality of the main characters who challenge other people’s opin-
ions, escape social conventions, indulge themselves in anarchic behavior,
create the unexpected, and, in doing so, introduce the romance into the
novel.69 Boredom is unknown in Scott and Balzac: every one of their pages
affirms life, as if the world would never disappoint us. Manzoni and Stendhal,
on the other hand, are more than familiar with the repetition of existence
68. Ezio Raimondi, Il romanzo senza idillio: Saggio sui “Promessi sposi” (Turin: Einaudi,
1974), 249–307.
69. Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval and Flau-
bert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 4.
and the average stagnation of ordinary lives. This comes through in their
descriptions of life in Verrières or the prosaic existence that Renzo and
Lucia fall back into once their adventures have come to an end. Still, ordi-
nary uneventfulness does not yet approach the anguished mire that
twentieth-century narrators will long to escape from. This is because the
novels of Stendhal and Manzoni focus on disruptions produced by excep-
tional events, and because the world of prose makes room for romantic ad-
ventures and characters who, following their demons at any cost, break the
social order and generate unpredictable stories.
While Robinson Crusoe’s father juxtaposed the middle station to ac-
tions out of the ordinary, for the novel of the early 1800s, daily life was
animated by grandiose disruptions. But not all the works that contributed
to forming the nineteenth-century paradigm expressed this image of the
world. Wilhelm Meister, for example, shares the opinion of Mr. Kreutznaer
and views bourgeois existence as uninteresting for narrative purposes.
Goethe responds accordingly. The lives of people like Albert or Werner
form the background of his novels, but the core is composed of characters
who stand on the side of middle-class normality: the intellectual hero, the
sensitive hero, the hero who develops his inner life by refining his thoughts
and deepening his passions. Not by chance, the two most influential novels
by Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther and Wilhelm Meister’s Appren-
ticeship), which provided the archetypes for the two genres flanking the
realism of the nineteenth century, namely, the roman personnel and the
artist novel, do not feature average protagonists.
The Novel of Personal Destinies
Like Goethe, like Manzoni, and like Stendhal, Jane Austen knew that the
private lives of people like us are almost always repetitive and conventional.
What makes everyday life representable is not the special quality of the
characters or the eruption of the romantic but a new way of conceiving
the prose of the world. Austen cut down the number of potentially narrat-
able stories: her books focus on a single human figure (a young woman of
marriageable age), on a single social class (the gentry), and on a single situ-
ation (marriage). Other stories and ways of being enter into the plot but
solely as a reflection of this primary core. Austen is interested exclusively,
or almost exclusively, in a single period of life: the few months or few years
when the heroines of her novels become adults, making a good marriage
or a bad one. This time of life is cut across by a momentous disruption,
while on either side there extends the prose of couples already formed, in-
dividual destinies already sealed and, therefore, unworthy of being told. A
restriction of this sort could be interpreted as a limit.
In reality, Austen discovers a crucial aspect of the modern form of life:
she discovers that our lives take on interest every time desire collides
with reality and that the aftermath of the confrontation seals our destiny,
deciding our happiness or unhappiness. She discovers that this collision
has universal value, because the pursuit of private happiness (or of its
disenchanted variant, “tranquility”70) is the only shared god still alive,
the only thing that really matters for modern individuals. The content of
this pursuit can be varied (“I wish as well as everybody else to be per-
fectly happy; but like everybody else it must be in my own way,” says
Edward in Sense and Sensibility71); nevertheless, the one value behind
everybody’s pursuit is that of achieving a balance. By focusing on a lim-
ited situation, Austen creates what we might call the novel of personal
destinies. Eighteenth-century precedents do exist (the Bildungsroman,
the marriage novel, and, more generally, narrative fiction telling the story
of a young woman’s entrance into society, as in the works of Fanny
Burney, a writer who was very important to Austen), but Austen further
normalizes exceptional states. The novel of personal destinies has a
Christian archetype (the spiritual autobiography), only now it is situated
in a secular, earthly horizon: instead of saving one’s soul, the goal is to
achieve happiness in this world.
The first consequence of this shift affects the internal structure of the
text. “Jane Austen is antimelodrama”:72 she has no need to exaggerate to
add interest to the everyday situations she talks about. Although her works
have a strong theatrical component—the characters seek meaning in their
lives by acting in the public sphere—Austen’s theatricality always, or al-
most always, skirts around the topoi of romance. This difference resides
70. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland, in The Cambridge Edition
of the Works of Jane Austen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 2, chap. 1
(orig. chap. 23), p. 160.
71. Ibid., vol. 1, chap. 17, p. 105.
72. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Letteratura inglese, in Opere, ed. Nicoletta Polo
(Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 982.
less in the structural and stylistic elements than in the type of interest the
stories seek to arouse. The plots and characters do not have an immediate,
universal hidden sense: they do not embody human types (the girl of mar-
riageable age, the proud gentleman), historical forces (a class or segment
of society), or cosmic powers (good and evil). Not even the universals cited
by some of the titles (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility) are so
important that they transform the protagonists into allegorical figures and
the stories into exempla. Austen knows that particular lives are dependent
on circumstances and that they bear the imprint of character: she expertly
describes the class differences within the confined social sphere to which
the characters belong. Also, all her novels are built around a difference in
status or conditions that marriage will overcome. And yet, a fracture is
opened up between the particular and the universal. Suprapersonal forces
are never embodied in individuals: particular events are influenced by cir-
cumstances, but they remain in the sphere of average everydayness and do
not become typical, in the sense Lukács gives to this term. Elinor Dash-
wood, Marianne Dashwood, and Darcy are not allegories of Sense, Sensi-
bility, and Pride: the text does not try to give an exemplary hidden moral
sense to their character or actions, except in the choice of titles. The ful-
crum of the novels, the reason the reader feels joy or pain, is the struggle
for earthly happiness that each of them experiences. We are not inter-
ested in discerning Good Sense in Elinor or Pride in Darcy: what we are
interested in knowing is whether Elinor or Darcy will ultimately succeed
in reconciling desire and reality and achieving a life that meets their ex-
pectations. Also, observations on the circumstances make very brief ap-
pearances in the text, and only when they serve to explain the paths that
individuals take: Austen’s desire is not to demonstrate causes but to recount
the destinies of her characters. The latter signify first and foremost them-
selves: no universal transcends the subjective pursuit of happiness or tran-
quility. True, the narrator expresses judgments and evaluates single-mindedly
and unabashedly. If a personage is defined as slow-witted, his character is
established objectively, with no polyphonic or perspectival games; and yet
selfishness and stupidity are not sins, but ways of being, forms of life.
Moreover, there is a strong sense of nuance: the characters are not en-
tirely good or bad, or always good and always bad. The same rejection of
melodrama can be found in the way the plot and episodes are constructed:
the love between the main characters is offset by misunderstandings, chance,
and circumstances. The awareness that social life is dominated by conven-

tions prevents or damps down pivotal scenes.
A Map of the Nineteenth-Century Paradigm
We can therefore draw a map of the nineteenth-century paradigm by con-

sidering the ways narrative interest in everyday life is conceived. At the
center of the spectrum, writers who rely on the melodramatic mode reveal
absolute conflicts in the private lives of people like us, ones that can be
made universal, significant, and typical by the presence of a historical back-
drop. For Scott, Balzac or Dickens, the problem of making life interesting
does not exist, because it is solved a priori: the utopia of universal narrat-
ability arose thanks to this poetics. Then there are the novelists who, while
sensing the boredom of daily life, introduce an element of romance into
the prose of the world: the kidnapping that disrupts the otherwise quiet
and repetitive life of Renzo and Lucia or the singular actions of Stendhal’s
demonic characters serve this purpose. At the edges of the spectrum lie
those who seek narrative interest in characters immersed in a prosaic con-
text but who do not have prosaic lives or thoughts: the intellectual hero, the
sensitive hero, the artist.
Jane Austen represents a later position. Her novels unearth an element
of perpetual fascination in ordinary life: the clash between desire and
reality, and the personal destinies that arise out of this collision, turn every
life into a potential subject for a novel. Although Austen’s works might
appear to be limited, they contain another utopia of universal narrat-
ability, founded on the conviction that all human beings, even the most
common, are faced with interesting conflicts during certain periods of their
lives. This happens when objective turning points determine one’s place in
the world, fixing the relations between what one wants to be and what one
becomes, laying the foundations for happiness or unhappiness, or, more
modestly, tranquility or preoccupation. The historical-philosophical
importance of Jane Austen’s work is comparable to the weight literary his-
tories have given for some time now to her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott.
Prior to these writers, the common life could be the subject of a story only
if it contained an adventure or a melodramatic conflict. Also, the novel
contained a strong element of romance, following an approach that pro-
longed the Aristotelian-based poetics of historical narratives and the po-
etics of the novella as a story of unprecedented events. Austen tells instead

about private disruptions that, however irrelevant or insignificant they may
be in the eyes of others, are crucial to the individuals undergoing them. She
was born in an era when particular individuals attributed an absolute,
untranscendable meaning to the most minor events that concerned their pri-
vate, earthly happiness. The epoch had arrived when nothing was important
but life.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Transition to Modernism
The Second Phase of Nineteenth-Century Realism
The symbolic weight that the nineteenth-century paradigm carried in the his-
tory of the novel became perceptible once its importance began to fade. In
Chapter 6 we saw how the culture of modernism and the avant-garde move-
ments cemented the ideal type, relegating the novel of the nineteenth century
to the past and defining itself as its antithesis. In the 1930s and 1940s,
György Lukács created a different narrative. The English edition of his
Studies in European Realism (1950) opens with two questions: Is the classic
nineteenth-century novel Balzac or Flaubert? Does the modern novel culmi-
nate in the works of Thomas Mann or in those of Gide, Proust, and Joyce?
To answer these questions, continues Lukács, we need a new philos-
ophy of literary history.1 His theory dates the crisis of the nineteenth-century
realistic model to an earlier time, identifying the first signs of dissolution in
the works of Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Zola, and Maupassant. Ac-
cording to this schema, the authentic tradition of realism survived in the
second half of the nineteenth century almost exclusively in the Russian novel,
specifically in the work of Tolstoy.
While many aspects of this interpretation have become debatable (the
importance of 1848, for example, and the idea that Tolstoy and Mann
are the continuators of Balzac) and the normative poetics that sustain it
are indefensible, Lukács’s studies still offer historical insights that I find to
be enlightening and irrefutable. The most important one is the following:
1. György Lukács, preface to Studies in European Realism, p. 2.

THE TRANSITION TO MODERNISM 273
The novel of the nineteenth century is not a uniform entity. Nineteenth-

century realism went through two phases, linked together by a dialectical
relationship of continuities and ruptures. On the one hand, the works
written after 1850 preserve and refine the devices of the nineteenth-century
paradigm, especially the theater model, generating a new phase of realism
that in many respects was more “realistic,” or closer to the assumptions on
which this poetics was based; on the other hand, they abandon the as-
sumptions and forms of that model. This twofold movement is often
present in a single text. The generation born between the late 1810s and
late 1820s—that of George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—was
decisive in this regard: in their greatest works, the schemas of the nineteenth-
century paradigm coexist alongside structures that prelude modernism.
The same ambiguity permeates the works written by later generations.
To gain a sense of this tangled imbrication of schemas, consider a list of
novels published around 1890: Édouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont coupés
(1887), Pérez Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta (1887), Maupassant’s Pierre and
Jean (1887–1888), Bourget’s The Disciple (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Por-
trait of Dorian Gray (1891), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
(1891), Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1894–1895), and The-
odor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1894–1895). The same overlapping is present in
Italian literature: in a matter of a few years, we find Dossi’s Gli amori (1887),
Verga’s Mastro Don Gesualdo (1889), D’Annunzio’s Pleasure (1889), Gual-
do’s Decadenza (1892), Svevo’s Una Vita (1892) and Senility (1898), and
De Roberto’s The Viceroys (1894). These decades offer a smorgasbord:
works that reflect the nineteenth century in its prime and others in which
naturalism opens into experimentation; novels of the decadent aesthete
and the first example of interior monologue. The epochal eclecticism of
this period recalls what took hold during the last decades of the twentieth
century. The transition to modernism thus began in the second half of the
nineteenth century; in 1890 the transformation was already perceptible;
around 1910 new schemas prevailed and modernism entered into its ma-
ture phase.2
2. I use the term modernism in the sense it has in English-speaking literatures: it refers to
the family resemblance shared by some of the most important novels that came out during the
first four decades of the twentieth century. Over time, the concept of modernism gradually
entered into the lexicons of the other European literatures. In the case of Italy, see the collected
essays in Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, eds., Italian Modernism (Toronto: University of
274 THE TRANSITION TO MODERNISM
Realism without Melodrama
What distinguishes the first phase of nineteenth-century realism from the

second? If we wanted to rewrite Lukács’s insights using a different concep-
tual framework, we might say that while up to a certain date the European
literary system considered the coexistence of realism and melodrama, or
realism and romance, to be normal, in the second half of the century an
overlap of this sort was viewed as a problem. During the period when Sue’s
The Mysteries of Paris (1842–1843) came out, it was praised as an example
of realism.3 Les Miserables (1862), published five years after the book edi-
tion of Madame Bovary (1857) and three years before Germinie Lacerteux
(1865), was destined for quite a different critical reception: in a collection
of essays entitled Les Romanciers naturalistes, in which Zola reconstructs
the history of French realism, the works of Hugo are now viewed as the
example of what a naturalist writer should not do. The most important
successor of the melodramatic novel in the second half of the nineteenth
century, Dostoevsky, worked with narrative structures inherited from Balzac
and Dickens, from Sue, and from the tradition of the roman feuilleton.
However, while in the 1830s and 1840s Balzac was at once the most impor-
tant melodramatic author and the most influential realist of his era, between
the 1870s and the 1880s Dostoevsky was forced to use the preface to The
Brothers Karamazov to defend himself against the accusation that his char-
acters were unrealistic and exaggerated:
To me [Alexei Karamazov] is noteworthy, but I decidedly doubt that I
shall succeed in proving it to the reader. . . . [H]e is a strange man, even
an odd one. But strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any
Toronto Press, 2004), and especially the entire book by Raffaele Donnarumma, Gadda mod-
ernista (Pisa: ETS, 2006), which interprets the Italian novel of the early twentieth century in
the light of this category. The Anglophone usage of the concept of modernism makes a reap-
pearance in studies by Loredana Di Martino, “Modernism/Postmodernism: Rethinking the
Canon through Gadda,” Edinburgh Journal of Gadda Studies 5 (2007), http://www.gadda.ed
.ac.uk/Pages/journal/issue5/articles/dimartinocanon05.php. See also Riccardo Castellana, Pa-
role cose persone. Il realismo modernista di Tozzi (Rome-Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2009); and by
the same author, “Realismo modernista: Un’idea del romanzo italiano, 1915–1925,” in Ital-
ianistica 39, no. 1 (2010): 23–45; and Valentino Baldi, Reale invisibile Mimesi e interiorità
nella narrativa di Pirandello e Gadda (Venice: Marsilio, 2010).
3. See Lyon-Caen, La Lecture et la Vie, chap. 2.
claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particu-

lars and find at least some general sense in the general senselessness.
Whereas an odd man is most often a particular and isolated case. Is that
not so? . . . For not only is an odd man “not always” a particular and
isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is pre-
cisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while
the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away
from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.4
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Goncourt’s imperative to

“tuer le romanesque” was a principle shared explicitly or implicitly by
most writers who saw themselves as part of the project of describing everyday
life in a serious way, and not only by the naturalists. From this perspective,
Tolstoy or George Eliot is much more stringent than Zola in eliminating
melodrama and romance. But what possibilities remained for writers who
attempted to limit unusual events yet at the same time were looking for
interesting material in the lives of people like us?
1. The most common device for sparking narrative interest in a novel is the
strategic, local use of mechanisms deriving from melodrama and romance.
Even the most theoretically rigorous of naturalist writers, for example,
maintain a problematic relationship with what they reject. The poetics of
Edmond de Goncourt and Zola often run contrary to their novels, in which
melodrama or romance make a regular appearance or are replaced by new
ways for generating exceptional disruptions: characters marked by a pa-
thology that makes them ipso facto romance-like; stories that take place
in downtrodden, working-class settings, where unconventionality or adven-
ture appear to be a natural product of the environment.5
The most significant works from this point of view are by Zola. Consider
the novel that made him famous, L’Assommoir (1877). The characters dis-
play their passions with eloquent gestures: Gervaise weeps while de-
scribing the poverty of the house where she lives, quarrels theatrically with
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brat’ya Karamazovy (1879–1880); English translation The

Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1990), 3.
5. See Pierluigi Pellini, In una casa di vetro. Generi e temi del naturalismo europeo (Flor-
ence: Le Monnier, 2004), 89ff. and passim.
Lantier, then comes to blows with Virginie in the washhouse. Zola may
think that this unfettered physicality is typical of the working-class envi-
ronment; the fact remains that the general stylistic result is very similar to
the gestures of melodrama. Furthermore, the Paris of the Goutte-d’or is de-
scribed following a rhetoric of amplification: everything is immense or
steeped in tragedy, from the “uninterrupted stream of men, animals and
carts,” “the endless procession of labourers,” “slaughterhouses,” “blood-
stained aprons,” and “the crude smell of slaughtered animals” to “the vast
pit of Paris.”6 Some characters seem to come straight out of the world of
Dickens: for example Lalie, the girl who raises her siblings after the death
of her mother and dies from her alcoholic father’s ill treatment. Chance
meetings always intervene at the crucial turning points in the plot: Ger-
vaise first finds Virginie and then Lantier; she loses everything she owns on
the same day as Mother Coupeau’s funeral; and finally, at her lowest mo-
ment, when she is driven to prostitution by hunger, in the “immensity of
Paris,” by chance she first comes across Old Bru and then Goujet.7
This ambiguity is hardly confined to naturalistic novels: the story of War
and Peace, for example, involves masses of people and vast spaces, but the
main characters always find each other, generating a continuous series of
improbable meetings that advance the story line. Even more clearly, the re-
alism of Middlemarch rests on romance-like narrative turning points: Feath-
erstone’s will, the sudden return of Raffles, Bulstrode’s murky past. These
pure forms of centripetal chance survive in the work of two writers who
created some of the most mature, most humanely disenchanted examples
of the serious mimesis of everyday life. Romance was never completely
eradicated.
2. Another form of the romance’s survival in a literary context that in

theory rejected it is the fait divers. The prehistory of this form dates back
to before the 1800s: rhetorical collections of cases, popular tales of memo-
rabilia, marvelous events that provided the material for novellas were based
on the same diegetic mechanism that came to be called fait divers during
6. Émile Zola, L’Assommoir; English translation L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 1.
7. Ibid., chap. 12, p. 114.
the nineteenth century.8 Until the modern era, as we have seen, the irrup-
tion of private history into the narrative space was made possible by states
of exception. With the development of the novel, disruptions of the ev-
eryday became introduced into a discourse that sought to be believable.
Because it violated the statistical norm, the fait divers had to legitimate its
anomalous nature by appealing to the authority of the real, like historiog-
raphy according to Aristotle’s Poetics, or like modern journalistic news sto-
ries.9 Although The Red and the Black had earlier drawn its subject matter
from a “little true fact” taken up by the press, the poetics of the fait divers
became popular mainly in the era of naturalism, because it allowed aspects
of the romance to be maintained while providing a rational justification
for it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, from Flaubert to
Chekhov, writers began to reflect on the repetitive, antinarrative, serial na-
ture of ordinary life. The fait divers presented itself as an occasional,
temporary, realistic interruption of everyday life—as the extension of
casus into an era that, by regulating life, made the existence of people like
us unnarratable.
3. Nonmelodramatic, nonromance-like narrative disruptions can be cre-

ated through the device of the tranche de vie. In the fifth chapter of
L’Assommoir, in about thirty pages Zola describes what it is like to work
in a laundry.10 After witnessing numerous fights, a courtship, a wedding, a
birth, and the fall of Gervaise’s husband from the roof, the reader is led to
believe that this passage, like previous ones, should end with a pivotal scene
or a twist of fate. But nothing happens: Zola limits himself to describing
life in a laundry, the minor incidents that punctuate the flat expanse of the
everyday. All his novels contain episodes of this type. To illustrate the dif-
ference between two models of realism, in “Narrate or Describe?” Lukács
contrasts an episode taken from Nana (1880), set in a hippodrome, to the
horse race during which Anna Karenina publicly demonstrates her love and
suffering for Vronsky—a slice of life and the crucial turning point in a great
8. See Maurice Lever, Canards sanglants: naissance du fait divers (Paris: Fayard, 1993),
and Philip Church, “Introduction: Fait divers et littérature,” Romantisme 27, no. 97
(1997): 7–15.
9. See Clotilde Bertoni, Letteratura e giornalismo (Rome: Carocci, 2009), 28ff.
10. Zola, L’Assommoir, chap. 5, pp. 126ff.
novel of personal destinies.11 Thanks to this device, Zola was the first
novelist capable of describing work, an activity that, until then, had been
talked about from a skewed perspective and only under special conditions
(Robinson Crusoe); or it had been used as a backdrop, as a scenario for
adventure stories. While Zola used this sort of expedient to make trivial,
normal actions interesting, Flaubert, the author who invented this tech-
nique, gave the tranche de vie a dysphoric function. He used it to describe
the great empty spaces of a daily life marked by the repetition of
existence:
But this, this life of hers was as cold as an attic that looks north; and
boredom, quiet as the spider, was spinning its web in the shadowy places
of her heart. She remembered the prize-giving days at the convent, when
she went up on to the platform to receive her little crowns. With her hair
in plaits, her white dress and her prunella shoes showing, she did look
pretty, and the gentlemen, as she made her way back to her seat, would
lean over to pay her compliments; the yard was full of carriages, people
were saying goodbye to her from their windows, the music-master was
waving as he passed by, carrying his violin case. How far away it was! So
very far away!
She called Djali, held her between her knees, stroked her long delicate
head and told her:
—Come on, kiss missy. Not a care in the world, have you?
Then, gazing at the elegant creature’s melancholy expression as it
slowly gave a yawn, she was moved; and, comparing it to herself, she
spoke aloud to it, as if consoling one of the afflicted.
Now and again there came gusts of wind, sea-breezes sweeping right
across the flat lands of Caux, bringing to inland fields the distant salt
freshness. There was a whistling down among the rushes, a rustling and
a fluttering in the beech-leaves; and the tree-tops, swaying to and fro,
kept up their immense murmuring. Emma drew her shawl around her
shoulders and got to her feet.
In the avenue, a dim green light filtered down through the leaves on
to the smooth moss that crackled softly beneath her feet. The sun was
setting; the sky was red between the branches, and the row of tree-trunks
looked just like a brown colonnade against a golden background; seized
11. György Lukács, “Erzählen oder beschreiben?” (1936); English translation “Narrate
or Describe?” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, 110–113.
with fear, she called Djali, hurried back to Tostes along the main road,
slumped into an armchair, and spoke not a word all evening.12
Boredom and work are related: they express the stuff out of which or-
dinary days are made when life is subject to discipline or emptied.
4. Zola, as we have said, uses the tranche de vie for dysphoric purposes.
He does this by observing episodes of everyday life as if he were seeing
them for the first time, with the freshness of someone who has yet to experi-
ence repetition. In doing so, Zola resorts to another way of making everyday
life narratable in the era when romance had become a problem: the device
of estrangement. This technique arose out of the culture of ancient stoicism,
reappearing every time the members of an intellectual elite develop the
feeling that they do not belong to the culture, institutions, and common
sense of their time.13 But if we go beyond the limited genre that Montes-
quieu’s Persian Letters (1721) inaugurated (the story of one’s own culture
told from the perspective of a foreigner), the intensive appearance of es-
trangement in European fiction actually came later than 1850 and took
place following two lines of development.
Omniscient narrators began to tell their story using categories of judg-
ment and stylistic forms that differed from those that would be adopted
by common sense. An extreme example of this approach is Flaubert’s
style, with its uncompromising, paratactic syntax and his unusual use of
verb tenses:
The regular troops had made themselves scarce and the post was now
defended only by the Municipal Guards. A wave of attackers boldly
made towards the front steps; they were mown down; others followed;
the door shuddered under the resounding blows of iron bars; the guards
stood firm. But a barouche stuffed with hay and blazing like some giant
torch was dragged up against the walls; firewood, straw and a cask of
spirits were hastily tipped on. The fire darted along the stones; the
12. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856–1857); English translation Madame Bovary,
trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Penguin, 2003), part 1, chap. 7, pp. 42–43.
13. Carlo Ginzburg, “Straniamento: Preistoria di un procedimento letterario,” in Ginz-
burg, Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (1998); English translation “Making
It Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” in Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Dis-
tance, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1–25.
building started puffing out smoke like a huge solfatara; enormous flames
roared out between the pillars of the balustrade on the flat roof. National
Guardsmen had occupied the first floor of the Palais-Royal and shots
were coming from every window in the square; bullets whistled through
the air and the water from the burst fountain mingled with the pools of
blood on the ground; people were sliding about in the mud on pieces of
clothing, military caps and weapons. Frédéric felt something soft under-
neath his foot: it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey greatcoat lying face
down in the gutter. Fresh groups of workers were arriving all the time,
urging the fighters on. The firing was intensifying. The wine merchants
had opened their shops and people kept breaking off for a smoke and a
pint of beer before going back to fight. A stray dog was howling. This
made people laugh.14
The accumulation of sentences (stacked in a list with no final or causal

connections) and the way everything is jumbled together (the taverns open
during the shooting, the dead, the stray dog that makes people laugh) de-
stroy any hierarchy of meaning. We could read in it the ideal continuation
of the war stories that we encounter in the work of Stendhal, a writer who
did not inspire Flaubert’s enthusiasm. The difference is that in Madame
Bovary, in A Sentimental Education, or in A Simple Heart, this technique
invades every page no matter what the topic, not only those related to
the war. The paratactic syntax and the use of the background imperfect com-
municate the idea that what happens is a mass of disorganized and uncon-
trollable minor events:
Then, keen to get to know, at long last, that vague, indefinable will-
o’-the-wisp, “society,” he [Frédéric] wrote to the Dambreuses enquir-
ing if he might call on them. Madame Dambreuse replied inviting him
for the following day.
It was her “at home” day. There were carriages standing in the court-
yard. Two flunkeys hurried out from the glass porch and a third was
waiting at the top of the steps to lead him into the house.
Frédéric went through the entrance hall, another room, and then
a large drawing-room with high windows and a monumental mantel-
piece, on which stood a globe-shaped clock and a pair of porcelain vases
of monstrous proportions from which two clusters of sconces were
14. Flaubert, A Sentimental Education, part 3, chap. 1, 312–313.

sprouting like two golden bushes. On the wall were paintings in the style
of Ribera; the tapestry door-curtains were heavy and majestic and the
furniture—the tables, consoles and armchairs—all in Empire style, had
something so imposing and diplomatic about them that, in spite of him-
self, Frédéric had to smile. Finally he reached an apartment, oval in shape,
panelled in rosewood, crammed with exquisite pieces of furniture, and
lit by one single plate-glass window looking out on to a garden. Madame
Dambreuse was sitting beside the fire with a dozen people grouped round
her. She showed no surprise at not having seen him for so long and with
a friendly nod invited him to sit down.
As [Frédéric] came in, they were singing the praises of the eloquent
sermons of Father Coeur. Then, in reference to a theft committed by a
footman, they bemoaned the immorality of servants. There was an end-
less stream of gossip: that old Sommery woman had a cold, Mademoi-
selle Turvisot was getting married, the Montcharrons wouldn’t be back
in town before the end of February, nor would the Bretancourts, people
were staying on in the country later these days. The opulence of the sur-
roundings seemed to emphasize the futility of the conversation; but what
was being said was less stupid than the pointless, desultory and dreary
way in which it was being spoken.15
The other great novelist who made substantial, systematic use of

estrangement during the same decades was Tolstoy. In his major works, epi-
sodes, things, and environments are described while suspending the cogni-
tive and value categories that should make them meaningful.16 A random
look through War and Peace easily turns up passages of this sort, not only in
the major turning-point episodes, but in the minor secondary episodes as
well. The Hussar Nikolai Rostov, in his first war experience, is encamped
with his squadron waiting to fight with the French. He meets some Aus-
trian farmers who are looking after the Russians’ horses. To overcome the
barrier of distance between human beings who belong to different cultures
and classes, and who will probably not see each other again, they exchange
small talk in order to socialize. He shouts, “Long live the Austrians, long
live the Russians, long live Tsar Alexander, and long live the whole world!”
15. Ibid., part 2, chap. 2, pp. 141–142.

16. Victor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo kak priem” (1917); English translation “Art as Device,”
in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, Illinois State
University, 1998), 1–14.
But the warmth that the people involved in the scene work so hard to create
is swept aside by the alienating gaze of the narrator:
Rostov himself, like the German, waved his peaked cap above his head
and, laughing, shouted: “Und vivat die ganze Welt!” Though there was
no particular reason for rejoicing either for the German, who was
cleaning his cowshed, or for Rostov, who had gone for hay with his sec-
tion, the two men looked at each other with happy delight and brotherly
love, shook their heads as a sign of mutual love, and smiling, went their
way—the German to the cowshed, and Rostov to the cottage he occu-
pied with Denisov.17
The other line of development takes the route of adopting a different

point of view from that of the author. This approach is also characteristic
of Tolstoy,18 but it was European naturalism that really embraced it. In
some of his novels, Zola allows the story to be narrated by the voice of
characters who belong to the milieu being described, and who consider
obvious things that the readers and the writer view as out of the ordinary.
Verga also works with a similar approach when he employs a narrator who
tells the story according to the common sense that prevails in the commu-
nity of people to which the characters belong, assuming a point of view
that the author and readers can only view as strange and backward.19
5. But the most important form of realism without melodrama is the novel
of personal destinies. If the varieties of narrative that tell serious stories
about the lives of people like us are distinguished by the way they make
everyday life interesting, then, regardless of their obvious differences, the
works of writers like Flaubert, George Eliot, and Tolstoy seem to be united
by a common element. Madame Bovary, War and Peace, A Sentimental
Education, Middlemarch, and Anna Karenina do not attract us by the nov-
elty of the plot twists, the singularity of the characters, or the representa-
17. Leo Tolstoy, Vojna i mir (1865–1869); English translation War and Peace (1865–1869),
trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), bk. 1,
part 2, chap. 4, p. 128.
18. The text Shklovsky uses to present the technique of estrangement in Tolstoy is the
story “Cholstomer,” in which the narrative is performed by a horse. Shklovsky, “Art as
Device.”
19. See Guido Baldi, L’artificio della regressione. Tecnica narrativa e ideologia nel Verga
verista (Naples: Liguori, 1980).
tive, typical value of the plots. While the melodramatic novel inflates par-
ticular stories to fill them with universal meanings, and the novel that
contains elements of romance introduces adventures into the repetition of
existence, these works reduce the number of states of exception and focus
on the moments in which a life, interacting and conflicting with other lives,
takes on a particular form and creates or submits to its fate. The novel of
personal destinies arose out of the conviction that all existences can be-
come interesting any time the desires of an individual—the potentials that
make up the framework of its possibilities—collide with reality and are
narrowed down to one. Each of us is familiar with these zones of density:
the moments, hours, or days charged with public events that decide who
we will become and if we will be happy or unhappy. There is no need for
the actions to be externally anomalous: a space for narrative interest opens
up every time a life crosses over a threshold that shapes it. Disruptions are
marked by uncommon events (the experience of war), but also by com-
pletely common ones (a personal development, the choice or acceptance
of a job, the success or failure of a marriage, the birth of a child). Whether
the twists of fate are exceptional or predictable is ultimately incidental:
what is important is that they are possibilities inherent in the life of people
like us. The attention to the destiny of individuals counts more than the
aura of romance in the stories. In War and Peace, Middlemarch, or Anna
Karenina, every scene is told from the perspective of the characters’ des-
tiny and, page after page, the narrator traces out their arcs and reflects
on what they have become. In Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Educa-
tion, the existential turning points occur in the midst of the daily unevent-
fulness, inside the cloud of pointless actions. And yet this narrative filled
with boredom, with existential waste, or with small contingencies is made
tragic precisely by the fact that, ultimately, we are witnessing the passing
of a life: a myriad of desires and possibilities is becoming something—
something limited.
Although every novel founded on empathetic identification with the
protagonists is ultimately a novel of personal destinies, this subgenre at-
tained its maturity during the nineteenth century. Descended from the
German Bildungsroman, it was perfected by the novels of Jane Austen,
which focus extensively on the slow metamorphoses of ordinary life. The
great writers of the generation born between the late 1810s and the late
1820s achieved a sort of synthesis between Austen’s model and that of
Scott and Balzac. The experiences that Flaubert, Eliot, and Tolstoy describe
cover many aspects of the human experience, as is the case in Balzac, but
the plots focus on common activities, as in Austen’s works. The stories are
embedded in a complex historical and sociological framework, as in Balzac,
but the intention of the novel is to follow the trajectories of a few individ-
uals, and not to describe an epoch or a milieu. This is precisely why the
work takes the implicit or explicit form of an existential scale—a scale that
is always latent in the type of attention the narrator gives to the protago-
nists, and that becomes evident in certain passages: for example, in the last
two chapters of A Sentimental Education, in the conclusion to Middle-
march, or at the times Tolstoy’s characters who wonder about the meaning
of life (Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, Konstantin Levin) reflect on
what they have become.
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the structure of
the novel of personal destinies was taken up by writers who subscribed to
different poetics. Many naturalistic works actually tell the history of an
individual. The novels of Hardy or those of Fontane follow the biogra-
phies of the protagonists. Symptomatically, a decade apart, Maupassant
and Svevo published works entitled Une vie (1883) and Una vita (1892).20
The early masterpiece by Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (1881), tells what
Isabel Archer finally does with herself:
But what was she going to do with herself? This question was irregular,
for with most women one had no occasion to ask it. Most women did
with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less
gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a
destiny.21
Often, the writer weaves a few personal trajectories into a polyhistor-

ical narrative (War and Peace, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina), perhaps in
the form of the family novel. As an ethical unit and collective person, the
family form allows singular lives to be bound in a natural way to the col-
lective events, telling the story of how the first community cell becomes
transformed.
20. Seventeen years after Svevo’s Una vita, Gertrude Stein published Three Lives (1909).
21. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, in Novels, 1881–1886, ed. William T. Stafford (New
York: Library of America, 1985), chap. 7, p. 254.
As we noted about Jane Austen at the end of Chapter 6, the emergence

of this type of novel was a decisive event in the history of Western narra-
tive: its existence signaled the arrival of the epoch in which nothing is impor-
tant but life. To attract the interest of the reader, a melodramatic conflict or
a romance-like event is no longer necessary because, potentially, every in-
dividual now has an infinite value. But this process has a dialectical conse-
quence that allows aspects implicit in the logic of the novel as a genre to
emerge—aspects only the novel of personal destinies illuminates fully.
When we focus on the lives of people like us, regardless of the collective
significance of the desires that people fight for, we also devalue the values
that transcend individuals and their pursuit of happiness (or tranquility). If
each person is an epicenter of absolute meaning, then each person is poten-
tially entitled to a legitimate point of view. The relativism and perspectivism
that lie implicit in the genre of the novel are fully revealed in these types of
narratives.
The novel of personal destinies brings two other important changes with
it. The first is the emergence of a new way of viewing time. For the pro-
tagonists in narratives constructed on this basis, the time granted to a life
is the only good that individuals possess, which is precisely why its pas-
sage becomes an issue. Of course, this theme is not without precedents: the
Christian spiritual autobiography, for example, or the topos of the fleeting
nature of life, so dear to ancient lyric poetry. However, never before had
the problem of time entered so glaringly into narrative fiction. The eigh-
teenth century is full of novels structured as biographies or autobiogra-
phies, in other words, as books in which the characters necessarily age, but
rarely is the attention focused starkly on the flow of time, on the desire to
not die unfulfilled. Usually the narrative focus falls on adventures that the
protagonists face or on the problem of vice and virtue, but not on life and
time as the single dimension of finite existence. The same thing can be
said about Scott, Manzoni, Balzac, Stendhal, and Dickens: in their novels
there are no passages to be found that bear resemblance to the endings of
A Sentimental Education or Middlemarch—sections in which the reader’s
attention is captured not by fanciful stories but by a reflection on what
Frédéric Moreau and Deslauriers, Dorothea Brooke, and Lydgate have
managed to do with themselves. When the interest is concentrated on the
characters’ destiny, the use of life becomes a theme as well as a problem,
and it takes on an emotional charge: hope or regret, expectation or anguish.
Only after this step is taken does it become possible to imagine an entire
book in search of lost time. The final ending of The Betrothed, after the
story has come to a conclusion, when we are told what happens to the
characters, might vaguely resemble these; the endings of Jane Austen’s
novels offer a more solid precedent, but even they are still weak. Perhaps
the text that best anticipates the perception of time for which the novel of
personal destinies will become its vehicle is Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from
Beyond the Tomb, with its sense of universal impermanence.
The second change concerns how the relationship between private and
collective matters is viewed. While the characters of Scott and Balzac em-
body universal historical forces, according to the principle of the typical
described by Lukács, in novels of personal destinies the connection between
small stories and the larger history is purely mechanical rather than or-
ganic. As in the novels of Jane Austen, works such as A Sentimental Educa-
tion, War and Peace, and Middlemarch accept the separation between public
and private spheres as a given. Singular existences live inside their bubbles
of subjective meaning; when they are touched by historical events, a bond
of pure exteriority is established between their little stories and the larger
course of the world. The life of Frédéric Moreau is shattered by the revolu-
tions of 1848, but he passes through the conflicts as if his life were detached
from the collective events: “The wounded falling all around him and the
dead lying on the ground didn’t seem really dead or wounded. It was like
being at a show.”22 The characters in War and Peace are swept away by
major historical events, but this larger history seems to be separated from
their essential concerns by a sort of ontological barrier:
In 1808 the emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a new meeting with
the emperor Napoleon, and there was much talk in Petersburg high so-
ciety about the grandeur of this solemn meeting.
In 1809 the closeness of the two rulers of the world, as Napoleon and
Alexander were called, had reached the point that, when Napoleon de-
clared war on Austria that year, a Russian corps went abroad to assist
their former enemy. . . .
Life meanwhile, people’s real life with its essential concerns of health,
illness, work, rest, with its concerns of thought, learning, poetry, music,
22. Flaubert, A Sentimental Education, part 3, chap. 1, 312.

love, friendship, hatred, passions, went on as always, independently and

outside of any political closeness of enmity with Napoleon Bonaparte
and outside all possible reforms.23
From the second half of the nineteenth century onward, for the Western
form of life it has become difficult to rediscover an organic relationship
between private and global destinies. This can occur only on days or in
years when history and politics go back to being an experience lived by the
masses, namely, in states of exception. The norm is the world described by
Tocqueville: private individuals enclosed inside personal spheres of meaning
who regard world destinies with detachment, delegate their political par-
ticipation, and submit to major historical upheavals as if they were uncon-
trollable, external events.
Historical Stations
Seeking to abolish or at least rein in melodrama and romance, the second

phase of realism moved decisively away from the trends that prevailed in
the first half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, some of the assumptions
crucial to the nineteenth-century paradigm continued to be adopted: the
inner and outer worlds preserved their order and hierarchy; the essential
resided in actions and public speeches. Then, starting from the 1890s, the
pace of innovation became faster and in the first decades of the twentieth
century led to the turning point of modernism and the avant-gardes. The
crisis of the nineteenth-century model thus took place in stages: between
1850 and 1890, a mix of completion and disintegration appeared in works
by the same authors; starting from the 1890s, the rupture started to pre-
dominate; then around 1910, “human character changed,”24 art lost its
obviousness,25 and the epoch of full-fledged modernism began. But the
changes that transformed the face of the novel between 1910 and 1940 did
23. Tolstoy, War and Peace, bk. 2, part 3, chap. 1, p. 418.

24. “On or about December 1910, human character changed. . . . The change was not
sudden and definite. . . . But a change there was, nevertheless; and since one must be arbi-
trary, let us date it about the year 1910.” Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” 421.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (1970); English translation Aesthetic
Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1977), 1.
not appear out of nowhere: they almost always arose out of processes that
had already come forth, sometimes in conspicuous forms, during the late
nineteenth century.
We must therefore imagine three historical phases bound together by a
dialectical relationship of continuity and rupture. I will mark these confines
using round figures that are deliberately vague:26 the first extends from
1800 to 1850, the second from 1850 to 1900, and the third from 1900 to
1940. During the first, the nineteenth-century paradigm emerged; during
the second, the paradigm began to transform into something else; during
the third, the themes and technical solutions of modernist fiction fully de-
veloped and became predominant. There were overlaps between the three
periods, and hybridizations continued. The most important element of con-
tinuity is the following: before and after the crisis of the nineteenth-century
novel, the stream of innovations rested on a substrate that remained un-
changed, because the serious mimesis of the everyday and the existence of
a backdrop with a sense of historical dynamics remained central to the
European literary system. For many of the great authors born between the
1870s and the 1880s—for Proust, Woolf, Forster, or Lawrence—the task
of the novel was still that of telling about the existence of people like us,
and not of creating fantastic worlds, stylistic games, metaliterature, écriture,
or pure lies. The critical vocabulary that dominated during the years of mod-
ernism was very different from the critical lexicon used by the avant-garde
movements of the 1950s and 1960s to justify their works. The basic reason
was that, although conceived in different terms, a majority of modernist
novelists remained faithful to the same project we find in the critical writ-
ings of the authors who were born around 1840 (Zola, James), and even
before that in the critical writings of Balzac or Stendhal: to properly, realisti-
cally, represent everyday life. The intentions of the modernist authors swarm
26. There are two ways to demarcate the symbolic thresholds: one is to make use of em-
blematic years, distinguished by the appearance of major works or major events in world
history; the second is to rely on generic thresholds. I opt for the latter solution, partly because
each national culture has its own internal chronology and milestones, and partly because
symbolic transformations are slow, extended processes, not sudden and discrete. The system
of culture maintains partial autonomy with respect to political and social history: the latter
can be quick and traumatic; the former is largely inert and sticky. Even the most traumatic
crises, even world wars, take years to transform artistic approaches. Brusque changes are
unknown to the collective imagination.
with appeals to “life.” So the criticism that Proust and Woolf directed
against the realism coming before them starts from a typically realistic lit-
erary project: the naturalists and the “Edwardians” are accused of not
properly describing ordinary experience.27 In English-speaking culture,
the dialectical relationship between the literatures of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries is made explicit by F. R. Leavis, who connects modernist
realism to the nineteenth-century novel through the concept of the great
tradition, drawing an ideal continuity between Jane Austen, George Eliot,
Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.28
What radically changed was the way of understanding life. A vivid grasp
of this transition can be had by reading the essays of Virginia Woolf. One
of the most important is “Modern Fiction,” which came out in an early ver-
sion in 1919 under the title “Modern Novels,” and in its definitive version
in 1925, as part of the collection The Common Reader. Woolf defines her
own poetics in contrast to Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy:
Is life like this [as Bennett imagines it]? Must novels be like this? . . .
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The
mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or en-
graved with the sharpness of steel. . . . Life is not a series of gig lights sym-
metrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope
surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not
the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncir-
cumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with
as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading
merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of
fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.29
Woolf explains a perceptual transformation, a gestaltic change. The

modernists linger on the swarm of minute impressions, on unconscious and
preconscious movements that run through a common mind on a common
day, and they consider important some ontological levels that Edwardian
writers did not comprehend or did not value. In other words, the modernist
27. Proust, Finding Time Again, 111ff.; Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 384–389.
28. See Niels Buch-Jepsen, “Arrière-garde et le modernisme en Angleterre: Leavis et la
grande tradition de la rupture,” in Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle: l’autre face de la moder-
nité esthétique, ed. William Marx (Paris: Puf, 2004), 195–202.
29. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” 160–161.
novel changed the order of the discourse by changing the criteria sepa-
rating the significant from the insignificant, the foreground from the back-
ground, the essential from the accidental. But while this transition may be
clear, the persistence of a common element is equally so: the modernists
were pursuing the same aim as the realists of the nineteenth century and
their continuers—they wanted to properly represent life.30 The relationship
between the “nineteenth-century novel” and the “twentieth-century novel”
(to use two unpolished and typically nineteenth-century critical concepts)
is therefore dialectical: it is made of continuity and rupture. In fact, the nar-
rative transformations that produced their most radical results between
1910 and 1930 were announced and prepared during the second half of the
nineteenth century. The change affected the cornerstones of the novelistic
edifice: narrators, plots, and characters.
New Narrators
According to the nineteenth-century paradigm, the narrator organizes,

interprets, and controls. But, despite being ontologically above the charac-
ters, the narrator does not reduce them to mere satellites of his or her
discourse. He or she is aware that the reader wants primarily to follow the
stories of the individuals and not the comments of the narrating voice. The
latter has the task of setting the characters in the milieu: he or she knows
more than they do, but cannot crush their truths and their words under the
weight of his or her own. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, this equi-
librium tipped in two opposite directions.
1. In some cases, the figure of the narrator became muted. Two of the most
important writers from the generation born between the late 1810s and the
late 1820s—Flaubert and Dostoevsky—created narrative voices quite dis-
tinct from those of the early nineteenth century. Flaubert cut the number
of the narrator’s opinions and comments down to as few as possible; Dos-
toevsky granted his characters their freedom, allowing what they said to
be just as valuable as the narrator’s words, creating a polyphonic effect.31
30. “The novelist is . . . terribly exposed to life.” See Woolf, “Life and the Novelist,” 400.
31. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (1963); Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics, trans. Carol Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
The same transformation can be seen in the works of the great writers born
in the 1840s. In the novels of Zola, the narrator hides behind free indirect
discourse, and the story is advanced by the interweaving of the characters’
voices. Acting out of a completely different poetics, Henry James constructs
his texts on the foundations of the dramatic method and a restricted point
of view. In the initial phase of his work, the texts take on a theatrical form:
he leaves the characters in the foreground and avoids casting an overly ana-
lytical light on the protagonists’ psyche, but the narrator retains the
prerogative of omniscience. In James’s last phase, which began in 1897 with
The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew, the narrator disappears to
make room for the limited point of view of the characters, and, with no
commentary, the novel resolves in a dramatic presentation of the partial,
confused way that states of mind rise to the surface. This movement from
an omniscience claiming to be objective to the narrowness of subjective
points of view became common in the age of modernism.
The change in the literary doxa can be measured by comparing two essays
written at a distance of sixty years that examine the attitude a narrator
should take toward the story. One of the most important writings of Zola
collected together in Les Romanciers naturalistes (The Naturalist Novelists)
(1881) is dedicated to Stendhal.32 What makes the essay especially
interesting is its contradictions: Zola would like to turn Stendhal into a
precursor of naturalism, but he cannot overlook the fact that the author of
The Red and the Black simply fails to fit this role. In resuming a distinc-
tion typical of his critical lexicon, Zola places Stendhal among the “psy-
chologists” rather than the “physiologists”: in other words, he belongs to
those who are interested in the mechanisms of the interior life, an approach
characteristic of the French narrative tradition, but who ignore the role of
the body and environments. Stendhal perpetuates the “abstract man” of the
eighteenth century; in contrast, the naturalist novelists reveal the influence
that the instincts and the outside world exert on personal destinies. Zola is
not overly fond of Stendhal, partly because the psyches of characters like
Julien Sorel, Madame de Rênal, and Mathilde de La Môle are too twisted
32. Émile Zola, “Stendhal,” in Zola, Les Romanciers naturalistes, in Œuvres complètes,
ed. Henri Mitterrand, vol. 10, La Critique naturaliste (1881) (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2004),
478–502.
in his eyes (“life is simpler”), and because Stendhal systematically ignores

the milieu. Zola focuses on one of the most beautiful chapters in The Red
and the Black, the one in which Julien Sorel forces himself to take Madame
de Rênal’s hand:
It is a small, silent drama of great power, and Stendhal has beautifully

analyzed the states of mind of the two characters. Now, the milieu
never appears, not once. We could be anywhere and under any condi-
tions whatsoever: as long as it was dark, the scene would stay the
same. Considering the tension created by his desire, I understand per-
fectly well that Julien is not affected by his milieu. He sees nothing,
hears nothing, feels nothing: he just wants to take the hand of Ma-
dame de Rênal and hold it in his own. But Madame de Rênal, on the
contrary, should be experiencing all the exterior influences. Give this epi-
sode to a writer for whom mileux exist and he will welcome the night
into the surrender of this woman, with its smells, voices, and soft sensual
pleasures. And this writer will be on the side of truth; the picture will be
more complete.33
When he says that the novelist’s task is to describe objective circum-

stances, Zola illustrates one of his poetic principles, but also a way of
conceiving narrative fiction that was common among writers and readers
in 1881: from Scott to Tolstoy, many eighteenth-century novelists be-
lieved that environments needed to be described and took this for granted.
Almost sixty years later, when the golden age of the modernist novel
was drawing to a close, Sartre wrote one of his first essays on poetics,
“M. François Mauriac and Freedom” (1939). The argument he puts for-
ward goes against what Zola had defended in his essay on Stendhal. Sar-
tre’s view is that novelists must avoid transcending the subjective world of
their protagonists. They must follow the good example of Conrad, who
uses multiple and partial narrators, and not the bad example of Mauriac,
who observes, controls, and judges the characters from a unitary, superior
point of view:
M. Mauriac is omniscient for everything relating to his little world. . . . It’s

time to say: God is not an artist. . . . I maintain . . . that [Mauriac] has no
right to make these absolute judgments. A novel is an action related from
33. Ibid., 485.

various points of view. . . . The introduction of absolute truth or of God’s

standpoint constitutes a twofold error of technique: To begin with, it pre-
supposes a purely contemplative narrator, withdrawn from the action. . . .
And besides, the absolute is non-temporal. If you pitch the narrative in the
absolute, the string of duration snaps; and the novel disappears before
your eyes: All that remains is a dull truth, sub specie aeternitatis.34
This is a statement of poetics arising from the philosophy of freedom

and choice that Sartre was developing during the years between his Sketch
for a Theory of the Emotions (1939) and Being and Nothing (1943), but it
is also the textual crystallization of a cultural atmosphere, like Zola’s essay
on Stendhal. In the early decades of the twentieth century, some of the
structures and attitudes typical of the nineteenth century—such as the om-
niscient narrator and descriptions of the milieu—had lost prestige, be-
coming unacceptable or ideologically suspect. According to the new lit-
erary doxa, the only possible realism was one that abandoned a panoramic
gaze, a superior transcendence, and accepted the finitude of individual
points of view as an inviolable limit for all discourses on the world. After
1945, thanks to the influence of Sartre’s literary theory, the concept of
“subjective realism” became widely accepted by French literary critics.
The concept is both descriptive and normative at the same time: as a
principle of poetics, it enjoins novelists to not judge or observe the con-
sciences of the characters from on high, in the light of future consequences;
as a principle of literary history, it made it possible to rewrite the entire
trajectory of the novel, making Stendhal a precursor of modernist
subjectivism.35
2. Between the 1850s and the 1930s, then, “nineteenth-century” omni-

science was attacked, but during exactly the same years the figure of the
34. Jean-Paul Sartre, “M. François Mauriac et la liberté” (1939); English translation “M.
François Mauriac and Freedom” (1939), in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette
Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 15–16.
35. In 1954, Georges Blin published Stendhal et les problèmes du roman. In his view, the
author of The Red and the Black initiated subjective realism, founded on restricted points of
view and on the knowledge that individuals are inside reality and not above it. Very often the
type of gaze Stendhal’s narrator casts on the outside world takes the form of our daily lived
experience: it is fragmentary, crossed by lines of force, deformed by our own interests and
passions, centered on our self. See Georges Blin, Stendhal et les problèmes du roman (Paris:
Corti, 1954), 107ff., 149ff.
narrator morphed in the opposite direction. In addition to being the era

of restricted points of view, modernism is also the period of the novel-
essay, that is, works in which narrative voices think, judge, and shift the
balance of narrative interest from the story to the meaning of the story.
The scaffolding of In Search of Lost Time and The Man without Quali-
ties is composed of ideas; Hermann Broch inserts an actual essay into
the last volume of The Sleepwalkers; first-person narrators like Mattia
Pascal, Malte Laurids Brigge, or Zeno Cosini slip continuously from telling
the story to reflecting on what it means.
The modern novel-essay has a long prehistory, punctuated by thresh-
olds. When classicism and Christian aesthetic Platonism permeated the
Western literary space, many texts belonging to the family of the novel
were surrounded by allegorical infrastructures expressed in the form of the
concept. However, there is an unsurmountable divide separating these ap-
paratuses of ideas and those that have surrounded the novel over the past
two centuries. The premodern conceptual atmosphere assumes that the
universals are common knowledge, it treats the story line as an exemplum,
and it uses “moralistic” categories. The modern conceptual atmosphere
does not assume that there are any commonly known universals, it does
not treat the story as an exemplum, and it uses categories that are sensitive
to historical dynamics. From this perspective, the genealogy of the novel-
essay can be seen to have undergone an early, crucial transformation at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Still, it rarely happens in the nineteenth-
century novel that the weight of the ideas crushes the autonomy of the
characters: concepts are used to create the backstage universals that sur-
round the stories, but not to shift attention to theories. In most cases, a
good balance is achieved: the narrator presents the historical, sociological,
psychological, and anthropological forces that make the story understand-
able, but without deflecting the reader’s interest from the story to the
narrator’s ideas.
The modern novel-essay came into existence when the center of gravity
of the work shifted increasingly toward abstract thought. The first signs of
this second historic frontier occurred early on: the last section of The
Human Comedy, entitled Analytical Studies, is composed of essays. How-
ever, the real turning point occurred decades later, in the works of Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky. At the beginning of the third book of War and Peace, the
narrator interrupts the plot and introduces a reflection on the philosophy
of history that grows as the novel progresses, eventually occupying the en-
tire ending. The contemporary readership viewed this gesture as trans-
gressing their reading codes. For his part, Tolstoy felt that the narrative
form no longer had the capacity on its own to contain the truth about life,
hence, his choice to slash the narrative canvas with a conceptual knife, su-
perimposing the transcendence of ideas on the immanence of particular
stories. Dostoevsky includes abstract thought in many ways. He allows a
first-person narrator to mix autobiography and thought (Notes from Un-
derground), he introduces apologues into the narrative plot (“The Legend
of the Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov), but, more than any-
thing, he transforms the theatrical conflicts that give form to his novels into
conflicts between ideas. Thus, while Tolstoy strengthens the philosophical
authority of the narrator, Dostoevsky multiplies the thinking voices. Still,
no matter how divergent the works of these writers may be, they do have
a common effect: they intensify the impression that stories are no longer
adequate to talk about what is essential in life, and that, to do so, we
must turn to ideas.
Nevertheless, there is another way to thicken mediation without using
concepts: by employing style. It was Flaubert who initiated this new pos-
sibility. His readers were struck by the filtering effect his writing created.
According to the author, when the subject matter of a novel or short story
is the lives of common people (Madame Bovary, A Sentimental Educa-
tion, A Simple Heart), it is up to the beauty of the form to redeem the
misery of ordinary life—the “nothingness” of what is being written
about.36 Many twentieth-century readers have interpreted these ideas in
the light of subsequent literary history, as if Flaubert’s words were a pre-
lude to the novel of uneventfulness that would become popular in the
modernist era. In reality, the story of Madame Bovary, like those of A
Sentimental Education and A Simple Heart, is rocked by events: Flaubert
knows how to talk about the empty spaces of boredom, but the plots
hinge on upsets and twists of fate. When Flaubert talks about “nothing-
ness,” he is not referring to a lack of peripeteia. Rather, he is expressing
an opinion on the intrinsic value of the subject matter: his words betray
36. Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, August 8, 1846; Letter to Louise Colet,
January 16, 1852, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830–1857, trans. Francis Steegmuller
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 50, 154.
the persistence of the background fallout from the Stiltrennung, the fos-
silized remnant of a classicist hierarchy that persisted into the Romantic
era. This was transferred into the idea that certain topics are intrinsically
less noble than others, and that, precisely for this reason, they need to be
redeemed by means of the form. In comparison to the historical scenes
Flaubert would go on to recount in Salammbô and The Temptation of
Saint Anthony, the provincial story of Madame Bovary is a topic devoid
of intrinsic greatness, a worthless subject. Even though the topic does not
lend itself to beauty on its own merits, the book manages to stay on its
feet thanks to style.
The difference between Madame Bovary, A Sentimental Education, A
Simple Heart, and the practices of realistic narrative fiction is the fact that
in these works the style can be seen. In theory, the novels of Flaubert—with
their impersonality, their focus on the outer world, and their wealth of
details—should embody the nineteenth-century ideal of transparent
writing; in actuality, the style is superimposed on the story like an opaque
filter that renews our perception of things37 through its distancing effect.
This is achieved by his relentless use of paratactic syntax and his extensive,
peculiar use of the background imperfect, his transformation of things into
agents of action, his destruction of causal and final links, which are re-
placed by temporal connections that align events without explaining them
or subordinating them to a telos. The overall effect is the creation of a
world in which lives pass “without the characters taking any active part so
to speak in the action.”38 In addition to containing an unwitting memory
of the Stiltrennung, these theories on books that are about nothing point
to a shift in the balance: they indicate that the interest has moved from the
story in itself to the way of telling it. While Flaubert’s impersonal narrator
may have given up on an explicit ideological role, apparently weakening
his own mediation, he actually gives an ideological role to his writing that
is implicit, judging the world much more continuously and pervasively
than would a traditional, omniscient narrator. It is thanks to style that the
37. Marcel Proust, “À propos du ‘style’ de Flaubert” (1920); English translation “On
Flaubert’s ‘Style,’ ” in Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. John Sturrock (London:
Penguin Books, 1988), 261.
38. Ibid., 265.
novelist becomes truly “like God in creation—invisible and all-powerful;

he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen.”39
New Plots
The transformations in literary forms during the second half of the nine-
teenth century shook up the nineteenth-century plot model; during the
modernist era, it would be repudiated by almost all the avant-garde writers.
The novelists born between 1810 and 1850 had a decisive role in this change,
but the most revolutionary of all was once again Flaubert: his works
dissolve theatrical plots from within, retaining their armature but loos-
ening the joints. Flaubert went about demolishing the cornerstones of
nineteenth-century story lines: the causal connection between the parts and
the hierarchy between the scenes. His novels have large, disconnected areas,
no-man’s-lands occupied by a plethora of small, centrifugal actions. This
motion permeates every aspect of the text, from the individual episodes to
the structure of the work. Random details shoot up in the middle of scenes,
blocking the main action or ignoring it completely, while the plot tends to
shatter into fragments.
Consider an episode like the wedding of Madame Bovary, which occupies

the entire fourth chapter of the first part of the novel.40 Although what is
being described is a turning point in the characters’ lives, the events are
presented in a long summary with no scene, held together by the list form:
the arrival of the guests, their carriages and unbelievable clothes, the
plethora of haphazard or ridiculous details, the idle chatter, the menu, the
wedding-cake kitsch, the grogginess from all the food, and the pranks and
obscene jokes of the relatives. A classic dramatic episode is inundated by a
sequence of trivial, chaotic events and matters. Everything piles up and life
seems to unfold in a perpetual background. Page after page, nothing hap-
pens: the crucial events are steeped in a swampy humus composed of repeti-
tion, false movements, and diverging actions. By creating a new dialectic
between connection and disconnection, Flaubert disrupted the theatrical
39. Flaubert, Letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, March 18, 1857, in The Let-
ters of Gustave Flaubert.
40. Flaubert, Madame Bovary, part 1, chap. 4, pp. 25–30.
type of narrative logic41 and, both directly and indirectly, had a decisive
effect on naturalism and modernism.
But Flaubert is not the only author of the second half of the nineteenth
century to contribute to the disintegration of plots. Many of the chapters
in War and Peace or in Anna Karenina, for example, hinge on a central ac-
tion that develops on the public stage, as in the classic nineteenth-century
paradigm, but the narrative flow is continually interrupted by small sec-
ondary events, by impressions and perceptions that have no relationship
to the main episode.
The war scenes of War and Peace provide a clear example of this technique.
Consider the scene where Tolstoy describes Nikolai Rostov’s baptism of
fire, the battle of the bridge on the Enns River.42 At the beginning, the epi-
sode is described from the point of view of some Russian officers who are
watching the shooting through a telescope while eating pastries as they so-
journ at a castle: comments about the war are superimposed on their
comments about the food. In the next scene, the Russian troops crowd
helplessly on the bridge, mixing with the fleeing civilians while the French
artillery fire on them as if they were in a shooting range. Prince Nesvicky,
who has come down on horseback into the line of fire, is stuck in the
crowd about the bridge. In addition to fearing for his own life and for the
safety of the troops, he has time to watch the waves of the Enns River as
they break against the bridge pillars, the details of the soldiers’ uniforms,
the feet moving in the mud transported onto the wooden floor planks,
and the minor conflicts that explode between the people crammed on the
bridge. In the following episode, the narrator multiplies the digressive de-
tails: soldiers who make obscene comments about the peasants, hussars
who want to show off, misunderstandings between the Russian officers,
the disorientation of Nikolai Rostov, the web of chaotic microevents that
occur in this sort of situation. The main, centripetal action is interrupted
continuously by centrifugal movements: life and the world are broad,
41. See Luca Pietromarchi, “Flaubert, le Parche e il filo del romanzo,” in La trama nel
romanzo del ’900, ed. Luca Pietromarchi (Rome: Bulzoni, 2002), 41–58.
42. Tolstoy, War and Peace, bk. 1, part 2, chaps. 6–8, pp. 137–149.
frayed, and complex, and they transcend single individuals and their illu-
sion of being in the foreground.
The same dialectic is found in more ordinary scenes. When Tolstoy’s
characters have to confront the crises that decide their fates, the main ac-
tion is almost always interrupted by secondary events that distract their
attention. In the first chapters of Anna Karenina, Stepan Oblonsky must
deal with the scandal caused by his infidelity, but this does not prevent him
from taking care of his correspondence and reading the newspapers.43
When Karenin needs to decide which public form to give his relations with
his wife after her relationship with Vronsky has become obvious, the an-
guish of making this choice is mixed with the reading of a book about the
Iguvine Tablets and the problem of land irrigation in Zaraysk Province.44
The scene does lead to a conclusion (in a “nineteenth-century” way, we
might say), but in the meantime the linearity of the plot has been disrupted
and the satellites have made the system much richer and more complicated.
Another significant change relates to endings. “Mimetic poetry . . . imi-

tates human beings acting under compulsion or voluntarily, and as a result
of their actions supposing themselves to have fared well or ill and in all
this feeling either grief or joy,” we read in the Republic (10.603c): the re-
solving of tension into an unambiguous outcome, whether good or bad,
seems to be inscribed in the transcendental form of narrative. Excluding
the tradition of the humorous romance, until the second half of the nine-
teenth century nearly all stories had clear endings. But already at the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen had introduced unusual sec-
ondary endings alongside the primary ones. In her novels, the outcomes of
the main stories are always happy and predictable, and conflict is resolved
once and for all without any semantic or emotional qualities. The out-
comes of the secondary stories can be hazy and uncertain: the characters
choose or are forced into compromise solutions and end up finding them-
selves neither completely happy nor completely unhappy, like Charlotte
Lucas in Pride and Prejudice. The finale of The Betrothed also exudes edgi-
ness: Renzo and Lucia’s life is first disturbed by slander from their neigh-
bors, but then it calms down, becoming “the most peaceful, happy and
43. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1–8.

44. Ibid., part 3, chap. 14, pp. 283–286.
enviable of lives.” But the narrator adds: “So much so that if I told you
about it you would be bored to death.”45 The novel that began with the
revolutionary intention of telling the stories of ordinary people, “mechan-
ical folk and of but small account,”46 closes by noting that the life of me-
chanical folk is narratable only when it is disturbed by an unpleasant,
romance-like incident, after which there is only the repetition of existence—
quiet but prosaic, and unnarratable.47
In the literature of the late nineteenth century, the rejection of a clear
ending became a common solution: Madame Bovary and War and Peace,
A Sentimental Education and Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and many of
the novels of Zola, Mastro Don Gesualdo, and Effi Briest all avoid osten-
tatiously concluding at the point of Spannung. In one way or another, they
convey the idea that there is no such thing as absolute events, because the
world, other people, the impersonal connection of things are unaware of
personal stories. There is no episode that can put a stop to becoming, no
action that can set itself up as culminating and tragic; reality is not anthro-
pocentric; the commonplace by which “life goes on” conceals the iron law
governing the human condition.
Another kind of denouement that the narrative of the late 1800s ex-
perimented with and transmitted to modernist literature is the quick,
open-ended, or cursory ending. The precursor of this technique was
Stendhal. In the second half of the century, the process of stripping de-
nouements of their canonical structure intensified, anticipating the solu-
tions of the early twentieth century. Virginia Woolf admired Chekhov’s
inconclusive, random endings, viewing them as closer to the life of the
classically nineteenth-century closing, sealed by the sort of absolute facts
that reality does not normally offer. The structure of Chekhov’s stories
shows that in the unpredictable web of events, human beings have no
privileged status and that things happen as they happen, randomly, in a
mediocre fashion:
45. Manzoni, The Betrothed, 719.

46. Ibid., foreword.
47. Ibid., chap. 38, pp. 719–20. On the ending of The Betrothed, see Ezio Raimondi, Il
romanzo senza idillio: Saggio sui “Promessi sposi” (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 185ff., 219ff., and
passim, and Daniela Brogi, “Concludere per ricominciare: ‘I promessi sposi,’ XXXVIII,” in
Per Romano Luperini, ed. Pietro Cataldi (Palermo: Palumbo, 2010), 123–148.
[Chekhov] is aware that modern life is full of nondescript melancholy, of

discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half-
ludicrous and yet painful and that an inconclusive ending for all these
impulses is much more usual than anything extreme. He knows all this
as we know it, and at first sight he seems no more ready than we are with a
solution. The attentive reader who is on the alert for some unmistakable
sign that now the story is going to pull itself together and make straight
as an arrow its destination is still looking rather more blankly when the
end comes.48
Introduced by the narrative fiction of the second half of the nineteenth

century, these three processes that disintegrated the theatrical plot were to
be found everywhere at the height of modernism after 1910.
New Characters
With the exception of Stendhal, no novelist of the early 1800s had dis-
solved the charakter; after 1850, the imprint that once stabilized protago-
nists now weakened or became problematic. Out of the vast expanse of
possibilities, I will pick out four new solutions that were significant.
1. I begin with the one that Tolstoy adopted. Lukács describes it perfectly
in one of his most beautiful essays:
His characters do not, any more than the personages of the naturalists,
develop dramatically, as did Balzac’s; but their movement through
life, their conflicts with the external world nevertheless give them very
well-defined outlines. These outlines, however, are by no means as
strictly monolinear and clear-cut as those of the characters drawn by the
old realists. Tolstoy’s plots revolve around the “extreme possibilities” of
the characters, possibilities which never become reality but which come
to the surface again and again, thus affording each character many op-
portunities of expressing their thoughts and emotions. Tolstoy describes
the fleeting moods of his characters at least as sensitively and accurately
as the most gifted of the newer realists, but nevertheless the figures never
48. Virginia Woolf, “Chekhov’s Questions” (1918), in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol.
2, 1912–1918, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), 245. See also by
Woolf: “Modern Fiction” (1919–1925) and “The Russian Point of View” (1925), in The Es-
says of Virginia Woolf, 4:162–163, 183–185.
dissolve into mere clouds of moods, for they are placed within a precisely
circumscribed space, a field of force within which all their moods must
oscillate.49
Tolstoy’s characters elude any rigid keynote: their behavior does not
lend itself to establishing social and psychological types. They do not em-
body “the aristocratic,” “the official,” “the prostitute,” “the hot-tempered
man,” “the hedonist,” “the adulterous woman,” or any sort of hybrid be-
tween human groups. For the same reasons, their behavior is never entirely
predictable: you can never know how the hero will act in a given situation.
Very often, the character’s moods and desires change in the middle of a
single episode in reaction to trivial, accidental events. But while individual
action remains unpredictable from one moment to the next, the behavior
of each character remains within the confines of a “magnetic field” (Lukács),
a band of oscillation defined by the tendencies left inside the individual by
the milieu, the moment, and the individual mental armor.
One of the most beautiful and eloquent examples of this technique is in a

minor episode in Anna Karenina. The leading roles are played by two sec-
ondary characters, Sergei Ivanovich Koznysev, Levin’s brother, and Va-
renka, a young woman who is getting on in years, the daughter of a cook,
who grew up in an aristocratic milieu as Mme. Stahl’s protégée. The two
meet in Levin’s country house, where they are both guests. Sergei Iva-
novich lives for his studies, considers himself old, and feels bound to the
memory of a woman whom he loved and who passed away, named Marie;
Varenka, who had a love affair a few years earlier, is poor, single, and
has no life of her own. They are attracted to each other. Everybody who
spends the summer at the Levins’ realizes how Sergei Ivanovich and Va-
renka feel for each other and try to encourage them.
One day, Sergei Ivanovich suggests to Levin and his guests that they go
mushroom hunting. He knows that this is the right time to declare himself,
as do Varenka and everybody else. The couple is left alone. The narrator
focuses on Sergei and shows us the band of oscillation, the field of possi-
bilities within which his thoughts move:
49. Lukács, Tolstoi und die Probleme des Realismus (1935); English translation “Tolstoy
and the Evolution of Realism,” in Studies in European Realism, 185.
He recalled any number of women and girls he knew, but could not re-
call one who would combine to such a degree all, precisely all, the quali-
ties that he, reasoning coldly, would wish to see in his wife. She had all
the loveliness and freshness of youth, yet she was not a child, and if she
loved him, she loved him consciously, as a woman should love: that was
one thing. Another: she was not only far from worldliness, but obviously
had a loathing for the world, yet at the same time she knew that world
and had all the manners of a woman of good society, without which a
life’s companion was unthinkable for Sergei Ivanovich. Third: she was
religious, and not unaccountably religious and good, like a child, like
Kitty, for instance, but her life was based on religious convictions. Even
to the smallest details, Sergei Ivanovich found in her everything he could
wish for in a wife: she was poor and alone, so she would not bring a heap
of relations and their influence into the house as he saw with Kitty, but
would be obliged to her husband in all things, which he had also always
wished for his future family life. And this girl, who combined all these
qualities in herself, loved him. He was modest but he could not fail to
see it. And he loved her. One negative consideration was his age. But his
breed was long-lived, he did not have a single grey hair, no one would
have taken him for forty, and he remembered Varenka saying that it was
only in Russia that people considered themselves old at the age of fifty,
that in France a fifty-year-old man considered himself dans la force de
l’âge, and a forty-year-old un jeune homme.50
Rather than a rigid mold, the interior life is a field of forces: some dis-
tance Sergei from Varenka (the memory of Marie, the fear of being too
old), while others push him closer to declaring himself, and, ultimately,
these prevail. Varenka talks less to herself, but from what the text says it is
clear that she, too, is crossed by opposing forces: there is a sense of her
undeniably low social position, which prompts her to not delude herself,
but there is also the desire to change her life and the attraction of a man
who is solid, respectable, and rich. Varenka is also divided, then, but the
sum of what stirs inside her would certainly drive her to accept his pro-
posal. The two are alone now. Sergei has mentally prepared a speech, but
cannot find the right moment to deliver it. Meanwhile, to gain time, he
talks about mushrooms:
50. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, part 6, chap. 4, pp. 562–563.

They went on silently for a few steps. Varenka saw that he wanted to
speak. She guessed what it was about and her heart was gripped by the
excitement of joy and fear. They went far enough away so that no one
could hear them, and still he did not begin to speak. It would have been
better for Varenka to remain silent. After a silence it would have been easier
to say what they wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms; but
against her own will, as if inadvertently, Varenka said:
“So you didn’t find any? But then there are always fewer inside the
wood.”
Sergei Ivanovich sighed and made no answer. He was vexed that she
had begun talking about mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to
her first words about her childhood; but, as if against his will, after being
silent for a while, he commented on her last words.
“I’ve heard only that the white boletus grows mostly on the edge,
though I’m unable to identify it.”
Several more minutes passed, they went still further away from the
children and were completely alone. Varenka’s heart was pounding so
that she could hear it, and she felt herself blush, then turn pale, then
blush again.
To be the wife of a man like Koznyshev, after her situation with Mme.
Stahl, seemed to her the height of happiness. Besides, she was almost
certain that she was in love with him. And now it was to be decided. She
was frightened. Frightened that he would speak, and that he would not.
He had to declare himself now or never; Sergei Ivanovich felt it, too.
Everything, in Varenka’s gaze, colour, lowered eyes, showed painful expec-
tation. Sergei Ivanovich saw it and pitied her. He even felt that to say
nothing now would be to insult her. In his mind he quickly repeated all the
arguments in favour of his decision. He also repeated to himself the words
in which he wished to express his proposal; but instead of those words, by
some unexpected consideration that occurred to him, he suddenly asked:
“And what is the difference between a white boletus and a birch
bolutus?”
Varenka’s lips trembled as she answered:
“There’s hardly any difference in the caps, but in the feet.” And as
soon as these words were spoken, both he and she understood that the
matter was ended, and that what was to have been said would not be
said, and their excitement, which had reached its highest point just be-
fore then, began to subside.
“In the birch boletus, the foot resembles a two-day growth of beard
on a dark-haired man,” Sergei Ivanovich said, calmly now.
“Yes, that’s true,” Varenka replied, smiling, and the direction of their
walk changed inadvertently. They began going towards the children. Va-
renka was both hurt and ashamed, but at the same time she had a sense
of relief.
On returning home and going through all the arguments, Sergei Iva-
novich found that his reasoning had been wrong. He could not betray
the memory of Marie.51
This scene could have concluded in two ways, both of which are plau-
sible and both of which are compatible with Sergei and Varenka, with their
bands of oscillation. The decision came down to chance; the less desirable
outcome prevailed; individuals redefine their identities based on these ac-
cidental verdicts. The interior life is a magnetic field bounded by confines
but exposed to circumstances and, in the end, destiny is created by circum-
stances, not character.
2. The second device extends the analytical French tradition, that is, the
lineage of psychological narratives most successful in transiting through
the epochs—the only one that managed to pass from premodern struc-
tures of sense to modern ones while substantially preserving its continuity.
This apparatus of concepts and techniques, as I have said, owes much to
Montaigne and to the rediscovery of Augustine in the time of the Refor-
mation and the Counter-Reformation. It took root during the second half
of the seventeenth century in the works of the moralistes and in nouvelles,
which created a vocabulary and syntax of inner analysis. At the beginning
of the nineteenth century, Constant and Stendhal explicitly laid claim to
this legacy, tracing themselves back to Madame de La Fayette. This tradi-
tion easily survived the development of the modern novel.
One of the scenes that best expresses the unique analytical capacity of
Proust is the episode with which he ends The Guermantes Way, the scene of
the red shoes. The narrator meets Swann in Madame de Guermantes’s house;
Swann appears to be very ill. After the reception, Madame de Guermantes
invites Swann to accompany her and her husband on a trip to Italy that
will take place the following spring; Swann responds that this will not be
possible, because he will already be dead in the spring. Madame de
51. Ibid., part 4, chap. 5, pp. 564–565.

Guermantes, who must attend a dinner and is late, finds herself caught
between two obligations and stalls for time:
“What on earth are you telling me?” the Duchesse burst out, stopping
short for a second on her way to the carriage and raising her handsome,
melancholy blue eyes, her gaze now fraught with uncertainty. Poised for
the first time in her life between two duties as far removed from each
other as getting into her carriage to go to a dinner party and showing
compassion for a man who was about to die, she could find no appro-
priate precedent to follow in the code of conventions, and, not knowing
which duty to honor, she felt she had no choice but to pretend to believe
that the second alternative did not need to be raised, thus enabling her to
comply with the first, which at that moment required less effort, and
thought that the best way of settling the conflict would be to deny that
there was one. “You must be joking,” she said to Swann.
“It would be a joke in charming taste, ” replied Swann ironically. “I
don’t know why I’m telling you this. I’ve never mentioned my illness to
you before. But since you asked me, and since now I may die at any mo-
ment. . . . But, please, the last thing I want to do is to hold you up, and
you’ve got a dinner party to go to,” he added, because he knew that for
other people their own social obligations mattered more than the death of
a friend, and as a man of considerate politeness he put himself in their
place. But the Duchesse’s own sense of manners afforded her, too, a con-
fused glimpse of the fact that for Swann her dinner party must count for
less than his own death. And so, while still moving toward her carriage, she
said with a droop of her shoulders, “Don’t worry about the dinner party.
It’s of no importance!” But her words put the Duc in a bad mood, and he
burst out: “Come along, Oriane, don’t just stand there with your chatter,
whining away to Swann, when you know very well that Mme de Saint-
Euverte makes a point of having her guests sit down at the table at eight
o’clock sharp. We need you to make up your mind. Their horses have been
waiting for a good five minutes now. Forgive me, Charles,” he said, turning
to Swann, “but it’s ten minutes to eight. Oriane is always late, and it will
take us more than five minutes to get to old Mother Saint-Euverte.”52
52. Marcel Proust, Le Côté de Guermantes (1920–1921); English translation The Guer-
mantes Way, translated with an introduction and notes by Mark Treharne, in In Search of
Lost Time, general editor Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2003), 594–595.
Madame de Guermantes continues to say goodbye to Swann while re-

peating that she does not believe a word of what he has been saying. When
she is about to enter the carriage, Monsieur de Guermantes realizes that
his wife has put on black shoes with a red dress. Annoyed by the combina-
tion, he asks her to go home and put on the red shoes that match the dress.
Madame de Guermantes is embarrassed by the presence of Swann, to
whom she has just said goodbye:
“But, my dear,” said the Duchesse softly, embarrassed to see that

Swann, who was leaving the house with me but had stepped back to let
the carriage pass out in front of us, had heard this, “given that we’re
late . . .”
“No, no, we have plenty of time. It’s only ten to. It won’t take us ten
minutes to get to the Parc Monceau. And anyway, what does it matter?
Even if we arrive at half past eight, they’ll still wait for us, but you simply
can’t go there in a red dress and black shoes.
...
“They were by no means a disaster,” said Swann. “I noticed the black
shoes and I didn’t find them remotely offensive.”
“You may be right,” replied the Duc, “but it looks more elegant to
have them matching the dress. Anyway, you can set your mind at rest.
No sooner had she got there than she would have noticed, and I would
have been the one who had to come back and fetch the others, which
means I wouldn’t have eaten till nine o’clock. Goodbye, my dear boys,”
he said, thrusting us gently away, “off you go, now, before Oriane comes
down. It’s not that she doesn’t like seeing you both. On the contrary, she’s
too fond of seeing you. If she finds you still here, she’ll start talking again.
She’s already very tired, and she’ll be dead by the time she gets to that
dinner. And, quite frankly, I have to tell you that I’m dying of hunger. I
had a miserable lunch this morning, when I came from the train. That
sauce béarnaise was damn good, certainly, but in spite of that I won’t be
sorry, no two ways about it, to sit down to dinner. Five to eight! That’s
women for you! She’ll give us both indigestion before the night’s out.
She’s far less robust than people think.”
The Duc had absolutely no qualms in speaking this way about his
wife’s petty discomforts and his own to a dying man, for, because they
were what was uppermost in his mind, they seemed more important to
him. And so, after he had gently steered us to the door, it was merely his
jocund sense of good manners that led him to boom out after Swann,
who was already in the courtyard, in a voice for all to hear:
“Now, mind you don’t let all this damned doctors’ nonsense get to
you. They’re fools. You’re in strapping shape. You’ll live to see us all in
our graves!”53
The crowning work of the “century of psychological realism (1850–

1950)”54 is the culmination of a long heritage: the vocabulary and syntax
that it uses for the mimesis of the mental world is inconceivable outside
the literary genealogy embarked on by the “science of the heart” of the âge
classique. Proust’s psychoanalysis is held together by gestures typical of
the moralistes: the magma of the interior life is put in order and split up
into opposing elements; the hierarchy of the passions is turned upside
down by a crudely analytical and realistic eye; the laws of the psychic life
are set out in the form of maxims (“for other people their own social obli-
gations matter more than the death of a friend”). In this passage, Madame
de Guermantes’s inner tension is related to the conflict between two asym-
metric duties, which are arranged in a hierarchy by the commonly ac-
cepted morality (compassion for a friend should count infinitely more
than one’s social life). The psychological realism of the narrator overturns
the scale of values and shows that, for Madame and Monsieur de Guer-
mantes, not being late for dinner is more important and less burdensome
than paying attention to a dying friend. Swann’s reaction is forged around
the same opposition (a member of fashionable society knows that, for
others, their social life is more important than his death), as is Madame de
Guermantes’s reply to Swann (“But the Duchesse’s own sense of manners
afforded her, too, a confused glimpse of the fact that for Swann her dinner
party must count for less than his own death.”) And yet Madame de
Guermantes continues to walk toward the carriage: her social obligations
matter more than the death of a friend. In the next scene, the more obtuse
Monsieur de Guermantes talks about his minor illnesses and those of his
wife to someone who is terminally ill because the former are more inter-
esting to him than the latter. Once again, the magma of the psychic life is
ordered by oppositions.
53. Ibid., 596–597.

54. The expression comes from Dorrit Cohn, preface to Transparent Minds.
Proust thus adapts his own times to some of the structures of sense
dating back to the culture of the moralistes. But in the two and a half cen-
turies that separate In Search of Lost Time from Madame de Sévigné, Ma-
dame de La Fayette, and La Rochefoucauld, a great deal had happened.
One of the most significant things to occur can be found as early as Stend-
hal’s time: in The Princesse de Clèves the outside world never, or almost
never, gets mixed up with self-analysis, but in the novels of Stendhal intro-
spection is inseparable from the circumstances. The analysis of the hidden
folds of the mind is placed within a richly textured context that influences
life. In the episode of The Red and the Black commented on by Zola, for
example, the narrator uses a psychological vocabulary akin to the tradi-
tion of the moralistes, which allows the dialectic between the interior
planets and satellites to be examined (“His soul was flooded with happi-
ness, not because he loved Madame de Rênal, but because a frightful tor-
ment had come to an end.”); and to name the psychic forces (“frightful
combat that duty fought against timidity”).55 But unlike what happens in
the works of Madame de La Fayette, the attention is focused on contin-
gent circumstances, and contingencies are involved in the action: the mo-
tion of the sun changes the atmosphere of the meeting; the clock that
strikes ten spurs Julien to make his move; the movements of Madame Der-
ville transform the balance of psychological forces. Proust perfects this
rootedness of the passions in minutely detailed contexts.
However, simply binding the mechanics of the mental world to those of
the outside world is not enough to transplant into the twentieth century
the psychological vocabulary and syntax of the seventeenth. Compared to The
Princesse de Clèves, it is not just the relation to circumstances that changes
but also the form of the planets and satellites. Character molds are further
shattered. If looked at from above, in a sort of existential blueprint, the
human beings of In Search of Lost Time still have an internal logic, and the
narrator’s task is still to show every hidden detail of their mental maps. But
subjective identity is by now so atomized that it has become a complex lit-
erary undertaking to provide plausible images of their interior landscapes.
The difficulty in keeping the multiplicity of the psyche unified is revealed
in a distinguishing feature of Proust’s work: the expansion of the analyt-
ical sections. An immense introspective space is now required to reveal the
55. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, bk. 1, chap. 9, p. 62.
hidden or semi-hidden folds of the mind, and to connect them together in

a logical way.
3. In 1923, a year after the death of Proust, while In Search of Lost Time
was still partly unpublished, Gide collected his essays on Dostoevsky into
a book.56 Many of them were written for the centenary of Dostoevsky’s
birth in 1921. This was the beginning of the most important decade for
modernist narrative fiction: five volumes of In Search of Lost Time were
about to be published, as were Ulysses (1922), Zeno’s Conscience (1923),
The Magic Mountain (1924), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse
(1927), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As
I Lay Dying (1930), the first volume of The Man without Qualities (1930),
and The Sleepwalkers (1931–1932). Gide considered Dostoevsky to be the
most revolutionary novelist, a writer who had subverted the images of
human beings and the world that had become fossilized in nineteenth-
century narrative forms. One of his greatest innovations was his way of
conceiving individuals:
The principal charge brought against Dostoevsky in the name of our
Western-European logic has been, I think, the irrational, irresolute, and
often irresponsible nature of his characters, everything in their appear-
ance that could seem grotesque and wild. It is not, so people aver, real
life that he unfolds, but nightmares. In my belief this is utterly mistaken;
but let us grant the truth of it for argument’s sake, and refrain from an-
swering after the manner of Freud that there is more sincerity in our
dream-life than in the actions of our real existence.57
“It suddenly came into my mind,” says the protagonist of The Gambler
about an act of insolence that leads him to the brink of a duel, and he adds
“I don’t know why.”58 By keeping a part of themselves hidden or uncon-
scious, Dostoevsky’s characters are entitled to exhibit inconsistencies to
which previous heroes of the European novel never had a right. When Fy-
odor Karamazov’s first wife dies, some say that the widower began to
56. André Gide, Dostoïevski (1923); English translation Dostoevsky (New York: New
Directions, 1961).
57. Ibid., 14.
58. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Igrok (1866); English translation The Gambler, trans. Constance
Garnett (New York: Random House, 2003), 50.
run down the street in joy; others, that he wept like a little child. The nar-
rator comments: “Both versions may very well be true—that is, that he re-
joiced at his release and wept for her who released him, all at the same
time.”59
Dostoevsky’s art of preserving shadows and inconsistencies distinguishes
him from the entire European introspective tradition. Gide uses Balzac as
his main term of comparison.
The chief protagonists, he does not portray, leaving them to limn in their
own portrait, never finished, ever changing, in the course of the narra-
tive. His principal characters are always in the course of formation, never
quite emerging from the shadows. In passing, note how profoundly dif-
ferent he is from Balzac, whose chief care seems ever to be the perfect
consistency of his characters.60
But this difference can be perceived not only in comparison to a story-

teller like Balzac, who uses bold strokes to describe his characters;
according to Gide, when compared to Dostoevsky, all French narrative
fiction exhibits an irremediable tendency toward simplification. The highly
sophisticated technique used by the psychological culture descending from
the moralists to dissect interior forces presupposed that the mystery of
inner life could be captured by analytical discourses. In addition, the
French psychological tradition was animated by a current of rationalism
whose aim was to trace actions back to specific motivations. When La Ro-
chefoucauld explains every behavior in relation to amour propre, writes
Gide, “what is contradictory in the human soul escapes him.”61 However
precise it may be, this anatomical art kills the unpredictable vitality of the
psyche. French culture abhors formlessness; formlessness was Dostoevsky’s
favorite territory.
The fact that, at the beginning of one of the most important decades for
European modernism, Gide juxtaposes Dostoevsky’s psychology with the
image of human beings found in nineteenth-century novels is telling. A sig-
nificant part of modernist literature, from Gide to Faulkner (in Italy, from
Tozzi to Pirandello), would learn a great deal from this paradigm, directly or
indirectly. At mid-twentieth century, Nathalie Sarraute viewed Dostoevsky
59. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, part 1, p. 9.

60. Gide, Dostoevsky, 17.
61. Ibid., 605.
as the precursor “for nearly all the European writers in our times,” since
he was the only nineteenth-century novelist who was able to represent
the perpetual motion of our selves.62 Between 1880 and 1923, between
The Brothers Karamazov and the publication of Gide’s essay, a new in-
trospective theory had taken shape that, after struggling for a name, fi-
nally settled on “psychoanalysis.” It is no coincidence that Gide would
cite Freud to legitimize the irrational, irresolute, and irresponsible char-
acter of Dostoevsky’s protagonists. The representational model of the
interior life that we find in works such as Notes from Underground,
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, or The Brothers Karamazov is well
suited to the idea of the subject implicit in depth psychology and in the
epoch that made it possible.
4. The fourth possibility that opens with the crisis of the nineteenth-century
character appeared a few years after Dostoevsky’s model took form and
responded to similar needs. In 1887, a writer associated with the poetics of
the Symbolist movement, Édouard Dujardin, published a short novel called
Les lauriers sont coupés (We’ll to the Woods No More). Forgotten for de-
cades, the work reappeared in 1924, after Joyce publicly acknowledged its
influence on his writing. Dujardin wrote an essay in the years that followed
in which he claimed to have invented interior monologue.63 It is true that
precedents can be found in Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, for ex-
ample, or in his short story “A Gentle Creature”) and in Tolstoy (the
monologue of Anna Karenina before committing suicide); it is true that the
expression interior monologue and the idea of pregrammatical speech that
mimics thought precedes Dujardin;64 it is also true that Bettina von Arnim
had earlier loosened logical and syntactic connections in her Dies Buch
gehört dem König (This Book Belongs to the King; 1843)65—but the fact
62. Nathalie Sarraute, “De Dostoïevski à Kafka” (1947); English translation “From Dos-
toevsky to Kafka,” in The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, trans. Maria Jolas (New
York: G. Braziller, 1963), 25.
63. Édouard Dujardin, Le Monologue interieur: son apparition, ses origines, sa place
dans l’oeuvre de James Joyce (Paris: Messein, 1931).
64. They appear in La Parole intérieure (1881) by Victor Egger. See Laura Santone, Voci
dall’abisso. Nuovi elementi sulla genesi del monologo interiore (Bari: Edipuglia, 1999), 7,
81ff.
65. See Peter Bürger, Prosa der Moderne (1988), in collaboration with von Christa Bürger
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 312ff.
remains that before Dujardin nobody had ever used this device to construct
a novel.
Two types of interior monologue can be distinguished: the kind that
mimics the confusion of an inner crisis, as in Anna Karenina; and the kind
that mimics the multiplicity of daily life, as in Ulysses.66 In both cases, what
emerges is an image of people that differs from the assumption implicit in
the very idea of charakter: the interest of the narrator is no longer focused
on the supposedly rigid mold that distinguishes individuals, but on the cha-
otic plurality of consciousness, the preconscious, and the unconscious.
Even when the trace of a mold remains visible (as in chapter 13 of Ulysses,
where Gerty MacDowell’s stream of consciousness intertwines with that
of Bloom and vividly illustrates the difference between the two personali-
ties), stream of consciousness is used to break up and complicate the life of
the psyche. A stylistic sign that the genre of the Theophrastian character
left on novels is the wide distribution of phrases like “he was one of those
men, she was one of those women who . . .” by which individual differ-
ence is connected back to the universality of a type. Although very
common in eighteenth-century novels founded on “moralistic” categories
(“Mr. Allworthy was not one of those men whose hearts flutter at any
unexpected and sudden tidings of worldly profit”67), they are also to be
found in nineteenth-century novels based on historic and dynamic con-
cepts68 (“Madame de Rênal was one of those provincial women . . .”69).
These expressions define, draw boundaries, and gather the dispersion of
the self into a unity. Interior monologue represents the end of the Theo-
phrastian character: it tends to shatter the I instead of uniting it within a
rigid mold.
Tolstoy’s model, developments in the French analytical tradition,
Dostoevsky’s model, and the mimesis of the psyche’s chaotic jumble using
interior monologue represent four possibilities that arose out of the crisis of
the nineteenth-century paradigm. The order I have presented them in cor-
responds to their progressive distancing from the charakter. These degrees
66. Franco Moretti, Opere mondo. Saggio sulla forma epica dal “Faust” a “Cent’anni di
solitudine” (1994); English translation Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to
García Márquez (London: Verso, 1996), 168ff.
67. Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, 281.
68. See Smeed, The Theophrastan “Character,” chap. 10.
69. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 35.
of distance are also reflected in the techniques that the novelists adopted.
As we have seen, in order to translate the interior life into language, our
culture uses the genres of psychological analysis and the monologue: the
former specializes in the description of enduring traits; the latter expresses
inner conflicts. Now: while Tolstoy and the French analytical tradition
present characters through the narrator’s psychological analysis, and while
Dostoevsky allows the protagonists of his novels to reveal themselves
through action and first-person discourse, authors who employ stream of
consciousness extend the tradition of the theatrical and epistolary soliloquy
into a radical form, eliminating all links with the public dimension, even
those implicit in the rules of grammar, punctuation, and syntax. If, as Ian
Watt believed, Ulysses was the culmination of the formal trend beginning
with Richardson, then the epistolary monologues of Pamela and Clarissa
are the modern version of the epistolary monologues of the Heroides and,
more generally, of the soliloquies of wounded, suffering, or conquered her-
oines and heroes. A frayed but recognizable genealogical line unites the
soliloquy of Dido in book 4 of the Aeneid to the monologue of Anna Kar-
enina. And when stream of consciousness later abandons crisis states to
become the vehicle for expressing the normalcy of the everyday life of the
psyche, this is when Anna Karenina’s monologue can give rise to the last
chapter of Ulysses.
Three Turning Points
In addition to developing new types of narrators, plots, and characters, the

literary epoch that began around 1850 witnessed a changing balance between
the elements of narrative texts. In the nineteenth-century paradigm, the
essential is expressed through visible actions and audible speeches; in the
mid-twentieth century, the barycenter started to migrate to other territo-
ries. For the first time, the noble forms of mimesis were able to locate the
essential outside of public action. This transformation led to three turning
points, freeing up new possibilities.
1. The most well known—the only one that has been defined as a turning
point thus far—is the inward turn. The concept appears in a book by Leon
Edel, The Psychological Novel (1955), where he speaks of an inward-
turning of the modernist novel.70 Eighteen years later, The Inward Turn
of Narrative (1973) by Erich Kahler was published. This was an expanded
English version of the work that appeared in the Neue Rundschau, left
unfinished due to the author’s death.71 Kahler describes the long-duration
process that led Western narrative to abandon cosmogonies and theogo-
nies to take up an interest in the sublunar world inhabited by human
beings, and then to shift interest from public actions to psychological
analysis.
The design, chronology, and vagueness of these books may be question-
able, but there is no doubt that Edel’s and Kahler’s concepts illuminate a
crucial aspect of modern literary history. An inward turn occurs when the
essential part of a story no longer takes place in the segment of reality that
everyone can see or hear, and is transferred instead to the unapparent
sphere that lies nestled inside the protagonists like a hidden territory, their
private realm. The Western way of viewing the ontological status of
thoughts and passions oscillates between two ideas. On the one hand, the
interior life is seen as the exclusive possession of the individual—according
to a way of thinking implicitly signaled by the metaphor of “interiority.”
On the other hand, the interior life is seen as inhabited by suprapersonal
and impersonal forces—according to a way of thinking that has come
down through our culture, reappearing in radically different forms, from
Homer to Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze.72 But whatever paradigm
we apply, thoughts and passions present us with a cognitive asymmetry:
while our actions and words enter into the public sphere and are manifest
to the senses, our thoughts and passions remain almost entirely concealed
from other people until they are expressed. We cannot claim any hypothet-
ical superiority for the actions we perform and the words we utter, because
everyone can see them and hear them, while we can claim to know our
70. Edel, The Psychological Novel, 1900–1950, chap. 2.

71. Erich Kahler, The Inward Turn of Narrative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1973). See also Kahler Die Verinnerung des Erzählens, in Die Neue Rundschau, 68,
1957 and 70, 1959, and Untergang und Übergang (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag,
1970).
72. Gilbert Simondon, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: PUF, 1964);
Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (1969); English translation The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark
Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 100ff.
thoughts and passions better than anyone else, at least until we transpose
them into the public medium of words. Regardless of its nature, the intus to
which interiority refers finds an ontological legitimacy in this cognitive
imbalance.
Narrative turns toward the interior when interest shifts from what everyone
can see or hear to what only individuals know, and what the narrative text
takes upon itself to reveal. As a possibility that is always available, the inward
turn traverses the history of the novel. The first example is in The Princesse de
Clèves, a work that locates what is essential in the psyche of the characters
and presents external behaviors as the secondary reflection of primary crises
taking place in interiore homine. This is so much the case that social life seems
like a show and “the return to the events of the heart is felt . . . like a return to
reality.”73 Because the inward turn is associated with the Christian idea that
the intus is the seat of divinity, it is a possibility of longue durée. Nevertheless,
it became a crucial element in the Western narrative space only during the
century of psychological realism, between the second half of the nineteenth
century and modernism. This is when public plots became emptied of meaning,
the narrative focus migrated to internal processes, and the characters attached
enormous importance to events that, for others and for the public sphere, are
trivial or nonexistent—as in the passage by Virginia Woolf that Auerbach
writes about in the last chapter of Mimesis:
The exterior events have actually lost their hegemony, they serve to
release and interpret inner events, whereas before her time . . . inner
movements preponderantly function to prepare and motivate significant
exterior happenings.74
This transformation overturns relations between the public and private,

between what is happening in the outside world and what matters for the
private worlds of individuals. It thus becomes possible to construct novels
around these ruptures or profane illuminations, fundamental for the pro-
tagonist and imperceptible for others, that Joyce called “epiphanies” and
Proust “intermittences of the heart.”
73. Rousset, Forme et signification, 21. See also Kahler, The Inward Turn of Narrative,
15ff.
2. During the same decades when Verinnerung became widespread, the

novel underwent a complementary metamorphosis that made the inward
turn possible. By analogy, I will call this the essay turn. The era when
Western novels were being loaded with ideas spans the works Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky published in the 1860s and those Musil and Broch published
in the 1930s. As we have seen, the phenomenon did not originate
during this period, but during these years it gained greater currency. With
a few exceptions, early nineteenth-century narrative fiction used concepts
to construct the invisible backstage surrounding the visible actions,
keeping the latter at the center of the represented world. Instead, during
the period we are considering, some crucial works shifted the text’s bary-
center toward a territory composed of collective regularities and suprap-
ersonal laws. This space, which surrounds, crosses, traverses, and explains
the acts of individuals, passes through the medium of the concept and
takes the form of the novel-essay. This is what happens in the sections of
War and Peace in which Tolstoy explains his philosophy of history or in
the first part of Notes from Underground. This is what happens, even more
obviously, in the continual reflective digressions in In Search of Lost Time
and The Man without Qualities, or in the essay “The Disintegration of
Values” that Broch inserts into the third part of The Sleepwalkers. Proust’s
aphorism comparing works of art that expound theories to an object with
its price tag still attached is clearly a product of denial: if we broke In
Search of Lost Time down into parts and calculated how much of the text
is occupied by theorizing, chances are we would find that no other novel
in the Western canon contains as many reflections, abstractions, and
ideas. But in addition to revealing, through antiphrasis, an essential char-
acteristic of the work in which it appears, Proust’s maxim introduces an
illuminating metaphorical field. A price tag defetishizes goods, depriving
them of their magical aura and reducing them to their mere exchange
value expressed by money, the universal equivalent that voids things of
their difference and makes them comparable to each other. In the same
way, theoretical remarks on the regularities that precede, surround, and
traverse the lives of individuals defetishize stories, depriving them of all
their specific differences and transforming them into particular cases of a
law. Attention shifts from the individual object or single event to the gen-
eral principle that makes all singularities equal and liquidates their preten-
sions. Like money, concepts presuppose the death of particularities: the
fact that ideas came to acquire more weight in the narrative economy
means that the nineteenth-century gamble on interest being generated by
the lives of people like us had been partly withdrawn. In the novel-essay,
the stories of individuals need to stand on conceptual surfaces in order to
generate a meaning and provide interest.
A method that achieves results similar to those of the novel-essay
without using the vehicle of the concept is the allegorical use of narrative
materials. When Joyce explains the internal characteristics of the chapters
in Ulysses using the “Linati schema,” he traces the form of his novel back
to a preexisting idea that explains the text through an explicit pattern of
correspondences. In a less pervasive but more general way, a similar effect
is obtained using the principle of montage. The novel widely appropriated
this technique between the second half of the nineteenth century and
modernism—between the scene of the agricultural fair in Madame Bovary
and Dos Passos’s U.S.A., passing by way of part 3 of The Sleepwalkers
(Huguenau, or The Realist). Using this mechanism to bring the parts to-
gether is tantamount to subverting every ordo naturalis: it subordinates
the plot to an idea that manifests in an oblique, silent form, in the autho-
rial decision to put a certain sequence near another.
3. The third turning point is estrangement. Flaubert, as we have said, was

the first to imagine narratives based on form, rather than on the appeal of
the plot or the characters. The literature of the early nineteenth century had
developed the ideal of transparent writing; instead, at a certain point novels
began to circulate that were founded on the opacity of their style. Form no
longer appears consubstantial with content, and thus natural and invisible;
instead it draws attention to itself, revealing itself to be artificial mediation,
creating a distancing effect on the habits of common sense and on the
ordinary way of telling stories. It sets up a sort of screen between the story
and the reader that is authorial and therefore subjective and lyrical—but its
lyricism has no subject, crystallized into pure form, like a transcendental
structure. In this case, too, interest is transferred from public action to the
way of narrating the action, from what happens to the way it is being told.
The importance writing assumes in some forms of the modernist novel
(the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda, for example, in Italian literature) stems
from this process.
Short Stories and Epiphanies
Another transformation that the serious mimesis of everyday life went

through after 1850 involves the length of the texts. The nineteenth-century
paradigm, as we have said, developed the utopia of universal narratability:
any life can become the content of a story, any destiny can enthrall, and
any situation is potentially loaded with interest. The great narrative cycles
or polyhistorical novels of the 1800s furnished the architectonic equivalent
of this project. Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the
first half of the twentieth century, cyclical novels did not fade away. On the
contrary, they met with remarkable success, from Zola’s Rougon-Macquart
(1871–1893), John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1906–1921), and Martin du
Gard’s Les Thibault (1922–1940), to Louis Aragon’s Le Monde réel (The
Real World) (1934–1944). This phenomenon was contemporary with the
new success of a genre that was in many respects diagonally opposed to it:
the short story.
In the early nineteenth century, the importance and popularity of short
narrative fiction were hardly comparable to the novel’s. German and Rus-
sian literature were exceptions to this rule; but elsewhere, and especially
in the two dominant European literatures, the short story was a sec-
ondary form mainly associated with fantastic tales. However, between the
last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twen-
tieth century, short narrative experienced a new development and joined in
the mimesis of ordinary life. During this period, some of the greatest
writers of the everyday expressed their narrative talent—or their finest
narrative talent—in short forms (Maupassant, Chekhov, Katherine Mans-
field, Sherwood Anderson, Luigi Pirandello). Others dedicated a signifi-
cant part of their work to short narrative forms. What lies behind this
phenomenon?
The first explanation is sociological: in many countries, newspapers and
magazines began commissioning short stories, which later appeared side
by side with the feuilleton, and in some cases replaced it. In Italy, for example,
press commissions affected the literary choices and writing of Verga, Piran-
dello, and Tozzi.75 But as always happens when we appeal to a mechanical
75. Gino Tellini, La tela di fumo. Saggio su Tozzi novelliere (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1972),
15–43; Romano Luperini, “Il trauma e il caso. Sulla tipologia della novella moderna,” in
L’autocoscienza del moderno (Naples: Liguori, 2006), 171.
model of causality, the conceptual schema provides a good explanation for

the dynamics of the event but does not shed light on the origin. All hege-
monic phenomena inevitably arise out of a varying tangle of force and
acquiescence:76 no historical subject is strong enough to impose its will and
desires on the social body if the social body does not already possess to
some extent that will and those desires. If newspaper and magazine com-
missions had not amplified an interest in short forms that was already la-
tent in a segment of readers, in the absence of an audience the practice of
printing stories in newspapers would soon have faded out.
At a certain time, Western readers felt the desire to read short stories set
in everyday environments. This happened because, in their eyes, narrative
disruptions now had a more limited reach: the modern short story, like
modern lyric poetry, originated from the idea that life is formed of long,
monochromatic backgrounds of repetition interrupted by small, unprece-
dented events. While the melodramatic novel assumes that each day is a
potential theater for major, externalized conflicts, while the Bildungsroman
and the novel of personal destinies describe the progress or decline in
people’s existences through decisive scenes that make each person what he
or she is, the short story imagines that under normal conditions daily life
is static, disciplined, and unnarratable. Very often in lyric poetry and in
modern short stories normalcy lies invisible inside the white spaces that
separate the pages occupied by writing, while the words set down on paper
record states of exception that interrupt the return of the identical. In
some respects, this represents a return to the conception of life implicit in
the premodern and early modern novella: daily existence juts out and
becomes worthy of storytelling only on certain occasions. What changed
was the context in which the protruding part of life is included, because
all exemplary frame stories had disappeared, and because now we have
the novel of personal destinies: every life, if observed well, can become
narrative content.
According to the logic of the literary field, the position occupied by the
short story stands opposite that of the great polyhistorical novel founded
on the idea that situations worthy of attention abound. The collected sto-
ries of Maupassant, Chekhov, or Pirandello give the impression of human
76. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi,
1975), Quaderno 19, §25, vol. 3, p. 2010. See also Quaderno 13, §37; vol. 3, p. 1638.
comedies constructed out of fragments: they embrace what the young

Lukács would have called “the extensive totality of life,” but they are com-
posed of relatively short pieces. Ordinary lives become narratable only rarely
and for short periods of time: surrounded by predictability and boredom,
life offers only flickers—or episodes.
But this reduction in narratability is evident beyond the genre of the
short story: it is also expressed inside literary works, in the role that epiph-
anies play in many modern novels.77 Intermittences of the heart tend to last
only an instant: even at the center of profuse works, what really counts,
what enshrines the sense of a life, does not get played out over its entire
duration but in the moment, and individual lives appear as long, mono-
chromatic backgrounds of emptiness interrupted by brief revelatory inter-
vals. Epiphanies also have two faces: they are crucial events for those who
experience them and irrelevant to everyone else; they are peripheral satel-
lites that become central only because they are overdetermined by a char-
acter, by the subjective meanings projected onto them.78 The movement of
a foot on the pavement in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes that
provides Marcel with a vital illumination is a purely private experience: in
the public sphere, on the objective stage of interhuman life, nothing has
happened.
This approach has nineteenth-century precedents. Not by chance, the
oldest of these arose out of lyric poetry: the illuminations of Baudelaire, in
their auratic version (“Correspondances”) and in their urbane, prosaic ver-
sion (“The Swan,” “To a Passerby”). But even as early as War and Peace
some of the decisive twists in the story line take the form of an epiphany.
We find some of the first great intermittences in well-known episodes of
the same work. During the battle of Austerlitz, the French take the core
of the Russian army by surprise and threaten to kill or capture Kutuzov.
Andrei Bolkonsky watches his battalion being overpowered by the French;
the Russians are fleeing. To reverse the outcome of the battle and cover
77. On the aesthetics of the epiphany in modernist literature, see Hugo Azérad, L’Univers
constellé de Proust, Joyce et Faulkner: le concept d’épiphanie dans l’esthétique du modern-
isme (Bern: Lang, 2002), especially chap. 4.
78. See Franco Moretti, “ ‘Un’inutile nostalgia di me stesso’. La crisi del romanzo di
formazione europeo, 1898–1914 (1999)”; English translation “ ‘A Useless Longing for Myself’:
The Crisis of the European Bildungsroman, 1898–1914,” in The Way of the World, 233ff.;
Romano Luperini, L’incontro e il caso (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007), chap. 7 and passim.
himself in glory, he picks up the standard and charges against the enemy so
that his men will follow him and stop running away. Only minutes later he
is wounded and falls to the ground with his face turned upward. The sky
opens up above him, lofty and serene: watching it, Andrei understands the
meaninglessness of the goals for which human beings fight.79 Until that
moment, Andrei had cultivated fantasies of military glory; the sky destroyed
what was at stake in the battle and revealed the vanity of the whole under-
taking. But, unlike medieval vanities, this illumination is not predicable to
the masses: it remains a secret possession and is revealed in a scene that
nobody except Andrei will ever be able to grasp. When Napoleon passes
by to inspect the battlefield, he sees the lifeless body of Andrei and assumes
that he is dead. Napoleon understands that Andrei was cut down in an act
of bravery and says, “Voila une belle mort” (Now that is a beautiful death).80
Up to that moment, in addition to being an enemy, he had also been An-
drei’s personal myth. But now, Napoleon’s words no longer count for any-
thing: in public, Andrei’s gesture means a glorious death; for Andrei, it means
the end of the layers of meaning that humans paper over the pure, indif-
ferent sky. The same type of sudden, private revelation is repeated in book
2 of War and Peace, when the double meeting with an old oak is trans-
formed by Andrei into a double epiphany.81
As a narrative adaptation of the tragic form, the melodramatic novel
imagines the human world as a chain of showy actions, motivated by and
tied to the need to compose a story line that develops over time. The exag-
geration of the actions and passions is intended to signify—and before that,
create—the absolute value of the events being described. The novel of
personal destinies abandons this device and develops instead around ob-
jective, public plot twists that shape human paths: the reader can witness
Natasha’s triumph on the day of her first ball; the reader can see that
Dorothea Brooke has finally found the right person. In the novel that de-
velops around epiphanies, on the other hand, the key events are set outside
the external world, transferring two prerogatives of modern lyric poetry
into the narrative domain: the breaking of the chronological chain that
binds instants of life to the course of life; and the breaking of the social
79. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, bk. 1, part 3, chap. 16, p. 281.
80. Ibid., 291.
81. Ibid., bk. 2, part 2, chaps. 1–3, pp. 419–420, 422–423.
chain that drives people to pursue the meaning of life in exchanges with
others.
Worlds Apart
The serious mimesis of everyday life remained at the heart of the modern
novel, but in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the first half
of the twentieth century, new ways of conceiving action, the interior world,
and ordinary life took hold in ways that segmented or emptied objective
events, shifting the interest elsewhere. During the same decades, the narra-
tive territories that were further removed from or peripheral to the core
formed by everyday realism were expanded and reorganized.
In his preparatory notes for Rougon-Macquart, Zola develops a sort of
theory of classes, distinguishing between the people, shopkeepers, the bour-
geoisie, and the grand monde (high society). He then identifies “a world
apart” whose members include “prostitute, murderer, priest, artist.”82 While
Zola’s map may not satisfy the criteria of sociology, it is accurate and il-
luminating for the criteria of narrative. The prostitute, the murderer, the
priest, and the artist are in fact united by a similar position in society: they
are not “people like us.” For one reason or another, their lives evade the
middle station of life—their experience is more adventurous or more re-
flective of what society normally reserves to laboratores. Telling the stories
of the “world apart” means to seek out narrative interest in characters who
do not fall within the bounds of average everyday experience, to venture
instead into a territory that I will divide into three regions.
1. The first contains stories focused on unconventional heroes, on charac-

ters who have an adventurous existence that evades modern regulations
and control: prostitutes and murderers, but also deviants, eccentrics, and
the insane. Between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first
half of the twentieth century, there were many novelists, from Dostoevsky
to Faulkner, who resorted to unconventional characters in order to create
nodes of narrative tension that ordinary life was no longer capable of gen-
erating, or in order to tell about ordinary life through states of exception.
82. Émile Zola, La Fabrique des Rougon-Macquart: édition des dossiers préparatoires,
ed. Colette Becker, with Véronique Lavielle (Paris: Champion, 2003), 50.
2. The second region contains the stages of life that come before the regu-
lated life of adulthood: childhood, adolescence, and youth. These periods
of life, which entered into literature between the second half of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth century thanks to autobiograph-
ical writing inspired by the model of Rousseau and the Bildungsroman,83
gained significantly in importance between the 1850s and the early 1900s. In
different ways, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Dostoevsky (and Nievo in Italy)
gave narrative depth to the unformed ages of life, the periods of discovery
and experience. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the era of
modernism, the European Bildungsroman was revitalized by the themes
of childhood and adolescence.84
3. The third region contains one of the most important literary figures for
writers: the intellectual hero. As we saw in Chapter 6, the roman personnel,
the “artist novel,” and the novel of the self-reflective protagonist are pos-
sibilities frequently employed in modern narrative fiction. Writers do so
with the implicit or explicit knowledge that only special people whose
depth of thought or experiences make them extraneous to the middle sta-
tion of life can spark narrative interest. In the modernist period, and more
generally in the twentieth century, the novel swelled with thinking heroes
and heroines located on the margins of the vita activa. Some of these char-
acters are professional intellectuals (Mattia Pascal, Malte Laurids Brigge,
Stephen Dedalus, Édouard, Ulrich Anders, Peter Kien, Antoine Roquentin);
others, like Marcel and Zeno Cosini, are intellectuals in disguise. It is not
difficult to glimpse another metaphorical appearance of this figure in the
outpouring of the “inept.”
If it is true that intellectual heroes proliferate in all periods of modern
fiction, simply because they represent the double of the author and allow
him or her to write fictional autobiographies through a third person, it is
equally true that some phenomena are peculiar to this epoch. The most in-
teresting of these does not involve the character of the intellectual, but the
intellectual makeup of the common protagonists. In the realistic novel
83. See Francesco Orlando, Infanzia, memoria e storia da Rousseau ai romantici (Padua:
Liviana, 1966).
84. See Moretti, “ ‘A Useless Longing for Myself,’ ” 229–245.
throughout the 1800s, people who are active in the practical world are
still capable of deep thought: although they are not intellectuals, or dis-
guised intellectuals, the Unnamed, Rastignac, Andrei Bolkonsky, and Dor-
othea Brooke all reflect with lucidity on the meaning of their lives, on the
meaning of life in general, or on the state of the world. Their thinking is
not restricted by preset limitations, nor is it filled with platitudes and cli-
chés. Instead, starting at a certain time, the distance between practical beings
and thinking beings began to grow. In the twentieth century it became in-
creasingly difficult to encounter heroes and heroines who are able to recon-
cile praxis and theory. Instead, there is an abundance of intellectual heroes
or the inept (which amounts to the same thing), who are detached from
the life of action and devoted to thought.
A scene in Buddenbrooks symbolically marks this transition. The pro-
tagonists of the novel are members of the ruling class of the city of Lübeck:
in the hierarchy of the social system that the book chronicles, they represent
the elite. They therefore should have the capacity to express themselves with
great depth on their personal lives and on the life of the city, as happens in
many nineteenth-century novels—for example, as Wüllersdorf and Innstetten
do in the closing scenes of Effi Briest. But Mann places a limit in front of the
most intelligent and thoughtful member of the family, Thomas Budden-
brook. This barrier appears toward the end of the novel, in the fifth chapter
of part 10. For a long time Thomas has contented himself with what he is
able to accumulate through his family firm and manages his business affairs
without enthusiasm. His wife is resentful toward him and spends her days
playing music with a young man, in such a manner as to call attention to
herself and raise suspicions. One day Thomas Buddenbrooks stays home
from the office. Sitting on the terrace of his house, he begins to read a book
that fell into his hands by chance. Although not named expressly, the book
is The World as Will and Representation. Thomas is bowled over: so many
of the things that he had confusedly felt now find their rightful place and a
meaning in Schopenhauer’s work:
He was filled with an unfamiliar sense of immense and grateful content-

ment. He felt the incomparable satisfaction of watching an enormously
superior intellect grab hold of life, of cruel, mocking, powerful life, in
order to subdue and condemn it. What he felt was the satisfaction of a
sufferer who has always known only shame and the bite of conscience
for hiding the suffering that cold, hard life brings, and who now, sud-
denly, from the hand of a great and wise man, receives elemental, formal
justification for having felt such suffering in this world—in this best of
all possible worlds, which by means of playful scorn was proved to be
the worst of all possible worlds.85
Thomas spends the day in a state of gloomy desolation and goes to bed
early, but he wakes up after three hours and begins to reflect on the absur-
dity of life, on the pain of individuation, on death as a deliverance from
the prison of the self:
He wept; he pressed his face into the pillow and wept. An intoxicating
joy ran through him, lifted him up, and it was incomparably sweeter than
the world’s sweetest pain. This was it, this was the drunken darkness that
had filled him since the afternoon, this was what had stirred in his heart
in the middle of the night, awakening him, quickening like first love
within him. And in being granted this understanding and realization—not
in words and sequential thoughts, but in the sudden bliss of internal il-
lumination—he was already free, was truly liberated from all natural and
artificial bonds and barriers.86
Like the Unnamed on the night of the conversion, or like Andrei Bol-
konsky as he watched the sky above Austerlitz, Thomas Buddenbrook seems
to have come to an agonizing revelation. But the next day, this lucidity has
vanished: Thomas wakes up “feeling slightly embarrassed by the intellectual
extravagances of the night”87 and returns to his regular habits. He would
like to start reading again, but asks himself whether it is right, if that knowl-
edge really suits him:
Still fully intending to read further from that wonderful book, he never-
theless began to ask himself whether his experiences of the previous night
were truly something for him and of lasting value and whether, if death
were to arrive, they would stand up to the practical test. His middle-class
instincts were roused now—and his vanity as well: the fear of being seen
85. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (1901); English translation Bud-
denbrooks: The Decline of a Family, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Random House,
1994), 631.
86. Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, 725.
87. Ibid., 726.
as eccentric and ridiculous. Would such ideas really look good on him?
Were they proper ideas for him, Senator Thomas Buddenbrook, head of
the firm of Johann Buddenbrook? . . .
And about two weeks after that remarkable afternoon, he had arrived
at the point where he abandoned the whole idea and told the maid to
fetch a book that for some reason was lying in the drawer of the garden
table and put it back in the bookcase.
And so Thomas Buddenbrook, who had stretched his hands out im-
ploringly for high and final truths, sank back now into the ideas, images,
and customary beliefs in which he had been drilled as a child.88
Supreme truths are now the possession of specialists, attainable only

through the mediation of a philosopher, “an enormously superior intellect.”
They are unacceptable if one is the head of the firm Johann Buddenbrook,
if one has a practical role in life and is therefore forced to dwell in the
commonplaces that one has assumed to be true since childhood—what Hei-
degger, in Being and Time, calls das Man, “the One” (“that is what one does
or say,” “that is what people have to do or say”). Over the course of the
twentieth century, the gap separating the thinking hero from the practical
hero often remained insurmountable. For this reason, novels that were able
to credibly fill this breach exerted a peculiar fascination. One of the rea-
sons behind the critical success of Philip Roth’s latest books resides in his
willingness to take seriously the kind of reflections on American history
and life in general that an adman or the owner of a glove factory might
have. The expedients used by Roth show that this is no easy task. His
characters are never left alone: they are always accompanied by the in-
terpreting voice of the narrator, or his double, Nathan Zuckerman, as if
the truth of ordinary characters needed to be translated into a more com-
plex language, as if this truth needed to be extracted.
What is the meaning of the metamorphosis represented by Thomas Bud-
denbrook’s crisis? Perhaps what novelists transposed into writing was an
objective feature of contemporary social structures. For a good part of
the twentieth century, in major cities as well as in small provincial towns,
the members of the ruling classes still had a robust intellectual function: the
systemic complexity and the division of labor had not yet fully segmented
human aggregates, separating the cultural worlds of the classes and social
88. Ibid., 727.

strata. However, there was an intermediate step between this change in the
real world and the changes occurring in literature. The nineteenth-century
paradigm adapted to the modern world archaic, premodern literary
forms premised on the centrality and wholeness of people. In this sense, the
ability to think deeply about the meaning of life and on the state of the
world became the intellectual counterpart of the capacity that many
nineteenth-century heroes preserved to perform showy actions or make
eloquent speeches. This is not just a simple reflection, then, but one that
filters through the internal logic of literature.
In any case, whatever its origin, this state of things could not last long
for several reasons: first, over the course of the nineteenth century, Euro-
pean narrative developed mimetic forms foreign to the anthropocentrism
inherited from the past by the early nineteenth century; second, because the
complexity of the social systems, which was growing beyond all measure,
created more distance between the mentalities of the social classes and
strata. For the elite intellectuals of the twentieth century, for those who
judged the doxa of the masses from the perspective of traditional human-
istic culture, it became increasingly difficult to view the prevailing common
sense of the practical man in a serious way. And while abstract thought and
estrangement turned into specialized activities, this transformation was in-
scribed into the language of literature, separating the intellectual hero from
the common hero.
The Modern Forms of the Romance

Narrative that uses special characters always, or almost always, respects
the logic of the novel, but places the interest outside the middle station of
life: it preserves the armature of the realistic paradigm but tells stories
about protagonists who are completely divorced from medietas, as if ordi-
nary life had lost its charm.
The development of this area, slightly peripheral to the center, is not the
only line of flight from everyday life that the novel took in this period: in
the second half of the nineteenth century there emerged new forms of the
romance. In the language of literary criticism, for the past few decades a
large portion of these forms of contemporary romance have been referred
to as “genre fiction” to convey their rigid, codified nature. The primary
templates of genre fiction are the fantastic (or, in the language of the cul-
ture industry, fantasy), crime fiction, and science fiction. By crossbreeding

them, we get the intermediate forms. While contemporary fantasy is the
more or less degraded continuation of the literature of the fantastic that
arose or became established during the Romantic era, crime fiction and sci-
ence fiction emerged as structured genres in the mid-nineteenth century.89
In addition to genre fiction, the second half of the nineteenth century
witnessed the rise of a new form of romance, packed with hidden allegor-
ical senses, but with a modern allegorism devoid of any fixed hermeneutic
key. Moby-Dick (1851) is one of the first examples of this type. This nar-
rative family has become remarkably important over the past fifty years. It
could be defined using a formula Roland Barthes used to describe the
work of Italo Calvino:
[Calvino] has a very distinctive imagination: essentially, the kind that
Edgar Allan Poe staged in his work. We might call it the imagination of
a certain kind of mechanics, or viewing imagination in relation to me-
chanics. The idea may appear somewhat paradoxical, because from a Ro-
mantic point of view one would think that the imagination is, on the
contrary, a force that is anything but mechanical, extremely “sponta-
neous.” Quite the contrary. The imagination, or perhaps a great imagina-
tion, is always the development of a certain kind of mechanics. In this
respect, although with huge differences in style, there’s an Edgar Allan
Poe side to Calvino, because [Calvino] sets up a situation . . . that’s unre-
alistic in terms of its faithfulness to the world, but only as far as the initial
conditions are concerned, and then this unrealistic situation is developed
in an implacably realistic and implacably logical way.90
89. Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 18ff.; Elsa de Lavergne, La Naissance du roman pol-
icier français: du Second Empire à la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris: Classiques Garnier,
2009); Paul K. Alkon, Science Fiction before 1900 (1994) (New York: Routledge, 2002),
chap. 1; Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures
of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), chap. 1;
Irène Langlet, La Science-fiction: lecture et poétique d’un genre littéraire (Paris: Colin, 2006),
134ff.
90. Roland Barthes, “La Mécanique du charme” (1978), in Italo Calvino, Le Chevalier
inexistant (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 1–2. For a definition and map of this narrative territory, see
Massimo Rizzante, Non siamo gli ultimi. La letteratura fra fine dell’opera e rigenerazione
umana (Milan: Effigie, 2009), 74ff., which resumes and develops the theoretical insights
presented in “La Mécanique du charme.” Barthes’s piece was originally a radio interview for
France Culture that was transcribed and published in the French edition of The Nonexistent
Barthes insists on the link between romance and logic that we find in
the works of Calvino and, before him, in the narrative current to which
Calvino is related: in the more cerebral and less visceral part of Poe’s work,
for example; but also in Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and Marcel
Schwob; and in Nabokov, Borges, and the writers that Borges influenced.91
This fiction of the imagination, but with a controlled irrationality, this
interweaving of romance and Aufklärung, or of romance and metalitera-
ture, constitutes one of the most important narrative fringes in recent cen-
turies. When this textual space took on defined features, it became
possible to read the preceding literary history in a new way and to interpret
certain premodern and early modern authors and genres as precursors of
the “mechanical imagination.” With a retrospective movement, then, the
works of Ariosto and Jonathan Swift or the eighteenth-century conte philos-
ophique can thus be included in the genealogical lineage that Barthes de-
scribes. What Kafka creates in his short stories and novels is a different but
related mode. The stories he introduces into the structures of ordinary life
cannot be explained by the categories of daytime logic—they disturb the
familiar framework of certainties that underpins common sense.
The Sense of a Transformation
I have tried to describe the narrative territory that took shape between the
second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth
century. What is the overarching sense of this transformation?
The main change was the crisis of the nineteenth-century paradigm and,
in particular, that of its symbolic core, the melodramatic model. Scott,
Balzac, and Dickens transferred devices at work in genres like epic and
tragedy, which enact public conflicts between cosmic-historical individ-
uals, to private individuals. In doing so, the melodramatic novelists
grafted a vision of the world and life belonging to the age of heroes onto
the age of prose. While the primary raison d’être of a technique of this sort
is intraliterary (the inert survival of schemas that came into being during
other epochs), this memory of antiquity could not have lasted long if it
Knight. It was not included in the first and second editions of the complete works of Barthes,
published by Seuil in 1993–1995 and in 2002.
91. See Rizzante, Non siamo gli ultimi, 75–76.
had not anchored itself to a fact of reality. The melodramatic novel arose
in an era when secular forms of life had collapsed and were replaced by
other forms, history had become a lived experience of the masses, and it
was plausible to think that people, subjects, or witnesses of an unprece-
dented transformation were involved in absolute conflicts. At a certain
point this paradigm proved to be unrealistic. This happened when the in-
stitutions and forms of life ceased to change at the same speed as before,
and modern society seemed to harden, losing its fluidity and turning into
the superpersonal mechanism that Weber described using the metaphor of
the iron cage. Universal forces were no longer revealed in the experience of
private persons, and particular individuals, now regulated and controlled,
signified only themselves: they are little monads (but endowed with win-
dows, permeable to the environment) enclosed in systems. Today, the great
collective history has a purely mechanical relationship with small, subjec-
tive stories. Today the only universality to which people can aspire is not
that of the cosmic-historical individuals, but that of private life as a uni-
versal condition of modern human beings as it unfolds in novels of per-
sonal destinies.
However, the crisis of the nineteenth-century paradigm did not stop at
the crisis of melodrama. The change had a much larger reach that touched
the very heart of the theatrical model. Beginning in the second half of the
nineteenth century, the life of people like us began to appear under a dif-
ferent light. It became increasingly difficult to discern the sign of great uni-
versal forces in the actions of private individuals. The space for narrative
disruptions gradually shrank; lives became more predictable; the form of
life in which people were immersed tended to be perceived as an unchange-
able background, or one that could be changed only on the basis of dy-
namics beyond people’s control. This diminishment of individual action in
the public space, and therefore of theatricality, corresponded to a different
way of interpreting events. Because the world lacked a great central event,
and because the way of the world was seen as indifferent to the trajectories
of individuals, as erecting obstacles or creating confusion, a new decentral-
ized, nonhierarchical mode of perceiving life was able to take shape: plots
were populated with secondary actions, ruptures, and dead time. It also
became possible to locate the essential outside the external world. The most
pervasive shift, the first, great inward turn that led to a work like The Prin-
cesse de Clèves, happened at the same time as the courtization of warriors
in the court society,92 when the aristocracy gradually lost its ability to act
and physical violence was transformed into symbolic violence, ceremony,
and the cult of distinction. It was in the court society that the psycholog-
ical approach to human action matured,93 when identities and destinies
were no longer defined through significant deeds, and desires and conflicts
spilled over into private life. It was in this sphere that people compared and
interpreted each other.
But the century of psychological realism originated from a second in-
ward turn. When the objective space for performing actions narrowed,
when the essential was transferred in interiore homine, the inner life became
more complex. No longer constrained by the unilateralism of action, the
psyche emerged from the molds that had previously defined it: “yes, a man
of the nineteenth century ought, indeed is morally bound, to be essen-
tially without character; a man of character, a man who acts, is essentially
limited.”94 But the inward turn, as we have seen, was not an isolated inci-
dent: in fact, the century of psychological realism coincided with the period
during which few novelists sought the essential in estrangement or in essay-
istic reflection. All these movements brought narrative interest outside the
public existence of individuals like us. At the beginning of the nineteenth
century it seemed plausible to tell stories about private people as if they still
lived in the age of heroes; at the beginning of the twentieth century, the
prose of modern life had now permeated the novelistic architecture.
92. Elias, The Civilizing Process, p. 387.

93. Ibid., 401.
94. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Zapiski iz podpol’ya (1864); Notes from Underground, trans.
Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 7.
CHAPTER EIGHT
On Contemporary Fiction
After Modernism
We have so far identified three phases in the history of modern narrative

(from 1800 to 1850, from 1850 to 1900, and from 1900 to 1940), all
marked by striking internal evolutions. Between 1800 and 1940, ground-
breaking devices widened the field of possibilities that lay before novelists
when they started to write. Authors and readers of this epoch perceived
literature as inclined toward novelty and transformation. The idea already
present in the thought of Friedrich Schlegel that beauty, like fashion, should
change along with the times was a controversial topic in Baudelaire’s time,
before becoming a topos of the historical avant-gardes and modernism.
This was also the period when the evolutionary paradigm gained a foot-
hold that has long dominated histories of modern literature: the notion
that the artistic space lives under a regime of permanent revolution, a
principle Ezra Pound set out in a maxim about another modern genre (“No
good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old”).1 According to
this view, authors like Flaubert and Joyce would thus belong to two com-
pletely different historical eras, and the task of criticism would be to de-
scribe the progressive movement that separates them, as if culture arose
through a series of small, consecutive breaks with the past. Also tied to this
principle is the conviction that in each period there exists only a limited
number of artistic works and schools, while all the others (to borrow the
1. Ezra Pound, “Retrospect” (1913–1918), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 11.
334 ON CONTEMPORARY FICTION
expression Hegel used to explain the irrelevance of Africa and Siberia in

Universal Becoming) lie “out of the pale of History.”2 Originally a product
of Romantic historicism, this model gained currency with the nineteenth-
century avant-gardes and with the radical tides of modernism. According
to this way of thinking, the evolutionary stages of the novel are marked by
Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education (1869) and not by Hugo’s Les Misera-
bles (1862); by Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and not by Forster’s Passage to India
(1924); by Nathalie Sarraute’s Planetarium (1959) and not by Pasternak’s
Dr. Zhivago (1957). Although these pairs of works appeared at the same
times, they are viewed as belonging to different developmental stages, some
of which are innovative, “at the height of their times,” and authentically
historical (Flaubert, Joyce, Sarraute); others of which are conservative, lag-
ging behind the times, and antihistorical (Hugo, Forster, Pasternak). Lit-
erary history is expected to dwell on the extreme fringes and pass over the
rest; or, to use the military metaphors typical of this paradigm, it must
concern itself with the avant-garde and forget the rearguard.
The fourth phase of modern narrative history, however, the one begin-
ning after the end of modernism, definitively resists any such notions. It is
true that between the beginning of the twentieth century and the 1930s the
novel underwent a transformation that, from a long-term perspective,
could also be interpreted as a progressive, continuous motion, but the
works written between the 1930s and the 1950s were often less technically
advanced and less innovative than those written during the previous two
decades. It was the first time this had happened in the modern era. The
second wave of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, the one beginning to
develop in the mid-1950s, was not able to reinstate the progressive schema
of literary history that reigned before the 1930s. What had changed?
The Decline of the New
Between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the early decades of
the twentieth century, a few literary inventions became predominant and
2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte; En-
glish translation The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (Kitchener, ON: Batoche
Books, 2001) 109ff.; this quote from p. 118. On the Hegelianism implicit in historiograph-
ical models of the nineteenth-century avant-gardes, see Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
ON CONTEMPORARY FICTION 335
grammaticalized. This transformation had two effects: it opened up new

possibilities and sidelined others, pushing them “out of the pale of History.”
This approach would be codified by the artists and critics of the twentieth
century, but the phenomenon existed before the 1900s, since the modernist
and avant-garde perception of aesthetic becoming was the extreme version
of an attitude whose essential traits date back to Romanticism—in other
words, to the time when the idea of a linear, irreversible transformation of
forms entered into the discourse of European aesthetics. When Balzac talks
about the new possibilities that Sir Walter Scott introduced into European
narrative, he adopts the same mental schemas that the culture of the early
twentieth century would revive.
By 1850 the European novel had already grammaticalized some of its
innovations: the theatrical plot, the transparent writing style, and the new
conceptual ether sensitive to historical dynamics had become part of the
narrative field, one of the possibilities always available for use. In the same
process, a few of the devices dear to eighteenth-century taste had become
obsolete and were marginalized. The insularity that a substantial part of
British fiction suffered from in the first half of the nineteenth century was
partly due to the survival of techniques in English narrative that the conti-
nental novel, prevalently French, considered outdated but that Dickens or
Thackeray continued to use as a matter of course: the comic mimesis of
everyday life, poetic justice, and a philosophical ether composed of static,
moralistic categories.3 Then, between the 1850s and the 1930s, the Euro-
pean novel absorbed into its grammar other groundbreaking devices: dis-
jointed plots, new ways of imagining the psychic life, and new narrative
mediations. These techniques were collectively accepted, altering the
range of possibilities available to high-culture writers. At the same time, a
few older possibilities (melodramatic plots, personages marked by a rigid
charakter) passed into disuse: Balzac, writes Ortega y Gasset, sounds arti-
ficial and à-peu-près in 1925.4
In the 1930s this evolutionary schema began to crack: innovations con-
tinued to exist, of course, but they no longer became part of the narrative
grammar in the way they used to. Even when the new avant-garde movements
3. See Franco Moretti, The Way of the World, 181ff.; and by the same author, Atlas of the
European Novel, 1800–1900, 151ff.
4. José Ortega y Gasset, Ideas sobre la novela, in Obras completas, 165.
of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s reintroduced extremely experimental nar-

rative, the new approaches no longer had the force to change the reper-
toire of shared manners and failed to become institutions. Proust, Kafka,
Woolf, Joyce, and Musil transformed European narrative far more deeply
than Sarraute, Beckett, Claude Simon, Uwe Johnson, or Perec. This is not
because their innovations were more radical, but because these earlier
techniques came to be part of the shared narrative vocabulary. At the same
time, the ability to expel, exclude, push out of the pale of history forms
that were considered outdated seems to have diminished. As we noted,
Western narrative written between the late 1930s and the 1950s, if viewed
from a distance like a faraway landscape, appears to be less revolutionary
than the narrative written during the three previous decades. At the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century, we can say that the innovations put for-
ward by the second phase of the twentieth-century avant-gardes have re-
mained confined to a big historical enclave. Furthermore, the imperative,
binding character of novelty itself has dissolved: the idea spread that there
exists a tradition of the new, a repertoire of experimentation that is equal
and opposite to the repertoire of preservation, and that the art from the
avant-garde belongs to a family, extends a genealogy, and is just as filled
with epigones as art from the non-avant-garde. As a result, the new has lost
prestige as a criterion of judgment, and works that might have been criti-
cized for their technical backwardness at the time they were published,
such as Buddenbrooks, Dr. Zhivago, and Grossman’s Life and Fate (or, in
Italy, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Elsa Morante’s History),
were less and less prone to these kinds of attacks. Contemporary arts form
a disjointed region cohabited by diverse factions that evolves without fol-
lowing any telos.
Only during the past four decades has this perception become wide-
spread, but the first signs of the discontinuity were perceptible as early as the
late 1930s. They became fully visible at the same time that thought on
the dialectic of enlightenment emerged—in other words when the crisis
of the idea of progress became a theme of contemporary philosophical dis-
cussion. It became common currency during the years when tensions in-
ternal to mass societies, the development of totalitarianisms, and World
War II transformed the way elite intellectuals in the West looked at history.
The search for the new in the world of narrative already began to wane
during the 1930s. But for the perception of this threshold to enter into
common sense, the literary domain had to pass through another phase, one
that was both artistic and political. This happened a few decades later,
when the second wave of twentieth-century avant-gardes had become ex-
hausted and mass trust in the future as progress or redemption had become
tarnished. At this point, the understanding that arts in the West had en-
tered a postmodernist period became pervasive. At the same time, dis-
courses on the dwindling hope for a future radically different from the
present extended from artistic domains into the form of life that incor-
porates these domains, and thought on artistic postmodernism became
thought on the surpassing of the modern era, which is to say, on
postmodernity.
A Multiple Archipelago
How should the medium-length phase that began during the 1930s be
interpreted? While it is true that novelty was no longer integrated and
institutionalized with the same enthusiasm, a steady, magmatic stream
of individual innovations continued to appear. From a perspective of long
duration, the structures of sense that originated during the Romantic pe-
riod are still with us. One of these is the anarchic logic governing the arts:
every creator or artist seeks to express himself or herself in an original
way, so much so that at first glance the modern aesthetic space gives the
impression of an endless, chaotic jumble of different works. Nevertheless,
there were some waves of collective innovation in this apparently puncti-
form territory that generated large, unprecedented literary regions un-
known to the novel of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
recognizable if viewed with farsighted eyes. Unlike what happened previ-
ously, these currents did not subvert the shared narrative grammar, nor
did they extensively alter the way of telling stories, constructing characters,
or managing the voice of the narrator. Instead, they produced rather large,
relatively isolated territories that intersected with the preexisting forms, gen-
erating a ragged landscape.
An atlas of contemporary literary plurality has to begin with a prelimi-
nary observation: after World War II, the genre of the novel became truly
planetary, since Europe and the United States began to steadily (and not
just occasionally) absorb works coming from Eastern and colonial cul-
tures, until the birth of a global novel. The first of the innovative narrative
trends was magic realism, which developed outside Europe during the
1940s, and after the success of Gabriel García Márquez went on to be-
come the dominant form of the postcolonial novel. The second were the
clusters of experimentation that emerged between the late 1950s and the
1970s, especially in the literatures of continental Europe. These experi-
ments reflected and extended the tradition of the first twentieth-century
avant-gardes and modernism, but in extreme forms. The third was post-
modernist narrative in a narrow sense, which developed in the United
States between the 1960s and 1970s especially thanks to authors born
between 1920 and 1940 (Gaddis, Vonnegut, Barth, Barthelme, Doc-
torow, DeLillo, Pynchon, and others). Through resemblance, their works
then served to define the poetics of authors who were not American, such
as Italo Calvino or Umberto Eco in Italy. Each of these currents intro-
duced new techniques; each of them created a genealogy that is still alive
at the beginning of the twenty-first century; and yet none of them was
able to establish their devices as models with the same force or the same
ability to create collective habits that the major innovations possessed
between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the 1930s. A few de-
cades ago it was thought that postmodernism would impose its own he-
gemony on high-culture literature just as the avant-gardes and modernism
had done in the early 1900s; in the early 2000s, though, we know that
magic realism, the second phase of the twentieth-century experimenta-
tions, and postmodernist narrative did no more than add provinces and
islands to a variegated territory where diverse literary families make their
collective home. At times remote from each other, at times hybridized,
they are always, in any case, multiform. The archipelago of contemporary
fiction is plural.
What has occurred over the past few decades allows us to observe it in
a new way and discern a continuity of long duration. Some of the most
interesting narrative works to appear between the end of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-first century elude all the taxo-
nomic categories and oppositional pairings invented by literary theory in
order to group texts together. This includes both recent categories (post-
modernism, avant-garde, and tradition) and those of medium duration
(nineteenth-century realism, modernism). Which classification in literary
history can be assigned to works like Le Labyrinthe du monde (The
World Is a Maze) by Marguerite Yourcenar (1974–1988), the autobio-
graphical trilogies by Elias Canetti (1977–1985) and Edmund White

(1982–1997), A Late Divorce (1982) by A. B. Yehoshua, the short stories
that Raymond Carver wrote between the 1970s and 1980s, those that
Alice Munro wrote from the 1970s to date, Flesh and Blood (1995) by
Michael Cunningham, the novels of Philip Roth, The Elementary Parti-
cles (1998) by Michel Houellebecq, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002)
by J. M. Coetzee, The Kindly Ones (2006) by Jonathan Littell—in other
words, some of the most important works of fiction to be written be-
tween the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the
twenty-first? Where do they get penciled in on our blueprints? One might
try to pigeonhole them into known categories using the prefix neo-. From
a technical point of view, A Late Divorce and Flesh and Blood owe a lot
to Faulkner and Virginia Woolf: it would be legitimate to interpret them
as neomodernist novels. And yet they lack an essential characteristic of
modernism: their authors are not interested in experimenting with radi-
cally new narrative forms, nor do they want to discover or fully explore
uncharted stylistic solutions. In A Late Divorce and Flesh and Blood,
modernism seems to have become repertoire. Also, while a category of
this sort can be adapted to certain books, it does not cover the entire area
we are discussing. The authors we mentioned are not linked exclusively
to modernist forms—their books are technically more backward, more
conservative, than the models that inspire them. The common traits uniting
these writers lie elsewhere: all of them offer serious treatments of epi-
sodes set in an everyday context against a backdrop with a sense of his-
torical dynamics; none of them is attracted by novelty for the sake of
novelty; all of them look to the past two centuries of Western narrative
with the attitude of someone who feels free to reuse techniques appearing
in the second half of the nineteenth century just as much as at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, in Tolstoy, in modernist literature, or in
postmodernist literature. What are we to make of these characteristics
and their peculiar mix?
First and foremost, they show that the three long-duration infrastruc-
tures that prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century still occupy
the center of the modern literary space. Magic realism and postmodernist
narrative had programmatically rejected them, the former by reintegrating
forms of magic and adventure, the latter by overthrowing the hierarchy
between playfulness and seriousness or by indulging in metaliterature. The
fiction of the second avant-garde wave focused for its part on devices of
estrangement in order to create new forms of narrative. Instead, the works
we are talking about preserved a continuity with the novel that over the
past few centuries has represented the conflicts of common life in a tragic
and problematic mode. In other words, they move in the realm of the “se-
rious realism of modern times [that] cannot represent man otherwise than
as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is con-
crete and constantly evolving.”5 Ways of problematically treating ordinary
life have changed, but its background radiation has not faded out: the se-
riousness of everyday life has continued to form the core of literary history
for the past two hundred years—the evolution we are experiencing is part
of a systemic continuity. In the face of this subterranean persistence, other
narrative modes are peripheral trends or short-term and medium-term
fashions.
But the existence of works like the ones we have listed also attests to a
changed relationship with the past. A few months after Jonathan Littell’s
The Kindly Ones came out, a reviewer attacked the novel in the following
way:
How can you write exactly as if you were in the nineteenth century? As
if Joyce, Proust, Hammett, Faulkner, and Robbe-Grillet had never ex-
isted, not to mention Toni Morrison, Rushdie, and Houellebecq. Can
you imagine for one second a contemporary artist who paints like
Monet? The weirdness of literature—the creative domain that is the least
aware of its own history. Littell may very well have brought off the tour
de force of writing a novel on the Shoah in a deliriously anachronistic
form, as if he were writing a century before the very event that changed
the face of literature for all time.6
This string of idées reçues encapsulates a way of understanding the his-

tory of the arts that was typical of radical modernism and the avant-gardes.
An entire literary landscape can be glimpsed against the backdrop of these
few lines: the aesthetic myth of novelty, the conviction that there has to be
a necessary correspondence between changing times and changing artistic
forms, and a popularized and sketchy notion of nineteenth-century narra-
tive. It even includes a reference to Adorno’s comment on the relationship

6. Sylvain Bourmeau, “Bête à Goncourt,” Les Inrockuptibles 569 (October 24, 2006): 69.
between the Holocaust and literature: nothing is left out. During the second
experimental wave of the twentieth century, Robbe-Grillet argued that
“to praise a young writer in 1965 because he ‘writes like Stendhal’ is
doubly disingenuous. . . . Flaubert wrote the new novel of 1860, Proust
the new novel of 1910. The writer must proudly consent to bear his own
date.”7 In reality, Littell does not write exactly like in the nineteenth
century, because The Kindly Ones is composed of a mix of elements. And
yet it is true that the nineteenth-century narrative tradition (Stendhal,
Flaubert, and especially Tolstoy) and its twentieth-century reinterpreta-
tions (Vasily Grossman) are technically essential to the architecture of The
Kindly Ones. Between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of
the twenty-first, writers can pick up on devices that come from Tolstoy
(Littell), from Woolf (Cunningham in Flesh and Blood, organized like The
Years), or from Faulkner (Yehoshua in A Late Divorce). They may refuse
to write the nouveau roman of 2000 and to instead reuse 150-year-old
narrative materials. For this reason, the persistence of these sorts of works
confirms that when thinking about literary history over the past few centu-
ries, and, more generally, about the history of culture, we must imagine its
evolution in a different way—leaving behind the paradigms that presup-
pose a perpetual renewal of forms.
If we look at literary history from the point of view of technical changes,
the narrative possibilities used by novelists at the beginning of the twenty-
first century for the most part originated between the second and fourth
thresholds that we identified: between 1850 and 1940. From this perspec-
tive, the first generation of writers that are still contemporary is that of
George Eliot, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. The storehouse of avail-
able techniques was expanded by other devices after them, but the ways of
constructing characters, plots, and narrators that these novelists invented
or perfected still furnish solutions that twenty-first century novels continue
to use today. Their greatest works are still somehow contemporary to our
epoch, while those of Scott, Balzac, or Manzoni show signs of an era that
no longer speaks to us.
But beyond narrative techniques, what unites the tradition of the modern
novel from the turning point that we nominally located in 1800 until today
is the centrality of existential realism. As a constant of long duration, the
7. Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, 10.

serious mimesis of everyday life set against a historical and dynamic back-
ground gives form to the narrative of our times. Challenges, rejections, al-
ternatives, and escapes have been and will be many, but in the end, from a
perspective spanning centuries, in different versions that change continu-
ously or return cyclically, this deep structure still occupies the center of the
narrative space. To change this status would require a transformation com-
parable to what resulted in the phase of human history whose protracted
twilight we are currently living through—the modern age.
Conclusion
A Theory of the Novel
The Genre of Particularity
In the Introduction to this book, speaking about the schemas that critical
thought uses to imagine the causal relationship between forms of life and
language games, I referred to Althusser and Jameson to distinguish between
a mechanical paradigm, an expressive paradigm, and a structural para-
digm. The first conceives of reality as a network of regional microevents
linked by small relations of cause and effect (the influence of one author on
another, of an environment on a group of writers, of an editorial choice on
a work or genre). It has met with remarkable success in histories of culture
with a philological and positivist slant, which for the past century and a
half have proliferated in academic journals. Even today those who speak
of “scientific rigor” in relation to literary criticism often refer to this model,
which claims to export the truth protocols of the natural sciences into the
domain of culture: the result is a tremendously impoverished scope of
problems and phenomena. The expressive paradigm hierarchically distin-
guishes between planes of reality, separating original ones from derivative
ones. This approach is typical of Marxist cultural history in its popularized
version and it generates the distinction between structure and super-
structure, between “the ultimately determining instance” of the economy
and the consequences that this primary level is said to have on all the others.
The third paradigm imagines that the totality is immanent in all its ways
of being and that each plane of the real expresses an aspect of the whole.
The three schemas are not mutually exclusive, and they all appear in this
344 CONCLUSION
book, but the structural paradigm is unquestionably the cornerstone that

holds up the construction.
Theory of the Novel presents a long-duration history of the ways in
which European culture has articulated its stories. It also offers an inter-
pretation of the relationship that mimesis, narrative, and the novel have
entertained with other games of truth and, more generally, with the idea of
truth itself. So far I have traced out the internal history of a genre; we now
need to investigate the meaning of this process, what it allows us to under-
stand about the form of life in which we are immersed. What contents lie
crystallized in the novel? What history lies sedimented in these works?
The novel is the genre of particularity: it expresses a plane of being that
for centuries was ignored or grasped only with difficulty by other discur-
sive formations. Even when the invention of photography and cinema en-
abled the sensible appearance to be represented through the media of
image and sound, the novel preserved its supremacy in the mimesis of the
interior life and of the relations between human beings and the forces
that traverse them. Telling stories about anything in any way whatsoever
means affirming the centrality of singular individuals, reproducing their
objective ways of being, imagining their subjective ways of being, and fol-
lowing the minute, anomic dispersion of all that exists. The genre we are
talking about “carr[ies] the incommensurable to extremes in the represen-
tation of human life”:1 using words, it tells about all the appearances that
particularities can assume. In the first place, it lingers on proper names,
follows the paths of individuals, and multiplies the epicenters of sense
that attribute a meaning and a Stimmung to what happens. Secondly, it
places particular beings into regional and transitory forms of life. It is an
“atmospheric” and “provincial” genre2 that describes microcosms: “re-
membering the titles of a novel is like remembering a city where we once
lived for some time.”3 It is a form that, in its own logic, introjects the
objective fragmentation of the world into worlds. Contemporary with the
age of exploration, the rise of modern states, the demographic growth of
the West, the increase in social complexity and division of labor, it emerged
1. Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov,” 87.

2. Ortega y Gasset, Ideas sobre la novela, 185, 198.
3. Ibid., 195.
CONCLUSION 345
in the epoch when the spheres of life differentiated, rendering the effects of
this fragmentation.
But there is a third aspect to particularity: in addition to telling stories
about anything, novels tell stories in any way whatsoever. In classical and
classicist literature, the style is set a priori by conventions: the epic voice
already knows what to talk about and what form to adopt. Novelists, on
the other hand, are not backed up by any collective norms that restrict the
choice of stories or ways of telling them. In transmitting real or possible
stories, the author chooses a few episodes from the infinite variety of beings
that, for the community he or she belongs to, are equivalent to countless
others, putting them into a form that can also be imagined differently. Mul-
tiple points of view and the theoretical possibility of telling things in a
different way abound in every novel, because it is assumed that each person,
in theory, has the right to represent the world according to his or her per-
ceptual and ethical angle.
Since nothing legitimates a priori a certain story or a certain style, since
these decisions are freely taken, the act of narrating embodies without fil-
ters or intermediate steps what happens in every form of mimesis. Writing
a novel means choosing a few discontinuities out of an unlimited expanse
of possible stories and condemning thousands of others to oblivion; it
means assuming a responsibility toward the real and the possible. This re-
sponsibility is redoubled by the choice of how to tell the story, that is, how
to judge the fragment that has been isolated out of the seriality. In both
cases, what is latent in every mimetic act becomes manifest. The novel ex-
hibits the subjective nature of our judgments on the world: it is the flag-
ship that literature ranges against systematic thought, against science
and philosophy. This is partly because in the language games of science
and philosophy certain points of view are presented as better than others,
but every point of novelistic view, even that of the most omniscient of nar-
rators, always coexists with other epicenters of sense. This coexistence is
asymmetric and symmetric at the same time. It is asymmetric because the
narrator is always in a higher position with respect to the protagonists (he
or she sees them from the outside, knows more than they do, and objec-
tively transcends them); it is symmetric because what the characters think
never entirely loses its value. This applies to narrative as a language game.
As we saw in Chapter 1, even Hector and Priam can inspire our compas-
sion; even an enemy’s point of view can be embraced. In the novel, this
346 CONCLUSION
openness appears even clearer: not even the most authoritarian of narra-
tors has a complete monopoly on sense. In the end, his or her version is
just one more point of view, one way of describing a microcosm that, in
theory, also provides for other possible outlooks.
Relativism and Perspectivism

The result of the threefold particularity that novels introject into their logic
is the relativistic and perspectivist nature of the Weltanschauung conveyed
by this game of truth. The modern success of the genre is mainly linked to
its ability to make us see the world through the eyes and conscience of
someone else, its ability to allow us to step into a possible life that is not
ours—and perhaps even to allow different and irreconcilable outlooks to
exist in the same text and on the same page, all of which are endowed with
a legitimacy and rightness of their own.
Novelistic relativism concerns not only the interweaving of worlds that
takes place in a single text, but also the accumulation of texts. When we
close a novel and then open up a new one, we change microcosms and
value spheres. Every reader may have his or her favorite novels, but the
worlds that the individual texts create are equivalent, because the intrinsic
meaning of the values is not essential to understand and appreciate the
stories:
No horizon . . . is interesting because of its subject matter. Any horizon
is interesting because of its form, because of its form of horizon, i.e., its
cosmos or total world. Microcosm and macrocosm are both cosmos in
the same way. . . . The relativity between horizon and interest—the fact
that every horizon has its own interest—is the vital law that makes the
novel possible in the aesthetic order.4
Modern novels do not offer models or exempla. There may exist an af-
finity between characters and readers, but more frequently this is not the
case: we would do very little reading if we identified only with the heroes
we resemble. In actuality, we very often feel compassion and fear for char-
acters who have completely different opinions and needs from our own.
The ease with which the average reader identifies with a variety of entirely
4. Ibid., 198.
CONCLUSION 347
different characters, adapting his or her own horizon each time to con-
stantly new horizons, is a sign that, in his or her eyes, the motivations that
drive the protagonists of the modern novel have lost any substantial sig-
nificance. The existence of a genre that allows the desires and the worlds
of others to be shared without judging their intrinsic value is eloquent. This
literary space within which it becomes possible to express points of view
so different as to be irreconcilable is governed by the maxim that Thomas
Buddenbrook applied to his own life: “All human endeavour is merely
symbolic.”5 Since there no longer exists an absolute scale to which to ap-
peal, “a man can be a Caesar in an old commercial city on the Baltic,”6 the
fate of a businessman from Lübeck deserves the same interest that other
cultures might have reserved for the fate of a prince, and the story of the
maid Pamela Andrews can move us with the force of a tragedy.
Few books express the deep logic of the novel as well as Tolstoy’s major
works. In War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the narrator goes into ex-
traordinary detail in describing the bubbles of desires and meanings inside
of which individuals move around. He locates them side by side on the
same plane, without creating any hierarchies. The seriousness with which
each person is treated and the way the details of his or her world are lin-
gered on create an objectively relativistic structure that is at odds with the
authoritative word of the narrator. What issues from this is a perpetually
shifting balance between the perspectivism implicit in the structure of the
whole and the judgments of the narrator. Above, around, and in the midst
of this interweaving of human interests, world history takes up its place,
following its own mechanisms, blind to the wishes of private individuals,
and sweeping their fates along with it.
Consider one of the most beautiful scenes in War and Peace, in which Tol-
stoy tells the story of Natasha Rostova’s first grand ball.7 Although Na-
tasha has been getting ready since eight in the morning, she is late. The
Rostovs have decided to arrive at the ball at half past ten. Now it is ten:
her mother and cousin Sonya are ready, but the skirt Natasha has chosen
is too long. At the last moment, crouched on the ground, the housemaids
5. Mann, Buddenbrooks, bk. 6, chap. 7, p. 353.

6. Ibid., bk. 5, chap. 4, p. 270.
7. Tolstoy, War and Peace, bk. 2, part 3, chaps. 14–17.
348 CONCLUSION
try to shorten it, hoping the seam will hold. Natasha is so overwhelmed
that she cannot even think. Once she is in the carriage and has calmed
down for a moment, she reflects on what is happening. She is about to
make her debut in society, before the sovereign and the most fashionable
young men of Petersburg, dressed as an adult.
The carriage pulls up in front of the palace. Natasha gets out, enters the
vestibule, goes up the stairs, and is blinded by the view; dazzled by the light
and brilliance of the guests’ images reflected in the mirrors, she loses her
own. In the end, stunned and distraught, she crosses the threshold into
the first room. The rite of presentations reassures her: she realizes she has
made a good impression on the hostess and sees two people she knows
among the guests, Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky. Then, suddenly,
the crowd divides down the middle; the orchestra begins to play, and the
sovereign makes his entrance, followed by the host and hostess. The dancing
can begin. More than half of the ladies already have a partner; Natasha is
among those who remain waiting, pressed against the wall:
She stood, her thin arms lowered, her barely defined bosom rising rhyth-
mically, holding her breath, her shining, frightened eyes looking straight
ahead with an expression of readiness either for the greatest happiness
or for the greatest grief. She was interested neither in the sovereign nor
in any of the important persons Mme Peronsky pointed out—she had
one thought: “Can it be that no one will come up to me, can it be that I
won’t dance among the first, can it be that all these men won’t notice
me, who now don’t even seem to see, and if they look at me, it’s with
such an expression as if they were saying: ‘Ah! it’s not her, there’s no
point in looking!’ No, it can’t be!”8
Nobody invites her for the first dance: Natasha remains alone with Sonya,
“as if in a forest, in this crowd of strangers,” while an adjutant of the
sovereign asks them to step further aside so as not to disturb the dancers.
Seeing herself relegated to a corner of the room with her mother and
cousin, almost as if it were a family reunion, Natasha is about to cry when,
right at that moment, by chance, Pierre Bezukhov notices her. He sees that
the girl is desperate and asks Andrei Bolkonsky, who has the reputation of
being a good dancer, to partner her. Everything changes: Natasha begins to
8. Ibid., chap. 16, p. 459.

CONCLUSION 349
dance magnificently; all kinds of people take note of her; after Bol-
konsky, other young men step up to invite her. Natasha is unaware of
anything, because she is illuminated by a childlike, totalizing serenity: “She
was happier than she had ever been before in her life. She was in that highest
degree of happiness when a person becomes perfectly kind and good, and
does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, and grief.”9
This scene provides a graphic summary of what we have discussed thus
far. Over the course of an entire chapter, the reader participates in the story
of a girl who is invited for the first time to a grand ball. We share in her
anxiety about getting dressed and being late; her wonder at the palace as it
opens its doors; the momentary calm that follows the presentations; and
then the anguish of those who are not picked to dance, a pain which is in-
tense for the person experiencing it but trivial when seen from the eyes of
an outsider; the anguish of not making a good impression at this sort of
social event; and finally, the subjectively limitless and objectively futile joy
of someone who is admired and desired by others at a party. It is the night
of New Year’s Eve 1809: a few years previously and a few years later,
Russia and Europe as a whole had been and would be shaken by the Na-
poleonic wars. In earlier chapters the narrator had described the battle of
Austerlitz: he presented the scene, in the absolute terms of a sacred text, in
which the wounded Andrei Bolkonsky, looking upward above the battling
armies, sees the vanity of human endeavors and the beauty of a sky that
offers neither salvation nor redemption. We will witness the advance of the
French into Russia and the war. Some of the people who will die in battle
are attending the New Year’s Eve soirée: for example Anatoly Kuragin,
who will try to seduce Natasha and who watches the women at the ball
with haughtiness and self-assurance, because he knows that he is one of
the most admired young men in Petersburg; and especially Andrei Bol-
konsky, who will fall in love with the girl and ask her to marry him, but
who will not survive the battle of Borodino. In parts of the novel, Tolstoy
presents the thoughts and words of Napoleon, Emperor Alexander, and
Kutuzov; in yet other parts he tells the story of Pierre and Andrei, the intel-
lectual heroes who search for the meaning of life. A little after the ball
scene, an essay written in conceptual language presents a philosophy of
history, interrupting the narrative mimesis and the illusion that personal
9. Ibid., chap. 17, p. 462.

350 CONCLUSION
life is the only reality. But regardless of what we have witnessed and re-
gardless of what is going to take place, page after page, we avidly follow
the story of Natasha: the story of a girl who, blind to the affairs of the
world, pursues her limited aims and desires, devoid of any substantial im-
portance and irrelevant to the collective fate. Nevertheless, when this epi-
sode is being told, we are ready to narrow our gaze. We understand that in
the game of happiness and unhappiness, of balance and imbalance that agi-
tates us, the contents we use to fill it up are valueless in themselves and
have a meaning only for us, and we share the perspectivist conclusion that
Pierre comes to during his captivity: “He had learned that . . . the man who
suffers because one leaf is askew in his bed of roses, suffers as much as he
now suffered falling asleep on the bare, damp ground, one side getting cold
as the other warmed up.”10
For us, the happiness of Natasha, the values of her world, the logic of
her microcosm, take on the utmost importance in these pages, just as the
desires of any other individual and the logic of any other microcosm do in
novels that successfully engage our interest. This segmentation of the world
into worlds is the first content crystallized in the genre of the novel. Swept
away by the democratic leveling of personal aims and desires, hierarchies
disappear.
An Analytics of Existence
Perspectivism is not the only content that lies sedimented in the novel,
though. Another layer of meaning shines below the fragmentation into
microworlds. In addition to talking about anything in any way whatso-
ever, the novel tells stories: the dissemination of value spheres occurs ac-
cording to the language game of narrative, and inscribed in the logic of
this game is a discourse on finite beings—an analytics of existence.
Choosing to tell a story (as opposed to engaging in abstract thought, or
counting, or writing in a form that completely excludes plot and narrator)
means to accept an ontology: it means to assume that reality is composed
of particular beings who are subject to time, agitated by an imbalance, and
located in a world. In narrative representation people are not abstract or
self-centering or disembodied or static or alone, unlike what may occur in
10. Ibid., bk. 4, part 3, chap. 12, p. 1060.

CONCLUSION 351
language games like science, philosophy, or lyric poetry. Rather, they are
proper names thrown into a here and now, placed in the midst of others,
cut through by influences, exposed to circumstances and paths, and sur-
rounded by a network of actions, words, and meanings that decide the
meaning or meaninglessness, happiness or unhappiness, peace of mind or
anxiety of every one of us. If the possibility of describing anything in any
way contains a relativistic element, the existential analytic implicit in the
narrative reflects an image of the world. There are two contents that get
crystallized in the novel form: the idea that reality is inherently multifac-
eted due to the perspectivist multiplication of egos, and the idea that in-
dividuals, regardless of the content of their lives, are thrown into time
and enclosed in a local sphere of forces, environments, and plots that
decide the destiny of each person.
Of all the language games our culture has developed, the novel is the
one that shows in the most detail what it means to exist in time and in a
world. Think of the philosophical significance of the two images we use to
unravel the logic of narratives: point of view and plot. The first descends
from Renaissance thought on pictorial perspective and circulated in the
philosophical vocabulary of the seventeenth century.11 One might think
that a metaphor of this sort could not be applied to an art like narrative,
which is completely extraneous to the medium of the image; and yet,
literary criticism appropriated “point of view” and transformed it into an
indispensable concept. This happened because the metaphor incisively con-
denses the two contents crystallized in the narrative form: every finite being
is an epicenter of sense (that is, a “point of view,” an outlook on the real
and the possible), and the beings are included in a world that embraces
them as finite subjects, located in a specific place, and therefore endowed
with a necessarily partial vision.12 The presuppositions that made Nietz-
sche’s Perspektivismus possible two centuries later took shape thanks to
11. James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994),
chap. 1.
12. On the process of the “objectification of the subjective” that took place in perspective,
see Erwin Panofsky, Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form” (1927); English translation
Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 60. On the “perspective para-
digm,” see H. Damisch, L’Origine de la perspective (1987); English translation The Origin of
Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 19–20.
352 CONCLUSION
the vocabulary of pictorial perspective,13 the same one that was appropri-
ated by narrative theory. The image of plot (intrigue in French, filo della
storia in Italian) points to the same dialectic. Personal trajectories inter-
weave to compose a fabric that transcends the individual parts, that is
moved by time, and that takes a definitive form only at the end.
Point of view and plot are connected to the systemic, environmental
ontology that we examined in Chapters 4 and 6. They presuppose that
human beings are structurally restless and out of balance. No moment, not
even the most beautiful, can be stopped in stories because time and desire
stir up every nunc stans and generate movement—hence the importance
we give to the way the tension is relieved, to the ending. Literally or meta-
phorically, the endings of stories coincide with the two existential situa-
tions in which time, desires, and tension with the world disappear: happi-
ness and death. These zones of stasis elude stories. If death is the archetype
of narrative endings,14 and if boredom projects death onto life (“deadly
boring,” mourir d’ennui, tödliche Langeweile, aburrimiento mortal, noia
mortale), the experience of happiness is the most refractory to the story
form, because every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but all
happy families resemble each other. The relief communicated by a happy
ending stems from the resolution of potential conflict between the self
and reality. In commercial literature and in commercial movies, in the arts
whose aim is entertainment and not knowledge, this type of conclusion is
almost always obligatory.
Discursive Transformations
What changes might give rise to this sort of discursive formation? We could
start with a historical reflection: precisely when the novel, literature, and
mimesis emancipated themselves from the safeguards of Christian aes-
thetic Platonism, the cultural frameworks underwent several epochal
changes. The rise of the novel genre must be understood within this wider
horizon.
13. Antonio Somaini, Rappresentazione prospettica e punto di vista. Da Leon Battista

Alberti ad Abraham Bosse (Milan: Cuem, 2004), 4ff.
14. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending; Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1; Peter Brooks,
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1984), chap. 4.
CONCLUSION 353
1. In his Aesthetics, Hegel reflected on the past character of art. Human

history has experienced periods during which works of art communicated
an image of the world that contemporaries judged as primary and corre-
sponding to the thing-in-itself, while for modern individuals true knowledge
no longer appears in an aesthetic form, but rather through the medium of
the concept. Art maintains an archaic relationship with truth. Following his
philosophy of history, Hegel situates the beginning of this archaism at the
height of Christianity.
In reality, the Vergangenheitscharakter of the aesthetic sphere is in the
first place a consequence of Platonism and Western metaphysics: it is a sign
that the narrative frontier discussed in the Republic continues to exert its
influence on us. Still today, in order to receive a salary as legitimate bearers
of knowledge about the world, we must present our knowledge through
the medium of the concept, as do modern philosophers, scientists, special-
ists in the human sciences, and historians. Artists have a different public
status: they are paid as experts in a techne, an ars, not as possessors of
official knowledge. The relationship between mimesis and truth remains
problematic for us: works of art still need to be explained; criticism and
educational institutions continue to translate the language of art into the
form of judgments and concepts; Western aesthetics can still be read as a
continuous debate on the idea that poets are liars. The very existence of a
philosophy of art is an organic offshoot of the discursive split sanctioned
by the character of Socrates, who called for poets to be banned from the
polis until their defenders were able to demonstrate, through reasoning,
that the practice of mimesis is not only pleasurable but also useful to the
life of the community.15 By reflecting on the truth content of the arts,
modern aesthetics and criticism respond to Plato in the form that Plato
wanted.
But even if this split still remains, art has not taken on a past character.
On the contrary: in very few historical periods has art had the importance
it has commanded during the past two centuries. For modern culture, the
aesthetic languages are not confined to embellishing the truths that phi-
losophy, the natural sciences, the human sciences, and history express in
pure form. Today, mimesis reveals aspects of the human condition that
elude concepts, reasoning, and numbers; it holds an importance that it
15. Plato, Republic 10.607c–e.

354 CONCLUSION
never had after Plato; it has fully reclaimed its place as a book of life. That
is why the main task of contemporary aesthetics and criticism is to trans-
pose into the form of ideas the content of truth that lies deposited in mi-
mesis, translating into the medium of the concept the image of the world
that Virgil, Michelangelo, Proust, or Kubrick expressed in the medium of
their specific language and that could not be fully articulated in any other
way. This problem never presented itself for ancient aesthetics, or it did
so in a different way: artists were masters of truth to the extent that they
adorned and transmitted, in the form of allegories, sententiae and exempla,
philosophical, religious, moral, historical, cosmological, and technical
knowledge that already existed and that other discursive formations ex-
pressed directly. While the idea that a crucial part of the human condition
eludes philosophy, theology, and science and that it reveals itself only in art
is foreign to the culture of aesthetic Platonism and classicism, it is the
raison d’être of the modern aesthetic. Where did this change arise from?
Each of the arts merits a specific answer to this question, but in this case
the languages of the mimetic arts form a system. The reason mimesis has
once again become so important and untranslatable is because we moderns
can say that “nothing is important but life.” What D. H. Lawrence meant
by “life” was the existence of ordinary human beings: Adam, Eve, Sarah,
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bathsheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon,
Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul, Peter, considered simply as “men
alive.”16 The importance that we moderns give to the ontological region
of particularities, to individual differences, to the nonidentical, makes mi-
mesis resistant to the leveling that takes place whenever concepts, ideas, or
numerals are used for conceiving the world of finite beings, turning the
chaotic plurality of individual leaves into the general notion of “the leaf.”
The writers who transported Hegel’s aesthetics into the twentieth
century—starting with Theodor Adorno17 and Peter Szondi—were also those
who reflected on this transition.
16. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” 191–198.

17. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Über epische Naivetät” (1943); English translation “On
Epic Naiveté,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Shierry Weber Nich-
olsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3–23, and by the same author, Aesthetic
Theory, 118ff.
CONCLUSION 355
Hegel does not seem to take into account the fact that particularity not
only separates people in the present, but also unites them. Precisely
because it is a law of the current condition—of the societies to which we
are all subject—the representation of an individual in all the constraints
of his or her world can be representative for all other individuals. . . . In
actuality, modern art is the very expression of the world of particularity
and antagonism that Hegel wanted to surpass, and not reflect, with his
conception of dialectics and art. The Hegelian concept of art is a critique
of our world: those who want to take it seriously cannot expect to apply
it to this epoch.18
It is because particularity is the proprium of our era that depicting an

individual in the full restriction of his or her world can become a represen-
tative gesture. The birth of narcissistic genres like modern autobiography, the
diary, or modern poetry is the first effect of the cultural transmutation that
justified the increasingly detailed imitation of contingency. The second ef-
fect, made possible by technology, is the multiplication of private images
in the age of photography and, later, video. Ever since the realm of particu-
larity became impossible to transcend, the entire system of mimesis was
changed, because discursive formations that tell stories about contin-
gency or depict it fully reverted to being the books of life. Starting from
the second half of the eighteenth century, “the novel, the movie, and the
TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the trea-
tise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress.”19 This follows
on a transformation that simultaneously affected the history of ideas and
the history of publishing. Until the first half of the nineteenth century, the
majority of published works were religious, devotional, and moralistic in
nature; in the second half of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of fic-
tion and autobiographical writings began.20 The conditions that had al-
lowed mimesis to emerge as a game of truth were recreated in a completely
new context.
18. Peter Szondi, “Hegels Lehre von der Dichtung,” in Poetik und Geschictsphilosophie
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 414–415.
19. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), xvi.
20. See Jack Goody, “From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Story-
telling,” in Moretti, The Novel, 1:29.
356 CONCLUSION
After being at the forefront of Greek culture in a premetaphysical age, in

our postmetaphysical age the arts have resumed their battle for supremacy
over legitimate knowledge. However, although linked by a similarity of po-
sition, these periods of cultural history are separated by profound changes.
The first relates to the choice of content for mimesis. While the epos and
cosmogonies allude to an aristocratic hierarchy of beings, ranking those
who deserve to be represented and those who do not, the modern aesthetic
space is egalitarian and, in theory, incorporates any singularity and any
event. For the Homeric bards, the deeds of gods and heroes were sovereign
actions because they founded, impersonated, or represented collective
institutions and values; for modern narrators, every life in principle is sov-
ereign because this ontological level has become sacred. The second
change, which mirrors the first, concerns the choice of form: post-Romantic
mimesis presupposes the principle of stylistic freedom, namely, the belief
that every creator has the right to come up with his or her own manner,
according to an aesthetic principle that, when taken literally, frees art from
any connection with mimesis. This is what happens, for example, in
the abstract visual arts or in “pure poetry.” Today we can tell stories
about, paint, film, and draw any fragment of pure contingency, because no
life or form of life is judged unworthy of mimetic reproduction. But for the
sake of our expressivist freedom we can also tell stories, paint, film, or
draw using any style to the point of destroying any link with the common
appearance of the external world. Both these currents are propelled by the
same epochal drift.
2. Until the dawning of the modern age, as we have seen, art forms were
conditioned by structures deriving from the logic of the concept. Alle-
gorism, moralistic prefaces, poetic justice, and the self-correction of heroes
served to introduce the unequivocal truths of normative ethics and philos-
ophy into the potentially equivocal material of narrative. In order to do
this, characters and plots were transformed into placeholders for concepts
or exempla: mimesis moved in the shadow of ideas. Starting from a certain
historical threshold, the reverse occurred: mental structures evoking the
ontology characteristic of mimesis entered into the domain of conceptual
knowledge.
Few revolutions have so deeply transformed philosophy as the emer-
gence of the idea that truth and thought are dependent on the historical
CONCLUSION 357
time and sociogeographical space that engender them. Modern historicism

and localism are the result of a long process of transformation that began
in the second half of the sixteenth century and came to completion in the
second half of the nineteenth century, when historical thought jettisoned
its Christian armature, dropped the notion of telos, and conceived be-
coming as a sequence of truths and contingent powers that emerge, do
battle with other powers and truths, dominate, perish, and are replaced by
others.
The most mature expression of this metamorphosis is to be found in the
work of Nietzsche. Significantly, some of the most important twentieth-
century interpreters of Nietzsche dedicated their thought to the implications
of these changes: Leo Strauss, for example, and, with completely different
aims, Deleuze and Foucault. Historicism and localism bring back into be-
coming, into changeability, everything that philosophy believed to be su-
pratemporal. The search for permanent forms, for universal and eternal
laws concealed inside and beneath the flow of phenomena, is displaced by
the idea that everything, starting with concepts, is temporary and situated—
because there are no constants, but rather only contingencies thrown into
time and space, interwoven with other equivalent contingencies in a web
of actions, conflicts, negotiations, victories, and defeats.21 As forms of ab-
solute immanentism, historicism and localism assail the assumption, essen-
tial for European metaphysics, that truth and thought can extract them-
selves from the influence of places and times and aspire to an eternal
validity.22 In doing so, they situate knowledge and expose human beings to
a “radical dispersion that provides a foundation for all other histories,” to
a “finitude without infinity.”23 In discussing one of the extreme forms that
the urge to situate thought assumes in modern philosophy, Deleuze ob-
serves that the internal rule Nietzsche’s genealogical processes obey is
tragic, in other words, theatrical: ideas are portrayed as conflicts between
21. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” (1971); English translation

“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchare, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–164.
22. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953),
11ff.
23. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses (1966); English translation The Order of
Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 369, 372.
358 CONCLUSION
underlying forces, and these forces are treated as individuals that emerge
in a certain place and at a certain time, and cross paths on an ideal stage.
For this “method of dramatisation,”24 the question “Who are you?” does
not mean “What is your stable essence?” Rather, it means “How did your
identity come to be?” “What is the accidental history of forces that made
you what you are?” By relating thought to the subjects or dynamics that
generated it, by interpreting ideas as actions that someone or something
produced under certain circumstances, historicism and localism introduce
a narrative type of ontology into the heart of philosophical theories—the
same one that has always dwelt in every form of history. Our interest in
ideas no longer resides in their claim to express an absolute truth, but in
their nature as events; rather than converging toward the unity of univer-
sals, reality proliferates in potentially myriad plots. The Platonic image of
philosophical speculation comes out of this obliterated: there are no es-
sences, only vicissitudes (of thoughts, people, groups, and forces) immersed
in worlds subject, in their turn, to vicissitudes. The gesture of historicizing
and situating is steeped in relativistic skepticism, in a disbelief toward
ideas and values, because “we view all concepts as having become.”25
This attitude is clearly visible in the forms of genealogy belonging to the
school of suspicion, but its most pervasive, mundane version is to be found
in disciplines that relate human creations to the laws of mechanical cau-
sality, presupposing that these are the proper confines of thought. Few
disciplines are based on such a thoroughly nihilistic foundation as philology.
The image of the world etched into its premises views reality as a heap of
particular events and minimal genealogies: the influence of one person on
another, of one singular event on another, of a restricted environment on
an individual. Indeed, while the schools of suspicion rest on a complex
metaphysics accepted as true and removed from the game of historiciza-
24. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962); English translation Nietzsche and
Philosophy, trans. Michael Hardt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 78–79.
25. “What divides us most radically from all Platonic or Leibnizian ways of thinking is
this: we do not believe in eternal concepts, eternal values, eternal forms; and insofar as phi-
losophy is science and not legislation, for us it represents simply the broadest extension of the
concept of ‘history.’ Starting out from etymology and the history of language, we view all
concepts as having become.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885, in
Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 11
(Munich: Deutsches Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 613.
CONCLUSION 359
tions and localizations (as it is in Marx and Freud, but also in Nietzsche),
philology admits no other metaphysics than the obtuse, minimal one in-
scribed in the method of mechanical causality. It destroys every form of
regularity that connect particular beings into larger assemblages. Philology
is the most extreme example of how narrative has permeated the realm of
concepts.
3. But the new importance mimesis has acquired as the book of life and
the introduction of particularities into disciplines that should seek uni-
versal regularities entail more than the finitude without infinity of a
thought that introjects narrative assumptions. These discursive changes
are actually accompanied by opposite changes, by reflexive gestures that
connect the chaos of particulars to a higher order. The same epoch in which
time and space were introduced into the transcendental structures of
thought, the same epoch that allowed disciplines of knowledge to prolif-
erate along the line of flight of an infinite contingency, also witnessed the
emergence of an analytic of finitude, in the form of a philosophical anthro-
pology or an existential analytic.26 These disciplines interpret multiplicity
starting from a common structure rooted in the ontology of particular be-
ings. These two types of knowledge are intertwined. It is the same dialectic
that traverses stories: modern fiction acquires an unprecedented freedom to
reproduce life, but its internal logic shows that the shifting surface of life is
founded on a single grammar of existence.
This change is accompanied by another, even more important one. As
we saw in Chapter 7, the development of the modern novel, poetry, and
drama, the emancipation of mimesis from its safeguards, the rise of the arts
to books of life were contemporary with the development of disciplines of
knowledge that seek to solidify the inconstancy of accidental life into the
medium of concepts, or even numbers. Between the mid-1600s and the early
1800s, the increased philosophical interest in particularities led to the emer-
gence of disciplines dedicated to the conceptual study of contingencies.
The novel attained its modern form precisely when the human sciences
established themselves: in other words, when the sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century “sciences of the soul” morphed during the eighteenth century into
26. Foucault, The Order of Things, 339ff., 369ff., 398ff.

360 CONCLUSION
the discipline of empirical psychology,27 and when thought on the life of

society, which began with Montesquieu and before him with Bodin, led to
the emergence of sociology.28 Auguste Comte, who invented this term, also
extended the mechanical and biological concept of milieu to human life
during exactly the same years when Balzac was completing an identical
maneuver in The Human Comedy—almost as if sociology and the novel
were bound by a symmetry and a secret competition.29 But the historical
parallelism is even more profound. The epoch during which the artistic
representation of singularities was refined and writers became capable of
describing the most minute details of consciences, destinies, and environ-
ments was the same period that applied the calculation of probabilities to
life and saw the rise of statistics.30 European literature became capable of
describing the most subtle nuances of people just when, on the other end of
the cognitive spectrum, sciences were dawning that were founded on the
attempt to relate the diversity among individuals to mathematical laws. The
opening to the chaos of differences occurred at the same time that the dif-
ferences were being nullified in the chilling sameness of numbers. What do
these specular transformations mean?
The Design of This Book
Theory of the Novel is the second part of a study that began with Sulla
poesia moderna (On Modern Poetry).31 Those who write philosophical
works assume that it is possible to speak of the present by dialoguing
with the works of other philosophers, in the conviction that philosophy
is the present time crystallized in thought. Sulla poesia moderna and
27. See Vidal, The Sciences of the Soul, chap. 1.

28. See Raymond Aron, Les Étapes de la pensée sociologique (1967); English translation
Main Currents in Sociological Thought, with a new introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney and
Brian C. Anderson, foreword by Pierre Manent (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
1998).
29. Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance”; Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, chap. 5.
30. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975); Alain Desrosières, La Politique des grands nombres: histoire de la raison statistique
(1993); English translation The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning,
trans. Camille Naish (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
31. Guido Mazzoni, Sulla poesia moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005); French version:
Sur la poésie moderne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014).
CONCLUSION 361
Theory of the Novel attempt to decipher a few aspects of the present,

using two of the most important literary genres of our times as a point of
departure and symptom. They do so in the belief that “art forms tell the
history of human beings with more accuracy than historical documents.”32
This project is distantly related to the hermeneutic tradition that draws
from the aesthetics of German idealism, particularly from the writings of
Friedrich Schlegel and Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics. Many of the
twentieth-century works that offer a theory of an art form issued either
directly or indirectly from this critical school: Lukács’s The Theory of
the Novel, Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama and his essay
on “The Storyteller,” Bakhtin’s studies on the novel, Panofsky’s Perspective
as Symbolic Form, Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, Szondi’s Theory
of Modern Drama, and Arnold Gehlen’s Zeit-Bilder. In spite of the differ-
ences separating these works, they share a resemblance because they con-
sider aesthetic materials to be “symbolic forms” in which “spiritual
meaning is attached to a concrete, material sign and intrinsically given to
this sign.” This is the formula Panofsky borrowed from Cassirer and used
to define the essence of perspective.33 If we wanted to express the same
concept in Hegel’s terms or to use more orthodox Hegelian vocabulary, we
could say that, considering that “the sensuous aspect of art is spiritualized,
since the spirit appears in art as made sensuous,”34 forms of art transmit
“sedimented contents”35 in a medium other than that of thought.
But if the distant source is the critical tradition we have just described,
Sulla poesia moderna and Theory of the Novel differ from the archetype
in two ways: they adopt a different metaphysics—as readers who have
reached this point in the book will be more than aware—and they have a
different conception of the nature of their objects. The theories of artistic
forms that we find in the works of Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, or Gehlen
owe part of their allure to the fact that their authors treat artistic genres and
eras not as shadows, but as solid things. The “novel,” the “Trauerspiel,”
32. See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949); English translation
Philosophy of New Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 37.
33. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923–1929); English transla-
tion The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1953); Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 41.
35. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 37; also by Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 144.
362 CONCLUSION
“storytelling,”“tragedy,”“new music,”“modern drama,”“modern painting,”

“Greece,” “closed cultures,” “the Baroque,” “Romanticism,” or “modernity”
enter into discourse as if they were proper names, as unitary bodies so evi-
dent as to require no explanation, following an approach we find earlier in
Schlegel or Hegel. Over the past forty years, a shift in historical time has
distanced us from the intellectual gestures that founded these studies,
propagating a pervasive, nebulized form of skepticism toward generalities
and master narratives. Our culture has become increasingly incredulous of
any consciously or unconsciously holistic, essentialist conceptions of cul-
tural phenomena and epochs. Today, anyone wanting to reflect on lan-
guage games and on historical periods must abandon certain gestures that
are too immediately synthetic and delve into the analytical territory of
philology. There are many reasons for this development, some of which are
mechanical: social changes during the past few decades have multiplied the
number of researchers and the amount of research being conducted; dig-
ital technology has multiplied the data to which we have access, and, with
them, the chaos of details. But this is not the only explanation. Between
their epoch and ours, there has been a change in the attitude of inter-
preters toward empirical data. The works of Lukács, Benjamin, Bakhtin,
Adorno, Gehlen (Panofsky and Szondi are a case apart) are made possible
by the assurance with which their authors can rely on a few master narra-
tives to define epochs, to unify phenomena, to control the mass of details,
and to ignore exceptions. This is the same gesture we find in Schlegel or in
Hegel, which is encapsulated in a famous phrase attributed to the latter: “So
much worse for the facts.” The way Lukács, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Adorno,
and Gehlen speak about their objects is intelligent but also vague; the syn-
thetic power of some of their opinions is directly linked to the lack of details
and to the assurance with which many facts are effectively ignored.
An approach of this sort presupposed a faith in the descriptive power of
theories. Today the cultural atmosphere of our time no longer legitimizes
these approaches. One of the harshest attacks directed against philosophies
of cultural history that order facts according to a unitary principle is the
one Ernst Gombrich launched in many of his books and summarized in his
methodological lectures, published as In Search of Cultural History (1967):
The cultural historian was much worse off than any other historian. His
colleagues working on political or economic history had at least a crite-
CONCLUSION 363
rion of relevance in their restricted subject-matter. They could trace the

history of the reform of Parliament, of Anglo-Irish relations, without ex-
plicit reference to an all-embracing philosophy of history. But the history
of the culture as such . . . could never be undertaken without some or-
dering principle, some centre from which the panorama can be surveyed,
some hub on which the wheel of Hegel’s diagram can be pivoted. Thus
the subsequent history of historiography of culture can perhaps best be
interpreted as a succession of attempts to salvage the Hegelian assump-
tion without accepting Hegelian metaphysics.36
In Gombrich’s view, although many histories of culture abandoned the

Hegelian philosophy of history, they never gave up on a fundamental Hege-
lian assumption—the idea that an epoch is not dispersed in facts, micro-
systems, and heterogeneous elements, but is held together by a unitary
principle. Usually, this unity is designated with a metaphor that serves as a
model: body, spirit, logic, grammar, mentality, structure. In the century and
a half or two that separate the invention of concepts like “spirit of the
people” or “spirit of the time” from the invention of concepts like “meta-
physical basis,”37 “episteme,”38 or “the cultural logic of an epoch,”39 philo-
sophical vocabularies did change, but the philosophical act, the gesture
of aggregating the multiple, remained the same even when the intentions
were entirely different. In the same way, many histories of culture assume
that their objects are obvious, unitary entities. Today, statements like “The
inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the prob-
lematic individual’s journeying towards himself”40 or “The novel was the
literary form specific to the bourgeois age. . . . Realism was inherent in the
novel”41 sound vague. The intellectual impulses that move us force us to
ask: “What type of novel are you talking about?” “What is meant by
36. Ernst H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1967), 25.
37. Martin Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes” (1938); English translation “The Age of
the World Picture,” trans. William Lovitt, in Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New
York: Garland, 1977), 115.
38. Foucault, The Order of Things.
39. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1991).
40. See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 54.
41. Theodor W. Adorno, “Standort des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman” (1954);
English translation “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,” in Notes to
364 CONCLUSION
‘novel,’ ‘bourgeois age,’ or ‘realism’?” For us there is no way around phi-

lology, and not only because of the mechanical reasons we mentioned
earlier. There is no way around it because philology cuts across two deep
tendencies of our age, which are actually bound tightly together: suspi-
cion toward master narratives, and the triumph of particularities qua par-
ticularities. Sulla poesia moderna and Theory of the Novel attempt to put
forward general interpretations while entering, as far as possible, into the
bad infinity of philology, and trying, as much as possible, to tackle the
dispersion of factual data. I have attempted to examine literary genres not
as obvious entities, but as universals in re that emerge, transform, and
evolve in different ways depending on the culture. Above all, I have
attempted to conceive of literary epochs and spaces as only partly continuous
and only partly ordered aggregates of various things: ideas, theories,
master narratives, disciplines, genres, standards, styles, gestures, manners,
habits, expectations, forms of attention, habitus, topoi, examples, canons,
watchwords, auctoritates that overlap, intertwine, and combine, creating
a temporary cohesiveness.
I would like to briefly explain an expression that recurs frequently in this

book: structures of sense. This is what I have called the elements that work
together in various capacities to form a literary epoch or space. Christian
aesthetic Platonism or the rule of the separation of styles, for example, are
two large structures of sense that interweave and generate a series of pre-
cise effects. What I mean by “structure of sense” is everything that makes
a certain discourse or practice sensible—the adjective “sensible” being un-
derstood in various ways depending on the context, and signifying “legiti-
mate,” ‘ “instructive,” “entertaining,” “authoritative,” “true,” “nice,” “in-
teresting.” Among all the available definitions, the most universal, it seems
to me, is the one Wittgenstein uses to describe why we accept propositions
or behaviors: “we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.”42 Be-
Literature I, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press,
1991), 30.
42. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” in Philosophical
Occasions, 1912–1951 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 123. See also his Philosophical Inves-
tigations, §88: “No single ideal of exactness has been envisaged; we do not know what we
are to make of this idea—unless you yourself stipulate what is to be so called. But you’ll find
it difficult to make such a stipulation—one that satisfies you.”
CONCLUSION 365
friedigen here seems to be the equivalent of to persuade in ancient rhe-

toric. We are satisfied that a certain thing has been done, said, written in a
certain way. We feel this way because we appeal, often unconsciously, to a
living structure of sense: because the law says so or because we are imi-
tating an authoritative model, because we have always done it this way or
because our culture tells us that we need to change, because we are fol-
lowing the protocols of a certain discipline or because we are repeating a
commonplace, because we are applying the Stiltrennung or because il faut
être absolument modernes. The apparatus of the justifications is multifac-
eted, mobile, and only in part cohesive. Some structures of sense are very
extensive (aesthetic Platonism, the Stiltrennung); others have a regional
validity (the appeal to the normative value of ancient poetics between the
mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries; others are minimal. However,
when some structures decline, a certain practice or a certain discourse
stops satisfying us, and the field of the possibilities changes. Structures of
sense are actually the expanded version of what topoi were in the system
of classical rhetoric, namely, the places that everyone is expected to relo-
cate in their minds and perceive as familiar or common. They are the
crutches we rely on, often unconsciously, to justify our actions and our
speech. Out of the shifting weave of these big and small elements there
arises a paradigm, a field of possibilities, a literary space. Each of these sets
is not the coherent expression of a unitary spirit of the time or an epis-
teme, but a varying weave of patches: a patchwork. Moreover, contradic-
tory structures of sense can exist in the same epoch, and every national
culture can express the same epochal structures differently. Every field of
possibility declines over time and space: a long-term constant (the literary
heritage of the ancient culture) may include a medium-term constant (the
European classicism of the early modern age between the humanistic re-
discovery of the Greco-Roman culture and the second half of the eigh-
teenth century) that takes on different forms depending on the nation
(more rigid in France, less so in England). The fact remains that by reas-
sembling the structures of sense through philology, and by comparing
what it was considered sensible to write in a certain period with what it
was considered sensible to write in another, historical boundaries and
thresholds emerge.
366 CONCLUSION
On the Present State of Things
Let us return now to the question with which we ended the “Discursive
Transformations” section. The art form we are talking about expresses a
relativistic vision of the world, but it accepts a specific grammar of exis-
tence, as if it participated in diametrically opposed cultural transforma-
tions: some extol the chaos of private life, while others insist on the seri-
ality of all beings. What do these specular transformations communicate?
What story do they tell?
The modern era enshrines the right of individuals to constitute them-
selves as epicenters of sense, to pursue their own interests, to criticize what
has been handed down to them, to participate, at least in theory, in the
creation of a collective political will, and to construct an autonomous
sphere of values. Between the sixteenth century and the eighteenth century
a relatively solid social structure held together by relatively strong shared
metaphysics, religion, ethics, politics, and aesthetics was torn apart by the
gradual affirmation of a form of life that claimed the right of unbelonging:
to exist only for oneself, to pursue exclusively personal or family aims.
Today we are witnessing the outcome of this process in its entirety. From the
perspective of the twenty-first century we have an excellent vantage point to
reflect on the modern age, because the set of conditions that developed over
the past three or four decades—what we call “postmodernism”—makes it
possible to perceive and understand certain aspects of modernity that re-
mained concealed in other historical periods. This is the case, for example,
when Raymond Carver’s common people allow us to see what was already
implicit in the characters of Maupassant or Chekhov, and the nineteenth-
century petite bourgeoisie reveals itself to be the origin, archetype, and
figure of the neoliberal middle class.
The consecration of individuals, the right to subjective freedom, and the
growth of material wealth accompanying the development of middle-class
society produced one of the fundamental turning points in human history.
Billions of individuals who lived in other times and other places viewed
the Western, middle-class way of life as progressive, as the very definition
of “progress.” What made “progress” attractive to the masses of the Third
World, to the inhabitants of totalitarian states, or to millions of European
farmers living in substantially feudal conditions until the first half of the
twentieth century was not democracy. Universal suffrage is an overly ab-
CONCLUSION 367
stract value for most people and, under ordinary conditions, the liberal
democracy of modern states is a fragile mechanism, stripped of its po-
litical effectiveness by the actions of economic powers external to states,
by the actions of oligarchic groups, by unequal access to mass communi-
cation, and by resistance to political decisions created by bureaucratic
mechanisms. More than the abstraction of democracy, what makes desir-
able the middle station of life—or its globalized twentieth-century exten-
sion, the American way of life—is the concrete capacity to construct small
spheres of autonomy, security, and material prosperity around individuals
and families. “Progress” has a Tocquevillian aspect to it: it allows private
individuals to live for themselves and to pursue their own aims. No matter
how insignificant, no matter how marginal and ephemeral they may be,
subjective desires and aims are now treated with absolute importance: no
culture has ever indiscriminately granted so much weight to individuals.
What we call sacred is that which one cannot transcend or negotiate: in
this sense, the particular life represents the only horizon of sacredness that
modern culture still recognizes. According to a certain model of philosophy
of history that emerged from the culture of German idealism, modern in-
dividualism arose out of the foundation of Christian theology: because
each person is created in the image and likeness of God, he or she repre-
sents an infinite value. While there may be truth to this explanation, it is
equally true that the cultural unconscious of the modern world pushed
this genealogy aside and transformed life ohne Eigenschaften and without
theological safeguards into an absolute value. The legal consequence of
this process was the rise of human rights, the political consequence was
democracy, the philosophical consequence was relativism, and the cultural
consequence was the multiplication of traces that each and every life feels
authorized to leave behind.
A system of this kind is traversed by two fractures. The first is the vio-
lence out of which the present state of things was born and by which it is
maintained: the regime of class struggle; the competition between indi-
viduals that has become a norm and a value; power relations that condemned
and continue to condemn billions of people to colonial or neocolonial sub-
jugation, to exploitation, to selling one’s time and work in exchange for
subsistence wages. But this first crack—the enormous denial on the part
of middle-class society, the barbarism on which our civilization rests—is
almost always kept out of Western discourses, all the more since there
368 CONCLUSION
has ceased to be a credible political alternative to the present state of

things.
The second crack, which appears more often in discourses, is the con-
stant, polymorphic discomfort emanating from the system’s mechanisms.
The consecration of private life produces contradictions that we see clearly
today. One of these we see most distinctly is the disintegrative force im-
plicit in modern individualism, the same one that fascinated and disturbed
Hegel, Tocqueville, Marx, Herzen, Nietzsche, and Kojève. Western hu-
manity lives in private little spheres that, for now, are quite protected;
within each of these territories, individuals seek personal happiness or,
more modestly, as in Jane Austen or Chekhov, tranquility—a form of
balance between desires and world. The names of collective transcen-
dences that the modern age inherited (God, Duty) or invented (Homeland,
Revolution, Engagement, Community) are increasingly more difficult to
pronounce without irony or without real or metaphorical quotation
marks. This crisis of transcendences must not be thought of as a political
and intellectual change with heroic features, but as a phenomenon with
systemic, mediocre origins. The relativistic deflation of collective values is
inscribed in the modern worship of personal and family life. Individualism
is “the most modest stage of the will to power”;43 the simple private condi-
tion, the choice to give natural rights and an absolute value to all bare life,
indiscriminately, contain a nihilistic core; the small objectives that “the
soul clings to . . . end up obscuring the rest of reality from one’s view.”44
By shutting itself up in a very restricted sphere of relations and by re-
placing public gods with personal demons, the modern, middle-class form
of life brings with it a drive toward unbelonging. In part 3 of Budden-
brooks, the consul Buddenbrook writes to his daughter Tony:
We are not born, my dear daughter, to pursue our own small personal
happiness, for we are not separate, independent, self-subsisting individ-
uals, but links in a chain; and it is inconceivable that we would be what
we are without those who have preceded us and shown us the path that
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente (1885–1887), in Friedrich Nietzsche:

Sämtliche Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 12 (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1999), 502.
44. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (1835–1840); English transla-
tion Democracy in America, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 593.
CONCLUSION 369
they themselves have scrupulously trod, looking neither to the left nor to
the right, but, rather, following a venerable and trustworthy tradition.45
In part 6, Thomas says to his brother Christian: “You do not belong just
to yourself alone.”46 The heads of the Buddenbrook family defend the
family, which is to say, the entity that binds each individual to a collective
history. By behaving this way, they obey a bourgeois ethic modeled on the
explicit example of the noble dynasties. In one of the most beautiful
scenes in the novel, Hanno comes across the family book in which, in
homage to an ancient tradition, all the major events of the lives of the Bud-
denbrooks are recorded, and he draws a line in it. This gesture is a har-
binger of his premature death and, at the same time, a declaration of unbe-
longing. Hanno traces out a line because this boy with artistic talent, marked
by disease, is alien to practical life, to its chain of responsibilities, to any
link with a genealogy. A very similar image can be found in a famous pas-
sage by Tocqueville: “The thread of time is ever ruptured and the track of
generations is blotted out. Those who have gone before are easily for-
gotten and those who follow are still completely unknown. Only those
nearest to us are of any concern to us.”47 Tocqueville speaks of the disinte-
gration of collective bonds that is inherent in modern, middle-class individu-
alism. In the light of this similarity, Hanno’s gesture takes on a wider meta-
phorical significance and the ethos of the Romantic and post-Romantic
artist is revealed as the elitist forerunner of the expressivist individualism
that would become a mass phenomenon over the course of the twentieth
century.48
“Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other
people; 2) nothing makes any real difference any longer,” says a character
in a story by Raymond Carver.49 In a specular fashion, the circle of per-
sonal interests ends up assuming an extraordinary weight. In the first two
parts of Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot tells the story of Gwendolyn
Harleth:
45. Mann, Buddenbrooks, part 3, chap. 10, p. 144.

46. Ibid., part 6, chap. 3, p. 314.
47. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 563.
48. On the relationship between the ethos of the Romantic artist and the individualism of
twentieth-century earth, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, parts 4 and 5.
49. Raymond Carver, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” in Furious Seasons and Other
Stories (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1977), 49.
370 CONCLUSION
Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history

than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the
way in which she could make her life pleasant?—in a time, too, when
ideas were with fresh vigour making armies of themselves, and the uni-
versal kinship was declaring itself fiercely: when women on the other side
of the world would not mourn for the husbands and sons who died
bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of the
world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a time when the soul
of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him
unfelt, until their full sum made a new life of terror or joy.
What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind vi-
sions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring
and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages
the treasure of human affections.50
In an age when “human affections” matter in themselves, and not in re-

lation to their objective value, the small inferences of Gwendolyn can have
the same weight as an immense tragedy. This is precisely the point: more
than a true nihilism, the shortsightedness implicit in an attitude of this sort
involves a shifting of weights. The struggle that each individual faces to find
a balance has taken on an absolute value, equivalent to what other cultures
attribute only to major public conflicts. We already came across this idea
in the observations accompanying the rise of the novel between the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries: the happiness or unhappiness of a private
man, wrote Lessing, moves us more than the destiny of a state.51 Balzac
picks up on this notion and amplifies it:
The unknown struggle which goes on in a valley of the Indre between
Mme. de Mortsauf and her passion is perhaps as great as the most fa-
mous of battles (Le Lys dans la vallée). In one the glory of the victor is at
stake; in the other it is heaven. The misfortunes of the two Birotteaus,
the priest and the perfumer, to me are those of mankind.52
According to the melodramatic logic that governs Balzac’s narrative, the

battles that are fought within individuals embody battles between universal
50. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), ed. G. Handley (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), bk. 2, chap. 11, p. 109.
51. Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, vol. 1, chap. 14, pp. 38–39.
52. Balzac, “Author’s Introduction” to The Human Comedy, lxv.
CONCLUSION 371
powers. But the passage cited above also applies to texts that do not obey
this logic: for us readers of novels, the destiny of the characters is tremen-
dously important; even when we do not agree with the goals that the he-
roes are pursuing, we are able to recognize ourselves in the schema of their
existence. We are like them: private beings, thrown into a world, occupied
in seeking a balance between desires and reality. The personal aims and
microcosms are different for everyone, but the attempt to quell our restless-
ness is the same and holds an absolute importance for us. This aspect of the
present state of things is what makes possible identification with others,
the preservation of a public ethic, and interest in lives other than our own.
On the other hand, since what we share is not a set of contents but a
form—a grammar of existence—the identification is never guaranteed.
This second aspect of the present state of things makes possible indifference
to lives other than our own, the destruction of all solidarity, and the impen-
etrable opacity of others.
Furthermore, the epoch during which the nominal importance of indi-
vidual people increased and collective transcendences were pulverized is
the same period during which human beings were bound into systems of
mutual dependence, multiplying the chains of uncontrollable actions and
reactions. Although individuals acquire independence and security inside
the little spheres that surround them, the overall orography of their
existential territories extends well beyond them. This has always been the
case, but in the modern era displacement and dispossession have been mul-
tiplied. The crisis of collective transcendences corresponds to a strength-
ening of objective transcendences, namely, the dependence of individuals
on suprapersonal powers, opinions, and mechanisms. The French Revolu-
tion and the Napoleonic wars, by transforming history into a lived experi-
ence of the masses, introduced a typical feature of modernity. Over the next
two centuries, major conflicts with mandatory conscription, global eco-
nomic cycles, and changes in manners and morals would reaffirm the con-
tents of that experience, showing that the atmosphere in which the small
worlds of individuals are immersed transcends individuals, eludes their
control, and constitutes the only true Event. The culture of the nineteenth
century—from Hegel to Tolstoy, and from Marx to Durkheim—would in-
terpret in many ways the discovery that the suprapersonal life sedimented
in history and in society is the true objective transcendence, the temporal
and secularized form of the divine.
372 CONCLUSION
Therefore, the era in which the absolute value of each individual is af-
firmed has been the same as the period in which there emerged, with abso-
lute clarity, the power of large impersonal forces—in planetary wars or
global economic crises, in the mechanisms of capitalist markets, or in the
changes of the Zeitgeist. This is also the age in which it has become clear
that our life, the life that we have led ourselves to view as our own prop-
erty, is always constitutively improper, uneigentlich, in the sense that Hei-
degger gives to this word. The ideas, habits, and behaviors that we have
introjected precede us: they are products of the world that includes us; they
do not really belong to us. If observed with an attitude of estrangement,
they reveal that we are serial beings, like everyone else.
The antithesis between the nominal importance of individuals and their
objective irrelevance divides the field of discursive formations. It shows up
in the conflict between the forms of mimesis of singularity (autobiography,
poetry, the novel, photography, film) and the language games that transfer
personal experiences to the equalizing order of concepts or numbers (the
human sciences, statistics). But the contradiction, in reality, is implicit in
every discipline. Modern narrative fiction, for example, refined the artistic
representation of singularity during the same period that it developed the
form of the novel-essay: the greatness of War and Peace lies partly in its
ability to bring these two currents together. During the age of modernism,
then, the two lines became distinct and intertwined in various ways. In a
chapter of The Man without Qualities, for example, Musil gives himself
the challenge of describing a man who thinks. In the 1920s, when the book
was written, the representation of the interior life was the typical theme of
narrative that sought to express individual singularity in all its fragmen-
tation and in all its idiosyncratic distinctiveness. Provocatively, Musil
transforms psychological mimesis into essayistic reflection: he does not
mimic Ulrich’s interior monologue; rather, he meditates on the dynamics
of thought in general.
Unfortunately, nothing is so hard to achieve as a literary representation

of a man thinking. . . . As long as the process of thinking is in motion it
is a quite wretched state, as if all the brain’s convolutions were suffering
from colic; and when it is finished it no longer has the form of the
thinking process as one experiences it but already that of what has been
CONCLUSION 373
thought, which is regrettably impersonal. . . . [A]nd this is manifestly

why thinking is such an embarrassment for writers that they gladly
avoid it.
But the man without qualities was now thinking. One may draw the
conclusion from this that it was, at least in part, not a personal affair.
But then what is it? World in, and world out; aspects of world falling into
place inside a head.53
Musil’s choice, by opposition, alludes to techniques to give form to

the fluid, subjective aspect of the interior life that had been invented
during the century of psychological realism in general, by the writers of
Musil’s generation in particular, and by Musil himself in an earlier phase
of his work. The Man without Qualities was written immediately after
Ulysses came out, during the years of debate on interior monologue and its
revolutionary novelty.54 In the third chapter of Ulysses, thinking about
Aristotle, Stephen Dedalus reflects on gnoseological problems of percep-
tion while walking on a beach. His thoughts are captured as they rise up
and then splinter off.
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought
through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and
seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust:
coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he
was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking
his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire,
maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane,
adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not
a door. Shut your eyes and see.55
The dialectic between essayism and minute introspective details well

expresses the contrast between the gaze that through reflection grasps uni-
versal laws, and the gaze that seeks to focus on each person’s particulari-
ties. The age of modernism saw the development of these two potentially
53. Musil, The Man without Qualities, bk. 1, chap. 23, pp. 115–116.

54. See Dujardin, Le Monologue intérieur, which also provides an account of con-
temporary discussion on interior monologue.
55. James Joyce, Ulysses, critical and synoptic edition prepared by Hans Walter Gabler
with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1986), 75.
374 CONCLUSION
opposing lines: a work like In Search of Lost Time, for example, contains
both.
The conflict between universal and particular, between suprapersonal
generalities and singular individualities, splits the cultural domain, cuts
through the single games of truth, and expresses a dialectic without recon-
ciliation. Inscribed in the ontological condition of finite beings, it ends up
multiplied by the dynamics of the modern world. People have become an
absolute primum; their fates can take center stage; every detail of their
finitude counts. At the same time, the modern form of life takes it upon
itself to show at every turn that this is not the whole story. Around and
inside the individual there operates an objective transcendence made of
regularities, universal trends, introjected attitudes, fields of forces; a tran-
scendence that conceives individuals as simple, particular cases of general
laws—the same laws that philosophy, the human sciences, and statistics
seek to establish. This twofold truth, which is consubstantial with the
present state of things, divides the cultural realm and traverses the indi-
vidual discursive formations—but only the narrative form incorporates it
into its structures. Only narrative fiction can show how particular beings
are exposed to the world, and how their identity, happiness, and unhappi-
ness depend on the way their paths cross with those of others, and the
power of circumstances.
Our existences are private, contingent, and unstable. We pursue a bal-
ance between desire and reality in the local system where we are thrown;
we live exposed to time, transcended by the influences that have made us
what we are. Our life is improper: on the plane of being, it fluctuates
between nothingness and seriality; on the plane of discourse, it fluctu-
ates between silence (disinterest in what, at bottom, is the same as every-
thing else) and concepts or numbers. And yet we take seriously the little,
local bubble where we exist; for most of us, the struggle to find a form
of happiness or tranquility inside this sphere is the whole world. Unlike
the philosophies from Montaigne to Heidegger that insist on the constitu-
tive unbelongingness of human beings to themselves, novelists do not
usually adopt an estranged gaze: they accept the goals that their protago-
nists set for themselves. To not be interested in the forms of life in which
one is immersed, just because these forms are contingent and improper,
signifies preserving a trace of transcendence or nurturing nostalgia for it; it
CONCLUSION 375
means taking the point of view of the absolute—an outlook that, for pre-
carious beings like us, is academic and unreal. In ordinary life we are al-
ways caught up in our existence. We are always inside and rarely outside:
the accidental and limited nature of what we are interests us to a certain
point; the objective tragedy of our condition does not prevent us from
playing an active part in the plot in which we are implicated. We live our
impropriety properly,56 as we inevitably must: a life that the anonymous
powers and the game of systems have forged for us is ours nonetheless,
and it is the only thing that we consider sacred. In narrative fiction, this
passion for particularity exhibits itself according to its own logic. We
follow the ups and downs of heroes, at the end of which, in one way or
another, they will reach a form of tranquility. We follow them not so much
because we are interested in the content of their desires, but because we
share the form of their condition, the grammar of their existence.
Modern culture has no answer for the question “Why?” or “What for?”
Those of us who are enclosed in the Western form of life can enjoy life with
an unprecedented degree of autonomy and comfort as long as we remain
immersed in the shortsightedness that normally envelopes us in the form
of common sense; but when faced with thresholds and crises, we feel an-
guish. In the emphatic, capital-S understanding of the term, nothing makes
Sense anymore. But outside the context of abstract thought and states of
exception, if one observes how the problem appears in the logic of those
who attempt to tell stories about particular beings, one arrives at a dif-
ferent conclusion. By telling stories about people immersed in local worlds
who are occupied with reaching their goals and finding a balance between
desire and reality in the midst of other individuals who are pursuing the
same type of balance, novels present an idea of sense that runs closer to
the one in ordinary experience. For the reader, the contents of the stories
are all interchangeable and all potentially worthy of attention for as long
as they continue to exist. Inside our small local worlds, everything at stake
has an unquestionable value, as if there were no longer a sense, as if the
word sense could no longer be in the singular, and instead, there were lots
56. See Giorgio Agamben, “La passione della fatticità” (1987); English translation “The
Passion of Facticity: Heidegger and the Problem of Love” (1987), trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen, in Potentialities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 185–204.
376 CONCLUSION
of little, regional meanings—all absolute in their absolute relativity. This

is the form our life has taken today, this product of impersonal forces, this
improper concretion that we cannot go beyond, because it is our only
property, the sole layer of existence that, for a certain span of time, distin-
guishes us from nothing. Nothing is important but life.
Theory of the Novel, 1995–2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Acknowledgments
The University of Siena, the Italian Fulbright Commission, and the University of
Chicago financially supported this work; Reading Room U at the Bibliothèque Na-
tionale de France in Tolbiac made it possible. My thanks go to those who contrib-
uted to the writing of this book with their suggestions, comments, and help: Annalisa
Agrati, Albert Ascoli, Vincenzo Bagnoli, Valentino Baldi, Alessio Baldini, Daniele
Balicco, Piero Caracciolo, Alberto Casadei, Pietro Cataldi, Valeria Cavalloro, Raf-
faele Donnarumma, Céline Frigau, Maddalena Graziano, Clemens Härle, Laurent
Jenny, Anne Lepoittevin, Romano Luperini, Marielle Macé, Maria Anna Mariani,
Franco Moretti, Michel Murat, Francesco Orlando, Giulia Oskian, Thomas Pavel,
Angela Piliouras, Martin Rueff, Elisa Russian, Guido Sacchi, Barbara Spackman,
Justin Steinberg, Carlo Tirinanzi de Medici, Roberto Venuti, Elissa Weaver. A special
thanks goes to those who read and discussed the final draft with me: Anna Baldini,
Clotilde Bertoni, Daniela Brogi, Barbara Carnevali, Claudio Giunta, Pierluigi Pellini,
Marina Polacco, Filippomaria Pontani, Matteo Residori, Gianluigi Simonetti, Paolo
Tortonese, Enrica Zanin, Sergio Zatti. Finally, I am very grateful to Zakiya Hanafi
for her meticulous translation.
Index
Abelard, Peter, 72 Aristotle, 4, 38, 40–44, 46, 76–77, 79,

Abrams, Meyer H., 195 90, 98, 99, 100, 102, 109, 119, 120,
Achilles Tatius, 68 121, 126, 127, 132, 138, 152, 167,
Adalberon (bishop of Laon), 106 170, 171, 211, 222, 252, 277, 373
Adams, Percy G., 75 Arnim, Bettina von, 312
Adorno, Theodor W., 287, 340, 354, 361, Aron, Raymond, 360
362, 363 Auerbach, Erich, 102–105, 139,
Agamben, Giorgio, 375 149–150, 164, 203, 204, 220–224,
Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier), 55 225–226, 256, 316, 340
Alemán, Mateo, 70, 125, 222 Augustine of Hippo, 73, 112, 128, 178,
Alkon, Paul K., 329 203, 305, 316
Althusser, Louis, 10–13, 343 Austen, Jane, 121, 163, 179, 197, 204,
Álvarez Barrientos, Joaquín, 63 216, 223, 233, 235, 243, 247, 250,
Amacher, Richard E., 30 253, 267–271, 283, 284, 285, 286,
Amadis of Gaul (Amadís de Gaula), 68, 289, 299, 368
122, 133 Austin, John, 227
Amyot, Jacques, 68, 76, 113, 143, Ayre, William, 136, 157
144 Azérad, Hugo, 321
Anaximander, 184
Anaximenes, 252 Bacon, Francis, 133
Anderson, Sherwood, 319 Baculard d’Arnaud, François-Thomas-
Ansell-Pearson, Keith, 27 Marie de, 136, 208, 209
Apollonius of Rhodes, 172 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 14, 16,
Apuleius, 69, 86 47, 52, 65, 85, 138, 141, 172, 224,
Aragon, Louis, 319 225, 226, 290, 361, 362
Ariosto, Ludovico, 64, 68, 75, 76, 90, Balayé, Simone, 93
112, 131, 132, 144, 148, 330 Baldi, Guido, 282
382 INDEX
Baldi, Valentino, 274 Besant, Walter, 188

Balibar, Étienne, 10, 11 Bible, 1, 3, 9, 104, 120
Balzac, Honoré de, 1, 14, 38, 57, 147, Bigazzi, Roberto, 148
148, 149, 168, 188–189, 190, 197, Blair, Rhonda L., 61
198, 199, 201–203, 204, 211, 214, Blanckenburg, Christian Friedrich von,
216, 220, 222, 223, 227, 228, 231, 80, 140, 210
232, 235, 237–238, 239, 242, 243, Blin, Georges, 293
247, 249, 250, 252, 253, 256, Blumenberg, Hans, 3, 30
257–261, 262, 263, 264, 266, 270, Boccaccio, Giovanni, 64, 72, 79, 88, 92,
272, 274, 284, 285, 286, 288, 294, 93, 154, 156, 162, 163, 165
301, 311, 330, 335, 341, 360, 370–371 Bodei, Remo, 194
Bandello, Matteo, 71, 93, 122 Bodin, Jean, 252, 360
Banfield, Ann, 55, 56 Boileau, Nicholas, 206, 207
Barclay, John, 133 Boisguilbert, Pierre le Pesant de, 81
Barilli, Renato, 232 Boitani, Piero, 101
Baron, Anne-Marie, 197 Bolaño, Roberto, 227
Barth, John, 228, 338 Bolzoni, Lina, 74
Barthelme, Donald, 338 Borges, Jorge Louis, 39, 330
Barthes, Roland, 58, 167, 178, 184, 245, Bouchare, Donald F., 357
329–330 Bourdieu, Pierre, 188
Bate, Walter Jackson, 78, 158 Bourget, Paul, 273
Battesin, Martin Carey, 78, 91 Bourmeau, Sylvain, 340
Battistini, Andrea, 73 Bouvier, Émile, 232, 233
Baudelaire, Charles, 188, 321 Boyce, Benjamin, 74, 153
Bayle, Pierre, 84 Branca, Vittore, 64, 154
Beach, Joseph Warren, 232 Braudel, Fernand, 155
Beasley, Jerry C., 3, 73, 114 Bray, René, 78, 121
Beckett, Samuel, 42, 123, 227, 336 Brecht, Bertolt, 52–53
Beebee, Thomas O., 72 Bremner, Geoffrey, 158
Benedetti, Laura, 67 Bremond, Claude, 41, 42, 135, 137
Benjamin, Walter, 144, 344, 361, 362 Breton, André, 227, 231, 236, 248, 249,
Bennett, Arnold, 231, 289 250
Bentley, Eric, 259 Broch, Hermann, 38, 148, 294, 310, 317,
Benveniste, Émile, 236 318
Berardinelli, Alfonso, 234 Brogi, Daniela, 210, 300
Bernadete, M. J., 70 Brombert, Victor, 234
Bernard, Catherine, 168 Brooks, Peter, 50, 74, 160, 173, 176, 177,
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, 178, 179, 195, 209, 258, 259,
Jacques-Henri, 14 261–264, 352
Bertelli, Dominique, 49 Brown, Homer Obed, 62, 67, 212
Berthiaume, Pierre, 84 Buch-Jepsen, Niels, 289
Bertoni, Clotilde, 69, 277 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de,
Bertoni, Federico, 195, 197 216, 253
INDEX 383
Bullitt, John Marshall, 158 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 264

Bunyan, John, 114 Charnes, Jean-Antoine de, 82, 91, 150,
Bürger, Christa, 312 181
Bürger, Peter, 312 Charpentier, François, 114
Burke, Peter, 183 Chartier, Roger, 161
Burney, Frances (Fanny), 15, 72, 93, 153, Chateaubriand, François-René de, 14,
179, 268 211, 215, 233, 286
Burton, Richard, 61 Chatman, Seymour, 245, 250
Bussière, Auguste, 197 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 277, 300,
Büttner, Stefan, 26 301, 319, 320, 366, 368
Chevrolet, Teresa, 120
Cadioli, Alberto, 161 Chiari, Alberto, 154
Calvin, Jean, 329 Chollet, Roland, 216
Calvino, Italo, 239, 329–330, 338 Chrétien, Jean Louis, 55
Canetti, Elias, 324, 339 Chrétien de Troyes, 64
Canguilhem, Georges, 253 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 90, 109
Cannone, Belinda, 55 Cioranescu, Alexandre, 171
Canto-Sperber, Monique, 194 Cleland, John, 129–130
Capoferro, Riccardo, 75 Clément de Ris, Louis, 198–199
Carnell, Rachel, 83 Close, Anthony J., 70
Carnevali, Barbara, 74, 152, 153, 178 Coetzee, John M., 339
Caro, Annibale, 68 Cohen, Margaret, 176, 211, 216
Carpentier, Alejo, 227–228 Cohn, Dorrit, 55, 56, 169, 233, 308
Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Colet, Louise, 295
Dodgson), 330 Colli, Giorgio, 358, 368
Carver, Raymond, 339, 366, 369 Collins, Wilkie, 214
Casaubon, Isaac, 74, 152, 170 Comte, Auguste, 153, 253, 360
Cassin, Barbara, 8 Congreve, William, 82
Cassirer, Ernst, 361 Conrad, Joseph, 259, 289, 292
Castellana, Riccardo, 274 Constant, Benjamin, 14, 174, 189, 190,
Castex, Pierre-Georges, 168 206, 211, 215, 232, 239, 305
Castiglione, Baldassarre, 177, 182 Cormier, Jacques, 81
Cataldi, Pietro, 300 Costa Lima, Luiz, 116
Cathala, M.-R., 120 Coventry, Francis, 114
Cavallo, Giovanni, 161 Crane, Stephen, 273
Cave, Terence, 97, 123, 143–145 Craveri, Benedetta, 183
Celati, Gianni, 218 Crébillon, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de, 136,
Centorio degli Ortensi, Ascanio, 122 174, 178, 207, 208, 209
Cervantes, Miguel de, 14, 63, 68, 70, 71, Cunningham, Michael, 339
78, 97, 166, 167 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 4, 60, 117, 119
Challe, Robert, 81, 166, 181
Champfleury (Jules François Félix Damiani, Rolando, 79
Husson), 232 Damisch, Hubert, 351
384 INDEX
Dandrea, Lorri G., 184 Doody, Margaret Anne, 62, 65, 85

D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 273 Dos Passos, John, 318
Dante Alighieri, 120, 203, 213 Dossi, Carlo, 273
Danto, Arthur C., 334 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich, 12,
Darmon, Jean-Charles, 74 34–35, 231, 235, 248–249, 250, 259,
Daudet, Alphonse, 14 273, 274–275, 290, 294, 295,
Davidson, Arnold I., 6 310–312, 313, 314, 317, 323, 324,
Debenedetti, Giacomo, 232 332, 341
De Bruyne, Edgar, 119 Dronke, Peter, 120
Defoe, Daniel, 64, 67, 75, 83, 87, 93, Dryden, John, 206
110, 114, 124, 126, 128, 136, 162, Duchêne, Roger, 89
168, 183, 187, 217–219, 222, 223, Duclos, Charles Pinot, 129, 208
255, 267 Dujardin, Édouard, 273, 312, 373
DeJean, Joan, 71 Dumas, Alexandre, 14, 259
Delbouille, Paul, 190 Dumézil, Georges, 105–106
Delcorno, Carlo, 135 Du Plaisir, 81, 159, 168, 169
Deleuze, Gilles, 315, 357–358 Dupont-Roc, Roselyne, 41
DeLillo, Don, 338 Duprat, Anne, 78, 101, 121
Deloffre, Frédéric, 71, 81, 114 Durkheim, Émile, 371
Delon, Michel, 130
Del Panta, Elena, 238 Eckermann, Johann Peter, 155
De Martino, Ernesto, 155 Eco, Umberto, 338
Démoris, René, 73, 80, 89 Edel, Leon, 175, 314–315
Dérely, Victor, 248 Eichner, Hans, 213
De Roberto, Federico, 273 Egger, Victor, 312
Desan, Philippe, 74 Elias, Norbert, 177–178, 332
Descartes, René, 169, 170, 172, 194 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), 38, 179,
Desrosières, Alain, 360 197, 220, 223, 235, 258, 273, 275,
Detienne, Marcel, 21, 26, 28 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 289, 300,
Dever, Carolyn, 176 322, 324, 341, 369–370
Dickens, Charles, 231, 235, 259, 270, Elkins, James, 351
274, 276, 285, 330, 335 Else, Gerald F., 26
Diderot, Denis, 15, 70, 93, 158, 160, 167, Erasmus, 73
191, 207, 209, 211, 242 Esmein Sarrazine, Camille, 71, 79, 80, 82,
Di Martino, Loredana, 274 161
D’Intino, Franco, 73 Euripides, 141, 171, 172
DiPiero, Thomas, 62, 161
Di Stefano, Giuseppe, 135 Faulkner, Thomas C., 61
Döblin, Alfred, 310 Faulkner, William, 17, 310, 311, 323,
Doctorow, Edgar Lawrence, 338 339, 340, 341
Donatus, 90 Fénelon (François de Salignac de la
Donnarumma, Raffaele, 274 Mothe-Fénelon), 99
Donneau de Visé, Jean, 81, 181 Feuillet, Octave, 14
INDEX 385
Fielding, Henry, 15, 69, 70, 78, 83, 87, García Márquez, Gabriel, 227, 338
90, 91, 93, 97, 99, 100, 101, 125, 150, Garside, Peter, 227
159, 161, 164, 176, 181, 182, Gastaldi, Silvia, 26
193–194, 200–201, 203, 204, 207, Gautier, Théophile, 14, 214
209, 313 Gehlen, Arnold, 153, 361, 362
The Finish’d Rake, 136 Genette, Gérard, 78, 101, 124, 241
Flaubert, Gustave, 14, 174, 188, 214, Gerratana, Valentino, 320
220, 223, 226, 227, 231, 235, 239, Gesner, Carol, 68
246–247, 258, 261, 272, 273, 278, Ghisalberti, Fausto, 154
279–280, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, Gide, André, 310–312, 324
290, 295–296, 297–298, 300, 318, Gildon, Charles, 114, 124
333, 334, 341 Gilson, Étienne, 171
Flores, Angel, 70 Ginsburg, Michel Pelad, 184
Fontane, Theodor, 273, 284, 300, 325 Ginzburg, Carlo, 279
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouyer de, Ginzburg, Lydia, 128
168–169 Giorgi, Giorgetto, 132
Ford, Andrew, 27 Giraldi Cinzio, Giovan Battista, 67, 76,
Forestier, Georges, 100 78, 131
Fórnari, Simone, 67, 76, 132 Godzich, Wlad, 184
Forster, Edward Morgan, 1, 2, 55, 288, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 14, 39,
334 52–54, 64, 93, 146, 155, 191, 207,
Foscolo, Ugo, 92–93, 162, 207, 213, 215 213, 219, 234, 242, 245, 247, 253,
Foucault, Michel, 6–7, 170, 357, 359, 267
363 Goldsmith, Olivier, 15
Freud, Sigmund, 40, 359 Gomberville, Marin Le Roy de, 68
Fried, Michael, 264 Gombrich, Ernst, 32, 362–363
Fuhrmann, Manfred, 135 Goncourt, Edmond de, 188, 198, 228,
Fumaroli, Marc, 73, 89, 115, 121, 182, 272, 275
183 Goncourt, Jules de, 188, 198, 228, 272
Furet, François, 161 Goody, Jack, 355
Furetière, Antoine, 69 Gramsci, Antonio, 320
Fusillo, Massimo, 101, 103 Grazzini, Anton Francesco (Il Lasca), 93
Greenaway, Peter, 207
Gabler, Hans Walter, 373 Gregor, Ian, 82
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 4 Gregory, John, 134
Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 274, 318 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 264–265
Gaddis, William, 338 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel
Galen, 170, 171 von, 70
Galilei, Galileo, 4 Grossman, Vasily Semyonovich, 38, 341
Galsworthy, John, 231, 289, 319 Gualdo, Luigi, 273
Gambarin, Giovanni, 93 Guastini, Daniele, 26
García, Felix, 112 Guazzo, Stefano, 182
García Berrio, Antonio, 101, 121 Guichemerre, Roger, 80, 156
386 INDEX
Guilleragues, Gabriel-Joseph de Herzen, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 368

Lavergne, comte de, 72, 134 Hesiod, 20, 24, 25, 41, 123
Guimarães Rosa, João, 227 Hewitt, David, 148
Guise, Christiane, 216 Hill, Aaron, 107–109, 198, 199
Guise, René, 216 Hillhouse, James T., 212
Gutting, Gary, 6 Hill Street Blues, 207
Hippocrates, 170, 171, 252
Habermas, Jürgen, 151 Hobbes, Thomas, 87, 177
Hacking, Ian, 360 Hochman, Baruch, 231
Hadas, Moses, 165 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus,
Hägg, Thomas, 62 214
Haller, Albrecht von, 158 Holquist, Michael, 52
Halliwell, Stephen, 26, 195 Homer, 20–25, 33–40, 41, 46, 51, 57, 64,
Hamburger, Käte, 55–56 99, 102, 117, 123, 143, 170, 224, 255,
Hammett, Dashiell, 340 315, 356
Handley, Graham, 258 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 77,
Hardy, Thomas, 273, 284 98, 100, 109, 117, 121, 171
Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp, 112 Houellebecq, Michel, 189, 204, 243, 244,
Hathaway, Baxter, 101 339, 340
Hautcoeur Pérez-Espejo, Guiomar, 63, Hourcade, Philippe, 81
71, 136 Howells, Robin, 80
Havelock, Eric A., 25 Huet, Pierre Daniel, 78–80, 92, 98–99,
Haverkamp, Anselm, 192 100, 101, 112, 121, 127, 132, 133
Hawkesworth, John, 157 Hugo, Victor, 14, 196, 259, 274, 334
Hecate of Miletus, 25 Hunter, J. Paul, 73, 75, 121, 136, 137,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 7, 10, 157, 161
15, 16, 38, 57–58, 115, 139–140, 141, Husserl, Edmund, 31–32
164, 184, 214, 224–226, 253, 254, Hytier, Jean, 227
255, 262, 333–334, 353, 354–355,
361, 362, 368, 371 Ignatius of Loyola, 73
Heidegger, Gotthard, 80, 112, 114, Iknayan, Marguerite, 196, 211, 212
144–145, 192 Il Lasca (Anton Francesco Grazzini), 93
Heidegger, Martin, 48, 251, 327, 363, Isbell, John, 207
374 Isocrates, 118
Heidler, Joseph Bunn, 114 Izalguier, Eugène d’, 197
Heliodorus, 63, 64, 68, 76, 79, 85, 113,
132, 143, 146, 147, 165 James, Henry, 1, 179, 188, 214, 231, 243,
Hellegouarc’h, Jacqueline, 183 259, 284, 288, 289, 291
Heloise, 72 Jameson, Fredric, 10–13, 343, 363
Heraclitus, 25 Janin, Jules, 197
Herodotus, 151, 152, 252 Jaucourt, Louis de, 90
Herrick, Marvin T., 78, 90, 101, 109, Jauss, Hans Robert, 30, 65, 192
121, 128 Javitch, Daniel, 132
INDEX 387
Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich 206, 222, 234, 239, 243, 249, 305,
Richter), 15, 70 309, 316, 331
Johnson, Samuel, 78, 125, 134, Lallot, Jean, 41
158 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 253
Johnson, Uwe, 336 Langlet, Irène, 329
Jolas, Maria, 69 Lange, Victor, 30
Jossa, Stefano, 112 La Rochefoucauld, François de, 177, 309,
Joyce, James, 123, 175, 272, 310, 311
312–313, 316, 318, 324, 333, 334, Lattimore, Richmond, 20
336, 340, 373 Lavergne, Elsa de, 329
Lavocat, Françoise, 68, 121
Kafka, Franz, 227, 330, 336 Lawrence, David Herbert Richards, 1–5,
Kahler, Erich, 315–316 8, 118, 210, 288, 354
Kambouchner, Denis, 194 Lazarillo de Tormes, 69–70, 75, 88, 166,
Kappl, Brigitte, 101 167–68, 222, 234
Karr, Alphonse, 211 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 289
Kellogg, Robert, 40, 171 Le Goff, Jacques, 135, 137
Kennedy, George A., 26 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 10, 358
Kermode, Frank, 50, 51, 352 Lenglet Du Fresnoy, Nicolas, 80, 84, 133,
Keymer, Thomas, 107, 108 134, 187,
Kibédi Varga, Áron, 78 Leopardi, Giacomo, 78–79
Kiessling, Nicholas K., 61 Leroyer de Chantepie, Marie-Sophie,
Kiš, Danilo, 38–39, 229 297
Kittay, Jeffrey, 184 Lesage, Alain-René, 69, 70, 86, 91, 97
Kluge, Friedrich, 61 Lescheraine, Joseph-Marie de, 89
Köhler, Gisela Ruth, 74 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 157, 370
Kojève, Alexandre, 368 Lever, Maurice, 277
Koller, Hermann, 26 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 152
Koselleck, Reinhart, 135 Lewes, George Henry, 212
Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 4 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 258
Krüdener, Barbara Juliane von, 215 Liapunov, Vadim, 52
Kubrick, Stanley, 354 Lilti, Antoine, 178
Kurzke, Hermann, 56 Linati, Carlo, 318
Littell, Jonathan, 189, 204, 339, 340–341
La Bruyere, Jean de, 203, 252 Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard, 26, 27
La Calprenède, Gauthier de Costes de, 68 Lloyd, Janet, 21
Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François Longus the Sophist, 68
Choderlos de, 14, 72, 93, 126, 174, Lope De Vega, Felix, 68
178, 186–187, 189, 207 Loretelli, Rosamaria, 144, 192
La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de Louis XIV of France, 161
La Vergne de, 64, 71, 79, 80, 84, 89, Lubac, Henri de, 117
93, 97, 109, 124, 134, 159, 162, 168, Lubbock, Percy, 231
169, 173–174, 178, 181, 190, 205, Lucian of Samosata, 69, 86
388 INDEX
Lukács, György, 3, 38,141, 185, 224, May, Georges, 84, 90, 100, 110, 136,
261–266, 272, 274, 277, 278, 286, 177, 208
301, 302, 321, 361, 362, 363 Mazzoni, Guido, 150, 360
Lumsden, Alison, 148 McKeon, Michael, 72, 136, 185
Luperini, Romano, 319, 321 McNeille, Andrew, 2, 231, 301
Lynch, David, 207 Melchior, Claus, 373
Lyon-Caen, Judith, 212, 274 Melville, Herman, 329
Meneghetti, Maria Luisa, 60
Mabbott, Thomas, 44 Mérimée, Prosper, 197
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 177 Merlant, Joachim, 215
Mack, Maynard, 82 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 354
Mad Men, 207 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 234
Magne, Émile, 133 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 151, 152
Mähl, Hans-Joachim, 210 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 182
Malón de Chaide, Pedro, 112 Monorchio, Giuseppe, 67
Mancini, Albert N., 136 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 73, 152,
Mandel, Ernest, 329 156, 173, 194, 252, 305, 374
Manganelli, Giorgio, 182 Montemayor, Jorge de, 68
Mangin, Edward, 67 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat
Manley, Delarivier, 82–83, 127, 181 de, 73, 252, 279, 360
Mann, Thomas, 56, 272, 310, 325–327, Montinari, Mazzino 358, 368
347, 369 Morante, Elsa, 259, 336
Mansfield, Katherine, 319 Moretti, Franco, 67, 111, 113, 176, 183,
Manzoni, Alessandro, 123, 148, 184, 219, 227, 245, 313, 321, 324,
153–154, 204, 210, 235, 239–240, 335
241, 243, 247, 250, 259, 266–267, Moretti Cenerini, Lucia, 133
270, 285, 299–300, 326, 341 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 93, 207
Marana, Giovanni Paolo, 73 Moroni, Mario, 273
Marguerite de Navarre/Margaret of Morrison, Toni, 340
Navarre, 71 Mullan, John, 83
Marini, Giovanni Ambrogio, 68 Munro, Alice, 339
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain Musacchio, Enrico, 67
de, 89, 93, 97, 136, 174, 178, 207, Musil, Robert, 44–46, 57, 243, 248, 294,
208, 223 310, 317, 324, 336, 372–373
Marquet, Abbé, 167 Mussato, Albertino, 120
Martin, Henri-Jean, 161
Martin du Gard, Roger, 319 Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 330
Marx, Karl, 11, 262, 263, 359, 368, Nagy, Gregory, 26
371 Néraudau, Jean-Pierre, 101
Massenzio, Marcello, 155 Nerval, Gérard de, 214
Maupassant, Guy de, 14, 174, 214, 231, Neuschäfer, Hans-Jörg, 154
272, 273, 284, 319, 320, 366 Newton, Isaac, 253
Mauriac, François, 292 Nicole, Pierre, 112
INDEX 389
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7–9, 26, 27, 36, Plato, 4, 5, 8, 20, 26–30, 34, 36, 41–44,
351, 357–359, 368 47, 54, 77, 98, 112, 113, 115–117,
Nievo, Ippolito, 324 118, 123, 127, 135, 152, 195, 299,
Nightingale, Andrea Wilson, 27 353
Nisard, Jean Marie Napoléon Désiré, 212 Plazenet, Laurence, 68
Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr Poe, Edgar Allan, 44, 214, 227, 242, 329
von Hardenberg), 207, 210, 213, 233 Polybius, 252
Potocki, Jan, 214
Omacini, Lucia, 93 Pound, Ezra, 333
Orlando, Francesco, 113, 324 Powell, Lawrence Fitzroy, 158
Ortega y Gasset, José, 256, 335, 344, Préchac, Jean de, 81, 107
346 Prendergast, Christopher, 258, 266
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 72, 172, Prévost, Antoine François, 14, 84, 89, 93,
175, 314 136, 167, 207, 208, 223
Owen, William, 181 Prince, Gerald, 41
Ozouf, Mona, 161 Pritchard Huber, Dorothy, 133
Prosperi, Adriano, 113
Paganini, Gianni, 178 Proust, Jacques, 177
Pamuk, Orhan, 192, 194 Proust, Marcel, 2, 55, 57, 123, 174, 177,
Panofsky, Erwin, 116, 117, 120, 351, 226, 227, 243, 288, 289, 294, 296,
361 305–309, 310, 316, 317, 321, 324,
Parmenides, 4 336, 340, 341, 354, 374
Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 17, 259, Pulci, Luigi, 69, 86
334, 336 Pure, Michel de, 133
Paul (Saint), 112, 113 Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich, 17
Pavel, Thomas, 62, 128, 129, 149 Pynchon, Thomas, 227, 338
Pegge, Samuel (the Elder), 114 Pythagoras, 25
Pellini, Pierluigi, 275
Pépin, Jean, 25, 117 Quint, David, 126, 164
Perec, Georges, 38, 49, 50, 249, 336 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 144
Pérez Galdós, Benito, 273
Perrault, Charles, 169, 170, 172, 249 Rabelais, François, 64, 69, 86
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 73 Racine, Jean, 112
Petronius Gaius, 64, 69, 80, 86 Radcliffe, Ann, 258
Phelan, James, 40, 171 Raimond, Michel, 231, 232
Piccolomini, Enea Silvio, 72 Raimondi, Ezio, 266, 300
Pich, Federica, 74 Rapin, René, 133
Picone, Michelangelo, 135 Raven, James, 67, 227
Pietromarchi, Luca, 298 Reeve, Clara, 67, 80, 83–85, 89, 91, 113,
Pigna, Giovan Battista, 67, 76, 78, 98, 134, 142
99, 100, 101, 132, 144 Reitz, Edgar, 207
Pirandello, Luigi, 311, 319, 320, 324 Renaudot, Théophraste, 133
Plantié, Jacqueline, 74 Residori, Matteo, 101
390 INDEX
Rey-Dussueil, Antoine François Marius, Salviati, Leonardo, 127

237, 238 Sánchez de Espejo, Andrés, 63
Ribière, Mirelle, 49 Sand, George (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore
Richardson, Samuel, 12, 14, 15, 72, 87, Dupin), 14, 196
93, 97, 99, 107–110, 122, 123, 125, Sannazaro, Jacopo, 68
126, 128, 129, 158, 161, 167, 168, Santone, Laura, 312
174, 175, 176, 181, 191, 194, 198, Sarraute, Nathalie, 69, 311, 312, 334,
201, 203, 204, 207, 209, 210, 222, 336
223, 234, 314, 347 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 48–50, 69, 292–293,
Rico, Francisco, 70, 222 324
Ricœur, Paul, 11, 44, 50, 56, 352 Sassi, Maria Michela, 27
Riley, Edward C., 78 Scarron, Paul, 69, 70, 156
Riley, Mark, 133 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 32
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 324 Schiller, Friedrich, 52–54, 242, 245
Ritrovato, Salvatore, 67 Schlegel, Friedrich, 14–15, 65, 71, 78, 79,
Rizzante, Massimo, 329, 330 92, 100, 139, 153, 156, 160, 164, 207,
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 228, 247–249, 250, 213, 214, 215, 224, 225, 226, 333,
340, 341 361, 362
Roche, Daniel, 161 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 135, 137
Romilly, Jacqueline de, 171 Scholes, Robert, 40, 171
Ronconi, Giorgio, 120 Schöner, Erich, 170
Rorty, Richard, 355 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 325
Rosa, Giovanna, 160 Schöwerling, Rainer, 227
Roth, Philip, 204, 327, 339 Schwob, Marcel, 330
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 14, 72, 93, Scott, Sir Walter, 37, 63, 69, 86, 92, 148,
110–111, 146, 174, 175, 178, 189, 153, 164, 168, 183, 201, 203, 204,
191, 194, 207, 209–210, 211, 213, 205–206, 207, 212, 216, 235, 237,
215, 234, 324 238–239, 241, 242, 243, 247, 249,
Rousset, Jean, 72, 215, 233, 234, 244, 250, 253, 259, 261, 262, 263, 266,
316 270, 284, 285, 286, 292, 330, 335, 341
Row, T. (Samuel Pegge the Elder), 114 Scudéry, Georges de, 68, 132
Rowland, David, 75 Scudéry, Madaleine de, 68, 132
Rushdie, Salman, 340 Sebold, Russell P., 63
Rushton Fairclough, H., 117 Seillier, Philippe, 179
Russell, Peter E., 70 Segrais, Jean Renaud de, 79, 80, 136, 157
Rymer, Thomas, 127 Senancour, Étienne Pivert de, 215
Seneca, Lucius Anneaus (the Younger),
Sabor, Peter, 107 113, 135
Sacchetti, Franco, 93 Seth, Vikram, 17
Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de, Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin Chantal,
126, 130 marquise de, 309
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Sgard, Jean, 84
de, 174 Shakespeare, William, 213, 234
INDEX 391
Shelley, Mary, 214 Strauss, Leo, 177, 357

Shklovsky, Victor, 281, 282 Strawson, Peter Frederick, 31–32
Showalter, English, 62 Sue, Eugène, 259, 274
Sidney, Philip, 68 Svenbro, Jesper, 25, 28
Simon, Claude, 336 Svevo, Italo (Ettore Schmitz), 273, 284,
Simon, Irene, 82 310, 324
Simondon, Gilbert, 315 Swift, Jonathan, 75, 168, 330
Simonides, 26 Szondi, Peter, 53, 242, 354–355, 361, 362
Siti, Walter, 3, 17, 111, 189, 207, 210
Smeed, John William, 74, 153, 313 Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe, 188
Smollett, Tobias, 70, 86 Taylor, Charles, 219, 222–223, 369
Soames, William, 206 Tellini, Gino, 319
Socrates, 41, 117, 353 Testa, Enrico, 181
Somaini, Antonio, 352 Temkin, Owsei, 170
Somigli, Luca, 273 Terence, 37
Sophocles, 171, 172 Teresa of Avila, 112
Sörbom, Göran, 26 Tertullian, 112
Sorel, Charles, 69, 70, 90, 133, 150, 156 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 231, 335
Sousa, Ronald W., 116 Theophrastus, 103, 152, 170, 203, 252
Spiazzi, Raimondo M., 120 Thibaudet, Albert, 234
Spinoza, Baruch, 11, 194–195 Thirouin, Laurent, 112
Spitzer, Leo, 251, 252, 253, 360 Thomas Aquinas, 120
Stachorski, Stefan, 56 Thorel-Cailleteau, Sylvie, 183
Staël, Madame de (Anne Louise Ger- Thucydides, 151
maine Necker de Staël), 92–93, 100, Tiedermann, Rolf, 354
139, 189, 190, 207, 211, 213, 215 Tieje, Arthur J., 114
Stafford, William T., 284 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 287, 368, 369
Stang, Richard, 188, 212 Todorov, Tzvetan, 18, 41, 48
Starobinski, Jean, 110 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich, 35, 38, 44,
Steel, Bruce, 1 148, 220, 223, 231, 235, 272, 273,
Stein, Gertrude, 284 275, 281–282, 283, 284, 286–287, 292,
Stempel, Wolf-Dieter, 135 294–295, 298–299, 300, 301–305, 312,
Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 14, 149, 174, 313, 314, 317, 321–322, 324, 326, 339,
196, 197, 204, 205–206, 211, 216, 341, 347–350, 371
226, 227, 228, 233, 235, 239, 243, Tomashevsky, Boris Viktorovich, 245
247, 250, 253, 259, 266–267, 270, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 268, 336
277, 280, 285, 288, 291–292, 293, Tortarolo, Edoardo, 178
301, 305, 309, 313, 341 Tortonese, Paolo, 120
Steppe, Wolfhard, 373 Tozzi, Federigo, 311, 319
Sterne, Laurence, 15, 70 Tulloch, Graham, 148
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 227, 242, 330 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 231
Stewart, Pamela D., 135
Stoker, Bram, 214 Urfé, Honoré de, 69, 125
392 INDEX
Valéry, Paul, 227, 231, 236 Wells, Herbert George, 231, 289
Valincour, Jean-Baptiste-Henri de, 168 Wessner, Paul, 90
Van Delft, Louis, 153, 171, 173, 194, 195 White, Edmund, 339
Vegetti, Mario, 26 Wilde, Oscar, 123, 273
Verga, Giovanni, 273, 282, 300, 319 Williams, Ioan, 37, 62, 82, 114, 136
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 21, 24, 26, Willis, Martin, 329
Vico, Giambattista, 252 Wilson, Edmund, 232
Vida, Marco Gerolamo, 143–144 The Wire, 207
Vidal, Fernando, 195, 360 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6–7, 364
Vigny, Alfred de, 14 Wittmann, Reinhard, 161
Villedieu, Marie-Catherine de, 81, 82 Woerther, Frédérique, 43
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 103, 141, Woolf, Virginia, 1, 2, 38, 226, 227, 231,
172, 314, 354 243, 287, 288, 289–290, 300, 301,
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 4, 14, 310, 316, 336, 341
93
Vonnegut, Kurt, 338 Xenophon, 25, 28, 65
Von Trier, Lars, 207
Yehoshua, Abraham B., 339, 341
Wakely, Alice, 108 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 338
Walpole, Horace, 258
Warner, William B., 62, 67, 207 Zach, Wolfgang, 128
Watt, Ian, 65, 69, 87–88, 175, 222, 314 Zatti, Sergio, 111
Weber, Max, 331 Zink, Michel, 135
Weich, Horst, 70 Zola, Émile, 1, 2, 14, 38, 188, 227,
Weinberg, Bernard, 78, 101, 197, 201, 259, 261, 272, 274, 275–276, 277,
233 278–279, 282, 288, 291–293, 300,
Weinrich, Harald, 236 309, 319, 323

Guido Mazzoni, Theory of The Novel

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What is the book about?

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THEORY OF THE NOVEL

Theory of the Novel

Originally published as Teoria del Romanzo, © 2011 by Società

The diagram on page 12 is reprinted from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

I N T RO D U C T I O N : Truth and Literature 1

Why the Novel Matters 1

ONE: A Theory of Narrative 20

People and Leaves 20

T WO : The Origin of the Novel 60

THREE: The Novel and the Literature of the Ancien Régime 95

The Dialectic of Continuity and Change 95

FOUR: The Book of Particular Life 138

The Romance and Private Aims 138

FIVE: The Birth of the Modern Novel 180

Freedom from the Rules of Style 181

The Expansion of the Narratable World 214

SIX: The Nineteenth-Century Paradigm 230

SEVEN: The Transition to Modernism 272

The Second Phase of Nineteenth-Century Realism 272

EIGHT: On Contemporary Fiction 333

CONCLUSION: A Theory of the Novel 343

The Genre of Particularity 343

And suddenly a long-forgotten, meek old teacher, who had

Truth and Literature

Why the Novel Matters

Nothing is important but life. . . . For this reason I am a novelist. And

Matters,” in speaking about literature in general but thinking about the

Between the mid-sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,

But this discontinuity in the sphere of literature was part of a broader

cultural transformation redefined the relations between the books of life.

transformations of a prelinguistic entity that Wittgenstein calls “forms of

19. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 37–38.

20. See Barbara Cassin, L’Effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

that become possible or impossible, conceivable or inconceivable, depending

Literature and Reality

and—to take up the expression used earlier and transform it into a

22. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 92ff.

Jameson illustrates this paradigm with the accompanying diagram:

MODE OF PRODUCTION, THE JURIDICAL

It is important to understand that these mechanical, expressive, and

Capital, Jameson defines “mode of production” as the totality of things and

What Is the Novel?

In its common sense meaning, as conveyed by contemporary dictionaries,

Bondage to a particular subject-matter and a mode of portrayal suitable

The first volume of the Aesthetics ends with extraordinary predictive

be told about beings and the contingent circumstances that surround

People and Leaves

This is the most ancient Western representation of storytelling, the prac-

2. Homer, Odyssey 1.150–154, 1.325–327, 8.487ff.

5. Homer, Odyssey 12.191.

Although the gods are immortal, they cause or undergo transformations

Mimesis and Concept

of knowledge and culminated at the beginning of the fourth century BCE

because it came up against an objective limit.16 The author of the Republic