Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion (Analecta Husserliana)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

TOPICAL STUDY LAWRENCE KIMMEL / Reality and Illusion in the Work of Art

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SECTION I MARIA AVELINA CECILIA LAFUENTE / Dream’s Shadows:

Fiction and Reality in Miguel de Unamuno

3

MAX STATKIEWICZ / On the Truth and Lie of Illusion in the

Theatrical Sense

43

JUNG-IN KWON / Simulating the Unpresentable and the

Sublime

55 SECTION II

PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL / The Restored Sistine Chapel

Ceiling: The Transcendent Made Immanent

67

JENNIFER ANNA GOSETTI-FERENCEI / T rompe L ’Oeil and the

Mimetic Tradition in Aesthetics

79

CARLTON HUGHES / A Metaphysical Perspective on Alberti’s

De Pictura

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JOANNE SNOW-SMITH / Triumph of the Dissolution of Reality

by Illusion: The Spiritual Experience of T rompe L ’Oeil Architectural Wall Paintings – The Tomb of the Leopards and the Villa of the Mysteries

103

˘ DA ˘ LINA DIACONU / Illusionary Touch, and Touching MA

Illusions

115

BRIAN GRASSOM / Reality, Illusion, and Alterity: The Advent

of the Other

127 v

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

JO ANN CIRCOSTA / Silence as Disclosure: Virginia Woolf ’s

Style of Being-in-the-World

139

SECTION III JOHN BALDACCHINO / Between Illusions: Art’s Arguments for

‘Weak’ Reality

157

JAMES P. WERNER / Post-Digital Awareness: An Insight into

New Immersion Practices in Installation Art

169

MARGUERITE P. HARRIS / Thought, Object and Experience in

Film/Video Installation Art

185

ANDREW E. HERSHBERGER / The ‘‘Spring-Tight Line’’ in

Minor White’s Theory of Sequential Photography

199

SECTION IV SCOTT A. SHERER / Imagination and Cultural Criticism in the

Work of David Wojnarowicz

233

DANIEL M. UNGER / A Message for the Queen: Guercino’s

Death of Dido, Cardinal Spada, and the Internal Conflicts at the French Court

243

RUTH RONEN and EFRAT BIBERMAN / Who is Deceived by

T rompe L ’oeil?

257

LANFRANCO ACETI / The Aesthetics of True Digital Illusions:

Crossing Several Roads at the Same Time

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APPENDIX Program of the 9th Annual Conference of the International Society of Phenomenology, Fine Arts and Aesthetics; HUMAN CREATION BETWEEN REALITY AND ILLUSION, May 14 and 15, 2004

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INDEX OF NAMES

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The articles in this Volume are a selection of papers read at the Ninth Annual Conference of the International Society of Phenomenology, Fine Arts and Aesthetics, Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion, which was held at Harvard Divinity School, May 14 and 15, 2004. Our heartfelt thanks go to the authors for contributing to the common pool of a fascinating inquiry. I also want to thank Ryan Walther for copyediting and typesetting of the papers, as well as Jeff Hurlburt for his careful preparations. A-T.T.

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REALITY AND ILLUSION IN THE WORK OF ART

PREFATORY REMARK

Two basic intuitions that frame the relation of art and illusion in this essay – a conviction that illusion is essential to art, but also that art is an essential resource of truth – present an apparent conflict that invites or requires resolution. Indeed, conflict and disagreement seem endemic to discussions of art. In philosophy, the question of the relation between art and reality invariably begins with Plato’s well-known critique of art as mimesis, as imitation, that makes the process of art a second order activity of copying, and thus an essential distraction from the more serious first order business of life and truth. It has always been a puzzle in philosophy what to do with Plato’s disparaging remarks about art, not least of all because the whole of his work, as well as its elemental detail, is embedded in artistic techniques of dramatic dialogue, allegory, metaphor, and literary allusion. Is it merely ironic that a consummate artist such as Plato seems to undermine the credibility of his own work in this criticism, or is there something more to it – a paradox on which Plato exercises a larger point about life, truth, and art? If we wish to account for the seriousness of the cultural activity of art in life, and abandon the limiting paradigm of mimesis to adopt the broader reach of art as experience and art as expression, a number of alternative approaches to the relation of art, truth, and reality suggest themselves. Plato aside, a crucial issue concerning art in relation to truth and reality – is that illusion is essential to art. It will be the recommendation of this essay to think of illusion as a particular strength of art, rather than a lack or shortcoming. It is a singular virtue of art to show truth in and through illusion by constructing a different modality for understanding the complex character of reality as it is disclosed in human experience. Philosophy since Aristotle has been concerned to defend art against charges of irrationality and irresponsibility in relation to fixing a coherent truth and stable reality. One counter might be, of course, that reality is not stable, and the coherence of truth is always a work in progress and ‘‘fixable’’ only on pain of diminishing both life and world. But beyond this, if we aspire to the whole truth – whatever that may be – we require an open aesthetics of experience to draw on all the modalities of our xi A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, xi–xxv. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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creative energy in the arts no less than the sciences. This seems to suggest that at least some aspects of truth are accessible through illusion – that illusion and reality in the end may not be definitive of difference. I

Magic, fantasy, wonder, mystery, romance are the variegated and insubstantial stuff of illusion of which both art and life are made. If the history of art is one of the progressive achievement of illusion we are presented with the question of how illusion is related to life, and life itself related to the illusions of reality. What really separates reality and illusion? Is there a disjunction between life and art with respect to this distinction? The art of inquiry – at least philosophical inquiry – consists in asking question in such a way that the inquiry itself becomes meaningful. In the present essay we will not get far beyond the asking of questions, but hopefully the questions will invite further inquiry into the relation of art, illusion, and reality. In order to better understand the role of art in the relation of illusion and reality it will be useful to consider kinds of illusions common to ordinary perception and language. The following seem obvious: Optical illusion – the straight stick appears bent in the water Psychological illusion – the familiar rabbit/duck image in which the cognitive shift first appears one thing, then the other. (The correlative physiological phenomenon is a shift from the left to the right side of the brain). V isual illusion – (trompe l’oeil) the effect of perspective in paintings. Graphic illusion – Escher’s sketches of visual paradox. Emotional illusion – being in love (transforming the beloved into perfection) or, a reaction to an object that has emotional attachments to some other experience – (a wooden Cross that brings tears or joy). Conceptual illusion – Cheshire Cat, disappearing so all that is left is a smile. Grammatical illusion – the squared circle, or an infinite sequence Metaphysical illusion – Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the actual as illusory. Scientific illusion – the sun rising in the east; the perception of solid objects that are, in fact (in reality) primarily interstices of space. On the other side of illusion in science, consider the quantum puzzle of Schrodinger’s cat. The category of kind is in a sense arbitrary, and one might argue that some of these kinds of illusions ought to be catalogued together. But grant that there are distinctions to be made, and that the distinctions all

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seem to indicate something about the normalcy and importance of illusion. It may be appropriate as well to note the different domains of illusion; for example the illusion in nature itself, in which a mirage appears in the dry desert, in the domain of art the illusion of three dimensions, in magic the illusions of slight of hand, in philosophy, the musings of skepticism and nihilism. Leaving aside questions of religious illusion and superstition, the intellectual landscape is littered with illusion. In philosophy, Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume are obvious examples. Plato’s everyday world of perception becomes illusion, so that reality is accessible only through the intellect. Descartes’ Evil Daemon so deceives the senses that the world that appears real may be an illusion. Berkeley’s basic thesis that ‘esse ist percipi’, in which perception constitutes being, still requires God to guarantee its reality. Hume’s critique of reason that divides the claims of knowledge makes reality a by-product of social agreement. In the case of literature there are again different kinds of illusion. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, illusion is negative – life itself is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, resulting in an expression of despairing nihilism. In T he T empest, illusion is romantic, not tragic, and the feeling is poignant but positive, that we are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little lives are rounded with a sleep. The differences between these kinds of illusion – one leads to despair, the other to melancholy – are differences between tragic and romantic visions of human existence; however both illusions disclose something essential about human reality. There are no clear limits to the extent of illusion in life and literature, whether the illusion is one of metaphor and symbol in language, or in the mind’s eye of imagination. Differences of domain is obvious enough. In the case of nature – the bent stick in the water – one might (people do) think the stick is in fact bent, and need to be corrected. But in the case of landscape painting, no one thinks that leaves will fall from the trees, or that the fruit of the still life painting will nourish. The illusions are of a different order. In Keats’ ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’, the moment pictured is frozen forever: the lovers will always be in pursuit, never fulfilled, but will also be forever young in their desire. The more general conceptual point to be argued here is that reality in the illusion of art consists in capturing the truth of that enduring moment and memory of youth and love. II

It is the first snow of the season, and I think with Wordsworth: ‘‘My heart leaps up when I behold/ a snowflake in the sky!’’ Now it is the next

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day; snow lies thinly scattered on the high mountain meadow where it fell, the sun is high in a clear sky. The white is still beautiful; I feel the change of seasons, a sense of winter in the air. Still, the wonder is gone, the moment has past, and I think, with a certain sadness, of John Donne’s line that ‘all my pleasures are like yesterday.’ T hat I perceive magic in the moment of the first snowfall, and how I perceive that moment is a complex phenomenon of both life experience and artistic (in this case poetic) remembrance. The reality of the world of snowfall is replete with illusion, a world infused with the values of its experience and expression. But it is the moment that is precious, and when it has spent its magic, then not all thy charm nor wit can call it back, nor capture a flake of it. The moment of awakening springs from the heart and soul and perhaps remains buried there in the expectation of another moment in another time and place. One can live in such a way, hopefully, that there are more, rather than less such moments in life; and it is such moments, surely that make the world a human place, a dwelling in which memories are shared and recorded. The great appeal of art, and music, and literature is both the enhancement of that moment and the sustaining of its possibility. A week before this first snow, I had marveled at the patterns the aspen leaves made as they released their grip from the tall branches and fell to the earth, as their graceful final flights spent the energy nature had granted in their first life in spring. Soft patterns spread out on the chilling earth, before the winds swept them into ridges to form the stuff of new soil that will feed another generation of growth. And I thought then of Tennyson’s turning of the seasons of life, as leaves decay and fall/ and weep their burthen to the ground ...’’ Hearing an echo of the waning autumn of the brief stay on earth, listening with Wordsworth to the still sad voice of humanity in the fading slant of sunlight on the leaves. I could remember back too, in the fragile shift of time, to the first quick sounds of spring – the mountain streams, the smell of new life before it gave way to the wages of summer and sun. Different moments spark the wonder of life simply in the passing of time. The reality, we want to say, is that creatures are born and die – Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath. But this latter coherence is still a product of illusion – perhaps truthful illusion that there is a meaningful pattern at the heart of existence. Without the coherence of illusion, the meaning of the cycle of natural life is lost. There are explanations for such things as the passing of seasons, of the spiraling leaves, the soft tumbling of snowflakes through the still air with barely enough weight to fall to the earth. In poetic terms, there is on the

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surface of the thing a feeling of oneness of life, a kinship with the passing life of seasons on earth. The excitement of change, of newness, expectation of growth, the strength of maturation, the wisdom of experience, the promise of regeneration in the decay, the sense of closure in the completeness of the cycle: sea to cloud to snowflake to river to sea – and earth to earth. We notice and inquire into reality in the essential illusions of time, of meaning, of life. At some indeterminate point they all mix and mingle, collapse into the experience of human sensibility and perception. The culture of art is a reminder of the illusion of reality in life, and of the other side of it – the reality of illusion in our lives. The two pillars of art in aesthesis and poiesis are different moments in the reality of illusion – in the perception of beauty, and of the making of it. The impulse of art is surely found in the first awakening of the soul to the beauty of the world. The fine edge of its making is just as surely a response in kind, in which the human mind and hand seek to capture the moment of that awakening. The genius of art, whether of perception or construction is not discovered in the how or even why of the moment. The wonder of its expression is that it is so, long before the techne or logistics of how it is so. To notice the tension between illusion and reality is to focus on their separation. Is it better or a transformation of this notion in philosophy to speak of a ‘‘dialectical tension’’ between reality and illusion on which art draws? The point of such an expression is to emphasize that art is in this way analytic, a techne that exploits the shifting perspectives that inform and misinform our ordinary and daily lives, not to mention extraordinary events and disruptive experiences. It is tempting to say that in life there is no strong and fast separation of reality and illusion, in the sense that reality is not given; rather, it is constructed – of experiences and perspectives that are individual as well as collective, perceived as well as decided, intuited as well as codified. The distinction that implies that reality can exist without illusion is a staple of everyday science that commends reason to a privileged perception of objective reality in opposition to ‘subjectivity’, a projection that declares the priority of facts as such, a domain of reality free of the stain of illusion. There are certainly contexts in which it is regrettable to be under the illusion that something is the case when it is not so. Most often, however, this is on the surface of things, and does not require the correction of science. In its inclusion of illusion, Art is closer to the reality of our experience and world – at least to the ordinary complexities of our shared lives in the world.

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Critical philosophy began with the impulse to separate reality from appearance, in the different venues of physical observation and speculation of Thales on the one hand, and in the ethical dialectics of Socrates on the other. Distinguishing between how things appear and how things really are became a central focus of philosophical discourse as Plato extended the critique to art. He responded to what he conceived to be the enhancing illusion of art in the deception of sense and imagination by censoring it. There is a question, however, whether something genuinely important to human sensibility may be lost in the presumption of this bifurcation. Is reality really in a separate world from that of appearance, as Plato puts the analogy? Arguably, it is an analogical illusion that Plato needs to express the reality of his conception, that is, his conception of reality. In apparent contrast to the central tradition in Western philosophy, it is interesting to consider that appearance may be integral to reality, illusion essential to the coherence of the life-world. If science is the attempt to discern a true reality independent of appearance (it may be understood differently than this, of course), then art is surely the cultural activity that insists on their interdependence. Art is less concerned with distinguishing reality from appearance than to show the reality in appearance, appearance in reality – to show the depth of beauty in the surface of things – through the ordering of sound, sight, and motion. Where illusion is the means of art, it is also a means to the reality that funds its expression. Life and world are not the same of course, and the realities of their perception are different as well. But if the reality of the world of objects (the objective world) is the domain of the sciences, what domain and discipline are the realities of human life unless it be the arts? III

Heidegger makes a point of emphasizing the ambiguity (and so fecundity) of the work of art, in the sense that the work itself (the thing, the object or product) is also just that: work (activity). As a work, it also elicits a response – that too, is its work, what it does, not merely what it is. Moreover, a work of art is an invitation to the percipient to work – at looking and listening, at appreciating and understanding, at relating and interpreting. In this joint and cooperative activity of art, the artist and the viewer or listener engage in a complex process that involves the work of imagination, of conception, of production, of performance, forming alloys of illusion in the production of a shared reality which is the work.

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If there are defining relations in art between reality and illusion they are to be found in the work that art is and does. The philosophical firstmove in answering any question is to question the question, to inquire into the meaning of the question – indeed, to discover the answer to a question in the meaning of the question. So in the case of the relation of art, illusion, and reality: the sense of the question and any answer depends most importantly and finally on what one means by reality. Is reality as such, for example, limited to the surface of things, to raw perception – and only subsequently augmented and diluted by processes of common language and agreement? Philosophical models that argue the obvious pro and contra are familiar in G. E. Moore’s ‘‘This is a hand’’ countering Bertrand Russell’s sense datum’s of ‘‘cat on the mat’’; instances of the empirically mundane contrasted with skeptical models which challenge the authority of any claim about certainty, e.g. Hume’s reminder of the essential contingencies of facts. In the larger context of the metaphysics of reality, illusion again presents itself at the heart of reality. The familiar question of Ontology: ‘‘What is there?’’ Or simply ‘‘What is?’’ is answered simply enough: ‘‘Everything.’’ But then we have to decide (not describe) what counts as ‘‘everything’’. Even if we restrict the question to a very limited context, the books on the table, Moore’s hand, or Russell’s cat on the mat, how are we to decide what to count? Do we count the books, and the pages, and the words, and the letters, and the acknowledgements, and the ideas, and the numbers, and the images, and the references and the allusions, and the grammatical mistakes, and ...? The complexity of counting ‘‘reality’’ gives a clue to the ambiguity of the reference, even in the most ordinary of circumstances. Quite apart from the vagaries of sense data theory, in the case of Russell’s cat – do we count the hairs, and the claws, and the eyes and ears and, meows, and fleas, and beauty, and indifference ... ? Do we count as reality all that is the cat, and of the cat, and how much of all this is separate from our counting, our perception, our expectations, values, history? I don’t mean to imply that to say anything, you must say everything, only that reality is not such a simple thing as the disjuncture reality and illusion might seem to suggest. This is the artistic charm in the Cheshire Cat, when only the smile remains. There is something philosophically interesting and right about this observation, hence the attraction of the story. In the absurdity, the schism of reality and illusion is itself breached, opening a space of imagination within which art deepens human understanding.

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If the relation between reality and illusion is not clear in general or comprehensive terms, and if admittedly art is deeply involved in the exercise of illusion, then how do we understand the relation between art and reality? What is the interest of art in reality, given both the fascination and dependence of art on illusion? Is it a general intent of art to resolve the dialectical tension between reality and illusion? Or, does it rather seek to illuminate reality through illusion? In any event art finds its life and calling in the indeterminate region between reality and illusion – as does the working of language, which in its core and use exists in the play between the literal and the metaphorical. The density of artistic experience indicates the depths of its complexity. Consider what it is to hear a melody. Even on the surface of the hearing, the experience is more than hearing the notes; more than hearing the sound of an instrument. Is the sound real, the melody an illusion? Is melody but a construction of the mind, a second order reality? Is our cognitive awareness of melody one that is native and natural, or is it learned? Is it constructed or merely constituted, and what would this difference be? Hearing a melody takes no effort; it comes to me of its own, seemingly resonant with spirit and mind, whole and distinct. This is part of the idea that music soothes the savage breast. Put another way, how is it that horsehair drawn across catgut strung on hollowed wood can induce a mood, excite and enchant? That this is so remains a fact about human beings, a real feature of our collective nature. The hair and gut and wood, the sound, and the emotional response to the sound somehow imbedded in the nature of the beast and in the course of the culture all constitute the field of experience that is reality. Reality is not independently given or distinguishable ‘‘as such.’’ There is, of course, some force to the view that reality is what you trip over or bump up against, and so a stone or brick wall is more real than what goes bump in the night, what terrifies or depresses. But this speaks only to the ordinary and traditional bias of perceiving and valuing. Is one bump a fact, the other a value? One bruises, the other terrifies. The bruise is common, the terror all one’s own. The reality is different in kind, of course, but one is no less real than the other in any ultimate sense. In the end, to call something an objective fact is to give it a value, and more importantly, to prize objectivity. That facts are things universally agreed upon is but an analytic truth; its acceptance is finally a factor of social need and agreement, not an independent certification of reality. The work of Art, upper case, is that of fashioning many worlds, of expanding as well as enriching the dimensions of reality.

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IV

The arts seem always pressed to defend themselves against a philosophical hostility born of suspicion that its practices are deceptive, depend on illusion, and distract from the more serious business of discerning truth and fixing reality. The dominant mode of human or at least ‘‘Western’’ perception from the time of Plato is that the true is the rational, the rational is the real, and that the cool-aid-acid of testability is hypothesis submitted to evidentiary proof. But even a traditional thinker like Aristotle, committed to the core of rationality in all things valuable, granted that the true is accessible in any number of ways: If then the means by which the soul discovers truth, and generally discerns things unchanging, or even those things variable about truth, are science, prudence, wisdom and intuitive reason, and if no one of the first three – prudence, science, wisdom – is a means of grasping primary principles, our only possible conclusion is that they are determined by intuitive reason. – Nicomachean Ethics

Or on the other end of the scale, consider again Hume’s skeptical division that limits the reach of reason so that the modalities and measures of existential reality are exceptive of proof: Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluency and transparency of water that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that is would consume him. No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact – T he Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

These are two very different, but representative cases within the history of intellectual discourse that allow for the exceptive and diversive modes of inquiry and expression concerning truth. But, granting the range of discourse concerning truth, what are the crucial questions to be decided concerning illusion and reality, and the role of art with respect to possible differences? In the case of the visual arts, why re-present things with the artifice of illusion? In the case of painting, for example, why paint? Why painting? As a creative activity – doing something, making something – there is no special puzzle. But what do we look for and see in the experience of the painting? What is attractive in the illusion for both painter and perceiver? We learn to see through

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the painting – to see nature, to see ourselves, see into ourselves, to access feelings that respond to some deep need for recognition. It is an established fact that surface recognition comes more quickly to a sketch of an object than a photograph of the same thing – it is the outline, an image that captures the essential features of thing. Artists have learned to see and capture the shifting moods of a face, as well as the shifting features of a church as the sun passes through the day, or as emotions pass through the soul. Language and art (and the languages of art) are similar in this way: they require and elicit recognition and insight, they draw on the compelling nature of impulse to draw, to symbolize The design seems as much to probe as to control, to find what is beneath the surface of our experience of an object – of a sunset, of a smile, of the penetrating light of midday or the waking light of morning. Something in our minds and souls responds to such stuff, and the artist is one who searches for the essentials of those experiences in the re-presenting of the thing in sound, sight, and motion. The initial impulse of art is arguably of two movements: expression – the occasion and result of being moved to movement, to sing or dance or draw, and representation – re-presenting what one feels, or sees or hears in the form of that expression. In the case of drawing or painting this manifests in the discovery and construction of those aspects of an object or experience that serves to identify and enhance its occasion – information critical for recognition and meaning. In the visual arts, for example, the use of outline to distinguish form has been a constant in artistic production from cave paintings to cartoons. This suggests the human inclination to somehow capture and express the passing moments of exhilaration and sense of empowerment that perception brings – in memory and imagination, dreams and expectations. Artists have continually informed and transformed common perception and understanding of the world in the most elemental ways. The point is that our sense of what is real is transformed in the process of artistic expression. We learn to identify the world and value its appearance in terms not only of practical need, but of imaginative expression. What we see of the world is clearly a function of how we look at the world and how we identify those aspects important to the meaning of our existence in the world. Reality, in short, is a function of illusion – how we look and see, and how we express and represent what we see and feel. The role of art in this process is obviously complex, but a few features of even the formal aspects of art will help to make this clear.

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In drawing a human face the expectation is that it be drawn from the front. A picture of a horse will be drawn characteristically from a side profile, a reptile from above – emphasizing those features of things that are consequential to our perception and understanding. These forms in turn indicate how it is we understand objects and aspects of our experience. What in all this is reality, and what illusion? How much of it is an element of the world, and how much a function of our perception and valuation of things? In realistic painting a three dimensional scene is depicted by a two dimensional image, which would seem to suggest that art is in its very nature a matter of illusion. On another level is the familiar case of the Mona Lisa smile. It is a common experience as well as a point of general agreement that to see the smile requires a kind of indirection of perception: only when one looks at the eyes, can one see, or feel the effect of the smile. The reality is in the illusion. Only through peripheral vision does the reality of the smile become apparent. On the other hand this may be instructive that in life as well as art, we see the smile in the eyes. How much of perception and projection depends on the fictive reality of illusion? The history of art, up to a certain point, has been the progressive development of techniques to represent the clarity of three-dimensional experience. The techniques of perspective, of shadow, dark tones, color, and contrast to suggest depth provides a painting with a depth of meaning as well, gives it an internal life of its own that results in the familiar and complex effect of art. Consider the different effect that the cave paintings of a bison would have, not simply in contrast with the presence of a bison, but in contrast with the blank wall of the cave. How is it that in the represented object of art we come to see and hear differently? In the history of art, for example it is common to point out the difference of a Chinese tree from a Dutch tree, an Egyptian figure from a Greek statue. Is this a difference of worlds or of perception, of culture or of levels of technique? Where is the reality buried in the illusions? A major turn in the history of modern art, from what one can gather casually from outside particular or scholarly analysis, seems to be shift in emphasis, or in some ways a reversal of the process of progressive realistic illusion, so that art now commonly calls attention to the effect of illusion – the ambiguous play between mind and world, object and image, perception, conception and representation in a work of art (e.g. Magrite’s Human Condition I).

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Of water and shadows: As with much else in philosophy, Plato is a sourcebook for a discussion of reality and illusion. Most familiar in his work is the example of the stick in the water: it appears bent but it is not. We are familiar with the physics that accounts for the appearance that, in the water, the stick bends. The difference between reality and appearance is made clear in the example: this is what we mean by illusion. But Plato’s second case and discussion of illusion in the allegory of the cave is perhaps of more interest. Here the illusion is that of perceiving reality in things that are only appearance. The familiar analogy is that what we perceive as real objects are but shadows cast on the wall of a cave. What we ordinarily think of and perceive as reality is nothing but illusion. His extended analogy is that just as we can reason to critically overcome the perceptual illusion of the bent stick in the water, so too we can overcome the cognitive illusion that the world of appearance is real. All this extends into the field of art for Plato: mimesis in the visual arts is but an imitation of an imitation – fostering illusions of knowledge where there is but faulty opinion. Art as intentional illusion becomes willful deception and moral dissuasion. When perception is illusory as in the bent stick, it is as if the mind were playing tricks on us. Here the distinction is clear however, between how something appears and how it is, and we call the ‘‘faulty’’ perception an optical illusion. What of the case of cognitive illusion? For example ‘‘Are you under the illusion that he is an honest man of integrity? He is in fact a scoundrel!’’ Is my mistaken view of Tartuffe a matter of perception or judgment? Not so easy to separate them, of course. He appears to be sincere, a man of honesty and integrity. But appears to whom, and at what are they looking? Would this simply be a mistake of categories – I mistake by attributing character to appearance, rather than deciding as a matter of judgment? We want to say that Tartuffe in reality is a fraud. His appearance remains the same, his actions are those same ones we viewed before, but now we make a judgment, and our whole perspective changes. Compare being in love, and falling out of love. We discover something about the person, and our whole perception changes. Have we come to our senses, or have we lost a sense we had? The beauty of gathering clouds in the mountains can turn suddenly terrifying, as a storm breaks upon the mountain. The case of a storm at sea is the same: the calm beauty of the benign sea suddenly becomes a torrent of violence, and fear replaces the calm as love turns to hatred. Such shifting perspectives are occasioned by turns of nature, and by our response to perceptions and judgment. Reality and illusion seem to ebb and flow into each other

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– the calm to violent sea, the peaceful sense of belonging to the terrifying reminder of difference. V. T ECHNE AND TECHNIQUE

In the 19th C., Impressionist painters discovered the image as a changing pattern of colors and tones – the forms that emerge in a painting are no longer outlined, but only suggested, as if through a glass darkly, mirroring the experience that we never see the whole of things, only parts and pieces, glances and glimpses – yet at the same time comprehending something essential in what it is we are seeing. This provides us with insight into the role of the perceiver in the changing patterns of what is really perceived – a hint of the reality that is not stable in the world, but continually in the process of flowing form. The classical linguistics of form were radically altered in the developments of abstract art in which the idea and images of perception no longer aimed at literal meaning. Uses of abstraction turned classical modalities of paintings back on themselves to evoke an awareness of technique and the contrived effects of illusion. This in effect, produced a kind of second-order illusion; in the reversal of illusionary techniques used to depict reality, abstract art demonstrated not only the illusionary nature of art, but the illusionary nature of perception itself. Thus illusion has played different roles in the development of art, and in the consequent development of perception and imagination as a result of art. We have become aware, through visual art, of the importance of illusion in our perception of the world, in our awareness of the process of perception. If philosophy is the attempt to understand the idea of idea (knowledge), then a critical history of painting is the attempt to understand the idea of perception. – the force and form of image in human consciousness. In Gombrich’s famous work Art and Illusion, he discusses the linguistics of the visual image in allegory and symbolism in making intelligible the ‘‘invisible world of ideas’’. Recall Plato’s ‘‘allegory of the cave’’ in T he Republic, in which he shows to the mind’s eye of understanding what his accompanying ‘‘theory of the divided line’’ can only indicate conceptually about the journey to truth. Idea and image: to portray the reality of the process of understanding and of access to reality of the human condition, both are needed. What is it ‘‘to look at nature’’? Is this a simple process? Does the artist teach us to see better, to see more, and more clearly and deeply through the techniques of illusion? However that may be, the art of every age in some important sense is an effort toward a progressive (?) discovery of

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visual truth. It is a collective attempt to overcome the limits – the distractions and distortions – of cultural tradition. To see clearly, plainly..? Is it possible that art, more than any other perspective, can progressively free itself from the prejudices of its time, place, and heritage? Or is it that art only draws attention to the importance of such prejudices, while at the same time showing them to be prejudices? Is art unlike science in that it is not committed to the strictures of foundational principles and the controlled consistency of construction, so that it builds not one, but many structures, not one perspective, but many possibilities? The point of the arts, in which case, is not to do away with illusion, but to show illusion as vital to human sensibility and to the spiritual and cultural life of human beings. There is a wonderful educational film with the title ‘‘Why Man Creates’’ that begins with a humorous romp through the history of cultural invention, from the lever and wheel and word, to that of creed, and law, and Armageddon, one that ends less humorously, with both a bang and a whimper. It covers artistic innovation from the serious investments of invention to the playful raptures of caprice, and provides a quick visual sketch of the dimensions of art in life. The philosophical effect of the film leads to the question of how it is that we come to identify our culture and times, our very identity as a species through an activity essentially useless, grounded in the technique of illusion. The extent of illusions common to human life suggests that illusion is essential to the character of human life: the illusion of truth, of faith, of reality – the illusion of the meaning of life, the significance of action, the sufficiency of reason, the efficacy of politics, the justification of war, the permanence of love, the expectation of fulfillment; the illusion of present, past, and future, the illusion of forever. It is not that such things do not exist, only that their existence is embedded in illusion, in the human construction of their meanings. Art, as a design of cultural activity, intends to create something – the intention, reason, motive for art, involves a paradox in the meaning of its activity. There may be as many motives for making something as there are artists – for its beauty, for its attraction, charm, diversion, fun, for profit, recognition ... ). But a general feature connected to artistic making seems to be simply for the sake purely of doing and making it, whatever it might be – its appeal is for appreciation of the thing made. The cultural fact of such making is in some important sense(s) paradoxical, and so in keeping with this animal that elaborates and enculturates the useless. It is difficult, or at least implausible from a point of view that would characterize the origin and value of all natural activity in terms of utility

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to give a credible account of art. However it emerged as a natural activity, the cultural activity of art comes to figure as essential in the development of the identity of the species, no less than of a given people. The paradox of essential uselessness is further extended in realizing that apart from the natural activity at the root of art – the delight in movement, the release of random sound, the focused impulse of making something, its cultural development seems to have the design or motive of expressing truth and discerning reality. Thus the paradox: the discernment of reality and the disclosure of truth through the art of illusion. END NOTE

A good deal of what has been argued in this essay depends upon the idea of fictive reality, and the role of art and literature in the constitution of that reality. There are fictions natural to the mind, as we have suggested in the discussion of illusions above. In these and other cases there is often a sense of the uncanny, of the disjuncture of meaning and expectation so that the character of reality is put in question. The fictive lies somewhere between the real of common sense and the imaginary of poetry, in Maurice Natansons’ expression. The creative work of art and fiction is to disclose that acute space in which consciousness does not construct but constitutes the reality of consciousness. Such fictive reality (reality) is present – only not acute – in ordinary contexts of perception. The shock of the uncanny in the midst of ordinary life is an occasion in which this becomes apparent. And herein is a model for art – what constitutes the thrilling sense of encounter in great and singular works, whether visual, audial, or literary. Philosophy is fond of distinguishing between minds and matter, physical and mental, objects and ideas, and has traditionally found empowerment in the analytics of opposition. We have inquired into the way in which art, in the employment of illusion, makes a case for the re-integration of our thinking about appearance and reality, about their integral relation in life and world. The question concerning the traditional disjunction between appearance and reality may be less important than is usually claimed, unless and until we have a specific reason for the asking, and acknowledge that in the greater scheme of themes there is a convergence of art and life, illusion and truth, that constitutes human culture. T rinity University San Antonio, T exas

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DREAM ’S SHADOW S: FICTION AND REALITY IN MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

1. INTRODUCTION: THE CONFLICT FICTION/REALITY IN UNAMUNO’S THOUGHT

Dream’s Shadows (Sombras de suen˜o) is a small theatre play, a drama, written in 1926 by the Spanish thinker and writer Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936). In this drama the main subject is the question of the interaction between illusion and actual existence, fiction and reality: between a character, Tulio Montalba´n, a historical and literary hero on the one hand, and a real human being, Julio Macedo on the other. As a matter of fact, they are both the same person. Montalba´n decides to abandon his heroic existence, his life in others’ minds, his historical character, and simulates his own death. He reappears in an isolated island, transformed into Macedo, ‘‘a man in flesh and bone’’ (in a typical Unamunian expression). He wishes to live a real existence, as a real human being which is not supplanted by his own character any more. However, as we shall see, his literary character actually ‘‘kills’’ his concrete real being, and Julio Macedo is pushed to commit suicide. The question underlying this drama is: is it possible or reasonable to connect or even to fuse (con-fuse) illusion, fiction, on the one hand, and reality, on the other? Unamuno answers in a positive way. The notion of illusion, contrary to reality, points to the idea of something suggested by imagination or caused by the senses’ deceit. Fiction is initially something which is made (one of the main meanings of fingere in latin is precisely to make, to form; others are to model, to represent and later to imagine), usually invented by the human mind. It is subjective in the sense that it depends on human subjects, on human agents’ imagination, for its existence. Reality, on the contrary is usually understood as something with an objective consistence; it exists in the world (or so we suppose) before being known by any subject. This is the classical approach, corrected by phenomenology, which implies that both subject and object are affected by intentionality and are, in this sense, interdependent. Unamuno also reaches a point of interconnection between fiction and reality through an original path. He starts from another notion of reality, different from the classical one: what is real is that which acts and to 3 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 3–42. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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exist is to act. In this sense, it seems clear that some literary works, and mainly their characters, are much more real that many concrete human beings who pass through their lives like dream’s shadows. They have an alienated existence, a trivial mode of life, without actually interacting with other human modes of existence. On the contrary, for Unamuno, classical literary characters live usually in their readers’ existence, provoking actions and reactions and perhaps modifying their lives. The question of the real power of characters and fiction is also posed in some of Unamuno’s novels. One of them, entitled T ulio Montalba´n and Julio Macedo, is the precedent (written in 1920) of Dream’s Shadows, but the most famous novel concerning the subject of the connection between fiction and reality is his novel Mist (Niebla), written in 1914. In addition, his brief essay T hree Exemplary Novels and a Prologue (T res novelas ejemplares y un pro´logo, 1920) is a fundamental point of reference to study the problem. Our aim is to analyse the problem of the opposition between fiction and reality through all those works, and some critical bibliography. For that reason, we shall first start by focusing our attention in the drama Dream’s Shadows. Its analysis will lead us to several philosophical subjects concerning the ontological and anthropological implications of the aforementioned opposition. We shall see that the opposition often presents many facets and that it also implies an intrinsic relationship between the apparently contrary terms. Then, we shall analyse a wider subject which underlies the previous question: the role of literature, in general, for the anthropological comprehension of the Unamunian confusion between fiction and reality. Our intention is to achieve this task through three examinations: the role of metaphor, the human being considered as fictitious, and the narrative heroes seen as real beings. At the same time, some basic anthropological problems, like alienation and authenticity of human existence, contingency, finitude, death and the yearning for infinitude, life as a tragedy, etc., will arise. 2. DREAM ’S SHADOW S. THE STORY – SOME ANTHROPOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Dream’s Shadows is a short drama, written by Unamuno while he was exiled in France, but it is inspired by his stay on the small island of Fuerteventura (in The Canary Islands), banished there by the dictator Primo de Rivera. It has only six characters: The hero, Julio Macedo, the stranger who arrives onto a small isolated island;1 two other important

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characters are Don Juan Manuel de Solo´rzano and his daughter, Elvira; their two servants, Toma´s and Rita are secondary characters; finally Unamuno includes an unusual character in his list: the Sea, a symbol of infinitude, which is omnipresent as a fundamental context of the drama. Moreover, there is a continuous reference to two other persons: Tulio Montalba´n, Macedo’s previous identity, and Tulio’s wife, another Elvira, who died when she was only nineteen, one year after their marriage. The family Solo´rzano live isolated on the island, almost without contact with other inhabitants. Solo´rzano is centred on the past, in the history of the island and of his own lineage; he is worried by the very probable end of it, given that Elvira has no possibilities of finding an adequate husband in order to form a family and give a continuation to the lineage. Elvira lives also in history, amazed by the story of a famous liberator of a small American republic, Tulio Montalba´n, missing since his last battle by the sacred river of his country, and supposedly dead. She goes everywhere with his biography and does not cease talking about Montalba´n to Rita, the servant who became her mother after the death of her biological mother. She is in love with Tulio Montalba´n, the liberator and hero of her loved book. Elvira is a dreamer, just like ‘‘Don Quijote’’, Unamuno’s dreamer par excellence. In fact the author refers to her as Quixotic woman (‘‘Quijotesa’’), a Quixotic seawoman who desires to travel throughout the eternally infant-seas.2 The sea is, in effect, an important image for the Unamunian anthropological approach.There are two dimensions in it: the calm and permanence of the deep sea and the turbulence of the surface. Both of them are essential ingredients of the human life, at an individual level as well as at the collective one. At the individual level the actual conflict and the desire of calm are simultaneously present in each person’s existence. At the collective level, the true history is compared with the sea’s depth; it is constituted by the quiet endeavors of people’s everyday life (intrahistoria). The big events, on the contrary, are like the agitated surface of the sea; they make a lot of ‘‘noise’’, they are taken as the fundamental content of History books, which usually stress conflict and disturbance, ignoring the day to day efforts of normal people, their quiet work and contribution to history. Basically, human existence is a permanent conflict for Unamuno, an ‘‘agony’’ (taking the etymological Greek sense) and it must be so if humans aspire to exist following an authentic mode of being human. Nevertheless, together with the agonic, tragic Unamuno, there is another Unamuno

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who intimately seeks some calm, a perpetual peace, if possible.3 Sometimes, infancy is also a symbol of calm. In Dream’s Shadows both images, the sea and the infancy are, in fact, associated: ‘‘the seas eternally infants’’ aforementioned. Unamuno goes further with these symbols: it is not only a question of searching for infancy, or of returning to it, but mainly the possibility of reaching peace beyond birth, the possibility of des-nacer (‘‘dis-being-born’’), returning to the maternal womb, where the conflict of real life does not exist yet; This is quite different from dying, as Julio Macedo notes.4 Here the opposition is not life versus death, but the continuous conflict versus an apparently eternal peace. The same peace is represented by another metaphor related with water: the lake, a fundamental symbol in Unamuno’s last novel San Manuel, Bueno, Ma´rtir (1933).5 In psychoanalytical terms, this yearning for calm and for returning to the maternal womb is a symbol of the deep need for protection and security, a fundamental requirement not only for children, but also for adults when they find themselves in problematic or critical situations, or when they renounce an authentic personal individualization. Let us take, for example, Erik Fromm’s approach, who tries to surpass the basically sexual, libidinal Freudian interpretation of the relationship with the mother (with the Oedipian complex as a fundamental key) and underlines a deeper emotional link.6 For Fromm the mother is the figure that offers help, protection and love; consequently the mother represents life and safety. When the individual grows up, he is encouraged by society to become mature and to be ready to establish affective links, as an independent person, with other mature persons. Nevertheless, the motherly link is often in the background of our adult life. According to Fromm, we sometimes search for maternal symbols in other persons and even in some protective institutions or social groups, which help us to live better with our inherent existential conflicts, in which we are so often involved. The conflict is, as a mater of fact, firmly underlined by Unamuno, in terms of perpetual antagonism between opposing human dimensions: usually reason and logic, on the one hand, and life, faith, sentiment, emotion, will, etc., on the other. Conflict, agony is the basis of our existence: And the most tragic philosophical problem is how to conciliate the intellectual needs with the emotional and the volitive ones. This is the point where every philosophy fails when it tries to do away with the eternal and tragic contradiction, which is the basis of our existence.7

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Fromm also considers that human nature (he uses, like Unamuno, a dialectic, non essentialist notion of nature) is precisely the inherent opposition to human’s biological constitution, which presents different solutions or proposals for becoming human as such. The possible solutions are multiple, but not infinite, given that they are limited both by the features of the human organism and by the concrete situation (the Orteguian circumstance, or the phenomenological life-world, we could say).8 The existential conflict often becomes, both in Unamuno and in Fromm, difficult to live with. This is the reason why the protective role of the maternal symbol is so important for both thinkers. Fromm stresses the fact that classical psychoanalysis overlooks the fundamental role of the crucial and primary link of children – the boy as well as the girl – with the mother. As a matter of fact, Freud had already pointed to this phenomenon, especially after 1931, when he wrote about feminine sexuality, and later in his Shema of Psychoanalysis.9 In these works Freud recognizes the unique meaning of the mother, lasting through the individual’s life, as the primary and most powerful object of love, as an archetype of every future affective, emotional link. This would be valid for both sexes, male and female, somehow in contradiction with the Freudian basic theory of the Oedipus complex, concerning only the boy’s relationship with the mother. In the new perspective, we deal with a pre-oedipal attachement of both boys and girls, with an anthropological and phylogenetic basis. Fromm reconsiders this explicit – but often forgotten – Freudian idea – also examined by Jung, but in this case taking in view the universality of the mother as an archetype – arguing that the maternal attachment keeps its strength forever, because it constitutes one of the possible spiritual answers to conflicting human existence: It is true that it can lead to an absolute dependence, to madness or to commit suicide, but it is also one of the possibilities offered to the human being in his effort to find a solution to the existential conflict. If we give a sexual explanation to it, or say that it obeys to a compulsion of repetition, the true character of this answer to existence is not properly understood.10

The yearning for the symbolic link with the mother, even the desire of returning to the mother’s womb is, as a matter of fact, a figure repeated by Unamuno which also appears in Dream’s Shadows. It could be interpreted, in Fromm’s terms, as a nostalgia of a paradisiacal condition.11 This situation is biologically normal and necessary at the very first stages of human life. The question is: why does it reappear later in adult stages? First of all, this is possible given the primary ontological condition of

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every human being: the radical situation of openness, uncertainty and sensation of helplessness. In fact, this situation is the root of the fundamental existential anguish, which is an essential anthropological key for Unamuno12 (and, as we all know, for many contemporary thinkers, such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger and some existentialists). The nostalgia for the mother’s protection returns once and again at every critical moment of our lives. As a consequence, the yearning for a peaceful and paradisiacal situation can provide us with a provisional shelter, with a comfortable ‘‘home’’, in order to avoid suffering.13 Nevertheless, the desire of ‘‘dis-being-born’’ (des-nacer, in Unamunian terms), although natural for a helpless creature (the human being), presents, at the same time, a negative facet, when the nostalgia of the paradise becomes a kind of escape from reality, from the necessity of becoming an adult, of living one’s own life in a free and personal individualization. Developing one’s own personality we escape from the manipulation of some leaders, totalitarian groups or mass phenomena. Comparing the helpless existential situation of the adult with that of the child, Fromm states, refering to the former: ‘‘Only the complete development of all his potentialities can make him capable of facing his helpless situation without searching a shelter in the ‘paradisiacal fantasy’.’’14 For Fromm, the development of our potentialities is parallel with the conquest of self-consciousness, which implies not only an intellectual, rational process, but, above all, the contact with our own irrational forces and drives.15 Should we ignore or neglect this non-rational dimension, we shall never be able to live an authentic existence. However, individuals often avoid the path towards authenticity, towards themselves; on the contrary, they prefer to unfold their binding with idols, with individual leaders or collective and ‘‘over-protective’’ groups. In that case, idols indicate to each individual the direction to follow in his life, the mode of living; thus, the phenomena of the blind collective mass emerges. In this situation, individuals believe that they are not alone and isolated, they feel that they are protected by the leader of the group. Nevertheless, as a matter of fact, this is not the case. Paradoxically, there actually appears a situation of loneliness, in spite of being surrounded by many other humans. The individuals are even far from themselves, from their identity and their personality. This phenomenon, which implies alienation, has been denounced by many modern and contemporary thinkers and/or writers, e.g., Pascal, Heidegger, Fromm, Unamuno. A similar case comes to light in Unamuno’s Dream’s Shadows, where the hero felt, as Tulio Montalba´n, absorbed by his collective identity,

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living by and for others; first of all for history, as the hero liberator of his mother country, then as a fictional hero, the hero of the book written by his father-in-law. After having tried to leave behind his collective character, his historical personality, which belongs to everybody except himself, he decides to reach his true self, his deep self, quite different from the superficial appearance. Until now he has lived for others, for his wife, Elvira, for his mother country, and also for forgeting his own self, his pain provoked by the death of his beloved wife. His exploits were the result of an escape from himself, something of which he is conscious, mainly at the end. Macedo decides then to abandon his historical, collective ‘‘robes’’ (those of Tulio Montalba´n), and start again from the beginning, existentially ‘‘naked’’, like a child, in order to become ‘‘a man in flesh and bone’’ with his own self; for that, he wanders aimlessly until his arrival at a remote island. Perhaps Macedo has never been himself; perhaps he has always been trying to escape from himself, searching for a refuge in others, before his arrival at the island. Since the beginning of the drama, Tulio Montalba´n is described by Elvira (the Elvira of the island) – who knows his biography very well thanks to the book which she never leaves – as a melancholy man who lives a trivial existence until the moment when he falls in love with the first Elvira. He marries her at the age of eighteen – symbolically like Simon Bolivar, the American Liberator; and, also like him, he becomes a widower a year later. Tulio Montalba´n’s deep despair nearly leads him to commit suicide. The only thing which prevents him from doing it is the change of his love’s object: from Elvira to his mother country, oppressed by the tyranny of a neighboring country.16 More exactly, Elvira, his lost love, becomes his most profound impulse for his famous exploit of liberating his country; or perhaps it is all a stratagem for trying to liberate himself from life, in order to meet Elvira again in the great beyond and share her peace. He tries to make the others believe that he is dead – physically dead, because it is clear that his aim is still to get rid of his previous personality, Tulio Montalba´n. Indeed, nobody knows – except himself – if Montalba´n’s dream of meeting Elvira in the great beyond had become real. The narration only explains that he had suddenly disappeared in a river.17 In light of Fromm’s approach, we could say that Tulio Montalba´n had never been himself. He had never been mature enough to govern his own life, in spite of having become a leader. In principle, it seems that his mode of being does not correspond with the idea denounced by Fromm (among others): a man ‘‘lost in the mass’’, an individual without initiative.

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On the contrary, he is dynamic, active and a historical creator by means of his exploits. Nevertheless, he feels trapped by the role he was representing in history. He was a teenager, lost in himself, who looked for shelter in two maternal figures: first, his beloved Elvira, then a collective entity (his mother country). However, none of them saved him from his existential alienation. First, because of the irruption of death; then because once his task is accomplished – the liberation of his country – he is still personally unhappy, unsatisfied. He feels himself encircled in a historical, fictional character, which is far from being his real true being. He had always been ‘‘pushed’’ by life and by his own circumstances: falling in love, the terrible situation of his mother country, etc. Which is the free, voluntary and conscious sense of his life, if there was one? This is the main question for the Unamunian hero. Paradoxically he appears, on the one hand, not only as having a strong self (‘‘an obstinate man’’, who does not renounces his ‘‘destiny’’, in Hermann Hesse’s expressions), but also as a leader, an example for others. Nevertheless, he is still unfortunate. He feels himself displaced by a historical, fictional character, which is not his real, true being. In theory, being the leader, we can suppose that he is not manipulated by anybody; on the contrary, perhaps he was able to manipulate others leading them to his fundamental historical goal. In practical terms, he is conscious that something is pushing him towards his actions, something that comes from inside (his own unsatisfaction?) or from outside (the need for recognition and appreciation by his fellow countrymen or even by the human collectivities along history?, the necessity of making ‘‘a name’’ for himself ?). In this case, inauthenticity emerges from two sides, his own self and the dependence from others. Julio Macedo needs to become himself, to become conscious of his own self beyond the chains of his fictional character, Tulio Montalba´n. This is the reason why he lets people think that Montalba´n is dead and he departs for an isolated place in the middle of the ocean, where history supposedly does not exist, where he can live surrounded by peacefulness, deepness and the profundity of the eternal sea. He wants to start on the island as a man in flesh and bone, as Julio Macedo, abandoning his fictional-historical entity, Tulio Montalba´n who only lives in a book and in others memory, mainly in Elvira’s mind. The cruel paradox is that history and fiction pursue him. First of all, Don Juan Manuel de Solo´rzano – Elvira’s father – is obsessed by the history of his lineage and his island. Nothing is more important for him than tradition and history. Once he sees Macedo, his only interest is how to integrate him in the island’s history. Thus, Macedo becomes, for

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Solo´rzano, a historical novelty,18 the basis for a historical document concerning the arrival of a stranger on the calm island, where time passes very slowly and history is almost suspended. Besides, the other fundamental character of Dream’s Shadows, Elvira, is also absorbed by a historical book; she is fascinated by the biography of her hero, her idol, Tulio Montalba´n. Because of this, she does not feel alone in her isolation; she has the company of the sea and of Montalba´n’s book.19 Being in love with the fictional character, with the historical hero, depending on him, she does not realize that she is also living a fictitious existence. One day, when she is reading the book, by the sea side, Julio Macedo arrives and recognizes in her a dreamer, the only dreamer on the island, where everybody seems to be ‘‘asleep’’, passive. For Unamuno there is an active and a passive role of the suen˜o (meaning, in Spanish, both dream and sleep) and Macedo admires the active role of Elvira’s dreaming. We shall see that this supposedly positive attitude will lead both Macedo and Elvira to a catastrophe; consequently, at a given moment, Elvira’s dreaming attitude in fact turns out to be negative. We recognize in this semantic playing with the words and their meanings the typical Unamunian paradoxical style. Macedo admires Elvira’s capacity of dreaming in a place where everybody is ‘‘asleep’’, absorbed in the day to day routine.20 He immediately falls in love with her, with another Elvira, a second concrete and real Elvira, but, in opposition to his feelings, she does not take into account the concrete man, Macedo, because she is blinded by the fictional Montalba´n. The ideal/fictional and the real are now in conflict, like Don Quixote and Sancho in Cervantes’ famous work. In conflict, but also in a certain exchange of roles at the end – both in Don Quixote and in Dream’s Shadows – as we shall see. Elvira is a symbol of the ideal dimension of the human being, like Don Quixote, but, at the same time she aspires to fuse the ideal and real, Don Quixote’s idealism with Sancho’s realism. According to Elvira, this is possible only for women, not for men, given that the latter tend to establish an ontological split, the real and the ideal: ‘‘Everything is only one thing. Man can be Quixote or Sancho; woman, dad – states Elvira –, is Quixotesse and Sancha all in one ... Our ideal is reality ...’’21 With this statement, Elvira anounces for the first time in the drama the problem of the opposition and, simultaneously, con-fusion between fiction and ideal, on the one hand, and reality, on the other. Elvira’s father does not accept the story of Tulio Montalba´n as true, because he is used to history with documents and considers Elvira’s book as fiction, as mere literature,

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full of images and metaphors, and far from the ‘‘strong’’ reality of the history of his island whose documents he keeps carefully. On the contrary, for Elvira Tulio Montalba´n and his story are the truest reality, because they keep her ‘‘alive’’, dreaming her true life (or what she supposes is so). As we have seen, Unamuno plays with the Spanish term ‘‘suen˜o’’, which means dream and sleep at the same time and he uses this metaphor in an ambiguous sense – as we shall see in point 3.1 – for signifying both the authentic existence – the one which is ‘‘dreamed’’, invented, created by the individual – and the alienated existence of the persons who pass their life as if they were in a continuous sleep, taking off the brakes of their own existence and melting it with the mass. In this sense, Elvira aspires to dream her own life with the help of a literary work. As we shall discover, she eventually does not succeed because her dream conceals reality instead of leading to it (she is not able to recognize Tulio Montalba´n in Julio Macedo; the character hides the real human being for her). She is far from being impressed by the real man. She is only interested in his story, in apprehending who he is by knowing his past and his life’s narration. Let us see a dialogue between them when they first meet each other: Elvira: Macedo: Elvira: Macedo:

Elvira: Macedo:

Well, but who are you? Me? My name is Julio Macedo And who is Julio Macedo? Does it matter? A shipwrecked person ..., one who has projected the sea towards this island ..., a new man who starts living now ..., one without story ...22 What does it matter who Julio Macedo is? This one who is here, who talks to you now, who looks at you and burns inside. Have I asked who Elvira Solo´rzano is? For me it is like we have just been born both of us, and without story. The past does not matter; I do not have a past; I do not want to have one; now I only want to have a future. On this island ... On this island? Isolated? Do you know what living isolated means? Yes, I want to live isolated ... with you, Elvira! You are my island ... and the sea surrounding us.23

This is the moment when Macedo speaks of returning to childhood or better beyond childhood, to the calm and peace of the motherly womb. He desires to ‘‘dis-being-born’’ (des-nacer). Fromm would interpret this desire as the yearning for being one with the mother, for annuling the fact of having been born. ‘‘Then – Fromm states – the maternal womb becomes a tomb, the mother earth in which to be buried, the ocean in which to drown.’’24 The oceanic sentiment is

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also alluded by Freud, for instance at the beginning of Das Ubenhagen in der Kultur (1930). We have already alluded to Fromm’s interpretation of this yearning as a form of escaping the responsibility of one’s own individualization. Unamuno also uses the same metaphors: mother’s womb, tomb, the sea, etc., often to underline alienated existence, in a sense similar to Fromm. Other times Unamuno stresses the yearning for peace, using the same metaphors, to compensate the enormous load, the oppression implied in the acceptation of the authentic existence, understood as an endless conflict by the Spanish thinker. In this case, the metaphors mean a provisional shelter in which to have a rest from the turbulence of life. Nevertheless, in Dream’s Shadows the main problem is the opposition between illusion/fiction and reality, between the historical character trapped in a book and the real person who searches his own true concrete self. In this context, the resort to childhood and to des-nacer means, in my opinion, the desire to start a new, real life, to try to be himself perhaps for the first time in his life. The choice of the sea as a drama’s character and as a fundamental framework is not fortuitous. The sea has two metaphorical dimensions for Unamuno (as we have already commented). On the one hand, the agitation of the surface, the waves always in movement, which means the ‘‘noise’’, the superficial dimension of life and history; but this dimension is not the most important one; it is only the more apparent, the one we see at first sight. On the other hand, the profound sea is the symbol of peace and it is also a metaphor both for our deep primary self and for the basic history of every day people (the ‘‘intra-history’’, for Unamuno). In effect, Macedo searches for his primary self trying to start a new life, surrounded by the sea, as a symbol of childhood: Elvira: I mean, Julio ... Don’t you think, Julio, that the sea is like the childhood, an eternal childhood? Don’t you feel, close to it, like plunging, with your regard, your soul in it, don’t you feel that you become a child, that we become children? Don’t you feel ... ?25

The problem is: can we completely annul the past, our lived story – as Macedo desires – and begin from a pure neutral and new starting point? This task seems impossible for real human beings whose life is inevitably woven by and in temporality. There is an interesting interpretation – made in connection with the post-modernist approach – of this problem in terms of opposition between modernity and history. I refer to the work of Francisco La Rubia Prado, Unamuno y Ia vida como ficcio´n.26 He relates Macedo’s attitude and his desire to live like a new man without

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any past, as well as Unamuno’s symbolism of childhood, with the Nietzschean points of view: For Nietzsche, in ‘‘On the Uses and Disavantages of History for Life’’, the biological aspect, not mediated of human life constitutes the ‘modernity’. For him, the fact of forgetting the past, which approaches human beings to their own spontaneity, attestes what he considers as the true human nature. In this sense, to attest what is truly human implies a radical rupture with the past, a refusal of history. Consequently, action can constitute the present as a new beginning or origin. The present moment becomes then both a definitive rupture with the past and a point of origin.27

According to this interpretation, Macedo’s rupture with Montalba´n could be compared with the archetypal Nietzschean act of spontaneity. In any case, the total rupture with the past and with the historical hero will eventually fail, as we shall see. Any how, Macedo and Unamuno himself consider the possibility of provisionally annuling time and searching for a true personal existence, a creative and innovating, unique existence, by means of the child’s metaphor.The child has the possibility of starting a new life. In this sense, we are all similar, given that we are everyone of us designed to become unique, unequalled. This is also our common feature as humans, according to Hannah Arendt.28 She speaks of plurality as a fundamental basis of the human being, of his action – different from other practical activities like labor or work – and of his discourse. The plural condition presents a double face: sameness, similarity, on the one hand, and difference, on the other; a difference which does not imply alterity. Should humans not be similar, it would be impossible for them to understand each other or make projects for the future. Should they not be different, they would not need action and discourse to mutually understand each other.29 Julio Macedo desires to accomplish his human task of being unique in the framework of human plurality. Nevertheless, in spite of his fundamental purpose of becoming himself as a real person, he seems to follow the wrong path from the beginning of his relationship with Elvira. Again, he does not try to accomplish in practice what he desires and proclaims in theory. He recognizes her as his poet, his creator, his mother, in a symbolic sense (the mother has no sex, he states). For Macedo, Elvira is creating and re-creating him, like the sea.30 The sea helps him to recreate himself in his new existential dimension: peace instead of fight, calm instead of the permanent ‘‘noise’’ of the superficial life. However, the hero’s acceptance of being re-created by the sea and by this new Elvira is, in my opinion, a bad starting point for someone who aspires to become himself,

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for someone who is trying to escape from his dependence on others, from his image face to others. The sea and the woman also symbolize, for Unamuno, the mother, the refuge par excellence. Fromm interprets this attachment to the figure of the mother, as the root for future emotional links with ‘‘idols’’ (leaders, institutions, groups, natural forces, loved persons from whom one depends too much, etc), an alienated form of existence, an evasion backward. It implies the nostalgia of a paradisiacal condition, trying to escape the complete individualization and tending to live, instead, in the fantasy of the absolute protection and security in the world. With this attitude, rooted in the unavoidable feeling of helplessness, the adult would renounce his freedom in order to diminish his existential anguish.31 In effect, Macedo is trying to avoid his feeling of helplessness – stressed by Freud and Fromm –, of ontological indigence, by attaching himself to protective figures. He was looking for the solitude of an island in the middle of the ocean, as the ideal situation for searching himself, but, as a matter of fact, he cannot bear the solitude, a provisional retreat to be alone with himself and so meditate about the basis of his new life and his new self. Once more, in the more isolated place, he repeats the same scheme of his life. He prefers ‘‘to be created’’, instead of assuming the responsability of creating himself, taking his own initiatives in his relationships with others. Macedo recognizes that he arrived at the island ‘‘ill of dreams’’32 (his past active existence full of dreams and exploits of liberation; liberations of his mother country, of others, but not of himself, trapped in his historical role). Sometimes he vacillates between the project of a new, real life, or the idea of succumbing to the definitive sleep – suicide? – of the peaceful ocean.33 At first, his meeting with Elvira moves him toward the first possibility. The drama emerges when he realizes that Elvira is definitively in love with Tulio Montalba´n, the fictional hero, and, unable to recognize him in Macedo, cannot accept the real man, the man in flesh and bone. Precisely because he has no past, he is not a man of historical relevance for her. Elvira’s father, Solo´rzano, suspects for a moment that perhaps Julio Macedo is, in fact, Tulio Montalba´n. He finds some similarities and wishes to know him better, especially because Rita, the servant, tells Solo´rzano that Macedo tries to cure Elvira’s obsession with her admired book and its idolized hero. Solo´rzano reveals his suppositions to Elvira, but she is blinded by fiction and completely disconnected from reality.

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She asserts that her father’s ideas are nonsense and is entirely sure that she would recognize her hero anywhere, under any circumstances. She trusts her heart in this domain and she does not realize that her fictional, sometimes intellectual ideas, impede her intuitions and heart’s feelings in the domain of reality.34 At a given moment, when Solo´rzano manifests his doubts about the truth of Montalba´n’s story from the strictly historical point of view, Elvira replies: ‘‘The questions of the theatre are the truest, father.’’35 We shall see how for Unamuno the literary heroes are truer than the life of many concrete individuals who ‘‘sleep’’ instead of ‘‘dreaming’’ their existence. At a given moment, Macedo is invited to visit the Solo´rzano’s mansion, and the first dialectic conflict appears: the opposition between home and history. Macedo is happy to ‘‘breath’’ the home ambience, but Solo´rzano insists that the most important question of the mansion is its history. ‘‘History? What for? – replies Macedo – Home is sufficient. Home and history are in conflict with each other ...’’36 We usually need to be dead in order to exist in history. Paradoxically history gives us a kind of immortality – a very important one for Unamuno, as it appears in many of his works; mainly in the L ife of Don Quixote and Sancho.37 Unamuno often declares his special yearning for fame, for leaving his work and his name in history. Doing so, he aspires to activate the deepest existential concerns of his future readers. Nevertheless, Macedo prefers – in his second opportunity at existence – a quite real fulfilled life, with real love, in spite of its finitude, better than a famous immortal existence in the memory of humankind.38 When Solo´rzano absents himself to meditate, Macedo and Elvira stay and the conflict between fiction and reality becomes the core of the dialogue. Macedo reproaches Elvira’s obsession with her book and considers that one must not be in love with fictional beings, with ghosts: Elvira: Macedo: Elvira: Macedo: Elvira: Macedo:

Elvira: Macedo:

A fictional being? A ghost? Tulio Montalba´n was not real? I do not know ... but I think that individuals who are in books – history or novels – are not real. None of them? Only men in flesh and bone and blood are real. Like who ... ? Like myself ! And this is why I told you, Elvira, that my story does not matter. My life, my true life has started a short time ago, and concerning my story ..., I do not want to have one! But, haven’t you lived before? Don’t you have a past? Me? No ..., no! (Pointing at the sea through the balcony) That is my past ..., the eternal childhood ...39

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Elvira is only interested in Macedo’s past. Given Elvira’s insistence, he finally admits a personal past which was actually ‘‘a dream’’, not a reality anymore for him; a dream in which he met and eventually killed Tulio Montalba´n. When Elvira hears this terrible confession, she orders Macedo to go away from her, calling him Cain – another important symbol for Unamuno, which constitutes the subject of some other writings.40 Elvira is not able to understand that Macedo decided to ‘‘kill’’ himself as Tulio Montalba´n, as a historical and fictional hero, because he did not want to become a tyrant, a kind of destiny in Latin American leaders. Paradoxically, Macedo’s heroic dimension, Montalba´n, has been able to exercise tyranny over her beloved Elvira,41 over the woman who represents his last hope for salvation, for rescuing himself from his other self. Besides, this fictional character is real enough (in the sense that it acts) to be able to destroy Macedo’s new life. Fiction is so real that it is able to obstruct a new possibility of reality. This reality, which stays at the stage of mere possibility, for the moment, is in fact a dream, a dream of a new existence. Fiction has at least some kind of existence; ‘‘living’’ in the books, it can exert an influence on the readers. Consequently, Macedo is devastated, desolated, and jealous of Montalba´n, of himself as a fictional hero. When Elvira asks him if he is jealous, he answers: Yes, I am jealous. Jealousy is devouring me. I cannot bear that one ..., the one of the book ..., the one I left as dead, comes and steals what had to be mine, what could be my peace, my life, something like a sweet maternal bosom [again the symbol of the maternal womb associated with home and peace, as we have already seen above], in my life. I arrived here, to this island, looking for death or for something worse than it; then I met you, I felt like been reborn to a new life, to a life of sacred isolation; I dreamed of a home which would be, I repeat it, like a maternal cloister (...) Closed to the world, and I have met him again ..., him again ...42

Elvira is very sad after her discovery of Montalba´n’s ‘‘murder’’ commited by Macedo, but, at the same time, she has contradictory feelings. She refuses to see the latter any more and, at the same time, she feels attraction for him. She is guilty and simultaneously the victim of a terrible error. She does not recognize her love when she meets him, as a real person; and what is more, she wrongly decides to eliminate him from her life as the only way to be herself, her own owner, remaining loyal to the love of her life. What a paradox! Trying to be loyal to a fictional hero, she refuses the real man.

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After some days, Elvira’s father, seeing her immersed in a deep sadness, decides to arrange another meeting with the two of them, in order to clarify the terrible secret discovered by her daughter, a mystery which is ruining her life. This time, Julio Macedo assumes an attitude of distrust and seems to be in a hurry; he has decided to say goodbye for ever. He recognizes that Julio Macedo was once Tulio Montalba´n and that his story about the fighting with the latter had really occured. The real man wanted to ‘‘kill’’, to definitively leave aside, the historical hero: Macedo: Yes, in that tragic night, by the most sacred river of my mother country, I believed that I had killed Tulio Montalba´n the one of history, so that I could live outside it, without mother country, exiled everywhere, as a pilgrim, as a wandering man, as an obscure man, with no name and no past. I made my loyal soldiers swear that they would keep the secret of my disappearance, convincing people of my death and burial, and I fled ... where? I do not even know.43

Macedo explains how he had been wandering, since then, trying to escape from himself, from his past which was considered like a dream, or better, like a nightmare, until he met Elvira in the island. Her refusal had killed his last fragment of hope, of the possibility of reconstructing a new real life. Hearing this, Elvira immediately reacts, trying to approach him emotionally, to recover his love, but Macedo reproaches her that she belongs to ‘‘the other’’ to Montalba´n, to a historical name, to a literary hero; that she loves intellectually, but not cordially: Macedo: (...) And you who loved – loved? – Tulio Montalba´n with your head, with your brain, you were not able to love with your heart, with your flesh, a shipwrecked person without name. All your insistence was directed to know my past, from which I was escaping. And you did not recognize me! This is the proof that it was your head, a book’s head, and not your heart, which was in love ...44

Macedo says goodbye, but when he sees Elvira’s book, his own story, he throws it on the ground. When Solo´rzano reproaches him for his behaviour, Macedo picks it up and gives it to Elvira saying: ‘‘There you are, this is my corpse.’’45 Then, he goes out of the house and shoots himself dead. The shock is enormous in the house. For the first time Elvira actually awakes from her sleepy – dreaming? – life and, horrified, throws the book away. Now, both, Elvira and her father want to be liberated from history, from books, from Literature’s haunt, from the portraits of Solo´rzano’s lineage. Solo´rzano says that it is necessary to burn everything, the books, the pictures, the house ...; he also wishes that

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the volcano would erupt and destroy the whole island. Everything is agitation, commotion. Everything except the sea; it remains as ever, as if nothing had happened, as if history did not exist; no time, only eternity. Perhaps confusion between fiction and reality. Some moments before his suicide, Macedo expresses this idea quite explicitely: Macedo: This world is so strange ... and also the other one! We, who seem beings in flesh and bone are merely fictional entities, shadows, ghosts; on the contrary, those who exist in the portraits and the books and we who wander in the scene of the history theatre, we are the true ones, the lasting ones. I thought I was able to escape from my hero and find under it, inside itself, the primary, original man. But it was only an animal attachment to life and a vague hope. However now ... , now I shall be able to eliminate the hero!46

As for Rousseau in his first discourses,47 Unamuno supposes that there is an origiral human being under the cover of culture and history; a real human being which is concealed by the apparent cultural one. Nevertheless, in the case of Rousseau, the main question is that of human nature, in general. For Unamuno, on the contrary, the conflict refers to individual personality. Returning to Macedo’s last affirmation, he is for a moment sure that he will be able to eliminate Montalba´n, but the fundamental question still remains: Who eliminates whom? We saw that Macedo tried to ‘‘kill’’ Montalba´n, the hero, but the latter follows him to the most remote island, pushing him to commit suicide. From the theoretical point of view, they kill each other, but from the practical perspective the real concrete man is not able to live his real personal life. The hero, on the contrary, will always exist in the book written by his father in law – the first Elvira’s father. He will exist and act in the lives of all readers, in spite of the elimination of the Solo´rzano’s book. Tulio Montalba´n will exist forever in History and in Literature. He is finally more real than Julio Macedo, who dies without leaving anything of him (children, books, pieces of art ...). Montalba´n exists because he can act in all the readers’s life. In effect, only what is able to act exists, and to exist is to act, according to Unamuno, as we shall see in the following point. 3. LITERATURE, FICTION AND HUMAN REALITY

3.1. T he Role of Metaphor in the Apprehension of Human Eistence In the preceding pages we have already considered, through an interpretation of Dream’s Shadows, some of Unamuno’s anthropological assump-

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tions. Now we shall return to this problem from a more general point of view, underlining also other anthropological questions by means of several Unamunian metaphors: life as a novel, theatre, sleep/dream, etc. In the analysis of Dream’s Shadows we have seen that the opposition between fiction and reality is primarily an anthropological question. Unamuno often asks: is the human being, the concrete human being in flesh and bone necessarily a ‘‘real’’ being? On the other hand, can the fictional entities, the heroes and characters of the narrative somehow be considered as real beings or just as mere products of human imagination without capacity for acting independently of their human creator? We shall see the apparent paradoxes of Unamuno concerning this question, especially when he states that most fictional heroes are often much more real than some humans whom we meet in our daily life. Considering the role of imagination gives us some keys for situating the problem in general. In effect, for contemporary philosophy, imagination is fundamental not only for interpreting and understanding human cultural products, but also for apprehending human existence following a dynamic and creative approach, as Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka has so often emphasized in her volumes entitled L ogos and L ife.48 The idea of human dynamicity and creativity have also been underlined by other twentieth century philosophical approaches. So, for example, for historicism the human being creates, makes his own being alongside history; for existentialism humans are not only able to construct themselves, they must do so, unavoidably, given that they are ‘‘condemned’’ to freedom, to choose their own selves, without a previous essence. Unamuno has often been considered, together with Kierkegaard, a precursor of existentialism. He insists on the creative role of the human being, concerning his own existence; and he does so not in a systematic philosophical system, but by means of literary metaphors; mainly with the symbols of the novel, theatre and sleep/dream (suen˜o). Let us briefly comment on these imaginary paths. Unamuno states that life is a novel, that there is a book of life, a narrative which plays a fundamental role in our existence, an idea stressed by Paul Ricoeur, among others.49 ‘‘Is our life something more than a novel?’’ asks Unamuno.50 For him, life is a novel because it consists of a kind of narrative that we have to elaborate, inventing it, creating it. Both, novel and life, are intrinsically affected by temporality and freedom. Freedom and creativity are crucial aspects of human life, but perhaps only to a certain extent, given that sometimes Unamuno, always paradoxically (because he tries to explore all the sides of our complex human

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existence), has some doubts and considers the possibility of our existence being ‘‘invented’’ by a Supreme Creator who would play the role of the novel’s author, as we shall see. In How a novel is made, Unamuno clarifies his metaphor of life as a novel in the following terms: So, when I tell you how a novel is made, I mean how I am making the novel of my own life, my story, I invite them [the readers] to make their own novel, the novel which is everyone’s life. And how unfortunate are they if they do not have a novel. If your life, reader, is not a novel, a divine fiction, a dream of eternity, then leave these pages aside, do not continue reading them.51

The temporal-creative dimension of human existence is true not only for the individual life, but also for the historical aspect, ‘‘the tragic novel of History.’’52 However, life is not compared with a novel in the sense of a fictional invention, a mere meaningless entertainement. On the contrary, both novel and life, are very serious endeavors, important tasks. The novel is an exploration of diverse human possibilities by means of the characters. Life is a task to be done by means of our works, a que-hacer (meaning task or what to be done), following the Spanish thinker Ortega y Gasset.53 In this sense, Unamuno states: Our work is our spirit and my work is me making myself day to day and century to century, in the same sense that you, reader, are your own work, making yourself, moment by moment, now listening to me, just like me talking to you.54

Consequently, our selves depend on our works, on our ‘‘inventing’’ ourselves and making concrete our imagination in our undertakings. Man is what he does, states another Spanish thinker, Eduardo Nicol. The problem is that he never does the same things and this is the reason why we cannot reach a definition of human being. It is impossible to encircle him in a logical definition precisely because of his inventiveness and the diversity of his actions.55 The metaphor of life as theatre shares the novel’s metaphorical dimensions of temporality and creativity, but in a much more limited fashion. Furthermore, it adds some other aspects. Life is also, for Unamuno, theatre, drama; comedy sometimes; more often a tragedy. There are several tragic dimensions to human life considered as theatre. First of all, the possibility of the end, also common to the novel; the omnipresent finitude in human life and human works. The literary work has an end, like life (in this case the unavoidable menace of death). The main problem is that we are not sure at all about the meaning of the drama of our lives,

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incessantly running towards an inevitable end which escapes our control, like in the case of the characters, absolutely dependent on the author. Consequently, these metaphors, novel and theatre, have many negative elements. They remind us of our finitude. Besides, Unamuno makes us doubt our fundamental human creativity. Maybe we are destined – like theatrical characters – to represent our role. A role which can be a farce, when we represent it to others, when our action only follows what is expected of us.56 In this case, the anthropological concern is the possibility of alienation, of the passivity of life, opposed to an active, creative, authentic existence in which we have control – at least relative – and the responsibility for our life, often in opposition to the general tendencies of the masses. When we limit ourselves to ‘‘representation’’, we act for the others, for others’ expectations; what is worse, we make a kind of performance for ourselves, falling into self-deceit. Let us refer, as an example, to the assertion of one of the Unamunian Mist characters, talking to the novel’s hero: ‘‘It is in the comedy, Augusto, it is the comedy that we represent for ourselves, inside ourselves, in the stage of consciousness, acting both as as comics and spectators.’’57 Furthermore, the metaphor of life as theatre also poses another negative problem: perhaps we cannot be authentic, because we are the actors of a pre-given, pre-written drama: ‘‘The world is a stage and we all, the actors, represent our role, or more exactly, the role assigned to us by somebody superior, the ‘Supreme Director of the scene’.’’58 Finally, another fundamental literary metaphor applied by Unamuno to life is the suen˜o (sleep and dream, as we have already precised). Unamuno sometimes associates comedy and sleep, in order to highlight the human tendency towards alienation: The comedy of life. Obstinacy in submerging oneself in the sleep and represent the role without seeing the reality. We arrive to the point of representing [our role] in solitude, and one becomes an actor for oneself, simulating before You [God], who read our heart. Not even for ourselves are we sincere and unaffected.59

We can see that the metaphor of sleep/dream can be interpreted in several directions in Unamuno’s work. Blanco Aguinaga60 underlines some of them. Among them, the already mentioned idea of sleep as peace, as a pause in the incessant agony (conflict) of life; we need to rest in it from time to time, not only in the literal meaning, but mainly in the figurative, imaginary one. In fact, the authentic life is agony for Unamuno, but even the most authentic human being needs the calm of the profound

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sea, the peace of a home-shelter, as we saw in the case of Dream’s Shadows’ hero. Nevertheless, we must not remain in this calm for a long time, even if we yearn for it. Otherwise we fall into an alienated existence dominated by monotony and by the role imposed by others. This is the reason why another interpretation of the suen˜o – in this case dream – is, for human life, complementary of the precendent one. Dream is the supreme manifestation of freedom, in the sense aforementioned when we examined the metaphor of the novel: we have to dream, to invent our own life, to use all our imagination in order to create it personally. Authentic life is, consequently, a goal for dreamers, for creators. Let us remember that Macedo first takes Elvira for a dreamer and this is the main reason why he falls in love with her. Eventually Macedo realizes that Elvira is not a dreamer-creator, but, on the contrary, a person encircled in an illusionary fiction. The turn is then radical: Elvira is dominated by a kind of sleep (lacking full consciousness), a self-deceit from which she only awakes at the end, when it is too late to face the reality of Macedo. There is a correlation and sometimes confusion between suen˜o and life as well as between fiction and reality. ‘‘Life is a dream’’, Unamuno repeats often,61 following Caldero´n’s62 formula. Segismundo, Caldero´n’s hero, has many doubts about his existence; often he is not sure if he is dreaming or living a real life. Don Quixote also discovers, at the end of his life, that life is a dream, perhaps a dream of madness.63 The assertion that life is a dream is, in fact, ambiguous. It can be interpreted in a positive or in a negative way, depending on where we put the accent: the possibility of being creative and ‘‘inventing’’ one’s own life, on the one hand, or the situation of being immersed in a dream which constitutes a state of semi-consciousness in which we are not the owners of our lives, on the other. Shakespeare’s dream’s metaphor shocks Unamuno much more than Caldero´n’s image. The first states: ‘‘we are such stuff as dream are made of ’’.64 The ontological-anthropological implications of this expression are menacing for the conception of human existence. With Shakespeare the problem is not only that life can be a dream, but that the human being can be the content, the object of this dream. Following this interpretation, humans are made of dreams. They are perhaps chimeras, dream’s shadows. The roots of their existence are now undermined: Have you not ever thought in those prophetic words of the man Shakespeare, when he said that ‘we are made of the stuff of dreams’? Have you not thought that we are nothing but a

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dream, ‘a shadow’s dream’,65 according to the also prophetic words of the man Pindaro? Have you not thought if we are a God’s dream?66

Perhaps we are a God’s dream and so is our story.67 In this case, human existence can be deprived of its most positive features: freedom, creativity, inventiveness, etc. Consequently we would lack responsibility, which could have very important moral repercussions. Underlining this negative dimension of the dream’s metaphor, human existence could become meaningfulness. Unamuno, always paradoxical, contemplates every possibility, including the negative ones, of human life, by means of his literary images. Of course, he also explores the positive dimensions. First of all, dream, as well as novel, is temporal, and can be creative (when it is a conscious project), directed to the future. For Unamuno, as for Fromm, we have to be active, we need to imaginatively create, to dream our own life. Conscious dreams (enson˜aciones) create the dreamed objects, stories, etc. When we live constantly creating our own life, we are the subjects of our life; subjects – I would like to be precise – in a given circumstance, in a previous lifeworld, but never with absolutely pre-fixed conditions, excepting some biological plastic predispositions which are unfolded according to our culture, our character and our own choices; but only with the ingredients of creativity and choice can we consider our life as free and authentic. At the same time and correlatively, sue n: o, dream is also life. Both are interconnected: I I I I

awoke myself dreaming, dreamed that I was awake; dreamed that dream was life, dreamed that life was dream68

Dream is life because it makes us live, because it situates us in the path which leads from what it is in fact, towards that which is possible, from ‘‘facticity’’ ( factum) to possibility; and doing so we try to transcend our own limitation and finitude. In short dream and life are both temporal and they both remind us of our limitation, our necessary end, our death in the case of human life. However, by means of dream we try to surpass finitude; we try to be the guides of our life and to persist somehow, to leave behind something of us in other’s memory (children, works ...).69 As a result, Unamuno states: ‘‘And if life is a dream, let me dream it as it was everlasting!’’70

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We could object that this is an illusory Unamunian belief. However, the main question is not if the statement is true, according to the logical sense of reality. The core of the problem for Unamuno is if dreams are able to produce something in our concrete real life, if they lead us to structure our Weltanschauung and organize our practical life. Here we reach the crucial point of the interaction fiction-illusion, on the one hand, and reality and life, on the other: If life is a dream, why should we insist on denying that dreams are life? Everything which is life is true. What we call reality, is it something more than an illusion which moves us to act and to produce works? T he practical eVect is the only true criterion of the truth of any perception.71

Dreams are then real when they are active, when they are not merely something that happens to us, but something that impels us to act creatively. Otherwise our life is not a dream, but a sleep, an unconscious or alienated mode of existing, a perpetual peace which reminds us of death too much (we think of Kant’s drawing of a cemetery with the inscription: ‘‘to the eternal peace’’, at the beginning of his article with the same title). Authentic life is, on the contrary, for Unamuno, agony, conflict, as we have already stressed. It is tragedy and perpetual dissension between the opposite tendencies inherent to humans; we have to become conscious of those tendencies instead of denying them or trying to calm them down.72 Otherwise, Unamuno considers that we risk taking an inauthentic existential path (Cf. the Heideggerian man), in his words, ‘‘apparential’’, trivial (apariencial, cotidiano): And this individual, daily and apparential, the one who escapes from tragedy is not even a shadow’s dream, as Pindaro called the human being. He is perhaps a dream’s shadow, as the Tasso said. Since who is a shadow’s dream and being conscious of it suffers because of it and wants to be it or not to be it, this one will be a tragic person, able of creating and recreating tragic – or comic – characters in himself, able of being a novelist, that is to say, a poet (...)73

The authentic person lives the conflict, the tragedy inside himself; he feels anguish, like the authentic Heideggerian human being; he is conscious of finitude, contingency and of the possible menace of nothingness; he lives trying to surpass all those negative elements, being, at the same time, always immersed in doubt and hesitation. As a matter of fact, the menace of nothingness is explicit in Unamuno – as in Heidegger – mainly after his spiritual crisis of 1897:

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We all understand how mournful, how terribly mournful is this funerary procession of shadows which go from nothingness to nothingness, and that all this will pass like a dream (...), like a dream’s shadow; and that one night you will fall asleep and never awake again, never, never, and you will not even have the consolation of knowing what is there.74

Pedro Cerezo finds in this text the echo of Schopenhauer, and the idea of universal vanity, void, nihilism, emptiness.75 However, we can also find the opposite idea: the desire of becoming everything, of participating in every reality, of wholeness; the paradoxical desire of being oneself and simultaneously being everything,’’ absolutely everything or nothing’’ (‘‘o todo o nada’’), in Unamuno’s terms. 3.2. T he Existential Doubt. T he Human Being as a Fiction. Mist Novel Now, let us consider more precisely the anthropological role of fiction and its opposition and relation with reality in the Unamunian sense. Unamuno questions the old gnoseological problem of the opposition between the realist and the idealist approaches, and stresses, instead, a dynamic and practical conception of reality aforementioned: What is, in effect, to exist and when do we say that something exists? To exist, for something, is to be situated outside ourselves so that it could precede our perception of it and could subsist when we disappear. But, can I be sure that something preceded me or that something is going to survive me? Is my consciousness able to know that there is something outside itself ? Everything I know or I can know is in my consciousness. Consequently we cannot agree concerning the insoluble problem of another objectivity of our perceptions; only what acts exists and to exist is to act.76

The primary reality is then, for Unamuno, the active human being, a dynamic being which needs to act in order to live; to act creatively and not merely automatically. Other entities can also be real as far as they share human active characteristics. So, for example, some ideas can be vital, dynamic when they move us to act.77 For the same reason, the literary works and every kind of narrative (novel, theatre, biography, history, etc.) share with human life the basic element of being an active entity. It is mainly the case of fictional entities, characters and heroes, which can be especially real, sometimes more real than the concrete human being. Therefore, the reality of fictional characters is understood at the light of the Unamunian heterodox conception of reality. We shall come back to this question later. Now, let us briefly consider the opposite question:

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the possible non-reality of humans (or, at least of some humans), the existential doubt, the possibility of having only an apparent existence. Unamuno surprises us once again with the confusion between fiction and reality, between the heroes and the authors: Be it a man in flesh and bone or what we call a fiction, which is the same thing. Since Don Quixote is as real as Cervantes; Hamlet or Macbeth as much as Shakespeare; and my Augusto Pe´rez78 was perhaps right when he told me, as he did (...) that I was maybe only a pretext so that his story and that of other people, including my own story, could arrive to the world.79

Why does Unamuno doubt the consistency of the concrete human being, including himself ? We have already alluded to the contrast between authentic and alienated existence. Some humans live in the monotony of daily life, without asking themselves about the fundamental existential problems or the meaning of their life. They do not feel the ‘‘tragic sentiment of life’’ which makes us ‘‘awaken’’ from our sleepy alienated existence. They pass through life like non-existing beings, given that they do not act as real humans. They do not put a bridle on their life; neither are they creative with themselves nor do they create for others, for their contemporay humans or for their descendants. They will not leave a trace of themselves in history. In this sense, they are like beings without ‘‘substance’’, without existential consistency. Their existence is more like a tedious sleep than like a creative dream. They are not active and we have seen that for Unamuno only beings which/who act are real. Moreover, in relation with that question of the connection between authenticity–activity and reality, Unamuno’s existential doubt also points to the problem of identity and of self-consciousness: Since, who am I myself ? Who is the one who signs Miguel de Unamuno? Well ... One of my heroes, one of my creatures, one of my agonists. But the ultimate, intimate, supreme self, this transcendent – or immanent – self, who is he? God knows ...80

So, Unamuno doubts his own self. Sometimes he affirms that there are several ‘‘selves’’ inside each one of us – the same idea as the multiplicity of the selves in Hermann Hesse.81 There is the self we believe we are; another who we present to others; the self who others reflect to us – possibly distorted – and finally the intimate, the true self, which perhaps we shall never reach.82 However, Unamuno’s doubt is deeper. It is a doubt about one’s own existence, real or apparent. We do not face now a methodical, rational doubt, a Cartesian doubt destined to be intellectually solved. Should there be a solution for Unamuno, it has to be extra-

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rational. There are two basic paths to the consciousness of a real selfexistence, based in love and pain. Both are crucial in Unamuno’s essay Del sentimiento tra´gico de la vida,83 but here we shall show some examples of literary works, given that we are considering the question of fiction. Augusto, the hero of Unamuno’s novel Niebla (Mist), lives confused, bewildered in the middle of his existential mist, until the moment when he falls in love with Eugenia Her eyes awaken him from his apathetic, void existence: They [her eyes] make me think that I exist, sweet illusion! Amo ergo sum! This love, Orfeo [his dog], is like the beneficial rain in which the mist of existence vanishes and becomes concrete. Thanks to love I feel that my soul is real, I can touch it.84

Thus, love and not cogito is the key for existence, for feeling it as real. The path to self-consciousness is then sentimental, emotional, not intellectual or rational. Pain is another fundamental means for feeling one’s own reality. After his love failure with Eugenia, Augusto remains for some time in a cold state of calm and he doubts again his real existence. He starts to think that he is a fictional being. However, at a given moment, all the restrained pain emerges and the uncertainty disappears: For years I have been wandering like a ghost, like a mist puppet, without believing in my own existence, imagining that I was a fantasy character invented by a hidden genius for his amusement or his relief; but now, after what I have suffered, after that gibe, that cruel gibe, now yes, now I feel myself, now I can touch myself, now I do not doubt about my real existence!85

Augusto feels himself real thanks to love, but above all, by means of pain. Nevertheless, his joy is menaced once more, when he learns that he is only a fictional entity and that his author, Unamuno, is thinking of eliminating him. Then, he decides to visit Unamuno and rebels against him: So, no? So, no? (...) You do not let me be myself, to go out of the mist, to live, live, live, to see me, hear me, touch me, feel me, feel my pain, be myself: so you do not want it? So, I have to die as a fictional entity? All right, my sir creator Don Miguel, you will also die, you too, and you will go back to the nothingness from which you came out ... ! God will cease dreaming you! You will die, yes, you will die, even if you do not want it; you will die and everyone who reads my story will die, everybody, everybody, everybody without exception! You are fictional entities, like myself; just the same. You will all die, all, all, all. I tell you, Augusto Pe´rez, a fictional being like yourselves, nivolesco86 like yourselves.

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Because you, my creator, my don Miguel, you are nothing but another nivolesco being, and your readers are nivolescos too, like myself, like Augusto Pe´rez, your victim ...87

Here we discover again the dimension of the possible lack of reality of the concrete human being, in flesh and bone. Their existence is contingent, limited and eventually destined for death. Perhaps we all live in a kind of existential mist. Human life consists of making itself on a temporal and unstable basis, but, at the same time, we run towards death, which definitively destroys the moments of consistency provided by our experience of love and pain. Finally death is, as ever in Unamuno, the fundamental menace for human existence. Is it also a menace for literary heroes, for fictional beings? Perhaps not, in spite of any author’s decision. We have tried to analyse why the reality of ‘‘real’’, concrete human beings is questionned by Unamuno. Let us now try to understand why fictional beings are often more real than human beings for him. Some aspects of this question have already been considered. At the end of his life Unamuno asks himself, commenting on the question of the reality of heroes: Do I know if that Augusto Pe´rez, the hero of my novel Mist was not right when he stated that he was more real. more objective than myself, who thought I had invented him? (...) Concerning the reality of this San Manuel Bueno ma´rtir (...) I have no doubt (...) I believe in it more than in my own reality.88

Literary characters are then usually more real than their creators. Unamuno is very explicit about this question in his essay V ida de Don Quijote y Sancho: And I have to add that very often we think that a writer is a true real and historical person because we see that he is made of flesh and bone; and we take the characters that he creates in his fictions for a mere fantasy; however what really happens is the contrary: that characters are completely true and real; they use the ones who appear to us as made of flesh and bone, in order to acquire beingness and figure in the presence of humans.89

3.3. T he Reality of Narrative Heroes It is clear that Unamuno believes that literary heroes can be real, even more real than ‘‘real’’ humans? Why? We have already alluded to some reasons. We shall try to summarize them in four points. First of all, the characters are alive, are real because they constitute a part, a creature of the author. By means of characters, the latter presents to the reader some dimensions – real or possible – of himself as a human

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being and consequently, some human dimensions in general. Besides, the author re-creates himself exploring his own possibilities. ‘‘Yes – states Unamuno – every novel, every work of fiction, every poem, if it is alive, is autobiographical. Every fictional being, every poetic character created by an author is a part of himself.’’90 In fact, Unamuno dialogues – monologues, he often says – with himself by means of his heroes. They are often in contradiction with others and with themselves, the same as Unamuno, the ‘‘agonist’’ par excellence. He exposes his soul to himself and to the readers and the same happens concerning every other author-creator: Every biographical man -let us call him novelist, if we like- is autobiographical, he describes himself, the best of himself, that which he wanted to have been. Don Quixote is the one who Cervantes wanted to be and Shakespeare wanted to be the people, the forest of humans he described. And if he wanted this, it was because deep down he was already them.91

Consequently, the heroes manifest and share the author’s personality, the writer’s identity, at least some dimensions of it. Second, the characters exist because they are able to act. We have already mentioned Unamuno’s surprising statement that ‘‘only which acts does exist.’’ In T he T ragic Sentiment of L ife he stresses this once more: ‘‘And so, the old adage operari sequitur esse, that acting is posterior to being, must be modified saying that to be is to act and that only exists what acts, what is active, as far as it acts.’’92 This implies a dynamic notion of reality, especially of human reality. The true human reality is never permanent, static. There is no pre-fixed human nature. We make ourselves acting in the path of life. The characters are, in this sense, alive; they act by exerting influence upon the author, making him become aware of some dimensions of himself. Furthermore, sometimes they seem to become independent from the author, they appear as taking the initiative of the narrative at some moments, according to Unamuno. Other times they go out of it and dialogue with the author, as we have seen with the hero of Mist. Unamuno states that humans are the children of their works, and writers the parents and the children, at the same time, of their works and their characters. Besides, literary characters act in readers’ life, making them think, feel and live possible or new experiences. Above all, they encourage the readers to act, to be active, alive, true, as much as the characters: ‘‘Everything which is life is also the truth. Is what we call reality anything more than illusion which moves us to act and produces works? The practical effect is the only valid criterion of the truth of any vision.’’93

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Thus, the practical dimension is the most important one for Unamuno, much more than the merely theoretical or rational-logical one, which often deforms reality or our experience of it: ‘‘Action is what makes the truth. Leave then the logics aside’’94 Human will and praxis take the place of theory and intellectual reason in Unamuno’s thought, and, according to him, the same must happen in our existence, when it is authentic. Third, characters are real because they escape death, surviving their creator. Finitude and death are inherent to the human condition. Both, real humans and fictional characters, are created by somebody else, they both have the reason for their contingent existence outside themselves, but the unavoidable destiny of humans is temporal limitation and physical death, in spite of the constant yearning for immortality, manifested in the diverse religious or philosophical beliefs in different forms of survival. Nevertheless, literary heroes can survive in history and be re-created once and again by many readers on whom they simultaneously exert their influence. In the aforementioned visit to Unamuno, Augusto Pe´rez is anguished by the proximity of his death, anounced by his creator. However, he suddenly reacts when he finds precisely in his fictional mode of being the key for his immortality: But, no, no! I cannot die! Only who is alive, who exists can die and given than I do no exist. I cannot die ... I am immortal! There is no better immortality than the one who is not born and does not exist, like me. A fictional being is an idea, and the idea is always immortal ... (...) I do not live, of course, I do not live. We, the immortal ones do not live, and I do not live, I survive; I am ideal!95

Fictional beings and ideas transcend biological death and so they can live in history. This is precisely what happens with Tulio Montalba´n in Dream’s Shadows. But here the problem is that the historical fictional hero becomes more real than the concrete man and, as we saw, the first suffocates the latter and pushes him to commit suicide. In Dream’s Shadows, Montalba´n not only survives Macedo, but also kills him at the tragic end of the novel. Fourth, characters are able to give immortality to their creators. In effect, the authors survive in history thanks to their works and their heroes. The fictional creatures are both the author’s spiritual children and their ‘‘fathers’’, given that they also re-create somehow their creators in the mind and heart of the readers. Heroes bring in themselves a part of the author’s soul, making it immortal. This is the reason why Augusto Pe´rez warns and all the more menaces Unamuno:

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Listen, my dear don Unamuno, consider that perhaps you are a fictional being, that you do not really exist, neither alive nor dead ... perhaps you are only a pretext for my story and other similar stories travel around the world. And later when you definitively die, we shall carry your soul.96

In effect, Unamuno often recognizes that he searches for his immortality by means of his works and his heroes. At least, this is a way to remain ‘‘alive’’ in other people’s memory. Augusto Pe´rez reminds Unamuno that God can stop ‘‘dreaming of him’’, that He can decide his death, but, as a last resort, if Unamuno survives it will be thanks to Augusto Pe´rez and other of Unamuno’s heroes. Julia´n Marı´as finds here three degrees of personal beings: God, the human creator and the fictional being. Depending on which stage we are situated at, the human ontological consistency moves from one point to another in the ontological scale.97 4. CONCLUSION

Let us now reflect on some conclusions concerning our main subject, fiction/reality and the anthropological questions of the drama Dream’s Shadows. The conclusions are necessarily provisional, given that narratives, in this case literary narrative, is always open to interpretations and re-interpretations. This continuous reinterpretation was, in fact, the proposal and the challenge proposed by Unamuno, when he presented his works to readers. This is also the contemporary hermeneutical goal; see Paul Ricoeur’s approach, for instance.98 Following this approach, in opposition with the structuralist, poststructuralist or post-modern ones, here we are not interested in the mere formal structure of the text. This is a valid method, but it remains, in my opinion, on the surface. I consider, on the contrary, that the analysis of literary texts, especially those of writers-thinkers, like Unamuno, which are strongly concerned with the human being, must be guided by the search for the ontological-anthropological keys for our existence. I have tried to do so focusing my analysis on the conflicting and paradoxical question of the connections between fiction/illusion and reality. Unavoidably, anthropological problems have emerged: authenticity, alienation, contingency, finitude death/immortality, etc. Underlying all those questions there is one which has already been alluded to and with which I shall finish, or better leave an open door for future investigations. It is the problem of identity, of one’s own true personality of the self.

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Unamuno was permanently concerned with his existential aim and destiny, with his future and the future of humankind, but he relates it to the problem of identity, of personality in existential and practical-ethical terms. This problem depends, at the same time, on the creative capacity, aforementioned and, above all, on the determined will of making one’s own ‘‘soul’’: ‘‘the aim of life is to make a soul for oneself.’’99 Identity, personality, one’s own soul is, no doubt, an endeavor conditioned by socio-cultural circumstances. But it is also, outstandingly, an existential, individual and creative task. The problem is that it is not an easy task. First of all, how do we know our own authentic being?. Then, in the case we do know it, how do we reach it? How to construct it day by day without distraction, without being confused by the agitation of the world around us? Perhaps we could say that there is an apparent, intellectual, phenomenological self which corresponds to the idea of the self (my own idea, the others’ idea ... As we have seen there are many possible selves in each person); and there is another self, noumenal, practical, volitional, the one which continuously creates oneself. Perhaps we cannot enclose our self in any idea, but, in this case, we could fall in a chaotic wandering with no aim. However, Unamuno is a voluntarist; he trusts the human extra-rational dimension more than the rational-logical one (in spite of the fact that the latter is unavoidably human as well). He fears that the idea, the name (in the case of historical or fictional heroes) conceals the creative dynamic and open self. This is precisely the case of Dream’s Shadows, where it seems clear that the name ‘‘kills’’ the concrete human being. In the drama, the ideal character the historical hero obstructs the unfolding of the man in flesh and bone who Macedo intends to be. It finally blocks any possibility for him to become himself, the new self who he desires to be. Is the hero more ‘‘real’’ than the concrete man? In Dream’s Shadows it seems so. Montalba´n exists; he is more real than Macedo because he acts to the extent that he eliminates the latter. Nevertheless, at the very end, there is a doubt, a certain ambiguity. After Macedo’s suicide Elvira and her father who had lived until then subjugated by history, by narratives and heroes, decide to destroy all the symbols of their previous mode of living. The fire must destroy everything. Only the sea remains, as a symbol of eternity, ambiguity and mystery. We see the surface, but who really knows about the marine depth? The same ambivalence is very clear in Mist, whose title is meaningful. There is also in this novel an oppositional fiction/reality, but what attracts our attention here is the confusion between both of them. The author is

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initially more real than the hero, Augusto Pe´rez, who lives ‘‘in the mist’’, who has an apparent life without a clear consciousness of himself, without an existential aim. However, we have seen that, at the end, it is far from being evident who is more real, the creator or the created (let us remember the scale God, the author, the character). The anthropological result of this tension between fiction/illusion and reality is here shown by means of literature (a very frequent procedure in Unamuno’s thought). In fact there is in the Unamunian literary works, a reflexion of the Unamunian conflicting philosophical conception of the human being. Life is also agony, conflict, tragedy, and perhaps the conflict between factic finitude and volitional infinitude does not have a definitive solution. The more you enter the profound interiority of the soul, and of one of its symbols, the sea, the more you are conscious of the endless task of your existence, which starts with the emphasis in will and finishes in two other extra-rational dimensions: pain and love-empathy. When you enter your own self and deepen in it, you start to discover your own nothingness, that you are not everything you are, that you are not what you would like to become, that you are, finally, nothing else but nothingness. And when you touch your own nothingness, when you do not feel your permanent ground, when you do not arrive to your own infinitude and less to your eternity, then you cordially feel pity of yourself and you catch fire in a painful love for yourself (...).100

Thus, it is by means of pain and love that we set the basis for an authentic search for oneself and for the sense of existence. Consequently, in Unamuno there is no closing end, no definitive conclusion. Only tragedy and agony-conflict as the most relevant features of human existence; a continous dialectic without synthesis. Humans are destined to live in the middle of an existential mist, but they can and must rebel against this situation and try to actively dream their existence, in spite of the constant menace of the sleepy alienated existence. We can try to create our own existence, but we shall always have the doubt that we are perhaps only dream’s shadows. University of Seville Spain NOTES 1 The experience of isolation is fundamental to his stay in the Canary Island, and so it is reflected in his works after 1920. ‘‘Ambiente de isla’’ – states Unamuno in an interview of 1928, concerning his drama –, de estas islas que yo he recorrido luego, palmo a palmo, y

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dentro de cuyos cascarones he comprendido por primera vez en mi vida, la verdadera amplitud de la palabra ‘aislamiento’ ’’. Quoted by Manuel Garcı´a Blanco, in his introduction to the 5th volume of Unamuno’s Obras Compietas (Madrid: Ed. Esce´licer, 1968), 83. From now on, OC. We shall quote this edition, excepting for some works like Del sentimiento tra´gico de la vida, and V ida de Don Quijote y Sancho. In these cases we shall quote the two volumes of Essays, Ensayos (Madrid: Eds. Aguilar, 1970). 2 Dream’s shadows in OC, V. 600: ‘‘Elvira: ‘‘Y Quijotesa islen˜a ..., marina ... Ire´, sı´, por esos mares de Dios, por esos mares eternamente nin˜os ..., eternamente nin˜os ...’’ 3 Most specialists in Unamuno underline his conception of life as conflict, as contradictory and paradoxical. There is, however, an opposed point of view, which is also evident in many extracts of Unamuno’s point of view. C. Blanco Aguinaga has written an interesting analysis of this yearning for calm and harmony, as a complementary human dimension in Unamuno. Blanco Aguinaga undertakes this analysis by means of images and metaphors – the sea among them. Cf. his book El Unamuno contemplativo (Barcelona: Ed. Laia, 1975). 4 ‘‘Elvira: ¿Es que le gustarı´a volver a la nin˜ez?. Macedo: ¿A la nin˜ez? ¡Ma´s alla´, mucho ma´s alla´!. Elvira: ¿Co´mo ma´s alla´?. Macedo: ¡Sı´, ma´s alla´ de la nin˜ez, ma´s alla´ del nacimiento!. Elvira: no lo comprendo!. Macedo: Sı´, me gustarı´a volver al seno materno, a su oscuridad y su silencio y su quietud ... Elvira: ¡Diga, pues, que a la muerte! Macedo: No, a la muerte no; eso no es la muerte. Me gustarı´a ‘des-nacer’, no morir ...’’, Dream’s shadows, in OC, V. 611–612. 5 In OC; Vol. 2 (Madrid: Ed. Esce´licer, 1967). 6 Fromm, E., Die Endeckung des gesellschaftlichen Unbewussten (written between 1968 and 1970). Here we shall use the Spanish edition, L o inconsciente social (Barcelona: Ed. Paido´s, 1992). Cf. Chapter II.4.6, ‘‘The unconscious and the repression of the link to the mother’’, 53–59. 7 T he tragic Sentiment of L ife. Del sentimiento tra´gico de la vida (from now on STV) in Ensayos, II, 742: ‘‘Y el ma´s tra´gico problema de la filosofı´a es el de conciliar las necesidades intelectuales con las necesidades afectivas y con las volitivas. Como que ahı´ fracasa toda filosofı´a que pretende deshacer la eterna y tra´gica contradiccio´n, base de nuestra existencia.’’ 8 Fromm, op. cit., II.3, 40–49. See especially 42–43. 9 Freud, S., Abriss der Psychoanalyse, quoted by Fromm, op. cit., 55–56. 10 Fromm, op. cit., 57. 11 Ibid., 58. 12 Cf. my book Antropologı´a filoso´fica de Miguel de Unamuno (Sevilla, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1983), Chapter V, 121–177. 13 Hermann Hesse is another case of a writer who constantly searches for a ‘‘home’’, in the middle of a continuous existential conflict, represented by means of his literary characters. Hesse sometimes arrives at the conclusion that ‘‘home’’ is inside ourselves, in our own identity and we must be ‘‘obstinate’’ in order to reach it. Cf. my article – ‘‘Hermann Hesse: The Search for Oneself ’’, Analecta Husserliana, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, Vol. LXV, 283–304. 14 Fromm, op. cit., 59. 15 Ibid., 97. 16 Dream’s Shadows, 601–602. 17 Ibid., 603. 18 ‘‘Solo´rzano: Y que nos vea ¿que´? Es la novedad de la isla, La novedad histo´rica. Porque la historia se reduce ahora aquı´ a estas pequen˜as viejas novedades, a estos hechos.’’ Ibid., 605.

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19 ‘‘Elvira: ¡Decir que vivo aislada cuando tengo por compan˜era a la mar! ¡Y al libro, que es otro mar! ¡O mejor a Tulio, a mi Tulio! Mi Dulcineo [allusion to Don Quixote’s heroine, Dulcinea], que dice mi padre. ¿Pore que´ nacı´ viuda? Porque yo nacı´ viuda, no me cabe duda de ello. Enfin, mientras el libro de la mar me arrulla, voy a releer su historia en este otro.’’ Ibid., 607. The analogy between history and the sea is frequent in this drama; it is also a leitmotif in other Unamuno’s works. 20 ‘‘Macedo: No se sobresalte, Elvira. Veo que gusta usted de son˜ar aqui, en esta isla, donde todos duermen ...’’ Ibid., 608. 21 Ibid., 603: ‘‘Todo es uno. El hombre podra´ ser Quijote o Sancho; la mujer, papaı´to, es Quijote y Sancho en uno ... Nuestro ideal es la realidad ...’’ 22 In Spanish historia means history and also story, narration. There is, in my opinion, an ambiguity consciously introduced by Unamuno. 23 ‘Elvira: Bueno, pero y usted, ¿quie´n es? Macedo: ¿Yo? Yo me llamo Julio Macedo. Elvira: ¿Y quie´n es Julio Macedo? Macedo: Y eso, que´ importa? Un na´ufrago ..., uno que ha echado la mar a esta isla ..., un hombre nuevo, que empieza a vivir ahora ..., uno sin historia ... ¿Que´ importa quie´n es Julio Macedo? Este que esta´ aqui y que le habla ahora y le mira y arde por dentro. ¿Le he preguntado yo acaso quie´n es Elvira Solo´rzano? Para mı´ es como si hubie´ramos nacido ahora y sin historia. El pasado no cuenta. No tengo pasado; no quiero tenerlo, ahora no quiero sino tener porvenir. Y en esta isla ... Elvira: ¿En esta isla? ¿Aislado? ¿Sabe usted lo que es vivir aislados? Macedo: ¡Sı´, aislado quiero vivir, aislado ... con usted, Elvira! Usted mi isla ..., y el mar cin˜e´ndonos.’’ Dream’s Shadows, 609–610. 24 Fromm, op. cit., 55. 25 Dream’s Shadows 612: ‘‘Elvira: Digo, Julio ...; ¿no le parece, Julio, que la mar es como la nin˜ez, una nin˜ez eterna? ¿No siente junto a ella, hundiendo en ella con la mirada el alma, que se hace nin˜o, que nos hacemos nin˜os? ¿No siente ... ?’’ 26 La Rubia Prado, F., Unamuno y la vida como ficcio´n (Madrid: Ed. Gredos, 1999). The same author has a previous and complementary study of Unamuno: Aalegorı´as de la voluntad. Pensamiento orga´nico, reto´rica y deconstruccio´n en la obra de Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Literarias/Proudhufi S.A., 1996). 27 La Rubia Prado, F., Unamuno y la vida como ficcio´n, 234: ‘‘Para Nietzsche, en ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, el aspecto biolo´gico, no mediado de la vida humana constituye la ‘modernidad’. Para e´l, el olvido del pasado que acerca a los seres humanos a su propia espontaneidad afirma lo que e´l entiende como la verdadera naturaleza humana. En este sentido, una afirmacio´n de lo que es verdaderamente humano implica una ruptura radical con el pasado, un rechazo de la historia. Ası´, la accio´n puede constituir el presente como un nuevo comienzo u origen.’’ 28 Arendt, H., T he Human Condition, published in English by The University of Chicago Press. Here I shall refer to the Spanish edition, L a condicio´n humana (Barcelona, Eds. Paido´s, 1993). 29 Ibid., 200. ‘‘La pluralidad humana, ba´sica condicio´n tanto de la accio´n como del discurso, tiene el doble cara´cter de igualdad y distincion. Si los hombres no fueran iguales, no podrı´an entenderse ni planear y prever para el futuro las necesidades de los que llegara´n despue´s. Si los hombres no fueran distintos, es decir, cada ser humano diferenciado de cualquier otro

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que exista, haya existido o existira´, no necesitarı´an el discurso ni la accio´n para entenderse. Signos y sonidos bastarı´an para comunicar las necesidades inmediatas e ide´nticas. La cualidad humana de ser distinto no es lo mismo que la alteridad (...)’’. Another interesting text concerning this apparent paradox of being univocal and plural at the same time is this one: ‘‘La alteridad en su forma ma´s abstracta so´lo se encuentra en la pura multiplicacio´n de objetos inorga´nicos, mientras que toda la vida orga´nica muestra variaciones y distinciones, incluso entre especı´menes de la misma especie: pero so´lo el hombre puede expresar esta distincion y distinguirse, y so´lo e´l puede comunicar su propio yo y no simplemente algo: sed o hambre, afecto, hostilidad o temor. En el hombre, la alteridad que comparte con todo lo que es, y la distincio´n, que comparte con todo lo vivo, se convierte en unicidad, y la pluralidad humana es la parado´jica pluralidad de los seres u´nicos. El discurso y la accio´n revelan esta u´nica cualidad de ser distinto.’’ Ibid., 200. 30 In Unamuno’ thought the symbol of the water, meaning peace refers not only to the sea, but also to the lake or the lagoon. This is very clear in the last Unamuno novel, San Manuel, Bueno, Ma´rtir (1933), in OC II, 1115–1154. In this novel, the village lake is omnipresent; it is like a symbolic mirror where the faithful, the people of the village, can guess their fundamental aspiration: their destiny of eternal peace. The hero, Don Manuel, the priest of the village, tries to help them to ‘‘dream’’, to believe the Christian promise of immortality and peace after death. According to him, the faithful must ‘‘become lakes’’ themselves (‘‘alagarse’’, a word invented by Unamuno, from ‘‘lago’’, which means lake in Spanish). He is, on the contrary, living in a permanent conflict, trying to believe in immortality, but having, like Unamuno himself, strong and inevitable doubts. Dream’s Shadows, 612. 31 Fromm, op. cit., 57ff. 32 Dream’s Shadows 615. 33 Ibid., 616: ‘‘Elvira: Pues ahı´ tiene la mar ... Macedo: Cierto; es su arrullo un canto brizador para el u´ltimo suen˜o de la pobre humanidad doliente. Aquı´ vendra´ a dormirse para siempre el linaje de Noe´ ...’’ 34 Ibid., 624–25. 35 Ibid., 625. 36 Ibid., 627: ‘‘Macedo: ¿Historia? ¿Para que´? ¡Basta el hogar! El hogar y la historia esta´n ren˜idos entre sı´ ...’’. 37 V ida de Don Quijote y Sancho, in Ensayos II. 38 Pedro Cerezo Gala´n describes Dream’s Shadows as the fight of the person for liberating himself from his chains, represented by the historical hero. Cf. L as ma´scaras de lo tra´gico. Filosofı´a y T ragedia en Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Ed. Trotta, 1996), 67. This is a very good study of Unamuno, which provides the reader with a very complete historical and philosophical context. 39 Dream’s Shadows 628–29: Elvira: Macedo: Elvira: Macedo: Elvira: Macedo:

¿Ente de ficcio´n? ¿Fantasma? ¿Es que no fue´ real Tulio Montalba´n? No lo se´ ...; pero creo que no es real ningu´n tipo que anda en libros, sean de historia o novelas. ¿Ninguno? ¡Ninguno! So´lo son reales los hombres de carne y hueso y sangre. ¿Co´mo ...? ¡Como yo! Y por eso le dije, Elvira, que no importaba cua´l es mi historia,

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Elvira: Macedo:

Mi vida, mi verdadera vida ha empezado hace poco y en cuanto a historia ... no quiero tenerla! Pero ¿es que no ha vivido usted antes? ¿No tiene pasado? ¿Yo? ¡No ..., no! (Sen˜alando por el balco´n a la mar) Mi pasado es e´se ..., la nin˜ez eterna ...’’

40 Cf. El otro a drama written in 1926, in which the problem of the personality is also the cardinal point. There are two twin brothers. One kills the other one but it is not clear who is who: A journalist, Enrique Dı´az Canedo, writes, the day after the first performance (December, 1932): ‘‘El Otro nos propone el problema de la ´ıntima personalidad, desdoblada en dos seres, uno de los cuales da muerte al otro. En Unamuno son dos hermanos gemelos, enamorados primero de la misma mujer, que se casa con uno; despue´s, ausente el otro, de la que con e´ste se casa. Un dı´a, los dos frente a frente, sobreviene el crimen. ¿Cua´l es Cain? El tema de Abel, atormentador, matador en verdad de Caı´n, que le dio´ muerte, no es ma´s que un aspecto del asunto. Una interrogacio´n termina el acto primero, en el ambiente de la casa, que es, a un tiempo, ca´rcel, cementerio y manicomio.’’ Quoted by Manuel Garcı´a Blanco, in his Introduction to the 5th volume of Unamuno’s OC, 90. The subject of Cain and the ambiguity of his personality is common in Unamuno, at least since 1902. El Otro has, for instance, a precedent in Unamuno’s novel Abel Sa´nchez (1917), in OC V. 41 ‘‘Macedo: (...) Mi patria no debe aceptar tiranos. La que se ha dejado tiranizar por e´l, luego de muerto, por un fantasma, por un tipo de libro, eres tu´!’’ Dream’s Shadows, 631–632. 42 ‘‘Elvira: Ah, ¿sientes celos? Macedo: ¡Sı´, siento celos! ¡Me devoran los celos! No puedo soportar que lo que debio´ ser mı´o, lo que serı´a mi paz, mi vida, algo como un dulce seno materno en vida, me lo robe ..., e´se ..., e´se del libro ..., e´se que creı´ dejar muerto. Vine aca´, a esta isla, buscando la muerte o algo peor que ella; te conocı´, sentı´me resucitar a nueva vida, a una vida de santo aislamiento; son˜e´ con un hogar que hubiese de ser, te lo repito, como un claustro materno (...) cerrado al mundo, y he vuelto a encontrarme con e´l ..., con e´l ...’’ Ibid., 632. 43 Ibid., 640: ‘‘Macedo: Sı´, en aquella noche tra´gica, junto al rı´o ma´s sagrado de mi patria, creı´ haber dado muerte a Tulio Montalba´n, al de la historia, para poder vivir fuera de ella, sin patria alguna, desterrado en todas partes, peregrino y vagabundo, como un hombre oscuro, sin nombre y sin pasado. Hice jurar a mis fieles soldados que guardarı´an el secreto de mi desaparicieo´n haciendo creer en mi muerte y entierro, y huı´ ... ¿Ado´nde? Ni lo se´.’’ 44 Ibid., 642: ‘‘Macedo: (...) Y tu´, que amabas – ¿amar? – con la cabeza, cerebralmente, a Tulio Montalba´n, no podı´as amar con el corazo´n, carnalmente si quieres, a un na´ufrago sin nombre. Todo tu empen˜o fue conocer mi pasado cuando yo venı´a huyendo de e´l. ¡Y ni me conociste! Prueba que era tu cabeza, cabeza de libro, y no tu corazo´n, el enamorado ...’’ 45 Ibid., 645. 46 Ibid., 641: ‘‘Macedo: ¡Es tan extran˜o este mundo ... y el otro! Los que parecemos de carne y hueso no somos sino entes de ficcio´n, sombras, fantasmas, y e´sos que andan por los cuadros y los libros y los que andamos por los escenarios del teatro de la historia somos los de verdad, los duraderos. Creı´ poder sacudirme del personaje y encontrar bajo de e´l, dentro de e´l, el hombre primitivo y original. No era sino el apego animal a la vida, y una vaga esperanza. Pero ahora ..., ¡ahora sı´ que sabre´ acabar con el personaje!’’ 47 Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts and Discours sur l’origine et le fondement de l’ine´galite´ parmi les hommes, in Oeuvres Comple`tes, vol. 2 (Paris: Eds. du Seuil, 1971).

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48 Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers. See also ‘‘Imaginatio Creatrix’’, in Analecta Husserliana, vol. III (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1974). 49 Ricoeur, P., T emps et re´cit three volumes (Paris: Seuil, 1983, 1984, 1985), Du texte a` l ’action, Paris, Seuil, 1986), etc. 50 Co´mo se hace una novela (How a novel is made), ‘‘Comentario’’, in OC VIII, 724. 51 Ibid., 726: ‘‘Y ası´, cuandoles cuento co´mo se hace una novela, o sea, co´mo estoy haciendo la novela de mi vida, mi historia, les llevo a que se vayan haciendo su propia novela, la novela que es la vida de cada uno de ellos. Y desgraciados si no tienen novela. Si tu vida, lector, no es una novela, una ficcio´n divina, un ensuen˜o de eternidad, entonces deja estas pa´ginas, no me sigas leyendo.’’ 52 Ibid., 747. 53 Cf., for example, Historia como sistema (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1971). Ortega considers life as a task, not at all a substance or a nature, not a participle ( factum), but a gerundive ( faciendum). Ibid., 43. 54 Co´mo se hace una novela. ‘‘Continuacio´n’’, OC VIII, 760.’’ Nuestra obra es nuestro espı´ritu y mi obra soy yo mismo que me estoy haciendo dı´a a dı´a y siglo a siglo, como tu obra eres tu´ mismo, lector, que te esta´s haciendo momento a momento, ahora oye´ndome como yo habla´ndote’’. 55 Nicol, E., L a idea del hombre (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1977). See especially the two first chapters. 56 This is a recurrent subject in Unamuno. Cf. for instance, his Diario intimo (1897), (Madrid: Alianza Ed., 1972), L a Esfinge (1898), in OC V, Amor y pedagogı´a (1902) and Niebla (1914), in OC II, Soledad (1921), in OC V, Co´mo se hace una novela (1925–27), in OC VIII, El hermano Juan o el mundo es teatro (1929), in OC V, etc. 57 Cf. Niebla (Mist) in OC II, 662ff. 58 Amor y pedagogı´a in OC II, 339: ‘‘El mundo es escenario y nosotros, cada uno, los actores, representamos nuestro papel, o ma´s bien el papel que nos ha asignado alguien superior a nosotros, el ‘Supremo Director de escena’.’’ 59 Diario ´ıntimo, 20: ‘‘La comedia de la vida. Obstinacio´n en hundirse en el suen˜o y representar el papel sin ver la realidad. Y llega al punto de representar a solas y seguir la comedia en soledad, y ser co´mico para sı´ mismo, queriendo fingir delante de Ti, que lees en nuestros (sic) corazo´n. ¡Ni para nosotros mismos somos sinceros y sencillos!’’ 60 Blanco Aguinaga, C., El Unamuno comemplativo, 129. 61 Cf. Unamuno’s article ‘‘La vida es suen˜o’’ (Life is a dream), in Ensayos I, 228–38. 62 Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca (1600–1681), Spanish dramatist, author of L a vida es suen˜o. 63 V ida de Don Quijote y Sancho, part 2, chapter LXXIV, in Ensayos, II, 346. 64 Shakespeare, W., T he T empest, IV, I, 155–56, in Works, V (Oxford: 1947), 1154. Quoted by Van der Grijp, R.M.K., article ‘‘Ensuen˜os. Un motivo en el pensamiento de Unamuno’’, in Cuadernos de la Ca´tedra Miguel de Unamuno, XIII (1963), 85. 65 Let us notice the words inversion in the title of drama we are analysing in this study: Dream’s Shadows. 66 Unamuno, article ‘‘Soliloquios y conversaciones’’, second conversation, in Ensayos, II, 549 ‘‘¡Ah!; ¿pero no ha pensado usted nunca en aquellas profe´ticas palabras del hombre Shakespeare, cuando dijo que ‘estamos hechos de la madera misma de los suen¯os’? ¿No ha pensado usted que no somos sino suen˜o, ‘suen˜o de una sombra’, segu´n las palabras profe´ticas tambie´n del hombre Pı´ndaro? ¿No ha pensado usted si no somos un suen˜o de Dios?’’ 67 See also the same idea in the prologue of the novel San Manuel, Bueno, Ma´rtir: ‘‘Que los que vivimos la sentencia calderoniana de que ‘la vida es suen˜o’ sentimos tambie´n la shake-

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speariana de que estamos hechos de la estofa misma de los suen˜os, que somos un suen˜o de Dios y que nuestra historia es la que por nosotros Dios suen˜a.’’ OC II, 1119. 68 Unamuno’s poem T eresa Presentation, in OC VI, 572: ‘‘Me he despertado son˜ando, son˜e´ que estaba despierto; son˜e´ que el suen˜o era vida, son˜e´ que la vida es suen˜o’’. 69 Unamuno analyses multiple forms of transcending finitude and death. Cf. for example, my book Antropologı´a filoso´fica de Miguel de Unamuno (Sevilla: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1983), chapter VI, ‘‘Hacia la superacio´n de la muerte ¿Esperanza de pervivencia?’’, 177–215. 70 V ida de Don Quijote y Sancho, second part, end of chapter XXIV, in Ensayos, II, 244. 71 Idem: ‘‘Si la vida es suen˜o, ¿por que´ hemos de obstinarnos en negar que los suen˜os son vida? Y todo cuanto es vida es verdad. Lo que llamamos realidad, ¿es algo ma´s que una ilusio´n que nos lleva a obrar y produce obras? El efecto pra´ctico es el u´nico criterio valedero de la verdad de una visio´n cualquiera’’. My italics. 72 This approach is, as we know, just the opposite of many Oriental perspectives (Buddhism, for example), which search for harmony and peace as the main goal of human existence. 73 T res novelas ejemplares y un pro´logo, Prologue, in OC II, 976: ‘‘Y ese sujeto cotidiano y apariencial, ese que huye de la tragedia, no es ni suen˜o de una sombra, que es como Pı´ndaro llamo´ al hombre. A lo sumo sera´ sombra de suen˜o, que dijo el Tasso. Porque el que siendo suen˜o de una sombra y teniendo la conciencia de serlo sufra con ello y quiera serlo o quiera no serlo, sera´ un personaje tra´gico y capaz de crear y de re-crear en sı´ mismo personajes tra´gicos – co´micos – capaz de ser novelista, estoes, poeta (...)’’ 74 OC II, 383: ‘‘Comprendemos todos lo lu´gubre, lo espantosamente lu´gubre de este fu´nebre procesio´n de sombras, que van de la nada a la nada y que todo esto pasara´ como un suen˜o (...) como sombra de un suen˜o, y que una noche te dormira´s para no despertar nunca, nunca, nunca y que ni tendra´s el consuelo de saber lo que allı´ haya ...’’ See also Del sentimiento tra´gico de la vida, chapter VII, in Ensayos II, 853, concerning the radical nothingness which dwells deeply inside ourselves. 75 Cerezo Gala´n, P., L as ma´scaras de lo tra´gico. Filosofı´a y T ragedia en Miguel de Unamuno, 279. 76 Del sentimiento tra´gico de la vida, chapter IX, in Ensayos II, 906: ‘‘¿Que´ es, en efecto, existir, y cua´ndo decimos que una cosa existe? Existir es ponerse algo de tal modo fuera de nosotros, que precediera a nuestra percepcio´n de ello y pueda subsistir fuera cuando desaparezcamos. ¿Y estoy acaso seguro de que algo me precediera o de que algo me ha de sobrevivir? ¿Puede mi conciencia saber que hay algo fuera de ella? Cuanto conozco o puedo conocer esta´ en mi conciencia. No nos entenderemos, pues, en el insoluble problema de otra objetividad de nuestras percepciones, sino que existe cuanto obra y existir es obrar.’’ We have the same idea in other Unamunian writings. Cf., for example, ibid., chapter VII, 861; the article ‘‘El caballero de la triste figura’’, in Ensayos I, 199; V ida de Don Quijote y Sancho, first part, chapter XXXII, in Ensayos II, 186; T res novelas ejemplares y un pro´logo, chapter III, in OC II, 974, etc. 77 See, for example, the article ‘‘Sobre la consecuencia, la sinceridad’’, in Ensayos I, 862. 78 Augusto Pe´rez is the hero of Unamuno’s novel Niebla (Mist), where, at the end of the novel, the hero ‘‘goes out’’ of the narration and visits his author, Unamuno. Augusto learns

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about the author’s decision and tries to convince him to change his mind to kill him. The dialogue concerning reality and fiction of each of them is remarkable. We shall present some quotations later. 79 Prologue to T res novelas ejemplares, in OC II, 972–73: ‘‘sea hombre de carne y hueso o sea de lo que llamamos ficcio´n – que es igual. Porque Don Quijote es tan real como Cervantes; Hamlet o Macbeth tanto como Shakespeare, y mi Augusto Pe´rez tenı´a acaso sus razones para decirme, como me dijo (...), que tal vez no fuese yo sino un pretexto para que su historia y la de otros, incluso la mı´a misma, lleguen al mundo.’’ 80 Ibid., 975: ‘‘Porque, ¿quie´n soy yo mismo? ¿Quie´n es el que se firma Miguel de Unamuno? Pues ... uno de mis personajes, una de mis criaturas, uno de mis agonistas. Y ese u´ltimo e ´ıntimo y supremo, ese yo trascendente – o inmanente – ¿quie´n es? Dios lo sabe ... ’’. 81 Cf. my article Hermann Hesse: The Search for Oneself, Analecta Husserliana Vol. LXV (Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 283–304. 82 For the problem of personality, see Cerezo Gala´n, P., L as ma´scaras de lo tra´gico. Filosofı´a y T ragedia en Miguel de Unamuno, chapter 11, ‘‘Sı´ mismo contra sı´ mismo’’. 83 Cf., for instance, chapter VII, in Ensayos II, 852, 853, 855. 84 Niebla in OC II, 578: ‘‘Y me hacen creer que existo, ¡dulce ilusio´n! Amo ergo sum. Este amor, Orfeo, es como lluvia bienechora en que se deshace y concreta la niebla de la existencia. Gracias al amor siento el alma de bulto, la toco.’’ 85 Ibid., 663–64: ‘‘durante an˜os he vagado como un fantasma, como un mun˜eco de niebla, sin creer en mi propia existencia, imagina´ndome ser un personaje fanta´stico que un oculto genio invento´ para solazarse o desahogarse; pero ahora, despue´s de lo que me han hecho, despue´s de esta burla, de esta ferocidad de burla, ¡ahora sı´, ahora me siento, ahora me palpo, ahora no dudo de mi existencia real!’’ 86 Unamuno invents this word. From novela (novel) he makes nivola, to differentiate his singular existential novels from others. 87 Niebla in OC II, 670: ‘‘¿Conque no, eh? (...), ¿conque no? No quiere usted dejarme ser yo, salir de la niebla, vivir, vivir, vivir, verme, oirme, tocarme, sentirme, dolerme, serme: ¿conque no lo quiere?, ¿conque he de morir ente de ficcio´n? Pues bien, mi sen˜or creador don Miguel, tambie´n usted se morira´, tambie´n usted, y se volvera´ a la nada de que salio´ ...! ¡Dios dejara´ de son˜arle! Se morira´ usted, sı´, se morira´, aunque no lo quiera; se morira´ usted y se morira´n todos los que lean mi historia, todos, todos, todos, sin quedar uno! ¡Entes de ficcio´n como yo; lo mismo que yo! Se morira´n todos, todos, todos, Os lo digo yo, Augusto Pe´rez, ente ficticio como vosotros, nivolesco lo mismo que vosotros. Porque usted, mi creador, mi don Miguel no es usted ma´s que otro ente nivolesco, y entes nivolescos sus lectores, lo mismo que yo, que Augusto Pe´rez, que su vı´ctima ...’’ 88 San Manuel Bueno, ma´rtir is the last novel of Unamuno. OC II, 1153: ‘‘¿Se´ yo si aquel Augusto Pe´rez, el de mi novela Niebla no tenı´a razo´n al pretender ser ma´s real, ma´s objetivo que yo mismo, que creı´a haberle inventado? De la realidad de este San Manuel Bueno, ma´rtir, (...) De esta realidad no se me ocurre dudar (...) Creo en ella ma´s que creo en mi propia realidad.’’ 89 V ida de Don Quijote y Sancho, second part, chapter LXXIV, in Ensayos II, 361: ‘‘Y he de an˜adir aquı´ que muchas veces tenemos a un escritor por persona real y verdadera e histo´rica por verle de carne y hueso, y a los sujetos que finge en sus ficciones no ma´s sino por de pura fantası´a, y sucede al reve´s, y es que estos sujetos lo son muy de veras y de toda realidad y se sirven de aquel otro que nos parece de carne y hueso para tomar ellos ser y figura ante los hombres.’’

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90 Co´mo se hace una novela in OC VII, 732: ‘‘Sı´, toda novela, toda obra de fı´ccio´n, todo poema, cuando es vivo es autobiogra´fico. Todo ser de ficcio´n, todo personaje poe´tico que crea un autor hace parte del autor mismo.’’ 91 Unamuno, article ‘‘Alrededor del estilo’’, X, in OC VII, 904: ‘‘todo hombre bio´grafo – llame´mosle, si se quiere, novelista – es autobio´grafo, se describe, se expresa a sı´ mismo. Y lo mejor de sı´, lo que quiso haber sı´do. Don Quijote es el que quiso haber sido Cervantes y Shakespeare quiso ser el pueblo, la selva de hombres que describio´. Y si quiso ser eso es porque, en el fondo, lo era.’’ 92 Del sentimiento tra´gico de la vida, in Ensayos II, 861: ‘‘Y ası´, el viejo adagio de que operari sequitur esse, el obrar se sigue al ser, hay que modificarlo diciendo que ser es obrar y so´lo existe lo que obra, lo activo, y en cuanto obra.’’ See also the prologue to T res novelas ejemplares, in OC II, 974. 93 V ida de Don Quijote y Sancho, second part, chapter XXIV, in Ensayos II, 244: ‘‘Y todo cuanto es vida es verdad. Lo que llamamos realidad, ¿es algo ma´s que una ilusio´n que nos lleva a obrar y produce obras? El efecto pra´ctico es el u´nico criterio valedero de la verdad de una visio´n cualquiera.’’ 94 Ibid., chapter LVIII, in Ensayos II, 301–302: ‘‘la accio´n [es] la que hace la verdad. De´jate, pues, de lo´gicas.’’ 95 Niebla in OC II, 672: ‘‘Pero, ¡no, no! ¡yo no puedo morirme! So´lo se muere el que esta´ vivo, el que existe, y yo, como no existo, no puedo morirme ..., ¡soy inmortal! No hay inmortalidad como la de aquello que, cual yo, no ha nacido y no existe. Un ente de ficcio´n es una idea, y una idea es siempre inmortal ... (...) Claro, yo no vivo. Los inmortales no vivimos, y yo no vivo, sobrevivo; ¡yo soy ideal!’’ 96 Ibid., 678: ‘‘mire usted, mi querido don Miguel, no vaya a ser que sea usted el ente de ficcio´n, el que no existe en realidad, ni vivo ni muerto ... no vaya a ser que no pase usted de un pretexto para que mi historia, y otras historias como la mı´a, corra por el mundo. Y luego, cuando usted se muera del todo, llevemos su alma nosotros.’’ 97 Marı´as, J., Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1971), 102. 98 Cf. the three volumes of T emps et re´cit and Du texte a` l’action. 99 Rosario de sonetos liricos, VIII, in OC VI, 341: ‘‘y es el fin de la vida hacerse un alma’’. 100 Del sentimiento tra´gico de la vida, chapter VII, in Ensayos, II, 853: ‘‘Segu´n te adentras en tı´ mismo y en tı´ mismo ahondas, vas descubriendo tu propia inanidad, que no eres todo lo que eres, que no eres lo que quisieras ser, que no eres, en fin ma´s que nonada. Y al tocar tu propia naderı´a, al no sentir tu fondo permanente, al no llegar a tu propia infinitud, ni menos a tu propia eternidad, te compadeces de todo corazo´n de tı´ propio y te enciendes en doloroso amor a tı´ mismo (...)’’.

MAX STATKIEWICZ

ON THE TRUTH AND LIE OF ILLUSION IN THE THEATRICAL SENSE

Die Wahrheiten sind illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, dass sie welche sind ... Nietzsche, Ueber Wahrheit und L u¨ge im aussermoralischen Sinne1 Manteu´ omai, e˚wg, skopeiPshai´ se ei˚te paradejo´ meha tracv˛ di´an te kai` kvmv˛ di´an ei˙z tg` n po´ lin, ei˚te kai´ ou˚. ˚Isvz, g˙P n d e˙cv´ , ˚isvz de` kai` plei´v e˚ti tou´ tvn. Plato, T he Republic2

Truth and illusion are sometimes presented as two poles of a binary opposition that governs our view on philosophy and art. The poets are makers of illusion, that is, liars. Aristotle already evoked this opinion as an old commonplace. Most of the readers of Plato took it as the lesson of the Republic culminating in Socrates’ presentation of the ‘‘old dispute’’ (palaia` diawora´ ) between philosophy, the realm of truth, and poetry or mimesis, the realm of illusion.3 And it is this ‘‘Platonic’’ formulation of the dispute and the equally ‘‘Platonic’’ way of establishing a jurisdiction of philosophy over poetry that has marked the history of Western thought. The twentieth-century philosophy and art that proclaim as their task the ‘‘overturning of Platonism’’ refer to the ‘‘old dispute’’ as the beginning of a process that ended with what Nietzsche calls a˙dia´ wora [sic], the suppression of the diaphora, that is, the subjugation of one side of the dispute (tragedy, art, mimesis) to the other side (philosophy, Platonism, Christianity).4 In Nietzsche’s view, the adiaphora caused the decadence, the nihilism of Western culture when philosophy ‘‘purified’’ and conceptualized tragedy and art, made it ‘‘more philosophical than history,’’ more philosophical than anything except herself, and finally, through Hegel’s dialectics, ‘‘sublated’’ (auf hob) art, made it a ‘‘thing of the past,’’ something in need of philosophical catharsis, in need of a ‘‘proper’’ interpretation. In what follows I would like to consider in some detail Nietzsche’s texts pertaining directly to the process of overturning Platonism and to the related move of displacing the dispute between philosophy and tragedy (theater, art, poetry, mimesis). I shall argue that Nietzsche’s effort to 43 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 43–53. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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overturn the eVects of the ‘‘old dispute’’ and to determine the conditions for the rebirth of tragedy and of art in the modern world of philosophical rationalism and Sophistic relativism leads paradoxically to a reaffirmation of the ancient quarrel in a new form, that of a raging discordance (erregende Zwiespalt) between truth and art. In spite of some commonly cited proclamations of the superiority of the Dionysian over the Socratic and of art and illusion over truth,5 both poles of the Zwiespalt are in Nietzsche’s view essential to an adequate account of our view of the world, just as philosophy and tragedy were both essential to the shaping of the world view in fifth-century BC Greece. If, however, the theory of the ‘‘raging discordance’’ between truth and art reaffirms in a sense the old Socratic dispute, it questions at the same time its definitive philosophical or artistic resolution. I Wagner’s Musik ist niemals wahr. Aber man halt sie dafu¨r: und so ist es in Ordnung. – Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner6

Nietzsche began his confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the Platonic view of the old dispute in T he Birth of T ragedy when investigating Socrates’ quarrel with poetry and his role in the so-called death of tragedy. He was to remain fascinated by the ‘‘dreadful’’ ambivalence of the dispute until the very end of his (creative) life. It certainly marked his vision of the world and his vision of philosophy and art as the primary ways of grasping the world. As late as the summer of 1888, referring to his first book, he wrote: ‘‘I was very young when I began seriously to consider the relationship of art to truth; and even now I look with holy dread at this discordance.’’7 Was it not the ambiguous character of the artistic and especially theatrical illusion that caused the ‘‘dreadful’’ (entsetzlich) character of the discordance for Nietzsche? And would not this dreadful power of illusion contribute to explaining Nietzsche’s puzzling relationship with Wagner? As long as Nietzsche’s experience of Wagner’s art did not include the theatrical performance in its ‘‘proper’’ setting, he was unreservedly enthusiastic. Wagner was for him an heir of both the tragedians and the philosophers of the tragic age. When in T he Birth of T ragedy Nietzsche describes the conditions of the rebirth of tragedy in nineteenth-century Europe as the ‘‘oneness of German music and philosophy’’ (Einheit zwischen der deutschen Musik und der deutschen Philosophie),8 he certainly

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thinks of the original pre-Socratic Dionysian unity of philosophy and tragedy. German music of Bach, Beethoven, and especially of Wagner was at that time ... the only genuine, pure, and purifying fire-spirit from which and toward which, as in the teaching of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double orbit: all that we now call culture, education, civilization, must some day appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus.9

The last sections of T he Birth of T ragedy do not permit any doubt as to the possibility of reviving German myth through the Dionysian experience of the Wagnerian musical drama. German Reformation, German spirit, German leader, German things! – all apparently culminates in Wagner’s theatrical art: ‘‘German music as we must understand it, particularly in its vast solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. ’’10 However, when four years after the publication of T he Birth of T ragedy Wagner’s Festival Theater opened in Bayreuth, Nietzsche’s enthusiasm abated. The event did not shake the operatic culture of the time, did not provoke the outrage of the bourgeois public. On the contrary, Wagner’s supposedly ‘‘Dionysian’’ theater was so easily co-opted by the conservative philistine audience that it raised Nietzsche’s doubts as to its revitalizing potential. Wagner’s total art seemed not only to coincide with but also to promote the ‘‘arrival of the ‘Reich’ ... both events prove the same thing: obedience and long legs. Never has obedience been better, never has commanding.’’11 Apparently, in Wagner’s hands, the theater became a perfect ideological tool, a ‘‘dramatic rhetoric’’ locking up German spirit in the notion of ‘‘German Reich.’’ Wagner came to represent for Nietzsche the theater at its worst: a combination of the ‘‘pseudo-Dionysian’’ looseness of the crowd and the military rigor of the leader and music conductor. This unlikely combination could only be achieved by theatrical illusion, in the hands of ‘‘an incomparable histrio, the greatest mime, the most amazing genius of the theater ever among Germans, our scenic artist par excellence.’’12 Wagner’s theater provoked an utter dissolution of forms that were then artificially fused under the tyrannical rule of the conductor. It did not allow for play between the Dionysian and the Apollonian as the Greek theater had done. It did not allow for play tout court as Bizet’s operas did. It did not allow for the theater’s self-display. It may seem, however, that Nietzsche’s critique of theater goes beyond the particular critique of Wagner’s musical drama. The danger of Wagner – a threat of chaos without rhythm, without melody, without form of any sort, without a frame that would contain the protean flow of images13 –

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is in fact the danger of all ideological theater. The audience of such a theater, the ‘‘Wagnerians,’’ will readily submit to an exterior pressure of forced unification. This is how Nietzsche imagines the credo of the Wagnerian ‘‘creators of illusion’’: We know the masses, we know the theater. The best among those who sit there – German youths, horned Siegfrieds, and other Wagnerians – require the sublime, the profound, the overwhelming. That much we are capable of.14

Politically, such an undifferentiated crowd, the public of Wagner’s musical drama, might readily become a substratum of a dictatorial regime, an empire (Reich). The three stipulations of Nietzsche’s late aesthetics, which conclude his confrontation with Wagner, directly refer to the theatrical principle of all ‘‘ideological lie’’ and are intended to purify art of theatrocracy, that is, of ideological illusion. It is vital: T hat the theater should not lord over the arts. T hat the actor should not seduce those who are authentic. T hat music should not become an art of lying15

The denunciation of the theatrical illusion in this manifesto seems surprisingly close to Socrates’ denunciation of mimesis in Plato’s Republic, where Homer is explicitly called a ‘‘maker of illusion’’ (eı˙dv´ lou dgmiourco´ z).16 It is enough to make a (in a sense not un-Platonic) substitution of philosophy for the Nietzschean music in order to obtain a totally Platonic version of the ‘‘old dispute.’’ Thus we may, for example, juxtapose two texts on the effect of theater on its spectators. First, Nietzsche’s presentation of the ‘‘young Wagnerians,’’ the model spectators at Bayreuth: You do not know who Wagner is: a first-rate actor. Is a more profound, a weightier effect to be found in the theater? Just look at these youth – rigid, pale, breathless! These are the Wagnerians: they understand nothing about music – and yet Wagner becomes master over them – Wagner’s art has the pressure of a hundred atmospheres: stoop! What else can one do?17

And then Socrates’ no less lively description of the corruption of the youth naturally endowed with the ‘‘true philosophical nature’’ (tg` n tvˆ n a˙lghvˆ z wiloso´ wvn wu´ sin) in T he Republic (VI, 490d), where the theater is again, or should we say for the first time, considered the paradigm of ideological illusion, an epitome of the ‘‘art of lying’’: When the people meet together, and the world sits down at an assembly, or in a court of law, or a theater, or a camp, or in any other popular resort, and there is a great uproar,

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and they praise some things which are being said or done, and blame other things, equally exaggerating both, shouting and clapping their hands, and the echo of the rocks and the place they are assembled redoubles the sound of the praise and blame – at such a time will not a young man’s heart, as they say, leap within him? Will any private training enable him to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion?18

The parallels between the two texts are striking. Apparently, Nietzsche repeats Socrates’ condemnation, and once again the remedy seems to lie in establishing the exclusivity of the ‘‘authentic’’ sphere of truth protected from the ‘‘illusion’’ of the theater. In both cases, the illusionist art seems to be rejected in favor of an original event – a direct contact with truth, in the form of music and authentic art for Nietzsche, and of dialectics for Plato. It seems that after the break with Wagner, Nietzsche himself remained the only candidate to assume the role of the protagonist in the ‘‘agon’’ between philosophy and tragedy. And thus the ‘‘old quarrel’’ took, in the words of Werner Dannhauser, the form of ‘‘[Nietzsche’s] quarrel with Socrates.’’ It was ‘‘part of a vast historical drama which [Nietzsche] recounts and which features Socrates as the first villain and Nietzsche himself as the final hero.’’19 The postscript to T he Case of Wagner confirms the Platonic inspiration of the text by adopting Plato’s notion of ‘‘theatrocracy’’ – ‘‘the nonsense of a faith in the precedence of the theater,’’ which leads to the regime of ‘‘demolatry,’’ the worship of the masses. And Wagner’s musical drama again best epitomizes this political danger of theater: ‘‘This is precisely what is proved by the case of Wagner: he won the crowd ...’’20 The notion of the audience as crowd is what distinguishes Wagner’s illusionist theater from the ancient theater, a genuine representation of the political order in the city. The Wagnerian type of theater, obliterating social distinctions between the spectators, obliterating the basic political oppositions, manifests a distinctive characteristic of modernity in Nietzsche’s view: ... such falseness as that of Bayreuth is no exception today. ... Such innocence among the opposites, such a ‘‘good conscience’’ in a lie is actually modern par excellence, it almost defines modernity.21

Thus in Nietzsche’s account Wagner’s theater functions as an epitome of the modern adiaphora,22 an extreme case of nihilism characterized by the indiscriminate amalgamation of opposites such as, for example, Icelandic saga and Christian doctrine of redemption.23

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Jetzt kann die Philosophie nur noch das Relative aller Erkenntniß betonen und das Anthropomorphische, so wie die u¨berall herrschende Kraft der Illusion. Nietzsche, Nachlaß 1872–7324

Thus Nietzsche’s reference to the dreadful discordance should be considered in the context of the modern, Wagnerian, theatrical adiaphora. The artificial obliteration of the contradictions in Wagner’s musical drama – just like the catharsis in the traditional Aristotelian theater, or the Hegelian Auf hebung in idealistic philosophy – risks bringing about an unchallenged reign of one particular ideology – that of the Prussian Reich, for example. The simultaneous acknowledgement and questioning of the difference between the arts, between the distinct parts of theatrical performance, between the classes of spectators compared with one another and with the performers, on the other hand, reduces the danger of such ideological overtaking. With all its ambiguity, Nietzsche’s reaffirmation of the discordance between art and truth constitutes the only possible resistance to any forced unification on the part of philosophy or the theater. The fact that Nietzsche contrasts art and truth does not mean that he unequivocally relates the latter to philosophy in the manner of the common interpretation of Platonism. To be sure, T he Birth of T ragedy refers to German philosophy as ‘‘Dionysian wisdom comprised in concepts.’’25 And in a more detailed description of the role of philosophy in laying foundations for the rebirth of tragedy, Nietzsche points to a modest critical labor of tracing the limits of ‘‘scientific Socratism,’’ that is, of philosophy as science: ‘‘ ... only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits, and its claim to universal validity destroyed by the evidence of these limits may we hope for a rebirth of tragedy ...’’26 Historically, such a destruction has been accomplished by Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s critique of the modern dogmatic epistemology: ‘‘The extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer have succeeded in gaining the most difficult victory, the victory over the optimism concealed in the essence of logic – an optimism that is the basis of our culture.’’27 Thus the apparently contradictory notion of ‘‘Dionysian conceptual wisdom’’ points to this critical work rather than to the idealistic system building of German Romanticism. Contrary to Hegel’s famous statement about

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art, philosophical critique makes of tragic art ‘‘a thing of the future,’’ opens the way to the aesthetic view of the world. Criticism, however, the tracing of the limits of scientific knowledge, is not the end of philosophy, is not yet philosophy: ‘‘The critic prepares the way: no more!’’28 Philosophy is for Nietzsche an affirmation – an affirmation of the contradictory character of existence and as such it is dramatic and tragic. To the optimism of logicians, who posit ‘‘their limitations as the limitations of things,’’29 Nietzsche opposes the pessimism of the philosopher who renounces the vain task of enclosing the simple ‘‘truth’’ of being in a stable system of clear and distinct concepts and boldly faces the complexity of becoming.30 ‘‘Everything simple is merely imaginary, is not ‘true.’ But whatever is real, whatever is true, is neither one nor even reducible to one.’’31 Truth (without quotation marks) is thus always multiple, contradictory, and in motion or, in other words, there is no truth (‘‘... there are many kinds of ‘truths,’ and consequently there is no truth’’).32 The dramatic discordance between art and truth, a discordance that arouses dread, belongs to this context of Nietzsche’s confrontation with the notion of truth. Truth as the basic concept of philosophy and of art can only emerge from their discordance (Zwiespalt), which is dreadful as well as fascinating. It is the threat of the reduction of truth to only one term of the opposition and thus to one truth that should arouse dread (Entsetzen). In order to avoid the threat of dogmatism, one has to resist the temptation of definitely solving the discordance. Thus Nietzsche emphasizes the long fascination exercised on him by the discordance, a fascination that suggests its irresolvable character. Although Nietzsche’s statement, just like Aristotle’s ‘‘theory’’ of catharsis, seems to take up Socrates’ challenge in Plato’s Republic, it does not plead for the reinstatement of tragedy and art on philosophy’s terms but rather maintains the necessity of the tension between the two parties. Unlike Aristotle’s ‘‘eleos and phobos,’’ Nietzsche’s ‘‘Entsetzen and Zauber’’ are not intended to end the ‘‘old dispute’’ by philosophically explaining the enigma of tragic pleasure but rather point to the heart of the enigma situated between philosophy and tragedy, between art and truth. Contrary to the complementary character of pity and fear, the nature of dread and fascination puts them into an irresolvable conflict that cannot be artificially suppressed by integrating one party, one point of view into another, as in Aristotle’s conception of ‘‘philosophical tragedy’’ or in Wagner’s notion of ‘‘philosophical drama.’’ In this point, Nietzsche’s view of the relationship between philosophy and tragic art as discordance seems closer to

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their Platonic rapprochement on the tragic stage, which nevertheless maintains their rivalry. It is the Athenian in the L aws who proclaims the true agon between philosophy and tragedy: Best of strangers, we will say to them [the tragic poets] we [the philosophers!] according to our ability are tragic poets as well, and our tragedy is the best and noblest; for our whole state is a dramatization (mi´mgsiz) of the best and noblest life, which we affirm to be indeed the very truth of tragedy. You are poets and we are poets ... rivals and antagonists in the noblest of dramas ... (Plato, L aws VII, 817; Jowett’s translation, modified)

Thus, after having condemned the ideology of the theater, the ‘‘theatrocracy,’’ in non-ambiguous terms – a condemnation familiar to the readers of the Republic – the Athenian, not unlike Socrates in the T imaeus and Critias, returns to the theater as the ideological principle of both political and aesthetic creation. Indeed, theatrocracy cannot be defeated by a withdrawal of ‘‘strong and solitary souls’’ such as Plato’s ‘‘philosophical natures’’ – Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or Nietzsche himself – from public life, of which the theater is the most ‘‘visible’’ manifestation.33 It is through art and in particular the theater that, paradoxically, one can see one’s own character, or rather its limits: ‘‘Artists, and in particular those of the theater, have first prepared people’s ears and eyes to the task of hearing and seeing what everyone is, what everyone experiences, what everyone desires.’’34 Theatrical experience is not only the experience of illusion but also of representation, the ‘‘play’’ of illusion. Thus in a sense only in the theater can one clearly see the truth as deception and the truth of deception, that is, the mechanism, the mgxang´ (an ideological ‘‘war machine’’ or a theatrical device) capable of conjuring up the gods or the idols. It is certainly this ambiguity of art and the theater in respect to the ideological effort of establishing and maintaining the unity, i.e., one truth, of the polis that has always provoked apprehension and dread in those – a Socrates, a Nietzsche – who understood the stakes of the apparently innocent aesthetic ‘‘play.’’ Indeed, both Plato’s and Nietzsche’s critique of the theatrical illusion and of the culture and politics marked by ‘‘theatrocracy’’ are paradoxically conducted in a highly theatrical fashion: not by philosophers as such but by the dramatic characters they produced, Socrates and ‘‘Nietzsche.’’ This is perhaps why the latter opposes the former – a philosopher hardly known otherwise than as a persona of Plato’s dialogues – rather than Plato himself.35 But the agon takes place in the ‘‘theater of philosophy.’’36 And it is this theatrical setting of the critique of illusion that, in spite of the ostensive diaphora and Zwiespalt, allows for a ‘‘deconstruction’’ of

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the binary opposition between truth and art, between philosophy and art, between reality and illusion.37 The discordance between art and truth bears the marks of this ambiguity. Nietzsche’s formulation of the dreadful discordance was written at the same time as his diatribes against Wagner and against the theater and yet it refers to his youthful work, T he Birth of T ragedy – to the time of the fascination with the Greek theater and with Wagner’s T ristan and Isolde (the most successful modern revival of this theater) – as the origin of the dread. The truth of the discordance is difficult to ascertain; is it the truth of Plato’s Socrates or of the philosopher-king banishing art from the philosophical state (the truth that young Nietzsche rejects), or is it the truth of an anti-Wagnerian and an enemy of the theater (the truth of Nietzsche in his case against Wagner and the theater)? In the latter case the theater would again – just like in The Republic – operate as art, or rather artifice, par excellence. In both cases the theater must appear as the place of decision even though at the end the discordance is to be seen as ‘‘undecidable’’. This double bind does not result solely from the problem of interpretation but rather belongs to the nature of art as the place of illusion against which, in both cases, truth is to be determined. The impossibility of making such a determination would account for the vigor of the debate – diaphora or Zwiespalt – over the role played by art in politics and education. The aesthetic as well as political importance of this debate is the common assumption of all those who either extol or castigate artistic illusion. From this perspective, it seems much less paradoxical that in his endeavor to overturn the effects of Platonism, Nietzsche had to recover Plato’s original thought as to the power of theatrical illusion. The erregende Zwiespalt, just like the palaia diaphora, reveals and questions this dangerous power. Comparative L iterature University of W isconsin-Madison Many thanks to Valerie Reed for her comments. NOTES 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sa¨mtliche Werke (Kritische Studienausgabe), edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, I Volume: Die Geburt der T rago¨die; Unzeitgema¨sse Betrachtungen I–IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873 (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–77), 880–81; ‘‘Truth are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions,’’ – ‘‘On Truth

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and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense’’ in T he Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Maximilian A. Magge (New York: Gordon Press, 1974), 80. 2 Plato Republic 394d: ‘‘I suppose, he said, you are asking whether tragedy and comedy shall be admitted into our State? Yes, I said; but there may be more than this in question ...’’(Jowett’s translation). 3 Ibid., 607b. 4 See, e.g., Studienausgabe XIII, 272. 5 ‘‘We have art so that we do not perish from the truth’’ – F. Nietzsche, W ill to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) 822 [henceforth W P]; ‘‘Art and nothing but art,’’ W P, 853 II. 6 Nietzsche, Studienausgabe VI: Der Fall Wagner, Go¨tzen-Da¨mmerung, Der Antichrist, Ecce homo, Dionysos-Dithyramben, Nietzsche contra Wagner, 31; T he Case of Wagner, in Basic W ritings of Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modem Library, 1992), 629 [henceforth BW N ]: ‘‘Wagner’s music is never true. But it is taken for true; and thus it is in order.’’ ¨ ber das Verha¨ltniß der Kunst zur Wahrheit bin ich am fru¨hesten ernst geworden: und 7 ‘‘U noch jetzt stehe ich mit einem heiligen Entsetzen vor diesem Zwiespalt.’’ – Nietzsche, Studienausgabe, XIII, 500. 8 Studienausgabe I (Die Geburt der T rago¨die, sec. 19), 128; BW N (T he Birth of T ragedy, sec. 19), 121. 9 Studienausgabe I, 128; BW N, 120. 10 Studienausgabe I, 127; BW N, 119. 11 BW N 636; ‘‘... die Herauf kunft des ‘Reichs’ . .. beide T hatsachen beweisen Ein und Dasselbe – Gehorsam und lange Beine – Nie ist besser gehorcht, nie besser befohlen worden.’’ – Studienausgabe, VI (Der Fall Wagner, section 11), 39. 12 T he Case of Wagner section 8 in BW N, 628. 13 See, e.g., ‘‘Wagner As a Danger,’’ in Nietzsche Contra Wagner in T he Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 666 (from Human All-T oo-Human II, 134 and T he Wanderer and his Shadow, 164), 667. 14 BW N 623; ‘‘Wir kennen die Massen, wir kennen das Theater. Das Beste, was darin sitzt, deutsche Ju¨nglinge, geho¨rnte Siegfriede und andre Wagnerianer, bedarf des ¨ berwaltigenden. So viel vermo¨gen wir noch.’’ – Studienausgabe Erhabenen, des Tiefen, des U VI (Der Fall Wagner, section 6), 24. 15 BW N 636: Dass das Theater nicht Herr u¨ber die Kunste wird. Dass der Schauspieler nich zum Verfu¨hrer der Echten wird. Dass die Musik nicht zu einer Kunst zu lugen wird. Studienausgabe, VI (Der Fall Wagner, sec. 12), 39. 16 Plato, Republic 599d. 17 T he Case of Wagner 8 in BW N, 628. 18 Plato, Republic V, 492b-c; Jowett’s translation. 19 Werner J. Dannhauser, Nietzsche’s V iew of Socrates (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 272; cf. Hermann Josef Schmidt, Nietzsche und Socrates (Meisenheim: Anton Han, 1969). 20 T he Case of Wagner Postscript in BW N, 638–9. 21 T he Case of Wagner Epilogue in BW N, 648. 22 Nietzsche, Studienausgabe XIII, 272. 23 T he Case of Wagner Epilogue in BW N, 647.

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24 ‘‘Philosophy can now only emphasize the relative and anthropomorphic character of all knowledge, as well as ubiquitous and imperious power of illusion.’’ – Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1872 –73 in Studienausgabe VII, 429. 25 T he Birth of T ragedy, sec. 19 in BW N, 121. 26 Ibid., sec. 17 in BW N, 106. 27 Ibid., sec. 18 in BW N, 112. 28 W P, 422. 29 Ibid., 535. 30 ‘‘The doctrine of being, of things, of all sorts of fixed unities is a hundred times easier than the doctrine of becoming, of development ...’’ – W P, 538. 31 Ibid., 536. 32 Ibid., 540. 33 Cf. Jonas Barish’s interpretation of ‘‘Nietzsche’s apostasy’’ in his T he Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 417. 34 Nietzsche, T he Gay Science translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974) sec. 78, 132–33, translation modified; ‘‘Erst die Ku¨nstler, und namentlich die des T heaters, haben den Menschen Augen und Ohren eingesetzt, um Das mit einigen Vergnu¨gen zu ho¨ren und zu sehen, was Jeder selber ist, selber erlebt, selber will ...’’ – Studienausgabe III, 433–34. 35 See, especially, Euge`ne Dupre´el, L a le´gende socratique et les sources de Platon (Bruxelles: Edition M. Sand, 1922) and Olof Gigon, Sokrates, sein Bild in Dichtung und Geschichte (Bern: A. Francke, 1947). 36 On the theatrical character of Nietzsche’s philosophy see especially Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche et la sce`ne philosophique (Paris: Galile´e, 1986) and Jacques Tamimaux, L e the´aˆtre des philosophes (Grenoble: Je´roˆme Millon, 1995). 37 Cf. Paul de Man’s characterization of Nietzsche’s critique of art as ‘‘openly Socratic in its deconstructive function’’ – ‘‘Rhetoric of Tropes (Nietzsche)’’ in Allegories of Reading: Figural L anguage in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) 113.

JUNG-IN KWON

SIMULATING THE UNPRESENTABLE AND THE SUBLIME

There are many films that produce difficult emotions. Although film is a narrative and temporal art, it is also a form of visual art. The narration of plot is dramatized and made intelligible to audiences by means of the visual design and sequence of the film. Considering that the emotional responses of viewers are contingent upon narrative comprehension, it will not be an exaggeration to say that viewers’ emotions toward narrative films are evoked by and made articulate in response to intriguing visual designs. I would like to analyze in detail an experimental film to clarify how the sublime is evoked in the process of narrative comprehension based on decoding of visual keys. 1. SUBLIME IN L A JET E´ E

Chris Marker’s film L a Jete´e is a striking anecdote of a man who travels into time in search of a woman from his childhood memory. In the opening scene, the protagonist, as a child, follows his parents to the Orly airport in Paris to see the take-off and landing of the airplanes. One Sunday, he witnesses a man dying at the pier of the airport, which is accompanied with a plane crash. At the end of the film, audiences come to know that in this scene they witness the death of the protagonist himself. Therefore, the film narrative involves a temporally incoherent plot. This is an intriguing narrative design. First, it elicits a bewilderment and puzzle in the audience, but at the same time, these disturbing emotions are what keep the audience glued to the film. In a word, the unsettling image is powerful enough to lead the viewers to seek the resolution of the puzzle. The events of the film take place shortly after a third world war. Survivors of this nuclear conflict live underground and have become the victims of scientists who are experimenting with time travel. As human beings cannot find any residence in the contaminated space of this world, they are sent to the past and to the future to seek a postwar abode. Scientists send the victims to the past and the future by means of having them create mental images. The narrative consists of two episodes alternating throughout the film. One is the story in which the protagonist 55 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 55–63. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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is the subject of an experiment conducted by a group of future scientists. The other is a series of events that occur in the mental images of the protagonist that he created as the result of the experiment. These two seemingly separate narratives merge into one in the image of the man’s death, in which I find the main theme of the film is expressed. In this way, time is spatialized in that people are sent to the past and the future in search of an alternate place to live. ‘Spatialized’ here means being called into the mind as constitutive of the current stream of consciousness. This highly original process of evoking the images is what renders the past as the spatialized entity. Summoning the mental images of past or future transports the imaginer to a place. Among the underground victims, the protagonist was chosen because of his particularly strong mental powers. He has an obsessive memory of a woman he saw at the pier of the airport on the day he witnessed a plane crash and a man’s death. The woman turns her face toward the protagonist when a crashing noise shakes the airport. The woman’s face remains, in the protagonist memory, as his last peaceful image before the war. The past in the images is not a preexisting entity where we can literally make a journey. Scientists first attempt to send the protagonist to the past, as the result of which images begin to appear. At first, peaceful scenes of the pre-war world appear. In the next images, we see the protagonist with the woman. They seem to have known each other, though the narrative does not inform us clearly of this. After the successful trip to the past, scientists now want to send him to the future. Our protagonist instead wishes to go back to the past in the hope of meeting the woman in his memory. His images lead him to the Orly airport on the Sunday when he saw the woman. He finds her at the end of the pier and runs toward her. When he almost reaches her, however, his movement is blocked by the head of the underground scientists. This last sequence takes us back to the opening sequence where the protagonist as a child witnessed a man’s death. The spatialized past turns out to be temporally coincidental with the past event. This inconsistency elicits deep puzzle and intense but ineffable emotions. Cynthia Freeland identifies the sublime in terms of four features: rapturous terror, astonishment, ineffable feeling, and moral reflection. In regard to the third feature, she states that the sublime evokes ineffable and painful feelings of great emotional intensity, which are transformed into pleasure and cognition. She does not, however, employ simulation theory in particular, but refers to cognitive neuroscience as the broad theoretical

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framework that can provide a useful account of the cognitive resolution and the feeling of the sublime as its affective expression. L a Jete´e’s deliberately confounding narrative structure arouses a chilling incomprehension, an intellectual conundrum, and a necessary reflection, all of which may be seen as varieties of Freeland’ s categories. As it turns out that the protagonist has witnessed his own death, the film engages the gaze of the protagonist in an ambiguous way. Within the narrative, his gaze is directed toward the death of the man as an objectified incident. On the other hand, we can say that he is in a position to see his own end when he steps outside the narrative in which he is a part. Can a character be positioned outside a narrative? Perhaps it is only when the character is at the same time the narrator of the story. To resolve the puzzle of the temporal inconsistency, we must assign to the protagonist an extended role, as narrator and subject of narration. If audiences identify with the protagonist only as an agent of the series of actions within the narrative, they will achieve only a partial understanding of the film. Another solution to the narrative inconsistency is to interpret time as the space where two incidents, which are extensionally identical, take place. As mentioned, time is spatialized in the sense that it has become the place for postwar human abode. The protagonist confronts his own death in his mental images of the past. He revisits the past, as he would visit a certain place, by evoking images of the past. He is at the pier of the airport where he first saw the woman. However, his move toward the woman is blocked. He is prevented from approaching the person of his obsessive memory. While seeing the blocked movement of the protagonist, we hear the voice of the narrator saying that one cannot escape time. Time resumes its characteristic temporal dimension by reaffirming its intrinsic property of irreversibility. It seems that the death in this context is a metaphor for the frustration of his desire rather than a temporal endpoint. Why is he prevented from encountering the woman? His willing is in vain, because it is willing towards the past. The moment of desiring, which belongs to the present or a moment in the present, is headed towards the future. Desire is intrinsically future-oriented. In the journey to the past, it is not allowed for him to alter what belonged to the past. In the images he creates, he plays the role of an observer, rather than an agent who is willing and able to do things. Death is an incident in which spatialized time gains its temporality. His death is inevitable, since ‘‘One cannot escape time.’’1

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JUNG-IN KWON 2. SIMULATION AND NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION

In the film L a Jete´e, we feel as if we were invited on a journey that eventually leads to where we started. The fact that we are puzzled indicates that the film at its surface level does not provide us with sufficient clues for appropriate comprehension. In other words, what the film shows for our visual and auditory perception does not contain all the information relevant to understanding the fictional narrative. Along with this cognitive difficulty, the initial puzzle engenders phenomenally intense emotions, for the more puzzling and intriguing a narrative, the more intense and powerful are the emotions it arouses. The intense emotion is in a sense ineffable, in that it does not fit into any determinate cognitive criterion of an emotion. The asymmetry between cognitive responses and affective responses to the film requires investigation. On the cognitivist theory of emotions, emotions are complexes of feeling states and cognitive states. This approach emphasizes the correlation between cognitive states and feeling, and rationalizes emotions in terms of the grounding beliefs and thoughts. Cognitivist views, however, do not handle well the complexity of feeling states associated with indeterminate cognitive states. If a feeling component must have an identifiable cognitive counterpart, how can we explain the fact that cognitive difficulty accompanies intense feelings such as those that mark the sublime? Moreover, the initially ineffable feeling becomes more and more fine-grained as we gain more insight about the narrative. Can a cognitivist approach give an account of this dynamic development of the emotions? I consider simulation theory as an alternative cognitive theory of emotion. It explains emotions as elicited through dynamic mental acts of the audiences. Emotions are aroused by means of an imaginative projection into the situation of another. According to Richard Wollheim, we are centrally imagining the characters’ thinking and feeling from their point of view. Similarly, Gregory Currie states that we impersonally imagine the protagonist to see things from his situation, without introspectively referring to our states. The main character in the film L a Jete´e is sent to the past through the images that he creates. His mental images are the passages through which he can visit the past and the future. In this film, it is a crucial insight to realize that the protagonist is given the role of the narrator. It is necessary to shift the perspective from that of the character within the narrative to that of the narrator outside the narrative.

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On simulation theory, it is by entertaining prepositional thoughts that we feel genuine emotions toward fictional works. But one of the peculiarities of the sublime is that we can hardly identify the cognitive components that causally affect feeling states. How can simulation theory handle this peculiarity? The merit of simulation theory is that it considers the imaginative mental act itself, rather than identifiable thought contents, as efficient in eliciting an aesthetic emotion. Simply put, simulation theory examines closely the process of formulating thoughts to give an account of the manner in which we search into appropriate thought contents. This aspect of simulation theory allows us legitimately to extend the scope of the objects of simulation. As we already examined, the sublime is accomplished through simulating an extended target. Despite the commonly held view that simulation is a mechanism of empathy, simulation is not simply identifying with the character within the narrative, nor putting oneself into the situation depicted in the narrative. The idea of going beyond the narrative boundary is consonant with the aim of central imagination or impersonal imagination. If the protagonist is the sole target of simulation, it is hard to understand the film. Our protagonist is at the edge of the narrative, which means that he cannot be the reference point from which the narrative is unfolded consistently. We have to extend the target of simulation from the character to the narrator. Confronting the limit of an imaginative projection into the character’s situation, audiences realize that our initial imagination is not properly central in Wollheim’s terms. Part of the reason is the disparity between what we believe is the protagonist’s inner states and what the narrative attributes to him. If central imagination is imagining someone from his situation, not from our point of view, then we have to in the memory belongs to time. As the narrator observes, ‘‘Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. T hey are only made memorable.’’2

3. THE UNPRESENTABLE

Extending the target of simulation beyond the narrative characterizes the reflective nature of simulation. To justify and clarify the claim to the extended simulation, I endorse Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard’s interpretation of the Kantian sublime. As a major postmodern theorist, Lyotard characterizes postmodern artworks as evoking the sublime, rather than beauty. His target artworks of postmodern sublime are avant-garde paintings, especially abstract paintings of the 50’s and 60’s American artists.

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In the early twentieth century, paintings began to give way to photography as a means of pictorial representation of objects. Paintings lost their traditional role and began exploring various ways of expressing the negation of representation. Avant-garde artists, notably abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman tried to evoke what was hidden behind the representational plane of traditional paintings. Lyotard calls the negated dimension ‘the unpresentable’, which is considered as the theme of the avant-garde paintings.3 The sublime is intrinsically the feeling elicited in response to such a negative representation. In the film L a Jete´e, time is represented in a spatialized dimension. The death of the protagonist is a pictorial representation of the idea that one cannot break the logic of time. His frustrated journey into the past is given expression in a physical movement that consider a broader point of view in order to get more lucid insight into the character. Alternating point of views or moving towards the narrative text and then moving away from it is the very nature of reflective engagement. Central imagination does not necessarily imply that I have similar or the same mental states as the protagonist. If we could compare my cognitive and affective states with those of the characters, then a character identification model makes more sense. However, we do not have any means to compare them. This is because characters’ mental states are animated by an imaginative participation on the part of the audiences, rather than determined from the first. Certainly, characters are the creations of the artist, but this does not mean that the scope of psychological participation is restricted to what the artist intended. If the artist omnisciently determines the psychological states of the characters, we have only faithfully to imitate those states attributed by the artist to the character. If simulating a particular character does not solve the question the narrative poses, we have to adjust the target of simulation. We need to extend the scope of simulation from the characters, (more properly, their mental states delineated by the depiction in the narrative) to an invisible storyteller or omniscient narrator. Such an extended simulation enables the audience to make a deeper conjecture about the narrative. For instance, it is not part of the information that the surface narrative of the film L a Jete´e delivers that temporal dimension is spatialized, somewhat like the places one can reside in. However, it is not even enough for narrative comprehension to reach the idea that time is spatialized. Such a reading may mislead us into thinking that every episode that takes place in a spatialized time, or in the images created by the protagonist,

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are immune from temporal logic. But the very moment of desiring or willing to go back to the past to reside occupies a physical space. Time can only be represented through a spatial dimension, since time belongs to the realm of the so-called ‘‘unpresentable’’ in Lyotard’s terms. The powerful emotion that the last scene evokes is, therefore, the sublime that is grounded in the narrative that visually presents the unpresentable, namely time and its irreversible logic. Visual narrative artwork, such as film, addresses visual perception as the primary source of narrative comprehension. What is represented in the fiction is given meaning by way of audiences’ perceptual experiences and cognitive organization based on perception. How, then, can we visually represent the irreversibility of time? What can be the significant visual designs that deliver an idea of what is intrinsically unpresentable? The director transformed the temporal dimension into a three-dimensional physical space. Events in the image space can be pictorially represented on screen in a cinematic medium. With this ingenious transformation, he delivers the message that time is not to be reversed, which is represented with the sequences of spatially blocked movements. Comprehension of the narrative with such a complex artistic design is possible only when we take a broader perspective than that of the protagonist in the film. It may be the omniscient narrator that we identify with. This is the target of simulation that the audiences of this film should aim at, if they attempt to construct a coherent narrative from the visual perception the film provides. In a sense, audiences are encouraged to identify with the omniscient narrator rather than with the protagonist. As the omniscient narrator is not part of the narrative content, the simulation in this case is directed to an extended target, for which reason I call it an extended simulation. In such an extended simulation, the affective response of the audience is not solely based on what is initially represented in the narrative. It is rather grounded in what is not presented or what the omniscient narrator can see and understand. The sublime L a Jete´e evokes is grounded in what is not visually represented in the fictional narrative. The emotional response is accompanied with comprehending the narrative as the representation of the unpresentable. The process of such a comprehension consists of proper simulation, whose target is the omniscient narrator. How do we, then, identify with the omniscient narrator? How do we take the perspective of the omniscient narrator? Recalling Kant’s remark about the feeling of the sublime, we can say that simulation is a dynamic psychological process of the vicissitude of cognitive states. According to Kant, sublime feeling

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is compared to the alternating of attraction to and repulsion from one and the same center. Alternating cognition refers to the dynamic process of cognition in which progress and regress in understanding alternates. 4. SPIRALING SUBLIME

When we approach the entire narrative with the multiple readings I illustrated, we feel an intense and complex emotion aroused in the course of the narrative comprehension. I consider this feeling the sublime. It is aroused in accompany with the strenuous efforts to understand clearly the narrative text. Also, the feeling is phenomenally dynamic, as well as complex and heterogeneous, in that it becomes more and more finely tuned as we gain more insight into the narrative unfolding. The emotions evoked by this sort of obscurity are characterized more by their phenomenal quality than by cognitive understanding. Burke defines the sublime as delight from a moderated painful feeling still tinged with horror. This illustrates aptly the distinct phenomenal aspect of the sublime. We can explain the reciprocity between the cognitive and phenomenal uniqueness of the sublime with Kant’s conceptual analysis of the imagination in his ‘‘Analytic of the Sublime.’’ As a catalyst of ordinary conceptual cognition, imagination bridges the gap between unorganized sensations and perceptual and conceptual understanding. When the imagination proceeds not in an ordinary way, it often generates pleasurable feelings. Those objects that do not fall under ordinary conceptual demarcation of the understanding hinder the imagination from proceeding smoothly from perceptual data to conceptual organization. To properly understand the object, we have to take an optimal perspective from which we can see the object adequately. Proper posturing itself depends on relevant knowledge about the object, despite the ironic situation that it is the proper knowledge of the object that we are searching for. The sublime L a Jete´e evokes is grounded in what is not visually represented in the fictional narrative. The emotional response is accompanied with comprehending the narrative as the representation of the unpresentable. The process of such a comprehension consists of proper simulation, whose target is the omniscient narrator. How do we, then, identify with the omniscient narrator? How do we take the perspective of the omniscient narrator? Recalling Kant’s remark about the feeling of the sublime, we can say that simulation is a dynamic psychological process of the vicissitude of cognitive states. According to Kant, sublime feeling is compared to the alternating of attraction to and repulsion from one

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and the same center. Alternating cognition refers to the dynamic process of cognition in which progress and regress in understanding alternates. I describe this process by means of a metaphor of a spiral motion. ‘‘Spiral simulation’’ enables the audience to take the omniscient narrator’s perspective, which provides a more coherent way of constructing the narrative than the protagonist’s. It is the pure idea of the irreversibility of time that the narrator reveals as the relevant cue to a coherent narrative comprehension. The powerful and intense affective response on the part of audiences is produced in the course of entertaining the thought of the intrinsic nature of time. In this sense, we are able to see the film as a visual representation of what is unpresentable. The powerful and ineffable emotion that seizes the mind of the audience is the sublime. Humboldt State University NOTES 1 L a Jete´e: Script 2 op. cit. 3 According to Lyotard, avant-garde painting eludes the aesthetics of the sublime that is not governed by a consensus of taste, whose products seem ‘‘monstrous,’’ ‘‘formless,’’ purely ‘‘negative’’ entities. He uses terms by which Kant characterizes those objects that give rise to a sense of the sublime. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, ‘‘Presenting the unpresentable,’’ Artforum 20, 8 (April 1982), 67–8.

PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL

THE RESTORED SISTINE CHAPEL CEILING: THE TRANSCENDENT MADE IMMANENT

What absurdity, to pull things from the dark recesses, sixty feet high – things which were obliged to be painted lighter, drawn fuller, and coloured harder than nature warrants, to look like life at a distance, and then bring them down to the level of the drawing room. Benjamin Robert Hayden1

Dierdre Shearman pointed out this quotation about the foolishness of Thomas Lawrence’s commission to make direct copies of individual figures from Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel. John Shearman used Hayden’s remark in his arguments about the color structure of the Ceiling. I use it to introduce my observations on how we have come to know and to judge Michelangelo’s Ceiling and its meaning. Modern interpretations of the Sistine Chapel provide examples of how our perception of the other can be distorted by accumulations of the detritus of our cultures (the world in time and place) and by sclerotic interpretations. It provides a case study in exercising Edmund Husserl’s aim, ‘‘the ultimate conceivable freedom from prejudice.’’2 Can we ‘‘put in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude (here, the reactionary criticisms of the cleaning), the better to understand them’’? Can we come into ‘‘a direct and primitive contact with [Michelangelo’s] world’’? Can we raise the questions of the reception of the cleaned ceiling to a philosophical status?3

THE SITUATION

Early criticisms4 of the cleaning of the Sistine Ceiling were based on color reproductions of details, as is only natural since the cleaning of the whole, ceiling and lunettes, took eight years.5 Information – photographs – came only in pieces. Since the whole has been finished, discussions concern loss of final layers of modeling, the significance of details of the paintings, and their meanings. Art historian Malcolm Bull rightly has argued for a syntagmatic reading, an analysis of the ‘‘relationship between elements within a picture or between a group of pictures.’’6 While this approach is definitely enriching, we must also include the fabric of Michelangelo’s 67 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 67–78. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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whole culture in our considerations, as did those scholars from religious studies. For example, John Dixon, Jr. emphasizes that the fresco was ‘‘not made for the sake of form or intellect – but as an act of worship and proclamation. It can be understood only by participating in the act, which is an act of worship.’’7 My concern here is not with the effect of the cleaning on details, but its effect on the whole sense of the chapel.8 The discussion I propose is based, not on past interpretations, but rather my own experience of the chapel in 2001, the first time I saw it cleaned. My reaction was in direct contrast to my experience of the chapel before the cleaning and also the images impressed in my mind by the thousands of reproductions I have studied.

THE EPOCHE

S. J. Freedberg’s comment that ‘‘the Sistine Ceiling basically means what it instantly and evidently says’’9 was borne out for me, only when I encountered the cleaned ceiling. In the dirty state, I had only seen a grand design painted sixty feet above me. It never moved me or revealed anything to me. The cleaning however completely changed the physical sense of the Chapel: it now appears lower and broader. What I saw, but what I can’t show you because no photograph I have found gives this sense, was a vast expanse of another world not very far from my own, one that had exposed itself to me, one that revealed itself for me. This world above me was close to me, it even extended beyond the walls of my enclosure, as a protecting mantle. The giant figures were not intimidating, they were wonders I was privileged to experience. While that world was above me, it was not beyond me. I recognized its sense because it was an extension of the sense of my own world. It transcended the room, yet was also immanent. Thus the Sistine Chapel seemed to me on 20 June 2001. Such was my epoche. I suppose I will never be able to explain the reasons the Ceiling appeared different to me in 2001. The color had changed significantly. But perhaps I was prepared to read the ceiling anew because of the publicity, perhaps I had believed my own lectures to freshmen that reproductions give false information and that the work only shows itself in person; perhaps it was my greater experience of Renaissance art, especially the study of the proxemics of the picture plane and eminentia.10

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The question, then, is how can I verify whether the illusion I experienced were real, were true? Although theories abound nowadays, Michelangelo never explained the iconographic program, nor did any of his contemporaries. How can I know whether the illusion I experienced was intentional, a part of the meaning of the Ceiling and of the Chapel? Does the work of others support my experience? Does my experience have any parallel in the aesthetic, religious or cosmological world of early sixteenth-century Rome? Color theory? Perspective? THE HISTORICAL CRITIQUES OF MICHELANGELO’S COLOR

Common sense tells us that the brightening of the surface, that is, the return of the surface to its original color saturation, would have the effect of making the images appear closer. It could even make it appear to spread over the boundaries of the walls. The brilliant oranges and yellows would advance. The human figures dominate the Ceiling; their warm flesh tones advance especially because they painted over the pale violet white of the intonaco. Historically Michelangelo has been considered primarily a sculptor and draftsman. His color, Manca points out, was not considered painterly until the nineteenth century when dirt had accumulated sufficiently to add a sfumato to the bold color choices. So in 1857 he was complimented for his rendering of texture, in 1893 for the’’ ‘technical delicacy’ of his modeling of the limbs, and the skillful ‘modulation from one tone to another.’ ’’11 As the ceiling darkened, the viewers interpretations became more and more subjective, as with Symonds, who noted that the vault ‘‘leaves a grave and harmonious impression on the mind,’’12 or with Charles de Tolnay, who in his definitive monograph on Michelangelo writes of the ‘‘ ‘tender suavity’ and delicacy of the color scheme and the ‘pale and subdued unity of the coloring.’ ’’13 Those critical of the cleaning base their judgments on the early impressions just cited. Contemporary critics are not shocked by Michelangelo’s color, for they know the modern color practice where ‘‘absence of modeling, surprising color combinations and expression are now acceptable.’’14 A critic of Michelangelo’s own era appreciated his color design: Giorgio Vasari in the 1568 edition of his V ite wrote that Michelangelo proved himself superior to his contemporaries by ‘‘concentrating’’ on painting nudes in the grand manner. ‘‘For some artists, lacking Michelangelo’s profound knowledge of design, have tried by using a variety of tints and shades of color, by including in their work various novel and bizarre inventions to win themselves a place among

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the most distinguished masters.’’15 We should remember that Michelangelo used color, not for pictorial effects, but for design, to construct forms and space. He used color as a sculptor and as an architect. PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION: COLOR DESIGN AND PERSPECTIVE IN THE SISTINE CEILING

Closely describing the structure of Michelangelo’s design for the ceiling provides a ground for the interpretation I propose here. The whole canopy of images on the ceiling is premised on and organized by on the illusionist architectural grid16 that divides the ceiling into segments. Faux architecture articulates the space of the chapel vertically, longitudinally and transversely. At the ends of the run of the central narrative panels is the blue open sky, but the view beyond the vault is not emphasized. Indeed it may be considered an extension of the space of the last full frames, T he Flood from the first campaign, and T he Division of L ight from Dark from the later campaign. It seems like a fudging for the open space above the cornice. There is also a pale grey wall rising into the blue, but it is barely articulated and indecisive. It does not continue behind the narratives that spread from cornice to cornice. All in all, the ceiling appears to be completely covered by faux architecture, faux sculpture and paintings, so much so that the suggestion of an enclosed space seems to be its function. Published diagrams of the ceiling are meant to list iconographies of the segments and to show their relationships. What Michelangelo expected the viewer to experience is evident in the color, especially the value patterns for the design of the architectural grid. What is stressed is the horizontal spread (lighter and brighter) across the ceiling rather than emphatic longitudinal flow down the chapel (grayer and receding). The cleaning has made the Michelangelo’s intention for the viewer response apparent, as can best seen in recent photographs.17 The narrative panels and medallions read as transverse pairs rather than longitudinal patterns. The spandrels tend to point inward or thrust outward rather than reading as a longitudinal zigzag. In the partial diagram shown here, the visual effect is distorted by the darkened line of the longitudinal cornices; the transverse arrangements more emphatic in the room. In the images, the viewpoints vary. The ancestors, prophets, sibyls and ignudi as well as their auxiliary figures are read from the front, except for Jonah whose figures is foreshortened to be seen from below. The narrative panels along the center are for the most part oriented toward the altar, and are meant to be read frontally except from the flying figure of God

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Figure 1. Diagram of the ‘’Noah’’ portion of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.

separating light from darkness, the last Michelangelo completed. As they are, they provide a canopy of shelter for the interior, rather than an exposure to a great distance. With the exception of the little oculus in the ceiling of Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi, ceiling paintings of the earlier Renaissance are like this. They reiterate the sheltering function of the roof and enrich to the ceiling (for example, the ceilings of the nearby Raphael Stanze or Leonardo’s Sala delle Asse in the Castello della Sforzesca in Milan). As Dixon explains: This project, the Renaissance definition of the relation between the spectator and images, was one of the most profound in the western intellectual enterprise. Awareness of it is the necessary background for any intelligible treatment of Michelangelo’s work. So long as his work is seen programmatically and in terms of routine ‘‘formal’’ analysis, it remains, finally, inaccessible to us.18

CULTURAL NEXUS

Etlin’s existential space is closest to our contemporary experience of the space in the Sistine Chapel, ‘‘nearly invisible ... because it is closest to our everyday self;’’ it provides deep aesthetic and spiritual experience,

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ranging from secure, sheltered existence to a feeling of exultation and even of transcendence ... [It] relates near the near and the far.’’19 It is the experience Le Corbusier termed ‘‘feeling the ceiling over our shoulders.’’ Unlike Etlin’ s examples of the characters from Kafka and Proust who are threatened by existential space,20 Renaissance participation existential space was expected. To understand the context of the Ceiling, we need to put off some of our deepest-felt prejudices about the basis of truth; we must bracket out the prejudices we have assumed from our daily experience of the cosmos. First, whereas in the modern world, ultimate truth lay with science, in the Renaissance that truth lay with God. Michelangelo’s ceiling demonstrates the reality of the religious and theological systems of the sixteenth century. His ‘‘illusion’’ depicts what was factual, but unseen by human eyes. Second, the fictive beings in the Pope’s Chapel are located in the closed universe of the Ptolemaic cosmology of the sixteenth century. Only in Kant’s eighteenth century will the heavens delineated as an open space, nouminous, and separate from the terrestrial, much beyond us and our reach, as in Tiepolo’s Grand Staircase, Residenz, Wiirzburg, 1750–53. Since the advance of electricity, our skies have faded; our relationship to the heavens is at best tenuous. We enlightened moderns tend to be skeptics, not believing that the world can hold wonders, skeptics who may not easily apprehend the reality of the existential space Michelangelo built in the Sistina. Our lamplights, designed for convenience and safety, have changed our common apprehension of the cosmos, so that we are, with Kurt Weil, ‘‘lost out here in the stars.’’21 Our stars are less brilliant. The black space into which they are set is less warm. Because our lights fade the emanating blackness of the night sky, we lose the sense that it is close and that we are a part of it. The cleaned Sistine Chapel brings us closer to the experience of the heavens that was and is common to all non-enlightened societies. The cleaning has removed the distancing effect of aerial perspective, the effect of the gray dirt. It has removed layers and layers of disinformation, not in terms of iconography, but disinformation to the senses. Merleau-Ponty described well the comfort of a dark night: When ... the world of clear and articulated objects finds itself abolished, our perceiving self cut off from its world imagines a spatiality without things. This is what occurs at night. It is not an object in front of me, it envelops me, it penetrates through all of my sense, it suffocates my memories, it almost erases my personal identity. I am no longer protected within my perceiving post, ... it touches me itself and its unity is the mystical unity of mana, ... it animates itself completely; ... without distance from it to me.22

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Van Gogh captured this sensibility in his Starry Night; perhaps it is so well loved because it presents us with what we miss.23 Michelangelo’s Ceiling is a declarative statement, not a subtle mystery. It is open to us, as we are open to it. All is set before us, against a clearly demarked backdrop. Michelangelo exposes the heavens, past and future, to our eyes revealing24 what we (as Renaissance men) know is ever present.25 In Augustine’s words, the ceiling celebrates that: ‘‘God did not withdraw from the world after He had created it, but was always filling heaven and earth with omnipresent powers’’ (de Gen. Ad L itt. iv, 12, de Civitate Dei vii, 30). It is as if St. Augustine were crying out, as his did in De fide rerum que non videntur vii: ‘‘Give heed unto me,’’ the Church says unto you; ‘‘give heed unto me, whom ye see, although to see ye be unwilling. For the faithful, who were in those times in the land of Judaea, were present at, and learnt as present. ... These things ye have not seen, and therefore ye refuse to believe. Therefore behold these things, fix your eyes on these things, these things which ye see reflect on, which are not told you as things past, nor foretold you as things future, but are shown you as things present. What? seemeth it to you a vain or a light thing. and think you it to be none, or a little, divine miracle. ... Understand, if you can, that unto the God of the Christians, Who is the Supreme and True God, the peoples of the nations come, not by walking but by believing. ... Those things concerning Christ already done and past, all of them ye have not seen; but these things present in His Church ye deny not that ye see. Both things we point out to you as foretold; but the fulfillment of both we are therefore unable to point out for you to see, because we cannot bring back into sight things past. (Emphasis added.)

Michelangelo brings back the past of creation, of man’s weakness, or the generations of Christ and of the prophets who foretold his coming. He places them above us, but within our immediate world enclosed in the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

HERMENEUTICS OF THE FICTIVE ARCHITECTURE

With Paul Barolsky, we must realize that the heart of the Sistine Chapel cannot be found in ‘‘style, symbolism, iconography, visual rhetoric, theory, reception aesthetics, art criticism or history.’’26 As Etlin knows: ‘‘The phenomenological sense of passing into a spiritual realm is created by a complex orchestration of movement through space, which in turn involves passing through the disorienting spaces. ... Whatever symbolism might have been attached to any of the aspects of such scene, the experiential effect could not possibly have been divorced from the symbolic intent.27

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While it is possible to illustrate the effect of the Chapel before its cleaning directly, the new effect is available only in the chapel itself, for, to recall Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘prior to and independently of other people, the thing achieves that miracle of expression: an inner reality which reveals itself externally, a significance which descends into the world and begins its existence there, and which can be fully understood only when the eyes seek it in its own location.’’28 The ‘‘work’’ of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling is not just in Michelangelo’s syntagmatic arrangement of powerful pictures, but in his creation of an extraordinary space through the illusionistic properties of perspective and color. Our experience of this is more than visual (two dimensional); through the illusion of the three dimensions of the architecture, our whole body becomes involved. Raymond Bayer describes the course of the profound aesthetic experience: ‘‘each and every aesthetic object imposes upon us, in appropriate rhythms, a unique and singular formula for the flow of our energy.’’29 The new space of the ceiling celebrates our entry into it, and vice versa. As August Schmarsaw recognized: ‘‘The spatial construct is, so to speak, an emanation of the human being present, a projection from within the subject, irrespective of whether we physically place ourselves inside the space or mentally project ourselves into it.’’30 The Ceiling’s fictive architecture leads us to think and dwell (a` la Heidegger)31 in the transcendent; our aesthetic reach32 makes the transcendent immanent. On the Sistine Ceiling, the ignudi, the prophets and the sibyls sit on the faux architecture and protrude before it and the histories (see the pedestals that hold the bases of the thrones of prophets and sibyls). These characters are most demonstrative; their motion captures our attention, brings us into their space and leads us around in it. Their noble gestures are casual intimacies rather than heraldic poses. We are not Heisenbergs who will change them by observing them; they are above such contingencies. We are the elect, witnesses to and at home in their company. As St. Augustine, often associated with the iconography of the Ceiling, holds: ‘‘the life of the city (of God) is a social life’’ (de Civitate Dei xix, 17). John Dixon contends: ‘‘The wall shapes the architectural space, which is the physical context of the spectator, and shapes the psychic and symbolic context. The shaped wall is a powerful psychic force and, therefore, a major theological issue.’’33 The carefully designed architectural grid marks the zero point beyond which stretches the blue sky. The heroic figures sit before the architecture, into the positive space (our space) of the chapel. They are organized across the vault34 and along the length of the chapel. The weightiest figures, the prophets and sibyls, are set

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between the springing and haunch of the vault, so the beholder is invited and held in the vault. Their physical position is their function, leading us and holding us in the force of God’s creation. The ignudi are frames that move us into the narrative scenes. Their functions as frames should not be underestimated, for, as Dixon so perceptively states, The frame is not simply a boundary between the painting and its context, it is an instruction in the nature of the relation between the extracted segment of the experienced world that appears in the painting and the world within which ... it is set. It is one of the means of defining the relation of the painting to the spectator, who occupies for the moment the same contextual world as the painting, who comes to it from a world which is not that of the painting or of the represented context but who is, by all the means of the painting, including the framing, disciplined to the symbolic order the painting embodies.35

When the frame is a beautiful human form, energetic and powerful, emblematic of a golden age, as Beat Wyss36 suggests, we are invigorated and drawn in further. The narrative panels tell us of the power of God, of his creation, of his continuing involvement in human affairs. He gives Adam life and with that life, Divine Wisdom, the young girl at his side.37 When man falls, that Wisdom provides the means of resurrection through punishment, as the scenes that continue the narrative show, but His continuing Wisdom will provide redemption, through Moses and ultimately, Christ. His ancestors mediate; they actually seem to support the Ceiling. Christ institutes the Church that will continue God’s wisdom until we ultimately are called to the Last Judgment where we will celebrate with the saints, or be damned. All this is told to us, who are not mere spectators, but participants in the Divine Order. ‘‘Apprehending such a painting requires a profound empathy. Participation is not simply [a matter of ] ‘‘mind and feelings, but [a matter of ] responding flesh.’’38 Whether we can give our whole self into the experience without belief in the faith on which it is based, is an open question. Can imagination substitute for faith, or would that just be an illusion? * * * As the seat of Christianity in 1508, the Sistina was an extraordinary space. Those who entered were of a common faith. They were in privileged positions. They must be aware of where, how, and who they are in the Divine Order that is concentrated in this spot. They must wish to maintain that Order, to become part of the City of God. Through his Herculean

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labors and those of the conservators of the Sistina, Michelangelo continues to leads us to that City and bring its Order to us. We too can partake of this gift, if we open our senses to the spectacle above us. For, as St. Augustine says, even though the body might deceive us at times ‘‘he is more wretchedly deceived who fancies he should never trust them.’’39 Siena College NOTES 1 L ife and L etter of W illiam Bewick, Artist, ed. T. Landseer, 1871, vol. 2, 114, as quoted by John S. Shearman ‘‘The Functions of Michelangelo’s Color,’’ 267, note 3, in T he Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration, ed. Pierluigi De Vecchi (New York: Abrams, 1994). 2 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier, 1962), 165. 3 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), vii. 4 For the opinions on the cleaning see Joseph Manca, ‘‘Michelangelo as a Painter,’’ Artibus et historiae vol. 16/31 (1995), 111–23, esp. notes 1–3 on 120–21. 5 A Glorious Restoration op. cit., 80. The sections of the chapel were cleaned in the following order: 1980–84 for the lunettes (over 600 square yards), 1985–88 for the ceiling (750 square yards); 1989–92 for the L ast Judgment (200 square yards). Carlo Pietrangeli, in Glorious Restoration, 6. 6 ‘‘The Iconography of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling,’’ T he Burlington Magazine Vol. 130/1025 (8/1988), 597–605. Bull argues that the ideas of Joachim of Fiore may have been a significant influence on design of the ceiling, especially the patterns that can be related to a Golden Age of the Church predicted by Joachim and Egidio da Viterbo, Prior General (through Julius II) of the Augustinian Order. Egidio thought the achievements Julius II, Michelangelo’s patron in the Sistine Chapel, signified the coming of the Golden Age of the Church. It is he who is proposed as a mediator of the patterns of iconography. Twenty-five years ago, Ester Gordon Dotson emphasized the Augustinian influence through Viterbo on the iconographic program of the Ceiling [‘‘An Augustinian Interpretation of the Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, T he Art Bulletin, Vol. 61 (1979), 223–56, 405–29. Reprinted in William Wallace, ed., Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English (5 vols). Vol. 2: T he Sistine Chapel (New York: Garland), 195, 203–27]. 7 John. W. Dixon, Jr., ‘‘The Christology of Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel,’’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. LV/3, 503–33, esp. 503. 8 What is more, since the cleaning, the mood of the L ast Judgment on the altar wall has become less glowering, and for Beat Wyss, it has become exultant (‘‘T he L ast Judgment as an artistic process: T he Flaying of Marsyas in the Sistine Chapel,’’ Res, vol. 28, August 1995, 65–77). 9 Dixon, op. cit. introduces his essay with this quotation. 10 Patricia Trutty-Coohill, ‘‘La Eminentia in Antonello da Messina,’’ Antichita` V iva, vol. XXI/4, 1982, 5–9; ‘‘The Plinian Concept of Eminentia: a Different Way of Conceiving Perspective in Antonello,’’ Atti del Convegno di studi tenuto a Messina dal 29 novembre al 2 dicembre 1981, Messina, 1987, 75–99. For Singer, ‘‘all is clearly on the surface of the ceiling

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vault’’ (‘‘Understanding the Sistine Chapel and its Paintings,’’ Bible Review, 4 August 1988, 21–25, esp. 21). Marcia Hall notes that the Genesis pictures are mark the surface of the wall plane (Michelangelo: T he Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel [New York: Abrams, 2002], 21). 11 Manca, op. cit., 116, quoting J. Hartford, T he L fe of Michaelangelo Buonarroti, London, 1857, Vol. 1, 267–68, and J. A. Symonds, T he L ife of Michelangelo Buonarroti, London, 1893, vol. I, 256–58. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., Charles de Tolnay, T he Sistine Ceiling (vol. 2 of Michelangelo), Princeton: Princeton, 1949, 99–102. 14 Manca, op. cit., 119. 15 Ibid., Vasari, L e vite de’piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori edarchtettori, ed. G. Milanese, Florence, 1888, 425–69, esp. 210. See also Vasari, T he L ives of the Artists, trans. G. Bull, Harmondsworth, 1965, 378–79. 16 The function as shelter is like that of Frank Gehry’ s characterization of the huge metal trellis he designed for the open-air Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a band shell in Chicago Millennium Park, recently opened: ‘‘You feel like you’re in something even though you’re not. It has the sense of being in an enclosure and defining the space’’ (reported by Tara Burghart, Associated Press, in T imes Union, Albany, NY, July 15, 2004, Arts Section, 41). 17 E.g. Frederick Hartt and David Wilkins’s History of Italian Renaissance Art (New York: Abrams, 2003), 536. 18 Dixon, op. cit, 514. 19 Richard Etlin, in ‘‘Aesthetics and the Spatial Sense of Self,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 56/1 (Winter 1998), 1–19, esp. 9. 20 ‘‘Nos e´paules ont sur elles les plafonds qui conviennent,’’ Le Corbusier, L a V ille radieuse, Elee´ments d’une doctrine d’ubanisme pour l’e`quipment de la civilization machiniste, 1935: reprint, Paris: Vincent, Fre´al et Cie, 1964), 54: as cited by Etlin, op. cit., 9. 21 Kurt Weill’s L ost in the Stars, based on Alan Paton’s novel, Cry the Beloved Country, premiered on Broadway in 1949. 22 Merleau-Ponty, Phe´nome´logie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 328, as cited by Eltin, op. cit., note 94. 23 Etlin, op. cit., 8: ‘‘night threatens to alter and even abolish the very sense of a unique or self-contained self.’’ 24 ‘‘Reveal’’ is too romantic an idea for the Renaissance, for it privileges the artist as conjurer, as priest. Better to think of the Renaissance artist as dissector, uncovering the working system of life, of God’s creation. 25 Vasari, op. cit. wrote that Michelangelo’s L ast Judgment ‘‘is that model to our art, that great painting sent by God to men on earth in order that they may see how fate acts when intelletti descend from the highest sphere to earth and infuse men with the grace and divinity of wisdom.’’ 26 ‘‘Michelangelo’s Doni T ondo and the Worshipful Beholder,’’ Source: Notes the History of Art, vol. 22/23 (September2003), 8–11, esp. 11. 27 Etlin, op. cit., 8–9, on Auguste Choisy’s description of an Egyptian pylon temple (Histoire de l’architecture [Paris: Edouard Rouveyre, 1899], Vol. 1, 60). 28 Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., 320. 29 Quoted in Etlin, op. cit, 5 (Bayer quoted by Susan Santag, ‘‘On Style,’’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays [New York: Dell, 1970], 5). See also I. A. Richards on the effect of rhythm: ‘‘Its effect is not due to our perceiving a pattern in something outside us, but

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to our becoming patterned ourselves’’ (quoted in Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. ed. [New York: McGraw Hill, 1979], 5). 30 August Schmarsow, Beitra¨ge sur Aesthetik der bildenen Ku¨nste. Plastik Malerei und Relief kunst in ihrem gegenseitigen Verha¨ltnis (Leipzig: Von S. Hirzel, 1899), 29, as quoted by Etlin, op. cit., 288–89. 31 Heidegger, op. cit. 32 Schmarsow, as quoted in Etlin, op. cit., 5, note 31. 33 Dixon, op. cit., 512. 34 John Pope Hennessey, too, thought that the ‘‘main axis was across and not along the vault.’’ ‘‘Storm Over the Sistine Ceiling,’’ New York Review of Books, Vol. 34/15 (1987), 16, 18–19, esp.18. 35 Dixon, op. cit., 512. 36 Weiss, op. cit. 37 For the most recent discussion of the identification of the girl with Wisdom see my ‘‘The Wisdom of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,’’ in Does the World Exist? Plurisignflcant Ciphering of Reality, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LXXIX, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 421–34. 38 Dixon, op. cit., 514. 39 Trans. Marcus Dods: HOW DIFFERENT THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE NEW ACADEMY IS FROM THE CERTAINTY OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH. As regards the uncertainty about everything which [Marcus Terentius] Varro alleges to be the differentiating characteristic of the New Academy, the city of God thoroughly detests such doubt as madness. Regarding matters which it apprehends by the mind and reason it has most absolute certainty, although its knowledge is limited because of the corruptible body pressing down the mind, for, as the apostle says, ‘‘We know in part.’’ It believes also the evidence of the senses that the mind uses by aid of the body; for [if one who trusts his senses is sometimes deceived], he is more wretchedly deceived who fancies he should never trust them. It believes also the Holy Scriptures, old and new, which we call canonical, and which are the source of the faith by which the just lives and by which we walk without doubting whilst we are absent from the Lord. So long as this faith remains inviolate and firm, we may without blame entertain doubts regarding some things which we have neither perceived by sense nor by reason, and which have not been revealed to us by the canonical Scriptures, nor come to our knowledge through witnesses whom it is absurd to disbelieve.

JENNIFER ANNA GOSETTI-FERENCEI

T ROMPE L ’OEIL AND THE MIMETIC TRADITION IN AESTHETICS

The aim of this paper is to revisit, through phenomenological analysis, one vital aspect of visual art, namely, mimesis or imitation as conceived in philosophical aesthetics, and as made poignant in the intensified realism of trompe l’oeil paintings. My thoughts here were initially prompted not by what is typically known as trompe l’oeil, but rather by considering claims Arthur Danto has made, in After the End of Art, about a work of art curiously related to trompe l’oeil: the Brillo Box by Andy Warhol.1 In his book, Danto reiterates a theme he has long held about Warhol, here in the context of his view of art history as having been eclipsed by the strategies of Pop Art, and the ensuing shift from modern to contemporary art. Danto’s claim is that Warhol’s presentation of the lowly, sometimes commercial objects of ordinary life, such as the Brillo Box, provoke radically new philosophical questions about the ontological status of art. Since the work of art, e.g., the Brillo Box, is indistinguishable from the object of the same appearance one might find on the store shelves, the viewer is forced to question what makes it ‘art’ – to question, in other words, the boundary between art and non-art, between the imitation of reality and the real itself (AEA, 14–15). From Danto’s point of view, art has been liberated from traditional constraints (AEA, 114), and only now, when traditional restrictions upon art have been overcome, does ‘‘the possibility arise of a true philosophy of art’’. Danto locates here a radical break with tradition, and indeed a philosophically pregnant one. He argues that ‘‘the philosophical question about the nature of art, rather, was something that arose within art when artists pressed against boundary after boundary, and found that the boundaries all gave way. ...’’ What makes art art, he claims, is its being ‘‘enfranchised as art’’ and so, ‘‘if you were going to find out what art was, you had to turn from sense experience to thought. You had, in brief, to turn to philosophy’’ (AEA, 14–15). While Danto’s claim that art has been ‘liberated’ by Warhol is itself not incontestable, more interesting is his articulation of a challenge to traditional assumptions of aesthetics as posed by artists (or artworks) themselves. The Brillo Box undoubtedly recalls strategies of imitation used by trompe l’oeil paintings, which ‘fool the eye,’ it is said, into thinking 79 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 79–93. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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that a thing is real rather than a work of art. In both cases there is first the presentation of thing, and then the recognition of the thing as not an ordinary thing after all, but a work of art. If a similar ontological question about the relation of art and ordinary things is provoked by trompe l’oeil, then one can say that this provocation issues from the structure of mimesis itself – from representation, of which even a Brillo Box, once enfranchised as art, becomes. It is not irrelevant that trompe l’oeil has been, too, a relatively ‘disenfranchised’ artform, a so-called genre painting, relegated to the status of ‘low’ art since antiquity, for some of the same reasons that Pop Art is thought to lie beyond the art-historical narrative: firstly, because trompe l’oeil painters choose ‘lowly,’ ordinary objects as their subject-matter; and secondly, because their realism has been regarded as a form of deception, and so politically and morally decadent. My paper, then, concerns the relationship between the work of art and the viewer, the questions provoked by the work of art’s likeness to objects of ordinary reality. In trompe l’oeil, as in the Brillo Box, the work of art confounds the viewer, challenges the viewing subject’s control over the representational ‘field.’ By pointing out the metaphysical and phenomenological continuity between the trompe l’oeil and the Warhol work Danto so champions, as I shall do in the conclusion, I hope to regard the question of art history in a different light than Danto does: not as a tradition overcome or broken with, but as internally challenged from the outset as regards the metaphysical legitimacy of representation. If I am right, then the Hegelian art-historical architecture that Danto deliberately inherits2 in After the End of Art, and with which, with some alteration, he accounts for the liberation afforded by Pop Art, is called into question. The following analysis of trompe l’oeil contributes to the notion that art history, that is, is not a narrative that can be ended or overcome, because it can be retold, reinvented, when overlooked, disenfranchised elements are reengaged. THE MIMETIC TRADITION IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ART

It might be helpful to begin by noting the way in which philosophical aesthetics has regarded the question of mimesis, imitation or representation, without which trompe l’oeil cannot be understood. The philosophical account of art begins in Western thought with Plato, it is well-known, who regards the mimetic or imitative element of art with suspicion. The objections to art in Plato’s Republic are not only political, but also ontological and epistemological.3 Plato is suspicious of art for the way in which art, being thrice removed, ontologically, from the essence of

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things, (mis)represents being and potentially obscures truth. The fact that Plato the writer deliberately employs mimetic strategies throughout the Republic, in telling ‘tales’ about fictional ideal cities, about the soul, and so forth, does not contradict his claims. For it is clear that mimesis is in some respect an inevitable feature of knowledge and communication – Aristotle argued that it is most ‘natural’ to human beings to imitate. Mimesis is necessary not only in ordinary life of the polis, but in philosophy: we must represent ideas in some manner in order to grasp hold of them, in order to engage in dialectical discovery. Mimesis, the term from Plato’s Greek, can mean a copy, an imitation, a likeness, a semblance, a representation. Mimesis is part of the operation of language and reason, or logos – for we must name and represent, signify in the process of recognizing similarities, generalities, and ultimately essences. Yet mimesis, if it is to be related to truth rather than deception (599a), must be employed by the philosopher who, guiding the dialectical search, can aim toward the proper telos: the truths themselves. Artists, on the other hand, mislead us, in Plato’s view; for they seem to use imitation as an end in itself, and not self-consciously: the imitation of objects, flora and fauna, human figures, and the gods in painting, poetry, and music are employed promiscuously, without respect to truth, without respect to the distinction between appearances and reality. What is more, imitations themselves are inherently deceptive, for in Plato’s account they present a likeness of an object which is, in turn, only an instance of an object rather than its essence – and yet such illusions can be taken for reality, such as in the famous story of Zeuxis’ painting of grapes from Pliny’s Natural History. This illusionism situates Plato’s ontological objection, of which one might discern two aspects: 1) seeing a painting of a couch, for instance, one might believe to be perceiving a being when in fact what is presented is only the likeness of a being, as if a mirror were held up to nature and one saw only the reflection (596d). Imitations deceive, for they ‘‘look like they are; however, they are not in truth’’ (596e). 2) Moreover, painting presents as a being what is in reality only a partial appearance (one side of a couch); whereas in reality the couch on all its sides is one and the same object (598a). Mimesis, then, interferes with the cognitive conception of identities and generalities, essential not only for discerning what things are, but also for discerning what does not appear to the eye: their essence or ‘form’ (eidos). Three epistemological objections follow: 1) imitators, it seems, have no knowledge of what they imitate (599a–e; 602a); 2) and thus they cannot convey knowledge. 3) Moreover, they address the ‘lower’ part of the soul – the

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senses rather than the faculty of cognition (601c). The best known of Plato’s objections are the political ones; they concern both the content of imitations and their style. What worries Plato politically is most of all the effectiveness of imitations – that, without the governance of reason, they reach into the ‘‘inward places of the soul.’’ Aristotle, of course, treats the problem of mimesis more generously. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that it is natural for human beings to imitate; and also for human beings to enjoy imitation.4 This – our natural propensity for and enjoyment of imitation – is the origin of art. Art can indeed be ‘philosophical,’ in fact because of its mimetic nature: art presents a likeness or representation of what is, but not an ontological exactitude. There is a difference between what art presents and what it is; and thus art can, in the space of difference between the representation itself and what is represented, show us not merely how things are (actuality), but how they could be (possibility or potentiality). Clearly Aristotle has in mind a more robust notion of mimesis than mere similitude. The difference between actuality and possibility makes poetic art, for instance, more philosophical than history, which merely records, or represents, what has in fact happened. Hegel, too, regards imitation as a source of philosophical contemplation; it is for Hegel the first step of cognition, for in raising a particular to the level of a generality, an ‘imitated’ or represented thing has ‘‘found a passage through the mind.’’5 The bison represented on the cave wall at Lascaux is already a primitive form of thinking. Here imitation must be differentiated from ‘representation,’ which is capable of articulating an ‘idea’ in the Hegelian sense. Whereas imitation is a copying of nature’s forms, representation is a kind of transubstantiation, wherein, to use Hegel’s terms, substance becomes ‘subject.’ Contrary to Plato’s view, art has genuine reality due to this becoming; through representation art is ‘‘the substance of nature and of mind, fixing itself indeed in present and definite existence’’ (Hegel, 10). Thus Hegel takes aim at the theory of imitation as an explanation for what art is. Against the Platonic and Aristotlian view, he argues that art does not exist for the purpose of imitating nature, and that imitation is not its defining feature. Hegel here understands ‘imitation’ as a merely formal copying, a rendering of natural forms with a kind of precision, such as we find in trompe l’oeil paintings. As such it is a superfluous and, according to Hegel, mediocre labor; conceived as imitation, painting, for instance, being ‘‘a semblance of reality addressed to one sense only,’’ can produce no genuine vitality but only a ‘‘mere parody of life.’’ As an

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imitation of nature, art is considered to be rather impotent: a mere worm chasing after an elephant (Hegel, 47, 48). The purpose of art, then, must ‘‘lie in something different from the purely formal imitation of what we find given, which in any case can bring to birth only tricks and not works of art’’ (Hegel, 50). While skill in imitation is impressive – Hegel refers to Pliny’s account of Zeuxis’ painting, at which living doves were said to have pecked – the significance of art must be defended against mimetic deceit which so troubled Plato, and what is perhaps worse for Hegel, its frivolity. Hegel argues for the seriousness of art in order to claim that it should ‘‘deserve a scientific treatment’’ such as he provides in his lectures on aesthetics. For Hegel art is to serve as a model for the unification of matter and spirit – and Hegel thus raises the philosophical significance of art tremendously, overcoming Plato’s opposition between art and rational thinking. Hegel’s task from the outset of his lectures is to refute the misconception that art is merely play, distraction, luxury, decoration, foreign to ‘‘the real purposes of life,’’ to our ‘‘graver purposes’’ (Hegel, 5). This is in part the aim of Hegel’s attack on imitation. Not only has imitation, since Plato, been regarded as deceptive, and thus corrupting; it has been dismissed as frivolous: ‘‘imitation is a kind of play and not serious,’’ writes Plato (Republic, 602b). Imitation is for Hegel, too, ‘‘but a presumptuous sport’’ (Hegel, 47). While Hegel regarded imitation as essential to art, imitation gives art neither its rule nor its guiding purpose. (Hegel, 51). Art must provoke thinking, and ultimately, thinking about the nature of art itself.6 The reduction of art to imitation, and the reduction of imitation to a ‘copy’ such as asserted in Plato’s account, has been shown by Hegel and others to be reductive and insufficient, even ‘‘disfiguring,’’ (AEA, 113) when addressed to art as its principal feature. Even so, I maintain that the question of mimesis must be again examined if we direct our interest to the kind of artworks which maximize the mimetic principle; and from looking at these works we are indeed provoked to think about the nature of art. Throughout the history of Western art, painters have drawn out the mimetic question in producing works of art that deliberately capitalize upon the mimetic element. MIMETIC STRATEGIES AND THE METAPHYSICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF T ROMPE L ’OEIL

First let us consider the kind of paintings which maximize the mimetic element, those of trompe l’oeil. Setting aside altogether the kinds of art

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which dispense with mimetic fidelity, the paintings we will consider here force the philosopher of art or the art historian to reconsider the significance of mimesis as well as the ontological status of the art ‘object’ and the epistemological position of the viewer. To begin with, trompe l’oeil paintings are named for their ability, literally, ‘‘to deceive the eye,’’ although the idea that trompe l’oeil and its effects are principally those of trickery is contested by art theorists.7 The French term was employed in 1803, pejoratively, to signify a kind of painting which aims at an ‘‘extraordinary naturalism that misleads the viewer, at least initially, to perceive that the image is the actual thing that it in fact merely represents’’.8 T rompe l’oeil presents the viewer – or ‘spectator,’ as one scholar employs (Mastai, 19) – with a kind of exaggeration or intensification of reality, though the logic of this description calls for scrutiny: how is it possible to exceed the real? Examples of trompe l’oeil paintings span nearly the whole history of Western art, but become prominent in the 17th–19th centuries, and usually present objects – on a shelf, tacked to a wall, in a cupboard – with no narrative significance, as if they had not been arranged at all but are simply stumbled upon. They exemplify what ancient Greek painters of lofty narrative, landscape, historical and other sorts of grand paintings disdainfully referred to as ‘‘rhyparography,’’ literally, paintings of waste, of sordid or lowly subjects – though such painters were, in Greek and Roman antiquity, equally popular and financially successful as megalographers.9 The subject-matter of trompe l’oeil is rendered with such mimetic fidelity as to erase all traces of having been painted – but as such they are also highly artificial, a kind of ‘simulacra,’ to use Baudrillard’s term, since their effect is almost overly constructed. As if against Plato, who, as we have seen, refers to imitation pejoratively as a mirror held up to nature, Samuel van Hoogstraeten, a 17th Dutch trompe l’oeil painter, writes that a perfect painting ‘‘is like a mirror of Nature, which makes things that are not actually there seem to be there, and deceives in a permitted pleasant and commendable manner’’ (cited Leffert, 19) – a pleasantness called into question phenomenological examination. Such paintings ‘‘recreate on canvas the retinal image of arranged objects,’’ in which the ‘‘selection of detail is governed solely by the invocation of optical criteria, that is, by asking what elements of the object would be registered on the retina of a viewer with normal vision.’’10 In order for trompe l’oeil painting to succeed, certain formal arrangements must be secured:

TROMPE L’OEIL AND THE MIMETIC TRADITION IN AESTHETICS 85 For example, the light source within the painting must match that falling on the picture itself ... The size of the images depicted must be identical to the things represented. There can be no evidence of the act of painting; brushwork has to be hidden. Colors and textures must match those of real objects. ... Shadows must be adroitly handled to give the objects a sense of depth this despite the fact that the objects made most easily convincing are ... as flat as possible, thus closely approximating the painting’s actual surface, which is literally without depth. Most important, the space represented must seem contiguous with that in front of the picture: Its space must also appear to be our space (Leffert, 20–2 1).

The choice of what is to be painted, then, is governed by the principle of maximum fidelity; letters, papers, curtains, and even canvases themselves are common objects represented in such paintings, in part because their flatter dimensions can be rendered most believably and fool the viewer into ‘‘seeing’’ what is in fact not there. Here I am distinguishing, following Mastai, between trompe l’oeil and architectural illusionism, which certainly shares some, but not all, of the features of such paintings as described here. T rompe l’oeil as a genre inevitably overlaps with others, such as architectural illusionism and still-life; some paintings, like the illusionistic frescoes of books in cabinets painted by Botticelli on the studiolo walls of the castle in Gubbio, belong to more than one genre. The ‘‘oldest extant example of two dimensional trompe l’oeil,’’ is the Roman mosaic tile (2nd century C.E., copied from a Greek original of the 3rd or 2nd century B.C.) of an ‘unswept floor,’ which makes it seem as if the floor is littered with the remnants of a feast: fishbones, shrimp’s tails, snail shells, pea pods, torn shells of crab legs, nuts, a bird’s claw, olive pits, and other such fragments, along with a mouse who arrives for the spoils after the hall is vacated.11 As opposed to architectural illusionism, which profits from the Renaissance rediscovery of perspective, trompe l’oeil in our more restrictive sense does away, ironically, with the perspectival horizon; in order to be more like reality; it must defeat parallax, and so does not continue the (fictional) space as receding further into the painting, but rather toward the viewer’s own space. T rompe l’oeil is presented with a kind of world of its own, imagistically protruding ‘‘forward,’’ as Baudrillard writes, into the space occupied and, normally, governed by the viewer. In order to have this effect all subjects in the painting must be rendered whole, without being cut off by the edge of the canvas, as is often the case in still-life paintings, where a table, shelf, books, vases, or other objects are rendered only partially, leaving the viewer to imaginatively fill in the rest. The 1892 painting ‘‘Old Models,’’ by the American trompe l’oeil artist William Harnett, defies the usual series rather deftly:

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on a (painted) shelf are presented a violin, a trumpet hanging from a nail, several books, and a rounded, vase-like mug, as well as sheet music, not flattened, but hanging over the shelf and so protruding toward the viewer. This painting provides an astonishing ‘‘objective accuracy,’’ meant perhaps for amusement and pleasure; and yet it also troubles the viewer, undermining his/her ordinary certainty about the reliability of senseexperience and of the control over the visual field. The effect is, at first, of a shelf holding up objects within and to one’s grasp – and then of loss, ‘‘signalled by its worrying strangeness’’ (Baurdrillard, p. 57). A somewhat different, though related, effect is achieved in Raphaelle Peale’s ca. 1822 painting ‘‘Venus Rising From the Sea: a Deception (or After the Bath).’’ Here we find a painting of a female nude almost entirely obscured by a curtain behind which she rises, and so we see only her foot and arm, which look rather like elements of a usual Romantic painting. Yet the curtain, which occupies most of the space in the painting, is rendered with astonishing accuracy, hanging from two ‘pins’ such that we almost perceive a real curtain, as it were, hiding the painting itself ‘‘After the Bath,’’ too, unsettles the viewer, who must look twice to be certain that the whole image, including the curtain, is in fact painted; and when this has been ascertained, the image seems still to be broken into two distinct levels of reality, though in fact they occupy a single ontological plane. The curtain recalls, of course, the painting of Parrhasios, who in competition with Zeuxis, was said to have presented a curtain: Zeuxis demanded it be opened so that the masterpiece of Parrhasios could be shown – the work, in fact, being the curtain; and so Zeuxis had to give up the prize to Parrhasios. Such paintings must confuse the viewer in order to be effective: what was, at first glance, taken to be a real object must then give way to the realization that it has been painted. Without this latter realization, the effect is incomplete, and the skill of the painter could not be appreciated. This kind of unsettling is, for Plato, morally suspect, associated with the lower part of the human soul – ‘‘with the part in us that is far from prudence, and is not comrade and friend for any healthy or true purpose’’ (603a-b). But equally suspect for Plato is sense-experience of objects in general, and it is upon the confusion of the senses that imitation capitalizes. Socrates explains this to Glaucon in the following passage from the Republic, apropos of imitation in painting and poetry: ‘‘Now, then, on which one of the parts of the human being does it have the power it has?’’ ‘‘What sort of part do you mean?’’

TROMPE L’OEIL AND THE MIMETIC TRADITION IN AESTHETICS 87 ‘‘This sort. The same magnitude surely doesn’t look equal to our sight from near and from far. ... And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and so both concave and convex, due to the sight’s being misled by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry’’ (602c–d).

T rompe l’oeil, however, does not merely fool, despite its (perhaps unfortunate) name; while it ‘‘must have been conceived with the specific purpose in mind of convincing visual delusion’’ (Mastai, 21), it also awakens in the viewer the uneasiness of having been fooled or almost fooled into believing what he/she first saw as real. In so unsettling the viewer, trompe l’oeil initiates the work of the rationalist philosopher, who scrutinizes the senses, as well as empirical reality itself, as insufficient resources of knowledge. Such instances of the unreliability of empirical experience as presented above by Socrates are a first step of dialectical awakening; one is forced to admit that the senses render only a partial, and often confused, account of what things are. T rompe l’oeil potentially engenders this kind of recognition, thus enacting a philosophical provocation – just as Danto claims that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box provokes the question for the philosopher of art of the distinction between art and ordinary things. The similarity is heightened when we include trompe l’oeil works of money and stamps, in both cases convincing enough to be employed for functional purposes, and so causing a disturbance.12 And what, of course, are stamps and paper money in comparison with Brillo boxes one finds on the supermarket shelf ? All are mass-produced objects of commercial design. If trompe l’oeil forces the viewer to think about the nature of seeing and of representation, it challenges Plato’s philosophical dismissal of mimesis, while still confirming his political suspicions that illusions might disturb the representational order. It is relevant here to consider the profound ambivalence, in the wake of Plato, with which trompe l’oeil, and even still-life painting (both underrepresented in art theory), have been regarded. On the one hand, the effect of trompe l’oeil, to quote Danto, is to ‘‘dazzle’’ the viewer13 – to give what van Hoogstraeten called that ‘‘pleasant’’ sensation of having been fooled. On the other and, ‘‘the veiled threat of trompe l’oeil is always the annihilation of the individual viewing subject as universal centre’’ (Bryson, 144). The cognitive judgment of the viewer is not so much confounded (as Plato ostensibly worries) – since it is in fact provoked by the moment of overcoming the initial illusion – as it is rendered irrelevant. Even after the initial confusion has been conquered by cognition, the

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objects of trompe l’oeil remain there stubbornly before the eye; the objects presented seem to exist in their own world, indifferent to judgment. It is as if they had not, contra Hegel, yet found a passage through mind-or as if, after such a passage they remain unaffected, appearances which go on without us. This is why the objects in trompe l’oeil have a ghostly look about them; it is the look of pre- or post-cognitive vacancy, similar to what Blanchot calls ‘fascination’. The ambivalence toward trompe l’oeil, as Norman Bryson has made clear, is also directed at traditional still-life, which, although involving no illusion, was long regarded as an inferior, humble form of painting. Such paintings present almost ahistorically the same kinds of timeless, familiar objects of the basic substrate of human material life, what George Kubler calls ‘prime objects.’14 In presenting such objects, still-life paintings, whether from the Pompeii of antiquity or from 17th century Spain or the Netherlands, follow a ‘‘virtually indestructible’’ form (Bryson, 137). In Kubler’s view, cups and vases and bowls themselves almost defy history; they do not significantly change from culture to culture. ‘‘While complicated tools and technologies are subject to rapid change, simple utensils obey a slow, almost geological rhythm. In stratum upon stratum the archaeology of Western sites unearths endless variations on the same basic ideas, of storage jar, oil-lamp, beaker, vase’’ (Bryson, 138–9). For ‘‘certain distinct forms recommend themselves as appropriate, where the propriety is not just a matter of bare function but of a whole network of practical activity, involving all the factors of suitedness to action, to the body, to cost, to the ease of manufacture, and to available materials; in short, to an economy of practices which, eliminating what is not suitable, in the end converge on this given form, which is then passed on’’ (Bryson, 137–8). In still-life paintings, where we find such things amidst even older natural forms like lemons, olives, and lobsters, it is as if the ‘‘objects themselves dictate to matter the forms of their replication.., and the objects go on existing outside the field of human consciousness, yet with no diminution of the powers stored within them’’ (Bryson, 144). In trompe l’oeil, in which all narrative elements of painting are eliminated, this effect is exaggerated, the scene almost theatrically absent of the human touch. As such objects ‘‘have the look of dead men’s clothes,’’ as has been said of Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Steckbrett painting of what is the equivalent of the contents of a night-table tucked behind ribbons on a board: comb, soap, scissors, spectacles, coins, writing quill, shaving implements, sealing wax, letter-opener, letter, handkerchief, and the like. Almost a sub-genre of its own, many trompe l’oeil paintings across the

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centuries present letter-boards such as those painted by Edward Collier (d.c. 1702), Cornelis-Norbertus Gysbrechts (active c. 1659–78), Wallerand Vaillant (1623–1677); Benjamin Henry Latrobe (ca. 1795), and William Harnett, where many scripted and folded, unfolded or torn, waxstamped, or enveloped and cancelled letters are tucked behind ribbons along with notes, labels, pages torn from books, prints, and the like. Like the contents of the Steckbrett, this very personal habitat, usually marked by the personality and intimate life of the owner, is threatened with the ‘‘fate of imminent reversion to debris’’ (Bryson, 144). This reversion is made explicit in John Frederic Peto’s 1894 painting, ‘‘Old Scraps,’’ where a few scraps of letters, labels, tickets, string, torn pages are tacked up and stuck behind ribbons on a board that is more empty than covered, to the effect of no one lives here anymore. They are ‘‘anticeremonial’’ (Baudrillard, 54) This is what Baudrillard calls the ‘‘metaphysical’’ origins of trompe l’oeil. As a genre, trompe l’oeil is ‘‘an extremely conventional and metaphysical exercise.’’ He writes: T rompe l’oeil is such a highly ritualized from precisely because it is not derived from painting but from metaphysic; as ritual, certain features become utterly characteristic: the vertical field, the absence of a horizon and of any kind of horizontality (utterly different from the still-life), a certain oblique light that is unreal (... and none other), the absence of depth, a certain type of object ... and of course the ‘realist’ hallucination that gave it its name (Baudrillard, 53).

Other trompe l’oeil paintings are still more explicit as an ironic challenge to the mimetic theory of art, as well as to ‘‘the whole representative space elaborated by the Renaissance’’ (Baudrillard, 54). T rompe l’oeil paintings can also imitate paintings themselves – represent representation. As often as letters, one finds prints and paintings – and later, even photographs – among the subject-matter represented.15 A relatively recent echo of this element of trompe l’oeil is found in Mark Tansey’s painting called T he Innocent Eye T est (1981), in which a cow is observed gazing at Paulus Potter’s painting of a bull. The most well-known of such examples is probably Rene´ Magritte’s surrealist painting ‘‘L a Condition Humaine,’’ in which a painting sits on an easel in front of an open window, and the painting on the canvas is indistinguishable from the view ‘itself,’ which is, of course, also painted. Only the edge of the canvas, and the dark legs of the easel, serve to define a ‘border’ between one (second-order) representation – the canvas – and another – the view from the window. It is as if Magritte is warning the viewer that everything we see is, after all, a representation, that there is no ‘pure’ empirical reality, no original gaze.

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The same can be said of Magritte’s ‘‘Reproduction Prohibited’’ – not a trompe l’oeil painting, for it does not ‘fool’ the eye; but its confusion of the visual field is indebted to trompe l’oeil strategies. We see in this painting a figure (his backside) standing before a mirror; what is reflected there is, however, not the man’s front side and face, which we expect to be disclosed, but a repetition – a re-presentation-of the figure’s backside. Hence the witty title, ‘‘reproduction prohibited,’’ a prohibition which the painter takes literally (refusing the mirror’s reproduction) and thus, paradoxically, breaks with (reproducing, instead, the backside). The painting is both frivolous and serious, both witty and discomforting. In 1670 Cornelius Norbertus Gyjsbrechts painted two trompe l’oeil paintings of the backs of canvases, stretched across wooden frames held together by (painted) nails and, in one instance, strung with a hanging wire. These examples are not merely cleverly deceptive; rather, they are ontologically confounding: their highly mimetic strategies which render the canvas backs so convincing are the same skills which effect a refusal to represent anything – a refusal borrowed by surrealist painters who show the ‘‘obverse and the reverse, [who] undo the evidence of the world’’ (Baudrillard, 57). What we see in Gyjsbrechts’ paintings are paintings we imagine to be hung backwards. The paintings are what they do not in fact give: the painting we are looking for, which we presume is on the other side of the canvas. Were we to turn the painting over to find the ‘real’ painting, we would find a (real) canvas back directing us back to the painted surface. What is more, clues are given on the painting of the canvas back to direct us to the painting we imagine is on the other side: on one example a small piece of paper is ‘stuck to’ (painted on) the canvas, printed with the number ‘36,’ as if the painting we imagine to be on the other side of the canvas is indeed for sale. The other example gives us an inventory number which would indicate as well that the painting we hope to see on the other side, were we to turn it around, is part of a collection. ‘‘In effect, the painting maintains a distant relation to us. The effects of linear perspective that allow and indeed establish this relation keep representation at arm’s length, spatially separate, and, to a degree, inaccessible’’ (Leffert, 27). An example of trompe l’oeil I find still more provocative are the paintings, one by Gyjsbrechts and the other painting by Antonio Forbera (Fort-bras), both entitled ‘‘Painter’s Easel,’’ the latter painted in 1696 for King Louis XIV of France. This painting of a wooden painter’s easel has literally the two-dimensional shape of an easel, which ‘holds up’ a painting in progress, a red-chalk sketch for the painting, an old print hanging

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sideways, the painter’s palette, brushes, and the back of a canvas-frame into which is ‘placed,’ behind the center brace, another print (both prints are copied from ‘real’ existing prints available to the painter). All of this is painted in oils, contrary to the initial presumptions of the viewer. ‘‘Everything we see in the reproduction is painted, including the easel’s legs – canvas covers the actual wood of the legs, allowing the painter to paint exactly what is behind the canvas, the real legs’’ (Leffert, 29). What is more, the painting ‘in progress’ on the easel is itself a not excellent copy of ‘‘Realm of Flora’’ by Nicholas Poussin. One commentator writes: By remembering the original and recognizing a not-so-good copy, by seeing the drawing based on the original serving as the model for the painting in progress, the spectator sees a magical transformation in progress based on an unseen representation (Poussin’s original), brought to a midpoint between the nothingness of the drawing paper, the marked surface of the quite detailed sketch, and finally the representation of the representation(s). ... Thus representations are layered atop representations, and in the process the viewer is delighted and ... confounded about what has happened in plain view’’ (Leffert, 29).

It is recalled that one viewer, convinced that the drawing was done in pencil rather than oil, ‘‘moistened his handkerchief and tried erasing just a bit of it’’ (Leffert, 30). One might indeed send the stamp off in the post, or spend the money, as more than one trompe l’oeil artist has done. Or one might place the Brillo box back on the shelf. T ROMPE L ’OEIL AND ART HISTORY

What is the purpose of such painting? Is it mere frivolity at the expense of the viewer’s ease? Is such dis-ease morally corrupting, as Plato might argue, or philosophically provocative? Leffert argues for the political power asserted by such representations: ‘‘the power of the artist ... yet [that] the genre lays claim to a ‘radically narrow ... set of insights’’ (Leffert, 31). Another commentator restricts the significance of trompe l’oeil to undermining ‘‘the viewer’s reliance on the absolute validity of his optical sense’’ (Feldman, 155). If Danto champions Warhol as a ‘liberation,’ we might find there a license to understand trompe l’oeil more radically: it exploits mimesis to it maximum significance; it ‘mimics’ above all the most ordinary, insignificant objects, as if to avoid distracting from the significance of the mimesis itself, yet in so doing it ironically flaunts these insignificant things, this ‘‘alimentary rubbish,’’ without regard to the scene of their usefulness, their purpose, their cognizable ‘essence’ – their refusal of a human scene, a subject who relegates them according

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to the function they serve. Thus Baudrillard suggests that trompe l’oeil deliberately presents ‘‘mere objects,’’ for ‘‘only isolated objects, abandoned, ghostly in their exinscription of all action and all narrative, could retrace the haunting memory of a lost reality, something like a life anterior to the subject and its coming to consciousness’’ (Baudrillard, 54). Paradoxically, in trompe l’oeil all artifact, absent of even the semblance of a natural light, reminds us, as it were, of a world before metaphysics, before the regulation of higher and lower planes of reality, before the ontological determination of the distinction between appearances and what is really ‘real.’ This is ultimately why Plato regarded mimesis, exemplified by trompe l’oeil, as morally corrupting and, what is more, politically dangerous. T rompe l’oeil gives us the effect ‘‘of a slight vertigo – that of some previous life’’ before the advent of metaphysics and its political order (Baudrillard, 56). The mimetic tradition – both in theory and in art-historical practice – is troubled by trompe l’oeil’s stubbornly ahistorical exaggeration of what ought remain, to use Aristotle’s distinctions, the mere method of art, not also its matter. Thus ‘‘every composition in trompe l’oeil contributes to the effect of loss, a sense of losing hold on the real through the very excess of its appearances’’ (Baudrillard, 56). Insofar as it is related to the trompe l’oeil, Pop Art such as Andy Warhol presents in his Brillo Box is not, as Danto argues, beyond the pale of history, as if it signified the end of a history; it is, rather, aligned with the ahistorical substrate of history – with the excessively slow, geographical time of ordinary things, and with the stubborn persistence of the mimetic reality. If the philosopher must give the label of ‘art’ – and even of ‘pure art’ – to the Warhol work – be that philosopher Danto or Warhol himself – trompe l’oeil challenges the legitimacy of representation in which metaphysics operates. Though no doubt in other respects heralding a ‘‘new era’’ in the history of art, the Brillo Box is, as an ironic mimetic enactment, in company with the ancient lowly forms of ryparography – the depiction of the offensively insignificant – and with their potentially radical metaphysical significance. If we are still rediscovering such neglected forms of art, now seeming to shed light even on the most enfranchised of forms, then the history of art cannot yet be said to have come to a close, for it is still being told, and no doubt still informs postmodern art that, in looking back, would see itself reflected. Department of Philosophy Forham University, New York City

TROMPE L’OEIL AND THE MIMETIC TRADITION IN AESTHETICS 93 NOTES 1 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of Histoty (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). Hereafter cited in text as AEA. See also Danto, Philosophizing Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Hereafter cited in text as PA. 2 See AEA, 26; although Danto does not accept Hegel’s system entirely, he calls Hegel ‘‘the philosopher I have taken as my sometime master in this inquiry.’’ 3 Plato, T he Republic of Plato, trans Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968). Hereafter cited in text according to the academic pagination. 4 Aristotle, Poetics in Classical L iterary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (New York: Penguin Books, 1965). 5 G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory L ectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 44. Citations in text after author’s name refer to this reference. 6 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: L ectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1975), 11. 7 See Jean Baudrillard, ‘‘The Trompe l’Oeil,’’ in Calligram: Essays in New Art History From France, ed. Norman Bryson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 58; and MarieLouise d’Otrange Mastai, Illusion in Art: T rompe l’Oeil (New York: Abaris Books, 1975), 13. 8 Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye: T he Cultural Functions of Imagery (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 19. 9 On this distinction, see Mastai, 36–7. See also Norman Bryson, L ooking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still L ife Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 136. 10 Edmund Burke Feldman, Art as Image and Idea (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967), 155. 11 See Mastai, 36; and Celestine Dars, Images of Deception: T he Art of T rompe l’Oeil (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1979), 9. 12 See Danto, ‘‘Trompe l’oeil’’ in T he Nation (254) 4 May 1992, 606. 13 Ibid. 14 George Kubler, T he Shape of T ime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962). 15 See Mastai, 15, who discusses the response of trompe l’oeil painters to the camera obscura and the camera lucida, forerunners of the present-day camera and aids to realism. Mastai claims that ‘‘in the nineteenth century, the practitioners of trompe l’oeil were not swept away by the new Romantic current; rather, they were among the ‘conservative’ minority of artists, who remained unconvinced that their emancipation from the necessity to merely record reality was actually a genuine liberation.’’

CARLTON HUGHES

A METAPHYSICAL PERSPECTIVE ON ALBERTI’S DE PICT URA

The first theoretical treatise on painting, Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, was completed in Florence in 1435. Certain aspects, most notably its humanism and its scientific discourse on perspective, have encouraged many to think of it as a ‘‘secularizing’’ work. But while it is not written from an explicitly religious viewpoint, it is important to remember that the treatise is imbued with its author’s sense of painting as a conduit for viewers’ interaction precisely with non-materiel realities, whether the soul of Alexander the Great, or the unrepresentable grief of Agammemnon. Thus Alberti countered, in a non-materialist way, Plato’s stigmatization of the art as merely mimicking the outward appearances of things, being doubly removed at best from Ideal reality. Moreover, Plato had emphasized the sophistic potential of painting to misrepresent what it depicts, and the fundamental deception inherent in conjuring appearances of things where they are not present. Playing on the theme of deception, Alberti named Narcissus as the mythical inventor/discoverer of painting.1 His choice of the youth who was fooled by the illusion of his own reflection emphasized the fact that creating or viewing Albertian pictures means imagining three-dimensional depth when confronting a two-dimensional surface. But at the same time, Narcissus’ fate warns us against mistaking perceptions for ‘‘objective’’ realities. Finally, in a positive sense, Narcissus’ pool hints at an element in painting that draws us toward transforming depths beyond the visible. The painter, Alberti wrote, should always prefer ‘‘those things in painting which leave more for the mind to discover than is actually apparent to the eye.’’2 Indeed, much of De pictura is concerned with how to use the visible precisely to evoke those unseen things that the visible implies, and several compositions he cites as exemplary, from the Death of Iphigenia to Giotto’s Navicella mosaic, feature the denial of sight in a way that hints at the primacy of the ‘‘incipient unseen.’’ In the Iphigenia, Agammemnon’s face is veiled because his grief was beyond depiction.3 And in the Navicella one of the seated apostles covers his eyes in response to the miracle. More fundamentally, in the latter story it was only when Peter looked around and ‘‘saw the wind’’ that he began to sink, paying more attention to his outward senses than the impulse of faith.4 95 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 95–101. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Far from dispelling the aura of mystery from painting, Alberti’s recipe for making all things recede into depth gave painters a tool to suggest the presence of more than is visible to the eye – in the metaphysical as well as the topographical sense. This essay will examine several paintings from Alberti’s central Italian, mid-quattrocento milieu as examples of response to this ‘‘mystical’’ possibility latent in Albertian perspective. Along with providing the illusion of physical presence and spatial expanse, perspective can also subtly suggest the illusory nature of ‘‘exterior reality’’ itself in the face of transcendent Being. Many quattrocento works feature a seemingly measurable constructed space, which is mocked by objects parallel to the picture plane whose contours or axes coincide with receding orthogonals, or is intentionally undermined by compositional cropping and overlapping. Once a systematic consistency is postulated for depicting the world, then such kinds of visual irony can formally assert the ephemeral, secondary, status of this temporal realm. For example, John White points out that in Filippo Lippi’s Munich Annunciation, the uppermost arch seems to stand on top of, rather than behind, the smaller arches of the screen that overlaps it.5 This collapse of perspectival illusion is produced by the coincidence of the arch with the top of the picture, the truncation of it below by the screen, the shortness of orthogonals at the top, and the identity of color and form between the large upper arch and the three below it. But I want to suggest that here, the tangible space of the picture’s lower zone is aptly transformed to a symbol of the Trinity above: the arrangement of one overarching three. A less explicit example is Domenico Veneziano’s St. L ucy Altarpiece, painted in Florence circa 1445. It presents us with a masterfully foreshortened stone floor, across which solid figures cast shadows. In the center bay the Virgin hovers indeterminately, her head and the Child’s suggestively contained by the niche, while her lower body clearly projects several planes forward of it. The triple arcade is correct but paradoxical; the revetment at its top is seemingly flush with the picture plane, but the bases of its columns reveal that it is counter-intuitively distant. This effect reduces the architectural armature to a flat two-dimensional pattern. Reality only inheres in the holy personages themselves, while the constructed trappings of the world are mere stage set, a projected reflection of their inner majesty. It was near the start of Book II in De pictura that Alberti wrote: ‘‘ I used to tell my friends that the inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus, who was turned into a flower; for, as painting is the flower of all the arts, so the tale of Narcissus fits our purpose perfectly. What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface

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of the pool?’’6 As a flower, an ornament, painting provides pleasure, but in addition to the beauty of color it adds the pleasure of illusionism. To a sophisticated viewer, Albertian painting offered the special recreation of temporarily and voluntarily abandoning oneself to artful deception, a relaxation of the vigilance otherwise required in an intensely unstable, competitive social milieu. But this illusionism has a metaphysical valence as well, for the Albertian painter seeks to present the essences of what he depicts. De Pictura was modeled largely on Cicero’s and Quintilian’s theories of rhetoric, which privileged Clarity, Concinnity and Ornament. Just as a speaker transports his hearers by descriptions which ‘‘place the scenes before their very eyes,’’ so Alberti’s historia is designed to make viewers feel that they actually witness what is depicted. The historia shares the same purpose which Terry Eagleton disparagingly attributed to phenomenological literary criticism: both seek to reproduce the effect of ‘‘L ebenswelt, reality as actually organized and experienced by an individual subject.’’7 Composition is the guiding principle of the historia, in which everything must contribute to the overall effect. This produces the key attribute of Clarity. Through proper overlapping, collocation and relative diminution of objects, the picture plane becomes transparent and pictorial space becomes co-extensive with our own. Similarly on the narrative level, it is through the proper and efficient coordination of figures that the main action and point of the story become transparent, clear and self-evident rather than obscured by distracting or unnecessary incident. Cause and effect are thus thrown into vivid relief, with the logical coherence of the scene being more important than its realism in the modern sense. For example, if painters wish to show clothes billowing, Alberti advocates adding personifications of the West or South wind as the visible cause. As a model of consciousness, the historia is more than a model of what is literally seen: It is a model of what is actually understood to exist, and of coherent relations. Closely related to logical clarity is Concinnity, by which each part must conform to the character of the whole. For example, Alberti cites a figure of the dead Meleager in which ‘‘there is no member that does not seem completely lifeless; they all hang loose; hands, fingers, neck all droop inertly down, all combine together to represent death ... the members of the dead appear dead down to the smallest detail.’’8 Thus the Albertian historia combines heightened optical fidelity in the portrayal of objects with the ‘‘essentializing’’ of those objects and a strictly rationalized structure, allowing the function or character of things to

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shine forth in pronounced fashion. It is a pictorial cosmos in which the appearances of things give access to their essences. Furthermore, compared to earlier art, the historia’s increased similarity to our own world suggests that in our world, our perceptions of things also apprehend their essences without the mediation of thought which Aristotle had theorized as necessary in the uncovering of Universals, and without the mediation of linguistic conventions. We instinctively behold the depicted in the depiction, and ‘‘Nature provides’’ that we sympathetically ‘‘mourn with the mourners, laugh with those who laugh, and grieve with the griefstricken.’’9 I will leave it to philosophers to decide whether this suggests consciousness like that which Edmund Husserl described, in which perception automatically apprehends essence. But even if the historia is not a model of Husserlian consciousness, then at least it asks to be analyzed in phenomenological terms, since it presents things as if to yield up their essences independent of external context. On a general level, therefore, Alberti’s hypothetical historia may also be said to imply something about the essence of the material or visible world as a whole which it depicts. This same statement is implicit in the St. L ucy Altarpiece as well as in some narrative scenes we shall see: the temporal world is revealed as the realm of illusion. Indeed, Alberti’s own recipe for illusionism presents the visible world as one of relativity. He cites ‘‘the belief of the philosophers that if the sky, the stars, the seas, the mountains and all living creatures, together with all other objects, were, the gods willing, reduced to half their size, everything that we see would in no respect appear to be diminished from what it is now.’’ He goes on to write that ‘‘Large, small, long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, light, dark, bright, gloomy, and everything of the kind – which philosophers termed accidents, because they may or may not be present in things – all these are such as to be known only by comparison.’’10 These accidental aspects of things exist only in relation to each other. Although the gleam of ivory registers as bright white, comparison with snow reveals it as dingy, and the painter must use his palette with this principle in mind when duplicating appearances. Although paintings from many periods have featured illusionistic details, the comprehensive nature of Alberti’s perspectival construction presents viewers with a global illusionism involving not just one detail, but the whole picture. Furthermore, because its orthogonals radiate outward, the historia implicates our own space, the wider world, in this illusionism. Although it is celebrated as his chief contribution to realism, Alberti’s constructed perspective, rendering the picture plane ‘‘transparent and like

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glass,’’11 carries metaphysical overtones and hints at an unseen world beyond the physical. As Michael Baxandall has pointed out, it was thought that in heaven, vision could pass through walls or other solid bodies.12 Albertian transparency of the painted surface provides an experience which may therefore be likened to heavenly vision. On a recent trip to Florence I was unexpectedly reminded of the spiritual connotations of perspective, which is literally ‘‘seeing through.’’ After you climb the Monte alle Croci to the church of San Miniato you can see all the way through the nave into the crypt. And in the crypt one can see through a grille to the marble altar which, in turn, has a window revealing a small casket within. Finally this casket has an opening cut into it through which is visible the shroud containing San Miniato’s remains. The journey is a set of penetrations; Through them one draws closer to the saint. Yet the last leap of vision must be an inner one, for at the very last step the sight of bones is denied. And the instrument of this denial, the cloth integumentum, is one which recalls the metaphor of the fleshly body itself as a mere veil for the spirit. The cloth reveals to the mind, not the eye, the status of earthly things as a veil for heavenly Being. In theory the relic, the artifact itself, is simply a conduit for divine agency. So after successive penetrations the arrangement at San Miniato presents us with a kind of porta claustra, a closed door through which saintly virtue mystically flows. In Catholic theology Mary herself was called the porta claustra, denoting that although she remained a virgin, she was the portal through which God entered our world in the person of Christ. The episode in which the conception occurred was the Annunciation. The central scene of the predella from the St. L ucy Altarpiece is one of many such Annunciations in which the Albertian ‘‘centric point,’’ Alpha and Omega of the image, is precisely this threshold between worlds. Our notional penetration of the picture plane finds its echo in God’s spiritual entry from beyond the porta claustra and through it into our world. These reciprocal penetrations occur on the same axis marked, as at San Miniato, by multiple telescoped openings: an arched portal, the tunnel of a trellis, and then a door. Even apart from explicit narrative matter, the typical form of pictorial perspective Alberti recommends, with its rectilinear architecture, gridded pavement and orthogonals receding to a point, gave its own kind of mystical inflection to paintings. Certainly it can encourage meditation on far-removed vistas. The main action when present, is often displayed in a frieze-like fashion. But the mind, via the eye, is haunted by the impression of a more distant realm of order. Ultimately, all things diminish toward the zone where orthogonals meet, with the implied presence of

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an atemporal numinous realm beyond, the foundation of Truth and Being. In phenomenological terms, the axiomatic alignment of our point of view with this centric point may be said to symbolize the apodictic rightness or force of our perception or consciousness. We view such scenes with eyes that wander but are ultimately anchored to a static focal point. In these compositions, there is a transition from the immediacy of foreground action to a measured, spatially articulated middle-ground which may or may not be populated by figures, and finally to the focal or ‘‘vanishing’’ point which is both the origin of the image and its immaterial telos: everything disappears into it. This may even be compared to contemplative stages described by texts on devotional practice where, like Narcissus fallen into the pool, the subject finally experienced ‘‘‘mystical union’ attained in the ecstatic overthrow of his or her own person.’’13 The same effect can appear in purer form in the absence of foreground action, as in the V iew of an Ideal City, attributed to the circle of Piero della Francesca. To quattrocento viewers, the twenty-four columns and round plan of the central building would have suggested a baptistery.14 The ritual of baptism was figured as a kind of death through which individuals were reborn into the Christian community. In that picture’s ghost town, one door at the center is open, anticipating our presence. We are invited into the site of rebirth by a picture that replicates the ancient saying ‘‘mors janua vitae:’’ Death is the gateway to life. At the center all orthogonals converge on the space half-revealed in the darkness but unseen, where identity itself hangs in the balance. A final example, darker still, is Paolo Uccello’s damaged masterpiece of 1440, the Deluge (Figs. 6, 7). Giorgio Vasari claimed that Uccello was obsessed and subsumed by the study of perspective – so much so that when his wife called him to bed, he used to refuse, saying ‘‘Oh, what a sweet thing is this perspective!’’15 The story, of course, plays on the erotic connotations of penetration. And as we have seen, there are conjugal mysteries of perspective, focused naturally on the vertex of Alberti’s projected visual pyramid, the centric point where worlds notionally intersect. But through the portal this time comes judgment, not divine incarnation or saintly grace. The scene, appropriately chaotic, is squeezed between two views of Noah’s Ark, one of the end, one of the side. Orthogonals lead us to the focal point where God’s wrath, the singular lightning bolt, strikes and blasts the tree between two men, light and dark. This is the point of violent contact between heaven and earth. And the scene within a scene symbolizes judgment, the separation between light and dark and the destruction of the dark or evil, which the catastrophe as a whole enacts.

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The compositions I’ve discussed all gain in metaphysical resonance from the way artists exploited the symbolic potential of perspective motifs. Just as the perspectival system defines the appearance of the visible world, so the coordination of measurements makes explicit the relativity of that world. And the Albertian centric point, where orthogonals run into each other, signifies the limitation of the visible and the limits of representation. Thus that point indicates the logical site of interaction between the temporal and atemporal, between the limited and the ineffable. It is impossible for me to say if Alberti envisioned such pictorial uses at the time of his treatise, even though they began to appear very shortly after it was finished in 1435. The very first perspectival demonstration, Brunelleschi’s trick in Florence’s Piazza del Duomo using mirrors and a painting of the Baptistery, had contained a kind of wit that implied a skepticism of appearances. Thus, perspective may have been associated with the paradoxical nature of phenomena several years before Alberti’s text. I only want to point out that De Pictura, for all its attention to the means of depiction, reflects an awareness that the visible world is but ‘‘the surface of the pool.’’ T he University of South Carolina NOTES 1 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, ed. Martin Kemp and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 61. 2 Ibid., 77. 3 Ibid., 78. 4 Matthew 14:30. 5 John White, T he Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 181. 6 Alberti, op. cit., 61. 7 Terry Eagleton, L iterary T heory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 59. 8 Alberti, op. cit., 73. 9 Ibid., 76. 10 Ibid., 53. 11 Ibid., 48. 12 Hans Belting, L ikeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 410–411. 13 For a concise discussion of these features of baptisteries, which were understood to replicate the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, see Richard Krautheimer, ‘‘Introduction to an Iconography of Medieval Architecture,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), 1–5. 14 Giorgio Vasari, L ives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2 vols., ed. David Ekserdjian and trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), Vol. I, 289.

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TRIUMPH OF THE DISSOLUTION OF REALITY BY ILLUSION: THE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE OF T ROMPE L ’OEIL ARCHITECTURAL WALL PAINTINGS – THE TOMB OF THE LEOPARDS AND THE VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES

As the procession of the ceremonial funeral dance wound around the town of Tarquinia in Etruria about 500 BC, it came to a halt at the entrance of an underground chamber, the hypogeum, made of stone with a vaulted roof, covered with the earth tumulus, identified today as the Tomb of the Leopards. The body of the deceased man of prominence was carried down the steep steps and placed in a chest or sarcophagus deep inside the tomb where it was sealed with a large stone in the belief that it would prohibit the spirit of the dead man from escaping. The participants gathered there for the sacred banquet, which formed an essential part of the funeral rites. The meal was based on the custom from a remoter past of the ritual sacrifice performed in which the dead person’s slaves, some of his beasts, and his favorite wife were buried with him to serve him in the afterlife.1 They believed that the blood of the victims, somehow metamorphosed by the ceremonial rites, nurtured and preserved his soul from eradication. The funeral banquet finally drew to a close after a state of ecstasy was induced by frenzied dancing and heavy drinking dedicated to the Greek god of wine Dionysus, worshipped by the Etruscans under the name Fufluns, in the belief that it would insure immortality. The tomb was sealed airtight which kept it relatively free from pillage as well as in a state of good preservation. Until recent modern excavations were carried out on tombs of this kind,2 the Tomb of the Leopards remained serene, hidden and guarding its funeral secrets. On entering the tomb, the visitor is immediately carried away into another reality – a psychological reality – in which the spiritual dominates the actual. The Etruscans firmly believed that a person’s spirit survived after death and this final resting place of the deceased gave vivid witness to this belief. Decorating the walls of the tomb are paintings of the Celestial Banquet with its dancing, music playing and wine drinking (Fig. 1). The real walls of the tomb appear to have dissolved and the 103 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 103–113. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Figure 1. End Wall of the T omb of the L eopards. First half of the 5th century BC. (Photograph: Art Resource, New York.)

figures appear to be actually carrying out their ceremonial dance and feast as if the original event were still in progress. On the pediment of the far wall, two leopards are represented facing one another; hence the name of the tomb. Leopards were trained for hunting and they represent part of the dead man’s possessions. Depicted on the walls, are three banqueting couples, two of a man and a woman and the one in the center of only two men. They are reclining on klinai, couches, and the most important group in the center is served by a nude youth. On another wall, four servants carry jugs of wine for the guests who hold drinking bowls or garlands. Two musicians play the pipes alluding to the frenzied dances that accompanied this ceremonial ritual for the departed (Fig. 2). This world of illusion within the walls of the tomb was achieved by the fictive space provided through the technique of architectural trompe l’oeil which acts as a substitute for the real space. With trompe l’oeil painting, the elements of reality have been overtaken by the opening up

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Figure 2. Right Wall of the T omb of the L eopards. First half of the 5th century BC. (Photograph: Art Resource, New York.)

of walls, which gives access to another world beyond – the world of infinity. The viewer has been forced to cast doubt on the real space. He becomes one in union with the figurative and transcendental creatures in their dwelling place of painted illusion. ‘‘In the shifting kaleidoscope of these fictive constructions, reality is concealed, reason surrenders and the eye accepts the magical power of mystifying appearances.’’3 In the Tomb of the Leopards, the interest of the artist is manifest in the increase in the decorative elements and less in the architectural motifs of the wall paintings. There is a decorative band running along the top of them and elegant small trees rather than painted architectural elements divide the scenes. The sides of the roof are depicted in a chequered design in red and green with the columen (beam) decorated with a series of concentric circles in the same color. It is this emphasis on the presence of the figures in the scene that indicates the importance of the viewer as a member of the ceremonial feast. His presence is spiritually imbued with realism as he psychically joins in the exuberant dynamism of the figures, which emerge in the diversity of the clothing and the portrait-like features of the illusionary personages. The expectation by the Etruscans of an ultimate celestial banquet is made explicate in this scene. With these burial rites, they

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hoped for a continual round of heavenly feasting and drinking in the company of the gods.4 Almost five hundred years later, the Romans utilized this illustrative type of material to reach extraordinary artistic and spiritual heights in the Villa of the Mysteries. Excavated initially in 1910–11 in the suburbs of Pompeii situated farther back from the Street of Tombs among the fields, it was finally completely opened and restored in 1929–30. Among the original wall paintings in the house, circa 50 BC, are the noble paintings in the Second Pompeian style for which the villa takes its name.5 From an interior peristyle, one walks into the chamber on which life-sized figures weave in and out of the fictive space of separate scenes as if performing on a long and narrow stage with a backdrop of bright red, divided by flat, painted pilasters. Traditionally this cycle of frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries is interpreted as the visual depiction of the actual rites of initiation into the Dionysiac mysteries (Fig. 3). In this present study, I would like to counter

Figure 3. Partial view of the wall paintings in the V illa of the Mysteries, Pompeii. First half of the 2nd century BC. Archives of the Casa Editrice Bonechi, Florence, 1999.

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this meaning and propose that the paintings represent the palpable presence of the mythic drama of the dromena, a dream-like vision of the soul, solemnly enacted during the initiation into the Lesser Mysteries of Dionysus. Scenes from this sacred drama, known as the Soul Drama or Journey were not intended to actually reveal the holy mysteries of the initiation to the profane but were intended to represent by a symbolic means the intended truth to the minds of the votaries. While these theatrical dramas, such as is portrayed in these frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries, constituted an important part of the initiatory rites into the Dionysian Mysteries, they did not in any way offer confirmation of the ultimate secrets whose revelation was restricted to the second state initiates or epoptai who alone were permitted to look upon the full contents of the sacred baskets or cesti. For this reason, scenes from the sacred myth were allowed to be painted on vases and to be represented in sculpture. The initiates of the cultic rites were vowed to secrecy and on the whole were constrained to keep their vows not to profane the Mysteries by performing the secret ceremonies or by speaking of them in public for fear of punishment both in this world and the next. This manifestation of the universal Otherworld Journey reached back into antiquity from Persia to Babylonia, from which arose the Epic of Gilgamesh, and then spread westward through Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and northward to Greece and Rome. Herein intelligible reality has been raised to a new understanding through contemplation and transcends the consciousness of normal humanity. It became one of the central religious dogmas in which the interest is placed primarily on the journey itself rather than in the next world.6 The mise-en-sce`ne creates the impression that this scene is being enacted in the cella of a temple to Dionysus inasmuch as the nearly life-size figures of Dionysus and Ariadne create the focal point and dominate the composition both physically and spiritually. It is traditionally recorded that there was a painting by Aristeides of Thebes depicting the couple in the Temple of Ceres in Rome at this time.7 In regard to the Villa paintings, Amadeo Maiuri poetically remarks, ‘‘For once the painter – perhaps an artist of the Campanian living in the first century BC – departed from the usual scheme of Pompeian decorative painting and ventured into the realms of high art.’’8 The continuous narrative within the wall paintings commences on the left as a nude young boy is reading from a scroll between two women, one of whom begins the action by walking from the direction of a real open door onto an illusionary raised, shallow stage atop a painted marble dado. The figures move gracefully and rhythmically into the next scenes

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as in real space. A young girl with a tray of offerings moves in the direction of a figure seated with her back to the viewer, in the act of sacrificing, assisted by two attendants. The next two scenes are painted on the two corners of the left and center walls (Fig. 4): on the left, a young satyr sits beside a nymph, called a panisca, who is nursing a kid, while a terrorized woman shrinks back with the upper part of her peplos raised in flight; on the right, an old Silenus offers a satyr a drink from a round bowl, while another raises a theatre mask over his head. In the center of the wall, the figure of Dionysus is depicted lying across the lap of the enthroned Ariadne. To their right, a kneeling woman is in the act of unveiling a phallus from the liknon, a winnowing basket. Completing the scenes on this central wall is the looming female figure with large dark wings lifting a long switch in readiness to strike. The object of her assault is the semi-nude woman distressfully lying across the lap of another woman. This scene begins those on the right wall. With her back to the viewer, a nude young woman dances joyfully while holding crotala, cymbals, in front of a purple-garbed attendant bringing a thyros. Beyond the window are the final scenes of the painted program – the preparation of the coiffure, confarreatio, of the bride accompanied by two

Figure 4. End wall of the V illa of the Mysteries, Pompeii. First half of the 2nd century BC. (Photograph: Art Resource, New York.)

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Erotes and the bride reclining on the kline.9 In the first, one of the halfgrown winged little boys holds up a mirror, which shows a reflection. Behind the bride, the other Eros is resting on a pillar with his right arm and lovingly gazes upon the whole scene. In the final scene the awaiting bride on the high ‘‘bridal’’ bed is portrayed with all of the symbols of her newly acquired social and marital status of a madrona. These wall paintings have been considered the most important and beautiful of Roman art, and they have garnered much literary attention in an effort to explain them. It is especially to the late Otto J. Brendel in his original German version (1966) with an English translation by Maria Brendel (1980), that we are indebted for the most complete allegorical analysis in which he answers many of the heretofore-unanswered questions.10 However, in this present study, I should like to reiterate my proposal that these painted scenes should be considered as representing the Sacred Drama of the dromena, which constituted an important part in the initiatory rites of the cult. This eschatological Otherworld Journey was enacted as a sacred pageant, which expressed precisely the prominent characteristic of a Mystery Religion as a religion of symbolism. S. Angus points out that ‘‘myth and allegory, iconic representations, blazing lights and dense darkness, liturgies and sacramental acts, and suggestion quickened the intuitions of the heart, and provoked in the initiate a mystical experience conducting to palingenesia regeneration, the object of every initiation.’’11 This mystic drama, which must have been of an impressively simple kind, was perhaps assisted by the art of the painter who would have provided curtains depicting architectural or landscape vistas hung on the columns of the stage structure. The creator of the wall paintings of the Villa of the Mysteries has utilized the literary characteristic of the writing of ekphraseis which tends to consist of a series of isolated scenes.12 This quality of dramatic immobility is evident in the manner in which the figures are posed as statues, in the nature of those actors observed in an impressive spectacle. Of this type of depiction, the words of Ammian the Historian and Julian [the Apostate?] seem to apply: ‘‘You might have supposed them statues polished by the hand of Praxiteles, not men.’’13 Within the Villa’s wall paintings, we see each episode is delicately poised within its own precinct, each in the manner of a separate statue or as part of a separate statuary group so as to form a syncretistic dramatic tableau. We must now investigate my proposed new interpretation of these paintings in relation to the subject of the scenes themselves and their

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allegorical meaning. Through the use of the trompe l’oeil technique, it appears that we are witness to a mystical initiation and are exposed to the full spiritual experience of the action. Reality has disappeared and illusion has transported us into this rarified realm of initiation. Rather than presenting the actual events, the artist has presented the viewer with a pictorial process of transformation of a real person into the spiritual state of purification. Intellectual and psychological concepts are almost impossible to portray by visual means, but this artist had the supreme ability to do just that. In the first scene, a young woman enters, undoubtedly the initiate, and a small boy reads from a papyrus, the contents of which are unknown. Perhaps, it was a prayer or sacred text because this scene constitutes the entrance rite of introitus. The initiation begins. A young girl with a tray of offerings moves in the direction of a seated priestess shown in the act of conducting a sacrifice aided by two attendants. Two scenes follow which concern the prominent figure of Silenus, an old satyr considered to have held the secret of wisdom, with his nine-stringed lyre, two young satyrs, companions of Dionysus, and a nymph nursing a kid. One of the satyrs has raised a theatre mask above the figure of the old nude figure indicating the presence of Dionysus. In Greece, Dionysus was at times represented only by a mask hung on a pillar as an effigy in festivals in his honor.14 Music was an essential part of the ritual of initiation, and the figure of Silenus seems to have become intoxicated with his own music and singing. It was believed that oniy through frenzied dancing accompanied by tumultuous music could a person join, for a brief moment, into a hypostatic union with a god. To the right of this group, a young woman appears to stride forward on the narrow stage in a state of advanced fear and alarm. Her gaze is in the direction of the next scene in which Silenus offers a young satyr a drink from a bowl while another raises a theatre mask above the old figure’s head. Within this scene are the principal figures of Dionysus lying across the lap of Ariadne. Directly next to them a kneeling woman reveals the Dionysiac phallus, a fertility symbol, within the liknon, a winnowing basket. This was an important symbol in female cults as it signified the perpetuation of life, of active power and the propagation of cosmic forces.15 We move to the end wall and the ritualistic flagellation of a partially nude young woman as she collapses across the lap of another. This must be interpreted as the psychological blows made to the psyche and not actually to the physical body. With these blows, the soul was deemed

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purified. This purification, according to Plato in the Phaedo, 67c–e, 69c, consists in separating the soul as much as possible from the body and freeing it from the shackles of the body. The later philosophic authority for the interpretation of the Sacred Drama constituting the heart of the Mysteries is considered to have been based on Plato’s Phaedo, of which Proclus in his Commentary on Plato’s Politicus, writes: ‘‘... every part of which is full of a symbolical representation, as in a dream, and of a description which treated of the ascending and descending ways, of the tragedies of Dionysus (Bacchus or Zagreus), ... and the wanderings of everything of a similar kind.’’16 Otto Brendel has identified the female figure with the large dark wings administering the blows as Lyssa, a Dionysiac demon whose purpose was to whip up the passions of an initiate into a divine madness.17 Thus the soul becomes purified and, at that moment, is united with the god Dionysus. The dancing woman to her right personifies the cleansed spirit, and she is depicted as a dancing maenad (Fig. 5). The nakedness of the woman after the whipping symbolizes the purity and chastity of the woman’s new state. The emotional climax has been reached and a sense of calm seems to pervade the last scenes on the series. The figures of Dionysus and Ariadne embracing signify the intimate and loving association between the newly initiated woman and her god. The last two bridal scenes are expressive of the higher level upon which she has been raised by the action of the god – he has raised her up on high and she has become exalted. This symbolic pagan union was to be reflected centuries later in the Christian rite of ‘‘marriage’’ of Jesus with a nun, after her sacred vows, who takes on the title of ‘‘The Bride of Christ.’’ As we solemnly depart from the chamber of the mysterious Dionysiac rites of the Soul Drama, the sacred dromena, in the Villa of the Mysteries, we realize that through the artistic technique of trompe l’oeil,18 we have been privileged to become, albeit briefly, in the presence of ancient beliefs and actions of life-changing importance. This mythopoetic series of wall paintings silently speaks a universal language. In symbolic images of grandeur the concept of the journey of the human soul and its safe return through the rites of initiation and ultimate purification is set before us. University of Washington

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Figure 5. Detail of Flagellation and Young Woman Dancing. (Photograph: Art Resource, New York.)

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NOTES 1 James Hall, A History of Ideas and Images in Italian Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 16–18. 2 On the history of many of these tombs in Tarquinia, still richly decorated, see Ezio Renda, T arquinia, trans. Rosalynd C. Pio (Florence: Bonechi Edizioril, 1990), 5–11, 26–62. 3 Miriam Milman, T rompe-L ’Oeil Painted Architecture (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1986), 7. 4 On the influence of these Etruscan tombs, both in painting technique and purpose, on later Roman wall paintings, see Nancy H. Ramage and Andrew Ramage, Roman Art: Romulus to Constantine (3rd ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 2001), 28–56. 5 On the development of this Second Style of wall paintings in Pompeii within the Four Styles, see Gilbert Picard, Roman Painting (Greenwich Connecticut: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 47–91. 6 See Morton W. Bloomfield, T he Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English L iterature (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952), 16–26. 7 For a discussion of the possibility that this painting could have provided a prototype, so to speak, of the wall paintings in the Villa of the Mysteries, see Otto J. Brendel, ‘‘The Great Frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries’’, in Readings in Art History, ed. Harold Spencer (3rd ed., New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), vol. 1, 195–196. 8 Amadeo Maiuri, Pompeian Wall Paintings (Berne: Hallwag Ltd., 1973), 9. 9 For a detailed description of these final scenes, see Brendel, op. cit., 189–192. 10 Otto J. Brendel, T he Invisible Idea, trans. Maria Brendel (German 1966; Washington, D.C.: Decatur House Press, Ltd., 1980). 11 S. Angus, T he Mystery-Religions: A Study in the Religious Background of Early Christianity (1925; reprint, New York: Dover Publ., 1975), 45. 12 For a discussion of the use of this literary form of ekphraseis in paintings, see Joanne Snow-Smith, T he ‘Primavera’ of Sandro Botticelli: A Neoplatonic Interpretation (New York, Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Berne, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Oxford: Peter Lang, 1993), 143–196. 13 Alan Cameron, Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorium (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 273. 14 For the mythology and representations of this satyr, see Ire`ne Aghion, Claire Barbillon, Franc¸ois Lissarrague, Gods and Heroes of Classical Antiquity (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1996), 271–272. 15 J. E. Cirlkot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962 and New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1971, 2nd ed., reprint, 1983), 253. 16 Quoted in Thomas Taylor, T he Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, ed. Alexander Wilder (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1891), 33, 34. 17 Brendel, op. cit., 186, 187. 18 For an in-depth study of this type of painting and its influence on later periods of art history, see Ingrid Sjo¨stro¨m, Quadratura: Studies in Italian Ceiling Painting (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1978).

˘ DA ˘ LINA DIACONU MA

ILLUSIONARY TOUCH, AND TOUCHING ILLUSIONS

A video installation presented by the Romanian artist Cristi Poga˘ceanu at the exhibition Blut & Honig. Die Zukunft liegt am Balkan (curator: Harald Szeemann, Collection Essl, Klosterneuburg/Vienna, 2003) shows an old master painting of Thomas touching Christ with, however, a slight difference: it sets the unbeliever’s hand into motion, causing it to touch the Savior’s wounds over and over again, as if he were still distrustful of their reality. He has confidence neither in Christ’s image, nor in his words – both phenomena of the ‘‘theoretical senses’’ (Hegel) –, but only in his own hands. Since Thomas, and at least until the metaphysics of the late 19th century, touch was considered the most reliable of our senses and the proof of existence par excellence. Apart from haptic illusions while dreaming or in pathological cases, both philosophy and common sense have always put their confidence in touch as the vital sense that could not mistake or mislead. Indeed, touch functions frequently as a corrective for likely visual illusions: looking at frescos or paintings en trompe l’œil or observing objects of an indefinite material (such as ‘‘marble’’ columns in Baroque cathedrals or even artificial plants in our daily life), one is tempted to get near them and verify his visual impressions by touching them. But are there possible phenomena which trompent la main itself ? The deeply rooted conviction about touch as the sense of reality was challenged in the last century from three main directions: 1. philosophers and psychologists examining the experience of blind persons and their aesthetic perception; 2. technology and electronic art experimenting with virtual reality and attempting to simulate touch; finally, 3. an increasing understanding of neurotic or even psychotic disorders, which made clear how vulnerable touch itself can be in encountering what we usually call reality. My paper attempts to outline and evaluate these three directions and their consequences for interpreting touch. 1. TACTILITY BETWEEN SUBLIME AND JOL I

Johann Gottfried Herder’s conception about touch leaves no place for illusions. He criticizes the delusive sight and overthrows the usual hierarchy of senses in the history of continental philosophy, asserting the 115 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 115–125. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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epistemological priority of touch as Sinn des Gefu¨hls in its double meaning, as touch and as feeling. Herder reformulates the Cartesian cogito as ‘‘Ich fu¨hle mich! Ich bin!’’ (236); Gefu¨hl provides the proof for one’s own (bodily) existence and thus makes possible knowledge of the outer world. Moreover, in the sense of touch converge not only the two dimensions of perception – objective qualities and affective impressions –, but also thinking. If sight produces ‘‘clear’’ ideas (Ideen), touch leads to ‘‘heavy’’ concepts (BegriVe) and to a ‘‘solid’’ ( gru¨ndlich) sensible knowledge, even if it therefore progresses carefully and slowly, rather like a sensory snail. This is, however, the price paid for reaching objective certainty: ‘‘Im Gesicht ist T raum, im Gefu¨hl Wahrheit’’ (Herder, 250). In other words, touch is the sense of corporeal solidity, of extension and force. Even God’s omnipotence as rational being is realized in his acting in the world, through touching and feeling the whole world. The further you can reach by touching, the further you can feel, and the greater is your power, claims Herder. Both universe and man are determined by two fundamental vital powers: attraction (Anziehung) and rejection (Zuru¨ckstoßung). It is not accidental that the same attraction and rejection were discussed in the history of aesthetics especially as reactions to the sublime. Herder’s mediating position between neo-classicism and romanticism is confirmed also by his art theory. Between painting as the visual-spatial art of surfaces, plans, and figures, and sculpture, as the art of force and monumentality, of corporeal things with their forms, Herder chooses – in a typical neoclassicist manner – the sculpture (Plastik), that is the tactile art. However, Herder not only takes his examples of so-called sculpture rather from the realm of architecture, but he also describes these similarly to the later Hegelian interpretation of architecture, i.e. as a sublime avant la lettre: Columns of colossal dimensions cannot be seen at a glance in darkness, but only touched along during a never ending process. What our hands experience little by little, piecemeal, seems to be bigger than what we can grasp at once visually. The apparent infinity of the touched object and the corresponding incompleteness of its haptic representation suggest greatness and inspire religious veneration (Herder, 314). On the other bank of the Rhine, Herder’s contemporary Denis Diderot declared his interest in the concrete experience of persons deprived of sight, which he analyzed – unlike Herder’s metaphysical approach – empirically. Diderot also suggests, like Herder, that blind people’s impressions when they investigate statues might be far more vivid than ours when we just look at them. What impressed him most, however, was the ‘‘painting’’ on the ‘‘canvas’’ of the blind person’s skin. In his L ettre sur

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les aveugles a` l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749) Diderot reproduces declarations of several sightless people that they are able to recognize silhouettes drawn on their hands and even, in case of well-known persons, to call them by name. While Herder associates touch with activity and force, the sense turns out to be, following Diderot, a matter of receptivity, refinement and subtlety. Interpreting the delicate sketches drawn on one’s hand requires a sense for fine distinctions. Herder’s sublime (Erhabenes) becomes joli, corpulence – a fine veil; the hand itself does not catch concepts (be-greifen), but is a sensitive mirror receiving impressions. With Diderot touch enters a different stylistic register: the rococo. The French philosopher does not any longer consider sight and touch in their irreducible opposition, but rather in their interchange and interweaving. After Leibniz had brought into light les petites perceptions and inaugurated by that a paradigm of physical and psychic continuity, Diderot suggested through the experience of the blind that the difference between touch and sight might be only gradual, insofar touch is nothing but a less refined sight. Thus Diderot implicitly opened the way for admitting for the first time that touch could make mistakes: if even the precise sense sight is exposed to confusions and deceptions, would this not be even more probable in the case of the ‘primitive’ sense touch? 2. THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE OF THE BLIND

The opposition between Herder’s and Diderot’s approaches concerning touch was lifted up and negated (in the Hegelian sense of Auf hebung) in phenomenology. In the 1930s, Ge´za Re´ve´sz carried out an experiment with blind people, asking them to judge aesthetically (neo)classical sculptures (three-dimensional works, mostly busts, but also bas-reliefs), simply by touching them (i.e. through stereognosis). His conclusion was the same as Diderot’s: blind subjects try to establish a correspondence between the concrete artistic reproduction of a person and specific beauty criteria for human types (according to age, sex, and race), which they have learned. In other words, beauty consists in correctness. Furthermore, the qualities ascribed by the blind to works of art and objects of common use blur the basic Kantian separation between pleasant (angenehm), beautiful (scho¨n), and good ( gut). But even mimetic correctness cannot be judged without first identifying the human type reproduced. As Re´ve´sz provided the tested subjects with absolutely no information concerning the objects they had to touch, they frequently committed errors of identification. It became apparent, for

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example, that the formal-haptic proportions of a woman’s face are close to a child’s, and that an error in interpreting a single detail could lead to opposite aesthetic judgments about the whole work. The eyes and mouth lose their essential importance in visually expressing feelings, and the mouth seems to be merely a transit station between the nose and chin. At the same time, previously secondary details come to the fore, such as the lack of teeth or face wrinkles as signs of age. In addition, the blind persons interviewed by Re´ve´sz were not able to recognize or differentiate artistic styles, and were generally trying to solve their task as soon as possible, without any special interest in lingering in ‘‘detached’’ aesthetic ‘‘contemplation’’ of their object of investigation. The individuality of the represented person escapes the blind person’s notice, Re´ve´sz noted, ignoring the fact that his own tests had no connection to the individual lives of his subjects. Concretely, the blind identify (sometimes surprisingly for us) and evaluate (aesthetically) persons around them not only by following their formal bodily regularities, the proportion and harmony of their features, but they also take into account their voices, body smells or the consistency of their flesh or fineness of the skin. But all these are languages that cannot be transposed without remainder into the sculptural matterform-synthesis. Despite an extended empirical-hermeneutical research (with methods of experimental psychology, art history, interviews with contemporary blind sculptors, etc.), the aesthetics of Re´ve´sz is nevertheless not unprejudiced. Some of its uncritical presuppositions, such as the belief in the universality of aesthetic judgment, are rooted in Kant, others belong to the heritage of philosophical anthropology, which identifies man’s essence with the ‘‘normal’’ presence of all senses. But above all his aesthetic theory relies on a false normative expectation: that blind persons should identify and appreciate haptically the same objects (with his example: Michelangelo’s Moses) as we do visually, disregarding the fact that these were created originally for the sense of vision and not for touch. But who or what guarantees that the ‘‘real’’ Moses is the one we see and not the one we touch? What could possible justify Re´ve´sz’ belief that eye judges ‘‘better’’ than hand and that the seeing person is right a principio? Furthermore, if several subjects were to make the same ‘‘mistake’’ in identifying the subject of a sculpture, might their judgment then be accepted as no less ‘‘real’’ than ours? Despite all these open questions, however, one thing remains indisputable: works of art created under visual control for the eyes cannot be judged accurately just by touching them. And conversely: no one can pretend to judge aesthetically the

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figurines shaped by blind sculptors simply by looking at them – we have to experience them haptically, in the same manner as their author did, otherwise we could fall prey to similar ‘‘illusions’’ as the blind do with ‘‘our’’ works. But although I do not share with Re´ve´sz the conclusion that persons deprived of sight are not capable of an authentic aesthetic experience, his research could still prove instructive for the contemporary defective pedagogy of art. Let us take a few examples of sculptures en ronde bosse and bas-reliefs: 1. In the Louvre Museum, copies of (neo)classical sculptures are placed at blind visitors’ disposal in the Tactile Gallery. The small room gathers three-dimensional heads, busts, full bodies and even bas-reliefs. Some works are adapted for the touch (for example, Miron’s Discobolus and the riding statue of Marcus Aurelius are reproduced on a small scale) and thus made – with a Heideggerian expression – zuhanden (ready-tohand). The works exposed are also accompanied by titles and explanations in Braille. Undoubtedly, it would be interesting to know why only human representations belonging to the classical art were selected, although modern art seems to be more accessible to the blind. The encounter with modern art diminishes after all also the difference between ‘‘correct’’ and ‘‘false’’ interpretations. In this respect, Wilhelm Cerveny’s attempt to interpret modern art (specifically, stylized figurative representations) together with blind children is noteworthy. The experiment was appreciated by its initiator as a real success, even if the subjects had once again refused to proclaim the touched works of art as ‘‘beautiful’’ and preferred instead to describe them as ‘‘interesting’’ or ‘‘giving a lot to think about’’. 2. In the Parisian Museum of Middle Age Cluny, models in bold relief of tapestries are designed for unseeing visitors. Decades before, Re´ve´sz’s study outlined that blind persons encountered serious difficulties in perceiving and understanding bas-reliefs. An important inconvenience of this category of works consists in the high complexity of the composition, with their several figures, mostly men and animals; these are represented in different positions and ordered in depth plans, which makes them interfere and overlap. As seeing subjects we are usually unaware of the fact that our very perception – as Panofsky showed – is already an interpretation and that the constitution of representations already presupposes that we complete in our mind the indeterminate zones and sche-

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matic ‘‘empty places’’ (L eerstellen – Ingarden). Such operations seem to become impossible for the sense of touch, whose subject – not far from Thomas – can perceive only what is present under his/her hands, being incapable of constituting phenomenologically the missing or concealed limbs of the body, sides of an object, etc. The representation remains incomplete till the end. Real means personally felt. As Constance Classen stated (147), however, research indicates that ‘‘the blind can identify and even draw pictures, insofar as these are available to the touch by means of raised lines’’, though one should add that this applies less to those blind from birth than to those who have had a previous visual experience. This discovery supported several studies that were undertaken in the past thirty years to translate pictures into tactile images: Projects seeking to design a television for sightless persons tried to convert visual information about movement, light contrasts and form patterns into vibrations or sounds (Klaus Hepp; Robert Ju¨tte, 353; Classen, 148). The albums edited by Living Paintings Trust in Great Britain contain relief reproductions of the paintings of old and modern masters, including detailed information about the artists and their work. Since 1962, when Daniel Spoerri arranged his first tactile labyrinth Dylaby in Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, a number of tactile museums and galleries have been opened in Europe, America and Japan; they exhibit not only sculptures of sighted and blind artists, but also play with the floor texture and with the inside temperature. Finally, ‘‘darkness courses’’ and half scientific, half fashionable experiments about dining in darkness like those initiated by Michel Reilhac in Paris in 1999 (Gouˆt du noir) and since imitated in Switzerland and Berlin have emphasized the difference between vision and touch, and reopened the question about the possibility of a tactile aesthetics. 3. THE ‘‘DECALOGUE’’ OF TOUCH

In the light of the new research I would suggest that, from Re´ve´sz’ major study on tactility, rather his psychology of touch than his aesthetics of blindness might still be relevant. By supposing that touch should achieve the same results as sight, Re´ve´sz contradicts his own general theory about touch, which he describes as a phenomenological one. The structural and functional differences between touch and sight are summed up in a ‘‘Decalogue’’ of the principles of tactility: 1. The stereoplastic principle refers to the instinctive need to take the object in the hand and to feel it or to investigate it on all sides. 2. The principle of successive progression

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defines tactility as a fragmentary and local perception; these characteristics are then repeated in the narrative description of the object. Unlike auditory perception, the subject’s haptic kinaesthesia give the impression of being accomplished arbitrarily and randomly, though they actually follow hints of the object itself, corresponding to its size, surface and whether it is already known or not. 3. The kinematic principle postulates that there be no tactile apprehension without body movement. 4. The metrical principle declares the hand to be the prototype of all measuring instruments. 5. The receptive and intentional attitude: Grosso modo, the visual subject is passive, the haptic, active. Concretely, what we see does not appear differently if the subject adopts a passive or an intentional attitude, but only more or less clearly. However, there is a difference between so-called haptomorph configurations (haptomorphe Gestalten), on the one hand, and optomorph configurations and integrative images (optomorphe Gestalten, Integrationsbilder), on the other hand. The haptomorph configurations are purely haptic and are constituted by a receptive subject. The other two types presuppose the subject’s intention to connect the individual tactile impressions to a representation, and are hybrid, bringing together haptic impressions, visual images and memories and even intellectual knowledge. 6. Touch aims at standardizing the object’s form, whereas sight individualizes. Tactile objects are apprehended in their general features and classified into already known categories. 7. The transforming tendency: being discontent with the ephemeral and vague character of their haptic impressions, sighted persons attempt to convert these into visual representations, either by associating them with already known images or – radically – trying to visualize every partial touch of an object. The result is nevertheless different from the usual visual image of the object. 8. The structural analysis: the haptic subject is guided in his/her investigation by the relation between the parts of the object or between the parts and the whole. Usually, the blind first touch the entire object rapidly, for a general orientation, and only then analyze its parts more carefully. 9. The constructive synthesis draws attention to the defining incompleteness of the haptic form (exceptions to this rule are the simple geometrical forms). 10. Finally, the autonomous formative principle (Gestaltungsprinzip) asserts that it is possible to perceive form even without any support from sight. The phenomenologically grounded irreducibility of the worlds of the senses is emphasized also by Merleau-Ponty (257–259), who mentions illusions of formerly blind persons right after their healing. These were tempted to grasp sunlight or were conducting their eyes along the object’s

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outline as if they were hands. However, the sensory specificity – states Merleau-Ponty – does not exclude by any means the functional interrelation of the senses, which he conceives according to the model of the binocular sight. In sum, from a phenomenological point of view tactile illusions or judgment errors occur when one attempts to convert touch into sight and to grasp the visible or inversely, to visualize the tangible. 4. HAPTIC EMPATHY

Another phenomenon that throws a new light over the question about reality and illusion is the sculpture created by persons who are blind from birth. It was Re´ve´sz again who analyzed such figurines, produced in the Blindenerziehungsinstitut in Vienna, and criticized them as aesthetically unconvincing, due to their ‘‘expressionist’’ distortions. One of them, entitled L oneliness, for example, represents a man sitting on a chair, with outstretched arms to the world. Not only are the arms disproportionately long, but also his head and hands are bigger than usual, and the forehead wrinkles deeper. The ‘‘artist’’ explains that he had imagined how he would feel if he were alone and expressed this feeling without having any experience at all of what a person looks like in such a mood. Contra Re´ve´sz I would suggest here again that these figurines are not made for being contemplated, but that they should be experienced by repeating the creator’s gestures, in a sort of Nachvollzug. Thus the deformations seen in the modeled body might not actually be grounded in a casual lack of talent, but in the haptic empathy itself, a phenomenon which remained, as far as I know, unanalyzed in the psychology of art, with its focus on visual empathy (Einfu¨hlung). But if the ‘‘distortions’’ noted in the sculptures created by the blind have a structural-general cause, then they should be more or less inevitable: anyone can verify this in everyday life, by trying to shape a figure or even move one’s body or dance with closed eyes. It turns out that corners become sharper, distances increase, and even the body‘s borders seem to shift when we localize them from inside, proprioceptively, instead of observing them from outside. How then does this expanded (i.e. not just oculocentric) concept of experience affect our common understanding of reality and illusion? Could or should the ‘‘transformations’’ of distances and borders mentioned above be regarded as mere illusions? We cannot deny that they are ‘‘really’’ felt, and still are invalidated by opening our eyes. The haptic empathy – a basic experience for any performing artist, even if, in preparing the show, he/she controls each bodily expression and movement in

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the mirror or by watching the others’ reactions – emphasizes the dissimilarities between the scientific objective space and the phenomenological, qualitative and experienced space, with its concepts of place and position, of remoteness and closeness. And after all what legitimates, for example, the claim that dance is rather a visual spectacle than a kinaesthetic experience?

5. VIRTUAL TOUCH

However, the most radical form of tangible illusions was made possible in the electronic age by the new media. In the past twenty years, experiments involving telepresence and virtual reality successfully simulated touch impressions over spatial distance and dimmed the demarcation line between technology and (cyber)art. One of the first was T ransatlantic W restling Performance from 1986, when two Canadian artists, Norman White and Doug Back, succeeded in shaking hands between Paris and Toronto via phone cable. Similarly, Paul Shermon’s installation T elematic Dream simulated the touch of another person by means of a videoconference. Data gloves and data suits enabled the contact with an encompassing virtual reality, that replaces the ‘‘real world’’, requiring a new reflection on sensory perceptions, on illusions, on the body‘s borders and the world of art. The classical philosophical distinction between being awake and sleeping turns out to be insufficient, its alternative, problematic. T ertium datur – and this is precisely the cyberworld. The same philosophy usually shuffled off the responsibility for producing illusions on dreaming. But the experience of virtual reality can neither be reduced to some technical sort of day-dreaming, nor confounded with psychopathological illusions. It is also questionable whether experiencing virtual reality does not go beyond any touching of illusions, becoming an illusionary touch. Moreover, at least one consideration makes me doubt whether simulation can be considered as a kind of illusion: illusions are experienced per definitionem involuntarily, even if the subject can be intentionally misled by other persons (by a magician or a painter), whereas no one experiences virtual simulations without assent. But leaving aside here the question of whether illusions are possible also inside the virtual world, as – so to speak – illusions of the second degree, art illusions and virtual perceptions have in common at least a playful character (Lat. illudere – illusion).

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Totally different is the case of pathological disorders. When proprioception recedes and one’s own body threatens to slip away and become illusionary, one feels the need to inflict pain on oneself. The difference between such ‘‘cutters’’ and religious flagellants is striking: in the medieval flogging two levels of reality were in conflict, the mundane and the sacred; the believers were voluntarily sacrificing the reality of their body, in order to open themselves to a pervading higher reality. In contrast, the cutters do not trust reality anymore and resort to the own body as to the last citadel against the invasion of derealization (Entwirklichung). A dialectic-existential attempt (such as Kierkegaard’s in Sickness unto Death) would even postulate that man has to reach a certain equilibrium between reality and possibility, between (tactile) reality and illusion taken in a wide meaning, including sensory deceptions and productive fictions. Moreover, psychic health is based on a tactile meso´ tgz: not only feeling too weakly (like cutters or the subjects of experiments on radical sensory deprivation do), but also feeling excessively may damage the bodily integrity, may lead to existential crises or even to mental illness. Let me mention here two final examples: Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s L a nause´e, cannot keep the surrounding objects at a distance; his ‘‘nausea’’ is unleashed when he feels how the door handle touches him while opening the door, and reaches its climax when, sitting in a tramway, he feels again how the seat itself touches him like a myriapod. From this perspective, illusions emerge, in a paradoxical manner, precisely when reality comes too close to the subject. The inevitable vulnerability of tactility (one cannot touch without being touched himself ) can develop into the fear of touching and being touched. Its pathological form was described over a century ago by Henri Legrand du Saulle as ‘‘la folie du doute avec de´lire du toucher’’. The patients suffering from manic doubts are scared that, by touching certain objects, they could be infected by their uncleanness or toxicity. Accordingly, they avoid as much as possible any physical contact (in extreme cases, for instance, walking in their room only on one line of the parquet) and transform their daily toilet into absurd rituals. Once the illness becomes chronic, the sick persons isolate themselves and do not leave their room anymore, while their movements slow down, to the point of immobility. In this case, abnormal psychical illusions have far-reaching consequences over the concrete touch and over the whole kinaesthetic system.

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In conclusion, relating touch to the topic of reality and illusion remains one-sided if the role of touch is reduced to that of a corrective to visual illusions. On close inspection it turns out that touch itself is exposed to at least three kinds of illusion: in interpreting the perceived, in apprehending one’s own bodily limits, and in touching the ‘‘invisible’’. Finally, psychical delusions can also affect the concrete touch and disturb the experience of reality. Academy of Fine Arts V ienna, Austria BIBLIOGRAPHY Classen, Constance. T he Color of Angels. Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Diderot, Denis. Œuvres philosophiques. Paris: Garnier Fre`res, 1964. ¨ sthetik, I–III. T heorie Werkausgabe, vol. 13–15. Hegel, G. W. F. Vorlesungen u¨ber die A Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970. Hepp, Klaus. ‘‘Projekt fu¨r eine sehende Haut’’. In T asten, edited by Uta Brandes, Claudia Neumann. Schriftenreihe Forum, vol. 7, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Go¨ttingen: Steidl, 1996. Herder, Johann Gottfried. ‘‘Zum Sinn des Gefu¨hls’’, ‘‘Plastik. Einige Wahrnehmungen u¨ber Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Tra¨ume’’. In Schriften zu Philosophie, L iteratur, Kunst und Altertum, 1774–1787, Herder-Werke vol. 4, edited by Ju¨rgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994. Ju¨tte, Robert. Geschichte der Sinne. Von der Antike bis zum Cyberspace. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000. ¨ sthetik neuer Technologien’’. In Die Kerckhove, Derrick de. ‘‘Touch versus Vision: A ¨ sthetischen, edited by Wolfgang Welsch. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993. Aktualita¨t des A Kierkegaard, Søren. T he Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard’s W ritings XIX. Edited and translated by with introduction and notes, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1983. Legrand du Saulle, Henri. L a folie du doute avec de´lire du toucher; suivi de De l’e´tat mental des habitants de Paris pendant les e´ve´nements de 1870–1871. Toulouse: Privat, 1998. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phe´nome´nologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Re´ve´sz, G[e´za]. Die Formenwelt des T astsinnes. 1. Grundlegung der Haptik und der Blindenpsychologie. 2. Forma¨sthetik und Plastik der Blinden, 2 vols. Hague: Nijhoff, 1938. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L a Nause´e. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.

BRIAN GRASSOM

REALITY, ILLUSION, AND ALTERITY: THE ADVENT OF THE OTHER

PART I. REALITY AND ILLUSION Lead me from the unreal to the real, Lead me from darkness to light, Lead me from death to immortality. Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad

When considering this verse from the collected wisdom of India’s ancient philosophers and seers, the texts of the Upanishads,1 we have to bear in mind that thousands of years ago those seekers of truth came to their conclusions by way of an enquiry into the fundamental questions of human existence. Their method of enquiry differed from our own philosophical tradition in one major respect – it was based upon a personal engagement with the phenomena of existence at a level somewhat removed from the entirely rationalistic. It was not proscribed by religion either, but was an empirical approach that paid strict attention to the personal experiences of each subject-author, who attempted to interpret the larger experience of life in the light of his own reason, knowledge, and intuition. Perhaps the greatest gift of this enquiry to humanity at large was to offer the realisation that there existed a higher Self, above and beyond the individual ‘I’ but intimately connected with it. According to Upanishadic philosophy, knowledge of this Self provided an understanding of the mysteries of Life, and the key to wisdom, peace, and true immortality. ‘Lead me from the unreal to the real’ is at once a heartfelt invocation to and a realisation of the Self whose reality was described as being beyond the small ‘I’ of the ego. The relationship between these two senses of ‘I’-ness is illustrated by a metaphor. Two identical birds – companions – sit within the branches of a tree. One eats the fruits of the tree, whilst the other looks on. One is bound by illusion, the other free from it. Art, and painting in particular, is fond of illusion. In fact painting owes its existence to illusion. What we see, as soon as a mark or a brushstroke is applied to paper, wall, or canvas, is the illusion of space. A new world has been created. When all the marks together in this new world depict a face, or a flower, or a landscape, it is undoubtedly an illusion. What 127 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 127–137. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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you see may look like a face or flower, but it does not exist before you in reality. It exists only within the picture, within the painting, and is made up of brushstrokes of coloured pigment. On the other hand, the mark itself, or the brushstroke, has its own existence: and that existence is, beyond doubt, a reality. You can see it. You might even be able to feel it, if it has a texture. Thus painting deals in both reality and illusion. The painting, as a physical object is real: what it presents (as representation or abstraction) is an illusion. The mark is, in addition, part of the life of the painting.2 The life of the painting deals with other realities. These are signified in the painting in one way or another. Aesthetically the mark as itself may count for quite a lot. For example the brushstroke, which has its own physical reality as paint, can also signify a movement, a gesture on the part of the artist. As such it is a trace of the artist’s hand. It may convey style, formal awareness, or expression. Such realities are real in the phenomenological sense – they exist as they present themselves to our consciousness. These impressions on the perception of the viewer are subtle but no less real than the paint, canvas, and wood of the art object. One might say that they are subtle realities. They are felt rather than seen, but they are concrete realities just the same. There are many subtle realities within a painting, which emerge by virtue of our perception. When we come to reflect upon representation within a painting we encounter them in strength. First of all, it is the peculiar magic of a representational painting that its manipulation and its re–presentation of reality fascinate us. The carefully orchestrated illusion of the real is somehow more interesting than reality itself. It has the power to arrest our attention and induce a feeling of contemplative wonder. This is perhaps what attracts us to what we call representational art. In the painting T he Annunciation by Fra Angelico what we see principally is the illusion of space upon a two-dimensional surface. The combination of the oblique view and the perspective of the architecture,3 although innovative in the fifteenth century, present us nowadays with a reality that is slightly unnatural. The strangely beautiful world depicted reflects a changing perception of reality from the medieval to the renaissance: it holds traces of the nascence of a new consciousness. It also sets the tone for the strangely beautiful event described by the painting’s narrative, which is a naissance of another kind. At the time it was painted the pictorial imagery, its conventions, signs and symbols, would be familiar to the painting’s intended audience of

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Figure 1. Fra Angelico, T he Annunciation, c. 1440, Monastery of San Marco, Florence. By kind permission of the Ministry for Cultural Assets and Activities, Florence.

Dominican monks, and would help to communicate its narrative: e.g. angels as supernatural beings have wings; both figures are accompanied by halos; Mary is cloaked in blue and has her arms crossed upon her breast as a conventional sign of humility (‘‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to Thy Word’’). And so the monastic community would recognise the story of the Angel Gabriel, as God’s messenger, announcing to Mary that she is to become the mother of Jesus, the Son, the Incarnation of God. The scene depicts the monastery – San Marco in Florence – in which the painting itself is actually sited. The fresco, on a corridor wall, is opposite the top of the stairs leading to the second floor of the main building, and is slowly revealed as one ascends the last few steps. The effect would be dramatic to its intended audience – the monastic community and such laymen as were allowed entry to that part of the monastery, where the cells for spiritual contemplation are situated. The painting would make immediate sense to its audience; it would be profoundly significant to them, individually and as a community, and so would integrate fully with its physical (i.e. spatial) and social context.

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The depiction of religious stories follows a didactic representational tradition long familiar to the people of mid-fifteenth century Europe. The aesthetic of the San Marco Annunciation is within an accepted style (essentially Gothic), which would, as a mode of visual conventions, appear familiar to them and so render the picture accessible. What would be striking to that audience would be the effect of the painting’s innovative qualities: the realism of the figures and their setting, in terms of form, space, colour, and perspective would enhance the effect of immediacy and relevance and so add to the painting’s communicative power. What we would have is a beautiful painting with perfect contextual relevance, depicting an event of profound religious significance. In its context it was not only aesthetically fulfilling but entirely practical and useful.4 As such, its ‘reality’ was assured. But now let as deal with the problems it poses for us in terms of reality and illusion. Its claim to reality (if indeed it makes one) appears to be first of all that it recalls a real event. From its initiation, the story of that event would be first spoken in Hebrew, then later translated and transcribed in Greek and Latin. The story came to the author of the text (St. Luke) by paths now unknown.5 Under the textual layering, therefore, the actuality of the event is uncertain. Let us also consider the structure of the narrative. Every story needs a teller and a listener. The original narrator could only have been Mary herself, because the angel appeared to her privately. We may also reasonably speculate that her experience was an inner one. Thus there are in the story only two participants – Mary and the angel: And yet the story is told by another. The narrator is an invisible, objective, first person who is at one and the same time in logical and chronological sequence the spectator, the narrator, and also by deferring the story through time, the future listener. As intended, you and I become one with the narrator and are (understood to be) invited to read of the event along with that ‘first person’. The painting depicts the written narrative, and follows the same method. Here the painter is the narrator, and we as spectator gain access to the event through the mediation of this phantasmal first person, whose vacant viewpoint we occupy. We see all the important points in the story occurring together as a scene, frozen in time. But here too there are problems. First of all, the painting shows us the event as taking place in a space that is intended to represent the ‘real’ world:6 But it shows the monastery of San Marco as the setting whereas the event would have occurred in a house in Galilee.7 Again, in the text the angel is not

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described, nor is Mary. Moreover if another person had been present as observer (and, remember, no-one was) they might witness Mary’s physical response, but the angel may well have remained invisible to them. If the painter, Fra Angelico, despite his name, had never seen an angel himself, then he must have relied upon (for the visual characteristics of angels) either pictorial conventions or upon his own imagination.8 However, if we are prepared to accept by way of faith the authenticity of the story, it then tells of an event that could never be substantiated as historical fact because that event, if real, was in its essence personal, experiential and mystical.9 Although accepted without question in its original context, the truth of the painting’s literal narrative remains in our time a matter of faith. (Aesthetically it may even be a matter of indifference). What we have then is a phenomenal image, arguably an aesthetic image (a matter too complex for further enquiry here)10 whose meaning, like the space between the two figures, is forever suspended between belief and disbelief, between faith and reason. It is wrapped in layers of intentionality, subject to hermeneutics and exegesis, semiotics and symbolism, and even psychological analysis. Strangely enough in spite of this, or even because of it, the painting with its complex weave of reality and illusion is charged with a mysticism that forever slips through the net of rationality. It attracts us into its shallow space, our imagination led like our vision in and out of its pillars and archways, garden, cloisters and halfhidden chambers. In this way our subject, T he Annunciation, contains a universe of intentionality, of which we ourselves are the author. PART II: FROM THE UNREAL TO THE REAL

In the Republic, his explication of the ideal city-state, Plato held that representation in painting was painting’s inherent imperfection. According to Plato,11 in the order of being mimesis comes after both the ideal form and its earthly manifestation, and is therefore inferior. In this sense one might say that pictorial representation is tantamount to illusion – in that it is not true or real. It is a second-generation copy of reality. Platonic Reality is the Ideal Form, and everything other than that is a shadow, a phantom. (Viewed in this way the whole of earthly life could be said to be illusion, with the only reality being that of the spiritual: a philosophy that had influenced Christian theology before Fra Angelico’s time). According to the Platonic view, an object – or what we call material reality – would only become more perfect in proportion to how close it

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might come to the ideal. But as long as it does not actually become the ideal, it can never be truly perfect, nor can it ever be truly real. Since it would seem by definition impossible for any object to become completely perfect, it follows that nothing created is actually Real in the Platonic sense. Therefore everything we see, if not real, must be the opposite – that is, unreal or illusory.

Figure 2. Brian Grassom, City II (detail), 2001.

Now this rather disconcerting state of affairs might become more acceptable if we introduce the concept of time (and this may be implicit in Heidegger).12 Through time things can perhaps become perfect. Therefore today’s perfection will be tomorrow’s imperfection, and so on. The introduction of time has the effect of removing the concept of Perfection as a static absolute. In this way everything that presents itself to our perception is already perfect, for the moment, since everything is always becoming perfect. By extension we could say that everything is Real, for the moment, since everything is always becoming Real.

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In postmodern thinking the whole concept of the transcendent (as in Plato’s Ideal Form) is problematic. But it has been shown by Heidegger, Derrida,13 Vattimo and others that if the transcendent ‘being’ of ontology is neither negated, nor deferred infinitely like Plato’s Ideal Form, but included, then everything would be seen to be ‘true’ in the sense that Being is within everything, rather than metaphysics defining a truth about Being as another object, or assuming its ‘presence’ as a concept. Thus it is currently impossible to challenge or ‘overcome’ any theory or tradition without substituting another, which must itself fall within the range of critique that is implicit in modernist and postmodernist thinking. In this democracy of values everything may have its say, without any one thing being of unchallenged authority. One might say everything can have its ‘moment’ of reality, its being. Vattimo takes Heidegger to infer – ... there is no Grund, or ultimate truth; there are only historically destined or historically despatched overtures from a Selbst or Same, which gives itself to us through these overtures (by traversing them rather than by using them as a means).14

The inference of this for painting could be that everything within the pictorial scheme of a painting has its place and being and is therefore real; nothing is actually false or illusory. The experience of a painting is just as real as the breakfast you had this morning, or the air that you breathed on your way to the auditorium. If this is not so, then the opposite must be the case – everything, including your breakfast, was an illusion. Factual truth or untruth, reality and illusion, become irrelevant to the painting’s summation of thoughts, references, significations, beliefs, and feelings: and as subjective phenomena these constitute a world of impressions that have their existence (and reality) within Being, like waves on a sea of consciousness.

PART III: ALTERITY

We assume that what is within a painting, or a novel, or a play, is not real in a rationalistic, objective sense. And this has always been art’s intrinsic value – it deals with a world of ‘make-believe’. However much we become immersed in that world, it is never real. From cave paintings to the present day, art has provided a liminal world where the experiences of life can be assimilated and its problems worked out without our immediate involvement with them. They are suspended from space and time, removed from everyday reality to the status of illusion, where they

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can be safely contemplated. It is within this state of contemplation that an assimilation of experience takes place: and we come to realise that Being shines through experience, no matter what the experience. All is phenomena, and all is valid. We ourselves, or rather what we come to realise as ourselves, are unattached. Reality is everywhere: and like the Upanishadic bird, our only illusion is our attachment to it. Subject to this realisation we begin to see that our lives are, in the same way as art, constituted of phenomenal experiences – nothing more, nothing less. But of vital importance are the position we take when considering the experiences, and the value we give them. That position is reflective, contemplative. It is a position of distance; and the value – a positive one – is made possible by difference. Although we have an experience, we are ‘different’ from it. I would say that both position and value are provided by art. For this reason a common view of our time, that reality and illusion seem to be virtually the same, i.e. all illusion, and that therefore life is meaningless apart from whatever enjoyment one derives from indulging the illusion (which turns out to be the old argument of hedonism put in a new way) must be seen to be illusion itself: For in order to appreciate experience totally, one must be detached from it. This is not logically possible to do whilst retaining one’s active participation in it, and being partial to it or affected by it, and one has therefore to be someone else simultaneously in order to see clearly one’s own situation – to experience all that is given in life and at the same time be detached from it. This someone else cannot simply be another person caught in the same corporeal, time-space situation, but must be a Someone, both immediate and transcendent, entirely within oneself while being detached from oneself. T. S. Eliot has indicated such a seemingly unlikely position – I was still the same, knowing myself, yet being someone other.15

Being someone other is not something that it is possible to do. Rather, it is something that, in the spirit of the poem, emerges through reflection, discrimination and contemplation. It is to a large extent, by definition, beyond the reach of either desire or cognition. As such it is an experience that transforms the quotidian view of life – Metaphysics, transcendence, the welcoming of the Other by the Same, of the other by Me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the Same by the Other, that is the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge.16

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When we can appreciate difference, we can respect the ‘otherness’ of being. When we recognise ‘otherness’ in a person, it is the basis of human civility. Strangely, this discrimination of ‘otherness’ is also the basis of oneness, just as uncertainty is the basis of knowledge. With this realisation comes the truly ethical, as indicated by Levinas, and with it a case for the ethical basis of art. To be oneself yet to be someone other is the classic state of consciousness that is signified, though not embodied, by art. Within this consciousness true Reality is beyond concepts of reality and illusion: it is something Other.

PART IV: THE ADVENT OF THE OTHER

Thus T he Annunciation, regardless of the truth or otherwise of its narrative, indeed announces something. What it announces is another Reality, a Poetic reality, the infinite reality of Self, beyond the finite concepts of reality and illusion. The subject of the story, the Person announced, is absent, or rather not yet present. The angel is announcing an event that is to happen in the future. It is yet to come. For the moment it could be said to be nascent, but not yet manifested. The event to come is a birth. The birth is a beginning, but it is also an end. It is the end of waiting, of expectation, a fulfilment. It is to be sure the fulfilment of a promise – always to come, always immanent. And when it arrives that will be an end, and also a new beginning. But it has not arrived – not yet. We know that it will come. It is written in the book of time. For the moment though, it has its Being, but remains invisible. It is not represented. And yet it in a way it is represented: by absence, which is its immanent presence. The absence signifies presence, a presence that is not there, not real, not yet. We know something of its qualities. They have been known for ages. It is foretold, but unprecedented; it will be mortal, yet immortal; and when it has come and been and gone, it will still be here but somewhere else as well; absent, but always present. It is the announcement of the ever-unfulfilled promise: the advent of the Other. The invisible is about to become visible. The unnameable will be named. The unknowable will become knowable. The impossible is about to happen, quietly and peacefully. A Stranger will appear at the door of the heart. Silence will become sound for a brief moment in

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eternity, before becoming Silence once more. Time stands still, and waits for eternity to pass, before becoming time again. Gray’s Art School T he Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, United Kingdom. NOTES 1 T he Upanishads, trans. Mascaro, Juan (London, Penguin Books, 1965), p. 127. 2 I refer to the ‘life of the painting’ although a painting has perhaps no life other than in the mind of the percipient. In this respect, I am reminded of the intriguing title of a book by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard – T he Psychology of Fire. 3 Cf. John White, T he Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 3rd ed. (London, Faber & Faber, 1987) for a thorough examination of the depiction of space in late Medieval and Renaissance art. 4 Here much could be said regarding the Hegelian view of historical artefacts, (cf. Lambriano, M., ‘‘Now and Then/Then and Now: Doubling and Forgetting In, Around and Outside the Museum,’’ L ondon Consortium, previous course essays: londonconsortium.com/kant); also the link between Hegel and Derrida (cf. Kierans, K., ‘‘Beyond Deconstruction,’’ Animus, vol. 2, 1997). In the case of the Annunciation, the painting’s physical situation has not altered but it is separated from its historical context by time. 5 St. Luke refers to ‘eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word ...’ (Luke, 1:2). 6 In saying this I am making an assumption. What was the ‘real world’ to Fra Angelico, whose perception would be influenced by concepts of reality current to late-medieval thought? 7 As above. Is the visit of an angel an event that ‘occurs’? Perhaps it is for the benefit of the Friars that it is shown happening in their own monastic surroundings, and is intended to illustrate, by way of metaphor, Christ being born into the lives of those following the religious order in San Marco (I am speculating). 8 As a Dominican monk, Fra Angelico would have at least been familiar with the writings of Thomas Aquinas, to whom the existence of angels and their ontological characteristics were matters of discursive knowledge. Contrast this with the empiricism of Hume, who would have regarded the angel’s appearance as an assemblage or hybrid of recalled visual memories, e.g. the wings of a bird, the form of a man/woman. 9 Here I do not mean to refer to Husserl’s ‘principle of principles’ as a claim to the story’s historical truth. The experienced reality here is, I feel, different from the ‘infinity’ of meaning and being that, according to Derrida, is implicit in Husserl’s phenomenology of subjective experience. 10 The aesthetic dimension is very important to the notion of art providing a medium for Alterity. However, since the discussion here is about reality and illusion, and necessarily brief, I have concentrated on that aspect. 11 Plato, T he Republic, 2 vols., trans. Paul Shorey (London: William Heinemann, 1956), Vol. II, pp. 419–433. 12 Martin Heidegger, Being and T ime, trans. McQuarrie & Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992).

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13 Also, Derrida has drawn attention to Plato’s Philebus, wherein he sees a vindication of painting as a form, like writing, that sometimes precedes eidos, reversing the order of being. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 189. 14 Gianni Vattimo, T he End of Modernity, trans. J. R. Snyder (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988), p. 175. 15 T. S. Eliot, ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ Collected Poems, 1909–62 (London: Faber & Faber, 1974). 16 Emmanuel Levinas, T otality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press), p. 289.

JO ANN CIRCOSTA

SILENCE AS DISCLOSURE: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S STYLE OF BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

Silence, as Bernard Dauenhauer has written, is indeed a positive phenomenon rather than, as many would assume, absence of meaning. Poets and mystics, early and late, both east and west, have long recognized the importance of silence. Dauenhauer’s effort to examine and establish the ontological status of silence is a notable exception to the fact that systematic philosophical discussion has lagged behind artists’ efforts to relate the importance of the elusive phenomenon of silence. As one of the great experimenters of Modernist literature, Virginia Woolf was a pioneer in contemporary treatment of silence by literary artists. And, as one of the twentieth century’s most philosophical writers, Woolf ’s deployment of silence is also some of the most complex and interesting. Silence holds Woolf ’s attention from the beginning of her career with T he Voyage Out, in which one character, a young, aspiring writer wishes to write a novel about ‘‘what people don’t say. A novel of silence’’, through to her last work Between the Acts whose very title hints at the importance of a silent in between. Influenced by Dauenhauer’s work on silence, I want to examine how Virginia Woolf conceived of silence as part of the interplay between the individual and his world, the ‘‘dyad’’ made up of the ‘determinate’ (humankind) and the ‘nondeterminate’ (world), which, while forming a synthesis, cannot be resolved into a finished whole.1 Woolf ’s use of silence is freighted with significance because it helps relate three of the her major concerns: the ambiguous and interrogatory nature of human existence, the achievement in writing of offering a more profound depiction of human existence, and her ability to convey her unique vision of life in a way that the ‘‘common reader’’ would find revealing. One way Woolf writes silence is in the form of peripheral characters that help express her philosophical ideas about the man-world dyad in which the nature of that relationship is revealed as fundamentally interrogative. Further, her silent figures signal an approach to creativity that emphasizes the ontological and epistemological significance of silence to life. Such representations bring into focus silence as deeply relevant to the gap of understanding between the perceiving subject and the world, a gap that, for Woolf, it is the artist’s job to bridge. Considered in this context, Woolf ’s silent, ethereal images are an attempt to connect her 139 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 139–153. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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readers with that silent but powerful and meaning-full gap between the propositional mode of language, our primary, but limited, way of communicating, and the latent meaning of the world of Being that is part of what Woolf hopes to convey. The role of the author as artist, Woolf implies, is to be the intermediary between self and world, to build a bridge between the silent world of meaning that surrounds us and our desire to find meaning. But, that is not to say that the search for meaning ends with a fixed and necessarily positive answer. Woolf ’s silent images in her central texts, Mrs. Dalloway, T o the L ighthouse, and T he Waves, are sites of interrogation, a vector for the human position of a perceiving and thus perpetually questioning subject in confrontation with the world. As such, they represent not easy or complete answers, but rather the silent interrogatory ‘space’ in our experience. Hence they are peripheral in nature, neither fully in nor fully out the text, neither entirely present, nor entirely absent, but nonetheless critically important. Silent figures such as the old poet Carmichael in T o the L ighthouse and the woman writing in T he Waves, at key points in Woolf ’s major texts, represent a kind of portal to the silent world, which exists on the edge of the so-called solid world of things, the crucial point where questioning of what we know and what can be known is most intense. Perhaps this is the ‘‘zone of silence’’ that Woolf felt artists live in.2 They serve as Woolf ’s dramatic expression of MerleauPonty’s claim that ‘‘The meaning of what the artist is going to say is nowhere, neither in things nor in his non-formulated life. It calls attention away from a fully constituted reason in which ‘cultivated men’ enclose themselves, to another which would contain its own origins’’3 But, Woolf ’s silent characters are not just an idiosyncratic element of style. They become a significant vehicle in Woolf ’s attempt to share with the reader a penetrating sense of the tension inherent in the man-world relationship which, while it can never be resolved, carries actual significance. In this respect, Woolf appears to share Dauenhauer’s thesis that ‘‘Both man and world are syntheses of two irreducible, but non-self-standing, components which are not contraries of one another. Being is the interplay of the play of these two components in man on the one hand and world on the other.’’4 Through her silent characters Woolf, as Dauenhauer does, questions the Platonic doctrine of the dyad and ultimately rejects the notion that it can be resolved into the One. Meaning is found in the very questioning itself and art is often its agent. Questioning then is fundamental to the human quest to understand our place in the world. As Merleau-Ponty has said, the interrogative is

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not simply derivative from the indicative and the positive, neither a form of negation nor of affirmation. It is rather the ‘‘original manner of aiming at something ... which by principle no statement or ‘answer’, can go beyond and which perhaps therefore is the proper mode of our relationship with Being. These questions [of knowing] call not for an exhibiting of something said which would put an end to them, but for the disclosure of a Being ... because it is silently behind all formulated questions.’’5 The spaces of silence that Woolf portrays then are both site of interrogation of Being and bridge to closer access to Being, and thus help relate our fundamental relation to Being. A questioning spirit is what Woolf found so compelling in the work of Russian writer who she felt related a ‘‘sense that there is no answer, that if honestly examined life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation that fills us with a deep, and finally it may be with a resentful, despair.’’6 Thus, though questioning is central to the human-world dyad, when it leads us most explicitly to the unanswerability within life, it can also lead to despair. Woolf, in a somewhat Nietzschean way, saw at the core of the artistic effort a fundamental opposition between hope and despair, the beautiful illusion of art and the raw reality of life, and the release of the Dionysian revelation linked to the very depths of Being,7 and the placid and self-contained Apollinian form of the artwork – what was called by one character in Woolf ’s second novel Night and Day, as ‘‘the faith in an illusion’’8 that existence requires. Thus her silent characters also carry with them an element of ominousness. Nevertheless, she also seemed to share the Nietzschean belief that the value of art to life could not be underestimated in its ability to add both to the questioning and the quest that is life. This is the realization of Lily Briscoe at the end of T o the L ighthouse when she is finally able to enact her particular vision by completing her painting. As the aspiring artist, it is Lily’s role to bridge to the two realms of the human-world dyad and, it is implied, she cannot do so without the silent presence of the old poet Augustus Carmichael, the focus of this discussion. The poet figure in the novel is part of Woolf ’s effort to give presence to the silent realm of meaning within the creative process that exists apart from what Merleau-Ponty would call the typical or ‘‘profane vision’’ – the ordinary seeing of everyday life. To emphasize the power of this silent realm of imagining, Woolf establishes a network of comparisons between Mrs. Ramsay, arguably the novel’s central figure, Carmichael the old poet, and Lily, the younger

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woman who wishes to be an artist when Victorian societal constraints discourage it. When the old poet first appears, Mrs. Ramsay is off balance and drained emotionally after having just finished reassuring her philosopher husband that he is not a failure. This moment in the text helps define Mrs. Ramsay’s role as one of reconciling, affirming, and supporting; she is at the center of the nexus of relationships that come together at the Ramsay’s summer home. At this point also Woolf calls again on an image that she referenced in A Room of One’s Own to signal a somewhat threatening aspect in the approach of the poet when the narrative voice states simply: ‘‘A shadow was on the page’’.9 Just as the shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’, the egotistical, male persona that Woolf claims has blunted women’s creativity and detracted from most maleauthored literature, so too does Mr. Carmichael cast a pall on Mrs. Ramsay’s special kind of creativity – her ability to give, to reconcile, to affirm. And here, the egotistical ‘‘I,’’ in the form of the old male poet is used to allude to the difference in the vision between Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Carmichael. Mrs. Ramsay’s is more the ‘‘profane vision’’ of everyday life, being engrossed as she is in the lives of those around her while Carmichael’s is more that of artistic vision. In this extremely subtle way, Woolf establishes the gap between the subject inured of ordinary seeing (Mrs. Ramsay) and the silent but profound seeing of the artist (Carmichael).’10 Carmichael the poet emerges ‘‘precisely now, at the very moment when it was painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships.’’11 He makes her feel, ‘‘that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity.’’12 Carmichael, the model of the detached artist who says little, takes opium, does acrostics ‘‘endlessly’’,’13 highlights the frailty of human relationships, Mrs. Ramsay’s raison d’etre and which, it is implied, perhaps keep her vision limited. That is, while Mrs. Ramsay has her own profound relationship to silence as we learn when she retreats to her ‘‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’’,14 there is also obvious contrast made between her outlook and that of the poet Carmichael. Mrs. Ramsay, the artist of actual living is confronted by Carmichael, the artist of words, in whom she finds a wall of indifference, an unknown and unknowable presence who is the obverse of Mrs. Ramsay after her death: he is the absence that is present. While Mrs. Ramsay’s presence lingers and perhaps is even stronger after her death, Mr. Carmichael’s presence evokes a more thoroughgoing timelessness which, the narrative voice implies, is the similar goal of his art: ‘‘he was the same – monumental, and contemplative,’’ ‘‘content and dignified,’’15 much like a Buddha statue,

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mute with secrets that Mrs. Ramsay cannot unlock. There is an apparent opposition between the artist of life, Mrs. Ramsay, who lives in the present and who appears so central to the text, and the artist of words, Mr. Carmichael who appears detached, peripheral, and timeless, like the refined and classical poetry of Ovid which he often reads. During the ‘‘Time Passes’’ segment of the novel, the middle section that grounds the story, an actual writing of silence, the usually lively Ramsay summer home falls into quiet darkness. There is a profound sense of withdrawal as evening closes and everyone returns to the house and lights are extinguished. Only one lamp remains burning, that of Mr. Carmichael, who ‘‘kept his candle burning rather longer than the rest’’ because he ‘‘liked to lie awake a little reading Virgil.’’16 The poet, it seems, holds a lamp against the darkness, until midnight after which are revealed the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and two of her children. Airs of desuetude swirl within the vacant home while the destruction of war sets in outside as a ‘‘purplish stain upon the bland surface of the seas as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.’’17 In the midst of war, Carmichael brings out a book of poetry to unexpected success because ‘‘The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.’’18 Thus surrounded by the chaos of war, chaos reflected in the disorder overtaking the Ramsay home, the poet holds promise of meaning – he has constructed a meaningful whole in the midst of chaos. We might be led to believe that he holds some final and definitive answer then, that his work, and indeed his presence, in their very placidness, can bring order. In opposing the Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Carmichael characters Woolf invites us to view art, in the form of the personification of a poet, as the true source of overcoming the often elusive or seemingly invisible and often disordered, meaning that surrounds us. Assuming such an easy and obvious conclusion, however, would be a mistaken reading of Woolf ’s fiction. But, she continues the illusion that Carmichael brings order and unity until the end when the unanswerability of life is revealed as the artist Lily Briscoe attempts to complete a painting of Mrs. Ramsay. The silent sphere of artistic imagining, in the representation of Augustus Carmichael, presides over what appears to be the ‘real’ conjoining of meaning – the resolution of Lily Briscoe’s artistic vision, her making visible her particular style, and, through it, the meaning Mrs. Ramsay holds for her. Mrs. Ramsay cannot really bring the unity and coherence that she wishes to the lives of those around her as she is forced to acknowledge at dinner when she notes that ‘‘nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate’’.19 Yet, Lily can apparently enact a unifica-

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tion through art to form a complete and meaningful whole, the apparent resolution of her ensuing struggle to complete her painting in her own, unique way. In the process, her struggle is ‘presided’ over by the poet who, although he is a ‘‘continuing presence’’ at the Ramsay’s summer home, remains a mostly silent and enigmatic figure throughout the story.20 Carmichael, in his self-containedness, bespeaks the silent but meaningfull gap between observer and art work and between subject and world, the spaces of silence between the sounds and ‘‘harmonies’’ that are as significant, to Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, as sounds themselves.21 Lily, alludes to the effort in her task to wrestle meaning from the silent world of ‘‘non-sense’’, as Merlean-Ponty has called it, when she compares herself unfavorably to Mrs. Ramsay. Lily sees herself as ‘‘helter-skelter, hand to mouth ...22 while Mrs. Ramsay brings unity wherever she is and thus ‘‘directly she went a sort of disintegration set in.’’23 Both women struggle with the possibility that a unification of reality and vision can never be found and for both Carmichael represents the space of silent uncertainty before finding the meaning of their urge to unify and make some completed whole. For Mrs. Ramsay, the completed vision is a network of relationships that keep life, given her particular, mostly Victorian image of it, going: the marriage of her daughter Minta to Paul Rayley, for instance. For Lily, the unified vision to be completed is the more technically artistic kind and for this the text implies the poet Carmichael, as the silent and charged realm of imagining, is necessary. But, while Mr. Carmichael is somewhat threatening to Mrs. Ramsay, Lily keeps an open, if puzzled, and inquisitive attitude toward his presence which is key to her eventually achieving her completed vision. Lily perceives in Carmichael the same inscrutability and detachment as Mrs. Ramsay, but we sense that she feels there is, or at least should be, a special bond between the two artists which could allow them to communicate. He is nearby when she has her final epiphanic moment after conflating her feelings for Mrs. Ramsay with her art. She is at a loss for words, she wants to ‘‘go straight up to him and say, ‘Mr. Carmichael!’ ... She wanted to say not one thing but everything ... no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.’’24 Desperately seeking some answer, she wants to approach Mr. Carmichael to ask ‘‘What does it mean? How do you explain it all?’’25 And she feels that one could almost fancy that had Mr. Carmichael spoken, for instance, a little tear would have rent the surface pool. And then? Something would emerge. A hand would be shoved up, a blade would be flashed. It was nonsense of course26

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As the ironic tone of the narrative tells us, Lily will receive no help from the poet, the artist for whom words are his medium, remains strangely silent. The standard bearer who supposedly will flash the truth, like Excalibur from beneath the surface, is serenely indifferent to her struggle. Just as he did earlier with Mrs. Ramsay as she felt the fulfillment of her particular talent, Augustus Carmichael at first seems only to add to Lily’s struggle the same ‘‘shadow of the ‘I’ ’’ in which ‘‘all is shapeless as mist’’ as Woolf described it. The ‘‘little tear’’ that would ‘‘rent the surface pool’’ recalls the earlier passage noting how war cast a stain on the ‘‘bland surface of the seas’’, suggesting that art, like war, holds lifechanging, and perhaps not always positive, possibility. Lily finds herself crying, unable to understand if she is crying for Mrs. Ramsay or something else. She wants to address to the old poet again, desperate to reach an understanding: ‘‘For a moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation.’’27 But, Augustus Carmichael is as inscrutable as life itself, the life that both gives and takes away loved ones such as Mrs. Ramsay; he remains unmoved and no explanation is forthcoming. Lily, in her pursuit of artistic expression, has run headlong into the ‘‘thickness’’ or resistance that we continually encounter in our interrogatory intercourse with the world. Artist though he is, an artist of words, Carmichael the poet, as site of artistic reach, has no answers, just as language cannot really explain life’s, and it is suggested, art’s ultimate questions of meaning. Just as the world’s significance is offered in silence, Carmichael too remains mute. Lily, as the interrogating artist-subject, at last realizes that she alone can bring her vision to fruition, without help from the poet or Mrs. Ramsay. She is caught up in the silent zone of creative struggle and must confront life and art on her own in her quest for meaning and, in the process, finds meaning in questioning itself. But, like Bernard later in T he Waves, she must first go ‘‘outside the sequence’’, she must put herself ‘‘alone outside the machine’’ of societal restraint, like the artists whose work in National Gallery Bernard contemplates28 and like the old poet Carmichael. The paintings Bernard stands before are the product of the artistic quest, the paradigm of the overall human quest for meaning. In her quest, Lily must go ‘outside the machine’, cross the bridge from everyday perception which society and practicality reinforce, to the world of non-sense, to find what is there to be discovered. Carmichael represents an awareness on Woolf ’s part that, as MerleauPonty has said, ‘‘The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere – not in things,which as yet have no meaning, nor in the

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artist himself, in his unformulated life. It summons one away from the already constituted reason in which ‘cultivated men’ are content to shut themselves, toward a reason which would embrace its own origins.’’29 If successful in her quest for meaning through artistic non-formulated reasoning, Lily will achieve insight into her own unique style and incorporate it into her painting. But finding one lasting and unifying meaning Lily also discovers is impossible. The culmination of her ‘‘vision’’ comes with her emphatic stroke of a cryptic line down the center of her painting which somehow represents Mrs. Ramsay. The wordless, formless line suggests that while Lily has managed to communicate something of her own style, whether or not she can communicate through her art the meaning another person such as Mrs. Ramsay holds for her or for anyone, is likely impossible. Her role of mediator between meaning and silence will continue as she negotiates the gap between subject and world. There is a continual reference to the silent gap of imagining in Virginia Woolf ’s work and it has its basis in her very approach to being, both in its human aspect and in the larger sense of surrounding and enveloping Being. A search for revelation of both aspects of Being is at the heart of Virginia Woolf ’s fiction. This is not only the result of her own acute sense of her ability to open up to Being – what she referred to as ‘‘moments of being’’ – but also, she seems to signal, is a result of her position as an artist. The artist of Being, such as Woolf, is poised on the tensional fulcrum between the human world and the larger world, and does not so much depict Being as reveal it. Woolf ’s comments demonstrate that she understood that a certain expressive power attaches to silence, that silence, after all, was meaningful and not simply nothing and was most intimately linked to her endeavor to bring Being to light. Woolf ’s intimate relation to silence can be discovered throughout her writing, as this diary entry makes clear: These October days are to me a little strained and surrounded with silence. What I mean by this last world I don’t quite know, since I have never stopped ‘‘seeing’’ people ... No, it’s not physical silence; it’s some inner loneliness ... If I could catch the feeling I would; the feeling of the singing of the real world; the sense that comes to me of being bound on an adventure. And this curious steed, life is genuine. Does any of this convey what I want to say? But I have not really laid hands on the emptiness after all.30

Woolf ’s choice of words indicates she feels that silence has actual ontological significance for her, beyond its outward, metaphysical presence; it was part of both her inner and outer reality. Further, she relates her concern with an inability to grasp it, to ‘‘lay hands on it’’, a metaphori-

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cal way of saying that practical language fails, reminding us, as MerleauPonty states, that language carries not only surface meaning but a profound emotional content or ‘‘gestural sense’’ that ostensibly allows us to express our own inimitable outlook toward the world. Part of the power of language, however, resides in its intertwining with silence. Hence, for Woolf, silence is further connected to the ‘singing of the real world’, it allows her to ‘‘sing the world’s praises and in the last resort to live it’’31 as Merleau-Ponty says. And, ‘‘this curious steed, life’’ carries her on the adventure that she thinks of as existence or life which is ‘‘genuine.’’ The image of horse and rider is revealing in that it conveys interaction and cooperation between the perceiving subject and the world, the world which carries forth the willing participant in its meaning. Thus the position of the subject, at once in cooperation with the world while at the same time in the position of resistance in his attempt to exert control over his world, is in its essence a contested and somewhat paradoxical one. Writing that would capture more of the complexity and thus the truth of this fuller sense of human existence, or ‘genuine’ life, was an everpresent concern for Woolf and compelled her to search for a new form for the novel, written in a new ‘language’. As Merleau-Ponty would say of both painting and literature, the ‘language’ of the art work gives us truth in the sense that it gives us a understanding of events. The ‘truth’ of a novel is based on its ability to help us see events in a way that relates a nontraditional or unorthodox understanding of them. Words then in the novel do not refer, as typical, everyday language does, to mere objects in the world. They are organized in such a way as to form a new object – the literary object – much as the painter organizes shapes and colors to relate a separate, non-instrumental object never before seen. Thus the meaning of the art work, whether literary, visual, plastic, and so forth, is self-contained – meaning in the artwork cannot be separated from the medium that makes it up. In addition, it does not give us a mere description of the world as we ordinarily see it but rather gives us a new way of ‘‘seeing’’, a new perspective on life’s events. This new perspective is partly what Conrad had in mind when he said it was his task to ‘‘make the reader see.’’32 It is most clearly what Woolf had in mind when she disparaged the ‘‘materialists’’ such as Galsworthy and Wells for portraying ‘‘factories, prisons, workhouses, lawcourts ... congeries of streets and houses,’’ relying merely on the prosaic details of objects of the human world more than actual human existence, that is, ‘‘not a man or woman we know.’’33

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Woolf ’s attention to silence is another way in which she attempts bring her readers to a new perspective on the plenitude of Being, both in its human aspect and in the larger world. Woolf, in making silence a key element of her work, implies a criticism of what Merleau-Ponty has directly called ‘‘the prejudice of the world,’’ our tendency to ‘‘construct perception out of the perceived, to construct our contact with the world out of what it has taught us about the world.’’34 We, as perceiving subjects, actively engaged with the world, run the risk of allowing ourselves to limit our understanding to the readily-understood, to the everyday understanding we most frequently employ but which limits our grasp of the full meaning of our bodily, perceptual experience or ‘‘being-in-the-world.’’ For Merleau-Ponty, the world offers up ‘‘the experience of a truth which shows through and envelops rather than being held and circumscribed by the mind’’ and this manifested truth is what we often overlook.35 This truth is ordinarily not seen by us; it is the lack which the painter brings forth in his painting, it is partly the silence that both surrounds language and dwells within it. Caught up in our everyday efforts to make sense of our world, we generally remain unmindful of the meaning inherent in the unrevealed aspects of our world and in our own various modes of expression. The artist, on the other hand, as MerleauPonty claims of the painter, ‘‘gives visible existence to what profane (ordinary) vision believes to be invisible.’’36 Things in the world embody a ‘‘brute sense’’ or silent meaning which remains invisible to everyday seeing. Through her use of silent figures Virginia Woolf ’s shared with her readers the silent meaning that arose not only within her very being, a silence that for Woolf was most intimately connected to her artistic sensibility, but which also extends to the entire plenitude of Being. A fundamental aspect of Being is the constant tension between human subjectivity and its need to understand the surrounding world and it is this tensional aspect of the relationship between the two that is threaded throughout Virginia Woolf fiction. And, silence, as an integral part of the total field of human expression does indeed have ontological significance within this dyadic relationship. Silence, as the background against which meaning is brough forth, is central to the man-world relationship; it is a real part of the metaphysical background against which meaning is revealed. One of Virginia Woolf ’s goals was to manifest the importance of the silent realm that is intrinsic both to the surrounding world and human relations to the world. Realizing the important role silence plays in the subject-world dynamic, Woolf sought a way to relay its importance

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to the ‘common reader’, who was always foremost in Woolf ’s approach to her art. The gestural or emotional content of language, what Woolf elsewhere calls ‘‘impassioned prose’’ is crucial to putting the reader in touch with a revelation of Being and the ‘genuiness’ of existence. Further, Woolf, an astute reader of a vast swath of British literature, admired Shakespearian drama because it ‘‘allowed the Elizabethan imagination to fill itself with lions and unicorns, dukes and duchesses, violence and mystery.’’37 But, Woolf too, like Merleau-Ponty as well as Heidegger, considered poetry, or the poetic, the mode of expression best suited to disclose life and reality in a way which would allow the reader to transcend the usual perspective. Poetry, with its condensation and metaphoric defamiliarization was for Woolf the form most capable of capturing the proximity to actual life which was her goal. The new novel that she envisioned as more accurately portraying the ‘‘true nature of our experience’’ amounts to a new way of truth-telling; a way that gets at the complexity of ‘‘life that is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it.’’38 Such truth-telling could be accomplished only by a novel whose aims reached beyond the ability of prose to portray life and which would need the condensation of poetry and the vividness of drama. It would she said ... dramatize some of those influences which play so large a part in life, yet have so far escaped the novelist – the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine.39

Woolf ’s list of influences is a mixture of the physical and emotional; human existence, revealed in its complexity, is never simply mind or body, but a mixture of the two and is shaped by our milieu as well as the nonrational, that area of consciousness which gives rise to unicorns and lions as well as ‘obscure terrors.’ The knotty problem for Woolf and other Modernist experimenters was how to relate the mysterious and often perplexing nature of human subjectivity in a form best suited to the ‘‘atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have now to create ...’’ at the dawn of the modern age.40 What Woolf and others sought was a new way of telling the truth of the story of human consciousness going out to and interacting with the surrounding reality. Part of telling the truth of this interaction for Virginia Woolf involved incorporating its inherent resistance or ‘‘thickness’’, which is the essential situation of embodied consciousness as it moves around and attempts to understand its world. Thickness, as the original opening of the subject-object distinction is the

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tension that arises from the interaction of the two and this is the tension that Virginia Woolf highlights in her portrayals of silence. Woolf once wrote that ‘‘meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds without words.’’41 To give voice to the other side of the visible, the far side of language, the invisible reality that she was so closely in touch with and make this real to the reader, Woolf needed to devise a way to express silence, a fundamental aspect of her being-in-the-world and thus a fundamental aspect of her style. How to make the invisible reality of silence ‘‘appear’’ for the reader? Her silent characters are one way she wants to make seem as conscious expression that which is not quite conscious but which impinges on consciousness. To this end, she drew on the power of drama’s vivid appeal to vision to make ‘visible’ the phantom phenomenon of silence. Woolf cited the importance images assume in our lives noting the impossibility that one should not see pictures; because ... ‘‘we must needs be pictures of each other’’. That is, whenever we encounter anyone, we formulate a mental image of that person based on what we know of him or her in relation to occupation, social standing, etc. The images we form of people, she implies, are much stronger than the language through which we might hope to overcome our generalizations about people: ‘‘We cannot possibly break out of the form of the picture by speaking natural words.’’42 Here Woolf is getting at the intertwined nature of participants in dialogue with each other, visual as well as verbal, an intertwining which includes not only actual dialogue but also the interwoven thoughts of participants as their perceptual domains intermingle and help them develop pictures of each other. Mental images are fundamental to that interaction between participants whether in actual dialogue, or in the dialogue between author and reader. To capitalize on the intertwining of perceptual domains Woolf skillfully incorporated images that represent the reality of silence as she experienced it to, in effect, place herself in dialogue with the reader. The artist, as a being-in-the-world like everyone, puts into his art not mere resemblance to the world. The artwork can never be just a reflection of reality, as Plato would claim, but is deeply invested with the artist’s own subjectivity, his immediate self, what Merleau-Ponty insists is his style. But, the artist’s style is not an ‘‘object of predilection’’43 but exists in the most fundamental way as his body does; it is not a mere vehicle or a set of recognizable features. Style is fundamental to the artist’s very being just as his body is and, like his body, is in a sense imperceptible to

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him as it appears in the work. In short, style is the artist’s very way of existing in the world and, as such, cannot be any other than what it is. His style emanates from his response to the world, it is ‘‘not what he seeks to express but is rather the operative, latent, silent meaning which animates him; this meaning is present in everything he sees or, rather, is his very way of seeing, of responding to the visibility of his world.’’44 Silent characters are one way in which Woolf makes visible for the reader her reality; through them she speaks her being-in-the-world, and at the same time allows the reader a position from which to engage the questioning and questing nature of his or her interaction with the world. Meaning emerges from the world and through human interrogatory interaction with the world. While phenomenology can try to put into words descriptions of pre-objective or ‘lived’ meanings, artists can in fact present them in the art work through their style. One way Virginia Woolf added such lived meanings to her art was through the silent characters who ‘haunt’ the pages of her writing, both fiction and nonfiction. They are one way Woolf dramatizes for the reader the questions she felt were central to life even as they call attention to art as the site of questioning. Department of English University of Kentucky NOTES 1 Bernard Dauenhauer, Silence: T he Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington, In.: Indiana UP, 1980), 143. 2 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays 2, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 92. 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty ‘‘Cezanne’s Doubt’’, T he Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. and trans. William B. Smith (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 69. 4Davenhaver, 142. 5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, T he V isible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, trans. Alsphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, Il: Northwestern UP, 1968), 129. 6 ‘‘Modern Novels’’, Collected Essays 3, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 36. 7 Friederich Nietzsche, T he Birth of T ragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1968). 8 Night and Day (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), 271. 9 T o the L ighthouse forward by Eudora Welty (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1981), 39. 10 It is true that Mrs. Ramsay has her own moments of deep introspection which show that she is not simply and superficially in touch with life. However, in relation to Augustus

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Carmichael, the difference in their respective outlooks toward life is something the reader is clearly meant to notice. I am here focusing on those more apparent differences in order to show how Woolf uses the contrast to highlight the importance of the Carmichael figure while at same time leaving him almost entirely speechless and more or less hovering between background and foreground. 11 T o the L ighthouse, 40. 12 Ibid., 41. 13 Ibid., 40. 14 Ibid., 62. 15 Ibid., 96. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Ibid., 134. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 126. 20 See Beverly Schlack Randles important study of Woolf ’s work, Continuing Presences: V irginia Woolf ’s Use of L iterary Allusion (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1979), for thoughtful analysis of Woolf ’s notion of past poets as ‘‘continuing presences’’ and its influence on her allusive style. 21 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, Introduction by Maureen Howard (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 22. 22 T o the L ighthouse 78. 23 Ibid., 168. 24 Ibid., 178. 25 Ibid., 179. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 180. 28 T he Waves (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), 264 and 155–56. 29 ‘‘Cezanne’s Doubt’’, T he Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. and trans. William B. Smith (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 69. 30 A W riter’s Diary (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954), Oct. 11, 1929, 144–5. 31 Phenomenology of Perception, 187. 32 Joseph Conrad, Conrad’s Manifesto: Preface to a Career: of Preface to T he Nigger of the ‘‘Narcissus,’’ with Facsimiles of the Manuscripts, edited with an essay by David R. Smith (Philadelphia: Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1966). 33 ‘‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’’, Collected Essays 3, 1919–1924, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988), 385. 34 T he V isible and the Invisible, 156. 35 Phenomenology of Perception, 404. 36 Maurice-Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘Eye and Mind,’’ T he Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. and trans. William B. Smith (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 127. 37 ‘‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’’, Granite and Rainbow: Essays by V irginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company), 14. 38 Ibid., ‘‘Impassioned Prose.’’ 32–40. 39 ‘‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’’, 23. 40 ‘‘Three Pictures’’, Collected Essays 4 (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1967). 41 ‘‘On Not Knowing Greek’’, T he Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition, edited and with an introduction by Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1984).

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42 Collected Essays 4 (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1967), 151. 43 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 53–64. 44 ‘‘Gary B. Madison, T he Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the L imits of Consciousness, forward by Paul Ricoeur, translated from the French by the Author (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1981), 86–87.

JOHN BALDACCHINO

BETWEEN ILLUSIONS: ART’S ARGUMENT FOR ‘WEAK’ REALITY

Alla domanda. ‘‘Che cosa e` l’arte’’ si potrebbe rispondere celiando (ma non sarebbe una celia sciocca): che l’arte e` cio` che tutti sanno che cosa sia. To the question: ‘‘What is art?’’ one may answer, tongue in cheek (although this would not be a silly joke): that art is whatever everyone knows it to be.1

Benedetto Croce qualifies this classic opening of his Breviario di estetica, by adding that even if we were unable to determine what is art, we cannot eliminate the question itself, because every question portends a demand that cannot simply be removed or ignored.2 To set the scene for the irremovable demand posed by the question of art, one could argue that amongst other, art is a balancing act between specificity and hybridity on one hand, and reality and illusion on the other. This ability to play between the real contexts of life and the assumptions by which we seek to understand reality, is pivotal to the legitimacy of art as a human activity. This has been the case for as long as we could identify those unique forms of human expression that from time to time we seek to confirm and identify as ‘art’. These forms of expression are identifiable as works of art (and not mere acts, objects or decorations) by a certain number of conventions. Like play, art is explained by the rules that define it as art. From time to time we also choose to adjust these conventions, particularly when we find that art’s phenomena – i.e. the external appearances of the human activity we call ‘art’ – keep changing with the time and space that we inhabit. Yet while these conventions change, the need to assume art by its rules remains constant.

I

Although the question ‘‘what is art?’’ remains self-defeating, it reflects our need to draw a distinction between art and the rest of the world of human phenomena, even when this ‘need’ could only lead us to the verge of talking nonsense. (Perhaps this is why Croce deemed the question irremovable in the first place.) As soon as we ask ‘‘what is art?’’ we assume 157 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 157–168. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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a priori that there must be a special kind of human activity that by its nature we recognize as art. Because the nature of this activity appears as illusive and ambiguous, the question cannot be ignored or shaken off. The illusion compounds when we are constantly aware that actually we do not need to ask the question because we know that the answer itself is not going to be sufficient (– and could never appear to be sufficiently real). Whenever we ask ‘‘what is art?’’ we are not exactly asking a question, because by asking that question we know that we are asking a peculiar kind of question – a question of the special sort that is already answered by it being posed. The question ‘‘what is art?’’ is illusive on all fronts. Firstly, it does not request an actual answer, because it always implies an indefinite answer (where often, the answer is open-ended, and hence a non-answer). Secondly, ‘‘what is art?’’ does not sit comfortably as a question, because unlike the question ‘‘what is a prickly pear?’’ or ‘‘what is Cricket?’’, ‘‘what is art?’’ is asked by someone who already has a knowledge of art. Those who utter the question always assume that the person who replies would raise further questions – by sporting a peculiar number of answers that remain inconclusive. So questions about art are illusive because in effect they invite a comparison of definitions of art and never pose a demand on anyone to define art without prior knowledge of it. ‘‘What is a prickly pear?’’ and ‘‘what is Cricket?’’ demand a conclusive answer. For anyone who has never tasted (or even seen) a prickly pear, the answer to his question has to be quite definite and conclusive if he is ever to be lured to taste this inedible-looking fruit which, once peeled, is delightful to eat chilled on a hot summer’s day in the Mediterranean. Likewise, because I cannot understand Cricket, when I utter the question ‘‘what is Cricket?’’ I am looking for an explanation that will open me to the delights of the game. My demand is based on the clear assumption that I can only nurture a passing knowledge of a game that to my mind seems to invite a formation of men to chase a small red ball which is thrown and then hit by a batsman whose role seems to be that of running between two sets of three sticks stuck in the ground. Evidently, in this case ‘‘what is Cricket?’’ is dictated by my absolute ignorance, and unlike my invitation to discuss art, my demand to learn (about) Cricket looks for an unequivocal answer. ‘‘What is Cricket?’’ has to be addressed with precise instructions and a proper education in the strategies and objectives of the glorious game. On the other hand, ‘‘what is art?’’ is an invitation to purview a panorama of possible answers that

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tend to fall back on themselves. When the question ‘‘what is art?’’ is seen for the tautology that it portends, one wonders whether it is worth posing at all. Any answer to the question is no answer. It just reiterates something that is already implied in the question. This is where art is seen in its illusive nature; and this is where we are puzzled by the need to align its illusion to the assertion of reality. Unlike any other activity that is bound to have an effect on the ways we define human reality, art could only reveal the truth by having to impress upon us the need to refrain from directly ‘announcing’ the truth and even by actively detracting from the world – an act that is useless in the case of Cricket or prickly pears!3 This is also why – in what seems to be an entire contradiction – we are always quick to agree that our recognition of art reflects a number of rules. The apparent nonsense of stating that art asserts truth by detracting itself from reality is not made any better by also stating that for art to reveal truth it needs to retain its illusive nature. Yet for this state of affairs to remain within the realms of human reason, we have established a number of rules by which we could ultimately distinguish art from non-art. Even when we argue that the distinction (of art from non-art) is ‘relative’, we can only say so because we have sufficient rules to be able to argue the case for relativity. When we say that we have to assume a set of rules for declaring x as an act of art and y as non-art, we are also saying that: (a) Questions about art yield short lived answers; and (b) Art is recognized by its illusive character. Because (and in spite) of this, we also need to legitimate art’s place in the construction of human reality for two very good reasons. (i) As we have just argued, the illusion that has to come with art’s question and what its question attempts to answer comes with prior knowledge of its consequences. (ii) Art is useless. Because illusion in art subverts any identitarian notion of legitimacy, in order to argue in favour of art’s legitimacy we need to begin with explaining why art is useless. Indeed it is also true that to say that art is useless is contradicted by the persistence of men and women in doing art throughout history. Yet the perception of art’s uselessness is not a casual remark. Rather, it is a consequence of art’s illusive answers. The most effective way to rebut the accusation of art’s uselessness is to accept it and then move on to distinguish it from other forms of uselessness. Art’s uselessness is not the same as the uselessness of an object, as in, ‘‘a cucumber is useless as a bottle opener’’, or ‘‘bicycles are useless in four feet of snow’’. Art does not add much to anything by itself. Unlike medicine, or food and clothing, or sources of energy, art is not indispens-

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able to humans. But at the same time art is entertained as essential because it is a human activity that takes on everything and so, unlike a cucumber, a bottle opener or a bicycle, its use is found beyond the remits of utility. In the myriad theoretical debates on art – particularly in the wake (and some would add, the demise) of Modernity – art’s use is explained by its non-use as well as a multiplicity of uses that it comes by, as of and by itself. So art is useless in the utilitarian sense because its use is primarily plural – and more so, because this plural usage is distinctly hybrid. In its hybridity art is a human commentary about everything. Because of the latter, we present art by force of a diversity of objectives. Its end is already present at the point of its origin, in its beginning. This is markedly different from the circumstances one encounters in other realms of living. In art one has to understand and engage with circumstances that transcend origins and where the notion of an ‘end’ – a telos – is illusive by its open-ended nature.4 It is doubtful whether one could talk about causality in art. The cause and circumstance of art are consequences of the act of art itself. This does not mean that we do art for the sake of art – because if that was so, art will have no meaning outside itself (and we know that is not the case). Yet the history of art also confirms that when artists were seen to be doing art for the sake of something or someone, the consequences of the work of art went far beyond the something or someone that prompted its creation. In this respect art is a human act that takes charge of itself not by way of a demand for something specific that is then made effective by causality (such as food, medicine or energy as caused by the demand for nutrition, good health or warmth). Rather, art ‘arrives’ to its actuality by its own identification of a use that goes beyond any utility per se. This means that by means of their artistic activities, women and men make possible a ‘method’ of self-reference. Far from being a state of self-interest, art’s method of self-reference gives us a method of expressing (as well as claiming) a state of freedom by which we could suspend the many pervasive assumptions that are made by polities of utility or ideology. In the case of art, this suspension – which in phenomenological speak has become a cornerstone of the notion of epoche´ – pertains to the lineage by which we move from art’s illusion as an expression of its specificity, to art’s claim for reality as an act of human convergence.5 It is by this convergent form of human activity that we also find a way to ‘mediate’ – and therefore give (as well as obtain) a meaning for our immediate day-

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to-day lives. It is also by way of this convergent set of activities that we could align our everyday living with the world. Furthermore, it is because of (and upon) the ground of this objective world that we find, consider, perceive and shape a personal life that encounters the general contexts that align a number of personal meanings to the ever moving and expanding ‘whole’ that we call ‘reality’. II

By way of expanding on the relationship between reality and illusion in art, I want to bring into the discussion a number of distinctions that impact on how art is viewed in the ways by which we are supposed to come to know and construct the world. I am referring to what is customarily assumed in art-speak as the act of ‘‘art as making’’. When making is singled as a primary act of art – which this paper will contest – one must also refer to the related argument of knowledge, particularly the purported lineage between what we make and what we know. This is important because the question of what we make and what we know has a lot do with the notion of art as a ‘‘construction of reality’’ – which, (as I have just argued) is tied intrinsically to art’s illusive ways of representing the world. In his short, yet incisive book W hat Philosophy is, Arthur Danto highlights the distinction between doing and knowing when he explains how ‘‘in his later philosophy Wittgenstein advances a thesis that culminates in a non-cognitivist view of language almost as a whole’’: This in turn goes with a certain conception of man as a user of language. It sees man as an agent, practically implicated in a form of life with which he is one, a view which contrasts sharply with another and dominating philosophical view of man, standard since at least Descartes, which sees man as a knower rather than a doer, concerned to describe a world he is set over against, a lonely intellect not even certain that there is a society with which to communicate or a world in which it might exist.6

Danto’s explanation helps us to make a further distinction, which in the light of the difference between knower and doer could help us set the questioning of ‘‘art as making’’ in a philosophical perspective. The limiting notion of ‘‘art as making’’ can be challenged when one draws a distinction between the artist as maker and as doer. Despite its well-meant tone, the notion of artist as maker (or art as a making) is very misleading, as it remains tied to a productivist aesthetic that is trapped in the romanticised idea of ‘process’. The tale of the ‘‘artist as maker’’ is also subscribed to a

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‘‘poetics of the material’’ by which artists are supposed to develop a sensibility which far supersedes that of other mortal beings. In this paradigm the artwork is legitimised by a specifically identified set of skills amounting to an identifiable craft (which could amount to anything ‘made’ – including figurative as well as conceptual art-works or installations). This definition of art stays within the confines of the atelier where the artist’s role remains that of a knower-maker. This is not restricted to the manufacture of the art-work, but more crucially to related areas like aesthetics, education, ethics and the polity. Though the concept of a ‘knower-maker’ has often been positioned as counter to Cartesian duality, on a closer look it becomes evident how this notion snaps back to (and ultimately reinforces) the practicist assumption of a mind that externally projects its deeds in the body’s forms of knowing. Even in the most unmade forms of art, one could discern an epistemology of art that is assumed on the same productivist parameters. In these cases, the work of art is meant to operate didactically and to that effect it is supposed to offer an environment where knowledge is facilitated. Even if this were to happen, art is never assumed as a form of life because as a process it remains an instrument. Furthermore, in the assumption of the artist as maker, art is supposed to give us something made. Even when this ‘something’ is not an object, the instrumental assumption of process and making expects of art to define reality. In the context of art as a making, art’s definition of reality is not only misleading but misconstrues the idea of art as a ‘‘construction of reality’’, which in the classical realist sense has nothing to do with making per se. To argue that art’s making is intrinsically responsible to a didactic construction of reality is to say that art constructs reality in the same way someone constructs a space with a specific remit to a function that would benefit its inhabitants. The didactic argument also misconstrues art as an act of learning. It reduces art to an intervention upheld for the sake of other than art itself. Where art is seen as a facilitator of knowledge acquisition, one finds that even when the claim is that of a progressive and inclusive form of learning, the claimed pedagogical grounds of art are equally instrumental – which defies the point of learning per se. In all these contexts, the purpose of art is externally assumed. Rather than a purpose of art, this kind of arguing for art is instrumental and utilitarian. By assuming art as a form of making, art is reduced to a tool to know. Deemed as a making, the act of art is reduced to a tool kit with a remit. On the other hand, if one does – rather than makes – art, the process of

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art (i.e. the making) becomes secondary to art in its autonomous mode of being.7

III

Unlike the concept of the knower-maker the argument for the artist as doer takes the speculative nature of art back into the thought of human beings as ‘‘users of language’’. As users of language men and women defy the limits of circumstantial utility. In this definition of language (as a form of life, and therefore as other than logos in the Platonic sense) one sees how the ground for art’s hybrid being is distanced from the externalised utility of economised bodies of knowledge or aesthetized objects. The form of reasoning assumed by art’s speculative nature – as the realm of the doer, rather than the maker – pertains to critical reasoning. Unlike instrumental reason, critical reason is a form of life (a language game, in the Wittgensteinian sense) by which individuals come to cognise and thereby negotiate their immediate particular needs to the universal ambitions by which they come to seek meaning. For the artist as doer, art-works are not objects but acts (and forms) of critique by which we can assert our competence of judgement. When we go by Kant’s classic meaning of Critique we are heartened to read that: ‘‘whoever has once tasted Critique will be ever after disgusted with all dogmatic twaddle which he formerly put up with, because his reason must have something, and could find nothing better for its support’’.8 Read, as it were, with our backs to what has become the assumed certainty of the natural sciences, we are still assured that as doers [our] ‘‘reason must have something’’. This something is not a mere trifle of what we now take for granted because we have ‘made’ the world in our own image. This something is a signal to (as well as a sign of ) our ability to understand and engage with the play between illusion and reality as a domain of that middle ground between our rational ways of being and our creative responsibility towards the world. Kant tells us that as ‘‘a middle term between the understanding and reason’’ judgement ‘‘contains in itself (... ) a special principle of its own’’.9 From this we could read that by judgement we mean the speciality by which we as rational beings have critiqued and thereby mediated what we often attribute to art. Indeed what we attribute to art remains within the realms of human doing. But this does not preclude us from arguing that in its ‘special principle’ the act of judgement arises from our need to

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muster that ‘something’ by which, in their artistic endeavour, women and men could balance specificity with hybridity, reality with illusion. Judgement and critique go hand in hand. Judgement emerges from the ability of human reason to recognize the distance between particulars and universals as one terrain – where one takes the so-called ‘long view’ by which we read circumstance from within a context that is other than a limit of immediacy. This is where the currency of illusion in art is evaluated as critical, and this is where as critique, art’s illusive character counters those other forms of illusion that are external to reason as doing. Critique is intrinsic to this ability to discern between an illusion that allows the playful grounds of reason and those forms of illusion that instrumentalize human reason and constrain it to a prescribed view of reality. As critique, the exercise of reason is counter to the accumulation of knowledge and thereby counters the idea that reason becomes instrumental to a polity of facts by which one is automatically assumed as part of a systemic whole. While critique partakes of the notion of universality, this participation is active and thereby ‘open-ended’ in terms of reason as manifest of our freedom and intelligence. Art is seen to provide that critical ground of open-endedness by its speciality. This speciality takes on illusion as possibility and recognises its role in the language games by which humans engage in possibility as revealed by art’s method of epoche´. In its suspension of a strictly externalised and objectivised world, art’s speciality is manifested by its discursive character – which in turn emerges as critical in both nature and use. Again, one must see how as a form of life – i.e. as a language game – art’s discourse pertains to the judgmental ability of the critique. IV

Art’s ability to convey reality through the implements of critical illusion reiterates the case for reality as truth. However in order to sustain the open-ended nature of art’s ‘criticality’, one must also qualify how this takes on the notion of reality as art’s claim to truth. The claim for truth – understood in the openness that we facilitate by art’s method of critical illusion – is, more than ever, an urgent one. Our ability to engage in illusion through the implements of art is a way for us to reinforce the case for reality in terms of its centrality within the study of both art and philosophy. The argument for this urgency also comes from the need to rebut the assumption that any argument for reality is an illusion because of the relativity by which ‘truth’ is quickly

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dismissed in certain ‘artistic’ and ‘philosophical’ quarters. On a closer look, one would find that these quarters misplace art by kitsch and what they consider to be ‘philosophy’ is nothing but an act of sophistry. To return to the question of critical illusion and how this enables art to claim reality: how does this work? In other words, what are the parameters of art’s critical illusion and what is actually meant by art’s ‘‘claim for reality’’? How could the method of illusion take on the notion of reality as art’s claim to truth? I would like to take the argument for reality and illusion in art by qualifying reality as ‘weak reality’. By ‘weakening’ the notion of reality, I want to conform to the open-endedness by which art’s criticality, as exercised by its methods of illusion, portends its claim on truth and its interpretation. I borrow the term weak (debole) from Gianni Vattimo’s usage of the term pensiero debole (weak thought). By qualifying the relationship between critical illusion and ‘weak reality’, I return to Vattimo’s characterisation of Heidegger’s ontology as ‘weak ontology’ – assumed in the light of his discussion of the ‘‘occurrence of truth in art’’. In L a Fine della Modernita` Vattimo argues that: The occurrence of truth in art is a problem upon which Heidegger never ceases to reflect right up to his last works. (...) [H]is argument in the last analysis means that (a) the truth which may occur does not possess the nature of truth as thematic evidence, but rather that of the ‘opening’ of the world, which signifies at the same time a thematization and a positioning of the work on the background, or an ‘ungrounding’; and (b) if truth is understood in these terms, then art, as its setting-into-work, is definable in far less grandiose or emphatic terms than those which are customarily taken to belong to Heidegger’s aesthetic thought.

After making further reference to the contexts of how Gadamer sees this in Heidegger, Vattimo continues to argue that: The full implications of this cannot be understood unless placed within a more general interpretation of Heideggerian ontology as ‘weak ontology’. The result of rethinking the meaning of Being is in fact, for Heidegger, the taking leave of metaphysical Being and its strong traits, on the basis of which the devaluation of the ornamental aspects of the work of art has always definitely been legitimated, even if through more extensive chains of mediating concepts.10

The notion of ‘weakness’ in Vattimo is tied to the koine´ between hermeneutics and nihilism. If by the hermeneutic argument we are made aware that thought is characterised by a system of interpretations – where truth emerges from a series of interpretations and where whatever it constructs operates on the basis of the notion that ‘‘all we have are interpretations’’

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– it follows that the rational systems by which we operate cannot externalise truth from the interpretative edifice that is human reason.11 The way I see this operating within the koine´ proposed by Vattimo – and here I assume that I am reading him right – is that ‘weakness’ is intrinsic to the openness by which (Nietzsche’s) nihilism urges us to take responsibility of our acts without projecting or reifying reason into an all-pervasive and absolute – i.e. strong – thought which has given a disproportionate power to moral and other systems only to enslave those who thought them out in the first place – i.e. human beings. There is also a further aspect to weakness which Vattimo takes from the fact that hermeneutics has emerged from an interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Bible (and adjoining Christian texts). The theological origin of hermeneutics allows us to take the issue of interpretation into a dynamic that has to do with the idea of a ‘revealed’ truth. In this context the revelation of truth is hidden behind a series of narratives that await elucidation through a series of rules. We approach revelation and interpretation knowing that the truth that is given to us comes from an act that ‘weakens’ the idea of an Absolute God whose word is above human knowledge. Taken as a system of thought whereby truth is approached as a gift that assumes an openness and accessibility, the question of interpretation (as evolved into a philosophical system that is removed from its theological origin) regales us with an opportunity to approach the issue of truth as an open-ended ‘gift’ of which we partake from the grounds of ontological equality. In Oltre l’Interpretazione, Vattimo makes mention of religion and takes the notion of kenosis from the Christian narrative of God’s incarnation whereby the notion of a Deity is presented to us as an act of ‘lowering’ that is neither submissive nor feeble – but rather meek and weak. (...) modern philosophical hermeneutics begins in Europe not only because here one finds a religion of the book which focuses attention on the phenomenon of interpretation; but because this religion is founded on the idea of God’s incarnation, understood as kenosis – as a lowering, which I will here translate as a weakening.’12

In this light I would suggest that the issue of weakness, therefore, has to do with: (a) the rejection of an all-pervasive metaphysics which will lead to a rightful claim to the openness that is proffered to us by the interpretative edifice of reason and its nihilist vocation in terms of its responsibility;

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(b) the idea of juncture between reality as an ‘incarnation’ as prompted by a lowering that implies a direct vinculum between origin and goal without having to tie this to a ground that prefigures anything and everything. Taken as it were from this source, the idea of reality must also be weak in order to make it possible for art to operate between the layers of illusion and critique. In other words, weak reality allows art to exchange its roles between that of intervening in the interpretative grounds of reality and that of assuming truth by way of its subscription to thought as a form of ethical lowering. For art to partake of illusion as critique, it also needs to reveal reality in the same weak (and kenotic) manner by which ‘‘the logos becomes flesh’’ – as the Christian narrative of reason’s (or God’s) intervention in the world would put it. Here, reality is seen as weak so that the juncture between the real and the true can be conceivable as a democratic construct that precludes the all-pervasive arrogance of a strong (and autocratic) assumption of reality. With reality assumed as weak and with illusion assumed as critical, it will also be easier to see how art is an act of doing, that is neither flamboyant nor arrogant in its open-ended questions.

V

From this it would follow that any claim to reality (which includes art’s claim to it) has to recognise the real as ‘weak’ by the above definition. In conclusion one can summarise the main claims made in this essay as follows: $

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While art manifests a negotiation between hybridity and specificity in one instance and illusion and reality in another, the claims it makes on truth are grounded on the fact that its questions are made from an awareness of an interpretative edifice that we could never externalise. The impossibility of externalisation is evident in the distinction that has to be made between art as doing and the fallacy of making – the latter being a remnant of a positivist attempt to externalise and objectify truth into an instrumental and measured entity. The context the doing of art conforms to the method of epoche´. In this way we consciously suspend the apparent empirical condition of the world in order to facilitate and attend to those forms of life by which we recognise the responsibility to realise in art a way of claiming truth.

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Taken from the method of illusion, by which art exercises its criticality, art also assumes itself as yet another human act by which men and women claim reality by deed of their responsibility. Rather than assume reality as an absolute and strong entity that has offered myriad excuses to those who wrench power over the freedom of others, art assumes reality by dint of a critical illusion that sees reality from within the openness offered to us by reason’s interpretative edifices. To this effect, while art lays claim on reality, what it regales us is an act by which we recognise truth in its openness. Likewise reality comes to signify the weak thought that empowers men and women as free and intelligent beings whose rights are exercised by the responsibility that they take as expressed, amongst other, by the human act that we call ‘art’.

T eachers College Columbia University NOTES 1 Benedetto, Croce, Breviario di estetica, Aesthetica in nuce (Milano: Adelphi, 1994), 15. 2 Cf. ibid., further. 3 Thankfully, to indulge in the definition and pleasures of a Cricket game or a chilled prickly pear, one has to be very much in the world – more precisely one has to touch, eat and enjoy the physicality of the world’s culinary and sportive games! 4 As Eco has confirmed almost 40 years ago in his Opera Aperta. Cf. Eco, Umberto, Opera Aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milano: Bompiani, 1995). 5 I discuss the notion of convergence at some length in my essay ‘‘The convergent ‘I’: empathy as an aesthetic category’’, published in Anna Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), Imaginatio Creatrix, Analecta Husserliana LXXXIII (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 515–529. 6 Arthur C. Danto, W hat Philosophy is. A Guide to the Elements (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 37. 7 Here I am reminded of Croce’s insistence on what art is not – that is, art is neither philosophy, nor history, nor natural science nor a play of the imagination, nor immediate sentiment, nor rhetoric (oratoria). cf. Croce, op. cit., 197ff. 8 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena T o Any Future Metaphysic T hat Can Qualify as a Science, trans. Paul Carus (Illinois: Open Court Classics, 1990), 140. 9 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, Collier-Macmillan Publishers, 1974), Introduction §111, 13. 10 Gianni Vattimo, L a fine della modernita` (Milano: Garzanti, 1985), English trans. T he End of Modernity, trans. J. R. Snyder, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 87–88. 11 Cf. Gianni Vattimo, Oltre l ’Interpretazione (Bari: Laterza, 1995). 12 Ibid., 60 (my translation).

JAMES P. WERNER

POST-DIGITAL AWARENESS An Insight into New Immersion Practices in Installation Art

This investigation is concerned with the overwhelming influences that digital media asserts on fine art and how those influences manifest themselves through spatial relationships with audiences. In short, how artists are engaging in a new language of spatial understanding through interactive spaces. Spaces that immerse the observer into an area of illusion that simulates, or insinuates a temporal understanding of spatial relationships that comes in light of a digital, or three dimensional understanding of digital space. How do we identify and interpret transitions between real and virtual space? Currently there are many artists who raise these issues with their work. But there are a select few who stand out from the rest in their choice to attack them by using media that is void of digital interface. Specifically what I am looking at is illusionist immersive spaces that disregard all digital interaction. These works in part belong to a shift in the representation of immersion environments being portrayed in contemporary fine art. The majority of contemporary artists working in ‘convergent’ media focus on the integration of digital media into fine art, or making digital media a form of art. Much of the aim is to show a shift of cultural dependence on materiality to a dependence on temporal experience through visual communication – for the most part digital representation. However, as art’s discourse develops in the advanced stages of what Martin Heidegger called ‘technological revealing’, (cf. Biro) audiences’ conception of the immersive situation in art demands that new forms of tangible, spatial interaction take place. The lack of physical involvement in experiences through digital media will become more prominent in the years to come. And what I am proposing is the emergence of a new genre in contemporary art that uses the marriage of science and multimedia with fine art as a stepping-stone to re-establish the physicality of space into the sensational experience. Today the word immersion or immersive environment is generally thought of in the context of graphical representations of space such virtual reality. But the idea of immersion has been around for thousands of years since man first surrounded his cave with hieroglyphics. As early as the 169 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 169–183. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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1st century, the Romans began painting 360-degree paintings aimed at providing emotional arousal during pagan rituals. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Christian church instituted a campaign where by combining architecture and perspective painting with faux terrain, they attempted to provide ‘Telepresence’, the impression of being somewhere else, to allow pilgrims to ‘‘witness’’ biblical events (Grau, p. 45). Given the history of the image, the idea of immersive art today, while quite different from the past, still seems to encompass the same general principal: ‘‘Enclosure of the observer within the image space’’ (Grau, p. 238). Digital experiences are unique in that they allow access to a universal language, void of the communication boundaries found in static art. Immersive and often interactive, they carry on a poetic relationship with individuals, giving access to ideas in a way unrivalled in temporal experiences. These experiences are subjected to an audience through a visual language that is universally recognizable. But as with all institutions, a dialogue will begin to falter when, after significant exposure, it ceases to carry on that poetry with its audience. Just as languages must evolve to account for new intuitions and answer new rationalizations, in digital environments evolutionary change occurs through the emergence of multi sensory physical sensation. People’s perception of digital environments is becoming keener and constantly requiring more realistic versions of the illusionary experience. As virtual experiences become more and more realistic, the direction of experiential representation of contemporary art has begun to escape the confines of digital space and seek illusionist effects from physical experiences instead of the screen. Is this a digression from digital interaction or a progression into and evolved understanding of spatial experience? The artworks I will be speaking of are acting as a venue for a reconnection with empirical space in light of modern departure from physicality. I

The following image is from the installation piece Forming Structure (Figure 1). I exhibited at the Metropole Galleries, in Folkestone, England, in 2003. This work suggests how we are beginning to relate to digital space. In this work I deconstructed materials that we recognize as structural elements to house us: brick, cement, steal and rock. I then reconstructed them into forms that represented what they once were. Intertwined into each piece was computer, lighting and cable wire. In constructing the individual panels, the physical element of digital

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Figure 1. ‘Forming Structure’, by James P. Werner, The Metropole Galleries, 2003.

media, the wire, found its way through each piece to eventually work in harmony with the constructive materials. Each piece was a stage in the relationship that the materials held with each other in my attempts to form a harmony between them. I wished to present digital space’s physical existence as a necessity, and a place that people think of as having an actual spatial dimension, providing a structural type of support for them. The installation space allowed viewers to enter and exit quite freely, as well as look into the space from outside it. It was interesting to see how people reacted to the elements within the space. Approximately fifty percent of the observers remained on the outside edge, too uneasy about the nature of the elements inside to risk entering. Inside, bits of brick, steel, and cement seemed to float within the space, between the 6 different works. Particularly uninviting was the piece above that supported dangling bits of metal and cement that looked as if they might give way at any time. Each panel was hung a few inches out from the wall, and the piece on the floor was raised so as to suggest that the installation as a whole was a self-supporting entity. The work was an attempt to physically represent the characteristics that digital environments have begun to project upon

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popular culture. The piece approaches the nomena aspect of digital experiences by placing representative elements of it within physical reach and insinuating a makeshift construction of structural elements that we normally recognize as providing physical support for us. II

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was in the belief that by studying, and recognizing the individual traits of various levels of experience, we could rediscover the fundamental structures of perceptual consciousness, transformed and irreducible to just perception. He stood by the point that truth is an ideal. He states, ‘‘Ideal truth lies only in perceived truth.’’ Merleau-Ponty, unlike his counterparts Sartre and Heidegger, maintained that the perception of the world is always part of the participant, being made up of both cognition and physicality. Heidegger would argue that when we begin to even discuss the idea of perception, then we only begin to touch on the fundamental aspects of the concept of ‘being’. But in this investigation I am leaving this aside, and am focusing on the concept of perceptions and how we engage them through the senses in relation to space. By examining the subject – object dichotomy Merleau-Ponty suggests that the perceiving subject, the individual, is not the absolute thinker. Individuals function through a joint relationship, a pact of the body and the world, our self and our body. The evidence of the perceived thing lies in its concreteness: its texture and form and our physical relationship to it. In this experience we experience a truth real to our senses, not just the mind (MerleauPonty, p. 6) The simple point being that the perceived world, through a synthesis of body and mind, is the foundation of all rationality. By tipping the scales of perception and taking away elements of the body, as virtual environments do, the synthesis of body and mind that Merleau-Ponty equates becomes skewed. The necessity to relate to and to rationalize the digital ‘spaces’ we create is becoming more prevalent as audiences engage more with digital environments. The focus on this is becoming evident in many works of convergent digital fine art. Researcher Mark Smalley from the University of Salford examines the concerns of consciousness and self-perception within telematic, digital spaces. In his essay ‘T elepresence and the Extension of Embodied Consciousness,’ he holds that telepresent art raises problems about our experience of time and physical space, and questions our understandings of consciousness and perception. These digital spaces question the boundaries of perceptual experience and facilitate the extension of consciousness

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into the telematic spectacle. (cf. Smalley) Artist Char Davies creates an immersive virtual space with her work Osmose (1994–95). This is an interactive, fully immersive, ‘‘virtual environment that uses a stereoscopic head-mounted display, three-dimensional interactive sound, and an embodying interface driven by the user’s breath and balance.’’ She has attempted ‘‘to present a different interpretation of being in the world,’’ and her conceptual models of the world are kinesthetically explored through full body immersion (cf. Davies). Artist Paul Sermon begins to bring the notion of real shared virtual presence in a physical space with his art work. His piece called T here’s no simulation like home and is an interactive installation in which participants can interact with each other via telepresence. Sermon creates installation art that brings remote participants together in a shared telepresent environment through the use of live chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology. He states: The user (or ‘browser’) is rapidly becoming a performer or even actor, often represented by avatars and agents within (these) new environments. To a certain degree, networked projects portray the increasing performing role the individual is adopting in media culture and in general society: omnipresent in endless phone-in radio stations, ubiquitous surveillance observation, or globalised Reality TV (cf. Sermon).

These digitally immersive artworks are quite essential to the pursuit of digital and technological interfaces in contemporary art. However, what they lack seems to be new approaches to temporal stimulation via an illusionary environment through a means other than digital, photographic or cinema-graphic representation. The question of the object-hood of an object has challenged art for a number of decades. Research in the area of cognition suggests that object perception is a developed, ordinary routine: a result of empirical learning. The materiality of an object to us is a result of the inhibition of subsets and routines and their execution. The point of interference with our routines of perception is the point that our aesthetic attention and intuition take over (cf. Bullot). Digital environments accentuate this displacement of routines, providing an enhanced aesthetic experience. But they lack the spatial structure of displaced physical objects. The combination of an immersive digital space with the tangibility of real presence would provide an almost transcendence of the two aesthetic understandings. New practices in installation art are acting as a venue for reconnection with empirical space in the light of modern departure from physicality. The transition involving post-modernist ideals and digital art is changing

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the notion of immersion from transportation to another place to the desire for transportation into another realm. Artist Michael Rovner approaches this threshold. At the 2003 Venice Biennale, Rovner presented an instillation where the viewer was completely surrounded by video screens. On the screen were silhouettes of tiny people walking in a line around the room. A low humming noise filled the room and as one exited the room, the door forced the viewer to step in a direction as if they were stepping into the revolving line of people. Though this installation still used digital media, it allowed the observer to become part of the work simply by leaving the room. The insinuation of humans being stuck in a revolving queue of virtual space was exemplified by forcing the viewer to become part of that queue in order to leave the space. In this piece the illusion is the outside world and is communicated when entering back into it. Instead of having the audience interact within a digitally virtual space, Rovner uses the bodily interaction with the installation to suggest that the real world is the illusion, where virtuality lies within how we structure our perceptions of the current human situation in modern culture. III

There have been a number of quantitative studies done on our visual perceptual field. Recently, P. Turner’s study, ‘T he Cognitive Mapping of V irtual Space’ examines three dimensional digital space constructed through a virtual reality kit. The experiments concluded that virtual environments give rise to primary spatial knowledge ‘‘which has similar characteristics to that which is acquired from exploring the real world rather than secondary spatial knowledge (derived from maps and figures).’’ Basically, the mind perceives the situation in a 3D screen space as if the space presented within the screen extends beyond the boundaries of the frame (cf. Turner). This finding is significant to my argument on the growing necessity for physical engagement with illusionist artwork because the study supports the idea that television, motion pictures and video art fall into a completely different category of perceptual engagement than digital 3D images and virtual reality. Another important factor is the interactivity taking place with the virtual reality program. By allowing observers to control aspects of the space, they play a role in the cognitive definition of the space presented through the screen. This seems to be quite an important factor in audience responsiveness. Recent research suggests that more realistic representations of characters in

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movies with the use of CGI tends to be less favourable to audiences than animation where the appearance of the characters is slightly more exaggerated and less realistic, but expresses more emotion. Carole-Anne Poole and Alex Jukes state: The creators of CGI characters in productions such as Final Fantasy or Animatrix seem to be predominately concerned with creating an ever increasing level of photo-realism. As a result the characters produced lack a sense of perceptual fulfillment and expression that in turn fails to conform to our expectations, exacerbating a feeling of dissonance. Creating a ‘real’ visual experience does not essentially lie in photo-realism and there are many physical examples within perceptual studies that suggest that realism is enhanced when strategic elements are removed thus allowing cognitive processes to become active. Likewise caricature and acting can be linked to this notion of abstraction and expression, and when grounded in ‘real experience’ animated caricature allows us to connect with characters in a very real way (cf. Poole and Jukes).

So, our relationship to an aesthetic situation where routines are changed and creative, aesthetic thinking takes over is where we connect with animation. It’s the realistic animation that attempts to trick our senses and recreate reality that we tend to relate to less because it takes away some of the aesthetic cognitive relationships we are used to using to define what is happening through that particular medium. Our mind would rather see something fake and interpret it as real than see something that attempts to be real that we know is fake. This is one explanation for why research in digital representation is focusing on introducing senses other than sight and sound into the equation, accommodating for the rejection of visually realistic virtual representations. Brian Massumi’s theory of ‘Determinate Vision’, based on the Gansfeld experiments held in the 1960’s, attempts to explain the dimensions of vision we experience. The Gansfeld experiments were a series of tests done on human sight in the late 1960‘s. The goal was to determine what the effects of ‘Pure Vision’ were on the subjects. ‘Pure Vision’ was described as the retina being placed under circumstances ideal to its function. Subjects were immobilized and their retinas were directly exposed to high intensity light – pure light. The data from the experiments was inconclusive due to the fact that no subject could agree on what they were seeing. All subjects described seeing moving forms, but could not agree on their description. At best, the collective description was a ripplelike fog of moving particles. From the evidence, Massumi concluded the experiments reached the limit of our perceptual field. What the subjects were seeing were the elementary units of vision that reflected the move-

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ment of subatomic particles. Massumi concludes that our formation of object space and our perceptual environment exist as a compromise, or deciphering of the chaotic movement occurring in the flux of subatomic space. For this to happen; to perceive objects in space; movement is required to equate a proper ratio between the flux of space and our body to make discernable forms. Seeing which yields complex forms that are resolvable into constant units (form likes such as slant and line) yet posses a unity of fusion that make them more than the sum of those parts: in a word, objects of perception (Massumi p. 149).

Virtual reality provides an interpretation of moving units of vision. It is not, however, another understanding of the ratio of chaotic elementary units of sight and bodily movement, as described through ‘Determinate Vision.’ If chaotic movement is the source of substance to form distinctions within space, digital environments become a compilation of the already deciphered units into a lesser fusion, lesser unity than that which we originally fused, creating a semi-empirical visualization: a translation of the already translated elements. This notion can be found rooted in the Lacanian theory of the ‘gaze’ of reality itself. Jacques Lacan suggested that we could perceive reality due to a veil of perceptual understanding put forth through the physicality of the body. ‘‘Determinate Vision’’ seems to be an interpretation of how this ‘gaze’ physically begins to work. And digital environments can be seen as an extended ‘gaze’ created by us as a manifestation to help perpetuate the psychological need for this gaze to exist, with the purpose of separating us from the real world (cf. Zizek). In Massumi’s book Parables of the V irtual, he says that to justify an idea, notion or concept (in this case our understanding of space) is to place it into the confines of a situation that is only relative to other justified concepts. Once the concept is taken out of context from the community that justifies it, then it is no longer justifiable and again becomes needy of validation (cf. Massumi). Similarly Thomas Nagel describes reason as the following: Reason deals with ideas of non-local and non-relative methods of justification; methods that distinguish concepts through means that do not rely on justifications. This type of pure reason is universal, understood outside any community of conceptual validations (Nagel, p. 5). Truth through pure reason does not need to be justified. It is just pure truth and constitutes pure reason. So, through sight – (referring back to the field of ‘Determinate Vision’ described earlier) all objects understood through the flux particle makeup of our perceptual field are absolute. Because its validity cannot be questioned

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through the concept of pure reason, sight, via light and color, is singular, incomparable, void of the need of justification through other venues. It is understood through the human body as pure reason. Digital representation of events creates a paradox. It has the ability to visualize thought for us, or rather, bring to the forefront of perception that which previously receded only into thought. This equates to a visualization of kinaesthetic action: we’ve now created a space that can show us actions we could only previously experience within the self. Interestingly, many recent art works using digital media attempt to visualize the internal processes of computer data in hopes of moving into, and beyond the limitations of the media and ultimately the genre of simulation (Grau, p. 220); in doing so they stab at opening a window to the kinaesthetic movements and cognitions of digital internals themselves. These artists raise questions about the aesthetic considerations of representing knowledge and representing physical forms of space through scientific data. The rebuttal to this is that scientific data cannot represent physical form to our perceptual field. And by doing so, they are regressing into a deeper simulation of the already simulated visualization of nature. ‘‘It is meaningless to interrogate the relation of the human to the nonhuman if the nonhuman is only a construct of human culture, or inertness.’’ (Massumi, p. 39) As we know from Baudrillard, the forces driving our need for experiencing objects do not begin with the notions of function and use, but only with the declamatory value of the objects within a system which is (for the most part) based on objects (Butler, pp. 41–52). Currently the take off of virtual existence, through digital interaction, into mainstream society, is progressing from a system of ideology within the system of objects, to an ideology within a system of digital representation. Instead of recognizing need within the values of objects, we recognize our own value through our temporal movements amongst digital atmospheres. Now we are witnessing Baudrillard’s premonitions of the system’s progression. By attempting to capture some pre-existing real or express a reality outside of empirical perceptual presence, we delve deeper into a homunculus extension of the object system. The popular theory that the digital world, often referred to in the context of the net, is an extension of the body, helps endorse this. In ‘going’ to websites and experiencing new things through these means, we become part of the narrative of the digital systems and their stories. Much like the grand narrative of history, our digital narratives can be fabricated, erased and taken further to be even re-experienced. But unlike the grand narrative, these experiences lack the small detail of actually physically occurring.

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Artist and theorist Joseph Nechvatal, takes the stand of digital immersion art being a diversion from the ‘other’ of reality. While accepting digital immersive and interactive environments as beneficial to imagination and intuition, he holds that ultimately the necessity of the entire arena of physical reality is of vital importance in the critique of what we are. The incompleteness of any virtual situation becomes a lure, attempting to ‘whole’ an environment that, ‘‘... elicits no intellectual exertion in the procedure of reasoning,’’ through withdraw from our primary perceptive field (cf. Nechvatal). Like Zizek, he equates the virtual world with a social withdraw from the questions of reality. A prime example of art that begins to present virtuality from outside the digital spectrum is Richard Wilson’s engine oil titled 20:50 (Figure 2) exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 1987. In this work the viewer walks onto what looks to be a metal platform with waist-high retaining walls suspended in the middle of a two storey room. But actually, the

Figure 2. ‘20:50’, By Richard Wilson, 1987. Image provided by the Saatchi Gallery, London, and used with permission.

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platform is submerged into a pool of oil that fills the entire room up to the very edge of the platform retaining walls. The reflection in the engine oil is so clear that it feigns the existence of a virtual space below the viewer. What’s great about this exhibit is Wilson does not attempt to alter or fabricate his medium, used engine oil, in any way. He thrusts the viewer into a situation that provides both physical reality, and total illusion. It offers all the visual stimulation of an illusionary experience without the use of digital media. He simply transports material into a gallery and places you in the middle of it. Since Duchamp, contemporary artists have been misplacing objects and substances from their traditional environment by placing them in the gallery. But Wilson immerses one into the object and substance. The space becomes another place in its own, separate from the gallery. In this way it is almost a transcendence of virtualization. How better to project the concept of immersion than to literally immerse the audience in its physical realization and then make them believe, even for a second, that it’s not really there? Another example is the work of Olafur Eliasson. One of his pieces at the 2003 Venice Biennale consisted of an empty space lit with a low glaring yellow hue that filled the room, allowing only the projection of a black and white color spectrum to exist in the space. When one entered the room, skin, clothes, backpacks, everything, was transformed to various levels of grey. From inside the space one seemed to be transported into a moving black and white film, or image. The intensified color spectrum relative to the black and white immersion space was now a glowing picture of moving color. It was as if by being transported into a black and white photo, the outside world was transformed into a film, its screen framed by the doorway. The immersion into a black and white image or film and the duality of reality that existed in this space exemplifies the idea of an immersion environment offering the same temporal stimulation and illusion of a separation from real space that digital immersive environments attempt. While relating the audience to the sense of involvement in a pictorial presentation, this piece both regresses to the ideals of black and white film and photography, yet transcends the notion of observer involvement within a simulated illusion. Like digital environments, the viewer is still controlled by the defining aspects of the spatial relationships created in the space; however, they are not reduced to a solely visual sensory engagement with their environment. By altering the perception of physical space, Eliasson successfully creates an interactive illusion outside of virtual space. Just like in virtual reality, it becomes a place

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where perception exists on two levels relative only to the plane you wish to recognize at the given moment. I suggest that concepts like these would not exist without interactive digital environments taking the precedence that they have in modern culture. For this reason, the reintroduction of immersion style art that has existed for centuries is not a digression from digital interaction, but a progressive evolution in experience. I see this as an evolved understanding of spatial relationships: what I call a ‘‘Post Digital Awareness’’. By understanding the make up of the virtual situation, I make the argument that spatial representation, and ultimately a greater understanding of the empirical and conceptual world, will progress as we (if we) alter our plight into a simulated make up of object forms that are void of their object-hood. Certainly we are the wiser for being able to create virtual spaces, but we are creating spaces that lack the essence of presence. In retrospect to the digital understanding of conceptual space, artists are discovering new ways to project similar spatial illusions. These works are allowing the situation’s physicality to engage with sensational singularity and approach pure reasoning while within the experience. I want to take one last look at understanding perception through the basic elements of digital representation: light and color. Light, and its product color, are absolute in their original form, at the time of our physical cognition of their presence. What you see is real according to ‘Determinate Vision’. However, before and after seeing color, we begin to objectify the idea of seeing it, and how we plan to relate to it. It is at this point that it becomes relative to other elements within our perceptual domain, and we begin to justify it within the domains of other influential elements. So once we see it, it is what it is to us at that moment. But once we begin to reflect on that experience, we place it into a different context. We have then taken it out of the context with which it is meant to be understood – the context of seeing. For example, some colors seem darker when placed next to a lighter color and visa versa. They are what they are to us under the circumstances in which they are presented. However, often we say this is an illusion; they aren’t really that dark or light. Once color and light are reflected on and represented through words, they are no longer understood as the elements they present themselves as. Thus, we can no longer place them in the context of pure reason because they have been taken out of their original venue and placed in a community of justifications which we apply to them through our empirical understanding.

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Everything seen through the digital spectrum is something that has been constructed via these reflections on visual representation of light and color. So, the understanding and the experience via pure reasoning cannot exists in a situation represented through a digital spectrum because the fabrications of the events taking place there is done via justifications on light and color during the construction of the computer environment. The events have been recreated, and so justified, taken out of the context of real space and are lost to the possibility of pure reasoning through the human experience. Wilson and Eliasson present work that is related to by the audience in the real world. These spaces allow us to touch upon the actual reality of the illusion presented because we are not subjected to them in an environment that is based on pure justification. Because of how we interact with these illusions, we are allowed to connect with these spaces and reflect upon them through determinate vision, with pure reason. I believe this to be a key reason as to why they have emerged in recent years. We are beginning to realize that digital experience lacks in this type of physical touch with reasoning. I’m not suggesting that this is a new concept. Many fine artists have been weary of graphics and digital representation since its introduction into art. The point I want to make is that in light of new understandings of 3D space, and new forms of interaction within digital fields, these artists have embraced the dilemmas of illusionism presented by the medium and have taken the concepts behind simulated, interactive environments to a higher level of understanding. By presenting immersive spaces that suggest alternative reasoning about the elements surrounding the viewer, much like the panorama paintings of the 16th century, they transport the observer to a different place; but in this case, it is almost a separated dimensional understanding of the space, only slightly rivalled by the lesser reality of virtual reality. These artists are actually using real space to simulate space itself. What this does is open up a field of perception to us that allows us to get a glimpse at the ambiguity of simulation that exists within modern culture’s object and new, virtually oriented state. Eliasson shows us what it is like to be looking back through the images that we picture the world through: we are allowed to walk into a black and white picture. Wilson lures us into the deep end of a pool of chemical waste and then tricks us into believing for a second that it is not really there. These are situations that have previously been accomplished through pictures, and in more recent times interactive digital interfaces. I venture to say that while here, instead of being immersed into these spaces, we are momentarily emerged from

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the simulated real space of modern culture. Now that representation of these ideas has begun to escape the confines of two dimensions and digital space, they begin to expose the seams and cracks existing in the layers of simulacrum we have become accustomed to living in. Oliver Grau sets the stage for debate about digital representation in his book V irtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion: Essentially, virtual reality stands for the complete divorce of the human sensorium from nature and matter. In the history of illusionism in art and media, virtual reality constitutes the greatest challenge so far to the human senses and their relationship with the environment, which produces, sustains, and permeates them. The interactor inside the image space recognizes that what is visible is an illusionist environment where the perception of the organs of sense and the quantities of time and space have become variables. It is highly questionable in this art how concept, as a matter of course, the ancients’ elements, or matter, make their comeback; how computed material things, perhaps soon to even be experienced haptically, pass over into the digital sphere, immaterial but unfolding the deception of being material. Apart from doubts as to whether models of the world based on Plato’s elements doctrine, which disappeared at about the same time as alchemy, are either timely or meaningful, it is questionable whether virtual reality image worlds are nothing, disregarding the technical equipment used to create them, and thus the excessive preoccupation with these worlds appears somewhat paradoxical, if it cannot find a new direction (Grau, p. 231).

I believe these immersive installations are a response to that paradox, and I hope a step in the right direction. Gray’s School of Art T he Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, United Kingdom BIBLIOGRAPHY Biro, Matthew. Anslem Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bullot, Nicholas. Art and Cognition: Objects and Aesthetic Attention. Available at: www.interdisciplines.org/artcog/papers/5/13, 2003. Butler, Rex. Jean Baudrillard – T he Defense of the Rea. London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1999. Davies, Char. Changing Space: V irtual Reality as an Arena of Embodied Being: Multimedia: From Wagner to V irtual Reality. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. Grau, Oliver. V irtual Art – From Illusion to Immersion. London/Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the V irtual. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. T he Primacy of Perception. Edited by James M. Edie. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Nechvatal, Joseph. V R and the Concept of the Other. Available at: www.rhizome.org, 2003.

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Petitot, Jean-Luc. Naturalizing Phenomenology. Edited by Francisco J. Carela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean Michel Roy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Poole, Carole-Ann and Alex Jukes. Creating Digital Realism. Presented at Pixel Raiders 2, Sheffield Hallam University, England, 2004. Sermon, Paul. T he Emergence of User- and Performer-Determined Narratives in T elematic Environment. The University of Salford, Presented at Pixel Raiders 2, Sheffield Hallam University, England, 2004. Smalley, Mark. T elepresence and the Extension of Embodied Consciousness. Pixel Raiders, Sheffield Hallam University, England, 2004. Turner, P. T he Cognitive Mapping of V irtual Space (BL). Available at: http://www.theses.com/idx/047/it047003106.htm, 1996. Zizek, Slavoj. T he Matrix – T he T wo Sides of Perversion. Philosophy Today Celina, 1999, Vol. 43.

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THOUGHT, OBJECT AND EXPERIENCE IN FILM/ VIDEO INSTALLATION ART

It is at this stage that the real problem of memory in perception arises, in association with the general problem of perceptual consciousness. We want to know how, by its own vitality, and without carrying complementary material into a mythical unconscious, consciousness can, in course of time, modify the structure of its surroundings; how, at every moment, its former experience is present to it in the form of a horizon which it can reopen – ‘if it chooses to take that horizon as a theme of knowledge’ – in an act of recollection, but which it can equally leave on the fringe of experience, and which then immediately provides the perceived with a present atmosphere and significance. T o remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal setting. T o perceive is not to remember. Phenomenology of Perception, M. Merleau-Ponty

The medium of film and video installation art has shaped the language of contemporary artistic discourse redefining notions of representation and perception. Artists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Valie Export, Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, Michael Snow and others have been important figures in this genre. Structural film, a term coined by P. Adams Sitney, explored the medium of film beyond its narrative construction of time to expose the processes evident in the language of conventional cinema. This form of ‘‘Experimental’’ film explores the relationship of the viewer to the screen, the disembodied gaze and voyeurism in film. Performance art also had an impact on the contemporary art scene as more artists began to explore the relationship of the artist to the object and the viewer. The experience of the gallery space, the dialogue on art experience and objecthood and reactions to modernism helped frame this new movement. With the advent of new technologies new forms of artistic practice were created. It has been called, as in Valie Export‘s case, ‘‘Expanded Cinema’’ or the extension of consciousness onto the screen, or, in the case of Rosalind Krauss, ‘‘Video as Narcissism’’. In Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception Ponty states, ‘‘We must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space, or in time It inhabits space and time. In the last analysis, if my body can be a form and if there can be in front of it important figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of 185 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 185–197. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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itself in its pursuit if its aims: the body image is finally a way of stating that my body is in the world.’’ It is interesting to look at these two perspectives of both Krauss and Merleau-Ponty in their methods on the discourse of consciousness and embodiment in reference to ‘‘new’’ technologies, which shape the contemporary art space. Both theories articulate relevant analysis in their methodologies of structure concerning video/film art. Film, video, computers, DVD players now sculpt the architecture of the gallery. As embodiment and consciousness frame the apparatus of the machine the phenomenology of perception becomes evermore apparent through the exploration of ‘‘new’’ media technologies. In many video and film installations the viewer experiences the space as a phenomenological gesture in which their experience is mediated through the body and its experience of place. This discussion will center on historical references, which helped shape the foundation for installation art in film and video. The second part of the paper will focus on contemporary artists who explore ‘‘new’’ media including virtual installations. First the term ‘‘new’’ must be defined. New refers to something original in its conception. As it is applied to new media it refers to a technical form, which is original in its development. It is interesting to pose the question of whether ‘‘new’’ media is in fact new and how it speaks to our level of self perception for we create societies and civilizations based on our desires and drives. The series of video/film installations to be discussed can be placed in two categories, those which pursue the materials and the medium from a sculptural, painterly and minimalist influence and the second category, which approaches the process of the form in a conceptual nature. The work of artist Valie Export can be defined as both sculptural and conceptual in its approach to the materials of film and video installation. The body of her work consists of film/video installations referred to as expanded movies. Valie Export was closely associated with the Viennese Actionists of the 1960s and early 70s in Vienna. Exports work, as a performance artist is interesting in the way the body is explored as a cultural construct marked with signs and signifiers such as gender. In the film installation Abstract Film No. 1 (1967–68), a light is held over a mirror which different liquids are placed atop the surface. The patterns created by the liquid running down the surface of the mirror are reflected onto a screen. Export viewed this as a gesture exploring materials beyond the technology of the day. Her return to the use of natural

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materials is closely linked with arte povera in which everyday materials are used in the creation of art projects. This is also another way in stripping the medium of film to its basics. This can be viewed as a return to natural phenomenon and a dialogue on nature and culture. This form of installation also explores the experience and perception of the audience, engaging the viewer in ways of focusing on the materials and actions of the process as opposed to the disembodied gaze of cinematic linear time. Ars L ucis (1967–68), consists of a mirror and screen environment. This environment includes projectors, filmstrips, cylindrical prisms, solid and moveable mirrors, and curved screens used as projection surfaces in addition to the walls and ceiling of the performance space. Film projectors are placed on rotating discs. The images interact with the prisms fracturing and covering the entire space. As the participants engage with the space their bodies create shadowed gestures. They become a part of the installation and performance sculpture. This experience of film replaces the passive gaze of the participants creating an experience in which perception is through the body. The shadowed apparition of the body appears through the use of projected light, which frames its present other against the backdrop of the walls of the performance space. ‘‘This group of actions or film shorts is characterized by their investigation of film as material and process’’ (Roswitha Mueller, p. 1). In the last group of expanded movies, the actors’ bodies are used for film materials. These expanded films include T app unjd T astkino (T ouch Cinema, 1968) and Genitalpanik (Genital Panic, 1969). In this perfomative action Export attached a mini-movie theater to her chest walking through the streets encouraging passersby to engage by touching the inside of the box. ‘‘Both of them take up the question of voyeurism in the movies, the fact that the film spectator’s interest is locked in through the promise of disclosure of the forbidden. In the majority of commercial films the forbidden revolves around the body of woman, more specifically her breasts and genitals. In T ouch Cinema the voyeurism is undercut by reversing the cinematic viewing situation. Instead of being able to hide in a dark room, anonymously engaged in spurious pleasure, the spectator is encouraged to enjoy the ‘‘real thing’’ – but out in the open, in the middle of the street, where he can be seen by everybody. Export considered this a ‘‘true woman’s film.’’ She describes is as ‘‘woman’s first step from object to subject’’ (Roswitha Mueller, p. 15). During the 1960s and 1970s the work of Valie Export includes a body of video performance and installation. With the advent of this medium Export explores the uses of video as a means for performance and the

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conventions of video in similar ways as film. The body as a site of investigation and endurance through performance and the real time recording of video feedback are fundamental elements, which shape the context of the work. In Silent L anguage (1972–76), Export looks at the historical nature of female body posture. She retraces the gestures of women in historical paintings. Export superimposes herself in the present performance onto the historical image. With the advent of video, which allows for immediate feedback, Export retraces her body over the postures of women in historical paintings. This performative action is completed within view of an audience in real time. This work would be considered sculptural as the body exists as an extension of the technical machine creating gestures and movements in real time to retrace historical references. In the video piece Movement Imagination No. 5 the audience watches the live performative action taking place on the video monitor directly located in front of the room. The camera focuses on the upper part of a room. On a monitor placed in the lower part of the room there is a view of the upper part on its screen. This creates a split in the room as viewed on the box. Export who is standing next to the monitor jumps into the frame bridging the split with her body. This pushes the conventions of cinematic language where the frame of the camera is centered on a specific image. By jumping in the frame of the monitor, Export draws attention to the horizon line in the picture frame bridging the gap between the opposite areas of the room which exists in the picture plane simultaneously. Export’s video installations engage the body with the technology of the machine. The audience, objects and artist exist in real time as a part of the sculptural installation. Also, the work explores conceptual themes such as real time and the framed image. If consciousness is embodied within the machine Export uses the body as the symbol of technological extension. Her performative actions of real time use the feedback loop of video to show simultaneous performative actions with the body in a sculptural fashion between the apparatus of the camera and monitor and the performative space of the viewer. Zeit und Gegenziet (T ime and Countertime) 1973 and Interrupted Movement are two other video installations. A bowl of melting ice is recorded on tape and then re-played in reverse, while an actual plate of ice is placed in front of the monitor showing the process in real time. Here in this piece Export explores the relationship of real time to that of the recorded time of the video loop. These installations can be considered both sculptural and concept based in their use of materials.

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For the installation titled Interrupted Movement two cameras are mounted back to back in the middle of a street. One camera is recording the oncoming traffic and the opposite camera records the rear of cars driving away. The video recordings show the live feed to two monitors inside the exhibition space. The two monitors are placed as to face each other to leave enough space for the viewers to walk between them. For this installation the gallery participants complete the piece. In projected time the shadow apparition of the image appears on the monitors in the gallery space. Export clearly explores the distinction between public and private as well as recorded time and real time in this piece. According to Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘spatial forms and differences are not so much relations in the world between different points in objective space as they are relations between these points and a central perspective. These relations are different ways for external stimuli to test to solicit and to vary our grasp on the world, our horizontal and vertical anchorage in a place and in a here-and now.’’ This would explain the recorded time image and real time and its relationship to body, situation and movement. In recorded time the image exists as a backdrop, apparition within the machine. Throughout the body of video work of Peter Campus there is a sense of intention and experience, which has a different presence from viewing the other work of video artists. Campus’ work consists of performance and video installation. In his body of work he explores the relationship of the viewer to the object and the presence of the self, which in the mechanical apparatus exists as its shadowed double. It is in this body of work, conceptual in nature, that there is a strong study in the processes of the conventions of cinema as well as the relationship to phenomenology and perception. In the video work Double V ision (1971) Campus uses two cameras each positioned on opposite sides of the room. In one scene both cameras are placed at opposite ends of the room both facing each other. Campus walks to the end of one side of the room in vision of the camera, he then slightly moves the camera turning it towards the center of the film frame. As he walks to the opposite side of the room he passes himself, his other, his own reflection through the camera lens. Campus repeats this gesture of walking across the room each time moving the camera slightly until both cameras are angled so that when he enters the center of the frame he collides with his alter ego walking through himself while simultaneously looking at himself. There is a sense of humor and unpredictability, which characterizes the work. Any sense of time as a linear construct is dissolved. There is a simultaneous expansion and compression of time in which the

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self recognizes it’s other as it is split into a dual status of existence within the time-space continuum of the film frame. The camera is exposed and is recording itself within the film frame. This construction of image is different from other films in which the mechanical device of the camera/recording unit, tripod are hidden in an effort to suspend disbelief and to create the illusion of time, the myth of narrative memory. In Campus’s work the camera is looking at and recording itself. In this case the instantaneous feedback of video creates a body double in which the self is split in a time-space continuum and encased in the absolute arena of technology. According to Merleau-Ponty, if the body inhabits spaces or haunts as a presence then the consciousness within the machine appears as a ghostly apparition, a partition of the self fragmented and frozen in the status of the technological object recognizing its other simultaneously. ‘‘Unlike the other visual arts, video is capable of recording and transmitting at the same time – producing instant feedback. T he body is therefore as it were centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis. T he first of these is the camera; the second is the monitor, which re-projects the performer’s image with the immediacy of a mirror. Selfencapsulation, the body or psyche as its own surround is everywhere to be found in the corpus of video art. T he result of this substitution is the presentation of a self understood to have no past, and as well, no connection with any objects that are external to it. For the double that appears on the monitor cannot be called a true external object. Rather it is a displacement of the self, which has the eVect of transforming the performer’s subjectivity into another mirror object. T he medium of video art is the psychological condition of the self split and doubled by the mirror-reflection of synchronous feedback ... Implicit in this question is the idea that autoreflection and reflexiveness refer to the same thing, that both are cases of consciousness doubling back upon itself in order to perform and a separation between forms of art and their contents, between the procedures of thought and their objects.’’ Rosalind Krauss, V ideo: T he Aesthetics of Narcissism

This quote from Krauss’ essay on V ideo summarizes the experience of consciousness and embodiment in the machine. It describes the work of Campus and video artists who use the medium as a form of conscious and perceptual awareness. In the second sequence of Double V ision Campus hangs a camera directly onto his body. There is a pinhole shape, which borders the frame. Campus turns with the camera attached to his chest, as he turns the eye of the camera watches itself pushing you out of the seat of the voyeur and making you aware of the instrument of investigation. The artist, the object and the viewer are one in the gaze of the filmic apparatus, a space in which the consciousness of the instrument and the gaze of the other acknowledge this recognition. You are aware

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of the watching and the sense of how the image is recorded. In this piece the intentions are less humorous and whimsical but yet revealing as to the process of recording. You are made very aware of the apparatus and the process, it is as though the image talks back. In T hree T ransitions Campus turns his back to the camera. As we watch the video frame his hand cuts directly through his back. Campus breaks through himself as though again he meets his alter ego. Within the time space continuum the self recognizes its other in a fragmentary moment of impulse only in this act to destroy and recreate its alter ego. This move is very unanticipated and so unpredictable that it contradicts any rational pattern of thinking. It is as though something was created that did not exist prior to this action. Again the linear concept of time in the video frame is broken. The frame instead of being read as a flat space is read as a dimensional area. There is a collapse of space and time in the moment of the action. As Merleau-Ponty states, the body inhabits or haunts spaces leaving imprints in its surround. This is evident in the video work of Campus as we witness multiple selves existing in dimensions of the video time-space continuum. Both Krauss and Merleau-Ponty reference the body double encased in the technical apparatus. In the case of Krauss it is a narcissistic mirror image, a form of the self captured inside the box. For Merleau-Ponty it is the imprint of the body in its relationship to spatial dimensions and its surroundings. The video installation work of Dan Graham explores issues of time and the relationship of the viewer to the medium. ‘‘Video is a present time medium. Its image can be simultaneous with its perception by/of its audience. The space-time it presents is continuous, unbroken congruent with that of real time which is the shared time of its perceivers and their individual and collective environments. Film is contemplative and ‘distanced’; it detaches the viewer from present reality and makes him a spectator’’ (Dan Graham, p. 52). In Graham’s installation pieces the space is activated by the presence of the viewer. This work can be considered both sculptural and conceptual. In Graham’s installation Present Continuous Pasts/Opposing Mirrors and V ideo Monitors on T ime Delay (1974) two large mirrors are placed on either/opposite sides of the room. Two video monitors are placed in the center of the room elevated on podiums they face the mirrors. There is a time delay of a number of seconds set on the recorder so that any action, which is seen in the mirror in real time, is then recorded and set to playback to view on the monitor. Any movements, which are made in the mirror, will be seen on time delay in the video where the time

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distinction is made between the immediate feedback of video and the latent image of film process. It is here in this domain of time in which the order of present and past are brought together with a sense of immediacy. In Graham’s pieces all objects are placed to activate the space of the room in sculptural fashion. There is no suspension of disbelief as the presence of the apparatus defines the space and becomes an element of the sculpture along with the presence of the viewer who activates the space with their body. The viewer becomes a performer in installation; they are made aware of the apparatus and its process of recording tasks and actions in real time. Michael Snow has produced a significant body of work. He is best known for his film Wavelength. Throughout the film and installation work of Michael Snow he has challenged notions of the relationship of the viewer, perception of the filmic narrative and the construction of cinematic language. His work belongs to the category of sculptural and conceptual. In his installation De L a 1972 there are four monitors with rotating video cameras designed as a mechanical sculpture. The viewer activates the space watching as they rotate in the space of the monitor. Rotating planes in the video frame replace the perspective of the straightforward image of video. This shift of perspective alters the perception of the viewer as they activate the installation space. The straight perspective of the frame is not seen leaving no room for cinematic interpretation of the image. Here once again the double of the body appears within the video frame. This double other exists as a phantom encased within the monitor frozen in the space of elapsed time. It is in constant motion as the frame is turned upside down altering the viewer’s perspective of their relationship to the space. In Michael Snow’s video installation So Is T his (2000) the text speaks to the viewer. The first few lines of the film read, ‘‘This is the title of this film. The rest of this film will look just like this. The film will consist of single words presented on after another.’’ This form of self-referential text guides the viewer through the video installation. You are never given the illusion of cinematic space or narrative convention of suspended disbelief. The language of the film is about the film itself. Each word is shown one at a time so as the viewer can only construct the words at a slower pace of anticipation. Snow toys with our sense predictability. We are never allowed to directly engage with any form of cinematic representation familiar to our sense of perception. This construction of self-referential language the film talking about the film pushes the viewer out of the

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voyeuristic space of cinematic illusion and breaks with notions of linear time or a conventional cinematic reading of the text of the narrative. The work of Joan Jonas has explored, among other mediums, video and installation. Her body of work can also be seen as conceptual in its use of exploring video language and cinematic structure. In Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll frame by frame is shown on the video monitor exposing motion and time. ‘‘Vertical Roll is another case where time has been forced to enter the video situation, and where that time is understood as propulsion towards an end. The vertical roll appears as the agency of a will that runs counter to an electronically stabilized condition. The grammar of the camera is eroded by the dislocating grip of the roll’’ (Rosalind Krauss). Jonas undresses herself upside down in the camera as the image runs pointing to the social encoding and inscription of the body. The body is marked with signs and signifiers, which encode its gender distinctions within the time-space continuum. CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND THEIR APPROACH TO VIRTUAL TECHNOLOGIES

In recent contemporary installation the structure of the body is replaced by a shadow appearance through a projection. Images of grids and lines are superimposed and capture the shadow. If video was narcissism to Krauss in the age of projection the self is split and projected in virtual time. If the body does not inhabit just one space but haunts in various spaces according to Merleau-Ponty, here is a self projected through a collapsed sense of time which appears as the apparition of its other, not just existing in two dimensional space but as a three dimensional image. In virtual installation art performance is now the role of the viewer as the machine apparatus is used as a form of projection to project the viewer’s body onto the architecture of the space. Virtual time is marked by the creation of simulated experience and authorship or created experience by the viewer. Archiving of information and memory are characteristic of the domain of the virtual. There is a different sense of engagement with the image than in the early experimental film projects. The act of watching is replaced by the shadow image of the haunting in threedimensional space. As opposed to revealing the element of time and the process of recording new media installations create an environment, which relies heavily on the presence of technology and an absence in the exploration of process. Coded language, graphs and lines are projected onto the

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body as the shadow apparition appears. Instead of the body in the machine its shadow exists in three dimensional space and time. Memories of past, present and the will to future experience exist simultaneously archived in an area of which the domain of time no longer adheres to the rules of natural order. Hierarchies of images are stored in memory banks. The body is graphed and coded. The viewer is no longer suspended by the gaze to read the image but is now an active participant in the sculpture of the space. If this is, as Krauss states concerning video, a case of consciousness doubling back onto itself, then what is the virtual? A desire and drive to become our own authors in creating ideal worlds through simulated experience? A fear of a world speeding vastly out of control and our last effort to maintain a balance by becoming authors of our own experience in a world controlled by our sexual fantasies and basic instinctual drives and desires. We no longer have to fear death as the physical constraints of embodiment are overcome through projection in a machine. Experience is no longer in the real but mediated through the apparatus of the box. The basic sense of sight is privileged over others of taste, smell and tactility. Warped spaces and experiences of vertigo are a part of the virtual. It has moved the body outside of the box and into the architecture of space creating multiple images and multiple selves. Interactivity, movement of the screen, and our ability to communicate with the phantom other characterize this domain of the virtual. New Media artists have various ways of working with digital technologies. One group looks at the language of the machine/computer of language and code. The other explores issues of identity, voyeurism and surveillance. In the work of video artist Sharon Grace the construction of identity in virtual time is explored. You don’t need an actual body to participate; you can in fact create your own identity and experience. In her 1970s video installation work Millennium Venus the gallery viewer has a conversation with a female cyborg. The installation consists of a PC workstation, voice recognition box, surveillance camera and a video laserdisc. The viewer picks up the receiver of the telephone. The voice on the other end is the female subject with her back facing the screen. She begins to speak talking of how she misses her place in the world. The viewer can communicate and create their own experience with the onscreen image. This female image reverts the male gaze as she turns her back toward the object of viewing. She becomes the voyeur looking at the viewer in a projected screen image. Issues of identity and power sexual relations are explored.

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‘‘T he ultimate ontological object is the T V and the telephone. T he will to power is replaced by the will to virtuality, a will to disappear into the technology. We’re in a time of fragmentation’’ (Sharon Grace).

According to Grace both presence and speed, characteristics of the virtual, create a system of atrophy in the experience of the social. Scott Snibbe’s work consists of projections /installations of computer animated images which are activated by the viewers’ participation in the space. ‘‘Although the ideas that my works attempt to convey are complex, I have adopted a minimalist artistic practice. I combine this approach with the principles of phenomenology, the philosophy of how the body ‘thinks’ through unmediated perception, rather than through reason and language’’ (Scott Snibbe). Snibbe’s work shows computer-programmed installations in which the viewer completes the piece with their presence or engagement with the space. In his piece Shadow the viewer enters the space to face a clear projection of a square in which only their shadow is seen. This is very similar to the earlier installations in film/video in which the shadow is projected onto the muralized field. As the viewer stands in front of the projection their shadow and gestures of movement are recorded. As they move away they are replayed eventually fading away to return to the lighted screen projection. The muralized field is no longer stable but is completely interactive. By the touch of the screen our desire to recognize and communicate with the virtual other is satisfied. In his work Boundary Functions viewers interact with graphed lines on the floor of the gallery space, which move relative to the body of the participant. As more people enter the frame of the space this creates motion in the borderlines as the participants’ body changes positions along the frame of the floor. In this work Snibbe looks as how we perceive space relative to experience of the body. Jennifer Steinkamp is another artist whose work fits into the group of artists exploring digital media through coded projections in a sculptural way. Some influences include Oscar Fischinger, Bruce Nauman and Hollis Frampton, to name a few. In Steinkamp’s installation pieces she uses 3-D animation to create projections which sculpt the space of the room or architecture. Many of her animation pieces are projected directly onto the wall. As the viewer enters the space, their shadowed silhouette is seen reflected in the image. Graphs and shapes and colors of geometric language then code the architecture of the space. Again very similar to the

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early installations of the 70s, the viewer activates the space of the installation recognizing the shadowed self in the landscape of coded colors. In the work of Shirley Shor moving computer animated graphs are projected onto the architecture of the wall space. Viewers enter the space to see their shadow appearance in the floating landscape of grids and lines. ‘‘In this real-time animation I strived to create a notion of liquid architecture. I challenge our prejudices that architecture is stable. The environment is generated by code that creates an on going changeable grid, and unstable structure of motion that the viewer can walk through’’ (Shirley Shor). As an artist much of my own work has been informed by the foundation of these various film and video creators. I write from the perspective of an artist. In the video installation work of Dakota Dehinde my role as a participant in performative actions has given me perspective on the nature of performance art and video installation as an active performer. In Dehinde’s work she uses video installation and projection. Her video and film installations are inspired by the writings of Luce Iriguay and MerleauPonty. ‘‘The ultimate justification of life is neither in the scientific or the ethical but in the aesthetic vision’’ (Primacy of Perception, p. 159). ‘‘Luce Iriguay takes bringing the body into focus as locus of perception through experience a level further to the recognition of the gendered body as subject to a multiplicity of gender regimes.’’ Dehinde’s video and performance installations consist of photographed and videotaped images of two women in a performance kissing one another with opposite shades of lipstick. In the performance piece Eve Black Eve W hite one woman of brown complexion wears black lipstick and the other of lighter complexion wears white. ‘‘My work explores recontextualizing intimate gestures commenting on the false constructs of gender sex and racial myths’’ (Dakota Dehinde). In my own video and computer installation work I am interested in many of the themes discussed in this writing. From video installation to animated moving color graphs my work resonates the same questions relevant in this discussion. As an artist I am still inspired by many of the historical figures in installation and their relationship to the medium, consciousness and embodiment. In virtual time there is no sense of experience outside of the mediated. In this domain is the will to become, the desire to perceive ourselves outside of physicality is evident. How do we perceive ourselves at this level of conscious awareness? I hope to pose the questions and continue to formulate discussions in an ongoing discourse to understand virtual time and contemporary technol-

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ogies. If the will of the body is to sustain its physical self in real time, its phantom exists in virtual space anticipating a level of communication with its other. Fragmented, split encapsulated inside the machine it exists as a mere haunting. If the fear of death is evident in life, the machine and the virtual realize an existence beyond the end, an unending openness to time where time has no boundaries and the phantom of the body exists as a memory. San Francisco Art Institute BIBLIOGRAPHY Dehinde, Dakota, Interview. Grace, Sharon, Interview. Graham, Dan, T wo-Way Mirror Power, Selected W riting by Dan Graham on His Art, Alexander Alberro (ed.). Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1999, p. 52. Krauss, Rosalind, V ideo: T he Aesthetics of Narcissism. Mueller, Roswitha, Valie Export, Fragments of the Imagination. Indiana: Indiana University Press, pp. 1, 15. Shor, Shirley, Artists statement, Internet Website. Snibbe, Scott, Artist Statement, Internet Website. Steinkamp, Jennifer, Artist Statement, Internet Website.

ANDREW E. HERSHBERGER

THE ‘‘SPRING-TIGHT LINE’’ IN MINOR WHITE’S THEORY OF SEQUENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHY*

In the last analysis this is a confusion of photography with painting. – Clement Greenberg, 19461

Ever since the invention of photography, the question of its similarity to and/or difference from painting has been a primary concern of photographers, painters, critics, and art historians. In 1839, the legendary response of Paul Delaroche to a daguerreotype image – ‘‘from this day forward, painting is dead’’ – already assumed an uncomfortably close relationship between the two media. While overwrought and incorrect, Delaroche’s reaction seems warranted considering that the two primary inventors of photography associated their new medium with painting and drawing as well. Louis-Jacques-Mande´ Daguerre (1787–1851) was himself a celebrated painter of highly illusionistic dioramas, and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) named his invention ‘‘photogenic drawing,’’ and then published his works in T he Pencil of Nature. Perhaps sensing a threat to these traditional media, the early photographer and theorist Sir William J. Newton argued for a hierarchy; all photographers must first learn how to draw and to paint before taking up the camera since the opposite approach would lead to artistic laziness or even ‘‘injury.’’2 In the twentieth century, Van Deren Coke reexamined these issues in T he Painter and the Photograph as did, famously, Peter Galassi in Before Photography.3 Galassi’s much debated thesis was that photography had simply inherited certain preexisting aesthetics from painting, making the connection *Important Copyright Information. Quotations from Minor White correspondence, all quotations from his published and unpublished manuscripts, quotations from his unpublished and published journal ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ and any other written documents found in the Minor White Archive are © Copyright by The Trustees of Princeton University. All rights reserved. Publication here is with the permission of the Minor White Archive, Princeton University. Photographs by Minor White are © Copyright by The Trustees of Princeton University. All rights reserved. Publication here is with the permission of the Minor White Archive, Princeton University. Quotations from materials in the Peter C. Bunnell Collection, including the unpublished interviews with various persons, are used with the permission of Peter C. Bunnell.

199 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 199–229. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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between the two even more intimate, perhaps inextricable. Nevertheless, the distinction that most writers before and after Galassi impulsively accept is that photography differentiates itself from painting via a greater degree of ‘‘realism.’’ However, there is a problem with that distinction in that no one has been able to define precisely what it means.4 The desire to separate photography from drawing and painting was perhaps never stronger than during the mid-twentieth-century period known as ‘‘high modernism.’’ While teaching photography at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) from 1946–1953, the American artist Minor White (1908–1976) emerged as one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century. White was part of a small group of artists of his generation who preferred the sequential mode of presentation to all others. The concept of a photographic sequence that he condensed into his already suspiciously mixed-media phrase, ‘‘cinema of stills,’’ would turn out to be his definitive theoretical statement, an idea that structured his life’s work. White poetically outlined this theory in the introductory text or colophon to his group of twelve ordered photographs of coastal rocks from Point Lobos titled Fourth Sequence, 1950 (Fig. 1). The Fourth Sequence colophon describes the connection between the photographs and the reality that they depict as a ‘‘spring-tight line.’’ This phrase appears at the beginning of the colophon’s third paragraph: ‘‘The spring-tight line between reality and photograph has been stretched relentlessly, but it has not been broken. These abstractions of nature have not left the world of appearances; for to do so is to break the camera’s strongest point – its authenticity.’’5 This passage developed from an unpublished, yet typeset, variant colophon and from sundry of White’s personal journal entries. For instance, his unpublished colophon uses the word ‘‘sprint’’ rather than ‘‘spring,’’ and thus identifies this same connection as a ‘‘sprint-tight line.’’ While possibly a typographical error, one effect of this slight variation is the evocation of Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographs of galloping horses and his other movement studies, and especially the taught mechanical and electrical lines that triggered the cameras used in their creation.6 White’s published colophon varies in several more substantial ways from his unpublished version. The corresponding paragraph in the unpublished colophon reads: ‘‘The sprint-tight line of authenticity between the photograph and the original has been relentlessly stretched without ever breaking the camera’s strongest point – the magic of its tether to reality. For to break it is to live the life of substance, surfaces and forms in the

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Figure 1. Minor White, Point Lobos, California, 1949. From Fourth Sequence, 1950, picture 1 of 12. Gelatin silver print. Minor White Archive, 49-455. Photographs by Minor White are © Copyright by the Trustees of Princeton University. All rights reserved. Publication here is with the permission of the Minor White Archive, Princeton University.

manner of paint or clay.’’7 In Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946, critic Andy Grundberg provided something of a commentary on this very passage. He argued that White’s writing, like that of his spiritual mentor, Alfred Stieglitz, reveals ‘‘an unresolved conflict between the need to situate photography as an independent, modernist art form, and the simultaneous need to rationalize it as an advanced medium by referencing it to the avant-garde of painting and sculpture.’’8 Whether or not such a tension exists, how does White’s writing distinguish photography from painting? What, for White, is uniquely photographic? What is the ‘‘springtight line’’? Eight years after White’s death, the photographer Robert Adams (unrelated to Ansel Adams) contributed to a commemorative issue of Aperture

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entitled ‘‘Minor White: A Living Remembrance.’’ Adams chose as his article’s subject and title ‘‘The Spring-tight Line,’’ and he provided a vernacular assessment of what White meant by it: ‘‘good pictures have to match up accurately with life.’’9 Adams thereby understood White’s idea as a standard for critical judgements and proceeded to apply this standard in a critique of White’s own work. He examined and praised several images in White’s sequence Song W ithout Words except for its sixth or seventh (depending on the version) picture because White had tilted the print’s horizon line vertically.10 Adams then gave similarly unfavorable reviews to White’s close-up and abstract photographs of nature, like all of the Fourth Sequence images, because they frustrated an accurate sense of the scale of the objects depicted. Adams concluded that the ‘‘spring-tight line’’ was a line that could be walked along but that should not be crossed, even though he felt that White himself had crossed it from time to time, especially with images like those in the Fourth Sequence. Needless to say, there is an obvious weakness in Adams’s argument because White generated the idea of the ‘‘spring-tight line’’ to accompany the Fourth Sequence photographs specifically. Thus, Adams’s interpretation and application seems necessarily at odds with White’s intention. In the Fourth Sequence colophon, perhaps White provided not so much a standard for critical judgement as a general theory of photography’s unique strength as a pictorial medium. Other than Robert Adams, few authors have examined White’s concept of the spring-tight line. Several general theories of photography’s uniqueness do exist, however, and many of them have been widely published (before, during, and after White’s CSFA years). This prevalent interest in defining the photographic image probably results from the sense that ‘‘there is no substitute for the facts about any medium.’’11 And while ‘‘we must recognize the limits of the particular medium of exchange to understand any act of communication,’’12 such limits are not always easy to determine. Not surprisingly, nearly all of the writers who have attempted to theorize ‘‘the photograph’’ have compared it with other pictorial media such as painting and film. The fin-de-sie`cle and the early twentieth century revisited a contentious nineteenth-century debate on photography’s uniqueness that crystallized around the issue of soft versus sharp focus.13 Dody Warren distilled this argument in the early pages of Aperture: ‘‘the essence of such controversies as the one concerning ‘sharpness’ is the question of what is distinctively photographic.’’14 Perhaps none of the new voices in this debate were more prominent than Stieglitz and his ‘‘Photo Secession,’’ a group founded

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in 1902 that turned away from the formulaic salons of the nineteenth century but still followed the spirit of Newton’s aesthetic ideals. Stieglitz expounded what would become his movement’s position in articles like ‘‘Pictorial Photography,’’ in Scribner’s Magazine in 1899.15 There he cited the example of German Secessionists who ‘‘have admitted the claims of the pictorial photograph to be judged on its merits as a work of art independently, and without considering the fact that it has been produced through the medium of the camera’’ (p. 126). Supported by the powerful arguments of others including Robert Demachy, the Pictorialist and Secessionist movements prevailed, for the most part, over critics like Sadakichi Hartmann and the modernist ‘‘straight’’ photographers until the end of WWI.16 That is, until Stieglitz’s final issue of Camera Work appeared in 1917, an issue devoted to the photographs of Paul Strand. By that time, and then throughout the 1920s and extending into the 1940s and beyond, some photographers and critics including Stieglitz argued for the ‘‘objective’’ nature of photography, and furthermore identified its aesthetic potential within this objectivity. Strand’s own 1917 article ‘‘Photography,’’ published in Seven Arts, opens with the claim that photography’s raison d’eˆtre is an ‘‘absolute unqualified objectivity.’’17 By identifying and promoting Strand’s photographs within Camera Work, Stieglitz himself – like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams after him – embodied the controversy between soft and sharp focus photography. Each of these four major modern artists, Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, and Adams, all made the transition from soft to sharp focus, from subjectivity to objectivity, from Pictorialism to Modernism, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.18 Stieglitz admitted as much in the conclusion to his 1923 article, ‘‘How I Came to Photograph Clouds,’’ when he observed that his goal ‘‘increasingly’’ had been to make his photographs look like photographs.19 After this initial victory of ‘‘straight’’ photography in the United States, the 1920s onward in Europe and America brought several new perspectives into the debate about photography’s uniqueness. But the fact that Graham Clarke and other contemporary writers continue to publish articles and chapters with titles such as ‘‘What is a Photograph?’’ makes it clear that there is still today no consensus on what photography is or ought to be, or on how to distinguish it precisely from other pictorial media.20 Nevertheless, it is possible to hypothesize about how Minor White defined photography’s uniqueness in the period under consideration. The paradox of objectivity co-existing with subjectivity, which would later so confound and elate Roland Barthes, did not seem to bother

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him.21 White’s ‘‘spring-tight line’’ was a tense connection or continuity between reality and illusion, object and subject, or matter and form, in photography. For White, the photograph’s spring-tight line stretched across that great divide and constantly oscillated between the two poles.22 THE WORLD OF APPEARANCES

The first step in defining the spring-tight line is to come to terms with White’s concept of ‘‘reality.’’ In the Fourth Sequence colophon he equated ‘‘reality’’ with the ‘‘world of appearances’’ and thereby pointed in a particular and peculiar phenomenological direction. The way that he worded this passage moreover suggests that he was concerned that his photographs might be seen as disconnected from ‘‘reality;’’ therefore, he felt the need to reassure the viewer of their connection to it. This concern may be due to his proclivity to work in the symbolic realm, treating ‘‘reality’’ as if it represented something else. White’s tendency in that regard may explain why he felt so attracted to photography in the first place, with its perceived predisposition and commonly exercised approach to stay within the bounds of realism. As early as 1945, in his first Columbia University graduate paper for Meyer Schapiro, White concluded that with photographs: ‘‘there is always the strong feeling that it is an external world that is referred to, and not one predominantly in the artist’s mind.’’23 In 1947, he again noted that ‘‘Camera will lead my constant introspection back into the world.’’24 Thus, one benefit of photography for White was that it ‘‘automatically provides aesthetic distance to those who are prone to print their hearts on their sleeves. Its ambiguity, its overwhelming subject matter provides sufficient cover for those prone to speak too intimately.’’25 Whether aware of it or not, White would have agreed with William Carlos Williams’ eloquent verse from 1915: ‘‘I will express my emotions in the appearances: surfaces, sounds, smells, touch of the place in which I happen to be.’’26 Or, as Williams otherwise expressed it: ‘‘through metaphor to reconcile / the people and the stones. / Compose (no ideas / but in things).’’27 Williams’ thoughts closely parallel those of Stieglitz, and predictably the two were friends.28 White confirmed both of the above points in 1955 while describing Stieglitz’s post-1917 work. According to White, Stieglitz at about that time was faced with a specific problem, one for which he invented a new and ingenious solution. The problem was whether photographers could continue to express their emotions and still remain within their medium’s proper boundaries. White

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described Stieglitz’s solution in the following manner: ‘‘Without losing contact with reality (world of appearances) he pursued the expressionist concept (to photo what he felt) to its logical conclusion, the equivalent. Within the limits of straight photography he made one photograph express what he felt about other things, people, life, etc.’’29 In this sense, White’s theory of the spring-tight line is a modified equivalent, one that continually fluctuates back and forth between reality on the one hand and equivalency (metaphor, illusion) on the other. While clearly championing Stieglitz’s ideas, White also problematized the use of reality or the world of appearances to express one’s personal feelings. At one point in November of 1951, he argued that ‘‘appearances are for the blind,’’ and he equated the blind with ‘‘documentarians.’’30 The next month he repeated this assertion even more forcefully: ‘‘The world of appearances keeps the blind, blind.’’31 So it seems that White wanted to maintain a connection to reality while at the same time to keep his distance from it: thus a tension, a spring-tight line. Yet, it is even more complicated than that. Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) published one of his earliest essays on photography in English in 1951. Titled ‘‘The Photographic Approach,’’ the article appeared in the Magazine of Art, the same journal that would publish White’s ‘‘The Camera Mind and Eye’’ less than one year later.32 (Curiously, White shared at least two friends with Kracauer. Meyer Schapiro assisted Kracauer’s escape to the United States from a prison in occupied France during WWII.33 Beaumont Newhall read early drafts of the writings Kracauer researched in the MOMA library, including ‘‘The Photographic Approach.’’ Kracauer also used Newhall as a sounding board for his film history, From Caligari to Hitler.34) ‘‘The Photographic Approach,’’ to which we will return at the conclusion, both fascinated and infuriated White. It argues that the distinguishing characteristic of photography is to be found in the realm of the snapshot, or in instantaneous photographs, and not in time exposures. Based on this narrowing of the medium, Kracauer claimed that photography emphasized a capacity first to ‘‘record’’ and then, following from this, to ‘‘explore’’ (p. 108). ‘‘Recording’’ in this vocabulary meant an indiscriminate replication of information, essentially undetermined by the photographer, and therefore tending towards disorganization and diffusion (p. 111). ‘‘Exploring’’ meant that any viewer of a photograph, including the photographer, could reasonably expect to discover new things in any photograph – objects or identities unseen even while making the picture. Therefore,

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Kracauer concluded, ‘‘the medium does not primarily aspire to artistic effects; rather, it challenges us to extend our vision’’ (p. 112). In an intriguing allusion to this unseen or ‘‘exploring’’ quality in Kracauer’s theory, White argued in the conclusion to his own ‘‘Exploratory Camera’’ article (begun in 1949 and published in 1952) that ‘‘the blindness that is sometimes felt at exposure is the utmost extension of vision.’’35 White seems to refer here to a different kind of ‘‘blindness;’’ in this sense, part of the authenticity, objectivity, and perhaps realism of the camera is its blindness, perhaps as justice is (ideally) blind.36 White’s journal from 1957 explains this idea in poetic terms: ‘‘when the illusion of the reality of appearances is high, the photograph, for me, fails – when it is a splinter of the broken bowl, it succeeds.’’37 In his unpublished book manuscript, ‘‘Fundamentals of Style in Photography and the Elements of Reading Photographs,’’ White provided an illustration of this seemingly moderate but perplexing position with a reference to Frederick Sommer’s portrait photograph of Max Ernst, a double exposure in which the painter appears as an apparition in front of a weather beaten, wooden plank wall. White described this portrait as follows: Two men, both painter and photographer, are the kind that see similarities beneath surface differences. They both see that things change and explore that effect in pictures. They see that there are relations of one thing to another, and with the means at hand state that idea. The photographer makes a very simple statement here, namely that a man is not what he appears on the surface.38

This description – ‘‘that a man is not what he appears on the surface’’ – contradicts an earlier, and very important, position White stated in 1948: ‘‘Photography is the belief that the outside shows the inside, the surface shows the man.’’39 Yet, the existence of this contradiction (that surface appearances both do and do not reveal the interior) only supports the idea of a high degree of tension in the spring-tight line. Not coincidentally, this kind of tension is what Ernst represented for White. White described Ernst as an artist whose work is engaged with the ‘‘economy’’ of form and matter generally, and specifically ‘‘with the change of one form into another.’’ Indeed, perhaps it is the middle ground of tension in the line, and not so much the line itself, which matters here. White noted as early as 1945 that the age he lived in, as exemplified by the preponderance of Wo¨lfflinian ‘‘open forms’’ in photographs, ‘‘seems to prefer balance by tension.’’40 In ‘‘Exploratory Camera,’’ White equated tension with importance (p. 14). And as late as 1957 he reinforced this point: ‘‘life, whether flesh or spirit, is manifest only by tension.’’41

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THESE ABSTRACTIONS OF NATURE

The first step in understanding White’s concept of the ‘‘spring-tight line’’ was to discuss his concept of reality/world of appearances as tension. The second part is to interpret his idea of abstraction. White’s interest in abstract art grew as he worked at the CSFA, no doubt partly the result of his close proximity to, and relationships with, Abstract Expressionist painters like Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko and their students, whose canvases hung on nearly every wall and corridor within the school building.42 Without a doubt, painting and painters were the dominant aspect of the CSFA.43 However, the progressive environment of San Francisco, its museums, galleries (one of which was run by Still’s advisees), and art conferences, all encouraged interaction between artists of various media. For example, in addition to Walter Chappell, Imogen Cunningham, Rose Mandel, Brett Cole, and Edward Weston, and Minor White, large numbers of painters, photographers, and filmmakers from the Bay Area and the CSFA all attended a ‘‘Big Sur Conference’’ in the mid-1940s at Slades Hot Springs (Esalen).44 At the same time, White’s ties to photographic realism were also strengthened at the CSFA, through his much closer relationships with Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, and his long-distance yet critical relationship with both Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. Indeed, Weston, Adams, the Newhalls, together with Dorothea Lange, all advocated realism and distrusted abstraction in the way that Still and other San Francisco School painters practiced it in the postwar period. As early as 1924 Weston had opposed abstraction with realism and privileged the latter. ‘‘I shall let no chance pass to record interesting abstractions,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but I feel definite in my belief that the approach to photography is through realism – and its most difficult approach.’’45 Weston penned his essay ‘‘Photography – Not Pictorial,’’ in 1930; as a rejoinder to Franz Roh’s catalog for the 1929 Stuttgart Film und Foto exhibition, which he had co-organized, it could be re-titled ‘‘Revelation – Not Expression.’’ Weston argued that all arts depend upon medium specificity. ‘‘Great painters,’’ he claimed, ‘‘have deep respect for photography when it is photography both in technique and viewpoint, when it does something they cannot do.’’ Revelation occurred for Weston only through the straight, sharp focus print and its ability to record ‘‘the very quintessence of the thing itself.’’46 Ironically, Clement Greenberg still went on the offensive in his criticism of Weston’s 1946 MOMA retrospective, mounted by the Newhalls with White’s assistance. Greenberg’s review, ‘‘The Camera’s Glass Eye,’’ published in T he Nation in March,

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attacked Weston and other photographers for their encroachment into the territory of painting. Abstraction especially was sacred ground that Greenberg did not want painting to accede. Weston responded: ‘‘The painters have no copyright on modern art!’’47 White clearly knew Greenberg’s review. In March of 1951 he lectured on photographing theatrical productions at the Interplayers’ theater, ‘‘The Glass Eye and the Grease Paint: A Talk on Photography for the Theatre,’’ and illustrated his talk with his photographs of their recent productions.48 In 1952, White provided his own direct assessment of photography’s singularity in an article that responds to Greenberg’s essay, at least in terms of its title: the camera is not merely an eye, it has a mind as well.49 Nevertheless, in March of 1947, Adams reinforced Weston’s intended hierarchy of realism over abstraction in a letter to White. ‘‘The earth looks very good indeed,’’ he argued, ‘‘the forms of nature – once they are integrated on the magic rectangle of the film – satisfy me completely. The fussiness of Esthetics, of Modern, of Mode, of Nonobjectivity, of the abstract, of the surrealist pregnancies, it all seems remote, actually outdated.’’50 In June of 1950, Beaumont Newhall mapped out his own related position in no uncertain terms: ‘‘I’ve said what I think about abstract or rather non-camera approaches to photography in my book. It is a thing apart, another medium, only accidentally photography. If I were teaching I’d tie the students to the camera.’’51 As further support of this argument, Newhall later forwarded White a letter, dated January 1952, from Vincent S. Jones, a Gannett newspaperman in Rochester, friend of the Newhalls, and future Aperture contributor. Jones supported artistic experimentation in general, but joined the (somewhat reactionary) humanistic realists who disliked and resisted what they saw as a current obsession with techniques and abstractions.52 Dorothea Lange joined with Newhall and Jones most pointedly in her first contribution to Aperture, ‘‘Photographing the Familiar,’’ in July of 1952. ‘‘For whatever reasons of fear, worship, convenience or custom,’’ she argued, ‘‘photography seems often more concerned with illusion than reality. It does not reflect but contrives. It lives in a world of its own. Living in a world of its own, it is not, either as art or science, successful.’’53 White had encountered a similar resistance from his own CSFA students in March of 1948 with the ‘‘posed and contrived’’ intervention that was required of them in class sessions on studio photography. ‘‘The whole aspect of shifting things around in front of a camera was foreign to the class and still is. And in studio work such is necessary. It’s a point I am trying to overcome in this year’s class.’’54 He reported that because of

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his students’ uncertainty about it – which perhaps fueled his own insecurities – he had a miserable time teaching studio photography. Somewhat at odds with his closest mentors and sometimes with his own students, White nonetheless continued to study painterly abstraction in the manner of Clyfford Still and others and to incorporate it into his pictures.55 For instance, by April of 1948, White felt that ‘‘Work with space organization in the other departments would be a great help and a few are beginning to realize it.’’56 He reported as much again on his CSFA classes in January of 1950: ‘‘Have been hitting on the difference between the Organizational and the Analytical Photographer lately. It is difficult to make the distinction; but it seems important to me. Because a man can treat his medium with the utmost respect and love and still see like a painter.’’57 Given the above phrases, particularly ‘‘space organization’’ and the capitalized words ‘‘Organizational and Analytical,’’ the painter White referred to must be Clyfford Still. Still had been and was then teaching, with Clay Spohn and Edward Corbett, a CSFA class entitled ‘‘Space Organization.’’58 White’s own photography course manuscript, titled ‘‘Space Analysis,’’ could have derived from this, and at least he had found a kindred spirit. At one point, White compared his medium with painting and asked himself a rhetorical question: ‘‘In photography there are less space analysis problems than as in painting?’’59 Moreover, White had a history of appropriating titles and philosophies. Indeed, Still would have been only the latest in a string of White’s intake, from his ‘‘Seven Lessons in Photography,’’ based on Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: T he First Six L essons, to ‘‘Fundamentals of Style,’’ based on Wo¨lfflin’s Principles of Art History, to his Zone System Manual, based on Ansel Adams’ Basic Series books. In October of 1952, Adams had even complained to the Newhalls that White ‘‘seems to spend a lot of time eliminating influences (including mine) rather than creating them.’’60 However, White had some doubts or perhaps even some guilt as to his approach. In March of 1951, two days before San Francisco’s Raymond & Raymond Gallery closed the debut exhibition of the Fourth Sequence, he wrote to the Newhalls: ‘‘The show could mark a termination of a way of working – a period of feeling my way around. Perhaps trying to prove that photography is an art to myself – in painter’s terms of course. I have started already towards what I feel to be strictly photographic in the miniature camera work’’ (i.e., his 1949 sequence Intimations of Disaster). In the same letter, however, White added: ‘‘I will doubtless continue the view camera abstractions – it seems to be better understood and might sell – for some time, and at the same time search for pure photography.’’61

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Thus, at least while communicating with the Newhalls, White regarded the abstract photographs in the Fourth Sequence to be not strictly photographic, or to be examples of somewhat impure photography. However, this did not seem to bother him as much as he assumed it would his friends. At the bottom of the carbon copy of this letter, White commented to himself on the word ‘‘pure’’ in relation to photography: ‘‘it seems funny to use this term since we think we know what it means (we are familiar with it at details only). I know Edward’s definition and Ansel’s – mine is still to be stated.’’62 A few days later, White once again expressed reservations about his photographs in the Raymond & Raymond exhibition. Considering the responses he had heard about it, he wrote: ‘‘Painters like it. And I guess I have reached the point that Edward did somewhere, that if painters like the photograph – it ceases to be photography. I have proved to them and to me that I can make the camera behave according to what they look for in pictures.’’63 By the beginning of April, Nancy Newhall responded to White’s concerns and reassured him, ‘‘Am not altogether sure that if painters like it it ain’t photography. But I agree it tends to imply one of two things: form for its own sake, divorced from the meaning of the subject, or that kind of seeing of the cinema of existence that no painter can achieve and therefore envies.’’64 It is especially significant that White mentioned ‘‘paint’’ in the unpublished typeset draft of the Fourth Sequence colophon as he was very likely referring specifically to painting in the manner of Clyfford Still – ‘‘I paint only myself, not nature’’ – the dominant figure at the CSFA. Even the CSFA Workshop 20 cinema instructor, Sidney Peterson, in his memoir T he Dark of the Screen, signaled the importance of Still’s ideas on the productions of his film studio. ‘‘In a sense,’’ Peterson wrote, ‘‘what we were up to was doing Still over again according to Nature, to paraphrase what Cezanne once said he was doing with Poussin’’ (p. 106). Perhaps in a similar way, whether intentional or not, that White called his sequence a ‘‘cinema of stills’’ hints at a relationship between his abstract photographs, Workshop 20’s films, and the canvases of the leader of these ‘‘San Francisco School’’ Abstract Expressionists. In relation to Still’s philosophy, and, in turn, Peterson’s, White’s unpublished colophon in effect states: I paint myself and nature, subject and object, form and matter. In other words, White both ‘‘paints’’ his-self and ‘‘photographs’’ nature simultaneously. Many of the photographs in the Fourth Sequence resemble the canvases of several other pioneering Abstract Expressionists that also taught with

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White and Still at the CSFA, including Elmer Bischoff, John Grillo, and Hassel Smith. Yet, when interviewed later about his time at the CSFA, Peterson suggested that while the relationship between the film and painting studios was close, there would have been a greater distance between Still’s philosophy and that of the photographers. Peterson claimed to know Weston and the f/64 Group, and regarded their ‘‘rigorous discipline’’ as a conservative contradistinction to the liberal ‘‘and experimental thinking of the painting leadership. That photography had such a focus on the outward – the natural world [–] also put it in a different position to the painting – by Still for instance, and his students, who were interested in introspection, in self awareness.’’65 As much as Peterson undoubtedly knew and remembered about that time, he seems not to have known (or to have forgotten) about White’s own interest in introspection and self-awareness, really his obsession with it. Thus, White may have been closer to Still, philosophically speaking, than Peterson realized. White did not behave, in retrospect, the way he was supposed to as a ‘‘high modernist’’ photographer. Maybe this should not be surprising: White was coming from New York, Stieglitz, Schapiro, and was exposed to more advanced thinking. In the ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ White added detail to his complex theory of photography and made reference to his distinction between photographs as a ‘‘bridge’’ to experience and photographs as a ‘‘source’’ of experience: The photographers who look at the photograph as a source of experience take the camera as something that neither tells the truth nor tells a lie – and take it seriously. While they recognize and often use the photograph as a ‘‘bridge,’’ they consider the bridge as one without a far shore, its last span leaping into space. In fact they consider that the fact of a discontinuity between original ‘‘object’’ and print ‘‘subject’’ squares better with the real relation between photographs and the world of appearance.66

Meyer Schapiro too recognized both this apparent paradox and White’s solution to it in a rough draft of his commemorative text for White’s book, Mirrors Messages Manifestations: There is in the outlook of some artists a receptiveness to a metaphysics that posits another and quite different world behind the visible and tangible. It may seem surprising, even paradoxical, that a photographer, committed in his art to the world of appearance, should insist with conviction on the supra-phenomenal content of his pictures. These are the objects and occasions of mystical feeling, awe, joy.67

For White, then, the world of appearances/reality was a door leading to this other abstract world beyond: to what White’s CSFA student, Dwain

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Faubion, called the ‘‘dark places,’’ or the ‘‘needlessly unknown – the strange country behind appearances.’’68 THE CAMERA’S STRONGEST POINT

Now that we have discussed White’s use of the words ‘‘reality’’ and ‘‘abstraction,’’ the third point in understanding the spring-tight line is his notion of photographic authenticity, or what he called ‘‘the camera’s strongest point.’’ The very last sentence in the Fourth Sequence colophon reinforces this idea: ‘‘For technical data – the camera was faithfully used.’’ A faithful camera technique leads to an authentic photograph, or to authenticity. At one stage in the ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ White connected this idea to the ‘‘world of appearances’’ and to his notions of ‘‘literal’’ and ‘‘non-literal’’ image types. For White, a literalist ‘‘has faith in appearances, a faith that surfaces reveal what goes on inside.’’ A literalist furthermore ‘‘believes that the objects in front of his camera, if reported faithfully, will reveal to others what was revealed to him, or capture what he saw’’ (p. 145). In a parallel contrast, the non-literalist has faith in abstractions, a belief that only what is beneath the surface reveals itself. The nonliteralist maintains the conviction that the objects in the world, if used abstractly, will reveal to others ‘‘what was revealed to him, or capture what he saw.’’ White split the difference. A suggestive comparison may be made between the two ‘‘spring-tight line’’ paragraphs in either version of White’s colophon with a segment in Alfred Barr’s famous text on Cubism and Abstract Art, published in 1936 by the Museum of Modern Art, and surely known to White. In a section subtitled ‘‘Near-abstractions and pure-abstractions,’’ Barr claimed that with the works of Jean Arp and Pablo Picasso, ‘‘it is often difficult to tell whether a given object represents a head or a cloud’’ and that a landscape ‘‘may sometimes be mistaken for a still life or a portrait. The cords which tie these works to nature are tenuous, but unbroken – nor would the artist wish them broken’’ (p. 12). Barr therefore classified such works by Arp and Picasso as ‘‘near-abstractions,’’ a conclusion that seems closely related to the corresponding parts of White’s colophons, especially the sections on the ‘‘spring-tight line’’ and the ‘‘subject of the sequence.’’ That is, the photographs in the Fourth Sequence actually do represent rocks on Point Lobos, but they look like they could be phallic or vaginal symbols, or all three. Even Edward Weston seemed to have supported this view of near-abstraction as early as 1930: ‘‘This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.’’69 Weston reinforced this

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point in his book My Camera on Point L obos, 1950: ‘‘Artists (fine ones) don’t copy nature, and when they do record quite literally the presentation is such as to arouse connotations quite apart from the subject matter.’’70 Thus, both Barr and Weston’s ideas mesh with White’s Wo¨lfflinian interest in ‘‘things as they are’’ and ‘‘things for what else they are.’’71 As early as 1945, White had summarized the effect of experiencing both a rock and ‘‘more than a rock’’ in a discussion of compressed space versus expanded space in a photograph. He argued that compressed space was two-dimensional, and that in extreme cases it became identified with the picture plane itself. Expanded space, on the other hand, was three-dimensional, and in extreme cases the picture plane acted as an invisible window onto the world. In this expanded space, objects retained their identity, whereas with compressed space, objects lost their identity. ‘‘For photography once identity is lost, even momentarily, the work becomes an equivalent of the non-representational (used in the broad sense) forms of art.’’72 White’s student Edward Dwight restated a variant of this point in Aperture: ‘‘Since my aim is to get a strong, self-contained photograph, I am not concerned if the identity of a subject gets lost. In painting the right to treat subject matter with greater freedom, such as this, has been won, in photography, refuge of the literal-minded, it has seldom been sought.’’73 This experience would seem to apply to nearly all of the Fourth Sequence photographs. In such images, we have a sense of loosing the reality of the subject. Or, we see in the reality the potential for abstraction, which is clearly related to but also slightly different from the way a painter places ‘‘near-abstractions.’’ We should not forget how Stieglitz showed the way here; his cloud photographs alternate between being clouds and being ‘‘equivalents.’’74 For White, then, a purely abstract photograph, while presumably metaphoric, would no longer be an ‘‘authentic’’ photograph.75 The similarity between Barr and White on this point suggests that White may have consulted Barr’s text. When considered as a whole, this possibility only increases since Barr included sections on ‘‘Abstract Photography’’ (pp. 170–171) and on ‘‘Abstract Films’’ (pp. 167–169). Interestingly, both Barr and White may have consulted here too Wassily Kandinsky’s famous book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In a chapter entitled simply ‘‘Theory,’’ Kandinsky argued: ‘‘If we begin at once to break the bonds which bind us to nature, and devote ourselves purely to combination of pure color and abstract form, we shall produce works which are mere decoration, which are suited to neckties or carpets.’’76

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As with the other concepts above, this idea of splitting the difference underwent significant developments and several revisions before finding its way into the finished Fourth Sequence colophon. In 1945, drawing upon Wo¨lfflin’s terms ‘‘classic’’ and ‘‘baroque,’’ White claimed that ‘‘Photography is always restrained, in fact so much so, that the whole medium has a superficial classic cast.’’77 In February of 1947, White argued that a certain amount of authenticity exists in all photographs, perhaps even in those made with an unfaithful use of the camera: ‘‘Camera objectivity has a way of getting into every photograph. I am calling this residue of objectivity, this glimpse of it, carelessness. This persistence seems to distinguish the photographic from the painterly.’’78 But he would not take this idea too far as White also felt that even the most faithful use of the camera still produced a not entirely objective photograph. An article in an early issue of Aperture put it this way: ‘‘Every ‘straight’ photograph is a selection from and a distortion of reality and therefore an abstraction.’’79 And in September of 1953, Adams provided White with an opportunity to discuss photographic abstraction in relation to Dorothea Lange’s documentary work, probably in response to her article in Aperture’s second issue in July of 1952: Extremely interested that you think there is a false note in the whole business. I suspect that the falsity comes from not recognizing how thoroughly subjective the medium is. Coming to camera as if it were an eye-to-eye medium is just dandy, but there needs to be a real recognition of the ‘abstraction’ that automatically takes place.80

White then explained that he had ‘‘made much of this difference between the eye-to-eye idea and the eye-to-brain,’’ or bridge versus source, or literal versus non-literal, idea in his San Francisco Museum of Art exhibit ‘‘How to Read a Photograph,’’ which he then incorporated into the ‘‘Fundamentals’’ manuscript. White predicted that an increasing awareness of the degree to which photography is a subjective medium would be a growing trend.81 A few years later, he reasserted this notion: ‘‘The authenticity of the medium as well as its canceling of handwriting tends to bury the personality of the maker. The documentary approach treats this as an asset to display fact or essence as if the photographer put the camera up to your eye instead of his. The two characteristics responsible may bury the personality [of the photographer] but there has rarely been such a live corpse.’’82 Curiously, as White argued in the ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ this dead corpse lives because even the literalist photographer ‘‘knows from experience that a strictly ‘literal’ report, a tone for tone reproduction will, in the

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photograph, look phony. [Thus,] some degree of altering, changing, transposing of the original is absolutely necessary’’ in order for it to look authentic (p. 145). Therefore, the camera’s strongest point is to relay the world of appearances, including even near-abstractions, authentically in terms of photography. Perhaps this is what White meant later in the Fourth Sequence colophon by the phrase ‘‘camera reality.’’ THE SPRING-TIGHT LINE

Having described White’s concepts of reality, abstraction, and authenticity, we have now arrived at the point of determining what he meant by the ‘‘spring-tight line.’’ It seems clear that he intended by it something related to his pared concepts of the ‘‘literal’’ and the ‘‘non-literal’’ image. In the ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ he detailed both concepts in relation to one another. ‘‘Whereas the photographer, who uses the literal image, shows an enormous respect for the identity and individuality of each object, the non-literal photographer has no such respect.’’83 Again borrowing Wo¨lfflin’s phraseology, the literal (classic) photographer engages ‘‘things as they are,’’ whereas the non – literal (baroque) photographer occupies himself with ‘‘what else they are.’’ The literal photographer uses objects as ends, as expressions of their own essences via a direct relation. The non-literal photographer treats objects as means, as the ‘‘material’’ for expressions of the self or identifications of ‘‘the truth of things,’’ a matter that either way ‘‘can be done only with equivalents – not by direct means’’ (p. 143). The literalist explores the stability of things, the non-literalist their transience. Having stated these differences, White recognized a connection between them in the world of photography: the spring-tight line. Nancy Newhall may have recognized this relationship as well in 1950. Juxtaposing Adams and White, she maintained: ‘‘You guys got no quarrel except in definition and degree; he likes the world around him and you like the world inside.’’84 For her, their difference in degree and in kind still equaled ‘‘no quarrel,’’ but rather a connection. White followed the above discussion in the ‘‘Fundamentals’’ with a diagram, prefaced with the following caveat: ‘‘If I were a person that valued sanity, or didn’t know from experience that people benefit from being deliberately confused occasionally, I would never do what I am about to do’’ (p. 143). He explained that rather than ordering these concepts, as he might have done, in a typical ‘‘linear fashion’’ from literal image to non-literal image, or from ‘‘respect for appearances’’ to ‘‘alterations of appearances,’’ he would instead ‘‘start in the middle and indicate

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progressions towards both ends, ... as if two men started back to back and walked straight ahead’’ (p. 143). ÷ Literal

Lens () Image

! Non-Literal

Following this graph, White continued: ‘‘Theoretically, two men walking away from each other (scattering photographs as they go) will meet sometime face to face. (Or maybe this is just poetic justice rather than mathematics and not at all in accordance with facts.) If they did, where would they meet? They meet in the mind of the spectator at the moment he recognizes that these two photographs ultimately mean the same [thing]’’ (pp. 145–146). Moreover, they are the same person. This diagram suggests that Minor White saw a dynamic relationship between reality, abstraction, and authenticity in photography. Authenticity was not only ‘‘the camera’s strongest point,’’ but also a possible hindrance to the intended metaphorical subject of his sequence. That is, White wanted to push photography beyond what he saw as its ‘‘authentic’’ boundary and as far as possible into the realm of metaphor (he photographed rocks abstractly to reveal aspects of his emotions) but without ultimately loosing touch with the photographic or with ‘‘camera reality.’’ In other words, he felt the modernist need to retain his photographs qua photographs and not as works in any other medium. White therefore recognized a ‘‘spring-tight line’’ or tension, or perhaps even an antagonism, between photographic authenticity and narrativistic metaphor (as between rocks and anatomical forms). But rather than avoid it, White celebrated this tension in his own photographs and, later, in his 1956 George Eastman House exhibition ‘‘Lyrical and Accurate’’85 – meaning metaphoric and authentic – and in one of his favorite aphorisms: ‘‘the eye that sees also shapes.’’ Interestingly, the CSFA filmmaker Sidney Peterson shared White’s approach. In a 1980s interview, Peterson claimed that his films were located in the middle space or gap between representation and abstraction.86 Or, in between what Walter Chappell later called the ‘‘known and the unknown.’’87 The difficulty of operating within this apparent antagonism, contradiction, or paradox inevitably raised its head in White’s correspondence during the time of the Fourth Sequence. In May of 1950, White wrote to Beaumont Newhall about the CSFA: ‘‘What I am teaching is the use of the camera in its characteristic orders.’’ However, following right after this, he admitted (sounding Wo¨lfflinian): ‘‘What I also need around the

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department is someone who has a flare for combining painterly with cameraly [sic] techniques,’’ like Man Ray or La´szlo´ Moholy-Nagy.88 Twenty-five years earlier, Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) had published his Bauhaus treatise Malerei, Fotografie, Film, or Painting, Photography, Film.89 One could argue that the opening paragraphs of its introduction signal not only an interest in combining but perhaps even more so in clarifying the ambiguous divisions between these three media and, especially, between the first two (pp. 7–8). Moholy-Nagy located the root of their differences in photography’s superior capacity for ‘‘representation,’’ and deduced that painting, therefore, should ‘‘concern itself with pure colour composition,’’ or with abstraction (p. 9). In a central chapter on ‘‘Photography,’’ Moholy-Nagy defined what ‘‘representation’’ meant: ‘‘reproduction (copy) of nature in conformity with the rules of perspective,’’ all of which he related to objectivity. This arrangement led him to transpose the normally subordinate position of photography by claiming that ‘‘every period with a distinctive style of painting since [the daguerreotype] has had an imitative photographic manner’’ (p. 27). That is, painters have been imitating photographers, rather than the other way around. In any case, in April of 1951, White’s Greenbergian ‘‘confusion’’ led him to make what amounted to an ironic discovery in his working philosophy while re-reading and responding to Kracauer’s aforementioned article on ‘‘The Photographic Approach.’’ White relayed his new knowledge in a letter to Nancy Newhall: After two weeks of boxing with Kracauer I emerged with it organized on paper a few minutes ago. Guess how perverse I am. After trying to distinguish painterly photographs from true to character ones for six articles myself when he does the same thing I take the stand, what in hell is wrong with esthetics similar to painting in photography.

He realized that he had probably intuited this similarity long ago: But I might have guessed it, had I given it any thought – while writing this year I have been photographing in a thoroughly painterly manner – close ups of peeled paint, 4th Sequence. So my condemning this kind of work is quite in keeping with my preparing to or doing just that. I used to go around snarling at sonnets for years – all in preparation for a year at writing a sequence of over a hundred of them. [90]

White then explained in more detail how he had come to this realization: Of course what made me mad was that he was attacking my beloved equivalents as unphotographic. And it is difficult to defend them on his grounds. So I just made some new ground – or harrowed the old in another direction. By crossing the degree of influence

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the spectator is under from the authenticity of the photograph with the degree of personal expression a photograph is even when it is most objective I got a little hybrid ... .

He believed that this hybrid photograph would deflate, if not obliterate, the thrust of Kracauer’s argument. White specifically noted Kracauer’s claim that all ‘‘true’’ photographs have a ‘‘tendency towards the unorganized and diffuse which marks them as records. If this tendency were defeated by the artist-photographer’s nostalgia for meaningful design, they would cease to be photographs’’ (p. 111). This got White’s blood boiling: Grrr. Nostalgia he talks as if photographers were all victims of circumstance. Which they are – and vigorously so – not pathetically as Kracauer implies. Well having defended my right to photograph as I damn well please I will continue to do so – and the devil take the writers. Who says I ain’t schizofrantic [sic]?91

In April of 1953, as if pressuring White to once again defend his hybrid position, the conservative British historian of photography, Helmut Gernsheim, warned White of too much graphic and not enough photographic in his contemporaneous work. Gernsheim used the example of ` la photographers that imitate painting, as in fin-de-sie`cle Pictorialism. A Greenberg, Gernsheim wanted photography’s independence to be a beacon leading the way towards its acceptance as art. He cited White’s photograph on the cover of the fourth issue of Aperture as another instance of the above problem. ‘‘Please don’t misunderstand me; there must be design in every photograph, and the stronger the design, the more outstanding the photograph, but the result must be photographic, not graphic.’’92 To which White replied in September of 1953: ‘‘‘Graphic’ ‘photographic’ and the differences between them cease to be important.’’ Rather, the area of merger between them ‘‘is the most important area in which a creative photographer can work.’’93 White reaffirmed this point at least twice in the years that followed. First in the ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ with regard to photography he claimed that Wo¨lfflin’s ‘‘concepts were found to help organize the visual experience so that the essence of a scene or object could be touched quickly. Or caught with a speed equal to the rapidity with which cameras can be operated. Obviously it takes practice. ... Cartier-Bresson says that the fusion of form and content can be seen instantly’’ (p. 267). Second, with regard to painting, in August of 1957, he noted: ‘‘Starting from a complete separation of the duality of perceiver and perceived, the painter by long experiencing of looking gradually fuses the duality.’’94

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For White, then, although photography perhaps naturally resisted abstraction and metaphor (metaphor=a kind of abstraction), he nevertheless pushed it into the realm of near-abstraction in order to evoke a greater sense of metaphor. But he did not, or dared not, break the springtight line; he liked objectivity too much, and possibly for this reason. In a 1946 essay on one of White’s favorite painters, Meyer Schapiro argued about Van Gogh: ‘‘When the self at the edge of destruction holds on to objects so persistently, its protective reaction permits us to see that the painter’s attachment to things is not passive or photographic, nor due simply to his origin in a period of naturalistic art, but is a constructive function with deep emotional roots.’’ White, like the painter he so admired and identified with, ‘‘He needs objectivity, the most humble and obvious kind, as others need angels and God or pure forms ... the unproblematic things he sees about him ... are his personal objects, which come forward and address him. Extensions of his being, they image the qualities and conditions necessary for his health of mind.’’ Schapiro concluded with Van Gogh’s own words: ‘‘‘It sounds rather crude, but it is perfectly true: the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures; at least it is more fertile and vital.’’’95 Schapiro’s article on Van Gogh reverberates with Andre Bazin’s now well-known essay, ‘‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’’ first published one year earlier in Proble`mes de la Peinture and then in his book Qu’est-ce que le cine´ma?.96 Bazin even more explicitly asserted that objectivity functions to preserve vitality. Like Andre´ Malraux whom he quoted at times, Bazin covered a large number of media within a similarly longue dure´e.97 He opened with a startling insight that surely would have appealed to Schapiro and to White perhaps via Schapiro: ‘‘If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex’’ (p. 9). Bazin traced this ‘‘mummy complex’’ throughout the entire history of art and located its final satisfaction within photography. He related the ‘‘mummy complex’’98 to religious practices: ‘‘the preservation of life by a representation of life’’ (pp. 9–10). But not just any kind of ‘‘representation’’ would fulfill the function of preservation. ‘‘If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than of their psychology, then it will be seen to be essentially the story of resemblance, or, if you will, of realism’’ (p. 10). Thus, we could re-write Bazin’s ‘‘mummy complex’’ as a ‘‘realism complex,’’ or ‘‘resemblance complex’’ and that, in fact, is just what Bazin ascribed ontologically to photography.

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In contrast to Walter Benjamin’s renowned thesis on photographic reproduction, Bazin linked painting and photography and many other media together by showing how photography fulfilled an ageless tradition rather than disrupted one.99 Concluding with this religious, spiritual, or mystical line of reasoning, in 1947 or 1948 Edward Weston prefaced a letter to White with a Zen Buddhist epigraph: To a man who knows nothing, mountains are mountains, waters are waters, and trees are trees. But when he has studied and knows a little, mountains are no longer mountains, water is no longer water and trees no longer trees. But when has thoroughly understood, mountains are once again mountains, waters are waters and trees are trees.100

Ultimately, White did not accept Van Gogh’s and/or Weston’s (or Bazin’s or Schapiro’s) notions completely. Rather, he kept the movement in the spring bouncing back and forth. He used the viewer’s faith and his own faith in the objectivity of photographic authenticity, and in the subjectivity of painterly abstraction, to push farther into the realm of the unknown and vice versa. In the ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ he explained this final stage by referring to his Resurrection, 1951 (Fig. 2): ‘‘The photograph, however far into mysticism it may get, is always tied to a visual reality which is its strength. I am left with no little sense that things are not what they seem when I remember that the original objects of the photograph above was paint peeling on a window and sunlight shining on rubbish behind.’’101 Thus, for White, the spring-tight line of photographic authenticity showed that ‘‘real’’ things have an unappreciated mystical dimension and that mysticism itself has a surprising reality. School of Art Bowling Green State University NOTES 1 Clement Greenberg’s review of Edward Weston’s 1946 retrospective at MOMA, ‘‘The Camera’s Glass Eye,’’ T he Nation (9 March 1946), as reprinted in Greenberg’s T he Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. J. O’ Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 2, 63. 2 Sir William J. Newton, ‘‘Upon Photography in an Artistic View and its Relation to the Arts,’’ Journal of the Photographic Society 1 (London, 1853), 6–7. Reprinted in Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography: Essays & Images (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 78–80, esp. 80. In 1890 and then in republications through to 1932, one of the first photographic historians, Josef Maria Eder, similarly based his entire Geschichte der Photographie on the notion that photography would eventually replace drawing and painting as other

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Figure 2. Minor White, Resurrection, 1951. Gelatin silver print. Minor White Archive, 51-20. Photographs by Minor White are © Copyright by the Trustees of Princeton University. All rights reserved. Publication here is with the permission of the Minor White Archive, Princeton University. machines had replaced manual labor. See Josef Maria Eder, Geschichte der Photographie [1890] (New York: Arno Press, 1979), or History of Photography, trans. Edward Epstean (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945). Franz Roh, the photographer, art historian, and critic, published his essay ‘‘Mechanism and Expression, the Essence and Value of Photography [1929],’’ in Photo-Eye: 76 Photos of the Period, ed. Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 14–18. Photo-Eye was the German, French, and English language exhibition catalog for the famous 1929 Film und Foto exhibition, in Stuttgart, directed by La´szlo´ Moholy-Nagy. In it, Roh countered Newton and the Pictorialists and argued that it would be mere romanticism ‘‘to maintain that ‘short cuts’ by relieving him of all effort, lead but to man’s greater dullness and laziness’’ (14). On the contrary, he claimed that photography’s labor savings provided greater access to visual literacy for larger numbers of people, and increased their capacity for self-expression. However, Roh also embraced manipulated (i.e. labor intensive) photographs as part of the show and catalog. Indeed, he argued that ‘‘applied photography’’ could be divided into five categories: ‘‘the reality-photo, the photogram, photomontage, photo with etching or paint-

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ing, and photos in connection with typography’’ (16). Only the first, the ‘‘reality-photo,’’ could be considered ‘‘straight’’ or un-manipulated photography. Minor White knew Roh’s catalog and the lowercase font in the Fourth Sequence colophon may have been inspired by Roh’s own unusual typography. Or, White may have followed the American-born French e´migre´ poet e. e. cummings (1894–1962) in this respect. I would like to thank Mark Mitchell for the latter suggestion. 3 Van Deren Coke, T he Painter and the Photograph, 1st ed. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1964). Van Deren Coke, T he Painter and the Photograph. From Delacroix to Warhol, rev, and enl. ed. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1972). Peter Galassi, Before Photography. Painting and the Invention of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1981). See also Joel Snyder’s review of Galassi in Studies in V isual Communication 8, 1 (Winter 1982): 110–116. 4 The continuing controversy surrounding David Hockney’s book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the L ost T echniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking Studio, 2001), potentially further blurs the boundaries. 5 A reproduction of the Fourth Sequence colophon appears in Peter C. Bunnell, ed., Photography at Princeton. Celebrating T wenty-Five Years of Collecting and T eaching the History of Photography (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1998), facing 203. 6 For two recent and fascinating discussions of Muybridge, see Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the T echnological W ild West (New York: Viking, 2003), and Phillip Prodger, T ime Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 7 Minor White Archive (MWA), Princeton University. 8 Andy Grundberg, ‘‘The Enduring Modernist Impulse,’’ in Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946, by Andy Grundberg and Katherine McCarthy Gauss (Fort Lauderdale, FL, and New York: Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1987), 26. 9 Robert Adams, ‘‘The Spring-tight Line,’’ Aperture 95 (Summer 1984), 46. Minor White was the founding editor of Aperture from 1952–1975. 10 White titled this image Surf, Vertical, San Mateo County, 1947 [MWA 47–190]. It is sixth in Pultz, 33, and seventh in Mirrors Messages Manifestations, 45. See note 55. 11 Peter C. Bunnell, ‘‘Introduction’’ to T he Robert O. Dougan Collection of Historical Photographs and Photographic L iterature at Princeton, ed. Peter C. Bunnell (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1983), 8. 12 David L. Jacobs, ‘‘Labyrinths,’’ T he Archive (Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona), 23 (June 1986), 40. 13 In 1853, the aforementioned Sir William J. Newton recommended that his fellow photographers put their lenses slightly out of focus to create more painterly, hence more artistic, representations. Other notable protagonists in this early struggle were Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Charles Baudelaire, and Peter Henry Emerson. See Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, ‘‘Photography,’’ Quarterly Review 101 (London, April 1857), 442–468, reprinted in Beaumont Newhall, ed., Photography, Essays & Images (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 81–95. Charles Baudelaire, ‘‘The Salon of 1859,’’ in Baudelaire: Selected W ritings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. 291–298. Peter Henry Emerson, ‘‘Science and Art [1889],’’ in A Photographic V ision: Pictorial Photography, 1889–1923, ed. Peter C. Bunnell (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine

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Smith, 1980), 9–12. See also Jonathan Crary, T echniques of the Observer: On V ision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 14 Dody Warren, ‘‘Photography as Art: Personal Opinions,’’ Aperture 1, 3 (October 1952), 26. 15 Alfred Stieglitz, ‘‘Pictorial Photography,’’ Scribner’s Magazine 26, 5 (November 1899), 528–537, as reprinted in Bunnell, ed., A Photographic V ision, 124–127. 16 Sadakichi Hartmann, ‘‘A Plea for Straight Photography,’’ American Amateur Photographer 16, 3 (March 1904), 101–109, as reprinted in Bunnell, ed., A Photographic V ision, 148–150, 167. In 1904, Stieglitz, Joseph T. Keiley, and Edward Steichen organized a Photo Secession exhibition in Pittsburgh. Hartmann criticized the show’s homogeneous emphasis on print manipulation, especially those techniques like soft focus that seemed to borrow from painting and, thus, to deny the camera. Condemning these ‘‘faking devices,’’ he regarded such over-worked photographs as illegitimate, artificial, and even deceptive (150). Like some before and many after him, Hartmann advanced the argument that photography’s acceptance as an art should, and could, only be won without simulating any other medium. ‘‘Photography must be absolutely independent and rely on its own strength in order to acquire that high position which the Secessionists claim for her’’ (150). The future of photography, he concluded, was to be found in the straight print. A member of the secessionist Photo-Club de Paris, Robert Demachy (1859–1937), reversed Hartmann’s critique, argued against the sharp-focus photograph and defended the heavily manipulated gum bichromate process in his article ‘‘On the Straight Print,’’ Camera Work 19 (July 1907), 21–24, and reprinted Bunnell, ed., A Photographic V ision, 172–174. Demachy based his case on the assumption of a dichotomy between the objectivity of the camera and the subjectivity of the artist. ‘‘Meddling with a gum print may or may not add the vital spark,’’ he asserted, ‘‘though without the meddling there will surely be no spark whatever’’ (172). For him, only artists can make art because art does not exist without subjectivity. Thus, a ‘‘straight’’ photograph by definition could never be a work of art even if its maker were an artist because art ‘‘must be a transcription, not a copy, of nature’’ (172). Demachy saw no middle ground here either; a work was either art or not art, personal or mechanical. Turning the tables on the labor savings lauded by photographers and art historians since Talbot and Eder, Demachy concluded that the ‘‘button-pressers will continue to extol the purity of their intentions and to make a virtue of their incapacity to correct and modify their mechanical copies’’ (174). 17 Paul Strand, ‘‘Photography [1917],’’ in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 141–142. The subjectivity of the artist entered into his equation through selection and organization of the objects within the image’s borders. 18 See, for example, David P. Peeler, T he Illuminating Mind in American Photography: Stieglitz, Strand, Weston, Adams (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001). See also my review of Peeler’s book in History of Photography 27, 1 (Spring 2003), 91–93. 19 Alfred Stieglitz, ‘‘How I Came to Photograph Clouds,’’ T he Amateur Photographer & Photography 56, 1819 (1923), 255, as reprinted Nathan Lyons, ed., Photographers on Photography: A Critical Anthology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 112. See also Waldo Frank, et al., eds., America and Alfred Stieglitz, 1934. 20 Graham Clarke, ‘‘What is a Photograph?’’ in T he Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11–25. 21 Barthes published one of his earliest articles on photography in 1961. See Barthes, ‘‘Le message photographique’’ Communications 1 (1961), or ‘‘The Photographic Message,’’ in Image, Music, T ext, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday, 1977), 19–20. In

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this essay, he defined photography as a paradoxical medium, a medium that, in so far as it communicated a message of any kind, did so first of all ‘‘without a code.’’ Applying structuralist theory, Barthes could not identify the ‘‘units’’ of photography’s signifying system; indeed, he claimed that there were no units in the uniquely ‘‘continuous’’ medium of photographic film. But the signifying power of the photographic image despite this lack of symbolic quanta left Barthes to argue for the paradox. ‘‘The photographic paradox can then be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art,’ or the treatment, or the ‘writing,’ or the rhetoric, of the photograph) ...’’ (19). That a coded message developed upon an un-coded one Barthes felt was unique to photography as well. 22 See also the Minor White Archive’s copy of George Boas, W ingless Pegasus. A Handbook for Critics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1950), esp. Chap. 5, ‘‘Form,’’ sub-section ‘‘2. Inter-relation of form and matter.’’ White included Boas in his ‘‘Ten Books for Creative Photographers,’’ Aperture 4, 2 (1956), 58–67. 23 Minor White, ‘‘Development of a Stylistic Analysis for Photography,’’ Graduate Seminar Paper for Meyer Schapiro, Columbia University (1945), 59, continues: ‘‘Always there is the feeling of looking through the surface of a print, that ultimately the surface, no matter how involved with the organization it is never quite involved.’’ MWA. 24 White’s personal journal, ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ 11 February 1947, 35A. ‘‘Memorable Fancies’’ is an unpublished bound manuscript in the MWA. 25 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ ‘‘1948 to 1949,’’ 53. 26 William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), ‘‘Vortex (1915),’’ in A Recognizable Image: W illiam Carlos W illiams on Art and Artists, ed. Bram Dijkstra (New York: New Directions, 1978), 58. 27 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1946–1958), as quoted in Robert Adams, ‘‘The Spring-tight Line,’’ 47. Adams preceded this quote by claiming that ‘‘Williams synopsized, in famous lines, the practice that seems most durable.’’ 28 On their relationship, see Mike Weaver, W illiam Carlos W illiams: T he American Background (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 29 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ dated ‘‘About August 1955,’’ 181, his emphasis. 30 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ 28 November 1951, 115. 31 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ 3 December 1951, 120A. 32 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘‘The Photographic Approach,’’ Magazine of Art 44, 3 (March 1951), 107–13. See also Minor White, ‘‘The Camera Mind and Eye,’’ Magazine of Art 45, 1 (January 1952), 16–19. White’s article was reprinted in Lyons, ed., Photographers on Photography, 163–175. See as well the translated collection of Kracauer’s writings, T he Mass Ornament, Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995). 33 Peter C. Bunnell, unpublished ‘‘Interview with Meyer Schapiro,’’ New York (December 19, 1987), p. 1. PCB Collection (PCB). 34 Letter from Nancy Newhall, 4 May 1951, recto. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (New York: Noonday, 1959). 35 Minor White, ‘‘Exploratory Camera: A Rationale for the Miniature Camera,’’ Aperture 1, 1 (April 1952), 16. A postscript note claims that this article was first written in the fall of 1949 and that White drew heavily upon his discussions with CSFA guest instructor Lisette Model. 36 Elmer Bischoff described the painting philosophy of the CSFA at this time in a similar way: ‘‘immediacy, flux, unselfconsciousness – using cheap paints, quickness and authenticity.’’

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Quoted in Peter C. Bunnell, unpublished ‘‘Interview with Elmer Bischoff,’’ (Berkeley, CA: April 19, 1985), 2. PCB. 37 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ 11 April 1957, 254–255. 38 Minor White, ‘‘Fundamentals of Style in Photography and the Elements of Reading Photographs’’ (Unpublished bound manuscript: Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum, c. 1953), 174, my emphasis; hereafter abbreviated as ‘‘Fundamentals.’’ For a reproduction of Sommer’s Max Ernst, 1946, see Newhall, T he History of Photography (New York: MOMA, 1982), 286. 39 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ ‘‘Winter or Spring’’ 1948, 48. 40 White, ‘‘Development of a Stylistic Analysis for Photography,’’ Graduate Seminar Paper for Meyer Schapiro, Columbia University (1945), 21. White’s ‘‘A Modification of Wo¨lfflin’s Modes of Representation for Use in an Analysis of Photographs,’’ Graduate Paper for Meyer Schapiro, Columbia University (1945), 9, similarly suggests that open forms provide balance by tension. MWA. See also ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ 174. 41 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ 10 March 1957, 246, with variant. 42 Peter C. Bunnell, unpublished ‘‘Interview with Walter Chappell’’ (Santa Fe, NM: April 22, 1984), 2. See also Bunnell’s ‘‘Interview with Elmer Bischoff,’’ 1. The Photography Department was located in the basement. PCB. 43 Bunnell, ‘‘Interview with Elmer Bischoff,’’ 1. 44 Walter Chappell, ‘‘The Threshold of Vision: Minor White,’’ Aperture 95 (Summer 1984), 19. See also Bunnell’s interview with Chappell, p. 7. The conference in question most likely occurred in 1946 or 1947. 45 Edward Weston, entry for 10 March 1924, T he Daybooks of Edward Weston, ed. Nancy Newhall (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973), vol. 1, 55. See also 150. 46 Edward Weston, ‘‘Photography – Not Pictorial,’’ Camera Craft 37, 7 (1930), 313–320, as reprinted in Photographers on Photography, ed. Nathan Lyons (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 155, his emphasis. Weston (1886–1958) had shown his Cypress, Point L obos, 1929, in the Stuttgart exhibition and had surely read Roh’s text, since he had organized the West Coast contingent to Film und Foto in conjunction with Steichen on the East Coast (after Stieglitz had declined Moholy-Nagy’s call to participate). For Weston, photography’s uniqueness and, therefore, the location of its ‘‘art,’’ lie not through expression in multiple forms but through revelation in one. See also Weston’s later article, ‘‘Seeing Photographically,’’ T he Complete Photographer 9, 49 (1943), 3200–3206. The famous Group f/64 was founded in Oakland, CA, in 1932, with Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Sonya Noskowiak, John Paul Edwards, and Henry Swift. The members argued against soft focus photography with their very name, f/64, which refers to a small lens aperture that produces a wide depth of field. Although the group officially disbanded in 1935, by that time it had fully adopted Weston’s ideas and set the stage to promulgate them well into the twentieth century. 47 As quoted in Nancy Newhall, ‘‘Controversy and the Creative Concepts,’’ Aperture 2, 2 (July 1953), 12. 48 White, ‘‘The Glass Eye and the Grease Paint: A Talk on Photography for the Theatre,’’ Interplayers Theatre, Sunday, March 18, 1951. PCB. 49 Minor White, ‘‘The Camera Mind and Eye,’’ Magazine of Art 45, 1 (January 1952), 16–19. Reprinted in Lyons, ed., Photographers on Photography, 163–175. 50 Letter from Ansel Adams, 29 March 1947, 2, his emphasis. The painter Arthur Dove once heard Adams say that his photographs were ‘‘extracts not abstracts.’’ I would like to thank Anne Hammond for this anecdote.

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51 Letter from Beaumont Newhall, 5 June 1950, 1. 52 ‘‘To most people,’’ Jones argued, ‘‘an important appeal of a photograph is its implied literal honesty. That’s why all obviously posed and contrived photos arouse so much criticism.’’ Letter from Vincent S. Jones, Director, News and Editorial Office, The Gannett Newspapers, to Beaumont Newhall, 14 January 1952, recto of carbon copy. In file ‘‘MW Correspondence – To Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, 1951–52.’’ MWA. 53 Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon, ‘‘Photographing the Familiar,’’ Aperture 1, 2 (July 1952), 15. 54 Letter to Nancy Newhall, 27 March 1948, 2. 55 Janet E. Buerger, ‘‘Minor White: The Significance of Formal Quality in His Photographs,’’ Image 19, 3 (September 1976), 24. Pultz, ‘‘Equivalence, Symbolism, and Minor White’s Way Into the Language of Photography,’’ Record of the Art Museum, Princeton 39, 1–2 (1980), 37–38, argues with Buerger and claims that White relates closer to 1960s painters Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland. 56 Letter to Nancy Newhall, 17 April 1948, 1. 57 Letter to Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, 26 January 1950. However, Dody Warren, ‘‘Photography as Art: Personal Opinions,’’ Aperture 1, 3 (October 1952), 26, agreed with White’s position here. 58 See course #6 in CSFA Catalogs for 1947–48, np., 1948–49, 3, and 1949–50, 3. PCB. 59 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ 15 March 1947, 42. White also photographed a painter named Mel Weitsman or Westman before an abstract canvas on an easel. See proof print cards 51-259, 51-553, 51-554, and 51-555 in the MWA. 60 Ansel Adams to Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, 12 October 1952, his emphasis, as quoted in Jacobs, ‘‘Labyrinths,’’ 37, 45 n. 46. 61 Letter to Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, 17 March 1951, 3. 62 Letter to Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, 17 March 1951, 3, handwriting on bottom margin. 63 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ 22 March 1951, 78. 64 Letter from Nancy Newhall, 3 April 1951. 65 Bunnell, ‘‘Interview with Sidney Peterson’’ (17 June 1985), page 2 of typed pages. PCB. 66 Chapter XV, section ‘‘The Photographer’s Approach to ‘Source,’’’ in ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ 217. 67 Rough draft of Schapiro’ s Mirrors Messages Manifestations text, 1969, 9b. PCB. 68 Dwain Faubion, ‘‘Concerning the Camera and Direction,’’ Aperture 1, 2 (July 1952), 22–29, esp. 25. Faubion attempted to confront the viewers of his own photographs with such ‘‘dark places.’’ There is a connection here with Sidney Peterson’s interest in T he Dark of the Screen, and with White’s ‘‘time between photographs.’’ 69 Edward Weston, entry dated 24 April 1930, T he Daybooks of Edward Weston, vol. 2, 154, his emphasis. The next line is ‘‘Significant presentation, – not interpretation’’ (154). White changes the not to and. 70 Edward Weston, My Camera on Point L obos, 1950, as quoted epigraphically in Aperture (Minor White: A Living Remembrance), 95 (Summer 1984), 28. 71 ‘‘Things for what else they are’’ is a subheading in Mirrors Messages Manifestations, 106. 72 Minor White, ‘‘Development of a Stylistic Analysis for Photography,’’ Graduate Seminar Paper for Meyer Schapiro, Columbia University (1945), 51. MWA. 73 Edward Dwight, ‘‘Statements,’’ Aperture 1, 3 (October 1952), 19. 74 Perhaps this oscillation between ‘‘reality’’ and ‘‘photograph’’ in the ‘‘spring-tight line’’ could be related to Wittgenstein’s famous ‘‘Duck-Rabbit’’ or other similar multi-stable

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images. For an excellent discussion of such works, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture T heory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 45–57. 75 See White’s ‘‘Lyrical and Accurate,’’ in Petruck, T he Camera V iewed, vol. 2, 51: ‘‘The sense of authenticity in a photograph is so effective it can seduce some persons who reject abstraction in painting to accept what looks like abstraction in a photograph.’’ 76 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael T. H. Sadler (London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1914; Dover Publications, Inc., 1977), 47. Stieglitz had published Kandinsky in Camera Work as well. On O’Keeffe and Kandinsky, see also Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming O’KeeVe: T he Early Years, 1st ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991). 77 White’s typed notes regarding classicism in his ‘‘Definitions of Categories II [:] Traditions,’’ in ‘‘Activities Files – 1945 Photo Analysis and Wo¨lfflin,’’ 1. MWA. 78 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ 16 February 1947, 38A, his emphasis. 79 Edward Dwight, ‘‘Statements,’’ Aperture 1, 3 (October 1952), 19. 80 Letter to Ansel Adams, 1 September 1953. See also White, ‘‘The Camera Mind and Eye,’’ Magazine of Art 45, 1 (January 1952), 16–19. 81 Letter to Ansel Adams, 1 September 1953. 82 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ undated entry [4 March 1956 or 12 January 1952?], 213–214. 83 ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ Chapter XI, ‘‘Varieties of Image,’’ subsection ‘‘Comparison of the Literal and the Non-Literal Images,’’ 142. 84 Letter from Nancy Newhall, 3 March 1950. White=transcendentalist; Adams=intranscendentalist. I would like to thank Mike Weaver and Anne Hammond for this reference. 85 Jacob Deschin, ‘‘Lyrical Mood,’’ review of L yrical and Accurate, by Minor White, New York T imes, Sunday, August 25, 1957. PCB. 86 Bunnell, ‘‘Interview with Sidney Peterson’’ (17 June 1985), 1–2. 87 Chappell, ‘‘The Threshold of Vision: Minor White,’’ Aperture 95 (Summer 1984), 21, on entering White’s Rochester flat in 1957: ‘‘standing between the parallels of the known and the unknown.’’ 88 Letter to Beaumont Newhall, 31 May 1950. 89 La´szlo´ Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film [1925], trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969). 90 For selections from the ‘‘Sonnet Sequence,’’ see Bunnell, Minor W hite: T he Eye T hat Shapes (Princeton: The Art Museum, 1989), 23. 91 Letter to Nancy Newhall, 8 April 1951, his emphasis. White’s letter quotes from page 111 of Kracauer’s article. 92 Letter from Helmut Gernsheim, 1 April 1953, 3, his emphasis. Warren, ‘‘Photography as Art,’’ p. 27: ‘‘PHOTOGRAPHY IS A GRAPHIC MEDIUM.’’ 93 Letter to Helmut Gernsheim, 4 September 1953, 3. 94 ‘‘Memorable Fancies,’’ August 1957, 264, repeated on 265. This comment may have been inspired by Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: The Noonday Press, 1955), as quoted in Aperture 95 (Summer 1984), 34. White’s copy of Underhill’s book still exists in the Minor White Archive. 95 Meyer Schapiro, ‘‘On a Painting of Van Gogh,’’ V iew 7, 1 (Fall 1946), 13, for all quotes above. See also letter from Nancy Newhall, 27 November 1950: ‘‘Minor V. G. (for Van Gogh) White.’’ The phrase ‘‘personal objects’’ leads us into Schapiro’s famous 1968 article, ‘‘The Still Life as a Personal Object – A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,’’ in T heory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, ed. Meyer Schapiro (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 135–142. This is followed by Shapiro’s 1994 essay ‘‘Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh,’’ 143–15 1. In 1978, none other Jacques Derrida responded to Schapiro’s 1968

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article with ‘‘Restitutions,’’ which has been reprinted often including in Donald Preziosi, ed., T he Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 432–449. Curiously, Schapiro’s 1994 essay does not respond to Derrida’s deconstructive critique. Of interest here as well is Maxwell Steer, ‘‘The Creative Voice,’’ Analecta Husserliana Vol. LXV, ed. M. Kronegger and A.-T. Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 171–188. Steer argues that Van Gogh provides a classic example of those artists whose ‘‘life journey and their creative journey are aspects of a central attempt to resolve (make sense of/render coherent) the discrepancies between their inward creative sense and the external experiences echoed back to them by the responses of others. ...’’ For Van Gogh, this creative sense or voice ‘‘was both inspiration and curse’’ (173). 96 Andre´ Bazin, ‘‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’’ in W hat Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 9–16. For the French text, see Andre´ Bazin, ‘‘Ontologie de l’image photographique,’’ in Qu’est-ce que le cine´ma?, vol. 1 (Paris: les E´ditions du Cerf, 1958), 11–19. Bazin’s essay was first published in Gaston Diehl, ed., Proble`mes de la Peinture (Paris and Lyon: Confluences, 1945). Obviously, the scope of Bazin’s article was not merely the photographic. Numerous reprints exist including one in Peninah R. Petruck, ed., T he Camera V iewed, W ritings on T wentieth-Century Photography vol. 2, Photography After World War II (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 140–46. 97 For a relevant discussion of Malraux, see Andrew Hershberger, ‘‘Malraux’s Photography,’’ History of Photography 26, 4 (Winter 2002), 269–275. 98 Surprisingly, no one to my knowledge has specifically critiqued Bazin’s idea of a ‘‘mummy complex.’’ The only reference found was to a play entitled ‘‘The Mummy Complex,’’ which appeared at the Armstrong Circle Theater, New York, in 1958. For this play citation, see Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson, T he Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 331. 99 In 1936, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) published a remarkable and now world famous essay. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–251. Benjamin stated the purpose of his article at the end of the first of its fifteen sections: to examine the ‘‘repercussions’’ of both photography and film on traditional art media such as painting (220). In the second section, Benjamin claimed that photography changes the aims of art. The most often quoted line from his essay is ‘‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction [photography] is the aura of the work of art’’ (221). By aura, Benjamin meant the authority or uniqueness of an artwork and, for him, this ‘‘withering’’ was an effect more joyous than grievous. He argued that by freeing art from tradition and ritual, or, by making innumerable copies of works of art, photography provides the means for progressive possibilities. (Here he specifically referred to the plight of the proletariat in dedicated Marxist terms). This claim fits together with the essay’s last line wherein Benjamin criticized Fascism for aestheticizing politics and advocated photography as a communistic means of ‘‘politicizing art’’ (242). Moreover, in his sixth section, Benjamin directly addressed the question of how the painter compares with the photographer. He answered that the relation between them was similar to that between a magician and a surgeon: ‘‘The painter [magician] maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman [surgeon] penetrates deeply into its web’’ (p. 233). Thus, for Benjamin, photography’s uniqueness resided in its capacity to operate within reality. See also Joel Snyder, ‘‘Benjamin on Reproducibility and Aura: A Reading of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical

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Reproducibility,’ ’’ in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), 158–174. 100 Letter from Edward Weston, probably 1947 or 1948. See also letter to Edward Weston, 29 November 1956, in which White stated, in the context of examining his own 35 mm color slides from his Lobos trip: ‘‘For the first time, the trees were becoming trees.’’ Beata Szymn´ska draws upon a similar haiku poem and discusses its significance in ‘‘An Experience of Pure Consciousness in Zen Buddhism,’’ Analecta Husserliana Vol. LXXVI, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 51. 101 ‘‘Fundamentals,’’ 227.

SCOTT A. SHERER

IMAGINATION AND CULTURAL CRITICISM IN THE WORK OF DAVID WOJNAROWICZ

Reflecting on his efforts to survive the gender and sexual violences coextensive with the cultural and political experience of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz (1954–92) understood the body both as vehicle for organic life and as conduit for intersubjective communication.1 Wojnarowicz considered sexuality as an inherently potent component of human life and yet one simultaneously marked by the prejudices of social discourse. The human body has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful location for the operation of cultural power as multiple discourses create the social subject by demanding that needs and pleasures conform to socially productive desires. Wojnarowicz understood that human possibility is inscribed within cultural frameworks such that lived experience depends upon the context of ideological frameworks. In an age of AIDS, Wojnarowicz exposed how heteronormative ideology supports itself by producing marginal others and by hiding the mechanisms of sexual difference through which it accomplishes its goals.2 In his Sex Series of 1988–89, Wojnarowicz produced large-scale images of war, industry, woods or the city, natural disaster and domesticity, inserting small vignettes of gay pornography. Working with photographic reversal of positive and negative values, Wojnarowicz shows us the covert desire that perseveres notwithstanding the normative representations we create for ourselves. Wojnarowicz writes regarding this series: Step back a few hundred miles into space; in the air above all this it all looks like ants in a clockwork maze of pre-invented structures. By mixing variations of sexual expressions there is the attempt to dismantle the structures formed by category; all are affected by laws and policies. The spherical structures embedded in the series are about examination and surveillance. Looking through a microscope or looking through a telescope or the monitoring that takes place in looking through the lens of a set of binoculars. It’s about oppression or suppression. It’s about sexuality in this age of AIDS and the attempted suppression of sexuality. Are you comfortable looking at these images of obvious sexual acts in a crowded room. Do you fear judgment if you pause for a long time before an image of sexual expression? Can you sense absurdity or embrace in the viewing of images. ... I’m in the throes of facing my own mortality and in attempting to communicate what I’m experiencing or learning in order to try and help others I am effectively silenced. I am angry.3

As an object of study, sexuality demands consideration of the character of human creation between reality and abstraction. It is a problematic 233 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 233–242. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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conception because of the integration of physical components and cultural interrogation. Much contemporary debate regarding identity, morality, obscenity, and ‘‘traditional values’’ frequently sidesteps the productive, often messy relations of the body and its pleasures, and of the ethical character of human intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and physical connection. As a gay man and then a gay man living with and then dying from AIDS, Wojnarowicz recognized that sexual pleasure converted into sexual identity based upon the normative control of a dichotomy of valued vs. non-valued characteristics and activities harms the potential for human life. Wojnarowicz’s art provides challenge to normative representation: ‘‘To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the preinvented world.’’4 In T he History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault against an interpretation of society as one that represses sexual discourses. He writes ‘‘What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.’’5 Characteristic of contemporary discourses of sexuality is the interplay between silence and overt discussion, between encouragement and discouragement. Ideological discourses strive not to admit their constructed character for fear of being exposed as being relative constructions and hence assailable. Fundamentally, Wojnarowicz questions the production of contemporary subjectivity. How do our natural desires become part of our social existence? How are our desires silenced? This essay recognizes but moves beyond interpretation of Wojnarowicz’s work as AIDS and homosexual activism. My interest is in the productive ways Wojnarowicz uses diverse media as evidence of the multiple components of our thoughts, dreams, and memories in resistance to inherently normative attempts of ordering and judgment. While Wojnarowicz clearly targets his enemies – general homophobia, suburban normativity and its veneers, and political and religious authorities’ homophobic response to HIV prevention, his work gives expression to the failure of normative discourses to assert their authority, rewards, and punishments. The interplay of photographic realism and painted and literary recordings of dreams and fantasies in Wojnarowicz’s work holds potential for resisting normative logic and narrative.6 Wojnarowicz integrates provocative rhetoric and vibrant compositions to demonstrate and challenge governing paradoxes of social identification even as the full complexity of thought and feeling remains beyond common language. The work is grounded in representations of human embodiment because

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social and individual knowledge target the body while the body also remains a catalyst for pleasure and productive unintelligibility. Wojnarowicz does not easily wear the mantle of ‘‘gay artist.’’ Indeed, few artists would take unproblematically labels that would pigeon-hole the critical edge of the work andlor their identity into specific categories. Feminist critics have long struggled with issues regarding lived, social effects of gender and sexuality discourses and with criticism of those discourses themselves. Wojnarowicz does not shy away from making art that presents the personal and social dimensions of sexuality. His prose, photography, and painting demonstrate the internal tensions of representations to reflect lived experience. Wojnarowicz presents the complexity of human subjectivity by creating work that presents multiple layers of personal and collective references in varying degrees of abstraction across the cultural discourses that construct our lives. Wojnarowicz’s art provides opportunity to examine visuality as central to processes of subjectivity. As an integration of physiological operations and social experience, visuality describes interrelationships within the world of objects and human life, the experiences of seeing and being seen, and the effects of those experiences.7 Responding to the social construction of the visual field and the visual construction of the social field, Wojnarowicz expresses embodied experience as response and resistance to cultural interpretation. Grounded in the particularities of his own lived experience and that of others of his generation, Wojnarowicz presents criticism of social discourses of masculinity and heteronormativity as well as the capitalist systems that benefit from these discourses and gestures toward conceptual and lived possibilities beyond social limitation and intellectual reckoning. Wojnarowicz seems to understand the interrelationships and differences between phenomenological and political criticism, and his work arguably reflects Maurice MerleauPonty’ s thoughts on the character of human subjectivity. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘‘When I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world.’’8 Wojnarowicz’s work demonstrates the profound ways bodies are vehicles for social and personal meaning and the profound ways embodiment may withstand interpretation and representation.

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A contemporary of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wojnarowicz hit the big time of the ‘80’s East Village New York scene. Following the adage that all press is good press, when an exhibit to which he submitted a catalogue essay became subject of a public funding skirmish. In November 1989, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chairman John Frohnmeyer withdrew a $10,000 grant from the exhibition W IT NESSES: Against Our Vanishing, an exhibit of twenty-three artists’ responses to the AIDS pandemic, curated by the photographer Nan Goldin.9 Under pressure from the arts community, Frohnmeyer reversed his decision but only on condition that no monies go toward the catalogue.10 Much of the visual work in the exhibition challenged discriminatory public policies and attitudes regarding support for people with AIDS and HIV prevention and directly targeted prejudices against sexual, racial, and ethnic minorities as well as class bias, and Wojnarowicz’s literary text made explicit his political challenge. The essay ‘‘Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell’’ makes public what the norm wants to restrict to the private realm – non-normative sexuality, grief of the marginal, the influence of conservative ideology on individual lives as well as society as a whole.11 In our times, the AIDS crisis has made explicit the direct relationship between public policies and the character of life. Wojnarowicz became an object for censorship because he directly criticized politicians whose prejudices contributed to the spread of HIV: Senator Jesse Helms (North Carolina), Congressman William Dannemeyer (California), and the New York Catholic Church’s highly influential John Cardinal O’Connor.12 In March 1990, the American Family Association (AFA) placed a fullpage ad in USA T oday. Captioned ‘‘Is this how you want your tax dollars spent?’’ the ad argued for an end for support for pornographic, antiChristian ‘works of art,’ with ‘‘works of art, being placed, of course, in scare quotes. The ad described fourteen incidents of NEA funds being misused, including exhibitions by Serrano, Mapplethorpe, and Wojnarowicz and listed the 252 members of Congress who had voted down the notorious Helms amendment against ‘‘obscenity.’’ Illustrating this advertisement was a 1/8 section of the upper right corner of one of Wojnarowicz’s works, depicting an image of Christ, stuck with a hypodermic. For Wojnarowicz, in 20th century contexts, Christ would be a martyr for those suffering in 20th century contexts – from poverty, drug use, and AIDS.13 Several weeks later, Donald Wildmon, executive director of the American Family Association distributed an anti-NEA brochure with

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details of works by Wojnarowicz taken from the catalogue of his exhibit T ongues of Flame, then on view at the University Galleries of Illinois State University.’14 This propaganda, titled ‘‘Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay for These ‘Works of Art,’’’ was put in envelopes marked, ‘‘Caution: Contains Extremely Offensive Material’’ and sent to 523 members of Congress, 3,230 Christian church leaders, 947 Christian radio and TV stations, and 1,578 newspapers. Wojnarowicz sued Wildmon and the AFA for 5 million dollars, for copyright infringement, defamation of character, and breach of the Lanham Act which would protect an artist’s work from being used by another for advertising or promotion of goods and services, and the New York Artists Authorship Rights Act. The court ruled that Wojnarowicz was entitled to an injunction under the Artists Authorship Rights Act because selective editing of Wojnarowicz’s work misrepresented the work. Misrepresentation was, of course, Wildmon’s intention – the reduction of Wojnarowicz’s work to pornography from an ethical challenge regarding gender and sexual norms and their impact on those most at risk for HTV infection. The court ruled that the copying was under the definition of fair use of copyrighted material, was not advertisement for other goods or services and did not cause Wojnarowicz harm as no exhibit or sale of work was cancelled in response. A Pyrrhic victory for Wojnarowicz, Wildmon was forced to distribute a correction regarding the misrepresentation of the work and to pay a $1.00 fine. In ‘‘Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-Inch-Tall Politician,’’ Wojnarowicz reflected about the context of identity politics: If I say I am homosexual, or ‘‘queer,’’ does it make you nervous? I have experienced various reactions to that simple disclosure in the course of my life. I often wonder whether my being a queer who asserts his sexual identity publicly makes some people see the word ‘‘QUEER’’ somehow written across my forehead in capital letters. And I wonder whether or not that revelation prevents some from hearing anything else I say, or whether or not it automatically discounts anything else I might say.15

Sexuality is a particularly powerful discourse because it makes indivisible the material and the ephemeral, the body and pleasure. While sexuality manages the human body for its optimization as laboring machine and as a source for the regulation of populations, sexuality also provides access to the individual by influencing the development and deployment of desire. Desire, through sexual activity and confession, brings together both physical and psychological dimensions and connects the individual to others. Foucault emphasizes the power of confession because sexuality

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exposes ideological ‘‘truths’’ of the individual. Far from being a secret, sexuality is a public concern. Thus marked against normative hierarchies, declarations of sexual difference do not bring liberation but its reverse. Sexuality proves to be an efficient discourse because it operates within the individual and compels the individual to accede to power. If power is variable throughout history and resistance faces constant siege and retaliation, neither perverse sexual release nor desire offers much lasting challenge. Hence, toward the end of T he History of Sexuality, Foucault calls for a shift in terms away from sex-desire to bodies and pleasures: We must not place sex on the side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusions; sexuality is a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation. We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim – through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality – to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.16

Foucault argues that the deployment of sexuality constitutes ‘‘sex’’ itself as something desirable (156) – and this desirability makes us think we can resist power through sex (157). As the truth’’ of sex-desire is socially constructed, pursuing the ‘‘truth’’ of sex-desire offers no liberation. Foucault argues that cultural imagination of homosexuality as immediate pleasure hides what makes homosexuality truly ‘‘disturbing’’: ‘‘everything that can be uncomfortable in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie and companionship, things which our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force.’’ Foucault suggests that ‘‘to imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another – there’s the problem.’’17 Foucault’s attempt to think a way out of the bind of sexuality is to suggest a foundation in ‘‘bodies and pleasures.’’ Although Foucault’ s phrasing unfortunately seems to maintain an oppositional politics, the proposal of a ‘‘counterattack’’ to sex-desire by bodies and pleasures is not simply an oppositional gesture. Foucault hopes for a future with a ‘‘different economy of bodies and pleasures’’ in which we will no longer be constrained by ‘‘the ruses of sexuality,’’ ‘‘the austere monarchy of sex,’’ and ‘‘the endless task of forcing its secret’’ (159).

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Thinking toward bodies and pleasures suggests moving away from the circular battle of discourse and counter-discourse – though it is not to avoid them, which would be, of course, an impossible task. Unlike sexdesire which coerces, circumscribes, and compels in order to make intelligible meaning, bodies and pleasures remain in the sphere of sensory experience, resistant to the abstract systems that assign sexual difference and provide histories and objects of desire. That is, although bodies and pleasures are not outside discourse, they do resist re-presentation and the controls marked at the entrance into the (social) order of meaning. Power concentrates endlessly on bodies and pleasures because bodies and pleasures can never be fully occupied. Each moment in their existence remains singular and ephemeral: something must always be lost in translation. My point is not to suggest that the human body and its pleasures are the ultimate refuge for individual resistance to the processes of subjectivity. While that they may be true, I am more interested in suggesting how the body and its pleasures exceed, pressure, and disrupt discourse. While sexdesire works on and through bodies and pleasures, no discourse is comprehensive and no power ever complete: bodies and pleasures continuously prove uncontrollable. I argue that unintelligible human embodiment and its corollary intersubjective sensory exchanges – all that can be perceived but not rationalized – offer the greatest potential to disturb relations of power. Wojnarowicz’s work that focuses on the suffering in the AIDS crisis and on homophobia opens possibility for considering how discourses of sexuality effect individual subjectivity and contribute to the production of social identity. The stakes for the marginal community are clearly focused on the very possibility of human survival. To understand Wojnarowicz’s work as simply an oppositional voice against social injustice, however, is to deny the challenge that occurs in understanding the human body as a vehicle for personal pleasure and ethical connection. In Untitled (One day this kid ...) [30×40, 1990], Wojnarowicz frames a photographic self-portrait of himself as a child with text that provides a counterpoint to the child’s youth and symbolic innocence. Wojnarowicz predicts the future: ‘‘One day this kid will get larger. ... One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and soul that makes him hungry. ...’’ Immediately, though, the potential for a full life – and one open to unrestricted social exchanges – is limited: ‘‘... One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will

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give false information to their children and each child will pass the information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. ...’’ Wojnarowicz tells us that either the kid will respond to this othering by living in dangerous circumstances or by committing suicide, or he will submit to silence and invisibility, or he will begin to talk. If the kid starts to talk, he will be faced with physical violence, medical and psychological violence, and ‘‘he will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms.’’ In telling us that ‘‘All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another body,’’ Wojnarowicz seems to present us with the inevitably of social norms. Yet, while few could argue that sexual difference is increasingly accepted in American society – notwithstanding the vicious political grandstanding regarding gays and lesbians in the military, as parents, and as partners that shows no signs of abating at the time of this writing before the 2004 presidential elections – bodies and pleasures continue to be subject to ideological determinations and be transformed into normative-marginal definitions of sex-desire. However, against this interpretation, I suggest that Wojnarowicz hints at the possibilities that exist in gestures that seem to extend beyond social history – in the imagination of the connection of two boys for a brief period of time. Wojnarowicz continues this theme of human creation beyond social constraint in Untitled (Inside this house) [1990]. In this work, he presents the viewer with a photographic image of a small house roughly constructed out of paper placed on a plane of grass. He gives no details as to any specific geographic or temporal location of the house. The structure appears childlike and a generic marker of American suburbia. In the bottom right hand corner, Wojnarowicz superimposes two short paragraphs that give voice to what may remain silent. The text begins with statements that span the diverse character of human experience: ‘‘Inside this house many things go on. Many people. Many lives. Many personalities. Some of them dream. Some of them don’t. Some of them eat. Some of them starve. Some of them cry. Some of them laugh. Some of them wake up. Some of them go to sleep. Some of them fall in their dreams. Some of them walk in their dreams. Some of them fly. Sometimes the interior of this house resembles a universe.’’ Wojnarowicz continues by shifting the social interaction of mundane life into a broader, naturalistic, and sensory experience: ‘‘Sometimes the movements of the bodies create a rhythm that is an exact thing like science: rotations for periods of time

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and then collisions. Words float like particles. Collide like meteors. Sometimes a little dog comes out of the house and makes sound and the sound carries and the sound shifts and it rises up over the treetops.’’ The second paragraph is about a quarter the length of the first, and in it, Wojnarowicz introduce a specific inhabitant who lives in society but dreams beyond it: ‘‘There, inside this house, lives a little girl. This little girl has dreams that not everybody understands. And the dreams sometimes go far away. Far far away.’’ Remaining unanswered is whether these dreams escape or take the child with them. In his best work, Wojnarowicz perseveres through rage, but does not lose his voice to it, and in so doing, Wojnarowicz encourages others to live fully in the world and hold the belief that ‘‘one of the last frontiers left for radical gestures is the imagination.’’ Kent State University NOTES 1 An excellent list of exhibitions and bibliography may be found in Amy Scholder, ed., Fever: T he art of David Wojnarowicz (New York: Rizzoli, 1999). 2 Much literature is available that discusses the political character of early government and popular lack of unprejudiced response to combating the AIDS epidemic. Further, the efficacy of efforts to prevent HIV transmission and to care for those HIV positive and those living with AIDS continues to be troubling, especially as regards those living in non-Western countries. For an early influential text on these matters see, Douglas Crimp, ed., AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). This was originally published as ‘‘Aids: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, October 43 (Winter 1987). Of particular note is Paula A. Treichler, ‘‘AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification,’’ 31–70. 3 Wojnarowicz, excerpted from his text on the ‘‘Sex Series’’ in In the Shadow of Forward Motion, 1988–89. 4 Wojnarowicz, ‘‘Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell,’’ in Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991), 121. 5 Michel Foucault, T he History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 35. 6 One example of Wojnarowicz’s use of biographical memory and fantasy regarding the pleasures and violences of gender and sexuality in both compelling prose and drawing is Wojnarowicz, Memories T hat Smell L ike Gasoline (San Francisco, Artspace Books, 1992). 7 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘‘Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture,’’ Journal of V isual Culture, 1: 2 (2002). 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Cohn Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 408. 9 Nan Goldin, et al. organizers, W IT NESSES: Against Our Vanishing (New York: Artists Space, 1989).

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10 Peter F. Spooner provides excellent discussion of controversies surrounding Wojnarowicz in ‘‘David Wojnarowicz: A Portrait of the Artist as X-Ray Technician,’’ in Elizabeth C. Childs, ed., Suspended L icense: Censorship and the V isual Arts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 333–365. 11 For excellent discussion of ‘‘culture wars,’’ see Brian Wallis, et. al., Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (New York: New York University Press, 1999) and Richard Bolton, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York: New Press, 1992). 12 Challenge to the discrimination and absence or negative response to combating AIDS on account of homophobia was a consistent theme in AIDS activism. Demonstrations by ACT-UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) proved effective to alert the public of the failures of public health initiatives. See David Deitcher in Art Matters, op. cit. 93–125, and Gabriele Griffin, Representations of HIV and AIDS: V isibility Blues (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 13 Wojnarowicz’s work is Untitled (Genet), 1979, Xerox collage, 22×28 cm. 14 The traveling exhibition was organized by Barry Blinderman at University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal, January 23–March 4, 1990, and was accompanied by a 128-page catalogue. 15 Wojnarowicz, ‘‘Do Not Doubt the Seriousness of the 12-Inch-Tall Politician,’’ in Close to the Knives, op. cit., 150. 16 Foucault, 157. 17 Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ Foucault L ive, trans. John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989). This interview first appeared in L e Gai Pied, April 1981. 18 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press), 11. 19 Wojnarowicz, ‘‘Postcards From America,’’ op. cit., 121.

DANIEL M. UNGER

A MESSAGE FOR THE OUEEN: GUERCINO’S DEAT H OF DIDO, CARDINAL SPADA, AND THE INTERNAL CONFLICTS AT THE FRENCH COURT

Guercino’s first venture into the genre of historical painting was T he Death of Dido (Fig. 1), undertaken at a time when he had already achieved considerable prestige and financial success. The work was commissioned in 1629 by one of his exalted patrons, Cardinal Bernardino Spada, the papal legate in Bologna, and intended for the queen mother of France, Maria de’ Medici.1 From the correspondence between the cardinal and the queen we know that the queen had asked the cardinal to offer the

Figure 1. Guercino, T he Death of Dido, 1630–1. Galleria Spada, Rome. © Archivi Alinari, Firenze; used with permission.

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post of her court artist to Guido Reni. When Reni refused the offer, Cardinal Spada suggested that she invite Guercino instead. Maria de’ Medici replied that she was not acquainted with Guercino and requested that he prepare for her a work on a subject of his choosing.2 The cardinal suggested to Guercino a scene from the tale of Queen Dido and Guercino, who welcomed the opportunity to introduce himself and his work to the queen, did T he Death of Dido.3 In the event, Guercino never went to Paris because the queen was compelled to flee before he could do so. The painting was completed in 1631 and remained in Cardinal Spada’s possession to form an important part of his collection. In modern scholarship it was Anthony Colantuono who contended that the tragic scene was meant to impart, in the guise of an historical subject, a topical message of direct political significance for the intended recipient of the work, Maria de’ Medici, the queen mother of France. Colantuono placed the commission of T he Death of Dido in the context of papal interests to contain Spanish military ambitions, and suggested that it was intended to complement the message of Reni’s Abduction of Helen regarding the Mantuan Succession (the marriage of the French Duke of Nevers to the heiress to the dukedom of Mantua).4 After noting how active the cardinal was in the formulation of the scene to be rendered by Guercino, he drew attention to a possible analogy between Maria de’ Medici and her relationship with the Spanish monarchy and Queen Dido and her love for Aeneas. According to Colantuono, the queen mother knew of the Spanish Habsburgs’ claims to ‘‘mythical descent’’ from Aeneas and the Trojans. Also, Dido, was a queen whose life experience resembled that of Maria de’ Medici. In Colantuono’s interpretation, Cardinal Spada asked for the death scene of Dido in order to warn the queen mother of France of the prospective treachery of the court of Madrid. ‘‘ Just as Aeneas had heartlessly abandoned Dido to pursue his destiny, so would his Habsburg ‘‘descendants’’ betray Maria de’ Medici whenever it suited them, with equally disastrous results.’’5 In the lines ahead I would like to suggest another interpretation of T he Death of Dido as a work designed to transmit a politically motivated warning to Maria de’ Medici. I would like to offer a different reading both of the historical circumstances that prompted the commission of the painting and of the rhetorical message embodied in it. The story of the death of Dido appears in two classical works known in Guercino’s day: Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Heroides. Both tell how the queen of Carthage chose to kill herself rather than reconcile herself to the departure of her beloved, Aeneas, the Trojan hero, whose descendants

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founded Rome. In Virgil’s epic poem, Dido’s death concludes the story of their love. This story runs through the entire fourth book, which starts with Dido telling her sister how strong her love for Aeneas is. When Aeneas, who had landed in Carthage after his ship was wrecked in a storm, expresses his wish to continue on his way to fulfill his mission, Dido vows that she will take her life if he leaves her. Aeneas does not heed her warning, and the unhappy and angry Dido, whose adoration of Aeneas blots out her reason, keeps her vow and commits suicide.6 In the Heroides, Ovid, who was twenty years younger than Virgil, describes in detail Dido’s love, disillusionment, and anger, in the form of a letter purportedly written by her, in which she complains bitterly that while she had offered Aeneas not only her love, but also the throne of Carthage, he had chosen to repay her with disloyalty and abandonment.7 The two poets describe the manner in which Dido took her life identically: she impaled herself on a sword, while standing on a funeral pyre. Nevertheless, there is an essential difference in the way the two conceive her and explain her conduct on the threshold of death. Virgil’s Dido is no more than an important obstacle in the way of Aeneas, a good man and good king. She is a negative figure, who sacrifices not only her life, but also her rule, her city, and her subjects. Virgil portrays Dido as a weak woman, driven by an obsessive love that she cannot overcome.8 Therefore, in the death scene, her sister Anna, accuses her harshly of bringing about her own destruction, and that of the government and the city.9 Ovid sees Aeneas as a treacherous figure and Dido as a victim.10 At the end of his account, Dido reminds her sister that she was privy to the secret of her love for Aeneas and asks Anna to bless the ashes on the pyre, and to ensure that the inscription on her tombstone blames Aeneas for her death. It was his sword that killed her, although she herself delivers the fatal stroke.11 Ovid’s Dido dies as a heroine; it is not she, but rather Aeneas who is responsible for her fate. Virgil depicts Aeneas as the true hero of the epos, acting out of a sense of duty, and mission. The queen’s love will divert him from his mission. He, therefore, has no choice but to leave Carthage and Dido. Ovid’s queen is the predominant figure and the point of view from which the events that led to her death are observed, is her own. The differences between the ways in which the two poets relate to Dido are in all likelihood the basis for the dualism in the perception of Dido in the seventeenth century. On the one hand, Dido was seen as a woman ruled by powerful lust, which ultimately led her to end her own life. On

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the other hand, Dido was the strong woman who established Carthage and whose honesty and the great favors she bestowed upon him, Aeneas repaid by abandoning her in the dark of night. Guercino’s contemporaries saw the pagan queen in both ways, as expressed, respectively, by Virgil and by Ovid.12 In Guercino’s painting, there is no room for doubt as to the centrality of Dido. Aeneas, the true hero of Virgil’s epic poem, is only alluded to in the form of his boats in the background, a fact that indicates perhaps, the artist’s preference for Ovid’s positive attitude to Dido. Guercino chose to capture the moment when the queen has just stabbed herself in the breast with a long sword. She is lying in the center of the painting, leaning on her elbow, in a typically Roman posture on a stack of planks crisscrossed in the manner of a pyre.13 Her posture is reminiscent of the death of martyrs. Under the planks, on the left, glowing embers are visible. Dido is looking at a young woman who faces her with her arms outstretched in surprise and with an anguished expression on her face. This, as stressed by Colantuono, is surely Anna, her sister, who according to Ovid was to eulogize Dido.14 Behind Anna there are several other figures that react to Dido’s deed with highly expressive hand movements. The woman behind Dido entwines her fingers, as does an elderly woman just behind Anna. Next to that woman, and behind her, on the left, there are two young women drying their eyes, one with a handkerchief the other with her hands. The way in which the mourning figures are positioned around Dido recalls the familiar postures of penance. Behind the women stand three male figures, one lifting his hands in astonishment. On the right-hand side of the painting there are two women and a man watching the scene. The man faces the viewer and with his right hand points at Dido. All the figures are clothed in upper-class seventeenth-century attire: costly velvet garments in rich colors studded with precious stones. The women are wearing expensive jewelry. On Dido’s head is a golden crown with a fleur de lis pattern. In the background Aeneas’s ships are sailing away from Carthage. In the sky there is a cupid, with his back to the beholder, looking at the departing boats. Guercino painted the scene from Dido’s point of view. It is she who is positioned as a monumental figure at the center of the work. Her sister is secondary, part of the group on the left. The red dress she is wearing distinguishes her from the others, but does not make her stand out in relation to Dido, whose dress is fairly ornate, in dark red and gold. Anna is stricken with mourning at the death of her sister, who is looking up at her ‘‘with her last ounce of strength.’’15

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Dido, despite the extreme behavior resulting from her turbulent emotions in the wake of Aeneas’ departure, is depicted in all her majestic glory; even her crown is not forgotten. There is nothing in her posture or her portrayed conduct to indicate a loss of self-control, as someone who had just lost her lover and her life. The emphasis is on the connection between the queen, with a sword through her heart and reclining on her pyre, and her sister, who gazes at her in pain and astonishment. The focus of attention on the dying Dido and the reaction of her sister attest that the scene was inspired not by Virgil, but by Ovid. In Virgil’s epos, Anna is not a witness to the suicide, but hears of it only later and runs to her sister in anger and despair. When she gets to Dido, the queen is dying and can only listen to Anna’s limitless anger. Guercino’s depiction of Dido’s death is almost unique. Other portrayals of her death are rare and generally do not depict the moment of her suicide. One early representation of Dido known to us today is that of Mantegna, from the years 1500–1505.16 In this work, the queen’s imminent death is alluded to – and she is identified – by the sword she holds, and the stack of logs on the left, on which her body will be cremated. A rendition of the actual scene of Dido’s death was made by the French artist Simon Vouet in 1642.17 Although it was made eleven years later than Guercino’s work, a comparison between the two will enable us to better understand the distinctiveness of the latter. While Vouet does include all the important components of the subject, they are not depicted with the clarity that is characteristic of Guercino. Vouet preferred a diagonal composition, with all the figures in motion. Dido is in the center, flanked by Anna and Iris. She is holding a sword in her right hand, but it is hardly visible, as is the crematory pyre on the right. Dido, with a bleeding wound on her breast, is held by an old woman, who is behind her. Anna is mourning, holding Dido’s left hand while drying her eyes. Iris is turning her head from the sight. Vouet’s rendition is completely different from Guercino’s. The emphases are not the same, and attest not only to another artistic tradition, but also to a different literary source. Vouet has depicted the moment when Anna, according to the account by Virgil, holds her sister and is seeking help in her attempts to heal her death wounds. Though Guercino preferred Ovid’s version, there is also a similarity: both artists ascribe importance to the relationship between the sisters. Vouet illustrates it by having Anna holding Dido’s hand while crying, emphasizing the movements of the two, while Guercino does so through Dido’s gazing at Anna, and the latter’s leaning towards her sister. Vouet, however, preferred to stress the

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dire condition of Dido, setting aside the sword and the pyre, both essential components of the story of the suicide. Guercino, on the other hand, was careful to give prominence to these elements, and by including Aeneas’ boats in the background, to the reasons that led Dido to do what she did. Another difference lies in the stylistic means employed by the two artists. Vouet creates powerful motion linking the two central female figures and producing the strong sense of drama. In Guercino’s work, Dido’s monumental dimensions and posture in the center, as a discrete, independent figure, makes for a calm, even wooden feeling. Notwithstanding the sword and the funeral pyre, the beholder has to make an effort to grasp that this is a dramatic, profoundly tragic event. Guercino has given Dido a serene facial expression, in order to preserve her queenly beauty. In painting T he Death of Dido, Guercino in all likelihood based himself primarily on a visual source known to him from his youth in Cento: the mural Suicide in the Casa Pannini (today in the Pinacoteca Civica, Cento).18 This is evidenced in a drawing by the artist, in Denis Mahon’s collection.19 The most salient similarity between the drawing and the mural is the manner in which Dido is leaning with her breast on a long sword before impaling herself on it. There are however, important differences. In the drawing, the cremation pyre and Aeneas’ ships in the background are also visible. These elements are absent from the mural, and its subject has never been identified. Indeed, without the drawing, we would not be able to see a link between the mural and Guercino’s canvas because ultimately, the only common motif is the long sword. In the oil painting, the sword has already run through the queen’s body, whereas in the mural she is only preparing to fall on it. Cardinal Spada’s choice of a subject from the ancient Roman world is not unusual in itself. What is intriguing is that for a work intended for a queen, he chose the death scene of another queen. What could have been the cardinal’s motives for such a subject matter? We should first dwell upon the political background at the French court as Cardinal Spada perhaps knew it in order to find the link that will enable us to understand the meaning of the painting. At the time Guercino executed T he Death of Dido, Maria de’ Medici was engaged in a bitter conflict with Cardinal Richelieu, then already First Minister of Louis XIII. As is common in such internecine struggles, personal and policy considerations were intertwined. Richelieu began his political career as a prote´ge´ of the queen (it was on her recommendation that the cardinal entered the Council of State in April 1624),20 but having

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won the king’s trust he developed positions contrary to hers on some of the major political issues of the day. His formal status as church dignitary notwithstanding, Richelieu pursued France-first policies, placing his country’s state-political interests before those of the church, whereas Maria de’ Medici sided with the de´vots – the Catholic faction at court which supported the alliance of the Catholic nations under the leadership of the pope and hence strove to maintain peaceful relationship with Spain, a natural ally in the Catholic struggle against the Protestants. Among others, the queen mother and the cardinal clashed over the appropriate retaliation to the Spanish intervention in Mantua, with Richelieu advocating a tough, hawkish policy that threatened to weaken the Catholic front against the Protestants and Maria de’ Medici advocating a conciliatory policy designed to strengthen the anti-Protestant alliance.21 Tension between the cardinal and the queen reached a peak in 1630 when Maria de’ Medici tried to get her son to depose the cardinal. When the king chose to support Richelieu’s militant policy over his mother’s, she was forced to flee to Brussels, never to return to Paris.22 In the conflict between Richelieu and Maria de’ Medici, Cardinal Spada seems to have sided with the latter. His role in our story is crucial, for it was on his initiative that Guercino’s painting of the scene of Dido’s death was undertaken (as mentioned above) – in the first stage, on his recommendation of Guercino to Maria de’ Medici, and in the second, on his suggestion of the subject to Guercino. It must be noted that Cardinal Spada had first-hand acquaintance with the French court, dating from the time of his service as Urban VIII’s papal legate in France in the years 1624–1627.23 He had established a close relationship with the queen mother, founded in part on their mutual interest in art and was almost certainly aware of her predilection for art with a political message, especially one regarding her own status. There can be no doubt that Cardinal Spada knew Maria’s lavishly decorated Palais de Luxembourg whose walls were decked with works depicting allegories of political significance. The subjects of the works the queen commissioned for the palace centered on the legitimacy of her claims to be the rightful regent of France (as the legal widow of Henry IV and the mother of Louis XIII who was still a child when Henry was murdered in 1610). Among these was a series of paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, executed in the years 1622–1623, relating to important events in the life of Maria de’ Medici. One of these paintings, T he Consignment of the Regency, depicts King Henry IV, the queen, and the crown prince, the future Louis XIII. The king is handing the queen a blue orb with gilt

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fleurs de lis, representing the regency, before going to war in Germany.24 The clear implication of the scene is that the crown prince willingly accepted the king’s decision to hand over the regency to his mother.25 Thanks to correspondence between Rubens and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, an adviser to the queen, we know of her plan, which never came to fruition, to place eight large sculptures of famous and powerful women over the northern entrance to the palace. Among those suggested was Dido.26 Cardinal Spada is more than likely to have heard about the plan for the statues, maybe even from the queen herself, for much of their correspondence turned on the subject of art. Cardinal Spada’s role in commissioning T he Death of Dido, his knowledge of affairs at the French court, his close relationship with the queen mother, his familiarity with her receptivity to artistically articulated messages concerning her own status and, above all, the strange choice of the suicide of a queen as a subject of the painting, all point to the conclusion that the painting was conceived as a vehicle of political communication. But, to come back to our question, what was the content of that communication? The answer that suggests itself is indeed that the painting was intended as a warning to Maria de’ Medici. It was meant as a friendly advice not to allow her conflict with Richelieu to escalate to a point at which she might come to share the fate of that other queen. The assumption that Spada was trying to warn the queen of what might happen also emerges from the work itself. In Guercino’s painting Dido’s reclining posture upon the pyre is reminiscent of the death of martyrs. Her posture is similar to that of St. Lawrence in another painting Guercino executed while he was busy with the work on Dido’s death, Martyrdom of St. L awrence of 1628. The connection between the two works lies in the structure of the composition: St. Lawrence, like Dido, is in the center, lying on a pyre, and on both sides there are figures that balance the work, but also lead the viewer to focus on St. Lawrence, just as in the case of Dido in T he Death of Dido. The artist is expressing Cardinal Spada’s opinion as to the hopeless struggle of Maria. Guercino, in his painting, leaves absolutely no room for the possibility that Dido could win her struggle. Not one of the onlookers tries to stop Dido; all are passive in the face of the tragic event. In Guercino’s work, Dido is not an immoral woman, although she threatened suicide and carried out her threat, undoubtedly a grievous sin, but not the message here. On the contrary, judging by the posture of Dido, she could even be considered a sacred woman, sacrificing herself for the sake of her love for Aeneas. Her loyalty is what brought her to

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her death. This coincides with Ovid’s version of the story, the figure of Dido is that of a victim who was unjustly wronged and maltreated. The notion of the suicide emerging from Dido’s inability to reconcile herself to a fate of separation from her lover could be interpreted as an allegory of the historical reality in which Queen Maria of France found herself. In fact, the story of Dido’s life is in many ways paralleled by that of Maria de’ Medici. Guercino hints to this by adorning Dido with a crown decorated with the symbol of the French monarchy, the fleur de lis. It is not clear to what extent Guercino was familiar with Cardinal Spada’s intentions. But, he must have been, at least, aware of the cardinal’s wish to draw a parallel between the two queens. Spada’s choice of the tale of Queen Dido could have sprung from at least two obvious similarities between the two queens: the first, both lost their husbands and, devoted themselves to a life of public activity after their husbands’ deaths – Maria de’ Medici as regent of France, Dido as the founder and ruler of Carthage. The second similarity relates to their prote´ge´s: Dido took Aeneas into her city and her home, and even wished to make him king; Richelieu owed the start of his career at the French royal court to Maria de’ Medici, who acted as his patron in his early days. By means of this painting, Cardinal Spada was reminding Maria de’ Medici of a situation in which an ancient queen had placed a ruler in a cruel dilemma, between love a woman and his public duties, as he saw them.27 Dido had presented Aeneas with an impossible ultimatum, and the result was that he chose to follow the call of duty rather than of love and she ended her life. Dido had made a mistake, and Spada’s message for Maria was to warn her not to repeat that mistake in her confrontation with Richelieu. He was urging her to conduct herself with restraint, in view of the political situation in her country, and not to emulate the impulsive and emotional reaction of Dido. It is altogether conceivable that Spada was apprehensive of the repercussions of Maria de’ Medici’s opposition to Richelieu’s foreign policy. That Spada apparently supported the queen’s positions can be seen in the manner in which Guercino portrayed Dido as worthy of the honor and esteem due to a saint, and her struggle as analogous to the acts of a martyr, with her demise taking place on a pyre and being burned at the stake. This interpretation may appear to be anachronistic, as if I am attributing prophetic properties to Cardinal Spada. However, since all the facts of the situation were almost certainly known to him, there is room to assume that he may well have been able to envisage Maria de’ Medici’s

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fall and to have seen fit to express his personal concern for her fate. As a man of the seventeenth century, it would not be surprising if he shared the belief that women were incapable of exercising cool logic, but were rather apt to be emotional and impulsive and thus, weak.28 This makes it reasonable for Spada to have selected the death of Dido as an appropriate subject for conveying a political warning to Maria de’ Medici, which makes it all the more likely that he should see the need to warn the Queen of the possible consequences of her confrontation with Richelieu. Indiana University NOTES 1 Other works commissioned by Cardinal Spada listed in Guercino’s libro dei conti include: a depiction of animals, on July 12, 1629; a portrait of the cardinal, which was paid for on July 8, 1631; an astrological work paid for on July 11, 1635, and a representation of St. Peter, which was paid for on January 12, 1640. See Il libro dei conti del Guercino 1629–1666, ed. Barbara Ghelfi (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1997), 56, 61, 79, 100. 2 Quote: Mon cousin, Je vous remercie dela peine que vous avez prise pour persuader a Guido Reni de venir en france Ses excuses paroissent si raisonnables que J’ne puis trouver a redire qu’il ait faict difficulte´ de quitter un pais ou il est engage´ comme vous me le mandez, Puis qu’il ne se peut autrement, et que le Guercino dont vous me´scrivez est apres luy le plus excelent paintre de toute l’Italie, Je vous prie de tenir la main a ce qu’il me faie un tableau tel qu’il voudra, et qu’il me l’envoie quand il sera acheue´ afin que il iuge de ce quil scait faire et s’il est capable de me donner contentement pour les ouvrages que i’ay dessein de luy commettre en mon Palais [...] Maria Teresa Dirani, ‘‘Mecenati, pittori e mercato dell’arte nel Seicento: Il Ratto di Elena di Guido Reni e la Morte di Didone del Guercino nella corrispondenza del cardinale Bernardino Spada,’’ Ricerche di storia dell’arte, 16, (1982–1983), 87. 3 Quote: Magistro mio amatissimo. Havendo io pensato sopra l’invenzione e la disposizione del quadro del quale vi tenni proposta ultimamente mi son risoluto ne l’historia o` sia favola di Didone come quella che mi pare capace di molta varieta`. di cose secondo il bisogno di chi lo richiede: Ho pero` fatto stendere un poco di scrittura toccante l’individuo de la favola e la disposizione de le persone ma pero` col pensiero che piu` tosto serva ad eccitare la vostra mente che a` legarla o` astringerla precisamente a la disposizione: sarete pero` contento di farli sopra quella riflessione che vi parera` oportuna e successivamente avisarmi il senso vostro per poter poi immediatamente por mano a` l’opera. Ibid., 87–88. See also: Anthony Colantuono, Guido Reni ’s Abduction of Helen: T he Politics and Rhetoric of Painting in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, New York and

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Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 101–102; Arne Karsten, Kardinal Bernardino Spada: Eine Karriere in barocken Rom (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2001), 122. 4 Colantuono, op. cit., 101–103. 5 Ibid., 103. 6 Quote: But Dido, trembling and frantic with her dreadful design, rolling bloodshot eyes, her quivering cheeks flecked with burning spots, and pale at the imminence of death, bursts into the inner courts of the house, climbs the high pyre in a frenzy and unsheathes the Dardan sword, a gift sought for no such purpose. Then, as she saw the Trojan garb and the familiar bed, pausing awhile in tearful thought, she threw herself on the couch and spoke her last words: ‘‘O relics once dear, while God and Fate allowed, take my spirit, and release me from my woes! My life is done and I have finished the course that Fortune gave; and now in majesty my shade shall pass beneath the earth. A noble city I have built; my own walls I have seen; avenging my husband, I have exacted punishment from my brother and foe – happy, too happy, had but the Dardan keels never touched our shores!’’ She spoke, and burying her face in the couch, ‘‘I shall die unavenged,’’ she cries, ‘‘but let me die! Thus, thus I go gladly into the dark! Let the cruel Dardan’s eyes drink in this fire from the deep, and carry with him the omen of my death!’’ She ceased; and even as she spoke her handmaids see her fallen on sword, the blade reeking with blood and her hands bespattered. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–V I, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed. (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), IV: 642–665. 7 See Ovid, Heroides and Amores, 6 vols., trans. Grant Showerman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1977), VII: 90. For the tale of Dido’s suicide, see also Ovid, Fasti, trans. James George Frazer, 2nd ed. (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), III: 543–550. 8 On Virgil’s Dido, see Francis Cairns, V irgil’s Augustan Epic (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 52–53; Antoine Wlosok, ‘‘The Dido Tragedy in Virgil: A Contribution to the Question of the Tragic in the Aeneid,’’ in V irgil: Critical Assessments of Classical Authors, 4 vols., ed. Philip R. Hardie (New York: Routledge, 1999), vol. 4, 163. 9 Quote: Was this your purpose, sister? Did you aim your fraud at me? Was this for me the meaning of your pyre, this the meaning of your altar and fires? Forlorn, what shall I first lament? Did you scorn in death your sister’s company? You should have summoned me to share your fate; the same sword stroke, the same moment would have taken us both! Did these hands indeed build the pyre, and did my voice call on our father’s gods, in order that, when you were lying thus, I cruel one, should be far away? You have destroyed yourself and me together, sister, the Sidonian senate and people, and your city! Bring me water to bathe her wounds and catch with my lips whatever last breath may linger! Virgil, op. cit., 675–685. 10 On Ovid’s perception of Dido, see John Watkins, T he Specter of Dido: Spenser and V irgilian Epic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 31–34. 11 Quote:

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Ovid, op. cit., 191–196. 12 See Watkins, op. cit., 50–51. 13 Dido looks as if she is reclining on a typical Roman lectus (type of Roman sofa) although she is actually lying on a stack of wooden planks. Another seventeenth-century example of this posture is in Nicholas Poussin’s second series of sacraments, painted for Chantelou, in which Jesus is depicted, in the rendition of the act of penance, reclining thus at the dining table. Also, in the portrayal of the Eucharist, he has the apostles reclining around the table of the last supper. In this work, it is St. Peter who is depicted in the same posture as Dido. For the Roman lectus, see Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, T he Furniture of the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), 105. For Poussin’s act of Penance, see Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Nicolas Poussin 1594–1665, exh. cat. (Paris: Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux, 1994), Cat. no. 110. 14 Colantuono, op. cit., 102. 15 Ibid. 16 Ronald Lightbown, Mantegna (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), Cat. no. 53. 17 This painting was published in an exhibition catalogue, in which the compilers make a brief comparison between the work and Guercino’s T he Death of Dido. They refer mostly to the compositional differences, Guercino’s being static and Vouet’s very dynamic. They contend that Vouet could not have seen Guercino’s work. See Jacques J. Thuillier, Barbara Brejon de Lavergnee and Denis Lavalle, Vouet, exh. cat. (Paris: Paris: Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux, 1990), 322. 18 See Renato Roli, I fregi centesi del Guercino (Bologna: Riccardo Pa`tron, 1968), fig. 69; Prisco Bagni, Guercino a Cento: L e decorazioni di Casa Pannini (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1984), fig. 120 and 121. 19 See Roli, op. cit., 95; Bagni, op. cit., 141; Denis Mahon, David Ekserdjian and Helen Davis, Guercino Drawings from the Collections of Denis Mahon and the Ashmolean Museum, exb. Cat. (London: Burlington Magazine Publications, 1986), 12–13; Gabriele Finaldi and Michael Kitson, Discovering the Italian Baroque: T he Denis Mahon Collection (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997), 174. 20 See, Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, L ouis XIII: T he Making of a King (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 221; Lloyd A. Moote, L ouis XIII, T he Just (Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989), 163. 21 On French foreign policy in the 1620s and 1630s, see Marvick, op. cit., 220–222; Hsia R. Po-Chia, T he World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68. 22 For the eventful Day of Dupes and Maria’s Brussels exile, see Victor L. Tapie´, France in the Age of L ouis XIII and Richelieu, ed. and trans. D. McN. Lockie, 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), 231–239; Marvick, op. cit., 222; Moote, op. cit., 170–171, 199–201. 23 See H. C. Gent, T he Scarlet Gown, or T he History of all the Present Cardinals of Rome (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1653), 55; Antonio di Paolo Masini, Bologna Perlustrata: T erza impressione notabilmente accresciuta in cui si fa mentione ogni giorno in

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perpetuo delle fontioni Sacre, e Profane di tutti l’anno, 2nd edition (Bologna: Vittorio Benacci, 1666), vol. 3, 238. 24 For the political significance of this painting, see Matthias Winner, ‘‘The Orb as the Symbol of the State in the Pictorial Cycle Depicting the Life of Maria de’ Medici by Rubens,’’ in Iconography, Propaganda, and L egitimation, ed. Allan Ellenius (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1998), 64–70. 25 See Frans Baudouin, Pietro Pauolo Rubens, trans. Elsie Callander (New York: Abrams, 1977), 184. 26 See Ge´raldine A. Johnson, ‘‘Imagining Images of Powerful Women: Maria de’Medici’s Patronage of Art and Architecture,’’ in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 139–142. 27 For the interest in the seventeenth century in the struggle between love and political and civic duty embodied in the story of Aeneas and Dido, see Peter N. Skrine, T he Baroque: L iterature and Culture in Seventeenth Century Europe (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), 140. 28 In the Christian world as a whole and in particular in seventeenth-century Italy prevailing views of the role and character of women were determined by traditional Christian concepts embedded in the story of the Garden of Eden and Original Sin. According to Christian doctrine, it was Eve who, by tempting Adam to taste of the forbidden fruit, brought misfortune upon humankind. Eve was perceived as the third and weakest side of the feminine triangle, the other two being Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalen. Richard Spear, in his book about Guido Reni, discusses the special status of the latter two women, each of which, represents an answer to Eve’s sinful nature: The Virgin Mary is the ideal woman, who succeeded uniquely in living her life without sinning. The Magdalen’s life was far more realistic, she was a sinner who expressed contrition and repented. These three represent the different types of women in the world. The Christian concept of Mary, Mother of God, embodies two eternally unbridgeable opposites, virginity and motherhood, both important moral ideals expressed in the sacraments of marriage, which for women implies motherhood, and ordination, which entails asceticism and monasticism. Mary Magdalen is the ideal figure to emulate and to repent for a life of sin. Eve is a negative figure, whose life is the precise opposite of that of the good Christian: she is expelled from Paradise, instead of being admitted to it. On Catholic perceptions of the Virgin, Mary, and Eve, see Richard E. Spear, T he ‘‘Divine’’ Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 166; Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 43–47; Christa Gro¨ssinger, Picturing Women in L ate Medieval and Renaissance Art (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 5.

RUTH RONEN and EFRAT BIBERMAN

WHO IS DECEIVED BY T ROMPE L ’OEIL ?

When King Henry the VIII, in search of a fourth wife, asked the court painter, Hans Hollbein, to draw portraits of young pretty women so that he could choose the most beautiful one to be the next queen, he was in for a great disappointment. The king soon realized how deceptive a visual image can be: Ann Cleve, the chosen beauty, turned out to be much less attractive than her portrait divulged. Hence, the painting that was meant to function as a transparent representation turned out to be misleading and unfaithful. King Henry was led into disappointment by the naı¨ve assumption, according to which aspects of reality can be pictorially represented even if the possibility of error or accidental failure is taken into account. The case of trompe l’oeil represents a counter tendency and aims to overstep the inherent limitedness of a faithful visual rendering. Artworks of this genre have as their manifest goal to deceive and cheat the observer into believing that the representation is (and does not simply stand for) the object represented. Recall the famous competition between the two Greek painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios. According to the legend, while Zeuxis succeeded in misleading the birds into trying to peck on his voluptuous painted grapes, the great Parrhasios succeeded in misleading not just an animal, nor even another human, but a skilled painter: Zeuxis himself. When exposed to the painting, the latter tried to unveil Parrhasios’s depicted curtain underneath which he believed he would find the ‘‘real’’ painting. Unlike Hollbein, who was, officially at least, striving to provide the king with an accurate depiction, these ancient Greek painters’ ambition was that of achieving a perfect copy, not in order to be loyal to the truth but in order to deceive the beholder. Since antiquity, the phenomenon of deceptive art, trompe-l’oeil, is present continuously in art history, in Pompeii’s floor mosaics, in the Renaissance architectonic illusions as in Sandro Botticelli’s studiollo of Urbino, in Baroque Dutch still life paintings, in American art of the late 19th, and in many others. Although trompe-l’oeil paintings appear mostly around the 15th–19th centuries, the term trompe-l’oeil is still relevant for discussions of contemporary art, from superrealism to the works of Jasper Johns, and of Fischli and Weiss. Yet, although trompe-l’oeil paintings 257 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 257–265. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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appear to have a constant presence in the history of art, they are also marginalized and devalued in comparison to other genres of paintings that also aim at raisemblance, such as portraiture. The constancy of these paintings however, proves that they cannot be regarded as merely an oddity, but must manifest something essential to aesthetic expression and experience in general. Furthermore, unlike other artistic genres such as portraiture or landscape painting that have undergone great modifications over the years because of a change in conceptions of style or subject matter, trompel’oeil artworks appear to transcend such contingencies and are hardly influenced by artistic modes or movements. Viewer responses to trompel’oeil also follow a constant pattern: the visitor at the Sonnaband gallery show in New York, encountering the Fischli and Weiss installation of 1994 which looks like a show under construction, finds himself/herself speculating whether the show is not yet on. The visitor feels the same uncertainty and embarrassment that Zeuxis probably felt, when trying to remove Parahesios’ painted veil. The unchanging, even rigid qualities of trompe-l’oeil works of art, and the constancy of the spectators’ pattern of response to them, suggest that this artistic phenomenon is constituted by a petrified form, a pure form subject neither to the changing face of objects of reality, nor to the influence of changes in the history of the field of art. Its form is pure in the sense that it cannot be examined in view of its adaptability to this or that object in reality, to the rendering of which the form is officially devoted. What is the meaning of that purity? The constant and stubborn presence of the genre of trompe-l’oeil suggests that these paintings manifest something essential to art and to aesthetic experience, something that the historical marginalization and devaluation has not successfully concealed. In this essay I will address the question of the truth-value of trompel’oeil paintings. The peculiar nature of trompe-l’oeil works of art, the fact that they are, by definition, mendacious and meant to mislead the beholder, has drawn philosophers and art theorists to question whether a truth-value can possibly be attributed to them. In order to counter this view I will refer to psychoanalytic thought, especially to that of Jacques Lacan, in the context of which the true-false opposition is superseded in a way that allows me to address the question of truth in terms that are not those of knowledge gained. In psychoanalytic thought what appears as a lie (a fallacious dream or a slip of speech) may turn out to reveal another truth about the subject.

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Trompe-l’oeil as a breakdown of representation: image/object The traditional interpretive attitude towards trompe-l’oeil paintings settled for their deceptive aspect, while striving to clarify and dissolve the deception as contingent, by claiming, for instance, that the act of deceiving the eye does not exhaust the essence of trompe-l’oeil paintings. The impact of these works takes us elsewhere, and has to do with the dialectic of the relations between extreme illusionism and the representation of reality. Hal Foster, when referring to super-realism, claims that while trompel’oeil paintings do more than ‘‘trick the eye’’, in order to deliver the reality of experience, these paintings ‘‘seal (the real) behind surfaces ... embalm it in appearances’’.1 Foster thus points at the connection between trompel’oeil and a deeper sense of reality, that is, he explains the opaque nature of trompe-l’oeil in terms of the dialectic between illusionistic form and object of representation, which, in the case of trompe-l’oeil, is reality itself. An opposite tendency is to identify trompe-l’oeil paintings with falsehood manifestly contrasted with realist art. Whereas trompe-l’oeil aims at deceiving the spectator by simulating the appearance of objects, realist paintings strive to reveal the truth about these objects themselves. Thus, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘‘The spectator of the realist representation is not supposed to be under the power of representation, but to be using representation in order to take power over the world’’.2 The spectator of trompe-l’oeil, in contrast, is captivated by the illusionist mode of representation. A similar state of affairs apparently arises from Lacan’s discussion of the gaze in Seminar XI. Lacan argues that Zeuxis’s birds would have never pecked Caravaggio’s life-like fruits (in Bacchus), for birds need something other than verisimilitude to make them peck on dabs of color. ‘‘If the grapes had been painted in this way, it is not very likely that the birds would have been deceived, for why should the birds see grapes portrayed with such extraordinary verisimilitude? There would have to be something more reduced, something closer to the sign, in something representing grapes for the birds’’.3 But Lacan’s interest does not lie in the animal kingdom. The birds’ preferences are meant to stress the way humans react to trompe-l’oeil paintings, as the human subject is tempted not by the depicted object but by what supposedly lies somewhere else: ‘‘the point is not that painting gives an illusory equivalence to the object, even if Plato seems to be saying this. The point is that the trompe-l’oeil of painting pretends to be something other than what it is.’’4 This point can be clarified by another zoological example that Lacan describes.

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Lacan addresses the problem of camouflage in nature as it is manifested in butterflies, on whose wings images of huge eyes are naturally drawn. The impact elicited by the image of the eye, argues Lacan, is not to be attributed to its resemblance to a real eye, but rather, to its resemblance to an ocelli, to a depicted eye. The impact on the beholder, like in trompel’oeil paintings, is owing not to the substitution of a real object with an image, but rather to the realization that real things resemble mere depictions. T rompe-l ‘oeil paintings, hence, expose the existence and power of the screen as opaque and not as transparent, revealing, not the object behind, but the fact that there is nothing there. Zeuxis’s astonishment stems from the fact that he finds himself lacking in front of an image that returns his gaze, disclosing nothing. What Zeuxis saw, in that depicted curtain, was his own gaze staring back at him from a location he could not occupy; the gaze is the object absent from the picture when looked at from the side of the deceived subject, but in that, the gaze reveals precisely the object that represents the subject himself from where he cannot be, that is, a truth about the subject. In an essay dedicated to trompe-l’oeil, Jean Baudrillard5 in a way sums up its paradoxical nature by implying that trompe-l’oeil can be taken as the exceptional case in relation to a number of relevant categories. Within the category of realism it is ‘‘too much like the things as they are’’, and hence we can surmise that as representation, it fails to convey the truth about reality. Within the category of illusion it cannot shed off the value of the deceptive image, and hence as illusion its effect is momentary. Within the category of the aesthetic it is not pleasurable, and hence as an artistic phenomenon its status is always questioned. Within the category of the metaphysical the pleasure in it is ironic since ‘‘the enjoyment of trompe-l’oeil comes from an intense sensation of deja-vu and of the eternally forgotten, of a life that preexists the mode of production of the real world’’,6 that is, it metaphysically refers to what cannot be. T rompel’oeil thus has a paradoxical nature that cannot be settled in terms of the routine, facile answers that refer to extreme illusion, or to the pleasure in the ineffable. Looking at the various comments trompe-l’oeil has elicited in critics and art historians, it can be claimed that this artistic phenomenon leaves a considerable amount of discontent. While being officially committed to the face of reality, it is a view shared by a range of critics that trompel’oeil in fact loses its grip on the world. Either by limiting its commitment to the surface of things, a commitment that can be interpreted as concealing what lies behind the surface, or by engaging itself with another notion

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of what representation of the real involves, trompe-l’oeil exhibits a peculiar relation between image and object. Baudrillard, as already mentioned, has attributed this peculiarity to the fact that ‘‘these objects are nearer to the black hole from which reality, the real world, and ordinary time come to us’’.7 These objects that are too much like the things as they are, create a sense of losing hold on the real through the very excess of its appearances (ibid.). In other words, rompe-l ‘oeil engages with another object that show its face, so to speak, but only through a peculiarity recognized in the object seen. Being too much like the things as they are, or being like objects too marginal and valueless to be worthy of artistic representation, are among the strategies, claims Baudrillard, that signal that trompel’oeil aims at what is beyond. Lacan’s perspective, at this point, differs radically: for him, there is only the screen. The screen may contain a hole or a blind spot, but there is nothing other than the screen. T he Observer Deceived ... and Ascertained In view of the critical tendency to consider the impact of trompe-l’oeil as not being exhausted by the brief moment of ‘‘being deceived’’, one can ask what is the nature of this deception. If trompe-l’oeil aims at another reality, why is it considered a deception, and if its deceptive strategy is momentary, how is the deception overcome? In other words, what is the truth about trompe-l’oeil and how is it related to the kind of affect this artistic phenomenon elicits in its observer? The history of this phenomenon, as we have shown, is too persistent not to force us to transcend the dimension of an anecdotal trick in the history of art. Baudrillard has attributed this transcendence to a hole in the picture of reality, to the fact that trompe-l’oeil suggests that not-all is within reality itself; something transcends the picture of reality and it is this hole that give trompe-l’oeil its metaphysical standing. There is something about which trompe-l’oeil does not deceive. In what follows I will attempt to explore this nondeceptive aspect by further examining the case of trompe-l’oeil through the domain of psychoanalytic reasoning in order to explore the notion of a ‘‘hole in the picture of reality’’, to investigate the moment at which the beholder hesitates between ‘‘being deceived’’ and ‘‘not being deceived’’, between reality and what perforates reality. The spectator encountering a trompe-l’oeil artwork is likely to see before him a disrupted object as a turned-over painting or an exhibition not yet prepared. The deceived viewer, not yet aware of being deceived, attributes the disruption to a mistake held by someone else, the artist or

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the museum’s staff. But then a doubt infiltrates, the spectator is unsure whether something is wrong or he himself is being deliberately misled. This moment of hesitation will sometimes lead the observer to try and touch the canvas’s two-dimensional surface, or to try and trace how others react to the artwork in question. Finally, the viewer is convinced that the mistake is his own, and that it is caused by the insidious image. The effect of this final conclusion is intensified in view of the certainty and satisfaction felt before. How should we understand this hesitation of the observer facing a work of trompe-l’oeil? What is the nature of the certainty of the subject in front of an image he sees as the thing itself, and how is it related to the certainty that follows the moment of recognition, as the certainty that can be phrased: ‘I have been deceived’? ‘‘Truth’’, says Lacan in his Seminar XI, ‘‘is based only on the fact that speech, even when it consists of lies, appeals to it and gives rise to it’’.8 It is this principle that will help us substantiate the truth produced by visual lies. The observer of trompe-l’oeil hesitates for an instant before the work of art, wondering how he should take the image before him. For instance, the moment at which the observer stands before what appears as a hole in the wall, or what appears as a turned-over board, or what appears as a show under construction, is a moment in which the certainty the observer gradually feels regarding what is actually seen is undermined. The recognition that the initial impression has turned out to be deceptive, opens a way for an alternative certainty, the certainty of being deceived. I would like to claim that in this way the deceptive image, consisting of a pack of lies, gives rise to truth. The truth is not a truth about ‘‘a beyond’’ but a truth about the split nature of the image itself, about the split between the lies it actually tells, and the truth that comes back to the subject from the deceptive image. The situation in front of the deceptive visual image can be compared to the statement ‘‘I am lying’’ that Lacan analyzes after Descartes. In order to solve the paradox inherent in ‘‘I am lying’’ Lacan says that the ‘I’ of the enunciation (the act of speech) should be separated from the ‘I’ of the statement (as the content of the spoken). ‘‘From the point at which I state, it is quite possible for me to formulate in a valid way that the I – the I who, at the moment, formulates the statement – is lying ...’’.9 That is, ‘‘the am lying’’ engendered at the level of the statement, produces at the level of the enunciation – I am deceiving you’’. The ‘I’ states that it is lying, or the ‘I’ of the cogito claims to exist. While the ‘I’ of the statement

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is attempting a lie, the ‘I’ of the enunciation is saying: I am deceiving you, and that is the truth. This division of the subject can be most clearly shown with the case of the cogito where the subject’s certainty depends on the punctuality of thought (as the subject is certain of nothing but his own act of enunciation or thought), while what makes up the entire statement, attributing existence to the thinking subject, already amounts to the content of this thought: I think, ‘‘I am’’. The truth about the cogito is the truth that comes back to the subject as a message in inverted form: by stating one is thinking and hence existing what returns to the subject is the message that says ‘I say to myself I exist’. The truth about the subject is precisely this split between the ‘I’ as stating, even doubtful things, and the ‘I’ as enunciating something that has nothing to do with determinate knowledge, yet is the truth about the speaking/thinking being. The truth about the subject is that the ‘I’ is lying. Similarly the only certainty the Cartesian subject has is the certainty of the ‘I think’, which very much like the ‘I am lying’ above is a minimal punctual certainty ‘‘of being certain only of the absolute doubt concerning all signification’’. How can we understand the deception in trompe-l’oeil in analogous terms? As a signifier that simulates reality but says something nondeceptive about the real. The certainty, the non-deceptive moment of any trompe-l’oeil arrives after the observer’s hesitation when the image says to the observer: ‘‘the truth is: I am deceiving you’’. In that the image of deception is truthful while at the same time it always lies, just like the subject of the unconscious. Note that the image of deception does not disappear once its nature is revealed, and its status as a left over from the deceptive moment has to be accounted for. Further, the psychoanalytic insight regarding the relation between deception and truth has an important significance for our understanding of the impact of trompe-l’oeil, since it situates this art in the domain where the reality of the unconscious is enacted. What the image presents as a lie, comes back in inverted form as truth. The observer of trompe-l’oeil is thus committed to the truth of the image of trompe-l’oeil, an image that opens up to reveal something by lying. While Descartes had to summon God to ascertain his certainty, images of trompe-l’oeil need not go that far. The certainty of Descartes could have been grounded, so Lacan suggests, on the signifier alone, yet this certainty eludes Descartes, which is why he guarantees his knowledge by addressing himself to God, to ascertain what is already certain, the truth of the subject. The certainty that comes back to the observer from the

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image of trompe-l’oeil is the one saying: I am deceiving you, and it is the observer as the Other of the picture, that is responsible for returning this truthful message. The observer of trompe-l’oeil hence fulfills a very crucial function in relation to these artworks: he acts in the same function as the analyst who ‘‘awaits the subject, and sends back to him, his own message in its true signification, that is to say, in an inverted form’’. The observer, just like the analyst, is the Other of the deceptive lies told by images of art. The structural similarity of trompe-l’oeil with the subject who states he is lying, can hence suggest why the observer is captured by the moment of deception: even when the deception is exposed, something remains of it, a remainder that may help us explain why in front of trompe-l’oeil the observer cannot feel pleasure, but rather only the anxiety or discontent exemplified in a moment of awkward embarrassment. It can further be said that trompe-l’oeil raises, with particular strength, the necessary presence of the observer for the deception to take place. Unlike King Henry VIII who feels deceived by the portraiture of marriage candidates, the observer of trompe-l’oeil is not deceived by the image. In other words, while the deception of the King relies on the distance between what the image conveys and what comes back from the object, the deception in trompe-l’oei/ works differently. The deceptive image states: let me show you something that will present reality as complete, as lacking in nothing, let me present to you a deceptive reality as it really is. What comes back as truth is the deception itself. What the observer returns to the image as its true signification is the truth about the possibility of an image that lacks nothing. Department of Philosophy T el Aviv University

NOTES 1 Hal Foster, T he Return of the Real (The MIT Press: an October Book, 1999), pp. 141–145. 2 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture T heory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 325. 3 Jacques Lacan, T he Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: T he Seminar of Jacques L acan, Book XI, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998), 111–112. 4 Ibid., 112. 5 Jean Baudrillard, ‘‘The Trompe L’Oeil’’, in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, edited by Norman Bryson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 6 Ibid., 58.

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7 Jean Baudrillard, ‘‘The Trompe-L’Oeil’’, in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, edited by Norman Bryson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 56. 8 Jacques Lacan, T he Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: T he Seminar of Jacques L acan, Book XI, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998), 133. 9 Ibid., 139.

LANFRANCO ACETI

THE AESTHETIC OF TRUE DIGITAL ILLUSIONS: CROSSING SEVERAL ROADS AT THE SAME TIME

This paper will discuss the oxymoron of a ‘true illusion’ and its representation in digital media. It will contribute to the aesthetic debate on the nature of real versus unreal, attempting to devise the existence of truth in the framework of digital media. The pulse of disembodiment and recorporealization is the flutter captured so well in cinematic suturing of the gaze from shot to shot, and whose pulses are regulated in the interlaced scanlines of video and even more in the pixel arrays of VDU graphic displays. The Virtual can then be understood as a perspective that looks on this perpetual motion as a perpetual vanishing.1

The vanishing of perspective as an expression of the disembodiment is reinforced by the concept of ‘parallel spaces’ in which Bukatman explains that the reader finds ‘a polymorphous stage for the dissolution of ontological boundaries; for the collision of competing and transmutating worlds’.2 In this world of digital possibilities Le Grice explains that ‘The only viable definition of the real is engagement in the arena of irreversible consequence, and that the distinction between reality and illusion is not one of opposition but of status’.3 If this is the case then the proof of the existence of a truth, beyond the postmodernist approach and Baudrillard’ s theory of the simulacra, will reinforce the existence of beauty and goodness. The paper will conclude with the concept of ‘true digital illusion’ as an element of the dialectic between ‘real and unreal’ transposed into the digital world. A digital dialectic that still retains the aesthetic inspiration of beauty and goodness. Therefore, it is necessary, in order to reaffirm the concept of beauty and goodness in the contemporary framework, to re-establish a form of dialectic discourse, which might overcome the impasse of the ‘simulacra’ and the concept of the ‘implosive digital black hole’ described by Baudrillard. The ‘moral imperative’ of re-establishing a meaning in contemporary society, even if it is the meaning of the illusory, is the key to understanding a process which is polymorphous, dissolving, competing and transmutational, as Bukatman describes it. A process which, in its complex organized structure of parallel worlds, is evolutionary and therefore still based 267 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXV II, 267–276. © 2005 Springer. Printed in the Netherlands.

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on a dialectic structure, which having surpassed a simple binomial phase is now multi-dialectic, multi-layered and clearly multi-temporal and multi-spatial. In this framework the ‘trialectic’ structure of Lefebvre,4 and the construction of multispatiality of Soja,5 are already faulty because of the impossible task, which they aim to conquer with a blunt instrument. Soja’s system of ‘trialectic’ fails the aesthetic challenge of Baudrillard’s simulacra: a trialectic of empty meanings does not represent a critique of the implosive contemporary ‘in-volutionary’ world. Lefebvre looks at a society where ‘... our theory can include a formal classification of the structural relations in a historical and dialectical movement.’6 He recognizes the inadequacy of theories which exhaust the problematics of this society in a ‘formal juxtaposition and structural opposition’,7 but at the same time he is unable to explain why ‘these territories do not fit exactly, do not constitute a perfect, coherent whole ...’8 In the attempt to explain these contradictions Lefebvre affirms: ‘... that which links them together is neither a subject nor a conscience (such philosophical hypothesis are no longer operant), but an action ...’9 Lefebvre substitutes ‘conscience’ with ‘action’, failing to recognize that the meaningless action and/or the meaningless conscience are external categories of the simulacra. It is Baudrillard himself who, whilst explaining the ‘meaningless’ and the ‘transparency’ of contemporary society, offers the key for a critique which may open a different perspective on the modality of existence of parallel worlds, disengaged by a simplistic dialectical construct. The energy of sexual difference, which passes into all the figures of desire, has as its counterpart in art the energy of dissociation from reality (Cubism, abstraction, Expressionism), though each of these corresponds to a desire to pierce the secret of desire and the secret of the object. To the point where these two strong configurations, the scene of desire and the scene of illusion, disappear, giving way to the same transsexual, transaesthetic obscenity – the obscenity of visibility ad of the inexorable transparency of everything. In reality; there is no longer any pornography identifiable as such, because the essence of the pornographic has passed into all the technologies of the visual and televisual spheres.10

If the transfer into technology has actually happened, then the technological process becomes the most important element to understand the aesthetic of the 21st century. No longer ‘ut pictura poiesis’ but ‘ut mathematica poiesis’. Expressed more simply, no longer the aesthetics of painting but the aesthetics of mathematics. The transfer is in the algorithmic nature of the representation.

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In this analysis it is helpful to observe the work of Sims and his Genetic Images, realized in 1993 or Galapagos of 1995 where a group of evolutionary mathematically generated creatures are brought to life. Sims allows viewers to create their own artificial life forms that grow inside the computer in a rapid simulation of Darwinian principles. [...] The viewer chooses a monitor, steps on the pad, and all the other screens go blank. Random mutations of the chosen creature appear on the monitor and continue transforming into new generations of genetic images.11

The technological process becomes relevant to the aesthetic process and is the key to understanding phenomena that are the manifestation and representation of a process and which are not linked to the interpretative keys of reality. In this sense Baudrillard is correct, but whilst dismissing this element as a container of the ‘pornographic’, he fails to see that it is in the nothingness of the representation of technology that art and aesthetic are residing. When the Nothing shows up in signs, when Nothingness emerges at the very heart of the system of signs, that is the fundamental event of art. It is the proper task of poetry to raise the Nothing to the power of the sign – not the banality or indifference of the real, but the radical illusion. In this way, Warhol truly is a ‘zero’, in the sense that he reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. He turns nullity and insignificance into an event which he transforms into a fatal strategy of the image.12

In Sims’ creatures the fatal strategy of the image and its nullity is embedded in the repetitive process, which each viewer, blanking the screens, can initiate, every time, infinitely. The nothingness of the manifestation of the digital creature is the real phenomenon. The technological process is the event, where the secret tension of desire and reality is hidden. This tension was evidenced by Leonardo da Vinci when he wrote that: ‘If poetry treats of moral philosophy, painting has to do with natural philosophy.’13 In contemporary art a mathematical science which produces visual images ‘has to do with natural philosophy’. This is evidenced by the Scritti Letterari of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Marinoni, where the editor illustrates the link between painting and philosophy: ‘Adunque la pittura e` filosofia ...’14 Therefore, for Leonardo da Vinci, painting is philosophy. The contemporary version is that painting is mathematics. A representation of the truth will not be possible outside a mathematical-painting, which unifies the visual with the dynamism of the technological generative processes.

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The problem of the digital aesthetic is the issue of understanding the influence of technology onto aesthetic. The difference between a ‘vector’ and a ‘jpeg’ is not simple. The scale of the inspection into a ‘jpeg’, what Cubitt calls cursory gaze, reveals a materiality of the image through the pixelled structure which instead the ‘vector’ keeps hidden in the structure of the code. This rejective and sedimentary character of contemporary art inspires a strategy of the nullity. The impossibility of decoding the structure, of decoding the mathematical code, becomes a strategy of the nullity, where ‘the non-understood’ is dissimulated as a value in itself. The others merely have a commercial strategy of nullity, to which they give a promotional form, the sentimental form of the commodity, as Baudelaire put it. They hid behind their own nullity and the metastases of the discourse on art, which works generously to promote this nullity as a value (among other things, a value on the art market, of course). In a sense, this is worse than nothing, because it means nothing and yet it exists all the same, giving itself every reason to exist.15

If it could be agreed that Baudrillard’s description may shed light on some aspect of the contemporary art world, it is also possible that at the same time it reveals the existence of work which presents itself as ‘nullity’ but hides its meaning beyond the reach of the simulacra. This is the art conspiracy and its primal scene, carried forward by all the private shows, hangings, exhibitions, restorations, collections, donations and speculations. It is a conspiracy which cannot be ‘unhatched’ in any known universe, since, behind the mystification of images, it has put itself beyond the reach of thought.16

In this world of art conspiracy, if there is existence beyond the world of illusion and mirrored representations of some meaningful reality, this would be disguised and confused in a structure which is complicated and multilayered. The other side of this trickery is the way people are bluffed into according importance and credence to all this, on the grounds that it is not possible that it should be so worthless and empty and there must be something to it. Contemporary art plays on this uncertainty, on the impossibility of a reasoned aesthetic value-judgment, relying on the guilt of those who simply cannot understand, or have not understood that there is nothing to understand.17

Another side to the trickery is that there is a reasoned aesthetic valuejudgment, undiscovered because its value is not a value-judgment set in the traditional context, but residing in a different area. This possibility

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that there is something to understand that has not been understood may belong to the technological, which, playing into the field of illusion and nothingness, represents itself as false, being instead real. It is a double ‘double cross’. The illusion of nothingness is a double game, in which the commodification of the image obliges the image to embed itself into the aesthetic: the image is an archeological representation of a process which needs to be rediscovered. It is pertinent in this setting to mention Jean Luc Godard. The Swissborn filmmaker, in his project Histoire(s) du cinema (History(ies) of Cinema, begun in 1989) ‘traces the entire history of worldwide film via many layers of images, interwoven with superimposed texts and loud music. For Godard, montage reveals, rather than obfuscates deeper truths.’18 The superficial nothingness in the appearance of the image relies on the guilt of those ‘who simply cannot be bothered to want to understand’ and prefer the aesthetic reasoning that ‘there is nothing to understand’ as Baudrillard suggests. The value is not in the ‘prima facie’ of the artwork, but in its technological construct, which re-presents a representation of fine art’s traditional motives translated into a different realm: the digital. This process is original and rooted in the aesthetic tradition of the challenge within historical representations. A famous example is the Mona L isa of Leonardo and the influence that the artwork bore on Raphael and the following five centuries of the history of art.19 The representation of the same subject and/or the alteration of the representation of the same subject culminated, in contemporary art, into the representations of Lillian Schwartz’s Mona/L eo in 1987 and Jean-Pierre Yvaral’s Synthesized Mona L isa in 1989. The technological input plays a relevant part in Yvaral’s work, where the Mona L isa of Leonardo’s is recreated through a numerical analysis. At this point in the discourse it is important to understand the reason for the impossibility of knowledge. If there is a meaning in the contemporary world and all is not vacuumed into the representation of the simulacra and its implosive black hole, why is it impossible to gain any knowledge? How do we perceive the existence of a meaning beyond the representation of void in the simulacra? The answer could be in the analysis of Karsten, who in T he Meaning of Modern Art writes: The primitivism of Rousseau, regardless of whether it is due to naivete or a consciously adopted method, is an alienating device: objects appear sharply delineated as if cut out of

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metal; Rousseau’s rigid forms and lifeless colors add to this sense of strangeness. Everyday reality becomes like a dream, and yet it is still that same reality, suggesting perhaps that it is only his too intimate engagement in the world which prevents man from seeing the dreamlike quality of life. The new realism of which Kandinsky is thinking moves everyday reality into the neighborhood of the dream, but this movement is interpreted not as a movement away from reality but towards it. Reality becomes like a dream precisely when our ordinary ways of dealing with it are bracketed. Only such a bracketing furnishes the distance necessary if man is really to look at what is before him.20

This necessity, to look at reality as a dream in order to recognize reality itself, is exemplified in T he Matrix, the film by the Wachowski brothers, where the necessity to recognize the illusion of the dream is realized through the shocking abandonment of it in order to affirm its reality. This may be better evidenced by Popper who, comparing Kant and Parmenides, explains: For Kant, the world of appearance also has reality: it is what natural science tries to describe by descriptions which are true, and to explain by theories which are true; while the world of reality – of the things in themselves – is for ever unknowable, hidden from us, and therefore – for us – only something like a shadow world.21

In a comparative analysis of Karsten’s and Popper’s passages, it emerges that both authors share a concept of illusion disguised as reality and of reality representing the shadow world. The relationship between these two terms reveals further complexities. It is a multilayered relationship in a digital context, where the processes hide behind the image, and what remains are just digital illusions. These digital illusions are the world of nothingness, according to Baudrillard, where the absence of meaning creates replicas in a self-defying and self-effacing structure. The interesting element in this representational process is that these ‘digital illusions’, ‘these dreamlike worlds’ which we are buying into as ‘virtual environments’, have ceased to be virtual and have become our real worlds. They are our objectified worlds of engagement with real pervasive consequences in the realm of our other ‘real’ worlds. One almost wonders if they have ever been real – or better – if they have ever been virtual. These worlds of virtual digital representation, since their creation, have been subject to the influence of external reality: human interaction. The virtual reality worlds were gates of possible illusionary representations. Nowadays, these gates, as in many movies, are portals of reality no longer separated, as in the early stages of computer activities, but communicating with our lives and between themselves. The connection between the illusionary and the real changes the nature of both, mixing their character-

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istics in an undefined territory of hybridized aesthetic. The illusions on the impact of reality, perceived by reality, have ceased to be dreamlike and have materialized into the real world of knowledge. The digital illusions have become true, in the sense that they correspond to what they represent. They actually are the re-presentation of what they represent as illusion: a representation which corresponds to each single characteristic of the illusion, now transposed into the real. The character of the illusion is not just true, but also real. This happens at the moment they abandon their status of non-real and translate themselves into the illusory reality of our real and concrete worlds of engagement. In this process of translation the question arises whether a binary distinction between illusion and reality is still viable. Each of these difficulties arises from the way in which a representational facsimile brings to our senses a pattern which is sufficiently close to an encounter with the real object as to be confusable with it – if only for a moment, or – if only with a colluding desire for the eye or ear to be fooled.22

It is the ‘fooling’ of the eye, ear, brain and soul, which the viewer seeks. The ‘cruciality’ which Le Grice reinstates is the irreversible consequence of the act in the arena of the real. The illusionary world has an effect upon the real: following an illusion can lead to an unpleasant encounter with the real, which in death, can still appear confused and misleading if the veil of illusion has not been broken. An example is Pasolini’s film Medea, in which the heroine falls victim of the illusionary veil of love, resulting in her being prey to the illusionary powers of madness. This results in the representation of everyone’s death, culminating with Medea’s demise. The appeal of illusions, and digital illusions in particular, is explained in the analysis of Schopenhauer, where the illusions deliver humanity from dissatisfaction. The viewer does not desire reality. The contemplating viewer does not desire, does not demand. As complete objectivity is achieved, there are no longer any particular interests which tie man to the world. Man loses himself in the contemplation of the aesthetic object. At this point it is no longer accurate to speak of an object overpowering the viewer’s value-judgment in relation to the subject considered as something other. Otherness is no longer constitutive of the experience. And with its disappearance also disappears the objectivity of the experience. An extreme emphasis on objectivity delivers the individual from the subject-object polarity in which the absurd has its foundation. No question has been answered; but no question remains.23

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This final context of no questions asked and no questions answered appears to confirm a world where the nothingness, as explained and condemned by Baudrillard, is the highest aesthetic achievement. It is a world which is rooted in the contextual approach. Schopenhauer and Heidegger ask for an emancipation from the contextual approach because it prevents the things around us from revealing themselves to us. This demand conflicts with the demand that man learn to master the world and that he deal with it as efficiently as possible. To do so he cannot give individual things their due. If it were not for the many conventions which enable us to deal with things superficially, and ordinary language is perhaps the most important of these, we would be paralyzed by the world. It would be impossible to do something so apparently simple as reading a newspaper. If the newspaper were really to reveal what it describes, we would recoil – horror-struck – from the first page. What enables us to pass lightly over another murder, is that the words stand between us and what we read about. They have lost their revelatory power. What they speak of is not really made present. Linguistic conventions thus protect us from the world. Man demands cliche´s to spare the shock of having to face reality. They enable him to take what is said for granted.24

The same can be said for artistic convention as well as aesthetic; which are there to protect us from what is portrayed. (And probably are there acting as counterweights to the heaviness of the contemporary world. The insidious void is better than the fullness of the contemporary fragmented social structures.) But the assessment of the void, of the hideous nothingness, is a description of reality. Baudrillard, according to Schopenhauer and Heidegger, fails to free the vision from the restraints of the context. The contemporary aesthetic is an aesthetic of reality, which, disposing of any artistic assessment, produces an infinite series of works, of digital works, which are now liberated from the tyranny of the principle of sufficient reason. This world where there is only nothingness is a world of non-engagement which doesn’t attempt to see reality, but represents the world of the simulation and the simulacra. It is a world where the ‘illusion is real’ and where reality is presented as ‘illusory’ or worse, as entertainment. A true real illusion is what has entrapped humanity in the Matrix of Morpheus. (Here Morpheus is the Greek mythological God, and not the character portrayed in the film.) The oxymoron has logical consequences: if the new illusion is real then it is also true. A false illusion would be a representation of reality. A false illusion is the real, disguised as an illusion but instead affecting our lives. Therefore an illusion that is false has to be false in its constituent character of not being illusory, consequentially having some opening onto the real.

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The reality principle comes back into play in the moment that a true digital illusion exists, an illusion, as described by Baudrillard, which necessarily presupposes in its constituents that ‘the wool is being pulled over their eyes.’25 The only question is how such a machine can continue to function in a situation of critical disillusionment and commercial frenzy. And if it can, how long will this illusionism, this occultism last? A hundred years? Two hundred? Will art have a second, interminable existence, like the secret services, which, though we know they have long had no secrets to steal or exchange, still thrive amid a superstitious belief in their usefulness, and continue to generate a mythology?26

Perhaps the real aesthetic crossroad is not in the representation of void, of illusion, but in the creation of a real illusion, one with no connections to the real, not embedded and occulted into the reality of the code, not related to any real and definitely not known. This true digital illusion will be the secret of a new mythology which will obliterate the present false digital illusions of post-modernity. Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design L ondon – UK NOTES 1 Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London: SAGE Publications, 1998), 32–33. 2 Scott Bukatman, T erminal Identity: T he V irtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 149. 3 Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Virtual Reality – Tautological Oxymoron’, in New Screen Media Cinema/Art/Narrative, eds. Rieser, Martin & Zapp, Andrea (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), 236. 4 Henri Lefebvre, L a Pre´sence et l’Absence (Paris: Casterman, 1980). 5 Edward W. Soja, T hirdspace: Journeys to L os Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, Oxford, 1996). 6 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday L ife in the Modern World (London: Athlone, 1984), 162. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 181–182. 11 Michael Rush. New Media in L ate 20th-Century Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 208. 12 Baudrillard, 183–184. 13 Leonardo da Vinci, T he Notebooks of L eonardo da V inci, ed. Irma R. Richter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 200. 14 Leonardo da Vinci, Scritti L etterari, ed. Augusto Marinoni (Milano: Rizzoli, 1991), 23. 15 Baudrillard, 184.

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16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Michael Rush, New Media in L ate 20th-Century Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 29. 19 Donald Sassoon, Mona L isa: T he History of the World’s Most Famous Painting (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 21. 20 Karsten Harries, T he Meaning of Modern Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 136. 21 Karl Popper, T he World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment, ed. Arne F. Petersen (London: Routledge, 1998), 81. 22 Le Grice, 233. 23 Harries, 138–139. 24 Ibid. 25 Baudrillard, 185. 26 Ibid.

APPENDIX Program of the 9th Annual Conference of the International Society of Phenomenology, Fine Arts and Aesthetics Marlies Kronegger, President Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Secretary General Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Program Coordinator HUMAN CREATION BETWEEN REALITY AND ILLUSION Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA May 14 and 15, 2004

Friday, May 14 2004 REGISTRATION, 8:30–9:00 a.m. – Room: Sperry 9:00 a.m.

OPENING ADDRESS

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, World Phenomenology Institute PUBLIC INVITED 9:20 a.m.

SESSION I

Presided by: William Roberts, Northwesteren University REALITY AND ILLUSION IN THE WORK OF ART Lawrence Kimell, Trinity University DREAM’S SHADOW S: FICTION AND REALITY IN MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, University of Seville, Spain WISHES, LIES AND DREAMS Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, Thailand IS THE AESTHETIC THEORY OF FICTION FICTIONAL OR NONFICTIONAL? THE ILLUSION THAT ARTWORKS ARE ILLUSORY FICTIONS OR MAKE-BELIEVE Dan Nesher, University of Haifa, Israel 277

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ON THE TRUTH AND LIE OF ILLUSION IN THE THEATRICAL SENSE Max Statkiewicz, University of Wisconsin-Madison REALITY VS. ILLUSION, CONTEMPORIZING CLASSICS: IS IT A CONSCIOUS DECISION Mahmood-Karimi-Hakak 1:00 p.m. 2:00–7:00 p.m.

Banquet at the Harvard Faculty Club SESSION II

Presided by: Jennifer Ann Gosetti-Ferencei, The University of Maine IMMANENCE: A NEW EXPERIENCE OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Siena College T ROMPE L ’OEIL AND THE MIMETIC TRADITION IN AESTHETICS Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The University of Maine A METAPHYSICAL PERSPECTIVE ON ALBERTI’S DE PICT URA James Carlton Hughes, University of South Carolina TRIUMPH OF THE DISSOLUTION OF REALITY BY ILLUSION: THE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE OF T ROMPE L ’OEIL TECHNIQUE OF ARCHITECTURAL WALL PAINTINGS – THE TOMB OF THE LEOPARDS AND THE VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES Joanne Snow-Smith, University of Washington ILLUSIONARY TOUCH, AND TOUCHING ILLUSIONS Madalina Diaconu, Academy of Fine Arts, Austria REALITY, ILLUSION, AND ALTERITY: THE ADVENT OF THE OTHER Brian Grassom, Great Britain SILENCE AS DISCLOSURE: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S STYLE OF BEING-IN-THE-WORLD Jo Ann Circosta, University of Kentucky

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Saturday May 15, 2004 9:00 a.m. – Room: Sperry

SESSION III

Presided by: Howard Pearce, Florida Atlantic University BETWEEN ILLUSIONS: ART’S ARGUMENTS FOR REALITY John Baldacchino, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Great Britain ARTISTIC ILLUSION TO THE SECOND DEGREE: INGMAR BERGMAN’S ALLUSIONS TO MOZART’S OPERATIC ILLUSION DIE ZAUBERFL OT E Ellen J. Burns, Halfmoon, New York REALITY VS. ILLUSION IN THE 17TH CENTURY PARISIAN ENGRAVINGS William Roberts, Northwestern University, Illinois POST DIGITAL AWARENESS: AN INSIGHT INTO NEW PRACTICES IN IMMERSION IN CONTEMPORARY INSTALLATION ART James Werner, The Robert Gordon University, Great Britain THOUGHT, OBJECT, AND EXPERIENCE IN FILM/VIDEO INSTALLATION ART Marguerite Harris, San Francisco Art Institute THE ‘‘SPRING-TIGHT LINE’’ IN MINOR WHITE’S THEORY OF SEQUENTIAL PHOTOGRAPHY Andrew E. Hershberger, Bowling Green State University 1:00 p.m.

Lunch together

2:00–7:00 p.m.

SESSION IV

Presided by: Max Statkiewicz, University of Wisconsin-Madison AN ANALYSIS OF PAINTING IN PROUST’S ACCOUNT OF PHILOSOPHICAL TRUTH Mary C. Rawlinson, State University of New York, Stony Brook

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AN EXPOSURE OF THE ILLUSION OF CREATIVITY Victor Gerald Rivas, University of Puebla, Mexico IMAGINATION AND CULTURAL CRITICISM IN THE WORK OF DAVID WOJNAROWICZ Scott A. Sherer, Kent State University REALITY AND ILLUSION IN THE POETRY OF WALLACE STEVENS Howard Pearce, Florida State University THE TRUTH ABOUT VISUAL DECEPTION Ruth Ronen, Tel Aviv University, Israel THE ART PORTRAIT, THE PIXEL AND THE GENE: MICRO CONSTRUCTION OF MACRO REPRESENTATION Steven McCarthy, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus

INDEX OF NAMES

Adams, A.: 203, 207, 209–10, 214–15 Adams, R.: 201–2 Aguinaga, B.: 22 Alberti, L. B.: 95–101 Angelico, F.: 128, 131 Angus, S.: 109 Arendt, H.: 14 Aristotle: xi, xix, 43, 49, 81–2, 92, 98 Arp, J.: 212 Augustine: 73–4 Aurelius, M.: 119 Bach, J. S.: 45 Back, D.: 123 Barolsky, P.: 73 Barr, A.: 212–13 Barthes, R.: 203 Basquiat, J-M.: 236 Baudelaire: 270 Baudrillard, J.: 84–6, 89, 91–2, 177, 260–1, 267–72, 274–5 Baxandall, M.: 99 Bayer, R.: 74 Bazin, A.: 219–20 Beethoven, L. van: 45 Benjamin, W.: 220 Berkeley, G.: xiii Bischoff, E.: 211 Bizet, G.: 45 Boleslavsky, R.: 209 Bolivar, S.: 9 Botticelli: 85, 257 Brendel, M.: 109 Brendel, O. J.: 109, 111 Brett: 209 Brunelleschi: 101 Bryson, N.: 88–9 Bukatman: 267 Bull, M.: 67 Bullot: 173 Burke: 62 Butler: 177

Caldero´n: 23 Campus, P.: 189–91 Caravaggio: 259 Cartier-Bresson: 218 Cerezo, P.: 26 Cervantes: 11 Cerveny, W.: 119 Cezanne: 210 Chappell, W.: 207, 216 Cicero: 97 Clarke, G.: 203 Classen, C.: 120 Cleve, A.: 257 Coke, V. D.: 199 Colantuono: 244, 246 Cole: 207 Collier, E.: 88 Corbett, E.: 209 Croce, B.: 157 Cunningham, I.: 207 Currie, G.: 58 Da Vinci, L.: 71, 269, 271 Daguerre, L-J-M.: 199 Dannemeyer, W.: 236 Danto, A.: 79–80, 87, 91–2, 161 Dauenhauer, B.: 139–40 Davies, C.: 173 Dehinde, D.: 196 de’ Medici, M.: 243–4, 248–52 Delaroche, P.: 199 Demachy, R.: 203 Derrida, J.: 133 Descartes, R.: xiii, 161, 262–3 Diderot, D.: 116–17 Dixon, J.: 68, 71, 74–5 Donne, J.: xiv du Saulle, H. L.: 124 Duchamp: 179 Dwight, E.: 213

281

282

INDEX OF NAMES

Eagleton, T.: 97 Eliasson, O.: 179, 181 Eliot, T. S.: 134 Ernst, M.: 206 Etlin: 71–3 Export, V.: 185–9 Faubion, D.: 211–12 Fischinger, O.: 195 Fischli: 257–8 Forbera, A.: 90 Foster, H.: 259 Foucault, M.: 234, 237–8 Frampton, H.: 195 Francesca, P. della: 100 Freedberg, S. J.: 68 Freeland, C.: 56 Freud, S.: 13, 15 Frohnmeyer, J.: 236 Fromm, E.: 6–9, 12–3, 15, 24 Gadamer, H-G.: 165 Galassi, P.: 199–200 Gernsheim, H.: 218 Giotto: 95 Godard, J. L.: 271 Goldin, N.: 236 Gombrich: xxiii Grace, S.: 194–5 Graham, D.: 185, 191–2 Grau, O.: 170, 177, 182 Greenberg, C.: 199, 207–8, 218 Grillo, J.: 211 Grundberg, A.: 201 Guercino: 243–4, 246–8, 250–1 Gysbrechts, C-N.: 88, 90 Haring, K.: 236 Harnett, W.: 85, 89 Hartmann, S.: 203 Hayden, B. R.: 67 Heese, H.: 10, 27 Hegel, G. W. F.: 43, 48, 82–3, 88, 115 Heidegger, M.: xvi, 8, 25, 74, 132–3, 149, 165, 169, 172, 274 Heisenberg, W.: 74 Helms, J.: 236 Henry IV: 249

Henry VIII: 257, 264 Hepp, K.: 120 Heraclitus: 45 Herder, J. G.: 115–17 Hollbein, H.: 257 Homer: 46 Hoogstraeten, S. Van: 84, 87–8 Hume, D.: xiii, xvii, xix Husserl, E.: 67, 98 Iriguay, L.: 196 Johns, J.: 257 Jonas, J.: 185, 193 Jones, V. S.: 208 Jukes, A.: 175 Jung, C. G.: 7 Ju¨tte, R.: 120 Kafka, F.: 72 Kandinsky, W.: 213, 272 Kant, I.: 25, 48, 62–3, 72, 118, 163, 272 Karsten: 271–2 Keats, J.: xiii Kierkegaard, S.: 8, 20, 124 Kracauer, S.: 205–6, 217–18 Krauss, R.: 185–6, 190–1, 193–4 Kubler, G.: 88 Lacan, J.: 176, 258–63 Lange, D.: 207–8, 214 Latrobe, B. H.: 88 Lawrence, T.: 67 Le Corbusier: 71 Le Grice: 267, 273 Lefebvre: 268 Leffert: 84, 90–1 Leibniz: 117 Levinas, E.: 135 Lippi, F.: 96 Louis XIII: 248 Lyotard, J-F.: 59–61 Magritte, R.: xxi, 89 Mahon, D.: 248 Malraux, A.: 219 Manca: 69 Mandel, R.: 207

INDEX OF NAMES Mantegna: 71 Mapplethorpe: 236 Marı´as, J.: 32 Marinoni: 269 Marker, C.: 55 Massumi, B.: 175–7 Mastai: 84–5, 87 Merleau-Ponty, M.: 72, 74, 121–2, 140–1, 144–5, 147–50, 172, 185–6, 189–91, 193, 196, 235 Michelangelo: 67, 69–76, 118 Miron: 119 Moholy-Nagy, L.: 217 Moore, G. E.: xvii Mueller, R.: 187 Muybridge, E.: 200 Nagel, T.: 176 Natanson, M.: xxv Nauman, B.: 195 Nechvatal, J.: 178 Newhall, B.: 205, 207–10, 216 Newhall, N.: 209–12, 217, 219 Newman, B.: 60 Newton, W. J.: 199, 203 Nicol, E.: 21 Nietzsche, F.: 14, 43–51, 166 O’Connor, J.: 236 Ovid: 143, 244–7, 251 Panofsky: 119 Parmenides: 272 Parrhasios: 86, 257–8 Pascal, B.: 8 Pasolini: 273 Peale, R.: 86 Peiresc, N-C. F. de: 250 Peterson, S.: 210–11, 216 Peto, J. F.: 89 Picasso, P.: 212 Plato: xi–xiii, xvi, xix, xxii–xxiii, 43, 46–7, 49–51, 80–4, 86–7, 91–2, 95, 111, 131, 133 Pliny: 81 Poga˘ceanu, C.: 115 Poole, C-A.: 175 Popper, K.: 272

Potter, P.: 89 Poussin, N.: 91, 210 Prado, F.: 13 Proclus: 111 Proust, M.: 72 Quintilian: 97 Raphael: 271 Ray, M.: 217 Reilhac, M.: 120 Reni, G.: 244 Re´ve´sz, G.: 117–20, 122 Richelieu: 248–52 Ricoeur, P.: 20, 32 Rivera, P. De: 4 Roh, F.: 207 Roquentin: 124 Rothko, M.: 60, 207 Rousseau, J.: 19, 271–2 Rovner, M.: 174 Rubens, P. P.: 249–50 Russell, B.: xvii Sartre, J-P.: 124, 172 Schapiro, M.: 204–5, 211, 219–20 Schmarsaw, A.: 74 Schopenhauer, A.: 26, 48, 273–4 Schwartz, L.: 271 Sermon, P.: 173 Serrano: 236 Shakespeare, W.: xiii, 23, 27 Shearman, D.: 67 Shearman, J.: 67 Shermon, P.: 123 Shor, S.: 196 Sims: 269 Sitney, P. A.: 185 Smalley, M.: 172–3 Smith, H.: 211 Snibbe, S.: 195 Snow, M.: 185, 192 Socrates: xvi, 43–4, 46–7, 86–7, 501–1, Soja: 268 Sommer, F.: 206 Spada, B.: 243–4, 248–51 Spoerri, D.: 120 Spohn, C.: 209

283

284

INDEX OF NAMES

Stanze, R.: 71 Steinkamp, J.: 195 Stieglitz, A.: 201–5, 211, 213 Still, C.: 207, 209–11 Strand, P.: 203 Symonds: 69 Talbot, W. H. F.: 199 Tansey, M.: 89 Tennyson, A.: xiv Thales: xvi Tiepolo: 72 Tolnay, C. de: 69 Turner, P.: 174 Tymieniecka, A-T.: 20 Uccello, P.: 100 Unamuno, M. de: 3–8, 11–7, 19–34 Urban VIII: 249 Vaillant, W.: 88 Van Gogh, V.: 73, 219–20 Vasari, G.: 69, 100 Vattimo, G.: 133, 165–6 Veneziano, D.: 96 Virgil: 143, 244–7 Vouet, S.: 247

Wachowski: 272 Wagner, R.: 44–51 Warhol, A.: 79–80, 87, 91–2 Warren, D.: 202 Weil, K.: 72 Weiss: 257–8 Weston, E.: 203, 207–8, 211–13, 220 White, J.: 96 White, M.: 200–21 White, N.: 123 Wildmon, D.: 236–7 Williams, W. C.: 204 Wilson, R.: 178 Wittgenstein, L.: 161 Wo¨lfflin: 209, 214–15, 218 Wojnarowicz, D.: 233–7, 239–41 Wollheim, R.: 58–9 Woolf, V.: 139–43, 145–51 Wordsworth, W.: xiii–xiv Wyss, B.: 75 y Gasset, O.: 21 Yvaral, J-P.: 271 Zeuxis: 81, 83, 86, 257–9 Zizek, S.: 176, 178

Analecta Husserliana The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research Editor-in-Chief

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka T he World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and L earning, Belmont, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Volume 1 of Analecta Husserliana. 1971 ISBN 90-277-0171-7

2.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he L ater Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology. Idealism – Realism, Historicity and Nature. 1972 ISBN 90-277-0223-3

3.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Phenomenological Realism of the Possible Worlds. The ‘‘A Priori’, Activity and Passivity of Consciousness, Phenomenology and Nature. 1974 ISBN 90-277-0426-0

4.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana. A Spectrum of Specialised Studies Establishing the Field of Research. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0628-X

5.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Crisis of Culture. Steps to Reopen the Phenomenological Investigation of Man. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0632-8

6.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Self and the Other. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part I. 1977 ISBN 90-277-0759-6

7.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Human Being in Action. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part II. 1978 ISBN 90-277-0884-3

8.

Nitta, Y. and Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds.), Japanese Phenomenology. Phenomenology as the Trans-cultural Philosophical Approach. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0924-6

9.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he T eleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part III. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0981-5

10.

Wojtyła, K., T he Acting Person. Translated from Polish by A. Potocki. 1979 ISBN Hb 90-277-0969-6; Pb 90-277-0985-8

11.

Ales Bello, A. (ed.), T he Great Chain of Being and Italian Phenomenology. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1071-6

12.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Philosophical Reflection of Man in L iterature. Selected Papers from Several Conferences held by the International Society for Phenomenology and Literature in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Includes the essay by A-T. Tymieniecka, Poetica Nova. 1982 ISBN 90-277-1312-X

13.

Kaelin, E. F., T he Unhappy Consciousness. The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett. An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and literature. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1313-8

14.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Individualisation of Nature and the Human Being. (Part I:) Plotting the Territory for Interdisciplinary Communication. 1983 Part II see below under Volume 21. ISBN 90-277-1447-9

Analecta Husserliana 15.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), Foundations of Morality, Human Rights, and the Human Sciences. Phenomenology in a Foundational Dialogue with Human Sciences. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1453-3

16.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Soul and Body in Husserlian Phenomenology. Man and Nature. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1518-1

17.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Phenomenology of L ife in a Dialogue Between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1620-X

18.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic – Epic – T ragic. The Literary Genre. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1702-8

19.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. (Part 1:) The Sea. From Elemental Stirrings to Symbolic Inspiration, Language, and Life-Significance in Literary Interpretation and Theory. 1985 For Part 2 and 3 see below under Volumes 23 and 28. ISBN 90-277-1906-3

20.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Moral Sense in the Communal Significance of L ife. Investigations in Phenomenological Praxeology: Psychiatric Therapeutics, Medical Ethics and Social Praxis within the Life- and Communal World. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2085-1

21.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Part II: The Meeting Point Between Occidental and Oriental Philosophies. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2185-8

22.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Morality within the L ife- and Social World. Interdisciplinary Phenomenology of the Authentic Life in the ‘‘Moral Sense’. 1987 Sequel to Volumes 15 and 20. ISBN 90-277-2411-3

23.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. Part 2: The Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination. Breath, Breeze, Wind, Tempest, Thunder, Snow, Flame, Fire, Volcano ... 1988 ISBN 90-277-2569-1

24.

Tymieniecka, A-T., L ogos and L ife. Book I: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2539-X; Pb 90-277-2540-3

25.

Tymieniecka, A-T., L ogos and L ife. Book II: The Three Movements of the Soul. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2556-X; Pb 90-277-2557-8

26.

Kaelin, E. F. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), American Phenomenology. Origins and Developments. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2690-6

27.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man within his L ife-World. Contributions to Phenomenology by Scholars from East-Central Europe. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2767-8

28.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Elemental Passions of the Soul. Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part 3. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0180-3

29.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man’s Self-Interpretation-in-Existence. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Life. – Introducing the Spanish Perspective. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0324-5

30.

Rudnick, H. H. (ed.), Ingardeniana II. New Studies in the Philosophy of Roman Ingarden. With a New International Ingarden Bibliography. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0627-9

Analecta Husserliana 31.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T heMoral Sense and Its Foundational Significance: Self, Person, Historicity, Community. Phenomenological Praxeology and Psychiatry. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0678-3

32.

Kronegger, M. (ed.), Phenomenology and Aesthetics. Approaches to Comparative Literature and Other Arts. Homages to A-T. Tymieniecka. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0738-0

33.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana III. Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetics in a New Key and the Independent Approaches of Others: The Performing Arts, the Fine Arts, and Literature. 1991 Sequel to Volumes 4 and 30 ISBN 0-7923-1014-4

34.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he T urning Points of the New Phenomenological Era. Husserl Research – Drawing upon the Full Extent of His Development. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1134-5

35.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserlian Phenomenology in a New Key. Intersubjectivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere, Human Encounter, Pathos. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1146-9

36.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserl’s L egacy in Phenomenological Philosophies. New Approaches to Reason, Language, Hermeneutics, the Human Condition. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1178-7

37.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), New Queries in Aesthetics and Metaphysics. Time, Historicity, Art, Culture, Metaphysics, the Transnatural. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1195-7

38.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), T he Elemental Dialectic of L ight and Darkness. The Passions of the Soul in the Onto-Poiesis of Life. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1601-0

39.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Reason, L ife, Culture, Part I. Phenomenology in the Baltics. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1902-8

40.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Manifestations of Reason: L ife, Historicity, Culture. Reason, Life, Culture, Part II. Phenomenology in the Adriatic Countries. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2215-0

41.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Allegory Revisited. Ideals of Mankind. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2312-2

42.

Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.), Allegory Old and New. In Literature, the Fine Arts, Music and Theatre, and Its Continuity in Culture. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2348-3

43.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): From the Sacred to the Divine. A New Phenomenological Approach. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2690-3

44.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of L ife. Passions of the Soul in the Imaginatio Creatrix. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2749-7

45.

Zhai, Z.: T he Radical Choice and Moral T heory. Through Communicative Argumentation to Phenomenological Subjectivity. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2891-4

46.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he L ogic of the L iving Present. Experience, Ordering, Onto-Poiesis of Culture. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2930-9

Analecta Husserliana 47.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Heaven, Earth, and In-Between in the Harmony of L ife. Phenomenology in the Continuing Oriental/Occidental Dialogue. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3373-X

48.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife. In the Glory of its Radiating Manifestations. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book I. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3825-1

49.

Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): L ife. T he Human Quest for an Ideal. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book II. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3826-X

50.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife. Phenomenology of L ife as the Starting Point of Philosophy. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4126-0

51.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passion for Place. Part II. Between the Vital Spacing and the Creative Horizons of Fulfilment. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4146-5

52.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of L ife and the Human Creative Condition. Laying Down the Cornerstones of the Field. Book I. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4445-6

53.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative V irtualities. Harmonisations and Attunement in Cognition, the Fine Arts, Literature. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book II. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4461-8

54.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Ontopoietic Expansion in Human Self-Interpretation-inExistence. The I and the Other in their Creative Spacing of the Societal Circuits of Life. Phenomenology of Life and the Creative Condition. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4462-6

55.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative V irtualities in Human Self-Interpretation-inCulture. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book IV. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4545-2

56.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Enjoyment. From Laughter to Delight in Philosophy, Literature, the Fine Arts and Aesthetics. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4677-7

57.

Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): L ife. DiVerentiation and Harmony ... Vegetal, Animal, Human. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4887-7

58.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and Matsuba, S. (eds.): Immersing in the Concrete. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Japanese Perspective. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5093-6

59.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife – Scientific Philosophy/Phenomenology of L ife and the Sciences of L ife. Ontopoiesis of Life and the Human Creative Condition. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5141-X

60.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): L ife – T he Outburst of L ife in the Human Sphere. Scientific Philosophy/Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Book II. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5142-8

61.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts. Breaking the Barriers. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6006-0

62.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative Mimesis of Emotion. From Sorrow to Elation; Elegiac Virtuosity in Literature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6007-9

Analecta Husserliana 63.

Kronegger, M. (ed).: T he Orchestration of T he Arts – A Creative Symbiosis of Existential Powers. The Vibrating Interplay of Sound, Color, Image, Gesture, Movement, Rhythm, Fragrance, Word, Touch. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6008-7

64.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and Z. Zalewski (eds.): L ife – T he Human Being Between L ife and Death. A Dialogue Between Medicine and Philosophy, Recurrent Issues and New Approaches. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-5962-3

65.

Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): T he Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6183-0

66.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Origins of L ife, Volume I: T he Primogenital Matrix of L ife and Its Context. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6246-2; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5

67.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Origins of L ife, Volume II: T he Origins of the Existential Sharing-in-L ife. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6276-4; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5

68.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): PAIDEIA. Philosophy/Phenomenology of Life Inspiring Education of our Times. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6319-1

69.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Poetry of L ife in L iterature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6408-2

70.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason. Logos and Life, volume 4. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6731-6; HB 0-7923-6730-8

71.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passions of the Earth in Human Existence, Creativity, and L iterature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6675-1

72.

Tymieniecka, A-T. and E. Agazzi (eds.): L ife – Interpretation and the Sense of Illness within the Human Condition. Medicine and Philosophy in a Dialogue. 2001 ISBN Hb 0-7923-6983-1; Pb 0-7923-6984-X

73.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife – T he Play of L ife on the Stage of the World in Fine Arts, Stage-Play, and L iterature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7032-5

74.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife-Energies, Forces and the Shaping of L ife: V ital, Existential. Book I. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0627-6

75.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he V isible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, L iterature and Reality. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0070-7

76.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): L ife – T ruth in its Various Perspectives. Cognition, SelfKnowledge, Creativity, Scientific Research, Sharing-in-Life, Economics ...... 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0071-5

77.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Creative Matrix of the Origins. Dynamisms, Forces and the Shaping of Life. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0789-2

78.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Gardens and the Passion for the Infinite. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0858-9

79.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Does the World exist? Plurisignificant Ciphering of Reality. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1517-8

Analecta Husserliana 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology World-W ide. Foundations – Expanding Dynamics – Life-engagements. A Guide for Research and Study. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0066-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Metamorphosis. Creative Imagination in Fine Arts, Life-Projects and Human Aesthetic Aspirations. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1709-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Mystery in its Passions. Literary Explorations. 2004 ISBN 1-4020-1705-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Imaginatio Creatrix. The Pivotal Force of the Genesis/Ontopoiesis of Human Life and Reality. 2004. ISBN 1-4020-2244-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of L ife. Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-2463-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): T he Enigma of Good and Evil: T he Moral Sentiment in L iterature. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-3575-6 Not yet published Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion. 2005. ISBN 1-4020-3577-2

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