What relation does the novel have to human being, human life, humanism? Its most obvious characteristic is the ability to encode life into text, by drawing on the conventions of ‘formal realism’. Compared with epic poetry and literary ballads, the novel has a greater purchase on mimesis, and against the short story and the novella it has the potential breadth to convey a life, a saga, a tradition. The novel, of all literary forms, can most comfortably contain the arc of history, from the personal to the global. By these lights, the roman fleuve is perhaps the epitome of the form.

Ian Watt maps the origins of the novel on to the beginning of modern philosophy. It was in his method, writes Watt, that Descartes attained greatness. In contrast with his predecessors, the French philosopher's pursuit of truth was conceived as a wholly individual matter, as a clean break with precedent and tradition. The literary form of the novel recapitulates these interwoven notions of individualism and innovation. In its aim, ‘truth to individual experience’, the novel could not help but strike a unique chord.