The slow emergence of the novel as a major literary genre is an ethical event. The novel as a form of literary writing goes back to Greek antiquity, and one novel from antiquity is still widely read, The Metamorphoses of Apulieus (or The Golden Ass by Apulieus). One of the great writers on the form of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, even claimed it went back to the Menippean Satire of antiquity. This is probably not one of his most shared ideas. In any case, the idea of a unique moment of origin is not a good basis. There are a series of beginning, which include antique epics, behind the novel as it developed from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, when it did become accepted as a literary genre on a level with epic, drama, and lyric poetry.
The modern origin is again ambiguous. Rabelais provides a strong candidate, with major attention coming from Eric Auerbach as well as Bakthin, but Don Quixote is the more widespread object of discussion. Nietzsche refers to it (Genealogy, II.6) as with regard to a change in ideas of humour, so explicitly ethical ideas about where we can find humour. The original readers of Cervantes could laugh without restraint at the suffering of Quixote, and the suffering caused by the ‘ingenious hidalgo’, but Nietzsche suggests that by his time, readers feel unease and even pain themselves at the suffering and humiliation.
We will return to Nietzsche’s view of literature later in the post, but for now it can be said that Nietzsche seems to have missed something. Surely Cervantes undermines the heroic cruelty to which Quixote aspires, the violence of a Homeric noble as discussed by Nietzsche in Genealogy I, even if dressed up as chivalry and Christian questing. Surely Don Quixote exposes the low moral level of those who take the knight of the ‘melancholy countenance’ as an object of humiliating designs. The text seems to be full of sympathy for the victims of cruelty, such as the Moriscos who had been expelled from Spain.
Sympathy is the apposite word here, because the novel developed as a major form in the age of sympathy in ethics, as found in Hume, Rousseau, and Smith, or the idea of law governed civility replacing heroic strength, as found in Vico, Montesquieu, and Ferguson. The earliest translation of Cervantes into English, which is still at all widely read, that of Tobias Smollett, dates from that time, and of course Smollett was notable comic novelist, author of works still regarded as minor classics. Montesquieu and Rousseau were the authors of well known novels. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, still one of the most widely read novels of that era, includes pastiche of the Don Quixote-Sancho Panza relationship.
If there is any festive cruelty in Cervantes, it looks to most like he helped create a taste for moral sensitivity and sympathy, which carries on into the nineteenth century novel as it expands sympathy in fiction for the lowest socially and those most excluded morally. The novel has a major place in a slow decline of Stoicism, Christian doctrine, and Natural Law. The concentration on them in the early modern period only serving to emphasise that they were becoming moral abstractions distant from the morality of subjective experience, and communication of that experience.
Perhaps Nietzsche’s sense of the enjoyment of cruelty in Don Quixote is not entirely inapposite though, relying on a reading back into Cervantes’ novel of what Nietzsche found most interesting in the nineteenth century novel. Nietzsche sneered at moralising novels like those of George Eliot, which put forward a Christian derived faith in morality though without the theology. He had a more positive evaluation of Dostoevsky and Stendhal, despite Dostoevsky’s very noticeable Christian inclinations.
What Nietzsche valued in those two, or that is what is proposed here, is the theme of egotism in Stendhal along with Dostoevsky’s fascination with nihilism, Superman claims, and the diabolical, more or less in contrast with Christianity as a euphoric faith. What Nietzsche sees in the psychological explorations of novelists, their sympathy with every kind of human subjectivity, is an awareness of the tension between subjectivity and moral community.
What Nietzsche sees in Don Quixote may be nihilistic self-obsession in the self-invented knight and the unrestrained enjoyment of greater power in those who mock the deluded hidalgo. What Nietzsche sees in the novel of his time is the exploration of nihilism, subjectivity, and egotism, which breaks down the sense of Bildung, moral development, social integration, and moral sympathy, often associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel. Nietzsche himself served as an example to those novelists and writers concerned with doubts about moral community and subjective adaptation to universality.
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