The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

by Franco Moretti

But next to Marx’s Balzac there is Auerbach’s, and this strange mix of capitalist turbulence and conservative persistence suggests something important about nineteenth-century novels (and about literature as a whole): their deepest vocation lies in forging compromises between different ideological systems.46 In our case, the compromise consisted in ‘attaching’ the two great ideologies of nineteenth-century Europe to different parts of the literary text: capitalist rationalization reorganized novelistic plot with the regular tempo of fillers—while political conservatism dictated its descriptive pauses, where readers (and critics) increasingly looked for the ‘meaning’ of the entire story. Bourgeois existence, and conservative beliefs: such is the foundation of the realist novel, from Goethe to Austen, Scott, Balzac, Flaubert, Mann (Thackeray, the Goncourts, Fontane, James . . .). To this small miracle of equilibrium, free indirect style contributed the final touch.