Novella

Abstract

Novella Florian Fuchs (bio) Given its brevity, the novella has been newly rediscovered as "the original #Longread,"1 an appellation that fits neatly into its centuries-long genealogy. Before there were hashtags, the novella has been described as many things: an anecdote retold, the sister of drama, a short novel, a story readable in a single sitting, an unprecedented incident, or simply as a piece of news. Curiously, these alternative titles point to no common feature, except one: novellas seem to be defined with respect to other genres. This is perhaps most true of the rapprochement of the novella and the short novel, which has proven so intuitive that its comparative nature is often forgotten and "novella" used interchangeably with "short novel." On the contrary, a novella and a novel, however long or short, are very different things. What helps these and other false equations cohere is that novellas have gained their specific features, including the ability to dwell alongside other genres, through a significant cover operation. Without losing its formal integrity, a novella seeks attachment to other forms, coalescence with other novellas into novella cycles, or even incorporation into a larger genre, while at the same time remaining intact and discrete. This affiliative impulse has been true since the novella's paradigmatic emergence in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, a novella cycle written and circulated a century before print. Despite the classical sovereignty of verse fiction on the one hand and oral storytelling traditions on the other, the novellas of the Decameron established a new kind of modern literature written in prose and telling of everyday events. Set within societies shaped by citizens, these early instances already carried the pointed, argumentative form that would be perfected during the nineteenth century, effectively allowing novellas to become narrative amplifications of unresolved issues of civic life. At second sight, the faux equation between novella and short novel is therefore categorically wrong, because it implies that novella and novel occupy the same spectrum. Yet novellas are not merely scaled-down novels. Their most obvious distinction might be word count, but this does not get at the fundamental difference between novella and novel. Form is the crucial feature that marks the novella, while the novel may [End Page 399] be called formless: novellas lack subplots and contain only one major storyline that centers around one decisive turning event, such as the sudden occurrence of an accident, a revelation of one person as another, or similar arrivals of the inexplicable into the characters' everyday. This plot and its unforeseen incident drive the whole of the novella and give it the form of a chance occurrence that brings about decisive consequences.2 Within these limits, protagonists cannot be developed at length, nor can their world ever be seen outside their spotlight. Instead of offering detailed and extensive panoramic setups of atmospheres or locations, novellas provide a schematic structure that calls on the reader's here-and-now for most of its contextualization. An office, a scene on a ship, a conversation before a date: in a novella, events like these are truncated and unstable, calling on the reader to flesh out the gaps. Novellas draw on us. They begin from our world, but they also conclude in our world because their focus on one episode prevents them from developing a world of their own. A novella, like Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener, is only an extension of an existing reality, whereas the openness of a novel strives to a create a whole reality anew, potentially infinite and flexible enough to add more and ever more subplots, details, protagonists, or even dozens of sequels, as in the case of Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart. If the novel is the epitome of infinite scalability and world-making, the novella is its counterpoint: guided by a strict, even measured focus, the novella's primary interest is to interfere with our world. The novella's tendency to latch onto other genres is active in the origin of the novel itself. The novel is a result of novellas latching onto one another, that is, a series of novellas with the same set of main protagonists. Already Friedrich Schlegel, who, in...