Thursday, January 15, 2009

Alryyes/Lukács, 12/2: Meeting minutes

On Tuesday, December 2, we met to discuss excerpts from Georg Lukács' Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel. Many thanks to Professor Ala Alryyes for leading our discussion, and to Glyn Salton-Cox for taking minutes! Participants should e-mail AG or CG if something has been lost in the passage from live voice to HTML. And all are welcome to comment. Follow the link to the full post for the minutes.

Our spring schedule will be forthcoming shortly--check back for updates.



Leader: Ala Alryyes
Present: Misha Avrekh, Katerina Clark, Sam Cross, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Heather Klemann, Sebastian Lecourt, Jessica Pressman, Glyn Salton-Cox, Rania El Shabassy, Johsua Sorley.

Ala Alryyes, introduction: Interested in seeing how Scott's Waverley bares the devices of literary theory, rather than the other way around. In Theory, Lukács judges Scott's novels as inwardly empty and lacking in ideas. In Historical Novel Lukács celebrates Scott for inventing a novel form in which history can be represented.

Major points of comparison, Theory vs. Historical Novel: Time vs. History; Epic hero vs. Peripheral characters; Romanticism favored vs. Romanticism denigrated.

In Theory, GL follows late-19th century German Hellenism on Greek culture: "The Greeks knew no riddles"; their world integrated art and civilization. Our richer, more complex world, by contrast, lacks this capacity for totalization. GL has an essentially formalist concept of totality: nothing points outside it. In epic, GL sees no separation between adventure and accomplishment; all experience is meaningful. In the novel, the quest is for a lost totality, given the divorce between interiority and the adventure in the external world. "The novel is the epic of a world abandoned by God." GL's typology of the novel: two kinds, those of abstract idealism and Romantic disillusionment. In the former, the hero's soul is narrower than the world from which it is isolated; in the latter, the hero's soul is too large for the world. Don Quixote is the only satisfactory abstract-idealist novel in GL's view, by virtue of its parody; his examples of the Romantically disillusioned novel include Oblomov and Sentimental Education.

In Historical Novel, the figure of the hero is now a middling sort, anxious, passive; he recedes in favor of the historical forces which, in the view of the later Lukács, drive history.

Heather Klemann: Can you elaborate on the time/history distinction?

Josh Sorley: Time is internal, history external.

AA: Time is associated with hope and memory, with the hope for the integration of inner life and outer events.

Andrew Goldstone: in Theory's novel of disillusionment, in fact everything is integrated by the flux of time---even though GL characterizes it as fragmented by the break between the hero's consciousness and the world.

AA: As in Proust.

AA: In Theory GL reduces all novels to Bildungsromane. That is why Scott's historical romance is condemned: not enough interiority.

HK: I'm struck by the idea of Waverley baring theory's devices rather than vice versa. Can we do the same thing with Don Quixote? Is it really a novel of abstract idealism? Isn't Sancho Panza already commenting on this idea?

AA: GL has the habit of making typologies into which only one novel fits; everything else resembles a vulgarization. Is there anything about peripheral characters in Theory?

AG: In these sessions we always try to raise the So-What question. Can we seriously contemplate using or applying Lukács' ideas, given the huge distortions that support his generalizations and the dubious status of his orthodox-Marxist theory of history?

AA: GL is useful because he offers ways of linking different scales of reading. In literary criticism we face the problem of losing ourselves in the particular. Other fields have an easier time linking up their specialized studies with large questions of general interest. GL gives a way into such larger questions. And, in fact, the reading of Waverley is still good.

I would also see History and Class Consciousness as a link between Theory and Historical Novel: there, he says: "The fragmentation of the object of production is a fragmentation of time." Thus the historical-materialist view leads back to the ideas about time and fragmentation in Theory (!).

HK: GL is important for the study of the eighteenth-century novel.

Glyn Salton-Cox: Even the so-called "Stalinist" GL of the 30s is important today. Despite, or indeed because of, the dogmatic nature of GL's defense of realism, these readings are important as a corrective to the hegemony of modernism in the study of twentieth-century literature which is prevalent in the academy today.

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