Humor and Inconclusiveness: The Modern Novel’s Experimental Origins and Hermeneutical Future

Abstract

Desiring to more fully accommodate any religious studies or medieval history reader, let us pause to briefly delve into the novel’s unfettered, experimental origins and purpose. A brief but focused dip within the experimental waters and “presence purpose” of the genre’s early modern life may clear dusty, confining stereotypes. Let us for a moment abandon familiar notions of a stylistically calculated, inch-thick chronological missive of realism, or a summery lightweight jaunt of two dimensionality. Let us even loosen our hold upon a treasured concept of literature as an obliging but ultimately subservient handmaiden of theology or philosophy. Turning to the swell of its exuberant past, let us situate ourselves for the discovery of a more closely authentic, if surprising, core. We have ascertained late medieval pained aesthetics, unrecoiling attention to the lowly figure, and inherent desire for unmoderated, inner/outer presence encounter as the novel’s fodder and energy. Perhaps space is now due to affirm an enduring priority of both early modern and contemporary literary theory, namely, the desire to ever-reconfirm the genre’s generously experimental energy and wholly nonconceptual purposes. A brief consultation with a range of zestful literary theorists from Henry James to Milan Kundera will perhaps divulge nearly two centuries of affirming the novel’s innate presence purpose and floridly experimental essence.