Points of View: Gramsci and “the Question of the Novel”

Abstract

Perhaps the most essential device for the organization of the novel form is narrative point of view. Mikhail Bakhtin, in “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–1935), maintains in fact that “every language in the novel is a point of view, a socio-ideological conceptual system of real social groups and their embodied representatives. … Any point of view on the world fundamental to the novel must be a concrete, socially embodied point of view, not an abstract, purely semantic position.” György Lukács, too, having discovered the particular Standpunkt of the proletariat in History and Class Consciousness of 1923, would define the novel—for instance The Historical Novel in 1938—as the “conscious and consistent application of … specifically historical viewpoints.” On closer inspection, Antonio Gramsci, only a few years earlier, had touched on similar theoretical issues in a (somewhat cryptic) observation on the Italian novelistic tradition: “the ‘point of view’ of the key cannot be that of the lock.” This observation in turn opened the way to a veritable taxonomy of various ways of representing “the people” in the Italian novel - from Manzoni’s “paternalism” to Dostoevsky’s “con-science.”

Keywords:

• point of view
• focalization
• formal criticism
• sociological criticism
• Antonio Gramsci

Notes

1 A plausible exception (but moving in a direction diametrically opposed to Gramsci’s) could be Henry James’ scattered prefaces to his novels, collected in 1934 as The Art of the Novel: “Fu Joseph Warren Beach a sistematizzare le intuizioni di James, in The Method of H. James, New Haven 1918 e The Twentieth Century Novel, New York e London 1932; ma la prima esposizione autonoma del problema si trova in The Craft of Fiction, London 1921, di P. Lubbock” (Segre 1984 p. 86).

2 “De Man studia i sentimenti popolari, non ‘con-sente’ con essi per guidarli e condurli a una catarsi di civiltà moderna” (452).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roberto Dainotto

Roberto Dainotto is Professor of Literature, Italian and International Comparative Studies at Duke University. His publications include Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Cornell UP, 2000); Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007), winner of the 2010 Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies; and Mafia: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2015). He has also edited Racconti americani del ’900 (Einaudi, 1999), a special issue of Italian Culture on Giambattista Vico (2017), and co-edited with Fredric Jameson Gramsci in the World (Duke UP, 2020).