2. "Pour la plupart d'entre nous, les oeuvres de Joyce et de Proust se dressent déjà dans le lointain comme les témoins d'une époque révolue", L'Ère de soupçon, p. 84, quoted in Compagnon, op.cit., p. 299.
3. Pierre V. Zima: L'ambivalence romanesque: Proust, Musil, Kafka, Paris (Syncore) 1981.
4. Robert Musil: Tagebücher (Hrsg. Adolf Frisé), Bd. 1, Hamburg (Rohwolt) 1976, p. 569.
5.The Man Without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, Vol.I, London (Secker & Warburg) 1961, p. 13.
6. See "Zum Bilde Prousts", in Gesammelte Schriften II.1, Frankfurt/ (Suhrkamp) 1977, p. 311, 314 f..
7. Leo Bersani: The Culture of Redemption, Massachusetts (Harvard UP) 1990, p. 11.
8. "Über dem Begriff der Geschichte", GW I.2, p. 702.
9. You find the latter in Adorno's scarce observations on the novel, based on the assumption that the modes of representation peculiar to the novel of the nineteenth century are not simply--as we are sometimes naively inclined to believe--the natural and only obvious grasp of reality, but that they are on the contrary highly calculated and truly manichaean, if not simply paranoid, attempts to get hold of a world in threatening and inscrutable transformation. As a consequence of this insight, Adorno suggests that we consider the experimental ways of rendering reality in the twentieth-century novel, although it seems on a surface level to break with the practices of the predecessors, as a continuation of their ambition, only resumed with a new set of tools. Thus, the monstrous deformation of narrative is really only a manifestation of what already prevailed as a latent threat the traditional modes of narration, namely that the modernized and rationalized world no longer allows the ancient epic ambition to say the real.
10. See Franco Moretti: The Way of The World. The "Bildungsroman" in European Culture, London (Verso Press) 1987.
11. It can be demonstrated in some detail how this strategy does not only serve as a vision expressed in these fictions, but how it is furthermore substantialized and elaborated in the technical repertoire of narrative devices. Even if the Bildungsroman is only a historically limited incident in the evolution of the novel, I think that it reveals a crucial feature in modern narrative, namely--to put it a bit differently this time--the ambition to configure a span of subjective time as a meaningful totality and thus to establish an image of conjunction or even reconciliation between social constraints and individual aspirations. This insistence on the importance of the representation of subjective time in narrative is elaborated philosophically in Paul Ricoeur's important study Time and Narrative.
12. "Ars Nova", in L'entretien infini, Paris (Gallimard) 1969, p. XX.
13. The Man Without Qualities Vol 2, p. 436.
14. "Grosser Stil und Totalität", in Der Ring der Clarisse. Grosser Stil und Nihilismus in der modernen Literatur, Frankfurt/M (Suhrkamp) 1987, (L'anello di Clarisse, 1984).
15. Or, as the traditional interpretations prove, in a platonic sphere of aesthetic ideas that leaves behind not only the detailed aesthetic sensibility but also the profound sense of history in these novels.
16. There exist, to be sure, a number of preceding instances of this practice, from Dante's cosmology and Francesco Colonna's alchymistic formulas via Goethe's use of elements from his philosophy of nature in Elective Affinities to Flaubert's calculated geometries, but with the major difference, that these--maybe with the unique exception of Flaubert, who might in this respect be considered as an immediate predecessor--are precisely incorporating their models in the visionary content of the works in a homogenous and intimate manner.
17. You get an idea of this dimension of infinity through Valéry Larbaud's comparison between reading Ulysses and looking into the firmament at night, where you keep recognizing new and still more distant stars the longer you stare into the dark.
18. Anne Longuet-Marx: "La rhapsodie musilienne", Europe, vol. 1991, p. 14: "Le projet monstrueux-prodigieux est de faire du roman un objet infini, l'art du romancier comportant une technique de l'infini, que l'on décèle dans la puissance d'évocation des objets finis. Chez Proust, l'expérience de l'infini n'est pas seulement totalisée par le roman, mais ponctualisée; l'épisode de la madeleine apparaît comme un multiple suffisamment puissant, dans sa singularité événementielle, pour contenir la narration tout entière."
19. "Erzählen in der Moderne", op.cit., p. 389. Bürger's observation should not, however, lead to a naive conception of realism; although the realist novel legitimates itself by an external instance, it will always already have had to establish the criteria of truth internally, in its proper system of representation; to this point, see Michael Riffaterre: Fictional Truth, Baltimore (Johns Hopkins UP) 1990, especially chapters 1 and 3.