The Tragic Novel: Historical Trauma and the Novelistic Form

Abstract

When literary theory turns its gaze to tragedy and the novel in an attempt to frame them within a single conceptual landscape, the fatalistic narrative that emerges generally revolves around the quasi simultaneity of the death of tragedy with the rise of the modern novel. The aim of this thesis is to reshape this narrative of incompatibility and to propose a theorization of the tragic novel as a form that overcomes it through the key mediation of philosophy. In particular, the intersection of German Idealism’s engagement with tragedy and the role that this form acquires in the self-definition of modernity clarifies how this genre does not result from a hybridization of the novel with the antithetical generic domain of tragedy but with the tragic as a mode of thought that is abstracted from it at a specific temporal juncture and that acts as a force of historical problematization. Conceptualized in association with Adorno’s negative dialectics, the tragic novel becomes the symbolic form of a fractured perception of history whose pieces it collects and processes not with a synthetic intent but with a negative, open one, ultimately challenging an understanding of literary products as sites reconciliation and affirmation. This theory then finds a concrete dimension in the analysis of three novels belonging to different historical and literary periods: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Johnathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2006). What this investigation reveals is that the tragic remains a relevant tool to process historical contradictions that continue to be perceived as irresolvable and impossible to assimilate.