The Self and its Sources Revisited

For those who have availed themselves of the Self and its Sources audio materials posted on this blog, the June 2014 edition of The Atlantic has an interesting essay by William Deresiewicz entitled "How the Novel made the Modern World". This piece reviews two recent scholarly books on the novel. Considering that Gil Bailie's 'reflections on the art of the novel' were done over 20 years ago it is intriguing to read echoes of his analysis in this essay.

It also includes this humorous critique of academic prose:

Buell (the author of one of the books under consideration), whose careful terror seems to be the possibility of saying something politically incorrect—the book does so much posturing, you think it’s going to throw its back out—appears to have absorbed every piety in the contemporary critical hymnal. You can see him fairly bowing to them in his introduction, as if by way of ritual preparation. There they are, propitiated one by one—Ethnicity, Globalism, Anti-Canonicity, Anti-Essentialism—like idols in the corners of a temple.

From the Archives: Part 121 of The Self and its Sources

The end of the novel.

While Virginia Woolf was writing “The Waves”, TS Eliot was writing “Ash Wednesday”.

From the Archives: Part 120 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard: a man without a self. The little light of dawn, seen as the Nietzsche's "eternal return", elicits a new desire to be tantalized and thwarted. The romanticism of death and nihilism

From the Archives: Part 119 of The Self and its Sources

Charles Taylor’s study of the modern self: the modern self insists on a position of subjectivity exclusively, to the extent that one can only refer to one’s self in the third person.

From the Archives: Part 118 of The Self and it Sources

Bernard stands at the back of St. Paul’s cathedral ready to verify and inform curiosity. Unable to rise on the shaft of someone else’s prayer he returns to the bustling street, swinging his stick, flowing with the stream of consciousness.

From the Archives: Part 117 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard at St. Paul’s Cathedral. He has come to the right spot for Virginal Woolf to end the novel. Can she do it? Bernard’s knee-jerk antipathy for received truth. Compare to Kierkegaard’s ‘purity of heart is to will one thing’.

From the Archives: Part 116 of The Self and its Sources

Studied nonchalance – the appearance of disinterest – pretending that one is not pretending. Hiding our lack of self-sufficiency

From the Archives: Part 115 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf’s attempt to conclude the novel: Bernard seizes his chance. At rush hour he dashes to the barber. It is shriving time. The melodrama is played out in mirrors.

From the Archives: Part 114 of The Self and its Sources

The difficulty of concluding the novel.

From the Archives: Part 113 of The Self and its Sources

Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended.

– René Girard

From the Archives: Part 112 of The Self and its Sources

After Percival’s death Bernard sees with disillusioned clarity.

From the Archives: Part 111 of The Self and its Sources

Will Bernard undergo a conversion, will the novel end coherently? Fixating on the details of Percival’s death renders Bernard unable to fully experience its effects. He again becomes entangled in the mimetic melodrama.

From the Archives: Part 110 of The Self and its Sources

Percival was structurally the ‘Lord’ in this novel and the resultant shock of his death provides an opportunity for a kind of conversion.

From the Archives: Part 109 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard’s attempt at stabilization via marriage; joining the throngs of people as competitors and comrades in the daily round of life, into which suddenly crashes death, the death of Percival.

From the Archives: Part 108 of The Self and its Sources

Can this novel be brought to a conclusion, can it come to an end, or is it just the last ripple of the waves, ‘petering out’? Virginia Woolf (in the voice of Bernard) is unable to find the “one true story, to which all of the other stories refer”.

From the Archives: Part 107 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard:

“The sound of the chorus came across the water and I felt leap up that old impulse, which has moved me all my life, to be thrown up and down on the roar of other people's voices, singing the same song; to be tossed up and down on the roar of almost senseless merriment, sentiment, triumph, desire.”

The difficulty of ending the novel.

From the Archives: Part 106 of The Self and its Sources

The longing to be part of a grand procession that leads to the search for a messianic hope.

From the Archives: Part 105 of The Self and its Sources

The centripetal, sacrificial force of gravity that breaks apart social cohesion only to instill an ‘itch’ to return to a galvanizing experience that brings everyone together again.

From the Archives: Part 104 of The Self and its Sources

Simone Weil: Gravity

From the Archives: Part 103 of The Self and its Sources

The metaphor of Bernard buying a picture of Beethoven in a silver frame ... Trying to make a symphony from cacophony...magnificence from craziness.

St. John of the Cross –

God gives himself to us truly without ever changing faith into knowledge.