What is a novel? Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin say that it is a epic of a lost totality, an unfinished genre, through which marginal forms of the carnival laughter of the common people have been able to penetrate the official language of church, state and science. Alex Matson,
the first Finnish translator of James #Joyce’s #Portrait, published his influential Romaanitaide (Art of the Novel) in 1947,and asked precisely this question. The study had a major effect on later Finnish prose,not the least on Väinö Linna, who studied it while writing Tuntematon
Sotilas (The Unknown Soldier).Which Novels does Matson use as examples and what does he say about them?I’ll reread the book and make English notes here:First of all,he shows that novels are not defined as or by story. As the origin of the art of the novel Matson sites #DonQuixote
What is the thing, asks Matson, that make’s Cervantes’ parody a novel? Matson looks for the form of the novel, because art is creating forms. A clear for cannot be the ideal, because then Cervantes would be one of the worst novelists. Realism and humour are its attributes, but
what is its form? The combination of parody and realism, realism draped as chivalric romance, releases something that awaited expression at the time, and creates the least constricted artform, the novel: The overarching plan of the relist character in a complete fictional world.
The form of a story is a single line, the form of a novel is a three dinensional composition, whose success depends of the balance of masses. Don Quixote is not a novel despite its digressions, but because of its digressions.
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