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.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
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.
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I agree very much with your application of the "transformation principle" to the Noli. The ending of the novel fits the description - "endings are instances of a narrative logic according to which a story's meaning resides precisely in the impossibility of 'fixing' it" (7). This certainly holds true to the Noli's impossible situation at its conclusion, when it seems that all is lost for the betrothed couple and the visionary revolutionaries of the Spanish Philippines. It's interesting that Moretti places on the "side of transformations...the novel of adultery" (8); this at first seems strange before Moretti asserts that such a novel becomes "the natural habitat of an existence devoted to instability" (8). I wonder if we should then view this particular type of novel as anormal or abnormally against the conventional and accepted novel that holds meaning "only in so far as it leads to a stable and 'final' identity" (8): the novel of marriage. In this view, the Noli breaks tradition - both in style and content.
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