Selected Essays

The End of the Novel

What distinguishes the novel from the long story, the chronicle, the memoir, or any other prose form is that it is a composed, selfenclosed, extensive narrative, complete in itself, about the lot of a single person or a whole group of people. Saints’ lives, for all their working out of the fabula,* were not novels, because they lacked worldly interest in the life story of their characters, illustrating instead some shared ideal. But the Greek story Daphnis and Chloe is considered the first European novel because this kind of interest appears there as a motive force, independently for the first time. Over a long period of time the novel form went on developing and gathered strength as it became the art of interesting the reader in the fate of individuals. As it does this, the art comes to fruition in two directions. Compositional technique turns biography into a fabula; that is, into a dialectically intelligible narrative, and, coinciding with the appearance of the fabula, another aspect of the novel develops—of an auxiliary nature, essentially—the art of psychological motivation. The quattrocento storytellers and the Cent novelles nouvelles confined themselves in their use of motivation to the juxtaposition of external situations, and this made their stories exceptionally dry and elegantly light and diverting. Novelist-psychologists like Flaubert and the Goncourts turned all their attention to psychological grounding at the expense of the fabula and handled this problem brilliantly, converting what had been an auxiliary device into a self-sustaining art.

Right up to our own days, the novel has been a central and urgent necessity, the form that summed up European art. Manon Lescaut, Werther, Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, Le Rouge et le noir, La Peau de chagrin, Madame Bovary were events in social life as much as they were artistic events. They produced in contemporaries who looked at themselves in the mirror of the novel a massive self-knowledge and resulted in imitation on a grand scale, as contemporaries adapted themselves to the typical images of the novel. The novel educated whole generations; it was an epidemic, a social mode, a school, and a religion. During the period of the Napoleonic wars, a vortex of imitative, lesser biographies formed around the central historical figure, around Napoleon’s biography, without reproducing it in every detail of course, but playing variations on a theme. In Le Rouge et le noir Stendhal told one of these imitative biographies.

If originally the personae of the novel were unusual, gifted people, the opposite could be noted as the European novel began to decline: the ordinary man became the hero, and the center of gravity shifted to social motivation. That is, society made its appearance as a character participating in the action, as for example in Balzac or Zola.

All this prompts conjecture about an existing link between the fate of the novel and how at a given time the fate of personality in history is viewed. There is no need here to speak of the actual fluctuations that occur in the role of personality in history, but only about how this problem might be resolved at a given moment, insofar as such a resolution forms and nourishes the minds of contemporaries.

And so the nineteenth-century flowering of the novel is directly dependent on the Napoleonic epos, which greatly heightened the stock value of personality in history and, through Balzac and Stendhal, enriched the soil for the whole French and European novel. The typical biography of the usurper and man of destiny Bonaparte was scattered by Balzac through dozens of his so-called “novels of success” [romans de réussite], where the basic motive force is not love but career—that is, the striving to beat one’s way from the lower and middle social layers into the upper.

Clearly, once we’ve entered the zone of powerful social movements, activities organized on a mass scale, the stock value of personality in history falls, and the power and influence of the novel fall with it. For the novel, the commonly acknowledged role of personality in history serves as a kind of pressure gauge, indicating the pressure of the social atmosphere. The measure of the novel is a human biography, or a system of biographies. From his very first steps, the new novelist felt that an individual fate did not exist, and he tried to transplant what he needed from the soil it grew in, with all its roots, all its accompaniments and attributes. Thus the novel always offers us a pattern of events, controlled by the biographical link, measured by a biographical measure, and sustaining itself compositionally only insofar as it responds to the centrifugal pull of our planetary system; insofar as the centripetal pull, the pull of the center on the periphery, has not decisively asserted itself over the centrifugal.

One may consider Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe the last example of the centrifugal, biographical European novel; that swan song of European biography, with its majestic fluency and nobility of synthetic devices which bring to mind Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Jean Christophe closes the circle of the novel; for all its contemporaneity, it is an old-fashioned work. In it is gathered the ancient centrifugal honey of the German and Latin races. In order to create the last novel, the two races that joined in the personality of Romain Rolland were needed; and even this wasn’t enough. Jean Christophe is set in motion by that very same powerful jolt of the Napoleonic revolutionary impetus, just as the whole European novel was, by way of the Beethovenlike biography of Christophe, by way of its contiguity with the powerful figure of the musical myth which came to birth at the same Napoleonic floodtime in history.

What happens to the novel after this is simply a story of the dispersion of biography as a form of personal existence; more than dispersion—the catastrophic collapse of biography.

The sense of allotted time a man has, in which he feels he may act, conquer, love, go under—this sense of time composed the basic tonality of the European novel, for, I repeat once more, the compositional measure of the novel is the human biography. A human life by itself is not a biography and provides no backbone to the novel. A man acting in the time of the old European novel appears as the pivot of a whole system of phenomena that group themselves around him.

Europeans are now cast out of their biographies, like balls from the pocket of the billiard table, and in the determination of their activity, as in the collision of balls on the billiard table, one principle operates: the angle of fall is equal to the angle of deflection. A man without a biography cannot be the thematic pivot of the novel, and the novel on the other hand is unthinkable without an interest in the fate of the separate individual, in the fabula and all that accompanies it. Besides, the interest in psychological motivation—the direction in which the declining novel so craftily escaped, already sensing its coming ruin—is radically undermined and discredited by the imminent impotence of psychological motives before those real forces whose willful discarding of psychological motivation becomes more cruel from hour to hour.

The contemporary novel was at one and the same time deprived both of the fabula, that is, of the personality that acts in the time belonging to it, and of psychology, because psychology no longer substantiates action of any sort.

Note

* I have retained the Russian fabula, rather than translating it as “fable,” to avoid confusion with the folkloric genre of the fable. It means “story” or “line of narrative.”