Blast from the Past: Theory: The Novel

The Theory of the Novel

Inescapable romance, inescapable choice
Of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion....
--Wallace Stevens

Lukacs establishes the distinction between the epic and the novel in terms of the category of alienation: “The epic individual, the hero of the novel, originates in the alienation from the outside world.... The autonomy of inwardness becomes possible and necessary only when the differences between men have grown to be an unbreachable gap; when the gods have grown silent and no sacrifice or prayer is capable of loosening their tongues; when the world of action loses contact with that of the self, leaving man empty and powerless, unable to grasp the real meaning of his deeds....: when inwardness and adventure are forever distinct.” The novel is “the epic of a world from which God has departed.” The novel remains in contact with empirical reality, which is an inherent part of its own form. But it is forced to represent this reality as imperfect, as steadily striving to move beyond the fragmentariness of existence. The theme of the novel is necessarily limited to the individual, and to this individual’s frustrating experience of his own inability to acquire universal dimensions. The novel originates in the Quixotic tension between the world of romance and that of reality. This tension manifests itself as irony. The ironic language of the novel mediates between experience and desire, the ideal and the real. (Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight)

Romance

OED: (3) A fictitious narrative in prose of which the scene and incidents are very remote from ordinary life.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: The meaning of the term is obscured by the fact that in both medieval and modern times it has been used loosely. By the 13th c. any tale of adventure could be called a romance and this adventure could be chivalric or merely amorous. Although it is not confined to romance, the courtly background is indispensable. It is not a realistic background of contemporary courts but an ideal of chivalry [truth, honor, freedom, courtesy, and love service]. In the story of the quest for the grail the fulfillment sought and achieved is spiritual and physical in nature.

Northrop Frye on Romance: The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream.... The essential plot in romance is adventure.... We may call this major adventure, the element that gives literary form to the romance, the quest. The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die, and the exaltation of the hero.... A quest involving conflict assumes two main characters, a protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy. [As romance approaches myth, the hero becomes divine and the opponent demonic.] The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, old age, and death, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor, and youth. The central form of quest-romance is the dragon-killing theme exemplified in the stories of St. George and Perseus. A land ruled by a helpless old king is laid waste by a sea-monster, to whom one young person after another is offered to be devoured, until the lot falls on the king’s daughter: at that point the hero arrives, kills the dragon, marries the daughter, and succeeds to the kingdom. The messianic hero is the redeemer of society. The quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.

In romance there is frequently a point where the apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment, which we propose to call the point of epiphany. The conjunction of heaven and earth is symbolized by mountain-tops, islands, towers, ladders, or staircases. Analogous to the point of epiphany are gardens symbolizing sexual fulfillment.

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Excerpts from The Theory of the Novel by George Lukacs

On the world of the Homeric Epic

Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths.... 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.... Thus each action of the soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality... rounded because the soul rests within itself even while it acts....That is why philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determines 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. It is not the absence of suffering, not security of being, which in such an age encloses men and deeds in contours that are both joyful and severe... : it is the adequacy of the deeds to the soul’s inner demand for greatness, for unfolding, for wholeness.... Being and destiny, adventure and accomplishment, life and essence are then identical concepts.

On the Difference between the Epic and the Novel:

The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life. The given structure of the object (i.e. the search, which is only a way of expressing the subject’s recognition that neither objective life nor its relationship to the subject is spontaneously harmonious in itself) supplies an indication of the form-giving intention.... Thus the fundamental form-determining intention of the novel is objectivised as the psychology of the novel’s heroes: they are seekers. The simple fact of seeking implies that neither the goals nor the way leading to them can be directly given, or else that, if they are given in a psychologically direct and solid manner, this is not evidence of really existent relations or ethical necessities but only of a psychological fact to which nothing in the world of objects or norms need necessarily correspond. (60-61)

On the Novel and Alienation

[The novel presupposes] transcendental homelessness--the homelessness of an action in the human order of social relations, the homelessness of the soul in the ideal order of a supra-personal system of values.... When the futility of genuine and profound human aspirations, or the possibility of the ultimate nothingness of man has to be absorbed into literary form as a basic vehicular fact, then the absence of any manifest aim, the determining lack of direction of life itself as a whole, must be the basic a priori constituent.... Where no aims are directly given, the structures which the soul encounters as the arena and substratum of its activity among men lose their obvious roots in supra-personal ideal necessities, they are simply existent, perhaps powerful, perhaps frail, but they neither carry the consecration of the absolute within them nor are they the natural containers for the overflowing interiority of the soul. They form the world of convention.... It is a world that does not offer itself either as meaning to the aim-seeking subject or as matter, in sensuous immediacy, to the active subject. It is a second nature, and like nature (first nature), it is determinable only as the embodiment of recognized but senseless necessities and therefore it is incomprehensible, unknowable in its real substance. ...The second nature, the nature of man-made structures...is a complex of senses which has become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel-house of long dead interiorities.... Estrangement from nature (the first nature), the modern sentimental attitude to nature, is only a projection of man’s experience of his self-made environment as a prison instead of a parental home. (62-64).

Thus the elements of the novel are... the nostalgia of the characters for utopian perfection, a nostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be the only true reality... the existence of social structures based only upon their factual presence and their sheer ability to continue... finally, the form-giving intention which, instead of surmounting the distance between these two abstract groups of elements, allows it to subsist... renders it sensuous as the lived experience of the novel’s characters... and so turns it into an instrument of composition. (70-71)

On Irony and the Novel

The self-recognition... of subjectivity was called irony by the first theoreticians of the novel, the aesthetic philosophers of early Romanticism. As a formal constituent of the novel form this signifies an interior diversion of the normatively creative subject into a subjectivity as interiority, which opposes power complexes that are alien to it and which strives to imprint the contents of its longing upon the alien world, and a subjectivity which sees through the abstract and, therefore, limited nature of the mutually alien worlds of subject and object, understanding these worlds by seeing their limitations as necessary conditions of their existence and, by thus seeing through them, allows the duality of the world to subsist. [The first form of subjectivity is that of the protagonist and the second that of the narrator or of the novel as a whole.]

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. ...The central character of a biography is significant only by his relationship to a world of ideal that stands above him.

The contingent world and the problematic individual are realities which mutually determine one another. If the individual is unproblematic [as in epic], then his aims are given to him with immediate obviousness, and the realization of the world constructed by these given aims may involve hindrances and difficulties but never any serious threat to his interior life. Such a threat arises only when the outside world is no longer adapted to the individual’s ideas and the ideas become subjective facts--ideals--in his soul. The positing of ideas as unrealisable and, in the empirical sense, as unreal, i.e. their transformation into ideals, destroys the immediate problem-free organic nature of the individual. Individuality then becomes an aim unto itself because it finds within itself everything that is essential to it and that make its life autonomous--even if what if finds can never be a firm possession or the basis of its life, but is an object of search. (78)

... the unbridgeable chasm between the reality that is and the ideal that should be must represent the essence of the outside world.... in the outside world the gap between reality and the ideal becomes apparent only by the absence of the ideal, in the immanent self-criticism of mere reality caused by that absence.... This self-destruction of reality, which, as given, is of an entirely intellectual dialectical character and is not immediately evident in a poetic and sensuous way, appears in two different forms. First, as disharmony between the interiority of the individual and the substratum of his actions.... Second, as the inability of the outside world, which is a stranger to ideals and an enemy to interiority, to achieve real completeness.... The incapacity of ideas to penetrate reality makes reality heterogeneous and discrete.

The inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself, the road from dull captivity within a merely present reality... towards self-recognition. After such self-recognition has been attained, the ideal thus formed irradiates the individual’s life as its immanent meaning.... The immanence of meaning which the form of the novel requires lies in the hero’s finding out through experience that a mere glimpse of meaning is the highest that life has to offer.

[The author of the novel] has lost the poet’s radiant youthful faith ‘that destiny and soul are twin names for a single concept’ (Novalis); and the deeper and more painful his need to set this most essential creed of all literature against life, the more deeply and painfully he must learn that it is only a demand and not an effective reality. This insight, this irony, is directed both at his heroes, who, in their poetically necessary youthfulness, are destroyed by trying to turn his faith into reality, and against his own wisdom, which has been forced to see the uselessness of the struggle and the final victory of reality. Indeed, the irony is a double one in both directions. It extends not only to the profound hopelessness of the struggle but also to the still more profound hopelessness of its abandonment--the pitiful failure of the intention to adapt to a world which is a stranger to ideals, to abandon the unreal ideality of the soul for the sake of achieving mastery over reality. And whilst irony depicts reality as victorious, it reveals not only that reality is as nothing in face of its defeated opponent, not only that the victory of reality can never be a final one, that it will always, again and again, be challenged by new rebellions of the idea.... (85-86)

The melancholy of the adult state arises from our dual, conflicting experience that, on the one hand, our absolute, youthful confidence in an inner voice has diminished or died, and, on the other hand, that the outside world to which we now devote ourselves in our desire to learn its ways and dominate it will never speak to us in a voice that will clearly tell us our way and determine our goal. The heroes of youth are guided by the gods: whether what awaits them at the end of the road are the embers of annihilation or the joys of success, or both at once, they never walk alone, they are always led. (86)

The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God. ... the objectivity of the novel is the mature man’s knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality. ...Irony sees where God is to be found in a world abandoned by God; irony sees the lost utopian home of the idea that has become an ideal... irony has to seek the only world that is adequate to it along the via dolorosa [the way of sadness] of interiority, but is doomed to never find it there.... Irony, the self-surmounting of a subjectivity that has gone as far as it was possible to go, is the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God. (92-93)

Don Quixote is the first great battle of interiority against the prosaic vulgarity of outward life, and the only battle in which interiority succeeded, not only to emerge unblemished from the fray, but even to transmit some of the radiance of its triumphant, though admittedly self-ironising, poetry to its victorious opponent. (104)

[Romance is the literary expression of the desire for a world in which life is radiant with meaning, fresh, alive, beautiful, intense, fulfilled, significant. In romance the human is infused with the heightened qualities of the divine. The gods support human longings, which thereby possess a metaphysical ground, an absolute reality. Nothing is accidental or random. Death and destruction affirm the beauty and meaning of what they destroy.]