The Novel as an Expression of the Writer's Vision of the World

Abstract

quently arbitrary character of this approach, in which ideas are often quoted out of context without taking into account the particular semantics of the literary conventions. The furor over Madame Bovary, for example, laid bare some of the most blatant general misunderstandings. It is only the more recent on the structure of narrative and plot in fiction that has enabled us to understand properly the laws governing artistic prose. When considering the relationship between technique and ideological message in the novel, one has to keep in mind the many-faceted relationships among the author, the work, and the reader. I use these three terms as follows: the author denotes the subject of creative activities, indirectly present in the novel as creator both of the narrative order and the narrated events, as well as the meanings conveyed through them. The work refers to the reality of the narrator and that of the story which remain in ever-fluctuating and semantically meaningful relationship to each other. The reader is the ideal addressee of the rhetoric of the message and the decoder of its meanings. The order imposed on the represented reality (i.e., the narrator and the story) cannot be fully explained in terms of the writer's vision of the world alone. Such an explanation would deny the traditional view of fiction as a form of entertainment (including texts a great deal more sophisticated than the works of popular literature). It is futile to draw a dividing line between the sphere of philosophy and the pure in the novel. Ian Watt has demonstrated in Richardson's Pamela that the Aristotelian combination of peripeteia with the recognition of the rules of the game correlates with the social and the moral attitudes affirmed in the novel.1 Although instruction and entertainment are combined in varying degrees, it would be hard to find a that would entirely lack one of them.