DIGRESSION ON THE NOVEL

This essay attempts to define the "essence" of the novel. After asking about the possible links between philosophy and literature (or philosophy and the novel), it becomes involved in a process of dialectical reflections in which a series of antithetical notions are put into play in search of a final synthesis of the "being of the novel". The result only acquires concretion towards the end of the essay. The novel is defined as one of the literary arts, as a genre that as such is indefinable due to its lack of formal limits, "the genre of the genres"; nevertheless, this apparent impracticability of a formal analysis of the novel brings the writer to confirm the "necessity" of ascribing the novel to a genre and in what is considered a first approach to the essence of the novel, he finally defines three of its essential properties: the fact of being a narration, narrating through a determined rhythm and the fact of narrating "what happened or what can happen"; in other words, "without excluding on principle nothing of what really or possibly could occur".