Quartet: On the Theme of to Portray is to Betray

Paul Magee

doi:10.5130/csr.v10i1.3526

Abstract

Art does not deceive its readers with an illusion of reality, as the common-sense notion has it, but rather pretends to deceive them. For the communicative power of the work of art lies precisely in the fact that we recognise its artificiality, its status as a work within a given genre, following certain conventions, set in a particular frame. What the work really points to, beyond the page, is the existence and actions of a creative consciousness, as that consciousness works through a given set of symbols to express itself. For reading is all about experiencing another’s mind. In the lack. Which makes it a matter of desire. My purpose in the following is to use literature to crack open the everyday, to write about neurosis and psychosis, how they write their way into the real world around us, the dinner table, this novel, a Greek tragedy, I mean Oedipus complex.

Highlights

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had obviously never heard of the experimental novel
Hegel argues that a properly scientific aesthetics traverses both extremes. True science is both empirical and conceptual. Just as he would elsewhere claim that the history of the world is the world, here he argues that art is nothing other than the particular works that comprise it
For one understands Hegel’s ‘idealism’, his commitment to the actuality of the object is clear here, as in all his works. This empirical focus on individual works is no mere art scholarship, for Hegel believes that the particular work is always and necessarily experienced as something more than itself

Summary

Introduction

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had obviously never heard of the experimental novel. His Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, written in the 1820s, sets forth two possible approaches to the ‘science of art’. The innate artificiality of art, he argues, heightens one’s awareness of the necessarily symbolic, and desirous, nature of all lived experience.

Results

Conclusion