Towards a Sociology of the Novel (review)

140 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW BOOK REVIEWS Lucien Goldmann. Towards a Sociology ofthe Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1975. 181 pages. The English translation of Towards a Sociology of the Novel by L. Goldmann, his fifth book in English, is made up of two theoretical essays and two essays of his practical criticism which, unfortunately, caused much misunderstanding as well as justified criticism of his genetic structuralist method. The two theoretical essays, dealing with an elaboration of his sociological categories, although already published in English (chapter one in Telos, no. 18, 1973-74; chapter five m Modern Language Notes, May, 1964), deserve renewed attention as sources for determining whether Goldmann did elaborate a scientific and paradigmatic model of dialectical literary criticism as he assumed or merely left us with a number of heuristic fragments which proved circumstantially operable in Le Dieu caché. In this sense, these two essays should re-animate discussion over the status of his method (the apparent eclectic joining of dialectical and neo-Kantian traditions), though it is to his scattered and as yet untranslated essays on the particular use of his categories that one must go for an accurate determination of this.1 The essays on the nouveau roman and Malraux are merely practical applications of his macro-analytical method-and as such, offer nothing qualitatively different from his essays on Sartre, Genet, and Gombrowicz translated for The Drama Review (respectively, 15, iv: pp. 102-119; 12, ii: pp. 51-61; 14, iii: pp. 102-1 12)-rather than a conceptual advance in the exposition of his categories. Moreover, it is GoIdmann the methodologist, not Goldmann the literary practitioner, whom we can look to for steering sociological aesthetics between the idealist dialectic of Lukács and the pessimistic dualism of Adorno, both of whom systematized their aesthetical theories while Goldmann, though extensively critiquing both, did not. To his disadvantage, his thought remains in essay form in his attempt "to formulate a few remarks much more with a view of raising a number of problems than to providing solutions" (pp. 169-70). The criticisms raised against Le Dieu caché-namely, accusing Goldmann of abstract schematization as a result of his technique of totalization and of applying his categories of world vision and englobing structures in an a priori fashion peculiar to the Weberian use of ideal types, and of confining himself to semantic analysis while ignoring the literary specificity of texts via Barthes-are also valid with respect to his practical criticism here, but need not be considered any more than Goldmann has in his two articles "Response a Mm. Eisberg et Jones" and "Le Dieu caché, 'la nouvelle critique' et le marxisme" in his collection of essays Structures mentales et creation culturelle. If one positions Towards a Sociology of the Novel within his oeuvre, and then within the ongoing context of his continuators, it is clear that Goldmann's theoretical model is dialectically credible even when his practical criticism appears to relate novels through a process of univocal causality to an economic base.2 It was his latest success to have carried out micro-analyses of Genet's play Nègres as well as of poetry by Saint-John Perse and Baudelaire (in Structures mentales. . .), thus evidencing his claim that the genetic structuralist model takes into account the necessary and complex relationship between the "what" of a test, the social group, and the "how" of the properly literary devices. What he failed to do in analyzing the nouveau roman and Malraux's novels, J. Leenhardt (his most significant continuator) does in his 1973 study Lecture politique du roman (ed. de Minuit) and S. Morawski does m L'Absolu et la form (Ed. Klinksieck, 1972), respectively. BOOK REVIEWS 141 The criticism that is pertinent here, however, concerns Goldmann's borrowing from Lukacs's The Theory ofthe Novel, inspired by G. Simmel's The Philosophy of Money-clearly neo-Kantian-and M. Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as Lukács has explained in his article "Mein Weg zu Marx" (in Marxismo e politica culturale, Einaudi, 1968). In his practical criticism it is clear that Goldmann continues the epic-novel typology Lukács...