Transgression is a term for which, it would seem, every theorist of the novel has a different definition. For Georg Lukács, transgression obtains specifically in those modern novels possessed of a nihilistic outlook which, by hook or crook, deny history. Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky like to talk about stylistic transgression in the novel, which, according to them, evolves independently of history through a constant, transgressive rewriting of former texts. In Roland Barthes’s model (in which there are two competing types of transgression), sexual identity and transgression are dialectically entwined.

We can thus easily identify at least three categories of transgression in the theory of the novel, which I will call, somewhat reductively, the political, the stylistic, and the sexual (which subsumes gender). As we will see, these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but combining them can be a tricky business. In addition to the three theorists mentioned above, I will limit my discussion to the influential models of Ian Watt, Mikhail Bakhtin, and D.A. Miller. It goes without saying that such a sampling of theorists merely scratches the surface of an extremely complicated field, and I must here apologize for my own transgression against academic thoroughness.

For Lukács—on this issue perhaps alone among leading theorists of the novel—transgression is defined negatively. Lukács’s Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola, as described in THE HISTORICAL NOVEL, are precursors and abettors of modern(ist) decadence, guilty, like so many Twentieth Century historians, of transgressing against history itself. This historical transgression takes the form of “modernization,” based in the “belief that the fundamental structure of the past is economically and ideologically the same as that of the present.”

Modern writers are not just blind to historicity (their own included), however; according to Lukács, they also needlessly vilify the present. Specifically, in the novels of Flaubert “those brutal and animal features are emphasized and placed at the centre, which occur later in Zola as characteristics of the life of modern workers and peasants. Thus Flaubert’s portrayal is ‘prophetic’. Not however, in the sense in which Balzac’s works were prophetic, anticipating the actual, future development of social types, but merely in a literary-historical sense, anticipating the later distortion of modern life in the works of the Naturalists.”

Lukács places great emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual in history (individualized collectivity) as well as on the uniqueness of the historical moment (historical materialism). To transgress against this uniqueness is the highest literary crime and merits Lukács’s reactionary wrath, as witnessed above. Transgression is further bluntly defined in Lukács’s model as inhuman: “Flaubert has against his will become the initiator of the inhuman in modern literature.” (Note that transgression is not necessarily a matter of will, but can inhere in a text despite the intentions of the writer, a line of thinking which runs, curiously, through Barthes.) Transgression operates equally at the level of style: “The Flaubertian attitude towards history inevitably leads to a disintegration of epic language” by inducing writers to approximate historicity through a misleading “pseudo-historical language form.”

Finally, given that the (true) novel is defined as an accurate portrayal of the individual (once again, collectively defined) within a specific historical moment, Lukács views the tendency to psychologize—so prevalent in modernism—merely as a transgressive aberration. The “tendency to make history private is a general characteristic of the nascent decline of great realism,” he proclaims. To summarize, we might say that, in Lukács’s theory of the novel, transgression is everything that is not realism.

In Shklovskean formalism, as in his THEORY OF PROSE, art is defined as that which transgresses against (disrupts) the unconscious: “The purpose of art ... is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘enstranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious.’ The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity.”

Here transgression is (positively) defined as an essential characteristic of the novel, as that which allows its always already old story to be made new. The novel, then, is like the phoenix forever being reborn out of its ashes, forever essentially the same, only plumed with new feathers: “a work of art is perceived against a background of and by association with other works of art. The form of a work of art is determined by its relationship with other preexisting forms ... All works of art, and not only parodies, are created either as a parallel or an antithesis to some model. The new form makes its appearance not in order to express a new content, but rather, to replace an old form that has already outlived its artistic usefulness.”

Clearly, Shklovsky’s theory opposes the Romantic (and for that matter, Lukácsean) view of the “natural” (or “realistic”) novel. Stated another way, the natural in Shklovsky’s model—if it exists at all—is purely a question of form, which is said to be in constant (transgressive) flux, rendering the “natural” paradoxically transgressive. Thus artistic formalism is intimately tied to the notion of the avant-garde: the novel is inherently generationally transgressive owing to its ongoing need to make itself new.

Unlike Pierre Bourdieu’s focus on the avant-garde, however, Shklovsky’s theory does not concern itself with economic or other “outside” determining factors of cultural production; rather, the latter’s model operates entirely on the “inside,” offering a view of literature as a closed history of texts in reaction/response to other texts. “If I were to use the analogy of an inventor and his tradition,” writes Shklovsky (using said analogy), “I would say that ... literary tradition consists of the sum total of the technical possibilities of [the given] age.”

Strangely, the ostensibly antagonistic theories of Shklovsky and Lukács, after traveling for so long in opposite directions, ultimately approach each other in their mutual disdain for psychologizing and emphasis on the collective nature of art. “There is no point in becoming enamored of the biography of an artist,” writes Shklovsky. “He writes first and looks for motivations later. And least of all should one be enamored of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis studies the psychological traumas of one person, while in truth, an author never writes alone. A school of writers writes through him. A whole age.”

The notion that transgression is constitutive of the novel itself is most evident in the example of Laurence Sterne, author of TRISTRAM SHANDY and arguably Shklovsky’s prototype of the novelist: “Sterne lays bare the device by which he stitches the novel out of individual stories. He does so, in general, by manipulating the structure of his novel, and it is the consciousness of form through its violation that constitutes the content of the novel.”

Sterne’s transgressiveness thus lies in his turning of novelistic tradition mercilessly on its head, in his subversion, or inversion, of the accepted forms of novelistic genre and style. In Shklovsky’s model, the novel as object, however, as “pure form,” merely a “relationship of materials,” is finally not transgressive in the least. Art is ultimately “inoffensive,” “shut up within itself.” Once rendered material, in other words, the novel ceases to be transgressive—the (formal) rendering is itself the transgressive act.

In THE RISE OF THE NOVEL Ian Watt defines the novel, as a “novel” form, as that which breaks definitively with the traditional, rigid hierarchy of genres: “literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience—individual experience which is always unique and therefore new.” At the same time, Watt maintains that this break with the past has its roots in Cartesian thinking, which sets the new individual tone for the post-Renaissance. In an attempt to account for mediation, to locate the origins of the novel both on the “outside” and the “inside” (to fuse Lukács and Shklovsky, so to speak), Watt defines the novel as doubly (ideologically and formally) transgressive against the old (collective, rigidly hierarchical) social and artistic order.

For Watt, novelistic formalism translates into “formlessness,” which (whether by dint of “genius” or “accident” it remains unclear) translates into “the lowest common denominator of the novel genre as a whole, its formal realism”: “What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel’s formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for realism.” And this realism, in the novels of Daniel Defoe, for example, “is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience ... as Descarte’s cogito ergo sum was in philosophy.” For Watt, then, like Shklovsky and unlike Lukács, the art of the novel is first and foremost an art of transgression.

According to Watt, there is a very important temporal transgression at work in the novel, which “[breaks] with the earlier literary tradition of using timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities. The novel’s plot is also distinguished from most previous fiction by its use of past experience as the cause of present action: a causal connection operating through time replaces a reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences, and this tends to give the novel a much more cohesive structure.” With the new conception of time comes a new conception of space: “Defoe would seem to be the first of our writers who visualised the whole of his narrative as though it occurred in an actual physical environment.”

Behind these (transgressive) changes in philosophy and literature lies something all-determining for Watt—the emergence of a large (relatively speaking) middle class reading public during the Eighteenth Century: “both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change—that vast transformation of Western civilisation since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one—one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.”

Here Watt’s model insists on a kind of precise historical materialism not unlike that found in Lukács’s theory, and yet Watt, by emphasizing a cultural rift as decisive in the formation of the novel, cannot escape the language of transgression: the transgression effected in and constituted by the novel reflects a vast cultural transgression that undergirds and surrounds it.

Watt’s theory of mediation has its share of inconsistencies. “Formal realism is only one mode of presentation,” he writes, “and it is therefore ethically neutral: all Defoe’s novels are also ethically neutral because they make formal realism an end rather than a means, subordinating any coherent ulterior significance to the illusion that the text represents the authentic lucubrations of an historical person.” Watt’s previous language of cultural transgression has without warning become a language of the social status quo smelling of Shklovskean formalism, a tendency which is even more pronounced when he focuses on the novels of Samuel Richardson: “The importance of Richardson’s position in the tradition of the novel was largely due to his success in dealing with several of the major formal problems which Defoe had left unsolved” (italics mine).

The next step on Watt’s form/ideology roller coaster, however, brings us back to Lukács: the novel typically “makes us feel that we are in contact not with literature but with the raw materials of life itself as they are momentarily reflected in the minds of the protagonists.” Watt goes on to attempt a synthesis of form and ideology which appears naďve at best, condescending at worst: the “combination of romance and formal realism applied both to external actions and inward feelings is the formula which explains the power of the popular novel: it satisfies the romantic aspirations of its readers in a literary guide which gives so full a background and so complete an account of the minute-by-minute details of thought and sentiment that what is fundamentally an unreal flattery of the reader’s dreams appears to be the literal truth.” Thus the reader, that defining figure in Watt’s model, remains little more than a shadow made to dance by the still more abstract concept of “literary greatness.”

The cracks in Watt’s theory are perhaps most pronounced in his treatment of Henry Fielding’s novels, whose “distinguishing elements have their roots not so much in social change as in the neo-classical literary tradition ... Fielding’s celebrated formula of ‘the comic epic in prose’ undoubtedly lends some authority to the view that, far from being the unique literary expression of modern society, the novel is essentially a continuation of a very old and honoured narrative tradition.” The possibility of a venerable novelistic tradition, however, Watt firmly denies by locating the source of Sterne and James Joyce (as well as that of Jane Austen and Marcel Proust) not in Fielding’s playful picaresque (in the tradition of Miguel de Cervantes), as one might reasonably expect, but in the formal realism of Defoe and Richardson—a shaky argument at best. So ends in a muddle a model with high hopes for reconciling the formal and ideological poles in the theory of the novel.

In Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical theory espoused in THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION, the novel looms forth out of history as the ultimate transgressor, Gargantua consuming (appropriating wholesale) all other genres into its heteroclite body from the dawn of culture onward: “The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them.”

Unlike Watt, Bakhtin makes no effort to identify a precise period for the rise of the novel (though he does cite the Renaissance, and particularly François Rabelais, as an important moment in the novel’s history), choosing instead to trace the evolution of the novelistic as a quality that ceaselessly forms and informs the novel genre. Yet, like Watt, Bakhtin stresses both the formal and ideological influences in the novel’s development: “It is of course impossible to explain the phenomenon of novelization purely by reference to the direct and unmediated influence of the novel itself. Even where such influence can be precisely established and demonstrated, it is intimately interwoven with those direct changes in reality itself that also determine the novel and that condition its dominance in a given era.”

Bakhtin defines the novelistic as against the epic. The novelistic (once again, the novel is appropriately “novel”) is that which breaks down (transgresses against) epic’s “absolute past” by admitting the reality of the present. Specifically, this transgression obtains through humor: “It is precisely laughter that destroys the epic, and in general destroys any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance.”

In other words, the reading subject, by actively decoding and approving a transgressive message (a message which travels through a semantic static of words in time and space) plays an essential role in the creation of the novel: “the reality reflected in the text, the authors creating the text, the performers of the text (if they exist) and finally the listeners or readers who re-create and in so doing renew the text—participate equally in the creation of the represented world in the text.”

Bakhtin thus adds a critical third element to the formalist/historicist equation—the reader as (actively transgressive) participant in the formation of the novel—thereby calling attention to the complex interplay of textual production. At the same time, his focus on the living word, the word made incarnate in a great transgressive body, is suggestive of the body politic, and from there it is but a small leap to arrive at the concept of a revolution of bodies effected through the word.

Following Bakhtin’s lead, Roland Barthes in S/Z wastes no time locating narrative transgression (for classic texts) in the figure of the narrator. The narrator, as a “joining of two antithetical terms,” positive and negative, inside and outside, “induces or supports a transgression.” Moreover, it is precisely the narrative body which is viewed as the transgressive element: “As supplement, the body is the site of the transgression effected by the narrative ... It is by way of this excess which enters the discourse after rhetoric has properly saturated it that something can be told and the narrative begin.”

For the classic, or readerly text, transgression is closely associated with the (bodily) presence of the author, with his/her intrusion into the world of the text which simultaneously effects the narrative and yet limits its free semantic play, thereby restricting our freedom as (re)readers (re)writing the text. Unlike Bakhtin, who stops just short of (approvingly) defining the novel as parody, a genre composed entirely of ironic appropriations by the author, Barthes maintains that irony destroys textual multivalence: “A multivalent text can carry out its basic duplicity only if it subverts the opposition between true and false ... if it flouts all respect for origin, paternity, propriety.”

Barthes argues that the readerly text must therefore by replaced by the writerly text, a move with definite implications for the politics of the body. Accordingly, the transgressive bodily intrusion of the readerly text (exemplified by Honoré de Balzac’s SARRASINE) must give way to another type of transgression: the infinitely plural, authorless, writerly text (anticipated, if not exemplified, by Gustave Flaubert’s BOUVARD ET PECUCHET): “multivalence (contradicted by irony) is a transgression of ownership. The wall of voices must be passed through to reach the writing: this latter eschews any designation of ownership and thus can never be ironic ... parody, or irony at work, is always classic language ... This is the problem facing modern writing: how breach the wall of utterance, the wall of origin, the wall of ownership?”

Thus, to the opposition between readerly and writerly corresponds an opposition between two types of transgression, the former negative, the latter positive, which, Barthes suggests, are currently locked in a struggle for hegemony not unlike the figure of antithesis, defined as a “battle between two plenitudes set ritually face to face.” To read this as simply a conflict between capitalist individualism and collectivist modes of thinking is, I offer, an oversimplification. The political stakes, however, would appear to be high and undoubtedly center on questions of sexual (bodily) freedom. Indeed, Barthes’s model could be thought of as a call to arms of the sexually transgressive which would undermine (or redefine) accepted, “canonical” notions of reading gender and sexuality, paving the way for the later transgressive model of D.A. Miller.

In THE NOVEL AND THE POLICE Miller structures his theory of the novel around Michel Foucault’s theory of discipline. Whereas Foucault focuses on increasing objectification and classification of individuals during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Miller examines discipline at work in the Nineteenth Century (realistic) novel, which he maintains institutes a panoptic (as in Jeremy Bentham’s infamous panopticon prison) transgression against individual privacy concomitant with the increasingly panoptic social ground.

In the typical case of Balzac, for instance, Miller writes that his “omniscient narration assumes a fully panoptic view of the world it places under surveillance.” Unlike Barthes, however, Miller is careful not to identify such narrative transgression with a single body, a move which shifts the focus from transgressor to transgressed against, from writer to reader: “this panoptic vision constitutes its own immunity from being seen in turn. For it instrinsically deprives us of the outside position from which it might be ‘placed.’ There is no other perspective on the world than its own, because the world entirely coincides with that perspective. We are always situated inside the narrator’s viewpoint, and even to speak of a ‘narrator’ at all is to misunderstand a technique that, never identified with a person, institutes a faceless and multilateral regard.”

It is hardly coincidental that, while Barthes chooses a first person narrative to make his point, Miller generally selects texts in the third person. In both cases, however, the narrative is conceived as a limited and limiting perspective which seeks to give itself the illusion of totality. The realistic novel thus effects a kind of underhanded power play which corresponds not only to Barthes’s “reality effect” but also to Bakhtin’s notion of “monologism.” “The panopticism of the novel,” writes Miller, “… coincides with what Mikhail Bakhtin has called its ‘monologism’: the working of an implied master-voice whose accents have already unified the world in a single interpretative center.” The realistic novel, in other words, constituting itself as the always already, the definitive one and only perspective, attempts to answer all questions before they have been asked.

Miller deftly avoids the good guy/bad guy binary he sees at work in realism’s taxonomy by not simply problematizing the panoptic text. In an important move, he points out the reader’s own complicity in the exercise of transgression against himself, writing, “power can scarcely be exercised except on what resists it ... one might claim that the novel rather than fearing desire solicits it ... desire brings the desiring subject into a maximally close ‘fit’ with the power he or she means to resist ... Insistently, the novel shows disciplinary power to inhere in the very resistance to it.” The “pleasure of the text,” according to Miller, is intimately tied to a desire on the part of the reading subject to be exposed (as an individual).

Anticipating Eve Sedgwick, Miller builds his closet out of glass: “Even when a character’s subjectivity may be successfully concealed from other characters, for us, readers of the novel, the secret is always out.” And yet: “the fact the secret is always known—and, in some obscure sense, known to be known—never interferes with the incessant activity of keeping it. The contradiction does not merely affect characters. We too inevitably surrender our privileged position as readers to whom all secrets are open by ‘forgetting’ our knowledge for the pleasures of suspense and surprise ... In this light, it becomes clear that the social function of secrecy ... is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge.”

In the final analysis, secrecy, rather than constituting the subject’s private identity, affords a term of resistance which allows the panopticon to cast its transgressive gaze while at the same time paradoxically affirming its blindness: “In a world where the explicit exposure of the subject would manifest how thoroughly he has been inscribed within a socially given totality, secrecy would be the spiritual exercise by which the subject is allowed to conceive of himself as a resistance ... The paradox of the open secret registers the subject’s accommodation to a totalizing system that has obliterated the difference he would make.”

The pleasure of the text is not finally different from a kind of condescending pity which, through a process of self-reflection, renders us, to a greater or lesser extent, “free”: “The charm we allow to Dickens’s characters ... is ultimately no more than the debt of gratitude we pay to their fixity for giving us, in contrast, our freedom.” Such freedom, however, as Miller suggests, is purely relative. In the world of the panopticon violation is the rule rather than the exception.

My search for the meaning of transgression in six theories of the novel has, I am afraid, produced far more questions than answers. Following, then, is my conclusion in which nothing is concluded:

• Why does it seem obligatory to define the novel, either negatively or positively, vis-ŕ-vis transgression? Is transgression in fact the art of the novel? If we could answer these questions, we would be much closer to explaining both what a novel is (form) and what a novel does (ideology).

• The novel, as a transgressive genre, is almost always associated with movement, change. Yet it is often difficult to pinpoint exactly where and when this change occurs, not to mention how and why. Is the novel a transgressive act or does it induce one? In other words, what is the relationship between transgression and culture? Is transgression truly transgressive, or is it, as Jonathan Dollimore maintains, “intrinsic to social process”?

• On a similar note, what is the relationship between transgression and subversion in the novel? To what degree is novelistic transgression subversive and vice versa? In Miller’s theory, for instance, transgression serves to maintain, rather than subvert, the social status quo. But Bakhtin suggests that the novel, as a transgressive genre, is somehow revolutionary. Are these views entirely incompatible, or might the novel be both? Barthes implies that it is indeed both, but his model for mediation is practically nonexistent. What might a theory look like that could mediate successfully between the transgressive and the (non)transgressive in the novel?

[Sol Luckman is author of the internationally acclaimed nonfiction Conscious Healing: Book One on the Regenetics Method and the Beginner's Luke Series of novels. Luke's signature obsessions with self, sex, satire and slapdash highlight a serious, and life-changing, point: consciousness creates. The point is there is a point to living in the imagination–for only through it can we reinvent our ourselves and our world. Currently, the author is giving away FREE copies of Beginner's Luke. To take advantage of this special offer, click here.]