But the spirit of our time is firmly focused on a present that is so expansive and profuse that it shoves the past off our horizon and reduces time to the present moment only. Within this system the novel is no longer a work (a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future) but one current event among many, a gesture with no tomorrow.

I don’t know. I merely believe I know that the novel cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time: if it is to go on discovering the undiscovered, to go on “progressing” as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world.

There is thus a radical difference between The Sleepwalkers and the other great twentieth-century “frescoes” (those of Proust, Musil, Thomas Mann, etc.): In Broch, it is continuity neither of action nor of biography (a character’s or family’s) that provides the unity of the whole. It is something else, something hidden: the continuity of one theme (that of man facing the process of disintegration of values).

Since Kafka’s time, because of the great systems that quantify and plan life, the uniformization of the world has made enormous advances. But when a phenomenon becomes universal, quotidian, omnipresent, we no longer notice it. In the euphoria of their uni-form lives, people no longer see the uniform they wear.

Some eighty years after Flaubert imagined his Emma Bovary, during the thirties of our own century, another great novelist, Herman Broch, wrote that however heroically the modern novel may struggle against the tide of kitsch, it ends up being overwhelmed by it. The word “kitsch” describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling.