Toma Pavel: Thinking of the Novel, towards the Ontology of Fiction

In this paper I highlight the fact that Toma Pavelʹs thinking about the novel is the terminus of a route that began with The linguistic mirage, continued with The art of distance and completed with the Thinking of the novel. Thus, it is the ontology of fiction that might provide some clues about the true nature of the novel. Toma Pavel avoids giving a definition to the novel. Fictional worlds restores the connection between the text and the world through an ontology of fiction in which linguistics joins philosophy and literary theory. Fiction is a world that becomes possible because of the choice of a certain path from an universe of potentialities. The fictional world is a way of organizing the universe. Thinking of the novel is a step forward in terms of approximating the nature of the studied genre. The continuous problematization of the relationship between the individual and the world is the mark of the genre, and the thinking of the novel is nothing more than the novel of novel, an open metanarrative. Even if the modernism and the postmodernism suspended the ideal-anti-ideal dynamic, it only means that history is still unfolding, and the matters of being do not suffer of fixity. The Romanian researcher believes that, in the case of the novel, what never changes is precisely the problematization around some essential aspects of the human being, because a new way of understanding the evolution of the novel over the centuries is highlighted, all the forms that novel has taken throughout its history being unified by the very permanence of this problematization. Beyond gnosiology and aestheticism, the novel can be considered a narrative ontology that corresponds through the highest degree of generalization to the social world of the individual, this being the main criterion based on which the genre of the novel constantly changes its nature.