Theory of the Novel

Theory of the Novel. Guido Mazzoni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Between the mid-sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the novel, which long considered to be a form of superficial entertainment, became the preeminent art form in the West because it portrayed the “totality of life” against the reductive accounts of science, philosophy, and other forms of systematic thought. Prior to the mid-sixteenth century, no one would have ranked a novelist ahead of a scientist or philosopher. But today novelists are seen as oracles, prophets, philosophers, conveys of the truth and presenting life as it is.

But what is a novel? In his introduction, Mazzoni reviews what people have thought is the novel’s defining feature. Prose tends to be characteristic of novels but not necessary for it; length does not seem to be a factor; some novels describe fictional stories, others real events. Schlegel asserts the novel is the first important literary form born outside age-old-norms: it is devoid of rules, changes constantly, and absorbs other genres. Bakhtin cites the comic and popular origins of the novel for its changeability, while Hegel describes the novel’s ability to portray simultaneously objective and subjective reality.  Mazzoni’s definition of the novel is in the same vein: “Starting from a certain date, the novel became the genre in which one can tell absolutely any story in any way whatsoever” (16). But this definition does have some markers to delineate the novel: it has a narrative form, and it can make free use of any content and any style.

In chapter one, Mazzoni examines the concept of mimesis, which is crucial for the novel to succeed, as the adoption of an ontology that inhabits a world of particularities and that makes stories possible. This include:

“. . . particular beings subject to time and located in a space; identified by a proper name, body, character, and manners; restless because they are vulnerable to becoming and to desire; being whose lives intersect with the lives of others, acting, speaking, and formulating thoughts; experiencing passions, living in a social system, until imbalance is righted and the story reaches its end: this is the matter of stories” (48).

They are, what Heidegger calls, an “existential analytic”: the concise mode of being of human beings.

Every story has four categories of interpretations: the author, the narrator, the protagonist, and the reader. The narrator and the protagonist exist within the text, while the author and reader are outside of it. These four interpreters make narrative possible: the story and those who interpret it. Narrative consequently is a type of mimetic activity: it is a reading rather than a copying of the world. The narrators (author, narrator, protagonist, and reader) make the story a hermeneutic activity where what is being conveyed possesses an ontological reality of its own. It allows endless stories to exist by carving open an ontological region in the world and populates it with contingent lives and forms of life.

The origin of the novel is recounted in chapter two, where its medieval parents were the courtly romance and the novella. 1550 was an important year because European literature rediscovered the Greek writings, such as Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, and the terms romance and novella began to emerge as separate genres. This distinction was adopted by French writers in 1670 with the romance considered a poetic genre that recounted the adventures of an ideal hero in a setting removed from ordinary experiences and the nouvella a historical narrative of a private individual. But it was with the writings of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding that the word and literary form “novel” became part of European literature.

As Mazzoni shows in chapters three and four, what makes the novel unique from other literary forms is that it became emancipated from the normative morality of religion and philosophy and freed from the strictures of classical poetics which kept styles distinct. Whereas romances defended themselves as low and vulgar entertainment and therefore did not merit serious criticism, the novel was more vulnerable to these critiques because it concerned itself with moral, philosophical, and political topics. Over time the novel adopted the subject of the private life for its content and a multiplicity of sceneries and objects for its narrative, giving it the feel of contingency. As the novel became increasingly popular among both elites and the masses, it emerged as a new, legitimate art form in European literature.

Chapter five, “The Birth of the Modern Novel,” defines the genre as 1) freedom from the rules of style; 2) freedom from allegory and morality; 3) the rise of empathic and observation in the attitude of the novels; 4) a new conceptual “ether” where the narrator could make visible to readers the invisible dimensions implicit in characters’ lives, whether psychological and/or sociological; 5) representing or conveying a type of truth to readers; 6) expanding its narratable world with attention to middle-class life; and 7) written in prose.

These features created the paradigm of the nineteenth-century novel where Mazzoni describes in chapter six the novel’s transparent or a natural style of writing; an omniscient and detached narrator; the discovery of a social, political, and economic environment and the dependency of individuals upon it; and partially model itself after the arts in the public sphere, like theater and painting. The melodramatic novel is an example of this where an absolute conflict is revealed in the characters’ private lives against a momentous historical backdrop, making these characters universal and significant. This type of novel is contrasted with the one preoccupied with personal destinies, where the character lives a prosaic context but do not have prosaic lives or thoughts (e.g., Jane Austen).

The transition from realism to modernism is difficult, if not outright impossible, to locate, as Mazzoni acknowledges in chapter seven. These works can perhaps be best characterized as realism without melodrama: the novel of personal destinies and the creation of a new type of plots, characters, and narrators in the novels of Flaubert, Zola, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and Proust. The novel has turned inward and philosophical and made its style opaque rather than transparent.

Mazzoni concludes with a look at the postmodern novel where the novel truly became global and is no longer European. New narrative techniques and an attitude of existential realism are also introduced to this form. This chapter was the weakest of the book, with only a few pages dedicated to the novel from the 1930s to today. It may be the case that we are still too close to this period to recognize the patterns and themes in the development of the novel but it would have been helpful to have some analysis of the novel from contemporary writers, especially non-European ones.

Nonetheless, The Theory of the Novel is an immense achievement for us to understand the novel and its significance. As perhaps the most important art form in the West today, Mazzoni traces the evolution of the novel from its humble origins to today’s status of rivaling science, philosophy, and religion for truth. To understand the world as it is portrayed, and the world as it actually is, The Theory of the Novel provides a path for readers to follow to make sense of the realm of the particular, psychology, and personal destiny.

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