Literary / Philosophical thought

William Faulkner, Henry James, Dostoyevsky, Dickens: A book could be written that traced the aspects of love revealed in literary history, as developed through these three novelists, passing backwards in time through their texts. The Town, Roderick Hudson, The Idiot, and Nicholas Nickleby contain four relationships that reveal four literary corners of the ponderous, heavily Romantic course of literary representation that leads to the birth of the modernist literary text, four specific relationships whose affinities and resemblances are striking in their philosophical significance. The relationships between Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes in Faulkner's The Town: Gavin Stephens sending Linda Snopes college brochures from Bard and Radcliffe in an attempt to remove her from where enemies have her under control, spying on her every movement, and yearning to dispel his emotions by clearing the field for her departure from Yoknapatawpha County, away from the morbid solitudes of the American South where she saw her mother's corpse disappear into the grave. Between Roderick Hudson and Christina Light in Henry James' novel: Roderick Hudson succumbing to the worldly temptations of European society, forsaking the intellectual for the personal and procrastinating over his talent by obsessing over a form of his love that does not, in fact, exist, but an impression of aesthetic virtue, freshening the reader's memory for that final moment of crystal purity. Between Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot: Prince Myshkin's recognition of Nastasya's essential innocence even when she is fully immersed in her destructive role as the corrupted and condemned woman; she herself recognizes Myshkin as the possible realization of her innocence, but convinced also of her own corruption, she is equally driven by self-destructive and vengeful urges, a prisoner in her world where a kiss upon the lips makes her crumble like a corroded statue, Myshkin's obscure instincts for the permanent brilliance of high-society women absolutely characterizes his illusion of the society of pre-revolutionary Russia, a bourgeois world which would soon disappear. Between Nicholas Nickelby and Madeleine Bray in Dickens' novel: its main character who, "while working at the counting house in London, encounters the beautiful young woman he had seen in the employment office and realises he is in love with her; his employers inform him that her name is Madeline Bray, the penniless daughter of a debtor, Walter Bray, and enlist his help in obtaining small sums of money for her by commissioning her artwork, the only way they can help her due to her tyrannical father" (Wikipedia); these early mysteries of love prepares the way for Madeline to enter Nicholas' heart, the resulting tumult leads to fanatic shouting and worshipping known in retrospect as to who his father really was, the trivial details of his life leads her to a superabundant bountiful life of the family with all its mysterious sweetness, which the critics judge as the failure of the novel to rectify social codes, one sees the images and words of Dickens' final picture of the Nickleby's life as in a painting. ================================================================================ Disinterested beauty in the age of mechanical reproduction: To the extent that James saw marriage as a vulgar impulse, in the same way as he saw the drive to be celebrated, the glamor of being considered unique, was a rejection of the practical-minded and utilitarian view of life, Henry James rejected marriage and all its trappings of bourgeois status because he thought his body of works was his Being, and would be subsumed and multiplied down through history. The constellation of thought between these four authors and their works parallels the practice and consumption of books in bourgeois history. Originally, literature was a sort of enforced leisure, as books were something to be experienced at rest, but with the birth of Marxism not only philosophy but humankind itself became vitalized and heard the injunction to alter the world and not just describe it, imagining an existence of unknown associates, who wrestled with the expenditures of life in theaters and in novels, in poetry and political speeches... Romanticism was essentially a reactionary movement, a reaction against the rationality of the 18th century that ended with the French Revolution and so, too, it was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment. Starting as a reaction against the scientific rationalization that saw nature as a thing in itself and, in doing so, Romaticism legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority; "the effect was to liberate the artist from classical notions of artistic form inherited from the ancient Greeks"; this is the beginning of literary modernism. With this new level of artistic freedom at the artist's command, revolutionary ambitions were no longer a hindrance to the exertion of the intellect and the complete development of the mind, but allowed the total engagement in productive labor with a fully acculturated will, inculcating an exceptional aestheticism. Only at the end of the 19th century, with the birth of the age of mechanical reproduction of the work of art there is a loss of the sense of exemption from labor, which stems from a residual nauseous essentialism, itself emanating from a idea of the vulgarity of useful productive employment; that is the aura that is stripped, removed and extirpated from the logic of the arts. Only now can we envision the aesthetically beautiful art-object as conceived under Kant's critique of judgment with the fullness of life it deserves: in his third critique Kant argued that aesthetic judgments, that is, judgments of taste, must contain a set of markers whose keystone is that they must be disinterested, "meaning that we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable." As a result of this aesthetic rule, mechanically reproducible art itself becomes a question of property relations under the system of capitalism. Conversely, these texts can be read as addressing the question of to what extent the psyche of the individual, who is now a worker, is the property of the master. The question of the employer, too, now becomes of paramount importance, as the relation of economic dependence in these love-relationships, which is reduced to the level of servitude at the beginning of Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, continues to become less and less disinterested the further in reading history we get. In addition, as these texts continue to acquire value in terms of economic serviceability, it becomes a question of the assiduity of one's lawyer and the level of one's personal economic liquidity, a new affective realm of predatoriness becomes the sine qua non of one's political attachments. Has the reading public's level of intellectual integrity made a similar evolution ?