The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel PDF
Preview The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel
The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel Francesco Campana The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel Francesco Campana The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel Francesco Campana University of Padua Padua, Italy ISBN 978-3-030-31394-4 ISBN 978-3-030-31395-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31395-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To my parents Preface In his famous and widely discussed essay Why Bother?, now present in the collection How to Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen questions the mean- ing of a literary genre such as the social novel for the contemporary world and is struck by its manifest loss of centrality in society, especially in comparison with the past. His essay, which previously appeared in the April 1996 issue of Harper’s magazine with the title Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels, sums the prob- lem up in the following way: ‘In the nineteenth century, when Dickens and Darwin and Disraeli all read one another’s work, the novel was the preeminent medium of social instruction. A new book by Thackeray or William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that a late-December film release inspires today’ (Franzen 2002, 65). Mass and consumer society, with its new technologies and chaotic network of information, has led to the loss of the pivotal role that the social novel and literature in general played two centuries ago. This happened in favour of more direct and instant media such as television, radio, pho- tography and even journalism: ‘Today’s Baudelaires are hip-hop art- ists’, Franzen stated (Franzen 2002, 66). Through a long reflection on his personal experience—he had already published his first two novels vii viii Preface but it was still five years before The Corrections—and the discourag- ing periods regarding his social role as a writer, Franzen tells us how his perception of literature gradually changed: in the abandonment of a ‘depressive realism’ and in the passage ‘from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it’ (Franzen 2002, 92), he rediscovers a renewed sense of trust as a writer who paradoxically believes in the potentialities of literature even today. He adopts an attitude that he calls ‘tragic realism’, which is an approach to things that, without simplifying conflicts in empty and hypocritical banalities, preserves complexity and the possibility of ‘access to the dirt behind the dream of Chosenness— to the human difficulty beneath the technological ease, to the sorrow behind the pop-cultural narcosis: to all those portents on the margins of our existence’ (Franzen 2002, 92). This happened thanks to a series of personal circumstances, ranging from the discovery of the works of the anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath on the emancipatory poten- tial of reading fiction up to a letter he received from Don DeLillo that placed writing as a form of freedom and personal self-salvation bearing moments of relevance (though increasingly rare) even in contemporary society. By means of the writer, Franzen tells us about a personal evolu- tion that took place through individual circumstances, but which also has the character of a historical-cultural analysis, as well as a critical-lit- erary one. Franzen’s essay is explicitly connected with a famous debate around the possibility of the ‘great American (social) novel’. At the same time, less explicitly, it is also one of the latest contributions of another long tradition, which developed in a more international context, namely that of the end of the novel and, even more generally, the end of litera- ture, which was itself part of the discourse on the end of art. The quarrel around the end of art has countless variations, made up of continuous declarations of the end (if not death) of art and equally persistent new beginnings, and which has its origin as a theoretical discourse in Hegel’s philosophy. For Hegel, art in modernity loses its centrality and becomes ‘a thing of the past’, reaching a degree of awareness of itself that perhaps even pushes it to become something else. Especially in the twentieth century, the tradition of the end of art has often been evoked in the attempt to understand the radical and Preface ix apparently irreversible changes that the field of the arts has undergone. In fact, if one looks at figurative art in particular (but such a discourse could also be put forward for other art forms, such as music, dance and architecture), something really seems to have changed. Mainly through the revolutions of the historical avant-gardes and the new avant-gardes, figurative art as it has generally been presented and conceived for centu- ries seems to have disappeared. A new way of making and perceiving art seems to have taken over, which no longer offers us an aesthetic experi- ence to enjoy on a sensory level, but rather disorients and questions us from many directions. If one compares a gallery of Renaissance works and an international festival of contemporary art, the radical turning point seems evident. Given this background, the basic question of this book is: Does the same shift happen in literature? Has literature experienced a radical and irreversible change analogous to the figurative arts? Does literature share with figurative arts (and other arts) the same fate towards its end? The answer I intend to give is no. Literature deals with its end in a very peculiar way. It does not seem to have experienced a definitive and unavoidable change but has shown—with the means and in the ways that are proper to it—a capacity for resisting its end through contin- uous self-renewal. But then, does literature experience its own end or does it keep itself completely unaffected by a process of ending? And if it experiences any end, even in resistance to it, what kind of end are we talking about? What kind of literature is produced after the end of art? What kind of literature emerges after literature? I will argue my position by showing that literature bears key differ- ences compared to other arts. I will dwell on that difference which, within the common sphere of art in general, distinguishes literature from the rest of the arts. Then, I will retrace various traditions regard- ing the end of art, literature and the novel. Within these traditions and returning to their origin, I will therefore propose an interpretative key in the wake of Hegelian philosophy that aims to understand some fun- damental trends of contemporary literature as ways that literature has found to resist its end. I will show how literature, remaining itself and without going through the upheavals that other arts have gone through, x Preface has found its own specific strategies to go through its own end. This book thus attempts to investigate the way literature faces its end and unfolds how it continuously (and perhaps since forever) puts an end to its own end. Padua, Italy Francesco Campana Reference Franzen, J. (2002). Why Bother? In J. Franzen, How to Be Alone. Essays (pp. 55–96). New York: HarperCollins. Acknowledgements A book could be worse than it is if there was not someone telling you how you could improve it. For this reason, I am indebted to a large number of encounters, discussions and common reflections. This study is the reworking of a substantial part of my doctoral dis- sertation discussed in Padua in March 2016. Much of the knowledge in this book goes through the years of attendance at the ‘legendary’ seminar Temi e problemi della filosofia clas- sica tedesca, organised by Professors Francesca Menegoni, Luca Illetterati and Antonio Nunziante at the University of Padua. My sincere thanks go to them and to the participants of this seminar. I would also like to thank the hegelpd—Classical German Philosophy Research Group of the same university for all these extraordinary years. During my Ph.D. years, I had the opportunity to spend two periods as a visiting Ph.D. student that have been fundamental. The first one at the Forschungszentrum für Klassische Deutsche Philosophie/Hegel-Archiv of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum under the supervision of Professor Birgit Sandkaulen. I would like to thank her most sincerely for her hospitality and for the advice she has continued to give me over the years. The sec- ond period was spent at the Philosophy Department of the Columbia xi
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