Modernism and Phenomenology
Modernism and Phenomenology
Series Editor
Roger Griffin
Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, 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
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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).
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
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:
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 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
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’:
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’:
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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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© The Author(s) 2017
Ariane Mildenberg, Modernism and Phenomenology, Modernism and...
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_2
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
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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’:
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.
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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© The Author(s) 2017
Ariane Mildenberg, Modernism and Phenomenology, Modernism and...
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_3
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.
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:
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:
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
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
:
.................................
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
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.
Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk
‘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
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
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:
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’:
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
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:
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
:
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
‘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’:
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
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.
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
Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
Correction
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