1The novel used to engage in sociological investigations, it aspired to describe the world in its concrete social dimension and aimed to gather and preserve information on the state of society. In this sense it used to be a sociology performed with literary tools, a sociology unconcerned with the precision of its methods or the perspicuity of its theoretical assumptions. An interest in society has become essential to the very material of literature. I mention these well-known facts because to remember what ambitions the novel had during an earlier phase of its development will be useful in analysing texts created later, at a time when the novel had already renounced those goals and redefined its areas of interest.

2It is especially important to recall the theories of the novel that Émile Zola proposed in his critical writings. They had a significant impact in their day and attracted numerous supporters, but critical voices also pointed out how groundless they were (to recall only Brunetière’s essays (Brunetière 1884, 121-140)). Two fundamental elements of Zola’s theory were seen as particularly questionable at the time, and it is not without reason that they continue to be seen as such today. What I have in mind is his idea of the experimental novel and his concept of the novel as a human document. Zola, as we know, transposed basic aspects of the positivist methodologies from the sciences—such as they were in the second half of the nineteenth century—into the realm of literature. Transplanted into literature, those methodologies turned out to be nothing but scientistic pipe dreams, fantasies of a great writer who took on tasks he could never accomplish. After all, they conflicted with the basic properties of the novel. The theory of experimentalism, as Brunetière emphasised, cannot be applied to the novel, for what could experimentalism mean in a text written just like any other, subject to a given poetics and taking shape at an author’s writing desk, which refused to look like the lab of a learned naturalist. The notion of an experimental novel seems inapt even as a metaphor, and for the historian it presents no more than the record of a scientistic fantasy—and that in a field which does not easily lend itself to scientistic approaches.

3Things are a little different when it comes to the theory of the novel as a human document. Zola’s idea was essentially equivalent to the novel of manners; only with his successors did it lead to different outcomes—novels of a particular design told in the first person—that Zola had certainly not foreseen.1 The concept of the human document did nothing to question the fictionality of the novel and had no major impact on its narrative or plot structure (though it did facilitate innovations that influenced the history of the novel).

4If I recall Zola’s ideas, formulated a hundred years ago, it is of course not to polemicise with them. In retrospect they have fully shown their incompatibility with novelistic matter. But they were also proven valid, many decades later, in writings of a very different kind, by authors who probably had no interest in Zola’s theories. To be specific, it was a certain kind of documentary writing that validated them. What appeared to be mere scientistic wishful thinking in Zola’s programmatic writing became, in these texts, a principle of operation, a programme that fulfilled all necessary requirements to be realised. In no way could a novelist have conducted an experiment—in the sense in which the word “experiment” is used by natural scientists, or by Claude Bernard (see Skarga 1970) (Zola, as we know, was referring to Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale); nor could a novelist present human documents—he could only create them, drawing on social patterns of one kind or another.

5However, everything that was beyond reach for Zola becomes accessible to someone who can arrange situations, who can create a kind of experiment, in the basic sense of the word, and thus set up social structures for a clearly defined purpose. One such experimental structure is, in some ways, the situation in which an interview is transcribed or recorded on tape. The person conducting the interview (in the broad sense of the term)—be it a journalist questioning a minister about his politics, or talking to a pop-singer about her hits and experiences, or a sociologist conducting field work—leaves nothing to chance, but proceeds like an experimentalist running a test, with a given objective in mind and aiming to find out and prove something. The answers provoked by the questioner cannot give rise to a chaotic stream of words, they have an established aim and limits, they are—like an experiment—more or less explicitly regulated by the interviewer or sociologist. But how does this kind of “experiment” relate to the experimental novel championed by Zola? The suspicion may surface, not entirely without reason, that there is no link whatsoever, that the whole question is not worth discussing. And indeed, there is no such relationship in the case of an ordinary journalistic interview or a sociological interview that stays within the bounds of a document. But it is a different matter when the messages assembled in that way (specifically: a series of interviews) form an arrangement with a clear narrative structure, when they are not exhausted by their status of being a “document”—when they are reminiscent of a novel, which has also never limited itself to its role as a social document, not even when it was charged with this task. It is a different matter when we take into account three outstanding books by the American sociologist Oscar Lewis. Focusing on indigent communities in Mexico and Puerto Rico, these books were created from narratives that had been recorded and then edited by the author so that their plots would form clear entities (Lewis 1961; 1964; 1965). They not only make us think of novels, but are also read as such (as evidenced by their global success among the reading public rather than among professional sociologists). Could this be where the singular notion of an experimental novel has found its true anchoring?

6Of course, we can read Lewis’s books as sociological works.2 He equips them with introductions where he outlines—very briefly, to be sure—his theoretical and methodological assumptions. Seen from this angle, his works exemplify the method of the so-called personal document, whose classic epitome is Thomas and Znaniecki’s study on the lives of Polish peasants in America. Lewis’s works can also be said to anticipate the sociological trends represented mainly by Erving Goffman, where the tendency is to analyse the social patterns of everyday life, common behaviour and interaction. Lewis’s books do not interest me on account of their methodological properties, though I cannot completely ignore this question, even as I examine their literary status. I cannot ignore Lewis’s methodology because each of these programmes of doing sociology can, though it need not, incline the writer to reach for procedures and means of expression belonging to literature. Łapiński says about Goffman that “with every successive work he becomes more radical in his use of the technique of inquiry proper to literature. And that this is not a question of vividly portraying customs or of stylistic fluency, but that it is a question of a mental vision that ruptures from within the entire building erected – deceptively—to look like a conventional academic construction” (see Łapiński 1977, 257–258).

7A similar case could be made for personal documents. They tend to be closer to literature than sociological studies, which are based on different assumptions (this is an obvious point). Who knows, perhaps the programme of human documents presents an unconscious realisation of Zola’s idea—his postulation of the novel as a human document. What was impossible to realise in literature turned out to be not only achievable in another discipline, but it became a coherent scientific programme. Might literature have demonstrated, once again, what a pioneer it is in relation to scholarly concepts?

8In Lewis’s book the turn to literature is not coincidental; it is rooted in the theoretical and methodological assumptions presented in the introductions to all three of his works. Not insignificantly, he is averse to the standard, highly abstract manner of conducting sociological research. It allows writers to lose sight of concrete detail and thus to enter into conflict with what could be described as sociological personalism:

Indeed, it was my dissatisfaction with the high level of abstraction inherent in the concept of culture patterns which led me to turn away from anthropological community studies to the intensive study of families. It seemed to me that descriptions of a way of life on the abstract level of culture patterns left out the very heart and soul of the phenomena we were concerned with, namely, the individual human being. (Lewis 1965, xv)

9Where interest is focused on the individual human being, scientific sociological discourse becomes a rather unhelpful model of communi|cation. The literary model suggests itself spontaneously, especially since Lewis’s other premise is to give voice to a social group that does not speak up publicly, that lacks the necessary means or skills, that has not produced writers who might speak on its behalf and from its point of view. Lewis’s premise, therefore, is to portray members of this group from within, such as they see themselves and as they think and talk about themselves and their issues; his premise is, let us add, to portray them without the filter of the consciousness of someone belonging to a different class, representing a different culture (see Lewis 1961, xi). Borrowing Zola’s terminology, we could say that his aim is to create a series of human documents. In this case: a series, as Lewis has it, of “multiple autobiographies” (Lewis 1961, xi).

10These assumptions represent the initial and necessary conditions of the literariness of a text purporting to be a sociological document. But these points of departure are neither sufficient nor complete; if they did not lead to further conditions, the literariness of the text could be purely accidental—it might not be a fundamental determinant of the character of an expression. In Lewis’s case, literariness is a constitutive element, not a serendipitous or ornamental one. This literariness is what my analysis will focus on. But before I proceed, I must outline a distinction that is key to my subsequent argument. It is the distinction between belletrisation [beletryzacja] and novelisation [upowieściowanie]. What I mean by belle|trisation is a serendipitous, unsystematic use of approaches and procedures proper to narrative forms of literature (in practice: mainly the novel) in texts conceived as social documents. Novelisation, meanwhile, refers to the fundamental and systematic shaping of a text in the image and likeness of a novel, but without allowing the text to become fully identified with the novel. Such full identification would undermine the specific characteristics of the document, those that confirm its uniqueness and its particular qualities. Belletrisation suggests a literariness that is fragmentary and coincidental, while novelisation entails literariness as a basic principle of expression. Both belletrisation and novelisation touch on the text’s structure, not its literary value, as the latter can be ascribed to texts constructed any which way; after all, almost any kind of text can become—here I quote Maria Dąbrowska—“an unintended work of art” (Dąbrowska 1964),3 or at least it can be read that way. We must agree with Todorov:

If one opts for a structural viewpoint, each type of discourse usually labelled literary has non-literary “relatives” that are closer to it than any other types of “literary” discourse. (Todorov 1990, 11)

11And another final remark: in the case of a collection of documents, such as Thomas and Znaniecki’s work, or the interwar editions of volumes of memoirs by peasants and the unemployed, individual parts can be marked by belletrisation, or, rather, novelisation, but not the publication as a whole. In Thomas and Znaniecki, the documents have been subjected to theoretical and methodological considerations; similarly, in the above-mentioned editions of memoirs no textual continuity emerges on the level of the publication as a whole—these are typical collections of materials where each part has its individual qualities. Things are different when the documentary text is by definition a uniform entity, especially when it is as voluminous as Lewis’s books.

12In this case, too, we come across both belletrisation and novelisation. Lewis’s readers will not be of two minds: these messages are novelised with astonishing consistency, constructed in the image and likeness of a novel. They are constructed in this way even though their constituent parts do not necessarily appear uniform. They do not present expressions by a single narrative subject; each of the three books offers a collection of autobiographical monologues by a number of individuals (three in Pedro Martinez; five in Sánchez; sixteen in La Vida, though here only five individuals play key roles, while the remaining monologues are com|plementary). No monologue by a single character has independent value, but they all make up a coherent and perfectly thought-through narrative construct. Literariness thus comes to light not only in the constituent parts but also on the level of the whole, which suggests particularly clear analogies to the novel. All his occurs as a result of montage—a key factor of literariness in this case.

13The notion of montage, borrowed from film studies, is of great service in the field of literary narrative, although in some ways it is still only a metaphor. Montage suggests assembling a new, coherent and meaningful whole from something that existed before, from prefabricated material, from ready-made elements. But in the novel nothing generally exists beforehand. I say generally because in the narrative prose of our century there are exceptions to this rule. Twentieth-century narrative prose often incorporates documents of various kinds (real ones or mere quasi-documents), or it is composed directly as a collage (see Weisstein 1978; Nycz 1978). Not counting a few exceptions, however, collage composition does not span the whole text; it forms enclaves and often boils down to the problem of quotation. With Lewis’s books it is a different matter: here everything—except the theoretical introductions, whose functions I shall discuss below—existed beforehand and was carefully assembled and arranged. Thus the creation of the work is not just about collecting materials and—subsequently—submitting them to selection according to certain criteria, but above all it is about positioning and linking those elements that have passed through the editor’s sieve. With Lewis’s books, just as in film, montage is not a metaphor. The point of departure are recorded tapes inscribed with stories told by many people; consequently, the task of the sociologist who wants to create one continuous text from these variegated documents is not only to transcribe the stories recorded on tape, but above all to assemble them into one entity that is coherent in terms of narrative.

14And here is something remarkable: in his authorial introductions Lewis talks about many issues—why he chose these individuals over others, how he behaved during the recording or over the course of the interview, finally he discusses the theoretical foundations, his methods, and the scholarly goals he wants to achieve. But he consistently passes over one thing, namely the principles of montage that informed process of assembling the whole. On this topic he is silent in all three books. In a sense this is unsurprising; Lewis treats his works as sociological studies and not as works of literature, even though he is aware of their kinship with the novel and goes as far as mentioning the work of Henry James, for instance (Lewis 1961, xxi). Had he delved deeper into this matter, he would have had to admit that the principles he applied while arranging and shaping his rich material, which he had collected during his research on indigent communities in Mexico and Puerto Rico, were principles borrowed from the art of the novel, including the contemporary novel. Such an admission could be problematic for a sociologist; it could weaken the force and significance of his works at least in the eyes of one group of readers—his colleagues in the profession. They might constitute not the only intended audience for these narratives, but they were certainly not excluded from the circle of virtual readers.

15Montage is a key factor in the literariness of Lewis’s books. If we limited our analysis to montage alone, we could argue that those books are simply novels, and hence we could argue that the documentary work had become completely identical to the novelistic work. However, this would be at odds with the author’s intention (though we might ignore that), and would clash with one crucial factor that obstructs, and even thwarts, such complete identification. So before I discuss Lewis’s novelistic procedures in more detail I shall pause to consider this factor.

16Here I must recall a truism: the novel talks about fictional events and creates fictional characters; fictionality is the basic characteristic of the fictional universe. Documentary narrative prose talks about real-life events, about the deeds and actions of people who are not born of the author’s imagination. We cannot ignore this truism when analysing the novelistic qualities of Lewis’s documentary narratives. We cannot ignore it even if we tend to agree with recent assertions that the dichotomy between narrative prose that operates fiction and documentary prose is not founded in textual material and does not correspond to the actual complexity of literary facts, since factographic elements can occur in fictional narratives and elements of fiction in factographic narratives (see Zavarzadeh 1974). However, it will not do to say that these books contain a little bit of factography and a little bit of fiction, especially as there is no way of proving that elements of fiction, understood as a structural property, occur in the fictional universe. We must accept in good faith the author’s assertions that everything that appears in his books is authentic and derived from material collected during field work (especially since Lewis declares that anyone who is interested may access his documentation—the raw material from which he constructed his books—in form of a complete transcript of the text recorded on magnetic tape). The non-fictionality of the world reconstructed in these works seems to reveal even more starkly the role and significance of the literary montage applied to them.

17Until recently, the general consensus was that fiction is merely a question of constructing the reality that is to be narrated. In actual fact, however, fiction relates mainly to the problem of the fictionality of the very speech acts that make up the novelistic text. Seen in this way, literary fiction is about operating with language in a way that is different from everyday linguistic practice. The speech acts that occur in a novel are not the novelist’s speech acts in the same sense as his letters or everyday utterances are his speech acts. This applies to speech acts on every level of the narrative structure (Herrnstein-Smith 1974; Searle 1975). In Lewis’s books, which represent his montages of utterances recorded on tape, the speech acts are obviously not fictional; what is more, their quality of being real is a basic assumption—it is the very foundation of the documentary work. We must accept that it is really Pedro Martinez and his wife Esperanza who are talking; the brothers and sisters of Sánchez, or Fernanda, her children and relatives. They are talking themselves; it is their voices that the sociologist and his team recorded on tape. They themselves are talking, even though their utterances were edited. Similarly, we cannot treat as fictional the speech acts of the authorial introductions in which Lewis outlines his assumptions and introduces additional information that is important for the reader to understand the autobiographical mono|logues; these speech acts correspond to the accepted poetics of an authorial introduction (including introductions to novelistic texts), and—to some extent at least—to the poetics of scientific treatises (although the author is sparing in his use of the conceptual apparatus of sociology). The natural|ness of these speech acts means that these works can never be seen as fully like novels. But it also makes it possible to point out novelistic procedures in utterances that might have been free of them; it allows us to point out the specific character of novelisation in texts with documentary goals and assumptions.

18All three books are fundamentally based on similar assumptions. They draw on stories that the author recorded over the course of his sociological research; they all refer to a similar micro-social environment—the family. As I mentioned above, each of them is constructed from the stories of several individuals, and finally each is composed in a way that offers distinct chronological divisions (most clearly in Pedro Martinez). These shared assumptions are crucial, as they allow us to understand all three books as realisations of similar concepts and intentions. Differences only appear in the background. They concern, for instance, the chronological span of events (Pedro Martinez covers the longest period), the setting apart of individual passages of the narration, the relationships between the monologues of individual characters (within the framework of a given sequence—especially in Sánchez—they are sometimes parallel, describing more or less the same events from the perspective of another speaker;4 in other cases this parallelism is maintained but the sequence of events becomes more essential). So the differences do not undermine the basic assumptions that Lewis already worked out in the first work of this sociologico-literary tryptic.

19This allows us to uncover the novelisation methods in the three books. They each form a coherent whole of distinct composition, though we can assume with absolute certainty (even if we have no access to the materials used in them) that this is not on account of the constituent elements themselves. The distinct composition was not suggested by the material (rather, we ought to assume that in its raw form the material was drowning in chaos); the composition was imposed on it in the process of literary crafting. Individual passages—if we can talk about passages at all in this case—unfold with remarkable reliability; they are guided towards a moment that is not necessarily a punchline or a point of closure in the narrow sense, but that is constructed to satisfy the reader’s piqued curiosity—a strategy that is clearly consistent with the procedures of a novel. Such a way of organising storylines was certainly not dictated by “naked life”, though we must mention that their closure is never complete. Lewis’s approach is discreet and toned-down—due, in part, to the fact that he refers to the experiences of contemporary novelistic prose (which I will address below). The question of storylines—that is to say the histories of the individual characters who tell monologues about events in their lives, or episodes from their histories that can be quite elaborate—does not exhaust the problem, it is just part of a broader question. Entire stories are built on this principle. They are supposed to present family histories, and, by extension, a portrait of the environment being studied. They are supposed to present a family history in its concrete and unique detail, not subordinated to any theory (and theories were surely easy to come by in books conceived not merely as collections of accounts but also as methodological propositions on ways of undertaking sociological research). The narrators from Mexican slums and villages or the indigents of Puerto Rico are not able to make generalisations, which is why these are absent from the main text.

20They are, however, able to talk about concrete things, about individual events. This also works in favour of Lewis’s novelisation of the narrative. It contains many details that would certainly not have been worthy of consideration in a sociological treatise whose goal was not to reconstruct everyday life in unconstrained particularity, but to expose what cultural patterns govern that everyday life and what mechanisms are at work in it. In other words, there are many details that would be irrelevant for a sociological interpretation, that would weigh it down, seem redundant and obstruct the clarity of the picture. Lewis not only retains them in the monologues, which form a composition with clear contours, but he seems to take great care to highlight them. If we were to talk about those books simply as novels, then we could say that those details, those volatile facts and minute events make up the fictional universe. This is apparent in each one of the books, but especially in La Vida. Here the author goes beyond the strict recording of statements. Each monologue dedicated to one of the five main characters in the book is preceded by a chapter containing a description of a normal day in their lives, based on interviews and participant observation. It is telling that in his authorial introduction Lewis defends this move by referring to literature:

The use of the day as the unit of study has been a common device of the novelist. […] it has as many advantages for science as for literature, and provides an excellent medium for combining the scientific and humanistic aspects of anthropology. The day universally orders family life; it is a small-enough time unit to permit intensive and uninterrupted study by the method of direct observation, and it is ideally suited for controlled comparisons. (Lewis 1965, xxi)

21The description of a day not only allows Lewis to introduce information that could not be expected of an autobiographical monologue (e.g. concerning the places where it is recorded), it also makes it possible to submit a great amount of information about seemingly unimportant details. Some of these have a typically novelistic design. This is, for instance, how one such account of a day begins:

Rosa hurried along Eagle Avenue toward Soledad’s house. It was almost nine o’clock and Soledad and her daughters had to be at the Public Health unity by nine-thirty. Rosa had agreed to go along as interpreter. Soledad lived in a four-story tenement in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Bronx. […] This April morning [in 1964] the blinds were closed. Rosa entered the tenement hallway, went directly to the kitchen door in the back, and knocked. Soledad’s sister-in-law, Flora, a short, thin, pleasant-faced woman of about thirty, opened the door. (Lewis 1965, 127)

22Reading this passage out of context one would guess it is part of a naturalistic novel. Seen in isolation, it fully demonstrates its novelistic qualities. Of course, not all parts of Lewis’s books do this with such intensity and ostentation, but even with this concession this passage can be seen as typical. The sociologist constantly and consistently pursues what Barthes once called “the reality effect” (Barthes 1986, 141-148). For him, this effect was a characteristic quality of the novel, for the novelistic narrative contains many elements that only play an indirect role in the course of events, but that are still significant in the way they narratively complete the world (according to Barthes, this is the special luxury of narrative). By talking about what is singular, the novel must operate on “futile detail”. Barthes’s remarks concern Flaubert, but they are fully applicable to Lewis’s documentary narrative. Lewis also sets great store by what is singular; for him it is important to try and fill the world being portrayed with the greatest possible amount of concrete detail, even if those details are insignificant for the character speaking at a given moment, or if they are unlikely to pique the interest of a sociologist studying the community in question. What counts is a full understanding about that community—including details that might seem banal.

23And this concerns not only the “days” that stand out against the rest. Incidentally, such days only appear in La Vida, while the principles discussed here also characterise Lewis’s other books. Barthes’s rule of filling and of futile detail is applied consistently in all monologues. They, too, talk about things that are short-lived, insignificant, fleeting in their ordinariness. They, too, are overflowing with an excess of material of this kind. This is bolstered by a principle used consistently in the monologues: they are dominated by the type of narration that British theorists have described as showing; the telling mode, i.e. the summary and synthetic account, barely comes into play at all. This is, therefore, a notable instance of novelisation.

24 The case is further supported by the use of another procedure, key to the novelistic narrative: the monologues are constructed from scenes in which dialogue plays a dominant role. The narrators in Lewis’s books not only talk about facts through concrete scenes, but they also repeat conversations that took place in those scenes. In other words: ample dialogue is cited in the monologues—even when the events took place long ago. These dialogues are elaborate; the speaker’s words are reproduced with as much dedication as their interlocutor’s (who is often their adversary; Lewis’s monologists—especially in Sánchez and La Vida – are quarrelsome). Examples can be found on almost every page. The dialogues cited are novelistic to the highest degree, and the novelistic convention of citing dialogue also coincides with the accompanying narrative context, which tells us who was speaking, and often also—how. A variety of questions come up here. The monologues recorded by Lewis are of course first-person accounts, and in this type of narrative, the citing of extensive dialogue, which sometimes took place in the distant past in the speaker’s life, calls for special justification. In the first-person novel certain conventions have established themselves, which, even if they do not call for this kind of dialogue, certainly ensure that the reader does not experience it as a foreign body in the flow of the narrative. The most important of these conventions is the one that Mendilow described as the convention of the perfect memory (Mendilow 1952).

25This convention of the perfect memory can characterize fictional narrators in novels written in the first person. But what happens when we are faced with authentic narrators whose stories were recorded on tape? This is where certain doubts arise. I do not know in what ways Mexican and Puerto Rican slum-dwellers or peasants from remote Aztec villages tell stories; perhaps in their narrative culture this is exactly how people talk—by citing extensive dialogue. If this were really the case, then this method of citing would be close to the novelistic conventions that influenced Lewis; then the Mexican and Puerto Rican narrators themselves would have supported the novelisation, even though they have certainly never read a novel in their lives (even if they were fortunate enough not to be illiterate).

26The prevalence of dialogue in the biographical monologues assembled by Lewis, which form a family history in each book, not only indicates that showing dominates over telling, but it is also one of the factors that allow us to determine the type of novelisation we are dealing with here, and to point out what sort of novel constitutes the author’s reference point. Most generally speaking, it is the novel after the naturalistic transformation, the novel of the twentieth century no doubt (John Dos Passos should be mentioned here). It is the novel of the point of view, especially in the case of Sánchez and La Vida; in Pedro Martinez the principle of the point of view is also observed, but its effect is less noticeable. This is because Pedro Martinez presents no more than three narrators and, what’s more, it is much closer to the family saga than the other books, as it recounts the history of a family over a particularly long period of time; Sánchez and La Vida are limited to a certain phase of the family’s history, and previous events are either treated as an introductory or background element or briefly mentioned—for the sake of a complete picture—in retrospect.

27 In Lewis’s books, the principle of the point of view not only means that the full autonomy of the monologue is preserved, that no one interferes with it and no one corrects what the monologist said. It also means that one event can be shown in different monologues. This results from the basic fact—especially in the composition of Sánchez and La Vida—that the monologues have been grouped in a way that advances the history of individual speakers and at the same time portrays the chosen phase in the family’s history from different angles. What counts in Lewis’s books is what a given narrator says about a given event. His books are not interested in establishing whether an account corresponds with reality, for the point is not to arrive at the truth about this or that occurrence, but to record the speakers’ awareness and to arrive at a general view of their lives. In this sense it is irrelevant which version of a given event is reliable. And here the analogy with the contemporary novel, broadly understood, suggests itself very emphatically, as this is the kind of fiction that renounced the pursuit of what could be called the literary equivalent of the classical definition of truth. My proposition does not belittle the documentary value of Lewis’s books in the least, as they also aim to record certain states of awareness, rather than pursuing pedantic faithfulness about every detail. This is especially the case as this principle poses no restriction on the wealth of real-life customs and has no diminishing effect on information about the social milieu.

28 On the contrary, this principle corresponds directly to one of Lewis’s research questions, for he aims to present not only a family history, but also the relationships between the members of the family. Thus what’s important is not only what the monologists say about their lives, but also how they perceive each other and how they understand individual aspects of their shared history. As a result, an agreement emerges between Lewis’s research goals and the technique of the point of view, or “Rashomon technique” used broadly in the novel. The subject behind each of the monologues appears in the role of the narrator telling his or her story, but also takes part in a game with other characters, becoming a participant in tensions and conflicts. Thus we can say that the monologues represent not just a narrative message recorded on tape, designed to satisfy the curiosity of an audience that remains rather obscure to the narrators; the monologues also become a reality for their own sake, a system of mirrors in which members of a family reflect one another.

29In the preface to Sánchez—as I pointed out above—Lewis mentions Henry James. I do not think that this is a coincidence. When he transformed materials collected during his field work into coherent narratives, Lewis was referring to a tradition, namely the model of the novel to whose formation James had made a notable contribution. This is expressed not only in the technique of the point of view and the resulting principle of portraying individual monologists, such as they see each other. It is also expressed in what post-naturalistic theorists of the novel call the absence of the author. As I said before, Lewis’s books respect the full autonomy of the monologues; he imposes meaning on them through montage (editing), but he does not directly interfere with them. Thus he acts like a narrator in a novel of our century. But in works whose goal is not only to tell stories, but also to express theoretical and sociological ideas, the voice of the author must be heard. And indeed, it can be heard—but only in the introductions, which establish essential facts and information. I am not going to discuss them as theoretical statements. What is of interest in the context of this paper is their relationship to the autobiographical monologues, for these introductions carry important narrative elements.

30The introductions acquaint the reader with crucial details that are not included in the monologues. They convey facts about where the recording was made, general information about the milieu, etc. We might say that these passages in the introductions take on the role that in the classic novel was played by narrative passages told directly by the omniscient narrator. This analogy seems apt, but we cannot ignore the fact that this type of information is placed outside the main narrative part. It is clear that the introductions do not belong to it—they form a text apart. Moreover, it is possible to skip the introduction and read the essential monologue parts with perfect comprehension. A reader who is not interested in the Lewis’s sociological questions might proceed this way. In this kind of reading the books will be no different from any “normal” novel. But a full identification with the novel was not the sociologist’s intention, for such a reading impoverishes his works by stripping them of an essential dimension. When we read one of his books as a novelised sociological document, however, we naturally cannot ignore the introductions. Worthy of particular attention are the passages concerning the role of the researcher and his relationship to the narrator-protagonists. Lewis describes his relationships with the people who were the objects of his study, the bonds they formed, the type of interview he used. Projecting this information onto the language used in analyses of the novel as a genre, we might say that these relationships correspond in some way to the relationships between the narrator and the fictional universe. The narrator governs and manipulates it, but wants to remain invisible, not intending to draw attention to his role and position; he renounces the privilege that he could have bestowed on himself. He only says about himself and his actions what is absolutely necessary. He communicates—let me stress it once again—outside of the main text. Thus another analogy emerges with the novel constructed on the principle of the point of view.

31Let me add a few concluding remarks. Lewis’s experiments are important not only in terms of the development of documentary literature, but also in terms of the development of the novel (though theorists of the novel have largely overlooked these works; the only exception, to my knowledge, is Steiner (1967, 84)). They demonstrate their new possibilities. Lewis designed a new form of expression—new not only in the field of the sociological document, or documentary writing in general; he also designed a new form in a strictly literary dimension. He designed a form that shows how authentic social facts are transformed into elaborate narrative entities. His form is also new in the sense that the narrative in his books was constructed with the help of a technological tool such as the magnetic tape. And this is precisely where his books correspond to recent tendencies in the novel: in many cases it aspires to imitate a stream of words across the text as a whole (to mention only the spoken monologue), but it is also stylised to resemble an expression recorded on tape (Kazimierz Brandys’s Unreality [Nierzeczywistość] is the best example). Even though in novels recorded monologues are a matter of stylisation, while in Lewis’s books they are authentic recordings transcribed from tape onto paper, the analogies suggest themselves very forcefully.

32Another issue is the expansion of novelistic forms across various types of narrative construction—the emergence of a novelistic narrative model that functions beyond the sphere of the novel. Lewis’s works would be a particularly salient example of how this model functions. But it is hard to be satisfied with such general statements. We should rather ask in what types of non-novelistic narration novelistic models seem particularly promising, where they operate with particular force. Lewis’s books seem to suggest a broader answer, as they are not coincidental but part of a more general tendency. It seems that the narratives that are particularly susceptible to novelisation are those that deal with unique facts, specific individuals, even when both facts and individuals are presented—as is the case with Lewis—in their social dimension. The novel has become, in our culture, a fundamental model of speaking about what is unique and inimitable in its concreteness—in the way that every biography is unique and inimitable (even when it is determined to the highest degree by the individual’s belonging to a given milieu or social group, as is the case with Lewis’s protagonists). Thus the novel may have become one of the fundamental forms of expressing a personalistic worldview (as a sociological researcher Lewis is a programmatic personalist).

33But it is certainly not only in the sociological document focused on what is unique that the novel has become a model of speaking. It is also the case in other types of writing, including, above all, biographical writing.

34In an interview, Sartre commented on his great biography of Flaubert, The Idiot of the Family:

I would like my study to be read as a novel because it really is the story of an apprenticeship that led to the failure of an entire life. At the same time, I would like it to be read with the idea in mind that it is true, that it is a true novel.
Throughout the book, Flaubert is presented the way I imagine him to have been, but since I used what I think were rigorous methods, this should also be Flaubert as he really is, as he really was. At each moment in this study I had to use my imagination (Sartre 1977, 112).

35What Sartre explained with such self-awareness can remain hidden and unconscious for many biographers. Of course this does not mean that all biographies written nowadays—especially those that submit to the rigours of historical discourse – draw on or must draw on the tools developed by the novel. But it is incontestably the case that the novel, when we look at it from this point of view, is a genre of vast expansiveness. Paradoxically, this is the case despite the crisis of its classical form. This does not mean, however, that non-literary or paraliterary writing should be influenced exclusively by traditional forms of the novel. Hanna Krall’s volume of interviews with Marek Edelman proves that a different possibility exists (Krall 1992, 129-247). Its narrative form would certainly have been impossible without the nouveau roman, especially the novels of Robbe-Grillet.

36The emerging link between the novel and documentary and biographical forms of writing can be understood as a symptom of what I called formal mimetism (Głowiński 1977, 103-114) Here we seem to be dealing with the other side of the coin: it is not literature that draws on and “imitates” other forms of non-literary or paraliterary writing, but non-literary forms draw on forms of literary expression that have been fixed in tradition. When we look at it this way, formal mimetism becomes a principle of correspondence between forms of writing, the literary and the non-literary—a correspondence that is in some ways analogous to the correspondence of the arts. Oscar Lewis’s outstanding books are exceptionally powerful examples of this process.

Notes

• 1 I discuss this in Głowiński (1969, 73).
• 2 Arguing for the usefulness of poetics for sociology, Richard Harvey Brown points out the literary character of Lewis’s works. See Brown (1977).
• 3 Dąbrowska’s essay, first published in Wiadomości Literackie, 37 (1937), is among the best studies on the literary qualities of documentary prose.
• 4 Brown (1977, 59) cites Lewis’s statement that he applies the same technique as the film Rashomon (as is commonly known, this Japanese film shows the same event from four consecutive perspectives).