La ora actuală, nu cred că există o propoziție mai frumoasă ca „moartea romanului are pagină de Wikipedia”. Propoziția asta ar merita 1 milion de dolari, dar cine să ni-i dea? Poate Premiul Nobel? Poate moștenirea Prințului Albert de Monaco? Funeraliile sunt încă destul de sărace. Moartea romanului are câteva referințe, deși e o moarte improbabilă. Sunt atât de puține, încât le vom transcrie aici:

I. Some of the earliest proponents of the “death of the novel” were José Ortega y Gasset, who wrote his Decline of the Novel in 1925 and Walter Benjamin in his 1930 review Krisis des Romans (Crisis of the Novel).

II. In the 1950s and 1960s, contributors to the discussion have included Gore Vidal, Roland Barthes, and John Barth. Ronald Sukenick wrote the story The Death of the Novel in 1969.

III. Tom Wolfe in the 1970s predicted that the New Journalism would displace the novel. Italo Calvino is considered to have turned round the question “is the novel dead?”, as “is it possible to tell stories that are not novels?”

IV. As for causes, Robert B. Pippin connects the ‘death of the novel’ with the rise of nihilism in European culture. Saul Bellow, discussing Ravelstein which was loosely a portrait of Allan Bloom, commented on a connection to the idea that they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about.

V. On the other hand, David Foster Wallace connected the ‘death of the novel’ with the mortality of the post-war generation of American novelists.

VI. Novelist and critic Robert Clark Young argues in his essay, The Death of the Death of the Novel, originally published in the Southern Review in 2008, that all arguments postulating the death of the novel are fallacious. Young goes back through literary history to show that F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Barth, Roland Barthes, Norman Mailer, Ambrose Bierce and others were incorrect when they claimed, at various times, that the literary novel was dead. Not only did literary novels continue to be published long after these writers announced the death of the novel, but many of the same writers, including Barth and Mailer, continued to publish literary novels—often to great acclaim—decades after arguing that continuing to do so was impossible.

VII. Young also argues that new technologies such as radio, silent movies, talking movies, television, and the Internet have failed to destroy the novel, a genre which today enjoys higher sales than ever.

Pagina oficială de Wikipedia a morții romanului poate fi vizită aici.

foto (c) Rareș Petrișor

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