The novelistic goes far beyond a merely literary category. The novelistic form, constituting a “modern” and “democratic” mode of storytelling, not subject to the hierarchization of forms and themes typical of classical genres – tragedy and comedy – is capable of reinventing the world beyond the form of action and the logic of plot, metabolizing heterogeneous elements and giving them a form that is not predictably codified.
The two classical genres – tragedy and comedy – and all their variants present an indissoluble link between the character and the mode of action, cemented by the construction of the plot. In fact, the meaning of the tragic or comedic work is rendered by a generic codification of a “mythical” type, with predictable endings, in which the plot overwhelms the characters: tragedy ends “badly,” with the real or symbolic death of the character, while comedy ends “well,” with a resolutive social integration.
The novelistic, however, is not constructed around mythical structures and defined plots, because its distinctive character lies in cultivating a specific relationship with the open and unfinished present, capturing its mutability and unpredictability.
The centrality of this “modern” form of storytelling is discussed by the great twentieth-century theories of the novel, from György Lukács to Mikhail Bakhtin. The latter identifies the novel as a macro-genre, a form with multiple plastic possibilities. It is capable of “novelizing” other genres, unmasking their conventionality of forms and language, characterized by a “specific semantic incompleteness” that is nourished by the “living contact with the unfinished and evolving contemporary age” (Bakhtin 1979). The scholar links the novel to a form of ritual life like the popular festival: the novelistic, drawing from and metabolizing festive ritual practices such as carnival, reinvents reality by overturning positions and hierarchies, redefining them under the subversive power of the comic (Bakhtin 2001).
According to Lukács’s reflection, the novelistic trait differs from the genres of action starting from the psychology of novelistic heroes. In character comedy, action is reduced to a repeated and comically stigmatized act, where life prevails over the “ought to be,” affirming itself despite everything. In tragedy, on the contrary, action is inexorable and leads the subject to succumb to an “ought to be” that denies life itself. In the novel, however, the random world depicted hosts characters who, endowed with an exacerbated interiority, “are individuals essentially devoted to searching” (Lukács 2019), unable to integrate and effectively impact reality. This distinguishes the novelistic hero from the epic one: if the latter is tasked with reaching goals clearly defined from the outset, the hero of the novel, by contrast, undertakes his journey in a condition of illusion, passing through phases of disillusionment and skepticism, and arriving, through a process marked by crises, symbolic deaths, and rebirths, at a gradual and laborious acquisition of truth.
The novelistic profoundly concerns cinema, which, without the great nineteenth-century novel – as Rancière believes – would not have been born. From the post-World War II era, the novelistic invention of reality, aligning itself with cinema and taking advantage of the decline of the rigid codification of Hollywood genres (melodrama, noir, comedy, western, etc.), marked the original trait of Italian neorealism and its ability to influence the entire modern cinematic tradition (De Gaetano 2019). The French critic André Bazin was the first to compare the forms of the neorealist image to those of the American modernist novel tradition. For example, Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà resembles the episodic and serial structure typical of novelists such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner (Bazin 2018). From neorealism to the Nouvelle Vague (Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, Resnais with La vie est un roman) to New German Cinema (Wenders, Herzog) and New Iranian Cinema (Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf), the pervasiveness of cinematic novelisticism would give rise to a cinema of belief, encounter, and event capable of reconfiguring life as an object of trust before knowledge (Journey to Italy by Rossellini is an emblematic example).
The novelistic form, therefore, no longer subjected to the causal concatenation of actions, forming itself on digressive structures and weak narrative connections, generates purely optical-sonic situations that replace traditional sensory-motor situations (Deleuze 2017). This allows the inactive, wandering, and visionary character (child, unemployed, pensioner, foreigner) to intercede for the author, freeing his gaze upon the world in suspensions and connection anomalies. The intercessor, living in the impossibility of confronting everything that looms before him, becomes a spectator: like little Bruno in Bicycle Thieves, an intimate and visionary witness of his father. Moreover, the intercessor character, which Pasolini in Heretical Empiricism identifies as the element of construction of the “free indirect subjective,” directly borrowed from literary free indirect discourse, determines a zone of indiscernibility between the character’s point of view and the author’s: the author speaks through the character, and the character uses the author’s style to orient and position himself in the world.
This is what Fellini and Antonioni do, populating their films with explicit intercessors of the director.
In Antonioni, the novelistic has a melodramatic basis: the characters, like those played by Monica Vitti in L’Eclisse or Il Deserto Rosso, are neurotic mediators through whom the author releases an aestheticizing vision of a fragmented and dispersive world; Fellini’s novelisticism, instead, on a comedic-carnivalesque basis, imagines redemption endings where the character, like Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita and 8½, internalizes and metabolizes the world, becoming its embodiment.
Ultimately, the novelistic, dealing with the contingency of a present that resists any attempt at transcendence, reclaims the singularity of experience, the real in its impurity, becoming an extraordinary tool for exploring the heterogeneity and instability of contemporary existence.
