Paradoxes of Self-Creation and Narrativity in the Symbolist Novel

Abstract

When the Symbolists and Decadents undertook to "break the Naturalist machine for novels", they faced a major technical problem: how to continue to write novels without falling into the old Naturalist recipes? In their struggle against determinism, the new novelists first attacked traditional narrativity, then they deconstructed the characters and the logical background of their stories. Nevertheless, can we still talk about "novel" when a "single man in a tower surrounded by swamps" meditates on his states of mind and the best way to furnish his house, without ever going outside? The solution proposed by the Symbolists consisted in the elaboration of a "novel of the extreme conscience", a philosophic-ontological genre that allows the grasping of the inner life of a subject that self-analyses and builds himself progressively. The purpose of this contribution is to demonstrate that the Symbolist novel has ended up engendering some new forms of modern self-reflection.