Is There a Myth of Progress in the Novel?

In a strange way, i feel like sometimes when i i have conversations about novels and conventionality, or experimentalism, or any of these things, in some ways i'm like, well, that's how we talk about art. It's like on this continuum. And you constantly feay that there's an of on guard, right? There's the sense that you're always trying to, in theory, as an artist, do something that hasn't been done before. I want to see it as just like this big mess of data points, you know, at i mean, and and im and in that configuration, i guess i would say, i don't know, i feel