Totality and the Novel

Abstract

advanced the claim that the novel a form of epic literature characteristic of disintegrated civilizations or of what Max Weber called the disenchanted world. The Lukaics says, is the epic of an age in which the extensive of life no longer directly given, yet which still thinks in terms of totality (TN 56). If the epic world rounded from within, so that, as Hegel said in his Aesthetics, each individual action and each object in it the reflection of a complete in itself, then the novel reflects the transcendental homelessness characteristic of the subject in the modern (read: postepic) world;2 this a world in which man unsheltered, deprived of the metaphysical comfort of the gods or of access to a natural context of desire, yet hard pressed to derive any ultimate meaning from the world itself. Lukaics places the origins of the novel, in Cervantes's Don Quixote, on the edge of a great upheaval of values. On the one hand, Cervantes the faithful Christian and loyal patriot, a steadfast believer in the values of traditional society; on the other hand, his protagonist set in a world that no longer recognizes the purpose of heroic action and that has come to doubt the value of literature as a source of ethical