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?
Monday, September 21, 2009
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)
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I understood Lukacs to argue that in the Greek world of the epic, the community always transcended its individual parts (i.e. human beings)--that there was never a quest for individual wholeness. Lukac's totality refers to an a priori organization of a Greek world in which "nature and consequences can certainly be described, whose metaphysical significance can be interpreted and grasped but for which it will always be impossible to find a psychology" (31). The statement that Greeks gave answers before questions means they explained their surroundings rather than grappling with them, so that ontological questions wouldn't contradict existing discourse. The distance and time concepts we encounter in Anderson are not even a question--all is explained from within, sans external influences. Those who might not have considered Greece perfect, like the many slaves that built it, were without resources to voice their experience. Life in the epic is thus static despite all its adventuring, preventing the rise of unique persons, while breeding citizens of a polis.
ReplyDeleteSo the epic hero adventures not to search for his own wholeness, but to reinforce the correct totality of his community. In these adventures we don't encounter the "others" of typical literary analysis--those who are frightening because they have a recognizable piece of the "non-other" in them; instead there are sirens or indescribable barbarians--creatures that do not call into question the "perfect" Greek civilization. Indeed, epics are not equipped to discuss the human's "torment of seeking and the real danger of finding" because her soul "never stakes itself; it does not yet know that it can lose itself, it never thinks of having to look for itself" (30). Lukacs is arguing that the questions of identity in This Earth of Mankind could not have been raised in a Greek epic. Rather, the "heaviness" that comes from a world without a comforting and repressive totality, in which one actually does question its being, may only be expressed in a prose novel acquainted with "the man-made world" in which the subject is familiar with some amount of agency. The increased ability of man to alter his world, or conceive of altering it, as seen in This Earth and Noli,respectively, I imagine is particularly representative of that change.
"As for the community, it is an organic - and therefore intrinsically meaningful - concrete totality; that is why the substance of adventure in an epic is always articulated, never strictly closed...[the] way Homer's epics begin in the middle and do not finish at the end is a reflection of the truly epic mentality's total indifference to any form of architectural construction..." (67).
ReplyDeleteThe epic itself not only represents but performs the totality of the Greek community; it performs the impossibility of the epic hero to behave on a strictly individual level. As S.S. stated rather eloquently, "the community always transcended its individual parts" - a point that Heidegger might take up in his discussion of "Being-with" in a "ready-to-hand" context of involvement, which positions conscious beings in an "active" relation towards each other, a shared existence so to speak. There is no individual, acting on an individual stage. There is only the one in relation to the whole, acting or performing within the whole.