Conclusion

Abstract

In the past, novelists regularly exploited formats and techniques borrowed from other genres—whether from collected correspondence, memoirs, diaries, or other generic traditions. Eventually, in every instance, novelists’ pilfering came to seem hackneyed and was discarded. Of course, even today, writers continue to feel justified in taking devices and strategies from other genres. Looking for something useful, they do not hesitate to pick through the techniques of theater, poetry, cinema, essay, opera, or history. Revivals from past masterpieces are also possible. Many novelists strive to make their creations novel by expanding subject or technical scope, and practitioners shamelessly borrow wherever they can to transmit a sense of newness in the hope of attracting, stimulating, and retaining readers. The genre is not exactly parasitic, for the best authors rework and renew whatever they steal. When Gide’s narrator pretends that his L’immoraliste records the exact words of Michel’s horrifying account, for example, he is bringing a worn-out eighteenth-century device back to life (“I heard these exact words one evening,” or “I found these letters in the attic of an abandoned chateau”), but he is using the tired claim to insist on the artificiality rather than the realism of the narration. The work then becomes the struggle between reality and fantasy that he felt the novel should be.¹