Splendeurs de la médiocrité: une idée du roman

The novel as a genre, since its origins, has been limited by its necessary devotion to human imperfection. The novel aims at the dimension of ordinary existence, often through romantic adventures written in a style between the sublime and the common. Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteaus new history of the novel demonstrates how this art of the mediocre took shape, bound to the practice of prose, in various forms. Although in its classic acceptation mediocrity meant that a work suited a chosen audience, it came to merge with a vulgarity or triteness from which nineteenth-century novelists attempted to extract beauty. The novel evolved from simply depicting that which is simply human to representing the defeat of the very values that it had expressed, demonstrating our mortal condition. Rather than spinning consoling stories, it raised, as in Becketts last works, a voice of gloom. French text.