Tag: woolf notes

From the point of view of this theory we can offer a pocket history of literature, establishing an order of merit. This pocket history
works through the idea of freedom as this idea has been treated at
different times. The history of the treatment of freedom falls into
five phases. These phases can be taken as roughly chronological, and  can also be used independently of chronology. They are as follows.
(1) Tragic freedom. This is the concept of freedom which I have
related to the concept of love: freedom as an exercise of the imagination in an unreconciled conflict of dissimilar beings. It belongs
especially to, was perhaps invented by, the Greeks. The literary
form is tragic drama. (2) Mediaeval freedom. Here the individual
is seen as a creature within a partly described hierarchy of theological reality. The literary forms are religious tales, allegories, morality
plays. (3) Kantian freedom. This belongs to the Enlightenment. The
individual is seen as a non-historical rational being moving towards
complete agreement with other rational beings. The literary forms
are rationalistic tales and allegories and novels of ideas. (4) Hegelian
freedom. This belongs mainly to the nineteenth century. The individual is now thought of as a part of a total historical society and
takes his importance from his role in that society. The literary form
is the true novel (Balzac, George Eliot, Dickens). (5) Romantic
freedom. This belongs mainly to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though it has its roots earlier. The individual is seen as solitary and as having importance in and by himself. Both Hegelian and
Romantic freedom are of course developments of Kantian freedom.
Hegel makes the Kingdom of Ends into a historical society; while
the Romantic concludes from the unhistorical emptiness of Kant’s
other rational beings that in fact one may as well assume that one is
alone. (This is one line of thought leading to existentialism. Angst
is the modern version of Achtung; we now fear, not the law itself,
but its absence). The literary form is the neurotic modern novel.
This pocket history is of course only a toy, but it does I think
suggest some things which are true. It does not work altogether
chronologically for obvious reasons, since Shakespeare was not a
Greek. We may also note, and this perhaps is one of its perceptions,
that this history seems to condemn the novel to fall below the level
of tragedy. The novel fails to be tragic because, in almost every
case, it succumbs to one of the two great enemies of Love, convention and neurosis. The nineteenth century novel succumbed to convention, the modern novel succumbs to neurosis. The nineteenth
century novel is better than the twentieth century novel because
convention is the less deadly of the two; and given a society which
is in a dramatic phase of its being the mere exploration of that society will take you very far indeed. It will not however take you all
the way. We can understand Tolstoy when he says, “strip the best novels of our time of their details and what will remain?” Yet Tolstoy himself also proves that the novel can be tragic, it can rise to
that level. A recent novel which also proves it, though it is well be
low Tolstoy’s achievement, is Dr. Zhivago. In the case of Tolstoy
and Pasternak, it is, I think, not difficult to see that the quality of
their greatness should be called compassion, love: the non-violent
apprehension of difference. And with what exhilaration do we experience the absence of self in the work of Shakespeare. That is the true sublime.