ENG328Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Economic Determinism, Inklings, Moral Relativism
The Good Soldier
The saddest story is what nature is all about
We value things intensely because we know we're going to lose them
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The tragedy of desire is precisely the transitoriness of the rare
moments of satisfaction
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A happiness that must pass
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•
All permanent structures: God, meaning, virtue - seem to not matter
Despite all the conversations of religion
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Nietzsche - God is dead
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Marx - relentless economic determinism, depriving people of free will
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Every value is a lie - or at least susceptible to betrayal
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Success of the novel lies in its power to create a realistic illusion of reality
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Special emphasis on justification
Granting motive and grounds to behaviours that otherwise seem
unintelligible
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Uses traditional methods of characterisation
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•
Centre of the novel is a detailed exposition into the details of the bringing up
of Leonora and Edward
Catholicism and Protestantism
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Justified self is both a standard of behaviour and a form of intelligibility
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Incongruity between appearance and reality
Florence's flawed descriptions of Edward
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Passion violates the rules of conventions
And challenges the idea that there are rules that regulate human
behaviour
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Character begins to lose its integrity
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Who in this world knows anything of anyone's heart or of his own
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One can never be certain that anyone will behave any way
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Justifications can no longer justify
Heredity vs. environment, nature, nurture, race, class, etc.
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Passion frustrates the attempt to justify human behaviour
But by the end becomes a justification itself
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Irony comes from incongruity between inherently moral categories and the
behaviour they're supposed to describe
New constraint rather than a new freedom
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Private desire more restrictive than the social norms that are supposed to
control
Just too many stimuli to attend to
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Dowell is the only character capable of any selfless behaviour
Comes to England at the request of Edward
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Travels far abroad to pick up a demented Nancy
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No more intelligible as a madman than as a gentle
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Impression, not the corrected chronicle that ought to preoccupy the novelist
Not knowledge, but rather impression, sensation and emotion
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These constitute for experience
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Therefore a novelist must ignore chronology and digress freely
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Digressivity is his narrative mode
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Dowell laments that he must have something to catch hold of now
He is suffering from the literary disease of impressionism
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Perception of an unusual self
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Social totality represented to be a serious artist•
Perversion and idiocy are seen as part of the human condition
Fails to see distortion as distortion
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Merely imitates the distortions of society
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•
Reveals an incommensurability between life as it is known and lived
experience
Even something that seems passionate becomes routine
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Problems that arise from yielding to desire
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Desire in the end becomes a constraint as severe as the morals that
oppose it
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•
Dowell is a nullity of sorts - he doesn't want to do anything
Doing nothing he feels nothing and feeling nothing he knows nothing
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Dowell is in some sense nothing
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He is a man without qualities
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No catalogue of traits can describe him
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No stable memory, no projection into the future
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Nullity is the final consequence of the impressionistic pursuit of
immediate experience
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Character simply exists after the fact, and Dowell is a personality
without actions
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As a man he is weak, but as an author, he is a free agent
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"It is so difficult to keep these people going"
Uninformed self taking steps towards articulation
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Goes along from moment to moment
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Private desires vs. indulgence vs. restraint vs. moral prohibition, etc.•
Escape from conventions that burden•
Humanitarian afterthought:
Out of nothing, Dowell begins to choose and construct a work
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In a faint way, he reanimates the ethical sense that atrophied and
withered away in Edward,
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Degraded by convention and thwarted by passion, morality reappears
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After endless professions of not knowing, Dowell says no to Florence
and Leonora and says yes to Nancy
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On the threshold of making a decision
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Founded on the values his own narrative has discovered
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Might be the inklings of the beginnings of the creation of character
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Dowell learns to see just by telling his tale
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He represents a human being as a dollar bill represents a quantity of
money
But this bill is used to purchase something of value - a moral
character
§
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Nihilistic arguments:
Dowell can't be bothered to prevent the suicide of his best friend
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In sync with the open-endedness of the novel
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Nostalgia of aristocratic responsibility
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Irreparable affronts to human freedom, agency and autonomy
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Underlying despair about the possiblity of making sense of the world
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Incredulity towards meta-narratives
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At the point where this incredulity is coming into play
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His awareness of reality is part of reality, the reality is observed
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No single standard truth is available
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Are we doomed to moral relativism?
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Ford himself has no answers and is fundamentally ambivalent
He has no remedy or cure
§
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Waves of invasions in Ireland•
Bildungsroman - coming of age tale
Childhood to early adulthood
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Künstterroman - subspecies - struggle of childhood through to maturity
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Focuses on Stephen's state of mind, his sensibility•
The artist is sensitive and can only become free through the disentanglement
of the external world
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"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe"•
Doesn’t offer any sort of chronology
Representative moments of Stephen's development offered
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Synechdochic moments
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Makes it different from normal bildungsroman stories
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Written in third person•
Epiphany - sudden moment of realisation or insight, revelation•
No explicit reference to Icarus•
Stephen is the introverted, thinking type
He is at first on the defence
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He is someone who only enjoys freedom within the confines of his own
sensibility
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Stephen can only find his identity through isolation
Defensive but productive
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Detached aesthetic attitude
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Icarus mythology crucial
Exiled and designed labyrinth
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Lecture 18
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
1:14 PM
Document Summary
The saddest story is what nature is all about. We value things intensely because we know we"re going to lose them. The tragedy of desire is precisely the transitoriness of the rare moments of satisfaction. All permanent structures: god, meaning, virtue - seem to not matter. Marx - relentless economic determinism, depriving people of free will. Every value is a lie - or at least susceptible to betrayal. Success of the novel lies in its power to create a realistic illusion of reality. Granting motive and grounds to behaviours that otherwise seem unintelligible. Centre of the novel is a detailed exposition into the details of the bringing up of leonora and edward. Justified self is both a standard of behaviour and a form of intelligibility. And challenges the idea that there are rules that regulate human behaviour. Who in this world knows anything of anyone"s heart or of his own.
