The Modern Novel from a Sociological Perspective: Towards a Strategic Use of the Notion of Genres (original) (raw)

2008, Journal of Narrative Theory

In his book Puissances du roman (1942), a text described in its preface as a sociological study of the novel, Roger Caillois examines the link between the novel and modern society and concludes, with the keenness characteristic of the politically committed intellectuals of the time, that the type of sociality that gives rise to the genre of the novel is fundamentally fragmented. As Georg Lukács and others before him, also Caillois argues that the genre of the novel is a symbolic form of representation closely related to a specific type of society. The novel, a dominant narrative genre of modernity, is, according to Caillois, a product of particular historical circumstances and a society that reduces the social aspect of life to the mere co-existence of individuals. Caillois wonders whether we can think of a different type of narrative and imagine a social and historical fullness that is missing from both the novel and the society in which it emerges. Speculating about the ways in which literature could represent the fullness of undispersed sociality in an anticipatory gesture, he denies that narratives could step out of the dispersive sociality through novelistic channels. Even though the question of whether the novel could eventually be brought to subscribe to such a program is, as Denis Hollier has more recently suggested (Hollier 66), never ruled out in Puissances du roman, Caillois remains rather skeptical about the potential of the novel to be transformed so