Structures mentales is the richest and most rewarding [of Goldmann's latest works]. It contains three sets of studies. In the first he discusses 'global models' and the 'significant structures' (another favoured term) of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and also of certain works by Valéry, Sartre, Gombrowicz, Genet, and Chagall. In the second group of essays, Goldmann, supported on occasion by a team of research assistants, attempts to explain the relevance to 'global models' of 'microstructures' within literary texts…. Marxisme et sciences humaines presents recapitulations of Goldmann's basic theoretical premises and methodology, offers brief studies of the young Marx, Lukács, Sartre and Marcuse, and finally makes clear Goldmann's own ethical and philosophical stance in the face of the great issues of our time. As for [La Création culturelle dans la société moderne], it is disappointing, mainly comprising as it does sketchy variations of pieces already published. One would be inclined to blame the editor were it not for the fact that Goldmann himself was clearly not averse to presenting his readers both with familiar arguments and also with familiar subject-matter marginally recast for different fields of missionary activity.

The limitations of Goldmann's culture may finally strike one more resoundingly than its resources. His frame of reference was almost exclusively confined to France and, to a lesser extent, Germany. Specialization need be no sin provided that a sense of proportion is preserved, but time and again Goldmann offered a single French writer as the model and incarnation of a universal truth. (pp. 220-21)

[He] was in love with the concept of 'totality', and there can be little doubt that the psychological impulsion behind his later work was not only to fashion valid statements about the human condition, but also to associate his own name with a distinctive theory, thus becoming a reference point in discussions and achieving the status of a Sartre or a Marcuse. This never happened; at congresses and seminars, young radical audiences were usually baffled by the clinical jargon he employed, and nowhere glimpsed within his doctrines that gleam of revolutionary hope provided by Marcuse. And indeed his Marxism was of the explanatory rather than the agitational variety; having buried the myth of proletarian revolution, he fell back on the vague prospect of stimulating resistance to alienation within the new class of salary and wage-earners.

Nevertheless, if he was not a revolutionary determinist he was certainly a methodological determinist, rigorously insisting that the only intelligible infrastructure for philosophy, art and literature was the coherent world view of a social class. In his hands the study of literature became neither more nor less than the study of political consciousness at the group level; in his work it was not really sociology, let alone literary criticism, which prevailed, but ideological theory. And since the creative writer, with his notoriously random motivations, tended to get in the way both of the theory and the theorist, he was cursorily dismissed or sold off as the proper province of psychoanalysis. The author was characterized as more the midwife than the parent of the work he delivered; the true parent lies in the 'transindividual' subject, the social group whose significant mental structures it is the critic's function to excavate from the work of literature. These are the forces which 'organize' the artist's imagination, whether he knows it or not—and usually he doesn't.

The quest for 'totality' engaged Goldmann as fiercely as it did Lukács…. Examining the practical results of Goldmann's researches, one may conclude that he fired off a good deal of heavy methodological artillery … in order to emphasize points which are scarcely in dispute: that a book can be understood only in terms of a context, and that every context possesses a super-context—but alas, every scholarly, labour must stop somewhere. (pp. 221-22)

According to Goldmann, the consciousness of the 'trans-individual' subject can manifest itself only in the consciousness of individuals, but it usually does so in a hidden way, as a form of 'non-conscious' (not to be confused with the 'unconscious', which represents the desires and repressions of the individual libido). The 'non-conscious', however, is not repressed: it can be brought to light by scientific analysis. One observes that this scheme of things leaves the vast majority of mortals in a kind of sleepwalking condition (including the creative artist himself), while arrogating to the sociologist of literature a position so privileged as to be almost godlike.

Is anyone else permitted a taste of the conscious, that is of knowing what he is doing and why? Yes, Goldmann conceded, but only as 'an area of varying importance'. In practice he virtually obliterated it. And in other ways, too, he ordered the mental universe to reinforce his own professionally privileged role, insisting that 'there is no valid criticism except that which places the literary work in relation to a world-view expressed in concepts', and dismissing the 'romantics' who believed that the appreciation of literature also demands sympathy and empathy.

The possibility arises that Goldmann here fell into the very errors for which he berated others, reviving in a new form the mistakes not only of positivism but also of 'non-genetic' structuralism. For just as positivism works to eliminate one form of subjectivity (philosophy and metaphysics) from the study of phenomena, so Goldmann eliminates the vagaries of libidinal emotion; and just as a certain kind of structuralism regards the writer as the prisoner of the literary language and forms he employs, so Goldmann renders the writer equally helpless before the 'structure' of group consciousness. The writers themselves may wonder why they are subjected to such frequent attempts at extermination!

The problem is highlighted by the belated thesis of two contemporary avant-gardes. At the time of his original study of Robbe-Grillet, Goldmann viewed the authentic modern 'realist' (Robbe-Grillet) as being a writer whose work bore a 'homologous' relationship to a self-regulating, technocratically controlled, alienated society. The determinism was absolute. But then the students began reading, or talking about, Marcuse, and Paris caught fire in 1968, with the result that Goldmann discovered a second avant-garde (Genet, Roger Planchon) whose work affirmed the presence of history, a perspective of refusal and dépassement. If the new socio-political situation had 'created' Planchon and Genet, then Goldmann's determinism would carry weight, but of course these artists were at work before the events mentioned.

Yet a reading of Pour une sociologie du roman leaves no doubt that Malraux was the last writer capable of expressing collective optimism or resistance to alienation, and that the only valid, authentic avant-garde of the postwar period was the one (supposedly) reflecting the all-pervasive dehumanization. Writers were accorded no choice in the matter; being non-conceptual creatures, they were not regarded as motivated by ideology at a conscious level—an amazing attitude for a highly ideological critic to adopt, until one recalls that the critic alone is entitled to inhabit the world of concepts. What, on the other hand, was refreshing about Goldmann's approach in contrast to the general run of Marxian criticism, Lukács not excepted, was his refusal to denigrate the modernists as decadent and spiritually bankrupt.

Yet the overview was hopelessly schematic. The novel as such was pronounced dead with the disappearance of the free market economy and the onset first of monopoly capitalism and then of the self-regulating technocratic capitalism in which we now live…. Goldmann always insisted that it is the exceptional individual, the great writer, who most accurately expresses the collective consciousness—a doctrine which inevitably led to contradictions, as when he simultaneously characterized Malraux as a 'particularly representative' writer and as the only one in the modern era to have incarnated in his work collective optimism.

The art of 'objectifying' literature and of blindfolding the creative writer had already been perfected by Lukács in his study of the nineteenth-century realists. 'Conceptual thought and literary creation are completely different intellectual activities,' wrote Goldmann. As for Racine's prefaces, they could ultimately be set aside: Goldmann could see 'no real reason why Racine should have understood the meaning and objective structure of his own works'. When Robbe-Grillet brashly usurped the critic's role and showed a lively conceptual intelligence of his own, explaining the purpose of his fiction in terms quite different from those elaborated by Goldmann, he was simply ignored. When Witold Gombrowicz replied that his play Yvonne and Le Mariage were not, as Goldmann insisted, representative of aristo-Christian scepticism but explorations of the problem of youth, he too was put in his place. Of course one need not accord the writer the last word on his own work, but one might decently allow him a few words. (pp. 223-25)

[Goldmann's] unitary approach to the work of art usually led him to neglect its richness and diversity; as he once admitted. But he qualified this admission with the thought that such richness, being probably biographical in origin, was not the proper province of sociology. He also pleaded guilty to schematic reductionism but declined to relinquish the habit…. [He] believed that traditional methods of criticism, rather than genetic structuralism, failed to grasp the essence of the fait littéraire, and he argued that the 'categorical structures … are what gives the work its unity: its specific aesthetic character'.

But earlier, in Le Dieu caché, Goldmann offered a more plausible formula which appears to contradict this harsh reduction.

My hypothesis is that the aesthetic fact consists of two levels of necessary correspondence: (1) … between the world vision … and the universe created by the writer; and (2) … between this universe and the specifically literary devices style, images, syntax, etc.—used by the writer to express it.

He declared the 'sociological aesthetic' competent to examine only (1); a 'more literary aesthetic' would have to deal with (2), which he himself intended to treat only 'in a fairly superficial manner'. Indeed, apart from a brief allusion to the three unities, he had little enough to say about the style or form of Racine's tragedies.

Goldmann made the point that genetic structuralism looks to the form or structure of a literary work, rather than to the content. In practice, what he called 'form' emerged as perilously close to content. Thus he defined the essential form of the novel, per se, as 'the transposition on the literary plane of daily life in the individualist society born from production for the market', whereas it might be wiser to regard the novel simply as a continuous, fictional, non-dramatic narrative in prose. Form and content are not, as he appeared to imagine, discrete and mutually independent entities; the content of the work is surely the result of the interaction of the subject or fable with the form employed. Nor does form merely 'express' a vision (world or otherwise), since it too is an active factor which also shapes the vision.

In time Goldmann seems to have despaired of aesthetic analysis: 'It is impossible to say a priori what are the realities external to the work which can fulfil a parallel explanatory function in relation to its specifically … literary characteristics.' And what could not be explained a priori did not greatly engage his attention. He tended, now, to assign (in theory) the strictly formal researches to specialists in style, phonetics and semantics, just as the role of the author was delegated to the psychoanalysts. Nevertheless he continued to insist that literary texts are faits de parole rather than significant literary structures, thereby forgetting that there is no parole or langage without langue. To refute the absurdities of ultrastructuralism is one thing: to claim that 'the collective consciousness and visions of the world exist before their literary expression' is another, and one which, incidentally, marries poorly with the assertion that literature is an active, constituent element of social consciousness.

Paradoxically, the virtues and insights of Goldmann's literary criticism in practice … had only a slender organic connection with the massive mechanism of theory he so laboriously constructed. The defects, unhappily, suggest a closer connection: a pervasive insensitivity to the nuances, inconsistencies and indeed mysteries of art, and, as Robert Emmet Jones pointed out, a constant adjustment of literature to categories alien or external to it. Goldmann replied that he always began with an internal or immanent analysis, but one has reason to feel that he usually began with Hegel and Marx. Above all, one remains worried about the 'representative' quality of the exceptional writer, by the failure to conduct large-scale field-work among the hundreds of talents he dismissed as 'mediocre' …, and, perhaps most damaging from a sociological standpoint, by his indifference to the habits of the reading public.

It is still too soon after Goldmann's untimely death to assess the impact and influence of his work. Possibly his research colleagues will further develop and modify the analytical tools which he forged with verve, clarity and deep conviction. The clarity of his style was a virtue in a critic whose terminology was often, of necessity, offputting to any reader not familiar with the particular Franco-German philosophical tradition to which he adhered. His passionate desire to teach and convince checked any tendency towards obscurantism: and if, ultimately, the body of his work appears more provocative than convincing, Lucien Goldmann nevertheless possessed the rare ability to provoke reflection and discussion at a high level of seriousness. (pp. 225-27)