novel

"When the average man lays claim to a destiny, then the average man can describe his own. The believe that psychology reveals our essence necessarily endears our actions to us. We imagine they possess an intrinsic or symbolic value. Then comes the snobbery of complexes which teaches us to exaggerate our wits, to be dazzled by them, to gratify our ego with faculties and depths it is obviously un-endowed with. The intimate perception of our nothingness, however, is only partially veiled by this process.

We suspect that the novelist who relies on his life is only pretending to believe in it, that he has no respect for the secrets he discovers there: he is not taken in, and we, his readers, are still less so. His characters belong to a second-rate humanity, conscious and contaminated, suspect on account of their artifices, their intrigues. We do not readily conceive of an astute King Lear ...

The vulgar, the parvenu aspect of the novel determines its characteristics: fatality inhibited, lower case destiny, romantic agony, pseudo-tragedy déclassée.

Compared with the tragic hero, so rich in the adversity that is his eternal patrimony, the contemporary novel’s main character seems like a naive candidate for ruin, horror’s cheap-jack, over-eager to destroy himself, terrified to fail. He suffers from the very uncertainty of his disaster. There is no necessity for his death. We sense that the author could have saved him, which makes us uncomfortable, spoils our pleasure as readers.

Whereas tragedy occurs on an absolute level, so to speak: the author has no influence over his heroes, he is only their servant, their instrument. They are the ones in control, and they prompt him to institute proceedings against themselves. They rule, even in the works for which they serve as a pretext. And these works affect us as realities independent of both the writer and the marionette-strings of psychology.

We read contemporary novels in an altogether different way. The novelist is always uppermost in our minds. His presence haunts us. We watch him struggle with his characters. In the long run, he is the only one who holds our attention. What is he going to do with his characters? How will he get rid of them? We wonder. Our curiosity tinged with apprehension. If someone once said that Balzac rewrote Shakespeare using failures, what can we think of today’s novelists, obliged as they are to deal with a humanity that has deteriorated still further? Bereft of cosmic inspiration, the novel’s inhabitants cannot manage to counterbalance the dissolving effect of their knowledge, their will to lucidity, their lack of character."

Cioran em 'Beyond the Novel', em Temptation to Exist.

a bit more.