Germinal

Regarding 'Germinal', just reading the back made me understand what Chris meant when he talked about the indepth imagery within the book's description. The insert they chose to put on the back cover as a teaser reads:

"Buried like moles beneath the crushing weight of the earth, and without a breath of fresh air in their burning lungs, they simply went on tapping."

The description used is so powerful you can almost picture yourself amongst the characters; inhaling the dirt into your lungs and struggling to breathe. Any writer that manages to portray this kind of imagery surely has talent, and would surely have to considering the uncompromisingly harsh and realistic portrayal of a coalminer's strike in 1860s France. The title itself refers to a month in the French Republican Calendar, being a spring month. 'Germen' is a Latin word meaning 'seed' and therefore reflects in the novel a hope for a better future amongst the miners.

I will be frequently blogging random updates on how I am finding the novel, and also talking about my favourite descriptive passages or chapters.

We're on a train called history!

My efforts to get ahead in the second year at Uni seem to be failing me miserably so far. I thought I would be clever and download ‘Germinal’ to watch; only to find that it was in French. Fine, that’s what subtitles are for, right? Only, not when they are in another language too. I might give it a watch anyway, pictures are supposed to tell a thousand words so perhaps I can work it out. Secondly I was eager to grab the books mentioned in the lectures as quickly as possible, only to find that they are out of stock for the mean time, however I have managed to pick up my copies of ‘Germinal’ and ‘Ulysses’ after reserving them from the bookshop. So I will be attempting to read those as quickly as possible so I can get blogging about them!

For now, I will go over what we have learnt so far in the lectures. The first lecture back was taken by Chris, and the main focus was socialism, alienation, and the Young Hegelians. I think the most important thing to note about German philosopher Hegel was his thought of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which basically translated to the starting point (intellectual proposition), the contradiction (a reaction to that proposition), and the resolution (the resolved conflict). This theory was adapted by Marx who said “Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways – the point is to change it”. He went on to use the same structure as Hegel, but instead talked about idealism, materialism, and instrumentalism. Idealism translated to ‘you are what you think’, materialism to ‘you are what you eat’, and finally instrumentalism to ‘you are what you do’. He placed these economic factors into Hegelian context by saying that they are internal contradictions which drive the development of prosperity. Both Marx and Hegel see the state as the vehicle of historical change; an instrument for the domination of one class to another.

Hegel famously stated “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”, meaning that philosophy comes to understand a historical condition just as it passes away; philosophy cannot be prescriptive because it understands only in hindsight. In Greek and Roman mythology Glaucus is the symbolic owl of Athena, often referred to as ‘owl of Athena’ or ‘owl of Minerva’. It is seen as a symbol of wisdom in Roman myths because the owl is capable of seeing in the dark and is awake at night when it is seen as the ‘norm’ to be asleep.