![]() ![]() ![]() I would include Balzac in this totalising current - and it was perhaps him who invented it, with his La Comédie humaine - as well as Zola, perhaps Proust, and Martin du Gard. Then there is the current that I would call the tendency of great totalisations: the novel has the objective of capturing the spirit and the uniformity of an era, of constructing a sort of vast universe in which the spirit of the time takes hold, like in an orchestra. Here, the novel is the narrative, the capturing of the real, in a rapid, narrative and stylised prose. There is what we could call the official lineage, which the academy presents as the history of the French novel, proceeding by way of Stendhal and Flaubert. There are three kinds of conception of the novelistic. This essay was first published in Ballast. ![]()
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