Abstract
The character of reality changes perceptibly from age to age, from generation to generation even, as man’s conception of it changes. As Erich Auerbach shows in Mimesis, literature reflects this shifting pattern of interpretation from the time of Homer to that of Stendhal and Virginia Woolf. For Schopenhauer the world is my idea; the logical positivists contend that the truth of reality is apprehended by operational techniques. For Émile Zola, the militant naturalist, medical science offered an excellent method for the novelist to follow in his exploration of the complexities of human nature. Joyce in Ulysses, utilizing different points of view and experimenting with the technique of the interior monologue, gave birth to a more “complex” version of reality. In the work of Virginia Woolf, reality is refracted through a spectrum of sensibility, seen through a haze of memory. In the case of Lawrence Durrell, the theory of relativity is incorporated into the body of fiction so that, in the Alexandria Quartet, as the point of view changes so does the meaning of the event being described.
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References
Herman Broch, The Sleepwalkers. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. London: Martin Secker, 1932, p. 559.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme. Translated by James Cleugh. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961, p. 90.
According to R. E. Money-Kyrle in Man’s Picture of His World (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1961), the world we think we live in is but a model shaped by the mind as to the nature of the reality outside it. Man, the image-builder, is not separated from the reality he is trying o comprehend and conrol; he is a part of it. What is more, the kind of world-model a man constructs affords a reliable clue to the kind of person he is.
Unamuno, like Nietzsche, perceived that ideas, far from being impeccably efficient instruments of logic, are expressions of vital energy, projections of the will, symbolic vehicles of desire. Hence the truth the thinker seeks is existential rather than abstract. In his torment man must cry out to God “even though God should hear us not....” (Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life. Translated by J. E. Crawford Flitch. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1926, p. 17.) If this makes for contradiction, then Unamuno replies that we all live in and by contradictions. The essence of tragedy lies in this battle of life with reason. The truth that reason supports is that which can be empirically confirmed, but even the rationalists, much as they reject the belief in immortality, seek to find motives for living, “even though there shall come a time, at the end of some tens or hundreds or millions of centuries, when all human consciousness shall have ceased to exist.” (Ibid., p. 96.) Rationalism, if carried far enough, culminates in a paralyzing inability to believe in anything; reason ends by disclosing that “there is no absolute truth, no absolute necessity.” (Ibid., p. 104.)
Nina Gourfinkel, Gorky. Translated by Ann Feshbach. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1960, p. 184.
According to Sartre, “To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, p. 566.
“If death is the end and there is no life after death, and humanity will perish utterly, then all our efforts will eventually come to nothing. Honesty and humility admit this futility, but ambition, courage, and love spur us nevertheless into attempts that we know must in the end fail inevitably.” Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961, p. 365.
Helen Muchnic, From Gorky to Pasternak. New York: Random 1961, p. 77.
Maxim Gorky, The Lower Depths and Other Plays. Translated by Alexander Bashky. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960, p. 6.
See Charles I. Glicksberg, The Tragic Vision in Twentieth-Century Literature. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963, pp. 152–53.
Samuel Beckett goes beyond illusion, beyond the frontiers of hope, in his anti-play, Endgame, which drives home the theme that there is no cure for the disease of living. At the end Hamm declares: “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.” Samuel Beckett, Endgame. Translated by the author. New York: Grove Press, 1958, p. 82.
Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh. New York: Random House, 1946, p. 9.
Ibsen, deals with a smilar theme in The Wild Duck, which shows how dangerous and destructive an influence a man can be who rigorously insists on the claim of the ideal. Dr. Relling, like Luka, believes in encouraging a man’s vital illusions; those who are uncompromising idealists suffer from a “disease,” an “acute inflammation of the conscience,” as Dr. Relling diagnoses it. (Henrik Ibsen, Three Plays. Translated by Una Ellis-Fermor. Hammondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1957, p. 213.) Doctor Relling recognizes that most people are “sick” and need treatment and his cure is to allow them to preserve “the saving lie.” (Ibid., p. 243.) “Because that lie is the stimulating principle of life....” (Ibid., p. 243.) He strives to keep people inwardly alive so that they do not collapse under the double weight of self-contempt and despair. Unattainable ideals, if taken too seriously, are equivalent to lies. “Take the saving lie from the average man and you take his happiness away, too.” (Ibid., p. 244.)
Edwin A. Engel says: “O’Neill proposed three ways in which men can find peace: through dream, drunkenness or death. Life is endured only with the aid of the pipe dream and the bottle. Deprived of these, men begin to die. But once they are reconciled to death, it, too, brings peace.” Edwin A. Engel, The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O’Neill. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, p. 280.
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© 1969 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1969). Illusion Versus Reality. In: The Ironic Vision in Modern Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0977-0_10
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