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Theory of the Novel. A Historical Approach

Sanda PADURETU
Universitatea Tehnica din Cluj-Napoca

This paper is trying to survey the concept of literary theory over the past decades. It
presents an attempt to clarify and rectify the imbalance between the different theoretical directions
of analyzing the fictional narrative (namely genre theory and structuralism) and works towards
establishing the idea of the coherence of the novel genre as a historical phenomenon.
Key words: literary theory, theoretical direction, fictional narrative, coherence, historical
phenomenon

The theory of the novel is a deceptively simple notion; the more its pondered the less
self-evident it becomes. Over the past few decades, as literary theory has become increasingly
central to literary studies, its singularity more often than not is defined against, among other things,
literary history.
One way of confronting questions about the scope of categories like these is to ask what a
given term seems, by standard definition, to rule out. Fiction rules out factuality; narrative rules
out discourse that isnt told, or whose telling doesnt take the form of a story. In other words, both
fiction and narrative are evidently a good deal broader than the novel, which isnt the only
path either to fiction or to narration. So why does common usage often imply it is? Again, theory
is a process of abstraction that most obviously rules out concrete practice in this case, either the
practical composition of novels or the practical activity of criticizing, interpreting or reading them.
But by this standard, the theory of the novel would seem compatible enough with another process of
abstraction, that involved in deriving from particular novels a notion of their more general historical
relationships. In fact theory and history might appear to complement, even interpenetrate, each
other. Then why does common usage imply they dont?
The answers to both these questions are being clarified in the anthology Theory of the
Novel, edited by Michael McKeon. The book
1
is a comprehensive attempt to clarify and rectify the
imbalance between the different theoretical directions of analyzing the fictional narrative and works
towards establishing the idea of the coherence of the novel genre as a historical phenomenon. In this
sense, they all take as their premise the need to put the novel in its place, even if their focus in
doing this is less the broad category of narrative in which the novel has a relatively limited place
than the placement of the novel in its own particular historical contingency and context. For the
novel genre to be coherent in these terms requires that it fulfill the demands that pertain to all
historical things: namely, that it displays both the continuity of an integral entity and, within that
continuity, the discontinuity that confirms its existence over time and space, its capacity to change
without changing into something else. If McKeons anthology is relatively uncommon for the
readings it brings together, its also unusual, perhaps, for the explicitness with which the
accompanying commentary seeks to elaborate, on the basis of those readings, its own syncretic
theory of the novel. The point is not simply to make visibly active the truth that all anthologies, if

1
***, Theory of the Novel, edited by Michael McKeon, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London,
2000

242
only in their principles of selection, take a position on the subject which they also aim to represent
broadly and impartially that is, as a whole. Indeed, the editors own aim there was (in this sense
of the term) the impartial representation of a historic, hence generic, theory of the novel. To this
end, however, the headnotes to each part of the anthology provide not only an interpretive
framework for their respective readings but also a continuous and developing argument concerning
the historical theory of the novel in general. Central to the theorization of the novel as a historical
entity is the premise that the novel, the quintessentially modern genre, is deeply intertwined with
the historicity of the modern period, of modernity itself. The organization of this book is therefore
historical, but not in the most obvious sense of that term. Although it would be possible to
proceed chronologically from the earliest (eighteenth-century) to the most recent efforts to theorize
the novel as a genre, a different procedure has been followed here. Instead, all of the readings date
from the twentieth century and most from the last forty years, and all of them take their shape, in
one way or another, as efforts to theorize the novel with and under the weight of the historical
consciousness of its significance (whether conceived in positive or negative terms) as a modern
phenomenon. A brief summary of this organization proves useful.

1. Genre Theory
Whats at stake in pursuing the theory of the novel as an exercise in genre theory rather
than narrative theory or narratology? Whats at stake is history. The study of genre is a historical
approach to literature because it understands literary categories in their contingency. The
contingency of genres has several dimensions. Conceived as integral structures, genres have a
temporal and spatial existence that defines the scope of their identity; conceived as parts of greater
wholes, genres have a structural existence in relation to other integral formations. That is, genres are
formal structures that have a historical existence in the sense that they come into being, flourish and
decay, waxing and waning in complex relationship to other historical phenomena. Genres are
contingent in the sense that they arent necessary: neither their nature nor their transformation,
neither their continuity nor their discontinuity, can be predicated in advance.
Moreover genres are contingent in the sense that they are models for making formal choices
within the larger realm of formal determinacy. In Claudio Guillns words
2
, a genre is an invitation
to form, to the matching of matter and form where matter is understood to be not content but
language already shot through with formal elements. The determinacy of genre consists in the
way the formal idea it implies evokes how this matching process has already been achieved in a
broad range of past literary practice. But a preexistent form can never be simply taken over by the
writer or transferred to a new work. The writer must begin once more to match matter to form, and
to that end he can only find a very special sort of assistance in the fact that the fitting of matter to
form has already taken place. To offer this assistance is the function of a genre. A genre is
therefore a problem-solving model on the level of form.
Why has the theory of the narrative mode proved more compelling, in the last few decades,
than the theory of the novel genre? Northrop Frye gives
3
one answer to this question by suggesting
(in 1957) that the dominance of the novel in modern times has resulted in a novel-centered view of
prose fiction by which diverse narrative forms are reduced to the single, culturally normative
model of the novel. His own theory of genres seeks to remedy this imbalance by situating the
lesser, generic category within the encompassing category of mode. Fryes usage is unusual, he
employs the term genre to refer to what we would call the mode of narrative (or prose
fiction), whereas the novel he designates a species of that genre (or genus). The procedure by
which Frye elaborates the several sorts of narrative is based on the salutary principle that texts
should be judged according to the categories to which they belong. The procedure itself combines

2
Claudio Guilln, Literature as a System: Essays, toward the Theory of Literary History in Theory of the Novel, edited
by Michael McKeon, Baltimore and London, 2000, p.34
3
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, op. cit., p.5
243
a sense of empirical investigation (the categories emerge from the investigation of texts) with a
finally more decisive sense of taxonomic deduction, whereby texts are seen to conform to a pre-
existent, synchronic grid of possibility. As a result, the contingency of the several genres of
narrative trends to be subsumed by the aura of necessity surrounding narrative as such;
chronological historicity is flattened into logical schematism.
With Fryes taxonomic view of genre may be contrasted E.D.Hirschs hermeneutic
4
view of
it. Although his concern is not with genre theory, Hirsch provides an account of genre that deepens
our understanding of its contingency at the most local level of compositional and interpretative
practice. Hermeneutics is the study of how meaning is constructed through interpretation. For
Hirsch, the way genres work provide a good paradigm for such meaning construction. Indeed, all
understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound. Like Guilln, Hirsch would see genre
as an invitation to match one thing with another in his words, the particular meaning or traits of
a text with the general type of meaning we bring to it by way of our meaning expectations. Hirsch
explains more fully the generality of type of meaning as the intrinsic genre of any utterance, the
entire, complex system of shared experiences, usage traits, and meaning expectations which the
speaker relies on to communicate a particular meaning to a readership.

2. The Novel Displacement: Structuralism
Modernity conjoins several, seemingly contradictory, developments: the emergence of the
novel genre; the decay of the genre system; and the movement to replace the historical theory of the
novel by the transhistorical theory of narrative. To this we may add the fact that some of the most
powerful efforts to historicize the theory of the novel have been formulated in reaction to what
Northrop Frye calls the novel-centered view of narrative. In this familiar view, the novel tends to
be conceived as the normative culmination of an evolution from lesser, more primitive, narrative
forms. Against this view theorists have proposed a contrary model of narrative change according to
which the novel is seen as falling off from more foundational modes of narration. Two related
versions of this model are the structuralist and psychoanalytic theory.
Although he is not a structuralist in a strict sense, Walter Benjamins reflections
5
on the
sociocultural role of the storyteller have deep affinities with the evocative retrospection
characteristic of structuralist analysis that undergoes historicization. For Benjamin, storytelling
occupies the place of narrative practice, a place that in other writers may be filled instead by myth,
epic or romance. For all such writers, however, it is the belated form of the novel that lies on the
other side of historical watershed between tradition and modernity, whose force Benjamin suggests
through a series of powerful antitheses: intelligence versus information, experiential wisdom versus
empirical verification, chronicle versus history, interpretation versus explanation, reminiscence
versus remembrance. Accompanying these conceptual pairings are their sociomaterial conditions:
community versus solitude, face-to-face craftsmanship versus mechanical reproduction, the
artisanal versus the middle class. Benjamins interest is therefore historical: concerned both with the
temporal persistence and with the structural relationality of discursive form. The definitive generic
differential in both these senses pertains, for Benjamin, to the technology of cultural production and
preservation; its the difference between orality and print. The art of repeating stories, storytelling
demands an audience self- forgetful enough to permit the memory to retain and reproduce
narrative, to transmit it from generation to generation and so contribute tothe web that all stories
together form in the end. Implicit in Benjamins account is the understanding of orality as a
cultural mechanism for sustaining the ongoingness of tradition by invisibly accommodating change
to the continuity of what has always been known. When knowledge is preserved not in the memory
but in objective transcription first in writing and then in print whats lost is the ability to adjust
the new to the old telling of the story. Discrepancies between different versions, thrown into relief

4
E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, op. cit., p. 14
5
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller, op. cit., p. 77
244
by the possibility of objective comparison, gradually destroy the subjective impression of
continuity, substituting for the value of wisdom and perpetuity the value of verification, innovation,
novelty and the novel.
The structural anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss confirms
6
that point. Like Benjamin, he
tells a devolutionary story of melancholy and loss. Unlike Benjamin, Lvi-Strauss describes the
difference between a static and a dynamic mechanism of producing narrative with scarcely any
recourse to the material technologies of orality, literacy and print. Some of Lvi-Strauss texts
provide an overview of this difference in terms that are fundamental to much of his work. The
stabilizing function of the savage mind consists in the way it coordinates images of nature and
culture. He calls this coordination a homology between two systems of differences so as to
emphasize the indirection with which nature and culture are aligned. Group cultural identity is
perpetually problematic because demographic and other sorts of material change continually
challenge identity with the evidence of difference. Rather than deny this evidence, the savage mind
discovers within nature itself a set of models of difference and analogizes them to problems of
cultural difference. But although it may be conceived differentially, the natural order is
experientially cyclical and constant as the domain of culture, left to itself, never can be. The savage
mind conceives nature and culture as an original and a derivative series, once linked but now
separate. The two series exist in time but under an atemporal regime, since, both being real, they
sail through time together, remaining such as they were at the moment of separation. The original
series is always there, ready to serve as a system of reference for the interpretation and rectification
of the changes taking place in the derivative series. If, however, culture conceives nature not as a
separate model of difference but as a repository of elements each of which is directly aligned with
its own, the stabilizing force of the natural domain as a distinct system of reference will be lost.
Two images, one social and the other natural, and each articulated separately, will be replaced by a
socio-natural image, single but fragmented. According to Lvi-Strauss, the transformation of a
given myth sustains and reproduces this fundamental reference system despite the more ostentatious
variations they introduce. To understand the meaning of myths we must read below the
diachronic linearity of their telling, in which elements of nature and culture are directly and
metonymically linked to one another, so as to grasp the synchronic, metaphorical relationship
between nature and culture that is the key to both their structure and their function. To put this
another way, the differential form of myths is of much greater importance than their content. This
helps account for the repetitive quality of myth, whose systematic structure controls and contains
the evolutionary dynamism of temporal process.
Northrop Fryes overview
7
of the great literary modes underscores the problems attendant
on a historiography thats derived from a structuralist method. His category mode occupies a
place midway between genre in the usual, historical sense and the transhistorical category of
mode as universal. Frye correlates a sequence of five models the mythic, romance, high
mimetic, low mimetic and ironic with the five epochs of Western literature: looking over this
table, we can see that European fiction, during the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its
center of gravity down the list. But what is it thats moving? The idea of historical change depends
on a compound of continuity and discontinuity, which designates both difference over time and that
element of identity without which the notion that something has changed lacks all meaning. In
Fryes scheme, difference is represented by social content, reality and the world; whereas
identity inheres in literary form or imagination. But if form and content, identity and difference,
structure and history are dichotomously distinguished, the result is a literary history in which
literature never changes. The history of forms is paradoxically devoid of history. Form doesnt
happen in history; rather history happens in form.


6
Claude Lvi Strauss, The Savage Mind, op. cit., p. 94
7
Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture. A Study of the Structure of Romance, op. cit., p. 139
245
3. Conclusions
This second movement, the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism, directed its critique
not at the novel but, more generally, at the perceived weakness of theoretical understanding in
literary studies. Still, the repercussions for novel study were considerable. Central to this critique is
the nature of language, the constitutive basis of literature. Broadly constructing theory as an
exercise in questioning the categories by which cultures uncritically understand themselves,
structuralism and poststructuralism looked (with very different emphases) to the operation of
language for rules by which to challenge the authority of what it saw as unselfcritical historical
practice not just local and temporary literary usages, but the categories of genre and literature
themselves. The effect was not only (in general) to divorce theoretical from historical study but also
(in particular) to redirect attention away from kinds of narrative that, like the novel genre, have a
specific historical character, and toward narrative as such, from whose general language use, it was
thought, might be derived a broad understanding unclouded by the specific biases of more narrowly
historical practice. As a result, during the past few decades interest in the theory of the novel as a
literary- historical genre has been replaced by interest in narrative or narratology, the study of
verbal narrative technique as it cuts across the chronological and disciplinary divides of historical
practice. Treated as a local instance of a more universal activity, the novel has been subsumed
within narrative in such a way as to obscure or ignore its special, generic and literary properties.
Divorced from inquiry into the truth, the secondary discourse is always in danger of falling
into arbitrariness or divagation, only abeyance by rigorous methodological principles and
investigatory protocols can ensure the verifiability reproducibility of its assertions and results. The
rise of the biological and physical sciences, with their clear distinction between object of knowledge
as given (datum) and procedures of inquiry, served as a model for apprehending the relation of a
secondary discourse to a primary text. Heidegger has been most persuasive on this score, drawing
attention to the widespread assumption of a mode of thinking about things as the model for all
forms of knowledge, and the specific elaboration of that model in Kant. It is not surprising then to
find the preoccupation with methodology in works of the Neo-Kantians, who were most concerned
with endowing the humanities with what they saw as the rigor of scientific enquiry.
Modern literary studies, founded as they were upon the opposition of primary text and
secondary discourse, did not escape the effect of this opposition; and the great number of
methodologies proposed in this century attests to this fact. Formalism, phenomenological criticism,
the New Criticism, Structuralism, most forms of semiotics, to name but a few of the more
prominent, have in common a preoccupation with the development of the right approach to the
study of literary texts, one that would provide the scholar, engaged in teaching as well as research,
with a degree of validation in the practice.
Literary critics, especially those of theoretical bent, rightly devote their energy to the examination
of these methodologies to assess their claims and establish their validity. Such is the case of
contemporary polemics in literary studies.


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***, Theory of the Novel, edited by Michael McKeon, The Johns Hopkins University Press,
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