ORIGINS OF THE NOVEL, BY MARTHE ROBERT – CRITICAL REVIEW

Abstract

This review aims at sketching the theoretical and methodological proposals of the French theoretician Marthe Robert presented in Origins of the novel – published in 1972 but translated to Portuguese, in Brazil, in 2007. In spite of being published more than 40 years ago, the discussion proposed by Robet is still current and the obstacles faced by critical and literary theory at the time have remained and even deepened. According to her, these fields of knowledge have failed in proposing consistent theoretic and methodological basis for the study of novel. Her proposal not only validates the psychoanalytical approach of literature but even inverts it, pointing out the literary making as the aesthetization of the family romance, a primitive narrative which plays the role of a psychic organizing process. This knowledge enables us to overcome the impasses created by what she calls an external history of novel, as made by literary theory, and pass to an internal history, focused on the desire that founds the genre. This debate is developed in the first section of the book, entitled O gênero indefinido. In the other two sections, O outro lado and Fatias da Vida the author puts at practice her theoretical proposal in approaching the novel.