Towards a Sociology of the Novel (French: Pour une sociologie du roman) is a 1963 book by Lucien Goldmann.
“The novel form seems to me, in effect, to be the transposition on the literary plane of everyday life in the individualistic society created by market production.
According to Goldmann, the novel form as identified by both Lukács and Girard follows a certain path: put in the most general terms, it chronicles the rupture between the hero and the world.
In this respect, the novel differs from its close cousins, the tragedy and the folk tale.
The hero experiences a rupture with his community because his is a quest for authentic values in a degraded world.
Goldmann explains that there are three types of novels, which both Lukács and Girard have identified: To clarify the differences between Girard and Lukács, Goldmann offers a short summary and analysis of each theorist's insights into the form of the novel.
In other words, the hero, frustrated by his attempt to find concrete values in the world begins to turn toward the metaphysical, the otherworldly for satisfaction.
Goldmann's example is the chivalric novels in Don Quixote that distract him from the search for authentic values.
Degradation happens because the hero gets closer to the mediating agent, and thereby further away from authentic values and what Goldmann terms “vertical transcendence.” While Girard and Lukács agreed on many points, they also disagreed on certain key elements of the novel form.
These new novels had absurd worlds and an abundance of reification (to treat something abstract as if it were a real thing), and were hardly reliable sources for understanding the society of the time.
Goldmann, in line with the novel-as-mirror-society ideology, says that he doubts the structure of the novel (degraded search for authentic values expressed through mediatization) was invented individually.
This is where Goldmann introduces his thesis: “The novel form seems to me, in effect, to be the transposition on the literary plane of everyday life in the individualistic society created by market production.
In the pre-capitalistic society, man judged commodities (clothing, tools, food) by its use value—that is, its value to him as the person who was going to use it.
Here Goldmann takes a short detour to answer a question that must now be plaguing every Marxist and non-Marxist reading the essay.
While some might consider this development bizarre, Goldmann has a ready answer to explain this development: Marx theorized that in market societies, the collective consciousness ultimately disappears as a separate identity because it becomes a direct reflection of economic life.
This disappearance of the subject can also be seen in the theater of absence exemplified by playwrights like Beckett and Adamov, as well as in non-representational art.
It is an opposition to a time that could not fathom/did not have the vocabulary for conscious (read: Marxian) resistance to the status quo.
Goldmann suggests that one French novelist may have succeeded in a representation of conscious bourgeois values: Balzac.
In general, however, the conscious value system played a secondary role in the novels of the time.