Magical Narratives Romance As Genre

Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre Author(s): Fredric Jameson Source: New Literary History, Vol. 7, No.
1, Critical Challenges: The Bellagio Symposium (Autumn, 1975), pp. 135-163 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468283 . Accessed: 05/07/2013 23:37
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 136.145.174.50 on Fri, 5 Jul 2013 23:37:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre Fredric Jameson

0, she's warm! If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating. The Winter'sTale
I
REACTION AGAINST genre theory in recent times is a strategic feature of what must be called the ideology of modernism. And it is certain that of all literaryworks, so-called modernistic ones are the least classifiableaccording to traditional "kinds": witnessthe rise of a new and hybridformin the novel, and in our own day, the emphasis on the incomparable uniqueness of the style and "world" of the individual writer. Yet the waning of the modern and the returnto plot suggest that a reexamination of the question of genre may be in order. Genres are essentiallycontracts between a writer and his readers; or rather, to use the term which Claudio Guillen has so usefully revived, of social life which like the other institutions theyare literaryinstitutions, are based on tacit agreements or contracts. The thinkingbehind such a view of genres is based on the presupposition that all speech needs to be marked with certain indications and signals as to how it is properlyto be used. In everydaylife, of course, these signals are furnishedby the context of the utterance and by the physical presence of the speaker, with his gesturalityand intonations. When speech is lifted out of this concrete situation,such signals must be replaced by other typesof directions,if the text in question is not to be abandoned to a driftingmultiplicityof uses (or meanings, as the latterused to be termed). It is of course the generic convention which is called upon to perform this task, and to provide a built-in substitutefor those older correctionsand adjustments which are possible only in the immediacy of the face-to-face situation. Yet it is clear at the same time that the farthera given text is removed from a or bard, or player), the performingsituation (that of village storyteller, will it be to enforcea given generic prescriptionon a reader; more difficult indeed, no small part of the art of writingis absorbed by this (impossible)
THE
136
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
attempt to devise a foolproofmechanism for the automatic exclusion of undesirable responsesto a given literary utterance. Traditional genre theoryhas been understood as performing the distinct but related functionsof furnishing for the production of this specifications or that typeof composition,and of providinga typology according to which the various existingcompositionsmay be sorted out by genus and species. In recent times, the firstof these functions,with its so-called techniques and its literaryrecipes, has become the propertyof commercial literature, where the older genres continue to live the half-lifeof the various paperback lines, gothics, mysteries, bestsellers,and the like; while the second has become an almost exclusively academic or antiquarian enterprise, ideals drawing its inspirationfrom nothing fresherthan the classificatory of earlynineteenth-century science. Still, it is hard to see how any genuine literaryhistorycould be written without the aid of somethinglike a concept of genre. The genesis of an individual work, the development of an individual writer,might furnish illuminatingfootnotesto the storyof overall cultural and literarychange, but would surely never figureas the principal events it has to tell. Only the historyof the forms themselvescan provide an adequate mediation between the perpetual change of social life on the one hand, and the closure of the individual work on the other. Such a history is a social one to the degree to which it takes as its object a social institution, namely, the generic contract itselfas a relationshipbetween producers and public, while retaining the use of what are almost exclusively literary-critical inasmuch as its data must be drawn fromprecise and concrete instruments, of experience the works themselves. When we look at the practice, rather than the theory,of contemporary genre criticism,we find two seeminglyincompatible tendencies at work which we will characterize as the semantic and the structuralor syntactic of comedy approaches respectively.A glance at some of the classic theorists will illustrate the distinction: for some, the object of inquiry is not the individual work but rather something like the comic vision, which may be seen as a more general or universal attitude towards life or form of being-in-the-world. Obviously, there is room for wide variation within this approach: thus, for Bergson, comedy is essentiallyan expression of society as a whole, and has the functionof punishing deviance with ridicule and therebypreservingthe social order; while for Emil Staiger, on the contrary,it constitutesone of the few avenues by which the fundamental absurdity of existence may be apprehended in a fashion still tolerable forthe human mind. Whatever the nature of the hypothesis,however, the advantage of this approach is surely that it aims explicitly at giving an account of the meaning of the genre; while just as clearly its weakness lies in the prospect of the invention of a whole series of imaginary entitiesand abstract personifications afterthe fashionof German idealism (the "spirit" of comedy, of tragedy, etc.), and of which Dilthey's elaborate system of Weltan-
MAGICALNARRATIVES: ROMANCE AS GENRE
i37
schauungen may serve as an instructiveexample. The conceptual operation involved in this particular approach may be characterized as the for the individual work in question, of some more generalized substitution, existentialexperience of which a descriptionis then given which can range from the impressionistic to the phenomenologically rigorous. In this approach, the essence of genre is apprehended in termsof what we will call a mode. For the second, or syntacticapproach, such a method stands condemned out of its own mouth as intuitiveand unscientific;the alternativeis rather a view of comedy as a determinate laughter-producingmechanism with precise laws and requirementsof its own, whose realization in the various media of theater or narrative, in film or in daily life, may be the object of analysis and syntheticreconstruction, resulting,not in the expression of a meaning, but ratherthe building of a model. We may further suggest the distance between these two general approaches by pointing out that the object studied by each has a different "opposite," or negation: for the the phenomenological approach, contraryin terms of which comedy will be defined will be another mode, that of tragedy,say, or of irony; while for the structuralapproach, the opposite will simply be the noncomic or the unfunny,the joke that falls flator the farce that remains a dead letter. This approach, whose monuments range from the lost chapters of Aristotle'sPoetics to Freud's joke book, has the advantage of forcingeven its ungiftedpractitionersto remain closer to the text itself. On the other hand, as Levi-Strauss has suggested in his critique of Propp,1 the danger of this kind of analysis lies in its susceptibility to a kind of mesmerization by the sheer empirical existence of the functions or mechanisms it uncovers, thus leading it to conclude (as does Propp himself in his classic but unsatisfying declaration that the structure work) with the peremptory in question is thus, and not otherwise. In this second, or structuralapproach, we will suggest,for want of a betterterm,that the genre in question is dealt with in termsof fixedform. Judging from similar alternations in stylistictheory and in linguistics itself,this methodological hesitation between a structuralanalysis and a semantics of genre must find its ultimate source in the ambiguous constitution of language itself. It does not seem particularly rewarding to perpetuate it by continuing to choose sides in a dogmatic and sectarian spirit. Rather, let us see whetherit may not be possible to turnthe dilemma into a solution in its own right by making it the basis for some fresh hypothesisabout the nature of genre. The latter would then be defined as that literaryphenomenon which may be articulated either in termsof a fixed form or in terms of a mode, and which must be susceptible of expression in either of these critical codes optionally. The advantage of a definitionlike this consistsnot only in its exposure of false problems (thus, it would no longer make any sense to wonder whether the novel as such can be considered a genre, inasmuch as one cannot imagine any determinate literarymode which would correspond to such a "form"); but also
138
NEW
LITERARY
HISTORY
in its capacity to generate new lines of research,for example, to raise the question of the nature of the mode to which such a fixed form as the historical novel may be said to correspond, or that of the fixed form of which a familiar mode like that of the romance may be said to be the expression. Yet such a definitionalso, at least implicitly, includes criteria for judging the completeness of any given piece of genre criticism; and in what follows, we will use problems raised by the criticismof romance, if not as the basis for some new and substantive account of the latter, then at least as a frameworkfor indicating the formal requirementswhich any reallyadequate account of such a genre must meet and the steps necessarily involved in fulfilling them.
II
The fullestaccount of romance as a mode has been given by Northrop Frye, with whose theorywe thereforebegin. Romance is for him a wish fulfillment or utopian fantasy,which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everydayreality,whether in an effort to restoreit to the condition of some lost Eden or to inaugurate and usher in some new and ultimate realm from which the old mortalityand imperfectionshave been effaced. To say that it is a wish fulfillment is not, indeed, to suggest that romance longs for total freedom from that everyday world or ordinary life: rather, "the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but 2 will still contain that reality." To put it this way is thereforeto turn our attention to those elements in the ordinaryworld which must be transformed, if the earthlyparadise is to reveal its lineamentsbehind it: it then becomes clear that forromance such elements are conceived, not as the humdrum contingencies of an ordinaryfiniteand mortal existence,but rather as the result of curse and enchantment, black magic, baleful spell, and ritual desolation. Not unnaturally, the forces capable of resistingthis sinister power themselves partake of magic, this time of a white or theological variety. So romance comes to be seen as the struggle between the higher and lower realms, between heaven and hell, or the angelic and the demonic or diabolic: froman upper world,and his enemyis analogousto the demonicpowersof a lowerworld.The conflict however takesplace in,or at anyrateprimarily concerns, our world, whichis in themiddle, and whichis characterized moveby the cyclical mentof nature.Hence theopposite of natureare assimilated to polesof thecycles the opposition of the hero and his enemy.The enemy is associatedwithwinter, moribund and old age, and the herowithspring, darkness, confusion, sterility, life, and youth.3 dawn,order, fertility, vigor, Such a passage calls for several remarks. We may first of all feel some
the hero of romance is analogous to the mythicalMessiah or deliverer who comes
MAGICAL
NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE
AS GENRE
139
skepticism about the importance assigned the hero in Frye's account of the romance paradigm (which in this respect is very similar to that proposed by Propp for the fairytale). In most romances, no doubt, the hero is called upon to struggle with the villain or demon; yet the account of Propp remindsus that he is able to do so only after elaborate preparation, and in particular with the help of various benign and preternatural agencies. In fact, a casual glance at the traditional heroes of romance, from Yvain and Parzifal to Fabrice and the Pierrot of Queneau or the "grand Meaulnes," suggests that the hero's dominant trait is naivet6 or inexperience, and that his most characteristicposture is that of bewilderment. Surely, far frombeing an emissaryof the "upper world," the hero of romance is somethingcloser to an observer,a mortal spectatorsurprised by supernatural conflict,who then himselfis gradually drawn in, to reap the rewards of victory without even quite being aware of what was at stake in the first place. It will of course rightly be observed that Frye's descriptionapplies, not to romance as such, but to the mythof which it is itselfa degraded form. However, the basic issue involved is not so much the relative elevation of the hero (Frye's own distinctions are well known: "superior in kind both to other men and to the environment,""superior in degree," "superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment,"4 etc.), but rather the relevance of the veryconcept of the hero as a critical category What Frye ascribes to the character of the "mythicalMessiah or deliverer" is indeed what Propp calls a series of functions,or what we may more looselycall a seriesof deeds: the hero is he who by his own action struggles and earns his victoryor suffers his defeat, whose own feats are responsible for the regeneration and transfiguration of the fallen world, when that proves possible. I would argue that such a descriptionis appropriate only for a narrative in which action as such is the predominant categoryof the a event, whereas what we find in romance is something quite different, sequence of events which are closer to states of being than to acts, or better still, in which even human acts and deeds are apprehended in relatively static, pictorial, contemplative fashion, as being themselves results and attributes,rather than causes in their own right. To put it another way, we might suggest that the very category of the "hero" as such belongs more properly to a dramatic literature, and that we thereforeneed to mark the contemplative nature of romance as narrative by the choice of some other term for the human figurationof which its pattern is in part woven. We will return to this problem later, for it becomes theoretically more urgentwhen we tryto grasp romance as a fixed form. For the present,we may now turn to the nature of the "states of being" of which the hero of romance is both a vehicle and a registering apparatus, for these go to the very heart of what is distinctiveabout romance as a mode. At this stage, what we would want to observe about Frye's account is that it fails to come to gripswith the conceptual categorieswhich inform and preselectthe attributesand qualities by which those states are charac-
140
terized. I would suggest that the most important of those organizational categories is the conceptual opposition between good and evil, under which all the other typesof attributes and images (light and darkness,high and low, etc.) are clearly subsumed. Now it will be said that such an opposition, which is the basis of all ethics, is present in every conceivable format everymoment in human historyand may thus be thought literary to have its roots deep in the nature of man; yet to think so would be to take this particular conceptual category at face value and on its own terms,rather than to attempt to "estrange" it in such a way as to view it as an anthropological phenomenon in its own right, an ideological formationas little natural, as historical and as humanly "constructed,"as are, say, the totemic systemsof certain primitivetribes,or that animism which formsa classical stage in the development of religion. Thus seen, it becomes clear that while belief in good and evil is a very old form of thought which has spanned most of what Marx called man's "prehistory"(i.e., the vicissitudesof the human race up to the moment in which, in socialism, it begins to exercise masteryover its own fate), it is by no means without an intimate link to the social structure,in which such a belief fulfills a crucial function. In the shrinkingworld of today, with its indeed, gradual leveling of class and national and racial differences, it is becoming increasinglyclear that the concept of evil is at one with the category of Otherness itself: evil characterizeswhatever is radifrom me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference cally different seems to constitutea very real and urgentthreatto my existence. So from earliest times,the strangerfromanother tribe,the "barbarian" who speaks an incomprehensible language and follows "outlandish" customs, or, in our own day, the avenger of cumulated resentments fromsome oppressed class, or else that alien being-Jew or Communist-behind whose apparentlyhuman featuresan intelligenceof a malignant and preternatural is thought to lurk-these are some of the figuresin which the superiority fundamental identity of the representativeof Evil and the Other are visible. The point, however, is not that in such figuresthe Other is feared because he is evil; rather,he is evil because he is Other, alien, different, strange,unclean, and unfamiliar.5 Any analysis of romance as a mode will then want to come to terms with the intimateand constitutive as a relationshipbetween the formitself, and this deep-rooted ideology which has genre and a literaryinstitution, only too clearly the function of drawing the boundaries of a given social order and providing a powerful internal deterrent against deviancy or subversion. As for the notion that the concept of good and evil is far more widespread in its literaryuse than this,and that it can thereforescarcely serve as a distinguishing characteristicof romance as a form,it is worth observabsence of the this particular opposition from tragedy, in which the ing triumphof an inhuman fate or destinyis feltto be somethingthat radically transcendsthe mere human categories of good and evil. The proof is that
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
141
when we do encounter,in somethingthat looks like a tragedy,judgments that come from the ethical realm (as when we see this or that character as a villain), we generallydescribe such works as melodrama, and, indeed, the latter may in that respect rather be considered a degraded form of romance. As for comedy, we will see a little later that its categories are also quite distinct from those of romance, being in particular far more social in application: thus the classical conflict in comedy is not that between good and evil, but rather between youth and age, while the oedipal resolution of comedy aims, not at the restoration of a fallen world, but rather at the regenerationof the social order. It may, however, also be objected that there are other semantic codes in the romance which are equally as importantas that of good and evil; in particular, it would seem that the role of magic as such is considerable, if not indeed constitutive. Yet the belief in good and evil is precisely a magical thought mode, that is, one which springs from a precapitalist, to imagine a conflictof essentiallyagricultural way of life. It is difficult magical forces which would not be marked in some way as positive and negative, or in other words, ultimately,as a struggle between good and that of evil, between white magic and black magic. Thus the two systems, good and evil, and that of magic, are inextricablyintermingled,and may indeed prove simply to be differentdimensions of the same ideological phenomenon, that of Otherness directing our attention to the political and social attributesof such a world view, while the formulationin terms of magic ratherorientsus towards the economic organization of the society in question and the relations it entertainswith the world of nature. A final observation must come to terms with the very notion of world itself as it has been presupposed in the preceding remarks. It is a term now used relativelyloosely, and without much awareness of its origins in the phenomenological movement and its status there as a relativelytechnical philosophical concept. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, however, we cannot impose a single, binding use on such a term, and it seems better to recognize that it has, as it were, both an esoteric-or technical-and an exoteric-or more popular-meaning. The latter conveys a relatively physical and geographical sense of landscape or nature; world here means "realm," even when it is associated with the presumablymore disembodied powers of good and evil, and the exoteric use of the term never completely severs its connections with sense perception, even when it has become relatively figurative. In its technical acceptation, however, world originallydesignated something like the frame or the Gestalt, the overall organizational category within which the various empirical innerworldlyphenomena are perceived and the various innerworldly experiences take place. In this sense, then, a world cannot, as in the preceding use, be itselfthe object of experience or perception,forit is ratherthat supreme categorywhich permits all experience or perception in the firstplace and must thus lie outside them as their own firstcondition.6 Thus, there would seem to be, from
142
the point of view of practical literaryanalysis,a verybasic incompatibility between these two uses of the term, for in the first, the world or worlds of a given romance are understood as phenomena within the narrative, as objects of representation;while for the second, miiore technicallyphilosophical perspective, the notion of "world" may serve as the framework for a descriptionof the distinctivefeaturesof this or that world structure, but could not then itselffigurewithin that descriptionas one of the latter's coniponents. The solution to the dilemma lies, I think,in the following hypothesis, namely,that, if we may be permittedthe cumbersome Heideggerian formula, romance is that form in which the world-nessof world reveals itself. For romance, then, both uses of the term are appropriate, forromance as a literary formis that event in which world in the technical sense of the transcendental horizon of my experience becomes precisely visible as somethinglike an innerworldly object in its own right,taking on the shape of world in the popular sense of nature, landscape, and so forth. And in its turn,the precondition of such a revelation is itselfhistorical in character: fortheremust,as in medieval times,be somethinglike a nature leftas a mysterious and alien border around the stillprecarious and minute human activities of village and field, for the structureof world-ness to find an adequate vehicle through which it can manifestits existence. So Frye is surelynot wrong to evoke the intimateconnectionbetween romance as a mode, and the "natural" imageryof earthlyparadise or waste land, of the bower of bliss or the enchanted wood; what is misleading is that he should suggest that this "nature" is in any way itself a "natural" phenomenon.
III
With this correction of Frye's account, we are for the firsttime in a and useful about such an approach, position to show what is interesting namely, that it makes a genuinely historical account of romance possible. For when we speak of a mode, what can we mean but that this particular type of literarydiscourse is not bound to the conventions of a given age, nor indissolublylinked to a given type of verbal artifact,but rather persistsas a temptation and a mode of expression across a whole as range of historicalperiods, seeming to offeritself,if only intermittently, a formal possibilitywhich can be revived and renewed? The persistence of romance as a mode raises the very precise historical question of what, under wholly altered historical circumstances,can have been found to replace the constitutive raw materials of magic and otherness which medieval romance found ready to hand in its socioeconomic environment. A historyof romance as a mode becomes possible, in other words, when we project it as a historyof the various codes which, in the increasingly secularized and rational world that emergesfromthe collapse of feudalism, are called upon to assume the literaryfunctionof those older codes which
MAGICAL
NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE
AS GENRE
143
have now become so many dead languages. Or, to put it the other way round, the fate of romance as a form is dependent on the availability of elements more acceptable to the reader than those older imagical categories for which some adequate substitutemust be invented. An instructive example of thisprocess of secularization and renewal may be observed in one of the earliest and monumental reinventionsof the genre, Manzoni's Promessi sposi, surely,along with Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, one of the few persuasive postrevolutionary attemptsto frame a genuinely religious narrative. In our present context, we are able to perceive that Manzoni's sophisticated theology-a post-Jansenist preoccupation with the states of sin and grace, a post-Calvinistpreoccupation with Providence-functions preciselyas a replacement of the older mediof the magical world and marks the beginningsecularization eval structure of romance as a form, a process whereby supernatural powers are supplanted by the more psychological "miracle" of conversion. The plot of I Promessi sposi dramatizes a conflict of ever-widening proportions between forces of good and evil still closely linked to older animistic notions of white and black magic, and conceived as powers which radiate outwards fromthe affectedcharacters. Here one does more than sufferevil, one is contaminated by it: thus, on learning of Don Rodrigo's plot to stop his marriage, Renzo is possessed by "a mad longing to do something strange and awful," on which Manzoni comments as follows: "Those who provoke or oppress, all those who do any wrong to others,are guiltynot only of the harm they do, but also of the twiststhey cause in the minds of those they have injured. Renzo was a peaceable young man and averse to bloodshed-an open youth who hated deceit of any kind; but at that moment his heart only beat to kill, and his mind turned only on thoughtsof treachery. He would have liked to rush to Don Rodrigo's house, seize him by the throat, and. . ..."7 The passage is important,not because it gives us Manzoni's personal opinion on the subject, but because it blocks out a world of a determinateand peculiar structure, in which moral essences exercise a power which greatly transcends their own immediate local manifestations, a world in which somethingwe may call character-emanation becomes an event within, or a causal convention of, such narrative in much the same way that action by distance, voodoo or curse, is an accepted part of the oral tales of primitive peoples. In such a world, then, we are prepared for the baleful spell of l'Innominato, which broods over the landexuded by the Gothic fortress scape like the verypromise of evil; prepared also to witness and to believe in the appeasing power of Archbishop Federigo as he moves through an anarchic and plague-ridden countrysidetouched by the grace that radiates from his presence. In such a world the climactic event is that of conversion,and it is the internal strugglefor the soul which, still conceived of in relativelyexternal terms, serves as the substitutefor the old agon of chivalric romance at thisparticular stage in the secularization of the form. The conceptual form taken by magic in Manzoni's work may then be
144
formulated in terms of providence, as a concept of some benign guiding order in human affairswhich marks out Manzoni's "religion" from other such as those which stresssin and corruption,or which theological systems, function as vehicles for social and instinctual repression. Yet Manzoni's of providence formagic, is historically a transitory solution,the substitution one, and is conceivable only in a society stronglyinfluenced by the new Enlightenmentvalues but not yet wholly secularized in the manner of the more advanced European countries of the postrevolutionaryera. It is thereforeinstructiveto glance at the other national options, as theymake for a survival of the form while compelling significantsemantic transformationsin its content. Stendhal is indeed particularlyuseful for this as to his own narrative and purpose, in that he shows signs of uncertainty generic aims: such episodes, indeed, as Julien's discovery of a scrap of his own ultimate death on the scaffold,or the newsprintwhich prefigures various astrological predictions and superstitiousomens of the Charterhouse, may be seen as archaic survivalsof the older magical romance within the frameworkof that new type which it was his originalityto have invented. Yet in Stendhal, the religioussense of fate or destinyhas been secularized still further, and a close inspectionof the text suggeststhat the operations of magic now take place in the realm of what henceforthmust be called psychology. This is perhaps more noticeable in The Red and the Black than in the Charterhouse, the latter rather suggestingan attempt to reexternalize the same material and to project psychological analysis back into the form of fairy tale, to restore the fixed form of the romance, to rescue magic out of the more secular mode into which it had devolved. In The Red and the Black, the twin worlds of magical romance, the "upper" and "lower" realms of white and black magic, have become two independent psychological "instances," two incommensurable and irreconcilable inner dispositions: on the one hand, a realm of spontaneity and sensibility, of the erotic as well as the political passion, of "bonheur" and of natural man; on the other,a source of vanity and ambition,hypocrisyand calculation, the locus of all those ego activities which, based on deferredgratification, findtheirfulfillment in commerce and in the obsession with status. Nothing in Stendhal is quite so strikingas the language in which the interference between these two systems,the mechanisms by which they short-circuiteach other, are registered: "Grace is perfect when it is natural and unselfconscious: Julien, who had distinct ideas about feminine beauty, would have sworn at that moment that she was only twentyyears old. All of a sudden the wild idea occurred to him of he was afraid of his own idea; an instant later kissingher hand. At first he said to himself: It will be cowardice on my part not to carry out a scheme that may be useful to me, and cut down this fine lady's contempt for a laborer just liberated fromhis sawmill."8 The resultanttransformation in Julien is somethinglike a psychological equivalent of that physical and natural desolation which in the older Grail romances is visited on
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
145
the waste land: indeed, the older magical landscape, weakened into of speech, stillclings to the wondrous sentenceswith which Stendhal figures "notes" the process, as in the following, from the Charterhouse: "La pensie du privilege avait dessech6 cette plante toujours si delicate qu'on nomme le bonheur." 9 In the present context, such passages must be seen, not as documents in support of the originality of the contribution Stendhal himself felt he was making to the nascent "science" of psychology (or of "id0ologie," as his master Destutt de Tracy termed it), but rather as the interiorization of that strugglebetween two worlds which characterizes the romance as a genre. But quite differentreplacement strategies are also possible in the same general historical situation: witness, for example, Eichendorff'sAus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, in many ways a purer and more perfect example of the romantic revival of the old romance form, of what we may henceforthterm the art-romance, than the more complex and eclectic narratives of Stendhal. Coincidence and comic misunderstanding are "motivated" and reinforced by the point of view of the Candide-like naif or invertedpicaro, the good-for-nothing himself,whose presence as hero articulates the twin filiationof the novella as a combination of picaresque and romance. In the context of romanticism,historicallythat of the secularization of the world and the birth of science and rationality,the formal problem of romance may perhaps be understood as that of slipping past the everwary censorshipof the new bourgeois realityprinciple: the reader craves the mystery inherentin the form,much as a sick body craves the elements in which it is deficient; but he now finds himself obliged to justifythe henceforth scandalous and archaic activityof fantasy, so that what we have called the replacements for the older magical function also serve as so many rational ways of explaining it away-in Stendhal by way of and in Eichendorffby the demonstrationthat it was not really psychology, thereat all in the first place. Thus, in the firstgreat period of bourgeois hegemony, the strategyfor forit of new positivities reinventingthe sacred consisted in the substitution the dramatic metaphor); at the end of the (theology, psychology, nineteenth century, however, the search for secular equivalents of this kind seems to have reached a dead end, and to be replaced by the new and characteristicindirection of modernism,which, in what from Kafka to Cortaizar is henceforth termed the "fantastic," seeks to convey the sacred, not as a presence, but rather as a determinate,marked absence at the heart of the secular world: from the houseintowhichZorzihad vanished, Andreasturned and walkedto the narrow street.It ended in an arch; but on the otherside,in a end of the rather somehow peculiarway, a littlebridgeover the canal led to a small oval plaza wentback and was annoyed to find, witha chapel. Andreas afterso fewminutes, thehouseamongthe simplebuildings thathe could no longer of similar recognize construction. One door, dark green,with a bronze knocker in the formof a he could lookedlikethe right one; yetit was closed,and Andreas thought dolphin, remember an open doorway.Still,there was little seeingZorziin the hall,through
146
enough chance of their missing one another if Andreas went back to the bridge utterlydeserted; he would have heard steps, let alone a cry or repeated shouts if
on it. Street and squarewere and tooka lookat the little squarewiththe church forhim. So he crossedthe bridge;below,a littleboat hung Zorzi came looking
tetheredupon the dark water, not another human being to be seen or heard: the whole square had somethinglost and forsakenabout it.10
The unnatural neutrality of this vacant cityscape may stand as an emblem of the modern fantastic as a whole, its expectant hush denoting an object world foreversuspended on the point of meaning, foreverdisposed to receive a revelation,whetherof evil or of grace, that never takes place. The unpeopled streets,the oppressive silence, convey this as yet indefinable presence like a word on the tip of your tongue, like a dream you cannot quite remember,while for the subject, a succession of trivial and apparently insignificant feelings (the "seltsamerweise" that nags at Andreas' attention, the sudden bursts of inexplicable humor-"Andreas war dirgerlich")record the internal activityof a psyche buffetedby forebodings and confirmHeidegger's account of Stimmung as the privileged medium through which the world-nessof world manifestsitself.11 For Stimmung-what in English is generally called "mood" in its most oppressive sense, as when a landscape seems to us charged strongest, with foreboding (Julien Gracq), as when the glimpse of a particularly sordid wallpaper unaccountably chokes us with anxiety, or, less often, a framed and distantvista fillsus with an equally unaccountable elationis the very element of what Frye, following James Joyce, terms an "epiphany," the sense of a whole environment slowlygathering,organizing itself into a revelation of meaning, or better still, into some new and unimaginable language. Yet Frye's term is misleading, precisely to the degree to which it suggeststhat epiphany or revelation is conceivable as an event within the secularized world of modern capitalism (and such an illusion explains the ultimate sentimentalism of Joyce's own first attempts,in the overrated Dubliners). However, the great realizations of the modern fantastic-the last unrecognizable avatars of romance as a mode-draw their magical power from their unsentimental loyalty to those henceforth abandoned clearings across which higher and lower worlds once passed.
IV
If Frye may stand as the richestsource of materials for a phenomenological description of romance, for an account of the genre in terms of mode, surely it is the Morphology of the Folktale of Vladimir Propp which, with all its faults, remains the model of a structural analysis of such narratives,and we are indebted to Propp for analytical instruments which allow us to reformulatethe sequence and episodes of individual romances in termsof a fixedform. Such an operation essentiallyamounts to a process of abstraction, whereby surface events or elements are
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
147
assimilated to emptier and even more general categories, and the operation should hold both for characters and acts. Thus the various secondary male figuresof Stendhal's novels-1'Abb6 Pirard, I'Abb6 Blanes, Mosca, of the Hero, or in Propp's etc.-prove to be so many father-surrogates so or of the single irreducible versions manifestations terminology, many figure of the donor; just as the hero's enemies reduce themselves to so many emanations of the villain. Even more important than this preliminary simplificationof the dramatis personae (and, in the long run, this second operation is of course inseparable from the first) is the abstraction of the innumerable and oftenquite unequal and diverse types of happenings or events in the novel to a relatively limited number of acts, or what Propp calls functions. So, for example, a series of minor mishaps visited on the hero may be read as so many versions of a trial or test to which he is being put; Fabrice's encounterswith various helpful and motherlywomen are all so many manifestationsof that basic relationship to the feminine donor which will find its ultimate realization in his indebtedness to the Duchess; and so forth. Propp formulatesthe basic axioms of his analysis as follows: ofcharacters serve as stable, elements in a tale,independent constant (1) Functions ofhowand bywhom are fulfilled. they of functions known to thefairy tale is limited. (2) The number is alwaysidentical. (3) The sequenceof functions talesare of one typein regard to their structure.12 (4) All fairy Now what is "fixed" in Propp's model would seem essentiallyto be the irreversible order of the functionsthemselves,or in other words, the third axiom. (As far as the second one is concerned, it is methodological rather than formal, for not all fairy tales include all possible functions,so that such "limits" are rather to be seen as imposed by the analyst rather than the tale itself.) The theoreticalweaknesses of Propp's model (Levi-Strauss has already given an account of them in his importantreview article) may be summed up in a two-fold and paradoxical way: on the one hand, his model is disengaged from the surface of the narrative text; his insufficiently abstractions still entertain as it were too great a complicity with the conscious storytelling categories, and this is nowhere quite so strikingly as we shall see shortly,as in his retention of the notion demonstrated, of a "character." To sum up this aspect of the critique, then, we might suggest that Propp's series of functions is still too meaningful, is informalized or abstracted, has not placed sufficient methodosufficiently own its and the official distance between operative categories logical claims of the text for itself. The other reproach one may make about Propp's methods and procedures suggests that on the contrary his analysis is not yet meaningful enough. This is the sense of the charge of empiricismwhich L vi-Strauss levels against Propp's conclusions, and which, as we have already suggested, takes as its object the point at which Propp is content to stop
148
work, namely, the establishmentof a series of functions whose reason for being is subsumed under the simple observation that they turn out to exist,that the functionsof the fairytale are "thus and not otherwise." Propp's model tends to fall apart into a relativelyrandom sequence of events, united only by the inexplicable fact of a certain fixed order: and to juxtapose such analysis with that which his structuralist critic makes of, say, the Oedipus myth (in "The Structure of Myth") is to measure the distance between Propp's relativelyempirical approach to his series of functionsand a typeof analysis which aims at seeing the entirenarrative in terms of a single mechanism, or in other words, of tying beginning and end, digression and climax, together in the unity of a single overall process (generally conceived of in structural analysis, as is well known, in terms of the mechanism of exchange). To return now briefly to the first of these objections, we may reformulateit in termsof a critique of Propp's concept of the Hero, for this is essentially a category of the surface narrative, an ideological value inherent in the story itself,rather than a neutral analytical tool. Such is indeed the weight of A. J. Greimas' reworkingof Propp's scheme, in which the concept of the actant is substitutedfor that-more anthropomorphic and representational-of the character itself.13The problems to which Propp's approach gives rise may be illustrated by what is for me the most enigmatic, but also challenging, part of his description,namely, the long and ratherdesultorycoda which follows the Hero's triumphover his enemies, and in which, firstconfrontinga false Hero in a renewal of his struggles,he is at length ceremoniouslyrecognized, his identityas Hero crowned and fulfilled by ritual marriage and elevation to the throne. That somethingsimilar is present in the more complex and sophisticated form of the art-romance is suggested by the rambling and foreshortened account, at the end of the Charterhouse,of the restof Fabrice's life after his climactic liberation fromthe tower. Such a lengthyand anticlimact;c sequel must surely be associated with Eichenbaum's remarks about the coda or epilogue with which the novel tends to end in general,14and which functionsas somethingof a decompression chamber for the reader slowlydisengaginghimselffromthe epic duree of the work fromwhich he is about to withdraw; but if Propp's reading is accepted, it also reconfirmsand ratifiesthe operative category of the Hero as such, for in these final pages it is a question of a kind of narrative ritual in which the qualifications of that loftyposition are tested and at length sealed once and forall. As has been suggested above, however, this particular terminology, informed by categories of bourgeois individualism or what has more recently been described as the ideology of the subject, no longer seems adequate. Structural analysis now gives us the critical instrumentsfor implementingour proposal to replace the older category of "character," as it dominates such psychology-oriented forms as the Bildungsroman, with that, more appropriate to romance, of "states" or world configurations: characters would then be understood as so many "actants" and
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
149
their deeds as so many properties in the complex mechanism which effectuate a transitionfrom one state to the next; while romance as a whole would be seen as a sequence of what, following Wagnerian opera, we may call "transformationscenes," in which, in some ultimate and unimaginablyrapid pass between higherand lower realms,all the valences are suddenly changed, negative and positive poles reversed, and new complex or inverted or neutralized conditions make an unexpected appearance. Such a model ought to serve not only in describingthe narrative structure of romance in a far more precise, if not exactly measurable, way, but also in solving the false problems to which a generic misreading of the form has given rise. I am thinking,for instance, of the character of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, whose ambiguous and enigmatic nature cannot be properly understood if we remain locked in the older categories of individual psychology. If on the other hand we follow Barthes' sensible transformationalformula,15we will want to see the novel, not as the historyof individual destinies,but rather as that of a "house" itself,as a late reworkingof family or dynastic material, beginning with Lockwood's initial impression of the Heights, and the archaic story of origins that lies behind it, to that final ecstatic glimpse through the window, where, as in the final scene of Cocteau's Orphee, "le decor monte au ciel," and a new and idyllic family takes shape through the love of Hareton and the second Cathy. But if this is the central transformationand constitutes what Greimas would call the principal "isotopie" of the narrative, then Heathcliff himselfcan no longer be seen as a hero in either the dramatic or the developmental sense: he is, rather, from the very beginning, from the abrupt introduction into the family of the orphan child, "as dark almost as if it came from the devil," something like a mediator or a catalyst designed to restorethe familyfortunes. The task of structuralanalysis would then be to show how such a mediatory agency must necessarily combine positive and negative elements-good and evil, love and money, the role of the "jeune premier" and the role of the villain-in such a way as to permit the final exchange to take place. The point of such a model is not, of course, to formulate a structure rigidlyapplicable to all of its possible exemplars, but rather to construct a norm in terms of which even deviations may be read in a meaningful way. Thus, for instance, an attempt to fit the Eichendorffnovella mentioned above into the structurewe have just described, where an exchange takes place between the so-called higher and lower worlds, leads us to the conclusion that, for reasons that are ultimatelysemantic (or in other scene has here been left out, and words, ideological), the transformation its absence disguised by a variety of compromise formations. This avoidance of the essential metaphysical conflict or confrontation is of course made possible by the attenuations of the force of black magic or baleful enchantment: it is characteristic that in this novella authority is incarnated only by an older woman briefly glimpsed, the single villain-
150
ous figurebeing that secondary and grotesque one of the Italian spy, who, galloping across the field in moonlight, "looked like a ghost riding on a three-legged horse." The basic conflict between the two worlds of Eichendorff's story--the humdrum workaday world of the village, of what in other national contexts would have been identifiedas bourgeois and the enchanted space of the chateau, with its music and utilitarianism, candelabra, its gardens and eyes twinklingthroughhalf-opened shuttersis in fact the object of a systematicmystification, in which elements of both are constantly and playfully recombined in various proportions (e.g., the flute-playing porter as a bourgeois with an aristocratic hobby, his very presence marking the chateau as an aristocratic space with a bourgeois corner in it, the old peasant with silver buckles as a representative of the bourgeois ethic with a few ancillary "artistic" or aristocratic decorations, and so forth). The two realms, indeed, swap functionswith each other: forthe realm of work borrowsits magic and its fantasmagorical elements from the other, higher aristocratic realm of leisure, while it is from the latter that the various (illusory) complications of the plot, or in other words what would in classic romance be the power of evil or the malignant spell, originate. The resolutionof the narrative is thus not a genuine purificationor triumph of one force over the other, but precisely a compromise in which everythingfindsits proper place, in which the Taugenichts is reconciled through marriage with the world of work, while at the same time findinghimselfprovided with a miniature chateau of his own within the enchanted grounds of the aristocraticestate itself. This "deviation" from the basic model of the structureof romance thus and the originalityof allows us to perceive and to respect the specificity the novella's inner structure,at the same time that it leads on to the conclusion that Eichendorffs solution-the phantasmagoria of pure Schein and Spiel, based on the structural compromise rather than lifeand-death conflict between the two worlds at odds here-reflects the presence of a threateningperception of class realities. It is because, in Eichendorff,the opposition between good and evil so nearly approaches and coincides with the incompatibilitybetween the new bourgeois life form and the older aristocratictraditions of the ancien regime that the narrative must not be allowed to press on to a decisive conclusion; its historical reality must rather be disguised and defused by the sense of moonlit revels dissolving into thin air: so the French revolution proves to be an illusion and the grislyclass conflictof decades of Napoleonic of bad dreams. world war fades into the mere stuff
V
Yet these alternate and complementary methods-the semantic and the structural readings of romance-can obviously only be called into play after an individual work has been so classified: we have, in other words, up to this point taken for granted the initial moment of all genre
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
151
criticism,namely that arbitraryranging of complicated works into oversimplifiedcategories which is surelywhat those who repudiate the generic approach have found most offensiveabout it. Is not, for instance, Manzoni's great work, far from being a romance, rather one of the supreme embodiments of that relatively new form which we know as the historical novel? (If not, or even if it is, ought it not also to be thought of as a late and unexpected variant on the Byzantine novel itself,a distant avatar of the Ethiopica of Heliodorus, with its lovers torn asunder by the labyrinthine adventures and coincidences which end up reuniting them?) Meanwhile, there would seem to be something impertinentin the use, as an object lesson in romance, of a novel-the Charterhousewhich has traditionallybeen read as the very prototypeof a form by our own account antithetical to that under study here, namely, the Bildungsroman itself. It is not just a question here of deciding to what genre a given work belongs, but also and above all of determiningwhat it means to assert that a work "belongs" to such a classificationin the first place. But perhaps we riay distinguishbetween two versionsof the problem, an internal and an external one, as it were: for there would seem to be a significant difference between the difficultiesraised by a work in which several different generic strandsor modes seem mingled or interwoven,and onemore homogeneous-about which there perhaps formallyand stylistically nonetheless persists a global uncertaintyas to its "kind." The phenomenon of eclecticism may indeed be converted into a useful of analysis. In I Promessi Sposi, for instance, it becomes clear instrument that the separation of the lovers provides Manzoni with two distinct and alternating story lines which in fact constitute two very differenttypes of narrative: on the one hand, the plight of Lucia gives him the material for a Gothic novel, in which the victim eludes one trap only to fall into a more agonizing one, confronting villains of ever blacker nature. In this half of his plot, then, Manzoni has at his disposal a modal instrument for developing his vision of evil and redemption, and conveying narrative messages about the inward life and the fate of the soul. Meanwhile Renzo wanders through the grosse Welt of history and of the displacement of vast armed populations, the realm of the destiny of peoples and the vicissitudes of their governments. His own episodic experiences-they make up formallysomethinglike a roman d'aventures, the misadventuresof peasant Candide-thus allow the novel to register a verydifferent dimension of realityfromthat revealed by the Lucia story, the namely, experience of social life itself as it comes to its moment of truth in the bread riots and the economic depression of Milan, the anarchy of the bravi and the incompetence of the state, and ultimatelygoing beyond historyitselfto those "acts of God" which lie behind itin the plague and the rejuvenation of the land which follows its passing. It is the presence, and systematicinterweaving,then, of these two quite differentgeneric modes of narrative which lends Manzoni's book an appearance of breadth and variety scarcely equaled elsewhere in world
152
literature. As an instrumentof exploration, the generic distinction is here not unlike an X-ray technique designed to project a model of the layered or marbled structureof the text; but who can doubt that the fundamental task of criticismhereafteris to come to grips with the coexistence of these two modes in Manzoni and to read them in some meaningfulsystematicrelationshipto each other? The situation is similar with respect to the Charterhouse, of which so many contradictoryclassifications have been made (fairy tale, Bildungsroman, political novel, myth,etc.). It seems clear that the court material, centeringaround the figureof the Duchess, is genericallyrelated to that literature of me'moiresand political gossip which has nourished the French tradition from Balzac to Proust and of which Saint-Simon remains the fountainhead and monument: this is a mode which demands study in its own right and whose privileged content is the gesture (more particularlyits verbal manifestationin the trait d'esprit), while its privileged form is the anecdote centering on characters who are greater and more powerful than the observersand narrators. The storyof Fabrice is on the other hand dominated by a quite differenttype of discourse,which we have in connection with The Red and the Black characterized as that of introspectionor of psychologyin the limited and highly specialized sense of the ideologues or of Stendhal's own book De l'amour: the anatomy of conscious mechanisms of the mind. To study these associative processes is to constructa kind of micronarrative of an essentiallyallegorical type, which can then, as we have seen, be invested with all the content of the older stories of magic and spells. The Enlightenment rationality of this mode is, however, to be seen as a variant on the older moralizing tradition of the French philosophes, so that Stendhal's plus moral epigramsbooks-mmmoires prove to unite two relatively conventionalized strains or impulses of French classicism. We conclude, therefore,that the discoveryof an apof Stendhal's novels to different parently contradictoryset of affiliations traditions is no reason abandon the categories of generic thinkto generic but rather the occasion for widening the critical inquiry and ing entirely, raising a new theoretical issue, namely, that of the relationship of the various genres among themselves. At this point, then, we pass from the internal to the external version of the problem of classification,for generic uncertainty (e.g., is Manzoni's novel a romance or a historical novel?) raises a question, not so much about the work itself,as rather about the systemof genres under whose configuration the individual work itselfcomes into being. The notion of system,which derives from Saussure,16 presupposes a series of synchronicstates,in which the various existentgenres are related to each other only by difference, constellationswhich shiftand rearrange themselves ceaselessly as certain genres fall into neglect, or as new ones emerge unexpectedly and force the older, traditional generic system to redefine itself in order to accommodate them. Such systemsdo not, of course, have to be binaryones, although the opposition of tragedy/comedy
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
153
is one of the oldest in the Western tradition: alongside it and coexisting with it, however, we find the triad lyric/epic/dramatic. But it should be emphasized that for the most part a given generic systemwill be more local, more provisory, and somehow more empirical, than these timehonored and virtuallymetaphysical oppositions: thus Garcilaso's poetry defines itself against the unstable conjuncture of elegy, verse epistle, and satire as somehow related yet distinct forms.17 The example sugis to evolve a gests that to thinkof genres in this way, in termsof systems, different model of the relationship of particular to general than that of traditional logic in which a given item is ranged in the class appropriate to it, or that of traditional taxonomy, in which a given species "belongs to" a given genus. Here, on the contrary,the two basic elements are wholly distinct in nature from each other, the one-the generic systembeing a constellation of ideal relationships,the other-the work itselfbeing a concrete verbal composition. We must then understand the formeras constituting somethinglike an environmentfor the latter,which emerges into,a world in which the genres form a given determinate relationship among themselves,and which then seeks to define itselfin terms of that relationship. A work may then be conceived as work in a given genre, or it may, as in the case of Manzoni himself and of Sir Walter Scott, by proposing a new synthesis(the historical romance), make an implicit commentaryon the systemitself. From the point of view of practical criticism,we would observe that, whatever the theory, the generic approach has always been implicitly of the comparatist and has always used the systematic differentiation genres as its principal instrumentfor defining any one of them. Thus, Frye's account of romance is systematically organized throughthe function of his definitionof comedy, and it is instructiveto retrace our steps for a moment in order to grasp to what degree such an opposition has been at work, even when the opposing term of comedy was never thematically mentioned as such. Both formsare, according to Frye, wish fulfillments; but the materials of comedy are those of the oedipal situation itself,and its antagonists are not the villains or evil forces called into play in romance, but rather while its heroes representthe younger simplyfathersand father-surrogates, as it and generation supersedes triumphsover the older one. The element of comedy is thereforenot that of magic, nor does it unfold within the metaphysical frameworkof upper and lower worlds: rather it remains resolutelywithin the social order, findingits culmination in the renewal of that order by marriage and sexual fulfillment, where the romance must seal the hero's mission by some form of revelation, of which the most celebrated is of course the appearance of the enigmatic Grail itself. active and bringsinto play desire and the obstacles Comedy is therefore to its fulfillment while romance unfolds beneath the sign of destiny,either benevolent or malign. It is in this sense that comedy may be said to be social, while romance is metaphysical; and the difference might ultimately be conveyed by the quality of the wish-fulfillment involved. If, following
154
Norman Holland's account of the fantasy sources of art, comedy is with its originsin the oedipal essentiallyan active, genital wish-fulfillment stage of psychic development, we may want to distinguish the wishfulfillmentimplicit in romance by suggesting that it has older, more archaic origins and reflectssome earlier, oral stage, some more passive symbioticrelationshipwith the mother,in both the anxieties (the baleful spell) and the appeasement (the providential vision) to which it gives rise. Thus seen, the relationship between the genres may itself play a signifyingand functional role within the individual work itself. So it would seem clear, from our account of the Eichendorff novella, that the romance mode in the latter has the functionof disguisingor masking off the comedy structure,which would otherwise too openly emerge as a social antagonism: the place of the father,or of the older generation, of the obstacle to desire, is there effaced by magical phantasmagoria. The relationship of the opposing generic terms of comedy and romance is thus to be seen as a functional one of substitutionor repressionin which one mode is used to defuse the other,for an explicitlyideological purpose, in the concrete historical situation of the Germany of the Holy Alliance.
VI
Thus we reemerge in historyitself,either on the concrete occasion of the text,or, in the attempt to account for a given historical configuration of the genres among themselves,of what we have called a generic system. This is the moment, then, to deal a littlemore explicitlywith the relation of genre analysis to historicalthinkingin general. In particular, it is the moment to do what we have postponed until now and to characterize the mode of being of a genre itself,in its diachronic existence. For to speak of romance surely suggests a kind of relativelyautonomous formal development in which a type of narrative initially realized, say, in the poems of Chretien de Troyes, then evolves into the elaborate Italian and Spenserian poems, knows its brief moment upon the stage in the twilightof the Shakespearean spectacle, is revived in romanticism, knows a new kind and, under the guise of the novel itself, of existence as what we have called the art-romance of Stendhal and Manzoni, or Balzac and Emily Bronti, only to survive on into modern times under the unexpected guise of the fantasticon the one hand and of fantasy (Alain-Fournier, Julien Gracq) on the other. For the moment we will set aside the question of the historical value of a sequence of this kind, which we have elsewhere called a "diachronic construct," and content ourselves with an inquiry into the operations by which the critic brings it into being before our eyes. When, for example, Frye discusses the various auxiliary figuresin comedy, and in particular the eiron, the "man who deprecates himself,as opposed to the alazon," or
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
155
boastful imposter,it is clear that the discussion already constructsa system in the sense of the word hithertoused, a structuredrelationalityin terms of which each element receives its value. Yet this systemof comic characters is so far a synchronicone. "Another central eiron figure,"he goes on, with hatchingthe schemeswhich bringabout the hero's is the type entrusted This character in Romancomedy is almostalwaysa tricky slave (dolosus victory. valet who.is so servus), and in Renaissancecomedyhe becomesthe scheming in Continental and in Spanishdramais called thegracioso.Modern frequent plays, with him in Figaro and in the Leporello of Don audiencesare most familiar such intermediate as Micawberand Giovanni.Through figures nineteenth-century the Touchwoodof Scott'sSt. Ronan's Well,who,like the gracioso, have buffoon of he evolves of modern fiction. The Jeeves intothe amateur detective affiliations, P. G. Wodehouse is a moredirect descendant.18 Such a passage, in which Frye's characteristicstrengths are in evidence, also reveals rather openly the constructionalprocess at work. The idea that there "is" somethingcalled the eiron which can "become" the scheming valet of Continental drama, is itself,of course, a fictionwhich makes of this paragraph a kind of micro-narrative. In reality,we have to do here with that phenomenon more recently termed intertextuality, in which a number of texts are superposed, and the notion of some larger one, which encompasses them all and includes them within itself, proposed. So the work of juxtaposition is designed to make us glimpse behind, or indeed through, Micawber, the prototypical eiron figure (I would have taken him to be an alazon myself,or indeed a combination of the two, but the process is in any case the same), with the resultthat the text of Dickens is enlarged to include all previous (and successive) actantial prototypes. We no longer apprehend Micawber all by himselfin Dickens' narrative; rather,in a kind of stereopticvision, we see him togetherwith all his predecessors in stage comedy back to the original Roman model, and what comes into being in Frye's hands here is neither the character of Dickens, nor the slave of Roman comedy, but some new composite and multidimensional entity which can perhaps best be designated a Micawber-considered-as-a-dolosus-servus. Some such procedure-a systematic construction of that imaginary entitydesignated as intertextuality-is at work in all genre criticism. So we have ourselves above constructed a Promessi-Sposi-considered-asGothic-novel,a Hofmannsthal-considered-as-variant-of-medieval-romance, and so on, and it becomes evident that the value of such constructsdoes not depend on some hypothetical historical accuracy (if not meaningless, such a criterionwould itselfdepend preciselyon an analogous fictive construct or model, e.g., the "influence" of some "tradition"). Indeed, its use is perhaps directlyproportional to the outlandishnessof the terms placed in conjunction, since it is only by such a shock that the model makes its point. Yet to see the operation in this way is to avoid the danger of assuming what Frye's work has so oftenbeen used to demonstrate,namely, that there exists somewhere some realm of archetypesof which all of our
156
modern storiesare so many variants; for it is clear that those "archetypes" are themselvesmerely texts in their turn (and impoverished ones, found between the pages of such manuals as Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces), linked up with some modern narrative in the form of the constructdescribed above, but for purposes surelydoctrinal and proselytizing in character. This new historical model, based on the identitybetween its various stages, is only one of the various possible forms which the, diachronic construct can take, and it should be clear that its ideological function lies in its apparent reinforcement of the notion of a tradition, of some unbroken and the mythicimagination of primibetween deep continuity tive man and the sophisticated products of the modern societies. But a diachronic construct can also be based on differenceand disview of historyitself as a continuity,therebyprojecting a very different series of irrevocable qualitative breaks. Here the absence, rather than the persistence, of a given element provides the methodological guide throughouta given generic progression,and Taugenichts can again serve as an apt illustrationof the process. For its theatricality-stylistically, the work may be seen as a virtual transcription of a theatricalperformanceinscribes it in that long tradition of the comedy of errors (doubles, disguises, sexual confusion, ritual unmasking), from Roman comedy to Shakespeare. Such formal affinitiessuggest yet another one, namely, with the theatrical double plot as it has been described by Empson in his Some Versions of Pastoral, the distinguishingtrait of which is the class differentiation between the two plot lines, the same material being dramatized now in high, now in low, style, depending on whether the protagonistis an aristocrat or his low-born servant. But the relationship of this form to Eichendorff'snovella is a negative one, that of a marked or signifyingabsence: Taugenichts is a double plot of which we are only given the secondary line, the comic or lower-class version; as for the aristocraticone (the background situation of the elopement, etc.), it is too well known to need a fresh representation,and at the moment of explanations, the bewildered hero is simply asked whether he has never read any novels! The aristocraticmain plot is thus in Taugenichts repressed-for precisely the ideological reasons we have given above, readernamely that it would not do to remind the new postrevolutionary of the survival of the feudal power structure. But ship too insistently with this alteration in the form, the other material-that of disguises and misunderstandings-also shifts its function. We have indeed the same kinds of Shakespearean quid-pro-quos which, flirting with scandal, end in laughter,the play with homosexual overtones,forbiddenencounters between disguised and apparently male figureswhich turn out to be safe because one of them is suddenly revealed to be a girl. Yet this flirtation with taboo and transgression has in Eichendorffa very specific structural function, namely, to draw the power of another, far more dangerous and explosive transgression, namely, that obtaining when a peasant youth courts an aristocraticlady, a scandal which can, in a feudal context,only
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
157
be characterized as miscegenation. While this situation lasts, the sexual disguises are there to distract us from it, and when at the end, the latter are unmasked, at one and the same time the formersituation changes as well, and we find, to our class relief,that the girl in question, far from being a noblewoman, is none other than the porter's niece! So generic and the systematicdeviation from them, provide clues which affiliations, lead us back to the concrete historical situation of the individual text itself,and allow us to read its structureas ideology, as a socially symbolic act, as a protopolitical response to a historicaldilemma.
VII
It remains to suggest the relationship between the generic approach we have outlined here and historyitself,for a famous passage from The German Ideology warns us that the progression of forms with which we have been dealing must not be mistaken for anythinglike a genuine historical event: "We do not set out," Marx and Engels tell us, whatmensay,imagine, norevenfrom menas narrated, from thought of, conceive, in orderto arriveat men in the flesh.We set out from conceived, imagined, real, we demonstrate the developactivemen,and on the basisof theirreal life-process ment of the ideologicalreflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the humanbrainare also, necessarily, sublimates of theirmateriallifewhichis empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, process, forms of all the rest of ideologyand theircorresponding religion, metaphysics, retainthesemblance of independence. thusno longer Theyhave no consciousness, their material no development; butit is rather menwho,developing produchistory, their tionand their material alter,along withthistheirreal existence, intercourse, and the products of theirthinking. Life is not determined by consciousthinking
ness,but consciousnessby life.19
I have tried to show elsewhere that such ideal constructs earn their realityby the operation of historical regrounding,and it is through such an operation that any consequent genre criticism must be completed.20 Genre criticismmay thus be seen as a process which involves the use of three variable terms: the individual work itself,the intertextualsequence into which it is inserted through the ideal constructionof a progression of forms(and of the systems that obtain between those forms), and finally that series of concrete historical situations within which the individual works were realized, and which thus stands as something like a parallel sequence to the purely formal one. This thirdseries is of course the realm of concrete or infrastructural historyin the sense of Marx and Engels. The relationshipbetween these three variables may now be formulated in terms of a permutational scheme, or what recent French theorists have called a combinatoire: a set of parallel series articulated into complexes of features or factors such that a variation in one results in a shift or transformationin the other.21 Such a combinatoire is hierarchical: that is, changes in the infrastructure always result in shiftsin and not the other way round (at least in the realm the superstructure,
158
of literaryhistory; the notion of a reciprocal interaction between base and superstructureis derived from other more overtly ideological types of superstructuralphenomena, e.g., political discourses, which do not enjoy the semiautonomyof the literarytext). It should be emphasized that this permutational model does not imply a returnto the older mechanical notions of causality for a reason which may also be helpful in distinguishingthe critical method proposed here fromsome of the cfuder formswhich so-called vulgar Marxism has taken in the past: forit is not here a question of the relationshipof positivities to each other, but rather of establishingwhat are essentiallylimitingsituations. The infrastructural series (development of social life, evolution of the mode of production in question, and so forth) does not cause the individual work which reflects it to come into being: such a work is the an of individual consciousness to his historical cirsymbolic response cumstances, and as such, dependent on the vicissitudesof individual life, mightjust as well have remained unwritten. The "causal" action exerted by the concrete or historical series on the combinatoire is rather one of exclusion than of production: the historical moment blocks off a certain number of formal possibilitieswhich had been available in earlier situations, all the while opening up certain determinate new ones which may or may not then come into being. To put it another way, the combinatoire aims at revealing, not the causes behind a given form, but rather the conditions of possibilityof its existence. Thus, in the case of romance, it would seem that this genre is dependent for its emergence on the availability of a code of good and evil which is formulatedin a magical, ratherthan a purely ethical, sense. This code findsits expression in the vision of higher and lower realms in conto suggest that it is itselfdependent flict,yet it does not seem inconsistent on a kind of historical coexistence within the social order itselfbetween two distinctmomentsof socioeconomic development. Romance as a form thus expresses a transitionalmoment, yet one of a very special type: its contemporaries must feel their society torn between past and future in such a way that the alternatives are grasped as hostile but somehow unrelated worlds. The social antagonism involved is therefore quite distinct from the conflictof two groups or classes within a given social order, as in the case in recent times,say, between labor and capital; and the archaic character of the categories of romance (magic, good and evil, otherness) suggeststhat this genre expressesa nostalgia for a social order in the process of being undermined and destroyedby nascent capitalism, yet still for the moment coexistingside by side with the latter. So Shakespearean romance (like its echo in Eichendorff) opposes its phantasmagoria to the bustling commercial activityat work all around it; while the great art romances of the Romantic period are only too obviously symbolic attempts to come to termswith the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the new and unglamorous social formsdeveloping out of the market system. In this context, then, a late variant like that of Alain-Fournier may be understood as a reaction to the stepped-up pace of social change
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
159
in the French countrysideat the end of the nineteenthcentury (laicization and the loi Combes, electrification, industrialization,etc.), while that of Julien Gracq only too clearly reflectsthe regressiveposition of a province like Brittany. This final step in the generic operation-the crucial one in any Marxist literarycriticism-calls for a basic qualification as to the nature of the infrastructuralseries with which the other, more properly literary or formal, series are to be correlated. We have grown accustomed to the view that interpretationor explanation is essentially a process of transcoding, in which the privileged conceptual order, or if you like, "truth" itself,may simply be seen as that ultimate code with which we agree to be content. And of course, as with Freudian doctrine,the various Marxist concepts of the social classes and the stages of production, constitutejust such a code or organized conceptual system,being abstractionsor simplifiedmodels designed to clarifythe far more complex and multidimensional realities of social history(or of the psyche as the case may be). code or But if this is all that is involved, it follows that some different specialized terminologymight do just as well, or in other words, that in this perspective Marxism would be simply one more critical language or method among others,and a peculiarly anticlimactic one at that: for if series are simply a conceptual code and the terms of the infrastructural nothing more, then the whole process of Marxist interpretationbecomes an allegorical reading of texts in which the various literary materials are simply "translated" into their infrastructural counterparts. But this is not the case, and the critical operation we have presented requires us to correlate literaryphenomena, not with such conceptual abstractions,but rather with the realities to which those abstractions correspond. The parallel with psychoanalysis is instructive,for what is distinctiveabout both Marxism and Freudianism, what marks both as materialisms and them from self-contained philosophical "systems" sharply differentiates of the traditional kind, is that both presuppose some previous concrete experience of the objects-political or depth-psychological-designated by theirrespectiveterminology.Without some prior "personal knowledge," in other words, the reader of Freudian or Marxist analyses is in the position of a child who grasps the Sinn of adult conversationswithout sensing their Bedeutung, and, what is more important, without having the slightest suspicion he is missing anything in the process: for, clearly, idealism as a worldview would be untenable were not just such purely formal and "intrinsically literary"analyses capable of seeming self-sufficient in their own right. On the other hand, this shorthand status of the language of materialistic explanation, its deliberately secondary and referential character, accounts for the disappointment which even the well-disposed reader may feel when all of these elaborate formal analyses remarksabout the class situation in a given end up in a few perfunctory period. It is this disappointment, I assume, which gives rise to the curious reproach of "reductionism" (as though all abstraction were not a process of reducing reality and making simplifiedmodels of it).
160
This is not the place for a defense of Marxism as such, but rather for pointingout the privilegedrelationshipbetween historicalmaterialismand genre study. The firstextended monument of genuinely Marxist literary criticism-the letters of Marx and Engels to Lasalle about the latter's verse tragedy, Franz von Sickingen-is in fact essentiallygeneric in its approach;22 while in our own time the most substantial corpus of Marxist literaryanalysis, that of Lukacs, has been genre-orientedfrom beginning to end (seeming, indeed, to recapitulate some ideal trajectory from a Hegelian 'interrogation of genre, in Sociology of the Modern Drama and The Theory of the Novel, to an Aristotelianemphasis in the late two-volumeAesthetik). I take it, indeed, as one of the moments of "high seriousness" in the historyof recent Marxist thought that when the aged Lukics responded to the urgency of supporting Solzhenitsyn's denunciation of Stalinism, while at the same time coming to termswith the tendentiousantisocialist and religious propaganda to which the latter lent his talent and the auhe did so by sittingdown at his desk and of his personal suffering, thority a writing genre study, incidentally one of his finest. The strategicvalue of the generic combinatoire for Marxism lies precisely in its ability to coordinate the synchronicrelationship between work and immediate historical situation and the equally indispensable diachronic perspective in which that situationitselfis grasped as a moment of an ongoing infrastructural evolution: it is this diachronic dimension which then permits a qualitative evaluation of the form as well-by juxtaposing it with what moments of social dehad been possible at other, structurallydifferent velopment. for such a final,"reductive" moment is that Ultimately,the justification of the completeness of the critical operation, the nature of the literary work as a symbolic act not becoming visible until the frame is expanded to include the historical situation itself. Still, it may be admitted that some literary phenomena seem to demand such completion more imthan others: such would seem, indeed, to be the mediately and insistently case with the very origins of romance in medieval times, where, as the cultural expressionof a dominant class, the formobviouslyhas a very differentsymbolic resonance from that, regressiveand nostalgic, which we have attributed to it in its later manifestations. We have already suggested the constitutiverelationshipbetween romance and something like or proa positional concept of evil, analogous to the function of shifters nouns in linguistics,where the person standing opposite me is marked as the villain, not by virtue of any particular characteristicsof his own, but simply in function of his relationship to my own place. Yet such a positional notion of good and evil does not characterize romance alone, but also the chanson de geste from which romance emerged, as well as the American westernwith which both have so much in common. Indeed, such a category of thought is only too intimatelyrelated to that fragmented and anarchic world of the post-Carolingian period, in which a
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
161
population terrorizedby barbarian incursions increasinglywithdrew into the shelterof local fortresses. When, in the twelfthcentury,this kind of social isolation is overcome and the feudal nobilitybecomes aware of itselfas a universal class, with a newly elaborated and codified ideology, there arises what can only be called a contradiction between the older positional notion of evil and this emergent class solidarity. Romance may then be understood as an imaginary "solution" to this contradiction, a symbolic answer to the question of how my enemy can be thought of as being evil, that is, as when what is other than myselfand marked by some absolute difference, for his so is characterized the responsible identity of his being simply own conduct with mine, which--challenges, points of honor, tests of strength-he reflectsas in a mirror image. In the romance, this conceptual dilemma is overcome by a dramatic passage from appearance to reality: the hostile knight, in armor, his identityunknown, exudes that insolence which marks a fundamental refusal of recognition and stamps him as the bearer of the category of evil, up to the moment in which, defeated and unmasked, he asks for mercy and tells his name: "Sire, Yidiers, li filz Nut, ai non" (Erec et Enide, 1042), at which point he becomes simply one knight among others and loses all his sinister unfamiliarity. This moment, in which the antagonist ceases to be a villain, is thus what distinguishesthe use of the category of evil in romance from that to be found in the chanson de geste or the classical western: but it has other, more positive consequences for the development of the new form as well. For now that the experience of evil can no longer be invested in any definitiveor permanent way in this or that human agent, it must be expelled from the world of purely human affairsin a kind of foreclosure and projectively reconstituted into something like a freefloating and disembodied realm in its own right, that baleful optical illusion which we henceforthknow as the realm of sorceryor of magic, and which thus completes the requirements for the emergence of romance as a distinctivenew genre. Yet as a literarydevice, this vision of a realm of magic superimposed on the earthly,purely social world, clearly outlives the particular historical and ideological contradiction which it was invented to resolve, therebyfurnishingmaterial for other quite differentsymbolicuses as the form itselfis adapted to the varying historical situations described above. So the persistence of romance poses problems even graver than those suggested to Marx by the "normal childhood" of Greek art: 23 for this crueler and more superstitious adolescence, and the archaic nostalgia with which it becomes associated (consider, for example, the implications of the revival of medieval romance by English neo-Catholicism, in particular by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) raises something like an aesthetic counterpart to the problem of ideology. Such an interrogation--ofthe ideological nature of form-can alone rescue literary study from its trivializationat the hands of antiquarian and aesthete, can alone restore
162
to literature itself its gravity as a mode of organizing experience and therebya social and political act in its own right.
UNIVERSITY
SAN DIEGO
OF CALIFORNIA,
NOTES 1 "La Structureet la Forme," Cahiers de l'Institut de Science Economique Appliqude, No. 99 (Mar. 1960), 3-36. 2 Anatomyof Criticism(Princeton, 1957), p. 193; my italics. 3 Ibid., pp. 187-88. 4 Ibid., pp. 33-34. 5 See J.-P. Sartre,Anti-Semiteand Yew and Saint Gene't. 6 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen, 1957), pp. 63-66. 7 I Promessi Sposi, Ch. 2 (or, The Betrothed, tr. Archibald Colquhoun [New York, 1968], p. 25). 8 Le Rouge et le noir, Book I, Ch. 6 (or, The Red and the Black, tr. Robert M. Adams [New York, 1969], p. 24). 9 La Chartreuse de Parme, Ch. 8: "Thoughts of ambition and advantage had quite witheredthat delicate plant we call happiness." 10 Hugo von Hofmannsthal,Andreas, in Erzdihlungen(Tiibingen, 1945), p. 176; or Selected Prose, tr. Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern (New York, modified. 1952), p. 59; translation 11 Heidegger,Sein und Zeit, pp. 131-40. 12 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin, 1968), pp. 21-23. 13 A. J. Greimas,Semantique structurale(Paris, 1966), pp. 172-91. 14 Boris Eichenbaum, O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968), p. 4. 15 Roland Barthes, "Par oui commencer?" Poetique, 1 (1970), 4: "firstestablish the two ensemble-termini, the opening and closing tableaux, then explore the various and strategic operations whereby the latter is paths, the various transformations linked to or differentiated fromthe former: it is necessaryin other words to define the transitionfrom one state of equilibrium to another, thereby passing through the black box." See, for an analogous reading of the novel, but in terms of Frank Kermode, "A Modern Way with the Classic," New LiteraryHistory, ecriture, 5 (1974), 415-34; and for a Marxist approach, Terry Eagleton, Images of Power (London, 1975). 16 See my Prison-House of Language (Princeton, 1972), pp. 13-19, and Claudio Guill6n, "Literature as System," Literature as System (Princeton, 1971), pp. 375419. Two quite different, models of genre study may but equally poststructural, be found in Hans Robert Jauss, "Litterature medievale et theorie des genres," Poetique, 1 (1970), 79-101; and Michael Riffaterre, "Systemed'un genre descriptif," Poetique, 3 (1972), 15-30. A convenient surveyof other recent theoriesis offered by Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre (Ithaca, 1972). 17 Claudio Guill6n, "Satira y Poetica en Garcilaso," Homenaje a Casalduero (Madrid, 1972), pp. 209-33. 18 Frye,Anatomy,p. 173. 19 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (New York, 1972), p. 47. 20 Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1972), pp. 375-400.
MAGICAL NARRATIVES:
ROMANCE AS GENRE
I63
21 Two suggestive and very differentconstructionsof such a model may be found in Charles Mauron, Psychocritique du genre comique (Paris, 1964) and Tzvetan Todorov, Introductiona la litterature fantastique (Paris, 1970). 22 See Marx and Engels, On Literature and Art, ed. Stefan Morawski and Lee Baxandall (New York, 1974), pp. 106-12, 143-44; or, for the complete correspondence (including Lasalle's replies), Marx and Engels, Ober Kunst und Literatur (Berlin, 1953), pp. 129-67. lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are 23 "The difficulty bound up with certain formsof social development. The difficulty is that they still affordus artisticpleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model," etc. Karl Marx, 1857 Introduction, Contributionto a Critique of Political Economy (New York, 1970), p. 217.
BULLETIN
OF
Public TheNewYork Library

ofcontinuous its8oth publication, year entering illustrated a handsomely journal quarterly in thehumanities DavidV. Erdman Editor:
to Address requests subscription
1ol FifthAvenue - New York, NY 10003
Now available: VOLUME78 (1974-75) $7.50 In preparation: VOLUME79 (1975-76) $12.oo
READEX BOOKS

Magical Narratives Romance As Genre

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Magical Narratives Romance As Genre

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre Author(s): Fredric Jameson Source: New Literary History, Vol. 7, No.

Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre Fredric Jameson

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

MAGICALNARRATIVES: ROMANCE AS GENRE

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Public TheNewYork Library

Anda mungkin juga menyukai