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Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100-1750, 1 (Theory & History of Literature)

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I bought these books (it was originally published in two hardcovers, Vols 1 & 2) because of the title: Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness 1100-1750. After having read them, I feel the title is misleading. A more appropriate title would have been Ideology of Adventure As Seen Through The Lens Of The Marx/Engels Dialectic Of The Class Struggle. It's as if some obscure German professor of Marxist theory came across an idea for an amusing Monty Python sketch, but didn't realize it was a joke and went on to write a lengthy academic paper on it. It makes me wonder if his follow-up paper was The Migration Of Penguins And Their Role In the Socialist Class Struggle.

To be fair, if you are interested in the ideology of adventure, there are a handful of useful observations contained in these books. For example, in the preface Nerlich offers up the following interesting definition:

"Adventure-ideology and adventure-mentality as well as adventure-practice meant and still mean:
1) Acceptance of economic, social, cultural, and mental changes and revolutions. Disorder is conceived of as a mode of producing a new order; order itself is conceived of as change.
2) Acceptance of the unknown as a positive value; the deliberate leaving of the known for the unknown; desire for the new.
3) Acceptance of blindness with regard to the unknown; acceptance of economic, social and cultural risks.
4) Acceptance of chance. Chance, constitutive of any adventure, becomes an essntial value of adventure-ideology and -mentality. Translated into the philosophical terminology of so-called scholastic philosophy, this means that accidens becomes essentia. Here we are confronted with the birth of the individual and the beginning of questioning the divine sense of life.
5) Recognition of the other (other races, other languages, other manners, other societies, other necessities, other desires, etc.). Integration of the other into one's own, whether by peaceful means or not; transformation of the other into a business partner, destruction of the other.
6) Elaboration of "search systems," calculation of chances, minimizing of risks, elboration of insurances, and so on."

Nerlich also, in the beginning at least, makes useful observations distinguishing the adventures of early myth, where the adventurer does not seek adventure but rather has it thrust upon him, from the later medieval and renaissance adventures where the adventurer actively goes in search of adventure. He also shows the evolution from medieval knightly adventurers to the later merchant adventurers, and the reasons and motivations for them.

That said, however, the problem is that you have to slog through an enormous amount of irrelevant pendantic prattle to find the occasional useful kernel of observation, because the author has an agenda for which the supposed theme of the book is only the most flimsy of frames. Nerlich constantly pushes everything back to Marx and Engels and the socialist class struggle. The following passage is typical of most of the book:

"We will have to analyze a similar dialectical process of the formation and use of the ideology of adventure from the side of the bourgeoisie: from its function as an emancipatory ideology of the rising bourgeoisie within the feudal system, aimed at first unconsiously and then consciously against the feudal system (whether the bourgeois self-designation as aventurier, "adventurer", is only a perliminary form) to its use as an ideology of exploitation and oppression, where its dialetical character is reflected in other respects as well. The bourgeois ideology of adventure as emancipatory is aimed against the nobility; as exploitative, it is aimed against the proletariat or against the restless petty bourgeoisie. And from its beginnings, it contains the dialiect of expansion, of the extension of power, of the increase of profit and security. The way in which this dialectic comes to the fore or takes effect depends on the actual historical process, on the development of the class struggle."

Regrettably, this is the tone and content of most of the two volumes. In addition, though Nerlich makes reference to certain satires - in particular the classic Spanish satire The Life of Lazarillo Tormes and His Good and Bad Luck - his interpretation is that of a blinkered ideologue utterly without humor, incapable of distinguishing either the nature or the point of satire. And on top of that, he seems to have an axe to grind with other academics with whom he disagrees, causing him to go off on odd tangents now and then.

The final word I would have on these books I will paraphrase from Monty Python: this is not a book for reading; this is a book for putting back and avoiding. _Not_ recommended.