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Modernism and Phenomenology

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© © All Rights Reserved
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Modernism and...

Series Editor
Roger Griffin
Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

The series Modernism and... invites experts in a wide range of cultural,


social, scientific and political phenomena to explore the relationship
between a particular topic in modern history and ‘modernism.’ Apart from
their intrinsic value as short but groundbreaking specialist monographs, the
books aim through their cumulative impact to expand the application of this
highly contested term beyond its conventional remit of art and aesthetics.
Our definition of modernism embraces the vast profusion of creative acts,
reforming initiatives, and utopian projects that, since the late nineteenth
century, have sought either to articulate, and so symbolically transcend, the
spiritual malaise or decadence of modernity, or to find a radical solution to
it through a movement of spiritual, social, political even racial regeneration
and renewal. The ultimate aim is to foster a spirit of transdisciplinary
collaboration in shifting the structural forces that define modern history
beyond their conventional conceptual frameworks.
More information about this series at
http://​www.​springer.​com/​series/​
14798
Ariane Mildenberg

Modernism and Phenomenology


Literature, Philosophy, Art
Ariane Mildenberg
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Modernism and...
ISBN 978-0-230-28936-9 e-ISBN 978-1-349-59251-7
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957303

Corrected Publication 2019


© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively
licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is
concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service


marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a
specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective
laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice
and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date
of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a
warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein
or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher
remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Cover design by Becky Chilcott, inspired by the famous
modernist propaganda poster
Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
by El
Lissitzky (1919).

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature


The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London,
N1 9XW, United Kingdom
For my mother, whose love of reading remains an inspiration.
And for my father, in memory. The angels are for you.
Series Preface
As the title ‘Modernism and …’ implies, this series has been conceived in
an open-ended, closure-defying spirit, more akin to the soul of jazz than to
the rigour of a classical score. Each volume provides an experimental space
allowing both seasoned professionals and aspiring younger academics to
investigate familiar areas of modern social, scientific or political history
from the defamiliarizing vantage point afforded by a term not routinely
associated with it: ‘modernism.’ Yet this is no contrived make-over of a
clichéd concept for the purposes of scholastic bravado. Nor is it a gratuitous
theoretical exercise in expanding the remit of an ‘ism’ already notorious for
its polyvalence—not to say its sheer nebulousness—in a transgressional
fling of postmodern
jouissance
.
Instead, this series is based on the
empirically
orientated hope that a
deliberate enlargement of the semantic field of ‘modernism’ to embrace a
whole range of phenomena apparently unrelated to the radical innovation in
the arts it normally connotes will do more than contribute to scholarly
understanding of those topics. Cumulatively, the volumes in this series are
meant to contribute to a perceptible paradigm shift slowly becoming
evident in the way modern history is approached. It is one that, while
indebted to ‘the cultural turn,’ is if anything ‘post-post-modern,’ for it
attempts to use transdisciplinary perspectives and the conscious clustering
of concepts often viewed as unconnected—or even antagonistic to each
other—to consolidate and deepen the reality principle on which
historiography is based. The objective here is to move closer to the
experience of history and its actors, not ever further away from it. Only
those with a stunted, myopic (and
unhistorical
) view of what constitutes
historical ‘fact’ and ‘causation’ will be predisposed to dismiss the
‘Modernism and …’ project as mere ‘culturalism,’ a term that, owing to
unexamined prejudices and sometimes sheer ignorance, has—particularly in
the vocabulary of more than one eminent ‘archival’ historian—acquired a
reductionist, pejorative meaning.
As with several volumes in this series, the juxtaposition of the term
‘modernism’ with the key theme, phenomenology, may be disconcerting,
since one seems to belong to the history of experimental aesthetics in high
art, while the other is associated with a somewhat recondite form of modern
philosophy. Yet readers should be aware that the broader context for this
book is a radical extension of the term modernism to embrace cultural
phenomena that lie beyond the aesthetic in the narrow sense of the term.
The conceptual ground for works such as
Modernism and Eugenics
,
Modernism and Nihilism
and
Modernism and Occultism
has been prepared
by such seminal texts as Marshall Berman’s
All That is Solid Melts into Air:
The Experience of Modernity
(1982), Modris Eksteins’
Rites of Spring: The
Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
(1989), Peter Osborne’s
The
Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde
(1995), Emilio Gentile’s
The
Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism
(2003) and
Mark Antliff’s
Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and
Culture in France, 1909–1939
(2007). In each case modernism is revealed
as the long-lost sibling (twin or maybe even father) of historical phenomena
rarely mentioned in the same breath.
Yet the real pioneers of such a ‘maximalist’ interpretation of modernism
were none other than some of the major modernists themselves. For them
the art and thought that subsequently earned them this title was a creative
force—a passion even—of revelatory power that, in a crisis-ridden West
where anomie was reaching pandemic proportions, was capable of
regenerating not just ‘cultural production,’ but ‘socio-political production,’
and for some even society
tout court
. Figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche,
Richard Wagner, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Pablo Picasso and
Virginia Woolf never accepted that the art and thought of ‘high culture’
were to be treated as self-contained spheres of activity peripheral to—or
even cut off from—the main streams of contemporary social and political
events. Instead they took them to be laboratories of visionary thought vital
to the spiritual salvation of a world being systematically drained of higher
meaning and ultimate purpose by the dominant, ‘nomocidal’ forces of
modernity. If we accept Max Weber’s thesis of the gradual
Entzauberung
,
or ‘disenchantment,’ of the world through an instrumentalizing rationalism,
such creative individuals can be seen as setting themselves the task—each
in his or her own idiosyncratic way—of
re-enchanting
and resacralizing the
world. Such modernists consciously sought to restore a sense of higher
purpose, transcendence and
Zauber
to a spiritually starved modern
humanity condemned by ‘progress’ to live in a permanent state of
existential exile, of
liminoid transition
, now that the forces of the divine
seemed to have withdrawn in what Martin Heidegger’s muse, the poet
Friedrich Hölderlin, called ‘the withdrawal of the gods.’ If the hero of
modern popular nationalism is the Unknown Warrior, perhaps the patron
saint of modernism itself is
Deus Absconditus
.
Approached from this oblique angle, modernism is a revolutionary
force, but it is so in a sense only distantly related to the one made familiar
by standard accounts of the (political or social) revolutions on which
modern historians cut their teeth. It is a ‘hidden’ revolution of the sort
referred to by the arch-aesthetic modernist Vincent van Gogh in a letter to
his brother Theo on 24 September 1888. In this letter, van Gogh remarks on
the impression made on him by the work of another spiritual seeker
disturbed by the impact of ‘modern progress,’ Leo Tolstoy:

It seems that in the book,


My Religion
, Tolstoy implies that
whatever happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an inner
and hidden revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will
be born, or rather, something completely new which will be
nameless, but which will have the same effect of consoling, of
making life possible, as the Christian religion used to.
The book must be a very interesting one, it seems to me. In the
end, we shall have had enough of cynicism, scepticism and humbug,
and will want to live—more musically. How will this come about,
and what will we discover? It would be nice to be able to prophesy,
but it is even better to be forewarned, instead of seeing absolutely
nothing in the future other than the disasters that are bound to strike
the modern world and civilization like so many thunderbolts,
through revolution, or war, or the bankruptcy of worm-eaten states.

In the ‘Modernism and …’ series the key term has been experimentally
expanded and ‘heuristically modified’ to embrace any movement for
change that set out to give a name and a public identity to the ‘nameless’
and ‘hidden’ revolutionary principle that van Gogh saw as necessary to
counteract the rise of nihilism. At the same time this expansion allows
modernism to be explored not primarily as the striving for innovative forms
of self-expression and style, but rather as the reaction against perceived
spiritual decline, physiological and psychological degeneration, and moral
decadence, which, of course leads naturally to the theme of ‘perversion.’
Van Gogh was attracted to Tolstoy’s vision because it seemed to offer a
remedy for the impotence of Christianity and the insidious spread of a
literally soul-destroying cynicism, which if unchecked would ultimately
lead to the collapse of civilization. Modernism thus applies in this series to
all concerted attempts in any sphere of activity to enable life to be lived
more ‘musically,’ to resurrect the sense of transcendent communal and
individual purpose that was being palpably eroded by the chaotic unfolding
of events in the modern world even if the end result would be ‘just’ to make
society physically and mentally healthy.
It is precisely in the context of a quest to find new sources of
transcendent experience in a modernizing world in which traditional portals
to it had been obscured or blocked, that philosophical, literary and artistic
variants of phenomenology reveal their subtle relationships to modernism
explored in Ariane Mildenberg’s fascinating book. Thanks to her wide-
ranging analysis, the idea of an
immanent
transcendence, so paradoxical in
the Western tradition, emerges as one of the recurrent features of the
European response to the growing nomic crisis which, having been first
detected by the likes of Blake and Heine, became the central obsession of
the whole Decadent movement. Moreover, phenomenology can perhaps for
the first time be clearly be seen as a form of
social
modernism, on a par
with the cults of Freud, Jung, Monism, Theosophy, and the Western
discovery of Eastern mysticism, a theme explored at some length in my
Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and
Hitler
(2007).
The premise of all the volumes in the ‘Modernism and...’ series could
be summed up in Phillip E. Johnson’s assertion that ‘Modernism is typically
defined as the condition that begins when people realize God is truly dead,
and we are therefore on our own.’ It locates the well-springs of modernism
in the primordial human need for higher, supra-personal meaning in a
godless universe, in the impulse to erect a ‘sacred canopy’ of culture that
not only aesthetically veils the infinity of time and space surrounding
human existence to make that existence feasible, but also provides a
totalizing world-view within which to situate individual life narratives, thus
imparting it with the illusion of supra-personal significance. By eroding or
destroying that canopy, modernity creates a protracted spiritual crisis that
provokes the proliferation of countervailing impulses to restore a ‘higher
meaning’ to historical time that are collectively termed ‘modernism,’ each
resulting art form, programme of reform, or world-view now destined to be
little more than temporary marquees or even personal parasols against the
void blown away in the storm of progress.
Johnson’s statement makes a perceptive point by associating modernism
not just with art, but with a ‘human condition.’ Yet in the context of this
series his statement requires significant qualification. Modernism is
not
a
general historical condition (any more than ‘post-modernism’ is), but a
generalized revolt against even the
intuition
made possible by a secularizing
modernization that we are spiritual orphans in a godless and ultimately
meaningless universe. Its hallmark is the bid to find a new home, a new
community and a new source of transcendence in the struggle against
nihilism that had been identified by Nietzsche, the first great modernist
philosopher, as he analysed the consequences of ‘the death of God’ on the
viability of the human existence.
Naturally no attempt has been made to impose the ‘reflexive
metanarrative’ developed in my
Modernism and Fascism
on the various
authors of this series. Each has been encouraged to tailor the term
modernism to fit his or her own epistemological cloth, as long as they
broadly agree in seeing it as the expression of a modernist reaction against
modernity not restricted to art and aesthetics, and driven by the aspiration to
create a spiritually or physically ‘healthier’ modernity, or at least discover
within the modern human experience a new spiritual dimension new
cultural, political and ultimately biological order, and Ariane Mildenberg
has enthusiastically embraced this brief. Her volume sits well with the
ultimate aim of the series ‘Modernism and...,’ which is to refashion the
common-sense connotations of the term ‘modernism,’ and hence stimulate
fertile new areas of research and teaching with an approach that enables
methodological empathy and causal analysis to be applied even to
apparently irrational movements, events and processes ignored by or
resistant to the explanatory powers of conventional historiography. Perhaps
this volume can help readers become more aware of the phenomenological
and modernist aspect of their own existences, and hence of a spiritual
dimension that is ecologically threatened in an age dominated by the
growing cacophony of virtual realities and other peoples’ fantasies and
fanaticisms.
Roger Griffin
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the help of many people.
First and foremost, I would like to thank Roger Griffin for believing in this
project and accepting my contribution to this series on Modernism. I am
grateful to the editorial teams at Palgrave Macmillan: Molly Beck, Oliver
Dyer, Jade Moulds, Jen McCall and Peter Cary. Librarians at the British
Library, the Royal Library in Copenhagen and the Huntington Library in
San Marino have been most helpful at different stages of a long research
process.
My research for this book has benefitted from the knowledge of and
conversations with colleagues and students at the University of Kent. I am
especially indebted to a number of people for reading and commenting
upon early or late drafts of this work: Kevin Hart, David Herd, Ben
Hutchinson, Ole Birk Laursen, Derek Ryan, Amy Sackville, Juha Virtanen
and Gail Weiss. I also want to thank Jason Edwards, Harald Fawkner, Filip
Mattens, Will Norman and Sarah Wood for invaluable discussions about
specific ideas over the last five years. Stella Bolaki, Declan Gilmore-
Kavanagh, John Gilmore-Kavanagh, Sue Marshall, Antonia Porter,
Ameneh
Sadeghpour
, Cecilia Sayad, David Stirrup and Keith Waggstaff also
supported me at crucial times. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Modern
Working Group at New York University, Oxford Phenomenology Network
and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Modern Studies at the University of
York for inviting me to present portions of this work to most encouraging
audiences.
I wrote central parts of this book at Retreats for You in Devon where the
wonderful hosts, Deborah Dooley and the late Bob Cooper, offered me a
beautiful space to read and write, great food and stimulating conversation.
My deepest thanks are for my family: Karin Lemvigh Løkke, Erhard
Thomas Julio Mildenberg, Jørgen Løkke, Vanessa Mildenberg, Jens Løkke,
Wilma Mildenberg, Maxim Mildenberg and Egon Mildenberg, all of whom
have encouraged me along the way. Finally, I want to thank Ole Birk
Laursen for his unfailing moral support, energy and laughter.
Earlier versions of sections from Chapters
2
,
3
,
4
and
5
have appeared
in the following publications: ‘A “Dance of Gestures”: Hyperdialectic in
Gertrude Stein’s Compositions,’ in David Ayers, Sascha Bru, Benedikt
Hjartarson, Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, eds.,
The Aesthetics of Matter:
Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange
(Berlin: De
Gruyter/Mouton, 2013), 380–395; ‘“A Total Double-Thing”: A Re-
evaluation of Phenomenology in Wallace Stevens,’
Textual Practice
29.1
(2015): 133–154; ‘“Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct?”: Woolf’s
“Gigantic Conversation,”’ in C. Reynier, ed.,
Etudes britanniques
contemporaines
, n° hors série (Univ. Montpellier 3, automne 2004), 69–80;
‘Interrelation and Separation: Dialectical Tensions in Paul Cézanne’s
The
Large Bathers
and Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves
,’ in Merry Pawlowski and
Eileen Barrett, eds.,
Across the Generations: Selected Papers from the
Twelfth International Virginia Woolf Conference
(CSU Bakersfield: Center
for Virginia Woolf Studies, 2003), 277–286. I am grateful for the
permission to use the material here.
Contents
1 Introduction:​Phenomenology, Modernism and the Crisis of
Modernity
Braiding
Phenomenology as Pre-theory:​Reduction and Historicity
Shifts of Attitude:​Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty
Epiphanic Modernism
The Time When Everything Cracked
Phenomenology, Language and Meaning-Giving
Primordial Faith
2 On Apples, Broken Frames and Fallenness:​Phenomenology and the
Unfamiliar Gaze in Cézanne, Stein and Kafka
Breaking the Frame:​Cézanne’s Secret Folds and Faithful Apples
Gertrude Stein, Fringed Experience and an Apple
Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
: A Rotten Apple
3 Earthly Angels and Winged Messengers:​Experience and Expression
in Hopkins, Stevens and Klee
Catching Flight:​Hopkins’s Windhover
Necessary Angels and Half-Way States:​Wallace Stevens
‘Still Imperfect’:​Paul Klee’s Angelology
Intuitive Appropriation
4 Virginia Woolf’s Interworld:
Folds, Waves, Gazes
Bracketing
‘Gigantic Conversation’
Doubling
Bernard’s ‘Little Language’
Exchanging Secrets:​Woolf and Cézanne
5 Hyperdialectic:​A Modernist Adventure
Stein’s ‘If I Told Him’ and NDT’s
Shutters Shut
Rhythms of Hyperdialectic:​Woolf
Stevens’s Never-Ending Meditation
Readiness for Questionability:​Kafka
‘Man is Half a Prisoner, Half Borne on Wings’:​Klee, Hopkins
Correction to:​On Apples, Broken Frames and Fallenness:​
Phenomenology and the Unfamiliar Gaze in Cézanne, Stein and Kafka
Bibliography
Index
© The Author(s) 2017
Ariane Mildenberg, Modernism and Phenomenology, Modernism and...
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_1

1. Introduction: Phenomenology,
Modernism and the Crisis of Modernity
Ariane Mildenberg1  

(1) School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

 
  Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk

Braiding
In his course notes on Edmund Husserl’s ‘The Origin of Geometry,’ the
French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty draws upon Husserl when
characterising his own notion of the ‘chiasm’ as ‘Verflechtung,’ which, as
Leonard Lawlor notes, ‘is translated into French as entrelacement or
enchevêtrement, and into English as “interweaving” or “entanglement.”’
1
One might pause for a moment and wonder about these translations, since
Verflechtung in German stems from flechten, meaning to braid. There is a
difference between weaving and braiding. Weaving uses two distinct sets of
elements: warp threads and weft threads. Weft threads can be on a shuttle to
weave in and out of the warp threads. While the warp and the weft remain
separate in weaving, in a braid the thread works as both the weft and the
warp. Braiding structures are produced by crossing three or more strands in
various zigzagging ways so that the warp becomes the weft and vice versa:
there are no distinct sets of elements.
2
This zigzagging or trading of
strands, which can be laces or twines, may also be referred to as interlacing
or intertwining.
This consideration is of paramount value. In his last, unfinished work,
The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes:
What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of
each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present and of the world is
the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by
a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogeneous with
them: he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself and that
in return the sensible is in his eyes as it were his double or an
extension of his own flesh.
3

Just as the warp becomes the weft and vice versa in braiding, the body-
subject, according to Merleau-Ponty, has a twofold being: the seer can also
be seen, the toucher can also be touched so that a certain reversibility or
crossing takes place. We are at once seeing/sensing subjects and
seen/sensed objects in a world of others just like ourselves. Collapsing any
distinct entities of objectivity and subjectivity and inside/outside polarities,
Merleau-Ponty braids rather than weaves selves, others and world into one
thick, intersubjective texture. Citing Husserl, he notes that the three strands
‘man, language, world (lived world, and objectified, idealized world)’ are
verflochten into a single braid and ‘given in one package.’
4
Merleau-Ponty
called this package ‘the flesh of the world.’
5
Braiding, interlacing or intertwining multiple strands of literary, art-
historical and philosophical reflections, and thus undermining the distinct
subject-object reasoning that informs Cartesian rationalism, the underlying
thesis of this book’s argument is that phenomenology, modernism and
modernity are inextricably verflochten.
6
It contends that the ‘sickness’ of
European Man identified by Edmund Husserl in ‘Philosophy and the Crisis
of European Man,’
7
‘accepting man per se and, in consequence, taking his
origin for granted,’
8
lies at the very centre of the crisis of the modernist
subject, and that this is expressed in the literature and art of the time. Just as
Husserl proposed that philosophy could only be recovered by ‘reversing’
the naïve acceptance of taken-for-granted existence, modernist literature
and art provide evidence of this sickness of modernity and present us with
new artistic models embodied in a shift of perspective, uncovering what
Merleau-Ponty thought of as a ‘primordial faith’—from Husserl’s Urdoxa
or Urglaube, a ‘primary belief (Urglaube) or Protodoxa (Urdoxa)’
9
—that
is, a faith in a pre-reflective contact with the world as the foundation for
artistic inquiry.
10
Phenomenology as Pre-theory: Reduction and
Historicity
In this book, I am less interested in using phenomenology as a theoretical
tool for analysing selected texts or artworks than in bringing into dialogue
modernism and phenomenology. Neither is it the purpose of the following
pages to pinpoint a certain influence of phenomenology upon specific
modernist writers and artists, but to highlight a kinship of method and
concern between modernism and phenomenology, bringing the two into
conversation and thus eliciting a questioning and examination of the
structure of experience, which is central to both the phenomenological and
modernist projects. My aim, then, is not to impose phenomenology upon
texts and artworks, which would clash with the inherent openness to the
world that the phenomenological lived body displays. Rather, the key to this
book’s structure, and the starting point for phenomenological inquiry, is
what Merleau-Ponty termed ‘primordial faith’: faith in the interrogation of
perceptual experience as an encouragement to such openness, where there is
pre-reflective ‘coexistence’ or ‘communion’ between the embodied subject
and the world.
11
Ironically, the common use of phenomenology as a theoretical tool
through which to understand more clearly a text, a piece of music, an
artwork or aspects of architecture is a non-phenomenological practice.
12
It
jars with the fact that phenomenology first and foremost returns us to the
pre-reflective and therefore taken-for-granted dimension of experience. This
‘return’ to the ‘non-theoretical activity of perceiving’ itself,
13
as Husserl
and Merleau-Ponty would think of it, merely suspends objective or
theoretical notions about the world, thereby leading us back to the
‘phenomenological standpoint’ that, according to Husserl, ‘renders pure
consciousness accessible to us,’
14
exposing the world as phenomenon and
‘allowing us to focus more narrowly and directly on reality just as it is
given—how it makes its appearance to use in experience.’
15
Phenomenology is not a theory, it is a practice.
The Husserlian method of epoché and the heart of phenomenological
practice—an abstention from preconceived notions about experience also
referred to as ‘bracketing’—inaugurates reduction. The word ‘reduction’
stems from the classical Latin word re-ducere meaning to lead or bring
back. In its root sense, then, the act of reduction indicates a leading back to
—a ‘return’—to a more primordial dimension of experience, as Husserl
writes in Ideas: ‘we start from that which antedates all standpoints: from
the totality of the intuitively self-given which is prior to any theorizing
reflection.’
16
Stepping back in epoché, and abstaining from our taken-for-
granted attitude to the world in which we live, phenomenology never
replaces one aspect of reality with another—reduction, then, is not a
narrowing down of world view—but tests our pre-reflective experience and
reflective expression of the world against one another. It suspends any
notions of the world ‘as a pregiven source of validities’ not to reject those
validities but to refuse ‘to use them as premises, or modes of explanation, in
philosophical reflection.’
17
Etymologically, phenomenology is the logos of
the phainómenon, the task of which is to ‘formulat[e] an experience of the
world.’
18
This formulation begins with Husserlian bracketing:

We do not abandon the thesis we have adopted, we make no change


in our conviction…. And yet the thesis undergoes a modification—
whilst remaining in itself what it is, we set it as it were ‘out of
action,’ we ‘disconnect it,’ ‘bracket it.’ It still remains there like the
bracketed in the bracket, like the disconnected outside the
connexional system. We can also say: The thesis is experience as
lived (Erlebnis), but we make ‘no use’ of it.
19

In reduction, the ‘thesis we have adopted’—the underlying commitment to


conventional preconceptions and expectations, which Husserl also thought
of as the ‘natural attitude’—thus remains there ‘like the bracketed in the
bracket’: it is never abandoned but simply not made use of.
20
Through
epoché, the phenomenologist passes from the ‘natural attitude’ to the
phenomenological attitude, directing our attention to a pre-theoretical,
‘primordial form of apprehension,’
21
uncovering the ‘essence’ of things
lying on the other side of our concrete fact-world.
The common misunderstanding of the reduction as abandoning or
negating objective points of view about the world is a common feature in
both literary critics’ understanding of phenomenology and extant
phenomenological approaches to modernist literature. According to Terry
Eagleton, in the introduction to phenomenology in his 1983 Literary
Theory:
As with Husserl’s ‘bracketing’ of the real object, the actual
historical context of the literary work, its authors, conditions of
production and readership are ignored; phenomenological criticism
aims instead at the whole ‘immanent’ reading of the text, totally
unaffected by anything outside it. … [P]henomenological criticism
tries to achieve a complete objectivity and disinterestedness. … It is,
in other words, a wholly uncritical, non-evaluative mode of analysis.
… It is an idealist, essentialist, anti-historical, formalist and
organicist type of criticism, a kind of pure distillation of the blind
spots, prejudices and limitations of modern literary theory as a
whole.
22

‘To claim that I am having a wholly private experience is meaningless,’


Eagleton comments on the phenomenological perspective, for ‘I would not
be able to have an experience in the first place unless it took place in terms
of some language within which I could identify it.’ He concludes that
‘phenomenology begins and ends as a head without a world,’ which in
solving ‘the nightmare of modern history … became a symptom, in its
solitary, alienated brooding, of the very crisis it offered to overcome,’
23
but
what does this actually mean? The assumption here that the
phenomenological return to pre-reflective experience entails a narrowing
down of our world-view to some kind of ideal, inward and ‘disinterested’
residuum that is ‘totally unaffected’ by the history or existence of the world
is problematic.
First, when insisting on the epoché (bracketed judgements) as a means
to return to what he thought of as a ‘first philosophy,’
24
Husserl never
suggested a negation of the existing world. On the contrary, in Ideas, he
writes: ‘Our phenomenological idealism does not deny the positive
existence of the real (realen) world and of Nature. … Its sole task and
service is to clarify the meaning of this world.’
25
After the operation of
‘bracketing,’ Husserl stresses, ‘[w]e have literally lost nothing’
26
; our
preconceived ideas and practical considerations about the world, then, are
never denied or negated.
Second, since experience is embedded in a structure of temporal
horizons of experience, and since ‘ultimately all structures of consciousness
are founded on the primary perceptual contact of consciousness with the
world’ within which we are ‘fatally immersed,’
27
phenomenology cannot
possibly be oblivious to history; rather, it can only be the case that ‘I carry
my history around with me.’
28
History, like time, is not an ‘actual
succession that I could limit myself to simply recording. It is born of my
relation with things.’
29
It is in this way that phenomenology traces the
constitution of history. Consciousness of the world also means that we are
‘coconscious of the men on our external horizon in each case as “others” …
It is precisely to this horizon of civilization that common language
belongs.’
30
This is what historicity means.
31
Yet, phenomenology is ‘anti-historical,’ according to Eagleton, because
he reads the epoché as performing a kind of narcissistic introspection aimed
at establishing the nature of some ‘human inwardness.’
32
In a similar
fashion, Daniel C. Dennett has claimed that the ‘aim’ of phenomenology
was ‘to find a new foundation for all philosophy (indeed, for all
knowledge), based on a special technique of introspection’
33
; and Donald
D. Price and Murat Aydede, in an essay on the ‘experiential-
phenomenological approach’ to pain, stress that ‘ontologically distinct
(nonphysical, psychic) phenomena’—pain phenomena in this particular
case—are ‘accessible only through the special epistemic faculty of
introspection.’
34
These critics first and foremost miss the point that
Husserlian bracketing, leading back to the pre-theoretic, unobjectified
experience-stream—the raw, flowing, dynamic, semi-chaotic experience as
it is originally offered to us—has nothing to do with ‘introspectionism’ or
with ignoring one world for another. In phenomenology, the world is never
closed off or forgotten. In fact, as Eugen Fink, Husserl’s research assistant,
stresses in Sixth Cartesian Meditation: in phenomenology, ‘[t]he human I,
with its belief in the world, with its inclusion of itself in its account of that
world, does not interrupt its belief in the world.’
35
Through epoché we do
‘not lose a previous thematic field at all. Quite the contrary … What we lose
is not the world but our captivation by the world.’
36
Phenomenology
‘precisely makes the world questionable’ by merely suspending the various
objectifications of the ‘natural’ attitude.
37
Epoché throws the world open in
all its complexity, implying not an abandonment of but a change of attitude
towards reality through a neutralising of preconceptions. In other words, the
surface world of everyday-life habits is simply withheld in order to examine
more closely its constitutive ground: the motions inherent in untouched
experience.
Our terrain, then, is that of pre-theory over theory, of a pre-theoretical
cognisance of things where we are ‘immersed in the space of meaning
without thematizing it.’
38
This book argues that phenomenology and
modernist works ‘make reference to that pre-theoretical situation.’
39
A pre-
theoretical dimension of experience can only but be non-relational, which
stands in stark contrast to the much-misunderstood assumption that
phenomenology is introspective. Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi have
stressed that ‘Husserl, who categorically rejects the suggestion that the
notion of phenomenological intuition is a form of inner experience or
introspection (1987, p. 36), even argues that the very suggestion that
phenomenology is attempting to restitute the method of introspection or
inner observation … is preposterous and perverse (Husserl 1971/1980, p.
38).’
40
Claiming that this kind of reading is very problematic, Gallagher
and Zahavi too aim to ‘ward off’ the misunderstanding of Husserl’s epoché
as detaching some ‘inner observation’ from the world.
41
In fact, in
phenomenology it seems ludicrous to use the terms inner and outer as, in
most daily experience, there is no subject–object split. Emil Lask, one of
Husserl’s neo-Kantian contemporaries who also influenced Martin
Heidegger, stressed that prior to all binary thinking, all subject–object
divisiveness and ‘relational “meaning”’ there is an ‘Ineinander,’ an in-
each-other, which ‘is in fact not a relation at all, if a relation presupposes
the coordination of distinct entities.’
42
‘Not the “members” of the
correlation, but the correlation is the prior thing,’
43
echoes Fink in Sixth
Cartesian Meditation. In Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, the
same notion of Ineinander is also referred to as a ‘fold’ in the flesh, the
‘doubling up of my body into inside and outside.’
44
As this makes clear, the mode of operation of ‘bracketing’ inaugurating
reduction does not equal a cancellation of one world for another, but a shift
in the direction of one’s attention, away from the pre-givenness of the world
and back to what Merleau-Ponty in The World of Perception calls ‘an
unfamiliar gaze.’
45
Rather, what happens is that my habitual way of
regarding the world is changed: that which is taken for granted now
becomes the object of examination.
46
No previous reality is rejected in
reduction and no world view is narrowed down or ‘reduced’ to some ‘anti-
historical’ or ‘inner’ residuum. When he called for a return ‘to the things
themselves,’
47
Husserl meant to recover our pre-reflective cognisance of
things prior to objective notions or thematisations, prior to reason and
theory, restoring an ‘uncaptivation and openness to everything that, in an
ultimate sense, “is.”’
48
The ‘brackets’ of phenomenology, then, are
brackets of opening in that they aim to bring to light the condition that
underlies experience and makes it possible at all. Human existence in the
world of daily life is exactly the world that is questioned in phenomenology,
and human existence is always ‘characterized by historicity in the sense that
the temporal horizon forms and shapes the present’:

Historicity means not simply that I am located at a certain point in


history, but that I carry my history around with me; my past
experience has an effect on the way that I understand the world and
the people I encounter in the world. I have been among others as
long as I remember, and my anticipations are structured in
accordance with inherited forms of apperception and
comprehension. … The social world is not made up only by
overlapping pasts belonging to individuals, but also by shared pasts
belonging to groups and communities.’
49

Likewise, modernist art does not detach itself from history; on the contrary,
in its receptivity to the flux of experience it has a great awareness of history.
T.S. Eliot presents this idea in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’:

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness


of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to
write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a
feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and
within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a
simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This
historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the
temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what
makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a
writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
contemporaneity.
50

Echoing Husserl’s examination of ‘time consciousness,’ of the ‘now


moment, retention and protention’ that are ‘three mutually related non-
independent parts of each conscious lived experience,’ Eliot’s ‘historical
sense’ is an apprehension of the ‘now’ thickened with ‘not yet memory’ of
the past and ‘not yet anticipation’ of the future
51
; it is, in other words, a
temporal flow of sensory consciousness, alive and constantly moving. This
‘historical sense,’ Eliot claims, ‘makes a writer traditional.’ Etymologically
the word ‘tradition’ itself means ‘handing down,’ implying movement and
hinting at process and productivity. Culture and history, then, cannot exist
as a preconceived totality but are ways of thinking about the productivity
and process of art. Eliot’s historical sense and implicit critique of
totalisation chime with Derrida’s words in Writing and Difference: ‘If
totalization no longer has any meaning, it is … because the nature of the
field—that is, language and a finite language—excludes totalization.’
52
Derrida’s writing ‘thinks the ground of phenomenology,’
53
the ground of
the Husserlian notions of time, temporality and historicity. Whereas
recorded and chronological history serves as a time frame for events,
historicity, according to Husserl, is ‘the consciousness of historical
experience,’ ‘the experiential dimension’
54
or subjectively lived aspect of
history:

Language is a vast reservoir for preinterpretation, but social order as


a whole reflects the historicity of things. When the individual finds
meaning in his world, then, he is, tacitly at least, ascribing
significance to a reality that already possesses significance. He is
creating a construction of the second degree—a construction of an
already existent construction.
55

Phenomenology, modernist literature and art challenge us to step back from


this ‘second degree’ and objectively ‘framed’ experience to first-order
experience, an un-framed and raw experience that can never be completely
possessed.
56

Shifts of Attitude: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-


Ponty
Husserl had introduced the reduction in a lecture course in 1906–1907, and
later published this work as The Idea of Phenomenology.
57
The
phenomenological shift of attitude that the philosopher argued for,
exhibiting the depth of human relations to and engagements with the world,
was a reaction to what he claimed was European man’s unquestioning,
naïve trust in pre-conceived scientific notions, asserting an objective and
ready-made reality. This unquestioning trust, which had separated him from
‘the absolute ground of pure pre-conceptual experience,’
58
had made him
lose sight of the fact that consciousness itself was the source of the meaning
of the world and that objectivity arises from an intending subjectivity. The
crisis of the ‘objective’ sciences—both mathematical natural science and
the humanistic sciences—amounting to what Husserl in the 1930s came to
call ‘Europe’s sickness,’
59
lay in the fact that this ‘objectivism’ had
provided the norm for all knowledge,
60
thus obscuring its original
foundation. The mode of operation of ‘bracketing’
61
—the epoché that
inaugurates reduction—would help put pre-conceived objectivity out of
play, uncover the world’s essential structure—the ‘primal ground’ for
knowledge
62
—and thus provide a description of things as they were met in
immediate experience.
Husserl’s work offers several versions of the reduction,
63
but the focus
of this book is on what he termed the eidetic reduction. The philosopher
described phenomenology as the ‘eidetic science,’ the science of ‘the Eidos,
the pure essence.’
64
Essences, which are also spoken of as phenomena, are
nothing mystical but simply ‘aspects or qualities of objects-as-intended,’
65
that is to say, in terms of how consciousness experiences them. Analyses of
the essences of the acts of consciousness, via a bracketing of
preconceptions and presuppositions, are thus eidetic or essential analyses.
The term reduction, then, should here be read as referring to the eidetic
reduction, signifying a ‘change of standpoint,’
66
directing our attention to
the essence or eidos that lies on the other side of our everyday, concrete
fact-world.
It should be noted that, in his ‘radical’ work on reduction, Husserl is
indebted to Descartes. In his study Descartes and Husserl: The
Philosophical Project of Radical Beginnings, Paul S. Macdonald traces
unexpected parallels between Husserl’s and Descartes’ philosophical
inquiries; in fact, Macdonald claims, Husserl is more indebted to Descartes
than Husserl himself appreciates.
67
Wanting ‘to begin in “absolute
poverty,”’ like Descartes, Husserl draws upon the Cartesian epoché, a
‘“putting out of action” of all one’s previous opinions and convictions.’
68
As Maurice Natanson explains, however,

as with Cartesian doubt, phenomenological doubt places in question


everything which is posited by consciousness. … But whereas
Descartes’ method carried with it a metaphysical apparatus
involving the role of God in the assurance of objective nature and
extended and thinking substance, Husserl’s procedure sets aside
questions of this order and moves along a metaphysically neutral
path.
69

Thus, it is both in relation to but also separate from Cartesianism that


Husserl continues to explore the meaning of epoché and the activity of
consciousness.
Borrowing from Franz Brentano, ‘intentionality’ is Husserl’s term for
this activity or directedness of consciousness. Consciousness by its very
nature is always consciousness-of; every act of thinking implies an object of
thought: ‘the thing is the intentional unity, that which we are conscious of
as one and self-identical within the continuously ordered flow of perceptual
patterns as they pass from the one into the other.’
70
Husserl’s ‘intentional
unity’ or ‘thing’ refers neither to a ‘thing’ nor a subject-object dichotomy or
relation; rather, the ‘thing itself’ is a pre-theoretic involvement of
consciousness and the world as untouched by Cartesian or empiricist
subject-object reasoning.
71
Pre-reflective intentionality, then, is ‘neither
internal or external, neither subjective nor objective. In a sense, then, it is
neutral.’
72
Heidegger agrees with Husserl, in Being and Time (1927), that the
growth of modern technology meant an obscuring of pre-reflective, holistic
understanding, which, unlike technology, cannot be objectified and broken
up into fragments. Characterising the dimension of experience that is
uncovered after Husserl’s reduction not as that of consciousness but as
being-in-the-world,
73
Heidegger’s appreciation of meaning-making differs
from that of Husserl. Yet, Heidegger too claimed that phenomenology was
responding to a ‘crisis’ in that it would help ‘break through our “rote”
procedures,’
74
and put ourselves back in touch with an authentic ‘pre-
understanding of being-in-the-world’
75
amidst what he terms ‘the facticity
of life.’
76
For Heidegger this pre-understanding is neither purely subjective
nor purely objective but should be seen as ‘a fundamental openness to the
Being of beings.’
77
What Heidegger showed is that an inauthentic,
theoretical understanding of life—‘Da-sein in its everydayness’
78

depended on an authentic, pre-theoretic and holistic experience of being, ‘a
primitive stage of Da-sein.’
79
For Merleau-Ponty, whose existential phenomenology was based on
both the fundamentals of Husserl’s philosophical method and Heidegger’s
notion of being-in-world, the roots of our acts and expressions lie in
primordial assumptions, not about how phenomena appear to us as given in
consciousness, but about the body in-the-world.
80
The efforts of his
thought are centred upon rediscovering, through the reduction, a ‘naïve
contact with the world’ from which our acts, expressions and relations stem
81
: ‘Seeking the essence of the world is not to seek what it is as an idea,

after having reduced it to a theme of discourse; rather, it is to seek what it in


fact is for us, prior to every thematization.’
82
Unlike Husserl’s emphasis on
the intentionality of consciousness (the pre-reflective nature of ‘the
consciousness of something’
83
as the starting-point for phenomenological
investigation), Merleau-Ponty holds that consciousness comes to birth in
the body. Hence, intentionality is assigned to what the philosopher in his
later work terms ‘flesh.’ In Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the arts, it is the
painter’s or writer’s bodily encounter with the world that is expressed onto
the blank space of his canvas or page:

The painter ‘takes the body with him,’ says Valéry. Indeed we
cannot imagine how a mind could paint. It is by lending his body to
the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To
understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the
working, actual body—not a body as a chunk of space or a bundle
of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and
movement.
84

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology seeks to uncover the genesis of perception


—in his 1945 essay ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ he calls it ‘the lived experience, that
which we actually perceive’
85
—and to describe how this experience bears
on the formation of linguistic and conceptual meaning. The ‘bracketing’
(suspension) of Husserl’s ‘natural standpoint’—the attitude of the ‘“natural”
sphere of knowledge and of all its sciences,’
86
that is to say, common
notions and habits of thinking—awakens in the perceiver a state of wonder
and amazement in the face of the world and it is thus the ‘expressive
operation of the body, begun by the smallest perception which is amplified
into painting and art.’
87
By painting the same motifs again and again—the
same vessels and fruit, and the Mont Sainte-Victoire series (1882–1906)—
for Cézanne, wonder would constantly be renewed; ‘perhaps, the best
formulation of the reduction,’ notes Merleau-Ponty, ‘is the one offered by
Husserl’s assistant, Eugen Fink when he spoke of a “wonder” before the
world.’
88
The experience of wonder, then, is a key to what Husserl had
already termed the ‘first philosophy’ of phenomenology,
89
its ‘radical
beginning’ turning the phenomenological philosopher himself into ‘a
downright beginner’
90
who was to get ‘back to the things themselves (zu
den Sachen selbst),’
91
that is to say, to recover how the world was ‘first’
experienced and constituted through pre-reflective intentionality. In a core
passage from Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty links the ‘first’
experience of wonder to the nature of modern thought:

The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoate style in


which it proceeds are not the sign of failure; they were inevitable
because phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the
world and the mystery of reason. If phenomenology was a
movement prior to having been a doctrine or system, this is neither
accidental nor a deception. Phenomenology is as painstaking as the
works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne—through the same
kind of attention and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the
same will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent
state. As such phenomenology merges with the effort of modern
thought.
92

Phenomenology, according to Merleau-Ponty, then, reclaims the pre-


theoretic dimensions of practice, re-awakening an awareness of the world as
this is met in immediate, ‘lived’ experience.
Setting out to redefine experience, and, like Husserl and Heidegger
before him, rejecting the traditional and simplistic ‘interior-exterior’
dualism or split between mind and body that informs both empiricism and
Cartesian rationalism, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the artist’s body
gains an unprecedented status in artistic creation. The creative act emerges
out of the world, from a receptive and active interaction with it. Cézanne,
the philosopher writes, ‘speaks as the first men spoke and paints as if no
one had ever painted before.’ His perpetual doubts in his ‘process of
expressing’ are ‘those of the first word,’ of how to make the first mark on a
blank canvas.
93

Epiphanic Modernism
Husserl’s cry for origin, for a ‘first philosophy’ that would return to the
‘essence’ of things as a way of re-engaging with the world, can be
considered in accordance with Roger Griffin’s recent definition of
modernism as a ‘countervailing reaction to modernity,’ offering what he
calls a ‘palingenetic’ reaction of sorts to the crisis of the time.
94
Showing
that the project of modernism across the arts steps back in epoché, performs
reduction and uncovers a pre-theoretic foundation for our reflective acts and
expressions, the focus of this book falls under Griffin’s notion of ‘epiphanic
modernism,’ the aesthetic counter point to what he calls ‘programmatic
modernism,’ the ‘mission’ of which was to ‘change society, to inaugurate a
new epoch, to start time anew.’
95
In contrast, epiphanic modernism, Griffin
argues, ‘phenomenologically suspends’ linear time and replaces it by a
‘transcendent temporality’ revealing a ‘higher reality.’
96
This ‘higher
reality’ might be mistaken for the ‘Kantean conception of ideality,’
97
the
‘thing in itself’ (the ‘Ding an Sich’), signifying what Kant termed the
noumenon, which exists ‘not as an object of our sensuous intuition’ but
refers to the thing or event as it is ‘in itself,’ lurking behind our
understanding of things and therefore distinct from human experience.
98
Thus, ‘the thing in itself’ is ‘unknown and unknowable’ to human beings
99
—a position that Husserl rejects: ‘It is … a fundamental error to suppose
that perception … fails to come into contact with the thing itself. We are
told that the thing in itself and its itselfness is not given to us. … But this
view is nonsensical.’
100
Unlike Kant’s unapproachable noumena, the
‘things in themselves’ or things as they are independently in the external
world, for Husserl ‘the thing itself’ lays bare the world as phenomenon, that
is to say, in terms of how consciousness experiences it: ‘Locating the object
as thing or as intended phenomenon depends on the perspective of the
inquirer.’
101
Although the focus of this study is not the epiphany per se but the
phenomenological aspect of Griffin’s ‘epiphanic modernism,’ it will be
helpful to flesh out the interconnection between phenomenology and those
epiphanic ‘unspeakable … privileged moments’ that in literature are called
epiphanies.
102
An integral part of the mind-set of modernism and its focus
on the self and sense data, the modernist moment of epiphany is always
related to a perceiving subject who always already has an implicit bond
with the world it seeks to know. The root of both phenomenology and
epiphany is ‘phaneien,’ meaning to show, appear or bring to light.
Phenomenology is the logos or study of the phainómenon, ‘that which
appears,’ that is to say, an occurrence perceptible by the senses. So, whereas
epiphany means ‘to appear’ or ‘to bring to light,’ phenomenology reflects
on appearance and asks: how is it that experience is possible at all?
Considering this etymological kinship between the words ‘epiphany’
and ‘phenomenology,’ it seems odd that the connection between the two has
been largely overlooked. While there have been studies on the concept of
the epiphany,
103
Martin Bidney’s 1997 Patterns of Epiphany is the only
book-length study that explores some connections between phenomenology
and the literary epiphany. Drawing upon Bachelard’s notion of the ‘reverie,’
Bidney argues that ‘[i]nvestigation of individual writers’ structures of
reverie/epiphany (the kind of study Bachelard does) is called
phenomenological criticism—an approach used in major works by such
critics as Geoffrey Hartmann and J. Hillis Miller. Phenomenology is the
study of structures of perceived experience.’
104
He goes on to stress that
his study ‘will avoid’ what he, without further examination, refers to as
‘Husserlian hazards’:

For Edmund Husserl, the most influential modern formulator of


phenomenological method, ‘self-present being, pure being, preceded
language’—a Platonic sounding assumption from which Derrida has
famously dissented. Also, Husserlian epoché or ‘bracketing,’ the
phenomenological isolation of a given object of consciousness for
the contemplation of its pure structure, was somehow meant
eventually to reveal ‘an unchanging and universal essence (eidos),’
again a kind of Platonism to which Derrida, or somebody else,
might react sceptically.
105

This account misses the point that Husserl actually ‘resisted “Platonic
realism”, the doctrine … that Platonic “forms” or eidos exist in a Platonic
heaven beyond space and time.’ As David Woodruff Smith explains,
Husserl accentuated that ‘we have ways of grasping or knowing essences in
“eidetic intuition”, or intuition of essences,’ a doctrine that ‘has been widely
misunderstood’
106
: ‘intuition of essences is not a magical faculty for the
gifted few.’
107
Rather, as indicated, phenomenology returns us to the
‘prepredicative and preconscious structures of experience that are the
“essences” of ever-changing experience.’
108
The Bachelardian philosophy
that Bidney promotes ‘is no dead end’ like Husserl’s, the critic claims, but
rather ‘a series of beginning,’ ironically missing the point that
phenomenology, as Husserl thought of it, cannot possibly be a ‘dead end’ as
it is never centred upon finality but upon constant opening onto experience
itself and thus a ‘radical beginning.’ In Phenomenology of Perception,
Merleau-Ponty comments on the fact that the concept of reduction was
never a dead end but rather a point of eternal return in Husserl’s work. The
latter re-examined the implications of the reduction without ever reaching a
conclusion; thus Merleau-Ponty stresses: ‘The most important lesson of the
reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction. This is why Husserl
always wonders anew about the possibility of the reduction. If we were
absolute spirit, the reduction would not be problematic.’
109
A key to the dilemma of incomplete reduction lies in the fact that the
temporal world persists in its own renewal and that the subject exists in this
world as a carnal being; hence ‘the philosopher is a perpetual beginner. …
This also means … that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its
own beginning, that it consists entirely in describing this beginning.’
110
Impossibility of complete reduction, then, is not a sign of futility but a
constant reminder of the pre-reflective dimension of reality, the ‘first
philosophy’ embedded within daily life from which our critical reflections
arise.
Thus, to proceed: beginnings are plentiful in modernist texts in which
epiphanic illumination is found in ‘the pots and pans’ of ordinary life and
the everyday.
111
Since James Joyce coined the word, which he took from
theology for literary exploration, the notion of epiphany is commonly
thought of as a moment of insight that shifts one’s fundamental conceptual
framework. Like the phenomenological reduction, which involved a
‘bracketing’ of habits of thought in order to get back to Husserl’s ‘things
themselves,’ the literary moment of ‘epiphany’ dramatically shifts the
subject’s perspective, suspends all everyday notions about the world and
lays bare the immediate, lived experience of the embodied subject,
heightening their sense of being-in-the world.
What the phenomenological reduction and the ‘epiphany’ have in
common is that both suspend the hard facts of everyday life and restore
wonder to the world: ‘An epiphany in the compounded sense, generalized
into the total world of experience, is the discovery of a thematic meaning
which has been lost in its “sedimentations” (to borrow a term from the
language of phenomenology).’
112
Both the epiphany and the reduction are
moments freed from doctrine; both are retrievals of the extraordinary in the
ordinary. Rejecting the traditional mind/world split that informs Cartesian
dualism and extant views of modernism as upholding a mind/world
opposition,
113
the epiphanic moment is a momentary shift of attitude that
does not reject the real world; rather, it restores openness to the world,
affirming the pre-theoretic in-each-other of the subject and the world.
Working back from this, I want to propose a different take on Griffin’s
epiphanic modernism. The modernisms explored in this book should not be
seen as revealing a ‘higher reality,’ detaching the subject from the world;
rather, they uncover a more basic reality that is experientially immanent, an
unmediated form of apprehension that is ‘naked of any illusion,’ to borrow
from Wallace Stevens.
114
We might refer to this return to everyday
immanence as the new ‘architecture’ of modernism: the old must first be
‘decreated’—a term that Stevens borrows from Simone Weil
115
—in order
to be recreated. An unmediated form of apprehension, experientially
immanent to and thus emerging ‘at the back of appearances’ as Lily Briscoe
has it in To the Lighthouse, also serves as the ground of Virginia Woolf’s
philosophy in ‘A Sketch of the Past’:

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a


constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a
pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with
this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the
work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this
vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there
is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are
the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
116

Just as phenomenology exposes the essential structure of experience


obscured by everyday facticity, so Woolf uncovers the essential ‘hidden …
pattern’ beneath the dumbing-down effects of the ‘cotton wool’ of daily life
—the ‘world hidden from us beneath all the sediment of knowledge and
social living’
117
—which is rooted in the embodied experience of reading
Shakespeare, listening to Beethoven and praying to God. For writers like
Woolf, ‘there is indeed another world, but … it is inside this one,’
118
in the
pre-theoretic in-each-other, in the very ‘folds’ of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of
the world. Thus, ‘epiphanic modernism’ brings a second sight to bear on the
hidden and often neglected truths of daily life, as here in Lily Briscoe’s
reflections in the final section of To the Lighthouse:

What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one
that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had
never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead
there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck
unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other;
herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay
bringing them together; Mrs Ramsay saying, ‘Life stand still here’;
Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in the
other sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something
permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation.
119

Modernist writing is not about the great revelation but exactly about those
angels of earth, the ‘little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck
unexpectedly in the dark,’ the ‘epiphanies of the everyday.’
120
As language is the means through which the experience of such
epiphanies is communicated, its ‘power to epiphanize transcendent
meanings through its own instrumentality’ must necessarily involve ‘a
certain appraisal of the limits of language, and a certain refusal to accept
those limits.’
121
Kearney elaborates that ‘we might say that epiphany
manifests a paradoxical structure of time which Paul calls “eschatological” .
. . —a phenomenon that numerous contemporary thinkers have called
“messianic” time (Levinas, Benjamin, Derrida)’
122
and confronts an
epistemological dilemma—that of an interface between the immediate,
experiential world and language. Woolf’s Lily Briscoe directly expresses an
awareness of her inability to catch ‘an incessant shower of innumerable
atoms . . . as they fall’ of a world in perpetual flux
123
; a world of ‘dappled
things,’ as Hopkins has it in ‘Pied Beauty’
124
; or a ‘fluent mundo,’ in the
words of Stevens, of ‘living changingness.’
125
Phenomenology and
modernism are aware of their own limits, yet both reject finality and
embrace openness.

The Time When Everything Cracked


In his 1934 essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry,’ Samuel Beckett refers to the
twentieth century as a time of ‘the rupture of the lines of communication,’
126
something that Derrida echoes in his essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in

the Discourse of Human Sciences’ when referring to the ‘event’ of ‘rupture’


in intellectual history, ‘the entire history of the concept of structure.’
127
What we face in modernist texts and artworks is the rupture of conventional
literary values, form and language. Etymologically, ‘rupture’ stems from
Latin rumpere, to break. When one of our limbs breaks in an accident we
realise that we take our bodies for granted and a new awareness of our own
bodies is raised. Usually the ruptured limb is pieced together again and
heals over time, but the new bodily awareness remains. In this light,
‘rupture’ should not be seen as a rejection but as a new awareness of the
taken for granted ground of our values, language, acts and expressions.
Writing in the wake of the rupturing of old certainties, modernist writers
and artists witnessed a loss of values and a cultural decline. While Woolf
would set out in the modern world of broken objects to ‘seek among
phrases and fragments something unbroken,’
128
Gertrude Stein portrayed
the ‘twentieth century’ as ‘a time when everything cracks,’ which, she
claimed, ‘is a more splendid thing than a period where everything follows
itself.’
129
Stein’s ‘splendid’ twentieth century evidences a time of radical
change, of showing forth what lies beneath the cracked surface of facticity
and everyday-life habits.
130
Wallace Stevens also confronted the broken
object-world by challenging his readers: ‘Piece the world together boys, but
not with your/Hands.’
131
‘[P]oetic truth,’ then, meant a turning away from
belief in some higher being and became ‘an agreement with reality,’
132
revealing ‘a new knowledge of reality’ different from that of nineteenth-
century realism.
133
In the works of modernists, all forms of expression and
inquiry underwent a radical shift of attitude, a clue to which lies in Stein’s
commentary on the work of Picasso: ‘No one had ever tried to express
things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them
without remembering having looked at them.’
134
In trying to express a pre-
objective and thus more direct experience of the world, the new realism of
modernism was concerned not with ‘the reflection of a prior truth,’ to
borrow from Merleau-Ponty, but with ‘the actualization of a truth.’
135
Just as phenomenological reduction never rejects preconceptions but re-
evaluates the depth of man’s engagement with the world, modernism is a
reaction to and re-evaluation of but never a rejection of nineteenth-century
realism. The realist art of representation or mimesis had attempted to give a
true image of what was considered to be a free-standing reality and this is
exactly what is thrown into relief when Woolf, in ‘Modern Fiction,’
famously criticises the Edwardian writers Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells and
John Galsworthy for being ‘materialist,’ too preoccupied with the ‘solidity
of [their] fabric,’ writing ‘of unimportant things’ and ‘spend[ing] immense
skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the
true and the enduring.’
136
‘Can it be,’ Woolf continues, that Mr. Bennett is
‘catching life just an inch or two on the wrong side?’ For ‘he can make a
book so well constructed and solid in its craftsmanship that … there is not
so much as a draught between the frames of the windows, or a crack in the
boards.’
137
However, it is the cracks and the imperfect, ‘varying’ and
‘unknown’ aspects of life that Woolf calls ‘the proper stuff of fiction.’
138
For the modernist artist, language could no longer simply represent
‘reality’; instead, what we see is an attempt to be more in touch with
immediate sense perception, to move beyond language itself to capture the
now of the experience, the contemporaneity of the moment. ‘If modern
thought is difficult and runs counter to common sense,’ writes Merleau-
Ponty, ‘this is because it is concerned with truth; experience no longer
allows it to settle for the clear and straightforward notions which common
sense cherishes because they bring peace of mind.’
139
Modernist art and literature throws the reader off balance so as to
capture the incoherence and dislocations of a bewildering age. Presenting us
with a re-evaluation of the notion of subjectivity, modernist writing
expresses the nature of modern consciousness, suggesting that our
perception of life comes from the elusive and random movement of
untouched experience itself. Recalling the immediate data and ceaseless
activity of consciousness that William James explored in The Principles of
Psychology (1890), the ‘myriad impressions’ of ‘innumerable atoms’
showering the ‘ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ in Woolf’s ‘Modern
Fiction’ can be taken as a reaction to the crisis of modernity, the
‘atomisation’ of a rapidly transforming culture. What we find in both
modernism and phenomenology is ‘a new paradigm or model for meaning,
justification and truth entering the historical scene.’
140
Drawing upon Hugo Ball’s ‘transvaluation of all values,’ which
included ‘a change in the sense of relationship between Man and Reality,’
Richard Sheppard explains that the classical conception of reality of
harmony and unity, ‘posit[ing] … a consonance … between the logical
structure of the material world (and) the structure of the human logos’ was
overturned. Major developments within the fields of subatomic—and astro-
physics collapsed the conceptual barrier between human beings and an
objective reality, proving the existence of a ‘meta-world,’ a non-linear
reality that involved ‘leaps, jerks, gaps, irregularity and discontinuities.’
141
This was the new reality of such high modernist writers as Joyce, Eliot,
Stein, Stevens, Kafka and Woolf to which Albert Einstein was applying his
law of mass-energy equivalence.
George Seurat’s pointillist painting ‘La Grande Jatte,’ which, like all of
Seurat’s paintings in the 1880s, consisted of little dots, offers a visual
representation of this atomisation of the world. When seen close up, this
stippled artwork looks like mere fragments—but, when seen from a
distance, the dots create one whole, one vision. What we have here are
molecular compositions, reflecting both the fragments of the mind and the
movements of the world within which that mind exists. Modernist art is
uncertain and engaged with identifying and interpreting the multiplicity of
the world in which we live. The stylistic plurality of Joyce’s Ulysses, for
example, indicates that modernism is less one particular style than a search
for a style.
On the one hand, then, modernist works break down previous
conventions of representing life, but on the other hand, they are closer to
life. On the one hand, a crippling doubt and uncertainty pervades the
modernist work, but, on the other hand, we are presented with a sense of
hope, new possibilities and openness. Just as our experience of the now is
thick with what Husserl called ‘retentions’ and ‘protensions’ of that which
has just passed and that which is still to come,
142
so modernist texts or
artworks display ‘the dual characteristics of being unfinished and
ambiguous,’
143
open-ended and inexhaustible. In a modern world in crisis,
Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the
world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion … human
existence … merely has the capacity to progress towards the objective and
does not possess objectivity in fully-fledged form.’
144
This recalls the ‘Preface’ to Phenomenology of Perception: ‘The world
is not an object whose law of constitution I have in my possession; it is the
natural milieu and field of all my thoughts and of all my explicit
perceptions.’
145
Lived experience, then, is a non-objectifying activity; it
‘perpetually transcends itself toward the world … without possessing the
world … because it is of its essence a process.’
146
Likewise, the modernist
subject is ‘meant for’ and directed toward the world but does not, and
cannot, possess it.
147
The pre-theoretic involvement of the subject and
world is not one of knowledge and not one of possession, but one of
curiosity and constant questioning, recalling Leopold Bloom’s thoughts on
ownership and water in Ulysses, reflecting both the intangible flow of
experience and our experience of reading the modernist text: ‘How can you
own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which is
the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.’
148
Experience is an
‘infinite task’
149
that can only be unending: that can only begin again and
again. Both modernism and phenomenology recognise the poverty of what
Husserl called a ‘radical beginning’; ‘both know that poverty, and are not
frightened by it.’
150

Phenomenology, Language and Meaning-Giving


The necessary poverty of phenomenology, however, has been
misunderstood. What Eagleton sees as the ‘idealist’ and ‘anti-historical’
qualities of ‘the wholly uncritical, non-evaluative mode of analysis’ that,
according to him, is phenomenology resembles a world that has been ‘hit by
some kind of neutron nuke,’ in the words of J. Benoist (who stresses the
importance of getting ‘phenomenology out of its nuclear winter’
151
).
Meaning is ‘an original, irreducible form of intentionality’ and an ‘original
phenomenon,’ not a belated one that is shaped via our written or spoken
language.
152
Meaning itself, according to Husserl, is a ‘non-
representational’ primary space as opposed to a belated theory, which
cannot consider anything that is not already a representation.
153
In this primary space of meaning that Husserl calls attention to via
epoché, something may be pre-reflectively ‘lived through and not itself
“known”’ before being a ‘categorically formed’ item of representivity
facing a self.
154
Merleau-Ponty elaborates this idea in Signs but, as
opposed to Husserl, he stresses the importance of bodily intentionality:
‘Language bears the meaning of thought as a footprint signifies the
movement and effort of a body.’
155
The phenomenological grounding of
speculation in ‘pre-reflective and pre-theoretical intentionality’—whether
this is the intentionality of consciousness (embodied) or bodily
intentionality—is what makes phenomenology a ‘first philosophy.’
156
Before we automatically theorise or judge an object as facing us, the object
(a real object or an object of consciousness) stands in a certain ‘first’ or
primitive dimension—an ‘openness’ of pre-knowing, as it were.
157
This
meaning ‘cannot be thought of as an object; the space of meaning is not,
strictly speaking, logical space.’
158
Like intentionality, meaning, as Emil
Lask sees it, is neither inside nor outside: it is not an entity.
159
Meaning, therefore, is always already a silent and latent part of what
Husserl termed the life-world (Lebenswelt), the ‘concrete world of everyday
experience.’
160
Arguing against critics’ claims that this silent dimension of
the life-world is ‘alinguistic,’ Benoist notes that it is ‘in fact … not,
properly speaking, “alinguistic”: it is just that silence that always
accompanies the speech and constitutes so to speak its background, a
background against which the speech can only do what it does and be what
it is.’ Language, in other words, ‘is not just language’ but is rooted in a non-
representational space of meaning.
161
According to Husserl, if
consciousness were not meaning-giving, the letters on this page would
simply appear as little figures. Meaning, then, comes from consciousness
but should not be reduced to something psychological.
162
Intentionality, the activity of consciousness and the the ‘starting-point
and basis’
163
of phenomenology is best understood in its original Latin
form, intendere, meaning primarily ‘stretching out,’ ‘straining towards’ or
even ‘directing.’
164
In intentional experience the subject stretches or
‘“directs” itself … towards an intentional object.’
165
The shift of attitude
occasioned by epoché brings to light this directionality: consciousness is a
constant stretching out, a spontaneity and movement. Intentional experience,
then, has a meaning-giving function.
166
The idea that we necessarily perceive, think or imagine something as
this or that, or in this or that respect, implies that there is, necessarily,
‘sense’ involved in intention. As Filip Mattens explains in his work on
language in Husserl, ‘language not only enables us to refer to an object, but
also allows us to report the specific modes in which an object is, or can be,
given to us. In a word, linguistic expressions reflect the cognitive structure,
or categorical articulation, of our apprehension of things. Thus, upon closer
examination, it is far from self-evident that language is merely external to
thinking.’
167
This anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s meditations upon the silent
centre of language, that ‘core of primary signification around which acts of
naming and of expression are organized.’
168
Although our clear
expressions presuppose this silent and invisible dimension of what, for
Merleau-Ponty, is primarily corporeal experience, we do not perceive it in
daily life as it already exists within being. In Phenomenology of Perception,
he writes: ‘There is an autochthonous sense of the world that is constituted
in the exchange between the world and our embodied existence and that
forms the ground of every deliberate Sinngebung [sense-giving act].’
169
Thus, focusing on the ‘Sinngebung,’ the meaning-giving action of the body,
Merleau-Ponty steers Husserl’s discussion of language in a different
direction when claiming that sense and speech are ‘enveloped in each
other’: ‘sense is caught in speech, and speech is the external existence of
sense’; ‘speech does not translate a ready-made thought; rather, speech
accomplishes thought.’
170
Linguistic meaning, then, presupposes the
structure of an embodied consciousness as meaning-giving but also
accomplishes it.
Cézanne’s famous still lifes, Stein’s experimental poems, Kafka’s
strange fiction, Woolf’s novels, Hopkins’s poems on aesthetic production,
Stevens’s ‘Supreme Fiction,’ and Klee’s preoccupation with questions of
origin are artistic reflections upon such processes of meaning-giving. In
fact, according to Husserl, the artist too ‘sees into the heart of things,’ into
‘how meaning is made.’
171
In this process of meaning-making, modernist
writers highlight the perpetual movement of the pre-reflective ‘flow of
becoming’ or lived ‘experience (Erlebnis),’
172
as Husserl had already
called it. Constantly renewing the challenges posed to its readers, modernist
texts turn us into practical phenomenologists, ‘perpetual beginners.’ Both
phenomenology and modernism thrive in the blend of insecurity and
possibility, in answers that are in motion and elusive, thus gesturing toward
meaning and never ceasing to open onto ‘infinite open horizons of the
unknown but potentially knowable.’
173
Both phenomenology and the
modernist writers and artists discussed in this book do not challenge values
themselves but the ground for those values that belong to what Husserl
called the ‘natural standpoint’: habits of thinking, common sense and
preconceived ‘objective’ notions, and the assumption that experience is
dichotomous.
The writers and artists explored on the following pages never present us
with perfect, representative and finished models for life and the modernist
self. Rather, what we encounter in their works is a dynamic stream of words
or brush strokes echoing the raw stream of experience as it is originally
offered to us, the unmediated dimension of experience that James called the
‘stream of thought’
174
and that Merleau-Ponty came to think of as the
‘lived’ experience of the body, which is always primarily a non-objectifying
understanding of itself. Challenging traditional processes of writing,
reading and representation, in the texts and artworks examined here there is
an emphasis on how seeing and perception take place, on the how rather
than the what. This means that there is a tendency towards reflexivity, self-
consciousness and questioning about the very production and reception of
art. This interrogative mode in modernist works, questioning experience
itself and meaning that ‘there is always the possibility of doubt,’
175
also
describes the depth of our engagement with the world. This book returns to
this ‘primordial faith,’ as Merleau-Ponty calls it, throughout the following
four chapters.

Primordial Faith
Primordial faith belongs to the earth and to the Verflechtung of body-
subjects, world and language. Primordial faith is post-theistic, possibly even
‘anatheistic,’ to borrow from Richard Kearney, in that it lies beyond the
dichotomy of theism and atheism, signalling ‘a via affirmative after the via
negative of disenchantment.’
176
While modernist literature ‘chose
aesthetics over religion,’ it still questioned and subverted religion in the
process, meditating upon and attempting to reconcile the chasm between
pre-reflective, embodied experience and reflective explication or
thematisation. In this way, it often evoked man before the fall in the Garden
of Eden, which, following Emmanuel Levinas, may be understood as ‘not a
place, but a stage of consciousness “prior” to the introduction or
development of reason.’
177
Thus, the second chapter of this book begins
with an apple.

Apples
Paul Cézanne wanted to ‘astonish Paris with an apple.’ Astonishment
—‘“wonder” before the world,’ as Fink called it—is the motive for
phenomenology, recalling the Aristotelian notion that wonder kick-starts
philosophy itself.
Starting with Cézanne’s still-lifes with apples (1890–1900), offering a
reading of an experimental apple poem from Gertrude Stein’s Tender
Buttons (1914) and meditating upon the rotten apple stuck in the back of
Gregor Samsa, the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis
(1916), Chapter 2 explores ways in which these modernists present us with
new artistic models embodied in a shift of perspective, returning us to
wonder and uncovering a pre-theoretic foundation for artistic inquiry.
Cézanne’s famous apples seem too solid to balance on plates or tables,
almost roll out of the paintings’ surfaces and begin to break the boundary
between seer and seen, paving the way for the framelessness of Picasso’s
cubism, as noted by Stein: ‘the framing of life, the need that a picture exists
in its frame, remain in its frame was over.’
178
Like Stein’s own frameless
poems, the frame and foundation of everyday affairs in Metamorphosis
collapse, shifting the perspective away from ‘ruination’ or ‘fallenness’ (that,
according to Heidegger, are natural tendencies of factic life) and back to the
pre-logical depths of an un-framed and raw lived experience. Re-evaluating
both the traditional mind/world split that informs Cartesian dualism and
extant views of modernism as upholding a mind/world opposition, through
the collapse of frames, the selected works present us with a radical shift of
attitude—an ‘unfamiliar gaze,’ as Merleau-Ponty calls it in his 1948 The
World of Perception—that does not reject the real world; rather, it restores
an ‘uncaptivation and openness to everything that . . . “is.”’

Earthly Angels
‘She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame.’
179
Clarissa
Dalloway’s atheism, however, gives way to a much-celebrated, physical in-
the-worldness:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her


when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now,
she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into
the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air
was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave;
chill and sharp.
180

For many modernist writers and artist, religious faith gives way to a self-
recollection of sorts through epiphanies of the everyday—the expression of
an almost sacred radiance of the sights, sounds and senses of daily life; the
extraordinary in the ordinary; the creative in normality. Fiction becomes
‘supreme fiction’ in the words of Wallace Stevens, capturing the living
movement between mute perception and words, an ongoing movement
toward, unfinished and infinite.
181
‘The Windhover’ (1918), a poem about physical and creative flight by
Gerard Manley Hopkins, often considered a modernist poet ahead of his
time, sets the tone for the third chapter’s discussion about creativity and
earthly angels—modernist winged messengers that are very much of this
world. Stevens promoted himself as the ‘Priest of the Invisible,’ whose
poetry would fill the void left by the death of God as proclaimed by
Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882.
182
Stevens’s ‘Supreme Fiction’ is like the
‘angel of reality’ in his ‘Angel Surrounding by Paysans’ (1950), an earthly
angel only ‘seen for a moment standing in the door,’
183
echoing and
celebrating the flux of life itself, living ‘uncertainly and not for long.’
184
Paul Klee’s ‘angelology,’ his hovering, hesitating and unfinished angel
paintings produced between 1938 and 1940, also express the uncertainties
of the modernist subject. Responding to the crisis of the loss of religious
faith, Hopkins, Stevens and Klee meditate upon processes of meaning-
giving—the passage between experience and expression—language and the
limits of language itself. All three present us with paradigmatic examples of
the modernist art of doubting, which should not be seen as futile but as a
prerequisite for the artistic event.

Intersubjectivity: Selves, Others, World


Perceptions and views never cease to ‘melt into each other’ and ‘make an
unsubstantial territory,’
185
says Bernard, Woolf’s phrase-maker in The
Waves (1931). ‘We are, for each other collaborators in perfect reciprocity:
our perspectives slip into each other, we coexist through a single world,’
186
writes Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. Subjectivity,
according to Merleau-Ponty, is always intersubjectivity.
The fourth chapter delves into the fleshy opening of Woolf’s
experimental novel The Waves, an ‘unsubstantial territory’ where subject
and world, perceiver and perceived are in-each-other. Here the perceptions
and sentences of six beings fold over and disappear into each other through
intersecting glances, thoughts and sensations, anticipating Merleau-Ponty’s
‘flesh of the world,’ the fact that we are at once seeing/speaking/touching
subjects and seen/heard/touched objects, at once distanced from and
interlaced with the world. This doubleness pervades Woolf’s work and
makes it expand and contract in wave-like movements of perception and
expression. The waves that constitute The Waves are essentially non-
dialectical in the traditional sense, in that they avoid synthesis, like the
perpetual tossing and breaking of waves in a sea, paving the way for
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘hyperdialectic’ and the final chapter of this
book.

Hyperdialectic
Suspending conventional forms of representation, modernism leads us away
from a familiar and ‘ready-made’ reality towards a more immediate, raw
and dynamic presentation. As the unquestioning trust in objective notions
about the world is suspended, all forms of expression undergo a radical shift
of attitude so that questioning itself takes over. As in phenomenology, these
questions are ‘driven by wonder.’
187
In the works of modernist writers,
language itself is decentred through such questioning and therefore placed
in perspective, calling attention to the invisible and silent dimension of
experience that is always already at the core of language. In this way, both
phenomenology and modernism ‘precisely mak[e] the world questionable.’
188

The ‘auto-criticality’ that radicalises the ‘situatedness of the questioner’


189
is what Merleau-Ponty, in his unfinished work The Visible and the
Invisible, terms ‘hyperdialectic,’
190
a dialectic without synthesis grounded
in our continual interrogation of experience; hence, the philosopher remains
a ‘perpetual beginner.’ The point of the questioning at the heart of the
hyperdialectical mode is not to collapse our usual ground of identification,
but to reacquaint ourselves with the pre-reflective ground of experience,
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘primordial faith.’ The fifth and final chapter braids
together multiple moments of ‘beginning’ in works by the writers and
artists explored, and brings these into dialogue with the polyphonic
structure of hyperdialectic.
The auto-criticality of ‘hyperdialectic’—a ‘non-totalizing movement of
constant decentring, that is continual questioning’
191
—displays a deep-
rooted openness to the world that is ‘conditioned by our changing
perceptions, judgments and situations’ and paves the way for new meaning
in a linguistic sense too,
192
shedding light on the ‘passage from the
perceptual meaning to the language meaning, from the behaviour to
thematization.’
193
The lines of communication in modernist texts are
‘ruptured’ exactly because they open onto this passage, an ‘écart’ as
Merleau-Ponty calls it, a dehiscence that is not an opposition existing
within being, between perceptual and linguistic or discursive meaning.
194
In the modernist formulation of our experience of the world, lack of closure
is less a sign of futilty, powerlessness and a deferral of reference and
meaning than an embrace of the openness and openendedness intrinsic to all
experience and creativity itself. Thought itself is the continuing product of
the flow of experience. Ending on an afterthought instead of a conclusion,
‘Hyperdialectic: A Modernist Adventure’ both meditates on and practises
the fertility of this hyperdialectical thinking.
Notes
1. Leonard Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung: The Triple Significance of Merleau-
Ponty’s Course Notes on Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry,”’  
Foreword to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of
Phenomenology, Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo, eds.,
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), x.
2.
See Jane Patrick, Time to Weave (Loveland: Interweave Press Inc.,  
2006), 8, 65; and Rose Sinclair, ed., Textiles and Fashion: Materials,
Design and Technology (Cambridge: Elsevier, 2015), 255 and 344.
3.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans.  
Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),
113–14.
4.
Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 38 and 41–  
42.
5.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 144, 255, 261, 267,  
271.
6.
Many thanks to Jason Edwards for a very helpful discussion about  
the difference between braiding and weaving.
7.
Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy,  
trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper Perennial, 1965), 153.
8.
Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks  
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 175.
9.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure  
Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen
& Unwin Ltd., 1931), 300.
10.
Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty refers to this perceptual faith as ‘the  
movement that carries us beyond subjectivity, that places us in the
world prior to every science and every verification through a sort of
“faith,” or “primordial opinion.”’ See Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York:
Routledge, 2012), 359.
11.
Ibid., 431, 163, 334.  
12. Ted Toadvine notes that phenomenology has ‘extend[ed] its
influence far beyond the academic discipline of philosophy to  
bli h h l i lb h i h di i li
establish phenomenological branches in such disciplines as
anthropology, architecture, geography, law, nursing, psychology and
sociology,’ in ‘Introduction,’ in Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree,
eds., Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl
(Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), xv.
13.
Sara Heinämaa, ‘From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty’s  
Interpretation of Husserl’s Reduction,’ in Merleau-Ponty’s Reading
of Husserl, 132; my italics.
14.
Husserl, Ideas, 114, 113.  
15.
Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 2nd  
Edition (London: Routledge, 2012), 25.
16.
Husserl, Ideas, 78.  
17.
Husserl as cited in Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the  
Space of Meaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 73.
18.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Metaphysics and the Novel,’ in Sense and  
Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricis Allen Dreyfus
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 28.
19.
Husserl, Ideas, 108.  
20.
Natanson has pointed out that ‘few concepts in phenomenology have  
led to as much misunderstanding as epoché. The chief problem
seems to be that it is interpreted as signifying the denial or,
somehow, the cancellation of reality,’ in Edmund Husserl, 57.
21.
Joseph J. Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology (West  
Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1994), 127.
22.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford:  
Blackwell, 1983), 59–60.
23. Ibid., 60, 61.
 
24.
Husserl, Ideas, 27.  
25.
Ibid., 21; my italics.  
26.
Ibid., 154.  
27.
James M.Edie, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Critical  
Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 87.
28.
Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 94.  
29.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 434.  
30.
David Woodruff Smith, Husserl (London and New York: Routledge,  
2007), 347.
31.
As Yvanka B. Raynova writes, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘approach to  
philosophy is the means of opening up to us the world, time, Nature,
and History as still present and alive,’ in ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
Turning-Point and the Ethics of Responsibility,’ trans. William L.
McBride, in D.H. Davis, ed., Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works and their
Practical Implications: The Dehiscence of Responsibility (New
York: Humanity Books, 2001), 227.
32.
Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a  
Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. Ronald Bruzina
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 47. Fink also
mentions the frequent misinterpretations of the reduction (45–48).
33.
Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin,  
1991), 44; my italics.
34. Donald D. Price and Murat Aydede, ‘The Experiential Use of
Introspection in the Scientific Study of Pain and Its Integration with  
Third-Person Methodologies: The Experiential-Phenomenological
Approach,’ in Murat Aydede, ed., Pain: New Essays on Its Nature
and the Methodology of Its Study (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 247.
35.
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 42.  
36.
Ibid.  
37.
Ibid., 47.  
38.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 84.  
39.
Ibid., 140.  
40.
Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 23.  
41.
Daniel C. Dennett, for instance, claims that the ‘aim’ of  
phenomenology was ‘to find a new foundation for all philosophy
(indeed, for all knowledge), based on a special technique of
introspection,’ in Consciousness Explained, 44.

42.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 45, 46, 47.  
43.
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Mediation, 45.  
44.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 146, 244, 264  
45.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, trans. Oliver  
Davis (London: Routledge, 2004), 68.
46.
As Maurice Natanson puts it, ‘disconnection from the natural  
attitude permits the originally taken for granted placement in the
world to become the intentional object of phenomenological
examination,’ in ‘Being-In-Reality,’ Philosophical
Phenomenological Research 20.2 (Dec. 1959): 235.
47. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. I, trans. J.N. Finlay
(New York: Humanities Press, 1970,), 252. In Phenomenology of  
Perception Merleau-Ponty stresses this point: ‘To return to things
Perception, Merleau-Ponty stresses this point: To return to things
themselves it to return to this world prior to knowledge, this world of
which knowledge always speaks, and this world with regard to
which every scientific determination is abstract, signitive’ (Ixxii).
48.
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 42.  
49.
Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 94–95  
50.
T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ in Modernism: An  
Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 152–
153.
51.
Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary (London  
and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 265–266.
52.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London:  
Routledge, 1978), 365.
53.
Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and  
Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 165.
54.
Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 70.  
55.
Ibid., 110. In addition, in The Phenomenological Mind, Gallagher  
and Zahavi write the following about historicity: ‘The beginning of
my own story has always been made for me by others, and the way
the story unfolds is only in part determined by my own choices and
decisions. In fact, the story of any individual life is not only
interwoven with those of others … it is always embedded in a larger
historical and communal meaning-giving structure’ (95).
56. Eliot’s famous doctrine of ‘impersonality,’ moreover, moves beyond
the single mind or personality to some larger and collective  
experience, anticipating Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ (la chair):
‘my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is as perceived),
and, moreover, … this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the
world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the
world.’ (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 249).
57.
Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. William P.  
Alston and G. Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1964). See
also, Edmund Husserl, Collected Works VIII: The Idea of
Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1999). For more on the development of Husserl’s
reduction, see Wolfgang Huemer, ‘Phenomenological Reduction and
Aesthetic Experience: Husserl Meets Hofmannsthal,’ in Wolfgang
Huemer and Marc-Oliver Schuster, eds., Writing the Austrian
Traditions: Relations Between Philosophy and Literature
(Edmonton: Wirth-Centre for Canadian and Central European
Studies, 2003), 121–30.
58.
Husserl, Ideas, 27.  
59.
Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 153.  
60.
Husserl writes: ‘this objectivism or this psychological interpretation  
[of objective sciences] of the world, despite it seeming self-evident,
is a naïve one-sidedness that never was understood to be such,’
(Ibid., 184. Also see 151–152).
61.
Husserl, Ideas, 107–114.  
62.
Edmund Husserl, ‘Husserl’s Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg in  
Breisgau (1917), in Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston,
eds., Edmund Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre Dame, Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 10.
63.
Husserl’s different reductions span from the transcendental  
reduction, the psychological reduction, the objective-science
reduction to intersubjective and eidetic reductions. See Paul S.
Macdonald, Descartes and Husserl: The Philosophical Project of
Radical Beginnings (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2000), 156–157.
64. Husserl, Ideas, 62.
 
65.
Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 14.  
66.
Husserl, Ideas, 15.  
67.
See Macdonald, Descartes and Husserl.  
68.
Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 57, 58.  
69.
Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 63.  
70.
Ibid., Ideas, 131.  
71.
As Emmanuel Levinas points out, ‘it must be clearly understood that  
intentionality is not a bond between two psychological states, one of
which is the act and the other the object. Nor is it a bond between
consciousness on one side and the real object on the other. Husserl’s
great originality is to see that the ‘relation to the object’ is not
something inserted between consciousness and the object; it is
consciousness itself. It is the relation to the object that is the
primitive phenomenon—and not a subject and an object that would
supposedly move toward one another,’ in Emmanuel Levinas,
Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. A. Cohen and Michael B.
Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 13.
72.
Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,  
2004), 143.
73.
 
Heidegger wrote: ‘If I say of Dasein that its basic constitution is
being-in-the-world, I am then first of all asserting something that
belongs to its essence, and I thereby disregard whether the being of
such a nature factually exists or not,’ as cited in Crowell, Husserl,
Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 300n28.

74. James Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy (London and New


 
75. York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), 28.
Ibid., 52.  
76.
Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle:  
Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard
Rojcewicz (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1985), 67.
77.
Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy  
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 30.
78.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany:  
State University of New York Press, 1996), 47.
79.
Ibid.  
80.
Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Far from being, as was believed, the formula  
for an idealist philosophy, the phenomenological reduction is in fact
the formula for an existential philosophy: Heidegger’s “In-der-Welt-
Sein” [being-in-the-world] only appears only against the background
of the phenomenological reduction,’ in Phenomenology of
Perception, Ixxviii.
81.
Ibid., Ixx.  
82.
Ibid., Ixxix  
83.
Husserl, Ideas, 115.  
84.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ trans. Carleton Dallery, in  
The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological
Psychology the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M.
Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 162.
85.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 14.  
86. Ibid., 51.
 
87.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary  
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 70.
88.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.  
89.
Husserl, Ideas, 27.  
90.
Ibid., 287, 28, 27.  
91.
Edmund Husserl as cited in Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl’s  
Phenomenology, 14.
92.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxv.  
93.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 19, 17,  
19.
94.
Roger Griffin, ‘Modernity, Modernism and Fascism: A “mazeway  
resynthesis,”’ Modernism/Modernity 15.1 (2008): 11.
95.
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning  
under Mussolini and Hitler (Houndmills, UK and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 62.
96.
Griffin, ‘Modernity, Modernism and Fascism,’ 11.  
97.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph  
Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 204.
98.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: J. M. Dent &  
Sons Ltd., 1934), 186.
99.
R.P. Singh, A Critical Examination of Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy  
(New Delhi: Intellectual Publishing House, 1987), 5.
100.
Husserl, Ideas, 135–136.  
101. Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 14.
 
102.
George Steiner, Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say?  
(London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 111–112.
103.
 
See, for instance, Morris Beja’s Epiphany in the Modern Novel
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971); Ashton Nichol’s
The Poetics of Epiphany (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press,
1987); Steiner’s Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say?;
and Wim Tigges’s collection Moments of Moment: Aspects of
Literary Epiphany (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).
104.
Martin Bidney, Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy,  
Pater, and Barrett Browning (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 4.
105.
Ibid., 8.  
106.
Woodruff Smith, Husserl, 141.  
107.
Ibid.  
108.
Edie, Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology, 87; my italics. Edie  
elaborates: ‘It is the realm of prepredicative experience which is the
primary field of phenomenology, and phenomenology is possible
only because this original field of experience (Lebenswelt) is already
“pregnant with meaning.”’ (89)
109.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii–Ixxviii.  
110.
Ibid., Ixxviii.  
111.
Richard Kearney, ‘Epiphanies of the Everyday: Toward a Micro-  
Eschatology,’ in After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn
in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 13 and 3.
Maurice Natanson ‘The Privileged Moment: A Study in the
Maurice Natanson, The Privileged Moment: A Study in the
112. Rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 43.2
(1957): 146. Merleau-Ponty writes of the ‘[s]edimented language …
 
the reader brings with him, the stock of accepted relations between
signs and familiar significations without which he could never have
begun to read.’ See Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans.
John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 13.
In The World of Perception, Merleau-Ponty also mentions ‘all the
sediment of knowledge and social living’ (69).
113.
 
See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Andreas Huyssen,
After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986); and Terry
Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism,’ in Against
the Grain: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1986).
114.
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1955),  
258.
115.
Stevens writes: ‘Simone Weil in La Pesanteur et La Grâce has a  
chapter on what she calls decreation. She says that decreation is
making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is
making pass from the created to nothingness. Modern reality is a
reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations
of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest
truth we could hope to discover, in whatever fields we discover it, is
that man’s truth is the final resolution of everything. Poets and
painters alike today make that assumption,’ in Wallace Stevens, The
Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London:
Faber and Faber, 1960), 174–175.
116.
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, 2nd Edition (New York: Harcourt  
Brace & Company, 1985), 72.
117.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 69.  
118. Richard Kearney, Anatheism (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010), 101.
 
119.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  
2008), 133.
120.
Kearney, Anatheism, 4.  
121.
Maurice Natanson, ‘The Privileged Moment,’ 144 and 145.  
122.
Richard Kearney, Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and  
the Postmodern Challenge, ed. Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon
Manoussakis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 146.
123.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern  
Life: Selected Essays, vol. 2, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin
Books, 1993), 8.
124.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford  
University Press, 1986), 132.

125.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 407, 380.  
126.
Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry,’ Disjecta: Miscellaneous  
Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (New York: Grove Press, 1984),
70.
127.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 353.  
128.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),  
210.
129.
Gertrude Stein, Picasso (New York: Dover Publications, 1984), 49.  
130. Ibid., 49. Note that the word ‘splendid’ derives from the Latin
‘splendidus,’ meaning ‘bright, shining, glittering, brilliant, …  
illustrious, showy.’ See James Morwood, ed., The Pocket Oxford
Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 130.
Hence the emphasis on spectacles and showing forth in Stein’s work.
131.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 192.  
132.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 54.  
133.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 534.  
134.
Stein, Picasso, 15.  
135.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxiv.  
136.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ 6, 7.  
137.
Ibid., 7. 6.  
138.
Ibid., 8.  
139.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 37.  
140.
Gary Overvold, ‘Husserl, Mann, and the Modernist Crisis of  
Culture,’ Analecta Husserliana XLIX (1996): 251–52.
141.
Richard Sheppard, ‘The Problematics of European Modernism,’ in  
Stephen Giles, ed. Theorizing Modernism, (London: Routledge,
1993), 26, 13–14.
142.
As Gallagher and Zahavi write: ‘According to Husserl’s analysis,  
any experience of any sort (perception, memory, imagination, etc.)
has a common temporal structure such that any moment of
experience contains a retentional reference to past moments of
experience, a current openness (primal impression) to what is
present, and a potentional anticipation of the moments of experience
that are just about to happen. Consciousness is the generation of a
field of lived presence. The concrete and full structure of this field is
determined by the protension-primal impression-retention structure
of consciousness.’ See The Phenomenological Mind, 86–87.
143. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 78.  
144.
Ibid., 80. As Michael R. Kelly elaborates: ‘Operative intentionality  
… functions beneath “the intentionality of the act, which is the thetic
consciousness of an object’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 418). It denotes,
for Merleau-Ponty, the non-objectifying activity of conscious life
that perpetually transcends itself toward the world without
objectifying its activity and thus without possessing the world in
mental acts,’ in ‘L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from Husserl;
Or, Absolute Time Constituting Consciousness,’ in Kascha
Semonovitch and Neal DeRoo, eds., Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of
Art, Religion, and Perception (London and New York: Continuum,
2010), 99.
145.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxiv.  
146.
Michael R. Kelly, ‘L’écart: Merleau-Ponty’s Separation from  
Husserl; Or, Absolute Time Constituting Consciousness,’ in
Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, 99–
100.
147.
Ibid., 99; my italics.  
148.

James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 193.  


149.
See Natanson, Edmund Husserl.  
150.
Kevin Hart, ‘Preface,’ in Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane  
Mildenberg, eds., Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2010), xiii. As Macdonald explains, Husserl’s ‘radical
return to beginnings … finds its historical source in Cartesian doubt,’
in Descartes and Husserl, 3.
151.
J. Benoist, ‘Linguistic Phenomenology?,’ in Filip Mattens, ed.,  
Meaning and Language: Phenomenological Perspectives
(Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 219.
152. Ibid., 224, 223; my italics.  
153.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 51, 75.  
154.
Ibid., 48.  
155.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University  
Press, 1964), 44.
156.
See Kevin Hart, The Tresspass of the Sign, 89.  
157.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 53.  
158.
Ibid.  
159.
See, among others, Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of  
Meaning; and Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith, ‘Two Idealisms:
Lask and Husserl,’ Kant-Studien 84.4 (1993): 448–446.
160.
See Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 189–193. Note that  
Husserl also termed the Life-world the ‘prescientific’ and ‘taken for
granted’ world, which is ‘the ground of all praxis’ (Ibid., 190–191).
161.
J. Benoist, ‘Linguistic Phenomenology?,’ 231.  
162.
Gallagher and Zahavi write: ‘Phenomenology is not interested in  
psychological processes … Phenomenology is interested in the very
possibility and structure of phenomenality; it seeks to explore its
essential structure and conditions of possibility,’ in The
Phenomenological Mind, 28.
163.
Husserl, Ideas, 245.  
164.
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague:  
Nijhof, 1960), 119.
165. Husserl, Ideas, 121.
 
166.
As Filip Mattens puts it, ‘Husserl discerns a peculiar power that  
radiates from the appearance of linguistic signs themselves and that
directs us toward their respective meanings. He characterizes this
power as a tendency that points (Hinweistendenz) toward the
corresponding meaning. When seeing a linguistic sign, a peculiar
intention originates in the sign and terminates in the awakening of
the meaning-intention.’ See Mattens, ‘Introductory Remarks: New
Aspects of Language in Husserl’s Thought,’ in Meaning and
Language, xiii.
167.
Ibid., xvii.  
168.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxix.  
169.
Ibid., 466.  
170.
Ibid., 187, 183.  
171.
Hart, ‘Preface,’ in Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, xi.  
172.
Husserl, Ideas, 220, 42, 140.  
173.
Alfred Schutz as cited in Maurice Natanson, The Erotic Bird:  
Phenomenology in Literature (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 16. Natanson writes: ‘My being-in-reality
always presents itself to me within a horizon of relatedness to more
or less determinate surroundings’ (Ibid., 235).
174.
 
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume One (New
York: Dover Publications, 1890), 224–290.

175.
Michael Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology  
of the Flesh,’ Philosophy Today 47.4 (Winter, 2003), 405.
176. Kearney, Anatheism, 86.  
177.
Roland Paul Blum, ‘Emmanuel Levinas’ Theory of Commitment,’  
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44.2 (December, 1983):
159–160.; my italics.
178.
Stein, Picasso, 12.  
179.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  
1992), 66.
180.
Ibid., 3.  
181.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 380.  
182.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans, Josefine Nauckhoff  
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 108, 120, 343.
183.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 496.  
184.
Ibid., 155.  
185.
Woolf, The Waves, 11.  
186.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 370.  
187.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the  
Flesh,’ 407.
188.
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 47; my italics.  
189.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the  
Flesh,’ 407.
190.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94–95.  
191. Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the
Flesh,’ 409.
 
192.
Berman continues: ‘Thought is existential because it is a continuing  
product of lived (perceptual) experience, not a metaphysically
constructed product of some absolute reference point (transcendental
subjectivity) obtained via a second degree reflection,’ (Ibid., 408).
193.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 176.  
194.
Ibid., 197, 198.  
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Ariane Mildenberg, Modernism and Phenomenology, Modernism and...
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_2

2. On Apples, Broken Frames and


Fallenness: Phenomenology and the
Unfamiliar Gaze in Cézanne, Stein and
Kafka
Ariane Mildenberg1  

(1) School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

 
  Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk

The original version of this chapter was revised. The incorrect text on page
45 has been corrected. A correction to this chapter can be found at https://​
doi.​org/​10.​1057/​978-1-349-59251-7_​6

When Virginia Woolf first laid eyes on one of Paul Cézanne’s still lifes with
apples in April 1918 she wrote in her diary: ‘There are 6 apples in the
Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. Theres their
relationship to each other, & their colour, & their solidity.’
1
Cézanne
wanted to ‘astonish Paris with an apple.’
2
Astonishment—‘“wonder”
before the world,’
3
as Eugen Fink called it—is the motive for
phenomenology, recalling Aristotle’s claim that ‘wonder is the source origin
of philosophy itself, because it represents man’s primary thirst for
knowledge.’
4
Virginia Woolf’s wonder, her astonishment with Cézanne’s apples and
their ‘relationship to each other’ recalls another essay on the relations
between things, her oft-mentioned 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown,’ previously published under the title ‘Character in Fiction,’ in
which Woolf noted that something had happened in the early twentieth
century, something that has broken the continuity and framework of
tradition. Not only had ‘human character changed,’ but there had been a
shift in the relations of things:
All human relations have shifted—those between masters and
servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when
human relations change there is at the same time a change in
religion, conduct, politics and literature. Let us agree to place one of
these changes about the year 1910.
5

A shift of relations resulting in a blurring of subject/object dichotomies


favouring neither immanence nor transcendence has also been marked by
Stephen Kern in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918:

As the public became more intrusive, the individual retreated into a


more strongly fortified and isolated private world. That is why we
can observe in this period both a greater interpenetration and a
greater separation of the two worlds.
6

The art and texts I discuss in this chapter were produced within this time
frame: 1880–1918, a period during which the scientific, religious and
political beliefs that had previously asserted a free-standing, objective
reality were breaking down. Witnessing a loss of old certainties and
traditional values; responding to capitalism, industrial acceleration, the
destruction of reason and meaninglessness of World War I, and the world
changed by Darwin, Marx and Freud, early and high modernist art is
engaged with identifying the multiplicity of the world in which we live.
Facing the challenge of the crisis of rationality that runs through the
twentieth century, and exploring the uncertain as well as the possible, Paul
Cézanne’s still lifes with apples and vessels painted between 1890 and
1900, Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book of strange prose poems Tender Buttons,
and Franz Kafka’s 1916 novella Metamorphosis are concerned with
recovering a primitiveness of experience as untouched by subject/object
reasoning.
In her 1938 book entitled Picasso, Gertrude Stein portrayed the
‘twentieth century’ as ‘a time when everything cracks, which is a more
splendid thing than a period where everything follows itself.’
7
Stein’s
‘splendid’ twentieth century evidences a time of radical change, of a
ruptured linearity and totality—a ruptured framework—showing forth what
lies beneath the cracked surface of habituality.
8
Cézanne, Stein and Kafka
evidence Husserl’s ‘crisis’ of modernity and present us with new artistic
models embodied in a shift of perspective, uncovering a pre-theoretic
foundation for artistic inquiry. Re-evaluating both the traditional
mind/world split that informs Cartesian dualism and extant views of
modernism as upholding a mind/world opposition,
9
the modernists
explored in the following pages present us with a radical shift of attitude—
an ‘unfamiliar gaze’ as Merleau-Ponty calls it in his 1948 The World of
Perception, which does not reject the real world; rather, it paves the way for
restoring what Eugen Fink called an ‘uncaptivation and openness to
everything that . . . “is.”’
10

Breaking the Frame: Cézanne’s Secret Folds and


Faithful Apples
When Paul Cézanne in a 1906 letter to his son wrote ‘it is all a question of
putting in as much interrelation as possible,’ he spoke of incorporating, in
his art, not only the ‘interrelation’ between himself and his object-world,
but also the ‘interrelation’ of objects.
11
He explained this to Joachim
Gasquet: ‘Those glasses and plates are talking to each other, endlessly
exchanging secrets … They do not stop living … They spread
imperceptibly around each other, through intimate reflections, as we do
through glances and words.’
12
It is the exchange of secrets I like here, the
gentle blessing of the space that Merleau-Ponty terms ‘l’intermonde,’ an
‘intermundane space … where our gazes cross and our perceptions
overlap,’ revealing our common world of ‘flesh.’
13
‘What, then, is this
secret science, which [the painter] has or which he seeks?’ asks Merleau-
Ponty more specifically in ‘Eye and Mind.’
14
It is one that must perform
reduction, that ‘must suspend the faith in the world only as to see it, only so
as to read in it the route it has followed in becoming a world for us; it must
seek in the world itself the secret of our perceptual bond with it.’ After all,
‘the visible things are the secret folds of our flesh’ in that they come into
being through our unspoken experience of and contact with them.
15
Performing a transubstantiation of sorts, the painter must, ‘dra[w] from this
world’ by ‘lending his body to the world.’
16
It is exactly this ‘exchange
between the world and our embodied existence … that forms the ground of
every deliberate Sinngebung,’ that is to say meaning-giving.
17
The ‘secret
folds’ of our flesh, the ‘umbilical,’ ‘living’ and ‘pre-logical bond’ of body
and world; perceiver and perceived, are usually out of sight, hidden beneath
the polished and ironed seal of language and living.
18
It is this ‘invisible’
dimension of experience that the modernist painter exposes through paint:

The preceding lectures have tried to bring the world of perception


back to life, this world hidden from use beneath all the sediment of
knowledge and social living. In so doing, we have often had
recourse to painting because painting thrusts us once again into the
present of the world of lived experience. In the work of Cézanne,
Juan Gris, Braque and Picasso, in different ways, we encounter
objects—lemons, mandolins, bunches of grapes, pouches of tobacco
—that do not pass quickly before our eyes in the guise of objects we
‘know well’ but, on the contrary, hold our gaze, ask questions of it,
convey to it in a bizarre fashion the very secret of their substance,
the very mode of their material existence, so to speak, stand
‘bleeding’ before us. This was how painting led us back to a vision
of things themselves. Reciprocally, a philosophy of perception
which aspires to learn to see the world once more, as if in an
exchange of services rendered, will restore painting and the arts in
general in their rightful place, will allow them to recover their
dignity and will incline us to accept them in their purity.
19

This is how Cézanne’s art, according to Merleau-Ponty, performs a


phenomenological reduction of sorts, bracketing our habitual and
geometrically correct ways of seeing. Emphasising experience as praxis,
Merleau-Ponty insisted on grounding his philosophy in the lived and
therefore open-ended experience of what he termed ‘flesh’ (la chair)
20

his idea of materiality as the ‘intertwining’ (entrelacs or Verflechtung) of
the body and the world—and proposed that Cézanne’s compositions were
the embodiment of this phenomenological perspective:
Cézanne’s difficulties are those of the first word. He considered
himself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was
not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it
completely into a spectacle, to make visible how the world touches
us.
21

But, for the painter, this process was littered with doubt; ‘[w]hat you have is
certainty,’ he told Henri Gasquet once, ‘[t]hat’s my great ambition. To be
sure! Every time I attack a canvas I feel convinced, I believe that
something’s going to come of it … But I immediately remember that I’ve
always failed before. Then I taste blood.’
22
A fundamental doubt about
translating pre-reflective experience, ‘the unreflected in myself’ is what
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ stands for.
23
The doubts of
the artist’s expression are ‘those of the first word,’ of making the first mark.
24
Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty claims, ‘speaks as the first men spoke and

paints as if no one had ever painted before.’


25
As Husserl points out, ‘[t]he
attempt to doubt everything,’ which is connected with Cézanne’s own
questioning of experience, ‘has its place in the realm of our perfect
freedom,’
26
that is, the attempt to doubt is part of our freedom at all times.
27
Doubt is not a dead end but a sign of openness to the world and can

therefore be treated with wonder, the ‘“wonder” before the world’ that
‘Husserl’s assistant Eugen Fink … spoke of,’ which is also ‘the best
formulation of the reduction.’
28
A return to primordial wonder in the face
of the world through reduction is a return to pre-reflective, lived
intentionality (the ‘thing itself’), to a reciprocity between the individual and
the world; to creative freedom, openness and possibility.
The painter was, in his own words, ‘germinating’ with his object-world,
tracing the growth of his own creation.
29
Wanting to ‘astonish Paris with an
apple,’ Cézanne gave the apple new life and painted it as if it had never
been seen before: ‘Fruit are more faithful [than flowers],’ he wrote, ‘[t]hey
love having their portraits done. It’s as if they’re asking to be forgiven for
fading.’
30
In Still Life With Apples (1893–1894), he gives form to a slanting
table, vessels and fruit that do not seem accurately elliptical. Distorting the
surface, the famous apples that ‘en[d] up swelling and bursting free from
the confines of well-behaved draughtsmanship,’
31
seem too solid to
balance on the tilting plate and almost roll out of the picture surface itself,
beginning to break the boundary between seer and seen.
As Hilton Kramer observes, Cézanne’s ‘late painting … is based, like
Turner’s, on the dynamics of the pictorial process. The motif is the
painting’s support but no longer its raison d’être.’
32
According to John
Berger, J.M.W. Turner, at once proud and critical of the tradition into which
he was born, ‘stopped painting totalities. The Snowstorm is the total of
everything which can be seen and grasped by the man tied to the mast of
that ship. There is nothing outside it’; in fact, ‘[i]f one really allows one’s
eye to be absorbed into the forms and colours on the canvas, one begins to
realise that, looking at it, one is in the centre of a maelstrom: there is no
longer a near and a far.’
33
The room of Turner paintings entitled ‘Finished
or Unfinished’ at the 2002 exhibition Turner at Tate Britain in London
exhibited paintings without frames, echoing the framelessness of Turner’s
non-totalising scenes. The removal of the material frame around and glass
covering the painting reflected the phenomenological notion of reversibility,
that our vision frames and is framed, that the ‘frame’ of the individual
perceiver’s views are already an integral part of a world of other visible and
seeing subjects, thus revealing a simultaneity and reversibility of seer and
world.
34
Thus, Cézanne’s apples begin to fight against their own frame;
‘refus[ing] to be contained any longer,’
35
their attempt to break out of and
move beyond the painting’s frame paved the way for the framelessness of
Picasso’s cubism: ‘the framing of life, the need that a picture exists in its
frame, remain in its frame was over. A picture remaining in its frame was a
thing that always had existed and new pictures commenced to want to leave
their frames.’
36
As the twentieth century was a time where ‘everything
crack[ed],’ meaning, Gertrude Stein suggested, no longer framed the work
from the outside; rather, meaning was made and re-made from within
through the event and movement of reading or viewing. Meaning-giving,
then, relied on the participation of the viewer or reader. The breaking of the
frame, the Cézannian ‘free[ing] of the line from the imitation function, from
the mimetic operation based on the prosaic conception of the line,’
37
and
the distortion of the perfectly balanced ‘objective’ representations of reality
known from nineteenth-century realism, marks the beginning of the
modernist composition of which Cézanne was the ‘one and only master!,’
according to Picasso: ‘Don’t you think I looked at his pictures? I spent
years studying them … Cézanne! … he was like our father. It was he who
protected us.’
38
Stein shared Picasso’s admiration of the characteristically
distorted surfaces and tilting objects in Cézanne’s paintings:

Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as


important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole,
and that impressed me enormously, and it impressed me so much
that I began to write Three Lives under this influence and this idea
of composition.
39

If ‘in composition one thing [is] as important as another thing,’ the reader’s
or viewer’s response to the composition should be as important as the
creator’s process.
40
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology stresses that
perception and creation alike are mobile activities, revealing the living
experience of the embodied subject: ‘Philosophy is not the reflection of a
prior truth, but rather, like art, the actualization of a truth.’
41
Hence the
meaning of an artwork—visual art or text—is never fixed but perpetually
renewed in the space of the perceiver; it ‘undergoes a continual birth’; ‘at
each instant it is something new.’
42
The tilting and almost animated objects in Cézanne’s many still lifes
with apples, painted between 1890 and 1900, bring into focus the
immediate nature of perceptual experience before our knowledge of gravity
and geometry begins to order it: ‘If many painters since Cézanne have
refused to follow the law of geometrical perspective, this is because they
have sought to recapture and reproduce before our eyes the birth of the
landscape.’
43
Challenging our usual way of looking, the painting enacts the
reduction, returning us to the ‘lived perspective’ from which Cézanne
painted: ‘I paint as I see as I feel,’ he said.
44

Gertrude Stein, Fringed Experience and an Apple


Much influenced by Cézanne’s famously decentralised paintings that paved
the way for what Clement Greenberg has called the ‘“polyphonic” picture
that relies on a surface knit together of identical or closely similar elements
which repeat themselves without marked variation from one edge of the
picture to the other,’
45
Gertrude Stein’s own de-centralised and un-framed
compositions have ‘no beginning or middle or ending,’
46
for ‘[e]ven the
very master-pieces have always been very bothered about beginning and
ending because essentially that is what a master-piece is not.’
47
On the
contrary, a ‘master-piece’ according to Stein is a non-hierarchical
composition, like Cézanne’s, promoting ‘words of equal value’ in which
‘one thing is as important as another thing.’
48
Such a composition has a
non-totalising function that highlights the lived and therefore de-centred
organisation of sense impressions and the gradual emergence of meaning.
Cézanne’s insistent approach to painting—he needed ‘one hundred
working sessions for a still life, one hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait’
49
—evidences that he anchored his work in the perpetual interrogation of

what he actually perceived. Since ‘existence simultaneously generalizes and


particularizes everything that it intends, and can never be complete,’
50
he
knew that ‘[e]xpressing what exists is an endless task’ and an uncertain one.
51
Phenomenology deals with this non-totalizing existential process of lived

experience, which is always grounded in what Husserl called ‘things


themselves,’ that is, the ‘emotive coloration or “boundary” character’ of an
experience, a pre-reflective ‘“borderline” experience’
52
laid bare through
the method of phenomenological reduction, the abstention from
conventional ‘objective’ ways of seeing in order to attend phenomena as
they present themselves to consciousness. Through reduction, ‘[t]he
phenomenon is seen, but it is seen in the sense that what is seen discloses
the very possibility of the phenomenon.’
53
This process of self-reflection
highlights what William James, Stein’s teacher in experimental psychology
at Radcliffe College, famously termed the ‘fringe of the object,’ the ‘dimly
perceived’ and still ‘unarticulated affinities about [a thing],’ that pre-
conceptual dimension of experience that is peripheral to what he called ‘the
mind’s object’ and what phenomenologists would come to call the noema,
the object of consciousness. For James the ‘mind’s object’—whether that is
the object of a sentence, a real object or an imaginary object—is never
perceived in isolation but is always circumscribed by a ‘dimly perceived’
‘fringe,’ an indeterminate framework of relatedness that can never be
pinned down in its totality.
54
James’s thought process regarding the ‘fringe’
or ‘horizon’ of experience is echoed 13 years later in Husserl’s previously
mentioned observation that concrete objects are surrounded by a ‘distinct or
indistinct co-present margin, which forms a continuous ring around the
actual field of perception’; perceptions are ‘partly pervaded, partly girt
about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality.’
As noted, the flow of consciousness is immersed in an infinite ‘misty
horizon’
55
which exists before reflection and can never be fully expressed.
The meaning of any object of experience, then, does not stem from the
object in itself but from its spatial-temporal horizon, the framework of
relatedness within which it comes into being. In other words, whenever we
experience, we experience within a temporal horizon of unlimited
possibilities that we never reflect on but are pre-predicatively aware of.
Although the relationship between William James’s work on what he
termed ‘pure experience’
56
and European phenomenology has been
explored since the 1960s and proved to be of ‘great philosophical
significance’ for new developments within phenomenological thought,
57
similar developments have not been sufficiently examined within the kind
of modernist literature that, like Stein’s, returns us to the structure of
experience itself. ‘[I]t is startling,’ writes Bruce Wilshire, ‘that [James’s]
pioneering work in phenomenology and his influence on Husserl went
without proper notice for seventy years and has only recently gained
recognition.’
58
This might explain why the related patterns between
phenomenological thought and Stein’s work have received little attention.
Rejecting the traditional mind/body and subject/object splits that inform
Cartesian dualism, phenomenology lays bare pre-reflective perceptual
experience of the embodied subject, that is, the primordial bond of the
subject and the world. James also rejected dichotomous thinking, but his
exploration of ‘pure experience’ lacked an analysis of the reflexivity of the
body subject that would become the focus of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of
‘flesh.’ In the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-
Ponty reflects on how we are all caught up in the ‘flesh of the world’ as
both sensing and sensed beings, at once objectivising and intertwined with
experience.
59
Where a Jamesian reading of Stein would help shed light on
the primordial dimension of pure experience and its ‘fringes’ that Stein,
paradoxically, tried to express through words, phenomenology can help us
write the reflexive body back into Stein in an entirely different way. Stein
repeatedly challenges her reader to develop a certain phenomenological
attentiveness open to the passage between pre-reflective, corporeal
experience and reflection, the pre-linguistic essence of things and language:
‘As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what
is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known.’
60
Stein’s preoccupation in Picasso with the objects of immediate
experience—‘not the things interpreted but the things really known at the
time of knowing them’
61
—which she shared with both Cézanne and
Picasso, is one of the many examples demonstrating that her thoughts on
modernist composition, which were influenced by James, can be
incorporated into the larger framework of European phenomenology. When
Husserl wrote about the ‘crisis of European existence’
62
which, according
to the philosopher, had hit philosophy in the first third of the twentieth
century, the Paris-based Stein was preoccupied with a ‘mimetic crisis.’
63
Through encrusted forms of representation, meaning, Stein felt, had become
detached from its original foundation. Thus Stein described the twentieth
century as a time where things ‘crack,’ ‘where everything is destroyed,
everything isolates itself.’
64
Yet neither to Husserl, for whom the
philosopher was ‘a beginner as he reflects upon himself,’
65
nor to Stein, for
whom ‘[b]eginning again and again and again explaining composition and
time is a natural thing,’
66
was the crisis of modernity ‘an obscure fate, an
impenetrable destiny.’ Rather, both saw it as a ‘cry for origin,’
67
for getting
back to the pre-conceptual ground of experience from which man had
become estranged, resulting in the loss of the idea of philosophy (according
to Husserl) and the loss of the value of words (according to Stein). In their
search for radical new beginnings, a pre-requisite for capturing the ‘primal
ground’
68
for perception and expression alike, the modernist projects of the
phenomenologists and Stein can be considered as attempts to reconstruct a
European world in crisis.
Like James’s non-focal ‘fringe’—that dimension of experience that is
peripheral to our conventional ways of seeing, habits, acts and expression—
in Tender Buttons, Stein leads us away from those particularities that are
usually central to daily life—its ‘Objects,’ ‘Food,’ and ‘Rooms,’ the titles
of the three subsections of Stein’s book—and back to the non-focal
periphery of perceptual experience; away from usual modes of expression
and back to a pre-structural form of expression before the habits of
grammar take over, revealing ‘things seen not as one knows them but as
they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them.’
69
Recalling Cézanne’s plump apples that break out of the picture frame,
thus reproducing the chaotic birth of perception itself; and like his portraits
of inanimate people with stiffened faces which ‘hesitate as at the beginning
of the world,’
70
a ‘pre-world,’
71
calling attention to the origin of the
painter’s creative process, Stein’s cry for origin calls to mind man before
the fall in the Garden of Eden, which is ‘not a place, but a stage of
consciousness “prior” to the introduction or development of reason.’
72
The
eating from the apple, the fruit of knowledge, occasioned the
insurmountable divide between primal man and reflective man, the
experiential world and human understanding, pre-theoretic meaning and
representational language. All of this offers an apt context for reading the
first half of ‘Apple’ from the ‘Food’ section of Tender Buttons:

Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold
cream, best shake, potato, potato and no gold work with pet, a green
seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little
piece please.
73

As we take our bite out of ‘Apple,’ its pre-linguistic essence or ‘appleyness’


74
gradually unfolds, like ‘the impression of an emerging order,’ as

Merleau-Ponty has it, ‘an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself
before our eyes.’
75
Meaning is made through the movement of reading.
There is no frame. And, as we read, Stein’s ‘Apple’ is experienced as
‘fringed,’ that is, from related perspectives. What her little prose poem
highlights is the relationality and interdependence not only between seer
and seen, words and reader, but also between the single words, their sights
and their sounds: each word, each sight, each sound is as important as
another. What our reading of this unusual combination of words allows for
is a form of free imaginative variation as Husserl thought of it,
76
challenging us to play with variations of the essential characteristics of the
phenomena. ‘Apple’ is primarily described by what it is not: ‘Apple plum,
carpet steak, seed clam.’ ‘Apple plum’ makes one think of small apples that
look like plums and ‘carpet steak’ recalls the unusual recipe for carpet bag
steak, the kind of steak that is slit through the middle, opens like a book and
is filled with oysters, just as the clam, to which the oyster is related, is filled
with seeds. The shells of clams are made up of two halves, which can open
like a book, each of which contains seeds, just as the two halves of an apple
contain the seeds of the same core. But, just as Stein claims that in order to
be ‘really and truly alive’ one must be ‘at once talking and listening, doing
both things,’ so should we, the readers, listen while reading and pay
attention to the sonorous interdependence of words through alliteration:
‘apple plum’ or ‘carpet,’ ‘clam,’ ‘colored,’ ‘calm,’ ‘cold cream’; through
assonance as in ‘seed clam,’ ‘calm seen’ and ‘cold cream’; and through
rhyme: ‘carpet steak’ and ‘best shake.’ This multiple relativity at a purely
sonorous level is part of the fringe of possibilities of ‘Apple,’ forming the
spatial-temporal ‘misty horizon that can never be completely outlined,’
77
but which is never out of sight throughout the durational event of reading
this prose poem. The word ‘potato’ brings to mind, as Margueritte Murphy
notes, the French ‘pomme de terre, apple of the earth.’
78
But, as soon as
this meaning seems to have emerged, it extends the phenomenological
‘horizon’ of another possible meaning through a repetition of ‘potato’ in a
new context: ‘potato and no gold work with pet.’ The ‘little piece’ recalls ‘a
green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready,’ implying yet another
framework of relatedness for ‘Apple,’ the ‘green seen,’ which becomes the
ingredient of a ‘sweet’ and ‘bready’ ‘bake,’ a cake. We could go on and on.
What the flow of words exactly refers to remains necessarily uncertain, but
what Stein’s poem does make us reflect on is how ‘the single mind . . .
directs an apple,’ as she puts it in ‘Rooms,’ for ‘[a]ll the coats have a
different shape,’
79
suggesting that the ever-changing meaning of this
‘composition’ depends on how it is ‘directed’ by the single mind of each
reader. Just as ‘the horizontal structure of experience always implies more
than itself,’
80
there is always more to be said about this ‘word-object.’
81
The insistence and assonance in ‘a little piece a little piece please’
reinforces that we could ‘piece’ together the poem, again and again, in an
infinite number of ways, revealing possible and multiple variants of this
fruit, the ‘invisible component of meaning’ of the object presented.
82
Between the metonymically linked words in ‘Apple,’ as in each part of
Tender Buttons, there is an existential communication as words ‘endlessly
exchange secrets,’ the full meaning of which can never be exhaustively
expressed. The contours, sight, and sound of each word is being caressed in
the poem; each word is at some point centre stage, at some point the guest
of honour at this party. Stein’s open-ended, decentralised and non-
hierarchical composition in which words have equal value promotes
‘meaning as an “open structure” … which can be approached perspectively
from an indefinite number of possible viewpoints but which can never be
“possessed” wholly and completely under any one aspect.’
83
What emerges
from this, then, is that Stein’s phenomenological interaction with ‘word-
objects’ grew out of an urge to ‘re-capture the value of the individual word’
in a manner that would not reflect possession: ‘Was there not a way of
naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without
naming them.’
84
What Stein thought of as the ‘rhythm of the visible world’
85
cannot be possessed for ‘we are always already in . . . [and] of it.’
86

Drawing upon what Fredric Jameson, following Jean Baudrillard, thinks


of as a ‘postmodern hyperspace,’ the perplexing space of late capitalism,
producing constantly searching and bewildered subjects incapable of
locating themselves, Ellen E. Berry has offered a beautiful reading of
Stein’s experimental poetry as a postmodern ‘new aesthetics of
fragmentation’ and places emphasis on what she calls the ‘cognitive
incapacity’ of Stein’s reader, thus joining forces with what extant Stein
scholarship interprets as postmodern groundlessness, fragmentation, or
indeterminacy.
87
By contrast, I want to call attention to how Stein’s work
grounds her reader in the pre-predicative dimension of experience. Just as
Merleau-Ponty plunges back into the ‘flesh of the world’
88
to disclose the
condition of possibility of perceptual experience, so Stein delves into the
texture of language to question the underlying structures of our usual modes
of discourse, which, she felt, had to be recaptured:

You had to recognize words had lost their value in the Nineteenth
Century, particularly towards the end, they had lost much of their
variety, and I felt that I could not go on, that I had to recapture the
value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within
it.
89

Freeing her compositions from the ‘imitation function’ of the ‘mimetic


operation’ of nineteenth-century realism, and an overlay of descriptive
knowledge,
90
Stein seeks to ‘express not the things seen in association but
the things really seen, not things interpreted but things really known at the
time of knowing them,’
91
an impossible project, some may argue, as her
emulation of immediate pre-thematic experience—an indivisible self-
presence—relies on the virtues of a language that is always already a
belated version of the actual experience. And yet, ‘to attempt to express
immediate experience is not to betray reason but, on the contrary, to work
toward its aggrandizement.’
92
Rather than anticipating a postmodern
hyperspace, Stein’s writing, then, opens onto a non-hierarchical free zone,
as it were, inviting us to continuously ‘see’ the world/word anew (while
welcoming and accommodating difference). Examining the experiencing of
experience itself, the non-totalising function of Stein’s decentralised
composition produces not postmodern bewilderment but continual
questioning.
93

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: A Rotten Apple


It was an apple; a second apple followed immediately; Gregor came
to stop in alarm; there was no point in running on, for his father was
determined to bombard him.
94

Apples are equally essential to the unfolding of Franz Kafka’s novella


Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s protagonist, who wakes up one
morning realising he’s turned into a giant insect, is hit by an apple, thrown
by his father, which ‘force[s] its way into Gregor’s back’ upon which ‘the
apple remain[s] embedded in his flesh as a visible souvenir’ and rots.
95
A
souvenir of what, one might ask? Of modern man’s rotten moral condition?
‘It is very sad to have a rotten apple stuck in one’s back,’ a friend of mine
commented recently, and it is unbearably sad, for Gregor lives through a
strange inversion of the fall of man on the most basic, corporeal level. The
apple is thrown back at him, making him carry the burden of his family’s
failure, which is what makes him one of modernism’s most unforgettable
anti-heroes and martyrs. The eating from the apple was the Original Sin
causing the eternal chasm between immediacy and reflection, but, although
a fallen immediacy is restored for Gregor, it is not Gregor himself but his
family that have fallen: their rotten habits and the general ‘sickness’ of
modernity are brought into relief in this novella. To fall or plunge is to
‘Sturz,’ writes Heidegger,
96
the Latin counterpart of which is ‘ruina—
collapse.’
97
In Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle:
An Introduction to Phenomenological Research, a series of lectures from
1921 to 1922, modern man’s existence commonly takes the shape of a
Ruinanz, a falling or fall, into ruin, from the Latin ruere, ‘to fall down,
rush.’
98
Ruinanz is a form of corruption or ruination by way of modernity
and technological progress, which later becomes ‘falling,’ indicating a
‘falling prey [verfallen]’ to the world in Being and Time.
99
Now consider
the following passage from Metamorphosis:

Oh God, [Gregor Samsa] thought, what an exhausting job I’ve


picked on! Travelling about day in, day out. It’s much more
irritating work than doing the actual business in the warehouse, and
on top of that there’s the trouble of constant travelling, of worrying
about train connexions, the bed and irregular meals, casual
acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate
friends. The devil take it all!
100

Heideggerian Ruinanz gives expression to a ‘natural’ sort of ‘fallenness’ in


us, a ‘self-forgetful plunge into the world’—an inclination in us to be
caught up in its ruinant movement toward ‘worldly entities’ allowing
everything to subside into ‘an enabling, though concealed, emptiness’ while
betraying our actual hopes and desires.
101
While ‘radically distinct from
any “myth of a fall,”’
102
‘falling’ in this way, then, is ‘an ‘idle’ yet natural
absorption in the incessant repetition of factic life
103
—like Gregor’s
‘trouble of constant travelling, of worrying about train connexions, the bed
and irregular meals’—but at the same time it is, ‘a falling away from myself
as authentic,’ for ‘being absorbed in our comportment to entities … we are
not mindful of what makes such comportment possible.’
104
In this way,
Ruinanz is also the prerequisite for what Heidegger calls a ‘counter-
movedness,’
105
the possibility of a ‘counter-ruinant motility’ and ‘self-
recollection’; which, as Heidegger writes, is ‘the continual struggle of
philosophy against its own factic Ruinanz, a struggle carried out
simultaneously with the actualization of philosophy.’
106
This counter-
ruinant movement is a ‘coming-to-oneself’ and ‘form of finding’ based on a
‘readiness for the questionable’ and curiosity about life itself.
107
In short,
questioning and curiosity serve as counter-ruinant movements against the
emptiness of the ‘idle’ repetitions of factic life in which we, as human
beings, are absorbed.
108
Connections have previously been made between Kafka and
phenomenology.
109
Terri J. Hennings writes that ‘whereas Heidegger holds
out the possibility of a non-alienated being in the world, Kafka seems to
suggest that this is not obtainable.’
110
A more hopeful approach is offered
by Cyrena Norman Pondrom in a comparative analysis of Husserlian
phenomenology and Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka’s K., she argues, ‘continues
from the “Who are you?” of his first words to the end of the novel to ask
countless questions of all he meets, and he comes to the end of his life with
the tormented resolution of a man who has not ceased to value reasonable
questions even when they have not been answered.’
111
But, Pondrom
concludes, K’s ‘refusal to accept the ambivalent answer to his questions’
can be seen as ‘a failure to recognize the real significance of the process of
asking questions.’
112
As in The Trial, a suspension of ‘Da-sein in its
everydayness’ also happens in Metamorphosis, and the process of asking
questions is equally important. What I want to call attention to, however, is
how Kafka from the very beginning of this novella highlights
questionability, the possibility of a ‘counter-ruinant motility’ and a strange
‘form of finding,’ which are the opposite of failure. My approach in what
follows is indebted to Maurice Natanson’s extraordinary reading of Kafka’s
novella, in The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (1998), which
gravitates around Gregor’s questions. Whereas Natanson relies upon his
wide knowledge of Husserl and Alfred Schutz, I want to focus on Kafka’s
collapse of the taken for granted frame of everydayness that humans have
fallen prey to—what Derrida calls the ‘chronological and topographical
marks … which are said to be “objective,” “in the world,”’
113
— that has
striking similarities with Heidegger’s notions of Ruinanz as a pre-requisite
for a counter-ruinant motility, leading to less of a finding of ‘absolute and
eternal’ answers than ‘a form of finding.’ As Gail Weiss observes, in an
essay on Kafka written in honour of Natanson, Gregor never quite
‘abandons the [Husserlian] natural standpoint despite the fact that his
metamorphosis directly challenges the standpoint and all it presupposes
about his everyday existence’ and yet, she argues, he is ‘on the verge of
making’ a discovery of an ‘unknown nourishment’ which is ‘never
successfully brought into fruition.’
114
I am interested in this sliver of
potential for discovery conveyed through the form of Kafka’s narrative. In
collapsing the taken-for granted frame of the natural attitude, Kafka both
builds upon and takes issue with aspects of representational and relational
meaning known from the mimetic trends developed by nineteenth-century
realism. Recalling the work of Cézanne and Stein, Kafka’s strange story is
‘freeing the line,’ so that our experience of the text itself becomes a
metamorphosis of taken-for-granted modes of representation.
115
‘What has
happened to me?’, Gregor asks himself in the opening paragraph of the
novella. ‘Will you give a true account of all this?’,
116
he asks the chief
clerk, his immediate boss at the sales firm where he works, who comes to
his house on the morning of his transformation and attempts to
communicate with Gregor through the door of his bedroom. Despite his
unfamiliar body and an unrecognisable voice, destroying the familiar
‘sense’ of words through ‘a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it,’
117
the otherness of which fuel the family’s hostility, Gregor’s new

existence as an insect who does not speak in a human tongue is ‘counter-


ruinant’ in that it reclaims a fallen immediacy, curiosity and questioning.
Gregor’s everyday being is suspended, giving way to that mute foundation
of experience from which signification arises but about which it never
speaks.
118
‘Within a logically disciplined “system of consciousness,”’
writes James Luchte,

the question of an ‘intimacy’ or pre-understanding, and therefore, of


a radical phenomenology of original temporality is rendered mute
(or shifted into the realm of practical reason). From the turrets of
Leibniz, Kant and Husserl, intimacy is guaranteed into those
makeshift domains of private languages, poetry and madness, such
as was done with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1928), ‘silent’ de
facto in the sense of the logical proposition. Consciousness is
suspicious of discourses which fall away from the rhetorics of
logical formalization, routine clarity and generic precision.
Heidegger contends that phenomenology must be a vital response to
this ‘crisis,’ one which will allow us to break through our ‘rote’
procedures, and to re-acquaint ourselves with our be-ing after the
fall.
119

Sharing a sense of the crisis of rationality that runs through the modernist
period, the passage sheds a new light on the fact that the simple, but
unheard, opening question in Metamorphosis—‘What has happened to
me?’—is never answered, instead triggering a suspension of logical notions
of the real and breaking through the door to its usually invisible dimension,
its strange underside not unlike the tunnel under the rabbit hole in Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland.
The ‘gaze’ in Kafka’s inverted world, then, is ‘unfamiliar,’
120
presenting us with an abstention from the ordinary, a phenomenological
reduction exhibiting the strangeness of experience itself that we have lost
sight of in the repetitive ruination of everyday, logical affairs. Aristotelian
wonder as an instigator of questioning is the way in to Metamorphosis: we
‘catch sight of this strange domain to which interrogation, properly so-
called, gives access.’
121
Kafka presents us with the topsy-turvy and
inverted world of Gregor who literally crawls across the walls and ceilings
in his room. Although Kafka insisted that the insect could not be depicted,
Nabokov claimed otherwise.
122
What is important, however, is that Gregor
is never described to us by others but only sensed from within his own
radically changed, bodily experience, from a certain ‘primitive stage of
Dasein,’ to recall Heidegger. Yet, as Paul L. Landsberg observes, there is an
absence of lyricism in Kafka’s prose here due to ‘an extreme objectivity in
the recital, into which the narrator and his sentiments are not allowed to
intrude even through the tone of the report.’
123
While I agree with this
observation, I would like to stress that this extreme objectivity is the
remains of the voice of man in what phenomenologist Hannah Arendt calls
‘his role as functionary of necessity’; the bureaucratic ‘machine’ in Kafka’s
The Trial, she writes, is ‘kept in motion by the lies told for the sake of
necessity’ and the ‘power of the machine that grabs and kills K. lies
precisely in the appearance of necessity that is caused by the way in which
human beings admire necessity.’
124
Being ‘a creature of the chief’s,
spineless and stupid’
125
and thus a ‘functionary of necessity’
126
or natural
Ruination, in his day job Gregor’s voice loses a sense of self and becomes a
voice of objectivity. What is so interesting about Kafka’s choice of narrative
style in Metamorphosis is that it is free indirect discourse, that is, third
person narration where the narrative voice places itself ‘directly into the
experiential field of the character, and adopts the latter’s perspective.’
127
As frames in modernist works were breaking and a ruptured image of the
world took over, the novel’s well-known omniscient narrator and its god-
like and objective overview of events was replaced with a shifting point of
view and disjointed picture of consciousness often constructed through the
free indirect discourse already used by the romantic and realist writers, but
‘not as systematically’ as in modernist works.
128
Taking issue with the
classical idea of reason, in Signs, Merleau-Ponty precisely describes
phenomenology as ‘the exact opposite of a philosophy of God-like Survey,’
129
an idea that is echoed in The World of Perception: ‘We can, no longer,

flatter ourselves with the idea that, in science, the exercise of a pure and
unsituated intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all
human traces, just as God would see it.’
130
Instead of objective truth, then,
‘the absolute’ looked for ‘beyond our experience’ is always already
‘implied within it,’
131
giving way to a non-totalising and open view of the
world, conditioned by constantly changing perceptions where ‘immanence
and transcendence are intertwined within each other, and neither is given
totally in any single experience.’
132
Such an interlacing of the immanent
(that which ‘dwells within’) and the transcendent (a ‘going beyond’) lies at
the heart of modernist free indirect discourse. Working back from this, in
Metamorphosis, the perspective is neither fully subjective nor fully
objective, placing the whole story not at the ‘root’ of things, to borrow from
Kafka himself, but ‘by some point or other situated toward the middle of
them,’
133
an unsettling and unsettled in-between of sense and non-sense.
Doubt takes over. Gregor’s unanswered questions become ours.
Much like Cézanne, Kafka, in other words, is not interested in
presenting us with ‘the skin of things,’
134
their outline. Thus, the question
‘Will you give a true account of all this?’, which Gregor asks the chief
clerk, but which nobody can actually hear, is ironic. Kafka’s novella,
offering a radicalisation of common modes of representation, makes us
reflect upon appearances and multiple truths and interpretations. The
difference from the ‘ordinary’ in Metamorphosis is baffling, shocking us
back into a more primal dimension of experience—‘What has happened to
me?’—as Gregor’s worries about everyday affairs are reduced to a purely
physical and pre-linguistic experience of things, rendering the familiar
strange, also turning the reader to the attitude of the questionable. If the
gaze in Metamorphosis is unfamiliar—for both Gregor and the reader—it is
only because the ‘truths’ about this strange event are merely ever indicated,
never offered as a fixed and ready set of definitions. There is no frame. Like
Gregor, who, self-reflexively, interrogates his embodied experience and the
experiencing itself, we, the readers are challenged to embrace ambiguity
and openness ‘grounded in our continuing interrogation of experience.’
135
We become questioners. Indeed, ‘there is something healthy about this
unfamiliar gaze,’ writes Merleau-Ponty, because what has been ruptured or
counter-ruined in order to expose its ‘underside’ is the world of
objectification, the ‘sickness’ of the modern world, ‘the carapace of
customs’ that society is ‘trapped in,’
136
in which individuals are ‘a creature
of the chief’s, spineless and stupid’; day in, and day out suffering the torture
of ‘constant travelling, … worrying about train connexions, the bed and
irregular meals, casual acquaintances that are always new and never
become intimate friends.’ As objectification is withheld through an epoché
of sorts, an unfamiliar light is shed upon the nature of Gregor’s most basic,
bodily and (since he has lost the ability to speak) purely gestural
experience. His only mode of communication with the world and focus of
his existence are his body and movement: ‘Gregor took refuge in movement
and crawled up and down the room.’
137
In The World of Perception,
Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Our era is destined to judge itself not from on high,
which is mean and bitter, but in a certain sense from below.’
138
In our daily
lives, no one has a ‘me-walking-across-the-room’ sensation when walking
across a room but, rather, an ‘I-need-to-get-that-book-by-Kafka-over-there-
on-the-shelf’ sensation. The room and the act of walking across are not
strictly speaking ‘there’ in experience. Paradoxically, however, it is the very
act of walking across that is highlighted in Kafka’s novella as Gregor finds
an ‘almost blissful’ freedom in a moment of inversion and
phenomenological ‘suspension’:

For mere recreation he had formed the habit of crawling criss-cross


over the walls and ceiling. He especially enjoyed hanging suspended
from the ceiling; it was completely different from lying on the floor;
one could breathe more freely; one’s body swung and rocked
lightly; and in the almost blissful absorption induced by this
suspension it could happen to his own surprise that he let go and fell
plump on the floor. Yet, he now had his body much better under
control than formerly, and even such a big fall did him no harm.
139

Dissolving any mind-body problems, in this moment Gregor’s ‘crawling-


criss-cross-over-the-walls-and-ceiling’ action becomes his existence. He
even recaptures an unrestricted joy—a ‘paradisal initial condition of
enjoyment,’
140
to borrow from Levinas—and complete liberation in
‘hanging from the ceiling,’ which is ‘completely different from lying on the
floor.’ While Gregor gains an entirely new awareness of the ceiling and the
floor, and the space between the two, the habitual frame of everyday life
(that of clock time, travelling, catching trains and work schedules) is also
brought into relief and loses its function, so that Gregor’s primordially
expressive body is literally and physically ‘freed of the shrouding cover of
human being [Menschsein].’
141
Like Cézanne’s broken frames and the
framelessness of Stein’s poems, the frame and foundation of everyday
affairs in Metamorposis, collapse! Momentarily a liberating ‘uncaptivation
and openness to everything that … is’ is restored,
142
a ‘blissful absorption
induced by this suspension’ as he dangles upside down from the ceiling
before letting go and falling ‘plump on the floor.’ Gregor is, borrowing
from Husserl, a zero-point or ‘nullpunkt’ for all perception and orientation.
143
And since objectification is suspended, Gregor cannot possibly be

represented and drawn. What is foregrounded instead is the invisible


dimension of what is immediately given and lived: ‘he now had his body
much better under control than formerly.’
Although there have been many interpretations of Kafka’s insect, none
of them offer a ‘final’ conclusion. Kafka merely ever indicates, like
Heidegger merely ever indicates in his circular ‘The Origin of the Work of
Art’ (1950). Such a phenomenological procedure based on carefully
indicating rather than defining concepts avoids the trap of the mentioned
‘carapace of customs’ by bringing to fruition a process that tentatively
discovers conceptual complexities in an encircling manner. What is lost in
Metamorphosis, then, is not the essence of Gregor, but the blind form of
day-to-day survival where individuals are ‘spineless’ and mere ‘creatures of
the chief’s.’ Instead, Gregor is turned into what Fink thought of as a
phenomenological ‘onlooker’ (a non-participant in ‘world-constitution’),
seeing his own family and taken-for-granted existence from the outside.
144
Infinitely more human than his sister and parents, of whom he thinks ‘with
tenderness and love’—thus refuting the very master-slave dialectic that his
family upholds—only seconds before his head ‘s[inks] to the floor’ as he
breathes out ‘the last faint flicker of his breath,’
145
it is clear that Gregor
never changes; rather, it is the morally sick world that is the target! It is not
Gregor who has undergone a metamorphosis; it is the metamorphosis of
modern civilisation (its ‘natural’ ruination) that Kafka highlights. Kafka
‘precisely makes the world questionable.’
Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 work The Human Condition, makes
reference to Heidegger’s notion of a natural ruination: ‘The miracle that
saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal “natural” ruin
is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is
ontologically rooted.’
146
In her own critical engagement with Kafka upon a
reading of his novel The Trial, in ‘Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew’ (1946),
Arendt notes: ‘[Kafka’s protagonists] discove[r] that the normal world and
society are in fact abnormal, that the judgments of its generally accepted
and respectable members are in fact insane, and that the actions complying
with the rules of this game are in fact ruinous in everyone.’
147
Remaining
innocent and full of love for others until the very end, Gregor never
discovers this; rather, he is the one who ends up carrying the burden of
modernity’s sickness in the shape of an ‘inflamed path around’ an apple in
his back, a remnant of the Original Sin.
148
And yet, despite his tragic fate,
offering us ‘[t]error and pity without catharsis,’
149
Gregor’s story remains
counter-ruinant in essence. Just as Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is, for all its
hopelessness, a life-affirming song, Metamorphosis is, for all its bleakness
and terror, a tale of neo-heroism.
150
If Gregor had been able to recognise
the full potential of his own ‘unfamiliar gaze,’ he would have been set free
from preconceived notions about living, just as the inability to reach a final
conclusion about his inverted world sets free our preconceived notions
about reading and interpretation. As Stephen Kern observes, ‘Kafkaesque
came to signify the alienation and anxiety of the modern age, but for Kafka,
personally, writing was a restorative act because he believed that by
capturing the terrifying aspects of the age, his work would help meliorate
it.’
151
To look at our world and at other humans from the outside in, to shift
the perspective from the taken-for-granted frames of daily life to the
unframedness of the unreflected depths of the world as lived, which can
never be fully articulated in a human tongue, is necessary for self-criticality
—it is what keeps us sane. Despite our unanswered questions, this is a form
of finding.
Notes
1. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, 140. In a 1918 letter
Woolf reflected on the same apples: ‘They are really very superb.  
The longer one looks the larger and heavier and greener and redder
they become.’ See Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf,
Vol. 2, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (London: The
Hogarth Press, 1976), 230.
2.
Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected  
Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 30.
3.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.  
4.
Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Duckworth, 1986),  
75. For a recent examination of the notion of ‘wonder’ in
phenomenology see Mark Kingwell, ‘Husserl’s Sense of Wonder,’
The Philosophical Forum 31.1 (Spring 2000): 85–107. Other recent
approaches to the concept of wonder include Ronald W. Hepburn,
‘Wonder,’ in ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics
and Neighboring Fields (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1984); and Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of
Rare Experience (Cambridge Massachusetts, and London: Harvard
University Press, 1998).
5.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ in A Woman’s Essays,  
vol. 1, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 71. The
essay was originally published as ‘Character and Fiction’ in
Criterion, July 1924 after which it was published separately in
pamphlet form as ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.’
6.
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918  
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 191.
7.
Stein, Picasso, 49.  
8.
The word ‘splendid’ derives from the Latin ‘splendidus,’ meaning  
‘bright, shining, glittering, brilliant, . . . illustrious, showy.’ See
Morwood, ed., The Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary, 130.
9. According to Andreas Huyssen’s well-established diagnosis of
Modernism in After the Great Divide (1986), the ‘core of the  
modernist aesthetic’ upholds an ideal of ‘genuine art’ against the
‘anxiety of contamination’ by ‘inauthentic mass culture.’ The
Modernist artwork is in this sense ‘the expression of a purely
individual consciousness,’ which is ‘totally separate from the realms
of mass culture and everyday life ’ See Huyssen After the Great
of mass culture and everyday life. See Huyssen, After the Great
Divide, 53, vii, 53. Christopher Butler also makes reference to
Eagleton’s description of the modernist artwork: ‘the modernist work
brackets off the reference or real historical world, thickens its
textures and deranges its form to forestall instant consumability, and
draws its own language protectively around it to become a
mysteriously autotelic object, free of all contaminating truck with the
real.’ This definition of the modernist work is, as Butler observes,
‘very reminiscent’ of Peter Bürger’s oft-mentioned political
interpretations in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) that ‘see the
artist’s techniques as symptomatic of larger, all-embracing cultural
forces, which it tends to hypostatize as “discourses,” which are
curiously independent of the individuals using them.’ See Butler,
Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–
1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 273, 269, 274, 273, 269.
Other scholarship since the work of Bürger and Huyssen has, like
Butler, opposed the notion of a genuine high art and low mass
culture divide. Mark S. Morrison, for instance, offers a
‘“revisioning” of modernism,’ which argues for an interdependence
of modernist art and the commercial mass market press. See
Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines,
Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (London: The University of
Wisconsin Press, 2001), 5. See also Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen
Watts, eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization,
and Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
10.
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Mediation, 42.  
11.
Paul Cézanne, Cézanne’s Letters, ed. John Rewald (Oxford: Bruno  
Cassirer, 1976), 323.
12.
Isabelle Cahn, Paul Cézanne: A Life in Art (London: Cassell, 1995),  
71.
13.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 48.  
14.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind.’ in The Primacy of Perception, 161;  
my italics.
15. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 38, 118, my italics.
 
16.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception, 161,  
162.
17.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 466.  
18.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 107, 27, 38.
 
19.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 69–70 (my emphasis).  
20.
Ibid., 139, 248, 249.  
21.
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 19.  
22.
Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: Memoir with  
Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1991), 206.
23.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 257.  
24.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 19.  
25.
Ibid., 19.  
26.
Husserl, Ideas, 107.  
27. As Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen explain, ‘Husserl’s procedure
of epoché is deliberately modelled on Cartesian doubt. Through his  
sceptical doubts, Descartes put the very existence of the world in
question in a radical way. Husserl refers to Descartes’ “quasi-
sceptical epoché,” but he emphasizes that this phenomenological
epoché is different from Cartesian doubt (Ideas I § 32) in that the
actual, historical Cartesian doubt involved a dogmatic denial of the
existence of the world,’ in The Husserl Dictionary, 79. As stressed in
this book, Husserlian bracketing never denies but merely suspends
th ‘ t l ttit d ’
the ‘natural attitude.’
28.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.  
29.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 17.  
30.
Cézanne as cited in Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne, 220.  
31.

Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 39.  


32.
Hilton Kramer, The Age of the Avant-Garde 1956–1972 (New Jersey: 
Transaction Publishers, 2009), 29.
33.
John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists (London and New  
York: Verso, 2015), 208, 207.
34.
See Brendan Prendeville, ‘Merleau-Ponty, Realism and Painting:  
Psychophysical Space and the Space of Exchange,’ Art History, 22.
3 (Sep. 1999): 364–88.
35.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern  
Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 7.
36.
Stein, Picasso, 12.  
37.
John Sallis, ‘Freeing the Line,’ in Kascha Semonovitch and Neal  
DeRoo, eds., Merleau-Ponty and the Limits of Art, Religion and
Perception, 25.
38.
Picasso as cited in Judith Wechsler, Cézanne in Perspective (New  
Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 18.
39.
Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946,’ in A Primer for the  
Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas
(Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 15.
40. Note that Wolfgang Iser’s reading response criticism is based on
Husserlian phenomenology. See Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A
Phenomenological Approach,’ in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed.
David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1988), 212–228;  
and Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication
in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978).
41.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxiv.  
42.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty: A  
Prospectus of His Work,’ trans. Arleen B. Dallery, in The Primacy of
Perception, 6.
43.
Merleau-Ponty elaborates: ‘The lazy viewer will see “errors of  
perspective” here, while those who look closely will get the feel of a
world in which no two objects are seen simultaneously, a world in
which regions of space are separated by the time it takes to move our
gaze from one to the other, a world in which being is not given but
rather emerges over time,’ in The World of Perception, 41.

44.
Cézanne as quoted in Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art:  
A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 343.
45.
Clement Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture,’ in Clement  
Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961),
155; here Greenberg refers to the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson
Pollock.
46.
Gertrude Stein, ‘Lecture 2’ in Narration: Four Lectures (Chicago:  
The University of Chicago Press, 1935), 20.
47.
Gertrude Stein, ‘What are Master-pieces and why are there so few of  
them,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures,
1909–1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Peter Owen, 2004),
150.
48.
Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946’ in A Primer for the  
Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 17, 15.
49. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 9.  
50.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 481.  
51.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 15.  
52.
Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 9–10.  
53.
Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of The  
Principles of Psychology (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1968), 160.
54.
James, The Principles of Psychology, 258, 259, 275–276.  
55.
Husserl, Ideas, 11, 102.  
56.
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Ralph Barton  
Perry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 39–91.
57.
James M. Edie, ‘William James and Phenomenology,’ Review of  
Metaphysics 23.3 (1970): 486. See also Wilshire, William James and
Phenomenology; Hans Linschoten, On the Way Toward a
Phenomenological Psychology: The Psychology of William James,
trans. Amedeo Giorgio, (Pittsburgh, 1968); and James M. Edie,
William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington, Indianapolis:
Indiana University press, 1987).
58.
Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology, 4. Wilshire also points  
out that although James never called his method phenomenological,
‘his actual practice points in the direction of what Husserl later
explicated’ (6). See also Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact
Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978). Steiner notes but
leaves unexplored the fact that ‘the influence of William James is
probably the significant factor in any relation between Stein and the
phenomenologists, since he is in part their precursor’ (54).
59. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.  
60.
Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I am,  
126.
61.
Stein, Picasso, 36.  
62.
Edmund Husserl, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science,’ in  
Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 78.
63.
The term ‘mimetic crisis’ is Adam Katz’s in ‘From Habit to Maxim:  
Eccentric Models of Reality and Presence in the Writing of Gertrude
Stein,’ Anthropoetics 15.2 (Spring 2010), accessed 2 August 2015,
http://​www.​anthropoetics.​ucla.​edu/​ap1502/​1502Katz.​htm
64.
Stein, Picasso, 49.  
65.
Husserl, Ideas, 17. This is related to Husserl’s notion of  
phenomenology as a ‘first philosophy.’
66.
Gertrude Stein, ‘Composition as Explanation,’ in Look at Me Now  
and Here I Am, 23.
67.
Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 172, 207.  
68.
Edmund Husserl, Husserl’s Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick  
and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame
University Press, 1981), 10.

69.
Stein, Picasso, 15.  
70.
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 16.  
71.
F. Novotny as cited in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of  
Perception, 337.
72.
Blum, ‘Emmanuel Levinas’ Theory of Commitment,’ 159–160.  
73. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Dover Publications,
1997), 187. Stein’s ‘Apple’ is quoted in full by permission of Dover  
Publications.
74.
Gilles Deleuze refers to D.H. Lawrence’s term when describing the  
apples in Cézanne’s paintings: ‘What is painted on the canvas is the
body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is
experienced as sustaining this sensation (what [D.H.] Lawrence,
speaking of Cézanne, called “the appleyness of the apple”),’ in
Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.
Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 35.
75.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 14.  
76.
Husserl also spoke of ‘free variation’ as ‘free fancies,’ in Husserl,  
Ideas, 198.
77.
Ibid., 11, 102  
78.
Margueritte S. Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem  
in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1992), 145.
79.
Stein, Tender Buttons, 46.  
80.
Enrique Lima, ‘Of Horizons and Epistemology: Problems in the  
Visuality of Knowledge,’ Diacritics 33.3, New Coordinates: Spatial
Mappings, National Trajectories (Autumn–Winter 2003): 30.
81.
The term ‘word-objects’—a suitable name for Stein’s perceptual  
reconstructions, which reflect on the relation between the experience
of our object-world and language—is Frederick J. Hoffman’s, as
cited in Bruce F. Kawin, Telling it Again and Again: Repetition in
Literature and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1972), 127.

82. Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the


Flesh,’ 418.  
83.
James M. Edie, ‘Expression and Metaphor,’ Philosophy and  
Phenomenological Research 23.4 (June 1963): 544.
84.
Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ 139.  
85.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London:  
Penguin Books, 1966), 130.
86.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.  
87.
Ellen E. Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude  
Stein’s Postmodernism (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1992), 18, 30, 9,
30. For one of the first interpretations of Stein’s work as a
postmodern collapse of our usual ground of identification, see Neil
Schmitz, ‘Gertrude Stein as Post-Modernist: The Rhetoric of Tender
Buttons,’ Journal of Modern Literature 3.5, From Modernism to
Post-Modernism (July, 1974): 1203–1218. Marianne DeKoven
approaches Stein as an ‘experimental writer’ along the lines of
structuralist linguistics and especially gendered aspects of
deconstructivist theory. The ‘moving in and out of focus’ of meaning
in Tender Buttons, she argues, ‘functions anti-patriarchally, as
presymbolic jouissance and as irreducibly, multiple, fragmented
articulation of lexical meaning.’ See DeKoven, A Different
Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison:
Wisconsin UP, 1983) 44, 79. For another interpretation of Stein’s
work as postmodern indeterminacy, see Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics
of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981).
88.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.  
89.
Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946,’ 17–18.  
90.

Sallis, ‘Freeing the Line,’ 25.  


91. Stein, Picasso, 36.
 
92.
Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining  
Embodiment and Alterity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 22.
93.
Here I am indebted to Berman’s observation that hyperdialectic is a  
‘non-totalizing movement of constant decentering, that is continual
questioning.’ See Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s
Ontology of the Flesh,’ 409.
94.
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, in Metamorphosis and Other Stories,  
trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 44.
95.
Ibid., 29.  
96.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 148.  
97.
Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 98.  
98.
In early lectures Heidegger uses ruinant(e), Ruinanz, ‘falling, fall,  
into ruin,’ from the Latin ruere, ‘to fall down, rush.’ See Michael
Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1999), 65.
99.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 130, 169. Also see Crowell, Husserl,  
Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 147.
100.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 9–10.  
101.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 150.  
102.
Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, 152.  
102.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 169.  
104.
Paul Gorner, Heidegger’s Being and Time: An Introduction  
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 110.
105. Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 99.
 
106.
Heidegger as cited in Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of  
Meaning, 148, 150.
107.
Ibid., 148, 150. Such ‘questionability,’ Heidegger writes, is ‘put ...  
into effect indeed not in such a way that it pretends to be able to find,
from its own resources, an absolute and eternal decision, but simply
such that it concretely brings the questionability to maturation and
maintains it in concretely available directions. Thereby, however, it
precisely keeps alive the actualization of the access to factical life,’
in Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 113.
108.
‘It is possible to take Kafka as paradigmatic of “epiphanic  
modernism,”’ writes Roger Griffin in Modernism and Fascism, and
relates the epiphanic to ‘a sudden sensation of “standing outside”
normal time—“ecstatically” in its etymological sense’ (63). Griffin
might have thought of Heidegger for whom being-in-the world is
grounded in an ‘ecstatic and horizonal temporality,’ which is the
foundation of our existence. (See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,
337). We have already seen that phenomenological reduction lays
open Husserl’s ‘misty horizon.’ In a further elaboration of the
Husserlian horizon, Heidegger writes: ‘The concept “horizon” in the
vulgar sense presupposes precisely what we are designating as the
ecstatic horizon. There would not be something like a horizon for us
if there were not an ecstatic being-open-for.’ (Heidegger as cited in
David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and
Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being (Pennsylvania: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 68). Etymologically the
Greek ‘ecstasy’ implies a standing outside of one’s conventional,
‘static’ attitude to daily life. In this sense, an epiphanic moment of
what Heidegger would call ‘ekstasis’ is a moment of openness to the
horizon, which is normally hidden from us, but which in reality
underlies the ruinant world of factic life, the ‘natural’ fallenness in
us.
109. The most recent book-length study on phenomenology and Kafka is
Neil Allan’s Franz Kafka and the Genealogy of Modern European
f gy f p
Philosophy: From Phenomenology to Post-Structuralism (Lewiston,
New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), which explores the  
influence of the early phenomenology of Franz Brentano upon
Kafka’s own work. Allan explains how Kafka joined the ‘Louvre-
circle,’ a Brentanian discussion group, from 1902, promoting
Kafka’s reaction to the Brentano School as a heretofore overlooked
basis for recent post-structuralist interpretations of his work. ‘[T]he
narrative technique of Kafka’s work, and in particular the
representation of consciousness and its “world,”’ writes Allan, ‘is
derived from Brentanian thought, and ... this influence is modulated
in a specific direction, which renders these texts so singularly
amenable to post-structuralist thought’ (4 and xi). While the
intersections between post-structuralism and phenomenology have
been previously explored, Allan sheds new light on how these
intersections may help us tackle Kafka’s enigmatic work.
110.
Terri J. Hennings, ‘Heidegger and Kafka before the Law’ in Hans  
Rainer and Ion Copoeru, eds., Phenomenology 2005: Selected
Essays from Northern Europe, Part 1, (Zeta Books, Electronic
Edition, 2007), 295. Hennings explores Kafka’s perception of Being
in The Trial against a backdrop of Heidegger’s ontology, making
clear the differences and similarities between the two thinkers
notions of ‘guilt.’
111.
Cyrena Norman Pondrom, ‘Kafka and Phenomenology: Josef K’s  
Search for Information,’ in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary
Literature 8.1 (Winter 1967): 80–81.
112.
Ibid., 90.; my italics.  
113.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime,’ trans. Nicholas Royle, in  
Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992),
421.
114. Gail Weiss, ‘Anonymity, Alienation, And Suspension in Kafka’s
Metamorphosis,’ in Steven Galt Crowell, ed., The Prism of the Self:  
Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 223, 229.
115.
Deleuze and Guattari also ‘ask us to be attentive to the labor of the  
“dismantling or demolition of forms and categories that determine
the “great literature” in Kafka.’ As Réda Bensmaïa writes in her
Foreword to the two philosophers’ Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature, ‘the authors show that referring Kafka’s work to an idea
of failure [as Walter Benjamin does] necessarily implies the full-
fledged return of literary and philosophical categories that
presuppose a logical, even ontological, priority of content over form:
“since the content is given in a given form, one has to find, discover,
or see the form of expression appropriate to it.”’ See Bensmaïa,
Foreword to Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, by Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), xix, xvii.
116.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 9, 22. Natanson stresses these questions in  
his reading of Kafka’s novella in The Erotic Bird.
117.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 11.  
118.
See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 97.  
119.
Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, 28.  
120.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 68.  
121.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 140.  
122.
See Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers  
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 250–83.
123.
Paul L. Landsberg, ‘The Metamorphosis,’ trans. Caroline  
Muhlenberg, in Angel Flores, ed., The Kafka Problem (New York:
New York Directorions, 1946), 123.
124.
Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford,  
California: Stanford University Press, 2007), 97, 96.
125. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 11.
 
126.
Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 101.  
127.
Roy Pascal, Free Indirect Discourse and its Functioning in the  
Nineteenth Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1977), 7. For a more in-depth exploration of free
indirect discourse, see Chapter 4 of this book.
128.
Stephen Kern, The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction  
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85.
129.

Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 21.  


130.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 36.  
131.
Kearney, Anatheism, 92.  
132.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the  
Flesh,’ 412.
133.
Claude Lefort, ‘Editor’s Foreword,’ in Merleau-Ponty, The Visible  
and the Invisible, xxvi.
134.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception, 181.  
135.
Berman, ‘The Hyper-Dialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the  
Flesh,’ 10.
136.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 68.  
137.
Ibid., 27.  
138.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 68.  
139. Kafka, Metamorphosis, 36, 37. Maurice Natanson highlights this
passage in his reading of Kafka’s novella in The Erotic Bird, calling
it the reader’s one ‘moment of fond recollection … the enjoyment of  
what Hegel called “the inverted world,”’ in The Erotic Bird, 126.
140.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority  
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 136. As Laura
Batnitzky explains, ‘in attempting a phenomenological analysis of
contentment, which he also calls “enjoyment,” Levinas stretches the
limits of Husserl’s notion of intentionality, claiming that the self
senses itself as a separate, isolated and independent self in a non-
cognitive way.’ See Batnizky, ‘Encountering the Modern Subject in
Levinas,’ Yale French Studies 104, ‘Encounters with Levinas’
(2004): 15.
141.
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 40.  
142.

Ibid., 42.  
143.
Husserl’s metaphor of the ‘“zero” or “null-point”’: ‘Husserl uses the  
term to mean that all sense of space, time, orientation, movement,
and so on, takes its reference point from the lived body of the
perceiver … Husserl speaks about perception as beginning with a
“zero-point” that is nothing other than one’s own body in space.’ See
Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 348.
144.
Ibid., 20.  
145.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 58.  
146.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of  
Chicago Press, 1958), 247.
147.
Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 104.  
148. Note that Heidegger’s notions of ‘fallen’ existence and Ruinanz
should not be understood as a fallenness from the original sin; rather,  
‘ruinanz’ is a ‘natural’ losing of oneself in the world of everyday
living. Emil Lask, however, in Die Lehre vom Urteil (1923), ‘speaks
in religious metaphors about the “original sin” of knowledge
(judgment) that interposes itself between us and the “lost paradise”
of the fully determinate paradigmatic object.’ See Crowell, Husserl,
Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 272n34.
149.
Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 26.  
150.
Stephen Kern writes: ‘Modernist protagonists are rather neo-heroic,  
that is, admirable in new ways even when they are physically
unattractive, sexually unconventional, impotent, cowardly immoral,
or even dead.’ See Kern, The Modernist Novel, 34.
151.
Ibid., 215.  
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Ariane Mildenberg, Modernism and Phenomenology, Modernism and...
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_3

3. Earthly Angels and Winged


Messengers: Experience and Expression in
Hopkins, Stevens and Klee
Ariane Mildenberg1  

(1) School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

 
  Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche had already announced
the death of God, implying a secularisation of a modern world in which the
individual had to look for the god-like elsewhere. In the works of high
modernist writers, the omniscient and ordered god-like view known from
their romantic and realist predecessors gave way to a shifting and more
disjointed picture of everyday lived experience. Divinity was now in the
‘pots of pans’ of daily life,
1
in a simple dinner arranged by Mrs Ramsay in
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; in the sweet taste of a small cake, ‘the little
Madeleine’ in Proust’s Swann’s Way; in the ‘yes’ of Molly’s desire at the
end of Joyce’s Ulysses or simply in the hustle and bustle of city life: ‘That
is God . . . What? A shout in the street.’
2
But, if a certain primordial ‘faith
is in things not seen,’
3
as ‘a sort of commitment to the world and to others,’
one question remains,
4
as Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor put it: ‘can we
find an order after the announcement that God is dead?’
5
Two relevant
poets to turn to here are Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), an ‘early
modernist’ poet ahead of his Victorian time whose poetry is pervaded by a
sense of religious doubt and alienation
6
; and Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
who, as the self-confessed ‘priest of the invisible,’
7
saw it as his task to fill
the void the gods’ going had left with the ‘Supreme Fiction’ of poetry. In
my discussion of the sacred secularity of the two poets’ work, I will briefly
touch upon the angelology of modernist painter Paul Klee (1879–1940)
whose many angels painted between 1938 and 1940 are trapped between
heaven and earth, a ‘transitional realm’ where the angels themselves
express the uncertainties of human beings.
8
The works I focus on here, Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ (1918) and
Stevens’s ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’ (1950), which is explored via
Stevens’s poetics, are concerned with retrieving a sense of the sacred in
ordinary things, in a universe where the presence of God is uncertain in the
case of Hopkins; and in a world estranged from God in the case of Stevens.
Demonstrating how the world is ‘an experience which we live before it
becomes an object which we know in some impersonal or detached fashion,’
9
both call attention to processes of meaning-giving and the relationship

between the experience of the ‘thing itself’ and the written word. Finally,
both appraise the limits of language but refuse to accept those limits.

Catching Flight: Hopkins’s Windhover


In Hopkins’s epiphanic poetry there is a frequent breaking into ecstasy,
representing Hopkins’s own creative energy, his own process of ‘catching’
the thing itself, the essence of embodied experience and translating this into
poetry. Offering an audible counterpart to the ‘lived perspective’ in
Cézanne’s paintings, Hopkins’s thick, colourful and sensual patchwork of
language germinates with the plurality of visions and sounds from the
natural world. In a linguistic explosion of sorts, ‘The Windhover,’ which
traces the correlation between a bird’s physical flight and a poet’s creative
flight, makes audible ‘how the world touches us’
10
:

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-


 dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
 Of the rólling level úndernéath him steady áir, and stríding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

 As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
 Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
11
Hopkins’s Falcon is ‘riding’ the air like a medieval knight hovering over
his horse, indicated by the ‘chevalier’ in line 11, that, according to
Bernadette Waterman Ward and others, is a reference to Christ.
12
Claiming
that ‘allegorical readings in general have severe drawbacks,’ Peter
Cosgrove has offered a radically different approach, arguing that Hopkins’s
concerns in this poem anticipate those of the modernists Wallace Stevens
and William Carlos Williams; ‘[t]he thing itself, as we have learned from
the profound explorations in the work of Wallace Stevens,’ he suggests, ‘is
always rendered inaccessible by the veil of language. Hopkins’s poetic
practice does not pretend otherwise. Indeed, the sestet overtly presents
“ideas about the thing” as the culminating moment of the poem.’
13
I would
agree with Cosgrove that Hopkins anticipates the modernist poets’ aesthetic
concerns, but I want to flesh out the idea of the elusive ‘moment’ itself in
the poem. Ironically, and despite many critics’ attempts to ‘catch’ the
poem’s meaning, its beauty lies in the fact that it escapes being ‘caught,’
which is tied up with the poem’s reliving of the temporality of the creative
act of catching—both the bird’s movement of catching its prey and the
poet’s ‘catching’ of the bird’s flight—and thus the specific time of its
unfolding. Unlike Cosgrove, who claims that Hopkins is ‘positing the bird
as a “thing,”’ the ‘essence’ of which is brought out by ‘the human
observer,’
14
thus affirming a subject/object relation and, therefore,
division, I want to call attention to an earlier moment of pre-relational
intentionality that Husserl would call the ‘thing itself,’ that experiential in-
each-other [Ineinander] that is neither a dualism nor a monism.
15
To explore this, let us return to Hopkins’s horse-back riding bird,
recalling Plato’s ‘noble’ ‘winged horse and the charioteer of the gods’
referred to by Stevens in his essay ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of
Words’ (1941). Here the latter states that the nature of poetry is ‘an
interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals.’
16
The
intertwining of reality and imagination, the visible and the invisible, the
external hovering of the kestrel and the poet-watcher’s invisible ‘heart in
hiding’ construct Hopkins’s ‘inscape,’ his much-discussed term for grasping
the intrinsic names or essence of things as these appear to him through a
moment of poetic achievement, an insight or epiphanic moment: ‘The
achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’
17
Just as ‘seeking the essence of the
world is not to seek what it is as an idea, after having reduced it to a theme
or discourse; rather, it is to seek what it in fact is for us, prior to every
thematization,’
18
Hopkins’s poem relives a moment of intentionality, the
poet’s unmediated experience of the bird’s flight prior to representation and
relational meaning. In correlation with the past tense ‘caught’ of the poem’s
opening line, the octave’s final line, which is placed after a dash and
significantly reads as an afterthought (a second-order experience), implies
that this lived experience has become the known object in a belated and
thus detached way, both through the final ‘mastery’ of the bird catching its
prey and of the poet ‘catching’ the ‘moment’ in poetry. The first-order
(precognitive) experience, however, is that in-each-other [Ineinander]
when seer and seen, the subjective and the objective—both the gazing poet
watching the hovering bird and the bird watching its prey—are still
primordially absorbed in each other. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm
in The Visible and the Invisible or ‘Verflechtung,’ as he refers to it in
Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, shed light on Hopkins’s braided
quilt of words:

True Husserlian thought: man, world, language are interwoven,


verflochten. What does that mean: man, language world (lived
world, and objectified, idealized world) given in one package.
19

The assonance of Hopkins’s opening lines indicates that the kestrel spotted
by the poet belongs to and is folded into the experience of morning (it is its
‘minion,’ its servant) and early morning light, drawn from the dappled
patches of dawn. The morning and morning’s minion; and the dauphin or
crown-prince of daylight and dappled dawn—all are interlaced in one
experience mirrored by Hopkins’s own interlacing of words. As the Falcon
is ‘riding’ the air ‘rolling’ beneath him, the poet rides language with a
similar rolling movement—his words too are ‘hurl[ing] and gliding’ as if
‘[r]ebuff[ing] the big wind’—put into practice through the ‘sprung rhythm’
developed by Hopkins himself, compound words, alliteration and
assonance. The double or triple compound words in the poem such as
‘dapple-dáwn-drawn’ and ‘bow-bend’ are meeting points, moments of
‘Verflechtung,’ inter-braiding man, language and the movements of nature.
Similarly, Hopkins’s use of assonance and alliteration also promote
connections or knots between usually disconnected sights and sounds:
‘Caught this morning morning’s minion,’ ‘dapple-dáwn-drawn,’
‘stríding’—‘gliding’—‘hiding,’ ‘wimpling wing’—‘swing.’ Thus, like
many of Hopkins’s poems, ‘The Windhover’ meditates on the connection of
the distinct to the larger whole, the particular to the general, ‘the unit and
the horizon within which it is viewed.’
20
The ‘inscape,’ the inherent
‘design’ of the experience of the Falcon’s adventure of flight in the early
morning sky ‘caught’ through the mentioned compound words, assonance
and alliteration, is what gives the composition its wholeness, its in-each-
other. Hopkins’s naturally ‘rolling’ language in this poem and the sprung
rhythm, in which there are no constraints on the number of syllables,
regulating both stress and syllable length so that it captures what Hopkins
thought of as ‘the native rhythm of the words used bodily imported into
verse,’ thus approximating ‘the native and natural rhythm of speech,’
21
briefly shock us back into that pre-relational lived experience itself.
22
Notably, Hopkins stressed that his poetry was a ‘living art . . . made for
performance’ and for listening instead of reading
23
; thus, the listener’s
experience would somehow be tantamount to the poet’s unique experience
of the music, sounds, colours, and movements of the natural world, such as
a falcon riding the wind or his observation of Kingfishers in the poem ‘As
Kingfishers Catch Fire.’ In this way, Hopkins presents us with a form of
parole parlante, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, a generative language
different from the objective meaning of spoken language, the thematised
‘language meaning’ that Merleau-Ponty in The Prose of the World refers to
as the ‘[s]edimented language . . . the reader brings with him, the stock of
accepted relations between signs and familiar significations without which
he could never have begun to read.’
24
Such objective language labels the
world by means of the kind of standard linguistic meanings we have at our
disposal in everyday life. But, ‘beneath’ the kind of ‘ready-made
significations’ of such ‘spoken language’ (parole parlée) lies a taken-for-
granted ‘operant or speaking language’ (parole parlante), the words of
which ‘have a silent life like the animals at the bottom of the ocean.’
25
The
‘speaking language’ is a ‘praxis’ or language ‘in the making,’
26
an
‘indirect’ language in that it is the expressive gesture that engenders
‘spoken language.’
27
Spoken language, the philosopher claims, has lost
sight of its original ground of an expressive experience, the speaking
language which is ‘an openness of the surrounding world.’
28
Hopkins’s
poem, embodying the kestrel’s rolling flight and thus lived experience
itself, is ‘sprung’ from the ready-made significations of objective language
and is experienced on the page as such fertile language.
Hopkins’s writing was deeply affected by his Roman Catholic faith:
God is always present in his poems, through the beauty of the nature
described, and yet he constantly seems to return to and marvel at his own
existence as a physical being in a world of beauty.
29
There is a tension
between ‘spiritual life and openness to the world, intellect and sensitivity’
30
that Dennis Sobolev calls a ‘split consciousness;’
31
and between his
belief in God, whose beauty does not change, and a sacred secularity, a
theology of the earth celebrating the magnificence of the inevitable flux of
ordinary things. Like the poet himself, the windhover is a winged
messenger hovering in between heaven and the world’s natural beauty, in
between Hopkins’s divine faith and human artistry. Hopkins himself
explained this as ‘two strains of thought running together and like
counterpointed.’
32
In a similar fashion, ‘The Windhover’ makes us reflect
on the limits of language, on the fact that the written word can never
completely ‘catch’ the unspoken essence of things as they appear to the
poet. In other words, the two strains of thought are out of joint in an
instance that Derrida would call contretemps, the ‘contradictory force of
naming’
33
in that the name itself, the ‘aphorism is exposure to contretemps.
It exposes discourse—hands it over to contretemps. Literally—because it is
abandoning a word [une parole] to its letter.’
34
Here Derrida’s
differentiation between a word and the letter echoes the dehiscence between
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘operant or speaking language’ and a ready-made ‘spoken
language.’ Both philosophers are indebted to Husserl for whom meaning is
already a latent part of the self-evident Life-world (Lebenswelt).
35
Meaning, therefore, cannot be produced because it is already ‘an original,
irreducible form of intentionality’ and an ‘original phenomenon,’ not a
belated one that is only shaped via our written or spoken language.
36
Yet,
both Merleau-Ponty and Derrida call attention to the process of writing
itself, which is not mere ‘codification’; rather, it is ‘necessary in order for
an ideal object to be fully constituted.’
37
Writing itself, then, presupposes
the structure of pre-reflective intentionality as meaning-giving but also
accomplishes it.
Hopkins’s flying kestrel ‘rebuff[s] the big wind’ just as the poet seeks to
triumph over his subject matter, the kestrel, through his generative poetry,
which will, nevertheless, remain a buffer between the thing itself—the
experience of the Windhover’s flight—and the poet’s words. This tension is
at once grasped and lost in the second stanza:

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
 Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
38
As Sobolev has it, while the octave is written in the past tense—I caught
this morning morning’s minion—the final sestet, which addresses the
kestrel as ‘chevalier,’ is a present tense ‘communication with Christ.’
39
Epitomizing what he sees as the ‘doubleness of Hopkins’s universe’
through the ‘double temporal structure’ of the poem, Sobolev stresses that
‘the emblematic meaning of the vision of the kestrel’s flight’—which,
according to the author, has an allegorical function—is revealed only in
retrospect, thus calling attention to ‘a temporal gap between the moment of
experience and the moment of the articulation of its meaning.’
40
The
transition from past to present, then, coincides with the transition from the
octave to the sestet, simultaneously marking a transition from nature to
divine presence, and from the actual experience to the written word.
Although Sobolev’s study of Hopkins bears the subtitle ‘An Essay in
Semiotic Phenomenology’—a ‘better option’ than simply
‘phenomenology,’ the author proposes, since it stresses ‘the textual aspect
of analysis, as opposed to the more familiar phenomenological orientation
toward the contents of consciousness’
41
—it is odd that phenomenology is
not drawn upon at any point throughout the book. Moreover, Sobolev
misses the point that the question of textual analysis, particularly the
dialogue between the data of consciousness and the written text, is always
already integral to the work of Husserl, Fink, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,
and the later Derrida. In fact, phenomenology can help us shed light on the
poet’s awareness of his ‘slippery hold on things’
42
despite being in
possession of the tool of language. The much-discussed ‘Buckle!’ in
Hopkins’s sestet implies the catching of the thing itself—like the buckling
or clasping of a belt—that is the bird’s catching of its prey as it swoops
down, and the poet’s catching of the object of his eye in a moment of
epiphany. But it also tells us something about the translation of experience
to the written word, ‘the problem of the passage from the perceptual
meaning to the language meaning,’
43
that is to say, the poet’s attempt to
‘catch’ the experience in words, which also, inevitably, means the
disappearance of the immediacy of the experience, a necessary ‘buckling’
under or collapse of that experience. The ecstatic moment of ‘catching,’
then, is come and gone in the Kierkegaardian ‘øjeblik’—what Heidegger,
borrowing from but also slightly altering Kierkegaard’s phenomenon of the
moment, termed the Augenblick
44
—the blink of an eye where ‘time’ and
‘eternity’ ‘touch’ each other and which is ‘Eternity’s … first attempt to …
stop Time.’
45
Kierkegaard makes reference to Plato when stressing that the
equivalent of the Danish ‘øjeblik’ would be ‘momentum’ in Latin, deriving
from ‘movere’: to move, stir, agitate. As Kierkegaard notes, in this light, the
moment always already indicates disappearance.
46
Significantly, the
speaker’s ‘heart in hiding’ in Hopkins’s poem ‘Stirred for a bird’ and also
stirs for the ‘achieve of; the mastery of the thing!’ And yet, due to the
inevitability of temporality, which ‘is the means offered to all that will be in
order so that it can no longer be,’
47
Hopkins’s thick and rolling language,
in ‘catching’ the kestrel catch its pray, simultaneously ‘catches’ but
necessary fails to really possess the ‘thing itself,’ the stirring moment of
creation, that moment of epiphany (‘the achieve of; the mastery of the
thing!’) when the visible and the invisible dimensions of experience
intertwine:

If the thing itself were attained, it would from then on be stretched


out before us without any mystery. It would cease to exist as a thing
at the very moment we believed we possessed it. What makes up the
‘reality’ of the thing is thus precisely what steals it from our
possession.
48

One of the doctrines of phenomenology is what we may call the fate of


perception. Theorised reflection, such as writing, is grounded in an
‘unreflected life,’
49
but because of the temporal distance between
experience and expression, it can never possess it as such. According to
Merleau-Ponty, our ability to speak about the world is conditioned by an
unspoken, bodily communication with it. This primary bodily
communication is the foundation for all thought and expression: ‘Meaning
is invisible, but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the
visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure).’
50
Merleau-
Ponty discovered this logic in the work of Paul Klee whose notebooks
reflect upon invisibility:

Something has been made visible which could not have been
perceived without the effort to make it visible. Yes, you might see
something, but you would have no exact knowledge of it. But here
we are entering the realm of art; here we must be very clear about
the aim of ‘making-visible.’ Are we merely noting things seen in
order to remember them or are we also trying to reveal what is not
visible? Once we know and feel this distinction, we have come to
the fundamental point of artistic creation.
51

Merleau-Ponty elaborates that just as visibility rests on an ‘invisible inner


framework,’ so all speech gravitates around a bodily, ‘mute perception’ of
the world.
52
In the philosopher’s late work, a constitutive difference
between these invisible/mute and visible/spoken dimensions of experience
bears the name of ‘écart,’ a principle of differentiation that is not an
opposition existing within being.
53
Reflection, Merleau-Ponty proposes, is
aware of and cannot overcome this ‘écart,’ the unperceived temporal
distance between the ‘perceptual meaning’ of pre-reflective experience and
‘language meaning.’
54
All our perceptions and clear expressions are
grounded in this unperceived ‘pivot’ or ‘hinge’ between the invisible and
the visible, the pre-reflective and the reflective, the experiential and the
articulated: ‘[t]his separation (écart). . . forms meaning,’
55
but we are not
aware of it as it is prior to our ability to reflect on and speak about the
world.
At once separating and pulling together through its buckling movement,
what ‘The Windhover’ does catch is the transition from experience to
language, thus moving through Merleau-Ponty’s écart and highlighting
such a process of meaning-giving itself. The word ‘Buckle,’ then, captures
the ‘buckling’ nature of language and is an image for a double bind that is
the inescapable fate of the poet, the fact that words both pull together and
yet collapse pre-reflective experience in that they can never completely
coincide with that experience. The ‘buckling’ moments of the bird’s and
poet’s processes of physical and creative flight in ‘The Windhover,’ it
follows, express the division of experience that phenomenology bring to
light: ‘Not only are we dealing with what is given but also with what is pre-
supposed for the giving to occur.’
56
Epiphany in ‘The Windhover’ is a
moment of inspiration where there is union or in-each-other and then an
inevitable parting with ‘the thing itself,’ come and gone, like the stirring of
the Kierkegaardian moment, which always already implies disappearance—
like the poet’s ‘stir[ring] for a bird.’ But the necessary moment of
disappearance is exactly what makes it beautiful, and this should not be a
surprise, as Hopkins stresses in the final stanza:

 No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plóugh down síllion


Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
 Fall, gáll themselves, and gásh góld-vermillion.
57
Here the ploughs of the plodding farmers hit down the sillion, from the
French sillon, that is to say, the furrow or trench in the ploughed soil,
recalling the cleavage or splitting open—the écart—without which
meaning-making would not be possible, and without which there would be
no epiphanies of momentary illumination that ‘gásh góld-vermillion,’ no
red-gold cuts into experience that reveal the simultaneous pain and beauty
of meaning-making itself, no moments, therefore, that burn and also split
open like blue-bleak embers in hot ovens.
Within the pattern of Hopkins’s inscape, then, his patchwork of
compound words and sprung rhythm, we are made aware of how the unit
and the larger whole are originally folded together in an in-each-other prior
to subject/object divisions.
58
The paradoxical logic of ‘The Windhover,’
highlighting our inability to quite catch the poet’s act of catching a bird
catching, is that ‘I must be both passive and active, must simultaneously
create and repeat, at once falling and ascending,’
59
thus necessitating a
‘descent,’ a falling back into a lived and open experience ‘prior to all
presuppositions’
60
and an ‘ascent’ upward into objective humanity; both
‘impassioned [passionelle]’ and passive,
61
both in possession of my
desires and interests and yet dispossessed—a form of ‘buckling’ in other
words.
62
Necessary Angels and Half-Way States: Wallace
Stevens
In The Necessary Angel (1942), a collection of essays on reality and the
imagination, Wallace Stevens introduced a poetics that shed light on the
invisible in the visible, the sacred in ordinary, earthly things, claiming that
‘the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem
of the earth remains to be written.’
63
He regarded the poet as ‘the priest of
the invisible’ whose ‘Supreme Fiction’
64
was to impose new secular orders
on the world and serve as a substitute for the breakdown of traditional faith,
as his Adagia (1934–1940) explains:

The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a


sceptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns
to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic
point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and
invalidate, for the support that they give.
65

Arguing that religion had become redundant in the interwar period and that
some substitute had to be found, Stevens promoted poetry—‘supreme
fiction’—itself as such ‘support’ by letting it piece the godless world
together: ‘God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms,
as, for example, the form of high poetry.’
66
This ‘high poetry,’ however,
should not be seen as a quest for a higher dimension of being, but as an
attempt to step back into the immanent intentional structures of the mind
—‘the poem of the act of the mind,’
67
as Stevens calls it—where the mind
and the world are correlatives; a more basic reality, in other words, the
essential structure of which is always, already there, but which has been
obscured by the habits of daily life and conventional forms of expression.
As we have seen, Husserl thought of phenomenology as a ‘first
philosophy’ or a philosophy of ‘a radical beginning.’ Throughout his
writings, Stevens refers to first-order or unmediated experience as the ‘first
idea’
68
: ‘If you take the varnish and dirt of generations off a picture, you
see it in its first idea. If you think about the world without its varnish and
dirt, you are a thinker of the first idea.’
69
His essay ‘The Figure of the
Youth as Virile Poet’ echoes this idea: ‘the poet must get rid of the hieratic
in everything that concerns him.’
70
In other words, by putting out of play
traditional ‘hieratic’ notions about the world, the poet can turn to ‘the poem
of the act of the mind’
71
—the creations of his own consciousness—and
perceive the world in its original ‘first idea.’ In order to perceive this ‘first
philosophy’ (within which philosophy is grounded) or to be a thinker of the
‘first idea’ (within which poetry is grounded), one must begin by shifting
the direction of one’s attention from the reflective (second-order) to the pre-
reflective (first-order) dimension of experience through an epochal
parenthesizing of the world. We must step back into a world that we have
lost sight of, as it were.
However, it seems to have become an ‘almost ritual gesture’ among
certain Stevens critics drawing upon phenomenology that Stevens’s early
work—Harmonium (1923), Ideas of Order (1935), and The Man with the
Blue Guitar (1937)—separates the subject from the object or the mind’s
poetic constructions from the outside world, whereas the later Stevens of
Parts of a World (1942), Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of
Autumn (1950), and The Rock (1954) re-connects the mind and the world.
72
In these studies, the method of epoché (bracketing) that inaugurates
reduction is read as a complete cancellation or rejection of the subject’s
interaction with the world and is drawn upon to shed light on what is seen
as a dichotomy of the mind and the world in the early Stevens.
73
Thomas J.
Hines, for instance, compares the poetics of the early Stevens to Husserl’s
process of phenomenological reduction, a ‘process of destruction wherein
the ancient orders are reduced to nothing’ or ‘thrown out.’
74
In an analysis
of ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ Hines argues that ‘Stevens’s process of
reduction is again at work as the speaker separates mind and world’—a
separation which is rejected by the more Heideggerian late Stevens who
realises that the ‘clear perceptions that were available through the processes
of reduction’ are now ‘inadequate for his aesthetic purposes.’
75
Other
critical studies of Stevens arguing for an ‘early’ Stevens separating the
mind from the world misread Stevens’s gestures toward the implicit bond
between subject and object-world constituting the intentional ‘act of the
mind.’
76
In another attempt to clarify the relationship between mind and
world in Stevens’s work, Alan Perlis also draws on the reduction. Once
again, Perlis assumes that the reduction separates the mind and the world
and yet his reading of Stevens is entirely different from Hines’s:
‘phenomenology . . . is the most outspoken in refusing to connect
particulars and to contrive synthesis; it abdicates point of view or inclusive
position, in favour of microscopic observation and exclusive vision. Yet
Stevens continually argues that an object, to be properly perceived, must be
held in relation to its environment.’
77
Thus, like Hines, Perlis reads the
phenomenological concept of reduction as a method that cancels rather than
suspends our fact-world, isolating the ‘microscopic’ mind from any relation
with the outside world, while he, unlike Hines, stresses Stevens’s continual
promotion of the necessary bond between subject and object-world. Due to
his unfortunate description of phenomenology’s central theme, Perlis fails
to see the connection between phenomenology and the poet’s work, leading
him to emphasise ‘the dangers inherent in trying either to connect Stevens’s
poems to a philosophy or to call Stevens himself a philosopher.’
78
Such
‘danger’ is also sensed by James S. Leonard and Christine E. Wharton;
comparisons between Stevens and Husserl or Heidegger, they argue, ‘tend
to distort both the philosophical and the poetic material (characterizing
Stevens’s view as nonaesthetic, or even antiaesthetic).’ Rather, Stevens’s
‘view of art—or imaginative acts in general—as enhancement of reality is
well beyond the sphere of Husserlian phenomenology,’ which they—
incorrectly—describe as ‘antiaesthetic.’
79
Finally, in The Practical Muse:
Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens (1997), Patricia Rae uses
the Husserlian epoché to read Stevens as a poet of hypothesis. Stevens’s
‘epochal spaces’—‘vatic figures within ironically circumscribed spaces—
jars, crystals, and mirrors, and huts and houses’—or in spaces midway
between the earth and the sky, she points out, ‘stress the lack of interaction
between phenomenologically reduced experience and the outer world.’
Taking her bearings from Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of ‘As If,’
according to Rae, Stevens is a poet of hypothesis because the poet’s
enclosed ‘epochal spaces,’ ‘shelters’ of ‘peace’ and retreat, fall apart when
the forces of reality ‘enter the poetry,’ thus ‘profoundly disturbing the
carefully balanced epoché Stevens otherwise works so hard to preserve.’
80
Once again, the critic fails to note that the phenomenological act of
‘bracketing’ is not an act of preservation or ‘retreat,’ protecting the poetic
mind and denying enhancement of the real; rather, it provides access to the
intentionality of consciousness, which, as we have seen, means that the
imagination is always, already, in an implicit relation to the real.
Distinguishing the poetic inquiries of the early Stevens from those of the
late Stevens, Rae’s Stevens also gradually comes to realise ‘that one is part
of everything’; hence his ‘will to sustain the epoche weakens,’ and the poet
can re-unite with the world.
81
All in all, in claiming that the Husserlian method of reduction is an
‘inadequate’ tool for examining the correlation of self and world in the
aesthetics of the later Stevens, the critics mentioned miss the point that
epoché brings into clarity exactly this correlation, which, in the worlds of
Husserl, is ‘the essence of consciousness in general.’
82
When insisting on
the epoché as a means to return to a ‘first philosophy,’ Husserl never
suggests an elimination of the existing world; on the contrary, he argues:
‘Our phenomenological idealism does not deny the positive existence of the
real (realen) world and of Nature. . . . Its sole task and service is to clarify
the meaning of this world.’
83
To recapitulate, in epoché our preconceived,
theoretical ideas and practical considerations about the world are never
denied, but simply pushed off centre. A ‘mere change of standpoint,’ the
epoché does not change or reject anything; rather, Husserl writes that after
the operation of bracketing, ‘[w]e have literally lost nothing.’
84
It is ironic,
then, that the phenomenological method of ‘bracketing’ is charged with a
denial of previous representations of the real, leading to a mind/world split,
whereas nothing is forgotten in epoché and nothing is denied. The epoché
occasions not the division between consciousness and world, leading to
narcissistic self-enclosure, but their prepredicative in-each-other, prior to
representation and subject/object divisions; hence it cannot possibly
demonstrate the ‘opposition’ between, or independence of, consciousness
and world.
85
Moreover, in contrast to the critics mentioned, it is my
conviction that Stevens maintains a shift of attitude similar to epoché
throughout his oeuvre. It is exactly the epoché that lays bare first-order
experience where consciousness is always consciousness of and always
already part of the world: ‘The epoché takes the phenomenologist not out of
the world but, in a sense, more deeply into it.’
86
Highlighting that one is
‘[p]art of the res and not about it,’
87
Stevens never ceases to promote that
the world is constituted not through second-order representations about the
world but through first-order experience.
88
A certain leading back to the ‘first idea,’ then, is the poet’s term for
entering into poetry, for, as Stevens puts it in Opus Posthumous: ‘the
essence in art is insight of a special kind into reality.’
89
This insight reveals
‘that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has
established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the
imagination,’
90
calling attention to an a priori referred to in ‘A Collect of
Philosophy,’ which contains the oft-mentioned and only reference to
Husserl in Stevens’s writings
91
:

Jean Wahl wrote to me, saying ‘I am just now reading the


Méditations cartésiennes by Husserl. Very dry. But he affirms that
there is an enormous (ungeheueres) a priori in our minds, an
inexhaustible infinity of a priori. He speaks of the approach of the
unapproachable.’ This enormous a priori is potentially as poetic a
concept as the idea of infinity of the world.
92

The passage echoes Husserl’s observation that concrete objects are


surrounded by a ‘distinct or indistinct co-present margin, which forms a
continuous ring around the actual field of perception’: ‘What is actually
perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate . . .
is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or
fringe of indeterminate reality.’ The flow of consciousness, according to
Husserl, is immersed in an infinite ‘misty horizon,’
93
figuring the infinity
and continuity of the world, which exists before reflection but can never be
fully expressed, and yet it is the horizon, that is to say, the very background
against which all acts and expressions stand out. The task of the
phenomenologist is ‘to penetrate to th[is] primal ground,’
94
which is
‘always already there, existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all
praxis.’
95
It is in this fundamental ground of experience that ‘the
immediate a priori phenomenology, the first philosophy’ takes root.
Similarly Stevens’s ‘first idea’ belongs to what ‘Notes toward a Supreme
Fiction’ calls ‘the giant’: ‘It feels good as it is without the giant, / A thinker
of the first idea.’
96
So what, then, does Stevens mean by this ‘giant?’ In
‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’ the poet’s ‘few words, an and yet,
and yet, and yet –’ will always be ‘part of the never-ending meditation, /
Part of the question that is the giant himself’ and ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’
speaks of ‘[a] giant, on the horizon, glistening.’ ‘The truth must be,’
Stevens writes in ‘Poem Written at Morning,’ ‘That you do not see, you
experience, you feel, / That the buxom eye brings merely its element / To
the total thing, a shapeless giant forced / Upward.’
97
The ‘shapeless giant’
and the ‘giant on the horizon, glistening’ are figures for the insubstantial
shapes of pre-semantic experience, which the ‘buxom eye’ fixes in poetic
trope. Like the Husserlian ‘misty horizon,’ Stevens’s idea of the ‘giant’ is
‘gigantic’ as well as unapproachable (to borrow from Wahl): it can never be
fully possessed in words and yet remains the foundation of all reasoning
and expression.
Working back from this, ‘Supreme Fiction’ should not detach the
subject from the world in a spiritual moment of elevation; rather, like
reduction, it brings to light the subject’s pre-conceptual bond with the world
prior to all polarities, as expressed in ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’:

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.


There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place


That is not our own, and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.
98
We describe the world to make it our own, but as we ‘live in a place /
That is not our own,’ this is merely ‘description without place. It is a
sense // To which we refer experience.’
99
For, ‘before we breathed,’ before
we could even think and sing of the world, ‘[t]here was a muddy centre.’
Our ability to perceive, differentiate objects, and impose order upon the
world rests on a non-differentiated core of primary meaning, a pre-theoretic
‘muddy centre’ where things are in-each-other, stand in a primitive
dimension and where they, according to Husserl, are pre-predicatively
given, that is to say, when we still have a ‘precognitive experience’ of them
before self-consciously ‘theorising’ them as objects.
100
Merleau-Ponty
builds upon a similar idea when stressing that our ability to speak about the
world is conditioned by an unspoken communication with it. Just as the
visible is made up of an ‘exterior’ and an ‘interior horizon,’
101
language
too has a silent centre, ‘the core of primary signification around which acts
of naming and expression are organized.’
102
Like Husserl, Merleau-Ponty
sought a philosophical beginning free from preconceived views about
reality, restoring a wild meaning
103
or ‘Ur-Sprung of language’ that is
already given but remains latent within the world of daily life.
104
Our ability to perceive, differentiate objects, and impose order upon the
world, then, rests on a not yet differentiated core of wild meaning, a
‘muddiness’ within being itself. It is through a perpetual blessing of the
muddy passage between the invisible/unreflected dimensions of experience
and the visible/spoken things in the world—a ‘muddiness’ that our world of
objectification has lost sight of—that Stevens’s ‘Supreme Fiction’ comes
into being. This blessing never stops, for, as Stevens writes in agreement
with Hopkins, ‘Poetry is a finikin thing of air / That lives uncertainly and
not for long’; it ‘has to be living’ and reflect the living experience of a
world in perpetual flux.
105
In ‘A Primitive Like an Orb,’ Stevens too
gestures towards the inability of language to completely possess experience:
‘the essential poem at the centre of things . . . is and it / Is not and,
therefore, is. In the instant of speech, / The breadth of an accelerando
moves, / Captives the being, widens—and was there.’ Thus ‘An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven’ confirms that the poem can only ever be ‘the cry of
its occasion, / Part of the res and not about it.’
106
Being ‘part of the res’—
in the middle of things—and at once detached from and defined by their
horizon, Stevens’s poems highlight their own process of meaning-giving in
a world which is always becoming. Hence the emphasis throughout his
work on passing states and therefore only half-caught and half-perceived
notions. It is from these half-way states, moving through that ‘in-between’
that is neither subjective nor objective, that the poet’s ‘necessary angel’
emerges:

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,


Since in my sight you see the earth again,

.................................

By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,


Myself, only half a figure of sort,

A figure half-seen, or seen for a moment, a man


Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn


Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?
107
Stevens’s angel is a ‘necessary angel of earth’ who ‘neither has ashen
wing nor wear of ore / And live[s] without a tepid aureole.’
108
As noted by
other critics, this poem was the product of a meditation upon a painting by
Tal Coat that Stevens bought in 1949 and gave the title ‘Angel Surrounded
by Peasants,’
109
as explained in a 1949 letter to Victor Hammer:

The question is of how to represent the angel of reality is not an


easy question. I suppose that what I had in mind when I said that he
had no wear of ore was that he had no crown or other symbol. I was
definitely trying to think of an earthly figure, not a heavenly figure.
The point of the poem is that there must be in the world about us
things that solace us quite as fully as any heavenly visitation would.
110

Upon receipt of Stevens’s book of essays significantly entitled The


Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination in 1951, Marianne
Moore, wrote the following in a letter to Stevens: ‘I have received the
NECESSARY ANGEL and thank you. In thinking of angels as
strengtheners, I see that I have not been amiss.’
111
Moore was not amiss.
The angel’s strengthening quality in ‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans’ lies in
its human quality. Surrounded by ‘paysans,’ this angel stresses the
commonplace, only has angelic qualities because it is imperfect,
representing a world of perpetual change, which can only ever be ‘half-
caught’ before it is gone, in the Kierkegaardian ‘øjeblik,’ the epiphanic
moment—or ‘crystallizations of freshness,’
112
as Stevens himself called
them—when ‘time’ and ‘Eternity’ ‘touch’ only to miss each other. Only
‘half a figure of a sort, / A figure half seen for a moment,’
113
this angelic
border-dweller is only ever half-caught before ‘quickly, too quickly’ it is
gone. Bringing us one step closer to that prepredicative in-each-other, a
mutual crossing over or ‘muddy centre’ prior to all subject/object
divisiveness and relational meaning, Steven’s half-seen angel is thus neither
wholly thing nor wholly idea, half fact and half essence; rather, it expresses
what Galen Johnson terms ‘the beautiful,’ laying bare ‘a peculiar,
remarkable openness that is not found in theoretical understanding,’ an
epiphanic moment, in other words: ‘the experience of the beautiful
transcends the subject-object dichotomy, and in it both union and difference
are philosophically integrated.’
114
Like the woman in ‘So-And-So
Reclining on her Couch,’ Stevens’s ‘angel’ ‘floats in the contention, the
flux / Between the thing as idea and / the idea as thing,’
115
anticipating the
later poem ‘A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream’ in which bathing figures
reminiscent of Cézanne’s Large Bathers are mere ‘addicts / To blotches,
angular anonymids / Gulping for shape among the reeds . . . / less than
creatures, of the sky between the banks.’
116
Neither subjective nor
objective, Stevens’s half-imagery is ‘passing a boundary,’
117
opening onto
what Stevens in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ calls ‘The madness of
Space’ 118
and laying bare the original and non-representational space of
meaning-giving poised between the primacy of perception and expression.

‘Still Imperfect’: Paul Klee’s Angelology


The momentary half-way states in Stevens’s poetry recall what Paul Klee,
in his Notebooks, thought of as ‘the tragedy of spirituality’ derived from
‘the simultaneous helplessness of the body and mobility of the spirit’: ‘Man
is half a prisoner, half borne on wings. Each of the two halves perceived the
tragedy of its halfness by awareness of its counterpart.’
119
As Christine
Hopfengart puts it in a commentary upon the painter’s angel series
produced between 1879 and 1940, the ‘idea of transition and of a
“transitional realm” is foundational for Klee’s intellectual approach and
artistic imagination.’ As for Hopkins and Stevens, for Klee, ‘the right thing
was never unequivocal but always “in between,”’
120
placing ‘emphasis on
the unfinished’ through the sketchiness and uncertainty of his drawings.
121
Hovering in mid-air, in between Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ and Stevens’s
poetics, we find Klee’s ‘angelology,’ which is as much a poetics as a
philosophy of painting; ‘the recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after
all,’ Klee claimed, ‘should be no hindrance in the plastic arts!’
122
What lies
at the heart of Klee’s poetics is an awareness of ‘the gradual process of
formation and transformation in every living thing, even of those that are
beyond our ken.’
123
This emphasis on process and lack of fixity in his art
was also highlighted by Heidegger for whom the works ‘are not paintings,
but feeling. Klee was capable of making moods “visible” in pictures . . .
The less we think of Klee’s paintings as presenting objects, the more they
“appear” (in the sense of the Greek phainestai).’
124
The German Jew
Walter Benjamin must have been taken aback exactly by such ‘feelings’
when in 1921 he purchased Klee’s watercolour Angelus Novus (1920), one
of Klee’s first angel pictures, which to Benjamin represented ‘the angel of
history,’ anticipating the catastrophe of World War II and the unfathomable
horrors of Nazi Germany. The angel, Benjamin claimed, is looking at
something he ‘seems about to move away from,’ wanting to put together the
‘wreckage upon wreckage’ piled in front of him and ‘make whole’ what has
been ruptured:

But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The
storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is
turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This
storm is what we call progress.
125

Offering a rewriting of the Fall of Man, Benjamin suggests there is no way


back in a world in crisis, not even for angels. There is an uncanny parallel
between Benjamin’s own exilic existence and the ‘composite literary icon’
126
that Angelus Novus has become; at the time of writing ‘On the Concept
of History’ in 1940, Benjamin himself was trying to escape the Nazis and
desperately attempting to get to the United States via Paris, Spain and
Portugal. But, when the idea to cross the French-Spanish border turned out
to be fractured, Benjamin took his own life. Klee’s Angelus Novus is also
attempting, but not quite succeeding, to cross a border; rather, the Angel
seems to hover over the border itself: that between heaven and earth, the
spiritual and the physical, origin and representation. Klee too, in his
Notebooks, kept returning to questions of origin: ‘What was in the
beginning? Things moved so to speak freely, neither in straight nor crooked
lines. They may be thought of as simply moving, going where they wanted
to go, for the sake of going, without aim, without obedience, moving self-
evidently, in a state of primal motion.’
127
Notably, Klee was terminally ill
with progressive scleroderma when he created his doubtful and often
unfinished angels that hover on the threshold between the living and the
dead. The small wings of Angelus Novus are too short and fragile and his
head is too large for comfortable lift off, thus presenting us with the very
embodiment of human fragility and doubt.
128
Will Grohmann has called
attention to other ‘still imperfect’ angels, the less discussed brothers and
sisters of Angelus Novus, such as Angel Still Female (1939), Angel Still
Groping (1939) and Angel Still Ugly (1940); or angels indicating permanent
change, such as Soon Fledged (1939), Last Step on Earth (1939) and the
humorous Not Yet Trained in Walking (1940); or titles containing verbs in
the present participle stressing process and growth, such as Kneeling Angel
(1939), Doubting Angel (1940), or simply Unfinished Angel (1939) and
Angel in the Making (1934). Indicating unfinishedness, all of these titles
stress the fact that Klee’s work is always in the making and ‘without
obedience,’ focusing less on result than the ‘primal motion’ of aesthetic
production—as David Sylvester puts it: ‘In journeying through a Klee you
cultivate it. It grows because it is an organism, not a constructed form.’
129
Like Hopkins and Stevens, then, Klee too is interested in how things are
lived through before known, before they are illuminated by cognition and
before representation or relational meaning takes over. Whereas Cézanne
had started the process of liberating the line itself from the imitation
function, for Klee the never-ending movement captured in his paintings was
already free, always ‘going where [it] wanted to go, for the sake of going.’
To return to Angelus Novus, despite its beating wings and dilated
pupils, this winged messenger’s small feet pull it downwards, making it
impossible to get any further than a perpetual ‘hovering’ in an in-between
space. ‘Barely mak[ing] it into the life of aesthetic form,’
130
Klee’s angel
traverses that intangible passage between ‘no body and embodiment,’
131
a
symbol of the self-reflexive artist who goes through a ‘transubstantiation,’
according to Merleau-Ponty: by ‘lending his body to the world’—a ‘body
which is an intertwining of vision and movement’—the artist ‘changes the
world into paintings.’
132
Yet, although blown away and detached from its
original Paradise, this is a necessary angel, an angelus ‘novus,’ a new kind
angel who is ‘hopeful yet filled with uncertainty’
133
in that it blesses a
transitional state between the visible and the invisible that should not just be
read as futility, as Klee himself suggests in a notebook entry from 1939:
‘Naturally a form defined in full is more conspicuous than one that is less
definite. In this realm we cross a boundary line of reality. There is no
copying or reproduction, but rather transformation and new creation. If we
surrender to it, a metamorphosis occurs, something which, if healthy, is
always new.’
134

Intuitive Appropriation
‘Life is always new; it is always beginning. The fiction is part of this
beginning,’
135
echoed Stevens in a letter to his friend Hi Simons only four
years later. Intrinsically Heraclitean, the awareness of a ‘fate of
perception’—the inability to fully possess unreflected life—at the heart of
Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ and Stevens’s poetics characterises a modernist
pattern of re-beginning that is ‘part of the never-ending meditation, / Part of
the question that is the giant himself.’
136
After all, ‘Creation,’ as Klee
writes in his Notebooks, ‘lives as genesis under the visible surface of the
work. All those touched by the spirit see this in retrospect, but only the
creative see it looking forward (into the future).’
137
Merleau-Ponty
undoubtedly draws upon this idea in ‘Eye and Mind’ when claiming that the
conception of the ‘line’ in the work of Klee and Matisse ‘no longer imitates
the visible; it “renders visible”; it is the blueprint of a genesis of things.’
138
This ‘line,’ as Rajiv Kaushik remarks, is not merely representational; rather,
it ‘confers onto the canvas what Merleau-Ponty calls the “fragile act of the
look [regardant],”’ which Kaushik explains as ‘the hidden point at which
the incarnated vision of his two eyes is laid open to the world in which it is
inscribed,’ so that the figurative line is of what Merleau-Ponty calls
‘floating pre-things.’
139
The philosopher’s discussion, in ‘Indirect
Language and the Voices of Silence,’ of the celebrated 1946 slow motion
film of Matisse at work entitled Henri Matisse sheds light on the
interdependence of experience and expression in artistic creation. While
Jacques Lacan has read the slow motion movement of Matisse’s drawing
hand as a gesture with a specific goal, enabling us to ‘distinguish between
gesture and act’—‘Let us not forget,’ writes Lacan, ‘that the painter’s
brushstroke is something in which a movement is terminated’
140
—for
Merleau-Ponty, Matisse’s film helps us understand that expression happens
‘not on the basis of any subjective decision but rather from out of the space
that is opened up by the free movement of the painter’s handwork.’
141
Just
as Cézanne was ‘not omnipotent . . . and wanted . . . to make visible how
the world touches us,’ Merleau-Ponty stresses that

Matisse would be wrong if, putting his faith in the film he believed
that he really chose between all the possible lines that day and, like
the God of Leibniz, solved an immense problem of maximum and
minimum. He was not a demiurge; he was a man … Matisse, set
within a man’s time and vision, looked at the still open whole of his
work in progress and brought his brush toward the line which called
for it in order that the painting might finally be that which it was in
the process of becoming.

Similarly, the philosopher explains, ‘[e]xpressive speech . . . gropes around


a significative intention which is not guided by any text, and which is
precisely in the process of writing the text.’
142
Like the process of drawing
or painting, the writer’s process happens by way of what Cézanne called
‘germination.’
143
Working back from this, what Hopkins, Stevens and Klee have in
common is that the emphasis in their works falls less on a final goal—on ‘a
form defined in full,’ as Klee puts it—than on a shift of perspective
reminiscent of epoché, calling attention to the genesis and process of art
making itself. Much like ‘poiesis,’ this process is ‘an undercurrent striving
towards the light of day,’ the unveiling or un-concealing into appearance of
which is unthought according to Heidegger’s ‘aletheia.’
144
In other words,
the epoché that plays part in artistic creation is intuitive rather than
voluntary, recalling Husserl’s 1907 letter to Hugo von Hoffmansthal:

Phenomenological intuiting is thus closely related to the aesthetic


intuiting in ‘pure’ art; obviously it is not an intuiting that serves the
purpose of aesthetic pleasure, but rather the purpose of continued
investigations and cognition, and of constituting scientific insights
in a new sphere (the philosophical sphere). Another thing. The artist,
who ‘observes’ the world in order to gain ‘knowledge’ of nature and
man for his own purposes, relates to it in a similar way as the
phenomenologist. Thus: not as an observing natural scientist and
psychologist, not as a practical observer of man, as if it were an
issue of knowledge of man and nature. When he observes the world,
it becomes a phenomenon for him, its existence is indifferent, just as
it is to the philosopher (in the critique of reason). The difference is
that the artist, unlike the philosopher, does not attempt to found the
‘meaning’ of the world-phenomenon and grasp it in concepts, but
appropriates it intuitively, in order to gather, out if its plenitude,
materials for the creation of aesthetic forms.
145
It is in this way that Hopkins, Stevens and Klee break ‘the skin of things’
and bring a second sight to bear on the invisible and often neglected ground
from which our expressions emerge. Like Klee’s threshold angels, the
poems of Hopkins and Stevens call attention to that muddy and unthought
‘passage’ of meaning-giving from the experience of the world to the word,
from the single unit to the horizon and from feeling to understanding.
146
If
the three modernists found an order after the announcement that God was
dead, this was not an order of complete entities but a new cry for origin, one
that promoted a lived poetics ‘penetrat[ing] right to the root of things
beneath the imposed order of humanity.’
147
Notes
1.
Kearney, Anatheism, 5. According to Kearney, Merleau-Ponty  
provides us with a ‘philosophically agnostic viewpoint … offering
an intriguing phenomenological interpretation of eucharistic
embodiment as recovery of the divine within the flesh, a kenotic
emptying out of transcendence into the heart of the world’s body,
becoming a God beneath us rather than a God above us’ (Ibid., 91).
2.
Joyce, Ulysses, 42.  
3.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty as cited in Darian Meacham, ‘“Faith is in  
things not seen”: Merleau-Ponty on Faith, Virtù, and the Perception
of Style,’ in Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and
Perception, 185. Note that Merleau-Ponty speaks of a similar
‘primordial faith’ as the ‘ground’ of ‘all our certainties’ in
Phenomenology of Perception, 431.
4.
Meacham, ‘“Faith is in things not seen,”’ 185.  
5.
Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, ‘The Value of Flesh: Merleau-  
Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/Postmodernism Debate,’ in
Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, eds., Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s
Notion of Flesh, (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2000), 1.
6. As Richard Kearney puts it, ‘Hopkins felt his alienation from God in
his very bones, of course. It was a personal, spiritual matter, not just
y p p j
philosophical or social,’ in Anatheism, 11.
7.  
 
Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York:
Vintage Books, 1990), 195.
8.
Hopkins’s poetry has been published in Modernist anthologies,  
partly because his work was not published until 1918, almost 20
years after his death, but also because Hopkins’s particular way of
challenging both ideas of representation and language anticipates
inquiries central to Modernism.
9.
Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy, 13.  
10.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 19.  
11.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Philips  
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 132. Hopkins’s ‘The
Windhover’ is quoted in full by permission of Oxford University
Press on behalf of the British Province of the Society of Jesus.
12.
Bernadette Waterman Ward, World as Word: Philosophical Theology  
in Gerard Manley Hopkins (Washington D.C: The Catholic
University of America Press, 2002), 97. See also Dennis Sobolev,
The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic
Phenomenology (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of
America Press, 2011), 98 and 210.
13.
Peter Cosgrove, ‘Hopkins’s “Windhover”: Not Ideas about the Thing  
but the Thing Itself,’ in Poetics Today 25.3 (Fall 2004): 438 and 456.
Cosgrove argues that ‘the “ungrammaticality” of “The Windhover’s
tropes and the importance of the notion of “thing” puts Hopkins in
proximity to the problems of the later modernist poets, such as
William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, who struggle with the
paradoxical ability of the conceptualizing power of mind to
simultaneously apprehend an external object and to distance us
further from it’ (ibid., 437).
14. Ibid., p. 456.
 
15.
For more on Hopkins in relation to Husserl’s phenomenology via the  
philosophy of Duns Scotus, see Eoghan Walls, ‘A Flaw in the
Science on Transcendence: Hopkins and Husserl on “Thisness,”’ in
Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg, eds., Phenomenology, Modernism
and Beyond, 167–188.
16.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 27.  
17.
Hopkins wrote in a journal entry: ‘Unless you refresh the mind from  
time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the
inscape in things is,’ in Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Journals and
Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, eds. Humphrey House and
Graham Storey, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1958),
205. And in a letter written on 15 February, 1879, to Robert Bridges
he wrote: ‘No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness … But as
air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in
painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling
“inscape” is what I above all aim at in poetry,’ in Gerard Manley
Hopkins, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges,
ed. Claude Collier Abbott (London: Oxford University Press), 66.
18.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxix.  
19.
Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 38 and 41–  
42.
20.
Similarly, phenomenology ascribes equal value to the part and the  
whole, as Maurice Natanson remarks: ‘At every point …
phenomenology honors the integrity of the aspect and the whole, the
unit and the horizon in which it is viewed, the concrete and the
universe in which it comes into clarity.’ See Natanson, Edmund
Husserl, 205.
21.
Hopkins, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges,  
46.
F th t h i liti f H ki ’ ‘ h th ’ P l
22. For more on the technicalities of Hopkins’s ‘sprung rhythm’ see Paul
Kiparski, ‘Sprung Rhythm,’ in Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans,
eds., Rhythm and Meter: Phonetics and Phonology, Volume 1:
 
Rhythm and Meter (San Diego: Academic Press Inc, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1989), 337.
23.
Hopkins, Letters to Robert Bridges, 246, 46; my italics.  
24.
Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 13. Merleau-Ponty, in  
Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, calls this sedimented
language ‘ready-made, instituted language, language as a given
dimension’ (44).
25.
Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 87.  
26.
Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of  
Phenomenology, xxviii.
27.
Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 87.  
28.
Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 16.  
29.
As Dennis Sobolev puts it, ‘In Hopkins’s poetic world, the  
possibility of meaning is warranted by the double semantics of
divine presence in nature and in the human soul,’ in Dennis Sobolev,
‘Semantic Counterpoint, Hopkins and The Wreck of Deutschland,’
SEL 44.4 (Autumn 2004): 842.
30.
Ibid.  
31.
Sobolev, The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 302.  
32. Hopkins to Alexander William Mowbray Baillie, 14 January 1883,
in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Further Letters of Gerard Manley  
Hopkins, Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed.
Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd Edition (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1956), 250–253, 252. For more on Hopkins and counterpoint, see
Dennis Sobolev, The Split Word of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An
Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology (The Catholic University of
Essay in Semiotic Phenomenology (The Catholic University of
America Press, 2011).
33.
Derek Attridge, ‘Introduction: Derrida and the Questioning of  
Literature,’ in Acts of Literature, 414.
34.
Derrida, Acts of Literature, 416.  
35.
Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 189–193. Note that  
Husserl also termed the Life-world the ‘prescientific,’ the ‘pregiven’
world and ‘the ground of all praxis’ (Ibid., 190–191).
36.
Mattens, Meaning and Language, 224, 223.  
37.
Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of  
Phenomenology, xxii.
38.
Hopkins, The Major Works, 132.
 
39.
Sobolev, The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 98, 293, 98.  
40.
Ibid., 294.  
41.
Ibid., 3.  
42.
Evans and Lawlor, ‘Introduction: The Value of Flesh,’ in Chiasms, 9.  
43.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 176.  
44.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 311 and 311n3. Heidegger writes  
that ‘Kierkegaard saw the existentiell phenomenon of the Moment in
the most penetrating way’ but that he, at the same time, ‘gets stuck in
the vulgar concept of time and defines the Moment with the help of
the now and eternity’ (ibid., 311n3).
45. ‘Skal derimod Tiden og Evigheden berøre hinanden, da maa det
vaere i Tiden, og nu er vi ved Øeieblikket … Det er Evighedens  
første Reflex i Tiden, dens første Forsøg paa ligesom at standse
Tiden ’ See Søren Kierkegaard Begrebet Angest (Koebenhavn:
Tiden. See Søren Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest (Koebenhavn:
Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk forlag, 1943), 107, 109. All
translations of this work are the author’s own.
46.
‘Det vi kalder Øeieblikket … Paa Latin hedder det momentum, hvis  
Derivation (af movere) kun udtrykker den blotte Forsvinden.’ See
Søren Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest (Koebenhavn: Gyldendalske
Boghandel, Nordisk forlag, 1943), 108.
47.
Paul Claudel as cited in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of  
Perception, 442.
48.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 242.  
49.
Ibid., Ixxviii.  
50.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 215–216.  
51.
 
Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye (London: Lund
Humphries, 1961), 454.
52.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 155.  
53.
Ibid., 197, 198, 201, 216.  
54.
Ibid., 176.  
55.
Ibid., 216.  
56.
Kevin Hart, ‘The Experience of Poetry,’ Boxkite 2 (1998): 285–286,  
288.
57.
Hopkins, The Major Works, 132.  
58. Merleau-Ponty also speaks of a ‘pre-Being,’ ‘prior to the division
between self and others … the “flesh of the world.”’ See Galen A.  
Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking through Merleau-
Jo so , e et eva of t e Beaut fu : g t oug e eau
Ponty’s Aesthetics (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 2010), 154.
59.
Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of  
Phenomenology, xx.
60.
Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, xiii.  
61.
Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘true philosophical radicalism inevitably has  
an impassioned [passionelle] atmosphere.’ Merleau-Ponty as cited in
Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of
Phenomenology, xiii.
62.
As Lawlor writes: ‘I fall down into passions of humanity (really into  
nature) and simultaneously upward into the idea of humanity’ (Ibid.,
xx).
63.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 142.  
64.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 380.  
65.
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 159.  
66.
Ibid., 193.
 
67.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 240.  
68.
Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens  
(London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 426–427.
69.
Ibid.  
70.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 58.  
71.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 240.  
72. As Anca Rosu writes: ‘It has become an almost ritual gesture to
recall such a dichotomy in any discussion of Stevens’s poetry,’ in
recall such a dichotomy in any discussion of Stevens s poetry, in
The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens (Tuscaloosa, Alabama:
The University of Alabama Press, 1995), 52.
 
73.
Thomas J. Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens:  
Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger (London:
Associated University Presses, 1976); Patricia Rae, The Practical
Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound and Stevens (London:
Associated University Presses, 1997).
74.
Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens, 31, 46, 47, 48. Hines’s  
view recalls Glauco Cambon’s statement in one of the first studies on
phenomenology in Stevens that ‘both Husserl and Stevens aim at a
focused apprehension of the essence of things … by a process of
“stripping” or “unhusking” … which Stevens calls “abstraction” and
which appears in so many of his poems as a kind of preliminary
negation of the given object, or of our construed interpretations.’ See
Cambon, The Inclusive Flame: Studies in American Poetry
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 237.
75.
Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens, 26–27. Similarly, Anca  
Rosa also suggests that the method of phenomenological reduction,
which is often used to shed light on this dichotomy, ‘cancel[s]
previous representations of the real,’ thus separating mind and world,
in The Metaphysics of Sound, 53.
76.

Stevens, Collected Poems, 240.  


77.
Alan Perlis, Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes  
(London: Associated University Presses, 1976), 78.
78.
Ibid.  
79.
Leonard and Wharton, ‘Wallace Stevens as Phenomenologist,’ Texas  
Studies in Literature and Language 26 (1984): 331, 334, and 340.
80. Patricia Rae, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme,
Pound, and Stevens (London: Associated University Presses, 1997),
( y )
15, 150, 165, 164, 154.
81.  
Ibid., 165.  
82.
Husserl, Ideas, 117.  
83.
Ibid., 21; my italics.  
84.
Ibid., 15, 154.  
85.
According to Merleau-Ponty intentionality is ‘too often cited as the  
principal discovery of phenomenology, even though intentionality
can only through the reduction.’ See Phenomenology of Perception,
Ixxxi.
86.
Kingwell, ‘Husserl’s Sense of Wonder,’ 102.  
87.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 473.  
88.
For a more elaborate version of this argument and more on the re-  
evaluation of phenomenology in Stevens, see my article ‘“A Total
Double-Thing”: A Re-evaluation of Phenomenology in Wallace
Stevens,’ in Textual Practice 29.1 (2015): 133–154.
89.
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 238.  
90.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 154; my italics.  
91.
 
Hines also calls attention to this paragraph in The Later Poetry of
Wallace Stevens, 23. Commenting on the same passage, Natanson
points out: ‘Wahl was a careful and knowledgeable reader of
Husserl,’ and as ‘Stevens read French with ease, he should have had
the time to discover phenomenology.’ But whether or not the poet
was familiar with phenomenological thought, Natanson stresses that
his work always ‘hovered at its edges,’ in The Erotic Bird, 8.
92. Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 275.
 
93.
Husserl, Ideas, 11, 102.  
94.
Husserl, Shorter Works, 10.  
95.
Husserl as cited in Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 44.  
96.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 386.  
97.
Ibid., 465, 442 and 219.  
98.
Ibid., 383.  
99.
Ibid., 343.  
100.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 72.  
101.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 152.  
102.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxix.  
103.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 155.  
104.
Merleau-Ponty as cited in Lawlor, ‘Verflechttung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, 
Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, xxvi.
105.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 155, 240.  
106.
Ibid., 440; my italics and 473.  
107.
Ibid., 496–497.  
108.
Ibid., 496.  
109. Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 649–50.
 
110.
Ibid., 661.  
111.
Handwritten letter from Marianne Moore to Stevens, dated  
November 22, 1951, Wallace Stevens Box 25, WAS 57, Huntington
Library, San Marino, California.
112.
Stevens, The Necessary Angel, 66.  
113.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 497.  
114.
Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 6, 5.  
115.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 295.  
116.
Ibid., 371. For more on Cézanne’s Large Bathers, see Chapter 4 of  
this book.
117.
Ibid.; my italics.  
118.
Ibid., 183.  
119.
Klee as cited in Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 127.  
120.
Christine Hopfengart, ‘Hovering: Klee’s Angels as Personifications  
of Transition,’ in Zentrum Paul Klee, ed., Paul Klee: The Angels,
(Hatje Cantz, 2012), p. 13.
121.
Ibid., 12, 14.  
122.
Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee  
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964),
42.
123.

Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (London: Lund Humphries, 1954), 357.  


124. Heidegger as quoted in Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 126.
 
125.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ in Illuminations,  
trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 249.
126.
O.K. Werckmeister, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the  
Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian,’ Critical
Inquiry 22.2 (Winter 1996): 242.
127.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, 19.  
128.
See Fawkner, ‘Self-Evidencing Life: Paradoxes of Reduction in  
Modernism, Phenomenology and Christianity,’ in Bourne-Taylor and
Mildenberg, eds., Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, 79; and
Ingrid Riedel, Engel der Wandlung: Paul Klees Engelbilder
(Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 2001). Galen A. Johnson has
also noted that Klee’s angels ‘retain the traits, weaknesses and
feelings of being human,’ in The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 127.
129.
David Sylvester, About Modern Art (London: Pimlico, 1996), 36.  
130.
Harald Fawkner, ‘Self-Evidencing Life: Paradoxes of Reduction in  
Modernism, Phenomenology and Christianity,’ 78–79.
131.
Maria Damon, ‘Angelology,’ in Peter Gibian, ed., Mass Culture and  
Everyday Life (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 210.
132.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception, 162.  
133.
Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 129.  
134.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume I: The Thinking Eye, 4.  
135.
Stevens, The Letters of Wallace Stevens, 434.  
136.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 465.  
137. Klee, Notebooks, Volume I: The Thinking Eye, 463.
 
138.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception, 183.  
In the words of Rajiv Kaushik, ‘In describing the objects of a
Matisse drawing, for example, Merleau-Ponty refers to the lines and
contours of these objects as in becoming from out of a previous
emptiness.’ See Kaushik, Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-
Ponty: Excursions in Hyper-Dialectic (London and New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 56 as well as the chapter entitled
‘Klee and Hand: Colour, Line, Word, Writing, Discourse’ (Ibid., 97–
121).
139.
Rajiv Kaushik, Art and Institution: Aesthetics in the Late Works of  
Merleau-Ponty (London and New York: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2011), 112–113.
140.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,  
trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 114.
141.
Kaushik, Art and Institution, 30.  
142.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,’ in  
Signs, 45, 46; my italics.
143.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 17.  
144.
Derek H. Whitehead, ‘Poiesis and Art-Making: A Way of Letting-  
Be,’ Contemporary Aesthetics 1 (2003), accessed 5 July 2016, http://​
www.​contempaesthetic​s.​org/​newvolume/​pages/​article.​php?​
articleID=​216&​searchstr=​whitehead. See also Martin Heidegger,
‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 15–
79.
145. Edmund Husserl, ‘Letter to Hoffmansthal,’ trans. Sven-Olov
Wallenstein, Site 26/27 (2009): 2; originally in Husserliana  
Dokumente, Briefwechsel, Band 7: Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 133–136.
146.
The word ‘passage’ is Merleau-Ponty’s: ‘the passage from the brute  
being to the acknowledged being,’ in The Visible and the Invisible,
57.
147.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 16.  
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https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_4

4. Virginia Woolf’s Interworld: Folds,


Waves, Gazes
Ariane Mildenberg1  

(1) School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

 
  Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk

Virginia Woolf’s diaries are pervaded by speculations on the connection


between direct experience of the visible world and the written word. In a
1928 entry she writes:
The look of things has a great power over me. Even now, I have to
watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which is high, and still
I say to myself instinctively ‘What’s the phrase for that?’ . . . But
what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my
eyes.
1

‘But who knows,’ ponders Woolf elsewhere, ‘—once one takes a pen &
writes? How difficult not to go making “reality” this & that, whereas it is
one thing.’
2
What we usually call ‘reality’ is ‘real’ only because we learned
to see it that way. In ‘Modern Fiction,’ she famously criticises her
Edwardian predecessors Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy for being
‘materialist’: ‘they write of unimportant things . . . they spend immense
skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the
true and the enduring.’ But Woolf wonders, ‘Is life like this?’ and ‘Must
novels be like this?’
3
If only one could suspend the conventional forms of
depicting the real, Woolf seems to argue, and return to the ‘one thing’ that
reality is before it is processed by some trivial objectivism, before
attempting to pin it down in the ‘this & that’ of our everyday fact-world.
4
‘[I]f we escape a little from the common sitting room,’ Woolf writes in A
Room of One’s Own, to realise ‘that our relation is to the world of reality
and not only to the world of men and women.’
5
Woolf never stops seeking
after that which is given to us in immediate experience without being
obstructed by the habits of daily life—‘the world of men and women’—
offering a perhaps surprising image of the writer as neither a mystic
concerned with ‘a kind of exalted subjectivity,’
6
nor concerned with depth
psychology, as others have argued,
7
but as a literary phenomenologist.
8
Critics have stressed the interiorisation of Woolf’s exploration of human
consciousness in The Waves. Jean Guiguet has claimed that ‘everything is
turned inward’ in The Waves, suspending the ‘external elements’ of an
‘objective universe’ that appeared in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
9
Mark Hussey has argued that the ‘aesthetic failure’ of The Waves ‘is partly

due to its inwardness.’


10
In what follows I take issue with this tendency to
bifurcate Woolf’s writing in accordance with the separate categories of
‘internal’ or ‘external,’ whereas the doubleness of The Waves evidences a
‘doubling up of my body into inside and outside,’
11
that ‘‘[t]he world is
entirely on the inside and I am entirely outside of myself.’
12
In Merleau-
Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, this same notion of in-each-other is
also referred to as ‘the fold, the application of the inside and the outside to
one another, the turning point.’
13
This ‘folding,’ as Frank Chouraqui notes,
is ‘the key mechanism for what Merleau-Ponty calls “chiasma” of
perception that he regards as the general structure of the flesh.’
14
In light of
this chiasmatic ‘fold,’ I propose to read the wave-like rhythm and structure
of The Waves as a text that perpetually collapses inside/outside polarities
and relations.
15
Woolf’s voices turn inward only to discover that they
cannot escape being pulled out by a world within which they are already
immersed as carnal beings.

Bracketing
A number of critical studies have previously pointed out similarities
between phenomenology and Woolf’s ontology.
16
In ‘Nature and
Community: A Study of Cyclical Reality in The Waves,’ Madeline Moore
briefly refers to phenomenology but leaves unexamined the following
statement: ‘It was not Woolf’s purpose in The Waves to overcome the
phenomenological opposition between subject and object, but rather to
dramatize that conflict.’
17
The term ‘phenomenological opposition’ has the
unfortunate effect of indicating that phenomenological thought involves a
separation of subject and object. When commenting upon Woolf’s usage of
brackets in the ‘Time Passes’ section in To the Lighthouse, Patricia Ondek
Laurence presents us with a similar idea: ‘If for Edmund Husserl, the
phenomenologist, objects exist independently of ourselves in the external
world, and anything beyond our immediate experience is “bracketed”—then
for Woolf it is the opposite.’
18
Woolf, she argues, offers a ‘unique
treatment of the outward and the inward as the “march of events” is
relegated to brackets (with the exception of The Waves) while the inner
discourse of characters is centre stage.’
19
Ironically, in claiming that
‘objects’ in Husserlian thought are independent in the ‘external world’ and
thus detached from the subject, Laurence, like some Stevens critics
mentioned, charges the goal of the epoché with a disregard of the external
world of facts whereas nothing is disregarded or denied in Husserl’s
method. Being nothing but ‘a new kind of practical outlook,’
20
phenomenological ‘bracketing’ sheds light on the world’s essential
structure, exposing the world in its pre-givenness and the implicit
involvement of consciousness with it (intentionality). The object-world,
then, is not at any point separated from the subject: ‘the world experienced
in this reflectively grasped life,’ stresses Husserl, ‘goes on appearing, as it
appeared before; the only difference is that I, as reflecting philosophically,
no longer keep in effect (no longer accept) the natural believing in existence
involved in experiencing the world—though that believing too is still there.’
21
Now read the following passage from ‘Time Passes’ in To the

Lighthouse:

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge
and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered
with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and
scatter damp paths. . . . Almost it would appear that it is useless in
such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why,
and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an
answer.
[Mr Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out
one dark morning, but, Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the
night before, he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]
22

And a few pages later:

The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce
in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-
eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought
by the beholders.
[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father’s arm, was given in
marriage that May. What, people said, could have been more fitting?
And, they added, how beautiful she looked!]
23

What is placed in brackets here are the hard facts of daily events (Mrs
Ramsay’s sudden death, Prue’s marriage), while our attention is re-directed
to the inevitable passing of time, the presence of night itself, the continuity
of the seasons—that is, the pre-predicative dimension of experience, which
is ‘always . . . in advance,’
24
providing the ever-present ground of our
human acts, relations and expression. Neither Husserl’s nor Woolf’s
‘brackets,’ then, close off subjective experience from the external world;
rather, they open onto the world, bringing to light the condition that is ‘prior
to any theorizing reflection,’
25
underlies experience itself and makes it
possible.
Throughout her work Woolf challenges us to such a shift of attitude,
always redirecting our attention to what in ‘Modern Fiction’ she calls ‘life,
spirit, truth or reality, this the essential thing,’
26
that is, the natural, and
unspoken order of things, which has always been there before we could
even reflect on it, before we even learned to pin it down in conventional
language. It is this essential order that Lily Briscoe tries to grasp through
painting in To the Lighthouse: ‘Phrases came. Visions came . . . But what
she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself
before it has been made anything.’
27
Woolf’s writing reflects her perpetual
struggle to translate into words what is inherently mute and yet, in the
words of Merleau-Ponty, ‘continues to envelop language.’
28
‘[L]ife is a
luminous halo,’ Woolf tells us in ‘Modern Fiction,’ ‘a semitransparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’
29
‘Gigantic Conversation’
In The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel, James Naremore
argues that Woolf, in her novels, ‘tries to evolve a technique which will
allow her to present the “luminous halo” of experience, even the “tremor of
susceptibility” in the self, without neglecting what is “outside . . . and
beyond.”’ Drawing on the work of Harvena Richter, who ‘has suggested
that we set aside the conventional terminology’ and ‘approach the question
of voice,’ which, in Virginia Woolf, ‘is at once conscious and unconscious,
personal and impersonal, individual and collective,’ Naremore attempts ‘to
indicate how the narrator of Mrs Woolf’s novels modulates between these
extremes until it becomes the voice of everyone and no one,’ but stresses:
‘It is probably impossible to find a term that would accurately characterize
this voice.’
30
More recently, Maureen Chun has offered an illuminating
approach to the puzzling language in The Waves, claiming that the novel
‘accomplishes something new and largely unrecognized in modern
narrative’ in that it ‘traverse[s] the boundary between objectivity and
subjectivity and frame[s] sensations, perceptions, and thoughts as physical
presences in the real world.’
31
There are signs in Woolf’s diary that the author struggled to perfect the
new ‘voice’ that Naremore questions and Chun attempts to analyse. Woolf
particularly struggled with the book’s closure: ‘[H]ow to . . . press it into
one,’ she wondered, ‘it might be a “gigantic conversation.”’
32
The final
version of The Waves never presents us with ‘conversation’ in the usual
sense of the term. Like waves in a sea, the words of the book’s six voices
are at once dispersed and yet gathered in Bernard’s closing soliloquy,
bringing to light an intersubjective world where voices ‘melt into each other
with phrases’ as they are ‘edged with mist. . . . [and] make an unsubstantial
territory,’
33
not unlike the ‘mist’ between people that Clarissa Dalloway
meditates upon in Mrs Dalloway.
34
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh (la chair)’
provides us with a term for this ‘unsubstantial territory.’ ‘The flesh is not
matter, is not mind, is not substance,’ he writes, but rather a ‘general thing,’
a phenomenon of reciprocal contact between perceiving subjects. Our
‘operative language’ Merleau-Ponty suggests, is inscribed in this world of
flesh, within its folds.
35
Taking my bearings from Merleau-Ponty’s reworking of Husserl’s
reduction through an emphasis on the notion of ‘flesh,’ I propose a twofold
change in our approach to The Waves. One is to show that the reduction
speaks of something central to Woolf’s aesthetic concerns, that it functions
as the engine of the wave-like movement that hold The Waves together, thus
offering a reading of this work as Woolf’s strongest aesthetic statement.
36
The other is to provide through the notion of ‘flesh’ and the related
chiasmatic ‘fold’ a terminology for the new kind of voice in Woolf’s work.
Not only is The Waves the most phenomenological of Woolf’s longer
works, it is also the most poetic in terms of its language and genre. Woolf
called it a ‘play-poem,’ ‘[a]way from fact; free, yet concentrated, prose yet
poetry; a novel and a play.’
37
The square brackets used in the ‘Time
Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse are still there but implicitly, presenting
us with a much denser vision which ‘saturate[s] every atom’ in order to
‘eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity; to give the moment whole,
whatever it includes. Say the moment is a combination of thought,
sensation, the voice of the sea.’
38
A similar attempt to shed light on the
‘voice’ of the totality of things pervades Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.
Consider the following passage from The Visible and the Invisible:

In a sense the whole of philosophy, Husserl says, consists in


restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning,
an expression of experience by experience, which in particular
clarifies the special domain of language. And in a sense, as Valéry
said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it
is the very voice of things, the waves and the forests.
39

The bringing to light of a more primordial ‘wild meaning’ from which our
clear language arises sits well with Woolf’s aim to reveal in one ‘moment’
the totality of the spoken and the unspoken, a ‘combination of thought,
sensation, the voice of the sea,’ which would, eventually, shape itself as a
‘gigantic conversation.’
Whereas the word conversation is often associated with purely linguistic
interchange, the ‘gigantic conversation’ that Woolf seeks to ‘press into one’
has overtones of something more primordial, something of pre-semantic
insubstantiality, existing prior to our usual form of communication. ‘The
world is always “already there” prior to reflection,’
40
Merleau-Ponty writes
in his Phenomenology of Perception; it is ‘already there’ in the shape of the
givenness of experience, the fringe or ‘misty horizon’ of infinite and
indeterminate reality that can never be completely outlined but remains at
the periphery of our acts and expressions. In The Waves we never lose sight
of this misty indeterminacy at the edge of the six speakers’ perceptions.
‘We are edged with mist,’ says Bernard, the book’s most dominating voice,
‘[w]e make an unsubstantial territory.’
41
It is against this misty horizon that
all creative acts, including that of writing stand out: ‘One sees a fin passing
far out,’ wrote Woolf elsewhere, suggesting that first and pre-semantic
impulse of creativity: ‘What image can I reach to convey what I mean?’ she
wrote: ‘Really there is none.’
42
The Waves presents us with three separate and yet interconnected cycles
of creation: that of nature, that of the human being and that of the creating
artist, the writing lady to whom Bernard repeatedly refers.
43
This writing
figure, a hidden and yet active force inside the text is not unlike Joyce’s
‘artist’ who, in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘like the God of the
creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,
invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’
44
Bernard, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda, Neville and Louis are six ‘essences’ in the
phenomenological sense of the term, presenting us with a form of ‘free
variation’ or ‘free fancies,’ as Husserl called it, which is related to the
‘eidetic reduction,’
45
the shift of standpoint from the world of fact to the
world of essence or eidos, challenging us to play with variations of the
essential characteristics of the phenomenon.
46
When the mind deals with
essence, there is a concern with the possible rather than the actual. The
point of free variation, Judith Butler explains, is ‘not to fix the actuality of
the object, but to render its actuality into a possibility,’ revealing the
object’s essence, ‘the strangeness of quiddity, that it is rather than not.’
47
In
‘The Leaning Tower,’ Woolf writes about the writer’s encounter with the
object as exactly such a process of variation: ‘A writer is a person who sits
at a desk and keeps his eye fixed, as intently as he can, upon a certain
object. . . . A writer has to keep his eye upon a model that moves, that
changes, upon an object that is not one object but innumerable objects.’
48
Recalling the Husserlian free variations of ‘apple’ in Stein’s prose poem,
challenging us to play with variations of the essential characteristics of the
phenomenon, the voices of Bernard, Lily, Susan, Rhoda, Neville and Louis
in The Waves are one mind’s (that of the ‘lady writing’) imaginary
variations on one ‘model.’ Just as the writing lady’s eye is ‘upon’ her
‘model’ from within the book, so are the eyes of the six essences directed
towards specific objects and each other.
The phenomenal feature central to experience exposed through the
reduction is that consciousness by its very nature is always directed toward
some object. As noted, this fact that every act of the mind implies an object
thought of bears the name of ‘intentionality.’ People do not exist in and for
themselves but only in and through intentional acts; through thoughts,
memories, and perceptions of. The monologue-like soliloquies that make up
Woolf’s The Waves can be characterised as intentional acts, continuous
streams of fresh perceptions of things. Like the birds in the book’s third
interlude, Woolf’s six perceivers are ‘aware, awake; intensely conscious of
one thing, one object in particular’:

 ‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers


 and hangs in a loop of light.’
  ‘I see a slab of pale yellow,’ said Susan, ‘spreading away
 until it meets a purple stripe.’
  ‘I hear a sound,’ said Rhoda, ‘cheep, chirp; cheep
 chirp; going up and down.’
  ‘I see a globe,’ said Neville, ‘hanging down in a drop
 against the enormous flanks of some hill.’
  ‘I see a crimson tassel,’ said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold
 threads.’
  ‘I hear something stamping,’ said Louis. ‘A great
 beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.’
49
Through the eyes of Woolf’s perceivers we ‘see . . . fine substance[s]
strangely,’
50
to borrow from Gertrude Stein, but only to uncover this
strangeness as ‘the condition of possibility of the ordinary.’
51
From the
outset of Woolf’s ‘play-poem,’ we plunge into a strange, abstract universe
of pure sensory perceptions. Presenting us with what the book’s second
interlude calls ‘a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole,’
52
these perceptions suggest an openness to the world before opinions are fully
formed and could be indicative of both early childhood and the primary
phase of artistic creation. These first perceptions manifest themselves
against the cyclical pattern of a horizon in the interludes: the rising and
setting of the sun, the singing of birds, and the breaking of the waves.
Woolf’s diary tells us that she imagined these perceptions to appear as
‘islands of light—islands in the stream that I am trying to convey; life itself
going on.’
53
What the six speakers perceive is conditioned by the ongoing
stream of life against which they see it. What Louis calls ‘the central
rhythm . . . the common mainspring,’ which he watches ‘expand, contract;
and then expand again’
54
is exposed not only through the cyclical pattern
of nature, described in the interludes, but also through the speakers’
insistent waves of fresh perceptions, embracing the ever-new.
The interaction between the six voices’ perceptions and the continual
change of nature in the interludes takes on the shape of some ‘gigantic
conversation’ that goes beneath and beyond our ordinary forms of
communication, calling to mind Stevens’s ‘shapeless giant,’ referring to the
shapelessness of pre-semantic experience, the first creative impulse, which,
like Woolf’s ‘fin passing far out,’ has not yet been fully crystallised: it is
‘on the horizon, glistening.’
55
Echoing Woolf’s thoughts, in The Waves
Bernard notes: ‘A fin turns’ in a ‘waste of waters.’ Signifying the primal
creative impulse which he ‘shall in time to come uncover and coax into
words,’ this ‘bare visual impression is unattached to any line of reason, it
springs up as one might see a fin of a porpoise on the horizon.’
56

Doubling
As discussed in Chapter 3, when presenting the thoughts of a character
through free indirect discourse, known from the work of for instance Jane
Austen and Charles Dickens, refined by George Eliot and pushed to yet a
different level of central importance by such writers as Joyce, Kafka and
Woolf, third-person narration places itself into the experience of the
character, adopting the latter’s perspectives. The narrative is thus situated
on the slippery threshold between outside and inside, merging the
omniscient and subjective voice, allowing us to delve into a single
character’s thoughts and yet keeping us at a distance so that a certain
doubling takes place, at once turning readers into non-participants as well
as immanently close participators. In free indirect discourse, then, the
relationship between the subjective and the objective is neither completely
dichotomous nor completely unitary; rather, this form of discourse points to
a dissolution of the body-mind problem that phenomenology embraces,
particularly the fields of intersubjectivity and reversibility—‘the medial
entre-deux between the whole of Being and each individual fragment’
57

illuminated in Merleau-Ponty’s late work.
Although the free indirect discourse of her earlier novels is left behind
in favour of an even more refined experimental style, a ‘doubling’ still lies
at the heart of Woolf’s The Waves. Collapsing any distinct inside/outside
polarities and relations, this work is neither purely internal nor purely
external, neither subjective nor objective; rather internal and external
elements, essence and fact at once merge and separate, creating a constantly
rippling whole very much like waves in a sea.
58
Anna Snaith, in her
excellent study of public and private negotiations in Woolf’s works argues
that Woolf’s specific ‘technique’ of discourse ‘neither unites or separates
the public and private realms; rather, it places them in a dialectical relation.’
59
Similarly, while Tamar Katz has stressed that the speakers in The Waves

are ‘at once distanced from and formed by culture’ and that The Waves as
‘an epitome of modernism’ is ‘bound’ to this form of ‘doubleness,’
60
Ann
Banfield argues for a dualism in Woolf’s vision of ‘subject and object, mind
and matter, . . . the public and the private’ that is influenced by the
philosophy of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.
61
What the following
pages explore, however, is the non-dialectical quality of Woolf’s
configuration of this doubleness, a dialectic without synthesis, like the
ongoing movement of the sea, anticipating Merleau-Ponty’s notion of
‘hyperdialectic’ and the final chapter of this book. Located within a
continuum of the modernist attention to the Husserlian ‘thing itself,’ it
uncovers pre-reflective intentionality through the reduction, which ‘does
not take me out of the world. Instead it serves to point out a central paradox
in human experience as Husserl explores it’ that is also a form of doubling:
‘How is it that I am both a subject experiencing the world and an object
within the world?’
62
By reflecting upon and imposing meaning upon the
world, we separate ourselves from it, and yet we are always already an
integral part of the same world; both encroaching upon the world and,
simultaneously, enchroached upon.
63
From the unperceived écart emerges Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the
entanglement of the body-subject and the world—the fact that ‘the same
body sees and touches’ while also being ‘visible and tangible,’ that there is
a ‘chiasm,’ a ‘crisscrossing . . . of the touching and tangible’ and the seeing
and seen, articulating a ‘reversibility’ and mutuality that also defines the
ontology of the ‘flesh,’ the pre-logical intertwining of body and world: ‘my
body is made of the same flesh as the world, . . . this flesh of my body is
shared by the world, the world reflects it’; ‘It is for that same reason that I
am at the heart of the visible and that I am far from it.’ The chiasmatic
structure of flesh, Merleau-Ponty stresses, is ‘not an obstacle between
[subject and object]’; rather, ‘it is their means of communication.’
64
Already in the first holograph draft of The Waves, it is clear that, for
Woolf, subjectivity cannot but be intersubjectivity where a single ‘world’
gives way to ‘interworld.’
65
Both the experiences and inner voices of the
six essences in The Waves interact, transform and at times disappear into
each other, pointing to an interlacing that chimes with Merleau-Ponty’s
common world of ‘flesh.’ Throughout Woolf’s ‘play-poem’—a work that is
neither fully play nor fully poem but, rather, ‘an abstract, mystical eyeless
book,’
66
dwelling in the ‘fold’ between poem and play—the six essences
live in worlds of their own while being immersed in a shared world full of
others like themselves. Both enveloping and enveloped, this intertwining
and reversibility between perceiving subjects is a form of folding: ‘it is only
in the fold between the sentient and the sensible, in their chiasmatic
intertwining, that experience (including the artistic event) is possible at all.’
67
Waves in a sea fold over themselves, break and vanish only to emerge

again from below.


Originally emerging from what Woolf describes in the book’s holograph
drafts as ‘folds in the napkin’ and ‘folds in the table cloth,’ the rhythm of
Woolf’s novel is that of perpetually folding and breaking waves of
perception.
68
Chiasmatic intertwining of the self and the other indicates an
event that is neither a complete separation nor a complete unity between the
subjective and the objective, invisibility and visibility, mute perception and
speech; rather, it lives in the fold between the two. The subject, Merleau-
Ponty told us, has a twofold being that locates it at once apart from other
sensible beings as a seeing/sensing subject and among them as a
seen/sensed ‘thing’: ‘every perception is doubled with counter-perception,’
69
as when Woolf’s Louis is ‘alone’ in the early morning garden: ‘I am

green as a yew tree in the shade of the hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I
am rooted to the middle of the earth. My body is a stalk. I press the stalk. . .
. Now something pink passes the eyehole. . . . She has found me. I am
struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered.’
70
Louis
experiences the woods, feels Jinny kissing him; Jinny sees Louis, kisses
him; Susan sees Jinny kissing Louis, despairs and runs away; Bernard sees
Susan despairing and runs after her:

‘I was running,’ said Jinny, ‘after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in


a hole in the hedge . . . What moved the leaves? What moves my
heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush,
like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. “Is he dead?” I
thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink
frock like the leaves . . . I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like
a net of flight. I lie quivering flung over you.’
‘Through the chink in the hedge,’ said Susan, ‘I saw her kiss
him.’
71

Bernard ends up going after Susan who ‘was not crying, but her eyes, which
are so beautiful, were narrow as cat’s eyes before they spring.’ A few pages
later, Neville wonders, ‘Where is Bernard? . . . He has my knife. We were in
the tool-shed making boats, and Susan came past the door. And Bernard
dropped his boat and went after her taking my knife, the sharp one that cuts
the keel.’ During their first lesson at school, each of the six speakers sees
words differently. Rhoda struggles with the exercises and has to stay
behind, ‘left alone to find an answer,’ when the others have finished and
despairs about it: ‘”Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop
of time!”’ Louis sees Rhoda, struggling on her own through the classroom
window: ‘There is Rhoda staring at the blackboard.’
72
Thus, ‘experiences
are constantly de-centred and intertwined with each other in a plurality of
relationships.’
73
Looking while being looked at, kissing while being kissed, touching
while being touched, the ‘eye/I’ and the Other in The Waves fold over each
other so that they become ‘collaborators in perfect reciprocity’ whose
‘perspectives slip into each other.’
74
Calling attention to both difference
and similarity, Woolf’s six essences have an intentional bond with that
world as active/passive beings, ‘visible-seer[s]’
75
:

The enigma is that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That


which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in
what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself
seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself.
. . . Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is
caught up in the fabric of the world and its cohesion is that of a
thing. . . . Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are
encrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world
is made of the same stuff as the body.
76

At the heart of Woolf’s rippling, constantly folding and unfolding narrative,


there is such a ‘double-touch’ experience,
77
the fact that the same bodies
both see/touch and are seen/touched, are at once intertwined with and
distanced from the world in which they exist but cannot stop questioning.
78
It is the phenomenon of the double-touch always ‘originating within the
experiences of the lived-body’ that makes Woolf’s text extract and expand
over and over again in wave-like movements of perception and counter-
perception
79
; ‘I am not concerned with the single life,’ wrote Woolf in the
first holograph draft, ‘but with lives together.’
80

Bernard’s ‘Little Language’


Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenon of flesh allows us to articulate more clearly
the paradox of experience that Woolf struggled to ‘press into one’ in The
Waves. The book’s ‘gigantic conversation’ reaches its zenith in Bernard’s
final summing up. Here Bernard’s voice and those of the other five merge,
creating one ‘gigantic’ voice, indicating that the flesh of the single body is
at once shared and reflected by the world : ‘Who am I? I have been talking
of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one
and distinct? I do not know.’
81
How can it be, Woolf seems to suggest, that
we are conscious of other people, who are, simultaneously, conscious of us?
Her six speakers are, on the one hand, part of the surging ‘stream’ of ‘life
itself going on,’ but are, on the other hand, above it, looking down from
their dry ‘islands of light,’ stressing at once their difference and similarity,
their distance and intertwining: ‘At the moment when I am most disparate,’
says Bernard, ‘I am also integrated.’
82
Woolf’s diary reveals that she was fascinated with Proust’s writing.
‘The thing about Proust,’ she writes in a 1925 entry, ‘is his combination of
the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. . . . He is as tough as catgut
& as evanescent as a butterfly’s bloom. And he will I suppose both
influence me & make me out of temper with every sentence of my own.’
83
Merleau-Ponty was equally impressed with Proust’s capacity to capture the
unseizable within the solid: ‘No one has gone further than Proust in fixing
the relations between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that
is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth.’
84
Proust
most clearly highlights this idea when in Swann’s Way he refers to a ‘little
phrase’ of a sonata for violin and piano, which is ‘dancing, pastoral,
interpolated, episodic, belonging to another world.’
85
Merleau-Ponty draws
upon this notion when elaborating his own phenomenon of flesh. Like the
‘little phrase,’ flesh is a ‘general’ notion, like ‘the notions of light, of
sound, of relief, of physical voluptuousness,’ which we cannot quite ‘get at
. . . immediately and lay hands on.’ In our ‘operative language,’ Merleau-
Ponty writes, ‘sense and sound are in the same relationship as in the “little
phrase.”’
86
The full meaning of language lies not merely in our spoken
words but in the mute perception or silent language inhabiting these words.
Proust’s concerns with the unrepresentable seem to have influenced the
gigantic project of The Waves in particular. When ‘[s]um[ming] up . . . the
meaning of [his] life’ to provide us, the readers, with a final story, Bernard
claims that he is ‘tired of phrases that come down beautifully with all their
feet on the ground.’
87
‘Distrust[ing] neat designs of life that are drawn
upon half-sheets of note-paper,’ he ‘long[s] for’ a different kind of
language,
88
which is not of our usual conversational kind, calling attention
to yet another fold, what Eva Meyer calls ‘the shifting fold between writing
and being’
89
wherein dwells

some little language that lovers use, broken words, inarticulate


words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek
some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation
and triumph that come now and then undeniably.
90

Just as Proust’s ‘little phrase’ catches the invisible lining of the visible, the
sense within the sound, so Bernard’s ‘little language’ highlights the
intangible and immaterial hidden within the ‘neat designs’ of our
conventional language. This ‘little language’ refers to the ‘broken’ and
‘inarticulate’ but it is not the opposite of what is ‘whole’ and articulate;
rather, it is that invisible/mute element that inhabits our visible world and
words. What Bernard longs to express is a more direct experience of the
‘thing itself’ without the obstructions of beautiful, neat phrases—a ‘poetry
[that] rediscovers what articulates itself within us, unbeknownst to us.’
91
‘It is Percival who inspires poetry,’ Bernard tells us elsewhere in The
Waves.
92
Like Jacob in Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922), Percival is a god-
like and ‘eyeless’ presence whose essence is built up in all its possible
manifestations through the eyes of the others. When he dies in India, the six
essences gravitate around an empty space in the middle of their world
where Percival—a religious symbol of sorts—used to be and their unity
temporarily fractures. Percival’s death recalls the sudden death of Mrs
Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, leading to the decay of the Ramsay’s holiday
home, indicating a questioning of the objective ‘God-like survey’ of
nineteenth-century omniscient narration, the collapse of traditional
nineteenth-century domestic values and, in the case of Mrs Ramsay, the
disappearance of woman as a domestic figure. What is left instead and
mirrored in Lily Briscoe’s ‘white space’ of her canvas is ‘an emptiness
about the heart of life,’ as Clarissa Dalloway calls it,
93
which must be filled
in new ways.
Percival’s death is also a typically modernist subversion of imperial
quest narratives inscribed ‘as conquest to establish imperial supremacy’
expressed through the ‘monomyth’ of Western literature, a ‘manifestation of
the archetypal quest . . . fashioned by the prevailing ideologies of Western
culture.’
94
As Julia Rawa points out, this modernist subversion of the quest
trope also seen in Conrad, Eliot, Rhys and Joyce—to mention but a few—
becomes ‘a vehicle for cultural representation’ and a form of ‘resistance to
the rhetoric of nationalism and imperialism.’
95
Instead the polyphony and
polysemy of modernist texts interrogate and subvert the ‘god-like survey’
of the totalising, linear narration central to the archetypal monomyth. If
Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is ‘the most famous of all Grail poems of the
twentieth century,’ although it is ‘about the absence of the grail,’
96
The
Waves must have earned its place as one of the most famous of all
twentieth-century Grail novels in that it is about the absence of the last
Arthurian Grail King—Perceval—an all-important absence that marks the
six selves’ search for a different kind of truth, not one that is objectifying,
totalising and ‘beyond our experience’ but one that is always already
‘implied within it.’
97
Just as the absence of Mrs Ramsay inspires Lily Briscoe’s final
epiphany in To the Lighthouse, so Percival’s death in The Waves at the time
of the birth of Bernard’s baby triggers both doubt and a sense of a new
beginning, leaving Bernard feeling like a latter-day Adam in a new world,
overwhelmed with wonder ‘as on the first day of creation.’ Gradually new
meaning takes the place of the emptiness at the centre, a new kind of
meaning that has little to do with objective truth and totalisation but
depends on subjects’ immediate and often erratic experience and has to
make do with ‘an imperfect phrase’ and broken words.
98
The mute and ‘eyeless’ figure of Percival, then, who is brought into
existence purely through the others’ perception of him, is neither a
character nor a presence who, even after his death, becomes a metaphor for
some ‘core of primary signification,’
99
to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, in
which the acts and the expressions of the others are anchored. When
Percival arrives at his own farewell dinner, he instantly inspires one
gigantic moment and makes visible the common ground of the six beings,
the ‘flesh of the world’:

‘Now once more,’ said Louis, … “Do not move … do not go. Hold
it for ever.”’
‘Let us hold it for one moment,’ said Jinny; ‘love, hatred, by
whatever name we call it, this globe whose walls are made of
Percival, of youth and beauty, and something so deep sunk within us
that we shall perhaps never make this moment out of one man
again.’
‘Forests and far countries on the other side of the world,’ said
Rhoda, ‘are in it; seas and jungles; the howling of jackals and
moonlight falling upon some high peak where the eagle soars.’
‘Happiness is in it,’ said Neville, ‘and the quiet of ordinary
things. … And the petal falling from the rose, and the light
flickering as we sit silent, or, perhaps, bethinking us of some trifle,
suddenly speak.’
‘Week-days are in it,’ said Susan, ‘Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday; the horses going up to the fields, and the horses
returning; the rooks rising and falling, and catching the elm-trees in
their net, whether it is April, whether it is November.’
‘What is to come is in it,’ said Bernard.
100
What the six voices seek to do is hold and freeze the fleeting and intangible
but only to realise that ‘the imperfect is our paradise,’ to borrow from
Stevens.
101
The repeated ‘it’ in the above passage directs our attention to
the ‘gigantic’ horizon of experience that cannot be completely expressed,
and yet it is the ever-present ground of our acts, relations and expressions.
‘It’ refers exactly to that we cannot ‘get at . . . immediately and lay hands
on’ but which is, nevertheless, ‘the common tissue of which we are made.’
‘It’ is ‘not matter . . . not mind . . . not substance’ but one of those
unsubstantial ‘general’ notions like ‘the notions of light, of sound, of relief,
of physical voluptuousness’: love is in it, happiness is in it, week-days are
in it.
102
In this light, let us finish this section by considering the opening of
Woolf’s short story ‘A Haunted House’:

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to
room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making
sure – a ghostly couple.
‘Here we left it,’ she said. And he added, ‘Oh, but here too!’ It’s
upstairs,’ she murmured. ‘And in the garden,’ he whispered.
‘Quietly,’ they said, ‘or we shall wake them.’
But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. ‘They’re looking for it;
they’re drawing the curtain,’ one might say and so read on a page or
two. ‘Now they’ve found it,’ one would be certain, stopping the
pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and
see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open.
103

As Woolf with ‘A Haunted House’ was sowing the seeds of the ‘Time
Passes’ section in To the Lighthouse, the method and concern in these
works is similar.
104
Just as the repeated ‘it’ in the short story points to the
pre-reflective dimension of experience, so is the silent, empty, ‘eyeless’
house, ‘beholding nothing’ in ‘Time Passes,’
105
exposed as the ever-
present condition round which the people in the house normally operate. ‘A
Haunted House,’ then, presents us with a phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of
conventional ‘neat designs’ of representation, laying bare ‘it’ or ‘life, spirit,
truth or reality, this, the essential thing,’
106
the more primordial dimension
of experience that is the condition of expression and creativity alike. This is
implied when the narrator stops her pencil upon thinking ‘Now they’ve
found it.’ ‘It’ marks that cry for origin, the ‘fin passing far out,’ which
Woolf struggled to ‘get down into [her] pen’ and out on her page, thus
calling attention to textual genesis, laying bare the open passage between
pre-semantic perception and articulation.
107
Like the ‘mist,’ edging the ‘unsubstantial territory’ of The Waves, the
repeated ‘it’ in ‘A Haunted House,’ then, represents what we are always,
already haunted and somehow framed by: ‘we are always already in. . .
[and] of it;’
108
it is ‘not what I think, but what I live [ce que je vis].’
109
This ‘essential thing’ is inscribed in the ‘gigantic’ region that Woolf never
stopped questioning and struggled to express in words, which, like the
Husserlian concept of the horizon, ‘appear[s] only . . . in a changing
configuration, which varies according to the point of view and the moment
in time, and which prompts the viewer to guess as much as to perceive.’
110

Exchanging Secrets: Woolf and Cézanne


‘In or about December 1910 human character changed,’ stated Woolf in ‘Mr
Bennett and Mrs Brown.’
111
It is well known that 1910 was the year that
painter, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group Roger Fry rented the
Grafton Galleries in London to mount an exhibition entitled ‘Manet and the
Post-Impressionists,’ introducing the British public to French post-
impressionist paintings. The exhibition shocked London into the modernism
of Gauguin’s primitive nudes and real life subject matters, van Gogh’s thick
and distinctive brush strokes, and Cézanne’s distorted forms and
geometrically warped still lifes and landscapes, promoting a visual art that
was not an illusion. ‘What can 6 apples not be?’ Woolf wondered about
Cézanne’s apples. ‘What can 6 voices not be?’ we might wonder about the
voices in The Waves. The number seven, denoting the fullness,
completeness and perfection of God’s word in the Bible, is missing for, as
Woolf told us, ‘there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly
and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we
are the thing itself.’ We, the readers, take the place of the seventh, the
missing Percival in The Waves and Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, the
central orchestrator of interaction between the novel’s other six characters.
Bringing Cézanne into dialogue with Woolf, the final part of this chapter
sums up the ontological questions at the heart of The Waves and sheds light
on how the reader or viewer is an integral part of the modernist
composition.
112
For Merleau-Ponty the roots of our habitual world are found in
primordial ideas, not of how phenomena appear to pure consciousness, as
Husserl set out to show, but of how they appear to the embodied subject.
Only by enacting the reduction, by ‘bracketing’ what we, according to
habit, believe to be real, can we return to a zero-point of perception, to what
the philosopher, appropriating Husserl’s ‘nullpunkt,’ calls ‘rediscover[ing]
[a] naïver contact with the world’ in order to ‘provide a direct description of
experience such as it is.’
113
Merleau-Ponty found in Cézanne’s painting an
example of the reduction: ‘Cézanne’s painting suspends … habits of
thought,’ he writes in ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ ‘and reveals the base of inhuman
nature upon which man has installed himself.’
114
When describing how
Cézanne’s canvasses suspend the familiar, uncovering our ‘wild’ and
primitive ground of existence—a prelogical muddiness within being itself,
to borrow from Stevens—we are, once again, reminded of the myth of Eden
before the Fall:

Nature itself is stripped of the attributes which make it ready for


animistic communions: there is no wind in the landscape, no
movement in the Lac d’Annecy; the frozen objects hesitate as at the
beginning of the world. It is an unfamiliar world.
115

‘I am telling myself the story of the world from the beginning,’ Woolf wrote
in The Holograph Drafts, as reflected in the first draft:

This is the beginning . . . birds have sung; & the . . . spiders webs
have been lit by starlight. . . . The blank . . . of profound night has
cleared little by little. On this white space first the trees have shown,
ponderous with mist. And then the sea, moving, has shown truly
distinct from the fields.
116

Offering us a secular creation myth of sorts, Woolf’s six essences fall from
their innocence in the Garden of Elvedon where a ‘lady sits between the
two long windows, writing.’ Elvedon is a place of creative conception, a
garden prior to the Fall from which Bernard and Susan run,
117
‘another
version of Eden,’ as Julia Briggs observes, ‘from which the fallen couple
are banished, not by an angel with a sword, but a gardener with a broom.’
118
‘We are cut, we are fallen,’ Bernard sums up in his final soliloquy, ‘this

is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.’
119
Notably, apples appear frequently throughout the book: It is ‘an apple tree’
that becomes ‘the tree that [Neville] cannot pass’ upon learning of a
murdered man and becomes ‘the immitigable tree which we cannot pass’
leading to ‘rotten apples’ in a later interlude.
120
The apple tree, then,
becomes a representative of the fall from innocence and the struggle to
come to terms with the lack of fit between experiential life and external
facts.
Both the early holograph draft and the final book show us Woolf’s
thoughts about an entirely secular ‘fresh philosophy,’
121
or what in ‘On
Being Ill’ she calls a ‘new language . . . more primitive, more sensual, more
obscene,’ a fresh language that stems from a place that is as unfamiliar and
frozen as Cézanne’s stripped landscape: ‘There is a virgin forest in each; a
snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown.’
122
The
untrodden and cold landscapes of Woolf and Cézanne are landscapes of
reduction, laying bare the preliminary phase of artistic creation. A ‘new’
and ‘more primitive’ language presupposes the reduction: a ‘stripped,’
‘white space,’ a blank page or zero-point. Each by means of a different
medium, the painter and writer sought to re-create a language of ‘the
beginning,’ using paint and words to communicate the pre-communicative,
which remains the source of creativity.
Like his apples and vessels, Cézanne’s people are stripped of the
characteristics of the ordinary. The figures in the portraits Portrait of Mme
Cézanne in a Red Dress (1890–1894), Old Woman with a Rosary (c. 1896),
Woman with a Coffee-Pot (c. 1893–1895), and Boy with Skull (1896–1898)
appear to stare into nothingness in a dream-like manner. The gazes of these
strange people are stiffened, their lips are tightened and their expressions
are completely arrested. These figures, too, ‘hesitate as at the beginning of
the world,’
123
a ‘pre-world,’
124
which is still silent and timeless.
125
‘Time shall be utterly obliterated,’ Woolf wrote in a diary entry on The
Waves. Like Cézanne, she was concerned with textual genesis, the process
of aesthetic production: ‘I want to watch & see how the idea at first occurs.
I want to trace my own process.’
126
Throughout Woolf’s work, the pre-
communicative dimension of experience—‘a zone of silence’—is ever-
present as the source of this first idea; ‘[t]he artists themselves live in it,’
she wrote in ‘Walter Sickert.’
127
The six essences that constitute The Waves
certainly ‘live in it.’ Like Cézanne’s strange fruit and inanimate people, the
inner voices of Bernard, Rhoda, Louis, Neville, Susan and Jinny operate on
the basis of the reduction. Woolf has brought to fruition her ‘new . . . more
primitive’ language through a series of ‘suspended present tense’
128
soliloquies, realising the ‘more primitive’ language that she spoke of in ‘On
Being Ill.’ This form of speech suspends the habitual, puts out of play usual
references to time and place and registers only the immediate, creating an
ongoing stream of fresh zero-points: ‘I flutter, I ripple, I stream like a plant
in the river.’
129
In Woolf’s phenomenological pre-world, ‘the normal is
abolished,’ exposing a stranger, more primordial viewpoint as the condition
for expression and aesthetic production.
130
Through a shift of standpoint,
Woolf leads us away from factuality and objectivity—what in ‘A Mark on
the Wall’ she calls ‘the surface, with its hard separate facts’
131
—and back
to the pre-predicative ground of experience. She suspends our
preconceptions about what a novel ought to look like to recover a more
original image of ‘reality, this, the essential thing’ obscured by ‘the cotton
wool of daily life.’
As noted, Gertrude Stein once praised Cézanne for showing that ‘in
composition . . . [e]ach part is as important as the whole,’ just as
phenomenology applies equal importance to the single unit and the horizon.
The single unit is highlighted but only to provide a clear view of its
involvement with the whole frame—the horizon—within which it exists,
which includes other things and other people. At every point this equal
balance between part and whole can be detected in The Waves and
Cézanne’s paintings. In the latter’s The Large Bathers (1906),
132
the
natural setting of sky, water and slanting trees envelope a group of nude
bathers who are, even more so than Cézanne’s earlier people, strange and
abstract figures. The brown hair and far from sensual but rather plant-like
shapes of these slanting women, each of whom seems enclosed within a
space of her own, mirror the equally brown and slanting tree trunks that
frame their space.
133
The scene accentuates at once separation and
interrelation between the natural and the human, the single unit and the
horizon. Cézanne’s plant-like women remind us of that moment in The
Waves when Louis intertwines with and becomes inseparable from the
object he intends: ‘I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go
down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick. . . . I am all
fibre.’
134
Similar moments of intertwining occur in To the Lighthouse and
Mrs Dalloway. Whereas Mrs Ramsay ‘often found herself sitting, and
looking with her work in her hands until she became the things looked at—
that light for example,’
135
Septimus does not meditate on becoming the tree
towards which his eyes are directed, he already is the tree: ‘when the branch
stretched he, too, made that statement.’
136
In other words, he is ‘the words;
. . . the music; . . . the thing itself.’
Whereas the aim of the Impressionists (Claude Monet, Georges Seurat,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir) had been to grasp the immediacy of the fleeting
impression, Paul Cézanne wished ‘to make of Impressionism something
solid, like the art in the museums,’ that is to say, to find a turning point of
sorts—a fold—between the broken and the solid, the fleeting and the
tangible.
137
Woolf’s writing also demonstrates that experience is only
possible in the very fold between the self and the other, humans and nature,
depth and surface, transcending both Cartesian rationalism and subject-
object dichotomies. Our attention, then, is re-directed not to things in
themselves but to the folds between them: those between bodies and trees,
clouds and sky. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse demonstrate
similar concerns, anticipating a theme that would come to ‘saturate’ The
Waves completely.
138
In Mrs Dalloway Clarissa ponders on the ‘the ebb
and flow of things’:

[S]omehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things,


here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she
being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there,
ugly, rambling, all to bits and pieces as it was, part of the people she
had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she
knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees
lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
139

Offering a literary version of that unperceived and misty divergence within


being from which self, other and world arise in mutual and reciprocal
relations—‘this flesh of my body is shared by the world’
140
—Woolf links
the prosperous Clarissa with the poor and poetic Septimus, in the eyes of
whom all conventional interests are ‘bracketed,’ leaving the world exposed
as phenomenon:

[L]eaves were alive; trees were alive . . . The sparrows fluttering,


rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the
white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made harmonies
with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as
the sounds.

Intuitively grasping that ‘the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts
of the work of art,’ the non-judgemental Septimus sees clearly the
interconnectedness of the visible and the invisible, the silent and the
audible.
141
Lily Briscoe, in To the Lighthouse, echoes this idea: ‘The
question was of some relation between those masses.’
142
In his reading of The Large Bathers, T.J. Clark draws particular
attention to what he calls the ‘double figure’ in the right side of the
painting: the bodies of two women merge and seem to disappear into each
other; it looks as though the one’s shoulders become the other’s buttocks
and vice versa.
143
Like Bernard in The Waves, these intertwined figures
seem to wonder: ‘Who am I? . . . Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I
do not know.’
144
The reversibility of the seeing and the seen takes place
within what Merleau-Ponty terms the ‘interworld (l’intermonde),’ exposing
our common world of ‘flesh,’ an ‘intermundane space . . . where our gazes
cross and our perceptions overlap.’
145
Within this crossover space, the
sentient and the sensible, the subjective and the objective intertwine. It is
here that vessels and fruit ‘exchang[e] secrets,’ as Cézanne had pointed out,
and where nude bodies seem more plant-like than human.
146
Although each of the six voices in Woolf’s play-poem repeatedly tries
to impose imaginative order upon a world of flux—‘We . . . stride not into
chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of
the illumined and everlasting road’—all are integral parts of the same world
and ‘made of the same stuff.’ Thus, as ‘life comes; life goes,’ Woolf’s six
free variations of the ‘lady writing’ vacillate between interrelation and
separation; between the need for community and the need to be private
selves. While ‘[o]utside the undifferentiated forces roar,’ the six essences
contract like waves and look ‘inside [where] [they] are very private, very
explicit,’ but only to be pulled back into the upsurge of the visible world.
147
Hencethe play-poem’s continual wave-like movements of reduction and
expansion:

The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed
in growth. Opening and shutting, shutting and opening, with
increasing hum and sturdiness, the haste and fever of youth are
drawn into service until the whole being seems to expand in and out
like the mainspring of a clock.
148

Cézanne’s bathing bodies—the double figure in particular—and the


perpetually ‘shutting and opening’ body of Woolf’s six figures lay bare a
paradox of experience that is at the heart of the artistic event itself. The
world that the artist tries to arrest in language or paint is, simultaneously,
the world of continuity and change within which he/she is rooted as a carnal
being. Thus, the tensions between bodies and natural worlds in The Large
Bathers and The Waves bring about a balanced shifting between unit and
horizon, the fleeting and the tangible, attempting to ‘make of Impressionism
something solid.’
As pointed out by critics, when looking carefully, the middle of
Cézanne’s The Large Bathers reveals the face of a woman.
149
Her eyes are
hidden in the sky, the water’s edge forms her mouth, and the slanting trees
constitute her hair. While mirroring the mirror-relation between bodies and
trees, the sky too approaches the human, once again stressing the mutuality
of body and world. Once this face is spotted it returns our gaze, drawing us
into the painting and yet pushing us away, giving us the feeling of being
‘visible-seers.’ In a similar manner, Woolf’s The Waves makes us aware of
our self-reflexivity. Our being conscious of the ‘lady . . . between the two
long windows, writing,’
150
a figure of the writer as a hidden and yet active
force inside the text, calls attention to ‘that which we actually perceive,’
making us reflect on our own activity of reading.
151
Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s
‘intermundane space . . . where our gazes cross and our perceptions
overlap’ is also the space at which our eyes are directed: the picture surface
and the page of the book. In our experience of looking or reading, we too
begin with reduction.
This brings us full circle and returns us to the theme of ‘doubling’ in
that the reader or viewer is at once a quasi-transcendent onlooker and a
quasi-immanent participator. This does not signify some sort of split; rather
he/she is ‘neither an outside witness, nor a pure agent.’
152
Cézanne’s face
in the sky and Woolf’s hidden lady suspend the expected and bring into
focus the particular phenomena to which we are oriented. As Woolf writes
in ‘The Moment: Summer’s Night’: ‘One becomes aware that we are
spectators and also passive participants in a pageant.’
153
Woolf’s readers
are at once active ‘spectators,’ projecting their own visions onto the work,
and ‘participants,’ components within a horizon: parts of the whole work of
art—at once ‘impassioned [passionelle]’ and passive, as Merleau-Ponty
taught us. If each part of the composition is as important as the whole, then
the viewer or reader’s viewpoint is an integral part of the composition’s
landscape. Woolf reminds us of this in ‘How Should One Read a Book’:
‘Do not dictate to your author, try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and
accomplice.’
154
Writer/Painter, reader/viewer and text/painting: each is an
essential part of the artwork’s making and re-making. Hence Bernard in The
Waves: ‘To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s
eyes’; ‘I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different
words from me.’ 155
Just as Cézanne, during the process of painting, was
‘germinating’ with his landscape,
156
we are ‘germinating’ with The Waves,
folding with the foam of each wave over itself only to begin again and
again: ‘The waves broke on the shore.’
157
Notes
1.
Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 3, ed. Anne Olivier  
Bell (London: The Hogarth Press, 1980), 191.
2.
Ibid., 196.  
3.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern  
Life, 6, 7, 8.
4. For an insightful reading of the connection between Woolf’s own
aesthetics principles concerning ‘Subject, Object and the Nature of  
Reality’ in relation to the philosophy of the Cambridge Apostles, see
Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the
Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008). Whereas Banfield’s study accentuates a dualism
between subject and object in Woolf’s vision, this chapter argues for
the collapse of such a subject object binary
the collapse of such a subject-object binary.
5.
 
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Books,
1945), 112.
6.
See Frank McConnell, ‘“Death Among the Apple Trees”: The Waves  
and the World of Things,’ Bucknell Review 16 (December 1968): 25.
Other critics who characterise Woolf’s writing as ‘mystical’ include
Madeline Moore, who refers to Woolf’s moments of ‘mystical
unity’; Stella McNichol, who calls The Waves a ‘mystical work,’ and
Cyril Conolly who describes The Waves as ‘one of the books which
comes nearest to stating the mystery of life.’ See Moore, ‘Nature and
Community: A Study of Cyclical Reality in The Waves,’ in Ralph
Freedman, ed., Virginia Woolf: Reevaluation and Continuity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 222; McNichol,
Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction, London: Routledge, 1980),
118; and Conolly, Enemies of Promise (New York: Macmillan
Company, 1949), 49.
7.
Among critics who stress Woolf’s concerns with cognitive or post-  
Freudian psychology are Robert Humphrey, Stream of
Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1959), 14; and Jean O. Love, Worlds in
Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970),
200, xi. Also see Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Dalgarno
offers a reading of the visible and invisible in Woolf by drawing
upon psychoanalytic theory, in particular that of Lacan.
8.
Using aspects of Heidegger’s phenomenology, Suzette Henke has  
already demonstrated that the ontology of The Waves is ‘more
phenomenological than mystical,’ thus taking issue with scholars
who place emphasis on the ‘mystical’ dimension in Woolf’s writing.
See Henke, ‘Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: A Phenomenological
Reading,’ Neophilologus 73.3 (July 1989): 461–472.
9. Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. Jean Stewart
 
10. (London: Hogarth Press, 1965), 379.
Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 82, 87, 88.  
11.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 264.  
12.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 430.  
13.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 118, 244, 146, my  
italics.
14.
Frank Chouraqui, Ambiguity and the Absolute: Nietzsche and  
Merleau-Ponty on the Question of Truth (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2014), 196.
15. Connections between Woolf’s ‘folds’ and Deleuze’s more recent
figure of the ‘fold’ have been explored by Jessica Berman in ‘Ethical  
Folds: Ethics, Aesthetics, Woolf,’ Modern Fiction Studies 50.1
(2004): 151–172; and by Laci Mattison in ‘Woolf’s Un/Folding(s):
The Artist and the Event of the Neo-Baroque,’ in Derek Ryan and
Stella Bolaki, eds., Contradictory Woolf: Selected Papers from the
Twenty-First Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf
(Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2012), 96–100.
I want to draw attention to Merleau-Ponty’s original notions of
folds and intersubjectivity, which also influenced Deleuze. However,
Stephen Günzel argues that Deleuze’s grasp of Merleau-Ponty’s
notion of ‘flesh’ is too superficial in ‘Deleuze and Phenomenology,’
International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 2.2 (2014):
31–45. Similarly, Jack Reynolds and John Roffe have argued that
‘Deleuze’s basic criticism of phenomenology, as well as his and
Guattari’s problems with the concept of flesh, do not adequately
come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy,’ in ‘Deleuze
and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology,’
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37.3 (October,
2006): 228. Frank Chouraqui, echoes this claim in his observation
that Deleuze’s understanding that in Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology intentionality is ‘object-directed in the sense of
object-affirming’ is ‘arguably a wild misreading of at least the whole
of Merleau-Ponty’s writings since the foreword to Phenomenology of
Perception—to the point that it interprets Merleau-Ponty’s mention
of a learning process (which is meant as an expression of the self
constituting the world) as referring to the acquisition of some
supposed objective knowledge,’ in Ambiguity and the Absolute, 117.
See also Stephen Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and
Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Taylor and Francis,
2005), which stresses that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘fold’
anticipates Deleuze’s.
16. See, for instance, Harvena Richter who briefly refers to both Bergson
and Husserl in Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton:  
Princeton University Press, 1970); and Mark Hussey who uses
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, alongside the
philosophies of Sartre and R.D. Laing, as a point of departure for
examining the role of the body in Woolf’s work in The Singing of the
Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1986). While the phenomenological
quality of Woolf’s ontology has been examined from a Heideggerian
perspective by Suzette Henke in ‘Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: A
Phenomenological Reading,’ Carole Rodier has offered a
chronological examination of Woolf’s novels by drawing upon the
thinking of Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, and Jean-
Pierre Richard, in Rodier, L’Univers imaginaire de Virginia Woolf
(Paris: Editions du Temps, 2001). A critical study that has attempted
an in-depth exploration of the kinship between Husserlian
phenomenology and Woolf’s philosophical concerns is M.L.
Wadikar’s Journey Towards the Centre of Being: Virginia Woolf and
Dorothy Richardson (1980). Although Wadikar, like Richter, points
out that ‘[i]t is not… easy to establish any direct influence of Husserl
on the two novelists,’ he aims to explore the ‘curious resemblance’
between their speculations by offering a ‘detailed examination of
Husserl’s position’ and using this to shed light on Woolf and
Richardson’s work. Unfortunately, Wadikar’s examination of the
novelists’ ‘journey[s] towards the centre of being’ in light of how
consciousness, according to Husserl, ‘effectuates ideas or essences,’
lacks clarity in places because the epoché, the most radical and
essential of Husserl’s procedures, is not explored. See M.L. Wadikar,
Journey Towards the Centre of Being: Virginia Woolf and Dorothy
Ri h d (M t I di A P k h 1980) 3 4
Richardson (Meerut, India: Anu Prakashan, 1980), 3–4.
17.
Moore ‘Nature and Community,’ 222, 220.  
18.
Patricia Ondek Laurence, The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in  
the English Tradition (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 1991), 110.
19.
Ibid. Critics who, like myself, stress parallels between the epoché  
and Woolf’s aesthetic concerns include Henke, ‘Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves,’ 467; and Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and
the Test of Production (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 228.
20.
Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philisophy, 169.  
21.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to  
Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof,
1977), 19–20.
22.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 175.  
23.
Ibid., 179.  
24.
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and  
Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), 110.
25.
Husserl, Ideas, 78.  
26.
Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ 7.  
27.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 260; my italics.  
28.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 176.  
29.
Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ 8.  
30. James Naremore, The World Without a Self (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1973), 75.
 
31.
Maureen Chun, ‘Between Sensation and Sign: The Secret Language  
of The Waves,’ Journal of Modern Literature 36.1 (Fall 2012): 53.
32.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 285.  
33.
Woolf, The Waves, 11.  
34.

Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 11.  


35.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139, 153.  
36.
In arguing this, I take issue with Arthur Koestler’s claim that The  
Waves is a ‘masterpiec[e] at dead ends,’ in Koestler, The Yogi and
the Commissar (London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1945), 31; and with
Mark Hussey who has argued for the ‘aesthetic failure’ of The
Waves, suggesting that it is an example of ‘antireading’: ‘The Waves
is hostile to reading, and yet, it has nearly always been read as a
complete, harmonious work of art. It is, though, a product of crisis
and reflects this in its form.’ See Hussey, The Singing of the Real
World, 86–87.
37.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 139.  
38.
Ibid., 209.  
39.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 155.  
40.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, vIxxi.  
41.
Woolf, The Waves, 11.  
42.
Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, ed. Anne Olivier  
Bell. London (The Hogarth Press, 1977), 113.
43.
The writing lady re-appears on pp. 102, 201, and 224.  
44.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London:  
Penguin Books, 1992), 231.
45.
Husserl, Ideas, 198, 55.  
46.
The book’s six inter-locking voices have often been referred to as  
‘selves’ or aspects of one whole self or creative mind. For instance,
Jean Guiguet claims that the six voices are ‘originally merged in one
single voice—the thinker,’ and James Naremore argues that ‘[t]he
speeches often seem like one pervasive voice with six personalities.’
See Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works, 285; and Naremore, The
World Without a Self, 152. It has also been pointed out that Woolf did
not think of these voices as ‘characters’ in the usual sense of the
word. Michael Rosenthal writes: ‘Woolf did not conceive of these
voices as adding up in any way to literary “characters”’ and quotes
the following passage from her diary: ‘What I now think (about The
Waves) is that I can give in a very few strokes the essentials of a
person’s character’ (A Writer’s Diary, 157).’ See Rosenthal, Virginia
Woolf (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 145.
47.
Judith Butler, Introduction, in The Erotic Bird, xii.  
48.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower,’ in A Woman’s Essays, 159.  
49.
Woolf, The Waves, 59, 5.  
50.
Stein, Tender Buttons, 4.  
51.
Judith Butler, Introduction, in The Erotic Bird, xv.  
52.
Woolf, The Waves, 21.  
53.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 229.  
54. Woolf, The Waves, 76.  
55.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 442.  
56.
Woolf, The Waves, 157.  
57.
Kearney, Anatheism, 90.  
58.
According to Derek Ryan, in his recent study of Woolf, The Waves  
challenges this much-discussed ‘subject-object relationship’ in that
that there is no longer ‘“an edge to [Bernard’s] mind,” a clear border
between his internal focus and external forces.’ Indeed, as Ryan
argues, ‘subject/object distinctions’ transform into ‘what Deleuze
and Guattari describe as an “assemblage” which includes “semiotic
flows, material flows and social flows simultaneously.”’ See Ryan,
Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 185–186. In another
recent reading of Woolf’s The Waves, Maureen Chun also stresses
that The Waves ‘traverses the boundary between subjectivity and
objectivity’: ‘the language, imagery, structure, and themes
collectively establish the continuity of word, narrative, and world
through a non-subjective, physicalized consciousness.’ See Chun,
‘Between Sensation and Sign: The Secret Language of The Waves,’
53.
59.
Anna Snaith, Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations  
(London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 69.
60. Tamar Katz, ‘Modernism, Subjectivity, and Narrative Form:
Abstraction in The Waves,’ Narrative Columbus 3.3 (October 1995):  
235, 248. Pamela L. Caughie offers a point not unlike Katz’s when
claiming that Woolf ‘enact[s] a way of thinking about and
responding to narrative discourse that considers different ways of
relating things rather than the distinction between two things.’ See
Caughie, Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and
Question of Itself (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1991), xii.
61.
Banfield, The Phantom Table, 73.  
62.
Kingwell, ‘Husserl’s Sense of Wonder,’ 99.  
63.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 249.  
64.
Ibid., 134, 133, 248, 135.  
65.
Ibid., 48.  
66.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 203.  
67.
Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, 74.  
68.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, ed. J.W.  
Graham (London: The Hogarth Press, 1976), 9, 3. Elsewhere in The
Holograph Drafts Woolf writes: ‘in the fold of the napkin was a seat
such as gardeners stand their pots on’ (12); ‘Here the fold in the …
napkin showed clearings in a wood’ (15).

69.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 264.  
70.
Woolf, The Waves, 8.  
71.
Ibid., 8–9.  
72.
Ibid., 9, 13, 15.  
73.
Berman, 413.  
74.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 370.  
75.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 260, 262.  
76. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, 162–163.
 
77.
Ibid., 411.  
78.
As Merleau-Ponty writes in The Visible and the Invisible: ‘since the  
same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same
world,’ 130.
79.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the  
Flesh,’ 411.
80.
Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, 9.  
81.
Woolf, The Waves, 227–228.  
82.
Ibid., 62.  
83.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 7. Hermione Lee has also  
pointed out that Woolf ‘wanted to feel what Proust felt and to see if
she couldn’t turn this world into something like À La Recherche,’ in
Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 468.
84.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 149.  
85.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann’s Way,  
trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), 221.
86.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139, 149, 150, 153.  
87.
Woolf, The Waves, 199.  
88.
Ibid.  
89.
Eva Meyer, ‘A Matter of Folds,’ Parallax 5.4 (1999), 97.  
90.
Woolf, The Waves, 199.  
91. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 208. Notably, Patrick
f
McGee also argues that Bernard’s ‘little language’ stands for the
unseizable but in a different way: ‘the little language is the discourse  
of the Other,’ which ‘signifies something beyond… at which all
language aims.’ Unlike my suggestion that the pre-semantic
dimension of experience, which I see as exposed throughout Woolf’s
work, offers a clue to her phenomenological concerns with aesthetic
production, McGee uses his notion of the ‘Other’ to point out a
‘compatibility’ between Woolf and Lacanian theory, claiming that
Woolf ‘reaches toward the unrepresentable … the locus of the
signifier before it is captured by the symbolic rule of patriarchy.’ See
McGee, ‘Woolf’s Other: The University in Her Eye,’ Novel 23
(Spring 1990): 244, 230, 245.
92.
Woolf, The Waves, 30.  
93.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 39.  
94.
Julia Rawa, The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory from Conrad  
to Greene (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 29, 14, 1.
95.

Ibid., 1, 30.  
96.
Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend (London:  
Penguin Books, 2004), 327.
97.
Kearney, Anatheism, 92.  
98.
Woolf, The Waves, 220, 181.  
99.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxix.  
100.
Woolf, The Waves, 118–119.  
101.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 194.  
102. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139, 149, 150, 153.
 
103.
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Haunted House,’ in A Haunted House and Other  
Short Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1972), 3; my
italics.
104.
As Hermione Lee puts it, ‘A Haunted House’ foreshadows ‘the  
questing airs in the “Time Passes” Section of To the Lighthouse.’ See
Lee, Virginia Woolf, 318.
105.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 183.  
106.
Woolf, ‘A Haunted House,’ The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, 7.  
107.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 191.  
108.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.  
109.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxx.  
110.
Michel Collot, ‘Phenomenology and Literary Experience,’ trans.  
Carole Bourne-Taylor, in Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg, eds.,
Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, 328.
111.

Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ in A Woman’s Essays, 71.  


112.
Anthony Uhlmann offers an enriching but very different reading of  
‘Woolf’s interaction with the ideas of Paul Cézanne (via Roger Fry
and through Cézanne directly), drawing out her understanding of
“sensation” and processes of translation between the visual arts and
literature.’ See Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Woolf, Joyce,
Nabokov (New York and London: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2011), 5.
113.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixx.  
114. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 16.
 
115.
Ibid.  
116.
Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, 6.  
117.
Woolf, The Waves, 12.  
118.
Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Allen Lane),  
244. As Briggs remarks, Woolf’s Holograph Drafts was ‘much
closer to the biblical Genesis since it concerns a couple in flight from
that “first” Edenic garden’ (Ibid., 243).
119.
Woolf, The Waves, 234, 247.  
120.
Ibid., 18, 197.  
121.
Woolf, The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts, 758.  
122.
Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, 45,  
46.
123.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 16.  
124.
F. Novotny as cited in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of  
Perception, 337.
125.
 
Meyer Schapiro makes a point not unlike that of Merleau-Ponty
when claiming that Cézanne’s fruit and vessels imply a ‘still
unordered world.’ The fruit, he argues, ‘is not yet fully part of
human life.’ See Schapiro, ‘The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the
Meaning of Still Life,’ in Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 25.
126.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 118, 113.  
127. Virginia Woolf, ‘Walter Sickert,’ in Collected Essays by Virginia
W lf V l 2 d L d W lf (L d Th H hP
Woolf. Vol. 2, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press,
1966), 236.  
128.
For this terminology I am indebted to Stephen J. Miko who  
perceptively remarks that the ‘suspended present tense’ of Woolf’s
six voices ‘seems to reduce existence to a moment perpetually, to
collapse both past and future without giving up consciousness of
both past and future,’ in ‘Reflections on The Waves,’ Criticism 30.1
(1988): 69.
129.
Woolf, The Waves, 83.  
130.
Woolf, The Waves, 83, 97.  
131.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall,’ Selected Short Stories  
(London: Penguin Books, 1993), 55.
132.
Cézanne painted three different versions of The Large Bathers, two  
of which are in the Barnes Collection, Pennsylvania, and the
National Gallery, London, respectively. In my discussion, I am
referring to the last 1906 version, which is now in the Philadelphia
Museum of Art.
133.
For this insight I am indebted to Ulrike Becks-Malorny’s comment  
that the ‘The figures are also aligned in the same way as the trees…
The women are self-absorbed; they exist only for themselves.’ See
Becks-Malorny, Paul Cézanne 1839–1906: Pioneer of Modernism,
trans. Phil Goddard in association with First Edition Translations
Ltd. (Köln: Taschen, 2001), 88.
134.
Woolf, The Waves, 7.  
135.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 68.  
136.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 28.  
137.
Cézanne as quoted in Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art:  
A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 345.
138. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, 209.
 
139.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1, 11; my italics.  
140.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 240.  
141.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 28, 72.  
142.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 200.  
143.
T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of  
Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999),
157.
144.
Woolf, The Waves, 240–241.  
145.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 48.  
146.
For a careful examination of this ‘exchange’ of space, see Brendan  
Prendeville, ‘Merleau-Ponty, Realism and Painting: Psychophysical
Space and the Space of Exchange,’ Art History 22.3 (September
1999): 364–88.
147.
Woolf, The Waves, 120, 145, 12, 213.  
148.
Ibid., 215.  
149.
Sidney Geist calls Cézanne’s hidden images such as the face in the  
sky ‘cryptomorphs,’ in Geist, Interpreting Cézanne (Harvard
University Press, 1988), 1–2. For another insightful discussion of
Cézanne’s hidden images, see Joyce Medina, Cézanne and
Modernism: The Poetics of Painting (New York: State University of
New York Press, 1995).
150. Woolf, The Waves, 12.

 
151.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 14.  
152.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 90.  
153.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Moment: A Summer’s Night,’ in Collected  
Essays by Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2, 293.
154.
Virginia Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book,’ in The Crowded  
Dance of Modern Life, 60.
155.
Woolf, The Waves, 95, 109.  
156.
Merleau-Ponty,‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 17.  
157.
Woolf, The Waves, 248.  
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Ariane Mildenberg, Modernism and Phenomenology, Modernism and...
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_5

5. Hyperdialectic: A Modernist Adventure


Ariane Mildenberg1  

(1) School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

 
  Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk

In the preface to Ideas, Husserl’s comments on the incompleteness of his


own phenomenological project:

The author sees the infinite open country of the true philosophy, the
‘promised land’ on which he himself will never set foot. This
confidence may wake a smile, but let each see for himself whether it
has not some ground in the fragments laid before him as
phenomenology in its beginnings. Gladly would he hope that those
who come after him will take up these first adventures, carry them
steadily forward, yes, and improve also their great deficiencies,
defects of incompleteness which cannot indeed be avoided in the
beginning of scientific work.
1

Phenomenology, however, remains incomplete and inconclusive in the


hands of those who come after Husserl. It is this incompleteness that
becomes the main theme of Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology: ‘the
incompleteness of the reduction . . . is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is
the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being,’ which ‘is to be
understood not as an imperfection . . . but as a philosophical theme.’
2
Since
phenomenology itself knows that a final conclusive analysis would clash
with its own interrogative mode and openness to the world—‘since our
reflections are taking place in the temporal flow that they are attempting to
capture . . . there is no thought that encompasses all of our thought’
3
—I
want to conclude by starting again. I want to end this book by reflecting
upon beginnings.
Towards the end of ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ Merleau-Ponty observes: ‘Only
one emotion is possible for this painter—the feeling of strangeness—and
only one of lyricism—that of the continual rebirth of existence.’
4
This
lyricism lies in the pre-reflective engagement of the embodied subject with
the world: since the body (as consciousness) is in the world, the creative
process correlates with the ‘continual rebirth of existence’; hence the artist
is a ‘perpetual beginner.’
5
Anticipating the aims of the Cubists, who
‘produced many-faceted interpretations of their chosen subject matter,
taking the viewer’s eye around it,’
6
Cézanne painted the same blue carafe,
sugar bowl, vessels and apples over and over again in his still lifes.
Similarly, he painted the famous Mont Sainte-Victoire at least sixty times:

Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject
seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most
powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself
for months without changing place, by turning more to the right,
now more to the left.
7

In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe echoes this view when reflecting
upon the impossibility of catching ‘all of’ Mrs Ramsay in paint: ‘One
wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were
not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.’
8
Wallace
Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ a poem that refuses to
decide between different viewpoints, is a response to and reflection upon
the creative mind’s interaction with the fluid quality of nature. Once again,
we are presented with the concept of free variation, as Husserl thought of it,
9
challenging us to play with the ‘open infinity’ of the essential possibilities

of the phenomenon, opening up ‘new aspects of the experience.’


10
Stevens’s poem is about multiple and various ways of looking at a single
thing—a blackbird, who, significantly, is always on the move—and ways of
looking at poetry while highlighting its own process of becoming in the
middle of a world which is always becoming. Kate Bush’s ‘Fifty Words for
Snow,’ a modern-day homage to Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird’ and ‘The Snow Man,’ also presents us with 50 free variations on
snow, the temporarily frozen form of the intangible condition of water,
recalling the Heraclitean fluidity of water in which Bergson saw ‘the
sensory image of lived time.’
11
Nothing endures, according to Heraclitus,
everything is in flux. The impossibility of ‘freezing’ and portraying in paint,
poetry or music a complete, objective view of the thing as experienced
should not be taken as a sign of inconclusiveness but as a perpetual genesis
of creativity: ‘Our openness to the world is conditioned by our changing
perceptions.’
12
We learned from Phenomenology of Perception that the
kind of attentiveness and wonder found in the work of for instance Cézanne
and Proust, and their ‘will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its
nascent state’ is a characteristic of modernist aesthetics in general.
13
Wonder in the face of the world always includes the possibility of doubt;
‘[o]ur interactions with the world and Others provide that “fundamental
interrogation that animates the world from within.”’
14
We exist, change and
interact in a world of constant change; thus, experience cannot but be
interrogated and this never-ending interrogation is at the heart of the
modernist aesthetic project. The modernist artist is a ‘perpetual beginner’
and his/her process of meaning-giving is ‘an ever-renewed experiment of its
own beginning,’
15
which is directly connected with the impossibility of
recapturing the Husserlian pre-relational ‘thing itself’ or what Merleau-
Ponty thinks of as the ‘pre-reflective zone’ of ‘perceptual faith’
16
: ‘The
most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of
a complete reduction.’
17
In Merleau-Ponty’s final work, The Visible and the
Invisible, this impossibility culminates in the notion of ‘hyperdialectic,’ a
dialectic ‘without synthesis’ which is not a sign of futility but of ‘a good
dialectic,’
18
recalling Phenomenology of Perception: ‘the unfinished nature
of phenomenology and the inchoate style in which it proceeds are not the
sign of failure.’
19
Rather, impossibility of reduction becomes the theme of
phenomenology itself and a constant reminder of the pre-reflective
dimension of experience, the ‘first philosophy’ embedded within daily life.
This incompleteness becomes a continual point of departure and point of
return for Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic concerns and ontology of the flesh,
explaining its underlying interlacing of separation and interrelation,
distance and closeness.
I want to end this book by reflecting upon beginnings via the
hyperdialectic, a dialectic without synthesis demanding a radical open-
endedness at the heart of which lies the impossibility of complete reduction.
Hyperdialectic pre-empts some of the aims of Derridean deconstruction and
its impossibility of capturing the Husserlian ‘thing itself.’
20
As Len Lawlor
suggests, ‘[a]t almost the exact same moment, in the late Fifties, Derrida
and Merleau-Ponty have stumbled upon the same structure of experience,
and, most generally, we can call this structure the structure of the
experience of intersubjectivity.’
21
Not only is hyperdialectic grounded in
our perpetual questioning of experience, it is always inscribed in what
Merleau-Ponty terms ‘écart,’ which, as we have seen in Chapter 3, is the
temporal divergence between pre-linguistic perception and expression that
is also the ground of meaning-giving.
22
Because of this temporal
distantiation, ‘hyperdialectic’ is aware of the impossibility of completely
grasping the ‘thing itself.’ Reynolds stresses that this ‘impossibility of any
absolute presence-to-itself is not a derivative accident, or fall from grace,
but is symptomatic of a constitutive divergence (écart) that can never be
assuaged.’
23
Although there are differences between the philosophers’
enquiries, the overlap between Merleau-Ponty’s écart and Derrida’s
différance is clear: both ‘discern a necessary divergence within our
everyday embodiment’; ‘subjectivity, for Merleau-Ponty, and the
perspective, for Derrida, are both made (im)possible by this very divergence
(écart) which cannot simply be characterized as yet another dualism.’
24
As Merleau-Ponty writes in The Visible and the Invisible: ‘The world is
what I perceive, but as soon as we examine and express its absolute
proximity, it becomes, inexplicably, irremediable distance,’
25
recalling the
ambiguous experience of the phenomenological concept of horizon, the
simultaneous joining and separation of earth and sky that is an imaginary
line which seems to recede as we approach it. As perceptual consciousness
is subject to change and ‘remoulding us every moment,’
26
as William
James would have it, the spatial-temporal horizon is never fixed and
remains beyond our grasp. This is one of the epistemological dilemmas
central to phenomenology which also challenged James and his student,
Gertrude Stein. The former proposed the following: ‘The condition of the
experience is not one of the things experienced at the moment; this knowing
is not immediately known. It is only known in subsequent reflection.’
27
Let
me repeat a passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception
that takes James’s idea one step further: ‘If the thing itself were attained . . .
[i]t would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment that we believed we
possessed it. What makes the “reality” of the thing is therefore precisely
what steals it from our possession.’
28
One of the doctrines the philosophers
seem to have in common, then, is this fate of perception. Theorised
reflection, such as writing, is grounded in the ‘unreflective life’ of
experience,
29
but because of the temporal distance between experience and
expression, it cannot grasp it as such. Yet, although it is aware of and
cannot overcome the écart, reflection can only ever be

hyper-reflection (sur-réflexion) . . . [which] must seek in the world


itself the secret of our perceptual bond with it. It must use words not
according to their pre-established signification, but in order to state
this prelogical bond. It must plunge into the world instead of
surveying it, it must descend toward it such as it is instead of
working its way back up toward a prior possibility of thinking it—
which would impose upon the world in advance the conditions for
our control over it. It must question the world, it must enter into the
forest of references that our interrogation arouses in it, and it must
make it say, finally, what in its silence it means to say.
30

Reflection, then, must question foundations. It must reflect upon and be


critical of itself, question its own sufficiency and ‘plunge’ into that pre-
theoretic and silent region where ‘inside and outside are not yet
distinguishable.’
31
From the ‘hyper-reflection’ that highlights our pre-
predicative, corporeal ‘bond’ with the world emerges a ‘hyperdialectic,’ ‘a
dialectic without synthesis’ grounded in our continual questioning of
experience:

What we call hyperdialectic is a thought that . . . is capable of


reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality
of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. . . . Being is
not made up of idealizations of things said, as the old logic believed,
but of bound wholes. . . . what we seek is a dialectical definition of
being that can be neither the being for itself nor the being in itself . .
. that must rediscover the being that lies before the cleave operated
by reflection, about it, on its horizon, not outside of us and not in us,
but there where the two movements cross, there where ‘there is’
something.
32

Breaking with forms of dialectical thinking that are imposed upon the
world, hyperdialectic, then, arises from continual questioning. A product of
our ever-changing experiences of the lived-body, for Merleau-Ponty,
dialectic does not rely upon dichotomies or a process of reconciliation of
polarised terms in dialectical tension, as in, for instance, the work of Hegel
and Sartre, both of whom Merleau-Ponty critiqued.
33
While the complexity
of both Hegel’s and Sartre’s arguments cannot be penetrated in the space
available, the essential point to extract is that in both welcoming and
accommodating difference,
34
hyperdialectic ‘introduces the shift from the
philosophy of negation to a philosophy of interrogation and the shift from a
Hegelian-Sartrean negative philosophy of desire to desire as a productive
shape and opening onto the world.’
35
It also introduces phenomenology as
an embodied praxis, which is what has been referred to as a ‘non-
philosophy—thought becomes the texture of an interhuman world of
experience.’ In this way, hyperdialectic surpasses dichotomies and is
instead committed to a reversibility of the flesh in a perpetual process of
emerging, questioning and openness where ‘experience is not “in between”
(dia) Being and beings, but rather “throughout” it.’
36
Reflection, Merleau-
Ponty tells us, is never terminated but always keeps the crossing paths of
the pre-reflective and the reflective open, for this is the very crossing— the
‘there where “there is” something’—where meaning is produced. This
‘there is,’ Patrick Burns observes, is ‘the originary openness of what is
there before it is “there” for reflective consciousness, before mind and
world have been set apart by reflection.’
37
Thus the ‘good’ dialectic that
Merleau-Ponty promotes is ‘essentially and by definition unstable’ and is
non-totalising
38
; it is a ‘hyper’ dialectic because it always ‘criticises and
surpasses itself as statement.’
39
The lack of synthesis or closure in
hyperdialectic, then, should not be taken as a sign of futility or
inconclusiveness but, rather, as a reminder of the perpetual genesis of lived
experience, the ‘global and primordial cohesion of a field of experience
wherein each element opens onto the others.’
40
Serving as a constant
opening onto the underlying ground that makes experience possible, never
allowing us to lose sight of wonder and the ‘first philosophy’ embedded in
daily life, the emphasis of the philosopher’s modernist lesson, then, is not
on result but on the how of the result, not on ‘the reflection of a prior truth,
but rather, like art, the actualization of truth,’
41
that is, the act of meaning-
giving itself.

Stein’s ‘If I Told Him’ and NDT’s Shutters Shut


This is where I want to return to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a work
which is auto-critical in nature. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the double
meaning of Stein’s slippery ‘Buttons,’ her strange prose poems, is
underscored by the word ‘Tender,’ which, when understood as the verb ‘to
tender’ derives from the Latin tendere, meaning on the one hand ‘to stretch
out, extend’ or, on the other hand, to ‘direct one’s course’ at. If we place the
verb ‘to stretch’ next to ‘button,’ the result is a process of oscillation, of
continual stretching and shrinking through switching on or switching off,
opening or shutting.
42
Notably, intendere in Latin means to stretch
(tendere) toward (in-) which is also the meaning of intentionality: the
stretching towards or directing of one’s attention at the intentional object.
43
Stein’s ‘Buttons’ are ‘Tender’ because they, through our necessary
participation as readers, are stretched back and forth between the pre-
reflective and the reflective, the ‘thing in itself’ and the object as named,
‘perceptual meaning,’ as Merleau-Ponty calls it, and ‘language meaning.’
The process of reading/eating Stein’s ‘Apple’ in Tender Buttons, which
we attempted in Chapter 2, then, is tantamount to a passage through
Merleau-Ponty’s écart and can be described as a hyperdialectical process
without synthesis, a movement beyond simple dichotomies through an
ongoing ‘stretching’ back and forth between pre-reflective experience and
the surface of language, between the appleyness of the apple and its outline,
the lid of a box and its contents (as in Stein’s ‘A Box’), a cushion cover and
its substance (as in Stein’s ‘A Substance in a Cushion’), the peel of an
orange and its leaking centre (as in Stein’s ‘Orange’).
44
The cushion
covers, box lids or fruit peel in Tender Buttons refer to our usual mode of
discourse, a form of clothing in itself, which Stein’s radical compositions
loosen, so that the essence of the thing can show itself.
45
What we end up
with is a continual opening and questioning of perceptual experiences that
avoids a totalising understanding. The engine of this process is a shift of
standpoint tantamount to phenomenological reduction, always leaving the
reader with a feeling of what Stein in ‘Composition as Explanation’ calls
‘beginning again and again.’ The reader of Stein’s text is a perpetual
beginner.
In her study of Stein, Berry notes that Stein’s reader must adopt ‘a
paradoxical split of attention—a relaxed hyperattention, an unconscious
hyperconsciousness, a borderline state of awareness a little like insomnia.’
By contrast, ‘hyperdialectic’ sheds new light on the auto-critical ‘hyper’
attentiveness of Stein’s reader and grounds her compositions in the
‘unreflective’ but material life of embodied experience. ‘Beginning again
and again,’ Stein’s writing lays bare the usually unperceived divergence
between perceptual meaning and language meaning where ‘hyperdialectic’
occurs, a passage that cannot be closed, according to Merleau-Ponty, as it is
the necessary ‘process of coming into appearance . . . grounded in the
specific things themselves.’
46
As pre-reflective engagement with the world is always rooted in the
materiality of the body, I want to demonstrate the occurrence of
‘hyperdialectic’ by briefly turning to Paul Lightfoot and Sol León’s 2003
dance production Shutters Shut as performed by Nederlands Dans Theater
(NDT) to the remarkably soothing voice of Gertrude Stein reading her own
‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ (1923).
47
Like Stein’s
‘Apple,’ ‘If I Told Him’ expresses the interaction and interdependence of
words as they oscillate between shaping and re-shaping meaning, reflecting
the dynamic nature of perceptual experience. Once again, the
phenomenological horizon is perpetually extended and meaning is
constantly decentred as language is being interrogated:

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would
he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like
it if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon
if I told him. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him.
If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters
and so shutter shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so
shutters shut and so shutter shut and shutters and so. And so shutters
shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance
as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly
resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly
and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
48

If we think we are going to get a literary portrait about Picasso, then we are
mistaken. Likewise, Shutters Shut is not about anything but the movement
of the two bodies, a modern day Adam and Eve from a pre-linguistic,
purely gestural world who have not yet eaten the apple. Stein is not
interested in description, that is to say, objectivising interpretation. Instead
her composition is eidetic, expressing essence as opposed to external
identity. For instance, the essence of Picasso resembles that of Napoleon
who is mentioned several times. Much like Napoleon and ‘[e]xactly or as
kings,’ ‘Picasso ha[d] his splendour,’ Stein tells us in Picasso, and, much
like Napoleon, Picasso was the embodiment of imaginative greatness and
took risks—he was a genius and had ‘another vision than that of all the
world [which] is very rare.’ But if Picasso is the modernist ‘king’ of visual
portraiture, Stein is the ‘queen’ of an inverted vision of verbal portraiture,
which is equally rare; ‘I was alone in understanding [Picasso],’ Stein
stresses, ‘perhaps because I was expressing the same things in literature.’
49
The variations of inverted parallelisms or rhetorical ‘chiasms’ that
characterise ‘If I told Him’ in the first six lines—‘If I told him would he
like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon
would Napoleon would would he like it.’—is mirrored by the dancers in
Shutters Shut whose synchronised movements mirror each other
chiasmatically in inverted parallels that are almost ‘exactly resembling.’
50
As mentioned earlier, Merleau-Ponty also uses the notion of the ‘chiasm’ as
a key figure in The Visible and the Invisible. As we are all caught up in the
flesh of the world as both perceiving and perceived beings, the structure of
all experience is an intertwined ‘chiasm,’ indicating an event that is neither
a complete separation nor a complete unity between mute perception and
speech, the sentient and the sensible. Rather, it is that ‘general thing,
midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea.’
51
It is because Shutters Shut, like Stein’s portrait, unfolds in this usually
unperceived crossover space that it seems at once absurd and truthful. As
one journalist put it, this ‘dance of gestures’ was ‘making sense in the same
way its text score, Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of
Picasso,” does: not at all, and completely.’
52
‘Mean[ing] names without
naming them,’ in a truly Steinian manner the dancers are literally moving
through the écart, the ‘eternal dehiscence’
53
and temporal space in which
hyperdialectic is inscribed, where purely gestural meaning and language
meaning cross. But, as ‘one thing is as important as another thing,’ so too
are the processes of watching Shutters Shut and of reading Stein’s text
tantamount to a passing through the écart that perpetually opens onto
meaning and yet shuts out totalising meaning: ‘Shutters shut and shutters
and so shutter shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut
and so shutter shut and shutters and so.’ Underlining that ‘insistence is
alive’ and that ‘exact resemblance,’ the mimetic representation known from
nineteenth-century realism, bringing into being an ‘exact’ portrait of reality,
can never be attained, the rhythm of Stein’s words is, as pointed out in ‘The
Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,’ ‘endlessly the same and
endlessly different’: ‘Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact
resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly
resembling.’ Knowing that the flow of perceptual consciousness is
‘remoulding us every moment’ and that we cannot escape the fate of
perception, the ‘now’ of portraiture is always already a belated ‘not now’:
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘hyperdialectic’ emphasises the importance of
experience as praxis: experience is not ‘“in between” (dia) Being and
beings, but rather “throughout” it . . . For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy moves
toward and becomes the experience of the world.’
54
Visualising Stein’s
modernist project, expressing the ‘rhythm of the visible world’ and literally
‘acting within [the word],’
55
Shutters Shut is the physical experience as the
bodies live through the rhythm of Stein’s words. Just as the meaning of the
portrait emerges through the different levels of ‘insistence’ placed on each
word as Stein reads it—thus taking her bearings from Cézanne and
allowing each part of the composition to be as important as the whole—so
meaning emerges through the moving bodies. What we see is a Kafkaesque,
topsy-turvy and ‘inverted’ world like that of Gregor in Metamorphosis. The
NDT performance is truly a presentation of ‘the speaking word’ (la parole
parlante), as Merleau-Ponty called it, ‘in which the significant intention is
at the stage of coming into being.’
56
Shutters Shut is the flesh of the world laid bare. The purely ‘fleshy’
communication of the dancers in Shutters Shut expresses beautifully how
Stein’s portrait of Picasso pulls the protective layer off our everyday world
of communication, opening onto to the silent but expressive life of the bare
bodies inhabiting them. Thus, presenting us with an anti-intellectualism
directed against static and formal aspects of knowledge, the aim of Stein’s
modernist composition is to embrace language from within. Stripped of the
‘clothes’ of ready-made reality, the words of this empress of the modernist
composition reveal, as Stein puts it, ‘how you are feeling inside you to the
words that are coming out to be outside of you.’
57

Rhythms of Hyperdialectic: Woolf


We begin again with Woolf’s waves in a sea: ‘Another general awakening.’
58
‘I am writing to a rhythm and not to plot,’ wrote Woolf about her play-

poem. The rhythmic pulse of hyperdialectic is at work in Woolf’s The


Waves, just like waves in a sea fold over themselves, break and vanish only
to emerge again from below; ‘immanence and transcendence are
intertwined with each other, and neither is given totally in any single
experience.’
59
The six essences in the play-poem are neither identical nor
completely opposed; rather, they are free variations of the ‘flesh of the
world,’ which expresses itself through the never-ending wave-like
movement of mutual alterity and convergence.
I have used Merleau-Ponty’s notions of ‘interworld’ and ‘flesh’ to shed
a new light on the ‘unsubstantial territory’ of The Waves, the crossover
territory between seer and seen, and between touching and touched which is
‘not an obstacle between them; it is their means of communication.’
60
Embracing pluralism and denying both dualism and monism, the structure
of flesh, I have stressed, is chiasmatic, referring to a folding over of the
sentient and the sensible, the very ‘there where the two movements cross,
there where “there is” something.’
61
Conveying the polyphony and
polysemy of reality, Woolf’s book presents us with ‘an intersubjective field
of different bodies, each with its own distinct but overlapping history.’
62
Central to the tensions between reduction and expansion, mutual
separation and interrelation in The Waves is the silent figure of Percival. It
is through the death of Percival that Bernard rediscovers a more original
vision of the ‘thing itself.’ At the time of Percival’s death, Bernard’s own
child is born, making him sense the ‘two sides of [his] body’ and wonder:
‘Which is happiness?’ … ‘Which is pain?’
63
This double feeling adds to
our understanding of the pattern of ‘perpetual beginning’ at the heart of
hyperdialectic. Percival’s death primarily leaves Bernard with a feeling of
doubt, recalling Lily Briscoe’s paralysing doubts after Mrs Ramsay’s death
in To the Lighthouse about how to make her first ‘mark’ on the blank
canvas in front of her.
64
Like Lily’s sense of ‘nakedness’ when faced with
the blank stare of her canvas,
65
Bernard is overwhelmed by a lack of
creative ideas: ‘Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden
conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the
waste of this immeasurable sea.’ This doubt and despair, however, is
combined with an experience of wonder and joy, making ‘the landscape
return to [Bernard] . . . but with this difference.’
66
Recalling the
‘snowfield’ in ‘On Being Ill,’
67
Bernard now moves about in a fresh
‘wintry landscape,’ a ‘new world, never trodden,’ and ‘is unable to speak
save in a child’s words of one syllable’: ‘So I went out. I saw the first
morning he would never see—the sparrows were like toys dangled from a
string by a child. To see without attachment, from the outside, and to realize
their beauty in itself—how strange!’
68
Objectification is put out of play and
the wonder at presence takes over, ‘the strangest of all experiences’
69
that
is the condition of possibility of the ordinary. Once again, the doubt that
Woolf presents us with ‘has its place in the realm of our perfect freedom’
70
: doubt is not a dead end but a sign of openness to the world, a ‘dawn . . .
some sort of renewal.’
71
We begin again at the end of Woolf’s short story ‘An Unwritten Novel.’
Just a split second after the narrator realises that there are in fact no stories,
that ‘Life’s bare as a bone,’ the visible world ‘floats [her] afresh!’
72
The
‘white light’ that illuminates the ‘carnations’ and ‘chrysanthemums’
73
of
this short story’s end scene recalls the ‘chrysanthemums,’ and the ‘light
upon the page’ that opened ‘The Mark on the Wall.’
74
The light and
whiteness bring to mind the creator’s ‘never-resting mind,’
75
to borrow
from Stevens, and the blankness of the writer’s new page.
It is often from behind a window, a threshold of perception, that a
certain double vision of Woolf’s creative selves unfolds, where the
perceiver moves towards and yet self-consciously withdraws from the
world, standing neither quite inside nor outside their own position. While
looking down upon the world ‘from an upper window,’ the narrator in A
Room of One’s Own wonders how the human mind can both ‘separate itself
from the people in the street,’ and ‘think with other people . . . as, for
instance, in a crowd.’
76
This brings us back to a moment in Mrs Dalloway
where Clarissa ‘slice[s] like a knife through everything’ but is ‘at the same
time . . . outside, looking on.’
77
It is also from behind a window that Mrs
Ramsay in To the Lighthouse moves into and yet self-consciously away
from her object, the rhythmic, flashing light of the lighthouse, constantly
sending signals from the island to the mainland through the ‘stream’ of ‘life
itself going on.’
78
The six essences in The Waves are, on the one hand, part
of this surging stream, but are, on the other hand, above it, looking down
from their dry ‘islands of light.’
79
Just as the moth in the essay ‘The Death
of the Moth,’ which flutters about at ‘the bottom of the window-pane’ but
fails to fly across it, 80
symbolises the creative artist’s simultaneous
withdrawal from and connection with the world beyond its window, so
Woolf’s moth-like essences fly about in endless circles of perpetual
beginning; oscillating between moving towards and withdrawing from the
world, they ‘expand, contract and then expand again.’
81
This movement of
withdrawal and return is, moreover, conveyed by their suspended present
tense soliloquies, pulling us, the readers, in and then pushing us out. Much
like Lily Briscoe, we are challenged to ‘[g]et that and start afresh, get that
and start afresh’ and become ‘perpetual beginners.’
82
Just as Stein, in
‘Poetry and Grammar,’ stresses that ‘writing should go on,’
83
implying that
the artistic process is a part of the whole, that it corresponds with the
continuity of the world within which we exist, so Woolf points out in
‘Modern Fiction’: ‘All that we can do is keep on moving, now a little in this
direction, now in that . . . It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to
stand, even momentarily, upon the vantage ground.’
84
What emerges from my discussion, then, is that the impossibility of the
complete reduction, that is to say, the impossibility of fully grasping what
Woolf calls ‘the essential thing,’ should not to be taken as a ‘product of
crisis’ or a sign of futility. Rather, it is the key to a ‘paradoxical
interrogative openness’
85
around which Woolf’s work gravitates.
Beginnings are full of promise and the creator’s only hope in a modern,
broken world—a world of what Bernard calls ‘odds and ends, sticks and
straws, detestable little bits of wreckage, flotsam and jetsam, floating on the
oily surface.’
86
As Patrick McGee perceptively remarks, ‘Bernard’s
discourse is the fin of The Waves: to exploit the bilingual pun in fin, it is le
fin—the end, the aim, the conclusion’
87
—an end which can, however,
never offer closure but only a new opening. Thus Bernard attempts to
express the world he experiences, to ‘ne[t] [it] under with a sudden phrase,’
like a ‘fin’ can be netted in ‘a waste of waters’: ‘“Fight! Fight!”. . . it is the
effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and
piecing together—this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing
pursuit.’
88
Setting this fight against ‘the eternal renewal, the incessant rise
and fall and fall and rise again’ of a horizon of continuity, which is too
‘gigantic’ to be fully ‘coax[ed] into words,’
89
Woolf directly expresses the
rejection of totalisation and returns to her own beginning—her own lifelong
quest to express a pre-linguistic ‘fin . . . far out.’

Stevens’s Never-Ending Meditation


For Wallace Stevens, ‘the central poem, is the poem of the whole, / The
poem of the composition of the whole,’ a ‘composition’ in which every
‘poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res and not about it.’
90
Being
‘Part of the res,’ Stevens’s poems call attention to ‘a total double-thing,’
91
which has much in common with the ‘double nature’ of both Merleau-
Ponty’s hyperdialectic and Derrida’s deconstruction, philosophies that
remains aware of but ‘can never recapture the pre-reflective faith.’
92
Stevens’s ‘Notes’ in ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,’ signifying both the
musical notes of his ‘Supreme Fiction,’ his poetry, and the note-taking
phase of aesthetic production, lie in the perpetual movement ‘toward a
Supreme Fiction,’ in between ‘an original past, a past that has never been a
present’ and what is still to become.
93
Like Stein’s ‘buttons’ and Woolf’s
‘marks’—the ‘mark’ as creative starting point in ‘The Mark on the Wall’
and Lily Briscoe’s first mark on her blank canvas—Stevens’s poetic ‘notes’
are fissures that simultaneously divide and join, bringing to light the
passage of creative production itself—that fertile passage between pre-
reflective intentionality (the ‘first idea’) and articulation; between the
‘poem of the idea’ and ‘the poem of the words.’
94
Double in nature, they
open up a creative process while pointing back to the pre-communicative
source of this creativity.
In the final stanza of ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’ the poet
writes: ‘It is not in the premise that reality / Is a solid. It may be a shade that
traverses / A dust, a force that traverses a shade.’
95
Poetry, Stevens taught
us in Chapter 3, ‘has to be living.’ It has to reflect the ‘living’ experience of
a world of perpetual change. Hence, ‘Supreme Fiction,’ which is part of the
fluctuation of the whole of reality, can never be a ‘solid.’ Rather, it lies
neither in the written nor the unwritten, but in the living movement between
mute perception and words, and ongoing movement toward, unfinished and
infinite, between ‘that ever-early candor’ of the ‘first idea’ and the ‘late
plural’ of poetic trope. 96
So, ‘does the poet / Evade us, as in a senseless element?’ as ‘the poem
goes from the poet’s gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back
again’?
97
From our discussion we can conclude that he does not. His
poems’ emphasis on interaction between ‘ever-early candor’ and ‘late
plural,’ leading the reader into an ‘a perspective that begins again,’ is
neither ‘structureless, fluid, and volatile,’
98
nor a sign of imaginative
limitation, leaving the poetic self in isolation, despair or self-enclosure. On
the contrary, it ‘satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning,’ suggesting
that the poet’s domain is one of perpetual opening.
99
As Merleau-Ponty
taught us, the impossibility of complete reduction becomes a philosophical
theme and should not be taken as a dead end but as a means to an end.
Similarly, in Stevens, the never-ending oscillations between ‘an immaculate
beginning’ and ‘an immaculate end’ should not to be taken as a sign of
futility but as a perpetual opening onto ‘the giant himself,’
100
the infinite
ground of expression. As ‘the partaker partakes of that which changes him,’
the self in Stevens is always in an implicit relation to a pregiven and infinite
world of change; as ‘Sailing After Lunch’ reminds us, he is ‘a pupil of the
gorgeous wheel,’ which turns and turns and is ‘part of the never-ending
meditation / Part of the question that is a giant himself.’ This, Stevens
asserts, is a ‘final good.’
101

Readiness for Questionability: Kafka


Kafka’s Gregor Samsa awakes one morning and begins again but in an
entirely new way. Our objective notions about experience and certainties of
common sense are never rejected in Metamorphosis; rather, ‘because,
precisely as the presuppositions of every thought, they are “taken for
granted” and they pass unnoticed . . . we must abstain from them for a
moment in order to awaken them and make them appear.’
102
Thus, in
Metamorphosis we scrutinise hitherto taken-for-granted familiarity. In
Chapter 2, we were introduced to Gregor’s inverted world through a radical
questioning. Responding to Husserl’s cry for ‘Back to the things
themselves’ in his return to pre-theoretical ‘matters themselves,’
103
Heidegger presents us with ‘authentic philosophizing’ through
questionability, a countermovement to the Ruinanz of factic life, disclosing
‘a radically temporal thought enacted before the constructed regions of the
objectification of being’ that is outside the frame of common time.
104
Heidegger’s readiness for questionability as an encouragement to openness
anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s hyperdialectic. Patrick Burke writes:

This primitive interrogation of wonder is the strangest of all


experiences because it is openness upon the strange. It is strangeness
itself. Merleau-Ponty resumes Claudel’s analysis of the strange as it
appears in banal questions as ‘What time is it?,’ ‘Where am I?’ As
long as we feel ‘at home,’ as long as one consults a watch or a map
for the ‘answer,’ these questions are not strange. But there are
moments when the sense of home becomes infected by a kind of
disease . . . , when the clock and the map suddenly become
conspicuous in themselves, stand out against a background in terms
of which they appear to have been arbitrarily placed, when the
questions find themselves animated by a deeper questioning. . . .
These are the questions of the sick or threatened individual beyond
the frontiers of the familiar world who, wanting to ‘situate his levels
and measure his standards’ in order to dissipate the strangeness,
ends up increasing it. For there is no end to the process, there is no
absolute dimension in terms of which everything else can be
determined or measured; and so the imagination, in search of
totality, finds itself flooded by something wild and unseen, by the
simultaneity and eternity of everything, by an abyssal presence, both
visible and invisible, out of which (the imagination) arises but which
it cannot frame.
105

The abyssal in this sense, Burke explains, is ‘the most rudimentary


openness at the core of perception,’
106
the ‘wonder’ before the world that
Fink spoke of and that is the most exact formulation of the reduction.
107
‘What has happened to me?’; ‘Will you give a true account of all this?’
Gregor Samsa’s unheard questions, unlocking the door of the rabbit hole
through which we fall with him down an ‘abyssal presence,’ are questions
that open onto ‘brute being,’
108
a wild and unframed experience. But I
primarily read Kafka’s novella in dialogue with Heidegger, not Merleau-
Ponty. The former’s re-evaluation of phenomenology in terms of
questioning does not offer an exploration of reversibility between the
sentient and sensible that is the structure of Merleau-ponty’s flesh.
Significantly, the Samsa family, trapped in everyday habits, have lost ‘all
the sense of their difference and that of others.’
109
Unlike Gregor, they
have lost the ability to question and to wonder, which is only made possible
by the reversibility of the flesh. Gregor’s own questioning is no longer
heard, just like he is no longer really seen. What Kafka shows us is that
without reversibility, without true intersubjectivity, humans become what
Hannah Arendt calls ‘tool[s] of active destruction.’
110
Yet, to turn the
everyday, banal world on its head and scrutinise its ‘necessity,’ while
dangling upside down from the ceiling, offers a brief moment of light and a
glimmer of hope. Another such moment occurs when Gregor hears his
sister playing the violin—‘Was he an animal, when music had such an
effect upon him?’
111
—which, like Proust’s little phrase, ‘doubles up lights
and sounds from beneath,’ illuminating an ‘opening of a dimension that can
never again be closed.’ This opening residing within Kafka’s bleak tale
points to a rhythm that not only exists in musical phrases but that ‘lies at the
origin of all art’ and corresponds with ‘the rhythm of being.’
112
Herein lies
the potential for counter-ruination and self-recollection.

‘Man is Half a Prisoner, Half Borne on Wings’:


Klee, Hopkins
Painting always begins again, according to Klee, through some ‘primordial
cell set in motion by fertilisation.’
113
The idea of motion is foundational for
Klee’s philosophy:

Movement is inherent in all becoming, and before the work is, it


must become, just as the world became before it was, after the
words, ‘In the beginning God created,’ and must go on becoming
before it is (will be) in the future.
114

Klee’s angels, we saw, are unfinished, forever in a ‘transitional realm.’


There is, however, a one-winged creature from Klee’s earlier work that
seems to bring together the paradox of his intellectual approach and that is
the etching ‘The Hero with the Wing’ (‘Der Held mit dem Flügel’) from
1905.
115
This half-figure is commented upon in one of Klee’s diary entries:

Berne, January 1905. The tragicomic hero with the wing, a modern-
antique Don Quixote. Unlike the divine creatures born with only one
angel’s wing, this man is forever trying to fly. He keeps breaking his
arms and legs, but that does not prevent him from clinging to his
idea of flight. I wished to capture the contrast between his
monumental-solemn attitude and his already ruinous state.
116

In 1922, Klee reflects upon a similar theme: ‘The source of man’s tragedy is
the contradiction between his physical weakness and his ideal ability to
measure both the earth and the cosmos at will. This conflict between power
and weakness is the dichotomy of human existence. Man is half a prisoner,
half borne on wings.’
117
We are reminded of such ‘neo-heroic’ modernist
figures as Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, both of
whom fail more than they succeed but remain some of the most human
figures of the modernist period. We are also reminded of the doubleness and
necessary moment of ‘buckling’ in Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover,’ in which
the catcher of the flight of a bird was both ‘impassioned [passionelle]’ and
passive, in possession of his desires for complete creative freedom and
flight and yet dispossessed because of pre-established significations. The
‘living’ art of Hopkins’s poetry, I noted, is a form of parole parlante, an
operant and fertile language in the making. This art can only be living if
there is a hyperdialectical coming and going between sedimented or
‘constituted’ language and that operative language that is an ‘unthought,’
118
continually criss-crossing the body-subject and world, the pre-reflective

and the reflective, without subsuming one by the other.


119
‘What then is Freedom?’ asks Merleau-Ponty in the final chapter of
Phenomenology of Perception. It is found exactly in this interlacing of the
passive and the impassioned:

To be born is to be simultaneously born of the world and to be born


into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never
completely constituted. In the first relation we are solicited, in the
second we are open to an infinity of possibilities. Thus, there is
never determinism and never an absolute choice; I am never a mere
thing and never a bare consciousness. . . . We choose the world and
the world chooses us.
120

It is in the reciprocal openness between the world and the individual, and
between the creative and the sedimented, that freedom is found. And
perhaps this is what it looks like: a poet who continues to catch the
epiphanic moment regardless of the buckling under of that moment; a one-
winged hero refusing to give up the dream of flight despite his fragile
body’s broken limbs.
From our first encounter with tempting apples through creative flight
with birds, the hesitation of earthly angels and the intersubjectivity of
humans, we have reached that ‘unlimited’ and ‘strange domain to which
interrogation . . . gives access’ and ‘once we have entered this strange
domain one does not see how there could be any question of leaving it.’
121
It is the domain of flesh and primordial faith lying at the heart of modernist
texts and artworks—a domain that never ceases to question itself and
returns us to the fruit of knowledge but in a secular way, designating the
wonder of creativity itself. The phenomenological lesson at the end of this
modernist adventure, braiding together strands of literature, philosophy and
art history, is that we exist as both pre-reflective and reflective beings
simultaneously; both open to the world and free to influence change while
shaped by the pre-established meanings of that same world. This is why the
fine balance between rigour and freedom in approaching the modernist text
or artwork remains so important. Our final image is that of a one-winged
neo-heroic angel-man, ‘condemned to being-at-the-world-from-within-it,’
122
who will always fail to fly and yet continues to question and choose his

world within this world.


Notes
1.
Husserl, Ideas, 29.  
2.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 178.  
3.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxviii.  
4.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 18.  
5.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxviii.  
6.
Cahn, Paul Cézanne, 125.  
7.
Cézanne, Cézanne’s Letters, 327.  
8.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 214.  
9.
Husserl, Ideas, 198.  
10.
Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 161.  
11.
Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg, ‘Introduction: Phenomenology,  
Modernism and Beyond,’ in Phenomenology, Modernism and
Beyond, 10.
12.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the  
Flesh,’ 407.
13. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxv.

 
14.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the  
Flesh,’ 405.
15.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxviii.  
16.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 52, 103.  
17.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.  
18.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94, 95, 94.  
19.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxv.  
20.
See Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, xv, 62–63. See also  
Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), 33–35.
21.
Len Lawlor, ‘The Need for Survival: The Logic of Writing in  
Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,’ Tympanum 4 (2000), accessed 20
January 2016, http://​www.​usc.​edu/​dept/​comp-lit/​tympanum/​4/​lawlor.​
html. See also Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at
the Limits of Phenomenology, ix-xxxvii.
22.
Gary Brent Madison, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: La différEnce,’ in  
M.C. Dillon, ed., Écart and Différance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida
on Seeing and Writing (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997), 104.
23.
Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, 58.  
24.
Ibid., 74.  
25.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 8.  
26. James, The Principles of Psychology, 234.  
27.
Ibid., 304.  
28.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 242.  


29.
Ibid., Ixxx.  
30.
Ibid., 38–39.  
31.
Kaushik, Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty, 4.  
32.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94–95; my italics.  
33.
As M.C. Dillon explains, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that ‘it is  
possible to do perceptual justice to both history and perception
without lapsing into the framework of dualistic ontology,’ in M.C.
Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1988), 213.
34.
See Jacques Taminiaux, ‘From Dialectic to Hyperdialectic,’  
Research in Phenomenology 10.1 (1980): 76.
35.
Galen A. Johnson, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique: The  
Beautiful and the Sublime,’ in Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art,
Religion, and Perception, 50.
36.
Hugh J. Silverman, ‘Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Interpreting  
Hegel,’ Research in Phenomenology 7 (1977): 223, 222.
37.
Patrick Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ Ontology and Alterity in  
Merleau-Ponty, eds. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 90.
38.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94, 92.  
39. Diana Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from
Kant to Poststructuralism (London and New York: Routledge,
2000), 141.  
40.
Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 204.  
41.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxiv.  
42.
See my article ‘Seeing Fine Substances Strangely: Phenomenology  
in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,’ Studia Phaenomenologica VIII
(2008): 259–282.
43.
In Ideas, Husserl writes that in intentional experience ‘the subject  
“directs” itself … towards an intentional object’ (121).
44.
Stein, Tender Buttons, 3, 4, 6, 38.  
45.
The cushion covers, boxes, fruit peel or concealing garments in ‘A  
Box,’ ‘Orange,’ ‘A Long Dress’ and ‘A Substance in a Cushion’ in
Stein’s Tender Buttons refer to our usual mode of discourse, a form
of clothing in itself, which Stein’s radical compositions loosen, so
that the essence of the thing can show itself.
46.
Kaushik, Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty, 12.  
47.
See the NDT production at: https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​  
yK2UCuVLi_​E, accessed 20 January 2016. I want to thank Vanessa
Mildenberg for reminding me of this performance.
48.
Gertrude Stein, ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,’ in  
Look at Me Now and Here I Am, 218. Gertrude Stein’s ‘If I Told
Him’ is quoted with permission from Peter Owen Publishers.
49.
Stein, Picasso, 50, 16, 43.  
50.
For more on the phenomenology of dance, see Maxine Sheets-  
Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (University of Wisconsin
Press, 1966).
51. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 264, 139.  
52.
Claudia La Rocco, ‘The Fires of Youth on a Restless Night,’ Dance  
Review: Nederlands Dans Theater II, in The New York Times (10
April, 2009), accessed 15 April 2013, http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2009/​
04/​11/​arts/​dance/​11neder.​html
53.
Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ 97.  
54.
Silverman, ‘Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Interpreting Hegel,’ 222.  
55.
Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946,’ 18.  
56.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 197.  


57.
Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I am,  
123.
58.
Woolf, The Waves, 247.  
59.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the  
Flesh,’ 412.
60.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 135.  
61.
Ibid., 94–95; my italics.  
62.
Lisa Guenther, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Sense of Sexual Difference,’  
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16.2 (2011): 29.
63.
Woolf, The Waves, 219.  
64. Lily Briscoe feels that ‘the urgency of the moment always missed its
mark’ and that ‘there was all the difference in the world between this  
planning airily away from the canvas, and actually taking the brush
and making the first mark’: ‘But … Where to begin? … at what
i k h fi k?’ S W lf T h Li h h 240
point to make the first mark?’ See Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 240,
213.
65.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 215.  
66.
Woolf, The Waves, 238, 239, 237.  
67.
Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, 46.  
68.
Woolf, The Waves, 239, 220.  
69.
Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ 93.  
70.
Husserl, Ideas, 107.  
71.
Woolf, The Waves, 247.  
72.
Woolf, ‘An Unwritten Novel,’ in Selected Short Stories, 36.  
73.
Ibid., 36.  
74.
Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall,’ in Selected Short Stories, 53.  
75.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 194.  
76.
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 96.  
77.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 10.  
78.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 228.  
79.
Ibid., 229.  
80.
Woolf, ‘The Death of the Moth,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern  
Life, 180.
81. Woolf, The Waves, 76.
 
82.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 261.  
83.
Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I am,  
130.
84.
Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ 5.  
85.
Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ 89.  
86.
Woolf, The Waves, 225.  
87.
McGee, ‘Woolf’s Other,’ 242.  
88.
Woolf, The Waves, 225, 157, 225.  
89.
Ibid., 247, 175.  
90.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 442, 473.  
91.
Ibid., 472.  
92.
Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, 61.  
93.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 252.  
94.
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 174.  
95.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 489.  
96.
Ibid., 382.  
97.
Ibid., 396.  
98. Theodore Sampson, A Cure of the Mind: The Poetics of Wallace
Stevens (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2000), 170.  
99.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 382, 528, 382; my italics.  
100.
Ibid., 465.  
101.
Ibid., 392,121, 405.  
102.
Merlea-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.  
103.
Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, 31.  
104.
Ibid., 11.  
105.
Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ 93; my italics.  
106.
Ibid., 94.  
107.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.  
108.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 57, 97, 110, 211, 168.  
109.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 68.  
110.
Arendt, Reflections on Literature, 101.  
111.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 53.  
112.
Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature and Music  
after Merleau-Ponty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2013), 123.
113.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, 6.  
114.
Ibid., 355.  
115.
See Grohmann, Paul Klee, 108.  
116. Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, 162.
 
117.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, 407.  
118.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 118, 119.  
119.
Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, 142.  
120.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 480–481.  
121.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 140, 152.  
122.
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, ‘Translators’  
Introduction,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, xxvi.
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© The Author(s) 2019
Ariane Mildenberg, Modernism and Phenomenology, Modernism and...
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_6

Correction

Correction to: On Apples, Broken Frames


and Fallenness: Phenomenology and the
Unfamiliar Gaze in Cézanne, Stein and
Kafka
Ariane Mildenberg1 

(1) School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

 
The updated online version of the chapter can be found at https://​doi.​org/​10.​
1057/​978-1-349-59251-7_​2

Correction to:
Chapter 2 in: A. Mildenberg,
Modernism and Phenomenology,
Modernism and...,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_2
The incorrect text on page 45 has been replaced with the following:
“According to John Berger, J.M.W. Turner, at once proud and critical of
the tradition into which he was born, ‘stopped painting totalities.”
In the Index, Berger, Peter, 45 has been replaced with Berger, John, 45.
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Index
A
aesthetics
Allan, Neil
alliteration
angels
apples
Arendt, Hannah
Aristotle
art
artists
artworks
assonance
atheism
Augenblick
See also øjeblik
auto-criticality
Aydede, Murat
B
Bachelard, Gaston
Ball, Hugo
Banfield, Ann
Batnitzky, Laura
Baudrillard, Jean
Beckett, Samuel
Becks-Malorny, Ulrike
beginnings
perpetual beginners
being-in-the-world
Benjamin, Walter
Bennett, Arnold
Benoist, J.
Bensmaïa, Réda
Berger, John
Bergson, Henri
Berman, Michael
Berry, Ellen E.
Bidney, Martin
body
See also mind-body dualism
body-subject
bracketing
See also epoché; natural attitude; reduction
braiding
Brentano, Franz
Briggs, Julia
Bürger, Peter
Burke, Patrick
Burns, Patrick
Butler, Christopher
Butler, Judith
C
Cartesianism
Caughie, Pamela L.
Cézanne, Paul
chiasm
See also
entrelacs; intertwining; reversibility;
Verflechtung
Christ
Chun, Maureen
Clark, T.J.
Cohen, Joseph
compound words
consciousness
Cosgrove, Peter
counter-ruination
creativity
crises of modernity
cubism
curiosity
D
decreation
dehiscence
See also écart; flesh
DeKoven, Marianne
Deleuze, Gilles
Dennett, Daniel C.
Derrida, Jacques
Descartes, René
Dillon, M.C.
discourse
doubling
doubt
E
Eagleton, Terry
écart
ecstasy
Edie, James M.
eidetic reduction
Eliot, T.S.
entrelacs
epiphanic moment
See also epiphany
epiphany
See also epiphanic moment
epoché
essences
Evans, Fred
expression
F
faith
fallenness
fall of man
‘Fifty Words for Snow’ (Bush, Kate)
Fink, Eugen
first-order experience
first philosophy
flesh
folds and folding
unfolding
framelessness
frames and framing
free variation
fringe of experience
G
Gallagher, Shaun
Galsworthy, John
Gasquet, Henry
Gasquet, Joachim
gaze, unfamiliar
Geist, Sidney
God
Greenberg, Clement
Griffin, Roger
Grohmann, Will
ground
Guattari, Felix
Guiguet, Jean
Günzel, Stephen
H
Hartmann, Geoffrey
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Heidegger, Martin
Henke, Suzette
Hennings, Terri J.
Heraclitus
Hines, Thomas J.
historicity
Hopfengart, Christine
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire,’
‘Pied Beauty,’
‘The Windhover,’
horizons
Husserl, Edmund
Hussey, Mark
Huyssen, Andreas
hyperdialectic
See also non-dialectic
I
immanence
impersonality
Impressionism
incompleteness
in-each-other
See also
Ineinander
Ineinander
See also in-each-other
inscape
intendere
intentionality
intersubjectivity
intertwining
interworld
introspection
inwardness
J
Jameson, Fredric
James, William
Johnson, Galen
Joyce, James
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
K
Kafkaesque
Kafka, Franz
Metamorphosis
The Trial
Kant, Immanuel
Katz, Tamar
Kaushik, Rajiv
Kearney, Richard
Kelly, Michael R.
Kern, Stephen
Kierkegaard, Søren
Klee, Paul
Koestler, Arthur
Kramer, Hilton
L
Lacan, Jacques
Landsberg, Paul L.
language
Lask, Emil
Laurence, Patricia Ondek
Lawlor, Leonard
Lawrence, D.H.
Lee, Hermione
Leonard, James S.
León, Sol
Levinas, Emmanuel
life-world
Lightfoot, Paul
lived experience
lived time
See also temporality
living art
Luchte, James
M
Macdonald, Paul S.
master-pieces
Matisse, Henri
Mattens, Filip
McGee, Patrick
meaning-giving
meaning-making
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Meyer, Eva
Miko, Stephen J.
Miller, J. Hillis
mimesis
mind-body dualism
monism
Moore, Madeline
Moore, Marianne
Moran, Dermot
Morrison, Mark S.
Murphy, Marguerite
mysticism
N
Naremore, James
Natanson, Maurice
natural attitude
natural ruination
natural world
Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT),
Shutters Shut
neo-heroism
Nietzsche, Friedrich
non-dialectic
noumenon
now, the
null-point (zero-point)
O
objectivity
objects
øjeblik
See also Augenblick
Original Sin
See also fallenness; Fall of Man
otherness
P
paradox
parole parlante
(speaking language)
parole parlée
(spoken language)
perception
Perlis, Alan
Picasso, Pablo
Plato
pointillism
Pondrom, Cyrena Norman
post-impressionism
postmodernism
poverty
praxis
pre-givenness
pre-reflective experience
pre-theory
Proust, Marcel,
In Search of Lost Time
Q
questionability
questioning
quest narratives
R
Rae, Patricia
Rawa, Julia
Raynova, Yvanka B.
realism
reduction
eidetic reduction
reflection
religion
reversibility
Reynolds, Jack
rhythm
Richter, Harvena
Rodier, Carole
Roffe, John
Rosenthal, Michael
Rosu, Anca
Ruinanz
See also fallenness
ruination
counter-ruination
rupture
Ryan, Derek
S
Sartre, Jean-Paul
Schapiro, Meyer
Schutz, Alfred
secularity
self
self-reflexivity
Seurat, Georges
Sheppard, Richard
sickness of modernity
silence
Smith, David Woodruff
Snaith, Anna
Sobolev, Dennis
speaking language (parole parlante)
spoken language (parole parlée)
Stein, Gertrude
Picasso
‘Poetry and Grammar,’
Tender Buttons
Stevens, Wallace
‘A Collect of Philosophy,’
‘Angel Surrounding by Paysans,’
The Necessary Angel
‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,’
Opus Posthumous
‘Poem Written at Morning,’
‘The Man with the Blue Guitar,’
‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’
‘The Snow Man,’
‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’
subject
subjectivity
See also intersubjectivity
Sylvester, David
T
taken-for-grantedness
temporality
See also lived time
thing itself
thinking
third-person narration
Toadvine, Ted
totality
translation
truth
Turner, J. M.W.
twentieth century
U
Uhlmann, Anthony
unfolding
V
Vaihinger, Hans
values
Verflechtung
visibility and invisibility
voice
W
Wadikar, M.L.
Ward, Bernadette Waterman
weaving
Weil, Simone
Weiss, Gail
Wells, H.G.
Wharton, Christine E.
Williams, William Carlos
Wilshire, Bruce
wonder
Woolf, Virginia
‘A Haunted House,’
‘A Mark on the Wall,’
‘An Unwritten Novel,’
diary
and hyperdialectic
Jacob

s Room
To the Lighthouse
‘Modern Fiction,’
Mrs Dalloway
‘On Being Ill,’
and Paul Cézanne
A Room of One

s Own
‘The Death of the Moth,’
‘The Leaning Tower,’
The Waves
The Waves: The Two Holograph Drafts
word-objects
words
compound words
writers
Z
Zahavi, Dan

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