Introduction

Abstract

If storytelling is as old as humanity, its crisis may be as old as the novel. In ‘The Storyteller’ (‘Der Erzähler’, 1936), Walter Benjamin (1999: 84, 93) suggests that the rise of the modern novel manifests a crisis of the art of storytelling, a crisis of the ‘communicability of experience’ that came to characterize the modern age and culminated in the First World War and its aftermath. Such an experience defined even more acutely the generation that witnessed the Second World War and the ensuing crisis of European humanism. When Alain Robbe-Grillet declared in 1957 that ‘to tell a story has become strictly impossible’, he voiced a sentiment that was widely shared among his contemporaries, particularly by novelists — such as Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute — whom the literary press, in the very same year, began to call nouveaux romanciers.¹ Throughout the 1950s and 1960s they played a seminal role in a thoroughgoing problematization of narrative as a form of representing human existence and of the subject as the agent of narrative sense-making. The nouveau roman thus prepared the ground for and took part in what was once polemically dubbed the ‘death of the subject’, but what now appears more like an ongoing process of rethinking subjectivity.