Formal Plasticity: Wholeness and Novel Form

This article probes the tension between the fragment and the whole in novel theory and nineteenth-century novels to advance a theory of the novel’s formal plasticity. Challenging dominant theories that locate formal unity in narrative closure, I contend that the ending is only one in a series of arrangements of the novel’s multiple forms. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, I theorize novel form as a dynamic, multiple, process. Turning to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables , I offer a model for reading formal plasticity in the novel’s extended “digressions” and their redistribution of literary, political, social, historical, and aesthetic forms. What emerges is a framework for novel form driven by the “subject” rather than teleology or plot. Rather than privileging coherence or fragmentation, formal plasticity offers a method for understanding the nineteenth-century novel as a site of ongoing articulation, resisting containment by singular structure, teleology, or plot.