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: 05/07/2010 19:44
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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

HE

REACTION

AGAINST

feature of what must be called the ideology of modernism. And it is certain that of all literary works, so-called modernistic ones are the least classifiableaccording to traditional "kinds": witness the rise of a new and hybrid form in 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 return to plot suggest that a reexamination of the question of genre may be in order. Genres are essentially contracts between a writer and his readers; or rather, to use the term which Claudio Guillen has so usefully revived, they are literary institutions, which like the other institutions of social life are based on tacit agreements or contracts. The thinking behind 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 properly to be used. In everyday life, of course, these signals are furnished by the context of the utterance and by the physical presence of the speaker, with his gesturality and intonations. When speech is lifted out of this concrete situation, such signals must be replaced by other types of directions, if the text in question is not to be abandoned to a drifting multiplicity of uses (or meanings, as the latter used to be termed). It is of course the generic convention which is called upon to perform this task, and to provide a built-in substitute for those older corrections and adjustments which are possible only in the immediacy of the face-to-face situation. Yet it is clear at the same time that the farther a given text is removed from a performing situation (that of village storyteller, or bard, or player), the more difficult will it be to enforce a given generic prescriptionon a reader; indeed, no small part of the art of writing is absorbed by this (impossible)

genre theory in recent times is a strategic

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attempt to devise a foolproof mechanism for the automatic exclusion of undesirable responses to a given literary utterance. Traditional genre theory has been understood as performing the distinct but related functions of furnishing specifications for the production of this or that type of composition, and of providing a typology according to which the various existing compositions may be sorted out by genus and species. In recent times, the first of these functions, with its so-called techniques and its literary recipes, has become the property of commercial literature, where the older genres continue to live the half-life of the various paperback lines, gothics, mysteries, bestsellers, and the like; while the second has become an almost exclusively academic or antiquarian enterprise, drawing its inspiration from nothing fresher than the classificatory ideals of early nineteenth-century science. Still, it is hard to see how any genuine literary history could be written without the aid of something like a concept of genre. The genesis of an individual work, the development of an individual writer, might furnish illuminating footnotes to the story of overall cultural and literary change, but would surely never figure as the principal events it has to tell. Only the history of the forms themselves can 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 itself as a relationship between producers and public, while retaining the use of what are almost exclusively literary-critical instruments, inasmuch as its data must be drawn from precise and concrete experience of the works themselves. When we look at the practice, rather than the theory, of contemporary genre criticism, we find two seemingly incompatible tendencies at work which we will characterize as the semantic and the structural or syntactic approaches respectively. A glance at some of the classic theorists of comedy 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 essentially an expression of society as a whole, and has the function of punishing deviance with ridicule and thereby preserving the social order; while for Emil Staiger, on the contrary, it constitutes one of the few avenues by which the fundamental absurdity of existence may be apprehended in a fashion still tolerable for the 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 entities and abstract personifications after the fashion of German idealism (the "spirit" of comedy, of tragedy, etc.), and of which Dilthey's elaborate system of Weltan-

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schauungen may serve as an instructive example. The conceptual operation involved in this particular approach may be characterized as the substitution, for the individual work in question, of some more generalized existential experience of which a description is then given which can range from the impressionisticto the phenomenologically rigorous. In this approach, the essence of genre is apprehended in terms of what we will call a mode. For the second, or syntactic approach, such a method stands condemned out of its own mouth as intuitive and unscientific; the alternative is rather a view of comedy as a determinate laughter-producing mechanism 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 synthetic reconstruction, resulting, not in the expression of a meaning, but rather the 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 phenomenological approach, the contrary in terms of which comedy will be defined will be another mode, that of tragedy, say, or of irony; while for the structural approach, the opposite will simply be the noncomic or the unfunny, the joke that falls flat or the farce that remains a dead letter. This approach, whose monuments range from the lost chapters of Aristotle's Poetics to Freud's joke book, has the advantage of forcing even its ungifted practitioners to 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 work) with the peremptory but unsatisfying declaration that the structure in question is thus, and not otherwise. In this second, or structural approach, we will suggest, for want of a better term, that the genre in question is dealt with in terms of fixed form. Judging from similar alternations in stylistic theory and in linguistics itself, this methodological hesitation between a structural analysis 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 whether it may not be possible to turn the dilemma into a solution in its own right by making it the basis for some fresh hypothesis about the nature of genre. The latter would then be defined as that literary phenomenon which may be articulated either in terms of 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 definition like this consists not 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 literary mode which would correspond to such a "form"); but also

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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 definition also, 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 criticism of romance, if not as the basis for some new and substantive account of the latter, then at least as a framework for indicating the formal requirements which any really adequate account of such a genre must meet and the steps necessarily involved in fulfilling them.

II
The fullest account of romance as a mode has been given by Northrop Frye, with whose theory we therefore begin. Romance is for him a wish fulfillment or utopian fantasy, which aims at the transfiguration of the world of everyday reality, whether in an effort to restore it to the condition of some lost Eden or to inaugurate and usher in some new and ultimate realm from which the old mortality and imperfections have 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 will still contain that reality." 2 To put it this way is therefore to turn our attention to those elements in the ordinary world which must be transformed, if the earthly paradise is to reveal its lineaments behind it: it then becomes clear that for romance such elements are conceived, not as the humdrum contingencies of an ordinary finite and mortal existence, but rather as the result of curse and enchantment, black magic, baleful spell, and ritual desolation. Not unnaturally, the forces capable of resisting this 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:
the hero of romance is analogous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic powers of a lower world. The conflict however takes place in, or at any rate primarily concerns, our world, which is in the middle, and which is characterized by the cyclical movement of nature. Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life, and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor, and youth.3

Such a passage calls for several remarks. We may first of all feel some

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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 fairy tale). In most romances, no doubt, the hero is called upon to struggle with the villain or demon; yet the account of Propp reminds us 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 naivete or inexperience, and that his most characteristic posture is that of bewilderment. Surely, far from being an emissary of the "upper world," the hero of romance is something closer to an observer, a mortal spectator surprised by supernatural conflict, who then himself is gradually drawvn 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 description applies, not to romance as such, but to the myth of which it is itself a 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 very concept of the hero as a critical category What Frye ascribes to the character of the "mythical Messiah or deliverer" is indeed what Propp calls a series of functions, or what we may more loosely call a series of deeds: the hero is he who by his own action struggles and earns his victory or 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 description is appropriate only for a narrative in which action as such is the predominant category of the event, whereas what we find in romance is something quite different, a 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 therefore need to mark the contemplative nature of romance as narrative by the choice of some other term for the human figuration of which its pattern is in part woven. We will return to this problem later, for it becomes theoretically more urgent when we try to 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 distinctive about romance as a mode. At this stage, what we would want to observe about Frye's account is that it fails to come to grips with the conceptual categories which inform and preselect the attributes and qualities by which those states are charac-

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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 types of attributesand 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 literary form at every moment in human history and may thus be thought 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 formation as little natural, as historical and as humanly "constructed," as are, say, the totemic systems of certain primitive tribes, or that animism which forms a 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 vicissitudes of the human race up to the moment in which, in socialism, it begins to exercise mastery over 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 shrinking world of today, indeed, with its gradual leveling of class and national and racial differences, it is becoming increasingly clear that the concept of evil is at one with the category of Otherness itself: evil characterizes whatever is radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a very real and urgent threat to my existence. So from earliest times, the stranger from another tribe, the "barbarian" who speaks an incomprehensible language and follows "outlandish" customs, or, in our own day, the avenger of cumulated resentments from some oppressed or Communist-behind whose apclass, or else that alien being-Jew human features an intelligence of a malignant and preternatural parently superiority is thought to lurk-these are some of the figures in which the fundamental identity of the representative of Evil and the Other are visible. The point, however, is not that in such figures the 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 intimate and constitutive relationship between the form itself, as a genre and a literary institution, and this deep-rooted ideology which has 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 literary use than this, and that it can therefore scarcely serve as a distinguishing characteristic of romance as a form, it is worth observing the absence of this particular opposition from tragedy, in which the triumph of an inhuman fate or destiny is felt to be something that radically transcends the mere human categories of good and evil. The proof is that

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when we do encounter, in something that looks like a tragedy, judgments that come from the ethical realm (as when we see this or that character
as a villain), we generally describe 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 regeneration of the social order. It may, however, also be objected that there are other semantic codes in the romance which are equally as important as 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, essentially agricultural way of life. It is difficult to imagine a conflict of 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 evil, between white magic and black magic. Thus the two systems, that of good and evil, and that of magic, are inextricably intermingled, and may indeed prove simply to be different dimensions of the same ideological phenomenon, that of Otherness directing our attention to the political and social attributes of such a world view, while the formulation in terms of magic rather orients us towards the economic organization of the society in question and the relations it entertains with 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 relatively loosely, and without much awareness of its origins in the phenomenological movement and its status there as a relatively technical philosophical concept. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, however, we cannot impose a single, binding use on such a term, and it seems better to an recognize that it has, as it were, both an esoteric-or technical-and The latter conveys a relatively more popular-meaning. exoteric-or physical and geographical sense of landscape or nature; world here means "realm," even when it is associated with the presumably more 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 originally designated something like the frame or the Gestalt, the overall organizational category within which the various empirical innerworldly phenomena are perceived and the various innerworldly experiences take place. In this sense, then, a world cannot, as in the preceding use, be itself the object of experience or perception, for it is rather that supreme category which permits all experience or perception in the first place and must thus lie outside them as their own first condition.6 Thus, there would seem to be, from

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the point of view of practical literary analysis, a very basic 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, iiiore technically philosophical perspective, the notion of "world" may serve as the framework for a description of the distinctive features of this or that world structure, but could not then itself figure within that description as one of the latter's
components.

hypothesis, namely, that, if we may be permitted the cumbersome Heideggerian formula, romance is that form in which the world-ness of world reveals itself. For romance, then, both uses of the term are appropriate, for romance as a literaryform is that event in which world in the technical sense of the transcendental horizon of my experience becomes precisely visible as something like an innerworldlyobject 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 itself historical in character: for there must, as in medieval times, be something like a nature left as a mysteriousand alien border around the still precariousand minute human activities of village and field, for the structure of world-ness to find an adequate vehicle through which it can manifest its existence. So Frye is surely not wrong to evoke the intimate connection between romance as a mode, and the "natural" imagery of earthly paradise 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.

The solution to the dilemma lies, I think, in the following

III
With this correction of Frye's account, we are for the first time in a position to show what is interesting and useful about such an approach, 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 literary discourse is not bound to the conventions of a given age, nor indissolubly linked to a given type of verbal artifact, but rather persists as a temptation and a mode of expression across a whole range of historical periods, seeming to offer itself, if only intermittently, as a formal possibility which 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 history of romance as a mode becomes possible, in other words, when we project it as a history of the various codes which, in the increasingly secularizedand rational world that emerges from the collapse of feudalism, are called upon to assume the literary function of those older codes which

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have now become so many dead languages. Or, to put it the other way round, the fate of romance as a forIm is dependent on the availability of elements more acceptable to the reader than those older miagical categories for which some adequate substitute must be invented. An instructive example of this process of secularization and renewal may be observed in one of the earliest and monumental reinventions of the genre, Manzoni's Promessi sposi, surely, along with Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, one of the few persuasive postrevolutionary attenmpts to frame a genuinely religious narrative. In our present context, we are able to post-Jansenist preperceive that Manzoni's sophisticated theology-a occupation with the states of sin and grace, a post-Calvinist preoccupation with Providence-functions precisely as a replacement of the older medieval structure of the magical world and marks the beginning secularization 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 lpowers which radiate outwards from the affected characters. Here one does more than suffer evil, one is contaminated by it: thus, on learning of Don Rodrigo's plot to stop his marriage, Renzo is possessed by "a miad longing to do something strange and awful," on which Manzoni conmments as follows: "Those who provoke or oppress, all those who do any wrong to others, are guilty not only of the harm they do, but also of the twists they cause in the minds of those they have injured. Renzo was a peaceable open youth who hated deceit of young man and averse to bloodshed-an any kind; but at that moment his heart only beat to kill, and his mind turned only on thoughts of 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 determinate and peculiar structure, in which moral essences exercise a power which greatly transcends their own immediate local manifestations, a world in which something we 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 exuded by the Gothic fortress of l'Innominato, which broods over the landscape like the very promise 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 countryside touched by the grace that radiates from his presence. In such a world the climactic event is that of conversion, and it is the internal struggle for the soul which, still conceived of in relatively external terms, serves as the substitute for the old agon of chivalric romance at this particular stage in the secularization of the form. The conceptual form taken by magic in Manzoni's work may then be

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formulated in terms of providence, as a concept of some benign guiding order in human affairs which marks out Manzoni's "religion" from other theological systems,such as those which stress sin and corruption, or which function as vehicles for social and instinctual repression. Yet Manzoni's solution, the substitutionof providence for magic, is historicallya transitory one, and is conceivable only in a society strongly influenced by the new Enlightenment values but not yet wholly secularized in the manner of the more advanced European countries of the postrevolutionary era. It is therefore instructive to glance at the other national options, as they make for a survival of the form while compelling significant semantic transformations in its content. Stendhal is indeed particularly useful for this purpose, in that he shows signs of uncertainty as to his own narrative and generic aims: such episodes, indeed, as Julien's discovery of a scrap of newsprint which prefigureshis own ultimate death on the scaffold, or the various astrological predictions and superstitious omens of the Charterhouse, may be seen as archaic survivalsof the older magical romance within the framework of that new type which it was his originality to have
invented.

Yet in Stendhal, the religioussense of fate or destiny has been secularized still further, and a close inspection of the text suggests that the operations of magic now take place in the realm of what henceforth must be called psychology. This is perhaps more noticeable in The Red and the Black than in the Charterhouse, the latter rather suggesting an 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, hypocrisy and calculation, the locus of all those ego activities which, based on deferred gratification, find their fulfillment in commerce and in the obsession with status. Nothing in Stendhal is quite so striking as the language in which the interference between these two systems, the mechanisms by which they short-circuit each 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 twenty years old. All of a sudden the wild idea occurred to him of kissing her hand. At first he was afraid of his own idea; an instant later 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 from his sawmill."8 The resultant transformation in Julien is something like a psychological equivalent of that physical and natural desolation which in the older Grail romances is visited on

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the waste land: indeed, the older magical landscape, weakened into figuresof speech, still clings to the wondrous sentences with which Stendhal "notes" the process, as in the following, from the Charterhouse: "La pensee du privilege avait desseche 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 "ideologie," as his master Destutt de Tracy termed it), but rather as the interiorization of that struggle between two worlds which characterizes the romance as a genre. But quite different replacement strategies are also possible in the same general historical situation: witness, for example, Eichendorff's Aus 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 henceforth term 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 inverted picaro, the good-for-nothing himself, whose presence as hero articulates the twin filiation of the novella as a combination of picaresqueand romance. In the context of romanticism, historically that 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 censorship of the new bourgeois reality principle: the reader craves the mystery inherent in the form, much as a sick body craves the elements in which it is deficient; but he now finds himself obliged to justify the henceforth scandalous and archaic activity of 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 psychology, and in Eichendorff by the demonstration that it was not really there at all in the first place. Thus, in the first great period of bourgeois hegemony, the strategy for reinventing the sacred consisted in the substitution for it of new positivities (theology, psychology, the dramatic metaphor); at the end of the 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 characteristic indirection of modernism, which, in what from Kafka to Cortazar 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:
Andreas turned from the house into which Zorzi had vanished, and walked to the end of the rather narrow street. It ended in an arch; but on the other side, in a somehow peculiar way, a little bridge over the canal led to a small oval plaza with a chapel. Andreas went back and was annoyed to find, after so few minutes, that he could no longer recognize the house among the simple buildings of similar construction. One door, dark green, with a bronze knocker in the form of a dolphin, looked like the right one; yet it was closed, and Andreas thought he could rememberseeing Zorzi in the hall, through an open doorway. Still, there was little

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enough chance of their missing one another if Andreas went back to the bridge and took a look at the little square with the church on it. Street and square were utterly deserted; he would have heard steps, let alone a cry or repeated shouts if Zorzi came looking for him. So he crossed the bridge; below, a little boat hung tethered upon the dark water, not another human being to be seen or heard: the whole square had something lost and forsaken about 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 forever suspended on the point of meaning, forever disposed to receive a revelation, whether of 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 drgerlich") record the internal activity of a psyche buffeted by forebodings and confirm Heidegger's account of Stimmung as the privileged medium through which the world-ness of world manifests itself.1 For Stimmung-what in English is generally called "mood" in its strongest, most oppressive sense, as when a landscape seems to us charged with foreboding (Julien Gracq), as when the glimpse of a particularly sordid wallpaper unaccountably chokes us with anxiety, or, less often, a framed and distant vista fills us with an equally unaccountable elationis the very element of what Frye, following James Joyce, terms an "epiphany," the sense of a whole environment slowly gathering, 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 suggests that 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 their magical power from their unsentimental loyalty to mode-draw those henceforth abandoned clearings across which higher and lower worlds once passed.

IV
If Frye may stand as the richest source 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 reformulate the sequence and episodes of individual romances in terms of a fixed form. Such an operation essentially amounts to a process of abstraction, whereby surface events or elements are

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assimilated to emptier and even more general categories, and the operation should hold both for characters and acts. Thus the various secondary male figures of Stendhal's novels--l'Abbe Pirard, l'Abbe Blanes, Mosca, etc.-prove to be so many father-surrogatesof the Hero, or in Propp's terminology, so many versions or manifestations of the single irreducible 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 simplification of 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 often quite 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 encounters with various helpful and motherly women are all so many manifestations of that basic relationship to the feminine donor which will find its ultimate realization in his indebtedness to the Duchess; and so forth. Propp formulates the basic axioms of his analysis as follows:
(1) Functionsof charactersserve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. (2) The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited. (3) The sequence of functions is always identical. (4) All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure.12

Now what is "fixed" in Propp's model would seem essentially to be the irreversibleorder of the functions themselves, 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 theoretical weaknesses of Propp's model (Levi-Strauss has already given an account of them in his important review article) may be summed up in a two-fold and paradoxical way: on the one hand, his model is insufficiently disengaged from the surface of the narrative text; his abstractions still entertain as it were too great a complicity with the conscious storytelling categories, and this is nowhere quite so strikingly demonstrated, as we shall see shortly, as in his retention of the notion 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 insufficiently formalized or abstracted, has not placed sufficient methodological distance between its own operative categories and the official 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 empiricism which Levi-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

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work, namely, the establishment of a series of functions whose reason for being is subsumed under the simple observation that they turn out to exist, that the functions of the fairy tale are "thus and not otherwise." Propp's model tends to fall apart into a relatively random 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 relatively empirical approach to his series of functions and a type of analysis which aims at seeing the entire narrative 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 reformulate it in terms of 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' reworking of Propp's scheme, in which the concept of the actant is substituted for that-more anthropothe character itself.13 The problems to morphic and representational-of 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 rather desultory coda which follows the Hero's triumph over his enemies, and in which, first confronting a false Hero in a renewal of his struggles, he is at length ceremoniously recognized, his identity as Hero crowned and fulfilled by ritual marriage and elevation to the throne. That something similar 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 rest of Fabrice's life after his climactic liberation from the tower. Such a lengthy and 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,14 and which functions as something of a decompression chamber for the reader slowly disengaging himself from the epic duree of the work from which he is about to withdraw; but if Propp's reading is accepted, it also reconfirms and ratifies the operative category of the Hero as such, for in these final pages it is a question of a kind of narrative ritual in wxhich the qualifications of that lofty position are tested and at length sealed once and for all. 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 instruments for implementing our 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

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their deeds as so many properties in the complex mechanism which effectuate a transition from one state to the next; while romance as a whole would be seen as a sequence of what, following Wagnerian opera, we may call "transformation scenes," in which, in some ultimate and unimaginably rapid pass between higher and 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 describing the 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 transformational formula,15 we will want to see the novel, not as the history of individual destinies, but rather as that of a "house" itself, as a late reworking of 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 transformation and constitutes what Greimaswould call the principal "isotopie" of the narrative, then Heathcliff himself can 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 restore the family fortunes. The task of structural analysis 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 rigidly applicable 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 Eichendorff novella mentioned above into the structure we 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 ultimately semantic (or in other words, ideological), the transformationscene has here been left out, and 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-

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ous figure being 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 identified as bourgeois utilitarianism,and the enchanted space of the chateau, with its music and candelabra, its gardens and eyes twinkling through half-opened shuttersis in fact the object of a systematic mystification, 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 corer 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 functions with each other: for the realm of work borrows its 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 resolution of the narrative is thus not a genuine purification or triumph of one force over the other, but precisely a compromise in which everything finds its proper place, in which the Taugenichts is reconciled through marriage with the world of work, while at the same time finding himself provided with a miniature chateau of his own within the enchanted grounds of the aristocratic estate itself. This "deviation" from the basic model of the structure of romance thus allows us to perceive and to respect the specificity and the originality of 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 threatening perception of class realities. It is because, in Eichendorff, the opposition between good and evil so nearly approaches and coincides with the incompatibility between the new bourgeois life form and the older aristocratic traditions 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 grisly class conflict of decades of Napoleonic world war fades into the mere stuff of bad dreams.

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

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torical 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 impertinent in Charterhousethe use, as an object lesson in romance, of a novel-the which has traditionally been read as the very prototype of 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 determining what it means to assert that a work "belongs" to such a classification in the first place. But perhaps we may distinguish between two versions of the problem, an internal and an external one, as it were: for there would seem to be a significant difference between the difficulties raised by a work in which several different generic strands or modes seem mingled or interwoven, and onewhich there perhaps formally and stylistically more homogeneous-about nonetheless persists a global uncertainty as to its "kind." The phenomenon of eclecticism may indeed be converted into a useful instrument of analysis. In I Promessi Sposi, for instance, it becomes clear that the separation of the lovers provides Manzoni with two distinct and alternating story lines which in fact constitute two very different types 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 make up formally something like a roman d'aventures, experiences-they allow the novel to register the misadventures of peasant Candide-thus a very different dimension of reality from that revealed by the Lucia story, namely, the 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 history itself to 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 systematic interweaving, then, of these two quite different generic modes of narrative which lends Manzoni's book an appearance of breadth and variety scarcely equaled elsewhere in world

criticism, namely that arbitrary ranging of complicated works into oversimplified categories which is surely what those who repudiate the generic approach have found most offensive about 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 his-

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literature. As an instrument of exploration, the generic distinction is here not unlike an X-ray technique designed to project a model of the layered or marbled structure of the text; but who can doubt that the fundamental task of criticism hereafter is to come to grips with the coexistence of these two modes in Manzoni and to read them in some meaningful systematic relationship to each other? The situation is similar with respect to the Charterhouse, of which so many contradictory classifications have been made (fairy tale, Bildungsroman, political novel, myth, etc.). It seems clear that the court material, centering around the figure of the Duchess, is generically related to that literature of memoires and 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 particularly its verbal manifestation in 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 story of Fabrice is on the other hand dominated by a quite different type of discourse, which we have in connection with The Red and the Black characterized as that of introspection or of psychology in 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 processesis to construct a kind of micronarrative of an essentially allegorical 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 books-medmoires plus moral epigramsprove to unite two relatively conventionalized strains or impulses of French classicism. We conclude, therefore, that the discovery of an apparently contradictory set of affiliations of Stendhal's novels to different generic traditions is no reason to abandon the categories of generic thinking entirely, but rather the occasion for widening the critical inquiry and 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 system of genres under whose configuration the individual work itself comes into being. The notion of system, which derives from Saussure,16presupposes a series of synchronic states, in which the various existent genres are related to each other only by difference, constellations which shift and 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 systems do not, of course, have to be binary ones, although the opposition of tragedy/comedy

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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 system will be more local, more provisory, and somehow more empirical, than these timehonored and virtually metaphysical oppositions: thus Garcilaso's poetry defines itself against the unstable conjuncture of elegy, verse epistle, gests that to think of genres in this way, in terms of systems, is to evolve a 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 former as constituting something like an environment for the latter, which emerges into a world in which the genres form a given determinate relationship among themselves, and which then seeks to define itself in 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 commentary on the system itself. From the point of view of practical criticism, we would observe that, whatever the theory, the generic approach has always been implicitly comparatist and has always used the systematic differentiation of the genres as its principal instrument for defining any one of them. Thus, Frye's account of romance is systematicallyorganized through the function of his definition of comedy, and it is instructive to 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 forms are, 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 simply fathers and father-surrogates,while its heroes represent the younger generation as it supersedesand triumphs over the older one. The element of comedy is therefore not that of magic, nor does it unfold within the metaphysical framework of upper and lower worlds: rather it remains resolutely within the social order, finding its 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. Comedy is therefore active and brings into play desire and the obstacles 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
and satire as somehow related yet distinct forms.17 The example sug-

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Norman Holland's account of the fantasy sources of art, comedy is essentially an active, genital wish-fulfillment with its origins in the oedipal stage of psychic development, we may want to distinguish the wishfulfillment implicit in romance by suggesting that it has older, more archaic origins and reflects some earlier, oral stage, some more passive symbiotic relationship with 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 signifying and 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 function of disguising or 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 substitution or repression in which one mode is used to defuse the other, for an explicitly ideological purpose, in the concrete historical situation of the Germany of the Holy Alliance.

VI
Thus we reemerge in history itself, 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 little more explicitly with the relation of genre analysis to historical thinking in 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 relatively autonomous 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 twilight of the Shakespearean spectacle, is revived in romanticism, and, under the guise of the novel itself, knows a new kind 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 fantastic on 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 figures in comedy, and in particular the eiron, the "man who deprecates himself, as opposed to the alazon," or

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boastful imposter, it is clear that the discussion already constructs a system in the sense of the word hitherto used, a structured relationality in terms of which each element receives its value. Yet this system of comic characters is so far a synchronic one. "Another central eiron figure," he goes on,
is the type entrusted with hatching the schemes which bring about the hero's victory. This character in Roman comedy is almost always a tricky slave (dolosus servus), and in Renaissance comedy he becomes the scheming valet who is so frequent in Continental plays, and in Spanish drama is called the gracioso. Modern audiences are most familiar with him in Figaro and in the Leporello of Don Giovanni. Through such intermediate nineteenth-century figures as Micawber and the Touchwood of Scott's St. Ronan's Well, who, like the gracioso, have buffoon affiliations, he evolves into the amateur detective of modern fiction. The Jeeves of P. G. Wodehouse is a more direct descendant.18

Such a passage, in which Frye's characteristic strengths are in evidence, also reveals rather openly the constructional process at work. The idea that there "is" something called the eiron which can "become" the scheming valet of Continental drama, is itself, of course, a fiction which 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 result that the text of Dickens is enlarged to include all previous (and successive) actantial prototypes. We no longer apprehend Micawber all by himself in Dickens' narrative; rather, in a kind of stereoptic vision, we see him together with 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 at work in all genre criticism. So entity designated as intertextuality-is 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 constructs does not depend on some hypothetical historical accuracy (if not meaningless, such a criterion would itself depend precisely on an analogous fictive construct or model, e.g., the "influence" of some "tradition"). Indeed, its use is perhaps directly proportional to the outlandishness of 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 often been used to demonstrate, namely, that there exists somewhere some realm of archetypes of which all of our

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guises, sexual confusion, ritual unmasking), from Roman comedy to Shakespeare. Such formal affinities suggest yet another one, namely, with the theatrical double plot as it has been described by Empson in his Some Versions of Pastoral, the distinguishing trait 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 protagonist is an aristocrat or his low-born servant. But the relationship of this form to Eichendorff's novella is a negative one, that of a marked or signifying absence: Taugenichts is a double plot of which we are only given the secondary line, the comic or lower-class version; as for the aristocratic one (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 aristocratic main plot is thus in Taugenichts repressed-for precisely the ideological reasons we have given above, namely that it would not do to remind the new postrevolutionary readership too insistently of the survival of the feudal power structure. But 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, forbidden encounters between disguised and apparently male figures which 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 Eichendorff a 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 aristocratic lady, a scandal which can, in a feudal context, only

modern stories are so many variants; for it is clear that those "archetypes" are themselves merely 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 construct described above, but for purposes surely doctrinal and proselytizing in character. This new historical model, based on the identity between 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 deep and unbroken continuity between the mythic imagination of primitive man and the sophisticated products of the modern societies. But a diachronic construct can also be based on difference and discontinuity, thereby projecting a very different view of history itself as a series of irrevocable qualitative breaks. Here the absence, rather than the persistence, of a given element provides the methodological guide throughout a given generic progression, and Taugenichts can again serve as an apt illustration of the process. For its theatricality-stylistically, the work may be seen as a virtual transcriptionof a theatrical performanceinscribes it in that long tradition of the comedy of errors (doubles, dis-

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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 former situation 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 affiliations, and the systematic deviation from them, provide clues which lead us back to the concrete historical situation of the individual text itself, and allow us to read its structure as ideology, as a socially symbolic act, as a protopolitical response to a historical dilemma.

VII
It remains to suggest the relationship between the generic approach we have outlined here and history itself, 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 anything like a genuine historical event: "We do not set out," Marx and Engels tell us, from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor even from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-processwe demonstratethe development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily,sublimates of their material lifeprocess, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness,thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development;but it is rathermen who, developing their material production and their material intercourse,alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousby ness, but consciousness life.19 I have tried to show elsewhere that such ideal constructs earn their reality by the operation of historical regrounding, and it is through such an operation that any consequent genre criticism must be completed.20 Genre criticism may thus be seen as a process which involves the use of three variable terms: the individual work itself, the intertextual sequence into which it is inserted through the ideal construction of 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 third series is of course the realm of concrete or infrastructural history in the sense of Marx and Engels. The relationship between these three variables may now be formulated in terms of a permutational scheme, or what recent French theorists a set of parallel series articulated into have called a combinatoire: of features or factors such that a variation in one results in complexes a shift or transformation in the other.21 Such a combinatoire is hierarchical: that is, changes in the infrastructure always result in shifts in the superstructure, and not the other way round (at least in the realm

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of literary history; the notion of a reciprocal interaction between base and superstructureis derived from other more overtly ideological types of superstructural phenomena, e.g., political discourses, which do not enjoy the semiautonomy of the literary text). It should be emphasized that this permutational model does not imply a return to the older mechanical notions of causality for a reason which may also be helpful in distinguishing the critical method proposed here from some of the cfuder forms which so-called vulgar Marxism has taken in the past: for it is not here a question of the relationship of positivities to each other, but rather of establishing what are essentially limiting situations. 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 symbolic response of an individual consciousness to his historical circumstances, and as such, dependent on the vicissitudes of individual life, might just 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 possibilities which 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 possibility of 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 formulated in a magical, rather than a purely ethical, sense. This code finds its expression in the vision of higher and lower realms in conflict, yet it does not seem inconsistent to suggest that it is itself dependent on a kind of historical coexistence within the social order itself between two distinct moments of socioeconomic development. Romance as a form thus expresses a transitional moment, 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 conflict of two groups or classes within a given social order, as in the case in recent times, say, between labor and canital; and the archaic character of the categories of romance (magic, good and evil, otherness) suggests that this genre expresses a nostalgia for a social order in the process of being undermined and destroyed by nascent capitalism, yet still for the moment coexisting side by side with the latter. So Shakespearean romance (like its echo in Eichendorff) opposes its phantasmagoria to the bustling commercial activity at work all around it; while the great art romances of the Romantic period are only too obviously symbolic attempts to come to terms with the triumph of the bourgeo;sie and the new and unglamorous social forms developing 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

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in the French countryside at the end of the nineteenth century (laicization and the loi Combes, electrification, industrialization, etc.), while that of Julien Gracq only too clearly reflects the regressiveposition of a province like Brittany. This final step in the generic operation-the crucial one in any Marxist literary criticism-calls for a basic qualification as to the nature of the infrastructural series with which the other, more properly literary or formal, series are to be correlated. We have grown accustomed to the view that interpretation or 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, constitute just such a code or organized conceptual system, being abstractions or simplified models designed to clarify the far more complex and multidimensional realities of social history (or of the psyche as the case may be). But if this is all that is involved, it follows that some different code or specialized terminology might 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 the terms of the infrastructural series are simply a conceptual code and
nothing more, then the whole process of Marxist interpretation becomes 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 literary phenomena, not with such conceptual abstractions, but rather with the realities to which those abstractions correspond. The parallel with psychoanalysis is instructive, for what is distinctive about both Marxism and Freudianism, what marks both as materialisms and sharply differentiates them from self-contained philosophical "systems" of the traditional kind, is that both presuppose some previous concrete or depth-psychological-designated experience of the objects-political by their respective terminology. 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 conversations without 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 end up in a few perfunctory remarks about the class situation in a given 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 simplified models of it).

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This is not the place for a defense of Marxism as such, but rather for pointing out the privileged relationshipbetween historical materialism and genre study. The first extended 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 essentially generic in its approach;22 while in our own time the most substantial corpus of Marxist literary analysis, that of Lukacs, has been genre-oriented from 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 Aristotelian emphasis in the late two-volume Aesthetik). I take it, indeed, as one of the moments of "high seriousness"in the history of recent Marxist thought that when the aged Lukacs responded to the urgency of supporting Solzhenitsyn's denunciation of Stalinism, while at the same time coming to terms with the tendentious antisocialist and religious propaganda to which the latter lent his talent and the authority of his personal suffering, he did so by sitting down at his desk and writing a genre study, incidentally one of his finest. The strategic value of the generic combinatoire for Marxism lies precisely in its ability to coordinate the synchronic relationship between work and immediate historical situation and the equally indispensable diachronic perspective in which that situation itself is 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 had been possible at other, structurally different moments of social development. Ultimately, the justification for such a final, "reductive"moment is that 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 immediately and insistently than others: such would seem, indeed, to be the case with the very origins of romance in medieval times, where, as the cultural expression of a dominant class, the form obviously has a very different symbolic resonance from that, regressive and nostalgic, which we have attributed to it in its later manifestations. We have already suggested the constitutive relationship between romance and something like a positional concept of evil, analogous to the function of shifters or pronouns in linguistics, where the person standing opposite me is marked as the villain, not by virtue of any particular characteristics of 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 western with which both have so much in common. Indeed, such a category of thought is only too intimately related to that fragmented and anarchic world of the post-Carolingian period, in which a

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population terrorized by barbarian incursions increasingly withdrew into the shelter of local fortresses. When, in the twelfth century, this kind of social isolation is overcome and the feudal nobility becomes aware of itself as 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 other than myself and marked by some absolute difference, when what is responsible for his being so characterized is simply the identity of his own conduct with mine, which-challenges, points of honor, tests of strength-he reflects as 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 identity unknown, 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 distinguishes the 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 definitive or permanent way in this or that human agent, it must be expelled from the world of purely human affairs in 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 henceforth know as the realm of sorcery or of magic, and which thus completes the requirements for the emergence of romance as a distinctive new genre. Yet as a literary device, this vision of a realm of magic superimposedon the earthly, purely social world, clearly outlives the particular historical and ideological contradiction which it was invented to resolve, thereby furnishing material for other quite different symbolic uses as the form itself is 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-of the ideological nature of form-can alone rescue literary study from its trivialization at the hands of antiquarian and aesthete, can alone restore

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to literature itself its gravity as a mode of organizing experience and thereby a social and political act in its own right.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

NOTES 1 "La Structure et la Forme," Cahiers de l'Institut de Science Economique Appliquee, No. 99 (Mar. 1960), 3-36. 2 Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 193; my italics. 3 Ibid., pp. 187-88. 4 Ibid., pp. 33-34. 5 See J.-P. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew and Saint Genet. 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 withered that delicate plant we call happiness." 10 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Andreas, in Erziihlungen (Tiibingen, 1945), p. 176; or Selected Prose, tr. Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern (New York, 1952), p. 59; translation modified. 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 ofu commencer?" Poetique, 1 (1970), 4: "first establish the two ensemble-termini, the opening and closing tableaux, then explore the various paths, the various transformations and strategic operations whereby the latter is linked to or differentiated from the former: it is necessary in other words to define the transition from one state of equilibrium to another, thereby passing through the black box." See, for an analogous reading of the novel, but in terms of ecriture, Frank Kermode, "A Modern Way with the Classic," New Literary History, 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 Guillen, "Literature as System," Literature as System (Princeton, 1971), pp. 375419. Two quite different, but equally poststructural, models of genre study may be found in Hans Robert Jauss, "Litterature medievale et theorie des genres," Poetique, 1 (1970), 79-101; and Michael Riffaterre, "Systeme d'un genre descriptif," Poetique, 3 (1972), 15-30. A convenient survey of other recent theories is offered by Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre (Ithaca, 1972). 17 Claudio Guillen, "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.

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21 Two suggestive and very different constructions of such a model may be found in Charles Mauron, Psychocritique du genre comique (Paris, 1964) and Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction a 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. 23 "The difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model," etc. Karl Marx, 1857 Introduction, Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (New York, 1970), p. 217.

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