"Take "Faust," what is it? A 'tragedy', as its author states? A
great philosophical tale? A collection of lyrical insights? Who can
say. How about "Moby-Dick"? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even
a 'singular medley, ' as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ... 'It
is no longer a novel, ' T.S. Eliot said of "Ulysses." But if not
novels, then what are they?"
Literary history has long been puzzled by how to classify and treat
these aesthetic monuments. In this highly original and
interdisciplinary work, Franco Moretti builds a theory of the
modern epic: a sort of super-genre that has provided many of the
"sacred texts" of Western literary culture. He provides a taxonomy
capable of accommodating "Faust," "Moby-Dick, The Nibelung's Ring,
Ulysses, The Cantos, The Waste Land, The Man Without Qualities "and
"One Hundred Years of Solitude."
For Moretti the significance of the modern epic reaches well beyond
the aesthetic sphere: it is the form that represents the European
domination of the planet, and establishes a solid consent around
it. Political ambition and formal inventiveness are here
continuously entwined, as the representation of the world system
stimulates the technical breakthroughs of polyphony, reverie and
leitmotif; of the stream of consciousness, collage and complexity.
Opening with an analysis of Goethe's "Faust" and the different
historical roles of epic and the novel, Moretti moves through a
discussion of Wagner's "Ring" and on to a sociology of modernist
technique. He ends with a fascinating interpretation of "magic
realism" as a compromise formation between a number of modernist
devices and the return of narrative interest, and suggests that the
west's enthusiastic reception of these texts (and "One Hundred
Years of Solitude" in particular) constitutes a ritual
self-absolution for centuries of colonialism.
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