Problems of historical understanding in the Modern Novel

334 Pages·1979·16.861 MB·English

by  S Andrew Bowie

Problems of Historical Understanding in the Modern Novel
Dissertation for the degree of Ph.D.
at the University of East Anglia, 1979
Submitted by Andrew S. Bowie
Berlin, October, 1979
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To all those who helped, particularly: my parents, Corinna
Stupka, Thomas Elsasser, Peter Steiger, Malcolm Bowie,
Peter Bayley, and the members of the Blue Bayou Jazz
Band.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale,
and Narx' s in Frankreich and
Di~~lassenkampfe
Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte:
Realism. p. 26-63
Contradic~ory
Chapter Two: 'Realism' and Totality. p. 64- 135
Chapter Three: Abstraction, Symbol, and Mass
History: Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg-. p. 136-· 99
Chapter Four: The Limits of
Abstrac~ion:
Hermann Broch' s Die Schlaf\",andler. p. 191-235
Chapter Five: A Precarious Synthesis:
Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. p. 236-79
Conclusion p. 280-317
Bibliography p.318--31
Footnotes ( ) are given at the end of the respective
chapters.
1 •
Introduction
to·
The present work is an attempt sugge$t ways in which
certain large-scale novels involving major events of
mo4ern European histori contribute to, or fail to contribute
to, an understanding of that history. As such, it can be
understood as being a, largely implicit, critique of those
approaches to literature which tend to ignore historical
interpretation. This is in many ways determined by the
material itself: an examination of novels -whose content
is so substantially related to the :field of historical
discourse can hardly limit itself to merely formal consider
ations. It will, though, become clear that precisely such
material is able to reveal a great deal about the novel
form. As Adorno states in the Asthetische Theorie, 'Die
ungolosten Antagonismen der Realitat kehren wieder in den
KUl1stwerken als die immanenten Probleme ihrer Form.'(l)
The novels in question can contribute to an awareness of
novel form by their being near to other forms of discourse,
most evidently the philosophy of history and narrative
history. The moments at which a form becomes problematic
show up its nature most clearly. This, of course, poses the
question of the point at which a problematic text ceases
to belong to the genre. A priori genre descriptions seem
to me generally unproductive. The main texts irl the present
examination: L'Education sentimentale, La D~b~cle, Les
per
Schlaftiandler, and.: Doktor
2'hi~aul~, Zauberberg,~··Die
Faustus all sustain the .representationofa-certain fictional
figure or fictional figures throughout a narrative which
givos an image of a p8.rticular socio-historical l"J'orld.
Jonathan Culler states in Structuralist Poetics that
'the basic convention which governs the novel - and which,
a fortiori, governs those novels which set out to violate
it - is our expectation that the novel will produce a world.' (2)
In the conclusion the work of Alexander Kluge will be
considered: none of his works could be considered a novel.
Kluge's montage does not sustain characters
~cchnique
2.
throughout the whole text, though it does give an image
of a socio-historical world which is not discursive in
the manner of narrative history or sociological description.
In this sense the texts are all 'fictional',in that
they involve 'possible historical fragments of the actual
world.'(J) To b~gin with it seems reasonable to take a
'realist' view of fictional characters and events in a text,
whereby they are seen as being made up of aspects derived
from actual history., How they are derived· can be specified
in the particular case and the conception can be revised
in terms of this. In the case of Faustus, for
D(~ktor
example, thG real history of modern music is obliterated
by the biography of-,the central figure; the b1.ography,
though, is made up of transformed structural elements of
that history. of the texts to be dealt with here can
~ost
be seen in similar terms. It should, be clear that
thu~
literary fiction cannot straightforwardly be separated from
historical fact, with the latter being true and the f'ormer
(4).
false A major aspect of the present study is to
suggest what fictional forms' particular contribution
to historical understanding is. If one upheld the simple
fact/fiction distinction the answer would be: not very much.
The further determination of what I understand by a 'novel'
will, I hope, be done by the concrete analyses of the texts.
By this-I do not intend to suggest that the question is
an empirical one, rather that definitions of a genre are
best arrivod at by contact with the object. The novel
is not an a priori entity: it arises at a particular stage
:1.n history arid is continually redefined by historical
dovelop::nents. One could not identify A la recherche du
te~~_~r~~ as a novel on the basis of criteria derived from
Robinson Crusoe.
Whilst, as will be seen, it is possible for the novel
to separate its characters more and more from the movement
of an objectified socio-historical world, the initial
3.
approach must be in terms of how levels of fiction
th~
and history relate, how they are integrated by the farm.
Eberhard Lammert suggests an initial contradiction in
an importru~t essay: the contradiction arises from the
demands of certain Romantic theories of- the novel (here
that of Schelling) but has mor-e general import:
'die eigenschopferische Phantasie_ muss notwendig
in Spannung geraten zu dem Verbinilichkeitsanspruch
einer Romangeachichte, die nicht weniger ala "ein
Spiegel des allgemeinen Verlaufs menschlicher Din~e
a
und also nicht bloss ein partielles
d~Lebens,
Sittengem~lde" sein soll.'(5)
This takes one nearer to the basic starting point of the
analysis. Fredric Jameson draws the fundamental consequence
fron! the contradiction suggested in the Romantic theory
when he refers to Regal's view of art in bourgeois society:
'Regel .•• distinguishes the peculiarity of
struct~ral
capitalism in terms of the dilemma it poses as a
potential content for the work of art; to constitute
the collective totality which fails to have any
existential equivalent in individual experience, to
determine individual reality while remaining structural
ly inaccessible to categories of the latter's
understanding or image-making power.'(6)
It is this conception of modern historical understanding
and literature that is ultimately a'; issue in the following.
The novels I have chosen to look at in detail all involve,
in some way or other, mass-historical change on an ever
expanding scale, whether it be the 1848 Revolution in Paris,
the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, the First
World War, or Nazism and the Second World War. It is, then,
perhaps more accurate to see the issue in terms of modern
mass-society, rather than simply 'capitalism', though
a major component is, as I shall try to show, dependent
upon the development of capital and the concomitant disasters
within bourgeois society. The formulation of the issue in
these terms makes it clear that a particular approach to
history and li-terary form is intended. In the rest of the
Introduction I want to try to justify this approach, as well
as explain the methodological assumptions that have determined
4.
the manner of the analysis.
This will entail a degree of abstract theorising which
until recently would have been unacceptable in ~litgraFY
thesis in England. For those familiar with the theoretical
areas in question it will pose no major problems. For those
unfamiliar, certain aspects may well,in this more abstract
form, be fairly impenetrable. In the rest of the" thesis,
however, the categories introduced here will be more
directly related to empirical material, thereby, I hope,
helping to set up a process of mutual clarification. To have
attempted a complete explanation of the method starting from
scratch would both have been too large an undertaking and,
for many readers, a tedious repetition of what they already
know. The present approach seemed the best compromise.
The term 'mass-history', which above, has to be
was.u~ed
used carefully, as Max Horkheimer suggests:
'Es gibt weder eine Massenseele noch ein Massen
bewusstsein. Der Begriff der Masse im vulgaren Sinne
scheint aus der Beobachtung von Menschenansammlungen
bei aufregenden Ereignissen gcbildet zu seine Mogen
die Menschen als Teile solcher zufalligen Gruppen
auf eine charakteristische Weise reagieren, so ist
das Verstandnis hierftir in der Psyche der sie bildenden
oinzelnen Glieder zu suchen, :ie bei jedem freilich
durch das Schicksal seiner Gruppe in der Gesellschaft
'-
bestimmt ist.'(7)
The latter part of the statement presents the central
dialectic involved in a consideration o£ large-scale modern
history in the novel. Alfred Schmidt expands the point
in a manner related to Jameson's view of Hegel:
'Hegels Philosophie - darin folgt ihr die Kritische
Theorie - verandert die Rolle psychologischer Tatbestande
beim Studium der Geschichte. Wohl haben wir auszugehea
von den unmittelbaren Interessen, Leidenschaften
und Trieben der Individuen. Aber durch sie hindurch
verwirklicht sich die objektive Tatigkeit des All-
geme inen ... (8)
t
Critical Theory, the theory of the Frankfurt School, will
playa central role in"my analysis, for the simplp reason
that I consider it to be the most profound attempt to
come to terms with modernhistory and aesthetics. Schmidt
5.
gives the following historical characterisation of Critical
Theory, which suggests that its origins have much to do
with the most extreme manifestation of mass-history:
'Die Kritische Theorio war eine spezifische,
unter den unwiederholbaren Bedingungen der dreissiger
Jahre entstandene Rezeption des Marxismus ... '
He cites Oskar Negt:
'''Die 'Kritische Theorie' ist die Form der marxistischen
Theorie, die den Faschismus, den hochzivilisierten
Riickfall in die Barb~rei, zu ihrem bcstimmenden
Erfahrungsgehalt hat~'(9)
If one accepts the premise that modern history's radically
problematic relation to the individ'.:ctl reaches a culmination
in Fascism, such a theory will be of evident importance in
the consideration of literary issues which relate to such
a phenomenon. Of the novelsto be looked at only two deal
directly with Fascism itself. the other novels
However~
deal with events which playa significant role in its
devekpment. Critical Theory moves from the difficulty of
accounting for Fascism in individualist terms to a consider
ation of Marxian and other approaches based upon the analysis
of classes and structures in modern capitalist society.
The continuity of many of these structures, most evidently
those based on commodity exchange, need for a
revea~the
theory which can take into account both the continuity of
Fascism with preceding history and its specificity. An
approach to literary texts must do something similar,
whilst at the srune doing justice to the literary
t~me for~
which mediates the historical material in question.
How, then, can one develop a mode of analysis in relation
to the novel dealing major crises of European society,
~ith
taking into account the concern of the novel with fictional
individuals as well as the 'allgemeiner Verlauf menschlicher
Dinge'? The general answer seems to me to lie in an
analysis of the way textual levels are constituted and of
how they interact. Such an amiysis i.nvolves both the:-
usual consideration of narrati. ve and the, .drawing of
epistemological consequences from this consideration.
6.
Although, by virtue of its use of epistemological categories,
it is nearer to more discursive modes, such an approach
can also reconstruct what historical aspects are sedimented
in the particular narrative form. The failure to attempt
such historical analysis in a convincing manner seems to
me to disqualify the kind of Structuralisw proposed by
Barthes and others as a mode of textual analysis. Thus
when Culler (admi tted,ly a somewhat sceptical Structuralist)
states:
'The attempt to understand how we:make sense of' a text
leads one to think of literature not as representation
or communication but as a series of forms which
comply with and resist the production of meaning.
Structural analysis does not move towards a meaning
or discover the secret of a text. The work, as
Barthes says, is like an onion, tta construction of
layers (or levels, or systems) whose body contains,
finally no heart, no kernel, no secret, no irreducible
~rinciple, nothing except the infinity of its own
envelopes - which envelop nothing other than the
unity of its own surfaces."' Cl0}-- 7·,.- -.-~ 2.."-.-" ••
it has to be objected that, whilst the work should not be
presumed to have an irreducible principle - the consequences
for criticism would be a disastrous dogmatism - the layers
of Barthes' onion are humanly produced layers, produced
at a particular historical stage, and, as such, they
relate to other human products of that historical stage.
As Jameson states:
!the essential characteristic of literary raw
material or latent content is precisely that it
never really is initially formless, never (unlike
the unshaped substances of the other arts) initially
contingent, but is already meaningful from the outset,
being neither more nor less than the very components
of our concrete social life itself: words, thoughts,
objects, desires, people, places, activities '. The
work of art does not confer meanings on these
elements, but rather transforms their initial meanings
into some new and heightened construction of meaning;
for that v~ry reason neither the creation nor the
interpretation of the work can ever be an arbitrary
pro c e s s .' (1 1 )
Adorno draws a further consequence of such a position:
7.
'Was Geschichte ist an den Werken, ist nicht gemacht,
und Geschichte erst befreit es von blosser Setzung
oder Herstellung: der Wahrheitsgehalt ist nicht ausser
der Geschichte,sondern deren Kristallisation in
den Werken.' (12) .
In the chapter to follow, on Flaubert's L'Education
sentimentale, I shall try to concretise the fundamental
dif€erence of the two approaches. It is undeniable that
Structuralist interpretations have ~nterestingly re-opened
the case on many authors. They tend, though, not to give
sufficient foundation to their method: the onion image
implies infin~te regress. This regress can best be prevented
by anchoring the analysis of the structural levels of a text
in an historical context, by taking into account that in
language systems:
'sind individuelles und gesellschaftliches Bewusstsein
zusammengeschlossen.(lJ) (My emphasis.)
It is this point which seems to me to constitute the best
basis for historical criticism of literary texts.
Literary language is no doubt, at least since the beginning
of the bourgeois world, distinguished by its individuality,
by its difference from other institutionalised forms of
discourse. A major aspect of the importance of literary
works, though, is dependent upon the way this individualised
use of language mediates collective historical significance.
This is evident if one considers question of the
~he
continuing importance of literary texts beyond their own
age, or even within tpeir own age. In the case of the novel
dealing with the major crises of modern European history -
and it should be emphasised that the argument is concentrated
on this topic, not a more general theory): one must find
appropriate ways of analysing how the characteristics of the
form relate to the mass-historical issues involved. This
entails a conception of novel-narration which is not simply
based on notions of empirical psychology, which is able
to show the collective implications of the linguistic
~cans
used in the text. If this is not achieved novel narration