Introducing the first chapter in his classic treatise on the phenomenon of tragedy, Sweet Violence, Terry Eagleton offers a short definition of its object as understood in common usage. According to this definition, tragedy is “something very sad” (1 on page 1). In approaching the object of my analysis, namely, the sociology of the novel, one could attempt to be as elegant (or frivolous) as Eagleton and propose a provisional definition according to which the sociology of the novel would be an interpretative or even scientific activity that somehow deals with society and novels. After all, even one of the most authoritative introductions to the giant field of sociology, Anthony Giddens’ Sociology (6th revised edition from 2009), does not refrain from bold, although almost trivial definition of its object. According to Giddens, “sociology is the scientific study of human life, social groups, whole societies and the human world as such” (2 on page 6). Formally considered, this is not a proper definition because it does not contain differentia specifica to other disciplines with similar topics (such as anthropology or ethnology). However, Giddens, a real heavyweight in the field, found it appropriate for his project. Analogous to such a gesture, the previously suggested solution of scientific activity that somehow tackles society and novels and their mutual relations do not sound so nonchalant. As I will try to demonstrate, this “somehow” turns out to be of crucial importance because everything that humans do, including writing rather lengthy pieces of more or less fictional texts, is done through interaction with the author's surroundings, that is, society.
From its very beginning, sociology was conceptually divided into two co-existent, mutually not necessarily intertwined perspectives: macrosociology and microsociology. While the former addresses “large scale phenomena such as institutional systems,” the latter deals “with smaller scale phenomena such as interpersonal behavior” (3 on page 2997). The sociology of the novel would meander through both fields, dealing with institutional arrangements, but also investigating the personal affective relations that members of a novel’s audience develop towards the artwork. In both cases, literary experience is much greater than the solitary act of reading, and thus acquiring the artwork’s meaning. With this in mind, the claim that creating novels is a social practice should be considered almost pleonastic.
Yet, significant, and the most prestigious approaches in literary theory, for most parts of the 20th century at least, formalism and structuralism insist on exactly opposite premises (for an early exhaustive overview, see 4). From these perspectives, literary artwork is self-sustained, and its first and last words determine the scope of legitimate interpretation. The task of a literary scholar within such an endeavor is to construct or reconstruct meaning from written material in front of her. We know from the history of literary theory in the last hundred years or so that such positions, controversial from the very onset, were seriously challenged many times, but the internalist paradigm (by which I mean a concept that incorporates all sorts of formalist and structuralist approaches) returns invigorated every time. Unlike original Kuhn’s (5 on page 43–51) concept of paradigm, that denotes a radically new, incommensurable mode of understanding that principally excludes the former paradigm from the field of epistemic legitimacy, the internalist paradigm resonates with ever new audiences, that is, generations of enthusiastic readers and scholars unobstructed by insights of various externalist positions, that is, those who treat social concerns as a legitimate aspect of literary-theoretical investigation.
The underlying presupposition of internalist positions is a conviction that literature substantially departs from all other worldly practices and thus requires an autonomous analytical apparatus.1 As Rita Felski states in the introductory lines to her manifesto, Uses of Literature:
Separating literature from everything around it, critics fumble to explain how works of art arise from and move back into the social world. Highlighting literature’s uniqueness, they overlook the equally salient realities of its connectedness. Applauding the ineffable and enigmatic qualities of works of art, they fail to do justice to the specific ways in which such works infiltrate and inform our lives. Faced with the disconcerting realization that people often turn to books for knowledge or entertainment, they can only lament the naïveté of those unable or unwilling to read literature “as literature” (6 on page 5)
This otherworldliness of literature, as a sort of apriori of every legitimate engagement with literature, is the object of pretty humble yet incisive Bourdieu’s analysis in the preface to his Rules of Art. He asks: “is it true that scientific analysis is doomed to destroy that which makes for the specificity of the literary work and reading, beginning with aesthetic pleasure (...) For a good number of accredited writers and readers of literature (including Bergson, Heidegger or Gadamer) the case is already made” (7 on page xvi). In other words, no serious scholar could disclaim the uniqueness of the aesthetic experience provided by literature. By virtue of its uniqueness, it is not possible to treat it statistically, i.e. scientifically.
The title of Bourdieu’s treatise – Rules of Art – sounds provocative: we take for granted that art and literature notwithstanding, is exactly that realm of human experience that defies rules. However, we tend to forget that this is a romantic heritage, the result of a century-long battle for protection of copyright, and not an intrinsic property of the art field8. Only a century earlier, one of the greatest poetic disputes in pre-modern Europe was the famous Querelle du Cid, a dispute among critics of Corneille’s drama Le Cid, assembled and coordinated by Cardinal Richelieu, which strove to prove that written work that breaks so many rules cannot be treated as serious artwork9. This task was among the first great public gestures of the newly founded Academie Francaise. Thus, we can see that the establishment of the most distinguished literary institution on European soil is closely linked to the codification of rules for the proper creation of art. This implies that the concepts of genius, originality, transgressiveness, and autonomy are not natural categories, pertaining to the very act of fictional writing, but historical inventions with their own material genealogy. However, as further history proved, this oblivion about the origin of uniqueness turned out to be extremely persistent. At the beginning of the 20th century, Neo-Kantian philosophers Dilthey and Rickert in the same fashion, but with new philosophical rigor, posited the insurmountable chasm between these two spheres of human praxis, classified as Geistwissenchaften and Naturwissenschaften, i.e. human sciences and natural sciences. The first group deals with natural kinds that can be objectively apprehended, analyzed, and explained, the other with spiritual/mental categories that can only be understood, but in principle, never fully explained (see 11 and 12).
The tension between the two does not seem to wane, and Felski does not need serious effort to recognize this still existing rift. She declares that her manifesto “strikes a path away from the dominant trends of what I will call theological and ideological styles of reading. By ’theological’, I mean any strong claim for literature’s other-worldly aspects, though usually in a secular rather than explicitly metaphysical sense.” Many diverging approaches share these methodological assumptions despite their obvious differences in everything else. “(...) What they share, nevertheless, is a conviction that literature is fundamentally different from the world and our other ways of making sense of that world, and that this difference – whether couched in the language of originality, singularity, alterity, untranslatability, or negativity – is the source of its value.” (6 on page 4).
In short, the literature is not of this world, so the usual methods to comprehend this world do not apply. The scientific task of literary theory worthy of its name, as envisaged by Russian formalists, involves constructing an autonomous theoretical apparatus capable of grasping the specificity and alterity of this non-worldly phenomenon. My aim here is rather mild in its theoretical ambition. Keeping in mind a wide spectrum of qualitative and quantitative sociological methodologies, I would like to stress how some sociological approaches enhance our understanding of some literary phenomena, namely political novels. I do not advocate for the replacement of internalist readings or claim the superior capacity of sociological approaches. I would like to sketch out some aspects of literary production that cannot be treated thoroughly without input from sociological methodology.
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The sociology of art, as a distinct research field, has developed rather late. Although we can find more than a few hints in the works of European sociologists and social theorists in the 1930s and the 1940s (most notably the Frankfurt School), it started to blossom somewhere from the 1970s onward (Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste was published in 1979, and Howard Becker’s Art Worlds in 1982). In the narrower field of sociology of the novel, the first giant step was undertaken by Lucien Goldmann in 1964 in his essay Introduction to the sociology of the novel. In it, heavily influenced by Lukacs’s and Girard’s theories of novel, Goldmann offers a Marxist account of the poetics of novels, mainly employing an extremely fashionable critique of commodity fetishism (probably most known from Debord’s classic The Society of the Spectacle) and trying to understand novel as an expression of the underlying generative principle that structures all of society, and that is capitalist dynamics (13). Although expressed in more sophisticated verbiage than vulgar reflection theory, this basic social philosophy of art boils down to the reconstruction of the artwork’s meaning from the social surroundings within which any particular novel arose. Although some of the formal traits of artwork can be analyzed using such an approach, its totalizing tendency, more often than not, leaves too much out of the focus, thus depriving us of many significant insights relating to the object in question.
In order to specify the appropriateness of some sociological tools, I will first try to define, or at least provisionally operationalize, some key concepts that will be used to strengthen my advocacy of sociological approach(es) in analyzing novels as aesthetic objects. “Narrative” and “fiction” seem to be essential features of any fairly lengthy written material that we acknowledge as a novel, so a finer elaboration of these concepts follows.
In his contribution to the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics Paisley Livingstone, one of the most ardent proponents of intentionalism in the interpretation of art, elucidates the importance of narrative for understanding art executed through the medium of narrativity. For him, narrative is interchangeable with story, and there are several conditions dominantly present in theoretical accounts under which we may recognize a particular expression as a story. For the purpose of my argument, I will only emphasize some of them. First, text must have at least one event, that is, a change of situation from one state of affairs to another; second, there must be at least two actions that form a coherent whole of purposeful activity, with beginning and resolution; third, there must be at least one narrator who tells the story; and finally, the text must possess the aim to convey a particular point by organizing a material in particular order (14 on page 279; emphasis mine). The latest aspect departs sharply from the first three. While the first three refer to the structural properties of the text, the last includes authorial intent, which is an extrinsic property of the text. Structural traits are not merely there to form a whole and provide aesthetic pleasure, but they tend to produce an effect on the recipient: to convey a point, that is, to communicate a message. Considering this capacity, we may say in Brechtian fashion that neatly organized narration always functions as the essence of bourgeois ideology. While the manifest aim was to provide a nice story, its latent intention was to convince readers of the non-conflicting nature of the order of things appropriately represented in a straight-forward course of events. No wonder then that novel, in Moretti’s words “found the nation-state. Being the only symbolic form that could represent it, it became an essential component of our modern culture” (15 on page 137).
With such a broadened, as it were “socialized” definition, we may see significant widening of the understanding of that which is written and conventionally called novel. It is no longer only a configuration of arbitrarily scattered signs, as (post)structuralists would have them, but a vehicle to exit the plateau of literariness and step into the world. And the world is full of protocols and procedures that cannot be grasped with regular tools of literary theory.
In the already mentioned Routledge Anthology, David Davies tries to elaborate on the conditions under which we may speak of fictionality. One important aspect of fictionality is, as Davies stresses, that it does not necessarily correlate with true/false distinction, as many commentators have observed (16 on page 264). We may confront a voluminous text full of true statements about the outer world, and still treat it as fictional (as is the case with Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes), or engage with pseudo-scientific discourses such as astrology or homeopathy that are not fictional, albeit full of utterly false theses and suppositions. This distinction has significant implications for our understanding of novels, since it saves us a lot of trouble when deciding upon the status of some highly influential recent novel-esque endeavors, such as Édouard Louis’s or Knausgård’s recollections of their childhood. Or even more conspicuous in the case of Annie Ernaux, particularly her diary of love affair Getting Lost which genre-wise and fiction-wise would not fit even the most flexible criteria for being a novel, and yet, it is commonly received as one. Here, we come to the next condition for discerning a fictional text that Davies proposes after removing the true/false alternative. He claims that the fictionality of a narrative may be a matter of how it functions or how it was designed to function (16, italics in the original). What matters is the function conferred on a narrative by users. Again, we have some authorial intent, strictly speaking a non-literary parameter that enters the formula for specification of fictionality, but even more, we have a third factor: the recipient is willing to invest her imaginative powers to treat the text as fictional. For this to function, there must be publicly recognized conventions that the author employs, and the audience can automatically or easily discern and make-believe. Now, fictionality is not a property of the sole text, but relational dynamics between the three instances. From an ideal, formally organized object, we come to a socially mediated transaction that is fiction. We will now come a bit closer to the social nature of the novel as an art form. This stance is further corroborated by Caroll’s insights.
In his investigation of the ontology of art, Carroll, one of the most meticulous philosophers of art, stressed three dominant perspectives that permeate aesthetic thinking within the field of analytic philosophy. In essence, these three approaches boil down to (17 on page 64):
1) Stage one essentialism: It consists of finding essential features of all objects of art (these may be the specific form, capacity to build affective communities, and capacity to arouse particular feelings). All these traits can be discerned from an outer perspective, as if art objects were natural kinds and not the output of human production.
2) Open concept approach: This defies stage one attempts to specify necessary and sufficient reasons for some objects to be deemed as artworks. Because art is, by its historical genealogy, the field of innovation, novelty, and originality, no fixed set of criteria can meet the versatility of practices that pretend to the status of art. Proponents of the open concept approach rely on Wittgensteinian family resemblances as reliable mechanisms for discerning art from non-art.
3) Institutional theory of art as articulated in George Dickie’s work, in which an object can be regarded as an art object only if it is legitimized as such by someone from the art world and generated by the right process and that is an institutional process. More precisely, there are no inherent formal criteria for judging objects as artistic or possessing aesthetic value. If an object is presented by the artistic authority of any kind (that may be a critic, curator, theoretician, art historian, art seller, programmer, or fellow artist) as worthy of being included in the category art, the consequence of such a procedure is a sort of transubstantiation, jumping from the category of mere objects into art objects.
The sharpest criticism that Carroll delivers to this position focuses on treating art as an institution analogous to that of law or religion. There are no strict rules that organize the art field, and the rigidity of rules is what makes a conglomerate of versatile human practices an institution. Therefore, after carefully examining all the flaws of the major approaches, Carroll proposes his interpretation of art as a cultural practice. In his words, “The sense of cultural practice I have in mind here is that of a complex body of interrelated human activities governed by reasons internal to those forms of activity and to their coordination” (17 on page 66). Alternatively, in less cryptic articulation, thinking of art as a cultural practice presupposes that:
the means for identifying a new object as part of the corpus of art are internal to the practice of art, and, furthermore, are related to the reproduction of the practice as a self-transforming tradition. The means of identification, here, are rational strategies rather than the types of rules that are, for example, identified with stage-one essentialism. That is, given a new work of art, we do not have a rule or set of rules to determine whether it deserves inclusion in the order of art; rather we have several strategies for thinking about the object and for justifying its acceptance in the tradition (17 on page 67).
This, obviously, is a procedural definition and not object-oriented, so to speak. It includes several actors (not only persons)–that is, several instances that are themselves products of historical genealogy – and these are authors, cultural producers, and audiences. The relationship between these instances cannot be grasped through an aesthetic apparatus in a narrow sense. Their understanding necessitates the use of concepts and tools dedicated to the analysis of human interactions, that is, those that only sociology can provide.
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Gisele Sapiro in her already pretty influential Sociology of literature (18) defines the discipline as an approach that “considers literature to be a social activity that depends on conditions of production and circulation and sees it as something closely linked to values and a ‘worldview’” (18 on page 8). Although pretty basic and clear in its sociological impetus, her position strongly correlates with Carroll’s understanding of art as a cultural practice, since production and circulation, values, and worldviews notwithstanding, stay dynamically embedded in the network of more or less socially determined instances.
Sapiro offers an extensive overview of the entire field, staying dominantly within the Bourdieusian paradigm. She divided her presentation into three main topics: i) social conditions for the production of literary works, ii) sociology of literary works, and iii) sociology of reception. Continuing on the aforementioned categories, we must ask ourselves in every instance of analytically approaching a particular novel or group of novels: How are the novels produced? What meaning do they convey? What kinds of relationships do various audiences establish towards them? As we have seen earlier, traces of analytical endeavors of this kind stem from the 1930s, but only Bourdieu’s field analysis offers appropriate tools that manage to eschew trappings of biographical illusion, where the value of the work derives from the unique singularity of a writer, or those of vulgar Marxist reflection theory, which sees the artwork as a mere reflection of the underlying economic dynamics. Beyond mere representation, it turns out that for the sociological analysis work of formalization (Mise en forme) is crucial. How do particular genres arise and amid what circumstances? What social conditions contribute to the consolidation of particular literary fashions? A famous example of such a problem would be Jameson’s dictum that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism; hence, the flood of dystopian fiction in literature and movies. More importantly, however, the Bourdieusian perspective gives us the opportunity to explore what social and literary schemes for representing the world stand at the authors’ disposal. What genres and models for structuring the narrative prevail in particular periods, and how do they affect writers’ choices? All these questions directly pertain to the cultural practice of producing novels and not solely to the imaginative processes inside authors’ minds.
However, the relationship between the social properties of participants in the production of novels and aesthetic choices they make is not direct; it is mediated by the space of possibilities and one’s position in the literary field. The same goes, a fortiori, to a political novel. This position not only goes against the grain of Ranciere’s (19) definition of political literature as one that disrupts the order of things by its particular enunciation; it also delegitimizes any direct, straightforward explanation of the politicality of the novel. From such a Bourdieusian perspective, we may say that Ranciere structurally repeats the gesture of biographical determination, or that of thematic focus on the novel’s content, only substituting one originary trajectory for the other. However, in both cases, we have one source that warrants the political status of the novel. In such circumstances, we are involuntarily forced to operate within the logic of discovery and not that of analysis - there is a truth to this situation, and it only needs revelation.
In contrast, the Bourdiesian analysis advocated by Sapiro works more slowly, taking into account more variables and warrants nothing. It is, technically speaking, original in every instance of its application, painfully aware of the complexity of the relations at stake. As such, it offers less spectacular insights but more nuanced accounts applicable in every moment in history for every actor in the field.
Besides these epistemic advantages over competing paradigms in the field, it manages to eschew ontological aporiae that arise when we take any artistic format, such as political novels, as given. Following Carroll’s suggestion, our analysis should strive not towards the discovery of some essentialist properties of the artworks in question, but towards the reconstruction of internal procedures of the artistic field that allow some objects to be treated as artworks of particular kind, such as political novels. It goes almost without saying that such multivariate analysis offers more versatile insights, and what is more important, of a sort that cannot be grasped with any formalist approach whatsoever. The global phenomena of J. K. Rowling and E. L. James offer little to no material whatsoever for formalist literary analysis; yet, their influence and significance for the book market and for the transformation of various audiences are undeniable. An analytic approach capable of shedding light on these mechanisms deserves to be treated as a part of literary studies.
