The Nineteenth-Century Novel: Generic Functionality and Ideology

113 LEWIS THOMAS E. LEWIS THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL: GENERIC FUNCTIONALITY AND IDEOLOGY For fairly clear reasons there is no satisfactory definition of the novel as a genre. Despite the premature doomsday placards lofted by many literary critics, the novel is not yet dead; and thus it daily produces new phenomena that challenge holistic descriptions of the genre. It is certainly true that our epoch may be witnessing the gradual displacement into cinema of what one considers traditional narrative art, but in the face of this competition the novel itself seeks new structural permutations and refines its use of language— that semiotic medium which, while present in cinematic screenplays, entirely encompasses and privileges the domain of semiosis for the novel. One example may suffice in this context: namely, that of the science fiction novel, which performs in our time the same function of a fictional projection destined to accentuate social consciousness as that carried out by the historical novel in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, we may explain, in part, the dearth of quality science fiction movies as the result of the fact that, because it demands so much repleter a sensory representation (sound, a more fully detailed visual space), the filmic image and filmic plot suffer in a way that the novelistic image and plot do not from the historical absence of precisely those future objects and exaggerated social realities it must attempt to portray. Furthermore, those who overhastily announce the death of the novel must be wary of falling prey to a perspective too-much grounded in the experience of the First World intellectual. In under-developed countries which have already made the transition from oral to written culture, but where only the wealthiest classes of the urban capitals have access to film, the novel (not necessarily the Euro-American novel) still has a role to play. One must also not confuse the programmed abandonment in the United States of reading as an activity with the status of reading in other countries. In Spain, for example, the cultivation of literary art flourishes in a manner unthinkable in the present day United States; for the newly born Spanish democracy there remains the task of disseminating massive quantities of stories, information, and 114 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW images of reality for which the film industry is not prepared, owing both to its reduced size and to the heavy presence of multinational influences ill-adapted to national needs. Finally, while for academics the novel may have perished with the nouveau roman, millions of people—even those who may log a disturbing number of television hours — still faithfully read the so-called popular, or pulp, novel. Here too it is instructive to recall the languishing economic state of neighborhood movie theatres in the United States. It is not the film which has supplanted the novel in North America; rather, it is the best-seller and the packaged TV-film which have undone both the "high-culture" novel and the serious cinema. One may readily postulate, therefore, that far from extinction , the novel still performs a basic social function, though in formats and at a social level that fall outside the range of normal academic optics. The multiplicity of novel-forms constitutes the major obstacle to a generic definition of the novel. Picaresque novel, "eighteenthcentury novel," Gothic novel, historical novel, romantic novel, novel of manners./eiíiMfon, novelapor entregas, realist novel, naturalist novel, psychological novel, modernist novel, anti-novel, novel of magical realism, proletarian novel, detective novel, science fiction novel, post-modernist novel — : it is not that these forms have nothing in common; rather, it is that their differences always prove more interesting and illuminating for the literary and/or cultural critic than their similarities. And indeed, formal descriptions of these novelistic sub-forms have enjoyed more success than attempts to delineate the form of the Novel as a whole. Even these less ambitious anatomies, however, may often be further complicated and threatened to the point of conceptual dissolution: is Balzacian realism identical to Dickensian or Galdosian? is Spanish modernism structurally and ideologically equal to French? is Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year an eighteenthcentury novel of formal realism, or is it even...