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The "novel" as process rather than as form: such is the intuition to which apologists of this narrative structure have found themselves driven again and again, in an effort to characterize it as something that happens to its primary materials , as a specific but quite properly interminable set of operations and programming procedures, rather than a finished object whose "structure" one might model and contemplate. This process can be evaluated in a twofold way, as the transformation of the reader's subjective attitudes which is at one and the same time the production of a new kind of objectivity. Indeed, as any number of "definitions" of realism assert, and as the totemic ancestor of the novel, Don Quixote, emblematically demonstrates, that processing operation variously called narrative mimesis or realistic representation has as its historic function the systematic undermining and demystification, the secular "decoding, " of those preexisting inherited traditional or sacred narrative paradigms which are its initial givens. In this sense, the novel plays a significant role in what can be called a properly bourgeois cultural revolution-that immense process of transformation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic , modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism. The "objective" function of the novel is thereby also implied: to its subjective and critical, analytic, corrosive mission must now be added the task of producing as though for the first time that very life world, that very "referent"-the newly quantifiable space of extension and market equivalence, the new rhythms of measurable time, the new secular and "disenchanted" object world of the commodity system, with its post-traditional daily life and its bewilderingly empirical, "meaningless," and contingent Umwelt-of which this new narrative discourse will then claim to be the "realistic" reflection. |
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