Nearly forty years after its original publication, the work in which Franco Moretti underlined the centrality of the novel of formation in European modernity is finally available in our language. The critic makes it the model of a narrative literature where social tensions are pacified, but concludes too quickly that a form that has long been unusable is aging.
A strange fate for this book by Franco Moretti, who had not yet converted literature into “atlases”, “graphs”, “maps”, “trees”, databases and other statistical tables: written at the start of the 1980s, published in Italian in 1986, translated into English in 1987, it was the subject of an expanded edition in 1999, immediately translated into the same language, but was not until now accessible in French (just as it is not in German, while studies on the Educational novel are, as we know, very present in Germanic lands).
Back to the future
This essay may therefore seem somewhat dated – particularly in the pages where the author argues, in a few murderous sentences, with the proponents (Barthes, Genette) of an approach to literature that is too formalistic in his eyes –, as it may also seem strong in perspectives that have been worked on independently of it since its publication. In the field of French studies, a number of recent works have thus focused on the question of the novel of formation, around the works studied here (The Red and the Black by Stendhal; Lost Illusions by Balzac; Sentimental Education Flaubert), while several important studies on youth and adolescence have also been given from a historical perspective. It is undoubtedly regrettable, from this point of view, that the present translation takes up the text of the 1999 edition without adding the slightest note or providing, moreover, any bibliography.
The work nevertheless attracts attention. Firstly, by the approach to which the corpus of works in which F. Moretti is interested is subjected, a corpus which includes, with a few absences, all the great texts of European literature (Germany, France, England, Russia) that the critical tradition has placed in the category of the formative novel since it was identified and interested (that is to say, since the beginning of the XXe century but especially, for French studies, from 1945). No return here, however, as many contemporary studies do, to the origins of the term Educational novelnor on those of the concepts with which it was put in competition: Development novel, education novel, artist novel – this last notion appearing at the end of the analysis (p. 321) without Marcuse’s thesis being mentioned, The German Artist’s Novel (1922). In fact, F. Moretti considers the novel of formation, an all-encompassing qualification under his pen, as a “central symbolic form” of modernity (p. 303) which he shows problematizes one and the same question, posed since the end of the XVIIIe century, that of the “great socialization of the middle classes” (p. 306), which leads him to regret, in a note from 1999, not having spoken of a novel of “socialization” rather than of training (p. 19).
Literature as a safety valve
On these foundations, proceeding in the manner of a comparatist open to the cultural, social and political dimensions of texts, F. Moretti highlights, from one analysis to another, that the coming-of-age novel finds its identity through the work of writing (actors in training, apprenticeship scenes, tutelary characters, values of socialization, etc.) to which it devotes itself in order to reconcile the subjective aspirations of a young hero with the requirements specific to the social system in which he evolves or, more precisely, to reconcile two competing legitimacies, individual and social. Study of Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship years by Goethe and rereading of The Theory of the Novel Lukács’ support, Educational novel and the novel of formation are thus considered as narrative systems in search of compromise solutions, solutions which become more difficult to develop as the century progresses, as shown by the analyses of the works of Stendhal and then of Balzac and, in counterpoint, a chapter devoted to English novels of formation, notably those of Dickens, which tend to deny the conflict of individual and social legitimacies to the point of taking the childish forms of the tale and losing all narrative dynamic (p. 251).
As this summary of the approach followed and the path proposed by F. Moretti would like to show, the author conceives the coming-of-age novel as a form in which all the values, always in tension, that could have been associated with youth and maturity are invented and reinvented, of which he traces, in his own way and without using this term, the respective sociograms. To do this, he pays attention to all the writing traits that reveal these tensions and analyzes them in their most complex (in)play. He is thus led to examine precisely the links which, within a given work, are established between characters in training and tutelary figures, between the hero who learns and the narrator who knows, between formative events initially devoid of meaning and the commentaries which give them meaning, thus revealing the way in which various attempts have been developed to de-dramatize the conflict which opposes, in post-revolutionary societies, the forces of individualism and those of the social order, forces which the formative novel seeks to control, even if it means showing ordinary heroes and praising the merits of everyday life.
This study goes beyond, at different times, the object it sets for itself and presents itself, beyond the question of the formative novel, as a reflection on narrative literature, which underlines that it is, throughout the XIXe century, a place of peaceful management of the contradictions of modernity. The contributions of such an analysis are obviously major, even if it is possible to resist certain assertions and to detect, over the pages, some shortcuts. Given the attention that F. Moretti pays to the social and cultural context in which all the works that interest him have found a place, certain juxtapositions, however cautious they may be, are surprising, like readings focusing on Eugene Onegin from Pushkin and A hero of our time Lermontov, which are inserted into reflections devoted to Stendhal’s formative novels. Thus are revealed tensions between national cultural traditions and the general morphology of the works, between spaces and times of literary creation, tensions that F. Moretti, very involved today in the debates around the World Literaturemakes fruitful in his 1999 preface, where he broadens his argument to the question of World literature: “I believe it is time to take Goethe’s idea seriously (…) what does he mean (…) by “universal literature”? Studying literature by “forgetting” historical and geographical differences in the name of its universality? Quite the opposite, in my opinion. Far from forgetting geography and history, we must work with patience and precision in order to integrate all spatio-temporal coordinates within ever more complex wholes, until we reach this “system of systems” that we will precisely call universal literature.” (p. 16).
Not Dead Training Novel
More worrying is the question of the period of relevance that the author sets for the novel of formation, because he affirms, when he makes it a novel that ignores the Revolution (p. 106), that the form-meaning of the Picture novel was soon outdated and that the writings which took over from it have themselves, at the time of Sentimental Education Flaubert’s novels, reach their point of expiry, youth becoming a value in itself, which seems to be denied by a final chapter (added in 1999), devoted to the “late formative novel” (p. 306), where mainly German-language writings are read (Thomas Mann, Kafka, Musil, etc.). A phenomenon on which he rarely dwells, F. Moretti thus conceives the formative novel as a space of narrative always on the way to obsolescence, as a genre threatened by a dynamic of exhaustion which would be inherent to it, which is indicated, for example, by the incompleteness or the reworking of works such as Portrait of the artist as a young man of Joyce or like Jean Santeuil of Proust (which is not discussed but which could have provided a convincing point of support). In fact, as attentive as he is to the way in which, based on games of value assignment (money, work, success, etc.), peaceful representations of the passage from youth to maturity are constructed, F. Moretti does not perceive one of the evolutions of the genre, at least as far as its French updates are concerned, namely that at the turn of the centuries it was seized upon by beginning writers (Barrès, Mauriac, Martin du Gard, etc.), eager to make their elders hear, with all their clumsiness, their voice as young people, thus radically distancing his writings from the model of Wilhelm Meister. Thus the coming-of-age novel becomes, for a time which the Great War puts an end to, the form par excellence of the first novel, which takes on the aspects of a novel of reverse pedagogy, where young people speak out to lecture their elders.
Very rich, always suggestive, translated into an elegant language, F. Moretti’s work, however late it may be, is easy to read (although the author has the disconcerting habit of calling the heroes by their first names and of assuming that all the works he analyses are known) and can only nourish new studies, attached to crossing cultural, social and political data, between the history of ideas and forms.