Claudio Magris, The Novel As Cryptogram
Claudio Magris, The Novel As Cryptogram
Claudio Magris, The Novel As Cryptogram
A
n entry in Benedetto Croces diary records a visit from
Moravia, the writer of novels.1 There is an unmistakable
hint of malice in the description, the shrewd, wounding
humour that is perhaps what chiefly endures of the genius
of Don Benedetto. The punctilious designation writer of novels is a way
of cutting Moravia down to size, implicitly making light of his reputa-
tion. It is as if to say that the name Moravia is not enough; more is
needed to establish his identity, details of a profession or other informa-
tion, as for any other anonymous visitor. The specification, moreover,
does not sound like a compliment. Though neutral on the face of it, like
the entry in a passport, it strikes a reductive note, suggesting an honest
occupation, commendable if only as a well-meaning endeavour, but not
a particularly brilliant one, and certainly not one of the highest expres-
sions of the life of the mind; the exercise of a practical functionuseful
enough in its own wayrather than what Croce understood as the work
of poetic creation.
To be sure, there were novels that Croce liked, and he knew how to inter-
pret them. But the novel as a form remained fundamentally alien to his
aesthetics and his criticism. This was no accident. For the novel was
an expression of that radical modernity Croce celebrated as affirmation
and progress of the spirithistory as the unfolding of freedom, liber-
alism emancipated from religious and political dogmabut which his
innermost nature resisted. He was unable to comprehend and share
this new way of being and feeling, these transformations of sensibility
and of subjectivity in their relations to the worlda dusty, parodic, even
degraded, yet also radically new and intrepid odyssey.
The novel was born out of the disintegration of a feudal agrarian civi-
lization, mirror of those perennialor at least, very long-livedstructures
1
This is a translation of E pensabile il romanzo senza il mondo moderno?, in
Franco Moretti, ed., Il romanzo, vol. 5, Rome 2003.
magris: The Novel 97
faith in the epic, meet their demise, yet without ceasing to traverse the
ruined roads of this world as if these were enchanted woods, dense with
poetry and meaning. His novel is born out of disillusionment and a
paradoxical resistance to it. Don Quixote is an epic of disenchantment
that preserves, at least at first, deep echoes of epic poetry in the lucid
new medium of prose.
According to Hegel, the great epic style consists in the works seeming
to be its own minstrel and appearing to be independent, not having any
author to conduct it or be at its head. Homer is one, nobody and many.
The hero of the epicand the author with himlives his life in a poetic
world, one as full of tangible meaning and poetry as the forests of the
ancient myths, inhabited by gods. It is the original poetic condition of
the world, as Hegel put it, in which the values, norms and unity of life
are felt by individuals not as an external imposition, but as if fused into
their souls, which know no scission. The subject bathes in a harmo-
nious, innocent unity with itself and with life. The infinite variety of
objects is subsumed within a higher order, illumined by a meaning that
confers on things their incommensurable value, transforming in Don
Quixotes vision a common barbers basin of metal alloy into a unique,
irreplaceable helmet of gold.
For Hegel, that original poetic condition came to an end with the mod-
ern epoch of labour, a stage of modernity in which individuals must
work towards prescribed objective ends, sometimes against their own
wishes, in keeping with a conception of social progress that requires
specializationcurtailing personal development and sacrificing
individualityin pursuit of a one-sided profession. Once this scis-
sion has occurred, the universal forces guiding human action are no
longer at home in the soul but rise before it like an external constraint,
a prosaic order of things. The abstraction and mechanization of labour
disempower the subject, counterposing to the poetry of the heart
the need to live a life that is entirely ones own, woven of experiences
whose meaning is irreplaceably individualthe prose of the world,
that anonymous web of social relations in which persons become mere
means in a social mechanism whose ends escape them. Hyperion, the
hero of Hlderlins novel-poem who dreams of the rebirth of Hellas in
a new civilization at once more harmonious and whole, tells of a life
cut off at its roots, of human beings who wereand should be once
againeverything, and instead are nothing.
98 nlr 95
The novel is a product of the triumph of this prose of the world, perceived
and affirmed philosophically as a radical historical rupture, a devastat-
ing alteration of society and life and how they can be recounteda
metaphysical turning point: the eclipse of metaphysics itself. Modernity
is domination over history and nature, a project to mould and direct
their development. Whatever that direction may be, it will induce a ver-
tiginous sense of the mutability of all that had once seemed unalterable.
Gradually the passions and perceptions, the consciousness and reason
of human beings themselves become subject to change, and so too their
canons of beauty and poetry. The novel is the perfect signifier of this uni-
versal transformation, which destroys every classical order and remnant
of a perennial poetics, dispelling any belief that Homers sun still shines
upon us. It is not hard to see why it found little favour with Croce, for
whom the dichotomy between poetry and non-poetry was immutable.
The novel is the literary form in which the subject feels at first a stranger,
sundered between a nostalgic inner life and an indifferent, disconnected
external reality. It will often recount a search for meaning that is no longer
there, an odyssey of disillusionment. Hegel hoped and expected that
the novel would be the modern bourgeois epic, whose protagonists
overcoming the adolescent need for poetry of the heartwould mature
to take their place in the concatenation of the world, submitting to the
mundane reality of the social relations that had initially dismayed them.
After passing through the Caudine Forks of disenchantment and depres-
sion, the conflict between the individual and the world would have a
happy epilogue in the acknowledgment of a social whole to belong to,
and conscious acceptance of the high price to be paidthe disempower-
ment of the individualfor historical progress.
Anti-epic
epic that fully accepts the prose of the world, indeed discovers within it
space for a life of adventure liberated from any moral code. Fieldings
Tom Jones is a real bourgeois epic, depicting the joyous correspondence
between a protagonist and a world that are equally unencumbered with
values, the second offering itself inexhaustibly to the boundless desires
of the first and the salutary conflicts that arise from them. Defoes
charactersabove all, the indestructible courtesan Moll Flanders
make and enjoy their own world, with a vital energy released by the
interchangeability of values, adopted or discarded like so many items
of clothing. The premise of this modern epic is confidence that out of
ruthless struggle and universal competition comes a greater liberty.
the close connection between progress and the violence of the changes
that realize it, where the individual risks being unseated and engulfed in
a featureless anonymity.
Extraneous to life, inactual to the time, art assumes at once its antithesis
to the world and entrapment by it. Modernity is marked by the want
of an ethical or aesthetic code, of foundational values which could give
meaning and unity to a protean existence that takes on the appearance
of a disconnected, random assortment of disparate objects. The novel is
born out of this confusion and reproduces it. Citizen of the metropolis,
emblem of modernity and allegory of transience, it dwells amid tumul-
tuous progress and gargantuan constructions, and the accumulation of
ruins they leave behind.
The novel is thus unthinkable without the new function of money, which
accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie. Money becomes a protagonist
of fiction. The great English novels of the eighteenth century revolve
around the new qualities it acquires: the rhythms of its circulation, the
mobility and fluidity with which it transforms lives, erases frontiers and
creates new ones, breaks and forges chains. Money seems to flow like
blood pulsing in the veins, in the drives of individuals liberated from
tradition and at the mercy of the world, raising them up or sweeping
them away. In a passage of Goethes Faust, Marx recognized one of the
first examples of the new demonic nature of money, an insight into
the essence of capitalism, where money does not simply permit the
acquisition of goods but transforms its users, becoming a way of being,
capable of converting anythingincluding feelings and valuesinto
anything else, as the medium of a universal interchangeability. In Defoe,
Goethe or Balzac, money and its manifold opposite uses (consumption,
investment, speculation) are inseparable from the seduction and vio-
lence that literaturehues and judgements varying according to author,
epoch and situationdepicts as the framework of encounters and con-
flicts between the individual and reality.
The novel recounts the trials of this quest, the odyssey of its failures
or, in spite of all, the long-sought harbour of meaning achieved. For
the form, born of the disintegration of the epic, could on occasion
especially in some great novels of the nineteenth centuryreconstruct
an epic sense of life as a whole. Such epics did not arise from the prose
of the world, as Hegel expected, from a totality coextensive with a purely
social mechanism, but from a totality conceived in mythico-religious
terms, the product of an agrarian society, still pre-industrial and not
yet bourgeois. Modern epic, or an art capable of grasping the totality of
life beyond all contingent divisions, is incompatible with social prose,
rejecting and transcending it. The amplitude of Tolstoys War and Peace,
which condenses its law in Natashas dance, is rooted in a natural total-
ity, and the society and ideology that correspond to it.
In American literature the epic totality finds expression not in the novel,
which typically focuses on the social sphere, but rather in the romance,
a form in which social-realist or psychological plausibility is alien to the
narrative, open instead to an intuitive and poetic vision of the world,
like that of little Pearl in Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter. The epic is not
the bourgeois novel but mythico-fantastical romance, freeas Henry
James observedof the vulgar contingency and banality of everyday life,
its gaze fixed on extreme situations and last things, the paths of des-
tiny, the burdens of sin, the scope of liberty. This American epic, still
104 nlr 95
close to the world of nature and not yet engulfed by the second nature
of technology and social relations, is often unfinished: groping in search
of some ultimate meaning in life beyond any prosaic social boundary,
it leaves the copestone to posterity, as Melville put it. This is an epos
that, as in Moby Dick and later in Faulkner, may recount the annihila-
tion of life, but not of meaning. In more recent times it has developed,
at or beyond the margins of bourgeois society, against the novel; Latin
American literature possesses a masterpiece of this kind, Grande Serto:
Veredas by Guimares Rosa, the epic of a nomadic life in the backlands
of Brazil which, through all its twists and turns, never loses a sense of
its own Faustian unity. In this case, the objective value that transcends
the single individual is not the social mediation of labour relations,
nor a subversive refusal of them in the ironic spirit of an avant-garde,
but a mythico-religious sense of the unity of life, faith in a universal
connecting the multiple.
So, like the spear of Achilles, the novel wounds and heals. From Hugo to
Dickens, from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky, a form that emerged as a splinter
from the fragmentation of time sought to recover the unity that modern
existence had shattered. It could celebrate ideals and narrate passions,
debate the great social questions of the day, inform and educate, offer a
map of fantasy and yet of knowledge, as it could also intensify the nega-
tivity of existence (an essentially modern concept), the dissociationto
irreconcilabilitybetween individuals and their lives.
The novel of the self, starting with Moritzs Anton Reiser, is about the
denial, repression and obliteration of the self. Some of the leading
heroes of the modern novelor better, of works depicting the crisis of
strong modernity and its projects of historical masteryare, in one way
or another, characters without a world and without a story: from Frdric
Moreau to Oblomov, from Niels Lyhne to Bartleby, from Josef K. to Peter
Kien. The great epic narrative and the isolated, inaccessible splinter
could come from the same author: Melville wrote not only Moby Dick
but also Bartleby the Scrivener.
No scrutiny has looked so deeply into the abyss of modernity, or its stale-
mate, as the novel. Zenos laughter, which could only come from this
form, is the last resortall the more tragic, as ironic and elusiveof
Western nihilism. Without that nihilism, the European novel as we
magris: The Novel 105
know it would not exist. Its protagonist, beneath so many and such con-
trary masks, is the bermensch theorized by Nietzschenot so different,
as Nietzsche himself acknowledged, from Dostoevskys Underground
Man: subjects undergoing a radical anthropological mutation. Like
Nietzsche, Dostoevsky had already glimpsed the imminent coming of
nihilism, in what is still a future for us, but partly also our presentthe
end of known moral values; for Nietzsche a liberation to be celebrated,
for Dostoevsky a malady to be fought.
So let us not place any particular value on the citys name. Like all big cities,
it was made up of irregularities, alternations, falls, intermittencies, colli-
sions of things and events, punctuated by unfathomable silences; of one
great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual displace-
ment of all its contending rhythms. All in all, it was like a boiling bubble
inside a pot made of the durable stuff of buildings, laws, regulations,
and historical traditions.
Endings
up questions the sciences could not answer and show us how to live in
a disintegrated world, capturing the significations of reality and of its
dissolution, mimed but also mastered in formal narrative experiments.