Individual vs community

In what way is the novel the best symbolic expression between the individual and social life in modern society?

"The epic hero is, strictly speaking, never an individual. It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics of the epic is the fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community." pg. 66

I believe that as an individual within a community, it is important to attempt to apply these larger themes (which are meant for the community at large) to oneself. In doing so, it not only comprises individualistic emotions within the self but also allows the individual to relate to others who also draw a relation of some sort out of the same theme. In a novel and especially one with an epic hero (in the form of a tragedy) it is easy to connect both worlds into the same source, in order to tie the community at large into individual attitudes. Because individuals within a "perfect" society that nature will provide are meant to, in essence, be the same, we are able to make grand themes "work" for our individual lives which are altered by the presence of various factors including social norms, customs, and overall lifestyles shaped by other individuals within our societies.

Furthermore, a tragedy is the absolute BEST form of a novel by which to bring a society together. Tragedies, unlike other forms of novel offer the tragic hero, who takes the burden of the larger problems faced by society and sacrifices him/herself for the sake of the community at large. So while the individual can find their own meaning from a given theme that falls into the larger societal category; the connection can also come from this very sacrifice of the tragic hero. The connection is no longer individually based and ensures that they will come together because of the larger problems which we all face as human beings. Then and only then can people start making judgments and assertions towards their individual aspects within their lives.

"...nature as a set of laws for pure cognition, nature as the bringer of comfort to pure feeling, is nothing other than the historico-philosophical objectivization of man's alienation form his own constructs." pg 64

And this type of novel and novel in general is quite necessary in our modern society because of the complexity that has resulted from years of historical buildup via practice, experience, and existence. In the beginning, there was nature and nature alone which guided truth and unity. As our society expanded and began to achieve infinite complexity, it resulted in subsequent limitless emotion and destiny. Therefore we need something today that can bring us back together in the form of a single community that holds the same truths and ideals. The symbolism of the novel can act as such by tying together history, morals, and nature into one piece.

Moretti and the Noli

In Moretti's consideration of the crucial features of the form Bildungsroman, he lists the "influence of education" on the protagonist youth as a discarded and "irrelevant" feature(pg. 5). I wonder about this in light of the ongoing role education played in Rizal's Noli. Education is often cited as a cornerstone to the instigation of revolution and empowerment of the youth. It seems to me, in general, that in keeping with the expression "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" that the progression of the youth into an adult who is initiated into himself (hopefully herself eventually in some of these novels?) is always accentuated by education.

Also, when looking at the two types of Bildungsroman in Moretti's breakdown, I was struck by what he said about the "transformation principle" as a possible lens to examine the ending of the Noli through. The end for many of us readers in class was ambiguous and unsettling (to the extent that we didn't know who died or what came of Maria Clara). For me, I experienced it as a kind of let down, but through the lens of the idea that "what makes a story meaningful is its narrativity, its being an open-ended process", I discovered that this more adequately deals with the sort of problems and moments expressed in the Noli.

Gyorgy Lukacs's Integrated Civilisations

Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths - ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for the fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: complete in meaning - in sense - and complete for the senses; rounded because the soul rests within itself even while it acts; rounded because its action separates itself from it and, having become itself, finds a centre of its own and draws a closed circumference round itself (Gyorgy Lukacs 29).

The Greek age is an era of complete homogeneity not despite its seeming binaries but because of them: the new yet familiar; the wide, expansive world that is home; the self in and of the world; the fire of the light. These distinctive, seemingly contrasting features of the Greek world are, though individual and separate ideas, nevertheless codependent of each other, the world fully perfect and complete only so long as both halves exist - the new and the familiar are one and the same; the great and vast world is the familiar home; the self exists in harmony with the world that is the familiar home; the fire of the soul is as the light of the stars. The fire and light come closer in their relation to the idea of homogeneity in the Greek world; as "the fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light" (Lukacs 29), the souls of the stars shine brightly as the light within the souls of conscious beings. The stars of the world's skies and the soul of the self are separate yet inseparable, a part and yet apart. Each entity is both a part of and apart from the other within the homogeneous perfection of ancient Athenian society - "sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another...each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality" (Lukacs 29). This duality brings to light Edmund Husserl's notion of the "duality of the body" and the fundamental sense of touch. The "Body is originally constituted in a double way" (Husserl 176): the double sensation - the body's ability to sense itself and other objects - and the double apprehension - the body's double sensation of itself simultaneously touching and being touched. The soul - or perhaps even the being - of the body remains apart from the tangible world, yet somehow both [the tactile being and the tangible world] are conjoined in the act of touching. The body - as the only entity with the ability to feel itself feeling, to touch and to be touched and to feel itself touching and being touched - performs the act of completion and rounding that encapsulates the seemingly strange, oscillating binaries within the homogeneous Greek world. In this way, it might be possible to understand the concept of "the world and the self" (Lukacs 29); the organic body or the individual man within the collective is unique and separate from others but inherently linked to the whole through the shared characteristic or sense of touch. Man's fundamental sense is tied to the collective. In this bodily understanding of the tactile sense, the "essential difference between the self and the world" (Lukacs 29) might be temporarily and philosophically bridged; as Lukacs explains, "philosophy...is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside' and 'outside', a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world" (Lukacs 29), a philosophical - or rather phenomenological - insight is offered by Husserl.
In the following description of the soul that rests within itself - "the soul rests within itself even while it acts" (Lukacs 29), Maurice Merleau-Ponty is recognized; he offers an explanation of the world as a Visible world, consisting of both the Seer and the Seen or the Viewer and the Viewed [the Toucher and the Touched to Husserl] - "the visible about us seems to rest in itself" (Merleau-Ponty 130). Given, is the notion of the Visible world, projecting visibility unto the individual that sees - an unusual concept of the visible creating vision in the viewer instead of the other way around. So here, the philosophical bridge is built through the sense of vision instead of touch.
Both notions [of the tactile and the visible] are capable yet temporary conceptual bridges, both philosophical understandings that do connect the assumed binaries; however in the Greek world, there are no true binaries, and what only seem as such are resultant from modern perceptions. The "happy ages have no philosophy" (Lukacs 29); there is only complete and rounded homogeneity. Modern philosophy - or simply philosophy - exists as a symptom, a side-effect of modernity's lost utopia. The perfection of the Greek world appears to us - Lukacs's use of "us" situates himself in the modern realm - as an unthinkable, unimaginable realm of contradictions. The Greeks knew the answers. The Greeks knew the truth. We are asking the questions in the aftermath, in reflection of ancient actions; but as soon as we even begin to ask or ponder or philosophize those answers that only the Greeks knew and understood, we will always already have lost them - "[he] drew the creative circle of forms this side of paradox, and everything which, in our time of paradox, is bound to lead to triviality, led him to perfection" (Lukacs 31). Already in summoning up both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, an error has been committed. Already in attempting to bridge the assumed binaries of that happy age, already in attempting to bridge the chasm between modernity and the classical world of Greece, already in merely asking the question, we have embarked on a trivial pursuit. The modern world has extended beyond the known parameters of the ancient world; the triumph of manifest destiny has made it impossible to understand how "the world is wide and yet it is like a home" (Lukacs 29) - "[the] circle within which the Greeks led their metaphysical life was smaller than ours: that is why we cannot, as part of our life, place ourselves inside it...[our] world has become infinitely large and each of its corners is richer in gifts and dangers than the world of the Greeks, but such wealth cancels out the positive meaning - the totality - upon which their life was based" (Lukacs 33-34). Interestingly enough, the modern world, in all its expansionist glory, has lost even more than it has gained: the meaning and completeness of the Greek world's perfection. The totality of the Greek world is and forever shall be lost to the modern world.

Sources
Lukacs, Gyorgy. "Integrated Civilisations." The Theory of the Novel. MIT Press, 1974.
Husserl, Edmund. "Perception, Spatiality, and the Body: The Self Constitution of the Body." Transcendental Aesthetics. Indiana University Press, 1999.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "The Chiasm - The Intertwining." The Visible and The Invisible. Northwestern University Press, 1969.

Moretti's War of Position

In defining modernity Moretti argues that the emergent forces of capitalism allowed for new, unfettered mobility, but also (as workers were more alienated from their labor) developed an interior restlessness characterized by dissatisfaction with the past and the present-- a new faith in the future:

Modernity as-- in Marx's words-- a 'permanent revolution' that perceives the experience piled up in tradition as useless dead-weight, and therefore can no longer feel represented by maturity, and still less by old age.  

In other words the Bildungsroman is obsessed with a youth that represents a social reaction to modernity, but-- perhaps to the comfort of the reader-- a temporally limited one.  A subject grows out of youth: youth was chosen as this symbol for its "built in limitation," its finiteness. 

Moretti argues that the Bildungsroman's two (opposed) principles are the 'classification' principle and the 'transformation' principle which operate at inversely proportionate ratios within the novel.   The classification principle establishes a definitive ending for the novel, one explicit ending. The transformation principle on the other hand establishes meaning in its open-ended process, not a progressively linked series of events to some appropriate (and arguably meaningless) end.  Moretti argues that the two principles express different reactions to modernity (and later argues that the Bildungsroman form is "far from innocent" in helping to ideologically dominate societies into the values of a bourgeois modernity).  The classification principle drives a young hero's "stable and final identity" within modernity (that is, finding meaning in maturity), while a novel where the transformation principle dominates the hero scoffs at such finality that would aim to rob youth of its meaning.  Where an author uses one rhetorical principle more than another can help describe different values, if not opposite attitudes towards modernity.  In the Bildungsroman novel however, these two principles are not at war.  Moretti argues that the Bildungsroman succeeds where other novelistic forms could not by establishing a thematic compromise between these two principles.  The Bildungsroman novel itself is an arena where oppositional values in modern society symbolically compromise with one another: 

...Freedom and happiness, identity and change, security and metamorphoses: although antagonistic, they are all equally important for modern Western mentality.  Our world calls for their coexistence...

The Bildungsroman novel, just as modern society itself, does not seek to answer these contradictions, but instead to "learn to live with it, and even transform it into a tool for [its] survival."  Moretti states that the success of the Bildungsroman tells us that the social values of modern society are not "intolerant, normative, monologic, to be wholly submitted to or rejected... they are pliant and precarious, 'weak,' and 'impure.'"  That just as modern society, the Bildungsroman promotes modern socialization through the "interiorization of contradiction."  We internalize in our individual worlds enormous contradictory forces and call them a personality, or subjectivity, or as the novel also suggests: normality.   The novel creates the middle-of-the-road everyday life in modern society and its "ordinary administration"-- a look at normality from the inside: "an internally articulated, interesting and lively normality..."  

Moretti's discussion of normality and "crisis and genesis" is his most convincing.  He begins: 

Normality as 'negation', as Foucault has shown, is the product of a double threat: the crisis of a socio-cultural order, and the violent reorganization power.  Its time is that of crisis and genesis.  

Moretti continues on to argue that the novel attempts to create an interiority of personal attitudes and of "lived experience and individual growth" so as to exclude "by definition both the crisis and genesis of a culture."  The novel evades such crisis and genesis (such societally and individually determining "moments of truth") in order to establish a compromise, the compromise of the modern social order.  This evasion suggests that the novel is a weak form, but Moretti says it's also our (individual and societal) weakness: "its contradictory, hybrid and compromising nature."   The way the novel evades is the way we evade.  Here Moretti moves to his beautiful conclusion to this first section: 

The point is that such features are also intrinsic to that way of existence-- everyday, normal, half-unaware and decidedly unheroic-- that Western culture has tried incessantly to protect and expand, and has endowed with an ever-growing significance: till it has entrusted to it what we keep calling, for lack of anything better, the 'meaning of life'.  And as few things have helped shape this value as much as our novelistic tradition, then the novel's weakness should strike us perhaps as being far from innocent.  

He then goes to argue in "The Comfort of Civilization" that the primary conflict within modern bourgeois civilization is that between self-determination and socialization (or in the novel, transformation and classification).  Socialization, Moretti states, is submission to not only a legalized domination, but a domination that is ideologically legitimized-- that is, we internalize the values of society and are convinced to believe that those values are in fact ours.  And so we learn to consent.  (This is basically an explanation of Antonio Gramsci's concept of "war of position.")  Moretti goes on to say that where the Bildungsroman succeeds and is meaningful is in its ability to convince the reader that "there is no conflict between individuality and socialization, autonomy and normality, interiority and objectification."  It creates a compromise.  Moretti doesn't explicitly state who he thinks this compromise benefits, but he certainly suggests that it functions to privilege class domination by the bourgeois.  Insomuch that we're convinced that this compromise exists societally, it is played out in the symbolic expression, the "cultural mechanism" of the novel-- that is, the novel creates a normal state out of accepting the compromise between classification and transformation.     

ind. vs. community

"The epic hero is, strictly speaking, never an individual. It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristics of the epic is the fact that it's theme is not a personal destiny of a community. And rightly so, for the completeness, the roundness of the value system, which determines the epic cosmos creates a whole which is too organic for any part of it to become so enclosed within itself, so dependent upon itself, as to find itself an interiority..." (pg. 66)

While reading Lukacs, the question of individuality versus the collective made me pause at this quote (above). If the soul of an individual is determined and always seeking adventure, then the the epic is the literary representation of such a search for wholeness, yet Lukacs here indicates that the individual, in the epic, is not an individual, but a representative of a larger community, which is "an organic-and therefore intrinsically meaningful-concrete totality" (67). Does this mean that the community defines itself by it's individual parts, or by the homogenous mixture that is the collective strive for wholeness? If an individual is searching for interiority, how does this relate to the connectedness and "otherness" of the soul that is essential to the exteriority that is represented by the estrangement of the epic's hero to the world in relation to the community as a whole? Am I completely off on this?

Lukacs: the strive for perfection

What is it that distinguishes the Greek world from the modern world?

After a critical reading of the Lukacs article I have come up on several claims that might dabble in the implied meaning of several of Lukacs' claims.

-He distinguishes two different societies (modern vs. Greek) in pointing out the similarities in order to show the differences and vice versa.

-A major link that also separates the two worlds is the Question and Answer format that both schools of thought use as a way of achieving the ultimate goal of "perfection"

-The difference between the way in which this method of reasoning and observation is used is:

In Greek culture- The answer always precedes the question (therefore to the Greeks, they

are always "perfect" in their observations)

In modern society- We tend to reverse the order and ask questions only to provide the

answers thereafter (making it almost impossible in our minds to achieve natural "perfection"

-Lukacs goes on to describe the fact that because history plays such a big part in the way we interpret current and past events, there is an even smaller chance of us achieving this "perfection" of thought and concepts because history itself is false.

"This exaggeration of the substantiality of art is bound to weigh too heavily upon its

forms: they have to produce out of themselves all that was once simply accepted as

given..." (pg 38)

-This example of art ties into his overall message of historical falseness and questioning what was at times "unquestionable" and no longer true according to nature.

::Welcome::

This is the space in which those who are responsible for the discussion section on the Lukacs and Moretti will post thought provoking questions (hopefully) to which the rest of the community of Rhetoric 127 will respond (hopefully).

Any questions?