restates and elaborates on his thesis: “Thus the two structures, that of an important fictional genre and that of exchange proved to be strictly homologous, to the point at which one might speak of one and the same structure manifesting itself on two different planes. Furthermore, as we shall see later, the evolution of the fictional form that corresponds to the world of reification can be understood only in so far as it is related to a homologous history of the structure of reification” (8). In other words, we can only understand the evolution of the novel if we understand the structure of reification in the real world. Here Goldmann takes a short detour to answer a question that must now be plaguing every Marxist and non-Marxist reading the essay. Mainly, “How was the novel form able to emerge from economic reality?” Both Marxists and non-Marxists have previously thought that the novel does not emerge directly out of social life, but out of a collective consciousness that is more abstract and more comprehensive than the particular moment in time in which the novel was written. This is how people thought novels developed: Social life → Collective consciousness → Literary form Goldmann noticed, however, that the collective consciousness did not seem to be the necessary intermediary in the new novel because the exchange structure seen in society and the novel form was not existent in the collective consciousness. Moreover, the novel form seems to be not the transposition of something in the collective consciousness, but a search for something missing and implicit in the collective consciousness. The result is a direct transposition of economic life into literary life (remember the values structures?). While some might consider this development bizarre, Goldmann has a ready answer to explain this development: Marx theorized that in market societies, the collective consciousness ultimately disappears as a separate identity because it becomes a direct reflection of economic life. So, how do we explain the economic structures->literary manifestations link outside of the collective consciousness? Goldmann blesses us with a four-point hypothesis. Bourgeois society starts to think of money not as a mediator, but as an end point (an absolute value). Some problematic characters remain in this society who do not fit in because they stay focused on the qualitative (use values). The novel form is an expression of discontent and the desire for qualitative values in society as