Critical Reflections on the Pathetic Condition of the Novel in Our Time

The novel is a bourgeois art because it gives itself time to play, and in so doing loses itself in the anguish of its own dreams.

To begin these reflections, I want to quote a passage from one of the great novels of the past: Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste.

Where?—Where? Reader you are of a rather cumbersome curiosity! By the Devil what does it matter? Even if I were to tell you that it was in Pontoise or in Saint-Germain or in Notre-Dame de Lorette or Saint-Jacques de Compostelle would you be better off? If you insist, I will tell you that they were going towards—yes, why not?—towards an immense castle, on the frontispiece of which was written: I belong to no one and I belong to everyone. You were already here before entering, and you will still be here after departing.

(my translation)

In Jacques le Fataliste Diderot creates a space never before seen in the landscape of the novel: a timeless stage without scenery (not unlike that of the novels and plays of Samuel Beckett) where his characters function more as voices than as full-fledged personalities. Listening to Jacques and his Master talk, one always has the feeling that they are talking from inside a book rather than from reality. I know of no opening of a novel more engaging, more fascinating, and more self-reflexive than that of Jacques le Fataliste:

How did they meet? By chance, like everyone else. What were their names? What do you care. Where were they coming from? The nearest place. Where were they going? Does one really know where one is going? What were they saying? The master said nothing, and Jacques was saying that his captain was saying that everything that happens to us here on earth, good or bad, is written above.

It is certainly the playful self-reflexiveness of Jacques le Fataliste that makes of this novel the great fun book that it is, and this because Diderot not only meddles with the text but also offers the reader the possibility of participating in the fiction: “No, no. Of all the different abodes possible, which I have just enumerated, choose the one most appropriate to the present situation.” Or even better, the author seduces the reader into the interplay of self-reflexiveness while pretending to be annoyed by the reader’s impatience, in the passage I already quoted:

Where?—Where? Reader, you are of a rather cumbersome curiosity! By the Devil what does it matter?

Clearly, Diderot, like Sterne and numerous other great novelists after him, understood that the novel is very much like the inscription on the frontispiece of the imaginary castle he invents on the spot: the novel belongs to no one and it belongs to everyone. We (as readers) were here before entering the book and we will still be here after closing it. This suggests that the process of reading a novel can be measured by the reader’s willingness to engage—or let himself be engaged by—the self-reflexiveness of the text. Or as Flann O’Brien puts it in At-Swim-Two-Birds(another outrageously self-reflexive novel): “. . . a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader can regulate at will the degree of his credulity.” In this respect, the reader can be fascinated either by the tale only (which sends him back to his own reality) or by the telling of the tale (which keeps him inside the fiction).

Can it be said then that by denouncing the fraudulence of a novel that tends to totalize existence and misses its multi-dimensionality, the critical work frees us from the illusion of realism? I rather believe that it encloses us in it. Because the goal remains the same: it is always a question of expressing, of translating something which is already there—even if to be already there, in this new perspective, consists paradoxically in not being there. In other words, the novel, in a sense, cannot escape the double-headed...