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Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry Janes to the Present
Comparative Literature, Fall 1999 by Prince, Gerald
SOCIAL FORMALISM: THE NOVEL IN THEORY FROM HENRY JAMES TO THE PRESENT. By Dorothy J. Hale. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. viii, 251 p.
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In this fine book Dorothy J. Hale argues that (Anglo-American) theorists of the novel's literariness and analysts of its ideology, formalist students of fiction and Marxist-inspired ones, poeticians and cultural critics, Henry James, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Henry Lotus Gates have much more in common than we or they (would) think. What unites them, what links novel theory with cultural studies or identity studies and puts not only the three writers just mentioned but also Percy Lubbock, Wayne Booth, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes, and Barbara Johnson on the same theoretical continuum is their "social formalism," their belief that the novel embodies social identity as well as a social world in its formal features and that it has social efficacy through its form. In the Prefaces to the New York edition ofhis collected work James describes the novel as manifesting a special capacity to represent the artist's identity and interest in the world. Indeed, he sees it as both expressing and instantiating social relations through the ties it establishes among author, narrator, character, and reader. Percy Lubbock, in his attempt to systematize James's insights with The Craft of Fiction, elaborates a poetics of vision whereby the true novelist frees characters from his or her own power and thus proves especially able to appreciate alterity. A second wave of theorists, including Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction), Genette (Narrative Discourse), and Barthes (S/Z), underline the novel's objectification of social identities even as they (implicitly) criticize Lubbock's aesthetics and replace Lubbockian "vision" with voice." In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language as well as in later works like "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin (who subsequently finds many enthusiastic Anglo-American disciples) tries to move beyond formalism but, in so doing, develops the view that language-most specifically, the language of the novelconstitutes a fundamentally social phenomenon. Finally, recent identity theorists like Gates (The Signifying Monkey) and Johnson ("Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God") find that the African American is particularly able to represent individual identity and alterity through linguistic means. Du Bois's "double consciousness" becomes confia@ed with Bakhtin's "double voice." The subaltern subject is said best to express the truth of self-division and, through this ability, to both reveal and resist hegemonic appropriation.
Hale does much more than find a paradoxical convergence between formalist and sociohistorical claims about the novel. She offers admirably detailed readings of the role of point of view according to James's Prefaces; she illuminates the difference between his view of indirection as an aesthetic strength and Lubbock's understanding of it as a prohibition against authorial visibility; she underlines the contradictions in Bakhtinian thought and, in particular, the confusion between the forces shaping ideology and the signs representing it; and she brings Out the similarities between James's "responding imagination" and Bakhtin's "creative consciousness." Though she detects many inconsistencies, splippages, mystifications, and circularities in the theoretical texts examined, she is attentive to their richness and is careful not to show undue impatience with the compromising of ideological concerns bN, formal interests, the transferral of the "social" from persons to texts, or the aesthetization of the political. She is also careful to point out that social formalism is not the only important twentieth-century theorization of the novel. However, she provides few hints of what other such theorizations might be (Georg LukAcs? Renee Girard? Marthe Robert;@), and, because of her determination to show how formal aims are infected by social ones and vice versa, her book ultimately suggests that perhaps we are all social formalists.
That determination sometimes leads Hale to arguments and statements that are not quite precise or entirely compelling. In her discussion of Genette's Narrative Discourse, for example, she claims in passing that Genette gives no,justification for treating narrative as "the expansion of a verb" (p. 81). But Genette defines narrative as "a linguistic production undertaking to tell of one or several events," and it is that emphasis on events that leads him to think it "perhaps legitimate to treat [narrative] as the development . . . given to a verbal form" (.Narrative Discourse, Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 30). Similarly, Hale argues that, for Genette, the author of a novel (specifically, Proust as author of A la recherche du temps perdu) is "authentically represented in discourse . . . through the 'traces' that he leaves behind as the implied ,teller"' (p. 85). Yet Genette has little, if any, use for implied tellers, and the traces that he invokes in the passage discussed by Hale refer not to Proust's act of writing, but to his narrator's (Narrative Discourse, p. 28).
