I see no Cardinal du Bellay, no Francois I, in today's Europe. But is Europe still Europe? Is it still "the society of the novel"? In other words, is it still living in the Modern Era? Or is it already moving into another era, as yet unnamed, for which its arts are no longer of much importance? If that is so, why be surprised that Europe was not disturbed beyond measure when, for the first time in its history, the art of the novel-Europe's art par excellence-was condemned to death? In this new age, after the Modern Era, has not the novel for some time already been living on death row?
The European Novel
To define precisely the art I am discussing, I call it the European novel. By that I mean not only novels created in Europe by Europeans but novels that belong to a history that began with the dawn of the Modern Era in Europe. There are of course other novels, the novel of China, of Japan, the novel of ancient Greece, but they are not bound by any continuous evolutionary
line to the historical enterprise that began with Rabelais and Cervantes.
I speak of the European novel not only to distinguish it from, say, the Chinese novel but also to point out that its history is transnational; that the French novel, the English novel, the Hungarian novel, are in no position to create autonomous histories of their own but are all part of a common, supranational history that provides the only context capable of revealing both the direction of the novels evolution and the value of particular works.