『오늘을 잡아라』에 나타난 수직적 초월

Vertical Transcendence in Seize the Day

Lucien Goldmann's theory of the novel is very close to that of Rene Girard. For Goldmann, the novel is the story of a search for authentic values in a degraded mode, in a degraded society, and this degradation is expressed through the mediatization, the reduction of authentic values to the implicit level and their disappearance as manifest realities. This structure of the novel corresponds to the structure of the degraded society. I tried to analyze Bellow's novel Seize the Day in the light of Goldmann's theory of the novel structure. The protagonist Wilhelm wants to be a man who will realize the 'American dream', such as Gloria Swanson, Charlton Heston, John Rockfeller, Henry Ford. They are the mediators of desire like Amadis in Don Quixote. The degradation of the fictional world, the progress of the ontological sickness, and the increase of metaphysical desire are expressed in mediatization that increases the distance between metaphysical desire and authentic search, the search for vertical transcendence. In a funeral ceremony, Wilhelm gives up his degraded search, and discovers authenticity or vertical transcendence. The end of the novel is a turning point for vertical transcendence because he converts to a new self from the old self. This means he finds his true self which Dr. Tamkin calls the 'true soul', the opposite of the 'pretender soul'. Authentic value or true self, does not mean the value that the critic or the reader regards as authentic, but that which, without being manifestly present in the novel, organizes itself in accordance with an implicit mode its world as a whole. Wilhelm feels transcendental epiphany when he goes on the subway. It is the same as Emerson's thought. So we can say the true self is the self as a part of the whole.