The novel is then not so much an organic unity as a symbolic act that must reunite or harmonize hetereogeneous narrative paradigms which have their own specific and contradictory ideological meaning. It is at any rate the systematic interweaving of these two distinct generic modes—in later bourgeois society they will be definitively sundered from each other in the sealed compartments of the private and the public, the psychological and the social—which lends Manzoni’s book an appearance of breadth and variety, and a totalizing “completeness,” scarcely equaled elsewhere in world literature.
The novel acts as great social unifier. It acts as a means of showing proletariat concerns for a bourgeois audience.
