“Consider Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, or Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities: What do these novels share? What kind of novels are they? Are these books truly novels, or are they another form altogether?”
“As he states at the outset of his study, the novel-essay has a “significance […] for the history of the novel and for modern culture,” since it is also “the symbolic form of the crisis of modernity.””
“Referring to one of his mentors, Franco Moretti, Ercolino reminds us that forms are “problem-solving mechanism[s].””
“But what is a novel-essay? According to the author, it is the “organic fusion of two distinct forms, the novel and the essay.” “Symbolic function,” “macroscopic features,” and “micro-morphological patterns” are grounded in both novel and essay, whose relationship allows the birth of the novel-essay. The main trait of the novel-essay is the essayistic intrusion in the novel, often by means of free indirect discourse; the role of the essay, within a novel, is to disrupt its temporal and narrative structures.”
“The history of the novel-essay parallels the crisis of modernity, from 1884–1947: tracking the sociological, political, and economic outcomes of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and Paris Commune (1871); the diffusion of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’s philosophy (known as “school of suspicion”) throughout Europe; the failure of Positivism; Einstein’s relativism theory (1905, 1916); World War I and II; the birth and the failures of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism.”
“The novel-essay is initially, at the end of 19th century, the negative counterpart of the naturalist novel.”
“In the first chapter, Ercolino shows how the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, the second Industrial Revolution, the Long Depression of 1873–1896, and the inner contradiction of capitalism precipitated the emergence of new literary forms.”
“The “development of classical electrodynamics, with energy taking center of the scientific investigation over matter, and the increasing mathematizing of physical description of reality, began to show the multidimensional nature of a world that was even more difficult to explain in terms of Newtonian mechanics.””
“Authors such as Huysmans or Strindberg, in other words, had to face the multidimensional nature of a world that was even more difficult to explain in terms of naturalist determinism. Strindberg’s “Rational Mysticism,” as it appears in the Inferno trilogy (1887–1889), is another example Ercolino takes into account to show this defection from both naturalism and positivism alike, whose inadequacy instantiated the urge for transcendence in Strindberg’s Inferno.”
“The novel’s aesthetic and ideology start changing at the end of the 19th century, given “the particular process of progressive historical, scientific, and technological acceleration” — a progressive transformation galvanized by psychoanalysis, relativity, and quantum mechanics.”
“Ercolino explains this essayistic changeover by means of the concept of mimesis: In the essayistic inserts in free indirect style, which are widespread in the novel-essay as a genre, free indirect style is a mimetic morphological device. The overlapping of the voices of the narrator and those of the characters typical of free indirect style mimes the genre indeterminateness of the essay, allowing a specific feature of the subvenient form, the essay, “to transmigrate” into the supervenient form, the novel-essay.”
“It is true that the novel-essay is a novel, but it preserves and utilizes the essay-device to “recompos[e] the fracture that occurred in the historical and social fabric of Europe between the turn of the nineteenth century and World War I.””
“He claims that symbolic forms need historical and social conditions to exist; in Dostoevsky’s case, the development of Russian history prevented him from writing a novel-essay per se. Radical ideologies, on the one hand, and structure of societies, on the other, dramatically separate Europe and Russia at the end of 19th century, not just historically, but also philosophically — the crisis of the symbolic order of modernity could not be thought or theorized by Dostoevsky through the form of the novel-essay.”
“About Musil’s unfinished masterpiece, Ercolino states that “[t]he essay is the tool used by Ulrich (and Musil) to explore the shapeless territory of the ‘nonratioid,’ the territory from which any rational certainty is banned, but which insistently demands to be investigated.””
“Ercolino argues that already in Doctor Faust we can see the postmodern need to “answer the exhaustion of literary language.” Mann was concerned to unravel the epistemological failure of modernity, and Ercolino understands the philosophical form and direction that the novel was already taking with Mann’s Doctor Faust in that light: absorbed by the postmodern age, the novel-essay resists, but devoid of its desire and need to describe the fall of modernity.”
“Ercolino does not attempt to trace this trajectory in The Novel-Essay, but by mentioning Pynchon’s Gravity Rainbow, De Lillo’s Underworld, Wallace’s Infinite Jest, or Siti’s Troppi paradisi, he briefly maps in the last page of his work what he will later call in his second book The Maximalist Novel, one of the most refined literary expressions of the cultural logic of late capitalism. The Novel-Essay is indeed a necessary step not just to understand the crisis of modernity or to study the premises of the ideology of postmodernism — it is a chapter of the history of the novel which will allow us to understand the development of our society through the mirror of literary forms.”