There is a famed and frequently quoted passage in Epic and Novel in which the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, uses the terms «novel-ise» and «novel-isation» in order to refer to the overpowering embrace that the new narrative model in prose is exercising over other literary genres. From the mid-Eighteenth century tragedy, epic and, even, lyric poetry were becoming «freer and more plastic», Bakhtin observed. Their language was renewing itself and was making room for laughter, irony and a sense of parody. The highlighting of established rhetoric, and the drift that the former were undergoing towards deeper layers of verbal expressionism, accentuated «the problem-ridden aspect, the specific semantic aperture and the real-life contact with the incomplete and ever-changing contemporary age».
It would not be very easy to deny the value of such lines, reminding us, as they do, of two crucial elements in our discus-sion. 1) Above all, the systemic state of conflict involving the novel since its very appearance. Bakhtin spoke of «domination». He explained that the new genre «replaced» previous genres, «unveiling» them, «attracting them in an imperious fashion» and, thus, evoking the «drama of literary development in the modern age». 2) Secondly, let us consider the totalising character of the process of «novel-isation». It does not encourage, in competing genres, any solely thematic repercussions but it very decisively broadens expressive opportunity – from the language to the treatment of materials and from the tone to the critical distance (with respect to the world represented).
The establishment of the novel in early bourgeois society was thus neither peaceful nor confined to peripheral and incidental aspects of literary production. It was a global phenomenon and was able to infringe upon a century-long setup and, therefore, upon the whole body of criteria of the Ancien Régime.
When we speak of writing in figures and of storybook iconism generated by the culture of visual media it is not our desire to position ourselves at such a pivotal level. We must emphasise this point strongly. However, we may subject the Bakhtin model to a certain overturning that is full of historiographical implications – perhaps a sort of «media coverage» of the novel type which, when it reaches its aesthetic fullness begins to undergo the pressure of other codes that are as dynamic and exchangeable. A point when the novel begins to receive more that it manages to transmit from the external environment in terms of suggestion, stimulus and model.
This phenomenon was clearly outlined, perhaps for the first time, by the American critic, Leslie Fiedler. I am referring to the essay, Cross the Border – Close the Gap, written in 1970. In this essay, at the moment when he started considering – and nominating – the postmodern, Fiedler’s attention was captured, above all else, by the crisis in elitist and twentieth-century poetics – the «Eliotic church», with a corrosive formula – in face of the gathering popularity of mass literary forms («pop forms»).
In his opinion, these «forms» coincided with rhetorical and expressive modules that were more connected to a new and more widespread visual culture. «Genres, he wrote, most associated with the exploitation by the mass media: notably, the Western, Science Fiction and Pornography».
The media coverage of the novel, in the sense we mean, is, in any case, a very premature phenomenon. Since the very first decades of the Nineteenth century, on account of its plastic nature and its openness towards the extraliterary, the novel underwent an undeniable sort of «twisting» in terms of periodical journalism that was, at that time, being rapidly developed. Suffice it to mention here the fascination that nineteenth-century writers had for the faits divers, news stories. Think, too, of the rise of the roman feuilleton (roman populaire), with the new rhythm of arsis and thesis, condensation and suspense, in tune with the daily pace of the means that was supporting it. [TO CONTINUE READING, please click here]
