Six Novels of the Sixties — Three French, Three Italian

To the various types of metahistorian (whose current dominance of humanities studies was recently lamented by Gertrude Himmelfarb),' novels are the vehicles of ideology, the sites upon which discourses meet in conflict, manifestations of the power of language. To too many mainstream historians they are elegant tombs to be plundered for the fine-sounding quotation exploited for literary effect, but whose exact historical significance is not usually explained. Novels may very properly be allusive, exploit the resonances and ambiguities of language; historians who are not absolutely explicit in their use of sources of all types simply provide gratuitous sustenance to the metahistorians (i.e. 'cultural materialists', 'new historicists', etc.) in their assertion that history is itself simply the 'the stories we tell', not different in kind from novels or poems. For their part, the metahistorians and cultural theorists, though abjuring the economic determinism of Marxism, fail to see that their concept of 'ideology' is integrally bound up with Marxist theories of class formation and domination, that discourses in conflict are simply classes in conflict under a fresh alias, and that, indeed, their entire metaphysical, epochal, approach to history (complete with the mystical apparatus of 'dialectic' and 'zeitgeist' -what is 'postmodernity' but contemporary zeitgeist?) is not new science for a new age, but is caged by the nineteenth-century preconceptions of Hegel and Marx.2 (The world, to be sure, is full of conflict, but in any top ten of causes, class -and discourse would come pretty far down the list.) For the analysis of cultural and social change, novels (along with songs, paintings, films, etc., etc.) are crucial sources, though they will not come first in the strategy which all historians, drawing upon the massive resources of their profession, prepare in mounting a major