Abstract
In this chapter, I apply and test the theoretical acquisitions of the previous chapters to today’s concrete literary production. The chapter also aims to provide a possible critical understanding of contemporary literature. I introduce the subject with some considerations on how a philosophy of literature cannot avoid dealing with the concreteness of its object of study. On the one hand, I identify in postmodern literature a kind of literature that tends towards philosophisation, i.e. a deconstructive reflection on its own configuration. On the other hand, I consider the nonfiction novel as an example of literature that tends towards ordinariness. Both kinds of literature represent polarities between which there is an infinite multiplicity of intermediate cases, which I consider at the end. Through these modalities, that is to say philosophisation and ordinariness, literature always knows how to renew itself in order to remain itself and thus resists its own end.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, the side of philosophy is emphasised with respect to that of religion because it refers to the readings of the end of art which result in its philosophisation; that is, it assumes this discourse in order to integrate it and thus, in part, to criticise it. It must be remembered, however, that this kind of reading is not entirely faithful to the Hegelian text, because not only does it elide one of the three forms of absolute spirit, but also because it understands these three forms hierarchically and diachronically, without taking into account the dialectical relationship that concerns them as different ways of expressing the same content.
- 2.
Pippin writes: ‘It is possible, for example, to see the modernist novels of James, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Musil et al. as presenting a historically distinct representation of human subjectivity, in unprecedented relations of social dependence and independence not capturable by even the greatest ‘realist’ novels and so requiring a distinct aesthetic form, with shifting, unstable and highly provisional points of view and constant experimentation with authorial authority and narrative coherence’ (Pippin 2008, 416).
- 3.
‘Literature thus entered a phase of experimentation from which it has not yet emerged: from Günter Grass to Salman Rushdie, from Ôe Kenzaburô to Gao Xingjian, the movement has taken on a global dimension. The forms open up, the styles clash, the fiction itself denounces its own illusions. And the vertiginous burst of the novel offers literature a magnificent final bouquet’ (Marx 2005, 180).
- 4.
The presence of Cervantes in City of Glass is discussed in Musarra-Schrøder (2009).
- 5.
For a recent discussion of the contemporary novel as a ‘hyper-novel’, that is, as a complex and plural network of the production of thought, cf. Regazzoni (2018).
- 6.
- 7.
Infinite Jest is, overall, a 1079 page novel. Of these, about one hundred pages are of footnotes.
- 8.
Again, the fact that literature crosses a scientific or essayistic dimension does not seem to be a characteristic of this kind of novel, but it seems to be present also in past eras. Ercolino analysed the topic with regard to European literature between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, identifying a proper literary genre that embodies the crisis of modernity (Ercolino 2014b).
- 9.
In addition to having studied philosophy at university, philosophical themes and questions return on several occasions in his fictional and nonfictional writings. For instance, The Broom of the System, his first novel, is described by the author as a ‘conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida’ (Lipsky 2010, 35). The relationship between Wallace and philosophy traverses the essays of Bolger and Korb (2014).
- 10.
P. D’Angelo discusses the nonfiction novel as an example of the ‘end of literature’ with particular attention to the novel Resistere non serve a niente by Walter Siti in D’Angelo (2013, 197–207).
- 11.
Very trivially, in bookstore catalogs, even if with some difficulties in some cases, this trend and the examples that will be proposed end up in the ‘narrative’ section.
- 12.
- 13.
The rise of the nonfiction novel in ’60, especially in relation to the crisis of the novel, is tackled in Hollowell (1977, 3–20).
- 14.
Karl attempts a definition and corrects the label ‘non-fiction’ to ‘non-novelistic fiction’; he thus brings all the attention to the journalistic side of the narrative and reduces, perhaps too much, the artistic and literary contribution of this form. He writes: ‘[t]he non-fiction novel is misnamed. It should be called “non-novelistic fiction,” since it transforms fact into fiction without using the full dimensions of a novelistic sensibility. The stress in this form of writing – whether one labels it “new” or “higher” journalism, “non-fiction novel,” or some other variants – is on the self of the author intruding into work that is factual’ (Karl 1983, 560).
- 15.
The anthology collects texts by Rex Reed, Gay Telese, Richard Goldstein, Michael Herr, Truman Capote, Joe Eszterhas, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Nicholas Tomalin, Barbara L. Goldsmith, Joe McGinniss, George Plimpton, James Mills, John Gregory Dunne, John Sack, Joan Didion,’Adam Smith’, Robert Christgau, Garry Wills.
- 16.
For a reading that emphasises the importance of considering the significant detachment from the tradition of the conventional realist novel and instead underlines the links with that of American modernist fiction, see Smart (1985, 1–28).
- 17.
Peter Lamarque addresses these conditions in depth, starting from the philosophical point of view of the distinction between fiction conceived as the form and nonfiction as the content of the nonfiction novel in Lamarque (2014, especially 89–94).
- 18.
The question of truth as a founding and problematic element in the definition of the nonfiction novel is addressed in Lehman (1997, 1–39).
- 19.
- 20.
A critical discussion of Gomorrah as autofiction is present in Giglioli (2011, 73–79). In general, Giglioli identifies autofiction as one of the possible outcomes of literature (in this case contemporary Italian literature), which seems to have reached a moment of strong transformation, where in the general absence of actual traumas there is a growing need to search for them in representation and self-representation (cf. Giglioli 2011, 53–98).
- 21.
The autofiction novel is usually catalogued as a specification of the nonfiction novel, a subcategory of it, but it does not seem entirely wrong, in the macrocategory of nonfiction, to put forward the hypothesis that it is, instead, its necessary consequence, its constitutive counterpart. The debate on the autofiction novel is vast and varied, for a general theoretical framework see Colonna (2004) and Gasparini (2008, 295–327).
- 22.
Siti (2013).
- 23.
On the possibilities and limits of realism, see also Hamon (2015).
- 24.
As known, for Walton, to be fiction is enough to be a ‘prop in a game of make-believe’, even if limited or peripheral. This implies including in fiction works that have fictional elements, but which we tend to find difficult to consider entirely as fiction, such as Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (for an in-depth discussion of Walton’s position starting from the issue of the nonfiction novel, see Lamarque 2014, 94–97).
- 25.
As Lehman explains it well: ‘the decision to engage a nonfictional text triggers a powerful and ongoing dilemma for the author (who implicates herself as a creator of, and as a character in, the text she fashions) and for the reader (who implicates himself as a character in, and as a consumer of, the text he encounters)’ (Lehman 1997, 7).
- 26.
It is interesting to note that Benjamin Rutter, in the opening of his volume, describes Wood as ‘the contemporary critic closest in spirit to what I think of as Hegel’s philosophy of art’ (Rutter 2010, 1). Moreover, in his Introduction Rutter proposes a Hegelian reading of the observations present in Wood’s criticisms. Starting from the situation of contemporary American literature, there are traces of correspondences, which certainly should not be taken literally—says the author—but which in a certain sense reveal something Hegelian: thus, DeLillo and Schlegel would be the ironics; Pynchon and Jean Paul, the humorists; Franzen and Novalis, the beautiful souls (Rutter 2010, 1–5).
- 27.
Wood describes very well what is one of the key themes of the novel: ‘Family is the great determinism. One of the subtlest and most moving aspects of Franzen’s often distinguished book is the way he develops the idea of “correction” as a doomed struggle against this determinism’ (Wood 2004b, 203). On the meaning of family dynamics in Franzen’s novel, see also Burn (2008, 98).
- 28.
Ercolino, regarding Underworld and White Teeth, discusses the ‘omnivorous relationship with time’ (Ercolino 2014a, 83).
- 29.
‘Clearly Smith does not lack for power of invention. The problem is there is too much of it. As realism it is incredible; as satire, it is cartoonish; as cartoon, it is too realistic […]. It is all shiny externality, a caricature’ (Wood 2004a, 183).
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Campana, F. (2019). The Contemporary Novel and the End of Literature. In: The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31395-1_5
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