Two Theories
Franco Moretti
L et me begin with two images: the character-networks of Antigone and Les
Misérables. Both plots have been turned into networks on the basis of the
interactions among characters, and yet the outcome couldn’t be more un-
like.1 While Sophocles’s system is small, tight, and visibly centered around the fa-
tal figure of Creon, strategos of Thebes, Hugo’s crowded network shows dozens of
figures with a single link to the body of the text, evoking the “minor-minor” char-
acters of Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many.2 One can still study minor characters
in tragedy, of course–“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead”–or the centripe-
tal pull of certain scenes in Fielding, or Dostoevsky, or even Ulysses. Aber, at bottom,
tragedies and novels pose different questions to critical reflection, encouraging it
to move in opposite directions. And that is indeed what the theory of tragedy and
the theory of the novel have done.
B eginning with Plato and Aristotle–and then Hume, Voltaire, Schelling,
Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche . . . Scheler, Unamuno, Hei-
degger, Camus . . . Foucault, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Žižek, Diener, Menke
–philosophers have dominated the theory of tragedy. At times, they have done so
by addressing strictly aesthetic issues, like the structure of tragic plot in the Poet-
ics, the one-sidedness of dramatic characters in Hegel’s Aesthetics, or the function
of the chorus in The Birth of Tragedy; more often, they have taken tragedy to be
the ideal terrain for general issues like the threat of emotions to political stability
(The Republic), the clash between liberty and the course of the world (Schelling’s
Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism), the struggle between the impera-
tives of the State and the bonds of the family (Hegel’s Phenomenology), the inter-
nal contradictions of the will (Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation),
the distinction between ancient pain and modern sorrow (Kierkegaard’s Either/
Or), all the way to Nietzsche’s critique of the homo theoreticus, Lukács’s aptly ti-
tled “Metaphysics of Tragedy,” and Heidegger’s “attempt . . . to assess who the
human being is” via his reading of Antigone’s second choral ode in the Introduction
to Metaphysics.
Under the weight of these questions, the analysis of a specific literary form
that was the object of the Poetics was replaced by a philosophy of “the tragic” as
a self-standing entity: an “essentialization” or, better, a “derealization of trage-
dy,” as William Marx has called it,3 which was further exacerbated by the frequent
16
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© 2021 by Franco Moretti Published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_01831
Figur 1
Antigone
Eurydice
Haemon
chorus
messenger
guard
Teiresias
Creon
Antigone
boy
servants
Ismene
“Four hours of action, that become this. . . . What do we gain, by turning time into space? Erste
of all, Das: when we watch a play, we are always in the present: what is on stage, Ist; and then
it disappears. Hier, nothing ever disappears. What is done, cannot be undone. Once the Ghost
shows up at Elsinore things change forever, whether he is on scene or not, because he is nev-
er not there in the network. The past becomes past, Ja, but it never disappears from our per-
ception of the plot.” Source: Franco Moretti, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” New Left Review
68 (2011).
focus on just a handful of notions–“catharsis,” “collision,” “reconciliation,” the
chorus–as the key to the whole enterprise.4 The “generic understandings of trag-
edy” in Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Hölderlin, Joshua Billings has
written, are “substantially based on a single play” (typically, Oedipus Tyrannus or
Antigone);5 in the past two hundred years, we have managed to add a couple more.
Within literary studies, the theory of tragedy is clearly the model for the study of a
single form with an exclusive canon, and very sharp boundaries.
17
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150 (1) Winter 2021Franco Moretti
German teamster
German teamster
Road mender
Road mender
Postillion
Postillion
Arras hotel keeper
Arras hotel keeper
Arras resident
Arras resident
Booking clerk
Booking clerk
Arras lawyer
Arras lawyer
Bailiff
Bailiff
Judge
Judge
Cochepaille
Cochepaille
Champmathieu
Champmathieu
Brevet
Brevet
Defense counsel
Defense counsel
Chenildieu
Chenildieu
Prosecuting
Prosecuting
attorney
attorney
Bamatabois
Bamatabois
Montfermeuil
Montfermeuil
coachman
coachman
Boatswain
Boatswain
Toll keeper
Toll keeper
Louis-Philippe
Louis-Philippe
Duc d’Havré
Duc d’Havré
Tholomyès
Tholomyès
Zephine
Zephine
WaiterWaiter
Favourite
Favourite
Listolier
Listolier
Fameuil
Fameuil
Two Theories
Figur 2
Les Misérables
Door keeper
Door keeper
Kitchen boy
Kitchen boy
Tavern keeper
Tavern keeper
Peasant’s wife
Peasant’s wife
Priest, Digne
Priest, Digne
Scaufflaire’s wife
Scaufflaire’s wife
Dowager M-s-M
Dowager M-s-M
Cashier
Cashier
Foreman, Grasse
Foreman, Grasse
Gendarme, Digne
Gendarme, Digne
Marquise de R
Marquise de R
Whole
Novel
Sister’s son
Sister’s son
Valjean’s sister
Valjean’s sister
Marie-Claude
Marie-Claude
Prison guard
Prison guard
Labarre
Labarre
Isabeau
Isabeau
Fisherman,
Fisherman,
Digne
Digne
Digne peasant
Digne peasant
M. Scaufflaire
M. Scaufflaire
Petit Gervais
Petit Gervais
Jailer, Digne
Jailer, Digne
Arras coachman
Arras coachman
Stable boy
Stable boy
Old woman
Old woman
Old woman’s son
Old woman’s son
Innkeeper’s wife
Innkeeper’s wife
Portress, M-s-M
Portress, M-s-M
Wheelright
Wheelright
Saint Pol Servant girl
Saint Pol Servant girl
Chastelar mayor
Chastelar mayor
Curé, Digne
Curé, Digne
Mayor of Senez
Mayor of Senez
Cravatte
Cravatte
Shepherd boy
Shepherd boy
Conventionist
Conventionist
Countess de Lô
Countess de Lô
Senator
Senator
Géborand
Géborand
Three gendarmes
Three gendarmes
Napoleon
Napoleon
Hospital director
Hospital director
Mountain curé
Mountain curé
Champtercier
Champtercier
Condemned to death
Condemned to death
Bishop Myriel
Bishop Myriel
Mme Magloire
Mme Magloire
Mme Boischevron
Mme Boischevron
Old soldier
Old soldier
Paris barber
Paris barber
Secondhand dealer
Secondhand dealer
Drunk coachman
Drunk coachman
Sergeant, Imprimérie
Sergeant, Imprimérie
Three concierges
Three concierges
Ragpicker
Ragpicker
Poor girl
Poor girl
Bourgeois
Bourgeois
Sohn
Sohn
Bourgeois
Bourgeois
man
man
Magnon
Magnon
Mlle Baptistine
Mlle Baptistine
Mlle Vaubois
Mlle Vaubois
Younger child
Younger child
Older child
Older child
Babet’s
Babet’s
girlfriend
girlfriend
Théodule
Théodule
Doctor,
Doctor,
Gillenormand
Gillenormand
Paris baker
Paris baker
Dandy
Dandy
Gavroche
Gavroche
Basque
Basque
Mlle
Mlle
Gillenormand
Gillenormand
Count Lamothe
Count Lamothe
Nicolette
Nicolette
Baroness de T
Baroness de T
M. Gillenormand
M. Gillenormand
Concierge,
Concierge,
Gillenormand
Gillenormand
Gribier
Gribier
Mother Innocent
Mother Innocent
Fauchelevent
Fauchelevent
Parisian coachman
Parisian coachman
Marius’s servant
Marius’s servant
Concierge, Verrerie
Concierge, Verrerie
NavetNavet
Card player
Card player
Bossuet
Bossuet
Grantaire
Grantaire
Matelotte
Matelotte
Feuilly
Feuilly
Sewermen
Sewermen
Porter,
Porter,
R. de l’Ouest
R. de l’Ouest
Government
Government
troops
troops
Cosette
Cosette
Courfeyrac
Courfeyrac
MariusMarius
Jean Valjean
Jean Valjean
Toussaint
Toussaint
Soldiers
Soldiers
Combeferre
Combeferre
Enjolras
Enjolras
Mme Burgon
Mme Burgon
Javert’s coachman
Javert’s coachman
Landlady, Gorbeau
Landlady, Gorbeau
Peddler
Peddler
Gibolette
Gibolette
JolyJoly
Prouvaire
Prouvaire
Insurgent
Insurgent
workers
workers
Bahorel
Bahorel
M. Mabeuf
M. Mabeuf
Mme Hucheloup
Mme Hucheloup
Minister of agriculture
Minister of agriculture
Minister’s wife
Minister’s wife
Gardener
Gardener
Mother Plutarch
Mother Plutarch
Anonymous worker
Anonymous worker
Javert
Javert
Azelma
Azelma
Babet
Babet
Montparnasse
Montparnasse
Mme Victurnien
Mme Victurnien
Fantine
Fantine
Thénardier
Thénardier
Mme Thénardier
Mme Thénardier
Deuxmilliards
Deuxmilliards
Gueulemer
Gueulemer
Pontmercy’s
Pontmercy’s
servant
servant
Colonel Pontmercy
Colonel Pontmercy
Doctor,
Doctor,
Vernon
Vernon
Doctor,
Doctor,
Valjean
Valjean
Eponine
Eponine
Claquesous
Claquesous
Brujon
Brujon
Boulatruelle
Boulatruelle
Panchaud
Panchaud
Mme Pontmercy
Mme Pontmercy
Abbé Mabeuf
Abbé Mabeuf
Concierge,
Concierge,
l’Homme Armé
l’Homme Armé
Police sergeant
Police sergeant
M-s-M
M-s-M
Guard, La Force
Guard, La Force
Doctor M-s-M
Doctor M-s-M
Concierge’s
Concierge’s
husband
husband
Porter,
Porter,
barricade
barricade
Dahlia
Dahlia
Blachevelle
Blachevelle
Barber
Barber
Furniture seller
Furniture seller
Itinerant dentist
Itinerant dentist
Thénardiers’ neighbor
Thénardiers’ neighbor
Factory supervisor
Factory supervisor
Landlord
Landlord
Marguerite
Marguerite
Hospital servant
Hospital servant
Sister Simplice
Sister Simplice
Sister Perpétue
Sister Perpétue
“The novel has many, many more characters than readers (myself included) remember or
even notice while reading. Most of these forgotten, unrecognized characters are nameless,
play a marginal role in the novel’s plot, appear only briefl y before disappearing without leav-
ing a trace. . . . I would argue, Jedoch, that their presence is of the utmost importance since
they stand precisely for ‘les misérables’ of the novel’s title. Thus our habitual reading practices
demonstrate the problem Hugo sought to bring to our attention: the invisibility of the misera-
ble ones to the social world we, the readers, represent.” Source: Michal P. Ginsburg, “Charac-
ters and Characters’ Networks in Les Misérables,” Visualizing Les Misérables, https://lesmiserables
.mla.hcommons.org/.
S ocrates was said to be a friend of Euripides; Plato, to have composed trag-
edies himself. True or not (almost certainly not), these views express the
fact that the study of tragedy arose simultaneously with tragedy itself. Für
18
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its part, the theory of the novel took shape approximately two millennia after the
composition of the earliest novels. Almost certainly due to the feeling that the nov-
el was an illegitimate form, with no place within the spectrum of classical genres,
this colossal hiatus between texts and theory was filled by all sorts of short-term
commentaries, generally dismissive or downright censorious. Philosophical in-
terest shrank to a few great intuitions of German romanticism, the most memo-
rable of which–Schlegel’s fragment 116, from the Atheneum of 1798–pursued the
exact opposite of an essentialization of novelistic form:
Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim is not merely to reunite all
the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. Es
tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry
of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and life and soci-
ety poetical; poeticize wit and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid
matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor.6
Philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, prose, Kritik, nature, life, society, wit, instruk-
tion, humor . . . Too much! In der Praxis, this universal-progressive utopia was dis-
articulated among a plurality of critic-historians–Shklovsky, Lukács, Bakhtin,
Auerbach, Watt, Barthes, Jameson–with the occasional incursions of anthro-
pologists (Claude Lévi-Strauss, René Girard), social scientists (Benedict Ander-
Sohn), Historiker (Mona Ozouf ), or psychoanalysts (Marthe Robert).7 Darüber hinaus,
those two millennia during which novels were being written, but not written
um, created a literary landscape where–in lieu of the handful of works writ-
ten in a single language over a couple of generations addressed in the Poetics–
theorists had to confront thousands of texts of all sizes and structures, in prose
and in verse, from disparate epochs, languages, and places. Having to account for
Chrétien and Cervantes, Sterne and Melville and Kafka–and eventually also for
Genji and The Story of the Stone, Noli me tangere, Macunaíma, and The Interpreters–
forced literary analysis into uncharted territory: if the study of tragedy had al-
ways been openly and un-self-consciously Athenocentric, the theory of the novel
had to come to terms–however slowly and reluctantly–with the mare magnum
of Weltliteratur.8 For all practical purposes, the two theories inhabited different
worlds.
As is often the case, geography had morphological consequences as well, Und
the theory of the novel quickly discovered that it needed to find room–conceptual
room–for the kaleidoscope of novelistic subgenres. Their proliferation is not
only a feature of modern literary systems (as in the forty-four British subgenres
that I once reconstructed):9 the decades around 1200 had already been singled
out by Cesare Segre for their “extraordinary eidogenetic activity”–“a thorough
inventory of representable reality, from the roman d’aventure to the roman courti-
san, from the roman intimiste to the roman burlesque or comique, from the roman ex-
19
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150 (1) Winter 2021Franco Moretti
otique to the roman picaresque”10–while Andrew Plaks had traced the same pattern
in premodern China,11 and Tomas Hägg, even earlier in time, had recognized it as
the original matrix of the ancient Greek novel.12 Theoretical reflection inclined
toward historical phenomenology: still sternly logical in Lukács’s tripartite Theo-
ry, more open in Bakhtin’s interplay of local forms and main novelistic “lineages,”
and completely explicit in the gusto for morphological ramifications of recent at-
tempts like Pavel’s and Mazzoni’s.13 In fact, the most distinctive form taken by the
theory of the novel may well be the unplanned collective cartography of specific
subgenres: from Lukács’s Historical Novel, Rico’s Novela picaresca, Bollème’s Biblio-
thèque bleue, and Vinaver’s Rise of Romance to, more recently, Catherine Gallagher
on the industrial novel, Katie Trumpener on the “national tale,” and Stefano Er-
colino’s dyptich on the maximalist and essayistic novel.14
“A group containing many diversified species,” wrote the British ecologist G. E.
Hutchinson in an essay that has become legendary, “will be able to seize new evo-
lutionary opportunities more easily than an undiversified group.”15 They are the
right words to understand the planetary success of the novel: as new social groups
gained access to literacy, the novel’s formal diversification allowed it to swiftly
occupy–“the novel permeates with its colour all of modern literature” observed
Schlegel in the Athenaeum–the cultural niches that were opening up. Hier, zu,
the difference with tragedy is unmistakable. The latter had long dominated the
literary field, Natürlich, but without ever changing the field itself: majestically tow-
ering above all other forms, it had left them free to pursue their less exalted aims.
Not so the novel, welche, by relentlessly “parod[ying] other genres,” interfered di-
rectly with their development until, as Schlegel had prophesized, the entire liter-
ary space became indeed pervasively “novelized.”16
A philosophy of the tragic; a phenomenology of novelistic subgenres. Nicht
überraschenderweise, the interaction between history and form differs markedly
in the two traditions. “Aeschylus increased the number of actors from
one to two,” wrote Aristotle, “reduced the choral component, and made speech
play the leading role. Three actors and scene painting came with Sophocles.”17
And this was it: “tragedy ceased to evolve, since it had achieved its own nature.”
Tragedy continued to evolve, to be sure, but not that much, really, in the two-and-
a-half millennia that have elapsed since the Poetics. Between the direct reincarna-
tions of great ancient figures–mostly women: Medea, Elektra, Iphigenia, Helen,
Hekuba, Phaedra, Antigone–and more subterranean metamorphoses (Oedipus
turning into Hamlet, Sigismundo, Don Carlos, Gregers Werle), the theory of trag-
edy has had to measure itself against this stubborn vitality of the tragic past: A
spectral longue durée in which the initial form has been exceptionally successful at
resisting historical change. Though never quite a narrative of decline–after all,
how could it: Shakespeare, Calderon, Racine, Büchner, Ibsen–the study of trag-
20
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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesTwo Theories
edy has thus been characterized by an increasingly fatalistic mood, well encapsu-
lated–The Death of Tragedy–by its major postwar bestseller.
The Death of Tragedy, The Rise of the Novel. No gloom at all in the other camp,
and not much respect for the past, entweder. Theory of the novel, theory of the new.
“We have invented the productivity of the spirit,” declares one of Lukács’s most
eloquent pages,18 and one couldn’t choose a better motto for an aesthetics of mo-
dernity. “Other kinds of poetry are finished,” had observed Schlegel in the Ath-
enaeum, but “the romantic kind of poetry should forever be becoming”; “only
that which is itself developing can comprehend development,” echoed Bakh-
tin in “Epic and Novel.”19 Here, historical change–Bakhtin’s “present in all its
openendedness”–is no longer an obstacle to morphological achievement, aber die
very basis of its unprecedented plasticity.
W hy tragedy? Answers have converged around its ethico-political sig-
nificance,20 from Aristotle’s Delphic dictum–“through pity and fear
accomplishing catharsis”21–to Christian warnings on the hazards of
worldly greatness, early modern awe at the implacable energy of ambition and the
antinomies of freedom in German idealism. “Speaking in general,” Leo Strauss
has observed, “pre-modern thought placed the accent on duties, and rights, Wann
they were considered at all, were viewed only as a consequence of duties.”22 An
emphasis on duties: “the jurisdiction of the stage begins where the domain of sec-
ular laws ends,” declared Schiller in his 1784 speech on the influence of the the-
ater: “only here do the great of the world hear what they never or seldom hear–
Truth–and see what they never or rarely see: Man (den Menschen).”23
This ethico-political dominant has made it notoriously difficult to spell out
what kind of pleasure is associated with tragic form. Schiller’s “Of the Cause of
Pleasure We Derive from Tragic Objects” has much to say about reason, ethics,
and even pain–“the highest moral pleasure is always accompanied by pain”24–
and very little about enjoyment. Even The Birth of Tragedy, which provided the
most celebrated attempt in the opposite direction, sounds often like a petitio prin-
cipii about the “health” of pre-Socratic Greece–“what then would be the origin
of tragedy? Perhaps joy, Stärke, overflowing health, excessive abundance?”25–
rather than a genuine account of the sources of tragic pleasure; while the famous
paragraph on the world being “justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon,” rests
for its part on a Wagnerian mood that would have been inconceivable in the ages
before Tristan.26
Why the novel? “Caramelos y novelas andan juntos en el mundo,” wrote Do-
mingo Sarmiento around the middle of the nineteenth century: “candy and nov-
els go hand-in-hand in the world, and the culture of a nation can be measured by
how much sugar they consume and how many novels they read.”27 Sugar had been
a protagonist of the eighteenth-century “consumer revolution,” and Sarmiento’s
21
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150 (1) Winter 2021Franco Moretti
sarcasm highlights the novel’s status as the archetypal literary commodity–one
that promises easy and immediate gratification. “Unlike other genres,” observed
Lukács, the novel “has a caricatural twin almost indistinguishable from itself . . .:
the entertainment novel.”28 Where the problem, it seems, is less the existence
of Jack Sheppard or The Wide Wide World than the fact that all novels incorporate
at least some of the vulgarity of Unterhaltungslektüre (entertainment novel). Too
much sugar, in the novel’s recipe, whence the Sisyphean attempt to “nobilitate” it
(Fielding, Flaubert, James, Proust) by severing all links with plebeian taste.
Too much pain, too much candy. Each in its own way, tragedy and the novel
seem to drift away from the “right” amount of aesthetic pleasure, forcing their re-
spective theories to struggle with this lack of measure. A problem? I don’t think
Also. As two extreme cases, tragedy and the novel help us delimit opposite dimen-
sions of the aesthetic realm, suggesting that its pleasure should not be seen as a
fixed category, but as a spectrum of divergent outcomes. It is one thing to concen-
trate on a play about the fate of the polis knowing that we may be involved in it,
and quite another to lose ourselves in an improbable adventure that we’ll never
Erfahrung; but there is pleasure in both, and we should try to recognize the cen-
ters of gravity around which it has clustered over time. A historical anthropology
of literary pleasure(S) will not by itself unify the two theoretical traditions, Aber
will at least place them within a single conceptual landscape. That would be a new
starting point.
about the author
Franco Moretti, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2006, is the Danily C.
and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Stanford Univer-
Stadt. He is the author of Graphs, Karten, Bäume: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005),
The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013), Distant Reading (2013), and Far Coun-
versuchen (2019) and editor of The Novel (2006).
Endnoten
1 In the case of the Antigone network, created by Holst Katsma, an interaction is defined as
an explicit verbal exchange among characters; in the case of Les Misérables, to be found
at “Visualizing Les Misérables,” https://lesmiserables.mla.hcommons.org/, they include
“all encounters, whether they are shown or told.” The two texts, incidentally, have not
been chosen at random. Apart from being very well-known, they embody, if not exactly
extreme cases–Persians has a smaller cast than Antigone, and The Story of the Stone a larger
one than Les Misérables–the inner tendency of each genre toward compression or expan-
sion of their character-systems.
22
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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesTwo Theories
2 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
3 William Marx, Le Tombeau d’Œdipe: Pour une tragédie sans tragique (Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 2012), 57. The shift from tragedy to the tragic is at the core of Peter Szondi’s
Essay on the Tragic, which opens with the trenchant assertion that “since Aristotle there
has been a theory of tragedy. Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the
tragic.” Peter Szondi, Essay on the Tragic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2002 [1961]), 1.
4 The never-ending debate on the Greek chorus is the most arresting instance of this state
of affairs, from the grand cognitive metaphors of German philosophy (“living wall,”
“ideal spectator,” “Dionysian cortege”) to the factual and interpretive controversies
among contemporary classicists (Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, Calame, Goldhill, Jung,
and more).
5 Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2014), 11.
6 Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments” [1798], in Classic and Romantic German Aesthet-
ics, Hrsg. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 249; italics
mine.
7 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965
[1961]); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners (London: Cape, 1968); Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology II (New York: Basic Books, 1976 [1973]); Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); Mona Ozouf, Les Aveux du ro-
man: Le XIXe siècle entre Ancien Régime et Révolution (Paris: Fayard, 2001); and Marthe Rob-
ert, Origins of the Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980 [1972]).
8 If one looks at the most influential recent collection on the topic–Christopher Prender-
gast, Hrsg., Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004)–world literature appears to be
unimaginable without the novel, but barely affected by the existence (or not) of trag-
edy: not only is the presence of the two forms disproportionately tilted in favor of the
ehemalig (with a ratio of about twenty to one), but the term tragedy does not even qualify
for an entry in the index to the volume.
9 See Franco Moretti, Graphs, Karten, Bäume: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso,
2005), 18–33.
10 Cesare Segre, “What Bakhtin Left Unsaid: The Case of the Medieval Romance,” in Ro-
Mance: Generic Transformations from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, Hrsg. Kevin Brownlee and
Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover and London: New England University Press,
1985), 34.
11 See Andrew H. Plaks, “The Novel in Premodern China,” in The Novel: Geschichte, Geography,
and Culture, Bd. 1, Hrsg. Franco Moretti (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006
[2002]), where he points to the existence of various noncanonical genres, einschließlich
“talent and beauty” stories, “military romances,” “wandering heroes,” “court cases,”
“fantastic journeys,” and “encounters with ghosts and demons,” plus, Natürlich, Die
variegated erotic corpus of Chinese prose.
12 Tomas Hägg’s key texts are The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991); and the more synthetic and radical statement in “The Ancient Greek Novel: A
Single Model or a Plurality of Forms?” in The Novel, Bd. 1, Hrsg. Moretti, where–along-
23
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150 (1) Winter 2021Franco Moretti
side the better-known forms of the Greek novel–he examines the “oral-popular back-
ground” of Ephesian tales, the “oriental military novel with a love subplot,” fictional-
ized biographies of historical individuals, epistolary novels, and the unicum of The Won-
ders beyond Thule.
13 See Thomas Pavel, Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2013); and Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, Masse.: Harvard Universität
Drücken Sie, 2017 [2011]): two studies that are also unusual for the philosophical intensity
with which they address the ethical (Pavel) and epistemological (Mazzoni) aspects of
the novel as form.
14 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983 [1937]);
Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970); Gen-
eviève Bollème, La Bibliothèque bleue: Littérature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe siècle
(Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1971); Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Oxford: Oxford
Universitätsverlag, 1971); Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: Der
Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997);
Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Rober-
to Bolaño’s “2066” (London und New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); and Stefano Ercolino,
The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
15 G. E. Hutchinson, “Homage to Santa Rosalia, oder, Why Are There So Many Kinds of Ani-
mals?” The American Naturalist, May–June 1959, 155.
16 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the
Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981),
4–5.
17 Aristotle, Poetics, 1449A.
18 Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, Masse.: Die MIT-Presse, 1971 [1914–1915]),
31–32.
19 Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” 7.
20 Ethico-political in the sense that tragic conflict activates supra-individual (politisch) val-
ues by showing their force at the (ethisch) level of individual choices: a hybrid dimen-
sion between public and private that appears to be the specific domain of the tragic
Vorstellung.
21 Aristotle, Poetics, 1449B.
22 Leo Strauss, Gerusalemme e Atene: Studi sul pensiero politico dell’Occidente (Torino: Einaudi,
1997), 55.
23 Friedrich Schiller, “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” [1784],
in Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, Hrsg. Carl Hanser (München: Verlag, 1980), 823, 828.
24 Friedrich Schiller, “Of the Cause of Pleasure We Derive from Tragic Objects,” [1791],
in Aesthetic and Philosophical Essays, trans. Nicholas Dole (Hadley, Masse.: Hadley Press,
2015), 537.
25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872], trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Pen-
guin, 2003), 6–7.
26 Here is the entire passage, from the penultimate chapter of The Birth of Tragedy:
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Dädalus, das Journal der American Academy of Arts & SciencesTwo Theories
existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Accord-
ingly, the tragic myth has to convince us that even ugliness and discord are an ar-
tistic game in which the will, in the eternal abundance of its pleasure, plays with
selbst. But this primal and difficult phenomenon of Dionysiac art is only intelligible
and can only be immediately grasped through the wonderful significance of musical
dissonance. . . . The pleasure produced by the tragic myth has the same origin as the
pleasurable perception of dissonance in music.
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 115. Adorno’s diagnosis of the role played by dissonance
in Wagner is the most appropriate comment:
In Beethoven and well into high Romanticism the expressive values of harmony are
fixed: dissonance stands for negation and suffering, consonance for fulfilment and
the positive. . . . That suffering can be sweet . . . is something that composers and au-
dience learned uniquely from [Wagner] . . . and few aspects of Wagner’s music have
been as seductive as the enjoyment of pain.
Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso,
2009 [1966]), 56.
27 Sarmiento’s 1856 article “Las novelas” is quoted by Alejandra Laera in El tiempo vacío de la
ficción: Las novelas argentinas de Eduardo Gutiérrez y Eugenio Cambaceres (Buenos Aires: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 2004), 9.
28 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic
Literatur, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Masse.: Die MIT-Presse, 1971 [1920]).
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150 (1) Winter 2021Franco Moretti
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