Abstract:
Can the novel be the type of all literary types?
This questioning of the departure orientated our reflection to a notion which exists since Hellenistic epoch as making integral part of the speech which is digression. The novel, first of all, tells a story. But besides told history, the author gets other speeches which take shape in the romantic text. The text becomes then a world of knowledge which strives towards digressions of other types than the text. Literary creativity is the stake of the romantic writing. And it is thanks to the imagination which instills this way to receive the text which differs, other, than these new forms of writing are attained.
Digression is the break with narrative continuity, it is action to go out of its subject in a speech or a story and to create a diversion, develop a subject which moves away from main subject. She feeds the history of the novel of knowledge, of descriptions, of comments which come to cut the narrative woof to go towards another form of writing. So, the principle of displacement, distance and investment calls to digression but also at the same time to trip.
We can think to get in the novel a broken up and learnt speech in the same time relay of discursive strategy. In that case, is the digression recovering from the surplus or is part of speech? And digress, it is to go out of main subject or it is to develop the possible of this main subject, possible of literary creation? Do these digressive developments delay the denouement of intrigue or they serve ultimately? Do digressions serve the ideological plan of the writer in a didactic perspective? Here are there the main axis of our research which tries to light a little more problems of digression.
