Signs Taken for Wonders On the Sociology of Literary Forms Book

Much of the text is interesting enough, yet a crux that centers the text seems to be bizarre for a Marxist set of beliefs about modernism and then organicism versus ‘open texts’ stemming from tragedies, sturm und drang among other fields which mean we are not taking into consideration ‘universal history’?

But,

meh, takes a too strict orthodox Marxist view (not that of Marx’s time however, more a post-1945 reckoning in the imperial core assimilating social-democratic governments with revolutionary impulses, seeking institutional validation as ‘official’ representatives of left culture), conflates modernism with ‘mass culture’/consumerism [yet will have a favorable view of pre WW1 desirous Parisian petit bourgeoise overlapping with Romanticism ‘veritable practices’, says ‘‘What does not convince me at all, however, is the widespread idea that what we may call the 'ironic' dominant of Modernist literature is subversive of the The Spell of Indecision modern bourgeois world-view. 'Open'-texts contradict and subvert organicist beliefs, there is no doubt about this; but it remains to be seen whether in the past century the hegemonic frame of mind has not in fact abandoned organicism, and replaced it with openness and irony’’ (240-241) [this doesn’t with hindsight seem correct, for someone whose associative field studying literary criticism through a Darwinian approach not making a ‘value judgement’ and overlooking its content].

When he continues with ‘‘I will try to show that such is indeed the case, and that, although irony is an indispensable component of any critical, democratic and progressive culture, its modernist version has a dark side with which we are not familiar enough, and which may be even more relevant to Marxist culture than those aspects focused upon in the recent past’’ this happens when New Left ‘Marxism alone’ takes a hegemonic position in ‘progressive culture’ assuming its mantle, (not being the figurative strand), yet wrongfully thinks ‘‘Dada, Surrealism, pound, Eliot and several others have produced countless variations on this basic pattern, which, to be sure, ironically negates any idea of 'totality' and any hierarchy of meanings, leaving the field free for a virtually unlimited interpretative play. And yet: is this really such a subversive image?’’(241) are anti-organicist and engaging ‘free play’ (all of them interrogate longer histories than recency, some of them as much so as the materialist-industrial-mercantilist historiography of capitalism); and more importantly thinks Adorno/Benjamin (‘‘recent Marxist criticism’‘) (wide ranging thinkers not exactly in agreement!) et al are is little more than a ‘‘left-wing apology of Modernism’’(240). What exactly is the right-wing of modernism, (and centre if any?), and all of the socio-cultural elements are of course critical of modernism, yes they don’t see a ‘‘hierarchy of meanings’’ (is this the great-chain to/of heaven/of being?), and all have reactionary anti-modern elements if you associate all modernist thinking with ‘progressiveness’, notwithstanding their disagreements with one another, a heightened historical-geographical separateness considering the collapse in brutal extractivist imperialism, nationalist/fascist/corporatist ‘responses’, and given this many were unable to read or interrogate the/each other’s works, informational exchanges having to be covert, samizdat/underground etc.
‘‘The aesthetic-ironical attitude, whose best definition still lies in an oid formula, 'willing suspension of disbelief', shows how much of Modernist imagination – where indeed nothing is unbelievable has its source in Romantic irony’‘It seems that a certain section of ‘traditional’ ‘Marxists’ do resent radical-individualist ‘separatism’ from official chronicles of how someone must act (Hobbesian?). Even though I think he/they would like the ambiguous ‘irony’ of Swift for ex, which slightly predates someone like Rousseau or Thoreau, and a ‘right-wing’ strand/form could be found in Nietzsche, although there are many interpretations and paths to take here!). Also the revolutionary/reform ‘authentic’/LARPer dilemma, the one of ‘individual sovereign commitments’ versus ‘individual so as to further given (utopian/dystopian to an enemy/liberatory) outcomes.

These conservative Marxists seem to not comprehend leftist (for their time) opposition to societal or nation-state structures properly: ‘‘one major psychological result of the pact is therefore a growing sense of irresponsibility (!)on Faust's part: the enjoyment of 'all treasures of the earth' is severed, although not completely, from the awareness of what is necessary to their production’’ and ‘‘The course of history is no longer contradictory and cruel (as in Goethe), but rather inscrutable and erratic. Potentially, it is even more catastrophic, but it has also become so remote that Frédéric can see it - and does see it, in the first days of the 1848 revolution – [not a good look thinking 1848 is the beginning of problems) simply as a show to be contemplated. This aesthetic attitude towards life and history is the key to The Spell of Indecision another novelty of Flaubert's work. Here money ceases to be the medium through which desire is satisfied, as Marx pointed out was the case with Goethe's Mephisto’’(244-245) which by using Marx as an attempted proof of valid criticism really misunderstands or hates (for whatever reason) that futurity or a vision for the future is required, that dialectics goes beyond every immediate transaction of the value form, that radical separatism from ‘‘ the course of history’’(a strange term as if one was pre-given) is not one of bourgeois indifference or aesthetic presentation but the ideological decision necessary for the transformation of society to change a given existing order of things, in the case of how capitalism reproduces itself through the ages/times and its modes of expression, as you are affected by it and choose to (or not) respond and react with/against/by another strategy.
It certainly is a strange view that is unclear (‘ironically’) what is meant ‘‘The 'possibilities' of a 'second' life produced anxiety because they constituted a challenge to what was 'real', and forced everybody to rethink his/her own 'first' life. Imagination, so to speak, was taken quite seriously: to the extent that it was a promise, it was also a threat. This implied a great deal of discomfort and stiffness - of anxiety. and guilt, too - but precisely because the products of the imagination were a source of inspiration and transformation for man's and woman's 'first' and 'actual' life. It is this feedback which has ceased to work in our century. Modernist imagination has become immensely more ironical, free and surprising than it was in the past - but at the price of leaving our 'first' life wholly bereft of these qualities’‘(246) - what is this ‘first life’ that wasn’t criticised by Engels/Marx in the State and Private Property and other works, the ‘traditional family unit’, citizenship-feudal relationship to nation-state-lord-monarchy and marriage, a somewhat modern invention? To in effect say afterwards ‘‘Romanticism, observed Carl Schmitt, managed to coexist with all sorts of political regimes and beliefs: this is even more true of Modernism, whose extensive range of political choices can be explained only by its basic political indifference’’(247) is another misreading since people claiming any link with romanticism belong to various ostensible and measurable political movements as their written/enacted works demonstrate. Since Schmitt in particular allows famously for the National Socialist state of exemption to be enacted through the directed will of the fuhrerprinzip (with romanticist historical links) 'permanently'; and able to be indefinitely modified doesn’t say anything substantial about Romanticism since fascism here is the concrete reality of the state and (inter)national culture, the protagonists are not at all motivated or cognizant in their ideology of/by romanticism. There can be ‘indifferent’, ‘apathetic’ or ‘‘un-emphasized‘‘ at the rhetorical level but historians and Marxists would interpret the approaches, actions and theories to/with how they interrelate with cultures, ideological currents, persons, chronologies of space/time.
‘‘The 'possibilities' of a 'second' life produced anxiety because they constituted a challenge to what was 'real', and forced everybody to rethink his/her own 'first' life’‘(247) very strange,
It is also ‘interesting’ for positing that in the context of ‘‘Joyce's more significant, and typically Modernist, innovation lies in the fact that he has managed to break down the connection between 'possibility' and 'anxiety'. This connection was still strong in Goethe (in the interplay of streben and Sorge in Faust), in Kierkegaard, and in that great and pained exploration of the logic of a possible second life which was the nineteenth-century novel of adultery (of which Flaubert was, predictably, a master). In Ulysses, adultery has become a harmless pastime, and even the most extreme experiments of its Modernist imagination may well produce stupefaction but no longer evoke anything threatening’’ (246) apparently Goethe and Kierkegaard are ruthless contrarians to the established order while Joyce (as an extension of his fiction) is an an irrelevant dandy, even though we know Bloom has a political outlook and opinions and so by extension since the authors themselves are mentioned, Joyce was engaged politically at some level? That he isn’t and cannot ‘do’ literary criticism properly is furthered by what is said immediately previously on 245, that (1) ‘‘The Romantic charm of indecision has found its most adequate temporal expression: no longer Faust's violent desire for the future, but daydreaming, which can freely handle past, present and future alike’’ - taking into consideration how the poet/radical is affected by environmental influences leads to given commitments, not ‘daydreaming’, just thinking, you would think to make this kind of criticism not choosing one of the most avant-garde spur for a generation of authors/writers/politically engaged people without regard to any thematic analysis of the text? (2) He says ‘‘The split between two different times, and two parallel lives [how would they not be linked?], has gone one step further. Stream of Consciousness Daydreaming is the kernel of Bloom's 'stream of consciousness' in Ulysses, which is our third text. Stream of consciousness, we know [no this is your separate interpretation!], deals not with consciousness but with what is usually called the preconscious, which contains the countless 'possible selves' of each individual: what he/she would like to be, or to have been, but, for whatever reason, is not. [this actuality/unreached referral is facile and thoroughly unprovable, and doesn’t make sense]. From this point of view, Bloom's daydreaming completes the separation between 'objective' or 'public' time, and its 'subjective' or 'private' version. The latter, this goes without saying, is by now considered the most interesting of the two: life as 'actuality' has become far less meaningful than that parallel form of life, life as 'possibility' – he gets this wrong again as in modernity as a ‘modern person’, public time isn’t ‘objective’ and there is no distinction between them since it is within our experience (since the tie of Descartes), that of the realm of thinking which is not ‘parallel’ or ‘separate’ from life, we can enact separatism and nowhere do we declare ‘life as actuality is ‘far less’ meaningful’, on the contrary, the ‘official’ regime is non-meaningful since the stultified ‘truisms’ are not shared by the population or mean anything in themselves and are not in any case accepted by any provable number, without their ‘private’ consent or labouring to make known.
Here seems a summary of this theme, that Goethe ‘‘in Faust he [Goethe] circumscribed tragedy to individual existence, thereby deleting it from the progress of universal history’’, that ‘‘This rhetorical choice, or 'plot', was of course Hegel's as well, in whose thought, as Hayden White has pointed out, a sequence of tragedies ultimately reveals a cosmic comedy. This anti-tragic thrust inspired not only Hegel's conception of historical movement, but the very inner form of his philosophy. In his dialectical logic, where the meaninglessness of whatever is 'one-sided' yields to the specular daim that 'only the Whole is the True', the tragic form is deprived of any cognitive value whatsoever [really?]. In the first fifty years of Modernity then, a great battle against tragic culture was fought - and won - on German soil. But in the long run, the weight of tragedy proved too strong: Lessing, Schiller, Hôlderlin, Kleist, Büchner, Hebbel, Wagner, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Hofmannsthal, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Benjamin, Heidegger; even, in sorne ways, Marx, Weber and Freud’’ - whom of those names are especially ‘progressive’ or have especial links to ‘modernism’ or any of them even to merely aesthetic sensibility with no relation to politics
It continues ‘‘This spatial partition of the three different Europes is easily discernible within the social institution most closely interwoven with space and boundaries: language. Here, we move from the rich and varied national languages of the novel, loaded with local peculiarities and idioms, to the abstract, barren, always translatable (who could ever read Norwegian apart from Joyce?) [this is a strange ‘insult’ given millions of Norwegians remain, have their works translated, studied in their language, what has changed with modernity?] speech of modern tragedy; and finally to the inter-cultural mélange of Modernism, foreshadowed perhaps by the aberrant yet all-inclusive English of Finnegan's Wake’’(252), with another strange ‘observation’ ‘‘as for France, its many political crises (1789, 1830, 1848) saw the clash of Modernity and the Ancien Régime: but the conflict was not the product of Modernity, nor did it point beyond it. (The Commune is the manifest exception: but its historical relevance may have been exaggerated by the [German] political theorist who saw in it a universal paradigm.)’’ - what is to point ‘beyond modernity’ in 1789-1848, how would the commune be different here and what of universalism? Another conservative Marxism belief ‘‘centrality of tragedy in German culture is the consequence of national weakness [vague]. Now we can be more specific, and claim that the symbolic power of tragic form is inversely proportional to the real power of the state. When the state is stable and strong, a national culture does not have to bother about it, and it evolves in a fundamentally unpolitical fashion [there are manifest changes according to the development of capitalistic relations within and regardless of any given state since it emerged before the state]: