BHA: Novella

[Mervyn Hartwig <mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all

Further to the sub-thread on the Fictionally real: Why does Bhaskar
essay a 'novella' in FEW? My hunch is that it has something to do with
the fact that for Bhaskar 'philosophy does not exist apart from the
sciences and other social practices (and arguably vice versa)', i.e. it
exists only via 'a dialectic of philosophy and science' (DPF:107-8).
With DPF and Part I of FEW he had come to the limits of philosophy (so
conceived) (arguably beyond), which, since it develops in relation to
its Umwelt, cannot by definition leap beyond it - however 'turbot-
charged' its prose (Jan's apt phrase). In FEW he wants to do just that,
herald a new age, a post-neo-liberal, post-capitalist world in which the
desire for desire is transcended and ecological sustainability achieved
in unity existence. So he *has* to try another form of writing.

Lukacs provides a clue as to why (consciously or unconsciously) Bhaskar
might have chosen the novella:

'the novella makes its appearance either as the harbinger of some new
conquest of reality by large-scale forms, narrative or dramatic, or else
at the close of a period, by way of rearguard or postlude. It appears,
that is to say, either at the moment of *not yet* in the subduing by the
creative imagination of some particular social epoch in its entirety, or
at the moment of the *no longer*.'

(Lukacs, 'Solzhenitsyn and the new realism' in his Marxism and Human
Liberation, ed E. San Juan, Jr (Delta 1973), p. 199.) The suggestion is
elaborated over the next few pages with examples, and accommodates the
Bhaskarian case even to the point of suggesting that the novella, qua
harbinger of a new age, does not 'necessarily [possess] any special
artistic talent' (208).

What is perhaps unique about the Bhaskarian 'novella' is the way in
which it keeps reverting to the older philosophical discourse. A sign of
uncertain confidence in the new form? Or a happy marriage of the new
with the old, to grasp the precisely *transitional* character of what is
being addressed? Or a sign of uncertain confidence in the transition?

Mervyn

--
Mervyn Hartwig
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London SE24 ONS
United Kingdom
Tel: 020 7 737 2892
Email: mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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