The Artist in the Labyrinth: Design or Dasein

Abstract

The growing point of the as a stubbornly polymorphic energy can be seen only as the recurrent antithesis of earlier postures and postulates. Out of a rejection of existing plot-conventions have come new forms of narrative, and out of the destruction of presuppositions about the unity or stability of character have grown new methods of investigating character. In fact, the end of the novel so often announced in gleeful or lugubrious tones, is almost as difficult to locate as its ambiguous origins. Never wanting for threnodists or grave-diggers, the genre has evolved from its own self-negation. History did not have to wait on Sartre's revival of the term anti-roman 1 or Claude Mauriac's coinage alitterature 2 to reveal the dialectical character of the novel's development. Cervantes, one of the first modern opponents of literature, orders the antithetical structure of his on the paradox of a fiction questioning its own imaginative assumptions: the mood of desengaiio implies its artistic counterpart. As early as 1627 Charles Sorel had hit on a subtitle, to characterize his good-natured assault on fictional conventions, which overtly acknowledges the dialogue of the novel: Le Berger extravagant, ou l'Anti-roman. Inciting the novelist to such violence against earlier forms of the genre, there may well be a more radical disruption in his view