History of Novel, was Re: Nobel Prize?

["Umberto Rossi" <urossi@programatic.it>]

> Sorry, but I just can't see what Hegel has to do with the Flaubert-Joyce
> scheme. Could you be more explicit, please?

Trying to synthesize here is not easy, but I'll try.

Basically Hegel's philosophy of history is a great attempt to deal with
change.  Historical change;  above all, historical-philosphical
change (geschichtsphilosophisch).  Every age has its own forms, its
own categories, its own artistic/literary genres, etc.  That's what
basically the Phenomenologie des Geistes is about.

Usually we associate this effort with what today is considered a
major intellectual flaw.  With this I do not want to say that Hegel
was wrong.  Philosophers of that size usually manage to be right even
when--especially when--they're wrong.  That is a way to say that
their errors can be more interesting than lesser philosopher's
truths.  An remember, I'm no Hegel specialist and have studied his
works the way a curious literary scholar does:  un-systematically.

The flaw is determinism.  Once Hegel individuates the forces which
drive human history (on multiple levels) you have the so-called
Stufengang:  history becomes much like a gigantic Via Crucis where
some positions must be reached before you (an humanity) can pass to
the following step.  Hegel-oriented literary histories are animated
by the same determinism.  They tell you that there is a zeitgeist,
that the authors who, in a given age, conform to that zeitgeist
(which is a stage in the historical-philosophical evolution of a
genre or a whole literature) "belong to their time" while the others
are misfits or failures, and then you have the sequence of ages,
rationalism/enlightenment, romanticism, realism/naturalism,
modernism, und so weiter.

If Juenger is criticized for his not being a modernist writer à la
Joyce, you accept a Hegelian view of history--or better, the hegelian
view of history which is taught in out licei, and which was taught to
me too.  I wonder if that is what Hegel really meant in his
Phenomenologie (modern readings of Hegel, like those of Derrida, tell
us that things are more complicated than that);  surely determinism
lurks behind the idea of avantgarde/modernism.

It seems that every age (it seems if you accept this weltanschauung)
has to achieve a certain result, so that you (we, Mankind) can pass
to the next stage.  After Joyce, who knows, Pynchon, and so on.
"Juenger does not write like that?  Ok, he can be dumped in the
junkyard of history".

My vision of history (and literary history) is quite different.
History jumps from one stage to another (see Japan).  Sometime it
gets back.  It seems to be more a territory than a Stufengang.  So
I'm not sure that you can measure the validity of writers measuring
their respect of the great timetable of literary history.  In history
you do not only have the chain of causes and effects, there is also
room for case and for flashbacks.  And the succession of historical
moments is not so logical and determined.

(one of the great critics of the Hegelian conception of history is
Walter Benjamin;  see his Thesis on the Philosophy of History--and I
suspect that another--covert--critic is Jouenger himself)

Alles klar?  Probably not, but you see this is not an easy topic.

Umberto Rossi

"A commission is appointed
To confer with a Volscian commission
About perpetual peace"--and nobody told me!