The Future of the Novel [1957]

I now come to an idea that is important to me and that I address in an article from 1957 entitled “Où va le roman?” Both André Malraux and Jean-Paul Sartre made use of the novel early in their careers before abandoning it. Is this development inevitable? Against the naturalist novel, which eliminates the subject in favor of the object, we see the rise, after the Second World War, of the metaphysical novel, which will, on the contrary, gradually destroy its object. I contend in this article that Malraux’s and Sartre’s transcendence of the novel—in Malraux’s The Voices of Silence (Les Voix du silence) and in Sartre’s engagement with an overly rational subjectivism—neither can nor should become a rallying cry. I therefore defend, of course, the Proustian novel. But this question is now far removed from my thinking. However much my work is fundamentally based on the study of the great novels and the description of an experience of which they provide a privileged form, this subject now seems to me to be outmoded. I do not much concern myself with the novel. It no longer seems to me to embody the meaning of an era of which it nevertheless announces all the dangers. Think, for example, of the power of Dostoevsky’s The Demons. But was a renewal of the novel possible after Proust? I do not see how.

—René Girard, Introduction to La Conversion de l’Art, 2008²

It would seem that some authors, having arrived at a certain point in their stylistic evolution, must bury either the novelist they were or the writer they have become. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who, at the end of his life, could only muse about The Wisdom of the Sands (Citadelle, 1948), and André Malraux, when he turns toward The Voices of Silence (Les Voix du silence, 1951), are authors who choose the first path. In these writers, there is no rupture between their novels and the essays that follow. They are part of the same vision. The essays contain ideas that had already been at least sketched out in the novels, ideas that, detached from their novelistic moorings, are systematically expressed without the mediation of fictional characters. The novel dies a natural death. Why would Malraux continue to create scenes of violence, eroticism, and death? Nowadays real objects, and particularly artworks, all have this taste of violence, eroticism, and death that were part of Malraux’s style.

A Jean Giono, on the other hand, chooses the second path. He renounces himself to not renounce the novel. His early novelistic style evolved rapidly toward the prose poem. Giono commits stylistic suicide. In the five volumes of the Chroniques romanesques, it is a new writer speaking, a young writer looking for models; he imitates Stendhal. Will Giono have a second career as a novelist? Despite the success of The Horseman on the Roof (Hussard sur le toit, 1951), his recent work has attracted little attention.

Jean-Paul Sartre too has transcended the novel. After Nausea (La Nausée, 1938), the principal orientation of his work shifts toward the philosophical essay and the theater. Roquentin’s vision is circumscribed, codified, and systematized in Being and Nothingness (L’Etre et le néant, 1943). Nevertheless, Sartre renounces neither himself nor the novel. A third path, it would seem, is opened up. But the Sartrean novel is now formulaic; it no longer springs from a personal urge but from a pedagogical concern.

Sartre is not principally looking for verisimilitude when he calls his characters to testify now as a subject now as an object, but never both at the same time. It is not his goal to formulate some rule of the three novelistic unities. Respecting the freedom of fictional characters does not mean letting them do whatever they want (a plainly nonsensical proposition); it means one should never interrupt them when they express their point of view. The novelist cannot renounce playing God with his characters, since he creates them, but he will no longer be this...