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. 但, 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, 伏尔泰, Schelling,

Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche . . . Scheler, Unamuno, Hei-
degger, Camus . . . 福柯, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Žižek, 管家, 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-
集成电路, the one-sidedness of dramatic characters in Hegel’s Aesthetics, or the function
of the chorus in The Birth of Tragedy; 更频繁地, 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/
或者), 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, 更好的, a “derealization of trage-
迪,” as William Marx has called it,3 which was further exacerbated by the frequent

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数字 1
Antigone

Eurydice

Haemon

chorus

messenger

guard

Teiresias

Creon

Antigone

boy

仆人

Ismene

“Four hours of action, that become this. . . . What do we gain, by turning time into space? 第一的
全部的, 这: when we watch a play, we are always in the present: what is on stage, 是; 进而
it disappears. 这里, 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, 是的, 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,“ 这
chorus–as the key to the whole enterprise.4 The “generic understandings of trag-
edy” in Schiller, Schelling, 施莱格尔, 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.

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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

数字 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

中号. Scaufﬂaire
中号. 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
儿子
儿子

Bourgeois
Bourgeois
男人
男人

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
中号. Gillenormand
中号. 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

政府
政府
troops
troops

Cosette
Cosette

Courfeyrac
Courfeyrac

MariusMarius

Jean Valjean
Jean Valjean

Toussaint
Toussaint

士兵
士兵

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
工人
工人

Bahorel
Bahorel

中号. Mabeuf
中号. 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. . . . 我会争辩, 然而, 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. 为了

代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & 科学

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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. 它
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, 修辞, poetry, prose, criticism, 自然, 生活, 社会, wit, instruc-
的, 幽默 . . . Too much! 在实践中, this universal-progressive utopia was dis-
articulated among a plurality of critic-historians–Shklovsky, Lukács, Bakhtin,
奥尔巴赫, Watt, 巴特, Jameson–with the occasional incursions of anthro-
pologists (Claude Lévi-Strauss, René Girard), social scientists (Benedict Ander-
儿子), 历史学家 (Mona Ozouf ), or psychoanalysts (Marthe Robert).7 而且,
those two millennia during which novels were being written, but not written
关于, 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, 语言, 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, 和
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-

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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-
里, 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, 最近, 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. 乙.
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. 这里, 也,
the difference with tragedy is unmistakable. The latter had long dominated the
literary field, 当然, 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, 哪个, 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. 不是

出奇, 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, 为了确定, 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-

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代达罗斯, 美国艺术学院学报 & 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, 任何一个. 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, 但是
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, 什么时候
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: 男人 (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, 伦理,
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, strength, 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

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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. 一个问题? I don’t think
所以. 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
经验; 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, 但
will at least place them within a single conceptual landscape. That would be a new
starting point.

关于作者

Franco Moretti, 自此成为美国科学院院士 2006, is the Danily C.
and Laura Louise Bell Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Stanford Univer-
城市. He is the author of Graphs, Maps, 树木: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005),
The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (2013), Distant Reading (2013), and Far Coun-
尝试 (2019) and editor of The Novel (2006).

尾注

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, 没有
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.

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2 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel

(普林斯顿大学, 新泽西州: 普林斯顿大学出版社, 2004).

3 William Marx, Le Tombeau d’Œdipe: Pour une tragédie sans tragique (巴黎: 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 (斯坦福大学, 加利福尼亚州。: 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, Young,
和更多).

5 Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (普林斯顿大学, 新泽西州:

普林斯顿大学出版社, 2014), 11.

6 Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenaeum Fragments” [1798], in Classic and Romantic German Aesthet-
集成电路, 编辑. J. 中号. Bernstein (剑桥: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 249; italics
mine.

7 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (巴尔的摩: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965
[1961]); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners (伦敦: Cape, 1968); Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology II (纽约: 基础书籍, 1976 [1973]); Benedict
安德森, Imagined Communities (伦敦: Verso, 1983); Mona Ozouf, Les Aveux du ro-
男人: Le XIXe siècle entre Ancien Régime et Révolution (巴黎: Fayard, 2001); and Marthe Rob-
埃特, Origins of the Novel (布卢明顿: Indiana University Press, 1980 [1972]).

8 If one looks at the most influential recent collection on the topic–Christopher Prender-
gast, 编辑。, Debating World Literature (伦敦: Verso, 2004)–world literature appears to be
unimaginable without the novel, but barely affected by the existence (或不) of trag-
edy: not only is the presence of the two forms disproportionately tilted in favor of the
以前的 (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, Maps, 树木: Abstract Models for Literary History (伦敦: Verso,

2005), 18–33.

10 Cesare Segre, “What Bakhtin Left Unsaid: The Case of the Medieval Romance,” in Ro-
曼斯: Generic Transformations from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, 编辑. 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: 历史, Geography,
与文化, 卷. 1, 编辑. Franco Moretti (普林斯顿大学, 新泽西州: 普林斯顿大学出版社, 2006
[2002]), where he points to the existence of various noncanonical genres, 包括
“talent and beauty” stories, “military romances,” “wandering heroes,” “court cases,”
“fantastic journeys,” and “encounters with ghosts and demons,” plus, 当然, 这
variegated erotic corpus of Chinese prose.

12 Tomas Hägg’s key texts are The Novel in Antiquity (伯克利: 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, 卷. 1, 编辑. Moretti, where–along-

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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 (普林斯顿大学, 新泽西州: 普林斯顿大学出版社,
2013); and Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel (剑桥, 大量的。: 哈佛大学
按, 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 (巴塞罗那: Seix Barral, 1970); Gen-
eviève Bollème, La Bibliothèque bleue: Littérature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe siècle
(巴黎: Éditions Gallimard, 1971); Eugène Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (牛津: 牛津
大学出版社, 1971); Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction
(芝加哥: 芝加哥大学出版社, 1985); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: 这
Romantic Novel and the British Empire (普林斯顿大学, 新泽西州: 普林斯顿大学出版社, 1997);
Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Rober-
to Bolaño’s “2066” (London and New York: 布卢姆斯伯里, 2014); and Stefano Ercolino,
The Novel-Essay, 1884–1947 (伦敦: 帕尔格雷夫·麦克米伦, 2014).

15 G. 乙. Hutchinson, “Homage to Santa Rosalia, 或者, Why Are There So Many Kinds of Ani-

马尔斯?” 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 (剑桥, 大量的。: 麻省理工学院出版社, 1971 [1914–1915]),

31–32.

19 Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” 7.
20 Ethico-political in the sense that tragic conflict activates supra-individual (政治的) val-
ues by showing their force at the (道德的) level of individual choices: a hybrid dimen-
sion between public and private that appears to be the specific domain of the tragic
imagination.

21 Aristotle, Poetics, 1449乙.
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, 卷. 5, 编辑. 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, 反式. Nicholas Dole (哈德利, 大量的。: Hadley Press,
2015), 537.

25 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy [1872], 反式. Shaun Whiteside (伦敦: Pen-

guin, 2003), 6–7.

26 Here is the entire passage, from the penultimate chapter of The Birth of Tragedy:

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existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Accord-
英利, 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
本身. 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 [瓦格纳] . . . and few aspects of Wagner’s music have
been as seductive as the enjoyment of pain.

Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 反式. Rodney Livingstone (伦敦: 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

Literature, 反式. Anna Bostock (剑桥, 大量的。: 麻省理工学院出版社, 1971 [1920]).

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