This is part two of an ongoing series. For part one, click here.
To understand where we are now and how we got here, it’s important to first understand the birth―and decline―of the bourgeois novel.
The development of the novel, as a codified form, was a gradual process. It did not spring into being from nowhere; rather, it evolved from earlier traditions of the written word. It drew on precedents from numerous sources around the globe stretching into antiquity. We begin to see distinct examples of the novel as a form by the beginning of the 17th Century, such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, published in 1605. This pegs the rise of the novel to a time period roughly coinciding with the ascendancy of capitalism as the dominant political economy and of the bourgeoisie as the dominant social class. Less than 50 years after the publication of Don Quixote, the blood of King Charles I of England would baptize the short-lived Commonwealth of England, marking the first attempt at building the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
One of the consistent hallmarks of literature in the modern age is interiority. When picking up a novel, modern readers take for granted that they will have access to the characters’ thoughts, feelings, reactions, and inner struggles. Readers expect stories to be driven by the intimate motivations and actions of unique individuals.
In contrast, characters in pre-modern literature tended to fill archetypal roles. Stories were marked by fantastic episodes in which characters served primarily as players in a story. Pre-modern literary characters are entities upon whom the events of the story are acted. This is not to say that the characters do not play active roles in their stories; rather, it’s to say that we, as readers, have no insight into the interior thoughts or imaginings of the characters. We take the events of the story as distant spectators, rather than as intimate voyeurs.
With the rise of the novel, we see a new literary form arise. For the first time, stories become fixated on the internal life of the individual. Stories ceased to be something populated by characters, and instead became things that happen around characters, while the characters themselves, and how their individual thoughts, choices, and actions shape history, became the novel’s focus.
How the Bourgeois Novel Conquered the World
We can look to contemporary author Rachel Kushner to provide a succinct explanation of the novel as a distinctly bourgeois artform:
“The novel is a nineteenth-century development in literature that’s meant to both illuminate private, individual bourgeois lives and also provide entertainment for those same sorts of lives…Heading into the twentieth century, the bourgeois novel fractured, of course, and we got modernism. But, summarizing a whole lot here, there’s a certain conservative formal logic that has a grip on the novel form still.”
I cite this analysis because there’s a direct correlation between the development of the novel as a mature, bourgeois mode of storytelling and the maturation of capitalism as bourgeois economics.
The political economy that would eventually mature into capitalism began coalescing as early as the Fifteenth Century. The European labor pool had been decimated by the Black Death, making the stability of feudal subsistence increasingly untenable. Economic forces created an incentive to seek cheaper labor and raw resources elsewhere. This pressure eventually led to a trans-Atlantic expedition mounted in 1492 which would reshape the course of world history. But, although the planting of Columbus’s boot on the Bahaman shore ignited the match, it wasn’t until the mid-Nineteenth Century that the fire in the engine of capitalism truly roared to life across Europe. Capitalism was becoming a global force, and its appetite for new markets demanded an acceleration of colonial expansion.
A byproduct of European imperialism in the Nineteenth Century was the exportation and mass saturation of bourgeois cultural values and tastes throughout the world. It’s no surprise, then, that the form of storytelling most suited to those tastes―the bourgeois novel―comes to dominate global literature during this period.
The Philosophical Foundation of the Bourgeois Novel
As mentioned above, the marker of the bourgeois novel is a focus on the interior lives of the characters as the prime factors determining what is relavant to distinguish reality.
For her part, Kushner draws on the work of McKenzie Wark, which we can see outlined in the essay On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene. In the essay, Wark identifies bourgeois novels as, fundamentally, works of fantasy. Specifically, though, they are fantasies in the sense that the reader can only interpret reality through the lens of the character’s subjectivity:
“The bourgeois novel is a genre of fantasy fiction smeared with naturalistic details -filler -to make it appear otherwise. It excludes the totality so that bourgeois subjects can keep prattling on about their precious ‘inner lives.’…From the point of view of this interiority of the bourgeois novel, certain things one can know about the outer world can only appear as the strange or the weird or the freaky.”
Later in the same essay, Wark had this to say:
“The bourgeois novel generally draws a sharp distinction between the human and the nonhuman, and concerns itself with actions, motivations and inner lives of its humans. Not only are the setting and period discontinuous with the world (although sometimes a metonym for it), the actions of the humans are discontinuous with other agents.”
Here we have distilled the central relevant point of the bourgeois novel as a form. The ideology of the bourgeois novel is guided by an abiding faith in the belief of the existence of the individual, to the exclusion of anything that is not the individual. The bourgeois novel is an artform which validates and reinforces the supposition at the core of the liberal (i.e. bourgeois) worldview. It insists that, in the words of René Descartes, each individual is the “self-conscious shaper and guarantor” of their own distinct reality. The subjective individual is the only thing which proveably exists, and therefore, is the only meaningful barometer by which to measure existence.
The Historical Role of Bourgeois Art
The purpose here is not to say that bourgeois art is bad. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Othodox Marxist analysis upholds that capitalism―the manifestation of bourgeois power in economic form―was, in its era, a progressive force that built upon the more primitive feudal societies of Europe which proceeded it. In the same way, bourgeois art was a development that built upon earlier modes of communication to convey something which had not previously been expressed effectively in art.
In a precapitalist society, human labor is devoted overwhelmingly to the act of subsistence. Under ideal conditions, the farmer generates enough product to sustain the family; the artisan’s crafts are sufficient to achieve the same purpose. With very rare exception does anyone generate any significant surplus. The capitalist mode of production, however, is marked by the generation of surplus, which is then held by the capitalist as profit. This new class of capitalists, the individuals who absorb surplus as profit, become the bourgeoisie.
We see a similar process unfold in the form of art. With no surplus with which to produce, art must be limited primarily to works which fulfill a function. Explicitly functional crafts formed the bulk of human artistic output into antiquity. They might take the form of an earthenware pot for the storage of food, a religious icon meant for the conducting of a religious rite, or a manuscript, scroll, or tapestry created to record legal or historical information.
We see with the rise of the bourgeoisie, for the first time in human history, the production en masse of art that is created not for an explicit function. Rather, it is created with the sole purpose being aesthetic enjoyment. It exists for the entertainment of one who possesses sufficient surplus to finance its creation. In essence, it is the transformation of art into a commodity which is valued not according to its function, but for what it can be bought and sold. This is why, in his 1984 work Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger describes the defining characteristic of bourgeois art as its autonomy; as “art’s independence from society.”
Bourgeois art offered a perspective not known in previous epochs of art history. It was art produced for bourgeois consumption, often by members of the bourgeoisie itself, with its subject being individual members of the bourgeoisie. It was not focused on kings, emperors, or other important historical, religious, or mythological figures. Rather, the focus was on people who could, in a manner of speaking, be called “common people.”
Like the bourgeois society itself, bourgeois art was a revolutionary idea when it arrived. And, like capitalism, the bourgeois theory of creating art fulfilled an important historical and dialectical role. We should regard this mode of art in a manner similar to our view of classical literature: it is a precedent we should remember, study, and occasionally even echo, as all things that exist contain within them the DNA of the forms that preceded them.
However, we now face two important questions. Fist we must ask how, at some point during the Twentieth Century, the bourgeois novel transformed from artistic avant garde to what Wark calls “mere lit fic.” Second, we have to consider what the bourgeois novel’s refusal to die might be costing us today.
Originally published at https://arguechat.substack.com.
