The Novel-Essay 1884–1947 by Stefano Ercolino

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Novel-Essay 1884–1947 by Stefano Ercolino Paolo Pitari Stefano Ercolino, The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xix + 194 pp. Stefano Ercolino theorizes "the novel-essay as the symbolic form of the crisis of modernity" (xv) and literary form as "a signifying structure that emerges in order to answer, on the aesthetic plane, specific symbolic needs posed by history" (xvi). To demonstrate these two theses, Ercolino discusses literature as one of many contextual forces, along with philosophy, history, music, and art, and shows that certain tendencies have led, in specific contexts, to the generation and sustainment of contingent artistic forms. The project is ambitious and the result convincing. Ch. 1 dwells on the landscape within which the novel-essay emerged. The genre "rose from the exhaustion of naturalist aesthetics" (1); it was introduced by Huysmans with Against Nature (1884), and later defined by Huysmans himself in Là-Bas (1891) and by Stringberg in Inferno (1898). If naturalism presented itself as a poetics of "battle in favor of the truth [that] had an overt ethical implication" (8)—namely the representation of "the social stillness determined by the conforming and oppressive power of monopolistic capitalism" (5)—the movement was never as revolutionary as it claimed to be, and it ultimately embraced the Zeitgeist—the Enlightenment, positivism. It was, rather, "starting from Against Nature [that] Huysmans developed an antithetical aesthetics, rooted … in contempt toward the Zeitgeist" (6). He introduced the essay as "the critical form par excellence" to "awaken the critical potential of literature" (9) and had characters always "escaping from the materialism of their own age with their aesthetic and metaphysical quests" (7). Against Nature constitutes the birth of the novel-essay plus the germination of the modern oppositional and fragile character—the "I" traversed by irrationalistic philosophies and psychoanalysis that inaugurates "a new attitude toward modernity: not only critical but also desperate" (9). Seven years later, Là-Bas opened with a fierce attack on naturalism, on its "materialism, mediocrity, and vulgarity" as a "vile carrier in art of bourgeois ideology" (14), a thesis replayed in Strindberg's Inferno: "the naturalistic phase was potent and fruitful, but it has served its purpose" (19). Huysmans and Strindberg converged on the need to overcome both romanticism and naturalism—on the need for synthesis, which, for Ercolino, is the need of the novel-essay and the need of modernity. This aesthetics originated when "positivism's materialist reductionism and determinism both fell into crisis in the last decades of the nineteenth century" (20), leaving the ground for the rise of the "philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche" (20). As a result, synthesis became the needed response to Western European "distinctions-oriented rationality" (23). By denying distinction and seeking synthesis, the novel-essay was fighting at least 250 years of European history, launching "a direct attack against the heart of the ideological apparatus of modernity" (28) by "supporting the impossible synthesis of what philosophy and art had separated for centuries" (27). Modernity [End Page 177] was looking at itself, and all it saw was contradictions and deep cracks. The novel had to become a novel-essay, because the essay, as stated in Adorno's "The Essay as Form," "challenges the ideal of clara et distincta perception and indubitable certainty" and should be "interpreted as a protest against the four rules established by Descartes' Discourse on Method at the beginning of Modern Western science and its theory" (28). Ch. 2 traces the development of the novel-essay. Formally, the genre became characterized by "an effect of suspension, dilation, rarefaction, and, in some cases, even of an explosion of the plot" (38) and anticipated the major experiments of modernism: "the breakup of the plot [and] the subversion of narrative time" (38). From Against Nature to Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), the novel-essay challenges the Bildungsroman, a form called to legitimize "the ideological paradigm of modernity" (42). And in Mann's novel (itself a Bildung), Ercolino explains, "the farewell to the Bildungsroman is definitive" (42): "never a Bildung had been so rich and complete; never a Bildung had been so useless" (44). Mann made clear that the Bildungsroman had become impossible...