This, Moretti knows, is the common wisdom, but he cannot quite accept it. Indeed, whatever Faust actually does in Part I primarily he has a love affair with Gretchen could have been done without any help from the Devil. Mephistopheles, far from granting Faust an agency he doesn't in fact need, serves to shield him from the violence outside himself, for example, the blow of Gretchen's brother Valentino in the nocturnal duel. Because and here the argument becomes especially interesting its nineteenth-century alternative, the realist novel, as representation of the modern scientific perspective, was not enough. As an inherited form, epic allows the modernist to confront the past, to historicize.
Digressions becomes the main purpose of the epic action.
The failure is not the individual writer's but the failure of the culture. The ambition is noble but it cannot be fulfilled. One level of the work can be bold because the other is crude and superfluous. This insight brings us to the end of Part I of Modern Epic , with its lively, provocative, genuinely fresh examination of the transformations of epic. In a chapter on the evolution of the stream of consciousness technique, Moretti contrasts the Joycean paradigm characterized above to such earlier variants as Tolstoy's in Anna Karenina or such later ones as Benjy's monologue in Faulkner's Sound and the Fury .