4.14.2006
The Theory of the Novel (Narrative)
Title
Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971.
Field
Narrative
Summary
The Theory of the Novel and Lukacs is deeply influenced by Hegel (and it seems like Hegelian Aesthetics) so I took it that way. It starts out making an argument that the novel is fundamentally different from the epic based on historical conjecture and posits a hopeful return to the epic someday (he this Dostoyevsky will do it) or at least something of the unity promised by the epic? I think. In the Romantic period, the classical (Greek) epic was misunderstood because we don't get its adequacy (this is the Hegelian bit in my mind, yeah?). "the circle whose closed nature was the transcendental essence of their life has, for us, been broken; we cannot breath in a closed world. We have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primaeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for us, and our thinking follows the endless path of an approcimation that is never fully accomplished. We have invested the creation of forms: and that is why everything that falls from our weary and despairing hands must always be incomplete. We have found the only true substance within ourselves: that is why we have to plac an unbridgeable chasm between cognition and action, between soul and created structure, between self and world, why all substantiality has to be dispersed in reflexivity on the far side of that chasm; that is why our essence had to become a postulate for ourselves and thus create a still depper, still more menacing abyss between us and our own selves."(34) - I think that would be the novel (the form). Form destroys totality, or the possibility for totality. With the loss immanence comes the loss of the epic. "But wheras the smallest disturbance of the transcendental correlations must cause the immanence of meaning in life to vanish beyond recovery, an essence that is divorced from life and alien to life can crown itself with its own existence in such a way that this consecration, even after a more violence upheaval, may pale but will never disappear altogether. That is why tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel." (41) The epic is total and adequate. "The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. It would be superficial - a matter of a mere artistic technicality - to look for the only and decisive genre-defining criterion in the question of whether a work is written in verse or prose." (56) "The epic gives form to totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life."(60) Ok this part is important here: "In a novel, totality can be systematised only in abstract terms, which is why any system that could be established in the novel - a system being, after the final disappearance of the organic, the only possible form of a rounded totality - had to be on of the abstract concepts and therefore not directly suitable for aesthetic form-giving. Such abstract systematisation is, it is true, the ultimate basis of the entire structure, but in the created reality of the novel all that becomes visible is the distance separating the systematisation from concrete life: a systematisation which emphasises the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one."(70) "The novel is the art-form of virile maturity: this means that the completeness of the novel's world, if seen objectively, is an imperfection, and if subjectivey experienced, it amounts to resignation." (71) "The novel, in contrast to others genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in the process of becoming. That is why, from the artistic viewpoint, the novel is the most hazardous genre, and why it has been described as only half an art by many who equate being a problematic with being a problem." (73) "The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. The fluctuation between a conceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never attain completeness because completeness is immanently utopian, can be objectivised only in that organic quality which is the aim of biography." (77) "[the novel] needs certain imposed limits in order to become form; whereas the infinity of purely epic matter is an inner, organic one, it is itself a carrier of value, it puts emphasis on value, it sets its own limits for itself and from within itself, and the outward infinity of its range is almost immaterial to it - only a consequence and, at most, a symptom." (81) "The composition of the novel is the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again. The relationships which create cohesion between the abstract components are abstractly pure and formal, and the ultimate unifying principle therefore has to be the ethic of the creative subjectivity, an ethic which the content reveals."(84) "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God."(88) "The abdonment of the world by God manifests itself in the incomennsurability of soul and work, of interiority and adventure - in the absence of a transcendental 'place' alloted to human endeavour. There are, roughly speaking, two types of such incommensurability: either the world is narrower or it is broader than the outside world assigned to it as the arena and substratum of its actions." (97) So one icommensurability is abstract idealism - the demonism of the narrowing of the soul. It forgets the distance between the ideal and the idea, imagines that it is perfect unity and then thinks reality is beset by demons which need to be conquered to redeem the unity. Or something. Then the other is dissillusionment - "the inadequacy that is due to the soul's being wider and larger than the destinies which life has to offer it." (112) "Whereas abstract idealism, in order to exist at all, had to translate itself into action, had to enter into conflict with the outside world, here the possibility of escape does not seem excluded from the start. A life which is capable of producing all its content out of itself can be rounded and perfect even if it never enters into contact with the alien realtiy outside. Whereas, therefore, an excessive, totally uninhibited activity towards the outside world was characterisitic of the psychological structure of abstract idealism, here the tendency is rather towards passivity, a tendency to avoid outside conflict and struggles rather than to engage in them, a tendency to deal inside the soul with everything that concerns the soul." (113)
Keywords
Epic, Novel, Immanence, Form, Totality, Rounded
Other Thoughts
"Philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determined the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside' and 'outside', a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed."(29)
"Every art form is defined by the metaphysical dissonace of life which it accepts and organises as the basis of a totality complete in itself; the mood of the resulting world, and the atmosphere in which the persons and event thus created have their being, are determined by the danger which arises from this incompletely resolved dissonance and which therefore threatens the form. The dissonance special to the novel, the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life, produced a problem of form whose formal nature is much less obvious than in other kinds of art, and which, because it looks like a problem of content, needs to be approached by both ethical and aesthetic arguments, even more than do problems which are obviously purely formal."(71)
"The overlapping of the novel form into the epic, such as we have discussed, is rooted in social life; it disrupts the immanence of form only to the extent that, at the crucial point, it imputes a substantiality to the world it describes which that world is in no way capable of sustaining and keeping in a state of balence. The artist's epic intention, his desire to arrive at a world beyond the problematic, is aimed only at an immenently utopian ideal of social forms and structures; therefore it does not transcencd these forms and structures generally but only their historically given concrete possibilities - and this is enough to detroy the immanence of form." (144)
Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971.
Field
Narrative
Summary
The Theory of the Novel and Lukacs is deeply influenced by Hegel (and it seems like Hegelian Aesthetics) so I took it that way. It starts out making an argument that the novel is fundamentally different from the epic based on historical conjecture and posits a hopeful return to the epic someday (he this Dostoyevsky will do it) or at least something of the unity promised by the epic? I think. In the Romantic period, the classical (Greek) epic was misunderstood because we don't get its adequacy (this is the Hegelian bit in my mind, yeah?). "the circle whose closed nature was the transcendental essence of their life has, for us, been broken; we cannot breath in a closed world. We have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primaeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for us, and our thinking follows the endless path of an approcimation that is never fully accomplished. We have invested the creation of forms: and that is why everything that falls from our weary and despairing hands must always be incomplete. We have found the only true substance within ourselves: that is why we have to plac an unbridgeable chasm between cognition and action, between soul and created structure, between self and world, why all substantiality has to be dispersed in reflexivity on the far side of that chasm; that is why our essence had to become a postulate for ourselves and thus create a still depper, still more menacing abyss between us and our own selves."(34) - I think that would be the novel (the form). Form destroys totality, or the possibility for totality. With the loss immanence comes the loss of the epic. "But wheras the smallest disturbance of the transcendental correlations must cause the immanence of meaning in life to vanish beyond recovery, an essence that is divorced from life and alien to life can crown itself with its own existence in such a way that this consecration, even after a more violence upheaval, may pale but will never disappear altogether. That is why tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel." (41) The epic is total and adequate. "The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. It would be superficial - a matter of a mere artistic technicality - to look for the only and decisive genre-defining criterion in the question of whether a work is written in verse or prose." (56) "The epic gives form to totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life."(60) Ok this part is important here: "In a novel, totality can be systematised only in abstract terms, which is why any system that could be established in the novel - a system being, after the final disappearance of the organic, the only possible form of a rounded totality - had to be on of the abstract concepts and therefore not directly suitable for aesthetic form-giving. Such abstract systematisation is, it is true, the ultimate basis of the entire structure, but in the created reality of the novel all that becomes visible is the distance separating the systematisation from concrete life: a systematisation which emphasises the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one."(70) "The novel is the art-form of virile maturity: this means that the completeness of the novel's world, if seen objectively, is an imperfection, and if subjectivey experienced, it amounts to resignation." (71) "The novel, in contrast to others genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in the process of becoming. That is why, from the artistic viewpoint, the novel is the most hazardous genre, and why it has been described as only half an art by many who equate being a problematic with being a problem." (73) "The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. The fluctuation between a conceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never attain completeness because completeness is immanently utopian, can be objectivised only in that organic quality which is the aim of biography." (77) "[the novel] needs certain imposed limits in order to become form; whereas the infinity of purely epic matter is an inner, organic one, it is itself a carrier of value, it puts emphasis on value, it sets its own limits for itself and from within itself, and the outward infinity of its range is almost immaterial to it - only a consequence and, at most, a symptom." (81) "The composition of the novel is the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again. The relationships which create cohesion between the abstract components are abstractly pure and formal, and the ultimate unifying principle therefore has to be the ethic of the creative subjectivity, an ethic which the content reveals."(84) "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God."(88) "The abdonment of the world by God manifests itself in the incomennsurability of soul and work, of interiority and adventure - in the absence of a transcendental 'place' alloted to human endeavour. There are, roughly speaking, two types of such incommensurability: either the world is narrower or it is broader than the outside world assigned to it as the arena and substratum of its actions." (97) So one icommensurability is abstract idealism - the demonism of the narrowing of the soul. It forgets the distance between the ideal and the idea, imagines that it is perfect unity and then thinks reality is beset by demons which need to be conquered to redeem the unity. Or something. Then the other is dissillusionment - "the inadequacy that is due to the soul's being wider and larger than the destinies which life has to offer it." (112) "Whereas abstract idealism, in order to exist at all, had to translate itself into action, had to enter into conflict with the outside world, here the possibility of escape does not seem excluded from the start. A life which is capable of producing all its content out of itself can be rounded and perfect even if it never enters into contact with the alien realtiy outside. Whereas, therefore, an excessive, totally uninhibited activity towards the outside world was characterisitic of the psychological structure of abstract idealism, here the tendency is rather towards passivity, a tendency to avoid outside conflict and struggles rather than to engage in them, a tendency to deal inside the soul with everything that concerns the soul." (113)
Keywords
Epic, Novel, Immanence, Form, Totality, Rounded
Other Thoughts
"Philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determined the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside' and 'outside', a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed."(29)
"Every art form is defined by the metaphysical dissonace of life which it accepts and organises as the basis of a totality complete in itself; the mood of the resulting world, and the atmosphere in which the persons and event thus created have their being, are determined by the danger which arises from this incompletely resolved dissonance and which therefore threatens the form. The dissonance special to the novel, the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life, produced a problem of form whose formal nature is much less obvious than in other kinds of art, and which, because it looks like a problem of content, needs to be approached by both ethical and aesthetic arguments, even more than do problems which are obviously purely formal."(71)
"The overlapping of the novel form into the epic, such as we have discussed, is rooted in social life; it disrupts the immanence of form only to the extent that, at the crucial point, it imputes a substantiality to the world it describes which that world is in no way capable of sustaining and keeping in a state of balence. The artist's epic intention, his desire to arrive at a world beyond the problematic, is aimed only at an immenently utopian ideal of social forms and structures; therefore it does not transcencd these forms and structures generally but only their historically given concrete possibilities - and this is enough to detroy the immanence of form." (144)
# posted by SMRT : 1:01 PM
