The End of the Novel and the Future of an Illusion

7/28/2019 The End of the Novel and the Future of an Illusion

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1 Experience, Storytelling, (Hi)stories"A man has been through an experience, now he is looking for the story togo with it - you can't live with an experience that remains 't'ithout a story,and I often used to imagine that someone else had exactly the story to fit myexperience."1 In Max Frisch's Gantenbein, different stories, different strandsof narrative, different sketches are then tried out and tried on ("I try storieson like clothes! "), such as the imaginative story outline (again and again: "Iimagine ..;" ) that begins with the opening declaration, "Let my name beGantenbein" (a declaration which, if you stop to think about it, is no morevoluntaristic, nor more upfr ont about its fictionality than, say, "Call meIshmael").Gantenbein, so the narrator imagines, pretends to be blind (he wears dark

glasses and a yellow armband and carries a white walking stick), and thosearound him accept him as such, even though at first he makes many mis-takes that threaten to give him away, and later, too, he sometimes falls reck-lessly out of the role. He's considered to be blind, and then no one looks soattentively any more, whereas he - as the supposedly blind man - looksabout him more keenly than ever before.

l Max Frisch, A Wilderness of ~irrors: A Novel, trans. Michael Bullock , London, ] 965, Il.The page numbers match those of the work's reprint as Gantenbein: A Novel by the sametranslator and publisher, also 1965.

The Novel: An Introduction.12y ChristoQh Bode. Translated by James Vigus . Eng lish translation 20]] James Vigus. Published by J ohn Wiley &Sons, Ltd.Original German text 2005 Narr Francke Art er npr o Verl ag GmbH + Co, KG.

The End of the Novel 243'"All that is played through as a thought-experiment: what a fantastic carver

. awaits him as an employee who never says what he sees, and can only everagree with the boss, since any contradiction would reveal that he had the useof his eyes; what a perfect husband, who never gets round to talking ablrlltthe discrepancies between what he's told and what he sees with his o-vneyes; how the blind man in his role provokes shameless deception.Yet this aspect of the imaginative mind-game isn't in the foreground. '\5

the narratgr tries out the identities "Enderlin" and "Svoboda" as well .15Gantenbei (each time with a number of beginnings to stories), as "j,,:"changes fr m I to he, from he to I, and lt one point, in the role of a jea kusman, even comes across the love letters that he himself, as lover, wrore tohis wife or mistress (so that he's imagined both as the adulterer and 1 hecuckold) - what's foregrounded is the provisionality and tentativeness ofall these projectio~s, and constr,uctions.! All of t~e~, as they're sketcl,ledout and then relarivized and withdrawn, stand In Inverted commas, ':1~if": "I irnugine:" - and there follows a fresh outline of a role, a fresh desi;for a story. So the actual subject matter of Gantenbein is how one con-serves, negates, and elevates (the full, threefold Hegelian sense ofAufhebung) experience in tto) a story; and the fact that that's a process ofinvention, of fictionalization: .. 'Every story is an invention,' I say a fre r : : 1while, without on thar.gccount doubting the horrors of being a prisoner ofwar in Russia, as a general principle: 'every ego that expresses itself illwords is a role _'. "2In a historiographical context Ha de W ite had maintained that ihcrnearung 0 a lstoncal event isn't integral to itself, but is attributed to itrhrough Its embeddin in a stor which in turn may adhere to widely differ-~literary) genre conventions - so t at e rese ecte 0 a.narra-~ictates the meatTing:qtIl'ie ezenr. (T at s a lso why "one and the same"

rustorlcal event can take on very different meanings when embedded indifferent stories.) Analogously, the "greed for stories" professed by the nar-rator of Gantenbein can be understood as the expression of a need toattribute and ascribe a meaning to one's own experiences, since meaningdoesn't emerge from experiences of its own accord, but only through a com-prehensive and integrated context, which can be generated - somehow orother - by means of a story ("somehow or other" because the events per sedon't yet comprise a story; rather, a narration cap link and process them invery different ways). "'- perhaps a man has two or three experiences,' J say,'two or three experiences at the outside, that's what a mrn has hadwhen he tells stories about himself, when he tells stories at all: F pattern ofexperience - but not a story.'''3 I2 Frisch, Gantenbein, 46.l Frisch, Gantenbein, 46.


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244 [he End of the NovelThe narrator has a certain idea as to why it is that, rather than being

ablelO fabrIcate. such stories-forotlrselves, we'redependent on out-sourcitrg."'H e ree K0n s It's due to-otrr-blin..d.n.s.J.no.t-play=acreOD Ii n d n ess thlSti me)~i ch respect to ourselves: II'One can't see onese lf, that's the trouble . storiesonly exist from outside,' I-, 'hence our arced for IItorl .' ' '' 4 You canonly get round this the way he does: by taking on the role of another. byallowing yourself to be someone else ("Let my name be Gantenbein") orseveral other people ("'Enderlin," "Svoboda ',') and by means of thi s simul-taneous rel in qu ish menr and expression to play along and discover where,you find yourself again in this space of possibi lit ies unfolded by the narra-tive: "what Iam really doing: - making sketches for an ego!"S For: "Thisis no time for ego stories. And yet human life is fulfi lled or goes wrong inthe individual ego, nowhere else.?" The search for the true "I" takes placein the medium of fiction, because it's only in drafting, testing out, andrejecting imagined stories that those relations (i.e., local, internal contexts)may be produced which are capable of bestowing a meaning on experience(" A man has been through an experienc~, now he is looking for the itoryto go with it"). I INow, for quite a long time it's regularly been questioned whether the term

"experience" still designates a valid category at all. I f i t didn't, that would havefar-reaching consequences for the connection that the narrator of Gantenbeinclaims berween experience , storytell ing, and hi story. In hi s essay of 1936, "TheStoryteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," Walter Benjaminclaimed that the art of storytelling - as the exchange of experiences - wascoming to an end, and the reason for t%'s was "experience has fallen [ 'n value.And it looks as if it is cont inuing to fa ll into bot tomlessness."?As the essay goes on, however, it e erges that Benjamin actuall has inmind two different causes for the disappearance of storytelling. Surveyingthe turning point constituted by World War I, he asks rhetorical ly (muchas he does in his 1933 essay "Experience and Poverty"): "Was it notnoticfable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefieldgrown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?"! Butas the context nukes clear, the accent here must lie on "communicableexperience" - what'~sue iL~jly not the experience-(o~ lack'r lY eT eut i, but rather the possibility of grasping and corTIiTluI11catingit in,, Frisch,Gantenbein, 46-47.Frisch,Gantenbein, 115." Frisch,Gantenbein, 65.~- "The Storyteller: Refle tions on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," trans. Harry Zorn, inNarrative Theory: Critica Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, PoliticalNarratology , ed. Mieke Bal, London, 2004, 88-106, here 88; this translation was first pub-lishedin Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York, 1968, 83-107., Benja mm, "The Storyteller,"88.

Ti-e End of the Novel ;,.1L


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246 The End of the Novelstorytelling in another medium is not the same thin g'- A hyposrarization ofpresence (of body, voice, truth) accompanies the cul t of ora li ty.With respect to "experience," Benjamin's a rgumen t i s s ti ll marc confused.

For he seems all the one hand melancholically to lament that the typeof experience that can still be adequately exchanged by word of mouth{Hthe epic side of truth, wisdom ")'? is in real, historical terms qisappearing,yet on the other hand to want to reproach the medium of literature andespecially the genre of the novel for no longer participating in the mediationof such experiences at all - which, though, according to Benjamin's ownargument is absolutely inevit able and fully in keeping with the times.Yet at another point in the same essay, Walte r Benjamin approaches very

close to the attitude of the narrator of Gantenbein, when he too - ratherpolemically - tackles the connection between storytelling and the generationof sense and meaning:

"A man who dies at the age of thirty-five," said Moritz Heimann once, "is atevery point of his life a man who dies at the age of th irty-five." Nothing ismore dubious than this sentence - but for the sole reason that the tense iswrong. Am an - so says the truth that was meant here - who died at thirty-fivewill appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at theage of thirty-five. In other words, the statement tha t makes no sense for reall ife becomes indisputable for remembered life. The nature of the character ina nove l cannot be presented any better than is done in this s tatement, whichsays that the "meaning" of his l ife is revealed only in his death. But the readerof a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the"meaning of life." Therefore he must, no mat ter wha t, know in advance thathe will share their exper ience of death: i fneed be their figurative death - at theend of the novel- but preferably their actual one;' '

11 Benje.min, "The Storyteller," 91.13 Benjamin, "The Storyteller," 100-101.

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The End of the Novel 247storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers"}." Benjamin's conceptof storytelling ~s defined in terms of conterrt, as the passing on of truths 311dwisdom (we have to assume: in a world that, in its essentials, does nutchange). In this essay at least, he can't do anything with the aestheticallymediated thematization of types of storytelling and types of exper ienri.ilprocessing in narrative. His concept of storytelling and experience is ba. i-cally pre-modern. .That distinguishes him fundamentally from Theodor W. Adorno, who, :n

his essay "The Posit ion of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel," lik e-wise pins the crisis of storyrellihg to the disappearance of experience ar.dlocates its causes in war and alienation:

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[IJt is no longer possible to tell a story, but the form of the novel requires nar-ration. [ ... ) [The narrator who dwelt on materia l concreteness) would beguilty of a l ie: the l ie of deliver ing himself over to the world with a love thatpresupposes that the world is meaningful[.) [ ... ) The identity of e xperience inthe form of a life that is articulated and possesses internal continuity - andthat life was the only thing that made the narrator's stance possible - has dis-integrated. One need only note how impossible it would be for someone whoparticipated in the war [by now, World War II] to tel l stories about it the W:1ypeople used to tel l s tories about their adventures. A narrative that presenteditself as though the narrator had mastered this kind of experience wou ldrightly meet with impatience and skepticism on the part of its audience.Notions like "sit ting down wi th a good book" are archaic. The reason for thislies not merely in the reader' s loss of concentration bur also in the content andits form. For tel ling a s tory means having something special to say, and that isprecisely what is prevented by the administer.ed world, by standardization andeternal sarneness.!' 1

But in marked contrast to Benjamih, Adorno considers it nothi g less tho nthe novel's vocation to thernatize these situations: "The reificarion of allrelat ionships between individuals, which transforms their human qua liti.-sinto lubricating oil for the smooth running of the machinery, the universalalienation and self-alienation, needs to be called by name, and the novel isqualified to do so as few other art forms are." 16 For: "The novel has longsince, and certainly since the eighteenth century and Fielding'S Tom 10m":,had as its true subject matter the conflic~ between living human beings


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248 The End of the Novelas an interspersed disclosure of its own p~etics, but as athoroughgoing,onrunning self-thematization (or interrelating and crossing out of its owndifferences). In Adorno's own words: "The new reflection takes a standagainst the lie of represe~tarion, actually against the narrator himself, who'tries, as an extra-alert commentator on ,vents, to correct his unavoidableway of proceeding. This destruction of fo~m isinherent in the very meaningof form." 18 It's in this sense, too, that Adorno interprets the narrative ironyof (say) Thomas Mann:Only now can the forrn-cdnstructing function of Thomas Mann's medium, theenigmatic irony that canno t be reduced to any mockery in the content, be fullyunderstood: with an i ronic gesture tha t undoes his own delivery, the authorcasts aside the claim that he is creating something real, a claim which, how-ever, no word, not even his words, can escape. Mann does this most obviously,perhaps, in his later period, in the Holy Sinner and the Black Swan [bur surelyhe already did this constantly in the Joseph-novels as well - CB), where thewriter, playing with a romantic motif, acknowledged the peep-show elementin the narrative, the unreality of illusion, through his use of language. Bydoing so, he returns the work of art, as he says, to the status of a suhlime joke,a status it had until, with the naivete of lack of naivete, it presented illusion astruth in an all too unrefJected way."

Thus when we also find the thought in Hans Blumenberg that "over a longperiod, the concept of experience has undergone a process of emaciatio~. Itis hard to imagine from it s endpoint tha t legibility could have been a meta-phor for experience, or that it could be so today or could be so again in thefuture,"20 it' s certainly not necessary to infer that storytelling and hence thenovel are coming to an end. If storytell ing arises from experience not in thesense that something whose worth is already fixed ("a valuable experience")must be communicated, but in the sense that experience requires narration,because exper ience has no meanin81 without (hi)story, then eve1 the verylack of individual experience (a poin~ that needn 't be contested) b:1omes thesubject matter and occasion of narrative - since if meaning is not the start-ing point but the result of narratives, then it's never out of the question thatstrategies for generating sense and meaning may be tried out on the basis ofsuch a lack. Storytelling doesn't automatically presume that the world ismeaningful; rather, it requires only ~he impetus to make sense or~omething(something, not the whole world straight away), to make somet~ing mean-ingful. It could well be that in this way the narrator is reduced to the condi-tion of the Gantenbein narrator, who projects fictions over and over again,18 IAd'orno,"The Position," 34.19 Adorno, "The Position," 34.20 Prefaceto Hans Blumenberg,Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, Frankfurt amMain, 1989 [1987],

C IThe End of the Novel 249always afresh - or to the condition of Sisyphus, who must eternally roll thestone up the hill anew: yet even in this absurd activity we'd sril l think of andimagine the narrator (and indeed the narrative authority) as a happy andfortunate person, about whom, admittedly, it is also said, "I imagine."In this s ituation, the storytell ing in Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries (1970-1983)

is also anything but anachronistic. The chronicle of the news items in theNew York Times indicates only the absence of a meaning-creating centerbeyond history (annals and chronicles presume the existence of atranscendental signifier, otherwise it makes no sense merely to list things);"Yet Gesine Cresspahl's dialogically organized narrative srye (addressed toher daughter Mary, to the dead, and to the New York Tim.is, but also cor-related with the, author in the text: "who's telling this anyway, Gesine.Both of us. You can hear it, can't you, Johnson?") turns the search fortruth (in reflecting on the past) and realization (in lookin ; to the future)innerdiegetically and extradiegetically into a dialectical project, whichescapes the charge of anachronism precisely through its (low: and as read-ers we're naturally involved in this project too, since nothing here is laidout in front of'us - we're not spoon-fed with anything. Precisely becausethe reader assists with the composition, the impression cannot arise thatthe narrator was from the outset "capable of such experience" (Adorno).Even though the Danish writer Peer Hultberg introduces 537 different

people in his magnificent Requiem (1985), in 537 sections of text that neverexceed one and a half printed pages (for the most part figurally, and not,pace the Austrian publisher of th e German translation and the occasionalclaims of cri tics, using interior monologue}, sections of text which only everconsist of one single sentence and, taken together, present a depressingpsychodrama of dead souls - the living dead of our cities - then, never the-less, the fabrication of these (otherwise still individually well differentiated)interior worlds has, not assisted the facade of realism "in its work ofcamouflage, "22 but rather demonstrates and displays - precisely through thefailure of a story - the failure of narrative; and so once again, by cal ling intoquestion the tellability of such existence, it also questions tl.e possibility ofproducing sense and meaning in and against such circumstances."We will have lived," wrote Heinrich Detering in his review of the later

(1992) Hultberg novel Byen og Verden (The City and the W0l'ld - a novel inone hundred texts), '

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as we will tell it to ourselves. Only in retrospect can a pattern in experience bediscovered (or produced) which makes the single details into a whole. Where

21 Cf. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and HistoricalRepresentation, Baltimore, 1987, 1-25.22 Adorno, "The Position," 32.


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250 The End of the Novelfrom the outset nothing is recognizable but plans ana possibilities, concep-tions or views, there the material for a future narrative lies in waiting. Whatwas previously just a date will afterwards have been an event. Stories that lifewrites ar e in reality life itself, told as (hisjsrory."

I f nar rative and story possess such importance, where should we place thespecific function and the specific achievement of the modern novel?

2 Meaning OrientationAs Christoph Reinfandt has shown in his award winning, systems-theoreti-cally oriented work Der Sinn der fiktionalen Wirklichkeiten (The Meaningof Fict ional Realities), against the background of the function that theautonomous system of "literature" fulfills for the total system of society,and analogously to the services it offers to other social systems and for psy-chic systems, one can in the first place distinguish two kinds of meaningorientation that the modern novel has to offer :

Narrative can profess to reproduce or discover a "meaning" objectively exist-ent in the reality it presents. In this way, via the criteria of verisimilitude (fic-tional narrative) or facticity (historical narrative), the comparability or identityof the reality designed by the text with "empirical" reality is established, andboth realities are interpreted as meaningful, using the same interpretativeframeworks as in societal communication or reality. The semantic vanishing-point of a narrative model of this kind therefore lies in the ordering patternsof society itself, in and around which the conflicts necessary for the p roduc-tion of narrative coherence, with their respective solutions in the form of aconfirmation of the order, are arranged.!"

This "objective" meaning of reality is above all presented by those narrativesthat conceal the relativity and construcredness of all immanent meaning-creationby referring primarily to those societal constructions of reality that have beenmost effectively and at the same time most thoroughly conventionalized and

23 Heinrich Derering, "Holle auf kleiner Flarnme" [review ofFeer Hultberg, Die S tad t und dieWelt: Roman in hundert Texten]' Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 21,1994." Christoph Reinfandt, Der Sinn der [iktionalen Wirklichkeiten: Ein systemtheoretischerEnturur] z ur Ausdifferenzierung de s engliscben Romans vom 18.Jahrhundert bis zur Cegenwart,Heidelberg, 1997, 149. Translator's note: Reinfandt has preserite d related work in Engli sh :"How German Is It? The Place o f Systems-Theoretical Approaches in Literary Studies,"European Journal of English Studies 5/3 (2001): 275-288; "Integrating Literary Theory:Systems-Theoretical Perspec tives of Lit erature and Literary Theory," Literatur in Wissenschaftund Unterricht 281J (1995): 55-64.

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have therefore become invisible. S~ch narratives also seek to obfuscate as i.lras possible the ir nar rative mediation, since only in this way can they allay .i 1 1suspicion o f consrrucredness with respect to the "objective" meaning uf tileeven ts presented. 25

ln marked contrast to this meaning orientation are meaning orientarions rhpr"turn the individual's subjective worldview into the semantic va nis hing-poi nrof narrative meaning":26

I',.y~ Just li ke the functionalized aspects of social order (power and moru liry) in rl,first kind tf meaning orientation, so the idea of the subject's identity as tLe'semantic nregrarion-point of the narrati e presentation is a IproduCt and "part of so ial "reality" beyond the narrari e.Conceptions of this kind are designed in societal communication anJ

become semantically enriched, conventionalized and ultimately invisible,whereupon they form the background for the conflict, necessary for the pr=-duct ion of narrative coherence, between desire and law."

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The space in which the resolution of the conflict between desire and lawends with a victory for the former can only be the space opened .up b) (heautonomous system of "literature" itself. In other words, the su b je . rivesense of "reality" presented by the narrative obviously satisfies the desir. formeaning of psychic systems in this area only. Its contribution consists :)[c-cisely in this "subjective" meaning orientation.Now, it can hardly be disputed that the success-story of the novel, unique

in literary history, must have something pertinently to do with the fact Ihatit formidably couples together two disparate references in a seemingly p.i r a-doxical way: a reference to reality and fictionality. Through varying acceri-ruarions and diff erent hierarchizarions, which are effected through difft/ e ntnarrative forms and a primary relationship to either the one or the 0/ hersystem, this coupling produces either the one or the other kind of mem ungorienta tion:

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The coulling of a reference to reality and~ictionalitY may be traced back to th"inrercon ecredness and the accornpanym hierarchizarion of sysrern-refercncc ,i fone u derrakes a correlation between r ality-reference and a reference to rI..social system on the one hand, and between reality-reference and a reference tthe psychic system on the other."

2l Reinfandr, Sinn, 150.26 Reinfandt, Sinn, 151.27 Re'infandr, Sinn, 151.28 Reinfandt, Sinn, 131. if,.~

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!

. 252 The End of the Novel IThe crucial thing, however, is that right from the outset of the modern novela third meaning orientation emerges, which has as its vanishing-point neither"objective" reali ty nor the subject ive view of reali ty: rather it arises from theauroreferentialiry of these texts (Reinfandt's "Meaning Orientation 1II:From Narrative to Literary Meaning").29 This is a meaning orientation thatarises, fro,,!, the th~fatization of the Posjibilities for generating sense andmeanmg tn narrattu .In terms of literar history, these three meaning orientations are equivalent

to the extent that the autoreferential thematizing of the possibilities for gen-erating sense and meaning is (as I emphasized repeatedly in chapter 2) rightfrom the very start inherent in and integral to the modern European novel.But these three meaning orientations are not equivalent in literary history toihe extent that meaning orientations 1 and 2 are increasingly harder to"sell" as solutions adequate to the complexity 1f the initial problem, whichwas: how the "subject" can be reconciled with 'reality,":"According to accounts of the history of the novel that take an evolution-

ary approach and thus concent~ate on the emergence of new forms, ratherthan on recording and t racing life forms that have existed historica lly for along while (for which we'd need a sort of "ecological" literary history),there's consequently a striking increase in the number and importance ofsuch novels as pla y rhrough the very process of sense- and meaning-gencrat ion in narrative and thus become - in an unmistakable, often annoy-ing, but sometimes also amusing way - self-referential. I'm referring, ofcourse, to modernism and postmodernism. IThere's also a further reason why the three types of meaning orienta-tion are not, in terms of literary history, equivalent. This reason is rha t thethird type - "the literary meaning" (Reinfandt) , the tbematization throughan extremely intensified autoreferentiality of possibilities for generatingsense and meaning in narrative - includes the other two and conserves,negates, and raises them to a new level. As a matter of course, highlyautoreferential texts such as, say, Joycfs Ulysses or Beckett's Trilogy orFrisch's Gantenbein, still circle (even if only ex negatiuoi round the pos-sibility e lf setting subject and world into a relationship that one coulddare to call meaningful - even if they do this only by conceiving our insa-tiable yearning for meaning in the discrepancy between effort and failure.l

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" Reinlandt , Sinn, 152ff.30 cr. Reinfa ndr, Sinn, 207: "The impulse to secularization, initiating in the second half of thenineteenth century and intensified by accelerating develdprnent in the fields of business andscience, leads to [a situation in which) the systems.refererJtially mediated inregrarive-rcconcili-aror y meaning-structures of the realistic novel can no longer be presented as the 'objective'consr u uc nr s of (represented) reality." Translated into critical theory: the explanatory abilityand thus t he iuregr arive power of ideolrgy decreases continually in the face of a dvancing objec-'t ivit y (WlIrLltcl,keit).

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The End of the Novel 253To the same extent that "objective" and "subjective" meaning orienta-tions no longer gear into each other - i.e., that on this track, the system"literature" has onlY1reduced efficiency" - the importance of such narra-tive texts as thernatize and portray the objective failure (i.e., whateverfailure can't be traced to individual inadequacy) of the other twoapproaches must, relatively speaking, increase: it's not just that one canno longer write, "The Marquise went out at 5 o'clock," but that afternarration, the narrative exploration of the possibil iti es of storytell ing,i.e., the [oregrounding of the contingency of attempts to generate senseand meaning, is now on the agenda.It's therefore doubly nonsensical to speak of the "dissolution of the

novel" or a bout the" destruction of the novel's su b stance. "32For one thing,something is merely coming into the foreground that has been there allalong, for hundreds of years - not just in texts like Don Quixote or TristramShandy, but also, as we saw more than once in chapter 6 in the context ofthe bas ic narrative situations, in those texts that you'd at first sight catego-rize as transmitters of the "objective" sense of reality (because every singlenarrat ive, even self-dissimulating ones, leaves ineradicable traces of itsconstructedness). And the second point is that especia lly wi th regard to thenovel, more than any other genre, it is misleading to speak of its "dissol u-tion," because there's no such thing as the novel (the title of this bonknotwithstanding), and the genre is anything but fini shed and washed up.As the genre that has already - up to this very moment - produced anunbeli evably abundant, protean variety of forms, and that moreover musts ti ll be understood as in a state of becoming (Bakhtin: "The novel is thesole genre that temains in the process of becoming and is stilluncompleted "),33 the novel approaches closer than anything else to what

I3J An "ecological" literary history in the above-mentioned sen se wou ld on the other handshow that, viewed in terms of the whole of society, the potential for meaning or ient at ion pos-sessed by t hese "dated" forms is far from exhausted; and that above all the compensatoryfunction of trivial forms of writing, from fantasy to the 10(t p orn p ro ducts of glossy and"Romanc e" magaz ines aimed at a predominantly fem.le public, guarantees for forms whicha're in literary and aesthetic terms worn out a life and an affective power well beyond theiruse-by dare. The genre's vi tal it y f ee ds of f t hi s, t oo . L it er ary evolution must be unde rs to od not

~. St as a self-reproductive process, but as a self-transcending process , which, in order to gener-e something new, i-, precisely not dependent on the exhaustion of t he old, but c re at es innova-

t On at the forefront of evolution - innovation that would not be be stimulated and producedby any significant demand; rather, it's i n r es ponse to this 'literarure that its public arises. Cf.Christoph Bode, I\st/'etik derAmbiguitdt: Zur Funktion und Bedeutung uon Mehrdeutigkeit inder Literatur der Moderne, Tubingen, 1988, 242ff.J2 Christian Scharf, Der Roman im 20. Jahrhundert~ Stuttgart, 2001, 69.JJ Josephine von Zitzcwitz's translation from the Russian. Cf. Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," inThe Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,Austin, 1981,3.


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54 The End of the Novelriedrich Schlegel called "progressive, universal poetry.":" Again, this isat only because-of its attractive force that's capable of integrating any-nirig and everything: it's also because the novel, with its ability to changeorrn, with its indeterminability, and through its self-referentia lity that gen-rates ever new meanings, reflects exactly those factors that produced it-actors tha t have certainly not d irnin ished since then: change, transformation,'ecoming, process:Only that which is itself in the process of becoming can comprehend this proc-ess. The novel became the leading hero of the drama of the literary develop-ment of modernity precisely because it best of al l re flec ts the t endency of themodern world to become; i t is, after all, the only genre born of this modernworld and in every respec t of a piece with i t.3l

ust as every non-conventional message influences the code (Urnberro.co: "in order to restructure codes, one needs to rewrite messages")," sovery truly novel novel changes our idea of what a novel is. But if thetimulus and origin of the modern novel consist not just in the "question-ng of real life" (according to Vargas Llosa the "secret raison d'etre ofite r a r ur e " ),3 7 but also in the desire to wrest meaning from real life throughr a r r arive, or to set a meaning against it (a meaning that can no longer be.ssurne d to be simply given), then it's also reasonably clear and doesn'tequire too much wild speculation to outline what the future of this nee-ssary, peril-averring illusion is, precisely in contrast to other media invhich narrative occurs as well.

Friedrich Schlegel, "Arhenaurn Fragrneurs" (no, 116), in German Aesthetic and Literary:riticism: The Romantic l ronists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen M. Wheeler, Cambridge, 1984,46,~erman: Kritiscbe-Friedricb Schlegel-Ausgabe, 35 vols., ed. Ernst Behler, Hans Eichner et a!', :Jvlunich, 1958-,2: 182. !.S This passage from Bak htiri's essay "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Srudy :)f the Novel" is taken from Ken Hirschkop's translation in The Cambridge History of Literary':riticism, Vol. 9, Tu/entieth-Cent ury Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives,"- d , Christa KneJlwol! and Christopher North, Cambridge, 2001, 145, with an addition byosephine von Zirzewirz. Cf. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 7. ' Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiot ics of Tex ts , Bloomington,1979,104. ' ., Mario VorSAI Llosa, L,tt,rs to a YOlmg Novelist, tram, Natosha Wimmer, New York;.!D02, 8. Cf. 71 "those who immerse themselves in the lucubration of livh different from theirrwn dernonsrrare indirectly their rejection" nd criticism of li fe as it is, of the real world, and~rranifesr their desire ro subsrirure for it the creations of their imaginations and dreams." ..

The End of the Nive! 255

3 Novels: Allegories of TellingToday, we realize that narrative pervades and informs cultural practices tosuch a vast extent that it's barely an exaggeration to call it ubiquitous("Narrative [ ... J is everywhere"}" and to regard it as a newly emergingfoundational paradigm of cultural studies. FO Ij that very reason, when tryingto Identify the specif ic function of the moderh and posrrnodern novel, it ISnot sufficient to remark that it offers a variety of different types of narrative.Rather, it would be necessary to identify the dislocation which the novel'splace has undergone in the field of all practices that may somehow be called"narrative," in order to deduce, from the changing difference between thenovel and other forms, the respects in which the former still retains its par-ticularity. Although more novels arq presumably bought and read in westernsocieties today than at any other Itime in history, nevertheless all majorempirical studies suggest that the importance of novel-reading as a leisureactivity is on the wane - in parallel to the general decline in significance oftj print media - and that it's increasingly superseded by the use of visuala d audiovisual elect ronic med ia (TV, cinema, video, DVD, audiovisualm re r ia l on the tnternet, er c .) . 1Although a r markable number of major electronic media productionsare themselves ased on textual (in the bro dest sense) literary scripts, itwould be wrong to underestimate the degree to which they produce theirvery own material and the media-specific complexity they evince. A would-bederogatory term like "MTV aesthetics" only conceals, rather than concep-tualizing or spiriting away, how remarkably innovative and effective somemusic videos, clips, or DVDs are; whereas the possibil iti es of Net literatureare still very far from being fuJly u til ized as long as authors ju s t continue towrite the same old texts in a different medium, without converting the spe-cific qualities of the new medium into a viral part of their own poetics.But if the modern novel is so fundamentally bound to the mediU] of theprinted book (and not just in a technical sense, but also in the hi to rica!

sense that the individual, middle-class subject can also - and not Ie st - beunderstood as a reading subject that re-produces itself through communi-cating with others about that reading experience in a kind of self-fashioningprocess), then the question of whether the novel has a future must beanswered in a significantly contradictory way. Obviously not, since likeevery historical phenomenon it has a finite lifespan, after which it'sexhausted (and with the declining relevance of the print media, its basis in

I f

III

" Corol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (eda.), Acts of Narrative, Stanford, CA, 2003, ix. Cf.H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge, 2002, on "theuniversality of narrative," 1-3; and in general Vera NLinning and Ansgar NLinning (eds.),Erzabltheorie transgeneriscb, intermedial, interdisziplindr, Trier, 2002. ~~

~I ,


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256 The End of the Novelcultural practice is predictably melting away}. All things must" pass, and itmay happen that 'something changes to such an extent that we're obliged toaddress it differently. And yet the novel obviously does have a future (forthe time being at least), since the modern novel can now (at the mostadvanced points of] its evolution) reflect on its "core business," on whatbrought it about in rhe first place. This was not an attempt (say) to conjureup a lost "totality of being.t'-" nor to present some sort of ready-madesense, meaning, viewpoint, or orientation; instead, by designing and dram-atizing imagined situations, the novel's core business has always been tooffer and display possibilities of the generation and construction of mean-ing. The prediction of someone who, alluding to Lenin, invokes the end ofthe nov e l," ? might miss the mark just as widely as Lenin did with respect tocapitalism - and for the same reasons. Such a view, that is, underestimatesthe persistent vitality of the supposedly deceased (the news of the death ofthe novel is slightly exaggerated - 0fituaries are precipitate), befause itoverlooks its core but also the protea capacity to change that is t ken upand accrued by that core: the ability to continue fulfilling the san e func-tions, to perform similar services, through radical self-transcendence andredefinition.Even a novel trapped in the most conventionalized realism can be regardedas an) allegory of narration, if we only reflect that it presents in a specific

form what must actually be thought abstractly: a way of making narrativesense, of making sense through narrative. These allJgories of telling, whichoccur implicitly even in novels dependent on the ~ealistic paradigm, butmore emphatically so in the somewhat more capacious paradigm of mime-sis, display such amazing scope, depth, and variety that one can think of thisgenre as like a gigantic, decentralized network of computers, mediating,exploring the field of possibilities for structuring something in a meaningfulway, in language. If you conceive the conqrete mathematical equation that agiven novel calculates out (comple te wi th lnumbers) as the ins tantia tion of aformula, then you've grasped the algorithm attributed above all to poetry,but which surely applies to the novel, too: to see the text at hand as a spe-cific instance of the general principle deduced from that very text, so thatthe text itself presents a concrete example of the processing and designing of"rca liry" that it abstractly conveys. It is a concre te i llustration of the generalthesis it conveys, its own example. This is why I call narrative texts allego-ries of telling. The novel can do that because! what it "expresses" aboutways o( constructng and processing world and experience can also be" Cf. Georg Lukpcs, The Theory of thr Novel; A Historico-Pbilosopbical Essay on the Formsof Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock, London, ]978 []971, 1920].'" Heinz Schlaffer, "Der Roman, das letzre Stadium der Literarur," Sinn und Form 6 (2002):7R9- ""97,

The End of the Novel 257referred to the novel itself. Whether it's Don Quixote or Ulysses, whether'it's Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), whether'it's Ivioby-Dick 'or Thomas Mann's Joseph-tetralogy (1933-1943) - theposition that the text ascribes to the reader, the activities that it requires ofus, the ways of reading that it suggests to us, are exactly those that the'respective novel itself rhernatizes and unfolds, so that reading these texts, emerges as an active, "allegorical" reconstruction and simulation of theInever-ending quest for meaning.. Freed from the shackles of any kind of aesthetic of realism, imitation, ormimesis, the postmimetic modernist and postmodcrnist novel redefines the"exhaustion" (as it appears 'from the new paradigms' viewpoint) of the pos-sibilities offered by the older paradigms as the ov,~rcoming and transcend-ence of a larval stage whose restrictions are felt as :, hindrance to the novel'svery own business - just as, to a painter eager to explore the possibilities offreely composing colors and forms, it would certainly seem onerous to stip-ulate that recognizable "objects" must eventually take shape.This view, which regards the novel as an allegory of telling and of the pos-

sibilities of generating sense and meaning in narrative, necessarily includesthe idea that the novel is always already to be regarded as metafiction. Insaying that I'm not disputing the fact that there a re differences in the distri-bution of expl icit and implicit metafictionalization, nor - this is precisely myargument - the fact of an evident increase in meta fiction and meranarrarion(every intensified form of autoreferentiality will bring with it, as a necessaryspin-off, reflection on fiction and narration, since autoreflexivity impliesnothing less than that: self-reflection - the bending back of reference to thesign-structure itself). IYet this view of the novel as an allegory of telling, as the self-thernati-zation of methods and possibilities of generating sense and meaning, ena-bles us now to precisely identify the place of the novel today: theaesthetically "released" novel (i.e., the novel that no longer has to offer acoherent il lusion and that doesn't adhere to any aesthetic program,because it has free, playful - but at the same time aesthetically dist ancing -access to all previous aesthetics; the novel whose vocation consists in theinterrelation and erasure of all conceivable codes (Urnberto Eco: an aes-thetic message is a message that questions the code - compare Adorno's"The destruction of form is inherent in the verv )neaning of form" } 41 is theliterary form that, above all others today, Ia dically and compellinglytransports narrative into that semiotic condition in which an "aestheticidea" (as Immanuel Ka nt defines it in his Critique of Judgment) can fullydevelop and unfold: "by an aesthetic idea," writes Kant, "1 mean that., Cf. Umberro Eco, Einfuhrung in. die Semiotik, Muni: h, 1972, 139; and Adorno, "ThePosition," 34.


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258 The End o(the Novelrepresentation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet with-out the possibiliry of any defin-re thought whatever, i.e., concept, being'.rdequare to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite onlvve l terms with or render completely intelligible. "42 When the. "intuition"(Anschauung) to which no concept can be adequate (that is, the "aestheticIdea") is offered in the realm of meaning-generating narrative, and whenIt is offered in "released" form, i.e., self-(re)presenting and rhernatizing,Ihen what Kant ascribed to "the imagination in its [reedom" can indeedoccur to an increased degree: "furtherance of the cognitive bculties intheir free pIa y. "43And so that would be the place of the novel today: not merely to be "a

machine to think with;"?" but rather, owing to its linguistic constructednessa nd its postmimetic freedoms, to reflect on and revolve in a very much morecomplex and incomparably more radical (=profounder, deeper) way thanthe other media in which narration is also possible how meaning is broughttnto the world; that is, ul timately to configure over and over again the para-cloxica l tension between contingency and grounding, to expose the ground-lessness of our yearning for a narratively mediated illusion of existentialsecurity, at the same time that, through its handling of precisely this humandisposition, the novel recognizes and acknowledges such a yearning as fullylegitimate.This is not to dispute, in principle, the possibility of conceiving visually

represented narratives, too, as "allegorical" in the above-mentioned sense.gilt there's the practical objection that something visually displayed is atfirst taken to be (fictionally) real and doesn't allow the same possibility ofd, . u b r as stories evoked through verbal narrative "only": the latter, as a rule(i.e., ill non-present-tense narration), are based on the absence of what isn.irratcd, and have to do without all sense-related evidence (which is onereason why it's difficult to turn a novel like Lolita into a film). However, itfollows that as far as highlighting its own contingency is concerned, a visualn.urarion has to make do with comparatively crude and relatively unsophis-ric.ited (though still potentially attractive) methods (think of Rashomon,'l 'iJeUsual Suspects), and is perpetually hindered (by the medial conditions)ill that it always and by necessity has to show something concrete that isgu-en to the senses.

" lmrnu nue l Kant, The Critique of judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith , Oxfor d, 1991[1 \/28), J 75-J 76 (= S49). German text: Kritik der Urte ilskra ft ; Stuttgart, 1981 [J963), 246." Kant, Judgement, 143 (= S35). In German text, 203. J . A. Richards, Principl f!$ of Li terary Criticism, London, 1983 [1967, 1924). I, referring tobooks in general; whereqs Abbott relates tlli. thought specifically to "narrative": d. Abbott,Narrative, 59.

; { ~ l l, ~'~" t...:~~;'~)~.~.jii~ ,.'t:~ s:.; .. ~~, ~ ~* .: ' 1 i~~:'~. . ~~

I::

The End of the Novel 259Considering, too, the incomparably greater sophistication of the lin-guistic system of signs (discussed above), it can't come as any major

surprise that the rhernatization of possibilities of the generation and con-I

in.lction of meaning through narration wi II for the foreseea ble futu rcccur principally in the medium of the novel. Indeed, even here a "srrug-Ie" constan1 y arises between reader and author," since, as cognitive na r-ratalogy conf r111s/6 the reader's" na turalJZing" tendency (the incli na tionto decode te s (or as long as possible w th codes established, tried, andtested in everyday contexts, i.e., codes that reduce complexity) stands dia-metrically opposed to the tendency of literary texts, which is to increasecomplexity: thus this "naturalization" always tends to reduce and impov-erish whatever the text may offer. Lorman's optimistic assessmert that thereader "has an inte rest in mastering the model that the author fresents tohim," and that therefore the artist's victory is a source of joy to the van-quished. reader, clearly doesn't cover those cases in which readers, by"naturalizing" - which is only another word for unlirernry reading -haven't remotely grasped the complexity of the text's model in the firstplace." To the sarne extent rhat posrrni meric literature functions precisely" Lorman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 288: "The perception uf an artistic texr isalways a struggle between audience and author [ ... ). The audience takes ill part of the text andthen 'finishes' or 'constructs' the rest. The author's next 'move' may confi rm the guess andmake fu rt her reading pointless (at least from the point of view of modern aesthetic norms) orit may d isprove rhe guess and require a new construction from the reader. But the next 'move'made by the author once again poses the two possibilities. This continues unt il the author wins;he outplays the artistic experience, aesthetic norms and prejudices of rhe reader, and th rusts hi,model of the world and concept of the st ructural reali ty upon him [this Iorruularion suggestsonce again that a particular v iew, a particular meaning, is conveyed, which 10 a considerableextent contradicts Lorman's own aesthetic - CB). This moment is the end of the work, and itcan occur before the end of the text if the author uses a cliche-model whose nature becomesapparent to the reader at the beginning of the work. The reader, of course, is not passive; he hasan interest in mastering the model that the author presents to him. With its help he hopes toexplain and conquer the forces of the outer and inner world. Therefore the artist's victory is aso~rce of joy 10 the vanquished reader."< . C., in general, Elrud Ibsch, "The Cognitive Turn in Narr arology," Poetics Today 11(1 90): 411-418; Manfred Jahn, "Frames, Preferences, and ~he Reading of Third-PersonNarratives: Towar1s a Cognitive Narr a t ofog y," poeti~s Today 18/4 (1997): 441-468; Rayjckendoff, Serna tics and Cognition, Cambridg, MA, 1983; Ray Jackendorff,Consciousness an the Comput anianal Mind, Cam ridge, MA, 1987; Meir Sternberg,"Proteus in Quotation Land: Mimesis and te Forms of Reported Discourse," Poetics Today3 (1982): 107-156.., Cf. Lorman himself, Structure, 295-296: "While the author strives to increase tilenumber of code systems and complicate their structure, the reader is inclined to reduce themto a minimum that seems sufficient to him. The tendency to complicate characters is allauthorial re nd encv: a black-and-white conrra sring structure is the tendency manifested l-ythe reader."

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260 The End of the Nove l ~oL-.-Jb ,, by hijndering, erasing, and undermining everyday processes o'f cogni:ion, anarratology based purely on cogrntrve psychology can hardly articulatemore (indeed, can only articulate less) than good hermeneutics already'could about the frictions and interferences that such posrrnirneric textsproduce."! It is to be feared that the reader-as-serial-offender, as modeledby cognitive narratology, is guilty of the crime tha t was absolute anathemato the seasoned novelist Vladimir Nabokov - ilentification: "Or, and thisis the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies imself with a character inthe book. This lowly variety is not the kind a imagination I would likereaders to use. "49It is not so much between vacancy and encyclopedia that the contempo-

rary novel moves'? - even as early as Bouuard et Pecucbet (1881) the author,Flaubert, could conceive the encyclopedia only as a farce" - as betweentwo extreme points that perhaps c0tne most graphically to the fore inThomas Pynchon's ceuure: either nothing has meaning, i.e., there is no suchthing as a sign, because everything stands alone and singly for itself, but asa consequence human beings also stand isolated and lost; or, instead, eve-':ything is a sign.- situ~tion that ~auses ch~racters an~ read.ers alike to fallinto the paranoid \delusion of seeing meaningful relationships everywhere(as already happened to Charles Kinbote in Nabokov's Pale Fire). The free-dom to make it like this or like that or in tny conceivable mixture of theavailable possibilities - as long as we don't torget, on pain of suffering thefate of Don Quixote or of a Kinbote, that it is we, as readers, who set thisparticular mechanism in operation - has been the freedom of the novel-reader right from the very sCflrt: the reader who, even here, faced with thepossibility of either understanding a story "just" as a story, as what it osten-sibly seems to be, or on the contrary of understanding it as a representativeof something else (an allegory, in the broadest sense), meets himself as theconstructor of "such" worlds - just as long as he does not forget this situa-tion of choice. So in general terms, one possible end (in the sense of "goal"Of "objective") of the novel would be this: to make possible an encounterwith oneself in the medium of another - and that's experience; which, in" With respect to the possible contributions that a narratology based on Possible WorldsTheory 11'Wf) could make to our knowledge of the processes of understanding and configura-tion in reading fictional texts (cf. above all the publications 0 1 Marie-Laure Ryan, primarilyPossible Worlds, Artif icial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, Bloomington, 1991), it's alsoevidently the case that the cognitive flow always proc ee ds from the level of higher complexityro rhe level of lower complexity; and therefore it may be that PWf can profit considerablyfrom relevant works of literary theory and criticism on fiction, fictionalization, mimesis, real-ism, posrmimesis, etc. - whereas it seems to me far from certain that this would work the otherW3Y round.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers, London, 1980,4.10 But see Blumenberg, Lesbarkeit, eh. ] 9; Calvino , Ha rv ard Lectures.Ii Cf. Blumenberg, Lesbarkeit, 308. I '

-. - J I- - ~ ~~ I--'order to be understood and be felt as meaningful, would in turn need to beembedded in a narrative.It was to th~t end (so one version of the story goes) - to make sense ofe~ocha l, new experiences, to rhernatize the experience of innovation andnovelty - that the modern novel arose; but it isn't coming to an end, becausethis st il l persists: the condition of i ts beginning.

The End of the Novel ~:,.,f~" Z f: )T " ....

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254 The End of the NovelFriedrich Schlegel called "progressive, universal poetry. "34 Again, this isnot only because-of its attractive force that's capable of integrating any-thing and everything: it's also because the novel, with its ability to changeform, with its indetermina bility, and through its self-referentiality that gen-erates ever new meanings, reflects exactly those factors that produced it -factors tha t have certainly not diminished since then: change, t ransformation,becoming, process:Only that which is itself in the process of becoming can comprehend this proc-ess. The novel became the leading hero of the drama of the literary develop-ment of modernity precisely because it best of al l ref lec ts the tendency of themodern world to become; i t is, after all, the only genre born of this modernworld and in every respect of a piece with i t.lS

Just as every non-conventional message influences the code (UmberroEco: "in order to restructure codes, one needs to rewrite messages"}," soevery truly novel novel changes our idea of what a novel is. But if thestimulus and origin of the modern novel consist not just in the "question-ing of real life" (according to Vargas Llosa the "secret raison d'etre ofliterature" ),37 but also in the desire to wrest meaning from real life throughnarrative, or to set a meaning against it (a meaning that can no longer beassumed to be simply given), then it's also reasona bly clear and doesn'trequire too much wi ld speculation to outline what the future of this nec-essary, peril-averting illusion i s, precisely in contrast to other media inwhich narrative occurs as well.

14 Friedrich Schlegel, "Athenaurn Fragrneurs" (no. 116), in German Aesthetic and LiteraryCriticism: The Romantic l ronists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen M. Wheeler, Cambridge, 1984,46.German: Kritische-Friedrich Scblegel-Ausgabe, 35 vols., ed. Ernst Behler, Hans Eichner et aI., ':Munich, ']958-,2: 182. !Jl This passage from Bak hrin' s essay "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study:uf the Novel" is taken from Ken Hirschkop's translation in The Cambridge History of Literary:Criticism, Vol. 9, Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives,ed , Christa Knellwolf and Christopher North, Cambridge, 2001, 145, with an addition by i,Josephine von Zitzewirz. Cf. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 7. ;~)0 Umberro Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiot ics of Texts, Bloomington',';1979,104. ' :," Mario Vargu Llosa, L..tt.rs to a You.,g Novelist, trans, Natasha Wimmer, New York,:;,2002, 8. Cf. 7, "those who immerse themselves in the lucubration of lives different from rheir 'own demonstrate indirectly their rejection ond criticism of life as it is, of the real world, and~manifest their desire to substitute for it [he creations of their imaginations and dreams." "t

The End of the N1vel 255

3 Novels: Allegories of TellingToday, we realize that narrative pervades and informs cultural practices tosuch a vast extent that it's barely an exaggeration to call it ubiquitous("Narrative [ ... ] is everywhere" )38 and to regard it as a newly emergingfoundational paradigm of cultural studies. F O Ii that very reason, when tryingto identify the specific function of the moderh and postmodern novel, it isnot sufficient to remark that it offers a variety of different types of narrative.Rather, it would be necessary to identify the dislocation which the novel'splace has undergone in the field of all practices that may somehow be called"narrative," in order to deduce, from the changing difference between thenovel and other forms, the respects in which the former st ill re tains its par-ticulari ty. Al though more novels ar~ presumably bought and read in westernsocieties today than at any other Itime in history, nevertheless all majorempirical studies sugges t that the importance of novel-reading as a leisureactivity is on the wane - in parallel to the general decline in significance oft1 print media - and that it's increasingly superseded by the use of visuala d audiovisual elect ronic media (TV, cinema, video, DVD, audiovisualm rerial on the tnternet, erc.). 1Although a r markable number of major electronic media productionsare themselves ased on textual (in the bro dest sense) literary scripts, itwould be wrong to underestimate the degree to which they produce theirvery own material and the media-specific complexity they evince. A would-bederogatory term like "MTV aesthetics" only conceals, rather than concep-tualizing or spiriting away, how remarkably innovative and effective somemusic videos, clips, or DVDs are ; whereas the possibil iti es of Net l ite ratureare still very far from being fully utilized as long as authors just continue towrite the same old texts in a diffe rent medium, without converting the spe-cific qualities of the new medium into a viral part of their own poetics.But if the modern novel is so fundamentally bound to the mediuJ of the

printed book (and not just in a technical sense, but also in the hi toricalsense that the individual, middle-class subject can also - and not Ie st - beunderstood as a reading subject that re-produces itself through communi-cating wi th others about that reading experience in a kind of self-fashioningprocess), then the question of whether the novel has a future must beanswered in a significantly contradic tory way . Obviously not, since likeevery historical phenomenon it has a finite lifespan, after which it'sexhausted (and with the declining relevance of the print media, its basis in

I f

II

I,:

" Coro l J acob. and Henry Sussman (eds.), Acts of Narrative, Stanford, CA, 2003, ix. Cf.H, Porter Abbo tt, The Cambridge I ntroduction to Narrative, Cambridge, 2002, on "theuniversality of narrative," 1-3; and in general Vera Niinning and Ansgar Niinning (eds.),Erziibltheorie transgeneriscb, intermedial, interdisziplinar, Trier, 2002.

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Documents

The End of the Novel and the Future of an Illusion