Replying to Mervyn was Re: BHA: Novella

[Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Very interesting, Mervyn.


How else could Bhaskar have integrated the Mike Robinson material but
through a novella? My own feelings on this are that the novella has been
essayed before by Kierkegaard. There it seems the only way to unite the
personal and the philosophical. Indeed the personal becomes the
philosophical.  Such is the pain of Kierkegaard's (Be good Phil!)existence
that he needs to don the masks provided by fictional forms.

You are right though I think to point out the curious relationship between
the novella material and the meta-commentary attached to it. There are
though themes, such as childhood rejection, that escape comment and these
are most directly related I suspect to Bhaskar's psyche. It is also
significant that the central figure that the soul must engage with is
continually a father figure.

There are other themes that for me remain unresolved in the novella.  Thus
I have been thinking lately on the dialectics of need and desire having
read James Heartfield's pamphlet for a paper on Cultural Studies I am
supposed to have sent off months ago!  Bhaskar in FEW appears to reject
asceticism - scandalously so for some. So desire is not to be rejected but
rather educated through a recognition of natural necessity. Yet, at the
same time, the Buddhist overtones of FEW seem to endorse the taming if not
the outright denial of desire. It reminds me very much of Adorno's explicit
attacks on asceticism while at the same time endorsing the 'refusal to
signify' of high modernism.

I also think that it is interesting to read FEW as the return of the
repressed Prometheanism. More on that anon - I hope.

regards

Gary

BTW I have not had time to comment on the excellent negativity thread.
Semester starts today - my 51st in Australia!  Will try and get something
off tomorrow morning.


At 11:04  24/02/01 +0000, you wrote:
> 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
> 13 Spenser Road
> Herne Hill
> London SE24 ONS
> United Kingdom
> Tel: 020 7 737 2892
> Email: mh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
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