So toward the end of the second to last section (on Wilhelm Meister) he describes how Novalis and romanticism "the triumph of poetry, its transfiguring and redeeming domination of the entire universe, has not the constitutive force to make all earthly and prosaic things follow it into paradise" – Romanticism cannot be "translated into events."
This is the setup for Wilhelm Meister itself, a novel about how a sensitive young man who likes to play with puppets and produce theatre reconciles with prosaic bourgeois life. Toward the end a series of marriages tie him into the nobility.
"Within this class, although confined to a small circle of its members, a universal and all-embracing cultural flowering is supposed to occur, capable of absorbing the most varied individual destinies. In other words, the world thus confined within a single class the nobility- and based upon it, partakes of the problem-free radiance of the epic."
But this doesn't work, the "world he describes, with its merely relative adequation to essential life, contains no element that can offer a possibility for the necessary stylisation."
So Goethe introduces this element as
"... the much-criticised fantastic apparatus of the last books of the novel, the mysterious tower, the all-knowing initiates with their providential actions, etc. Goethe makes use here of the methods of the (Romantic) epic. He absolutely needed these methods in order to give sensuous significance and gravity to the ending of the novel, and although he tried to rob them of their epic quality by using them lightly and ironically, thus hoping to transform them into elements of the novel form, he failed. With his creative irony, by means of which he was able everywhere else to give substance to things that were in themselves unworthy of artistic treatment and to control any tendency to go beyond the novel form, he devalued the miraculous by revealing its playful, arbitrary and ultimately inessential character. And he could not prevent it from introducing a disrupting dissonance into the total unity of the whole; the miraculous becomes a mystification without hidden meaning."
Gave me a new perspective to think about so called secret societies and the dual function of the exoteric/esoteric divide on which they are based. Almost like an element of game design required by the breakdown of immanent meaning which is exactly what Lukacs is describing at the literary apocalypse attending capitalism-modernity. Not so much what they "do," but what they represent, and therefore can capture.
did Goethes invention of the tower creep you out i know it did me
Wait say more
So toward the end of the second to last section (on Wilhelm Meister) he describes how Novalis and romanticism "the triumph of poetry, its transfiguring and redeeming domination of the entire universe, has not the constitutive force to make all earthly and prosaic things follow it into paradise" – Romanticism cannot be "translated into events."
This is the setup for Wilhelm Meister itself, a novel about how a sensitive young man who likes to play with puppets and produce theatre reconciles with prosaic bourgeois life. Toward the end a series of marriages tie him into the nobility.
"Within this class, although confined to a small circle of its members, a universal and all-embracing cultural flowering is supposed to occur, capable of absorbing the most varied individual destinies. In other words, the world thus confined within a single class the nobility- and based upon it, partakes of the problem-free radiance of the epic."
But this doesn't work, the "world he describes, with its merely relative adequation to essential life, contains no element that can offer a possibility for the necessary stylisation."
So Goethe introduces this element as
"... the much-criticised fantastic apparatus of the last books of the novel, the mysterious tower, the all-knowing initiates with their providential actions, etc. Goethe makes use here of the methods of the (Romantic) epic. He absolutely needed these methods in order to give sensuous significance and gravity to the ending of the novel, and although he tried to rob them of their epic quality by using them lightly and ironically, thus hoping to transform them into elements of the novel form, he failed. With his creative irony, by means of which he was able everywhere else to give substance to things that were in themselves unworthy of artistic treatment and to control any tendency to go beyond the novel form, he devalued the miraculous by revealing its playful, arbitrary and ultimately inessential character. And he could not prevent it from introducing a disrupting dissonance into the total unity of the whole; the miraculous becomes a mystification without hidden meaning."
Gave me a new perspective to think about so called secret societies and the dual function of the exoteric/esoteric divide on which they are based. Almost like an element of game design required by the breakdown of immanent meaning which is exactly what Lukacs is describing at the literary apocalypse attending capitalism-modernity. Not so much what they "do," but what they represent, and therefore can capture.