Existence, Historical Fabulation, Destiny (Analecta Husserliana)

EXISTENCE, HISTORICAL FABULATION, DESTINY

A NA L E C TA H U S S E R L I A NA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VO L U M E I C

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Hanover, New Hampshire

For other titles published in this series, go to http://www.springer.com/series/5621

EXISTENCE, HISTORICAL FABULATION, DESTINY

Edited by A N NA - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A The World Phenomenological Institute, Hanover, NH, U.S.A.

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President

123

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009920093

ISBN 978-1-4020-9801-7 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-9802-4 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009  No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

THE THEME

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xi

PA RT I EXISTENCE, LOGOS, AND IMAGINATION JADWIGA SMITH / Contextualizing Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Concept of Fabulation

3

SECTION I LAWRENCE KIMMEL / The Mythic Journey of a Changeling

11

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ / Aura; Ontological Materiality of Existence and Fabulation

27

WILLIAM D. MELANEY / Sartre’s Phenomenology of History: Community, Agency and Comprehension

37

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE / Historical Fabulation as History by Other Means: Shakespeare’s Caesar and Mofolo’s Chaka as Opposites in Rubiconesque Leadership

51

MICHEL DION / The Dialectics Between Self, Time and Historical Change According to Milan Kundera

77

SECTION II FRANCK DALMAS / Lived Images/Imagined Existences: A Phenomenology of Image Creation in the Works of Michel Tournier and Photography

93

LUDMILA MOLODKINA / Aesthetic and Historical Framework of Russian Manor as a Genre

107

v

vi

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / The Portrait of A Real Live Man: Individuality, Moral Determination and Historical Myth in the Light of Henry James’s The American

113

REBECCA M. PAINTER / Healing Personal History: Memoirs of Trauma and Transcendence

139

MATTI ITKONEN / Once I Was: A Philosophical Excursion into the Metaphors of the Mind

155

SECTION III RAYMOND J. WILSON III / Existence and Historical Fabulation: The Example of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties

205

CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER / Metaphysical Fabulation in the Berkshires: Melville’s ‘Arrowhead’ and the Anachrony of Thought

219

BRUCE ROSS / Being is Believing: The Underpinnings of Walter Benjamin’s Deconstruction of Historicism

231

SECTION IV BERNADETTE PROCHASKA / Historic Fabulation and T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”

241

TSUNG-I DOW / Harmonious Balance as the Ultimate Reality in Artistic and Philosophical Interpretation of the Taiji Diagram

247

JERRE COLLINS / Time After Time: The Temporality of Human Existence in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

259

PA RT II

TOWARD DESTINY

SECTION I BERNADETTE PROCHASKA / Destiny in the Literature of Walker Percy, Leo Tolstoy and Eudora Welty

285

REBECCA M. PAINTER / The Interior Quest: Memoir, Lens of Personal Destiny

293

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

CEZARY JÓZEF OLBROMSKI / Collective Intentions and the Phenomenology of Time – The Theory of Non-Domination in Communication

vii

323

SECTION II ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ / Interpretation of Destiny

335

MICHEL DION / Human Destiny at the Edge of Existential Categories of Life: Musil and Kundera in Dialogue

345

SECTION III VICTOR KOCAY / Aspiring Beyond: French Romanticism, Nietzsche and Saint-John Perse

361

BRUCE ROSS / Words Turn into Stone Haruki Murakami’s after the quake

375

VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / On the Modern Opposition of Fate, Destiny, Life, Doom and Luck in the Light of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

383

RAYMOND J. WILSON III / Gail Godwin: Negotiating with Destiny in the Odd Woman and “Dream Children”

419

ROBERTO VEROLINI / The Soul and its Destiny: Readings and Dialogues on Science, Philosophy and Religion – A Meeting with Vito Mancuso and Orlando Franceschelli

431

NAME INDEX

451

THE THEME

Surging from the ontopoietic vital timing of life, human self-consciousness prompts the innermost desire to rise above its brute facts. Imaginatio creatrix inspires us to fabulate these facts into events and plots with personal significance attempting to delineate a life-course in life-stories within the ever-flowing stream – existence. Seeking their deep motivations, causes and concatenations, we fabulate relatively stabilized networks of interconnecting meaning – history. But to understand the meaning and sense of these networks’ reconfigurations call for the purpose and telos of our endless undertaking; they remain always incomplete, carried onwards with the current of life, while fluctuating with personal experience in the play of memory. Facts and life stories, subjective desires and propensities, the circumambient world in its historical moves, creative logos and mythos, personal freedom and inward stirrings thrown in an enigmatic interplay, prompt our imperative thirst for the meaning of this course, its purpose and its fulfillment – the sense of it all. To disentangle all this animates the passions of the literary genius. The focus of this collection is to isolate the main arteries running through the intermingled forces prompting our quest to endow life with meaning. A-T. T.

ix

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

Essays presented in this collection are gathered from two successive and thematically interlinked conferences of the International Society of Phenomenology and Literature (an affiliate of the World Phenomenology Institute) annual conferences, number 31 (held May 16th and 17th, 2007 at the Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts) under the title: Existence and Historical Fabulation and Conference number 32 (held on May 5th and 6th, 2008 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, Cambridge, Massachusetts) on the topic: Human Destiny in Literature. Our authors are sincerely thanked for their studious contributions and participation in the discussions which make an essential feature of our conventions. Our faithful secretary Jeff Hurlburt and Springer publisher deserve as usual thanks for their expert editorial help. A-T. T.

xi

PA RT I E X I S T E N C E , L O G O S , A N D I M AG I N AT I O N

SECTION I

L AW R E N C E K I M M E L

THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

Once upon a time, there was a creature that crawled out of the sea and. . . Once upon a time, there was a creature made perfect who met a serpent in a garden and. . . Once upon a time, there were heroic creatures on earth that strove against the gods and. . .

There are many such tales in the archaic moorings of our collective memory, but one in particular that seems inclusive if indeterminate: Once upon a time there was a creature that came out of the darkness with a only a faint memory of water, and sand, and cold, and fear to discover that its very life depended on telling a story about its origins—of which it had no clear memory, and its destiny—of which it had no certain knowledge. What more fabulous to conceive than this creature which, having lost its tail, dreams of growing wings? It is a being whose nature transforms itself and the world it inhabits but, for all this, keeps running up against its own limits: neither Ape nor Angel, it remains a creature caught between, looking through a fractured mirror at possibilities always just beyond reach. It is a changeling creature, a child seeming stolen from the gods. I

Historical fantasies in language and life: The nature and reach of language has been variously construed by philosophers with only a common acknowledgement that it is the single instrument we have toward a comprehensive critical discernment of life and world. It remains a critical issue, however, whether the entire range of meaning can and should be used in comprehending truth and reality. It may be well to clarify at the outset the difference in these two questions. Truth has many forms, indeed truth is a matter of form. Reality, on the other hand, however and wherever manifest, is a matter of flow rather than form. Its modality is one of continual transformation. If the limits of our world are the limits of our language, then it makes a world of difference if we confine our language to facts. Even the most fundamental forms of knowledge in science are discontinuous and subject to paradigm shifts, but reality is itself formless and suffers no such fixations. Inquiries concerning truth invariably require a calculus of language with an abridgment of meaning, but if we move 11 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 11–25. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

12

L AW R E N C E K I M M E L

from the question of what is true to what is real there can be no final abridgement of language and no abstractions into a calculus. The world of reality unlike the world of truth refers to the whole of what is possible—that is, to whatever is meaningful within the range and sense of language. In ancient classical philosophy the long standing ‘quarrel’ that Plato alludes to between literature and philosophy is framed in many different ways, most particularly as that between mythos and logos. It has an historical sequel in the divide between Plato’s rejection of the value of rhetorical discourse and its reinstatement by Aristotle. Two philosophers in the modern period have similarly commented on a kind of conceptual schism in the relation of language and world: With regard to Nietzsche’s rhetorical claim that there are no facts, only interpretations, Wittgenstein offered the logical corrective that not everything can be an interpretation. While these seem to be contradictory claims (as Wittgenstein so intended in his reminder to Nietzsche) they can also be regarded as compatible remarks about and within the world of sense and meaning. Interpretations can only be interpretations of something, of course, but that something can be other than a fact—e.g. it may be an assumption or postulate, or else be grounded in a social or existential commitment unrelated to a factual claim. The point here is that to call something a fact whether in common sense or science, is to give it a value, or accept it as constituted by a value. The world is not reducible to facts in the absence of some determining structure of agreement as to what will count as a fact. In scientific discourse and practice this is commonly expressed as ‘all observations are theory laden’ with the general implication that all seeing is ‘seeing as. . .’ To put it differently, no intelligible world—including that of physics—consists in a totality of facts. The world in which we live is not made up simply of things, nor is it comprehended by facts: facts are not the building blocks of meaning, only one of its potential attributes which in turn requires interpretation. To put the matter in terms other than interpretation and as it will be addressed in this essay: the world in which we live is meaningful in terms of the stories that we tell, stories that we share, stories we remember and stories that we live. Stories and the lives they embrace are neither constituted nor limited by an independent description of facts. They are formed and edited in terms of the perspectives and interpretations we bring to the experiences we share. Aristotle’s indelible inscription in the bedrock of western thought—that Man is a creature with Logos—is a point of departure and a point directly in question concerning the issue historical fabulation. In the specific context and currency of his time Aristotle’s definition focused on the rational discourse of self governance so that his original claim split into the memorialized definition

THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

13

that as a possessor of Logos or speech, Man is a rational and a political animal. These two features of Logos are of course the result of an interpretation of a founding claim that intellectual history has since adopted as the defining capacity of human-being. So understood it has the effect of restricting the cognitive limits of language to discursive reason. But another interpretation can and has been given to ‘Man is a creature with Logos’ (words/ speech/ language) that does not center in logic nor serve the narrow limits of control in reason and rule. As a creature with Logos, Man is understood as having the capacity to tell stories—that is, as an alternative to Aristotle’s governing definition, Man is a story-telling animal. Man is a creature graced not only in a faculty needed to reason and govern, but able to put her life and experience into stories. The stories we live by are legion—collectively they comprise the different human concerns investigated by religion, history, philosophy, biology, economics. . . Within each of these collective accounts the dominant interpretation in western intellectual and political history has been that of rule and reason, logic and legislation—that is, it has biased Aristotle’s interpretation of Logos. This bias has tended to establish and direct the central use of language to that of control—of the environment, of the world, of others, of ourselves. Such a bias in philosophical terms represents an ambition to reduce meaningful discourse to the category of facts and so use language (Logos) to constrain the myriad possibilities of imagination toward a matrix of control. This project was made explicit in logical positivism but it is residual as well in the general culture. It is instructive to consider what a shared life-world would become if it were reduced to a discourse of facts, in which no stories are told, or rather, just one story, the recounting of facts according to the master narrative in which all facts are given or from which they are derived. As a case in point, and reflective of a dominant male culture still in keeping with the Classical Greek bias, the traditional form of autobiography has been that of factual summary. In Lionel Trilling’s wonderful story about college teaching, Of This Time, Of that Place. . ., a class of first year students is assigned to write an initial essay about who they are and why they have come to the college. The responses all take the form: ‘My name is James Bierbower III. I was born on. . .in. . .and went to school at. . .my father, James Bierbower II and his father. . . were born and raised. . .’—a series of related facts and events that frame the endowed life of an entitled class at a small liberal arts college. The one exception to this litany of sameness is a student who begins his essay by seeming to reject the essay question: ‘Of this time, of that place, of some heritage. . . what does that matter to those of us now engaged in the creative adventure of learning. . .?’ It turns out, of course, that it does matter, and throughout the term, the teacher is hard pressed and finally unable to locate this student on any spectrum of acceptable

14

L AW R E N C E K I M M E L

discourse and decides that he cannot pass his work. However brilliant in other ways, the boy simply does not fit in, nor fit the mold of common sensibility grounded in the factual discourse of learning and life. His work is eventually consigned to a discard pile of student failures. There is a tragic context in the telling of this story which would take us aside from the limited point of our interest here which is to note the standard of autobiography in the listing of facts and events in standard categories of social accountability. In contrast to this factual encasement the emerging literature of the feminine movement has produced new voices that have found a different way to shape the possibilities of autobiography more in keeping with the complexities of our changing life stories. In this literature a life-story can well begin at any point that constitutes a significant sense of its coherence and importance, nor is one limited to a single starting point or narrative. One might begin a story of her life: ‘I was abandoned by my parents. . .’ and so a life narrative unfolds in terms of that critical perception and experience. But at another juncture, or just as well, this autobiography may be transformed along with the life of its telling: ‘I first met my birth mother on my graduation from middle school. . .’ Where one starts is critical for the narrative, obviously, and also critical for the life of its telling, but that place is not assigned by any objective order in terms of its importance or the coherence of the narrative. Language is a tool for many purposes, and the meaning of a life cannot be determined independently of the story in which it is framed; to the extent that there are optional narratives, there exist also different life possibilities. No one is stuck with one set of determining facts, no matter how hard the circumstances of her life. In a world fast losing its tether to religious conviction, moral objectivity, universal reason, political solvency, ecological sensibility. . .it may be that all we have left are stories to replace the once endowed gods, the enshrined templates of True, Good, Beautiful, Sacred. . .except of course that the gods and these various testaments were all and in themselves stories and the products of stories. Hopefully we can avoid succumbing to any insistence that there is only one way to see the world (e.g. physics), one way to consider life (biology), as once people were persuaded or forced to think there was but one God—their own (theology.) I trust it is not necessary to note here that this is in no way to dismiss the importance of any particular story—e.g. physics or biology—or to debunk any efforts to assess truth, goodness, or the sacred. This is only to suggest that the meaning and value of any discourse is related to the context of the stories being told. Our lives individually and collectively are comprised of stories in which events are recorded, interpreted, evaluated, edited, but also in which possibilities, disappointments, alternatives, dreams, regrets, hopes are woven into the narrative; occasionally, our experiences may be sufficiently shaken by joy or

THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

15

sorrow such that a whole paradigm shifts in the narrative. It is in this sense that historical fabulations surround our most ordinary lives, extend and inform the range of our possibilities as human beings. We are in fact not bound by facts. If we have a nature, it is one that we have given to ourselves in some accepted story or other and which remains ever a work in progress. Does this mean there are no facts that form the boundaries of life and world? No, only that the facts in our lives are first of all dependent on the meaning of our experience—individually and collectively, existentially and historically—in its myriad forms and flaws; it is only in this flexible and variable way that the meaning of our lives is ever ‘determined by the facts.’ What I am arguing for, then, is more a plea for the centrality of metaphor in language (Logos) and of imagination in life—for the possibilities embedded in a living language that is addressed to the comprehensive if indeterminate richness and complexity of human existence. To put it in another way the division of Logos from Mythos and the related genders of language that estrange and hermetically seal facts from the reach of fiction and fantasy must be reconciled in order to create the life stories in which we find meaning.

II

True stories: some say that in the beginning there was a great void and out of Chaos came Desire and Destiny and the ensuing generation of first things. Others say that in the beginning darkness covered the earth but the creator brought forth light and knelt down in its early mist to breathe life into the clay. Still others say that in the first three seconds of the universe there was a cosmic mix of mass and energy that generated life. Like most autobiographies, the self-life-writing of human-being can begin at any particular moment that is memorable or that the retrospective mind finds especially compelling. Some picture human life to be that of a naked ape whose existence in the world of his own making is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Others imagine that of one race are gods and men. The story seems to depend on where and when the teller, and what the point of telling or taleing. But no story holds title to truth for, of course, the story itself is in process, the subject in transit, the end in question. We attribute to the writers in the age of Classical Greece, particularly the critical historians and philosophers, the intuition that it was important to get things right, to give reasons and argue for perspectives about the name and nature of Man. It is not uncommon to suppose that in the gradual transformation of mythos into logos—of emergent sense into manifest truth—that we have left well behind as vestigial myth the primal energy and spiritual core of

16

L AW R E N C E K I M M E L

generative stories. But to think so is a mistake. History is still a story, allegory survives at the heart of philosophical discourse and metaphor generates invention at the base and boundaries of scientific inquiry. Mythos remains subliminally operative and functionally transformative in the living culture of the storytelling animal whose very life blood is possibility. Still, we would like to get it right; indeed the literal bias of the modern temper rather insists on it, but we must trace back this particular obsession to its archaic source in wonder if we are to understand its nature and risk. Arguably, the first point of critical separation of the mythic and historical, the factive from the fictive, is found in the development of ‘the Socratic Method.’ The Platonic Dialogues mark the distinctive turn to an insistence on rational discourse as the touchstone of value and this also allegedly marks the fatal fracturing of reason and passion in philosophical inquiry. However, we will try to discern in this most enigmatic of the triumvirate of Classical Greek philosophers the more fundamental and sustaining resource of mythic energy that keeps open the possibilities of human imagination. Further developing the counsel of Socrates and framing the paidaeic project of Aristotle, Plato’s poetic dialogues contain countervailing and contrapuntal elements of both mythos and logos. It is the philosophical convergence of discursive logistics and dramatic erotics which make his work such a compelling study of Man as a changeling creature caught-between. Throughout the Platonic corpus there are countless instances and uses of myth, allegory, and extended metaphor imbedded within the discursive logic of his Dialogues A long history of scholarship has argued the point and import of Plato’s wide and effective use of what otherwise and in the context of his valuations he seems to dismiss as nonsense or insidious. Should we believe what he says against what he does? The rhetorical, dramatic, and figurative uses of myth are so obviously deliberate and intentionally integrated such that they cannot be dismissed as incidental accessories. So what then are we to make of the fabulations of Plato in the midst of the serious business of a search for truth? It is one thing to credit the great tragic dramatists with imaginative license and emotive excesses in the search for the darker reaches of the pathological in human perversions, marking the territory of That Way Be Dragons. But et tu Plato? How and why myth and to what end in the larger body of his work? I want to look briefly at one of Plato’s Dialogues, more precisely at two sections of the Symposium, which I take to be a crucial index of what the thinker was about in his task of truth-telling concerning the nature and destiny of human kind. I suspect it is more usual to think of the Symposium as a derivative, supplemental, or even incidental relief text in the Platonic corpus,

THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

17

rather than generative for the whole of his systematic inquiry into Truth, Wisdom, and the Form of the Good. But the erotic genesis of inquiry is the whole point of the text of this dialogue and as such marks the conceptual beginning of Plato’s central project of achieving a synoptic vision of reality. Of the two myths to be discussed in Plato’s Symposium one is familiar and oft-cited (the speech of Aristophanes), the other is more complex and variously interpreted (the dialectical teaching of Diotima). Both occur in the context of a gathering of friends to celebrate the victory of a tragic dramatist during the festival of Dionysos. The evening is given to drinking and conversation, and an invitation is given to each person to address an encomium to Love. In Aristophanes’ speech, Plato has the great comic dramatist relate a fabulous myth which depicts the human condition as one driven by desire resulting from a radically divided soul in which the separate parts are condemned to search the world for completion and fulfillment by reuniting with its other half. Characteristically, the effect of Aristophanes’ myth is a deep mix of comic pathos. The original rotund creatures possessed of two heads, four arms, four legs, etc., were so aggressive, obnoxious, and threatening that the god split them in half—creating a vast community of half-life beings whose plaintive existence is driven by an obsession to recover their whole identity through the other. Given the great plurality of people and expanse of the world, and given the complexities of ordinary human association along with the risk and pain of experimental intimacy, the prospect of reconciliation is not optimal. At root this fabulation has the telling truth and compelling reality of common human experience. If Socratic wisdom consists in striving the whole of our lives so that the end of all our striving will be to return to where we began and know the place for the first time—that is, if the journey of the intellect is for the mind to come to understand what in some important and archaic sense it already knows, then this myth represents an important parallel with respect to the journey of the heart. There is in each person a life-long striving to arrive whence we began, and there is the hope that if we are fully alive, sensitive and open to the risks of desire, then we may finally come to ourselves in simple fulfillment of the nature of our existence. However poignant the human situation seems under Aristophanes’ comic tale, there is promise as well—a further analogue to the myth of human discord that placed hope in the bottom of Pandora’s Box. The series of encomia to love in the Symposium predictably reflect the character of each speaker and further index the relation each has to this most intimate and binding phenomenon of social existence. Recall that the series begins with a speech in praise of that first impulse of desire in the journey toward beauty and truth: the physical attraction to the body of the ‘other.’ But in terms of Aristophanes’ interpretive myth this means that we are drawn out of ourselves toward ourselves. Each speech expands the domain and level of this

18

L AW R E N C E K I M M E L

impulse, in which Love, Desire, Eros, is depicted variously as a young playful and vigorous god, as a great benevolent god of age and wisdom, as the most beautiful of gods. . .until it is the turn of the old satyr Socrates. Subsequent to Aristophanes’ account, and leading up to Socrates’ interrogatories, the host and honoree of the symposium, the new and victorious playwright Agathon, flushed with victory, pictures the god in his own image, as if he were looking into a mirror for a likeness. One is reminded of Nietzsche’s remark about one loving that in which they find their own strength. It remains for Socrates to lift the discourse to embrace the whole of humanity.

III

The love and pursuit of wisdom in its most general as opposed to professionally philosophical sense is a journey without a destination. As such the journey itself a fabulation of human sensibility—desire in search of its ground, the soul in search of its sense and limits. Its object is the subject itself. The Greeks analyzed desire as a lack, as an immediate and compelling sense of incompleteness, and as such at the heart and impulse of all movement. It is significant that Plato places the mythic account of desire at the root of human endeavor in the character and voice of the comic poet, who begins in a playful and vulgar style in keeping with his reputation. The burlesque gives way however to a more somber rendition of desire in human longing for a soul mate that will reconcile the divided self. Recalling why Zeus split in two the strident creatures of the originating species, there is reason to question the wisdom of any reunion. However poignant the plight of the human being so divided, this reminder of what a permanent reconciliation would restore in the form of the two headed many armed monster suggests the human being is a finer and nobler creature when caught up in the infinite and insistent space of desire. This sense of the incompleteness of human endeavor is familiar characteristic of the eristic activity and aporetic discourse of the early ‘Socratic’ dialogues, but it is true also in the more ambitious epistemic extensions of the later dialogues. There is, for example, a characteristic lack of closure even in the Republic when the question is put at the end of the long discussion, looking back on the constructed ideal system of rational order of human community ‘But how and when will all this come to pass. . .?’ To which Plato has Socrates respond “Not until philosophers become kings and kings philosophers.” In both conceptual and historical terms, this must mean something like ‘When hell freezes over.’ A reconciliation of ideas and the framing of ideals is one thing, but human life fraught with desire is something quite other, and Plato again counters the idyllic rationality of the Republic as well as the exacting epistemic but still incomplete efforts at

THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

19

birthing knowledge in the Theaetetus with the great dialogue and dialectic of desire in the Symposium. The lesson of the Symposium in the larger body of Plato’s work suggests that the rational framing of the instrumentality and power of Logos requires an associated discourse of Mythos, and a generative base of Eros. Reason and passion, inference and inclination, deduction and desire are always in play if not in concert. Aristotle confirms this same point in his founding insight that wisdom begins in wonder. He includes what amounts to a cosmic addendum that acknowledges desire at the root of all things—that the principle of all motion is attraction. In the different context and concern of the Symposium, the teaching of Diotima is that only the gods remain unchanged: in mortals attributes pass away and age, but they leave behind a new generation of possibilities that enable mortal life a share in immortality. Plato’s efforts to circumscribe the limits of desire on the positive side, that is, at the highest reach of intelligence and imagination, invariably meet with a discursive aporia at which point he resorts to the dramatic figuration of myth, metaphor and allegory. Although Plato was patently hostile to the use of fabulation and provided extended critiques of differing orders against the various arts and their disfiguring conceits, he nonetheless found it necessary to supplement and contextualize his vision of human aspiration and achievement in figurative terms. Many of these dramatic vignettes have made their way into the canon of world literature quite apart from the abstract corpus of Plato’s philosophical work. The most famous is likely the ‘Allegory of the Cave’, from the Republic, which is sufficiently well known not to require detailed description here. The fabulation of this allegory is first of all a portrait of the human condition as an imprisonment of the senses. The world into which we awaken is a life buried in the deep cave of a shadowland in which phenomena play across a dimly lit cavern and knowledge is limited to guessing the sequence of their occurrence. Shackled to this world of shadows in a flickering and false light of enfeebled perception, the ambitions of relational desire is limited to cleverness, where prizes are awarded to those who provide the most persuasive story of sequencing. This allegory is usually read in epistemic terms as a figurative framing of Plato’s theory of knowledge, one that requires the transcendence of phenomenal appearance toward an ideal world of enlightenment independent of the senses. So considered, it serves as a dramatic analogue to Plato’s discursive explication of ascendance to the realm of intelligibility in the equally famous theory of the divided line. Our interest in this essay, however, will remain with the developmental issue of desire and with the apparently necessary discourse of fabulations through which the nature of desire finds adequate expression. At the basic erotic level the crudity of desire demands immediate gratification in a physical object, a raw craving for the other. In the Symposium this

20

L AW R E N C E K I M M E L

level consists in an enflamed desire for the body of a beautiful youth. In the corresponding allegorical context of the Cave, however, it is clear that such an appeal leaves desire in possession of an empty husk, the faint satisfaction of an embracing shadow. Plato’s cave and its shadow-world recalls the Underworld of Homer, in which the wandering Odysseus meets the shade of great Achilles who soon disabuses him of any notion that power, authority or prestige exist among the faded creatures of Hades. Desire is empty in such regions, whether in Hades or among the idle and vacant distractions of a world devoid of transcendence. At the same time, however, Plato makes clear that it is in the visceral commonplace of craving that one discovers in oneself the base stirrings of a desire. It is through effort and direction that this primitive desire becomes the aspiration of wisdom—a desire which, taken root, transforms the self and the world it inhabits. Plato’s measured constraint in this initial position is to insist that from any level of apprehension deserving the name “humanity” it makes little difference whether the movement is that of an organism above or a shade below: fulfillment is hollow without a transcendent aspiration of desire. The life journey from out of the cave is not only toward cognitive enlightenment, but one in search of moral and emotional maturity. Once free of the shackles of immediacy, desire effects a transformation of intellect and imagination toward the soul’s fulfillment. It is convenient to mark the stages of this ascendancy of desire in the lexicon of Love within classical Greek literature in terms of libidos (the first and sustaining movement of life energy) through Eros (the cathecting immediacy of desire on available objects) to philein (recognition of the mediating reciprocity of the desire of others) to agape (the fulfillment of desire in realization of human possibility.) This characterization of the growth and maturation of desire which is developed in the Symposium is a moral and emotional analogue to the wisdom of human aspiration that begins in the movement out of the cave into the light in Plato’s Republic. So who and what is this creature that struggles out of the cocoon of the senses, who emerges from a primitive encapsulation and begins its journey to overcome the remnants of its birthing? Plato’s answer is to describe a philosophical animal, one whose realization of desire gradually transforms a world of contingency and necessity into a realm of freedom and beauty—a creature that in transforming its environment transforms itself. Plato’s metaphor for this changeling creature is that of pregnancy: a human being is a creature of desire whose manifest destiny in wisdom is to give birth in beauty. The characteristic figure in this process is Socrates as midwife as described in the Theaetetus. This self-description and model of the teacher is confirmed throughout the Platonic corpus, in which we discover Socrates assisting others both in finding a source of the beautiful and of assisting in

THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

21

the birthing and examination of the created offspring. In the Theaetetus, it is argued that while all men are pregnant, not all are ready for the labor that will bring forth promising offspring. Even the most earnest among those who labor bring forth wind-eggs and become discouraged in their passion. The Symposium gives an account of the origin and development of this idea of birthing, and this once again requires the figuration of the fabulous: males are pregnant and laboring to give birth, seeking a transcendence not only of the prison of the senses but of the time of their tenure in the world. The point of all pregnancy, as explained in the concluding wisdom of Diotima, is immortality—either through the natural physical begetting of children, or through the intellectual and imaginative creation of immortal thoughts, deeds, or works. IV

That Plato was ever in search of truth and reality is not in question, of course, but it is also the case that in order to do this he must construct a world in which his former teacher appears throughout as a protagonist of mythic proportions. No less an authority than Shelley, who translated the Symposium, refers to the poetic structure of the Platonic corpus in his essay on the Defense of Poetry arguing that Plato was essentially a poet such that the truth and splendor of his imagery are matched by the melody of his language. Shelley claims to be following Plato in holding that the exercise of every imaginative art is poetry. His further thesis in a famous and often contested passage is that poets who imagine the indestructible order of beauty are more than authors of language, music and painting but are also founders of civil society and inventors of the arts of life. Shelley’s claim that poets become teachers by drawing near to the beautiful and true reflects his general understanding of Plato’s work grounded in the force of the poetics of the Symposium. There is reason to believe that the historical Socrates, as he remarks in his own words in the Phaedo, is not a mythologist, not a ‘teller of stories’. His basic attitude was critically opposed to the fancy of poetic conceit, and the purpose of his inquiry essentially aporetic—to bring discourse only to the point of its limits. Not so Plato; although he burned his tragedies when he took up philosophy at the death of Socrates he retained a poetic sense for the importance of the mythic in his development of the genre of philosophical drama. The major emphasis of his work is committed to transcendence toward a synoptic vision of reality, which could not be fully developed within the logistical constraints of argumentative discourse. Plato is more than a creator of particular contextual myths. His incorporation of the mythic begins and is sustained through his depiction of Socrates—a character of mythic proportions who is a fusion

22

L AW R E N C E K I M M E L

of logos and mythos, ethos and pathos. Among the countless fabulations of Socrates throughout Plato’s Dialogues perhaps the most important for our purposes is found in the closing sequence of the Symposium. In a mock encomium to the god of love, the drunken interloper Alkibiades likens Socrates to the Sileni, the seduction of his words having the same effect as the flute playing of the demon Marsyas. That Socrates is here and throughout depicted as an erotic force comparable to the fabled satyr of Dionysian passion is evidence of Plato’s commitment to revitalize the tradition of myth that was being displaced from the literature of his time. Euripides’s dismissal of myth from the Dionysian ritual of drama in favor of common characters and ordinary life signaled an end to the tradition and depth of the tragic vision once achieved in Aeschylus and Sophocles. In its place Plato offers a new mythic genre that provides a conceptual and creative base to revitalize the possibilities inherent in the metaphysical depth of tragic drama. Although Plato no longer probes the darkness of the human soul characteristic of tragedy, his dialectical drama draws on the residual depths of the earlier drama. The Platonic Dialogue neither rivals nor replaces the great tradition of the tragic dramatists, but as evidenced in the Symposium, it does transform into a new key a human drama grounded in passion. In the Symposium Plato constructs a variegated account of the strange creature Eros in such a way to mirror the various mythic images of the satyr figure of Socrates. Neither god nor man, the daemon Eros is the child of Poros and Penia—an offspring of the coupling of affluence and poverty; he is, in the solemn description of the priestess Diotima, rough and disheveled, without house or shoes one who sleeps in the open streets and alleys of the world. However, he was conceived during the birthday celebration of Aphrodite so he is a lover of beauty and a pursuer of good, and thus a driving force in the relations and aspirations of human beings toward virtue and wisdom. Neither Eros, love nor Socrates, teacher possess the good, the true, or the beautiful, but they are so disposed in nature that they aspire to these things, and in so doing inspire others to do the same. We are thus given the condition of human-being as divided and infused with need and longing, but having manifest possibility, pregnant with the prospect of great thoughts and deeds needing only to be brought forth in beauty. The journey of man is always toward the fulfillment of this possibility—the birthing of human excellence through the love of another. The self is divided in its very nature throughout Plato’s range of mythic images. The description in the Republic is the familiar political myth of human soul as tripartite, composed of intellect, spirit, and appetite. Later in that same work Plato constructs a fabulation fashioned after the mythic beasts of the Chimera, Scylla, and Cerberus. This image of the soul is the mythic figure of a three headed beast or rather three beasts joined together ‘naturally’: the first

THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

23

a multicolored beast with a ring of man-heads that grow and change at will, the second beast that of a lion, and the last in the figure of an ordinary human being, the composite given the outward features of the latter. In the Republic, Plato’s subject is the just soul, and his analysis here is that the manifest soul will be determined by which of the beasts are fed and nurtured—if the first two are favored and the last neglected or starved then the different parts of the beast will devour and kill one another. To achieve a harmony of soul, clearly the human intellect must make the courage and strength of the lion an ally in order to control and domesticate the many appetites of the multiform beast of the passions. The nature of the soul for Plato is movement; the virtue of the immortal soul is life. Prior to its incarnation the soul, as it is pictured in the Phaedrus, is winged and feeds on the pure forms of the true and the good, but incarnated in human form it is weighed down in visceral accessories and torn by good and bad desires. In yet another tripartite image this soul is depicted in terms of a charioteer with a team of horses, one good, one bad. The soul is attracted, as in the Symposium first to the sight of a beautiful youth, which brings to mind the idea and ideal of beauty itself. The soul takes wing at the aspect of beauty but there ensues a struggle between the two horses, between the base and higher impulses of passion. The task of the charioteer is to bring the team into harmony of action and aspiration. It is clear that neither love nor beauty alone will satisfy the need of the soul for fulfillment, but also that both the carnal and the spiritual impulses of the soul remain active in its journey. The detail and stages of this journey is the subject text of the Symposium and the capstone of that dialectical discussion is the teaching of Diotima in which she instructs the young Socrates on love. She teaches that the object of love is not beauty, as many think, it is birth. Procreation is the closest things mortals can get to immortality. At this most basic level of generative desire, Diotima explains that its source is not reason, for animals too are seized by desire and will sacrifice everything to protect their offspring. Mortal nature itself is locked into an imperative to overcome mortality. If wisdom is to achieve birth in beauty then clearly its object is immortality Even where the question of a Dialogue is more narrowly directed to epistemology—the nature of knowledge rather than love or wisdom—the imperative of desire is still present. Socrates is depicted in the Theaetetus as a midwife assisting in the labor of bringing to birth the truth that is in each person, a truth through which one participates in immortality if only for the moment its realization. The sole resource for this birthing is the reproductive capacity to constantly replace the past generation with a new one. An individual is constantly renewed and constantly losing other qualities. Plato observes that no characteristics, traits, beliefs, desires, delights, troubles or fears ever

24

L AW R E N C E K I M M E L

remain the same. And it is the same with knowledge: it comes and goes, is manifest and is replaced. Despite Plato’s modal paradigm of form, clearly he acknowledges here the more fundamental flow of reality in our perception of human life and world.

V

The question finally is why a master dialectician like Plato who insisted that all values be rational resorts to fabulation. The simple answer is that the human creature and its world at issue is itself fabulous. Any adequate description of the changeling whose mortal nature is freedom and whose passion is immortality cannot be circumscribed in any but mythic idioms. Implicit in Nietzsche’s insight that the genius of classical Greek drama was its celebration of both gods, Dionysos and Apollo, is the parallel notion that no culture can be fully alive to human possibility that has lost its sense of myth I am suggesting, however, that Nietzsche is wrong to dismiss Plato from attending the shrines of these gods, albeit in a different way from the tragic dramatists. We have already noted Plato’s engagement and extension of the mythic tradition through the various forms of metaphor and fabulation. The seminal nature of Eros in the Symposium that frames the rest of his work indicates Plato’s broader though seldom acknowledged recognition of the tensions of Logos and Mythos at the heart of his dialectic. The extent and importance of fabulation in Plato’s work makes it clear that his rational dialectic should be regarded also as a passionate journey that embraces the creative fissions and fusions that fully constitute human reality. If philosophy remains rooted in the pursuit of wisdom, then it must track and trace the machinations of imagination that frame the always-to-be-determined nature of the forever divided creature that would be god. The trick in discerning this fabulous beast is not to domesticate its prodigious achievements but also to celebrate the imaginative reach and the splendor of its failings. To do this, philosophy must reconnect with the mythic tradition kept alive in the poetry of the world’s great literature. To say that the human-being of the creature caught between is undetermined is in moral terms to acknowledge that its nature is freedom. In Sartre’s expression it is not what it is, and is what it is not. The language of fabulation allows for the loosening of the logistical binds that traditionally have fixed the nature of this transformational enigma. The cultural convergence of the various allegedly rival discourses of ethics politics, economics, biology and theology attests to the dominant tradition that seeks to delineate the defining limits of this changeling creature. But each completed tapestry of culture

THE MYTHIC JOURNEY OF A CHANGELING

25

includes a ghostline to the literature of fabulation. The mythic impulse in literature must continue to search for resonance with the uncanny, the surreal, and those existential fragments of imagination that bear witness to the flow of reality beneath the form of conjecture. The fictive discourse of fabulation keeps alive the Dionysian impulse that resists fixation and keeps faith with an alternative discourse in which the understanding of human being is enriched under the aspect of exception. Trinity University

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

AU R A ; O N T O L O G I C A L M AT E R I A L I T Y O F E X I S T E N C E A N D FA B U L AT I O N

ABSTRACT

Aura by Carlos Fuentes points to the significance of existence and fabulation in its discourse and in the relevance and irrelevance of historical truths. The meta-language forms sequential storytelling, editing and writing possibilities, real or not, with similar functions. A pseudo-psychoanalytical model of reality creates a textual unconscious as poetic discourse. The representation of truth and its signification is a Kantian idea (Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, V.I, New York, Humanities Press, 1970, 194–5) by the innermost recesses referencing existence not as essence but as answer to and for oneself (Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, Humanities Press, NJ, 1997). The narrative suspends historical time and essence of the non-existing General Llorente in a convergence suspending signification based on vraisemblanc in a double reconciled interpretation. Its diegetic implementation, mimesis; forms derivations of a phenomenon that relates to actions at each prohiresis, in an Aristotelian sense. Truth and fabulation are intrinsically intertwined and parallel to valorizations and consequences, evident in fictional truth; the unfolding of existence reduced to presence as interpretative reality within historical fabulation, rendering historical reconstruction and existence as testimony of a self punctuated history which can be textual and human. Aura by the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes is a narrative of a story within a story, a novel based on a biography being re-written by one of the central characters, a student named Felipe, a detail which is mentioned only once in the first paragraph, then the plot continues without ever mentioning his name again. The biography which he edits and re-writes pertains to a historical character and the inter-textuality questions the ontology of existence and degrees of fabulation in discrepancies created based on the public image of a general, whose memories are recount by those who knew him and others who did not. An attitude and configuration is being construed by those who have not known this individual personally based on the image staged for public consumption creating discrepancies between the private and the public image. 27 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 27–35. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

28

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

Fuentes uses an effective writing technique creating a ghostly ambience to point to the real versus unreal, using a character named also Aura, who wonders in and out as the plot unfolds, making it difficult to distinguish what actually happens. Her role as mediator in essence guides us through philosophical issues as: What is the true nature of existence? What fabulation has been created on the historical plane? The semi-real atmosphere in the plot points to what could be identified in post-modernity as the production of image. We are living at a time when virtual reality has its place and many uses of technology create ways to represent presence which previously never existed, some are true, some are not. There is a departure from presenting facts as truth, confusing the perception of verisimilitude because globalization emphasizes fluidity, flexibility and self-reinvention in the market place. The images are being marketed as products therefore many individuals do not seem to care if they are truthful or not. The visual has taken prevalence over the written after the marketing of television which it has increased in the last decades. There is a generation that has grown with this process. The use of images has created a confused ambience in how things could be perceived which renders more significance to possibilities in a multiple fragmented world reality. In the novel one has to focus on the imaginatio creatix, the possibilities and differentiation being presented over what actually happened. The notion of what captures the ways of the world is now constantly changing in people’s mind. The truly real about what you think of yourself or what others perceive you to be is constantly blurred by shifts in identity perceptions enmeshed in the many technical advances and cultural changes. Consequently an individual character as it is portrait by mass media culture is affected and distorted by the same media that propels it. It is even more in reference to popular figures since the more they get to be known the more different perceptions about his/her image exist. Each human reality is always a direct project to metamorphose its own for itself and into an in-self. Individualization with its range of variables and perceptions and the constant dispersal of ideas aids to obliterate the establishment of any permanence in meanings. Is questionable where the true authentic self remains as where the public versus private separates in an individual existence. The realm of modernity and imagination presents fantasy and denial as viable roles to play. The contemporary era has created a thin reaction to these issues and has underscored the understanding that relates to self and society. We see daily a multiplicity of cultures and identities co-existing at a given time and place in any of the world metropolis. Dislocation and dispersal are now prevalent characteristics of postmodern times; as fantasy, denial, abandonment of fixed social status and hierarchy of power relations. It is difficult to enable to understand the historical and practical dilemmas of life.

M AT E R I A L I T Y O F E X I S T E N C E A N D F A B U L AT I O N

29

One of man’s constant dilemmas is to bestow meaning upon the world and upon his own life. Sartre in L’Etre et le Néant deals with the risk in trying to overcome personal groundlessness and yearns to become what he names: “En-soi-Pour-soi” (Sartre, 1950), leading to the question of human reality (la réalité humaine), the awareness of the essential ambiguity of the human condition and the boundless capacities for self-deception. We are both subjects that are world-related and world-constituting. There is an ontological gulf between historicity and the history that proves metaphysically unbridgeable. True knowledge and opinions should have reality as their object as opposed to appearance. If we give up truth as correspondence to reality, as it seems to be happening now, and we are left with conflicting opinions and no truth at all. The interpretation of lived experience tends in a way to constitute truth (Eugene T Gendlin, 1973). This covers arguments one uses for oneself and a whole range of discourses. The general aim is for persuasion and conviction whatever audience is being addressed and whatever subject matter is dealt with, becoming clear why Fuentes centered the novel on editing a biography; to present philosophical aspects in a nomos/physis debate, to address ontological issues that ought to concern us since technology is affecting how we think and react to the main events in our lives. Language, its use and manipulations play a role in any truth being presented. All events, past or present carry within possibilities of actually being real and as such relates to the understanding of the projecting character, fictional or nonfictional. Experiences contained in understanding are interpreted as being. A person’s capability knows its finitude and presupposes that it surrenders to signification without knowing what could be found. Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method, asserts to it without disputing difficulties in otherness for mediator and/or receptor. . . .that this kind of understanding does not at all understand the ‘you’ but rather the truth you tell us. (Hans–Georg Gadamer, 1989, xxiii)

The role Aura has as mediator points to the questioning of ontological issues. Post-modern ontological inquiries deals with what is significant, inferential, different and coincidental, specially referring to the personal in the world realm which is more questionable when includes virtual reality as part of the possible and credible image of a being. Aura produces an explicit attempt to holistically articulate the correctness of existence, materiality and fabulation. A historical figure is a life structured and expressed in a work, no longer understood or produced by the non-reproducible and idiosyncratic individual experience but mostly by what others attain, articulate and think of it. The

30

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

reading of a biographical text is at best interpretational. (Jacques Derrida, 1974). In Aura the meta-language in the memories being edited, adds several sequential to the plot and increases ambiguity focusing on new version of events through other characters’ perceptions, as when Felipe revises the memoirs or the widow’s perspectives contradicting insights and Aura who creates more contradictions as we understand that she in non- corporeal. . . .all concepts hitherto proposed in order to think the articulation of a discourse and of an historical totality are caught within the metaphysical closure . . . (Jacques Derrida, 1997, 1999)

As readers we become aware of the duality when actions becomes more than the appearance of themselves; giving hidden, subterranean possibilities relating to main incidents or persons placed fragmentarily as information throughout the text. This fragmentation provides insight about the existence recalled, dwelling on images transforming under historical pressures. Literally images are being created before our eyes and we are not sure of this transformation because through time views of history change. Every epoch has its ideals, taboos and dissonances to which individuals are constrain to. The psychology and motivation of the general, the central character in the biography, become crucial structuring elements dealing with the historical consciousness of the given time. As events take place, references become convincing whether the referent is fictional or not, in both circumstances they perform a similar function to create a credible and marketable image of who he was. Transcendentally the structure of subjectivity makes possible that all kinds of objects present themselves to us. Aura as connector of text, characters, author, and reader forms part of virtual reality. The image of Aura is a fictional creature in someone’s imagination, created probably by the editor but we remained unsure of whom. Her role of living metaphor does not follow a traditional logic and the narration schematically reflects on several contexts, it argues and thinks things through, suggesting that at the core of the reality in question lays a paradigm regarding the interrogative nature of practical reasoning. Facts are recorded as possibilities, as a video game, for they do not speak for themselves but are there to be interpreted (WJT Mitchell, 1983). Consequentially the existential could be seen optimally as inevitable and insurmountable, by products or derivation of the plot, precisely because it discusses contrast, demonstrates, seeks and inquires wisdom. Existence is an answer to and for oneself and at the age of information technologies it has its own adverse effect over and above the intended. In Aura, Felipe as well as the reader participates in constructing reality.

M AT E R I A L I T Y O F E X I S T E N C E A N D F A B U L AT I O N

31

Lees esa misma noche los papeles amarillos, escritos con una tinta mostaza; a veces horadados por el descuido de una ceniza de tabaco, manchados por moscas, El francés del General Llorente no goza de las excelencias que su mujer le habrá atribuido. Te dices que tú puedes mejorar considerablemente el estilo, apretar la narración difusa de hechos pasados. . . Nada que no hayan contado otros. . . (You read that same night the yellowish papers, written with a mustard colored ink; at times neglectedly pierced with ashes of tobacco, stained with flies. The French of General Llorente does not enjoy the excellence his wife had attributed. You say that you can considerably better the style, tighten the diffused narration of past occurrences. . . Nothing that has not being told by others. . .) [Translation’s mine]. (Carlos Fuentes, 1988, 30)

The narrative achieves a time inversion, past as present, with factors creating a historical convergence punctuating history, what is being re-written will remain certain for posterity. According to Jean-François Lyotard we face an open space time, a recombining intersection of prelude and absence. (Jean-François Lyotard, 1988, 31–6). These are transmutations in spatial and temporal coordinates that have political, individual and social implications, obvious in the attention lavished on identity in post-modern culture, commonly concerning celebrity figures. The transfiguration marks a delegitimization of the deep structures of experiences and subjectivity of the self. Products of human agency tend to surpass what individuals merely intended; self understanding cannot itself be merely understood in terms of what was consciously intended. Dudas al caer sobre la butaca, si en realidad has visto eso; quizás sólo uniste esa imagen a los maullidos espantosos que persisten, disminuyen, al cabo terminan. (You doubt as you let yourself fall in the armchair that if in realty you saw it; maybe you only united the image to the horrific miaows that persist, diminish and finally end.) [Translation’s mine]. (Carlos Fuentes, 1988, 31)

One is confused to the point of questioning what events that took place, non-existent facts transformed into real ones. Hermeneutical truth is rhetorical, essentially historical in nature and context bound. The text discloses fundamentals about the significance of existence and the possibilities that can exist, including the virtual that have resulted from rhetorical transformations. An intense storyline lucidly explores nature of characters’ essences. As fictional entity Aura seeks the believable while she might not be able to live to expectations. Some of the images purposely created, are studied and polished to set in motion the public image, based on wishes and distortions which takes us to fabulation as integral part of the intentionality for public consumption. Felipe and later the widow re-write events to emphasize optimum behavior. In The Gravity of Thought, Jean-Luc Nancy presents the question of

32

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

existence as a construed reality that lies not in the basis of essence but in the answer given to and for oneself. The telling of partial truths can facilitate at times personal freedom as well as damage it. Fuentes questions ontological validity, using virtual images forming a new present, diminishing the value of what was known or said. The past is treated as otherness, distancing or freeing from reality, creating a historical horizon addressing alterity. There is an attempt to conceptualize reality which the notion that we could arrive at a conclusive interpretation about the essence of life seems nonsensical at best. The world presents itself subject in multiple insights and our own expectations of its meanings. A truly historical way of thinking has also to keep in mind its own historicity. Only then will it give up pursuing the phantom of a historical object, the topic of linearly advancing research, learning instead to recognize in the object the Other of its own, therewith bringing to recognition the One and the Other. The true historical object is not an object, but rather the unity of the One and Other, a relationship in which the reality of history consists just as much as the reality of historical understanding. (Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1988, 70)

There are competing views of the world rather than one, no main narrative or universal claims but knowledge as multiple, content, dependent and fragmentary; recounting what exist out there. Reality is not definite or a fixed criterion to be arrived at, when it seems that the ultimate judge is the interpretative community one belongs to. Gadamer in Truth and Method hypothesizes that one has to place oneself within a historical horizon from which a tradition presents itself not to defeat historical understanding. Each one relates to others as subjects of inquiry under the rubric of human nature, under the form of self-relatedness and in relation marked by openness. We are binding interpreters seeking understanding in a given situation. The message at the height of hyper-reality is that there is no reality that counts but the image. Fiction and reality are not metaphysical opposites. In human affairs and in the reality being lived, the real is many times brought into being by means of imaginaries, especially in the media where the public image exist, providing the concrete reason for Aura’ existence in the novel. A possibility exists for fiction to function in truth and to induce effects of truth in order to bring about a true discourse on existence, to intuit or discover and represent the true nature of things. The notion of transcendental consciousness is basically the immediate selfpresence of a waking life. In the realm one calls one’s own, concepts find a systematic unity (Husserl’s account of language). In the text, comments by Felipe alerts us to philosophical inquires inextricably linked to editing. At the heart of human subjectivity and in facing reality are passions and representations of unconscious creations as well as truth. Duality, fragmentation and

M AT E R I A L I T Y O F E X I S T E N C E A N D F A B U L AT I O N

33

multiplicity have become a contemporary medium in our time. Post modernity with its proliferation of media simulations unleashes multiplicity of identities and cultural paradigms without central or authoritative coordination. Cultural experience generalizes media communication while information technologies are at the core of importance in any symbolic exchange. The fundamental issue of fracturing knowledge in post-modernity has produced conceptual displacement related to the creative and self-instituting capacity of the unconscious imagination. It explores the foundation of the physicality of life and creates a specifically modernist tension between rationality and imagination. The argument develops on ontological issues, interpreting webs of signification through meaningful actions that have spun and in which the characters find themselves caught up. Each us as humans daily integrate our experiences into the texture of our psychic world. Ousted from an established terrain of theoretical and practical reason, identity and subjectivity in a post-modern context are positioned within a politically and culturally variable social contingent, in linguistic and discursive practices which are always coordinated in space-time zones. What goes along with the current postmodernist tendencies effectively endorses and promotes ideological mystification. In an age of hyper reality truth conditions vary from one specific context to another, involving criteria according to evidences and in most cases, there is no established form of generalized theory for facts. Aura discloses an unchanging fundamental for existence, pointing the possible in the real and fabulated, to an ontological gulf between historicity and real history which proves metaphysically unbridgeable. There is a difference between being and beings when one questions intelligibly what happened as the past shapes the future and each individual thou freely have limitations due to previous conditioning. It is very hard to escape from ideas, myth and conditions that have being established in one’s own time. I am myself and my circumstances, and if I do not save them, I cannot save myself. Benefic loco illi quo natus es. (José Ortega y Gasset, 1960, 8)

As Ortega y Gasset articulates it is impossible to extricate oneself from the environment one is part of and this ought to be considered in ontological questionings. A notion that captures the meaning of existence changes constantly as more and more images are being produce through media outlets. The transformation that embodies Aura, sometimes undecipherable, becomes helpful to differentiate relationships. Felipe and the widow, who commissioned the editing, are manipulating the events being written. Aura transforms as quasi cinematic

34

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

presence into a metaphor of functionality questioning the meaning of presence. The evolution of the biography and the technology of simultaneous communication undermine the notion of reality, as truth and fabulation are intrinsically intertwined here, historically and individually. In an age of hyper-reality fiction more and more displaces reality and simulacra reigns supreme showing a vital concern about credulity. One is aware that there is more than one way to interpret reality. One abstains from judgment because of evident conviction of fictional truth in the unfolding of presence and that the conviction that descriptions of life are directly constituitive to the communicating and the use of language of individuals. Al despertar, buscas otra presencia en el cuarto y sabes que no es la de Aura la que te inquieta, sino la doble presencia de algo que fue engendrado la noche pasada. [When awakening, I look for the other presence in the room and know that it is not Aura that unsettles me, but a double presence of something that was given birth to the night before] (Carlos Fuentes, 1988, 31)

The narrated history, the content of the representation and internal meanings are perceived to be connected to visual effects more than words. Interpretative reality plays here with what is existence within the historical, rendering consequences and confutations by reconstruction. Existence becomes a testimony of the self suspending significations including singularities which inscribes in them one and the same historicity. One ends with the conviction that in the postmodern realm of human understanding in a post-modern world, most of what seems real is left to speculation, that there is no specific answer to ontological questions but a phenomenological approach to understanding that facilitates to ask the right question. Temple University, Philadelphia BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, T.W., The Jargon of Authenticity, London, Routhledge, 1973. Adorno, T.W., Negative Dialectics, London, Routhledge, 1984. Baudrillard, J., Oublier Foucault, Humanities in Society No3 (Winter 1980), 87–111. Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Derrida, J., Writing and Difference, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1978. Echeverría, E.J., Criticism and Commitment: Major Themes in Contemporary Post-Critical Philosophy, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1981. Elliott, A., and Charles, L., The New Individualism; the Emotional Cost of Globalization, London, Routledge, 2006. Ernorth, M., Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1982.

M AT E R I A L I T Y O F E X I S T E N C E A N D F A B U L AT I O N

35

Fuentes, C., Aura, Ediciones Era, S.A., México, 1988. Gendlin, E.T., “Experimental phenomenology” in N. Nathanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973. Gadamer, H.-G., Truth and Method, New York, Crossroad, 1989. Gadamer, H.-G., “On the circle of understanding” in J.M. Connolly and T. Keutner, trans and ed., Hermeneutics Versus Science?, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Gasché, R., The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1986. Habermas, J., Theory of Communicative Action, Boston, Beacon Press, 1984. Habermas, J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity, 1987. Heidegger, M., Identity and Difference, New York, Harper & Row, 1969. Husserl, E., Logical Investigations, VI, II, New York, Humanities Press, 1970. Husserl, E., Cartesian Meditations; An Introduction to Phenomenology, Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993. Jalbert, J.E., Hermeneutics or phenomenology: Reflections on Husserl’s historical mediations as a ‘Way’ into transcendental phenomenology, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 8, 1982, 98–132. Lyotard, J.-F., Peregrinations, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988. Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition; a Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Mitchell, W.J.T., ed., The Politics of Interpretation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983. Nancy, J.-L., The Gravity of Thought, New York, Humanities Press, 1997. Nancy, J.-L., The Sense of the World, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Ogilvy, J., Many Dimentional Man, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. Ogilvy, J., Self and World; Reading in Philosophy, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Ortega y Gasset, J., Meditaciones del Quijote, ideas sobre la novela, Madrid, Revista de Occidente, 1960. Sartre, J.-P., L’Etre et le Néant, Paris, Gallimard, 1950. Ulmer, G., Applied Grammatology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

WILLIAM D. MELANEY

S A RT R E ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F H I S T O RY: C O M M U N I T Y, AG E N C Y A N D C O M P R E H E N S I O N

ABSTRACT

The paper argues that Sartre’s work as both a literary critic and social philosopher is deeply indebted to his early commitment to phenomenology. The first part of the paper examines the nature of reading and writing in the account of literary meaning that is presented in the transitional text, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? While acknowledging the political turn that occurs in Sartre’s work, we then discuss how the theme of history emerges in the later essay, Questions de méthode, as one that opens up a “double reading” of human motivation. Our conclusion maintains that the Marxist phase of Sartre’s work is based on the hermeneutical notion of comprehension, which provides an anthropological grounding for his existential philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre’s contribution to philosophy was crucial to the reception of Husserlian phenomenology in France during the early post-war period. This reception was mediated by a growing interest in the work of Martin Heidegger, but it also provided Continental philosophy with a unique agenda that can be examined as a special case. However, the widespread view that Sartre abandoned phenomenology for political concerns has made a thoughtful appraisal of his work difficult to sustain in professional circles. Underlying this view is the perception that Sartre’s ‘conversion to history’ was basic to the political turn that occurs in his later work. We would like to reconsider the degree to which this historical thematic can be linked to Sartre’s long-standing commitment to phenomenology, which remains important to all phases of his work. With this goal in mind, this paper will begin with a discussion of Sartre’s early attempt to define literature and to clarify the space in which it appears. The paper will then examine how Sartre assesses the performances of history in phenomenological terms. Our conclusion will establish links between phenomenology and the hermeneutical orientation that accompanies this new historical outlook. 37 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 37–50. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

38

WILLIAM D. MELANEY I

Only in the perspective of time can we appreciate the phenomenological importance of Sartre’s seminal 1947 essay, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Various interpretations of this widely read study have prevented the phenomenological dimension from emerging in an essential way. Sartre’s proclivity for philosophical realism is probably the major obstacle to a rediscovery of this crucial dimension. No one would deny that the early Sartre privileges the virtues of prose over the values of poetic association. This early essay notoriously revives an apparently Fregean opposition between psychic meaning and the indications of sense. However, when considered in phenomenological terms, Sartre’s interest in verbal transparency has less to do with the actual existence of objects than with the capacity of language to clarify our engagement with the world on a subjective level. From this standpoint, we might say that Sartre’s dismissal of poetry is less of a rejection than a displacement that restores an ‘active’ role to language as it functions in everyday life. The distinction between prose and poetry rests on the difference between a language that signifies and one that mutely evokes but cannot communicate what it improperly intends. The artist detaches meanings from the world and presents them as autonomous, whereas the prose writer mingles with the world in order to signify what can be directly known. At the same time, Sartre contends that the distinction between prose and poetry reveals how language can be approached from different standpoints. This basic distinction enables Sartre to define the poet as someone who relates to words as things rather than as signs. This virtual possibility is perhaps inscribed in the nature of language. Language functions through signs that are always in some way ambiguous. Ambiguity, however, provides us with opportunities for taking up different positions with regard to how the sign can function in the world. The sign can be considered from two points of view: “For the ambiguity of the sign implies that one can penetrate it at will like a pane of glass and pursue the thing signified, or turn one’s gaze towards its reality and consider it as an object.”1 The first mode of access is that of the prose writer who produces literary works that establish a dialogue with those who act in the world, whereas the second mode of access is that of the linguist who approaches language as the object of a human science. At the beginning of his argument, Sartre seems to have limited himself to two proper modes of access to language, relegating the poetic use of language to a marginal role in a rational semiology.2 Nonetheless, we cannot interpret this limitation as a subordination of language to a contemplative view of the world. Sartre emphasizes that the prose writer is not simply a stylist for whom “the word is a gentle breeze which

S A RT R E ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F H I S T O RY

39

plays lightly over the surface of things, grazing them without altering them,” any more than the person who speaks is a pure witness who remains outside a visible order.3 On the contrary, the writer is not only self-conscious but conscious of being seen at the moment that he becomes conscious of himself. In his early masterwork, L’Être et le néant, Sartre situates the conscious ego in a fundamental relation to an emergent other whose sudden appearance accompanies the upsurge of self-consciousness.4 Subjectivity, therefore, is already intersubjectivity, as Husserl contends. Moreover, we demonstrate a capacity to transform ourselves to the degree that we are able to integrate social perceptions of our various moves in a revised self-image. Sartre’s conception of the self as a being-in-the-world is quasi-dialectical to the extent that it rests on a phenomenological analysis of subjectivity as co-constituted. However, the movement of self-consciousness cannot be interpreted according to a rigid or formulaic conception of dialectics. The role of beauty in this unfolding process is to persuade in a manner that does not involve coercion or angry force. When beauty “acts by persuasion like the charm of a voice or a face,” we can be sure that the point of contact between self and other is a place of mediation, rather than a site of conflict.5 Furthermore, the world of the prose writer leads as a matter of course to an assessment of how literature requires both writers and readers, instead of existing on its own in a depersonalized setting. Literary works should not be confused with the products of a craft: “When it is a matter of pottery or carpentry, we work according to traditional patterns, with tools whose usage is codified; it is Heidegger’s famous ‘they’ who are working with our hands.”6 Here Sartre could be responding to the reduction of art to craft that seems to occur in Heidegger’s hermeneutical approach to the work of art.7 In distancing himself from Heidegger, Sartre also looks forward to a conception of art that is centered around literature rather than around the visual arts. No doubt literature is concerned with how our lives are given shape and form through the signs of writing: “It is our history, our love, our gaiety that we recognize in it.”8 Our proximity to literary results is precisely what prevents us from considering them as objective. Sartre contrasts the place of objectivity in the perception of art to the preeminence of subjectivity in artistic creation. The dialectical nature of art is particularly evident in the case of literature, which demonstrates how the act of writing always entails the act of reading. Sartre contends that the writer never reads himself but produces signs that require an outside interpreter in order to be understood. The writer creates a work that exceeds the limits of his own subjectivity and only discovers its objective meaning after he ceases to recognize it as his own. What this means is that, contrary to popular doctrines, the writer does not write for himself but always writes for others. The reader for whom he writes functions as a subject

40

WILLIAM D. MELANEY

in relation to a literary object that never fully appears. This non-appearing object cannot be thought apart from the reader’s subjectivity. It would seem, therefore, that the construction of the literary object is dialectical to the precise extent that it engages the reader on a subjective level, just as it derives meaning from an inexhaustible literary work. Sartre contends that the dependence of the writer on the attentive reader challenges the formalist view of reading as inessential to the literary work. This dependence assumes existential importance to the extent that literature can be envisioned as an appeal: “To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language.”9 Sartre’s mode of address highlights the emphatic but non-coercive nature of literary production. Moreover, in claiming that writing is an appeal, Sartre underscores both the irreducible nature of the literary work and the role of the reader in responding to the work itself. In the former case, we learn that writing can be an appeal because it is in some sense irreducible. Literature derives from the writer’s subjectivity so that “the appearance of the work of art is a new event which cannot be explained by anterior data.”10 At the same time, when considered from another point of view, the literary work engages the reader in an essential way: “The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it.”11 The freedom of the reader does not extend to the point of determining the work’s content; on the contrary, it serves as the formal condition that grounds the reception of the work in a delimited consciousness. Sartre readily acknowledges that his own conception of freedom resembles what can be found in Kant’s aesthetic thinking. However, unlike Kantian aesthetics, Sartre’s approach to literature provides the imagination with a constitutive, rather than a regulative, function. The imagination participates in the grounding of aesthetic interpretation, but its spontaneity is restricted when “it is called upon to recompose the beautiful object beyond the traces left by the artist.”12 Sartre’s conception of reading would be incompletely understood if it did not allow us to see how literature negotiates between self and other. His concern for the role of the reader in co-constituting the literary work anticipates the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and the phenomenology of Wolfgang Iser. Reading brings to life what literature evokes, and the relationship between reader and text is asymmetrical.13 But Sartre also looks forward to a position that was more fully and somewhat differently developed by Emmanuel Lévinas. The writer provides us with an experience of freedom through which we recognize the other as other than ourselves. Sartre contends that reading requires an atmosphere of trust which cannot be conveyed apart from a spirit of generosity. Both writer and reader must give themselves over to an acceptance of the other without whom freedom would remain purely subjective.

S A RT R E ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F H I S T O RY

41

In relating the history of Western literature to the evolution of the reading public, Sartre discusses how the heterogeneous nature of writing derives from a division in the way that language can be understood. Far from functioning as a seamless totality, language possesses a material character that the writer invariably accepts in taking up a unique literary style. However, rather than separate the writer from the world, language functions on the basis of a productive distinction between things and thought. The material aspect of language does not conceal the world but maps over this more basic distinction.14 It also helps us understand how in thinking we do not merely transform things into ‘ideas’ but allow Being to “sparkle as Being, with its opacity and its coefficient of adversity, by the indefinite spontaneity of Existence.”15 Being exceeds us and produces in us an awareness of what cannot be freely changed. At the same time, Being cannot be thought apart from the categories of subjective existence. Sartre’s reflections on the development of literature throughout the nineteenth century culminates in a discussion of how the writer might have responded to the reality of a divided reading public. By addressing a particular readership in concrete terms, the writer might have performed a critical function in awakening the less privileged social sectors to enduring injustices. This unexplored option might have produced a diversity of works and brought together divergent points of view. Sartre reminds us, however, that the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1870 distorted the potential of Marxism to provide a more pluralistic vision of social life.16 By suppressing ideological options that might have enriched the Marxist tradition, this historic event had the devastating effect of reducing socialism to a rigid orthodoxy. At this stage in his analysis, nonetheless, Sartre is not yet prepared to explain how phenomenology can contribute in fundamental ways to historical understanding. II

Those who argue that Sartre’s contribution to social philosophy involves a radically new departure tend to restrict phenomenology as a guide and influence to the early phases of his thought. To be sure, Sartre began with a strong interest in psychology and epistemology, which yielded only in time to historical and political concerns. However, the argument in favor of considering Sartre’s investment in phenomenology as continuous with his entire life’s work has not yet received its due, nor has it been clearly stated in a way that adds something original to the phenomenological heritage. Sartre’s preamble to his philosophical attempt to renovate Marxism, Questions de méthode, provides a basis for interpreting the data of history in systematic terms, allowing the past to be revisited and relived as essentially intelligible. What remains to

42

WILLIAM D. MELANEY

be proven is that phenomenology can illuminate Sartre’s social philosophy in fundamental ways. In discussing how existentialism might correct and supplement dialectical thinking, Sartre reminds us that Kierkegaard, no less than Hegel and Marx, has become irreplaceable to a contemporary view of the world.17 He readily acknowledges that, compared to Hegel, Kierkegaard is not even a philosopher. However, in suggesting that the existing human being cannot be reduced to an intellectual abstraction, Kierkegaard indicates a realm of being that is heterogeneous to pure thought: “Whatever one may say or think about suffering, it escapes knowledge to the extent that it is suffered in itself, for itself, and to the degree that knowledge remains powerless to transform it.”18 Kierkegaard, unlike Hegel, established an infinite distance between man and God. Moreover, the faith that he identifies with subjectivity cannot be reduced to a moment in a dialectical process that culminates in philosophical knowing. While Hegel opens up the possibility of mediation, Kierkegaard “marks a progress toward realism, since he insists on the primacy of the specifically real over thought.”19 In this case, Sartre emphasizes the non-identity of reality and knowledge. With certain qualifications, we might even compare Kierkegaard’s realism to that of Husserl, who refers to the object that transcends whenever the mind confronts it on an intentional basis.20 Furthermore, in criticizing Marxist orthodoxy, Sartre once again discusses how the hasty assimilation of facts to ideal hypotheses can distort a genuine appraisal of concrete situations. The false essentialism of Marxist historiography does not allow us to uncover the relationship between part and whole. Marx himself was more perceptive: “In other words, he gives to each event, in addition to its particular signification, the role of being revealing.”21 The quest of the historian is for a synthetic ensemble rather than for a Platonic idea. If Marxists during a later period move too quickly from facts to conclusions, they have lost touch with the concrete realities that are always subject to interpretation. Concepts lose their elasticity in systems of thought that exclude actual encounters: “They are no longer keys, interpretive schemata; they are posited for themselves as an already totalized knowledge.”22 Change in this situation has been reduced to identity in a system of interpretation that depends on preconceived notions of its subject-matter. Sartre’s response to this situation would be difficult to understand apart from his starting-point in phenomenology, which provides a coherent basis for reconsidering the role of human agency in public life. Sartre argues against an economic determinism that would reduce historical events to conflicts between rival interests. When the Girondists opt for war in the wake of the French Revolution, they do not merely express a mercantilist bias in the sphere of policy. Sartre disagrees with the historical analysis of Daniel Guérin, which

S A RT R E ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F H I S T O RY

43

he considers in some respects to be exemplary. Hence, instead of reducing Girondist attitudes to economic considerations, Sartre reminds us that “the political reality for the men of 1792 is an absolute, an irreducible.”23 From a certain standpoint, therefore, Sartre’s view of historical causation can be interpreted as an attempt to restore an old-fashioned view of human agency that accepts political motivation at face value.24 No doubt Sartre is opposed to the tendency of various historians to bury political contradictions in economic facts. We might object, nonetheless, that the Girondists disguised their true objectives in political rhetoric in order to conceal an underlying commitment to economic imperialism. Sartre offers a fascinating counter-argument to this sophisticated objection to the more political reading. An actor playing Hamlet, who crosses his mother’s room and kills Polonius, not only ‘acts out’ a set of stage directives but also earns his living as an actor in a certain society. This is entirely obvious. However, Sartre contends that long-range results which are present in an imaginary act cannot be understood in a restricted setting.25 The values of an imaginary prince are expressed in an actor’s movements, just as the actor imagines that he is Hamlet when he thinks of himself as appearing on stage. By way of analogy, when the revolutionaries of 1789 call themselves Cato, they position themselves as members of a class that discovers History and also attempts to stop it. Historical fabulation enables specific individuals to emerge as “heirs of a classical culture” that is both universal and outmoded.26 The historian who fails to grasp the double meaning of historical fabulation is invariably at a loss to interpret a particular course of action in complex terms. Sartre clarifies how impersonation can be an imaginative response to a political and economic challenge. The revolutionaries who imitate Cato are interested in substituting virtue for politics and in forming a myth that carries them into an unknown future. The fundamentally ambiguous nature of this gesture is what renders it useful to historical interpretation. A careful examination of this rhetorically charged gesture demonstrates how a particular class can have the dual role of both advancing a revolutionary movement and bringing it to a premature end. Nonetheless, double meaning is perfectly compatible with the singularity of historical events. The French Revolution, for example, is a singular ‘event’ that cannot be reduced to economic concerns or assigned an entirely political meaning. From this standpoint, existence constitutes the site of praxis and provides the motive for a whole school of thought: “Existentialism, then, can only affirm the specificity of the historical event; it seeks to restore to the event its function and its multiple dimensions.”27 Sartre’s approach to historical agency can be related to his interpretation of writers and their works. Literature is a vocation that enables the writer to order his own life according to specific ends while assuming a basic comportment in

44

WILLIAM D. MELANEY

the world. Sartre argues that literature is a fundamental choice that allows us to infer the unity of a life as a productive task.28 Flaubert, for instance, chooses literature over other options during a period of experiencing intense rivalry with an older brother who has already won paternal esteem. The choice of becoming a writer is inseparable from a personal trauma, and yet the outcome of this trauma establishes the parameters of a life that will remain the same from beginning to end. This does not mean that our original choice must prevent us from maintaining some sort of tension between identity and difference. On an interpretive level, nonetheless, we remain interested in discovering the underlying coherence of a life that would otherwise lack integrity: “What the totalization must discover therefore is the multidimensional unity of the act.”29 Nonetheless, Sartre clearly rejects the strategy of reading literary works from a purely biographical standpoint. The production of a literary work is a singular ‘event’ that contains a plurality of meanings. These meanings are not reducible to what emerges at the moment of the work’s composition. To be sure, the literary work enables us to pose questions concerning the life that surpass the experience of the lived. At the same time, the explanation of the work exceeds whatever can be learned about the life that produces the work in the first instance. Sartre discusses the relationship between the life and work in a way that sustains the work’s relative autonomy: The life is illuminated by the work as a reality whose total determination is found outside it – both in the conditions which produce it and in the artistic creation which fulfills it and completes it by expressing it. Thus the work – when one has examined it – becomes a hypothesis and a research tool to clarify the biography.30

In the domain of criticism, Flaubert’s work reveals the traits of a certain writer who discovers his place in a limited social structure and remains related to a unique childhood drama. Nonetheless, the critic must be willing to acknowledge at every interpretative juncture that the literary work contains meanings that exceed the scope of biographical inferences. Sartre also suggests how the literary work, like the historical act, contains different meanings when examined from different perspectives. A writer who constructs a work that embodies the values of one period may anticipate the concerns of a world that lies ahead. The attitudes inscribed in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary were prevalent in the post-romantic generation of 1830. They shaped the young Flaubert in ways that have long-term significance and became evident only in retrospect. However, while falling behind his contemporaries, Flaubert looks forward to the anti-romantic disgust of 1845 and writes a ‘prophetic’ novel that could be enlisted in the cause of social or political criticism.31 In addressing two different audiences, Flaubert demonstrates how temporal distance can be overcome on the basis of shared attitudes. Of course,

S A RT R E ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F H I S T O RY

45

the novel only achieves a critical meaning if the new historical situation can be interpreted in ways that at least partially contradict the values of romantic defeatism. The novel from this standpoint would enact a despair that is by no means inevitable but expresses only a temporary setback for a more creative response to human existence. While discussing how the literary object can be recovered as both complete and in the process of formation, Sartre opens up two possible readings of Madame Bovary that are perhaps equally valid. We might identify one possible reading with a ‘classical’ conception of phenomenology that begins with an analysis of Emma Bovary herself.32 The classical reading would demonstrate how Emma is consumed by the imaginary in her failure to master the real. This reading would emphasize how Emma’s inability to distinguish imagination from reality brought about her own undoing. Sartre’s own remarks on Flaubert, however, are dismissive of the ‘realist’ label and also support a reading that takes the author’s identification with Emma Bovary as the starting-point for a very different analysis. This second reading would also be phenomenological in emphasizing the appearance of the self as a fictional construct, just as it would enable us to discover the writer in his own creation, thereby validating his image of himself as the female protagonist.33 More importantly, this second reading would suggest how the creation of an imaginary being fulfills a role of the writer and pertains to a unique human project. While it would be easy to make use of this equivalence in order to fault the writer for his femininity, pessimism and escapism, we might achieve more by showing how he attempts to invent a way out that seeks recourse in the imaginary. Sartre cautions us against assuming that Flaubert merely evaded a responsible sense of self in constructing his literary surrogate: “This project has a meaning, it is not the simple negativity of flight; by it a man aims at the production of himself in the world as a certain objective totality.”34 III

There can be little doubt that Sartre assumes an increasingly hermeneutical attitude when approaching the problems of history. Nonetheless, we are often at a loss in trying to contextualize the strain of hermeneutics that characterizes his ambitious undertaking. The tradition that begins with Schleiermacher and extends to Dilthey and Heidegger is certainly a crucial influence on his later position. Manfred Frank has discussed how Sartre’s reading of Flaubert continues this tradition, while combining a hermeneutics of the individual with the insights of historical materialism.35 While Frank’s remarkable analysis deserves close study, we might go one step further in suggesting how the notion of the individual provided Sartre with a non-foundational thematic that

46

WILLIAM D. MELANEY

departs from traditional theories of knowledge. Sartre’s view of comprehension is completely at odds with an appropriative conception of knowledge that resolves all differences in a seamless totality. We discover his distance from this tradition when we learn that comprehension is never reducible to a contemplative stance. Comprehension is either related or identical to praxis, which lies at the heart of every human project that organizes a meaningful life. Our discussion of Flaubert has already shown us that Sartre assigns phenomenological significance to the literary work as a possible source of biographical knowledge. To insist on the relative autonomy of the literary work is not to argue that it is unrelated to the life of the writer. Flaubert’s vocation as writer is central to an existential project that reveals the singularity of a particular individual who embodies a general truth. We would not be able to grasp this singularity apart from the writer’s achievements: “It is the work or the act of the individual which reveals to us the secret of his conditioning.”36 In maintaining that the significance of the work or act does not derive from external conditions, Sartre reaffirms the ‘space’ of the imaginary as an improvisatory site in which human destiny can be assessed and varied. It would seem that Sartre assigns literature a unique role in demonstrating how singularity reveals the general in any particular instance. However, literature is perhaps only the expression of a more basic capacity that defines human beings as perpetually in the process of becoming. Man is a signifying being who constantly goes beyond the present and explains his actions in the light of future goals. The signs that he creates refer to absent objects or to objects that remain hidden in time. Sartre identifies signifying with an act of surpassing that enables human beings to separate themselves from their empirical conditions: To surpass present conditions toward their later change and to surpass the present object toward an absence are one and the same thing. Man constructs signs because in his very reality he is signifying; and he is signifying because he is a dialectical surpassing of all that is simply given.37

The capacity for language is what distinguishes man as a cultural being and sets him apart from the order of nature. In the act of signifying, human beings begin to move in a space that is irreducible to the empirical conditions in which they find themselves. From the standpoint of what is yet to come, this space is ‘empty’ but it also provides the basis for imaginative variation and free invention, which enable the individual to discover both absence and presence in the movement of verbal signs in a world of meaning. Human conduct, however, is not only constituted through significations but presents itself to us as the occasion for hermeneutical comprehension. In observing someone cope with a shared situation, I grasp the field of my material space as something that can be crossed and unified through practical

S A RT R E ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F H I S T O RY

47

activity. Comprehension is the term that describes this synthetic effort of bringing together self, other and material space. Moreover, in opposition to a short-sighted positivism, Sartre argues that our comprehension of the other necessarily takes place through a certain perception of human ends. This does not mean, of course, that such ends are equivalent to the objective results which enable living persons to establish contact with the world. Flaubert’s early and tentative reflections on a novel that would eventually become Madame Bovary should not be confused with the novel itself. However, these reflections are significant as ends and turn out to be binding to the degree that they allow us to relate the future to the present in all of its concrete detail. By the same token, we recover Flaubert himself through a regressive effort that moves from the objective book to the set of subjective intentions that once animated the living writer. This concern for ends is ultimately what enables Sartre to identify existentialism with anthropology as a human concern. Edmund Husserl earlier discussed how the sciences in general make use of their own subject-matter but never question their relationship to what they assume to be true.38 In a similar manner, Sartre will argue that the human sciences have generally failed to ask questions about their own foundations. The reason for this failure resides in the mistaken notion that scientific activity allows us to constitute the laws of the human world instead of providing an existential basis for revealing them. Anthropology has despaired of discovering a human essence that could provide us with an objective source of scientific legitimacy. In offering the ‘ideology’ of existence as the basis for anthropological reflection, Sartre merely suggests that the role of comprehension in the acquisition of knowledge can show how every human project embraces a mode of praxis that unites immediate existence with an incomplete but always vital understanding of the other. Words sometimes have regressive meanings and function as mere indicators, but they also refer us back to a process that is interminable. This process is none other than comprehension itself, which should not be confused with knowledge but functions as the indirect ‘foundation’ of all we know. Sartre’s philosophical contribution to the study of man challenges the way that knowledge is usually grounded in a stable relationship between knower and known: This perpetual dissolution of intellection in comprehension and conversely, the perpetual redescent which introduced comprehension into intellection as a dimension of rational non-knowledge at the heart of knowledge is the very ambiguity of a discipline in which the questioner, the question, and the questioned are one.39

Sartre’s reference to ambiguity in this remarkable excursion into anthropology as a human science is perhaps what best preserves the openness of his phenomenological approach to history. In accepting the indeterminate

48

WILLIAM D. MELANEY

relationship between knowledge and comprehension, we have already begun to place the ‘event’ of existence within the contested site of historical experience. American University, Cairo NOTES 1

Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 6. Dominick LaCapra, however, has argued effectively that Sartre’s opposition between poetry and prose quickly breaks down upon close examination. He even suggests that the category of the proper, in this case represented by prose, ‘deconstructs’ itself during the course of an exposition that becomes increasingly ‘poetic’ as it unfolds: 2

The writing is in no sense pure ‘prose,’ and it even seems to be more on the side of poetry – heavily allusive, evocative, connotative, persuasive, if not cajoling, even lyrical, and replete with metaphors and obscure resonances. It shows that what the text tries to say cannot be taken at face value. Dominick Lacapra, A Preface to Sartre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 73. 3 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 13. 4 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), pp. 340–400. 5 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 16. 6 Ibid., pp. 28–29. 7 Cf. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), pp. 15–86. This essay employs craft production to renovate the concept of the work for hermeneutical purposes. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s use of the peasant shoes as an example of a work leads back to Van Gogh’s painting, which opens up the question of truth as ontological disclosure. It could be argued, therefore, that Heidegger never dispenses with art as a key to revealing what would otherwise remain inadequately revealed in everyday life. 8 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 29. 9 Ibid., pp. 33–34. 10 Ibid., p. 34. 11 Ibid., p. 34. 12 Ibid., p. 35. 13 Cf. Wolfgang Iser, “Asymmetry Between Text and Reader,” The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 163–79. Iser discusses the concept of indeterminacy in Roman Ingarden’s approach to literary works. His criticisms suggest how interpretive discord can shape the reader’s assessment of textual meaning. Hence reception theory could be understood as an attempt to deepen Sartre’s more radical claim about the way that literary meaning is co-constituted, rather than merely constituted on an eidetic basis. 14 The material aspect of language is precisely what complicates Sartre’s later conception of the writer as a poet who employs ordinary language as a non-literal resource: “The literary writer is a custodian of ordinary language, but he goes beyond it, for his material is language as non-significant or misinformation.” Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals,” Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), p. 272. While Sartre’s later position seems to be diametrically opposed to the earlier reduction of literature to prose, we cannot

S A RT R E ’ S P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F H I S T O RY

49

help but notice that he sometimes fails to exclude ‘poetic’ uses of language from his earlier, rather programmatic agendas. 15 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 88. 16 Ibid., p. 114. Sartre briefly discusses how another sort of Marxism might have triumphed if the Paris Commune had not been crushed by external forces. This imaginary socialism “would have been coloured with a thousand nuances” and thus could not have developed into a monolithic ideology. While Sartre’s historical reflections have a speculative cast, they cannot be dismissed as entirely implausible or outmoded in a time that has witnessed the collapse of Communist orthodoxy. Paul Ricoeur has explored this aspect of the Marxist tradition more extensively in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 17 A more complete discussion can be found in Jean-Paul Sartre, “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal,” Between Existentialism and Marxism, pp. 141–69. In this essay, Sartre explores the notion of the singular universal as a hermeneutical category and places Kierkegaard in the company of Marx as a seminal intellectual influence. 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 10. 19 Ibid., p. 12. 20 Husserl explains that the thing is transcendent, rather than immanent to experience, in a manner that brings phenomenology close to ‘classical’ realism. Transcendence in this sense is not a concern of experience but pertains to the thing as such in its mode of being given: “Thus the Thing itself, simpliciter, we call transcendent. In so doing we give voice to the most fundamental and pivotal difference between ways of being, that between Consciousness and Reality.” Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931), pp. 133–34. 21 Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 26. 22 Ibid., p. 27. 23 Ibid., p. 41. 24 Jameson argues that Sartre’s acceptance of political motivation at face value does not correspond to what occurred after most revolutionary upheavals in the twentieth century. Cf. Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 267–68. We might suggest in response that Sartre’s phenomenological analysis indeed qualifies the value of economic reform as a strategy that has little chance of success if it is inadequately linked to political tasks. 25 Sartre, Search for a Method, pp. 45–46. 26 Ibid., p. 46. 27 Ibid., p. 124. 28 The concept of an original project is presented theoretically for the first time through the example of Flaubert, the monumental figure who enables Sartre to produce a lengthy intellectual biography in which the vocation of literature performs a central role: The irreducible unification which we ought to find, which is Flaubert, and which we require biographers to reveal to us – this is the unification of an original project, a unification which should reveal itself to us as a non-substantial absolute. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square, 1956), p. 717. Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 111. 30 Ibid., p. 142. 31 Ibid., pp. 64–65. 32 The ‘classical’ reading of Flaubert would center around the opposition between the imaginary and the real as well as the attempt to substitute imagination for reality. Hazel E. Barnes has pursued this reading in her insightful account of Madame Bovary in Sartre and Flaubert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 340–61. 29

50

WILLIAM D. MELANEY

33

Needless to say, both the ‘classical’ and the autobiographical readings of Flaubert could be combined in various phenomenological analyses to argue that literature and history are important to the novels themselves. In emphasizing the writer’s failure on the level of social engagement, Sartre tends to offer a literal interpretation of Flaubert’s famous statement, “I am Madame Bovary.” This same statement could be used to support that idea that literature saved Flaubert, while it doomed Emma Bovary. Flaubert’s text, however, provides an image of his age that places in question the possibility of authorial detachment. 34 Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 147. 35 Cf. Manfred Frank, “Archäologie des Individuums. Zur Hermeneutik von Sartres Flaubert,” Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), pp. 256–333. 36 Sartre, Search for a Method, p. 152. 37 Ibid., p. 152. 38 Ibid., p. 168. 39 Ibid., p. 174.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barnes, Hazel E. Sartre and Flaubert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Frank, Manfred. “Archäologie des Individuums. Zur Hermeneutik von Sartres Flaubert.” Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993. pp. 256–333. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadler. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. pp. 15–86. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. London and Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jameson, Fredric. “Sartre and History.” Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. pp. 206–305. Kaelin, Eugene F. An Existentialist Aesthetic: The Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962. LaCapra, Dominick. A Preface to Sartre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Ed. George H. Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal” and “A Plea for Intellectuals.” Between Existentialism and Marxism. Trans. John Mathews. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. pp. 141–69, 228–85. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Family Idiot, I: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857. Trans. Carol Cosman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search for a Method. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

H I S T O R I C A L FA B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O RY B Y OT H E R MEANS: SHAKESPEARE’S CAESAR AND MOFOLO’S C H A K A A S O P P O S I T E S I N RU B I C O N E S Q U E LEADERSHIP

ABSTRACT

My paper argues that analyzing the characters of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (Zulu) in terms of the interrelationships of each character’s secret self, private self, and public self offers a more plausible account of the nature and ends of each character’s ambition and leadership style: in the case of Caesar as a democratic dictator and in the case of Chaka as a demonic dictator. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar probably premiered in 1599 as the Globe’s inaugural play and first appeared in print in the First Folio (1623). The compilers of this Folio place the play under Shakespeare’s tragedies and title it The Tragedie of Julius Caesar, but in the Folio’s table of contents the title becomes The Life and Death of Julius Caesar. An editorial essay in the (1980) 3rd edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Scott, Foresman publisher) aptly notes the implication of this double title: the Folio’s table of contents lists the play “as The Life and Death of Julius Caesar as though it were a history” (Bevington 1032). This double or alternate title phenomenon hints at the fact that Shakespeare’s drama fabulates (rather than fabricates) out of history the life and death of Julius Caesar, the Roman general and ruler who lived from about 100 B.C. to 44 B.C. Shakespeare principally owes his history for his Caesar play to Thomas North’s 1579 English translation of Jacques Amyot’s 1559 French translation of a Latin translation of Plutarch’s (A.D. 2) book Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. However, Shakespeare refashions or remodels this Plutarchian history by omitting or adding or modifying certain events or characters. For instance, Plutarch does not have a deaf Caesar, but Shakespeare does. Shakespeare shortens or resituates the historical chronology: he conflates the October 45 B.C. celebration in Rome of Caesar’s defeat of Pompey’s with the annual February Feast of Lupercal, which commemorates the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus. In Shakespeare, both celebrations occur March 14, one day before the ides of March. Octavius Caesar 51 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 51–76. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

52

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

reaches Rome long after Caesar’s death but in Shakespeare he gets there on the day of Caesar’s assassination. Furthermore, the forging of the second Roman triumvirate of Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar, and Aemilius Lepidus, which in Plutarch occurred over a year after Caesar’s death, occurs in Shakespeare shortly after his death. In Act III, a Roman mob attacks Cinna the poet, but in Plutarch the mob attacked Cinna the poet because it truly mistook him for Cinna the conspirator. The play ends with the victory of the triumvirate in the 42 B.C. Battle of Philippi. Hemingway’s “theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” seems relevant to Shakespeare’s Caesar (Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 75). In Shakespeare’s Caesar drama we feel the character of Julius Caesar as Caesar tries to make his public life consistent with his private and secret self. Similarly, when a 1928 critic challenged the historical accuracy of Thomas Mofolo’s 1925 novel Chaka, the novel’s author replied, “I am not writing history, I am writing a tale, or I should rather say I am writing what actually happened, but to which a great deal has been added, and from which a great deal has been removed, so that much has been left out, and much has been written that did not actually happen, with the aim solely of fulfilling my purpose in writing this book” (Mofolo xv). In the first two sentences of the opening paragraph of chapter 5, the novel’s we-narrator addresses (though vaguely) the novel’s purpose or focus: “The events in Chaka’s life were overwhelming because they were so numerous and of such tremendous import; they were like great mysteries which were beyond the people’s understanding. But since it is not our purpose to recount all the affairs of his life, we have chosen only one part which suits our present purpose” (153). Hemingway’s thinking also applies to Mofolo’s historical fabulation. In Death in the Afternoon, he advises, “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the reader is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them” (Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon 192). Mofolo focuses on one part of Chaka, the part behind the historical parts of Chaka, the part Chaka forever tries to hide from the public. This secret self of Chaka goes under the alias Isanusi, a so-called soothsayer, the godhead of his diabolical trinity of himself, Ndlebe and Malunga – a trinity which mostly functions as Chaka’s secret self. In a 1950 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin contends that “There is no document of Civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin 256). Mofolo’s we-narrator dwells on Chaka’s tragic attempts to convert his private world and his public world into his secret world. What happens when a leader tries to force his own family and

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

53

confidantes in his private life and the people (the Zulus) in his public life into the tyranny of his secret life? Isanusi means soothsayer in Sesotho. “Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them,” declares Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus 89), Shakespeare and Mofolo remodel biography, specifically ambition and leadership, in terms of the interrelationship of the selves of one’s being in the world: the secret self, the private self, and the public self. Both Caesar and Chaka evince a Rubiconesque ambition, an irreversible Macbeth-like vaulting ambition which overleaps itself and falls on the other side beyond one’s ends of being onto the ends of being in general. However, Caesar and Chaka exude differently this Rubiconesque ambition in such ways that make Caesar live and die a democratic dictator while Chaka lives and dies a demonic dictator. In both cases we feel how their secret selves relate to their private and public lives. The Soothsayer in Julius Caesar and Isanusi in Chaka function respectively as windows into the nature of the interrelationship of character and fate or of acts of one’s self and acts of destiny, destiny or fate in the sense of all others (such as family and friends in one’s private life and the people in one’s public life). In Caesar we have a democratic tyrant who dwarfs all his contemporaries in ambition, in military success, and in political achievements. In Chaka, we find a monomaniacal despot whose thirst for blood never ends. Apparently, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Mofolo’s Chaka do not believe in a fate that acts no matter how one acts, but they do believe in a fate that acts when one fails to act. The main conflict in Julius Caesar lies in the consequences of the acts of Caesar and the acts of the cast as the movement of the interrelationship of the acts come to an explosive end. Caesar’s intra-psychic fight drives his secret self (the self when no one around to hear or see or sense what one does or thinks), his private self (the self known only to confidants and confidantes), and his public self (the self accessible to anyone). In each case, a soothsayer forces a decision. Similarly, the long silent encounter between the acts of Chaka and the acts of those inside and outside his inner royal court finally explode and Chaka’s character and destiny show themselves. The Soothsayer triggers the battle of and for Caesar’s selves. Chaka’s secret self assumes the alias Isanusi (the soothsayer), head of the diabolic trinity of Ndlebe and Malunga. It appears every human has a secret life, a private life, and a public life, with only the nature and degree varying from person to person. Even Mother Teresa (Agnes Bojaxhiu) had a secret self. The cover of the September 1, 2007 issue of Time carries the headline “The Secret Life of Mother Teresa.” The magazine’s 8-page cover story reviews the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk-edited book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, which consists “primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years” (38). The secret life involves the agnostic or even atheistic tendencies that haunted her almost all

54

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

her life. Secret self and its attempt to bridge or widen the gap between it and the private or public self has from immemorial times been a source of curiosity and sometimes insight about human character. Apparently, what often passes for one’s destiny or fate involves how one does or does not insert or assert oneself in the acts of being in the ever-recurring drama of the ends of one’s being and the ends of being in general. As Nietzsche aptly suggests Emersonianly, “ultimately one experiences only oneself” (121). Shakespeare and Mofolo appear to present a non-metaphysical fate, a fate grounded in the acts of one’s being and in the acts of being in general. Julius Caesar opens in 44 B.C. in Rome. The first scene, a public street, shows in shorthand Rome’s recent and not so recent history relative to Pompey and Caesar, with Caesar experiencing and enjoying the height of power. Roman tribunes Flavius and Murellus spar with a Cobbler about why he cobbler and his fellow workers or commoners stay idle on this day. The Cobbler tells the tribunes that he and his fellows have taken the day off to see and celebrate Caesar for his victory over Pompey’s sons. The tribunes force these Roman commoners to leave. Scene 2, the first Soothsayer scene, comes. Note that the Soothsayer has only nine lines out of the play’s total lines of 2540, yet these few lines, especially the line “Beware the ides of March,” reverberate throughout the play and beyond. History often shows Caesar as a general or top politician or husband who enjoys issuing orders rather than receiving orders. His private self and public self seem immune to orders. Act I, Scene 2, begins with music so loud that it drowns his wife’s name Calpurnia, as he Caesar calls it commandingly. When Caesar speaks, people listen. So Casca summons the music to stop, “Peace, ho! Caesar speaks” and the music stops. Caesar calls his wife again, “Calpurnia,” and she answers, “Here, my lord.” His command to his wife continues, “Stand you directly in Antonio’s way/When he doth run his course.” His orders shift to Antony, “Forget not in your speed, Antonio,/To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say/The barren, touched in this holy chase,/Shake off their sterile curse.” Antony replies deferentially, “I shall remember:/When Caesar says ‘Do this,’ it is performed.” Caesar re-commands Antony, “Set on, and leave no ceremony out.” At the end of these serial Caesar commands, the music resumes and the Soothsayer shouts, “Caesar!” (I, 2, 14). Caesar wonders who calls his name, “Ha! Who calls?” Once more, Casca orders silence so that Caesar can hear and be heard, “Bid every noise be still. Peace yet again,” and music ceases. Caesar proceeds, “Who is it in the press that calls on me?/I hear a tongue shriller than all the music/Cry ‘Caesar!’ “ Caesar orders the person to “Speak,” for “Caesar is turned to hear.” Then the Soothsayer warns Caesar, “Beware the ides of March” (I, 2, 20). For the first time a mere mortal orders mighty Caesar to beware of something. No one commands Caesar to do or not do something unless he already wants to do it.

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

55

Caesar asks, “What man is that?” Ironically, we see for the first time in the play the two men for whom this date (the ides of March) would also most matter, the same two men who would lead the anti-Caesar conspiracy: Brutus and Cassius. Brutus becomes the first to identify the speaker as a soothsayer. He tells Caesar “A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.” Caesar orders for the man to appear before him, “Set him before me; let me see his face.” So in another ironic Judas Iscariot-like moment, Cassius commands the Soothsayer to “come from the throng” and “look upon Caesar.” The Soothsayer complies. Brutus’s first words in the play concern Caesar and the Soothsayer, and Cassius’s very first gesture in the play involves Caesar and the Soothsayer. As the Soothsayer faces Caesar, Caesar asks him, “What sayst thou to me now? And orders him to “Speak once again.” The Soothsayer repeats his dare, “Beware the ides of March” (I, 2, 25). But Caesar dismisses the Soothsayer as “a dreamer,” and adds, “Let us leave him. Pass!” All heed Caesar and leave except Brutus and Cassius. Still in Act I, Scene 2, right after this Soothsayer warning to Caesar, Cassius begins to lay or strengthen the foundation for anti-Caesar conspiracy by first working on Brutus. Cassius asks Brutus if he would observe the forthcoming ceremonial public race (which would include Antony). When Brutus says no, Cassius prays he does. Brutus blames his hesitation on the fact that he is “not gamesome” and lacks “that quick spirit that is in Antony.” Cassius refuses to give up on Brutus. He points out, “Brutus, I do observe you now of late. . ../You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand/Over your friend that loves you.” Brutus tells Cassius not to worry, for his demeanor and behavior have nothing to do with him and that he still counts Cassius among “my good friends.” Cassius asks rhetorically, “good Brutus, can you see your face?” Brutus concedes that “the eye sees not itself/But by reflection, by some other things.” Cassius gradually progresses in his effort to manipulate Brutus through flattery. He laments the point that Brutus has “no such mirrors as will turn/Your hidden worthiness into your eye,/That you might see your shadow” In Act I, Scene 2, Lines 140–142, we glimpse Caesar’s philosophy of life when Cassius (as he tries to work on the anti-Caesar-leaning mind of Brutus) broods over why Caesar bestrides the Roman world “Like a Colossus, and we petty men/Walk under his huge legs, and peep about/To find ourselves dishonorable graves.” Cassius concludes in a Caesarean manner, “Men at sometime were masters of their fates/The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In other words, one should not believe in a fate that acts no matter how one acts. Rather one should believe in a fate that acts only when one fails to act. Fate often works in Caesar’s life non-metaphysically through the acts of those in his private world and his public world. Timing also acts sometimes as a corollary of fate. When motivation and timing match productively for us, we usually compliment fate but when they do otherwise we

56

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

curse fate. Later in Act IV, Scene 2, Lines 270–276, Brutus speaks of a time to seize time: There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures

The Soothsayer frames the plot of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Right from the play’s beginning (in Act I, Scene 2, Line 20) the Soothsayer warns Caesar, “Beware the ides of March.” In a sense the whole of Julius Caesar is about the ides of March, especially the ides-motivated intellectual (sometimes ambivalent) emotions of Julius Caesar and of Caesar’s time in general. Coming to terms with this date and the consequences of this date consume directly or indirectly the time, labor, and integrity or villainy of every character from then on to the end of the play. For Caesar, telling Caesar to beware of something or anything amounts to testing or questioning the courage or audacity or bravery of Caesar. Who dare tell Caesar what to do or not to do other than Caesar? All who wish Caesar well beseech Caesar to stay home on the ides of March and unbeknown to him those who wish him ill or want to trap him for death lure him out on the ides of March. Caesar (from the start) reads Cassius’s character correctly. He notes, “Cassius has a lean and hungry look/He thinks too much,” and he concludes, “Such men are dangerous.” But Caesar trusts Antony absolutely and lets Antony’s misreading of Cassius prevail. Antony advises Caesar, “Fear him not, Caesar, he’s not dangerous” (I, ii: 195–197). Caesar’s reading seems sensible. For Antony, Caesar’s assessment of Cassius apparently rests on physiognomy or mere impressions. That one looks lean and hungry or that one thinks too much does not make for a dangerous man. Caesar’s conclusion may be accurate but it lacks any substantiation. Similarly, Antony’s objection may be right but it too lacks any supporting evidence. In Act II, Scene 2, Caesar asks his servant, “What say the augurers?” The servant replies, “They would not have you to stir forth today./Plucking the entrails of an offering forth,/They could not find a heart within the beast.” Caesar then comments on the augurers’ message: The gods do this in shame of cowardice. Caesar should be a beast without a heart If he should stay at home today for fear. No, Caesar shall not. Danger knows full well That Caesar is more dangerous than he. We are two lions littered in one day,

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

57

And I the elder and more terrible And Caesar shall go forth.

At first it appears that Caesar would heed the Soothsayer’s caution as his wife Calpurnia persistently and passionately persuades him not to honor this date. On the other hand, Chaka seems to hide behind a metaphysical fate that acts on one all the time. However, fate for Chaka, mostly means Isanusi (also a soothsayer but of a sorcerer or witchcraft type and as such differs from Shakespeare’s Soothsayer). Oddly, Isanusi devilishly subscribes to a parallel Caesarean philosophy of life. He heads a diabolic trinity consisting of himself and his two servants, Ndlebe and Malunga. Isanusi acts as Chaka’s destiny or Chaka’s crutch fate. In chapter 18 of Mofolo’s 1925 novel Chaka, Isanusi says “there is a time in the life of a human being which he must seize at once or else forfeit numerous blessings which will never come his way again till he is buried in the cold earth; whereas if he is alert and vigilant, he will receive blessings which will never again slip out of his grasp” (124). Isanusi first meets Chaka (an exiled or runaway teenager) in chapter 6 and thereafter Chaka willingly surrenders the movement of his life to Isanusi. Isanusi becomes the surrogate for Chaka’s secret self, as opposed to Chaka’s private self or public self. The words – beware the ides of March – carry with them a history of Roman antiquity in general and a biography of Julius Caesar in particular. Shakespeare relies heavily on Plutarch’s own portrait of Julius Caesar. In other words, Shakespeare’s drama telescopes the time of Julius Caesar, all of his life of 56 years, from about 100 B.C. to 44 B. C. and a good portion of Roman antiquity. To have some strong sense of Caesar’s voracious ambition, it would be helpful to bring to the foreground through historians Plutarch and Suetonius the life of Caesar which lies buried in Shakespeare’s play. According to Plutarch, Gaius Julius Caesar came from a poor but respectable family; his uncle, Lucius Julius Caesar, rose to become a Consul during the Social War of 90 to 87 B.C. Julius Caesar’s own father, who bears the same name Gaius Julius, also rose as far as Praetor (a position just below Consul) before he died in 86 B.C., when his son Julius Caesar was about 15. His mother, Aurelia, doled on him and raised him in a neighborhood full of people from lower social class. Julius Caesar’s aunt, Julia, married Gaius Marius, a very wealthy Roman, a heavyweight player in Roman politics and warfare, who died in his sixth term as Consul. When Julius Caesar began his career he found himself in the middle of the growing conflicts between Marius and his rival Consul, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Cinna became Consul and made Julius Caesar a Flamen Dialis (head priest) of Jupiter, which he soon lost. Marius and Cinna opposed Sulla. Shortly thereafter, Caesar (in 84 B. C.) married Cornelia, Cinna’s daughter. Cinna died in the hands of his own mutinous soldiers. By 81 B. C. Sulla had crushed all

58

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

opposition and become the unchallenged victor and dictator. Sulla proscribed his enemies by execution or property confiscation. Caesar’s name appeared on the proscription list. While Sulla’s agenda favored the Optimates (the conservative wing of the Senate) or the boni (the good men), as Cicero usually called them, Caesar’s agenda favored the populares (the common people). Caesar ran away from Rome to hide in the countryside. Caesar’s mother pressured Sulla and he removed Caesar’s name from the proscription list. Sulla ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, his former rival. Caesar refused and Sulla confiscated her dowry. Suetonius quotes Sulla as saying of Julius Caesar, “in this one Caesar you will find many a Marius.” In 80 B. C., at about age 20, Caesar left Rome for Asia to work for the Asian governor Praetor Marcus Minucius Thermus. Caesar’s bravery at the siege of Miletus won him the very high honor of the corona civica (oak crown), which a recipient wore for standing applause in front of the Senate. Sulla died and Caesar returned to Rome, where he tried to sharpen his rhetorical and oratorical skills by serving as a trial lawyer, a job which allowed him to take on the political elite. In 75 B. C. on his way to Rhodes to study under Apollonius Molon, Cilician pirates kidnapped him for about five weeks for a ransom of about 5,000 gold coins but Caesar vainly insisted that a man of his kind was worth at least 12,000 gold coins. Before he left he told the captors that he would return to kill them. The death of his cousin, Gaius Aurelius Cotta, returned Caesar (now 27) to Rome from Rhodes, in 73 B. C. By appointment Caesar replaced Cotta as Pontiff (priest). Caesar usually lived beyond his means. His debts mounted fast. By election, he soon became a military tribune. He and Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of Rome’s richest men, became very close friends. Crassus began funding his lavish lifestyle. In 69 B. C. Caesar won the election for Quaestor. However, Caesar’s aunt (Marius’s wife) died and Caesar violated Roman tradition by making her funeral a huge public laudation, the kind usually reserved for historic figures. Caesar sang the praise of Julia’s husband (Marius), a man the Optimates of the Senate vilified. Caesar flaunted Marius’s popular images unseen since Sulla’s time and claimed Ancus Marcius Rome’s fourth king and Venus the goddess as part of his lineage. The crowd enjoyed Caesar’s performance and frustrated the Senate’s effort to undermine it. Cornelia (Caesar’s wife and mother of their infant daughter, Julia) died. Caesar again violated Roman tradition by having a public laudation for his wife, a very young woman. Caesar used the opportunity to honor Cinna (Cornelia’s father), another man the Senate’s Optimates hated. Caesar left Rome to serve under Antistius Vetius, the governor of Further Spain. On his way to Spain, Caesar encountered a statue of Alexander the Great, an encounter which made him note that Alexander at only age 30 had

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

59

conquered many nations while he Caesar at 31 had done nothing memorable. He increasingly identified with the people of Cisalpine Gaul who never ceased to complain about their being oppressed ever since Sulla’s time. The Senate impeached Caesar for treason but failed to convict him. In 67 B. C., Caesar married his second wife, Pompeia (the daughter of Quintus Pompey and the granddaughter of Sulla). Caesar was now a Senator. As senator, he supported both the Lex Gabinia measure to grant Pompey unrestricted power to deal with Cilician pirates and the Lex Manilia, a later measure to grant Pompey the ability to command the whole east against the Mithridates. But the rivalry between Pompey (Caesar’s father-in-law) and Crassus (Caesar’s overgenerous benefactor) intensified. Before he could help advance the second measure to help Pompey, Caesar became (by appointment) the curator of the Appian Way. In 65 B. C., Caesar and Bibulus (Caesar’s rival and a member of the Optimate faction of the Senate) became (through election) curule aedile, a magistrate position, responsible for maintaining temples and public buildings and for holding public games on state holidays. Caesar erected statues of Marius for public display but Caesar’s popularity with the people made Senate’s objections to his agenda irrelevant. As Caesar’s debts increased in 63 B. C., he ran for and won two offices: the office of Pontifex Maximus (Rome’s head priest) and the office of Urban Praetor. The former, a non-political position with high pay, lifetime tenure, and political advantages somewhat insulated him from his debts. However, the Catiline Conspiracy delayed his being the Praetor in 63 B. C. and widened his disagreement with the Optimates of the Senate. Lucius Sergius Catiline, a candidate for Consul, faced the charge of plotting to violently overthrow the Roman Republic and to kill Cicero. Catiline lost the Consular race and escaped from Rome to be part of the rebellion in Etrurie, where he lost his life in battle. In 63 B. Caesar became the Urban Praetor and advanced his populares agenda. At this time, Pompey’s eastern conquests had ended and so he headed back to Rome. Caesar supported Pompey’s return plan but the Optimates killed it because they feared that Pompey would become another Sulla. Caesar lost his Urban Praetorship but through a threat of violent intrusion by a mob Caesar regained the position. Pompey apparently did not want to be a Sulla or a dictator at all. Pompey gave up his troops, returned to Rome, and sought land bills for his military veterans. The boni rejected the plan, but Caesar endorsed it. Caesar worked to end or lessen the long rivalry between Crassus and Pompey. Then the annual women-only Bona Dea celebration, which Pompeia (Caesar’s wife), hosted at their home became scandal-ridden. Publius Clodius Pulcher, a patrician politician with a wild side, came to the celebration incognito as a woman, but Pompeia identified him and he escaped. Consequently, Caesar divorced Pompeia and declared that his wife had to be

60

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

above reproach or suspicion. Cicero brought Clodius to trial but failed to convict him. 61 B. C. came with Caesar as the proconsular governor of Further Spain. He left Rome and reached Rhone where some of his soldiers expressed dismay at the barbaric or wretched life of the villagers there. Caesar replied that he would rather be the first man among these local villagers than be the second man in Rome. Wherever he went from 61 to 60 B. C. Caesar defeated Roman enemies and one such military achievement earned him the title of imperator, which qualifies him for a triumph in Rome. Caesar decided to run for Consul but he had to be in the city of Rome to run. On the other hand, he also wanted his triumph. Roman tradition demanded that for his triumph to hold he had to remain outside the city of Rome but such delay would deny him the opportunity to run for Consul. He abandoned the opportunity for a triumph to celebrate his conquests in Spain and marched into Rome to run for Consul. Initially, controversy over Caesar’s age qualification for Consul brewed. Was Caesar 40 or 42 in 60 B. C? The Optimates opposed his decision to run. Caesar’s popularity with the people assured his political victory. He suggested to Pompey (Crassus’s rival) the idea of amicitia (coalition). Pompey had not given up his bid for land for his veterans of the eastern wars. Crassus had vested interests in the east. Caesar later married his third wife, Calpurnia (the daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso and the one we find in the Shakespaeare drama under discussion). In 60 B. C. Caesar formed a secret coalition which included Crassus (his wealthy benefactor) and Piso. Though Caesar won his race for Consul, the boni-supported Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus (his former co-aedile) also got elected as the junior Consul. In 59 B. C. Caesar helped pass a law that mandated the public release of all Senate debates and proceedings. Caesar himself eventually wrote seven volumes on the Gallic Wars and three volumes on the Roman Civil War. He wrote a land bill for veterans of Pompey’s eastern wars, a bill that Cato’s Optimates still rejected even though it compromisingly excluded Campania lands in order to attract their support. Caesar’s co-Consul Bibulus boasted that it would never pass and actively opposes it. Caesar then carried his campaign straight to the people. Existence of the first triumvirate came to light. Pompey and Crassus supported the land bill, and it became law. In shame Bibulus returned to his home and spent the rest of his consular year trying to void Caesar’s legislation. Caesar wrote a pro-Crassus tax bill that would help Crassus’s business interests; the people’s assembly passed it. He also advanced anti-corruption laws to make provincial governors more accountable. The first triumvirate often took bills directly to the people’s assembly and bypassed the Senate, an approach which though technically legal later became a basis for the attempts to prosecute Caesar. Caesar’s relationships with Crassus, Piso (his

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

61

new father-in-law), and Pompey (his new son-in-law) seemed secure. Pompey had married Caesar’s daughter, Julia. With the help of the Tribune Tublius Vatinius, the Lex Vatinia gave Caesar the ProConsulship of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum, which he held for about five years. When the governor of Gallia Narbonensis (Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer) died, Caesar added the territory to his domain. Caesar took over his control of Cisalpine Gaul, Transalpine Gaul, and Illyricum in 59 B. C. In 58 B. C. Caesar defeated the Helvetii (a Celtic tribe in today’s Switzerland). When Germanic incursions into Gallic land and diplomacy failed, Caesar defeated Ariovistus (the leader of the Germanics) on the battlefield. Publius Licinius Crassus, Caesar’s young lieutenant and son of triumvir Crassus, played a key role in this Roman victory over Ariovistus. In 57 B. C. Caesar defeated the warriors of Belgae, a confederation of northern tribes in northern Gaul. When news of his victory reached Rome, Cicero succeeded in obtaining a Supplicato (a public offering of gratitude) for Caesar. A Supplicato usually lasted five days. Pompey’s Supplicato lasted ten days, but Caesar’s lasted fifteen days. In 58 B. C., Publius Clodius Pulcher, who earlier had violated Caesar’s home, became Tribune of the Plebs. He supported Caesar’s agenda and pushed Cicero (who had prosecuted him in the Catalini Conspiracy) into exile. But Clodius soon fell out with Caesar. The Crassus-Pompey rivalry continued unabated. Clodius sent Cato to Cyprus, a move that created unrest in Egypt. Ptolemy the XII (the young king of Egypt) escaped from Egypt into Rome to secure Pompey’s intervention. Clodius did not want Pompey to intervene. Clodius used street gangs to help in his cause and Pompey through Titius Annius Milo (the 57 B. C. tribune) got his own gangs to do the same. Pompey and Consul Cornelius sought the return of Cicero from exile. In 57 B. C. Cicero returned and endorsed the fifteen-day Suupplicato for Caesar for the victory over the Belgae warriors. Cicero appointed Pompey to a five-year term as Cura Annonae (manager of grain supply) to deal with the pervasive grain problem. Clodius’s and Milo’s street gangs ran amuck as the two men tried to prosecute each other for the use of violence. Milo is tried and at the trial Crassus and Pompey testified for Milo. Clodius attempted to divide Crassus and Pompey by publicly complimenting Crassus and castigating Pompey. Caesar’s supporters appeared to be morphing into his opponents. Clodius, Cicero, Bibulus, Cato, and the rest of the Optimates hold Caesar’s Consulship responsible for all the ills that plague Rome. In 56 B. C. Caesar pushed for Roman control of all of Gaul. He planned for his next military campaigns in Gaul, Britain, and Germania, but all was not well in Rome. Caesar returned to Cisalpine Gaul as Pompey stayed in northern Italy to carry out his grain commission duties. Caesar summoned the triumvirs (Crassus, Pompey, and of course Caesar himself) and about 200 senators to

62

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

Luca for a conference. Caesar needed his command extended to guarantee immunity from recall and prosecution. Pompey and Crassus to become coConsuls in 55 B. C.: Pompey to get Spain and Crassus, Syria. Pompey got uneasy with Caesar’s growing army and Crassus sought a chance for military glory and loot in the east in Parthia. With nothing settled at the conference, Crassus and Pompey headed back to Rome to run for the 55 B. C. elections. Crassus and Pompey became joint Consuls. Clodius and Crassus’s rivalry cooled. Crassus left to rule his province. Pompey remained in Rome at the helm of state affairs. Maintaining law and order increasingly leaned on the boni. Caesar stopped Germanic incursions into Gallic territory by crossing the Rhine River into Germania and thus became the first Roman to cross the Rhine. Also in 55 B. C. Caesar invaded Britain and became the first Roman to cross the channel to the island of Britain. Rome granted Caesar another twenty-day period of thanksgiving for his expedition to Britain. He returned to Cisalpine Gaul but Britain did not leave his mind. In 54 B. C. he invaded Britain for the second time. When Crassus’s 55 B. C. joint Consulship with Pompey ended, Crassus decided to live out his dream for wealth and the kind of military glory that the other triumvirs enjoyed. Crassus was last in battle about twenty years before, in the battle against Spartacus. In 54 B. C. Crassus went to his province of Syria in order to attack the Parthian empire. Many senators opposed Crassus’s intention since Parthia had done nothing to injure Roman interests. Crassus’s son, Publius Crassus, joined his father in 54 B. C. With Publius’s help, Crassus crossed the Euphrates into Mesopotamia in 53 B. C. In the battle at Carrhae, the Partians trapped some of his men and promised peace if Crassus himself would negotiate with them. The Parthians kidnapped Crassus at the meeting and executed him and his Roman legions. Not until 20 B. C. would Augustus Caesar (Rome’s first emperor and Julius Caesar’s grandnephew), recover from a Parthian temple the lost standards of Crassus’s lost legions. Crassus’s death began the death of the triumvirate of Crassus, Caesar, and Pompey. Crisis gathered as Caesar returned from his second invasion of Britain in 54 B. C.: all was not well in Gaul, word reached him that his daughter, Julia (Pompey’s wife), had died in childbirth. After her death, Pompey aligned more and more with Caesar’s enemies (the Optimates). To resuscitate his alliance with Pompey, Caesar made two offers to Pompey: Octavia (his grandniece) would marry Pompey and he, Caesar, would divorce his wife and marry Pompey’s daughter. Pompey rejected both offers. Soon after Julia’s death, news of Caesar’s mother’s death arrived. The violence between Clodius and Milo ultimately claimed the life of Clodius, and the prosecution of Milo forced Milo into exile. Pompey acted now as the only Consul for the year. Pompey married Claudia, the daughter of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio, one of the

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

63

boni. Metellus later assumed joint Consulship. Pompey had earlier promised to protect Caesar from his enemies by letting him recover his imperium via public office when Caesar’s Gallic term expired. Caesar scored victory over Vercingetorix’s Gallic forces at Divio. Vercingetorix surrendered and moved to Rome to spend five years waiting for a ritual execution. Caesar secured another twenty-day Supplicatio (the third). The Gallic wars ended after eight years. Caesar secured every honor in the ancient Roman traditional course of honor. Chaka also climbs and extends the Zulu course of honor in a manner similar to and different from Julius Caesar’s. According to Mofolo’s novel, Chaka’s father, Senzangakhona, rules Mazulu, a small old nation. He has three or four wives, who bear him no boys but only girls and thus no heir apparent to the throne. He stages a feast that attracts young women from the neighboring villages. One girl, Nandi, attracts the king. Nandi (tall, beautiful, and erect) falls for him too. After the feast, Senzangakhona persuades her to do with him “an ugly deed” that violates “the law of nature and man” (5). Disappointed, Nandi walks away from Senzangakhona’s “evil design.” Nevertheless, she gives in ultimately and pregnancy results. The king married her and she joins his household. When her delivery nears, he sends her back to her village to live with her mother. She delivers the baby boy and Senzangkhona names him Chaka and asks Nandi to bring him for a short stay so that father and son can be acquainted. Nandi then returns to her home at Ncube’s to keep infant Chaka “away from witchcraft since” rumor says that “Senzangakhona’s wives had been bewitched so that they would not carry male children” (7). Those who know Chaka from childhood claim that his eyes betray his “royal blood.” They describe him in animal terms as “the cub of a lion” or “the nurseling of a wild beast” or “a new-born little lion” (8). A Bugane woman folk doctor warns Nandi that when Chaka becomes “a man, he must never be accompanied by another man when he goes to bathe,” that “he must go entirely alone” unless the other person is a woman (9). Senzangakhona’s second wife delivers a son, Mfokazana. Nandi returns to her husband’s household in Nobamba, with Chaka ready to be weaned. Shortly after, another most senior wife delivers a male child, Dingana. The arrival of Mfokazana and Dingana problematizes the royal succession line and worsens the lives of Chaka and his mother. The senior wives declare Mfokazana the king-elect, with Dingana next in line. Then another senior wife delivers a son, Mhlangana. This arrival of a fourth son ruins the lives of Chaka and his mother. Senzangakhona still loves Nandi very much and this love gesture irritates his senior wives with jealousy. When they fail to make their husband announce the royal succession line, they secure the services of a sorcerer who would make their husband turn his heart away from Nandi. Nandi becomes pregnant again and returns to

64

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

her home at Ncube’s to deliver. The senior wives pressure Senzagakhona to exile Nandi permanently from Nobamba. They insist that “though Chaka was born first,” the royal succession line should read thus: Mfokazan, Dingana, and Mhlangana (10). They dismiss Nandi as a dog and remind their husband that Nandi conceived Chaka out of wedlock while they themselves were virgins when he married them. They threaten to report the matter to their husband’s bigger king, “the Great King Jobe” (10). Their husband gives in and rules out Chaka as his heir apparent and makes Mfokazana the king-elect. He also banishes Nandi from Nobamba. The senior wives further demand that Nandi and her child (Chaka) be banned from Ncube’s also and be forced to return to her own home at Lageni’s. The we-narrator says that Senzagakhona’s pain in giving up Chaka and Nandi or child and wife “was like swallowing a stone.” The public sides with the senior royal wives, wishes Chaka were killed and brand him as “a child of sin” (11). As a boy, Chaka undergoes much harassment, teasing and suffering in the hands of his peers. Nandi summons the Bungane woman doctor, who gives him some medicines prepared from “the liver of a lion, the liver of a leopard, and the liver of a man who had been a renowned warrior in his lifetime.” The narrator says that once vaccinated with these medicines, Chaka henceforth “had an uncontrollable desire to fight, and it had to be a serious fight” involving “heavy sticks and spears” (14). Chaka soon becomes the leader of the herdboys. He shows his prowess by killing a lion when still a boy. His father carries the news to “his overlord Dingiswayo,” the successor to the now dead King Jobe. This lion feat brings fame to Chaka but shames the males (young and nonyoung) and generates envy in the village. Young women compose and sing a praise song which celebrates his physical courage and castigates the cowardice of Senzangakhona and other male children (Chaka’s half brothers) whom the women now regard as “no men” at all. Similarly, Nandi’s female age-mates compose their own praise song which celebrates Nandi as the only woman for she alone is the mother of a child hero or a child wonder. This women’s praisesong dismisses Senzangakhona’s other wives as useless since they are mothers of cowardly sons. In those days of might rather than good looks, according to the narrator, women were not attracted to cowardly men no matter how handsome the men were. A woman wanted a man who could protect her, a man whom others feared. Brave men regardless of how ugly become objects of adoration and praise-poems or praise-songs. The two praise songs (one for Chaka and the other for his mother) generated much ill will among men, especially the young ones. The narrator states that “evil spirit spread until it influenced people like Mfokazana” and others to plot “to kill Chaka” cruelly at a feast. A messenger from Dingiswayo tells Senzangakhona that the big king wants to

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

65

see Chaka and know Chaka. It begins to dawn on Chaka that his father works not to save him but to burn him. In chapter 4, with his mother to guard him from “the evil spirit among the people,” Chaka goes to a Bokone river to bathe. Out of his mother’s sight, he ominously encounters a “huge water monster” snake with “two long tongues,” which at one point the monster wraps around Chaka’s neck. This encounter makes him fear, an unprecedented cowardly kind of fear. When the snake disappears back into the water, Chaka hears “out of the reeds . . . a heavy, stentorious [sic] voice,” which thrice says among other things that the mighty water snake is only for the eyes of favored ones. Another voice, a soft one follows, hailing him (like the three witches in Macbeth): “Hail! Hail! This land is yours. . .. You shall rule over nations and their kings. You shall rule over peoples of diverse traditions. . . . And all things shall obey you with unquestioning obedience. . .. Yet you must go by the right path” (24). These developments at the river seem ominous and alarm Nandi, who quickly calls for the Zwide woman native doctor to intervene with her magical medicine, Nandi gets the news that the doctor has just died. However, the doctor leaves message before her death that her client, Chaka, be transferred to another doctor, her mentor, the one who “taught her everything she knew about medicine.” According to the message, the new doctor now has the task of completing the “work of strengthening Chaka” medicinally (25). The new doctor doubles as both doctor and diviner, which supposedly makes him superior to the dead doctor. The dead doctor’s message also says that Nandi must not seek the new doctor “for he will come to you on his own accord, since he will divine for you where you are.” The message adds that while the old doctor uses only medicines, the new doctor “sometimes uses the divination of the head. He will see danger” ahead and Chaka “will have time to avoid it. The doctor/diviner divines wars before they are fought or contemplated. He can foretell without failure who will win a war. Chaka’s enemies slander his name and link him with “all things evil.” Rumor also claims it Chaka is not “human” at all. They associate his mother’s pregnancy and his birth with some abnormality. But this slander does not slow “Chaka’s fame” (26). In chapter 5, Chaka rescues Mfokazana’s girl from a menacing hyena. Gossip thrives on latent family troubles in the royal household: Mfokazana hits Chaka on the head, and Dingana attacks Chaka. The chapter ends with the narrator editorializing: “it is indeed true that the fruit of sin is amazingly bitter, because we do not see any transgression on Chaka’s part . . ., yet . . . his father commands that he should” die. The narrator adds that “the cause of it all” is “that Nandi and Senzangakhona suffered from guilt.” Senzangakhona fears that “his crime would be exposed,” so he plots “to kill his own son” (34). Chaka, their son would assume and absorb this guilt and he and

66

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

his mother would face it by invoking a metaphysical intervention which metamorphosizes into a diabolical trinity of Isanusi, Ndlebe, and Malunga, which functions as a cover for Chaka in the form of Chaka’s secret self. Chapter 6, the crucial chapter where Isanusi and Chaka meet, finally arrives. Chaka’s thirst for kingship shows as he gloats, “How I shall take my revenge the day that sun of mine shall rise” (35). Clearly, Chaka’s ultimate ambition to be king and his desire for revenge precede the arrival of Isanusi. Isanusi does not originate Chaka’s ambition to be king. Isanusi merely activates Chaka’s secret self. Chaka dissimulates the different acts of his being: the acts of his secret self, the acts of his private self, and the acts of his public self, which at one time or another increasingly become undifferentiated as they merge with the ends of his secret self. Before Sanusi appears, Chaka repeatedly declares not if he becomes king but when he becomes king. Fate and character are about to match wits. Isanusi would impersonate fate (or the secret ends of Chaka’s secret life). Chaka leaves his Ncube village to spend time in the forest. While there, he falls asleep by a tree. When he eventually wakes up, he finds “a man doctor standing right there by him, looking at him in a strange way.” Chaka’s body shivers immediately as he sets his eyes on this man. Chaka grabs his own spear, “afraid that” this man “had nearly” murdered him “in his sleep.” He soon realizes this man appears here not to kill him but as a friend and a doctor. The man greets Chaka as Chaka “from the royal house.” Chaka says humbly that “I am not a person of the royal house, but one from a little village.” But the man says, “It would be a wonder if you were not from the royal house” since Chaka’s appearance and manner of speech indicate royalty (36–37). The man claims that he can read people. To make Chaka believe this claim, the man reveals something about Chaka that only Chaka knows, “In your tuft of hair there is a medicine to bring you luck and kingship” (38). He also identifies to Chaka the woman doctor associated with this tuft of hair. Chaka begins to wonder joyfully if this man is not “the isanusi [meaning soothsayer or diviner in Sesotho language] who, it had been said, would come to him!” Chaka realizes quickly that if the man is the isanusi then Chaka’s “affairs were going to take a new turn.” When Chaka asks him twice or thrice where he is coming from and where he is going, the man at last answers by pointing at the sky with his stick and saying, “Ngivela kude le! (‘I come from far away yonder!’)” (39). The doctor’s statement renews Chaka’s confidence, “and he saw clearly that his father’s kingship was now his, that he had that day secured it, and it would not any longer slip out of his grasp as long as he was with this man” (40). This man, this Isanusi, this so-called soothsayer symbolizes Chaka’s secret self, not his alter ego. Chaka uses Isanusi or Isanusi’s alter ego to hatch and reinforce the ends of his being in the ongoing conflicts or contradictions regarding his secret self, private self, and public self. The Faustian oath Isanusi insists on Chaka

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

67

taking guards Chaka’s secret self. Chaka takes the oath eagerly and voluntarily: “I bind myself to abide by your commandments in every way in which you will command me.” He wants Isanusi to make him “a great king,” an “independent king,” the king of kings “to whom all lesser kings owe allegiance.” Isanusi then declares, “You must believe in me, I will never deceive you,” and he draws Chaka’s attention to “the affairs of this world,” where “people live by favoritism and bias, by hatred and by strength.” He adds, “now you too must part with mercy from this very day, because mercy devours its owner” (41). In chapter 7, Isanusi arms and scarifies Chaka’s body with some cultic or juju-like “medicine of kingship” (including “the brain of a crocodile”) that would insure the obedience of others to his commands (42). However, he warns Chaka that his present medicinal ware lacks a medicine that involves “the spilling of blood,” a medicine that is “extremely evil” but also “extremely good.” To choose this complementary medicine also means Chaka choosing death over life. Isanusi invites Chaka to the search for the medicine. The novel refers to a lone tree in Bokone with sap that looks like human blood. Only a human whose body has been armed with medicines can cut it without dying. To cut it a human must be totally naked. When one chops it, it cries “like a goat.” Isanusi, the doctor, vaccinates Chaka with the medicine from this “tree of witchcraft,” this supernatural tree. Isanusi administers other medicines, including “snake poison” (43). From another tree far away, Isanusi makes a stick and a spear for Chaka. The spear has a short handle with a medicine-stuffed base. One end of the stick is stuffed with “that terrible evil medicine”. He advises Chaka to obey Dingiswayo because Chaka’s desired kingship would come through Dingiswayo. Isanusi instructs Chaka on the routine to follow whenever he (Chaka) needs him (Isanusi). The routine includes going to the river, submerging part of the reed in water and whispering “Isanusi” into the reed. And in battle if Chaka sees “death at hand,” he should strike his forehead where the stuffed medicine lies and then call “Isanusi” and help would come in a jiffy and what more, Chaka’s “enemies will flee when they hear my name” (44). Then Chaka asks curiously, “Doctor, we have already been together several days now, talking about one thing, but you have not yet told me your name. Who are you?” The doctor replies, “Neither did you tell me yours, I discovered it for myself with my own intelligence. When you call me, say ‘Isanusi’.” Chaka points out, “But ‘Isanusi’ is not your name, it simply describes what you are, whereas what I am asking is your name.” The doctor responds, “You speak the truth, but I am Isanusi both by name and by deed.” Chaka concedes, “I was about to ask you, Isanusi, how many days it would take you to reach me, starting from where you will be when I call you.” Isanusi promises to arrive quickly or a little late, depending on whether where Chaka calls from is near or far from him. Nonetheless, if unable to make it he can always send one of

68

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

his servants. He adds that the day Chaka takes over the throne, one of these servants would come to live with him to watch over him. As Chaka says, “But doctor, will they also . . .,” Isanusi interrupts, “You must not say ‘doctor’ when you speak to me, you must say ‘Isanusi.’ Be careful not to say ‘doctor’ when you summon me, and thus make it impossible for me to hear your call.” Apparently worried, Chaka asks, “But you are a doctor, aren’t you?” Isanusi retorts, “Yes, I am, but my name is Isanusi, and that is the name I use in addressing the dead, and it is by that name that they know me.” Chaka resumes his earlier unfinished question, “I was about to ask you, Isanusi, whether those servants of yours will know where I am?” Isanusi says, “With precision.” Chaka wonders, “How will they know?” Isanusi turns the question around, “How did I know? The way that I knew is exactly the way they too will know.” He informs Chaka that “the great king who once visited you at the river is a person who loves war; if you do not spill blood, he will not be pleased with you.” He reminds him that “the medicine with which I have vaccinated you is a medicine of blood” and “if you do not spill much blood, it will turn against you and kill you instead.” Isanusi reiterates without mincing words, “Your sole purpose should be to kill without mercy, and thus clear the path that leads to the glory of your kingship” (45). Chaka calls Isanusi doctor again and Isanusi commands him not to say doctor anymore, “You must say ‘Isanusi’.” Chaka adds fame to kingship as what he desires. He wants fame that comes through bloody, deadly spear battles. Isanusi notes, “Chaka, I tell you there is nothing that is too difficult for a man. If you are a man, and you know how to work with your spear, everything will happen the way you want it.” He adds that the spear brings cattle, brings fame, and ensures royal rule. The spear rules he who does not know how to use the spear. The spear kills those who don’t know how to kill with the spear. (46) What Isanusi says next reminds me of a similar saying by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Isanusi says, “The diligent cultivator of sorghum is the person who knows the time for working in the fields, who, when the proper month comes, gives up beer parties and feasts, and rises at the crying of the cock to go to his garden, caring nothing about the cold and the fury of the sun, his one aim being that that moment should not pass him by.” Julius Caesar tells us that there’s a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Isanusi’s maxim continues his seize-the-moment advice. He tells Chaka, “If you like, you must be like that. You must be a cultivator of kingship: let your spear be your hoe, use it, and use it intelligently. Where necessary, you must reduce everything to total annihilation, sweep it all away, and never let your enemy escape lest he should afterwards rise against you. Remove the weeds from your garden of kingship with war, and that is how you will achieve your fame.” Isanusi’s parting words, Chaka, “you must work like a man with that

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

69

spear of yours, so that the day we meet again you will tell me of the great things which you have done” and of how “Dingiswayo regards you.” As they near Dingiswayo’s place, Isanusi leaves saying that he does “not want to meet Dingiswayo because they hated each other” (46–47). In chapter 8, Chaka escapes from home as an erring human but after his meeting with Isanusi he changes “greatly” and has “a completely different spirit” and personality. Now “it is only his flesh that is coming back, only his outer self; as for his true self, that has remained at the place from which he is returning” (47). His Isanusi world conceals his motivating thoughts from outsiders. Before withdrawing into his Isanusi life, the narrator describes Chaka as “amazingly persistent,” “ never letting anything “stand in his way.” and retaining his humanity (48). His formal initiation into the Isanusi world, Chaka’s secret evil world, marks Chaka’s ultimate loss of his humanity. He now thinks that “the law of this world” licenses him to kill anybody anytime for any reason (regardless of innocence). He returns determined to fight a war without end. When others flee for their lives, Chaka all by himself uses the Isanusimade short spear to kill a madman who has been frightening, plundering, killing, and harassing Bokone’s people and livestock. When Dingiswayo and his armies attack Zwide’s men (a perennial enemy), Chaka joins Dingiswayo and plays (through several invocation of the name Isanusi) a decisive role in the defeat of the enemy. On the recommendation of Chaka’s fellow soldiers, King Dingiswayo makes Chaka a regiment commander. Chapter 9 informs us that Chaka used to confide in his mother about medicines his doctor had given him, but after Isanusi the situation reverses. He relegates his mother to the background. She no longer belongs to his secret life. She now at best belongs to his private life. Chaka does not disclose the Isanusi affair to his mother. The narrator speculates that Chaka fails to reveal the Isanusi phenomenon in his life to his mother because he believes “Sanusi was a sorcerer” and if his mother knows this fact, she would warn him to end the relationship. People usually associate sorcery with witchcraft or wizardry or some supernatural or metaphysical spirits or powers. However, Chaka says he does not care about Isanusi’s identity, be he a sorcerer or not as long as this Isanusi-connection yields the kingship he so desires. He reminds himself that he has resolved to do any deed regardless of how ugly “if only it led him towards that kingship” (55). His paramount objective: to be king at any cost. Two of Isanusi’s servants or intercessors (Ndlebe and Malunga) appear before Chaka. Malunga reveals that Ndlebe would be Chaka’s ears and he Malunga would be his arm. Both have access to his inner or secret mind and would assist him in wartime, and in peacetime they would analyze his plan with him, which means Chaka has “an idea in your mind you must tell me, and I shall seek a way” to turn it into action” (59). Chaka tells nothing about the two Isanusi men

70

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

to his mother other than that “he had found himself a fool who would carry his blankets” (60). In chapter 10, Chaka introduces Ndlebe and Malunga as his “servants” from his “home” and immediately adds, “Let me correct that and say that one of them is my servant who carries my blankets.” Their presence makes Dingiswayo’s body shudder and after their departure, he wonders, “Chaka, are you saying that both of them come from your home?” Chaka says, “Yes, O King.” The king continues, “Have you known them since childhood, or have you met them only recently?” Chaka states confidently, “I grew up with them, O King.” Ndlebe and Malunga embody and extend Isanusi’s world and by default Chaka’s secret life. For his public life to succeed Chaka believes he has to protect his secret or esoteric world from public incursions or betrayal. Dingiswayo dismisses Ndlebe as retarded and Malunga as frightening, “truly evil” and “full of guile and treachery. He orders Chaka to take Malunga away, and re-wonders: “Are you telling me that you have known him also from childhood?” (61). Malunga senses Dingiswayo’s unease and returns home, leaving Ndlebe in charge of assisting Chaka. Dingiswayo sends Chaka’s regiment to battle with Zwide’s forces. Ndlebe exposes to Chaka the secret cave where Zwide and some of his men hide as a strategy. They pry them out. With Ndlebe on Chaka’s left side with a battle axe and Malunga on Chaka’s right side with the short spear, Chaka’s warriors kill the fleeing warriors of Zwide and capture Zwide himself. Ndlebe performs the lion share of the intelligence work on the battlefield, but Chaka claims and gets credit for all the military achievements and successes on the battlefield. Dingiswayo releases Zwide the prisoner a few days later and promotes Chaka to commander of all of Dingiswayo’s armies, a promotion that brings envy. In chapter 11, Senzangakhona (Chaka’s father), the man who persecuted Dingiswayo in his youth, fears and envies the growing alliance between King Dingiswayo and his son, Chaka. Dingiswayo’s memory of Senzangakhona’s persecution still lives and plots revenge. Chaka now lives in Dingiswayo’s royal palace and feels more confident he would get his father’s kingship since so far everything Isanusi has predicted has come true. Ndlebe identifies anti-Chaka plotters (Dingiswayo’s paternal uncle and two men) to Chaka who informs Dingiswayo of it. Dingiswayo puts the plotters to death. Ndlebe informs Chaka of the death of Senzangakhona, still a very young man. Without Dingiswayo’s permission and even knowledge, Senzangakhona’s royal advisers install Mfokazana (Senzanghona’s second son and son of Senzangakhona’s second wife) as the new king. Ndlebe informs Chaka and Chaka informs Dingiswayo of the installation. Dingiswayo readies Chaka to take over the kingship from Mfokazana, Chaka’s younger half brother. Dingiswayo now

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

71

assumes the role of Chaka’s father. In chapter 13, with Dingaswayo’s blessing and Dingaswayo’s two regiments, Chaka wages war against Mfokazana and kills him. Dingana and Mhlanga (Chaka’s other half brothers) did not participate in the decisive battle between Chaka and Mfokazana but still Chaka wanted to kill them too. He spares their lives only because Ndlebe intervenes. The narrator wonders why Ndlebe pleads for the lives of Chaka’s enemies? Malunga also appears at the battle that kills Mfokazana. Isanusi, who first appears in chapters 6 and 7, appears the second time in chapter 13. Isanusi meets Chaka at the river a day before Chaka’s installation as king. He reminds Chaka that “the spear I made for you must do its work in the proper way.” He insists, “If you wish for kingship as great as that of Dingiswayo’s, and even a hundredfold greater, if you seek the fame for which you were crying, let that spear remain covered with blood, fresh blood, not dried up.” He reminds Chaka that “the medicines with which I inoculated you were ugly, and if you don’t kill, they will turn against you and kill you instead.” Isanusi gives Chaka another chance to back out, so “if today you think you have killed enough, that you are satisfied with the kingship and the fame you have achieved, that you wish for nothing more, you must tell me at once, this very day, so that I may dilute the strength of the medicines that are in your blood in order that they may not kill you.” Chaka far from reducing his ambition reaffirms his absolute belief and confidence in Isanusi’s terms. Isanusi, Chaka, Malunga, and Ndlebe visit the grave of Senzangakhona, who speaks. He says that he feigned his hatred of Chaka (his son) and ends his speech from the grave with a blessing for Chaka, “May you be a powerful king who is not ruled; may you conquer all your enemies. May your shield protect you from your enemies’ spears, and may your spear kill; may your nation pay you much respect and fear you. Be a man; be a king” (82). All leave the grave except Isanusi. In chapter 14, Chaka realizes his ambition to be king. Dingiswayo presides over the installation. Chaka compliments Dingiswayo for giving him asylum and for making him “a human being again” (85). To please Chaka, whom he knows “craved for war,” Dingiswayo orders an attack on Matiwane’s village. The village falls and Dingswayo captures the village’s cattle. With Dingiswayo’s encouragement and help, Chaka takes Noliwa (Dingiswayo’s sister and daughter of the late big king, Jobe) as his bride. Ndlebe tells Chaka that Dingiswayo would die within ten days and urges him to “Be prepared” (90). In chapter 15, Zwide (Dingiswayo’s old nemesis) unexpectedly attacks Dingiswayo (who has dismissed his warriors for the day so they can rest). Chaka captures him, beheads him, and pins his head on a stick for display at Dingiswayo’s royal home for his subjects to behold. Malunga urges Chaka “to rejoice because the death of one king is the beginning of the reign of the one who succeeds him and the one who will succeed Dingiswayo is you” (92). Chaka immediately regains

72

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

his courage. Ndlebe informs Chaka that a Zwide attack on the Bathethwa is underway. Dingiswayo’s armies pledge their support, call him their new king, and plead with Chaka to protect them and the people from Zwide. They implore him to marry Noliwa. When Zwide crosses Mfolozi-Mhlophe river, Chaka orders all his experienced warriors to attack and kill all Zwide’s people (men, women, and children) except the young men, whom he has “incorporated into his armies.” Chaka wipes Zwide’s big nation off the earth and turns his villages into ruins. The novel’s multiple narrator switches to a singular voice, “I do not believe that there was ever a human being whose life was as full of mystery as that of Chaka. Dingiswayo’s life was full of darkness and secrecy, but these could be unraveled and be made intelligible; but Chaka’s life has been cloaked in dark mystery until this very day” (96). Isanusi appears before Chaka for the fourth time in chapter 16, where he discloses to Chaka, “I am Isanusi the Diviner,” an admission which embarrasses Chaka. Ndlebe and Malunga admit to Chaka that they aborted Chaka’s attempt to pay ransom to Zwide for Dingiswayo’s freedom and return. They point out to Chaka that though he now reigns as the king of kings, he has yet to reach “kingship of the stature that Isanusi tells us you are craving for.” Isanusi advises Chaka not to marry Noliwa, and in fact not to marry at all, “If I were you I would not marry. Marriage splits kingdoms apart” (98). Before Isanusi leaves he assures Chaka that all would go well with mutual trust and mutual love between Chaka and Isanusi’s two servants whom he “will remain with.” He identifies Ndlebe’s duty as intelligence: detecting for Chaka gossip, secrets, and evil plot. Malunga is responsible for arming Chaka’s forces with appropriate medicines. Isanusi poses a question to Chaka and advises him to answer only after thinking through the question. He prefaces his question by recalling what he has so far obtained for Chaka, his father;s kingship, king of kings (Dingiswayo’s kingship), and fame. He then asks, “Are you now satisfied, or do you still want something beyond that?” Chaka urges Isanusi to “take me to the very limits of your wisdom and your strength.” Chaka wants kingship and fame greater than what he now knows or has. Isanusi warns Chaka not to ignore the fact that as Chaka’s royal ambition gets bigger so does Chaka’s “payment due to me.” Chaka assures Isanusi, “Payment is nothing to me, there is nothing I would spare as long as you take me to the things I desire.” Isanusi cautions Chaka about the difficulty of attaining his kind of royal goal since it requires some “medicine that must come from you, not me” (100). This medicine has to come from the blood of a sacrificed human. Isanusi says he knows no other way of gaining such kingship except through the blood of such a person. He adds that he knows someone from his own country who (when seeking such kingship) sacrificed his first-born child to strengthen his royal city by using the son’s blood to fortify the city gates. As Chaka tries

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

73

to answer immediately, Isanusi tells him to think carefully before replying. Shortly after Chaka responds, “I, Chaka, do not ponder long over a problem.” Chaka accepts Isanusi’s conditions in full and since he has no children he wonders if the blood of his mother or brothers would be suitable. Isanusi says no and notes that Chaka has omitted Noliwa, the one who most fits the sacrifice criterion. Isanusi contends that there is a kingship greater than what he now has but he cannot get it unless he Chaka himself kills Noliwa. Isanusi confirms what Chaka has always known but has been in denial of. Isanusi tells Chaka, “Chaka, we are teaching you witchcraft, how sorcerers kill their own children or their parents in order to ensure that they shall be efficient in their sorcery” (101). He gives Chaka a whole day to think through this witchcraft vow. Chaka concludes that Noliwa means “nothing” and as such he can sacrifice her. Besides, a big kingdom would yield him women even more beautiful than Noliwa. Isanusi says to Chaka, “I am not binding you to do anything, but I am leaving the decision entirely up to you, because we doctors simply give a person the medicine he wants, even though it may be one that kills. We are barterers, accepting no responsibility . . .. You must understand that there is neither force nor compulsion; you are to act according to the wishes of your own heart” (102). Isanusi functions as the mouthpiece of Chaka’s heart, Chaka’s secret self. Chaka tells him, “I have heard you well, you have told me the price of that kingship, and now I am deciding on my own to buy it myself, because I like it.” Isanusi gives Chaka a year to decide, but when Chaka pleads for a shorter time, they agree on nine months. Before Isanusi leaves, he suggests that Chaka change the (ugly) name of his nation to something beautiful. Chaka agrees and renames his nation “Zulu” (the sky) and its people “Mazulu” (people of the sky). At this point the narrator switches to a multiple (we) narrator and recalls the “evil gossip” in his early childhood that Chaka “was not quite like other human beings, and that he had been sired by a tikoloshe, an evil genie” and hence Senzangakhona exiled him and his mother. But now that he is king the people sing again his praise, his beautiful face, his tallness, and his impressive manner of commanding his soldiers in war and they even partially equate him with God. The legend of groom Chaka and bride Noliwa as messengers of God grow (103–104). Chaka reads differently the scandal surrounding his biological origin as pointing toward his royal greatness. Chapter 17, describes the state of the Bathethwa nation under King Dingiswayo as prosperous economically and then notes that after Chaka changes the national name, he begins the Zulunization of his other national neighbors. He looks at the nations of Basotho and Batswana and he says, “My kingdom will begin right here where I am, and spread along the breadth of the earth, till it reaches its very ends. There will be but one king, not many, and

74

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

that king will be me!” (106). Chaka builds a new royal city, and kills without any question anybody who arrives accidentally at “the city gates” unmet and unseen (108). Ntululu (Great House), Chaka’s personal dwelling within the royal court admits very few people (such as Isanusi, Ndlebe, Malunga). It also houses the king’s medicine pot and small royal stone. He builds many military villages. He abolishes circumcision for boys because it unnecessarily takes away from their military time. Boys undergo military indoctrination very early in life. Promotion in the military would rest on meritocracy or performance. Marriage diverts, so he prevents his troops (except the best regiment) from marrying. Chaka sets the non-marriage example himself: he never marries. The reader observes that “among all the things that are held in high regard by the black people, there is none held dearer than marriage” (114). Chaka got rid of spears with long handles and stopped the practice of a warrior carrying a bundle of spears. Now each warrior carries one spear, the one with a short handle (the one for stabbing an enemy and not for throwing or hurling at an enemy). As Chaka grows older he begins to see himself as the voice of God. His warriors greet him as “Bayede” (which means one “who stands between God and man” (115). We are told that Chaka has “only one purpose in mind: war” (117). In chapter 18, the nine months Isanusi and Chaka set for Chaka to decide between the kingship and the now-pregnant Noliwa arrive. Isanusi appears before Chaka for the fifth time and asks Chaka, “Have you chosen to live with Noliwa as your wife . . . or have you chosen the kingship?” Chaka says, “I, Chaka, do not know how to speak two things with one mouth. What I have spoken I have spoken, Isanusi” (122). For the last time, Isanusi asks, “What do you choose for yourself, Noliwa or the kingship?” “The kingship,” Chaka wastes no time replying. Isanusi beams with joy and lauds Chaka for answering “like a man” and for not acting like “someone whose mind is fickle” (123). Isanusi echoes a theme reminiscent of Julius Caesar’s statement that “a tide” exists “in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” Isanusi says to Chaka, “truly there are not many like you for recognizing the right moment; for there is a time in the life of a human being which he must seize at once or else forfeit numerous blessings which will never come his way again till he is buried in the cold earth” (124). Chaka himself kills Noliwa. In chapter 19, the narrator notices that the last trace of humanity in Chaka disappears after Noliwa’s death. Chaka can no longer distinguish between war and indiscriminate killing. Grief befalls Nandi, Chaka’s mother, when news reaches her that her own son has killed Noliwa, the woman she loves and treats like a daughter-in-law. Having exterminated those in his private life, Chaka now concentrates on those outside it.. He attacks Buthelezi and Qwabe territories. He destabilizes “the whole of Nguniland,” where peace and prosperity hitherto reigned. Executions and massacres of thousands and thousands of

H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N A S H I S T O R Y B Y O T H E R M E A N S

75

(even) his own people become the normal order of his rule. Chaka descends more and more into demonic land as whatever he touches becomes an inferno. He decrees that “to say that I, Chaka erred is a great wrong” (132). He elevates Mzilikazi to commander of the nation’s elite regiment, which means he may marry. Chaka banishes cowardice from Zululand. In chapter 20, he ravages Maqwabe and the Mafuze, Bathembu, and the Machum. He intensifies his Machiavellian principle. He attacks and provokes attacks everywhere. The narrator observes, “Whether they died by the spear or from hunger mattered little to him so long as they were dead” (136). Chaka-induced persecutions, suffering, and serious hunger force some Zulus and others into cannibalism. People call him “Chaka, originator-of-all-things-evil” (137). After the war with the Mangwane of Matiwane, Chaka stops participating in person in battles. He makes Mzilikazi (aka Moselekatse) the commander of all Chaka’s commanders, with Manukuza as next in command. Mzilikazi tries to break away or free himself from Chaka by reminding people that “Chaka is a human” and not “god” (139). Manukuza and Moselekatse soon desert Chaka. The desertions disappoint and frustrate Chaka who now systematically defiles and destroys Zululand. Envious Chaka cold-bloodedly executes even his loyal commanders, such as Nongogo and Mnyamana, whose popularities among the troops and people he could no longer stomach. When the people repeatedly realize that Chaka’s spear does “not spare even those who had served him so well,” their dissatisfaction with Chaka gathers momentum (147). Chaka’s half brothers Dingana and Mhlangana fan this growing anti-Chaka spirit. In chapter 22, Chaka continues to defile or rape many beautiful young girls; he even kills many of them. He kills at birth any children he has fathered. Chaka eventually kills his mother the way he killed Noliwa. His killings or executions become a sadist’s sport. In chapter 23, the multiple narrator states that there are many parts to Chaka but they have chosen “the part which suits our purpose,” the litany of his barbarities or evils (153). Nightmares plague Chaka in chapter 24. He attributes his condition to witchcraft and decides to “go into the veld” until Isanusi arrives to strengthen him again (157). He accuses the Dukuza regiment of bewitching him. The novel’s end, chapter 26, also marks the end of Chaka. Apparitons of Noliwa and Nandi haunt him as they appear and vanish. With spears, Dingana stabs Chaka on one side, Mhlangana stabs Chaka in the back, and Mbopha (Chaka’s head royal councilor) stabs Chaka on another side. The three spears converge “inside Chaka’s stomach, and at that very moment Isanusi” appears “before Chaka to demand his reward.” As Chaka lies there dying, he says to Dingana and Mhlangana, “You are killing me in the hope that you will be kings when I am dead, whereas you are wrong, that is not the way it will be because umlungu, the white man, is coming, and it is he who will rule you, and you will be his servants” (167). Chaka dies. His corpse lies

76

IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE

in the veld for the beasts to feast over, but the next day the people find the body intact. Even hungry hyenas did not touch it. Dingana orders the body buried lest it rises again. Thereafter the Zulus think of “the days of Chaka” as when “the Zulus “were once a strong nation” and “other nations dreaded them” (168). In Isanusi Chaka experiences himself, his inner self, his secret self – that part of himself he could not for the most part appropriate publicly. In Isanusi, Chaka fulfills the ends of his being and thus changes forever the being of his people. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar lives and dies as a democratic dictator and Mofolo’s Chaka lives and dies as a demonic dictator. University of Nebraska REFERENCES Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bevington, David. Ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1980. Caesar, Julius. The Civil War: Together with the Alexandrian War, the African War, and the Spanish War Trans. Jane F. Gardner. New York: Penguin, 1976. Caesar, Julius. Seven Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Trans. Carolyn Hammond. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. 1942. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1959. Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964. Mofolo, Thomas. Chaka. [1925]. Trans. Daniel P. Kunene. London: Heinemann, 1981. Plutarch. Fall of the Roman Empire: Six Lives. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: Penguin, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Adrian Del Caro. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Ed. William Montgomery. Intro. Douglas Trevor. In The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Eds. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller. New York: Penguin Books, 2002, pp. 1295–1336. All Shakespeare references are to this text. Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars. Trans. Robert Graves. Revised by Michael Grant. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

MICHEL DION

T H E D I A L E C T I C S B E T W E E N S E L F, T I M E A N D H I S T O R I C A L C H A N G E AC C O R D I N G T O M I L A N KUNDERA

ABSTRACT

Milan Kundera (1929- ) has produced literary works focusing on various themes connected to social and political life, as well as categories of human existence. In this paper, we would like to reflect how Kundera deals with historical change within his novels and short stories. We will see how historical change cannot be explained without understanding the essence of two basic concepts: (1) the Self: the way it is perceived by others; our self-image; (2) Time: the basic link between Time and memory. Finally, we will describe how historical change, according to Kundera, is revealing a quest for meaning of life, a basic struggle for freedom and justice, a way to overcome suffering and to actualize the historicality of human being. INTRODUCTION

Milan Kundera is a Post-modern novelist who looks at the paradoxical character of human life and the interpretation of historical events as well. For Kundera, we are facing the meaninglessness of our dehumanized world. Kundera seems to adopt Albert Camus’ viewpoint on meaninglessness and existence. But Kundera’s perspective cannot be reduced to Camus’ ideas. Indeed, Kundera is much more concerned with History, and more particularly with the desecration of History. Kundera looks at History as the end of a “dreamy innocence”, a subject of self-mystification. That’s why Kundera is questioning all possibilities of human existence that remain unknown, unexplored. Kundera ne revient pas à l’univocité du personnage et du sens de l’action fondée sur un ordre immuable des choses et une image du monde stable. Il laisse au contraire entrevoir que toute histoire peut se raconter de différentes façons, que son sens peut s’interpréter de différentes manières, et que la fiction choisie n’est jamais qu’une simple possibilité entre autres. Il souligne le caractère créatif des histoires et leur statut ontologique d’hypothèses.1

As said Kvetoslav Chvatik, the aesthetics of Kundera’s novels is not an aesthetics of the mimesis (the exact replication of reality), but rather a semiotic 77 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 77–90. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

78

MICHEL DION

aesthetics of all possible worlds. Kundera’s novels reveal that life is never a pure repetition. They also manifest to what extent life is ambiguous, so that the only relevant way to talk about human life is to identify all human possibilities, the mysterious set of all possible human worlds. (. . .) le romancier insiste fortement sur le fait que ce n’est pas la  réalité  que ses romans examinent,mais bien l’existence, ou pour le dire autrement, le monde de tous les possibles, que ceux-ci soient incarnés ou non par ses personnages.2

In this paper, we will analyze Kundera’s novels out of the themes of self, Time and historical change. We would like to show to what extent Kundera’s novels are revealing a dialectics between those three basic philosophical concepts.3 We believe that we cannot isolate one of the three concepts from the others. We cannot understand the essence of the self without considering the nature of Time and historical change. We cannot grasp the nature of Time without looking at the essence of the self and of historical change. We cannot reflect the essence of historical change without considering the nature of self and of Time. In Kundera’s novels, those three philosophical concepts are interconnected. 1. The Self In our deeper self, there is a discrepancy between what we are, on one hand, and what must be and want to be, on the other hand (P, 52). We can neglect our self-image because we can never fully be our self-image. We cannot be what we perceived of our self (IM, 465). We should recognize our self as it is. We must identify ourselves to our self. But it is not enough. In order to have a specific individuality, we must passionately identify ourselves to our life and death. In doing so, we will no longer be a single “entity” within the whole “same” humanity. We will be someone who can never be replaced by others (IM, 26–27). The unique character of our self can be cultivated in adding new qualities and traits of our self: we are then identifying ourselves to such new elements of our self, but we could loose the basic, unchanging nature of our self. The problem is that if we want to make people adhering to our personal qualities and traits of our self, we are then denying the “unique” character of such self (IM, 151, 153). Our existential life means that we are bearing a “suffering self”: the most painful experience in life is to be our self (and thus not to be an idealized self that contradicts the way we perceive our self) (IM, 381). Kundera said that there is a very powerful capacity to remould the reality in order to place it in pure and total continuity with our ideals (P, 272). But if we are very honest, said Kundera, and look at our self, we can only find out the image of the self which is looking at our self (VEA, 56). This is almost a Buddhist approach of the self, an approach

S E L F, T I M E A N D H I S T O R I C A L C H A N G E

79

that was developed by the Madhyamika-Prasangika school. But when we hear correctly other messages sent by Kundera, we can understand that he adopts a communicational approach of human existence. Kundera believes that we can only be fully ourselves when we are totally among others (VEA, 179). In discussing with others, we can become aware of what we are (the essence of our being), of what we think (the essence of our thinking) (P, 21). Moreover, there is a psychological mechanism through which we will put barriers in order to be in a situation where it is impossible to reveal our deeper feelings (P, 119). Emmanuel Levinas put the emphasis on such a self-perception that is intrinsically linked to our relationships with the others. Martin Buber considered that the “I-Thou” relationships is the explanatory pattern for the development of the self.4 Although Kundera’s novels reveal a basic concern for self-perception, Kundera is much more focusing on the communicational processes through which we could define our self rather than the I-Thou relationships. Kundera puts the emphasis on the various ways in which a given being is trying to understand himself (herself) in front of others, rather than focusing on the strict dialogue between I and Thou. We are revealing ourselves in undertaking given actions. Action is the origin of self-perception. As said Kundera, in a spontaneous action, we are revealing ourselves as we are (VEA, 196). It is not relevant to know the nature of given actions, since our actions are always revealing the fact that we remain ourselves throughout such actions (RA, 201). The uniqueness of the self is hidden within what cannot be imagined about human being. We can only imagine what is identical (or common) among all beings. The individual self is what is radically different from the general, the universal. It is something we cannot describe in advance. The individual self is what we must discover, what we must conquer in the other’s individuality. Nothing is so difficult to grasp than the self (ILE, 286). Someone who wants to be admired by others is dependent on them. He (she) cannot live without their positive perception of his (her) self (VAA, 145). But we must never be dependent on others’ expectations. In doing so, we would never find out what we are. We would be a “nobody”, a not-individualized person. We should rather be what we are (P, 272–273). Even in love relationships, we are bothering about the way the person we love perceives our self. This anxious pursuit of our selfimage in other’s thinking cannot be avoided. If we are indifferent to the way the other is considering our self, we are no longer loving him (her) (IM, 193). We cannot be indifferent to the way people look at our self. Our self-image exerts a decisive role in our self-esteem. Being indifferent to others’ perception of our self is humanly impossible (IM, 319). Sometimes we become aware that others’ perception of our self is quite different from the way we perceive it. For instance, we do not know exactly why people could find us ridiculous.

80

MICHEL DION

Our self-image is indeed a mystery (IM, 189). The way others perceive our self is not a superficial view. Our self cannot be fully described. It always remains confusing. We cannot master the way people look at their selves. We could try to control such perception, but we cannot exert a major influence on it (IM, 194). Some people are more attached to a superficial view of others’ self than to the reality itself (IM, 504). 2. Time and Memory (a) Time: The pace of Time is so rapid that human beings cannot follow it (RA, 187). Temporal dimension of life is the distance between what has been (the past) and what actually is (the present) (IG, 93). Out of a given part of our self, we are living beyond Time. In given moments of our life, we become aware of the fact we are growing old. Most of the time, we consider ourselves as “beings without age” (IM, 14). Being mortal is a basic human experience. But human being is unable to accept this fact. Human being cannot know how to be a mortal being (IM, 320). In that context, beauty is a revolt against Time, the annihilation of duration (LRO, 92). Kundera is deeply concerned with the past (as a “dead present”) and the future (as the source of the absolute newness). Past events play a major role in his novels. According to Kundera, the past is a dead present. But the past always lives in our present life. The past still influences our present (P, 246). As said François Ricard (2003), the past is enlightening the present. Such an aspect of Kundera’s perspective is quite close to Hans Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy:5 Mémoire et miroir, le passé crée ainsi autour du présent un horizon ironique et herméneutique qui à la fois le banalise et l’illumine.6

We are going through our present reality as if we were blind. Sometimes, we become what we are going to live and experiment. Later, when we will look behind and examine our past life, we will grasp what we have lived, the meaning of our past life (RA, 13). We should not develop the trend to always go back in our past life. But generally speaking, we often put the emphasis on our past life, in spite of our will (and of our self) (RA, 196). Kundera is not so much concerned with the present. According to Kundera, the present is nothingness that is slowly approaching its own death (LRO, 147). Death is non-being as infinite void (LRO, 277–278). Kundera is quite fascinated by the future, although past events remain the basic explanatory pattern of his novels. According to Kundera, we cannot know exactly the contents of the future. So, how could we know the meaning of our present if we cannot circumscribe the future? If we cannot know the relation between our present and our future (how our present is determining what will be our future), we

S E L F, T I M E A N D H I S T O R I C A L C H A N G E

81

cannot morally judge our present. We cannot say if our present condition is morally good or bad (IG, 165). This is a kind of Nietzschean assertion that tries to reinvent moral notions and to introduce a transmutation of human values. Moreover, it is a way to reveal the paradoxical character of the future. Future is both the source of consolation and fear. On one hand, we usually take refuge in the future in order to avoid any kind of suffering (ILE, 241). On the other hand, future is the origin of fear. If we could be released from the bondage to future, we could no longer be afraid of anything (L, 10). But future is much more than such a paradoxical ground of human existence. Future is the source of the absolute newness. Future will be absolutely new (and thus pure) or it will never arise and will remain full of stains (VEA, 261). (b) Memory: Memory actually keeps a very small portion of our past life experiences and perceptions. Such finitude of human memory is an integral part of human nature as such. Someone who could gather in his (her) memory everything that he (she) has lived in the past would not be a human being. Indeed, nostalgia reveals its application to specific experiences and perceptions. Nostalgia reveals the existence of past events, the power of the past on our mind (IG, 91–92). Nostalgia does not increase the potentialities of memory. It is rather focusing on its inner pain (IG, 42). Nostalgia reveals the basic finitude of our memory. Love, friendship, and emotions are based on our finite memory. We do not know why our memory keeps some past events and perceptions while others are not safeguarded and disappear. Such choice is not voluntarily made (IG, 141–142). The capacities of memory vary from an individual to another, but the intensity of our consideration for others is variable. We could share with others some past life experiences we have lived together, while we do not keep the same remembrances. We do not keep in mind the same elements or perceptions of such experiences. Kundera believes that such difference is due to the fact that we could have more affection or consideration for others than they have for us (IG, 145). It is interesting to notice how Kundera looks at duration and it basic relationships with memory. On one hand, memory (and beauty) gives a form to duration, so that what is formless cannot be grasped by our memory (L, 51). On the other hand, our past life experiences and perceptions that are safeguarded by our memory are not subjected to duration (IG, 148–149). In other words, memory (and beauty) gives a form to duration, while supporting the “no-duration” character of the past experiences and perceptions it can store up in the daily life. Remembering our past, keeping it “living” in our self is probably necessary to safeguard our personal identity. More particularly, our friends remain the most important witnesses of our past. Friendship is required for the right functioning of our memory. Our friends are our memory (ID, 61–62).

82

MICHEL DION

3. Historical Change According to Kundera, an ideal is what we will never be able to discover, to find out in human existence (ILE, 289). Ideals are usually intrinsically linked to worldviews, especially when they constitute the motive of social transformation. Kundera said that we must firstly know the world as it is, before any attempt to transform it radically (VEA, 61). However, Kundera looks at human existence and society in a way that reflects the various ambiguities of human condition, precisely because realism makes subtle and elusive dimensions disappearing (VEA, 64). (a) Events and Meaning of Life: This is an illusion to affirm that we lead our own “existential adventures”, as if we could decide of their nature and pace. Those existential adventures could be radically imposed from external conditioning factors and should then never be considered as characterizing our self. In that case, such adventures are driven from unknown (foreign) powers and lead our own existence (RA, 51).When existential adventures (or events) happen very quickly, nobody can be sure of the contents of such events and even of oneself (L, 159). Usually, when an unavoidable existential adventure (or event) will happen in few moments, we make the pace of events going much more rapidly, as if we would like to show that we still keep power on the way such events will happen (VEA, 182). An event is more important, more meaningful if it depends on a large number of hazards or chance events (ILE, 76). But is there any basic connection between an event and its duration? Kundera said that no event is present in its duration, except at the beginning (within a very short duration) (L, 112). In a given historical (limited) period, communism has been a doctrine that helped people to find out their meaning of life (IG, 190). The problem is that such meaning of life that is rooted on communist beliefs has become the only one that was possible to inhabit personal consciousness, so that to be personally rejected by the communist party meant to loose our meaning of life (P, 181). If we accept that the world is full of unquestionable meaning (heteronomy or autocracy), then human being is crushed and disappearing. If I would not believe I am living for something that is greater than my personal life, I would be unable to live (RA, 278). We are not living for our self only (RA, 279). It is sad to live when we are unable to take anything seriously (RA, 302), that is, when it is impossible to question given meanings that are imposed by various social institutions. Every human life has immeasurable meanings. Depending on the way we describe the present or the past life of one or the other individual in a given community, it will be the biography of a well-renown and respected Chief of State or the biography of a tough criminal (RA, 38). On the other hand, if the world would actually loose its meaning, human being can no longer live in such world (LRO, 107).We usually believe that any event in our life has

S E L F, T I M E A N D H I S T O R I C A L C H A N G E

83

an inner meaning. In other words, our life experiences reveal a message that life is giving to us. Life would then be gradually expressing some secrets. Our life experiences would thus form a mythology that could open us to the truth. Kundera believes that such perception could be an illusion, but that we cannot repress such need to decode the meaning of our life experiences (P, 247). As said Kundera, it is useless to abandon ourselves to illusions (VAA, 27). Human being can never know what he (she) should want to be, what he (she) should want to do, or what he (she) should want to think about/believe. He (she) has only one life and he (she) cannot compare his (her) current life with former lives. He (she) cannot correct himself (herself) in further lives (ILE, 19). This is a clear rejection of reincarnation. There is no means to check which decision is the right one, since there is no possible comparison between various kinds of decision. Everything is lived for the first time and without any kind of preparation. Life looks like a sketch. A sketch is a draft of something, the preparation of a final piece or work. But life as sketch is a draft of nothing as such, a draft without any final piece or work (ILE, 20). Human lives are composed as musical scores. Human being is led by a sense of beauty. He (she) transforms unintentional events in a motive that will thus impregnate the “life score”. Human being will repeat and modify his (her) life score, as the composer does with the theme of his (her) sonata (ILE, 81).The extremes reveal the frontiers beyond which life is extinguishing. The passion for the extremes (in art or politics) is a disguised desire for death (ILE, 139). The meaning of life is to play with life. If our life is too lazy to give us any kind of delight or fun, we should help it to do so. Human being must constantly create new existential adventures (RA, 28). (b) Politics, History and Freedom: Criminal political regimes have been moulded by enthusiastic people who believed they had discovered the unique way to Paradise. Later, we found that this Paradise did not exist at all and that those enthusiastic people were actually criminals (ILE, p. 254). A too passionate faith is the worst ally. The habit to strictly “follow the book” makes us committing meaningless actions, or saying meaningless words. A too excessive faith has no positive fruit or impact. It is true for religions and political systems as well (RA, p. 79).We are responsible of our own country (VAA, 155). If we would be only responsible for those actions we were actually aware of, idiots would always be absolved of their fault. It is not the case. Human being must know. He (she) is thus responsible of his (her) ignorance as a fault (RA, p. 127). Responsibility (and fault) is not the only existential category we must take into account. Suffering is the basis of our “unique” self. Through the experience of pain, the world disappears. We are lonely (IM, 299–300). Moreover, everybody is competing against others about the intensity of his (her) own pain. We usually believe that we are suffering more intensively than others, because

84

MICHEL DION

we all want to be recognized as a victim (IG, 50). The Greek philosopher Epicure (341–270 B.C.) understood the happy life in an extremely sceptical way: the absence of suffering is the origin of pleasure. Suffering is then the basic notion of hedonism: we are happy insofar as we can avoid suffering. However, pleasures often create more suffering than pleasures. So Epicure said we should only search for prudent and modest pleasures. Epicurean wisdom implies a deep melancholy.7 Human being understands that the only self-evident fact (and thus value) is pleasure. Hedonism is rooted in selfishness. But, said Kundera, the true problem of hedonism is its utopian character. The hedonist ideal is not compatible with human nature as such (L, 16–17). The awareness of our responsibility and suffering is presupposed in any attempt to initiate a deep social change. But we cannot change the whole world. Rather we can change our life and live freely (VEA, 75–76). Although we must never annihilate others’ freedom, it does not mean that freedom is unlimited. An unlimited freedom is not indeed human freedom. Freedom is inherently linked to responsibility (P, 38–39, 159). The worst thing is not that the world is not free at all, but that human being actually knows no longer what it means to be free (VEA, 75). It is a great relief to become aware that we are free beings, or that we have no specific mission to accomplish in this life (ILE, p. 454). History is not only the record of dramatic situations in human life. It is also impregnated in daily life (VEA, 357). History is nothing but a series of transitory changes, while eternal values are immutable and do not require any memory (LRO, 301). We must never be the object of History, but rather the subject of History (P, 184). Every historical period has its own symbols (P, 236) and ideologies (IM, 176). Human being is unable to think about the end of History, or the end of the present era. Human life imitates History: it is buried in a still slowness, and then it progressively speeds up (RA, p. 60). Human being is constantly rewriting History. The past could give birth to revolutions, so that we could want to destroy past events or remould them. We can master the future only in order to change the past (LRO, 43). About Kundera’s first novel (La plaisanterie), Chvatik (1995) said: On pourrait aussi dire que l’Histoire elle-même est l’héroïne du premier roman de Kundera, la ruse de l’histoire moderne qui, dans l’Europe du XXè siècle, broie les individus avec une cruauté aussi impitoyable que le destin de la tragédie antique.8

(c) Social Change, Kitsch, and Revolution: There is no deep social change without a group of individuals who are devoted to a superior end and who are giving their whole life in order to reach such end (P, 354–355). Those who make their ideas publicly known will eventually (this is a true risk!) convince others of the truthfulness of such ideas, and thus to influence them. Indeed, they will assume the role of people who tends to change the world (L, 33–34).

S E L F, T I M E A N D H I S T O R I C A L C H A N G E

85

The first chapter of Genesis said that the world as been created as it should be and thus that being is good. This is the “categorical harmony with being” (ILE, p. 356). Such categorical harmony with being has an aesthetic ideal: a world where the despicable is negated (ILE, p. 356). Kitsch excludes everything that is basically unacceptable within human existence ILE, p. 357). If there would be no difference between the noble and the despicable, human existence would loose its basic dimensions. In that case, human existence would have an unbearable lightness (ILE, p. 351). According to Kundera, kitsch is the conjunction between being and “having-forgotten” (ILE, p. 406). The origin of kitsch is the categorical harmony with being. But what is the ultimate ground of being? There are many answers to that question, and every answer is giving a specific kind of kitsch: catholic kitsch, protestant kitsch, Jewish kitsch, communist kitsch, fascist kitsch, democratic kitsch, feminist kitsch, European kitsch, American kitsch, international kitsch. Since the French Revolution, there is a strict distinction between the “right wing” and the “left wing”. However, it is practically impossible to define the essence of the right wing and the essence of the left wing. Political movements are not grounded on rational attitudes, but rather on representations, images, words and archetypes; the whole set of those components of the political discourse or behaviour is the essence of a given political kitsch. Political kitsch has unified the left wing for many centuries. The Great March is a path towards brotherhood, equality, justice, and happiness. The Great March is always facing impediments. Otherwise, it would never be the “Great March”. People belonging to the left wing are able to integrate one or the other theory into the Great March. They are not characterized by the fact that they would share the same beliefs (ILE, p. 373–374). The left wing cannot exist without the kitsch of the Great March. The identity of the kitsch is not determined by political strategies. It is rather determined by images, metaphors and words. It is thus possible to transgress some habits or customs, and to express our concerns against the interests of a communist country. But it is not possible to substitute the words with other words. Those words are essential to the nature of the Great March. That’s why they cannot be changed. Those who would like to save their face will safeguard the pureness of their own kitsch (ILE, p. 381). The Great March continues and focuses on a different country (Israel, Palestine, Cuba, and so forth). The Great March is a procession of people who are walking during a rush. However, the Great March will soon go to its final end (ILE, p. 391). The scene is progressively reducing, so that one day, it will only be a simple point, without any spatial dimension (ILE, p. 390).

86

MICHEL DION

Eva Le Grand (1995) rightly said that kitsch opens up an ecstatic and illusory worldview that sacrifices reflection (thinking) to the profit of “feeling glorification”: Il revient justement à Kundera d’avoir rappelé que le kitsch est une catégorie existentielle et qu’il faut le concevoir surtout comme une attitude du Kitschmensch, comme l’expression de cette fascinante et indéracinable faculté humaine de substituer les rêves d’un monde meilleur (paradis perdu comme avenir radieux) à notre réalité, bref de travestir le réel en une vision idyllique et extatique du monde à laquelle on sacrifie sans scrupules tout conscience éthique et critique.9

In that sense, we could say that kitsch is reducing the plurality of human existence to a false, one-sided existence. Kundera’s perspective is thus very close to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of one-dimensional existence. Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) criticized Western societies (especially, USA) because of the trend to emphasize the uniformity of thought (“pensée unique”). Marcuse explained how human being is now without any faculty of opposition (the “critique”) and is thus imprisoned within a given political worldview.10 This is exactly the perspective that Kundera uses to look at political movements as well as human existence and being. In the kingdom of kitsch, there is a dictatorship of the heart (ILE, p. 361). Universal brotherhood can only be grounded on kitsch (ILE, p. 362). The true function of kitsch is to hide death (ILE, p. 367). Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and of all political movements. In a society where many political movements exist, we can avoid the influence of kitsch. Individuals keep their uniqueness. Artists still freely create what they want. But where there is only one political movement which holds the power, we are in a totalitarian kitsch. Everything that could put damage to kitsch is excluded of social life: (1) every expression of individualism: individualism contradicts universal brotherhood; (2) every expression of scepticism: the specific doubt is progressively widening so that at the end of the process, the doubt is about life itself, (3) every expression of irony: everything must be taken seriously (ILE, p. 363). In a totalitarian kitsch, answers are provided in advance, so that there cannot be any other question. The opponent of totalitarian kitsch is human being who is questioning every aspect of reality (ILE, p. 368). Totalitarian kitsch stimulates human struggling against the distortion of reality. According to Epicure, said Kundera, the wise man does not search for any activity that is basically linked to struggling (L, 18). It is particularly true if struggling means imposing our will over others’ will. But, said Kundera, we should remind that life is basically a struggle (IM, 226). Saying that we strive for happiness and justice is revealing that we are struggling “against” some people. Moreover, we are saying that during such struggle, those who have initiated it will forget the inherent (less glorious) aspects of the struggle (IM, 227). According to Kundera, there are five meanings (or aims) to “struggling”: (1) striving for happiness; (2) striving for justice: the word “justice”

S E L F, T I M E A N D H I S T O R I C A L C H A N G E

87

refers either to the human justice (blind and cruel justice) or to the “superior justice” that we cannot understand, that is beyond our capacities (VAA, 295); (3) striving for future; (4) striving for peace; (5) striving for peace although it implies destruction of all by all (IM, 138). All we do, whether it is poetry or science, is a revolt. Human being is always in revolt against something: against oppression, or, if there is no longer oppression, revolt against our existential condition we have not chosen (L, 96–97, 121). Only those who fight against totalitarian regimes cannot struggle in keeping questioning and doubts in their mind. They need a certainty and a simple truth that must be easily understandable for most of people - such truths that can easily provoke “collective tears” (ILE, p. 368). In the context of social struggling, revolution appears as a basic source of hope. However, revolution does not want to be studied as an object. Revolution rather calls us to become part of it. In that sense, Kundera said that revolution is a lyric phenomenon, a way for human being to become integral part of his (her) world (VEA, 294). Revolution would transform the whole human life, including family and love. If it would not be the case, it would not be a real revolution (VEA, 267). The human self-liberation will be applied in all spheres of human existence; if not, it will not be a real liberation (VEA, 269). Revolution gives to future a specific meaning. Future is no longer a mystery. Future is rather known through books, conferences, propaganda tools, discourses and brochures. We thus have no reason to be afraid by our future. Future is giving a certainty within a present moment that is full of uncertainties. That’s why revolutionary people take refuge in such future (VEA, 296). Karl Marx (1818–1883) said that humanity has lived until now its prehistory.11 Our true history will only begin with the proletarian revolution. Proletarian revolution implies the transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (VEA, 177–178). Two revolutions happened almost simultaneously: (1) the discovery of the automatic writing (and thus the powers of the human unconscious) by André Breton (1896–1966) and other surrealists;12 (2) the socialist revolution in Russia. The liberation of human imagination (from surrealism) means the same shift in the kingdom of freedom than the abolition of economic exploitation (VEA, 178). In the pre-revolutionary society, love was distorted by “money concerns”, social perceptions and prejudices. Love could then never be fully itself. It was the shadow of its real essence. In the revolutionary period, there is a new era that gets rid of the power of money and the influence of prejudices. Such historical period can make human beings more humanistic, so that love will radically increase (without any kind of comparison with love as it was expressed during the pre-revolutionary period) (VEA, 349).

88

MICHEL DION

During revolutions, life is impregnated by risk, courage and threats of death (ILE, p. 152). Those who struggled for revolution are proud of their involvement: they are proud to be on the right “side”. Later, the line distinguishing the right and the wrong disappears. Then, those people who struggled for revolution are frustrated. They are searching for new lines, new frontiers that could separate the right and the wrong. Because they are atheistic, they can decide that atheism is the right “side” and that believers of one or the other religion represent the “wrong side”. Such attitude gives them a feeling of superiority over the group of believers (RA, p. 263). Even the most rigorous revolutionary sees violence as a required evil, while the goodness of revolution is re-education (RA, p. 274). Understanding revolution as re-education is not a true revolutionary assertion. It is rather a classical (Marxist) way to look at revolution. The reason why Kundera is thus presenting revolution is that re-education as the basis of Marx’s notion of revolution has been neglected in communist countries. Kundera deepens the implications of re-education as the basis of revolution. According to Kundera, re-education could be closely linked to poetry and youth. Poetry plays a major role during revolutionary historical periods. Poetry gives to revolution its voice, and revolution releases poetry from its inherent solitude. Poetry, youth, and revolution are the same thing (VEA, 256). Revolutionary youth works for a radically new world based on a single idea. They are not open to any kind of compromise, in love and in politics as well (VEA, 331). Revolution and youth are intrinsically linked one to the other. Revolution presupposes that some benefits will be created. However, such benefits do not come alone; they are accompanied by uncertainties and a deep transformation of customs and habits, particularly for the adults. Youth is not erased by the phenomenon of fault, so that revolution could protect youth from its dangers. The uncertainty of revolutionary eras remains an advantage for the youth (VEA, 245). CONCLUSION

The most serious questions are those that are asked by children. These questions do not have easy answers, and most of the time, no answer at all. Questions for which there is no answer are giving limitations to human possibilities and are thus providing the frontiers of human existence (ILE, p. 201). It is in that context of philosophical questioning that we should understand Kundera’s literary principle according to which we should never take given assertions and try to isolate them from others. Philosophical (existential) questions that cannot be answered are reflected through the interconnections of various components and discourses that constitute the basic materials of the

S E L F, T I M E A N D H I S T O R I C A L C H A N G E

89

novel. Kundera deeply believed that any assertion must be confronted to other assertions, situations to other situations, gestures to other gestures, ideas to other ideas, event to other events that are interconnected in a given novel. (. . .) aucune des affirmations qu’on trouve dans un roman ne peut être prise isolément, chacune d’elles se trouve dans une confrontation complexe et contradictoire avec d’autres affirmations, d’autres situations, d’autres gestes, d’autres idées, d’autres événements. Seule une lecture lente, deux fois, plusieurs fois répétée, fera ressortir tous les rapports ironiques à l’intérieur du roman sans lesquels le roman restera incompris.13

Kundera’s novels presuppose that we cannot know the ultimate truth on the various components of reality, whether they are things, events and beings (even oneself). We always are in a state of ignorance and self-delusion when we are trying to understand the reality. Kundera seems to believe that it is impossible to grasp the whole (interconnected) reality, so that the only possible attitude towards reality is to reveal its “absolute relativity”. (. . .) l’oeuvre de Kundera, celle d’un des plus grand ironistes de cette fin du XXè siècle et du plus impitoyable démystificateur de tous les Absolus, nous apprend avant tout une  vérité  fondamentale; celle de l’absolue relativité de toute chose humaine et, partant, l’inachèvement et la relativité de toute connaissance – celle de l’homme, de soi-même, comme celle de toute œuvre artistique authentique.14

Insofar as Kundera is demystifying all truths or Absolutes, he looks like an existentialist novelist. Indeed, he is struggling against any kind of absolutes, as Albert Camus (1913–1960) clearly did in his works.15 We could even look at Kundera’s philosophical viewpoint as implying a Nietzschean denegation of any “will to believe in fixed realities”, although Kundera’s critique of religion is not so strong than Friedrich Nietzsche’s atheistic view.16 Université de Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada NOTES 1

Kvetoslav Chvatik, Le monde romanesque de Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 16. Eva Le Grand, Kundera ou La mémoire du désir (Montreal: XYZ, 1995), p. 27. 3 In this paper, we will use abbreviations in referring to Kundera’s novels: La vie est ailleurs (VEA), La lenteur (L), L’identité (ID), L’immortalité (IM), L’ignorance (IG), Le livre du rire et de l’oubli (LRO), La valse aux adieux (VAA), La plaisanterie (P), L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être (ILE), Risibles amours (RA). 4 Martin Buber, La vie en dialogue (Paris: Aubier, Montaigne, 1959); Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini. Essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968). 5 Hans-Georg Gadamer said that we all belong to History, so that any authentic understanding is a dialectics between the movement of (past) traditions and the movement of the (contemporaneous) interpret (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Vérité et méthode. Les grandes lignes d’une herméneutique philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p.133. 2

90

MICHEL DION

6 François Ricard, Le dernier après-midi d’Agnès. Essai sur l’œuvre de Milan Kundera (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 117. 7 Épicure, Lettres et maximes (Paris, PUF, 1995). 8 Chvatik, op.cit., p. 89. 9 Le Grand, op.cit., pp. 38–39. 10 Herbert Marcuse, L’homme unidimensionnel (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964). 11 Karl Marx, Contribution à la critique de l’économie politique (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1957). 12 André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme (Paris: Livre de proche, 1971); André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Pauvert, 1962). 13 Milan Kundera, Les testaments trahis (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 241. 14 Le Grand, op.cit., p. 26. 15 Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Crépuscule des idoles (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 261–453.

REFERENCES Chvatik, Kvetoslav, Le monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, Paris, Coll. “Arcades”, Gallimard, 1995. Kundera, Milan, L’ignorance, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 4155, Gallimard, 2005 (2000). Kundera, Milan, L’identité, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 3327, Gallimard, 2000 (1997). Kundera, Milan, La lenteur, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 2981, Gallimard, 1998 (1995). Kundera, Milan, Les testaments trahis, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 2703, Gallimard, 1993. Kundera, Milan, L’immortalité, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 2447, Gallimard, 1993 (1990). Kundera, Milan, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 2077, Gallimard, 1989 (1984). Kundera, Milan, Le livre du rire et de l’oubli, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 1831, Gallimard, 1985 (1978). Kundera, Milan, La vie est ailleurs, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 834, Gallimard, 1987 (1973). Kundera, Milan, La valse aux adieux, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 1043, Gallimard, 1986 (1973). Kundera, Milan, Risibles amours, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 1702, Gallimard, 1994 (1968). Kundera, Milan, La plaisanterie, Paris, Collection “Folio”, no 638, Gallimard, 2003 (1967). Le Grand, Eva, Kundera ou La mémoire du désir, Montréal/Paris, XYZ/L’Harmattan, 1995. Ricard, François, Le dernier après-midi d’Agnès. Essai sur l’œuvre de Milan Kundera, Paris, Coll. “Arcades”, Gallimard, 2003.

JA DW I G A S M I T H

C O N T E X T UA L I Z I N G A N N A - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A’ S C O N C E P T O F FA B U L AT I O N

ABSTRACT

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Book three of Logos and Life is devoted to the exploration of the life-significance of literature and the fabulating creativity of the human being. Her work is to be viewed in contrast to the postmodern treatment of narrative as an ever-present factor in private or social discourse and ultimately without any essential or epistemological foundations and values. The fabulating creativity of literature as a particular form of aesthetic involvement in the arts is specifically human: it enagages the individual human being in a given historical time and culture. However, Tymieniecka eschews the underlying possibility of relativism, so strongly implied in postmodern thinking, on the grounds that the richness of life’s variables is not “random.” Instead, these variables constitute the very primeval laws of life. It is the vocation of literature to embrace these variables and, thus, to engage in philosophical investigation as well. From formalism to postmodernism, from the interest in a variety of narrative strategies and techniques to the concept of narrative as crucial to a political discourse of power—we have witnessed a continuous reinterpretation of one of the fundamental human activities of telling stories, writing stories and critiquing stories. A contemporary field of narratology represents one of the disciplines specifically interested in the production of narratives and their existence through written, spoken and visual language in a variety of media, whether in film, graphic novels, television news, miming, etc. The traditional focus of literary studies on the rules, structures and conditions of telling a story in literary texts, folk stories or myths, as initiated by Shklovsky and Propp, is now augmented by a strong interest in telling stories and producing narratives in other fields. Whether in political science, sociology or cultural studies—we observe a shift toward analyzing the ways of grasping knowledge and conveying it through various narratives as a means of interpreting social and political control or execution of power. Modern psychology, though no longer under Freudian sway, certainly has its share of incorporating private stories and interviews into its general body 3 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 3–8. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

4

JA DW I G A S M I T H

of knowledge, particularly in its clinical component. Such acceptance of private stories on a large scale is also evident in the field of history influenced, though at times reluctantly, by a new historical push in the direction of obliterating a distinction between a document and text, any text. A postmodern approach to history accepts individual stories of average citizens and grants them an important role in constructing some larger historical narratives with unclear boundaries, negotiable by textuality and varied historical context. Whether indicated as Lyotard’s “grand narratives” or Foucault’s “episteme,” these attempts at reinterpretation of validity of historical experience, primarily in social sciences, explain all normative behavior as contextualized by ever changing historical processes or, in other words, narratives not grounded in any essential norms and values. Lyotard’s thought, so instrumental to the poststructuralist distrust in the human being’s epistemological faculties and the human being’s role as the central subject of knowledge, stresses such non-rational elements of human existence as sensations, emotions and subconscious reflexes. According to a grand narrative of the postmodern era, an individual human being is ultimately unaware of his or her role in the production of any grand narrative, past or present. To introduce, at this point, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Book Three of Logos and Life, devoted to the life-significance of literature, is a calculated effect: only in contrast to the prevailing context of the postmodern treatment of narrative as ever present factor in private or social discourse but ultimately without any essential or epistemological foundations and values, we can appreciate her work on the fabulating creativity of the human being. “Fabulating” or “fabulation” as used by Tymieniecka should not be confused with the use of the term by Robert Scholes who incorporated it in his work The Fabulators, dealing with the twentieth-century novels not fitting into the traditional category of realism because of their experimentation with the fantastic, mythical or gothic, in other words, what we would call now magical realism. In the Introduction to Book Three of Logos and Life, Tymieniecka talks of the fundamental role of individualizing each human life through unfolding in successive steps of that life’s inward/outward functioning. However, “The Human Condition is a set of functional virtualities which accounts for the emergence of the specific type of living beingness that is man within which the interiorization/extoriorization vectors of life assume a unique amplitude and significance” (10). The human being, then, is able to grapple with “the final metaphysical question” about the onto-poietic factors behind the individualizing progress of life and “the first elemental factors behind the establishment and subsistence of life” (10). Thus, the fabulating creativity of literature as

A N N A - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A’ S C O N C E P T O F F A B U L AT I O N

5

a particular form of the aesthetic involvement in arts is specifically human: it is engaging the individual human being in a given historical time and culture. However, Tymieniecka eschews the underlying possibility of relativism, so strongly implied in the postmodern thinking, on the grounds that the richness of life’s variables is not “random.” Instead, these variables constitute in their “inward/outward orientation” and “dominant/submissive dimensions,” the very primeval laws of life. It is the vocation of literature to engage in and embrace these constants of the onto-poiesis of life, and thus engaging in the philosophical investigation as well. Though philosophy and literature are frequently encroaching upon each other’s territory, each claiming superiority in grasping reality, truth and essential human values, Tymieniecka avoids a trap of qualifying the role of philosophy or of literature as a better vehicle of “the cognition of knowledge of anything” (17). Instead, she observes, the task of superior grasp of knowledge does not pertain to literature because literature reaches the much deeper level of human existence. Literature portrays the human world and existence postfactum, after the events of life are experienced and lived; only then these events are recreated through the “creative vision” in literature in order “to establish contact to convey experience” (18). Thus, unlike philosophy, literature does not attempt to establish some positive knowledge of life; rather, literature remakes the so-called facts, establishes understanding of order or truth and reshapes them into the unique personal vision. Lucidity and clarity of a philosophical treatise are replaced by the “subliminal logic of the significance of life” (20). In other words, the conscious state emerges out of a pre-intentional and prenoematic state. The subjective circuit, then: “Is already ‘pre-objectivized,’ that is, with respect to it the intimate inner-realm of the self, has already assumed its universally valid posture, ‘direction toward’ objectiivized forms, and should in fact be considered to be already the ‘intersubjective’ circuit of interiorized life” (23). But this mediation between the subjective and intersubjective for each human being has to take place in the flux of life, relating each individual human beingness to the totality of life and all its brutal forces. This is accomplished because of Imaginatio Creatrix. Thanks to Imaginatio Creatrix, the aesthetic, the moral, and the intellectual emerge as taming and stabilizing roles amidst nature and its vital forces. This creative orchestration establishes the means of “the stabilization of the inner/outer flux of life’s force” (25), and ultimately the humanization of nature. Chaos and fragmentation, unreason and lack of comprehension are replaced by “structurizing intentionality . . . as if ‘exorcising’ the frightening tentacles which threaten life’s poise” (26). The most crucial function of the creative orchestration, then, is making sense out of the vital stream of life, and this is, ultimately, the primordial function of fabulation. Thanks to it, the human being projects, integrates, and endows

6

JA DW I G A S M I T H

with meaningfulness those individual interests with those of the vital stream of life: “there occurs in fabulation a basic end uniquely important, dramatization of the events and their effects, a modeling of views about human predicament” (30). Three basic principles of fabulation—the tragic, the comic, and the epic—play each a crucial role in life-significant creative arts of story-telling or writing. Tymieniecka clearly warns against treating a literary work as a handy tool for transmitting to the reader a rational view, patterned and arranged in orderly schemata, reaching down to the first principles; “rathers, literature provides the reader with means to recognize his or her most” “secretive, inert, waiting bundles of emotions, concerns, forebodings, anxieties” (33). Illuminated in new, defamiliarized ways, they reach the current life. Why does one need this intermediary, this creative act of literature? The answer is in the fact that though everyday life-experience of the human being is already in “the lucid zone,” above the brute forces of vital nature, not all is clear and controlled for an individual and an individual within a social network. This lack of clarity occurs because beneath this lucid zone there are still present elemental forces of nature, giving us “spontaneous urges to move, to advance, to rush forward” (34) beyond the everyday repetitious activities of life. No wonder, says Tymieniecka, that every great civilization is advanced by its art, literature, and laws. Though almost a cliché, and Tymieniecka is aware of it, this statement should reclaim its value in light of phenomenology of life: “Art and literature appear as crystallization of the answers to the deepest longings of the subliminal soul, thereby, responding to the needs of the human spirit as it takes off,” compensating for the fact that the human being “fails to become his own master within the intricate web of life, and longs for completion, compensations, reward, and redemption.” (35–36). The fabulating function comes to life as the result of the first movement of intellect, triggered by natural curiosity to know as well as need to question. Whatever the form of fabulation—from dance to stories, to music and societal laws—it deals with the tormented, convoluted, unclear, chaotic, etc., and endows it, after “imaginative de-composing,” with patterns. Thus, “the brute and opaque fact of life are imaginatively transfigured into elements of existence, and to confront them, there emerge the elemental passions of the subliminal soul” (38). The new patterns endow the old and convoluted entanglements of the human being with a universal validity, as instigated by the fabulating imagination. The links between these patterns and all the individual and experiential traits possessed by the readers, viewers and listeners are conditioned by “the three primogenital sense-giving factors or virtualities”: the poetic sense, the moral sense, and the intelligible sense. The fabulation then:

A N N A - T E R E S A T Y M I E N I E C K A’ S C O N C E P T O F F A B U L AT I O N

7

intentionally transfigures life’s nude facts in accordance with the propensities, virtualities, and factors of the human condition. The result is prototypical models of human character, conduct, societial organization, vision of humanity; the stage is set for the ideals which will fashion a culture’s style. (39)

Tymieniecka continuously stresses the role of a literary work as a source of gaining insight into the significance of life. Initially, the text or the stage play or film makes the recipient focus on the particular fabula, but that is not enough because each individual will qualify the elements of the fabula from the point of view of some personal experiences, establishing the possibility of conflicting interpretations. However, Tymieniecka warns against the relativistic position which inevitably results from accepting all interpretative versions are correct. What is ignored in such a critical approach, so currently favored, is the fact of the existence of a fabula. Instead of relativity: inasmuch as the possibility of relating personally to some or other special point in complex texture of the work of literature is established by the works’ intentional-ideally unchangeable-structure, these clues are intentional knots of significance in the pattern that makes the fabula ciphered in the script. They punctuate the significant “nervous system” of this pattern as it emerges from it structural formal—material moments. (44)

Because fabula originates from subliminal sources, it connects with “elementary drives, pulsations, stirrings, etc.,” and it helps to distinguish between “Nature without” and “Nature within,” that is to establish some significance in the eyes of the human being (45). Tymieniecka illustrates the concept of fabulation with her several page-long discussion of drama, particularly Greek. She sums up the most important observations about what ultimately distinguishes great literature; she makes a connection between an intentional structure of a given work and its lasting value. It is through a “pattern of intentional knots of significance” that the fabula is ciphered in order to be deciphered by the readers or viewers, and ultimately igniting some imaginative and passionate responses in the subliminal soul. Hence, the life significance of the literary work depends on its poetic enjoyment, a crucial factor in the human condition, necessary for fully embracing psychic acts. It should be stressed again, then, that it is not the intellectual faculty of the human being but the aesthetic enjoyment which allows for the exploration of the significance of life and self-understanding. Tymieniecka returns to the issue of fabulation in 2006, in her essay titled “Logos’ Timing of Life—Fabulating History.” This time, she investigates the role of the interrogative logos as a primogenital function of fabulation and, as explained by her in Book Three of Logos and Life, with Imaginato Creatrix as an instrumental factor. The interrogative logos is behind a sense of history because it is involved in the introspective probing of the conscious life by the human mind, and it also questions the contribution of individual memory as well as the common human condition. This common human condition

8

JA DW I G A S M I T H

reaches out also to all acts of communicating the story of life. The human mind, through various ways of experiencing the reality of life, individually and collectively throughout time, forms and reforms models of experiencing, reflecting the deepest human concerns. Thus, Tymieniecka gets involved in the contemporary discussion about the role of an individual human being as defined by the context of various societal functions and historical events: To understand now means not only to situate an event within the network of life in its natural unfolding, but also to relate it to traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation. This quest spirals up to find or establish a sphere of sense higher than that of vital significance. (xvii)

In other words, instead of postmodern stress on an infinite play of social and historical variables, Tymieniecka explores the possibilities of human communication. She points out that fabulation allows, thanks to imagination, to go beyond the historical, factual marking of reality. This going beyond the identifiable marking of social reality does not lead, however, toward relativism or even nihilism, so characteristic of our contemporary thinking because fabulation is essential to human communication, to the exploration of the deeply personal as well as communal, connecting the past and the present: “The human condition bends toward the rays of fabulation, a love of fabulation being a life force” (xviii). As a life force, it is not to be confused with the ontological grounding of truth or knowledge; it is an impetus to search for meaning of human condition. Stories, then are not to be understood in a Lyotardian sense—as a final destination in the constitution of relativistic knowledge. Instead, stories have a crucial epistemological value because they are fundamental to the very inception of human communication and the explanation of the possibilities of knowledge, including the eventual judgment about the ontological acceptance or exclusion of relativism. WORKS CITED Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. Logos and Life. Book III. Analecta Husserliana.

S E C T I O N II

FRANCK DALMAS

L I V E D I M AG E S / I M AG I N E D E X I S T E N C E S : A P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F I M AG E C R E AT I O N IN THE WORKS OF MICHEL TOURNIER A N D P H OT O G R A P H Y

The act of reading or looking at a work of art is subjective in essence, but then it loses this subjectivity in the process when the subject’s consciousness projects itself into the object of interest, ultimately brought back to the subject as a newly objectified act. It is the purpose of this article to show the relationship between literature and the visual arts by studying their mutual borrowings and thus recognize the valuable critique of phenomenology behind creativity and art reception. To discuss this relationship, I will only consider the medium of photography and the works of the French writer, Michel Tournier. Around the photos of artists such as Eugène Atget, Édouard Boubat, and Arthur Tress I will apply the terminology of Roland Barthes from his essay Camera Lucida. I will show the technique borrowed from photography that Tournier has adapted to his novels, revealing the hidden from the darkroom of his imagination and developing new ways of seeking identity. This should come as no surprise as Michel Tournier is an amateur photographer himself, and he has befriended and worked with the greatest photographers at a time when he was broadcasting a TV show called La chambre noire (The dark room). My nod to the critical framework of phenomenology is not accidental either, since Tournier graduated in philosophy from the Sorbonne and spent four fruitful years studying in Germany, at the University of Tübingen (1946–1950). Barthes also dedicated his aforementioned essay to Sartre’s early work on phenomenology, L’Imaginaire (1940). When Roland Barthes introduces the terms studium and punctum in his seminal book on photography, he hints at a phenomenological equilibrium between the subject and the object. As he explains, while the intentional act of my cogito is still perceptible “as a consequence of my knowledge, [and] my culture,” another factor may come unexpectedly from the viewed object, and he adds: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”1 Ultimately, a phenomenological reduction infuses the making of a photograph with the initial intention, the “putting in parenthesis” of ostensible phenomena, and the specter of the hidden meaning or poignant 93 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 93–106. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

94

FRANCK DALMAS

detail—the so-called essence behind the transcendence. We can read it in the very words of Barthes’: In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience the micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.2

In addition, Barthes sees three components in the photographic act, which makes an obvious parallel with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of the noesis, noema, and hyle: I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs—in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives. . . And the person or thing photographed, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph. . .3

With this background terminology and theory we can start the study of photos and texts. Our first photographer, Eugène Atget, was born in Southwestern France in 1857 and died in 1927. He left a huge collection of some 12,000 photographs of Paris (glass plates at the time) at the turn of the 20th century: its buildings— especially front porches and adorned doors—, its street merchants, and its shop windows. His work can be best described as ethnographic and detached of any subjectivity—he himself referred to his pictures as mere documents. There is, however, an unconscious layer of visibility in his craft that made the Surrealists look to him, and a young Man Ray met him when he arrived in Paris. In Atget’s art there is undeniably a mythical aspect beneath the melancholic effect of his photographs that bring back to life the memory of the past, and also a phenomenological aspect through the split identity suggested in his series of shop window pictures. In the blurring shadows as well as in the empty streets, there is indeed a haunting presence within the absence of human people. In these pictures people are marginalized in an allusive way—fictionalized, could we say—, as if they were no longer the focus of the photographs but rather merged into a discreet narrative; they are used instead as objects to fix the viewers’ attention and allow them a phenomenological bracketing of their own presence inside and outside the scenes altogether. Let us compare this visual process to what Michel Foucault has ventured to show about the literariness of the image in a masterly reading of Velasquez’s Meninas (Fig. 1).4 In Atget’s photograph (Fig. 2), a central figure at the front gate of his metal-shop (chaudronnerie) already resembles the painter at his canvas. In both pictures the (virtual) “operator” is out of the frame and both

LIVED IMAGES/IMAGINED EXISTENCES

95

Figure 1. Diego Velasquez. Las Meninas, 1656–1657 (National Museum of Prado, Madrid)

artists use a sort of mirror to signal its presence. In Foucault, Velasquez echoes the invisible models (the Spanish royal couple) by the means of a background mirror, easily mistaken for a framed painting; in Atget, we notice a faceless character at the window of the first floor, almost acting out as an intrusive viewer. Finally, both pictures show an enigmatic remote figure looking straight at the operator’s external location. These marginal characters are involved in the picturesque narratives without taking significant parts, either on the threshold or in the distance; they only exist to denote the ambiguity between subject and object within any seer. That might reveal the correspondence between real people looking at the shop windows from outside and mannequins made alive

96

FRANCK DALMAS

Figure 2. Eugène Atget. Magasin de métallier, passage de la Réunion, 1911

inside for the sole purpose of projecting, reflecting, and internalizing their external gaze. Precisely, Atget arrived at another achievement in his visual art with the photos of shop windows. The camera is no longer this external machine that takes the picture; it is now the internal medium, the essence per se, of the reflecting window that makes the viewer’s picture within the picture. A passive object taken by the operator behind the optical lens has become an active subject looking back at the transfixed, objectified spectator (Fig. 3). In the catalog of a 1982 exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, we can read:

LIVED IMAGES/IMAGINED EXISTENCES

Figure 3.

97

Eugène Atget. Avenue des Gobelins, 1925 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

Atget also made the startling discovery that the world creates its own montage of objects through a kind of “layering” just waiting for the photographer’s lens. Such photographs as Avenue des Gobelins, 1925, pose the questions about reality by shifting contexts and creating ambiguities through the layering of window reflections.5

This picture, indeed, is a good example of the phenomenological aspect of photography. We can see female mannequins with realistic features, manners, and dynamic attitudes that counterfeit human behavior. On a first layer, we, conscious observers, look at a simple fashion stall through the shop window. It is the most plausible reading that our minds will validate. But the street is reflected on the windowpane with buildings in the background, and therefore our imagination may play a visual trick upon us. So, on a second layer

98

FRANCK DALMAS

the mannequins, no longer the objects on show, could act like real people walking along the street and looking at the shop window too. The camera is so close to the glass that we lack an objective distance with the setting. And on a third layer, the tables have turned: an object can surely acquire a life of its own and we lend the mannequins a subjective mind; they have become the true observers of the outside scene. We can even venture that they are looking at the passers-by, one of whom appears on the windowpane as object of their gaze. The picture reveals a multiplicity of perspectives in the same way a piece of fiction would with its main narrative and subplots. This phenomenal interpretation of Atget’s photographic art parallels the act of reading a book along which the readers will experience depersonalization, denial of their subjective minds, followed by a re-appropriation of a general identity through the object, in a broader sense, they are looking into. That supports the comment made by the French writer, Pierre Mac Orlan, in a preface to Atget’s work, about the relationship between literature and the visual arts: “The photographic art is a literary art.”6 Earlier in his life, Atget had envisioned being an actor, but it remained a mere hobby; as a matter of fact, we know that he was learned in literature and owned a large personal library.7 No doubt then that he unconsciously would replicate his lost aspirations in the professional routine. The second artist on display, Édouard Boubat, was born in Paris in 1923 and died in 1999. He is an exact contemporary of Tournier whom he met on his TV show in the 1960s; from then they started a lifelong collaboration and went on many trips around the world. As we will see, many descriptive passages in Tournier fall under the influence of the photographer. Boubat’s biographer, Bernard George, points out the artist’s precepts: Although Édouard Boubat’s photographs are not prearranged in the “manufactured” sense, his work, viewed as a whole, is in the best sense of the word premeditated. I do not intend to sound pompous when I mention in this context the words of Martin Heidegger on the subject of truth: truth can endure only when it is coupled with an “openness towards existence.”8

Photography is an art of doubles; there can be a naturalistic rendering of the visible or a suggestive creation of the invisible. Looking at a photograph by Boubat, Tournier makes this interesting comment (Fig. 4): There is no better way to turn the back to the picturesque, to the anecdotal, to the life-studies, to the capture of fleeting images. The tree and the hen are fixed in the consciousness of their fundamental ascribed roles, which are to represent the symbols of constancy, authenticity, and self-confidence. Boubat or the sweetness of being.9

As Tournier said, we could see an allusion to these “symbols of constancy” in the roundness of both the hen and the tree. Between the tiny object in the center and the huge object above it a relationship exists. The round shape of

LIVED IMAGES/IMAGINED EXISTENCES

Figure 4.

99

Édouard Boubat. Arbre et poule, 1950. Rpt. in Des clefs et des serrures

the foliage standing on top of a slender tree trunk would almost make, out of the frame, our imagination look for a gigantic hen hatching the little hen, thus virtually turned into an egg. Does it tell us about the myth of the origins, whether an ancient hen made the first egg or a mythic egg gave birth to the first chick? Here we have another instance of Barthes’ punctum, which Derrida justly characterized as being out of the picture.10 The real attraction of this photo dwells on the mystery of creation, on the metonymic detail for the whole, on this rapport between the immense and the miniature, between the seeing subject and the object of the gaze. “What comes first?” questions the picture. We really start to think through the object we are looking at and no longer with our Cartesian minds. The picture unconsciously arouses within the subjectobserver the perception of a bigger entity above. In his book on the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes about the phenomenology of angular shapes and round shapes: the first ones, he suggests, reduce the universe to our most intimate feelings whereas the second open up our horizons; the first make us feel as if in a cozy home and the others project us into the world.11 A student of Bachelard, the philosopher of myths Gilbert Durand, has used the concept of “anthropological path” to express the

100

FRANCK DALMAS

constant movements back and forth between the personal conscious that tells—if not writes—its ‘text’ and the whole of contextual suggestions from the environment, from the ‘surrounding’ milieu, and as [the philosopher Emmanuel] Mounier says, there is a constant exchange without even starting from the hen or from the egg.12

What urged Boubat to take this picture we cannot tell; the photographer explained that he had one last exposure on his roll at the end of the day and he shot this innocent scene. We have already realized how intuitive artistic creation can be, and so we must acknowledge that it is not only accidental but it also conveys essential thoughts and feelings. Michel Tournier has been so far referenced through his friends and mentors and I now want to apply a literary example to this discussion initiated by Boubat’s photograph. Among literary genres, folktales and legends of the human heritage use the same rhetoric and material to reveal the invisible behind the visible. Tournier has written a book of stories, Le Coq de bruyère (The Fetishist), in which he distorts classic tales and from which I will quote a passage of “La fugue du petit Poucet” (“Tom Thumb Runs Away”). Here, the French “fugue” is polysemic as it may express the contrapuntal piece of music “the fugue” as well as the act of running away from home; it really is a contrapuntal narrative. He lay down on his bed and closes his eyes. And then he was far, far away. He became an enormous chestnut tree whose flowers were upright as creamy little candelabra. He was suspended in the immobility of the blue sky. But suddenly, a slight breeze passed by. Tom [Pierre] made a gentle soughing sound. His thousands of green wings beat in the air. His branches moved gently up and down, dispensing blessings. The sun opened out like a fan, which then shut again in the gray-green shade of his foliage. He was immensely happy. A big tree. . .13

The final happiness exhaled through the imaginative text replicates the kind of craftsmanship used by Boubat in his photos. Tournier has made an astute comment on the art of his friend, which could well be considered as self-reflection of his own work: He looks up. His large nose inhales the wind. He lays his hands on everything, and, gradually, the animals compose a fresco, a gypsy girl raises her arm and dances, some children form around her a cherubim’s scene by Giotto, the clouds erect in the sky an altar of light. . . Boubat lifts to his eye an old Leica camera with the sheen of a doorknob. Finally he brushes his hands as if he were to erase the painting he has just envisioned.14

Two excerpts from the novel Les Météores (Gemini) present very similar visual descriptions with multiple perspectives. Throughout this book the theme of the twins structures the narrative but also diffracts the reading process. To sum up the story, the happenstance of life has separated twin brothers, Jean and Paul, single named Jean-Paul as their likeness makes their identification almost impossible. While one strives to recompose the lost harmony, the other

LIVED IMAGES/IMAGINED EXISTENCES

101

manages to get loose from what he feels as a type of enslavement. One twin tries to find an identity of his own and the other chases him all around the world, experiencing at every halt the estrangement of his brother’s stopover. The multiple viewpoints of the split protagonists imitate snapshots in which the attention is drawn to the four corners; here too we can think of the studium and punctum as a narrating strategy. In order to understand the whole story the reader must recapture the many layers of visibility. The first passage turns the narrative into a kaleidoscopic riddle: But the mysterious impressiveness of these huge rooms comes even more from the profusion of mirrors, multiplying them, breaking them up and putting them together again, sending their proportions crazy, wrenching planes awry and creating endless perspectives. The majority are tinted—greenish, blue, or yellow—making them look more than ever like the surface of some frozen fluid. One in particular held my attention, not so much for itself as for its frame. For the frame was composed of tiny mirrors angled in different directions and was disproportionately large, so that the oval mirror it contained seemed the smaller. I lingered in front of the little image of myself, lost in its shimmering depths, troubled by the throng of images that beset it.15

This description of a mirror gallery in Venice, Italy, speaks for the shattered identity of the twins. If we record Bachelard’s dialectic of the round and the angular, the passage clearly states the opposition of two natures within the twin rapport: the nomadic mind of the adventurous brother, and the settled attitude of the sedentary double. The second passage also addresses the identity dilemma. On another leg to his long journey, the twin Jean has arrived in Japan and met a painter encountered by his brother. The paintings he is looking at are no less than mind-impressed reflections of his personal search: He had managed to catch an essence, a cipher in everything, relating it directly to the cosmos, something simpler and more profound than all the attributes, colors, qualities and other properties that follow from this relationship, which we normally go by. In these canvases, the Japanese landscape was no longer cherry trees in blossom, Mount Fuji and the pagoda or the little humpbacked bridge. Going beyond those movable, interchangeable, imitable symbols, here was the cosmic formula of Japan, the outcome of a vertiginous but by no means infinite number of coordinates, made sensible and obvious but at the same time explicit and inexplicable. In every picture one was vaguely aware of the hidden presence of that formula.16

The photographer Arthur Tress comes last in the study for he is a younger artist, born in New York in 1940. Tournier discovered his first photo-album, in 1972, and he immediately invited him to France. Their works evoke similarities about the strange, the phantasmagoric, and the mythical; the American photographer acknowledged an artistic kinship with Tournier’s writing when he happened to read the translated works. As Tournier once described it, a photo by Tress can be characterized as “image abîmée”17 which, in French, reveals two facets of the picture: first, it means that the image is worn out by time as the representation of the past collides with the present of the shot;

102

FRANCK DALMAS

then, it states the spatial mise-en-abîme of the viewer-operator circumscribing a framed picture within the boundaries of a printed photograph through the square visor of his camera. If we want to compare this collision of time and space with literature, we surely would agree that inter-textuality and framed narratives within the main storyline operate as visually as the theatricality of Tress’ pictures. Just as a photograph is made of light and darkness, so it is for the aesthetic look and the memory of past events; and this statement is true of any kind of image, either visual or literary. A typical example of Tress’ work demonstrates the artificiality and multiplicity of his art (Fig. 5). In some respects, he retells in this picture Plato’s myth of the Cave. In his parable Plato wanted to express how easy and wrong it is to make up reality out of illusion, and how people willing to do so become the slaves of images. Even though Plato was critical of the poets and the storytellers for bending the truth through imagination (i.e. the shadows on the cave wall), he professed the primacy of essential rapports through the Ideas (i.e. the light that allows an escape from reality). In the photo, the conical light beam is demonstrative of the artifice. But it tells something valuable about a creator, a creature and a creation—could it be the operator, spectator and spectrum; or the subject, the object and their transcendence? Indeed, a man (the autoportrayed artist) holds a bird in a gauntlet. There seems to be a master-slave relationship between the creator and his creature. But the shadowy figure is also submissive to the bird for his nutrition and, metaphorically, his culture. All we can account from this image is purely illusory and fictional; the indirect light exposure reinforces it. So, bird and human on the obscured wall of imagination reveals other truths about the act of illusion. To size up the many references to photographic images in Tournier’s novels, I want to quote an explicit passage from La Goutte d’or (The Golden Droplet). I first have to recap that, at the beginning of this novel, a blonde woman photographs the protagonist, a young Algerian shepherd named Idriss, and she disappears shortly after without leaving him a duplicate. He then decides to go after his stolen portrait. He starts a long journey that leads him to Paris, in the hostile world of the media industry. There he meets professionals from the advertising business—works on a commercial; then a department store manager proposes him to mime a mannequin in his store; and he encounters a photographer who collects second-hand dummies and installs them in natural settings. The following paragraph reproduces a conversation Idriss has with this photographer: Yes, but with a bit of landscape, real landscape, real trees, real rocks. And like that, you see, there’s a sort of mutual contamination between my boy dolls and the landscape. The reality of the landscape brings the dummies to life much more intensely than any shopwindow display. But it’s the reverse that really matters: my dummies throw doubt on the landscape. Thanks to them, the

LIVED IMAGES/IMAGINED EXISTENCES

103

Figure 5. Arthur Tress. Shadow. A Novel in Photographs, 1975 trees just slightly—not completely, only slightly—seem to be made of cardboard, and part of the sky seems to be just a backcloth. As for the dummies, since they themselves are already images, their photo is the image of an image, and this has the effect of doubling their dissolving power. The result is an impression of a waking dream, a genuine hallucination. It is, absolutely, reality being undermined at its very foundations by the image.18

Finally, I would say, after commenting on the photographic image and the literary image, that bringing together the visual arts and literature leads to a

104

FRANCK DALMAS

reflection on the image and the sign. On the one hand, the linguistic sign is an empty vessel—as we think of the arbitrariness of the Saussurean sign—until it acquires meaning, until it gets filled with sonorous or visual significance (of phonemes and morphemes). Mind images, on the other hand, convey their inner intentionality toward transcendental significance. The signs are the external objects through which the images will find rational articulations in all spoken languages. The concept of a tree, for instance, is meaningful to everyone but only the content of the sign will deliver the opportunity to speak of it as such. Then we conclude that the visual arts are essential to literary creation and criticism as much as the reception of art forms needs the linguistic endorsement of a literature, either oral in proto cultures or written in ours. This is true of prehistoric cave paintings as of multimedia installations. The reciprocal processes are validated through the synthesis of phenomenology: the visual or linguistic sign transcends the immanence of an image; and in turn, the sign becomes the objective tool to develop the image. Michel Tournier has tackled this important issue not only through his fictional writing but also in a lifetime interest for the two mediums, as his philosophical trends and other essays demonstrate. What I have attempted to show in this article, with the support of phenomenology, is the dialogue of two mediums that we may think at the extreme poles of image creation but which, in actuality, work hand-in-hand to reveal something hidden from the visible reality. Duke University NOTES 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar-StrausGiroux, 1981), p. 13; original French: La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 1980). 2 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 3 Ibid., p. 9. 4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971); Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 5 Eugène Atget 1857–1927, ed. James Borcoman (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1984), p. 76. 6 Pierre Mac Orlan, Atget: photographe de Paris, ed. Berenice Abbott (New York: E. Weyhe, n.d.), p. 2. 7 The posthumous inventory of his property lists: “the complete works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Racine, Corneille, Molière, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Byron, Hugo, Delavigne, Dumas père and fils, de Vigny, de Musset, and Emile Augier”, in Eugène Atget 1857–1927, op. cit., p. 25. 8 Bernard George, Edouard Boubat (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 11.

LIVED IMAGES/IMAGINED EXISTENCES

105

9

Michel Tournier, Des clefs et des serrures: Images et proses (Paris: Chêne-Hachette, 1979), p. 71 [my translation].

On ne peut pas davantage tourner le dos au pittoresque, à l’anecdote, au pris sur-le-vif, à l’image capturée à la sauvette. L’arbre et la poule sont figés dans la conscience du rôle fondamental qui leur incombe: incarner des symboles de permanence, de fidélité, de confiance. Boubat ou la douceur de l’être. 10

Jacques Derrida, “Les morts de Roland Barthes”, Poétique 47 (Paris: Seuil, 1981), p. 286. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: PUF, 1957). As a young student Tournier was an avid reader of Bachelard, whose Sorbonne lectures he later attended. Cf. Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), p. 124; Le Vent Paraclet (Paris: Gallimard, 1977). 11

The only teacher I saw with any regularity was Gaston Bachelard. Two of his books, The Psychoanalysis of Fire and The Formation of the Scientific Spirit, which I chanced to find in a Dijon bookshop [. . .] persuaded me that I ought to take first my licence and then, in 1941, the agrégation in philosophy. 12 Gilbert Durand, Introduction à la mythodologie. Mythes et sociétés (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), p. 159 [my translation].

[. . .] va-et-vient incessant entre le conscient individuel qui énonce, sinon écrit, son “texte” et l’ensemble des intimations contextuelles de l’environnement, de la société “ambiante”, comme le dit E. Mounier – il y a un échange incessant sans première poule et sans premier œuf! 13

Tournier, The Fetishist, trans. Barbara Wright (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), p. 49; Le Coq de bruyère (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1978, 1981), p. 65.

Il s’étend sur son lit, et ferme les yeux. Le voilà parti, très loin. Il devient un immense marronnier aux fleurs dressées comme des petits candélabres crémeux. Il est suspendu dans l’immobilité du ciel bleu. Mais soudain, un souffle passe. Pierre mugit doucement. Ses milliers d’ailes vertes battent dans l’air. Ses branches oscillent en gestes bénisseurs. Un éventail de soleil s’ouvre et se ferme dans l’ombre glauque de sa frondaison. Il est immédiatement heureux. Un grand arbre. . . 14

Tournier, Le Crépuscule des masques: Photos et photographes (Paris: Hoëbeke, 1992), p. 92 [my translation].

Il lève les yeux. Son grand nez hume le vent. Il impose ses mains à toute chose, et, lentement, les bêtes forment frise, une gitane lève un bras dansant, des enfants prennent à ses pieds la place des angelots de Giotto, les nuages s’édifient en un grand reposoir de lumière. . . Boubat élève à son œil un Leica usé et patiné comme une poignée de porte. Enfin ses mains font un geste comme pour effacer le tableau qui vient de se composer. 15

Tournier, Gemini, trans. Anne Carter (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), p. 309; Les Météores (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1975, 1977), p. 430.

Mais ces vastes pièces doivent plus encore leur prestige et leur mystère à la profusion des miroirs qui les démultiplient, brisent et recomposent toutes leurs lignes, sèment la folie dans leurs proportions, défoncent les plans et les creusent de perspectives infinies. La plupart sont teintés – glauques, bleutés ou aurés – et évoquent d’autant plus fortement la surface gelée d’un liquide. L’un d’eux

106

FRANCK DALMAS

surtout me retient, moins par lui-même que par son cadre. Car ce cadre composé de petits miroirs orientés dans des plans différents est d’une largeur disproportionnée et fait paraître médiocre le miroir ovale qu’il cerne. Je m’attarde devant cette petite image de moi-même perdue au fond de ce miroitement, accablée par cette imagerie turbulente qui l’obsède. 16

Ibid., p. 386.

Il était parvenu à saisir dans chaque chose une essence, un chiffre, sa relation directe au cosmos, plus simple et plus profonde que tous les attributs, couleurs, qualités et autres accessoires qui découlent de cette relation et sur lesquels nous nous réglons habituellement. Dans ces toiles, le paysage japonais, ce n’étaient plus les cerisiers en fleur, le mont Fuji, la pagode ou le petit pont arqué. Au-delà de ces symboles transposables, transportables, imitables, était, devenue sensible, patente, mais catégorique, inexplicable, la formule cosmique du Japon résultant d’un nombre vertigineux, mais non pas infini, de coordonnées. Dans chaque tableau, on percevait confusément la présence occulte de cette formule. Elle émouvait sans éclairer. (MT, p. 534). 17

Tournier, Des clefs et des serrures, op. cit., pp. 121–23. Tournier, The Golden Droplet, trans. Barbara Wright (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 167; La Goutte d’or (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1986, 1987), p. 181.

18

—Oui, mais avec un morceau de paysage, du vrai paysage, des vrais arbres, des vrais rochers. Et alors, vois-tu, il y a comme une contamination réciproque entre mes garçons-poupées et le paysage. La réalité du paysage donne aux mannequins une vie beaucoup plus intense que ne peut le faire un décor de vitrine. Mais c’est surtout l’inverse qui importe: mes mannequins jettent le doute sur le paysage. Grâce à eux, les arbres sont peu à peu – pas complètement, un peu seulement – en papier, les rochers en carton, le ciel n’est en partie qu’une toile de fond. Quant aux mannequins, étant eux-mêmes déjà des images, leur photo est une image d’image, ce qui a pour effet de doubler leur pouvoir dissolvant. Il en résulte une impression de rêve éveillé, d’hallucination vraie. C’est absolument la réalité sapée à sa base par l’image.

LUDMILA MOLODKINA

AESTHETIC AND HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK O F RU S S I A N M A N O R A S A G E N R E

It’s a strange thing, but there is a kind of special and unique fascination in this tale of the past, which, perhaps, might be transparent only to a Russian in origin: a fascination of bearish popular print, a miracle of folksy Russian word, a fairytale of village descants or rakish steps of Russian dance. All of those are on the background of antique temples with columns overarched by caps of Ionic, Dorian or Corinthian Orders. A dance of Russian barefooted Malashkas and Dunkas in a “Temple of Love”, a masquerade of ploughboys dressed as ancient gods and goddesses. . . What else could be more farcical and amusing, sad and wise? (N.N. Wrangel, Old Manors)

Russian manor is the entire culturological universe embedding multilayer phases of formation of national history and heritage, Russian mentality and our ancestral memory. The formula of Russian Manor is a quintessence, virtuality of the universe as “patrimonial estate” with its provincial culture of humdrum and way of life, with its philosophy of cultural leisure and coziness through the unity of a human being with nature, social service and individual life style of enlightened citizen of the motherland. Following the contemporary academic and artistic way of thinking, the aesthetics of the manor culture might be perceived as a mirror, which focuses various aspects of socioeconomic and family life tenor of Russian reality. However, the world of a manor is not just an aesthetic well-fit dwelling space; this is a “rigidly observed structure of power”, a “lymph gland” of national culture. This is the most successful nodule out of those selfreproducing cultural elements, which have been created for centuries. And, indeed, it is still self-reproducing. This is confirmed by humanitarian community, which has always been impassioned with the fate of Russian Manor. It was in the beginning of XX century, when P.P. Weiner, editor and publisher of “Past Years” was one of the first who realized the acuity and actuality of manor problem, while V.V. Zgura after the events of 1917 unified the best representatives of intellectuals in the framework of the Society of Studying Russian Manor (1922–1931), and through 1992, when with the help of creative endeavors of Professor L.V. Ivanova the activities of this Society was reestablished and broadened through publishing of scientific treatises, carrying out of scientific and theoretical conferences and excursions. The library sphere 107 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 107–112. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

108

LUDMILA MOLODKINA

of exploring the conglomerate of Russian Manor is consistently growing thanks to untiring work of the best representatives of humanitarian elite of XX–XXI, who were trying to “restore stereometry of analytical vision when viewing Russian manor illuminated and consecrated with historical memory”. Today, different variations of manor space museification allow us organizing music festivals “Sheremetyev’s Seasons” in Ostankino and Kouskovo, “Open Air Concertos” in Arkhangelskoye Manor, various exhibitions, including personal vernissages, as well as literature evenings in Ostafyevo, Melihovo, Tsaritsyno, in the Museum of manor culture in Kouzminki, Zaharovo-Bolshie Vyazemy etc. On the background of today’s social and cultural situation the manor philosophy is being written by young and talented Russian architects, who create concepts of exclusive development fashion on the crest of this architecturaleconomical wave. Some of them are pragmatically focusing their creative look on the genre model of old Russian Manor, thus germinating an ultra fresh manor’s style of “architectural archeology”. Presentation of the new magazine “Living in a Manor: Now and Then” in Arkhangelskoye Manor or well-organized and interestingly arranged exhibition under intriguing epithet “Who is Doing Well at Dacha? Revival of Good Olden Time” held in the All-Russia Exhibition Center; scenic canvas of Igor Revenko in the Museum of antique furniture dedicated to the mysterious beauty of Russian Manor, – this empirically “live” material broadens the scientific-aesthetic spectrum of contemporary manor themes. The professionals pose and analyze questions, such as revival of national traditions in intensive creative life; a dacha for compatriots is the place for recreation and creativeness, rather than a kitchen garden; the art of living outside; aesthetics of dacha lifestyle. They reconfirm the fact of “self-reproduction” of the Russian Manor’s spirit. “Blooming like a flower on the pages of decent books, the Russian Manor, therefore, keeping its God blessed image, once again demonstrates its fundamental affiliation with national culture, which is identified by persistent survivability – the most substantial feature of a national culture. . . In this new century (I wish to believe it) Russia will never leave this wonderful bloom of Russian Manor without an ovary”. From both philosophic and, specifically, aesthetic point of view, the new scientific-theoretical potential of modern Russian manor culture contemplates, to my mind, the following questions and their solutions: – Drafting of architectural-manor genre typology; – Cultural dialogue of Russian Manor, Italian villa, English country mansion, French geometric landscape and Japanese symbolic garden both in a historical context and at present; – Defining the dynamics of manor styles;

AESTHETIC AND HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK

109

– Aesthetics of memory (manor memories); – Semiotics of manor as symbolic character; – Analysis of manor as museified space-exhibit. Undoubtedly, each of the above problems requires a separate deep and comprehensive scientific analysis. Using an epitomic approach to discourse, let us review the typology of the architectural-manor genre, the principles of which reflect historical stadiality and continuity of manor development. Projection of “genre” category over the manor culture allows us supposing that some of its highly valuable aesthetic constituents might be acknowledged as works of art. Genre denomination of manor/work-of-art correlates the same with some architectural-stylistic norms, identifies certain over-individual and persistent features. First of all, the architectural-manor genre acts as a classifier. We may singularize the following array of such genres: Russian manor, Italian villa, English country mansion etc. Specifically, genre differentiation of Russian Manor might be represented by a manor-patrimonies, palace-park ensembles (Peterhof, Pavlovsk), noblesse and merchantmen manors; later on – dachas, then – cottages and villas. However, the classificatory, the most obvious function of architecturalmanor genre is not the only one. Authorial genre denominations, creative signature of an architect-artist presuppose mutual understanding between the manor and its owner, as well as the visitor as a spectator. A problem of communication arises. The genre in manor art operates as a symbol of architectural tradition. The Manor as a monument, as a museified space is apprehended under the “laws” of the genre based on analysis of its antecedent archetypes. This apprehension has been given by the customer, the owner, the visitor and the audience of the manor-museum. Similar genre “expectation of readers” of the manor’s “text” exercises a significant influence on the creativeness of architect-artist. As I believe it, methodologically, it is wise to build the system of architectural-manor genre on the basis of the Hegelian philosophic genre concept, which derives from the stadiality of social evolution and observes “general status of universe” being the ground of such genre. The case in hand is about the fruitfulness of sociohistorical approach to manor culture in general and to its genres in particular. The historicism the Hegelian thinking might be philosophically fit on architectural-manor genre analysis. Various genres of manors might be considered, first of all, as artistic projection of certain phase in social evolution. In support of the above, let us historically trace the evolution of Russian architectural-manor genre. Starting from XVI century – the time of development of landed gentry system and emergence of seigniorial estates and up to rich manorpatrimonies of Muscovy in XVII century and thereafter towards to XVIII

110

LUDMILA MOLODKINA

century – “The Age of Enlightenment”, which enriched formal and contextual parameters of manor life. That was the time of the birth of new genre – Tsar’s palace manor-residence, aristocratic manor, such as Kouskovo, Ostankino or Arkhangelskoye. In the person of their enlightened owners the Sheremetyevs, Golitsins or Yusoupovs, who were striving for self-prominence and eminence of personality, such fates acquire an individually inimitable and personified overtone. Manifesto on Liberty of Noblesse in 1762 opened up a vastitude for thousands of well-educated gentry for arrangement of their own patrimonial estates in accord with European humanitarian ideals and philosophic principles of naturality (“Back to Nature!”, Jean Jacques Rousseau). The second half of XVIII and the first half of XIX century was the time of efflorescence, peaking ascent of rural noblesse manors, not only large aristocratic, but also modest “patrimonial estates” of landed gentry (Dvoryaninovo Manor of A.T. Bolotov’s). Thus, that was a beginning of a new manor genre. That was the period of shaping-up of truly haut-manor aesthetics, a time of creation of the greater part of splendid examples of architectural-landscape ensembles, the foundation of realistic philosophy of Russian Manor, which as a mirror reflected the emancipated personality of educated noble and their aspiration for self-expression in social, economic and spiritual life. In this context the original concept of A.N. Veselovskiy’s has much in common with the Hegelian genre typology, and which correlates the genre history with historical personality development. According to the scientist, a certain stage in relationship of an individual and the society induces a content of a work of art, i.e. the Manor. Culturological image of a manor would not be ever completed without its economical constituent. Actuality and undeniable importance of studying socioeconomic and household characteristics of manor lifestyle was clearly acknowledged by art critics, historians and philosophers. It was the manor’s space that formed the stratum of rural intelligentsia. The owners of town houses introduced new elements to agricultural and industrial-craft production; they developed new agrotechnical culture and laid the basis for efficient environmental management. Manors have influenced the formation of cultural-economic landscape of Russia. The process gained its utmost intensity after 1861, when some part of noblesse’s manors passed into the hands of new owners – the merchantry. In most of cases merchants used to buy out the “noble nests” rather than building new manor ensembles. Impressive wealth and remarkable managerial capacities of those new Russian promyshlenniks (industrialists) allowed expanding the culturological functionality and adding value to merchantmen manors – a new architecturalmanor genre. Taking advantage of literary criticism’s categories, one may say that there was an apparent process of “cross” genre attraction between

AESTHETIC AND HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK

111

noblesse’s and merchantmen’s manors. This was due to modernization of manor’s economic-entrepreneurial activities, as well as thanks to a modish crush (which became a norm) of inviting famous architects, artists, composers and writers. In those days it was quite fashionable and praiseworthy to establish favorable conditions for their creativeness out in the country and to nourish a very special spiritual aura of confidence on the background of a manor’s walk of life. In the light of solving problems with manor genres, it is interesting to dwell upon a question of rapprochement of manor culture with dacha’s one, which was first put by G.U. Sternin, who analyzed it using the example of famous Abramtsevo Estate. Moreover, there was not only a movement “from manor to dacha”, but vice-versa too – “from dacha to manor”. Dacha of A.P. Chekhov in Melihovo is a good example of that. In Abramtsevo Manor’s atmosphere, in spite of quite high artistic professionalism, however, the owners cultivated dilettantism or amateurism, which was indigenous specifically for the theatrical hobby of the participants of artistic circle established by Mamontov. The very “cult of dilettantism” justified the movement of Abramtsevo’s “from manor to dacha”. Such a tendency was quite naturally embedded into the general context of manor’s life in the beginning of XIX century with its typical ludic primordium, penetrating occasionally the most prosaic and everyday aspects of the same, which, to a certain degree, “theatralized” manor’s routine and added an inimitable touch of charm and vibration to its separate fragments that in aggregate comprised the complete and organic whole. In Chekhov’s Melihovo the cult of “dilettantism” was even much more articulated: the dwelling facility was located amidst the village and was neither fenced from the street side nor had it any front yard; the cultural order was, first of all, the dacha’s order. Nevertheless, A.P. Chekhov and his family perceived Melihovo as a manor. The process of moving from “manor” to “dacha”, conversely, was exposed to the pressure of complicated social changes in then reforming Russia. However, it testified both to the decay of haut-manor culture, especially the old noblesse’ one, and triggered emergence of certain positive momentums such as patronage of the arts. Applying the manor dilemma of “manor-dacha” to genre problems, one may obviously notice a kind of “dialogue” between these two manor genres. Genre concept of M.M. Bakhtin’s splendidly explicates the internal and external interlocutory feature of “manor’s multilingualism”. Manor-genre and dacha-genre, according to Bakhtin, may be perceived as types of socially-historically substantiated “statements”, as participants of social dialogue.

112

LUDMILA MOLODKINA

The objective of a researcher is in listening to the “voices and dialogical relationships between them”. The problem of “genre expectation”, analyzed by M.M. Bakhtin, in relation to manor’s work of art demonstrates a dialogue between the architect and the customer, between the author and the audience. In XXI century – as historical time-space – the architectural-landscape character is not identified exclusively by variations on a theme “dacha’s fever”, “a wooden house with “amenities” or a “small farmery”. The dominating architectural-manor genres of nowadays in Russian manor culture are again represented by imitations of old noblesse manors, castles, villas, cottages and manors. Such a tendency in the national artistic and architectural-landscape “environment” of out-of-town dwellings can be compared with the genesis of Italian villa, starting from the Renaissance, and English country mansion, which also has long historical traditions. M.M. Bakhtin is absolutely right in his supposing that the main genreforming factor is the historical time, its social and ideological distinctness. Reasoning about the sustainability of genres, their continuity and historical actuality of genre content, the researcher of genius arrived at an idea of the efficiency of studying the “genre memory”. From this point of view, the manor in its genre diversity is the most sustainable imaginative stratum of Russian national culture, the “representative of creative memory” with its long genealogy.

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N: I N D I V I D UA L I T Y, M O R A L D E T E R M I N AT I O N A N D H I S T O R I C A L M Y T H I N T H E L I G H T O F H E N RY JA M E S ’ S T H E A M E R I C A N

In the present reality, it is too narrow the circle of the ideal figures. Hegel. To Monica, the only one. ABSTRACT

This paper sets forth the development of the logical link among the concepts mentioned in the title and the subtitle thereof through the analysis of James’s novel. Resorting to the image of the carrying out of a likeness of the protagonist of the work, in the first section we shall explain the import of the expression “real live man” and we shall show why it agrees with the modern approach to the individual existence in its two main aspects, the search for a material welfare and the search for a conscious liberty, which we shall respectively call the “Epicurean one” and the “Stoic one” (without major reference to the import of these terms through the history of philosophy). In the second section we shall deal with the differences between America and Europe, considered as two paradigms of how history and culture furnishes the background of the individuality, whether emphasizing the sheer willpower or the transcendence of tradition. In the third section, we shall figure out the dramatic development both of history and individual life toward the would-be overcoming of the mentioned differences, which will explain the odd importance of myth in modernity. Finally, in a brief coda we shall dwell upon the general import of all this in James’s work and beyond it. I. T H E T Y P E A N D T H E B A C K G R O U N D O F T H E W O R K

What is the philosophical ground to think man over after phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics have progressively eroded the secular belief in the universality of truth? Whether the question itself is anachronistic or not (for “man” seems one of those essential terms that have been swept away by 113 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 113–137. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

114

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

the would-be wreck of metaphysics),1 I dare to say that the present time defines man in the middle of an odd socio-historic contradiction: on the one hand, the doubtless universalization of welfare, the distribution of goods and opportunities of personal improvement that turn every happening into the origin of a new adventure; on the other hand, the finitude of the individual and that kind of relativity that is tantamount to meaninglessness, which coincides point by point, as I have just remarked, with the downfall or rather devastation of the sundry kinds of philosophical transcendence, including the one that is the very touchstone of Modernity: the exigency of an absolute self-consciousness that everyone has to come by through his vital experience, which endows life with an dramatism and a philosophical depth that would hardly been conceivable whether for Antiquity or for Christianity, inasmuch as both of them focused life just like the unfolding of a transcendent reality and by no means like the ground thereof;2 as a matter of fact, life was conceived as a testimony or as a fulfilment, not as an autonomous determination, as a subjective project or as the search of an imaginative fullness, which is how Modernity has set it forth in accordance with the odd dualism of reason and life that has prevailed over the systematisation of knowledge and action that the technical trend of Modernity always has been after. Now, it is more difficult to fathom this axial change in the meaning of life because it goes hand in hand with a feature that, independently of the importance of laying the foundations of an empirical science and of the concomitant sway of man over nature, could be considered the very engine of modern thought: the want of the personal capacity for discerning the elemental difference between good and evil.3 This has got its most dangerous expressions during the last decades and is by no means easy to explain because it is undeniable that Modernity has from the onset striven for providing everyone with a universal standard to establish that difference by himself and without resorting to the substantiality of good (or, rather, of Good) that Antiquity upheld throughout, to the extent that being modern and being able to establish the difference at issue should be the same, which is precisely what philosophies as opposite as Spinoza’s, Hume’s or Kant’s uphold; but, notwithstanding that, the case is that the development of modernity through the last century has led to the fact that everyone behaves, thinks and even desires in accordance with the general or rather abstract aims that culture has proposed from the end of the World War II, which at bottom are no other than the consumption of everything within the own reach, a situation that contrasts brutally with the blur impression that we have at least on a theoretical plane got the balance of life, individual personality and satisfaction and that it is only necessary to put it into practice all the world over so as to fulfil humanity as such, which would be tantamount to overcome the contradictions and brutalities that rule the historical process.

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

115

It is needless to say that this impression is a long way from being new, for it can even be traced to the weird contradiction that prevailed throughout nineteenth century between, on the one hand, the praise of the progress that was supposed to release man from the burden of work and allow everyone to enjoy a life of creative leisure and, on the other, the endless denunciation of the unsettlement of the consciousness and of the misery of the individual existence, which was an aim that, for instance, Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche shared despite their abyssal differences. Still more, the contradiction between the objective or socio-economical development and the subjective or individual wretchedness was so terrible for the contemporary thinkers and writers that it was necessary for them to appeal to a sui generis rationality, whether it were metaphysical or not, in order to explain how man would prevail upon the stints of a determined epoch or of a determined way of being. This conviction (or rather, this creed concerning rationality) entailed a radical transformation of the part that history played in the comprehension of man that is worth emphasising because if history had until then been merely the temporal expression of the transcendent link of Fate, Nature or God with man (which was the way Antiquity and Christianity approached it), it was for nineteenth-century thought the universal overcoming of all the alienations and the final conciliation of man with himself, not only on the plane of ideals but also and above all on the individual existence; against the ancient hierarchization and the irrational subjection of the individual to a would-be fate, which had been the rise of the horrors that bereave human existence of its beauty,4 all and sundry men would enjoy life, for this would be no more particular but universal and none would require to oppose society in order to affirm his being; in other words, everyone would as it were agree perfectly with his own humanity in all the circumstances and aspects, which is how Hegel set out the question: “The individuals that stand out in the universal history are those ones that have neither wanted nor accomplished a mere daydream or slant but what is fair and necessary, and that know that what was in time, what was necessary, was in their interior”.5 History was so the unequivocal announcement of a new kind of individual that had to bring forth the final reconciliation of man and nature; now, inasmuch as the process as a whole required the literal sacrifice of every gift, ability or mean that was not useful for it, it was necessary to rely on the individual conviction to assure that everyone would contribute willingly and lucidly to it,6 which involved withal a metamorphosis of the own sensibility insofar as the aim was not only theoretical but demanded enthusiasm and even a sacrilegious creativeness to be carried out, as Nietzsche points out in the Birth of Tragedy: “Man, rising to the level of the Titans, acquires his culture by himself, and compels the Gods to ally themselves with him, because in his self-sufficient wisdom he holds in his hands their existence and their

116

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

limitations.”7 Thus, sensibility provided the drive to metamorphose the own life beyond the narrow realm wherein the ancient culture defined it (which at bottom was always overwhelmed by the fearful omnipresence of the divinity) and, moreover, to partake in a social world where the relationships were no more ruled by a would-be nature of things but were aimed to come by a vital fullness whose integrity was more desirable because it would make up for the loss of the ancient metaphysical transcendence that the modern thought had reduced to the darkness of prejudices and superstition8 . In other words: since the dread before nature or the hope in a post mortem reality were equally meaningless for most of the nineteenth century thought, everyone had to experience everything as it came, specially when it stood for the overpowering drive of someone else’s will, which demanded more than ever to rely on the individual capacity for discerning good from evil so as to safeguard the individuality in the middle of a universal competition that would otherwise lead everyone to the most brutal fight for power or possession, even at the cost of the own felicity. This dramatic or rather critical relevance of morals, which would have been hardly understandable for the ancient thought that ordered the moral questions together with the metaphysical determinations of existence, was even more determinant for nineteenth century because it brought to light the contradiction between the ideal fulfilment of the own humanity and the inner unsettlement of the individual that fought his way, a condition that, on the other hand, is a lot more tangly for the present time, which has brought it to such a contradiction that it can only be solved by the consumption and the economical success, as we have said at the onset of this paper. And since the dramatism of life has been the ground of the complex socio-individual identity during the last two centuries, it furnishes us with the thread to understand the two and utterly opposite meanings of the concept that appears on the title of this paper, the “real live man”, which on the one hand simply means the personality of the individual that has, as it were, been carried away by time, who is devoted to do what the circumstances require and aspires to no goal beyond possession and welfare because thinks that, however much it can be surprising or thrilling, life is just the endless reiteration of a possibility that one must not let to slip by; this first definition of the concept agrees blatantly with the real live individual of the two last centuries that, as we have pointed out before, always is after the enjoyment, the experience or the use of everything, provided that it will strengthen his status or the shallow satisfaction that he enjoys. There is, nevertheless, a second definition of the concept that has nothing to do with the shallowness or the immediacy of satisfaction that we have just set out and that on the contrary entails that a “real live man” is the one that always is ready to accept the untimely rhythm of life because he knows that everything is an

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

117

opportunity to enrich the own personality and to experience the diversity of life that is the only transcendence that tallies the finitude of man, whereby he can forego the eagerness to succeed.9 Now, although this odd attitude borders prima facie on the resignation that Christianity has traditionally upheld or on the would-be mediocrity that the modern individual so blindly rebuffs, it differs from both of them because it leaves aside by principle either the transcendence of the divine will or the unconsciousness of the mediocre one that does not dare to overcome his stints; for its part, this definition of the real live man vindicates the experience as the only value of life but, contrary to the sameness and the anonymity wherefrom the first interpretation stemmed, integrates it in the consciousness of the person so that he comes by a utter identification with the finite determination of his own being and can leave aside the anxiousness and the competitiveness of whom tries instead to agree with a fullness that is always before him, which is the case of the first kind of the real live man that, in the light of the foregoing, can be called hedonist, just like the second one can be called stoic (independently, of course, of the historical meaning of these terms). It is needless to say that although both interpretations are subjected to the general lack of final transcendence that has prevailed throughout the last two centuries in Western culture, each one of them stands for an outright different appraisal of sociability and also of the vital fullness that everyone tries to carry out despite the corrosive power of chance and those external determinations that must be faced whether voluntarily or not, whereof the most important is by far the very liberty of the others that, as Kant kenned before than anyone else,10 stands for the only kind of absolute compatible with the modern conception of life, inasmuch as it demands a categorical respect for the decisions and choices of the others who, in the absence of a natural law that compels them, are free to do what they want, which would directly lead to a state of permanent conflict if there were not a way to agree with the absolute relativity of the individual will. This way, nevertheless, cannot be defined on the respective present (wherein none would consciously accept to yield to another will not even in the realm of the deepest intimacy) and must then be projected to a mythical future that must however be anticipated somehow, at least by means of illusion, which shows that the singular relevance of morals through the two last centuries has gone hand in hand with the preponderance of history because both of them are, firstly, for laying the foundations of an agreement between beings that would otherwise be utterly alien one another and, secondly, for allowing everyone to get an identity in the process itself. Morals and history are so the double frame of the image or rather of the myth that everyone must trace in the common, multitudinous drive of will that brims over the illusory surface of time. Let us see this in a literary instance.

118

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S II. T H E S I T T E R O F T H E W O R K

We have, as it were, set forth in the foregoing section the type that has to be figured out: the real live or rather the modern man, who embodies the mythical identity of existence and socio-historic development that Modernity has from the onset been after; our remarks have also shown that such a type would have been inconceivable in the ancient cosmos because of the absolute contradiction existing between the hierarchical order of society that Antiquity always took for granted and the equalitarian liberty wherewith the real live man goes hand in hand; as a matter of fact, the differences among men had an ontological ground for Antiquity and it would have been absurd to defy or to criticize them, whereas for Modernity they are questionable although reality demonstrates outright that someone is healthier, richer, wiser or handsomer than the rest of people; of course, because of the utilitarian character of modern thought, this can only be assessed in terms of success, a condition whose relevance must nevertheless be tinged in the case of whatever society that despite its Modernity (that is to say, its democracy, its free-market economy and its individualism) is at least ideally determined by the ancient vision of human reality, as it happened until nineteenth-century in the European countries, where there was still an aristocracy that, independently of its having been displaced from political and economical preponderance, worked as a standard of behaviour and taste for the rest of the society. Albeit this situation has dramatically changed in the last lustrums all the world over (to the extent that aristocracy and even royalty have nowadays lost all their lustre because of the want of popularity and are hardly distinguishable from the would-be plebeians), it remained practically unchallenged in the nineteenth-century, whose historical identity lies so in its having witnessed the clash between the ancient hierarchy and the modern society beyond the plane of theory or beyond the borders of a particular nation, as it had been the case of France during the revolution of 1789, which, notwithstanding its violence, had not destroyed the cultural primacy of aristocracy. The nineteenth-century was simultaneously the time when the universalization of man became an historical reality and when, in spite of that, the wretchedness of the individual consciousness got its most dramatic expression, a double condition that we must keep in mind on taking that century as the temporal frame of a literary masterwork that unfolds in all its crudity the conflict that we have just mentioned: we mean Henry James’s The American.11 The title of the work is in itself the best guide for the exegesis that we propose to develop, inasmuch as America is, from whatever historical slant, a country whose only kind of transcendence lies in the liberty whereby the real live man defines his existence; man has in America triumphed over the resistance of nature and, above all, over the “stints” or rather ontological

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

119

determinations of consciousness that for the ancient man endowed life instead with all its meaningfulness and complexity (think, for instance, of the odd rebelliousness of the tragic hero or of the agitation of the Christian sinner that cried for redemption while resisted wholeheartedly God’s grace). This lack of an ontological determination and of the concomitant psychological conflict has been strengthen by the absence of a cultural tradition that compelled the individual to yield to an all-embracing hierarchy that played the part of religious transcendence on the plane of society; thereat, the real live man or, which is the same, the real live American stands on the triple plane of nature, history and consciousness for an unheard-of human archetype that seems to have overcome the eternal conflict of Modernity that, briefly, lies in the want of a natural link between man and reality that secures the truth of knowledge, the justice of the moral action or the total sense of existence. This conflict, which Europe has taken more than three centuries to lay aside without its never having really overcome it (unless the post-modern thought is deemed a solution to the question, which I gainsay outright), has from the onset been practically unimportant in a society such as the American, wherein the reduction of the ontological ground to a technical framework has come by its final expression eliminating the gap between reason and reality or between life and satisfaction by means of the identification of productivity with subjectivity, which has been due to the factor that we have just emphasised: America has not been defied by history since it – contrary, by the by, to what happened to Latin America, where the Spaniards conquerors should face the problem entailed by the pre-Columbian civilizations – was born with neither mythical past nor natural or ontological orders that overwhelmed the individual or prevented him from feeling literally the master of the world; therefore, as we shall see in what comes next, America has not wanted justification for the instauration of Modernity and for the enthronisation of the real live man, a double advantage that James symbolised with the name of the protagonist of the novel, Christopher Newman, which merges the name of the discoverer of the New World and of the archetypical inhabitant thereof: the new, the modern, the real live, the American man. James himself underlines the symbolical import of his character in the preface that he wrote for the New York edition of the work, where there is a passage that is worth quoting in extenso: [. . .] I found myself, of a sudden, considering with enthusiasm, as the theme of a “story”, the situation, in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot: the point being in especial that he should suffer at the hands of persons pretending to represent the highest possible civilisation and to be of an order in every way superior to his own. What would he “do” in that predicament [. . .]? This would be the question involved [. . .] He would behave in the most interesting manner – it would all depend on that: stricken, smarting, sore, he would arrive at his just vindication and then would fail of all triumphantly and all vulgarly enjoying it.12

120

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

This dramatic situation agrees perfectly with the conceptual ground that we have set forth: the modern individual is stark alone before a historic world wherewith he does not have any natural link bar; in this case, the wickedness of others and the adamant will whereto he is going to resort in order to overcome disappointment. Such a loneliness enhances the absolute newness of the character whereof James speaks and brings furthermore to mind the transcendental liberty that, in accordance with Kant, allows the modern moral subject to determine his actions by the sheer strength of his reason and against the would-be power of nature that is for its part expressed in the likes and dislikes that arouse unexplainably or unfairly more often than not, which implicates that the subject has to rebuff whatever feeling and preference in order to be good.13 Now, the conflict in the case that James imagines is neither transcendental nor moral stricto sensu (although it has, as we shall hereinbelow see, an axial moral sense), for it simply shows how someone fights for his dignity against the values and ideals that rule whatever society whose members sully stealthily what they pretend to extol publicly, a situation that is nevertheless inevitable when the ideals collide with the socio-historical dynamism that is the touchstone of Modernity and of the individual consciousness related to it, which oscillates between the two definitions of the real live man that we have hereinabove set forth, whose opposition has somehow to be solved by means of the psychological development of the protagonist of James’s novel, as we shall see on referring briefly the anecdotic content of the work: Christopher Newman, a middle-aged man that has amassed by himself a large fortune in his native America and travels to Europe for the first time in search of culture, ideality and love, is introduced by a compatriot in Paris to the inner circle of the marquises of Bellegarde, one of the most aristocratic families of France, which is made up by the widow matriarch and his three sons, the younger of whom becomes friend of Newman and encourages him to treat his sister, madame de Cintré,14 who is a widow and lives with his mother and siblings; after overcoming her original resistance, he gets that she accepts to be his wife, even against the will of her mother and of her elder brother, who oppose the marriage due to obvious prejudices; when they grudgingly resign themselves to it, they organize a great ball to announce the engagement to all their friends, but immediately after that they change their mind and force madame de Cintré to break off the engagement; she obeys albeit she loves Newman wholeheartedly and, as a pledge of the purity of her feelings, decides to go into a convent. For his part, Newman tries to take advantage of his having discovered that the old marquise killed her own husband, but gives up finally his revenge because he realizes that even if he were able to crush his enemies, he has lost madame de Cintré forever. In the final scene, he himself burns the only proof of the crime.

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

121

As we see, the conflict that James refers unfolds within a socio-historical frame and aims to an aesthetical and psychological identity that demands to overcome the utmost brutality by the sheer willpower and sensibility, which will be a lot harder for the character because the false grandeur of his enemies prevents him from perceiving their wickedness; in other words, and appealing to a more precise language, the conflict that James sets out opposes the weight of false ideals to the personal authenticity of someone who accepts his life notwithstanding he has been humiliated and cannot take revenge on the evildoers; the authenticity possesses then the transcendental sense of the Kantian autonomy of the subjectivity but, unlike the latter, integrates the whole of the vital development. And what stage would be better to set out all this than the nineteenth-century Paris, whose beauty and cosmopolitanism so perfectly agreed with the contemporary identification of history and human uncheckable progress? What class would stand better for the contradiction of the utmost ideality and the moral baseness than the French aristocracy that, in spite of its having been toppled by the revolution, intended still to vindicate the sway of lineage even against the nobleness that its members were supposed to embody? What character would in short be better for showing the tension existing between the Epicurean and the Stoic definitions of the real live individual than a former American entrepreneur that travels to Europe to find out a new life but wants to come by it as if it were a trade procedure? In the light of these questions, it is blatant that the anecdotic content of James’s novel is relevant just insofar as it helps to fathom how the protagonists is going to experience it, how he is going to integrate it in the whole unity of his temper and beyond the abstract satisfaction of succeeding in business, which, of course, does not mean at all that he renounces what he has lived for until then, since being a moneymaker is as valuable as any other occupation and perhaps more, considering that it has provided him with an independence and respectability that he would have not enjoyed otherwise. Due to this conviction, the character is going to strive for showing that whatever existence and activity is by principle worthwhile for the real live man, despite the prejudices, the ignorance and the wickedness of some people; for him, everyone has by nature the right to devote himself to what he likes, provided that he will not harm consciously the others. The foregoing makes up so the symbolical personality of Newman, the real live man by antonomasia, who is very proud of his having ceaselessly worked all his life and of the enviable success that he enjoys when he still holds his full strength; nevertheless, he does not want to waste his best years in accumulating more money; on the contrary, he wants to get rid of business and become immersed in something that he has never experienced and only knows by hearsay: the aesthetical fullness of life, the imaginative unity of

122

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

possibilities and interests that endows existence with an intensity that would be incomprehensible by principle for whom moves in the hectic world of business that, however much it is valuable and thrilling, binds man to the abstract logic of accumulation and to the impersonal competitiveness. This feature shows that Newman is by no means a vulgar self-seeker and that his going abroad, notwithstanding the narrow-mindedness of his concerning culture and learning, is amply compensated with his sensibility and his wholeheartedness. For albeit he has sought the richness of life above all in luxury and leisure, he has always been ready to participate in the way beauty and art bring sociability to a higher plane, a feature that is decisive from the onset, since the novel begins with the description of Newman in one of the rooms of the Louvre, wherein he is not as a mere tourist but as an observer of the diversity of forms, of the masterfulness of artistic creation and of the bewilderment of most people before them. This disposition towards observation and beauty shows the other fundamental aspect of Newman’s personality: the ability of turning whatever passional movement into the rise of a reflection. Although he is very keen, he never rushes to anything and is able to wait for the right moment to act, which is the lesson that the roughness of life taught him during his youth, when he was poor and had to stand a reiterative failure that haunted him before his first and definitive stroke of luck. Now, precisely because of his having overcome haplessness by himself, he knows that it is not worth living for the abstraction that money stand for and that he must venture on the only field of life that he has never tried: the sentimental one, which he wants to know to the full extent: Upon the uses of money, upon what one might to do with a life into which one had succeeded in injecting the golden stream, he had up to the eve of his fortieth year very scantly reflected. Life had been for him an open game, and he had played for high stakes. He had finally won and had carried off his winnings; and now what was he to do with them? He was a man to whom, sooner or later, the question was sure to present itself, and the answer to it belongs to our story. A vague sense that more answers were possible than his philosophy had hitherto dreamt of had already taken possession of him, and it seemed softly and agreeably to deepen [. . .]15

This passage shows that Newman’s best feature lies in his overcoming past effortlessly and with no bitterness, for he, despite the roughness of his youth, never has lived for working and let alone for making money because it would be tantamount to go on subjected to the poorness that overwhelmed his first years; as a matter of fact, however much someone gets to prevail against the worst material conditions of life, he will keep being their thrall at any rate if he does not change his mind with regard to the aspirations and goals that the former bring forth, which demands a metamorphosis of the own person so as to discover aims other than those material ones wherewith money as such can supply; that metamorphosis substitutes the illusion of an socio-economical

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

123

improvement by the vital consciousness that unfolds through an imaginative whole whose sense and strength order the love experience that Newman is after; this whole takes over from the devotion to business but makes the most of the discipline and the contention that the latter entails; thereat, Newman is not in search of an illusory happiness or of a marital status that agrees with his welfare; he is a man that wants to know all that life offers when one goes deeply into it, which would be impossible if illusion interposed between decision and action; and the way to set it aside is to carry it out, which for Newman is tantamount to marry the best woman in the world. It can seem somehow preposterous the way Newman focuses love as if it were almost a procedure; nevertheless, it must be taken into account that although he is not mean and has a sui generis intuition of the sentimental richness of life, he has until then remained apart from any love link and slights moreover the secondhand substitutes wherewith illusion makes up for the absence of a really full experience; the insensitivity of his is so more apparent than real and reveals rather the outright determination of someone that wants to enjoy only the best of the best provided that it will be an occasion for a further improvement of the self-possession, which shows that although the character is from the onset conscious of his goals and of how he can come by them, he focuses the issue on the plane of his previous life and thinks that it can be as easily made as any trade deal. As a matter of fact, this weird opposition between a high aspiration and a very ordinary fulfilment is perceptible in the very sight of Newman: It was the eye, in this case, that chiefly told the story; an eye in which the unacquainted and the expert were singularly blended. It was full of contradictory suggestions; and though it was by no means the glowing orb of a hero of romance you could find in it almost anything you looked for. Frigid and yet friendly, frank yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet sceptical, confident yet shy, extremely intelligent and extremely good-humoured, there was something vaguely defiant in its concessions and something profoundly reassuring in its reserve.16

The mere succession of the epithets in the final sentence of this passage evinces that Newman is very far from being conscious of the sentimental diversity that someone like him can experience beyond the circle of business and trade, which, independently of its function as the dramatic thread of the novel, reminds us of the stints that the modern or real live individual faces whenever he intends to ground his existence solely on the consciousness of the material wants of his life and on the desires wherewith he tries to make up for them beyond the socio-historical determination of existence, which is the natural rise of whatever idealization. On the one hand, that individual only wants to partake in the dynamism of history and in laying the foundations of an endless welfare; on the other, he interprets that as a mere projection of his own consciousness, almost as a possibility to hold his sway over nature and, through it,

124

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

over all the others, who, whether they want it or not, oppose him at least on the plane of possibility insomuch as they also want to come by the success that he enjoys. This “unsociable-sociability”, as Kant called it,17 is reflected in Newman’s distant cordiality (more a warning than a welcome), in his disposition to change everything into a contrivance of comfort or in the odd blend of original receptiveness and final narrowness that prevents him from understanding whatever is beyond immediacy, whether it is art, beauty or love itself, which he mistakes respectively for decoration, pleasantness and marriage although his own sensibility tells him that they have nothing to do with the conventional representation of the respectability, which reverts us to the aesthetical plane that we have so far considered the only ground of the modern individuality, since it confirms the absolute independence with regard to whatever natural determination of life wherein everyone wants to make his way. Now, the contradiction at issue would be unbearable if there were not a possibility to make the most thereof for strengthening the own vital development. Oddly enough, this possibility does not appear as the logic consequence of the own success but through a discomfiting interruption thereof that despite its abruptness is definitive and turns everything that the individual had striven for until then into something whereof one can get rid almost effortlessly, as Newman explains to a friend that he meets in the Louvre when the latter asks him what an entrepreneur like him looks for in Europe; precisely when he was on his way to take revenge of a disloyal competitor whose nastiness had aroused the utmost anger in him, he discovered that he did not care it a straw and decided to go abroad: I couldn’t tell the meaning of it; I only realised I had turned against myself worse than against the man I wanted to smash [. . .] And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going on inside me. You may depend upon it that there are thing going on inside us that we understand mighty little about [. . .] I seemed to feel a new man under my old skin; at all events I longed for a new world. When you want a thing so very badly you probably had better have it and see. I didn’t understand my case in the least, but gave the poor beast the bridle and let him find his way. As soon as I could get out of harness I sailed for Europe. That’s how I come to be sitting here.18

When someone has more than sufficiently secured the material ground of his life and enjoys his leisure without the burden of the sentimental illusions, it would seem to be a foolishness on his part to abandon all that so as to be carried away with an overpowering drive, above all when he is stark alien to whatever kind of transcendence bar the progress of work and responsibility and is furthermore wont to think everything over before acting; but precisely because he does not need to care anymore for money and status, Newman can indulge in the inner want to go abroad to find something that he has not come by in spite of all his success: the identity of consciousness and achievement

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

125

that is the condition sine qua non to recognize the own life. Let us underline that however much he has got to be well-off by himself, Newman remains on the same plane of work and struggle whereon he has always been, and wants still a vital kernel, that is to say, a real identity that allows him to appraise the trade functions that he so successfully performs in the light of the multiple possibilities wherewith richness supplies him, which he has not heeded due to his outer improvement. Of course, it is questionable that this kernel were important to such an extent for someone with the interests and practical orientation of a wholehearted businessman like Newman, but the immediate response of his to the mysterious revelation of the final meaninglessness of business corroborates that he by no means comes down to the mere determination of economical success and status, which also is sound for the type that he stands for insomuch as it has been blatant from the very title of the novel that he embodies a whole conception of existence; in other words, although the real live man that we have in the foregoing section called “hedonist” agrees point by point with the immanency of life and the only transcendence that he can accept because of his utilitarianism is the psychological or the economical one (which entail respectively satisfaction and prosperity), he cannot limit himself to that and must search a way to carry out a real life, simply because life is neither a mental representation nor a socio-economical position but the complex identity of consciousness and accomplishment, as we have just said, which reminds us that due to the gap existing between the subjective or psychological ground of the real live man and the socio-historical reality of existence, the former has to face a conflict that would hardly have been understandable for the ancient thought, which subordinated the consciousness of everyone to the all-embracing compass of the natural law that made up for whatever individual wretchedness with the recognition of the universal relativity of grief, whereto were subjected men and animals alike, but also of the universal possibility of coming by an internal balance, which endowed human life with its dignity despite chance or the enmity of others. Now, since the real live man lacks this universal or, rather, metaphysical link with life, he must always guide his actions by values such as utility or success that are, nevertheless, finally abstract because they work only on specific fields of experience and are not for integrating the vital identity or unity that we have set out so far, which brings forth a permanent unbalance that can be more or less palliated if the individual is impervious or very narrow-minded, which is, however, contrary to the logic of the same type, inasmuch as the real live man is after the totality of existence and does not accept the would-be consolations of transcendence; thereat, when the palliatives to the unbalance fail and the individual breaks down without previous warning, there is no other escape than what Newman does: changing life from the very bottom and face what chance may bring. And what would be more definitive

126

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

in this sense than love, in as much as it channels the own psychological flow into the fulfilment of a new identity that includes perforce the multiplicity and also the resistance of reality by the will of someone else? III. T H E S U B J E C T O F T H E W O R K

We have so far showed that the protagonist of James’s masterwork epitomizes the contradictoriness of the modern or real live man, which in general stems from the categorical reduction of an ontological or transcendent order of life (such as the one that the natural law stood for in the eyes of the ancient thinkers) to the psychological or immanent determination thereof (such as the empirical ground that modernity imposes in every field of experience); we have on the other hand set forth the dramatism inherent to all this, which is a logical consequence of the pretension of finding out a universal identity between the individual and the socio-historic frameworks that could overwhelm or even destroy him for lack of a natural link between them, which makes perfectly contrivable the possibility of a general alienation insomuch as the individual wants a common ground to recognize the others and even the rest of reality, which compels everyone to search the sense of his life beyond the normal order thereof, whether in the universal appropriation and consume of every kind of good (which entails for its part a new reduction, in this case the one of personal balance to immediate satisfaction) or in the mental realms where everyone can pretend to be whatever he wants despite the consequences. These two possibilities make up so the double aspect of what we have called the hedonist real live man, which in either of them evinces the same tendency to the unsettledness and the self-seeking; however, there could be another approach to the issue, precisely the one that the stoic individual stands for insofar as he rebuffs indeed the ancient ideas of transcendence and natural hierarchization of society but, instead of substituting them with the raw materialism of the hedonist one, changes his own life into the revelation of a new kind of liberty and balance, an aim worth fighting despite the disappointment and even the wastage that it could bring about, which is what the hero of The American has to face after having literally thrown overboard his life as a successful businessman and set out to Europe in search of a vital fullness that he could not experience in his own homeland because of a simple reason: in America, unlike any other country, the individual existence is determined by the uncheckable universalization of the sway of man over nature and over himself, which opposes point by point what happens in Europe, where modernity has evolved very contradictorily because of a decisive factor that prevents the individual will from being the only ground of existence: tradition. As a matter of fact, whatever tradition imposes an array of values that everyone must fulfil independently

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

127

of the satisfaction, utility or convenience wherewith they provide, which is at the same time terrible and reassuring because albeit the own tradition helps to span the differences of every kind with others and, of course, with the own consciousness, it imposes restrictions to the desire and limits to the will that must be obeyed even when there is no a clear reason to do so, which contradicts the modern demand of a universal justification of whatever limit that one has to accept, which arouses tensions and distresses that are almost inescapable for whom, having been brought-up within a traditional culture, is at any rate subjected to the utilitarianism and the structuralism of modernity that are indifferent to the would-be “nature of things”, i.e., the “final sense” of whatever form of transcendentalism beyond an empirical determination. Now, this would be catastrophic if there were not a possibility to overcome the antagonism and identify welfare and consciousness, which is precisely the function of history. As we have remarked in the first section, history works for Modernity exactly as myth for Antiquity because it is for linking everyone with the universal ground of existence, which in this case is not located in the unfathomable darkness of past and nature but in the systematic improvement of the future society wherein everyone will receive insofar as he participates, whereby he will be stark satisfied. Thereat, independently of the feasibleness of this, the case is that it is by no means clear the part that tradition plays in the carrying out thereof and in the metamorphosis of the individuality that it entails, which explains, firstly, why the link of modernity and tradition is problematic by principle on the very plane of the individual existence (which in this way comes by an intensity and a dramatism that would have been preposterous in the light of the ancient vindication of a universal self-command that bordered imperviousness) and, secondly, why it only can be experienced in the countries or cultures such as the European ones, where the individuals were integrated by tradition, which was so, at least until very recently, a value by itself, a situation that would instead have been incomprehensible in America, where the sole “tradition” has from the onset been the absolute primacy of the individual over society, an idea that would for its part be perfect if it had not been interpreted according to the shallowest conception of individuality, that is to say, the numerical one, which goes hand in hand with the reduction of the psychosomatic complexity of everyone to the basic organic drives, such as greediness and lust, which has doubtlessly been the common source of all the theories on the metaphysical selfishness of man, whereof Hobbes’s and Sade’s are perhaps the most famous.19 Thereat, whereas in America culture and history centre, at least theoretically, on how satisfying the individual wants – which are, as we have just underlined, defined materially or economically-, in Europe both of them require the identification of the individual with a superior, ideal or traditional consciousness, which is why the European individual must

128

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

define himself before history whereas the American one simply takes it as the anticipation of a boundless action or of an uncheckable momentum, which is expressed in the motto “where there is a will, there is a way”. It is needless to say that if this outright liberty of the American individual with regard to the traditional frame of historical existence is far from being an ideal by itself, the same can be said of its counterpart, the consciousness of the European one regarding the problematic correspondence of history and tradition, which more often than not is for feeding the relativism and meaninglessness of life; still more, one could very soundly uphold that notwithstanding the shallowness and narrow-mindedness of the average American, which Christopher Newman so perfectly embodies, he has an enormous advantage concerning the European individual, id est, that he always is ready to face the risks of the human condition without his appealing to metaphysical or indemonstrable values whose weight ends up crushing the willpower of man; even if he wants the sophistication or the refinement of the European man, the American exhibits a sui generis greatness that cannot be other than the sheer strength of the conscious dignity; on the contrary, the European, who claims a millennial heritage and a cosmopolitism that would be preposterous in the boundless cultural continuity of America, is seldom able to free himself from the tensions existing between his values and his wants, which is perceptible in the most determining cultural phenomenon of the nineteenth-century: the wretchedness of the individual consciousness, whereon the greatest thinkers and the artists of the time have alike dwelt. There is no way of asserting the superiority of the European individual with regard to the American one, and that appears with a particular clearness in one of the passages of the novel, where Valentin de Bellegarde – the younger brother of madame de Cintré, who is the only member of the family that stands by the lovers and who finally dies because of a duel that he fights by a trifle – figures out what America and Europe mean as the respective ground of two conceptions of the individual liberty of action: Being of your race and stamp, it was impossible you should remain what you were born, and being born poor – do I understand it?-, it was inevitable you should become as different from that as possible. You were in a position that makes one’s mouth water; you looked round you and saw a world of things you had only to step up to and take hold of. When I was twenty I looked round me and saw a world with everything ticketed “Don’t touch”, and the deuce of it was that the ticket seemed meant only for me [. . .Unlike you. . .] I’m good for three or four years more perhaps, but I foresee that after that I shall spring a leak and begin to sink. I shan’t float any more, I shall go straight to the bottom. Then, at the bottom, what shall I do? I think that I shall turn monk.20

As we have already remarked, the existence of a tradition does not entail at all that the determination of vital aims will be easier for the individual; still more, it could be the contrary, for the tradition interposes between will

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

129

and deed and, although furnishes weak people (who, by the by, make up the majority) with values that reassure them, also prevents them from being conscious of the part that their choices play in the whole course of their life, which explains why, in a time when the historical horizon varies and the archetypes of tradition become anachronistic (which is the very engine of Modernity), people feel that there is nothing worth living for, not even death, and wreck into that kind of mitigated nihilism that appeared during the nineteenth-century and is called conventionalism, which implies that the meaning of the values that rule the own life does not hinge upon the individual consciousness but upon considerations and commonplaces that are for strengthening the general comfort at the expense of a really personal conception of existence. Now, if this is disgusting in the case of the ones that have struggled to make their way in life and that consequently have no superior order to uphold bar their will (we mean the average modern individuals that flaunt their egotism and opportunism), it is doubly disgusting in the case of the ones that claim to stand for those traditional ideals that, like nobleness, honour and purity, imply a sui generis transcendence that has remained as a standard both of culture and behaviour for the whole society. We mean of course the aristocrats, who, however, after their having been defeated by the modern egalitarianism, only have availed themselves of their would-be lineage to compete advantageously with the former plebeians, with whom they ally whenever they can make a profit or whom they take as a model because they are not anymore able to keep the transcendent sense of the values that they should fulfil, the highest whereof is honour, a notion that despite its almost sacramental meaning is very close to the modern ideal of the absolute respect to the moral law, whereto we have already alluded.21 In fact, beyond the cultural or rather civilizing function that aristocracy could still vindicate in the nineteenth-century, it had always been traditionally identified with the defence of transcendent values and with the consequent imposition of a moral archetype of behaviour that was sound independently of the fact that the individual were aristocrat or plebeian and of its being stark incompatible with the rational and subjective ground of the modern moral universality, for the latter is indifferent at bottom to the metaphysical transcendence of honour and, above all, to the social hierarchization that the French revolution destroyed. Because of all this, the ideal of honour could not help degenerating into an empty conventionalism during the first half of the nineteenth-century and ended up agreeing with the relativism and individualism that the bourgeoisie upheld, which was on the other hand contrary to the authenticity of whomsoever had decided not to live for moneymaking but for coming by a vital unity. In other words, and despite its being enemy of the socio-political egalitarianism of bourgeoisie, aristocracy has shared with the

130

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

latter the reduction of whatever vital value to the standard of profit and comfort that is the main feature of the Epicurean real live man as we have defined him, whose idea of spirituality comes down to the purely imaginative plane of the aesthetic or hedonistic experience that most of the nineteenth-century philosophic thought eagerly rejected on behalf of the dignity of man. Now (to return to the issue in hand), the narrative development of James’s novel shows that the final meaningless of a purely Epicurean determination of life refutes both the success of the covetous American businessman and the centennial lineage of the supercilious French nobleman, which compels the protagonist to resort to what would from a Nietzschean perspective be the inescapable want of living according to unheard-of values,22 whereof the former had shown more than enough signs on abandoning his country and his success in order to follow an intuition that would have been preposterous for anyone that had solely been after utility. Thereby, on comparing the liberty of someone that was able to set aside his own past without further ado and the fatalistic submissiveness of someone that upholds values that he cannot neither challenge nor fulfil, one realises that the Epicurean real live man is a cultural and historical type that works beyond the differences of a particular psychological frame, of a social environment or of a set of ideals, which leads as a whole to another consequence, id est, that the cultural superiority of Europe with regard to America can easily be inverted in the light of the ineffectiveness of tradition to make up for the conventionalisms of modern society and to the correspondent immorality of the individuals. Although the protagonist of the work lacks lineage and is more often than not incapable of discerning a masterwork from a gimcrack, he is neither awkward nor short-sighted and faces the European cosmopolitanism with a total self-assurance because he does not live for the cultural values; on the contrary, he uses them to enjoy his life more deeply: He believed serenely that Europe was made for him and not he for Europe. He had said he wanted to improve his mind, but he would have felt a certain embarrassment, a certain shame even – a false shame possibly – if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the mirror. Neither in this nor in any other respect had he a high sense of responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man’s life should be a man’s ease and that no privilege was really great enough to take his breath away.23

This acute consciousness makes up for whatever refinement and, above all, for the false superiority of the European society and of the aristocracy that pretends to epitomise a way of being whereof, nevertheless, its members does not know nothing at all, as the antagonists of Newman show on breaking their word by a conventionalism disguised beneath a trifling respectability; the mother and the elder brother of madame de Cintré consent to the marriage of the latter with

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

131

Newman because it is literally a good business and/or because the felicity of hers is indifferent to them; but after they realise that it has been a mistake to publicise the event, they change their mind invoking the opinion of their friends and acquaintances but without their caring their honour. In both situations they evince the shallowness, the grotesque meanness and the revolting opportunism that they pretend to find out in Newman, who, in contrast, comes by a greater nobleness because he bases all his actions on the only value that matters, the authenticity of his being, which is specially manifest in a scene when he compares his feelings with the aspirations of the sister-in-law of madame de Cintré, whose ancestry is supposed to be even more ancient than Bellegarde’s and who tries to fraternise with Newman on the basis that he wants to be married with an noblewoman just to improve his status, which is something whereof he has not thought at all: He wondered what the deuce she too was driving at, with her hope he wouldn’t be afraid of her and her protestations of equality. In so far as he could understand her she was wrong – he didn’t admit her equality; a silly rattling woman was never on a level with a sensible man, a man preoccupied with an ambitious passion.24

Who possesses then the real aristocracy, not the conventional value of an anachronistic glory but the inner assurance of the own dignity that nothing could belie? The one that brags about his lineage while lives after the fashion of people that he pretends to slight, or the one that is able to change his feelings into standards of his behaviour and vice versa? Before the comparison of the characters of the novel and of the symbolic value of them, the answer is unequivocal: it is the foreigner, the literal New-man that has broken with a mythical past but also with the array of abstract wants and truisms that the present imposes everywhere. And if it is true that this privileged individual must be considered the American by antonomasia it is not because America is the Promised Land as its upholders foolishly think but because it stands for an individual liberty that will be fulfilled in a mythical future that everyone can anticipate in his own existence provided that he is conscious of his potency to change a way of being that he has assumed without real conviction. If the foregoing is true, why Europe is at any rate the place whereto whoever wants to experience the fullness of life must go? Why, in accordance with the development of the novel, one cannot come by the vital unity in America? The answer is simple: because the diversity of the cultural traditions in Europe and the fight of the hierarchical or pre-modern conceptions of the socio-individual identity against the modern creed of the universal rights of the man and of the citizen, together with a dialogical conception of reason, makes compelling to define the limits of the own liberty within an original respect for the others’, which prevents the individual from assuming the Epicureanism and the

132

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

egalitarianism of modern life as a matter of fact, a condition unthinkable in America because of the lack of a traditional determination of society beyond folklore and, above all, because of the omnipresence of a metaphysical individualism – in the deprecatory import of the expression – that pervades every layer of society and every manifestation of the individual. In Europe, the interaction of tradition and modernity has always been the fulcrum of a deeper consciousness of the social ground of existence and of the part that the individual plays in the configuration thereof; in America, despite the fiery proclamation of the transcendence of a social consciousness whereby everyone is supposed to determine his interests, the fact is that the link of the individual with society and with anyone else is merely formal or, to say it with more acuteness, merely external and even abstract, for it works without requiring reflection whatever: the own identity does not hinge then upon a conviction but upon a convention. On the contrary, whether the European individual is crushed by tradition, as the perfunctory aristocrat is, or by the brutal fight for competitiveness and profit, as the covetous bourgeois is, he can resort to the cultural diversity as a plethora of perspectives and values that release him from the abstractedness of success; it is true that he cannot vindicate the would-be Edenic innocence wherewith the American man goes on as if the whole world were just a boundless chain of trade branches where everything could be purchased or given back at will, but he can instead discover a sense that has nothing with the sheer materialism of moneymaking or of a mere conventional sociability. And precisely because aristocracy cannot stand anymore neither for the moral or the cultural ideality and just remains like the symbol of an anachronistic refinement, Europe must rely on the existence of critical individuals that partake in politics and in the development of society (such as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment upheld)25 or that change their own sensibility into the assumption of the boundless potency of nature and history (such as the nineteenth-century romanticism proposed). Now, what is axial here is that such an aim would perfectly be for strengthening the definition of the personal authenticity and of the Stoic real live man that we have hereinabove set forth, since the exposition of the falsity of traditional values that rule European aristocracy goes hand in hand with the revelation of the meaninglessness of the commercial aims that dominate American society: each to his own way, both the nobleman and the businessman are symbols of the Epicurean real live man that traces the circularity of a present that, even against the philosophical grounds of modernity,26 has progressively been reduced on the plane of socio-individual frameworks to the revival of a mythical greatness or to the fulfilment of a universal welfare.27 But this alternative is not the only solution at hand for the circularity of present, since history provides the critic individuals with the consciousness of the absolute value of the

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

133

own existence not, of course, as a thing in itself (as the individualism does on asserting the boundless right of everyone to everything) but within the complex determination of historical reality; in other words, the Epicureanism whereof we have so far spoken and that both the aristocrats and the businessmen follow, is a psychological or symbolical determination that is finally meaningless because it passes over the ontological and historical order of existence whose rational understanding is instead decisive for the Stoic real live man who, the same as the former, remains in a purely immanent conception of existence but who, unlike them, accepts its relativity instead of trying to conceal it beneath the preposterous transcendence of conventionalism and appropriation. This preeminence of reason and experience over drive and satisfaction, which in accordance with us is the ground of a truly personal and critical existence and also of a truly Stoic individual, is expressed in the novel in a scene that vibrates with that dramatism that we have considered inseparable from the real live man and whereto Newman resorts so as to overcome the betrayal of the Bellegardes. After having gone for the last time to contemplate at a distance the convent where madame de Cintré has professed, he comes back to the city centre and goes into the Cathedral of our Lady; there, in the middle of the dimness of the nave, a revelation, very similar to the one that he had had in New York, comes over him: He said no prayers; he had no prayers to say. He had nothing to be thankful for and he had nothing to ask; nothing to ask because now he must take care of himself. But a great church offers a very various hospitality, and he kept his place because while he was there he was out of the world. The most unpleasant thing that had ever happened to him had reached its formal conclusion; he had learnt his lesson – not indeed that he the least understood it – and could put away the book [. . .] Whether it was Christian charity of mere human weakness of will – what it was, in the background of his spirit – I don’t pretend to say; but Newman’s last thought was that of course he would let the Bellegardes go [. . .] At last he got up and came out of the darkening church; not with the elastic step of a man who has won a victory or taken a resolve – rather to the quiet measure of a discreet escape, of a retreat with appearances preserved.28

It is remarkable the utter contrast that exists between the background of the scene and the action that takes place therein: instead of addressing a merciful deity in search of consolation, man must search serenity in a kind of resignation that cannot be propped however either by the faith in a religious providence or by the confidence in the boundless reaches of human will. When grief overwhelms and future offers nothing but the lucidity of disappointment, man must resort to the unshakeable certainty that the temporal framework of life will remain intact notwithstanding the wretchedness he must face; beyond the strength of illusion, life unfolds according to a cyclical regularity, to a rhythm that is nevertheless incomprehensible for the Epicurean one that always is after pleasure and sinks into the giddy succession of pleasure and boredom; on the

134

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

contrary, that regularity is perfectly audible for the Stoic one, who is permanently ready to get rid of his highest hopes, of his dearest illusions, because he knows that whenever the imaginative, blur tissue of future has been rent, man is able to come by what he has really been after, which is not, as the epicurean one could have supposed, the possession of something or the subjection of someone; far from that, the Stoic one fathoms that the intensity of sorrow hinges upon an illusion whereto none has right simply because it belies the roughness of the average human bonds and the odd untimeliness of the vital development, which more often than not overtakes desire or lags behind it: after all, how could anyone deserve felicity before having measured his own willpower against someone else’s or against the sheer potency of haplessness? Whomsoever can overcome the baseness of his origin whether by chance or by an unyielding decision; he can, of course, fend for himself and even enjoy respectability and inner peace at the end; but if he has not tried out his own illusions, he will never be the master of his life, which, unlike the way the Epicurean one understands it, does not entail that one will be beyond good and evil, but that one will simply be able to accept what one has to by the simple fact of being alive, despite, as we have just underlined, what one could formerly have wanted or what one would have deserved by his perseverance and industriousness, as Newman had to ken at the cost of a felicity that would not even have harmed anyone else and that would furthermore have his own Epicureanism in favour of a really personal way of behaving and living, which he came by at any rate, yes, but through wretchedness; after all, the development of the novel shows that it is impossible to carry out by oneself the mythical identification of pleasure and welfare with felicity and farsightedness that the Epicurean so eagerly upholds, and the worst of it is that that cannot be made up for anything bar for that sui generis wisdom that goes hand in hand with the oblivion of oneself. IV. T H E A U T H E N T I C I T Y O F T H E W O R K

Before finishing, I just want to remark that the “new man” wherewith we have dealt is not an image or a fiction in the deprecatory import of the term but a myth, a possibility of carrying out by oneself what Newman tried to come by, even against the final upshot of his tour, which shows that in spite of how it can end, the effort is worthwhile. Of course, such a vindication of the very experience of facing whatever life brings forward would utterly be incomprehensible if it were not by the metamorphosis of the substantial temporality of individual life into a historical continuity wherein everyone partakes: one can suffer the utmost misfortune and even so come by a certain greatness because the own individuality is just an image of an eternal becoming, as Nietzsche has

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N

135

set out better than anyone else.29 Now, if this is or not beyond the consolatory part that a dogmatic religion such as Christianity plays in a time when even the deepest truth or the innermost movement must pass through the sieve of reason and/or experience, is something that goes by far beyond the limits of the present reflection; religion can indeed provide a kind of consolation, but it must at most be the outward confirmation of a personal conviction, not the revelation of a transcendent certainty.30 Now, inasmuch as none can be wholly self-assured in the lack of such a certainty (let alone after his having experienced the soundlessness of his original expectations) he is historically compelled to be less demanding and more understanding concerning the stints of human nature, which also are his. This unheard-of relativity, so far from the fullness of the religious faith but also from the shallowness of the fashionable opinion, is thus the sole ground of the Stoic real live man and enables him to go on even outside the hospitality of religion and of its promises of an eternal life. But that only can be fathomed when one is outside the world of the uncheckable progress and of the linear accumulation of moneymaking and success, in the lack of ideals and the contradictoriness of human relationships that are oddly enough displayed to their full extent by the conflicts that tradition imposes, wherein, beyond the commonplaces of the modern optimism, it lies the true sense of history. History works so not as the fulfilment of the promise of a never-ending happiness for everyone but as the determination of the own existence within the universal becoming of reality and of the consequent relativity of everything bar the inner unfolding of the individual life. Vale. Meritorious University of Puebla, Mexico

NOTES 1

Concerning this, it is meaningful that one of the most problematic fields of philosophy has from Nietzsche to Foucault been the definition of man and of the human sciences within culture and that it has led to the reiterated denunciation of humanism and the search of a new approach to the issue beyond the sundry ancient and modern theories of what man is. 2 For a reference a lot more extensive on this issue, vide my article “A reflection on the Autobiographical Memory and on the Current Meaning of the Individual Life” in Mystery in its Passions. Literary Explorations, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004), Analecta Husserliana, vol. LXXXII, pp. 215–235. 3 With regard to this point, vide my article “On the Fourfold Ontology of Evil throughout Western Tradition and its Final Disappearance in the Present Time” in The Enigma of Good and Evil; The Moral Sentiment in Literature, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), Analecta Husserliana, vol. LXXXV, pp. 317–363. 4 Regarding this question, vide the article of mine that I mention in the note seven.

136

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

5 Lessons on the Philosophy of the Universal History, Spanish trans. José Gaos, Ensayo 141 (Madrid: Alianza, 1999), p. 92. It is worth remarking that, independently of the arbitrariness of several of the conclusions of Hegel with regard to the peoples outside Europe (which Marx, by the by, also upheld) and with regard to the determination of the process as a whole, it is admirable his vision of the spiritual or rational unity of whatever human activity through time. 6 Something that Kant had already noticed, which led him to figure out the soundness of a critical approach to the subject or, in other words, the soundness of the historical knowledge. Vide above all Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose and Review of Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, which are included together with several minor works by Kant in In Defence of Enlightenment) ed. José Luis Villacañas, Spanish trans. Javier Alcorza y Antonio Lastra, Pensamiento. Clásicos, 1 (Barcelona: Alba, 1999). Although the lack of space prevents me from dwelling upon the subject as it deserves, I would like to remark that Kant was utterly opposed to whatever determinist conception of history, which makes him an adversary of Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. 7 Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (eds.), Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, trans. of Nietzsche: Clifton P. Fadiman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 529. Now, it is worth mentioning that the achievement of a universal freedom through art and aesthetic consciousness was developed in extenso before Nietzsche both by Goethe and by Schiller. With regard to this, vide my articles and “A Life Beyond Go(o)d: A Criticism of Wisdom and the Foundation of a Poetic Conception of Life Based on Goethe’s Faust” in The Enigma of Good and Evil; The Moral Sentiment in Literature, pp. 749– 785, and “Enlightenment, Humanization and Beauty in the Light of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” in Virtues and Passions in Literature, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), pp. 171–198. 8 I realize that this statement is very debatable because there is a singular coincidence between Romanticism and the foundation of a new approach to terror and the darkest aspects of reality; still more, one cannot gainsay the preponderance of this question in the work of one of the most illustrious American writers, who preceded James in sundry aspects: Poe, who metamorphosed the romantic divinization of Nature into the ground of a lurid conception of existence [regarding this, vide my article “Del Hambre y del Hombre” [On Hungry and Man] in En Gustos se Comen Géneros, 3 vv., ed. Sara Poot Herrera (Mérida: ICY, 2003), v. I, pp. 277–311, where I take up how Poe sets forth an ontology of man and nature quite unlike the optimism of so many contemporary heirs of romanticism]. At any rate, the scope of my statement is narrower than what a general appraisal of the point would entail. 9 On this point, vide my article “An Enquiry Concerning the Dialectic of Personality and its Practical Consequences” in Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Two: The Human Condition in-the-Unity-of-Everything-there-is-alive. Individuation, Self, Person, Self-determination, Freedom, Necessity, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), Analecta Husserliana, v. XLLLIX, pp. 61–89. 10 Vide the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), above all the pp. 37 and ff. 11 Edited by Adrian Poole, Oxford World Classics w/n (Oxford: OUP, 1999). Whatever quotation of the novel will refer to this edition. 12 Ibidem, p. 4. 13 As a matter of fact, Kant himself underlines that, insomuch as his moral theory entails that the individual has categorically to act according to the law or rather by it and lay aside his personal inclinations, it would be very possible that none were able to achieve the moral goodness, which, however, the philosopher did not consider a sound criticism against his theory. Vide the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 47 and ff. of the edition mentioned in the note ten.

T H E P O RT R A I T O F A R E A L L I V E M A N 14

137

Whoever has read James’s works knows the passion of his for announcing with the name of his characters the features of theirs; in this case, it would be worth bearing in mind that “Cintré” means in French “too tight” and also “foolish”. 15 Edition quoted, p. 34. 16 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 17 Vide the “Fourth Principle” of the Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, ed. quoted, p. 78. 18 The American, pp. 36–37. 19 Regarding this issue, vide the interesting introduction of Crawford Brough Macpherson to his edition of the Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 31–38, where he underlines that Hobbes mistook the competitiveness and rivalry of the average capitalist individual for a conception of human nature, which in accordance with my slant also was a general assumption of Sade, on whom is worth reading the book by Simone de Beauvoir Faut-il Brûler Sade? (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). 20 The American, pp. 102–103. 21 Vide note seventh. 22 Among the myriads of works devoted to this issue and its relevance beyond the understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy as such, vide the fifth chapter of the comprehensive study by Arthur Danto Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: CUP, 1980). 23 The American, p. 72. 24 Ibidem, p. 163. 25 The best exposition of the archetype whereto we refer is, as far as I know, contained in the justly famous Kant’s essay entitled An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, one of whose Spanish translations appears in the book mentioned in the note fourth, pp. 63–31. 26 I would like to emphasize this because it has been a commonplace from Marx to Heidegger and to the present hermeneutics to blame the contradictoriness of the historical development of modern society on the philosophical conception of human being and reality whereon it is supposedly based; however, I think the problem is not due to that but to the uncheckable tensions that the primacy of economics brings about, which has nothing to do with the rational determination of nature, with the empirical foundation of knowledge or with the critical definition of the own subject that, as far as I know, are the triple ground of modernity. 27 Whereof the most distressing instances would be the totalitarianism and the globalization that have dominated the twentieth-century and the twenty-first, which were nevertheless prefigured by the imperialism and the mercantilism of the nineteenth-century. 28 The American, p. 359. 29 Concerning this, the obvious reference would be The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra; however, the issue is relevant to such an extent in the Nietzschean philosophy that it could be considered the very touchstone of the conception of human existence that the former upholds. 30 Regarding this, vide Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, above all the “General Observation” wherewith it finishes the First Part of the work, wherein the philosopher emphasizes that whatever religion must further the fulfillment of the moral law instead of reinforcing the natural tendency of man towards bigotry, which is what most churches have done through history.

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

H E A L I N G P E R S O N A L H I S T O RY: M E M O I R S O F T R AU M A A N D T R A N S C E N D E N C E

ABSTRACT

Memoir writing, especially concerning experiences of suffering and trauma, is not only an increasingly popular form of literature—perhaps overtaking fiction among the reading public—but also a proven means of healing and overall improvement in psychological and physical health. It is folk art as well as a less formal but significant extension of philosophy as phenomenology, ethics and metaphysics. It explores, in Levinas’ terms, “the problem of the relationship between the I and the totality,” which “comes down to describing the moral conditions for thought.” It is living rather than dead historical discourse, in that it struggles to express the evolving consciousness of living souls. The greatest memoirs throughout the centuries have been and remain attempts to heal. This paper suggests that their achievements result from fully mindful attention as the medium of creative resolution and the transformation of individual consciousness to new levels of personal growth and healing. Three examples of individual transcendence in memoir writing are offered: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking; Patty Dann’s The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth about It); and an episode from the writer’s memoir in progress in which she gains an unexpected and more morally cognizant perspective on the adolescent trauma of being jilted for the high school prom. These works are discussed from a standpoint of attention not only to personal experience, but also to the craft of storytelling and the challenges of meeting a personally set standard of truth-telling. The writer spoke with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and Patty Dann, quoting them on various problems and benefits of memoir writing. The paper closes with reference to David Grossman’s reflection on writing as a means of transcending the enslavement of degrading personal memories—which connects memoir writing to the exploration of ultimate reality, i.e. metaphysics. I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my questions that shatter my sleep. I write to remember. I write to forget. I write to quell the pain. I write as a form of translation. I write with the patience

139 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 139–154. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

140

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

of melancholy in winter. I write as an act of faith. I write to record what I love in the face of loss. I write because it makes me less fearful of death. I write to listen. I write out of silence. I write because of the humor of our condition as humans. I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness. I write past the embarrassment of exposure. I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient. I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love. Terry Tempest Williams, Why I Write

As early as 1996 The New York Times Magazine pronounced that fiction was no longer “delivering the news. Memoir is. At its best, in the hands of a writer able to command the tools of the novelist—character, scene, plot—the memoir can achieve unmatchable depth and resonance.”1 This should catch the eye of anyone interested in phenomenology and literature. In a how-to book about memoir writing, Tristine Rainer describes this assertion as merely the tip of the iceberg: Publication of memoir by noncelebrities as well as big shots is the real news, and the value of the new memoir writing doesn’t even depend on publication. For New Autobiography transforms how we view and value even the most private and seemingly insignificant lives. It is a complete redefinition of who may write about their lives, who they write for, the reasons they write, how they write, what they write about, and what they do with the writing.2

Rather than trying to account for personal life histories in a more or less chronological sequence, the recent proliferation of more free-flowing reminiscences, especially when directed at specific life-changing events, signals not only a major trend in what the buying public chooses to read but ultimately an inward turning focus of contemporary culture and intellect. It is part history—personal, individual, family and group history within the broader frames of politics, society and culture—but it is also fabulation, storytelling, the poesis of characterization, scene and plot in the descriptive sharing and reflection upon psychic and worldly events. In other words, it is history and art. It is akin to folk art, given its enormous popularity throughout this country, both in book sales, television and film spinoffs, and the growing number of memoir workshops that have sprung from our need to make sense of our lives in chaotic times. Within the past two decades the psychologist James W. Pennebaker and others have conducted clinical studies showing that undisclosed childhood traumas make people far more susceptible to serious health problems later in life.3 What is more, they have demonstrated a connection between writing about traumatic experiences and a substantial improvement in a person’s overall health.4 The key element Pennebaker emphasizes is allowing traumas to receive direct attention, and the writing process and, if in a safe environment,

H E A L I N G P E R S O NA L H I S T O RY

141

verbalizing, has a healing effect. Whether one ever shares one’s writing with others, he notes, writing about problematic life experiences forces us to slow down our thinking and follow ideas to more orderly conclusions, which more often than not lead to clearer and better perspectives.5 This in itself should not sound surprising, but the substantive correlation with actual physical health and healing verified in recent years brings the importance of attention to personal trauma into a dimension of reality beyond the intellect. The attempt to make honest, probing attempts to achieve self understanding casts the personal memoir into humbler, less formal but nevertheless qualifying precincts of philosophy. Of particular interest here are memoir writing’s contributions to ethics and metaphysics. The efforts of serious memoir writers achieve what Emmanuel Levinas termed “The problem of the relationship between the I and the totality,” which “comes down to describing the moral conditions for thought.”6 Lest one take this as quite a stretch, consider Levinas’ further assertion: Impersonal discourse is necrological discourse. Man is reduced to the legacy of man, absorbed by a totality of the common patrimony. The power he exercised over his work while living (and not only through the mediation of his work)—the essentially cynical man—is annulled. Man becomes— not, to be sure, a thing—but a dead soul. This is not reification; this is history. History which is determined by posterity, by those who are absent, with a judgment by those who are not born of those who are dead. To seek the I as a singularity within a totality made up of relationships between singularities that cannot be subsumed under a concept is to ask whether a living person does not have the power to judge the history in which he is involved. . ..7

Writers of memoirs these days are determined, if nothing else, to enscribe their particular perceptions of their own history, the tenor and discoveries of their own consciousness within the duration of their singular experience in close relation to others they have loved, coped with, been hurt by, or otherwise movingly encountered on a shared expanse of mortal coil. Theirs is a discourse of the living, decidedly non-necrological. And many memoirists are women who do not wish to be lumped into some historian’s impersonal idea of a common patrimony! They struggle to express living, evolving consciousness, and if one had to characterize some of the most moving memoirs—from centuries ago to the present—one would have to acknowledge that they are attempts to heal. Their efforts, in the words of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, exemplify the Logos of Life. . . .the passion to know and to understand is directed as much toward our inner self as toward the surrounding world. In fact, it is this passion to know and to understand our actions, feelings, relationships, motivations, etc. that is the intrinsic force of our inner development, our character building, our self-interpretative life-course, as well as of our pursuit of our transnatural destiny, and lastly of our turning against life-interests and turning toward the religious quest. This explains not only why we are always for ourselves the most interesting subject of conversation, but also why we seek to clarify ourselves to ourselves by bringing to the light reflective images

142

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

of ourselves in autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, confessions, family histories, genealogies, etc. and why we seek to plumb our deepest subliminal empirical psyche in psychoanalysis. . .and why we always talk about our past as well as that of our families and friends; we are bringing all these things up from the dark spheres of our psyche into the luminosity of the significant word.8

Sixteen centuries before Freud, Saint Augustine’s Confessions were a process of reviewing his past in order to rebuild his soul that he felt to be “in ruins,” in the hope that God would help him.9 With or without recourse to God, other historically influential memoirs such as Rousseau’s Confessions and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past are likewise attempts at self understanding and the attainment of personal justification and a healing peace. Women memoirists, notably mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, and Therese of Lisieux, have addressed the healing of the soul through spiritual self-knowledge and self-sacrifice, including the transcendence of personal suffering. Decades after the third wave of what seems no longer fashionable to call feminism, in the 1970s and 80s, it should come as no surprise that women today feel confident enough about the importance of their own life stories to increasingly take up the challenge and gift of memoir writing. The ones I will focus on here explore what amounts to a phenomenology of dealing with trauma and suffering, with healing as the ultimate goal and achievement. My particular lens will be one I have discussed in previous papers in this conference series on phenomenology and literature, though applied in a more positive aspect. In the past I have focused on the absence of caring attention as an essential causative factor in the emergence of evil.10 Here I will explore the beneficent influence of fully mindful attention as the medium of creative resolution and transformation to new levels of personal growth and healing. Joan Didion’s bestselling memoir The Year of Magical Thinking recounts with coolheaded precision the sudden heart attack of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, during a quiet dinner at home. She compares her husband’s abrupt death with fictional mortality that usually always arrives pre-announced. She reflects on how Sir Gawain in the Chanson de Roland, when asked, says “I shall not live two days,” and how Philippe Aries, in The Hour of Our Death, notes: “Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.” Her response to this is terse: You sit down to dinner. “You can use it if you want to,” John had said when I gave him the note he had dictated a week or two before. And then—gone.

H E A L I N G P E R S O NA L H I S T O RY

143

Then comes her reflection: Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died: my father died a few days short of his eighty-fifth birthday and my mother a month short of her ninety-first, both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life. . . . I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.” . . . Such waves began for me on the morning of December 31, 2003, seven or eight hours after the fact, when I woke alone in the apartment. I do not remember crying the night before; I had entered at the moment it happened a kind of shock in which the only thought I allowed myself was that there must be certain things I needed to do. . .while the ambulance crew was in the living room. . .to get the copy of John’s medical summary, so I could take it with me to the hospital. I had needed. . .to bank the fire, because I would be leaving it.11

The above selections place the reader directly into the sight lines of personal trauma. A very literary person observes here that most literature gives forewarning of death, and tries to imagine whether her writer husband was aware of his impending fate when he made the unprecedented offer of allowing her to use a note he had dictated for a possible book. Was it evidence of mortal foreknowledge, or simply an offer by a close fellow writer who figured he would not use that item? She had no way of finding out, readers witness along with her, because he suddenly collapsed over his meal, then onto the floor, and she was swept into the vortex of calling for medics and rushing to the hospital. Her painstaking precision resonates with countless others who have lost someone without warning, and have searched—or will lose and will search—for some sign that they knew their time was coming. A grim topic, but when Didion puts it to paper and shares it with the world, it has a cool, sensible timbre. It transmits some of the light of consciousness that Tymieniecka describes as bringing human experience from the dark regions of the psyche to the luminosity of the word. Yet before we take for granted the luminous quality of Didion’s prose, we should appreciate that its content results from unblinking attention. We see Didion trying but not ascertaining whether her husband knew he would soon die. We read how she successfully differentiates between how she

144

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

went on with her life after her parents died—feeling lonely and abandoned even as a grown child—and the waves of grief that followed her husband’s demise. Things crystallize when Didion asserts that she wanted to be alone the first night, not because she did not want to be consoled by her close friends and family, but because she “needed to be alone so that he could come back,” which marked the beginning of her “year of magical thinking.”12 Much of her memoir is spent tracing the odd recollections and emotional connections she makes in what she calls memory vortexes, which are more or less random and specific to Didion’s former life with her husband. Readers can easily imagine the odd linkages of their own personal recollections, themselves possibly falling into a grief-induced whirlpool of magical thinking. And we are there with the author many pages and months later, when she reflects on grief again. Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. . . .We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. . . .We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral. . .we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion. . .. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.13

Nevertheless, readers might pause here in wonderment that, in spite of Didion’s assertion of the meaninglessness of her experience of loss, the bitter absence of so-called healing, our overall impression—perhaps selfishly, perhaps insufficiently compassionate, but nonetheless fully attentive to her story—is quite the opposite. She has despite herself conveyed genuine meaning, forewarning those of us who have not yet lost a life partner about the possibly narcotic regression and anodyne aura of the funeral, preparing us subliminally for the starker experience of their unending absence. Of course, absence does have an empty meaningless quality, but so much of what Didion shares with us is rich in meaning. For those who have experienced such grief as hers, who can say whether there is a measure of healing in the simple fact that she has given eloquent voice to a recognizable abyss of suffering? That she has helped us bring some of the painful darkness out of the caverns of our psyche? How has she done that, not believing that she can? One explanation might be that she has allowed us to accompany her on the journey of her attention to the matter of grief itself. By attuning our attention to hers we perceive some of the unacknowledged strength of character that is exposed in the rigor of Didion’s self-examination.

H E A L I N G P E R S O NA L H I S T O RY

145

It is also craft, of course, that produces eloquence. We do not see what Didion has left out, what choices of words she has made and remade, how she has reordered and restructured her experience to arrive at what the reader is meant to witness as exactly the way things happened. But students of memoir writing know that all personal experience has to be reprocessed in the telling. It must be edited for extraneous details, tangents of thought and description that may be valued parts of one’s personal history but nonetheless do not move a life story forward on the page. Clinical research on memory has found that people keep in longterm memory only those experiences that are connected with emotions, retaining the gist of what happened but not the exact time, physical surroundings, and other surface data. Therefore teachers of memoir writing instruct their students to make up names of persons they have forgotten, to declare that it was a cold day in April and one was wearing a red sweater, when such details are fabricated in order to flesh out the emotion-charged phenomenon or interaction that carries the actual significance. This, too, is behind-the-scenes attention—to craft: scene, characterization, tone, and story line—the kind of attention that captures readers’ hearts and minds. It takes a deserving share of the credit for whatever we find inspiring and healing about what we gain from someone’s life story. A sub-textual focus of any memoirist’s attention comes under the rubric of ethics. How honest should we be about painful or embarrassing personal events? Should we name real names, even if legally safe to do so, or protect the anonymity of friends and surviving family members? Is it justified to combine the personalities and characteristics of two or more individuals into an amalgam presented as one person? More than a few autobiographical writers have admitted to this. Then there is the matter of resisting temptation to add melodrama or triumph to episodes or phases in one’s life that would give readers a heightened impression of one’s suffering, heroism, quick-wittedness, victimization, and other routes to situational hyperbole. A notorious recent example was the media furor over James Frey’s memoir, A Million Little Pieces, in which he claimed to have spent three months in prison for drug abuse, naming the prison, and was exposed as a fraud when a web blogger searched that prison’s records for his mug shot and did not find it because Frey had never been incarcerated. When asked why he had exaggerated his criminal activities due to drug abuse, Frey explained that he had been trying to enhance his “street cred”[ibility], to be more convincing as a tough guy’s bad guy.14 The uproar among readers and publishers resulting from Frey’s mildly egregious act of mephistophelian puffery points to the value placed upon truth-telling among readers of memoirs. They are looking for self-scrutiny that is made courageous by the degree of honesty behind it. Its rootedness

146

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

in real human experience, first-hand knowledge of trauma, suffering, and survival cannot be fully replicated by fiction writers, despite the immense powers of the imagination. It is perhaps one of the reasons why the memoir genre now accounts for such impressive sales figures compared to those for works of fiction. While many writers are able to conceal the kind of tinkering that James Frey was caught out on, the ethical burden is deeply personal. Only the memoirist can answer the question, Am I being as honest as I can about this event/phase/relationship in my life, even if I invent some extraneous details to fill in my spotty recollection of the particulars? Readers appreciate, if only subliminally, the formidable challenge entailed in any serious standard of truth-telling. There is also the ethical element of intent, expressed from the standpoint of reception by Rainer: You can never know how someone will actually be affected by your work. . . .People will take offense who have no right to, and others will forgive almost any trespass. You cannot control how others will react; all you can command is your intent. Do you intend to lie? Do you intend to hurt? Or do you wish to heal? Is your commitment to humor at any cost? Is it to truth transmuted through love? These are ethical questions you need to ask yourself.

Asking oneself such questions requires attention to self as not only self but as Other. It necessitates the cool head of distance, the conscience as fly on the wall, as impartial observer. It also compels one to own up to the contents of one’s heart, identifying the component degrees of love, hate, indifference, personal bias, and mixtures thereof. Not for nothing has the heart been called a foul rag and bone shop. Some might say this avenue of attention is within all human experience the most arduously traversed. Yet one’s underlying awareness of intent is what qualifies one’s quality of attention, which can make the achievement of writing honest personal history healing. Rainer notes another key factor in the phenomenology of personal history, that justice and truth-telling are interpersonal responsibilities: Do not forget that family and friends have some ethical responsibility to your need to write your own truth, as you have a responsibility to respect their feelings. Writing your own version of how you experienced your life—owning your own truth—will often be threatening to others. But remember they may write their version, too. They have that right. So do you.15

Another phenomenological factor of attention, raised in conversation with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,16 is that of one’s changing perspectives on personal experiences. A simplistic example of this might be viewing a closed door in one’s life—say, a humiliating arbitrary dismissal from an enjoyable job—as a tragic setback, then sometime later looking upon the same event as an opportunity to embark on a different and possibly more rewarding career path. As Tymieniecka pointed out, her opinions about her own memories

H E A L I N G P E R S O NA L H I S T O RY

147

keep changing, so writing down one point of view might seem a transitory or frivolous endeavor, to herself if not to her readers. Continuing with the above example, if our memoirist wrote about getting fired in the tragic frame of mind, the result would not do justice to this writer’s later perspective, or even the ambivalent view that both humiliation and eventual appreciation of the new direction were important components of the writer’s life experience. My response to Tymieniecka’s concern, at the time, was that a memoir writer’s challenge is always to weigh the final product, having to choose, even as fiction writers must, among a range of possible frames of “reality” or interpretation. And one must accept that readers of fiction and memoir—as well as writers—are free to change and evolve in their impressions of a given work. The changing perception of life’s traumas is notable when contrasting the memory of losing a spouse written within less than a year by Joan Didion, and one penned several years after the event by Patty Dann. While Didion’s memoir takes a rather straight trajectory, other highly effective memoirs employ a piecemeal approach and a lighter touch. Described by the New York Times as part memoir, part self-help book, Patty Dann’s The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth about It) looks back on the 15-month terminal illness of her husband from a much stabler foothold. The title refers to the kind of statement made to a child by a parent trying to conceal the reality of death. Dann’s memoir testifies to the beneficence of candor to a child, to the person diagnosed with terminal illness, the spouse and close friends who will survive. Something ominous occurred when Willem, the author’s Dutch-born husband, a historian and archivist, carried their three-yearold adopted son on his shoulders back to their apartment after a drive to visit a friend’s sheep farm. Dann asked whether they should go back and fetch the car seat. Willem, fluent in English, asked “What’s a car seat?” and “with that seemingly simple question,” she writes, ‘we entered a new kingdom.”17 Humorous details grace the narrative, such as the fact that Dann had been teaching memoir writing for twenty years and, when she determined to remember “the life of our little family before it was lost,” found herself, as the Dutch put it, getting “a taste of her own cookie dough.”18 Importantly, Dann’s memoir harkens back to a scene from her own childhood, when she was away at summer camp and heard a girl weeping in the bunk above hers. The girl, Jane, who became a lifelong best friend, said she missed her mother. When Patty said it was okay to be homesick and she’d be able to see her mom on visiting day in four weeks, Jane whispered, “I’ll never see her again.” According to the prevailing wisdom, Jane had not been told that her mother was dying. She recalled seeing her sitting up in bed when she came home from school one day, and the next day returning to find her gone. Dann writes:

148

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

“They took her to the Mayo Clinic,” said Jane solemnly. I wanted to make a joke about it, asking if it was a place where they made tuna fish sandwiches, but I refrained. “And then,” Jane said, “my dad gave away all my mom’s things. . .and we moved.” I knew, in my ten-year-old bones, that there must have been a better way to do things. I had no idea I would be in the position to try another way with my own child.19

Dann’s memoir is graced by the elemental charm of their son Jake. Willem towered more than a foot above Patty, and when he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the worst form of brain cancer, and had to stay in the hospital, Jake cried, “I hate Daddy sick. I miss my tall Daddy.” Then he sighed and said, “Maybe the sun will come down from heaven and take the disease out of Daddy and give it to the rain and the clouds and he’ll be all better.”20 The memoir edifies readers by example. Dann quickly turns to a capable child psychologist for advice in handling Jake, who tells her that parents should always tell a child who is losing a parent three things. These are: the truth about what is happening, the name of the disease, and that the doctors are doing everything possible and giving the best medicine available. When Patty explained that Jake’s father had a tumor, Jake called it a “tubor,” and, as she recounts with simple eloquence, “we began to talk a new language, the language of illness, the language of dying, the language of living with it all. I realized that if Jake could learn the words Tyrannosaurus rex, he could learn glioblastoma.”21 The same piercing candor springs from Patty’s reflections on herself: For months after my husband’s funeral, on the nights I could not sleep, I rewashed his shirts and stayed up ironing them. . . .and I would chant the word widow over and over in my head. I had been preparing for it for the fifteen months he was ill, but actually being one was another story.. . . But I know everybody does this widow and widower thing differently. I still carry my husband’s grave plot and section number in my address book, in addition to his sleeve and collar size. After I ironed my husband’s shirts I looked at Willem’s desk as he’d left it, with the stack of fiftieth-birthday cards and a photo of us eating pizza in the snow on a street corner in Montreal. While Jake slept I put on a quiet waltz on the CD player and danced tiptoe around and around. As I reclaimed the room, I began to feel more balanced than I ever had before. After you’ve taken care of someone with cancer, life feels startlingly simple. I feel stronger as a widow than I ever felt when I was single or married.22

Everyone’s experience is unique, but we might note that Patty Dann’s response to bereavement after ten years of marriage and the fifteen-month decline of her husband is one that includes a feeling of being more balanced, possessing greater inner strength than ever before, and the ability to see life as amazingly uncomplicated. This seems very close to healing. Though we cannot take time here to mark out those fifteen months, Dann’s later remarks may suffice:

H E A L I N G P E R S O NA L H I S T O RY

149

Every few months I get a telephone call that starts with, “A friend’s husband just died. She has children. Would you mind talking with her?” Jake’s gotten so used to it he now says, “You talk to the mom. I’ll handle the kid.” One widow and child were over on a Saturday evening for dinner. As the mother and I whispered earnestly in the hallway, we overheard the boys talking on the couch in the living room as they watched Sponge Bob. They stared at the screen as they spoke. The other child, Zachary, age five, said, “What did your daddy die of?” “Brain cancer,” said Jake, matter-of-factly. “What about yours?” “Stomach cancer. Which do you think is worse?” said Zachary. “Well,” said Jake, “you think with your brain, so that kind is bad, but stomach cancer probably hurts a lot. Either way, they’re dead. Do you want to play Legos?” Jake intersperses play and remembering his father all the time. “Get me a new daddy when I’m at school,” he said two weeks after Willem’s death. “I need someone to play dominoes with.”23

When Jake turned ten, they rode their bikes past Willem’s favorite tree in the park by the Hudson River, then abloom with tiny plum-colored blossoms. “As we passed by,” Dann writes, “Jake said softly, ‘I don’t remember him. . . .I don’t remember Daddy.’ ” Subsequently she remembered having watched an interview with John F. Kennedy, Jr., who said he couldn’t tell whether he remembered sitting under his father’s desk at the White House or if he’d constructed the memory from seeing all the photographs. She reflects, All that effort to remember, I thought, all those talismans in Jake’s room. As I poured the lemonade I smiled to myself. I now realized that this was part of it all. Perhaps in fifteen years, or perhaps when he is an old man, Jake will have a memory of his father, perhaps then it will be time to remember again.24

In the memoir’s Afterword by the child psychologist Sallie Sanborn, advice is offered that might apply to all of us: Children feel everything and often feel opposite feelings at once. It’s important for them to know it’s okay to feel relief when a parent dies after a difficult illness. It’s okay to want to be at your dad’s funeral but wish you could be at your Little League game. It’s okay. . .for a child to ask the surviving parent, “When will you marry again?” Children want to keep the circle whole. What they say and questions they ask can be startling, but if you are prepared, you can be an honored witness in keeping their lives together.25

Keeping a child’s life together is another version of healing. Honesty and tolerance of a child’s feelings, as recommended in the above example, can be applied just as well to adult approaches to healing from trauma. What carries over to child as well as adult is the quality of caring and honest attention. I had the privilege of speaking with Patty Dann in regard to this paper, and asked her whether memoir writing is an attempt to make a better story of one’s life, or even to cultivate a wiser, stronger self. She answered, warning it would be off the cuff:

150

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

“Memoir writing is not so much to make one’s life better, but to make sense of one’s life. In over 25 years of teaching memoirs, I’ve found that by writing down memories it sort of stitches back together your life. Oh, my brother did do that, or I did deal with that–. By writing it they show that they didn’t realize that they grieved, and when it’s right there on the page you can’t hide from it. You can go years to a therapist and nothing gets written down, but in memoir writing you really have it. “I always give an exercise to write about ‘car.’ Someone recalled how her father had been so strict and yelled at her when she was learning to drive. While she was writing about this she remembered that her father had told her that when he first got his license he had run over a child and killed somebody. Then she really understood why he had yelled at her driving. . . . “So often in reading memoirs we’re trying to match our experience”.

I asked if she felt that the feeling of writing something well gives her a sense of power over something painful, in the sense that attention to one’s life story can be empowering as it develops a fuller consciousness about something one has lived through. She replied, “I’m pleased with the Goldfish book, and the one about adopting my son, but I would not use the word power. Not knowing what one is feeling is the worst ambivalent feeling, but if you put it into decent prose, you can at least feel it again, and write out exactly what you did go through. Putting the words right, putting it in orderly paragraphs, gives you the courage to face the next challenge of life. So in that way I agree that putting your attention to memories is empowering.”26

Though expressed with modest reserve, speaking of finding the courage to face one’s next challenge because one has made the effort to write out, in decent prose, exactly what one went through, to “at least feel it again,” Patty Dann touches upon a use of one’s attention that is deeply significant. Speaking of putting the words right about experiences of life-shaping impact, establishing some kind of narrative order, she may actually be alluding to what Tymieniecka describes as “a quiet recapitulation of the inner self before the inquisitive eye of the mind.” The philosopher adds, This is also the psychic climate most propitious for sharing one’s innermost in confidence with a fellow man, for co-communicating in trust our innermost with open hearts. More, it is a spiritual climate which allows for the rare move of a noble elevation of the heart, both the lifting of one’s self toward trust in the absolute truth of one’s being and being able to receive and appreciate this experience.27

Ultimately, such “movements of the heart in communication with other human hearts. . .establish with them the spiritual life-significance of a culture.”28 Such creative efforts at personal history, forged in one’s own fire of full attention, combine history and fabulation in the creative endeavor of healing and expanding our moral consciousness and our capacity to appreciate life. I emphasize the creative aspect, because as a novice memoir writer I have experienced the amazement that comes from writing about something that was

H E A L I N G P E R S O NA L H I S T O RY

151

once traumatic, having it take on a surprising and strangely ethical resonance. In the process of describing the night I was stood up by my date for the high school prom, I recalled the presence of a frequent visitor and family friend, an unappealing cranky older man of no relation who my brother and I were told to call Uncle Wayne. He had been an admirer and hanger-on of my late father, a small-scale charismatic leader of the Theosophists in Washington State during and briefly following the Second World War. When my father, who was nearly twice my mother’s age, died, Wayne asked her to marry him, and she gently refused. But he kept coming to visit us, through two more of my mother’s husbands, with whom he would talk politics and various esoteric topics almost every weekend. Though he was gruff, pot-bellied and balding, Uncle Wayne drove my brother and me to the roller skating rink many Saturdays, paying for our lessons in the afternoon and chauffering us home after the evening socials. This particular Saturday evening, he sat at the kitchen table as I appeared in my first prom dress, sewn by my mother in a beautiful lavender brocade, and watched the clock with me as my date did not arrive. My mother and stepfather could think of nothing to say or do to console me. I had never felt much affection for Uncle Wayne, but as I wrote about this memory his place in my life and my family took a different cast. An hour after my date was to appear Uncle Wayne stood up, reached for the newspaper, and said, “Let’s go, Becky. That son of a bitch is never going to show up. Here’s the paper. Pick any movie you like and I’ll take you to see it.” Oh, of course I was humiliated, but somehow while writing it all down the episode was taken over by Uncle Wayne’s crusty compassion and its probable source. It was an ethical epiphany of sorts, a desire to do justice to a presence in my childhood that I had not fully appreciated. I recalled my mother’s helpless, grateful look as she watched Uncle Wayne pull his car up to the front door, to spirit me away. I took note of his kindness when, unasked, he replenished my supply of popcorn and soda as I stuffed myself during the movie. I had no memory of the film’s title or content, so I invented what kind of movie it was—a Clint Eastwood Western. The made-up movie paled in importance next to the real-life debt of gratitude that emerged from deep within my psyche to this off-putting old man who had attached himself to our family out of unrequited love for my mother. His sympathy for me, I reflected, must have come from his own experience of rejection, a pain masked by his gruff disposition. On that terrible night he took me under his wing, unused to providing comfort as he was, and we became survivors together. Mine was a modest trauma compared to death and terminal disease, but there was transcendence in the writing of it. By placing my attention on this mortifying teenage moment, an unlikely hero emerged from the shadows of my consciousness. A slight feeling of artistry registered as I decided to invent

152

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

a memory of choosing to watch Clint Eastwood shoot at the bad guys when normally I would have preferred a Rock Hudson-Doris Day romantic comedy. But the greatest satisfaction came from the feeling of doing justice to someone I had unwittingly disparaged and taken for granted all the years he hovered around our family, until he had outlived all of my mother’s husbands and was welcomed to stay in the basement apartment of her home when she was a widow. I began to appreciate the dogged devotion of an unattractive man who was able to finish his life in close domestic friendship with the woman he had always loved. It lifted me out of my relatively shallow depths of self-reflection and into a more luminous inner space. In my stumbling way I found myself participating in what Iris Murdoch described in an address titled “Salvation by Words”: Both art and philosophy constantly re-create themselves by returning to the deep and obvious and ordinary things of human existence and making there a place for cool speech and wit and serious unforced reflection. Long may this central area remain to us, the homeland of freedom and of art. The great artist, like the great saint, calms us by a kind of unassuming simple lucidity, he speaks with the voice that we hear in Homer and in Shakespeare and in the Gospels. This is the human language of which, whenever we write, as artists or as word-users of any other kind, we should endeavour to be worthy.29

Memoir writing can be an ordinary person’s means of personal salvation, a realm of exploration through memories and words open to those who are not great artists or saints, a home turf where those who give full and honest attention to the stories of their lives can prove themselves worthy of the language they use. As the Israeli novelist and memoirist David Grossman observes, We writers go through times of despair and times of self-devaluation. Our work is in essence the work of deconstructing personality, of doing away with some of the most effective human-defense mechanisms. We treat, voluntarily, the ugliest and also rawest materials of the soul. Our work leads us time and again to acknowledge our shortcomings, as both humans and artists.

On the relatively shallow level of writing about being jilted for the prom, I unearthed an ethical lacuna in my adolescence. I had taken for granted a person who had shown compassion to me not once but indirectly many times, a man whose crusty demeanor I had allowed to excuse a serious case of ingratitude. Now, in recording an event that for many years had occasioned feelings of shame, self-pity and anger, I had discovered an entirely new motivation, that released me from a cell of petty self-conception. I now wanted to honor this surrogate uncle for his own frustrated life, to pay proper respect, thank him belatedly, and mark his place in the world of letters, should my memoir ever be published. Grossman concludes, And yet, and this is the great mystery and the alchemy of our actions: In a sense, as soon as we lay our hand on the pen, or the computer keyboard, we already cease to be the helpless victims of

H E A L I N G P E R S O NA L H I S T O RY

153

whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us before we began to write. Not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the “official narrative” of our country, nor of fate itself.30

Though the facts had not changed for me—I had been jilted; it was humiliating—the act of writing had freed me to enter a new reality, larger in focus, a bit less enslaved to personal injuries and more inclined to compassion for the Other. That transformation of consciousness—to round out the scope of the philosophical implications of memoir writing—is a matter of metaphysics. Is not the metaphysician’s search for ultimate reality also a search for how the human experience of reality—especially when most painful and disruptive— can be transformed by careful reexamination and reflection? It may be that caring attention itself is our greatest healing agent. Marymount Manhattan College NOTES 1 Atlas, James, The New York Times Magazine, May 12, 1996, quoted in Rainer, Tristine, Your Life as Story: Discovering the “New Autobiography” and Writing Memoir as Literature (New York: Putnam/Penguin, 1998), p.10. 2 Ibid. 3 Pennebaker, James W., Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions (New York: The Guilford Press, 1997), 19. 4 Ibid., pp. 37–38. 5 Ibid., pp. 95, 190–191. 6 Levinas, Emmanuel, Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), p. 17. 7 Ibid., p. 25. 8 Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa, “Tractatus Brevis: The Primeval Elements and the Elemental Passions of the Soul – The Context of the Novel Metaphysical Vision of the Onto-Poiesis of Beingness,” Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXVIII: The Elemental Passions of the Soul, Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: Part 3, ed. A-T Tymieniecka (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 90–91. 9 Rainer, Op.Cit., p. 14, citing Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Confessions, Books I-IV (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995). 10 Painter, Rebecca M., “Literature and the Play of Attention: A New/Ancient Look at the Roots of Evil,” Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LXXXV: The Enigma of Good and Evil; The Moral Sentiment in Literature, ed. A-T Tymieniecka (Dordrecht, Netherlands: 2005), pp. 655–674; and “Fiction and the Growth of Consciousness: Attention and Evil,” Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XCII: Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos Book Five, ed. A-T Tymieniecka (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2006), pp. 235–258. 11 Didion, Joan, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 26–28. 12 Ibid., p. 33. 13 Ibid., pp. 188–189. 14 Summarized in the website http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey6.html.

154 15

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

Rainer, op.cit., pp. 317–318. In Cambridge, MA, May 16, 2007. 17 Dann, Patty, The Goldfish Went on Vacation: A Memoir of Loss (and Learning To Tell the Truth about It) (Boston: Trumpeter, 2007), p. 2. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 20 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 21 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 22 Ibid., pp. 140–141. 23 Ibid., pp. 148–149. 24 Ibid., pp. 153–154. 25 Ibid., pp. 158–159. 26 Telephone conversation with Patty Dann, May 10, 2007. 27 Tymieniecka, op.cit., p. 118. 28 Ibid., p. 119. 29 Murdoch, Iris, “Salvation by Words,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi; foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1997), p. 242. 30 Grossman, David, “Writing in the Dark,” The New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2007. An essay adapted from the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, delivered at PEN’s World Voices Festival in New York on April 29, 2007, and translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf. 16

M AT T I I T K O N E N

O N C E I WA S : A P H I L O S O P H I C A L E X C U R S I O N I N T O T H E M E TA P H O R S O F T H E M I N D

MOTTO

Translucence of days, images gliding by, the translucence of yesterday present; awakened as an image, as the memory of a fragrance I opened while still a child. The gliding is ceaseless, on and on – yet I am never further, the movement gains no ground. Between the crests it is lower always. The images assume no truth unless memory meets perception and anticipation its new dawn. Translucent days here and now: the movement is forwards and wave pursues wave. ABSTRACT

I might set as the objective in this stage of my journey, its philosophical goal, an outlining, an account, of an autobiographical “Bildungsnovelle” – perhaps one might speak of a narrative journey into the self. The notion of a Novelle, of course, suggests an attempt at predictive accuracy, and here it must be acknowledged that the future can hold surprises, turns one cannot expect. If I were to read someone else’s account of my alter ego’s life I might not be able to accept everything it brought out. My memory might be selective; or that other narrator’s perceptions might be too bogged down in subjective premisses of his own. What further complicates the matter is the requirement that this account be written prospectively, that it map out things to come (Translated by Robert MacGilleon). 155 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 155–201. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

156

M AT T I I T K O N E N PROLOGUE

How do we go about studying man? How do we study ourselves? Our innermost being – all that has been, all that is now, and whatever still somewhere awaits us? Who is that man who bears my name? Do we know each other? Can I even think of him as me? Here the point from which the journey commences into the story of the lived self (see also e.g. Pilardi). To write an account of one’s own being, one’s existential journey – for whom would such a tale be devised – who will understand it, and how? The answer must surely be: “First and foremost for oneself!” In speaking and writing of myself to myself I am constructing my own narrative identity. Thought, perusal of one’s own inwardness, confers on language, too, a unique position and significance. Language resembles some kind of recess to retire to, a house to set up in. As thinker and poet I am both builder and keeper of that dwelling-place. (See also Heidegger, 1999, pp. 51–107.) My journey into myself might bring to mind a work of art, in special a piece of music. The meanings of the visible and palpable objects of the spatial world are different from those of the realm of pure music. That world has its being only in the dimension of inward time. Poetry and its language, too, partake of that place of retirement; only in them subsists contact with conceptual form and the objects of the world. Poetry is a mode of being, a way of inhabiting this world; hence language, too, acquires in its representativity “higher” purposes. Being at home is likewise being in language. (See also Schutz, pp. 244–245, 268.) A picture gathers in itself unnumbered – spoken and unspoken – words, elements of life lived.

I. T H E J O U R N E Y: M A N - B O Y E X I S T E N T I A L S

Narrator: For background, as it were, to this opening monologue may I put to the reader a number of thoughts which may shed necessary light on the matter in hand. All efforts towards a phenomenological study of man entail in reality a plunge into the structure of man’s life-world, a leap into the lived everyday of situations and relationships. The experiences lived through and the meaning-structures in which these lived traces may be described and interpreted constitute the infinite complexity of our life-world. We may of course speak even manifold and diverse lived worlds which mark man’s varying existences and realities. We know, too, that the life-world of a child contains different qualities of experience from those of the adult. By the same token we may imagine the worlds of the teacher, the parent, the scholar,

O N C E I WA S

157

why not the administrator. Each of us may be seen to inhabit different worlds at different times of the day – the lived world of work, the lived world of home. If we confine our attention to the most general level of our life-world we will perceive that the basis of this human existence may also be examined in terms of its essential thematic structures such fundamental aspects of existence as life, death, otherness, meaning, secrecy, for example, have found their place in the phenomenological literature of human studies. In this context the objective here is to identify some basic existential themes which may be assumed to subsist in the life-world of every individual regardless of his historical, cultural or social disposition. In order to avoid confusing these fundamentals of existence with the various given attributes of human phenomena such as parenthood we must speak of these thematic components of the life-world as essentials or existentials. There are four such indispensables in our existence which may prove to be particularly useful lode-stars on the journey towards reflection: lived space, lived body (corporeality), lived time and lived human relations (relationality and communality). These four essential aspects of being – spatiality, corporeality, temporality and communality – may be understood as belonging to the existential basis upon which each of us experiences the world, each of course in his own way. In the phenomenological literature these four categories have been perceived as properties of the fundamental structure of our life-world. This is readily understandable, since any experience whatsoever may be appraised in terms of four fundamental questions corresponding to these four essentials. For this very reason these four essences of our being constitute eminently appropriate categories for phenomenological inquiry, reflection and exposition. (On the entire foregoing Narrator section see van Manen, pp. 101–102.) This then was my part; now we may proceed to the matter proper. The following exchange takes place between theoretician and experiencing individual; scholar and subject – a masculine inhabitant of this world appraising his own fleshly existence. The setting consists in the accompanying pictures, fragments from the trodden way. ( A ) W O R D S O F S PA C E Scholar: Lived space, spatiality, means experienced, felt space. When we think of space, we normally have in mind a mathematical area or the dimensions of length, height and depth. We readily speak of the distance between big cities – how many kilometres or how many hours’ drive – or we describe the proportions of the house or apartment we live in. Lived space, on the other hand, is considerably more difficult to convey in words, because the experience of it – as of lived time and the body lived – is largely prelinguistic. We do not

158

M AT T I I T K O N E N

ordinarily reflect on these unformulated elements. For all that, we know that the space we find ourselves in affects us. The enormous proportions of a modern bank building make us feel small, the openness of a landscape might arouse in us a sense of insecurity, but also possibly of freedom – quite the opposite of the feelings which assail us in a crowded lift. Upon entering a church we may be filled with a sense of the transcendent even though we are not perhaps particularly religiously inclined or regular church-goers. Walking alone in an unfamiliar, teeming city may make us feel lost, abandoned, alien, vulnerable, possibly excited or agitated. It may generally be said that we “become” the space in which we move. Home retains its own very peculiar spatial sense, connected somehow with the ground-note of our being. Home has thus been described in terms of peace, certainty, security, of inner sanctity, a purity in which we may feel protected and intact. At home we may be what we really are. Having sojourned elsewhere we “arise and turn homewards”. We feel particular sorrow for the homeless, seeing this as a tragedy which goes beyond the mere loss of a roof to live under.

Plate 1. “I breathe in deep, again and again. These wooden dwellings are redolent of home, of a lived landscape”

Man-boy: I breathe in deep, again and again. These wooden dwellings are redolent of home, of a lived landscape; of something which came to me, moved into me once, before language was – in that world which lies behind, or rather, before words. In the picture the foundations are being dug for the street, the pathway blazed on that place which was once to bring me to myself. There I found something for which the name is more than a mere outer shell. It is the fons et origo of one mode of my selfhood.

O N C E I WA S

159

If I now suddenly had to answer the question “Boy, who are you?” “What are you, boy?”, I would not hesitate for a moment: “Child of the sanded yards, son of the old town, brother of the silver birchtrees” I would reply with a touch of poetry. The house in the foreground to the right is Crossways II – one of the most important of the crossroads of my being. Within, the dwellings were small, but a certain openness made up for this. It was indeed strange how the borderlines of privacy were obscured in that place; I would visit the neighbours, eat there, stay the night. Our door, too, was open to all who lived in the house – the house itself seemed like a great space without walls despite the truly tiny proportions of the apartments in it. The yards about were spacious, green, partly sanded and fragrant – blackthorn, lilac, apple-trees heralding spring. I am part of that fragrance, part of the pregnant green of May. Leaving it made me restless, something of a lackland. I was and still am part of that old quarter, the timber dwellings now vanished. Now there is only me, looking at a picture of something that slipped away and remembering the concrete sense of being at home. My essence exists only in my being from somewhere (see also Rajanti, pp. 29–37). If the theoretician is right in seeing home – the spatial experience of it – as the foundation of our being, then the essence of my individuality must be interwoven in those walls, those houses and yards. The buildings in the picture did not, in Heideggerian terms, dominate that space but made of it a dwellingplace, freed it for people to live in. (See also Passinmäki, pp. 45–67.) What distinguished that place from my subsequent domiciles was precisely its character as the epitome of a familiar milieu; since those days I have lived always in “mathematical” homes. These have also been invested with language, replete with predefined and definable words. They were thus in a sense already lived, whereas living in that earlier world before words I was within something, a part of it. The boundlessness inherent – then and now – in those seemingly cramped surroundings freed me of place – from the neighbours there was no need to get up and go home; I was at home even when I was outside what was strictly speaking “our place”. Perhaps in fact the core of my being was left there and I am some kind of vagrant in my own existence. I have lost not just a roof over my head but a lived space within me. I press on with my search, the construction of my abode in this world – my road to manhood? Scholar: In a more general sense, too, lived space is an existential theme which sets us in a familiar world or landscape; moving in that milieu we find ourselves at home. In seeking to understand someone we inevitably ask about his world, his work, his interests, his background, birthplace and childhood. We do likewise when we try to grasp what lies at the bottom of “the essence of reading”, “the maintenance of friendly discourse” or “giving birth”; it is useful

160

M AT T I I T K O N E N

to examine the core of lived space which sets off each given experience with its peculiar qualities of meaning. When for example we feel like sitting down with a favourite novel we tend to seek out a suitable place to settle in – a snug corner somewhere, a small table in a café, out of the hurly-burly, soothed perhaps by quiet music or the subdued buzz of conversation among the regulars. From a phenomenological standpoint the business of constructing this reading experience would indeed appear to require a measure of spatial experience – in other words reading involves its own modality of lived space and may be understood in the light of various qualities and aspects of lived space. The writing process likewise seems to presuppose an appropriate spatial component; even the writing of this present text proceeds most readily at the computer with my own things laid out around me.

Plate 2. “My teacher opened up to me two entirely new worlds – the realms of writing and reading”

Man-boy: Red-brick school, alma mater to generations, owned by the local sawmill. The big field in front of it, the meadow of flowers, formed part of my home ground long before I started school. Perhaps for this reason this picture, too, belongs in an essential sense to this journey inward. My teacher opened up to me two entirely new worlds – the realms of writing and reading. Or perhaps those two dimensions are only two facets of one and the same world; perhaps this a part of the post-modernism now so popular – this is why I write of my childhood. The “nature of reading” revealed itself

O N C E I WA S

161

to me all at once; I was acting as monitor, and during one break it was suddenly borne in on me that I could make out what it said on the placards on the classroom walls. A secret was laid bare, and I imagine I jumped for joy. Even now I carry in me the core of that lived space. I am standing behind the row of windows to the right of the main door on the second floor. I soak the sponge and set about cleaning the blackboard – and something very strange happens. The symbols on the board come to life, they form words and sentences. There I came into a fortune whose value is not to be gauged in money. It can only be experienced, lived. A year has gone by now, and I stand again in that same classroom. I am reading Enid Blyton’s Island of Adventure. School is over, but I am still at my desk alone, immersed in the whirl of events, in the eye of the narrative storm. All is quiet, and I am at once in the class and in the world of the book. The cleaners – they were not yet called ancillaries – arrive and “wake” me, and I return to participate in the passage of time, part of the day and the schoolroom. Sitting at home now I stare at Blyton’s book and the old photograph of the factory school. Writing makes me forget the present – or rather, perhaps, step within it. I get up from my desk, pack my satchel and go down the familiar stairway to the yard; it is spring, the smell of the flowers is strong. Then I realise with astonishment that I am sitting at my own desk in Jyväskylä; I had written myself into my own past – or wrote up the past to the present. All in all, at least for a moment I felt I was at home. Scholar: Children presumably experience space differently from adults. In first place adults will have learnt its social aspect, conventional space. The same applies to lived time and to the body. Cultural and social contracts attend them which lend the experience of them a certain qualitative dimension. We notice this for example in the way people require a certain area around them in order to feel at ease, at home. Otto Friedrich Bollnow deals with various aspects of lived space, for example distance as experienced – a highroad. He points out how the objective and the lived distance between two places may diverge markedly. Some location may be geographically close enough by, and yet seem far removed because to get there we must, say, cross a river or a busy junction. Roads, too, have their peculiar quality; highways and motorways are not places where we can feel at ease – not places of sojourn but a means of getting from one place to another. How different a forest path, a tree thrown across a gully, or the spots close to home where we are wont to walk. It would indeed seem that lived space constitutes a category which allows us to study the ways in which we experience our day or the objects and events it brings with it. Lived space also helps us to reveal more of the fundamental dimensions of the life we live.

162

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Plate 3. “The rapids and I, I and the rapids: in love with each other, each athirst for the other. Here the dayspring of youth and dawning manhood”

Man-boy: The road in the background is highway 23, from Varkaus to Joensuu. Through Kämärinkoski the waters of Saimaa – Unnukka – flow on down through Haukivesi to Savonlinna. The boy saw this place for the first time from the window of a bus – he would be about seven years old. The surge of the waters, the white foam and the morning mist impressed themselves on his mind, and the inward image of them persisted night and day for almost two years. In school and on the bus one had to sit still – so we had been told, ordered, taught. The aura of that spatial experience had an oppressive effect; sociality and “manners” learnt by heart imposed silence and immobility. The rapids in my mind’s eye raced down their course in an unfettered torrent. May: the boy steps before the class in his new pointed best shoes; he is supposed to demonstrate what he has learnt over the winter – to bow and click his heels in the approved manner. Mission accomplished – now for summer and the liberation of being from constraint to expanding space. In objective terms those rapids – Kämärinkoski – lay only two kilometres away; as lived distance, however, the way seemed at least three times that. Bringing the perspective now closer to myself I use instead of the boy the first-person form. If I cycled there the way lay first along what was to my boyish thinking the fairly big road to Savo, and right up to the traffic lights. There was still a bridge to cross. I felt no personal involvement whatsoever on

O N C E I WA S

163

that stretch of the journey; particularly highway 23 after the traffic lights was merely a means of reaching my destination – I neither was nor tarried on it, I was simply on my way. I crossed yet another bridge and attained to the fount of my mind’s image; that re-presentation took form before my eyes. The water gambolled through a tunnel into a steeply descending course. I left my bicycle under the side of the bridge – I wanted to feel the ground under my feet. I walked along the path at the very brink of the rapids and the spume flew in my face. No constraints here, dictated by grown-ups; I may even have opened my mouth and shouted out my joy. Nobody came giving orders and laying down the law. What was more, I was wearing soft corduroy sneakers – hardly suited to heelclicking. This place was my own ground, a mode of being which wore my aspect. I am a Red Indian – the Last of the Mohicans; the running stream is my brother, my companion the sky so blue. This extremity and this verdure, they are me and I am born of them. I gaze into the water where it runs smooth, and a boy stares back at me, flaxen-haired, at the dawn of his own day. He is full of dreams – waking and sleeping – giddy with the scent of summer. If something has meaning, then this moment in time, this fundamental point in being. Everything is present, at hand. The core of existence is there to be lived, a proximity to be felt. The rapids and I, I and the rapids: in love with each other, each athirst for the other. Here the dayspring of youth and dawning manhood.

( B ) W O R D S O F T H E B O DY Scholar: The lived body entails the phenomenological circumstance that we are in the world always as bodily beings, corporeally. When we encounter a fellow-being in his own setting or in a painting, it is always above all through the medium of his body. In our physical presence each of us reveals something of himself and always in the same conceals something – not necessarily consciously or deliberately, rather in spite of ourselves. When the body is the object of another’s gaze it may lose its naturalness; or, in place of loss it may be that the body grows exaggeratedly in its characteristic mode of being. Under fixed scrutiny it may, for example, become awkward and its movements may then appear clumsy. Beheld with admiration, again, it may excel in its suppleness and its ordinary capacities. In like manner someone in love may flesh out the erotic mode in a mysterious glow, a radiant countenance, or sometimes in the eyes of the beloved in a responding blush.

164

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Plate 4. “I am in the centre of the picture; let the boy be Boy and the girl Girl. The story opens – or rather, three”

Man-boy: I stare at my picture and the words fall as of themselves: Wish, shrug off the yoke of years, look behind you. And there he is once more, flaxen-haired boy that was.

Before me is one situation, fixed for ever in that scene; two boys and one girl in the physical being that then clothed them, How else in fact could we have been realised, human as we are? I contemplate myself and my companions: we meet now in my painting – or more precisely, we meet in the picture I am now “drawing” in this text. I am in the centre of the picture; let the boy be Boy and the girl Girl. The story opens – or rather, three. The voice in my monologue resembles somewhat an omniscient narrator, drawing out his tale from different points of view. I behold the world through the eyes of Boy and Girl; I also know more than either of them. For the most part in any case the words spring from the first-person narrator. Boy: When I looked at this same picture five years ago I wrote this in my diary about the Boy: “We are linked by the Savo road and a shared childhood: the games, the dark evenings and those same timber homes. He is more to me than just a name such as adult years have seen come and go. The Boy courses

O N C E I WA S

165

through my being as a trace of absence, a face which follows me ever and anon. I cannot remember my own childhood without him: this is something which I understand as meaning. A lived trace which has made of me what I am – a boy-traveller.” The Boy climbs the steps and walks in to join the other six children. Work on the car project is left; it is 11 o’clock and Father will be home for his meal. For that we must all be in – sat round the table just so. Outside the boy is at his ease; then a grown-up arrives to take a photograph: look sharp! sit on the steps, hands in lap and a straight face – just as at table. Gone the lively activity and creative handiwork of a moment ago. Nothing remains but the bridled body, being now tamed to the human mould. “Properly for the picture!”, Father too had said. So the Boy toes the line, properly for a picture, and there he is in the picture. The stare of the camera is like baleful eye of the adult: what was natural, supple, alive is gone. Quite the opposite of the day before, when the crowd of us made stilts and had a race on them round the woodshed in the picture. The Boy has dexterously built the most “stylish” pair and sped like an arrow round the course. His speed and agility had dumbfounded the others. The prize was a kiss on the cheek from the Girl and a flush of pleasure spread over the Boy’s cheeks. At that moment his physical essence had shown of its best: the Boy had been absolute sovereign of his own being. Girl: Oh no, there’s that man from nextdoor again with his camera – had enough of trying to look smart, “fit for a picture”. And Tomas, my dog, has to be in it as well; “Come on, there’s a good boy, jump up here, don’t be afraid, it won’t take long; there we are, good dog.” Her mother has dressed the Girl up in her best – at least good and beautiful clothes awaken respect. The Girl knows this too. Today she is somehow prouder of her own being than usual, seems somehow in possession of this her milieu, her own essence. Now, however, the Girl is no longer a mere object of scrutiny – the adult with the camera has gone; the Boy has taken note of the new dispensation. The Girl is not clumsy but feather-light in her movements, knowing she is accepted and admired. The Boy does not take his brown eyes off her; now he rises, takes to his stilts and does a lap round the woodshed. The feat itself means nothing – all that matters is to show off to the Girl. And she knows that all this is because of her, only for her. Now a smile comes easily, perhaps a blush. Time again in the evening to be prim and proper, to submit to the yoke of adult constraint. The door to the woodshed is still open – in the picture and in me. I have just stepped out of the light into its darkness – a moment of blindness in which I can

166

M AT T I I T K O N E N

only feel that I am there. I see nothing but am aware of my corporeal dimension and sense the lived interior of the shed. I fumble around for the stick I had “fashioned” the previous evening as an essential part of the morning’s building project; finding it, I step back across the threshold into the light, and for a moment everything turns black-and-white, as if I had leapt for an instant into a photo negative, a framed world. Father stands in front of me, camera in hand; I haven’t even time to straighten my pullover, all rucked up when I went rummaging in there. I stiffen myself: hands to my sides, back straight. I too have learnt how to be proper for the picture – the sole objective in my being is to stand straight and look attentively at the eye of the camera. I feel awkward and inadequate: click! and there I am for ever with all my shortcomings. Now it’s over and I can get back to my job on the racing-car. My ease of self is restored. The “accessory” also finds its right place – the stick I cut is to reinforce the axle between the front wheels. Time enough to worry about a steering-wheel at the beginning of next week.

(C) WORDS OF TIME Scholar: Lived time is subjective time in contrast to time measured by the clock. Lived time seems to fly when we are enjoying ourselves, and seems to slow down when we are bored listening to a dry-as-dust lecture, or in a state of discomposure – as in the dentist’s chair! Lived time also consists in our temporal mode of being in the world – in youth headed for an open and beckoning future, in later years remembering, recollecting the past. Here, too, when we seek acquaintance with another we ask after his personal history and the pattern he envisages for his life, what he has mapped out for himself. The time dimensions of past, present and future constitute the horizons of our temporal world. Whatsoever has befallen me in my past remains with me as a memory or as an experience (only recently) forgotten, which in one way or another leaves its imprint on my being; and that trace defines the cast of my demeanour, of the way I bear myself – hopeful, confident, or defeated, wornout; it manifests itself in the gestures I have adopted or made my own – learnt from my mother, my father, teachers, friends; it lies behind the words I use and in the language which links me to my past – to family, school and race. For all that it is also true that present pressures and influences must alter my past. As I now make of myself this or that I may well put a new interpretation on what I once was and what I now am.

O N C E I WA S

167

Plate 5. “Domiciles have changed, but the ring of lived language still marks my speech. Once more the Boy shyly asks: ‘Will you come to the cinema tomorrow?’ ”

Man-boy: Spring, a few clouds float in the blue. No wind; time and life seem at a standstill. I savour the first portents of my youth, standing at the gate of my selfhood. I am standing down on the street waiting for my schoolmates and thinking back to the class meeting just over. The whole thing lasted no more than 45 minutes, but to me it seemed an age. We talked about the coming class excursion, only the destination was left open. Amid the shilly-shally my own surging impatience was on its way out of those confines almost before it got going – at one and the same time I was member of the excursion committee and already making my way along the main street: then at last the thing was over and I was free. Standing in front of the Maxim, glass-and-concrete glory; I am going to see Starwars. Suddenly before me I see a girl I have noticed a few times this spring. She stops, gives her hand and says straight out “Hi! I’m Marjukka. You must be Matti.” Perhaps I bridle at this – next thing she’ll be asking about my summer plans. But in fact I am pleased, and time sprouts wings. I tell her of my dreams, my plans, myself. All externals lose meaning; only the lived integrity of this inward moment has any point.

168

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Looking at the photograph now I am aware that the monument to functionalism has been demolished ages ago and Parts I, II and III of the new Starwars trilogy have already had their first showings. Yet I still feel on my face the warm wind of that May in the seventies; I still see the girl’s bright eyes and eager smile, and the fragrance of the lilacs blossoming that spring have pervaded every spring since. What has been is like a horizon from which my present and my future take their beginnings. Still I would carry within me that same boy who spent his spring of youth wandering up and down that street. Domiciles have changed, but the ring of lived language still marks my speech. Once more the Boy shyly asks: “Will you come to the cinema tomorrow?” Life and its pressures close in. I shut my eyes – and there she is, waving, coming to meet me. We take our seats, the lights go out. No hurry to go anywhere any more – again the boy grasps the girl’s hand offered. I am a man and at once that boy, man-boy. Scholar: The past in itself changes, because we live towards the kind of future we already see taking form – manifesting itself – or assuming the shape we still believe to be the secret of our experiences, in some way “in store” for us. Through our hopes and dreams we perceive a prospect of life before us, or perhaps we have lost that perspective in despair of failure of will. Bollnow aptly describes the mode or spirit of youthful life as hope and a feeling pervaded with the dayspring, with dawn – as if we were setting out on an endless, promising day. Man-boy: Has that cinema experience of 20 years ago changed? Has it been gilded in the passage of time? Even then I could foresee that much of my future to know that I would matriculate and go on to university. There were no alternatives. Or were there? Have I in some way altered my own past, written it up in a form more to my liking? At the end of the seventies everything was still before me, as it were stored up for me, awaiting its revelation. Time lay like a boundless horizon opening and expanding to infinity. The springs were long, full of the mystery of anticipation. They were fragrant and aquiver with yet lifeless life: each morning was the herald of a new and yet more sun-drenched day. Dawn and dusk suffused me with the blood of life. That was youth, the opening day, time in a cocoon. Did adult years break the back of all that promise? (D) WORDS FOR YOU Scholar: The lived other subsists in the lived relationship which we maintain with our fellowmen in an interpersonal space which we share with them. When we encounter another, we approach him corporeally: with a handshake or in

O N C E I WA S

169

forming an impression of him on the basis of the physical presence he has for us. Even though we may learn of the other only indirectly – in a letter, on the phone or through the pages of a book – we will often already have formed a general image of him – which may subsequently be confirmed, or turn out to be wide of the mark. To our astonishment we may discover that this “you” of ours looks quite different from what we had expected. In encountering another person we are able to establish a contact of discourse which allows us to overcome our bounds. In a broader existential sense man has always sought in this experience of the other a common, social sense of purpose to his life, meaningfulness, a foundation – as in the religious experience of the absolute Other, of God. (See on all contributions of the theoretician Van Manen, pp. 102–105.)

Plate 6. “Finally the time came to agree on a meeting – to flesh out the idea of the lived other. After the fashion of Finnish films the rendezvous was the park at Kämäri with its winding paths and idyllic benches”

170

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Man-boy: I arrive home from school. On my desk a letter awaits me. The handwriting is meticulous. That is the beginning of an ardent correspondence on the basis of which I have constituted my picture of that other. Telephone conversations have only reinforced the mind’s image. For all that, she is still something void of life: an eidetic form not yet incarnate. Finally the time came to agree on a meeting – to flesh out the idea of the lived other. After the fashion of Finnish films the rendezvous was the park at Kämäri with its winding paths and idyllic benches. We both knew the spot where the lovelorn birchtrees intertwine. On that part of the path there is a bend and a white-painted loveseat. When I did see the “you” of my letters the eidetic image was altered. The handshake was limp and clammy; the general impression all too much to the fore. The beautiful seat, the running waters – and repugnant lips on mine. The listlessness of the handshake flowed on into the kiss; the poor start to her corporeal presentation was only confirmed. My idea of the girl, my counterpart, the mystic other, was sullied; I transcended myself in a negative sense. Things I had formerly held significant became repulsive – the gilded edge of my ideals flaked away. I was not to find on that bench a ground to my life, let alone a lived other who would awaken a lifelong yearning. Something of essence I learned there nonetheless; the presented, physical other does not necessarily correspond to the other the inward eye conjures up. The idea is more evanescent than the flesh. Or vice versa? Narrator: These four existentials – lived space, lived body, lived time and lived relationality – the lived other – may be distinguished from but not detached from one another. Together they form the entity which we call the life-world, our lived world. For purposes of analysis, however, we may temporarily subject these discrete aspects from differentiated standpoints, even though in its realisation each will inevitably evoke the others. (On this Narrator section see ibid., p. 105.) The first inward journey thus reaches its end, and part of the man-boy’s selfhood has been laid bare. Part, however, lies somewhere still concealed, and the business of constructing his narrative identity must be taken further. Our attention must turn now to a world already slipped away. An appraisal of memory and what has been can alone make possible the “narration” of the self which is yet to come. What in fact do I remember? Can I even claim that I remember?

O N C E I WA S

171

II. S E C O N D J O U R N E Y: M E M O R Y A S A P O S S I B L E C O M M O N P R E S E N C E O F S E L F W I T H S E L F PA S T

Narrator: Here too is an exchange between theoretician and man-boy. The approach may be crystallised in two aspects: (1) Where does the past reside? (2) What is and of what kind is the relationship between myself and (my) memories? Here as a fragment of what has been is a picture of a dance-stand which in actual fact no longer exists but which is etched indelibly in the manboy’s innermost, some kind of interiorised trace blazed on his being. A further essential element here is the idea of a lived milieu – together with a lived language, the primacy of the mother tongue. May this philosophical discourse thus commence.

( A ) AWA K E N I N G A N D E C S TA S Y Scholar: “Where are memories stored?” The question springs indubitably from an erroneous conception of the problem, an inept configuration of its aspects; as if memories were to be “banked” somewhere – as if for example the brain could stack them up. The brain, however, is a completely objective line: there can be no difference whatsoever between any other circumstances and the brain. There, after all, everything is movement, even as the pure movement the brain can define. (It would seem, nonetheless, that ‘movement’ must not be understood in the sense of constant motion but, on the contrary, as an instantaneous cross-section.) Memory, again, means part of the linear segment of subjectivity, and it is clearly absurd to confound the lines of subjectivity and objectivity in imagining the brain as a storage place, a substrate, for memory. Analysis of the line of subjectivity would moreover suffice to reveal that memory need not be stored anywhere else than in duration. Memory is thus stored in itself. That property of being preserved in itself would alone make us aware of the fact that inner experience in pure space relieves us of the search, even forbidding us to seek the storage-place of memories. Inner experience also furnishes us with the substance whose true nature subsists in being permanent and thus ever prolongs the imperishable past into the present. Memory itself “conserves” itself. Nor will we have much inclination to assume that what is past is stored up in the brain or anywhere else than in the past itself. Otherwise the brain in turn must be able to conserve itself. Likewise we would have to attribute this disputed capacity for conservation to the business in hand.

172

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Plate 7. “If I seek that dance-stand, the memory of it or of myself, does it flee me? And do I by the same token flee myself?”

Man-boy: I am looking at the boulder before the entrance to the stand. Sitting on that stone my mother awaited some event long before me. When I myself climbed onto it for the first time, with the dance-stand in mind, I remember wondering how what I perceived might have differed from what my parents saw. Same stand, different time, different people – is that all? Esteemed scholar, I take the liberty of altering slightly the question you posed, asking simply: “What are memories really made of?” Brain researchers are strongly of the opinion that the basis of all being is to be found specifically in the brain (see for a critique of brain research e.g. Puhakainen). So that must be the locus of my waiting-stone and dance-stand memories. In that case, though, my mother’s feminine memory must be different from mine, a masculine memory. Has my mother, then, “stored up” in her brain her own femininity and I in mine my being as a man? In that case we should also be justified in speaking of a suprasexuality: a woman’s brain forms an objective segment of femininity, a man’s its own objective line of masculinity. Perhaps this is why women so often claim that men’s brains are turned on a lathe. Well, no harm in a joke. Time is not yet, time is, and time just was. And throughout it all lives the experiencing subject – lifeless, alive and lived. The same applies to the dance-stand: first it is anticipated, then perceived, finally remembered. That place is thus a memory precisely because it has first been “imminent”, then “extant”, eventually to continue its being as what once was. The stand is thus

O N C E I WA S

173

conserved in its being as a dance-stand – it persists in its own pastness which lies within me. There is in fact no point in setting out in search of some particular locus in myself in which the dance-stand could have “hibernated” to await its next liberation. On the other hand one may perhaps speak in metaphorical vein of a capsule of experience which contains – among other things – that dancestand, the memory of it. The memory and the stand have themselves conserved themselves in their past duration, their own pastness, which is at the same time my past. I myself am the medium, the experiencing subject, who can bring that photograph to life – prolong the still extant past into the present. I can see through that dense thicket of time and am yet in the present moment; I am that dance-stand, and the dance-stand is me. Perhaps, then, we are also each “stored up” in the other? Scholar: We are now touching upon one of the most profound but least understood aspects of Bergsonism – the theory of memory. In nature there must be a difference between matter and memory, pure observation and things remembered, and between present and past – in precisely the same way as we distinguish between the lines of objectivity and subjectivity. We find it extremely difficult to understand the survival of the past in itself, believing as we do that the past has ceased to be. We have thus confused being and being present – the presence of being. The present moment – presence – does not after all exist; it consists rather in pure becoming, perpetually outside itself. The present is not; it subsists as action, influence. The most essential element of the immediate moment is not being but functioning, being of use. The past for its part has ceased to function, ceased to be of use; it has not, however, ceased to be. Useless and non-functional, unfeeling – at rest – the past is in the fullest sense of the word: it is one with immanence. We should not say that the past was, because that element which has slipped by consists in the indwelling of being in itself, where being is “conserved” in itself in contrast to the present, a mode from which being is brought to a conclusion and from which being sets itself outside itself. Up to a certain point the conventional definitions may be retained: of the present we must from moment to moment say that it “was”, and of the past that it “is” – perpetually for the future. A similar difference prevails in nature between past and present. This first aspect of Bergsonian theory would nevertheless lose its meaning if we fail to stress the exceptional nature of the concept. What Bergson terms pure memory has no psychological existence. Hence it is called virtual – ostensible, inactive and unconscious – all words fraught with danger, in particular unconscious, a notion which since the days of

174

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Freud has come to constitute an inseparable component above all in influential and active psychological existence. We have in fact an opportunity of comparing the Freudian with the Bergsonian unconscious, as Bergson himself has done so. We must nonetheless be clear on the following point: Bergson does not employ the term unconscious with reference to a psychological reality outside consciousness; he means a reality which is non-psychological – he means being as it is in itself. Strictly speaking the psychological implies the present – only the present moment is “psychological”, while the past means pure ontology. Pure memory thus has only ontological meaning. Man-boy: It is fashionable to speak of real-time reflection, the simultaneous instantaneous reflection of the present to the experiencing subject. In this, pure perception and pure memory are somewhat ineptly confused one with the other. Matter lies before the eye in the immediacy of the present; memory lies within, a trace of something experienced. If the past had altogether ceased to be, that dance-stand would also have vanished – literally without trace. It would be born again as I regard the photograph before me. Both stand and photograph would also disappear if I were, say, to burn them. What has its being in me continues to exist – but it is no longer physically present. I am not particularly inclined to embark upon a contemplation of the now popular problem of the existence of the present moment. More interesting – and more to the point – is to consider the nature of that dance-stand as a dancestand. In other words, if the immediately present moment entails a continuous process of becoming, the dance-stand nature of every perception of it would be “located” continually outside itself, before its own self. Sitting on that boulder listening to Slade some twenty years ago and more, I was waiting for an event, an arrival. The meaningfulness of that presence lay in its projecting the coming function of the dance-stand, establishing the possibility of meeting girls. The immediate moment helped me in mapping out my own future, choosing a “suitable” alternative. At this moment the stand and the memory of it are of the past, which is at least in a sense inactive; not however entirely, since it helps me to understand myself and thus to compile my narrative identity. Thus the past has indeed not vanished, never ceased altogether to be. That dance-stand and waiting-stone in the picture – where “are” they now? And in what sense “are” they? The matter may be presented in perhaps simplified form in the following propositions: 1) The stand is “stored up” in perpetuam in its own self, in its being in itself and its own having been. It is in being, it is of the past, and it is immobile. 2) Every time I saw the actual stand it “was” in each of those presences. Now all those presentations have taken their place as part of the ever extant past.

O N C E I WA S

175

3) The past “is” for the immediate present and particular for the future which still awaits its realisation. The past thus helps in the construction and understanding of what is yet to come. All these propositions apply equally to the waiting-stone. Pure memory (as part of the pure past?) may be defined in psychological terms as unconscious, non-extant – it lacks psychological existence. This is probably not the only lapse psychology in its complacency may be arraigned for. The dance-stand, too, would then lack existence, the element of continued presence. What then is the meaning of this essence of it which I bear in me? In point of fact the fascination of psychology for the present is itself entirely void of sense: the inherent evanescence of presence leaves no scope, for its only mode of being is of the past; it has been. The manner in which that dance-stand lies ever within me, as a memory, is of the utmost significance from the point of view of understanding: ontology gives its being sense and content. At the same time it lends meaning to my own being. The persisting past furnishes words for the way I am and the reason I am. The pure ontology of pure memory by the same token lays the foundation for an understanding of my becoming self – knowledge of whence I am and whither bound. The psychological present would thrust me out as a vagabond of my own being – a rootless statue which never had the opportunity to be. Scholar: We may at this point quote an eminently relevant locus in which Bergson draws up a summary of his whole theory. When we seek memories, they flee us: “We become aware of the unique – sui generis – act by which we detach ourselves from the present to relocate ourselves, first in the past in general, then in some particular area of it. The act resembles the adjustment of a camera, the lens being directed at, then focused on the desired object. Our memories remain for all that ostensible, virtual; we prepare ourselves simply to receive them in adopting an appropriate attitude. A little at a time they emerge, like a cloud condensing; and from the virtual mode of being they attain actuality, they become real.” Here once more we must beware of an excessively psychological construal of the text. Bergson is indeed referring to a psychological act. This act itself, however, is “sui generis” in that it has effected a genuine leap. We locate ourselves immediately in the past – we leap into it as into the right element. We do not perceive objects in ourselves but in the locations where they lie. In the same way we understand the past at whatever point it lies in itself. For this reason we do not understand the things of the past in ourselves, in our present. There is indeed a “past in general” which is no particular past to a particular present. “The past in general” resembles an ontological element: things gone which are eternal and for the future – condition for the passage of every given present moment – in perpetuam. It is the past in general which makes possible all pasts.

176

M AT T I I T K O N E N

According to Bergson we first set ourselves back in this past in general – this is how he describes our leap into ontology. In actual fact we leap into being – being-in-itself, the being-in-itself of the past. This entails rejection of psychology altogether. What is involved is ontological memory – Memory immemorial. Memory gradually assumes psychological existence only when that leap has been accomplished – “from virtual it becomes actual, real”. We have had to seek memory in a locus where its being is impassive; and at the same time we gradually accord it manifestation, embodiment, “psychologisation”. Stress must further be laid on the consistency of the foregoing notions with Bergson’s other writings. Bergson analyses language in the same way as memory. The way in which we understand what has been said to us is identical to the way we come to memory. At a remove from the sounds we hear and the meaning of the re-configurations we make on the basis of the images associated with them, we set ourselves at once in the element of meaning – and only then in some particular area of it. This, however, entails a true leap into being. Only then is meaning actualised in psychologically perceived (understood) sounds and the images which are psychologically associated with those sounds. There prevails here a certain transcendence of meaning and at the same time the ontological basis of language. The foundation outlined is of particular importance in Bergson’s work as a writer, in which the critique of language has been held to be exaggeratedly precipitate, even hasty. Man-boy: If I seek that dance-stand, the memory of it or of myself, does it flee me? In spite of Bergson’s scepticism I press on in my journey in time. I fix my gaze on that photograph, staring and staring at it; I place everything inessential in brackets and focus on those bygone days. I leap first into the pastin-general – or perhaps more to the point, into the has-been which continues to be – the past seems to be past, finished, seems to have ceased to be. (For a more detailed account of the distinction between ‘past’ and ‘has-been’ see esp. Heidegger, 2000, pp. 389–398.) I am standing in my place in another time; the desk that was formerly in front of me is gone. There is a smell of birch-leaves, somewhere the sound of running water. I look down; I am wearing real flared jeans, the over-long bottoms frayed, left on purpose below my heels. The shoes are brown and extremely thick-soled. I stand amid a seventies presentation, whose re-presentation the seventies revival in the fashions and partly in the music of the nineties constitutes. I sense the has-been, the aura of the former decade – an overall sense without specific focus. I narrow down my search; I focus myself and my consciousness on that summer when the dance-stand at Kämäri breathed life into itself and also came to life for that boy I once was. Perhaps I was re-born then into dawning manhood

O N C E I WA S

177

in my relationship to girls and femininity – this was my own gender-moment, a first step to maturity. And now as I revive them the sounds, the odours and the music flood in, suffuse me. To begin with I apprehend them only as some all-pervading sorrow, a source of longing. Then that nebulous aura begins to assume form; a face is delineated before my eyes, shining with a light of its own in the darkness (here I openly acknowledge my debt to Emmanuel Levinas). The long absence is filled with something – or rather, someone; the scar on being heals over, the virtual presence is actualised. I have leapt into that Saturday in the summer of my boyhood, into the photograph and onto the floor of the dance-stand. I have accomplished the psychological, or rather, phenomenological vault into my own realm of the has-been – and found myself face to face with my Sibylla. She regards me with her green eyes, and, seeing her now, I am existentially and corporeally at the point at which I stood that summer in the seventies. It seems I have also detached myself from the May of the year 2000, and I have dispelled that haze of that day – which in relation to the year 2000 is also an actual moment in the past. Perhaps this is an eternal moment – a moment in eternity – as an image of other such moments; through them any given present moment must have passed in order to take its place in the realm of what has been. An immemorial point, the meaning of whose existence lies in being for the future. Only thus can my world of the has-been, my past – or those of any fellow-being – have become possible. Now Sibylla speaks: my Memory (capitalised after the manner of the Scholar) is awakening. “When you are a grown-up you will probably be a gentleman with a walking-stick and a stylish peaked cap” – thus my future is mapped out for me. I revert for a moment to the present and glance into my wardrobe: I do not possess a walking-stick nor a peaked cap. Perhaps for all that I can pass as a gentleman – or a man of the people. Now I return to ontological Memory; and now I am indeed no longer only in the realm of the has-been as such – that can be at anyone’s disposal – but indubitably in that pastness which has coursed through this my life. “Perhaps I will smoke fat cigars too?” I answer. “And I’m far far away”, Slade sings. Sibylla looks at me with such intensity that my neck begins to prickle. We dance Slade’s piece to the end. I sense the warmth against myself and a strange feeling assails me; I am a boy, and that there in front of me is a girl. Who has taken it upon themselves to decree our coming together, as if for each other? Even now I feel the agitation – impassive memory is indeed now suffused with being. It has taken on body in the girl on my arm. This is no longer anything virtual, it is fascinating, enchanting being. The golden thread of my youth once more flares up in me.

178

M AT T I I T K O N E N

The mother-tongue is in its primacy an existential: truly lived language. I would claim that the language of love, too, qualifies as lived. One might say that I was on that evening “amorously” tuned. Now tracking down the experiences of language I had in those days I leap first into the general love rhetoric of early youth: books and films, magazines, had furnished some kind of model, some kind of paradigm of love-talk. Then suddenly I was hearing the same kind of words from the lips of a living being. “You interest me, I could perhaps fall in love with you” – Sibylla drops it like a bombshell, out of the blue. I blush from head to foot. Slade, the innocent green of early summer, the day unending – now I am within something, in its midst. I stand on the ground of this element of love: Sibylla’s voice, Noddy Holder’s song and the promise of summer awaken a powerful experience of being. I live this new language intensely with my whole body; mere words are definitely not enough. We speak to each other in the language of youth and love. We come together and for the first time I transcend my corporeal immanence; in this moment I know the difference between empty words and lived language. My existential ontology has a name – Sibylla. And at the same time I became acquainted with the absolute other – and with my own manboyhood.

(B) TRACES OF YOUTH Scholar: We must set ourselves in the past immediately, in a leap, in one stride. Such an almost Kierkegaardian notion of a leap is alien to a philosopher like Bergson, seen as he is to be so attached to the idea of continuity. What are we to make of this? Bergson never tires of saying: “You will never re-arrange the past in keeping with present things – whatever those things may be.” A picture – the photograph here – will not purely and simply restore us to the past unless we truly seek that picture in the past. It is true that the past would seem to be caught up between two presents: its own original present which once was, and the actual present for which it constitutes the past. This conception has, however, led to two erroneous assumptions: (1) we believe that the past as such has come to be only in having once been the present, and (2) we also believe that the past has in some way remoulded itself on the basis of the present moment whose past it now constitutes. These two misconceptions lie at the core of all psychology and all psychological theories of memory. If we allow such assumptions to stand we

O N C E I WA S

179

must take it that memory and perception differ only in degree. To do so is to confound ourselves in an inadequately analysed configuration – the very projection which constitutes psychological reality. The conception does thus contain within it something of those areas in which we must have sought the memory realised or embodied in the picture; it does not, however, actualise that memory without accommodating it to the requirements of the present. The picture is taken to be preparing the present moment of that memory for something, to become something. Hence we obfuscate with simplistic differences of degree between the images of perception and memory the qualitative differences which obtain between present and past and between pure perception and pure memory. We are all too well accustomed to think in a mode “brought into line with the present” – we imagine that the present moment is past only when it has been displaced by another present. Let us pause for a moment, however, and consider: How would a new present come about if the former present did not secede simultaneously with its presence? How could any single present moment pass if it were not at once past and present? The past could never be constituted if it had not been constructed first of all in being simultaneously the present. Here lies the fundamental postulate of time and the profoundest paradox of memory; the past is “simultaneous” with the present which it has itself once been. If the past had not tarried in ceasing to exist, if it were not immediately and now what it is when once withdrawn – the past-in-general – it could never become what it is: it would never be that particular past. If it were not constructed in immediacy, it could not be reconstructed on the basis of a subsequent, coming present. The past could not be reconstituted if it were not co-present with the immediate moment whose past it is. Past and present do not mean two succeeding moments but two moments which subsist simultaneously: one is the present moment, which never ceases to elapse, the other the past, which never ceases to be but through which each present moment proceeds. In precisely this sense there is a pure past, some kind of past-in-general. The past does not come after the present but is, on the contrary, the premiss for the present, a pure space without which the present moment would not elapse. In other words, every present moment reverts to itself as a past. The only thesis commensurate with this is Plato’s concept of Reminiscence. By the same token memory confirms the existence of the pure past, its being in itself, ontological Memory, which is capable of serving as a basis for the unravelling of time. Here once more the Platonic inspiration makes itself profoundly manifest in Bergson’s thought.

180

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Plate 8. “The direction of the presentation lies from the present ever deeper into the layers of my former being. The woman cycling is bound from the sediment of bygone days towards presence”

Man-boy: I have moved directly into the past, vaulted back into the days when the old timber-built town of Varkaus was approaching its demise. There were now two channels on television, and the Hurriganes had already recorded Get on. I had bought myself a Yamaha Lightweight. So now I have taken that leap in time, as an existential adult. I have before me a picture showing houses – named Suontaus I and II, number I being further back – which have since been simply pulled down, cleared out of the way of development. The one and only objective was modernisation. Were I to walk that way now, along the Savo road, I would see on the site of those dwellings the two-storeyed red-brick factory building of Honeywell Measurex. How, then, has this leap of mine into the past in fact been feasible? Even if I were to stand behind the Honeywell boundary fence three days in a row, what once was there would not be restored to the present – any more than a mere photograph can bring the wooden houses back to life. The only way to accomplish anything essential here is to set myself “on the spot”.

O N C E I WA S

181

Astride my Yamaha I ride along the Savo road – on my way to the cinema to see the new Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me. Now the film is over and the voice of Carly Simon rings in my head: “Nobody Does It Better”. Must we assume, then, that the reality of the film exists somewhere between that moment and the writing of this? Trapped somehow between these two points in time? In other words must I now assume that that moment on the Yamaha on the Savo road with the wooden houses that were is in being only because it was once a present moment to me? And has this current moment of writing re-moulded the past of the photograph before me? Has it breathed life into it again? We must presumably answer the foregoing questions in the negative. Once more the bogey of psychologism raises its head: memory and perception are apparently being confused again. If I now attempt to re-awaken this photograph with help from my actual present, my Yamaha reality of those days “merges” into this presence. I am perhaps telling myself my own story in the most favourable possible form. I am not actually lying but altering what is vague or negative in it into a more positive guise. It may be that I am also seeking to enhance my prestige in the eyes of others. I am treating this content in the same way as I do my present perceptions, conjuring up some kind of half-true flashback. My past self presenting itself in an idealised update, an embodied overlay of what is, what was, what never was and what I would like to have been. In other words, are those wooden houses and my Yamaha existence the past only because this present moment of writing is located in the year 2000? My updated presence has displaced and substituted for that past of the Savo road – what conclusions does that allow me to draw? As I contemplated the sites of those dwellings from the saddle of my motorbike, that present moment was already slipping into the past. The past can only be in being first present time – and being in the same its own past; simultaneous existentiality means that my past self is contemporaneous with my present self, since that self that has slipped away has also been my present self. My being of yore means my past self in general which my present self has become as it “lapses”. I regard the picture before me and am contemporaneous with a certain particular self that once was. In this way my coming self, too, the prediction of myself, may contain in it that being that was and the being of this present. All three selves in time are indeed co-present to each other. There are in fact two essential selves in time: the ever-ageing present self “exiting the stage”, and the permanent self-that-was to which every present self is linked. There is – or must be – some kind of self-that-was for each present self to exist and thus leave its own presence. Each one of my present selves – each born of myself – returns to itself, to my pure “self-that-was”. This “pure”

182

M AT T I I T K O N E N

entity is, as it were, an ontological Ideal Self: a permanent emanation of my past self – the substrate from which each of my fleeting present selves is born and to which each also reverts – into which each “dies”. This anamnestic self quite simply ever is, only without ever receiving corporeal manifestation. For all that it is the pre-condition for the Yamaha self-that-was. Scholar: The notion of the contemporaneity of present and past has one ultimate implication: not only is the past simultaneous with the present that has already slipped by; in conserving itself within itself (at the same time as the present lapses) it comprises an overall, complete past. What is involved is our entire past, which subsists contemporaneous with all present moments. The well-known metaphor of the cone illustrates this overall space of co-presence. Such a space, however, ultimately implies that in the past itself there subsist a diversity of ever deeper levels reflecting every possible moment of that contemporaneity.

A

B

A'

B'

B"

A"

P S

Figure 1. The overall space of co-presence

O N C E I WA S

183

The past AB is co-present with current time S, containing however within itself all the stratifications of the past A’B’, A’B” and so on. These planes indicate purely imaginary degrees of proximity or distance in relation to the present S. Each of these areas is in itself ostensible, virtual, in belonging to the being-in-itself of the past. None of them contains particular elements of the past but always the totality of the past. This they contain in levels to some extent either expanded or limited, and at precisely this point of confluence ‘contraction Memory’ coincides with ‘recollection Memory’ and in a sense “takes over”. It may thus be concluded that Bergsonian duration is defined in the last analysis by sequentiality and not simultaneity. In Time and Free Will duration is indeed defined in terms of sequentiality – contemporaneities refer back into space – while by the power of novelty repetition refers backwards in Matter. Upon more profound analysis, however, duration is seen to subsist in sequentiality only in relative terms (as we have also observed that it is indivisible only relatively speaking). Duration does indeed mean sequentiality, but in the fullest sense only in that it means ostensible simultaneity; the co-presence of all levels with themselves at each expansion and contraction and at every degree of détente. In this way, together with simultaneity – co-presence – repetition must be restored to duration. What is involved here is a model of “psychic” repetition diverging completely from “physical” repetition, rather the recurrence of levels than of discrete elements in them – rather virtual than actual repetition. When our entire past is “played out” it begins again, repeats itself simultaneously at all of the levels it configures. Let us return to the leap we make – in our search for memory – when we set ourselves at one stride back in the past. Bergson envisages it as proceeding first into the past-in-general and then to some particular area in the past. This must not be taken to mean that one zone contains certain of the elements of the past, some given memories, in contrast to another area which contains different memories. The point is that there are discrete levels, each of which contains our past in its entirety, only in a somewhat contracted form. In precisely this sense it is possible to speak of areas of being in themselves, of ontological zones of the past in general, all of which are in being at one and the same time, each “repeating” the other. (On these comments of the Scholar see Deleuze, pp. 54–61.) Man-boy: The notion of the superimposition and concentricity of my selvesin-time is extremely fascinating. That overall self that has been contains the totality of my past fates, my provenance in its entirety. My current self is in fact replete – crammed full – with my former beings. All the days I have lived or left unlived are present in my every actual perception. This is my being of yore in all its extent, in uncontracted guise.

184

M AT T I I T K O N E N

The direction of the photographed scene here lies from the present ever deeper into the stratified layers of my former being – the woman in the picture is cycling out of the sedimented substrate of life past and towards presence. In the background is a kiosk, and alongside it a playing-field. Following the road further we come to the kindergarten I went to. The chart of my being nears completion: 1) AB designates the time which lies beyond the photograph – those days when I made my way, moneybag stowed safely in my satchel, to the Kommila kindergarten (as it was called in the language of the time). I managed the journey well on my thick-tyred minibike, which matched up to all my dreams of the new and extra-special. This particular contraction Memory might be called my Agostini self. 2) A’B’ brings me a step closer to the present in the history of my being. Now I am attending a proper school and I am standing at the counter of the Empo kiosk there buying myself some Moonflight chewing-gum. Apollo 11 has landed up there and taken me with it on a long voyage into space. Collection of the picture-cards I am still missing requires not only a bit of luck but a measure of business instinct: with the right set of swaps it is easy to make tempting offers for rarer items. This contraction Memory might be called my Neil Armstrong self. 3) A”B” brings me ever closer to the lens of this time camera probing out of the present. We are in the late eighties; I have just gained my Master’s degree and this is my gala night. Gone is the kiosk, the wooden dwellings; everywhere about me I am confronted with the glass and concrete blocks of the seventies; modernisation demands plain smooth walls and sharp angles. I am no longer at home here; my contraction Memory might best bear the name Alienation. 4) I am now at the apex S of my cone of time: in that present which as I finish this sentence is already of the past. The plane P represents my subjective world-view, my conception of the universe. At this existential spearhead, my present self, is gathered my picture of reality – one aspect of plane P. Let this memory – or perception – be called my Evanescent self. Recollection Memory is that ontological Memory whose more limited components contraction Memories constitute. One might thus say that level AB contains in itself fewer elements of my being than A”B”. On the other hand AB stretches far further back into my past being than A”B”. Now as I regard the photograph and execute my leap to some particular point in my past, the moment A’B’, for example, together with all the preceding elements it contains, is repeated. Contemporaneity is part of memory in itself: reiteration is inevitably associated with every new perception in the present. If I set out to return to the ever-extant past as a “game of presence”, my act of perception

O N C E I WA S

185

must be able to repeat every former element of past being that I see in the photograph, always at a certain point – simultaneous with the entire prior history of my being. AB contains the thinnest “tranche de ma vie”, since it lies furthest away, deepest in my history. A”B” also reiterates A’B’ and AB; thus all previous elements in my ontological being are simultaneously present at point S in my Evanescent self. It is nonetheless impossible to attain to any particular zone without first shifting into the totality of things past. It might further be said in jest that I am existentially at my fattest at point S – and at the level AB I appear at my thinnest – a mere sliver of being.

III. T H I R D J O U R N E Y: R E A L D U R AT I O N A N D P E R C E P T I O N OF THINGS TO COME

Narrator: My journeys so far have taken me back into what has been. How is the situation altered when I reach out into the dimension of being yet to come? Outlines of the future look invariably to some kind of as-it-were world, an existentiality sensed and foreseen. Is prediction, accurate prognostication, at all possible? A kind of internal dialogue now proceeds on the pattern of proposition and response. The claims are put forward by the philosopher Matti from the standpoint of the scholar, together with a consideration of the nature of the capacity requisite for prediction. Matti’s interlocutor is his lesser known self, his alter ego named Tapani. My philosopher self moves for the most part in the present, the time-traveller chiefly in the realm of what has been – or is that now the past? The lived scene is as before the Savo road with its wooden houses in the town of Varkaus. Now, however, the camera looks out of the strata of things gone by into what lies ahead. The woman in the picture is walking out of Matti’s lived past towards Tapani’s anticipated future, the mode of his being not yet embodied. (See also esp. Itkonen, 1999b, pp. 35–83; 2002a; 2002b; 2002c; 2002d; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; 2005a; 2005b.) Let the dialogue commence. Proposition: By way of approaching our problem, let us imagine an experiencing self who is faced with the task of reaching an ostensibly free decision in serious circumstances. Let us say this is Tapani. The question now is, could the philosopher Matti – living contemporaneously with Tapani, or possibly a few decades earlier, have been capable of knowing all the circumstances and conditions in which Tapani would be acting? Could Matti thus have predicted with certainty all the choices Tapani would make? There are any number of ways in which we may describe – or imagine some individual’s state of mind at any given moment. We try to do this for example

186

M AT T I I T K O N E N

when reading a novel; and no matter how much trouble the writer has gone to in depicting his hero’s emotions and following up the details of his life as they unfold, the end of the book – anticipated or unforeseen – will inevitably add something to the conception we have formed of this figure. This character, then, is after all only partly familiar. In reality, on the other hand, the deep psychic states which explain our free actions find outlet in them and sum up our entire past history. If Matti now knows the circumstances in which Tapani functions, we must assume that no single detail of Tapani’s life will escape his notice. We must also assume that in such a situation Matti’s imagination will reconstruct and even relive Tapani’s whole history. Here, however, we must draw one essential distinction. When we experience some psychic state ourselves we know precisely the intensity of that state and its significance in relation to other states. We are not apprised of this by means of any measurement or comparison; we know because for example the intensity of a deep emotion subsists in nothing but that emotion in itself. If, on the other hand, we attempt to describe this psychic state to others, we will find it impossible to get them to grasp the nature of its intensity except by means of precise mathematical symbols. We must measure the significance of the state and compare it with preceding and subsequent states. In short, we must define the part that state – and its meanings – play in the final act. We have to say that it is of varying intensity, varying significance, whether the final act is explained by it or not. Our own consciousness, however, in becoming aware of this inward state, felt no need for any such comparisons; the intensity of it was given to our perceptions as a quality emanating from the state itself and not amenable to formulation in words. Thus the ‘potency’ of a psychic state is not given to consciousness as a symbol accompanying it and indicating its power like an exponent in algebra. The foregoing, then, brings out the fact that a psychic state is in reality a manifestation of its own shadow, its own inherent quality. At the same time we note that the intensity of an emotion consists in the amenability of that emotion to experience. We must indeed distinguish two modes of appreciating the states of consciousness of another individual: 1) a dynamic approach, where one experiences the other’s state oneself, and 2) a static approach, in which the other’s states of mind are substituted with a depiction of them or rather an intellectual symbolisation, an idea of them. In the latter case states of consciousness are imagined instead of being reiterated. Such an image of psychic states in themselves must, however, be incremented with some indication, some sign of their intensity, since they are no longer ‘in force’ in the mind of the person they are being attributed to. The person imagining them is no longer in a position to experience their intensity in being himself truly subject to it. Hence any indication of it must inevitable

O N C E I WA S

187

assume a quantitative nature, attesting for example that certain emotions are fraught with greater profundity than some others. At the same time it is felt that the stronger emotion calls for closer attention since it has played a more significant role. And how can this be known without prior knowledge of that other’s entire subsequent history? The whole of his history would after all have to be known – every detail of its unfolding whereby or wherein this multiplicity of states or inclinations has come to fruition.

Plate 9. “Still we stand, my Tapani self and I, waiting for our friend in front of the old house; fragrance of spring, the sun blazing down on us. Perhaps there is a God after all”

Response: I am standing in front of the old house, leaning against a metal transformer box, waiting for my friend to come out. We are going fishing on the rapids at Kämäri. Eleven years old, we start at different schools next autumn – he has chosen intermediate and I am going to the Co-ed Lyceum. What of that? Perhaps nothing more than a difference in names. The journey into future time thus commences a step in front of the woman walking there with her bag; she is just coming up to the spot where I stand by the transformer. When my alter ego chose to go to the Lyceum – having passed the entrance exam – he chose a great many things besides – this completely unawares. The old school was owned entirely by the Ahlström concern,

188

M AT T I I T K O N E N

and from it the ways parted; gentlemen this way, workers that – the children were heir to their parents’ social standing, mere adjuncts willy nilly (see also Itkonen, 2000, p. 4). Those wooden houses and their environment were working-class domain. This notwithstanding I was entering an emphatically right-wing and ostensibly liberalist elite school. I was quite simply proud of my achievement and oblivious to the “side-effects” my decision might possibly incur. And so, from this point where will Tapani take his way? I might set as the objective in this stage of my journey, its philosophical goal, an outlining, an account, of an autobiographical “Bildungsnovelle” – perhaps one might speak of a narrative journey into the self. The notion of a Novelle, of course, suggests an attempt at predictive accuracy, and here it must be acknowledged that the future can hold surprises, turns one cannot expect. I am still standing there leaning against that transformer – at my ease, nonchalant – my mind filled with a happiness that does not show. I look now at that boy and wonder: What does that expectant face regard? Tapani, what dreams? If I were to read someone else’s account of my alter ego’s life I might not be able to accept everything it brought out. My memory might be selective; or that other narrator’s perceptions might be too bogged down in subjective premisses of his own. What further complicates the matter is the requirement that this account be written prospectively, that it map out things to come. Let us imagine, then, that I pick up the threads of (my) story from that moment in front of the old house. It is then erased from my memory, and is not restored to me to read until the year 2006. The first chapter or act is confined to my schooling and the various possibilities it holds. Tapani, my other self, is starting at the Lyceum, where one can go on to matriculate provided one gets into the higher grade. Performance in the entrance exam gives the teachers some conception of their pupils in advance, likewise the letter of recommendation from the Ahlström school, which would doubtless also contain references to their parents’ financial status. By no means a poor start even if not the best. The milieu is industrial – paper and cellulose turned out here from at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Presumably, then, Tapani like the rest will choose the safe course and go on via middle school – later the comprehensive – to vocational training. In that world a young chap has no particular reason to try for the higher grade. Later Tapani will fill out his training at the Walter Ahlström technical and make his way up to the foreman. But now: at the end of the Novelle the truth is revealed; the outline turns out to be completely wrong, the pattern taken all too readily for granted. I have known my alter ego only in part – what have I missed, and why? I must try again. That expectant look on Tapani’s face must after all be inspired by the other visions than the prospect of following in his fathers’ footsteps. Perhaps he

O N C E I WA S

189

will shake off the dust of the past as school proceeds. The lyceum is a school with traditions – founded in 1919, when the bloodstains of the Civil War had faded and the Red parasites had been rooted out. The language line offered ample choice – English, German, French and Russian. At Ahlström Tapani has been the only one in the class to get tens in English. What if he goes on after comprehensive and takes languages at the higher grade. That would also mean short maths and no technical courses. Heavens above, that would set him on course for a humanist education! Perhaps the young dreamer has his eye on university, studies in literature and Finnish; then the way would be open to a doctorate – if necessary more than one. The pride my Tapani self takes in having gained entrance to the lyceum is not to be measured in centimetres or grammes; that feeling can only be lived through, simply experienced. The pride and contentment are nevertheless so potent than abandonment of the traditional vocational path is in fact no great wonder. Just the same, humanistic studies and a doctor’s degree – nothing in the history of that youngster or the milieu of Varkaus as he has lived it gives cause to presage such a course. His upbringing throughout has stressed modesty and humility – virtues not to be dismissed and trampled underfoot. Each must learn to know his limits. With some reservations, then, the dreamer’s gaze is directed to university and the humanities. In the upheavals of the 1970s the intermediate becomes part of the new basic school system. Tapani steps up the pace and concentrates ever more on his homework. If anyone were to ask what store the young schoolboy set by study and learning, the easiest answer would be marks 10 out of 10 – clear enough to convince even the most pedantic stickler. Or perhaps the word ‘infinite’ might be a better rating – that would be a high enough number to discourage contradiction. It would then be easy to set the coming graduation against this moment and say complacently: “Didn’t I say at the time that this young fellow will go far.” My alter ego evidently enjoys school; learning new things affords him pleasure. Exam results tell their own story and go to vindicate the chosen course. Not that the matter is so simple that his sources of pleasure could be listed in order – for example 1) fishing, 2) school, 3) sports and 4) the cinema. The feeling is born quite simply of what one happens to be doing at the time and how intensively one throws oneself into it. There is no symbol or indicator to register the zeal for school, the passion for fishing and so on. My Matti self likewise has surely no red lamp or the like which flashes on the moment he steps into school. No words are needed when a new language opens up the experiential landscape that lies behind a piece by Slade; there is simply the sense of an expanding world and a fervent desire to learn more. The sky alone is the limit – where will this road still lead?

190

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Such enthusiasm is possible if there is opportunity for it – and then of course the experience of its enchantment from within. In order to be able to imagine the feelings of my alter ego I have to live through them myself. This dynamic procedure would confer upon me the further potential to give a veritable account of the content of my experience. In the other approach, the static, I would be fooled into settling for a symbol or idea in place of the actual experience, intellectualising the true touch of the world. Now I can move only in some kind of as-it-were dimension and imagine the visions and dreams behind the schoolboy’s hazy eyes. I must insert my Tapani half into the various phases of his own future – for example leaving the comprehensive, celebrating matriculation, gaining a Master’s degree. It would also be necessary to make some kind of quantitative difference between those various impacts still ahead. Perhaps prime place ought to be accorded to matriculation and least significance to completion of the intermediate level. In this way the mutual order of the forces working upon Tapani’s fate would also be manifest to outsiders. My whole construct would nevertheless remain pure speculation (like futurology in general?), had I not known all that myself in advance. When the young Tapani sets his student’s cap on his head the fervour of blossoming youth must be felt – nominal presence alone is a lie, gets us nowhere. Proposition: To what was put forward in the first proposition must now be added this: if Matti is to have an appropriate conception of Tapani’s state of mind at any given moment in his history, only two ways are open to him: 1) Like a novelist – knowing what paths and ends he has proscribed for his characters – Matti must know in advance the last scene of Tapani’s story and thus be able to fill in his mental picture of the successive states through which his counterpart must go. This incrementation must be accomplished be referring repeatedly to the significance of those states in relation to Tapani’s whole history. 2) Matti must make up his mind to experience these various states, not in imagination but in reality. The first of these hypotheses must be set on one side, because the real core of the question is whether Matti – on the basis solely of the given phases previously unfolding – is able to foresee the final act. We find now that we must radically alter the conception we have formed of him; he is not – as we initially imagined – a spectator, an observer, whose eyes see through time into the future. Matti is an actor who plays Tapani’s part in advance. We must further bear in mind that Matti cannot be relieved of one jot in this role; even the most mundane events are of significance in a life story. Even if we assume that the commonplace is of no importance in itself, we still cannot conclude that it is of significance only in relation to the final act. The hypothetical denouement, we remember, has not been given. Nor have we the right to interrupt – even for

O N C E I WA S

191

a second – any one of the various states of consciousness Matti passes through before Tapani. Continuity is of the essence, since for example the effects of one and the same emotion continue to accumulate through every moment of duration. The ultimate outcome of these effects could not be appreciated all at once without knowledge of the significance of that emotion – apprehended in its entirety – in relation to the final act – and precisely that is assumed to remain unknown. If, however, Tapani and Matti have experienced the same emotions in identical order, if they share the same psychic history, how shall we distinguish one from the other? Shall it be by the body in which those minds reside? or by the location they occupy in time? If so, they would no longer be present at the same events; yet now they have hypothetically a common past and a common present, a mutuality of experience. There are indeed two matters we must decide: Tapani and Matti are one and the same person – which do call Tapani when he acts, and which is Matti when we draw up a summary of his history? The more completely we fill out the main contents of those conditions which – once known – would have made it possible for us to predict Tapani’s future actions, the closer our understanding will have approached to his existence. At the same time we would come ever closer to living his life once over in its every smallest detail. In this way we would attain to the actual point where – as some action proceeds – nothing remains to be seen, or known, in advance; only something to be done. Likewise every attempt to construct ideally a truly intended act comes down to mere witnessing of the act as it is implemented or when it has already been accomplished. Response: The second chapter of this Novelle of identity might be associated with religion and relationship with God. My Tapani self set out from a milieu in which everything was customarily taken – accepted as given. This was particularly the case in the sphere of religion. (See also esp. Itkonen, 1999a.) What would have been Tapani’s probable development in respect of “religiosity”? If I were to write a tentative account of this side of me, in all likelihood – given the historical situationality of the background – the course would have been the following: (1) attendance at Evangelical Lutheran denominational instruction throughout school, (2) Confirmation at 15, (3) participation in obligatory (official) Church events, (4) Church wedding with the confirming minister officiating, (5) due payment of Church tax, and (6) burial in sanctified ground, possibly under the shadow of the church he was baptised in. That would be the entire script, set out and entitled appropriately ‘Tapani’s pilgrimage’. Chapter titles would follow the list above. As the protagonist stands on the verge of the cemetery where his fathers lie, all the essential phases would

192

M AT T I I T K O N E N

have been passed through; the mind at rest, taking easy farewell, looking back on a life well lived. Or is that how it would be? If one is familiar with my counterpart’s religious history for example up to the summer of his confirmation, is it possible to predict the final phases of the plot to their close? This at least is certain; he has lain in bed alone, hands folded on the eiderdown – that ensures untrammeled access to Heaven, the suppliant’s every childlike jingle heard, and peaceful the sleep that is blessed. Indeed I could not represent myself as an observer of my other self whose presaging would cleave the mists of future time. That would make me some kind of stand-in for the protagonist, my own existential stuntman playing out Tapani’s role in advance. The script would need to correspond completely to the as yet unrealised life-course of my Tapani half; I could not overlook a single detail nor depart one step from the track. Nonetheless only the closing scene will reveal the ultimate truth; the accumulation of insights and certain emotional contents is an essential part of the path to be trodden. Not one interruption is permitted. Even if the final product is an out-and-out atheist, every preceding interlude must have played its part. The entity without the unbroken continuum of its parts remains wanting – and the mystery that is Tapani will not be solved. If I succeed in planting my steps in every single print my other half has left, I will have approached very close to an understanding of being. I have the feel of the hard church benches, and the all-pervading sense of shared loneliness. Awed wonderment raises questions, ever more of them, that go unanswered. Have we one and the same body? and mind? Or else as an undivided whole we would be Matti-Tapani and Tapani-Matti – both at once and each his own. Which name used would net smack of deceit, dishonesty? All that would remain would be our common decisions: withdrawal from the Church, marriage at the Registrar’s and cremation. Still we stand, my Tapani self and I, waiting for our friend in front of the old house; fragrance of spring, the sun blazing down on us. Perhaps there is a God after all. Proposition: It is in fact irrelevant to ask: “Is it or is it not possible to envision an act in advance, given as it were as the result of its precedents and previous stages?” There are, namely, two possible ways of assimilating these former phases, the one dynamic, the other static. 1) The dynamic approach: We are led by unapprehended steps to identify ourselves with some other with whom we are involved. Unawares we are induced to pass through, experience, the same sequence of states as that “companion” of ours, and so we arrive back at the very moment in which some act is accomplished. There is thus no possibility whatsoever of our having envisioned that act in advance. 2) The static approach: We assume in advance, anticipate, the final scene by dint simply of conjoining the qualitative description of prior states and a

193

O N C E I WA S

quantitative assessment of the significance of those states. Here likewise one partner is induced simply to realise that the act is not yet accomplished when it is still in the undertaking; the other is led to see that once accomplished, the act is over. Once more, as above, the question of freedom is left exactly where it first arose. Proceeding even further into this dual argumentation we find, at the heart of the matter, two basic illusions of reflective consciousness: Illusion A: The dynamic procedure entails the deluded assumption that intensity fervour, may be regarded as a mathematical property of psychic states, and not a peculiar quality of them, a nuance specific to them. Illusion B: In this second case the concrete reality or dynamic development, progression – as understood in consciousness – is substituted by a material symbol of that progression once the living sequence has come to its end. In other words progression is replaced by an accomplished act together with the procession of its former states. When the last scene is concluded we can presumably attribute the blame or praise for former states to their peculiar significance and imagine the interplay of these fluctuating elements as a conflict or a gathering of forces. To ask whether the last scene can be predicted by knowing the preceding phases as well as their significance is to avoid the question; it means forgetting the fact that we cannot know the significance of former states without knowing the import of the last – and this is the very knowledge we do not yet possess. It is an erroneous assumption that a symbolical diagram which we devise in our own way to represent completed action is drawn as that action proceeds and, what is more, automatically drawn by the action itself. These two aforesaid illusions must now also be seen to entail a third, for we must acknowledge that the question of seeing or not seeing the ultimate denouement in advance reverts invariably to the problem of whether time is space. Let us approach this by placing alongside each other in some ideal space the states of consciousness which follow upon one another in Tapani’s mind. We may then envisage his life as a kind of path, MOXY, which the corporeal entity M lays out as it moves in space.

Y M O Figure 2.

The path of life lived through

X

194

M AT T I I T K O N E N

We might then mentally obliterate the OXY section of the curve and ponder whether, knowing MO, we could map out the OX fragment of the curve which the moving body depicts beyond O. This primarily is the question we pose when we “introduce” the philosopher Matti, who lives before Tapani and who must imagine for himself the conditions Tapani acts in. We thus “sensualise” those conditions: we bring to the path already marked across the plateau the element of time, and we can survey that plateau with its pathway from a prominence even through we have not passed that way ourselves nor ever will. Now, however, we soon realise that knowledge of the segment MO would not suffice unless we had been shown the positions of the points on the line – not only in relation to each other but in the framework of the whole sequence MOXY. This would entail the prior givenness of those very elements which we are to define. We must thus alter our hypothesis: we understand that time need not be seen, it must be lived. And when we therefore conclude that if our knowledge of the MO segment was inadequate, the reason must lie in the following error: we appraised our “pathway” from without instead of identifying ourselves with point M, which depicts not only MO but the entire course, and thereby making the movement our own. Let us then persuade Matti to make an appearance and live contemporaneous with Tapani; then the line MOXY is naturally the very path which Matti blazes in space, since presumably Tapani depicts this line. We can in no way, however, prove that Matti foresaw Tapani’s course of action. We may only show that Tapani acted the way he did when once Matti became Tapani. True, we thus unwittingly revert to our earlier hypothesis in that we are constantly confounding the line MOXY which we are supposed to be mapping out with a line MOXY already completed; we are confusing time with space. Having called Matti down to identify himself with Tapani for as long as necessary we may now dismiss him and take up our earlier vantage-point. It is no wonder if Matti can grasp that line MOXY in its entirety – he was a moment ago himself engaged in completing it. (On all propositions see Bergson, pp. 139–144; see also Bachelard; Itkonen 2006a; 2006b.) Response: In the third chapter we might do well to consider the matter of manliness, its achievement. What then the hallmark of the manly man? Is there any existential rite of passage to its accomplishment? I consider the houses in the photograph and recall that in each and every one of them resided the ideal of physical endurance – a true hero was he who would work himself off his feet. Burn-out and problems of the psyche – they did not exist, one hushed them up. My Tapani half has been furnished with a model for physical manhood; little by little he has been cornered into the head-of-the-house way of thinking. Coming up to the time for choice of a future the set-up is in fact somewhat awry: a humanistic education and the quest for intellectual capital have not

O N C E I WA S

195

been accorded the status they deserve. Everything so far has been contrived to initiate him into the world of physical labour. If my Tapani self partakes of that collective male consciousness, the choice has been made for him in advance. Is it a question indeed of being a mere adjunct to one’s own precedents, the inevitable culmination of a process immemorial. Of the neighbours’ sons four out of five made their way to manhood by dint of manual labour, hands calloused, the dirt ingrained under their fingernails. My alter ego could easily be imagined among that majority – no great amount of anticipation would be required, one would simply be noting the prevailing state of affairs. The act of choosing would be accomplished before any planning stage, my Tapani’s allotted part would be simply to ratify the draft and execute the project. Any freedom would be for appearance sake. Now is the time for disclosure, unravelling of illusions. My Tapani half should in all common sense loathe poems and the idea of reading them, and the intensity of his loathing should only be exacerbated with growing manhood, raised to the power according with anticipated maturing. It is much to be desired that Tapani uphold the traditions of his fathers and drop such silliness at the latest at the higher grade. Time then to be interesting himself in engines and technology. Deepening disgust keeps pace with the maturing years which sharpen the mind to distinguish between what matters and what does not. The ideal culmination of this progression is fore-ordained – the quality of this manliness is defined in relation to whether it is achieved or not. A man can become a man only by flaunting his manhood. What if all such assumptions prove misplaced? If the final outcome turns out to be completely at odds with what was anticipated, the conflict must arise from something other than the influence of provenance. Or must it? Perhaps after all the rebellion springs from resentment of that ready-made history of other consciousnesses, the self bridling at the prospect of being a mere marionette. Only at the stage when my Tapani half is setting out on his studies in literature and Finnish can we begin to analyse the significance of those earlier phases. And here the element of hindsight creeps in. The chart of my being may inevitably be mapped partly in advance; nor does my alter ego resemble the demiurge, artificer of his world as he moves through it. Some of the choices are already made – the atmosphere of the times he lives in, gender, home background and the like. Does his existential temporality constitute space? This is a matter calling for particularly thorough consideration. My Tapani self may be seen as some kind of charting device logging its own course on the map of his being. As the journey proceeds a number of stagingpoints can be discerned, halts along the path of his life – O would mark the beginning of his studies, X his marriage at the registrar’s office, Y his refusal

196

M AT T I I T K O N E N

to confer his own surname on his wife. The years at the higher grade, summer jobs at the papermill, his place in the common masculine milieu – these lead up to the point O; none of them, however, should adumbrate the “detour” of a secularised marriage, and knowledge of the segment MO furnishes no means of predicting the content of the succeeding stage OX. What all would I have needed to know in order to anticipate the choices Tapani would make? The wind of time must blow now along my path, and I must descend from my metaphysical vantage-point to become part of the sensed dimension of my Tapani’s being. How, then, would the situation be altered if I knew the location of all the points on the line MOXY and their positions in relation to each other and to the whole segment? There would be nothing more to choose – everything would be mapped out ready; seeing would (here too) mean merely confirmation of prior knowledge. The wind blows, the dust brings tears to the eyes – eureka! time is a living thing, something to be passed through. I am no longer an onlooker in my own being but tread the path of my Tapani half myself; I am the moving body M and gouge out the whole trail from M to Y. Now that I live the whole journey simultaneous with my alter ego it is a matter of indifference whether I foresaw this and that or not. I acted as Tapani acted – because I am Tapani and Tapani is me. Now I am tracing out my path by living it truly – not by simply following up some ready-drawn line. I live the being of time in myself, not confusing the temporality meant to be experienced with space that is stillborn. I may be at peace and return to my metaphysical heights. I have implemented the idea of lived manhood instead of an aped version of it imposed from without. I have myself charted my own life course, MOXY. S U P P L E M E N T : A C O M PA R I S O N O F T H E N AT U R E OF APED AND LIVED MANHOOD

Foreword: In accordance with Bergson’s thinking it is well to distinguish between what he calls recollection and habit memory. In so doing we may attain to the very core of the matter in hand. (See also esp. Merleau-Ponty.) First voices: Learning has taken place by repeated attempts at the same thing, and the repetition is an element not belonging to memory. When the goal is reached, it is reached once and for all. What is involved is the essential process of formation of the habit memory; its products are always, in keeping with their cumulative nature, stepwise in structure, and success, too, is measured in terms of the number of repetitions required. If one witnesses a sufficient number of vanishings, one learns: learns to forget and not to fret for things. Their disappearance is just a repeat of something

O N C E I WA S

197

Plate 10. “I fix my gaze on that old house and remember the boy there with me eating sun-soup in the grass on the yard. It made us so strong we could jump over the house”

one has experienced before. A good schooling in this may be had by taking a job in demolition and watching old things being ripped down to make room for new. After a dozen or so such spectacles the first grade of seasoning is achieved: a grown man sheds no tears. Longing, too, yearning, is only for wetnecks; look to your forefathers and brace yourself like them. Second voices: Habit memory is at least partly dependent upon willpower. This entails being in a perpetual state of endeavour; the repetition (for example that required to learn some new skill) is typically deliberate. Memory, again, is completely spontaneous, it springs of itself. The house in the photograph was indeed removed like a blot from the landscape. I could continue acquiring my aped manhood by pulling down the rest of them sometime. At the same time I would get into the routine of manual labour and the work of men in general. More or less a must is to be a dab hand with a crowbar if you mean to maintain and shape your own home as well. Everything you do must have a purpose. But why, why should I consent to such idiocy? The truth is, I long for that old house and the smell of timber that pervaded its rooms. Now when I pass that place the yard and the dwelling come to life in me. And the modern thing they put up is unsightly, the bleak straight lines depressing, enough to damp the spirit.

198

M AT T I I T K O N E N

Third voices: Despite the will-driven nature of its repetitiveness habit memory – once acquired – constitutes a strictly sequential process: it is stored in a mechanism which is touched off in toto by an initiating impulse. This is a closed system of automatic movements which follow upon each other in stereotyped order. Memory proper, again, is on the one hand characteristically immediate, instantaneous. On the other, however, it may subsist in duration, not being restricted to any specific order of emanation exclusive of exceptions. Looking at that photograph I ought in keeping with my aped manhood to react to it always in the same way. The masculinity turned on the lathe would be touched off at the sight of a demolition job under way; I would feel relieved that the house was gone and the useless people in it now out of my ken. Anyone who cannot be of use to me is of no consequence. I fix my gaze on that old house and remember the boy there with me eating sun-soup in the grass on the yard. It made us so strong we could jump over the house. We shone in the dark too, and lit up the night; perhaps the glow of us was also a little to be feared. That house continues its being in its own capacity of having been, awakened again in the manner described. Next time I may do something quite different – the place surprises me ever and again. Fourth voices: Inexorably habit memory drifts away, moves ever further from its own sources in time and space. The point of departure may even be lost in oblivion: a learnt memory – one that has become a habit – dies out of time as for example does a lesson in something of no import. Homework done in vain becomes, after all, ever more impersonal, ever more alien to our past. Pure memory, in contrast, retains its place and its time – its dating – and so is personal, it pertains to us, presenting to us over again some particular episode of temporality in our own former lived history. One characteristic of the manliness aped from others would be the forcible subjection of the smaller and the weaker. I see myself standing at the corner of that house eating an icecream. Two bigger boys appear from behind the house – moving towards the camera – and “Wouldn’t mind a bit of that – hand over!”. I try to argue but size and numbers carry the day; soon the red balls and biscuit cone are gone. If any smaller kids get in my way, I walk all over them. The source of that action is gone from my consciousness – it is simply something which is part of me – always was. Nonetheless I recall that scene as if it was yesterday; seeing that photograph makes my hackles rise. At that moment I began to loathe force and violence. That vignette from the past will never fade – it is updated every time I encounter it. Fifth voices: Closely connected with the above (fourth) characteristic (voice) is the circumstance that habit memory never looks back to the past but always to the future. The past of a memory thus acquired is completely immanent, present, in that memory itself. In its own “exposition” it tends to be oriented

O N C E I WA S

199

to the immediate future – its forward movement bears it into action and life. Recollections, in contrast, look solely to the past and depict what has been, never what is and will be. Having once acquired the manliness of habit, I can always switch it on at will, turn it on like a tap. I am what I am right now, and I continue my existence unchanged. If I am ever offered a contract pulling down a house I shall be much better at it that the jobbers in the photograph; I’ll blow the whole place sky high. My motto is swift action. I remember how I feared the men who demolished that house – surly and loud. Everything had been fine before they came; you could hide and stalk in the grass, invisible as a ghost. What is there left of all that? Only sadness and a longing for those days. Do the Red Indians have to be gone for ever? Sixth voices: Most significant of all is that habit memory entails action, never presentation or re-presentation. It no longer confronts us with our past – it makes our past. The foregoing may be understood in the light of the fact that no single trace of this memory will manifest its provenance, the point of its origin, nor locate it in the past. Recollections, on the contrary, subsist precisely in that they re-present past things – the past – by means of specific markers of time and place. What is beautiful? Beauty must always be associated with ease and efficiency. What is handy is thus beautiful. When the old higgledy-piggledy houses of wood were pulled down, the world assumed a much more pleasing aspect. With prefabricated elements, quick and simple, a modern landscape was knocked up in no time. I am in favour of the same approach for the future as well – finery and frippery are pointless, action is still the order of the day. I have always thought so. The photograph restores me to the time when decoration and detail were in their heyday; beauty came of the pride of the craftsman and the grace of handiwork. I have not forgotten them – memory restores them within my reach. The colours are kindled again in the old glow, my man’s mind is filled with the bliss of boyhood. (See on all these voices Casey, pp. 280–281; Itkonen, 1999c, pp. 72–92.) EPILOGUE Man, look behind you. There you are still, boy flaxen-fair. Standing in the dawn of what you were, in the yesteryear of this path you have blazed. Man, close your eyes. See the smile, hear the laughter. Who are you now?

200

M AT T I I T K O N E N Never forsake that boy: you are alive only because he is still in you.

Translated by Robert MacGilleon University of Jyväskylä BIBLIOGRAPHY

( A ) L I T E R AT U R E Bachelard, G. Tilan poetiikka. Suomentanut ja esipuheen kirjoittanut T. Roinila. Helsinki: Nemo, 1957/2003. Bergson, H. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. 96. Édition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1889/1961. Casey, E. S. “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty.” Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. Edited by J. N. Mohanty. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985, pp. 279–297. Deleuze, G. Bergsonism. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1966/1988. Heidegger, M. Kirje “humanismista” & Maailmankuvan aika. Suomentanut M. Lehtinen. Tampere: Tutkijaliitto, 1947, 1950/1999. Heidegger, M. Oleminen ja aika. Suomentanut R. Kupiainen. Jyväskylä: Vastapaino, 1927/2000. Itkonen, M. “Alter et Alter. The Two Faces of the Mirror.” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Phenomenological Inquiry. October (23), 1999a, pp. 107–132. Itkonen, M. Esteettinen kasvatus. Filosofisia lähtökohtia. Jyväskylä: Kirjayhtymä, 1999b. Itkonen, M. “Mieheksi syntynyt. Maskuliinisuus ja fenomenologisen itsekasvatuksen luonnos.” Rakkaudesta filosofiaan. Juhlakirja professori Juha Varton syntymäpäivänä 27.6.1999. Toimittanut M. Lahtinen. Tampere: TAJU, 1999c, pp. 72–92. Itkonen, M. “Mies-pojan paluu olleeseen. Savontieltä ja Savontietä maailmalle.” Warkauden Lehti 3.6., 2000, p. 4. Itkonen, M. Ainokaiselleni. Näkyvä ja näkymätön Ain’Elisabet Pennasen rakkaudessa Juhani Siljoon. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopiston opettajankoulutuslaitos, 2002a. Itkonen, M. Ajan kanssa. Tuokiokuvia ja filosofisia tarinoita koetusta kulttuurista. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopiston opettajankoulutuslaitos, 2002b. Itkonen, M. “Asemalta Lyseolle. Aikakulkijan askelissa.” Dynaamista majoitus- ja ravitsemisalaa etsimässä. Toimittanut V. Heikkinen. Tutkimuksia 1. Helsinki: Haaga Research Center, Haaga Instituutin ammattikorkeakoulu, 2002c, pp. 50–61. Itkonen, M. “The Milieu: A Chart of Our Margin of Play.” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Analecta Husserliana. Volume LXXV. The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality. Edited by A-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 2002d, pp. 139–155. Itkonen, M. “Bel Esprit. An Assay in Depth-Aesthetics.” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Analecta Husserliana. Volume 81. Metamorphosis: Creative Imagination in Fine Arts Between LifeProjects and Human Aesthetic Aspirations. Edited by A-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004a, pp. 101–122.

O N C E I WA S

201

Itkonen, M. “Does What Has Been Survive After All? The Touch Yesterday.” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Analecta Husserliana. Volume 82. Mystery in its Passions: Literary Explorations. Edited by A-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004b, pp. 359–369. Itkonen, M. “Man-Boy and Dreams Lived Through: Rock Music as a Mode of Experiencing the World.” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Outis: Deception. Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media. Volume 2, 2004c, pp. 73–88. Itkonen, M. “Lived Words: The Phenomenology of Poetry Experienced.” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Analecta Husserliana. Volume LXXXIV. Phenomenology of Life: Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World. Edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005a, pp. 145–163. Itkonen, M. “Sana, kuva, elämä. Kaikuja ja heijastuksia entisajoilta.” Työ, voima ja yritys. Toimittaneet V. A. Heikkinen, S. Inkinen ja M. Itkonen. Haaga-Sarja 10. Helsinki: Haaga Instituutin ammattikorkeakoulu, Haaga Tutkimus, 2005b, pp. 75–107. Itkonen, M. “Estonia’s Bane: Philosophico-Critical Recollections, Observations and Images.” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Outis: Deception. Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media. Volume 3, 2006a, pp. 35–53. Itkonen, M. “From the Station to the Lyceum. In the Footsteps of a Wanderer in Time.” Translated by I. Gurney. Analecta Husserliana. Volume 90. Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Three: Logos of History – Logos of Life. Historicity, Time, Nature, Communication, Consciousness, Alterity, Culture. Edited by A-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006b, pp. 501–520. Van Manen, M. Researching Lived Experience. Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990. Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated from the French by C. Smith. London: Routledge, 1945/1988. Passinmäki, P. Arkkitehtuurin unohtunut ethos. Tutkielma Martin Heideggerin ajatusten soveltamisesta arkkitehtuurin tarkasteluun. Tampere: TAJU, 1997. Pilardi, J-A. Simone de Beauvoir Writing the Self. Philosophy Becomes Autobiography. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Puhakainen, J. Kohti ihmisen valmentamista. Holistinen ihmiskäsitys ja sen heuristiikka urheiluvalmennuksen kannalta. Tampere: TAJU, 1995. Rajanti, T. Kaupunki on ihmisen koti. Elämän kaupunkimuodon tarkastelua. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 1999. Schutz, A. Collected Papers. Volume IV. Phaenomenologica 136. Edited with preface and notes by H. Wagner and G. Psathas. In collaboration with F. Kersten. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.

( B ) P H OT O G R A P H S Ekström, I. Plates 1–3 & 5–7. Ivar Ekström collection/Varkaus Museum. Itkonen, K. Plate 4. In author’s possession. Jänis, P. Plates 8–10. Jänis collection/Varkaus Museum.

S E C T I O N III

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

E X I S T E N C E A N D H I S T O R I C A L FA B U L AT I O N : T H E E X A M P L E O F T O M S T O P PA R D ’ S T R AV E S T I E S

ABSTRACT

An inherent connection persists between the terms “existence,” “narrative,” and “fabulation.” A fourth term, “identity” is needed as a link between the first two above. A person accepts his or her identity when that person conceptualizes to him or herself the essence of his or her existence. The person does this by creating a narrative about one’s self that is sufficiently complex to separate the person from all others. A person learns how to create complex narratives about him or herself by reading complex narratives. One of the modes by which simple narratives have been made more complex carries the name “fabulation.” All of these terms intersect with “history” when a personal story interacts with the story of the larger unit: nation, continent, or all humanity. This article will trace the steps of the above stated sequence. The first step, conceptualizing the essence of one’s existence to one’s self, creates an immediate problem. Although existence is the primary phenomenon, the most common strategies for knowing do not apply to it, meaning that humans need a special strategy to be able to conceptualize their own existence. The primary human strategy for knowing is “contrast” or the noting of similarities and differences. Let us take the example of sound. Martin Heidegger says in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that “In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 156). Heidegger gives an example: “we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen” (p. 156). For another example, a person might be in pain for a long time, making the contrast between pain and non-pain less easy to use, but if the pain varies, being worse some days and better other days, the variation provides a basis for using the contrast strategy.1 Existence is always present, so we cannot know it by the contrast strategy; we have never experienced (and never can experience) non-existence. Also, the phenomenon of existence does not vary. We are never more or less in existence. Thus the second opportunity for using contrast as a conceptualizing strategy is also unavailable. How then can we know–that is, conceptualize for ourselves– the phenomenon of our own existence and thereby grasp our identity? The answer involves narrative. 205 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 205–217. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

206

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

Phenomenology’s answer is that we human beings conceptualize our own existence by telling stories about ourselves. We, no doubt, first tell these stories to our selves, but it is a small step to telling these stories to others. A concomitant to this insight is that one benefit of our listening to stories about other people is that, to the degree there is a commonality among people, a story about someone else may also reveal some aspect of our own existence that we had not previously conceptualized. This allows the person to apply the principle of contrast at a distance of one remove from the raw phenomenon of existence. At times our reaction might be “that is exactly my story.” Just as valuable are the times when we say, implicitly, “That is almost my story, the difference being that in my case this and that is different.” Or perhaps we reveal the nature of our own existence to ourselves by saying, “My story is the exact opposite.” Or perhaps we say, “That could become my story if I take certain actions.” The phenomenological philosopher Richard Kearney, to whose insights I am indebted, says in his book On Stories, that stories create patterns and that it is from deriving the meaning of the patterns that humans come to know their own existence. For Kearney, this background enriches the meaning of Aristotle’s term anagnorisis, translated as “recognizes again.” The anagnorisis is the point in the narrative when the protagonist recognizes the meaning of the pattern, when he or she grasps the essence of his or her own existence; and in “so doing you give a sense of yourself as a narrative identity that perdures and coheres over a lifetime” (Kearney, 2002, p. 4). The power of anagnorisis is enhanced because the audience members have experienced similar moments in the stories they have told themselves, moments when they saw the meaning inherent in the pattern of their own narratives about themselves, and so grasped the essence of their own existence. Richard Kearney also provides an analysis of why stories are primitively structured with beginnings, middles, and ends, as Aristotle noticed. Because our lives have a natural beginning (birth) and a natural end (death), our “existence” is already pre-plotted before we ever consciously seek out a narrative in which to “reinscribe our life as life-history” (p. 129). None of us has yet experienced our own death, but as Kearney suggests, Heidegger’s noticing our being “‘towards an end’—namely, our ‘being-towards-death,”’ enabled Heidegger to posit the “temporal circle of retrieval (Wiederholung) and project (Entwurf)” (p. 130). Kearney points out that this is only one of the ways that twentiethcentury phenomenologists had of “reformulating” the beginning-middle-end structure of “narrative drama.” Godamer called it “anticipation of completion”; and Ricoeur the “prefigurative synthesis of the heterogeneous.” All of these perhaps hark back to Husserl’s formulation of “the internal time consciousness of retention and projection” (p. 130). Thus, we tell stories about ourselves to

E X I S T E N C E A N D H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N

207

grasp the essence of our existence, and one benefit of hearing stories about others is to allow us to use the strategy of contrast to formulate our identity. Perhaps the clearest prescription that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end comes from W. Somerset Maugham in his “Introduction” to Ashenden, his book of stories based on his experience as an agent of the British Secret Service during the First World War. While admitting that “some very good stories” have been written on other principles, Maugham says that by and large, a story needs a “supporting skeleton . . . a plot”: Now a plot has certain characteristics that you cannot get away from. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is complete in itself. It starts with a set of circumstances which have consequences but of which the causes may be ignored; and these consequences, in their turn the cause of other circumstances, are pursued till a point is reached when the reader is satisfied that they are the cause of no further consequences that need be considered. (pp. 5–6)2

The second benefit of hearing stories about other people is that doing so teaches us how to narrate our own, individual stories. Inherent in the word “identity” is the concept that each of us is different from all the others. The narrative that enables us to grasp our identity has to be unique, and if there are to be billions of unique stories, these stories have to be complicated. Consider the following story: “I was born. I went to school and got the appropriate degree. I got a job as a professor. I moved up through the ranks. Now, as a full professor, I am anticipating retirement. I am aware that I will some day die.” The story has a beginning and a middle; it projects an end. It is undoubtedly the story of a large number of people, but—if identity implies uniqueness—this story is too simple to allow me, its teller, to grasp my identity (i.e., to recognize the essence of my existence). The reader can learn how to tell a more complicated narrative about her or himself by reading narratives that are more complicated than this. The history of twentieth-century fiction (and drama, as I hope we will see) may be conceptualized as progressively adding complexity to narratives. We might speculate that what drives this move to increased complexity is a need for more complex strategies of telling one’s own story to one’s self in order to grasp one’s identity in an increasingly complex world. One form taken by this increased complexity has been given the name “Fabulation” by critics and scholars. The term can be expanded to include a play like Travesties by Tom Stoppard. If increased complexity is an inherent element of fabulation, this is interesting because the term derives from the word “fable,” used to denote a literary form often thought to be extremely simple. Tom Stoppard’s line, “I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself” would appear to reveal a mindset that is the direct opposite of that of a fable writer, fables being renowned for their universalizing didacticism. To begin working our way into this topic,

208

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

let us start with the term “fabulation.” The word fabulation comes from the word “fable,” an ancient literary type going back to Aesop, often thought of as being simplistic. Aesop’s fables do appear simple compared to Homer’s epic or Pindar’s lyric complexity. In addition, the apparent simplicity of fables as moral lesson-teachers has been illustrated by my colleague Andrew Auge, in an analysis expanded by my former colleague and frequent co-author Jerre Collins. Auge contrasts fables with the more-complex parables. Fables, he proposes, embody moral lessons that are “easily extractable” and “conveniently distilled from established moral doctrine” (Auge, 1989, p. 8). Auge asks us to see the difference between a fable such as “The Goose with the Golden Eggs” and a parable told by Jesus, such as “The Good Samaritan” which must have shocked a contemporary audience, conditioned to think of Samaritans as the worst sort of people. By “reversing our expectations,” Auge argues, “the parable forces us to reconsider our familiar notions of good and evil” (p. 9). Literature, in this view, is more like parable than it is like the simpler form: fable. However, even while granting the points made by Auge, the term “fabulation,” although drawn from the term “fable” denotes an aspect of literature that is fascinatingly complex. Let us trace a bridge from simplicity to complexity. First, as I suggest in my article, “The Phenomenology of Ethical Criticism: How Literature Affects Ethical Development,” the analysis of a fable titled “The Crow and the Fox” shows that the effect of fables is not as simple as it appears. Jean-Jacques Rousseau studied La Fontaine’s rewriting of Aesop’s fable in which a fox, seeing a crow with a piece of cheese in its beak, praises the beauty of the crow’s voice and begs for a song; the crow, flattered, opens its beak to sing and so drops the cheese, which the fox pounces on and runs away. In Emile, Rousseau says that children allow what most would call the simple and obvious moral “to escape them”; “children despise the crow, but they all form a liking for the fox” (Rousseau, 1762, pp. 80–81). Youngsters “always” identify with “the most dashing character,” and this should surprise no one since, “no one likes to be humiliated” (p. 81). Rousseau implies that some parents who buy La Fontaine’s book and read it to their children may secretly regard the fox as a model for their children to emulate, the exact opposite of teaching them that flattery is morally or ethically unacceptable. Perhaps without quite admitting it to themselves, Rousseau implies, these parents might be hoping that their children develop into successful flatterers to prosper in the bourgeois economy. Thus, a level of complexity arises when readers draw a double moral from a fable, an obvious one that justifies their use of the fable and a subtler one that they might not want to openly admit. In 1967, Robert Scholes saw a further degree of complexity in fables which led him to adopt the word fabulation for “a movement of great importance in contemporary fiction” which “was being

E X I S T E N C E A N D H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N

209

ignored, misinterpreted, or critically abused because it lacked a name,” as he said in Fabulation and Metafiction (1979, p. 1). Scholes points out that one of the first books printed in English was a book of fables by William Caxton in 1484. Looking at one of the fables, Scholes says “it reveals an extraordinary delight in design. With its wheels within wheels, rhythms and counterpoints, this shape is partly to be admired for its own sake” (Scholes, 1979, p. 2). In Scholes’s use, fabulation denotes a shift from valuing a work of fiction for what it directly reveals to valuing how it is written, and especially to how it is structured. Umberto Eco also noted the shift in novels well past mid twentieth century in which an author “renounces all psychology as the motive of narrative and decides to transfer characters and situations to the level of an objective structural strategy” (Eco, 1979, p. 146). A character in Norman Mailer’s The Man Who Studied Yoga is an author who has temporarily given up his novel: “He cannot find a form, he explains. He does not want to write a realistic novel, because reality is no longer realistic” (quoted in Lodge, 1971, p. 3). Commenting on this quote, David Lodge says the assumption behind such statements “is that our ‘reality’ is so extraordinary, horrific or absurd that the methods of conventional realistic imitation are no longer adequate” (p. 33). If artists shift their goals away from photographic depiction of reality, what do they shift to? Writing in 1979, Eco saw this “choice familiar to many contemporary disciplines” as one in which an author passes “from the psychological method to the formalistic one” (p. 146). Eco’s discovery confirms Scholes’s comment in The Fabulators that the key element in the coming era of fabulation would be a “care for form” (Scholes, 1967, p. 41). In his revised version of The Fabulators, Fabulation and Metafiction, Scholes concludes that a “sense of pleasure in form is one characteristic of fabulation” (Scholes, 1979, p. 2). “Of all narrative forms, fabulation puts the highest premium on art and joy” (Scholes, 1979, p. 3). How one wonders, does joy in the subtlety of form fit with the traditional use of fables of pointing out obvious morals as verified by Auge? Scholes notes the use of fables in medieval preaching, akin to the point “conveniently distilled from established moral doctrine” noticed by Auge (1989, p. 8). Scholes interestingly notices that “This didactic quality is also characteristic of modern fabulation—but in ways which will need considerable qualification” as he considers “this whole complex question of the relationship between fabulation and reality,” a topic that “requires a fuller discussion” (Scholes, 1979, p. 3). What moved some writers beginning in the 1960s, toward fabulation, Scholes believes, is “that reality, if it could be caught at all, would require a whole new set of fictional skills” (Scholes, 1979, p. 4). In forecasting his analysis, Scholes immediately hits on the last major term of my essay–history:

210

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

The fabulative movement grew and flourished, however, drawing strength from masters like Borges and Nabokov and finally, in works like Gravity’s Rainbow, Ragtime, and The Public Burning, turning back toward the stuff of history itself and reinvigorating it with an imagination tempered by a decade and more of fictional experimentation. (Scholes, 1979, p. 4)

“Reality,” says Scholes, interpolating from Borges, “is too subtle for realism to catch. It cannot be transcribed directly” (Scholes, 1979, p. 13). Here Scholes’s idea fits with the insights of other thinkers. Philip Roth, a writer known for his realism until he entered the realm of fabulation with his novel called The Breast, saw that “‘the toughest problem for the American writer,”’ in the 1960s and 1970s, “was that the substance of the American experience itself was so abnormally and fantastically strange, it had become an ‘embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination’ ” (Roth is quoted in Bellamy, 1975, p. 3). Realism, says David Lodge “depicts the individual experience of a common phenomenal world” (Lodge, 1971, p. 5). But “If reality becomes surrealistic,” Joe David Bellamy asks “what must fiction do to become realistic?” (Bellamy, 1975, p. 5). If by invention, by “fabulation, we may open a way toward reality that will come as close to it as human ingenuity may come,” says Scholes, perhaps we can solve this dilemma (Scholes, 1979, p. 13). Fabulations, Scholes believes, “endure because they continue to function for human beings as signs of some unattainable reality, and as emblems of the human struggle to imagine that reality. They are . . . real dreams” (Scholes, 1979, p. 20). Scholes says that fiction must work for us in a way similar to dreams. “It must provide us with an imaginative experience which is necessary to our imaginative well-being. . . . . But as our imagination stretches and we grow more serious . . . we require not fabling but fabulation” (Scholes, 1979, p. 24). Having defined fabulation and connected it to history, Scholes shows the relationship between fabulation and existence. In John Fowles’s The Magus, Nicholas Urfe, Fowles’s main character and narrator “is confused about the relationship between art and life” (Scholes, 1979, p. 38). As narrator, “he is no longer confused; in fact, he can present his life to us fictionally, as a meaningful metaphor, precisely because he has learned the difference between fiction and existence” (Scholes, 1979, p. 38). As narrator, Nicholas presents “Nicholasas-character victimized by . . . his misreading of literature as an excuse for mistreating life as if it were art” (Scholes, 1979, p. 38). Guided by an actual fable, Nicholas “abandons metaphysics for existence” (Scholes, p. 41). A lesson of fabulation is that if each person becomes a magician, reality is no longer nauseating as Sartre implies by his famous title, nor is it banal, as Alain RobbeGrillet and other writers of the nouveau roman take for granted. The everyday existence of each of us becomes fascinating when seen through the lens of fabulation.

E X I S T E N C E A N D H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N

211

It would be surprising if the forces at work in fiction were not also affecting drama; and, according to David Lodge, “Much the same situation” occurred in the theater as had occurred in fiction. In the drama of the 1960s, the play of “scrupulously realistic illusion,” which Lodge sees as a “by-product of the cultural dominance of the novel form” was “displaced” in theater “by experiments corresponding roughly to fabulation” in narrative (Lodge, 1971, p. 17). Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, first performed in June, 1974, provides an excellent illustration of the relationship among “existence,” “fabulation,” and “history.” The play depicts a man named Henry Carr trying to narrate his own story to himself, the exact strategy, as argued earlier, by which humans gain the ability to conceptualize the essence of their existence. The form taken by Carr’s story has many characteristics of fictional fabulators who “are fascinated by how history is altered in the telling, how the retelling itself changes the way things were in order to make a story out of how things might have been,” as Kearney says (Kearney, 2002, p. 23). What attracted Stoppard to Carr, a historical person, is that Carr played Algernon Moncrief in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest put on by James Joyce in Zurich during World War I. Carr subsequently sued Joyce for the price of a pair of trousers Carr had bought to wear in the production, and Joyce countersued for slander and the price of a few tickets Carr had been given to sell, but had not paid for. The real historical situation presents multiple levels of opportunity for the kind of complex moral-drawing of fabulation. First is the idea that Joyce received support for his project from the British diplomats on the grounds that putting on an English play would counteract the German propaganda. As Stoppard’s Joyce explains, “Here culture is the continuation of war by other means—Italian opera against French painting—German music against Russian ballet—but nothing from England” (Stoppard, 1975, p. 51). Given official consular backing, the “English Players intend” to show “the Swiss who leads the world in dramatic art” (Stoppard, p. 51). And then Joyce chooses a play by an Irishman that mercilessly satirizes the English upper class. Second is the ludicrous spectacle of a lawsuit over a pair of pants taking place a few miles from the French-Swiss frontier, from which a battle line stretched all the way to the English Channel, on which millions were dying and suffering agony. An old man in the play, Carr is trying to write his memoirs of his days at the British Consulate in Zurich during World War I. Unfortunately, he mixes up the events of history with those of Wilde’s play. After the democratic revolution that overthrew the Tsar in Russia, the German government smuggled Lenin out of Zurich and gave him millions of marks to start the Bolshevik Revolution, hoping at least to disrupt the Russian war effort and perhaps, if Lenin

212

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

succeeded, to remove Russia from the war, freeing German troops to concentrate on the West. Carr does remember being asked to keep an eye on Lenin to prevent the Germans removing him from Switzerland, but the play depicts him being too interested in his petty dispute with Joyce, and too interested in a young woman named Cecily (the same as in Wilde’s play) to pay enough attention to Lenin to stop his exit. The role of art, especially though not limited to fiction, in relation to history forms a central core of the play’s serious idea structure. A second attraction of the historical situation for Stoppard is that he could dramatize the true, historical fact that Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara were all writing in the public library of Zurich at the same time. Tzara is one of the founders of Dada, which was founded in Zurich in 1916. The Dada movement, “created an atmosphere of rebellion” as Lee T. Lemon says, having the admittedly destructive intent of perverting and demolishing the tenets of art, philosophy, and logic (Lemon, 1971, p. 119). The Dadaist acted on the grounds that as pseudo-logical elements in “literature, painting, sculpture and music” had interacted with bourgeois society and government, these artistic activities had contributed to the insanity that was the war. Carr’s fallibly distorted memory provides Stoppard an opportunity to conduct a three-way debate on the role of art. Lenin, as a character in Stoppard’s play, sees that art is being used as an effective tool to reinforce the capitalist state and society, and wishes to seize it out of the hands of the bourgeoisie to use it as an effective tool for the revolution. After the revolution, art would be controlled by the Party for the maintenance of the socialist state and society. Stoppard’s character Tzara, seeing that art is being used as an effective tool to reinforce the capitalist state and society (so much so that people blindly support the insanity of the war that the state and society have brought about), wishes to rescue art from this corrupting influence, by violating and ridiculing all the logical rules and conventions by which art helps society maintain its spurious pretense of sanity. Stoppard’s Joyce, while recognizing that art is used to reinforce the position of tyrants and nonentities, believes that such effects are momentary and totally unimportant compared to the value of art to the human spirit. “An artist,” he says, “is a magician put among men to gratify—capriciously—their urge for immortality” (Stoppard, 1975, p. 62). Supposing the Iliad, for example, reinforced the position of a warrior aristocracy or gained support for the monomania of an Alexander? So what do we care about that now? “The temples are built and brought down around [the artist], continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders,” says Stoppard’s Joyce. “If there is any meaning in any of it, it is what survives as art” (Stoppard, 1975, p. 62). Governments and even systems of governments pass away without a trace, but the poem continues to have value as art.

E X I S T E N C E A N D H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N

213

Without the poem, the Trojan War would be “a forgotten expedition . . . A minor redistribution of broken pots” (Stoppard, 1975, p. 62). Joyce’s view, as expressed and implied in the play, fits with the famous exchange which Carr remembers ruefully. When James Joyce was asked, “What did you do during the Great War?” he replied, “I wrote Ulysses,” and then after a pause, “What did you do?” (Stoppard, 1975, p. 65). In Stoppard’s Travesties, each major character parallels someone in Wilde’s play. Carr’s memory, naturally, casts himself in the role of Algernon, which the historical Carr had played in Joyce’s production of the Wilde play. Two women have the names of Cecily and Gwendolyn, just as in Earnest. Bennett, in reality Carr’s boss in the Consular Service, is made to play the role of Lane, Algernon’s manservant. Wilde’s Jack Worthing becomes Tristan in Travesties. And, ludicrously, Joyce plays the role of Aunt Augusta. While admitting the possible role of unconscious selection, Stoppard claims that it was not until later that he discovered that the actor who played Jack in the Zurich production was actually named Tristan (Tristan Rawson), and as Tzara says in Travesties, when James Joyce’s family was attempting to have him “christened James Augustine,” he was actually “registered, due to a clerical error” by the church, “as James Augusta” (Stoppard, 1975, p. 42). Joyce himself had, at times, joked about this. Stoppard is willing to accept that in creating a situation with so many possibilities for cross referencing, a few may occur by accident (Londre, 1981, p. 69). Such things strike me, however, as instances of the care for form and structure, creating a level of joy in art that Robert Scholes sees as a characteristic of fabulation. Stoppard’s play is even more complex in its interplay with previous texts because, while Wilde’s play provides an obvious intertext, Joyce’s Ulysses provides a more subtle one. Travesties contains a “catechism” exchange between Joyce and Tzara, in which Tzara tells Joyce (and at the same time tells the audience) what Dada is. This section illustrates the complexity of narration that fabulation permits. The section is first Aunt Augusta quizzing Jack, as she does in The Importance of Being Earnest to see if he is worthy of marrying her daughter. Jack Worthing, ironically is found initially to be not worthy, only to be later deemed worthy when it is discovered that his name is not Worthing. Second, the section evokes the eighth (“Ithaca”) chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses, which is structured on the question-and-answer style of the Catholic catechism. The two prior texts intersect in Stoppard’s play when a switch occurs between a folder containing the book Lenin is writing, Imperialism, the Final Stage of Capitalism, and the chapter of Ulysses that Joyce is writing, “Oxen of the Sun.” And yet the people who read the manuscripts do not realize that a switch has been made. One can imagine an admirer of Joyce saying, “Amazing! I knew James reads a dozen languages, but who knew he was so fluent in Russian?

214

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

What a brilliant parody of the style of a revolutionary economist!” Meanwhile, an adherent of Lenin might be saying, “How brilliant of Vladimir to write in English. What a devastating critique of conditions for women in capitalist society. The poor woman is suffering labor pains, and the bourgeois doctors are in the staff lounge getting drunk. No more of that after the revolution!” As in Earnest, the plot resolution that occurs when the mix-up is revealed seems secondary to the fun of the process. If, as I claim at the beginning of this essay, a person accepts his or her identity when that person conceptualizes to herself or himself the essence of that person’s own existence, then we can see Carr as attempting to establish his sense of identity by narrating his life to himself. His ludicrous mistake of imposing the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest on his own life might be seen as a special, comic instance of the tenet that a person learns how to create complex narratives about him or herself by reading complex narratives. The addition of the more subtle intertext of Ulysses adds complexity. It illustrates one of the strategies by which fabulation makes simple narratives more complex. All of these intersect with “history” when Carr’s personal story interacts with the story of the Russian Revolution, the outcome of which affected every nation, continent, and nearly all humanity for many decades. Yet, Travesties is not the equivalent of history, or thinly disguised history presented as drama. Old Cecily corrects the misremembering of Old Carr: No, no, no, no it’s pathetic though there was a court case I admit, and your trousers came into it, I don’t deny, but you never got close to Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], and I don’t remember the other one [Tristan Tzara]. I do remember Joyce, yes you are quite right and he was Irish with glasses but that was the year after—1918—and [Lenin’s] train had long gone from the station! I waved a red hanky and cried long live the revolution as the carriage took him away in his bowler hat and yes, I said yes when you asked me, but he was the leader of millions by the time you did your Algernon. (Stoppard, 1975, pp. 97–98)

Richard Kearney suggests that stories which overlap with history but deviate from strict factuality can still give a form of knowledge, “a truth proper to fiction” (Kearney, 2002, p. 142). This is “a kind of understanding specific to narrativity”; it “corresponds closely to what Aristotle called phroesis—namely, a form of practical wisdom,” one kind of which results from “a certain overlapping of history and story” (Kearney, 2002, p. 143). In this overlap, “what seems impossible” must “be made credible” (Kearney, 2002, p. 143). In Stoppard’s play, the impossible–a major turning point in world history, the German spiriting of Lenin from Switzerland to lead the Bolshevik Revolution–is made plausible by a minor British diplomat’s obsession with making James Joyce pay for a pair of the diplomat’s pants. Then just before the ending, Cecily tells us that the dispute over the pants took place a year after Lenin left Zurich. Can

E X I S T E N C E A N D H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N

215

we say that we have still learned something true? Perhaps we see in the British upper class a certain triviality and naiveté that puts the events of war and revolution into a perspective that is truer than the view we took before seeing or reading the play, even though the events of the play are admitted within it to be not accurate to reality. In the same “Introduction” to Ashenden in which W. Somerset Maugham presents his defense of the beginning-middle-end story structure, he casually mentions something that I find equally revealing of a sense of naiveté of the British Secret Service. “In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik revolution and keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success” (Maugham, 1927, p. 7). It seems astounding that anyone could think they could prevent something as historically pivotal as the Bolshevik Revolution by sending the mild-mannered, stuttering Maugham to Russia, especially as Maugham was not a professional agent, but had been recruited only three years before because his reputation as a writer of domestic stories who lived abroad gave him an excellent cover. Such naiveté is consistent with the phroesis of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties which embodies this level of triviality; thus, we learn a truth based on Carr’s factually inaccurate retelling of his life’s story. Carr’s mistakes reveal that the quest to grasp one’s identity by narrating one’s life may not always be successful. Yet Carr’s quandary introduces an irony upon which to end this essay. In an interview on Travesties, Stoppard hints that he discovers the essence of his own existence in the process of writing and completing his plays: “One’s whole existence often comes out in a play.” This happens because a play “consists of unconscious collecting of possible material and elimination of most of it.” He sees “an element of fortune, coincidence, and a sort of unconscious selection going on” (Stoppard, quoted in Londre, 1981, p. 69). Even so, Stoppard insists that “My plays are a lot to do with the fact that I just don’t know.” He sees this open attitude as “the most valuable element in his work.” In reference to his play Jumpers, Stoppard says that his plays contain “an argument, a refutation, then a rebuttal of the refutation, then a counter-rebuttal, so that there is never any point in this intellectual leap-frog at which I feel that is the speech to stop it on, that is the last word” (quoted in Londre, pp. 48–49). This essay thus ends with the firm conviction that there can be no last word. NOTES 1 What dramatized to me that we know mainly by contrast is the phenomenon of pain. One day I injured my left knee and I had pain continuously for about ten years. The immediate sense of contrast between no-pain and pain was, of course, dramatic. After a time, however, the sense of contrast between my current pain and my pre-injury experience of painlessness became a remote

216

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

memory. What primarily enabled me to conceptualize the phenomenon of pain was its variation. Most of the time the pain was a constant condition of my consciousness, but occasionally I would have a day with less pain or more. If the pain had stayed at an unvarying level, I would have had to rely on the fading memory of no-pain for the strategy of conceptualizing by contrast; and if I had never experienced anything but the phenomenon of an unvarying pain, I would have had difficulty conceptualizing this phenomenon to myself. This was brought home to me one morning when I awoke with a strange sensation. After a few moments I said to myself, “Something is different.” And I asked myself “what?” After a few moments the answer came: “no knee pain, no pain anywhere!” A strong sense of knowing the phenomenon of pain swept over me, and in time I understood that this was made possible only when I was able to do the equivalent of Heidegger’s “listening away” from a sound to know the sound. 2 Maugham’s practice is probably a strong evidence that he regularly followed his own prescript. Interestingly, however, “Miss King,” one of the early stories in the Ashenden collection, ends enigmatically. An elderly English woman who has spent all her life as the nanny and governess for children of an Austrian aristocrat, now the enemy of England, is staying in Ashenden’s hotel with her employer who, Ashenden guesses, is an agent for the Austrian spy service. It crosses Ashenden’s mind that he might play on Miss King’s sense of patriotism to give him information about her employer. However, the woman treats him with distain, and avoids even speaking to him. One night he is called to her room and finds her dying. She says one word: “England.” And the story ends without further explanation in it or in any other story in the collection, apparently violating the prescription that Maughm put in the “Introduction” to this very collection. Maugham destroyed fourteen of the stories he intended for the collection in order to get the Secret Service to clear the remainder for publication, and even then had to wait ten years for the clearance, as Ted Morgan relates. Some of the stories overlap characters and events with others, so perhaps one of the destroyed stories continued the events of “Miss King” to the point where her last words would be meaningful to the reader.

REFERENCES Auge, Andrew. (1989) “Literature and the Moral Life.” Loras Faculty Review, 1.1, pp. 5–18. Bellamy, Joe David. (1975) “Introduction,” to Superfiction or the American Story Transformed: An Anthology. New York: Vintage, pp. 3–28. Collins, Jerre and John Zbikowsky. (2005) “Literature as the Laboratory of the Moral Life: Building Moral Communities Through Literary Studies.” The Enigma of Good and Evil; The Moral Sentiment in Literature, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. The Netherlands: Springer Dordrecht, pp. 845–864. Eco, Umberto. (1979) The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1977) “The Origin of the Work of Art,” tr. Albert Hofstader, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 143–187. Kearney, Richard. (2002) On Stories. London: Routledge, reprinted 2006. Lemon, Lee T. (1971) A Glossary for the Study of English. New York: Oxford University Press. Lodge, David. (1971) “The Novelist at the Crossroads” in The Novelist at the Crossroads and Other Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Londre, Felicia Hardison. (1981) Tom Stoppard. New York: Ungar. Maugham, W. Somerset. (1927) “Introduction,” in Ashenden: The British Agent. NewYork: Avon, 1951, pp. 5–9. Morgan, Ted. (1980) Maugham: A Biography. New York: Touchstone.

E X I S T E N C E A N D H I S T O R I C A L F A B U L AT I O N

217

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1762) “Emile,” in Rousseau’s Emile or Treatise on Education. tr. William Payne. New York: D. Appleton, 1914. Scholes, Robert. (1967) The Fabulators. New York: Oxford University Press. Scholes, Robert. (1979) Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stoppard, Tom. (1975) Travesties. New York, Grove, first performed in1974. Wilson, Raymond. (2005) “The Phenomenology of Ethical Criticism: How Literature Affects Ethical Development.” The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Sentiment in Literature, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. The Netherlands: Springer Dordrecht, pp. 445–456.

CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER

M E TA P H Y S I C A L FA B U L AT I O N I N T H E B E R K S H I R E S : M E LV I L L E ’ S ‘A R RO W H E A D ’ A N D T H E A N AC H RO N Y OF THOUGHT

ABSTRACT

Herman Melville’s fondness for fusing philosophical speculation with allegory had a negative impact on the sales of his books, which readers found difficult. Yet he mostly refused to adapt his writing to the demands of the marketplace. The obduracy with which he persevered in his metaphysical fabulations is allegorized in the story, “I and My Chimney.” Although the tale is not directly about a writer but a rustic armchair thinker who seeks freedom for speculation, little guesswork is needed to link the tale with Melville’s situation as a writer composing Moby-Dick, Pierre, and other works at his farmhouse, Arrowhead in the Berkshires. The present study performs a niche phenomenology to gain detailed access to the ethos of composition and the particular value and necessity of meditative thinking in Melville’s writing space at Arrowhead. For the rural thinker, smoking his pipe by the fireside is a spiritual exercise outside the economics of the busy household; his armchair lucubrations are unprofitable. The chimney is the symbolic site of the arché of literary-philosophical lucubration, principle or ground of thinking. “My chimney is grand seignor here—the one great domineering object.” He says it is king of the house: this means writing and thinking come before any other human affairs. In response the housewife, referred to as “she,” threatens to supplant the stolid sovereignty of the rustic thinker when she requests that the chimney be dismantled. “She avers that endless domestic inconveniences arise—more particularly from the chimney’s stubborn central locality.” The central place of writing philosophically and the resolve needed to continue such a profitless activity are defended with each attack on the chimney. In the multi-tasking hubbub of a household trying to sustain its basic agrarian needs, the chimney and its thinker are entirely obsolete. For a writer like Melville, as we will see, writing is itself a niche that, subject to conditions of the marketplace, places his family at risk even as it seeks to save his own artistic selfhood in an act of stoic endurance. In such a case niche building cannot be typified merely as in the service of survival and preservation, of sheltering, as commonly understood. While it prolongs 219 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 219–229. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

220

CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER

Melville’s metaphysical fabulations, it also exposes his family to psychological stress and pecuniary hardship. It is a commonplace of literary discourse to describe the inner struggles of writers otherwise unapparent to the reader. The peaceful horizon of reading a novel on a summer day registers barely a trace of the upheaval its composition registered in the soul of the author, for which Victor Hugo’s expressions are fitting: the “storm under the skull,” the “monstrous weight of the whole.”1 The objective accomplishment of the masterpiece evinces an aura of poised mastery in its published form, not the violent oscillations between control and chaos, joy and despair of the composing process. A case in point is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), a challenging book to write if there ever was one, with legend having it that the novel evolved in two stages, two manuscripts, the first literal, a book about the whaling industry, the last a cosmic allegory about the costs of tyrannical power. Whether this legend is true or not, says John Bryant, the novel remains “structurally problematic.”2 One suspects that this problem observed by a discerning scholar was and remains less a hindrance to the popular reader than the allegory and metaphysical speculation to which Moby-Dick is prone, its events enveloped in a panorama of anachronistic fabulation echoing the likes of Aristotle, Sir Thomas Browne, and Shakespeare. The recorded complaints about Melville’s writing mainly cite its prolixity, its philosophical and taxonomic obscurities. In this regard Arthur Steadman blamed Melville’s preoccupation with “philosophy and fantasy” for the decline in his popularity after 1851.3 Yet this very “philosophy and fantasy” or metaphysical fabulation that made Melville “an alien to his contemporaries” in a novel like Pierre (1852), gave Melville pleasure in authorship and demonstrated his stubborn refusal to meet the tastes of the audience that adored his bestselling travel fiction such as Typee (1846).4 Even in the 1850s, not unlike today, the number of readers with the advanced literacy required to comprehend Melville’s mature writing comprised a minority, the majority of readers seeking entertainment. In one of his infrequently cited but insightful essays in literary criticism, the American novelist Walker Percy suggestively depicts the happy experience of Melville’s creative effort on the Moby-Dick manuscript, which was largely written at Arrowhead, Melville’s farmhouse in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Melville feels a sort of cosmic freedom which enables everything to be written from metaphysics to obscure literary allusion, to nautical taxonomy. “The happiness of Melville, in Moby-Dick,” says Percy, “is the happiness of the artist discovering, breaking through into the freedom of his art. . .Everything works. One kills six birds with one stone. One can even write a treatise on cetology, which comes off as a kind of theology.”5 Melville’s happiness is heterogeneous, confiding itself to a multiplicity of meanings. It calls

M E TA P H Y S I C A L F A B U L AT I O N I N T H E B E R K S H I R E S

221

to mind the kind of capacious, unconstrained thinking that is described by Heidegger as Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen, or “releasement toward things.” This mode of thinking has archaic roots and can be traced back to mystics such as Meister Eckhart. It is a meditative thinking that “demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, not to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all.”6 Elsewhere, Heidegger says that “the multiplicity of meanings is the element in which all thought must move in order to be strict thought.” The philosopher continues: To use an image: to a fish, the depths and expanses of its waters, the currents and quiet pools, warm and cold layers are the element of its multiple mobility. If the fish is deprived of the fullness of its element, if it is dragged on the dry sand, then it can only wriggle, twitch, and die. Therefore, we always must seek out thinking, and its burden of thought, in the element of its multiple meanings, else everything will remain closed to us.7

For Melville, what Heidegger calls “multiple mobility” involves not only multiple meanings but allegorical thinking and writing. Be this as it may, it has been the judgment of critical commentary on Melville’s novels that his writing style was the outcome of a cognitive flaw. R.P. Blackmur calls the writing in Moby-Dick “bad allegory”: “Melville’s allegory in Moby-Dick broke down again and again and with each resumption got more and more verbal, and more and more at the mercy of the encroaching event it was supposed to transcend.”8 Melville’s creative imagination was, according to George Stewart, “always outrunning his critical judgment and his technical skills.” This tendency is confirmed, as Stewart points out, by the character Lombardo in Melville’s novel Mardi (1849). “When Lombardo set about his work, he knew not what it would become. He did not build himself in with plans. . .”9 With regard to Mardi, Perry Miller remarks that Melville’s “reckless and disorganized reading had stirred up a hurricane of ideas.”10 However obscure the outcome of such unconstrained thinking, however ruinous it was to his book sales, Melville found pleasure in it. In the “MastHead” chapter of Moby-Dick he fondly portrays in the “unseasonable meditativeness” of his “young Platonists” an irrepressible feature of his own cognitive style.11 The youthful whalers perch up high, supported by the mast-head, lost in abstract ruminations like Thales and other sages of ancient times. Their pensiveness is associated with a lack of productivity and indolence. This archaic activity in Moby-Dick, this cosmic speculation, is not unlike the armchair philosophizing of the rural metaphysician who smokes his pipe by the chimney in Melville’s story, “I and My Chimney” (1856). His apparent inactivity upsets his wife, who blames the chimney hearth; its cozy space represents a temptation to sloth she wants removed. The armchair philosopher falls behind not

222

CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER

only in his farm labors, but as it were historically: “I have got to be quite behind the age too, as well as running behind in everything else.”12 The massive chimney to which he stubbornly attaches himself is, like the mast of the whaling vessel called the Pequod, the objective correlative of the obduracy of meditative thinking, its archaic rootedness–in Heidegger’s word, autochthony. The armchair philosopher and Melville seek freedom for speculation, a free space for Aristotle’s prized theoria in a world increasingly given over to practical labor and production.13 Although Melville’s tendency to philosophize has been perceived as a weakness by some, the fact that it is an impediment to clear writing does not lessen the achievement of his work. We can’t expect every great author to write clearly, to abstain from multiplicity and as Heidegger says, be “dragged on the dry sand.” As he grew older, Melville increasingly indulged in philosophical studies, “until his conversation with friends became chiefly a philosophical monologue.”14 The criticism of Melville’s writing as “bad allegory” reflects the preference of modern critics and readers for novels written inductively, from realistic particulars, a style that defines the modern novel since Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson.15 These novels remain true to a certain philosophical realism totally unlike Melville’s style of fabulation, which, although laden with taxonomic details, is Shakespearean in its verbal dynamism and Spenserian in its allegory. It proves worthwhile to probe a little deeper into the conditions that enabled Melville’s happiness of composition while writing Moby-Dick because such conditions were so rare. The Melvillian happiness evoked by Walker Percy contrasts with what R.P. Blackmur calls “the long aggravation of his private life.”16 Research has shown that writing was painful for Melville partly due to the difficulties of domestic life in his household. His own anger cannot be overlooked as a contributing factor. Elizabeth Renker was one of the first scholars to break the silence in academia when she explored the full impact of domestic discord on Melville’s writing life in her book Strike Through the Mask.17 Yet somehow, through a singular combination of circumstances at Arrowhead, Melville finds his literary stride or groove while writing Moby-Dick, as when the home-run hitter hits a grand slam, or the woodcutter strikes an angle toward the core section of timber that brings it all down with one blow. To what specific conditions do we owe this fact? A critic can never comprehensively retrace a literary work’s production in the author’s consciousness, nor can we fully retrace the “happiness of Melville” evoked by Walker Percy. Be this as it may, one approach that does not fall entirely short of the matter at stake is a concrete analysis of the writer’s attunement and positioning in the niche that enables the completion of the work. The writer finds, if he or she is lucky, a concrete setting and projective

M E TA P H Y S I C A L F A B U L AT I O N I N T H E B E R K S H I R E S

223

horizon, all correlative with mastery. The dynamics of such a niche are in part communal: Walker Percy speaks of a “sociality” associated with Melville’s creative episode at Arrowhead. Melville’s happiness was nourished not only by his concrete surroundings, such as the stunning view of Mt. Greylock from his study, but by the proximity of a discourse community including Hawthorne and other peers. Melville moved from New York to the Berkshires in 1850 with a manuscript entitled “The White Whale” or “The Whale.” New York, he said, was “too busy, too social, too disturbing, too expensive.”18 This move was, whatever else it was, a sort of ascetic gesture to gain an undistracted lifestyle. Remoteness was obviously not an issue for a writer who had traveled to Pacific islands on a whaling ship. He felt that he could make a hardscrabble existence by farming, and that his writing could benefit from the rhythms of rural life and the proximity of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived about six miles away in Lenox. Melville was poorly suited to farming, but whatever his aversion or ineptitude, he had to keep up with basic chores such as wood cutting. When Melville purchased Arrowhead in 1850, the property had about 160 acres of meadows and woodland; he called his house “Arrowhead” because he found many Indian arrowheads in the fields around it. Arrowhead was built in 1780 in the township of Pittsfield, and remains today one of the most carefully preserved homes of American writers. It was already included in a book titled Literary Shrines: The Haunts of some Famous American Authors in 1897. Managed and maintained by the Berkshire Historical Society, it receives visitors throughout the year and occasionally sponsors Melville events. Standing in the souvenir shop today which was once the attached barn in the rear of the house, one thinks of Melville and Hawthorne retreating there “to drink a little rum, smoke cigars, and talk metaphysics.”19 At the time the Melvilles lived there, the farmhouse contained an idiosyncratic assemblage of nooks, crannies, annexes, hidden spaces, and rooms, none the same shape, at the center of which was a gigantic chimney about which Melville wrote the story “I and My Chimney.” These days, a tour of the farmhouse brings you face to face with the chimney; then you are taken upstairs to the study area where Melville actually composed his works. There is a fine writing desk and fireplace. The window in the study affords a magnificent view; when Hawthorne was conversing with Melville in his study, a glance outside showed Hawthorne “a fine snow-covered prospect of Greylock.” A recent guide to literary New England provides an account of the writing space at Arrowhead as it appears to visitors today. In his first year at Arrowhead, Melville wrote Moby Dick. Considering the book’s bulk alone, more than 600 pages, that simple fact is overwhelming. Melville worked in a room on the house’s second floor, which is today much as it was when he began work each day by locking himself in (the key

224

CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER

is on display in the room). He wrote at a table set in the middle of the room. The corner fireplace could not have provided great warmth during the winter months, and the room as a whole, at least today, has a stripped-down shipshape plainness. Melville sat so that he could look out on Mount Greylock. He fancied the mountain had the shape of a whale, and he dedicated his novel Pierre to “Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty.” Today you can look through the same whorled and striated windowpanes Melville looked out. After Moby Dick and Pierre. . .Melville wrote Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, and The Confidence Man here. From the key he used to lock the world out, to the chair and desk at which he worked, and the window out of which he gazed in thought, no other New England writer’s study I have visited carries the impact of this room.20

In a letter Melville refers to the place where he writes as “my smug room here.” That writers seek a niche to accomplish their writing is an observation which at first glance hardly justifies further analysis now that A Room of One’s Own has become canonical. Yet the resources of phenomenology have hardly been exhausted in elucidating the nuances of this phenomenon. As I have shown in an earlier study, a niche phenomenology can help us gain detailed access to the conditions of composition–the composing process–and the particular value and necessity of literary space in individual works and authors’ lives.21 The meaning of niche as a literary concept is by no means as straightforward or unambiguous as its ecological usage, from which our own concept nevertheless derives. The ecological niche of creatures, like the logos of the household, of the Greek oikos, house, encompasses shelter and sustenance.22 It pertains not only to a defined living space but the “economy” or process that accompanies it, such as foraging for food or writing to make money for food.23 In this regard Heidegger speaks of a fundamental capacity for self-encirclement, for “self-preservation and maintenance of the species,” and the human being is particularly inventive in this capacity. The difference between animals and humans is as follows. Animals are bound to a specific kind of environment according to instincts, captivated by objects that lure their instincts; things that do not captivate instinctively are excluded from the animal niche.24 Humans can, however, take things as something else, perceive a mountain as a whale, that is, bestow meaning and thereby expand and enrich their sphere beyond merely instinctual limits. They can captivate themselves with image and analogy. This ability to be creatively encompassing, to configure and draw lines, is the very power of interpretation and relies not only on instinct but at least partly on the human imagination. Exemplary in the matter of self-encirclement is Kafka’s need for the solitude of an “innermost room”: Writing means opening oneself to an excessive degree. . .That is why one cannot be too alone when one is writing, that is why it cannot be quiet enough when one is writing, the night is insufficiently night. That is why one doesn’t have enough time, for the roads are long, and one easily goes

M E TA P H Y S I C A L F A B U L AT I O N I N T H E B E R K S H I R E S

225

astray. . .I have often thought that the best life for me would be with paper and pen and a lamp inside the innermost room of a vast, locked cellar. Food would be brought and placed far from my own room behind the outermost door of the cellar. The walk to the food, in my housecoat, through all the cellar vaults, would be my sole promenade. I would return to my table, eat slowly and deliberately, and then resume writing immediately. What things I would then write! From what depths would I tear it out!25

One surmises from Kafka’s statement about exposure that it is essential for the completion of a work that the writer’s glance not be diverted, or attention distracted, but directed to the literary object with intensity of focus. The literary work demands a bounded space even if the author enjoys peripheral stimuli. If writing were merely instinctual, as a bee makes honey, the niche issue would be less fundamental; literature would not be something miraculous but a mechanical product. But the writer is exposed to surrounding conditions which may or may not be conducive to or constitutive of writing. A writer takes a position with regard to his writing and is therefore not always “at one” with it; only in certain moments or phases do things “flow” and there is literary production. A controlled environment suitable to the writer’s taste and comfort, as in Kafka’s extreme example, is preferable for the sustainability and completion of the work. The highly delimited space described by Kafka is not unlike Melville’s writing niche in the Berkshires, although the few differences are glaring. Both offer a coziness of encirclement. When the chores were done, Melville would install himself in his study and not eat all day, or have a plate of food left outside the door. He had to be called repeatedly when it was time to stop writing and rejoin his family or eat. This behavior is akin to that of Kafka, who as we saw fantasized of writing in a sort of underground lair, with food delivered through a small opening in the door at the end of a long tunnel. But Arrowhead was more exposed to the environment, encompassing a rural view. The piazza or porch that Melville built on the farmhouse demonstrated his proclivity for outdoor thinking. We have already noted the sociality of the Berkshires for Melville, with Hawthorne and others for neighbors. One circumstance apparently conducive to writing at Arrowhead was what we might call the ship effect. In a letter written by Melville, he describes his experience of being ensconced at his Berkshire farmhouse. He depicts his house in the terms of the nautical environment he inhabited in his earlier years, associated with his whaling adventures and the success of the novels that documented them, Typee and Omoo: I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.26

226

CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER

The shelter is not windproof; the Melville family discovers it has cracks and various other flaws, not unexpected in New England farmhouse. The feeling conveyed here of being at sea is at once one of exposure and shelter; the coziness of his berth is enhanced by the very ferocity of the wintry landscape of the Berkshires. Not only the ship-like environs but the whiteness of the snow, in view of a whale-like mountain, are all conditions that install Melville in a niche that is co-extensive with the novel he is composing. It is as if he is writing from within the whaling vessel the Pequod. After his long hours of writing, Melville would ride to the post office to get the mail, which he would bring home and have his family read. It was the highpoint of the day. Communication before phones was solely by letter; everyone looked forward to the day’s mail brought home from town in the darkness. Melville often went alone, and deliberately kept his mail unread so that his family could share in the event when he returned. Although much of this household and rural description sounds idyllic, the ironical details of “I and My Chimney” are as sobering as they are comical. As is well known but bears repeating, market conditions and prevailing literary tastes would not be favorable to Melville’s books, which sold poorly, and the pressure mounted in the house for the author to be practical and make money. He wrote The Piazza Tales, which included short stories such as “I and My Chimney” that would first be submitted when possible to magazines. No one in his family was capable of defending his failures or understanding his literary position (“ideology” in today’s parlance). “They knew he was reckless, impulsive, knew he committed acts all but blatantly designed to bring down the wrath of reviewers. . .”27 As a result, Melville became ever more defensive, i.e., poetical and abstruse. Whether in New York or the Berkshires, Melville wrote not as a lord of the manor but as a sort of obscure hacker in a labyrinth with multiple users or inhabitants. Although the narrative “I and My Chimney” is not directly about a writer, little guesswork is needed to link the tale with Melville’s situation. The domestic concerns of the housewife, referred to as “she,” perhaps entirely justified within the economics of the busy household, threaten to supplant the stolid sovereignty of the rustic thinker who sits by the fireplace. It is the chimney that receives the accusations of obsolescence. “She avers that endless domestic inconveniences arise—more particularly from the chimney’s stubborn central locality.”28 The central place of writing novels and the focus needed to create them, a profitless activity, is questioned with each such attack on the chimney. The thinker is seen as wasting time and energy that could be spent on agrarian production. In the multi-tasking hubbub of a household trying to sustain its basic needs, the chimney is a symbol of stoic resolve and autarchy.

M E TA P H Y S I C A L F A B U L AT I O N I N T H E B E R K S H I R E S

227

“Going through the house, you seem to be forever going somewhere, and getting nowhere. It is like losing one’s self in the woods; round and round the chimney you go, and if you arrive at all, it is just where you started, and so you begin again, and again go nowhere.” The flight from thinking stops at the chimney, where thought can collect itself and meditate. The chimney is the symbolic arché of literary-philosophical lucubration, principle or ground of thinking. It is in the shadow of the chimney that the thinker finds peace of mind. For the rural thinker, smoking his pipe by the fireside is a spiritual exercise. “I and my chimney, two gray-headed old smokers, reside in the country.”29 There are several characteristics worth noting. First, we are often reminded that the chimney and its human accomplice are anachronistic—rural bygones. Secondly, the chimney takes precedence: “My chimney is grand seignor here—the one great domineering object. . .”30 So important is it that it must survive a catastrophe before all other objects. ‘ “Wife,” ‘said I’ “far better that my house should burn down, than my chimney should be pulled down, though but a few feet.” ’31 By personifying the massive chimney and its hearth at Arrowhead as a sovereign presence that moors the protagonist in a meditative space all his own, the story suggests that the chimney increased in value in Melville’s psychology such that it had to be defended at all costs as a sacred object or space. The story narrates an account of such a defense, underscoring the existential value of the writing niche at Arrowhead embodied and symbolized in the chimney that runs through the center of the house. In staying true to his post by the chimney and protecting it from dismantlement, the protagonist refuses the domestic law that seeks to dominate him and ruin the rigor of his meditative routine by trivializing it as mere armchair philosophizing or malingering. In this regard, it can be argued that at least symbolically the writer Melville is deliberately choosing a meditative structure or niche for his compositional process. In the case of Melville it is possible to demonstrate that niche building is not solely a protective activity, a sheltering, as commonly understood, but also an event of exposure for others in proximity. The niche at Arrowhead serves the purpose of the continuation of writing while putting his family at risk. His abstruse compositions preserve his own artistic selfhood in an act of stoic endurance, but when they are submitted to the literary marketplace their failure imperil his loved ones. Failure is integral to his work ethos, not theirs. “With the problem of the universe revolving in me,” Ishmael says in “The Mast-Head” chapter of Moby-Dick, “how could I. . . but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eyes open, and sing out every time.” ’32 His spell of pensiveness on the masthead distracts him from fulfilling his strictly defined obligations as watchman.

228

CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER

Ishmael temporarily chooses Theoria over Phronesis, contemplation over practical knowledge, to borrow the terms of Aristotle. Melville’s pipe smoker in “I and My Chimney” does the same. Furthermore, for Melville himself the creative niche he creates at home is less a Mitwelt (community) than an Eigenwelt (personal world). Although he was running out of money, Melville did not significantly alter his style of thinking and writing, although he did seek to publish some stories in magazines for a few dollars, tried to feed his growing family, and considered taking out a second mortgage on the farmhouse. Hence the comic melodrama of “I and My Chimney,” in which the protagonist’s wife realizes such is the case and, assuming he is being selfish, attempts to demolish the site of his literary and cognitive production. Melville himself did not refrain from his unpopular philosophizing. He did not heed the warning Ishmael gives to the “young Platonists” manning the mast-head, that sooner or later, if they continue to hover over Descartian vortices, they would lose their identities and plunge into the sea. Although he was running out of money, he continued to write The Isle of the Cross, never to be published, instead of applying for a consulship in Hawaii that he desired but never obtained due to procrastination. Something in Melville’s stubborn activity invited failure. He plunged into poetry in the final years of his career and wrote Clarel, a very long poem that Melville said was “eminently adapted for unpopularity.” It was a work of metaphysical fabulation. He had grown to embrace his fate as an anachronistic thinker and writer: amor fati. University of Guam

NOTES 1 Georges Poulet, The Interior Circle, trans. Elliot Coleman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964, p. 163. 2 John Bryant, “Moby-Dick as Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 67. 3 Steadman is cited in Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Pursuing Melville: 1940–1980. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1982, p. 212. 4 Ibid., p. 220. 5 Walker Percy, “Herman Melville,” in Signposts in a Strange Land. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1991, 202. I would like to thank John Curry, of Rochester, NY, for bringing Percy’s essay to my attention during one of our many discussions of Melville. 6 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John Anderson and Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 53–54. 7 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968, p. 71.

M E TA P H Y S I C A L F A B U L AT I O N I N T H E B E R K S H I R E S

229

8 R.P. Blackmur, “The Craft of Herman Melville: A Putative Statement,” in Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, Ed. Richard Chase. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962, p. 81. 9 George Stewart is cited in James Barbour’s essay, “’All My Books Are Botches’: Melville’s Struggle with the Whale,” in Writing the American Classics, Eds. James Barbour and Tom Quirk. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990, p. 39. 10 Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956, pp. 224–225. 11 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale. New York: Penguin Books, 1992, p. 172. 12 Herman Melville, “I and My Chimney,” in Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems, ed. Richard Chase. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950, p. 159. 13 “But, if we were required to find one word and one only which best describes what is most to be desired, it would be hard to find a better word than theoria, contemplation.” See W. F. R. Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980: p. 357. 14 Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Pursuing Melville: 1940–1980. Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1982, p. 213. 15 Ian Watt, “from The Rise of the Novel,” in Theory of the Novel, ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000, pp. 363–381. 16 R.P. Blackmur, The Craft of Herman Melville: A Putative Statement, p. 76. 17 Elizabeth Renker, Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 57–59. 18 Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: Poe, Melville, and the New York Literary Scene. p. 279. 19 William Corbett, Literary New England: A History and Guide. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993, 65. 20 Ibid., pp. 64–65. 21 Christopher S. Schreiner, “Phantom Relations and the Writer’s Niche in Paul Auster’s Leviathan,” The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Sentiment in Literature. Boston: Kluwer Academic Pub.,2005, pp. 613–628. 22 Chambers Etymological English Dictionary, ed. A. M. MacDonald. Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1964, p. 193. 23 Paul Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: An Ecologist’s Perspective. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 11. 24 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, p. 258. 25 Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words, trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979: p. 84. (The Kafka passage is cited in Canetti’s essay, “Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice” contained in the above cited volume) 26 Herman Melville, The Letters of Herman Melville, eds. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960, p. 117. 27 Herschel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography (Vol. 2: 1851–1891). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, p. 163. 28 Herman Melville, “I and My Chimney”, p. 167. 29 Ibid., p. 159. 30 Ibid., p. 160. 31 Ibid., p. 164. 32 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, pp. 171–172.

BRUCE ROSS

BEING IS BELIEVING: THE UNDERPINNINGS O F WA LT E R B E N JA M I N ’ S D E C O N S T RU C T I O N OF HISTORICISM

ABSTRACT

“Being is Believing: The Underpinnings of Walter Benjamin’s Deconstruction of Historicism” considers Walter Benjamin’s modulation between Marxism (historical materialism as expressed in the Frankfurt School) and Kabbalah where “everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday” encounters his aesthetics of “aura” and procedure of the “monad.” For Benjamin: “every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter.” History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. —Walter Benjamin, Illuminations1 Getting rid of things and clinging to emptiness is an illness of the same kind. It is just like throwing oneself into a fire to avoid being drowned. —Ying-Chia2 Just have no mind on things and no things on mind, and you will naturally be empty and spiritual, tranquil and sublime. —Te-Shan3 Come and see what is written about the evil inclination. You must know that it will never cease its activities against man until the moment comes [The Messianic Age] . . . —The Wisdom of the Zohar4

Walter Benjamin’s deconstruction of historicism and ideological divergence from the Frankfurt School and materialist ideology accomplished, he focused on issues of “live,” even “ritualized,” time in the historical process. He did this through a kind of idealist speculation based on Kabbalah and, in part, Hegel, and his concepts of the “aura” and the “monad.” Such irruptions of things and in the flow of time, a basis of his literary critical procedures, suggest the mystical recovery of “fallen sparks” in the kabbalist speculation of Issac Luria, the seventeenth-century kabbalist. For him, in his words, “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” For Benjamin, the 231 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 231–238. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

232

BRUCE ROSS

future is pregnant with the horizon of millenarian metaphysical possibility and each present moment and those special moments from the past, his monads, are charged with the history of the sacred life force. Wishing to become Germany’s greatest literary critic, Walter Benjamin nonetheless experienced the horrors of the modern world and, like so many intellectuals of his generation, struggled with some ultimate resolution of this abomination through an exploration of historical pattern and, ultimately, first things. That he could not simply accept the witness of history to such repeated abominations or the simple millenarian truth of the Zohar led Benjamin to pursue the almost dialectic exploration of culture and first things. At stake is what might be called authentic experience in the historical process and in the very ontological stance of one’s being in the world. In Buddhist terms such authenticity depends upon what goes on and what does not go on in the mind. As Hui-Neng advises: “One who understands truth is wu-nien (without thought), wu-i (without memory), and wu-chao (without attachment).”5 Yet both Western millenarian ideas and Eastern transmigration-related ideas depend upon the progress of history. Exactly what history is, including its abominations, as opposed to the individual consciousness, is in question. How does history exist? Is it one thing after another or is there a design to it? Eastern thought suggests that everything is illusion and we are enacting personal dramas spun out of our consciousness. But even in Hindu philosophy there are Kant-like models of consciousness. Yet historians have sought patterns in the flowing of history and social philosophies have sought to influence such patterns. Benjamin’s deconstruction of historicism, history written by the winners, so-to-speak, as opposed to the so-called materialist model, is predicated on his lifelong exploration of the phenomenological ground of reality as such, exposed in his peculiar wavering between the coordinates of materialist ideology and idealist speculation. One considers his “devil’s game” under hashish exploration of “calling up” historical figures: The objects are only mannequins; even the great moments of world history are merely costumes beneath which they exchange understanding looks with nothingness, the base, and the commonplace. They reply to the ambiguous wink from nirvana.6 His game is a deconstructive endeavor to demythologize historicism which, as he suggests in Theses on the Philosophy of History, such a historian’s approach is a ” . . . process of empathy whose origin is indolence of the heart, accedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly.”7 Benjamin had noticed the failure of historicism as an explanation

BEING IS BELIEVING

233

of events. Hannah Arendt, the well-known philosopher and editor of his work, explains his insight: . . . he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of “peace of mind,” the mindless peace of complacency.8 So, according to Benjamin, the historicist procedure had obliterated whatever authenticity inhered in the historical process. History was a long gallery of the portraits of the rich and powerful. Benjamin needed a new model to account for historical authenticity. To the historicist’s empathy with the victor, he opposed historical materialism and its end of metaphysics. Derived from Marxist theory and expressed in his affiliation with the Frankfurt School of critical theory as well as his predilection for Brechtian theater, these influences insisted on a transformation of social order based on acute analysis of social structures. Theodor Adorno, a chief theorist of the Frankfurt School, for example, famously stated that modern art through a process of “commodification” affected a numbing and mindless expression on humanity, not unlike historicism’s “peace of mind.” In general, humanity became insulated from the very stream of social process it existed in and its birthright to existential authenticity. Diverging somewhat from the ideological interests of the school, Benjamin, according to the bibliographer of contemporary critical theory Donald G. Marshall, in a Talmudic-like bracketing of historical event “traced oblique relations of form and content to highly specific historical realities.”9 Benjamin’s deconstruction of historicism and ideological divergence from the Frankfurt School and materialist ideology accomplished, he focused on issues of “live,” even “ritualized,” time in the historical process. He did this through a kind of idealist speculation based on Kabbalah and, in part, Hegel, and his concept of “aura.” As Howard Caygill sums up in his article on Benjamin’s concept of history: While history cannot be written according to theological structures of the progress of Messianism, the experience of the past in remembrance contains an excess that is not, as in Hegel, the humanistic concept of freedom, but the theological concept of incompleteness. The incompleteness of the past forces the present to face its own fragmentation.10 This excess in history for Benjamin is the theological “aura” which bares a resemblance to the seventeenth-century Kabbalist idea of Issac Luria that

234

BRUCE ROSS

“fallen sparks” of holiness became trapped in materiality in the cosmogonic explosion and need to be recovered and released. Benjamin distinguishes between two types of excess, “aura” and “trace”: The trace is the apparition of a proximity, however far away that which is left may be. The aura is the apparition of a distance, however close that which evokes it may be. With the trace, we grasp the thing; with the aura, the thing becomes the master.11 What is this quality adhering to things? Derived from the Greek, “aura” or breath, it suggests in many cultures the numinous spiritual energy that hovers around things. As such, it serves as a potential metaphor of the Lurianic sparks. It is also reflective of the enigma of form and content and the metaphysical issue of first things. Eastern philosophy asserts that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Contemporary quanta theory suggests the same thing. Existentially, how does one become aware of such emptiness or energy? Benjamin thought his experiments with psychotropic drugs would uncover, in an intellectual protocol, in his words, “the historical presence or authenticity of the object outside the reproducible signs of its existence.”12 Marcus Boon’s consideration of this aspect of Benjamin and the “aura” concept uncovers the wisdom of Eastern philosophy and quanta theory: . . . Benjamin’s unique contribution was that he saw this perception [of hidden meaning in objects and altered time and space orientations] as being both the revelation of an object’s historical being (its aura) and, beneath all the “veils” and “masks” which everyday objects wear, the apprehension of a “sameness” indicating the presence within history of secret transcendental forces.13 The millenarian aspect of this perception in the historical process is restated in a non-theological way by the contemporary Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson through his notion of an “untranscendable horizon” that defines our facticity as it moves toward some kind of utopia.14 Jameson nonetheless insists on the credo: “Always historicize,”15 as his Marxist roots would demand. Yet James Joyce asserted that history was a nightmare we are trying to awake from. This is not far from the Eastern thought that everything is at bottom an illusion, Maya. For Benjamin, the intellectual, the pattern of modern history with its abominations might well appear nightmarish. If the saving grace of the historical dialectic is freedom, or even joy, for Hegel, certainly Benjamin might find a similar saving grace in what might be termed the true moment of particulars. Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History expresses the Lurianic metaphor in juxtaposition to historicism’s unmediated causality: Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason

BEING IS BELIEVING

235

historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.16 Under his first protocol with hashish, he perhaps uncovered the kind of rejection of simplistically formulated causality, though short of Hume’s skepticism. This leads to a mystical experience of ecstasy as in one notation: “Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of rapture.”17 But even such a theologically grounded state would nonetheless be incomplete according to Benjamin’s millennialism and Lurianic Kabbalah, which suggests that all the fallen sparks will be released at the end of time. Until then, Benjamin states: “Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a ‘weak Messianic power,’ a power to which the past has a claim.”18 He adds that “only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation à l’ordre du jour—and that day is Judgment Day.”19 Yet, according to Peter Demetz in the introduction to a collection of Benjamin essays, Benjamin does not want to tolerate any irrational romantic, or intoxicating element in that secularized epiphany or the overwhelming moment of “profane illumination”; in spite of his hashish experiments (or, rather, because of them), he asserts that it is not productive to accentuate the mystical element in the mystery of discovering hidden forces and meanings.20 Demetz then quotes Benjamin’s reason for not pursuing these forces and meanings: for histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.21 Of the drug protocols and related altered states of consciousness that Demetz and Benjamin, according to Demetz, disavow, Marcus Boon, translator of those protocols, notes: “Like the Surrealists, with whose works he was critically engaged during the 1920s, Benjamin sought to infuse thinking with the energies of dream—but in the interests of a ‘waking’ dream.”22 Walter Benjamin’s long relationship with Gershom Scholem, the leading expert on Kabbalah in the modern period, might suggest that more credence

236

BRUCE ROSS

be given to Benjamin’s altered states and ideas about altered states, particularly the Lurianic metaphor and his own statements on Messianic time and history. In addition, Benjamin’s dictum, “everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday,” sounds suspiciously similar to the Eastern metaphysical dictums, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” and nirvana (enlightenment) is samsara (physical reality). In effect, the old theological relationship of transcendence and immanence is invoked in the context of historical theory. One of Benjamin’s notes under a protocol, cited by Boon: “One becomes tender, fears that a shadow falling on the paper might hurt it . . .,”23 seems pathological, but could it be breaching the crux of such issues, the existential experience of lived moments of heightened insight or their supposition? The Theses on the Philosophy of History were composed in response to what Benjamin calls the “state of emergency”24 which for him was the current Fascism but which he saw as a continuous disconnect of justice throughout history. In Kabbalist terms, in Benjamin’s words, it is the “ ‘weak’ Messianic power.”25 In the understanding of the Zohar, the central text of Kabbalah, cited in one of the epigraphs, it is the perpetual presence of injustice, literally the “evil impulse.” Specifically for Benjamin, in his criticism of Marxism and the then current Fascism, it is in the “mastery [and “exploitation”] of nature” at the expense of the “retrogression of society . . .”26 Like Blake and Turgenev, Benjamin was experiencing a shift, or rather a speeding up of the shift, from an agrarian culture based on ritualized contact with the natural world to one of urban industry at the expense of nature. In effect, he was confronting the precursor of the “postmodern condition,” though, for him, the negative aspects of the current historical moment would appear as characteristic of history in general. The daunting problem was of history being only one thing after another as Hemingway once put it or as Benjamin said of any historical approach, “. . . a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time.”27 Benjamin, modifying the Lurianic metaphor, constructed a meaningful pattern in this mass of events filling emptiness. That construct served both his historical and literary theory. Benjamin’s historical project, encompassing his aesthetics of “aura” and sympathy for Brechtian drama, had advanced itself through reconsiderations of epistemological ground (referenced with memory and language) and the metaphysical ground (referenced with ontology). According to Demetz, Benjamin saw language as a means to express the universal communication of all existences as a “glorious medium of being.”28 Further, as Arendt, explains, Benjamin saw language as an Adamic procedure which connected humanity with the essential nature of beings and that consequently, in her words, “naming through quoting became for him the only possible and appropriate way of dealing with the past without the aid of tradition.”29

BEING IS BELIEVING

237

The epistemological mode through which “quoting” resolved the historical issue was expressed through the materialist procedure in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.30 In language that mirrors the Lurianic recovering of the fallen holy sparks in order to speed the Messianic Era, Benjamin then offers the crux of his historical and literary theories: He takes cognizance of it [the monad] in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history.31 The final section of “Theses on the Philosophy of History” concludes with the assertion that Jews, unlike cultures based on divination, are forbidden from investigating the future. Rather, the Judaic ritual practice was, according to Benjamin, centered on the remembrance of the past, the illud tempus, the sacred history of origin celebrated by all cultures. But, Benjamin asserts, the Judaic lack of a magical future, like that embraced by soothsayers, does not produce a future, in his words, of “homogeneous, empty time.”32 For him, in his words, “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”33 For Benjamin, the future is pregnant with the horizon of millenarian metaphysical possibility and each present moment and those special moments from the past, his monads, are charged with the history of the sacred life force. Benjamin is heir to the Proustian mode of holding the true moment in recollection, whether of historical happening or of the cultural present embedded in history as he strolled around the Paris documented in his Arcades Project. But like the creatures in Kafka’s parables The Animal in the Synagogue,34 and Leopards in the Temple,35 Benjamin was looking for an intrusion in the flow of sacred time. Kafka’s animals inadvertently became part of sacred ritual because of their expected presence or the memory of that presence. For Benjamin, rooting out such truth or untruth in the sacred flow, past or present, and experiencing that truth or untruth is the philosopher’s duty. Not really a flâneur, perhaps not really a kabbalist, Benjamin was a detective searching for the Riss

238

BRUCE ROSS

in the life force and the lifework, doing in his mind for the past, present, and future generations the great redemptive work. Hampden, Maine NOTES 1

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1968), p. 261. 2 Zen Calendar, ed. David Schiller (New York: Workman Publishing, 2006, 2007), March 16, 2007. 3 Ibid., December 16, 2006. 4 The Wisdom of the Zohar, An Anthology of Texts, vol.II, ed. Fischel Lashower and Isaiah Tishby, trans. David Goldstein (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 801. 5 Zen Calendar, March 30, 2007. 6 Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, ed. And trans. Howard Eiland and intro. Marcus Boon (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 24. 7 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 256. 8 Ibid., p. 38. 9 Donald G. Marshall, Contemporary Critical Theory, A Selective Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1993), p. 135. 10 The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 95. 11 Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 95. 12 Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, p. 11. 13 Ibid., p. 11. 14 Donald G. Marshall, p. 142. 15 Ibid., p. 142. 16 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 263. 17 Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, p. 20. 18 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 254. 19 Ibid., p. 254. 20 Walter Benjamin, Reflections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz and trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. xxxi. 21 Ibid., pp. xxxi–xxxii. 22 Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, p. ix. 23 Ibid., p. ix. 24 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 257. 25 Ibid., p. 254. 26 Ibid., p. 259. 27 Ibid., p. 262. 28 Walter Benjamin, Reflections, p. xxii. 29 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 49. 30 Ibid., p. 263. 31 Ibid., p. 263. 32 Ibid., p. 264. 33 Ibid., p. 264. 34 Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schoken Books, 1966), pp. 49–59. 35 Ibid., p. 93.

S E C T I O N IV

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

H I S T O R I C FA B U L AT I O N A N D T. S . E L I OT ’ S “LITTLE GIDDING”

ABSTRACT

T.S. Eliot, in his Fourth Quartet, “Little Gidding,” engages historic fabulation, especially in his creation of the children in the apple tree. At the source of the longest river, The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.1 248–253

Why does Eliot posture these children in the apple tree? What fable do they represent? And most importantly, what is the historical meaning of Little Gidding, an actual church in Huntingshire, visited by Charles I in 1646? What is so important about that church, that place of innocence, as it relates to the 20th Century? The poet visits Little Gidding in 1946, after the Second World War, and associates the “children in the apple tree, not known, because not looked for” to an enduring fable from the past, now present here in this place. Who are these children? What a wonderful discovery lies here for the individual who seeks them. In his treatise on time consciousness, Edmund Husserl explores perception as it relates to primary and secondary remembrance.. T.S. Eliot’s fabulation of time past and time present in “Little Gidding engages the phenomenon of Husserl’s phrases of primal consciousness and retention as they relate to present day history. In the perception of the children in the apple tree, and their reality, we distinguish the idea given now, which we term the “perceived” from the enduring reality of the past, which has been maintained throughout human history. The past and the now-point become one whole. Considering historical fabulation in “Little Gidding” and Husserl’s precise examination of time consciousness, we can read Eliot’s verse with added appreciation. Exactly what Eliot perceives in the children in the apple tree is basis for the whole paradym of the historic Little Gidding. The perception of the “half 241 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 241–246. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

242

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

heard” children is a tendency toward the transcendent. The transcendence that Eliot perceives begins with the opening lines, which immediately name the half-heard and half-seen aspects of the universe Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden toward sundown Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest. With forest and fire, The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches In windless cold that is the heart’s heat Reflecting in a watery mirror A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon. 1–82

The beginning of the poem sets the scene for the point that the poet is making. Midwinter spring is a phenomenon of nature, a phenomenon of time and an all encompassing phenomenon of the human spirit, a season suspended in time between pole and tropic. There is a historical correlation between the little church of the 1600s and what Eliot saw was a general malaise of the 20th century. There definitely is for Eliot, an enduring presence of a magnificent transcendence in the hum drum everyday life with its “sodden and windless cold” moving through the glare that is blindness. His children in the apple tree, not seen because not looked for, embody the transcendence that the poet saw in history. Eliot’s Wasteland was a fable of fragmentatio,. a broken world historically, bewildered and smitten by the First World War. “Little Gidding,” however, is a fable of oneness, of transcendence, written after the Second World War. After this terrible war, Eliot, in his poetry of life, engages historical perception as a self giving act, involving the possible seeing and hearing of some marvelous reality present in our shattered humanity. The phenomenon of presence of the children in the apple tree has to do with appearances. The poet knows that the children are in the apple tree, just as the church of the Little Gidding is historically present in the 20th century. The poet can half hear the children between two waves of the sea. Who are these children created into a fable by Eliot? Certainly, among other perceptions, they are the objects of remembered innocence and bliss, as is the church of Little Gidding, the object of a remembered innocence and bliss, is surviving through World Wars and their historic chaos. Husserl explores the meaning of appearances of transcendent objects (objeckte) as constituted unities. In his examination of this concept of perception, Husserl claims that perception is an act which brings something other than itself before us.3 The re-presentation that Husserl associates with appearances, is an act which Eliot employs in his re presentation of Little Gidding. The remembrance of Little Gidding offers us a fantasy of the now and the past, the

H I S T O R I C F A B U L AT I O N

243

same and the modified. The historic little church is an object of transcendence, it is an object of human desire, and it is an object of human experience. The presence of a moral lesson is intrinsic to the fable. The church of Little Gidding was built by members seeking a place to encounter the transcendent, to rise past their hard, earth-bound lives. It is a place of transcendence historically present in the 20th Century. The poet knows this. Eliot regards history as the past which gives identity to the present. Little Gidding, the small church in Huntinshire, which dates back to the 1600s, becomes a fable, a story that intrinsically contains a moral lesson. The lesson of the little church engages the appearances of a past life which is timeless, thus extending into the present. If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity, Or carry report. You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid. 42–494

A moral lesson definitively is didactic. The poet presents fable which teaches that this historical place can be approached from any route, starting from anywhere, at any time. This place of the children in the apple tree is always the same, and the individual who approaches it has “to put off sense and notion.” It actually is a mystical place where the visitor does not come “to verify,” or instruct self, or “inform curiosity,” or to “carry report.” However, the moral lesson of this place demands an action. The visitor is here to kneel. The act of kneeling demands recognition. The individual who kneels before an object of person does so as an act of homage, an act of veneration, an act of humility. Is this then the moral of the fable? Is the poet asking the reader to recognize, and moreso, to venerate the church of Little Gidding and the children in the apple tree.. He says “You are here to kneel,” not even to verify, or carry report. The lesson that the poet suggests is a lesson of the heart, of an aspect of our human desire that surpasses “informing” our curiosity. The poet invites the reader, and the visitor to Little Gidding, to see beyond the church, to know the presence of the children in the apple tree, and to kneel in homage of this marvelous reality in a world that has just experienced a deadly war with its horrific acts. A moral lesson certainly engages the right and the wrong of human action. The poet makes an emphatic statement of the lesson of his little fable, when he gives direction to what we are to do in the presence of our encounter with this historical setting. Just as the church has survived the bombing of the war, we are not here to destroy, but to kneel. Something surpassing the historical

244

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

little church is present here. In centuries past people have knelt here, and in our present time, we are here to kneel. The poet defines this lesson of transcendence in history in the fifth movement of his fourth quartet when he says. A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So while the light fails On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England. With the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling.5

The moral lesson of this fable, a story about a little church built by faithful souls persecuted in their homeland, is a lesson which encompasses history, for the poet says “history is now and England.” History, in Eliot’s major poems, The Waste Land and The Four Quartets are both written after the two great world wars of the 20th Century. For Eliot, there is a historical alliance with his own experience and with his own belief system. As there is the movement toward a national unity and well being, there was also in Eliot’s own life a movement toward a well being in his own psyche. The Waste Land , published in 1920, is a poem of fragmentation and lost direction, with a hint of redemption in the final lines where the thunder is heard, and blessed rain will come to nourish a parched earth. In the Fourth Quartet, “Little Gidding,” first appearing in England in 1944, Eliot has moved into some realm of wholeness, coming to the center (the last word of the poem is ‘one’) and an aspect of our humanity that is at peace. In his early years, the poet learned Italian so that he could read Dante. One cannot read Eliot at all without noticing the Dantesque perspective in his work. In a talk that he made to the Italian Institute in London (1950), he expressed his alliance with Dante. “I do not think I can explain everything, even to myself; but I still, after forty years, regard his poetry as the most persistent and deepest influence upon my verse.”6 Certainly The Waste Land is the our journey through The Inferno as Little Gidding is our journey through The Paradiso. On a literal level, claims R. A. Malagi, The Divine Comedy is concerned with ‘the state of the soul after death straightforwardly affirmed,” while on a symbolic level it is concerned with the state of the soul in time and in eternity, in the world and in God.7 While this concern of Dante with the soul in time and eternity is true about The Paradiso, it is certainly true about the poetry of Eliot in Little Gidding The fable of the children in the apple tree, half-heard and half-seen, because not looked for, are emblematic of a reality encompassing the two worlds, the

H I S T O R I C F A B U L AT I O N

245

Paridiso, and the world in time. The moral lesson of this fable is an exhortation by the poet, to kneel, to recognize and honor the splendid reality of our existence, the reality that spans our temporal lives and casts us into en endearing experience of presence in the world beyond time. At the end of Little Gidding, Eliot’s poetry aptly addresses the first question, of why this historic little church, important to its members in the 1600s is still important to the visitor on the 20th Century. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And how the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate Where the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterrall And the children in the apple tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea.

This last section of The Four Quartets moves into a realm of phenomenology that addresses the revelation and the concealment of a central reality of our existence. That central element is our notion of time and our presence in it. In his examination of Internal Time Consciousness, Husserl claims that if, in the comprehension of a temporal object, we distinguish between perceptive and memorial consciousness, then the contrast between the perception and the primary remembrance of an object corresponds to that between “now” present and past. Temporal objects, and this belongs to their essence, spread their content over an interval of time, and the objects can be constituted only in acts which likewise constitute temporal distinctions. Husserl associates these temporal distinctions, these elements of past and present, with primary remembrance, which is also essential to perception8 . The enduring objects of the children in the apple tree are held in the one moment of the perception, an eternal moment in time. In other language than that of the philosopher, the poet says, “We shall never cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” The perception that Husserl examines, is engaged by Eliot, in his recognition of the children in the apple tree, not known because not looked for. But heard, half heard, between two waves of the sea. The memorial consciousness that Husseral claims to of essence in perception, is encountered by the poet, when he claims that in

246

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

our existence, we “half hear” a pure voice from some transcendental world of human experience, a world between two waves of the sea. NOTES 1

Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding” The Four Quartets. THE COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1971. 2 Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding” 138, 1–8. 3 Husserl, The phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Translated by James Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 64–65. 4 Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding” 139. 5 Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding” 144. 6 Malagi, R. A. “Four Quartets and Paradiso” New Essays on T. S. Eliot. Edit by Vinod Sena and Rajiva Verma. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1992, 130. 7 Malagi, R. A. Paradiso, 135. 8 Husserl, Edmund, 60.

TSUNG-I DOW

H A R M O N I O U S B A L A N C E A S T H E U LT I M AT E R E A L I T Y I N A RT I S T I C A N D P H I L O S O P H I C A L I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F T H E TA I J I D I A G R A M

ABSTRACT

In an attempt to decipher and understand the ultimate reality and enable our lives to have realistic guidance, it appears at present, thanks to the advancement of quantum mechanics, that the universe is evolving through a two-fold process. This two-fold basic structure interacts in complementary contradiction and allows for a harmonious balance, which assures the existence of and change in all events and things in the world. Many artists and philosophers have created interpretations of this world process but it is best illustrated by the Confucian-Taoist Taiji Diagram, which ultimately was used by Niels Bohr as his coat-of-arms. Who actually created the Taiji Diagram is uncertain but the philosopher widely credited with its first interpretation is neo-Confucian Zhou, Dongyi (1017–1073) during the Song Dynasty. The opening statement of the Taiji Diagram simply conveys the idea that the universe or “great ultimate” evolves from nothingness and the process is continuous (wuji or taiji.) Today’s contention of the Big Bang and recent discoveries of dark matter, dark energy and black holes, among others, lend support to the concept of nothingness. Subsequently, the diagram’s contention that the “great ultimate,” or the concrete universe, consists of a two-fold, dual primordial structure of Ying and Yang operating in complementary contradiction to attain harmonious balance is seen as the most singularly important characteristic of all elements of the world process. Neither Ying nor Yang can produce anything separately (Gu ying bu sheng, du yang bu zhang.) Within the sphere of Ying there is Yang and vice versa. When the development of Ying reaches its maximum, Yang emerges and vice versa. In all matter, the fundamental constituents are pairs of quarks and leptons; each particle has its anti-particle with four basic counterbalancing forces of strong and weak, electromagnetic and gravity act to consolidate and disperse the particles into their shapes. For example, an electromagnetic force can combine with a weak force and interact as one entity operating against a countervailing force. Gravity has been discovered to have attractive and repulsive features. DNA’s double helix 247 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 247–257. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

248

TSUNG-I DOW

structure also displays the same counterbalance. Thus, Ying and Yang appear to support scientific answers but why is it so? The concept of harmonious balance does not indicate precise equality but a dynamic equilibrium of proportions or super-symmetry that shapes all things and events. Homeostasis exists between a dynamic, microscopic nearly invisible world and a relatively stable macroscopic world creating the galactic habitable zone to sustain human life and existence. The Taiji Diagram depicts the whole universe within a cycle in a zero symbol that reflects the sense of an ultimate unity within all diversity operating in harmonious balance, thus anticipating the phenomenon of particle entanglement and ultimately the human ability to perceive the world. I

Needless to say, knowledge is the product of the human mind. The search for the ultimate reality and what it means is bound to be one of the most significant efforts put forth. Confucians envision a universal law according to which all human beings are expected to live. This, in turn, serves as the foundation for the meaning of life and an individual’s sense of fulfillment (Fa tien tao yi li ren tao.) The main contention is that the universe is evolving through a two-fold process. This two-fold basic process interacts in complementary contradiction to attain a harmonious balance ensuring the existence of and change in all events and things in the world. Ever since its original inception and presentation in The Book of Changes, many artists and philosophers have created interpretations of this world process. Perhaps it is best illustrated by the Taiji Diagram. It is uncertain who originally created the design in uncertain, but the philosopher widely credited with its first interpretation is neo-Confucian, Zhou, Dongyi (1017–1073) during the Song dynsaty. In essence, what the Diagram suggests is: first, there is a visible and invisible universe that interacts in harmonious balance to sustain a suitable zone in which human beings can live; second, within the visible or observable universe, a microscopic world interacts with a relatively stable, concrete macroscopic world to achieve a harmonious balance within the cyclical web of life; third, on the human level, our search for knowledge follows a similar process whereby known and unknown phenomena interact in a two-fold harmonious process of investigation and exploration advance the acquisition of knowledge. The concept of harmonious balance does suppose equality among “opposites” but a dynamic equilibrium of proportions, super-positions or super-symmetry. Ideas along these lines have only recently been advanced by quantum mechanics. Prior to that the propositions of the Diagram were

H A R M O N I O U S B A L A N C E A S T H E U LT I M AT E R E A L I T Y

249

difficult to reconcile with classical physics. How and to what extent the principles of quantum mechanics and its related new sciences mesh with the ideas of Taiji Diagram, in terms of a relational duality in our existence, requires in-depth examination. II

The opening statement of the Taiji Diagram simply conveys the idea that the universe (great ultimate, taiji) evolves from nothingness (non-ultimate, ultimate of non-being) and the process is continuous (Wuji erh Taiji.) In fact the term nothingness is inadequate and imprecise in describing the state that existed before the Big Bang. It poses a challenge to scientists and linguists to create a term for scientific interpretation. As Alex Vilenkin pointed out in “Creation of the Universe From Nothing” (Ch. 2, Many Worlds In One, Hill and Wang, New York, 2006) nothingness cannot be identified as absolutely nothing. What term is available to describe the state of no space, time or matter as such? There is no definitive answer. Yet, existence before the Big Bang can not be denied. Chinese thinkers attempted to explain the state of Wuji in terms of Winton Soup, named after Winton Tang, which is reminiscent of the phenomenon considered to be Quantum Soup. The statement “Wuji erh Tauji” appropriately can be rendered as a two-fold structure, an invisible and visible universe, interacting to reach a harmonious balance. The recent discovery of dark matter, dark energy and black holes, seems to amply such a two-fold primordial structure in which a harmonious balance prevails to establish a habitable zone among the galaxies in which human beings live and progress. At present, the issue is to what extent or to what proportions does dark matter exist in our universe. New studies indicate that dark matter does more than hurry along the expansion of the universe. It may be the key link among servers aspects of galaxy formation. According to Christopher Conselice, “Had dark energy been weaker or stronger, the Milky Way might have had a lower star formation rate, so the heavy elements that constitute our plant might never have been synthesized.” (Christopher J. Conselice, “The Universe’s Invisible Hand,” Scientific American, Feb. 2007, pp. 35–41.) The harmonious balance of elements and their role in the universe appears to continue. While the Taiji designer includes the concept of both phenomena— Wuji and Taiji—in the taiji circle, no symbols or signs for wuji were incorporated. The balance of yin and yang in the circle seems to imply a similar alternation between Wuji and Taiji in a cyclical progression. Recent scientific observations of the cyclical nature of the universe mirror the cyclical concept of the Taiji diagram. The universe seems to evolve in a repeating cycle of expansion and contraction (Vilenkin, p. 171.)

250

TSUNG-I DOW

Even in mathematics and binary structures, a cyclicality is observable. Suppose that a circle can be symbolized as the digital figure of zero, the sign of Wuji. Within the circle, the content signifies wholeness, which can be symbolized with the digital figure, 1. Whether or not the concepts of the Taiji Diagram inspired Leibnitz to imitate its significance with the binary structure of 0:1 is debatable. But, there is no question that the designer of the quantum computer assigned the digit”0” with a black sphere in place of the fish’s eye in the Taiji Diagram and the “1” in the lieu of the other fish’s eye in the white sphere. These quantum bits or qubits exist in superposition functioning in harmonious balance. III

The Book of Changes is the foundation on which the concept for the Taiji Diagram is based. It serves to crystallize the profound meaning of a primordial two-fold structure in its most simple form. The swirling two fish heads contained within a circle show the balance of light and dark yet each hold some of the other—the eye of the dark is white and the eye of the white is black. Neither Yin nor Yang can exclude the other. “. . .Yin and Yang are intertwined in an ever cycling polarities. The end of polarity contains within itself the seeds of its opposite,” (Charles Hampton-Turner, Maps of the Mind Macmillan, N.Y., 1981, p. 20) The manifestation of a harmonious balance in such supersymmetry instantly evokes a sense of beauty as well as meaning. This imagery may explain why the Taiji Diagram has become universally popular. Immediately following his initial description of the diagram, Zhou elaborates on the movement within the symbol. Yang is generated through movement, while Ying exists through tranquility. When motion reaches its limit, it becomes stable and vice versa. Thus motion and stability alternate and are at the same time the root of each other. Zhou relies on the theory of the five elements advocated by Tung, Zhoungshu (179–104 B.C.), who lived during the Han dynasty, for illustration. But, his interpretation of the role the five elements plays seems to confuse its original meaning. Zhou treated Yin and Yang as two completely separate entities—e.g., males and females. Tung, it appears, meant that the five elements—water, fire, wood, metal and soil—all interacted in complementary contradiction. For example, fire could burn and eliminate wood but water can extinguish fire and the embers contribute to the soil, regenerating wood. At present, the advancement of quantum mechanics has brought forth a series of new sciences, such a molecular biology, particle physics, etc., all of which deepen the understanding of our universe. Consequently, these new areas of knowledge not only reveal the beauty, complexity and thoroughly integrated nature of a harmonious universe (Keith J. Laider,

H A R M O N I O U S B A L A N C E A S T H E U LT I M AT E R E A L I T Y

251

The Harmonious Universe, Prometheus, N.Y. 2004,) but also enables us to understand that harmonious balance may be the ultimate reality resulting from the two-fold primordial structure represented by the Taiji Diagram. Niels Bohr also reflected on the importance of their connection, “quantum physics ties in well with the traditional Eastern philosophy,” (Brian Clegg, The God Effect: Quantum Entanglement, St Martins Press, New York, p. 235). Undoubtedly, the emergence of quantum mechanics firmly established the fact that there is an invisible microscopic world to attain harmonious balance, assuring the existence and change in all things and events in our universe. For example, as we see a mountain it appears to be motionless and unchanging and this would be considered accurate in terms of classical physics. Yet, on an atomic level, quantum mechanics reveals an entirely different picture. Atoms are constantly changing and decaying and ultimately the mountain will become something different. To truly understand the physical reality of the mountain, both views are necessary. The Taiji Diagram can be seen to represent the unity of diversity. At present, classical physics governs macroscopic phenomena while quantum mechanics governs microscopic phenomena. In many aspects the two are seemingly contradictory. For instance, the law of causality is essential to classical physics and is used to predict events. But, the uncertainty principle is essential to quantum mechanics. At a particle level, things can occur without a cause. According to Shrodinger, a cat can be dead and alive depending on the level at which one is looking at it. The balance between the macroscopic and microscopic world reflects the ultimate unity of all things and events. It provides this potentiality and quantum entanglelment shows this possibility (Clegg, The God Effect.) According to Bohr’s principle of correspondence, classical physics must be contained in quantum mechanics when objects become larger than the size of atoms. However, recent discoveries in particle physics disclosed that the behavior of nano-scale particles, which are considered small but bigger than a single molecule, reflect the rules of quantum mechanics but do not simply obey the rules of classical physics. Properties of matter in the “meso-scale” world are governed by a complex combination of classical physics and quantum mechanics (Michael Roukes, “Plenty Room In Deed,” Scientific American, Sep. 2001, pp. 48–55) In an effort to clarify this mixed phase between the macro and micro world, a new science of complexity emerged and later the concepts of super symmetry and super position were envisioned (Steven Weinberg, Super Symmetry, Even in mathematics, string theory carries a “super string” and a “string duality.” All these new advances are in search of an understanding of the ultimate reality and seem to lend support to the concept of harmonious balance. While science may have difficulty explaining why, a two-fold primordial structure permeates all things and events in the universe. Quantum mechanics

252

TSUNG-I DOW

undoubtedly has proven the symbolic value of the Taiji Diagram. For example, all matter is constituted of quarks and leptons of which there are six each. The so-called standard model of particle physics asserts there are four fundamental forces prevailing in the universe. The strong force binds quarks to form hadrons, while the weak force and electromagnetism promote their decay. In the past, scientists recognized the manifestation of gravity, the fourth force, with it attractive power, but later incorporated its repulsive effects. Thus, a harmonious balance is an essential characteristic of gravity’s two-fold role in sustaining the universe. Recent advancements in string theory seem to uphold this concept. It conceives of elementary particles in the universe as wriggling strings. They have multidimensional counterparts know as brane which coexist with another parallel brane which cannot be seen. These two branes and act as if they are connected by a string, which pulls the branes together when they are far apart and pushes them apart when they are too close together. Thus, they oscillate to and fro and periodically bounce off each other like cymbals. (George Musser, “Been There, Done That: The Cosmic Reality Check and the Great Cycle of Being” Scientific American Mar. 02, pp. 25–26) If harmonious balance, as illustrated through these dynamics and quantum mechanics, does not signify the ultimate reality, then when Laotzu complained that the creator is unkind (Tiendi bu zen) may have some relevance. Why does every particle have an anti-particle. Why must life end with death? Although he came close, the venerable Linus Pauling lost the race to discover life’s building blocks, DNA, mainly because he was unable to comprehend the ideas of complementarity in contradiction. James Watson’s perceptions allowed him to envision a double helix of pairs of T.A.G.C, comprising DNA, and its relationship to RNA, which displays the same principle. The homeostatis Watson was able to envision and replicate, proves the existence of a harmonious balance on which all human life depends. Take this other example, the “immune system functions in a harmonious balance. . .[otherwise] it could go to its opposite.” (Zeltan Fehervari, “Peacekeeping of the Immune System.” Scientific American, Oct. 2006, p. 57). Additionally, within the observable world, the importance of the air we breathe on our survival is indisputable. It, too, is in harmonious balance. A twofold process of inhalation and exhalation governs our breathing. Its role is even more important than food. Yet, what is the source of this air on which we depend? According to classical physics, the air comes from empty space. But, a new cosmology has been discovered through the advancements of quantum physics, showing that space is not empty at all. Particles move in and out of our atmosphere and the energy they contain exerts a gravitational force that is crucial to maintaining a balance within the universe. These particles exist in a hot, gaseous interstellar medium, which envelopes our galaxy and fills the

H A R M O N I O U S B A L A N C E A S T H E U LT I M AT E R E A L I T Y

253

space between an infinite number of stars. Within the medium exist an extreme diversity of densities, temperatures and ionizations. The atmosphere of a planet is what binds its surface into a unified whole. Local phenomena can have global consequences. The interstellar medium is constantly stirred, heated and recycled, transforming the plane that defines the middle of the galaxy. The balance of pressure and weight in the medium appears to dictate the existence and change in stars. Scientists believe that supernova explosions interconnected our galaxy. They have learned that when stars exhaust their fuel and “die” the expel much of their matter back into the medium, following a cycle, much like the water cycle on Earth, of precipitation and evaporation and so on. The fundamental materials of the universe appear to be “recycled” over and over. Not only do conditions in the galaxy determine the fate of the starts but they are effected by the medium in what is a negative and positive interchange. The Milky Way appears to still be an open system, gaining and losing mass amongst its cosmic surroundings. (Ronald J. Reynolds, The Gas Between the Stars,” Scientific American, Jan. 2002, pp. 36–43) Again, we see the signficance of the Taiji Diagram the cycle of the universe. Amid the current idea of a cyclical universe, in 1999, the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ) was discovered. The harmonious balance within the structure of our Milky Way provides the correct conditions for sustaining life on Earth. Only part of our galaxy is fit for our survival. The stars and their retinue orbit within a specific range from the galactic center, neither too close nor too far. If a star moves too far out from the GHZ, it will lack the necessary elements supplied by the other stars; and too near comet collisions, exploding stars and radiation can impair the ecosystem. Thus, the location of the habitable zone is determined by a balance between the supply of materials necessary for survival and the prevention of outside threats. On Earth, the balance of water and land is critical to temperature control and maintaining habitable zones. Within our solar system, the Earth’s distance from the sun effects harmonious balance within our atmosphere. Hence, macro and micro environments hang within that harmonious balance. Only a few years after the monumental accomplishment of mapping the human genome, the new science of protemics emerged. Scientists learned that the role of the structure and function of proteins is as critical as the role one’s genes play in sustaining life. The genome only provides the full set of the body’s genetic information much like recipes for making proteins. But, it is the proteins that distinguish the various types of cells in which genes are active. Diseased cells often produce proteins that healthy cells don’t and vice versa. Unlike the gene’s linear nature, proteins fold into complex shapes. (Carol

254

TSUNG-I DOW

Ezzell, “Proteins’ Roles,” Scientific American, April 2002, pp. 42–47.) Therefore, proteins are the fabric of which cells are made. Amazingly, there are only 20 amino acids, which come together in various combinations to create the 10 trillion cells in the human body. Strands of DNA encode the order in which the 20 amino acids assemble and orchestrate the cells’ development. Throughout the entire cycle amino acids are recycled to make new proteins and strands of DNA also permit steady degeneration and death of cells. In this cycle cell division is essential for cell development but cannot occur without cell death and the breakdown of those proteins. Human life is linked to that cycle of regeneration and degeneration. (Alfred L. Goldberg, et al., “The Cellular Chamber of Doom,” Scientific American, Jan. 2001, pp. 68–73). Even the human body has a two-fold structure at it earliest embryonic stage. Scientists have identified several proteins that govern a bi-lateral symmetry that is essential to the generation of healthy organs. At a predetermined time, these same proteins facilitate the latter stages of development when the organs further evolve and develop asymmetrically. If the process misaligns or is perturbed by some outside influence, abnormalities occur. (J.C.I. Belmonte, “How the Body Tells Left from Right,” Scientific American June 1999, pp. 46–51) Harmonious balance begets human health and well-being. Niels Bohr posited that the precepts of quantum mechanics could be applied to social phenomena. Indeed, this may be the case. For example, economic activities constitute a large portion of human affairs. A balance must exist between the value of what is produced and the value it is given in the marketplace but if free markets are constrained and a monopoly occurs the balance is upset. Then the gap between rich and poor becomes so great that inequalities seem insurmountable and revolutions arise. Eventually, when peace and order are restored the free market will be reestablished. Additionally, a central value of democracy is the principle of checks and balances. Confucians considered it was the government’s function to maintain a harmonious balance in economic activities by, for example, establishing a state granary, taking the rich and subsidizing the poor (Ya fu ji ping) and assisting with production and transportation of goods, among other things. Also, the duty of the ruler was to a surrogate parent to their people (wei min fu-mo,) and to provide proper livelihoods for his subjects. The primary thrust of Confucian metaphysics was aimed at the discovery of the ultimate reality achieved through harmonious balance and to impose it on human beings (Fa tien tao yi li ren tao.) Central to this is the relationship of men and women, husbands and wives (Junzi zhi tao cao duam ho fufe.) Confucius declared that harmonious balance is the ultimate principle of morality and, hence, humanity.

H A R M O N I O U S B A L A N C E A S T H E U LT I M AT E R E A L I T Y

255

IV

In the final analysis, the search for understanding the ultimate reality of our world involves the cognitive activities of our mind. Yet, how does one define what the mind is? Much investigation and exploration has centered around this question with no absolute certainty to the information revealed. A series of newer areas of science, notably neurology, molecular biology and psychology, have provided a framework for the biological basis of the mind and in particular the brain. But the brain is not the mind and vice versa. Both seem to function in monistic unity, operating as one in the process of cognition, which indicates a two-fold structure in harmonious balance. As far as neurologists are concerned neurons constitute the brain and are responsible for cognition and automatic nervous responses that govern our survival. How the human conscience, which is also critical to the survival of humanity, operates or develops is still somewhat mysterious. Yet, the balance between the unconscious and conscious operations of the brain are what truly comprise the mind and its role. How consciousness arises from the unconscious and automatic firing of neurons in the brain is uncertain. Even the neural communication between the left and right sides of the brain is fundamentally important to our survival. A harmonious balance must exist between left and right, conscious and unconscious. (J.C.I. Belmonte, Scientific American, June 1999, pp 46–50). The brain’s features include two parts, cerebrum and cerebellum. The cerebrum has two hemispheres, left and right, with each split into four lobes, back and front, top and bottom. These parts overlay the limbic system, which appears to control the automatic functions of the brain as well as strongly influence actions that impact the conscious activities of the brain. The cerebral cortex appears to control the conscious activities most of which fall into two-fold categories. Emotions can be categorized as happiness-sadness, lovehatred, anger-joy, among others. Memory manifests itself as long-term or short-term, explicit, conscious and implicit versus declarative, unconscious and procedural. Apparently, the essence of the minds is a two-fold structure which is contradictory in nature but complementary in function operates to achieve cognitive activities and a harmonious balance in the unity of wholeness. A view through the prism of quantum mechanics helps to shed more light on this view. Due to quantum physics, scientist discovered a two-fold process to the acquisition and application of knowledge, which correlates to the Taiji Diagram principle of nothingness and wholeness. Our minds operate in a cyclical manner as information moves from unknown to known and later is shed, moving from known to unknown. Knowledge, then, can be seen as proximate, provisional and evolutionary. What classical physics claimed in the past century compared to what is now understood has been modified by

256

TSUNG-I DOW

the notion of the “limit of science and.. . .the science of the limit.” (John D. Barrow, Impossibility Oxford Press, April 1998) A world of unknowable things exists alongside the known world. (Gregory Chaitin, Unknowable, Springer Verlag, 1999) The mind is able to stretch to postulate the unknown but uses what is known on which to base it. For example, the existence of dark matter, dark energy and black holes are undeniable today. But, what exactly is dark matter? The answer is unknown and unknowable predominantly because most of our information is gathered by what we “see” through the use of light and dark matter emits no light. Recent studies indicated there are an uncountable number of suns besides our own. Each emits trillions of neutrinos, particles devoid of a charge. Until recently, it was thought they also had no mass but that has been reassessed. The role they play in dark matter and other matter in the universe awaits further clarification. Thus the astronomy of the invisible is also the astronomy of the visible. A new two-fold trend in cosmology is emerging. Since it can be said that light reveals the world to us, what is light? It, too, is not fully understood but bears exploration on the macroscopic and microscopic levels. Quantum mechanics has defined it as subatomic particles called photons. When an electron changes from a higher energy state or a more excited state to a lower energy state, its nucleus emits a photon. A beam of light consists of an oscillating electromagnetic field, a manifestation of the four fundamental forces of the universe. There has been light from the beginning of the world and consists of both visible and invisible features. While the human eye only perceives visible light, quantum technology has allowed us to manipulate the other features of light to create lasers, among other things. Light’s two-fold nature, of particle and wave, complement each other to provide communication and cognition. Particles, which constitute the basis for digital light and the waves the bandwidths, allow us to convert digits into meaning and, therefore, information. A restriction imposed by the principle of uncertainty is that both cannot be observed simultaneously. For us to perceive and understand a microscopic object we must rely on measurement. The act of measurement disturbs the state of the object being observed and interferes with its actual state of being. In terms of quantum physics, the more accurate the position measurement, the less accurate the measurement of its momentum. Thus, the unknowable is a fact of life. (Berthold-George Englert, et al., “The Duality of Matter and Light,” Scientific American Dec., 1994, pp. 36–90). Moreover, molecular neurology has confirmed that the light sensitive neurons in our eyes transmit the signals of objects we perceive through a two-fold neural structure of rods and cones. Numerous other dualities occur in this process of visual perception. They are received by the visual cortex of both hemispheres, stimulating two other centers, one for memory and the other for emotions associated with the perception. Neurons act in a two-fold process of

H A R M O N I O U S B A L A N C E A S T H E U LT I M AT E R E A L I T Y

257

either excitation or inhibition. Excitation activates many neurons, while inhibition deactivates neurons. The mind integrates the known and the unknown to generate perception. While, the most reliable knowledge we have may be based on science, mathematics also plays an essential role. At the same time it has been assumed because of its accuracy to provide a symbolic representation of reality. But, Godel and other have demonstrated mathematics’ limits. “The concept of having a choice in mathematics for characterizing uncertainty is randomness.” (John L. Caste, “Confront Science’s Logical Limits,” Scientific American, Oct. 1994, p. 104) Unlike the computer, the mind is not solely computation. The unknowable inspires human creativity. Finally, as a human being, we have a thirst for knowledge and an urge to seek out the truth. Otherwise, an object might pass before us, be registered by our brain but not be truly noticed at all. The limbic system is assumed to generate the urges we feel that motivate us to do something. And, it is that will that fosters the integration of emotion and reason and motivates us to obtain knowledge. The state of the mind, operating in harmonious balance in complementary contradiction, functions as an all encompassing whole. V

Scientific knowledge may be the most reliable knowledge of all; yet, it is provisional, approximate and evolutionary. The simple observation of the oscillations of an electric charge, as recorded through the operations of neurons, demonstrates these phenomena. Although some have criticized the Taiji Diagram as over-simplified, it provides a powerful paradigm for the interpretation of quantum mechanics, by which much of the world and universe is observed. Scientists, artists and philosophers have all chosen this two-fold symbol to represent some of the most powerful revelations to date. Harmonious balance can be seen as the ultimate reality of the universe, even if, speaking on a moralistic level, Confucius lamented how difficult it is for people to uphold. Florida Atlantic University, Boca, Raton, Florida

JERRE COLLINS

TIME AFTER TIME: THE TEMPORALITY OF HUMAN E X I S T E N C E I N FAU L K N E R ’ S T H E S O U N D AND THE FURY

Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal. (Rosalind, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It III.ii.293–296) ABSTRACT

This article uses a model of time drawn largely from Heidegger and Ricoeur, which sees three “levels” or dimensions of human time–the mundane, the radical, and the historical. Intentionality on these three levels configures temporal experience in complex, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory ways. Faulkner presents us with a powerful mimesis of this constructive activity. In Faulkner’s portraits of Quentin and Jason, we see two characters struggling with the dialectic between imposition and discovery. Quentin seeks to construct his life in the shape of the story of the South’s loss, as epitomized by Jefferson Davis, and this project leads him to suicide. Jason seeks to fashion and maintain his life as a story of revenge, but by the end of the novel begins to acknowledge another configuration, the story of a man fated to a life of disappointment. Only Dilsey, through “the recollection . . . of the Lamb” has already successfully negotiated the task of discovering a “narrative identity” which enables her to endure what time brings. And the novel asserts that the tale of a life, even when told by an idiot, does not signify nothing, but is richly significant, even if the significance is disquieting. William Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury only two years after Heidegger published the first edition of Being and Time. And in his novel, Faulkner explored in an original way the modalities of human temporality, through his portrayal of a few specific days in the lives of several members of the Compson family. In a previous paper I analyzed the Benjy section of this novel, using a phenomenological model of time drawn from Heidegger but influenced also by Augustine, Husserl, and Ricoeur.1 According to this model, human temporality has three levels or poles: (1) mundane temporality, the time of ordinary “everyday” activity, configured by Care in the form of concerns or preoccupations; 259 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 259–279. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

260

JERRE COLLINS

(2) radical temporality, the finite time of life in the face of death, configured by Care in the form of resoluteness (Heidegger’s “authentic time”); and (3) historicality (Geschichtlichkeit–Heidegger, Being, pp. 437–438), the time that mediates between the two, configured by Care in the form of repetition or fusion of horizons (see Ricoeur, “Human Experience,” pp. 19–20). In that paper I showed how even the brain-damaged Benjy exhibited the configurative power of each of these levels or poles of human time. Here I will continue my analysis of time in Faulkner’s novel. I hope to show that, though these levels are distinct and incommensurable, there is a “slippage” from level to level, and also a “tension” within each level that exerts pressure for “movement” towards the others. In addition, exploring the configurative “repetitions” in the text will elucidate some of the many valences (both psychological and public-historical) of historicality. In the Benjy paper I argued that “human time” is an ongoing attempt to construct a meaningful time in the face of two poles of meaninglessness, one from without human consciousness and one from within. From “without” there is a time that may be called at once cosmic and biological–on-going, irreversible, without resonance of human meaning. From “within” there is “duration”–to borrow Bergson’s term and analysis, if not his evaluation of the durée. Interrogating the rest of Faulkner’s text will suggest that meaningful time is generated by the human individual and by the human community in a dialectical response to the tension and conflict of the two poles of meaningless cosmic and meaningless mental time. Human time, as with all other human institutions, has a certain stability similar to the inertia of a large mass, but as an ongoing product of human activity, it is also contingent and precarious. The various human times of The Sound and the Fury are one register of that contingency. THE QUENTIN SECTION

In the second or Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury, the mimesis of Quentin’s experience shows us each of the temporal levels as distinct and incommensurable, each generating tension on the other levels, yet interactive in the strain towards one complex but unified experience. Quentin’s “steam of consciousness,” especially when it becomes more intense and less organized (indicated by the increasing brevity of the fragments, omission of punctuation, etc.), represents the phenomenal or durational level. But this level is only a “baseline” for a complex experience of time. Let us describe Quentin’s time twice, once in terms of his vision or concept of time (and the way it makes sense of his suicide as a choice of times), and again in terms of his experience of time as it can be phenomenologically described.

TIME AFTER TIME

261

First, Quentin is obsessed with cosmic time and all its measures, natural and man-made. Cosmic time as objectified in clocks is particularly threatening to him not because it undermines his mundane actions or marks the precariousness of their success, but because for him it is identified with two “other” times. To begin with, the inexorability of cosmic time is like the inexorability of biological time. For one thing, it is biological time that has taken Caddy out of childhood and away from Quentin. Marked by hormones and its own menstrual measure (“‘periodical filth between two moons,’ said Father”–p. 159), biological time is the time of Caddy’s maturing into sex and independence. But it is not just the specific threat of the affectivity of sex and the consequent change in childhood allegiances that bothers Quentin; rather, it is sex as betrayer into a world of change. The changes of puberty put everything into question. Secondly, Quentin also identifies cosmic time with historical time, the time of the stretching along of life and of becoming. It is on this level that nothing is ever finished, since something can always become other than what it has been so far. “If things just finished themselves” is Quentin’s desperate wish (p. 97). When his father criticizes his unrealistic notion of suicide– you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard (p. 220)

–the one word Quentin fixates on and repeats again and again in contexts ever more inappropriate is “temporary” (pp. 220–222). In a way, what he desires is indeed “finitude,” or a “wholeness of life” on the level of radical temporality. But because he identifies wholeness of life with fixity, with a nunc stans2 beyond change, because he identifies the inside (wholeness) with the outside (absolute presence), just as he identifies the “inside” of historicality with the “outside” of cosmic time, his finitude can have no openness to the future. Quentin conflates (1) the measured linearity of cosmic time and (2) the inexorable progression of biological time with (3) the transience and mutability of historical time. He feels threatened by the imperviousness to human meaning of the first, by the changeability and impermanence of the second (both that already accomplished and that anticipated), and by the defeatist, entropic vision instilled by his father of the third. His reductive vision of time sees only two alternatives: movement or fixity. Despite the considerable complexity of his actual temporal experience, his vision of human temporality focuses only on the “external” boundaries of sheer linearity and a nunc stans. Rejecting one means choosing the other. Furthermore, once change is associated with meaninglessness, the only way to

262

JERRE COLLINS

escape anomie is to achieve changelessness. On the level of his own vision of time, then, Quentin’s suicide is a gesture towards meaningfulness, a desire for plenitude of presence, meaning, and order. We can also describe Quentin’s temporality or his experience of time “from the inside.” On the level of mundane temporality, Quentin lives much more obviously “within” time than Benjy, taking time into account and reckoning with it. He organizes his day in terms of tasks, errands, actions, and the time between them. Individual actions have an intentional configuration giving them an intelligible shape (for instance, “packing his trunk,” “going to the post office to mail a letter,” etc.), and separate actions are grouped into an intelligible configuration by “larger intentions.” His intention to commit suicide is a “larger intention” which draws together disparate mundane actions into a larger configuration. It dominates and determines a number of more particular actions: packing his trunk, mailing the trunk key to his father, writing a note to Shreve and another to Deacon (giving Deacon some of his things) but arranging that Deacon not come round until the next day, planning to mail the letter to Shreve on his way to the bridge, buying two flatirons to weigh him down, etc. What ties these for the most part ordinary but puzzling actions into a meaningful configuration, what gives them their intelligibility or “readability,” is Quentin’s intention to commit suicide.3 This intention is not mundane, however. The intentionality of mundane temporality, even if it concentrates on the present, contains within itself a certain impulse toward the future (in terms of goals, purposes, expectations, etc.). Quentin’s intention is not only energized from a different temporal level (the level of finitude and life-as-a-whole), but this particular intention breaks with the future: after a certain point there will be no more coming-to-be. So Quentin’s intention to commit suicide creates a peculiar tension. What configures also throws configuration into question. For example, just before leaving to commit suicide Quentin cleans the bloodstain off the vest he will wear when he jumps into the river, where he expects to stay until his body decays: “Until on the Day when He says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up” (p. 98). The cleaning of the vest reveals the tension, since it appears to be a meaningful action on the everyday level, yet Quentin does not expect his body to be found; therefore, on this level it is also “senseless” because Quentin has no future, not even the future of being brought home for burial. (As we learn elsewhere, Quentin’s body was brought home for burial, but this was not something he anticipated.) The overriding intentionality (intentio) that spreads out (distentio) to give a shape or configuration not

TIME AFTER TIME

263

merely to Quentin’s day but to his whole life–this intentionality is not mundane but radical: it springs from a concern with finitude that is characteristic of “being-toward-death.” So this particular intention of Quentin’s–to make life whole by putting an end to it–manifests that a configurative intention/attention on one temporal level can “carry over” and shape the temporal experience of a different level. Furthermore, configurative intentions can “interfere” with each other, one rendering nonsensical what another would make sense of. And this interference can occur across temporal levels. In addition to mediating between radical and mundane temporality, Quentin’s intention to commit suicide also draws configurative power from the level of historicality. By his suicide he accomplishes a number of historical repetitions or resonances. To begin with, he repeats, in advance and with more “courage” (p. 219), the suicide of his father, who is drinking himself to death as a response to Caddy’s sexual activity (as both Quentin and Caddy realize–p. 154). In addition, he metaphorically repeats Caddy’s fate. He enacts her equation of sex and death–“I died last year” (p. 153); “When they touched me I died” (p. 185)–as an expiation or punishment for his contribution to her fate. For he did contribute: if she betrayed him by turning sexually to others, he first betrayed her in his adolescent “hugging” of Nadine in the barn (pp. 169–170)– the passage clearly indicates that, at least as Quentin remembers it, at the time it happened all three of the principals saw the episode as Quentin’s betrayal of his special relationship with Caddy. It is as if, having betrayed Caddy into the world of sex, a world he himself hardly knew, he will now carry out the harsh New Testament judgment: If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones . . ., it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea (Matthew 18:6).

When, after Caddy discovered him, he first rolled in the mud and then “smeared it on her wet hard turning body” (p. 170), Quentin metaphorized (using the available clichés of his culture) the sequence he now metaphorically atones for. He also takes on all the guilt for the sale of Benjy’s pasture, though it was sold not only to pay for his year at Harvard but also to pay for Caddy’s wedding. So he may be punishing himself or making expiation for depriving Benjy of two of the three things Benjy loved, the pasture and Caddy. (The third is the smooth bright shape of fire.) Furthermore, in committing suicide Quentin now “repeats” or accomplishes his mother’s wish, taking up explicitly “a possibility of existence” or here,

264

JERRE COLLINS

ironically, of non-existence, “that has come down to” him (Heidegger, Being, p. 437). He recalls her saying to his father: Let me have Jason and you keep the others they’re not my flesh and blood like he is strangers nothing of mine and I am afraid of them . . . I’ll go down on my knees and pray for the absolution of my sins that he may escape this curse [and] try to forget that the others ever were (p. 128)

Here the paragraph breaks off. The missing word of course is “born,” yet the sentence even as it stands reveals the full force of the mother’s desire: that her children not exist. Almost the last words Quentin recalls from his father are: “no compson has ever disappointed a lady” (p. 221). Mingled with the defiance of his suicide (he refuses to quite finish the year at Harvard which his father says “has been your mothers dream since you were born”–p. 221) is the desire to please, to give his mother what she most wants. In suicide he appropriates his mother’s desire in a perverse achievement of a kind of fusion of horizons. Finally, Quentin aims at a kind of fusion of horizons or historical resonance by choosing to die on or just before Jefferson Davis’s birthday, June 3. He apparently intends to commit suicide precisely on the hour: “A quarter hour yet. And then I’ll not be” (p. 216). If the hour is midnight then he dies on June 3, but in any case he dies within a few hours of midnight.4 In choosing the time of his suicide Quentin associates himself with the failure of the South (in losing the Civil War) and with the hero of that failure, and attempts to assimilate his personal fate to the communal destiny of the South. Quentin’s time, then, is neither mere sequence nor stasis but a complex configuration, or better, a complex of partial, overlapping, even conflicting configurations, stemming from concerns, preoccupations, obsessions, cultural and familial preconceptions, pressures toward various kinds of repetitions, and resoluteness. His suicide, born from configurative impulses both radical and historical, structures his time on all three levels, the mundane, the historical, and the radical, in different but overlapping ways.

T H E JA S O N S E C T I O N

The temporality represented in the Jason section of The Sound and the Fury appears to be less complex than that of the first two sections. For Jason the configurative power of the pole of radical temporality is greatly attenuated. In this section (set on April 6, 1928) his time is overwhelmingly structured by the concerns and preoccupations of mundane temporality–except that, as with Quentin, we find a “larger intention” from another order exercising an ongoing configurative power on the mundane level. However, for Jason this larger intention is historical rather than radical.

TIME AFTER TIME

265

Jason orders and has for seventeen years ordered his life around revenge, chiefly revenge on Caddy for “depriving” him of the bank job Herbert Head had promised him. Much of the time of Jason’s life, and many of his actions, in particular those actions involved in his relationship with Caddy’s quasiillegitimate daughter Quentin, receive their shape and intelligibility from the intentionality of revenge. For him repetition takes the form of “turning the tables” on those who have frustrated him in the past by frustrating them in the present–by depriving them of what they want, by inflicting pain on them, etc., in a whole series of metaphorical transformations. Thus it is that making the girl Quentin miserable is a way of revenging himself on Caddy. (And perhaps even Caddy stands in for Jason’s mother.) Even more than with Quentin, this larger intention interferes with the intentionality of the mundane level: Jason neglects his job at Earl’s, he chases the girl Quentin into the country and misses the telegram telling him it was “time to sell” on the cotton market, etc. The intensity of his desire for revenge (on the historical level) deranges the practical functioning of his more mundane intentionalities, disrupting their configuring power. Some of the intensity of Jason’s revenge-motive, which so powerfully configures and also disfigures his time, derives from a sadism deeper than revenge, leavening it with an animus from an even deeper level of historicality than the level of specific wrongs and their righting, the level of Caddy’s betrayal of him. The configuring power of this sadism is especially evident when in Luster’s presence he burns his free tickets to the traveling show rather than give one to Luster (p. 318). Here he does indeed “create a scene,” an organized temporal deployment or “stretching along” of his need to inflict pain. If sadism and masochism are as closely linked as Freud suggests, then the selfdefeating and self-destructive effects of Jason’s pursuit of revenge are perhaps partly masochistic, partly products of an unconscious configurative impulse, and not merely by-products of a clash of intentions/attentions.5 So Jason’s temporality in this section turns out to be not so simple after all. With Jason’s time, as with Quentin’s, we see the temporally configuring power of intentionality, we see nesting series of intentions and also different orders of intentions (springing from the different levels of temporality), and we see configuration-effects (and disfiguration-effects) from the intersections and interferences of different intentions. THE “DILSEY” SECTION

The fourth or “Dilsey” section of The Sound and the Fury, as it is usually called, offers a greater complexity of temporal effects than we have seen so far, because now the text presents not only the mimesis of two different characters’

266

JERRE COLLINS

time but also a mimesis of a “narrator’s” time. This latter is actually the time of “the world of the fourth section,” but for simplicity of exposition I will call it the narrator’s time, because this narrative voice appears only in this section of the novel. Let us begin by looking at the representation of the temporal experience of the two major characters in this section, Dilsey and Jason.6 One of the most striking aspects about Dilsey’s experience is her power of accommodation: she is able to accept what time brings. At the beginning of the section, when she emerges into the dawning day to discover that it has brought rain, disappointing her expectation of clear weather, she goes back inside and changes her clothes–and changes them again later, when the weather clears (pp. 330–332). She is able to tolerate the constant threat that the movement of cosmic time will betray her expectations without renouncing her expectations; when she opens her door she looks into the rain “with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment” (p. 331). She also successfully copes with defective and potentially misleading measures of time. When the one-handed kitchen clock strikes five times, she says without hesitation or surprise, “Eight oclock” (p. 342). Cosmic time puts obstacles in her way, but she does not respond with anxiety, the way Quentin did; and she is comfortable with the markers of time. In addition, she navigates well the various predictable and unpredictable demands of mundane temporality. She “coordinates” breakfast (p. 341). Without trying either to “get ahead” of things or even to “keep up,” she responds to the demands of the moment without losing track of other demands. In the face of a multitude of practical intentionalities, some disparate, some nesting, some conflicting, she configures her time more by patience than by will, as much by “attention” as by “intention” (Augustine’s intentio includes both meanings). Though not at all passive–she is continuously engaged in purposeful action and as much as she can she takes the initiative in shaping the activity around her–she suffers things to happen. The crux of Dilsey’s part of the novel’s last section is her attendance, with her family and with Benjy, at her church’s Easter service, itself centered on the sermon delivered by the Reverend Shegog. This service is significant in the presentation of Dilsey’s temporality for two reasons. First, Shegog’s sermon inducts her and her community into a quasi-mystical experience. When the Reverend Shegog begins to preach, she and her fellow worshipers are taken by his remarkable voice: the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words . . . (p. 367).

TIME AFTER TIME

267

Here we have, in language typical of the language used to describe mystical experience, the representation of an experience that goes beyond all symbolization but is nevertheless spun out in time, an experience in which attention ceases for a while to experience in itself any distention. This experience has its resonances in some of Dilsey’s daily activities. For instance, her making biscuits for breakfast is represented in the following way: As she ground the sifter steadily above the bread board, she sang, to herself at first, something without particular tune or words, repetitive, mournful and plaintive, austere, as she ground a faint, steady snowing of flour onto the bread board. The stove had begun to heat the room and to fill it with murmurous minors of the fire, and presently she was singing louder, as if her voice too had been thawed out by the growing warmth . . . (p. 336).

Here, though less explicitly than in the church example, Dilsey is taken up into a kind of communion with her immediate world, an experience that is temporal but without the sense of passing time. Both in church and in the kitchen, it is as if a certain aspect or level of her intentionality becomes diffuse and unfocused, without this interfering with her ability to “follow” and to configure mundane tasks. But there is another important aspect of the Reverend Shegog’s sermon, an aspect which at least partly accounts for Dilsey’s rapture: the interpretation Shegog gives to time. He presents a version of the Christian kerygma, the public story of the founding events of Christianity and their meaning. But it is an idiosyncratic version: “I sees hit, breddren! I sees hit! Sees de blastin, blindin sight! I sees Calvary, wid de sacred trees, sees de thief en de murderer en de least of dese; I hears de boasting en de braggin: Ef you be Jesus, lif up yo tree en walk! I hears de wailin of women en de evenin lamentations; I hears de weepin en de cryin en de turnt-away face of God: dey done kilt Jesus; dey done kilt my Son! . . . I can see de widowed God shet His do’ . . .” (p. 370).

With an inconsistency and a heterodoxy characteristic of the entire sermon, Shegog depicts God as deprived simultaneously of son and spouse. The deeper sense is clear: God has suffered loss and bereavement. The gap between the eternal and the temporal is closed, but in a heterodox way: the eternal is subject to loss, just like the temporal. The outside is brought into the inside. Dilsey cries quietly during the sermon and continues to weep as she returns home with her family. The intensity of this vision, which Dilsey shares, combined with the intensity of her communion with the people there, has brought her “annealment” (p. 371). To anneal is “to free from internal stress by heating and gradually cooling” and “to toughen or temper” (Random House Dictionary). Through a “peak experience” both affective and cognitive, through “the recollection and the blood of the Lamb” (p. 367) she experiences a kind of “wholeness of life,” a polarizing configuration that allows her to take her life

268

JERRE COLLINS

as a whole without reducing the complexity of her temporal experience to a single configurative intention. Under the impress of this vision and this communion, she says, “I’ve seed de first en de last, . . .. I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin” (p. 371), then returns to the Compson house to fix lunch. This is the closest Dilsey comes to the plaintive note that surfaced in Augustine’s reflections on time. But for Augustine the affect is tied to a stretching out experienced as dispersal–“My life is a kind of distraction and a dispersal” (Confessions XI, 29:39)–while for Dilsey it is tied to a “stretching out” through time that retains a sense of wholeness. Her life is one whole, and has been stretched out enough for her to see the several generations of the Compson family that she has cared for,7 as one whole. For her the family history apparently begins with Mrs. Compson’s withholding of love from her children and ends with the family’s affective rejection of the young Quentin–a rejection that is reciprocated. This means that Dilsey’s temporality is more strongly configured on the radically temporal and mundane levels than it is on the historical level. In fact, it could be argued that the kind of faith preached by Reverend Shegog and embraced by Dilsey implicitly denies the meaningfulness of history, and that this is one of its attractions for Dilsey and her community. Orthodox salvation history and redemption theology see a divine plan or plot configuring all of history. But if Jesus dies against God’s will, then history is impervious even to the purposes of God. (God would then stand in the same relation of impotence to history as the Compsons père et fils do.) In this view, there is no way to make historical life meaningful; at best, one can be rescued from history by faith, by “the recollection and the blood of the Lamb” (p. 367). This faith, then, would be what enables Dilsey to “endure,” to survive the assaults of time with her integrity intact, in a persevering, self-sacrificing service of others, and with a calm sense of identity.8 Such a faith establishes a nomos which acknowledges and encompasses the anomie of history, the perceived or experienced senselessness of the historical, without trying to eliminate the senselessness through a historical configuration. If historical experience is configured at all, it is shaped as loss and bereavement; and recuperation is to be sought and found not on the historical level but on the radical. For servant-class blacks, living in the rural South sixty years after the Civil War, such a gesture towards annulment of history could be quite attractive. Yet we see, mainly in other sections of the novel, that Dilsey lives effectively in the configurations of historical time as well as in those of radical and mundane time. In the Benjy section, she shows some respect for Benjy’s graveyard (but that may be simply out of a recognition of its importance to Benjy). More importantly, she makes him a birthday cake, using her own money to buy the ingredients, so his birthday can be properly celebrated/remembered. In

TIME AFTER TIME

269

the Jason section, we see Dilsey interposing herself between Jason and the girl Quentin: “‘Hit me, den, . . . ef nothin else but hittin somebody wont do you. Hit me,’ she says” (pp. 229–230)–here she assimilates to herself the role of scapegoat, a role associated in the Christian tradition with Jesus. Such assimilation is on the level of the “repetition” characteristic of the historical level of temporality. However, there is little of such evidence in the fourth section. In this section we have a portrait of a temporality well anchored in the mundane but strongly configured on the radical level by faith and by a movement toward a sense of “timelessness” both in peak experiences and in everyday life. Over against this portrait is the representation in the fourth section of Jason’s time. Here Jason is presented as someone who, as the day goes on, more and more explicitly encounters his “fate” and comes to recognize it as such. For seventeen years Jason has been forging his mother’s name to the checks Caddy has been sending for Quentin’s support, and hiding the money in a box in his room. When he first begins to realize the possible significance of the hole in the window of his room (that Quentin has stolen his money), he rushes to Quentin’s room and finds it still locked: then he stood with the knob in his hand and his head bent a little, as if he were listening to something much further away than the dimensioned room beyond the door, and which he already heard (pp. 349–350).

The same slowing down and attentive attitude accompanies his examination of the rifled metal box in his room (pp. 353–354). Some impulse is contravening Jason’s usual haste, as he appears to be “hearing” his fate approaching. We see an initial specification of that impulse when he tries to convince the sheriff to pursue the runaway girl and help him get his money back. Jason tells his story twice, and the narrator reports those tellings, linking Jason’s narration to impotence, rage, –and pleasure: Jason told him, his sense of injury and impotence feeding upon its own sound, so that after a time he forgot his haste in the violent cumulation of his self justification and his outrage. . . . He repeated his story, harshly recapitulant, seeming to get an actual pleasure out of his outrage and impotence. (p. 378)

And when he leaves the sheriff’s he generates an anticipation of impotence in the face of a kind of cosmic opposition to his will. Because he will be driving on rural roads, he expects it to rain by noon and he expects that the rain will cause him to get bogged down on a country road: He thought about it [getting bogged down] with a sort of triumph, of the fact that he was going to miss dinner, that by starting now and so serving his compulsion of haste, he would be at the greatest possible distance from both towns when noon came (pp. 380–381).

270

JERRE COLLINS

This anticipation triggers an escalating series of compensatory fantasies, starting with him slogging through the mud and knocking down the owner of a team of horses who tries to stop him from taking them, going on to “entering the courthouse with a file of soldiers and dragging the sheriff out,” and ending with “dragging Omnipotence down from His throne, if necessary” (pp. 381–382).9 For Jason every present event is or is part of a repetition of an archaic battle of wills. To fend off his archaic feelings of powerlessness and impotence, Jason must constantly exert his will, to the point of defying others and bending them to his will; if he can reduce others to powerlessness, that will prove his own power. This is the historical configuration that has been imposed on his time and that he has been trying to impose on his time for most of his life. Now we can see why the theft stirs specifically Jason’s sense of impotence. First, it is a counter-assertion of will, the seventeen-year-old Quentin’s defiance of him and his control over her. In a configuration based on an “either-or,” one or the other of them has to be powerless. If it is not Quentin, then it has to be Jason. Second, it disrupts and threatens to bring to an end a complex structure, which he had constructed and has maintained for almost seventeen years through deception and manipulation, that has enabled him to continually dominate and overmaster the wills of others. It is the loss of this structure, which shapes his time into endless repetitions of dominance and prepotency, real and metaphorical, and not the loss of his money, that really bothers him: Of his niece he did not think at all, nor of the money. Neither of them had had entity or individuality for him for ten [sic] years; together they merely symbolized the job in the bank of which he had been deprived before he ever got it (p. 382).

Worse still, it is out of this very structure he built to empower himself that the ratification of his impotence has come. It especially bothers him to have been robbed of that which was to have compensated him for the lost job, which he had acquired through so much effort and risk, by the very symbol of the lost job itself . . . (pp. 383–384).

Jason’s attempt at recovery is a last attempt to fend off the determination, in the public order, of the real limits of his power. Thus the narrator can report what Jason “sees,” using language that goes beyond Jason’s in its articulation but not in its import: “He could see the opposed forces of his destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now, toward a junction that would be irrevocable” (p. 384). He suspects that Quentin and her lover are in one of the sleeping cars used by the traveling carnival, now in Mottson. Impelled to configure all action as a contest of wills, Jason thinks to himself that he has one last chance: “There

TIME AFTER TIME

271

would be just one right thing, without alternatives: He must do that” (p. 384). In this contest of wills, he must prove more alert and willful: It never occurred to him that they might not be there, in the [railway] car. That they should not be there, that the whole result should not hinge on whether he saw them first or they saw him first, would be opposed to all nature and contrary to the whole rhythm of events. And more than that: he must see them first, get the money back, then what they did would be of no importance to him, while otherwise the whole world would know that he, Jason Compson, had been robbed by Quentin, his niece, a bitch (p. 385).

What he does not allow himself to think is that perhaps they have left the train, that already there is nothing he can do to get his money back and overmaster the girl Quentin’s self-assertion. His narrative to the sheriff could give him pleasure because, on the one hand, it was of the past, and so was like his other remembrances of impotence, ratifying and reinforcing them, and because, on the other hand, the story was not over yet, and he still counted on being able to reimpose or repeat the pattern of overmastery that had worked for seventeen years. But now the paradoxical threat is that the story is over and that it is a story not of his past but of his present. The threat is that that story and not the story of hidden revenge is his story, the representative configuration of his life. The present, public, “historical” ratification or repetition of his impotence is the disaster Jason wishes to avoid, the destiny or fate in conflict with his will. And when Jason accosts a frail old man inside the railway car, the man quickly comes to personify all that resists Jason’s will and makes a counter-assertion of its own. Jason accuses the man of lying, and the man responds by scrabbling for a knife to cut Jason with: Jason tried to grasp him in both arms, trying to prison the puny fury of him. The man’s body felt so old, so frail, yet so fatally single-purposed that for the first time Jason saw clear and unshadowed the disaster toward which he rushed (p. 386).

Through the body of another Jason feels the strength of a resistance to his will that forces him from his fantasy of domination. By surrounding himself with weak or dependent people he was able to sustain that fantasy for a long time. But if an old man’s resistance can be this strong and this tenacious, so can a seventeen-year-old girl’s. Furthermore, it was his very attempt to tyrannize the old man that roused the man’s resistance. This is the disaster he now sees he has been rushing toward: not merely the loss of the money and the girl’s escape, but more than that the rewriting of his story, the forced reconfiguration of his life. He begins to accept the minisequence of his interactions with the old man as a figure for his relations with Quentin, internalizing the sheriff’s interpretation (“ ‘You drove that girl into running off, Jason’ the sheriff said”–p. 379) and Quentin’s own (which we

272

JERRE COLLINS

know from the previous section: “ ‘Whatever I do, it’s your fault,’ she says. ‘If I’m bad, it’s because I had to be. You made me’ ”–p. 324). This is not quite impotence, since he could still see himself as responsible for “the disaster.” Nevertheless, it remains true that Jason’s attempt not merely to assert power but to do so by depriving others of power, has energized the very resistance that now deprives him of power. He has structured his life around the dichotomy: either he renders the other impotent or the other will render him impotent. Now Quentin has demonstrated that she is not powerless and cannot be ruled by his will. Worse still, easily and without even intending it, she has overmastered him, stealing back the money he had stolen from her over almost a seventeen-year period. When Jason learns that Quentin and her lover have left the carnival, he realizes he will not be able to find her to revenge himself on her and get his money back. Now he faces another dichotomy: either (1) accept the other half of the first alternative and see himself as powerless in face of forces that have overmastered him, or (2) give up his (and perhaps everyone’s) archaic fantasy that the world revolves around him and accept as true his archaic fear that it does not. At the end of this entire sequence, during which he has come up against and has had to acknowledge the limits of his power, Jason is sitting in his car with a gasoline-induced headache, dependent on someone else to drive him home, “with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock” (p. 391). When Jason accepts his powerlessness and hires a local Negro to drive him home, he has begun the process, to paraphrase Heidegger, of handing down to himself the possibilities of life he has inherited, and thus taking over his own thrownness; he is taking up explicitly the limited possibilities of existence that have been given him (Being, p. 437). He has begun appropriating his life, with its straitened possibilities, as his life. The historical configuration of his life as “a story of revenge” is being superceded by another configuration, “a story of accepting one’s fate.” If in the Quentin section we saw the level of mundane temporality being (re)configured by radical temporality, here with Jason it is the historical level rather than the mundane that is being influenced by the “resoluteness” of radical temporality.

T H E N A R R AT O R O F T H E “ D I L S E Y ” S E C T I O N

Moving now from character’s time to narrator’s time, what can we say about the temporality of “the world of the narrator” of this section, the temporality of “the narrated world”? Let us consider first how the narrator’s presentation of

TIME AFTER TIME

273

diverse character-temporalities relativizes them, then how the narrator’s pronouncements on the meaning of time do not fit well with what happens during the narrated time. To begin with, the narrated world encompasses both Dilsey’s time and Jason’s time. Neither temporality is privileged; neither temporality is presented as illegitimate or inauthentic. Furthermore, while the narrator represents these temporalities, he does not try to induce in the reader an analogous experience. For example, if readers are going to participate sympathetically in Dilsey’s vision and experience they have to overcome two difficulties. First, from the very beginning of the section, the narrator’s diction when describing Dilsey is extravagantly mock-heroic. For instance, even during the Easter service itself, when Dilsey receives “de comfort en de unburdenin” (p. 364), the narrator’s extravagant language keeps readers at a distance: Dilsey sat bolt upright, her hand on Ben’s knee. Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time (p. 368).10

Second, there are problems with the minister and his sermon. The minister’s name of “Shegog” seems an obvious play on the “God and Magog” of Revelation 20:8, symbolic names for the nations to be mobilized by Satan after his thousand years’ confinement, for the final battle against the Kingdom of God. Together with this play on names, the Reverend’s deformations of the elements of the traditional Christ-story and the patent inconsistencies even within his own sermon, force readers to keep a certain critical distance from the Reverend’s sermon. Even if readers end up accepting Shegog’s theological vision as legitimate, they must weigh, ponder, come to a decision. Their entry into Dilsey’s experience as catalyzed or precipitated by Shegog’s sermon becomes more and more mediate, reflective, and unspontaneous. Their attention to Dilsey becomes distended over a wider and wider range of this text, over preunderstandings and cultural codes of interpretation, over other texts, especially Biblical, etc. As a result, the reader’s experience, constructed by and in response to the text, is a very different kind of experience from Dilsey’s. Moreover, in view of the variety of textual strategies prompting distance, mediation, and reflection, we must say that this difference is deliberate. That is, the narrator does not try to get the reader to experience time the way Dilsey does. A similar argument can be made regarding the representation of Jason’s time, though with Jason the distancing is effected more by portraying or “constructing” him in such a way as to make him morally repugnant not only according to the moral standards most readers would be expected to bring to the text, but also according to the “moral vision” constructed within the text as part of its world, a moral vision whose main “spokespersons” in the text

274

JERRE COLLINS

are Dilsey, Earl, and the sheriff. This distancing is ironical, since Jason’s time corresponds more closely than Dilsey’s to “our” time, the time of the punctual subject, where we go about our business. In sum, the effect of the representation of these diverse temporalities in a “world” that does not privilege or reproduce either (in the reading-experience that constitutes that world) is to relativize them. Neither one is the “true” shape of temporal experience, the norm or normal temporality in contrast to which all others are partial or deformed. In fact, the very strategy of deliberately contrasting such distinctive temporalities suggests that in this intentional world, human time has no “essential” shape but is malleable within a wide range of complex configurations. The narrator does make “pronouncements” about time which might suggest a normative or “essential” shape of time. The most startling of these pronouncements are those connected to the descriptions of Benjy’s crying or bellowing: he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun. (p. 395) Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets. (p. 359)

Elsewhere, too, his wailing is called “hopeless” (p. 394) and even “meaningless” (p. 356). These locutions are startling because oxymoronic. Benjy’s bellowing is “nothing,” “just sound,” that is nevertheless richly communicative. His wailing is “meaningless” and simultaneously not merely “hopeless” (communicative of hopelessness) but also an adequate symbolic expression of “all voiceless misery” and “all . . . injustice and sorrow.” Furthermore, this misery, injustice, and sorrow, and their vocalization, are projected onto the plane of cosmic time: “under the sun” “made vocal by a conjunction of planets.” Not only that, “time” itself is vocalized in Benjy’s on-going, relentless wail. Thus the narrator presents us with a series of equivalencies or close associations: (cosmic) time = meaninglessness = prolonged, senseless wailing = hopelessness = misery and sorrow = injustice = time. If we were to translate this series of substitutions or metaphors into the logic of ordinary discourse, we might say something like the following: what time in its ineluctable course brings–let us call it injustice–causes humans misery and sorrow, and nothing else (and perhaps this is why we call it injustice); the human response is hopelessness and a sense of meaninglessness whose adequate expression is a formless, prolonged bellowing.

TIME AFTER TIME

275

This “steady-state” view of time (if we may so call it) is desperate enough; but in other descriptions the narrator’s view is definitely entropic. For example, near the beginning of the section Dilsey’s body is described in terms of inevitable, entropic loss: She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in un-padded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts . . . (p. 331).

Here, “the days or the years” is sufficient specification of what wears one away, and what they wear away is the whole person, body and spirit. Time is not presented as taking back what it had given to begin with, but as merely and inevitably taking away. Again, in a sentence which resonates to the gothic vision of Edgar Allen Poe, the narrator describes the family clock: “The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself” (p. 355). Not just individuals but entire “houses” or families are subject to entropic loss. The narrator’s expressed view of time, then, is that time is the inevitable and inexorable carrier of injustice, sorrow, and misery, putting into question the desire for “meaning,” or for a humanly satisfying nomos. Through his diction and rhetorical constructions he conveys a Gothic sense of inevitable decline and decay on both the individual and the societal levels. When we shift from the narrator’s obiter dicta to the temporality of the narrated world, we must ask if, for the one day presented here, time really does bring injustice, misery, sorrow, meaninglessness, and decline–and only these. The answer must be no. Dilsey, whose courage and fortitude have survived the erosions of time, receives “de comfort en de unburdenin” (p. 364) and “annealment” (p. 371). It is true that Jason’s money is stolen, and his structure of deceit and domination is destroyed. But the reader perceives this as a kind of rough justice–“poetic justice”–even in terms of the moral standards constructed within the narrated world: Jason “gets what’s coming to him.” And I suggest that even Jason begins to see what happens not as a decline but as a fulfillment–as the access of his fate. The events of his life have been leading towards this day for a long time: the day on which the story of his life gets its reversal and resolution, the day of Jason’s secular epiphany. The section closes with a focus on Benjy. But here, on the verge of chronic meaninglessness and misery, the movement of the text is noteworthy. When Luster swings the carriage horse Queenie the “wrong” way around the monument in the town square, Benjy bellows–but the narrator does not present this as Benjy’s usual plangent wail:

276

JERRE COLLINS

For an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound . . . (p. 400).

But it is clearly more than just sound. It is a specific affective response to a specific disturbance of the expected (temporal) order of things. It is described as such by the narrator and it is perceived as such by Jason (just returned from Mottson), who intervenes to take the horse and buggy back up the street, then to repeat the pass around the monument, this time on the side Benjy is used to: Queenie moved again, her feet began to clop-clop steadily again, and at once Ben hushed. . . . [H]is eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place (p. 401).

Thus ends the novel. Benjy suffers disorder, but his desired and expected order is restored. Jason, for the moment at least, responds appropriately to Benjy’s need. In the final scene of the section, Benjy experiences loss . . . and restoration. Despite what the narrator says about time, the time of this day brings a lot more besides meaninglessness, injustice, loss, misery, and sorrow, though these are not excluded.11 During this day, at any rate, time is not entropic, and at least occasionally brings rough justice and surcease of sorrow. CONCLUSION

We have, then, multiple configurative shapings of time, one for each of the main characters and one for the world of the “Dilsey” section. And in the case of Jason, the shape of his time is changing right before his eyes, as it were. Faulkner shows that there is a slippage from level to level, and also a tension within each level that exerts pressure for movement towards the others. All three characters operate on the levels of mundane, radical, and historical temporality, and in all three we see the influence of one level on the others. The inescapable implication is that there is no one normative shape to human temporality. As Paul Ricoeur states, “Our life, when . . . embraced in a single glance, appears to us as the field of a constructive activity . . . by which we attempt to discover and not simply to impose from the outside the narrative identity which constitutes us” (“Life” p. 32; Ricoeur’s italics). Faulkner presents us with a powerful mimesis of this constructive activity. In Faulkner’s portraits of Quentin and Jason, we see two characters struggling with the dialectic between imposition and discovery. Quentin seeks to construct his life in the shape of the story of the South’s loss, as epitomized by Jefferson Davis, and this project leads him to suicide. Jason seeks to fashion and maintain his life as a story of revenge, but by the end of the novel begins to

TIME AFTER TIME

277

acknowledge another configuration, the story of a man fated to a life of disappointment. Only Dilsey, through “the recollection . . . of the Lamb” (p. 367) has already successfully negotiated the task of discovering a “narrative identity” which enables her to endure what time brings. And the novel asserts that the tale of a life, even when told by an idiot, does not signify nothing, but is richly significant, even if the significance is disquieting. In this novel, even though the fortunes of the Compson family are running down, time is not entropic but brings, at least sometimes, justice and annealment. In addition, the experience of reading the novel is anti-entropic, defying the pleasure principle’s drive towards the return to a simpler state of things, for the reading makes more and more sense, it gets more richly significant, as the reading process goes on. But to explore the implications of this last point belongs to another paper. University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

NOTES 1 See Collins, “Achieving a Human Time.” Major source-texts for the phenomenological investigation of time include Augustine’s Confessions, Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Heidegger’s later essay “Time and Being.” In developing the following model of time I found extremely helpful Ricoeur’s own exposition and critique of the phenomenology of time, especially in “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative” and Time and Narrative I, pp. 3–87. I am also indebted to Ray Wilson for many stimulating and helpful conversations about this present paper. 2 Literally, “now present.” In his Confessions, Augustine uses this phrase for the eternal present of God, as opposed to the dispersal of the human present into the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future (XI, 20:26, 30:40-31:41). See also Ricoeur, “Human Experience,” p. 19. 3 These mundane actions are puzzling to the reader because Quentin’s intention to commit suicide remains unexpressed in the Quentin section of the novel. It is not until the next section that we learn that Quentin has committed suicide. At that point, and all at once, much of the action of the Quentin section “makes sense.” 4 There is some ambiguity about exactly when Quentin plans to die. The action of his section is set on June 2, 1910. After nightfall he continues to track the quarter-hours, but does not identify the hour. Early in the day, in response to Shreve’s question, “Say, what’re you doing today, anyhow?” Quentin responds, “I’m not doing anything. Not until tomorrow, now” (p. 125). Quentin’s wording suggests he deliberately used a phrase that would resonate to his hidden intention, his plot. Even if Quentin dies before midnight, the close association with the birthday of the hero of the South’s failure could not be accidental. No Southerner would be unaware of the date of Jefferson Davis’s birthday. 5 In another example of Jason’s self-defeating sadism, the following explanatory sequence might be carried back one step further: Jason lost his chance at a job in Herbert Head’s bank, because Herbert kicked Caddy out and wouldn’t have anything more to do with her or her family, because he was not the father of the child she was carrying, because she was pregnant before she

278

JERRE COLLINS

met him. The further step would be to explain how Herbert found out that Caddy was already pregnant before they met. Jason recalls that when his father brought the newborn infant home, his mother insisted that Herbert be forced to support the child: “‘He can prove nothing, unless–Jason Compson,’ she says, ‘Were you fool enough to tell–”’ (p. 246). So the whole family knew she was pregnant and not by Herbert. Furthermore, Mrs. Compson recognizes that telling Herbert would be consonant with Jason’s character. Also, on the level of the world of the text, a “tattle-tale” motif has been connected with Jason already in the Benjy section and has been repeated several times in different scenes and different sections. Answering the question “How did Herbert find out?” with “Jason told him” accords well with several configurative intentionalities. In this reading, Jason’s depriving the girl Quentin of her rightful support (by stealing the money Caddy has been sending for her daughter’s support), is a repetition of his depriving Caddy of her husband’s support by telling Herbert about her pregnancy. As in the present sequence with the girl Quentin, so too in his past “telling on” Caddy, a particular sadistic action of his produces an untoward effect that profoundly damages Jason’s “future prospects.” 6 Many readers have seen Dilsey as the “hero” of the book, based on their seeing her as representing the moral center or norm developed within the novel. For a brief summary of this position see Hagopian, “Nihilism,” p. 45n3. In an intriguing variation of this position, Thomas Merton sees Dilsey as a “Christian saint” and “a mystic” (“Time,” p. 7). He bases his evaluation not only on the quality of her love or her concern for those given into her care, but also on the quality of her experience of time. 7 In fact, Dilsey may be seen as the very figure of Care in this novel. 8 In an earlier passage Dilsey showed her strong sense of identity in her attitude towards her name. In the Benjy section, Benjy recalls Dilsey’s response to his name being changed: My name been Dilsey since fore I could remember and it be Dilsey when they’s long forgot me. How will they know it’s Dilsey, when it’s long forgot, Dilsey, Caddy said. It’ll be in the Book, honey, Dilsey said. Writ out. Can you read it, Caddy said. Wont have to, Dilsey said. They’ll read it for me. All I got to do is say Ise here. (p. 71) One can perhaps see in this passage an assimilation of the time of one’s life, via the level of radical temporality, to the eternal. 9 This escalating spiral of fantasies of omnipotence, prompted perhaps by an escalating spiral of fears of being overmastered by another’s will and being reduced to impotence–this never-ending spiral can be arrested only by developing acceptable and attainable substitutes or metaphors for the object of desire or by accepting the impossibility of satisfying desire. 10 The word “coruscations” presents a slight problem. The tears’ sliding in and out as they course Dilsey’s cheeks suggests that the skin of her cheeks is uneven, worn, exhibiting the “ravages of time.” But they slide in and out of “coruscations.” A coruscation is “a sudden gleam or flash of light,” a sparkle, glittering, or scintillation (Random House Dictionary). Could Faulkner or his narrator, under the pressure of semantic appropriateness, have brought together “corrosion,” “abrasion,” and “ablation” into the intonation pattern of “depredation,” and as a result have mistaken the meaning of “coruscation"? All of these substitutions would make sense of the rest of the phrase; they could appropriately be said to be [the effect] “of immolation and abnegation and time.” The other possibility is that “the narrator” did indeed want to say that Dilsey’s face during

TIME AFTER TIME

279

this Easter service sparkled, in a mock-apotheosis that associates her with the transfigured Christ, whose garments “shone like the sun”–a description often transferred to the risen Christ. In this reading, “coruscations” intensifies the narrator’s mock-heroic treatment of Dilsey. 11 The narrator’s view of time is often taken as normative. Lawrence Kimmel, for example, in a comment about Quentin pulling the hands off his pocket watch, says that Quentin does this “so that [the watch] no longer marks the measure of movement, but the internal spring keeps driving the mechanism, a reminder of the relentless force and fate of life, that like his idiot brother’s tale, beneath the sound and fury, signifies . . . nothing” (p. 265; Kimmel’s elipsis). I would agree that this may be Quentin’s interpretation of his action, but as should be apparent by now, I think Benjy’s tale, and the novel as a whole, are abundantly significant.

REFERENCES Augustine (c. 400). Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. Rex Warner. NY: Mentor-NAL, 1963. Bergson, Henri (1910). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Trans. F. L. Pogson. London: Allen, 1959. Collins, Jerre (2007). “Achieving a Human Time: What We Can Learn From Faulkner’s Benjy.” Temporality in Life as Seen Through Literature: Contributions to Phenomenology of Life. Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI. Ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 355–365. Faulkner, William (1929). The Sound and the Fury. NY: Vintage-Random, 1954. Freud, Sigmund (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. NY: Norton Library-Norton, 1961. Hagopian, John V. (1967). “Nihilism in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.” Modern Fiction Studies 13.1, pp. 45–55. HarperCollins Study Bible. New Revised Standard Version (1989). NY: HarperCollins, 1993. Heidegger, Martin (1927). Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. NY: Harper, 1962. Heidegger, Martin (1968). “Time and Being.” On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. NY: Harper Torchbooks-Harper, 1972, pp. 1–24. Husserl, Edmund (1928). The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Ed. Martin Heidegger. Trans. James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964. Kimmel, Lawrence (2007). “Notes on a Poetics of Time.” Temporality in Life as Seen Through Literature: Contributions to Phenomenology of Life. Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI. Ed. AnnaTeresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 257–269. Merton, Thomas (1973). “Time and Unburdening and the Recollection of the Lamb: The Easter Service in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.” Be Reconciled: Katallagete Summer 1973. pp. 7–15. Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1973). Unabridged Ed. Ed. Jess Stein. NY: Random. Ricoeur, Paul (1979). “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.” Research in Phenomenology 9, pp. 17–34. Ricoeur, Paul (1991). “Life in Quest of Narrative.” On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. Ed. David Wood. Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature. London: Routledge, pp. 20–33. Ricoeur, Paul (1983). Time and Narrative. Volume One. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Shakespeare, William (1623). As You Like It. The Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969, pp. 243–273.

PA RT II T O WA R D D E S T I N Y

SECTION I

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

D E S T I N Y I N T H E L I T E R AT U R E O F WA L K E R P E R C Y, L E O T O L S T OY A N D E U D O R A W E LT Y

ABSTRACT

The word, destiny, engages the focal point of action regarding human endeavor. It comes from the Latin word, destinare, which means making firm or determining. The general interpretation of destiny has to do with naming the end toward which we move, toward which we aspire, and toward which we enlist our physical, our mental and our spiritual energies. In Medieval Literature, the interpretation of destiny is associated with fate, wherein some force outside of the individual was so intense that the individual was powerless and bewildered in the face of a destiny that struck fear into the person, for that fateful destiny was absolute. One could not escape destiny. Something would happen. Around the corner destiny lurked, and the event actually would occur. It was that person’s destiny. This examination explores Human Destiny in Literature as the journey. In our humanity we are all destined for the journey; the beginning, the middle and the end of our human life. Our destiny is to live without closure, without the final reward of our purpose, our destiny. Literature engages journey, and all of humanity participates in the journey, the story of our beginnings, the story of our passages, and the story of our desires and continual struggles that move toward an end. The journey is our destiny. It may be a chosen destiny, or it may be thrust upon us. Our destiny also defines us, gives us our identity and individuals. And our destiny also necessarily encompasses multiple possibilities for the human journey. JOURNEY

Walker Percy, twentieth century philosopher/author, aptly created Will Barrett on a journey that was physical and spiritual, personal and universal, in his novel, THE LAST GENTLEMAN.1 With Walker Percy’s story, this examination of Destiny will also include the fine literature of Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path,”2 and Leo Tolstoy’s “Death of Ivan Ilych.” Because human destiny is inherently in flux, this examination will also employ the philosophy of Wolfgang Iser, especially from his book THE ACT 285 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 285–292. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

286

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

OF READING,3 for Iser engages the human propensity of observing and participating in a moving universe, and at the same time, he engages the “wandering viewpoint” while we “read” our elemental life journey, our evermovable destiny that is textualized. Actually, Iser maintains that the text of our life is a vast landscape, open for reading by every individual. Text goes beyond language, as Iser claims, its function is not merely to present data, but text offers guidance to what is to be produced.4 Moreover, the dynamic of reading necessarily engages the interaction of the reader and the text. In terms of our destiny. each reader, each individual, participates in the perception of a personal landscape that encapsulates our destiny. Walker Percy, in tracing the journey of Will Barrett, begins the novel, THE LAST GENTLEMAN, by introducing an everyman of sorts, basking in the sunlight of Central Park in New York. The first examination of Will Barrett’s destiny is involved with choice. This young man is meditating and Percy presents two observations regarding the destiny of Will. First, the man has a telescope, and he watches a peregrine falcon as it moves among the buildings of New York. Second, just by chance, the young man in Central Park is situated at the very center of Ground Zero. Ground Zero is the calculated point at which a huge hydrogen bomb would explode to destroy this great center of New York if the citizens were to be attacked. CHOSEN AND UNCHOSEN

These two elements of destiny, the chosen event, and the unchosen event, highlight a particular point about the journey of Will Barrett. On the one hand, the telescope engages observation of choice, choice that the peregrine falcon will make, and it engages the possibility of choices the man can make in creating his own destiny. On the other hand, the Ground Zero aspect of destiny represents fate, destiny that cannot be controlled. How can the man escape the possible destruction that may be his destiny? Leo Tolstoy, in THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH creates a man who has these same elements of destiny. Ivan Ilych would create his own destiny. He chooses to invest his energy in becoming prosperous. He knows that his destiny is the good life, a big house, an honorable job, a family, and wealth. Actually he lives out his destiny, becomes a judge, has power over people’s lives, owns his house. However, as fate would have it, Ivan Ilych hurts his side while hanging curtains and becomes ill. He despises his destiny, and refers to this most unpleasant event of his life as IT. His destiny is a nameless and most terrible aspect of his journey. For it is his death.5 Destiny in his journey is centered in the choice of his journey. Ivan chooses a destiny, yet he receives a destiny that he does not choose.

D E S T I N Y I N T H E L I T E R AT U R E

287

Likewise, the marvelous character created by Eudora Welty, Phoenix Jackson can embrace her destiny. She knows that she is destined to be a savior of her little grandson. Alone in the remote hills past the Natchez Trail, the very old Phoenix makes her journey to the city to get medicine for the little boy who lies in bed, breathing like a little bird, for his throat gets contracted because he had swallowed lye. Certainly Phoenix has not chosen her destiny. It has been thrust upon her. She has been destined to be a savior like the heroic figures in myth, and she willingly succeeds in the salvation of the little boy, year after year. Not only that, she contrives to get a dime to buy a Christmas gift, a little paper windmill, that she will carry to him. “He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world” she says6 Besides choosing or not choosing our destiny, the examination of human destiny as the journey has other distinguishing features. One of these characteristics is that destiny determines our identity. Oedipus was destined to slay his father and marry his mother. Certainly he did not choose his destiny. However, it defined him, gave him his identity. Phoenix Jackson was destined to care for her grandson and save him. She did not choose her destiny, but she did accept it with great affection and even joy. Certainly her journey of salvation had great obstacles and she even fell on her back into the ditch. This frail woman had a destiny to be a savior, and this was her identity. IDENTITY

Will Barrett, in Percy’s story, is a bewildered individual. He does not know his destiny and he couldn’t care less. He is an everyman. Percy describes him. He was a young man of a pleasant appearance. Of medium height and extremely pale, he was nevertheless strongly built and quick and easy in his ways.7

Percy reveals an “everyman” but as the story goes on, we discover what Will already knows that all is not well with him. He has wealth, education, family, but there is some flaw in his life. He is afraid that he has amnesia, for he knows there is something that he has forgotten. There is some important fact in his life, and he cannot quite remember what it is. He yearns to know what it is, because he knows that it is important. Certainly Will Barrett is seeking his own identity. In the book he is called an engineer, a Lance corporal, a boxer, a driver, and later on, a friend. As identity is integral to the journey, it is an ongoing quest. Will Barrett uses a telescope to see the world around himself. It may hold the great secret of who he is. He asks, who am I? Where am I? He had heard that an individual could find himself if he went back to nature. However, in his journey of discovery, Will Barrett is destined to become a companion. The author sets up a mythic

288

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

journey for this man who never was satisfied with the limits of his knowledge. Will’s quest is actually aimed at discovery of the self. His journey will be from New York, across the country, with Jamie Vaught, a dying youth, and the journey will come to its end in Santa Fe. The sense of direction is integral to the journey, whether the journey be chosen, or whether the journey be an essential duty imposed upon the individual. But where does direction come from? Will’s job is engineer for a water system under Macy’s Store in New York. Sometimes he is not exactly sure about where he is or what exactly he has to do. His philosophy is a very simple one. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad environments.8

POSSIBILITY

Action sometimes seems better than the exact direction. Will uses maps and his own perceptions of direction, and sometimes flounders. The element of possibility is lurking around every corner. In one episode on the journey, Will and the dying youth, Jamie, are sitting at a picnic table and trying to figure out which way to go. The difference between me and him, thought the engineer and noticed for the first time a slight translucence at the youth’s temple, is this: like me he lives in the sphere of the possible, all antenna, ear cocked, lips parted. But I am conscious of it, know what is up, and he is not and does not. He is pure aching primary awareness and does not even know that he doesn’t know it.9

What Will is saying is that he is aware of the multiple possibilities in the journey, in his destiny, while Jamie doesn’t really know the possibility of his own death. Possibility and direction are closely allied in the human journey that is our destiny. Our literature is filled with how we relate to multiple possibilities. We can perceive the elements of the journey, the importance of its determination and its creation of our identity, and we can also understand the meaning and significance of direction in the journey. However, we cannot know the end of the journey, and like Jamie, we are unto something great and do not even know that we do not know it. T.S. Eliot likes to ponder this same theme, of “we know and we do not know.” When he speaks about our journey, he says, “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we have started/ And know the place for the first time.”10 When Percy places Jamie and Will on their journey where the direction is inexact, he is creating a paradigm which is all too familiar when we are considering multiple possibility and our destiny. We are destined to explore, and we are destined to seek for knowledge.

D E S T I N Y I N T H E L I T E R AT U R E

289

Eudora Welty reincarnates in Phoenix Jackson, that search for knowledge in her journey through a benign natural environment to seek help for her grandson. Her eyesight is bad, so she mistakes a scarecrow for a ghost in the cornfield. She is frail and falls in the ditch, but a hunter finds he and assists her on her way. The multiple possibilities that could happen and that do happen on the journey are all centered in the fact that Phoenix succeeds. She climbs the stairs to the doctor’s office and she will go home with the medicine, plus a gift for the little boy. Leo Tolstoy’s character, Ivan Ilych also engages the many possibilities in his destined journey. He chooses his own direction toward his destiny, when, as a young man, he studies law, and is appointed to the court. His promotions to higher courts enable him to succeed in achieving his career, his security, and his life. However, a destiny that he does not include as possible, strikes him, and the smitten man cannot escape the possibility of debilitating illness and death. He cannot escape his destiny. He does not choose it. It does however give Ivan a new identity, and it also engages a realm of possibility that he does not want to deal with. A C C E P TA N C E

One element of human destiny is centered in the aspect of acceptance. We cannot forget that Oedipus, destined to murder his father and marry his mother spent his last days, blind and repentant, wandering as a shepherd through the hills of Thebes, weeping and grieving a life that was destined for destruction. What does the individual do with destiny? Humanly speaking, all are destined to make the journey. The journey is chosen or not chosen but cast upon the individual. We receive our identities from our journey, and the journey also engages countless possibilities. The other aspect of destiny, acceptance or nonacceptance, is on the shoulders of the acting person. Walker Percy’s Will Barrett, sets about with the intention of being a companion. It seems to be his destiny to accompany the dying youth across the country, and he knows himself to be inadequate to the task. While playing golf one day, he thinks “golf he was good at, it was living that gave him trouble.”11 Inadequacy does not deter Percy’s Will Barrett from acting. The name the author gives the man is Will bear it. The man will act, he will respond, he will make the best of it. His acceptance of his destiny is a transforming element of his journey. Will meets all the members of Jamie’s family and he tries to make sense of the boy’s illness and the effect that it has on the family. Although the boy is transformed in death, it comes about that it is Will, the narrator of the story who becomes transformed by the journey, to live. Life takes on a valued meaning for him.

290

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

In our other literatures also, acceptance of destiny or non-acceptance for what is happening is associated with the human response to experience. Can the situation be accepted, and the what happens when the individual cannot accept the tribulation. Leo Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych cannot accept his fate, his destiny. All his life, this man has worked for the good life, worked hard and had given up certain aspects of his life, even the love of his family, so that he could achieve financial security and a comfortable life. When sickness comes, it is the most undesirable thing that can happen to his person, and he cannot accept it. Tolstoy writes Ivan’s story of his journey, which is full of suffering, mainly his battle against his deathly condition. But finally, in the last chapter, in a paragraph with mystical implications, Ivan can say, it is all right. Tolstoy describes the moment of acceptance for Ivan And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. . . .How good and how simple he thought.12

Tolstoy presents a mystical moment, like that of Julianne of Norwich, who could say “All will be well.” It is all right. Let go. Let all fall away on all sides. All is OK. Ivan Ilych can now say of his destiny, “He understands.” Ivan Ilych can finally accept his destiny. Eudora Welty’s Phoenix Jackson accepts her destiny from the beginning. Phoenix loves her little suffering grandson and never resists her duty to save him. Salvation goes on for years, and Phoenix makes the journey along the Natchez trail, talking to the animals along the way, tired, forgetful, frail, against the big logs and little ditches. Her destiny in life is to save the boy and her journey is enduring. She actually embraces her destiny although at one moment she even forgets her mission. She says, “I remember so plain now. I not going to forget him again, no, the whole enduring time. I could tell him from all the others in creation.”13 It is love that moves Phoenix to engage her destiny as a savior of the little boy. The obstacles in her journey are both physical and psychological. She takes verbal abuse from a hunter along the way, and from a clinical attendant when she gets to the doctor’s office. Her text is her environment, for she cannot read the written word. However, she reads her surroundings with great respect and dignity. She admires the doctor’s framed diploma, as she admires herself when a lady has tied her shoes at her entrance into town. Phoenix is the mythic heroine, battling demons along the journey, on her quest for the medicine. The demons include a dog who knocks her down, a hunter who makes fun of her, and her own physical inadequacies. But she triumphs. She has accepted her role and she has succeeded.

D E S T I N Y I N T H E L I T E R AT U R E

291

Certainly, our human destiny engages the journey. In literature the main character is on a quest. This quest is most often the mythic quest having an element of salvation in it. It always has a journey and that journey is physical and psychological and spiritual. Demons and gods are ever lurking at the side of the road. Sometimes the gods assist the hero or heroine and sometimes the demons hinder the wayfarer on the quest. However, direction is important for the hero must not get lost on the way. And finally there has to be victory. The quest must be fulfilled. And the hero or heroine can then go home, a great savior of a particular situation. Walker Percy’s Will Barrett embarks on a journey as a companion for a dying youth. However, the victim he is saving is himself. He has maps and various signs to guide him on his trip to Santa Fe. Gods and demons are ever present, personified in the members of Jamie’s family who on one hand, try to abort the journey, and on the other hand try to support the man on his way, that is both a physical and psychological trip as it is a spiritual journey. His reward, his destiny, is a new knowledge that he receives from the big trip. He accepts the greater plan that engages Jamie’s life and death. He falls in love with Jamie’s sister Kitty, and she loves him. He knows that his life is “on track.” Leo Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych also makes the mythic journey which engages his own soul. His journey is basically the movement from despair to joy. Ivan Ilych’s journey is so terribly difficult for more demons are present to him, than are the saving angels. His quest is for some kind of human peace which finally is given to him in a mystical moment, when he can acknowledge that all is beyond his control and he can accept the fact that “all is well.” Of course, Phoenix Jackson, created by Eudora Welty in the story “The Worn Path,” also makes the mythic journey that is her destiny. She is the epitome of the savior, for she lovingly embraces the difficulty and hardship of her journey. And she brings salvation, the medicine, back home to her grandson. As her eyesight is dim, the signs for the direction of her feet are mainly in her heart. These characters are simply arbitrary samples of literature’s rich population of individuals living out their destinies in their journeys. All have a destiny, sometimes chosen, and sometimes thrust upon them. All receive their identity because of the journey and who they become in the journey. Various possibilities are ever present on these multiple journeys. And finally, individuals can accept or reject their personal destinies. This is the marvelous human condition. Marquette University

292

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA NOTES

1

Percy, Walker. THE LAST GENTLEMAN. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Welty, Eudora, “The Worn Path.” THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF SHORT FICTION. R.V. Cassil. New York. Norton Publishing Co. 2000 3 Iser, Wolfgang. THE ACT OF READING – A THEORY OF AESTHETIC RESPONSE. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1978. 4 Iser, Wolfgang. 107. 5 Tolstoy, Leo. “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF SHORT FICTION. Sixth Edition R.V. Cassil. New York. W.W. Norton Company. 2000. 6 Welty, Eudora. 1592. 7 Percy, Walker. 8. 8 Percy, Walker. 88. 9 Percy, Walker. 162 10 Eliot, T. S. “Four Quartets.” THE COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Woeld, Inc. 1971. “Little Gidding.” V. 241–244. 11 Percy, Walker. 192. 12 Tolstoy, Leo. 1543. 13 Welty, Eudora. 1592. 2

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

T H E I N T E R I O R Q U E S T: M E M O I R , L E N S O F P E R S O NA L D E S T I N Y

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the role of memoir writing in reexamining and finding meaning and purpose in lives that might otherwise be deprived of a key source of personal fulfillment, the sense of achieving individual destiny. It argues that the writing of memoir requires narrative flow, craft, and creative awareness— all produced by a quality of attention that can be transformative in itself. This reflective and artistic distance is a key factor in the phenomenology of human self-perception. In the writing of memoir, life material is restructured, reframed, and perceived afresh. For some, memoir has a creative potential that can be seen as self-directed destiny. Several outstanding memoirs are considered here. Russell Baker’s Growing Up credits the ambitions of his mother, combined with his fascination with people’s Depression era stories, to his rise through the newspaper ranks to national status as a columnist. A contrast is shown in Frank McCourt’s memoir trilogy—Angela’s Ashes, ’Tis, and Teacher Man—in which a childhood of extreme poverty, working class obscurity, and an entire teaching career passes before the author is able to write lucidly about the struggles that made him into a late-life hero to those who devote their lives to a vital, mostly thankless profession. Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase climbs to a realization that, though failing to find the God of her original quest, she has by unexpected means fulfilled a spiritual destiny through a lifelong study of world religions. The paper concludes with a reflection on Amy Tan’s key assertion, in her memoir The Opposite of Fate, that by writing one can create a better destiny than what seems to be fated. Her approach is poignantly verified in the case of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a life-affirming memoir composed when all the author had left was his awareness, imagination, and the control of one blinking eye. It is a triumph of attention as the creative catalyst of human destiny. In the scope of human experience a fortunate few are blessed with a clear sense of direction, a feeling of destiny to accomplish something extraordinary. It drives them to become scientists, astronauts, ballerinas, writers, political leaders, artists, even philosophers. Vast numbers of others, however, muddle 293 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 293–321. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

294

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

through life seeking whatever doors might be open, buffeted by circumstance and constrained by deep forces of economics and cultural bias. For these individuals, the desire to fulfill an unidentified personal destiny can be just as strong as for those who pursue a known calling. How do they fulfill that quest? One increasingly significant means is looking over one’s life in the writing of memoir. Those who lack time or confidence express this urge by reading the lives of others—ergo the fact that memoir and biography are the most popular forms of narrative history published today. Unlike traditional biography, memoir tends to be more selective, ruminative, emotionally and intellectually honest, a more philosophical reflection on the direction and significance of one’s life. It is phenomenology in retrospect, characterized by an old adage: The owl of wisdom flies at dusk. The topic of destiny can be a conversation stopper. Friends and colleagues ask, What exactly do you mean by destiny? When asked what they think it is, they defer to the dictionary, and for good reason. The Oxford English Dictionary offers two competing categories of definitions. The first is destiny as something fated to happen, predetermined by events, or, “in a weakened sense: what in the course of events will become or has become [for] a person or thing; [an] ultimate condition.” The second, involving a long tradition of polytheism, monotheism, and some forms of philosophy, defines destiny as an agency or agent: “the power or agency by which. . .all events, or certain particular events, are unalterably predetermined; supernatural or divine preordination; overruling or invincible necessity; [or] FATE (Often personified).” Those trying to define it for personal use must therefore navigate between the Scylla of individual free will and the Charybdis of determinism. They must also distinguish how much they are influenced by belief in supernatural influences or predetermination. Easy, for those who say all is chance, life is a roll of the dice, an exercise of quantum theory. Daunting, however, for everyone else. For many, human experience militates against the view that life is all chance. Free will and individual choice remain capable of negotiating, even surmounting, layer upon layer of causality that constitutes the life-world we are born into. Memoir provides a means of exploring the connection between necessity, Providence, and individual will. Destiny is frequently the goal that emerges, flowering from the murky soil of a previously unexamined life. By the mid 20th Century, after two world wars and the lingering influence of totalitarianism, religious fanaticism, and the devaluation of human life in movements grasping for political power and religious dominance, the old Idea of Progress became at best bracketed by history and at worst a cruel joke attributed to the Renaissance. Writing during World War II, the Protestant theologian Reinhold Neibuhr opined, in Human Destiny,

THE INTERIOR QUEST

295

It was not recognized that the same technology which would create a potential world community, might also produce international chaos. . .. . . .We can only know that the twentieth century has refuted the dreams of the earlier centuries of the modern era in the most tragic terms, and that modern culture is immersed in pathetic confusions. . .because modern culture has no alternate perspectives upon life and history to which it might turn, when it finds the certainties of yesterday dissipated by the realities of today. No alternate perspectives are available because the triumph of the Renaissance was so complete that it destroyed not only particular interpretations of Christian religion, but submerged the Christian religion itself, as, in any sense, a potent force in modern culture.1

That encompassing statement can apply to the beginning of the 21st century just as accurately, and include all world religions, given the potentiality of brotherhood available to us through global communications and computer technology, combined with equally potent forms of isolation and maniacal movements using the latest technology. Though organized religions are far from dead, looking toward religion for guidance into human destiny is fraught with the powerlessness of religious entities to overcome large scale forces of chaos and violence. As ever, factions within some religions have been instigators of violence and fear. Still, on an individual level, many of the soldiers and civilians who defeated the forces of totalitarianism in the last century were motivated by religious and spiritual values as well as by personal ethics, as are many peacemakers and human rights activists today. Therefore historians are hard put to distinguish between religious and secular ethical influences. What seems clear is that they are most powerful on an individual level. The latter half of the 20th Century brought about the postmodern era of skepticism about the validity of any particular point of view. As the acclaimed memoirist Jill Ker Conway notes in her study of the art of autobiography, When Memory Speaks, . . .[V]irtually the only prose narratives which are accorded the suspension of disbelief today are the autobiographers’ attempts to narrate the history of a real life or the biographers’ carefully documented historical reconstructions of lives in times past. Even this concession is not made by readers influenced by postmodern criticism, which calls into question the possibility of apprehending reality from a single point of view. Hence the convention in many forms of modern narrative of switching points of view, and leaving open the possibility of many endings for the story.2

Conway insists that we remain beings who “experience life as though reality could be apprehended from the single locus which is the point from which we view the world.” Most readers remain confounded by postmodern views based on quantum mechanics and relativity theory, and “want to know how the world looks from inside another person’s experience, and when that craving is met by a convincing narrative, we find it deeply satisfying.”3 As William Zinnser observes in Writing about Your Life, “Most people are on some kind of pilgrimage, whether or not they recognize it as such. If you

296

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

put your writing in the form of a quest you will make a connection with your readers that will surprise you with its power.”4 Zinnser asserts, “Most people don’t give themselves a long-range destiny; life is kind of a rambling thing.”5 Writers who can distill their own experience, therefore, can inspire others to find meaning in their lives or the lives of those dear to them. This paper shall explore some noteworthy examples and examine why they achieve such power. I have divided these examples into four illustrative categories, not to circumscribe the limitless possibilities of memoir, but to indicate how narratives of life experience constitute not one but many lenses by which we can find meaning in lives perceived in the context of individual destiny.

MOTHER AS DRIVING FORCE

In Russell Baker’s classic memoir, Growing Up, his eventual success as a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist is largely attributed to the iron determination of his mother. Baker recounts how his career in journalism started when he was eight, when his mother made it clear that she wanted him to “make something” of himself, despite his having “no more gumption than a bump on a log.”6 It was she who, in 1932, the depths of the Depression, finagled him a job selling The Saturday Evening Post after school, answering all the questions convincingly for him during the interview she’d arranged with a representative of the Curtis Publishing Company. She was determined her son would not grow up like his father’s people, “with calluses on their hands, overalls on their backs, and fourth-grade educations in their heads.”7 Russell had no aptitude for salesmanship; it was his mother who forced him to ring doorbells and, when all else failed, told his plucky seven-year-old sister to go out with him and help sell the magazines. Three years of dismal sales later, his mother notices that he’s earned an A on a school essay, and decides he has a better future as a writer. Baker states, I clasped the idea to my heart. I had never met a writer, had shown no previous urge to write, and hadn’t a notion how to become a writer, but I loved stories and thought that making up stories must surely be almost as much fun as reading them. . . .Writers did not have to trudge through the town peddling from canvas bags, defending themselves against angry dogs, being rejected by surly strangers. . . .So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn’t even be classified as work. I was enchanted. Writers didn’t have to have any gumption at all. . . .secretly I decided that what I’d like to be when I grew up was a writer.8

It becomes lucid that Baker’s feminist mother, who argued for women’s suffrage in her 1913 high school debate, gave her son the gumption he lacked. She was his first and most vivid storyteller, whose descriptions of her Virginia childhood brightened the “ruined and colorless landscape of the Depression.”9

THE INTERIOR QUEST

297

She had a year of college before her father died at 53, so could only qualify for backwater teaching jobs, where she met a minimally schooled blacksmith, Baker’s father, who died of untreated diabetes. His widowed mother was so poor that she had to live with relatives and gave up one of her two daughters to be raised by a childless aunt. Baker’s memoir becomes a homespun social history, made poignant through his account of the range of work the women in his country family had to perform. They had no electricity, gas, plumbing, or central heating. No refrigerator, no radio, no telephone, no automatic laundry, no vacuum cleaner. Lacking indoor toilets, they had to empty, scour, and fumigate each morning the noisome slop jars which sat in bedrooms during the night. For baths, laundry, and dishwashing, they hauled buckets of water from a spring at the foot of a hill. To heat it, they chopped kindling to fire their wood stoves. They boiled laundry in tubs, scrubbed it on washboards until knuckles were raw, and wrung it out by hand. Ironing was a business of lifting heavy metal weights heated on the stove top. They scrubbed floors on hands and knees, thrashed rugs with carpet beaters, killed and plucked their own chickens, baked bread and pastries, grew and canned their own vegetables, patched the family’s clothing on treadle-operated sewing machines, deloused the chicken coops, preserved fruits, . . .darned stockings, made jelly and relishes, rose before the men to start the stove for breakfast and pack lunch pails, polished the chimneys of kerosene lamps, and even found time to tend the geraniums, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, dahlias, and peonies that grew around every house. By the end of a summer day a Morrisonville woman had toiled like a serf.10

Passages like this reveal the depth of Baker’s debt to his mother and the women of his family, while displaying his skill as an observer of differences in human perception. While he was enjoying “the luxuries of a rustic nineteenth century boyhood,” so quiet in the afternoons that he could hear corn grow and hens lay eggs, he was able to appreciate that his mother and grandmother had hard lives of “endless, dirty labor.” It is salutary to read of Baker’s boyhood, feeling that some of our own forebears toiled like serfs and we could be more grateful for comforts taken for granted. Reading a variety of memoirs tends to give one a wider perspective on the degrees of hard times. Baker’s family was poor, but after his father died they were able to take refuge with his mother’s brother Allen in Newark, New Jersey. Living with his uncle brought him under the influence of his aunt Pat, a spunky orphan who had grown up in New York City, where she grew into “A hopeless news junkie. . .powerless to resist when a newsboy came up the street yelling, ‘Extra! Extra! Read all about it!’ Rushing onto the sidewalk, surrendering two pennies for the paper, she stood there staring in wonder at the wet black headlines.”11 Baker attributes his love of newspapers to her. It helped that his mother could point to a cousin who was a managing editor of The New York Times. She insisted he was no smarter than anybody else, and if

298

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

he could do it, so could her boy Russell. The first piece Baker ever had published was a seventh-grade essay on wheat that his teacher proudly submitted to the local paper, researched and written mostly by his mother. Baker’s independence from maternal influence emerges in his account of Uncle Harry, known in the family as an inveterate liar. Young Baker is enthralled by his uncle’s tales, and eventually sees him as a gifted storyteller who convinces him there are worse ways to spend one’s life. “We were two romancers whose desire for something more fanciful than the humdrum of southwest Baltimore was beyond the grasp of unimaginative people like. . .my mother.”12 Baker’s mother, however, pushes him to attend a public high school for high achievers. One passage displays how much the once gumptionless Baker owes this “eternal schoolteacher forcing me to learn to read when reading bored me, watching over my shoulder while I did my homework, encouraging me when I complained it was too hard. ‘Just calm down and think it through, Buddy. You can get it if you try.’´’ If he tried and still couldn’t, she would sit beside him and help get it done.13 As he nears graduation with no means to attend college, it is she who insists, “Something will come along.” When he gloomily replies, “Fat chance,” she snaps, “For God’s sake, Russell, have a little gumption.”14 At last he shows some. Paralyzed with boredom at an essay assignment by a stuffy English teacher, he scans a list of suggested topics, stopping at “The Art of Eating Spaghetti.” His mind fills with vivid memories of when they were living with his mother’s steadily employed brother and two other uncles who couldn’t find work in the Depression, and sat down to a rare spaghetti dinner. All the good humor of Uncle Allen’s house reawoke in my mind as I recalled the laughing arguments we had that night about the socially respectable method for moving spaghetti from plate to mouth. Suddenly I wanted to write about that. . .simply for my own joy, not for Mr. Fleagle. It was a moment I wanted to recapture and hold for myself. . . .[It] would violate all the rules of formal composition I’d learned in school, and Mr. Fleagle would surely give it a failing grade. Never mind. I would write something else for Mr. Fleagle after I had written this thing for myself.15

Instead of an F, Baker gets an A+ and the joy of hearing Mr. Fleagle read his piece to the class. He sees them all listening attentively, and is ecstatic that his words have the power to make people laugh. This moment convinces Baker he has a calling. His mother shares his delight, affirms he’s always had a talent for writing, and reiterates that if he works hard he can make something of himself. As high school graduation nears, a classmate supplies Baker with the Providential gumption he needs. The friend asks about his plans for the future; Russell says none. Insisting he join in applying to Johns Hopkins University, the friend even fetches him the application forms. Baker says there’s no use applying because he has no money, and the friend informs him that scholarships are available to those who pass a rigorous examination. Because Baker

THE INTERIOR QUEST

299

has studied hard—kudos of course to his mother—he passes, proving her right that something would come along. When the Second World War starts up, she prays he will never see combat. Though he yearns to be a heroic Navy pilot, the training program is so time consuming that the war ends and her prayers are answered. After the war a Hopkins professor helps Baker get a lowly job at the Baltimore Sun, phoning in stories from the police blotter. He does this for two years, until there’s a sudden need for a rewrite man in the newsroom and Baker proves his mettle. No need to detail his steady climb to nationally syndicated columnist, ending his career at the New York Times. We understand that the compassion he gained from his Depression era childhood and the vast range of tragedy and comedy he encountered on the police beat are colored by the humor and wisdom of his family, most vividly by his mother. Few passages reveal more of the writer’s approach to destiny than his description of how the Depression destroyed his mother’s hopes of marrying Oluf, a man she cared for deeply in the last years of her youth. The once jovial and optimistic Dane was gradually worn down by his failure to find steady work. Baker came across the letters his mother had saved, including the last, when Oluf asked that she stop writing to him because he’d given up all hope of making a life with her. At this moment, in her defeat. . .she was already laying plans for another campaign, a longer, harder struggle to come up from the bottom without help from the sort of Providence Oluf had represented. In this long, hard pull, I was now cast as the central figure. She would spend her middle years turning me into the man who would redeem her failed youth. I would make something of myself, and if I lacked the grit to do it, well then she would make me make something of myself. I would become the living proof of the strength of her womanhood. From now on she would live for me, and, in turn, I would become her future.16

Thus Baker strikes a chord with many whose mothers’ ambitions weighed heavily upon their lives. The writer lets us realize how Baker’s love for his mother combines with her unfulfilled personal ambition that she must channel through him because history and circumstance contrive against her but leave room for her son. Though he did love stories and obviously possessed writing talent, readers come away convinced that the spine of Baker’s character was reinforced by his mother’s valiant will. Baker goes on to meet another plucky woman, whom he eventually marries, a former orphan like his news junkie aunt. Readers get the impression that his wife, who is smart and capable but—like so many Depression era young people, especially women—denied the opportunity of higher education, takes up the baton of gumption that Baker’s mother hands off in the relay of her son’s burgeoning career. Baker’s memoir establishes his mother’s place in history, his success founded on the gumption of a woman whose own chances

300

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

were thwarted by economic hardship and by social forces proscribing career opportunities to women. Most importantly, we can wonder how much this timid boy would have accomplished without a maternal dynamo nudging him ever forward, helping with his homework, telling him he can do it if he tries. What the memoir suggests is that his mother set the sails of his destiny, and almost all he had to do was man the boat.

PA R E N T ( S ) A S T R A G I C C ATA LY S T

Although both men depict Depression era childhoods, compared to the trilogy of memoirs by Frank McCourt, Baker’s effort seems to come from an altogether simpler and kinder life-world. A critical difference is that McCourt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first effort, Angela’s Ashes (1996) is not the work of a well-known author after a much lauded career. He writes as a retired schoolteacher, whose level of poverty growing up in Brooklyn and Ireland makes Baker’s seem like deluxe accommodations. As with Baker, there is great emphasis on the writer’s mother. But in McCourt’s story she is longsuffering, a talented woman who is eventually abandoned by an alcoholic husband whose inability to hold down a job and refrain from drinking his wages results in such poverty and malnutrition in their family that three of her seven children die in infancy or as toddlers, and McCourt nearly dies of typhoid at age ten. McCourt’s father Malachy had been shipped to the States to avoid retribution for a secret offense connected with his role in the old Irish Republican Army. McCourt’s mother Angela was given her fare to New York by relatives hoping she could find a means to support herself, as her family in Limerick could not. They met in Brooklyn, and were forced to marry after a drunken encounter resulted in pregnancy. In Baker’s childhood there was always food, however humble, on the table. His family’s poverty was eased by kindly relatives and an untarnished sense of good character in bad times. McCourt’s memoir diverges into a more troubling direction of poverty and shame, and faces a more serious longterm challenge. McCourt’s father’s inability or unwillingness to choose feeding his family over indulging his craving for drink, the humiliation Angela McCourt experiences having to seek public assistance and charity hand-outs, the rejection Frank receives from the Catholic Church to serve as an altar boy and to attend a Christian Brothers school, and the morally compromised behavior of his mother in order to live rent-free with an abusive cousin, underpin this memoir with a deep layer of rage and humiliation. Although laughter and good-natured ridicule of the foibles of others permeated his childhood, McCourt has stated that he would not have been able to write this memoir earlier in his life.

THE INTERIOR QUEST

301

McCourt has commented elsewhere that his own students, many of whom came from very difficult backgrounds, forced him to overcome the shame of his upbringing. First of all, I had to overcome the anger, because the anger was paralyzing. I think a lot of kids knew that. They helped dissipate the anger. They gave me a break. I was kind of an exotic with this accent, from Ireland. Once I dropped the mask, then they were cooperative and I stopped being a phony. That helped me transcend the anger, and the shame and everything else so that I became a teacher in the classroom instead of somebody preaching at the kids. That was the transcendent experience, so that I was able to find myself.17

McCourt seems to come about his awareness of the rightness of his chosen profession—unappreciated, low-status and low-paying as it was and is—by having tasted other types of work, especially as described in his second memoir, ‘Tis. He speaks of a 30-year process when he says, You know how, in the corporate world, everybody is putting on an act all the time? If I had gone into anything else, I would have been dead in five years. . . .But I was with kids, and they demand honesty. They know when you’re telling them lies and you can’t sustain them, or the hypocrisy. The teacher was shaped by the kids. Maybe I taught them something in return, but they shaped me.18

What we witness in this extended memoir, moreso than in Baker’s, is a gradual accretion not only of life material—mostly of terrible hardship lightened by camaraderie and compassion—but of the years necessary to overcome anger and shame, enough to use that material in teaching and ultimately to offer it freely to the reading public. McCourt explains that he eventually found out why he was put on this earth: to write. He agrees with Thomas Carlyle, who said, “Happy is the man who has found his work.”19 So writing is his selfproclaimed destiny, but what about the life itself, the misery-laden childhood, the long years teaching? That became the very substance of his writing, and therefore inseparable from his destiny, as did the students who forced him to be honest about his past. Here one could wonder where to draw the line between destiny and life history, but that would leave out the choices made by McCourt: first, to narrate significant swaths of his life to his students; then to write it more fully as memoir. The key here is phenomenological: in memoir the life in question is depicted from an observational distance, the author’s life-world and experiences perceived through the lens of narrative and reflection. It is the lens of memoir that makes the subject’s destiny so clear in hindsight. An important factor that comes out only in interviews with McCourt, is the origin of his innovative style, in which he assumes the mind of himself as a child to describe events as they occurred in his childhood. We might identify it as a phenomenology of a child’s range of perceptions. Much-imitated now, McCourt’s style of narration stems from his desire to write something his

302

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

young daughter could understand. He mentions that he began writing Angela’s Ashes in the past tense, but wanted to get at his earliest memories, when he was his daughter’s age. So he wrote, “ ‘I’m in a playground on Claussen Avenue in Brooklyn with my brother, Malachy. He’s two. I’m three. We’re on the seesaw. He goes up. I go down. Up, down. I get off. Malachy comes down, crashes, bites his tongue and there’s blood.’ That was my earliest memory. And the next day I picked that up in the present tense with the perspective of the three-year-old, me, and it felt comfortable and I continued that way.”20

This style works especially well when McCourt explains his childhood devotion to the father he perceives as good. It also reveals that the kernel of destiny was first planted by his father, for him to be good in school and return to America to have a real future. I know when Dad does the bad thing. I know when he drinks the dole money and Mam is desperate and has to beg at the St. Vincent de Paul Society and ask for credit at Kathleen O’Connell’s shop but I don’t want to back away from him and run to Mam. How can I do that when I’m up with him early every morning with the whole world asleep? He lights the fire and makes the tea and sings to himself or reads the paper to me in a whisper that won’t wake up the rest of the family. . . .[M]y father in the morning is still mine. He gets the Irish Press early and tells me about the world, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. . . .He tells me about the great Roosevelt in Washington and the great De Valera in Dublin. . . .He tells me about the old days in Ireland when the English wouldn’t let the Catholics have schools because they wanted to keep the people ignorant, that the Catholic children met in hedge schools in the depths of the country and learned English, Irish, Latin and Greek. The people loved learning[,]. . .stories and poetry even if none of this was any good for getting a job. . . .The masters risked their lives going from ditch to ditch and hedge to hedge. . .. I should be good in school and some day I’ll go back to America and get an inside job where I’ll be sitting at a desk with two fountain pens in my pocket, one red and one blue, making decisions. I’ll be out of the rain and I’ll have a suit and shoes and a warm place to live and what more could a man want? He says you can do anything in America, it’s the land of opportunity.21

No question, the clandestine teaching of Irish masters during the centuries when Ireland was oppressed by the English inspired the future McCourt to consider teaching, however beleaguered, a noble profession. And no question the boy’s love of his father in the morning makes him want to reach the land of opportunity, perhaps even acquiring a teacher’s red and blue pens in his pocket. Though he eventually deserts the family, McCourt’s father was a master spinner of tales who helped Frank and his brother do their homework. “Before bed we sit around the fire and if we say, Dad, tell us a story, he makes up one about someone in the lane and the story will take us all over the world, up in the air, under the sea and back to the lane.”22 His father’s rich imagination stands in grim contrast to the description of what his sons wear to school: We wear short pants till we’re thirteen or fourteen and our long stockings always have holes to be darned. If she has no wool for the darning and the stockings are dark we can blacken our ankles with shoe polish for the respectability that’s in it. . . .We might be lucky enough to get our stockings

THE INTERIOR QUEST

303

on but then we have to block the holes in our shoes and I fight with my brother, Malachy, over any scrap of cardboard or paper in the house. . . .The rest of the dressing is easy, the shirt I wore to bed is the shirt I wear to school. . . .It’s the shirt for football, for climbing walls, for robbing orchards. I go to Mass. . .in that shirt and people sniff the air and move away. If Mam gets a docket for a new one at the St.Vincent de Paul the old shirt is promoted to towel and hangs limp on the chair for months or Mam might use bits of it to patch other shirts. . .before it winds up on the floor pushed against the bottom of the door to block the rain from the lane.

One is hard pressed for a more vivid description of you-are-there poverty. And with poverty, for the McCourt children, unlike Baker’s boyhood peers in the States, comes the humiliation of class: We go to school through lanes and back streets so that we won’t meet the respectable boys who go to the Christian Brothers’ School or the rich ones who go to the Jesuit school, Crescent College. The Christian Brothers’ boys wear tweed jackets, warm woolen sweaters, shirts, ties and shiny new boots. We know they’re the ones who will get jobs in the civil service and help the people who run the world. The Crescent College boys wear blazers and school scarves tossed around their necks and over shoulders to show they’re cock o’ the walk. . . .We know they’re the ones who will go to university, take over the family business, run the government, run the world. We’ll be the messenger boys on bicycles who deliver their groceries or we’ll go to England to work on the building sites. Our sisters will mind their children and scrub their floors unless they go off to England, too. We know that. We’re ashamed of the way we look. . ..23

Frank and his siblings have to settle for Leamy’s National School, where many boys are malnourished, too poor to have shoes, and consider themselves fortunate to get jobs as messenger boys when they turn 14. Only one teacher encourages Frank to write, considers him gifted, and “is disgusted by this free and independent Ireland that keeps a class system foisted on us by the English, . . .throwing our talented children on the dungheap.” Mr. O’Halloran declaims, “You must get out of this country, boys. Go to America, McCourt. Do you hear me?” Frank says, “I do, sir.”24 Still, the time comes when Frank can take the post office examination for a permanent job delivering telegrams. He would surely pass and earn a decent place in the lower rung of society. It becomes the first of several turning points, spurred by the vision of others. His uncle asks him why would he do such a thing, and Frank answers it will be a secure job with a pension. His uncle is furious. “Make up your own bloody mind and to hell with the safeshots and the begrudgers. Do you hear me, Frankie McCourt?”25 Like Mr. O’Halloran, his uncle insists he go to America. It’s not that Frank lacked gumption, but he surely needed strong reinforcement to break out of the Irish cycle of poverty. McCourt recounts several disreputable things he has to do to accumulate enough funds for his passage back to New York. These include writing threatening letters for a female Irish loan shark who preys on the poor. Already showing writing talent, Frank’s letters are so frightening that Frank’s mother says the unknown writer should have his fingernails pulled out by blind

304

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

people.26 He also delivers copies of the Protestant Irish Times, considered a treasonous act amongst his own people. Our eyes bulge with anticipation when the old loan shark sends Frank out for a bottle of sherry, and he returns to find her dead, with no next of kin, her purse open at her feet. We are ready to cheer when he apportions himself some of her ill-got wealth, affording him, with his own savings, enough for the trip back to America at age 19—but not before heaving her ledger of unpaid debts into the River Shannon, regretting that he can’t reveal his role as Robin Hood because it would expose him as the accursed author of her dunning letters. Enthralled by this mix of wild, desperate humor and wily perseverance, we accept whatever Frank finds necessary to pursue his destiny, which begins with making it to the land of opportunity. If we hadn’t been treated to McCourt’s gimlet-eyed attention to the fine points of class consciousness, shame, lust, conscience, and ignominious toil on behalf of those who exploit the poor, we might not appreciate the extent he labored to take the advice of father, teacher, and uncle, forging a path for his destiny against crushing odds. ‘Tis brings to life McCourt’s initial employment cleaning the lobby and rooms of the Biltmore Hotel, observing that he is invisible to its privileged clientele. His Greek boss berates him, “Anyone who knows English should not be cleaning toilet bowls.” He should be in university.27 Frank doesn’t know how to take this advice, lacking a high school diploma, but he is grateful when the Korean War escalates and he is drafted into the army, where against his will he is transferred from handling dogs in Germany to being trained as a company clerk. Readers catch the irony when he is told he should be happy he learned how to type, he “might write another Gone with the Wind someday, ha ha ha.”28 As in Baker’s memoir, we encounter a blunt friend who imposes practical advice against the protestations of the pessimistic author. McCourt is badgered by a Jewish fellow draftee. Rappaport says I should concentrate on getting an education, that if I were Jewish that’s all I’d be thinking about. How would he know about the times I looked at college students in New York and dreamed I’d be like them. He tells me when I’m discharged I’ll have the Korean GI Bill. . .but what use is that when I don’t even have the high school diploma? Rappaport says I shouldn’t think about why I can’t do something. I should think about why I can do it. . . .I tell him I can’t go. . .to high school if I have to earn a living. Nights, says Rappaport. . . .I can’t spend years working by day, going to school by night. I’d be dead in a month. So what else are you going to do? I don’t know. So? Says Rappaport.29

It bears noting what might seem obvious, that in many memoirs of achievement against terrible odds, it is the boosterism of others, sometimes just a fleeting

THE INTERIOR QUEST

305

acquaintance, that prods the subject forward, if only to avoid accusations of sloth or dearth of gumption. Observations such as these are frequently overlooked in day-to-day life, while one is reluctantly going along with or ignoring such suggestions, but tend to emerge in retrospect when gratitude creeps in. In this way destiny is etched in fine lines drawn at times by others. Not only does the U.S. Army cure McCourt of his chronic eye infection and send part of his pay to support his mother, but his typing skills earn him a promotion to corporal plus two weeks leave, ennabling him to return to Ireland and visit his family. In front of Leamy’s National School, Mr. O’Halloran stops his car to ask about Frank’s life in America. McCourt does not say how he answers his old schoolmaster and mentor, but we can assume he alludes to the degrading menial work he has done before entering the army. For Mr. O’Halloran’s wisdom and tact strike the mark. He reminds Frank “of what the Greeks said, that there is no royal road to knowledge. He’ll be very surprised, he says, if I turn my back on books to join the shopkeepers of the world, to fumble in the greasy till.” He gives Frank his “President Roosevelt smile” and drives away.30 When McCourt returns to New York and supports himself by working on the docks, he gets the chance to inherit a union job in charge of a till, and turns away from it. Mr. O’Halloran’s influence, though unstated, is ingrained in Frank’s conscience. This trip is noteworthy, in phenomenological terms, for the author’s onestep-removed description of the volcanic rage he still harbors against the father who left the family when Frank was ten, to work in England during World War II, to spend every penny he earned in the pubs of Coventry with German bombs dropping all around him, his family next to starvation in Limerick and here he is putting on the air of one in the grip of sanctifying grace and all I can think of is there must be some truth to the story he was dropped on his head or the other story that he had a disease like meningitis. . . .Aunt Emily whispers he hasn’t had a drink in ages and it’s a great struggle for him.

We see his careful observation of his 22-year-old self when he explains, I want to tell her it was a greater struggle for my mother to keep us all alive but I know he has the sympathy of his whole family and anyway what use is it going over the past. Then she tells me how he suffered over my mother’s disgraceful doings with her cousin, how the story drifted back. . .that they were living as man and wife, that when my father heard about it in Coventry. . .it drove him so mad he was in the pubs day, night and in between. . . .My face feels tight and there are dark clouds in my head and all I can do is stand and tell them my father drank all through the years, drank when babies were born and babies died and drank because he drank.

His grandmother shakes her head to disagree, and Frank picks up his duffel bag and leaves the day he arrived. His Aunt Emily begs him to come back, that his grandmother wants to talk to him, but he keeps walking. Here especially

306

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

we benefit from the fruits of reflection and attention as the memoirist enlarges his own vision and ours by the way he frames the scene. McCourt informs us that he is aching to go back, that bad as my father is I’d at least like to know him, that my grandmother was doing only what any mother would do, defending her son who was dropped on his head or had meningitis, and I might go back except that a car stops and a man offers me a lift to the bus station. . .and once I’m in the car there’s no going back.31

Therefore we understand his dilemma when facing his mother the next day. He cannot tell her he’s returned because of what his father’s family was saying about her adulterous sin, and that they had nearly canonized his father for his suffering over it. So he lies and says he’s back because his father is drinking again. His father had stopped drinking for some time, which would normally have opened the door to a family reconciliation, were it not for the infuriatingly misplaced blame on Frank’s mother. It is therefore heartrending, his mother’s reply. She had hoped her younger children would be able to see the father they barely knew. She says that when he was sober he was the best husband and best father in the world. He’d always have a song or a story or a comment about the state of the world that made her laugh. Then everything was destroyed with the drink. The demons came, God help us, and children were better off without him. She’s better off now by herself with the few pounds coming in and the peace, ease and comfort that’s in it and the best thing now would be a nice cup of tea for I must be famished after my travels to the North.32

Though McCourt never acknowledges it, his description of his mother makes clear something he is loathe to admit: that his mother and father loved each other, and the only thing keeping them from a happy and stable life together was his father’s drinking. Now that his father has stopped drinking, they still cannot be reconciled because of the adulterous relationship his mother had with her cousin, which we might suspect she engaged in to ensure a roof over their heads. All this goes to say that the unpacking and processing of deep wounds and rage can seem like—to borrow the words of memoirist Günter Grass—peeling an onion. But the peeling process is deeply rewarding, for it takes the wounds and rage and turns them into stories that spark the compassion of others. It puts a liberating one-step-removed quality into the experience of writer and reader, a philosophical distance whose basic goal is wisdom and healing.33 It also permits readers to respond individually to any person’s take on their own life and those in it. In a course I gave on memoir, my students believed that in describing his mother’s grave sin of adultery, McCourt did not appreciate the sacrifice she made to placate her selfish cousin, who surely would not have allowed her family to live with him without a trade-off greater than cooking and housecleaning.

THE INTERIOR QUEST

307

Another aspect of memoir as a lens of individual destiny is its ability to delineate why some roads are not taken. A pungent example is McCourt’s depiction of office work, which he sampled as a temporary typist after leaving the army: I don’t know how they can work in these offices day after day, year in, year out. I can’t stop looking at the clock and there are times I think I’ll just get up and walk away. . .. The people in their offices don’t seem to mind. They go to the water cooler, they go to the toilet, they walk from desk to desk and chat, they call from desk to desk on the telephone, they admire each other’s clothes, hair, makeup, and anytime someone loses a few pounds on a diet. . . .Office people brag about their children, their wives, their husbands and they dream about the two-week vacation.34

The passage reeks of tedium and incomprehension at others’ ability to tolerate mindless occupations. Some of us might have experienced similar forms of monotonous labor, but without the attention to detail that makes it beyond obvious that this could not be McCourt’s chosen path. Here is a different example of the memoirist’s craft. In ‘Tis, when McCourt works on the docks and attends NYU at night—where he has been accepted on a trial basis without a high school diploma because he is exceptionally well read—he meets the second of two teachers who inspired him to pursue his writing career. When asked to write about a familiar household object from his childhood, there is nothing he can think of that he is not ashamed of. His essay on the bed and mattress he shared with three younger brothers—obtained from a charity that did not see fit to give them sheets and blankets to put on it, and requiring three trips to bring home because their father was too proud to be seen carrying it—is something he could write about only when trusting that his professor alone would see it. The professor insists on reading it to the class, and McCourt is ashamed. When the professor smiles and tells him he should continue to explore his “rich past,” McCourt claims that he regretted ever writing about the bed and feared everyone would pity him, especially the girls.35 This has to be only partially true. What McCourt leaves out of ‘Tis and Angela’s Ashes before it, is that he has always loved to write, that his revered teacher in Ireland, Mr. O’Halloran, told him he was a literary genius, and took his compositions home to read to his children who attended private school.36 In an interview McCourt states that the grade he received at NYU for his composition about the bed was an A+37 , not just an A, as described in ‘Tis. Some editing of reality is going on here, downplaying the degree of praise he received as a child and the exceptional recognition given his writing in university. Why would he do that? Narrative flow, pacing, tone, the virtue of understatement, come to mind. When we read interviews of successful memoir writers, we can appreciate how their life stories might be crafted to underplay signs of exceptional ability, and to emphasize their struggles as seemingly ordinary, fearful and insecure individuals who keep forging their destinies. And yet

308

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

those moments of recognition, praise and encouragement are what keep them struggling and believing in themselves. McCourt, Baker and other memoirists make clear that in tandem with these precious pulses of encouragement beats a heartfelt love of what they are struggling to achieve. McCourt confesses with some irony that admitting to a love of literature in a fashionable university risks loss of face. He’d like to tell his professor how much he’d like to have a pint in a Greenwich Village pub with the likes of Chaucer and John Donne. But, “it’s dangerous to raise your hand in any class to say how much you love anything. The professor will look at you with a pitying little smile and the. . .pitying little smile will travel around the room till you feel so foolish. . .you promise you’ll never love anything in college again or if you do keep it to yourself.”38 This is related to his inability to join more privileged students in their attraction to nihilism. McCourt opines, If I didn’t have to work in banks, docks, warehouses, I’d have time to be a proper college student and moan over the emptiness. I wish my father and mother had lived respectable lives and sent me to college so that I could spend my time in bars and cafeterias telling everyone how I admired Camus for his daily invitation to suicide and Hemingway for risking the bull’s horn in the side. I know if I had money and time I’d be superior to every student in New York in the despair department though I could never mention any of this to my mother because she’d say, Arrah, for God’s sake, don’t you have your health and shoes and a fine head o’ hair and what more do you want?39

Following his career into the third memoir, Teacher Man, we note that his intention to be a teacher is considered suspect even by those interviewing him for a teaching position, who expect him to aspire to something better, with more amenities, in administration. One interviewer, who does not hire him, is speechless when McCourt asks who will be left to teach the students. This leads to a masterful summary of what ails American public education: The farther you travel from the classroom the greater your financial and professional rewards. Get the license, teach for two or three years. Take courses in administration, supervision, guidance, and with your new certificates you can move to an office with air-conditioning, private toilets, long lunches, secretaries. You won’t have to struggle with large groups of pain-in-the-arse kids. Hide out in your office, and you won’t even have to see the little buggers.40

More experienced teachers tell him never to talk about his own life, but that is another suggestion he has to ignore, and it turns out to be the key to his destiny. My life saved my life. On my second day [teaching] a boy asks a question that sends me into the past and colors the way I teach for the next thirty years. I am nudged into the past, the materials of my life. I had to find my own way of being a man and a teacher and that is what I struggled with for thirty years in and out of the classrooms of New York. My students didn’t know there was a man up there escaping a cocoon of Irish history and Catholicism, leaving bits of that cocoon everywhere.41

THE INTERIOR QUEST

309

He is quick to confess that this was no brilliant stroke of pedagogical genius; it was a survival technique. Telling stories about his miserable Irish childhood was the only way he could get the attention of American teenagers whose last care in life was learning grammar, vocabulary, topic sentences, and paragraphs. They’re looking at you. You cannot hide. They’re waiting. What are we doing today, teacher? The paragraph? Oh, yeah. . . .They straggle in from auto mechanics shop, the real world, . . .and here’s this teacher going on about the parts of a paragraph. Jesus, man. You don’t need paragraphs in an auto shop. . . .If you bark or snap, you lose them. That’s what they get from parents and the schools in general, the bark and the snap. If they strike back with the silent treatment, you’re finished in the classroom.42

A boy raises his hand to ask why can’t teachers treat them like human beings, and McCourt decides to tell them the truth: he doesn’t know. He tells them he went to school in Ireland in a state of terror, hating it and dreaming of turning 14 and getting a job, and suddenly they look at him as if they just discovered him.43 And so it goes over the years, he tells them the most shameful things, the humiliations, the hunger, the diseases, the preciousness of books, the chance to hear world news and Shakespeare plays on a neighbor’s radio, the desperate things he did to get back to America, where he was born, the degrading work he did to make a pittance before the army drafted him and the G.I. Bill allowed him to go to university. Eventually he developed his own approach to education, which we can identify as what he needed for himself. I worked out this equation: What am I doing in the classroom? . . .I wanted to move the kids from what I call “From F to F: from Fear to Freedom.” And I would explain most of us are fearful of something or other. So if I accomplished anything in the class, it was to help the kids to think for themselves, because we had never been encouraged to think for ourselves. We were told we were worthless. The only thing for us to do was behave ourselves, observe the edicts or the pronouncements of the Catholic Church so we could go up to heaven. But eventually I knew the [American] kids lived in a state of fear. . .being teenagers, worried about their looks, worried about their popularity with the opposite sex, worried about their future, and I wanted to try to help them think for yourself.44

McCourt declares his goal was always to be a writer, and he achieves this goal, this destiny, with remarkable success. Yet the content of his much acclaimed writing is his miserable childhood, his shame-filled encounters, his longsuffering mother’s wit, humanity, and perceived moral failings brought about by extreme poverty, the two sides of his alcoholic father, the two teachers who encouraged him, and so on—his life, his work, and his teaching career. Which was the destiny, one might ask, and which was the life material? McCourt helps us answer it in a passage recounting a lesson he gave to his creative writing students at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in New York, where he finished the last 18 years of his teaching career. He begins with the prospect of

310

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

facing Saturday night as a student who has a crush on a girl but no idea of how to get a date with her. Dreaming, wishing, planning: it’s all writing, but the difference between you and the man on the street is that you are looking at it, friends, getting it set in your head, realizing the significance of the insignificant, getting it on paper. You might be in the throes of love or grief but you are ruthless in observation. You are your material. You are writers and one thing is certain: no matter what happens on Saturday night, or any other night, you’ll never be bored again. Never. Nothing human is alien to you. Hold your applause and pass up your homework.45

If he weren’t lecturing on writing, we might mistake this for some form of high school phenomenology. McCourt’s professed destiny was to write, yet what he writes about is his life, marvelously told, a life of degrading poverty made worse by an alcoholic father, the tragic loss of three siblings, the humiliation and exhaustion of his mother, mixed with the love of stories, ridicule of the pompous, excitement and delight at the smallest of pleasures, and dogged perseverance to get to America and make a life for himself. His storytelling, before he puts anything on paper, is honed and polished through many years inveigling teenagers to pay attention and learn something. What makes it compelling is the real anger and shame, that his students could hear and therefore know he wasn’t a phony. This brings us back to what makes the lens of memoir so vital to the discovery and articulation of individual destiny. We all have life stories, life histories, but without an extra dimension, that which comes via creative attention, the craft of structure, narrative movement, characterization, descriptive scenes, dramatic tension, and other aspects of effective storytelling, the lived life does not become a life story, let alone a story that reveals destiny. McCourt’s trilogy is masterful because it brings us into the grimy nooks and crannies of a very gradual, hard won victory over extreme circumstances and paralyzing anger. Yet without the extremity of those circumstances and the 30 years of recycling and refining that material in order to teach others, his achievement would not be so great. Funneling those circumstances through a storyteller’s art requires and displays a very high quality attention, which is the stuff of phenomenology. Witness McCourt’s parting advice to a new teacher: First, find what you love and do it. Finding what we truly love can require enormous outlays of attention for some, and honesty to dig past the pressures of others’ expectations. Second, realize that the classroom is a place of high drama where good teachers develop antennae after a few years. “You see them leaving the classroom: dreamy, flat, sneering, admiring, smiling, puzzled. . . .You can tell when you’ve reached them or alienated them.” Critics of high drama must be astute observers of scripts as well as actors. One thing is certain, he admonishes, “You are with the kids and, as long as you want to be a teacher, there’s no escape.

THE INTERIOR QUEST

311

Don’t expect help from the people who’ve escaped the classroom, the higherups. They’re busy going to lunch and thinking higher thoughts. It’s you and the kids. So, there’s the bell. See you later. Find what you love and do it.”46 What is left unsaid but evident in this quintessence of pedagogy is that the teacher is at the center of the high drama, and her love for what she is doing will stimulate her own ingenuity to capture the attention of those she teaches. It is the long applied attention of the writer, storyteller, and teacher that fulfills McCourt’s destiny, revealed to others through the lens of memoir. FA I L E D Q U E S T R E C O N F I G U R E D I N T O U N E X P E C T E D S U C C E S S

Although Karen Armstrong had a comfortable childhood, she surprised her family by entering a convent as a teenager. Her goal was to find God. Unfortunately, she suffered from a mysterious set of symptoms that were not well received by the nuns: a smell of sulphur, a sense of danger and evil, flickering light, nausea and black-outs. For these she was accused of “Emotional indulgence. Exhibitionism. . .weakness of will” and subjected to “merciless scolding.”47 She tried to explain that she had no desire to gain attention with these fainting spells, but in those days fainting meant one thing: hysteria, and Armstrong admits that she had “imbibed this ethos,” assuming she was “displaying some subconscious need for notice, love, or intimacy,” and did not question why no one ever suggested seeing a doctor.48 Probably due to suppressed anger, Armstrong wept uncontrollably, could not hold down food, had severe nosebleeds and, after seven years of disapproving reception in the religious life, had a breakdown which resulted in her leaving the order. Continuing her studies at Oxford, a college nurse attributed her fainting to stress, and rattled off some clichéd advice to get back into the swing of things and not feel sorry for herself. Again, no referral to a doctor. Instead, Armstrong wasted several years having her uneventful childhood probed by Freudian psychoanalysts. An award-winning student of literature, Armstrong was inspired by the third poem of T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday. He is climbing a spiral staircase, a mythical image of the ascent of the mind and heart to spiritual enlightenment. But “at the first turning of the second stair” he sees a shape twisted into the banister, surrounded by vaporous, fetid air, and he is forced to struggle with “the devil of the stairs.” He leaves these convoluted forms behind, and at the next turning finds only darkness: “Damp, jagged, like an old man’s mouth driveling beyond repair, / Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark,” the underbelly of consciousness that lurks in the basement of all our minds.49

Armstrong could see that others had been to this dark place: it was depicted in van Gogh’s writhing olive trees, the hellish visions of Bosch, and the heart

312

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

of darkness evoked by Joseph Conrad. The fact she was isolated by others and undiagnosed for many years weakened her already tenuous faith. Almost certainly, hell was simply the creation of infirm minds like my own. There was no objective evidence to support such a belief. That was a wonderful and liberating thought, but what if God was also a mental aberration? The ecstatic, celestial visions of the saints could be just as fantastic as my own infernal sensations. What we called God could also be. . .the invention of a mind that had momentarily lost its bearings. I was slightly dismayed to find that this idea did not trouble me overmuch. . . .God had never been a real presence to me. . . .Perhaps I should just leave the church and have done with it.50

What never left her was her intense ability to focus on the writings and ideas of others, which she displayed by winning a congratulatory first at Oxford, in which she did not have to undergo an oral examination for a bachelor’s degree, but was instead applauded by the board of examiners. Still, she admits to great anxiety about whether she would pass at all, having no idea what she thought about the subjects she studied, all her written essays having been “intricate edifices of other people’s thoughts.”51 For her doctoral dissertation she was drawn to Tennyson’s poetry, because “so many of his characters seemed walled up in an invincible but menacing solitude,” as she was. For example, the Lady of Shalott was imprisoned in a tower, confined there by some unexplained curse, because she could not confront external, objective reality. . . .I too longed to join in the vibrant life that was going on all around me, but found myself compelled to withdraw by forces that I did not understand. Like me, Tennyson seemed sucked into a horror of his own. . . .it was as though we inhabited the same unpredictable world, in which “all things were and were not.”52

To protect her vulnerability and neediness, she explains, she developed a hard, intellectual manner surrounding herself with a formidable barricade of impressive words and wit.53 A psychologist made matters worse, telling her that she produced weird psychic states and memory loss to make herself more interesting, when what she had to face up to was that she’s just another brainy, uninteresting girl having problems accepting her femininity.54 Shortly after that verdict, she took a non-lethal overdose of sleeping pills as a cry for help, and in her third year of graduate study she finally gave up on psychiatry. Attending a reading of T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, Armstrong was inspired to pursue her spiritual quest, in defiance of feeling hopeless and not yet having any idea the nature of her illness. Repeatedly the poet tells us, “I do not hope to turn again,” and yet throughout the poem, he is doing just that, slowly ascending to one new insight after another. And even though he insists that he has abandoned hope, I felt paradoxically encouraged. . . .My hope of discovering eternity had died, and instead I knew that all we have is now; that “time is always time” and place “is always and only place.” What Wordsworth had called “the glory and the dream” had faded, and the only joy to which I could aspire lay “in what remains behind.”

THE INTERIOR QUEST

313

But what thrilled me most about Eliot’s poem were the words “because” and “consequently.” There was nothing depressing about his deliberate acceptance of reduced possibilities. It was precisely “because” the poet had learned the limitations of the “actual” that he could say: “I rejoice that things are as they are.”55

To focus on things as they are is to pay full attention to them, without the distractions of future expectations or past rationales. And though Armstrong still did not know the nature of her mental disorientation, she chose to accept her limited range of possibilities as part of life, and to keep climbing the stairs, determined to be scrupulously truthful to herself, heeding Eliot’s warning in another poem that “Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.” Shortly before she is unfairly denied a doctorate by one eccentric Oxford reviewer, Armstrong asks a friend what she should do. The friend tells her as if it was so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning: “Oh, you should write. . .. Not this thesis—that’s just an exercise in writing what other people want, but something of your own.”56 Similarly to McCourt, Armstrong takes work that is available to her, but not really suitable. Without a doctoral degree, she can only teach in a secondary school, but blackouts and other symptoms make that precarious, though she is a gifted teacher. Having been ejected from the upper halls of academe, she finds herself no longer having to impress anyone or to use literature somehow to promote herself. Her attention is washed clean of pretense and she finds herself . . . inundated with ideas and with the words to express them. The mind that I had bludgeoned into stupor had been given back to me. . . .I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself in the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond the self.” 57

What Armstrong describes is perhaps the most exalted form of pure attention, the kind that results in that overused motivational word, bliss, what we are supposed to follow to have a happy fulfilling life. Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow your bliss resembles McCourt’s tip to teachers: Find what you love and do it. This can be confusing. What it might boil down to is the act of giving one’s fullest attention to whatever it is that one finds compelling, or simply what is in front of us and must be dealt with. As Armstrong’s memoir is structured, it is right after this revelation of ekstasis, or losing herself in full attention to what she is reading and thinking about, that she receives a correct diagnosis of her condition: temporal lobe epilepsy. A blessedly qualified and fully attentive physician takes special interest in the fear, distress, and smell Armstrong experiences, explaining that they are associated with the part of the brain responsible for the retention of memories, and

314

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

for the senses of taste and smell. This form of epilepsy is also characterized by hallucinatory experiences, by starting to go somewhere and ending up somewhere completely different—all experiences that had greatly disturbed her. The doctor was appalled that Armstrong had been treated by psychiatrists with medical training who had not even suggested she have an EEG. As he writes out a prescription for a drug that will help her, he notes, “It’s interesting that you were once a nun. People with temporal lobe epilepsy are often religious!”58 Attention can be liberating, but a lifetime of mental habits and conditioning are difficult to escape. Armstrong admits that she developed the gender-neutral self-regard of an androgynous anchorite. After being forced to obey frequently meaningless orders in the convent, she finds it impossible to accept the way men of her age become “minidictators” once she has let them into her bed. She considers herself a “failed heterosexual,” who has been in love many times but whom most men respond to as not female.59 But other forms of attention, from family and friends, compel her write her story, beginning with her experience as a nun, which resulted in the memoir Through the Narrow Gate (1982). After it was published she was invited to speak on British public television, and surprised herself by being effectively outspoken about the problems of the Catholic Church and organized religion in general. The BBC sponsored her to do a series of programs on the Holy Land, which introduced her to Judaism and the possibility that Jesus had belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel, one of the leading Pharisees, since he taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule.60 Her inquisitive and unbiased approach on television and in her written accounts of world religions have led to a successful career as a television commentator on religious topics, and a best-selling author on world religions—despite being told by her agent that she would never make a career writing about religion.61 In writing these studies of religions so different from the one she was taught, Armstrong explains the kind of attention she has had to put forth: I had to penetrate another culture and develop a wholly different way of looking at the world. It required a constant concentration of mind and heart that was in fact a type of meditation. . . . . . .I was learning the disciplines of ecstasy. . . .The Greek ekstasis, it will be recalled, simply means “standing outside.” And “transcendence” means “climbing above or beyond.” . . .For years I had longed to get to God, ascend to a higher plane of being, but I had never considered at sufficient length what it was that you had to climb from. All the traditions tell us, one way or another, that we have to leave behind our inbuilt selfishness, with its greedy fears and cravings. We are, great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.62

THE INTERIOR QUEST

315

Though she admits to not having found the God she was seeking as a young woman, Armstrong indirectly confirms that she has found her destiny by opening herself to the study of these wisdom traditions and letting silence become her teacher. Sacred texts, she observes, should not be read as holy encyclopedias giving clear information about the divine. They are not written in the language of everyday speech or in logical, discursive prose. “You have to listen to them with a quietly receptive heart. . .. That is why so many of the faiths have developed a form of the monastic life, which builds a disciplined silence into the working day.”63 Armstrong’s lens of memoir rewards readers with a profound insight into the meaning of belief itself, intimately connected with the importance of giving one’s full attention to something. The reality that we call God is transcendent—that is, it goes beyond any human orthodoxy— and yet God is also the ground of all being and can be experienced almost as a presence in the depths of the psyche. . . .Faith was really the cultivation of a conviction that life had some ultimate meaning and value, despite the tragic evidence to the contrary—an attitude also evoked by great art. The Middle English work beleven originally meant “to love”; and the Latin credo (“I believe”) probably derived from the phrase cor do: “I give my heart.” Saint Anselm of Canterbury had written, “Credo ut intellegam,” usually translated “I believe in order that I may understand.” I had always assumed that this meant that I had to discipline my rebellious mind and force it to bow to the official orthodoxy, and that as a result of this submission, I would learn to understand a higher truth. But no, [as the theologian] Cantwell Smith explained, “Credo ut intellegam” should be translated “I commit myself in order that I may understand.” You must first live in a certain way, and then you would encounter within a sacred presence that which monotheists call God, but which others have called the Tao, Brahman, or Nirvana.64

For many, what Armstrong refers to as living in a certain way implies a religious or at least a virtuous way of life, but for some—say, those interested in phenomenology—it could mean living one’s life with full attention, aware and observant, and free of preconceived filters of mind and feeling. The goal of all religions, Armstrong states, should ultimately be an increase of practical compassion.65 Emmanuel Levinas would surely concur. And without full attention to the Other, how can we achieve that? This makes the impulse to find faith or God a more active process, in Armstrong’s view. A huge weight falls from her shoulders when she realizes that “instead of waiting for God to condescend to me, I should create my own theophanies, just as I cultivated an aesthetic sense that enabled me to experience the transcendence of art.” Seeking a personal God had not worked for her, but Armstrong realized she was not a failure. She had simply tried to work with a form of theology that was wrong for her, too rationale, as she feels the whole Western tradition had become in its reliance on reason alone.66 To give one’s heart, the likely origin of the Latin verb to believe, could also be translated as to give one’s attention.

316

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

A colleague in the study of religion surprised Armstrong by saying, in the summer of 2001, that despite her claims that she had never had a religious experience, he disagreed. To him, she was constantly living in the dimension of the sacred, absorbed in holiness all the time!67 She accepted this on condition that it be understood that she remained surrounded by a cloud of unknowing, that the mists allowing her to see the face of God may never part. She cites Christian, Hindu, and Jewish scripture to support her view that the divine is invisible and dissolved throughout the universe, but present when we remain open to it. “My ‘bliss’ has been the study of theology. For other people it may be a career in law or politics, a marriage, a love affair, or the raising of children. But that bliss provides us with a clue: if we follow it to the end, it will take us to the heart of life.”68 Attention itself precedes reason, openness to others, and compassion. W R I T I N G T O C R E AT E D E S T I N Y

In the Baker and McCourt memoirs two lifetimes are shaped by the Great Depression, both showing indelible mother figures. One prods her son into a life of achievement, despite his lack of gumption, and he repays her with as moving a tribute as any mother could want. The other portrays his mother’s charm, potential, and tragic love for a hapless alcoholic who chooses to drink rather than support his family, whose poverty and humiliation are transcended by humor, compassion, and dogged determination to survive and succeed. Armstrong’s reflections on her life focus on her own quest for religious experience, with no great parental influence but rather the huge burden of an undiagnosed and cruelly misunderstood illness. In all three, the lens of memoir very gradually makes clear the writer’s destiny, to use the experiences of life to show how a personal destiny can evolve from dauntingly difficult circumstances. Although our purpose here is to shed light on memoir as an elucidator of destiny, it is only fair that we briefly suggest entirely different life material. Amy Tan, well-known author of the novels The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), had a relatively protected childhood, but her mother brought with her from China memories of an abusive first husband and the suicide of her own mother. In The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life (2003), Tan describes how her imagination shocked her mother, because the stories she made up about her maternal grandmother were more true to her mother’s secret past than what she had been told. She tells how her story “Magpies” changed what her mother had shared with her about her grandmother, making the heroine a young widow raped by a rich man, becoming his fourth wife, a lowly concubine who gives birth to the man’s first son. When her baby is claimed by a higher-ranking wife,

THE INTERIOR QUEST

317

the fourth wife kills herself. Tan’s mother, upon reading this story, asked how she knew her grandmother was really the fourth, not the first wife, and that she killed herself, rather than accidentally eating opium while having a good time. Tan’s mother came to believe that her daughter was serving as the ghostwriter and intermediary for her dead grandmother.69 Instead of denying this, Tan used it at times to influence her mother, at one point telling her that her grandmother is ordering them to move immediately—when the young Amy realizes that their neighbor is a child molester. Tan’s connection with spirits of the deceased does not end there. Her decision to become a writer at 33 may have resulted from such an influence. As a young woman studying for a doctorate in linguistics, one of her best friends was killed in a gruesome robbery. After his death Tan had a series of very specific dreams, in which she was conscious that she was alive and that her friend was dead but talking to her as clearly as if he were alive. In the first of her dreams the friend gives her the names of his two killers, which turn out to be accurate. In the last dream—which he tells her will be the last—he informs her that a writer named Rose, known by both of them, will become very important to her, and will help her when she becomes a writer. Tan replies, “Who said I was going to be a writer?” The friend answers, “That’s all I wanted to say,” and walks off as if going to the corner store. Though Tan had always loved words, she had never imagined herself becoming a writer. But her deceased friend’s prediction came true, and Rose became the first person who encouraged her to write fiction, suggesting what she might read for inspiration and what magazines would publish her first attempts.70 Although Tan claims to neither believe nor disbelieve that these supernatural events occurred or that she could somehow channel her grandmother’s spirit, she prefers to puzzle over what is to be gained or lost by believing one reality over another.71 Her writing indicates the reality she prefers to believe. In my writing room, I go back into the past. . .. My grandmother and I are walking side by side, imagining the past differently, remembering it another way. Together we come upon a tomb of memories. We open it and release what has been buried for too long—the terrible despair, the destructive rage. We hurt, we grieve, we cry. And then we see what remains: the hopes, broken to bits but still there. I look at the photograph of my grandmother. Together we write stories of things that were and shouldn’t have been, or could have been, or might still be. We know the past can be changed. We can choose what we should believe. We can choose what we should remember. That is what frees us, this choice, frees us to hope that we can redeem these same memories for the little girl who became my mother.72

What Tan is saying is not altogether different from what Baker, McCourt, and Armstrong demonstrate in their memoirs, that choices of what and how to write

318

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

about one’s past empower it with forces for good or ill, and offer a liberating perspective that frees writer and reader from the bondage of less fully considered views. But for Tan, voices from the ancestors play a much more complicit role; her use of fiction to change the harsh realities of the past gives us a different slant on what it means to discover our destiny. Having attuned her imagination to ancestral and other ghosts to produce transcendent fiction, Tan asks, Did the ghosts of friends and family come and serve as my muses? Aren’t ghosts merely delusions in grief? . . .What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are delusion, then let me be deluded. Let me believe in the limitlessness of love, the beauty of contradictions, the miracle that is an ordinary part of life.73

She writes fiction to pose questions about life, not to offer answers. For Tan, life is mysterious, not dissectable. “I can’t paraphrase or give succinct morals about love and hope, pain and loss. I have to use a mental longhand, ponder and work it out in the form of a story that is revised again and again, twenty times, a hundred times, until it feels true.”74 Writing for her is “an act of faith, a hope that I will discover what I mean by truth. But I don’t know what that will be until I finish. . . .The feeling is the entire story,” diminished by analysis and summary.75 Tan’s memoir of her writing life closes with a bewildering account of how it took her three years of extreme exhaustion, numbness, hypoglycemia, insomnia, ringing in the ears, migrating joint pain and hallucinations, to find out that she has late-stage Lyme disease, a life-threatening illness. After months of frantic searching on the World Wide Web for information and advice from more knowledgeable “Lymies,” she found the right doctor. Tan declares that she has a persistent infection, but that she is quite persistent by nature. Even if she does not recover completely, she is grateful to have improved slightly, and can write when the rare good days come. “The terrorist in my body has been found. Yes, the world to me is still a scary place, but no more so than it is for most people. . . .I have hope and, with that, a determination to change what is not right. As a storyteller, I know that if I don’t like the ending, I can write a better one.”76 The storyteller’s ability to write a better ending is very similar to the memoirist’s ability write a more meaningful life story. This is no better illustrated than in the memoir communicated under the most tenuous of circumstances, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death (1997) [originally in French, Le Scaphande et le Papillon], recently released in a film version. Paralyzed by a massive stroke at 43, Bauby was the editor of a French fashion magazine, father of two children whose mother he never married, a sophisticated womanizer whose glamorous life was brought

THE INTERIOR QUEST

319

to an abrupt close as a victim of locked-in syndrome, his only means of communication the blinking of one eye. And yet he had an unfulfilled book contract, and the means to hire a language therapist and assistant who could, with great patience and skill, interpret the words he wished to dictate by reciting a rearranged alphabet beginning with most frequently used letters. All Bauby had left was his consciousness, his lively mind, his wit, memory, and powers of observation. One could see this as a state of almost totally pure attention, achieved at terrible costs. The memoir that he produces is arguably in itself a far greater destiny than all he might have achieved in a longer, less afflicted life. Bauby delineates the extremes of his paralysis, the pain he feels at being unable to move, the ignominies of being helpless. And yet, though trapped in an invisible diving bell, he says his mind can take flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her stillsleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions. . . .In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.77

Bauby’s love for his children, his appreciation of and exasperation with the care he receives at the hospital where he stays overlooking the English Channel, thoughts of the career he can never return to, the debonair life he led in Parisian cafés, a boyhood friend able to invent tall tales about a father who invented the atom bomb who was also General de Gaulle’s unacknowledged son. He now envies this friend his inventive imagination, and imitates him by seeing himself as a Tour de France long shot about to pull off a record-setting victory, a phenomenal downhill skier, a soldier who helped Napoleon to victory, who also survived the battle of Verdun.78 On his final page he simply observes the contents of his therapist’s purse as she reads through the pages they have composed for publication. He realizes that his life is “here, in this bed, that wheelchair, and those corridors. Nowhere else.”79 But in truth he has transcended those environs. He has put his life, his mind, spirit, and heart into a memoir, one that achieved a destiny that he would never have imagined as a top fashion editor. One perhaps far greater for being so tenuous yet fiercely embracing his own consciousness, the life-world of memory, imagination, and the utter isolation of the present. It is no surprise that Bauby died two days after this memoir was first published, after he had heard of its ecstatic reception. One might say, per McCourt, that Bauby, postponing and heroically rewriting a grim and futile end, finally found what he loved and with extreme effort did it. In Armstrong’s terms, he stood outside his physical wreck of a body, and used his consciousness, his full attention and intense determination, to achieve

320

R E B E C C A M . PA I N T E R

ekstasis and to fulfill a life cut short. As Amy Tan might say, he wrote a better ending, created a better destiny. That is the potential of memoir. Marymount Manhattan College NOTES 1 Reinhold Neibuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, Volume II: Human Destiny, intro. by Robin W. Lovin (Louisville, KY: Westminster Knox Press, 1996 [1943]), p. 182–183. 2 Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Exploring the Art of Autobiography (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1999), p. 5. 3 Ibid., p. 6. 4 William Zinnser, Writing about Your Life: A Journey into the Past (New York: Marlowe & Co., 2004), p. 182. 5 Op. cit., p. 188. 6 Ibid., p. 17. 7 Ibid., p. 23. 8 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 9 Ibid., p. 30. 10 Ibid., pp. 58–59. 11 Ibid., p. 93. 12 Ibid., p. 182. 13 Ibid., p. 214. 14 Ibid., pp. 217–218. 15 Ibid., p. 238. 16 Ibid., pp. 121–122. 17 Academy of Achievement Interview, June 19, 1999, Washington, D.C. http://www. achievement.org/autodoc/primtmember/mcc1int-1, 3/28/2008, p. 15. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Academy of Achievement Interview, op. cit., p. 11. 21 Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 1996), pp. 208–209. 22 Ibid., p. 209. 23 Ibid., p. 272. 24 Ibid., p. 290. 25 Ibid., p. 334. 26 Ibid., p. 333. 27 Frank McCourt, ‘Tis: A Memoir (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 66. 28 Ibid., p. 87. 29 Ibid., p. 119. 30 Ibid., p. 113. 31 Ibid., pp. 115–116. 32 Ibid., pp.117–118. 33 Re the healing potential of memoir, see my paper “Healing Personal History: Memoirs of Trauma and Transcendence,” forthcoming in Analecta Husserliana. 34 ‘Tis, p. 167.

THE INTERIOR QUEST 35

321

Ibid., p. 174. Academy of Achievement Interview, op. cit., p. 3. 37 Ibid., p. 7. 38 ‘Tis, p. 181. 39 Ibid., p. 207. 40 Frank McCourt, Teacher Man (New York: Scribner, 2005), p. 157. 41 Ibid., p.20. 42 Ibid., pp. 67–68. 43 Ibid., p. 69 44 Academy of Achievement Interview, op. cit., p. 9. 45 Teacher Man, p. 246. 46 Ibid., p. 255. 47 Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness (New York: Borzoi/Knopf, 2004), p. 46. 48 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 49 Ibid., p. 55. 50 Ibid., pp. 60–61. 51 Ibid., p. 76. 52 Ibid., pp. 91–92. 53 Ibid., p. 93. 54 Ibid., p. 123. 55 Ibid., pp.140–143. 56 Ibid., pp. 144–145. 57 Ibid., p. 177. 58 Ibid., pp. 181–182. 59 Ibid., pp. 188–189. 60 Ibid., p. 235. 61 Ibid., p. 227. 62 Ibid., pp. 278–279. 63 Ibid., p. 285. 64 Ibid., pp. 292–293. 65 Ibid., p. 293. 66 Ibid., p. 294. 67 Ibid., p. 300. 68 Ibid., p. 305. 69 Amy Tan, The Opposite of Fate (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 35. 70 Ibid., pp. 58–59. 71 Ibid., p. 60. 72 Ibid., p. 104. 73 Ibid., p. 266. 74 Ibid., p. 322. 75 Ibid., p. 323. 76 Ibid., p. 398. 77 Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1998), pp. 6–7. 78 Ibid., p. 117. 79 Ibid., p. 129. 36

C E Z A RY J Ó Z E F O L B RO M S K I

COLLECTIVE INTENTIONS AND THE P H E N O M E N O L O G Y O F T I M E – T H E T H E O RY O F N O N - D O M I N AT I O N I N C O M M U N I C AT I O N

“The state does not have a monopoly on rule but it has exclusive rights to applying power in extreme situations.” (Carl Schmitt) “Where freedom as non-domination represents the freedom of the city, freedom as noninterference tends to represent the freedom of the heath.” (Pettit 1997: 67) ABSTRACT

The paper discusses some conceptual problem of communication in non-domination terms of the republican theory of freedom in comparison to Husserlian phenomenology of time. While our mental constructs and imagination are largely shaped by past-oriented narratives of grand cultural patterns, in the modern world we are close relatives of Heraclitus not Parmenides. As a matter of fact we must have strict and certain knowledge (our personal and subjective, too), but we can only have a secure one. The search for security is our response to diagnosed risk factors. Objectivity and intersubjectivity of knowledge is gained by conducting and futurological work, and not through in-depth in historical analyses. This paper intends to be an answer to these socio-economic processes of the modern world on neutral territory of phenomenology of time. The paper investigates the question about creation of social sense of communication in social time of phenomenology of consciousness of time. The view proposed in the text leads to unconditional intentions. In this postulated collective appointment of representatives, entitlements of individuals become entitlements of citizens: entitlements of citizens are defined as entitlements of the community; these, in turn, are defined as power of representatives. The basis of the legitimisation of this reciprocal power is its pre-community (by virtue of social design) of appointment of those in power: non-domination is the notion of (civil) freedom. 323 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 323–332. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

324

C E Z A RY J Ó Z E F O L B RO M S K I

My paper is based on a phenomenological statement that a motivation in the actual consciousness of time does not accompany a subject from the beginning of consciousness that is, an interpretation is done on the basis of previous experiences. The reference to the Nullpunkt is the basis of our interpretation, in the foregoing question, however, the existence of consciousness-in-the-pre-point is “only” pure and full depiction of reality. We are coming to the conclusion that, previous experiences as resources of at-hand-knowledge are schema with respect to the constitution of internal time. This historical-ness is given because we can make reference to the past of every individual in concrete “now” (cf. Schütz 1962: 133–134). Let us use as an exemplification of this statement the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination. The phenomenological issue can be worded as seemingly non-phenomenological questions. Firstly, is the idea of freedom a way of solving of the issue of intersubjectivity in temporality? Secondly, is the civic relation a solution of the issue of intersubjectivity in social sense? Thirdly, is the freedom of city “stronger” that the freedom of fields and heaths? TERMINOLOGICAL PRECISION

1. The term of collective intention is used as a designation of the idea of democracy considered in the context of collective intentionality represented by neo-republicanism (cf. Ph. Pettit, J. Searle, R. Tuomela). 2. The analyses focuses mainly on the theory of neo-republicanism. 3. The main research method is applied within the confines of neorepublicanism idea of freedom as non-domination. S TAT U S Q U E S T I O N I S A N D T H E S E S

1. Depolitisation is a theoretical consequence of the adoption of a new definition of freedom as non-domination. 2. (Post)democratic legitimisation is primarily based, first of all, on the internalisation of the principle of pre-predicative freedom. The significance of internalisation of positive law has second-rate significance. In other words, the principle of freedom precedes the rules of positive law. 3. It can be argued that the idea of freedom is one of the most important imponderables. 4. Freedom is incorporated in accepting people as citizens. 5. The acceptance of a statement that freedom is incorporated in accepting people as citizens is equivalent to a statement that other citizens have the right to undertaking acts within the confines of their own horizons.

INTENTIONS AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME

325

6. Statements from the first to the third constitute the basis for a democracy. It is my intention to explain that these spheres of civil life are inscribed in modern idea of democracy. 7. Having made these assumptions (cf. 1st–4th) I recall only the basis of the modern idea of the democratic order in the name of which we are capable of limiting non-civil freedom. However, besides the modern basis of the political order, the ancient/Greek basis of the political order is also brought forth since wielding power in the ancient polis anticipates our images of a modern democratic model. Firstly, the ancient order was based on axiological self-limitation of needs (it was an indispensable condition for long-term democracy) and, secondly, it was based on comprehensive limitation of the democratic power. The modern one is based on the division of authority and risk-diversification of professional representatives relating to modern technology, civilisation, culture, corruption etc. These seven statements present but initial and rudimentary assumptions. The crux of the matter is outside classic and modern argumentation. A contemporary view of the legitimisation of democracy goes beyond the concept of power. Greeks and the attitude towards the problem of legitimisation of democracy assume that just power really exists (cf. Plato). We know that even a mere question concerning the existence of justice is very problematic (cf. Höffe). The first step of the new paradigm of the political power is the idea of negative non-power-freedom. We must, therefore, weigh it’s the advantages and disadvantages on this standpoint. First of all, we finds ourselves in the ground of utopian ground of ideas which leads us, unfortunately, to a philosophical and political idea of anarchy. Thus, it proves useless. This is the way of Theory of Justice by Otfried Höffe. According to Höffe the only link within the theory of non-power-freedom is a paradigm of self-interest in the name of which citizens undertake social and political activity. This neoplatonian theory of freedom fulfils the condition according to which there are personal levels of internalising values into this theory. Such internalisation is based on the exterior basis of this principle. Self-interest is closely connected with property and ownership. These two notions are perhaps most important in ancient, modern and contemporary democratic systems but they are outside the personal constitution of humanity. We are interested in making pure political and civic decisions. To evoke Pettit’s theory we are interested in the possibility of making decisions and acting by choosing a non-dominated way. Thus, we considering an idea of freedom as “freedom as non-domination” (cf. Pettit 1997, 2001). This idea remains within liberal traditions according to which citizenship is the basis for every political system and relations. This is the fundamental thesis worded as a conditional sentence. If one can prove that a sphere of non-domination choice exists, it means that one can

326

C E Z A RY J Ó Z E F O L B RO M S K I

agree with the statement that there is a sphere exist where the theory of conflict does not apply. If so, the legitimisation of democracy can be built outside the theory of political conflict. And now we are in the centre of the theory of freedom as non-domination. “Where freedom as non-domination represents the freedom of the city, freedom as noninterference tends to represent the freedom of the heath.” (Pettit 1997: 67)

That much is clear. Attractive as it seems, the subject of our analysis is not “the freedom of the heath”. We are not interested in deprivation traits of conflict of civil relations. Modern topics within the confines of political philosophy are strictly connected with the idea of freedom. Modern political philosophy attempts to answer what political freedom is and how it incorporates in Lebenswelt. It seems that one of the most important propositions of how to solve this issue lies in the liberal tradition (cf. Rawls 1971, 1993), communitarian tradition (cf. MacIntyre 1981/1987; Taylor 1979; Sandel 1984), libertarian tradition (cf. Nozick 1974) and—especially interesting for our considerations—the republican tradition (Pettit 1997; Pettit 2001; Skinner 1998). On what grounds can ones recognise the idea of the republican tradition as the basis for a contemporary discussion on the idea of freedom? A very classic distinction between ancient and modern (negative vs. positive—Berlin 1958) freedom (cf. Constant 1988) is an expression of the historical context and it constitutes a frame of reference for Pettit’s theory of freedom. Pettit overcomes internal aporia of this respectable definition. Pettit’s theory of freedom is based on the criticism of Berlin’s distinction between positive liberty (liberty as mastery over the self) and negative liberty (negative liberty as the absence of interference by others). (Pettit 1997: 21) According to Pettit this distinction leads to the third possibility, namely, to the freedom as non-mastery, freedom as non-domination. (Pettit 1997: 22) In other words, the problem does not consist in the distinction between non-domination of others over us and a positive idea of liberty as self-mastery but on the adoption of non-domination as a fundamental the idea of non-interference. Let us use an example. In an Italian town a new system of traffic regulations has recently been put into effect. This system has replaced two former systems: one—a traffic light system regulating city traffic and the other—a speed control radar system. By combining of the two system speeding driver triggers a change of traffic lights into red. Thereby the driver has to stop. So, what is the nature of this change? Two independent systems assuming an interference with behaviour of traffic participants were put together into one system which, also assume an interference.

INTENTIONS AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME

327

1. Traffic has been regulated depending on the observance of regulations concerning the permissible speed limit. 2. The possibility of non-dominated traffic (its existential sphere) has been drastically restricted by a sophisticated new controlling system. 3. Internalisation of the road code was restricted by a principle of the higher level. 4. At the same time the level of internalisation of the road code has been increased. 5. The quality of life to the extent to which it is regulated by the road code is not characterised by freedom/liberty but by a strictly instrumental identification of the subject with a sphere of domination. Within the confines of the neo-republicanism theory one can say that the sphere of absence of interference has been narrowed down to an instrumental identification as it has allowed for the possibility of interference on the part of others. 6. Thus, we deal with an idol described as a mechanism by which the possibility of making-a-mistake is significantly reduced. This statement, as I intend to prove below, leads us to the conclusion that the sphere of equality is narrowed down on an existential level. Why are we entitled to say so? Because (i) a finite set of determinants of social and political equality narrows down the validity of the principle of equality (ii) to the sphere of an object of equality. Literally speaking, this is a tautology. In the context of political terms an apparent tautological character of this sentence results from the application of the same term “equality” on different logical levels of the language. “Equality” signifies (i) universal features as imponderabilities of the principle of equality; (ii) the limitation of the principle of equality to the concrete social situations and a qualification of the systemic basis of this principle. (iii) Referring in consideration on the principle of equality to “in what?” and “how?”. Therefore, this tautological sentence can be treated as a example of the application of the principle of equality on several logical levels of the language. In other words, it can be interpreted by a reference to the idea of equality on several stages of the procedure of conceptualisation of the rule of equality. Intellectual honesty prompts us to assume that this sentence is tautology, because the procedure of conceptualisation of the rule of equality is self-looped just by the correspondence with the social facts. Indecisive nature of the problem of this “essential equality” (cf. Dahl) has a material and existential character. 7. We all remember the classic question: “Should philosophers wield the power and should rulers be philosophers?”. Let’s apply this question to our traffic example. Philosophers (or the new Italian system of traffic

328

8.

9.

10.

11.

C E Z A RY J Ó Z E F O L B RO M S K I

regulation for the matter) do not wield the power even though democracy permits its beneficiaries to communite and this falls within their competences. They rise over private interests (it gives a short-term effect of stopping road users at the traffic lights?) and thereby they classify the action of the authorities as being for the common good of the community, which is defined on the basis of the state needs (cf. Höffe). It is a kind of politicalness a priori of intellectual power—the category completely incomprehensible to the modern political thought. Neo-republican description of the idea of freedom as non-domination overcomes the limitation of two political models. (i) a classic democratic model which is restrictive in exclusion its own beneficiaries and is very tolerant as regards a range of the wielding of beneficiaries. (ii) a contemporary democratic model which uses a mechanism of inclusion of as many beneficiaries as possible aiming at the distribution of non-internalisation responsibility. We witness contemporary objectivisation, but the main difficulty consists in the impossibility of objectivisation. The idea of classic commonwealth gives way to a prospect of ideal-typological homunculus. Axiological and ontological optics charges radically such a social being: the modern rejecting of horizon of paideia and substituting this being by behavioural and mechanical reaction of writing down accidental competence (roles) leads to relativism. Ideal, from political point of view model of political involving everybody (but only citizens) excepting everybody else, as possibility of political action choice regardless of motives has ensured required coincidence justice and satisfying in one’s best interest—the common good and personal interests was never earlier in history as strong ontological connected. We are analysing almost idyllic vision pre-democratic existence of precitizens. Equality has reduced to technical conditions of political representation. Ontological sense of these two axiological orders was, at least as intention of its founders, civil (civic) virtues and paideia. We are coming back to a main topic, namely to the idea of freedom as non-domination. Information supplying have possessed in the case of previous separated systems strictly given value translated to specific social/political actions. Now a new role of information lies in the fact that it is the basis of personal independence. In this case loyalty towards the political system is specially required. However, from the theoretical point of view the sequence of events connecting personal interests with civil interests is dashed in the place in which citizen is stopped by the red light because of speeding.

INTENTIONS AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME

329

CONCLUSIONS

What is attractive in non-democratic systems which regulate the functioning of a political and social environment is that freedom is a postulated state. There are a Buddhist monk escaping from suffering; Believer of the Old Testament; Christian pining hope an existential vision of the word on the suffer; Muslim; subject; someone oppressed by despot; American Indian waiting for the spring—all these examples of dependence on political systems are out of freedom. Those who take these social roles do not claim that freedom is given while they establish a company with a specific initial capital. A similar process takes place in a democracy. There appear several spheres of domination which is manifested in a twofold way. Firstly, an extracting internalisation by some higher level of rule derives from the same system (catalogue) of behaviour. In this case we can hope that a solution will be found within the limits of the system. Secondly, it is manifested by deriving from the other system. In both cases the basis of democracy and the idea of freedom are seriously jeopardised. In conclusion it is worth mentioning that this argumentation is not weakened by the statement of assumption of the originators of the new type of a traffic system that a speeding driver will stop at the intersection because of the red light. There are at least three cardinal types of abuse that fall within the terms of reference of politicalness. 1. Limitation of politicalness to the domain (sphere) of what does not permits making a mistake. Citizens (as stricte citizens and their representatives) appropriate the idea of a state and give it flat and static significance. The essence of this tactic is “sheltering from a crucial battle” (Schmitt). The battle can disclose not only manners of the struggle for power but subscribed by beneficiaries of that order values and imponderabilities. The domain of politicalness is in this case “a factory” (Schmitt) conducted by the élite devoid of politicalness. 2. The confusing of the private order with the public one. The Sermon of the Mountain does not relate directly to social life—cf. J. M. Boche´nski). A perspective of the private order of individual is not in force in the civil perspective of the community. Citizens make a mistake of attribution when they move into the sphere of public affairs using dimensions of the private sphere, regardless of their intention. Contrary to the sphere of the family, such a tactic is unacceptable by the state and in the local government. 3. The confusing of the public order with the private one. The citizens wielding of power can formulate a statement on humankind, common interests, the choice and election under the condition of uncertainty, the spirit of history, raison d’état, political games in the age of globalisation, risk games

330

C E Z A RY J Ó Z E F O L B RO M S K I

etc. Citizens make a mistake of attribution when they knowingly adjust the dimension of the public sphere to the their private action. It is unacceptable in every case. Having introduced aporias of the democratic system of politicalness ones can announce mandatory conditions of freedom as non-domination. 1. Non–domination as non-interference. Understanding the ideas of freedom as non-domination requires not only the classification of the positive conditions of the idea of freedom as self-mastery (non-domination of others does not guarantee achievement of self-mastery) but, more importantly, it also depends on drawing attention to the difference between republican non-domination and negative freedom as non-interference. It is not obvious that that mastery or domination are different from interference. The idea of “domination” can be illustrated by the relation between the master and the slave. In this the relation dominator can interfere in the sphere of a dominated person completely arbitrary (cf. Pettit 1997: 22). 2. Guaranteed absence of inference. According to Pettit the idea of republican freedom as non-domination is very attractive conception of social and political freedom, for existing followers of the dichotomy of the idea of freedom as non-interference and as self-mastery. The idea of freedom as non-domination can be defined not by non-domination but by the impossibility of domination over anyone. In other words, it is guaranteed total absence of inference (cf. Pettit 1997: 26). 3. The necessary claim of freedom as non-domination is the following: “if he or she performs those activities in a position where are others who can interfere at their pleasure, then there is a sense in which that person is not free. This can hardly be denied, especially by someone who thinks that it is also plausible to describe self-mastery as an ideal of freedom. It is similar to the claim that in order for someone to be free in doing something, they must be master of themselves; it requires, more weakly, that at least they must not be a subject to anyone else’s mastery.” (Pettit 1997: 26)

4. The sufficient claim of freedom as non-domination is that: “if a person is not dominated in certain activities—if they are not subject to arbitrary interference—then however much non-arbitrary interference or however much non-intentional obstruction they suffer, there is a sense in which they retain their freedom. This can hardly be denied, especially by someone who thinks that it is also plausible to describe non-interference as an ideal of freedom.” (Pettit 1997: 26)

If one supposes that a non-interference obstacle can be overlooked in one’s ideal of freedom, one can suppose that another ideal may overlook the sort of interference that is non-arbitrary, being required to track the agent’s interests and ideas. Thereby, according to Pettit, the idea of freedom as

INTENTIONS AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF TIME

331

non-domination is a solution of Berlin’s—Constant’s aporias of the idea of freedom. 5. Non-domination as a negative idea of freedom. Distinct from diffused due to Berlin/Constant statement that the republican idea of freedom is positive freedom followers of contemporary republicanism take note of the existence of a negative aspect of freedom. Strength of the neo-republican idea of freedom as non-domination is based on a negative aspect of freedom (Pettit 1997: 27). The basis of this acceptance is statement that this freedom is free from internal and external menaces. 6. Empire of laws not of man. This condition determines the positive law which is created by individuals exclusively in order to protect them. According to Locke societies ought to aim at “freedom from Absolute, Arbitrary power” and “the end of Law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlage Freedom”. (Locke 1965: 325, 348)

In other words, there is no law, there is no freedom. 7. Liberty is civil as distinct from natural. “Where freedom as non-domination represents the freedom of the city, freedom as noninterference tends to represent the freedom of the heath” (Pettit 1997: 67)

and “From the natural point of view, a man is in a social being. Solitude is entitled to gods and animals.” (Aristotle)

Also, we come back to the most important dimensions of freedom which are connected with the social sphere of life. “You are somebody in relation to them, not a nobody.” (Pettit 1997: 71)

8. Common interest, common good. Freedom is a common internal good. The connection between public order and civil virtues consists in that both depend on civil laws. Therefore, there is a constitutive character of the order and the virtues. They are not incorporated into the civil order but they constitute it. We talk about protection against something not from somebody. This relation can not be described as resulting from something. It is interactive, because it is fulfilled by citizens when they do not deprives one another of their citizenship. They are not free together, but each of them is free in the same situation. They are not free alone, but each of them is free because there are the others. The John Paul II Catholic University of Lubin, Department of Political Science (Lubin)

332

C E Z A RY J Ó Z E F O L B RO M S K I SOURCES

Berlin, Isaiah (1958). Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Constant, Benjamin (1988). The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns, [in:] B. Fontanta (red.) (1988). Political Writings, Cambridge, 309–328. Locke, John (1965). Two Treasides of Government, New York: Mentor. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981, 1987). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Nozick, Robert (1974). Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basis Books. Pettit, Philip (1997). Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettit, Philip (2001). A Theory of Freedom. From Psychological to the Politics Agency, Cambridge: Polity Press. Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John (1993). Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press. Sandel, Michael (1984). Liberalism and Its Critics, Oxford: Blackwell. Schütz Alfred (1962). Collected Papers, vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality, edited and introduced by M. Natanson with a preface by H. L. van Breda, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Skinner, Quentin (1998). Liberty Before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles (1979). What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty, [in:] Alan Ryan (red.), The Idea of Freedom, Oxford, 175–193.

S E C T I O N II

ALIRA A SHVO-MUÑOZ

I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F D E S T I N Y

ABSTRACT

Destiny could be a powerful force for humanity, a constant dilemma and quest since Classical Greece. This does not indicates having lack of responsibility or free will (libre albedrío) in decision making but marks the manifestation of independent acts that in its ineradicable structural moments go beyond one’s control, intentionality or comprehension, altering one’s path irremediably. One’s personal realities, beliefs and perceptions constitute visible and invisible circumstances (Sø´ ren Overguard, Husserl, and Heidegger on Being in the World, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2004). Javier Marías’ novel Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí [Tomorrow at the Battle Think of Me] that centers on destiny as an unknown and incomprehensible force that shapes human actions. O son los atajos y los retorcidos caminos de creyendo que el destino, acabamos viendo toda nuestra vida a la luz de lo último o de lo más reciente, como si el pasado hubiera sido solo preparativos y lo fuéramos comprendiendo a medida que se nos aleja y lo comprendiéramos todo al tiempo. [Oh, they are the short cuts and twisted paths of believing destiny, we end up seeing all our life at the light of the last or more recent, just as the past had only been a preparation and one was able to understand it in proportion to its moving away from us and then we are able to understand it all at once] (J Marías, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, Madrid, Alfaguara, 2002, 189).

The social nature of one’s perceptual orientation formulates that for a phenomenological analysis of experience one must examine one’s links to others, to designate pre-objective commitments or unconcerned issues hidden in the enterprise, both subjective and inter-corporeal in which intentionality and randomness played a part. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning. Marías gives multiple accounts questioning what might have happened, not providing answers. The plot unravels with an omnipresent narrator and key characters accounts giving details clarifying events. Questions of truth and falseness, correctness and incorrectness arise within the practice of inference, calculation and unexpectancies. The question of justification for judgments is nothing more than an exercise of accredited practical capacity. Destiny can be interpreted in indefinitely ways. We are no more than fragmental agents playing in a world within a vast array of possibilities, with incomprehensible circumstances and partial capability. Experience has a sense within limits, manifested as possibility. The practice, in which our mastery 335 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 335–343. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

336

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

allows us to participate in, is to be conceived as a phenomenon that emerges and evolves over the course of our life. It is not reasonable or unreasonable; it is there like life and destiny itself . . . und die findigen. Tiere merken es schon, Daß wir nicht sehr verläßlich zu Haus sind in der gedeuteten Welt. [. . . and the perceptive beasts have noticed that, we aren’t very comfortably at home, in our interpreted world] (Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, København, Green Integer, 2003, “Die Erste Elegie”, pp. 1—11)

Destiny has been a powerful force that shapes humanity. It is a constant dilemma and meaningful quest persisting through the centuries and does not indicates lack of responsibility or free will (libre albedrío) but marks the manifestation of independent acts that in its ineradicable structural moments go beyond one’s control, intentionality or comprehension and alters one’s path irremediably. Personal realities, beliefs and perceptions conform to visible and invisible circumstances (Sø´ ren Overguard, Husserl, and Heidegger on Being in the World, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2004). Javier Marías’ novel, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí [Tomorrow at the Battle Think of Me], interprets destiny as the incomprehensible force that shapes human actions. O son los atajos y los retorcidos caminos de creyendo que el destino, acabamos viendo toda nuestra vida a la luz de lo último o de lo más reciente, como si el pasado hubiera sido solo preparativos y lo fuéramos comprendiendo a medida que se nos aleja y lo comprendiéramos todo al tiempo. [Oh, they are the short cuts and twisted paths of believing destiny; we end up seeing all of our life at the light of the last or which is more recent, just as the past had been only preparation and one was able to understand it in proportion to its moving away from us and then we understand all at once] (Javier Marías, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, Madrid, Alfaguara, 2002, 189.).

Experiences of destiny are understood or revealed to us usually afterwards. The present as perceived always relates to the past and future. We remember the past in various degrees of accuracy, guesses or reconstructions. Marías novel begins at medias res to unify time frames, rendering outcomes more credible. The future is foreseen, predicted or guessed within ranges of probability. Past and future are known in content by the events that alter the present. This is an unknown factor about the existence of being; self-evident and uneliminable. In temporal dimensions the present or the moment in the present only exists. Individual life is at a crossroads, (R Wollheim, The Thread of Life, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1984) as the past affects and the future lies open meeting the present.

I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F D E S T I N Y

337

Marías ‘destiny is about the exploration of the riddle of transcendence or objectivity in contextual knowledge and the meaning of existence and the known as what is self evident and possible, irrevocably containing both the known and unknown. When knowledge expresses a known, it contains a part of an unknown. Meaning in knowledge is an affirmation of identity, the existent and the known and unknown. Being, in a primordial sense is generally incomprehensible and unfamiliar and is eternally present with us and for us. Knowledge at best is fractional and inadequate, every knowledgeable individual is conscious that everything he-she knows is infinitesimal and insignificant. Things, actions, thoughts, situations and ideas in life remain unclear placing the unknown as unknowable which Goethe referred to: “vor unsere Nase gar bleibt viel versch lossen” (much is hidden from under our nose). The unknowable and unknown maintains a perceptional gap remaining factually limited and finite. Individuality has unique factors which are ungraspable. Being has not ordinary background embracing facts or common grounds but multiple particularities rooted in infinitesimal segments permeating reality. The immediately and concreteness of reality is self-revealing, experienced and unknowable. All that is unknowledgeable and incomprehensible that comes from external forces we attribute to destiny, or God’s will. Pero aquella era una noche rara, sobre todo lo que fue para Marta Téllez, sin duda la más rara de su existencia. [But that was an odd night, it was mostly for Marta, without doubt the oddest of her existence.], (Marías, 28).

Reality is reveal to us at rare heights of philosophical speculation, directed to encompassing totals of what is or what being constitutes. One must manage a dose of it all, in order to understand identity, location and temporality in the world. Destiny is intertwined in daily existence, part of the fiber of being that relates to free will. Destiny is above and beyond our control while one engages in it. Reality serves as ground and object of experience while its cognitive import is not immediately graspable. The abstract and incomprehensible side of destiny is validated for coherence in life as one relies on interpretations for validity and appropriateness. Rationally one cannot be too much objective for one’s own benefit as Socrates recognized that one has to accept one’s docta ignorantia. The prominent in human behavior has a purposive functional range which does not live by and for reason alone. To insist in reasoning as all encompassing in human affairs is not rationalism but hyper rationalism, going against rationality. It is a cogent factor that one cannot adhere objectively because objectivity has limits and it is not a substitute for personalized sensibility since the reverse is equally true.

338

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

Por el entrecuzamiento. Las cosas pasan, eso es todo, lo sé, quizá es mala o es buena suerte, a veces nadie interviene y nadie busca ni quiere nada. Pero ocurre que siempre le pasan a alguien. [Due to intercrossing things happen, is it maybe good or bad luck, but sometimes no one interferes nor searches neither wants anything. But it happens that always occurs to someone.], (Marías, 409).

Disorientation exists concerning the relationship between thought and truth. Emergence of truth can be found in and through psychological events. Nowadays this disorientation defines a postmodern image of thought when positives and negatives become indiscernible. Husserl says that when making hypothetical premises about the possible modalities of being, we must look at categorical propositions in occurrences, specifications, complex conjunctive and disjunctive propositions for ways of expressing universality, particularity and singularity, as nothing prevents one from explaining meanings through personal perceptions of a lived experience; even thou one is mistaken. Internal observation relates to the empirical self, its’ reflection concerns the transcendental pre-individual subject, being neutral to the empirical self and the other. Husserl relates the notion of Wesenschau to truth in and through psychological events that link personal experiences with universality. Implicit knowledge includes insight into essence while description and comprehension of events pertains to the phenomenon. God in its powerful role forges destiny while maintains free will but many sees it controversial and questionable. God as philosophical construct does not situate man much better in order to deal with outside forces; reduces, reduces man to a result of external conditions. Life determined from external angles was named moira by the ancient Greeks, as the path traced by the gods to understand the meaning of life. No contaba con lo último que había dicho, quiero decir que no se me había ocurido pensar en tal cosa, y fue eso lo que me decidió a seguirla también a ella, o más bien a no irme del todo. . . [ I was not counting with the last thing she had said, I wish to say that it had not occurred to me to think such thing and it was that which make me decide to follow her or better still, not to completely leave. . .], (Marías, 291).

Emotion, sentiment and affections have a proper place in human schemes, important as aims and goals. One must preserve idiosyncrasies and predilections, for there is not a single way to accomplished things and now globalization adds complexity with the increase of choices. Comprehensible and valuable selections have no exact mode, personal circumstances include limits; an objective fact that one’s reasoning can and should come to terms with. Since human makeup is complex, multiple sided and similar for most which multiplies at infinitum the possibilities that could or could not occur as result of interpersonal relations. -Nadie podía prever eso, ¿cómo podíamos saber ninguno? . . . No sea absurdo. No sea injusto. [No one could have prevented it, how could one has known it, no one? . . . Do not be absurd. Do not be unjust.], (Marías, 226).

I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F D E S T I N Y

339

One must begin acknowledging that in most circumstances in human activities one has no clue of how others might react; having a narrow and fragmentary position in grasping the facts that might result in future actions. One’s conduct is mostly based on views and limitations. Destiny then offers an acceptable mode for interpreting outcomes, for reason alone does not constitute a proper and legitimate parameter for understanding, in life any rule could apply. Dealings, ideas and pursuits play a small part in this as Kant in Critique of Pure of Judgment (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952) interprets as part of an objective experience. Existence of the objective world is presupposed from an outset rather than ex post facto discovery about the nature of things (JN Findley, Kant and the Transcendental Object, a Hermeneutic Study, Oxford. Clarendon P, 1981). Our attempt at external communication and inquiries concerning these predicaments are undermined by the stances on information, transcending a shared world of independent entities, a world in which we live and into which we inquire for a sense of personal identity, to best cope with unexpended outcomes of reality. Sí, yo no puedo estar safisfecho del mío, ni tu del tuyo. [Yes, I cannot be satisfied of mine (destiny), neither you of yours], (Marías, 431).

Rational beliefs, actions and evaluations in situations beyond compelling personal motives are cogent grounds for actions. We are individually circumstanced, person to person and group to group. Communication requires coordination and collaboration as life’s circumstances are enmeshed in various situations, the wants and needs that could be satisfied in the interest of knowledge which is impossible by using only rationality to resolve all cognitive difficulties in the world. Cualquiera de las dos cosas podía ser cierta, como puede serlo decir, yo no lo busqué, yo no lo quise o yo lo busqué, yo lo quise, en realidad todo es a la vez de una forma y su contraria, nadie hace nada convencido de su injusticia y por eso no hay justicia ni prevalence nunca. . . El punto de vista de la sociedad no es el propio de nadie, es solo del tiempo y el tiempo es resbaladizo como el sueño. . . [Any one of the two things could be certain, just as can be said I did not looked for it, I did not wanted it or I did search it and wanted it, in reality everything is in a way the same and its opposite, no one does anything convinced of injustice and for that reason there is never justice, neither it prevails . . . the point of view of society is not anyone’s own, it just of the times and time is slippery as dreams. . .], (Marías, 329–30).

The image of man can be acquired with empirical presuppositions as man is part of the chain of worldly causality. Man is not only a simple equation but a bearer of life’s reflection. Individual life is conditioned with impersonality being part of a larger content which accounts for the presence of destiny as unknown.

340

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

Introspection to the outcomes of destiny fills a gap between perception and lived perception. Thinking leads to understanding possibilities and might trap us as well within the boundaries of perception. Perception is referential in aspects or parts. Perception of destiny is paradoxical, containing immanence and transcendence, presence and absence that make reality translucent while acknowledging free will or God’s omnipotent power. In this novel the reader is aware that Victor has been describing reality non-concernedly while hovering behind his enmeshment in Marta’s death, due to the fact that she was a married woman and his presence that night in her apartment while her husband was in a business trip was not appropriate when in actuality they simply had diner. It was destiny that implicated him in this. He observes, questions, interprets and investigates the consequences for those still living; an analysis that serves him to focus on complex experiences that intertwines separate realities. Victor is both perceiver and perceived, he moves his gaze inward and to others and he reaffirms and comprehends the exterior-interior orientations of unknown factors believed finally and he attributes them to destiny. Plato, Levinas and Deleuze have incurred that ethics has a great concern in destiny. Victor’s destiny is not as the Greek concept of moira since his perceptions situates him in a contemporary realm of meaning; deconstructing limitations, engagements, temporalities, encounters and consequences in double variants consisting of meaning and meaninglessness. Destiny impacts how one chooses to live. Victor was enmeshed in personal relations that connected him to others which later produce outcomes that he never intended or even dreamt but resulted from Marta’s death. When the book ends he speculates ways of possibly raising her young toddler, whose existence he did not know prior to arriving at her apartment that night. His choices concerning the interpretation of destiny, does not have religious predicament as part of an unconditional, unknowable, absolute and primordial parameter, experienced and relocated in the lived experience. Paradoxically it feels intimate and inner, its being and essence does not depend on the individual or it, for destiny is an autonomous force, sovereign in existence and essence. One cannot fully penetrate its mystery or determinate its suitability or consequences prior to events, nevertheless one seeks to comprehend the rigorous changes it causes to life. Difficulties emerge from understanding the concept of free will, a freedom that is rationally incompatible in relation to theological absoluteness. Therefore we must reconcile or resolve the contradiction since a rational interpretation does not exist that encompass all. One is the autonomy of one’s being as God creation but never independent of him. God remains an absolute primordial ground and all-embracing unity. Cuando las cosas acaban ya tienen su número y el mundo depende entonces de sus relatores, pero por poco tiempo y no enteramente, nunca se sale de la sombra del todo, los otros nunca se acaban

I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F D E S T I N Y

341

y siempre hay alguien para quien se encierra un misterio. . . [When things are finish they already have an assignation and the world depends on storytellers, but for a little while and not entirely. One never goes totally out of the shadows, others never finish and always there is someone for whom it holds a mystery. . .], (Marías, 447).

As everything else, independence is relative; chance, movement and change are implicated in the schema undermining daily commitments. If pursued relevance complicates questioning. Non-skeptical and unidiomatic understanding of individual practices allows us to view skepticism. One’s inability occupies part of the engaged perspective. The unknown and the objectionable do not constitute certainty, uncertainty, or unwillingness facing skeptical arguments questioning life’s purpose, meaning and relativism. Judgment according to Gilles Deleuze is concerned with specificity in the decision making process by linking conditions with vinculum substantia, impossible to substantiate in its fragmental understanding. ‘De momento no, pero a ver por dónde me sales’, respondió ella con una especie de término medio, como si me hubiera adivinado el fugaz pensamiento, o no llegaba a ser tanto. . . [‘At the moment no, but let’s see what you come out with, answered her quasi unknowingly as if she guessed my fleeting thoughts nor was not that much. . .], (Marías, 269).

Marías uses possibilities beyond essence of propriety, focusing on them but not being judgmental since most of us can make a miscalculated move. Ningún proceder es recto, nunca sabemos- me atreví a opinar yo, quizá impropiamente. [No behavior is correct, we never know- I dare to say, maybe unsuitably], (Marías, 431).

Certainty is a matter of attitude, many occurrences are senseless or are devoid of specific meaning and consequences vary and are understood afterwards. Certainty is an attitude, man’s role of interpreter of destiny fails to grasp the why and how in many instances. Language, culture and beliefs have cultural boundaries linked to meanings, feelings and knowledge. Destiny changes as consequence of cultural parameters which fluctuate and relate according to current specificities of meaning inherent in language interpretation; this include mode of utterance as language is alive and fluid, constantly evolving. Analysis of experience does not emphasize individual involvement but designates the unfolding of the phenomenon. Hidden pre-objective commitments or unconcerned issues in explicit enterprises are both subjective and intercorporeal in intentionality and randomness. Interpretations do not determine meaning. Marías gives multiple accounts questioning what happened which do not provide answers. The world is a referential mode regarding the essence of being as resoluteness pertains to will and the capacity for assertion and self-transcendence. The plot is based on reflective thoughts emotionally receptive to the death that took

342

ALIRA ASHVO-MUÑOZ

place, a transcendental event for Victor, who then becomes an interrogative being as in Merleau-Ponty definition of life by questioning. Quest for thought and meaning exceeds significations in actions that focus on the meaning of life and the interpretation of destiny. Its source, significance, values and activities re-appropriates and defines the self as entity. Destiny falls within the potentiality of consciousness, intentionally it does not aim to uncover but contrarily creates closure in understanding the clarifications. Destiny is void of specific signification by randomness and infinite possibilities, it exhausts the system of signification releasing meaningful demands which creates intellectual propositions but do not fully penetrate its mystery, it determines suitability and expresses it. Destiny is found in a lived experience, an experience that presents itself as an adumbration of manifestations in destiny itself. The manifestations create ambiguities and diversifications, autonomously and intuitively perceived in diversity; constitutes an alternity of understanding. This is part of the mental process by the appearance of a transcending world. Perception changes throughout life and the awareness of destiny is being manifested that seems beneficial can turn to be later the opposite; the difference lies in perceptions of objective moments and the thing itself. Correlatively significance by questioning and intention concerns destiny as Aristotle’s determinates the perceived subject as distinct of being and from experience. Experience includes destiny with its mystery, to which one is unable to immediately conform. One comprehends better the meaning of destiny while accepting its autonomous capacity to re-create itself that relies in the fluidity of the intellectual creative process. . . . una red con estribaciones multiples que podrían llevarse hasta el infinito y que ya no queremos denominar o albergar en la lengua aunque sí la concebimos con el pensamiento y los hechos; también un fastidioso recordatorio, los conyacentes o cofolladores si bien lo contrario es asimismo possible y . . . [ . . . a web with multiple bases that could be taken to the infinite and we do not wish to find it’s origen or harbor it in speech although we conceived it in thoughts and actions; also a fastidious remembrance, attachments or intanglements as well, also the contrary could be possible and. . .], (Marías, 256).

Aspects of experience in destiny have determinate non-intentional structure; involve awareness, social dimension and applications without mediated answers in casual mechanisms that make use of information relating to an environment one is located in. Quizá no sabía lo que estaba diciéndo, hablamos sin saber muchas veces, solamente porque nos toca, impellidos por los silencios como en los diálogos de teatro, sólo que nosotros improvisamos siempre. [Maybe she did not know what was saying. We speak thought knowing many times only because it is our turn, pushed by silences as in theatrical dialogues, only that we always improvise], (Marías, 394).

I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F D E S T I N Y

343

Imagination plays a role in perceptual experience, for Kant imagination understands but is not correlative to sensibility, receptivity or spontaneity about the imagined in understanding. Husserl’s investigation of being concerns human existence with the indissoluble inter-relationships. Pero es verdad que no me entiendes, tú no sabes mi parte como yo no sabía la tuya, hasta ayer solo hacía hipótesis. Tu parte y la mía no se complementan ni se completan, no se necesitan, sólo se cruzan involuntariamente. . .. [But it is true that you do not understand me, do not know my side just as I did not know yours, only yesterday I was making hypothesis. Your side as well as mine, do not compliment neither integrates, do not need each other but cross only involuntarily . . .], (Marías, 408).

One relies in metaphysics and imagination to deal with unobserved causes in which observations transpire. Imagination brings forth the phenomenological in experience. Marías’ novel creates a quest for interpreting destiny, connecting thoughts and opinions without arriving at absolute certainty. Destiny is interpreted without notions of rules as we are fragments in a world of possibilities, in uncontrollable circumstances with partial capabilities within given limits and have or tries to make sense of it. We participate in destiny, conceived as a phenomenon that emerges and evolves over the course of a lifetime, not reasonably or unreasonably but integral to life itself. Temple University, Philadelphia

REFERENCES Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, NY: Columbia UP, 1990. Derrida, Jacques, De la Grammatologie, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1967. Findlay, John Niemeye, Kant and the Transcendental Object, a Hermeneutic Study, Oxford, Clarendon P, 1981. Harper, William H, and Ralph Meerbote, ed., Kant on Casuality, Freedom and Objectivity, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964. Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations, NY: Humanity P, 1970. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Judgment, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1952. Levinas, Emmanuel, La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménology de Husserl, Paris: Vris, 1930. Levinas, Emmanuel, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Paris: Vrin, 1949. Marías, Javier, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Husserl and the Limits of Phenomenology, Evanston: Northwestern P, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Le visible et l’invisible, Gallimard: Paris, 1964. Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Sense of the World, Minneapolis: Minneapolis UP, 1997. Tito, Johanna Maria, Logic in the Husserlian Context, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2002. Wagner, Daniel M, The Illusions of Conscious Will, Cambridge: MIT P, 2002.

MICHEL DION

H U M A N D E S T I N Y AT T H E E D G E O F E X I S T E N T I A L C AT E G O R I E S O F L I F E : M U S I L A N D K U N D E R A IN DIALOGUE

ABSTRACT

Is there still a meaning for destiny when we assume the self-determined freedom of human being? Destiny is basically asking the question about the essence of human freedom. Two Postmodern answers appear as original ways to address this issue: on one hand, we could say that to be free means to create ourselves. Thus, any notion of destiny has no real contents, except for the faith itself, or for believers who accept the idea of a divine Destiny. That’s precisely Kundera’s perspective on destiny. On the other hand, we could affirm that human beings are self-creating beings. They are determined by external forces or powers that they cannot control or predict. “Human without qualities” is an expression that is chosen to reveal the idea that human being does not have a complete, precise and definitive essence. That’s Musil’s perspective on destiny. In both approaches, the issue of destiny cannot be discussed without using traditional existential categories of life, such as hazard, freedom, evil and necessity. INTRODUCTION

Dostoyevsky said that we cannot avoid our destiny. He believed that destiny is a terrible thing.1 But if destiny is a so terrible thing (because it could have terrible and unpredictable effects), then are we still free human beings? Proust believed that the real influence of hazards is not important in our daily life.2 If hazards are quite rare, then life would be full of deterministic dimensions and factors. Two major novelists have addressed this issue in a very different way, although they are both Postmodern writers: Robert Musil and Milan Kundera. Quite differently, one and the other have substantially contributed to create a new literary style that is a mix of philosophical ideas and historical criticism. As said Kundera, Musil has made the novel closer to philosophy, while Nietzsche made philosophy closer to the novel, so that the “Musilian” kind of novels implies that the structure of the novel itself can include any theoretical reflection on human condition or any other concern or questioning. Musil 345 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 345–357. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

346

MICHEL DION

is a true novelist. He is not proposing a philosophical system as such, said Kundera.3 According to Kundera, Musil has initiated a structural revolution of the novel: “(. . .) tout devient thème (questionnement existentiel) chez Musil. Si tout devient thème, l’arrièreplan disparaît et, comme sur un tableau cubiste, il n’y a que le premier plan. C’est dans cette abolition de l’arrière-plan que je vois la révolution structurelle que Musil a effectuée”4

Kundera here describes the main elements of Musil’s analysis of human existence since the beginning of the First World War (1914): “En effet, tout est déjà là, dans cette Kakanie musilienne: le règne de la technique que personne ne domine et qui change l’homme en chiffres statistiques (. . .) la vitesse comme valeur suprême du monde enivré par la technique; la bureaucratie opaque et omniprésente (les bureaux de Musil sont un grand pendant des bureaux de Kafka); la stérilité comique des idéologies qui ne comprennent rien, qui ne dirigent rien (. . .); le journalisme, héritier de ce qu’on a appelé jadis la culture; les collabos de la modernité; la solidarité avec des criminels en tant qu’expression mystique de la religion des droits de l’homme (. . .)”5

Is there any idea or concept that Musil and Kundera actually share? They have a similar view on human being as it has become a “human without qualities”. Musil defined the human without qualities as a barbarian decline that is progressively growing within the Self, the end of the era of great individualities (HSQ, I, p. 767, 811). As said Dethurens (2004): “(. . .) le roman de L’immortalité constitue la synthèse de tout ce que le XXè siècle européen a découvert de plus étonnant, la naissance de l’homme moderne comme homme sans qualités. Seul, se croyant unique et se voulant dépourvu de semblables, sous peine de s’évanouir, cet homme-là s’est vu ravalé au statut d’homme en situation, parfaitement similaire à tous les autres et en toutes circonstances privé des attributs qui devaient l’assurer de sa sacro-sainte identité. Alors qu’on pouvait croire réglée la question du sujet, après la psychanalyse et l’existentialisme, voici donc que surgit à nouveau notre nouveau Graal postmoderne, l’individu en tant que ce qui résiste à toute définition”.6

Is there still a meaning for destiny when we assume the self-determined freedom of human being? Destiny is basically asking the question about the essence of human freedom. Two Postmodern answers appear as original ways to address this issue: on one hand, we could say that to be free means to create ourselves. Thus, any notion of destiny has no real contents, except for the faith itself, or for believers who accept the idea of a divine Destiny. That’s precisely Kundera’s perspective on destiny: there are two wings, two viewpoints for looking at destiny; being with God will imply to accept a divine Destiny, while being without any God will put the responsibility of any action on the individual, the group or even the society itself. On the other hand, human beings could be self-creating beings. They are still determined by external forces or powers that they cannot control or predict. “Human without qualities” is an expression

H U M A N D E S T I N Y AT T H E E D G E O F E X I S T E N T I A L

347

that is chosen to reveal the idea that human being does not have a complete, precise and definitive essence. That’s Musil’s perspective on destiny: destiny is very difficult to circumscribe because human being as such cannot really be defined. It then has an indefinable import. In both approaches, the issue of destiny cannot be discussed without using traditional existential categories of life, such as hazard, freedom, evil and necessity. I. R O B E R T M U S I L ( 1 8 8 0 – 1 9 4 2 ) 7 A N D T H E I N D E F I N A B L E HUMAN BEING

(A) HAZARD AND FREEDOM Basically, events are not predictable (HSQ, II, p. 707). Sometimes we can prevent hazards, sometimes not (HSQ, II, p. 490). But what is decisive is not the hazard in our life, but what comes after (HSQ, II, p. 85). The limitations and the inconsistency of ideas and feelings, the mysterious relation between their meaning and the appearance of their opposite, all that is presented as a natural effect when we admit that a given thing or event has the same probability to be expressed or revealed than other things or events. This presupposition is the basis of probability calculations and the definition of the hazard that we accept. It gives us the impression that the world would not be so different if from the beginning, everything would be determined by hazard (HSQ, II, p. 510). Hazard makes things different: it moulds the faith of the community in its own role, the will of progress, the attitude of solidarity and cooperation of private and public institutions (HSQ, II, p. 790). However, hazard is not what makes history what it is. Musil then said that a historical hazard is a mystification that could have severe consequences (HSQ, II, p. 655). It is one thing to say that the development of sciences is determined by history and many hazards (HSQ, II, p. 1082); but it is another thing to believe that such hazards are the power without which history would not be possible. That’s why some people define hazard as destiny. The fact that I am what I am and not the other would then be due to hazard but perceived as destiny (HSQ, II, p. 284). Hazard could be disguised in a kind of destiny (HSQ, II, p. 604). Bouveresse (1993) explained that Musil’s view on hazard is based on the belief that hazard cannot be controlled or exploited except if it is not another word for Destiny; in other words, hazard could be meaningful only if it is connected with laws that we can know, even partially. “S’il y a une science du hasard, elle devrait en principe, comme l’espéraient et le voulaient ses créateurs, nous permettre de le comprendre et de l’apprivoiser jusqu’à un certain point, et certainement pas nous encourager à le laisser faire ou, pire encore, à le diviniser. La science du hasard s’intéresse, par définition, essentiellement à ce qui est intelligible et maîtrisable dans ce que nous

348

MICHEL DION

appelons le hasard, et non comme la conception vulgaire de la chose, dont l’attitude est sur ce point à peu près diamétralement opposée à la sienne, à ce qui ne l’est pas. Lorsque Musil parle du hasard, c’est comme d’une chose que nous ne pouvons espérer contrôler et exploiter qu’à la condition qu’il ne soit pas simplement un autre nom pour les caprices du Destin, ou dans l’hypothèse la plus favorable, les secrets de la Providence, autrement dit qu’il reste soumis à des lois que nous pouvons jusqu’à un certain point connaître et utiliser pour faire tourner les choses à notre profit”.8

Dahan-Gaida (1994) said that Musil has not excluded any hazard, although he got rid of necessity and causality. “La probabilité d’un événement y est donc appréhendée hors de toute considération d’ordre chronologique ou causal, ce qui autorise Musil à dégager les événements historiques de toute forme d’enchaînement logique pour les replacer à l’intérieur d’un cadre abstrait où seuls comptent les phénomènes de récurrence. Sur de petits segments temporels, le désordre et l’inconstance sembleront régner tandis qu’à grande échelle, la courbe de fréquence sera absolument régulière et prévisible”.9

We cannot discuss the issue of hazard in human life without taking into account the notion of freedom. According to Musil, the inner freedom is the power to conceive everything, the power to know, in every situation, why it is not necessary to be attached to some event, thing or person, the power to never know what kind of events, things, or persons they should be attached to (HSQ, I, p. 334). Nietzsche, said Musil, asserted that free spirits must respect external rules insofar as they love their inner freedom (HSQ, II, p. 156). There is a kind of freedom that characterizes great historical figures or persons; such freedom requires the absence of any doubt (HSQ, I, p. 111). If human being is morally free, we can impose him (her) sanctions, although we do not believe in the theoretical validity of such sanctions. If human being is not morally free but is considered as a set of natural processes having intangible chains, then sanctions that could be imposed on him (her) could provoke an efficient discomfort, but the final result is that we cannot make him (her) morally responsible for what he (she) has done (HSQ, I, p. 676). (B) EVIL AND NECESSITY Spirit and Good cannot have a sustainable existence without the collaboration of matter and evil. Musil thus affirms the dialectical relationship between spirit and matter, good and evil (HSQ, I, p. 521). In loosing God, the world has also lost the Devil. We transfer the Evil to scapegoats. We shake the Evil. Those who are splashed are our scapegoats. In that way, everything in this world has its own motive to exist, its own order. But this technique of estrangement is dangerous. It fills up the whole world with tensions provoked by multiple inner unfinished struggles. Because part of our being is “out of ourselves”, all events seem to happen either before or behind reality. The old belief in devils

H U M A N D E S T I N Y AT T H E E D G E O F E X I S T E N T I A L

349

that made infernal spirits responsible of the whole Evil (and heavenly spirits responsible of the whole Good) played a really useful role. According to Musil, we could hope that, one day, the progress of “psychotechnics” will allow us to come back to it (HSQ, I, p. 647). In order to make good things, we must firstly be actualizing a will through a given action. We must reveal our ability to make things happened (HSQ, I, p. 590). But good persons have defaults that are not considered so negatively. However, mischievous persons have bad virtues (HSQ, II, p. 585). We feel a higher degree of sympathy for a great man who has committed wrong actions than for the man of the street who made right actions (HSQ, I, p. 545). The bad and the good persons are equally responsible for the main problems following from the world situation (HSQ, II, p. 738). Musil is then asserting that evil is needed to safeguard the whole world (HSQ, II, p. 856). The will of a whole society is free to decide what is good or bad. And we should not decide personally what is good or bad, without taking into account the social morality (HSQ, II, p. 859). However, although we are trying to make good actions, we ignore the degree of wisdom and obedience we need to reach our objective (HSQ, II, p. 808). Reason is basically linked to evil. Morality and reason are the opposite of the Good. That’s exactly a Nietzschean10 perspective on good and evil (HSQ, II, p. 1068). Musil believed that defeating evil is not a way to make goodness victorious. Evil actually grows out of the increasing of a false good. Good and evil are then basically linked one to the other (HSQ, II, p. 596). Is evil unavoidable?, asked Musil (HSQ, II, p. 1082). Is evil a necessity? Musil firstly said that any development is basically linked to a constraint, a necessity (HSQ, II, p. 358). If we had the power to determine ourselves, aside of any constraining necessity, to go ahead with a wrong action, we must acknowledge that we have committed a wrong action (HSQ, II, p. 46). In the daily life, we act out of necessity (a chain of causes and effects) and not of motivations. A part of us is intervening in this chain of causes and effects, so that we could still be defined as “free beings”. According to Musil, the freedom of will is the power we have to willingly do what we didn’t want to do. Motivation has no connection with our will. It is both the extreme constraint and the extreme freedom (HSQ, II, p. 638). Is there anything that makes historical events necessary? Musil is particularly concerned with the “historical necessities”: “Des lois peuvent bien être impliquées – par exemple la connexion entre des évolutions intellectuelles et des évolutions économiques ou le facteur de situation dans les beaux-arts -, mais il y a malgré tout toujours encore quelque chose qui n’est là ainsi qu’une fois, et cette fois-ci. Et, soit dit en passant, au nombre de ces faits qui n’ont lieu qu’une fois, nous comptons aussi pour une part, nous les hommes (. . .) lorsque nous disons que telle ou telle chose a eu lieu et que telle ou telle en

350

MICHEL DION

est résultée, la connexion que nous affirmons a toujours un caractère unique et ne constitue jamais l’exemplification d’une loi proprement unique (. . .) non seulement les événements eux-mêmes, mais la façon dont ils s’enchaînent conservent toujours quelque chose d’irréductiblement factuel et historique. Les connexions que décrivent ce qu’on appelle, d’une façon qui a été souvent considérée comme impropre, les lois de l’histoire ne sont pas celles des événements eux-mêmes; et elles devraient, pour réussir à conférer à leur enchaînement, un caractère nécessaire, remplir une condition impossible, à savoir être suffisamment individualisées pour parler des événements eux-mêmes, toute en conservant néanmoins le caractère de lois générales”.11

Musil has created a kinetic theory of history. Musil criticized Hegel12 and Spengler who developed a philosophy of history that was based on a subtle form of destiny. A kinetic theory of history gets rid of: (1) the idea of historical necessities; (2) the notion of causality between historical events. A kinetic theory of history puts the emphasis on: (a) the contingencies that impregnate the human condition and its becoming; (b) the meaning and value of human action; (c) the various factors that are gathered in a changing whole that is not dependent on given causes; (d) the fact that events are due to circumstances that cannot be totally controlled by the individual or the group. In this kinetic view of history, we can observe an existentialist (even Sartrian) notion of human liberation from God’s powers.13 As said Dahan-Gaida (1994), Musil has elaborated a kind of spiritual liberation that gives back the future as a personal responsibility. We can see here the idea of a self-creating man: we create ourselves in actualizing our freedom. Our being is nothing but the result of our choices and actions.14 According to Vatan (2000), Musil perceived the historical contingency as the interconnectedness of various factors that have together unpredictable effects. “Les mille hasards qui marquent le commencement d’une époque forment une coïncidence sans loi d’ensemble de nombreux faits: bien que chaque événement en particulier soit déterminé, les causes qui ont œuvré à son apparition sont trop complexes et multiples pour qu’il soit possible de les rapporter à une nécessité unique qui en régulerait le sens et la destination. Non que certaines relations causales ne puissent être objectivées, mais elles “ne rendent jamais compte intégralement de l’état des choses”. Cette nécessité sans loi, purement factuelle, et étroitement liée aux conditions spatio-temporelles de son apparition. Elle ne peut être subordonnée à un schéma déterministe univoque” (. . .) Aucun sens caché – immanent ou transcendant – ne préside à l’évolution historique (. . .) La vie recèle une nature profondément ambiguë”.15

If our spirit is itself sainthood, although it has the defaults of the warrior and the hunter, we should conclude that our trend to perversion cannot fully be actualized, or be purified in its contact with reality. Today, many people share an obscure state of mind: expectation of the worst things or events, inner disposition to rebellion, suspicion toward what we venerate. Some individuals deplore the lack of idealism among young people; but when they should act, they spontaneously behave as someone who, through a sound mistrust of ideas, rather violently reinforces their power (HSQ, I, p. 384). Musil defines two kinds of diabolic beings: (1) a devil of the first category: this person knows

H U M A N D E S T I N Y AT T H E E D G E O F E X I S T E N T I A L

351

what should be done (the Good itself in the given situation), but actually chooses the opposite attitude or conduct; he (she) does the opposite of what he (she) wants; (2) a devil of the second category: this person wants to make wrong actions, because he (she) is unable to do better actions, in his (her) life (HSQ, I, p. 826). Today, the worst vileness does not come from what we have done, but rather from what we let people do. It is much more dangerous to let people do something than to make personally a given action (HSQ, I, p. 448). In that sense, Musil asserted that evil consists in the diabolic submission to the nonchalant walk of the whole world (HSQ, I, p. 559). (C) DESTINY For young people, destiny cannot be separated from the music of life; they would like to have a destiny but they do not know what it is. Many years later, they interpret the word “destiny” in a statistical meaning (HSQ, II, p. 68). What we call “personal destiny” has been unseated by collective events that recover from statistics (HSQ, II, p. 71). Growing old is, for ourselves, a destiny (HSQ, II, p. 68). In a human being, the process of disembodiment would not have seemed so strange, but in the animal life, it would be a metamorphosis into a human being. None of these people, each in his or her peculiar situation, could escape the thought that it was his or her destiny that was being vicariously accomplished in this little cat already half released from earthly bonds (Five women, p. 64) Very few people actually know how they have become what they are, their worldview, their lover, their character, their profession and their achievements. They rather feel that they cannot change a lot of things in those elements of their life. We should pretend that they have been deluded, because we can never find enough motives to explain how things happened as they did. Such personalities could have been very different. Events are rarely the pure emanation of human beings. Most of the time, they depend on various circumstances, on the life and death of other human beings. In other words, events have simply appeared at a specific moment of their life. When they were adolescents or young adults, they saw life as brimming with possibilities and emptiness. But, at the midst of their life, they see something that is really their life and cannot be negated as such. This is something most of people are not aware of. They adopted the being that progressively comes to them. From now on, events of their life seem to be the expression of their qualities. Their destiny is their merit or misfortune. Something has hindered their movement and has buried them into a being that is far from what they originally are. They then think very obscurely to their adolescence, when there were a strong power of resistance in their heart, the mocking spirit of young people, the refusal of established state of things, the readiness to any kind of heroic action or

352

MICHEL DION

sacrifice, the ardent seriousness and inconsistency. These are attempts to evade. Any action is not connected to an unquestionable inner necessity, although it has been said that the action is urgent and essential. How could we call an inner or external good action? A vital attitude? An expression of the impression? A technique of being? It is natural to see passionate people adopting new forms of expression much more quickly than the people of the street, since such expressions give the moment of Being, the equilibrium of the tensions between the inner and the external, between the crushing and the outburst (HSQ, I, pp. 163–165). Destiny is beyond the self (HSQ, II, p. 782). Destiny is revealing itself through emotions (HSQ, II, p. 334). One cannot make destiny speak when it chooses to be silent. One must simply harken for whatever is on its way (Five women, p. 61). The higher the situation where the Destiny places someone, more clearly he (she) acknowledges that what is decisive is the set of simple principles, a firm will and the planned activity (HSQ, I, p. 565). These elements define the essence of leaders, and sometimes heroes, according to Musil. Some persons have the destiny to become heroes (HSQ, II, p. 947). Heroes assume their destiny as if it would be part of themselves (HSQ, II, 302). According to Musil, we have two kinds of destiny: (1) an active and secondary destiny that accomplishes itself in our life: the idea that we should accomplish our duties where our destiny has put us is an infertile idea; the true duty is to choose our place and to consciously model our situation (HSQ, I, p. 535); (2) an inactive but essential destiny that we will never know (HSQ, II, p. 72): we can get or loose kingdoms, but we cannot do anything to reach our destiny (HSQ, I, p. 537); some people are gathered by a true intervention of destiny (HSQ, I, p. 415). Musil said that in the present era, human being is threatened to reproduce the destiny of animals of the Prehistory that are dead out of their own greatness (HSQ, I, p. 193). Thus, Musil defines personal destiny as something that is clearly impersonal (HSQ, II, p. 69). Few centuries ago, we interpreted events as God’s unfathomable decrees (HSQ, II, p. 70). If God determines and know everything in advance, how can human being sin? In that conception, God becomes an extraordinary devious being. We offend Him with His own acquiescence. God would then put human being to commit mistakes, wrong actions, and then He would reproach him (her) such actions. God knows everything in advance and provokes actions that He prohibits. Today, it is in a similar situation that people are in their relationships with others (HSQ, I, pp. 596–597). Now, destiny is something that could be compared with the movements of the multitude we could be subjected to. Nowadays, every truth is divided in half-truths. In such a way, we are able to get a higher productivity than the productivity that could follow from the individual who accomplishes his (her) duties with seriousness

H U M A N D E S T I N Y AT T H E E D G E O F E X I S T E N T I A L

353

and in his (her) solitude. The problem is that many could conclude that we then could do everything we would like to do (HSQ, II, p. 70). Some creative artists try (and suffer in this attempt) to safeguard the pureness of their intellectual activity, as it is the case for the genius; they suffer a lot for their talent that would never create some greatness (there is no greatness in their works). Their destiny has calmly brought them back to their starting point, that is, nothing (HSQ, I, p. 65). Some are victims of the prejudice according to which they are interdependent for their passions, characters, destiny and actions. Indeed, for more than the half of people, existence is not made of actions, but rather of dissertations we have to assimilate the basic perspective or viewpoint, of opinions and counter-opinions, of the impersonal hodgepodge of that we know or what we have heard (HSQ, I, p. 260). Our destiny is influenced by many factors, such as our feeling of guilt, our free will, the use of reason and our psychological equilibrium (HSQ, II, p. 857). Some women want to be the mate of great people and then struggle with destiny itself (HSQ, I, p. 67). On the other hand, there is no more desperate misery than to be associated for a common destiny with someone that we do not love (HSQ, II, p. 181), or someone that we do not love enough (HSQ, II, p. 184). So, according to Musil, people are subjected either to the social order, or to the destiny (HSQ, I, p. 330). The New Human Being is called to relieve the former Powers in the orientation of destinies. The New Human Being is introduced in the spheres of Power (HSQ, I, p. 414). II. M I L A N K U N D E R A ( 1 9 2 9 – ) 16 A N D T H E D I L E M M A O F “ B E I N G WITH OR WITHOUT GOD”

( A ) D E S T I N Y A N D P R E D E S T I NAT I O N What makes human life significantly different from other life forms is the fact that human being is continuously bearing his/her own destiny (ILE, 55). However, some people have lost their destiny, while others have stolen them their destiny. Those who steal others’ destiny use it for their own interests (P, 154-155). So, we are safe when we could find moments in which destiny cannot control the events of our life, said Kundera (VEA, 417). Sometimes, destiny is putting to an end before the physical death. There is then no coincidence between the moment of death and the extinction of a given destiny (P, 455). Kundera asserted that our own destiny is basically linked to others’ destiny through the power of wisdom (P, 200). According to Ricard (2003), Kundera believes that there is nothing sure in this world and that the meaning of all things and beings is continuously changing.

354

MICHEL DION

“Au même titre que le tragique, que l’Histoire ou que la vérité ou la justice, le destin suppose en effet un univers stable et ordonné, ou du moins la possibilité d’un tel univers. Dès que cette possibilité disparaît, dès que s’affaissent les balises métaphysiques, morales ou historiques que lui conféreraient de la continuité et un sens, dès que la conscience sait, comme le Jacques de Kundera l’enseigne à l’Aubergiste, qu’«il n’est rien de certain en ce monde et que les choses changent de sens comme souffle le vent», l’existence perd du coup tout caractère de nécessité, toute apparence de direction et de progrès, si bien que le modèle du destin ne peut absolument plus lui convenir”.17

Destiny does not imply the denegation of human freedom. Future is not predetermined in detail. The way future is programmed does not set up the conditions for every historical event. The program did not include the battle of Waterloo and the fact that the French would loose it. Destiny (or the way future is programmed) only implies that human being is naturally aggressive, so that wars directly follow from human nature. Technical progress thus contributes to improve means of torture and atrocity. The program is not a prophetic anticipation of future. It determines the possibilities and their limitations. Between those limitations, hazard can play its role (IM, 24-25). In a religious perspective, destiny gets a very different import. Believers often maintain that God knows everything, so that He does not need to require any answer to any question He could ask to them (IM, 166-167). Kundera said that a religious meaning of destiny cannot be separated from the fact that believers have a great capacity to set up miracles (VA, 150). Everybody is suffering in his /her too ordinary life and wishes to avoid it, to raise himself/herself over such an ordinary life. Everybody has felt, in a more or less intense way, the illusion to be worthy of such “self-overcoming”. This self-overcoming is then interpreted as being linked to our own predestination, so that the way we raise ourselves beyond our ordinary life would be determined by our destiny, rather than the fact of our personal decision (L, 63). The feeling to be “elected” is perhaps rooted in the experience of the first years of life, when the baby receives affection and love from his/her mother (without any merit) and claims that he/she is entitled to be granted of such affection and love in a continuous way. Education often gets rid of such a delusion, so that children learn that everything in life has to be paid. But it is too late. The feeling to be elected remains active within our consciousness (L, 64). Some persons would like to be “elected beings”. So, what could they do to prove their “electedness”? What should they do in order to make themselves and the others believe that they are “elected beings” and that they do not share the common daily life experience? (L, 65) Those who would like to be “elected beings” usually venerate the “famous people” (particularly the historical figures); the famous people are useful only if they remain inaccessible. Those who would like to be elected beings publicly express that they belong to the “extraordinary

H U M A N D E S T I N Y AT T H E E D G E O F E X I S T E N T I A L

355

life”, so that they are far from ordinary life that is common to their neighbours, colleagues and partners that they have to live with (L, 65). (B) HAZARD AND FREEDOM In human life, coincidence is not ruled over by the calculation of probabilities. We are often facing hazards that are so improbable that they have no mathematic justification (IM, 334). There are five types of hazard: (1) a mute coincidence: this is a coincidence of events that does not have any meaning; (2) a poetic coincidence: this coincidence has given to the event an unpredicted meaning; (3) a contrapuntic coincidence: this coincidence does not have any specific meaning; (4) a coincidence that is creating stories: it is particularly important for novelists (IM, 333-334); (5) a morbid coincidence: a precious but unusable coincidence (IM, 336). Now, what could we seriously say about hazards in human life ? The problem is that there is no existential mathematics. Such existential mathematics would present the following principle: the value of a given hazard is equal to its degree of unlikelihood (IM, 335). Only hazard can appear as a message. Every event that is apprehended, or every event that constitutes a necessity, or every event that is continuously repeated in the daily life is a mute event. Only hazard is saying something to us (ILE, 76). Unlike necessity, hazard has its own spells. For having an unforgettable love, hazards must join together from the first moment (ILE, 77). Our daily life is full of hazards, more particularly of fortuitous encounters between people and events, that is, of coincidences. As said Kundera, there is a coincidence when two unexpected events are simultaneously arising (ILE, 80). Too often, we neglect to consider those hazards, so that we are depriving human life of its beauty (ILE, 82). There is a curious meaning of freedom in which everything is allowed (P, 39). In fact, we live in a world of implacable laws. That’s why we continuously try to get more freedom. We tend to create human disorder in exercising our own freedom (RA, 125). In any kind of games, we are not free. There is no way to avoid the game and its basic rules (RA, 109). The ideal for humanity would be to mix uniformity and freedom (IM, 16). The worst thing is not that the world is not free, but rather that human being has unlearned freedom itself (VEA, 75). Insofar as we cannot change the world, we can individually change our life and make it free (VEA, 75-76). It is a very important relief to become aware that we are free beings, that is, we have no mission (ILE, 454). As said Chvatik (1995), human being without God is absolutely free, without any regulative supreme principle that could give him (her) the meaning of things, beings and events. Human being without God is totally responsible of his (her) own meaning of life”.

356

MICHEL DION

“L’homme qui croit en Dieu, qui est né du Créateur, comme dit Kundera, vit en contact avec ce principe supérieur, devant sa face et sous son regard. Il s’adresse à lui dans ses prières matin et soir, lui rend compte de ses actes, respecte ses commandements comme des tabous – L’homme sans Dieu est absolument libre, abandonné à lui-même et à son horrible solitude, sans principe suprême régulateur du sens”.18

The unrelenting powers of History that could have attempted to our freedom have made us free (IG, 30). We must let to the people being free, and we should not meddle in their personal life (P, 38). Responsibility is not possible without respecting the freedom of each other (P, 159) CONCLUSION

As said Dugast (1992), Musil has defined History as basically linked to “whathas-been-said”. It participated in the spirit of narrative activity that paralyses human thought and prohibits any authentic evolution. World history is so basically linked to what-has-been-said that we are unable to live separately from it. Such a denegation of the present and of creative life makes crucial to «live the history of ideas» rather than the world history, according to Musil.19 What we could observe in Musil’s and Kundera’s novels is the basic link between History and the understanding of destiny and freedom. However, the dialectic relationship between History and destiny/freedom is much more emphasized in Kundera’s novels. On the other hand, Musil is initiating a new, revolutionary worldview that is focusing on human being and his/her historicity: a philosophical enquiry that Musil has succeeded in very much. It characterizes his novels, mainly the “Human Without Qualities”. While “À la recherche du temps perdu” (Marcel Proust) is a novel in which every event firstly happens in the consciousness (the “novel-within-the-consciousness” approach), “L’Homme sans qualités” (Robert Musil) is a novel that redefines the historical consciousness and the understanding of the meaning of History (the “novelwithin-the-History” approach). Kundera’s novels constitute a mix between both literary styles, so that the literary structure of such novels implies the dialectic relationships between the consciousness and the History. It is because of such paradigmatic variety of literary style and approach that Kundera and Musil define destiny in a different way. University of Sherbrooke NOTES 1 Dostoyevsky Fedor (1952) Les Frères Karamazov, Paris: Gallimard, p. 495; Fedor Dostoyevsky (1977) L’idiot, Paris: Éditions Garnier, p. 675. 2 Proust Marcel (1954) Contre Sainte-Beuve, Paris: Gallimard, p. 112. 3 Kundera Milan (1993) Les testaments trahis. Paris: Gallimard, p. 211, 281.

H U M A N D E S T I N Y AT T H E E D G E O F E X I S T E N T I A L 4

357

Kundera Milan (1993) Les testaments trahis. Paris: Gallimard, p. 198. Idem, p. 199–200. 6 Dethurens Pascal (2004) “La dernière leçon du roman: l’inqualifiable. Lecture de L’immortalité de Kundera”, L’atelier du roman, no 39, septembre 2004, p. 154 (153–167). 7 In this paper, we will use abbreviations in referring to Musils’ writings: Five Women (FW), Les désarrois de l’élève Törless (DET), L’homme sans qualités (HSQ). 8 Bouveresse Jacques (1993) Robert Musil. L’homme probable, le hasard, la moyenne et l’escargot de l’histoire. Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, p. 21–22. 9 Dahan-Gaida (1994) Musil. Savoir et fiction, Saint-Denis, Collection “Culture et Société”: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, p. 141. 10 Nietzsche Friedrich (1971) Par-delà le bien et le mal, Paris: Gallimard. 11 Bouveresse Jacques (2001) La voix de l’âme et les chemins de l’esprit. Dix études sur Robert Musil, Paris, Collection “Liber”: Seuil, p. 275. 12 Hegel G.W.F. (1965) La raison dans l’Histoire. Introduction à la Philosophie de l’Histoire, Paris: Plon. 13 Sartre Jean-Paul (1970) L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris: Nagel. 14 Dahan-Gaida Laurence (1994) Musil. Savoir et fiction, Saint-Denis, Collection “Culture et Société”: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, p. 148; Sartre Jean-Paul (1970) L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris: Nagel. 15 Vatan Florence (2000) Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, Paris: PUF, pp. 121–122. 16 In this paper, we will use abbreviations in referring to Kundera’s novels: La vie est ailleurs (VEA), L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être (ILE), La Plaisanterie (p), L’immortalité (IM), La valse aux adieux (VA), La lenteur (L), L’ignorance (IG), Risibles amours (RA). 17 Ricard François (2003) Le dernier après-midi d’Agnès. Essai sur l’œuvre de Milan Kundera, Paris: Gallimard, p. 184. 18 Chvatik Kvetoslav (1995) Le monde romanesque de Milan Kundera, Paris: Gallimard, p. 186. 19 Dugast Jacques (1992) Robert Musil. L’homme sans qualités, Paris, Collection “Études littéraires”: PUF, pp. 49–51. 5

S E C T I O N III

V I C T O R K O C AY

A S P I R I N G B E Y O N D : F R E N C H RO M A N T I C I S M , N I E T Z S C H E A N D S A I N T- J O H N P E R S E

ABSTRACT

This article attempts first to outline the understanding of human destiny in the works of French Romantic poets such as Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire. All of these poets present a sort of spiritual world as distinct from the real, material world in which they live, but their understanding of human life is firmly rooted in nature, that is, in the physical nature of human beings. Second, this paper considers the romantic notion of human destiny as it is developed notably in Nietzsche’s Will to Power. In spite of his criticisms of romanticism, Nietzsche also rooted his conception of human destiny in the physical and physiological nature of human beings, and at the same time proposed that human destiny was to go beyond. Strongly influenced by romanticism and by Nietzsche, the French Poet, Saint-John Perse, proposes a similar understanding of human nature. The third part of this paper shows to what extent Perse grounded the notion of “going beyond” in human physiology, notably in sexual desire, which he considers as a reflection of the divine in Man. Human destiny is a common theme in the works of French poets influenced by romanticism and romantic ideals. The end of the belief that God acted directly in human affairs or through the office of the monarch and the priest that the French revolution came to symbolize meant that a new understanding of human destiny was possible, even necessary, to fill the void that the crumbling structures of feudal power and of religious hierarchy left behind. And even though religious sentiment was an important aspect of romanticism, the understanding of human destiny portrayed in the works of romantic poets makes nature and human actions, rather than God, the fulcrum of human destiny. This is evident in the works of poets such as Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire where nature and physical existence, often associated with suffering and melancholy, are portrayed in conjunction with a more idealized and more beautiful spiritual world. The understanding of human destiny as action and achievement is present also in the work of Nietzsche. In spite of Nietzsche’s criticisms of romantic ideals, it would seem that he shared both the 361 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 361–373. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

362

V I C T O R K O C AY

romantic belief in the force of nature and the notion that human destiny was to a large extent a human creation. And, perhaps as a direct influence of both romanticism and of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Saint-John Perse too considers human destiny as a creative ideal based in nature, although for Perse, human destiny is expressed in a more abstract way, transformed as it were, into the seemingly never-ending human search for freedom. In this paper I propose to establish the romantic notion of human destiny as it is manifested in specific poems by the French poets named above, to show that this romantic ideal can be found in the work of Nietzsche, and to outline the manner in which Perse has given form to the notion of human destiny, particularly in his work, “Amers”, or “Seamarks”. In his poem entitled “Les Destinées”,1 or “The Destinies”, Alfred de Vigny recounts the advent of Christianity from the perspective of the Destinies, the female goddesses who apparently ruled over the fate of individuals.2 According to the poem, before the advent of Christianity, individuals believed themselves to be subject to the whims of goddesses who controlled and determined their lives. This type of belief was typical in the ancient world. In Homer, for example, individuals, whatever their rank and power, are aided or punished by the Gods and believe their triumphs, and/or their defeats, to be an expression of divine intervention. For Vigny, the advent of Christianity represents a new beginning for human beings because it means the end of the influence of the Destinies in human affairs. The God of love would remove the yoke of lead that was fate from the shoulders of human beings who would then know freedom and could at last breathe more easily. But the Destinies ask God for guidance, for they no longer know what their role will be in this new regime, under the laws of one supreme God, and God answers them that they are to return to the human world, for human beings, in their eternal uncertainty, will be happier in their struggle to be free than in their understanding of freedom itself. Subsequently, human beings will continue to aspire to do God’s will, but will nonetheless be subject to the belief in fate and individual destiny that the Destinies represent. In spite of his “free will” and his intellectual pride, in spite of his moral virtues and his sentiments of love and of genius that bring him close to God, man will struggle to realize his ideals, and his efforts will be continually thwarted. “Is this human destiny?” the poet asks. He responds that for the slave of the Orient, such is it written in the book of God, and in the West, so it is written in the book of Christ. Vigny completed his allegorical poem, “Les Destinées”, in 1849. There are many allusions in the poem to human destiny and fate, a subject that attracted Vigny for many years. For the poet, human life was often considered as a struggle between destiny and human will, and he believed that the pagan notion of human fate was essentially identical to the Christian notion of providence, as is

ASPIRING BEYOND

363

reflected in the final lines of the poem just mentioned. Vigny’s poem, however, can be read as a satire of the notion of predestination and more particularly, as a critique of human complacency and resignation, of the belief that everything happens according to God’s will. For Vigny, even if God is responsible for what is given in nature and in the material world, as we know it, it remains a particularly human endeavour to construct and build a human world. For Vigny, a stoic and in the end an optimist, fate is a foolish notion invented by lazy minds. He believed rather that human beings are free to act according to their own will. As such, they are masters of their own destiny, a destiny that in the end is similar, for Vigny, to the notion of self-respect. Vigny’s poem is the most allegorical and perhaps the most philosophical of the romantic poems presented here, but even in this type of poem it is evident that human nature is in contrast with an ideal represented by human aspirations, and that it is human nature itself that makes possible the dream of a better world. Human beings may not always be masters of their own destiny, although this is often their desired goal. Using much more concrete images than Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo also recognizes that human destiny is a goal to be reached as opposed to a scenario to be played out by the Gods in spite of human efforts. In his work, Les Contemplations,3 Hugo often bemoans his fate in life and expresses a desire to be done with the present. This central work in the Hugo corpus is structured around an important event in the poet’s life, namely the death of his eldest daughter and her husband who both drowned in the Seine in 1843, just a few months after their marriage. Poems published prior to his daughter’s death are in general of an optimistic tone, and those published afterwards are more pessimistic, or such is the manner in which Hugo presented this work. In Hugo’s poetry the notion of human destiny is frequently invoked, and in general, it is characterized by a form of pantheism and by an unending spiritual quest. In his poem “Halte en marchant”, or “A Pause while walking”, the last poem in book one of six, so therefore a generally more optimistic poem, Hugo first describes the scene and the natural setting of a village. It is a pastoral scene. The early morning mist dissolves in the sun and forms pearl drops on the blossoms of periwinkles. Smoke rises gently into the air from the huts of the village, a stream runs nearby, and the beech and the elm seem to be holding hands from opposite sides of the stream. Birds are singing in the trees, dragonflies hover over the pond. There is a rundown café amongst the sage, the thyme and the flowers where an icon of a smiling saint is visible, such that the poet wonders if this structure is perhaps a temple and not a café, destined not to quench the thirst of the body but to quench the thirst of the heart. He enters the café praising God who offers drink to travellers, and notices a happy, but poorly dressed young girl who goes to the fountain to fill her jar with water. The murmuring

364

V I C T O R K O C AY

fountain seems to admire the young girl with eyes as blue as the sky. Her simple yet happy life is in marked contrast with the religious and philosophical musings of the poet who notices also the image of a martyred Christ next to the bed, and this causes him to reflect on the futile character of martyrdom. For human beings, he says, glory is only possible in death. He refers to famous martyrs of the past such as Socrates, Scipio, Dante and Thomas More, and notes that these men are like the sun whose glory is in its setting, like the Niagara River whose beauty is in its falls. It is only in death that such glory becomes possible, he says. In this sense as well, it is only after he dies that Christ becomes the God of the Christian religion. It is significant to note that in Hugo’s poem the glory achieved and realized only in death is founded on the works and deeds of men and not on their fate. This is underscored by the imagery and contrasts that the poet uses throughout the poem. The simple yet pleasant world of nature seems to speak of harmony and of love on all levels with the natural world reflecting, as it were, the spiritual values of the poet: the trees seem to be united in their growth, the café could also be a temple, the blue of the firmament is reflected in the eyes of a young girl, and a lock of hair torn from the head of Jesus on the cross becomes a ray of light in the hand of the relic seeker. Reflective human beings can only marvel at the lives of great men whose glory and whose destiny, like the sun, are most beautiful in their setting. In other poems Hugo invokes the notion of love as the ultimate human destiny in this world where everything appears vain and ephemeral. In the poem “Aimons toujours! aimons encore!”4 (Let Us Love, Let Us Love Again) the poet uses syntactical as well as semantic structures to suggest that the union of man and woman creates a new dimension of human experience. According to the poet, love is the only flame that is never extinguished, the only flower that never dies. The poem uses a sequence of metaphors to convey the notion that love opens up new realms of experience. In the first stanza we read that love is the cry of the dawn as well as the hymn of the night. Now in addition to opposing night to day, and sound to music, the cry of the dawn is also the symbol of new life whereas the hymn of the night is the song of death. For Hugo, love is both the beginning and the end of human life. In the second stanza of the poem, the poet uses a series of binary images to symbolize the unity of opposites. The stream of water is united with its banks to form a river, the wind is in harmony with the mountains, and the stars and the clouds are together in the sky. This series of “naturalistic” images underlines the union of elements in nature that together form a new entity. The currant of water together with its banks creates a river. The wind against the mountains is the air and the earth where we dwell, and the stars and the clouds together represent the sky above. It appears that there is no void in nature. Other images used in the poem in a similar

ASPIRING BEYOND

365

sense are that of the mirror and its image, the flower and its scent, distinctions that are in fact defining features of the entity in question. This type of image would seem to suggest that individuals alone are only appearances or aspects of a greater entity that is formed by their union with another individual. Essentially, Hugo’s pantheism does not lead to a disappearance of the individual in the realm of nature. Rather, the individual is united with another by means of a natural sentiment, that is, according to nature, following the laws of nature is it were. And this union with another that is human destiny leads to a more complete understanding and a better appreciation of life. It would seem that in love as in glory, human destiny involves a transformation. It means going beyond divisions and distinctions that are only apparent in order to participate more fully in the spiritual world. For Baudelaire as well poetry evokes another realm, an aesthetic realm, a more beautiful world than the real world in which we live, a world created by imagination and by aesthetic vision. In his sonnet entitled “Beauté” or “Beauty”, Beauty speaks to mortal men of her eternal inspiration. She is like a sphinx, the mythical monster with the body of a lion and the head of a human; she dominates the sky and represents the idea of mystery. But Beauty, for the poet, is like a mirror that makes everything more beautiful. Now, on the one hand, Baudelaire’s poetry is characterized by feelings of hate and melancholy, by macabre images and descriptions of hardship and pain. But poetry can transform reality and create a better, more beautiful, world. This, after all, explains the title of his work, “Les fleurs du mal”, (The Flowers of Evil). As many of his poems make clear, Baudelaire was fascinated by elements that could transform the psychological state of human beings, elements such as wine, opium, or even sexual desire. Poetry too had the power to change psychological states. This is evident in one of Baudelaire’s most famous poems, “La Chevelure” or “Hair”.5 In this poem, the poet expresses his desire for a woman, but the woman being referred to is never named or represented as such. Only her hair is represented, as a synecdoche, and her hair is described and presented as an expression of the poet’s desire. By use of metaphor and comparisons, the woman’s hair is transposed, as it were, into other domains, into the animal domain by means of words such as “moutonnant”, “encolure” and “crinière”, words that are commonly used to describe animal features. But her hair is also like a flag to be waved in the air, a forest that masks the presence of people from far away lands; it is waves upon a sea of ebony, a sea of sails and rowers, of ship masts and exotic port cities. It is also a black ocean that surrounds her head with odours of coconut oil, of musk and tar, an oasis and a flask from which the poet can drink the wine of memory. In this sequence of metonymies and metaphors the woman’s hair is transformed and becomes something, many things, that it is not in reality. It takes on new dimensions for the poet, and

366

V I C T O R K O C AY

transports him, and the reader, to a realm in which far away places and diverse objects are brought together in an aesthetic world that is richer than the real world and probably more exciting than a woman’s hair would normally be. Evidently, this transformation takes place as an expression of the poet’s desire, such that it is sexual desire that functions here as a transforming agent, playing the role that is played in other poems by wine or opium. But, what is essential for my purpose here is that the transformation of the woman’s hair into an object of desire belies the poet’s belief in a better world, in a more beautiful world than that in which he lives, and this ideal world of aesthetic richness and charm is created by verse. The poet’s desire to surpass the real world and to participate in the more ideal, more beautiful world of poetry is also apparent in the subtitle of the section from which I have chosen my examples, that is, “Spleen and ideal”, as it is apparent in the poem entitled “Élévation” (Elevation). In this short poem, the poet recognizes that his mind moves quickly and with agility beyond the apparent and often morbid world that we live in and purifies itself in superior air where it drinks in the clear fire of space like a pure and divine liqueur. When one’s thought is able to take flight like a lark, to hover above life and understand the language of flowers and voiceless objects, one can be happy. This then would be an idealized human destiny, that is, to be weightless, free from physical existence, in harmony with nature, and therefore happy. Now the three poets that I have spoken of this far are quite different, and of course the degree to which they represent romantic ideals or were influenced by romanticism is debateable. Yet all three of these poets consider the notion of human destiny as an aspect of human constructive efforts. In his allegorical poem, Vigny establishes a parallel between the pagan notion of destiny and the Christian notion of providence in order to satirize a complacent belief in predestination and to underscore the importance of will power and of human efforts for individual self-respect. Hugo transforms his personal sufferings and his loneliness into verse and in so doing establishes a rapport between the natural and the spiritual worlds. He understands that isolation and individuality are only appearances in the real world, and that the poet’s glory, like that of great men, can only be achieved after the poet’s death. Hugo would seem to advocate, that love, the uniting of two separate and distinct appearances, creates a new and better entity to which human beings aspire. Baudelaire goes perhaps a step further than Hugo in his desire to transform the real world by means of poetic vision into a more pleasingly aesthetic world and therefore into a world of greater happiness. What these three poets have in common, on a very general level, is a belief that human destiny is rooted in human nature and aspires to go beyond human life by means of the efforts of human beings themselves. Human destiny is no longer the object of forces and powers that we cannot

ASPIRING BEYOND

367

understand and can only submit to; our destiny is shaped by our own efforts and by our own creativity, according to our place in nature. Now, Nietzsche6 is in general very critical of romantic notions and ideals, mainly because he sees the romanticism of Wagner and of Schopenhauer in particular as producing very pessimistic art forms,7 whereas for Nietzsche the essence of art is that it completes existence, that it is the creator of perfection and plenitude. Art for Nietzsche affirms because it creates and because it completes existence.8 From the perspective of the notion of human destiny, however, and more specifically in reference to the poets we have discussed, one notices a certain affinity between Nietzsche and the Romantics. First of all, like Nietzsche, the Romantics believed in the creative power of poetry, and of art in general. Further, nature itself is a central aspect of both romantic poetry and of Nietzsche’s philosophy, although, according to Nietzsche, the return to nature and to naturalism that marked the romantic era, was not so much a “return” to nature as it was the discovery of nature and of naturalism, because natural humanity had never existed before. Being natural, for Nietzsche, is daring to be without morals, like nature. And finally, for the Romantics and for Nietzsche what we often call reality is an appearance that masks a greater entity or force. Nietzsche claims that the object of the real world or the “thing in itself” does not exist as a thing in itself but only as a mode of the subject,9 let’s say as an appearance. For Nietzsche, both notions, thing and subject, were discovered by human beings. The “birth of things” is the work of thought, of will, and of feelings, and the notion of subject too is a creation of thought, a simplified way of referring to the force that poses, invents, and thinks as opposed to the activities of posing, inventing and thinking. For Nietzsche, the appearance of things is the true and unique reality of things, but the appearance of things really only denotes the inaccessibility of things for human logic, and it is the appearance as the reality of things that resists our efforts to transform things into an imaginary and “true” world: a world that is true, because it’s a logical world, or, one might say, because it is an aesthetic world created by thought. This reality that is appearance, and that resists our efforts to reduce it to an imaginary world of truth, is what Nietzsche calls the will to power, a term that refers to the inner force of appearances and not to ever changing external forms. Now, the transformation of the real world of things into forms of art is a common theme of romanticism, at least in the works of poets such as Vigny, Hugo and most notably Baudelaire. These poets struggled with yet resisted the common belief in predestination and insisted on the creative efforts of human beings both on the level of deed and of artistic creation. Nietzsche, for his part, claims that his cult is that art would be in the service of illusion,10 because art creates a unified world of our own creation,11 in much the same way

368

V I C T O R K O C AY

that poets of the romantic period aspired to create, by means of their poetry, a more beautiful world than the reality they knew. Nietzsche takes the creative efforts of the artist a step further, however, and applies these creative efforts to human beings themselves. The goal, for Nietzsche, is to establish a better human being. Humans must go beyond good and evil, he says, they must adopt a mechanistic conception of the world and not feel themselves humiliated by their destiny as physical beings, for man is his own destiny and he holds the fate of humanity in his own hand12 . Nietzsche is here rejecting the morality of his day in favour of a more naturalistic conception of human behaviour. He sets as his objective the glorification of the creations of men, of the beauty and the sublime that we have accorded to things in our role as poet, thinker and God. He is talking about the creation of a better human being more in agreement with the natural instincts and the naturalistic tendencies of human beings in general. As he says, it is in our nature to create a being that is superior to us.13 We create that which surpasses us. This is the reproductive instinct at work. Every act of will power presupposes an end, and man presupposes an end that does not yet exist but which is the end of his existence. Now the Romantics did not apparently go so far as to propose the creation of a new superman or overman by means of our own creative efforts, but they did envision the creation of a better, more beautiful world created by their imaginative powers and by their creative efforts. They considered the power of imagination as a means to transform the real world, at least in the form of art. The model they often used, if only implicitly, was the natural world as a beautiful, organized and created world as opposed to the economic and social institutions created by human society, and in contradistinction to the social traditions and morals that governed human activity at the time. Like Nietzsche, they rejected the moral laws that were part of classical society and that governed much of the bourgeois society in which they lived. They perhaps did not consider that the creative efforts of poetry could or should transform the physical nature of human beings, but the aspiration towards a more beautiful world and their attempt to understand more fully the world of nature by correspondences of thought and imagination – i.e. by the creation of illusions – was certainly a key element of their aesthetic vision. The basis for their aspiration was their own natural inclinations according to the laws of nature that they understood, discovered, or at least intuited, as human beings and as poets. For his part, Saint-John Perse was significantly influenced by Nietzsche as well as by romantic poets such as Hugo and Baudelaire, most notably in is major work, “Amers” or “Seamarks”, published in 1957.14 In this work, Perse combines the techniques of epic poetry and classical Greek drama to give an account of the history of human life on earth. He does this from the perspective

ASPIRING BEYOND

369

of the sea that has witnessed the coming and going of diverse human cultures from the beginning of time. The main character or voice of the poem is that of the poet/sailor who inspires a wave of renewal and exaltation among coastal inhabitants, similar in this respect to the role played by Dionysus, the God of theatre and revelry in Greek mythology. The poet’s arrival is in fact anticipated and intuited by the mostly female characters that hear his message and respond to it, a message that mirrors, or inspires their desire to break the chains of social traditions that have imprisoned them for too long. In this sense, Amers is a song of feminine liberation. It encourages women to reject unnatural and contrived morals founded on contempt for nature, morals that mask their sexuality and prevent them from knowing the pleasures of life and love. On many occasions the poem suggests a kind of feminine sexual liberation by means of references to the ancient cult of Aphrodite in which young women who were initiated into the cult offered themselves to strangers, in this way sacrificing their virginity to the goddess.15 In the second and longest section of the poem, which is divided into two distinct parts, the female respondents speak essentially in pairs. Their discourses are organized somewhat historically, but chronology is not the most important factor. The tragic actresses speak first. They are of plebeian abstraction. They lament the fact that the theatre has been silent and abandoned for so long. Their passions have been repressed, their art form neglected. They believe that the poet who approaches will write new tragedies for them, that subsequently they will feel again their passion for life, and that this new and unusual verse will restore to the theatre the glory of days gone by. In spite of their desire for freedom, they are prepared to submit to the rules of the poet’s language and to abandon themselves to this new art form with the hope of renewing their lost art form and their desire. Their abandonment is emotional and intellectual but it has sexual overtones.16 The noble wives of Patriarchs speak next of their boredom and of their submission. Even though they are wealthy and enjoy privileged positions in society, they are ready to abandon their domains, to take to the sea, and to risk the reprisals of their husbands and of the powerful men who govern over the land in their effort to know freedom. They are inspired by the arrival of this new voice whose coming they have intuited, and they are prepared to abandon their life of luxury in order to rekindle their desire for life. The voice of a woman poet then recounts in a realistic fashion the troubling events of her time and the struggle for freedom engaged by women in general through the course of history. Her discourse is followed by the voice of a girl prophet who can no longer interpret the oracles, either because she is unable to, or because she no longer believes in them. The implication is that societal beliefs have changed in the past, albeit not without struggles, and that they

370

V I C T O R K O C AY

will therefore continue to evolve. The poem recounts as it were the efforts of women to free themselves from beliefs and traditions that have enslaved them and suggests that women too can control their destiny. The next discourse or scene is of a group of young girls who seem to be making preparations for a marriage ceremony. They pay homage to women whose struggles have preceded them. In a rather pastoral or romantic setting that again suggests the cult of Aphrodite, these young women seem uninhibited by the moral concerns of women of previous generations. They are close to nature and they accept the laws of nature, including its desires and the pleasures that nature makes possible. And in the last discourse of this series, the young girls speak to the sailor and welcome him ashore. When asked, the sailor explains that he has for a time abandoned the sea, drawn to shore as it were by the force of his sexual desire. The following section of the poem is actually a love scene between a man and a woman. It apparently breaks with the poem’s narrative structure in order to give an example of what sexual relations might be and what they mean. Historical development is here replaced by a present moment, one night that is longer in terms of the number of pages it contains than any of the preceding historical developments. This section of the poem, entitled, “Étroits sont les vaisseaux” (Narrow are the vessels), was originally published separately in 1956. Perse then incorporated it into his previously published poem about the sea in order to create the work known as “Amers”. I see this part of the poem as a kind of Trojan horse fitted into an epic type poem of human liberation for it demonstrates what triumph might look like as opposed to the ongoing struggle for change. It involves a series of discourses between a man and a woman who are lovers. Structurally, therefore, because the previous section of the poem can also be read as a series of discourses, there is continuity between these parts of the poem. And thematically, all of these discourses deal with sexual relations and with human freedom. In “Étroits sont les vaisseaux”, however, the passion of both the man and the women is verbalized and both characters recount their desire and their fears. Basically, the woman fears that her lover will abandon her, and the man feels that he must rejoin the sea in order to satisfy his own desire to be free, although he fears the women’s anger that he suspects his confession will occasion. In spite of their pleasure and their fears, however, the relationship between the two lovers has transformed both of them, and this is where the theme of human destiny is most apparent. The couple was united initially by means of sexual desire. Their inhibition is a rejection of the moral traditions that repress their natural sexuality, and the satisfaction of their desire gives them a glimpse, as it were, into their own destiny as human beings. As both the man and the woman express it, because they have known love they will no longer fear death, for they have understood that each individual is only

ASPIRING BEYOND

371

an appearance or a part of the whole, whereas the whole, on the other hand, is an entity that is never ending and ever changing. Their conclusion is similar, in a sense, to the romantic ideal expressed by Hugo as well as to Nietzsche’s notion of an eternal recurrence. The account of human development and of human civilization proposed by the poem makes it clear that Perse sees the human world as in a constant state of change.17 Once glorious civilizations have disappeared, leaving only a few vestiges and ruins as testimony to the fact that they once existed. It would be perhaps a natural consequence under these circumstances to resign oneself to fate and to believe in predestination, given that individuals by themselves can achieve so little and that they naturally fear their own death. But to see oneself as a member of a race that has established glorious societies in the course of history and that has accomplished great works and great feats is to move beyond individual concerns and to take pride in the human quest for freedom. This is expressed most clearly, albeit metaphorically, in the final short section of Perse’s poem. The notion of “noon”, where the sun is at its highest point in the sky, is used in this section as a symbol of human civilization that is always active, always in the present, and always at its zenith. Perse most likely borrowed this concept from Nietzsche. In the final section of the Will to Power, entitled “Noon and Eternity”, Nietzsche presents his vision for the future and his Dionysian concept of life. He writes that the “happiness that we find in becoming is only possible in the annihilation of the real, of ‘existence’, of beautiful appearance, in the pessimistic destruction of illusion – it is in the annihilation of even the most beautiful appearance that Dionysian happiness is most complete” (Will to Power 547, p. 442). In Perse’s poem, the stranger that arrives by means of the sea and who inspires revelry and sexual desire resembles Dionysus for those reasons. Further, the highest point of the sun in the sky is also a biblical symbol for sexual desire. Motivated by desires such as financial gain, the exploration of new worlds, and including sexual desire, perhaps the strongest and most primeval of desires, human society will continue to thrive, to develop, to crumble and to renew itself. In the poem “Amers”, it is specifically by means of sexual relations that individuals are able to understand that they are part of the human race both physically and historically. Human desire is in this sense a natural desire, the expression of a law of nature, as it is for the Romantics and for Nietzsche. From this perspective sexual desire is also a constituting factor of human nature. It affects every individual and yet it is unusual in that its origins remain mysterious. It has the ability to transform human beings, like wine or drugs can change a psychological state. But the transformation that sexual desire occasions in human beings is not the result of a foreign substance that one consumes. It is

372

V I C T O R K O C AY

present in nature, and individuals can only submit to its presence, given that resistance would seem to be futile. For Perse, this strange yet fascinating aspect of human nature can only come from beyond, let’s say from another world, from a divine world that human beings cannot understand but can only accept as such. For Perse, therefore, sexual desire is like a small part of the divine in human nature. In the discourses of the man and woman, this inference is frequent. The woman says, for example, that her tears “were not the tears of a mortal woman”,18 and her lover responds by making a reference to the God that visited them.19 The woman later states that footsteps seem to be drawing away from her, and that they are not the footsteps of a mortal woman.20 It is thus by means of sexual relations that human beings understand the divine character of their nature, and this understanding allows them to go beyond their own individual concerns, to renounce their fear of death and to embrace life. Further, this divine character of human existence is in fact a quality of human nature for it is human and natural to feel sexual desire. Human destiny, therefore, would be to aspire beyond individual concerns by embracing human nature as it is expressed in reality. The ideal to which the Romantics aspired is therefore embedded in human nature. Although Perse does not advocate for the creation of a superior being, as does Nietzsche, his attempt to acknowledge the ever changing state of reality and of appearances, and to overcome individual fears by means of recourse to a greater power, would seem to make of him a twentieth century romantic, and perhaps even a religious poet. But the divine, in Perse, is embedded in human nature, to the point that it is human nature itself that constitutes the divine. Sexual desire, in this sense, is not to be condemned for religious reasons, but must be embraced as an expression of the divine character of man. In this, his perspective is close to that of Nietzsche. The poem “Amers” is not limited, however, to a theory of sexual desire and relations, for this desire is itself an aspect of the creative drive of human beings, and in this, as well, Perse is close both to the Romantics and to Nietzsche. Poetry is an expression of human desire and creativity. As Perse notes in his Stockholm address, following his acceptance of the Nobel prize for literature in 1960, that is, three years after the publication of “Amers”, religion is born of poetry, and by poetic grace the divine spark lives forever in the human flint (l’étincelle du divin vit à jamais dans le silex humain).21 According to Perse, rather than condemn nature, we must embrace it along with its desires, its pains, and its pleasures, as the Romantics sought to do in their own way, and this will be an embracing of that aspect of human nature that is essentially and primordially human, and this, after all, was Nietzsche’s moral imperative. Human destiny would be, in the words of the poet, to live better and beyond, “Pour vivre mieux, et plus

ASPIRING BEYOND

373

loin.” This was Perse’s reason for writing poetry, as he noted in an interview with Pierre Mazars,22 but for Perse, this is also human destiny, “to live better and to aspire beyond”. St. Francis Xavier University NOTES 1

Alfred de Vigny, “Les Destinées”, Œuvres complètes I, (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1986). In this sense, the Destinies resemble the Greek Moiras or the Furies. Cf. François Germain and André Jarry, in Vigny, ibid., p. 1057. 3 Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations (Paris: Gallimard, 1943, 1973), pp. 86–88. 4 Victor Hugo, Ibid., pp. 111–113. This poem is from book II of Les Contemplations. Like the previous poems discussed, it is also from the cycle of “optimistic” poems. 5 Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Larousse, 1993), pp. 66–67. 6 All references to Nietzche’s works are to the work known as The Will to Power. I have used a translation of the edition compiled by Eric Würzbach (1940), of which a partial translation exists in two vlumes in French (La Volonté de puissance, texte traduit par Genviève Bianquis (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). The numbers given indicate the paragraph in which the passage can be found. I have also given, when possible, a reference to the Colli and Montinari edition, Kritische Studienausgabe (Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), abbreviated as CM. 7 Nietzsche, The Will to Power II, Book IV, op. cit., 453. Although published in The Will to Power, this passage can also be found in The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), cf. CM, vol. 3, pp. 619–622. 8 Ibid., II, Book IV, 461. Cf. CM vol. 13, p. 241. 9 Ibid., I, Book I, 202. Cf. CM vol. 12, p. 396. 10 Ibid., II, Book III, 582 and Book IV, 8. Cf., CM vol. 13, 521 11 Ibid., II, Book III, 615. Cf. CM vol. 9, p. 582. 12 Ibid., II, Book III, 426. Cf. CM vol. 11, p. 160. 13 Ibid., II, Book IV, 300. Cf. CM vol. 13, p. 191 (the passage indicated in CM is not, however, the direct source of the passage referred to in the text). 14 Saint-John Perse, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972, 1982), pp. 253–385. 15 Fernand Comte, Larousse de Mythologies (Paris: Larousse, 2004). 16 At the height of their passion the tragic actresses ask if they must display their sex to the spectators, symbolically giving themselves to strangers: “Nous faudra-t-il, haussant la bure théâtrale, au bouclier sacré du ventre produire le masque chevelu du sexe [. . .]”. Cf. Perse, op. cit., p. 289. 17 One can also see the notion of constant change in Perse as a reference the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, to whom Perse has referred on other occasions. 18 Perse, op. cit., p. 337. 19 The reference is most likely to the cult of Cybele. Cf. Fernand Comte, op. cit. 20 Perse, op. cit., p. 141. 21 Perse, “Discours de Stockholm”, in Œuvres complètes, op. cit., p. 445. 22 Perse, “Extraits d’une interview de Pierre Mazars”, Ibid., p. 576. Cf. “Une journée à la villa Vigneaux”, Le Figaro littéraire, 5 November, 1960. 2

BRUCE ROSS

W O R D S T U R N I N T O S T O N E H A RU K I M U R A K A M I ’ S A F T E R T H E Q UA K E

ABSTRACT

Haruki Murakami’s after the quake (2002) collects six stories that are emotional reckonings of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Suggestive of Kafka and magic realist writing, the finely crafted stories are ruminations over the perennial issues of living and dying and the Buddhist idea of suffering, dukkah. A critique of the malaise and conformism of Murakami’s generation, after the quake approaches a resolution through the equation of one’s psyche and catastrophe. What he suggests through the metaphor of dance is that suffering is mediated by the heart. Yoshiya in “all god’s children can dance” states it thusly: “Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another. All God’s children can dance.” Japanese culture has had an intriguing way of adapting other cultures’ surface representations, refining them, and making them its own. One looks at McDonald’s in Tokyo serving Japanese-oriented food, the adaptation of baseball with new Japanese-oriented rules and ceremonies, and the Japanese Disneyland with Japanese-oriented theme rides and services. The short story writer and novelist Haruki Murakami has been accused by Japanese literary critics of being too influenced by the West. In his fiction that is set in Tokyo and other cities there is an immediately recognizable surface culture of Western jazz and contemporary rock and character attitudes linked to existential Western fiction and philosophy and a neo-Beat lifestyle. Yet his fiction is really guided by a decidedly Japanese aesthetic tension between an aesthetic of surface display, i’ki (stylish, fashionable), and an aesthetic of Buddhist philosophy, dukkah (grief, human suffering), notwithstanding thematic borrowings from Western detective fiction, postmodern novels, and magic realist writing. In the stream of modern and postmodern serious Japanese fiction, Murakami is the central representative of the latter. The impressionistic style of Yasunari Kawataba, Japan’s first Nobel laureate for literature, in his signature novel Snow Country (English translation 1956), an exploration of fated love and natural beauty, evokes traditional Japanese culture. Junichiro Tanizaki represents 375 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 375–382. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

376

BRUCE ROSS

a transition and resistance to the modern period and Western influence, as in the novel Some Prefer Nettles (English translation 1955) in which the main character Kaname must choose between his wife and tradition (symbolized by the puppet theater) and Eurasian prostitute Louisa (symbolizing the modern Western world). More telling for his criticism of Murakami is the 1994 Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe. His critique of post-World War II Japanese culture is founded on Continental and American existentialist thought and literary theory and reflective of his generation’s disillusionment, often using sexual metaphors to symbolize the occupation of Japan. His central symbol is the retarded child, based on his own son, who represents a breakdown of communication between generations. Throughout his work this child is associated with an idealized forest symbolic of Japan’s traditional nature-based culture. Certainly the particularly Japanese version of the postmodern condition is predicated upon the presiding affect of World War II and the overriding encroachment of a Westernstyled Pacific Rim soft technology. Yet for Murakami in his fictionalized critiques of the conformism of the so-called salary man through Westernized sensibilities and postmodern fables, which Oe and others might have thought non-Japanese and philosophically and aesthetically non-rigorous, two more recent events in Japan momentarily eclipsed the legacy of post-World War II disillusionment and conformity. Perhaps Oe relented and awarded Murakami the prestigious Yomiuri prize for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1992–1995) because, although it included Murakami’s typical of realism and fantasy, one of its subject was the Japanese war crimes in Manchuria. Murakami had been traveling in Europe and America in the company of a Japanese therapist and had settled in America writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle while undoubtedly absorbing American popular culture. He however returned to Japan after the Aum Shinrikyo gas attack, resulting in a non-fiction collection of interviews with the attack’s victims, Underground, and the Kobe earthquake, resulting in another collection of stories with fantasy elements, after the quake (1999–2000). Both works were attempts to reconcile the affects of these events on the Japanese people. In one case the testimonies spoke for themselves. In the other case Murakami attempted to resolve the massive natural disaster in Kobe through mythic elements. Murakami has said he was motivated to write fiction because of Kafka and was in fact awarded the 2006 Czech Franz Kafka for his novel Kafka on the Shore (English translation 2005). The affinities are apparent. The anonymous and threatening bureaucratic structures of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, each with endlessly deferred resolution, perhaps critiquing then contemporary European social structures, match the critique of the modern Japanese corporate enterprise and the resulting malaise and conformism in Murakami’s work.

WORDS TURN INTO STONE

377

The fantastic elements used as expressionistic symbols in Kafka’s well-known “The Metamorphosis” or any of the tales in his Parables and Paradoxes (1935), such as “The Tower of Babel” and “The Hunger Artist,” match the fantastic elements used as expressionist projections of the psyche in most of Murakami’s work. However, a Japanese precursor of Murakami’s who has been compared to Kafka, Kobo Abe, also deserves comparison. Kobo Abe’s existentialist novel The Woman in the Dunes (English translation 1964) repeats the Sisyphus myth in a realistically rendered remote seaside village. The senseless captivity of the main character and overall threatening atmosphere recalls Kafka’s novels and Murakami’s reckoning of the Kobe earthquake with a variety of mythic devices. Mythic elements occur from the earliest period of Murakami’s fiction, his so-called “Rat Trilogy,” Hear the Wind Sing (1979), Pinball (1980), and A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). A sequel, Dance, Dance, Dance (1988) is formulated on the i’ki or stylish surface culture of contemporary Japan, with lavish attention afforded to bars, entertainment, contemporary Western jazz and pop music, and gourmet food preparation. It features the characteristic disjointed structure, here a hallucinatory dreamlike shifting of mental states and settings, and fantastic elements, here an elevator leading to a different dimension, of Murakami fiction. Basically a detective thriller, the main character searches for a lost love while moving through a world organized on magical causality not unlike that in fairy tales or primal society myth. He is accompanied by a psychic teenage girl and receives cryptic instructions from the Sheep Man, an inhabitant of another dimension. The collection The Elephant Vanishes (1994) reintroduces the element of dream hallucination and alternate reality in one of its tales “The Dancing Dwarf” (1984) which begins: “A dwarf came into my dream and asked me to dance. I knew this was a dream, but I was just as tired in my dream as in real life at the time. So, very politely, I declined. The dwarf was not offended but danced alone instead.”1 This is not unlike, in matter-of-fact tone and fantastic occurrence, the beginning of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” The tales of this collection again like Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes are well crafted, and, as with Murakami’s following short stories, the disjointed shifting style of Dance, Dance, Dance is replaced by a direct flow of narrative time and structure. That approach is found in the title story “The Elephant Vanishes” (1985) which begins: “When the elephant disappeared from our town’s elephant house, I read about it in the newspaper.”2 In a conversation with a companion about that event, the narrator reveals he had observed something strange the day before the elephant disappeared, the elephant and its trainer shrinking. What he claims to have observed is a dimensional warp: It was a mysterious sight. Looking through the vent, I had the feeling that a different, chilling kind of time was

378

BRUCE ROSS

flowing through the elephant house—but nowhere else. And it seemed to me, too, that the elephant and the keeper were gladly giving themselves over to this new order that was trying to envelop them—or that had already partially succeeded in enveloping them.3 A paradigm shift had occurred quite naturally here. Or has the narrator lost his mind? In retrospect he notes: “I never should have told her about the elephant. It was not the kind of story you could tell freely to anyone.”4 Why would the narrator want to be protective of this story? Would it reflect that he was indeed mad? That he might actually be mad is supported by a declared shift in perception after the witnessed fantastic event: I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me. Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomena to strike my eye in a strange way. It’s probably something in me.5 Yet he is not mad. Rather, he is more akin to Dostoyevsky’s underground man as a spokesperson for a critique of culture. The story concludes with Murakami’s criticism of his generation’s conformism and technological economy: I continue to sell refrigerators and toaster ovens and coffeemakers in the pragmatic world, based on afterimages of memories I retain from this world. The more pragmatic I try to become, the more successfully I sell—our campaign has succeeded beyond our most optimistic forecasts—and the more people I succeed in selling myself to. That’s probably because people are looking for a kind of unity in this kit-chin we know as the world. Unity of design. Unity of color. Unity of function.6 This conformism and economy were also critiqued in “The Dancing Dwarf” in which the narrator works in a factory absurdly reconstituting elephants to produce more elephants than would naturally be produced, each with the company’s logo on one of its heals. The dwarf that encourages the narrator to dance symbolizes an evident attempt to escape such a culture. The tale “The Little Green Monster” (1991) of the collection begins: “My husband left for work as usual, and I couldn’t think of anything to do.”7 The bored housewife narrator is offered an escape from her malaise by a creature that has come from the depths to offer her love which she rejects by destroying the creature. This story is again both a critique of conformism and an examination of the psyche in such a culture. The theme of violence seems to be a byproduct of the society Murakami fiction inhabits. It is interspersed throughout Dance, Dance, Dance and occurs as expressionist hallucinatory murder in both “The Dancing Dwarf”

WORDS TURN INTO STONE

379

and “The Little Green Monster.” Murakami’s implication seems to be that the psyche, perhaps Jung’s “shadow,” will attempt to undermine the overly conformed self. What happens when that “shadow” actually appears in an already conflicted society is ruminated over in the interviews of Underground. What happens likewise when apparently natural disaster occurs within such a society and how this relates to the psyche is the subject of after the quake. after the quake (English translation 2002) follows The Elephant Vanishes in its well-crafted Kafkaesque stories in which fantastic elements are introduced for symbolic value into an otherwise seemingly realistic narrative. A mythic element is casually introduced in the first of the six stories in the collection, “ufo in kushiro” (1999). The wife of the protagonist Komura, a hi-fi equipment salesman, leaves him because he is emotionally empty. While delivering a black box to a friend’s sister, he is told the story of a housewife who sees a UFO and disappears a week later. Komura during a tryst with the sister’s friend becomes enraged when she taunts him: “ . . . that box contains the something that was inside you . . . you’ll never get it back.”8 The social emptiness of these characters is mediated by the mythic UFO, which is referred to as a ghost story, and casual sexual exchange in which the friend “traced a complicated design on Komura’s chest with her fingertip, as if casting a magic spell.”9 Yoshiya in “all god’s children can dance” (1999) is celebrated by his girlfriend for his life force when he dances “like a frog in the rain!”10 Yoshiya realizes in a trance dance revelation that primitive forces inhabit both his psyche and deep inside the earth, the latter a source of earthquakes. In “landscape with flatiron” (1999) Komura’s malaise in which she feels “completely empty”11 is offset by a trance experience while staring at a bonfire. She explains: “ . . . all of a sudden you get very clear about something people don’t usually notice in everyday life . . . I get this deep kind of feeling.”12 She is contrasted to an old painter’s recurring dream of suffocation in a refrigerator. The most developed inroad of mythic occurrence occurs in the tale “thailand” (1999). The protagonist Satsuki while on vacation is introduced to a soothsayer who tells her there is a stone with Japanese writing inside her body which must be removed. She further tells her she will dream about a fearful serpent coming out of a wall which she must grab and adds: “Hold on to it with both hands. Think of it as your life, and hold on to it with all your strength. Keep holding it until you wake from your dream. The snake will swallow your stone for you.”13 The story “super-frog saves Tokyo” (1999) is a neo-traditional fable in which a talking frog enlists an old man, Katagiri, to battle a huge worm beneath Tokyo in order to avert an earthquake. Likewise, “honey pie” (2000) begins with a neo-traditional fable about a bear told to the young girl Sala but focuses on Sala’s recurring nightmare of the “Earthquake Man.” Overall,

380

BRUCE ROSS

the tales of after the quake incorporate Murakami’s usual concerns with the failures of modern Japan but obviously focus on the emotional outwash of the Kobe earthquake and the perennial issues of love and death. Yoshiya’s realization in “all god’s children can dance” that there is a relationship between his psyche’s primitive forces and those beneath the earth which cause earthquakes has set up an equation to understand primal destructive forces as in the Kobe earthquake. In the story “thailand,” Katagiri is asked to literally confront these threatening underground forces concretized in a fantastic worm. In “honey pie” those forces are symbolized by the “Earthquake Man,” the recurring nightmare created by the child Sala’s psyche traumatized by TV images of the earthquake. Her de-facto father Junpei realizes that his love for Sala and her mother will protect them from the metaphoric “Earthquake Man.” The story “landscape with flatiron” similarly resolves Junko’s malaise and Miyake’s nightmare of destruction through a shared confrontation with death by simply sharing the existential weight of the symbolized Kobe trauma through facing mortality together. Junko states the matter simply: “I’ve never thought about how I was going to die . . . I “can’t” think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to ‘live.’ ”14 Miyake offers, through the perennial issue of philosophy, a kind of resolution: “But there’s such a thing as a way of living that’s guided by the way a person’s going to die.”15 The fact that human emotion might precipitate physical illness is a mainstay of Eastern and holistic thought. In terms of myth, as in the stories of after the quake, the equation is a kind of revelation. Of the stories “thailand” amplifies most the equation in a psychological context. Satsuki learns this equation from her guide Nimit: “If you devote all of your future energy to living, you will not be able to die well. You must begin to shift gears, a little at a time. Living and dying are, in a sense, of equal value.”16 She comes to realize that the symbolic egg buried inside her is in fact the stored up hatred for a man who abandoned her long ago. Her thoughts reveal the equation: “She hoped that he would die in agony. In order to bring it about, she had gone so far as to wish in the depths of her heart for an earthquake. In a sense . . . I am the one that caused that earthquake.”17 Satsuki anguishes over the child she never gave birth to. In effect this is her own inner self that must be regained through the exorcism. Nimit figuratively summarizes the issue for her: “Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone.”18 Yoshiya in his final epiphany also realizes the same thing: “Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another. All God’s children can dance.”19 What matters, no matter what happens, including earthquakes, is the inner self and the heart. The psychological catharsis expressed through the stories of after the quake is predicated upon

WORDS TURN INTO STONE

381

this wisdom. The weighty Buddhist issue of dukkah, suffering, is mediated by kokoro, the heart. This wisdom in after the quake under the stress of the Kobe destruction and in other of Murakami’s fiction within the challenge of the postmodern condition is represented by the metaphor of dance, the open-hearted, if at times i’ki-constructed, figuration that brings into the open the simple truth of our being. Moreover, there might be embedded in the stories of after the quake an ancient symbolism. The eighth century Kojiki is the oldest collection of Japanese legends and the fundamental text of the native Japanese religion Shinto. In an early section the sun goddess Amaterasu is offended by her unruly brother who has desecrated some holy places. She retreats to a cave covered with a stone door, thus precipitating endless darkness. She is coaxed out as is the sunlight by another goddess’s attempt to touch Amaterasu’s heart in ritual dance: Moreover Ama no Uzume no Mikoto, ancestress of the Sarume Chieftain, took in her hand a spear wreathed with Eulaila grass, and standing before the door of the Rock-Cave of Heaven, skillfully performed a mimic dance. She took, moreover, the true Sakaki tree of the Heavenly Mount Kagu, and made of it a head-dress, she took club-moss and made of it braces, she kindled fires, she place a tub bottom upwards, and gave forth a divinely-inspired utterance.20 Here at the beginning of Japanese culture is the metaphor for dealing with natural disaster and perhaps psychological trauma. One removes the mythic and symbolic stones and opens the heart by dancing. By the looks of the goddess’s dress and accessories, not to mention her impressive singing and dancing, however fervid, there may have even been a bit of the popular i’ki style in her. Hampden, Maine NOTES 1

Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes, trans. Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 242. 2 The Elephant Vanishes, p. 308. 3 The Elephant Vanishes, pp. 325–326. 4 The Elephant Vanishes, p. 326. 5 The Elephant Vanishes, p. 327. 6 The Elephant Vanishes, p. 327. 7 The Elephant Vanishes, p. 153. 8 Haruki Murakami, after the quake, trans. Jay Rubin (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), p. 22. 9 after the quake, p. 23. 10 after the quake, p. 65.

382 11

BRUCE ROSS

after the quake, p. 43. after the quake, p. 36. 13 after the quake, p. 85. 14 after the quake, p. 42. 15 after the quake, p. 42. 16 after the quake, p. 87. 17 after the quake, p. 87. 18 after the quake, p. 88. 19 after the quake, p. 68. 20 Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. I, compiled by Ryusaku Tsunoda, Wm. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 28. 12

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

O N T H E M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F FAT E , D E S T I N Y, L I F E , D O O M A N D L U C K I N T H E L I G H T O F H E N RY JA M E S ’ S T H E P O R T R A I T O F A L A DY

To my mother, who enlightened me so much. Il y a quelque chose en moi, Au fond de moi, au centre de moi, Quelque chose d’infiniment aride. V. Larbaud. ABSTRACT

We shall set out through the five sections of this paper the opposition that structures the existence of the modern or rather average individuality, which lies in the impossibility of conciliating the objective or properly sociohistorical determinations thereof (which is what in other times was called “fate”) with its subjective or psychological framework (that is to say, the “destiny” that each tries to build up by himself). This is due to the pretension for the part of the individual of a self-rule that is not conceived however in accordance with the formal universality of reason but with the material particularity of imagination and desire, whose dialectics prevents the identification of the two planes that we have just mentioned, which is a condition of the modern culture that plays havoc with the traditional order of existence and with the concomitant valuation of functions and personal aims. Of course, this explains why life is for the modern culture a lot more dramatic, passional and sorrowful than what it was for Antiquity. Now, the analysis of this phenomenon is developed through the novel of James because, according to our approach, the phenomenon at issue is all the more perceptible in the case of a feminine consciousness since women were until some decades ago supposed to maintain and hand down the ideal framework of existence, which contradicts point by point the pretension of having an original destiny. The development of all this leads to the aberrant metamorphosis of liberty into a doom that at firs sight seems to be unavoidable, which explains why infelicity, far from being accidental or dispensable, appears all of a sudden as the utmost object of desire for whom is after a full life, which goes hand-in-hand with the tenant that 383 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 383–417. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

384

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

everyone is doomed to endure a meaningless wretchedness even in the middle of the best material and cultural conditions, whereby a rampant nihilism rides roughshod over whatever idealization of existence. However, precisely because of the lack of an ideality, the own dynamics of the process allows to resort to the unforeseeable possibilities wherewith luck transmogrifies even the most baneful life. I. F AT E

What would do with her life a woman that with neither suffering nor struggle had everything within her reach? A woman that were young, beautiful, mettlesome, smart, cultivated, immensely rich, that had none to answer for or none to obey, that were single, parentless, childless, alien to yearning or homesickness and, in a word, serenely rootless? A woman that did not want just to enjoy life but, with all the go of her youth, wanted to be absorbed in her inner unfolding, to delve into all her possibilities and to come by the utmost experience of her humanity without her being marred by pride or haughtiness but neither by the common or garden aims of feminine existence such as romance, marriage and breeding? Taking into account all the conditions that we have just set out, it could seem that we daydream and speak of a will-o’-the-wisp that should rather belong to the kingdom of illusion than to a secular society made up by beings of flesh and bone very conscious of their rights and obligations; however, the fullness of the characterization must not beguile us, for we speak of a woman such as Henry James imagined her in The Portrait of a Lady, within a socio-historical reality that had burgeoned through the nineteenth-century and that attained its utter expression in the first half of twentieth-century: the apparition of the modern individual that is aprioristically free from whatever natural or transcendent duty regarding reality, society or even himself, so that he can do whatever he likes and shape his life in accordance with his personal wants while he prevents everyone from meddling with him, which, on the one hand, makes a lot more problematic or even dangerous the inter-subjective relationships and, on the other, endows the individual choices and experiences with a dramatism that would doubtlessly have been preposterous before the destruction at the end of the eighteenth-century of the metaphysical identity of nature and life, which made for the first time conceivable an individual free from the traditional determinations of existence, the main whereof was that odd determination called fate, which implies that there is an all-embracing determination of existence that acts beyond the own will or even against it. Fate always prevails over the personal intentions, wants o wishes. As I make out the issue, insofar as Modernity is defined by the unity of a critical rationality, of the self-rule of the individual will and of the infinitude

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

385

of desire, there seems to be no room for fate in it short of in a metaphorical or rather vague import of the concept that assimilates it to “haphazard” and that at any rate places the action of fate on the field of irrationality. In fact, for a reason that only yields sound knowledge within the limits of a universal and necessary experience, “fate” smacks of those phantasmagorical chimeras wherewith metaphysics and, by and large, ignorance, have endlessly troubled man.1 Withal, a conception of the selfhood that (independently of the weakness of the concrete human being that is perceptible at the least touch) takes for granted the capacity of everyone to overcome whatever vital determination alien to his conscience, has perforce to dismiss fate as the badge of a sham ideality, just another variation of the would-be repressive obscurantism of other times, and the same happens with the endless strength of desire, which belies downright the inexorable stint that fate is supposed to lay on human existence. Thus, the formal unity of reason, self-rule and desire, which is the general ground of all the modern conceptions of man,2 contradicts as a whole the possibility that fate plays a meaningful or rather a rational part in the unfolding of existence, which is why, as we have just pointed out, to be modern is by definition to lack fate and, even more, to assume such a lack not as a wretchedness but as the very essence of liberty and of a utterly immanent or profane conception of existence. For what would be the case of vindicating fate when the own existence hinges entirely upon the personal capacity of transfiguring it? And although at the very onset of the nineteenth-century Goethe and the host of romantic poets that he spearheaded linked this capacity with the assumption of a trans-historical fate, whereof the best proof is the reformulation of the myth of Faust, the fact is that the myth itself implicated that such a possibility was beyond the scope of the average individual and had a sense utterly alien to the existence of his and to the socio-cultural order that made understandable it.3 Thereby, despite the poetic actualization of fate, the idea of a transcendent determination of individual life remained kindred to metaphysics, religion and art, if not to a lucubration of a dangerous ilk. Now, although we set aside the heroic conception of the individuality that the romantic idealism upheld, we have still to see if the a priori self-rule of each one is compatible with the untimely character of life that is a lot more overwhelming for the average individual than for the poetic hero, since the latter has by principle to fulfil his own fate, whereas the former always runs the risk of making a wrong choice due to an unexpected factor that he cannot foresee or integrate with his precedent development. For the average individual, there is no predetermined link between life and achievement, and the possibility of forging it seems to be beforehand belied by the adamant strength of the own past that is expressed through the character of the individual but also and above all by the irruption of chance, which more often than not exceeds the

386

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

imagination of whom moves on a plane that has no room for the truly unforeseeable, the revelation of a way of being that is beyond whatever previous guide. In other words, since the average individual is by definition circumscribed to a certain level wherein he defines himself, whatever happening that transmogrifies his life can conceal the destruction of his own happiness by the revelation of a heroic possibility that is nevertheless beyond his reach; in such a case, he will have lost his previous tranquillity without having come by a deeper consciousness of his own being, which is the very essence of that modern archetype that has meaningfully been called the antihero, whereof one of the best instances is Isabel Archer, the protagonist of The Portrait of a Lady, who embodies the apparently insurmountable opposition of a life that expresses the momentum of the own will and a chance that reveals a liberty that exceeds not so much the moral resoluteness of the character as her imaginativeness.4 First things first. The feature that defines Isabel throughout is the disparity existing between her psychological framework, her objective life and the all-embracing determination of fate that without previous warn goes to meet her through the fabulous fortune that she inherits. On the one hand, since the moment when she appears in the novel, she exhibits a “comprehensiveness of observation”5 that goes by far beyond the dilettantism or the shallowness of the would-be sage; she is not after pleasure or excitement, she does not aim at having a theoretical solution to the riddles of life, she only wants to unfold her own being: She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world.6

For Isabel, then, life possesses an intuitive sense that has nothing to do either with the poetic vision of reality or with the compulsoriness that leads fate; she wants to embrace all the possibilities within her reach, not on behalf of a ghostly ideal but under the aegis of her own drives that, unlike the mythic yearning of the Faustian hero, have not a metaphysical sense but a strictly empirical aim: they are just the elements indispensable to build up a truly personal existence without breaking nevertheless with the average individuality. Due to that, when, for instance, a perfect life seems to arise under the opportunity of the best marriage that anyone could have desired, Isabel simply dismisses it and goes on: She couldn’t marry Lord Warburton; the idea failed to support any enlightened prejudice in favour of the free exploration of life that she had hitherto entertained or was now capable of entertaining. [. . .] What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

387

pretended to be larger than these large, these fabulous occasions? If she wouldn’t do such a thing as that then she must do great things, she must do something greater. Poor Isabel found ground to remind herself from time to time that she must not be too proud, and nothing could be more sincere than her prayer to be delivered from such a danger.7

The refusal to marry Lord Warburton, which would be an aberration from whatever objective slant, is understandable when one sees it in the light of an existence whose sole form of transcendence lies in the imaginative flow of feeling: even an aristocratic marriage that is withal based on love can be a handicap to experience life when one is carried away by the illusion of a total fulfilment. Isabel is certainly as learned as mettlesome, but her being is stark absorbed by the oddest desire: to feel intensely each moment, to drain the cup of life to the dregs provided nevertheless that she will not become intoxicated: her soul is neither sublime nor mystic, and she just wants to vibrate intensely enough to be self-assured. Thereat, she does not search for a would-be poetic existence but for the sentimental framework indispensable to live more consciously. And this goal is so important for her that it makes her reject both the marriage with Lord Warburton, which would have been the utmost boon for a woman of subtle spirit, and the keen and distressing love that Caspar Goodwood feels for her, which would have been the maximum for a woman of powerful passions; but neither of these two options entice Isabel because she prefers to live imaginatively to live sublimely or passionately, which is all the more evident when she explains to Ralph why she has decided to marry Osmond: “You must have changed immensely. A year ago you valued your liberty beyond everything. You wanted only to see life”. “I’ve seen it”, said Isabel. “It doesn’t look to me now, I admit, such an inviting expanse”. “I don’t pretend it is; only I had an idea that you took a genial view of it and wanted to survey the whole field”. “I’ve seen that one can’t do anything so general. One must choose a corner and cultivate that”.8

The corner whereof Isabel speaks is nothing more than the average existence that accrues to the immanence and normalization that modernity has spread throughout thanks to the reduction of the metaphysical priority of fate to the determination of life by the choices of a subject that dispenses with the recesses of the human heart or with the conundrums of existence, which had gone handin-hand with the development of an array of sentimental and moral framework that allow everyone to come by the greatest intensity without trespassing the sancta sanctorum of normality. Due in part to this drastic reduction and also to the lack of a genuine farsightedness for the part of Isabel (her keenness is more a juvenile ingenuousness than a personal insight), she is incapable of discovering anything in the vast ocean of experience and consequently chooses at each

388

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

moment the situation more suitable to a concreteness that instead of standing for the sublime, almost borders on the grotesque: “The world lay before her – she could do whatever she chose. There was a deep thrill in it all, but for the present her choice was tolerably discreet; she chose simply to walk back from Euston Square to her hotel”.9 Which, of course, does not entail at all that the archetype that Isabel embodies has perforce to be mean or vulgar; these features rather point at the fact that it has to circumscribe to a sphere of action that is exceedingly narrow when compared with the strength of the own illusions, which confirms the contradiction that Isabel has willy-nilly to face as a character and as a badge: she surrenders to a sheer daydream but remains emotionless when life unfolds before her with all its strength; thus, when she rebuffs practically at the same time two magnificent opportunities of experiencing the greatness of love or of passion, she obeys a historical determination that expresses itself through a temperament and through the election of certain vital goals that should be meaningless before a real want of living beyond normality, which is by the by what the myth of the Faustian individual proposes: that is to say, Isabel prefers to recreate her illusions to carry them out, and that is so because, despite her audacity and cleverness, she is not a heroine; she is imaginative and zestful, which can be too much for an average existence, but not for a truly personal one. Due to all this, it is not surprising that Isabel is unable to integrate in the illusory world where she lives the very bedrock of her existence that she comes across as if by magic: the tremendous power of money. Ironically, the only ilk of transcendence within her reach is beyond her comprehensiveness, and she receives it without making the least imaginative effort to grasp that she owes it entirely to her cousin Ralph, who, in spite of his cynicism and perfunctoriness regarding most things, loves Isabel and wants to provide her with the material means to accomplish her illusions; oddly enough, she never gets to guess the part that he has played in her life and thinks that she owes her fortune to the will of his father, an old banker that had spent his last years as a cripple; now, although Isabel knows that the brief relationship that she maintained with Ralph’s father was deep and tender, she also is aware that that would not justify that he had inherited her with so much money unless there would be a powerful reason for that, which she, nevertheless, takes for granted with that shortsightedness that she always exhibits when she should really be ken, so that she just discovers the truth at the end of the novel, when it is too late both for Ralph and for her. And this unconsciousness concerning how she got to be so well-to-do reappears time and time again during the work simply because Isabel is not up to the freedom that money allows her to enjoy, which reinforces withal the moral inconsistency perceptible beneath her aspirations: she says all the time that she wants to be free, and when she has the possibility at hand, she searches

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

389

desperately the way to avoid it. When in her first encounter with Ralph after the demise of Mr. Touchett she discusses with him the question of the inheritance, she sets out the perplexity and the uneasiness that she experiences before the possibility of using wrongly her richness, and the reason is no other than her incapability of going beyond the almost oneiric sphere wherein she has settle her own existence: I’m absorbed in myself – I look at life too much as a doctor’s prescription. Why indeed should we perpetually be thinking whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a hospital? Why should I be so afraid of not doing right? As if it mattered to the world whether I do right or wrong!10

This passage confirms that Isabel’s perplexity before her fortune is due to the narrowmindedness of hers, to the chimerical character of her conception of a vital fulfilment and to the abstract sense of the moral values that she vainly tries to put into practice, which ends up in a breakdown because she, without being properly selfish or mean, never breaks away from the worries and wants of the average existence, which is, I repeat, a socio-historical condition that imposes itself over the good will of the character: “I try to care more about the world than about myself -but I always come back to myself. It is because I’m afraid [. . .] A large fortune means freedom, and I’m afraid of that”.11 And it is needless to say that this fear evinces the disparity existing between the psychological framework of Isabel, her objective resources and a freedom for which she is not ready, which on the other hand proofs that the average individuality is not only a social determination but a inner structuring of the selfhood whose more important outcome is the alienation of everyone (in this case, of Isabel) regarding what could have been a desirable fate, at least in the light of the own illusions. For although the ancient transcendence of fate demanded that it appeared without previous warning and that it deployed throughout existence at the cost of the intentions of the individual (whereof the best instance is doubtlessly Oedipus),12 there must at any rate be a minimum fitting between its all-embracing advance and the personality of the individual, which in the case of the Hellenic tragedy was provided by the fact that the hero was always a king or a member of the royalty and in the case of the romantic poetry by the fact that he was a creator beyond good and evil.13 But since the average individual knows neither metaphysical greatness nor poetic creativity, he cannot fathom how something that transcends the normal causality of life transmogrifies it suddenly from the root, and it is this lack of understanding of the unforeseeable that leads him to his fall. It is preposterous or perhaps pathetic how Isabel strives through the novel to set aside her money and to act only on the supposition that her life can still have a purely sentimental ground with

390

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

an aesthetical glow, without realizing that she is what she is because of her purchasing power. The paradox that Isabel faces sheds light on how Fate, the all-embracing determination that sweeps every personal intention and destroys every personal accomplishment, is literally fatidic when the individual is unable to broaden his vision of things so as to face a possibility that he had neither anticipated nor desired in the way it appears, which demands, more than to set aside the own desire, to find out other aims to fulfil it, which is feasible both for the tragic and the romantic hero thanks to the natural or the poetical link of his with reality but is impossible for the average individual insofar as he is alien to that and just intends to remain within the appeasing boundaries of normality. What Isabel should require is then to assume her wants not as mental projections but as the bedrock of the intersubjective and disruptive framework of life that she passes over inadvertently provided that she is going to sustain the daydream of a sublime love for beauty together with Osmond, which is why the final upshot of her fortune is her total misery: At bottom her money had been a burden, has been on her mind, which was filled with the desire to transfer the weight of it to some other conscience, to some more prepared receptacle. What would lighten her own conscience more effectually than to make it over to the man with the best taste in the world? Unless she should have given it to a hospital here would have been nothing better she could do with it; and there was not charitable institution in which she had been as much interested as in Gilbert Osmond.14

The awful vacuity of an existence that should have been lived zestfully and that should have been bountifully shared with the people that had made it possible, is a lurid testimony of the meaninglessness of fate in the absence of a metaphysical and moral framework that allows to integrate imaginatively the own drives with the own self-rule but also with the brutishness of nature and with the unfairness of society. In other words, the lesson that fate is traditionally supposed to teach, the possibility of overcoming sorrow and of being free of the own past, is out of the reach of the average individual because of the socio-historical determination that makes him understandable. II. D E S T I N Y

After having set forth how the meaninglessness of fate goes hand in hand with the reduction of life to the aims of the average individual that goes to his ruin precisely when he thinks that he is fulfilling his utmost desire, let us revert to the array of questions that we have asked at the onset of the foregoing section: what could take over fate as the adamant determination of the existence that the nineteenth-century pragmatism put, at least theoretically or imaginatively,

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

391

within the reach of a woman that were mistress of her life and that only hinged upon her own will to be what she wanted? Precisely that determination called “destiny”, which, briefly said, means that there is a way of shaping one’s life by the sheer strength of the own will. Of course, this definition implies the possibility that the individual makes a mistake on choosing the means to carry out what he considers to be his destiny or, which would be equally catastrophic, that he ended up overwhelmed by his ideals. Thus, retaking what we have said, the stints of Isabel, her lack of a real mettle and the would-be momentousness of her daydreams that so grotesquely contradict her freedom, would be a more than enough reason to explain why she, who flaunted her contempt for all the conventionalisms at the onset of the novel, finishes crushed by the most conventional of the individuals, which, as we have also seen, is due to her incapability of availing herself of her money. Thus, despite the absence of an all-embracing fate that compels her to perform the traditional feminine roles (which come down to marriage or romance), her resources bring about her bane simply because on exercising her liberty, she willy-nilly strays from the security that whatever archetype offers and faces the uncertainty and the perils of coexistence that are all the more overwhelming for someone simultaneously insightful and feeble. For if the possibility of breaking with a would-be natural feminine role by no means implies a conscious transgression but simply the use of a possibility that had until the nineteenth-century been conceivable only for men, it can accrue to a selfhood that is determined no more by the action of fate but by the only ilk of transcendence wherewith modernity can deal on the plane of the sheer individuality: the mental one, whether that means the passional drives or the framework that one imposes in this case over the own existence. Now, if the possibility of doing what one wants is determinant for the modern subjectivity, it is doubly so for the feminine structuring thereof, which makes a lot more disturbing the rejection of whatever natural or cultural determination that tries to hold sway over the individual consciousness. Thus, in accordance with our slant, what Isabel stands for in The Portrait of a Lady is a feminine character that, being free from the stint of fate because of her lack of personal ties and having decided to experience the best of life on every plane, just needs to choice how to fulfil her innermost desire, which is to have a destiny by herself, as James himself explains: The point is, however, that this single small corner-stone, the conception of a certain woman affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for the large building of The Portrait of a Lady. It came to be a square and spacious house [. . .] But, such as it is, it had to be put up round my young woman while she stood there in perfect isolation. That is to me, artistically speaking, the circumstance of interest [. . .] By what process of logical accretion was this slight “personality”, the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?15

392

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

For the understanding of what follows, it will be useful to note that although James emphasizes in the passage that Isabel must face her destiny, the use of the term there must not mislead us, for in this case it is not synonymous of “fate”; on the contrary, the destiny that Isabel will face through the novel means the fulfilment of a conscious desire, the identity between actions and consequences and also the way of valuating all that in accordance with a personal vision of life, which is the real meaning that destiny has not only for the character but for modernity as a whole. Thereby, although the term “destiny” is usually interpreted as synonymous of “fate”, they just share for us the minimum reference to the determination of life, which is important because, as James has told us, Isabel Archer is not only a character but, so to speak, a badge that stands for an unheard-of possibility, the woman that, being stark alien to all the attributes wherewith tradition endowed feminine existence (the main whereof was, of course, the subjection to a masculine authority), looks zestfully or even iconoclastically for a selfhood of her own beyond the regulatory ideality that, as we have hereinabove pointed out, is the part that fate played in existence for Antiquity. The identification, then, of Isabel with a historical type beyond the ladyship that heralds from the title of the work the ideal identity of hers, is not mainly due to the well known rejection for the part of James of whatever kind of literature based on anecdotes, rejection that the writer sets forth in the preface of the novel some lines before the passage that we have just quoted; it is rather the announcement that the reader is going to grapple through the novel with a very different issue: to imagine the existence of a woman that, because of her original lack of vital links and withal of historical and cultural precedents, were absolutely free from the burden of the feminine duties and, above all, of the feminine ideals, the main whereof is to find the sense of the own life by the side of a man. Contrary to that, the ladyship of Isabel, if she has any, will lie in being indifferent to the external disposition of the social functions and only heeding her inner wants, as she downright states in a dialogue: “I shall always tell you”, her aunt answered, “whenever I see you taking what seems to me too much liberty”. “Pray do; but I don’t say I shall always think your remonstrance just”. “Very likely not. You’re too fond of your own ways”. “Yes, I think I’m very fond of them. But I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do”. “So as to do them?”, asked her aunt. “So as to choose”, said Isabel.16

Thereat, if the title of the work could at first sight be misleadingly apologetic, the reading shows that it must be interpreted trenchantly since what Isabel does throughout the novel is to act against the would-be ideality of femininity with a sui generis waywardness that is all the more interesting when it is compared,

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

393

for instance, with Emma Bovary’s: whereas the latter simply besmirches her honour in a vain attempt to have an amorous life beyond the boredom of marriage and respectability (which leaves notwithstanding untouched the value of both of them for the character, as the miserable death of her shows), Isabel disdains what would be the most obvious expedient to fulfil whether positively or negatively the ideality that has ruled the existence of woman at least from the Middle Ages and until the nineteenth-century: to be the ideal factor for the sublimation of man and to find her utmost felicity in the union with him.17 But contrary to that, Isabel expresses eagerly that she does neither want to marry nor to be a conventional person and that what she most cares for, even a lot before she knows that her uncle has inherit her a fortune, is her independence: She held that a woman ought to be able to live to herself, in the absence of exceptional flimsiness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another sex [. . .] It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself [. . .] She was always planning out her development, desiring her perfection, observing her progress.18

This ardent defence of her independence or rather self-fulfilment for the part of Isabel, however much it is decisive for the subsequent development of her life, must not be understood as a vindication of woman’s rights or superiority because the character herself does not set it out in that way: she never cares for a reality as abstract as the universal liberty of woman, she just cares for the fullness of her own being, which is why the trenchancy implicit in the title of the novel implicates simultaneously a criticism of femininity and of the individual self-rule, for the identity of both factors is all the more striking in the case of a woman because of the historic and cultural reasons that we have already emphasised: Isabel will be a lady malgré lui in a sense by no means understandable at first sight. Just think what surprising it would have been for the nineteenth-century readers to see the disdain of Isabel regarding marriage and the consequences thereof for the representation both of the feminine psyche and of the part of woman in the general structuring of society, which is the reverse of the other axial subject of the work, the opposition existing between fate and destiny. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the preeminence of the search for a consciously chosen destiny over the gender condition of the protagonist, although distorted and practically reduced to a caricature, allows to set out from sundry slants the array of feminine characters that surround Isabel, the first whereof is her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, who has managed to live with all the conveniences of matrimony without having to face its obligations: she married a successful banker, but she has from time immemorial forsaken him and their only son to live in a Florentine palace, far away from England; a person stark emotionless, she has notwithstanding a high conception of the

394

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

respectability (whereby she does not care to be divorced) together with a penchant for refinement and a sui generis liberality thanks to which Isabel passes from her provincial life in America to the rich atmosphere of Gardencourt, the princely English dwelling where the husband and the son of her aunt wait for the occasional visits of the latter. Now, and taking into account the lifelessness of Mrs. Touchett, the gesture of generosity of hers concerning Isabel does not stand for a recognition of their kinship, and if she helps her niece it is because it is convenient for a girl like Isabel to be en Europe so as to have a respectable life, and not because Mrs. Touchett had all of a sudden decided to help a member of her family. It stands to reason that the deed is brought about by the pragmatism of the old lady, not by her affections. Thus, the character’s unshakeable common sense goes hand-in-hand with her frightful insensitivity; she does not know what sensibleness or broad-mindedness are, which in no other passage is more obvious than in the one that refers the lady’s reaction to the death of her own son: Mrs. Touchett was not an optimist, but even from painful occurrences she managed to extract a certain utility. This consisted in the reflection that, after all, such things happened to other people and not to herself. Death was disagreeable, but in this case it was her son’s death, not her own; she had never flattered herself that her own would be disagreeable to any one but Mrs. Touchett.19

The character, then, shows doubtlessly that it is possible to lead a very respectable and pleasurable life without having ever experienced a deep emotion or, to say it otherwise, without having ever faced the risk implicit in a really sentimental link with the others or even with oneself: Mrs. Touchett has not required to be a deep or thoughtful person because she does not have spirituality whatever wherewith deal, which is why it is so perturbing how she has come by such a perfect harmony among inner lifelessness, serenity and that aesthetical refinement whereby she, without feeling a real passion neither for the beauty or art, nor for the personal enlightenment and let alone for the sublimity of creativeness, enjoys the best of all of them indifferently, which, on the other hand, reinforces the distinction that we have hereinabove made between “fate” and “destiny”: Mrs. Touchett has indeed a luxurious destiny that she has very consciously shaped, but she leads it miserably since she just confines herself to use it instead of experiencing it, which corroborates that someone can be independent throughout notwithstanding the meaninglessness of her life or precisely because of it. This feature, which is the very essence of the modern nihilism,20 is all the more perceptible in the feminine villain of the work, Madame Merle, whose farsightedness is the obverse of her wickedness. “[. . .] A woman of strong impulses kept in admirable order”,21 she has managed to live as an aristocrat and possesses a vast network of friends and acquaintances with whom she

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

395

spends the several social seasons of the year all over Europe. Contrariwise to the tasteless Mrs. Touchett, she is passionate and clever enough to make up for her lack of social position and of fortune without having to descend to the role of the vulgar opportunist or of the cadger. But for all that, she has to squander her gifts into the trifles and the pettiness of gossip, as a spectator of the other’s life that must willy-nilly abide in the background thereof, where the people that have a life of their own can give rein to their pleasures or to their frustration without the mask of respectability, whereas people like Madame Merle must permanently refrain from every expansion so as to pretend to be amiable or trustful when the fact is that they just want to hold sway over others since they have no other think to do. Thereat, Madame Merle’s sensibility and cleverness end up being the reason of her bane, since they have nothing to do with the joy and the expansiveness that are supposed to be the best badges of a voluntary chosen destiny in accordance with the odd identification of cultivation and personal improvement that no other intellectual trend has upheld more eagerly than the idealistic aesthetics after Kant,22 which is at any rate belied by characters like Madame Merle, who from every slant embodies the philistine, the individual that notwithstanding his being shrewd, cultivated and charming lacks the mettle and the self-assurance that allow to dispense with the opinion of the others concerning the own behaviour.23 In other words, and despite the tenants of the Enlightenment, neither cultivation nor sensibility are necessary for having a fuller life, much less for building up a destiny even in the lowest meaning of the term that is synonymous of sheer economical independence and not precisely of self-rule, which is precisely what Isabel gets to perceive in Madame Merle after a time of treating her: “Isabel found it difficult to think of her in any detachment or privacy, she existed only in her relations, direct or indirect, with her fellow mortals. One might wonder what commerce she could possibly hold with her own spirit”.24 None at all, of course, according to what we have said, which corroborates that notwithstanding possessing shrewdness (or rather due to it), one can very easily be uncouth, incapable of coming by a destiny in the philosophical sense of the term that always entices ideality, an accomplishment out of the reach of Madame Merle because all the strength of hers is aimed at the others through her plots and ploys, which to top it all are thwarted more often than not since the passional momentum of life triumphs over the farfetched schemes of wit. Even her most ambitious deed, the marriage of Isabel and Osmond, only benefits the latter, who disparages Madame Merle the more while she thinks that she holds all the trumps. Oddly enough, who has devoted her life to fathom the passions of everyone, ends up with no feeling to share bar disappointment, and what is most preposterous is that her misery is the upshot of her own refinement: “Her great idea has been to be tremendously irreproachable – a kind of full-blown lily- the incarnation

396

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

of propriety. She has always worshipped that god”.25 And what a terrible god it is for the character! It has demanded the renunciation to happiness, to love, even to the dearest vital link, the motherhood, which Madame Merle has set aside in the cruelest terms provided that she can go on all the time at the mercy of a man that just considers her a bothersome factotum. Taking all this into account, it is not surprising that in a moment of sullenness she bursts before Isabel: “What have my talents brought me? Nothing but the need of using them still, to get through the hours, the years, to cheat myself with some pretence of movement, of unconsciousness. As for my graces and memories the less said about them the better”.26 In addition to the desperation, these words bring to light the emptiness of a would-be destiny that can only be built at the cost of the own life. So as to live as Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle each in her way live, it is necessary to shun whatever bond and smother whatever feeling, even the call of blood. If one wants to have a destiny according to one’s wishes (or in accordance, rather, with one’s feebleness or one’s selfishness), then it is better to forego passion and coexistence: is it not by chance meaningful that both women had forsaken their children provided that they could do what they wanted? And here the dereliction is not brought about by an unavoidable wretchedness but by a heartlessness literally contra natura that is a lot more monstrous in the case of Madame Merle, since she yields her daughter to a man that is as insensible as refined, whereas Mrs. Touchett at least knows that the company of her husband will be more profitable for her son than hers. One way or another, both women exhibit the same selfishness to such a degree that they can be considered embodiments of an identical prototype, the modern individual that struggles to shape a destiny and tries to get rid of whatever or whomsoever that might hamper him, for in his eyes it is a lot better to be alone than to be accompanied when company entails accepting the possibility that the others can eventually be a lot more important than the own wishes, so that destiny, which was supposed to render the fullness of life, ends up becoming desolation and uprooting, which, nevertheless, offers an undeniable advantage: it lessens the risk of suffering or, in other words, it makes up for the unhappiness with the insensibility or with the shallowness, which, preposterous as it could at first sight seem, matches the narrow-mindedness of whom (like Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle) so loudly claim for a destiny of their own when they do not want to accept the life that they themselves have built up under the pretext that it is not up to their best possibilities or perhaps because the egotism and meanness prevents them from surrendering to the others (which in the case of the characters with whom we are dealing would be tantamount to be a loving mother). This contradiction of self-rule and lifelessness is brutishly evident when Isabel tries to console Mrs. Touchett for the death of Ralph, who

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

397

has just passed away; instead of showing the least sign of grief, Mrs. Touchett confirms that her lurid attitude is no other thing than her incapability to accept what life offers in moments like that: She went to her aunt and put her arm around her; and Mrs. Touchett, who as a general thing neither invited nor enjoyed caresses, submitted for a moment to this one, rising, as might be, to take it. But she was stiff and dry-eyed; her acute white face was terrible. “Dear Aunt Lydia”, Isabel murmured. “Go and thank God you’ve no child”, said Mrs. Touchett, disengaging herself.27

In this sharp remark culminates the lifelong indifference of Mrs. Touchett to her son, just as Madame Merle’s finishes in the cell of the convent where Osmond has secluded Pansy, which shows how both characters pass over the motherhood or over any other bond so as to impose their will: for them, the destiny that one has chosen prevails over the call of blood, however much it is despicable when it is compared with the sorrow or the misery that it brings about; due to this, it is better to live desolated than to have to acknowledge the otherness of life, which reveals again how the destiny that the modern individual is after unfolds against the intersubjective framework of existence and also against whatever kind of ideality, since it precludes everyone from sharing it, which is why it cannot cater the bedrock of the common existence such as the ancient fate did. Think, for instance, of Oedipus or Antigone, who manage to change their bane into boon for others thanks precisely to the all-embracing potency of their fate.28 For its part, the destiny that the modern individual yearns for is stark private and consequently meaningless for others and, at bottom and beyond the most tenacious illusions, for oneself. It is needless to say that this by no means entails that every effort to challenge one’s choices must be wrong by principle or that one has to submit for ever and ever to the past so as to be considered responsible. Far from that, the very temporal and emotional framework of life that modernity has brought to light through philosophy and literature,29 implies that there is no value superior to the own will and that everyone has a priori the right to defy what could have been his fate and to live how he wants, that is to say, to build up a destiny; still more, even if that harmed himself or the others, he could claim that no desire can be carried out without a sacrifice, which in the case of Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle should be made by the children of theirs. The problem, then, is not that man accepts or not the life that he has received by birth or that he struggles to find out a destiny; it is quite a different thing: that unlike what the common or garden approach to the issue upholds, destiny cannot be reduced to an expression of the subjectivity because the transcendence that defines it overflows the utmost scope of the individual: to pursue a destiny in the terms that we have previously set forth is as such preposterous and ridicule, and has

398

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

a grim side that none can pass over without more ado. To set consciously aside the own motherhood so as to live comfortably abroad or to please the fads of a maniac is not something that can be justified invoking the transcendence of the own desires regarding good and evil, whereby the meanness of the two characters shows that whatever vindication of a personal destiny must take into account that the individual existence is perforce a social phenomenon. Still more, the repulsive personality of Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle makes evident that the question of destiny is willy-nilly bound to the moral valuation of life and to the stints that everyone has to accept so as to be precisely what he wants. If destiny is defined when one lays a wager on its mere possibility, it is because of the presence of others and of the moral sense of the link. It would seem disconcerting that destiny implies a moral valuation since it unfolds above the normal plane of life, at least in accordance with the vulgar explanation of it; but this is a daydream, and the only way to come by a destiny is to face the moral concreteness of life, which is what thinks the last important feminine character of the work, Henrietta Stackpole, the American journalist that with tremendous zestfulness vindicates time and time again the superiority of her country over Europe on every aspect, above all on the conception of the personal life: in America there is no fate to face because everyone has to forge by himself a destiny of his own. Now, notwithstanding her gaudy pragmatism and her total lack of psychological depth, Henrietta is a very sensitive person and possesses an array of convictions that have nothing to do with the lifelessness that Mrs. Touchett or Madame Merle exhibit; on the contrary, Henrietta acts because she is convinced that one must fulfil one’s duty, which she identifies mainly with being a good patriot, with having a good marriage, with working hard and enjoying everything within one’s reach provided that it is not indecorous or illegal. Thank God, the ideal that Henrietta upholds possesses a tremendous moral import that overflows amply the Puritanism of the character. And it is precisely because of this that she can fathom the real problem wherewith whoever is after a destiny of his own must perforce grapple: the hardship of matching it with moral respect for others, as she says to Isabel while they are speaking about the amazing legacy of Mr. Touchett: The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You’re not in contact with reality – with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say sinning, world that surrounds you. You’re too fastidious; you’ve too many graceful illusions. Your newly-acquired thousands will shut you up more and more to the society of a few selfish and heartless people who will be interested in keeping them up [. . .] You think you can lead a romantic life, that you can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You’ll find you’re mistaken. Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it.30

The difference, then, between Mrs. Touchett’s or Madame Merle’s nihilism and Henrietta’s pragmatism lies in a deep approach to destiny that only a truly

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

399

sensible person comes by: that the absolute condition of it never is reducible to a mental frame, let alone to the flow of imagination. In other words, destiny, understood as an autonomous fulfilment, is not just an image or a blurred ideal, it is the cause of the constant inner conflicts of everyone that wants to be as boundless free as Isabel or, to set the question in the terms that we have so far handled, as the modern individual that has no fate whereof to be afraid but has at any rate to face the contradictoriness of his own life. For instance, Isabel can pass over the constraints of nature and society because of her endowments and of the fortune that she has inherited; but neither she, nor the modern individual that she and the rest of the characters stand for, can dispense with the determinations that the own actions have created, which are, as we have hereinabove said, the only kind of transcendence that modernity can accept. But what happens when, because of the ignorance or shortsightedness, that transcendence is squandered on the most preposterous aim instead of finding its natural shape in the most elevated accomplishment? It is clearer now the import of what James said in the passage of the preface of the work that we have quoted at the outset of this section: that Isabel had to face a destiny. It was precisely because she lacked fate whatever or, to put it in other words, because she had no possibility whatever to agree with a traditional framework of existence, which is from a certain slant other possible sense of fate. And this is not due, as it would surely happen in a sentimental work on the matter, to the original lack of money or of a social position; far from that, the destiny that Isabel builds through the novel rests entirely upon the mental framework of hers, which can be defined by the opposition of two words: mettle and illusoriness. But this compels us to enter into a new phase of our analysis. III. L I F E

Whichever woman in the situation that we have set forth would hardly have any other worry beyond being happy in accordance with her own interests and aims, since she possessed beforehand everything that makes up a full life and just would need to choose the particular way of shaping it. Yes, a woman like the one that we have described would only need to make a choice so as to be the happiest being of the world, whether she wanted to live it through a special ideal or simply through a normal existence or, which would doubtlessly be harder to accomplish, through the identification of both planes, the one of self-fulfilment and the one of a life that must perforce be shared with others, a condition that makes dubious the success of the choice because the frame belies by principle the measure of the average individual and it would be very difficult for the woman at issue to find someone up to her gifts, unless in

400

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

addition to them she had a psychological selfhood that made her as farsighted and pliable as fortunate, which, as we have seen, is not the case of Isabel. Now, that the latter is not lucid enough at the moment of choosing her destiny is not perforce a problem; after all, who is up to his possibilities? Moreover, we have seen that she does not properly make choice whatever regarding the framework of her life beyond the run-of-the-mill decision of marrying, which is by the by a denial of her would-be horror to be conventional but not one as terrible as to deserve an endless punishment. Still more, that decision could be vindicated in the light of Isabel’s boundless ideal, for she marries Osmond precisely by the reasons contrary to what would have been expected either of a poor provincial American girl or of a well-off cosmopolitan woman in her prime: to make the most of the youth or of the money and land a good husband. Far from that, Isabel sees from the onset the marriage with Osmond as a spiritual adventure, a way of coming by the vital fullness that she has considered the only thing worth the hardest sacrifice. For although she dismisses once and for all the respective proposal of Lord Warburton and of Caspar Goodwood, that does not mean that she has not been aware that she had foregone in either case a lot more than what both the noblest lady and the most thoughtless girl would have considered her utmost boon. In the first case, she knows that Lord Warburton stands for “the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion”,31 that he is the perfect husband from whatever slant and that she will not find again a man as full in his ilk as him. However, she perceives somehow from the beginning of their relationship what one could consider the sole fault of his: that his whole being is the upshot of a tradition that is utterly alien to what she would like to experience: he is doubtlessly good-hearted, handsome, intelligent and passionate, but he has no possibility whatever of transcending the life that he has received or, in other words, of forging a destiny by himself, which is what Isabel would admire more than anything else, as she states when she argues with Ralph concerning her decision of marrying Osmond: Your mother has never forgiven me for not having come to a better understanding with Lord Warburton, and she’s horrified at my contenting myself with a person who has none of his great advantages – no property, no title, no honours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor reputation, nor brilliant belongings of any sort. It’s the total absence of all these things that pleases me. Mr Osmond’s simply a very lonely, a very cultivated, a very honest man – he’s not a prodigious proprietor.32

Thus, a decision that could at first sight be deemed a proof of the sheerest haughtiness for the part of Isabel, is the badge of an ideal liberty and self-rule that is alien to Lord Warburton’s amazing perfection: an aristocrat’s highest qualities are nothing when compared with someone’s that has a destiny of his

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

401

own. Thereat, the rejection of Lord Warburton, which seemed to be an act of foolishness, agrees with Isabel’s idealization of her own life; however, it also allows kenning the lack of depth of hers that we have already figured out, since she is not capable of appraising the inner nature of his love for her, which, oddly enough, is what she is after: the sublimation of the feelings, the enjoyment of beauty and the boundless unfolding of the own being. None the less, there is an axial difference between the respective approach of each one of them to the question: that she sets it out as an imaginative deed whereas he sees it as his life itself. Contradictorily, who limits herself to the aims of the average individual mistakes the concreteness of life for the dizziness of her daydreams and, why not, for the convulsions that her own spiritless sparks off: “What she felt was that a territorial, a political, a social magnate had conceived the design of drawing her into the system in which he rather invidiously lived and moved. A certain instinct, not imperious, but persuasive, told her to resist – murmured to her that virtually she had a system and an orbit of her own”.33 This psychological framework reappears in the refusal of Caspar Goodwood, although in this case by reasons stark different. Unlike Lord Warburton, Ralph and Osmond, who from sundry slants symbolise a refined conception of life akin to Isabel’s, Goodwood, without being at all a rough man, stands for that vital strength that all the other characters, including the protagonist, lack: The difficulty was that more than any man she had ever known, more than poor Lord Warburton (she had begun now to give his lordship the benefit of this epithet), Caspar Goodwood expressed for her an energy – and she had already felt it as a power- that was of his very nature. It was in no degree a matter of his “advantages” – it was a matter of the spirit that sat in his clear-burning eyes like some tireless watcher at a window.34

We have just stressed that due to the abyssal disproportion existing between the imaginative flurries of the average individual and the exquisiteness of a really aristocratic spirit, the former cannot identify himself with the latter, which is too much evident to require a further explanation, but now we see a possibility a lot more complex and interesting from the philosophical slant: the downright opposition of a purely imaginative zestful and of a passion that demands a real fulfilment. In the first case, the individual obeys illusory motives whose inconsistency prevent him from carrying them out, which is what happens with Isabel, who contents herself with following an oneiric flow that, on the other hand, is contrary to that moral duty that she sets aside despite her protestations of righteousness and love for fairness: she dreams all the time of having a wonderful life that has withal a moral framework, but she never takes the first step to it because of her fear to responsibility of whatever ilk, which is why she

402

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

lingers on the lowest rung of her own ladder, the marriage with someone that worships the beauty of art instead of submerging at one go in the multitudinous stream of life, which is instead what Goodwood stands for. He always appears in the eyes of Isabel as a man whose terrible strength would sweep once and for all the farfetched idealization of life and the pseudo spirituality that Osmond so prodigally sets forth and that she praises as if it were the utmost achievement. However, the problem here lies not in the stalwartness of Goodwood and in the sensuality that it entails, however much they seem more often than not almost disgusting for Isabel’s Puritanism; the real problem lies in the fact that such a temperament brings to light by contrast the fear to life that Isabel tries to make up with her juvenile outbursts and, why not, the selfishness that is the natural upshot thereof: at bottom, Isabel rejects Goodwood precisely because he is as adamant as she would like to be, because the only way of being happy with him would be subjecting herself to his overpowering manhood, and, above all, because she is unable to requite love whatever, which is all the more evident in the last encounter of theirs, when he tries again to convince her to stay with him forever; when he urges her answer, she has no other possibility of dissimulating and must reveal the inner truth of her life: “To get away from you!” she answered. But this expressed only a little of what she felt. The rest was that she had never been loved before. She had believed it, but this was different; this was the hot wind of the desert, at the approach of which the others dropped dead, like mere sweet airs of the garden. It wrapped her about; it lifted her off her feet, while the very taste of it, as of something potent, acrid and strange, force open her set teeth.35

Two motifs coincide here: firstly, the extraordinary wretchedness of Isabel, the fact that she, who had everything to know life and love passionately, has not met neither wisdom nor love and is all the time in the doldrums; secondly, the horror to experience a real passion, a drive that were unmanageable and compelled her to subject her would-be destiny to a superior command; thus, it is not that Isabel does not love Goodwood as she did not love Lord Warburton, that is to say, simply because of his personhood; the reason of her refusal of the former lies in the volcanic passion that he embodies, which exceeds whatever capacity of hers. Considering this, it is not strange that she is bewildered or rather ashamed when he utters a inner freedom and a broad-mindedness that should have united them if she had really been as she thought to be: “We can do absolutely as we please; to whom under the sun do we owe anything? What is it that holds us, what is it that has the smallest right to interfere in such a question as this?”36 And Isabel, who at the onset of the novel would have spoken in a very similar terms and should exult on finding in the middle of her distress the ardent love that she was supposed to idealize, just manages to implore pity and refuses the only really burning feeling that she has ever experienced:

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

403

He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free. She never looked about her: she only darted from the spot.37

It is in this passage, more than in any other of the work, where we perceive the terrible dramatism wherewith it unfolds the opposition between destiny and life that we have followed in this section throughout: before the all-embracing drive that should have agreed with her highest wants, Isabel flinches and finally flees because she perceives once again that she is not up to it despite her defiant juvenile attitude and the would-be experience that she has acquired through the breakdown of her marriage, which is none the less worthless because she cannot overcome it neither inwardly nor outwardly and is ready to vindicate through thick and thin a bond with someone that disparages her. It is the lifelessness that she has tried to hide beneath the refinement and the empty respectability, which would not have be the cause of her ruin if she had accepted her emotional stints and had not mistaken her daydreams for wisdom; but in her pride and her shortsightedness (that were as plain as a pikestaff all the time), she believed that she was going to create a wonderful life just because she was young, beautiful, mettlesome, smart, cultivated, immensely rich and had none to answer for or none to obey, as we have said at the onset, without heeding that none of those features is enough for having a destiny such as the one she had imagined. Thereat, her attitude must be assessed a sample of the most preposterous conventionality more than the moral recognition of a choice made once and for all. For although Isabel has desperately tried to shun conventionality, she is the most conventional of women, which matches the character’s psychological framework and furthermore accrues to the nineteenth-century culture, for which conventionality offered three unquestionable advantages: firstly, it vouched for the integration of everyone within the general development of a secular and cosmopolitan society; secondly, it regulated whatever want through a system of comfortableness that worked on the most diverse circumstances; thirdly, it made up for the standardization with the variety of a coexistence based throughout on individualism and with the variety of states of mind that everyone was supposed to experience according to his sensibility. Thus, conventionality, far from implicating a stint, was for securing independence and comfortableness and for avoiding all the conflicts that liberty could bring about, which explains as a whole why it took over fate as the leading force of the individual existence and why, on metamorphosing in the outward structuring of destiny, allowed the average individual to

404

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

experience commotions and disasters without breaking down, which is blatant in all the crucial moments of Isabel’s life, when she restrains the emotional outburst by means of the conventionality. For instance, in the night when she, alone in the darkness of one of the chambers of her Roman palace, while Osmond is sleeping, hast to acknowledge that she married him because they were birds of a feather: “He was fond of the consecrated, the transmitted; so was she, but she pretended to do what she chose with it”.38 And although in that axial moment she also acknowledges that she has resisted with all her forces the imposition of that conventionality for the part of Osmond, the fact is that she at any rate resorts motu proprio to it when less expected, precisely during her last and most important dialogue with Ralph, when the truth of his bounty and of her stupidity come simultaneously out. After having listened that she is aware that Osmond married her above all for her money, Ralph summarizes the sense of all that she has passed through: “You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!”39 But oddly enough, the acceptation of her bane does not free Isabel from it; on the contrary, an instant later she states that everything goes on as always between Osmond and her, and when Ralph tells her that she must stay in Gardencourt, away from her husband, she refuses with a conviction hardly dissimulated: “I should like to stay – as long as seems right”. “As seems right – as seems right?” He repeated her words. “Yes, you think a great deal about that”. “Of course one must”.

This last answer evinces that Isabel is willing to the end to vindicate her choice not by a moral cause but by a psychological motive that is at bottom rather immoral: she is to the same extent afraid of life in the passional and in the social senses of the term, which instead of involving conscience, points at the most deplorable conventionality: Isabel rules her life by what people say, and that is due to the abstract sense that her most intimate deeds have in her own eyes: in the same way that her heritance has been the origin of her woe, her respect for the sanctity and respectability have nurtured her conventionality, whereby she does not appear as an embodiment of the Kantian moral subject but of the Kafkian antihero that does not know how to handle his freedom and dies crushed by the weight of the law.40 Of course, to these two causes it should be added the sui generis incapacity to enjoy that stems from the effort to assure the fulfilment of the preposterous destiny that one has chosen, wherewith one tries to reduce life to an endless reiteration of an elusive past:

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

405

She had a husband in a foreign city, counting the hours of her absence; in such a case one needed an excellent motive. He was not one of the best husbands, but that didn’t alter the case. Certain obligations were involved in the very fact of marriage, and were quite independent of the quantity of enjoyment extracted from it.41

Without this note, the way Isabel yields to her conventionality would seem bizarre, almost farfetched: how could she be so meanly submissive before a man that she is perfectly aware that does not love her? But now we know that she sacrifices without much ado love, pleasure and even dignity to conventionality so as to come by a greater sway over her life, which is in accordance with our approach what the idea of destiny implicates despite the elemental fact that such a conception contradicts point by point the internal complexity of destiny itself, which means the identity of three different things that are not so easily compatible: the imaginative transcendence and/or the sentimental plethora and/or the moral fulfilment that the average individual is supposed to experience on shaping his life by himself and beyond the all-embracing potency of fate. In the particular case of Isabel, that treble import of destiny should have led her to the identification of her personal improvement with the happiness by the side of Osmond and, last but not least, with the freedom that her money should have vouched for; however, and unfortunately for her, her life was spoiled by the conjunction of her worthless insight with her having mistaken a dabbler for and artist and, to top it all, with her being outwardly rolling in money while she wallows in an inner misery. In other words, she has certainly got a destiny, but only insofar as she has marred her life.

IV. D O O M

What is left of life after destiny has been reified at the cost of the own illusions? Perhaps sheer mopes or desperation? Or is there still a way to make up for the loss of one’s felicity? If we abide by what happens with all the characters of James’s novel that we have reviewed (bar Henrietta Stackpole, to whom we shall return later on), the answer could not be more disheartening: nothing but the everlasting reiteration of breakdown or, on the other hand, the hardheartedness that is tantamount to a death in life and that can even be worse than breakdown. In accordance with what we have so far said, these two possibilities have respectively been embodied by Isabel and, regarding the second one, by Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle, who, both from a dramatic and a moral standpoint, are decidedly repulsive because they have deliberately forsaken their children without the slightest remorse or yearning, heedful of how satisfying their cupidity, whereas Isabel has at least fought to the end against her own stilts and, although has ended up yielding to them, has desperately tried to

406

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

harmonize her ideals and her wants, which is why she can be deemed a foolish woman but not a greedy or an opportunist one; her fault lies in sentimentality, not in wickedness. None the less, it is decidedly mean that she renounces the fight and with her return to Osmond accepts the ridiculous determinism of a wrong choice, wherewith it finishes the literary interest of her life. From a certain slant, this desolating conclusion could remind us the woe that the tragic hero faces when he realizes what Fate has brought or, why not, the terrible punishment that overwhelms the biblical sinner; however, notwithstanding the similitude, there is a crucial difference between the tragic hero or the rebellious creature regarding the modern individual that vindicates waywardly his destiny, i.e., that the latter cannot resort to the transcendent determination that at the same time crushes and redeems both the hero and the sinner; far from that, the individual that, like Isabel, has spoiled his life, has to endure an ontological loneliness and a vital meaninglessness that are all the more terrible because their mutual bedrock is the own mental and moral formlessness, which is nevertheless potent enough so as to beguile Isabel throughout despite her cleverness. For what must be clear is that the breakdown of hers is not so much due to her feeblemindedness and sentimentalism as to her capacity of idealizing life, of projecting it beyond the selfishness and the hardheartedness of the average individual that, as Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle, defines destiny in accordance with a material satisfaction and reduces so life to the obtainment of that base accomplishment called success. Isabel’s wretchedness, then, must be not mistaken with Madame Merle’s, and not because she is well-to-do whereas the latter is not, but because her breakdown, if it must still be called so, lies in the impossibility of identifying self-rule and felicity because of the innermost contradictoriness of the own ideals, which in this case is represented by the most singular of all the conceptions of Isabel concerning the issue: that her destiny lies in suffering. As a matter of fact, what attracts the attention is how she strives to have a thrilling life under the aegis of sorrow, which is, I repeat, the touchstone of her existence. Whenever she must justify her in principle incomprehensible resistance to happiness and pleasure, Isabel resorts to the same reason: she has to suffer. For instance, when she explains to Lord Warburton her refusal of his proposal, she emphasises that it is incompatible with her destiny: “It’s that I can’t escape my destiny. “Your destiny?” “I should try to escape it if I were to marry you”. “I don’t understand. Why should not that be your destiny as well as anything else?” “Because it’s not”, said Isabel femininely. “I know it’s not. It’s not my destiny to give up – I know it can’t be” [. . .] “I don’t think presumptuous in me to suggest that you’ll gain more than you’ll lose”, her companion observed. “I can’t escape unhappiness”, said Isabel. “In marrying you I shall be trying to”.42

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

407

Why is it impossible to escape unhappiness? To a large extent, because of the idea that Isabel has of happiness, which she conceives as “a swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see”;43 a woman that is always overwhelmed by the want of being good and fair (even is she is more often than not indifferent to the pains of others) would hardly dare to abandon herself to such a blind drive, no matter how much she could enjoy it, for it would demand to break with her prejudices, on the one hand, and with the dramatism that makes up the kernel of her own life: without the comings and goings of her imagination, without her endless examination of her soul and without that ever-present threat that Osmond embodies, what could she do? How would she spend her hours? She should then face the boredom that is the utmost evil for the average individual, for it reminds him that notwithstanding his restlessness, he is not able to be the only aim of his own existence and must therefore heed the surrounding world where everyone and everything is waiting for him to broaden his horizons, which in the case of Isabel would have been very easy considering that she was surrounded by a lot of people that suffered and that due to her money she had the possibility of participating actively in the social world through the figure of the philanthropist that was so praiseworthy for the nineteenth-century culture. But Isabel never heeds either her personal circle or the social realm: she only spins round the same mean motif, her innermost conflict, which even precludes her from accepting what she wishes wholeheartedly, Osmond’s love; when he declares his love for the first time, what she feels is a long way off happiness: “Oh don’t say that, please”, she answered with an intensity that expressed the dread of having, in this case too, to choose and decide. What made her dread great was precisely the force which, as it would seem, ought to have banished all dread – the sense of something within herself, deep down, that she supposed to be inspired and trustful passion. It was there like a large sum stored in a bank – which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out.44

This odd fluctuation between wanting and do not wanting is doubtlessly one of the most interesting psychological phenomena of the average individuality, if not the very ground thereof,45 for it allows to experience all the intensity of life without running risk whatever on the plane of coexistence, where the alien will could at any moment take hold of one’s and thwart so the fulfilment of one’s expectations. Thereat, the so-called fear to love could be explained as the effort for the part of the individual to prevent the others from interfering in his destiny however much the appraisal of his of the whole process makes him believe that his ironbound resistance is due to a natural bewilderment, which is how it could appear in Isabel’s eyes. But the matter is blatant: the vital force must not be spent, let alone together with others, it must linger within oneself, and the expedient to keep it so is precisely the conviction that one’s life is

408

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

doomed to suffering, which does not implicate that the individual is perforce masochist but simply that he avails himself of the reflexive potency of sorrow so as to strengthen his sway over his life, which is on the other hand due to a socio-historical determination that goes by far beyond the individual will and/or the natural want of coexistence. Regarding Isabel, she would surely reject that she were a self-centred person, because that would contradict her moralism; at any rate, she is, and the worst thereof is that she does not even has to pay the consequences, for although she knows that on coming back to Osmond she is carrying out her doom, she is doing what she thinks right or rather sublime and that is enough to make up for her, if not psychologically, at least dramatically: she will get her deserts because she wants to. Doom, thus, does not imposes itself as an unavoidable woe, it springs, as we have already pointed out, from the capacity of the individual for idealization, which, far from contradicting the feeblemindedness and the sentimentality, goes hand-inhand with them, whereby the passion for suffering has finally a very positive function for whom experiences it on purpose, which is not the case, however, of those people that are ready to face the alien will because they are after a real life, not after a mental drama or an inner adventure, which is the case of the two most wretched characters of the novel, the only ones whose suffering is useless although not meaningless: Pansy and Goodwood. Pansy has been forsaken by her mother from her birth and has been brutishly tyrannized by his father during all her life, but notwithstanding that she never evinces neither that lifelessness that overwhelms Isabel nor that pseudo refinement that changes the love for beauty of Osmond and Madame Merle into sheer dilettantism: on the contrary, she always expresses a wonderful meekness that is the external face of her inner purity, which overcomes the hardness of a doom that imposes over her the love for her father. Whereas Isabel is all the time struggling and/or reflecting over the same, Pansy flows through obedience, tenderness and love within an imaginative world that has nothing to do with the tawdry greatness of Isabel’s, let alone with Madame Merle’s or Osmond’s because the lass, unlike the former ones, is not carried away by the idea that she has to fulfil a destiny and can accept so what her life offers her. From this perspective, she stands for that vital fullness, for that real ingenuousness that Isabel never gets to experience in spite of all her eagerness or rather because of it, whereby it is all the more desolating that the girl is also crushed by the unyielding logic of life and has to yield to the cruelty and the cupidity of her father. Neither purity nor sincerity prevent Pansy from being sacrificed as the perfect scapegoat, but what distinguishes her sacrifice from Isabel’s breakdown is that her subtle harmony overcomes it, which is nevertheless utterly incomprehensible for the average individual that takes it as an idiocy or as a weakness; and it is by the by to a certain extent, but only because

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

409

in the absence of a transcendent compensation, the individual has nothing that allows idealizing his action: “Papa wished me to think a little – and I’ve thought a great deal”. “What have you thought?” “Well, that I must never displease papa”. “You knew that before”. “Yes, but I know it better. I’ll do anything – I’ll do anything”, said Pansy. Then, as she heard her own words, a deep, pure blush came into her face. Isabel read the meaning of it; she saw the poor girl had been vanquished [. . .] She laid her hand on Pansy’s as if to let her know that her look conveyed no diminution of esteem; for the collapse of the girl’s momentary resistance (mute and modest thought it had been) seemed only her tribute to the truth of things.46

One of the saddest proofs of the adamant consistency of life is doubtlessly that not even the best features of someone are enough to exempt him from misery and sorrow or, which is equally unbearable, that the innocent has to suffer without receiving relief, and Pansy must endure both possibilities: she yields to her father because of her love for him and she cannot rebel against him without besmirching her own feelings. She could, of course, make out that he is unfair and that she has the right to disobey him, which would tally the common or garden vision of the conflict that someone like Isabel would surely vindicate because of the penchant to dramatism and outlandishness that characterizes the conception of life of the average individual. But for Pansy, who is deeply stuck into the immediate reality of her life and does not require dramatism whatever to deal with it, such a way out is simply unimaginable, which is why she resorts to the sole expedient within her reach: resignation. But this does not mean that she has to ride roughshod over her dignity in the way Isabel has done it; on the contrary, resignation allows Pansy to be simultaneously loyal to her love for Edward and for his father although she is perfectly aware that both feelings contradict each other. Unhappiness, which for Isabel was an abstract tenet, is instead a concrete doom for Pansy, who saves the emotive kernel of her being at the cost of her life. This brutish disproportion between the personal character and the doom is also perceptible in the other character of the work that reaches the end utterly thwarted: Goodwood. He, the same as Pansy, is alien to the unsettlements of Isabel and of the others and keeps throughout resolute and staunch in spite of the waywardness of Isabel and of her manifest lack of love for him that at the end becomes foolish cruelty when she rejects him once and for all. Goodwood, who does neither have the sophistication that allows Lord Warburton to idealize Isabel, nor the cynicism that allows Ralph to abandon her to her lot under the pretext of the respect for her self-rule, nor the heartlessness that allows Osmond to lead her to the innermost intensity so as to grasp his contempt, only can listen the dictates of his conscience that tells him that he does

410

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

not must to abandon her to herself. In his case, the reiteration of his unrequited love is not a proof of stubbornness or of lack of manliness but of an amorous insight: he has through time seen that Isabel cannot live happily because of her daydreams, and he is willing to help her to get rid of them; at bottom, his attitude is an odd kind of resignation, a badge of the true love that fights against the obtuseness of the beloved one and, also, of the doom that goes to meet someone when he tries to go beyond the natural selfishness of the human being. Because of this, it is doubly touching that at the very end of the novel, after the last and definitive rebuff for the part of Isabel, he has to accept that she has come back to Osmond although she is perfectly aware that the latter slights her and has married her only for her money. When Henrietta tells him that Isabel has set off for Rome, the preposterousness of his situation comes to light brutally: Caspar Goodwood was not looking at her; his eyes were fastened on the doorstep. “Oh, she started-?” he stammered. And without finishing his phrase or looking up he stiffly averted himself. But he couldn’t otherwise move. Henrietta had come out, closing the door behind her, and now she put out her hand and grasped his arm. “Look here, Mr Goodwood,” she said; “just you wait!” On which he looked up at her – but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience.47

With this trenchant contraposition of wretchedness and shallowness both the novel and Goodwood’s hopes reach their end. The revulsion that the latter feels shows again how the false ideals of the average individual play havoc with the individual life and lead in a literally fatal way to the nihilism whereon we have remarked. Thereat doom is not for the average individual a way to wisdom or to redemption as it was for the tragic hero or for the Judaeo-Christian sinner but to disappointment and loneliness, which are, at worst, the double root of whatever ilk of nihilism and, at best, of that attenuated form thereof called pragmatism. V. L U C K

In a way or in another, the framework that we have so far set out has led us directly to the unavoidable conclusion that it is not possible to identify self-rule and happiness, which, beyond the dramatism of Isabel and the cynicism or the feebleness of the rest of the characters (excluding, perhaps, Pansy and Goodwood), explains the all-embracing sway of a doom that to top it all does not even caters wisdom: it is true that the last two characters stand out because of their moral staunchness, but, as the final scene of the work shows,

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

411

neither of them could stand for a fulfiled individuality:48 Pansy’s innocence is utterly crushed by the tyranny of his father and Goodwood’s mettle is miserably wasted on a woman that thinks that does not deserve to be happy, which, oddly enough, would justify the perversity of Osmond or the hardheartedness of Mrs. Touchett and Madame Merle: if beauty, morality and material resources do not enhance life, if even the most gifted or the most stalwart individual is at bottom a fool or a daydreamer, then the best thing to do is to have a good time at the expense of others while it is possible, although it demands to ride roughshod over the most sacred bounds: parenthood and love. None the less, the moral life must obey the irrational law that the big fish swallows the little ones, and no ideal can preclude the opportunists form imposing upon everyone, which is what Osmond does with Isabel, which strengthens the presumption that there is no way of conciliating the search of a personal destiny for the part of the average individual and the action of an objective framework of existence whose main function would be furnish everyone with a scale for valuating the own deeds and the vital ideals. But if this framework is crushed by an abstract individualism, then it seems that the only possibility for keeping a minimum idealization lies in changing the badges of transcendence into images that must stand for the own wants and wishes, such as Isabel does in the scene where Osmond unmasks himself and makes her know that she is not allowed to go to England although Ralph is dying simply because he, Osmond, does not want her to go. Instead of rebelling against the foolish wickedness of his, she accepts it under the pretext that reveals an ineffable value: His last words were not a command, they constituted a kind of appeal; and, though she felt that any expression of respect on his part could only be a refinement of egotism, they represented something transcendent and absolute, like the sign of the cross or the flag of one’s country. He spoke in the name of something sacred and precious – the observance of a magnificent form.49

The nihilism, as we see, does not implicate that its badges are as mean as its ground, and that is so by the work of imagination and also by the prejudices and fears of the individual, which in the passage that we have just quoted is blatant insomuch as Isabel makes out the selfishness of her husband through the sacredness of religion or her country, which she practically reduces to an abstract form, taking furthermore into account the contrast between the vulgarity of the situation and the pseudo greatness wherewith Isabel tries to endow it. Thereat, if this reduction shows on the one hand the conventionality and the narrowmindedness of Isabel together with the unsettlement that she has got to feel by the side of who was supposed to make her the happiest of women, it shows to the same extent the inefficacy of the badges that should represent a reality beyond whatever subjectivism: neither religion nor the native land shape the conscience of Isabel or of the rest of the characters, and that is

412

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

all the more shocking because of the ceaseless reference to moral conflicts and to the cultural differences that everyone faces. Concerning religion, this inefficacy is emphasised through the repressiveness of the Puritanism of Isabel or of the Catholic education of Pansy in a convent, which, despite the doubtless goodness of the nuns, is denounced as the best expedient to crush the personal inventiveness and vitality. Briefly, religion cannot span the opposition of the subjective and the objective determinations of existence and is just, at least in its institutional aspects, a reminder of the pre-modern vision of existence that is by principle useless to the average individual. Concerning the value of the native land, the other badge whereto Isabel resorts, it must be taken into account that the notion of “country” possessed for the nineteenth-century culture a transcendence that tried to overshadow the sacredness of God, which in the passage at issue reinforces the preposterousness of using it for emphasising the importance of Osmond’s raves. Now, independently of this, it is meaningful that Isabel uses the flag, image of her country, to express the only kind of transcendence that she recognizes beyond her mental world, because America is in fact an axial motif both in the dramatic development of the novel and in James’s work as a whole, not so much because of its political or economical preponderance as because it stands for an unheard-of conception of individuality according to which everyone is metaphysically free concerning whatever natural link and must build up a destiny of his own, which implies that there is no limit for will (where there is a will there is a way) and that the possible breakdown would practically be tantamount to an ontological fall very similar to the tragic hero’s or to the biblical creature’s, which is why the mention of America is for reminding the terrible weight that a freely chosen destiny has in the eyes of every American.50 Of course, it is needless to say that, short of Lord Warburton, all the main characters of the novel are American and that the question of their nationality is crucial for them, as Madame Merle says to Isabel in one of their first colloquies: There are a great many of us like that in these parts, and I must say I think we’re a wretched set of people. You should live in your own land; whatever it may be you have your natural place there. If we’re not good Americans we’re certainly poor Europeans; we’ve no natural place here. We’re mere parasites, crawling over the surface; we haven’t our feet in the soil.51

It is not clear at all why the Americans are out of place in Europe; perhaps because Europe stands for the traditional order of existence that America has fought since its historical foundation: so to speak, to be American is to be constrained to uphold that everyone has right to decide what and how to live, which is the very essence of the modern individuality and of the modern ideal of a self-made man. Of course, this does not mean that the European average individual has not to face the modern indeterminism of existence, but in his case,

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

413

if I am allowed to say it so, he must deal with tradition and cultural diversity, the two props of that cosmopolitism that, in accordance with Madame Merle, the Americans are unable to grasp simply because in their native land the only axial difference is the individuality as such, which, on the one hand, explains to a large extent why the characters of the novel are only interested in their personal vision of reality and also why they are unable to overcome it so as to share a really common existence, which would be possible precisely through feeling or through convictions, the two elements of coexistence that are meaningfully absent in the novel. From this slant, Isabel’s illusory juvenile self-rule, her dramatism, her moral conflicts, her reticence after her disappointment and, above all, her choice of Osmond as husband, must be seen as proofs of an individualism that leads to a blind alley: we have already seen that if she chooses Osmond it is because he is a rootless man that has no other feature beyond the personhood that he himself has built up, which changes him into the badge of the American individual that has the destiny that he has chosen, which would doubtlessly have been a boon for Isabel if it had not gone hand-in-hand with the most atrocious selfishness and cupidity, which is why Madame Merle considers that the average American just crawls over the surface: he cannot go further on because reality reduces for him to his destiny, and if he cannot fulfil it, he must face the absolute lifelessness that Isabel chooses at the end: after all, it is a way to vindicate one’s election, however much it seems to be the contrary. Now, although we have so far stressed only the negative aspects of the issue, it also has a positive side: that is crucial to get a solution to the opposition that we have figured out in this paper: the sui generis shallowness of the average American that, far from contradicting the nature of the common or garden individual, agrees with it point by point, since independently of the intellectual power and of the doubtless morality, that individual always lingers on the surface of life and contents himself with having a good time as often as possible although he does not come by the greatness that culture has idealized.52 Due to this, if on the one hand the average American is historically determined or rather compelled to build up a destiny, he can on the other very willingly accept what luck brings. For luck, the last determination of existence wherein we are going to delve, means that there is always a possibility of finding something good on the way of life provided that one is humble, nimble or broad-minded enough to take it at once, which is not the case, by the by, neither of Isabel nor of the rest of the characters with a sole meaningful exception: Henrietta Stackpole, the out-and-out Americanist that considers that her country stands for the acme of socio-cultural welfare and of technical progress. We have seen that she, unlike Isabel, is eminently practical and, notwithstanding that, she is staunch and ready to help her beloved ones when they need her and even

414

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

against their wishes, whereof she gives proof time and time again to Isabel, Ralph and Goodwood. This double aspect of the character, the confidence in the technical and social superiority of the present and the refusal of whatever mental excess, make her as a whole the thoroughgoing embodiment of the average individuality, not of the romantic kind thereof but of its pragmatic fulfilment, which makes the most of its lack of transcendence so as to deal with life with no prejudice or daydream. Just like Isabel, Henrietta wants to shape her life according to his wishes, but unlike the former, she does not put them on a metaphysical plane but on the very prosaic plane of job, travels and social world, which is precisely why she, again unlike Isabel (and the other characters) can develop and metamorphose her original aims, that is to say, can live fully and happily. This surprising transformation is all the more perceptible in the conceptions of Henrietta regarding love, marriage and the respect for her country, as one sees when both friends meet in Paris when Isabel goes to Gardencourt to be with Ralph before he dies. Whereas the eternal dreamer has to confess one more time her breakdown and her doom, the eternal pragmatist announces that she is going to marry a man that contradicts utterly her original aspirations, for her husband-to-be is not American and either exaggerates his claims as American people are wont to do; withal she is going to settle in London with him: “Ah,” said Isabel, “you’re changed indeed! It is the first time I’ve ever heard you say anything against your native land”. “I only say that we’re too infatuated with mere brainpower; that, after all, isn’t a vulgar fault. But I am changed; a woman has to change a good deal to marry”. “I hope you’ll be very happy. You will at last – over here- see something of the inner life”. Henrietta gave a little significant sigh: “That’s the key to the mystery, I believe. I couldn’t endure to be kept off. Now I’ve as good a right as any one!” she added with artless elation.53

The whole meaning of this passage is as plain as a pikestaff: one can live more freely and carelessly, that is to say, more intensely, when one does not try to impose abstract ideals over life and allows it to unfold with no inner hindrances, which implies accepting wholeheartedly the possibilities that luck always has in reserve for whom is wise enough to forget his utmost ideal when it is not able to make him be in peace and share with others the common framework of life, which is the obverse of the real inwardness. Thereby, the final scene of the novel, when Henrietta gives Goodwood the poor comfort of her wisdom and invites him to go further on, shows that there is an option before the disappointment and the subsequent nihilism, and that it lies in trusting luck, in dismissing all daydream and in striving to understand life, which is, after all, the very essence of whatever human vision of the matter. Vale. Meritorious University of Puebla, Mexico

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E

415

NOTES 1 Concerning this, it should be taken into account that since fate implies the absolute or rather hierarchical difference between the individuals that contradicts the aprioristic regulation of reason, it would provide the material justification for fanaticism and a dangerous penchant for daydream that would in the absence of a mythic world lead to the most atrocious socio-individual unsettlements. 2 I am aware that this unity would at most be sound for all those thinkers that beyond their specific ontological grounds consider reason the framework of human existence; I speak of thinkers such as Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, although materialists such as Marx could also be included. Now, beyond the criticisms against reason that has been a constant throughout Modernity, as Pascal, Hume and Nietzsche among others show, the fact is that the former has in a sense or in other played a fundamental part in the philosophical understanding of man from Descartes onwards or, to say it more properly, from Thales onwards. Withal, even when a thinker as Heidegger deprecates the systematization of modern existence, he cannot be indifferent to it, as is evident in the first chapter of his Introduction to Metaphysics. 3 Vide my article “A Life Beyond Go(od): A Criticism of Wisdom and the Foundation of a Poetic Conception of Life Based on Goethe’s Faust” in The Enigma of Good and Evil; The Moral Sentiment in Literature, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana LXXXV (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 749–785. For a reflection on romantic vision of man, vide Rafael Argullol, El Héroe y el Único. El Espíritu Trágico del Romanticismo (Madrid: Taurus, 1999). 4 The edition of the work that we handle is The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Nicola Bradbury (Oxford: OUP, 1998). In all the quotations, the Roman numeral will designate the chapter and the Arabic one the page 5 Ibid., II, 33. 6 Ibid., IV, 51. 7 Ibid., XII, 131. 8 Ibid., XXXIV, 368. 9 Ibid., XXXI, 348. 10 Ibid., XXI, 245. 11 Idem. 12 I have analyzed this at length in my article “On the Fourfold Ontology of Evil Throughout Western Tradition and its Final Disappearance in the Present Time”, which is included in the volume of the Analecta Husserliana quoted in the note three, pp. 317–363. 13 As a matter of fact, it can be argued that the Nietzschean figure of Zarathustra is the final upshot of this transcendence of will concerning the moral valuation. For a global study, vide the central chapters of the book by Arthur C. Danto entitled Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: CUP, 1980). 14 The Portrait of a Lady, XLII, 458–9. 15 Ibid., preface by James, p. 10. 16 Ibid., VII, 86. 17 This last condition stands for the modern contribution to the question, which is explainable by the necessity of settling a sentimental framework for the secularism that structures the society, whereof the best exposition is in my eyes Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, wherein the intimacy of the spouses is aimed to the constitution of a family that will provide State with responsible citizens. 18 Ibid., VI, 71. 19 Ibid., LV, 617-8. 20 Vide note 23. 21 The Portrait of a Lady, XVIII, 197.

416 22

V I C T O R G E R A L D R I VA S

It is evident the affinity of moral law and aesthetic disinterestedness that Kant sets forth throughout the Critique of Judgement, above all in the paragraph 42 of the work that is very meaningfully entitled “Of the intellectual interest on Beauty”. For an analysis of this point, vide my article “Enlightenment, Humanization, and Beauty in the Light of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”, in Virtues and Passions in Literature. Excellence, Courage, Engagements, Wisdom, Fulfilment, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana XCVI (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), pp. 171–198. 23 It is needless to say that the main purpose of the first works of Nietzsche is precisely to unmask this contradiction between cultivation and lifelessness, which so easily changes culture into a way to nihilism. 24 The Portrait of a Lady, XIX, 213. 25 Ibid., LI, 581. 26 Ibid., XIX, 221. 27 Ibid., LV, 616. 28 Which is one of the cornerstones of Nietzsche’s appraisal of tragedy and, by and large, of the post-Nietzschean approach to the matter. For a criticism against this position, vide Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence. The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), specially the chapters two and eight). 29 This is evident to such an extent that even in an author utterly alien to the temporal or empirical approach to existence, such as Spinoza, one sees how the absolute determinism of reason is not against the possibilities of liberty but, on the contrary, is the only bedrock thereof. Concerning this, vide the final chapter of the following book: John Cottingham, The Rationalist (Oxford: OUP, 1988). For a general vision of the subject, vide the book by Alasdair MacIntyre entitled A Short History of Ethics. A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century (2nd Ed., Indiana: Notre Dame, 1988). 30 The Portrait of a Lady, XX, 238. 31 The portrait of a Lady, XIV, 154. 32 Ibid., XXXIV, 375. 33 Ibid., XII, 122. 34 Ibid., XIII, 135. 35 Ibid., LV, 626. 36 Idem. 37 Ibid., 627. 38 Ibid., XLII, 462. 39 Ibid., LIV, 612. 40 This exegesis contradicts Terry Eagleton’s, for he considers that Isabel returns to Osmond because of a moral duty whereas I see a more complex causality both on a psychological and a formal plane. Vide Sweet Violence. The Idea of the Tragic, pp. 10–11. 41 The Portrait of a Lady, LV, 617. 42 The Portrait of a Lady, XIV, 152. I have changed the term “fate” that appears in all the sentences of the fragment by the “destiny” so as to agree with the distinction that I have made between them. 43 Ibid., XVII, 187. 44 Ibid., XXIX, 336. 45 James figured it out in what is in my eyes the masterwork of his tales, The Beast in the Jungle, which I analyzed at length in my article “On the Distinction of Tragedy and Pathos Through the Perusal of Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle”, which appears in Temporality in Life and Seen Through Literature. Contributions to Phenomenology of Life, Ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), pp. 187–207.

M O D E R N O P P O S I T I O N O F F AT E , D E S T I N Y A N D L I F E 46

417

The Portrait of a Lady, LII, 591. Ibid., LV, 628. 48 This appraisal takes into account the Nietzschean criticism against the modern interiority and the predominance of the subjective intentions over the real determinations of existente. Vide the First Treatise of The Genalogy of Morals and the First Part of Thus Spake Zarathustra. 49 The Portrait of a Lady, LI, 571–2. 50 Concerning this, vide my article on James’s The American that appears in this book. 51 The Portrait of a Lady, XIX, 217. 52 Which goes hand-in-hand, by the by, with the odd affinity of Puritanism and Capitalism that Max Weber studied in his classical book The Protestant Ethics and the “Spirit” of Capitalism. 53 The Portrait of a Lady, LIII, 601–2. 47

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

G A I L G O D W I N : N E G OT I AT I N G W I T H D E S T I N Y I N THE ODD WOMAN AND “DREAM CHILDREN”

Edmund Husserl has said, “We cannot say that he who fantasizes and lives in a world of phantasms (the ‘dreamer’), posits fictions qua fictions” (qtd. by Schutz and Luckmann 313, Husserl’s italics). This contradicts the conventional wisdom that literary characters and characters found in dream and imagination are “unreal.” Gail Godwin, perhaps unwittingly corroborates Husserl’s claim in her novels and stories. Godwin’s characters use a strategy of analogy between themselves and these “unreal” people to negotiate with their sense of destiny; in doing so Godwin’s characters imply that no barrier exists between provinces of meaning—between the province called “reality” and the provinces called “dream” and “imagination.”1 This seemingly radical position actually receives support in phenomenological philosophy. A connection to the phenomenological framework arises from an example found in Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman. In this novel, Jane Clifford, Godwin’s main character wrestles with the issue of whether she has a destiny or whether she can control the direction of her life. To do this Jane “ransacked novels for answers to life” (24). The issue arises: Do our lives compare to literary patterns because we imitate the patterns or do the patterns achieve popularity because readers recognize them as typical of their lives? Jane’s friend Sonia Marx says to Jane: “Too many women’s lives conform to” the soap opera’s “pattern. Do you think the soap opera follows life or do we pattern our lives with their innumerable crises and catastrophes and shifting casts of characters after this model?” (53). Godwin has said, in her essay, “Towards a Fully Human Heroine,” that to shape her own life, a woman must “resist the old stories” (28). Although Jane primarily analogizes her life story to that of Rhoda Nunn, a character in George Gissing’s novel The Odd Women, Jane’s breakthrough arrives when she compares the life of Cleva Dewar—a family member from an earlier generation in Jane’s ancestry—to that of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Deciding that Cleva and Lily were “closer in nature and in destiny than Cleva and her own sister had been, Jane believed that she had found, unexpectedly . . . a penetrable chink in the wall between life and literature; reality and imagination” (236). “Someday in the future,” Jane thinks, “when the world was whole again, there would be no such walls, and people would laugh in amazement at their ancestors’ ignorance in pretending such 419 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 419–429. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

420

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

false divisions were ‘real’ ” (236–237). Without realizing it, perhaps, Jane has made a fundamentally Phenomenological insight, for—and it is worth quoting again—Edmund Husserl has said, “We cannot say that he who fantasizes and lives in a world of phantasms (the ‘dreamer’), posits fictions qua fictions” (qtd. by Schutz and Luckmann 313, Husserl’s italics). What were the destinies of the two women whose lives Jane compares? Cleva had run away with an actor in a melodrama and had died giving birth to an illegitimate child. Lily Bart took a series of missteps which resulted in her losing all chance of a good marriage match and in her being forced out of upper-class society and into the working class; death from an overdose of drugs is Lily’s escape from an existence which has become intolerably painful to her. In contrast, George Gissing’s character Rhoda Nunn, whom Jane often thinks about, consciously decided not to marry. In Gissing’s novel The Odd Women, which Jane teaches in her university class, Rhoda is courted and tempted to marry, but decides to maintain her earlier decision to stay single intentionally for life, becoming one of the “odd women” of Gissing’s somewhat ironic title. Jane’s insight that the destinies of Cleva and Lily are similar is interesting because Gissing leaves his readers to assume that his character lives out a fulfilling and fruitful life as a single woman, a stark contrast to Cleva’s and Lily’s tragic ends. Jane evokes the Greek myth of Procrustus who put guests in a bed; if they were too tall, he cut off their legs; if they were too short, he stretched them. Jane thinks that “stories, by their very nature, were Procrustian. Even the longest of them had to end somewhere” thinks Jane. “If a living human being tried to squeeze himself into a particular story, he might find vital parts of himself lopped off. Even worse, he might find himself unable to get out again” (44). With this insight does Godwin’s Jane accept her “destiny” or does she see that she can direct her life to an end she desires? An example is Jane’s judging her relationship with her lover Gabriel by George Eliot’s Dorothea’s relationship with Dorothea’s husband Mr. Casaubon. Jane met an Art History professor and presented Gabriel’s idea as a thesis idea of one of her students. The professor said it was a mishmash and referred her to two scholars, Ficino and Pico. Later, Jane had asked Gabriel, casually, what he thought of Ficino’s categories and of Pico’s refinements. Gabriel had frowned, temporarily blanking on these scholars who had already done the work that Gabriel had spent his career trying to do. Jane had a moment of horror, remembering George Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon, and his worthless, lifetime project, The Key to All Mythologies. Someone in Eliot’s novel had told Dorothea that her husband would have done better to have learned German; most of the work Casaubon was slaving over had already been surpassed by the Germans (265). Thus, Jane actually tests the literary parallel to her own life.

GAIL GODWIN

421

The answer to the question about destiny should be sought in Godwin’s proposal, through her characters, that no barrier exists between provinces of meaning—that no barrier separates a person in so-called “reality” from the inhabitants of the imagination, such as dream characters and literary characters. In Godwin’s story, “Dream Children,” published after she published The Odd Woman, a woman had gone through natural childbirth when doctors had to “tear the baby out of her” with no anesthetic. The baby boy died, and the doctor ordered a sedative for the mother to “put her out all night” (516): When she woke the next morning, before she had time to remember what had happened, a nurse suddenly entered the room and laid a baby in her arms. “Here’s your little boy,” she said cheerfully, and the woman thought, with profound relief, So that other nightmare was a dream . . . (516)

Here a woman experienced an external event, her baby’s death, yet a nurse saying that her baby is alive and putting an actual baby in her arms provoked the woman’s judgment that the “real” event was a dream. Jane awakes from her dream thinking, “So I got him . . . Gabriel has left Ann. The other was a dream.” Then she really woke and realized that “the other” was a dream (406). This is similar to the woman in Gail Godwin’s story “Dream Children.” In the short story, what are the chances of the woman easily accepting that the baby at her breast is not hers—that her baby died? What is the destiny of a person who chooses not to distinguish a perception from a dream? Or perhaps we ask the question the other way around—What is the destiny of a person who insists that an imagined event is real?—because that is how Gail Godwin poses it in her novel The Odd Woman; she builds The Odd Woman around the claim of the main character that imagination produces real products. In what at first appears to be merely an odd exchange, Jane, The Odd Woman’s main character, explains to a friend that Jane broke off her engagement with an Englishman after an argument with her prospective mother-in-law about the nationality of the children who might be born from her marriage to her fiancé. The friend says Jane is a fool to argue over children who do not exist, but Jane insists that they do exist—in some way. Referring to an essay by Charles Lamb, Jane says they are her dream children.2 Jane’s friend implies that Jane should be embarrassed, as an intelligent person, to hold such views, putting Jane on the defensive and launching her on a course to prove she is right, a motive that drives the remainder of the novel. Jane may not have known it, but in addition to the Husserlian quote above, she could have summoned two prominent phenomenological philosophers, Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann to her defense, as this article will reveal. As the critic Nicci Gerrard says, Jane “wants her life to have appropriate meaning, like a well structured book; she continually reads and re-reads and edits herself to discover her dissonances and her textual glitches” (viii). Jane thinks, “You remained indestructible by eluding

422

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

for dear life the hundreds and thousands of already written, already completed stories. You climbed out of them before they rose too high. You reminded yourself that you were more than they were, that you had to write yourself as you went along, that your story could not and should not possibly be completed until you were: i.e., dead” (44). Jane, indeed, has a long trail of literary supporters from Homer to Joyce to Lamb.3 Homer’s Odyssey provides the first literary supporter. Near the beginning of it, the goddess Athena, disguised as a young man, asks Telemachus if he is the son of the famous voyager, Odysseus. Telemachus replies in Samuel Butler’s translation that “it is a wise child who knows his own father.” When this saying is wrenched from its literary roots, it can easily be taken as a slur on the virtue of the child’s mother; and if it is taken as a suggestion that no child knows his or her own father, it suggests that lack of virtue in married women is so widespread that no one should be confident about his or her own paternity. However, in the precise context, the saying can hardly have this implication since Telemacus’s mother Penelope is not only true to her marriage vows; she is so much so that her name became a virtual literary emblem of wifely fidelity. Thus, the interpretation that makes sense in context relies on the knowledge that Odysseus has been absent for twenty of his son’s twenty-one years, and no imaginative or emotional bond has arisen to make Odysseus’s fatherhood real to Telemachus. His answer to Athena may then imply that Homer believes the parent-child relationship is more one of imagination than of blood ties. As for James Joyce, Godwin’s affinity for Charles Lamb’s story-like essay, “Dream Children: A Reverie” takes us to another literary depiction of a “son who is real and yet not real.” Within the paragraph in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, where Joyce evokes Lamb’s “Dream Children,” Leopold Bloom looks at the young men in the room and thinks “those about him might be his sons. Who can say?” Bloom then produces one of his typical, ludicrous misquotations: “The wise father knows his own sons” (337). One of the running jokes of Ulysses is a series of Bloom’s misstatements of proverbs, famous quotes and sayings, and misinterpretations of simple dogmas and rituals. Even so, it is not in the least beyond Joyce’s typical procedure to refer meaningfully to Homer’s evocation of the imagination in the essential father-son relationship by means of Bloom’s misquotation. In this part of the novel, the “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, Joyce writes a series of parodies to recapitulate English prose history. Joyce based these parodies on an anthology selected by Thomas Love Peacock and a History of English Prose Rhythm by George Saintsbury. One section of Joyce’s episode consists of what J. S. Atherton calls Joyce’s “sympathetic imitation of Charles Lamb” (328).4 From all the works of Lamb that Joyce could have selected to insert into his novel, Joyce picked Lamb’s “Dream Children.” Atherton points out that “Dream Children” is “the

GAIL GODWIN

423

only title from Peacock’s anthology Joyce entered in his notes” and that Joyce “seems to have admired the essay” (329). Perhaps a thematic connection to the idea of an imaginary son explains Joyce’s decision to refer to Lamb’s essay. Having a character transcend what appears to be one’s destiny by a dream or an act of the imagination unites these writers. Connecting to the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, Godwin’s “Dream Children” concept relates to this interpretation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that is, famously, paralleled to the Odyssey. All four writers, Homer, Lamb, Joyce, and Godwin, rely on the larger, more generous notion of the parent-child relationship, the notion that imagination plays a major role in it. Both of Joyce’s main male characters are in crisis; both men escape what appears to be a negative destiny by forging a surrogate parent-child relationship with each other, even though Stephen knows full well that Leopold is not his genetic father, and Leopold knows full well that Stephen is not his genetic son. The interpretation relies on an acceptance of the strength and validity of the imagination, a topic which Gail Godwin, like Joyce, perhaps, pursues in response to Charles Lamb. Godwin’s story “Dream Children,” which contains the traumatic episode quoted earlier in this essay, depicts a woman who refuses to accept the destiny implied in her situation and history. The story depicts the lonely life of the woman named Mrs. McNair who had experienced the traumatic episode of the baby’s death and the mistake of the nurse. She now lives in a town outside New York City; Mrs. McNair rides a horse every day in a way that makes a “horse-savvy” neighbor say, “She’s too reckless” (508). Her habitual risktaking hints at a tragic destiny: “One woodchuck hole,” says the neighbor to his wife, “and she and that stallion will both have to be put out of their misery” (508). The neighbor later tells the woman’s husband, “It’s madness, the way she rides” (514).5 Even beyond her harrowing childbirth experience, a reason for her recklessness soon arises. Her husband spends weeknights at his city apartment and only comes up to the house on weekends. He is having an affair (514). She has guessed that he has a mistress, having “assumed he had another life in town,” and she has “accepted” the situation (511). However, Mrs. McNair’s mind diverts her from her apparent destiny; she either sees or believes she sees a little boy from Florida in her house each night. The boy appears, dressed in pajamas. The woman decides that the spirits of children who sleepwalk go visit other places and that this is the explanation of the child’s visits. She sees that the boy is frightened, so she does nothing to scare him further, hoping that he will continue his visits. She just watches him during the lonely nights when he appears in her house. She imagines the “other mother” with too many children, unable to give the boy the attention he needs (514).6

424

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

The woman in Godwin’s story tells no one of these visits, realizing that everyone else will insist that she cannot be seeing a child and that she must be dreaming or hallucinating. Her silence results from an intentional decision to protect herself from a pain too great to bear. She believes the child is a real, external child, and, not wishing to hear a contrary judgment, the woman continues cherishing her secret. By implication, Godwin presents a twist on the standard method of distinguishing hallucinations from perceptions, suggesting that we do not need to actually ask others if they have seen the same thing. From our own past experience, we can anticipate that they would discount our experience. If the event is sufficiently odd, we can predict that others will identify the experience as a dream or hallucination. Is the woman dreaming or does she perceive an external event? A simple way of checking whether an experience is external or not might be the situation summarized in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967). Guildenstern speaks of a man who “sees a unicorn crossing his path.” The man who saw a unicorn can “put it down to fancy”; that is, he can tell himself that he has dreamt, or hallucinated, or imagined the experience— “until—‘My God,’ says a second man, ‘I must be dreaming. I thought I saw a unicorn.’ ” The second man’s comment adds a “dimension,” says Stoppard’s character, “that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be.” “A third witness,” he explains, “adds no further dimension but spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still.” If nearly all people see unicorns, then seeing unicorns has become “reality, the name we give common experience” (21).7 The phenomenological dimension would qualify the comment of Stoppard’s character only by adding the word “external” and say that external reality is the name we give to the common experience. Simply put, if we are not sure whether an experience is a dream/hallucination or a perception of an external event, we ask our friends if they also had the experience. But this is the very assumption that Godwin’s character challenges. A similar situation drew the attention of Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann. They realize that “We become accustomed to waking up again day after day, and to falling asleep again at night.” We judge our sleeping experiences according to the standards of “other people,” say Schutz and Luckmann just as Stoppard’s character Guildenstern claims; Schutz and Luckmann explain that “we adopt orders created long ago” because “precisely in everyday realms we are not alone and not the first.” Schutz and Luckmann then come to the question posed by Godwin: they ask, “But what if old habits abandon us and new ones do not make life more bearable? What if the orders of the day are threatened at night . . . And what if the orders crumble apart by day?” (100).

GAIL GODWIN

425

Interestingly, these two philosophers do not proceed to give an answer. Perhaps further exploration in the literary realm will allow some progress toward an answer. In Godwin’s “Dream Children,” although we receive numerous hints, it is only near the narrative’s end that we are told a key part of the woman’s story, the death of the baby introduced at the beginning of this essay. Mrs. McNair’s inability to distinguish internal from external reality produced wrenching consequences: . . . she had the child at her breast feeding him before the nurse realized her mistake and rushed back into the room, but they had to knock the poor woman out with more sedatives before she would let the child go. (516)

Readers suspect that the woman, in refusing to let go of the baby, was actually refusing to let go of her belief that the image in her mind of her baby’s death was a hallucination, not a memory of an external event. It is the insistence of everyone else that the baby’s death is an external event that forces her to accept that her baby died. What if no one ever realized the mistake? What if the baby’s true mother had been unconscious during the birth of her child and is now told that the dead baby is hers? Would there be an experiential basis upon which Mrs. McNair could come to realize that her experience of horrible pain and her baby’s death had, indeed, happened? In the story, this “what if” does not arise, and further consequences do occur. For example, the woman experienced complications and more surgery, as a result of which she lost all sexual feeling and has no chance of further pregnancies. At first, Godwin’s “Dream Children” seems to narrate an unrelenting, heartbreaking destiny; however, Godwin throws a puzzling detail at her reader. Contemplating the pajama boy’s nightly visits, the woman tells herself, “I am happy, that’s all I know. Who can explain such things?” (516). Godwin’s point is not just that some people benefit from their hallucinations; it is also that as Jane of The Odd Woman believed, an imagined child can be real; if the criteria of reality is simply everyone else’s opinion of what is real, we are free to decline to accept these opinions. Such a move can free the person who makes it from what appears to be that person’s destiny. Thus Gail Godwin’s short story “Dream Children” provides a clue to why Jane in The Odd Woman, published two years before Godwin’s story, insists on the reality of her never-born children. Jane was using these imagined children to deflect what appeared to be her destiny—the life of an American woman married to an upper-class Englishman. Defending the “imaginary children,” Jane “thought of Charles Lamb’s tender essay, ‘Dream Children,’ an old bachelor’s reverie about telling bedtime stories to the children he might have had,”

426

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

one of several mentions of Lamb’s “Dream Children: A Reverie” in The Odd Woman (232).8 Lamb’s work shares with Godwin’s story the difficulty of determining by internal details that the experience is a dream. Lamb starts the story saying how “my little ones crept about me the other evening” to hear a story (122). During the telling, Lamb makes the children’s presence evident with realistic details which, if they imply anything, imply that Lamb was describing his perception of external events. At one point he says, “Here Alice put on one of her dear mother’s looks, too tender to be called upbraiding” (122). Or “Here John smiled, as much as to say ‘that would be foolish indeed’ ” (122). When Lamb tells the children that the children’s great grandmother was “the best dancer,” he adds that “here Alice’s little right foot played an involuntary movement, till upon my looking grave, it desisted” (123). Only near the essay’s end, when the narrator tells the children of his long courtship of their now-dead mother, does doubt enter concerning the external reality of the children and the narrated events; “both children,” Lamb says, “gradually grew fainter” until “without speech” but, strangely “with the effect of speech,” the children communicated their essence: “We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams” (125). Lamb says that he then awoke to find himself in his “bachelor chair” (italics added). As in Godwin’s story, information revealed at the end reverses the implication of the whole preceding narrative.9 While the similarities above could occur equally in reality or a dream, Lamb’s grandmother believed “that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept” (123). Lamb says that his grandmother “said, ‘these innocents would do her no harm’ ” (123). If, guided by a concept that Godwin is closely tailoring her story to Lamb’s essay, we look for a staircase episode in “Dream Children,” we find something revealing. We see that Mrs. McNair knows the difference between her dream child’s existence and a physically present child. “She coaxed him down stairs.” “He held to the banisters, a child unused to stairs, and yet she knew there was no danger; he floated in his own dream with her” (515). This sentence reveals that the woman experiences this child differently from how she would experience the visit of a neighbor child—with whom she would worry about a fall. This fits with what the philosophers Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann say: that the “natural attitude of daily life” gives us the “knowledge that we call upon to say what was and was not ‘in reality,’ ” (120). They say that repeated experiences of daylight reality create a “reality accent” (or “reality character”) to perception of outside events. The hallucinations allow Mrs. McNair to hang on emotionally, metaphorically, as the child hangs on to the banisters—to deal, day to day, with her pain. Even while insisting on his reality, she clearly

GAIL GODWIN

427

experiences the dream child differently in some subtle way that gives her an underlying knowledge that the boy is a product of a dream. If so, how is it that she insists that the child is none-the-less “real”? Schutz and Luckmann have an idea from which to suggest an answer. They say that only when we accept an “absolute theory of reality that blindly denies the claim to reality of other provinces of meaning, does the dream (and other, non-everyday provinces) appear unreal” (120, italics added). They continue to insist on the word “theory” in a way that suggests their readers need not adopt this particular theory: Theories of reality of this kind form, as is known, the core of the more or less rationalist worldviews predominant in modern societies. They reshape the natural attitude of members of these societies in a way that produces the “sound common sense” with which we are familiar. (120–121)

This provides a context for what is happening in Godwin’s “Dream Children.” Mrs. McNair simply decides to adopt a different theory of reality. She knows that most people’s theory of reality would consign her experience of the dream child to the status of unreality, but we see her in the story attempting to create a revised theory of reality for herself, one in which a child can be part of a dream and yet still be real, just as Leopold Bloom, who had also lost an infant son in Ulysses, can believe that Stephen is his son when he knows no one else will accept this. We now inhabit a context in which Jane, Gail Godwin’s heroine in The Odd Woman, can insist that it makes just as much sense to argue over imaginary children as over real ones, and even more to change one’s life course over the argument. She will be an American college professor, not a British housewife. The parallel is deepened when we recall that the imagined child of Gail Godwin’s story “Dream Children” consoled Mrs. McNair not only for the loss of her newborn son but for the loss of her sexual feeling and the resulting pain of her spouse’s adultery. Godwin’s Jane and Mrs. McNair know their children are dream children, that they would not pass the practical test of being “real” under the prevailing theory of reality. However, both of Godwin’s characters call for a revision of the theory. Under the revised theory of reality, the dream experience and the parallel imaginative experiences are real. While the caveats must be maintained that the dream experiences exist in what, Schutz and Luckmann, developing from their quotation of Husserl, call a different “province of meaning” than the waking one and that the characters know the difference, nothing in what I have quoted from Schutz and Luckmann forbids a revision of the prevailing theory of reality to accept dream or imaginative experiences as being real. The implication is that there is no philosophical justification for separating the dream experience from the daylight experience if the former does not violate

428

R AY M O N D J . W I L S O N I I I

one’s theory of reality. And even if we know the answer would be a negative, as with seeing a unicorn, must we consider these dream/imaginative events to be not real? Husserl says, “Only he who lives in experience and reaches from there into the world of phantasm contrasts with the experienced, have the concepts of fiction and reality” (qtd. by Schutz and Luckmann 313). In this sentence the operative word from Husserl is “contrasts.” Unicorns contrast with the everyday sense of reality, but a child does not. However, given the prestige and usually the practicality of the rationalist theory of reality, one must assume that a very good reason would be needed to compel a person to abandon it. Perhaps, negotiating with what appears to be a tragic destiny is such a reason. Godwin’s Jane in The Odd Woman had asked, “Why can’t” what goes on in the imagination “be real too?” And she saw she was closer to Charles Lamb than to her woman friend who told her it was foolish to argue over children that did not even exist, that were “imaginary children” (233). Jane is supported by a philosophical statement by Schutz and Luckmann: “it cannot from the outset be ruled out that there might be experiences aimed at a transcendent, although ‘merely’ inner-worldly transcendent.” At this point in their analysis they quote the line of Husserl that appears at the opening of this essay, that we cannot say without qualification that the dreamer posits unrealities. Literature often explores such provinces of meaning as part of reality: “The possibility that the transcendent is grasped not merely by inference,” say Schutz and Luckmann, but rather could belong to the ‘content’ of experience must therefore be considered” (103). With appropriate variations, Godwin, Homer, Lamb, and Joyce consider just this possibility when they ask their reader to accept the reality of dream children. Jane’s vision of herself “telling wonderful stories to her unborn child,” thus, need not be a tragic ending or even a pathetic one; it can be a choice of available theories of reality (233).10

WORKS CITED Atherton, James S. “The Oxen of the Sun.” James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, Eds. Clive Hart and David Hyman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 313–340, 1974. Drabble, Margaret Ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Gerrard, Nicci. “Introduction,” (2001) to The Odd Woman (1974) in The Odd Woman. London: Virago, vii–x, 2001. Godwin, Gail. “Dream Children” (1976). Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories, 7th Edition, Ed. James H. Pickering. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 508–517, 1995. Godwin, Gail. The Odd Woman (1974). New York: Ballantine, 1995. Godwin, Gail. The Finishing School (1984). New York: Viking, 1985. Godwin, Gail. Queen of the Underworld (2006). New York: Ballantine, 2008.

GAIL GODWIN

429

Godwin, Gail. “Towards a Fully Human Heroine: Some Worknotes.” Harvard Advocate, CVI, 26–28, Winter 1973. Homer, The Odyssey. Tr. Samuel Butler. Gutenberg Project on-line books, 700 BCE. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Gabler. New York: Random House, 1995. Lamb, Charles. “Dream Children: A Reverie” (1818). Essays of Elia, New York: Burt, 122–125, 1886. Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann. The Structures of the Life-World, Vol. II. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989.

NOTES 1 In “Towards a Fully Human Heroine,” Godwin says she wants to create a heroine who is not “a character in someone else’s destiny” (28). 2 In her novel The Finishing School, Godwin depicts a middle-aged woman whose fiancé was killed in war, and who never married, who befriends a teenage girl over a summer. The woman refers to the girl as her “dream daughter.” 3 Godwin hints that readers should interpret her book by reflection of earlier literature. Jane, the novel’s main character, has read a book of fiction entitled The Country Husband. The title is similar to the title of a seventeenth-century play by William Wycherley, The Country Wife. The novel Jane read has a male character named Horner and a female character named Margery, as does the old play. The author, who “teaches Restoration Drama,” despairs of readers interpreting his novel properly because “the stupid novel-reading public will never have read The Country Wife, or heard of Jacob Horner or Wycherley’s Margery” (151–152). Godwin, likely, expects more of her readers. Incidentally, Wycherley’s plays were “admired by Lamb,” according to The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1080). 4 Atherton points out that in “The Oxen of the Sun,” “Bloom’s sentimental reverie over his childlessness” is written in “Lamb’s manner” of a “perfectly achieved rhythm” broken by “occasional quaint phrases,” creating a “broken effect.” The closeness of the connection is emphasized by the fact that while Lamb was childless because he never married after being rejected by the woman he loved, Bloom actually had two children, a son who died shortly after birth and a daughter who is now a teenager, living outside her parents’ home, p. 328. 5 Lamb’s “Dream Children” also contains an episode of a wildly reckless horse-rider. A character in Lamb’s essay, “would mount the most nettlesome horse” available, “and make it carry him half over the country in a morning, and join the hunters when there were any out” (124). 6 Gail Godwin, “Dream Children” was first published in 1976 and has been widely anthologized. 7 Stoppard’s play, following the off-stage actions of Shakespeare’s characters, intrinsically interrogates the issue of the reality of the imagination’s products. 8 The reference to Lamb is reinforced by the fact that Godwin calls her story “Dream Children,” in the plural, when Godwin’s character sees only one child. “Dream Children, ” the plural form, is the title of Lamb’s essay. 9 With this parallel, we begin to notice several other similarities. Lamb’s story-within-an-essay contains a reckless horseman. There are even incidentally mentioned fishponds in each story (Lamb 124, Godwin 511). 10 In Godwin’s 2006 novel The Queen of the Underworld, her main character Emma Gant from North Carolina, a conscious take-off from Thomas Wolfe’s North Carolinan, Eugene Gant, also contemplates destiny through literary characters, even thinking that “Hamlet might still be alive if he had gone off to fight with those recruits of Forntinbras’s. Maybe all he needed was to get away from Gertrude” (307).

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

T H E S O U L A N D I T S D E S T I N Y: R E A D I N G S AND DIALOGUES ON SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – A MEETING WITH VITO MANCUSO AND ORLANDO FRANCESCHELLI

ABSTRACT

The present work relates to several meetings occurred between the theologian Vito Mancuso and the philosopher Orlando Franceschelli, on the major topic “The Soul and its Destiny: Readings and Dialogues on Science, Philosophy, and Religion”. Mancuso proposes, from a theistic perspective, revisions of fundamental aspects of the Catholicism, such as the original sin and soul concepts, on the light of the current idea of nature. With this purpose Mancuso suggests strong connections with elements of modern scientific and naturalistic observation. Probably this represents the most interesting aspect of the work of this brave philosopher although the assumption of such interpretations may result to be a critical point at a deeper scientific analysis. Franceschelli, a natural philosopher, proposes a rigorous lay vision of nature; starting from the great Greek philosophers, he highlights the strong contradictions existing between this conception and the idea of creation in modern doctrines. Despite this criticism, Franceschelli endorses an explicit opening, proposing an interesting concept of evolutionistic theism which leads back to the idea of a Kenotic God. We consider this opening interesting in so far as it is possible to propose a distinction between evolutionistic theism and deism. Last May Vito Mancuso and Orlando Franceschelli took part to a series of meetings, under the title “The Soul and its Destiny: Readings and Dialogues about Science, Philosophy, and Religion”, that were held in Tolentino, a little town in the province of Macerata.1 Vito Mancuso, an eccentric theologian from San Raffaele University in Milan, has been brought to the attention of the Italian mass media by the publication of his last provocative book L’anima ed il Suo destino,2 in which he holds highly unorthodox theses aiming at the realization of a new synthesis 431 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IC, 431–450. c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 

432

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

among philosophy, scientific evidence and religion. Mancuso’s bold positions have triggered strong polemical reactions. Among them, Civiltà Cattolica, an authoritative Catholic review, has raised bitter objections to the courageous views that this author had already stated in a work published in 2005 and lately put forward again under the new title Rifondazione della Fede.3 Orlando Franceschelli, a Naturalist philosopher, teaches Teoria dell’evoluzione e politica at La Sapienza University in Rome and writes in various Italian reviews. He is the author of La natura dopo Darwin. Evoluzione e umana saggezza4 and Dio e Darwin. Natura e uomo tra evoluzione e creazione,5 (published by Donzelli,) in which he presents, from an evident secular point of view and with rigour, the problem that contemporary naturalistic interpretations pose to the Catholic religious tradition. Both authors, who were meeting publicly for the first time, gave rise to an interesting and polite dialogue about such notions as nature, soul and the re-interpretation of the event of the original sin in the Genesis: themes that were strictly connected to the majority of the studies proposed in recent conferences by the World Phenomenological Institute I very often had the honour of taking part to.6 Which are the two authors’ positions? According to Mancuso with nature « . . .we name an ambiguous and controversial concept. Suffice it to think of the never ending debates between creationists and evolutionists [. . .] And I think, moreover, that contemporary consciousness is inhabited by a negative conception of nature, which views it more as a stepmother than as a mother, thus following the supreme poet of the modern age [. . .]: nature, following necessarily the law of destruction and reproduction, and in order to preserve the actual state of the Universe, is essentially, regularly, and perpetually a persecutor and a deadly enemy of all the beings, of every kind and species, it gives life to; it starts persecuting them from the very moment in which it originated them. Leopardi concluded with a theological remark: “All this, as it is a necessary consequence of the actual order of things, does not allow a great opinion of the intellect of the one who is or was the author of such an order”.7 Leopardi’s feeling does not seem to me too far from Charles Darwin’s, who concluded The Origin of Species referring to “the war of nature, famine, and death”.8 First of all I need, then, to make clear what I mean with nature, at least in its outline. Nature is to me the primordial foundation of the being, what makes things come into existence and appear, those inanimate such as stones, as well as the animate ones such as my daughter’s kitten, or my children, as they themselves are part of nature [. . .] Nature is the birthplace of the being, as the Latin term itself reveals. It comes from the verb nascere (nascor, nasci) and contains a powerful link with an unfinished action, never fulfilled. As a matter of fact, it is interesting to notice that the verb nasci originated the term nature as a short form of the future nascitura, i.e. “what must always

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

433

be about to be born”. The Greek term for nature, physis, from which physics, contains the same root that means “generate, be born, sprout, spring up”».9 According to Orlando Franceschelli the term nature refers to « . . . vast masses of galaxies and stars. Cosmic and biological evolutions of their dust, from the first elements of matter and life till us. And with no design by any god. Perhaps it is difficult for everybody to see the world, and the human being, emerged from its abysses, without feeling a sense of unquiet and humble wonder in their mind and soul. We are even vulnerable to the temptation to transform nature into a creation of a mind-will, to transform what is the product of physical and fatally superhuman effects of such a powerful, though un-reasonable, mother into something wanted and designed by a conscious ens for an end. By a God for the human being or, as far as possible, by the human being itself, at least in order to increase its will power. [. . .] At a closer look, just a similar comparison allows us [. . .] to get fully the philosophical value [. . .] of the progressive sovereignty transfer suffered by the mighty creator of the Christian-platonic tradition in favour of purely natural laws and mechanisms, and the lowering of the human being, from image of God and end of creation to a product of those laws and mechanisms, to the status of being part of nature.”10 [. . .] Later in the book, the author analyses « . . . . the progressive contemporary departure from classical cosmology and theology, from theistic creationism,. . . .and obviously [. . . .] the plausible and coherent outcome that such an emancipation implies: a sort of naturalism able to conceive the whole biological and cosmic evolution as a reality that is no more inhabited by any intrinsic deity, nor is dependent on a creator or supernatural cause constituting its necessary foundation. In sum, as a reality no more sacred, nor created, but, indeed, physical: ontologically self-sufficient and capable to self-generate the whole bio-cosmic event, including human nature: the Homo sapiens’s body and mind (the ability to produce language, feelings, will, ethics, culture, history). Indeed, regaining a conception of the world and humanity thoroughly emancipated – disenchanted! – from theological (the creation dogma) and metaphysical (the design issue) conditionings of biblical and platonic origin, [. . .] revealed itself far from easy for contemporary consciousness. Suffice it to think of the idea of a weak nature, that is still created and unable to generate life by itself [. . .] or the influence exercised [. . .] by the body-soul dualism and by anthropocentrism. Kant himself considered a mere desert a nature deprived of humanity as its ultimate end [. . .] Any attempt [. . .] of diminishing the importance of the radical alternative between the created Universe and the natural Universe, science and philosophical scepsis make us aware of, is bound to be naïve, whereas the attitude of believers, theologians, and religious institutions is speciously polemical, when they try only to put naturalism under attack in their inability to face science and contemporary philosophy with a

434

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

critical stance. However, the ability of philosophical scepsis of raising again the problem of the naturalness of the world and humanity, and then of the relationship between natural evolution and human will, can provide a critical contribution to our sciences and capacities. As it were: the problem of a sort of naturalism engaged and guided by knowledge-wisdom, that, while disenchants any reality from values of sacredness and createdness, does not condemn us to an essentially anguished feeling – of being cast and exiled in the cosmos. All of us should be interested in such knowledge-wisdom. [. . .] The rebirth of nature, plausible and unavoidable for everybody, is the key event of modernity and our wisdom its most desirable fruit.»11 Franceschelli’s radical thought expresses itself in the definition of a real oxymoron- created nature: «Neither fides ex auditu experience, nor theological interpretation – even of an evolutionistic type of the creatio continua – are able to combine the naturalness and createdness of the world and the human being, to conceive physical reality as created and nature at the same time.12 “Sine natura naturam creare”: creating nature without nature, as the Scholastic philosophers would say,13 with an undoubtedly efficient formula. As a matter of fact, creating nature with nature is simply impossible, as it would mean to require reality to be contradictorily the creator’s volitum and, at the same time, the effectum of an ontologically self-sufficient and spontaneously generating physis. Strictly speaking, a created nature is an oxymoron. It is treacherous not only at the linguistic level, but also, and above all, at the critical one, as, even beyond intentions, it does not respect the awareness that creation is never analogous to nature, but rather always and exclusively its most radical alternative. More precisely, it is an oxymoron that contributes, on one side, to think that whoever speaks of nature «definitively» speaks, however, of creation.14 In other words, it is an oxymoron so often practised as an authentic prejudice, as well as dangerous to understand and face, in a dialogical spirit, the comparison between the theology of creation, and the most authentic scientific, philosophical, and ethical implications of the whole arduous process of contemporary consciousness emancipation from the paradigm of the createdness of the world and the human being, and of the plausibility itself of naturalism which such an emancipation gets to. On the other side, it is an oxymoron that greatly contributes also to the loss of awareness of the most relevant critical and ontological knot that any creationistic perspective brings about: the radical de-naturalization of reality.»15 The meanings of nature proposed by the two authors put in evidence how the concept of nature represents a central category in their rather different philosophical positions. In Mancuso it represents the basis, the meaning of the human being rests on, and, in particular, the meaning of the soul, which will be considered later, and, at the same time, it represents the reality that

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

435

should reverberate the whole teleology of creation. Nature, however, does not seem to be analysed by Mancuso in a strictly naturalistic perspective, but rather in an ontological one, which tends to make the being emerge – in particular, in an anthropic perspective. Mancuso’s interest in nature would seem, then, oriented to underline aspects and dynamics propaedeutic to the successive definition of a natural and spiritual profile of the human being, that can be, at the same time, coherent with scientific and philosophical inquiry, and combine and interpret the teleological, soteriological, and escatological instances of testamentary/biblical theology – obviously, strongly oriented towards Catholic doctrine. We will consider this aspect, in more details, in analysing Mancuso’s proposals about the soul. Whereas Mancuso identifies in nature a stage on which the human being plays its life and from which we can detect possible clues about the nature of the soul, a stage the origin of which is, however, brought back to a creative event of a personal creating divinity, in perfect consonance with Catholic theology, Franceschelli delineates the meaning of an autonomous, self-consistent nature, liberating any space and connections to similar references. The concept of nature offered by Franceschelli seems to be centred, beyond basic philosophical positions, on a rigorous and articulated definition. Differently from Mancuso, Franceschelli proposes a philosophical meaning of nature which tends, above all, to avoid contaminations or theological creationistic drifts, in order to distil a conceptual definition of the terms nature and creation able to avoid overlappings in the use of the single meanings, and semantic misunderstandings. Franceschelli’s strong conclusion, the fact that the locution “created nature” is to be understood as an actual oxymoron, is a fair synthesis of the author’s path, and his search for methodological rigour, towards the exact definition of the concepts examined. If the argument was limited to this, we could view Franceschelli’s work as an analysis aiming at include the concept/term nature in a purely a-theistic meaning, in a radical naturalism, perfectly antithetical to the concept of creation, and, consequently, as an irreducible negation of any reference to any possible creator, in particular, of the idea of personal creator typical of Western theological tradition. From Franceschelli’s work, however, emerges a further perspective, though not completely brought to light, that marks, according to me, the shifting to an interesting and higher level of analysis- the level of an evolutionistic theism- we will turn later to. It is at this point that the research lines of the two authors inevitably cross: this cross-section becomes vivid just when the three concepts at the basis of the debate – nature, the soul and the interpretation of the event of the original sin-are cast in the background of contemporary scientific research, and, in particular, of contemporary evolutionistic theories, or when we try to see them under the magnifying lens of

436

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

philosophical enquiry. It is here that the distinct perspectives overlap, and it is here that, in the politeness of the debate, the two philosophers’ positions show their radical difference. A difference that emerges, in an even sharper way, when we consider the second concept: the soul. Mancuso offered a courageous conceptual analysis in which he combines with some originality contributions from other thinkers, he repeatedly and explicitly refers to. According to the author, the soul would be the final expression of the fulfilment of a sequence of cosmic discontinuities in the energetic manifestations, accessible also to the philosophical scientific observation of physical reality, in particular, of the sphere of the living. «The soul as life. The condition of being is one and unique for any thinking phenomenon, for the stars, the sea, the trees, the gazelles, the human beings, and this one and unique condition is called Energy. At this level, there is no difference between the human being and the world: stars, the sea, trees, gazelles are energy, as well as the human being is energy, no more no less than any other portion of the world. The difference rises when we start considering the concrete configuration with which energy presents itself as matter. Even if energy, which is the primordial being, is the same for any phenomenon, stars are different from trees, as well as human beings are different from gazelles. Why if energy is one and unique? [. . .] Let’s take a pebble. Like any other natural body, it is constituted of molecules and the molecules of atoms. The atom [. . .] is formed of a nucleus. . . . and of some electrons that. . . . turn round it. Respect to the atom volume, the nucleus is very small; and respect to the nucleus, electrons are even smaller, and so evanescent. . . .that we do not know whether they are corpuscles or waves. Which means that an atom is essentially void: [. . .] Energy is [. . .] what keeps this immense void space together [. . .] Let’s take [then] a human body. What we said about the pebble is also true for the human body [. . .] Also the human body, as well as the pebble, is then fundamentally void [. . .] Differently from the pebble, our body moves, it is alive. The result of the movement of the atomic elements, constituting the pebble, produces immobility, whereas the result of the movement of the atomic elements, constituting the body, produces, on its turn, movement. It produces what we call life. Why? The answer is in the different configuration of energy. In the former case, energy is all condensed in the mass of matter. In the latter case, the energy arising from the atomic movement is not completely enclosed in the matter configuration, but it presents a surplus, an excess. Such a surplus of energy respect to the matter mass is what makes the living body animated. At this first level, the soul is understood as the surplus of energy respect to the material configuration of the body [. . .] This surfeit, this remnant, this surplus of energy is the secret of life: it is the soul [. . .] The Greeks had already had this intuition and had called it pneuma (term that we translated with spirit but it also

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

437

means “wind”, just as anemos), movement, heat, the push of energy. Simone Weil writes: “The Greek word translated with spirit means literally igneous breath, a breath combined with fire, and showed, in the old times, the notion that contemporary Science designates with the term energy.”16 Without this fundamental understanding of the being as energy, we do not explain life, which exists just because it is not reducible, as is a pebble, to an inanimate matter [. . .] Those who think to explain life reducing it to the deterministic laws of an non existing inanimate matter betray the essence itself of life, that is energy, movement, and vital breath. Materialism is the poorest of philosophies. The soul as mind. We human beings are the most complex known organism in the immense world of life. Inside us we have always sub-nuclear waves/particles, atoms, and all the rest, but we are something, infinitively more organised, more informed, more ordered than a simple casual mass of who knows how many billion atoms. [. . .] The vegetative soul in the human beings appears in the control of the breathing, digestive systems, and of all the other unconscious mechanisms governing our physiology. Inside us, like in animals, we have perceptive sensations we are conscious of, such as hunger, tiredness, the impulse to copulate for reproduction. Inside us, like in higher animals only, we have the manifestations of the peculiar character of a human being: [. . .] The perceptive soul in the human being is called character, temperament, psyche. The soul as spirit. But inside us we have also something more, something higher respect to these first levels of the being. We are able to understand the world in which we happened to be at our birth. . . .And it is not all. [. . .] Our mind produces, on its turn, a higher degree of order, characterized by more and more information and liberty, manifesting itself as creativity in the form of science, art, music, thought. The mind now sees the manifestation inside itself of an even higher reality: spirit. Spirit is more than mind, as mind is more than brain. Spirit is the emotion of the intelligence transferred into sound and that produces the immortal music of Mozart’s concerts; [. . .] spirit is the emotion of the intelligence for the order and the symmetry of the world that is transferred into scientific research and that made Einstein speak of “ecstatic admiration of the laws of nature”;17 [. . .] spirit is the emotion of the intelligence for the feeling of brotherhood and unity of the human kind transferred into religion and that gives the universal formula of the golden rule. . . The [. . .] difference between the understanding of the world (rational mind) and the creation of something that was not in the world before, had been seen many centuries ago and expressed with the word spirit, the point of the soul. [. . .] Spirit [. . .] is the intelligence that wants, and it is thinking will, and for this, this wholeness of human experience, this total commitment of the human

438

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

being to something bigger than itself, are referred to as heart by the spiritual tradition.»18 Orlando Franceschelli is at the opposite side of Mancuso: «The explanation of the mind in biological evolutionistic terms helps us understand not only that the brain itself is not a mere machine, because, for each person, it is embodied and “inextricably linked to the cultural humus in which it is immersed ”, [. . .] it helps us also to understand that a human being, and the production of its thoughts, opinions, emotions, connected to its social and cultural interactions, represent something that exceeds any rigidly deterministic fatalism, just like Physics moved beyond the rigid mechanistic determinism of Newton’s clockwork-universe. Nowadays, then: “we can realize that, if the new way of seeing the brain working and consciousness is correct, that type of fatalism is not necessarily justified. The present is not impregnated with a designed and established future. [. . .] The theories of contemporary Physics and the results in Neurosciences not only allow to exclude the models of a world-machine, but also those that consider the brain in such a way [. . .] It is evident that any individual is different from any other, and cannot be a machine. [And] in any case, foolish reductionism and mere mechanism are unacceptable. . .”19 It is true, then, as we have pointed out that neuro-scientific revolution is in full development. [. . .] However, exactly how we have already seen for the reunion of Physics and Biology, and cosmological research,. . .we can hardly deny that there is the increasing plausibility that also the mind, with its cognitive and ethical capacities, will be more and more reintegrated in nature. In sum, “the materialistic and naturalistic hypothesis has greatly gained ground in the last two centuries: never before in the history of humanity, it has seemed plausible that as after Darwin, we can do without God to explain life, in the same way we can do without the soul to explain intelligence”20 »21 It is evident how, in their approach to the theme of the soul, we start observing the progressive departure of the two authors’ positions. We must say, above all, that the comparison of the two authors’ theses can be carried on in absolutely limited fields. As a matter of fact, Mancuso proposes a definition of the soul and its features, linked to its origin, nature, the conditions inhering immortality, etc., that go decisively beyond the naturalistic boundaries philosophically admitted by Franceschelli, pointing to a sphere of metaphysical hypotheses in which concepts and references typical of scientific enquiry are extrapolated from a theological perspective. Whereas Franceschelli circumscribes his meanings to terms and elements directly connected to scientific analysis, and he is moving inside the area of a careful philosophical lay scepsis flowing, in observance of his naturalistic profession, into a rigorously monistic immanentistic anthropology, Mancuso puts in evidence the particular ontological becoming, actually observable in natural reality, that should constitute the

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

439

unfolding of that exigency that will be indicated as soul. The progression from the soul as life, the soul as mind to the soul as spirit would seem to trace, above all, an evolutionistic process, a series of ontological stages that the natural, spontaneous becoming of the physical phenomena would not have only inscribed in its potentialities, but that would constitute their inevitable evolutionistic outcome – to be tracked back, obviously, to the Creator’s original will. Mancuso individuates in this progression some cosmic discontinuities, namely four, that « . . . define the way run by the being-energy since the moment it started its expansion. They are: – the passage from the tiny cosmic point at the origin of the Big Bang to the vastness of the being; – the passage from inert matter to life; – the passage from natural life to intelligence; – the passage from self-referential intelligence to morality and spirituality.»22 These cosmic discontinuities would represent evolutionistic moments however pushed by a powerful phylogenetic and ontogenetic télos that would witness the unrolling, open as well as ineluctable, of a creative design able to give sense to the highly profound geological eras and to the peculiar evolutionistic evidences that modern science is describing; evidences theology cannot avoid to consider any longer. The existence of these discontinuities will allow Mancuso to formulate a further discontinuity through which he can access the contents of the notion of soul.23 In connection with this, there is a singular particular aspect linked to the natural energetic processes thermodynamics put in evidence by Mancuso. The creative breath inherent natural dynamics would lead, according to the author, to the emerging of a physical biological reality, more and more characterized by an increase of order, a reality that would seem, at first, in an evident contrast with the fundamental thermodynamics principles. As a matter of fact, classical thermodynamics establishes that spontaneous physical processes must lead to an increase of entropy. The author, connecting the meaning of “increase of entropy” with “increase of disorder” – and vice versa – notices how « . . . the overall progress of the being-energy of the universe, at least as far as the life on our planet is concerned, goes to the opposite way of the disorder due to entropic increase; a way, instead, that proceeds towards an increase of order, information, complexity.»24 And asks: «How is it possible? Who did the necessary work to win entropy? »25 We have to notice how Mancuso, distancing himself with intelligence from «a certain religious attitude highly diffused and instinctively inclined to think about external interventions by God, according to which the natural being would necessarily contain holes or gaps . . . »26 and then avoiding, à la

440

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

Bonhoeffer, to join those who agree to evoke the God of the gaps, holds that: « . . . there is an intrinsic purpose in nature, exactly the same teleology as Aristotle spoke about, that I know being a big taboo for many contemporary biologists.»27 He does this counting on the fact that in these phenomena the concept of order is decisive: or better, just counting on this fact, and in analogy to the four cosmic discontinuities inhering the natural sphere, Mancuso proposes also an interpretation not only about the existence of the soul, but also about its capacities to give the human kind immortality, to overcome, through a fifth discontinuity, death: «What I really want to underline is that the condition of being that is given to us, the energy constituting us human beings, either by means of gravity or through any other immanent cause, is intrinsically oriented towards order. On the basis of this intrinsic tendency to order I hold that it is not implausible to think that the ultimate and the most perfect of the stages reached by this cosmic progression, that is, the moral and spiritual life that sometimes appears in the human beings, can produce a further form of life, a higher stage of the being unknown to us, that after the death of the body goes on leaving aside any connection with the physical substrate that had produced it. Obviously, as I have said since the beginning, no evidence exists, both in favour and against».28 Apart from the possible confirmations about the legitimacy of showing such cosmic discontinuities as effective evidence of the dynamics and the qualities of the being-energy from which Mancuso proceeds from the bottom29 to the concept of the soul, we have to observe that the concepts of entropy and neghentropy, actually used in science, are only partially employable as synonyms of disorder/order. Such disavowal can lead to evident contradictions, or to understand in a way, not completely valid, some applications of these concepts, just like in this case. To that end, for instance, the definition of entropy proposed by David Ruelle, in explicit reference to Boltzmann’s work, as the expression of the «logarithm of the number of the counter-factual (alternative) states accessible to a physical system,»30 would seem very interesting. According to this perspective, an increase of entropy would consist in an increase of the spaces that a physical system can have access to, and not of disorder. Shuffling a new pack of cards, just unwrapped from its factory packaging, does not imply passing from an ordered sequence – as we are led to consider the cards of the various suits put in an increasing order – to a disordered sequence produced after their shuffling. The probability of obtaining any sequence of forty cards is just identical to the initial one with the cards in line! Taking into consideration, in some metaphysical extrapolations, this different meaning can lead to very different conclusions, less obviously available in such a progression towards an order-complexity as the one meant. And obviously

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

441

there is the opportunity to read these phenomena – or progressions or cosmological discontinuities, as we like to call it – in totally different metaphysical theological modes: a formidable risk for any purely metaphysical speculation like the one under examination that we need to take into consideration. The issues chosen by a certain theology along the centuries teach us to take care of this never-ending risk of stumbling blocks and invite us to be cautious in the use of these evidences in such strongly speculative perspectives. Notwithstanding this, we have to acknowledge Mancuso’s wide opening to an interpretation that highly disagrees either with creationism’s meanings or with the Intelligent Design’s illusions, respect to which the author tries to find, and partially gets, a position of radical difference – and, consequently, an acknowledgement of rigour and methodological accuracy. Franceschelli’s views on these still interesting and innovative perspectives are pervaded of substantial scepticism, showing the author’s strong attention to achieve, as much as possible, a strict methodological and analytical rigour. Franceschelli’s naturalism is not in favour of some metaphysical enterprises; yet, he proposes, though in its outline, an interesting concept that, though structured in a very distinct way, seems to join covertly Mancuso’s same perspective: evolutionistic theism. According to Franceschelli the problem people try to answer resorting to the concept of soul, looking for evidences in favour of a possible divine creative will, or something like this, is actually placed at totally different levels and is to be seen from a wider perspective, more responsive to contemporary scientific views. This different proposal aims, then, to a plausible conception of evolutionistic theism. Yet, in what terms? How is it possible to reintegrate some theism when we make use of a purely and typically naturalistic framework « . . . able to conceive the whole cosmic and biological evolution as a reality, which no intrinsic divinity nor any dependence from a creator are attributed to any longer, . . . »?31 Moreover, as the author admits the total radicalness of the distinction between theism and deism, does theism represent indeed the most adequate perspective for a possible theological statement of evolutionism as the one evoked by the phrase evolutionistic theism? Or not?32 These are the most interesting hints. Franceschelli refers to Bonhoeffer: «Bonhoeffer, [. . .] invited to notice that in the modern world become adult, «the human being has learnt to take care of itself in all the important questions without the help of the “work hypothesis: God”.»33 It has realized a weaning from theology and faith applying not only «to the relationship between God and scientific knowledge”, but also to other philosophical, ethical, and existential questions, respect to which we have now some human answers that can completely leave God aside. In fact, people answer these questions – as they had done in any age – also without God,

442

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

and it is simply false that only Christianity has a solution for them. [. . .] Here again, God is not the God of the gaps.34 [. . .] At this point, it is important to confirm how even nowadays just the work of homogenization between science and theology, on one side, and, on the other, the abandonment of any vain and apologetic assault to post-Christian and adult modernity, constitute the two vital prerequisites of that thinking theology that science itself can consider «allied and united against a common adversary”:35 that is to say, the ingenuously popular theology or the Theology of the gap, like the one defended by the Intelligent Design supporters. In other words, today the only type of theology that does not maintain the God of the gaps is the one really interested [. . .] in a high and lay comparison with naturalistic disenchantment, which, in dialogue with science, a great part of modern philosophy has come to. A type of theology [. . .] able to shun the diffused and indeed singular claim that the metaphysical religious outcome of the comparison with Science, supported by the faith in the creation dogma, would be a sign of «right reasoning» and true Enlightenment, whereas the naturalistic one, supported by a «sceptical and rationalistic attitude» that also fuelled Darwin’s parting from faith, would be a myth, a Gnostic heresy, an ideological conspiracy, the intellect abdication, epistemological suicide, nihilism, desperation. At a closer look, the opposite is quite true: any form of theism comes across anything but irrelevant evidences. . .engaged in the wide, complex, and unavoidable task of homogenization between what not scientism but science plausibly says – to everybody, naturalists and creationists alike – about cosmic and biological evolution and faith, that look at these processes, anyhow, since the doctrine of creation, [. . .] where the creator’s salvation promise, also eschatological, realizes itself. [. . .] So, as openly recognised also by churchmen directly engaged in scientific research, if «the results of modern sciences of nature are assumed seriously», it is difficult to believe that God is mighty and omniscient in the same sense as the medieval philosophers and theologians believed. In sum, today believers find themselves not only in front of the following question, inevitable even if we admit that God «did know all the laws and fundamental forces of nature»: “Could God effectively «know with certainty» that human life would be born, after about fifteen billion years of our universe?” They find themselves also in front of the righteousness of the answer: If we truly accept Science’s view, according to which, among processes necessarily occurring and among the infinitively countless possibilities offered by the Universe, there exist also processes occurring in a casual way, we have the impression that God himself could not know with certainty the final result. God cannot know what is not knowable. [. . .] If believers recognise the acquisitions

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

443

of modern science, they must detach themselves from the vision of a GodLord, of a Newtonian God who conceived the universe as a clock regularly ticking.36 In sum, exactly in opposition to the «undeniable evidences of finalism and design» that, as we have just seen, contemporary Catholic hierarchies expect even from science, a type of theism not superficially, but critically evolutionistic, cannot be but aware also of the unavoidable complexity of any attempt to reconcile God’s mighty omniscient design with casualness and contingency that, anyhow, mark the quantum and selective problems of cosmic and biological evolution. And if we cannot expect that something is, at the same time, really causal and known – designed since the beginning by a God, to what extent, then, are the traditional ideas of an infinitively indulgent, mighty and wise God, and of the human being as the «end of creation» (St.Thomas), homogeneous with what we know about evolutionistic processes today?»37 In the light of these considerations we think desirable a deeper analysis of the theological modes in which we can understand the meaning of Franceschelli’s evolutionistic theism. Above all, in the folds of this meaning, there seem to be a sense of vagueness: the theism quoted by Franceschelli cannot obviously be identified, as the author himself points out, with a sort of pantheistic deification of a self-poietic nature, maker of itself (demiurgesasa phisis)38 – and, then, cannot be brought back to classical theism, that is, the one of the Christian Jewish tradition and that of orthodox theological speculation. So, it seems logically inevitable to make use of an antithetical, new concept of theism – and of all that pertains to this term. We can, however, notice, in consideration of the quotations above, as Franceschelli would seem to point out not explicitly but by defect, or if we want, by exclusion, that deism, as it is free from personal, creativedeterministic, eschatological, and, in the end, anthropocentric references to that theism, creationists and supporters of the Intelligent Design refer to, reveals itself much more suitable, if, of course, it is newly interpreted according to a perspective compatible with the evolutionistic paradigm in order to obtain the plausible homogenization quoted above. This new deism obviously will have to be different, at the same time, from the conception of the watchmaker God, Newton’s mechanicistic God of the machina mundi and, retrospectively in time, from Plato’s demiurge.39 On this subject, Franceschelli proposes, always indirectly – at least apparently? – a type of Deism that seems to refers to an evolutor and kenotic God,40 similar to the «Tzimtzum, the divine self-contraction [in Jewish Mysticism] that makes possible the existence of the world; or to the God of process and evolutionistic teleologies.»41 Only in the perspective of an alternative theology that seems to assume, as a good starting point, to all intents and purposes, the foundations of classical

444

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

philosophical deism, to be newly remodelled though, it seems possible to get to an evolutionistic deism, factual and alternative, that cannot be confused, to be clear, with Spinoza’s well known pantheism, and that cannot be attracted again into the sphere of creationistic theism. An evolutionistic deism, finally, able to present a new meaning of nature that is really self-poietic, marked by indeterministic evolutionistic dynamics and then devoid of classical teleological objectives, and that may, however, be included in a religious framework that does not result in an umpteenth unresolving declination of pantheistic creationistic meanings. In conclusion, the two authors’ works seem to propose, in concert – neither looked for, nor wanted – a basis of intentions and concepts personally highly felt, in which we can perceive just the founding elements and perspectives of research issues I have recently enquired.42 Mancuso seems to propose the undelayable necessity of putting the whole biblical theological canon under a radical exegetic revision, in consideration of the fact that the theological interpretations stratified along the centuries are about to implode when confronted with contemporary scientific paradigms, in particular, with indeterministic evolutionistic views. Franceschelli insists, although from a more a-confessional and lay stance, on the concurrent necessity of setting out a new religious evolution-oriented vision. Both authors agree, beyond their basically distinct positions, on the necessity of finding theistic meanings totally different from the more orthodox ones. For instance, Franceschelli puts in evidence that in such a view the new theological frameworks will need to re-interpret, or perhaps to abandon, the fundamental contents of past exegetical interpretations, especially those related to eschatological themes, as, from the new perspectives of an evolutionistic theism (deism), is « . . . far from easy [. . .] to foresee an eschatological future of the new creation compatible with new quantum and inflationary cosmologies . . . »43 The rethinking of these perspectives, very far in the future, will have to brush away any undue and ungrounded reference to what is traditionally meant in the field of theism, and be ready to depict absolutely distinct, and distinguishible, backgrounds. Whereas Franceschelli seems to halt at the door, even if after picketing efficaciously and precisely the ground of this new theological (deological) philosophical object, Mancuso has gone further on, moving to facts, to a proposing phase. His tone and his philosophical and theological boldness are immediately evident in his addressing an exegetic revision, from the basis, from the origin, of the whole eschatological theological scaffolding of Christian theology. The exegesis of the original sin is last issue of the meeting. Mancuso seems to take the relay baton of the trouble that, as he says, a theologian feels when

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

445

he acknowledges how Christian eschatology is inapplicable to the modern frameworks offered by science: «Cardinal Camillo Ruini has declared that Christian eschatology cannot “be linked to cosmological schemes that have been surpassed since long”.44 I agree with him. Yet, whenever Christ’s ascension or Our Lady’s assumption are celebrated, these old cosmological schemes are repeatedly proposed. [. . .] So, for these problems [. . .] it is true what Ernst Troeltsch, a Protestant theologian, claimed, that is,. . . . for contemporary consciousness “the eschatological office is almost always closed ”.45 »46 Mancuso’s approach to the issue is straightforward and radical, going right to the heart of the problem, in an uncompromising way: «The original sin dogma is a totally Christian invention, started by St. Paul, in order to set Christ’s redemption against Adam’s sin, the so-called original sin47 [. . .] Since that time this dogma has come to have a role of vital importance for Christian theology, so that current Catechism writes “it is not possible to attack the revelation of the original sin without attacking Christ’s Mystery”, and this is because, goes on the magisterial text, “the doctrine of the original sin is [. . .] the reverse of the Good News”.48 [. . .] If the connection between creation and the original sin is lacking, or the uniqueness of Christ’s historical redemption is lost, and Christianity aligns to religions without redemption [. . .] Just considering all this, a sense of loss cannot but invade the theologian, who realizes, for the sake of truth, that the original sin dogma, as it was formulated in the Decree on the original sin on June 17, 1546 by the Tridentine Council, presents highly problematic aspects. Under a critical look, we see its several inconsistencies and we have the impression that trying to sum up is similar to pulling the ropes of a very high and frail scaffolding, making it all fall with a dull thud. [. . .] Even today the Magisterium of the Church states that the original sin is “a fact happened at the beginning of the history of humanity”49 holding with this the historicity of Adam and the event concerning him, the so called original originating sin [. . .] The link, however, between Adam as a historical person and the original sin presupposes the statement of monogenism, tracing back all human kind to a unique primordial couple. Just this necessity of the link between the origin of the first man and the historical fact of the original sin made Pope Pius XII, in his 1950 Humani generis Encyclical, write that as for polygenism “believers cannot espouse that view”.50 Yet, if we want to remain in the historical field, and we love truth above all, the opinion we cannot espouse is, indeed, the one held by the supporters of the very frail theory of monogenism, as scientific research data about the origin of man lead to the opposite theory, polygenism.51 . . . The second great difficulty concerning the original originating sin refers to the evident contradiction between the situation of the first man come out of God’s hands, and, for this

446

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

reason considered perfect, and the fact that he immediately fell in front of the first temptation, not so irresistible, after all. The Tridentine Council credited Adam with “sanctity and justice”. We can object here: If Adam was perfect, why could he commit a sin? The “perfect control over passions” in the Theology of the Original State sank in front of the first innocent passion, curiositas. [. . .] What kind of sanctity and justice is the one that, at the first opportunity, despises God’s command? We would speak today of a manufacturing fault. The creation of man theology must be greatly revised. [. . .] Just only for these reasons, the original sin dogma, as it appears in Catholic dogmatics, is leaking everywhere. If it were a ship, once at sea would not go far. However, the most urging question [. . .], must be still asked. [. . .] How can God create the immortal soul that participates to its nature, and, at the same time, make it be born dead respect to supernatural life, because of the original sin, made by another person? He cannot. It is evidente that he cannot. Neither cannot God make a bent straight nor can he make iron be wood: if it is a bend it must be bending, if it is iron it must ferrous [. . .] If the soul shares a divine nature, cannot be corrupted; if instead, it is corrupted it cannot share a divine nature. We cannot state both things, if we want to reason respecting Logos. [. . .] Not even did Augustine know how to solve the problem put by this dogmatic conflict (in any of my numerous works I dared express a precise and decisive opinion about such a problem),52 as it is impossible to do it from a logical point of view. To solve it, there are only three possibilities: – we accept the datum of the direct creation of the spiritual soul by God; – we accept the datum of the soul that is born spiritually dead as it is subject to the original sin; – we accept neither of them. [. . .] From our point of view we hold that both dogmas are to be logically framed [. . .] As to the original sin, after all the unanswerable questions above, we think that theological reason imposes a new, even stricter, reformulation. We speak of theological reason, since it is on the basis of God as Logos that we see that the original sin dogma does not work. [. . .] The original sin is an offense to creation, an insult to life, an outrage against the innocence and goodness of nature, against its divine origin. Freeing ourselves of this dogma, however, can be theologically legitimate, only if we understand how to fulfil the duty for which the dogma has been formulated and proclaimed by the Magisterium.»53 We can observe here how Mancuso, although he is aiming to distinct ends from Franceschelli’s, completely admits the contradictions that contemporary scientific paradigms put in evidence in the canonical meanings of this fundamental part of the whole Christian theology and eschatology, and the viscosity and obstacles that a theologian must face when he refers to doctrinal orthodoxy.

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

447

And even if Franceschelli does not explicitly deal with these theological implications in his last work,54 his proposals of an adequately naturalistic approach – in a perspective not insensitive to religious requests – seem to sustain the urgency denounced by Mancuso to give these controversies a novel solution, finally coherent with the last scientific view – a further confirmation of a sort of methodological parallelism underlying the two authors’ interests and tensions. The most interesting philosophical aspect is then given by the possibility of getting from the whole of the perspectives proposed by the two authors, notwithstanding the respective different positions, the evidence of the urgency and the importance of the themes inherent the dialogue between science and theology, both in contemporary philosophy and epistemology, and in the naturalistic scientific analysis, and, last but not least, in the theological field. Even more, there is the more and more ineludible necessity of finding a new meaning that can solve, as, in particular, Franceschelli wishes, the interpretative contradictions and difficulties we are all, believers and non-believers alike, still inheriting from Western theological and philosophical tradition. The rigour of ‘the naturalist’ Franceschelli’s philosophical scepsis, the theological boldness of ‘the believer’ Mancuso seem anyhow to contribute to outline a background, not yet defined, in which we can finally project, with the politeness that, I underline, the two authors showed in their interventions, the most general requests of religious themes. As for the contents, we are convinced that the solution key of this profound problem is to be found inevitably in the form of the evolutionistic theism evoked by Franceschelli – or better of a distinct new evolutionistic deism possibly defined in such a way to reinterpret, in a theological way, as Mancuso is wishing,55 the meanings of creation, God, and, consequently, of the whole eschatological and soteriological dimensions we are used to attribute to them. It is obviously a result to get to with more secular and distinct modes, to the extent that we can propose theologies authentically coherent with the epistemological contents of contemporary science, neatly antithetical to the fixism and determinism of past centuries on the basis of which Christian orthodox theology had been formed. The interest for this meaning of evolutionistic deism is caused by the fact that it is just in this direction that the research I have been engaged in for years lead, being also the themes of various interventions in the Conferences organized by the World Phenomenological Institute.56 And this for two important reasons. First of all, because evolutionistic deism, in consideration of the distinctions presented in this article between deism and theism, represents the unique framework able to admit coherently a religious metaphysics and the contemporary scientific paradigm. Secondly, for the fact of putting in evidence the different psychocognitive and sociocultural implications of the different buildings of deism and

448

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

theism, it has been possible to propose an alternative interpretation of the original sin, concretely verifiable also from a historical and scientific point of view, founded just on the originality of evoluzionistic deism. As Mancuso hopes only a positive proposal, autonomous, scientifically compatible, philosophically founded, and theologically pertaining, will be able to coherently delineate the true theological knot of the biblical narration and allow us to get rid of any dogma. This has been our target. It is not my intention to refer here to my further personal research, as I do not want to shift the attention from the two authors. The opportunity to promote and coordinate the meeting between Vito Mancuso and Orlando Franceschelli has represented to me, and I think to all the participants, a vivid experience of how certain themes are always topical and central to each of us, and how the dialogue of interlocutors confronting contents in mutual philosophical respect, away from any fundamentalist closure, dogmatic and ideological, represents always, and in any case, a huge opportunity of growth. Mancuso and Franceschelli have been, then, the former with his tone and heterodox courage, the latter with his analytical rigour, immediate and unforgettable witnesses both of how “Nothing is more fecund than [. . .] doubting obviousness” (Anonymus) and how “The profound nature of things loves to hide itself” (Heraclitus). Even more, they have been the last of a long series of teachings that in my long, silent, and solitary life research I have never forgotten. The have represented almost a stimulus and a wish for my eccentric theses, in all my dramatic and exhausting quest: «And nobody pours wine into old wineskins, otherwise the wine breaks the skins, and both wine and skins are lost; but with a new wine, new skins!» Mark 2, 22. Tolentino, Italy Authors and persons mentioned, in alphabetic order: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Orlando Franceschelli, Giacomo Leopardi, Vito Mancuso, Camillo Ruini

NOTES 1 The meetings were held with the help of Tolentino Town Council (Assessorato all’Istruzione ed alla Cultura), the Associazione Culturale “La Città del Sole”, and, in particular with “La Bottega del Libro”, a bookshop of Tolentino (MC), ITALY, and, among its staff, “Francé ”, my trustful and helpful friend. 2 Mancuso Vito, L’anima e il suo destino, Cortina, Milan, 2007. 3 Mancuso Vito, Rifondazione della Fede, Mondadori, Milan, 2008.

THE SOUL AND ITS DESTINY

449

4 Franceschelli Orlando, La natura dopo Darwin. Evoluzione e umana saggezza, Donzelli, Rome, 2007. 5 Franceschelli Orlando, Dio e Darwin. Natura e uomo tra evoluzione e creazione, Donzelli, Rome, 2005. 6 Verolini Roberto, “The concept oh human soul/mind in the light of the evolutionist theory of knowledge: scientific epistemological aspects and metaphysical implications”, in A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCIV, Springer, 2007, pp. 279–305. 7 Leopardi Giacomo, Zibaldone, 4486, in Opere, a cura di Giovanni Getto, Mursia, Milan 1973, p. 843. 8 Darwin Charles, L’origine delle specie, it. tr. by Celso Balducci, in L’evoluzione, Newton Compton, Rome 1994, p. 511. 9 Mancuso Vito, 2007, op. cit., pp. 9–10. 10 Franceschelli Orlando, 2007, op.cit., pp. 3–11. 11 Franceschelli Orlando, 2007, op.cit., pp. 3-11. 12 As a matter of fact, we are convinced of the possibility of such an outcome. On this topic, see: www.diolaico.it. 13 Ugo di San Vittore, Patrologia latina, 176, 207 D. 14 Nature, then, is bound to be always quoted in inverted commas, as we will see also referring to Pope Ratzinger; Ganoczy 1997, pp. 18–23 on the attempt to know «nature», starting from reality and from God’s revelation. 15 Franceschelli Orlando, 2007, op. cit. pp. 53. 16 Weil Simone, L’Enracinement. Prélude a une declaration des devoirs en-vers I’etre humain, in Oeuvres, Edition établie sous la direction de Florence de Lussy, Quarto Gallimard, Parigi 1999, p. 1186; published in Italian under the title La prima radice, tr. di Franco Fortini, Leonardo, Milan 1996, p. 218. 17 Einstein Albert, Come io vedo il mondo, tr. it. di Remo Valori, Newton Compton, Rome 1992, p. 22. 18 Mancuso Vito, 2007, op. cit., pp. 55–64. 19 Edelmann G. M., Sulla materia della mente, Adelphi, Milan, 1999. pp. 266–268. 20 Nannini Sandro, L’anima e il corpo. Un’introduzione storica alla filosofia della mente, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2002, p. 207. 21 Franceschelli Orlando, 2007, op.cit., pp. 127–128. 22 Mancuso Vito, 2007, op. cit., p. 111. 23 Ibid., p. 122. 24 Ibid., p. 111. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 27 Ibid., p. 116. 28 Ibid., pp. 122–123. 29 Ibid., p. 97. 30 Ruelle David, Caso e Caos, Boringhieri, Turin, 1992, p. 116–121. 31 Franceschelli Orlando, 2007, op.cit., p. 5. 32 After the debate, I proposed this question directly to Franceschelli, but I did not get further details. I had the impression that, though very interesting, the idea is still in the making, in fieri. 33 Bonhoeffer Dietrich, Resistenza e resa, Lettere e scritti dal carcere, San Paolo, Milan, 1996, p. 398. 34 Ibid., pp. 382, 398.

450 35

RO B E RT O V E RO L I N I

As Dawkins, a non-believer Darwinist, noticed referring himself also to Bonhoeffer in his proposal of atheism and in his efficient denunciation-analysis of any faith a-critically assumed (Dawkins Richard, The God Delusion, 2006, pp. 125–127 – trad. It. L’illusione di Dio. Le ragioni per non credere, Milan, Mondatori, 2007). 36 Coyne George, Ursprünge und Schöpfunge, 2004, p. 24. 37 Franceschelli Orlando, 2007, op.cit., pp. 144–148. 38 Ibid., pp. 24–37. 39 Ibid., p. 105. 40 Ibid., p. 150. 41 Ibid., p. 46. 42 Verolini Roberto, Il Dio Laico: caos e libertà, Armando Armando, Rome, 1999; Verolini Roberto, Petrelli Fabio, Metamorfosi della Ragione. Esegesi evoluzionistico psicosociologica di Gn 1,3 ed implicazioni bioetiche, Dipartimento Scienze Igienistiche e Sanitario Ambientali, University of Camerino, 1994; Petrelli Fabio, Venturi Larissa, Verolini Roberto, Neuroscienze ed evoluzionismo per una concezione olistica delle psicopatologie e dei disturbi della personalità, Camerino; University of Camerino, 2000. 43 Ibid., p. 153. 44 Ruini Camillo, Verità è libertà. Il ruolo della Chiesa in una società aperta, Mondatori, Milan, 2006, p. 116. 45 Troeltsch Ernst, Die Absolutheit des Christentums und die Religions-geschichte, Tübingen, 1901: citato da von Balthasar Hans Urs, Lineamenti dell’escatologia, 1957, ora in Verbum Caro. Saggi teologici I, tr. It. di Colombi Giulio, Morcelliana, Brescia, 1985, p. 277. 46 Mancuso Vito, 2007, op. cit., p. 43. 47 vedi Romeni 5, 12–21. 48 Catechismo della Chiesa Cattolica, articolo 389. 49 Catechismo della Chiesa Cattolica, articolo 390. 50 (DH 3897). 51 See, Verolini Roberto, 1999, op. cit.; further exegetic developments – especially in relation to Karl Rahner’s monogenism and polygenism (See, Karl Rahner, Il problema dell’ominizzazione, Morcelliana, Brescia, 1969, Rahner Karl, Saggi di antropologia soprannaturale, Edizioni Paoline, Rome, 1969) can be found in: www.diolaico.it. 52 Agostino, Epistola 190, 1, 3; ed. it. Le lettere. III, tr. di Luigi Carrozzi, Citta Nuova, Rome 1974, p. 205. 53 Mancuso Vito, 2007, op. cit., pp. 160–168. 54 Differently from his previous work Dio e Darwin, where he focuses more on these topics. Franceschelli Orlando, 2005, op. cit. 55 Ibid., p. 167. 56 Verolini Roberto, Petrelli Fabio, “Rethinking education from the perspective of life”, in A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCV, Springer, 2008, pp. 355–382; Verolini Roberto, 2007, Op. cit.

NA M E I N D E X

Abe, K., 377 Achilles, 20 Ahlström, W., 187–189 Alexander, 58–59, 212 Amyot, J., 51 Antonio, 54 Antony, M., 52, 54, 55, 56 Archer, I., 386, 392 Ariovistus, 61 Aristotle, 12–13, 16, 19, 206, 214, 220, 222, 228, 229 n.13, 331, 342, 440 Armstrong, K., 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 319 Atget, E., 93–98, 104 n.7 Atherton, J. S., 422, 429 n.4 Auge, A., 208–209 Augustine, J., 213, 259, 266, 268, 277 n.1 Bachelard, G., 99, 101, 105 n.11, 194 Baker, R., 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 308, 316, 317 Bakhtin, M. M., 111–112 Barnes, H. E., 49 n.32 Barrett, W., 285, 286, 287, 289, 291 Barrow, J. D., 256 Bart, L., 419, 420 Barthes, R., 93–94, 99, 104 n.1, 105 Bauby, J. -D., 293, 318, 319 Baudelaire, C., 361, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373 n.5 Bellamy, J. D., 210

Belmonte, J. C. I., 254, 255 Benjamin, W., 52, 231–238 Bergson, H., 173–176, 178, 179, 183, 194, 196, 260 Bibulus, M. C., 59, 60, 61 Bill, G. I., 304, 309 Blackmur, R. P., 221–222, 229 n.8 Bloom, L., 422, 427, 429 n.4 Blyton, E., 161 Boche´nski, J. M., 329 Bohr, N., 247, 251, 254 Bollnow, O. F., 161, 168 Bolotov, A. T., 110 Bond, J., 181 Boon, M., 234, 235, 238 n.6 Boubat, E., 93, 98, 99, 100 Bouveresse, J., 347, 357 n.8 Bovary, E., 45, 50 n.33, 393 Breton, A., 87, 90 n.12 Browne, T., Sir, 220 Brutus, M. J., 55–56 Bryant, J., 220, 228 n.2 Buber, M., 79, 89 n.4 Butler, S., 422 Caesar, J., 51–76 Caesar, L. J., 51–63, 68, 74, 76 Caesar, O., 51–52 Campbell, J., 313 Camus, A., 53, 77, 89, 308 Cardinal Camillo Ruini, 445 Carlyle, T., 301 Carr, H., 211–215

451

452

NAME INDEX

Casca, S., 54 Casey, E. S., 199 Cassius, G., 55–56 Caste, J. L., 257 Catiline, L.S., 59 Caxton, W., 209 Celer, Q. C. M., 61 Chaitin, G., 256 Charles, D., 432, 449 n.8 Chekhov, A. P., 111 Chvatik, K., 77, 84, 89 n.1, 90 n.8, 357 n.18 Cicero, 58, 59–61 Cinna, H., 52, 57–58 Clegg, B., 251 Clifford, J., 419 Clodius, P., 59–62 Collins, J., 208, 259–279 Compson, J., 259, 264, 268, 271, 277, 278 n.5 Conrad, J., 312 Conselice, C. J., 249–250 Conway, J. K., 295, 320 n.2 Cotta, G. A., 58 Crassus, M. L., 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 Dahan-Gaida, L., 348, 350, 357 n.14 Dalmas, F., 93–106 Dann, P., 139, 147–150, 154 n.26 Dante, 244, 364 Davis, J., 259, 264, 277 n.4 de Bellegarde, V., 128 de la Fontaine, J., 208 de Spinoza, B., 114, 415, 416, 444 de Vigny, A., 361, 362, 363, 373 n.1 Defoe, D., 222 Deleuze, G., 183, 340–341 Derrida, J., 30, 99, 105 Dewar, C., 419 Didion, J., 139, 142–145, 147

Dilthey, W., 45 Dingiswayo, 64, 67, 69–73 Dion, M., 77–89, 345–357 Donne, J., 106, 308 Dow, T.-I., 247–257 Dunne, J. G., 142 Durand, G., 99, 105 n.12 Eco, U., 209 Eliot, G., 420 Eliot, T. S., 241, 288, 311–313, 420 Englert, B. -G., 256 Ezzell, C., 254 Faulkner, W., 259, 276, 278 n.10 Fehervari, Z., 252 Fielding, H., 222 Flaubert, G., 44–47, 49–50 Flavius, 54 Foucault, M., 4, 94–95, 104 n.4, 135 n.1 Fowles, J., 210 Franceschelli, O., 431–450 Frank, M., 45, 123, 300, 302, 303, 304, 305 Freud, S., 142, 174, 265 Frey, J., 145–146 Gadamer, H.-G., 29, 32, 80, 89 Sir Gawain, 142 George, B., 98 Gerrard, N., 421 Gissing, G., 419, 420 Godwin, G., 419–429 Goldberg, A. L., 254 Golitsin, 110 Goodwood, C., 387, 400, 401, 402, 408, 409, 410, 414 Grass, E., 381

NAME INDEX

Grass, G., 306 Grossman, D., 139, 152, 154 n.30 Guérin, G., 42 Hampton-Turner, C., 250 Hawthorne, N., 223, 225 Hegel, G., W. F., 42, 113, 115, 136 n.6, 231, 233, 234, 357 n.12, 415 n.2 Heidegger, M., 37, 39, 45, 48 n.7, 98, 136, 137 n.26, 156, 159, 176, 205, 206, 216, 221–222, 224, 259–260, 264, 272, 277 n.1, 335, 336, 415 n.2 Hemingway, E., 52, 236, 308 Hobbes, T., 127, 137 Höffe, O., 325 Hofstadter, A., 136 n.7 Holder, N., 178 Homer, 20, 152, 208, 362, 422–423 Hugo, V., 220, 361, 363–368, 371, 373 n.4 Hume, D., 114, 235, 415 n.2 Husserl, E., 27, 32, 39, 42, 47, 49 n.20, 94, 206, 241, 242, 245, 259, 277 n.1, 336, 338, 343, 419–421, 427–428 Idriss, 102 Ilych, I., 285, 286, 289, 291, 292 n.5 Isanusi, 52–53, 57, 66–76 Iscariot, J., 56 Iser, W., 40, 48 n.13, 285–286, 292 n.3 Itkonen, M., 155–199 Ivanova, L.V., 107 Jackson, P., 287, 289, 290, 291 Jacques, D., 357 n.19

453

Jake, 148–149 James, A., 153 n.1 James, H., 113, 383 Jameson, F., 49 n.24, 234 Jane, 419 Jobe, 64, 71 Joyce, J., 211–214, 234, 422–423, 428 Julia, 57, 58, 61, 62 Julius, G., 57 Kafka, F., 224–225, 229 n.25, 237, 346, 375–377 Kant, I., 40, 114, 117, 120, 124, 136 n.13, 137 n.30, 232, 339, 343, 395, 415 n.2, 416 n.22, 433 Kawataba, Y., 375 Kearney, R., 206, 211, 214 Kennedy, J. F., Jr., 149 Kierkegaard, S, A., 42, 49 n.17, 115, 178 Kimmel, L., 11–25, 279 n.11 Kuhns, R., 136 Kundera, M., 77–90, 345–357 Lacapra, D., 48 n.2 Laider, K. J., 250 Lamb, C., 421, 422, 423, 426, 428, 429 n.3 Le Grand, E., 86, 89 n.2, 90 n.9 Lemon, L. T., 212 Lenin, V., 211–214 Leopardi, G., 432 Lepidus, A., 52 Lévinas, E., 40, 79, 89 n.4, 141, 153 n.6, 177, 315, 340 Lodge, D., 209–211 Londre, F. H., 213, 215

454

NAME INDEX

Luckmann, T., 419, 420, 421, 424, 426, 427, 428 Lyotard, J.-F., 4, 8, 31 McCourt, A., 300 McCourt, F., 293–321 MacGilleon, R., 155, 200 Mac Orlan, P., 98, 104 n.6 Macpherson, C. B., 137 madame de Cintré, 120, 128, 130–131, 133 Madame Merle, 394–398, 405, 406, 408, 411, 412, 413 Mailer, N., 209 Malagi, R. A., 244 Malunga, 52–53, 57, 66, 69–72, 74 Mancuso, V., 431–450 Manukuza, 75 Marcius, A., 58 Marcuse, H., 86, 90 n.10 Marías, J., 335–343 Marius, G., 57, 58, 59 Marx, K., 42, 49 n.17, 87, 90 n.11, 115, 136, 137 n.26, 415 n.2 Marx, S., 419 Maugham, W. S., 207, 215–216 Mazars, P., 373 Melville, H., 219–229 Merleau-Ponty, M., 196, 342 Merton, M., 228 n.3, 229 n.14 Merton, T., 278 Mfokazana, 63–65, 70–71 Mhlangana, 63–64, 75 Miller, A., 154 n.30 Miller, P., 221, 229 n.10, 229 n.18 Milo, T. A., 61, 62 Mofolo, T., 51–76 Molodkina, L., 107–112 Molon, A., 58 More, T., 364

Morgan, T., 216 n.2 Mother Teresa, 53 Murakami, H., 375–382 Murellus, 54 Murdoch, I., 152, 154 n.29 Musil, R., 345–357 Musser, G., 252 Mzilikazi, 75 Nandi, 63–65, 74–75 Ndlebe, 52–53, 57, 66, 69–72, 74 Neibuhr, R., 294, 320 n.1 Newman, C., 119–125, 128, 130–131, 133, 134 Nietzsche, F., 12, 18, 24, 54, 89, 90 n,16, 115, 130, 134, 135 n.1, 136, 137 n.22, 345, 348, 349, 357 n.10, 361–373, 415 n.2, 416 n.23, 417 n.48 Noliwa, 71–75 North, T., 51 Nunn, R., 419, 420 Odysseus, 20, 422 Oedipus, 287, 289, 389, 397 Okhamafe, I., 51–76 Osmond, G., 387, 390, 397, 400, 401, 404, 405, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 416 n.40 Overguard, S., 335, 336 Painter, R. M., 139–154, 293–321 Pansy, 397, 408, 409, 410, 412 Passinmäki, P., 159 Pauling, L., 252 Peacock, T. L., 422, 423 Pennebaker, J. V., 140, 153 n.3 Percy, W., 220, 222, 223, 228, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 292 n.1 Pilardi, J.-A., 156

NAME INDEX

Pindar, 208 Piso, L. C., 60 Plato, 12, 16–17, 20, 22, 23, 24, 325, 340, 443 Plutarch, 51–52, 57 Poe, E. A., 136, 275 Polonius, 43 Pompeia, 59–60 Pompey, Q., 51, 54, 59–63 Poole, A., 136 Pope Pius XII, 445 Prochaska, B., 241–246, 285–292 Propp, V., 3 Proust, M., 142, 345, 356 n.2 Ptolemy XII, 61 Puhakainen, J., 172 Pulcher, P. C., 59, 61 Rainer, T., 140, 146, 153 n.1 Rajanti, T., 159 Ralph, 387, 388, 389, 396, 400, 401, 404, 409, 411, 414 Renker, E., 222 Revenko, I., 108 Reynolds, R. J., 253 Ricard, F., 80, 353 Richardson, 222 Ricoeur, P., 40, 49 n.16, 206, 259–260, 276, 277 n.1 Rilke, R, M., 336 Rivas, V. G., 113–137, 383–417 Robbe-Grillet, A., 210 Rosalind, 259 Roth, P., 210 Roukes, M., 251 Rousseau, J. J., 110, 142, 208 Ruelle, D., 440 Saint Augustine, 142 Saint-John Perse, 361–373

455

Saintsbury, G., 422 Sanborn, S., 149 Sartre, H. E., 24, 29, 37–50, 93, 210 Sartre, J. -P., 48 n.14, 49 n.18 Satsuki, 379, 380 Schiller, D., 136, 238 n.2 Scholes, R., 4, 208–210, 213 Schreiner, C. S., 219–229 Schutz, A., 156, 324, 419–421, 424, 426–428 Scipio, C. M. P., 62, 364 Senzangakhona, 63–65, 70–71, 73 Shakespeare, W., 51–90, 104 n.7, 152, 220, 222, 309, 429 n.7 Shegog(Reverend), 266, 267, 268, 273 Shelley, P. B., 21 Shklovsky, V., 3 Shreve, 262, 277 n.4 Simon, C., 181 Smith, C., 315 Smith, J., 3–8 Socrates, 16, 18, 20–23, 337, 364 Stackpole, H., 398, 405, 413 Steadman, A., 220, 228 n.3 Sternin, G. U., 111 Stewart, G., 221, 229 n.9 Stoppard, T., 205–216, 424, 429 n.7 Sulla, L. C., 57–59 Tang, W., 249 Tanizaki, J., 375–376 Thermus, P. M. M., 58 Tolstoy, L., 285–292 Tournier, M., 93–106 Trail, N., 287, 290 Tress, A., 93, 101–103

456

NAME INDEX

Tymieniecka, A-T., 3–8, 135 n.2, 136 n.7, 141, 143, 146, 147, 150, 153 n.8, 415 n.3, 416 n.22, 451 n.6, 452 n.56 Tzara, T., 212–214 Urfe, N., 210 Van Gogh, V., 48 n.7, 311 van Manen, M., 157, 169 Vaught, J., 288 Velasquez, D., 94–95 Veselovskiy, A. N., 110 Vetius, A., 58 Vilenkin, A., 249 von Goethe, J. W., 136, 337, 385, 415 n.3 Warburton, (Lord), 387, 400, 401, 406, 409, 412

Watson, J., 252 Weil, S., 437, 451 n.16 Weinberg, S., 251 Weiner, P. P., 107 Welty, E., 285–292 Wilde, O., 211–213 Willem, 147–149 Wilson, R. J., 205–216, 419–429 Wittgenstein, L., 12 Wrangel, N. N., 107 Yoshiya, 375, 379, 380 Yusoupov, 110 Zgura, V. V., 107 Zhoungshu, D., 250 Zinnser, W., 295–296, 320 n.4