Theorizing the Novel
The Novel | Week 4 | Natalia Cecire
n.cecire@sussex.ac.uk | @ncecire
Reading theory can feel like this sometimes.
"Formalist" approach: identify and analyze forms that usually appear in the novel, like narration, fabula, sjužet, point of view, and description.
"Formalist" approach: identify and analyze forms that usually appear in the novel, like narration, fabula, sjužet, point of view, and description.
- Russian formalism: Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
- structuralism: A.J. Greimas, Roland Barthes
- narratology: Gérard Genette, Toril Moi
- psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Peter Brooks
Again, these categories aren't mutually exclusive.
Description...has no predictive mark; ‘analogical,’ its structure is purely summatory and does not contain that trajectory of choices and alternatives which gives narration the appearance of a huge traffic-control center, furnished with a referential (and not merely discursive) temporality.
Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect" (142-3).
[E]liminated from the realist speech-act as a signified of denotation, the “real” returns to it as a signified of connotation; for just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do—without saying so—is signify it; Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of “the real” (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified.
Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect" (148).
"Formalist" approach: identify and analyze forms that usually appear in the novel, like narration, fabula, sjužet, point of view, and description.
- Russian formalism: Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp
- structuralism: A.J. Greimas, Roland Barthes
- narratology: Gérard Genette, Toril Moi
- psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Peter Brooks
Again, these categories aren't mutually exclusive.
"Historicist" approach: situate the novel in a historical trajectory and explain why the novel became popular when it did.
"Historicist" approach: situate the novel in a historical trajectory and explain why the novel became popular when it did.
- Foucauldian approaches: Nancy Armstrong, D. A. Miller
- Marxist approaches: György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Benedict Anderson
- other: Ian Watt, Franco Moretti
Always historicize! This slogan—the one absolute and we may even say "transhistorical" imperative of all dialectical thought—will unsurprisingly turn out to be the moral of The Political Unconscious as well.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Preface, p. ix in the Routledge edition).
So much for the main analogies between realism in philosophy and literature. They are not proposed as exact; philosophy is one thing and literature is another. Nor do the analogies depend in any way on the presumption that the realist tradition in philosophy was a cause of the realism of the novel.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (476).
[By the early nineteenth century] it had been established that novels were supposed to rewrite political history as personal histories that elaborated on the courtship procedures ensuring a happy domestic life. That novels ultimately seemed to steer clear of politics held as true for the more masculine fiction of Fielding and Scott as it did for the domestic fiction of Richardson and Austen. But fiction was particularly good at picking up the fragments of an agrarian and artisan culture when it recast them as gender differences and contained them within a domestic framework.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (38-9).
It seems to me that the novels which best exemplify the genre for us today are indeed those which translated the social contract into a sexual exchange. By representing social conflict as personal histories, gothic tales of sensibility, and stories of courtship and marriage, a relatively few eighteenth century authors were allowed to displace an entire body of fiction in which political conflict was not so thoroughly transformed by middle-class love.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (38-9).
My description of a few early nineteenth century novels will show that this subtle power of transformation was not peculiar to domestic fiction or to novels in general, much less to literature. It was a political strategy in its own right that certain novels shared with other kinds of writing characterizing the age.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (38-9).
And the novel? May we not pose the question of the novel—whose literary hegemony is achieved precisely in the nineteenth century—in the context of the age of discipline?
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (18).
Marxist historicism
- materialist understanding of history: phases correspond with economic relations
- focus on class struggle
- ideology critique
<— olden times ——|—— "today" ("modernity") —>
This is a very useful but pretty sketchy way to periodize. Proceed with caution.
Watt:
<— romance ——|—— novel —>
Barthes:
<— the old verisimilitude —|— the reality effect —>
Benjamin:
<— story/experience —|— novel/isolation —>
One reason for this phenomenon is obvious: experience has fallen in value. ... Beginning with the First World War, a process became apparent which continues to this day. Wasn't it noticeable at the end of the war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent—not richer but poorer in communicable experience? What poured out in the flood of war books ten years later was anything but experience that can be shared orally.
Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (143-4).
The story:
- oral, proximity of human bodies
- communal
- imparts wisdom; practical
In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today "having counsel" is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence, we have no counsel either for ourselves or others.
Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (145).
The earliest indication of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on the book. The dissemination of the novel became possible only with the invention of printing.
Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (146).
What distinguishes the novel from all other forms of prose literature—the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella—is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor enters into it. ... The birthplace of the novel is the individual in his isolation, the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel and can give none.
Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (146).
A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader. ... In this solitude of his, the reader of a novel seizes upon his material more jealously than anyone else. He is ready to make it completely his own—to devour it, as it were. ... What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.
Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (162).
[O]nly Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism evoked above. Only Marxism can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past....This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one. ... These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (415).
How do we responsibly relate the past and the present?
- Antiquarianism: look how weird and arcane the past is! (bad)
- Presentism: projecting our own values onto the past (bad)
- A true philosophy of history that understands past and present as part of the same story (good): for Jameson, Marxism offers that philosophy.
From this perspective, the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (415).
[T]he novel plays a significant role in what can be called a properly bourgeois cultural revolution—that immense process of transformation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic, modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism. The "objective" function of the novel is thereby also implied: to its subjective and critical, analytic, corrosive mission must now be added the task of producing as though for the first time that very life world, that very "referent"…of which this new narrative discourse will then claim to be the "realistic" reflection.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (418).
The novel creates a sense of:
- quantifiable space
- rhythms of measurable time (Anderson, following Benjamin, will call this "homogeneous, empty time")
- secular, commodity-oriented object-world
- market equivalence
- the "monadic ego"/bourgeois individual (cf. Benjaminian isolation)
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (418).
The function of the sexual comedy is essentially to direct our reading attention toward the relationship between sexual potency and class affiliation. Our assumption that it is the former which is the object of this particular game of narrative hide-and-seek is in fact the blind or subterfuge behind which the otherwise banal and empirical facts of social status and political prehistory are transformed into the fundamental categories in terms of which the narrative is interpreted.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (424-5).
It may…readily be admitted that what [Marshall Sahlins] calls the instrumentalization of culture is a temptation or tendency within all Marxisms….
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (272 in Routledge edition).
But the cure in that sense is a myth, as is the equivalent mirage within a Marxian ideological analysis: namely, the vision of a moment in which the individual subject would be somehow fully conscious of his or her determination by class and would be able to square the circle of ideological conditioning by sheer lucidity and the taking of thought.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (273-4 in Routledge edition).
Such a demonstration might be staged under a reversal of Walter Benjamin's great dictum that "there is no document of civilization which is not at one and the same time a document of barbarism," and would seek to argue the proposition that the effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily Utopian.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (276 in Routledge edition).
The Benjamin quotation is from "On the Concept of History," also translated as "Theses on the Philosophy of History."