Recent critics who have approached the novel as a formal construct have argued for space, not time, as its organizing principle. In that influential document of the formalist New Criticism, “Spatial Form in the Modern Novel,” Joseph Frank notes how Joyce, Woolf, and others have “spatialized” time, halted its flow so that relations might be perceived as juxtaposed in space, thereby forcing us to read their novels, like poems, for the “reflexive reference” within simultaneity. A perceptive critic from a later generation, Sharon Spencer, hails the advent of the “architectonic” novel—written by Fuentes, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Cortazar, and others—which...

In a study devoted to the disclosure of a genealogy’s imperatives, any search for “roots” is necessarily subject to the greatest irony. I hope I may escape that consequence here by concentrating upon structural affiliations rather than historical descent. There are some novels, prior to those of our own century, that demonstrate a structural stress expressive of their authors’ tentative discomfort with linear dominance, and these seem to presage the full assault against dynastic narrative mounted by the modern authors we will be considering. Since the nineteenth century was so preeminently the century of the paternal prerogative, and novelistic strategies...

Buddenbrooks,Thomas Mann’s first novel, is patently a matter of fathers and sons. In tracing the decline of a family dynasty through forty years and four generations, Mann fixes his focus in each generation upon the male heir who is destined to assume the leadership of the family and its firm. Within the novel the line of descent begins with old Johann Buddenbrook, whose physical vigor and decisiveness assure his amiable integration in “the jolly present.” Johann’s son Jean, softening into sentimental self-consciousness, tends to be inept in business, pompous and pious in family matters. Jean’s son Thomas is fiercely...

Thomas Mann’s serious respect for dynastic tradition, his pleasure at the thought of generations “crossing hands in the dance of life,” his notion of art as the legitimation of historical time—not one of these responses is shared by David Herbert Lawrence. Indeed, given his abundant testimony to the contrary, one is led to inquire why Lawrence ever chose to write a novel of generations. The structure of any novel is hardly a subordinate fact of its total impact; and the structure of a genealogical novel, in its elevation of the societal fact of family to formal significance, most especially...

D. H. Lawrence’s unequivocal advice to the critic—“Never trust the teller, trust the tale”—becomes richly problematic for the critic of William Faulkner’s work, for Faulkner himself is a teller who has proven marvelously unreliable in commenting on his own novels, and who writes novels featuring unreliable tellers of the tale. Once the teller isinthe tale, it becomes impossible to dismiss him so summarily. Yet this seems to be the impulse behind Faulkner’s repeated insistence, to his students at the University of Virginia, that the genesis ofAbsalom, Absalom!was “the idea of a man who wanted...

To come to Nabokov through Lawrence and Faulkner is to move from their difficult negotiations with the imperatives of genealogy to his carefree banishment of them from the realms of fiction. Here, where abolition forestalls accommodation, the genealogical imperative survives only in parodic disgrace—as the ironic subtitle ofAda or Ardor: A Family Chronicle,as a family tree riddled with incestuous scandal, as the defunct impotence of the traditional novel. Here, a critical rhetoric of tension and subversion will not suffice, and one must learn to speak of a rich plenitude within a strict economy, where all the sources...

“Everything is known,” intones the gypsy alchemist MeIquiades, but there is much that has been lost; and as the narrator ofOne Hundred Years of Solitude admits,“the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is difficult to find them.”¹ It is the recovery and the bringing to life of this "everything," which has been lost in the linear pursuits of genealogical order, that constitutes the aesthetic achievement of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Confronted with the presence of “everything” in the contemporary Latin American novel, the critics tend to account for its astonishing plenitude...

The disappearance of God, the end of history, the demise of man, the death of the novel, the murder of the father—these are the apocalyptic phrases by which we now measure the passage of our culture through time. To our own period we relegate the onerous burden of temporal belatedness—of being post-Christian, postindustrial, postmodern. And this burden would seem to be the necessary condition for knowing each of these deaths: they can be named only because they have already happened, because we who name them, like Nietzsche, are already aware that we come after the fact. Like the...