In the text The Ideology of Modernism, George Lukács proposes a dialectic examination of the core difference between ‘realist’ and ‘modernist’ literature. His method aims at a scrutiny of the ‘ideological basis of these trends’ pointing towards an appreciation of the artist’s weltanschauung. That is to say, in a given piece of work, Lukács is interested in the writer’s view of the world and whether this writer has managed to problematise his subject-matter on the way to a materialistic critique. What matters to him is how the artist may be contributing to an anthropological evolution. However, beyond an engaged attitude, it seems he is also seeking a certain perspective to literature, in order to match his Platonic predilections.
As a result, special treatment is given to the realist school of writing, for it has the preferred style to the subject-matter. According to the philosopher, a realist piece of writing is mainly concerned with the external world; it focuses on concrete reality and displays a ‘hierarchy of significance’, well rooted in historical time and in social environment. On the other hand there is the theory and practice of modernism, placing solitariness as the central human condition, failing to present a clear definition of the plot (lack of perspective), and alienating History from its representation. In short, realist and modernist schools are described respectively as: ‘dynamic and developmental on the one hand, static and sensational on the other’.
Lukács’ argument orbits around the realisation of ‘potentiality’, a philosophical term meaning roughly: ‘the possibilities in a man’s mind’. The recognition and eventual practise of a potentiality in a work of art, supposedly explains the superiority of the realist school in detriment of the modernist school. The examples used to illustrate the ‘good’ (concrete) and the ‘bad’ (abstract) use of potentiality are, in that order, Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939) and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Drawing upon a Hegelian concept, Lukács states:
“Abstract potentiality belongs to the realm of subjectivity; whereas concrete potentiality is concerned with the dialectic between the individual’s subjectivity and the objective reality. The literary presentation of the latter thus implies a description of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world.”
Rather than linear, as it is commonly asserted, Lukács view of the world is dialectic. Although it is right to say his ideas aim at a development of history, it also needs to be said that his weltanschauung is not concerned with a 'photographic' representation of reality; a rendering of external appearances, for no work of art can accurately represent reality. He is rather trying to apprehend inner contradictions, which are expressed in class struggle. However, in his intend for Platonic evolution, Lukács ends up offering a limited synthesis that can not account for every literary piece:
“Only in the interaction of character and environment can the concrete potentiality of a particular individual be singled out from the ´bad infinity` of purely abstract potentialities, and emerge as the determining potentiality of just this individual at just this phase of development. This principle alone enables the artist to distinguish concrete potentiality from a myriad abstraction”
This is then the ‘bad infinity’ Lukács identifies in Joyce’s work. Ulysses was read by him as a rejection of History and an escape to hyper-subjectivity. Lukács position, put forth in 1956, has in many aspects become unviable today. When narrative is not represented as a synthesis, his method of analysis becomes fallible. The artistic problem the philosopher was trying to work out can be put, quite simply, in terms of subjectivity and objectivity. He tries to untangle the aporia subordinating the possibilities in the mind to a resolution in the concrete world.
Lukács’ criticism has become an easy shot nowadays, but Dialectical Marxism had proven for him a durable creed, shock-proofing him against the vicissitudes, even the atrocities, of the second quarter of the last century. It also provided him with a method, he felt entitled to speak, in the name of ‘science and objective truth’, placing the burden of proof, or refutation, on the disbelievers. In addition, Marxism, as weltanschauung and method, enabled him to use his gift of human empathy (with his adaptation of Aristotelian-Hegelian ontology) without having to succumb to the psychologising tendencies. The problems with Lukács’ analysis perhaps should be seen bounded to the man’s history and the predicaments of his time. As much sympathy one should have for his work, founded on the intellectual love of mankind, the fact is, his readings of Ulysses failed to perceive nodal points of political intent; furthermore, discussions about Philosophy of History, freed from a crystallised form of representation. Modern criticism has gone beyond the idea that social critique can only take place in organic narratives.
I reckon that, for today’s reader, the political invective in Ulysses is much clearer; and it is also clearer that Joyce was a more politically-aware writer than earlier critics had thought. Ulysses provides rich material for literary analysis and many to-day critical studies (be it tied to the text or seeing beyond the words on the page) may find its dense, encyclopaedical text particularly congenial. Joyce cheekily comments: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries”.
My reading of Ulysses was much influenced by A. Cormack’s thesis I read concomitantly to the novel. He argues that a materialist historicist account of the work would be antithetical to the novel’s subject-matter. The author points out that Joyce’s modernism is not the rejection of History, as seen by Lukács, but rather ‘an attempt to reconceptualise it’. From Joyce’s point of view, the colonised voice cannot be represented by the notion of synthesis, which in Ulysses is identified with the word of the coloniser. Alternatively he presents a solution where subjectivity and objectiveness are seen aligned rather then opposed. By refusing the ‘hierarchy of significance’ Joyce moves the discussion to another ground. For him History is seen as a ‘series of modes of thought’, instead of a Platonic development.
The lack of hierarchy becomes particularly evident in the chapter Cyclops, as various levels of enunciation mingle. The misadventures of Leopold Bloom in Kiernan's pub are narrated by a third element in an episode interpolated by several voices. Despite the first person narration, collective and anonymous voices can be distinguished, emerging to form Joyce’s synchronic idea of Culture and History. Politics plays an important role in this episode, and despite the constant interpolation in style, action keeps on going, speaking against the ‘static’ evaluation. The men in Kiernan's pub discuss the role of the church in politics, the possibility of Russian tyranny, the arguments between pro-Britons and pro-Irish factions. Drink after drink is consumed as the men reflect on the politics of Ireland in the present and the past. Like the Cyclopes in the Odyssey, these men are lazy creatures. Instead of attempting to support and push their views, they would rather spend their time at the tavern. Bloom is the only man who differs from this crowd, clashing his liberal views to confront the conservative beliefs of the men in the pub. Bloom proclaims his opinions and is constantly arguing to support them. But he is made the underdog, as the other men in the pub ignore his arguments.
As a result, special treatment is given to the realist school of writing, for it has the preferred style to the subject-matter. According to the philosopher, a realist piece of writing is mainly concerned with the external world; it focuses on concrete reality and displays a ‘hierarchy of significance’, well rooted in historical time and in social environment. On the other hand there is the theory and practice of modernism, placing solitariness as the central human condition, failing to present a clear definition of the plot (lack of perspective), and alienating History from its representation. In short, realist and modernist schools are described respectively as: ‘dynamic and developmental on the one hand, static and sensational on the other’.
Lukács’ argument orbits around the realisation of ‘potentiality’, a philosophical term meaning roughly: ‘the possibilities in a man’s mind’. The recognition and eventual practise of a potentiality in a work of art, supposedly explains the superiority of the realist school in detriment of the modernist school. The examples used to illustrate the ‘good’ (concrete) and the ‘bad’ (abstract) use of potentiality are, in that order, Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939) and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Drawing upon a Hegelian concept, Lukács states:
“Abstract potentiality belongs to the realm of subjectivity; whereas concrete potentiality is concerned with the dialectic between the individual’s subjectivity and the objective reality. The literary presentation of the latter thus implies a description of actual persons inhabiting a palpable, identifiable world.”
Rather than linear, as it is commonly asserted, Lukács view of the world is dialectic. Although it is right to say his ideas aim at a development of history, it also needs to be said that his weltanschauung is not concerned with a 'photographic' representation of reality; a rendering of external appearances, for no work of art can accurately represent reality. He is rather trying to apprehend inner contradictions, which are expressed in class struggle. However, in his intend for Platonic evolution, Lukács ends up offering a limited synthesis that can not account for every literary piece:
“Only in the interaction of character and environment can the concrete potentiality of a particular individual be singled out from the ´bad infinity` of purely abstract potentialities, and emerge as the determining potentiality of just this individual at just this phase of development. This principle alone enables the artist to distinguish concrete potentiality from a myriad abstraction”
This is then the ‘bad infinity’ Lukács identifies in Joyce’s work. Ulysses was read by him as a rejection of History and an escape to hyper-subjectivity. Lukács position, put forth in 1956, has in many aspects become unviable today. When narrative is not represented as a synthesis, his method of analysis becomes fallible. The artistic problem the philosopher was trying to work out can be put, quite simply, in terms of subjectivity and objectivity. He tries to untangle the aporia subordinating the possibilities in the mind to a resolution in the concrete world.
Lukács’ criticism has become an easy shot nowadays, but Dialectical Marxism had proven for him a durable creed, shock-proofing him against the vicissitudes, even the atrocities, of the second quarter of the last century. It also provided him with a method, he felt entitled to speak, in the name of ‘science and objective truth’, placing the burden of proof, or refutation, on the disbelievers. In addition, Marxism, as weltanschauung and method, enabled him to use his gift of human empathy (with his adaptation of Aristotelian-Hegelian ontology) without having to succumb to the psychologising tendencies. The problems with Lukács’ analysis perhaps should be seen bounded to the man’s history and the predicaments of his time. As much sympathy one should have for his work, founded on the intellectual love of mankind, the fact is, his readings of Ulysses failed to perceive nodal points of political intent; furthermore, discussions about Philosophy of History, freed from a crystallised form of representation. Modern criticism has gone beyond the idea that social critique can only take place in organic narratives.
I reckon that, for today’s reader, the political invective in Ulysses is much clearer; and it is also clearer that Joyce was a more politically-aware writer than earlier critics had thought. Ulysses provides rich material for literary analysis and many to-day critical studies (be it tied to the text or seeing beyond the words on the page) may find its dense, encyclopaedical text particularly congenial. Joyce cheekily comments: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries”.
My reading of Ulysses was much influenced by A. Cormack’s thesis I read concomitantly to the novel. He argues that a materialist historicist account of the work would be antithetical to the novel’s subject-matter. The author points out that Joyce’s modernism is not the rejection of History, as seen by Lukács, but rather ‘an attempt to reconceptualise it’. From Joyce’s point of view, the colonised voice cannot be represented by the notion of synthesis, which in Ulysses is identified with the word of the coloniser. Alternatively he presents a solution where subjectivity and objectiveness are seen aligned rather then opposed. By refusing the ‘hierarchy of significance’ Joyce moves the discussion to another ground. For him History is seen as a ‘series of modes of thought’, instead of a Platonic development.
The lack of hierarchy becomes particularly evident in the chapter Cyclops, as various levels of enunciation mingle. The misadventures of Leopold Bloom in Kiernan's pub are narrated by a third element in an episode interpolated by several voices. Despite the first person narration, collective and anonymous voices can be distinguished, emerging to form Joyce’s synchronic idea of Culture and History. Politics plays an important role in this episode, and despite the constant interpolation in style, action keeps on going, speaking against the ‘static’ evaluation. The men in Kiernan's pub discuss the role of the church in politics, the possibility of Russian tyranny, the arguments between pro-Britons and pro-Irish factions. Drink after drink is consumed as the men reflect on the politics of Ireland in the present and the past. Like the Cyclopes in the Odyssey, these men are lazy creatures. Instead of attempting to support and push their views, they would rather spend their time at the tavern. Bloom is the only man who differs from this crowd, clashing his liberal views to confront the conservative beliefs of the men in the pub. Bloom proclaims his opinions and is constantly arguing to support them. But he is made the underdog, as the other men in the pub ignore his arguments.
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Opposing the idea of ‘static’ narrative claimed by Lukács, the climax in action can actually be summarised. Bloom says to Citizen "Your God was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like me". His factual bluntness puts him at odds with the Citizen and the rest of the pub. The men find themselves in a heated argument. Bloom exits and heads for the street. Citizen right behind him. Bloom and his colleagues speed away. Citizen throws a metal tin, barely missing Bloom's head.
Opposing the idea of ‘static’ narrative claimed by Lukács, the climax in action can actually be summarised. Bloom says to Citizen "Your God was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like me". His factual bluntness puts him at odds with the Citizen and the rest of the pub. The men find themselves in a heated argument. Bloom exits and heads for the street. Citizen right behind him. Bloom and his colleagues speed away. Citizen throws a metal tin, barely missing Bloom's head.
The materialist method is discarded in Ulysses, along with its subordination of the text to a specific form of representing history; instead Joyce approaches the theme in a way that is not ‘infected with an alienated positivism that both authors (Joyce and Yeats) identify with colonialism and tyranny’, says Cormack. Still according to Cormack we learn that in the novel, ‘rather than offering a political allegory (history) should be understood as a sort of tropological store, a range of human types, identified by their own form of languages, which are constantly being translated by new social requirements’.
That is to say in Ulysses, History can be seen manifested within language and culture, representing something that is disordered and impermanent. Joyce appears to claim that the moment of truth, originated by the dialectic process and defended by Lukács, is as much make-believe as his ironic and abstract representation. Cormack summarises the idea by saying that ‘narrative progression is abandoned as an inadequate method of perceiving the reality of the soul’. Joyce’s notion is tributary to Gianbattista Vico’s epistemology, which understands History as a circular or cyclic process, of chaotic nature, ultimately created by man’s mind (although Cormack sees it more like a palimpsest). Originated from our primal use of metaphors, History and Philology are comprehended as entwined concepts; Vico states that ‘only God can know Nature whilst men’s knowledge is limited to those words he created’.
History is seen as a dynamic process of constant revision, opened to amendments and inventiveness. Conforming to this view implies that in the text ‘everything is historical and the actual and the possible meet in the “form of forms” the artist’s word’, says Cormack. That is to say that no rank of significance should be imposed on the elements that compose the novel and no particular view should predominate on a text where the tone is: plurality. The historical aspects are solved within language and culture.
J.L. Borges statement, "that history should have copied history was already sufficiently astonishing; that history should copy literature was inconceivable", seems to endorse the idea of a general misconception of identifying the ‘objective’ with history and the ‘subjective’ with fiction. In Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, the world of forms is collapsed into that of its imitations; resulting in two stories in which different realities seem to interpenetrate each other. The reader is de-familiarised with the sense of truth whilst fact and fiction become mere ‘constructions’. This symbiotic nature suggests a cyclic pattern in the existence of humanity. Borges seems to state that we take upon previous narratives to describe present events; our stories are basically recollection of old stories we put together, like a mosaic of words. As Shakespeare fictionalizes the death of Julius Caesar; Nolan plagiarizes the plays of Shakespeare in orchestrating his plan; and finally, as the gate-keepers of history record only the superficially relevant events of a deeply-involved labyrinth of historical value. The interaction between the storytellers produces a tangled web of correspondences where truth and lies meld inextricably and the fiction of Shakespeare becomes as factually accurate or inaccurate as a history textbook. Nestor is a short episode within Ulysses, but which brings about this very debate of ‘historical truisms’ versus ‘literary constructions’, also reflecting on how history of humanity is tainted and tampered with the ideas of those who enslave their fellow man.
References to Julius Caesar and Hamlet may indicate that betrayal seems to be a present theme in the chapter. Even though Garret Deasy claims to be an authentic Irishman, he sabotages any efforts to keep Ireland from ruling itself. In his eyes Ireland seems to be better off attached to the British Empire. The second part of the chapter takes place in Deasy’s office. He is the headmaster in the school Stephen works as a teacher, and seems to be a man concerned with power and money. Perhaps he is unaware of his (self) betrayal, as he is represented as a prisoner and a fool. Mr. Deasy tries to be intellectual and hold intelligent discussions, lecturing Stephen on debt, saving money, shares his pro-British thoughts and shows his anti-Semitism. The conversation held between the schoolmaster and the teacher (and previously with Haines, in the chapter Telemachus) involves two debates which will be constantly referred to throughout the book. There is an ironical touch to the chapter, as in the Odyssey, Telemachus goes to King Nestor seeking advice and guidance; however this is not the case for their counterparts, Stephen and Garret Deasy, as the headmaster is not able to give a single piece of wise counselling to Stephen.
Bibliography:
BORGES, .L. Theme of the Traitor and the Hero. IN: Labyrinths, Penguin, London, 1964.
CORMACK, A. Yeats and Joyce: Cyclical Theories of History and the Tradition of Irish Idealism in Ulysses, A Vision and Finnegan’s Wake. PhD Thesis, UEA, 2004.
JOYCE, J. Ulysses. The Bodley Head, London, 1960.
Works consulted:
NOLAN, E. James Joyce and Nationalism. Rutledge, London, 1995.
Sites consulted:
www. athena.english.vt.edu
www.marxist.org/archive/lukacs
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