Mystery in its Passions: Literary Explorations (Analecta Husserliana)

MYSTERY IN ITS PASSIONS: LITERARY EXPLORATIONS

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME LXXXII

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: A NNA -T ERESA T YMIENIECKA T he World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and L earning Hanover, New Hampshire

For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.

MYSTERY IN ITS PASSIONS: LITERARY EXPLORATIONS Edited by ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA T he World Phenomenology Institute

Published under the auspices of T he World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and L earning A.-T. Tymieniecka, President

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 1-4020-1705-7

Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, PO Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Sold and distributed in North, Central and South America by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers, PO Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / The Theme: Literature’s

Path through the Unknown

1

SECTION 1 NANCY MARDAS / Orphic Listening: The Hermeneutics of

Poetry and the Mystery of Transcendence

7

JENNIFER ANNA GOSETTI-FERENCEI / Phenomenology of

the Mysterious: Rilke’s Sonnette an Orpheus LAWRENCE KIMMEL / Literature, Mystery, and Truth MAX STATKIEWICZ / The Master of Riddles and the Mystery

of Truth

19 31 47

PAUL BEIDLER / Meditation and Mediation, Secrets and

Seizures: Tennyson’s In Memorian as Fiction/Testimony

65

SECTION II BERNADETTE PROCHASKA / The Mystery of Pain:

Walt Whitman’s ‘‘Lilacs’’ and Edmund Husserl’s ‘‘Meaning’’

77

TIMOTHY WEISS / Mystery in a Jellabah: Cultural Worlds in

Borges’s Historia Universal de la Infamia

85

M. J. SAHLANI / In the Name of God: Sufi’ism, a

Transcendental Pantheism and the Mystery of Mysticism in Persian Poetry CATHERINE MALLOY / Reading J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: In Search of the Good MARA STAFECKA / The Beauty of Thought: Heidegger, Gadamer and Marmardashvili

115 125 133

SECTION III GARY BACKHAUS / Solving the Mystery: A Schutzian

Analysis of Sherlock Holmes

145 v

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

TONY E. AFEJUKU / Fictionalization of Incidents in the

Autobiographies of Ezekiel Mphahlele, Wole Soyinka, Camara Laye and Peter Abrahams MATTHEW JAMES DUFFY / Mystery, the Genetic System, and Children’s Books VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / A Reflection on the Autobiographical Memory and on the Current Meaning of the Individual Life JADWIGA SMITH / Paul Ricoeur’s T he Symbolism of Evil and the Problem of Evil in Marston’s Antonio Plays RAFFAELA GIOVAGNOLI / The Relationship between Translatability and Competence

183 193

215 237 245

SECTION IV HOWARD PEARCE / Wallace Steven’s Poetry of ‘‘The Strange

Unlike’’

263

DENNIS E. SKOCZ / Of Time and the River: Heidegger’s

Reading of Ho¨lderlin’s River Hymns MARIOLA SUŁKOWSKA / Kantor’s Mystery of Death LEON U. WEINMANN / Pindar and the Ethic of Encounter VLADIMIR L. MARCHENKOV / Art and Mystery in

299 311 321

Mikhail Bulgakov’s Novel T he Master and Margarita and Aleksei Losev’s Study T he Dialectics of Myth MATTI ITKONEN / Does What Has Been Survive after All? The Touch of Yesterday

359

INDEX OF NAMES

371

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection of papers stems from the 26th annual conference held by the International Society of Phenomenology and Literature in honor of its president, Marlies Kronegger, May 8–10, 2002 at the Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thanks go to colleagues Nancy Mardas and Gary Backhaus for their help with running the conference and, first of all, to all the participants who brought their insights, expertise and enthusiasm to make this conference an unforgettable event and this volume a source of inspiration. We also thank Isabelle Houthakker and Ryan Walthers, our copyeditors, and Jeff Hurlburt, our secretary, for their dedication and expert work in preparing this volume for publication. A-T.T.

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THE THEME

LITERATURE’S PATH THROUGH THE UNKNOWN

While philosophy focuses upon the generative principles, constructive devices and cohesive ordering of the logos upon which the great game of life is suspended, and which give the conscious human being some foothold of certainty, literature reveals the pulp of the human life itself, showing the foci of conflicts that tear apart the threads of cohesion in their ramifications. It shows the struggles of the individual life to maintain a relatively coherent course upon the stormy wave, constantly defied by their hidden currents, it shows how the acumen of the human being is constantly alert to deflect the dangerous turns and to take proper advantage of the propitious ones. As we have shown in our preceding inquiry (T he Play of L ife on the Stage of the World. Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXXIII), literature brings to the stage the profoundly rooted drama of human life which is like a dynamic process of plowing ahead through obstacles at every step, passed dangers and incertitudes toward an unforeseeable future. The Homeric virtues (calculation, cunning, foresight, expectation, combativeness, bravery, courage, passions, expectations, hope, fidelity to the purpose, faith in a higher destiny) characterize life’s demands in the universal world situation of the living being. His/her progress within the flux in which no halt is possible, consists in conquering or undergoing the adversities step by step, relying upon one’s acumen to detect them, disentangling knots of their intricacies and exercising foresight in avoiding perils and grabbing opportunities. Hence human conscious life in its powerfully significant sphere is a weave of recognized matters of fact and of conjectures, of expectations and suspension, of much sought relaxation and dangerous tensions, of striving with problematic success and of hope. All things considered, the human life is projecting itself into the twilight of discovery within the maze of the Unknown. While in real active existence we are striving to solve our concrete predicaments, focusing upon their most evident factors, literature dwells upon the not so obvious, the puzzling networks which subtend them, the knots that create circumstances which we have to deal with, intrigues and riddles that our personal and social life confront us with. Hence the fascination with which we watch a drama unfolding on stage or read a novel. We find there, through the penetration of the author, artfully articulated the engines of real life tragedies which are similar to 1 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 1–3. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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those which we experience ourselves, but we discover for the first time through literature their inner workings. In this effort of literature to unveil the hidden we also encounter the deepest interests of the human being, the interest in questions which we attribute to philosophy. Not only do we learn from literature, in its efforts to clarify our puzzling situations, about the possible keys to their intricacies, but digging deeper may lead us to their underpinnings, to the subterranean workings of the logos of life which subtends it. We reach the heart of ontopoiesis of life, of metaphysics. First, literature, digging deep into the creative sources of the human mind, reveals the subliminal passions which the human soul distills from our natural urges of survival into a specifically human significance of life. Passions become prompting forces for our deepest urges, vital as well as psychic and intellective, to understand. They thereby bring to light the philosophy/phenomenology of Human Creative Conditions as the central knot of human faculty (Analecta Husserliana: Volume XIX, Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part 1, T he Sea. From Elemental Stirrings to Symbolic Inspiration, L anguage, and L ife-Significance in L iterary Interpretation and T heory, 1985; Volume XXIV, L ogos and L ife, Book 1: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, 1988; Volume XXVIII, T he Elemental Passions of the Soul, Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part 3, 1990). Second, having in our previous investigations (Analecta volumes XIX, 1985; XXIV, 1988; XXVIII, 1990) sought to dig through literature into the subliminal spheres of the human soul we discovered the source of the specifically human significance of life that the creative imagination of the Human Condition instigates. The metaphysical/ontopoietic significance of literary explorations reaches through our extensive studies of the role of Imaginatio Creatrix. This latter not only stirs the specifically human virtualities for the works of the mind, but also leads us to the stream of the subterranean – hidden to the eye – ontopoietic becoming of life, towards the workings of the logos of life at the tunnel of the ontopoietic individualization of beingness. We seek its workings in the twilight of T he V isible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, L iterature and Reality (Volume LXXV, 2002); T ruth in Its Various Perspectives (Volume LXXVI, 2002); and in Metamorphosis: Creative Imagination in Fine Arts between L ife-Projects and Human Aesthetic Aspirations (Volume LXXXI, 2004). Our way leads along the eidetic between the unknown and our lifeefforts at plowing through it a furrow that might become ‘‘familiar’’, to

THE THEME

3

‘‘domesticate’’ it for our milieu of existence; the work of life slowly reveals itself in the conquest of the unknown. All the above mentioned inquiries following the unquenchable human thirst to understand, distilling from the maze of life’s becoming its reasons, motivations, and interlinkings, culminate in the queries of the present collection devoted to the mystery. The generic notion of ‘‘mystery’’ comprises the entire host of questions the fully conscious human being addresses to the unknown, which surrounds him/her through and through. However, while in the formulations of the enigma, riddle, labyrinth, puzzle, Gordian knot, intrigue, etc. it is the intellective mind which with its curiosity, inquisitions, practical sense, is mostly put to the task of formulating, for seeking reasons, interconnections, motivations, and reaches its peak in the crucial human questioning: the exemplary notion of mystery. It is stirred not mainly by the perplexities of the intellective mind to solve issues of the life-progress; it is prompted with vigor by passions stemming from the entire human mind-soul coordinations gathering all the forces of life in the dynamic fulguration in which our entire beingness vital, psychic, personal in our desires, forebodings, anxieties, hopes, is involved. It touches upon the sense of our life-course, our ‘‘destiny’’. Does it not open the zone in between knowing and beingness? Does it not lead to the greatest mystery of the logos of life? Anna-T eresa T ymieniecka

SECTION I

NANCY MARDAS

ORPHIC LISTENING: THE HERMENEUTICS OF POETRY AND THE MYSTERY OF TRANSCENDENCE

In her 1968 article ‘‘Cosmos, Nature, and Man and the Foundations of Psychiatry,’’ Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka posed the following metaphysical question about the mystery of human nature: For Heidegger, Dasein and the world are two indispensable counterparts of the fundamental structure of the specifically human. Should we understand the type of being that we are ourselves, Dasein, as characterized through what we may call ‘‘being a subject’’? Its fundamental structure consists, according to Heidegger, of ‘‘transcending,’’ going beyond itself. . . . The world, explains Heidegger, constitutes . . . the structure of transcendence, in turn, as belonging to transcendence, the concept of the world is called by Heidegger ‘‘transcendental’’ (Vom Wesen des Grundes, 23).1

Tymieniecka then analyzes the proposals for healing existential malaise that lie hidden in Heidegger’s understanding of the horizons that seem to delimit the human from the natural world. The task, Tymieniecka avers, is not to redraw the boundaries of consciousness, but rather to correctly understand the nature and meaning of consciousness itself. The answer, she suggests, is to ‘‘establish our being within the scheme of nature.’’2 The crucial project is to discover the meaning of experience as ontically creative. The challenge that Tymieniecka sets is also the task set by Rainer Maria Rilke in his Sonnets to Orpheus. In this work, Rilke revived the ancient vocation of the poet as seer and interpreter for the gods: the poet as an agent of hermeneutics. Rilke’s Orpheus manifests a unique and mysterious relationship to the world, and in so doing serves as a paradigmatic figure for hermeneutics, for understanding the mystery of being. The vocation of a poet, in this perspective, is to bring the entire world of experience into what Rilke calls the Weltinnenraum, infinite inner space. Heidegger suggested that Rilke’s Orphic poetry provides a unique access point for meaning to come to presence in language. It is this mystery that I will explore today. (I will be speaking here about the three central Heideggerian terms: das Sein, das Seiende, and Dasein. Most often, I use the English term Being, Being-as-such, or ‘‘what-is,’’ to designate das Sein. Das Seiende is generally rendered as ‘‘the things that are’’ or simply ‘‘things.’’ Dasein is 7 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 7–17. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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the greatest mystery of all. I hope that in what follows, its nature will become clearer.) I. THE FIRST MOMENT: MIRRORING BEING

There are three moments of the myth of Orpheus as related and commented upon by Rilke and Heidegger: 1) the creation of a world through language; 2) the turn which Orpheus makes at the threshold of Hades; and 3) the death of Orpheus. In Rilke, the first ‘moment’ of the myth of Orpheus (into which the others are subsumed) is simultaneously the creation of world through language and the creation of the poet’s identity. (All translations used here are my own.) A tree arising! There. What pure excess: the song of Orpheus! Soaring in the ear, then: silence. And, within that emptiness, beckonings to change, to birth appeared. The animals of silence stole forth then perfectly still, not hunted, not in prey but in a rapt, attentive hearkening they emerged from unlocked wood, from nest and den to listen. Noises hot with threat or fear now died within their hearts. And even where there’d stood a shelter of dark animal dreams, a refuge built of longing, with tottering beams, dark mouth of some forgotten mine – just there you built your temple, deep within the ear. (Sonnets to Orpheus, Book I, Sonnet 1)

This ‘moment’ is a continual, ongoing mystery in which the poet translates the experience of what is experienced. In and among and through what is seen and heard, the poet discerns something about Being (das Sein): this becomes (is) the subject of the poetry. Along the way, the poet’s self becomes swept up into the poem, completely absorbed into the language through which Being comes into presence. As the whole self is drawn into the ‘other’ of the poem, a poet transcends the limits of self. To follow the destiny of self-transcendence, a poet must dare the venture, as Heidegger would say, cross the threshold of reason, and enter into the poem: begin a journey whose destination is as yet unknown. A poet cannot predetermine the outcome by will, or by ego-driven desire.

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The figure of Orpheus presented by both Rilke and Heidegger proves that the distance between desire and letting be (living as part of the fullness of das Sein) may be overcome through a particular relation to language. For language – most specifically, poetic language – is always moving simultaneously towards its outermost and its innermost capabilities. This movement takes no regard for the human ego. The history of the figure of Orpheus in Rilke and Heidegger is not a study in how poets or philosophers ‘use’ language as a tool to manipulate the world, nor how ego-driven desire tries to force the fullness of Being to adapt itself to a human wish. Rather, the history of Orpheus can be seen as a study in the poetics of human being itself: how language comes to the aid of the human in the enterprise of self-transcendence. In order to attain self-transcendence, we must – despite our obvious limitations – be able to move freely, not bounded by subjectivity, fear, desire, the drive to manifest self. We must be able to tolerate having a full or an empty identity, being visible or being hidden, either absence or presence. We must be able to tolerate (more than tolerate: celebrate!) the notion that we enter destiny by means of language, and that we can fulfill and transcend destiny only by these same means. In order to attain selftranscendence, we must learn to translate. To translate in such a free and faithful way that some new moment of the fullness of Being comes into presence, to translate our individual experiences into the universality of the Weltinnenraum. This, Heidegger and Rilke agree, is the hermeneutic task of poetry. The free faithfulness of such translation, Heidegger says in his essay ‘‘The Anaximander Fragment,’’ is both the project behind our history and a mirror for the way Being reveals and conceals itself. ‘‘As it reveals itself in beings, Being withdraws. In this way, by illuminating them, Being sets beings adrift in errancy . . . [it is] the space in which history unfolds. . . . Without errancy there would be no connection from destiny to destiny: there would be no history.’’3 The space in which history unfolds is the space in which a poet moves with language towards meaning. Irrtum (translated here as ‘errancy’) means the capacity to make a false step, to be in error, to miss the mark. In one sense, since poetry is neither true nor false, Irrtum could be seen as an irrelevant concept for hermeneutics. And yet of course aesthetically, poetry can be true or false to the rules of poetics (which include meaning); it can be wrong, can miss its mark. Heidegger insists on the importance

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of this concept, insists on it as an essential characteristic of the nature of poetic language and of our connection to the fullness of Being (das Sein). What Heidegger means here, I think, is the capacity of poetic language to be and move freely precisely in this fashion. The indeterminacy of error is the free space in which the poetic becomes the vehicle for finding and revealing meaning. Heidegger argues that this cannot happen anywhere else. It happens in poetry because of the non-teleological nature of the poetic. ‘‘The setting-adrift is accomplished through poetic language. Errancy is a crucial component.’’4 II. THE SECOND MOMENT: THE DEATH OF EURYDICE

The second ‘moment’ of the Orpheus myth occurs at the threshold of the underworld, when Orpheus turns to look back at Eurydice. At that moment, Orpheus fails to be true to his destiny as a poet because he does not set himself adrift in the poetic. Instead of continuing to sing, Orpheus looks back. In looking back to Eurydice, Orpheus fixes her with his gaze, transfixes her, freezes her into that moment with his willful desire. The moment of her death is the moment of his failure to let be. Instead of allowing history to come into presence as and when it will, in line with its own destiny, Orpheus tries to fix the moment with his gaze. This activity is an instance of what Heidegger calls the ‘‘essential process’’ of disjunction on which human being always stumbles. In Heidegger’s view, the disjunction of lingering turns out to be a fundamental trait of what is present in human being, which is never Being (the fullness of what-is), but rather always Becoming, and is so with will, willfully. Thus, in Rilke’s sonnets, redemption for Orpheus lies in letting himself go completely into nature, becoming one with the things of nature, becoming one with Being. By setting himself adrift, Orpheus can turn (in)to meaning. Rilke points the way: Step past all parting, as if it lay already far behind you, like the winter that is gone. Beneath, an endless winter of the heart Enfolded you, must now be overcome. In Eurydice be ever dead – and in her, rise. Rise singing, back to pure love, praising. Be here among sinking shades, a ringing glass that shatters as it sounds. Be all this, be – and in one matchless instant know the perpetual pull, the inner surge and flow of being and nothing, their union consummate.

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Now: add yourself with joy to Nature’s store, To the incalculable, muffled, mute, and worn, And making up the sum, wipe clean the slate. (Book II, Sonnet 13)

Even in his failure, the negative silhouette of the figure of Orpheus points us towards the necessary shift in attitude by which we will come to use language in good faith. We resist making the proper turn. We are willing to follow Orpheus in his turn back to Eurydice, but we are unable to make the ‘turn’ of conversion into Irrtum, the turn in which we might be set adrift towards meaning. We are able to turn back in anxiety, but we are unwilling to turn ourselves over in trust. We are unwilling to give up what we perceive as our authority over language, unwilling to enter the unknown. We are unwilling to sit silently in attentive contemplation of language, until the right moment, the moment of the fullness of time, when meaning might reveal itself. So we make a false turn, and gain nothing. It would indeed be tragic if the story of Orpheus ended with his first, false turn. But we have not yet worked to the end of the myth of Orpheus. All three moments of the Orpheus myth speak of the task of hermeneutics as incarnated in the figure of Orpheus. After losing Eurydice to death a second time, Orpheus continued his poetic journey and hermeneutic task. He founded the mysteries that bear his name. But he was not yet fully enfolded into language.

III. THE THIRD MOMENT: FROM DEATH TO LIFE

The third moment of the Orphic myth – the death of Orpheus – represents for Heidegger the event of metaphysics. In this moment, the thought of the poem, the thought that has come into presence through the poet, is set free from its origin, set free from identification with the poet, and brought into presence. The poet dies, and yet remains alive through the poem. Orpheus returns to his original vocation of creating a world. Having mourned in silence for a time, the poet returned to singing. But in the intervening period, he left the world of romantic love behind, and spurned the women who would replace Eurydice. Although various retellings of the myth conflict, in all the versions he meets his end torn to shreds by jealous maenads, and nevertheless, continues to sing. The severed head of Orpheus continues to sing as it floats down the river. As

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Heidegger later reflected, death does not interrupt the presencing through language that Orpheus embodies. Even as death withdraws into the enigmatic . . . the trace of the holy remains present.5 Here is Rilke’s portrayal of the death of Orpheus at the hands of the ecstatic Bacchantes: But God, right up until the last you sang, as they fell, rejected furies, in a throng upon you. Above their cries, your calm tone rang out, lovely, from the ruins, your uplifting song. Not one was there could crush your head, your lyre, however they struggled and raved – and all the sharp stones, hurled from hatred at your heart, grew soft, began to hear – at last on fire with rage, they tore you asunder, the while your ringing tones yet lingered in the birds, in trees, in cliffs, in beasts. There even now you sing. Forsaken god! By hatred rendered out to all – Oh infinite echo’s wake – that we might hear you now, might speak from Nature’s mouth. (Book I, Sonnet 26)

In death as in life, Orpheus embodies the point that is always pointing away, the marker of that which is always both full and empty and constantly shifting. The destiny of Orpheus is to be eternal beginning: always on the verge of being said, just about to be heard. There is no such thing as a completed poem: it remains unfinished until it is heard. Even then it is never heard in a final way, but always in a way that points to a deeper hearing, as each new hearer brings their own self to bear upon it in a new way. In his death, Orpheus – as both singer and song – points the way to a goal which lies ‘‘at the center of the eternal movement,’’ through what lies between, in the mysterious interplay of poetry. Maurice Blanchot puts it this way: Orpheus is the act of metamorphosis. . . . If the poet could become a poem, Orpheus would be the poem: he is the ideal and the emblem of poetic plenitude. Yet he is at the same time not the completed poem, but something more mysterious and more demanding: the origin of the poem, the sacrificial point which is no longer the reconciliation of the two domains, but the abyss of the lost god, the infinite trace of absence. . . .6

So too, Heidegger suggests, metaphysics, as an inquiry into what lies beyond knowledge and experience, goes on in the echoing silence of the

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oblivion of Being. Heidegger tells us that ‘‘oblivion of Being belongs to the self-veiling essence of Being.’’7 Poetry, in revealing something of the process by which meaning conceals and discloses itself in language, gives us a new way of speaking about this process, a new path to follow. As we continue to inquire into the possibility of transcending knowledge and experience through poetry, we encounter traces of the absent god. More importantly, as Tymieniecka intimated, in this transcendence we discover traces of our subjectivity. Poetry as inquiry consists in bringing the oblivion of Being out of silence into presence through language, catching the echoes of this silence and then moving with them towards transcendence in the fullness of Being. This movement is clearly visible in the death of Orpheus, as the poet enters into the being of things (das Seiende), and the distinction between poet and poem blurs. The ‘event of metaphysics’ is at the same time the dawn of history, the dawn of inquiry into, and by means of, language.8 Heidegger continues this thought: ‘‘. . . the distinction between Being and beings . . . can invade our experience only if it already unveiled itself with the presencing of what is present; only if it has left a trace which remains preserved in the language to which Being comes.’’9 It is the destiny of Orphic poetry to retain the essential trace of meaning that perdures over and above time, the trace of the essence that is borne in language. As Being falls back into forgetfulness of itself, only the poet remembers what has been seen: the distinction between knowledge and experience, on the one hand, and transcendent mystery, on the other.

IV. A FOURTH MOMENT: MOVING TOWARDS TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH LISTENING

A fourth moment is implicit in the myth of Orpheus: the conversion to listening that might move us towards transcendence. To catch the silent echoes of ‘the oblivion of Being,’ to be invaded by and enter into what has come into presence through poetry, this moment only comes about through the most concentrated effort of attention. Listening. And here again we meet Heidegger, who explains the task of metaphysical inquiry in just these terms: ‘‘The proper bearing of thinking is not questioning but rather listening to the promise of that which is to come into question.’’10 Here again, the Orphic poet provides a model for how to listen. Blanchot sees Orpheus as ‘‘the mysterious sign pointed toward the origin, where not only secure existence and the hope of truth and the gods are

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lacking, but also the poem; where the power to speak and the power to hear, undergoing their own lack, endure their impossibility.’’11 The impossibility of the task should not deter us. The inherent impossibility of language, the impossibility of communicating between unbridgeable gaps of subjectivity, between the fullness of das Sein, das Seiende, and individual beings, must and can be endured through the poem, which provides the space, the L ichtung, in which meaning may occur. A poet can in this way point us away from self, and towards being. If Orpheus’ downfall was a failure to move freely within language, a failure to respond to the Open through which language brings Being into presencing, then the ‘failure’ of Orpheus represents the moment at which communication between the fullness of Being (das Sein) and individual beings becomes at once both possible and urgent. Each encounter with poetic language represents a moment of decision, in which an individual being has the opportunity to become – for just a moment – one with the fullness of das Sein, part of the movement of ‘going forth’ towards meaning, by listening. This is because, although a poem communicates, poetry is not primarily about communication, but rather about transcendence. A poet moves fluidly back and forth in the space between the realms of human being and Being as such. This is, I think, the essence of the ontic message of Rilke’s Sonnets. The Orphic poet has no room for a Cartesian ego. Rather, the whole of the Orphic self is an ear, through which the breath of the fullness of Being can be heard speaking its eternal word. What occurs to the poet in Rilke’s Orphic Sonnets is the turn from a self-conscious ego addressing a world of things to a self-transcendent ego realizing its place in the fullness of das Sein. The immersion of the poet into the world of things (the objects of poetic attention) is not a matter of fusion, adhesion, or blurriness. If all (universe-world-things-poet) is one in the Orphic worldview of Weltinnenraum, this is not a matter of all being merged into an undifferentiated mass. That sort of amalgamation, dissolving difference, would perform the same compressing function as absolutism. Orphic listening is designed quite differently. The Orphic sense of ‘being with’ through language is in this instance what Heidegger understands as the task of hermeneutics, bringing all things together in order that they may experience meaning: The Laying that gathers has, as Logos, laid down everything present in unconcealment . . . [it] assembles in itself all destiny by bringing things and letting them lie before us, keeping

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each absent and present being in its place and on its way; and by its assembling it secures everything in the totality. Thus each being can be joined and sent into its own.

Just so, an Orphic poet brings things together not to merge them, but to engage with them in reflective dialogue. Absence and presence are thus preserved, each ‘‘in its place and on its way’’; difference is thus simultaneously observed and celebrated. All things draw together not into a formless ‘same’ but into a harmonious whole, to be heard. This occurs in the open, fluid Weltinnenraum. Orpheus’ translation of experience into language moves first from mimesis to creation, and thence towards meaning and transcendence. As experience occurs, an Orphic poet describes and delineates the process, translating the way in which the concrete world disappears into the abstractions of language. The figure of Orpheus holds the thought of transformation even as it occurs, and makes it real by re-presenting it in language. This expression is far more than mimesis, far beyond an imitation of experience. Orphic language creates – and then holds open – the space between concrete and abstract, between real and ideal. An Orphic poet, then, must first listen in at-one-ment with others, and then try to transform what is said into a new intelligibility, perhaps a new meaning – thus, as Tymieniecka correctly surmised, becoming a subject, an ‘‘I’’. This ‘‘I’’ understands what Heidegger said about poetry in his essay on the Anaximander Fragment: ‘‘The poetic essence of thought upholds the sway of the truth of Being.’’ Poetic language keeps the truth of Being in movement, in play, so that from moment to kairological moment, human beings may make contact with the mystery of the fullness of das Sein, and begin a reflective dialogue. This new understanding of ‘conducting a dialogue with language’ falls in line with Corradi Fiumara’s proposal that the way we ‘use’ language needs to shift from an assembly-line model to the model of the midwife, ‘‘from a cult of speech to a culture of maieutics as the process which supports the birth and rebirth of our thinking.’’14 If we can re-conceive language as listening (in the way that Rilke suggests through the Sonnets), we can radically renew its communicative strength. Such a shift will necessitate a leap, not of faith, but of hope. And hope, as Ricoeur said, ‘‘begins with an a-logic. It breaks into a closed order. . . . Hope, when it breaks out, is ‘aporetic’, not because of deficiency but because of excess of meaning.’’15 I believe that this hope is the secret behind the Orphic mystery. Hope is the hidden hermeneutic telos of Orpheus’ task, as transmitted by Rilke

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and Heidegger, poetry conceived as an exercise in listening. When we truly learn to listen to Being (das Sein) by entering fully into it (das Seiende) as Orpheus does, we will transcend the closed world of the individual self and find an abundance of meaning, in our human subjecthood, in our Dasein. In the fluid openness of Orphic listening, perhaps we will at last begin to understand our place within what is. What a message for poetry to carry into a destitute and anxious time. What a gift from the heart of language to the heart of a broken world. I will leave the last word for Rilke. We should, after all, begin by listening to the poet. Here is the last of the Orphic Sonnets – Book II, Sonnet 29: Silent friend of far horizons, feel How your breath expands the encircling space. Into the darkened belfry rafters peal Your carillon. Yet what eats away At you still flourishes. As you drift In and out of transformation, find: What knowledge wounds you most? And if The cup is bitter, change yourself to wine. Be, in this night of abundance, alchemy – Distilling at the crossroads of your soul A meaning from this strange encounter – and Then, when all this world forgets you, greet The silent earth, declaring: still, I flow. And to the racing water: here I am.

College of the Holy Cross NOTES 1 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, ‘‘Cosmos, Nature and Man and the Foundations of Psychiatry,’’ in Heidegger and the Path of T hinking, ed. John Sallis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970), p. 198. 2 Ibid., p. 207. Italics in the original. 3 ‘‘The Anaximander Fragment,’’ in Early Greek T hinking, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1975), p. 26. 4 Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: L iterature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 43. 5 Heidegger, ‘‘What Are Poets For?,’’ in Poetry, L anguage, T hought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 96. 6 Blanchot, T he Space of L iterature, trans. A. Smock (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1983), p. 142ff.

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7 Heidegger, ‘‘The Anaximander Fragment,’’ op. cit., p. 50. 8 The original Greek word for inquiry is historia. 9 Heidegger, ‘‘The Anaximander Fragment,’’ op. cit., p. 50ff. 10 Heidegger, On the Way to L anguage (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 175. 11 Blanchot, op. cit., p. 157. 12 Which so easily flips over into nihilism. 13 Heidegger, Early Greek T hinking, op. cit., pp. 70–72. 14 Corradi Fiumara, T he Other Side of L anguage: A Philosophy of L istening (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 165. 15 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Essays on L anguage, Action, and Interpretation, trans. J. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 153.

JENNIFER ANNA GOSETTI-FERENCEI

PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE MYSTERIOUS: RILKE’S SONNET T E AN ORPHEUS

‘‘THE MYSTERIOUS’’ AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL HORIZON

How might a phenomenologist engage the notion of the mysterious? If ‘the mysterious’ indicates what is beyond the reach of, but still related to, the phenomenal realm, one might begin with the notion of horizonality in Husserl’s description of the synthetic constitution of a world. A world, phenomenologically described, is a nexus of actualities and potentialities: conscious acts and objects of conscious life, both actual and potential.1 For every object of my conscious intention – be it a sensory perception or an idea – potentiality appears as its horizon. The world, according to Husserl, is never completely given in actuality, just as an object of consciousness is ‘‘never present to actual consciousness as a finished datum’’ (CM, 45). Thus what I would see if I turned this cup over, walked around to view its other side, or how my idea might appear in connection to some other idea; all this coappears with actual phenomena; this coappearance not only enriches but renders possible my experience. In addition to the ‘‘infinities of evidences relating to the same object,’’ and a totality of such, a world is then a ‘‘multiform horizon of unfulfilled anticipations’’ (CM, 61). In a ‘world,’ actuality and potentiality are inextricably conjoined; and their relationship, since Aristotle, has been conceived as the stuff of poetic creation ( poeisis).2 The ‘mysterious’ might be articulable phenomenologically according to the realm of the horizonal, in an acute and perhaps unnatural awareness of the possibility of my being surprised, of something unexpected; for the horizon, though of ‘‘ ‘predelineated’ potentialities’’ is given, as Husserl writes in Cartesian Meditations, ‘‘never with more than a certain degree of foreshadowing,’’ which he calls apperception (CM, 45). Husserl describes the performance (L eistung) of consciousness, a synthetic performance, as being responsible for the connectedness of the tissue of the world, for its very ‘worldhood.’ Insofar as Husserl establishes phenomenology as a rigorous science, it is reassuring that the ‘‘Heraclitean’’ phenomenal flux and the flux of intentional synthesis ‘‘can be apprehended in strict concepts’’ because ‘‘an essentially necessary conformity to type prevails’’ (CM, 49). However, this does nothing to prevent a 19 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 19–29. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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poet, particularly one so invested in the conditions of appearance as Rilke, from articulating the relationship between the actual and the potential poetically, with respect to its mysteriousness, and from suggesting that what transcends the actual might exceed, too, its ‘predelineation’ – a suggestion which makes Rilke, though phenomenologically inclined and an oft-cited source of philosophical inspiration, decidedly poetical. In this interpretation of Rilke, I will argue that the world, poetically conceived, is mysterious, and its mysteriousness can be rendered according to the bonds between the seen and the unseen, and through the notion of the ‘horizonal.’ The ‘mysterious,’ then, will here come to signify, a relation to the horizonal ‘beyond,’ to the ‘‘invisible’’ in which Rilke, in fact, recognizes ‘‘a higher level of reality.’’3 Further, this mysteriousness is articulated in Rilke by virtue of a poetical structure that I would like to examine initially by drawing an analogy to Husserl’s theory of constitution – specifically to his notion of synthesis. In Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, the poet-figure Orpheus, whom we know from Greek legend and Medieval Latin folklore, is the emblem for a poetical synthesis that joins all things in harmony – and joins what appears and what by its very nature does not; Orpheus is thought to keep open what Rilke will call a ‘dual realm’ (Doppelbereich) between the actual and the potential that lies beyond it. Since it has been argued elsewhere that Rilkean poetry elicits comparison with the phenomenological project,4 I shall leave aside here a defense in general of the phenomenological approach to interpreting his literarypoetical works.5 However, I hope it shall become clear in this study of the Sonnets in particular that the unified texture of the ‘worldhood’ they poeticize can be meaningfully approached with phenomenological means. The poet-figure to whom Rilke’s sonnets are addressed, of course, is the Greek poet Orpheus, who, according to legend, sang so divinely that all of nature hearkened to his call; Orpheus was thus able to charm the god Hades and bring back his dead wife, Eurydice, from the underworld, holding open what Rilke calls the ‘pure relation’ (rein[er] Bezug) (12/13) between the here and the beyond. And so the Sonnets to Orpheus series is about the access of poetic language to appearance and to what transcends it. Rilke’s language itself, through its elusive but also vertiginously concrete references, realizes a world that encompasses the actual and the unseen, the special transcendence6 of potentiality. This is why Rilke’s poetry emphasizes the ‘other side’ of even ordinary things – an other side not exhausted by the actuality that ‘foreshadows’ it. Insofar as Rilke’s text also provides an attempt to remedy the penury of a modern age that overlooks the richness and opacity of things, it suggests a faithfulness to

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the mysteriousness and even, to use a word from the last poem of the series, the ‘magic’ (Zauber) of what attends and accompanies the known. For a Rilkean poem is often ‘‘a call to the object, to the thing, to unfold itself in language’’ in a way that retains its mysterious or magical quality.7 ASPECTS OF THE MYSTERIOUS IN RILKE’S SONNET T E AN ORPHEUS

The inspiration for Rilke’s Sonnets is twofold. First of all, it is indebted to the Orpheus legend we have mentioned, an illustration of which hung in the Chaˆteau de Muzot, where Rilke was staying in February 1922 when the series was written. Equally importantly, it was occasioned by the untimely death in youth of Vera Duckama Knoop (a daughter of a friend of Rilke’s), to whom the sonnets are dedicated.8 One can infer then that Rilke takes the task upon himself, as Orpheus did for Eurydice, of establishing a relation to the mysteriousness of the ‘other side,’ which Rilke claims, in a letter about the Sonnets, the dead girl symbolizes. In a commentary Rilke writes that the Sonnets are ‘‘placed under the name and protection of the dead girl whose incompletion and innocence holds open the door of the grave, so that she, gone from us, belongs to those powers who keep the half of life fresh and open towards the other woundopen half ’’ (SO, 136). Rilke is fascinated by the legendary poet, who is said to have sung so beautifully that all beings, even gods, were enchanted by his song; but it is primarily the invisible potential horizon of things that Rilke’s own poetry, by invoking Orpheus, aims to bring into poetical intimacy. Through this horizonality, Rilke finds an access to what he often refers to as the essence (Wesen) of things. The girl is a symbol of that horizonality, a symbol of incompleteness itself: as a young girl, she was half yet to be. Her death transports her to the ‘other side’ of life, which illuminates life’s own incompleteness. In the Duino Elegies,9 the second part of which was finished during the same prolific month of February 1922, the figure of the angel, which Rilke takes pains to distinguish from the Christian symbolism of the same,10 serves the same unification of distinct realms. Orpheus’s poetic song – and Rilke’s poetical devices (his use of ‘‘metonymy, personification, simile, oxymoron, etc.’’)11 – perform a kind of synthesis such that even life and death no longer appear fragmentary and opposed, as in prosaic perception, but are brought into a harmonious whole. This wholeness depends, however, on the mysteriousness of the poetic bonds themselves, which requires not the kind of poetry that states

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a philosophical thesis, but a poetry in which horizonality itself is enacted by a constant disturbance of natural-attitude associations, by way of a constant circling around things that nonetheless draws them into seemingly incompatible realms: the tree and the dead which sleep at its roots. For Rilke the mysterious especially concerns the bonds not merely among the plethora of material phenomena, but between the visible and the invisible, life and death. Death then becomes one emblem of horizonality as such, because it indicates, by supplementing it, life’s essential incompleteness. According to Rilke, the poet must engage in ‘‘affirmation of life and death,’’ as he wrote in a letter about the Duino Elegies (SO, 131). Rilke’s sonnets are divided into two sequences of twenty-six and twentynine poems each. Their subject matter is multifarious, and this in part constitutes the difficulty in approaching the poems. The connections between the sonnets are not always obvious.12 Also rendering them difficult, Rilke admits, is their being so marked by ‘‘condensation and abbreviation (in the way they often state lyric totals instead of lining up the stages necessary to the result) that they seem intended to be generally grasped rather through inspiration in those similarly directed than with what is called ‘understanding’ ’’ (SO, 130). The poems concern perception of objects, both human-made ( jugs, rings) and natural (trees, flowers, and fruit); time and space; death and the wholeness of nature; the machine age, which, for all its material progress, negates or neglects this wholeness. Despite this heterogeneous subject matter, Rilke described the sonnets, in a letter of 1923, as framed around two intertwining themes, death and love; the poems are about what he calls ‘‘the determination constantly maturing in me to keep life open towards death, and, on the other hand, the intellectual necessity of instating the transformations of love differently in this wider whole than was possible in the narrower orbit of life (which simply excluded death as the Other). It is here that one should, so to say, seek the ‘plot’ of these poems . . .’’ (SO, 130). Rilke takes pains to show that death, as the mysterious ‘horizon’ of life, informs the realm of the living. Consider this sonnet (no. 14 of Part I), which concerns the relationship of transient things – the fruits of nature – to the dead, those ‘‘who sleep with the roots’’ and ‘‘invigorate the earth’’: Wir gehen um mit Blume, Weinblatt, Frucht. Sie sprechen nicht die Sprache nur des Jahres. Aus Dunkel steigt ein buntes Offenbares und hat vielleicht den Glanz der Eifersucht der Toten an sich, die die Erde sta¨rken.

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Was wissen wir von ihrem Teil an dem? Es ist seit lange ihre Art, den Lehm mit ihrem freien Marke zu durchma¨rken, Nun fragt sich nur: tun sie es gern? Dra¨ngt dies Frucht, ein Werk von schweren Sklaven, geballt zu uns empor, zu ihren Herrn? Sind sie die Herrn, die bei den Wurzel schlafen, ¨ berflu¨ssen und go¨nnen uns aus ihren U dies Zwischending aus stummer Kraft und Ku¨ssen? We have to do with flower, vine-leaf, and fruit. They speak the language not only of the year. Out of darkness rises a motley manifest, having perhaps the gleam of the jealousy of the dead about it, who invigorate the earth. What do we know of their share in this? It has been their way to marrow the loam through and through with their free marrow. The only question: do they do it gladly? Does this fruit, work of heavy slaves, push up, clenched, to us, their masters? Are they the masters, who sleep with the roots, and grant us out of their overflow this hybrid thing made of dumb strength and kisses? (42/43) In this poem it is said that ‘‘we forget the usual demarcations of the material . . . and conceptual . . . and the visible and invisible worlds coexist effortlessly. . . . Rilke uses every sort of poetic figurative voice . . . to make the coexistence possible.’’13 The fruit we enjoy and love, Rilke writes, ‘‘comes from far,’’ from the realm of the dead; it is ambiguous (doppeldeutig). Even our earthiest, most sensual pleasures involve an ‘‘indescribable’’ (namenlos) occurrence of the unity of love and death: ‘‘Full round apple, pear and banana, / gooseberry . . . All this speaks / death and life into the mouth . . . I sense . . . / Read it from the face of a child / tasting them . . .’’ (41/42). Again, he writes: ‘‘Only who with the dead has eaten / of the poppy that is theirs / will never again lose / the most delicate tone. / . . . Only in the dual realm / do voices become / eternal and mild’’ (32/33). Death and love, then, are considered accordingly in quite a different configuration, and perhaps a more mysterious one, than the coupling being worked out contemporaneously in Freud’s theory of the psyche.

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Rilke does not consider love to be haunted by a primal death drive; rather, as a yearning for wholeness, the most embracing kind of love also includes, in its reach and ‘protection,’ the ‘other side’ of things, their horizonal ‘beyond,’ which in part constitutes them. For the life of poetical consciousness, not God, but death is the transcendent per se, and it is not a mere negation. Death’s transcendence holds and protects for Rilke the mystery of presence. It coappears with the phenomenon of life as its ultimate horizon. Finitude, in other words, is the horizonal reality that gives form and possibility to all things: ‘‘For the very falling away of time conditions their existing.’’ For Rilke, ‘‘transience everywhere plunges into deep being’’ (SO, 133). Thus Rilke’s interest in death is not morose, but rather a drive to keep life open toward the unknown, to the mysterious;14 and his task as a poet is to love – and unify – this wider whole. For when the natural-prosaic attitude is broken down, ‘‘there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity’’ (SO, 132). The Orpheus myth for both Rilke and his predecessor Ovid concerns the relation between this ‘known’ side of life and the mysterious beyond. Orpheus is the one ‘‘who has lifted the lyre / among shadows, too,’’ who has entered the underworld, and so the one to whom is allowed the ‘‘infinite praise’’ of poeticizing (32/33). It is because the figure of Orpheus, like the dead girl, is characterized by transcendence, that he serves Rilke well here. Rilke devises, in his invocation of Orpheus, a decidedly modern poetical access to the transcendent, by presenting, in condensed and abbreviated form, a ‘lyrical total’ without translating that total into logical or even associative statements. (Consider the lines: ‘‘Dance the orange’’ and ‘‘She slept the world.’’) The unfolding of the thing and its ‘‘Weltinnerlichkeit’’ is not opposed to the thing as it appears, but is, rather, merely its coordinate. Hans Egon Holthusen observes that the effect of such unfolding ‘‘is achieved by means of an intricate and delicate system of . . . constructions, small relative clauses and appositionally used nouns’’ and that there is often ‘‘a kind of prime or pivotal noun, from which issues the sequence of associations. And while the normal sentence advances as it were dynamically from subject to predicate, what we find here is . . . [t]he sentence . . . unfold[ing] itself in space. . . .’’15 In this fashion, Rilke is able to indicate without exhausting what is indicated; to always say more than what his assertions add up to. The same critic thus notes that ‘‘there is something mosaic-like about this manner of paratactic co-ordination, a kind of magical and primitive juxtaposition.’’16 From the first sonnet of the series, Orpheus and his song are associated ¨ bersteigung) (16/17). Orpheus, by Rilke with ‘‘pure transcendency’’ (reine U

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who sang so sublimely that he was said to have become a god, transcended the ordinary relation that (prosaic) language (and philosophy) gives us to things, a relation which Rilke conceives as relying upon opposites, the cleavage (Zwiespalt) between being and non-being. Rilke’s references to Orpheus are marked by a repetition of German verbs that indicate a crossing of such boundaries: u¨bertreVen, u¨berschreiten, u¨bersteigen. ‘‘His word transcends (u¨bertriVt) the being-here (das Hiersein)’’ (24/25), because it ‘‘oversteps’’ (u¨berschreitet) ontological boundaries even as he obeys them; and so Orpheus enters into relation with the mystery of things and their transience. Their transience renders them intimate with our own; and so we must, according to Rilke, resist the will to ‘‘run down and degrade everything earthly, just because of its temporariness, which it shares with us’’ (SO, 133). Things, too, belong to the ‘dual realm’ (Doppelbereich) (32/33) or ‘‘beiden Reichen’’ (both realms) to which Rilke’s sonnet series repeatedly refers (26/27). This is suggested in these lines from Rilke’s Sonnet I, 19 on the relationship of poetic song and the change of nature:

Wandelt sich rasch auch die Welt wie Wolkengestalten, alles Vollendete fa¨llt heim zum Uralten. ¨ ber dem Wandel und Gang U weiter und freier, wa¨hrt noch dein Vor-Gesang, Gott mit der Leier . . . Einzig das Lied u¨berm Land heiligt und feiert. Even though the world keeps changing quickly as cloud-shapes, all things perfected fall home to the age-old. Ever changing and passing, wider and freer, still lasts your leading-song, god with the lyre. . . . Only song over the land hallows and celebrates (52/53).

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POETICAL SYNTHESIS AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONSTITUTION

Much remains to be said regarding the mystery of the lived world and the unity of the dual realm of life and death, of the here and the beyond. Nonetheless, I would like to turn back to the notion of poetical synthesis and, in conclusion, to the comparison I drew at the outset of this essay to the phenomenological notion of the synthesis of actuality and horizonal potentiality involved in the constitution of a ‘world.’ What I am calling poetical synthesis is central both to the form and the content of Rilke’s sonnet series. ‘‘Synthesis’’ seems an apt enough word for the poetic endeavor as Rilke sees it, since, as I have argued, the poet’s task is to draw together, in the relation of the ‘mysterious,’ the prosaic oppositions of life and death, the here and the beyond, the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown; and in relation to the perceived object, synthesis affords not only the presence of the thing but also the ‘‘withdrawn’’ (Entzogenes) element (114/115), the ‘‘unheard-of center’’ (124/125), the ‘‘specter of transience’’ (122/123). In describing Orpheus’s poetical endeavor, Rilke employs the terms of song (singen, Gesang), praising (Ru¨hmung), longing (Sehnsucht) – the last of these a well-known theme in German Romanticism17 – as well as, on the side of things, those of the ‘‘hearkening’’ (das Ho¨ren) with which beings respond to the poetical call. These elements of poetical synthesis, and what they bring together, thus constitute the lyrical content of the Sonnets to Orpheus. But this is also what the Sonnets to Orpheus themselves accomplish formally. Rilke is able to conjure the ‘‘inexhaustib[ility]’’ (80/81) of things – for instance, that which he attributes to the rose (Sonnet II, 6). Poetical synthesis is opposed to what Rilke seems to consider the natural attitude and the modern form of technological subjectivity, which reduces the world to the data of the statically given, the unmysterious, the ‘‘dull quotidian’’ (den stumpfen Alltag) (112/113), as if things merely occupied objective coordinates of space-time. To this, as with the phenomenological reduction, the poetic synthesis is an alternative. But although it engages subjectivity in much the way phenomenology engages consciousness in the constitution of things and of a world, Rilke, despite his poetry’s being permeated with reflection, prioritizes the unforeseeable. Despite the apparent synthetic powers of Orpheus, who is, after all, able to ‘‘create the relation’’ (44/45), Rilke insists that poetical synthesis involves restraint of the ego: ‘‘Song, as you teach it, is not desire [Begehr], / not suing [Werbung] for something yet in the end attained; / song is existence’’ (20/21).

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Although for Husserl, a world is always a world ‘‘for me,’’ we remember here a principal thesis of phenomenology, that consciousness exists only as consciousness of a world. Poetical ‘constitution,’ likewise, transcends an ego-centered model of consciousness, but perhaps more radically, since the ‘horizons’ it affords are inherently mysterious. As in Husserl, consciousness must be awakened from its natural-attitude tendency to grasp the world as a world in-itself without respect to the L eistung of consciousness. For Rilke this requires an alternative to ordinary expression, with which, Rilke thinks, ‘‘we, with words and finger-pointings, / gradually make the world our own, / [only] . . . its most weakest, most precarious part’’ (46–47). And a poetical seeing, too, is opposed to the practical life of the technological subject, which according to Rilke, ‘‘wallows and wreaks revenge [ra¨cht], / distorts and weakens us’’ (50/51). The concern for the destructiveness of modernity is found again and again in lines of the second half of the first series (Sonnets 18, 22, 23, 24), the final poem of which (Sonnet 26) renders an account of the dismemberment of Orpheus by maenads. Whereas, from Rilke’s point of view, the machine age is destructive, Orpheus’s poetical synthesis ‘‘taught the creatures’’ (54/55) to hearken, and the earth itself was ‘‘like a child that knows poems by heart’’ (56/57). Poetry, as opposed to technology, ‘‘hallows and celebrates [heiligt und feiert]’’ (52/53), but it does so in such a way as to never suggest a final or complete articulation. In conclusion, some differences between Rilke and Husserl, aside from the obvious poetical-philosophical distinction, might now be mentioned with regard to our analogous treatment of phenomenological and poetic synthesis. The first is determined by Rilke’s poetical investment in finitude, in the radical transience of what is perceived and known, which informs his notion of the ‘other side’ of phenomena. For this reason, the ‘horizonal’ that attends the actual is not restricted to potential actuality, as it is in Husserl, but maintains an elusive and mysterious nature perhaps accessible only through the poetical regard. Moreover, what pertains to the constitution of a ‘world’ in Husserlian phenomenology ought to be describable within the phenomenological method, because the horizon of potentiality is predelineated and structured by actuality. Here Rilke strays far from the phenomenological project as Husserl conceives it, in that for poetical synthesis, it is the absent-horizonal that gives meaning and density, and perhaps even ‘foreshadows,’ actuality. The horizonal remains mysterious, remains to be uttered in the resonant, residual song of Orpheus, who stands for the ‘‘magic power at your senses’ crossroad/ . . .

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and the meaning of their strange encounter [Zauberkraft am Kreuzweg deiner Sinne, / ihrer seltsamen Begegnung Sinn]’’ (126/127). University of Maine Orono, Maine NOTES 1 See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993). Cited in the text as CM. 2 See Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a39–1451b10. 3 Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnette an Orpheus / Sonnets to Orpheus, bilingual edition, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1942), p. 135. All references to the poems themselves will be given in the text with page numbers alone, the German page followed by the English. All references to Rilke’s letters, which are provided in the Notes in translation by Herter Norton, are cited in the text as SO followed by the page number. 4 Ka¨te Hamburger provides a rather extensive defense of the parallels between Husserlian phenomenology and Rilkean poetry. See her ‘‘Die pha¨nomenologische Struktur der Dichtung Rilkes’’ in Rilke in neuer Sicht, ed. K. Hamburger (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1971). 5 Jennifer Anna Gosetti, ‘‘The Ecstatic Quotidian: Literary Phenomenology in Sartre and Rilke,’’ Journal of the Association for the Interdisciplinary Study of the Arts 7: 1 (Fall 2001); and ‘‘Phenomenological Literature: From the Natural Attitude to Recognition,’’ Philosophy T oday 45: 5 (2001), SPEP Supplement, pp. 18–27. 6 A discussion of the notion of transcendence itself must be left aside owing to the brevity of this paper. See a discussion of transcendence and its modes in Rilke, and of the difficulty of carrying a philosophical definition over into his poetry, in Anthony Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Gedichte an die Nacht’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 189–192. 7 Hans Egon Holthusen, Rainer Maria Rilke: A Study of His L ater Poetry, trans. J. P. Stern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 41. 8 It is said also that Vera was a dancer, possibly the source of inspiration for the repetition of notions of dance and movement. See Norbert Fuerst, Phases of Rilke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), p. 185. 9 The task of interpreting the Sonnets to Orpheus seems to me to make demands quite similar to those made by the Duino Elegies; Hans-Georg Gadamer gives a helpful description of the kind of interpretation indicated by these difficult poems: one ‘‘will proceed from the unity of what is actually being said and try to explain what the poem wishes to say,’’ an apt method for cases of poetry ‘‘with a very high degree of reflection and for that reason considered generally obscure and hard to understand.’’ Hans-Georg Gadamer, L iterature and Philosophy in Dialogue, trans. Robert Paslick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 154. 10 Rilke writes of transience ‘‘not, however, in the Christian sense, from which I more and more passionately depart’’ (SO, 133). Gadamer, too, claims ‘‘we must free ourselves from all theological and pseudo-religious preconceptions in regard to Rilke’s symbolism of angels;’’ L iterature and Philosophy in Dialogue, p. 155. 11 David Young, ‘‘Introduction’’ to his translation of Sonnets to Orpheus (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p. xii.

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12 Cf. Fuerst, pp. 185–186. 13 Young, p. xii. Young’s commentary here, however, is made in reference to another of the sonnets. 14 The same might be said of Heidegger’s notion of Being-towards-death in Being and T ime and in his essay-lecture T he Concept of T ime, the latter written only two years after Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. 15 Holthusen, p. 41. 16. Ibid. 17 See Paul de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, edited by E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 130–134.

LAWRENCE KIMMEL

LITERATURE, MYSTERY, AND TRUTH

PREFATORY NOTE

In this essay I will make use of a procedure and concept of truth that emerged from the work of Brentano and Husserl that runs against the currents and idols of our age. In its most recent articulation in the work of Heidegger, truth as aletheia is an attempt to see the truth of Being as it discloses itself to understanding. In this way, truth is an activity of disclosure that has two moments: coming to light and bringing to light. Its notion is that of allowing things, as it were, to come into presence, to speak for themselves. Rather than construct an artifice of propositional reference for external verification, phenomenological analysis allows for disclosure of meaning through a natural form of life in which a question at issue is at home. A hermeneutical circle of interpretation surrounds a concept – in this case ‘mystery’ – with a network of sense natural to its occurrence, and so brings understanding into a space in which the whole meaning of the moment is revealed. This way of proceeding requires, or at least invites, an indirection of discourse. Kierkegaard famously remarked that the secret of communication is to set the other free. This is also a useful rule of inquiry into the truth of Being: to position oneself in such a way that one can hear as well as see, feel as well as think what it is that we are trying to understand. Literature is, in the view I will develop, an open domain and field of expression in which truth can happen, can come to a fuller presence in human understanding. There is an important cultural lesson in this procedure, whether or not I am able to make good on it here, that such understanding requires patience. This point has its parallel in Aristotle’s reminder about moral knowledge: that some subjects can be learned only by being made a part of the learner’s very nature, and this takes time. I

Mystery is elemental in human consciousness, generative in language, and fundamental to the project of culture; as such, it is a creative source and paradoxical aspiration of literature. The archaic and originating activities that became literature are not only shrouded in mystery, they address the shroud of mystery that surrounds consciousness. The emergence of ancient myth was less an attempt to explain the unknown than 31 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 31–46. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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to provide the unknown with a form of expression within which human existence could make itself known. ‘‘To make known’’ at this level is not to provide explanation, nor ensure understanding, but only to connect human consciousness with what it is not, with that out of which it came to be. This first movement of literary imagination is a means that enables understanding, of making a space for Being to come into presence. So conceived, myth is a primitive form of literature that joins truth and reality. Mystery and the wonder of the unknown arose with imagination, and remain a vital part of its cultural appeal. The modern world seems often to have outgrown fascination with the deeper mysteries of existence, but there is still marginal wonder with the unknown of endings, most of all with death. But in the beginning, the wonder was with the unknown of the beginning, the before. The earliest mystery concerned the unknowable that led to life and world, not just to the mystery of what leads away. The Greeks, who first brought critical reflection into focus and so into literature, still had a sense of astonishment concerning Being. For Aristotle, philosophy only begins in wonder; in creative literature – unlike philosophy and history – that wonder is preserved, and with it, the mystery that constitutes the bookends of existence and world. In the ubiquitous metaphysics of modern technology, whatever discourse is not instrumentally useful becomes thereby meaningless or vacuous; lacking specificity, it becomes specious. Nietzsche’s provocative challenge to the contemporary spirit, that whatever does not destroy you makes you stronger, is only an extension of enervating logic of ‘‘Carpe Diem’’ in which the cultural imperative of intelligence is self-empowerment, a self-absorption of existence in conflict with itself. If not a dismissal of mystery, this engagement of will is pitched to contest its hold on human imagination. Mystery, in this now common view, is an occasion and obstacle such that the task of the critical arts is to dispel mystery, and that of the creative arts to explicate it. Science is to displace mystery with fact, and one presumes the correlative task of literature is to translate it into entertainment. Perhaps this oversimplifies even common understanding, but I set it out as a touchstone for what I want to investigate, that mystery must remain a vital part of every cultural endeavor; preserving mystery is an essential task of both scientific and literary imagination. In what follows, I will compare the response to mystery by philosophy, science, religion and literature. Each cultural domain offers something of value to an understanding of the mystery of existence, but it is the world

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of literature that is most open to the self-disclosing truth of mystery. To this end we will consider not only how truth is a mystery, but also in what way there is truth in mystery. The goal of this inquiry is to understand the sense in which mystery is truth, open to the reach of poetic imagination in literature. It is only at the margins of our language, our culture, and our sensibilities that we are still open to the elemental experience of mystery. This experience has many names, indeed comes in any number of possible categories, both common and rare. Familiar names given to normalize the experience of mystery are ‘‘beauty’’, ‘‘awe’’, ‘‘faith’’, ‘‘God’’, ‘‘ecstasy’’, ‘‘the uncanny’’, ‘‘eternity,’’ and ‘‘the unfathomable’’. But the same sense of self and other, of ‘‘everything and nothing’’ may be occasioned by anything that quickens consciousness to its own existence: a sudden awakening to the sound of rain, a pause beside a brook on a fine summer day, the calling of one’s name in a distant land, the smile on a strangely familiar face. But mystery objectified, projected only onto or away from the order and disorder of things in the world, defeats the phenomenological project of understanding human existence. We live now in a world leveled by the dominance of objective discourse obsessed with material things, and with the calculative utility of their possession. In human terms, this victory of man over nature, world over man, comes at the expense of a deeper perception of reality. Against such leveling of discourse, the task of literature is to remain open to inclusive dimensions of Being disclosed through creative imagination. Nietzsche remains a provocative and productive source for an analysis of the connection between art and culture. Although the concept of the will to power seems to dispel the hold of mystery on imagination, his demonstration that mythos is essential to a healthy culture reinstates mystery in the equation of cultural evolution. On Nietzsche’s analysis, in the modern reduction of logos to logic, and logic to the social logistics of common agreement, culture loses the mystery of the mythic, the mythos of story, and so the imaginative core of its creative energy. While Nietzsche has a point in his criticism of the common sense reduction of normal science to the delineation of fact, there is clearly a sense and level at which creative science is a cultural poiesis, a making of intelligible stories. While it is useful to distinguish the point and profit of different languages and genres of human inquiry and expression in the arts and sciences, we do violence to truth by disjoining them into categories of either creative or critical discourse. Although the question of the connection between the factive and fictive in science is of interest here, my focus will concern

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the nature of mystery in the truth of literature, where mythos is both source and measure. A common idea that leads away from recognition of elemental mystery in all forms of cultural expression is framed by C. P. Snow’s demarcation of the ‘‘two cultures’’ of science and art that divide critical and creative intelligence. This is a very old idea. Plato remarks on the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature, relegating one to divine inspiration, presumably a madness of mystical indulgence, granting the other critical logos in which the mystical is put aside. Despite posting sentries at the gates of the Republic to turn away poets, however, Plato had a wonderful way of waffling on the issue. His own dialogues, in praise of reason, have both a discursive and dramatic element to ensure that what cannot be demonstrated can still be disclosed through dramatic portrayal of context and character. Moreover, he makes use of myth at strategic points in argument to tether the sense of what otherwise remains an abstract consideration: for example in the Allegory of the Cave, or the Vision of Er. Finally, of course, there is the significant reminder in the Phaedo, where Socrates on the day of his execution is discovered setting into verse the fables of Aesop, with the worry that maybe he had the God wrong all along and that the way to wisdom was an art other than the practice of philosophy. The critical literature of classical Greek philosophy marks a significant beginning for the importance of mystery as a sustaining resource of human self-understanding. An early philosophical fragment of Heraclitus, ‘‘I went in search of myself,’’ signaled a foundational task for ensuing intellectual reflection and inquiry, paradoxically tying it to a fundamental conviction that Man in his very existence is most of all a mystery to himself – consciousness itself is a mystery. This paradox is echoed in the familiar imperative of wisdom, ‘‘Know Thyself,’’ carved on the cornerstone of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. An important contemporary consequence of the dark sayings of Heraclitus and the postulate of Aristotle that connects philosophy and wonder is that they provide an occasion to once again raise the core issue of mystery in human self-understanding. A sharpened sensibility to the fullness of life restores mystery to a world grown otherwise too weary and wise in its skeptical and protective indifference to residuals of wonder. If we want the whole truth of human reality, we must first confront the mystery of life itself. While it may be clear that mystery is a source of both inspiration and inquiry, it is a harder case to make that there is truth in mystery. Concerning both mystery and truth, our focus will remain that of litera-

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ture. It is possible to wash one’s hands of a concern for truth; this was the reasonable decision of Pilate, and remains a popular posture of skeptics everywhere. A dismissal of the question of truth in the effective acceptance of pragmatism is now a standard presumption of social science and political practice. Only literature seems always to remain immune from the debunking press of impatience in dismissing truth, partly because as fiction, it is excused from an expectation of fact, and partly because as an aesthetic endeavor, it is understood to appeal finally to beauty, not truth, goodness, or utility. Even so, the world’s great literature has always raised anew the question of a deeper truth, of an enduring, universal, or eternal truth, even against the post-colonial, post-modern particularities of opposition to the facticities of circumstance. There has always been an important connection between truth and freedom, when framed independently of the motive of power. This is no less so at the frontiers of scientific inquiry, commonly conceded in even a surface understanding of the work of Einstein, Heisenberg, or Feynman. The free play of imagination at the creative borders of poetry and physics thus re-introduces the germ of mystery at the heart of every cultural exchange. The physicist, facing the indeterminacy of nature in fixing reality, the poet challenged by the indeterminate density of the spirit. When the search for truth concerns wisdom or faith, its goal is manifestly freedom. For Socrates, the pursuit of wisdom required the freedom of discourse; Kierkegaard, echoing the Scriptural promise that Truth sets one free, insisted that the secret of all communication is to set the other free. In each case, freedom into what? Into the mystery of the mind’s exercise of inquiry and expression. The question of truth as such, rough-hewn or whole cloth, remains open, subject only to the limits of human imagination. In literary terms, the plainest expression of this is to concede that life in all its wonder is a depth of mystery. In philosophical terms, whether the context is critical, intuitive or revelatory, truth is still couched in the familiar paradox framed by Socratic ignorance: how is a contingent, historical, existing temporal person to attain what is timeless? If truth worthy of the name is not subject to the fleeting vagaries of time and place, how are we, creatures bound in time and space, to gain access to it? The Socratic understanding of moral life, of how to live fully as a human being, defined truth not as a power of possession but as a search for transcendence. Wisdom, Socrates remarked, belongs only to the god; for the rest of us, there is only the commitment to its pursuit. Plato’s amendment, making Truth an ideal object of transcendence, did not remove the paradox of

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our grounding in its remove: whatever wisdom we ultimately acquire of truth, in immanence or transcendence, it is a moving point fixed briefly in the interstices of mystery. Whatever analytical answers are given to connect opinion and knowledge, mind and world, subject and object, word and thing, existence and essence, there remains always the initial quandary concerning truth that seems to undermine the whole project: how do we get there from here? Literature has no such question; for both here and there are wherever imagination takes root and its expression finds resonance with the possibilities of lived experience. We can, as is often recommended in the temper of our time, reject or override the question of truth, either in skeptical dismissal or in dogmatic embrace. But if one takes the question of truth seriously, then alternative modalities of at least two kinds become apparent: truth as fixed or truth as transcendence. There are endless claims of legitimacy in configuring truth. The question is: can truth appear other than in some agenda of conscription? Can truth somehow simply be disclosed without deliberate configuration? Poetic license does not take leave of truth, only transcends the ordinary of expectation or fact. In this sense the poetic is a transcendent search for truth in the sense of its disclosure to the broad reach of the imagination. Literature is an indispensable mode of exploring the depths of transcendence – transcending time, place, and circumstance, it transports the individual, transfigures the actual, transforms the common. In this mode it constitutes a hermeneutics of truth. The simple view that truth is most clearly manifest in the shared experiences of ordinary lives must still find its source in a broader ascription of embodied truth. In the absence of an enframing story, perceptual experience, whatever its claim for meaning, is so far, without appeal to truth. Lived experience as such, as Sartre pointed out, is not yet even an adventure. Until a story connects the flux of awareness into coherent meaning, and literary imagination further transforms the commonplace into the transcending possibilities of self-understanding, the question of truth arguably is not even brooked. II

There are different cultural responses to mystery that reflect different human interests and historical achievements. In terms of the immediacy of experience, in what we now think of as purely aesthetic expression, the artistic impulse of imagination first framed images of things absent – brought the past to presence of mind and perception. The ancient paint-

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ings on the deep cave walls of Lascaux suggest both the mystery of imagination and magic of its expression. Such expression allowed human beings to take hold of the world, to recreate the images seen and felt, and so command power over the forces of their being and movement. Such images refined into art provide historical continuity to culture and a continuous window into human possibility. Through them, in art and literature we still have access to voices in the time of the gods. Mythic expression is an elemental response to the mysteries of the turning seasons and heavens, of life and death, gods and men; its codification into a coherent story simply frames the mystery of existence in a way that makes sense. Nature, destiny, and the will of the gods, however concerned or unconcerned they are with human life, are beyond the pale of human command or conscription. Myth and mystery sustain each other; at the very least they are compatible. Once stories become invested in the lives of those who tell and hear them, the practice of ritual arises, and mythic literature becomes encoded in a cult of practice, in a commitment to the truth or necessity of belief. Religious impulse, generated in a sense of awe, transforms fear into a celebration of wonder. It is a cultural insistence that mystery is in itself meaningful, and its appropriation is a matter of belief and inspiration rather than comprehension. While religion is a celebration of mystery, theology is its intended explication. One may argue that the hermeneutics of revelation is the first misstep of cultural retreat from what Nietzsche called the vitality of mythos. Modern science, locating the historical grounding of the logic of its method and discipline with Aristotle, might agree that scientific inquiry begins in wonder, but insist that this only sets the task for its removal. The modern era of critical inquiry turned to the elimination of mystery in the systematic framing of all questions within a logic of verification and falsification. Descartes’ impatience with any inquiry for which certain boundaries of truth cannot be set out advanced the principle of methodological doubt that remains the spiritual core of the sciences: doubt everything in order to ground certainty. It is only in this grounding that a progressive mastery of the world can be accomplished. As a method of achieving mastery, the method is faultless; as a mode of understanding truth, it is flawed. Contemporary logical positivism further extended the principle of verification to a monopoly of sense. Social science statistical techniques constitute a leveling of mystery. It may be that the attempt to dismiss or eliminate mystery properly refers only to normal science, not to revolutionary science. Arguably, the latter does not eliminate mystery,

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but only extends its boundaries, or re-describes the shifting grounds of its configuration. Moreover, at the present and penultimate point of revolutionary science, it may be useful to suggest a category compatible with that mystery still at the heart of creative inquiry that we might call revelatory science. This would include the search for new modes of artificial languages that prove more powerful than the so-called ‘natural’ languages, which have formed traditional social frameworks of agreement. Such revelatory inquiry must not only tolerate, but also court the mystery of paradox. An obvious example is non-Euclidean geometry, in which the shortest point between two points is no longer a straight line; or, expressed paradoxically, a straight line is now defined as the arc of a circle whose radius is infinite. The power of the paradox generating systems in which parallel lines do meet further opens the exploration of mysteries that await in space. There are two ways to assess the power and success of variable perspectives in science: either dismiss the idea of a singular and ultimate truth of reality entirely, or concede the limitations of human perspectives in its comprehension. Emergent scientific interest in pattern analysis and chaos theory reintroduces mystery without mysticism, and opens up critical inquiry again in creative and imaginative ways. The recent film concerning the recognition accorded the mathematician John Nash dramatizes a point. Recall his first efforts at configuring significant patterns in the movements of birds searching for food, or plotting the random gathering or couplings of students in a cabaret. The important point to notice is a legitimate mathematical, and consequently scientific interest in (apparently) random patterns of life that form the mysterious relations among disparate perceptions of human experience. It may well be that the point of scientific inquiry is to project useful configurations of possibilities, but it needs acknowledging that possibility exceeds those useful configurations. Philosophy has always modeled a similar limited ideal; in its most obvious traditional forms, it is an effort to replace the natural mystery of life with systematic designs of its own reflections. It remains primarily, then, to literature and the arts to engage in a discovery of the spirit of truth in beauty – a creative project that has no need to eliminate, reject, replace, explain or explain away the wonder of life. III

It is important to note that mystery, which seems to be an awareness of something absent from comprehension, is nonetheless experienced as a

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presence. Mystery commonly brings with it a sense and meaning of indeterminate, perhaps indeterminable, content or reference. We speak, for example, and importantly, of death as a mystery, but it is a mystery experienced as a Presence. Obviously, it is not death itself that I experience, but the mystery of its meaning. Whether the context is a sense of loss concerning my own death or that of another, the mystery of death takes hold of my soul. The presencing of this mystery may bring an accompanying terror, or regret, or possibly anticipated release. In the case of my sister who has just died, or, alternately, my anticipated loss when she is failing, I dread the emptying out of her existence, the disintegration of the life force that she has been. Imagination is never more real than in the presence of such mystery, the soul more centered and concerned. It is not merely my own loss, but my sense of her loss that fills the growing sense of absence, of disconnection, that comes to presence as the mystery of death. The Stoic counsel is that death is nothing, no living experience, for death is the absence of experience. But however well intended the counsel of taking delight only in the ease of pleasure, it cancels the depth and reach of imagination. A full life yields all the variances between rapture and despair in the play of imagination that inspires and directs literature. Themes of death and love in literature connect consciousness to life and world. Mystery itself is a mode of being in the world upon which literature draws. The experience and impulse of love, more than the desire for an object, pleads a reciprocal desire of another. But in its fundamental ontological aspect, as Sartre put it when referencing Stendhal and Proust, love aims at laying hold of the world in its entirety. Death and the mystery of its presence in consciousness are a different kind of connection from love, of course. Love is an intimate relation of transcendence to world in the alchemy between two existing persons. Death is a creative space of presencing between being and non-being, between the existent being I am and the nothingness against which I exist. Death is an acute awareness of existence, as love is a celebration of that existence. The world’s great literature is a domain of understanding manifest in the tension between the two defining categories, love and death. Typically philosophical discourse is directed to fix these categories. Death, for example in Plato, is analyzed in terms of possible meanings: it is a release of the soul from the body into cycles of continuance, or a dispersion of atoms of energy, as oblivion into the advent of nothingness, or into sanctions of judgment. Literary discourse, on the other hand, is concerned rather to keep the avenues of mystery open to the imagination,

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even as it may elaborate the possibilities of Plato’s options. Primal images of death, a fearful lurking creature waiting in the devouring dark, fuels poetic imagination to expressions that leave the soul exposed to the remembered fears of childhood, drawn once again into the unknown and unknowable. Two ancient Hellenic and Hebraic poets offer similar and sweeping metaphors of inevitability that preserve the mystery of life and death: that Man’s days are numbered as the grass, so the wind passes over the field and shall know it no more, and that men’s lives are as leaves scattered by the seasons of wind that are no more. The poetic response to these great themes creates a space of imagination in which the individual comes to recognize the mystery of herself in the mirror of existence, whether in love or in death. The poetic surface of the looking glass of literature is fractured so that every experience is given infinite configurations of shapes, images, moods, and effects. Images of love range from the passionate excitement of first love to the no less passionate calm and gentle assurance of aging closure: the brilliant radiance of Juliet, within which Romeo finds his spirit awakened in love, to the simple grace of each day’s most quiet need in the loving devotions of Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. The poetic expression of the experience of death has equal breadth of mystery: John Donne’s line from the Holy Sonnets that in the face of death, ‘‘all my pleasures are like yesterdays . . .’’ pries open the mystery of each person’s life in the detail of unique, but still commonly lost, yesterdays. A subsequent line voices a resolution and defiance against the dominion of death that lends some sense of empowerment, however tenuous, within the frail mystery of human existence. A different isolating and ominous sense comes to presence in Emily Dickinson’s line of a failing life that hears ‘‘a fly buzz when I died.’’ Perhaps the most familiar of any poetic context in which human existence is placed against the mystery of death is that of Hamlet’s quirk of puzzled speculation, and pause, courting death, as a journey ‘‘beyond the borne, from which no traveler returns.’’ These poetic images in response to life in death are profoundly diverse and viscerally dense, and yet the mystery remains intact and in force. In the creative poiesis of words and works, love and death become natural objects, not in reference to something other. Death and passion coalesce into a concrete moment of presence in Macbeth’s great soliloquy of exhaustion in the sound and fury that signifies nothing. Shakespeare’s voice echoes the lamentation of death in Hamlet’s ‘‘good night, sweet prince. . . .’’ In a different mood, we are drawn into the aged longing of Tennyson’s Ulysses, or the youthful sorrow of loss in In Memoriam, drawn

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into the tenuous hope of Wordsworth’s Intimations, and so on into the acute and intimate images that surround these themes in literature. Poetry in this way brings to presence concrete and palpable experiences otherwise out of reach of shared meaning. The essence of the poetic, whether of love or death, is mystery. Browning’s line that ‘‘a man’s reach should exceed his grasp – or what is a heaven for?’’ marks the reach of literature as well, to move beyond, beneath, or apart from what is given, predictable, and possessible, to what is only possible through the poiesis of creative imagination. The poetic re-discovery of mystery in the obvious and common, is always a lesson of looking into the depth of a mirror of culture that otherwise reflects too often only an indifferent world otherwise engaged. Mystery, endemic to the opening presence of imagination, leads to a quickened sense of literary expression, discovering its own power, and at the same time its own vulnerability. The poetics of mystery in literature range from surface surprise to wondrous awe; they record the variegated capacities of human response from nervous amusement in comedic puzzles, to lyric joy in poetry and drama, to profound and resonating depths of despair and triumph in tragic drama. The greatest mystery in literature may be the existence of language itself, the sheer fact of meaning. It is easily enough said that Man is a symbolic animal, a creature with the capacity of speech, as Aristotle put it. But only a moment’s reflection on this incredible empowerment of selfconsciousness gives access to the core of what makes literature an evolutionary extension of the human modalities and ways of being. It is a familiar thing to mark the magic of words as a process of transformation. Science transforms the possible into the actual, exercising a leverage of language over the phenomena of nature. In literature, there is a reverse sense in which the actual is transformed into the possible, the plausible into the impossible. Imagination is so much an ordinary part of the mind’s exercise that we too seldom take time to reflect not on its accomplishments, but on the simple fact of its existence. Whether its achievement is scientific or literary, language is the root of transformation, and there is surely no more transparent symbol for the mystery at the heart of human endeavor than language itself. The draw and movement of literature is founded in this gift of mystery in the genius of language. Mystery comes into reflective existence in the activity of imagination as it becomes aware of its estrangement from the source of its content. In this case the mystery of one’s own existence may bring with it in an acute sense of loss in the realization that the individual is not one with the world. So

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described as a theme of literature, mystery marks a process both of alienation and realization. In this experience the individual comes to a heightened awareness of both herself and the other. The mystery of the past has its epistemic parallel in the present: whether a puzzle of perception or cognition, memory or imagination, it takes only the disconnection of a moment to throw the whole into mystery of mind and world. Mystery and magic are allied where the ordinary of memory and imagination are revisited. Memory brings the dead past to present life; in transforming past to present, it brings a past event in the world, to a present remembrance in the mind. A simple model for this alliance can be shown in the deconstruction of perception and cognition. The now familiar distinction between an object of perception and an idea of conception, only becomes curious to us when the distinction breaks down, in some ‘‘pathological’’ setting – e.g. hallucinations – in which a person cannot make a distinction between what is being perceived and what imagined (recall again the recent depiction of the case of the mathematician John Nash in the film ‘‘A Beautiful Mind’’). In quite ordinary circumstances, we often have a similar problem in confusing memory and imagination. I remember so well the magnificent elms I climbed as a child in front of our house in Chicago, but now I discover through conversation with my parents that we lived in a new development where there were no trees at all. So I concede that I must be imagining this; but I may wonder at the persistent conviction that it was so, that this is not an ethereal invention, but a coming to presence in mind of a past situation and lived event. The point pertaining to mystery is not that there may be a mistaken conflation of imagination and memory. The phenomenological network of mind and calling may be recalled in Faulkner’s reminder that ‘‘Memory believes before knowing remembers, believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.’’ Mystery remains a presence in the web of beliefs that constitute our existence. IV

Mystery, Magic, Miracle: The advent of mystery at the point of reflective consciousness is astonishment that the world exists, that there is anything at all, that there is something rather than nothing. Magic enters the circle of mystery in the search for the logos and techne of power in the poiesis, praxis, and theoria of thought and action. Miracle completes the mystery cycle in human culture with the acknowledgement or projection of a transcendent creative power concerned for the world. Three different

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kinds of response to mystery may be referenced broadly as philosophy, science, and religion. If we make a basic division of mystery into the unknown and the unknowable, science, under the rule of demand and logos of control, responds to the former and dismisses the unknowable. The unknown is met in the case of theoretical science with explanation, and in the case of the practical sciences with organization. The goal of each is to remove the mystery of the unknown through the rational empowerment of knowledge. In contrast to this, the domain of the unknowable remains a source of appeal to both philosophy and religion, and to literature, which draws from and deepens the sense of each. The telos of philosophy is wisdom in an understanding of the unknowable. The telos of religion is worship of the unknowable through faith. Whether the mode is sacred or secular, however, a rule of service and supplication orders this response to mystery. The attributive aim of science is power, of philosophy wisdom, of religion faith. Finally, though not independently, the parallel aim of literature is beauty. But in each case there is a legitimate claim to truth, albeit of different kinds, and those truths are connected to the many aspects of mystery – truths of explanation, organization, understanding, worship, and in the case of literature and the arts generally, the truth of celebration. In the poetic response to mystery, imagination is not limited to a logic of explanation (science), a logic of resolution (politics), or a logic of belief (religion), but only a logic of expression, and as such imagination is opened to a disclosure of human consciousness not grounded in a prior concern for limits. In literature, imagination is fueled by passion as well as reason, by arbitrary as well as ordered forms of articulation, by mood no less than method; its appeal is as much seduction and sedition as reason and rationality. Unconcerned with truth as either verifying or legitimating, literature is as close as human understanding comes to the realization and expression of freedom in truth. Three principal sources of mystery embedded in human consciousness seem to divide in literature: the mystery of emergence that produces a literature of wonder, the mystery of endurance that produces a literature of courage, and the mystery of transcendence that produces a literature of hope. Consider the historical genres of literature responding to the great open depths of mystery. Hebraic and Hellenic texts respond to the mysteries of beginnings and overcomings. In beginnings there is a literary search for sense; in overcomings, a search for identity. In myth, stories of gods merge into stories of heroes. Epic literature searches the reaches of imagination for a sustaining sense of tradition, tragic drama

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for a sense of destiny in the logic of inevitability. It hardly requires argument or example that poetic expression is the haunt of mystery. Consider easily accessible examples in the mythic themes of Yeats’ L eda and the Swan, in which the violent parting of these thighs envisions the destruction of Troy and death of Agamemnon, of the spiritual terror of T he Second Coming, in which some rough beast slouches toward its birthing in Bethlehem (an image particularly haunting in our time). Think of the nature themes in Wordsworth’s often hearing the still sad music of humanity in the green hills looking down upon the delicate stone ruins of Tintern Abbey; think of the mystery of the burning brightness in Blake’s dark forests of night, of Tennyson’s soft lament as the trees weep their burthen to the ground in the parting beauty of the last summer song of the swan, of Frost’s woods, deep and dark in snow and of the road’s parting, leading to one knows not what; of Dickenson’s courtly prince of darkness kindly stopping, Thomas raging against that darkness, Keats quietly ceasing upon the midnight with no pain, of Rilke’s soul exposed to the raw dark space of the universe, rejoicing in the mystery of the dark earth’s renewing life. Continuing with the theme of darkness and mystery in the novel, think of Conrad’s definitive work in which Marlowe, backing away with humiliation from the pit of recognition in the heart of darkness, confesses his rational cowardice, musing about the droll mystery of Life, that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose . . . , concluding that if such is the meaning of life, it is a bigger puzzle than anyone could have imagined. These are familiar lines, images that come easily to mind, however deeply disturbing their contemplation. At the heart of the language of metaphor is the mystery of its density and disclosure. The life of mystery in a line of poetry is endless in its awakening. The name and nature of mystery in the culture of poetry, as well as its occasions, are endless as well: Fate and Destiny, Future and Past, Being and Nothingness, Immanence and Transcendence, Existence and Oblivion, Life and Death, Time and Eternity, God and Immortality, Love and Loss, the unfathomable abyss of mind, body and soul, the consciousness of existence. Wittgenstein’s suggestion that the most obvious image of mystery is language itself, in its very existence, places mystery prior to the poetic reach of metaphor and paradox through which literature stretches the limits of language. We are creatures caught in the moment between past and future. The past is lost to us but in memory; the future is unknown to us but in imagination. Literature finds resource in both, gives expression to both,

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and brings both to presence in the poetic work. Claude Monet provides an apt metaphor for the poetic task in his remark that he ‘‘paints the moment,’’ but in the work of genius, that moment opens into eternity, and therein lies mystery and its truth.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

We have noticed three primary creative languages in response to mystery: the language of science that dismisses mystery in favor of the secular magic of technology and the ordering of nature; the language of religion that captures mystery within the confining net of faith; the language of philosophy that first remarked on the mystery opened to critical consciousness but only proceeded to anatomize the wonder it provoked. In contrast to the limiting logic of these languages designed to empower specific perspectives, we have commended the language of literature. Here the variegated expression of the poetic freely draws on the creative intuitions and insights of all forms of discourse. The ground that sustains the freedom of poetic discourse seems to be twofold: the beauty of expression, and the truth of reality. The aesthetics of beauty are open to every form of human expression. The elegance of mathematics and devotions of the mystic both have a claim to beauty, no less than to a piece of the truth. The collusion of the poetic is more apparent, perhaps, in religious literature, music, and art than in scientific theory or practice, but a concern for, and response to the ineffable of Beauty is apparent in the appreciation and judgment of each. The singular advantage of literature is that it is open to draw on themes as well as insights of philosophy, science, religion and every other form of cultural articulation of human existence. The second grounding of literature, in the truth of reality, again is not exclusive. Any sense of reality that includes human passion can hardly deny access to religion. The case of science one must argue from the other side, showing there are good reasons not to grant to the language of science an exclusive claim to the truth of reality. Even granting each cultural project access to truth, it is the poetic language of literature that searches out the full dimensions of human concern in questions that lead either to religious devotion or a scientific ordering of nature. Not limited in motive to the empowerment of truth nor transcendence of world, literature is creatively free to fantasize fact and secularize the sacred, and so stretch the boundaries of human sensibility to the possibilities of its own existence.

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Whether Keats’ aphorism that ‘Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth’ can survive the debunking ironies of an embarrassed age in which ‘‘. . . all we have to know’’ concerns neither, there is reason to preserve the mystery of this relationship, whatever it may be. Nietzsche’s remark that tragic drama must worship at the shrine of both gods, Apollo and Dionysos, reason and passion, has its broader analogue in the whole of literature, which exists in a continuous poetic tension and occasional confluence of these two pillars of mystery: beauty and truth. The centrality of aletheia is the truth of self-disclosure and the unfolding of Being; whatever weight one gives to Heidegger’s warning that its recognition is imperative for the future survival of human life, the importance of this conception of truth for the life of literature is clear enough. Truth, so understood as the creative space that literature opens to human understanding, constitutes a vital endowment that preserves the mystery of existence necessary to inspire imagination and sustain the human spirit. T rinity University San Antonio, T exas

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Une e´nigme peut encore se re´soudre, mais un myste`re doit rester impe´ne´trable a` la raison. J.-F. Lyotard, Moralite´s postmodernes1 Oedipus: v˝z pa´ nt’ a˚can ai˙nikta` ka˙sawg@ le´ cez. Tiresias: ou˚koun su` tau@ t’ a˚ristoz eu˝ri´skein e˚wuz; Sophocles, Oedipus T yrannus2 Alles Entbergen geho¨rt in ein Bergen und Verbergen. Verborgen aber ist und immer sich verbergend das Befreiende, das Geheimnis. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Die Frage nach der Technik’’3

I

When Oedipus meets the Sphinx – a monster that plagues the city of Thebes – he doesn’t know that he is on his way to becoming a monster himself. The Sphinx proposes a riddle, the content of which would have remained a mystery had not some collectors of mythological gossip from the late antiquity included it in their anthologies. The most famous, most detailed, and most relied-upon version of the riddle (ainigma) is that of Athenaeus, who in the tenth book of his Deipnosophists quotes from the Stories from T ragedy (T ragoˆdoumena) by Asclepiades of Tragilos, a disciple of Isocrates: ‘‘There walks on land a creature of two feet, of four feet, and of three; it has one voice, but, sole among animals that grow on land or in the sky or beneath the sea, it can change its nature; nay, when it walks propped on most feet, then is the speed of its limbs less than it has ever been before.’’4 And apparently the right answer to the ainigma, the one that made Oedipus famous, was ‘‘man.’’5 Oedipus was able to solve the riddle not only because he possessed an uncommon intelligence but also because of his experience of suffering, of joy, of questioning – of being human. At least this is the opinion of those who use the myth of the Sphinx in their reading of Sophocles’ tragedy. Indeed, although the 47 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 47–63. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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wording of the ainigma in Oedipus’ myth does not belong to Sophocles’ drama in the strict sense – it is exo tou dramatos and as such should not be taken into account according to the Poetics – the modern ‘‘humanist’’ and professedly Aristotelian readers of Oedipus the King often refer to the enigma of the Sphinx. Bernard Knox is perhaps the most influential among those who read Oedipus the King as a kind of philosophical riddle. He links the ainigma and especially Oedipus’ answer to the enlightenment and humanism of fifth-century-B.C. Greece. Protagoras’ famous formula: ‘‘Man is the measure of all things,’’ is offered in support of this interpretation.6 Protagoras, the famous Sophist and a contemporary of Sophocles, expressed this extreme faith in the centrality of anthroˆpos at the outset of his book T he T ruth (Aleˆtheia), and it became the most striking expression of the so-called ‘‘Greek enlightenment.’’ But the possibility of an infinite development of arts and sciences was questioned at about the same time in another tragedy of Sophocles, Antigone, in the so-called ‘‘Ode to Man.’’ However, Knox, who refers to the ‘‘Ode’’ in his interpretation, doesn’t read it as a radical questioning of the humanist faith in the progress of civilization, but rather as its philosophical enframing. Oedipus is then presented as the hero of civilization,7 a pilot of the ‘‘ship of state,’’ a healer of the community, an orator, a mathematician and a craftsman in general, trying to apply rigorous methods to all problems of life.8 In Knox’s view, even though Oedipus fails at the end, it is not without learning the Socratic humanist wisdom: ‘‘The closing note of the tragedy is a renewed insistence on the heroic nature of Oedipus; the play ends as it began, with the greatness of the hero. But it is a different kind of greatness. It is now based on knowledge, not, as before, on ignorance, and this new knowledge is, like that of Socrates, a recognition of man’s ignorance.’’9 Tragedy, indeed poetry in general, is ‘‘more philosophical’’ than history or myth. Knox’s questioning does not go so far as to abandon Aristotle’s belief in the pleasurable learning process of mimesis and catharsis. Knox’s reading of Oedipus the King helped Leon Golden to establish his famous interpretation of the Aristotelian catharsis as intellectual clarification.10 The effect of tragedy, its ‘‘ergon’’ as suggested in the Poetics,11 should be understood neither morally (as in most neoclassic doctrines) nor psychologically (in the wake of Bernays, and Breuer and Freud),12 but intellectually as an elucidation of the spectators’ view of man and the world. Golden’s theory, which seems like the extreme consequence of the view of tragedy as an ‘‘intellectual riddle,’’ has been largely accepted

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among the most recent interpreters of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King.13 The incontestable merit of this reading is the introduction of some important qualifying factors to the optimist humanist worldview of Greek, and by analogy modern, enlightenment. But it certainly does not reverse this view. Oedipus remains a philosopher: not der letzte Philosoph of Nietzsche, who announces the reversal of Platonism,14 but rather a Socratic philosopher. The tragedy again conforms to the Aristotelian models.15 II

To say that the word ‘‘mystery’’ is mysterious does not seem philosophically sound. But then, mystery is perhaps not philosophical, at least not altogether philosophical – pre-philosophical perhaps, if we believe (with Plato and Aristotle, among others) that philosophy begins with wonder, which seems to be situated at the limit of mystery and puzzle. The history of Western philosophy, in the sense given to this word by Platonism, is the history of the efforts to reduce the original mystery of being, the cause of philosophical amazement, and to bring it to the level of puzzle. Plato’s own theory of Intelligible Forms constitutes such an attempt – the most famous one. If amazement (to thaumazein) is the arkheˆ (beginning and principle) of philosophy, in fact ‘‘the only one’’ (T heaetetus 155d), it is only the beginning. The amazement caused by the puzzling nature of sensible things – which seem at once alike and different, singular and multiple, static and in motion – should be overcome by the reference to the world of real beings, the mathematical and moral Intelligible Forms (ideai). When set against the latter – ideal numbers, triangles, and moral virtues – sensible things and human actions (merely apparent realities) lose their mysterious character. When in the ‘‘introduction’’ to his Metaphysics (book alpha),16 Aristotle, like Plato, insists on ‘‘wonder’’ as the beginning and principle of philosophy, again this wonder marks only the initial stage of philosophical investigation. A causal explanation should ‘‘save phenomena’’ that appeared puzzling in the beginning and – through such rational, causal explanation – eliminate wonder. The telos of philosophy, for Aristotle as well as for Plato, is to produce a coherent picture of the world. It is in this sense – the sense of puzzlement at an aporia (a contradiction, a paradox), mixed with (and eventually transformed into) admiration – that Aristotle brings together the amazement of the lover of myths ( philomuthos) and that of the lover of wisdom or knowledge ( philosophos): ‘‘It

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is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize . . . the myth-lover ( philo-muthos) is in a sense a philosopher ( philosophos), since myths are composed of wonders’’ (982b19). The alignment of the lover of myth with the philosopher here reduces myth to the status of an immature science, an inchoate knowledge of the world in need of a rational completion. Aristotle’s understanding of the principle of amazement (to thaumaston) in the Poetics comes close to his general epistemological view. When analyzing the end (telos) of tragedy – to arouse pity and fear in order to achieve catharsis of these and similar emotions – Aristotle insists on the suppression of bewilderment and amazement. This statement comes just after his proclaiming tragedy more philosophical ( philosophoˆteron) than history.17 As in philosophy, the end of tragic plot is admiration in the face of the triumph of the rational and rightful order of the universe.18 If all Western philosophers seem to agree with Plato and with Aristotle that the beginning of philosophy is wonder before an aporia, most of them tend to focus on philosophy’s end as the solution of aporias, overcoming of contradictions, and the suppression of wonder. The initial bewilderment and uneasiness before the object of inquiry is not supposed to persist in the advanced philosophical state, the state of sophia (wisdom or knowledge); it is to be replaced with the intellectual comfort of understanding and familiarity with the object. The state of wonder when confronted with a world ‘‘out of joint’’ is to be transformed into an admiration of the ‘‘new wonderful world,’’ a world comprehensively ordered by natural and divine laws. Such a world is often an ideal realm set against the chaotic world of everyday experience. III

The emphasis on the enigma of the Sphinx and its solution in the reading of Oedipus the King conforms to this pattern of philosophical maneuver. In the play, Oedipus succeeds in solving his own enigma through the same intellectual method that he displayed in the confrontation with the monster. Now he himself is revealed to be a monster but his eventual acknowledgement of this fact makes him still superior to those who watch his struggle. An epitome of disorder, he still manages through his recognition (anagnoˆrisis) to secure the sense of an orderly universe. Not only does Oedipus (as a master of riddles) discover the culprit, but he also remains in charge in spite of the appearance of humility: it is he himself who punishes the culprit (that is, himself ) through blinding and exile.

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The mode of the ainigma or the unquestionable belief in intellectual mastery continues to dominate this reading of Oedipus the King. But is it certain that this mode determines the myth itself and that it governs the tragedy of Sophocles? Archeological and philological investigations of the origins and development of the myth of Oedipus show the belatedness of the motive of the Sphinx and her riddle. Homer’s Odyssey (book 11)19 does not mention the ainigma and it is only starting with the pottery of the fifth century B.C. that we find representations of Oedipus slaying the monster or listening to her attentively.20 The motif of the riddle does not appear earlier than the development of the fifth-century rationalism and humanism. In the framework of Aristotle’s Poetics, which continues and develops this trend, the motif of the riddle would provide a fitting reason for the intellectual superiority of the tragic hero (his ability to achieve anagnoˆrisis) and contributes to Aristotle’s marked preference for the tragedy of Sophocles in general and Oedipus the King in particular. This is also the conclusion reached by Lowell Edmundson, who collected much of the documentation concerning the development of the Oedipus myth and brought together the results of the previous research. Edmundson undertook a comparative study of this structural element in folktales from various traditions (ancient and modern Greek, Turkish, French, Russian, German). Their common pattern shows a hero who slaughters a monster in order to gain the princess. It seems that the motif of the riddle came later in order to justify the quality of the hero – his intelligence; the muthos (myth in general and the plot of tragedy) conformed to this model of a hero as the riddle-solver. The plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King belongs to this pattern. It begins with repeated references to the greatness of Oedipus, the savior of Thebes, and his action is then spelled out as an intellectual feat of solving the riddle of the Sphinx.21 Consequently, when Apollo’s oracle prescribes the purification (exposure of the murderer of Laius, in Oedipus’ and Creon’s interpretation) as the condition for the healing of the city tormented by the plague, Oedipus ‘‘naturally’’ sets out on his riddle-solving quest. The plot of the play develops along a series of steps leading to the discovery of the culprit. As with the Sphinx, Oedipus relies on his ability of rational calculation: he takes into account the number of perpetrators, of those who accompanied Laius, the exact time of the crime, etc. And he is again successful. To be sure, the inquiry and the discovery concerns mainly, if not exclusively, Oedipus himself; the spectators and almost all the characters know the truth long before the king. And here perhaps

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lies the real mystery of the play: why is Oedipus so blind to the truth? The simplest answer is again related to Oedipus’ calculations: there were several murderers according to the eyewitness, whereas Oedipus was alone when he killed a man in the place where the three roads meet. To be sure, Oedipus will get his counting right at the end. But is the real issue ‘‘who done it’’? Is the denouement of the detective story, the solution to the enigma (of the murder at the crossroads), what counts in (the) tragedy and in (the) myth? The riddle of the Sphinx represents – both in Sophocles’ tragedy and in the history of its interpretation (which, from Aristotle to Knox and Golden, epitomizes the interpretation of tragedy and of art in general) – a conception of philosophy and of truth epitomized in Heidegger’s phrase ‘‘the calculative frame of mind’’ (das rechnende Vorstellen).22 The major flaw of this conception, and of reading Oedipus the King according to the mode of the riddle, is its blindness to mystery. The Heideggerian theory of art as the setting-into-the-work (Ins-Werk-setzen) of truth, on the other hand, and his theory of truth as aleˆtheia, are able to ‘‘account for’’ the tragedy of Oedipus, while at the same time preserving the mystery of his fate, and eventually pointing to the truth of myth and poetry. To some extent Heidegger’s reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King conforms to the traditional philosophical pattern. The text where the Sophoclean tragedies are considered – An Introduction to Metaphysics23 – brings together myth, tragedy, and philosophy. And the second choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone, the famous ‘‘Ode to Man,’’ also plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s reading of Oedipus. However, in contradistinction with the Platonic/Aristotelian tradition, Heidegger does not situate myth and tragedy in either the antechamber of philosophy or a representation far removed from the true, original ‘‘reality,’’ from ‘‘the king and the truth.’’ It is precisely in myth and tragedy that the origin of the history of being appears. An Introduction to Metaphysics could be juxtaposed with Aristotle’s ‘‘introduction’’ to his own Metaphysics (book alpha). Both refer to the analysis of myth as the beginning of philosophical knowledge. But when Heidegger extols ‘‘mythology’’ to be a possible ‘‘knowledge of primordial history’’ (W issen von einer Ur-geschichte), which would maintain the mysterious character of this beginning in the history of Dasein (Geheimnischarakter dieses Anfangs), he is not exactly following Aristotle in his praise of the philomuthos. A true ‘‘lover of myth’’ would not be for him an initiator of philosophical or scientific knowledge.24 Heidegger firmly dismisses the idea of progress in the history of humanity from ‘‘primitive’’ to ‘‘developed’’ culture, an idea that can be traced to Aristotle’s

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view of the history of philosophy in the introductory sections of his Physics and Metaphysics. Myth – for example in the ‘‘poetic outline’’ (dichterischer Entwurf ) of Sophocles’ ‘‘Ode to Man’’ – does not narrate ‘‘man’s development from the savage hunter and primitive sailor to the civilized builder of cities’’ (119, 155). The latter view is an unwarranted application of a natural science [principally ethnology and psychological anthropology] to man’s being’’ (ibid.). It assumes the primitive, timid and ‘‘weak’’ beginning of the history of humanity. But in fact, ‘‘the beginning is the strangest and mightiest’’ (das Unheimlichste und Gewaltigste), says Heidegger, and myth is there in order to provide the testimony of this event of strangeness at the beginning. Its philosophical importance owes not to the fact that it launches philosophy and culture on its course toward a full realization of its scientific and technological potential – a capacity for rational explanation and mastery of the world – but precisely because it safeguards the mysterious character of the beginning. The misinterpretation and misappropriation of myth in the cultural history of the West (and the philosophy that supports it) testify to the difficulty of preserving this unique character of the beginning, its mystery and power. The ‘‘Ode to Man’’ in Sophocles’ Antigone constitutes a fundamental testimony to the ‘‘might’’ of the beginning. Heidegger reads this text in the section of An Introduction to Metaphysics devoted to the relationship between being and thinking. As a form of ‘‘thinking poetry,’’ indeed as a part of ‘‘the poetic project of being-human among the Greeks,’’ the ‘‘Ode’’ supplements Heidegger’s previous study of two ‘‘poetic thinkers’’: Heraclitus and Parmenides. These philosophers achieved an understanding of being in the essential union of physis as ‘‘original emergence’’ and logos as ‘‘unifying gathering,’’ and of being human in the ‘‘essential belonging together [Wesenszugeho¨rigkeit] of being and apprehension [Vernehmung].’’25 There is a need for such supplementation because the poetic thinking of the first philosophers is ‘‘strange’’ and ‘‘hard to approach directly’’ by modern readers. And it is precisely the strangeness of being human that needs to be grasped. The ‘‘Ode’’ points to the essence of Dasein as the ambivalence of to deinon: the strange and uncanny (das Unheimliche), at the same time wonderful and terrible. This phenomenon of strangeness intimated by the Sophoclean tragedy can be fully appreciated only in the experience of ‘‘the power of appearance and the struggle with it’’ as the ‘‘Poem’’ of Parmenides and Sophocles’ ‘‘Ode’’ are concerned, in Heidegger’s reading, with defining man out of being itself. Both texts point to the relationship between the order of being (to einai, dikeˆ)

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and that of ‘‘apprehension’’ (to noein, techneˆ) as the nexus of such definition. A reciprocal, sometimes violent, relation produces the effect of strangeness. Indeed, the essence of being human appears in both Parmenides and Sophocles as an aporia rather than as a clearly determined solution. This happening of strangeness or of the unfamiliar (das Geschehnis der Unheimlichkeit) is at the same time the happening of truth as unconcealment (das Geschehen der Unverborgenheit), as announced by Parmenides’ ‘‘Poem.’’ Both take place in the beginning of the history of humanity, which is thus the strangest and the mightiest.26 Thus, in Heidegger’s ‘‘philosophical’’ reading of Sophocles, the essence of human being as to deinotaton – das Unheimlichste, the strangest of all – is given in the form of questioning and of meaningful aporia. How different is this use of the ‘‘Ode’’ from that of the ‘‘humanist’’ interpretation! The accent is no longer (as it is still in Knox’s reading) on the nature of man and that which endangers it, but rather on that dangerous and mysterious element, to deinon – which, as part of human nature itself, makes it impossible unequivocally to circumscribe such a nature as an ideal. The perplexity before the strangeness of the beginning is not to be overcome or scientifically explained (away) as in the Aristotelian model. On the contrary, the greatness of thought resides in its respect of ‘‘the mysterious character of this beginning.’’27 The full appreciation of this event of disclosure/concealment of being human occurs – ‘‘if at all,’’ says Heidegger – in the domain of myth.28 The truth of myth ‘‘lies’’ not in its representation, approximation or correspondence of/with the real, which might be discovered independently – through a calculative reason – but in a direct manifestation of the primordial reality. Heidegger’s reading of the Sophoclean tragedy in his Introduction to Metaphysics does not belong to the representational thought, supported by the correspondence theory of truth (homoioˆsis, adaequatio, convenientia) but rather to the thought of truth as aleˆtheia or unhiddenness, unconcealment. Heidegger’s reference to paragraph 44 of Being and T ime, just before his remarks on Oedipus, unmistakably points to the problematic of truth. V

The word ‘‘mystery’’ (Geheimnis), used in An Introduction to Metaphysics, certainly belongs among the ‘‘basic words’’ (Grundworte) of human thought such as beauty, art, knowledge, freedom, or truth.29 One might even say that it is the most basic of them all, as it marks their fundamen-

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tally problematic character in relation to truth. Indeed, ‘‘mystery’’ is closely associated with truth in the series of lectures entitled ‘‘On the Essence of Truth,’’ delivered by Heidegger many times since the beginning of the thirties. Chapters six and seven of the seminal essay Vom Wesen der Wahrheit are centered on the notion of ‘‘mystery’’ (Geheimnis).30 In chapter six, often considered a decisive step in the ‘‘turning’’ (Kehre) in Heideggerian thought, mystery is not understood as a particular mystery concerning this or that region of being but rather as the mystery in general, the ‘‘concealing of what is concealed as a whole’’ (Verbergung des Verborgenen im Ganzen), of ‘‘beings as such’’ (des Seienden als eines solchen). It is this hidden mystery of being that ‘‘holds sway throughout (durchwaltet) man’s Da-sein.’’ The mystery of Dasein results from the ex-static nature of its temporality. Insofar as Dasein ek-sists, it enters the state of non-essence, of untruth, of the non-essence of truth, that is, precisely mystery. Paradoxically, this state does not mark a deficiency (of a general concept) but, on the contrary, a dignity of an originary, preessential essence (vor-wesendes Wesen) of the truth of being. The dignity of this mysterious non-essence as a part of the essence of truth is conceived in terms of precedence and primordiality. It is older (a¨lter) than the openness (OVenbarkeit) of beings, even older than letting-be (Seinlassen) itself, and hence originary. The ‘‘non-’’ (Un-) of the primeval (an-fa¨ngliche) sway of the non-essence of truth leads, then, to the truth of Being (Wahrheit des Seins). However, the same ek-sistence that brings Da-sein in the proximity of mystery, when combined with the in-sistent turning towards the everyday existence, leads it away from mystery and towards errancy (Irre). In Heidegger’s words: ‘‘The insistent turning toward what is readily available and the ek-sistent turning away from the mystery belong together. They are one and the same.’’31 This oscillating movement is proper to Dasein. Immersed in the rapid stream of everyday issues, man errs (der Mensch irrt). Erring (das Irren) is essentially ‘‘passing the mystery by’’ (vorbei am Geheimnis). ‘‘Essentially,’’ because errancy belongs to the essence of truth as its ‘‘essential counteressence’’ (wesentliches Gegenwesen). Errancy is not a simple mistake – an error (Irrtum) is only one of the most superficial of its forms – but rather the entire historical sphere of human Da-sein containing the possibility of all kinds of erring, from a simple waste of time or a miscalculation to an essential ‘‘going astray,’’ and at the same time a possibility of realizing the presence of mystery or even the possibility of a glimpse into the mystery out of errancy (Ausblick in das Geheimnis aus der Irre). This possibility depends on freedom, that is to say, letting beings as such be

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as a whole in the resoluteness, the ‘‘resolute openness’’ towards the mystery (Ent-schlossenheit zum Geheimnis).32

VI

In view of the common opinion issued from the ‘‘forgottenness of mystery’’ (Vergessenheit des Geheimnisses) and preoccupied with everydayness, with what is readily available, and what is easy to control, Heidegger recommends the renunciation of a paradoxical kind of discourse hinting at the thought of the mystery of Being.33 Indeed, because of its provocative and at the same time powerless character, this discourse should be abandoned. This recommendation can only be understood in light of Heidegger’s theory of art: it is the domain of myth and tragedy that constitutes a particular place where the truth of Being – understood as a mystery, not as a riddle – can come forth or appear. ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ an essay contemporary with An Introduction to Metaphysics, conceives art – in the most radical opposition to the Platonic tradition – as the setting-into-the-work of truth (das Ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit).34 The staging of Sophocles’ ‘‘Ode to Man,’’ a prominent example of a literary work of art, is such a setting-into-the-work of the truth of being-human with all its mysteriousness.35 Sophocles’ Oedipus T urannos goes one step further in staging the occultation of the mysteriousness of truth, and thus the possibility of its own misinterpretation in the form of confusion between riddle and mystery. The master of riddles, Oedipus could appear as an epitome of the will to truth, even in the sense of aleˆtheia. In one essential point, Heidegger’s reading of Oedipus Rex might be interpreted as going against his own view on art, truth, and respect for the original mystery. In a passage that cites a famous statement by Ho¨lderlin, Heidegger attributes not only to the poet Sophocles, but also to Oedipus the vocation of the setting-intothe-work of truth: [W]e cannot regard Oedipus only as the man who meets his downfall; we must see him as the embodiment of Greek being-there (Dasein), who most radically and wildly asserts its fundamental passion, the passion for disclosure of being, i.e., the struggle for being itself. In his poem ‘‘In lieblicher Bla¨ue blu¨het . . .’’ Ho¨lderlin wrote keen-sightedly: ‘‘Perhaps King Oedipus has an eye too many.’’ This eye too many is the fundamental condition for all great questioning and knowledge and also their only metaphysical ground. The knowledge and the science of the Greeks were this passion.36

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The paragraph that follows speaks of the degeneration of modern knowledge into science and calls for the recapturing of the original, ‘‘pristine’’ knowledge (urspru¨ngliches W issen), which in the modern world became science.37 It confirms the role of Oedipus as the agent of quintessential searching and questioning of Greek Dasein before this stance degenerated into superficial curiosity. In a recent book concerned with the ‘‘philosophical’’ readings of Greek tragedy, Jacques Taminiaux interprets Heidegger’s statement in this passage as the definite affirmation of the tragedy’s speculative character, with Oedipus as its ideal epitome.38 Thus, in spite of his theory of the mystery of truth, Heidegger finds himself in the company of Schelling and Hegel as a ‘‘metaphysical reader of the tragedians,’’ limited to the sphere of the bios theoreˆtikos or the contemplative way of life.39 Just like Antigone and Creon for Hegel, Oedipus is for Heidegger an ‘‘ontological effigy,’’ a ‘‘model for the Dasein,’’ ‘‘whitewashed of all hubris.’’ In short, for Taminiaux, Heidegger’s Oedipus would be ‘‘the effigy of the theoria, of the (prophetic) seeing (voyance), in what is the highest, and which is the source of all ‘greatness’: the vision of being.’’40 VII

Taminiaux’s view is justified to some extent by Heidegger’s reading of the fourth choral ode in Sophocles’ play – the one immediately following Oedipus’ recognition of the mystery of his fate (‘‘Oh the generations of men . . .’’ – Oedipus Rex, 1186–1221).41 Heidegger’s later text, however, the essay ‘‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,’’42 which refers to the same lines of Ho¨lderlin, offers another reading, and perhaps even sheds a new light on the one in An Introduction to Metaphysics. Indeed, Heidegger looks more closely at the whole poem ‘‘In Lovely Blueness . . .’’ (‘‘In lieblicher Bla¨ue . . .’’). The poem is concerned with setting a measure for being human. One is reminded of the Protagorean definition of man as ‘‘the measure of all things,’’ which we associated with the traditional humanist interpretation of Oedipus the King and of the Sophoclean tragedy in general.43 Here, however, it is no longer the philosopher (not in Protagoras’ or Aristotle’s sense at least) that is deemed competent to discover or establish this measure, but the poet. And Ho¨lderlin, who both in his own eyes and in those of Heidegger represents the ‘‘poetic thinking’’ comparable to that of Sophocles, places the ‘‘measure of man’’ (des Menschen Maaß) in the divinity: ‘‘As long as kindliness, which is pure, remains in his heart not unhappily a man measures himself against the godhead’’ (misset nicht unglu¨klich der Mensch sich mit der Gottheit).44

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What kind of measure is this? And what is the divinity Ho¨lderlin has in mind here? Is it not the goddess Aleˆtheia of Parmenides’ ‘‘Poem,’’ with its ‘‘mysterious’’ nature as outlined in Vom Wesen der Wahrheit? Heidegger does not say this explicitly, but his characterization of the godhead mentioned by Ho¨lderlin and of the process of measuring point in that direction. Indeed, not only the divine but also its manifestness (OVenbarkeit) are said to be mysterious (geheimnisvoll).45 The divinity is revealed as unknown, and it is as such that it is the measure for the poet. It is true that Ho¨lderlin uses the pronoun ‘‘he’’ when talking of the divinity here: ‘‘der Gott,’’ ‘‘dieser Unbekannte.’’46 But Heidegger’s elaboration of this notion includes the obvious attributes of Aleˆtheia. The appearance (Erscheinen) of the divinity consists in a disclosing (Enthu¨llen) that lets appear what conceals itself (sich verbirgt). And the poet makes the divinity appear in the sky without wresting the concealed (das Verborgene) from its concealment (Verborgenheit). Rather, he guards (hu¨tet) the concealed in its self-concealment (Sichverbergen). This is a strange measure (ein seltsames Maß) for being human – strange and perplexing ‘‘to the common notions of mortals, inconvenient to the cheap omniscience of everyday opinion, which likes to claim that it is the standard for all thinking and reflection.’’47 It is this cheap omniscience, the customary kind of measuring confined within a quantity and order, especially in the modern ‘‘calculative frame of mind’’ that is foreshadowed in the riddle episode of the myth and the tragedy of Oedipus and, one might add, in the history of the interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. At the end of his essay, Heidegger repeats the reference to Ho¨lderlin’s words on Oedipus’ supplementary eye, which in An Introduction to Metaphysics seemed to express his admiration for the passion of the Greeks for knowledge and science. This time, however, Heidegger’s comment unambiguously condemns the excess of Oedipus’ ‘‘scientific’’ curiosity – ‘‘a curious excess of frantic measuring and calculating’’ (ein seltsames ¨ bermaß eines rasenden Messens und Rechnens).48 Indeed, his excessive U trust in common measures prevents Oedipus from taking the poetic measure, which in Heidegger’s view is essential for all human – also, or perhaps especially, political – dwelling. It is because of Oedipus’ trust in this calculative power that Tiresias calls him – with a measure of sarcasm – ‘‘the master of riddles.’’49 VIII

Ho¨lderlin himself refers to the exchange with Tiresias in his ¨ dipus’’ (remarks which might have influenced ‘‘Anmerkungen zum O

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Heidegger’s rereading of ‘‘In lieblicher Bla¨ue . . .’’).50 And he categorizes as nefas (Latin translation of the Greek hubris or ‘‘arrogant excess’’) Oedipus’ action initiated by his ‘‘too infinite’’ (zu unendlich) interpretation of Phoebus’ oracle brought by Creon:51 Geboten hat uns Pho¨bos klar, der Ko¨nig, Man soll des Landes Schmach, auf diesem Grund gena¨hrt, Verfolgen, nicht Unheilbares erna¨hren.52 The oracle could be (and should, in Ho¨lderlin’s view) understood politically and in that case Oedipus’ riddle-solving skill might prove appropriate. But Oedipus enters the sphere of the religious and the sacrificial; he speaks in a priestly way ( priesterlich): ‘‘Durch welche Reinigung,’’ etc.53 The problem of catharsis and the question of sacrificial order are referred to here for the first time in the play, and Oedipus immediately proclaims himself competent in dealing with it; he starts an investigation: ‘‘Und welchem Mann bedeutet er diß Schiksaal?’’54 It is this question that prompts Creon to make for the first time a connection between the oracle and the murder of the former king Laius and leads to the fateful curse of the murderer. The appeal to Tiresias and the crucial scene of their encounter (the famous caesura – Ca¨sur)55 express Oedipus’ ‘‘wonderful furious curiosity’’ (die wunderbare zornige Neugier), which, given the sacred domain where it operates, is a symptom of a hubris or ‘‘furious excess’’ (zornige Unmaas).56 Later in the text, Ho¨lderlin calls this excess in terms recalling Augustine’s condemnation of the perversity of knowledge as appetitus noscendi and libido noscendi:57 ‘‘The all-searching, all-interpreting [drive]’’ (Allessuchende, Allesdeutende).58 We can recognize in Holderlin’s characterization of Oedipus’ attitude the excess of the ‘‘calculative mind,’’ which he himself extols in the encounter with Tiresias as mastery in riddle solving. And it is this intellectual pride that eventually leads to the tragic, identified by Ho¨lderlin with the monstrous, the tremendous (das Ungeheure).59 Thus, when Oedipus meets the Sphinx near the city of Thebes, he is on his way to becoming a monster himself, not so much because he will get to know his mother Jocasta, but because he is solving the monstrous riddle and thus acquiring the libido noscendi, the taste for an ‘‘excess of frantic measuring and calculating.’’ This excess will eventually blind him to the sense of mystery without which even his answer to the riddle will

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not have been meaningful. This is why the content of the riddle was meant to remain a mystery in Sophocles’ tragedy. University of W isconsin – Madison Many thanks to Sabine Gross and Rachel Naylor for their comments. NOTES 1 Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, Moralite´s postmodernes (Paris: Galile´e, 1993), p. 203: ‘‘An enigma can yet be resolved, but a mystery remains impenetrable to reason.’’ J.-F. Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 240. 2 ‘‘Oedipus: How riddling and obscure in excess are all your words! Tiresias: Do you not excel in answering such riddles?’’ Sophocles, Oedipus T yrannus, ed. and trans. Hugh LloydJones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 439–440; see also, trans. Jascha Kessler, Sophocles 2: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, ed. David R. Slavitt and Palmer Bovie (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 46. ‘‘Oedipus: Riddles! Dark thoughts! Wild words! And the wilder threats! Tiresias: I heard you were the master of riddles!’’ 3 Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Die Frage nach der Technik,’’ in Vortra¨ge und Aufsa¨tze (Stuttgart: Neske, 1954), p. 29; English transl. William Lovitt in T he Question Concerning T echnology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 25: ‘‘All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees – the mystery – is concealed and always concealing itself.’’ 4 Athenaeus, T he Deipnosophists, trans. Charles Burton Gulick (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), book X, 456b; cf. Apollodorus, T he L ibrary of Greek Mythology, trans. Keith Aldrich (Lawrence, Kansas: Colorado Press, 1975), book III, 54–55: ‘‘Creon announced publicly that he would give both the kingdom and the widow of Laius to the man who solved the riddle. Oedipus heard and solved it, stating that the answer to the Sphinx’s question was man. As a baby he crawls on all fours, as an adult he is two-footed, and as he grows old he gains a third foot in the form of a cane. At this the Sphinx threw herself from the acropolis . . .’’ 5 Or rather ‘‘human being’’ (a˚nhrvpoz). The answer did not belong to Aclepiades’ Stories, though; it can be read in the Hypothesis to Euripides’ Phoeniciae (see also the scholia to the verse 50): ‘‘it is man who in infancy creeps on all four and in old age uses the staff as a third foot’’ – Euripide, He´le`ne, L es Phe´niciennes, edited by Fernand Chapouthier, translated by Louis Me´rdier (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950), pp. 151f. 6 Diels, Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1951, reprint, Zu¨rich, Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1985) B1; Bernard M. W. Knox, Oedipus at T hebes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 45. 7 Cf. Eric Segal, T ragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), pp. 3 and 207ff. 8 Sophocles, Oedipus T yrannus, ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994), Vol. I, 68, 104, 694, 922, 1295. 9 Knox, Oedipus at T hebes, p. 194.

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10 Leon Golden, ‘‘Hamartia, Ate and Oedipus,’’ Classical World, 72, no. 1 (1978), pp. 3–13. 11 ‘‘Suggested’’ and not explicitly stated, since Aristotle’s formulation is notoriously obscure; see Stephen Halliwell’s assessment of the scholarship on Aristotle’s katharsis in his Poetics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: The University of Carolina Press, 1987), p. 90: ‘‘Unfortunately, katharsis continues to provoke various forms of fantasy . . .’’ and his citation from Else: ‘‘Every variety of moral, aesthetic, and therapeutic effect that is or could be experienced from tragedy has been subsumed under the venerable word [catharsis] at one time or another.’’ G. F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: T he Argument (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 439. 12 Jacob Bernays, Zwei Abhandlungen u¨ber die aristotelische T heorie des Dramas (Berlin, 1880); English translation by J. and J. Barnes, of the selections from this book, under the title ‘‘Aristotle on the Effect of Tragedy,’’ in Articles on Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, M. Schofield, and R. Sorabji (New York, 1979), Vol. 4, pp. 154 ff; Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer (1895, reprint, New York: Avon Books, 1966). 13 Ame´lie Oksenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 14 Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1988), Vol. 7, p. 460. 15 On the other side are apparently those who, like Freud and Le´vi-Strauss, do not take the riddle of the Sphinx into account at all, not literally at least. Preoccupied with the elucidation of the secrets of human psyche and myth, they apparently do not have any use for the content of the riddle (for Le´vi-Strauss the Sphinx represents just the chthonic as opposed to the kin relationship). One can note, however, that in a sense both structuralist and psychoanalytic methods are often akin to riddle solving (Freud himself makes this association when he compares the Oedipus inquiry to that of a psychoanalyst). 16 Aristotle, T he Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989) 982b12–13: ‘‘It is through wonder (dia` to` hauma´ fein) that men now begin and originally began philosophizing.’’ 17 Aristotle, T he Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982) 1452a4, 1451b5. 18 See, e.g., Jonathan Lear, ‘‘Katharsis,’’ in Ame´lie Oksenberg Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, pp. 315–340. 19 Homer, T he Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 271–280; see also Homer, T he Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 307–317. 20 Lowell Edmunds, Oedipus: T he Ancient L egend and Its L ater Analogues (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 33. 21 Sophocles, Oedipus T yrannus, 35–48; later Oedipus himself will stress his faith in human intellect when he says to Teiresias: ‘‘But I came, Oedipus, who knew nothing, and I stopped her. I solved the riddle by my wit alone. Mine was no knowledge got from birds’’ (391–398); see also the chorus at 507–510. 22 Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 211; On the Way to L anguage, trans. Peter Hertz and Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 104. 23 Martin Heidegger, Einfu¨hrung in die Metaphysik (1935; Tu¨bingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953); English transl. Ralph Manheim: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). 24 Heidegger, Einfu¨hrung in die Metaphysik, p. 119; An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 155.

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25 Einfu¨hrung, p. 107, Introduction, p. 140; Vernehmung is Heidegger’s translation of the Greek noei@n in Parmenides’ dictum to` ca` r au˙to` noei@n e˙sti´n te kai` eiˆ˙nai. 26 Einfu¨hrung, p. 119; Introduction, p. 155. 27 Ibid. 28 Or in ‘‘mythology’’ (Mythologie, ibid.); in his later work – the lecture course on Parmenides from the winter semester 1942–43 at the University of Freiburg [published posthumously as volume 54 of Heidegger’s Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe) – Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982); English transl. Andre´ Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz: Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)], Heidegger rejects the term Mythologie as an unwarranted conjunction of the two apparently opposed terms. ‘‘Mythology’’ is misleading since it suggests a sublation [Auf hebung] that leads to the loss of their primordial essence: ‘‘To try to understand mu@ hoz with the help of ‘mythology’ is a procedure equivalent to drawing water with the aid of a sieve’’ (Parmenides [German], p. 104). Heidegger’s expression ‘‘the mythical’’ (das Mythische, muthos-hafte), ‘‘refers to the play of disclosing and concealing (entbergend-verbergenden), in which the fundamental essence of Being itself appears in the mode of continual beginning (anfa¨nglich)’’ (Parmenides [English], p. 70). This correction or clarification of the terminology of An Introduction to Metaphysics in the lecture-course on Parmenides has as its consequence a closer association between the critique of Western onto-theology, on the one hand, and the traditional mythology, on the other. It doesn’t, however, invalidate the earlier work’s results, namely, a bringing together of the thought of being and its apparent other – poetry and myth. And it is always the doctrine of Parmenides, the ‘‘founder’’ of Western metaphysics, that constitutes the background of Heidegger’s study of myth. 29 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Verlag Gu¨nther Neske, 1961), Vol. I, p. 144; English transl. David Farell Krell: M. Heidegger, Nietzsche (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979), Vol. I, p. 143. 30 Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Frankfurt A.M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1954), pp. 21–26; English transl. John Sallis: ‘‘On the Essence of Truth,’’ in Martin Heidegger, Basic W ritings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977, 1993), pp. 130–135. 31 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. 24; Basic W ritings, p. 133. 32 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. 26; Basic W ritings, p. 135. 33 Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, p. 22; Basic W ritings, p. 131. 34 Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (1950; Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), p. 64. 35 Einfu¨hrung, pp. 122 and 125, Introduction, pp. 159 and 164. 36 Einfu¨hrung, p. 81, Introduction, p. 107. 37 Einfu¨hrung, p. 82, Introduction, p. 107. 38 Jacques Taminiaux, L e T he´aˆtre des philosophes: L a T rage´die, l’eˆtre, l’action (Grenoble: Je´roˆme Millon, 1995), pp. 92ff. 39 L e T he´aˆtre des philosophes, p. 194. 40 Ibid. 41 Einfu¨hrung, pp. 82–84, Introduction, pp. 108–110. 42 ‘‘. . . Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . ,’’ in Martin Heidegger, Vortra¨ge und Aufsa¨tze (Stuttgart: Verlag Gu¨nther Neske, 1954), pp. 181–198; ‘‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,’’ in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, L anguage, T hought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 211–229. 43 See page 2 above.

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44 Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, bilingual edition, (London: Routledge, 1966), pp. 600–601. 45 Vortra¨ge und Aufsa¨tze, p. 191; Poetry, L anguage, T hought, p. 222. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Vortra¨ge und Aufsa¨tze, p. 197; Poetry, L anguage, T hought, p. 228. 49 Sophocles, Oedipus T yrannus, 439–440. 50 Supplemented by the ‘‘Anmerkungen zur Antigonae,’’ both published in 1803 – Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Sa¨mtliche Werke und Briefe (Mu¨nchen: Carl Hanser, 1992), Vol. II: ‘‘Anmerkungen ¨ dipus’’ pp. 309–316; English translation by Thomas Pfau in Friedrich Ho¨lderlin Essays zum O and L etters on T heory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988): ‘‘Remarks on Oedipus’’ 101–108. 51 ‘‘Anmerkungen’’ 311, ‘‘Remarks’’ 102. 52 Ibid.; Ho¨lderlin translates the following text by Sophocles: a¸nvcen g˝ma@ z Woi@boz e˙mwanv@ z a˚naj mi´asma xv´ raz, v˝z tehramme´ non xhoni` e˙n tg@˛ d’, e˙lau´ nein mgd’ a˙ng´ keston tre´ wein. (Oedipus T yrannus, 96–98) Here is Pfau’s translation of the passage: In plain words has Phoebus commanded us, the King, One shall expurgate the country’s disgrace Nourished by this soil, not nourish the incurable. (‘‘Remarks,’’ p. 103) 53 Ibid.; poi´v˛ kaharmv ˛@ . . . (Oedipus T yrannus, 99); in Pfau’s translation: ‘‘What is the rite of purification?’’ etc. (‘‘Remarks,’’ p. 103). 54 Ibid.; poi´v˛ ca` r a˙ndro` z tg´ nde mgnu´ ei tu´ xgn: (Oedipus T yrannus, 102); in Pfau’s translation: ‘‘Who is this man whose fate the God pronounces?’’ (‘‘Remarks,’’ p. 103). 55 ‘‘Anmerkungen,’’ p. 310, ‘‘Remarks,’’ p. 102. 56 ‘‘Anmerkungen,’’ p. 312, ‘‘Remarks,’’ p. 104. 57 ‘‘Appetite to know,’’ ‘‘lust for knowing’’ (French: de´sir de connaıˆtre) – Saint Augustin, Confessions X.35, texte e´tabli et traduit par Pierre de Labriolle (1926, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1969) vol. II, pp. 280–281; English translation by F. J. Sheed: Augustine, Confessions (1942; rev. ed., Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), pp. 200ff. 58 ‘‘Anmerkungen,’’ p. 315, ‘‘Remarks,’’ p. 107; Lacoue-Labarthe in his excellent analysis of Ho¨lderlin’s ‘‘Remarks’’ calls it appropriately ‘‘folie du savoir’’ (madness of knowledge) – Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘La ce´sure du spe´culatif,’’ in L ’Imitation des modernes: T ypographies II (Paris: Galile´e, 1986), p. 67; English transl. Christopher Fynsk, ‘‘The Ceasura of the Speculative,’’ in T ypography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 234. 59 ‘‘Anmerkungen, p. 315; ‘‘Remarks,’’ p. 107.

PAUL BEIDLER

MEDITATION AND MEDIATION, SECRETS AND SEIZURES: TENNYSON’S IN MEMORIAM AS FICTION/ TESTIMONY

I will argue here that Tennyson’s In Memoriam is an authentic, sustained response to what Derrida has called differance.1 My reading of In Memoriam is informed primarily by Derrida’s essay Demeure, a discussion of Maurice Blanchot’s short story, ‘‘The Instant of My Death,’’ which is the story of a young man, to some extent Blanchot himself, who is forced from his Chaˆteau by French Nazi soldiers, sentenced to death by firing squad, and then not killed (the execution is interrupted by noises of a battle raging nearby). But during the instant of reprieve, the young man feels ‘‘a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy, however) – sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death?’’ (Demeure 5). This feeling, the feeling of death encountering death, of death dying, stayed with the young man for fifty years until, as an old man, he wrote this story about it. Tennyson’s In Memoriam is also a story about a close encounter with death. Like Blanchot’s story, the poem also details the experience of a feeling resembling catharsis. And in both works, this feeling is presented as being unanalyzable: ‘‘In his place, I will not try to analyze,’’ Blanchot writes (Demeure 5), and Tennyson insists, ‘‘I sometimes hold it half a sin / To put in words the grief I feel’’ (5.1–2). Derrida’s essay on Blanchot’s story explores this unanalyzable feeling the young man experiences, showing 1) why it cannot be analyzed, and 2) why it is, while not happiness, a positive feeling rather than a negative one. This last is important because, while deconstruction is often assumed to be a somehow negative or nihilistic enterprise, it is actually a discourse of affirmation.2 And since these works by Blanchot and Tennyson have so much in common, it will be interesting to see what Derrida’s analysis brings to our reading of Tennyson. In Demeure, Derrida shows the following: 1. That ‘‘testimony always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, and lie. Were the possibility to be eliminated, no testimony would be possible any longer; it could no longer have the meaning of testimony’’ (p. 27). This is the deconstructive move: testimony and perjury seem mutually exclusive, but they are shown to be 65 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 65–74. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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concepts quite dependent upon one another. Testimony and perjury each are thus implicated in the other: ‘‘There is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, lie, and perjury – that is to say, the possibility of literature’’ (p. 29). 2. That literature does not exist: ‘‘There is no essence or substance of literature: literature is not. It does not remain at home, abidingly [a` demeure] in the identity of a nature or even of a historical being identical with itself ’’ (p. 28). Literature is thus like a ‘‘net,’’ ‘‘loose, unstable, permeable’’ (p. 56) – an elusive and highly problematic boundary between fiction and testimony. Elsewhere Derrida speaks of ‘‘the perforated veil, the net or mesh of fiction’’ (p. 71): ‘‘Literature serves as real testimony. Literature pretends, through an excess of fiction – others would say lie – to pass itself off as a real and responsible testimony about a historical reality – without, however, signing this testimony because it is literature and the narrator is not the author of biography’’ (p. 71). Tennyson’s In Memoriam is an excellent example of the radical ambiguity Derrida is talking about: neither fiction nor autobiography, the poem is what it is precisely insofar as it evades categorization. If it were merely one or the other, no one would read it. In this sense, it does not exist.3 3. That iterability is prior to existence. Husserl writes in Ideas that ‘‘W hatever belongs to the essence of the individual can also belong to another individual can also belong to another individual ...’’ (p. 47). What this would mean for Derrida is not that ‘‘Empirical or individual insight can be transformed into essential insight (ideation)’’ (Ideas 48) but that iterability is prior to existence. ‘‘Testimony seems to presuppose the instance of the instant that, at that very instant, however, it destroys. It destroys it as if it were destroying its own condition of possibility’’ (Demeure 32). The idea here is that, as Derrida shows in ‘‘Signature Event Context,’’ existence is a consequence of iterability.4 One testifies about an instant, a moment – what happened, how one felt, what was done, etc. But the testimony is really of or to a copy, a simulacrum, not to the instant itself. In and of the instant itself one cannot testify: only when the instant is re-cognized, later, can one testify. It exists only insofar as it is repeatable, rememberable. Iterability precedes existence. I’ll first discuss iterability with respect to In Memoriam and then proceed to a reading of Section 19 of the poem. The event of the poem, Hallam’s death, happened – it is real. And yet both the poem and the thoughts and feelings it explores are fictional –

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precisely because their existence is predicated on their iterability. In other words, since the poet’s grief is inexpressible, all expressions and even conceptions of it are false – each is a pale copy, a shadow, a failure to convey. One senses that each section in In Memoriam, each attempt to explain and convey, is hurled into existence by the failure of the last, and so there’s an urgency to this long, patient, painful elegy, this ‘‘discontinuous series of instantaneous seizures,’’ to invoke a phrase from Derrida that seems to aptly describe Tennyson’s poem (Demeure 59). But what Derrida has drawn our attention to is the logical priority of iterability. The verses are neither merely real (truth) nor fictional (art) – nor merely poetic, but something else, precisely because iterability precedes existence. The instant is always already split: it can only be recognized in and from another instant, an instant that is not itself, so the instant is always distant from itself, always different from itself. The urgency of In Memoriam, and also the tedium, is not so much that each poem fails but that each has always already failed. Jean Baudrillard has written of the nostalgia that accompanies the ‘‘precession of the simulacra’’: ‘‘There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; ... there is a panicstricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production’’ (Simulations 12–13). It would be hard to deny that these responses to the radical absence of the signified seem to describe pretty well what Tennyson is up to. Each thought, each pang of grief, can only be insofar as it can be recognized – re-cognized. And therefore not only is each poem a copy: each feeling is as well. And yet, ‘‘We can speak, we can read this because this experience, in the singularity of its secret, as ‘experience of the unexperienced,’ beyond the distinction between the real and the phantasmatic, remains [demeure] universal and exemplary’’ (Demeure 93). Tennyson writes, ‘‘I sometimes hold it half a sin / To put in words the grief I feel’’ (5.1–2), and this is why: because the grief is only alive when it remains unrecognized, unsaid – when it does not yet exist. To feel it is to re-cognize it, so it is elusive, always already having deteriorated into copy, into mere parody of itself. Strangely, though, Tennyson writes, ‘‘A use in measured language lies; / The sad mechanic exercise, / Like dull narcotics, numbing pain’’ (5.6–8). The repetition – of sound (rhythm, rhyme), but also the repetition of which each articulation is a consequence – numbs the pain as well as the life of the grief. But then he is immediately dissatisfied – he speaks almost condescendingly of ‘‘The lesser griefs that may be said’’ (Sec. 20), the griefs that words do not fail to convey.

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Tennyson’s poem is thus all about the secret. Derrida writes, ‘‘the experience of the secret is, however contradictory this may seem, a testimonial experience’’ (Demeure 32) – one testifies to a secret by keeping the secret: by not telling it, by refusing to testify, as Lazarus does in Section 31: ‘‘He told it not, or something sealed / The lips of that Evangelist’’ (31.15–16). Tennyson, like Derrida, cannot go that route. Despite their affinities with various mystical traditions, they choose, instead, to speak, to write – and thereby to undermine, structurally, the sacredness of their experience. Recognizing this, therefore, they must write on, each new text supplementing the last in an endless sequence of supplements. One valuable quality of Derrida’s work is that it brings us back to Tennyson with a new sensitivity to the poems in In Memoriam that do fixate on individual moments or instants. I was surprised, on rereading the work recently, to note how few such poems it contains, given Hallam’s own characterization of Tennyson as a poet of sensation, not reflection (Hunt 57). Some sections are intense meditations on single instants,5 but most of the lyrics are reflections: philosophical observations on religion, class, evolution, love, and death. The many reflective lyrics relieve the tension of the more instantaneous ones, bringing in various aspects of the outside world and making the poet seem less obsessive. But they are all reflections grounded in Hallam’s death – they all point back to the feelings of overwhelming grief, to that grief that the poet indignantly refuses to let go of (Secs. 6 and 21). The relative scarcity of meditations on the actual experience of that grief makes the few instant revealing poems that there are seem important and worthy of study. And yet, as I say, each of Tennyson’s meditations seems to invalidate the moment, the feeling, the truth, the grief to which it was written to bear witness – hence all the reflective lyrics that surround them. It’s time for an example. As I have noted, the meditations on profound moments, or instants, are few in In Memoriam, and therefore they are of some importance. Section 19 is probably the best example of the way this poet is capable of being almost absorbed into the moment and conveying precisely an impression of it – it’s an even better example than the more famous Section 95: The Danube to the Severn gave The darken’d heart that beat no more; They laid him by the pleasant shore, And in the hearing of the wave.

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There twice a day the Severn fills; That salt sea-water passes by, And hushes half the babbling Wye, And makes a silence in the hills. The Wye is hush’d nor moved along, And hush’d my deepest grief of all, When fill’d with tears that cannot fall, I brim with sorrow drowning song. The tide flows down, the wave again Is vocal in its wooded walls; My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then.

The assemblage of h-sounds (heart, hearing, half, hush’d) is mediated by a filling, of both the ‘‘babbling Wye’’ and the babbling poet, and then a falling. Phonologically, the poem is a texture of fricatives and stops, with stops predominating in stanzas one and three, and fricatives in stanzas two and four – this ab:ab pattern complicates and complements the ab:ba of the rhyme scheme. Repeating ‘‘fills’’ and ‘‘hushed’’ completes the metaphor: the poet, like the Wye, is periodically hushed to silence and filled to overflowing. The instant, a moment of strange equilibrium in the poet and in the world around him (‘‘I brim with sorrow drowning song’’), is comparable to the ecstatic instant of not-death in Blanchot. Derrida notes in Demeure that ‘‘the instant is instantaneously, at this very instant, divided, destroyed by what it nonetheless makes possible – testimony’’ (p. 33). I account for the ecstasy of Section 19 in three ways, each involving not a unity of emotion but a splitting, and each an echo of the ‘‘essential iterability’’ of the instant (Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context’’ 9). First, Section 19 is an analogy. The poet expresses his grief through a comparison: his feeling is like the estuary. Even in this poem, one of the least reflective and most immediate in the whole collection, there is no direct communication or message or emotion – there is only comparison. The instant, which is essentially mediated because it only exists insofar as it can be remembered and recognized, is not itself but like something else. Content, the analogy, eerily echoes form – both the prosodic form of the poem and the structure of the mark. Second is the problem of testimony. In Memoriam 19 certainly reads like a testimony. Derrida writes, ‘‘If testimony ... became proof, information, ... or archive, it would lose its function as testimony. In order to

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remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted’’ (Demeure 29–30) – haunted by the possibility of a lie. If it were not for the possibility of someone telling or thinking how it wasn’t, there would be no reason to tell how it was. And the ghost in Section 19 is very real, though it lives mainly in Section 67: the facts are all wrong. Tennyson apparently never bothered to visit Hallam’s tomb: he wasn’t clear on its placement. One critic, Darrel Mansell, has written, ‘‘I contend that he scrupulously avoided knowing the facts ... concerning Hallam’s burial, or took care not to be influenced by them.’’ It seems a shame to chastise Tennyson, as Mansell does, for not being authentic enough: Tennyson’s method seems true to the truth of the priority of iterability. We might remember that ‘‘there is no testimony that does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, lie, and perjury.’’ To obsess too intently over the factual details would be to oppose the whole current, the compositional flow and also the ‘‘very structure of written text’’ (Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context’’ 9). Third, there’s the question of influence. The temptation to imagine the poet sitting in meditation by Hallam’s grave, ecstatic and hypersensitive to the details of his surroundings, and later recollecting them in tranquility, is pretty strong. Especially since Tennyson wrote it, in 1834, at Tintern Abbey, the site of Wordsworth’s great ode. That poem was, like In Memoriam, a song of love across great distance: while Wordsworth wrote to bridge the chasm between maturity and youth, Tennyson writes of and to one who is gone. And both are poems of the divided self. ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ is a conversation between youth and maturity, and in In Memoriam the poet theorizes the moment when a child, The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast Has never thought that ‘‘this is I.’’ But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘me,’’ And finds ‘‘I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch.’’ So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As through the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.

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This use may lie in blood and breath, Which else were fruitless of their due, Had man to learn himself anew Beyond the second birth of death. (Sec. 45)

As in Wordsworth, the self only attains existence through separation. All Derrida does in ‘‘Signature Event Context’’ is generalize the dynamic, echoed here by Tennyson, making it a law. And it is interesting to note that he therein also uses the metaphor of weaning to describe the severing that initiates being: This structural possibility of being weaned from the referent or from the signified (hence from communication and from its context) seems to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, a grapheme in general; which is to say, as we have seen, the nonpresent remainder [restance] of a differential mark cut off from its putative ‘‘production’’ or origin. And I shall even extend this law to all ‘‘experience’’ in general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of pure presence but only of chains of differential marks (p. 10).

What Derrida says of the word also applies to the text as a whole. Ultimately, the meditation on an instant of the poet’s grief is a repetition, one famous poet’s echo of another – almost an allusion. Like Wordsworth and Tennyson, Derrida also struggles with the problem of the self ’s always having already been weaned from the world: The one who says and undersigns ‘‘I’’ today, now, cannot replace the other; he can no longer, therefore, replace himself, that is, the young man he has been. He can no longer replace him, substitute himself for him, a condition that is nonetheless stipulated for any normal and non-fictional testimony. ... Consequently, he cannot analyze what he himself felt, this other himself, at that moment. (Demeure 65–66)

The more one meditates on Tennyson’s Section 19, the less it seems like a pure and direct narrative of ‘‘experience,’’ and the more it seems like only one of a chain of texts linked by tradition and a common epistemological paradigm. Derrida writes of ‘‘simulacra, lie, and perjury – that is to say, the possibility of literature, of the innocent or perverse literature that innocently plays at perverting all of these distinctions’’ (Demeure 29). That’s the point: the innocence of literature, the innocence of its refusal to be. The repetition, which severs the authentic link to originality and identity, also guarantees this innocence – of literature, of the self, of language. Of the key instant in Blanchot, Derrida writes: ‘‘A life that simply stops is neither weighty nor light. Nor is it a life that simply continues. Life can only be light from the moment that it stays dead-living while being freed,

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that is to say, released from itself ’’ (Demeure 89). Tennyson’s instant is freeing, also, by the same logic. Derrida again: ‘‘The thinking of the ‘X without X’ comes to sign, consign or countersign the experience of the neuter as ne uter, neither-nor by bringing it together’’ (Demeure 99). Because his love is alive, Tennyson’s poet feels death without death, grief without grief: ‘‘Hush’d my deepest grief of all,’’ he says, and then: ‘‘My deeper anguish also falls.’’ And the experience is freeing: ‘‘And I can speak a little then.’’ The poem has the power that it has precisely because it is uncategorizable, because it is difficult to decide whether to read it as art or truth, as fiction or testimony – it is signed by the logic of the X without X, by the structural absence of signature. Section 19 is perhaps emblematic of In Memoriam as a whole because its subject, the undecidable boundary between two opposing forces, is a metaphor for its refusal to exist. Derrida’s idea of literature is like his idea of differance: ‘‘[D]ifferance is not’’ (Speech and Phenomena 153). Differance, like literature, ‘‘has the structure of an interlacing, a weaving, or a web’’ (ibid., 132). The question, really, is how to feel about this differance. At one level, Tennyson seems to be anxious about it. The whole poem, with its several beginnings and its refusal to end, seems like a seventeen-year effort to control and master differance. As Alan Sinfield has written, ‘‘Tennyson strives within the tradition of western metaphysics to bridge or eradicate the gap between language and reality’’ (Sinfield 85). But at another level there is the In Memoriam stanza, built to emphasize repetition and reversal, and the not episodic but archival form of the whole, which almost necessitates contradiction. I suggest that the intense, almost cataleptic absorption into the moment that is the subject of In Memoriam 19 is comparable to the ‘‘weird seizures’’ to which the young man in Tennyson’s T he Princess is prone – in which he cannot know ‘‘the shadow from the substance’’ and feels himself ‘‘the shadow of a dream’’ (I.9,18). But in In Memoriam the catalepsis is not a hereditary mental defect. It is the profound experiencing of the deepest truth. That truth is not the loss of a friend so much as the structural collapse of every coherence-giving metanarrative about the world. The poet struggles almost madly with evolution, for example. His thinking on it is a little disappointing: I’ll ‘‘dream my dream, and hold it true,’’ he says (Sec. 123). But we must admit that what he is feeling, the provisionality of being, is unthinkable – it is a mystery: not a riddle, and not mere paradox either, but something we actually can’t know. Moreover, it is true. That iterability is prior to being is demonstrable (to see this, simply try to imagine a word that can’t be quoted or a thing that can’t be represented or copied), and that this fact problematizes

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knowledge and truth is clear. And furthermore, it is good: 1) because it is in differance that death dies, 2) because differance is ‘‘another name for ‘passion’ ’’ (Demeure 27), and 3) because the possibility of the lie is what makes the truth possible.

NOTES 1 Differance is ‘‘neither a word nor a concept’’ (Speech and Phenomena 130); it is a ‘‘juncture,’’ an ‘‘assemblage,’’ an ‘‘interlacing, a weaving, or a web, which would allow the different threads and different lines of force to separate again’’ (ibid., 130, 131, 132). Derrida explains differance as follows: ‘‘What we note as differance will thus be the movement of play that ‘produces’ (and not by something that is simply an activity) these differences, these effects of difference. This does not mean that the differance which produces differences is before them in a simple and in itself unmodified and indifferent present. Differance is the nonfull, nonsimple ‘origin’; it is the structured and differing origin of differences’’ (ibid., 141). Differance is the origin, which is not of repetition, of which being is a consequence. 2 John D. Caputo has made this point enthusiastically in T he Prayers and T ears of Jacques Derrida: ‘‘Deconstruction is never merely negative; its desire is never satisfied with ‘no, no.’ Deconstruction is thoroughly mistrustful of discourses that prohibit this and prohibit that, that weigh us down with debts and ‘don’ts.’ Deconstruction is so deeply and abidingly affirmative – of something new, of something coming – that it finally breaks out in a vast and sweeping amen, a great oui, oui – a` l’impossible, in a great burst of passion for the impossible. ... Deconstruction says yes, affirming what negative theology says whenever it says no’’ (p. 3). For Derrida on the yes, see ‘‘A Number of Yes.’’ There Derrida talks about the originary affirmation that makes everything, including affirmation, possible: ‘‘Language without language, it belongs without belonging to that totality which it simultaneously institutes and opens. It exceeds and incises language, to which it remains nonetheless immanent: like language’s first dweller, the first to step out of its home. It brings to being and lets be everything which can be said’’ (p. 101). 3 One might object that I am setting up a false binary here. (A teacher and friend once asked me why I always had to be ‘‘so bloody binary.’’) But we shouldn’t assume that everything can be clearly and rigorously defined. In Memoriam is not merely fiction (invention) or autobiography (truth), nor is it simply elegy, lyric, epic, or anything else, though it is certainly like all of these. Some readers will want to make the nominalist assumption that, nonetheless, In Memorium is definable – there are words that convey its essence – and seek the definition. But I say, with Sterne, ‘‘To define – is to distrust’’ (Sterne 3.31). Deconstruction is important precisely because it entails reading without defining, without reducing. Reading without thinking, one might say. Reading to keep the secret. ‘‘Writing is read; it is not the site, ‘in the last instance,’ of a hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth’’ (Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context’’ 21). 4 The import of Derrida’s observation that ‘‘a written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given’’ is that ‘‘This spacing is not the simple negativity of a lacuna but rather the emergence of the mark’’ (Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context’’ 9, 10). 5 My list would include 15, 30, 50, 67, 70, 87, 95, 100, 104, and 108.

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Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Caputo, John D. T he Prayers and T ears of Jacques Derrida: Religion W ithout Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. ‘‘A Number of Yes.’’ In Martin McQuillan, ed., Deconstruction: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000. 97–106. —. Demeure: Fiction and T estimony. Testimony in a volume with Maurice Blanchot’s autobiographical fiction T he Instant of My Death. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. —. ‘‘Signature Event Context.’’ Trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. In Jacques Derrida, L imited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. —. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s T heory of Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Hunt, John Dixon. T ennyson: In Memoriam, a Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1970. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Phenomenology. New York: Collier, 1962. Mansell, Darrel. ‘‘Displacing Hallam’s Tomb in Tennyson’s In Memoriam.’’ V ictorian Poetry 36 (1998). Sinfield, Alan. Alfred T ennyson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Sterne, Laurence. T ristram Shandy. New York: Norton, 1980. Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam A. H. H. In Christopher Ricks, ed., T ennyson: A Selected Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

SECTION II

BERNADETTE PROCHASKA

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN: WALT WHITMAN’S ‘‘LILACS’’ AND EDMUND HUSSERL’S ‘‘MEANING’’

In the month of April, 1865, Walt Whitman wrote of his anguish and the ancient mystery of pain, as well as the sadness and grief of a nation that mourned the death of its President, Abraham Lincoln. Whitman, a poet particularly devoted to America, expressed in his poem, W hen L ilacs L ast in the Dooryard Bloomed, the mystery of pain in an individual and in a nation, as he associated the meaning of the lilac, the bird, and the star to the mysterious experience of loss and death. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. (l. 1–3)

With these opening lines of his poem, Whitman creates the setting; the time is spring, the Eastern star is now setting in the west, and the central theme is the mysterious and ever enduring pain of loss. The loss is one that will endure with every recurring spring. In examining meaning and expression, Edmund Husserl maintains that meaning necessarily demands the object. He claims, An act of meaning is the determinate manner in which we refer to our object of the moment, though this mode of significant reference and the meaning itself can change while the objective reference remains fixed.1

As Husserl maintains that we can discover meaning only with an indicator, an object, Whitman associates the meaning of pain with the objects of the lilac flower, the star, which has passed into darkness, and the bird that carries its song over a land that has suffered a Civil War and the assassination of its President. Pain and grief remain the mystery and the objective references about which Husserl speaks remain fixed. The poet gives meaning to the mystery by associating the fixed objects of the fragrant lilac, the bright star and the singing bird. These objects, in the language of Husserl, are indicative of both the meaning and the expression of the mysterious phenomenon of pain. 77 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 77–83. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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BERNADETTE PROCHASKA In the swamp in secluded recesses, A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song ... Song of the bleeding throat, Death’s outlet song of life (for well dear brother I know If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die) (l. 18–19, 23–25).2

Besides the lilac and the bird, expressing pain, is the third object, the star. Whitman associates the star with the inexpressible pain of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who is, in the peaceful Quaker Whitman’s words, the star of the nation, the light that has freed the slaves. O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night – O moody, tearful night! O great star disappeared – O the black murk that hides the star! (l. 6–9)3

The pain that Whitman addresses in this poem, is both personal and national. The star that is ‘‘fallen,’’ for the poet, is the powerful western star. The night is crying, for the light of the star has disappeared. The poet is near to the star, as he is near to the fallen President. Obviously, Whitman incorporates a great love for America and its President. During the Civil War he personally went to the battlefields and assisted the fallen soldiers as a member of the medical unit. He bound up the wounds of soldiers, and he gave them water to drink. He suffered their pain, all the while revealing a steadfast patriotism. To express the pain he feels, he says the powerful western star has fallen. Black murk hides the star. Whitman uses the fallen star to express the mystery of pain. In Husserl’s theory, the object itself differs from meaning. However, an objective correlative means something. ‘‘An act of meaning is the determinate manner in which we refer to our object of the moment.’’4 The object used by Whitman means something. Unutterable pain is associated with the object of the fallen star, the darkness of those who grieve and mourn, the long procession of those who greet the coffin of the fallen star, as it makes its way from Washington to the center of the nation, Springfield, Illinois. Coffin that passes through lanes and streets. Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land, With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black, With the show of the States themselves as of crepe-veil’d women standing (l. 33–36).5

The coffin is associated with the star in this passage for both are present to the night with the great cloud darkening the land. Whitman uses words like pomp, and the inloop’d flags as the procession moves through the

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black draped cities. The tone is that of sadness and grief of a nation in pain. When language fails to express the mystery of loss experienced by the nation, the poet uses the graphic objects of the great cloud and the inloop’d flags that are familiar in human engagement. Whitman believed in America. His Quaker sensibilities were essentially associated with Lincoln’s determination to free the slaves and to keep the nation united. Now, as the coffin moves through the center of the nation, the poet expresses the grief of the States, standing as ‘‘crepe-veil’d women.’’ Near to the coffin, and brightened by the star, is the bird, the central object and character of the poem, singing a song of a bleeding throat. Whitman obviously is the shy bird, the poet who is withdrawn, and who wants to sing the song of praise for the fallen star while his throat is bleeding. Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfaltering (l. 142–146).6

Actually, Whitman creates death as an object, a feminine dark mother who assumes qualities of gentleness for she is always gliding near with soft feet. Death, also the mysterious and unutterable essential presence to humanity is given meaning, as in references made by Husserl, in the dark mother who becomes the indicator of meaning. Not only does Whitman create the object, but he welcomes and praises death, saying, ‘‘Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? / Then I will chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all.’’ The bird, obviously the poet, who likes to withdraw among the shadows of the cedars and the pines, must sing. In his Preface to L eaves of Grass, Whitman extols the powers of the poet. He says, Without effort and without exposing in the least how it is done, the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read.7

This praise of the poet was written in 1855, ten years before the writing of W hen L ilacs L ast in the Dooryard Bloomed. Whitman had said that the poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons before our eyes. In the poem about the great mystery of pain brought about by the terrible loss of a nation’s leader, the poet sings the song of a bird that sees the procession of the train carrying the coffin

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through the center of the nation. The poet also sings the mysterious song of welcome to the Dark Mother coming on soft feet to claim President Lincoln. Whitman actually calls America a great poem, a song to be sung. Again, in the Preface to L eaves of Grass, which he wrote and continually rewrote, he claims The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. ... Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.8

When Whitman claims that the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem, he is articulating again his huge theme of the procession of humanity which has a voice. His engagement of the bird in this poem of Lincoln is an extension of himself as the poet, the singer of the song of grief and pain, and praise for the fallen star, in the Eastern Easter sky. The object, which Husserl claims is essential for meaning, in Whitman’s scheme of things, resonates in the great object of a nation itself that experiences mysterious pain and loss in its very self. We as readers of the poem, sense all over again, the spring night and its great sadness. Whitman engages the star and the bird and the lilac to express his own anxiety and grief. He is the one who places the lilac on the coffin. He is the one who remembers the fragrance of the lilac for Lincoln was killed while the lilacs were blooming on Good Friday, April 14, 1865. The star was high in the heavens and the night was bright. The country was at peace for the first Easter in five years. The poet himself was at the height of his powers. Kenneth Burke interprets this poem in Trinitarian terms. Embodied in it, there is a notable trinity of sensory images, since the three interwoven symbolic elements – evening star, singing bird, and lilac compose a three-ness of sight, sound and scent respectively. Also, perhaps they make a three-ness of paternal, filial and maternal respectively. Clearly, the star stands for the dead hero, the ‘hermit’ bird, ‘warbling a song’ just as clearly stands for the author’s poetizing self.9

Burke claims that the lilac and its fragrance, figure in Whitman’s idiom in this poem, indeed, as in various poems by the author, and are associated with the feminine, as in V istas, where Whitman refers to ‘‘that indescribable perfume of genuine womanhood.’’10 In this poem, the feminine image is death coming on soft feet. Edwin Haviland Miller says that Whitman is the lyrical (or feminine) poet who attempts an epic (or masculine)

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statement.11 The poet associates lilacs with this death, and incorporates various fragrances. All over bouquets of roses, O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies, But mostly and now mostly the lilac that blooms the first, Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, With loaded arms I come, pouring for you, For you and the coffins all of you O death. (l. 49–54)

Whitman has bouquets of flowers, which he brings to the coffin. He has mentioned that he personally has placed the lilacs on the passing coffin. He is not simply the solitary bird, observing the procession from afar. The poet is in the middle of the experience. He participates by touching the coffin, by inhaling the fragrance of the flowers, by seeing the grieving crowds that follow the coffin, and by carrying and placing roses and lilies and lilacs on the coffin of his beloved fallen star. This participation is important to the poet. Whitman has obviously been called the poet of the common man and woman. He proclaims in Oneself I Sing, ‘‘The Female equally and the Male I sing.’’12 Everyone, all citizens lie within his realm of thought. Participating in the grief, and participating in the action of all those who mourn is important to the poet. Whitman puts the flowers on the coffin. He stands with bowed head with all those he sees and touches. He is in the middle of the scene with the coffin close to him. This presence of the poet gives life to the poem. The presence of the poet at the train in the center of America is historical and enduring in the aspect of time. Lincoln’s train passes the battlefields of the Civil War. And I saw askant the armies, I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them, ... I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war. (l. 127–174, 177–179)

The historical context, the scenes of the dead, the battlegrounds are present as the train moves toward Springfield, Illinois. Whitman repeats the word debris, ‘‘I saw the debris, and all the debris of the slain soldiers of the war.’’ Actually, the poet says he saw askant these things. The debris of the Civil War is present, not directly before him. He sees the scenes of the Civil War from the ‘corner of his eye.’ What is directly before the

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poet’s vision, is his beloved Star in the coffin on the train. But the scenes of myriads of dead soldiers and their white skeletons cannot be hidden from his sight. These scenes are America’s present history. And these scenes of debris are essential to the identity of the mourners, the fallen star, the procession of people on the way, and the poet himself. John Jay Chapman says Walt Whitman himself could not have told you why the poem was good. Had he any intimation of the true reason, he would have spoiled the poem. The recurrence and antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought of death, the beauty of nature are a balance and dream of natural symmetry such as no cunning could come at, no conscious art could do other than spoil.13

The genuine grief and terrible loss that is present in the poem engages the mystery of pain for which there is no language, no word. Whitman gives meaning to the pain by contemplating the star, the lilac and the bird, finding what Husserl examines as indicators, objects of expression that convey meaning. As the basic layer of meaning in the poem is the star that has fallen. At the end of the poem, Whitman returns to the star, which had begun the poem. The first line of the poem sets the scene of lilacs blooming in spring, as the great star early droop’d in the west. At the end, the singing thrush again speaks to the star. I cease from my song for thee From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communicating with thee, O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night. (l. 194–196)

Whitman is ever in the midst of the scene of sorrow in this poem, and he is always close to Lincoln. He communicates with Lincoln, and the silver face of the star, while he says, ‘‘Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, / For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.’’ (203–205) At the end, there are various words having to do with vision, and light. The Star is ‘‘lustrous with the silver face of night.’’ The poet will cease his ‘gaze’ on that face, and with his song will keep the memory of the sweetest, wisest soul, of all his days and lands. Time and space are limitless for the memory the poet places before his comrades for every age. In the end, the poet retires back into the shadows, as he has said ‘‘good bye’’ to his comrade, the president, and to all those who are encapsulated in the mystery of pain and sorrow. In this poem of grief, he has engaged that sorrow in the objects of the star and the bird and the lilac. He has

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also given the nation a language to express the pain that is incorporated in America’s national history. He ends the poem with these lines: Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and cedars dusk and dim. (l. 207–208)

The shadow of the thrush hidden in the fragrant pines and cedars, is dusk and dim. Night is the prevailing time of the poem. For the poem starts with the poet seeing the star, and ends with the retreat of the bird into the shadows. NOTES 1 Husserl, Edmund, T he Essential Husserl. Edited by Donn Welton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, 36. 2 Whitman, Walt, W hen L ilacs L ast in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Anthology of American L iterature. Edit. George McMichael. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 3 McMichael, George. McMichael claims that Whitman hoped to be the ‘‘bard of democracy.’’ He (Whitman) served with the medical unit in the Civil War, and he truly loved America. Anthology of American L iterature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000, 10. 4 Husserl, Edmund, 36. 5 Whitman, Walt, ‘‘Lilacs.’’ The train bearing Lincoln’s body in the coffin made its way from Washington D.C. to Springfield, Illinois where he was buried. 6 Whitman, Walt, ‘‘Lilacs.’’ 7 Whitman, Walt, Preface to L eaves of Grass. Anthology of American L iterature II. Edit. George McMichael. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000, 16. 8 Whitman, Walt, Preface to L eaves of Grass. 11. 9 Burke, Edmund. W hen L ilacs L ast in the Dooryard Bloomed. A Century of W hitman Criticism. Edit. Edwin Haviland Miller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969, 294. 10 Burke, Edmund, 294. 11 Miller, Edwin Haviland, A Century of W hitman Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, xvi. 12 Whitman, Walt, One’s Self I Sing, 26. 13 Chapman, John Jay, Walt W hitman. A Century of W hitman Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 105.

TIMOTHY WEISS

MYSTERY IN A JELLABAH: CULTURAL WORLDS IN BORGES’S HIST ORIA UNIV ERSAL DE L A INFAMIA

When we speak of the aesthetics of mystery, do we allow that mystery may differ from one culture to another? Is mystery the same experience to someone Chinese, for instance, as it is to someone English? This is one question about the phenomenology of mystery that this essay considers in the context of five short pieces by Jorge Luis Borges, drawn from his earliest collections of tales, Historia universal de la infamia (1935): ‘‘La ca´mara de las estatuas’’ (‘‘The Chamber of the Statues’’), ‘‘Historia de los dos que son˜aron’’ (‘‘Tale of the Two Dreamers’’), ‘‘El brujo postergado’’ (‘‘The Wizard Postponed’’), ‘‘El espejo de tinta’’ (‘‘The Mirror of Ink’’), and ‘‘El tintorero enmascarado, Ha´kim de Merv’’ (‘‘Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv’’). These tales have distinct features that link them with the magical, Oriental world of Alf layla wa layla (T he T housand and One Nights). They are eminently intertextual, and to read them is to read intertextually as well as intersubjectively. Written by an erudite Western author who knew T he Arabian Nights in several languages, they reference a fictional Oriental world and construct not only an atmosphere but also a certain kind of being and knowing associated with that world; when the tales are read today, what is the source of their mystery? Is it something culturally specific, something universal, or perhaps some combination of the two? In what sense might mystery be intertextual and intersubjective? Borges’s tales, which impose a certain rigor and labyrinthine structure on the reader’s reconfiguration of them, constitute miniature test cases for a phenomenological approach to mystery because they seem like textual worlds enclosed within their intricate structures. In highly artificial tales such as these, can we still talk about the world in the fiction? Is mystery – at least in the case of Borges – finally only a particular kind of verbal game? WHAT WAS, WHAT IS, MYSTERY?

Mystery has a history, and history has its mystery. Etymologically, the word ‘‘mystery’’ derives from the Greek verb myein (‘‘to close’’) – to close, that is, the lips and eyes of the person being initiated (the mystes) into a cult. As Walter Burkert explains, the Latin translation of mysteria, myein, 85 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 85–113. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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and myesis as initia, initiare, and initatio reveals that ‘‘mysteries are initiation ceremonies, cults in which admission and participation depend upon some personal ritual to be performed on the initiand. Secrecy and in most cases a nocturnal setting are concomitants of this exclusiveness’’ (7–8). In these mystery cults, whose origins lie in the prehistoric Near East, various kinds of initiatory activities were involved, such as common meals, dances, and ceremonies, especially initiation rites.1 The mystery cults thrived in ancient Greco-Roman times and developed in parallel with Christianity, with which some of the cults share certain features. In fact, to demarcate itself from the mystery cults, the Church hierarchy strategically fixed the dates of its most significant celebrations: thus, Christmas was set on December 25 so as to push into the background the festival of the sun god; the Epiphany, on January 6 in order to supplant an Egyptian festival; and Easter, in the spring to overshadow pagan fertility festivals.2 In time, the denotations of the word ‘‘mystery’’ gradually became generalized and secularized, taking on its contemporary meaning, with distinct ontological and epistemological accents: ‘‘A hidden or secret thing; a matter unexplained or inexplicable; something beyond human knowledge or comprehension; a riddle or enigma’’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Within the secular, non-theological meaning of the word lie traces of non-Western, Gnostic ways of thinking about and being in the world. The notions of game and artifice are also present. Fundamentally, mystery mediates experiences of limitation and paradox, encompassing an interplay between the visible and the hidden, the known and the unknown; to what degree this definition might apply to mystery in literary texts is the broad topic to which I will now turn, looking at mystery from the perspective of discourse. MYSTERY AS EVENT

Mystery in literary texts can be approached from various perspectives; here I will discuss it as an event located within the relationship between author, reader and text, with text conceived of as discourse that intends to say something about something to someone. As a discourse, the text opens a world; it reveals a dimension of reality in relation to dialogue with another person, although this dialogue as written text is itself interrupted and suspended and must be actualized by the reader (Ricoeur, ‘‘Text,’’ 43–45). Some questions that we might ask about the discourse of mystery are the following; for convenience’s sake I will order them begin-

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ning with the author, although we could just as easily begin with the reader or the text. In any case, there is a sense in this place of beginning; as Paul Ricoeur explains, ‘‘It is, indeed, from the author that the strategy of persuasion that has the reader as its target starts out. And it is to this strategy of persuasion that the reader replies by accompanying the configuration and in appropriating the world proposed by the text’’ (Ricoeur, ‘‘Between Text and Reader,’’ 390). Indeed, mystery as discourse is, among other things, a ‘‘strategy of persuasion’’ about the nature of human beings and the world. Author. First, what does the author intend and what does he/she configure in a discourse of mystery? As Umberto Eco and other structuralists argue, we can make conjectures about the former (i.e., the author’s intentionality) only on the basis of the coherence of the text itself, or textual intentionality (Role, Eco 10). Ricoeur makes a similar point: ‘‘The text is the very place where the author appears’’ (‘‘Text,’’ 48). So although we cannot ascertain exactly what or all that Edgar Allen Poe, Georges Simenon, or Ellis Peters intended – or why – we can comment on what the text does, or its embodiment of that intentionality. For mystery, it is evident that one thing the author does is enter and play a kind of game with the text itself and its implied reader. Here I am thinking of game in the sense that Gadamer discusses in T ruth and Method, specifically the chapter entitled ‘‘Play as the clue to ontological explanation’’ (101–133). The author of a mystery constructs a puzzle – he configures it, and he/she does this by formulating a strategy of puzzlement and then placing certain elements before the reader’s view and concealing others. In this sense, he plays a kind of shell game with symbols and story elements. In another sense, he defamiliarizes and distances the reader from that which is immediately understandable or can be understood; sometimes he makes obscure, and sometimes he reveals the hidden obscurity in something ostensibly transparent. In doing this, the author posits an intended reader capable of appreciating the puzzle and willing to be drawn into the defamiliarization or puzzlement of the world within the text. In a discourse of mystery the author says something about something to someone; however, this saying involves a concealing, an intentional incompleteness or obscurity, just as much as it involves an intentional showing of the way of concealment. There can be no such thing as a transparent mystery, a contradiction of terms. Mystery communicates – and miscommunicates – from behind its own partially veiled intentions; it suspends the completion of its message through defamiliarizing, baffling, or otherwise distanc-

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ing the reader from the transparent, the knowable, and the understandable. As a discourse, mystery partakes of the nature of all symbols, which look in two directions, toward a buried archeology and an incompletely perceptible goal (teleology); with reference to the insights of psychoanalysis, Ricoeur contends that it is the law of symbol to conceal and show forth, to say and to disguise (L e conflit des interpre´tations, 27–28, 220). Mystery as a narrative equally partakes of this law. There is an analogy worth exploring here, pointing to a kind of pre-configuration upon which the mystery story depends. We might argue that the ‘‘mystifying’’ in which mystery engages corresponds analogously to the covering of the eyes of the initiates in the mystery cults of ancient Greece and Rome; in these ceremonies, the covering-of-the-eyes reveals not only truth, but the truth of darkness, or the significance of that which was overlooked or never suspected. The world is not wholly transparent; its truths lie partially hidden: this, it would seem, is mystery’s universally applicable message. In this sense, mystery has an ontological and epistemological quality. Reader. Second, what does the reader do? Like the author, he/she also enters into or agrees to play a game; he follows the clues of the mystery, with its pattern of revelation and concealment, which is always a selfinterpretation to a certain degree. Every day we engage in an interpretation of symbols, and we engage most intensely with those that dig into our past and project toward our future. Although the reader appropriates the text, or understands it in his own terms, he/she must also surrender to it, follow the path that it lays forth because in a mystery there is often only one solution or one final truth to be grasped. The reader of mystery assumes from the beginning that something is being said and that there will be a solution; he assumes that there is a motivation stretching back to a narrative past and a solution that will appear in the narrative future. We have said that the author of mystery defamiliarizes or makes distant, whereas the reader appropriates or makes understandable; these are complementary, dialectical activities, however, and there is certainly an element of distanciation and appropriation in the reader’s engagement in the fictional mystery, as well as in the author’s. To appropriate is to seek to shed light on the darkness or obscurity within mystery; conversely, to distance oneself is to surrender to the path of the mystery, just as initiands in the ancient cults allowed themselves to be led into the truth that only the initiated could know. And just as the author posits a reader who will become engaged in the unraveling of the mystery, so too the reader posits

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an author who becomes the absent guide to the interpretation of the mystery; textual mystery depends on the reader’s belief that there must be a meaning, a solution, or a truth – that something is being said to someone – behind which there is a history (or motive). The text mediates this intentionality. From the standpoint of the reader, mystery depends on a textual dialectic of concealment and showing forth and on the different emphases of appropriation and distanciation within the reader’s engagement with the text. So, in general, we could say that the discourse of mystery textualizes the same fundamental relation, grosso modo, between guide (author) and initiand (reader) as the rituals of mystery in the pre-Christian cults of Greece and Rome; the same process of concealment and revelation occurs in the textual event of mystery. There is, however, an important point not to be forgotten: textual mystery depends not only on a certain structure but also on an interpretive projection and highlighting. Textual mystery depends on the reader just as a ritual depends on the initiand. T ext. Third, how does the text mediate the dialogic exchange between author and reader? The text constitutes the terrain of the game, a game of cache-cache (hide-and-seek); but it is also more than the terrain, since it mediates the intentions and acts of the author and the work of the reader to follow and comprehend those acts and intentions. In these senses, then, the text as the sum of the relation between author, reader, world, and written script becomes an event – a game or a performance in which the author and reader engage, though each differently. One configures or lays down the symbols; the other interprets and reconfigures them. All along the way, during the course of the game, the text obscures and clarifies, often at the same time. In fact, all the better if it can ambivalently obscure and clarify at exactly the same time. A mystery is made of clues and enigmas, each configured in the text, and each clue or enigma must have both a dark and a light side. A clue must lend itself to an appropriation, yet incompletely so; it should remain, when the perspective changes, sufficiently shadowy. Otherwise, it will lose its quality of attraction or mysteriousness. Textual mysteries should suggest their own solutions; these solutions, however, should be twisted solutions. The path to the solution should be sufficiently labyrinthine, sufficiently shadowy and illusory to stimulate the desire, the motivation, of the author’s and readers’ intentions. The text objectifies the intentionality of the author to defamiliarize the world – to clothe it in mystery – while in the end appropriating it in understandability – that is, the shining of a light on

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the shadowy or obscure; it objectifies the reader’s intentions to decipher, or appropriate, that world. In all of these senses then, the text is both a singular event and a potentially recursive game or performance, the joint work of the author and reader. It is an intersubjective space, objectified as signs and symbols whose interpretation involves a transactional loop that touches author, reader, and world.3 The specific question that this paper poses is whether mystery has a cultural aspect. I think that it certainly must, since the author and the reader are themselves situated in historical moment and within a culture and society. This situatedness informs any intention and reflection; it informs the construction of the literary text as well as its reception and actualization by the reader. Yet within a written text, is the cultural aspect of mystery something that can be analyzed, structurally or otherwise? Since we cannot climb outside of the culture in which we live and look upon all cultures transcendentally from above, with a global view, we inevitably look from the side, or incompletely, culturally implicated in all our observations and reflections. But it would also seem that any discussion of cultural difference in terms of mystery presupposes that there would be some point of comparison and contrast, that there would be some universal base from which to discuss different senses of what constitutes mystery. Within a text, culture can be both part of a fundamental orientation, and an effect that highlights or heightens; the two possibilities blend into each other. The title of my paper ‘‘Mystery in a Jellabah’’ metaphorically encapsulates one of these possibilities or one way that we might think of the universal and cultural elements of mystery: the universal element could be likened to the body; the cultural element could be likened to the clothes covering and accentuating it. Since I will be focusing on Oriental aspects of mystery, I have clothed the dark lady (or gentleman) in a jellabah, an outer garment worn in many Middle Eastern and North African countries such as Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, where I taught and conducted research during a two-year period as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer. Clothes reveal a style and an attitude toward living, and the cultural aspect of mystery might likewise be compared to dress, an overt manifestation of style in the accentuation of the body. An attitude toward living goes deeper than dress, however, so style in an encompassing sense tends to blend and cross into the universal component of mystery, that is, the dynamic game of cache-cache or, philosophically speaking, the paradigm of the concealment and unconcealment of existence. The cultural element of mystery likewise consists of those things that distance and defamiliarize; the effect may be relatively superficial or profound. Let

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us take the example of the motif of the veil in two very different stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘‘The Minister’s Black Veil’’ and Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘‘Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv.’’ In both tales the veil has a cultural quality, one having to do with New England Puritanism and the other with Islam and Middle Eastern cultures; in both it represents a profound symbol. However, when we attempt to isolate that aspect of the veil that gives it a mysterious quality in these two stories, we find that it is ultimately the reader’s interpretation of the veil that becomes cultural, rather than the veil itself, even though certain veils clearly signify certain cultural traditions. It may be possible to analyze mystery from a triple perspective – as word or symbol, as structure, and as event – each of which might have a cultural quality. The question then of whether or not mystery has a cultural quality will be left open for further consideration in terms of other stories in Borges’s collection, with their clearly intentional referencing of Oriental cultures, and specifically the fictional world of T he T housand and One Nights.

BORGES’S ORIENT

Before turning to the analysis of particular pieces, it is worth taking a short detour to consider Borges’s great interest in and fascination with Asian and Middle Eastern cultures and their literature. Borges’s Orient was varied and idiosyncratic, drawing and improvising on aspects of Persian, Arabic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese cultural heritages – as well as the Anglicized and Europeanized translations of those cultures and literatures as he encountered them through readings in English (his first language of education, if not his mother language), Spanish, German, and French. In T he Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994) Robert Irwin elaborates on the profound impact of one of those Eastern sources, the various versions of T he T housand and One Nights that Borges read throughout his life: Borges read the Nights as a child and many times subsequently as an adult. He quotes the Nights, he rewrites tales from the Nights and he often strives for the same imaginative effects that the medieval authors of the Nights achieved. Clearly, in several senses (all of them naı¨ve) Borges has been influenced by the Nights, but what does this mean? Influence does not just pass down from ancient writers to more modern writers, like a stream running downhill. Writers are not passive receptacles. Being influenced is an active process, and writers actually hunt for the books that they wish to be influenced by, making choices among the thousands of books that they might be influenced by. Sometimes they are seeking the retrospective authorization of past – or, if not that, then an ancient set of references to

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provide a familiar form for something new. Writers choose those whom they will be influenced by and they also choose how they will be influenced. (286)

‘‘Influence,’’ as Irwin explains, is a complicated concept, certainly not the one-directional, downward movement (author to author, generation to generation) that we sometimes naively suppose it to be. Influence, or better, intertextuality, can take many shapes. It can take the form of a borrowing of, or commentary on discrete elements, from scattered phrases to settings, to characterization to plotting. But it can also constitute an enthusiasm for a subject matter and style and then a reformulation of that style in the domain of one’s own art. Intertextuality is also something very contextual and ‘‘eventful’’ (or reader formulated): once two entities are brought together in the same context, an interaction between them may occur. Reading T he Arabian Nights and Borges together, one begins to notice Borgesian elements that might otherwise have been ignored in the original text, and vice versa; by way of the reader, an infiltration of texts in both directions occurs. Borges lays out this idea in the essay ‘‘Kafka and His Precursors’’: ‘‘Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future’’ (L abyrinths 201). Especially in his early work, Borges makes a point of acknowledging his sources in a scholarly manner with endnotes or works cited; throughout his career he enjoys alluding to arcane sources of all sorts, many real, some imaginary. He borrows a lot, but he invariably transforms whatever he borrows, adding something of his own; he will take discrete elements and change them to suit his purpose, or he will perceive a concept – the idea of recursion and infinity in A T housand and One Nights – and turn it into the theme of a short story like ‘‘El libro de arena’’ (‘‘The Book of Sand’’). So Borges mythologizes an Orient not in the pejorative sense that Edward Said uses to expose the stereotyping and diminishment of Middle Eastern cultures and societies, but rather by transforming it as a work of art into a fictional space, an aesthetic. Historia Universal de la Infamia Borges often references Middle Eastern and Asian histories and cultures. Historia universal de la infamia (1935), one of his earliest works, shows a specifically Arabian Nights’ influence in many of its segments and a broader Oriental intertextuality (Persian, Chinese, and Japanese) in others. First, the very conception of the book would seem to owe something to the author’s delight in the world of T he Arabian Nights, which

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contain remarkable stories about human types and behavior: the fisherman’s story, the first dervish’s story, the hunchback’s tale, and so forth. Their stories often treat the infamous in its diverse forms; the frame tale of King Shahrayar and Shahrazad, for example, is a model of the infamy of cycles of revenge. Borges’s stories similarly focus on the remarkable and on transgressions of law and tradition: ‘‘El espantoso redentor Lazarus Morell’’ (‘‘The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morrell’’), ‘‘El impostor inverosı´mil Tom Castro’’ (‘‘Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter’’), ‘‘La viuda Ching, pirata’’ (‘‘The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate’’), ‘‘El incivil maestro de ceremonias Kotsuke´ no Suke´’’ (‘‘The Insulting Master of Etiquette Koˆtsuke´ no Suke´’’), ‘‘El proveedor de iniquidades Monk Eastman’’ (‘‘Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities’’), ‘‘El asesino desinteresado Bill Harrigan’’ (‘‘The Disinterested Killer Bill Harringan’’), and so forth. The unusual, the infamous, and the fantastic are certainly not the private domain of T he Arabian Nights, but they are without a doubt one source that inspired Borges in this collection. Another element that links Arabian Nights and Historia universal de la infamia is that of fate, coincidence and chance. In the former, human destiny has a strangely scripted, aesthetic quality, and it is this quality that Borges incorporates in Historia universal de la infamia. We encounter it even in pieces that have nothing to do with the Orient, such as ‘‘The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morrell,’’ ‘‘Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor,’’ and ‘‘The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan.’’ A central theme of T he Arabian Nights and even of current works with Oriental themes such as Salman Rushdie’s East/West is that one never knows the consequence of one’s actions. Thus, in the opening paragraph of ‘‘The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morrell,’’ Borges remarks that so much has come from the Spanish missionary Bartolome´ de las Casas’s plea to Charles the Fifth that Africans be brought to the Caribbean to relieve the suffering American Indians; de las Casas acts out of faith and humanitarian concern, yet his suggestion ironically leads to much horror, the infamy of African slavery in the Americas, among other things: To this odd philanthropic twist [de las Casas’s plea] we owe, all up and down the Americas, endless things – W. C. Handy’s blues; the Parisian success of the Uruguayan lawyer and painter of Negro genre, don Pedro Figari; the solid native prose of another Uruguayan, don Vicente Rossi, who traced the origin of the tango to Negroes; the mythological dimensions of Abraham Lincoln; the five hundred thousand dead of the Civil War and its three thousand three hundred millions spent in military pensions; the entrance of the verb ‘to lynch’ into the thirteenth edition of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy. . . . (Universal History 19)4

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Like T he T housand and One Nights, this list could go into infinity, as might the twists and turns of irony and differing sentiments that the list engenders. To the question ‘‘what is fate?’’ Borges responds: it is that ‘‘name we give [to] the infinite, ceaseless chain of thousands of intertwined causes’’ (Historia, 37).5 Although the author is quite modestly dismissive about this early collection of fictional miniatures, he is certainly in control of the material, stamping it with his own unmistakable style. The intertextual connection with T he Arabian Nights is there for anyone who knows that work to observe and enjoy. In ‘‘Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor,’’ for instance, there are shades of the duplicities of the false caliph in ‘‘The Story of the Slave Girl, Anis al-Jalis and Nur al-Din.’’ In ‘‘The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan,’’ the fate of Billy the Kid, whose dead body is dressed up and put on display, resembles that of the beheaded magician, Duban, of the ‘‘Tale of the Fisherman and the Demon.’’ Even in a story about a non-Middle Eastern place, China, the Moors and T he Arabian Nights seem to have been on Borges’s mind; in ‘‘The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate’’ he quotes buccaneer Anne Bonney’s altered version of Aisha’s legendary reproach of Boabdil, who surrendered Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Andalusia, to the King and Queen of Spain: ‘‘If you had fought like a Man, you need not have been hang’d like a Dog’’ (Historia, 42).6 A final element not to be overlooked is the sense of universality that T he Arabian Nights conveys and that Borges seeks to echo in the title of this collection. In other words, the author embraces the paradoxical idea that a book – composed within a historical moment – and its commentary can be all-inclusive and ageless. Perhaps the most important point to emphasize is that Borges breathes new life into these Oriental materials; he composes his stories intertextually out of various sources and then alters the material in varying degrees. Above all, he bathes them in his style, which combines the restraint of minimalism with the baroque and the arabesque. In the ‘‘Postface du Traducteur’’ in Histoire universelle de l’infamie, a French translation of this collection, Roger Caillois examines Borges’s use of sources in the collection’s final section ‘‘Etce´tera.’’ He notes that Borges’s translations or adaptations read very much like the Argentinean’s own original work. In ‘‘The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv,’’ for example, Borges has retained only the bare sketch of the history; according to Caillois, none of the sources upon which the author drew indicates that Hakim was a leper, a key element in the denouement of Borges’s tale. The Hakim of other sources, including the Irish poet Thomas Moore’s collection, L alla Rookh, meets his fatal end in different ways, depending on the history consulted;

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Borges abides by none of these, concocting his own final dramatic flourish. Caillois concludes that Borges’s story is entirely original, and of the others in the third section of the book, ‘‘Etce´tera,’’ he confirms that, although Borges works from a tradition, his personal contribution to these stories is almost total. He is very much the creative artist, not the translator only (Histoire universelle 245). The manner in which Borges has created new stories out of these histories and legends shows his sense of things Oriental, the Orient of his urbane and bibliophilic imagination.

MYSTERY IN ‘‘ETCE´ TERA’’

The section of Historia universal de la infamia entitled ‘‘Etce´tera’’ features five vignettes that draw on T he Arabian Nights and/or the Persian AraboIslamic tradition of story; these pieces show a Borgesian creation and improvisation on the Orient. The first two tales, ‘‘La ca´mara de las estatuas’’ and ‘‘Historia de los dos que son˜aron,’’ are drawn directly from T he T housand and One Nights. Distinguished by its skillful use of repetition and variation, like a Baroque fugue, ‘‘The Chamber of Statues’’ mixes magic, morality, and history. The tale provides a poetic, lightly moralist explanation of the eighth-century Spanish loss of Andalusia: that is, a king who will not leave well enough alone insists on opening a castle door, with its twenty-four locks that twenty-four kings before him have put firmly in place and have refused to tamper with. Upon forcing his way into the castle’s locked chambers, he finds marvel upon marvel, including sculptured statues of Arabic horsemen, with their scimitars and lances at the ready. In the seventh and final chamber, at the end of a long corridor, the king finds an inscription which reads: ‘‘If any hand dare open the door of this castle, living warriors after the likeness of the figures here depicted will conquer the kingdom’’ (Universal History 111).7 And so it comes to pass, with the Moorish conquerors crossing the narrow straits from North Africa to install themselves in Southern Spain for the next seven hundred years: These things came to pass in year 89 of the Hegira. Before he was finished, Tarik had taken possession of the castle, defeated the king, sold his wife and his children into bondage, and taken their lands. And so Arab dominion spread throughout the kingdom of Andalusia, with its orchards and spacious meadows that never suffer from thirst. As for the treasures, legend has it that Tarik, son of Zaid, remitted them to the Caliph, who hid them in a pyramid.8

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The tale perfectly illustrates both the spirit of T he Arabian Nights and that of Borges’s own fiction. As he does so well in later stories such as ‘‘El sur’’ (‘‘The South’’) and ‘‘El libro de arena’’ (‘‘The Book of Sand’’), Borges composes a tale with two levels of explanation in simultaneous progression: the story makes sense within both the interpretive realm of magic and legend and that of historical events. The sense of mystery in this story derives from the interplay between the reader’s curiosity about what lies behind the locked castle door and a careful progression of effects. Each detail serves the story’s end, either introducing a new element of mystery or reinforcing it; in the conclusion, the magical, spectacular aspect of the tale resolves into the quotidian and the historical. In terms of mystery, the tale has a tripartite structure corresponding to the following process or journey or hermeneutic: 1) a barring of the way, 2) entry into a hermetic space, and 3) revelation. Specifically, within the first stage of the hermeneutic, this tale has three elements: the locked door, the reinforcement of the locks through twentyfour generations of kings, and the concomitant reinforcement of the appeal not to break the locks and open the door. I have used the word ‘‘hermeneutic’’ here because the locked door and all of its trappings pose a problem of interpretation; all three stages of the process pose problems of interpretation to the reader, and to struggle to understand or interpret is precisely to take the journey of mystery that the tale proposes. During the second stage of the tale, the locks are broken and the door is opened; incredible sights appear and are reinforced with even further incredible sights. Now even though the door has been forced opened, the way is not straight and clear; it is, rather, labyrinthine, because each incredible sight also reinforces the mystery. Like the locked door, each sight must be interpreted, yet each eludes immediate interpretation. The incredible sights show forth, yet they also obscure or place something shadowy within the reader’s path. During the third and final stage, the solution is revealed; this solution, however, is not immediately understandable and only becomes so when the hermetic space beyond the barred door transforms into the space of the real and the historical, that is, at the denouement of the tale with its references to the Arab invasion and conquest of Andalusia in the eighth century. A few more words about this hermeneutic process and the motif of the locked door. With the opening of each lock and entrance into each new chamber, the tale creates suspense and a sense of marvels. In addition to wondering what lies within the final chamber, the reader also wonders how the contents of each chamber are related to one another: for example,

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how do figurines of Arabs seated on camels relate to a map of the world and to a circular mirror? So the tale can also be thought of as a puzzle, or better, a series of related puzzles that demand interpretation. The locked door that the king is warned not to open is a prevalent motif in T he T housand and One Nights; the metaphor of the locked door is polysemous, but one of its significances would seem to be a kind of universal division between what is known (the present) and what is unknown (the future), and between what is permitted and what is forbidden or what is beyond human limitations. The door would also seem to be analogous with the mystery of death, our sense of apprehension and wonder about the end as end. The door is an apt metaphor for the essential quality of mystery itself: an opening and closing, a concealing and a revealing. In this tale, mystery has both a universal and a culturally specific component. I have already mentioned the locked door as a story motif that one encounters again and again in T he T housand and One Nights; the use of numbers and the twisted path toward the story’s resolution constitute two other culturally specific elements. But there is also something even more fundamental, conveying a metaphysical attitude: the sense of mystery in the tale illustrates the Islamic belief of ‘‘mektoub’’ (i.e., ‘‘it was written’’), which holds that Allah knows all and that all has already been determined. It illustrates the moral lesson that human beings have a limited vision and knowledge and therefore should submit to the omniscience and omnipotence of Allah. The images of the story embellish this basic lesson. Mystery is a cache-cache, yet from an Islamic perspective that mystery always finds its clarification in Allah’s intentions. So it is tempting to conjecture that a culturally specific element of this tale and of Oriental tales in the style of T he T housand and One Nights is that the meaning of the mystery is implicit at the very beginning of the story. In Western mystery stories, we must wait until the end for the solution; in these orientalized stories we must also wait until the end for the particularized solution, yet the message revealed by the mystery is always the same and knowable even at the beginning: ‘‘mektoub,’’ God is all-powerful and all-knowing; we are not. The next story is perhaps an even better illustration of this. On the literal level, ‘‘Tale of the Two Dreamers’’ treats familiar themes of dreams, belief, and fate, all drawn together in the form of a Borgesian paradox. The plot is simple: A man from Cairo has a dream in which another man pulls a gold coin out of his mouth and tells him to go to Isfahan, a city in Persia, where he will find his fortune. The Cairoan

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leaves the next day; upon arrival in Isfahan, he encounters numerous misfortunes; he is beaten, mistaken for a thief, sent to jail, and then expelled from the country by a local magistrate. Before expelling him the judge chides the Cairoan for his gullibility: ‘‘O man of little wit,’’ he says insultingly, ‘‘thrice have I dreamed of a house in Cairo in whose yard is a garden, at the lower end of which is a sundial and beyond the sundial a fig tree and beyond the fig tree a fountain and beneath the fountain a great sum of money. Yet I have not paid the least heed to this lie; but you, offspring of a mule and devil, have journeyed from place to place on the faith of a dream. Don’t show your face again in Isfahan. Take these coins and leave’’ (Universal History 116).9 The Cairoan returns home, digs beneath the fountain of his garden and uncovers the treasure. In addition to its value as a simple, entertaining tale, the story also serves as an allegory, which may be approached differently depending on the highlighting that the reader gives to various elements. If, for example, we highlight the cultural element – that is, if we attempt to translate or situate ourselves within the cultural framework of the tale – then the meaning and moral clarify accordingly. Mystery in this tale concerns the nature of dreams and the Divine; the intentionality of Allah, who seems to employ suffering and misdirection as part of the intrigue, seems inscrutable. It would appear that Allah, like hermeneuticists such as Paul Ricoeur, prefer ‘‘la voie longue,’’ or the long road to meaning; that is to say, the Cairoan can understand his dream (or his self ) only by way of the journey he takes and his interpretation of another man’s dream. As Ricoeur puts it, the comprehension of self passes by the detour of the comprehension of the other; or in slightly different words, ‘‘comprendre le monde des signes, c’est le moyen de se comprendre’’ (‘‘understanding the world of signs is the means to self understanding’’) (L e Conflit des interpre´tations 20, 260). The tale concerns this path to self-knowledge as well as a corollary idea, the interrelatedness of all things in the world: the man from Cairo’s dreams and life intermesh with the life and dreams of the capita´n in Isfahan. Dreams can be mysterious; coincidence can be mysterious. These things are universally true. However, the story especially emphasizes that the ways of fate are crooked and unfathomable. Culturally speaking, the mystery concerns why Allah would send to a poor, insignificant man a dream that leads him to further suffering and humiliation; in the end, Allah’s plan becomes clear and all is revealed. The final sentences of the story underscore this: ‘‘Ası´ Dios le dio benedicio´n y lo recompense y exalto´. Dios es el Generoso, el Oculto’’ (120). God is generosity itself, God is that which is hidden. God is mystery

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itself. The tale, then, is an allegory of life for the devout Muslim: Follow the dictates of Allah, and you will be rewarded in the end, is its message. Here, then, the cultural context seems to play an important part in guiding our interpretations of this tale, establishing the particular emphases of the moral. The cultural context, if the reader has the capacity to imaginatively enter it, orients the hermeneutic of mystery. Be that as it may, the tale as allegory is not exhausted by an interpretation that highlights its specifically cultural component. Other interpretations remain not only possibilities, but have in fact passed into the texts of other authors. Readers who know Paulo Coelho’s popular contemporary novel, O alquimista (T he Alchemist) (1988) will perhaps recognize that Coelho, like Borges, has dipped into and transformed the same magical tale from T he T housand and One Nights. In T he Alchemist the interpretation takes the form of an individual’s search for a treasure within, his true self; this interpretation of the allegory secularizes and psychologizes the Islamic element of the tale and directs the focus on the process of individuation and realization of selfhood. Coelho’s rewriting touches on still another aspect of the tale that itself could be highlighted and elaborated in an interpretation slightly different in emphasis from the two already mentioned. This third interpretation would be a commentary on an idea central to hermeneutics, that authenticity of self depends on a continuing interpretation and re-interpretation. So, from this perspective, the hidden treasure of the tale stands as a symbol of the authentic self, and the journey that the man from Cairo undertakes stands for the continual process of interpretation that authenticity of self demands. In this context, an essay entitled ‘‘Heidegger et la question du sujet’’ may prove illuminating; in this essay Ricoeur explicates the phrase, that in our everyday lives, ‘‘chacun est l’autre et personne n’est soi-meˆme’’ (229). The basic idea would seem to be that in everyday life we are often alienated from authenticity and that we must engage in a continual interpretation of ourselves vis-a`-vis others and life in order to discover and enact it. Ricoeur writes: The recovery of self proceeds not only from a phenomenlogy, in the sense of an intuitive description, but also from an interpretation precisely because the [authentic] self is forgotten; it must be recovered by an interpretation that brings it out of the shadows (229).10

Given a certain highlighting, that could also be an allegorical interpretation of Borges’s tale and Coelho’s O alquimista: there is something hidden; the quest to find what is hidden is long and labyrinthine, with the treasure buried where one least expects it and with information about how to find

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it mixed up with the lives of others and the confusion of the world. The tale is, after all, not about one person who dreams, but about two persons and two dreams that are related; an intricate chain of events brings them together. Given this highlighting, the tale can be read as a thematizing of authenticity via intersubjectivity. Two slightly more elaborate tales, ‘‘The Wizard Postponed’’ and ‘‘The Mirror of Ink,’’ also treat magic and reversals of fate, though both shift the emphasis toward human law as opposed to divine law. In the former, the gist of the story revolves on a test: a certain don Illa´n of Toledo tests a dean of Santiago de Compostela to determine whether or not he is worthy of learning the art of magic; the dean shows himself to be ungrateful and inhospitable and therefore he fails. The Oriental aspect of story comes out most strongly in Borges’s use of repetition during the course of the testing, which recalls the various calendar tales, among others, in T he T housand and One Nights. In this story the dean of Santiago rises to bishop, archbishop, cardinal, and finally to pope, showing at each elevation to a higher rank a growing disregard for and annoyance with don Illa´n, whom he quite incredibly does not suspect of being the magical source of his promotions. Power blinds and corrupts; courtesy and hospitality are never to be forgotten, no matter how high one’s station in life. This Oriental (Arabic-Islamic) message mixes with the traditions of Borges’s Hispanic heritage. With its emphases on honor and hospitality, the tale bears traces of both Spain and the Middle East; in fact, the tale has Arabic origins, but comes to Borges by way of a Spanish translationrendition of it, so a certain cultural filtering has already taken place prior to Borges’s rewriting. Although honor (i.e., keeping promises) and courtesy constitute the readily visible subject matter of the tale, slightly obscured by these obvious emphases lies a more fundamental matter apropos in the world as well as in fiction – the interrelatedness of all things. This is one of the basic messages of mystery and magic: that everything does make sense, though the chain of causality may be obscured or hidden from view. In this tale, for instance, banality rules, particularly in the opening paragraphs, yet the banal details are precisely what is important – though easily overlooked – in order to interpret the mystery. Again we see the game of cache-cache or the dialectic of clue and concealment at the heart of the discourse of mystery. Indeed, perhaps the most banal of details and questions that the tale puts before the reader is how a servant’s preparation of partridges for dinner relates to the narrative’s focus, the dizzying ascension of the dean to bishop, archbishop, cardinal, and pope:

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The arrangement agreed upon, don Illa´n explained that the magic arts could not be learned except in a secluded place, and taking the dean by the hand, he led him to the next room, on whose floor there was a large iron ring. Before this, however, he told the serving maid to prepare some partridges for dinner but not to roast them until he ordered her to. (Historia 122)11

The partridges are in fact an integral part of the ending, and the banal reference at the beginning of the tale has the function of putting the reader in the same position as the dean – both aspire to something – and teaching that while it is easy to overlook small details, it is often important to take notice of them. At the end of the tale, when the dean of Santiago repeatedly fails the test that don Illa´n has set for him, the latter commands his servant to cook the partridges, which breaks the spell of magic that has enchanted the dean and demonstrates to him his failure to act honorably and courteously. In terms of its cultural content, the story has a Spanish flavor, yet the notion that everything is related is a fundamental concept grounding the magic world of T he T housand and One Nights. The seemingly inconsequential detail of the partridges corresponds to details like the date pits in the tale of the Merchant and the Demon: in that story, the merchant, casually tossing the date pits over his shoulder, fells a passer-by, and this leads to all kinds of unexpected events and consequences. ‘‘The Mirror of Ink’’ also treats magic and, in a more pointed manner than ‘‘The Wizard Postponed,’’ fate and justice. Within Eastern traditions, whether Islamic or Buddhist, the individual is accountable for his or her actions; fate does not alter this accountability, but rather, incorporates it and figures it into the calculations. Those who torment and inflict sufferings on others shall themselves be repaid, either in this life or the next. ‘‘The Mirror of Ink’’ illustrates this principle. In the tale a wizard, Abd-erRahman al-Masmudi, is held captive by the ‘‘cruelest’’ of Sudanese rulers, Yaqub the Ailing, who forces him to demonstrate his magical powers. The wizard conjures images from a pool of ink poured in the palm of Yaqub’s right hand, and phantasmagoric scenes pass before the king’s eyes as he gazes into his cupped palm: the cities, the climates, the kingdoms into which the earth is divided; the treasures hidden in its bowels; the ships that ply its seas; the many instruments of war, of music, of surgery; fair women; the fixed stars and the planets; the colors used by the ungodly to paint their odious pictures; minerals and plants, with the secrets and properties they hold locked up in them; the silvery angels, whose only food is the praise and worship of the Lord; the awarding of prizes at schools; the idols of birds and kings buried in the heart of pyramids; the shadow cast by the bull that holds up the world and by the fish that lies under the bull;

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the sandy wastes of Allah the All-Merciful. He saw things impossible to tell, like gaslit streets and the whale that dies on hearing the cry of a man. (Universal History 126–127)12

One of these arabesque images is the ‘‘Man with the Mask,’’ who becomes part of the background of a kaleidoscope of increasingly violent events that Yaqub and the wizard Abd-er-Rahman witness. When the king demands to be shown an execution, it is the Man with the Mask who steps forward to the beheading. When the mask is lifted, the face behind the veil is Yaqub’s. The king collapses at the moment of the imagistic execution. The image, by way of the king’s own reading or interpretation of it, has a power to reach out and shape life, an idea that can be found in, among other examples, the protector image of the eye found on doors in North African homes. The essential symbol in this story, and found in all of these tales of ‘‘Etce´tera,’’ is that of a barrier, a door, or a veil, separating human power and comprehension from the divine. Fate travels a crooked, labyrinthine path; truth is often obscure or concealed, and emerges only at the end of the path. But there is perhaps nothing culturally specific about this pattern, which can be found in folktales in numerous cultures. Incorporated within this pattern one also finds the universal equation of folktales everywhere, that the good are finally rewarded and the evil are punished. Like ‘‘The Wizard Postponed,’’ ‘‘The Mirror of Ink’’ teaches that everything is related in the world. If one is cruel to others, one will be dealt with cruelly in return; this is a salient message in T he T housand and One Nights, but also in Greek tragedy. Rhetorically, the story builds to a climax through showing more and more spectacular sights, with the final scene as Yakub’s ironic execution. The tale illustrates the all-powerfulness of Allah, final arbiter, and concludes with this culturally specific recitation: ‘‘Glory to Him who never dies and who holds in His hands the keys of unlimited Pardon and everlasting Punishment’’ (Historia universal 131).13 The question that mystery implicitly poses in these stories is not only how everything is related to everything. Mystery is a veil placed before the reader’s eyes; to follow the path of the story, to interpret it correctly, is to begin to remove the veil. The manner in which the unmasking occurs constitutes a culturally specific element. One could go at least one step further in this explanation: in these tales, with their origin in Oriental materials pervaded by the spirit of Islam, the culturally specific element often concerns how the will of Allah will be shown or revealed. Yakub is cruel; God does not allow such cruelty to go unpunished, so when will the punishment come and how will it come? If we highlight the Islamic

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element of the tales as we read them, then mystery takes on a certain coloring and fundamental significance. The tales’ intentionality, manifest even in atmospherics and seeming banalities, encourages the reader not only to enter the mystery, but also to experience it from a particular cultural slant, as much as that might be possible. Why was Borges attracted to this Oriental material and how has he altered it in translating and rewriting the tales? He attributes ‘‘The Mirror of Ink’’ to Sir Richard Burton, but scholars have been unable to track it down (Histoire universelle de l’infamie 237). Borges may have mistaken the source, or he may have changed the germ of the source beyond recognition. In any case, Borges’s Orient and his fictional world generally operate according to two basic principles: things are never what they seem, and there is no eluding things as they are. A tension binds together the symbolic, the historical, and the existential in his works. He was attracted by the shimmering quality of Arabian Nights’ transformations as well as by its underlying somber strains of unchangeable finality. ‘‘Allah is the Beneficient, the Unseen,’’ ‘‘The Tale of Two Dreamers’’ concludes. ‘‘Glory be to Him, who endures forever, and in whose hand are keys of unlimited Pardon and unending Punishment,’’ ends ‘‘The Mirror of Ink.’’ But even this culturally specific message has a universal component if we choose to highlight in our interpretations the existential quality of fate or destiny. We are all thrown into the world, and each individual confronts this inalterable predicament. ‘‘Our destiny,’’ Borges writes in ‘‘A New Refutation of Time,’’ ‘‘is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron clad . . .’’ (L abyrinths 234). This remark offers a clue to the author’s preference for Oriental subject matter, in which fate plays a major role, and suggests an aspect of the essential quality of mystery. What makes something mysterious is not always its obscurity or vagueness, but rather, sometimes its clear finality and irreversible closure. Detective stories and other popular fiction that depend on mystery play with this tension between the open and the closed, or between obscurity and finality: in the detective-fiction formula, the murder is set clearly before the readers’ eyes; the resolution of the murder then occupies the rest of the story. Within the imaginative world of T he Arabian Nights, fate takes the place of murder in the detectivefiction formula, and this fate is always Allah’s will; the particular working out of an individual’s fate, like the solving of a mystery in a whodunit, has lots of twists and turns, and this is where the magic in stories of the Arabian Nights genre enters. Magic, a sudden, unexpected opening, counterpoints fate, with its definitive closing. Whereas the resolution in

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a whodunit is secular, in the world of T he T housand and One Nights and Borges’s tales, the sacred is the unfathomable and irreversible closure. Again, it would seem that mystery can be given at least some distinctive cultural highlighting. ‘‘The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv’’ is perhaps the most deftly written piece of the collection; it has many of the fine qualities of Borges’s best work in Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949), with its opening recalling those of ‘‘The Garden of Forking Paths’’ and ‘‘The Immortal’’ in which various sources are cited to give the story that follows a historical verisimilitude. The tale is organized imagistically and dramatically into six short segments: ‘‘La Purpura escarlata’’ (‘‘The Scarlet Dye’’), ‘‘El Toro’’ (‘‘The Bull’’), ‘‘El Leopardo’’ (‘‘The Leopard’’), ‘‘El Profeta velado’’ (‘‘The Veiled Prophet’’), ‘‘Los Espejos abominables’’ (‘‘The Abominable Mirrors’’), and ‘‘El Rostro’’ (‘‘The Face’’). Like these enigmatic headings, Borges’s prose exhibits an imagistic, arabesque quality conveying a sense of poetry and mystery: ‘‘[Hakim’s] home was the ancient city of Merv, whose gardens and cities and pastures sadly overlook the desert. Midday there, when not dimmed by the clouds of dust that choke its inhabitants and leave a grayish film on the clusters of black grapes, is white and dazzling’’ (Universal History 80).14 Borges’s Orient, as exemplified in this story, contains some typical as well as atypical elements. For example, his Orient is almost entirely without a sexual component; this is remarkable in that, as Said argues, the West has often conceived of the Orient as a region to be penetrated. Sex figures abundantly in Richard Burton’s translation of T he T housand and One Nights and the descriptions of numerous other Western travelers and authors, but not so for Borges. In ‘‘Hakim of Merv,’’ the closest the author gets to a sexual description or sexual innuendo – and this is much further than usual for him – is the following oblique passage: ‘‘Ever mindful of serenity and meditation, the Prophet kept a harem of a hundred and fourteen blind women, who did their best to satisfy the needs of his divine body’’ (Universal History 83). Overtly sexual passages simply do not occur into Borges’s writing, so that its absence from his Orient is perhaps not surprising. But still I think that the reader can draw some tentative conclusions from this: Borges’s Orient resembles his other imaginary beings and bears all the marks of his particular imaginative genius. We find other idiosyncrasies in ‘‘Hakim of Merv,’’ such as Borges’s fascination with numbers, mirrors, doubling and repetition, philosophies and theologies. Hakim’s conception of the castigations of the afterlife is illustrative:

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Those who deny the Word, those who deny the Veil and the Face . . . are promised a wondrous Hell: for each lost soul shall hold sway over 999 empires of fire; and in each empire, over 999 mountains of fire; and in each mountain, over 999 castles of fire; and in each castle, over 999 chambers of fire; and in each chamber, over 999 beds of fire; and in each bed he will find himself everlastingly tormented by 999 shapes of fire, which will have his face and his voice. (Universal History 85)15

Reality and illusion are often a motif in Borges’s stories; mirrors, like repetition, function to question the nature of self and world: At the root of Hakim’s cosmogony is a spectral god. This godhead is as majestically devoid of origin as of name or face. . . . The lord of th[e] lowermost heaven is he who rules us – shadow of shadows of still other shadows – and his fraction of divinity approaches zero. The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply the parody, are abominations. (Universal History 84)16

Metamorphoses and magic as well as shams and hoaxes characterize Borges’s Orient. To separate one from the other becomes the stories’ end, as it often is in detective and spy fiction, two genres with which Borges enriches his Oriental tales. So in the end, Hakim of Merv, the blind prophet, is exposed for what he is; when the veil is removed, the beguiled onlookers find a disfigured, leprosy-spotted face: ‘‘There were no brows; the lower lid of the right eye hung over the shriveled cheek; a heavy cluster of tubercles ate away the lips; the flattened, inhuman nose was like a lion’s’’ (Universal History 86).17 Borges’s Orient is a fantastic Orient. But just as writers of mystery must drop inadvertent clues, so too Borges foreshadows the tale’s denouement by noting, as a kind of aside, that the veiled prophet seemed to pursue danger and scandal, inviting lepers to his palace where he kissed them and gave them pieces of silver and gold. Thus the connection with leprosy has a psychological explanation, and the supernatural elements of the tale, a natural one: for example, Hakim’s head is not in fact a lion’s, but rather lion-like in the deformities that the ravages of leprosy have wrought. Just as the tale’s narrative proceeds according to a series of symbols, so too each section introduces one or more mysteries about the masked prophet’s life. The first section concerns his birth, apprenticeship as a dyer, and mysterious disappearance, before which he destroys the caldrons and cubes for immersing textiles as well as a scimitar and a bronze mirror. As a clue to this mysterious disappearance, the narrator suggests that Hakim, torn between the conflicting appeals of an Angel and Satan, begins to view all color as a falsification of the world. Mystery in this tale has a Gnostic highlighting, which I shall say more about shortly.18

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The second section introduces the mystery of Hakim’s visage: he appears to have the head of a bull, which he covers with a mask; the reader later discovers that leprosy has disfigured him. Section three retrospectively recounts the legend of how Hakim lost his human head and gained his supernatural powers; his mask protects ordinary mortals from a view that would blind them, for Hakim, the prophet of Allah, utters words so ancient that they ignite a fire in his mouth and a glorious splendor in his face. In sections four and five, the mysteries surrounding Hakim take a further Gnostic turn: at the core of his beliefs is a speculation that the world is a projection of images, or parodies, and that acts and objects of this world, such as procreation and mirrors, are abominable because they multiply and perpetuate that illusion. Section six solves the tale’s primary mystery, but because the solution is itself ambiguous, remnants of the mystery persist. Hakim is a leper, and his veil is designed to hide the leprosy and turn the personal misfortune into a political and religious power; a second explanation is Hakim’s own: the state of sin in which human beings live prevent them from seeing his real splendors. Throughout the tale’s five sections, Borges incorporates cultural elements within the composition of the mystery, which could be categorized and analyzed in terms of atmospherics, symbols, and intertextual referencing to Gnostic traditions. In the first category, we find elements such as the desert setting itself, as well as references to T he T housand and One Nights and historical figures and texts from Arabo-Islamic traditions. All the dates in the story use the Islamic rather than the Gregorian calendar, thus marking off the story’s referential space as outside of the ken of Western calculation. Similarly, images and symbols such as the dyer and the veil are given an Oriental accentuation. Although we might think of these elements as the clothing surrounding the body of mystery itself, or the creation of a mood in which the reader enters the imaginative space of the author’s text, there may be something more fundamental at play, to which the Gnostic material and highlighting in the tale point. Mystery is an incertitude that can never be completely resolved, and this incertitude – and capacity of illusion – concerns the nature of the self and the world. How do these elements intend or direct the tale’s interpretation? At least two possibilities present themselves: following the author’s lead, the reader may interpret the tale as an allegory of mystery as discourse, or as a commentary on the nature of the world when viewed from the perspective of Gnosticism. In the former interpretation, Hakim doubles for the author; his parodies of the Prophet parallel the author’s rewritings of the sources from which he draws the tale. Just as Hakim misleads

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others to believe in his supernatural powers, so too the author leads the readers into the game of mystery, whose endpoint may in fact be a kind of deception or emptiness. What is behind the veil? In this case, only an anti-climax: Hakim’s leprous face. As for the second interpretation, that the world itself may be a parody, a cruel game, is a possibility that Gnosticism embraces; the essence of Gnostic doctrines, whose origins lie in the Middle East, holds that the inner spirit must be liberated from a world that is basically deceptive, oppressive, and evil. In both of these interpretations, the notion of mystery takes a somber turn: we are no longer talking about mystery as a revelation of the truth, but as an unmasking of the parody and the falsehood of words and the world. These interpretations, especially the second, depend on a certain cultural highlighting that is no longer primarily Arabo-Islamic, but rather Gnostic. If we compare ‘‘Hakim of Merv’’ to another story whose mystery derives from the veil as central symbol, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘‘The Minister’s Black Veil’’ (1836), we see that the minister’s final declaration actually resembles Hakim’s: Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his innermost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and lo! on every visage a black veil! (Norton 639)

What makes these two stories similar is a certain Gnosticism, which infiltrates Hawthorne’s New England Puritanism, but which he leaves largely unexamined. The world is a place of deception and evil. Both Borges and Hawthorne illustrate that mystery depends on interpretation, but only Borges takes the additional step of considering mystery itself as an emptiness. Behind the veil, behind the mystery, there is nothing; could we say that this is fundamentally an Eastern message? A final piece in ‘‘Etce´tera,’’ a bagatelle entitled ‘‘Un doble de Mahoma’’ (‘‘A Double for Mohammed’’), returns indirectly to the tale of Hakim, the leprous dyer who pretends to be a prophet, by extending the logic of the tale’s Gnostic references and overtones. Beginning with characteristic Borgesian wit and humor, it toys with an idea whose source the author lists as the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg: Since the idea of Mohammed is so closely associated with religion in the minds of Muslims, the Lord has ordained that they should be presided over in Heaven by someone impersonating Mohammed. This delegate is not always the same person. A native of Saxony who in

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earthly life was taken prisoner by the Algerines and became a Muslim once held this position. Having been a Christian, he was moved to speak to them of the Lord, and to say He was not Joseph’s son but the Son of God; it was found advisable to have this man replaced. The office of the representative Mohammed is marked by a torchlike flame, visible only to Muslims. (Universal History 133).19

In the context of this paper’s analysis of mystery, we might read this passage as a proposition that mystery, like religion, has both a universal aspect and, like the indissoluble connection for Muslims between Mohammed and religion, a sociocultural aspect. Different analytic approaches present themselves: we could analyze mystery in terms of its distinguishing mood, structure, and dynamic; this would tend toward a formalist, structuralist approach in which we look at mystery as an object in isolation. But such an approach becomes unsatisfactory, finally, because the boundaries of mystery exceed it. So we turn to an analysis of mystery as a discourse, as an event; this tends toward a phenomenological, hermeneutic approach, viewing the text of mystery as something incomplete that the reader must actualize in a performance. The cultural aspect of mystery depends on an interpretive highlighting that derives from the concrete situation of the discursive event in conjunction. This approach also meets its limitations, however: Hermeneutics, even as a recursive looping, does not exhaust the unlimited intertextual referentiality of mystery. When mystery becomes, as it often does in Borges’s texts, an inexhaustible and irresolvable interplay of concealment and revelation, then still another interpretative approach must be considered. In the preceding passage and others that I have cited, I have tried to show that Borges’s relationship to things Oriental was really quite sophisticated; he could both take seriously and poke fun at things Oriental. And yet he does so not with an attitude of Western superiority, but rather with the understatement and modesty that mark his writings. He bathes in an Orient of the interpretive imagination – of the texts he has read and reflected on – and is refreshed by the encounter. He transforms himself (through interpretive translations of Oriental material) and in turn transforms the material through improvisations and new creations. In the event of interpreting an intertextual Orient, Borges composes the Oriental within his authorial self. We the readers also take part in the event; through the text we reconfigure it, interpreting it from our historical moment, which itself is not closed to cultures, themselves no longer easily identifiable. A final interpretive approach that is perhaps apropos to mystery, and in particular Borges’s treatment of it, is that of the ‘‘traveling differential,’’

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which seeks to examine incommensurabilities from within rather than without (Iser 7–8). Borges himself seems to engage in this kind of interpretive translation and actualization of mystery. In the ‘‘Preface’’ to the 1954 edition of Historia universal de la infamia, he calls his composition ‘‘baroque’’ and describes it as a ‘‘style which deliberately exhausts . . . all its possibilities and . . . borders on its own parody’’ (11). He continues the line of thought, surprisingly introducing a culturally specific, Eastern idea: The theologians of the Great Vehicle point out that the essence of the universe is emptiness. Insofar as they refer to that particle of the universe which is this book, they are entirely right. Scaffolds and pirates populate it, and the word ‘infamy’ in the title is thunderous, but behind the sound and fury there is nothing. The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable (12).20

The baroque and the Great Wheel meet in an intertextual space, which is also the place of thought grasping the text of the world. What is mystery? Like the baroque, it may be a play of appearances, a game in which both author and reader have their parts, each implicated in the other, both implicated in the play and interpretation of symbols. Perhaps mystery, in its recursive process of concealment and revelation and its resistance to closure, embodies something fundamentally Eastern. Whether its essence is finally an emptiness would itself be an interpretation with no final answer or solution because it is a continuing event with a past and a future. The nature of mystery lies in the nature of symbols and signification, which themselves are situated in the intentionality of discourse, with its arche´ (past) and telos (future). But it also lies in the cultural orientation of a reader’s experiences and expectations: to expect that finally there is something behind the mystery and that this something can be analyzed is a Western orientation; to sense that behind the mystery there may be nothing at all is perhaps an Eastern one. For Borges, and for the reader, a traveling differential of negation and affirmation move the event of mystery forward in its concealment and revelation, never arriving at closure while generating increasingly more refined differentiations. The differential loses itself in the immeasurable: mystery and infamy. So too with the universal and the culturally specific aspects of mystery: an interpretation based on traveling differential can reach no conclusion, for it shows the dovetailing of the one into the other, interminably, manifesting ‘‘multifarious possibilities’’ (Iser 152). So the question that this essay attempts to answer must settle for the inconclusive differentiations of the traveling differential as an interpretive approach. There is no

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end to mystery, and there is no end to its interplay of transcultural and culturally specific aspects. We enter from within, and experience it. ‘‘The very title of these pages,’’ Borges writes of the pieces in this collection, ‘‘flaunts their baroque character’’ (10). Using another term now more popular, the contemporary reader experiences these tales as postmodern in their playfulness, intertextuality, and self-reflexivity. In them, the Oriental is something both taken seriously, indeed it was a great inspiration to Borges – and something taken to the verge of parody. Writing in the 1930s, with Historia universal de la infamia Borges became the first Western writer to treat Oriental material in a postmodern fashion; today we know that at the same time he was moving forward in that avant-garde he was also looking back to the ancient and interminable world of mystery, Gnosticism, and Buddhism. T he Chinese University of Hong Kong NOTES 1 See ‘‘Mystery Religion,’’ Encyclopedia Britannica Online. [Accessed 10 November 2001]. One stereotype of mystery religions, Walter Burkert argues, is that they are ‘‘Oriental in origin, style, and spirit.’’ ‘‘The term ‘Oriental,’ ’’ he writes, ‘‘betrays the perspective of Westerners; ancient Anatolia, Egypt, and Iran were separate worlds, each in its own right, even if all of them are situated more or less east of Western Europe’’ (2–3). See also Marvin W. Meyer, ed., T he Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook. 2 See ‘‘Mystery Religion,’’ Encyclopedia Britannica Online. [Accessed 10 November 2001]. 3 Wolfgang Iser uses the term ‘‘transactional loops’’ to characterize the interpretive approach of Paul Ricoeur. See T he Range of Interpretation. Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of European and American Studies, 2000. 4 The original reads: ‘‘A sea curiosa variacio´n de un fila´ntropo debemos infinitos hechos: los blues de Handy, el e´xito logrado en Parı´s por el pintor doctor oriental D. Pedro Figari, la buena prosa cimarrona del tambie´n oriental D. Vicente Rossi, el taman˜o mito´logo de Abraham Lincoln, los quinientos mil muertos de la Guerra de Secesio´n, los tres mil trescientos millones gastados en pensiones militares, la estatua del imaginario Falucho, la admisio´n del verbo linchar en la decimotercera edicio´n del Diccionario de la Academia . . .’’ (Historia universal 18). 5 The original reads: ‘‘El Destino (tal es el nombre que aplicamos a la infinita operacio´n incesante de millares de causas entreveradas) . . .’’ (Historia universal 37). 6 The original reads: ‘‘Si tu hubieras batido como un hombre no te ahorcarı´an como a un perro’’ (Historia universal 42). 7 The original reads: ‘‘Si alguna mano abre la puerta de este Castillo, los guerreros de came que se parecen a los guerreros de metal de la entrada se aduen˜ara´n del reino’’ (Historia universal 117).

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8 The original reads: ‘‘Estas cosas acontecieron el an˜o 89 de la he´gira. Antes que tocara a su fin, Ta´rik se apodero´ de esa fortaleza y derroto´ a ese rey y vendio´ a sus mujeres y a sus hijos y desolo´ sus tierras. Ası´ se fueron dilatando los a´rabes por el reino de Andalucı´a, con sus higueras y praderas regadas en las que no se sufre de sed. En cuanto a los tesoros, es fama que Ta´rik, hijo de Zaid, los remitio´ al califa su sen˜or, que los guardo´ en una pira´mide’’ (Historia universal 117). My translation. 9 The original reads: ‘‘Hombre destinado y cre´dulo, tres veces he son˜ado con una casa en la ciudad de El Cairo en cuyo fondo hay un jardı´n, y en el jardin un reloj de sol y despue´s del reloj del sol una higuera y luego de la higuera una fuente, y bajo la fuente un tesoro. No he dado el menor cre´dito a esa mentira. Tu´, sin embargo, engendro de una mula con un demonio, has ido errando de ciudad en ciudad, bajo la sola fe de tu suen˜o. Que no te vuelva a ver en Isfaja´n. Toma estas monedas y vete’’ (Historia universal 120). 10 The original reads: ‘‘la reprise du ‘je suis’ ne rele`ve pas seulement d’une phe´nome´nologie, au sens d’une description intuitive, mais d’une interpre´tation, pre´cise´ment parce que le ‘je suis’ est oublie´; il doit eˆtre reconquis par une interpre´tation qui de´socculte.’’ (My translation.) 11 The original reads: ‘‘Ya arreglado el asunto, explico´ don Illa´n que las artes ma´gicas no se podı´an aprender sino en sitio apartado, y toma´ndolo por la mano, lo llevo´ a una pieza contigua, en cuyo piso habı´a una gran argolla de fierro. Antes le dijo a la sirvienta que tuviese perdices para la cena, pero que no las pusiera a asar hasta que la mandaran’’ (Historia 122). 12 The original reads: las ciudades, climas y reinos en que se divide la tierra, los tesoros ocultos en el centro, las naves que atraviesan el mar, los instrumentos de la guerra, de la mu´sica y de la cirugı´a, las graciosas mujeres, las estrellas fijas y los planetas, los colores que emplean los infieles para pintar sus cuadros aborrecibles, los minerales y las plantas con los secretos y virtudes que encierran, los a´ngeles de plata cuyo alimento es el elogio y la justificacio´n del Sen˜or, las distribucio´n de los premios en las escuelas, las estatuas de pa´jaros y de reyes que hay en el corazo´n de las pira´mides, la sombra proyectada por el toro que sostiene la tierra y por el pez que esta´ debajo del toro, los desiertos de Dios el Misericordioso. Vio cosas imposibles de describir, como las calles alumbradas a gas y como la ballena que muere cuando escucha el grito del hombre. (Historia universal 128–129) 13 The original reads: ‘‘La Gloria sea con Aquel que no muere y tiene en su mano las dos llaves del Ilimitado Perdo´n y del Infinito Castigo’’ (Historia universal 131). 14 The original reads: ‘‘Su patria fue la antigua ciudad de Merv, cuyos jardines y vin˜edos y prados miran tristemente al desierto. El mediodı´a es blanco y deslumbrador, cuando no lo oscurecen nubes de polvo que ahogan a los hombres y dejan una la´mina blancuzca en los negros racimos’’ (Historia universal 84). 15 The original reads: ‘‘A los que niegan la Palabra, a los que niegan el Enjoyado Velo y el Rostro . . . , les prometo un Infierno maravilloso, porque cada uno de ellos reinara´ sobre 999 imperios de fuego, y en cada imperio 999 montes de fuego, y en cada monte 999 torres de fuego, y en cada torre 999 pisos de fuego, y en cada piso 999 leches de fuego, y en cada lecho estara´ e´l y 999 formas de fuego (que tendra´n su cara y su voz) lo torturara´n para siempre’’ (Historia universal 90–91). 16 The original reads: ‘‘En el principio de la cosmogonı´a de Ha´kim hay un Dios espectral. Esa divinidad carece majestuosamente de origen, ası´ come de nombre y de cara. . . . El sen˜or de cielo del fondo es el que rige – sombra de otras sombras – y su fraccio´n de divinidad tiende a cero.

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‘‘La tierra que habitamos es un error, una incompetente parodia. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables porque la multiplican y afirman’’ (Historia universal 90). 17 The original reads: ‘‘No tenı´a cejas; el pa´rpado inferior del ojo derecho pendı´a sobre la mejilla senil; un pesado racimo de tube´rculos le comı´a los labios; la nariz inhumana y achatada era como de leo´n’’ (Historia universal 92). 18 Fascinating but difficult to define, Gnostic beliefs can be summarized as follows: In the Gnostic view, the unconscious self of man is consubstantial with the Godhead, but because of a tragic fall it is thrown into a world that is completely alien to its real being. Through revelation from above, man becomes conscious of his origin, essence, and transcendent destiny. Gnostic revelation is to be distinguished both from philosophical enlightenment, because it cannot be acquired by the forces of reason, and from Christian revelation, because it is not rooted in history and transmitted by Scripture. It is rather the intuition of the mystery of the self. The world, produced from evil matter and possessed by evil demons, cannot be a creation of a good God; it is mostly conceived of as an illusion, or an abortion, dominated by Yahweh, the Jewish demiurge, whose creation and history are depreciated. This world is therefore alien to God, who is for the Gnostics depth and silence, beyond any name or predicate, the absolute, the source of good spirits who together form the ple Ro´ma or realm of light. See ‘‘Gnosticism’’ Encyclopedia Britannica Online. [Accessed 14 January 2002]. 19 The original reads: ‘‘Ya que en la mente de los musulmanes las ideas de Mahoma y de religio´n esta´n indisolublemente ligadas, el Sen˜or ha ordenado que en el Cielo siempre los presida un espı´ritu que hace el papel de Mahoma. Este delegado no siempre es el mismo. Un ciudadano de Sajonia, a quien en vida tomaron prisionero los argelinos y que se convirtio´ al Islam, ocupo´ una vez este cargo. Como habı´a sido cristiano, les hablo´ de Jesu´s y les dijo que no era el hijo de Jose´, sino el hijo de Dios; fue conveniente reemplazarlo. La situacio´n de este Mahoma representativo esta´ indicada por una antorcha, so´lo visible a los musulmanes’’ (Historia universal 132). 20 The original reads: ‘‘Los doctores del Gran Vehı´culo ensen˜an que lo esencial del universo es la vacuidad. Tienen plena razo´n en lo referente a esa mı´nima parte del universo que es este libro. Patı´bulos y piratas lo pueblan y la palabra infamia aturde en el tı´tulo, pero bajo los tumultos no hay nada. No es otra cosa que apariencia, que una superficie de ima´genes; por eso mismo puede acaso agradar’’ (Historia universal 10–11).

WORKS CITED T he Arabian Nights. Trans. Husain Haddawy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990). Borges, Jorge Luı´s. El Aleph. 1949; Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1994. ——. T he Aleph and Other Stories, 1939–1969. Ed. and trans. Thomas Norman de Giovanni. New York: Dutton, 1970. ——. Ficciones. 1944; Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995. ——. Histoire universelle de l’infamie/Histoire de l’e´ternite´. Ed. Roger Caillois and Laure Guille. 1951; Paris: Union ge´ne´rale e´dition, 1994. ——. Historia universal de la infamia. 1935; Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1993. ——. L abyrinths: Selected Stories & Other W ritings. Eds. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. Preface by Andre´ Maurois. New York: New Directions Books, 1964.

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——. A Universal History of Infamy. Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972. Borges, Jorge Luis and Alicia Jurado. Que´ es el Budismo. Buenos Aires: Emece´ Editors, 1991. Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Citati, Pietro. L a lumie`re de la nuit: L es grands mythes dans l’histoire du monde. Trans. Brigitte Pe´rol and Tristan Mace´. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Coelho, Paulo. T he Alchemist. Trans. Alan R. Clarke. San Francisco: Harper, 1998. ——. O alquimista. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Pergaminho, 1988. Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: T he Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Trans. Philip Mairet. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. Eco, Umberto. T he Role of Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of T exts. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. T ruth and Method. Second Revised Edition. Trans. and rev. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1994. Grossvogel, David. Mystery and Its Fictions: From Oedipus to Agatha Christie. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1979. Irwin, Robert. T he Arabian Nights: A Companion. London: Allen Lane, 1994. Iser, Wolfgang. T he Range of Interpretation. Taipei, Taiwan: Institute of European and American Studies, 2000. Magliola, Robert R. Phenomenology and L iterature. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1977. Meyer, Marvin, ed. T he Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987. Ricoeur, Paul. A l’e´cole de la phe´nome´nologie. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1993. ——. L e conflit des interpre´tations: essais d’herme´neutique. Paris: E´ditions du Seuil, 1969. Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. 1978; London: Penguin Books, 1995. Valde´s, Mario J. Hermeneutics of Poetic Space: Critical Studies of L iterature, Cinema, and Cultural History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

M. J. SAHLANI

IN THE NAME OF GOD: SUFI’ISM, A TRANSCENDENTAL PANTHEISM AND THE MYSTERY OF MYSTICISM IN PERSIAN POETRY

The advanced and uncompromising Sufi’ism taught by some Persian poets makes ethics subservient to philosophy. Virtue, as they conceive it, is not an end, but a means: the end is union with God, through Love. Thus their poems are based on a transcendental pantheism; however, they work out from the moral, not the metaphysical, standpoint. Among these genuine Sufi poets, Jalaluddin Rumi is without a rival. He was born at Balkh on the 6th of Rabi’u-l-Awwal, 604 A.H. (30th September, 1207). A Platonic type of mystical love had been cultivated by Sufis, among whom Rumi declared that he and Shamsi Tabriz were ‘‘two bodied in one soul.’’ In this union of loving souls all distinctions vanish: nothing remains but the essential Unity of Love, in which ‘‘lover’’ and ‘‘beloved’’ have merged their separate identities. In calling his lyrics the Diwan (Poems) of Shamsi Tabriz, Rumi of course uses the name Shams as though Shams and himself had become identical and were the same person. Though to us Shams’s figure may appear unsubstantial, we need not accept the view put forward by some modern scholars that he is merely a personification of Jalaluddin’s poetic and mystical genius – an Eastern equivalent for ‘‘the Muse.’’ Western scholars will recall a celebrated parallel that points the other way. Did not Dante transfigure the donna gintil who was the object of his romantic passion into Celestial Wisdon, and glorify her under the name of Beatrice? Rumi’s literary output, as stupendous in magnitude as it is sublime in content, consists of the very large collection of mystical odes, perhaps as many as 2,500, which makes up the Diwan-e-Shams-e-T abrizi; his Mathnawi in six books of about 25,000 rhyming couplets; and the Rubaiyat or ‘quatrains’, of which maybe about 16,000 are authentic. The forms in which he clothes his religious philosophy had been fashioned before him by two great Sufi poets, Sana’J of Ghaznah and Fariduddin Attar of Nishapur. Though he makes no secret of his debt to them both, his flight takes a wider range, his materials are richer and more varied, and his method of handling the subject is so original that it may justly be described as ‘‘a new style.’’ It is a style of great subtlety and complexity, 115 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 115–124. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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a mystery hard to analyze; yet its general features are simple and cannot be doubted. In the Mathnawi, where it is fully developed, it gives the reader an exhilarating sense of largeness and freedom by its disregard for logical cohesion, defiance of conventions, bold images drawn from homely things and incidents familiar to everyone. The poem resembles a trackless ocean: there are no boundaries; no lines of demarcation between the literal ‘‘husk’’ and the ‘‘kernel’’ of doctrine in which its inner sense is conveyed and copiously expounded. The effortless fusion of text and interpretation shows how completely, in aesthetics as in every other domain, the philosophy of Rumi is inspired by the monistic idea. ‘‘The Mathnawi’’, he says, ‘‘is the shop for Unity (wahdat); anything that you see there except the One (God) is an idol.’’ Ranging over the battlefield of existence, he finds all its conflicts and discords playing the parts assigned to them in the universal harmony which only mystics can realize. Sufi pantheism or monism involves the following propositions: (a) There is One Real Being, the Ultimate Ground of all existence. This Reality may be viewed either as God (the Divine Essence) or as the World (phenomena by which the hidden Essence is made manifest). (b) There is no creation in Time. Divine Self-manifestation is a perpetual process. While the universe’s forms change and pass and are simultaneously renewed without a moment’s intermission, in its essence it is co-eternal with God. There never was a time when it did not exist as a whole in His Knowledge. (c) God is both Immanent, in the sense that He appears under the aspect of limitation in all phenomenal forms, and Transcendent, in the sense that He is the Absolute Reality above and beyond every appearance. (d) The Divine Essence is unknowable. God makes His Nature known to us by Names and Attributes which He has revealed in the Qur’an. Though essentially identical, from our point of view the Divine Attributes are diverse and opposed to each other, and this differentiation constitutes the phenomenal world, without which we could not distinguish good from evil and come to know the Absolute Good. In the sphere of Reality there is no such thing as evil. (e) According to the Holy Tradition, ‘‘I created the creatures in order that I might be known,’’ the entire content of God’s Knowledge is objectified in the universe and pre-eminently in Man. The Divine Mind, which rules, and animates, the cosmos as an Indwelling Rational Principle (Logos), displays itself completely in the Perfect Man. The supreme type of the Perfect Man is the pre-existent Reality

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or Spirit of Mohammad, whose ‘‘Light’’ irradiates the long series of prophets beginning with Adam and, after them, the hierarchy of Muslim Saints, who are Mohammad’s spiritual heirs. Whether prophet or saint, the Perfect Man has realized his Oneness with God: he is the authentic image and manifestation of God and therefore the final cause of creation, since only through him does God become fully conscious of Himself. These are some of the themes underlying Rumi’s poetry. He is not their original author; they may be regarded as having been gradually evolved by the long succession of Sufi thinkers from the ninth century onwards, then gathered together and finally formulated by the famous Andalusian mystic, Ibn-al-Arabi (1165–1240). Ibn-al-Arabi has every right to be called the father of Islamic pantheism. Probably no one has exercised deeper and more pervasive influence over the intellectual life of the community of Sufis during the past seven hundred years. He was soon called by his disciples and followers al-Sheikh al-Akbar, the ‘‘Greater Master,’’ and few who have taken the trouble to study his works would dispute this title, though some would argue over the direction in which his greatness lies. He devoted colossal powers of intellect and imagination to constructing a system which, though it lacks order and connection, covers the whole ground in detail and perhaps, all things considered, is the most imposing monument of mystical speculation the world has ever seen. Rumi’s mysticism is not ‘‘doctrinal’’ in the Catholic sense but ‘‘experimental.’’ He appeals to the heart more than to the head, scorns the logic of the schools, and nowhere does he embody in philosophical language even the elements of a system. The words used by Dante in reference to the Divina Commedia would serve excellently as a description of the Mathnavi: ‘‘The poem belongs to the moral or ethical branch of philosophy, its quality is not speculative but a practical spiritual guide engaged in making others perfect and furnishing novice and adept alike with matter suitable to their needs.’’ Assuming the general monistic theory to be well known to his readers, he gives them a panoramic view of the Sufi gnosis (direct intuition of God) and kindles their enthusiasm by depicting the rapture of those who ‘‘break through to the Oneness’’ and see all mysteries revealed. While the Mathnawi is generally instructional in character, though it also has entertaining passages, as befits a book intended for the enlightenment of all sorts of disciples, the Diwan, and, on a much smaller scale,

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the Ruba’iyat are personal and emotional in appeal. Lyrics and quatrains alike have everywhere the authentic ring of spiritual inspiration, while in image, style and language they often approximate very closely the Mathnawi. In some of these poems the mystic’s passion is so exuberant, his imagination so overflowing, that we catch glimpses of the very madness of Divine experience. Yet the powerful intellect of Rumi the man never quite capitulates to the enthusiasm of Rumi the mystic; at the last moment there is a sudden drawing back, a consciousness that certain matters are too secret and too holy to be communicated in words. It is not surprising to read that these poems, chanted (as many of them were doubtless composed) in the spiritual se’ance of the Mevlevis, roused the hearers to an almost uncontrollable fervour. In Rumi the Persian mystical genius found its supreme expression. Viewing the vast landscape of Sufi poetry, we see him standing out as a sublime mountain peak; the many other poets before and after him are but foothills in comparison. The influence of his example, his thought and his language is powerfully felt through all the succeeding centuries; every Sufi after him capable of reading Persian has acknowledged his unchallenged leadership. To the West, now slowly realizing the work of Rumi, he is able to provide a source of inspiration and delight not surpassed by any other poet in the world’s literature. Since all manifestations of the mystical spirit are fundamentally the same, in so far as each is unmodified by its peculiar environment and by the positive religion to which it clings for support, we shall not be astonished to encounter in remote lands and different ages of the world ‘one set of principles variously combined.’ To illustrate this parallelism with regard to the chief doctrines of Jalal-ad-Din and Plotinus: Although the name of Plotinus was unknown in the East, his philosophy, made popular by his immediate successors and reflected in Aristotelian commentaries, had considerable influence upon the kindred oriental system. The idea of emanation, or rather the particular form of it exhibited in Sufism, proceeded, if we are not mistaken, from the Neoplatonic mint. Sufi metaphysics – naturally the product of mature speculation – are cast throughout in the mould which Alexandria aptly contrived to satisfy at once the despairing credulity and devotional enthusiasm of the time. This resemblance, extending also to practical ethics, would be still more striking, were it not disguised by a total contrast of expression. What Plotinus states tersely and baldly, Jalal-ad-Din throws into an obscure allegory: he ‘implies things’, but seldom utters them. It has already been remarked that Jalal-ad-Din approaches his subject on the moral side, and while he

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makes no pretence to logical and coherent exposition, in his brief metaphysical flights he is so vague, fanciful, and allusive, that the depth of his acquaintance with Greek and Arabian philosophy cannot be definitely fixed. Nevertheless, if we fairly interpret these oracular deliverances in the light afforded by Sufi authors and commentators, the following sketch of Neoplatonism will be found to contain little or nothing that Jalal-adDin has not presented, after his own fashion, to readers of the Masnavi and Diwan. The aim of Plotinus is to achieve perfect union with God. Assuming the reality of a supernatural over against the material world, he has to show (a) the relation existing between them, (b) the means whereby he may ascend. (a) ‘‘The one watchword in the new Platonic philosophy is continuity’’ (Bussel, T he School of Plato, p. 327). There shall be no impassable gulf dividing God from Man, spirit from matter: they shall be the first and last links of a single chain. Thus we have, according to Plotinus, (1) Absolute Unity, the ground of all being, the highest Thought, the highest Good, the highest Beauty. Nay, it is something above all these. It is inconceivable, and therefore ineffable; it can only be expressed by negation. Jalal-ad-Din’s favorite metaphors, referring to Absolute Being, are Sea, Light, Love, Beauty and Truth. (2) Universal Mind, the eldest offspring of the One, which it eternally contemplates. It is inferior to the One, for thought involves duality. It is the home of the Ideas and the true archetype of the phenomenal world. (Jalal-ad-Din calls it the First Soul.) (3) Universal Soul, begotten by Universal Mind and connecting it with the world of sense. She has thus a double nature. As the heavenly Aphrodite, she receives the overflowing radiance of the Universal Mind, which, as an earthly goddess, she communicates to the region below. This region is the material world. Matter is absence of Form, mere defect and privation. Nothing in itself, it is yet the mirror of all things. It is also Evil, being utterly devoid of the Good. But why, we may ask, should plurality issue from the inmost seclusion of the One? Plotinus answers that every perfect being desires to create another. (The Sufis, like the Neoplatonists, invoke the shape of metaphor, to solve the mystery of creation.) The One remains, indeed, unmoved and undiminished: its substance suffers

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no change, but its redundant energy streams over. He compares this process to the sap coursing through a tree, or to the sunbeams which illumine the atmosphere. Thus all things partake of God in proportion as they approximate the divine centre; all strive upward to that Unity without which they would not exist, and of this strife the Universe is born. Accordingly, the phenomenal world is a dream of the soul, a subjective entity. (b) The soul in her primeval state belongs to the World-Soul. Going forth from Eternity and passing the frontiers of the Intelligible, she enters the realm of Matter, not by an act of will, but in obedience to an instinctive necessity. (The soul, like Narcissus, made of herself an idol and desired to embrace it. Egoism no less than Fate is the cause of her fall. Plotinus agrees with Jalal-ad-Din that Man has free will, though his freedom is subordinate to eternal law. In so far as he yields to the sensual he is not free: his freedom consists in following reason instead of passion. He sins under compulsion, as the original sin.) As embodied she is a part of Nature, as spiritual she still firmly plants her foot in the ideal world. She is fallen, but not irretrievably: ‘the ancient track’ lies open, if she will tread it. Return sums up the whole duty of Man. As the imperfection of the soul is due to nothing but the contaminating influence of the body, it follows that she again becomes perfect when this is dissolved. By purifying herself from lusts, passions, and worldly imaginations, from whatever is alien to the divine element, she wins back the Paradise that she had lost for a while. Yet even the sensible may serve as a bridge to the spiritual, and love of earthly beauty kindle a holier flame, for what is love but a yearning for the Good and Fair? The soul travels homeward by a series of ascending stages, which correspond to those of descent. In the last stage she rises beyond reason and knowledge to a state of unconscious rapture, where seer and Seen are no more distinct, seeker is one with Sought, lover with Beloved. Putting off her humanity, she ‘assumes the god’. Sufistic theosophy is the fountainhead of Jalal-ad-Din’s inspiration. From this, his great works of poetic mysteries, the Masnavi and Diwane-Shams-e-T abrizi descend by separate channels. The one is a majestic river, calm and deep, meandering through many a rich and varied landscape to the immeasurable ocean; the other a foaming torrent that leaps and plunges in the ethereal solitude of the hills. It may be doubted whether the vast reputation of the Masnavi has not injured the poet’s

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fame. He has even been denied a place in ‘the notable succession of Oriental singers about whom the world is willing to hear’ (Quarterly Review, January, 1892; p. 34). And perhaps this estimate is not altogether surprising. Had Wordsworth never written anything besides the ‘‘Exclusion,’’ he would still be read by Wordsworthians and neglected by his countrymen. The Masnavi contains a wealth of delightful poetry. But its readers must pick their way through apologies, interpretations of Qur’anic texts, metaphysical subtleties and moral exhortations in order to chance upon a passage of pure and exquisite song of mystery. Now in the Diwan we have the poet with his singing robes about him. Thus equipped, he can hardly fail to be recognized. That his odes should exhibit a certain monotony of ideas is inevitable. To the mystic all apparent difference is the evidence and manifestation of an underlying unity, or rather it is unity: What was that mass of water? Nought but the wave. What was that wave? Nought but the Sea.

For him the world is non-existent, and he will not study the unreal; like the compass he circles ever round a point on which his thoughts, actions, and very being depend: he cannot stray from his course any more than a star can leave its orbit. Hence all mystical writings are the record of one spiritual experience and are pervaded by a single overpowering emotion. The language of all mystics is the same. How often do Law, Emerson, and Shelly remind us of the Masnavi! Juan de la Cruz has indited lyrics which it would be easy to mistake for translations from the Diwan. The beauty and purity of Jalal-ad-Din’s mysterious poems need not be illustrated at length. One passage refers to a verse of Qur’an, the Holy Scripture of Muslims. These words are not found in the Qur’an. Possibly there is an allusion to the Verse 11 of Chapter 43 of the Qur’an, which says: ‘‘And God will by no means grant further respite to a soul, when its time shall come’’: Hard by a master dwells, his feet in mire Deep-sunken; of his state I prophesy. Recite the boding verse, ‘‘When Doom shall fall.’’ Tyrannous he and mighty, and of the swept Along in proud magnificence to mock At lovers, love he deemed an idle play.

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M. J. SAHLANI Lo, a besotted fool like thee to scorn The votaries of love! God’s wine has drowned Thy wits and bidden thee wrestle with thy Lord. As when a bird his airy flight resumes Exultingly, nor dreads the distant lure: Fate to his bosom speeds the shaft of woe.

The style throughout is simple and unaffected. There are passages like the following, which recalls a euphemism: Go forth from Place, and settle in Unity, in absolute Everlasting; Plant every head that is dual on the Christian’s neck. To this holy parrot in the cage of existence Thankfully give sugar to peck, ere it soars aloft. When thou art grown drunk with eternity future, Take the sword of eternity past; Plunder, like a Turk, the wretched Hindu, Life.

A glance at these impassioned hymns will inform the reader that the weapon of allegory is seldom out of the poet’s hand. But Jalal-ad-Din does not balance literal and spiritual meanings so equally as to leave the choice uncertain. His words will always bear the profoundest interpretation. He is no juggler with mysteries. Although his metaphors are drawn from every field of Nature and Art, neither Art nor Nature is the subject which they adorn. God is the Saki and the Wine: He knows what manner of Love is mine.

While these figures are sometimes, to our taste, grotesque and inappropriate, they more often display a daring and felicitous originality. Tho’ Penitence spring up and grow apace, Love will uproot it in a moment’s space. Let vows bind all, ye cannot bind the free And mountain-surging thunder of the Sea. The wine of God’s grace hath no brim: If it appear to have a brim, ’tis the fault of the cup. All these ‘patines of bright gold’ on the table of heaven Are in order that one day I may be bidden to the feast. I was snow and melted away, so that the earth drank me up, Till I became one mist of soul and mounted to the sky.

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Jalal-ad-Din is especially partial to metaphors of light and sound. The conception of God as a radiant Sun, whose shadow is the world, recurs continually with reference to Shams-e-Tabriz. Love is fierce-sparking fire, the lover Shineth among his fellows as in heaven The brilliant moon among the host of stars.

The soul is a flashing mirror, wherein God reveals his beauty; in the hour of separation it becomes a glowing furnace. Now it is a falcon summoned by the fowler’s whistle to perch again upon his wrist, now a lonely dove that seeks her mate and ceases not to moan. The poet likens it also to a lute thrilling at the lightest touch of the musician, or to a voice that echoes on the hillside. To Nature he never appeals in vain. The stork’s cry bids him think on God, ‘‘to whom is the kingdom and the glory’’; in autumn the pale cine-leaves mourn the loss of his Beloved. To conclude this somewhat desultory review, I have this to say: Jalal-ad-Din lacks the colour and perfume of Hafiz, the other great Persian poet, who is by turns grave and gay, blasphemous and devout, serious and ironic; his music is rich and full, but for the most part he plays on one string; he has no sense of humor; his allegory is often grotesque and his execution careless. In sublimity of thought and grandeur of expression he challenges the greatest masters of song; time after time he strikes a lofty note without effort; the clearness of his vision gives a wonderful exaltation to his verse, which beats against the sky; his odes throb with passion and raptureenkindling power; his diction is choice, splendidly imaginative figure, ‘‘A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.’’ As a mystic, he was too earnest to care for, even if he observed, the incongruities which draw upon him the censure of fastidious critics. As a poet, he sought to invest the Sufi doctrine with every charm that his genius could inspire. The traces of this conflict are not wholly obliterated. But in higher moments the opposing characters are swept away and overwhelmed in a flood of celestial harmony, for of Jalal-ad-Din as of Shelley it may be truly said: ‘‘This is not poetry borrowing the forms of pantheistic speculation, but pantheism assuming to itself the faith and passion which transmutate speculative thought into religion.’’ J. A. Symonds, Essays, Vol. II, p. 120. Jalal-ad-Din himself has this to say about his works:

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Although this divan contains many thousands of argreeable verses and much excellent poetry, yet the whole of it is not suited to the taste of an audience. Perceiving, however, that a number of the sincere and candid were very eager to have it printed, I resolved to prepare a selection of the qasida [ode]-like love-poems, the tarji [stanzas] sweeter than sugar, the delightful ghazals [lyric poems], and the priceless quatrains included in the Divan.

CATHERINE MALLOY

READING J. M. COETZEE’S DISGRACE : IN SEARCH OF THE GOOD

Fiction offers a lens through which one may see the world, as well as the person next door, as well as oneself. In both life and fiction, personal transformation may occur, and may be attributed to such things as a particular event, a resolved conflict, an epiphany. Occasionally, change occurs in a character for which there is no logical explanation. In J. M. Coetzee’s novel. Disgrace, David Lurie’s transformation from a disgraced man to a man approaching ‘‘grace’’ is a mystery. Although a culmination of serious events occurs in the novel, the events in themselves do not appear to be the catalysts responsible for David’s sea change. However, it is possible to discern his transformation by applying Emmanuel Levinas’s theory of the Other as a way to apprehend the mystery of David’s progression towards grace. In an interview with Richard Kearney in Paris in 1981, Emmanuel Levinas, when asked how the God of ethics differs from the God of traditional ontology, answered in the following way: In ethics, it is only in the infinite relation with the other that God passes . . . that traces of God are to be found. God thus reveals himself as a trace, not as an ontological presence, which Aristotle defined as a Self-Thinking-Thought and scholastic metaphysics defined as an Ipsum Esse Subsistens or Ens Causa Sui. The God of the Bible cannot be defined or proved by means of logical prediction and attributions. Even the superlatives of wisdom, power and causality advanced by medieval ontology are inadequate to the absolute otherness of God. It is not by superlatives that we can think of God, but by trying to identify the particular interhuman events which open towards transcendence and reveal the traces where God has passed. The God of ethical philosophy is not God the Almighty Being of creation, but the persecuted God of the prophets who is always in relation with man, and whose difference from man is never indifference. This is why I have tried to think of God in terms of desire, a desire that cannot be fulfilled or satisfied – in the etymological sense of satis, measure. I can never have enough in my relation to God for he always exceeds my measure, remains forever incommensurate with my desire. In this sense, our desire for God is without end or term: it is interminable and infinite because God reveals himself as absence rather than presence (Kearney 196, 197).

Levinas’s response to the question affirms his consistent belief in the ethical responsibility inherent in being human, in being watchful of the Other, as being ‘‘a face to face [as he writes in T otality and Infinity], as delineating a distance in depth – that of conversation, of goodness, of 125 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 125–131. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Desire – irreducible to the distance the synthetic activity of the understanding establishes between the diverse terms, other with respect to one another, that lend themselves to its synoptic operation’’ (Emmanuel Levinas, 39, T otality and Infinity). In J. M. Coetzee’s appropriately titled novel, disgrace and desire permeate the text. Set in South Africa before the ‘‘end’’ of apartheid, the novel discloses a plethora of various desires. There is the desire that David Lurie, the protagonist, has for several women in the novel: Soraya, his mistress; Melanie, a student with whom he has had an affair; Bev, a friend of his daughter, Lucy. Lucy, on the other hand, is committed to her altruistic desire to stay on her plot of land in the uplands of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, so she can actualize her determination to help put an end to apartheid. The disgrace manifesting itself in the novel is integral to it, and far-reaching in its implications. David is disgraced by his dismissal from the university after his affair with Melanie is made public, and Lucy, his daughter, is disgraced after a violent rape by three of her black neighbors leaves her pregnant and terrorized. David, who was himself nearly incinerated in the raid on Lucy’s house, struggles to understand Lucy’s continued sacrificial devotion to peaceful co-existence with the native Africans (even after the assault), and is incapable of comprehending her reasons for remaining in a place which is so brutally and obviously hostile to her. David moves from Cape Town in order to stay with Lucy temporarily after his tribunal at the university, and eventually, following her disgrace, which results in her conceiving a child, David settles permanently in a boarding house close to her ‘‘farm.’’ A pathetic character, a man about whom, early in the novel, there is little to like, David, before his most recent and monumental fall from grace at the university, ‘‘earns his living at the Cape Technical University, formerly Cape Town University College [where] once [he was] a professor of modern languages, [but] . . . since Classics and Modern languages were closed down as part of the great rationalization, [he] is now adjunct professor of communications’’ (Coetzee 3). David is allowed to teach one ‘‘special field’’ (3) course each year because it is ‘‘good for morale’’ (3), but his other courses sound like a litany of Communications subjects, all of which serve (ironically) to call attention to the characteristic he appears, most certainly, to lack. Although he speaks to Soraya, his mistress, to Rosalind, his ex-wife, to Lucy, his daughter, and to Melanie, the student with whom he has an affair, David’s inability to truly communicate (whether in speech or silence), precipitates, perhaps even causes, his failure to recognize his responsibility to the Other. Had recognition occurred,

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had he been awakened to the primacy of the Other above the self, at this stage, he would have become aware ‘‘that the devotion for the other,’’ as Levinas writes, ‘‘is not shut up in itself like a state of soul, but is itself from the start given over to the other’’ (Levinas TLR 182). He would have known that ‘‘if silence speaks, it is not through some inward mystery or some sort of ecstasy of intentionality but,’’ as Levinas continues, ‘‘through the hyperbolic passivity of giving, which is prior to all willing and thematization’’ (Levinas TLR 183). But David’s awakening does not occur simultaneously with his return to the uplands of the Eastern Cape to live with his daughter, Lucy, for although he tries to escape the disgrace he has brought upon himself and upon Melanie’s family by going there, he fails to recognize that there can be no retreat from the Other because his individual responsibility is (and always has been) existent. Nonetheless, in this locus, altruistic Lucy and uneasy David attempt to co-exist, and their separateness, Lucy idealistic, David resigned, does not compromise their ability to live peaceably. Tending her vegetable garden and selling her vegetables in the village on market day, living peacefully next to her neighbor, Petrus, Lucy appears to be pleased with her contribution towards erasing apartheid. David, except when he is working on the opera he is writing about Byron, finds it difficult to understand Lucy’s passionate and self-sacrificing commitment to a peaceful resolution between the Afrikaners and the Africans, especially in light of the heinous assault she survived, but he doubts he could convince her to relinquish her way of thinking. Meanwhile, Lucy suggests to David that he could help Bev Shaw, who runs an animal welfare clinic nearby, and the deeply felt tensions separating father and daughter explode into a heated argument. The ideological differences surfacing between them contribute to the strain already existing in their relationship, but despite this David tries to comfort her, struggles to meet her face to face as a result of the summoning that presents itself to him. What may be seen as David’s first step in his long journey from disgrace to grace begins during this exchange. The primacy of the Other is illuminated, and David attempts to approach its radiance, but falters for lack of understanding. His woefully limited sense of discernment in being able to recognize the calling, the summoning, of the Other, halts him. He is not fully aware that [t]he sense of the human is not to be measured by presence, not even by self-presence. The meaning of proximity exceeds the limits of ontology, of the human essence, and of the world. It signifies by way of transcendence and the relationship-to-God-in-me (l’a-Dieu-en-

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moi) which is the putting of myself into question. The face signifies in the fact of summoning, of summoning me – in its nudity or its destitution, in everything that is precarious in questioning, in all the hazards of mortality – to the unresolved alternative between Being and Nothingness, a questioning which, ipso facto, summons me (Levinas, pp. 112, 113, ‘‘Beyond Intentionality’’).

David does not lose himself by being summoned. To the contrary, he assumes a truly ethical position by beginning to listen to the summons, to open himself to the Other: he becomes aware that his responsibility to the Other does not compromise or fragment his true self, although Lucy confronts him thus: ‘‘[you] think I ought to involve myself in more important things, . . . you think, because I am your daughter, I ought to be doing something better with my life . . . [you] think I ought to be painting still lives or teaching myself Russian. You don’t approve of friends like Bev and Bill Shaw because they are not going to lead me to a higher life . . . [and] they are not going to lead me to a higher life [because] there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That’s the example that people like Bev try to set. That’s the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beasts’’ (Coetzee 74).

Whereby David answers her: [We are of ] ‘‘a different order of creation from the animals . . . so if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution’’ (Coetzee 74). David starts to articulate the idea of serving not sacrificially, but completely, and in the process he begins to discover that being truly human may differ from what his formerly held Eros-centered perspective thought it was. The remembered satisfaction from his past vacuous and amoral actions begins to slip away, to become less desired, less longed for, not necessarily as a result of his disgraced state, but because he is beginning to experience the slightest glimmering of transcendence in facing the Other, speaking to the Other, and taking responsibility for the Other, seeing that it is within this realm that the mystery of transcendence must dwell. ‘‘[In] this strange mission that orders the approach to the other [Levinas writes], God is drawn out of objectivity, presence and being. He is neither an object nor an interlocutor. His absolute remoteness, his transcendence, turns into my responsibility – non-erotic par excellence – for the other’’ (Hand 179 TLR). David inclines towards the Other, perhaps, knowing he will not be filled up with ‘‘goods’’ (Hand 179), but he proceeds, nonetheless.

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The on-going conflict between David’s position, that of feeling responsible for Lucy’s well-being, and Lucy’s, that of believing that she must inhabit the land to affirm her commitment to end apartheid, heightens David’s sensitivity to the demands Lucy has placed upon him. His continued and keen awareness of her summons, particularly after the series of terrorizing events that leave them both physically and emotionally brutalized, contribute to his awakening, and he begs Lucy to leave the country, to make a new life elsewhere, where whites are not viewed as enemies. And yet, despite his plea, he tries to exact from himself a compassion for the perpetrators of the crimes, as well: ‘‘It was history speaking through them . . . [a] history of wrong. Think of it that way . . . [it] came down from the ancestors’’ (Coetzee 156). But David cannot stop himself from also raging and expressing his utter despair over the incident, pleading with Lucy to ‘‘close down the kennels . . . lock up the house, pay Petrus to guard it. Take a break for six months or a year, until things have improved in this country. Go overseas. Go to Holland. I’ll pay’’ (Coetzee 157). Filled with remorse for not having saved her from the attack, for abandoning (he believes now) his responsibility towards her, David knows the exigency of his task to tend to her is thwarted when she refuses to leave her home, and he is baffled. What now? How is he responsible for her if she refuses to heed his advice, if she will not do as he asks? Although David fails to convince Lucy of the folly of her choice to remain on the land, he accepts unconditionally her decision to stay. In a reversal of the political system she deplores, Lucy becomes a sacrificial victim, her disgrace continuing before the community she hopes to appease. ‘‘Petrus wants to know if you are going to market tomorrow,’’ David informs Lucy. ‘‘He is afraid you might lose your stall.’’ But she does not reply. She would rather hide her face, and [David] knows why. Because of the disgrace. Because of the shame. That is what their visitors have achieved; that is what they have done to this confident, modern young woman. Like a stain the story is spreading across the district. Not her story to spread but theirs; they are its owners. How they put her in place, how they showed her what a woman was for (Coetzee 115).

Lucy’s humiliation becomes inexplicably congruent with David’s recognition of his failure as a father, but she does not see the subtle victory of the men who invaded her home as a cause for her departure or a reason for her to be vanquished. She tells David: ‘‘ ‘Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.’ ‘Like a dog’ [David answers]. ‘Yes, like a dog’ ’’ (Coetzee 205).

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Clearly, Lucy’s vulnerability has no influence on her decision to stay, nor do David’s hopeless lectures, or his futile attempts to enlighten her about (what he sees as) the folly of her choice. David, on the other hand, decides to leave her up on the Eastern Cape in order to restore (perhaps) what is left of his life. Disgrace augmenting his determination, David visits Melanie’s parents and apologizes for the dishonor he has brought upon her family. He tells Mr. Isaacs, ‘‘As for God, I am not a believer, so I will have to translate what you call God and God’s wishes into my own terms. In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened between myself and your daughter. I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept that I live in disgrace as my state of being. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term?’’ ‘‘I don’t know, Mr. Lurie. Normally I would say, don’t ask me, ask God. But since you don’t play, you have no way to ask God. So God must find his own means of telling you’’ (Coetzee 172).

Isaacs’s statement is incomprehensible to David; still, as he takes his leave, he bows ‘‘with careful ceremony . . . gets to his knees and touches his forehead to the floor. Is that enough? He thinks. Will that do? If not, what more?’’ (Coetzee 173). David cannot fathom Mr. Isaacs’s words and is unsure of what he is to do in order to be forgiven. The Isaacs, he knows, cannot restore his good name, but what is he called to do? Influenced, perhaps, or enlightened, by Mr. Isaacs’s words, to follow the path ‘‘God has ordained for him’’ (Coetzee 174), David decides to return to his daughter, to forsake his freedom for the face to face encounter with Lucy. Acknowledging and recognizing his separateness from her renews his responsibility towards her, and underscores his desire to subordinate his past failures to the possibility of ‘‘being’’ with Lucy in the truest sense. But David’s return is a solemn one, and when Lucy requests him to live elsewhere because the two of them cannot live together, David feels admonished. Despite his rejection, he arranges for a room at a nearby boarding house, agreeing to help Lucy at her market stall on Saturday mornings. He is kind and caring towards her as they carry on with their lives, and somewhat pragmatic about his approaching grand-fatherhood, asking Lucy if she ‘‘love[s] him yet’’ (216), referring to the child she is carrying. Lucy tells him that love will grow, that she is determined to be a good mother and a good person and that he should try to do the same. David is keenly aware that as a father he ‘‘has not been much of a success [and that] as a grandfather he will probably score lower than average

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too’’ (Coetzee 217), but he is resigned to whatever will come, and he prepares for the future one day at a time. His coming grandchild, a figurative blend of the colonized Other and himself and Lucy, and Bev, and Mr. Isaacs, and the others he cannot recall or name, will help David to keep his disgrace at bay, will help him, perhaps, to become whole. On Sundays, he resumes his sessions with Bev Shaw at the clinic, bringing in cats and dogs, ‘‘the old, the blind, the halt, the crippled, the maimed, but also the young, the sound – all those whose term has come’’ (Coetzee 218). ‘‘He has learned by now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name, love’’ (Coetzec 219). Perhaps, David needed to come through the aridity of the first half of his life in order to be awakened to the refreshment and mystery of the Other in the second half where desire of a different order inhabits his consciousness. In Disgrace, David’s journey is just beginning, and in the arid world of South Africa David’s passion may not be spent; but (rather) just redirected towards the Good. AN AFTERWORD

In writing about the strength of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry, J. M. Coetzee’s words could be useful in the search for meaning in his own novel, Disgrace. Coetzee writes that the strength of Herbert’s poetry resides in ‘‘his dryness, dryness to the point of dessication: in a removed, cerebral stance expressed in ironies that mask the most intense ethical and indeed lyrical passion’’ (Coetzee). Mount Mary College Milwaukee, W I WORKS CITED Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Kearney. Richard. ‘‘Emmanuel Levinas.’’ In States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary T hinkers, 177–199. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Levinas, Emmanuel. ‘‘God and Philosophy.’’ Translated by Richard A. Cohen and Alphonso Lingis. In T he L evinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand, 166–189. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Levinas, Emmanuel. ‘‘Beyond Intentionality.’’ In Philosophy in France T oday, 112–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Levinas, Emmanuel. T otality and Infinity. Translated by Alfonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

MARA STAFECKA

THE BEAUTY OF THOUGHT: HEIDEGGER, GADAMER AND MAMARDASHVILI

What would Heidegger, Gadamer and Mamardashvili, two Germans and a Soviet-Georgian, heirs of German Idealism and an heir of MarxismLeninism, a self-taught student of the Stalin era, have in common? It seems obvious that each of them would have a different path to walk on. Nevertheless, they were all pursuing the same goal: they wanted to recover philosophy from oblivion. All of them, Heidegger, Gadamer and Mamardashvili, were equally aware that philosophy is none of those cognitive activities it was identified with in modern times. Philosophy is not a top floor in a warehouse of knowledge, and it does not oversee, guide and summarize discoveries from a multitude of human experiences. Philosophy is unique in the way it provides a foundation for the authenticity of human being. Philosophy is the basis of thinking that can reach beyond itself and is able to function in the vicious circle of gaining selfawareness and losing it. Gadamer walked on Heidegger’s path. He inherited the proper tone of mental considerations that illuminated and guided his thinking. A distinctive feature of his philosophical thinking is the authenticity of being in tradition, of being connected to his own roots equally in his time and in the past. Gadamer calls our time the epoch of alienation of education, which leads to progressive deafness and blindness in all walks of life. Something is happening to our thinking, so that it cannot distinguish the voices of our own roots, cannot see the past sprouting through our words, feelings, likes, dislikes, and symbols that surround us. Our ears and our eyes have lost their power to distinctly know how to follow the leading light, the leading tune of Being. We live in an epoch of a cacophony of voices. Who do we listen to? Who do we trust? What do we choose as a starting point of testimony in defending our statement? At the dawn of the twentieth century, Husserl was looking for a rigorous foundation for our thinking. His ideas crystallized in a concept of phenomenology. Husserl tried to ensure that we would know exactly what happens when we step into the process of acquiring knowledge. He thought that if we find a way to follow our consciousness from its natural point of view and purify it of all the psychological and empirical disturbances, we will get the clarity we can rely on. Others had their own critical view 133 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 133–141. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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of Western culture and its interaction with the human being. Freud and Spengler accused Western style rationality of entangling and strangling the free-spirited and ambitious successor of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. There was a plentitude of ideas, symbols, concepts and theories coexisting in society and the human mind. The human being lost guidance and direction and, thus, control over his own future. Misconception and misunderstanding were leading to acceptance of false identity and loss of spiritual power. This existing misleading mental environment was causing enormous damage because it constituted a disabled faculty of thinking unable to detect its own partiality: the lack of wholeness. In the twentieth century, knowledge manifests as information. It is channeled through different media and educational institutions. It is preserved in books, magazines, technology and cyber-gadgets. But the alienated knowledge, living outside the mental space where it was created and constituted, becomes a blindfold that any impostor can use for any purpose with equally good or bad intentions. This ambiguity has worried great minds since Nietzsche. One of the loudest voices in this chorus belongs to Martin Heidegger. He repeatedly directs our attention to questions about truth, thinking, and authenticity of being. To get attention, he invents language that does not follow either the patterns of philosophical tradition, or everyday use by laymen. What should the purpose of this be? The language has to conduct and hold the mental energy of thought, and be able to recreate the mental field of thought that language contains. In his research about Nietzsche, Heidegger returns to the question ‘‘What is thinking?’’ in the context of European history. First, ‘‘to be cognizant, to know, is not mere familiarity with concepts’’ (Heidegger, 2, p. 59), reminds Heidegger. Western society in the nineteenth century was moving in a different direction. Western society was on its way to trivializing the role of thinking, and ready to accept platitudes of everydayness. Second, Heidegger blames Schopenhauer and his influence on the nineteenth century. Heidegger says that Schopenhauer’s ideas were more acceptable for the broader public than those of German idealism – Hegel, Kant, Schelling. According to Heidegger, ‘‘Schopenhauer advanced to the forefront of philosophy at that time not because his philosophy conquered German idealism philosophically, but because the Germans lay prostrate before German idealism and were no longer equal to its heights’’ (Heidegger, 2, p. 63). The consequence of this happening was that ‘‘the philosophy of German Idealism, seen from the point of view of Schopenhauer’s commonplaces, became something foreign, an oddity. It

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fell into oblivion. Only by detours and byways do we find our way back into that relation to our history’’ (Heidegger, 2, p. 63). Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s ideas as one of the byways that tries to find and open the door and reenter the realm of metaphysical thought and be touched by its vitality. Nietzsche did not succeed in his reconnection with the spirit of metaphysics. But this does not mean that his experience was wasted. His wandering into the soul of Western tradition lets Heidegger show what the power lines are in our thinking, and how they interfere with our attempts to navigate towards truth and authenticity of being. By nature, the human being is a thinking being. But is he really thinking? Is he ready to think? In his lectures about thinking, Heidegger is very critical about modern man’s ability to think: The learned world is expending commendable efforts in the investigation of the history of philosophy. These are useful and worthy tasks, and only the best talents are good enough for them, especially when they present to us models of great thinking. But even if we have devoted many years to the intensive study of the treatises and writings of the great thinkers, that fact is still no guarantee that we ourselves are thinking, or even are ready to learn thinking. On the contrary – preoccupation with philosophy more than anything else may give us the stubborn illusion that we are thinking just because we are incessantly ‘philosophizing’ (Heidegger, 3, p. 5).

The educated world’s thinking lacks almost every qualification to understand, par exemple, Nietzsche’s metaphysical ideas, says Heidegger. Why is this happening? Why are well-read, erudite scholars unable to hear the message that comes from the past? Heidegger states that hearing it presupposes that we meet a certain requirement, and we do so only on rare occasions. We must acknowledge and respect it. To acknowledge and respect consists in letting every thinker’s thought come to us as something in each case unique, never to be repeated, inexhaustible – and being shaken to the depths by what is unthought in his thought. . . . The more original the thinking, the richer will be what is unthought in it. The unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow (Heidegger, 3, p. 76).

Thinkers like Nietzsche have a lot of unthought in their writings, which most likely is considered incomprehensible and set aside as unworthy of consideration. The same thing now happens to Heidegger himself. Researchers note that Heidegger ‘‘thinks poetically’’ (Heidegger. 3, p. XV). That means increasing the amount of what was not thought directly, but was touched poetically with a whisper of the mind and left unthought for the coming ones. It is common to both Heidegger and Mamardashvili, that they tried to minimize the use of established philosophical terminology and appealed

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to the consciousness in its wholeness through the power of poetical metaphor. During one of his last lecture courses in Tbilisi, Mamardashvili purposely avoided language that could be considered theoretical. His intention was to activate the consciousness of his audience and to show how at every step of preparedness for thinking it is possible to achieve awareness of what has been done and where to go next. In his lectures Mamardashvili demonstrated how thinking works. He showed what it looks and feels like when we think. Mamardashvili uses the analogy of body-building and gymnastics. If somebody wants to have a strong body and well-developed muscles, that person needs to spend many hours in a gymnasium, exercising and working out, sweating and feeling tired. This is even more true about thinking. Mamardashvili uses the Russian word ‘‘otmislivaniye’’ that means to think something until it becomes a part of our own mental space. There is a great difference between a thought that comes as a carrier of particular information and a thought that transforms our mental space. How do we distinguish those two different kinds of thoughts? Actually, the carrier of information always looks more impressive and many, I believe, would rush to approve it and to disregard the other that works invisibly for the outsiders. If we think philosophically, a poem does not exist until we read it. It exists only in a moment of reading it because it opens a chance for us to plunge into a state of being that it contains. A work of art is a catalyst that enables us to become meaning-constituting beings. Mamardashvili explains that ‘‘a theatrical show is a machine that intertwines circumstances in ways that create intense dynamics, which could create an event that is not in the text but which I, the listener and the playgoer, could plunge into’’ (Mamardashvili, p. 103). ‘‘Thinking is a state of understanding; thus, it is something into which we have to plunge every time we want to think’’ (Mamardashvili, p. 96). Mamardashvili wants to make evident the difference between the act of reasoning and the thinking that is a constitutive action. Vitim Kruglikov, one of the Russian philosophers who worked on Mamardashvili’s philosophical inheritance, preparing it for publication, called the ‘‘Aesthetics of Thinking’’ the ‘‘propaedeutics of thinking,’’ thus, drawing parallels with Kant and his introduction to philosophy. ‘‘Aesthetics of Thinking’’ contains 24 conversations (lectures) on the topic ‘‘What is Thinking?’’ with students at the University of Tbilisi during the 1986/1987 school year. Why does Mamardashvili use ‘‘aesthetics’’ when talking about thinking? We can see similarities with Heidegger’s approach to introducing thinking. They both start by distinguishing thinking as a

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psychological process and thinking as a meaning-bearing process. This distinction is not obvious. It is not evident to us, human beings, engaged in mental activities. Most likely, we will assume the opposite – that every mental activity is thinking. We cannot gain clear evidence about thinking because there is a lot of ghost-thinking around us. Mamardashvili speaks about simulacres, imitation-thoughts (Mamardashvili, p. 14). Those are the dead thoughts. They are not wrapped in an emotional state of clarity and joy, which distinguishes thinking from its pale shadows. Thinking is a state of joy similar to the joy of seeing an artwork. This strident, sad and joyous lucidity is a state of mind where thinking is born (Mamardashvili, p. 10). Thinking is happening. Something happens to us when we think. It is happening without our direct involvement or willingness to think. Reasoning is not thinking, repeats Mamardashvili. We can use reasoning skills that were discovered and developed by somebody else. That is very common in our mass media and technology-dominated time. We use somebody else’s thinking experience, and we also use somebody else’s emotional experience. When we do that, we are unable to feel the difference between the thinking and the simulacre. For us, both look like and feel like thinking, because we lost the mechanism that enables us to stay connected with our roots and, thus, to distinguish thinking and pretend-to-be-thinking. Gadamer also is concerned about the loss of depth, the loss of tradition in our thinking. As Edward Tingley points out, Gadamer is aware that ‘‘the history of Western thought is a narrowing of rationality, encouraged, first, by the development of the Greek metaphysics of presence (with its emphasis upon the concept, predicates, nominalization, mathematics) and, second, by the final flowering of that very investigation of reality in the form of modern science, with its extraordinary unfolding of the ‘properties’ of the natural world and its demonstrable penetration into the means of obtaining this knowledge’’ (Tingley, p. 216). The Western way of thinking tended to simplify rationality and to equalize it with technical or informational rationality. According to Tingley, Gadamer is also aware that modern sciences have changed our understanding of the world. A myth of cognitive technique becoming an unquestioned dogma was born out of excitement about achievements of technology. As a result of this dogma there is a philosophically significant misunderstanding of the classical tradition, of philosophy and art (Tingley, p. 225). Unfortunately, not only are empirical sciences deeply under the spell of this dogma, but also humanitarian sciences, which leads to misconceptions about their nature. It turns out that the modern human sciences are helping to reproduce

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the narrowed image of rationality and human being. Instead of guarding, protecting and polishing their self-awareness and returning to their embeddedness in the tradition, modern human sciences are misrepresenting themselves while participating in the race for more factual knowledge. Analyzing Gadamer’s view on modern human sciences and the ambiguity that comes with it, Tingley reaches an interesting conclusion. He thinks that the ambiguity cannot be interpreted as a contradiction, but needs to be regarded as a part of today’s reality that cannot be eliminated, but has to be noticed and approached as it is. Every time Gadamer speaks about human sciences, he describes two different realities. First, he criticizes the contemporary condition of human sciences, which are lining up with technical rationality and perceiving themselves as cognitive techniques. Second, Gadamer talks about human sciences as carriers of the spirit of tradition with its focus on conscious development of self, on self-awareness and self-constitution of human being. According to Tingley, even hermeneutics are being transformed and altered. ‘‘The works and texts, ‘known’ precisely through the new hermeneutics, are themselves transformed, becoming something different in content and import. They come out of the knowledge factory – a factory being precisely the place where things are made – differently than they come out of the relation to the other – strained and chastened into the kind of result that functions in the way the scientific result functions’’ (Tingley, p. 230). As a result ‘‘methodical interpretation, universalized in professional institutions whose very task is to interpret ‘properly’ for a mass clientele, now fails wholesale: now we have a system in which failure is built in’’ (Tingley, p. 230). There are processes in our culture that no one acknowledges because their presence is no longer heard and no one can witness their existence. At the same time, disabled, one-track thinking dominates on the stage. This is the thinking that does not know how to think, says Heidegger. ‘‘The one-sided view, which nowhere pays attention any longer to the essence of things, has puffed itself up into all-sidedness which in turn is masked so as to look harmless and natural. . . . It reduces everything to a univocity of concepts and specifications the precision of which not only corresponds to, but has the same essential origin as, the precision of technological process’’ (Heidegger, 3, p. 34). Heidegger warns against simplifying explanations and platitudes based on common sense. What is called thinking? He repeats and repeats the question. He wants to captivate the listener’s attention using the repetition as a tuning tool. Our thought has to be tuned into the question. Only then will the question lead to being on the way. ‘‘We must guard against the blind urge to

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snatch at a quick answer in the form of a formula. We must stay with the question. We must pay attention to the way in which the question asks: what is called thinking, what does thinking call for?’’ (Heidegger, 3, p. 48). Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was a call for thinking, a scream that was intended to wake up a side-tracked thinking and give it a chance to face something unthought and undescribed. Once Heidegger stated that being drawn into ‘unthought’ and ‘undescribed’ is what constitutes man as man. He himself regarded Nietzsche as the last thinker of the Western tradition, the last one to still listen to the whisper of words from the past and to promise a path, a way, a window. Heidegger noted that Nietzsche’s thought contains a multiplicity of Western ways of thinking, which are rarely identified. Heidegger points to Nietzsche as a pioneer striving for proper thinking: With greater clarity than any man before him, Nietzsche saw the necessity of a change in the realm of essential thinking, and with this change the danger that conventional man will adhere with growing obstinacy to the trivial surface of his conventional nature, and acknowledge only the flatness of these flatlands as his proper habitation on earth (Heidegger, 3, p. 57).

Listen to this – the conventional man with growing obstinacy will adhere to the trivial surface of his conventional nature. Heidegger regarded this as a main danger. Man was closing the path of wholeness, fulfillment and self-awareness for himself. Mankind was endangered! The future would lose its awe of uncovering the unknown and turn into plain infinity. The change was needed, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was taking the responsibility and bridging the way into the future, where man’s spiritual dignity would not be abdicated. Thinking is man’s most distinctive power. If the thinking is proper, a man’s destiny is saved, because he has the means to overcome whatever is obstructing his way and to reach his destination, which is not a place but a mode of being, being as understanding. Nietzsche created his Zarathustra to address this problem. For Heidegger, the being of an artist can be considered as a model of ‘‘live’’ thought. The ‘‘live’’ thought is a thought that is able to constitute a new meaning that in Heidegger’s language would sound like ‘‘to be able to bring forth.’’ The mystery of art is a mystery of creative ‘‘live’’ thought. Heidegger underlines that ‘‘art and its works are necessary only as an itinerary and sojourn for man in which the truth of beings as a whole, i.e., the unconditioned, the absolute, opens itself up to him. What makes art great is not only and not in the first place the high quality of what is created. Rather, art is great because it is an ‘absolute need’ ’’ (Heidegger, 2, 44). Thinking

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in art still possesses qualities that are needed for it to function as a meaning-bearing faculty, able to reach self-awareness and withstand forces that would tend to uproot it and disconnect it from the past. Sciences, technical disciplines, mass media that oversee the information industry by their definition are oriented to knowledge that is not embedded in time, as thinking and understanding are. In our times thinking functions as a decoration, as something that does not allow us to recreate the state of mind that permeates us when thinking is born. According to Mamardashvili, an artwork marks a place where thinking was present (Mamardashvili, p. 43). If we revisit an authentic artwork, we can induce states of mind to help the thinking happen. An artwork functions as a cradle of thinking because it provides the sensation of a mental state, that unforgettable astringent lucidity of knowing – I am because I think. Thinking can be recognized only as a state of mind. We either have it or we do not. It is impossible to describe it and to learn about it from the description. It is not something that can be learned from the experience of others. It can be learned only from our own experience because the experience of others can only teach us how to reason, how to operate with ready-made chunks of thought. To learn thinking, we have to find that shaking and shocking sensation in our experience that marked the state of mind and the beginning of the journey towards thinking. If we missed that point, we are out of the mental space where thinking happens. We have lost our connection, and we can reconnect only through mental sensations that will guide us towards thinking. Mamardashvili used Socratic methods to engage his listeners in thinking. Mamardashvili’s conversations created a magic space where in a fireball of emotional tension, mental evidence was transmitted from the thinker to the learners. Mamardashvili was the center of ecstatic and joyous activity, which resonated in the minds of listeners and illuminated the path they could step on. Everyone was participating in the art of thinking. Evidence of being in the state of mind when the mental sensation illuminates words that are used to form thoughts, brings an ecstatic sense of joy. Mamardashvili was aware that the only way to introduce thinking was to guide the seeker into the state of mind where thinking is possible. Thinking starts from that astonishing sensation when we somehow identify thinking as being in a special mode of mental awareness, open, alert and burned by longing for something that is beyond reach. Thinking is a mode of being in which we constitute ourselves as human beings. In thinking, human beings transcend as beings.

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Like Heidegger, Mamardashvili talked about metaphysical impossibilities of language. We have objective and subjective impossibilities. Subjective impossibilities occur when, as a result of estrangement from tradition, we are not able to hear the authentic voices of thinkers and are stuck in a labyrinth without a guiding light. We face objective impossibilities, when we have to find words to describe the striking sensation that carries us beyond ourselves. When we are in the process of transcendence, we need to mark it to be able to revisit and let others visit it. Language is used for that. Mamardashvili speaks about a ‘crucified word’. If we are in a state of mental evidence and want to express it using words, we might face the problem that there is no adequate language yet to say what we want to say. If we use the inadequate language, we might ruin the evidence. We are proceeding through the purgatory of our own consciousness, and our only light and guidance comes from the state of mental evidence. Meaning cannot be borrowed from somebody else’s life experience. We cannot avoid the purgatory where, from our own love, suffering, agony and commitment, a word rises and a meaning comes into being. That explains why Heidegger, Gadamer and Mamardashvili are very careful about the language they use and also why they stay away from the traditional philosophical terminology and prefer to use a poetic metaphor instead. ‘‘All artistic creation challenges each of us to listen to the language in which the work of art speaks and to make it our own,’’ repeats Gadamer (Gadamer, p. 39). Beauty is a sensational awareness of thinking that transcends itself and supports our ability to liberate ourselves from the simulacres our mass-media dominated time produces. Thinking needs the sense of beauty to illuminate its moment of stepping out and beyond, and also to mark the moment of happening. Rockford, Illinois REFERENCES Gadamer, Hans-Georg. T he Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1968. Heidegger, Martin. W hat Is Called T hinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Mamardashvili, Merab. Estetika mishleniya. Moscow, 2001. Tingey, Edward. ‘‘A Multiply Shattered Echo: Gadamer and Human Sciences.’’ In: International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. XLI, N. 2, No. 162, June 2001.

SECTION III

GARY BACKHAUS

SOLVING THE MYSTERY: A SCHUTZIAN ANALYSIS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

You must be aware of the fact that my father’s favorite readings for relaxation were mystery stories. I now understand for the first time why my father always read the ending first to find out ‘who done it’ before he indulged himself in the whole plot from beginning to end! Evelyn S. Lang1

INTRODUCTION

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s serial adventures of Sherlock Holmes comprise the best representatives of the subgenre of mystery writing called the ‘detective story.’ The word, ‘mystery,’ invites an inherent ambiguity and tension as it refers to the profound, the inexplicable, or the secretive. ‘Mystery’ carries both secular and non-secular references. The finite Being of humankind in its existential situatedness is circumscribed by a fundamental transcendence. The great mystery of life horizons all meanings that humankind creates and constitutes in its socio-cultural constructions. Hence a typology and characterization of the literature of mystery must take into consideration a subgenre’s relation to the ever-present horizonal opacity, or existential mystery, inherent to the human condition. The thesis presented here is that the treatment of mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the literature of the fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, can be understood from a more profound standpoint than usually recognized in ‘‘the standard interpretations’’ of detective stories. My contending thesis is that the socio-functional processes underlying the detective mystery reveal a fundamental interconnection with profound symbolic provinces of meaning. This thesis is exhibited through a Schutzian based analysis in social phenomenology.2 This paper is organized into three major sections. The first section offers an ontological, epistemological, and sociological analysis of mystery, which situates the ‘‘detective story’’ within mystery literature and which explicates how mystery functions within the detective story. The views of David I. Grossvogel on the subject of mystery literature are presented as a foil in order to counter the standard thesis to which he subscribes – that the detective story treats mystery in an essentially shallow manner.3 A deeper understanding of the sense of the 145 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 145–181. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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detective story’s framing of mystery is gained through a sociological description of life-world transcendencies, knowledge intransparencies, nomic orderings and anomic disorderings, legitimations, symbolic universes, and world-maintenance. This analysis employs a phenomenological description in the sociology of knowledge, the social construction of reality, and the sociology of religion. That the Sherlock Holmes adventures exhibit a serious treatment of the profound mystery of life is corroborated by the Unitarian minister, Stephen Kendrick’s interpretation of the adventures as parables.4 Furthermore, I establish that Kendrick develops the Holmesian corpus in the service of a theodicy. A theodicy provides religious explanation for marginal life experiences for the purpose of subjugating the intrusion of chaos to the nomizing function of human world-building. The second section of this paper consists of implementing Schutzian structures of ideal typification: personal and course-of-action, in an analysis of two adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The purpose is to establish that the figure of Holmes cannot be reduced to a cold logician by exhibiting a richer reading of Holmes as not only a sagacious practitioner of applied human science and social psychology, but as someone whose efforts are guided by the profound mystery of life. This allows for a deeper understanding of the significance of the stories, for logical puzzles are one thing, but the complexity of the human psyche in its existential situatedness involves a deeper perspicacity and reverence toward life. I argue that Holmes is attuned to the opaque boundaries concerning the deepest mysteries of human nature and thus displays profound forms of compassion in his interactions. The third section of the paper explores why Alfred Schutz, who was a great enthusiast of the detective story, read the ending of the mystery first, which essentially defeats the psychological context for the mystery reader. Schutz engages in the didactic methodology of social science training and the mystery genre is excellent for this purpose because it offers a closed world based upon the delimited relevancy structure of solving a mystery. Explorations of the structures of Schutzian social sciences disclose the structure of mystery writing in a way that reveals its peculiar possibilities for profundity. PART ONE: THE DETECTIVE STORY AND THE SENSE OF MYSTERY

T ranscendencies In the ‘‘Introduction’’ to his book, Mystery and Its Fictions, David I. Grossvogel writes, ‘‘A past beyond recall and the end of present being

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remain shrouded within shadows that are too deep for the glimmering of awareness to dispel.’’5 Schutzians will readily recognize in the above quote a reference to the transcendence of world time, which objectively confronts everyday experience. Mundanely, when one falls asleep, world time continues and upon awakening one finds that world time has transcended inner subjective time. In the relation of world time to successive intersubjectivity (generations), there is the awareness that others existed before one’s birth and that others will live beyond one’s death. One’s own finitude is objectively structured due to world transcendence, which manifests in the establishment of life-plans, daily plans, and value-hierarchies based on the objective principle of first things first.6 Thus, the mystery of world time transcendence is the horizon by which humans structure livedmeanings: its function is to provide the organizational background for the world on the everyday side of the boundaries of experience. Nevertheless, ‘‘the permanency of its [mystery’s] remoteness and intractability becomes the commensurate permanency of a need to overcome it.’’7 One doesn’t experience in the everyday province the temporally transcendent realities, but rather one experiences the boundaries of the everyday that indicate various transcendent realms. Schutz distinguishes three levels of transcendencies, little, medium, and great.8 Little transcendencies are those indicating a non-experienced reality that in principle is as experienceable as the present experience. Medium transcendency indicates that which is present but is only experienceable through its indications: an Other’s consciousness or subjectivity indicated by the external perceptions of embodiment. Great transcendencies are absolutely non-experienceable in everyday reality. Obviously, the profound mystery of life is a great transcendency. Each level of transcendency can or does entail some form of mystery. The object that is not found in one’s present experience which one searches for and expects to find ‘‘somewhere,’’ but does not turn up ‘‘anywhere,’’ seems to have mysteriously disappeared and so is said to have gone to ‘‘safe place heaven.’’ Unnerving as such a situation appears, nevertheless, the mystery remains within the everyday life-world; it points to a transcending spatial/perceptual experience that in principle belongs to the everyday life-world, even if one makes reference to a nonexperienceable fictitious reality due to the failure to locate the object. The opacity of the mystery, e.g., where could that book possibly be, is given meaning by positing a fictitious transcendent reality to which the ‘‘lost’’ object now belongs. Little transcendencies are a major aspect in the detective work of gathering clues and evidence. The medium transcendence of the consciousness of Others can involve mystery when

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encountering an alien culture, for the indications connected to their embodiment are foreign. Also those incongruent actions of Others that shock a person out of habitualized typifications can be linked to the mystery of personhood. Here though, one usually expects to surmount the mystery by learning to interpret the embodied indications of ‘‘mysterious’’ Others. What is meant by interpretation is that one eventually learns to link the observed actions to a typificatory schema and to a motivational context, which in principle, is a feat that requires an achievement of understanding through signification. In understanding other individuals, behavior and artifacts are symptoms that reveal aspects of the individual’s subjectivity. Since in the detective story someone is hiding their crime, mystery pervades the subjectivity of suspects and so is intensified at this level of medium transparencies as well. Still, consciousness itself indicates an absolutely transcendent human reality – some would call it the depths of the human soul – far deeper than the manifestations of consciousness. The profound mystery of the human psyche can only be symbolized through transcendent provinces of discourse, e.g., psychoanalysis or the soul of religious discourse. Surpassing even this mysterious transcendency of the human soul, Stephen Kendrick writes, ‘‘If the sleuth can discover the darkest and most guarded and protected secrets within the human heart, can that of God’s inscrutable will be far behind? Perhaps, at last, they are the same mystery.’’9 ‘Discover’ is not meant as rendering the secrets transparent, but rather as encountering their impenetrable boundaries. A subtle genesis but profound transformation of meaning accompanies the word ‘mystery.’ ‘Mystery’ applies to anything that is unknown, but in principle, knowable, and it applies to that which is beyond human understanding. This distinction, however, does not set up a simple dichotomy, for Kendrick’s point helps to establish how potentially knowable reality shades into the absolutely unknowable. The process of penetrating the depths of the human psyche indicates a subtle passage to a transcendency beyond knowability. In the Sign of Four, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes concurs with this thesis. Observing a group of ordinary workers leaving behind their workday, Holmes and Watson make reference to the great transcendency – ‘‘a spark of the divine’’ in each of them. Holmes remarks that by appearance you would never know that they carry this spark and he hearkens the great transcendency by calling humankind ‘a strange enigma.’ It is not necessary for the detective adventures to dwell upon this enigma in order to establish their weightiness. On the contrary, it is necessary for the great transcendencies to subtlely enter the thematic field

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from the horizons, but it is sufficient to limit meanings to the everyday side of experience for detective stories to exhibit their profundity. On the side of noesis, it is when one passes from the attitude of searching after the hidden or the secret to an attitude of awe that one passes to the profound sense of mystery. There is a wonderful passage in ‘‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’’ that ironically captures both senses. Holmes carefully examines a flower. He exclaims, ‘‘What a lovely thing a rose is! . . . Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in flowers. . . . We have much to hope from the flowers.’’10 Holmes falls into reverie and after several minutes, his client beseeches him. ‘‘Do you see any prospect of solving this mystery, Mr. Holmes?’’ Brought back to the everyday world Holmes exclaims, ‘‘Oh, the mystery!’’11 Obviously, the client’s mind is pragmatically set on the hidden mysteries (transcendencies) within the everyday lifeworld and not the awesome mystery indicated by the beauty of the rose, which inspires hope! I argue that the Sherlock Holmes adventures deal with the mysterious on all three levels and not merely little and medium transcendencies, which would be the case if the standard interpretations of shallowness were correct. It is obvious that the little and medium transcendencies are intensified in detective stories. In this sense, Holmes remains immanently tied to the everyday world, however, and this is the one key to his genius: he radically brackets the taken-for-granted. The detective traces missing objects, searches for clues that piece together transcendent events, and must interpret the personality and motivations of Others. The detective does so by bracketing typifications in order to entertain possible explanatory contexts, which rearrange the known facts. The reader marvels at the exceptional skills of the detective in overcoming transcendencies in solving the mystery. It is not, however, readily apparent as to how the detective story directly relates to the great transcendencies. After all, the crime-contexts in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes obviously do not readily confront the great transcendencies as do such novels as Fyodor Dostoyevski’s T he Brothers Karamazov and Albert Camus’ T he Stranger. This oblique treatment of the great mystery must be investigated. Enclavic Meanings Crisis situations, such as facing one’s own death or the death of a significant other, and ecstatic situations (ek-stasis – out of the ordinary), such as the birth of one’s own child, present experiences that indicate transcendencies delimiting the boundaries of the everyday lifeworld. These exam-

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ples are chosen to show that everyday life cannot avoid encountering the great transcendencies. In order to make sense of the appresented realities indicated by these events (e.g., from where do we come and to where do we go and why does anything, including myself, exist at all) consciousness shifts into provinces of symbolic meanings. Explications of these experiences are articulated in a way that transposes them into the meaningstructures of a relative-natural world-view of everyday life. Schutz calls ‘enclaves’ those meaning-structures that bridge the gap between two provinces of reality. A theme that spans two provinces of reality is called a symbol.12 The symbol is a medium of appresentation that presentifies a transcendent meaning to the order of everyday reality. When experiences transcend the province of the parameters of everyday meanings, human beings call on transcending forms of discourse, e.g., religion, philosophy, or theoretical science to provide explication of the intransparent phenomena. In one particular religious symbolic interpretation, one’s soul is created by God and after death it returns to Him. Literature too presents enclavic meanings; it grapples with the transcendencies by symbolizing them. It too attempts to bridge the bounded opacity of human understanding by bringing mystery onto the side of everyday reality. By experiencing the art form of literature, the reader is influenced in everyday life by the interpretation of mystery in the literary symbolism. Detective stories that deal with murder obviously treat within the thematics a great transcendency revealed through crisis. But how they deal with this great transcendency – as a problem of human crime – is why critics think detective stories are shallow. The argument is that by bringing the great transcendency of death onto the side of humanity, which consists of treating it as a foil for its ‘‘dis-solution’’ in criminal justice, detective stories present a trivialization of absolute transcendence/mystery. Mystery, in its deepest sense, concerns that which absolutely transcends human understanding, or concerns an indicative presence connected to that which transcends human understanding, e.g., the mystery of transubstantiation whereby bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Grossvogel states how humankind copes with mystery: Unable either to grasp or to abandon mystery, he [man] resorts to a familiar fraud: he attempts to absorb mystery in speculation; he invents incarnations with which he can cope. Literature plays a part in this process, and most literature is tinctured to some extent with this concern. An intercessory image is created, similar in its position to that of the initiate, and corresponding to the ritual wherein the initiate demonstrates and secretes his knowledge. But whereas the initiate is eventually absorbed by the mystery he mediates, the image remains wholly within the grasp of man.13

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Grossvogel describes the absolute transcendence and opacity of the fundamental mystery: The most dazzling epiphany cannot reduce this darkness, which remains intact, however much it is forced to yield, and at unvarying remove, however hard it is pressed. The permanency of its remoteness and intractability becomes the commensurate permanency of a need to overcome it.14

What Grossvogel calls fraud rests on the essential fact that humankind cannot tolerate meaninglessness and thus is existentially motivated to construct meanings, especially in those aspects of life that present mysterious intransparencies. Grossvogel labels these enclavic descriptions/explanations ‘fraud’ because their construction cannot obliterate the absolute intransparency of the mystery of life. Nevertheless, the nature of the efficacy of symbolic meaning (fraud) needs investigation, given its inevitable failure. These ‘‘speculative failures’’ of metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, or religion, however, serve a most important sociological function in terms of culturally constitutive world-construction and worldmaintenance. Unwittingly, Doyle projects Grossvogel’s sentiments in the character of Holmes. In ‘‘The Retired Colourman’’ Holmes asks Watson if he observed a particular fellow whom Watson then types as ‘‘a pathetic, futile, broken creature.’’15 Holmes responds with a microcosm/macrocosm analogy. Exactly, Watson. Pathetic and futile. But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands in the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow – misery.16

Holmes is not a nihilist, nor is he Beckett, but more like a negative theologian who would rather stay within the limits of the human understanding than to prop it up with speculative meanings that in the end cheapen the opacity of the transcendent mystery. Kendrick points out that, ‘‘For many, I suspect, this spiritual bleakness is exactly what makes Holmes all the more trustworthy as a spiritual guide.’’17 His enclavic interpretation preserves the fundamental sense of mystery. Let us conclude by noting that Holmes actually avoids the frauds of which Grossvogel speaks. ‘‘Holmes is willing . . . to take philosophy seriously, and even the awesome judgements of God in the realm of justice, but not the cloudcuckoo religious imaginative constructions of divinity, no matter how well-intentioned, ancient, or revered.’’18 So, the way that Holmes recog-

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nizes the fundamental mystery, yet leaves the mystery intact by remaining on the everyday side of meanings by avoiding symbolic articulations, is a profound strategy for dealing with the fundamental intransparency of mystery. Knowledge Intransparencies The next step is to explicate the notion of intransparencies in terms of knowledge, for obviously the detective story concerns gaining knowledge through uncovering the purposely hidden. Intransparencies of human knowledge are relative or absolute.19 Thus, the delineation of the levels of knowledge is necessary to establish relations to the various senses of mystery. Schutz explores the relative intransparencies of knowledge within the everyday life-world, which are derived from the limitation of the biographically conditioned stock of knowledge. In principal, these relative intransparencies are surmountable. The vast amount of things that an individual does not know is derived from the individual’s acquisition of knowledge. In the pragmatic determination of situated relevance, what one does not know enters from the horizons of experience as that which can be mastered one way or another. Pragmatically determined interests set parameters to how much one needs to master for successful everyday management. Such mastery, if it becomes habitual, sinks into the takenfor-granted. When problems arise, then new knowledge must be gained, which then also becomes sedimented into the stock of knowledge. One knows that one does not know a great deal, but only that information which one needs or wants to know and does not know, that is, elements relevant to one’s situatedness are viewed in terms of a lack of knowledge. To those relevant intransparencies, one turns attention and formulates projects for their mastery. Otherwise one either remains ignorant of the existence of irrelevant elements or understands them to be relevant to someone else. If important or interesting, elements are handled as relevant to persons who encounter them, which is contingent upon the stratifications that function to socially distribute value-contexts. It must be noted that in dealing with relative intransparencies, Holmes excels due to his powers of observation and his abilities to transcend the taken-for-granted and to imagine possibilities. In this way he fills in the gaps in knowledge that those of ordinary powers cannot. Schutz states that the ‘‘suspicion’’ of the fundamental intransparency of the lifeworld (the veil of darkness fundamentally horizoning the lifeworld) is not met with in the pragmatic attitude of everyday consciousness.

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By shifting into the theoretical attitude of questioning and entertaining virtualities and possibilities, it does arise. But theoretical contemplation alone distances the knower from the object of knowledge and the fundamental mystery does not necessarily penetrate one’s very being. Holmes is heavily involved in the theoretical construction of possible worlds, but in a way that puts him in the thick of life. In the imaginative construction of possible worlds, the world that eventually manifests as the actual world motivates a fundamental metaphysical question: the mystery of why this and not that? Existential situations that transcend the pragmatic constitution of everyday life motivate the recognition of the fundamental intransparency. The important point is that the fundamental intransparency does arise in certain events that disrupt everyday life. The delimitations concerning experience flow into the absolute intransparency in marginal situations. ‘‘T he world can become a mystery. . . . If the fundamental intransparency of the life-world in general comes to be grasped by consciousness, a need appears to arise to elucidate it again by means of ‘higher, metaphysical ’ insights’’ [italics mine].20 We existentially depend upon non-everyday provinces of meaning to situate us existentially in light of the profound mysteries that are indicated within the everyday world. These symbolic discourses tend to crystalize as canopies (protective coverings) for relative natural world-views. On the other hand, such symbolic provinces are connected to everyday life, which as the umbrella for the other provinces (subworlds), must absorb symbolic enclavic meanings within its structure, e.g., social prescriptions for the right way to die. There is a dialectic relationship between the everyday ‘‘umbrella,’’ to which all other meaning provinces one must return, and the symbolic ‘‘canopy,’’ from which the everyday province grounds its ultimate significance. The detective story obviously deals with relative transparencies that are functionally relevant to the detective trying to solve a case. The detective is pragmatically motivated in a highly attentive tension of consciousness in terms of the function of her role. The successful mastering of the situation by solving the mystery of the crime is the teleology of the detective story. On the surface, then, it appears that the mystery of detective stories never thematically leaves the relative transparencies of everyday life. But it may just be that the ‘‘surface’’ is where the deeper mystery lies. Kendrick states, ‘‘The most elegant disguise for the sacred is right in plain sight. The ordinary is richly concealing because our eyes, our touch, our hearts are seduced to dullness.’’21 In ‘‘A Case of Identity,’’ Holmes retorts, ‘‘Depend upon it there is nothing so unnatural as the

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commonplace.’’22 He also states, ‘‘Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.’’23 In ‘‘A Study in Scarlet,’’ Holmes warns, ‘‘It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery.’’24 So, it would be a mistake to think that the fundamental mystery does not reveal itself in the subtlest of ways in the everyday world. According to Doyle’s fictitious character it is the most commonplace that is the key to mystery – the indications are encountered but rarely perceived. In ‘‘A Scandal in Bohemia,’’ Holmes scolds Watson, ‘‘You see, but you don’t observe.’’25 Kendrick remarks, ‘‘The Christian understanding of mystery is not what is hidden, but rather that what is right there in plain sight is splendor once we are ready to attend.’’26 So, the entities of everyday life can be constituted through the socially transmitted schemata and typifications, but those very same entities from a standpoint/attitude of profundity mediate deep cosmic mysteries. Thus, it is a noetic modification that can transform the everyday into a profound mystery. If a blade of grass is contemplated in a certain way, it too can reveal the awesome power of the fundamental mystery. Holmes does not think according to the linear structures of deductive logic. He epistemologically presupposes the ontological notion that life is a great chain of interconnected events. Thus, what linear thinking analyzes as causes and effects, Holmes sees instead as an ever-synthesizing dynamic of a higher level meaning-context, a non-linear network of interrelated meanings. Holmes varies the values in the constellation so that alternative patterns of meaning dynamically emerge. He envisions time holistically as well, which enables him to think the past forwardly and the future backwardly in order to establish possible contexts. In T he Sign of Four, Holmes retorts to the perplexed Watson, ‘‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’’27 It is this very uncanniness that can be unearthed in the everyday contexts that harkens the horizon of the fundamental intransparency. Holmes makes it apparent that our comfortable taken-for-granted assumptions fail to be of help and in fact impede progress in truth. Due to the impotency of everyday thinking to solve mysteries, the precariousness of our everyday ‘‘assurances’’ is revealed to us. But through the successful solution to a serious problem, Holmes’ extraordinary modes of inquiry serve to put the everyday back in order. Doyle is careful to have Holmes fail, more than once, which functions to bolster the worth of his achievements. Thus, the solutions to the crime mysteries in the Holmes adventures do not cheapen their treatment of the fundamental mystery. The uncanny nature of restructuring taken-for-

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granted meaning-contexts in a way that exposes the deficiency of the pragmatic motive of everyday life exactly points to the awesome horizon of intransparency. Holmes’ noetic genius reveals the everyday noema to be ‘‘haunted’’ by mystery. This is exactly how Holmes’ crime solving functions as a protective canopy. Holmes exhibits a penetrative attitude at a level that surpasses everyday noesis precisely because he sees mystery seeping out of, or is it ‘into,’ the everyday. Due to his uncanny ability to return the everyday world to nomic order from the chaos of crisis, he himself symbolizes profound justice. L iterature and the T ransmission of Symbolic Meaning In terms of the social transmission of symbolic meaning-contexts, Schutz writes, What we experience are indications; what we run into are boundaries. . . . The nonexperienceable presents itself in ciphers and secret languages that we do not know. Nevertheless, sometimes we believe we understand; mostly, however, others, wise men and scholars, tell us that they understand the strange language, and we believe – or do not believe – their translations.28

The fundamental mystery, then, is not complete absence; it is present to us because we do have experiences of confronting boundaries whereby ‘‘some ineffable unknown’’ lurks beyond. The fundamental intransparency dealt with through esoteric knowledge provinces does pervade the everyday through enclavic transmissions. Grossvogel echoes this point that there is the transmission of boundary crossings through special enactments of meanings. Unable to cross over or dismiss the fateful boundary that hems it in, the frustrated awareness establishes surrogates for the beyond on this side of the divide: a false boundary is posited, but one that is permeable, inviting a mock penetration of the unknown through an active participation . . . or a speculative one.29

Literature transmits the refractory mystery by providing ‘‘a sense,’’ which is to presentify a disclosure of meaning as a symbolized actuality or in terms of the mystery’s effects. Since to fall asleep is the crossing of a boundary, a children’s story as simple as ‘‘the sandman’’ discloses a symbolic meaning of the transcendence of sleep. A grander example is the monster Grendel in Beowolf, who symbolically personifies an actual historical event that cannot be explained through the socially constructed norms of the situated culture. Effects of mystery are gathered in literature’s

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appropriation of depth psychology, for example – its deeply sedimented effects upon, or its inherently deep nesting within, the individual psyche. The symbolizations of literature need not transmit any profound insight; they may not provide any enclavic symbolic sense of the fundamental mystery. As I have already mentioned, the standard interpretation denies that the detective stories provide enclavic insight. But Kendrick states of his book on Holmes: ‘‘Holy Clues is a book that finds parables where others have not noticed them before.’’30 What is interesting about the figure of Holmes is that he uncovers the ambiguity of the everyday, that if we could really observe, we could recognize manifest in the very everyday itself, fundamental mystery. It is necessary to my thesis to exhibit the sociological function of these parables in order to show the seriousness of the treatment of mystery in the Holmes adventures. Grossvogel’s T hesis: T he T rivialization of Mystery in the Detective Story So far, I have paralleled Grossvogel’s discussion of mystery with Schutz’s analysis of transcendencies and the fundamental intransparency of the lifeworld. There is congruency between them in terms of the need for humankind to interpret the meaning of mystery by symbolizing it. Linking the profound sense of mystery to the detective story, as I have so far accomplished, does not mean, however, that its treatment is not shallow. By examining the sociological function in its handling of mystery the next step is to challenge Grossvogel’s characterization of the detective story as a literary genre that trivializes the sense of mystery. However, Grossvogel (and anyone who maintains the standard interpretation) fails to account for the following sociological functions in his treatise on mystery, e.g., institutionalization, socialization, legitimation, symbolic canopies, nomization, cosmization, and theodicy/anthropicy. The detective story is connected to the deepest senses of mystery through these social functionings in a serious and profound way. Grossvogel makes a distinction between high and low literary genres based on the principle that high literature is as ‘‘true’’ as a real existential event, in its proportion to effect an identical ‘‘brooding’’ in the reader. In low literary genres, this effective transference through literary mediation is relatively low. The detective story’s treatment of mystery is characterized as a descent from the high genre. He claims that the detective story does not effect in the reader an existential awe concerning the fundamental opacity of the human mind when confronted with the great transcendent mystery of life.

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If we accept that a certain literature is an attempt to come to terms with the mystery of what lies beyond the reach of consciousness, then the mode of the detective story is to create a mystery for the sole purpose of effecting its effortless dissipation. . . . Mystery is, in fact, a patent knowledge over which a veil has been drawn at the first page that cannot extend beyond the last. . . . The intensity of the consciousness projected towards that beyond is replaced in the detective story by an expectation: the duration of the story (its reading) is the time we must wait for the pieces to fall into place; the intensity of the ‘‘mystery’’ is voided by our awareness of that mystery’s transitoriness.31

The attunement to the existential experience of mystery that is effected in what Grossvogel calls high literature becomes not only trivialized, but negated in the detective story – an antimetaphysical modality. It redefines mystery by counterstating it; by assuming that mystery can be overcome, it allows the reader to play at being god with no resonance, . . . as a child might be given a plastic stethoscope to play doctor.32

In another passage: Transitoriness exaggerates to the point of parody the shrinking of the mystery contained within fiction: a concern formerly like the one induced by the reader’s existential reality is reduced, in the detective story, to the dimensions of a small game; the metaphysical mode is replaced by a mode of play.33

These critical remarks follow from an interpretation that does not take into account the sociological necessities of every culture in world construction and maintenance, and would follow from a surface reading of the Sherlock Holmes literature – dealing with criminality in social life and the correlative psychological deviances. The key is to consider Schutz’s doctrine that the relative intransparencies of everyday life lead into the fundamental intransparency of the lifeworld. This progressive ‘‘darkness’’ holds in spite of the pragmatic attitude of everyday experience, which serves to steer us away from its enclavic bridging, e.g., the hospital staff filling out bureaucratic forms and taking coffee breaks while people are dying. The fundamental mystery is irrelevant to the everyday attitude, even though symbolic structurizations inform the cultural style of the everyday. The fundamental mystery is only encountered authentically in the everyday lifeworld when through crisis or ecstasy the fundamental intransparency breaks through the taken-for-granted barriers. We must investigate the sociological connection between the relative and the absolute so that the relatively intransparent ‘‘mystery’’ within the purview of the detective’s knowledge is connected to the absolute intransparency –

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the mystery of life – in an essential way. This fundamental enclavic connection concerns world-construction and its maintenance. T he Social Function of Symbolic Universes In order to subscribe to a deeper interpretation it is necessary to investigate the social function of symbolic universes. Social reality is the dialectical process of externalization, objectivation, and internalization.34 Externalization is the human expressivity of subjective meanings. Objectivation consists of the products of expressivity that become concretized in the world that then exhibit their own ontological status, e.g., a knife, a work of art, a steel worker, or an economic system. Internalization is the reappropriation of the objectivations back into subjective life, but on the basis of their objectivity. Humankind’s biological constitution is open-ended and is characterized by a built-in instability; it must be complemented by sociologically organized world building activities. Through constructing a humankind world, i.e. culture, humanity produces its Being. Society as the structure of relations in culture enjoys a privileged significance in terms of culture because it is its necessary condition, but also one of its products. Society as the necessary condition for a world constructing enterprise is an ordering, or nomizing activity. ‘‘Men are congenitally compelled to impose a meaningful order upon reality.’’35 The sociological process of imposing order is called institutionalization. ‘‘Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors’’ and it ‘‘further implies historicity and control.’’36 The institutionalized world is experienced as an objective reality and it requires the second order objectivated processes of legitimation, especially for the process of transmission to new generations. Socialization is the process of transmitting objectified meanings. The function of legitimation is to explain and to justify the first order institutionalized meanings of a society. Legitimation is a protective canopy or second order of institutionalized meanings that offers both cognitive and normative interpretations. Institutionalized programs are always precarious, as socialization is never complete and not always internalized in a satisfactory manner. People act on self-interest and insipidity; they sabotage the institutional orderings. Legitimation serves as a mechanism of social control. When the legitimational mechanisms are insufficient to curb deviance, then social sanctions must be in place. There are levels of legitimation37 that begin with the incipient legitimation in the institutionalized transmission of linguistic objectivations. The order

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is legitimized merely through its objective existence. A second level is reached through the prototypical theoretical expressions of maxims, proverbs, and wise sayings. The third level involves differentiated bodies of knowledge that legitimate specific sectors of activities. The fourth level and highest is the construction of symbolic universes. Symbolic universes are enclavic meanings of the most comprehensive cosmological proportions. These theoretical constructions constitute the nomos in its totality and they entail the highest nomizing self-consciousness – Weltanschauung. The symbolic universe pervades the realities of everyday experience and functions as their all-embracing frame of reference. All of human experience is explicated and justified in the cosmic ordering that transcends the institutional order. Through cosmization institutionalization is viewed as participating in a non-human transcending order of reality. Cosmization provides a nomization of human affairs that protects them from the fundamental cosmic abyss of chaos, the opposite of universe. Society is the guardian of order and meaning so that a separation from society involves the terror of anomy. Berger states, ‘‘The most important function of society is nomization’’ – ‘‘as a shield against terror.’’38 ‘‘Every socially constructed nomos must face the constant possibility of its collapse into anomy. . . . Every nomos is an edifice erected in the face of the potent and alien forces of chaos. This chaos must be kept at bay at all costs.’’39 Anomy involves worldlessness, disorientation, and identity disintegration. Through cosmization, ‘‘nomos and cosmos appear to be coextensive.’’40 Reaching the limits of human understanding, humankind encounters the inherent instability of its own constructions. Humankind seeks to stabilize the precarious character of the socially constructed world by envisioning it as a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm. The fundamental recipe of world-construction is to hide the constructed character by relating a particular empirical society to ultimate reality. Traditionally, it has been religion that has dealt with the mysterious cosmic power by designating the sacred, which mediates (bridges) a transcending reality. Cosmogonic myths sanctify the nomic construction of the universe by opposing it to chaos, the metaphysical category for anomy. Religion traditionally has been the most widespread and effective instrument for legitimation, due to its process of cosmization, which provides human nomoi with a sacred status. The terrorizing anomic experiences are explained and justified by religious legitimation – theodicies, e.g. the inexplicable death of an infant as God’s will. Chaos, then, is integrated into the symbolic universe by giving it theodicic meaning. The

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prevalence of theodicy has been lessened by the growth of anthropicy, which attempts to explain and justify chaos through plunging into the depths of the human soul, but the same principle applies. Anthropic appropriation of chaos must explain how it is that humankind can act in devisive, anomic ways. Whether cosmic or in the depths of the human psyche, primeval forces of ‘‘darkness’’ must be integrated into the nomic world structuralization of society. No society can sustain itself without interpreting the mystery of life through its nomoi, because the mystery of life is encountered through marginal experiences. A symbolic universe is constructed that explains and justifies first order social meanings by referring them to an interpretation of the fundamental mystery – cosmization. Without this structure in place a society cannot sufficiently legitimate its interpretation of human experience for the mollification of the chaos that marginal experiences introduce into the everyday. What we thus can realize is that everyday reality is imbued with a symbolic legitimating mechanism in a way that allows the everyday to maintain its functioning. The everyday is intimately connected with the fundamental mystery of life through the protective canopy of symbolic legitimations. The Schutzian notion that the relative intransparencies flow into the fundamental intransparency has now been given a sociological basis. All meanings engendered in a society receive their final explanation and justification by a guiding symbolic cosmization. The detective story deals with the concrete effects of anomic forces that present a chaotic threat to societal orderings. The detective is an ideal personal type that upholds the legitimations of society not as an apologist for society’s nomoi, but by seeing to their efficacy in the actual workings of the social world. The detective does not mete out the sanctions of social control, but is the one who reveals those who are not deterred by sanctions and thus introduce anomy into the social order. Anomic events cannot be erased, but however are brought within nomic control by revealing them and bringing wrongdoers to the nomic reinforcing institutions of justice. The sleuth must have insight into these anomic forces because she encounters the most opaque boundaries of human evil. The sleuth does not operate on positive evidence alone. The sleuth must be guided intuitively by all of the legitimating levels, including theodicy, which explicate the anomic forces that pervade and diabolically motivate the human psyche. Kendrick remarks, ‘‘We love detectives because we trust them to reveal that the world contains truth, not chaos; clues, not dead ends.’’41 In the Sherlock Holmes adventures it is obvious that the

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police are positivistic in their approach, while it is Holmes who is able to penetrate more deeply into human anomy. I would argue that Holmes accomplishes more than solving crime mysteries, because the ultimate mystery of life is horizoned in a play of visibility and invisibility – not merely positive evidence. As already established, his reverence to profound mystery is one of silence; he does not try to articulate its symbolization. This is exactly what keeps his mind open to the concrete lifeworld and thus he has vision where others do not. Holmes interprets deeply the human psyche through its indications and places his faith in the cosmization of the nomoi of his culture, but transgresses its positive functions when necessary for the purpose of reaching a more profound justice that is ‘‘informed’’ by profound mystery. T he Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as T heodicy The next task is to show how the detective story can be viewed to present this intimate connection between the everyday and the legitimating apparatus of symbolic meanings. It is not sufficient to rest on the point established that detective stories display the sociological functions that link everyday meanings with ultimate ordering through their cosmization within symbolic nomoi. Beyond the connection through cosmization, Stephen Kendrick develops the Sherlock Holmes literature into a Unitarian theodicy: Kendrick examines the psychological function of theodicy: Maybe people read detective fiction for the same reason they adopt religious doctrine. We all desperately crave both internal order and cosmic understanding: a sense that there is a hidden force operating through and beneath us that makes life not only sensible and just but, more importantly, reveals compassion at the heart of creation.42

The detective story, then, like other symbolic universes concerning the fundamental mystery of life – links the taming of chaos with cosmic forces. On the surface, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries do seem unlikely guides to ineffable secrets of life. Still, I have discovered in them an intriguing gateway to understanding something quite surprising: that detective stories of all kinds may be seen as subtly humble religious parables.43

Parables serve a legitimating function. They are not at the level of symbolic universes; they are of the second and third level of legitimation. However, they follow from the symbolic level by ‘‘popularizing it’’ – making it easier to understand.

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In symbolic universes, roles are legitimated in mimetic terms. These human meanings are interpreted as mimetic presentifications of divine mysteries. In the fourth lesson of the Bible (4:1–16), the story of Cain and Abel, ‘‘God is revealed as the first detective.’’44 God is investigative (looks for Abel), interrogates (asks Cain the whereabouts of Abel), uncovers clues and evidence (Cain’s evasiveness and the blood), and assigns guilt. There is always the hope that the evidence will indeed cry out who is the guilty one. Death always leaves its traces, and so it is in Genesis and beyond. The detective who searches for evidence that can cry out ‘‘Guilt!’’ is simply acting out God’s role so early in the first book of the Bible.45

Kendrick relates a point made by English poet laureate C. Day Lewis that the detective story mimics religious ritual. The detective story presents a highly formalized pattern that includes an initial sin (the crime), a victim, a diabolical priest (the criminal), who in turn is vanquished by a higher power. ‘‘Thus the detective enters the ritual. Lewis even likened the typical close of a detective story to a kind of final Day of Judgment, wherein the mystery is revealed and the guilty separated from the innocent.’’46 Judgment Day is obviously symbolized in Doyle’s ‘‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,’’ which is analyzed in Part Two of this paper. Kendrick cites others who have noticed that clergy members in general seem to be attracted to the murder mystery. He believes that this interest is due to the fact that their life’s calling immerses them in the vagaries of sin and its detection. But in a more profound way, Kendrick interprets Holmes’ role in terms of its theodicic function. The book of Deuteronomy phrases is just as Sherlock Holmes experiences the divine: God now has a hidden face, but still waits to see what is to become of us. The missing God is found in acts of human justice, and in a sense that justice is real, a kind of moral gravity that grounds and sustains all reality. . . . It is Holmes’ judgment that this foundational divine judgment is true.47

Kendricks forms the tenets of the Holmesian gospel. We can train our minds and hearts to profoundly notice what we encounter. The everyday is full of mystery and is capable of moving us to awe. Science can be conducted in a manner of reverence. Even though God seems so hidden and distant, through exploration of the divine, we gain clues for a new beginning. The Book of Life tempers judgment and justice with profound (ecstatic) acts of mercy and forgiveness.48 Holmes insures that this gospel

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rings true through personifying the legitimating role. And, Holmes’ legitimating role can exhibit its function in a theodicy because it manifests the most serious sociological aspects of world-construction and worldmaintenance in its ‘‘taming’’ of threatening marginal experiences. PART TWO: A SCHUTZIAN ANALYSIS OF SHERLOCK HOMES

In this part I construct a characterological type of Sherlock Holmes. A characterological type is a concrete personal ideal type, which means it is the typing of a specific individual.49 As revealed in social relationships, Holmes displays profound insights into human nature and human interaction. This characterological study exhibits the complexity and richness of the personality of Holmes. The appraisal counters the typological assessment of Holmes as a cold logic machine and as a rather flat character by critics of the serial stories. Although many ‘‘snapshots’’ of Holmes could be collected, in this section I develop a characterology through a sustained genetic analysis based on a couple of adventures. By proceeding through the entire corpus in ‘‘historical’’ order, a characterology of Holmes can be further advanced. The interpreter tests the typifications employed to understand Holmes in ‘‘direct observation’’ of each serial adventure. His complex character is built up and various typifications become tempered and qualified, confirmed or disconfirmed, as one’s own subjectivity streams along with that of this fictitious character. Doyle offers a richly developed characterological personal ideal type that changes over time. ‘‘Silver Blaze’’ Schutz discusses at length how the face-to-face encounter offers the possibility for the richest genuine understanding of an Other.50 The face-toface presents the greatest number of perceived ‘‘symptoms’’ of the Other’s subjectivity and through interaction entwines both streams of consciousness together in a We-relationship. Still, even in the face-to-face, ideal typifications must be employed in the understanding of the Other. But, unlike the They-relationship in which social partners are types and thus remain constant, types are continually tested in the We-relationship. When we become intimately familiar with someone we learn the dynamic richness and complexity of their personalities. There are standard typifications of Holmes, as I have begun to show, that really cannot be maintained when one becomes a more subtle reader

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of the corpus of stories. A standard ideal typification of Holmes points to his arrogance in his brash way of flouting his mental superiority. But this characterology must be tempered with his sensitive insight into the personality of others and his careful handling of social partners, whether friend or foe. The goal now is to submit the ideal typology to the test in the observation of Holmes in the adventure, ‘‘Silver Blaze.’’51 It can be shown how Holmes patiently and perspicaciously utilizes his highly cognitive and emotionally developed personality in order to most effectively deal with a difficult client. Holmes leads the client to discover his own shortcomings, rather than to confront him directly, which Holmes prudently recognizes would not be effective. Holmes’ case is to find out what happened to a missing racehorse and who killed its trainer, John Straker. As typically, Holmes solves the case. He uncovers that Straker was not murdered, but killed by the horse while attempting to maim it. Doyle alludes to Holmes’ investigation of Straker indirectly. But the reader learns that Straker was maintaining a woman outside of his known marriage and that he needed a lot of money to sustain the arrangements. Silas Brown, from the neighboring stable, found Silver Blaze out on the moor after it had mortally kicked Straker. Brown decided to disguise and conceal it, since in competition with its owner, Colonel Ross, he had placed bets against it for the upcoming race. For the purposes at hand, I focus on the horse’s owner, Colonel Ross, and his attitudes toward Holmes, and then the course-of-actions that Holmes takes to deal with Ross. Course-of-action types point to personal ideal types and these personal typifications point to typified actions. Thus, back-and-forth is the way to proceed in order to effect a characterological investigation. While taking the carriage ride to a town where they are to meet Colonel Ross and Inspector Gregory, Watson and Holmes go over the facts of the case. However, Watson is befuddled by the fact that Holmes waited two days before leaving. Holmes states that he had made an error in that he thought that the horse would show up, but that it did not. But this retort is ‘‘tongue-in-cheek’’ as Holmes was testing one avenue for possible worlds and now that the horse did not show up, he could rule out these possibilities and could concentrate on others. A knowledgeable reader of Holmes would genuinely understand Holmes’ motivational context. But interpreting the contents building up in his mind requires an intellectual astuteness that most readers do not possess, which is why the reader is so enamored with Holmes.

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After meeting their social partners face-to-face in a small town, and now traveling with them in a landau, Inspector Gregory informs Holmes of progress in the case. Upon arriving at the stables and manor, everyone exits the carriage except Holmes who is deep in thought. Surprised at this peculiar behavior, Colonel Ross interprets Holmes as indolently lost and inattentive. The Colonel exhibits all the formal stiffness of the military, cognitively and behaviorally. Gregory immediately suggests that they investigate the crime scene. Instead, Holmes wants to see the body of Straker. Ross tersely dismisses Holmes’ request as superfluous, ‘‘We have always found him an excellent servant.’’52 Holmes prudently resists confronting the Colonel with a defense for his method of investigation, for Holmes must mind his own course in order to be effective. After apprehending possible leads by examining the dead man, Holmes investigates the crime scene and finds a piece of evidence missed by the Inspector. The evidence is a small piece of wax, which dripped from the candle that Straker brought with him so he could see while performing the meticulous operation of severing the horse’s tendons. The finding of a wax dripping seems to the Inspector and the Colonel to be inconsequential as both have settled on the fact that they have already had a man arrested and they direct their thoughts linearly, foreclosing other horizonal possibilities. They thus cannot entertain the possibility that the wax could be serious evidence. Holmes’ scrutinizing work seems impertinent. And, to personalities used to legislating reality, they don’t like it when someone appears to be challenging their legislative authority. Watson reports, ‘‘Colonel Ross who had shown some signs of impatience at my companion’s quiet and systematic method of work glanced at his watch.’’53 As Ross is pulling the Inspector away to give attention to what he considers to be more important, Holmes interjects for Ross not to scratch Silver Blaze from the upcoming race. Note that Holmes does not react to the abuse, which is really quite offensive, given the fact that he was called upon as a consultant whose work is dismissed as if he were a simpleton. Holmes now, however, is free of the two ‘‘obstructors’’ to complete his work. He and Watson search the moor and spy the horse and human tracks that lead to the neighboring barn. ‘‘See the value of imagination. . . . It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the presupposition, and find ourselves justified. Let us proceed.’’54

Master Silas Brown, the devious opportunist, first begins by threatening them, but soon Brown is under Holmes’ control and he vows to carry

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out Holmes’ detailed instructions. Brown is to make sure that Silver Blaze is ready for the upcoming race and to keep the horse disguised with paint, or Holmes will expose him. Brown knows his only hope is to rigorously comply. Watson observes, ‘‘Colonel Ross did not impress me as a man who would be likely to show much mercy in any case.’’55 Holmes responds, ‘‘The matter does not rest with Colonel Ross. I follow my own methods, and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial. I don’t know whether you observed it, Watson, but the Colonel’s manner has been just a trifle cavalier to me. I am inclined to a little amusement at his expense. Say nothing to him about the horse.’’56

The reader can only speculate concerning the relationship between the neighbor Silas Brown and Colonel Ross. But the fact is known that the relationship is strained, and given the Colonel’s obdurate ways, the reader is inclined to put much of the fault on the side of the Colonel. Holmes even befuddles Watson when he nonchalantly tells the Colonel that they are leaving for London. ‘‘We have had a charming little breath of your beautiful Dartmoor air.’’57 The Colonel sneers condescendingly, intimating that Holmes is a defeated man and has given up finding the horse and solving the murder. Four days later when Holmes returns for the race, the Colonel is furious, as he has not seen his horse, as Holmes had assuredly promised. Holmes inquires whether or not the Colonel would know the horse if he saw it. The Colonel is enraged at such an ‘‘impudent’’ question. Holmes is giving the Colonel a dose of his own medicine of offensive interaction, but with much more subtlety, apparent in the ambiguity of the remark indicative of the circumstance of the horse’s disguise. When the disguised Silver Blaze wins the race, the dumbfounded Colonel gasps, ‘‘It’s my race anyhow.’’58 They all go down to the stall to see the horse and Holmes instructs the confused Colonel to wash its face. Holmes explains to Ross that he had found the horse in the hands of ‘‘a fakir.’’ Ross overtures, ‘‘My dear sir, you have done wonders. The horse looks very fit and well. It never went better in its life. I owe you a thousand apologies for having doubted your ability. You have done me a great service by recovering my horse. You would do me greater still if you could lay your hands on the murderer of John Straker.’’59

Holmes states that he has indeed found the murderer and that he is amongst the present company. The Colonel once again returns to his usual lackluster capacities and angrily perceives this remark as an insult. Obviously Holmes knows that the Colonel would react in this way, yet

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pursues this manner of exposing the Colonel’s impulsive stupidity to him. Holmes then reveals that he is referring to the horse and promises to explain the details after the races. However, he later does not tell the Colonel who had sequestered the horse. ‘‘We must have an amnesty in that direction, I think.’’60 Holmes deals with Ross in a very careful way. Ross is thoroughly overmatched by Holmes and so there is no way that Holmes could ever have Ross understand what he is about. The Colonel’s limitations mean that he reacts in predictable ways, because he perceives things in such a stiffly regimented, dull fashion. Doyle makes Ross a colonel to symbolize his ideal type. The only way that Holmes can work for the Colonel is to expose him to his own shortcomings. This seems to be arrogant, as it could be argued that Holmes could just completely ignore Ross’ incorrigible dullness. And, if Holmes were to confront Ross, he would be fired. Holmes does not need to work on this case, but Holmes, out of his own goodness, does good for Ross, even if Ross acts in an undeserving manner. Holmes has to protect his own autonomy, or he becomes the pawn of the likes of Ross, which at the least would put him in a position in which he could not solve the case. Holmes establishes his distance for these prudent reasons and at the same time creates a space for the Colonel to sense his own faults retrospectively, even if his dullness precludes that he will ever foresee anything. This remarkable ability of Holmes to transcend conventional forms of social interaction in order to bring about a good that transcends the mundane conventions of law and order points to the deeper facets of the human soul and the mystery of life in which it is embedded. Holmes’ ‘‘course-of-action’’ points to a characterological type that is attuned to the mystery of a higher justice and compassion. ‘‘T he Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’’ I offer a more sophisticated Schutzian analysis of ‘‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’’61 by illustrating an essential aspect of the social psychological perspicacity of Sherlock Holmes, which concerns the ability to transform motivational contexts from in-order-to structural complexes into the determinants of because-contexts.62 Any ascription of a motivational context to outwardly perceived behavior of a social actor requires assignation of the observed behavior to known or postulated subjective events comprising a meaning-context that transcends the present timeframe of the observed behavior. Motivational explication requires that the conduct of a social actor acting in a specific situation had been

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understood first from the standpoint of free acts motivated by a goal projected into the future horizon. A series of in-order-to motives are recognized in the concretization of a projected goal, which proceeds through progressively ordered actions oriented to its ‘‘real-ization.’’ An action is only understood from the actor’s subjective point of view by assigning the present action of the actor to a project that had been formulated by the actor sometime in the past. And, the present action refers to a subjectively constituted goal that has been projected in the future perfect tense to which it is teleologically oriented. Interpretive transformation requires that this same conduct interpreted from the standpoint of its future-orientation in in-order-to meaning-contexts, then become interpreted from the standpoint of the past as a bound or ‘‘causally determined’’ act. The because-motive precedes the project of the act; it explains why the actor had formulated the project in the first place. For example, what circumstances in a social actor’s life led him to choose a life of crime? So, in the because-motivational context the actor acts in such and such a manner because some meaning-context formed in the past motivates it. Interpretational transformation is a feat of understanding that can be accomplished by ordinary social partners in the everyday life-world when a partner wishes to orient his behavior to that of the Other. Typically, for example, an actor formulates the project to ask a question because there is something that he wants to find out. In the case of Holmes, however, it is his extraordinary talents at which we marvel, and here it is not merely logical acumen, but his social psychological insight. By discerning an individual’s make-up that had motivated the formulation of a project to which certain actions belong, Holmes is better able to prudently deal with the social situations in which he is called upon to act. In order to illustrate these two motivational contexts, which are distinguished by their respective orders of temporality, let us say that we see a social actor leave her house, get in the car, and drive away. Unless our understanding can transcend the present time-frame, we do not know the actor’s motivational context. People exhibit this specific behavior for any number of reasons. Upon investigation, we find out that this social actor has engaged in this observed action in-order-to buy food. We then recognize that she had previously formulated the project that she wanted something to eat and the action that we observe is oriented to concretizing that goal. But why did she formulate this project in the first place? We could find out that this project was formulated because she was hungry

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and that she had nothing in the house she wanted to eat. And thus we link the same observed action to the two motivational structures. In the denouement of this particular adventure concerning the theft of a prized jewel, Holmes elicits a confession from James Ryder, who is a man who has stolen the blue carbuncle. After Ryder’s recountal, Holmes orders Ryder to leave Holmes’ flat, which signifies that Holmes does not intend to inform the authorities. He cites several reasons for this decision in his subsequent address to Watson: that he need not expose the deficiencies of the police, that the case of the wrongly accused man surely won’t hold up, and that Ryder will not go wrong again, for he is too terribly frightened. If he were to be sent to jail, it may turn him into a hardened type, while rescinding his capture will go towards saving his soul. Besides it is the season for forgiveness. The readers’ skills in logic no doubt can be employed for filling in the missing propositions in this series of enthymematic inferences. The aesthetic enjoyment involves the writing skills of Doyle to supply just the right amount of propositional material at just the right moments in the story. But let us construct a syllogism based on Holmes’ reasons. All seasons of forgiveness (Christmas) are times that we should forgive even those like James Ryder who have committed grand larceny. Now is the season of forgiveness. Thus, now is a time when we should forgive even those who have committed grand larceny. This is arguably a rather unsound, almost ridiculous, argument. Without further ado it should be clear that a study of Holmes’ logical reasoning at the conclusion of this story is insufficient for insight into how Holmes could determine that James Ryder would never again be capable of committing such a crime. And it is this decision to let Ryder ‘‘walk’’ that most captures the attention of a reader. James Ryder completes his confessional declaration to Holmes by supplicating God and then sobbing convulsively with his face buried in his hands. Doyle writes, There was a long silence, broken only by heavy breathing, and by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes’ finger-tips upon the edge of the table. Then my friend rose, and threw open the door. ‘‘Get out!’’ said he.63

During this interval of finger tapping the reflective Holmes made his decision to let the man go. This scene symbolizes Judgment Day and profound compassion as Ryder on his knees faces Holmes in terrorized supplication.

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What Holmes accomplishes is to link a preceding because-motivational context to the formulated project. But, the because-motive for formulating the project to steal the jewel in the first place incriminates Ryder and it is quite clearly ascertained by Holmes. ‘‘The temptation of sudden wealth so easily acquired was too much for you as it has been for better men before you; but you were not very scrupulous in the means you used.’’64

The theme of the because-motive is amplified by the fact that Ryder carefully prefigured how he would be able to get away with the crime. A fuller understanding of the because-motivational complex reveals the lustful desire to be wealthy and the belief that its acquisition by stealth would be attainable by a foilproof, undetectable means. ‘‘It seems to me, Ryder, that there is the making of a very pretty villain in you. You knew that this man Horner, the plumber, had been concerned in some such matter before, and that suspicion would rest the more readily upon him. What did you do then? You made some small job in my lady’s room . . . and you managed that he should be sent for. Then, when he had left, you rifled the jewel case, raised the alarm, and had this unfortunate man arrested.’’65

With such divisiveness in the because-motivational context and the clues as to why Holmes dismisses Ryder only implicitly provided for the text by Doyle, Holmes’ deep insights into the structures of the social world are left up to the intuitive imagination of the reader. Thus it must be the case that Holmes would have grasped some other because-context that would have overruled the above incriminating context, which had been so straightforwardly presented by Doyle. Otherwise, Holmes certainly would not have let Ryder go free. By implementing specifically Schutz and Luckmann’s discussion of the biographically conditioned nature of attitude we can explicate how Holmes would have had to arrive at his decision. Attitude involves the motivational relevances that constitute the because-context, and it is comprised of a syndrome and a frame of mind. A syndrome consists of expectations, hypothetical relevances, plans of action, and skills and other elements of habitual knowledge. A syndrome is the connection or synthesis of all the relevant elements. When a syndrome consists of no counter elemental indications it is potentially highly effectual. As Ryder would have thought out the possibility of committing his crime, he conceived of it in such a way that he convinced himself that he would get away with it. The frame of mind ‘‘is determined by the limits of the life-worldly situation (finitude, ‘first things first,’ etc.), and of the biographically condi-

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tioned plan-hierarchy of the manner of living.’’66 The intensity of the frame of mind is measured by degrees of importance and urgency. We can surmise that James Ryder values material circumstances and when the opportunity arose that would change his whole manner of living, this magnitude and this once-in-a-lifetime urgency set his frame of mind. An attitude is ‘‘already there’’ and is activated whenever certain circumstances arise. When the circumstance is present the attitude arises through the automatic coincidence of the theme and the element or through a process of explication. Ryder was not a thief awaiting an opportunity; rather, he first recognized an ideal opportunity, which activated an attitude, and then he became a thief. This means that the situation had to be explicated by Ryder in order to activate the attitudes that determined the becausemotives. Through the facts that Holmes had assembled, the content of Ryder’s confession, and the various indications of his subjectivity through gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice, etc., Holmes would have to assess Ryder’s attitude in the constitution of his because-motives. And these would have to have been so interpreted that Holmes could make the decision to let Ryder go. The source for an attitude is not frequently open to memory, for it is a complex that is built upon various experiences, which are not traceable to specific memories. An attitude is difficult to thematize and requires much labor of reflective consciousness to grasp it. Mostly an attitude functions as an ‘‘unconscious’’ motive in the formation of specific actcomplexes. Holmes not only would have to identify an attitude as providing a certain motivation determining Ryder’s actions, but he would also have to bank on that attitude as a deterrent to any possible future engagement in criminal acts. But how is it that Holmes, as an observer, is able to discern the attitude that functions as the because-context for the actions of James Ryder? Schutz states that the actor himself is in no way in a privileged situation for discovering attitudes ‘on his own,’ as is the case for motivational chains in an in-order-to context. Rather, motivations in a because-context can also be adequately grasped by attentive observers.67

By observing Ryder’s nervousness at the market and in the cab and through Ryder’s recountal of the events that led to the discovery by Holmes, Holmes is able to check his own deductions and evidence gathering against Ryder’s reporting of his in-order-to motivational context. So, in this instance, the attentive observer concerning the because-context is Sherlock Holmes. The because-context is unnecessary for the issue of

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arresting Ryder. But it would have to be of the utmost importance to Holmes, for he is weighing a decision as to what to do with James Ryder. Such attentive observing in this instance requires much more than Holmes’ uncanny ability for logical deduction, which is insufficient for this decision; it requires social psychological assessment. Through painstaking interpretation of such motivational contexts, through the systematic accumulation of knowledge, and through generalizing typifications, some people can also be brought to a certain expertise concerning human motivation. An important basis for the predilection of social-scientific thought for such quasi-causal motivational contexts (excluding methodological considerations) is to be sought in this circumstance.68

We now can gather clues from the text that allow for the construction of the because context that Holmes would have used in his assessment of Ryder. Briefly, so that our evidence gathering makes sense, after stealing the jewel Ryder stuffed it into a live goose, but then he mixed up the goose with another. This led him on a frantic search to recover the ‘‘jewelcropped’’ goose, which landed him into the clutches of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, being in the right place at the right time, overheard Ryder, whom he had not yet connected to the crime, haggling with a salesman at the market. ‘‘I’ve had enough of you and your geese,’’ he shouted. ‘‘. . . If you come pester me any more with your silly talk I’ll set the dog at you. . . . Did I buy the geese off you?’’ ‘‘No; but one of them was mine all the same,’’ whined the little man.69

Obviously, Ryder had been to the salesman more than once, probably several times, insistently trying to get the man to reveal to whom he had sold the goose. Realizing that this is likely the very man for whom he had been looking, Holmes catches up with him and taps him on the shoulder. He sprang round, and I could see in the gaslight that every vestige of colour had been driven from his face. ‘‘Who are you, then? What do you want?’’ he asked in a quavering voice.70

Ryder does not exhibit self-control and he is in a state of panic. His voice is whining then quavering, and he is in terror when Holmes taps him on the shoulder. This encounter is Holmes’ first face-to-face impression of Ryder. Holmes introduces himself and tells Ryder that he can be of assistance because he himself has traced the very geese that Ryder is trying to trace.

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‘‘Oh, sir, you are the very man whom I have longed to meet,’’ cried the little fellow with outstretched hands and quivering fingers. ‘‘I can hardly explain to you how interested I am in this matter.’’71

Not only has his emotional state gotten the better of him, but Ryder is so beside himself that he no longer acts in a prudent way concerning the need to avoid arousing suspicions. In terms of his formulated project, we know he is capable of very cool calculated activities. But here Holmes interacts with a man who is desperate in a way that could easily expose him as the thief. The little man stood glancing from one to the other of us with half-hopeful eyes, as one who is not sure whether he is on the verge of a windfall or of a catastrophe. Then we stepped into the cab, and in half an hour we were back in the sitting-room at Baker Street. Nothing had been said during our drive, but the high thin breathing of our new companion, and the claspings and the unclaspings of his hands spoke of the nervous tension within him.72

Obviously, this unusual circumstance is made even more suspect by the fact that the three men sit in silence. If someone knows the whereabouts of geese that you are trying to track down, even if there is a destination from where business will be conducted, it would be better to try and appear relaxed. But Ryder is too traumatized to think so he does not make pleasant conversation while figuring out a good alibi as to why he searches for the geese. When they get inside the flat and Holmes unmasks him as the thief along with showing him the jewel, Ryder nearly passes out and almost falls into the fire. For a moment he had staggered and nearly fallen, but the brandy brought a tinge of color into his cheeks, and he sat staring with frightened eyes at his accuser.73

Ryder continues to passively allow himself to be manipulated by Holmes. There is no sense of fight or of flight. Holmes becomes even more stern with Ryder and recounts to him the exact manner in which Ryder had formulated his plan, which Holmes deduced from the facts of the case that he had learned from the police and the new facts presently before him. As Holmes was continuing, Ryder threw himself down suddenly upon the rug, and clutched at my companion’s knees. ‘‘For God’s sake, have mercy!’’ he shrieked. ‘‘Think of my father! Of my mother! It would break their hearts. I never went wrong before! I never will again. I swear it! I’ll swear it on a Bible. Oh, don’t bring it into court! For Christ’s sake don’t!’’74

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Holmes orders him back into the chair and orders that he tell the truth as to how the stone got into the goose and then how the goose got into the open market. Before addressing the rest of the relevant elements of the story, the motivational context up to this point needs to be constructed. Why did he frequent the salesman several times at the market? In order to find out to whom the salesman sold the geese. Because he was desperate and was unable to think clearly enough to figure out another way to obtain the information that he needed. Why did he get in the cab and go with Holmes and Watson? In order to obtain information from Holmes as to how to get back the goose. Because he was so frightened that he was extremely vulnerable to any sign of receiving help. Why does he fall to his knees and beg for mercy? In order to persuade Holmes not to turn him in and let him leave the country? He begs because he is so painfully frightened, deeply ashamed, and sorry for his weaknesses. His new attitude is formed through the unforeseen wrench in his ‘‘foilproof plan,’’ which shakes his confidence. It is also formed by the fact that the same weakness of character that led him to steal is also responsible for his utter inability to live with the aftermath of the deed. But is this sufficient to believe that the man will never commit a crime again? Or that he deserves to be turned loose? After taking the jewel, Ryder began immediately to fall apart. He decided then that it was unsafe for him to stay at the hotel where he worked and had committed the crime. He decides to go to his sister’s farm. All the way there every man I met seemed to me to be a policeman or a detective, and for all that it was a cold night, the sweat was pouring down my face before I came to the Brixton Road. My sister asked me what was the matter, and why I was so pale; but I told her that I had been upset by the jewel robbery at the hotel. Then I went into the back yard, and smoked a pipe, and wondered what it would be best to do.75

In Holmes’ flat Ryder is utterly beside himself with nervous tension, and Holmes treats him the way a parent may ‘‘turn on the heat’’ so that a child will learn a lesson for life. But, symbolically, this confrontation represents atonement before God. Holmes produces the jewel from his strongbox. ‘‘The game’s up, Ryder,’’ said Holmes, quietly. ‘‘Hold up man, or you’ll be into the fire! Give him an arm back into his chair, Watson. He’s not got blood enough to go in for felony with impunity.’’76

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By continually testing the character of Ryder, Holmes is not merely solving a case. Certainly, this adventure modifies the typifications of Holmes, because Holmes reads the human soul in a most profound way, but more importantly invests interrelationships in the We-relation with awe-provoking power. Kendrick says of Holmes, ‘‘He is a living paradox, a person who purposely tempers his emotional involvement so as to keep his intelligence hard and keen – but for the purpose of helping, of healing, of revealing the painful and thwarting secrets that twist and maim lives. He is a physician of the soul.’’77 Kendrick discusses parables of forgiveness and the meaning of compassion. ‘‘What makes forgiveness so hard is that it is counterintuitive.’’78 And this brings insight into why Holmes’ logical reasoning at the end of the story is so shoddy. His decision of compassion was made from a deeper sense of justice and forgiveness. This deeper sense is what allows for Holmes’ course-of-action to be interpreted from the standpoint of theodicy. The Ryder/Holmes interaction entails crisis profoundly transformed into ecstasy through the reintegration of nomos and love. Is this not the power that is attributed to the divine mystery of God, which is revealed through this powerful scene? PART THREE: SCHUTZIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE AND MYSTERY

The purpose of this section is to provide a plausible motivation for why Alfred Schutz would read the ending of a mystery first and then would go back to the beginning and read the story through in its entirety. As an indirect consequence of this project of gaining a genuine understanding of the subjectivity of Alfred Schutz, much insight into the mystery genre can be gained. We can then better assess the genre in terms of its level of profundity. Social scientists deal with ‘‘data’’ that is quite different from that of the natural scientist. The observational field of social science is the social world, which is a world already meaningfully constructed through the structured realities of everyday life. So, the constructs of the social scientist are constructs of constructs, or second order constructs based upon the lived first order constructs of everyday life. Schutz develops methodological rules that set the parameters for constructing the second order meanings pertaining to the social sector and the problem relevancy in which the social scientist is engaged. In order to be objectively accurate, the social scientist must respect the common sense interpretations of the real social actors and thus must

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remain consistent with the subjective point of view of the social agents. However, the subjectivity constructed by the social scientist does not refer to the uniqueness of real persons in real situations. The social scientist replaces the thought objects of common-sense thought relating to unique events and occurrences by constructing a model of a sector of the social world within which merely those typified events occur that are relevant to the scientist’s particular problem under scrutiny. All other happenings within the social world are considered as being irrelevant.79

Unlike living in the real world of contingencies, the social scientist freely determines what is and what is not relevant in the consideration of the problem that is to be solved. She must remain consistent with the ways of an everyday observer, yet she is guided by her own problematic. The social scientist first observes patterns of human action or their results. She then constructs typifications: course-of-action patterns and personal ideal types. She only ascribes those that are relevant to the limits of her study and assumes these to be invariant. These actors are not real human beings, but puppets, delimited by a set of relevances and manipulated by the social scientist for her scientific purposes. The puppet is awarded a ‘‘Here and There’’ and certain social relationships. The ‘‘puppet show’’ is a model of the social world. This puppet show is a rational simplification of the social world whereby the puppets make choices from motives based on their typified courses-of-actions and personal ideal types. Unlike the lived-world, the puppet world is a closed system of rational homunculi. Alfred Schutz (as reported in the epigraph) would have read the ending of a mystery first because the ending establishes a closed world – the facticity of the world has been established. The characters have been appropriately disclosed and the fact that the deeds have been done constitutes a closed world. An already objectivated information system is what the social scientist begins with when constructing the puppet show. Now the puppets can be placed in situations by which they will act based upon the reduced set of relevances constituting a particular social problem. The mystery story provides the problem: the project of solving the mystery of a crime. The mystery author creates his characters according to typifications and places them in situations. Schutz, then, treats the author of the mystery as a fellow social scientist conducting a puppet show and thus is able to critically evaluate the detective story by examining how the puppets respond in the various circumstances of the plot.

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The mystery is conceived similarly to the way the social scientist creates second order constructions. The plot revolves around the solving of a particular problem and thus the relevances surrounding the characters are restricted to just what is necessary to the problem. This feature of being a delimited system is really the basis for the reasons that many consider mystery writing to be shallow. But, it might be asked, do not all authors construct characters? Yes, but many genres attempt to portray an open world, one in which the characters, as in real life, must face the openness of the world. Then, what specifically makes the mystery similar to the puppet show of a social scientist? It is because the plot is constructed around the subjectivity of the detective. The detective acts similarly to a social scientist in the gathering of empirical information by deciding what is relevant and what is not relevant in order to reconstruct a world that is closed on the basis of a certain problematic past facticity – a crime that needs to be solved. By reading the ending first, not only does Alfred Schutz critically evaluate the puppet show of the author, but he knows in advance the solution to the sleuth’s problem. He then studies the sleuth, who acts very much like a social scientist in gathering first order evidence concerning the everyday world. There is a difference in that the sleuth acts in the world that he studies so that his position is ambiguous. In order to solve his problem, the sleuth must consider various courses of actions from the various personal ideal types that he is constructing. The sleuth constructs various possible worlds through imaginative variation in order to test their congruencies against the progressive gathering of data. Schutz explains variation with a specific example. The circumstances within such a model may be varied, that is, the situation which the homunculi [‘‘puppets’’ involved in the case] have to meet may be imagined as changed, but not the set of motives and relevances assumed to be the sole content of their consciousness. . . . In this way, it is possible to predict how such a puppet or system of puppets might behave under certain conditions.80

Since the system is assumed closed (and is closed in terms of reconstructing the past) and evidence is progressively gathered, the sleuth solves the case by modifying variables that would result in different consequences. She tests these possible worlds in ways that eliminate possibilities until the real world is disclosed. Schutz, who has trained himself to follow this methodology, interprets the subjective meaning-context in the ‘‘mind’’ of the sleuth concerning the construction and testing of hypotheses. He attempts to figure out what is going on in the mind of the sleuth, which is revealed to the readers only after events, as we are not privy to her

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motivational context during the action. Since Schutz already knows the ending, he knows what will be revealed to be the ‘‘actual world,’’ but must attempt to make the leap into the sleuth’s subjectivity in order to figure out what element within the matrix of relevancies the sleuth is modifying in the consideration of possible worlds. In this way Schutz evaluates his understanding of the social sector through imagining the variations entertained by the sleuth. Multilevels of interpreting a mystery would have appealed to Schutz. Still another level is what he calls the work of a methodologist. I shall illustrate through the Holmes adventures even though Schutz would have engaged in this regardless of which mystery writers he had read. Holmes typifies the suspects and others in his investigation, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as the ‘‘social scientist,’’ manipulates Holmes’ world according to the problem that he wants to explore. Alfred Schutz then interprets Doyle’s interpretation of Holmes’ interpretation of various people he encounters in his investigations. This might be called a third order interpretation, which is the work of a methodologist – the study of the social scientists’ methodologies, which in this case are the methods of the author. Without reading the ending first, the detective story reader knows from the genre that the world is closed in two ways. By the fact that a crime has been committed or the facticity of the past, and that the solving of the mystery ends the story, the final delimitation of relevancy. By the fact that the story is constructed around the relevances as perceived and conceived by the sleuth, how the world is closed is the mystery. People who are fans of the Holmes adventures read the stories over and over. Why, if the puzzle once solved is solved forever? By rereading, readers are intuitively following Schutz’s methodology. In subsequent readings the reader recognizes Holmes’ motivational context during the action and does not have to learn it in hindsight. But more interestingly, because the reader is gaining a more genuine understanding of the subjectivity of Holmes, the reader can then begin to imagine like Holmes. The perspicacious reader then begins to vary elements in the relevancy matrix and learns to envision possible worlds. Thus, without knowing it, the reader is learning to become a Schutzian social scientist and a sleuth. Grossvogel’s criticism of the detective story is that the mystery does not touch the life of the reader. Even if we were to grant this point, it is not a necessary condition for the achievement of excellence in literature. The particular excellence of the detective story is that the reader is able to take up the detached viewpoint of the social scientist. Yet, I want to argue that from this viewpoint the awesome mystery of life enters into conscious-

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ness as well – because of its theoretical mode of questioning the takenfor-granted everyday world. It is up to the reader to then draw what is gained in contemplation into existential life. This is exactly what Stephen Kendrick does by treating the Holmes corpus as a theodicy and a gospel. And, because of this Kendrick recognizes in it an intimate connection to the ultimate mystery of life. Thus sociological acumen may be the missing ingredient for those critics who cannot see the profundity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. CONCLUSION

Through Schutzian social phenomenology the proper excellence of the detective story is revealed. Because of its particular limitations, it is difficult for writers of this genre to achieve the status of great literature, but these limitations can be transcended and are transcended by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes series. The horizon of the fundamental intransparency of life pervades the world of Sherlock Holmes as the sociological function of upholding the nomizing function of worldconstruction is threatened by the marginal chaos of crime. And more than renewing the nomic, the method of Holmes establishes a theodicy and a way, a gospel, that connects to the ultimate mystery of life. The character of Holmes exudes qualities, such as a profound compassion, that links his way to the ultimate mysteries of divine justice. Finally, it is the theoretical attitude of the social scientist in the study of the series of Holmes stories that can best teach us to gain awareness of their awesome, and peculiar, power to evoke the great transcendent mystery that is the horizon to life. Morgan State University NOTES 1 Lang, Evelyn S. Letter to author, 23 November 2001. Evelyn S. Lang is the daughter of Alfred Schutz. 2 What I mean by a Schutzian analysis is that I apply the theoretical work of Alfred Schutz, his students,Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, and my own Schutzian influenced work in this study of mystery and the literature of Sherlock Holmes. 3 See David I. Grossvogel, Mystery and Its Fictions. From Oedipus to Agatha Christie (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 4 See Stephen Kendrick, Holy Clues. T he Gospel Acccording to Sherlock Holmes (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

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5 Grossvogel, op. cit., p. 1. 6 See Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, ‘‘World Time,’’ in T he Structures of the L ifeworld, trans. Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 45–50. 7 Grossvogel, op. cit., p. 2. 8 See Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, ‘‘The Boundaries of Experience and the Boundary Crossings,’’ in T he Structures of the L ife-World, Volume II, trans. Richard M. Zaner and David J. Parent (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), pp. 99–147. 9 Kendrick, op. cit., p. 4. 10 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘‘The Naval Treaty,’’ in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Book-of-the-Month, Club Inc., 1994), p. 215. 11 Ibid. 12 ‘Enclave,’ ‘symbol,’ and ‘gap’ are introduced by Schutz and Luckmann, op. cit., p. 127. 13 Grossvogel, op. cit., p. 4. 14 Ibid. p. 2. 15 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘‘The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,’’ in T he Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., 1994), p. 300. 16 Ibid. 17 Kendrick, op. cit., p. 52. 18 Ibid. p. 60. 19 See Schutz and Luckmann, op. cit., pp. 171–173. 20 Ibid. p. 171. 21 Kendrick, op. cit., p. 38. 22 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘‘A Case of Identity,’’ in Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., 1994), p. 56. 23 Ibid. 24 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., 1994), p. 64. 25 Doyle, Adventures, op. cit., p. 6. 26 Kendrick, op. cit., p. 40. 27 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T he Sign of the Four (New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., 1994), p. 42. 28 Schutz and Luckmann, Volume II, op cit., p. 106. 29 Grossvogel, op. cit., pp. 13–14. 30 Kendrick, op. cit., p. 22. 31 Grossvogel, op. cit., p. 15. 32 Ibid. p. 40. 33 Ibid. p. 16. 34 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, T he Social Construction of Reality. A T reatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 129. 35 Peter L. Berger, T he Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological T heory of Religion (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 22. 36 Berger and Luckman, op. cit., p. 54. 37 Ibid. pp. 93–97. 38 Berger, op. cit., p. 22. 38 Ibid. pp. 23–24. 40 Ibid. p. 25. 41 Kendrick, op. cit., p. 31.

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42 Ibid. p. 13. 43 Ibid. p. 4. 44 Ibid. p. 10. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. p. 13. 47 Ibid. p. 58. 48 Ibid. pp. 154–155. 49 Alfred Schutz, T he Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. 196–197. 50 Ibid. ‘‘Analysis of the Face-to-Face Relationship,’’ pp. 167–172. 51 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘‘Silver Blaze,’’ in Memoirs. 52 Ibid. p. 13. 53 Ibid. p. 16. 54 Ibid. p. 17. 55 Ibid. p. 20. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. p. 21. 58 Ibid. p. 25. 59 Ibid. p. 24. 60 Ibid. p. 28. 61 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,’’ in Adventures. 62 The theoretical discussion concerning attitude and motivation in the because-context is formulated by Schutz and Luckmann in op. cit., pp. 215–223. 63 Doyle, ‘‘Blue Carbuncle,’’ p. 107. 64 Ibid. p. 172. 65 Ibid. 66 Schutz and Luckmann, op. cit., p. 217. 67 Ibid. p. 220. 68 Ibid. 69 Doyle, ‘‘Blue Carbuncle,’’ p. 169. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. p. 170. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. p. 171. 74 Ibid. p. 172. 75 Ibid. p. 173. 76 Ibid. p. 171. 77 Kendrick, op. cit., p. 140. 78 Ibid. 79 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers 1: T he Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 36. 80 Ibid. pp. 64–65.

TONY E. AFEJUKU

FICTIONALIZATION OF INCIDENTS IN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE, WOLE SOYINKA, CAMARA LAYE AND PETER ABRAHAMS

1. INTRODUCTION

This essay examines how crucial incidents are to the artistic appeal of such African autobiographies as Ezekiel Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue, Wole Soyinka’s Ake: T he Years of Childhood, Camara Laye’s T he African Child and Peter Abrahams’s T ell Freedom. In these autobiographies, incidents which the autobiographers utilize in the telling of their tales enable us to determine how much of what we read in the autobiographies is actual or fictional. In fact, the extent to which each of the autobiographies can be regarded as an invention or a false picture of the past, or better still, the extent to which each of the autobiographers can be regarded as a writer of fiction and hence as a literary autobiographer, is to be judged by the way the events or incidents in the autobiography are reported. As Seymour Chatman informs us, events (or incidents) in a narrative ‘‘are actions (acts) or happenings’’ (44) in the said narrative; but how factual or fictional these events appear depends on the mode of presentation. In the works under consideration, the writers try to create fantasy or sustain the illusion of reality and to enhance the aesthetic appeal of their works by reporting probable incidents as if they were essentially imaginary. Exaggeration and idealization of incidents are the means by which the autobiographers achieve this paradoxical objective: to make them real, events have to be presented as if they were not real. 2. EXAGGERATION OF INCIDENTS

Writers like Ezekiel Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka deliberately make use of exaggeration in their narratives to give force to their illusion of reality, and to underline the point that fiction and autobiography are never completely separate in the creative writer, as Mphahlele would say. In answer to a question from a panel of interviewers as to how his autobiography came into being, Mphahlele replies, ‘‘It was really a novel that 183 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 183–192. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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had been turning around in my mind which later became Down Second Avenue. I decided to chuck the novel altogether and simply write an autobiography. / [. . .] As far as events are concerned, one has to invent a lot of them’’ (6). ‘‘Invent’’ in his usage does not mean that most of the events, or what he says, are not true, but that they have been restructured and reshaped by his imagination. Thus, the word ‘‘invent’’ in Mphahlele’s usage serves to assign to the imagination an essential function in recreating or fantasizing the experience that is being written about. An examination of Mphahlele’s autobiography reveals that some of the events have been grossly exaggerated. The passage where Mphahlele describes the beating he received from a white policeman when he was a thirteen-year-old boy keeping watch for his aunt who was brewing illegal beer, is quite illustrative of this. In fact, the passage certainly reveals that in his description of incidents Mphahlele is far from maintaining a sober and restrained accuracy: The Black constable had hardly reached my hand when the big white hand crashed full on my cheek so that I seemed to hear my name called, and staggered and hit against a pole that was supporting a vine. The Black man pulled me away with a jerk that sent a pain shooting through my side. ‘‘Are you going to tell the truth, ‘jou donder’?’’ I didn’t care now. Let anything happen, I thought. I got a backhand on the mouth, and in an instant I tasted something salty. While I held my mouth the big white man caught me behind the neck and pressed my face against his other massive hand, so that I began to suffocate. ‘‘Now this is for your bloody lies, you son of a stinking kaffir!’’ With the last word he thrust me away from him. I went down on hard ground. A big terrible light. . . . Shining steel pokers with sharp points for destroying beer containers. . . . Heavy footsteps. . . . Clanging of steel . . . the sound. coming faintly. . . . I felt sick. The earth was turning and I seemed to hang precariously on the edge. Everything became dark and black before me. . . . (42–43)

The above passage is aimed at matching, as closely as possible, the reality of the beating the thirteen-year-old Mphahlele received at that tender age, but the mental image he presents here is a wild inaccuracy of what he possibly felt or experienced. The picture is in fact a myth, a subconscious distortion of the truth for social and political motives. This point gains force if we realize that part of Mphahlele’s purpose in writing his autobiography was to show that South Africa was a land of terrible apartheid (racist) brutality. To drive home this point, Mphahlele in this passage deliberately amplifies the thought that goes on in his head, in his imagination, as a result of the impact of the beating the ‘‘big’’ white policeman with his ‘‘massive hand’’ gave him, a mere thirteen-year-old

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boy! No doubt, the size of the white policeman is exaggerated with such words as ‘‘big,’’ ‘‘massive’’ and ‘‘heavy’’ in order to emphasize the policeman’s brutality and ruthlessness. Moreover, the policeman’s hostility is conveyed in the exaggerated quickness of his actions and the metallic quality attributed to his blows – all of which confound Mphahlele. Although it could be argued that the above incident is undoubtedly true to the pre-independence South African situation, yet from the experience of the youthful Mphahlele the event was stranger than fiction; hence it has to be reported as such. In any case, the presentation of the incident demonstrates the paradox whereby an autobiographer resorts to the mode of fiction, namely, the exaggeration of details, in order to make a true event look more real by acquiring through exaggeration a vividness of description and the gripping emotional intensity of a deeply felt experience. Another recreated and slightly exaggerated incident is the Dinku Dikae episode recorded in chapter sixteen. Mphahlele similarly uses the incident to stress the horrors and tension experienced by the non-white in South Africa. Dinku Dikae, a Coloured South African and the father of Mphahlele’s classmate and intimate girlfriend, Rebone, is a man who ‘‘always trembles when he sees a [white] policeman’’ (141). This is evident in the scene where he is accosted by a white health inspector whom he mistakes for a policeman. In fact, to him any white man is a policeman because, in his own words, ‘‘look at it up or down the street when a white man looks for a fault it is to take you to the police’’ (116). In recalling the encounter between Dinku Dikae and the white health inspector, Mphahlele’s interest is not in portraying his character as such, but in using the encounter to show to what extent apartheid South Africa was a land of tension especially for non-whites. Mphahlele’s presentation of the incident is done with controlled exaggeration: We found a white man in black uniform talking to Rebone’s father, examining the horse as if he were looking for something in the air, in the mare, under the tail, on the hoofs. ‘‘It’s not a policeman, pa.’’ I heard Rebone hiss out to him. ‘‘It’s not a policeman, pa.’’ Dinku Dikae might as well be deaf. For the first time I saw a man tremble as the hawker did. He followed the white man round almost falling over him, but not saying a word. Rebone’s face was one massive frown, and her attention was on the father all the time, ‘‘Don’t be afraid, pa,’’ she hissed. ‘‘He’s a health inspector, not a policeman.’’ Of course, he had been stopped several times before by health inspectors. When the white man left, after saying brusquely, ‘‘All right,’’ Dinku Dikae held on to the harnessing, like one about to faint (115).

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In his endeavour to portray South Africa as a place of tension for the non-whites, Mphahlele presents this incident with characteristic, though probably subconscious, exaggeration: ‘‘Dinku Dikae might as well be deaf ’’; ‘‘He followed the white man round almost falling over him’’; ‘‘Dinku Dikae held on to the harness, like one about to faint.’’ These descriptions brilliantly convey not just an exaggerated or tragicomic picture of the man, but also of the incident. Mphahlele’s description of Rebone’s face as ‘‘one massive frown’’ also underscores the point. The whole incident or her father’s behavior generally must have been grotesque indeed to elicit such a ‘‘massive frown’’ from Rebone! Nonetheless, Mphahlele gives the incident verisimilitude by rationalizing thus: That afternoon and into the night the picture of Dinku Dikae, trembling in the presence of the white inspector, could not leave me. Leaning against his strong horse, then moving to lean against the strong wheel and holding on to the spokes that radiated so much strength, then muttering something. . . . Now how come such a strong man with a heavy shoulder should fear a policeman or anybody or anything that suggested a policeman? I felt at once a close alliance with Rebone’s father and a little awe for him. Yes, wasn’t a policeman made to be feared – his handcuffs, big broad belt, truncheon, his heavy boots, his shining badge? (116)

The rationalization thus tries to conceal or minimize the exaggeration involved in the recreation of the incident. The larger than life picture of the South African police that is conveyed in his professional paraphernalia – ‘‘his handcuffs, big broad belt, truncheon, his heavy boots, his shining badge’’ – tends to excuse Dinku Dikae’s behavior and give emphasis to its genuineness. In short, the larger than life picture of the police tends to lend credence to the details of the encounter between Dinku Dikae and the white health inspector. Thus, once again Mphahlele has successfully employed the paradoxical mode of making reality more real by employing the fictional device.of exaggeration. In Ake, Soyinka exaggerates incidents purely for aesthetic effect. Unlike Mphahlele, who exaggerates incidents in the attempt to elucidate or underscore the point he is making about the sad experience of the Blacks and non-whites in South Africa, Soyinka tends to exaggerate incidents purely to delight the reader with the consequently enhanced artistry. Exaggerated incidents are recalled with an unrestrained self-indulgence which hardly creates verisimilitude in the narrative. Such incidents contribute nothing much to the narrative’s core or central design. An incident

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that persuasively illustrates this is the snake scene in Broda Pupa’s farm at Isara. With the consent of his grandfather and mother, Broda Pupa, his grandfather’s neighbour at Isara, takes Soyinka to the farm for the purpose of initiating him into farm life. They are accompanied by Yemi, Soyinka’s cousin. In the farm they encounter a snake which Soyinka tells us is ‘‘fat and unruffled’’ (133) and bigger in size than any snake he had seen before. And in the words of Yemi, who first discovers the snake hiding up on a kola-nut tree, ‘‘It is huge. It is monstrous! That isn’t a snake at all, it’s a sorcerer up there I swear. It’s a sorcerer’’ (133). In recreating the incident, Soyinka’s interest is not in the snake’s sheer size, which I think is deliberately exaggerated to underline the fear it struck in him and Yemi, but in the way he himse1f, Yemi and Broda Pupa enter into ‘‘battle’’ with the snake. Of course, its ‘‘fat,’’ ‘‘huge,’’ and ‘‘monstrous’’ size – the description of the snake in these terms of dimension – is an artistic attempt to explain why it must be confronted in the way Soyinka describes in the narrative: The pair kept up incessant barrage. The snake was disorientated, moved backwards and forward, climbed to the very highest perch but the stones and sticks found him there. I had long given up trying to contribute my pebbles, convinced that Broda Pupa never intended more than that I should not feel left out. I occupied myself with watching the futile efforts of the snake to escape. Finally, it plunged downwards. I noticed then that Brother [sic] Pupa had already picked up the heavy sapling with his left hand. As the snake fell downwards he transferred it to his right and was on top of the snake before it could recover its reflexes. A blow landed on its body and the next thunked squarely on its head. It writhed with incredible energy, lashed out in all directions. Broda Pupa banged it once more on the head, then stood a few feet away. (135)

The killing of a snake in ordinary life is supposed to be a trivial incident, yet in the above passage it is reported with great gusto. What we have here is not an ordinary killing of a snake by man, but a kind of epic battle, a kind of duel between man and animal, in which the former triumphs. Anyone who has watched a boxing contest or is familiar with the sport will easily see how Soyinka’s description of this event turns it into a do or die ‘‘boxing’’ combat between Broda Pupa and the snake. In fact, it is part of Soyinka’s narrative skill that he turns an act that initially involved the three of them – himself, Yemi and Broda Pupa – into such a ‘‘bang-and-lash’’ combat between Broda Pupa and the snake, with himself as the commentator-cum-spectator and Yemi as Broda Pupa’s active corner-man. Soyinka’s description of the ‘‘fight’’ is a conscious and deliberate attempt to transmute banal fact into entertaining

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creative fiction. But no matter how artistically satisfying this transmutation may be, the problem is that it tends to render the incident unconvincing and unrealistic. Moreover, for all its attractiveness and for all the unrestrained exuberance with which it is recalled, it contributes nothing significant to the autobiography’s central idea, which has to do with the writer’s lament for the changes that have overtaken the world he used to know.1 Other incidents in the narrative which are recalled with exaggeration and are aesthetically appealing include, for example, the ‘‘Mr. Le-moo’’ and ‘‘Mr. You Mean Mayself ’’ episodes found on pp. 72–76 and pp. 115–121 respectively. These incidents are quite appealing for their comic or melodramatic effect. To be sure, they are ‘‘embroidered’’ by ‘‘Soyinka’s sense of drama,’’ to borrow Alistair Niven’s words (179), but like the snake incident, however, they do not tell us anything worthwhile about the autobiography’s central idea. What might emerge from the above is that there is nothing wrong with autobiographies whose incidents are recast in a new light so as to reveal ‘‘some imaginative purpose or central design, the core of an idea or obsession’’ (Lewis Nkosi 94). Down Second Avenue and Ake are good examples of these autobiographies. But Soyinka, unlike Mphahlele, appears to overwork the details of most incidents in his life all to no effective or significant thematic purpose. 3. IDEALIZATION OF INCIDENTS

Some autobiographers idealize events or incidents either to enhance their recreations aesthetically or to underline particular points of view or themes. Of all the autobiographers under discussion, Camara Laye is the only one who deliberately idealizes incidents. He does this, though, to underline his idyllic vision and to say something about the social customs and beliefs of his people. Of course, a writer like Peter Abrahams makes one or two attempts to idealize incidents in order to create a desired way of life which is denied him in his land of birth. The play scene between Abrahams and his Zulu friend Joseph (44–6) and the love scene between Abrahams and Anne (206–214) are examples of such idealized incidents. However, idealization cannot be said to be a distinguishing feature of Abrahams’s narrative since, unlike Laye, he does not conceive his narrative as an idyllic tale. In T he African Child, Laye’s major concern as I pointed out above is to paint an idyllic picture of his society, a society that knows no unpleas-

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antness and in which the communal spirit is reasonably sustained. This tendency to portray only what is good in the society leads him to idealize several incidents without caring for the apparent contradictions and fictionalizations contained in their descriptions. This is the case, for example, in his description of the rice harvesting which is a major event in the narrative. Because he is mainly interested in stressing the communal significance of rice harvesting, he deliberately understates its hardships: We would go home contented, weary but happy. The good spirits had taken care of us: not one of us had been bitten by snakes that our trampling feet might have disturbed. The flowers, which would begin to unfold with the approach of evening, would be spreading their perfume on the air again, so that we walked as if attired in freshly-plucked garlands . . . the shouts and laughter of women mingling with the lowing of cattle returning to their byres. But we were singing, always singing! Ah! How happy we were in those days! (53–4)

This is a passage that celebrates the joy of the people after a successful completion of the day’s work in the rice field. It vividly and feelingly recreates the harmony that attends group farming. The whole picture, however, is hardly credible. In fact, as Charles Nnolim rightly says, ‘‘It is only [to] those who have never harvested rice or have never worked a full day in the farm that Laye’s idyllic picture of a harvest will seem credible’’ (45). Laye wants us to suspend our disbelief and accept that at the end of a full, hard day on the farm, instead of ‘‘trudging home, tired, arm-weary, footsore’’ (Nnolim 45), the harvesters happily troop home chanting at the ‘‘top of [their] voices the Song of the Rice’’ (53). These harvesters are clearly unlike the herdsmen in Child of T wo Worlds, who after a long, hard day in the ‘‘forest clearings,’’ go home exhausted and in dire need of food. As R. Mugo Gatheru frankly says, without any deliberate attempt to distort the hardship involved in herding, ‘‘When the sun was going down we turned our way homeward and in the dusk we could hear the goat-bells tinkling as we brought the animals home, tired and hungry’’ (20). Where the herding episode in Child of T wo Worlds rings authentic, unidealized and unfalsified because there the work is a chore and not a jolly-ride, the description of the rice harvesting in T he African Child is deliberately embellished and romanticized in order to enhance Laye’s idyllic vision. Of course, Laye’s is a fairytale world where, too, the spirits protect the joyous harvesters against the danger of snake bites. The introduction of spirits here definitely suggests that Laye is a writer of fantasy. If we agree with E. M. Forster that a ‘‘fantastic book asks us to accept the supernatural’’ (105) then we will agree that the presence of the spirits as the harvesters carry on their work exposes

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Laye’s fictionalization of the episode. In telling us that ‘‘the good spirits had taken care of us: not one of us had been bitten by snakes that our trampling feet might have disturbed,’’ Laye is urging us to suspend our disbelief in the description of the close correspondence between the reapers and invisible spirits. Descriptions of incidents such as these help to underline the mythical and hence aesthetic quality of T he African Child. It is also necessary to point out that it is Laye’s tendency to idealize the rice harvest that leads him into commenting thus: ‘‘December is our dry season. . . . In our December the whole world is in flower and the air is sweet; everything is young and fresh’’ (46). This statement is false and contradictory. How can December be dry and at the same time be ‘‘young and fresh’’? December, which in West Africa is the dry season, cannot be ‘‘young and fresh.’’ Nothing is in flower or fresh in December, as those familiar with the geography of West Africa very well know. December is the harmattan season when the winds blow ‘‘very dry air from the Sahara: air that dries the skin and cracks the lips’’ (Nnolim 45). Through such apparent embellishments or fictionalizations, pointed out above, Laye does not only enhance his idyllic vision, but also succeeds in sustaining an illusion of reality. For the idealization (fictionalization) is absolute, so competently done that the reader, without knowing it, willingly suspends disbelief. Laye’s ‘‘lie’’ of the harmony of communal harvest labour is so compellingly presented that it succeeds in making the unbelievable, believable; in transforming fantasy or illusion into reality. Here we have to distinguish the reader whom Laye carries willingly along, from the critic who deliberately refuses to suspend disbelief. It is the latter who sees Laye’s fictionalization. The former, swept along by the powerful current of Laye’s descriptive fictive power, is unaware of it. In T ell Freedom, Abrahams’s attempt at idealization of events and the effect the idealization produces in the reader differ from Laye’s. In this narrative, as suggested earlier on, the love scene between Abrahams and Anne has something idyllic about it, but it is certainly not Abrahams’s intention to make it so. In recreating the love relationship between him and Anne, Abrahams is only trying to convey as realistically as possible what it was like for an innocent, virgin boy to be in love. For him the experience was too real to be true: [Anne] looked at me. I could think of nothing more to say. She closed her book and leaned her head against the post. I put out one hand and the world stood still while a great and

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aching happiness crept into me and spread through my body. Many years, many ages later, one of the boys approached us. (206)

As long as it lasted, the love relationship between Abrahams and Anne was like something happening in a fairyland, but Abrahams’s narrative skill is such that it enables him to report it as vividly and as credibly as possible. In the above quotation, for instance, he makes a believable attempt to transform his feeling of love for Anne into something tangible by the metaphor of ‘‘Time and the world that stood still.’’ He also believably describes happiness as something visible creeping into the body. Thus, although their relationship is like something that takes place in some imagined world outside the real world he knows and lives in, it is believable. This is because the feeling of first love is invariably comprehended and expressed by the young love in hyperbolic, idyllic terms. This is realistic. It should be noted that this is the only time that Abrahams knows true happiness in South Africa. Yet he does not for this reason distort or over-describe the incident, as Laye would certainly have done if he were the one recreating it. It is clear from the above discussion that through his idealization of the episode of the rice harvest, Laye enhances his idyllic vision and creates an illusion of reality or myth achieved by deliberate distortions and embellishments. Abrahams does not achieve the same effect. Although his recreation of the love relationship between him and Anne is somewhat idealized, it nonetheless can be said to be authentic.

4. CONCLUSION

By the apparent distortions and embellishments of events achieved through exaggeration and idealization, the autobiographers under discussion, to varying degrees, underline the fact that their autobiographies are essentially fictional. Thus, the exaggerated incidents in Down Second Avenue and Ake and the idealized incidents in T he African Child and T ell Freedom can be seen as parts of an artistic attempt by the autobiographers to turn obvious reality into illusion or fantasy, paradoxically to achieve a greater sense of realism. University of Benin Benin City, Nigeria

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1 I have already dwelt on this in an earlier essay. See Tony E. Afejuku, ‘‘Aspects of Language in the African Literary Autobiography,’’ African L iterature T oday 21 (1998): 55–6.

WORKS CITED Abrahams, Peter. T ell Freedom. London: Faber, 1954; rpt. 1981. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1978. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1927; rpt. 1981. Gatheru, R. Mugo. Child of T wo Worlds. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964; rpt. London: Heinemann, 1975. Laye, Camara. T he African Child. Translated by Kirkup. London: Fontana, 1955. Mphahlele, Ezekiel. Down Second Avenue. London: Faber, 1959. Munro, Ian, Richard Priebe, and Reinhard Sander. ‘‘An Interview with Ezekiel Mphahlele.’’ Studies in Black L iterature 2.3 (1971): 6–8. Niven, Alistair. ‘‘Contrasts in the Autobiography of Childhood: Nirad Chaudhuri, Janet Frame and Wole Soyinka.’’ Autobiographical and Biographical W riting in the Commonwealth. Ed. Doireann McDermott. Barcelona: Editorial AUSA, 1984. Nkosi, Lewis. T asks and Masks: T hemes and Styles of African L iterature. Essex: Longman, 1981. Nnolim, Charles. ‘‘From Nostalgia to Myth: An Archetypal Interpretation of Camara Laye’s T he Dark Child.’’ Nigerian Journal of Humanities 2 (1978): 43–51. Soyinka, Wole. Ake: T he Years of Childhood. London: Rex Collings, 1981.

MATTHEW JAMES DUFFY

MYSTERY, THE GENETIC SYSTEM, AND CHILDREN’S BOOKS

The reality within which we dwell does not offer us its final explanation, is not selfexplanatory. . . . the creative conflict . . . throws man into a struggle which demands the participation of that which is most specific to him, of that by which he is most essentially himself. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

I

The following is from ‘‘The Voyage of Maildun.’’ Its original date of composition is unknown. It is has been found copied down into medieval Irish manuscripts such as L ebor na hUidre (T he Book of the Dun Cow, ca. 1100 AD) and L ebor Buide L eca´in (T he Yellow Book of L ecan). P. W. Joyce introduces this ancient tale as ‘‘an account of the adventures of Maildun and his crew, and of the wonderful things they saw during their voyage of three years and seven months, in their curragh, on the western sea’’ (p. 79). The whole voyage has a sense of mystery to it, sometimes ominous, sometimes awesome, as Maildun and his fellows travel from one otherworldly episode to another in the manner of a distinctly Celtic Odyssey. In one particular episode, deep within the narrative, the atmosphere of mystery is unmistakably concentrated, and is simultaneously present in both the simplest and the most beguiling terms. CHAPTER XXVI THE SILVER PILLAR OF THE SEA The next thing they found after this was an immense silver pillar standing in the sea. It had eight sides, each of which was the width of an oar-stroke of the curragh, so that its whole circumference was eight oar-strokes. It rose out of the sea without any land or earth about it, nothing but the boundless ocean; and they could not see its base deep down in the water, neither were they able to see the top on account of its vast height. A silver net hung from the top down to the very water, extending far out at one side of the pillar; and the meshes were so large that the curragh in full sail went through one of them. When they were passing through it, Diuran struck the mesh with the edge of his spear, and with the blow cut a large piece off it. ‘‘Do not destroy the net,’’ said Maildun, ‘‘for what we see is the work of great men.’’

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‘‘What I have done,’’ answered Diuran, ‘‘is for the honour of my God, and in order that the story of our adventures may be more readily believed; and I shall lay this silver as an offering on the altar of Armagh, if I ever reach Erin.’’ That piece of silver weighed two ounces and a half, as it was reckoned afterwards by the people of the church of Armagh. After this they heard someone speaking on the top of the pillar, in a loud, clear, glad voice; but they knew neither what he said, nor in what language he spoke. (p. 105)

Perhaps it is anticlimactic to say that Maildun and his fellows sail away, as they do at the end of their other adventures, in a state of bewildered awe. Yet this is surely the strangest episode of them all, for it is so simple in terms of its constitutive elements, and yet so powerfully surreal in its effect. It is obvious that such a passage is mysterious. It could even be said that everything about it is mysterious. But where exactly is the mystery? And how is that mystery expressed? I would venture to say that one can account for the mystery of this passage in at least one way, and that is to interpret the mystery in terms of basic existential categories (‘‘themes,’’ more properly) of human experience. Among these, I include here: time, space, the body and the physical world, the self (ego), and the ‘‘other.’’ In terms of time, the episodic character of Maildun’s narrative lends itself to mystery. The story is largely timeless, as Maildun and his crew wander the ocean and only the ‘‘peaks’’ of action are accounted for. One is given the impression of a vast expanse of time, somewhere in the legendary past, when these strange things occurred. And when these strange episodes did occur, they were so overwhelmingly strange that all that was retained within the short, recorded episode was all that could be comprehended. In a sense, ‘‘continuous’’ time does not exist in this story. Episodes exist. Mysterious episodes, accounted for incompletely, according to the understanding of their narrator. Time is reflected in these action-oriented fragments. Space, according to scientific interpretation, is likewise disrupted. The pillar’s size is accounted for, but it is accounted for in concrete terms with meaning directly related to the experience of the crew. The pillar is ‘‘eight oar-strokes’’ in circumference. Similarly, Maildun and his crew see that the net hanging down is so large that their curragh, even in full sail, could pass right through one of the meshes. But, mysteriously, space can’t otherwise be accounted for in this passage. The crew, in the middle of the endless ocean, cannot see the top of this pillar up above, nor can they see its bottom in the watery depths. Only that which has been experienced

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can be measured; and it is measured according to experience. The colossal pillar and the ocean it is found in can be measured only in the direct terms of the crew’s experience: oar-strokes. The boat traces a little circle around the pillar on the surface of the water. Above and below are unknown and unfathomable. They are beyond the illumination of experience. In this chapter, Diuran literally seizes mystery. He cuts a piece of the silver net away and claims it for the altar of Armagh. He claims the piece of silver as ‘‘proof ’’ of their adventures. The mystery is manifest, and has been grasped, though not fully comprehended. Indeed, it is weighed later and we are given an exact weight of ‘‘two ounces and a half.’’ Yet the mystery, though possessed, its real weight felt, has perhaps become even more mysterious through physical possession, for although it is close, it offers no explanation. The article is thus placed on the altar of Armagh, receiving an honored place like a holy relic. It is mystery in physical form, grasped in presence, yet obscure nonetheless. Concepts of the self and the other are, of course, intertwined in this story as in life. Not only is the crew in a constant reassessment of their own orientation to the world when confronted with the mysteries they encounter (Maildun is hesitant before the pillar, while Diuran strikes a piece off the net), but this particular episode places an enigmatic ‘‘other,’’ perhaps a divine ‘‘other’’ somewhere atop the unseen heights of the pillar. This Other, whose laugh is clear, whose intentions are uncertain, and whose language is unknown is a mystery of human detachment. The individual selves which comprise the crew, afloat in their tiny curragh, cannot even be sure of the scale of the mysteries they are dealing with, for so much here is unknown. All that can be certain is that there is something mysterious, on the very borders of comprehensibility. Children live intimately with a sense of mystery. Like Maildun and his fellows, it surrounds them on all sides. This is the natural condition of childhood. Children, new to the world, will discover mystery through experience in almost any direction they turn. Childhood is an intense period of exploration and revelation. In terms of the basic existential categories already mentioned, young children account for time in action-oriented episodes defined by personal meaning: next week is not a matter of ‘‘seven days from now.’’ Instead, it is ‘‘when I go to Grandma’s again.’’ For Maildun, the day is not remembered by a number or a day of the week, but is remembered as the day they found the Silver Pillar. Children understand space in terms

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of their own experience. For Maildun, the pillar was measured in oarstrokes. Children will use measurements bearing meaning to themselves: the kindergarten room is ‘‘twelve big steps across,’’ not a number of inches or centimeters. In terms of mystery and the physical world, who has not seen a child (or been a child) gathering seashells or pebbles or marbles (all of which may be alternately known as ‘‘jewels’’ if they are shiny enough) and then displaying them in a special place at home: on a dresser next to the bed, or on a desk? This is how Diuran’s silver is presented upon the altar of Armagh. This concrete proof develops the idea of the self: ‘‘I was at the ocean, I found this blue shell, it was in a pool near a crab, did you ever see a crab? I did, it has lots of legs, I went there with my family, I got sand in my shoe, the sand was hot and white and yellow.’’ All of these are impressions of the self in development, given to consciousness one at a time. Finally, what of the ‘‘other,’’ that mysterious voice from above which speaks in a language one doesn’t know, although there is a clear emotional content in what is being said? Surely nothing could better represent the world of the very young child. The emotional impression of the ‘‘other’’ may be clear, the rest a mystery. Mystery is essential to the experience of the child, as nothing less than a condition of childhood. This mystery involves the same basic existential themes which also hold mystery for adults. Although adults may think in more complicated abstractions about their own experience of mystery, this does not mean that mystery is any less real, or of any less importance, to the child. Any artistic endeavor which genuinely reaches such primordial mystery in a child’s consciousness will also drive deep through the accumulated abstractions of adulthood to a more original experience of self. The appeal of such art is elementary – that is, primary. Without going any further, I will now begin to clarify my use of the term ‘‘mystery’’ in conjunction with the child’s experience, as well as mystery’s specific significance for creativity. I will then consider selected classic children’s books in this light and according to the existential themes (time, body, etc.) which have already been mentioned.

II

In his life of Dr. Semmelweis, Ce´line wrote: Even more than the rest of us, children lead a surface life and a profound life. Their surface lives seem very simple, a matter of a few rules of discipline, but the deeper life of the first child you may pick out is the difficult harmony of a world that is in the process of being

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created. The child discovers in this world, day after day, all the sadness and all the beauty of the earth (p. 53).

Ce´line also appears to believe that this inner life is one which develops entirely according to its own devices, and along its own trajectory: What can teachers do, with all their wisdom, to aid in this spiritual gestation, this second birth, in which everything is a mystery? Almost nothing (pp. 53–4).

I agree with Ce´line’s first statement. The inner life of the child is the ‘‘difficult harmony of a world that is in the process of being created.’’ (Any attempt to remove the essential word ‘‘difficult’’ here would put one in direct risk of sentimentalizing childhood.) An answer to the question of whether or not another can ‘‘aid this spiritual gestation . . . in which everything is a mystery,’’ will have to wait until mystery has been thoroughly explored as an operation in relationship with creativity. In my previous work, I sought to answer the question: 1. ‘‘W hat is essential in classic children’s literature?’’ In other words, what quality do classic books for children possess that makes them classic? Why is it that a handful of books continue to appeal to generation after generation of children, through reprinting after reprinting, finding love at home and utility in classrooms, while thousands of newer books (swathed in bright colors, hypnotic graphics, and promoted by generous advertising campaigns) vanish completely at the end of each publishing season or linger, unread, on library shelves? My answer to this question is, in the tradition of phenomenology, apparent though perhaps not obvious. Those children’s books which multiply their own readership through the love of parents, teachers, librarians, and, most importantly, of course, children, have one special ingredient: Classic books for children remain faithful to the child reader’s point of view (Duffy, 2001). Although this answer may seem simple, the fact is this: if it is understood, it continues to be ignored by the greater number of authors and illustrators of children’s books. In any bookstore or library one will find shelves full of children’s books available which minimally consider their child reader’s point of view, and are, thus conceptually impoverished. (These books alienate their audience. One is justified in asking: what, then, is their purpose?) After this first analysis of classic books for children, and determining that they are classics because they are faithful to the child reader’s point of view, the question naturally follows:

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2. How does one remain faithful to the point of view of the child reader? The answer, which I wish to develop here, is that one must make a genuine appeal to the child reader through the existential structures of childhood (time, body, self, other), structures which are ever-expanding and reorganizing in the inevitable flux of experience and development. One must intimately understand and be able to live in a reflective attunement with the genetic phenomenology of a child’s world, developed through the child’s creative processes. Essential to this task is the child’s sense of mystery. It is a sense of mystery, a natural condition of childhood, which leads one to explore the world and to engage the world through creative activity. Mystery is a portal to creativity. Mystery must not be misunderstood as astonishment or mere uncertainty. Astonishment and uncertainty are passive reactions. Mystery is closely tied to the active processes of consciousness, specifically to creative processes. Leo Lionni, a gifted picture-book author-illustrator, wrote: When in an artist’s vision we detect ‘‘a childlike sense of wonder,’’ we too find ourselves confronted with the feelings of our initial discoveries made when the world, instead of surrounding us, simply stood before us, nameless still and without any heavy pretensions and impositions of meaning. Those feelings lie deep but firm in our memory, but we often deny them access to our consciousness, like much else that relates to our childhood, as an unnecessary and slightly embarrassing heritage. (p. 728)

These meanings and pretensions have to be created. It is after their creative origins that they lapse into passivity as they are comfortably assumed as fully given to consciousness. An individual moves beyond them to other creative possibilities, or, as is the common fate of adult life, one lives almost exclusively within a circumscribed area of routine experience and generalized assumption, and ventures out only rarely (or is forced out by events apparently foreign to previous experience, as in the sudden presentation of the surreal or a non sequitur. Psychopathology may provide more dramatic examples). Regarding the narrowing path of adulthood, Paul Klee wrote: Childhood was a dream, some day all would be accomplished. The period of learning, a time for searching into everything, into the smallest, into the most hidden, into the good and the bad. Then a light is lit somewhere, and a single direction is followed . . . (p. 50).

Klee’s direction, however, was to dedicate himself to his artistic creativity. How easily a different light may be lit, one of a million other lights, all

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alike in that they do not place a priority on artistic creativity. These are the lights of routine and generalization. These lights are yet unlit in childhood. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka has described the importance of this issue with the insight: ‘‘One of the great teachings of phenomenology is that the world in which we passively live is a hardened, petrified world’’ (Tymieniecka, 1988, p. 95). The world is largely understood through passivity in adult consciousness. Through the spontaneity of creative activity, however, the world always stands before one in a state of potential renewal. Consciousness, naturally englobed in the world it made arise by engulfing in a perpetual resumption that which renders the world inert and hardened, suddenly understands in the creative act that it is the engineer of the world. (p. 98–9)

As has already been mentioned, this creativity in perpetual resumption is the everyday frame of reference for the child. I will now consider the role of the active ego as the basis for all creativity, and the role of mystery as a portal to creativity. I will refer to the following ideas in conjunction: a. Ego and Perception (Husserl’s concepts of Active and Passive Synthesis) b. Ego and the Structure of Logical Operations (Piaget’s concept of Equilibration) c. The Creative Ego (Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of the Creative Act) Although these thinkers approach their problems from different points of view, there is a shared moment in their thinking which, I believe, it is important to appreciate. For the creator of books for children, these ideas provide an understanding of the nature of human consciousness and its worldly context from its very origins. They also provide a theoretical background for approaching the consciousness of a child which is in the throes of such dramatic reformation and extension from day to day that, otherwise, the child may remain a closed and erratic enigma to the adult. By way of introduction, Tymieniecka provides a description of development which will serve, here, as the foundational conception of the situation of the ego: The intellective constructivism of life does not follow haphazard fragmentary directions; on the contrary, it is itself organized around this pivotal complex, the ego. Ignoring all the disputable points concerning the constitution of this pivotal center, we see it first manifested in its concurrent drawing on all the functions that it centralizes – even as it distributes itself

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in them. All functions are ‘‘empowered’’ by the ego in their performance; all enter into collaborative intercourse referring to the ego’s pivotal role; all represent this pivotal complex in their enactment as if they were governed from this central source of command. In this relation the ego appears as a vibrant, constant, and ever nearer undefinable moment that is translucent in its undetermined nature as an absolute unifying power. However, it draws its power from the synergies and forces of the performing functions themselves. Its unifying role is not to gather the circuits of operations unto itself. On the contrary, it in a centripetal fashion sprays them ‘‘all around’’ like rays. Indeed, we first stretch, expand, reach out, tend out of ourselves with our acts, and thereby we constitute our universe ‘‘all around’’ the ego that becomes its center. We live in a universe in the shape of an infinitely expanding globe. But the ego also lives in all of its acts; thus, they centrifugally ‘‘return’’ to its core complex. (2000c, p. 385)

The ego is the center, and lives through its acts. Its acts bring the ego to a fuller understanding of the world. In fact, it is the act of the ego which forms the objects we act upon. For Husserl, perception in consciousness must first be active: . . . a consciousness of the object is actually and genuinely carried out only first in egoic acts; an object – an object as object – is only first there for the active ego. All of the concepts that refer back to the concept of the object: ‘identical sense,’ ‘being’ and ‘modalities of being,’ ‘true being’ and ‘verification’ – all of these get their genuine character only first within the framework of activity. (p. 275) All genuine activity is carried out in the scope of attentiveness. (p. 276)

Here, one is led to ask: ‘‘What would cause one to engage in activity with a particular object?’’ Of all the objects given to consciousness through perception, how does one take priority for active engagement? Husserl cites ‘‘affection.’’ The ego is drawn to an object (or a set of objects through thematization): By affection we understand the allure given to consciousness, the particular pull that an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego; it is a pull . . . striving toward self-giving intuition, disclosing more and more of the self of the object, thus, striving toward an acquisition of knowledge, toward a more precise view of the object. (p. 196)

Here we are led to the importance of mystery. For, what if the ‘‘allure given to consciousness’’ is given precisely because of the incomprehensibility of the object? Husserl writes of incomplete perceptions: Nebulous givenness, the unclarity of intuitive givenness. . . . Likewise in perception, which is external perception in obscurity, in the obscurity of twilight . . . my view is befuddled, and yet I still make things out. (p. 474)

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If such incompleteness provides the affective interest of the ego, one has mystery. For all that is incomplete in a child’s newly forming world, one can see the absolutely fundamental role that mystery plays in a child’s life. Mystery is part of the active procession toward creative realization. Now that activity and passivity have been introduced, how is the process of ‘‘allure’’ regulated, whether the allure is caused by a sense of mystery or not? Although activity and passivity have been made plain, ‘‘allure’’ remains vague. Why should the mystery be mysterious and not simply incomplete? Why would mystery prompt the ego to action? Piaget’s studies of the growth of logical operations hold an answer to this question through the concept of the equilibration of cognitive structures. Piaget wrote: ‘‘Development is the process of always adding to temporary and limited states of equilibria’’ (1972, p. 31). Roughly, when an object or action presented to consciousness cannot be readily understood by existing cognitive structures (through assimilation and accommodation, in Piagetian terminology), a state of disequilibrium is the result. In such a case, it is the biological imperative of the organism to seek a state of equilibrium, or to turn away from the problem. The structure remains in a state of disequilibrium and can be returned to later. In other words, a child may seek clarification of a given mystery or ignore the problem indefinitely, leaving the related cognitive structures in a state of disequilibrium until the problem is later clarified further through some other experience. Perhaps through further experience or creative experimentation, something will ‘‘click,’’ understanding will be achieved, and equilibration attained. ‘‘The term ‘equilibration’ . . . refers above all to a process’’ (p. 30). That is, as a process, equilibration is active: . . . equilibration is the search for a better and better equilibrium in the sense of an extended field, in the sense of an increase in the number of possible compositions, and in the sense of a growth of coherence. (p. 18) Attained equilibrium is limited and restrained, and there is a tendency to go beyond it to a better equilibrium. (p. 18)

Piaget emphasizes the importance of equilibration for the foundation it provides for consciousness to deal with future states of disequilibrium. T his foundation is the stable core of the ego. All that one believes one knows is situated here, in a linked system, internally revised and externally expanded through the continual process of equilibration-disequilibrationequilibration.

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Little by little there has to be a constant equilibrium established between the parts of the subject’s knowledge and the totality of his knowledge at any given moment. There is a constant differentiation of the totality of knowledge into the parts and an integration of the parts back into the whole. . . . All operational subject structures, on the one hand, and all causal structures in the domain of physical experience, on the other hand, suppose a combination of production and conservation. . . . These two are absolutely inseparable. Without any transformation we have only static identity. The world becomes rigid and unchanging in the sense that Parmenides conceived it. Without any conservation we have only constant transformation. There is total change; the world is always new and it becomes unintelligible. It becomes like the world of Heraclitus with its river in which one was never able to bathe twice. In reality, there are always both conservation and production (pp. 16–8).

In creative activity, one is building upon what one believes one ‘‘knows’’ about the world. Disequilibration, in its turn, always provides an opportunity for creativity. This creative interactivity between the ego and the world moves human consciousness beyond the restrictive stimulusresponse confines of classical behaviorism. Tymieniecka has written: M. Piaget has shown us at length how one constructs the framework in which new sensations come together to be placed as the work proceeds . . . these reference points are neither entirely subjective – submitted to the rules of consciousness which must transform them to appropriate them to itself, as lived experience – nor are they entirely objective – conforming to a world already constituted to exterior consciousness. They are at the same time one and the other. (1988, p. 75)

In sum, the child’s conception of the world is at once received from the world and given to the world. ‘‘Life does not throw itself onto a readymade territory; its territory is existentially dependent on the emergence of life’’ (2000b, p. 9). Piaget’s work accounts, however, only for cognitive structures, and not the complete range of affective experience (as he readily – and regularly – admitted). As a result, a properly ‘‘existential’’ account of the individual remains incomplete. Tymieniecka writes: ‘‘. . . to be human means to be creative’’ (1988, p. 26). Piaget would agree. But what is it like to be creative, and why is it rewarding for a human being to be creative? What is the meaning of the affective allure to mystery, in particular? Piaget did not seek to account for this aspect of experience, for he saw it as beyond the capabilities of his methodology and beyond the boundaries of his research question. Thus, he could not properly account for affectivity, although he insisted on its influence being as important to human development as the cognitive structures that he mapped. In Piaget’s monograph: Intelligence and AVectivity: T heir Relationship During Child Development, he explains this position. It is essential to understand that Piaget did not

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ignore the importance of affectivity; he deferred an opinion because he felt he could not do justice to the problem. It is to Tymieniecka’s credit that she has been one of the very few phenomenologists to see beyond this limitation and appreciate Piaget’s work in its own right. She did this as early as 1962 (in Phenomenology and Science in Contemporary European T hought), before Piaget’s concept of equilibration had been wholly articulated in his own works. It is absolutely essential for the author or illustrator of children’s books to understand what creativity is like affectively, beyond logic, as the child is naturally placed into creative situations by necessity (that is, through a combination of passion and logical demand). How the child’s creativity ‘‘feels’’ is at the heart of how a child will approach mystery. For an author or illustrator, this means: ‘‘How a Child Will Approach and Understand Mystery in a Children’s Book.’’ Husserl has shown us the importance of the active ego in perception. Piaget has shown that cognitive structures build upon each other through a process of equilibration. How is the problem of creativity handled? And what is the role of the affect in all of this? For without it, there is only a randomly ‘‘creative’’ machine, with no reason for the selection of one ‘‘allure to consciousness’’ over another. Tymieniecka’s orientation to the problem of affectivity is summed up in the following passage (and here is where Tymieniecka importantly moves beyond the affective limit Piaget set for himself ): ‘‘. . . the creative conflict . . . throws man into a struggle which demands the participation of that which is most specific to him, of that by which he is most essentially himself ’’ (1988, p. 76). Tymieniecka’s work gives proper emphasis to the affect. The affect is the ego’s knowledge of self beyond logical facts. It is the natural predisposition toward a clarification of the self through the exploration and revelation of life. Tymieniecka’s description of man in a creative ‘‘struggle’’ is reminiscent of Ce´line’s comment regarding the ‘‘difficult harmony’’ of the child’s world in mid-creation. Tymieniecka describes how affectivity, in conjunction with cognition, carries the ego into creativity and, thus, novel thought: ‘‘. . . the creative process maintains a twofold relationship with the constitutive one: it situates itself between two diVerent temporal phases of the constituted world by stemming from it and then breaking oV from it, and then, breaking back into it in order to transform it.’’ (p. 349)

For Tymieniecka, as for Piaget, the creative act seeks to transform. For Piaget, transformation is through equilibration. Tymieniecka describes

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the creative mechanism behind equilibration, that is beyond pure logical structure. The layman perceives the spectacle of nature, ‘‘re-cognizing’’ it as an instance of a familiar type of object. In his constitutive process it has been construed with reference to this structural type as its architectonic principle, intentionally orienting its operations . . . the ‘‘searching eye’’ of an artist . . . proceeds by searching through more and more penetrating dissociations and comparisons, and tentative variations of distinct elements at all possible structural levels, looking for ever new prospective proportions, symmetries and dissymmetries, analogies between colors, intensities, densities, linear shapes, surfaces, etc. From this trial and error procedure there emerges a bare outline of a provisory pattern, a THEME . . . toward which the architectonic operations will be directed. (p. 127)

The ‘‘searching eye’’ is the eye of the child. It is an eye that seeks to collect impressions and to compare them. The searching eye of the child is always investigating, assessing, comparing, imagining reversals, noting sequence; the kind of logical operation used and the kind of sense involved (kinesthetic, visual, etc.) will change in type, preference, and aptitude as the child matures (physically, cognitively, and emotionally). As a result of this active searching, the child begins developing themes although she is not aware of them as such. In a child’s world, these themes are directly related to the existential themes in children’s books, for as Lionni has written: A good children’s book describes those distant moments of our lives when, as yet uncluttered by the impositions and demands of the adult world, every personal experience, no matter how specific, is bound to be truly universal. (p. 728–9)

III

Now that we have seen the importance of creativity within the genetic system and, in turn, seen that mystery is a portal to creativity, it is appropriate to observe mystery functioning as a portal to creativity within classic books for children. Mystery, in classic children’s books, is not necessarily found in a form as dramatic as a towering silver pillar in an endless ocean, as it is found in the ‘‘Voyage of Maildun.’’ This is not at all to say that it should not be found like this in stories for children. Surely, myths and legends have always attracted child listeners. Yet, at an age when all large distances are incomprehensible, what difference does it make if the pillar is 500 feet high or 5 million? Besides, at the age of five one is likely to believe that 500 is the higher number. And if one doesn’t have the power of abstraction

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to conceive that it just might be God on top of that pillar and that He may have expressed notice of you, the voice may just be a voice like any other. Here, the mystery may be too remote for the child for it to be appreciated as mystery. For the young child, such mysteries can quickly become too big and leave the child lost in unknown concepts. They are beyond the child’s point of view. In what has been established here so far, the author of children’s books must remain faithful to the child reader’s point of view. What is the proper scale of mystery for the child? If a child is to comprehend the object and act upon it, it must be within the sphere of his experience. If the object is to possess the quality of mystery, it must be on the very edge of his experience. W hat is on the edge of the sphere of experience for the child? T he everyday. As we have seen already, the everyday is petrified for most adults – for the child it is alive with mystery, alive through the child’s acts which reach out into the world to learn from it, to clarify it, and to shape it. The creative genius of the author or illustrator of books for children must grasp the mysteries of the everyday world, rescue them from petrification, and depict them in an aesthetic arrangement which enhances their mystery. The child must be presented with the world he knows, in a way which will project allure on the edge of consciousness. T he Snowy Day, written and illustrated by Ezra Jack Keats, is one of the finest picture books ever written for young children. In twenty-eight pages Keats presents mystery on a scale which is ideal for a three- to five-year-old. This mystery, in the hands of an expert artist, is not diminished by being described from a child’s point of view. The basic existential themes of time, body, physical world, self, and other are all revealed in their own mystery throughout the book. This story portrays all the mystery of the ‘‘Voyage of Maildun’’ through the everyday afternoon of a child. On the opening pages of the book, the main character, Peter, awakes to a world of snow outside his bedroom window. In his pajamas, Peter is sitting up in bed, in a warmly colored red-wallpapered room. Even the blankets in the collage illustration appear to be made of textured fabric, the texture of which has been enlarged and is obvious for the child reader. Peter’s hand is half-hidden under the blankets. Outside the bedroom window, the sky is a cold bluish-gray, and snowy rooftops are all that are visible. The result of this composition is that these pages plainly contrast the warm inside of home with the cold outer mystery of the snowy world. The inside of the room – home – is the center of the child’s

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knowledge. Out there – snow – is mystery. The inside of the room represents passivity – Peter is in a state of passive astonishment. But active mystery beckons him outside. On pages three and four, Peter has moved into mystery. These pages show Peter literally moving in the territory of mystery as he steps beyond the fence in front of his house – the last visible fragment of his home – into the high white piles. Peter is framed by this gate; it is his portal to mystery. He is leaving behind his passive area, his home. And into activity he goes, with immediacy. He tries out the mystery with his feet. ‘‘Crunch, crunch, crunch,’’ the text reads, as Peter experiments walking with his feet pointing out, and then pointing in. Peter is investigating this snowy world, learning. He stops at the far right side of the pages and looks back at the path he has left behind. Keats’s care as an illustrator is obvious on this page. He was careful to leave the tracks in a clearly arranged sequence, so that a child reader can follow the footsteps as they occur ‘‘normally,’’ and then pointing out, and then pointing in, as the text describes. Peter stops and looks at his footsteps in a way that a child might stop and look at them. Peter stands still, feet fixed forward, and he turns the upper half of his body, keeping his balance, careful not to disturb the snow any further until he’s gotten a good look back at how he ‘‘really’’ left it. This is how a four-year-old conducts an experiment. On the next pair of pages, the book takes an abstract leap, adding a new sort of mystery to the very act of reading. Peter is nowhere on the page. However, from the continuity thus far, and from the hints in the illustration, one can guess where Peter went. On these pages, Peter has dragged his feet to make long track-lines across the page. He pulls a stick along that he finds, making a third track. These tracks disappear off the right side of the page, in the same direction that Peter has been traveling for the course of the book. The fact that Peter is not on this page could go completely unnoticed by an adult, who comes to the logical conclusion almost instantly. Yet the child will see that Peter is ‘‘gone.’’ What is left of him is his mark: his dragged footsteps and his dragged stick-line. Peter has inscribed himself into the landscape. He has transformed it. On pages nine and ten, Peter decides that his stick is ‘‘a stick that was just right for smacking a snow-covered tree.’’ What happens when one smacks the snow-covered tree? Peter finds out. Keats conscientiously makes the snow ‘‘jump up’’ when the stick hits, and the small piles retain their shapes just long enough for the reader to see how the pieces interlock with the branches. They resemble separated puzzle pieces. Between the

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patterns in the tracks, and the shapes of the snow, there is a logic at work in this snowy world! Here, I would like to note two structures that have been subtly developing over the course of the narrative: time and space. Time, as in the adventure of Maildun, is being related in isolated segments. Something very distinct is happening on each pair of pages, although they are connected by the left-to-right progress of Peter’s walk. First Peter tries out his footsteps, then the stick, and then the stick against the tree. There is a fluidity of action here that is native to childhood. Peter is literally having ideas one after the other and acting upon them, surrounded on all sides by this mystery of the snow. He walks, grabs a stick as he passes it, and whacks the first tree he sees. There is a freedom in this activity that is lost as the world becomes passive and petrified in later life. Space is related in the same episodic fashion as time. In these illustrations, there is nothing that is not essential to the action at hand. Only active elements are featured (Peter, incidentally, wearing the most active color of all: red). These active elements stand out on each page against a background which is the theme of the book, and which has provided all of the action through its presence: the mystery of the white snow. For Peter, and for the child reader, nothing else exists but this immediate concern. After the snow drops onto Peter’s head from the tree episode, his exploration detours. In the action of the moment, Peter has exhausted the potential of his feet and his stick. He heads off into the snowy world to find something new to do, continuing his creative adventure. Here, the book takes additional subtle, abstract turns. First, there is no text on this page. Second, Peter’s detour leads him vertically off the page; instead of traveling left-to-right, Peter totters up and away toward a distant vanishing point. Finally, there is no object of action depicted; simply Peter and the footsteps which account for his passing. The sense that is given here is that Peter has gone deeper into the mystery, covering an uncertain amount of time and space, silently. That is, reflectively, without comment – perhaps the child reader will vocalize the ‘‘crunch, crunch, crunch’’ of Peter’s footsteps, spontaneously creating a novel text. Keats has certainly left room for this possibility. Appropriately, Peter encounters the ‘‘big boys’’ on unlucky page number 13. While Peter was happily lost in the snowy mystery, in a silent reverie, perhaps, on the previous page, that involvement with the self comes to a sudden, smashing halt on these pages. Caught in the middle of a snowball fight, Peter has been knocked down and looks at the mocking white splat in the middle of his red snowsuit. The mood is

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reflected in the illustration by a suddenly dark-blue sky with uneasylooking green swirls. For Peter, the entire environment has shifted, as it does for any child who, at such a young age, is wholly given over to emotion. Peter has overstepped his bounds, gone too far into the mystery. In too deep, he is surrounded by ‘‘others’’ whose behavior is just beyond his understanding and control. Keats gives his character the credit of this insight: ‘‘. . . He knew he wasn’t old enough – not yet.’’ How would a child react to this threatening situation? ‘‘Run home!’’ But instead of describing Peter’s retreat to a safer area closer to home – to a shallower depth of the mystery – and without embarrassing his reader by showing the tears of frustration that Peter may have cried, Keats opts to show how Peter creatively resolved his situation. Peter appears to have returned closer to home, where the sky returns to its light blue color, and he builds a more suitable companion for himself – a ‘‘smiling snowman’’ to watch him play. Here is an ‘‘other’’ who can share in Peter’s exploration, unlike the big boys. Again, on these pages, Peter leaves his creative impression: he makes the snowman and two snow angels. It is important to note that, here, Peter is leaving his mark. W hen he ran into the big boys, they left their mark upon him. His exploration into mystery was interfered with; he was no longer himself. He was measured by the standard of the ‘‘other.’’ Here, ‘‘. . . he made a smiling snowman, and he made angels.’’ These are Peter’s alone. On pages 17 and 18, Peter pretends to be a mountain climber on a ‘‘great big tall heaping mountain of snow.’’ An accurate childhood measurement – does it matter how many inches or centimeters? The introduction of symbolic play here adds a complicated dimension to the mystery of the snow. The mystery has now become a background for another mystery; it is the background for Peter to pretend he is grown up, to explore what it is like to be a mountain climber. As he has explored the snow in the familiar environment around his house, the snow has become familiar, too. It is being assimilated into his experience and becoming the springboard for further creative action. The mystery is becoming a foundation for symbolic fantasy; Peter is passing into another, more complex, layer of mystery. Before going inside his home on page 19, Peter carefully packs himself a souvenir snowball. He puts the snowball in his pocket ‘‘for tomorrow’’; clearly, a mistake in judgment which is faithful to the point of view of the four-year-old reader. On page 20, Peter tells his mother ‘‘all about his adventures while she took off his wet socks.’’ Peter is back in his completely familiar surround-

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ings, and the warm colors of home match his mood. Indeed, the one dark color (the blue of his wet socks) is being pulled off and left behind on the bright orange carpet. Peter’s mother – the ‘‘other’’ in this scene, is a receptive audience, much like the snowman was. She will share in his experience, and thus allow him to relive it. The tub illustration on pages 21 and 22 show Peter reflecting upon the mystery and his explorations. The text says: ‘‘. . . he thought and thought and thought about them.’’ Peter is immersed in the warmest color of the house, a bright pink tub, with his familiar tub toys. Peter stares across the room as dream-like bubbles rise up from the water. Here is the self in reflection upon mystery. It is rare that an author of children’s books honors his child reader with such quiet reflection. This is the complete opposite of the vapid stimulus which comprises most children’s television shows: explosions, sudden shifts in perspective, blinking animations, etc. Here we have a boy quietly daydreaming about his day in a warm tub. Here is a child in contemplation with his soul. On page 23, back in his pajamas, Peter finds a wet spot in his coat pocket instead of his snowball. What happened to it? Snow is still very mysterious. Keats is careful to not use the word ‘‘melt’’ prematurely here. He describes this event as a child would, as Peter would: ‘‘His pocket was empty. The snowball wasn’t there. He felt very sad.’’ And, again, Peter is bewildered by the mystery of the day, and reflects upon it in a darkening gloom. Peter has gone into deep reflection twice; Keats was clearly not writing down to a child’s point of view in this book. He repeatedly met it on its own terms. ‘‘Melting’’ is the subject of his dream on page 25. What if all the snow melted away? This is still an unsolved mystery, and one which Peter can’t creatively master. He can only wait in his bed with a sense of loss. But on page 26, Peter wakes to find more snow falling; snow in its own state of activity. Peter knows something about snow from his adventures with it. He has voyaged out into the mystery alone. And now he is the voice of experience: he calls to his friend across the hall, and on pages 27 and 28 ‘‘They went out together into the deep, deep snow.’’ The new snow will cover all the old tracks, and invite new play and discovery. In this final scene, Peter has brought a new ‘‘other’’ to the mystery of the snow. All that Peter discovers in the new snow will add to his knowledge of himself, and all that he shows his friend about the snow will be an affirmation of himself.

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Through mystery as a portal to creativity, access has been gained to the childhood beginnings of ‘‘that by which he is most essentially himself.’’ I have only treated one book in detail here, but other classics for children perform the same task, focusing on different existential themes for different age groups. For example, there is the remarkable picture book Goodnight Moon (by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd) which tackles the difficult problem of time for children as young as two. This abstract concept is rendered totally concretely for the two-year-old’s point of view. The young bunny character names the objects in his room from his bed while the room darkens and their identities are not wholly certain. Time is implied in a variety of insightful ways in the background of the illustrations, from the night-time behavior of pets to the silent turning of clockhands, details which are beyond the comprehension of the youngest readers, but which are there, nonetheless, for the child to grow into. A pile of knitting is left behind on a chair by the mother bunny who leaves the room after the young bunny’s bedtime. The knitting on the chair implies a future time in which the mother will be back to resume knitting again. By accounting for all of the objects in the room, the young bunny is not so alone in the dark room at bedtime. The mystery of night-time is explored through naming and watching, the behavior of a young child. The young child reader is likely to point to the pictures and name the objects along with the young bunny. This brings clarity to the bedroom of a two-year-old. The bedroom which is a passive background for fiveyear-old Peter is active in the two-year-old consciousness of Goodnight Moon. Arnold Lobel’s four-book series about Frog and Toad explores the idea of the ‘‘other’’ for children around seven years of age. This is the age, for Piaget, in which the child ‘‘de-centers,’’ and begins to comprehend the point of view of the ‘‘other,’’ instead of approaching all thinking from an egocentric point of view. Lobel’s short stories relate all of the subtleties of friendship which would go unnoticed in lesser hands. Frog and Toad learn to keep one another company, and there is even a story ‘‘Alone’’ in which Toad learns that Frog sometimes needs to be alone – and this does not mean that Frog doesn’t want Toad to be his friend anymore. Again, in this story, there is a character who is portrayed as reflecting upon mystery. He is reflecting upon friendship. In the Frog and Toad books, the self and the other are intertwined, and the mystery of friendship is clarified. Finally, I will briefly mention T he House W ith A Clock In Its Walls, by John Bellairs, a novel-length book for readers around age ten. This

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book, like many others that Bellairs wrote, is a long exploration into the self told through a unique type of occult fantasy. One passage will suffice in order to give a taste of what Bellairs has accomplished in these books in the service of exploring the mystery of the self. Bellairs opens T he House W ith A Clock In Its Walls with a scene in which Lewis Barnavelt, the main character, is alone on a bus. The bus is traveling through the dark night, and Lewis, newly orphaned, is going to live with his uncle, who he has never met, in a place where he has never been. Lewis stares at the reflection of his face in the dark bus window, and asks himself where he is going. In desperation, he begins reciting, in Latin, some of his altar-boy prayers, but shortly gives up on their formality and humbly asks God in plain English: ‘‘. . . help me to live a happy life.’’ John Bellairs respected the dignity of his child readers. Hurtling through mystery, toward mystery, his character begins to understand the deep origins of his own ego – the self. After briefly considering the works of some of the few exceptional authors and illustrators of children’s books, and keeping in mind the ever-growing pile of low-quality, conceptually poor books, which entirely lack the mystery which is natural to a child’s point of view, it is easy to agree with Gaston Bachelard’s assessment: ‘‘Grown-ups write children’s stories too easily’’ (p. 118). Anita Silvey, respected children’s book publisher and critic, wrote: ‘‘The remarkable thing about classic books is that they give readers that sense of ‘this is my book; it was written for me’ – child after child, generation after generation’’ (p. 517). Silvey is right. And none of the books for children which are conceptually impoverished will ever carry the feeling of ‘‘this was written for me’’ with them. Silvey’s comment reminds me of Tymieniecka’s statement that: . . . the creative conflict . . . throws man into a struggle which demands the participation of that which is most specific to him, of that by which he is most essentially himself. (1988, p. 76)

There is nothing in conceptually impoverished books for children which will let them be themselves, creatively, through mystery. An author and illustrator must build a world, rich with mystery, on the proper scale for children. This means a shift in perspective to a child’s point of view and, thus, a child’s sense of mystery. Rudolf Rocker wrote: In architecture, the purposive is most intimately blended with the esthetic. It was not the whim of the artist that built a pyramid, a Grecian temple, a Gothic cathedral; it was a generally experienced faith, a common idea, that made those works arise under the hand

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of the artist. . . . The Christian cathedral had to be able to take in an entire community; this purpose underlay its whole structural type, and in spite of all the alterations of external form remains always the same. (pp. 480–1)

A children’s book must welcome the entire community of children. They are free to come and go as they please, according to their own taste; but the door to the cathedral must not be too heavy, and a doorknob must be placed low enough to invite the turn of a child’s hand. Ce´line was asked what a person could do to aid the child’s spiritual gestation, and answered, ‘‘Almost nothing.’’ This is a correct answer for the author of children’s books if, from the beginning, he does not take his reader’s point of view into account. But let us consider Lionni’s memories before making a final judgment: When I was a child, I was a passionate collector of small animals, mostly reptiles. I kept them within the glass walls of terrariums where in a mixture of order and randomness I arranged sand and stones, mosses and ferns, to simulate a natural habitat. With an astonishing sense of presence I remember their shapes, colors, and smells, and of course the surprising coolness to the touch of the slippery bodies of frogs and salamanders, the quick rhythm of their tiny pulsating hearts. Actually, these small landscapes . . . were . . . not unlike Japanese gardens, they were alternative worlds for my contemplation, and of my own creation. They were safe, predictable, stable substitutes for an ever-moving reality. . . . Until recently, in a moment of critical insight, I suddenly recognized them, after half a century, in the fables I had written and illustrated. I realized then that the protagonists of my stories were the same little silent actors who on the glass-walled stages of my childhood had enacted the complex fiction of chance and destiny, nature and artifice, life and death. (p. 730)

Children’s books can provide organized access to the existential themes of life through mystery. Instead of portraying a frameless, chaotic ground, a book for children can aesthetically order the child’s familiar experience through the child’s own point of view, and lead the child beyond familiarity, through the grand portal of mystery, and into the creative realization of the world. Duquesne University BIBLIOGRAPHY Bachelard, Gaston. T he Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, L anguage, and the Cosmos. Daniel Russell (trans.). Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Bellairs, John. T he House W ith a Clock in Its Walls. Edward Gorey (illus.). New York: Dial Press, 1973.

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Brown, Margaret Wise. Goodnight Moon. Clement Hurd (illus.). New York: Harper & Row, 1947. Ce´line, Louis-Ferdinand. Mea Culpa & T he L ife and Work of Semmelweis. Robert Allerton Parker (trans.). New York: Howard Fertig, 1979. Duffy, Matthew James. ‘‘Contributions to a Theoretical Reference for Children’s Books: Emergent Phase.’’ Paper presented at the 31st Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, Berkeley, 2001. See also T he Genetic Epistemologist 29 (2), 2001. Husserl, Edmund. Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis: L ectures on T ranscendental L ogic. Anthony J. Steinbock (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Joyce, P. W. Old Celtic Romances: T ales from Irish Mythology. New York: Devin-Adair Company, 1962. Keats, Ezra Jack. T he Snowy Day. New York: Viking Press, 1962. Klee, Paul. T he Diaries of Paul Klee (1898–1918). Felix Klee (ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Lionni, Leo. ‘‘Before Images.’’ Horn Book Magazine, November/December (1984): 727–34. Lobel, Arnold. Frog and T oad Are Friends. New York: Harper, 1970. ——. Frog and T oad T ogether. New York: Harper, 1971/1972. ——. Frog and T oad All Year. New York: Harper, 1976. ——. Days W ith Frog and T oad. New York: Harper, 1979. Piaget, Jean. ‘‘Problems of Equilibration’’ in Piaget and Inhelder: On Equilibration. Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society, Philadelphia, 1971. C. F. Nodine, J. M. Gallagher, R. H. Humphreys (eds.). Philadelphia: Jean Piaget Society, 1972. ——. Intelligence and AVectivity: T heir Relationship During Child Development. T. A. Brown and C. E. Kaegi (trans. and eds.). Mark Rosenzweig (consult. ed.). Annual Reviews Monograph. Palo Alto: Annual Reviews Inc., 1981. Rocker, Rudolf. Nationalism and Culture. Ray E. Chase (trans.). St. Paul, Minnesota: Michael E. Coughlin, 1978. Silvey, Anita. ‘‘What Makes a Classic.’’ Horn Book Magazine, September/October (1993). Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa. Phenomenology and Science in Contemporary European T hought. New York: Farrar, Straus and Gudahy, 1962. ——. L ogos and L ife, Book 1: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. Analecta Husserliana, Volume XXIV. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988. ——. ‘‘Aesthetic Enchantment.’’ In Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXV. M. Kronegger and A.-T. Tymieniecka (eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000a (source of first introductory quotation, p. 3). _____. ‘‘Origins of Life and the New Critique of Reason: The Primogenital Generative Matrix.’’ In Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXVI. A.-T. Tymieniecka. (ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000b. ——. L ogos and L ife, Book 4: Impetus and Equipoise in the L ife-Strategies of Reason. Analecta Husserliana, Volume LXX. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000c.

VICTOR GERALD RIVAS

A REFLECTION ON THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY AND ON THE CURRENT MEANING OF THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE

What Enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, You whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. Virginia Woolf, T he Waves.

I

Sometime ago, one of those people that would never be a real friend, told me that he intended to publish his autobiography and asked me to check a rough copy of it. I must confess that I was flabbergasted when I listened to him, for I had known his life through our conversations and I knew that there was nothing interesting to write about it, which was what I tried to tell him without offending his literary ambitions; although, since I never received the mentioned rough copy during the rest of our relationship, which was rather brief, I guess that my acquaintance understood what I meant and he kept his opera magna for a less execrable reviser. What I intend to show with this anodyne anecdote is the double objective that I will clarify in the following lines: first, how the link is established between personal memory and writing in order to create an autobiographical text; second, what these texts mean to us, who live in a culture dominated by the media, which has reduced the distance between the vital experience and the act of writing to a snapshot. Nowadays, it is much easier to take a photograph from time to time in order to know who one has been all his life, than to put pen to paper and narrate it. Even more, what could be told about oneself by someone living in a society where the principle is anonymity, where character, which is a metaphysical and moral concept, is defined only by an image, that is, as a successful way to make an impression upon the others? I know that what I just said could seem absurd compared with the immense production of memoirs that the publishing market, particularly the American one, crams into the shelves of bookshops and the bestsellers lists every year. However, as I intend to show, the autobiography 215 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 215–235. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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does not have anything to do with memoirs, for, contrariwise, it is not based on a series of random linked memories but on the identification of personal life with an ideal, without which the narration of the ‘own’ existence would be meaningless. As a matter of fact, memoirs discover their absolute nullity in the plural form that defines them: they are simple snapshots of an individual who appears in some places, most of them insignificant, even when the individual is a celebrity; in this last case, the person will intend to bring to light the ‘‘secret aspect’’ of his participation in some happening (of course, the ‘‘secret’’ shall be as vulgar as possible). Therefore, memoirs are suitable for providing publicity to those who are beyond the immediate present but who were popular in a particular time and bet on the scandal to make the headlines again. The horizon of the autobiography is very different from such superficiality, and this reveals its originality with regard to both memoirs and biography, a literary genre that apparently is more similar to the one we study, but that is basically diverse from it because it does not need to figure out any ideal – it is limited in its ability to show the inwardness of an individual existence. It is not only irrelevant if the person concerning the biography was really great or not, it is even more desirable that he or she had been mediocre in order to give the writer the possibility to make the narration more powerful, as we can see in the case of Marie Antoinette, the splendid biography by Stefan Zweig on a queen that without the talent of stateswoman faced one of the most important historical events. At the end of the book, Zweig says: The supreme law of any creative study of a soul is not to glorify but to humanize; that is what we have intended to do here, by taking our subject as an average character, that owes her irradiation beyond her time only to an incomparable destiny, and whose innermost greatness only springs from her boundless misfortune.1

There is no doubt on the matter: Zweig does not intend to praise the personality of the last queen of France when he narrates her life, but to show that we can find in an individual without boldness the willpower that characterizes great human beings. But it is not the person who makes such willpower explicit, he who could have thought that his life was miserable or tedious – it is the future author that literally and literarily transforms that specific person into a character. According to this, we see that in memoirs a life’s narration is replaced by more or less sensationalist news, and that in biography the subject is worth knowing only by the way the author describes how an individual’s

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existence was created. In both cases, personal memory is ignored, for either it is used for underlining a few events without integrating them into a character, or it disappears completely in the writer’s imagination, who solely creates the identity of the hero of his work. On the contrary, autobiography springs from a memory that orders the existence in accordance to an ideal that recognizes it as its principle, which means that the memory is vivified by the ideal: life is meaningful because it is a proof of the topicality of the ideal, which shows that when we speak of an ideal we refer to the principle that integrates all and sundry of the moments of the individual existence, and not to the projection of the personality through the works. That is why when someone sets out his life in a text, he knows that he is between two temporal dimensions, the instant in which the past is narrated and life as a whole, which is summed up in the meaning that one intends to communicate to others, meaning that is the only justification for the writer and that determines both his past and his future, that are taken into account just as the antecedent or the reflection of the moment in which one writes. T he time of the revelation dominates the time of the personal experience and so it universalizes it, and this is why the autobiography concerns, on principle, everyone. All that we have said until now is supported by Saint Augustine, the author of the Confessions, the first autobiography in history.2 If we study how the saint structures the narration of his life, we will see that two levels are superimposed from the beginning: the first of them is the level of experiences that flow chronologically, and the second one is about the revelation of the identity that exists between God’s and Augustine’s will, which appears as an example of the reciprocity that determines the destiny of every human being. In the first of these two levels, chronological memory, the saint only underlines the events that transformed his life into one like many others. For instance, he describes that when he was a child he stole some pears with some friends without needing to, or that he was a victim of lust and pride during his youth. What is really important about Augustine’s past is the negativity that he sees in it. He does not tell of the petty larceny or the abandonment to lust because he wants us to understand his personality more clearly, but rather to show that any man is disposed to evil when he intends to impose his will without taking into account his relationship with God. If a man lives by his desire, he necessarily loses his balance, for desire is unsteady, and that is why man sooner or later starts to suffer.

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Worse still, this suffering becomes servility to others, in whom the average man seeks the certitude that he does not find in himself. From this standpoint, lust is not the proof of a powerful eroticism; on the contrary, it shows the permanent dissatisfaction of the one who runs after pleasure all his life without getting it. And it is the same regarding pride, which forces us to scorn people who praise us, but only after they have done it. The chronological memory, consequently, does not distinguish one existence from another, for it finds the same motives in all of them: the desire to impose the person’s will and its unavoidable failure. There is no originality in the personal experiences, whereby to write about them is completely absurd; even the most wonderful of them, if remembered, seems to be insignificant when it is not directly linked to the present, which proves that its sense is not essentially moral, it is vital, for it is a meaningless mental representation and nothing more. I emphasize this point because it makes the difference that I have already mentioned between the autobiography and memoirs: memoirs are the coarsest way to bring up to date a memory that is irrelevant by itself, no matter how shockingly or excitingly it is communicated. Far from that, in autobiography the memories show the true meaning of writing, that is, the revelation of the ideal and concrete identity. This difference defines the second level that appears in the Confessions, that makes this work the paradigm of any reflection on personal life. And as an attentive reading shows, this second level, although emphasized throughout the work (for the saint leaves aside time and time again what he tells in order to fit it in his relationship with God), is accomplished stricto sensu when Augustine is converted. This is why the core of the book is the passage of the conversion, for it joins perfectly the two levels of memory. The memories that were carried away by the chaotic and hurting desire, all of a sudden show their real nature: they are moments when the ideal determinates the memory; besides, on integrating will and knowledge, this ideal provides the certainty that the person uselessly seeks everywhere: [When I was weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart] I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating: ‘‘Take up and read; take up and read’’. [...] So checking the torrent of my tears, I arose; interpreting it to be no other than a command from God, to open the book, and read the first chapter I should find, [...] I seized, opened, and in silence read that section, on which my eyes first fell: ‘‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh’’, in concupiscence.

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No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away (VIII, xii, 29).

This passage provides us with the key of any autobiography, the instant when the personality of the author is defined, not, of course, at the everyday life level, but at the level of his identity with a transcendent ideal, that for Saint Augustine lies in the union with God. That could be very different according to any other time or convictions, although it never would lose its condition of absolute principle of personal existence, which amounts to saying that whatever its meaning might be, the ideal can never be reduced to the simple contents of chronological memory, which are rather fixed by it. We will come back to this point later; now, I want to continue the analysis of the structure of the Confessions, whose books IX and X show the insignificance of simple memory. After describing his conversion, Augustine does not add very much to what he has told us about his life: filled with God’s love, he writes and studies under the care of saint Ambrose and he mourns the death of his mother. However, before that, they can share another of the most beautiful moments of their life: while both of them hold a dialogue on the divine goodness, all of a sudden they fall into an ecstasy in which they simultaneously get the vision of the celestial glory. In book X, this vision grounds a meditation on the possibilities that man has to know God and to know himself, which leads Saint Augustine to study memory in full detail, for, according to him, memory is the ground to knowing the divine and the interior. The saint distinguishes first the kind of memory that we have called chronological, where we find the images of all that we have perceived by the senses; these images are related to one another thanks to memory, which transforms the order of time and is able to put the present and even the future before the past. The second level of memory, the reflective one, is quite different, for the images that it contains are not the ‘‘[...] images thereof, but the things themselves’’ (X, ix, 16), that is, the concepts which form discursive thought, concepts that are prior to any perception and that are actualized by thought: ‘‘For cogo (collect) and cogito (re-collect) have the same relation to each other as ago and agito, facio and factito. But the mind hath appropriated to itself this word (cogitation), so that, not what is ‘collected’ anyhow, but what is ‘recollected’ – i.e., brought together in the mind – is properly said to be cogitated, or thought upon’’ (xi, 18).

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The singular distinction between ‘‘image’’ and ‘‘thing’’ is worth studying, for it has to do with the one between chronological and reflective memory. The author says that when someone asks us what a thing is, the sound of words dissipates forthwith in the air, but the meaning that it raises, remains in us, without our knowing how it happened. For example, the concepts ‘‘logic’’, ‘‘grammar’’ or ‘‘rhetoric’’, show their meaning by pure introspection, whereby thought is, as told by the saint, a kind of recollection or rather a determined articulation of things that are in the reflective memory ab initio. Reflective memory contains mathematical notions, which are prior to the perception as well as the memory of the sundry passions that we felt in a given time. Memory that does not have, however, any affective power: neither pleasure nor sorrow are brought back to life when we remember them. To which we must add forgetfulness, surely the most mysterious element of memory, which oddly enough is an essential factor to delineating what we remember and what we do not. Needless to say, the exegesis of the reflective memory raises a lot of thorny questions that we will put aside to concentrate on the main goal of these passages, to show the paradoxical development of memory and why, notwithstanding the exactitude that it could have, it never reveals to us what we are: ‘‘It is not so wonderful, if what I myself am not be far from me. But what is nearer to me than myself ? And lo, the force of mine own memory is not understood by me; though I cannot so much as name myself without it’’ (xvi, 25). The incommensurability of memory and of yearning to know oneself is by no means a secondary problem, and it does possess a complex theoretical sense: that everybody gets lost in his interior when he searches keenly for himself is a proof that our innermost being goes beyond the order of personal memory and tends to an absolute certitude which is God himself, as Saint Augustine had already pointed out in the first lines of the Confessions: ‘‘Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it repose in Thee’’ (I, i, 1). What is the aim of man when he figures his memory out and even tries to overcome it? An infinitely happy life or, as it is called by the author, a blessed life. Some perhaps err and imagine it godlessly, but the truth is that everybody wishes it, which again shows that blessedness has nothing to do with individual memories nor with sensual pleasures: ‘‘For a happy life is joy in the truth: for this is a joying in Thee, Who art ‘the Truth’, O God ‘my light’, the ‘health of my countenance, my God’. This is the

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happy life which all desire; this life which alone is happy, all desire; to joy in the truth all desire’’ (X, xxiii, 33). This infinite life which is called blessedness by Saint Augustine could not be found even in the innermost recesses of memory, where the soul itself is hidden, no matter how much man strives to find it. The soul has, contrariwise, to forget itself and to get absorbed in God, which is possible only because He is hidden in everything: ‘‘Everywhere, O Truth, dost Thou give audience to all who ask counsel of Thee, and at once answerest all, though on manifold matters they ask Thy counsel’’ (xxvi, 37). We have followed the Augustinian exegesis of memory until now, just to understand that in an autobiography memory is only the way to identify life with an ideal, rather, the idealization of life in which this last becomes a universal paradigm. This amounts to saying that the autobiographical existence is in principle an example that any other can use to shape their own life. That is why the principle of any autobiography is that each person finds by himself a behaviour that matches the blessed life, the ideal that is worthy for each and every one of us, which gives to the autobiographical work, without any moralism, a fully ethical sense, even more, an ontological one, for it transforms the narration of a life into the beginning of the meditation on the adequate way to live in order to accomplish the humanity of an individual. So, there is no way to tell of one’s own life if it is not transformed into revelation and testimony. To have had very exciting experiences or to have participated in some of the capital historic events is by no means necessary in order to write an autobiographical work, but rather one must believe that life must correspond to a conception of human being that goes beyond what Nietzsche called ‘‘human, too human’’. Therefore, it is obvious that the transcendence and idealization that we have spoken about do not have any metaphysical meaning in the deprecatory sense of this expression, as Saint Augustine shows in the Confessions. It is true that the author writes to praise God and that in accordance with him the human life is under the power of the devil and of his insurmountable consequences, the unsettledness and the incertitude, but it is equally true that each individual is able to understand himself if he strives to beat his most pernicious enemy, his own tendency to reduce life to the immediacy of desire: This is the fruit of my confessions of what I am, not of what I have been, to confess this, not before Thee only, in a secret exultation with trembling, and a secret sorrow with hope;

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but in the ears also of the believing sons of men, sharers of my joy and partners in my mortality, my fellow-citizens, and fellow-pilgrims, who are gone before, or are to follow on, companions of my way (X, iv, 6).

Without minimizing that in the Confessions asceticism plays a fundamental role for, as a last resource, Saint Augustine identifies life with the beyond, I emphasize that to narrate one’s own existence is the starting point to meditating on human life as such, which implies the elucidation of the time that constitutes the horizon of our being, the present that we share with others, a present that is also the time of revelation and of ontological value to the individual personality.

II

Let us figure out the second of the objectives of our study, the meaning that autobiography has in a culture that only offers subjective ideals, that is, ideals unable to determine the personal memory, which consequently appears as the always relative and incommunicable outcome of an experience that will never be ‘‘ours’’ because none will recognize it. Each writer forgets as soon as he advances in his text, rather, he writes in order to forget, to throw the memory away on the page. So, if life fails by the impossibility of sharing it, it is because it did not correspond with any ideal, not even with the ideal of being interesting for some else. Abstractly solipsistic, the modern subject wastes his memories for he does not discover in them any value. What reveals this reduction of the ideals to a solipsism for which the past is identical to annihilation? The radical difference between the two levels of existence, the chronological and the reflexive one, that, in the Augustinian paradigm, ended up identifying one with the other, which stands for the imbalance between the time of memory and the time of self-identification. Contrary to what everybody says, for contemporary man to remember is not to live, it is rather tantamount to fleeing a memory that rots the present experience: obsession or amnesia, such are the limits of our identity. This last statement is not, however, so terrible: that the memory is obsessive or dispensable is natural for the structure of life; man misses the past or tries to forget it according to the circumstances. On the other hand, it is not lamentable that one does not care about someone else’s life, especially when his own experience is exciting. As we have said before,

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life has the same chronological structure, whether it is personal or not, and it is absurd to seek in it an originality that it does not have. What is really worrisome does not lie in the vacuity of memory itself, but in the fact that it is trivial for us to meditate on a life in principle ideal because we unceasingly discover in it infinite causalities that reduce the most noble motives to misleading symbols of shameful limitations. As heirs of psychoanalysis, we must study a life, even the greatest one, as the mask of what cannot be confessed. What do I mean? That there is no way to get rid of solipsism, which condemns us to the boredom of other people’s memories. If, for an unimaginable anachronism, someone dared to write a text like the Confessions nowadays, any reader would immediately underline the pathological aspects of the personality of the author, the sometimes annoying exaltation of the divine mercy and the lamentation regarding human wickedness, the flat asceticism that condemns pleasure, things that could be interpreted as symbols of a hopeless incapability to enjoy a normal life, instead of being understood as symbols of a spiritual ecstasy, which would provoke that a passage like the one of the conversion of Saint Augustine were read as not the beginning of sanctification, but was an indisputable proof of mental illness. This reduction to the psychological sense explains why the autobiography fails as an ideal revelation and becomes a simple projection of the interiority of the author, which we perceive behind the text. Autobiography changes into an exercise of introspection, the scrutinizing of a psyche that never springs from the abyss of passions and instincts, an exercise that can be made relevant only by the capacity of the writer to analyze himself but not through an essentially philosophical reason. We can also note this in the other possibility of the autobiography, the one that sets out the ideal not as determination, but as a search for a personal realization that is told because it provokes everyone to start their own adventures, which transforms the ideal into a simple link but not into a determination, a link whose meaning is fundamentally aesthetic, that is, to be an image that reflects the desire of present time, where the transcendent is taken for the subjective. So, the importance of what we have said lies not in the reduction of the autobiographical to the parameters of the average existence; the contemporary solipsism and the banality have been vituperated enough to insist on them. Instead, what we must remember is that in order to make the autobiography meaningful again, we have to think about what personal life is, both for oneself and for the others.

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Now, personality, as the Greeks show, is not the same as individuality; it is enough to occupy a place in the space to be an individual, whereas for being a person it is necessary to own an unmistakable identity, a character shaped by the passage of time, without which the simple individual is, like the slave, not much more than an animal able to grasp an order. Personality, then, means transformation and determination, both of will and circumstances in which the individual lives, circumstances that, according to ancient thought, go back to the empire of fate on human being and that imply somehow a contradiction between this one and that one. This contradiction is so hardly understandable that it was forced to develop a new kind of thought, which was the most remote origin of what could be called the ‘‘humanism’’ of Greece, which ‘‘does not spring from the individuality but from the idea. On man as a gregarious being or as a supposedly autonomous ego, the man as idea rises [with a] universal and normative validity’’.3 Undoubtedly, Nietzsche’s T he Birth of T ragedy is – beyond its questionable historical precision – the book that has explained in the best way how the struggle to understand the cosmic determination of personal existence, generated in the passage of the 6th to the 5th centuries B.C., is seen in two antagonistic conceptions of human being, the tragic one and the one that could be perfectly called the metaphysical-moral one, whose shared ground, the determination of man by universal nature, was respectively interpreted in a contradictory way. In the first case, man is integrated in an infinite generative cycle in which even suffering has a keen affirmative sense, for it makes possible the transformation of one’s own being. In the second case, the cycle is substituted by a final solution that considers suffering as a punishment whereof the ideal life must be freed to get contemplative happiness. Therefore, the morals and the metaphysics implied by it are the original root of the autobiography as Saint Augustine understood it, for in both of them the ideality is imposed on the existence in order to sublimate it and to establish an absolute concordance, which necessarily calls for asceticism, that is, the elimination of all the corporeal or natural impulses, which leads to the transformation of life into an unsolvable problem: one gets idealization at the cost of one’s own nature, and personality at the cost of individuality. The identity of the person with the ideal is not natural, it is literally supernatural. How, then, could Saint Augustine be the author of the first autobiography that we know? How come not a Greek or their heirs, the Romans?

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Because of one simple reason: that for Greco-L atin thought, individual existence does not have the absolute value with which Christianity has conceived it. Insofar as every human being is a divine creature, he is responsible for his life in a world under the diabolic power of nature, power that man himself has stirred up by disobeying his Creator; so, man can reconcile himself with the divine will only in a life beyond the natural one. Any passage of the Confessions shows the fight between life and nature, between the desire for pleasure and elevation; let us remember that the hobbyhorse of Saint Augustine is the lamentation on pride and lust, and that he finally defeats them not by his own forces but with God’s help, help that one must beg for, time and time again, during one’s existence, because, if it ceased, man would be at the mercy of his inexorable proclivity. L ife against nature: that is the genesis of the autobiography. Thus, it is not possible to separate the autobiography from the development of morality and metaphysics and it is necessary to elucidate it in relation to the transcendence of the ideals. For if in the first part of our study we have said that autobiography always implies the identification of the personal life with an ideal that essentially determines it, we can add now that such identification implies, at least according to the Augustinian paradigm, the total absorption of the vital into the ideal, the categorical conformation of every instant of existence by its eschatological meaning. On the basis of all this, what could we say about the current importance of the autobiographical in a culture that, as Nietzsche understood better than anyone else, is immersed in the fundamental event of history, the death of God, that is, the impossibility of bringing to agreement ideals and life? How to speak about determination when it seems that all the causalities have lost their force and personal existence is reduced to the purely individual, to the fortuitous character of chronological memory that cannot sustain a reflection on one’s own being because it lacks the principle that universalizes it? A possible solution to the vacuity of the ideals would be, as I already said, the reduction of the autobiographical to the aesthetical, the projection of the individual personality as the ideal that everybody could follow. This solution, however, is unsuccessful because of two reasons: first, because an aesthetical ideal, as long as someone postulates it through his deeds, is valid only for him and for nobody else; secondly, because any aesthetical ideal, if we consider it through life itself, sinks into psychol-

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ogism; there is no identity between ideal and personality, there is only a series of motives hidden behind the actions of everyone. That is why, if we want to find the meaning that autobiography could have for us, we must liberate it both from Augustinian transcendentalism and from reduction to the aesthetics that nowadays shapes the culture, taking into account what is more important for a philosophical meditation: the search for concrete determinations of personal existence and the way to form oneself in accordance with a universal paradigm. I think that we do not need to go a long way to notice that any thought which intends to fix these determinations will have a historic sense, which means that it will not depend on individual opinions, but will be defined by the temporal structure of human existence. So, if for Saint Augustine and his time it was a priority to reconcile the heathen conception of personal life with the transcendent character of Christian religion and morality, for us it is peremptory to link the death of God with the revaluation of concepts that beyond Christianity have themselves allowed philosophy to understand man. This implies the criticism of one’s own tradition, not by the inconsistencies that its conceptual structure shows, but by the analysis of why it has been reduced for us to an anachronistic paradigm in a process that in the specific field of the autobiography is tantamount to revealing that there is no way to vindicate an ideal without making explicit all the violence which dominates everyday life, violence that in the case of Saint Augustine leads to a brutal asceticism that is, notwithstanding, hidden behind the sublimity of the union with God. T he autobiography must consist, then, in a radical criticism of personal life in modern societies which are ordered by the decisive event of the 20th century: genocide. And this means that the autobiographical text, more than to bring to light the vulgarity of common individuality (if it were by chance necessary to show what is so evident), must confirm that life is problematic because its essential sense is not the universalization of the metaphysical sense of the Confessions, but the sense that could be called ‘‘untimely’’, in the sense that Nietzsche uses it in his reflections on modern culture and education: the exposition of the limitations and falsities of contemporary ideals in the light of tradition, that in such a way stops being a transcendent value and becomes an active force to spread a really creative thought. We will illustrate what we have said with the aid of two of the 20th century’s most significant autobiographies, one by Thomas Bernhard and one by George Steiner.

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By reading the titles of some of Bernhard’s novels we have a very accurate understanding of his conception about existence: Disturbance, Extinction or Correction are works whose characters suffer under a brutal nature that destroys man by sickness, decrepitude or insanity. Nature is not generous to living beings, it subdues them to an inexorable cycle of necessity and devastation, a cycle that in the case of man is even more terrible because it is strengthened with the activity of thought. Thought is neither a process to establish a correspondence with reality, nor to discover the universality of human experience: it is rather a way to stare at the horrors of individual existence, horrors that grow infinitely when one is in touch with others, which immediately shows the ravages that one’s own thought provokes: obsession, phobias, palsy and infinite rage, such are the outcomes of a devotion to understanding the world. Thinking, however, is the only way for man to stand for his identity without despairing or committing suicide. Therefore, the thinker has a sole subject, the concrete life, which is comprehensible, thanks more to literature than to philosophy. The most profound thinker, the philosopher, has to become a writer and vice versa. And his most relevant work necessarily has to be the autobiography. In the splendid autobiographical pentalogy that was published between 1975 and 1982, Bernhard narrates his infancy and adolescence, which he lived in the shadow of World War II. From T he Origin, the first of the five volumes, the author privileges the level of reflective memory, wherein, contrariwise to what happens with Saint Augustine, instead of the revelation of a transcendent ideal, the reader finds that the essential subject of thought is the horror of existence: ‘‘What refers to men is always absurd’’,4 Bernhard says on evoking Salzburg as a city in which the terror of bombings brutally eroded the supposed love for music and for beauty, love that beyond the utterances of its inhabitants, just revealed the religious fanaticism and the total connivance with Nazism. It was not Mozart whom Salzburg loved, it was Hitler. And this love was neither hypnotic nor unconscious, it sprung from the fanaticism in which the city had always lived under Catholicism, whose hierarchs had been as cruel as the Nazis or even more, for they had been dedicated to debasing anyone lucid enough to realize that the religious or the academic education did not foster intelligence, but rather aimed at the destruction of every defence of the individual organism, the first of which is intelligence itself. To win, Nazism and its counterpart, Catholicism, had in their favour an ominous element: the imbecility of all those beings that reproduce in

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an instinctive, animal way, for whom a son is not the possibility that thought surpasses the inexhaustible cruelty of life, but embodies an opportunity to vent the dissatisfaction or the mediocrity of his parents. It is very meaningful that T he Origin is mostly about the education process, and that this subject appears again in A Boy, the volume with which the pentalogy concludes, where Bernhard recreates the memory of his grandfather, a writer like him – although lacking his success – who taught him that ‘‘the human being has a head’’,5 and that it is useless to repeat the commonplaces of sentimentalism, of morality and even of philosophy (for even philosophy can become a commonplace in the brain of a stupid person), if one does not put them to decisive proof, the brutality of nature. If an inkling shows this, then it is a worthwhile ideal, which does not mean at all that the process is similar to the aesthetic vision of the existence that we have already mentioned, according to which everyone lives depending on an image of himself. Indeed, the ideal defined by thought does not correspond to the individual imagination and neither to the conventions of a time, but to a meaning strong enough to determine even the most somber aspects of life. In the case of Bernhard, the ideal was the lucid endurance against the obsession about suicide to which the author was dragged by the prison regime of the boarding school where he lived in his childhood, and by the war horrors that were the backdrop then. If he could stand all this, it was because he somehow felt that ‘‘the suicide and the thought of suicide are always the more scientific subject’’,6 and because he had close at hand a tool to survive that his mates lacked: the music. If he had not played the violin an hour a day in a room full of the fetid shoes of the interned boys, he would have succumbed to the insanity and he would have hanged himself or he would have defenestrated himself like so many of his mates. The ideal is, so, the strengthening of the character and of intelligence, the daily exercise of a will that, facing the impossibility of going beyond any paradigm, discovers in self-affirmation its only aim. Bernhard preferred to be smitten with suicide instead of committing it, he converted the necessity of killing himself into the one of forming himself. Thereby, T he Origin finishes when Bernhard, who was then 15 years old, decides to abandon the institute where he studied and to start to work. The ideal of endurance that his grandfather and music taught Bernhard was not completely explicit with all its potency until the author had to confront life in its perhaps most ominous face, an incurable and destruc-

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tive illness. After three years of working as an employee in a grocer’s, during which he concentrated on studying human nature in every customer, Bernhard felt ill. He had tuberculosis. Three of the five volumes that integrate Bernhard’s autobiographical pentalogy are dedicated to narrating his deeper and deeper sinking into the sickness, and this shows that it was for the author, even more than the war, the capital experience of his life. To go together with him through the wards of the several hospitals where he was interned or through the consulting rooms where he suffered aberrant treatments for years, is tantamount to opening a sewer in which the most hideous aspects of life dwell, precisely the ones that modern culture has tried to hide. So, if Bernhard describes in great detail the hospital environment, the ignorance of the people who work there, the cruelty with which they take charge of the patients, he does not aim to provoke an emotion, but to compel the reader to meditate on his own organic relationship with nature. For if, during his childhood, Bernhard had seen ‘‘that life and, in general, existence are awful and little esteemed, rather, not esteemed at all, in war times’’,7 by his hospitalization he saw that ‘‘the patient is farsighted [and] for none else is the image of the world more clear’’.8 Everything in life leads to thought, to demanding of oneself a major understanding in order to avoid any excessive self-indulgence, especially in the field of health, where the empire of nature on man can be devastating. If, as Aristotle says in the very beginning of the Metaphysics, ‘‘all men by nature desire to know’’ (980a21), it is because knowledge is the most powerful link with life. We return so to the ideal of lucidity, of incessant learning, that identifies Bernhard’s autobiography with the human paradigm of Antiquity. Selfknowledge is precisely the way to overcome the tendency to subjectivism that implies living only according to the personal standpoint without taking into account the social reality. The ideal determines again the individuality, although in an immanent sense that in the case of Saint Augustine was lost in the ascetic aspiration to the religious beyond where the ‘‘pain of flesh’’ would cease. If the ideal must lose its sublime meaning and become an overwhelming fight against suffering and death in order to shape life, that is the unavoidable consequence of a time that has confronted us, through nihilism, with the terrible nature of life. Could, however, life be an ideal for itself ? Bernhard’s answer is unequivocal: yes. Because ideal life is not the everyday repetition wherein tediousness, sorrow and stupidity come and go without any sense, life is

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the self-affirmation in the world, affirmation that is completely free from solipsism because it is generated by the endurance against annihilation. If the axis of any autobiography is the revelation of the leading ideal of life, we find it in T he Breath, the third book of Bernhard’s pentalogy, where the author tells us of his first and most decisive fight against an illness that was going to last throughout his life. After some days in the hospital, when he was already hopeless, Bernhard was brought to a ward where there were only moribund patients. He saw how the stretcherbearers took out the corpse of a man that had died in the bed next to the author’s. When he was alone again, a very heavy wet rag fell from the bedhead almost on his face; he was so weak, that he knew that if the rag had fallen on him, he would not have been strong enough to take it off, and he would have died, asphyxiated. He was actually overcome by horror, but, at the same time, he was completely sure that no matter how hard his life could be, he wanted to live: I wanted to live, and the rest was meaningless. To live and live my life, as I would like it and as long as I would like it. It was not an oath, it was something that has been proposed by the one who has already been hopeless in the instant in which, before him, the other one has stopped breathing. Between two possible ways, that night I had chosen, in the decisive instant, life’s way. It is absurd to ask if that choice was wrong or right. Since the heavy and wet rag had not fallen on my face and had not asphyxiated me, I did not want to stop breathing. I had not wanted to stop breathing like the other one that I had before me, I had wanted to keep breathing and to keep alive.9

I emphasize the sentence that defines for me the philosophical sense of the previous passage: ‘‘It is absurd to ask if that choice was wrong or right’’. As a matter of fact, there was no reason for a tuberculous youth, who only had until then experienced war and misery, and whose future only predicted even more frightening evils, to chose to live. But neither the lack of logic nor the corporeal devastation could hold him up: he affirmed his individuality. And this affirmation did not have a purely psychological sense because it was the answer to the action of another human being, the dead one whose last breath provides the title of the central book of the autobiography. Life does not require any justification because, if it is contradictory or even stupid in the immediacy, it reveals the sole form of ideal within the reach of contemporary man: to stay alive. That this ideal is not alien to reason but that it springs from it, is proved by the fact that precisely when the individual lacks motives to live, he must meditate more accu-

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rately on why life, even in the most desperate conditions, is an absolute exigency. In the Ethics – which is for me the most complex book ever written – Spinoza says that ‘‘every thing strives, as much as it can, to persevere in being’’ (B. III, p. VI). However, he also notes that most human beings, instead of reasoning, imagine and therefore destroy the possibility of affirming their existence, which corroborates that man is always against his own reason. Of course, by ‘‘reason’’ we do not mean the intellectual discernment with which one solves specific problems; rather, we use the term to name the capacity to idealize individual existence. ‘‘Reason’’, then, designs the ontological identity between man and reality by which the violence of nature becomes reconciled with individuality. And that identity could only be called tragic. The concept of tragedy has been so widely used throughout the last century, that it could be reduced to a meaningless word.10 However, if it were possible to understand it beyond the subjectivism – that is, beyond the individual standpoints – we could say that the sole vital ideal for us must be tragic: it matches our being, that is only the effort to persevere in itself although there are no reasons for it. The tragic, then, as Nietszche clearly shows, does not lie in the abstract determination of life by will, but in the reconciliation of nature and individuality that we call fate, a term inseparable from the one of person. The difference, then, between person and individual, stems from the difference between an ideal life and a life sunk into incoherent circumstances. T he comprehension that tragedy is the fundamental structure of existence is the only current aim of the autobiography and that is why it has a deep philosophical meaning. This has been explicit both in the case of Saint Augustine and in the case of Bernhard, two authors not only temporally distant from each other but even radically opposed in their respective ways of exposing their pessimistic conception of human nature, a conception which is completely independent from the experiences of each author, although it is deduced from a personal meditation, as we see in the book that we will analyze to conclude: Errata. An Examined L ife,11 the splendid autobiography by George Steiner. It is not so much what Steiner tells about his life, but it is enough to show that the author has suffered neither terrible interior convulsions, nor exasperating physical suffering; from the perspective of pure narration, one could say that his life matches the image of success by which contem-

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porary man is obsessed: Steiner is a great intellectual and nothing else. And this is what really matters, that Steiner’s life does not offer an inwardness or privacy important by themselves. Where, then, does the meaning of Errata lie? What could be pointed out in a life that so admirably matched the ideal of a person who at the same time universalized his thought and lived everyday events? The answer of Steiner is based on the exhaustive analysis that he makes of his personal root, Judaism, the most problematic of modes that history has known for being a man. Why the millenary hatred against Jews, why have they always been a stone on the road in Western thought, especially in modern culture, for which, paradoxically, they have been so determinant? Because Judaism begins with the notion of dVerence in identity. Steiner mentions that a lot of biblical passages narrate the arrival of a foreigner, an alien who bears the intentions of God that are incomprehensible for the others: this alien is the Jew himself, who has been chosen by God to establish a pact of sanctity that implies the sacrifice of the ill-disposed nature of each one; if all men are creatures of God, not all of them are part of the pact. Beyond what Steiner says, this implies that existence for any Jew has a character at the same time extraordinary and terrible: as Jeremy’s laments show, it is not comprehensible at all why God has chosen a specific individual or, even more, a whole group of people, in order to reveal His law by them to the gentiles who have become hardhearted; which, on the other hand, is not a sign of supremacy either, but could imply more hardheartedness against these chosen ones. So, neither the Greeks nor the Romans needed autobiography due to their conception of existence: for them, existence was not a problem by itself, for man could live in peace if he tried to understand the cosmos and did not disturb it. And even if fate turned against one all of a sudden, there was the possibility of relying on one’s own character to overcome the misfortune, no matter how painful it could be. For Jews, however, knowledge and obedience were not enough: the inscrutable will of God is above the human attitude; precisely because God is the creator of man, He has the right to ask about everybody’s life anyway, anytime. And the determinant sense of difference appears again: the omnipotence of God, which escapes the most profound human thought, always rises between every man and his life. Reason, in a word, has a limit: the unfathomable meaning of divinity. Jews have been aware since the beginning of this difference and of their simultaneous identity in relation to all the other people, which distin-

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guishes them in history and explains, insofar as it is possible, why they did not really integrate into a culture like the Greco-Roman, whose basic assumption was the homogeneity of reason beyond the sometimes cruel differences between the world of gods and the world of men. Let us return to Steiner: in the 20th century the Jewish difference reached an extreme point, because what had always been a religious or cultural problem was brutally solved by the destruction of the difference itself, that is, of the concrete existence of any people who embodied the difference that defines Jews: ‘‘The purpose, honestly stated by Nazism, was ontological. It was wiping from this earth of Jewish being [...] For to be a Jew was, in the eyes of the haters, the original sin’’ (p. 53). The personal life has become a crime: that is why after the genocide of the Jews it is an imperative for everybody to meditate on the human sense of existence, which, paradoxical as it could seem, is just the consummation of Judaism itself, for it throws light on the difference that reason always hid behind the identity of the ideals. Thereby, even a life as successful as Steiner’s must be read through the many errata that spoil the unequivocal sense, which, instead of implying the incommunicability, involves that whatever happens to a human being, concerns not only him, but everybody else, because it is the simultaneous possibility of misunderstanding and doing well, the double way that converges through reflection. So, the certitude that has led the life of Steiner, that there is a concordance between the particularity and the whole and that such concordance is almost incomprehensible for most, must be identical in the 20th century for every person who had tried to recover the meaning of the term ‘‘vital ideal’’. That Steiner realized this one evening during his infancy, when he saw that all the blazons of a book of heraldry had the same form in spite of their variety, is the best index of the personal farsightedness of the author: I grew possessed by an intuition of the particular, of diversities so numerous that no labor of classification and numeration could exhaust them. Each leaf differed from any other on each differing tree (I rushed out in the deluge to assure myself of this elementary and miraculous truth). Each blade of grass, each pebble on the lake shore was, eternally, ‘‘just so’’ (p. 12).

The particular ephemeral nature of every being, does not deny but confirms the perfect immutability of the universe, of the movement to the unity that each instant expresses by the relationships that constitute it: but – and this is what the 20th century really provides for the comprehension of life as the realization of the individual personality – there is no way to

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understand such a coincidence, although we cannot stop looking for it either. All this reminds us of what modernity itself has been since its beginning, that is, a struggle to determine the limits of reason, not in order to mine it but, contrariwise, to reinforce it, as it is corroborated both by the history of philosophy starting from Descartes, and by the search for a new way to lay the foundations of social relationships beyond the archaic concept of natural law. Finally, if time and time again in the autobiographical pentalogy by Bernhard we listen to the furious complaint against the imbecility whereby parents and institutions corrupt every individual during their educational development, in the examination that Steiner makes of his own life we see that the formation, the cultivation of personal harmony is what makes it possible for everyone to reach what modern man runs after unsuccessfully: originality. 1 1 1 Let us recapitulate: we have seen that in its Augustinian origin, the autobiography leads to the explanation of the transcendent ideal that rules the individual life, an ideal that is defined at the cost of the immediacy of memory. I hope that I have shown how the transformations of the autobiographical paradigm during the 20th century have made it peremptory to restate the identity of the ideal and of the individual, and also that those transformations, although they are not completely understandable, could at least bring us to question the modern vital standards. Reason, enriched by the difference that determines our time, is more adequate to the tension inherent to any existence, as Zarathustra says in the middle of his inebriation: Oh, man! Heed! What does the thick midnight say? I slept, I slept – I have woken up from a sound dream: World is deep, And deeper than what day has thought. Its pain is deep. Pleasure – is even deeper than pain: Sorrow says: go on! But every pleasure wants eternity – It wants a deep, a deep eternity!

Meritorious University of Puebla, Mexico.

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NOTES 1 Maria Antonieta, trans. Raymond R. Terreiro, Pocket Books 11, 5th ed. (Barcelona: Juventud, 1977), p. 495. 2 T he Confessions. T he City of God on Christian Doctrine, Edward Bouverie-Pusey (Ed. and trans.), Great Books, 18 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952). In all the future references to this work, I will mention at the end of the quotation the respective book (Roman numerals in capitals), chapter (Roman numerals in lowercase) and paragraph (Arabic numerals) of this edition. 3 Werner Jaeger, Paideia. L os Ideales de la Cultura Griega, Joachim Xirau (trans.) (Mexico City: FCE, 1957), p. 12. 4 El Origen. Una indicacio´n [Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung], Michael Sa´enz (trans.), Panorama de narrativas 41, 4th ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1990), p. 68. 5 Un Nin˜o [Ein kind], Michael Sa´enz (trans.), Panorama de narrativas 93 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1987), p. 22. 6 T he Origin, p. 24. 7 Ibid., p. 72. 8 El aliento. Una decisio´n [Der Atem. Eine Entscheidung], Michael Sa´enz (trans.), Panorama de narrativas 63, 3rd ed. (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1991), p. 56. 9 Ibid., pp. 20–21 (the italics are Bernhard’s). 10 On this subject, see my essay ‘‘De por que´ el pensamiento de Hiedegger no ofrece base alguna para la e´tica’’ [‘‘Why the thought of Heidegger does not offer any base for Ethics’’], in Heidegger y la pregunta por la e´tica [Heidegger and the Question about Ethics], Juliana Gonza´lez Valenzuela (ed.) (Mexico City: UNAM, 2001), pp. 59–72. 11 New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. In the next references to the work, I will mention the number of the corresponding page at the end of the quotation.

JADWIGA SMITH

PAUL RICOEUR’S T HE SY MBOL ISM OF EV IL AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN MARSTON’S ANT ONIO PLAYS

The drama of the Jacobean period explores evil with passion but also with an almost scientific determination and focus. The evil in the Jacobean tragedy is both insidious and violent, often politically motivated but interwoven with sexual intensity, eloquent though at times rhetorically overwrought, and, despite its fanciful theatricality, chillingly executed on stage. The evil in the plays of Marston, Webster, Ford, Middleton and Turner almost never fails to appear jarringly shocking but nonetheless familiar, immediately recognizable, the only element of the plays to be agreed upon critically since other issues can be questioned, such as love, friendship, honesty, marriage, innocence, honor, and a stoic view of life. A few years ago, at this conference, I discussed John Webster’s T he Duchess of Malfi in the context of Paul Ricoeur’s T he Symbolism of Evil. My paper today deals with two plays by John Marston: Antonio and Mellida (1599/1600) and Antonio’s Revenge (1600/1), both printed in 1602. Again, I’m going to refer to Ricoeur’s work, though not as a source of potential material to analyze the representation of evil in Marston’s plays. Rather, it is the methodological stand of his view of hermeneutics which illuminates my own interpretation of the source of evil in Antonio’s Revenge. Such an application of Ricoeur’s T he Symbolism of Evil has been prompted by this year’s general topic of mystery. Ricoeur’s work is not an ethical study of moral, judgmental aspects of evil. Instead, it is an investigation of an awareness of evil, of a conscious act of identification through a recognizable vehicle, medium, symbol. Ricoeur’s rich collection of myths, from Sumero-Akkadian, through Orphic, Hellenic to Jewish and Christian is not intended to be just a catalogue of symbols of evil, a Northrop Frye compendium of entries for handy thumbing through for a particularly fitting reference. First of all, according to Ricoeur, ‘‘The dissolution of the myth as explanation is the necessary way to the restoration of the myth as symbol’’ (350). But that does not imply an easy, naive application of myth in the explication of the human existence and its application to modern philosophy. It is criticism which through interpretation can make us ‘‘hear again’’ 237 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 237–244. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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these myths in modern times. Because interpretation means battling the old hermeneutic problem of understanding in order to believe, and believing in order to understand. Such a critical approach at first seems insurmountable. To counteract this critical impasse, Ricoeur quotes Bultman (Glauben und Verstehen): All understanding, like all interpretation, is [. . .] continually oriented by the manner of posing the question and by what it aims at [by its Worauf hin]. Consequently, it is never without presuppositions; that is to say, it is always directed by a prior understanding of the thing about which it interrogates the text. It is only on the basis of that prior understanding that it can, in general, interrogate and interpret. (351)

And also: ‘‘The presupposition of all understanding is the vital relation of the interpreter to the thing about which the text speaks directly or indirectly’’ (351). In other words, it is not a kinship of one’s life with another’s but a kinship of thought which is the basis of hermeneutics. Thus, by interpreting we believe. Though we ‘‘demythologize’’ in criticism, sift for the psuedo-historical in order to separate it from the historical, according to Ricoeur, ‘‘modern hermeneutics brings to light the dimension of the symbol’’ (351). He notices the paradox of ‘‘demythologization,’’ which is also a source of ‘‘recharging of thought with the aid of symbols [. . .], a corollary of what we have called the circle of believing and understanding in hermeneutics’’ (353). My discussion of Antonio’s Revenge is illuminated by Ricoeur’s T he Symbolism of Evil in the sense that it accepts the hermeneutic premise of using Gadamer’s term, ‘‘fusion of horizons.’’ Ricoeur uses the expression ‘‘a meditation of symbols.’’ He says that ‘‘there is no philosophy without presuppositions’’ (348). The belief in finding a philosophical position of total neutrality and thus a lack of presuppositions is an illusion: A meditation on symbols starts from speech that has already taken place, and in which everything has already been said in some fashion; it wishes to be thought with its presuppositions. For it, the first task is not to begin but, from the midst of speech, to remember; to remember with a view to beginning. (348–9)

Ricoeur’s investigation of the beginning, the roots, the primordial of the area of the symbolism of evil assumes ultimately that it is necessary to promote ‘‘a philosophy that starts from the symbols and endeavors to promote the meaning, to form it, by a creative imagination’’ (355). The main challenge when interpreting Antonio’s Revenge is to find the beginning or, in other words, the cause, the justification for the switch from a romantic, comedic foundation of Antonio and Mellida to the tragic,

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violent, sadistic character of Antonio’s Revenge. Finding and pinpointing all the elements of Antonio and Mellida which would illuminate the shift can be at first a worthwhile task. It then reveals that it is a rather mechanical endeavor. The list of possible causes may include, for example, the character of Piero as a justifiably unlikely giver and recipient of reconciliation. Ultimately the list cannot serve any purpose of understanding the horror of Antonio’s Revenge. What matters is the theatrical experience of the audience which accepts the comedic in the first part as an independent entity: a play with a happy ending in which bad characters undergo a transformation. The audience has every right to expect that from a comedy, and the transformation does not have to be well justified – that is permitted in comedy on a regular basis. Thus what matters is the audience’s feeling that Antonio and Mellida achieves its well-deserved status as a comedy. Even though ‘‘Marston is evidently concerned in the play to probe the pathology of grief and suffering’’ (Stungess xvi), the fact remains that things are patched up tidily, and there is no adequate warning about the true nature of the reversal of fortune in Antonio’s Revenge. What could be assumed as such a warning, the opening words of the prologue, actually accentuates the horror of the first scene. The Prologue thus informs the audience: The rawish dank of clumsy winter ramps The fluent summer’s vein, and drizzling sleet Chilleth the wan bleak cheek of the numbered earth, Whilst snarling gusts nibble the juiceless leaves From the naked shuddering branch, and peels the skin From off the soft and delicate aspects. O now, methinks, a sullen tragic scene Would suit the time with pleasing congruence. (Prologue, lines 1–8)

The implication is clear; the switch in mood from comic to tragic seems to be fitting the season of winter, and thus finding ‘‘a sullen tragic scene’’ a suitable entertainment, ‘‘a pleasing congruence’’ going well with a warm fire, good cheer and fun, a bit like telling ghost stories to amuse guests during a long winter evening. The warning is no warning at all; it actually has a dulling effect, like ‘‘crying wolf.’’ The very next image, the opening scene of the play, is the sight of Piero. The stage directions describe him in detail: Enter Piero unbraced, his arms bare, smeared in blood, a poniard in one hand, bloody, and a torch in the other, Strozzo following him with a cord. (1.1)

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Nothing in Antonio and Mellida can justify the callous explanation of Piero a few lines later: ‘‘Hell, night/ Give loud applause to my hypocrisy’’ (lines 30–1). In other words, to say that Piero was already a hypocrite in Antonio and Mellida is to state such an obvious fact that it does not explain anything about his tragic horrific shift to violence. What matters is that a bad character in a comedy embraced his enemy and that there is a happy ending, and that we expected both the embrace and the happy ending. Whatever follows now in Antonio’s Revenge has the same aura of incredulity about it as the only sustaining aesthetic factor for unity and cohesion in the play. The multiple violent deaths, each surpassing the previous one in cruelty and sadism, culminate in the death of Piero’s small son, Julio. Julio is killed by Antonio even when the boy invokes the name of his and Antonio’s now dead beloved fiance´e. Antonio proclaims his love for Julio when stabbing him and sprinkling the tomb with blood ‘‘to perfume [. . .] circling air! With smoke of blood’’ (3.2 lines 308–9). He admits: ‘‘My heart has thirsting dropsies after gore’’ (3.2 line 313). Of course, Antonio is revenged for the deaths of his father, his friend, and his beloved, but the audience has to question if these deaths justify the frenzy of killing Julio and then serving his body at a banquet to his father, Piero, followed by the murder of Piero by several characters under the leadership of Antonio acting like a high priest in a ritual of chanting and stabbing. One may say that Revenger’s T ragedy, another Jacobean tragedy, now ascribed to Middleton, is even more bloody and inventive in its instances of cruelty and mayhem; however, it has in its companion piece no comic counterpart and no happy ending of life’s suffering. But in the case of Antonio’s Revenge, the preceding play, Antonio and Mellida, is also a parallel play, and it says: life can be happy. The two plays coexist and they portray two versions of life as coexisting as well. Middleton’s play can be ultimately rejected as a source of information about the tragic nature of human existence, but Antonio’s Revenge cannot be treated so because it claims the knowledge of life’s happy side as well – in Antonio and Mellida. The more exaggerated the evil seems in Antonio’s Revenge, the more clearly emerges the point that goodness and happiness in Antonio and Mellida seem incongruous. The ultimate mystery is in the fact that evil just emerges without warning, or justification. Its source exists in the realm in between the two plays. This is not an empty place. It is filled with the possibilities of interpretation, with a hermeneutic task of understanding. These possibilit-

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ies are not in a vacuum. They are, following Paul Ricoeur’s discourse on symbols, bound to symbols because: symbols are already in the element of speech [. . .]. They rescue feeling and even fear from silence and confusion; [. . .] in virtue of them, man remains language through and through. That is not the most important thing: there exists nowhere a symbolic language without hermeneutics; wherever as dreams or raves, another man arises to give an interpretation; what was already discourse, even if incoherent, is brought into coherent discourse by hermeneutics. (350)

The realm in between Marston’s two plays, that is the realm between the happiness and goodness of the comedy and the evil of the tragic drama, is not empty. It does not accept the latter as emerging without any preamble. Instead, the reality of evil is filled with interpretation and not just accepted as a matter of fact. Nor is the reality of evil in Antonio’s Revenge to be refuted on the premise of exaggeration or incongruity. Instead, the evil in Antonio’s Revenge, as conveyed through images, cultural symbols and beliefs grounded in a long cultural history, can be comprehended even if only to a certain degree, thanks to Ricoeur’s insistence upon the value of cultural anthropology. Such a methodological approach can help to uncover layers of meaning hitherto unforeseen. Thus, hermeutics brings up a discourse, an attempt at interpretation and then understanding. That does not negate the notion of mystery because the search in the mythical, the symbolic is not a search for the objective. The modern subject and particularly a post-modern one does not have a trust in the objective anyway. According to Ricoeur, ‘‘the task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to break out of the enchanted enclosure of consciousness of oneself, to end the prerogative of selfreflection’’ (356). Thus, the self-satisfaction of solving and ending a mystery is not the goal. Instead: ‘‘The being which posits itself in the Cogito has to discover that the very act by which it abstracts itself from the whole does not cease to share in the being that challenges it in every symbol’’ (356). Ricoeur acknowledges the problem: ‘‘How the quasi-being and the quasi-nothingness of human evil are articulated upon the being of man and upon the nothingness of his finitude’’ (357). The solution is that ‘‘the transcendental deduction itself must be inscribed in an ontology of finitude and evil that elevates the symbols to the rank of existential concepts,’’ all in the name of an obligation to ‘‘remain constantly concerned with thematizing the universal and rational structure of its [a philosophy first nourished on the fullness of language] adherence’’ (357).

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Of course, this concern for the universal is anathema to a post-modern mantra of relativism, multiplicity, and ideological justification. The investigation of the mythical and the symbolic, however, is not to be apprehended as a throwback to the good old times of a trust in meaning only to be discarded with contempt. The basic assumption of the need to communicate should be acknowledged, and the limitations of understanding should also be acknowledged, not over-imposed as culturally insurmountable obstacles. The cultural grounding of symbols is an alltoo-obvious reality, but their interpretation assumes an all-too-often approach that the pluralism of their transformation and cultural mutation is beyond the task of modern hermeneutics in a post-modern era. It is, nevertheless, very interesting to observe that in the post-modern era, evil has a remarkable staying power in terms of its continuous status as an almost universally acknowledged awareness of the ultimate transgression. The beautiful, the sublime, even the good have their universality eclipsed by an everyday sort of relativism, measured by a practical, mundane sense of variety of daily experience. In post-modern relativism we are not jolted to the awareness of goodness or beauty or sublimity because we have certainly lost the cultural ability to recognize the sublime and name it, and we certainly approach goodness and beauty with an ‘‘in the eye of the beholder’’ attitude. But evil does not seem to be devalued. Naming something good or beautiful in the post-modern era doesn’t call for our awareness of its opposite, but, in the case of evil, the awareness of goodness often springs to mind, as a need to better grasp the nature of evil. In other words, we are now culturally conditioned to question the concept of goodness and particularly beauty, but we are still initially struck by an awareness of evil as a universally shared recognition. This Kantian sense of the subjective as one with the universal does not last, curtailed by comparing notes, so to speak, but still this initial sense of assuredness is contrasted with the much more self-conscious cultural/ ideological approach concerning the beautiful and even the good, which nowadays often assumes an almost automatic tone of apology in anticipation of the plurality of opinions. Even with a lowering of the threshold of sensitivity to violence and devaluation of the concept of vice/sin, we seem to be for a moment trusting our initial identification of evil. This digression into the post-modern sensibility serves as a necessary commentary about the mystery behind the wild exploration of evil in Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge. It seems that the shock and horror of Antonio’s Revenge are delivered with such consistency that they provide an aesthetic unity in an otherwise discordant play, and thus

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underscore the powerful status of evil in the play. In other words, a postmodern reception of the play in the prevailing atmosphere of cultural relativism actually helps to understand it in the context of the concept of evil as the universal of the modern era. The fact that this concept should be studied in light of modern hermeneutics is because hermeneutics can inform the understanding of evil and not grant it a tautological status. In other words, with the absence of objective criteria, as prompted by cultural relativism, the mystery of evil will remain and exist ultimately without any need to be understood. To delve into the explication of the mysterious source of evil lurking somewhere between the two plays is a hermeneutic task which can be helped by the study of the world’s cultural wealth of symbols, concurring with Ricoeur’s trust in a philosophy which: finds man already settled, with a preliminary title, within its foundation. His being there may appear contingent and restricted [. . .]. But, beginning from this contingency a restrictedness of a culture that has hit upon these symbols rather than others, philosophy endeavors, through reflection and speculation, to disclose the rationality of its foundation. (357)

Thus, the hermeneutic task for a critic of these plays is to reach for that ‘‘settled’’ foundation. Paul Ricoeur’s T he Symbolism of Evil is part of that foundation, of course. His answer to the cultural relativism of logical positivism is an investigation of cultural anthropology as an extension of a phenomenological premise of the human being’s immersion in life, culture, and history. Thus, the analysis of Antonio’s Revenge and its representation of evil should profit from a critic’s attempt of grounding it in the findings of cultural anthropology. Ricoeur’s discussion of phenomenology of confession, his study of defilement, particularly the symbolization of stain, his study of sin and guilt point out the fact of how culturally ‘‘advanced’’ we seem now in our application of language to the conceptualization of transgression. At the same time, we realize that at the very core of the cultural baggage we still recognize the basic symbols and myths as orienting us in the cultural ‘‘merging of horizons.’’ Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge is an example of a play which challenges the moral/cultural assumptions of the audience, but it does not tamper with these assumptions. Instead, it appeals to the solid core of beliefs which the audience has to adhere to. Otherwise, the play would be an absurdist, nihilistic exercise in theatrical prowess only. Rather, the symbolic richness of the play, on the one

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hand, and its appeal to an instinctual sense of morality, on the other, can explain the source of the challenging problems in Antonio’s Revenge. Bridgewater State College REFERENCES Marston, John. T he Malcontent and Other Plays. Ed. Keith Sturgess. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Ricoeur, Paul. T he Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon P., 1969.

RAFFAELA GIOVAGNOLI

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRANSLATABILITY AND COMPETENCE

1.

TRANSLATABILITY AND RATIONALITY

The concept of ‘‘translatability’’ may be analyzed within the framework of the discussion on the rationality of the standards that guide the processes of interpretation of the social sciences. In particular, the aspect of the comprehension of the meaning of a symbolic expression must be considered in that it presents different conditions depending on whether a ‘‘relativistic’’ or a ‘‘universalistic’’ position is assumed. Within the totality of the contributions made in the ample debate over this point that has been taking place since the Sixties, I shall highlight the position of Habermas in contrast to the ‘‘strong’’ contextualism of MacIntyre to underline the formal and universal structure of the concept of ‘‘competence’’ understood in a pragmatic sense, which is connected to the use of language. The close connection between ‘‘translatability,’’ as the possibility of the interpretation of a symbolic expression, and ‘‘competence,’’ as the set of universal conditions that structure such a possibility, will be made clear. A first example of the discussion on rationality can be found in the English debate conducted between social scientists and philosophers stimulated by two publications of Peter Winch.1 Returning to the question previously discussed by Hans-Georg Gadamer2 and by Ernst Troeltsch,3 two of its aspects were therein pointed out: the objectivity of comprehension and the compatibility of civilizations and worldviews. These two aspects take us back to the problem of whether or not there are alternative standards of rationality. The problem addressed by the polemics of Habermas is the thesis of Steven Lukes, Alasdair MacIntyre and F. E. Evans-Pritchard.4 The question that concerns Lukes is the following: When I come across a set of beliefs which appear prima facie irrational, what should be my attitude towards them? Should I adopt a critical attitude, taking it as a fact about the beliefs that they are irrational, and seek to explain how they came to be held, how they manage to survive unprofaned by rational criticism, what their consequences are, etc? Or should I treat such beliefs charitably: should I begin from the assumption that what appears to me to be irrational may be interpreted as rational when fully understood in its context?5

Lukes’ thesis is that underlying the decision in favour of the intepretative clarification of the meaning of an expression that prima facie is obscure 245 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 245–260. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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is the assumption of alternative standards of rationality. This thesis also has the support of MacIntyre, who maintains that for the interpretation of an expression that at first sight seems irrational the interpreter may make use of causal hypotheses and preliminary conditions by explaining it in a psychological or sociological manner as the occurrence of an empirical event.6 Habermas’ criticism of these positions points out an important methodological option that confutes the alternative presented by Lukes. In fact, the interpretation of the symbolic expression of subjects capable of language and of action is related to descriptions that refer to the orientation of action and the possible reasons of an actor. In this sense too the interpreter is left with only the possibility of verifying whether an expression ‘‘which is not totally incomprehensible but is only so with regard to certain aspects’’ cannot be considered rational with respect to the implicit assumptions in the context of the agent. This possibility has nothing to do with methodological indulgence but represents a methodological imperative. In this sense it is possible to avoid imposing one’s own standards on foreign cultures as if one’s own standards were universal. This methodological option does not require a pre-decision on alternative standards of rationality. The contextual dependence of the criteria on the basis of which members of different cultures in different periods in time evaluate the validity of expression in a differential manner does not, however, mean that the idea of truth, normative correctness – and that of truthfulness or of authenticity which are fundamental to them – are, if also only intuitively, the choices of the criteria that in equal measure depend on the context.7

In the research of Evans-Pritchard on witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande tribe of Africa, the strategy of Evans-Pritchard in the interpretation of an obscure expression to a high degree consists in the separation of the logical requirement of coherence, which the belief of the people of Zandeland in witches amply satisfies, and the methodological demands that regulate empirical knowledge and technical intervention in natural processes. In interpreting the expressions of the aborigines, the anthropologist makes reference, on the one hand, to a system of rules that holds equally in both realms (the principles of formal logic mastered intuitively), and, on the other hand, to the class of expressions whose operative rules are not problematic, supposing that the reference is to the same concept of the world of entities. The limitation of this model, in the opinion of Habermas, is in the fact that in the case of reference to a world of common entities, the parties cannot make use of any unequivocal

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positing of interpretative rules that are intersubjectively valid. In fact, in cases of obstinate dissent the methods of verification turn out to be strongly linked to the standards considered to be scientific within the ambit of Western culture. Therefore Winch, contrary to Evans-Pritchard, proposes a cultural concept of language along lines similar to those of Wittgenstein’s account of it, where by language Winch means worldviews articulated linguistically and life-forms structured in a corresponding manner. In this context it may be held that each culture produces a reference to reality in its language and that, therefore, concepts such as ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘not real,’’ ‘‘true’’ and ‘‘not true’’ are present in all languages. But it must be underlined that these differentiations into categories are carried out within each linguistic system. Consequently it would be contradictory to suppose that the anthropologist and the aborigine start with the same concept of the world. Regarding the rejection of the universal criteria of truth carried out by Winch, Habermas maintains that worldviews may be compared ‘‘also’’ from the point of view of cognitive adequacy. ‘‘The adequacy of a worldview that is expressed through language is a function of the true sentences that are possible in that linguistic system.’’8 This does not imply that Habermas falls into a form of relativism, because in the fourth ‘‘decisive’’ step of discourse (Diskurs), Habermas introduces universal normative criteria that define ‘‘communicative rationality.’’ While in ordinary practice these criteria are included in the performance of speech acts, in discourses they are idealized reflexively and expressed in the ‘‘ideal speech situation.’’9 The acceptance of a claim to validity is therefore bound to a double universality. The first form of universality is related to linguistic and grammatical competence; the second is related to a communicative competence, one that regulates the interaction and presents universal normative conditions in order to reach an authentic consensus. The theory of communicative competence demonstrates that we have a common basis for the evaluation of worldviews; the interpretations of the world are not therefore absolutely incommensurable. We can count on assurances of rationality that transcend context, that generally permit translations from one context into another. 2.

TRANSLATION AND TRADITION

At this point, I would like to introduce the critical observations made by Habermas regarding MacIntyre’s interpretation of the relation between

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translation and tradition, this in order to bring out the effectiveness of formal pragmatics. This comparison can be made in the ambit of the contemporary debate on rationality that involves philosophers such as Rorty, Davidson and Putnam. MacIntyre’s conception rests on two fundamental theses: a) there is no rationality that transcends context but only forms of rationality that depend on tradition; b) a productive communication between self-enclosed traditions is possible because it is possible to learn from foreign traditions. The recognition of the rational superiority of a foreign tradition is justified when the subjects that learn can compare the capacity for clarification of both traditions as regards the same problems. MacIntyre’s theory of ‘‘adherent’’ but non-complete translation clarifies the fact that traditions must communicate among themselves without assuming common criteria of rationality. A precondition of the adherents of two different traditions understanding those traditions as rival and competing is of course that in some significant measure they understand each other. This understanding is sometimes to be achieved only by a set of related historical transformations; either or both of the traditions may have had to enrich itself significantly in order to be able to provide a representation of some of the characteristic positions of the other, and this enrichment will have involved both conceptual and linguistic innovation, and quite possibly social innovation too.10

Understanding a tradition on the part of members of another tradition may present, for MacIntyre, consequences of various types: one may come to discover that a question that distinguishes the two traditions cannot be decided, or, but in rare cases only, one may recognize that the point of view of the other tradition offers better resources for understanding the problem and the themes faced in one’s own tradition. These preliminary observations indicate the criticism that MacIntyre makes of those philosophers who maintain that common criteria of rational evaluation exist. In this sense, the possibility of translating implies commensurability and not only carrying out the work of translation but also identifying with the speakers of a different language, belonging therefore to a foreign culture, in that the speakers have minds. The target of these polemics is, in the first place, Davidson who maintains that ‘‘finding the common ground is not subsequent to understanding, but a condition of it. A creature that cannot in principle be understood in terms of our own beliefs, values, and modes of communication is not a creature that may have thoughts radically different from our own: it is a creature without what we mean by thoughts.’’11

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MacIntyre supports his theses on the type of relations between different traditions that are incompatible with the arguments of Davidson. To illustrate this incompatibility the types of relations of ‘‘translatability’’ and ‘‘non-translatability’’ must be identified and taken as ‘‘key elements’’ of the concept of translation, as ‘‘rival conceptual schemes’’ that undergo a historical evolution. The research of MacIntyre must not be considered as a further step towards a more fundamental level. The polemic here is concentrated on a semantics that ‘‘has been highly abstract and uninformed for the most part by attention to empirical enquiry either about the differing uses of language in specific cultures or about the historical transformations of languages.’’12 For MacIntyre the substance of the translation is synonymous with the totality of the peculiar assertions and actions of a particular culture; in this sense there is no ‘‘English on its own as such’’ or ‘‘Hebrew on its own as such.’’ Consequently, wherever one wishes to extend one ‘‘linguistic community’’ to another, it is first necessary, on the one hand, to identify within the new language the types of assertions that have value as examples of ways of saying the same things affirmed by certain assertions in the language or in the languages through which the tradition has expressed itself up to that moment and, on the other hand, to identify that which cannot be said in the new language. The identification of untranslatable matters that occurs in translation may be of two types: translation through saying things in the same manner and translation through linguistic innovation.13 Languages can be compared and contrasted ‘‘in respect of the degree to which some particular language-in-use is tied by its vocabulary and its linguistic uses to a particular set of beliefs, the beliefs of some specific tradition, so that to reject or modify radically the beliefs will require some corresponding kind of linguistic transformation.’’14 Following the lessons of the anthropologists and of Quine, MacIntyre maintains the thesis that to understand a language it is necessary to be thrown into a foreign culture. From this thesis a second emerges: learning a language and acquiring understanding of a culture are not independent activities. In this sense the rites, the tastes, the choices and the silences can ‘‘occasionally’’ express assertions and the assertions themselves will be a class of actions ‘‘exactly as the actions are classified.’’ Given these two theses it is easy to understand the nature of the ‘‘untranslatable.’’ It may be of various types. In the first instance a lack of conceptual linguistic resources may present itself in one of the two languages concerned. Furthermore there may be cultural barriers militating against apprehension of the true meaning of a term. MacIntyre cites the example of the

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procedure for naming people and places described in studies carried out in 1962 by Robin Fox on Tory Island near the north coast of Donegal.15 The manner of naming people falls under three different fundamental procedures: one used in Irish in relatively formal circumstances; one used in the daily interaction in which Irish is the common language, but in which English can ‘‘also’’ be used; and one used in English in relation to external figures (used in British or Irish Government proceedings). The names of the second and third types sufficiently distinguish a person of the community. In the second case there is the addition of the name of a family member or of a particular characteristic that supplies further information: a man whose grandfather was an immigrant was called ‘‘Owen-John-Dooley from Malin.’’16 In the use of names, therefore, necessarily there are presupposed beliefs concerning family relations. The logic of the term ‘‘necessarily’’ is reconstructed by MacIntyre in his controversy with Kripke. In Naming and Necessity17 Kripke had maintained that when we use the name ‘‘Aristotle’’ we cannot mean partly, for example, the master of Alexander. In fact, it is always possible that Aristotle may not be the ‘‘master of Alexander,’’ and this discovery could not be expressed if ‘‘master of Alexander’’ were part of the meaning of the name ‘‘Aristotle.’’ In MacIntyre’s opinion this argument does not demonstrate that the names of persons have or cannot have informative content. Rather the names of people either lack informative content, or it is true that their use does presuppose beliefs, so that if it were discovered that these beliefs were false, it would not be possible to continue to use the name in the same manner. This latter possibility is therefore proposed by MacIntyre to demonstrate that in the system of naming persons on Tory Island and in many other systems of naming, names are used on the basis of assumptions that are true, certain beliefs that are solidly rooted in the social system. Therefore, it is not possible to translate by ‘‘simply’’ reproducing a name or one version of it, but the use of a name must be accompanied by an explanation of that name or, if it be the case, of the whole system of naming. These observations emphasize the role of paraphrase and explanation as an indispensable part of the work of translating. Another example of how names convey more than the simple reference is given by two rival place names, ‘‘Doire Columcille’’ in Irish and ‘‘Londonderry’’ in English. ‘‘Doire Columcille’’ is a descriptive name, ‘‘the sepulcre of oak of Saint Colomba,’’ and expresses the intention of a particular community – Irish and Catholic – to name a place that has had a constant identity since 1564. ‘‘Londonderry,’’ on the other hand,

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expresses the intention of another particular community – Protestant and English-speaking – to denote a settlement dating to the seventeenth century. The use of one of these two names implies denial of the legitimacy of the other. This demonstrates that there is no way of translating ‘‘Doire Columcille’’ in English apart from using ‘‘Doire Columcille’’ in English and supplying an explanation. The question that comes to mind at this point is the following: ‘‘What then happens to the use of such names when they are used to identify those persons or places whose names they are by someone from outside the community, by, for example, a stranger who had noticed a place name, the name on a map but knows nothing of the background beliefs governing and presupposed by its intracommunical use?’’18 The foreigner has two ways of using this name. He/she can identify a place by using its name, or he/she can use it to identify that place by means of a name that effectively serves the function of identification. In this second manner the name is used ‘‘simply’’ as a referential expression. Naming has then become detached from naming as and naming for, and the relationship of the name to that which it names is reduced to that which holds between any identifying label successfully used and that of which it is used. What makes two uses of ‘‘Londonderry’’ or ‘‘Aristotle’’ uses of one and the same name, when employed in this way, is no more and no less than that they are uses of tokens of the same spoken or written type used of the same object. The absence of shared background beliefs makes any informational context attached to the names redundant to their function as names.19

Pure reference is therefore an artificial product of a particular type of cultural and social system. In this system the relationship between names and their bearers is associated – almost without difficulty – with the relation between names and their bearers in a version of the first order predicative calculus, creating the illusion that a unique essential relation of reference exists. A second problem of ‘‘the translatable’’ concerns translation from a language-in-use in a community linked by a particular system of belief into a language of another community having beliefs relating to the same ‘‘key-sector’’ that turn out to be highly incompatible with those of the first community. In this case beliefs may be not only incompatible but also incommensurable. The incommensurable nature of the two schemes of belief does not however preclude their logical incompatibility. Examples of such incommensurability can be drawn from the beliefs expressed in rival schemes of naming. The translator from language-in-use A to language-in-use B of such a scheme will have to explain the scheme of naming in A to those whose language is B in

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terms of the beliefs of the members of this latter community. The scheme of naming in A, that is, will have to be explained in terms of its differences from naming in B, but so to explain will be to exhibit A’s scheme of naming as lacking in justification, as in some ways defective. To understand the translation-plus-explanation into B will entail for those whose language is B rejecting the beliefs so explained.20

The problem of the translatable is further complicated by two characteristics of language-in-use. The first may be a consequence of the manner in which the schemes of common belief, the basis of comprehension, permit a speaker who says something to be able to make the people he/she is speaking to understand certain other things. The second characteristic introduces the criticism of MacIntyre concerning the criteria for the translation of languages internationally. Learning a repertory of sentences that a language-in-use prepares for the foreigner does not mean ‘‘mastering’’ a language. The foreigner expresses himself through units in which each expression or each small group of expressions has a discrete function. In this sense, the expressions (types, not tokens) associated with expressions or with similar small groups of expressions in the language of the speaker (both associated with certain contexts) normally produce the effect desired by the speaker, by means of the use of corresponding tokens. The measure of the success in making such an association is therefore of a pragmatic nature. This type of ‘‘know-how’’ is not the same thing as the mastering of a language-in-use, which allows one to go from the use of an expression in the context of one discourse to a use that is notably different for the same expression in the context of another discourse and therefore introduces innovations, thus inventing a third type of use for this expression. Someone who knows that it is appropriate to assent to ‘‘Snow is white’’ if and when snow is white does not as yet thereby evidence a grasp of ‘‘white’’ in English. Such a grasp would be evidenced by being able to say, for example, ‘‘Snow is white and so are the members of the Ku Klux Klan, and white with fear is what they were in snow-covered Arkansas last Friday’’. That is the kind of things you cannot learn how to say from phrase books or indeed from any recursively enumerable set of individual English sentences.21

Finally, a further type of problem arises when it is necessary to make a translation ‘‘from’’ a language-in-use ‘‘into’’ one of the international languages of modern times. MacIntyre is of the opinion that these international languages have two characteristics: on the one hand they are linked in a very general manner with any given set of controversial beliefs, and on the other they allow various modes of characterization and explanation within foreign schemes of systematic belief that are not based on any

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substantial standard of truth and rationality. Abstraction from the context of a tradition takes place because the international languages in their concrete use have a ‘‘minimum of presumptions’’ compared to any rival system of beliefs; consequently their common criteria for the application of concepts such as ‘‘it is true’’ and ‘‘it is reasonable’’ prove to be equally minimal. This neutralization takes place for the following reason: The conceptions of truth and rationality become not part of a presupposed framework of beliefs to which the author appeals in addressing an audience who shares or shared that same framework but are relegated to an explanation to an audience characterized as not possessing any such framework. The particular history out of which the author wrote and which it is his or her purpose to carry one stage further also disappears from view as the presupposed context of the work and appears instead, if at all, as an explanatory appendage to it.22

This is the distortion that, in MacIntyre’s opinion, would give the illusion that nothing is untranslatable. 3.

TRANSLATABILITY AND COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

With reference to the ‘‘zone of the untranslatable,’’ MacIntyre, on the one hand, explains the manner in which individuals belonging to different traditions can communicate in general among themselves; on the other hand, he states the reasons why the same individuals, if they enter such a zone, can recognize the superiority of another tradition. The argument of MacIntyre – if we follow the criticism of Habermas – appears to be inconsistent. In fact, it makes use of paraphrase in an irrelevant manner in that it demonstrates the incommensurability of two linguistic worlds by paraphrasing instances taken from each in a third language (English). Paraphrasing is not identical to translating; rather, MacIntyre should have demonstrated the untranslatability of key expressions. But MacIntyre’s use of paraphrasing has resulted in a contradiction, in that it solves the problem of untranslatability, which he wished to demonstrate, in a third language.23 These observations place the emphasis on the problem of identity. ‘‘How would a subject have to be constituted who in the course of communicating with a member of a foreign tradition comes upon something that is absolutely untranslatable?’’24 On the hypothesis of inflexible identity (this would seem to implicate the argument of MacIntyre), the speaker has these alternatives: changing identity through a sort of ‘‘conversion’’ to another form of life that is considered superior, or acquiring

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a second identity that in the circumstance cannot mediate his/her first identity, which is strongly linked with the context of origin. ‘‘In both cases there would no longer be a subject to which to ascribe the experience of the change of identity or of the split in personality.’’25 To any speaker with an inflexible identity it is therefore equally impossible to ascribe the experience of the incommensurability of linguistic worlds and of the untranslatability of their constitutive expressions; in fact, during this experience his/her identity would change. It is more realistic to assume, in the case of bilingualism, an identity that has been amplified bilingually and is flexible, which makes it possible to put the language and the rationality of both his/her worlds of origin into a relationship that is such as to fuse them into a horizon of possible understanding. It is this fusion that takes place within the person him/ herself that makes it possible to express the difficulties of translating by means of various paraphrases instead (even in a third language). In this sense, the ‘‘pseudoproblem’’ of the absolutely untranslatable must be solved ‘‘ ‘before’ the more or less radical zones of difficulty of translation can be generally identified.’’ Translatability cannot, therefore, be tied entirely to the exercise of translating. Consequently, there is a knowledge prior to that, one which proceeds according to universal rules and has to do with the formation of identity. This knowledge is expressed by the competence in the use of the language that the speaker acquires in the process of socialization. In this context the position of Habermas is rather close to that of Putnam in the criticism of Rorty’s contextualism. In fact, Habermas holds that an idealized concept of truth or of validity is necessary in order to explain why we learn in a reflexive manner, why, that is, we are able to improve our own standards of rationality. The ‘‘fusion of horizons’’ theorized by Gadamer and also adduced – even if in a different context – by MacIntyre does not have the sense of a non-critical assimilation as much as that of a ‘‘convergence’’ regulated by means of reciprocal learning. Even in the most complex process of reaching understanding all the participants rely on the common reference point of a possible consensus, even if this be actually conceived starting from the particular context of each participant. In fact concepts like truth, rationality and justification play the same grammatical role in every linguistic community, in spite of the fact that they are interpreted differently and applied according to different criteria.26

Habermas analyzes the competence that orients interactive praxis and that includes the rational conditions of comprehension among speakers. In this context the Wittgensteinian analysis of those linguistic games that

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are based on a logical and conceptual plane, not on that of an empirically oriented pragmatics, become relevant. The grammar of a linguistic game consists in the rules for the contextual utilization of symbolic expressions. These rules, however, are constitutive, because they serve to constitute the situations of possible use of the symbolic expressions. In this sense the ‘‘communicative’’ life-form turns out to be the grammar of the linguistic game. A fruitful approach based on the Wittgensteinian model is that of Chomsky, one that clearly identifies the levels on which a formal pragmatics can be articulated.27 Generative grammar is considered important by Habermas for two reasons. In the first place it is a universalist research strategy: the reconstruction of the system of rules of a language must be carried out at higher and higher levels of generalization in order to identify the pragmatic universals that are fundamental to each individual language. Secondly, generative grammar operates on two levels; in fact it is projected as a transformational grammar. The linked symbolic expressions are regarded as superficial structures that are formed upon a base of deep structures through the use of rules of transformation. To every deep structure, therefore, may be associated a class of paraphrases in superficial structures. This construction, which has been demonstrated empirically, also serves the grammatical clarification of ambiguous meanings. The concept of ‘‘ideal speaker’’ introduced by Chomsky underlines the relationship between the concept of the validity of grammar rules and the complementary concept of the competence of the rules. Such an idealization has an ontological dimension, which arises from the principle that the system of linguistic rules develops on the genetic foundation of the cooperation of evolutionary processes conditioned organically by processes of stimulation specified by phases. To this principle is associated a second according to which all the participants in a linguistic community, i.e., those who have undergone the average level of socialization insofar as they have learnt to speak, master the system of linguistic rules completely. In this sense linguistic performance is explained with reference to innate linguistic competence and external conditions that limit that competence. This last point refers to the fact that if linguistic competence can be represented as passive linguistic mastery (comprehension), then the active mastery of the language (performance) can be explained by means of psychological variables (memory, attention, emotion, inhibition, etc.). This assumption has been criticized from the point of view of sociolinguistics. It would follow that the use of linguistic competence can be

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explained by means of a system of rules. These rules represent systems of pragmatic rules or linguistic codes that determine the use of those expressions that are adequate to the situation. Such codes are not fixed permanently, but they constitute cultural ‘‘signs.’’ In spite of this, and this shows again the distance between the positions of Habermas and MacIntyre, they are an idealization. In fact for each single code there is a corresponding competence of the rules that must always be based on linguistic competence. In this sense ‘‘no one can master a dialect or a jargon until he/she has learnt a natural language.’’28 The differentiated subdivisions of pragmatic competencies do not allow for the neglect of idealizations. It is only that other empirical assumptions regarding the acquisition of these competencies are necessary. Pragmatic competencies like linguistic competence in the real sense (or grammatical competence) are expressed in an implicit knowledge, that is, in the judgments of the speakers on the acceptability of linguistic expressions. Formal pragmatics must therefore distinguish between ‘‘grammaticality’’ and ‘‘acceptability.’’ In the words of Wunderlich: ‘‘The former is a property of chains of symbols that are produced as sentences by a grammar; the latter is a property of chains of symbols that appear in communicative contexts and, upon being spoken, can be evaluated by different speakers in different ways. Both properties can be explained theoretically, the former in the grammatical, the latter in the pragmatic application of language.’’29 According to Habermas it is therefore possible to reconstruct the general structures of communication that underlie the concept of linguistic code itself. In fact, with the performance of a speech act the conditions under which the sentences can be expressed also come to light in a performative sense. If, for example, the following statement be uttered, ‘‘I promise you I’ll come tomorrow,’’ not only is a promise expressed but a promise is made. It therefore becomes evident that a speech act besides having a linguistic meaning also possesses an institutional meaning. In performing a speech act the general conditions for the contextualization of expressions come to light, and they refer to structure, that is to say, to linguistic expressions that are called pragmatic universals. A theory of communicative competence must therefore explain the skills that speaker and listener must put to use with the help of pragmatic universals when they use sentences. The study of pragmatic universals aims at explaining the internal ‘‘reflexivity’’ of natural languages. This point should be emphasized because it is on this phenomenon that the ability of the speaker who is

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competent to paraphrase any expression of a language in the same language is based.30 Contrary to MacIntyre, for Habermas this capacity is not ‘‘poetic’’ but is related to the functioning of a double structure that realizes the elementary association of a performative expression and the content of a proposition: communication concerning objects or facts takes place under the conditions of a simultaneous meta-communication on the meaning of the use of the dependent sentences. Formal pragmatics must therefore satisfy the demands of the simultaneity of communication and meta-communication through studies of the system of rules for use of the ordinary language regardless of particular contexts. The innate reflexivity of natural languages arises from reference to the cognitive use and the communicative use of language. In the cognitive use of language, communication is the means by which the speakers understand each other concerning objects or states of affairs: they supply the theme, that is, the propositional content. In this sense the propositional content is only mentioned in order to establish performatively a defined intersubjective relationship between the speaker and the listener. Habermas therefore proposes a pragmatics of the cognitive use of language and of the cognitive use to which correspond certain pragmatic universals.31 The competence concerning the capacity of the socialized subject that allows comprehension to take place can be divided into different types: cognitive, linguistic and communicative. These types form the ‘‘flexible’’ identity of the individual, which can be contrasted, in a normative sense, to the ‘‘rigid’’ identity that is inevitably assumed by MacIntyre. In this context linguistic, cognitive and communicative skills can be analyzed, in the opinion of Habermas, from universal points of view, that is, independently of specific cultures. The confirmation of the existence of universal structures according to which cognitive, linguistic and interactive capacities are developed may easily be found in the studies of psychology and the other social sciences.32 The hypothesis of Habermas concerns the existence of a system of delimitations of the id and is expressed in the following thesis: We can say that the self [das Ich] constitutes itself in a system of delimitations, one in which subjectivity having an internal nature is defined over against the objectivity of a perceptible external nature, the norms of the society and the intersubjectivity of language. Nevertheless the self knows itself not only as subjectivity but also as a proceeding, one that ‘‘already and always’’ has gone beyond the limits of subjectivity in knowledge, language and interaction simultaneously.33

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The formation of the identity of the self returns to the ontological beginnings of ‘‘imputability’’ (Zurechnungsfa¨higkeit), which develops in four stages: symbolic, egocentric, sociocentric/objective and universalistic. This process of decentralization can be explained in a systematic manner, and this is the original contribution in the proposal of Habermas, only if we can demonstrate the existence of corresponding structures in the medium by means of which the subject carries out the process of delimitation, that is, in language. The formal pragmatics that rest on the concepts of the speech act, illocutory force, the immutability of the content of assertions, objective and intersubjective planes and claims of validity yield results that can be summarized in three fundamental theses. The first thesis concerns the so-called ‘‘regional delimitation’’ that is evident in carrying out the speech act. In fact, in the speech act, the speaker simultaneously raises four validity claims: the claim of truth for the assumption of the existence of a mentioned propositional contribution, the correctness of the norm that justifies an intersubjective relation instituted in given contexts, the truthfulness of the representation of self of the subject in his/her intentions and the comprehensibility of the propositions used. This universal structure of validity claims is explainable only in language that demarcates external nature, society, internal nature and the language itself in this way. The second thesis shows how we represent reality, society and personality through the use of linguistic universals. To make reality objective each single language has a system of reference that permits an identification that is sufficiently clear about something in the world about which something must be asserted. In fact, in each language the means for the classification, relationship, location and the dating of an object of possible experience are available. For deeper communication within the normative reality of society each individual language has a system of personal pronouns and a system of non-speech acts with which we establish interpersonal relationships (performative verbs and equivalent functional forms). For the self-representation of subjectivity each individual language has a system of intentional expressions that, in spite of the wide variation of linguistic formations, reflects the system of the delimitations against which the self hones itself. The last thesis is embodied in the concept of linguistic development according to levels that are distinguished depending on the degree of differentiation between speaking and acting as well as by means of the degree of integration of speaking and knowing. These stages are: the level of the interaction that is mediated through symbols, the degree of the

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interaction that is proportionally differentiated and the degree of the argumentative practice of ‘‘discourse.’’ The theorization of this final stage is essential to establishing the ideal conditions under which it is possible to advance validity claims, to distinguish, therefore, in a ‘‘procedural’’ sense, that is, without a substantive standard of truth and rationality, the real from the false, the just from the unjust, the true from the untrue and the correct from the incorrect.34 NOTES 1 P. Winch, T he Ideas of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958); Idem, ‘‘Understanding a Primitive Society,’’ in B. R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), pp. 78ff. 2 H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1960). 3 E. Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (Tu¨bingen, Mohr, 1922). 4 T. McCarthy, ‘‘The Problem of Rationality in Social Anthropology,’’ Stony Brook Studies in Philosophy 1, 1974, pp. 1–21; Idem, T he Critical T heory of Ju¨rgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), pp. 317ff. 5 S. Lukes, ‘‘Some Problems about Rationality,’’ in Wilson (ed.), op. cit., p. 194. 6 Cf. A. MacIntyre, ‘‘The Idea of Social Science,’’ in Wilson (ed.), op. cit. 7 J. Habermas, T heorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), p. 88. 8 Ibid., p. 93. 9 Cfr. J. Habermas, Vorstudien und Erga¨nzungen zur T heorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 127–183. 10 A. MacIntyre, W hose Justice? W hich Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 370. 11 D. Davidson, Expressing Evaluations (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1984), p. 20. 12 A. MacIntyre, op. cit., p. 371. 13 Cf. ibid., pp. 371–373. 14 Ibid., p. 374. 15 R. Fox, ‘‘Structure of Personal Names on Tory Island,’’ Man (1963); reprinted in R. Fox, Encounter with Anthropology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), Ch. 8, ‘‘Personal Names,’’ pp. 176–189; 2nd expanded ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1991), pp. 156–167. 16 We can find a subtle satire of this system of naming in R. Quenau, L es oeuvres comple`tes de Sally Mara (Paris: E´ditions Gallimard, 1962). 17 S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 18 MacIntyre, op. cit., pp. 378–379. 19 Ibid., p. 379. 20 Ibid., p. 380. 21 Ibid., p. 382. 22 Ibid., pp. 384–385. 23 J. Habermas, Erla¨uterungen zur Diskursethik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp. 213–216. 24 Ibid., p. 216.

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25 Ibid., pp. 216–217. 26 J. Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 178. 27 Cfr. Habermas, Vorstudien, op. cit., pp. 11–126. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 88. 30 Cfr. D. S. Shwayder, T he Stratification of Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965). 31 Cfr. Habermas, Vorstudien, op. cit., pp. 83–104. 32 In this context Habermas refers to the studies of Piaget, Freud, Mead, Flavell and Selman. 33 Habermas, Vorstudien, op. cit., pp. 194–195. 34 We can find a pragmatic interpretation of the ideal conditions of the discourse in J. Habermas, ‘‘Rorty’s pragmatische Wende,’’ Deutsche Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie 44 (1996), pp. 715–741.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Davidson, D. Expressing Evaluations. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1984. Habermas, J. T heorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. Habermas, J. Vorstudien und Erga¨nzungen zur T heorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Habermas, J. Erla¨uterungen zur Diskursethik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991. Habermas, J. ‘‘Rorty’s pragmatische Wende,’’ Deutsche Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie 44 (1996), pp. 715–741. Kripke, S. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. MacIntyre, A. ‘‘The Idea of Social Science,’’ in B. R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1970. MacIntyre, A. W hose Justice? W hich Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Wilson, B. R. (ed.), Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1970.

SECTION IV

HOWARD PEARCE

WALLACE STEVENS’S POETRY OF ‘‘THE STRANGE UNLIKE’’

. . . Saving a little to endow Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs The difference that heavenly pity brings. Wallace Stevens, ‘‘To the One of Fictive Music’’ It can never be satisfied, the mind, never. Wallace Stevens, ‘‘The Well Dressed Man with a Beard’’

Essential to the poetry of Wallace Stevens is a dramatized aesthetic need that echoes phenomenological themes, not only observable in the thought of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also traceable in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and recent ‘‘possible worlds’’ theory.1 The reiterated concern is for the need to find fulfillment in this life, in this world, and for acknowledging the impediments that derive from a priori proscriptions to that fulfillment. Calling for satisfaction in this world, which as ‘‘this’’ seems to be a comfortably closed dimension, would seem to generate a shallow hedonism. Yet ‘‘this’’ world, considered pragmatically and phenomenologically, becomes less a closed system, more a concatenation of possibilities and opportunities. The angels that must be struggled with are voices from the past that have constituted a world-understanding as idealism opposed to realism, or as otherworldliness in conflict with this-worldliness. These conflicts turn around the essential human problems of knowledge and being, of a being in a world, experiencing it, troubled by the gap between knowing and the known. Heidegger saw the establishment of thought as not merely the building of philosophy but also the covering up of essential truths, a historical attainment resulting in the need to uncover, realizable in his conceptualization of truth as alethia – unforgetting or uncovering. For Heidegger both strife and interdependence appear in the relationships of world and earth.2 In T he Birth of T ragedy Nietzsche dramatized the difficulty and imagined a resolution in the resurgence of the Dionysian, first in opposition to the Apollonian and at length reconciled with it in Greek tragedy. 263 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 263–298. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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The Dionysian recovers human involvement with the earth and releases power of earthly beings. One problematic theme running through the philosophy and poetry I am exploring here is the essential reduction of a world to a coherence read as the factuality of earth or the transcendent reality of some other dimension, expressed as the abstractions of science or the truths of religion. This abstraction is underlain by the essential difficulty of the individual subjectivity in relation to the objects of knowledge – as ideas, as objects of perception or imagination, as earth and world, as possible worlds. The accomplishments of Husserl’s phenomenological and eidetic reductions, both as anticipating clarity and certainty in their eventual outcomes and as attempts to establish a method with assurance, might be seen ironically as moving toward assurances that can come as gainfully, perhaps more so, when they are acts of the imagination rather than of perception.3 The residual air of tentativeness and anticipation recalls the way James’s ‘‘radical empiricism’’ probes the reigning ‘‘empiricism’’ in order to affirm the event of experience in a way that anticipates Husserl’s phenomenological reduction.4 I have been circling around what seem to be two essential aspects of the need to achieve unity, coherence: on the one hand is the individual consciousness, the activity of knowing the not-self; and on the other is the nature of the world or worlds, the negotiations between the one and the other possible worlds. Stevens’s dramatization of the events of experience presents experience, the self in relationship with world and others, as an accomplishment of uniting. In those events the center of connection – if it can be said to stand as a center, that fragile moment, and metaphorically appropriate to Husserl’s endeavor, or if it should be thought of as a horizon – retains a quality of uncertainty, a questionableness, that again and again leaves the event as in an aura of mystery or awe. The ‘‘difficulty’’ of Stevens’s poetry is not always to be found and explained as at this site, but the affirmation of a mysterious ‘‘epiphany’’ often leaves the event shrouded in the ineffable. The impulse toward transcendence is readily discernible in Stevens’s work, as noted for instance in Janet McCann’s observation that ‘‘the interplay of forces in Stevens’s work reflects a lifelong search for a new metaphysic’’ (ix); McCann argues that the later work ‘‘becomes phenomenological and finally mystical, developing a complex aesthetic that either bridges or transcends opposites’’ (my emphasis). Anthony Libby considers the ‘‘mystical’’ in Stevens’s poetry, emphasizing the tradition of the via negativa of St. John of the Cross and its persistence from medieval thought. Although for Libby the manifestation of mysticism in

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Stevens’s poetry is ‘‘more hesitant and vague’’ than in Eliot’s (17), Stevens seems to move ‘‘toward acceptance of the supreme fiction as a valid bridge, sometimes mystical, between poet and world’’ (47).5 I would argue that the impulse in Stevens’s negotiations is bi-directional, paradoxically toward both the ‘‘beyond’’ and toward the earth. The human yearning in Stevens’s poetry is for both the absent fulfillment – heaven, the pastoral retreat, the ideal, perfection – and the humanly achievable ‘‘touches’’ and ‘‘sounds’’ of earth and others. The countermovements are, on the one hand, toward the ‘‘fragrant portals’’ and ‘‘ghostlier demarcations’’ of a ‘‘blessed rage to order’’ (‘‘Idea of Order at Key West’’)6 and, on the other, a response to the appeal of the ‘‘intelligible twittering’’ of birds that is more gratifying than ‘‘unintelligible thought’’ (‘‘The Hermitage at the Center,’’ 430). In ‘‘The Man on the Dump,’’ for instance, the man’s passion is for both immediate, concrete, sensual realization and for transcendence. The dump is furnished with things of earth, ‘‘So the sun, / And so the moon, both come. . . . / The freshness of night has been fresh a long time’’ (CPP 184–86). But this world is fundamentally the place of detritus, ‘‘papers from a press . . . / the wrapper on the can of pears . . . / the corset, the box / From Esthonia.’’ The flowers of spring produce ‘‘disgust’’ as do the things on the dump, because they too will end up there: ‘‘The dump is full / Of images.’’ Images are not experienced as the direct apprehension of essences Husserl sought in the eidetic reduction, but are ‘‘loaded.’’ They are the human accoutrements made out of or in imitation of natural objects: ‘‘How many men have copied dew / For buttons, how many women have covered themselves / With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew.’’ They are thus representational rather than essential. Becoming encrustations, these accomplishments are no more than aesthetic trifles that must all end on the dump. And this man on the dump experiences the need not to just realize being on the dump, but to transcend that kind of transformation as devolvement into trash. At the center of the poem he expresses his revulsion to the things made in this aesthetics, a temporal aesthetic of the adornments of time that ever and always descend toward the dump. He can at this point affirm that, ‘‘One feels the purifying change. One rejects / The trash.’’ His metamorphosis is not a rising away from the dump, however, or a repudiation of the world as dump, but a recovery of a kind of innocence in affirming the earth and accepting ‘‘what will suffice’’ (‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ CPP 218–19).

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The mystery of transformation constitutes a world in immediacy and, improbably, in the affirmation of transcendence that does not rely on already imagined or ‘‘philosophized’’ schemata of reality. The ‘‘freshness’’ that is there, even, we might say, on the dump, is earth’s persistent freshness: ‘‘One says / That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs / More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.’’ As the first century B.C. Roman historian ‘‘reads’’ – the text might be his own historicizing, his own conversion of experience into the language of history, into images – the freshness puffs; and we and this man of our time on our created version of reality, the dump, are capable still of experiencing the freshness. The central mystery and core of realization is the individual’s performance in affirming the constitution of self as ‘‘there,’’ like Heidegger’s da-sein, and as capable of realizing the self in ‘‘the purifying change.’’ ‘‘What one wants to get near’’ is, as so expressed, perhaps ‘‘after all . . . merely oneself.’’ To know that the dump is a world of detritus is to make and to become possibility. If what is ‘‘found’’ is a ‘‘philosopher’s honeymoon,’’ the inherited ‘‘images’’ are known to be images, ideas, adornments. If ‘‘one sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail,’’ it is possible to re-imagine what has become accepted as images on the dump, to call for ‘‘aptest eve,’’ ‘‘invisible priest,’’ which may be revitalizable archetypes, and to ‘‘cry stanza my stone.’’ The capacity to make music, poetry, is endowed by the reduction to a Husserlean essentiality. As the poem begins, the moon comes up as one of the images, and the sun too is an image, an architectural construct, a ‘‘corbeil of flowers,’’ and with the ‘‘purifying change’’ at the poem’s center: ‘‘The moon comes up as the moon / (All its images are in the dump) and you see / As a man (not like an image of a man), / You see the moon rise in the empty sky.’’ Direct, clear, honest perception, seeing directly and without past constituted ways of seeing, makes possible the final affirmation of renewal and possibility. The call for potential transformation in ‘‘stanza my stone’’ is, paradoxically or mysteriously, neither flatly a call to the self nor to another being existing objectively – a god or muse, perhaps. The isolated ‘‘merely oneself ’’ is finally not isolated but, in a miraculous transcendence or ineffable epiphany, capable of projecting toward, of invoking, other imagined or real beings. The renewal is a ‘‘freshness’’ that, like the being who could ‘‘stanza my stone,’’ is neither flatly objective nor subjective. The freshness sought is the need to recover or rediscover the ‘‘first idea’’ of ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’’: ‘‘It is the celestial ennui of apartments / That sends us back to the first idea’’ (330).

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That journey, or return, provoked by the ‘‘freshness’’ that perpetually plays around us, is not ‘‘philosophical,’’ then, in the sense that philosophical thought is embedded in the word, naming, logos. The poem plays off the fixative nature of language in naming as opposed to the instigative activity of becoming. Adam’s naming the animals was concomitant to his gaining ‘‘dominion’’ in the world; his history, and ours, was a process of action, the discovery and revelation of self in the process of becoming. The man on the dump’s ‘‘purifying change’’ is phenomenological process, activity. The attempts to name and build images through language are the source of the revulsion and transformation mid-way in the poem. And the final, mysteriously expressed insight or discovery in the last line of the poem does not declare but points toward a truth: ‘‘Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.’’ As the reader engages in this process, the ineffable truth leads perhaps, reflexively, to a recognition that the language here and in the poem establishes truth by naming, and names – nouns – are preceded by the the, a direct rather than indirect pointing to the ‘‘object,’’ image, name. The poem begins with such pronounced naming accompanied by the definite article: ‘‘T he moon is creeping up. / T he sun is a corbeil of flowers, the moon Blanche places there. . . . T he dump is full of images.’’ The locale in which we ‘‘first heard of the truth,’’ then, is in the ‘‘the,’’ the preparation for the identity. Recalling the ‘‘scrawny cry’’ that is sounded in ‘‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself ’’ (451–52) we might correlate the action of the man on the dump with the event of a beginning, an ‘‘earliest ending of winter.’’ In ‘‘Not Ideas . . .’’ the mere sound, the ‘‘scrawny cry,’’ is preparatory and must be attended to in the emergence of the full-blown, symbolic ‘‘colossal sun.’’ The frail cry is part of that grand image, and ‘‘it’’ – evidently the cry – ‘‘was like / A new knowledge of reality.’’ The ‘‘new knowledge of reality’’ likewise comes in ‘‘The Man on the Dump’’ as a provocative final line about origins of the truth in the diminutive and seemingly inconsequential, a ‘‘cry,’’ a ‘‘the.’’ * * * To the extent that Husserl’s thought can be seen in relation to this event of clarification and transformation, however, his concern is admittedly not with anything mysterious. His commitment is to refining a new approach to what had been a painfully ubiquitous split between the world and the experience of it. His hope is to achieve the assurance of a process or technique that yields certainty. Nevertheless, the site of that split

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manifests what may be thought of as the persistent and recurring mystery of what is not yet experienced but remains possible. As for Heidegger the ‘‘withdrawal’’ is perhaps what is most central to the act of experiencing,7 the experience for Husserl retains an element of anticipation and, in the possibility of seeing afresh, allows for revision and correction. In the ‘‘stream of mental processes,’’ in ‘‘this primal form of consciousness,’’ the ‘‘mental process which has become an Object of an Ego-regard . . . has its horizon of unregarded mental processes; a mental process seized upon in a mode of ‘attention’ and possibly in unceasing clarity, has a horizon of inattention in the background with relative differences of clarity and obscurity as well as salientness and lack of salientness. Eidetic possibilities are rooted therein: ‘the eidetic possibility’ of making the unregarded an object of the pure regard, of making the marginally noticed the primally noticed; of the making of the unsalient salient, the obscure clear and always clearer’’ (Ideas 197). The potentiality for further discovery and, implicitly, revision keeps the process open to what is not yet seen or known, to discovery. It seems that Husserl’s phenomenological endeavor is to always allow for possibilities that can surprise us, can present themselves in such a way that we have not anticipated or foreknown that there remains always in that ‘‘horizon’’ an element of the inchoate, or in effect of mystery. We might recall how Aristotle’s argument for believability and predictability in the construction of a tragedy not only allows for but requires a horizon of the mysterious or wonderful. The wonderful, grounded in ill logic, seems to constitute a horizon of something more, a ‘‘beyond,’’ that is essential to the aesthetic experience. Speaking of the peripheries of attention, Husserl observes specifically that the ‘‘horizon of mental processes not only signifies . . . the horizon of phenomenological temporality according to its described dimensions, but also differences in novel modes of givenness.’’ The conditions of the world’s temporality are not the only habitat of that fading from sight or accessibility; what gives itself might be, as radically ‘‘novel modes of givenness,’’ a demand for an acceding to a new apprehension in the very ways and means of presentation of what is to come as experience. Such exposure to what is not already known, apprehended, grasped, is surely a standing open to the uncertain appearances from the sphere not quite in the compass of a world already known by the ‘‘naturalistic’’ attitude, which Husserl establishes as a comfortable, known, already defined world understood always in its own terms, without strangeness, without challenge, without wonder. The ‘‘naturally’’ limited world can exist without thoughtfulness, specula-

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tion, consideration beyond the mundane and familiar, which comforts, consoles, and secures. This ‘‘natural’’ apprehension is the world of the inhabitants of Stevens’s ‘‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’’ (CPP 52–53). The complacency of dwellers in ‘‘white nightgowns’’ and their routine ten o’clock bedtime define their existence, which is a complacency of attitude consistent with Husserl’s world of the ‘‘natural attitude.’’ ‘‘We begin our considerations as human beings who are living naturally, objectivating, judging, feeling, willing ‘in the natural attitude’ ’’ (Ideas 51). Husserl argues the case against this attitude, in the need for a phenomenological clarifying and authenticating of experience. ‘‘The whole rediscovered [already known, familiar] world posited in the natural attitude,’’ finally, ‘‘actually found in experience and taken with perfect ‘freedom from theories’ as it is actually experienced, as it clearly shows itself in the concatenations of experience, is now without validity for us; without being tested and also without being contested, it shall be parenthesized’’ (Ideas 62). In Stevens’s world of ‘‘Disillusionment,’’ the strangeness and possibility of a counter reality is realized as an individual consciousness ranging toward horizons. Opposed to the complacent denizens of that world of ‘‘disillusionment,’’ there is ‘‘Only, here and there,’’ a fulfilling and satisfying mind. The consciousness that answers to the dull sleepers is the poetic adventurer toward horizons, toward the experiences liberated from, or bestowing strangeness on, that humdrum quietness. The ‘‘old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots, / Catches tigers / In red weather.’’ The expansiveness of his experiences is an opening to the imaginative, to dreams, to wonder. He in his vitality and colorfulness, the colorful objects of his experience, in a world opening out from the confines of the whiteness of the ordinary world, journeys into the land of inebriation and counter-dreams, horizons indeed opening toward imaginative possibilities. His adventures – perhaps derived from memories and generated imaginatively, having their aspects of both objectivity and subjectivity – are both discovery and fabrication of a world, and as acts they project away from the mundane into a wonderful world of imaginative possibility, a world not fully known and bearing a mysterious vitality. From the ‘‘natural’’ standpoint, the world is already adequately known, conformable for the most part to our expectations. But the resident problems of knowing challenge us with the dubitability of the transcendent. As Emmanuel Levinas explains Husserl’s phenomenological view of consciousness as opposed to the ‘‘natural attitude’’: ‘‘the transcendent object is given by essence in an inadequate way. We cannot, in a single

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act, grasp all the sides of a table; to do this a continuous series of looks would be necessary, a series which by essence is infinite. Moreover, the transcendent object is given as something relative: there are only aspects, without it being possible to say, except by convention, what it is in itself ’’ (14–15). Even the house of modern science is ‘‘troubled by ‘crises’ and ‘paradoxes,’ and disturbed to see that the very meaning of its judgments, despite their being so certain, eludes it. It often asks, as did Berkeley long ago, if ‘‘that of which it speaks is anything but nothingness, convention and fiction’’ (34). The difficulty in establishing the substantiality of this answering to the natural assumption produces language of explanation that aims at clarity and conviction but resorts to paradox, appeals to an understanding that the language remains inadequate, must approximate, or reverts to the language of metaphor and poetry. Levinas stresses that ‘‘it was Husserl who introduced into philosophy the idea that thought can have a meaning, can intend something even when this something is absolutely undetermined, a quasi-absence of object, and we know the role this idea has played in Scheler’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies’’ (61). Even when the argument is for the ‘‘self-evidence’’ of ‘‘intellection’’ in the comprehension of object and subject, in that ‘‘Self-evidence is not some indescribable intellectual feeling; it is the very penetration to the true,’’ the accomplishment is couched in mysterious terms: ‘‘The miracle of clarity is the very miracle of thought.’’ The event of experience is activity, not in the first place a relation between subject and object, and the event can be described in terms that challenge simple understanding or seem to be paradoxical: ‘‘The mind, while receiving something foreign, is also the origin of what it receives. It is always active.’’ The phenomenological outlook, then, enacts a transposition of values in the relationship of the merely real, actual, and experience as eidos. Levinas sees the outcome of phenomenological thought as a retrieval of genuine experience of the world and a declaration of freedom from the restrictive one-world view of reality that modern science has imposed: The world overflows nature, recapturing all the contours and richness that it has in our concrete life; it is a world of things interesting and boring, useful and useless, beautiful and ugly, loved and hated, ridiculous and anguishing. The phenomenological method wants to destroy the world falsified and impoverished by the naturalist tendencies of our time – which certainly have their rights, but also their limits. It wants to rebuild; it wants to recover the lost world of our concrete life (36).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty recalls how ‘‘Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant . . . spoke of ‘wonder’ in the face of the world. Reflection does not withdraw

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from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical’’ (xiii). In a discussion of Fink’s fidelity to Husserl’s thought in his work entitled ‘‘Representation and Image: Contribution to the Phenomenology of Unreality,’’ Levinas observes how for Fink the structures of memory and anticipation are temporally grounded and determined – as ‘‘the future of the past world is already past for the current world, etc.’’ – whereas ‘‘the structure of imagination is different’’ (42). The movement of this site of imaginative experience is toward an indefinite and intermediate point. ‘‘A painted image, belonging by its material reality to the real world, reveals to us at the same time an unreal world and time; it takes its place between two worlds. Fink speaks of its ‘fenestral’ character.’’ This characterization of the aesthetic, imaginative experience as between two worlds, as a window, raises the questions that persist about Aristotle’s dramatic aesthetic: questions of the representation of reality, questions of how an audience relates to represented characters, questions that might be best dealt with in terms of the stage as a strange, true, and problematical relationship, fenestral, between the world of reality and the imagined world. Mihai Spariosu argues for this imaginative site as realizable in the poem. The metaphor of ‘‘fenestral’’ becomes, in Spariosu’s adapting the anthropological thought of Victor Turner, ‘‘liminal,’’ not a window opening between worlds but a threshold, which provides not just a window for seeing, a perspective, but a transitional place, for movement between worlds, for being. The metaphorical shift might manifest the movement from a Husserlean epistemology to a Heideggerean ontology, from seeing to being. The site, at any rate, is for Spariosu a justification of the ludic nature of poetry, in that it posits or represents, in its play, a world not caught up in the strife, wars, and political alignments of the actual world: he ‘‘attempts to develop a ludic-irenic view of liminality as a margin that permanently detaches itself from the center (any center), thus providing a playful opening toward alternative worlds that may be incommensurable with ours. From this perspective, literature is best seen not as fictional or marginal, but as a liminal phenomenon that can not only undermine or reinforce a certain state of affairs in the historical world but also act as a threshold or passageway from one historical world to another’’ (xiii). As ludic and liminal, as an imaginatively generated world, the poem

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becomes a ‘‘possible other world,’’ as argued by Lubomı´r Dolezˇel. Dolezˇel characterizes fictional worlds as incomplete, as heterogeneous, and as ‘‘constructs of human productive activities. . . . Textual poiesis, like all human activity, occurs in the actual world; however, it constructs fictional realms whose properties, structures, and modes of existence are, in principle, independent of the properties, structures, and existential mode of actuality’’ (23). The imagination and the imaginative creation of fictional worlds, then, reiterate the prodigious enterprise of experiencing, perhaps what is not actual and might even be incommensurable to the natural attitude, or what is not in actual existence in this world but is generative of a nonfactual, liminal, and ludic world. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological philosophy is like art: it ‘‘is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. . . . [It] is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being’’ (xx). This revaluation of art as truth is consistent with Heidegger’s assessment of poetry, and it is an inversion of the natural attitude’s assumptions about truth and reality of the one and only objective world and the negligible value of poetry’s fictions in dealing with the real. And in Merleau-Ponty’s appraisal, the actual world retains for us what Heidegger talks about as the ‘‘horizon’’ and the ‘‘withdrawal,’’ the ever-emerging ‘‘freshness’’ of itself, in Stevens’s establishment of earth’s potentiality for the man on the dump. For Merleau-Ponty ‘‘the world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by some ‘solution,’ it is on the hither side of all solutions.’’ The impetus of phenomenology and poetry are in consonance: ‘‘If phenomenology was a movement before becoming a doctrine or a philosophical system, this was attributable neither to accident, nor to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Vale´ry, or Ce´zanne – by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being’’ (xxi). It is this recall of the human to itself, into the potential for wonder at its relationship to the world, that Stevens offers. Merleau-Ponty’s respect for human thinking in the world as opposed to ‘‘Absolute Thought’’ (409) characterizes ‘‘belief in an absolute mind, or in a world in itself detached from us’’ as being ‘‘no more than a rationalization’’ of our ability to experience in the world. Stevens insists that ‘‘heaven’’ and the peopled world beyond are essentially this pro-

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jection. The poet argues with the antagonist in ‘‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’’ that the Christian religion and the counter-religion of poetry alike construct out of the materials of earthly experience. The other world is built from the ‘‘moral law’’ as a nave, the architectural form appropriate to the religion, which constitutes ‘‘haunted heaven’’ (47). The ‘‘opposing law’’ is built from a Greek architectural form, the peristyle, and both ‘‘religions’’ convert their values, her morality and his ‘‘bawdiness,’’ into palms, hers the palms associated with Christ and his hedonistically ‘‘squiggling like [earthly] saxophones.’’ Poetry becomes, then, not an inferior mode of truth, but equal to her truth, as thought, and superior, as earthly satisfaction. This acceptance of the human engages us in the creation of those abstractions Merleau-Ponty refers to as ‘‘absolute thought,’’ but their being human creations does not mean that they are inferior or of lesser consequence than some other-worldly absolute truth would be. The reduction of religion and poetry to equality in the human realm allows the imaginative constructs of poetry to become, not logically but pragmatically, superior, as of having greater genuine value for the earth-bound. The poet with great assurance affirms this belief to the old woman: ‘‘Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.’’ Becoming spokesperson, the poet is, as Merleau-Ponty observes, both individual and representative of humankind: ‘‘We are in the world, which means that things take shape, an immense individual asserts itself, each existence is self-comprehensive and comprehensive of the rest’’ (409). The individual is no longer merely a lone individual, but partaker of the abstraction. Heidegger’s pursuit of an understanding of Being requires talking about this essence of being human as Da-sein, the there-being of the human in the world that is not the individual nor the totality of individuals but the beingness of Being. This constitution of truth is a human activity, and it is not only the recognition of how we experience phenomenologically, but also that this activity is, for Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘the ground of all our certainties.’’ In ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar xxiii,’’ the interdependence of the voice of earth and the voice of heaven produces, beyond the ‘‘duet,’’ a mutual contribution to discovery, both as knowledge and being. The opposed voices, the ‘‘voice in the clouds’’ and the voice of the ‘‘undertaker,’’ who is ‘‘smelling of drink,’’ sing of opposed realities, the world of ‘‘ether’’ and the world in which life merely ends, yet together they produce ‘‘a few final solutions.’’ Both the voice in the clouds and the voice of the ‘‘grunted breath’’ are identified as ‘‘serene and final.’’ In that found serenity, the poet is, as a finality, committed to keep on ‘‘playing year by year, /

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Concerning the nature of things as they are’’ (CPP 145). Through the interplay of ‘‘the imagined and the real, thought / And the truth, Dichtung and Wahrheit,’’ there is resolution. ‘‘Confusion’’ is ‘‘solved, as in a refrain / One keeps on playing.’’ In Stevens’s poetry, for instance in ‘‘The Poems of Our Climate,’’ the desire is for both the ‘‘more,’’ that which is intuited as Absolute Thought or Being, and the precise, immediate, sensible experiences that are ever renewable for us in the world. Beginning with the imagination or perception of a bowl of flowers, with the ‘‘nothing more than the carnations there’’ in the bowl (178–79), the poet knows that the full sensibility of the experience recalls other experiences, ‘‘the light / In the room’’ asserting itself as ‘‘more like a snowy air, / Reflecting snow.’’ For Merleau-Ponty, this being ‘‘brought into relation with an external being’’ involves us in a reciprocality, the qualities that radiate having ‘‘a power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value,’’ and the experiencer is not ‘‘set over against’’ the object of experience but ‘‘abandons’’ himself ‘‘to it and plunge[s] into this mystery’’ (214). Similarly, the carnations are not for Stevens’s poet a mere objectivity, but present an idea, for the poet with which he would like to, but cannot identify. Even if the sharpness and ‘‘complete simplicity’’ of the moment’s experience could simplify the self, could strip him of torments, the ‘‘evilly compounded, vital I,’’ could transform the self into the perfect simplicity of the object of experience, there would be not only an awareness of but also a desire for more: ‘‘Still one would want more, one would need more, / More than a world of white and snowy scents.’’ Human Being is not realizable in this primitive purity of an experience as simple and unentailed but brings with it a double knowledge, not only the consciousness that there would ‘‘still remain the never-resting mind’’ desiring absolute thought but also the certainty that ‘‘the imperfect is our paradise’’ and that our delight ‘‘lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.’’ The image experienced is not, then, a purity of objectivity, but presents itself as that, and more. It recalls the snow and the complex Being of the poet, and its interdependence with ‘‘flawed words and stubborn sounds’’ is the making of the ‘‘Poems of Our Climate.’’ The ‘‘clear water in a brilliant bowl, / Pink and white carnations,’’ are like the sky for Merleau-Ponty: ‘‘Of the sky, as it is perceived or sensed, subtended by my gaze which ranges over and resides in it, and providing as it does the theatre of a certain living pulsation adopted by my body, it can be said that it exists for itself, in the sense that it is not made up of mutually exclusive parts, that each part of the whole is ‘sensitive’ to what happens in all the others, and ‘knows them dynamically’ ’’ (214–15). The experiencing subject is not ‘‘a

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pure nothingness with no terrestrial weight,’’ but the sensation – the sky, the bowl of flowers, the light in the room – is generative: ‘‘It presupposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder.’’ The desire generated and responded to in Stevens’s poem, in provoking the need to ‘‘escape, come back / To what had been so long composed,’’ is for what is already ‘‘composed’’ in both the potentiality for immediate sensory experience of the bowl of flowers and the knowledge that fulfillment is not realized in pure sensation of the object but in complicity with it, with a past, with already constituted desires and potentialities. For Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘to return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is’’ (ix; my emphasis). The phenomenological return to the things themselves involves us, then, in the wonderful possibility of connecting temporally and deeply, not with absolute thought but in genuine sharing of experience in that site of human possibility, where participants are complicit and interdependent. In ‘‘Solitaire Under the Oaks,’’ Stevens’s protagonist achieves that paradoxical or mysterious state that Merleau-Ponty suggests as a ‘‘return to that world which precedes knowledge.’’ Stevens’s poems often move toward that accomplishment of insight, or intuition, that seems ineffable and wonderful. As I suggested above, this movement occurs in ‘‘The Man on the Dump.’’ It occurs, too, in ‘‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself ’’ (CPP 451–52), in which the waking to a new day constitutes reality as emerging from the uncertainty of whether the image experienced is subjective or objective. The ‘‘scrawny cry from outside / Seemed like a sound in his mind,’’ but it like the rising of the sun ‘‘would have been outside.’’ If the sun is objective, ‘‘not from the vast ventriloquism / Of sleep’s faded papier-maˆche´,’’ then the ‘‘scrawny cry’’ is objective as well, since ‘‘it was part of the colossal sun.’’ This melding of the visual and auditory is essential to the accomplishment of reaffirming ‘‘the thing itself ’’ as opposed to ‘‘ideas about’’ it. Abstract ‘‘thought’’ is once more depreciated. The directness and fullness of the experience is complete in itself, and as accomplishment is finally ‘‘like / A new knowledge of reality.’’ Again this new knowledge seems to be so primordially beyond the presumption of ordinary thinking that it bears in its freshness that element of mystery

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that cannot be further explained. Similarly, in ‘‘Solitaire Under the Oaks,’’ the man playing cards, a game of solitaire, plays alone and, immersed in the game, operates by the rules of the game, ‘‘exists among pure principles’’ (473). He is set free from the objective factuality of the cards, the trees, and the air, and they exist as participants, not ‘‘facts,’’ as do the scrawny cry and the sun’s ‘‘choral rings’’ of ‘‘Not Ideas About the Thing. . . .’’ The card player’s ‘‘escape’’ is to ‘‘meditation,’’ which is not engaging in ‘‘ideas about’’ but in the magical moment of complete absorption: ‘‘One knows at last what to think about / And thinks about it without consciousness.’’ The repudiation of consciousness does not reject an achieved purity of thought, but seems to be another instance in Stevens’s thought of that descent to an essential moment that overcomes conventional premeditated thought and, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, ‘‘precedes knowledge.’’ And again the language expressing the achievement retains that quality of mystery, in that declaring that ‘‘one knows at last what to think about / And thinks about it without consciousness’’ does not attempt full clarity of expression, and the reader is left to consider what is thought in the assurance of ‘‘what to think about,’’ and what it means to ‘‘think . . . without consciousness.’’ I have tried to suggest how, in light of Husserl’s thought and MerleauPonty’s commentary, Stevens’s precise concern for knowledge and being in the world leads us to a scene of dramatic discovery, the event of his poet’s arriving at greater knowledge by finding the essence and dispensing with extraneous or obtrusive thought. This activity is dramatized as a profoundly important feat, yet one that implicitly reveals only so much of itself and leaves its implications and significance in a cloud of mystery. At times, of course, the horizon of the mysterious is demonstrated in language that expresses that quality. In ‘‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’’ for instance, the poet and his companion, Ramon Fernandez, observe the way the woman singing beside the sea makes her world. She and the sea make complementary music, but the sea’s song is ‘‘inhuman, of the veritable ocean’’ (105–06). Although their music is mingled, it is not ‘‘medleyed,’’ since her music is sung in human language. In creating the music she creates a world, which is not the world of the sea. The argument of the first portion of the poem makes clear that her world is subjectively made, and the language is of geometrical, earthly form: ‘‘She measured to the hour its [the sky’s] solitude. / She was the single artificer of the world / In which she sang.’’ But when the poet turns to the evening scene that is meaningfully there for him and his companion, without the singer’s presence and direct influence, the world’s determining itself, not for a subject

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but in itself, becomes the mystery. He asks Ramon to tell him, ‘‘if you know,’’ why the lights in the fishing boats ‘‘anchored there . . . Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, / Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, / Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.’’ The lights of the fishing boats are the agents of mastery and apportionment. The world’s geometry has become not subjective but objective, and the haunting question is why this is so. The lights’ power to arrange is not only a deep mystery but also paints of the scene a mystery, ‘‘deepening, enchanting night.’’ The poem ends in confirming not that design is subjective or objective, but that it is neither, or both. The poet praises the ‘‘blessed rage to order . . . the maker’s rage to order words of the sea’’ and of the ‘‘fragrant portals, dimly starred, / And of ourselves and of our origins, / In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.’’ The ‘‘maker’’ is not the woman only, or the poet, but any maker. Entertaining the idea of God as maker might lead to imagining that the earth has its principles of order there in its geometry, the lights of the fishing boats then expressing their own inherent design. Our ‘‘rage for order’’ would then be consonant with the boats’ ordering, and we as being of nature, as human beings, as Da-sein, would sustain an ordering principle, an essence of design, in making something of our historical selves not only as ‘‘ghostlier demarcations,’’ suggesting the way the ‘‘High-Toned Old Christian Woman’’ has had built for her a ‘‘haunted heaven,’’ but also in the music of earth, ‘‘keener sounds,’’ sounds of the sea and the woman’s song and the poet’s music.8 * * * The ‘‘blessed rage for order’’ that might aspire to or intimate knowledge beyond does not for Stevens become an unfounded belief in a spiritual dimension. There is the perpetual turning back to earth for experience and pleasure that ‘‘can never be satisfied’’ any more than can be the desire for the sublime aspect sub specie aeternitatis. Both Nietzsche and William James entertain thought about a possible other world of spiritual or divine beings, and Stevens’s poetry dramatizes this appealing thought.9 For all three of them, however, the pervasive question is of the objective reality of those beings. If Stevens’s human being tentatively and uncertainly makes ‘‘contact’’ with other beings, sometimes affirming the reality of the transcendent other, sometimes settling for reality within the subject, his relationships with ghosts and gods manifest an even more spectacular, even miraculous, but suspect, achievement.

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Nietzsche’s divinity is posited as a metaphorical counterpart to the human poet. In the ‘‘Critical Backward Glance’’ he confesses that, ‘‘throughout the book,’’ he has ‘‘attributed a purely esthetic meaning – whether implied or overt – to all process: a kind of divinity if you like, God as the supreme artist, amoral, recklessly creating and destroying, realizing himself indifferently in whatever he does or undoes’’ (9). Such a metaphorical interdependence of God and His creation is a manifestation of the play between the morally right, the literally true, the real as apprehended by Husserl’s ‘‘natural attitude,’’ and the contradictorily perverse, fictional, and literary or dramatic. The morality of the world, preserved by the Apollonian vision, is thought to be the only guide in the only existing world, but it is of the Apollonian dream and requires a gesture of transvaluation. Morality, from the darker Dionysian perspective, is seen as ‘‘a mere fabrication for purposes of gulling: at best, an artistic fiction; at worst, an outrageous imposture’’ (10). The ‘‘mere fabrication’’ and ‘‘artistic fiction,’’ as valuations, would seem not only to undermine the substantial validity of the Apollonian structure but also to devalue fabrication and fiction. The world as made by ‘‘God as the supreme artist’’ is, however, a process of creation as aesthetics, and morality becomes in essence aesthetic. The poet, in repeating or recreating as God creates, is generating the (or a) world. The poet’s use of metaphor is generative as is God’s. Nietzsche argues that ‘‘Metaphor, for the authentic poet, is not a figure of rhetoric but a representative image standing concretely before him in lieu of a concept’’ (55). A poet’s metaphors and a culture’s myths incorporate them into the divine process of life. Myth is ‘‘a concentrated image of the world, an emblem of appearance’’ (136), and in appreciation of it, all participate in the ‘‘miracle.’’ ‘‘Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture.’’ Stevens talks of this power of creation in terms of the poet’s imagination. In ‘‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,’’ he characterizes the struggle between ‘‘reality’’ and the need for a creative imagination in much the same way as Nietzsche sees the Apollonian in need of the Dionysian. Stevens’s word ‘‘reality’’ in this essay carries a double meaning, as if it is undergoing a Nietzschean ‘‘transvaluation of values.’’ In the beginning it means the social-natural world as apprehended from the naive or ‘‘natural’’ attitude, and that is the sense in which it is conceived as a pressure against the imaginative mind. On the other hand, it comes to mean the essential reality of the world as created – by poetry, by the mythic mind, by the imagination – in a Nietzschean revision of values. Discussing a ‘‘pejorative’’ sense of ‘‘escapism,’’ he says that this meaning

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‘‘applies when the imagination does not adhere to reality. . . . There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live, or, I ought to say, no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it’’ (CPP 662). In this sense, then, ‘‘the poet has his own meaning for reality, and the painter has, and the musician has’’ (658). The word has a certain negative power, a force, akin to the militaristic power of the Apollonian in Nietzsche’s view: Apollonian, ‘‘Doric art and the Doric state is as a perpetual military encampment of the Apollonian forces. An art so defiantly austere, so ringed about the fortifications – an education so military and exacting – a polity so ruthlessly cruel – could endure only in a continual state of resistance against the titanic and barbaric menace of Dionysos’’ (35). The world’s ‘‘reality’’ that Stevens has established in the first sense of the term is talked about as strife, the wars of the past and the encroaching Nazi menace of the late 1930s and early 1940s, characteristic of the strifedriven Apollonian world. But in the sense as associated with the poet’s power of imagination, the word ‘‘adapts itself instantly. . . . Reality is not that external scene [the raw mechanical objects of science] but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are’’ (658). ‘‘Things as they are’’ cannot, then, be a scientist’s objects but are a complicity of human being, Da-Sein, in the world: reality. The imagination is then a resistance to this killing power and is effectual in generating another reality. ‘‘It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential’’ (663). The imagination is, then, creative of reality, and that reality may at times be referred to as the ‘‘supreme fiction.’’ ‘‘It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era. What happens is that it is always attaching itself to a new reality, and adhering to it. It is not that there is a new imagination but that there is a new reality’’ (656). This poet is not merely a voice intuiting the truth of life as illusion but is also ontologically a participant in the truth of the world as the poet God’s drama of the world. Nietzsche’s crass satyr-like poet Archilochus, befittingly sounding the Dionysian music, undergoes a mysterious transformation in a ‘‘mystical process of the un-selving’’ (Nietzsche 39). ‘‘The man Archilochus, with his passionate loves and hates, is really only a vision of genius, a genius who is no longer merely Archilochus but the genius of the universe. . . . Archilochus,

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on the other hand, the subjectively willing and desiring human being, can never be a poet’’ (39–40). For Nietzsche and Stevens, the poet’s individuality and idiosyncracy are transformed into the Idea of the poet, who serves as correlate to the cosmic creator. The idea of God has been established, of course, as just that: an idea of purposiveness in the universe entailing continual creation and design as process. In metaphor and myth, in the ideas of poet and cosmos, Stevens achieves this Nietzschean sense of assurance within the mysterious and of uncertainty in the process of unfolding, anticipation. In ‘‘A Mythology Reflects Its Region’’ (476), the poem begins with the conviction of the title that ‘‘A mythology reflects its region.’’ Since, however, we of Connecticut ‘‘never lived in a time / When mythology was possible,’’ and in the emergence of the thought ‘‘if we had,’’ the question is raised of ‘‘the image’s truth.’’ In the absence of a complex of mythic narrative and symbol, which would bear the truth of its world, or would represent its world, the more limited question of ‘‘the image’s truth’’ must be dealt with as what is and what is present. As the mythology is mimetic of and participatory in its world, the image is mimetic or perhaps not mimetic of but essential to or participating in the being of its maker: ‘‘The image must be of the nature of its creator.’’ The micro- and the macrocosmic both concern the making of a world, the poet as God or as earthly poet, but whereas the macrocosmic, the mythology as narrative or poem, reflects its world, the image, as the poet’s creation, reflects and constitutes its creator, the poet. The transformation that occurs, through a kind of sleight-of-hand or magic, is that the poet that is reflected in or by his creation becomes his world. The image is ‘‘the nature of its creator increased, / Heightened.’’ The image is not merely representative, but is ‘‘of the nature of ’’ the poet-maker; and in his becoming, he is renewed, as ‘‘it is he.’’ He is, by being the image he makes, made ‘‘anew, in a freshened youth.’’ This is no individual youth, however, but he is transformed, as is Archilochus, into being with his region. The image ‘‘is he in the substance of his region / Wood of his forests and stone out of his fields.’’ If the mythology, like the ‘‘Tragic myth’’ for Nietzsche, ‘‘delivers us from our avid thirst for earthly satisfaction and reminds us of another existence and a higher delight,’’ it ‘‘shields us from music while at the same time giving music its maximum freedom’’ (Birth of T ragedy 126). The ‘‘Dionysiac musician,’’ unlike sculptor and epic poet, who are ‘‘committed to the pure contemplation of images . . . himself imageless, is nothing but original pain and reverberation of the image. Out of this mystical process of un-selving, the poet’s spirit feels a whole world of

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images and similitudes arise’’ (39). In Stevens’s poem, the mythology that ‘‘reflects its region’’ shares with tragedy the principle of mimesis, and that loss could be what the poet in Connecticut feels with the regret that mythology has not been possible for them. But the thoughts that arise in mythology’s absence are not only of the poet’s ‘‘reverberation of the image,’’ but of its becoming him and his being transformed in the ‘‘mystical process of un-selving,’’ not only in becoming one with the image but also in becoming one with the ‘‘substance of the region.’’ The accomplishment then is a ‘‘mystical process,’’ a wonderful integration, a oneness – of the work the artist produces, of the artist himself, and of the world. In ‘‘Blanche McCarthy’’ (529), again, the metaphor of reflection is transformed from the mimetic, which always raises the problem of how the two – representation and represented – relate. The perennial problem of dualism, the relationship between mind and world, had to be reduced by Husserl, and when Aristotle talks about the way the tragedy represents the world, the world has to be relocated in the play itself. The play’s world is its own representation; it does not need to be, and should not be, thought of as merely representing a historical world beyond itself. Blanche McCarthy is admonished to transcend the limited grasp of reality in the old mimetic way. The conventional mirror image is to be repudiated as a ‘‘dead glass, which can reflect / Only the surfaces.’’ Indeed, it reflects, as in ‘‘A Mythology Reflects Its Region,’’ both the subject and the world. She is reflected in it as surface, ‘‘the bending arm, / The leaning shoulder.’’ But the reflection includes as well ‘‘the searching eye,’’ the subject as searcher needing to see, to discover. That need is for the absent, the mystery of existence. The ‘‘terrible mirror of the sky,’’ unlike the pellucid mirror at hand, can be challenging and, in being ‘‘terrible,’’ threatening, as the instances of the sublime in Longinus – the mighty ocean and raging rivers, the fires of Aetna – are opposed to the familiar, useful objects in our world – the stream, the fire on the hearth. Blanche McCarthy is entreated to ‘‘bend against the invisible . . . lean / To symbols of descending night . . . search / The glare of revelations going by.’’ ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar ix’’ negotiates between the natural world, the things of earth, and the creation that contains him and relates him to the darker reality beyond the earth. The ‘‘blue guitar’’ he plays is a ‘‘form’’ of the ‘‘color, the overcast blue / Of the air,’’ and he is ‘‘merely a shadow hunched / above the arrowy still strings’’ (138–39). He is, on the other hand, the ‘‘maker of a thing yet to be made.’’ The color, as idea that grows and transforms, becomes his ‘‘tragic robe / Of the actor . . . the dress of his meaning, silk / Sodden with his melancholy words, / The

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weather of his stage, himself.’’ He makes himself and his stage, as one, from the guitar that has a belonging in the world of blue sky and earth. The making leads to an interdependence of earth and world, of sky blue and guitar blue and player ‘‘shadow’’ and tragic stage and world. Apprehending these cosmic, inaccessible, or withdrawing images would be in ordinary terms, from the perspective of the ‘‘natural attitude,’’ miraculous or mystical. From the perspective sub specie aeternitatis they would constitute both an epistemological and an ontological transformation. Their mastery promises, as in ‘‘A Mythology Reflects Its Region,’’ a further integration or fusion in that the image, the perceiver, and the world become one. Blanche McCarthy’s looking ‘‘into the terrible mirror of the sky’’ will reveal not only a deeper vision of the world but also of the self: she will ‘‘See how the absent moon waits in a glade / Of your dark self.’’ The moon becomes an image, like the other images beyond the ‘‘dead glass,’’ of absence. But it can appear not out there among those ‘‘symbols of descending night,’’ but within her. Seen in relation to the structure of meaning of ‘‘A Mythology Reflects Its Region,’’ this poem too seems to be about the making of images, not merely the reception of them in perception. The images that transcend the ordinary perception of the mirror become suggestively not merely perception but, more profoundly, imagination. The ‘‘terrible mirror . . . symbols of descending night . . . glare of revelations’’ seem to be, beyond ordinary perception, images of the imagination; and the woman would be, like the ‘‘creator’’ of the image in the other poem, a poet figure. The miracle of metaphor in this transformative and generative sense is that it is not, like the mirror of naturalistic ‘‘dead glass,’’ an instance of disjunction. Images of the world, like the moon, are interior, in the ‘‘dark self,’’ and world and self come together transformed. The final image is evidently out there in the world, but no, in the metaphorical fusions that take place it must be of the imagination: the metaphor ‘‘wings of stars’’ unites the ideas of birds and stars, and the dominance of the metaphorical value, ‘‘wings’’ of birds, becomes primary for the stars, which ‘‘Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.’’ If ‘‘unimagined,’’ the bird/stars’ hiding places, ‘‘coverts,’’ are perhaps like the ‘‘revelations’’ of the ‘‘invisible.’’ The accomplishment of such meditation in a ‘‘dark’’ poem would be an intimation of the sublime. The process would be a de-regularization of experience and an irresolution about whether such experience is subjective or objective, a demurral and a leaving uncertain the mystery inherent in the power and activity of the imagination and in the identity of the poet.

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* * * This resistance to easy committal with regard to whether objects of experience are imaginative or perceptive is, of course, the ground of William James’s contentions about ‘‘radical empiricism,’’ and it is instrumental in the ‘‘will to believe’’ and in the question of the divine.10 Jonathan Levin, tracing in Stevens’s poetry concepts of transition, metamorphosis, and discovery from Emerson and William James, talks about the strangeness of the transactive moment: ‘‘Discovery transpires in the mysterious zone where active and receptive powers converge, imagination and reality only being labels we can apply after the event of discovery itself ’’ (85). The ‘‘mysterious’’ site of this event remains somehow not quite accessible, is ineffable; and if we talk of questions of perception and imagination, subjectivity and objectivity, we are structuring an abstraction beyond the event, which – Husserl would insist – is neither subjective nor objective, an attitude that can be traced from James.11 In Essays in Radical Empiricism James argues against conceiving of consciousness as a kind of mental substance or entity, by analogy with the way we from the natural standpoint view objects in the world. He insists that ‘‘pure experience’’ be recognized as a ‘‘function of knowing’’ (4), and this premise might lead us to see ‘‘relation itself ’’ as with two ‘‘terms’’: ‘‘one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the knower; the other becomes the object known.’’ If, however, this way of thinking leads to a dualism, it requires a corrective: ‘‘Experience,’’ he argues, has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction but by way of addition. . . . Dualism, I say, is still preserved in this account, but reinterpreted, so that, instead of being mysterious and elusive, it becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the single experience considered, and can always be particularized and defined (9–10).

The separation of knower and known, then, is subsequent abstraction of the ‘‘single experience,’’ which is transitional, always on the move. The way that James continues to talk about this manner of viewing immediate experience leads to language that provokes an ‘‘intertextual’’ reading of implications in Stevens’s term ‘‘ignorant.’’ Considering how the experience of an ‘‘Absolute’’ would differ from our mortal experience, God’s knowledge might ‘‘terminate’’ while ours is still incomplete. . . . The instant field of the present is always experience in its ‘‘pure’’ state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple that, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only classifiable as objective fact or as someone’s opinion about fact. This is

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as true when the field is conceptual as when it is perceptual. . . . Only in the later experience that supercedes the present one is this naif immediacy retrospectively split into two parts, a ‘‘consciousness’’ and its ‘‘content’’ (Radical Empiricism 74–75).

James has worked his way towards this ‘‘naif ’’ experience as if in a return to a purer state, before the abstraction and analytical divisive activity that complicates life in a dualism. As a ‘‘naif ’’ this experiencer would be immediately involved in a flow of consciousness without subsequent adulteration. In Stevens’s ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,’’ the poet instructs his alter ego, the ‘‘ephebe,’’ about experience. The student should recognize, from the beginning, that he too must make such a journey back to a kind of innocence, a purer and simpler state. It seems as difficult a maneuver as James and Husserl had to perform, in persuading the world to strive for this accomplishment. He can dispense with the idea of the Absolute: ‘‘Never suppose an inventing mind as source / Of this idea [this invented world] nor for that mind compose / A voluminous master folded in his fire’’ (329). Without this rationalized source, the world becomes cleansed: ‘‘How clean the sun when seen in its idea, / Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven / That has expelled us and our images.’’ This idea in itself has a purity, cleansed of ‘‘us and our images,’’ which recalls the purification that takes place in ‘‘The Man on the Dump.’’ In that poem, the man’s transformation and freshening takes place in the process of ridding the world of our ‘‘images,’’ and it is specifically the moon that rises as the moon, not as an image. The moon has been named ‘‘Blanche’’ in the beginning, a personified woman ‘‘creeping up’’ and placing the sun as ‘‘a corbeil of flowers.’’ Drama and architectural detail must finally be overcome, since the ‘‘dump is full / Of images,’’ and the man comes to ‘‘see / As a man (not like an image of a man).’’ The moon’s being named ‘‘Blanche’’ might be echoed in the name of ‘‘Blanche McCarthy,’’ in that the name suggests the moon’s whiteness. Blanche McCarthy needs to recover from the ordinary way of seeing herself and the world as reflected in a mirror, as the moon in ‘‘Man on the Dump’’ is recovered from images. In ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,’’ Eve ‘‘made air the mirror of herself,’’ and she and Adam ‘‘found themselves / In heaven as in a glass; a second earth’’ (331). In ‘‘Notes,’’ then, the ephebe ‘‘must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it’’ rather than as an image. These poet figures must achieve the condition of the ‘‘naif ’’ in James’s terms, recapture a state of immediacy without the adulteration of images, allowing the sun to be likewise in this

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state of ignorance. ‘‘The sun / Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be / In the difficulty of what it is to be’’ (330). To attempt to recapture this state is to seek the ‘‘first idea,’’ purged of images; the achievement of ‘‘not having’’ is a dispensing with what is inessential to that state. Our accomplishments need, like Heidegger’s ‘‘covering’’ of thought, an uncovering and a recovery; we need to come to know of ourselves ‘‘that what it has is what is not / And throws it away like a thing of another time.’’ The ‘‘first idea’’ is of ourselves and of our world. ‘‘The first idea was not to shape the clouds / In imitation. The clouds preceded us. / There was a muddy centre before we breathed.’’ This recovery is not conceived as in a nostalgia for some never-real, lost innocence of childhood, which is one of those images that must be abandoned. The achievement of becoming the naif demands a rigorous appeal to the simplification and clarity that comes of James’s ‘‘radical empiricism’’ and Husserl’s phenomenological reduction. It is a matter of discovery, of dispensing with the accretions of thought that delude: ‘‘to impose is not / To discover. To discover an order as of / A season . . . to find, / Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all. . . . / It is possible, possible, possible. It must / Be possible. It must be that in time / The real will from its crude compoundings come’’ (349). Although this accomplishment is not declared to be mysterious, seeking the clarity and truth of both James’s and Husserl’s enterprise, the rigor of its demand amounts to what James allows concerning the ‘‘transitional’’ nature of experience, and concomitantly its way of being transitory and elusive: there is ‘‘no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and of being gradually followed by other pieces of substantive experience, with conjunctively transitional experiences between’’ (Radical Empiricism 57–58). Appropriately, Stevens argues for this precise apprehension of experience in ‘‘Notes’’ and other poems, notably in the also appropriately titled ‘‘Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man’’ (205). The Sleight-of-Hand Man in the title of the poem is by designation a magician, performing the wizardry that the world finds dumbfounding. In the insistence of Husserl and James that what they direct us to can be grasped, phenomenology and radical empiricism are not easy, and those of us at home in the ‘‘natural attitude,’’ conditioned by scientific thought to live within that dualistic structure of mind and world, remain skeptical about what seems a mystery, and with this outlook we are reflective of the audience watching the sleight-of-hand man’s manipulation of the three walnut shells, one with a pea inside. He is our version of Plato’s Ion, whose ‘‘strange unlike’’ is the claim to esoteric knowledge of the mind of Homer. Convinced by Socrates that he has no craft proper to himself, he succumbs

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to Socrates’s proposition that his knowledge has to be mystical, beyond the apprehension of ordinary minds. The connections between his mind and Homer’s are like the mystery of the magnet, which can be seen in the way magnetized rings attract one another without revealing the source of power. Stevens’s Ion, the Sleight-of-Hand Man, has Sense, both in the sense of making sense and having sensuality, immediate apprehension of the sensual. What he talks about is, once again, the way we must clarify and achieve genuine knowledge of ourselves and our worlds, and concomitantly achieve an ontological transformation as well. The past must be recognized as built up into myth and illusion. The ‘‘grand flights’’ of the past ritualized and made comfortable the participants, and they ‘‘occurred’’ as if all the pomp and ceremony were about reality, ‘‘As if someone lived there.’’ But when a surprising thing happens – ‘‘Could you have said the bluejay suddenly / Would swoop to earth?’’ – the discovery, the grounding, is a freshening and renewal of human being and world. The sun here again is cleansed of the old mythology, the old gods, and metaphor becomes the means of expressing it. ‘‘It is a wheel, the rays / Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths. / The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.’’ It becomes possible to think of sharp, distinctive objects, objects that seem of the world, perceived, and of the imagination, and they are imaginatively linked with metaphor, the ‘‘dove with an eye of grenadine’’ and ‘‘pines that are cornets.’’ This occurs, as did the abandoned myths, as ‘‘it occurs.’’ The Sleight-of-Hand Man’s wisdom, like the poet’s for the ephebe in ‘‘Notes,’’ concerns the possibility of achieving the state of the naif, becoming, as for the poet in ‘‘Notes,’’ ‘‘an ignorant man again.’’ The Sleight-of-Hand Man’s proposal is about the possibility of becoming ‘‘the ignorant man, alone,’’ like the man on the dump and the poet of ‘‘A Mythology Reflects Its Region,’’ who can become one with his creation and his world. He might have ‘‘any chance to mate his life with life / That is the sensual, pearly spouse.’’ This centering activity, achieving the unity of experience that precedes the intellectual divisiveness of thought, of dualism, is an achieved purity and a realization of self as at one with the world. In his ‘‘Preface’’ to T he Meaning of T ruth, James seems in agreement with the Sleight-of-Hand Man: The great obstacle to radical empiricism in the contemporary mind is the rooted rationalist belief that experience as immediately given is all disjunction and no conjunction, and that to make one world out of this separateness, a higher unifying agency must be there . . . the absolute all-witness which ‘‘relates’’ things together by throwing ‘‘categories’’ over them like a net. The most peculiar and unique, perhaps, of all these categories is supposed to be the

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truth-relation, which connects parts of reality in pairs, making of one of them a knower, and of the other a thing known (173).

As well as anticipating the direction Husserl would take, James establishes in his argument for a pluralism premises for what has recently developed in literary critical theory as an argument for ‘‘possible worlds.’’12 In his pluralism, all things are in process and unfinished (consistent with the argument for ‘‘radical empiricism,’’ that the ‘‘flow of consciousness’’ is an integrity before it comes to be abstracted as subject and object). In both James’s thought and possible worlds theory, we need to escape the stricture of a closed one-world conception of reality, the reduction of life and reality to the single dimension of a naturalistic understanding of the world. So long as we allow the ‘‘possible other case’’ of James’s Pragmatism, the case might be seen as the spirit in Stevens’s reiterated ‘‘possible, possible, possible.’’ And it might allow for other dimensions and realms, as in the not yet realized possible future of Stevens’s ‘‘As at a Theatre.’’ The theater metaphor engages us in possibilities about reality, the presumed unreality of the stage yielding its own reality through the transformative activity I have approached as the freshness and clarity that comes for poet, the poem, and the world when ‘‘the first idea’’ is regained and he becomes the ‘‘ignorant man.’’ Such adaptation is unitive, and reality lies not in distinctions but in the immediacy of true experience. This poem delights in possibility: ‘‘Another sunlight might make another world,’’ and ‘‘The curtains, when pulled, might show another whole, / An azure outre-terre, oranged and rosed’’ (455–56). James’s proposition recognizes that human desire leads us toward possibilities, that ‘‘the human heart . . . will willingly forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs’’ (‘‘The Sentiment of Rationality,’’ W ill to Believe 110). ‘‘The ultimate philosophy,’’ James concludes, ‘‘must not be too strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy from orthodoxy by too sharp a line. There must be left over and above the propositions to be subscribed, ubique, semper, et ab omnibus, another realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and indulge its own faith at its own risks.’’ Stevens savors the thought of the ‘‘left over and above . . . other realm.’’ The muse of ‘‘fictive music’’ is nearest to earth, and ‘‘that music is intensest which proclaims / The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom’’ (70–71). Yet she answers as well to the need for the ‘‘unreal,’’ and she can ‘‘give back to us . . . / The

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imagination that we spurned and crave.’’ She provides something beyond the ‘‘too near, too clear . . . endow[ing] / Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs / The difference that heavenly pity brings.’’ I tried to suggest, early on, that the sense of mystery in Stevens’s poetry addresses both the mysterious transaction, the transformation and even depreciation of the isolated self in becoming one with the not-self of earth, and the equally mysterious unknown beyond the beautiful assurances and gratifications of the ordinary world. James’s entertainment of the possibility of worlds beyond implies other beings, and thereby the idea of divinity. Here again, the possibility does not require that divine beings actually exist, and this connection between James’s and Stevens’s thought is explored by Patricia Rae in T he Practical Muse. The uncertainty of angels’ existence does not preclude their appearing, and the appearances retain the ambiguity I pursued concerning the poet’s transformation, wherein images may be out there in the world or subjective products of the imagination. The ‘‘Angel Surrounded by Paysans,’’ Rae suggests, is one of the muses of Stevens’s poetry, neither an actually realized objective being nor a pure imagined object. ‘‘Ambiguous, anonymous muses . . . abound in Stevens’s poetry’’ (135). This Angel ‘‘is a muse of this type. . . . Only ‘half seen’ . . . and, hence, presumably, half imagined, this figure makes its brief appearance on a threshold.’’ In Stevens’s placing such figures in the ‘‘liminal space’’ that Spariosu finally argues can be the poem itself, Rae finds this possible ambiguous place in Stevens consistent with James’s thought. The best defense against reading Stevens too pessimistically is to remember that virtually everything we find in his poetry, from his floating women, to his hopeful birds, to his various propositions about the world, is suspended within the liminal space defined and endorsed by James. Whether it takes the form of images like the jar or of grammatical qualifiers, this enclosure has the effect not of rendering its contents invalid but only of declaring them to be of uncertain provenance’’ (Rae 226–27).

In ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar xxiii,’’ the voice of the musician/poet orchestrates the ‘‘few final solutions’’ as a ‘‘duet / With the undertaker’’ (145). There is a ‘‘voice in the clouds’’ and ‘‘Another on earth, the one a voice / Of ether, the other smelling of drink.’’ Counterpointed by the ‘‘undertaker’s song in the snow,’’ the ‘‘voice / In the clouds serene and final’’ resolves, ‘‘all / Confusion solved.’’ Yet it is ‘‘as in a refrain / One keeps on playing year by year, / Concerning the nature of things as they are.’’ The Archilochean voice ‘‘smelling of drink’’ and the musician’s playing ‘‘things as they are’’ on the ‘‘blue guitar’’ are ‘‘Like a buzzing of

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flies in autumn air’’ (136), ‘‘a lazy, leaden twang.’’ Yet they participate in the music of the ‘‘voice in the clouds’’ and become in their uncertain involvement ludic, a playing that makes of their union a liminal world. I find ‘‘The World as Meditation’’ (441–42) to be a compelling instance of this uncertainty and liminality. Ulysses is for Penelope the absent husband, but he is also the anticipated and desired god-like being. In questioning whether it is ‘‘Ulysses that approaches from the east,’’ the thought is ambiguously the poet’s or the woman’s apprehension. The figure is grand: ‘‘Someone is moving / On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.’’ As in ‘‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,’’ the moment and the site are liminal; in both poems the event is an awakening from sleep. The strangeness involves the liminal moment that is not pure subjectivity, sleep, nor pure perception of a world around her, and it induces meditation on the questions of perception and reality. He who approaches is a ‘‘form of fire,’’ a ‘‘mere savage presence,’’ but she does not know whether it is Ulysses the husband or ‘‘only the warmth of the sun / On her pillow.’’ The essential metaphorical relation between Ulysses and the sun pertains, as in Romeo’s affirmation that Juliet is the sun, to the unitive activity of metaphor itself, the bringing together equivocally of subject and world of perception and the making, in poetic language, of a relationship, effecting the magic of transformation. He is that ‘‘savage presence’’ that ‘‘awakens the world in which she dwells.’’ He is a power of influence, from out there, as she is, subjectively, in meditating on the metaphorical relationship of man-hero and sun. In Penelope’s meditation, the resolution on waking is that ‘‘It was only day,’’ but the dream wish remains in the daylight: ‘‘It was Ulysses and it was not.’’ Whereas the world outside has its own ‘‘savage’’ nature, its power of ‘‘inhuman meditation’’ – ‘‘trees had been mended . . . / In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own’’ – she maintains, in the balance, her own strength that brings Ulysses home: ‘‘The barbarous strength within her would never fail.’’ She continues to perform a magic rite of language, incantational, ‘‘Repeating his name with its patient syllables,’’ bringing or wishing him home: ‘‘Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.’’ Ulysses, remaining apart, adventuring, suffering the vicissitudes of the journey, is nevertheless, for her, amenable to her poetic force, the compounding of opposites. ‘‘She has composed, so long,’’ in her imagination, herself as ‘‘Companion to his self for her’’; as she imagines it, their unity is fabricated as a satisfaction of desire, ‘‘Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.’’ The imagination unites and makes. The ‘‘interminable adventurer’’ meets the requirements of the poetic cre-

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ator, his being transformed into the precious anticipation of the arrival of the absent, the neither here nor not here, the figuratively divine, in answer to the desire of the human. This liminal space constitutes the making of a world, the harmonizing, that the poem accomplishes. * * * A possible other world carries with it, then, an aura of mystery in that its conditions and values are not known, and its rules of the game can be incommensurable with the familiar and reliable rules of the game of this, our world. This ‘‘mystical process,’’ the integration of poet, work, and world, also includes the audience. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of the play as a ‘‘transformation into structure’’ requires that the structure be understood as including the audience (110). As poetic and dramatic engagement, a liminal moment and space engages the reader in poem, as Spariosu argues, and the audience in play, as Gadamer argues. The created world, interdependent with the maker of that world and they with the actual world, composes the other participant, the reader or audience. Clayton (‘‘The Alphabet of Suffering,’’ Clayton and Rothstein 50) observes characteristics of the journey motif and suggests that the reader participates in the openness of the journey: The intertextual network is ‘‘open’’ in a way that the relation of influence is not. Influence is unidirectional, flowing from an earlier to a later author, whereas intertextuality establishes a flexible relation among texts. The itinerary of the reader, which is shaped by individual interests and experiences, determines the ‘‘direction’’ of the relation, and that direction can change over time as the reader develops new interests and accumulates further experience.

In the three parts of ‘‘Certain Phenomena of Sound’’ (255–56) Stevens engages us in the progression from (1) being in and experiencing the world to (2) creating poetry of the world for an audience and finally to (3) the world as poetic dimension, possible other world, in which the poet not only creates the world, others in it, and the self, but also makes her audience an accomplice. In Part I the conditions of earth are imperative and governed by the natural conditions of this world. A ‘‘geranium withers,’’ the ‘‘Sunday song’’ is merely ‘‘the beating of the locust’s wings, / That do not beat by pain, but calendar’’ (are known as part of the natural cycle of seasons, not interpreted by personification or the pathetic fallacy); and, like the song of the sea in ‘‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’’ the locust’s music does not ‘‘meditate the world as it goes round.’’ There is a sparseness in this world, someone perhaps having ‘‘left for a ride in

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a balloon,’’ an adventurer to some other place, someone perhaps ‘‘in a bubble examin[ing] the bubble of air.’’ One could be seeking in a world beyond, another in a bubble-world within. The one present is ‘‘old John Rocket,’’ who ‘‘dozes on his pillow,’’ comfortable and secure, feeling himself ‘‘safe to sleep to a sound that time brings back.’’ Asleep in his life, apparently as secure in his sleep as is Nietzsche’s Apollonian dreamer, he seems to need no stories. His security lies in the natural recurrence of the sounds that ‘‘time brings back,’’ the recurrence of seasonal music like that of the cricket and locust. Old John Rocket, like the sleepers in ‘‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,’’ seems to be the ‘‘natural’’ man in a world that confirms and consoles in his natural perception of things. In Part II, the traveler, Redwood Roamer, has returned and has a story to tell. All things are brought to bear on the story he brings to an audience, and it is grand, epic. They will celebrate with mango and Moselle wine, and they will ceremonialize the occasion: ‘‘We must prepare to hear the Roamer’s / Story.’’ A ‘‘slick sonata’’ will make ‘‘music seem / To be a nature, a place in which itself / Is that which produces everything else.’’ As the music creates an illusion that it generates the world, the Roamer’s ‘‘most prolific narrative’’ will also be ‘‘sound producing the things that are spoken.’’ Not a ‘‘natural’’ phenomenon, the narrative creates the world it sings. The epic poem, ‘‘a voice taller than redwoods,’’ produces a ‘‘prolific narrative,’’ which is not merely mimetic of a world, a traveler’s ‘‘report’’ on where he has been; it is the poem as made for an audience by an epic poet, perhaps as Nietzsche characterizes Homer as opposed to Archilochus. This poet’s voice, however, as opposed to the grand story the Roamer will tell, carries a degree of the Archilochean in that his language and tone are not fully participating in Redwood Roamer’s performance. He calls the music a ‘‘slick sonata,’’ and it helps to create a seeming world for the Roamer with a ‘‘voice taller than the redwoods,’’ performing a ‘‘prolific narrative.’’ The Third Part moves to a poet, perhaps appropriately thought of as a muse figure, who creates, in her own voice, herself and her world as poem, uniting the three. ‘‘Semiramide, dark syllabled,’’ addresses Eulalia, ‘‘sister and nun,’’ whom she has ‘‘beheld . . . walking, white, / Gold shined by sun.’’ The site of Semiramide’s meditation is on the east side of a hospital porch, where she ‘‘opened wide / A parasol, which I had found, against / The sun.’’ The natural sunlight is not the means or arena for seeing, but the field is rather the ‘‘interior of ’’ the parasol. It is on this stage – in this little world that both blocks the natural light and creates a light, a scene, by natural light’s being blocked – that she sees Eulalia

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‘‘walking, white.’’ Semiramide’s seeing is of a reality appearing within that world, the truth that ‘‘of that light Eulalia was the name.’’ Semiramide, then, ‘‘contrasting our two names, considered speech.’’ Language has become not only vehicle but also substance, and in Semiramide’s consideration of the difference between Eulalia’s being, as light, and Semiramide’s, as dark, Eulalia, beautiful sound, becomes one with the word and the light. If Eulalia is the name of that light – and ‘‘that light’’ would seem to be the light of the sun seen in the constructed world-within of the parasol rather than the pure and simple light of the actual sun – then the light woman or muse, ‘‘created of your name,’’ is to be identified with the Apollonian word and sunlight: ‘‘the word / Is that of which you were the personage.’’ She exists in a union of word and light that contains her; ‘‘there is no life except in the word of it.’’ Semiramide has identified Eulalia, explained her. In the metaphorical parasol she has found as means of seeing Eulalia, Semiramide has played the role of poet, making world and character; but in characterizing herself she does not simply become a dark word standing against the light Eulalia. They become mutually implicated as Apollonian and Dionysian principles, and the reader is in a position to identify, become one with, either or both. Semiramide’s identity appears in the complex image of the stage and dramatic text. Her name can be recognized, of course, as a version of Semiramis, for her dark, tragic story: a husband who hanged himself when the king demanded to have her; her eventually killing him and being killed by her son. Semiramide takes her place in a dark drama that might involve these events of legend: ‘‘I write Semiramide and in the script / I am and have a being and play a part.’’ Not a natural John Rocket, not an epic storyteller Redwood Roamer, not a mellifluent, light Eulalia, she is the poet who writes her own script; in the poetic construct she has ‘‘a being and play[s] a part.’’ Her being and her playing are not to be distinguished, then, and she becomes the poet who unites a complex world – made and found – self, and work, in all of which there runs a dark current, and who finds reality in playing her part. Such a poem sets up possible worlds, the diminished natural world of Part I, the world of heroic accomplishment and epic poetry in Part II, and the contrastive worlds of the Apollonian and Dionysian in Part III. It is the Dionysian or darker poet Semiramide that brings us to the mysterious force that is her being and the part she plays in her own script. This darkness is of the nature of the Dionysian for Nietzsche: ‘‘the peculiar blending of emotions in the heart of the Dionysiac reveler – his ambiguity if you will – seems still to hark back (as the medicinal drug harks back to the deadly

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poison)’’ to a dark past: ‘‘For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss’’ (26–27). Eulalia, as the Apollonian word and light, becomes then the audience and participant for Semiramide, dark Dionysian poet. As audience she is taken into the fabric of Semiramide’s poem and participates. This eventfulness of the dramatic performance is, like the final ‘‘the’’ of ‘‘The Man on the Dump,’’ not a resolution in the name but an activation of mind in an event of becoming. The ‘‘truth’’ emerges in Eulalia’s becoming an actor with Semiramide in Semiramide’s script. The play becomes, as in Gadamer’s concept of play, a ‘‘transformation into structure’’ of the poet’s role – Semiramide’s, Stevens’s – with the audience’s. The reader of the poem becomes taken in and participates, as well, in the poem of the poet who makes this world. Considering audiences, then, John Rocket as audience to the natural voices in his world is the elemental Apollonian dreamer without consciousness except of his world. The poet as audience of Redwood Roamer might be considered as the individual Archilochean poet, manifesting an alienation of himself from the Homeric story. The audiences of Semiramide’s drama, both Eulalia and the reader, are participants and are realized, fulfilled, in the recognition of the dark appearances. I would recall, briefly, that the sublimity of darkness and danger in Semiramide’s vision are there for both the poet and the audience in other poems, including ‘‘Domination of Black.’’ I want to consider, finally, one last poem in coming to focus on the poet’s/poem’s making and the complex participation, the involvement in mystification, of the reader. In ‘‘The Reader’’ (118), worlds, poet, and reader are intimately engaged, and the action moves from the everyday act of reading a book to a sight of ‘‘the trace of burning stars / In the frosty heaven.’’ The evocation of worlds functions, as the parasol does in ‘‘Certain Phenomena of Sound,’’ to put into play possible worlds in a relationship that is essentially metaphorical. The simple, probable activity of the first line is unremarkable in the ordinary world: ‘‘All night I sat reading a book.’’ The metaphorical turn in the second line de-realizes that first ordinariness: ‘‘Sat reading as if in a book / Of sombre pages.’’ The ‘‘as if ’’ construction creates an imagined world-within-a-world, the book he reads and the book he is in, and the second book is qualified as having ‘‘sombre pages.’’ The second stanza establishes a world of eerie, nightmare unreality, evidently the world he is in; but it could be the world of the book. ‘‘It was autumn and falling stars / Covered the shrivelled forms / Crouched in the moonlight.’’ Autumnal, ‘‘shrivelled’’

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shapes ‘‘crouched in the moonlight,’’ are covered by falling stars. The fantastic scene has in common with the world of Stevens’s poem ‘‘Metamorphosis’’ an illogic. In that poem, the process of metamorphosis culminates in a bizarre world in which ‘‘The street lamps are those that have been hanged, / Dangling in an illogical / To and to and fro / Fro Niz - nil - imbo’’ (238–39). ‘‘The Reader’s’’ world of surreal images, if the primary world the poet is in, is transformed from the ordinary to the strange, requiring a reader’s (the reader of the poem’s) participation and imaginative effort to discover. Not a verbal puzzle like ‘‘Niz - nil - imbo,’’ the situation nevertheless seems a kind of riddle. If this strangeness is the world of the book, it comments mimetically, or mysteriously, on the poet’s world. In the next stanza, ‘‘No lamp was burning as I read’’ deepens the mystery, since if there is no lamp in the darkness, we the readers cannot be sure that he is reading; and he seems, rather than reading, to be listening: ‘‘A voice was mumbling, ‘Everything / Falls back to coldness. . . .’ ’’ The voice, perhaps even more ambiguous than the evoked world of the second stanza, could be the book speaking to him, or it could be a voice from his own world. The message about a principle of everything ‘‘falling back to coldness’’ seems to be a statement about the conditions of the poet’s world, and if from his world a statement of truth; if from the book, a mimetic statement reflecting on the primary world. The final stanza reiterates the sombreness of the world, whose ‘‘sombre pages bore no print / Except the trace of burning stars / In the frosty heaven.’’ If a statement about the literal pages of the book, then the qualities of images have been transferred to it, if the second stanza is about the actual world. The difficulty is in negotiating an understanding between the two worlds, and as I suggested above, it produces a poem with a riddling quality. In the tradition of the riddle poem, the reader is brought into the poem as its being problematic and challenging. The riddle was a compelling medieval mode, and recurs in such poems as Emily Dickinson’s ‘‘I like to see it lap the miles,’’ which never names the train that is rendered concretely in the poem. ‘‘The Reader’’ seems to turn on the problematical relationship between the primary world and the world of the book, leaving the mysteries of the two to be dealt with by the reader. This poet creates himself in the reader, creates a doubling of worlds, and engages a second reader as in mimetic relationship, ‘‘as if ’’ the reader in the poem. The second reader becomes a participant in the way the reader of ‘‘Metamorphosis’’ performs, and in the end becomes the maker in ‘‘making up’’ meanings that might or might not be there.

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The act of discovery is dynamic and contributive. The central structure of thought, the metaphor of doubling and reflecting worlds, like the metaphor of the cycle of the seasons in ‘‘Metamorphosis,’’ is not merely seen in the poem, but is a potential for understanding that is brought to the reading. Like the poem’s reader, the reader in the poem lives in a world of danger and desire, and the ‘‘sombre pages’’ of his world are brought to bear on the reading. The reader might find in this world a fusion of worlds, his/her own participating in the ‘‘sombreness’’ of this world and book of the poem, sharing the dark images with the voices of the poem. * * * This riddling poem seems to have to do, then, with the mystery of creation, of poems, of worlds, and with the intricate, sometimes perplexing, truths of poetry that is liminal, irenic, and ludic. The uncertain provenance of the world of the book and the world of the poet seems to be a matter of worlds reflecting on each other, or perhaps being structured in a metaphorical relationship, or perhaps exhibiting some mysterious power of interdependence. The uncertainty I express concerning knowing would involve me in a relationship with the poem that is not to be explained and resolved as simply the relationship of a reader with an objectivity (the major stance that has been held objectionable in the New Criticism), nor as simply a metaphorical relationship (understanding as grounded in language, which would tend to erase other considerations and establish a single dimensionality), nor as simply a power enveloping both reader and poem (which would tend to affirm the metaphysical as objectively real, the target of objection to Jungean or archetypal theory). Considering Stevens’s poetry as in ‘‘intertextual’’ relationship with texts of Husserl, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Gadamer, James, and Nietzsche would open us and the poetry to mystery that engages us, whether imaginatively generated or out there stalking us. In the way some of Stevens’s poems create a liminal world engaging work, worlds (both the worlds of/in the poem and the worlds beyond), creator, and reader, they achieve the mysteriousness Merleau-Ponty talks about in phenomenological terms. To the extent that this creation remains unresolved and anticipatory, it sustains a Heideggerean sense of the withdrawal central to our being and the requirement of resignation to always being limited in knowledge, always moving with awareness of a horizon and our sight extending only so far. As instances of the need to adopt James’s pragmatic

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attitude, the poems aim both to heighten awareness of experience as event and process and to allow for possible other cases, possible other worlds. With an acquiescence to the possibilities that metaphors pose, the fictionality of the real, the metaphorical construct of reality, the poems might play with the Nietzschean proposition that God is the poet of reality, and God the creator in this metaphorical relationship can be thought to have made a world like the one the poet makes, liminal and ludic. Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida NOTES 1 Recent criticism has considered influence, echo, or ‘‘intertextuality’’ of these four philosophers, among others, as enlightenment in reading Stevens’s poetry. Jan Clayton and Eric Rothstein identify ways of considering intertextuality: as a beginning, it ‘‘might be taken as a general term, working out from broad definition of influence to encompass unconscious, socially prompted types of text formation (for example, by archetypes or popular culture); modes of conception (such as ideas ‘in the air’); styles (such as genres); and other prior constraints and opportunities for the writer’’ (3). B. J. Leggett pursues intertextual relationships between the texts of Nietzsche and Stevens and in his first chapter ‘‘Nietzsche Reading Stevens’’ establishes a rationale for intertextual reading (1–31). My free passage from one to another of these ‘‘texts,’’ to and fro, seems to be, perhaps, an extension of the ‘‘intertextual’’ critical approach. My aim is to allow greater responsiveness to a manifold of issues, coming from various directions, rather than to practice a methodology that would tend to inhibit as it focuses and clarifies. J. S. Leonard and C. E. Wharton find the influence of Nietzsche on Stevens pervasive, more so than had been previously ‘‘identified as Stevens’ Nietzschean phase’’ (xi). Others have observed the relationships between Stevens’s thought and the philosophers I talk about here, and I am indebted to their discussions, agreements, and disagreements with one another. Thomas Hines sees the progress of Stevens’s poetry as from the Husserlean to the Heideggerean. And Patricia Rae pursues Jamesean themes and language in Stevens’s poems. 2 In Being and T ime, Heidegger suggests several ways in which ‘‘covering up’’ occurs: ‘‘The covering-up itself, whether in the sense of hiddenness, burying-over, or disguise, has in turn two possibilities. There are coverings-up which are accidental; there are also some which are necessary. . . . Even in the concrete work of phenomenology itself there lurks the possibility that what has been primordially ‘within our grasp’ may become hardened so that we can no longer grasp it’’ (60–61). In ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ the distinction between ‘‘world’’ and ‘‘earth’’ is a continual challenge to understanding, and the work of art serves in ‘‘the setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth. . . . The world is the self-opening openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing’’ (Basic W ritings 172). 3 Although the imagination retains the primary characteristics attributed to it by Romantic theory, and because it was such a powerfully creative agent for the Romantics, the twentieth-

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century appreciation of it as a faculty has been restrained, especially by phenomenological thought. I think the description of it by Edward S. Casey demonstrates this careful and reserved appreciation of it. Casey concludes, concerning autonomy, that ‘‘the autonomy that I realize in imagining is not to be confused with the autonomy that I may attain in being creative: the two kinds of autonomy, though capable of overlapping, are by no means identical with one another’’ (188). Stevens dramatizes both the power of the imagination to create and order and also the excess that would retain the undue claims for the Romantic imagination. 4 In displaying the relationships of thought in Husserl and James, James Edie observes a ‘‘large number of themes in contemporary phenomenological thought which find parallels in the thought of William James. Some of these can be traced to the direct influence of James on Husserl, but for the most part they transcend such direct historical interaction and rather show a common spirit and temper, developing independently but convergently toward the same goal – namely, the establishment of the bases for a method of radical empiricism in philosophy’’ (1). 5 Libby suggests that the mysticism he talks about remains in the poetry as a mystification for the reader: ‘‘No poetry has captured that subtlety better than the poetry of Stevens’s last few years, its visions still beyond our understandings’’ (62). 6 Collected Poetry and Prose 105–06. All citations of Stevens’s work are from this edition. 7 Language for Heidegger abides with and carries us within the mystery: ‘‘Being remains mysterious, the simple nearness of an unobtrusive governance. The nearness occurs essentially as language itself. . . . Language is only in this mysterious and yet for us always pervasive way’’ (‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ Basic W ritings 212, 239). Language is, like the withdrawal, an eventfulness: ‘‘Withdrawal is an event. . . . [B]eing struck by what is actual, man may be debarred precisely from what concerns him and touches him – touches him in the surely mysterious way of escaping him by its withdrawal. The event of withdrawal could be what is most present in all our present, and so infinitely exceed the actuality of everything actual’’ (‘‘What Calls for Thinking?’’ Basic W ritings 351). 8 David Lavery observes the desire for ‘‘more’’ and the desire for precisely what can be experienced on this earth. ‘‘The desire to hold nature to itself ’’ is ‘‘overthrown by a prompting to make things over new which comes from within ‘reality’ itself ’’ (1). 9 Leggett places his ‘‘intertextual’’ reading of Stevens and Nietzsche among other interconnections of the poet and the philosopher, for instance those of Harold Bloom, Milton Bates, Frank Doggett, and Leonard and Wharton (7–19). 10 Rae reads Stevens against the conception of him as ‘‘escapist’’ aesthete, stressing the practical social values and responsibilities of the poet commensurable with William James’s pragmatism. For Stevens, ‘‘as for James, the lingering sense that the mind’s constructs have some hope of being true informs a commitment to dismantling the imagination’s constructions when they come into conflict with empirical counterevidence’’ (227). 11 James Edie’s characterization of the relationship: ‘‘The ‘object of thought,’ according to James, belongs neither to the physical world (the ‘topic’ or reference of thought) nor to the stream of experience but is rather the means by which we can objectify both consciousness, on the one hand, and the things in the world, on the other. . . . [It] is the ‘function’ through which the mind intends ‘a permanent subject of discourse’ ’’ (33). 12 Dolezˇel’s essential argument for the ground of a possible worlds theory maintains James’s central concern for possibility and a pluralistic ‘‘multiverse’’ that would save us from the finality of a closed one-dimensional reality. Spariosu’s concern is for the aesthetic applications of this pluralism and possible worlds theory toward reaffirmation of the poem as a

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liminal place – ludic and irenic rather than embedded in the strife of that one-world set of values.

WORKS CITED Casey, Edward S. Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976. Clayton, Jan, and Eric Rothstein. Influence and Intertextuality in L iterary History. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991. Dolezˇel, Lubomı´r. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Edie, James M. W illiam James and Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. T ruth and Method. 2nd ed. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Basic W ritings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper, 1977. ——. Being and T ime. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 1962. Hines, Thomas J. T he L ater Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1976. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book. Translated F. Kersten. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer, 1982. James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longman Green, 1912. ——. Pragmatism and T he Meaning of T ruth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978. ——. T he W ill to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, 1923. Lavery, David. ‘‘ ‘The More Than Rational Distortion’ in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens.’’ Wallace Stevens Journal 8 (1983): 1–7. 25 August 2001. Leggett, B. J. Early Stevens: T he Nietzschean Intertext. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Leonard, J. S., and C. E. Wharton. T he Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988. Levin, Jonathan. ‘‘Life in the Transitions: Emerson, William James, Wallace Stevens.’’ Arizona Quarterly 48 (1992): 75–97. Levinas, Emmanuel. Discovering Existence with Husserl. Trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1998. Libby, Anthony. Mythologies of Nothing: Mystical Death in American Poetry 1940–70. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984. McCann, Janet. Wallace Stevens Revisited: ‘‘T he Celestial Possible.’’ New York: Twayne, 1995. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962. Rae, Patricia. T he Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1997. Spariosu, Mihai. T he W reath of W ild Olive: Play, L iminality, and the Study of L iterature. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1997.

DENNIS E. SKOCZ

OF TIME AND THE RIVER: HEIDEGGER’S READING ¨ LDERLIN’S RIVER HYMNS OF HO

‘‘The rivers . . . are . . . of time and are time itself.’’

This quotation is an abbreviation of a statement in Martin Heidegger’s reading of Friedrich Ho¨lderin’s hymn, ‘‘The Ister.’’1 Taken at face value, the statement is provocative. How can a river be time? or even be of time? It is not hard to imagine ways in which a river can be said to be like time or conversely how time can be said to be like a river. We speak of the ‘‘river of time,’’ a common, if not worn, metaphor for time. But Ho¨lderlin, Heidegger says, is not speaking metaphorically, and Heidegger rules out a metaphorical interpretation of Ho¨lderlin’s meaning.2 The issue here is not the ‘‘river of time’’ – cliche´ and symbol – but, may we say, the time of the river: the river which is (the very stuff of ) time. This ‘‘saying’’ of the river is one we propose to address in this paper: how shall we understand the saying from the clues that Heidegger and Ho¨lderlin provide, or still more profoundly, from the intimations which the river itself proffers? What does the river say of itself as time? And what does the river have to say about human historicality? What is the relevance of the time of the river to humankind? This paper will proceed in a way that is more like a jazz improvisation than a conductor’s ‘‘reading’’ of a classical symphony. We will begin with themes from Heidegger and Ho¨lderlin, elaborate and transpose them, and, inspired by them, invent complementary variations – all with the aim of coming to understand how the river is time and how the time of the river determines the historicality of human-being.3 ‘‘Improvisation’’ is a metaphor for our ‘‘methodology’’ in this paper, but if we are to be true to the ‘‘poeticized river,’’ we must carry out our improvisation without recourse to metaphorical interpretation. In this regard, Heidegger’s text frustrates. While it is a philosophical reflection of a poetic work, it rules out philosophical analysis and literary critique.4 Indeed, it links analysis and critique as twins issuing from a common metaphysical origin, said to be inimical to the very undertaking of reading Ho¨lderlin.5 Heidegger makes it abundantly clear what the river – more precisely, the essence of the river – is not, what the time of the river is not, and how not to understand the relation of the two. The river is not that of the 299 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 299–310. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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geographer, who can chart its course in time and space.6 The time of the river is not the time in which the river runs its course from its source to its destination.7 The river is not something present at hand in space and in time, and these are not universal, uniform containers in which the river is, in which the river flows. Heidegger’s statement is not saying that the river is in time, but that it is of time, is time. ‘‘So then, Heidegger is speaking metaphorically,’’ one replies. ‘‘To say that ‘the river is time’ really means, ‘the river is like time.’ ’’ But Heidegger is quite clear that this is not what he means.8 The river of the geographer and the river as metaphor are both the products of metaphysical conceptualizing, which frames beings in virtue of the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible.9 The river of the geographer is a sensible object in space and time. Space and time, can, in Kantian terms, be seen as the universal a priori subjective forms of sensible intuition – a framework whose origin is rooted in the metaphysical bifurcation of the sensible and the intelligible. The river as metaphor, on the other hand, is a sensible object referring to an intelligible object, idea, or concept like time. The sensible river stands for the idea of time, something intelligible. The river as metaphor and the ‘‘real’’ river of the geographer as well find their place within the metaphysical scheme. We may wonder why metaphysical conceptualization is objectionable and in particular why metaphorical interpretation of a poem, no less, is inappropriate. Much of Heidegger’s reading of Ho¨lderlin seems metaphorical – indeed, a magisterial example of literary interpretation. For his part, Ho¨lderlin seems a master of evocative imagery and metaphorical expression. What harm do we incur or what insight do we miss if we simply assume that Heidegger and Ho¨lderlin speak metaphorically? Moreover, if the river is not a metaphor or symbol of time, then what is the way in which to understand the river in its timeliness? What may we say aYrmatively of the river and time? We will postpone an effort to answer these questions until after we have recapitulated Heidegger’s ‘‘argument.’’ Only after we have followed his path of thinking will we be able to judge whether Heidegger meets his own standard – invoking the time of the river and thinking its relation to the historicality of humanbeing without lapsing into metaphysical conceptualizing. At the outset, we quoted an abbreviated statement of Heidegger’s. The full statement reads: ‘‘The rivers intimate and vanish into time and do so in such a way that they themselves are thus of time and are time itself.’’10 The timeliness of the rivers must be thought from out of their intimation and vanishing. Here we find the beginning of an affirmative determination.

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At first, it seems that vanishing and intimation are simply opposed and that vanishing does duty for the past, intimation for the future – leaving one to speculate on what counts as the present.11 In this scheme, the present would seem to be that of the one who hearkens to the vanishing of the river. In terms of the flow of the river – and Heidegger tells us that the flow of the river is its actuality12 – the future or destination (can we say destiny?) of the river is the sea, to which the river flows and into which it vanishes. The river’s past would be its origin, the source of the river. The river would flow from its past into its future. If we want to ‘‘desubjectivize’’ our understanding of the time of the river, then should we not opt for this second schematization whose directionality does not derive from the ‘‘knowing subject’’? And what of the opposition of vanishing and intimation? Ho¨lderlin himself tells us that the river intimates as it vanishes – and vanishes on the way to its destination, the sea.13 Intimating and vanishing are not opposed here but are characterized as parallel events or aspects of a singular, unidirectional phenomenon.14 And what is that direction? Is it into the past – an interpretation suggested by the word ‘‘vanishing’’ itself, or is it into the future – the river moves toward the sea, its destination? Confusion seems to meet us at every turn as we try to understand vanishing and intimating temporally. Yet, Heidegger does not inadvertently fall into contradiction. He, in fact, underscores apparently contradictory propositions within a single paragraph.15 On the one hand, ‘‘As vanishing, the river is underway into what has been. As full of intimation, it proceeds into what is coming.’’ Vanishing, past; intimation, future. On the other hand, ‘‘Likewise, vanishing proceeds . . . into what is to come,’’ and, ‘‘What has been . . . also lets itself be intimated.’’ Vanishing, future; intimation, past. These are not the blunders of sloppy speech. They are challenges to think the dynamic of time, river time, outside of the framework of metaphysics and its conception of time as a series of ‘‘nows.’’ How can past be future and future, past? The past is future as it prevails over, determines, and destines what is to come. Heidegger tells us that profound recollective intimation occurs ‘‘when that which is to come . . . comes out of what has been.’’16 From the emergence of the river at its source, the destiny of the river, which is to merge with the waters of the sea, is already intimated. Conversely, the future is past as passing – passing out (vanishing) from the present moment and from our certain knowledge and sure grasp into what is not yet and

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only hints of what is to be.17 The future is what slips from our hold – the elusive, the vanishing. And, what shall we make of the difference in the directionality of time, noted above, between that established by the flow of the river and the directionality determined from the standpoint of the ‘‘knowing subject’’ or rather the ‘‘one who hears them vanishing’’? Perhaps it is no mere opposition or accidental juxtaposition. Perhaps, the ‘‘two times’’ belong together in a fateful difference – fateful, inasmuch as the difference establishes the historicality of human-being and ‘‘lets be’’ the time of the river as enigma. Recall that Heidegger tells us that ‘‘human beings, as historical, are grounded in relation to this essence of the river.’’18 Perhaps it is time to ask about the relation between the time of the river and the historicality of humankind. To understand the time of the river and its relation to the historicality of human-being, we must enlarge our vocabulary to include journeying and locality (dwelling). With the addition of these, the time of the river will come to be seen as a ‘‘time-space.’’ The river is journeying and locality (dwelling).19 The river itself journeys and is a journeying.20 The river itself dwells and is a dwelling.21 More than this, the river is the locality of journeying and journeying of locality.22 Are these empty formulae? Heidegger allows that we might think so.23 Well we might, if we fail to understand the temporality of dwelling and the spatiality of journeying. At first, journeying seems to stand for time; locality (dwelling), for space: two metaphors doing symbolic duty for two concepts.24 But Heidegger helps us to see that journeying is ‘‘spatial’’ through and through. It proceeds from a locality and terminates in locality, indeed is a journeying precisely as destined to a locality. To be ‘‘on the way’’ is not only to proceed from place to place but also to do so in such a way that each place along the way anticipates those to follow and preserves those already covered in the journey.25 Locality, for its part, is not static. Not only is it the starting point and the destination of journeying, but in its aspect of tarrying, meandering, and ‘‘seeming to flow backwards,’’ it is a ‘‘thing of time’’ – a ‘‘whiling.’’26 How does all of this – intimating, vanishing, journeying, dwelling – relate to the historicality of human-being? Heidegger says that the river in the originary unity of locality and journeying ‘‘determines [emphasis added] the being at home of human beings [locality] as historical in their coming to be at home [ journeying].’’27 Are we making an analogy: humankind is to journeying and dwelling as the river is to journeying and dwelling? The river’s temporality would be a symbol for man’s

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historicality. But Heidegger says emphatically, ‘‘the river is not a ‘symbolic image’ of ‘human life.’ It is not a symbolic image at all.’’28 How does the river ‘‘determine’’ our historicality? How can we speak of the relation of the river to us without lapsing into analogizing? without invoking images of the river that merely symbolize humankind’s historical situation? The timeliness of the river can only be determinative for human historicality if the river’s temporality engages human-being historically – beckoning us to journeying and bidding us to dwell. We shall see that indeed the river beckons us to the journeying that is ours to undertake, refusing to carry us along with it or even to allow us to fathom its meaning, eluding us in its onward rush to its destination, the sea. The river offers a dwelling to humankind but it does not relieve human-being of the need to find appropriate dwelling and to appropriate that dwelling.29 While the temporality and spatiality of the river might invite comparisons to the temporality and spatiality of human-being, it is not in speaking of human-being but rather in speaking to human-being that the river determines human historicality.30 Decisive for the historicality of human-being is that allusive and elusive moment when the river vanishes into its future (its ‘‘not yet’’; the ‘‘no longer’’ for us). The river allures the one who hearkens to it. ‘‘Who loves them not?’’ Ho¨lderlin asks. Even as the rivers slip away, Ho¨lderlin avows, ‘‘always do they move my heart.’’31 Even as the river withdraws from us, it draws us closer to itself. Its very allure owes to its holding itself aloof, set on its own course and indifferent to our concerns. Our attraction to the river is not owing to its pliant submission to our purposes and schemes. Nor does it satisfy our will to know. Its very spirit and essence is to be a riddle. Never will we know its meaning.32 The call of the river rushing along to its enigmatic destiny ‘‘tears human beings out of the habitual midst of their lives.’’33 It unsettles and then steals away, and in stealing away from us, it leaves us to our own devices, to the journeying that is ours to take. That journeying will take us to our dwelling place, to where we are at home. This reading of historicality ‘‘refutes’’ any historicism. Nowhere is there any talk of the powerful ‘‘current of history’’ which sweeps us off our feet and carries us whether we will it or not or even against our wills to a destination not of our making. On the contrary, while the river rushes to its future, it vanishes into our past. For us, it is no longer. The river leaves us alone, uprooted, and abandoned, so that we must make our own journey, find our way home, and take up our own abode. Nor does the

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river even point in a certain direction. The river reveals nothing of its own meaning, which it keeps from us, but only confounds us with the enigmatic itself. Having beckoned to us in its own allusive way, it then eludes us. The very ones who cannot but love the river precisely for its ‘‘independent spirit’’ are left to themselves.34 Heidegger’s reading is seemingly so rich in imagery and symbols, so suggestive of multiple interpretations, that we can no longer avoid asking whether it avoids metaphorical/metaphysical conceptualizing. With Heidegger’s interpretation laid out, we should have the wherewithal to raise the issue and offer a response. Metaphor presupposes a bifurcation of the sensible and the intelligible, the particular and the general. In this, it is, at root, metaphysical. So much we know from Heidegger. The use of metaphor, however, is metaphysical in another way, one that Heidegger does not make explicit. In using metaphor, the speaker/writer begins with a preexisting or presumed knowledge of the abstract and general whose meaning he/she seeks to convey. Moreover, the speaker/writer always already knows the particular, chosen precisely for its conformity with the general concept and for its common familiarity to listeners or readers. The latter, to be sure, will come to know something of the general concept – or rather what the speaker/ writer intends to communicate. But what they learn is not derived from the matter itself as it gives itself to a seeker of knowledge. No one in the circle of communication described here knows or seeks to know the truth of the matter from the things themselves. The language of metaphor, so understood, is about communicating meanings rather than about naming the essential. What is metaphysical here is the knowing-in-advance of what counts (of the essential) before any encounter.35 In speaking of the ‘‘river of time,’’ I already know or presume to know what time is. I seize upon the river as a concrete phenomenon in order to make my already understood notion of time intelligible to others or myself. I do not learn from the river what time is – or, for that matter, what the river is. I always already know what time is, and I do not care about the river except insofar as it serves to convey my meaning. The conveyance (communication) of meaning, and not the effort to ponder the essence of the matter, is determinative. Metaphor, in this sense, deflects thought from thoughtful encounter with the matter of thought itself precisely by anticipating what shall count as being essential. It is inimical to coming to know because it already presumes to know. Metaphysical/metaphorical conceptualizing transposes thought to a realm of the universal, the common, the least determined,

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and fully transparent. It discounts the unique, the ownmost, and the hidden. The essential as well, in this metaphysical view, is always already known and never recedes from our grasp, as it truly does, because it is conceived to be precisely that which gives us the access by which to grasp, sort, order, and dominate beings. Journeying, dwelling, intimating, and vanishing – are not metaphors as just described. They are not employed as familiar images to illustrate a preconceived notion of time. The four are enigmas, as is the temporality of the river. These images are employed individually and in relation to each other, not to communicate a preconceived notion of time but rather to enter into the enigmatic essence of the time of the river. This essence is not a universal truth applicable by analogy to the historicality of man. No parallel or likeness between the temporality of the river and human historicality counts as being decisive. It is precisely their difference that matters. Each goes its own way. Indeed, the indifference of the river to human-being, manifest in its vanishing, leads to an abandonment of human-being, leaving human-being to assume its historicality in its own journeying-dwelling. Ultimately, it is not what the poeticized river says about the historicality of human-being that counts, but rather how the river in its intimating-vanishing and its joumeying-dwelling speaks to human-being. ‘‘They are to be to language.’’36 They address human beings: beckoning to journeying, bidding to dwell. Alluring and then eluding us, they throw us back upon ourselves to undertake our own journeying and in so doing to appropriate our own dwelling. 1 1 1 What may we gather from Heidegger’s reflection on Ho¨lderlin’s river hymns? Is there a generally applicable truth about rivers? nature? time? being? Should the work of art not tell us something about reality? ourselves? Should the interpretation of a work of art not help to understand its truth or its meaning? The temptation to plumb the text – Heidegger’s and/or Ho¨lderlin’s – in search of a ‘‘higher truth’’ is almost irresistible. On the basis of what Heidegger has said about Ho¨lderlin’s poems we want to say something about time, specifically human time or historicality. We want to say that time is not to be understood as a river in the way ‘‘river’’ is usually understood, i.e., as a steady, unidirectional movement from past to future. We want to say that the difference between ‘‘river time’’ and our own ‘‘human time’’ makes manifest what is unique to human time or histori-

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cality. But, in setting river time and human time in opposition and then ‘‘grounding’’ human time in its opposition to river time, are we not making a dialectical employment of the river as metaphor? Are we not working the metaphysical opposition of nature and spirit to find in the opposition something of the nature of spirit? In this dialectical play does not the river become a kind of metaphor, a ‘‘counter-metaphor’’? Would not the particularity of the river find meaning in the universality of an understanding of human time, historical time? If these speculations have merit, then Heidegger – and Ho¨lderlin before him – might be enacting what Schiller understood as the mediating role of art or beauty, making the intelligible sensible and the sensible intelligible, bridging the gulf between the particular and the universal in the work of art.37 On Heidegger’s own terms this is not what he is doing. He would insist that our interpretation of his interpretation is fundamentally at odds with his ‘‘project.’’ But leaving aside the objections we might expect from Heidegger, let us ask: how does ‘‘the’’ river speak to us about time? Put this way (with the emphasis on ‘‘the’’), the question makes it obvious that there are many rivers, even many poeticized rivers. The Danube and Rhine, as poeticized in Ho¨lderlin’s river hymns, may speak to us differently than the Mississippi in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or the Congo in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the Ganges in the Vedas. If rivers, specifically poeticized rivers, are many, might there be many times as well? Critic Lionel Trilling and poet/critic T. S. Eliot both point to the centrality of the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn. Trilling speaks of the ‘‘river-god . . . whose comments are silent – sunlight, space, uncrowded time, stillness and danger.’’38 Eliot uses the expression, ‘‘River God,’’ as well, and calls Huck the ‘‘spirit of the River’’ – a river which reminds us of the ‘‘power and terror of Nature, the isolation and feebleness of Man.’’39 Trilling quotes with approval Pascal’s statement, ‘‘rivers are roads that move’’; it is Leo Marx, another critic, who picks up on this thought and points to the fact that the river becomes an avenue of escape and freedom, bearing Huck and Jim away from the confines of life on shore.40 Within each of these ‘‘Mississippis’’ time unfolds differently. For Eliot, ‘‘the River itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning it is not yet the river; in its end, it is no longer the river.’’41 The temporality of ‘‘Trilling’s Twain’s’’ river is adumbrated in the quotation cited above. For Leo Marx the promise of freedom that the Mississippi seems to offer is contradicted by the end of the story, ‘‘the quest cannot succeed.’’ Huck seems fated to be

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‘‘civilized’’; ‘‘I been there before,’’ he says.42 The journey – river journey – ends where it began. Time is cyclical. Freedom founders against fate. In these Mississippis we hear resonances of the Rhine and Danube of Heidegger and Ho¨lderlin: rivers elusive and enigmatic and yet linked to human fate and freedom. But, we hear differences too: in Twain, a river that carries away and serves as means of escape and freedom, if only for a time; in Ho¨lderlin, a river that escapes us and thus abandons us to our freedom. With so many rivers and so many times, are we left to construct inductively a notion of time from the many rivers and the many temporalities of those rivers? Or is this a hopeless task? Are we left to conclude that these and other rivers, these and other ‘‘manifestations’’ of nature – seas, mountains, plains, skies – are but metaphorical material for the diverse imaginations of poets who appropriate these to give form to their aesthetic notions and feelings? Perhaps the ‘‘take away’’ or the lesson learned from thinking the poeticizing of rivers and time lies in understanding the thinking and the poeticizing as much as in understanding the matter of the thinking and poeticizing. Heidegger has taught us to understand the work of art as the site of the happening of the truth of being.43 Happening, Ereignis, is event Ereignis, happening, is the timely, the historical.44 If Twain and Ho¨lderlin successfully poeticize rivers, they fall short of universal and necessary truths, they do less than give us a doctrine of time. But, they also do more than that, for, if Heidegger is right, their work allows the very being, time, place and truth of the river itself to unfold in their works. We may cite Eliot as a witness in the ‘‘case’’ of Heidegger. Mark Twain makes you see the River, as it is and was and always will be, more clearly than the author of any other description of a river known to me. But you do not merely see the River, you do not merely become acquainted with it through the senses: you experience the River.45

What then do we take away from encounter of poet and poeticized in the work of art, e.g., in the work of Ho¨lderlin? Surely, we take away what he or she has given us to see and ‘‘to experience’’ in its time, place, truth, being. But, beyond this singular event in its singularity, there is the way of the poet manifest in the poeticizing itself, the poet’s way of encountering what will be the poeticized. The nature of the encounter, the way in which the poet stands to the poeticized, is fully the subject of a separate reflection, but we have in this paper an account of Heidegger’s reflection on Ho¨lderlin poeticizing and, in that,

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the thoughtful reenactment of a poetic encounter. This is not an ontology or a philosophical anthropology. It provides no rules for harmonious living with others. If, however, Ho¨lderlin is right that humans dwell poetically on the earth, then learning the way of the poet should bear on how humanly we dwell and on our relationship to the earth.46 Arlington, V irginia NOTES 1 Martin Heidegger, Ho¨lderlin’s Hymn ‘‘T he Ister,’’ trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 12. 2 Ibid., p. 18; ‘‘Ho¨lderlin’s hymnal poetry, which is the vocation of the poet after 1799, is not concerned with symbolic images at all.’’ 3 Ibid., p. 42; ‘‘Human beings, as historical, are grounded in relation to this essence of the river.’’ 4 Ibid., p. 19; ‘‘But if the rivers in Ho¨lderlin’s poetry are in truth not ‘symbolic images,’ then what else can they be? How are we supposed to be able to know anything about them, when all our knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, has its ground and hold in metaphysics?’’ 5 Ibid., p. 26; ‘‘The essence of art and of metaphysics are not sufficient to lend this poetry the essential space appropriate to it. If it is not metaphysics [which determines the essence of art and poetry], however, then this poetry is not ‘philosophy’ either; for since Plato, all thinking that has been called ‘philosophy’ is metaphysics.’’ 6 Ibid., p. 20; Heidegger identifies the actual river, the subject of Ho¨lderlin’s hymn, as the Donau, but he casts doubt on the worth of any factual, geographical knowledge for understanding the river as ‘‘it truly is.’’ 7 Ibid., p. 39; Heidegger tells us that both the precise location and time of year of the scene depicted in ‘‘The Ister’’ can be identified, but that this knowledge does not grasp the ‘‘actuality of the actual.’’ 8 Ibid., p. 18. 9 Ibid., p. 17. 10 Ibid., p. 12. 11 Ibid., p. 12; ‘‘One of them [intimation] names the relation of the rivers to what is coming and close to being intimated. The other [vanishing] names the river’s going away into what has been.’’ 12 Ibid., p. 20. 13 Ibid., p. 12; from the second strophe of Ho¨lderlin’s ‘‘Voice of the People’’: ‘‘. . . when I hear them vanishing / full of intimation. . . .’’ 14 Ibid., p. 30; ‘‘The river is simultaneously vanishing and full of intimation. . . .’’ 15 Ibid., p. 29; cf. the first full paragraph. 16 Ibid., p. 29. 17 Ibid., p. 29; ‘‘Likewise, vanishing proceeds not simply into what has been, but equally into what is to come.’’ 18 Ibid., p. 42. 19 Ibid., p. 43.

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20 Ibid., p. 32. 21 Ibid., p. 35. 22 Ibid., p. 43. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 43; ‘‘Locale is a spatial determination. Journey, movement, takes its course in time.’’ 25 Ibid., p. 35; ‘‘Yet the river is equally essentially the journeying of locality. . . . The locale is both there and here. . . . The locale is not something that is first there and then here, in a mere succession or arbitrary arrangement of places that are occupied and then relinquished. The previous locale remains preserved in the subsequent one. And the subsequent locale has already determined the previous one.’’ 26 Ibid., p. 20; ‘‘Dwelling takes on an abode and is an abiding [emphasis added] in such an abode. . . . The abode is a whiling. It needs a while.’’ 27 Ibid., p. 42. 28 Ibid., p. 43. 29 Ibid., p. 21; ‘‘One’s own must come to be appropriate. And in turn, whatever has become appropriate needs to be appropriated.’’ 30 Ibid., p. 26; here Heidegger ponders how the rivers are ‘‘to be to language’’ without; thereby, becoming symbols or metaphors. 31 Ibid., pp. 27–28; Ho¨lderlin, from his poem, ‘‘Voice of the People’’: ‘‘Unconcerned with our wisdom/ The rivers still rush on, and yet/ Who loves them not? And always do they move/ My heart, when from afar I hear them vanishing/ Full of intimation. . . .’’ 32 Ibid., p. 6; last two lines from ‘‘The Ister’’: ‘‘Yet what that one does, that river,/ No one knows.’’ 33 Ibid., p. 28. 34 Ibid., p. 28; ‘‘The rivers’ intimative vanishing along their own path is alike an abandonment of the realm of the human landscape, it is like an unfaithfulness toward that landscape.’’ 35 Ibid., p. 26. Metaphor precludes the poetical naming in Ho¨lderlin’s hymns, because metaphor presumes that what is named is already known in its essence, but naming is what first brings the named to its essence: ‘‘Yet if Ho¨lderlin’s hymnal poetry is a naming, and if naming first elevates and poetizes what is named into its essence, then the river poems cannot be poems ‘about’ rivers, in which the rivers are already familiar in their essence and are taken as images or emblems signifying something else.’’ 36 Ibid., p. 5; from ‘‘The Ister.’’ 37 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of L etters, trans. Reginald Snell (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1954), pp. 87–88. 38 Lionel Trilling, ‘‘Introduction,’’ T he Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1948), reprinted in Huckleberry Finn, T ext, Sources, and Criticism, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), p. 196. 39 T. S. Eliot; ‘‘Introduction,’’ T he Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (London: The Cresset Press, 1950), reprinted in Huckleberry Finn, T ext, Sources, and Criticism, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), p. 201. 40 Leo Marx, ‘‘Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn.’’ T he American Scholar, Vol. 22, No. 4 (United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa, 1953), reprinted in Huckleberry Finn, T ext, Sources, and Criticism, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), p. 206. 41 Eliot., op. cit., p. 202. 42 Marx, op. cit., p. 210.

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43 Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ in his Poetry, L anguage, T hought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 39, 58. 44 Ibid., p. 65. 45 Eliot; op. cit., p. 201. 46 Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Poetically Man Dwells,’’ in his Poetry, L anguage, T hought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 213–218. See, ‘‘dwelling rests on the poetic’’ (p. 214); and, ‘‘when Ho¨lderlin speaks of dwelling, he has before his eyes the basic character of human existence’’ (p. 215); and finally, ‘‘poetry is what first brings man onto the earth’’ (p. 218).

MARIOLA SUŁKOWSKA

KANTOR’S MYSTERY OF DEATH

Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all; Many times he died, Many times rose again. A great man in his pride Confronting murderous men Casts derision upon Supersession of breath; He knows death to the bone – Man has created death.1

This article presents the conception of the theatre of the Polish artist, director, designer, actor and painter, Tadeusz Kantor.2 Among other things, he founded the very peculiar Theatre of Death. His vision seems to be one of many different attempts at defining death. First of all, his proposition emphasizes the mystery of death, which consists of a very special mixture of different elements. It is a homogeneous mixture of death and life and it features the attendance of a dummy-double of an actor in the Theatre of Death. Moreover, it can be associated with photography and its fatal atmosphere, as expressed by Roland Barthes. It turns out that encountering the dummy-double, as well as encountering the camera, is based on the scheme of a very specific contradiction, namely on the palinode which is a denial by hyperliterality. So the main thesis of this article is that the mystery of death consists in its inseparable, inconceivable and, because of this, mysterious connection with life. It appears that both elements – death and life – simultaneously contradict and witness one another. Reflection on death – evidenced in works from ancient to modern times – gives rise to a variety of philosophical questions. A crucial question concerns the nature of death. Traditionally, philosophers interpret this question as a call for an analysis or definition of the concept of death. We can, obviously, provide many different solutions to the problem. Among other things, death is described as ‘‘mysterious,’’ but it is not clear what this means. Suppose we cannot formulate a satisfactory analysis of 311 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 311–319. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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the concept of death: in this respect, death would be mysterious, but no more so than any other concept that defies analysis. Death is not distinctively mysterious – all other unanalysable concepts are equally mysterious in this way. Yet it is widely thought that there must be a special mystery about death. Some seem to take the mystery to be that we cannot know or even conceive of what being dead will be like. This might be thought to follow from the simple fact that most of us who are living have no recollection of ever having been dead, and thus we lack first-hand experience of what death is like. Furthermore, since there is considerable doubt about the veracity of the testimony of those few who claim to recall having been dead, none of us has a reliable second-hand report of what death is like. So, what makes death especially mysterious and frightening is the fact that we cannot know what it will be like. On the other hand, however, we can ask why Yeats is convinced that man ‘‘knows death to the bone’’ because ‘‘man has created death.’’ Creation of death enables its reproduction; familiarity with it does not exclude fear – on the contrary, the animal dies with ‘‘nor dread nor hope attended.’’ In the case of man, the mystery of death consists of a mixture of hope and dread. I perceive a similar perspective in Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death where we are allowed to encounter our death. The atmosphere of such an encounter is evidently a particular one: there is a constant contrast between the evanescence of one plan and the giganticness of the other, a permanent heroic comical tension between the ordinariness of image and the dignity of sense. These two contradictory tendencies – of sublimation and compromise – overlap, crossing incessantly. In the convention of remorseless, cruel realism invoking the ‘pathos of poverty’, in the realm of men-objects degradated and humiliated, questioned by their doubles-dummies – simultaneously witnessed by photographs – there is no place for reflection but only for emotions: fear and bliss, excitement and pain. As if Kantor would want to repeat with Witold Gombrowicz that ‘‘being felt, not realized is of some importance’’ and that ‘‘the world exists for us only as a possibility of pain or pleasure.’’3 He thus, creates his ‘‘theatre of constructed affection,’’ which is also characteristic of masses, fairs, liturgy and circus.4 The perennial creation of death, a permanent chain of dying and living, eventually constitutes a myth that ‘happens’, occurring not only once but happening all the time, right in front of our eyes; one has only to perceive it. Myth is situated somewhere in ‘between’, it constitutes a specific ‘being in between’ – Bardo, as mentioned in ‘‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead.’’ Bar-do is not only

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an interlude after death but also a suspension in specific life situations; death also occurs in life. Birth and death in this respect concern everyone – repeatedly and in this particular moment. Kantor speaks of the specific condition of being ‘stateless’ that might be regarded as the counterpart of Bar-do, by means of which he determines the real dialectic of death, which is an ‘attended absence’. The creation of the myth of death simultaneously intensifies its mystery; myth as a structure includes a dialectical mixture of melancholic consolation and fatal fear. Myth being an expression of faith in rhythm is a means of escaping from all conceivable absurdities. As Malraux wrote, it is ‘‘death that changes life into fate.’’ Moreover, this fate is most mysterious not only in death but also in life ‘‘if we do not realize the presence of our death there will be no power and no mystery.’’5 The essence of this mysterium mortis consists in the fact that, because of death creeping after us, life itself constitutes an impenetrable mystery and man constitutes an immeasurable force. The contradiction between life and death perfectly reflects Kantor’s dichotomy of fiction and reality.6 Past and death – the two opposites of the avant-garde stereotype of progress – were for Kantor not only stylistic figures, or simply a conscious yet provoking anachronism. His interest in death was due to his awareness of theatre and the condition of its participants: actors, viewers; both the human and the artistic condition. Death likens a man-actor to the ‘great marionette’; within the theatre it creates surrogate situations. First of all, it triggers off the mechanism of memory. The Theatre of Death is a ‘monstrous memory machine’; this is the Dead Memory Machine, in which a partially dreamt vision – as sleepy as faded photographs – constantly collides with fearful reality. Photography mediates between life and death. Roland Barthes demonstrated in ‘‘Camera Lucida’’ that photography is simultaneously a dead and stopped time. It is a unique sign: it is the effigy of what-has-been that became immobilised and thus exists further exposed to the decay of cellulose.7 ‘‘Uniqueness of Photography among other arts consists in the fact that it is the sign of what-has-been. Even faded it is still a way of remembering. It is still a trace. Photographic print in its fragility is more durable than the human body.’’8 What would happen if it were able to overcome death? Kantor discovered terror and the theatrical aspect of photographs of the dead. In his theatre – which was labelled by its creator a Hiring Agency of the Dear Absent – the living are already dead, and the theatre itself becomes a gambol of the returning dead dummies, which are the

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doubles of the living or, maybe quite the opposite, the living are the doubles of the dead . . . as in the danses macabres, where the living and the dead performed the dance, accompanied by giggles and terror; this renaissance dance is the key to the Theatre of Death.9 Kantor himself, like Charon, crosses the river of Oblivion on the celluloid raft, accompanied by the living as well, as he escorts the dead through the river of Memory. Kantor translated the obliterated memory, which is inherent in us like an ill-healed wound, into the signs of theatre. In addition, his cathartic role as Kantor-Charon consists, perhaps, in bringing the dead into life and taking the living away, arranging in this respect a common fatal human comedy, commedia dell’ amore e della morte. . . . * * * The idea of the Theatre of Death appeared in Kantor’s mind about 1975. It originated from the rejection of a neo-avant-garde belief in the possibility of blurring the borderline between life and art. In the Theatre of Death’s manifesto he wrote that death and ars moriendi are ‘‘the only argument against the conformity of art and life.’’10 Due to the fact that the reality of art is substantially a ‘counterfeit’, a dummy closely related to illusion, he stated that ars moriendi is the only possible way of producing art after the end of art: ‘‘I feel the breath of Death, the Beautiful Lady, as Gordon Craig calls her. Is she not a figure that accidentally rules the world of art? . . .’’11 Moreover, ‘‘the work of art is born on stage in imprisonment. In HER ward, in the ward of Death! . . .’’12 Is it possible that Kantor did touch in this way the greatest mystery of art, which disguises the tragic condition of artistic creation? The basis for Kantor’s Theatre of Death was the metaphysics of dummy and the metaphysics of photography; the former is represented by dummies-doubles, the latter by means of Daguerre’s lethal invention – an old fashioned camera being at the same time a cannon in which the noise of closing the shutters denotes gunshots. From such ontological assumptions there is no other way of describing Kantor’s art as the incessant pulsing beat between the escape from illusion that falsifies the truth and the eagerness for recapturing the irretrievable loss of man’s relationship with reality. The beat is rather hopeless: for the illusion cannot ever be defeated (it does not have material existence), for one cannot believe in a momentary triumph of the real, which, deprived of illusion, cannot exist in terms of consciousness. Life could not exist without death and matter without

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form.13 ‘‘Art’’ he said, ‘‘for me is a form of meeting, confrontation, contrasting the real and fictitious elements of the real.’’14 The stimulus to write his first score (that is what he called his scripts for the Theatre of Death) – the score of ‘‘The Dead Class’’ – was the realization of, as Kantor writes, the existence of recollection. ‘‘Recollection lives out of our sight, it grows in the regions of feeling and affection. And cry. (. . .) The discovery of recollection appeared in time because in the battle against the visible and the material the biggest cannons of scientism were wheeled out. To close this chapter a revision and rehabilitation of the notion of the past ought to be executed. I have done it. I wandered through the world proclaiming the triumph of the past, dared to believe that this is the only relevant and counting notion of ‘real time’ in art because it expresses the ‘perfect’ aspect! Soon came the while for me to state that recollection must be expressed. At that stage it was necessary to comprehend how memory functions. In this way, the era of my own avant-garde was commenced, i.e. the ten years’ vanguard of recollection, memory, the invisible, emptiness and death.’’15 Apart from ‘‘Dead Class’’ to The Theatre of Death belong the following plays: ‘‘Wielopole, Wielopole’’ (1980), ‘‘Let the Artists Die’’ (1985) and ‘‘I Shall Never Return’’ (1988). The mysterial structure of each consists in a polyphonic scheme of semantic rhythms: the rhythm of enlivening and dying, the rhythm of absorption and diffusion, recalling and forgetting, progression and regression, the rhythm of lasting and contradicting, identifying and distancing, the rhythm of continuing and disintegrating, of the conscious and unconscious. They all motivate an incessant comeback to the specific ‘zero state’, to the ‘stateless’ condition between the obliterated dead yesterday and the unachievable posthumous tomorrow where the rhythmical mystery of Death – the great death wedding – is being performed.16 THE RHETORIC OF DEATH AND THE DUMMY

Kantor’s dance macabre is performed between garbage and eternity; instead of the Renaissance figure of a mummified corpse, a dry skeleton – la morte secca – there dances the enormous marionette, a mechanical homunculus, a human dummy – la atrapa secca. But why a dummy? What is more, why is it a dummy-double of an actor of the Theatre of Death? Kantor himself, answering the first question, referred to Gordon Craig, who demanded ‘‘with all seriousness the comeback of the marionette to the theatre’’ and ‘‘when it (the marionette)

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appears people as in the past will be allowed to worship and adore the happiness of Being, and pay godly, cheerful homage to Death (. . .).’’17 Craig, together with Heinrich von Kleist, Ernst Theodore A. Hoffman, and Edgar Allan Poe, accordingly with the assumptions of the aesthetics of symbolism, considered a human being – subjected to unpredictable emotions and passions, and consequently to chance – the ‘bastard of reality’ – as an element completely incongruous to the nature of works of art. In the case of Kantor’s theatre the nature and structure of a work of art – a work of total art18 – is totally homogenous and totally cohesive – and in this sense is, above all, totally mysterious. The dummy, appearing in the peripherals of official avant-garde, becomes a model through which passes the intensive sensation of Death and the condition of the dead. A dummy as the symptom, sign, and manifestation of ‘the real in its lowest range’ was also called an ‘empty object’. A dummy evidently burdened with the sign of death is introduced by Kantor to express the rules of his art, i.e. the rule that says that ‘‘the notion of life in art can only be reclaimed by the absence of life, by reference to Death, by appearances, by emptiness (. . .).’’19 The message of Death and Nothingness that passes through the being deprived of consciousness, created by the illegalised and not perfect demiurge, is reinforced, intensified by means of imitation and delusive likeness: the dummy is the Dead double of an Alive actor or, perhaps, the Alive actor is the Dead dummy. . . . For, indeed as Heinrich Bo¨ll noticed, it often happens that ‘‘the living are dead and the dead are alive.’’ Closed in its corporality a dummy allows Kantor to confront Death with Matter; for ‘‘life in its pure form flows through matter. Only flows.’’ For Kantor dummies are such beings that are subject to this flow in a perfect manner because they do it unwittingly.20 Human body This fragile and poetical Embalage of Skeletons, Deaths, Hopes for Survival.21

The human body becomes here a lethal shroud that embraces dead matter, a still life revealing its tragic seriousness and the ‘pathos of poverty’; its mystical consistence.22 A fascinating encounter evoking confusion and embarrassment: there stands a delusively similar creature in front of a living man; despite this (or perhaps because of that) a creature infinitely distant, thrillingly alien,

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like a Dead . . . , conveying the moving message of unusual weight; the message concerning the human condition with its responsibility, with tragic awareness, measuring the fate of man with the relentless and final scale of death. THE RHETORIC OF DEATH AND PHOTOGRAPHY

A similar, yet no less fascinating encounter, shows photography shrouded by its fatal atmosphere, which is not only the metaphor of the dead matter, as it was in the case of the dummies, but rather the metaphor of dead time. A camera–machine gun operated by the photographer from Wielopole’s widow who is a ‘gloomy agent of death’ appeared among other symbolic images of Death in Kantor’s theatre. An old forgotten photograph paradoxically being a plate of recollection conveys us to the realm of memory, where incomplete existences and events live their lives not yet completely forgotten. Recalling the metaphysics of photography Kantor re-creates the structure of recollection: what we recollect does not exist anymore; the developer for a plate of dead recollection is a solution of memory, a solution so dissolved, that it foils visualizing. Departing from plates and reapproaching them designates, in Theatre of Death, according to the phenomenology of photography, the rhythm of enlivening and dying. The act of enlivening is temporal and transient; the noeme of Photography is that-has-been, or, to put it in a different way, that-which-is-no-longerhere, what is already dead: ‘‘The photograph’s immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (‘‘this-has-been’’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.’’23 In addition the trick is reinforced by a specific ontical status of a photograph: ‘‘to annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself (. . .). From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.’’24 Since there is a shortage of representation, there is no place for interpretation. The fact that Photography cannot be comprehended is due to its obviousness: a photograph cannot say what it (re)presents. We all have in mind that ‘‘what can be shown cannot be articulated.’’25 A

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photograph does not say, it shows something that has been: and that it is, or better was, is mystical and mysterious.26 Kantor’s Theatre of Death is also deprived of interpretation and hermeneutics – it is a pre-opinion that cannot be changed or modified by anything. Roland Barthes highlighted the intimate relationship between Death and Photograph, suggestively calling the camera a ‘clock for seeing’. A photograph is closely related to theatre and not to painting because of its unique medium, i.e., Death. We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese Noˆ mask . . . Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however ‘‘lifelike’’ we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of T ableau V ivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.27

The true total photograph accomplishes the unusual mixture of reality (‘‘that-has-been’’) with truth (‘‘there-she-is!’’); it becomes at once evidential and exclamative. On the other hand, encountering the dummy-double as well as encountering the camera is based on the scheme of contradiction, on palinode ( palinodia) – the dead dummy contradicts the living human being. Posing in front of the camera I anticipate my own death, I wear a mask, I emit myself causing necrobiosis of my body – I contradict myself. The Living contradicts the Dead. Death contradicts Life. Contradicting it, Death confirms Life, Life witnesses Death. . . . University of Silesia, Poland NOTES 1 W. B. Yeats, ‘‘Death,’’ in: Collected Poems, A. Martin (ed.) (London: 1992), p. 242. 2 Tadeusz Kantor, born in Wielopole, near Cracow, Poland, 6 April 1915, Polish director, designer, actor and painter. Founded underground Independent Theatre during the Nazi Occupation, 1942 and Theatre Cricot 2, 1956; staged series of happenings, from 1966; regularly visited France and other countries with the Cricot 2 company, from 1971; also visited Edinburgh, Rome, Shiaraz, New York. Died in Cracow, 8 December 1990. Main productions: Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, 1973; The Dead Class, 1975; Wielopole, Wielopole, 1980; Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear?, 1982; Let the Artists Die, 1985. The 1967 ‘Theory of Theatre of Real Space/Theatre Happening’, the 1972 ‘Impossible Theatre’, the 1980 ‘Theatre of Death’, the 1980 ‘Inn of Memory’, the 1985 ‘Theory of Negatives’ and the 1986 ‘Theory of Hyperspace’, mark subsequent stages in Kantor’s journey within the boundaries of what Jan Kott calls the ‘Theatre of Essence’. All these theories emphasized the rupture between the

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traditional and Kantor‘s theatre, and, as the subsequent productions indicated, were the extension, the elaboration or even the rejection of previously accepted tenets concerning theatrical illusions of space, text, character and time. 3 W. Gombrowicz, Dzienniki (Diary), Vol. III (Paris: 1966), p. 122. 4 See N. Bielski, ‘‘L’e´motion imme´diate’’, in L e Matin (October, 17, 1977). 5 Carlos Castaneda, ‘‘Opowies´ci o mocy’’ (Tales of Power), M. Kłobukowski (trans.), L iteratura na s´wiecie: 8–9 (1985), p. 118. 6 T. Kantor, W ielopole, W ielopole: An Exercise in T heatre, M. Tchorek (trans.) (London: 1990). 7 R. Barthes, Camera L ucida. Reflections on Photography, R. Howard (trans.) (London: Vintage, 1982). 8 J. Kott, Kadysz. Strony o T adeuszu Kantorze (Kaddish. Essays on T adeusz Kantor) (Gdan´sk: 1997), p. 11. 9 See Ibid. Cf. P. Arie´s, L ’Homme Devant la Mort (Editions du Seuil: 1977). 10 T. Kantor, T eatr S´mierci (T he T heatre of Death) (Krako´w: Galeria Foksal, 1975). 11 T. Kantor, Metamorfozy. T eksty o latach 1938–1974 (Metamorphoses. T exts about the Years 1938–1974) (Cracow: 2000), p. 16. 12 T. Kantor, Spotkania ze s´miercia˛ (maszynopis) (Encounters with Death; typescript), p. 8. 13 T. Kantor, W ielopole, W ielopole, op. cit., p. 11. 14 Rozmowa z T adeuszem Kantorem (An Interview with T adeusz Kantor), in W. Borowski, Kantor (Warsaw: 1982), p. 111. 15 T. Kantor, Klasa szkolna (T he Class-Room), in Metamorfozy, op. cit. 16 See K. Ples´niarowicz, T he Dead Memory Machine. T adeusz Kantor‘s T heatre of Death, W. Brand (trans.) (Cracow: 1994). 17 T. Kantor, T eatr S´mierci, op. cit., part 2. See E. G. Craig, O sztuce teatru (On the Art of T heatre), M. Skiba (trans.) (Warsaw: 1985). 18 Kantor supported the idea that arts cannot be differentiated – one can speak of total art in this respect. He answered Denis Bablet that the question whether he was a painter or a member of theatre had been asked mistakenly: ‘‘ This question was asked by the person for whom the form is the most important value. Form in theatre is quite different from form in painting and different from its structure. No matter what I do I reject form. Whether it is theatre, painting, books, everything is created in a queer manner, I can do everything. This is total art. One cannot say: Here is the end of theatre and the beginning of painting. To me it is all the same.’’ 19 T. Kantor, T eatr S´mierci, op. cit., part 6 and 8. 20 See T. Kantor, Metamorfozy, op. cit., p. 19. 21 Ibid., p. 31. 22 Cf. B. Schulz, ‘‘Traktat o manekinach (The Treaty of Dummies),’’ in Sanatorium pod Klepsydra˛ (Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass): ‘‘Matter does not know jokes. It is full of tragic seriousness. (. . .) Demiurge was in love with sublime, perfect and sophisticated materials – we give priority to rubbish. We are just enchanted with cheapness, poorness and tawdriness of the material. This is (. . .) our love to matter as such, to its fluffiness, porousness to its only mystical consistence. Demiurge makes it invisible, orders it to disappear in the play of life. On the contrary, we love its grind, its resistance, its clumsiness.’’ 23 R. Barthes, Camera L ucida, op. cit. p. 79. 24 Ibid., pp. 89 and 45. 25 L. Wittgenstein, T ractatus logico-philosophicus, thesis 4.1212. 26 Cf. Ibid., thesis 6.44: ‘‘Not what the word is like is mystical but that it is.’’ 27 R. Barthes, Camera L ucida, op. cit., p. 31.

LEON U. WEINMANN

PINDAR AND THE ETHIC OF ENCOUNTER

Out of the silence, the saying. Into T he silence, the said. T hus Silence, in timelessness, gives forth T ime, and receives it again. ...1

In his book on the English ode, Paul Fry identifies in the most prominent odes of the English tradition a radical uncertainty about the power of the poetic voice to bestow praise. The poet’s ‘‘invocation of absent things,’’ Fry claims – that is, the poet’s characteristic apostrophizing of exteriority – ‘‘is a revocation or exorcism of disturbing presences, but such presences cannot be quite shut out, and remain, not to fuse, but to confuse the formality of the poet’s calling.’’2 Uncertain as he is about the efficacy of his voice (which Fry, throughout his book, equates with ‘‘calling’’), it must follow, Fry argues, that the praise the poet purports to bestow is likewise riddled with ambiguity. ‘‘[I]n the considerable odes of every era,’’ he writes, ‘‘a burden of doubt subverts the assertion of knowledge.’’3 Take as an example these lines from the conclusion of John Dryden’s final Pindaric ode, ‘‘Alexander’s Feast’’: Let old Timotheus yield the prize, Or both divide the crown ... (vv. 177–178).

Allegedly an ode in praise of ‘‘The Power of Musick,’’ Dryden’s poem, uncertainly and somewhat disappointingly, bestows on its twin laudandi Timotheus and St. Cecilia not immortality or some other seemly boon but rather a mere ‘‘half a crown’’ each. Numerous examples from the ode tradition could serve equally well to illustrate the ‘‘burden of doubt’’ borne by singers of praise. So Fry is right, I believe, in seeing what he (somewhat mysteriously) calls ‘‘disturbing presences’’ in the English ode. And I agree with his conclusion that the ode’s praise – not only in the English ode, but in the tradition as a whole – is saddled with an ambiguity that often seems to subvert the author’s intentions. Yet I would like to make two suggestions in this essay which I hope will enrich and complicate Fry’s argument. The first is that while Fry sees the ambiguity inherent in the ode’s praise as an unintentional element 321 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 321–345. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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which the poet attempts unsuccessfully to suppress, it may be more accurate to see the ode’s ambiguity rather as a formal element of the Pindaric tradition. Fry, of course, does not claim to speak for the entire tradition, merely for the English ode. But I will suggest that it would be fruitful, in a discussion of the Pindaric tradition in English, to see if that ambiguity might have its origin in the odes of Pindar himself, and, furthermore, to inquire as to what social purpose, if any, that ambiguity might have served. That we ought to inquire into the purpose of Pindaric ambiguity, then, is my second suggestion. Fry’s book is largely deconstructive in outlook, and as such, its concern is with ‘‘texts’’ and the nature of language rather than the specific cultural circumstances that affected the production of those texts. Fry is even less concerned with discovering what reciprocal effects, if any, those texts might have had on their cultures.4 I will address these issues in this essay. My argument here, broadly stated, is that the ambiguity of praise, which Fry rightly identifies as a characteristic of the ode, is in fact a quite intentional, formal element, and furthermore, that that ambiguity is a necessary element in the expression of the ode’s ethics – that is, what the poem has to say about human actions and human attitudes toward existence. Before proceeding, however, I must insist that in using the word ‘‘ambiguity’’ in referring to Pindar’s odes I do not mean fuzzy thinking, or overwhelming emotion, or anything else that might obscure the formal clarity and precision of the poet’s compositions. I mean rather a specific, identifiable formal element that is employed for the specific purpose of contextualizing the athlete’s victory, and thus endowing it with meaning. Fame treads a knife-edge between hubris and oblivion; around the farshining light of victory there is always darkness. To concentrate only on the light would be to rob the victory of its significance – there must always be the suggestion, the nagging ambiguity, that things might not have turned out this way, and that they might not turn out this way in the future. Without the figure of blame lurking in the shadows around the victory celebration, praise lapses into flattery.5 Any critical discussion of literary ambiguity is inherently dangerous, and especially so with Pindar. He has often been seen as an ‘‘obscure’’ poet, and a great deal of misguided criticism over the centuries, unfortunately, has often further obscured his poems. We may hope that Pindar’s Greek audience understood and appreciated him; but even the Alexandrian grammarians, who were so much closer to the source than we moderns, seem to have been puzzled by his odes. As Mary Lefkowitz

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writes, ‘‘[N]o other scholia leave such a confused impression of the poetry that they were meant to explain.’’6 Horace, of course, who appraised his predecessor as numerisque/lege solutus, approached him by way of Alexandria, and in turn profoundly affected Europe’s understanding of Pindar’s poetics.7 Among modern examples, there is Perrault’s dismissal of ‘‘le galimatias impe´ne´trable de Pindare,’’8 Boileau’s conception of Pindar’s ‘‘beau de´sordre,’’9 as well as the innumerable ‘‘Pindaricks’’ of the British tradition, which Congreve rightly attacked as ‘‘a Bundle of rambling incoherent Thoughts.’’10 Congreve, in fact, was one of the few of his time to recognize that in Pindar’s odes, ‘‘... tho’ his Digressions are frequent, and his Transitions sudden, yet is there ever some secret Connexion. ...’’11 And even among classicists, it is only in the 20th century that the very strict unity of Pindar’s odes has been accepted as a matter of course.12 ‘‘Ambiguity,’’ then, in the context of this essay, refers neither to the deconstructive ‘‘disturbances’’ with which Fry is concerned nor to any notion of ‘‘de´sordre,’’ but rather to a specific technique, which I hope to explain in the following pages. This essay is divided into two sections. In the first, I discuss what I mean by the ‘‘ethic of encounter,’’ and discuss the two principal arenas for the performance of that ethic, the agon and the komos. The second section examines the role of ambiguity in the enactment of Pindaric ethics in one of Pindar’s most famous and influential odes, Olympian I. THE ETHIC OF ENCOUNTER: PINDAR AND HIS LIMITS

The first things to be said about Pindar’s victory odes is that they were public performances of poetry accompanied by music and dance,13 that their official purpose was to praise the victor, and that they were performed in either the quasi-religious arena of the agon, or, more commonly, in the festal atmosphere of the komos that celebrated the victor’s return to his community. Of first importance is the fact that the Pindaric ode is a performance. Because it is a temporal event, an act (as opposed to simply being a text), the ode echoes, or reenacts symbolically, the act of achievement that it praises. Because it is an act, and because it praises certain types of action while implicitly and sometimes explicitly censuring others, we may say that it possesses an ethical function; that is, it has something to say about certain types of human behavior. What, then, are the ethics of Pindar’s victory odes? That is, what, specifically, does Pindar praise, and why? The first half of this question

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is easy to answer, at least generally: Pindar praises the athlete’s/tyrant’s victory in an athletic contest. The second half of the question – ‘‘Why?’’ – is more difficult. The unimaginative, and ultimately unsatisfactory answer, is ‘‘Because he has been paid to do so.’’ Yes, Pindar was paid for his services, but his value was as a poet, not as a flatterer. No man of power, surrounded as he inevitably is with sycophants, ever pays for flattery. To provide a satisfactory answer to this question, we need to take into account the arenas of performance, the agon and the komos. Pindar’s odes, after all, formed an integral part of these cultural events. His services were sought throughout the Greek world. Choruses were trained, at some cost, specifically for the odes he had composed. And the poet’s travel expenses cannot have been insignificant. So while it is true that Pindar’s victory odes were also preserved as texts, they enjoyed their first, and fullest, expression as cultural events within the larger cultural events of the agon and komos. If we want to understand these texts – which is all we moderns can hope to possess – we must consider their original contexts. The quasi-religious agon, ‘‘contest,’’ or perhaps more accurately, ‘‘gathering,’’ arose from the tradition of the ludi funebres, the physically actualized, ritual striving against death on the part of the living as a response to the disruption of order created by the death of a prominent leader or warrior. Walter Burkert notes that the four principal Panhellenic games were associated in mythology ‘‘with a local hero whose death had occasioned the first celebration; Pelops or Oinomaos in Olympia, Archemoros in Nemea, Palaimon on the Isthmus, and in Delphi the Python dragon.’’14 In fact, the agon in Pindar’s era was still in some locations indistinguishable from ritual.15 We must expect Pindar’s ethics, then, to be rooted in the religious nature of the event. My intention here is not to tie the language of the odes to any of the specific athletic events of the agon, although the odes certainly abound in athletic metaphors. But we can learn about Pindar’s ethics by understanding what it is, exactly, that the agon hopes to accomplish. Viewed philosophically, the agon symbolizes the response to, or encounter with, something bigger than and exterior to human consciousness – death, the experience of divinity, the apprehension, brought about by historical vicissitude, of what Rudolf Otto terms das Numino¨se.16 William Fitzgerald expresses it succinctly that the agon is ‘‘a structure for containing and articulating the ambiguous status of beings who may experience, but not possess, divinity.’’17 What Pindar is ultimately prais-

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ing, then, and what his own lyric act is reenacting, is the act of encounter with divinity, variously characterized as the numinous, the beyond, the sublime, the metaphysical, the unmanifested, the potential, death, nonbeing, the unconscious, or God. We risk absurdity in assigning terminology to the ineffable; yet we must attempt it if we are to talk about elements of religious consciousness, and the religious consciousness of the agon in particular. I will use the term ‘‘numinous,’’ since it captures two ideas that are central to my thesis. According to Otto, the apprehension of the numinous produces two opposite yet complementary feelings: first, a feeling of utter annihilation of self in the presence of the numen; second, a feeling of utter dependence (Abha¨ngigkeit) on the numen. In other words, the apprehension of the numinous possesses ethical value because it gives shape to our being – that is, by filling in the space of our nonbeing. But precisely because it signifies what we are not – because it is what Otto calls ganz Andere – it also threatens us with what we lack, terrifying and ‘‘destroying’’ us as it simultaneously defines us. The performance of the Pindaric ode (and the performance of religious liturgy in general, for that matter) brings the nonrational numinous, at least temporarily, into the rational structure of the poem, paying homage to it while simultaneously limiting it and blunting its destructive capacities. The nave of a cathedral performs architecturally and spatially the same function that Pindar’s odes perform linguistically and temporally: it puts a shape around the numinous, acknowledging it and limiting it. What Fry sees as the poet’s radical uncertainty about ‘‘disturbing presences’’ I see as a liturgical gesture, an admission of the two opposite yet complementary effects of the numinous presence and an attempt to call that presence temporarily into the structure of the human. Like the agon, the komos, or revel, is also a ritualized encounter with the nonrational, a periodic disruption in the order of things that allows the limits of that order to be delineated and that thus allows order’s reassertion. Both the agon and the komos are likewise characterized by the potential for violence, by the disorder that pulses beneath the ordered social surface like muscle under skin. An athlete seeking to gain kleos for himself and his household puts his reputation quite literally on the line when he competes. If he loses, he risks his reputation’s abandonment to oblivion. If he wins, he risks not only hubris but also the barbs of envy, both human and divine.18 The victor’s nostos is, likewise, not without danger. Touched with divinity as he is, he represents the entry of something new and thus dangerous into the structure of the community. The

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celebration that welcomes him back is an upending of the old order and the establishment of a new one; as a result, it always contains an element of chaos. Joseph Fontenrose has collected numerous Greek folk stories that relate the mythic violence of the ‘‘avenging hero type,’’19 athletes who, Achilles-like, wrought havoc on their communities for their failure to pay them due honors. Malcolm Heath has pointed out the potential violence of the komos,20 as has W. R. Connor, who sees ‘‘an apparent convergence between festivals and political disturbances,’’ citing as an example the plot carried out against the Pisistratids by Harmodius and Aristogiton during the Great Panathenaea of 514.21 So we would err in seeing the komos as merely a drinking party, even a raucous one. Like the agon that preceded it, the komos that welcomes a returning victor is a sort of festive battleground where the forces of order and chaos meet. The characteristic mingling of these two opposite forces is perhaps best represented by the figure of Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium. Crossing the threshold of Agathon’s house at the very end of the evening, he makes his entrance looking unmistakably like the god Dionysus, drunken, flushed, his head decked with garlands. He appoints himself drinkingmaster (an assertion of order) but then proceeds to change (or at least shift) the subject of the night’s discussion from eros to Socrates (an irruption of disorder). His speech, in fact, is a systematic upending of several social conventions: besides changing the topic of the conversation, his account of his attempts to seduce Socrates reverses the deeply ingrained social roles of erastes/eromenos. His praise of Socrates’ seductive power over him runs directly counter to what he tells us about Socrates’ ugly, Silenus-like appearance. And Alcibiades’ own failure to excite Socrates’ libido likewise runs counter to what we know about Alcibiades’ famous good looks. Plato’s psychological portrait of Alcibiades is, in short, also a portrait of the komic mentality. The world of the komos, like the world of the drunken, lovesick Alcibiades, is the world upended, the world of crowning and uncrowning, of power withdrawn and reasserted. It is not hard to see why Plato chose Alcibiades as the representation of komic ambiguity. He was young, beautiful, diabolically charismatic, and possessed not only the talent but also the pedigree to become Greece’s greatest political leader, raised as he was in the house of Pericles. Yet he was also accused of impiety, and in fact was exiled for his alleged mutilation of the herms in 415 B.C.E. By calling on such a two-sided character Plato exemplifies the ambiguity inherent in the komos. Like the agon, the komos suspends order so that that order can be enlarged and reestablished.

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It is an example of what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘‘the carnivalistic life,’’ that is, life that is ‘‘drawn out of its usual rut.’’22 But it is drawn out precisely in order that it may be put back again with more force. The aristocrats who wait to compete in the agon, their chariots arrayed at the starting line, withdraw, for the duration of the race, their assertion of their own excellence and hence their right to rule, since while they race their status as winners or losers remains undetermined. But this periodic suspension of order, paradoxically, allows the aristocratic values of the victorious athletes to reassert themselves more forcefully, since victory in a contest is a physical manifestation of the proof of one’s right to rule (a manifestation that the epinician poet does not fail to point out). It should be clear by this point that the victory ode’s two arenas of performance are in fact very ‘‘ambiguous’’ cultural events, events in which the social order on which the colonial Greek world depends is rendered temporarily indeterminate. This does not mean that they subvert the social order in any real political way; on the contrary, part of their effect is to strengthen the bonds of power by physically reaffirming it. But during these events, I contend, the numinous also manifests itself in the breach effected by the temporary withdrawal of judgment, and this manifestation, paradoxically, calls attention to the limits of human power. As Pindar repeatedly asserts, all is folly without divine favor. So Pindar is clearly not bestowing unadulterated praise in his poems; it is praise, surely, but it is ‘‘tempered’’23 by an awareness that the numinous power of Fate and of the gods had been to some degree responsible for the victor’s success. This encounter with the numinous is the true object of Pindar’s praise, since the numinous is, for him, the source of ethics. Pindar’s odes are not ‘‘ethical’’ because they express any sort of programmatic dogma (although they are certainly not free from political concerns), but rather because they manage to articulate what it is that makes ethics possible. They point to the source of the community’s ethics, the numinous, which borders its consciousness, simultaneously threatening it with its own ephemerality and yet also defining it. This encounter with the border of our being is what ultimately, according to Pindar, allows us to recognize ourselves. We might characterize the Pindaric ethic as the fusion of the two famous mottoes carved into the temple at Delphi, mgde`n a˚can,‘‘nothing to excess,’’ – that is, ‘‘know your limit’’ – and cnv ˜ qi seauto´ n, ‘‘know yourself.’’ Pindar’s praise is never mere unqualified gushing over his patron’s random qualities. Symbolically, at least, the victor has reached the limit of his own being, a limit Pindar also reaches in song, and

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consequently he has come to a reckoning of his own status as a human being – ephemeral, tentative, yet capable also of partaking in divinity. The victor ‘‘needs to be told what he has done,’’24 and no hired flatterer can do this. It requires a skilled poet like Pindar to create a choral analogy of the act of victory that will make the event intelligible and hence useful as an ethical paradigm for the community. For the ode to function successfully as an analogy of the victory, it must express the idea of the limit. It finds its expression in most of the epinician odes either as a gnomic element or symbolically as a physical border. We might well expect talk of limits in poems about athletic contests (finish lines, deeds accomplished), and certainly, those finish lines are there, but Pindar’s act of praise draws out the significance of those boundaries in order to make an explicit ethical point about the limits of being and about the possibilities of self-knowledge. For example, twelve of the fourteen Olympian odes conclude with references, oblique or explicit, to various limits of being. (Odes XI and XII, the other two, both contain their gnomic elements in the middle.) The third Olympian is the best representation of this positing of the limit, since it manages to mingle praise of the victorious tyrant Theron, the myth of Heracles, and a reference to the poet himself with a gnomic warning about the limits of power: nu˜ n de` pro` z e˙sxatia` n Hg´ rvn a˙retai˜sin ˝ixa´ nvn a˛ptetai oi˚koqen ‘Hrakle´oz stala˜ n. to` po´ rsv d’ e˙sti` soQoi˜z a˚baton ka˙so´ Qoiz. ou˚ nin div ´ jv · keino` z ei˚gn. Now Theron, by his arete, has touched the limit, as far as the pillars of Heracles. Beyond this point, to wise and unwise both, is unapproachable. I shall not pursue it; I would be a fool. (vv. 43–45)

Ol. I, which we shall examine later in this essay, ends with a more concise yet essentially identical statement in the form of a gnomic utterance: ... mgke´ti pa´ ptaine po´ rsion ... peer not too far (v. 114).

Ol. VIII and XI end with prayers to the gods for the continued success of the victor, revealing Pindar’s pious belief that success is ultimately

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determined by forces beyond the boundaries of human endeavor and even of human consciousness. The victor may be praised for his hard work and noble lineage, but his status depends on forces that lie beyond him. Ol. V concludes by drawing an admonitory line between the victor and the gods: mg` mateu´ sg qeo` z cene´sqai Let him not seek to become a god (v. 24),

while Ol. IX contrasts learned skill with God-given talent, asserting the superiority of the latter over the former (vv. 105–112). In other odes, the border motif is more subtly evoked; e.g., Ol. IV, which warns us that even the hair of young men often goes gray before its time (vv. 26–28). Ol. XIV concludes with the poignant yet ironic image of the young victor’s deceased father rejoicing in the underworld at the news of his son’s victory (vv. 20–24). The border motif is a formalized rhetorical element in Pindar’s other victory odes as well, illustrated most famously, perhaps, in the eighth Pythian: e˙pa´ meroi · ti´ de´ tiz; ti´ d’ ou˚ tiz; skia˜ z o˚nar a˚nqrvpoz ... Creatures of a day! What is man? What is he not? A shadow of a dream is man ... (vv. 95–96).

Four types of limits, then, may be identified as formal elements in the discourse of Pindaric praise. First, time may be invoked as a limit; the victor may be reminded of his ephemerality through references to change, old age, or death. Second, the limits of human power may be invoked; the victor may be praised for his achievement but reminded as well of what he can’t do (e.g., Pyth. X, vv. 27–30, where the victor, though blessed, is told that he can’t reach the land of the Hyperboreans). Third, the limits of knowledge may be invoked; Pindar often tells us that a man must be wise to accomplish much in life, or to understand the poet’s message, but that even wisdom ultimately has its limit (Ol. III, vv. 44–45). Lastly, Pindar may point to the limit of his own speech, ‘‘standing back’’ from what he considers improper to discuss (Ol. I, v. 52), or refusing to speculate about the designs of Fate. The social purpose of his odes, I am arguing, is to insist that intelligibility, meaning, and order – ko´ smoz – are not self-

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contained, self-referential cultural systems which the tyrant can manipulate for his own purposes, but rather that the perpetuation of meaningful existence depends upon the continued ethical act of encounter (performed ritually by the victor and echoed in song by the poet) with that which lies outside the manifested world and has the power to bless or damn us. The act of encounter breaches the closed system of meaning, allowing the unknown to become known, the unseen seen, the nonrational rational. It allows the social order to cope with the vicissitudes of history, to exist intelligibly in time. However, in acknowledging the religiosity of these two events, are we then compelled to see the contests of the Panhellenic games merely as metaphors for a religious sensibility, and the athletes of those games as mere zealous strivers after some abstract ideal of ‘‘self knowledge’’? While the agon may have begun as a response to the social chaos set in motion by the death of a warrior king, must we really continue to see it as such? Are we really expected to believe that the wealthy tyrant Hieron, for instance, felt any degree of ‘‘annihilation of self ’’ as he watched his welltrained, well-fed horses race to victory? Isn’t the goal of the agon really to win kleos for oneself and one’s house, and isn’t that a social and not a religious quest? These are important questions, and they lead ultimately to an even greater question about the nature of ethics. How can Pindar’s ethics, which I am arguing have their source in the exterior numinous, be discussed separately from the aristocratic values of Pindar and his patrons? The undeniable fact that Pindar’s odes are resolutely aristocratic in their values does not mean that the odes are no more than cultural ciphers. Yes, they represent a definite political viewpoint which is wholly ‘‘within the text,’’ that is, inside the context of a culture that we can examine as a system. And insofar as it is a system we can criticize its values as being more or less in accordance with our own cultural values, attacking or defending it as it suits us and pointing out its internal inconsistencies. Yet Pindar’s odes portray not simply an aristocratic ideal but an ideal that has been thrown momentarily into indeterminacy by its confrontation with its own limits. And far from trying to ‘‘erase’’ these limits, Pindar points to them, repeatedly and insistently, as the very ground of his ethic of encounter. The agon, the komos, and the performance of the ode itself all confront the continuing crisis of history which reveals both the limit of the human and the numinous which continually reveals itself beyond that limit.

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‘‘Crisis’’ is the right word: there is ample evidence that Pindar’s aristocratic world was in trouble. In T he T raYc in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy, Leslie Kurke notes that ‘‘the archaic period in Greece is one of great upheaval, for it sees, in addition to the rise of the polis, the development of tyrannies, the invention of coinage and the beginnings of a money economy, the crisis of the aristocracy, the slow spread of literacy, and the trend toward Panhellenism.’’25 Walter Donlan writes that ‘‘the forfeiture of [the aristocracy’s] claim to an unchallenged, ‘natural’ superiority had produced a kind of ‘crisis of identity’ among aristocrats by about the middle of the sixth century B.C.’’26 A. Andrewes notes that Hieron, the Syracusan tyrant and laudandus of both Ol. I and Pyth. I, ‘‘was less popular [with the collapsing aristocracy] than Gelon [his brother and predecessor] had been.’’27 And it is well known that Pindar is the last great practitioner of epinicia; while Callimachus attempted the Pindaric manner,28 he lacked access to equivalent arenas of performance. To see Pindar’s odes as a sort of ‘‘crisis management,’’ then, as the record of the attempts of an endangered aristocracy to reassert its privilege, is perhaps not an unfair assessment. I will argue neither for nor against it. My assertion is that the presence of an overt political dimension in the odes – even a reactionary political dimension – does not preclude the presence of an ethical dimension that has its origin elsewhere – i.e., in the numinous. Thus, while Pindar’s worldview is resolutely aristocratic,29 and while he simply dismisses other classes as ‘‘invisible’’ (a˚Qantoi),30 he still insists, as we have seen, that the favor of the gods, in addition to hard work, money, and noble lineage, is a prerequisite for success. Pindar’s ethic of encounter is thus fundamentally different from, for example, a nationalist ethic of military encounter. The sentiment expressed in the German nationalist hymn ‘‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?,’’ that ‘‘sein Vaterland muss gro¨sser sein,’’ is founded upon an ideal which is given in advance, namely, the inherent superiority of the German race. In Pindar’s ethic, conversely, the superiority of the victor is not determined until after the contest, and then not for always but only for that moment. The kleos of an aristocratic household may fade; not every generation will measure up. As C. M. Bowra writes, ‘‘Pindar was aware that even in the most gifted families not every generation is equally distinguished, and he explains this by a parallel from nature, in which fields and fruits give their full yield not annually but in alternate years (N. 11.39–42) or at irregular intervals (N. 6.9–11).’’31 The nationalist ethic sees the transgression of boundaries as the natural and inevitable

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unfolding of a destiny that is already written (‘‘sein Vaterland muss gro¨sser sein’’); Pindar insists that confronting one’s limits is the only way to come to a true estimation of worth. And while a tyrant’s victory in a chariot race certainly reinforces the prerogatives of the ruling class, it does so only after the fact and only temporarily. To allow his ‘‘natural superiority,’’ his Qug´ , to shine through, the victor must confront the numen which both grants his success and can, alternately, consign him to oblivion. And if he wants to maintain his house’s reputation, he must continue to confront it. Pindar’s ethic of encounter is thus not some timeless ideal to be attacked or defended, but rather something that can only be actualized in history and as a response to it, and which can only be understood properly as an act that must keep repeating itself. Pindar’s odes praise acts. They are acts themselves. Acts take place only in time. Hence the epigraph of this essay, ‘‘Out of the silence, the saying. Into/the silence, the said. ...’’ At this point we must turn to the true body of evidence, the poetry itself, to identify precisely how Pindar’s ‘‘ambiguity’’ contributes to the expression of his ethics. THE FIRST OLYMPIAN: PELOPS’ SHOULDER AND THE ‘‘BLESSINGS’’ OF THE GODS

Ol. I celebrates the victory of Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, in the singlehorse race of the Olympiad of 476 B.C.E. The famous proem announces a series of various superlatives with which Hieron is implicitly compared: ˚Ariston me`n u˛dvr, o˝ de` xruso` z ai˙qo´ menon pu˜ r a˛te diapre´pei nukti` meca´ noroz e˚joxa plou´ tou · ei˙ d’ a˚eqla caru´ en e˚ldeai, Qi´lon g˙˜ tor, mgke´t’ a˙eli´ou sko´ pei a˚llo qalpno´ teron e˙n a˝me´ra Qaen – no` n a˚stron e˙rgmaz di’ ai˙qe´roz, mgd’ ’Olumpi´az a˙cvna Qe´rterou au˙da´ somen ... Best is water, while gold, like a blazing fire at night, shines forth first among manly wealth; yet if you wish to sing, dear heart, of athletic games, look no further than the sun for another star shining with more warmth by day through the empty sky, nor shall we praise a greater gathering than the Olympiad. (vv. 1–8)

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The poem begins with an assessment of worth: ‘‘Best is water.’’ Pindar does not tell us what makes water best, or even best of what, but we may make some reasonable inferences. Water is best in a hot country often parched by drought. Where water flows, flocks and crops prosper, and hence wealth and (indirectly) political power. In Greek thought, water is sacred. In a symposiastic contest, water is the ingredient that is measured into wine as a means of preserving the kosmos of the banquet. And (perhaps obviously) in an athletic contest, water is best for the thirsty victor and his horse. This primary image suggests a cluster of associations, both divine and human, which Pindar will go on to develop later in the poem. Yet this supposedly unqualifiable superlative that introduces u˛dvr, ˚Ariston, is immediately undercut by the me`n ... de` (‘‘on the one hand/on the other hand’’) clause which follows it. Yes, water is best, but on the other hand, so is gold, the sun, the Olympic games, and (as Pindar goes on to tell us) Hieron. Each of the things that Pindar singles out for praise thus stands metaphorically for excellence in general but – significantly – is also limited by its ‘‘genus.’’ Water is best among natural elements, gold among possessions, the sun among celestial bodies, the Olympic games among athletic contests, and – though this is only inferred – Hieron among his competitors. Pindar’s praise thus contextualizes but does not totalize – it places an implicit limit on each of these ‘‘bests,’’ locating each one solidly within its particular plane of existence, outside of which the assessment of worth is impossible. The ambiguity of this first strophe is that while each object of praise is limited by its genus, the range of associations that each suggests carries the object beyond itself into indeterminacy. Just as water partakes of both the divine and human (since it is granted by the gods and used by mortals), gold, the best of human possessions, also symbolizes immortality and divinity. The sun, best of celestial bodies, is also a well-known symbol of earthly political sovereignty. The Olympic games are best not only because of the excellence of the present competitors but also because of the mythical, semi-divine excellence of Pelops. And Hieron is best not only because of his hard work, noble lineage and wealth but because of the favor showered on him by the gods. This ambiguity, which I am arguing is a formal element of Pindar’s praise, performs two specific functions. On the one hand (me`n), the laudandus (Hieron) becomes momentarily touched by divinity as a result of his great achievement. Yet on the other hand (de`), the fact that it is the gods who have bestowed such good fortune on him from without simultaneously threatens Hieron with his

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own insignificance (the ‘‘annihilation of self ’’ I spoke of earlier). The ode articulates the psychological state induced by the agon and komos, a sort of borderline state in which the victor’s old self collapses as he undergoes his crisis of encounter with what is ganz Andere.32 In the process, the ode also articulates an ethic of encounter by presenting this divine encounter as the source of all blessings – wealth, political power, prosperity, and most importantly, one’s kleos, or reputation. Pindar does not praise the possession of these blessings – that would turn his praise into an essentializing flattery – but rather their achievement. And to maintain these blessings, the victor, or his descendants, must repeatedly try to reenact that achievement. Pindarically speaking, that is ethical behavior. All of these introductory images and their attendant ranges of meaning unite in the final word of the stanza, e˝sti´an, the ‘‘hearth’’ of Hieron. The word has profound religious and political significance; the hearth is the center of the family, the seat of patriarchal and political authority, and the focal point (literally: Lat. focus) of household worship. In addition to its cultural significance, Hieron’s hearth is ma´ kairan, ‘‘blessed,’’ i.e., touched by divinity. Moreover, R. Drew Griffith claims that Hieron’s ´ numoz, referring to the ‘sacred name’ of name is ‘‘probably short for ‘Ierv Demeter,’’33 of whom Hieron was a priest.34 If that is the case, then the first strophe ends with Hieron, whose name is a combination of the divine and human, placed squarely between the divine and human (ma´ kairan ‘Ie´rvnoz e˝sti´an). The line also foreshadows the story of Pelops’ dismemberment later in the poem – another kind of divine blessing. In this tale there is also a hearth, water, fire (v. 48), the gleam of wealth (ivory this time, v. 27), the chiaroscuro of blazing light and darkness, and the divine presence which both grants Pelops the success he desires and – though Pindar calls the story a lie – partially consumes him. The antistrophe, meanwhile, dramatically enlarges the scope of the ode, pulling back from the focal point of the hearth in almost cinematic fashion to show the whole of Sicily. While the strophe had presented a series of images that coalesced in the image of the hearth, the antistrophe reverses the polarity of the hearth, showing the blessings that flow out from Hieron and his ‘‘lawful scepter’’ (v. 12): qemistei˜on oˇz a˙mQe´pei ska˜ pton e˙n polumg´ lv ; ˜ n, Sikeli´a, dre´pvn me`n koruQa` z a˙reta˜ n a˚po pasa ; a˙claiBfetai de` kai´ mousika˜ z e˙n a˙v ´ tv, ; oi˝˜a pai´fomen Qi´lan a˚ndrez a˙mQi` qama` tra´ pefan.

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[Hieron,] who tends the lawful scepter in flock-rich Sicily, gathering the crowns of every excellence, and who is glorified too in the choicest of songs, such as we men often play around the friendly table. (vv. 12–17)

The dynamic enlargement and reduction of scope in this ode, from the broad and general (water, gold, the sun) to the specific (Hieron’s hearth, his scepter), back to the broad (Sicily), and back again to the specific (the friendly table), mirrors the dynamic ontological tension between interiority and exteriority. Leslie Kurke writes that ‘‘[t]he tension between these two forces, between the spatial and temporal imperatives of the household and the centrifugal force of the competitive search for prestige, shaped a cultural pattern that looped out from the house and back again.’’35 But this cultural pattern is not only cultural. Besides the negotiation and acquisition of kleos (a form of ‘‘cultural capital’’), the ode presents a pattern in which the finite ‘‘loops out’’ into the infinite and back again, a pattern in which both Hieron’s hearth and indeed Hieron himself function as the nexus of divine blessings which flow into the household and out again into the community. This is, in a sense, a komic pattern, in which the boundaries of the human are temporarily obscured, invaded and enlarged for the duration of the festival. And the context here is unmistakably komic: the table is set for the feast, the men have gathered around it, and the poet has taken down the Dorian lyre so he may sing Hieron’s praises. Pindar praises him by means of the mythic parallel of Pelops. Pindar’s characteristic use of myth in the odes is another example of ambiguity: by making such a comparison, Pindar endows his laudandus with a significance that transcends his own historical and cultural particularity, but in so doing he throws into question his own ability to judge the victor by the cultural standards on which kleos depends. Further complicating matters in this ode is Pindar’s deeply ambivalent treatment of the Pelops story. The stories that surround this founder of the Olympic games depict the gods as thoughtless cannibals and Pelops himself as a cheat. Pindar, of course, refuses to believe this, but in the very act of refusing he calls the suppressed version into the spotlight.36 He begins by insisting that Pelops was actually born with an ivory shoulder, that it was not a replacement for the shoulder that was eaten. And he follows this version of the story with a defensive indictment of such ‘‘lies’’:

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As Louise H. Pratt writes, while Pindar ‘‘shows himself interested in condemning a particular kind of distortion, the denial of excellence, not in condemning lying per se,’’37 his evocation of the ‘‘false’’ version of the Pelops story inevitably ‘‘makes the truth of all poetry, including Pindar’s, highly suspect.’’38 That is, if poetry can lie, what makes Pindar’s report trustworthy? By introducing the possibility of falsehood into the ode, Pindar’s praise of Hieron, Pelops’ modern counterpart, becomes disturbingly ambiguous. For not only is the poet’s ability to effectively bestow praise called into question, but also Hieron’s character (since Pelops is a conniver in the suppressed version) as well as the will of the gods toward the victor. But, as I am arguing, Pindar’s purpose in his epinicia is not to promote some static model of human excellence but rather to reenact in song and dance the victor’s achievement and to articulate his liminal status. And that liminal status is by definition ambiguous and provisional, outside the scope of the known, and waiting to be ‘‘brought in,’’ that is, contextualized, by the poet. The ode’s arena of performance, the komos, also evokes this liminal status. Wine, of course, transports the drinker across the threshold of sobriety into the realm of Dionysian inspiration. The music of the komos, played on either the phorminx or the aulos, represents a voice that sings from beyond the threshold of language.39 Finally, the komos is characterized by sexual license, another threshold transgression, represented in Ol. I by the story of Poseidon’s desire for the beautiful Pelops: to´ t’ ’Aclaotri´ainan a˝rpa´ sai, dame´nta Qre´nz ˝ime´rv, xruse´aisi´ t’ a˙n’ ˛ippoiz ; ` dv u˛paton eu˙ruti´mou poti ˜ ma Dio` z metaba˜ sai · e˚nqa deute´rv xro´ nv ; ´ dgz; g˜˙ lqe kai` Canumg Zgni` tvu˚t’ e˙pi` xre´iz.

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Then the God of the Gleaming Trident seized you, his mind crazed with desire, and with golden horses took you to the highest home of widely-honored Zeus, where at a later time came Ganymede too for Zeus’ same use. (vv. 40–45)

This passage repeats many of the elements of the proem: the play of light and shadow, the reference to gold, the allusion to water (in the figure of the sea-god Poseidon), the swift, athletic horses, and the centrality of the house, whose inhabitant, like Hieron, is ‘‘widely-honored.’’ But in aligning Hieron’s mythic parallel Pelops with Ganymede, Pindar also aligns Hieron himself with Ganymede, and in so doing he subtly changes the reason for Hieron’s ‘‘honor.’’ If Hieron is Ganymede, then he is indeed blessed: he has been transported beyond the temporal world of sickness and death to an immortal realm where he will enjoy perpetual youth. But what’s the point of praising this? As Kevin Crotty writes, ‘‘Praise is a suitable response to others’ worthy actions, but to fare well, which is out of the mortal’s hands, may be thought neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.’’40 Complicating matters further is the sexual role in which Hieron is implicitly cast. Greek homosexual relationships consisted generally of an erastes, an older, well-established man who played the active, dominant role, and an eromenos, an adolescent who acted as the older man’s prote´ge´ in political or business life and who played a thoroughly passive sexual role. An eromenos might be penetrated by a man (or god) and thereby gain a certain amount of kleos as the ‘‘boyfriend’’ of someone important, but he took no physical initiative himself. Athletic contests, however, are ritualized displays of aggressive physical initiative; to equate victor with eromenos calls into question Hieron’s right to take any credit for what he has accomplished. It calls into question the very nature of kleos. Is it a gift from the gods, or is it something one earns for oneself ? In v. 23, just after we have been told that Hieron gathers ‘‘the crowns of every excellence’’ (v. 13), Pindar claims that ‘‘fame shines for him’’ (la´ mpei de´ oi˝ kle´oz), suggesting that Hieron has earned his kleos through his own actions. But in the same sentence Pindar begins the story of the birth of Pelops, who is ˜˙ mon kekadme´non ... e˙le´Qanti Qai´dimon v distinguished [lit., ‘‘surpassing’’] by his gleaming ivory shoulder ... (v. 27).

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Here Pindar locates the ‘‘gleam’’ of kleos within an image that seems to refute the previous insinuation that Hieron/Pelops deserved the credit for his fame. For if, as Pindar asserts, Pelops was born with an ivory shoulder, then he (and by extension Hieron) deserves no credit for his ‘‘surpassing’’ qualities, since he did nothing to create the gleam. If we follow the less pious version of the story, in which the ivory shoulder replaces the human shoulder which Demeter has eaten, then we likewise have no grounds for praise. Pelops has simply been ‘‘blessed’’ (in the dual sense of the French ‘‘blesser’’): his wound, which has partially destroyed him, is also the mark of divinity, something ganz Andere which may be wondered at, or feared, but which can never be assumed comfortably into the casuistic mortal world. How did the laudandus – Hieron in this case – react to such relentless ambiguity? We can hardly expect him to have missed it, so it is not a tenable interpretation to read all this ambiguity simply as vicious subtext. Assuming that the victor was not some vainglorious fool whom the more clever Pindar was duping, and assuming that all this ambiguity was not simply an accident of language of which Pindar himself was not aware, I conclude that this subtle yet consistent undermining of the victor’s success served specifically as a means of articulating the ode’s ethics, an ethics with which the victor surely must have concurred. For ethics is fundamentally a matter of will; as in the story of Heracles at the crossroads, one is faced with choices, and may take either the praiseworthy or the blameworthy course. And to make this perfectly clear to his patron, Pindar consistently presents the victor’s status as ambiguous. His achievement has brought him into contact with forces that he can neither understand nor control, and which can either bless or damn him. What matters, and what may be praised or blamed, are the victor’s actions and/or attitudes in the face of this liminal situation. As we shall soon see, if he does not respect his limits (mgde´n a˚can), he leaves himself vulnerable to punishment. If, on the other hand, he does not even try to reach this limit (cnv ˜ qi seauto´ n), he sinks uselessly into oblivion. It should be clear by this point that Pindar is not simply praising an athletic victory; his ode is an enactment of the ethics which inform the agon and the komos. Because the victor’s status is ambiguous, it makes sense that there is always an element of blame in praise poetry, however subtle. There was, in fact, a whole corpus of ancient ‘‘blame poetry,’’ represented most famously by Archilochus’ iamboi, the barbs of which were reportedly so venomous that they drove Lycambes (Archilochus’ would-be father-inlaw) and his daughters to hang themselves in shame over the poet’s attack

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on the girls’ reputations (i.e., their kleos).41 Pindar himself refers to ‘‘the song of Archilochus’’ (To` me`n ’Arxilo´ xou me´loz, Ol. IX.1) and ‘‘censorious Archilochus’’ (yocero` n ’Arxi´loxon, Pyth. II.55) in his songs of praise, and gives us no hint that such references are at all unusual. Praise, in the epinician, gains much of its efficacy through the evocation of its alternative. One such evocation is the story of Tantalus, which Pindar inserts into the Pelops story. Tantalus, the son of Zeus and father of Pelops, was renowned for his wealth, and seemed by his lineage and social standing to be the perfect hero. His downfall, according to Pindar, is that he stole the immortality he’d tasted during his feast with the gods and distributed it among mortals. He did not respect his limits, and because of his inability to negotiate the divine encounter properly received an everlasting punishment: ei˙ de` dg´ tin’ a˚ndra qnato` n ’Olu´ mpou skopoi´ e˙ti´masan, g˜˙ n Ta´ ntaloz ou˝˜ toz · a˙l – la´ ca` r katape´yai me´can o˚lbon ou˙k e˙duna´ sqg ... And if indeed the watchers on Olympus ever honored any mortal man, that man was Tantalus; but he couldn’t digest his great blessing ... (vv. 54–56).

As a result, he is forced to live forever – according to Pindar’s retelling – with a giant rock suspended over his head (vv. 56–58). R. Drew Griffith thinks that the punishment takes place not in the underworld but on Olympus.42 If this is the case – and it’s certainly a plausible hypothesis – then the Tantalus tableau that Pindar presents here functions as the perfect emblem of komic ambiguity. Tantalus’ just punishment reasserts the ontological limit that he had transgressed; in the presence of the immortals he receives not bread but a stone. He is a permanent guest at the divine feast without being able to eat. Likewise, though he is immortal, he is permanently threatened by the limit of his own mortality (symbolized by the rock) without ever crossing that limit. The entire Tantalus episode, in fact, is imbued with komic ambiguity. In verses 37–38, for instance, Pindar tells us, with what must be mock ´ taton/... e˚ranon (‘‘most orderly feast’’) that seriousness, of the eu˙nomv Tantalus held for the gods, and yet tells us in the lines that immediately follow that it was at this very feast that Poseidon abducted the young Pelops as his lover. Also, Pindar’s audience certainly knew the original,

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suppressed version of this myth, in which Pelops is boiled and eaten. The ´ taton seems like an obvious pious assertion that the feast was eu˙nomv fiction. We know from vase paintings and various literary accounts that these revels were certainly not ‘‘most orderly,’’ that in fact their dynamism and indeed their social relevance came from the transgression of various types of order. Tantalus’ banquet is no different. But by drawing attention to the line that stands between order and disorder, human institutions and divine caprice, Pindar articulates the choices that face the victor: he can seek to become a god, like Tantalus, he can scorn the pursuit of kleos altogether, or (and this is the course Pindar recommends) he can seek to embody excellence in the particular stratum of existence he occupies, that is, the human stratum. Pindar himself, in fact, makes a point of praying for excellence within his own poetic stratum (vv. 115 f.), thus uniting his ethics with his poetics. He also embodies his ethics by making a point of refusing to tell ‘‘untrue’’ tales about the gods, knowing that this transgression invites divine wrath: e˚sti d’ a˙ndri` Qa´ men e˙oiko` z a˙mQi` dai – mo´ nvn kala´ · mei´vn ca` r ai˙ti´a. It is right for a man to speak good things about the divine; for the blame is less. (v. 35)

Concerning the gods’ dismemberment and consumption of Pelops, Pindar (who brought the story up in the first place) exclaims indignantly: e˙moi` d’ a˚pora castri´mar – con maka´ rvn tin’ ei˙pei˜n · a˙Qi´stamai ... For my part, I won’t call any of the blessed gods gluttonous; I draw back. (v. 52)

In bringing up the ‘‘false’’ account, of course, Pindar mingles true and false, noble and base, praise and blame. Without the ambiguity that the agon and the komos invoke and which Pindar captures in song, there can be no ethics, because there can be no expression of will. There can be no human decision, and hence no right action, and hence no grounds for assessing worth. Besides transgressing one’s limits, like Tantalus, one can conversely refuse to even confront one’s limits. In T he T raYc in Praise, Leslie Kurke examines the ways in which kleos is maintained by the aristocratic household, seeing the progress of kleos over generations of a family as a cycle

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in which kleos is won, lost, or maintained by each new generation. Since Tantalus had lost the family’s kleos through his transgression, his son Pelops, who had been flung back down into the world of mortals as a result of his father’s sin, faced the responsibility of reclaiming it. Pindar relates the story of Pelops’ attempt to win the hand of Hippodameia by defeating her father Oinomaos in a chariot race. In darkness, symbolizing oblivion and the loss of kleos, Pelops goes down to the sea to petition his erastes Poseidon, whose gleaming trident symbolizes fame and glory. Reminding the god of his past service to him, Pelops then exclaims, ... o˝ me´caz de` ki´n – dunoz a˚nalkin ou˙ Qv ˜ ta lamba´ nei. qanei˜n d’ oi˝˜sin a˙na´ cka, ta´ ke´ tiz a˙nv ´ numon cg˜ raz e˙n sko´ tv kaqg´ menoz e˛yoi ma´ tan, a˝pa´ ntvn kalv ˜ ;n a˚mmoroz; a˙ll’ e˙moi` me`n ou˝˜ toz a˚eqloz u˝pokei´setai · tu` de` pra˜ jin Qi´lan di´doi. Great danger does not welcome a coward. But since all men must die, why then would anyone, sitting in darkness, nurse a nameless old age for nothing, with no share in all blessings? But this contest will be for me to undertake – and you, grant me the outcome I want. (vv. 81–85)

Pelops here exemplifies the Pindaric ethic of encounter. Unlike his father, Pelops does not transgress his limit, since he knows that ‘‘all men must die,’’ but neither does he commit the equally grievous sin of turning away from the risks of competition, since he knows that ‘‘Great danger does not welcome a coward’’ (or as J. E. Sandys translated it, ‘‘High emprise brooketh no coward wight’’43). If he loses the chariot race, he knows that he will be killed and his family will not regain its kleos. But if he risks nothing, he will ‘‘nurse a nameless old age.’’ The fame he had gained by being Poseidon’s lover apparently is not a lasting one; he must renew the fame of his name and house through competition and through the successful negotiation of the will of Poseidon – that is, his numen. In his attempt to win Hippodameia, Pelops must submit his entire being to the indeterminacy of competition, and he knows that the outcome depends not only on his own bravery and noble lineage but on divine will, a force which he may try to influence but cannot utterly control. But he does win, of course, and upon his death years later is ‘‘gather[ed] into the artifice of eternity’’: his tomb on the banks of the Alpheos

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becomes a religious shrine that rivals Zeus’. Moreover, Pelops ‘‘reclines’’ at the sacrifices made in his name: he has become a symbol not only of the Olympic games but of the resurrecting power of the komos. Pindar concludes Ol. I by tying Hieron again to his mythic predecessor and praying for his benefactor’s continued success: qeo` z e˙pi´tropoz e˙v ` n teai˜si mg´ detai e˚xvn tou˜ to ka˜ doz, ‘Ie´rvn, meri´mnaisin · ei˙ de` mg` taxu` li´poi, e˚ti clukute´ran ken e˚lpomai su` n a˛rmati qov ˜ kleiB – jein ... ; A god is your steward, Hieron, and he takes care of your desires; and unless he should suddenly leave, I hope that I shall yet celebrate a sweeter victory with the swift chariot ... (vv. 106–110)

The chariot race was the most prestigious of competitions; although Pindar claims that Hieron has reached the crown (or summit) of achievement, it was clearly felt that greater glory awaited him. Like Pelops, Hieron had to keep renewing his kleos. But a full eight years passed before he won the Olympic chariot race. And one can only hope that Pindar, who had warned his patron to ‘‘peer not too far’’ (mgke´ti pa´ ptaine po´ rsion, v. 116), took his own advice to heart: it was not Pindar but his rival Bacchylides who received the honor of that commission. CONCLUSION

I have tried to achieve three goals in this essay. First, I have tried to show that Pindar’s odes cannot be understood apart from the cultural arenas in which they were performed, nor apart from the political realities of Pindar’s society. Second, I have tried to show that this is not all, that although we must not ignore the influence of culture on artistic production, it would be misguided to assign responsibility for that production solely to cultural forces beyond the artist’s control. While Pindar clearly has absorbed the aristocratic, conservative values of his patrons, he never praises the excellence of the victor as a value which has been assigned a priori; rather, he praises the fact that the victor has achieved something praiseworthy

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through undergoing the ritual crisis of indeterminacy that is the agon. And he is quite honest about the possibility that he who wins today may lose tomorrow. Finally, I hope I have shown the usefulness of the ode form as a vehicle for the exploration of various limits: the limits of consciousness, the limits of culture, the limits, even, of being. Further, I hope I have shown how a form which is ostensibly devoted to praise can also function as a vehicle for self-exploration and even for trenchant social criticism, since the Pindaric ode, if it does nothing else, always reveals the limits, and hence the limitations, of what is given. Fitchburg State College

NOTES 1 Robert Penn Warren, ‘‘The True Nature of Time,’’ Or Else – Poem/Poems 1968–1974 (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 61. 2 Paul Fry, T he Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 2. Fry is talking about the speaker in Allen Tate’s ‘‘Ode to the Confederate Dead,’’ but his statement applies to poets of the ode in general. 3 Ibid., p. 8. 4 Throughout his book, in fact, Fry equates ‘‘voice’’ with ‘‘vocation,’’ revealing his basic assumption that the poet’s calling can be separated somehow from the poet’s culture. But voice and vocation are not the same thing. ‘‘Voice,’’ in Fry’s argument, is an idea, which Fry then uses as a tool for seeing into the texts. ‘‘Vocation,’’ however, is always an element of culture, determined by the community’s attitudes toward the poet’s usefulness or lack thereof. 5 For a discussion of praise and blame in archaic Greek thought, see Marcel Detienne, L es maıˆtres de ve´rite´ dans la Gre`ce archaı¨que (Paris: F. Maspero, 1973). 6 ‘‘The Pindar Scholia,’’ American Journal of Philology 106 (Fall 1985), p. 271. 7 Lefkowitz, ‘‘The Pindar Scholia,’’ p. 281. 8 C. Perrault, Paralle`le des Anciens et des Modernes (Paris 1688), II 235. 9 Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, ‘‘L’Art Poe´tique,’’ in F. Escal (ed.), Oeuvres Comple`tes (Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1966), Chant II, v. 72. 10 Discourse on the Pindaric Ode. 11 Ibid. 12 Some of the best overviews of the groundbreaking work of the early Pindarists (Boeckh, Dissen, Schadewaldt, Illig, and Bundy) are: Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ‘‘Modern Interpretations of Pindar: The Second Pythian and Seventh Nemean Odes,’’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 93 (1973), pp. 109–37; Malcolm Heath, ‘‘The Origins of Modern Pindaric Criticism,’’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986), pp. 85–98; David C. Young, ‘‘Pindaric Criticism,’’ in Pindaros und Bakchvlides, ed. W. M. Calder III and Jacob Stern ([Wege der Forschung CXXXIV], Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1970); and finally, the first chapter of John Kevin Newman and Frances Stickney Newman’s Pindar’s Art: Its T radition and Aims (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1984), entitled ‘‘Pindar and His Interpreters.’’

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13 Exactly how the music and dance accompanied the poetry has been a matter of great debate (a debate I won’t enter here). Some scholars see the poems as monodic, that is, sung by Pindar; others see them as choral. The relevant articles on this debate are: Malcolm Heath and Mary R. Lefkowitz, ‘‘Epinician Performance,’’ Classical Philology 86 (July 1991): 173–191; Christopher Carey, ‘‘The Victory Ode in Performance: The Case for the Chorus,’’ Classical Philology 86 (July 1991): 192–200; Mary R. Lefkowitz, ‘‘Who Sang Pindar’s Victory Odes?’’, American Journal of Philology 109 (Spring 1988): 1–11; Christopher Carey, ‘‘The Performance of the Victory Ode,’’ American Journal of Philology 110 (Winter 1989): 545–565; and Malcolm Heath, ‘‘Receiving the kvmoz: The Context and Performance of Epinician,’’ American Journal of Philology 109 (1988): pp. 180–95. See also Mary R. Lefkowitz, FirstPerson Fictions. Pindar’s Poetic ‘‘I’’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) as well as William Mullen, Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 14 Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 106. 15 ‘‘... At the Dorian Karneia festival the race is still is more ritual than sport.’’ Greek Religion 106. 16 Das Heilige (Gotha/Stuttgart: Verlag Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1925). 17 Agonistic Poetry: T he Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, Ho¨lderlin, and the English Ode (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 7. 18 Gordon M. Kirkwood, ‘‘Blame and Envy in the Pindaric Epinician,’’ in Douglas E. Gerber (ed.), Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1984), p. 176. 19 ‘‘The Hero As Athlete,’’ California Studies in Classical Antiquity I (1968): p. 99. 20 ‘‘Receiving the Komos: The Context and Performance of Epinician,’’ American Journal of Philology 109 (1988): p. 80. 21 ‘‘Tribes, Festivals and Processions; Civic Ceremonial and Political Manipulation in Archaic Greece,’’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 107 (1987): p. 41. 22 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ardis, 1973), p. 101. See also J. K. and F. S. Newman’s Pindar’s Art for a much more comprehensive discussion of the komic nature of epinicia. 23 Bruno Gentili, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century, trans. A. Thomas Cole (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 112. 24 Newman, p. 2. 25 Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1991), p. 2. 26 T he Aristocratic Ideal in Ancient Greece: Attitudes of Superiority from Homer to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1980), p. 77. 27 T he Greek T yrants (London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1956), p. 136. 28 Mark Golden, Sport and Society in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 86. 29 While most scholars assume that Pindar himself was an aristocrat, Hugh Lloyd-Jones is not so sure (‘‘Modern Interpretation of Pindar,’’ p. 112). In any case, Pindar is aristocratic in his values if not in his bloodline. 30 Donlan, p. 97. 31 Pindar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 101-102. 32 Rudolf Otto, referring to this feeling of annihilation, cites Abraham’s exchange with God in Gen. 18:27: Ich habe mich unterwunden mit dir zu reden, der ich Erde und Asche bin. (Das Heilige 9) 33 ‘‘Pelops and Sicily: The Myth of Pindar Ol. I,’’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 109 (1989): p. 172.

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34 Ol. VI.94–95. 35 T he T raYc in Praise, p. 16. 36 Kathryn A. Morgan, ‘‘Pindar the Professional and the Rhetoric of the KVMOS,’’ Classical Philology 88 (Jan. 1993): p. 10. Pindar also rejects myths in Ol. IX.35–41 and Nem. V.14–17. 37 L ying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 122. 38 L ying and Poetry, p. 124. 39 The physical design of the aulos itself captures the tension inherent in komic liminality. It was comprised of two pipes, one of which played the melody and the other of which functioned as a ‘‘chanter,’’ playing a droning bass line that tugged against the dominant tone. In Pythian XII, Pindar refers to the keQala˜ n polla˜ n no´ mon (v. 23), the ‘‘many-headed tune’’ of the aulos. 40 Song and Action: T he V ictory Odes of Pindar (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 33. 41 See Gregory Nagy’s chapters on praise/blame and iamboi in T he Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, revised edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), as well as Gordon M. Kirkwood, ‘‘Blame and Envy in the Pindaric Epinician,’’ in Douglas E. Gerber (ed.), Greek Poetry and Philosophy: Studies in Honour of L eonard Woodbury (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1984), p. 169. 42 ‘‘The Mind Is Its Own Place: Pindar, Ol. 1.57f.,’’ Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies (Spring 1986): pp. 5–13. 43Pindar, T he Odes of Pindar. 2nd rev. ed., ed. J. E. Sandys (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919).

VLADIMIR L. MARCHENKOV

ART AND MYSTERY IN MIKHAIL BULGAKOV’S NOVEL T HE MAST ER AND MARGARITA AND ALEKSEI LOSEV’S STUDY T HE DIAL ECT ICS OF MY T H

I. MYSTERY, MIRACLE, AND MYTH

Perhaps the most common understanding of mystery is that it is something unknown. It cannot be something entirely unknown, however, because in this case the knowing subject would not be able even to perceive it, to come up against the boundary of his own knowledge. Mystery is, therefore, a perceptible intrusion of the unknown into the horizon of the known. The correct perception of mystery will, further, distinguish it from the unknown in general, for, when faced with the unknown, the knowing subject has two choices: to hope for more knowledge beyond the limit of what is currently known to him – in which case he would assume the attitude of the philosopher and mystery in the genuine sense would disappear; or to accept the unknown as such in principle – in which case he would adopt the attitude of the mystic and will be in the presence of a genuine mystery. Mystery, in the latter sense, is the intrusion of the unknown as such into the sphere of the known. To complicate matters further, the mystic is not only convinced that mystery poses a real boundary to his knowledge, but, paradoxically, also believes that he can penetrate that boundary and enter into unity with the unknown. In the words of Al-Ghazali: What is most distinctive of mysticism is something which cannot be apprehended by study, but only by immediate experience (dhawq – literally ‘tasting’), by ecstasy and by a moral change. I apprehended clearly that the mystics were men who had real experiences, not men of words, and that I had already progressed as far as possible by way of intellectual apprehension. What remained for me was not to be attained by oral instruction and study but only by immediate experience and by walking the mystic way.1

This is where we need the notion of rational knowledge in distinction from the mystic’s peculiar brand of immediate experiential knowledge. But even the two kinds of knowledge had something in common: the concept of the unknown in principle remains the sine qua non of mystery. 347 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 347–357. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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For the knowledge that the mystic claims to possess comes about precisely in rationally inexplicable ways – that require an appeal to miracle. A. F. Losev defined miracle as the coincidence of the ideal and real, the given and desired planes of being.2 If, for example, the ideal of music is to establish the harmony of all cosmic elements, then it is precisely such harmony that is accomplished by the song of Orpheus and it is doubtless a miracle when stones flying at him or the raging waves of the sea or quarrelling warriors or the implacable deities of the underworld obey the soothing power of his lyre and voice. The mystery here consists in the inexplicable connectedness of phenomena; myth, says Losev, suddenly elevates consciousness into such universal unity of things.3 Orpheus’ singing is a mysterium precisely because reason fails to explain this unity and yet there it is, visible, palpable, manifested to the senses. Or if the task of the icon-painter Alypios is to connect profane with sacred reality on his painted boards, then the act of a saint miraculously limning himself on a wooden tablet is, again, an instance of the ideal plane of being meeting the real plane. The key element in these encounters between the ideal and the real is that they must occur in a mysterious, rationally inexplicable fashion. If Orpheus used science and technology to calm the seas and pacify dragons; if Alypios accomplished his task through the use of photography, there would be nothing miraculous in what they do because scientific theory and technology based on it are distinct from myth and magic by the virtue of the fact that they can be explained without an appeal to mystery. Orpheus is mysteriously endowed with an extraordinary poetic gift and Alypios is mysteriously endowed with holiness – such that this gift and this holiness bring about magical transformations of mundane reality that no amount of philosophising can ever explain. This is why mystery and miracle, hand in hand, affirm faith and faith, conversely, requires mystery and miracle, and this is why the philosopher will be forever suspicious of the miraculous – even as he acknowledges, as did Socrates and Aristotle, that his own lantern is lit with a spark from miracle’s glowing halo. A miracle is thus the apparent and mysterious coincidence of reality’s different planes, a vision of their momentary unity. It is the moment when the mundane world becomes what it is supposed to be by its original, pure, and beautiful design – only to slip back into its fallen, ordinary, and bland existence. It is the moment when the sacred radiates through the pallid face of the profane world and shows us what the latter ought to be in its ultimate fulfilment.

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The tale that conveys the experience of the mysterious and miraculous is myth. Myth, according to Losev, is distinct from art by virtue of being a story about reality – a distinction that will be important in our analyses below – whereas art is marked by aesthetic detachment, or ‘‘disinterested pleasure,’’ as Kant put it in his third Critique. Mystery, miracle, and myth are therefore intimately bound together: myth is miraculous and miracle is mysterious. Thus the Losevian concepts of miracle and myth form the framework through which I shall address the riddle of the mysterious in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel T he Master and Margarita. II. THE TWO WORLDS IN BULGAKOV’S NOVEL

T he Master and Margarita includes two closely intertwined plots: the story of Satan’s visit to Moscow and the story of Pontius Pilate told in the Master’s ill-fated novel that was written shortly prior to the visit. In the most peculiar and paradoxical fashion, the miraculous is ostentatiously concentrated in precisely that plane of reality which is supposed to be completely devoid of it – the Moscow of the 1930s where, according to one of the protagonists, Mikhail Berlioz, no one any longer believes in the most remarkable miracle, i.e., Godmanhood, the reality of Christ. And vice versa, Bulgakov carefully removes all hints of the miraculous and mysterious from precisely that plane of reality where it is supposed to rule supreme: from the Master’s novel that at first blush seems to be derived from the Gospel. As a result of this inversion, the mysterious envelops the mundane life in Moscow and, conversely, the miraculous appearance of Christ described by the evangelists is transformed by the Master into an event that is devoid of all mystery and whose mundane character is dispelled only by the dramatic nature of the situation. As Yuri Lotman notes, Bulgakov no sooner establishes the two distinct worlds than he begins to problematise the distinction.4 The putatively mundane reality of Moscow suffers eruptions of the magical and mysterious, manifested in the antics of Woland’s companions. The tension between the real and fantastical reaches its peak in the variety show when Woland and his troupe completely confuse reality and fiction. The intrusions of the magical thoroughly undermine, even almost completely dissolve the fabric of realism in the Moscow chapters and the only remaining trace of it is perhaps the satirical nature of most tricks performed by Koroviev and Fagott, the two comical members of Woland’s retinue. In the end of the novel these two lines converge and a final reckoning, redemption of sins, and forgiveness take place: the Master is given eternal

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peace; Pontius Pilate is released from his torment and resumes his conversation with the wandering philosopher whom he had sent to the cross; and Satan retires into the outer darkness, having once again fulfilled his mission of bringing about good, in Goethe’s words taken by Bulgakov as the epigraph for the novel, while striving to bring about evil. I shall deal in more detail with the significance of this ending below. III. THE PARADOX OF THE MASTER’S NOVEL

As I noted above, it is not only the Moscow chapters, however, that receive a great dose of ambivalence. The same applies to the Master’s novel. The Master is a writer who lives in Moscow in the 1930s and certain autobiographical features of this character, linking him to Bulgakov, have always been responsible for a large part of the novel’s charm. The Master writes a novel about Pontius Pilate – which is an openly inappropriate choice of subject matter under the circumstances – that is ostensibly based on the Gospel.5 One would think that due to its source the novel must be a tale of mystical reality, a myth. It is frequently observed in the Bulgakov scholarship, however, that the Master’s novel transforms its source and turns it into a realistic account of Christ’s passion. This transformation has given rise to an on-going controversy about Bulgakov’s intention and, further, about his attitude toward religion. Verdicts range from calling him a Christian to gnostic to agnostic to apostate to Satanist. The animosity is, however, quite understandable because the question about the nature of the Master’s novel is critical for our attempts to interpret the import of T he Master and Margarita. The removal of the mysterious and miraculous from the Master’s novel, staged in Yershalaim, as the Master renames Jerusalem, manifests itself in the elements of a mystery novel in the usual sense, i.e., in the quasidetective story motifs that Bulgakov introduces into the Yershalaim chapters. The integration of these motifs into the Master’s novel is not accidental. It is widely acknowledged that the modern mystery novel of the Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie type is an example of the rationalistic attitude toward the world typical of the science of the period. The novel is, among other things, a positivist celebration of the so-called ‘‘deductive’’ thinking that is believed capable of unravelling any mystery and of penetrating all enigmas of human existence, especially such deviation from the rational order of things as crime. Needless to say, from the point of view adopted in this paper the name of the genre is a gross misnomer, for ‘‘mystery’’ is understood here as something to be rationally solved –

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which is the point of the genre designed to reassure the reader that the world is ruled by an inexorable rationality – and thus the mysterious in the genuine sense is completely excluded from the universe of such a novel. It makes perfect sense, then, that Bulgakov should use elements of this genre in order to demythologise the Gospel and replace it with a modern novelistic account. In the scene of Pilate’s interrogation of Yeshua, for example, Bulgakov evokes Conan Doyle’s stories in which the astute detective discloses his method. In this scene Yeshua (Jesus) divines the procurator’s psychological state: ‘‘You can’t even think about anything and only dream that your dog should come, apparently the one being you are attached to.’’ And when the procurator suggests that Yeshua is a healer because he guessed correctly (and this would be the moment that a mythopoet would seize to insist on the miraculous nature of Yeshua’s powers), the ‘‘wandering philosopher’’ explains a la Sherlock Holmes: ‘‘It’s very simple. You were moving your hand in the air – and the prisoner repeated Pilate’s gesture – ‘as if you wanted to stroke something, and your lips. . . .’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ said Pilate.6

One can discern Pilate’s palpable disappointment in this falling monosyllable. Furthermore, one can glimpse into the source of this disappointment: Pilate had expected something miraculous, he wanted to find himself immersed in a myth but instead of a miracle he was given a piece of shrewd observation. A similar demythologising effect is achieved by what may be called a reversed detective story, i.e., the story of Judas’ assassination. Instead of creating suspense by presenting the reader with the question, Who’s done it? – Bulgakov builds up drama by making sure that the reader knows that Judas will be murdered and that Pilate is responsible for his death. Just as in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the denouement precedes the crime, further adding to the sense that there is no trace of mystery in the Master’s novel. To sum up, the paradox of the Master’s novel consists in the fact that it reduces sacred reality to an openly profane one by means of modern literary realism, which by definition is not supposed to fool anyone into thinking that it is not fiction. The realism of the modern novel is a prime example of the Kantian aesthetic detachment from the reality of things. The question is, then, why Bulgakov should wish to use this genre for the description of Pilate’s predicament. Why should he wish to demythicise the Gospel account? I shall return to this question below and in

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the meantime note that Bulgakov problematises, in turn, the notion of aesthetic detachment typical of modern art in general and modern literature in particular. IV. THE MEETING OF THE TWO REALITIES

Throughout T he Master and Margarita, Bulgakov hints at the nonnovelistic character of the Master’s work. In the scene at the Patriarch’s Ponds, for instance, Woland recites to Berlioz and Homeless the beginning of the Master’s novel precisely as an example of myth, i.e., as a story that requires no proof beyond itself because its authenticity is so compellingly obvious. Later in the novel the Master exclaims, ‘‘Oh how correctly I guessed [the truth of Pilate’s story]!’’ (Let us note this matter of guessing, we shall return to it later.) These indications of the truth contained in the Master’s novel seem to show that Bulgakov does not, after all, entirely share the Kantian view of art, that for him literature, genuine literature goes beyond creating pure fiction and does possess the capacity to attain sacred reality and touch the truth of the world’s life. This theme comes to a head when in the last chapter the Master’s story coalesces with Pilate’s, signifying the end of the writer’s (both writers’) work. When Woland’s adventures in Moscow are over he departs with the Master and Margarita, now no longer among the living, riding on mighty black steeds away from the earthly city, away from the immanent world, and into the eternal transcendent world of spiritual existence. It is here, in this transcendent world that the Master’s novel finally finds its conclusion – the Master frees Pontius Pilate from his torment. This conclusion, however, is no longer a novel, but, from the Master’s point of view, belongs already to myth, for it occurs not in his imagination, but in the reality that he immediately perceives and participates in. And it is here that Yershalaim finally loses the realistic features it had in the Master’s novel and becomes a mythical symbol, as does Moscow. Thus ends the constant interplay between the two realities and with it ends the constant doubting of the reality of each. Bulgakov suggests that neither mythical reality nor aesthetic realism by themselves are capable of maintaining themselves and can only subsist if the unbreakable link between them is preserved – a thoroughly Losevian conception, for Losev closes T he Dialectics of Myth with the proposition that neither irrational faith nor faithless rationalism can by themselves legitimately claim access to truth, but that they dialectically presuppose each other and thus are mutually necessary. Losev called their final, complete union ‘‘absolute

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mythology – absolute dialectics,’’ i.e., a dialectics that is thoroughly real fused with a mythology that is thoroughly dialectical. And yet Bulgakov makes sure that we do not stop at this ultimate unity of myth and the novel but problematises it once again in the Epilogue. V. UNRESOLVED QUESTIONS

The intrusion of the mythical into the life of Moscow does not bring about its transfiguration: the life of the earthly city returns to its usual course and all mysteries and miracles are explained ‘‘rationally,’’ i.e., from the point of view of the modern scientific outlook. In other words, there is no permanent convergence of Yershalaim reality and Moscow reality: Satan’s appearance is not the transfiguration of earthly reality, but merely an episode, a brief collision of the two planes of being. The earthly world remains ordinary, devoid of mystery, while the latter withdraws almost completely into the unearthly, transcendent world. But here is a puzzle: in the Master’s novel this ‘‘transcendent’’ world is described as immanent. Where does, then, the mystery of the world’s life come from if Godman is indistinguishable from man? VI. THE DIALECTICS OF MYTH AND ART

T he Master and Margarita is no longer a modern novel: the miraculous and hence the mysterious roam too freely on its pages. But this becomes possible only because miracle and myth are now, in the fourth decade of the twentieth century when the novel is written, decisively conquered. Jose´ Ortega y Gasset commented in his ‘‘Notes on the Novel’’ that this modern genre does not tolerate the extraordinary. ‘‘It is in reporting the wonders of the simple, unhaloed hour,’’ he wrote, ‘‘not in expatiating on the extraordinary, that the novel displays its specific graces.’’ And he remarked further: This aesthetic stress on the daily and this strict preclusion of marvels and wonders is essential to the modern novel. It characterizes Don Quixote in contrast to the romances of chivalry. Indeed, were we to determine the conditions of the modern novel, we should only need to ascertain what a literary prose production must look like that makes a principle of eliminating marvels.7

The realistic novel of the nineteenth century so ardently insisted on its thaumatophobic realism because the latter was an island amidst a nonrealistic thaumatophilic ocean of a religiosity that was still quite serious,

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the superstition of the illiterate folk, and monarchist ideologies which are always mythological. By the time of T he Master and Margarita this entire mythological ocean was vanquished and with catastrophic speed was becoming a matter of the past. The mystical novel of Bulgakov, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse was the last victory of modern literature over myth and miracle: in this novel myth and miracle become nothing more than literary material. But Bulgakov had sufficient tact and, perhaps, religious feeling not to transform the myth of the Gospel into literary material. He turns – in a perfectly logical fashion, as I shall presently show – myth into literature in order not to allow the transmogrification of myth into literature. To rewrite the Gospel a la Count Tolstoy, i.e., to provide the allegedly correct version of it would have been, from the literary point of view, tasteless and, from the religious point of view, blasphemous. Bulgakov, however, makes a prodigiously intelligent decision: his Master writes not the true version of the Gospel, but a novel about Pontius Pilate. Here we must carefully distinguish between myth and art in order to appreciate the significance of this decision and understand Bulgakov’s handling of scriptural sources. The Gospel is a myth, it enunciates the truth and this is precisely how its genre should be understood. The Master’s novel, on the other hand, is a literary work that can realistically present anything in the world, even sacred history, yet never becomes apodictic truth.8 The change of perspective in the Master’s novel in comparison with Scripture is highly characteristic: the Gospel tells us about Christ, i.e., about truth itself, whereas the Master’s novel, by contrast, is about the Roman procurator, the man who doubts the very existence of truth and fears it even – and perhaps especially – when it is standing before him. Moreover, Pilate fears truth to the extent of wishing, despite himself, to destroy it. Myth is full of the miraculous because it has not the slightest doubt about its own truth; the novel zealously exterminates the miraculous and insists on its own realism precisely because it is full of ineluctable doubt about its own truth. Or rather, the novel knows that it is fiction and a lucky guess at best. VII. THE MYSTERY OF THE CREATIVE GIFT

But here the matter is complicated by the fact that the Master’s guess turns out to be extremely important and compels us to revise the above separation of myth and literature. These converge once again in the

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notion of artistic gift, inspiration which is central to both. Losev called myth ‘‘religious art’’ and this casts additional light on his approach to it. The creation of any work of art, be it mythical or aesthetic, is possible only by means of the artistic gift that Kant considered mysterious, inexplicable. In the mystery of the gift myth and art are made equal to each other despite all their fundamental differences. Hesiod is at once a mythopoet and a poet and he cannot be anything else. It is by means of his gilt, artistic clairvoyance, that Master gleans the truth of the foundational event of Christian sacred history. In this extraordinary vision he becomes, for a moment, a mythopoet who describes the event directly in its immediacy. But the Master is not, after all, a mythopoet: he is a novelist and it is not a myth, but a novel that ultimately emerges from under his pen. The crux of the matter is not, however, that myth is reality itself rather than a mere guess about it, whereas the novel forever strives and forever fails to become reality. The main point is that the only justification of the novel’s existence is precisely the mystical moment of its insight into reality. The novel does not and cannot remain at the peak of such insight; it invariably returns to the realistic, i.e., the purely external plane of being and to the sober, objective view of things. Unlike Al-Ghazali, the novelist cannot ‘‘walk the mystic way’’ and lose himself in ecstasy. But this is precisely what leaves the Master profoundly dissatisfied. He wants to penetrate the essence of things and . . . pays dearly for this by becoming an outcast and by virtually disappearing from the Moscow world altogether in the seclusion of a psychiatric clinic. The objective, sober, anti-mythical world, die entzauberte Welt, severely punishes any attempt at (mythical) dissent. When the abstract objective husk of being is left behind and below, however, the novel fully converges with myth and the unity of myth and poesy is finally restored. Reality becomes not realistic, but mythopoetic. Somewhere in its depth, art always remains mythical and therefore miraculous and mysterious. Kant’s insistence on art’s detachment from the reality of the world’s life is one of the great delusions of modernity. In Kant’s own thought, however, this delusion is counterbalanced by his doctrine of natural genius, or what may be called his philosophy of artistic gift, and modern art is marked by an unresolved balancing, oscillation between aesthetic formalism and the mystical cult of human genius. I noted above that the earthly city remains unreformed in Bulgakov’s novel. This must be qualified: in contrast to the false miracles of Woland and his suite, the Master does manage to create one genuine miracle that plants the seed, after all, of the transfiguration of the created world. It is

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Ivan Homeless who from an ignorant poet becomes a historian and philosopher, i.e., a person who, in contrast to Pontius Pilate, is not afraid of the truth but seeks to grasp it. But here is the final Romantic trick that Bulgakov plays on a philosopher who would like to reduce his novel to an argument: the former poet Ivan finds peace only in dreams, or rather in the dream of Pilate and Yeshua, doubt and truth, walking along a moonbeam – a dream sealed with the kiss on Ivan’s forehead by the Master’s Muse. And yet, like the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate, Bulgakov’s own novel is not a myth, after all: it ends with the words that the Master said he knew would end his novel: ‘‘the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, equestrian Pontius Pilate.’’ But even as I am making this observation, I realise the power of the longing that moves the historian and philosopher toward an encounter with myth: an immediate encounter in which my forehead, my rational thought, would be sealed by the kiss of ‘‘a woman of boundless beauty’’ who ‘‘forms herself in the stream [of moonlight],’’ and I would hear the words, ‘‘I will kiss you on the forehead, and everything with you will be as it should be . . .’’ – spoken to me by the fallen witch Margarita.9 Ohio University Athens, Ohio

NOTES 1 Hyman, A. and Walsh, J. Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1973). 2 Losev, A. F. Dialektika mifa (The Dialectics of Myth) (Moscow: Mysl, 2001), 180–183. 3 Losev, 91–92. 4 Lotman, Yyri. Kul’tura i vzryv (Culture and Explosion) (Moscow: Progress, 1992), 117–119. 5 Krugovoy provides an interesting and persuasive discussion of Bulgakov’s sources for the Master’s novel. Especially prominent among them, according to him, are the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and particularly the gnostic ‘‘Song of the Pearl’’ (cf. Krugovoy, George. T he Gnostic Novel of Mikhail Bulgakov: Sources and Exegesis [Lanham: University Press of America, 1991]). 6 Bulgakov, Mikhail. T he Master and Margarita (transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York: Penguin Books, 1997). 24–26. 7 Ortega y Gasset, Jose´. T he Dehumanization of Art and Other W ritings on Art and Culture (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 82. 8 This is where it may be especially useful to resort to Krugovoy’s argument: an apocryphal and gnostic source would have a weaker claim to truth than the four recognised Gospels, and are thus further from myth and closer to literature. 9 Bulgakov, 395–396.

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REFERENCES Bulgakov, Mikhail. T he Master and Margarita (transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York: Penguin Books, 1997). Hyman, A. and Walsh, J. Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1973). Krugovoy, George. T he Gnostic Novel of Mikhail Bulgakov: Sources and Exegesis (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991). Losev, A. F. Dialektika mifa (The Dialectics of Myth) (Moscow: Mysl, 2001). Lotman, Yyri. Kul’tura i vzryv (Culture and Explosion) (Moscow: Progress, 1992). Ortega y Gasset, Jose´. T he Dehumanization of Art and Other W ritings on Art and Culture (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956).

MATTI ITKONEN

DOES WHAT HAS BEEN SURVIVE AFTER ALL? THE TOUCH OF YESTERDAY

1. T o Begin Morning tea – the sudden clack of the letter-box; and nothing was ever the same again. My awakening had begun. Paris, December 31, 1999 Greetings, stranger! How many times has the sun gone down behind those trees; how many rains have drenched these streets. I have sat at this window with eyes unseeing – or actually looking at things no longer there, a world that has flowed by me long since. I care nothing for these trees, for the dawns to come; nothing for the mornings which once heralded new light. All that is over and done with – or is it? Does it perhaps live on in me after all, a lucid image within me of what was once present to me? I am not that one with whom you shared the awakening fragrance of spring. Do you remember the Seine, its banks, the blazing days of youth? Its eternal green, those warm summer nights we lived? Can you feel their ecstasy; do you still live the reality of it all ? My youth has flown, its fervour has forsaken this body, leaving only a shell – wrinkles, old age and confusion. But this is not me, this lifeless hunched-up tree; this is just a frame. Me – I ceased long ago to be – in those long nights when life – its marrow – slipped away. And I just looked at the clock – even then with unseeing eyes, or eyes that saw only what lay behind. I suppose I loved you once. Or did I love only myself ? Or the time that once was? One way or the other, here is my longing for youth, for Paris, and my contempt for the triviality of the present. L isten to me, burn the pain of yesterday into your soul, for a brief moment follow in my footsteps. Come as your own self, my torment of yesterday. W ith empty eyes, Matti Itkonen It is said that a picture condenses in itself a myriad words. Let me try to outline my own situation in an eidetic mode, juxtaposing my past and 359 A.-T . T ymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana L XXXII, 359–369. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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my present, at once creating a vivid sense of my vanished self and breathing life into the self that is. The time has come to take hold.

2. Unraveling the Situation: A Draft for Pure Psychology Before I can get to the bottom of myself I must outline a strategy, the right way of going about it. Once one realizes the all-distorting danger of psychologism there is a chance of coming up with something philosophically interesting. So I shall set out on this quest for my lost present – this sketch for a philosophical probe – with an outline of a phenomenologically ‘‘pure’’ psychology. What I am after is a description of things original, things peculiar to themselves; I want to establish the nature of a universally valid intentional-spiritual process which would comprise the all-embracing rule of synthesis: every connection of consciousness with the consciousness of another gives birth to a new consciousness. I must set out to explore those discrete modes of the intentionalspiritual process which must and can manifest themselves at all in the mind. In the same context I shall consider such syntheses whose components those discrete forms comprise. My fixed purpose is indeed to lay bare the existential pattern of those manifestations. The resulting typology would embrace all forms, the discrete, the concomitant and the finite, and those which reach out to infinity. My objective is to reveal the overall structure of the mental life as such and at the same time to offer an eidetic presentation – a Wesensdeskription – of that structure. My analysis is thus designed to illustrate the essential nature – the Wesensart – of the universal stream of consciousness. The word ‘‘I’’ now entails a new direction of inquiry in the context of ‘‘ordinary’’ modes of being. ‘‘I’’ here comprises the subject of permanent conceptions or modes of thought – convictions such as are associated, for example, with existence, matters of value and deliberate decisions; the subject, then, of habit and practiced skills and qualities of being. (On the foregoing, see for detail, e.g., Husserl, p. 26.) All that sounds far too theoretical – I am still not sure where I stand, where exactly my present is; I must persevere and hammer this out.

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3. T he Elements of Philosophical Self-education Inasmuch as introspection, self-observation, proves inadequate, it must be well replaced with retrospection, hindsight. Since immediate entree is thus withheld, I must try an indirect approach. This will involve human and personal memory. We humans have the ability to recall what has vanished along with our experiences. Remembering in fact begins from what has happened only a moment ago, and extends into the furthest reaches of our past lives. One notes that the philosopher Henri Bergson dedicated one of his great works to Matie`re et Me´moire (1896). Bergson explained that every single experience leaves its mark on consciousness. This would seem a good place for me to pick up the thread. The stream of experience builds up into a semicontinuous sequence of memory images like a strip of film. Whenever the experience of the present moment impinges upon that sedimented stratum of the mind, ‘‘appropriate’’ memories return to present themselves anew, and take their place in the experience of the here-and-now. In appraising the memory of what has just passed I attain to some indirect knowledge of that experience. But there is of course only the memory – the experience itself is beyond recall. To this understanding of memory as a route of access to experience the philosopher-psychologist William James has added two fruitful concepts. In developing his thesis of the independent components in the stream of consciousness, he alludes to a floating jetty or drifting raft from which one may deliberately focus one’s gaze upon specific memories of past experience. In his theory of ‘‘fringes’’ James explains the immediacy, the self-triggering nature of some of our recollections of experience by envisaging them as located on the periphery of the stream of consciousness, the fringe still within its sphere of influence. More recent phenomenologico-psychological thinking likewise sees fragments of memory as fringe phenomena which often awaken simultaneously with some current experience. (On the foregoing section, see for detail, e.g., Wagner, pp. 33–34.) How indeed is it possible that my entire present moment is brimful of the Latin Quarter and red wine? It is as if memory and experience had merged; the whole present experience – perception – is taken up by that recollection. Let me try to bring the situation into better focus. 4. Past, Present and Anticipated Future: A Mould for a W hole Self What I was just now – my past, what I am – my present, and what I soon must be – my anticipation; that is the entity of my being (see also

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Heidegger 1935; Ingarden 1983; Itkonen 1996; Itkonen 1998; Itkonen 1999). I obliterated my now and my yet-to-be when I locked myself in my past being. To rediscover my true present I must first recover my own self – I must change back into my proper self. However has it come to this? There are in fact two dimensions of the self: an outward reflection of the inner – its spatial and social aspects. Perhaps a ‘‘warmed-up’’ deepened introspection may help to understand inner states as living processes of ever-becoming. These states are not amenable to measurement, and they pervade each other. The sequential nature of this process has nothing in common with parallels in homogeneous space. I seldom understand my selfhood, and am thus seldom free. Most of the time I live outside myself, understanding practically nothing of myself. I see only a phantom, a pale shade whose pure duration is projected into undifferentiated space. I live rather for outward reality than for myself, pretending rather than doing. Free – voluntary – action entails retrieving my selfhood and regaining authentic duration. (See esp. Bergson, pp. 173–180.) In this effort to distinguish the essential from the inconsequential some help may perhaps be derived from an analysis of two concepts pertinent to my situation: homogeneity and heterogeneity. If time (and reality) were homogeneous, uniform in quality, all moments in time would also be ‘‘of a bunch.’’ My identity would be a continuous line of successive points, a quantitative entity – and temporality with it. There would be the swing of a pendulum and a point to mark that swing – no trace left of its movement in space. My pendulum has stuck at some point in the past, in my ‘‘once-upona-time’’; I am a captive in my own former being. Duration proper is by nature heterogeneous, diversified. This implies a qualitative dimension in which the elements, the moments, stand in inward relation one to the other. Simultaneity means a situation in which past and present swings of the pendulum are realized together – two tracks at once parallel and encompassed one in the other; my selfhood ‘‘folded’’ through space, I as a self ever the same, ever changing. And in even more concrete terms: My inessential moment-to-moment self hood I am just an unbroken line of successive points in the past. Unalterable, known of old: merely a totality of moments one after the other, elements each external to the other; and I would be chained by them to that eternal Paris in the spring.

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My essential moment-in-moment self hood I am an I of multiplicity; a myriad qualities with their mutually encompassed elements. I must be able to see at one and the same time the Paris of the past and my present moment, dwelling in my former being without forfeiting my here-and-now. One dimension need not then cease to be for the other to exist. And so, there is still one place where I am not at one with myself – my anticipation. If I am disappointed today, perhaps tomorrow I shall not be; for all that today’s prospect might not please. If one day I get a black eye, part of my face will retain the mark long after. My true selfhood, my ipseity, also entails experienced space; space lived as a body (see esp. Schutz 1970b, pp. 173–174).

5. My T rue and My False Reality Activity, work, and its philosophical nature might be the answer to my problem. Concrete attachment to something – involvement in what is – might help me in my search for my present. I had better devise some plan with which to set out on my quest. Even an instant of absence – a moment of all-pervading transcendence – offers no escape from loneliness. The core of all is light, the light which allows an encounter with some being other than oneself. That light moulds the other as if that being emanated from me, and that vivid illumination constitutes comprehensibility in itself; in that it makes everything seem to come from myself, that lucidity reduces every experience to the elements of memory. Reason is ever alone. Hence knowledge can never attain to anything truly other in this world. This is the profoundest truth of idealism. It makes manifest the fundamental difference between spatial externality and the externality of moments that are mutually interlaced. In the reality of necessity – that is, the reality in which I exist with all my needs and wants – the space which separates me from myself has always to be overcome. I must pass over that no-man’s-land and seize the object itself: I must work with my own hands. In a slightly modified sense the old saying ‘‘The labourer has earned his bread’’ is indeed an analytical proposition. Tools and the making of them constitute the unrealized aspiration to eliminate that distance. Surveying the perspective since man’s passage from tool-maker to this age of the machine, we see ourselves to be more fascinated with the functioning of our ingenious

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contraptions than with the instrumental purpose they originally had. And this worship of function carries with it a denial of work. In work – in the sense of effort, its agony and travail – that is where I find the significance of my existence, in which the freedom of being, of presence, is entwined. Pain and toil – it is to these that the loneliness of whatever exists is ultimately reduced and returned. (On the entire foregoing section, see Levinas, p. 68.) I have been too long ‘‘out of action,’’ too long deprived of the sense of my own blood coursing in my veins. I have known, that is, thought I knew, that my whole reality lay in the Paris of yore. I thought I knew myself through and through. And so whatever has befallen me since has been lost on me; I have lived as if only my past being were my world. Spatial externality has led to the situation where I have severed the bond between my former being and my now. Using myself as a machine, I have lost the actuality of being. Self -illumination means understanding one’s own presence as an absence, realizing that it is lacking. Amid that bright light glows that face which once was me. If only I can overcome that absence, I may learn once more to live and feel. In order to be able to distinguish true reality from false, I must achieve a profounder and more precise level of self-analysis – I must learn to see the difference between what is essential and what is not. 6. My Corporeal and My Noncorporeal Self The self that creates the imaginary world is original; the self that inhabits that fantasy world is not. Imagined experiences exist in contrast to memory, because they are not given as re-presentations of actual experiences. Fantasy experiences are always given as a nonoriginal form of present experience. This ‘‘presence,’’ this immediacy, is not a token of the current moment of objective time but of lived presence that can be objectivized, illustrated, only in the ‘‘neutral’’ now of imaginary time. The neutral or nonposited form of present memory – that which is now a real but disembodied re-presentation of givenness – exists in contrast to the neutralized pre- and post-memory (Ru¨ck- und Vorerinnerung). Thus the noncorporeal memory of false reality exists conversely to the imagined events of future or past, conversely to the re-presentation of unreal past or future experiences. (For detail, see esp. Stein, pp. 8–9.) To apply this thought-construct to my own situation: I may also encounter myself in the realm of imagination, both in memory and in anticipation. This constitutes an encounter with a self whom I recognize

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as myself even though there is no unifying sequence of experience to create an entity. There is, then, no experiential continuity in which I could meet my mirror-image. The situation resembles that which Goethe describes in Dichtung und Wahrheit: he was returning from Sesenheim, having taken leave of Friederike, and met his own future self; himself as he would be. A brief updating is now in place.

7. I Can Confront Both of My Selves: My Imaginary and My Real Self My imaginary self was original in the Paris of the past; experiencing and living, present in its own actuality. And in Paris it remained and changed into a fantasized self. My here-and-now exists as a pseudo-self of false reality; looking with empty eyes derives no proof of presence. It exists as a mere phantom of the past which has no experiential connection with the self that is. When I encounter my imaginary self; I see a self with its hair parted on the wrong side; this is my mirror image. My real self has vanished; it lives a here-and-now of its own in the position of its imaginary self. In order to exist as an entity of experience I must be able to meet that self with its part on the right side, seen, that is, as others see me. I would need to find a ‘‘corporeal’’ memory of myself; break down the doorless bastion of the past. So I must change from a re-presentation to a presentation – from a fantasy to a self of flesh and blood. (See esp. Itkonen 1997, pp. 47–58.) There was mention above of a change of viewpoint; someone else seeing the same reality differently from myself. Perhaps that other – my fellow being – can help me in my search for my true present.

8. Otherness and the Fecundity of T ime It is perfectly natural to assume that one is in daily contact with intelligent people, and that the objects in our shared world are equally open to those ‘‘others.’’ My fellow men, then, know the objects of my reality, or at least there is no reason why they could not know them. It is also obvious that one and the same object must mean different things to me and to any of those ‘‘others of mine.’’ My self in this context must make an appraisal of sound common sense, which can overcome the differences arising from personal perspectives by formulating two conceptions, namely:

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Mutually interchangeable viewpoints I take it for granted – and assume that others do likewise – that if I were to change places with my ‘‘other,’’ his here-and-now would become mine. I also assume that if I were to stand at the same distance from some object as my fellow being, I would see that object as being of the same nature as my ‘‘other’’ actually does. Perhaps one could take these assumptions even further; those objects which are within my fellow being’s actual reach would likewise be accessible to me – and of course vice versa. Congruence of systems of meaningfulness Unless otherwise evidenced, I take it for granted – and assume that others do likewise – that the divergences in viewpoint arising between myself and ‘‘my others’’ in consequence of our respective unique life situations are insignificant from the standpoint of the ultimate objective which we share. I also take it as given that each and every one of us assumes the other to have chosen and interpreted our actually or potentially common objects and their qualities in the same way. This ‘‘empirical’’ identity of interpretation I take to mean that our relationship to any object is moulded in keeping with all practical requirements. (On the whole foregoing section, see esp. Schutz 1970b, pp. 183–184.) These two formulations are essential from the viewpoint of my situation in a number of senses: I can approach myself as I would another, and with my fellow being’s help I may also make acquaintance with my own self. The first thing that must be changed is the assumption of the automatic nature of the world of experience – that view of being must be eradicated. I have lost my own you-position, the immediacy of my hereand-now and the unknown quality of my coming being, for I behold my present and my future through the eyes of the past – everything was laid out for me in Paris that spring. I see only something that once was realized repeating itself over and over again. In a word: I have not only lost my present, I have lost my fellow being’s present with it. It is time to retrieve the secret. Sensuality will help me to encounter a pure, absolute future; my anticipation, which is emptied of all content. In sensuality I meet the secret of the future, the mystery. Since voluptuous pleasure involves a relationship with otherness, it must also mean a relationship with an ‘‘other.’’ A relationship, contact, with another being grants me time which is over and above my own present or the unknown future of my death.

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Hence I cannot in my own solitary experience imagine time in its fullest meaning; that is rather the achievement of a social relationship. Without another being I am confined to my own present; my time is not real time, it is merely a return of my former ‘‘emParised’’ present – perpetual return. A social relationship indeed brings out my temporality in its fullness: my fellow being reveals to me my unconditional future, the secret and the surprise of my anticipation. At the same time my existence opens up to a future which is no longer within my power. A relationship with another thus confers upon me the whole new beginning I crave; a future which exceeds all the established parameters of what could be foreseen or was possible in the present. Time in itself is fecund; it begins ever anew, is born ever fresh. (On otherness and time, see esp. Manning, pp. 76–78.) There it was, my lost present: a living presence in its unceasing flow. At last I had found myself. 9. As the Beginning Comes to a Close Just when I thought I had come to terms with myself; I found on my bedside table a poem which wiped the smile from my face. I lifted the curtain, looked out – and was looking within me. A sandbox I saw, a spade, a castle and a boy building it; he is building it still. The game was and is: it began and is still in its beginning. The boy sat down, looked behind him – and gave a start; at the window stood a man, familiar, with a strange look on his face. What happened there?

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Past and future gazed into A COMMON PRESENT. The boy went on with his play, I let the curtain fall. No window anymore, no view – no within. Only the body I was given, reflecting on its surface the distance between me and the boy. Each holding in his yesterday the line engraved, the anteroom of tomorrow from which every now is born. Man and boy – me – all in one; from somewhere towards something new. In that same window, staring each at each. – Matti Itkonen Those who are familiar with the ontology of the work of art – particularly of the film – may well expect at this juncture the opening of the next installment. Just so; you have just read a text which adumbrates a step forward in the quest; the beginning of a new undertaking. University of Jyva¨skyla¨ Translated by Robert MacGilleon.

REFERENCES Bergson, H. (1961). Essai sur les donne´es imme´diates de la conscience (1889). 96. e´dition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Heidegger, M. (1935). Sein und Zeit (1927). Erste Ha¨lfte. Unvera¨nderte 4. Auflage. Halle a. d. Saale: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Husserl, E. (1981). ‘‘Phenomenology’’ (1927). Revised translation by Richard E. Palmer. In: E. Husserl: Shorter Works. Edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Pp. 21–35. Ingarden, R. (1983). Man and Value (1970). Translation by Arthur Szylewicz. Munich: Philosophia; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.

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Itkonen, M. (1996). Itseyteni ja toiseutesi – opettajuutemme ja¨ljitetty maa. Esseistinen montaasi kasvatusfilosofian perusteiksi. Kertoma ynna¨ Kesta¨ma¨ -ela¨mykset. Mielen sisa¨lto¨ 2. Jyva¨skyla¨: Jyva¨skyla¨n yliopistopaino. ——. (1997). ‘‘Dialogic or Dialogistic? Dialogicity or Dialogism? A Word of Warning Against Rigor Metodologiae.’’ Translated by Robert MacGilleon. Human Studies 20: 1. Pp. 47–58. ——. (1998). Voinko minutella? Filosofisia puheita itsekasvatuksesta. Tampere: TAJU. ——. (1999). ‘‘Alter et Alter. The Two Faces of the Mirror.’’ Translated by Robert MacGilleon. Phenomenological Inquiry 23. Pp. 107–132. Levinas, E. (1987). T ime and the Other (and additional essays) (1947). Translation by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Manning, R. J. S. (1993). Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger. Emmanuel L evinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Schutz, A. (1970a). ‘‘Interactional Relationships’’ (1942, 1953, 1955, 1960, 1967). In: A. Schutz: On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Selected W ritings. Edited and with an Introduction by Helmut R. Wagner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pp. 163–199. ——. (1970b). Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. Edited, annotated, and with an Introduction by Richard M. Zaner. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stein, E. (1980). Zum Problem der Einfu¨hlung (1917). Mu¨nchen: Gerhard Kaffke mbH. Wagner, H. R. (1983). Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the L ife-world. An Introductory Study. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press.

INDEX OF NAMES

Abrahams, P. 183, 188, 190–1 Aesop 34 Alcibiades 326 Al-Ghazali 347, 355 Alypios 348 Ambrose 219 Andrewes, A. 331 Antigone 53, 57 Aristotle 19, 31, 34, 37, 41, 48–52, 57, 229, 250, 268, 271, 281 Asclepiades 47 Athenaeus 47 Attar, F. 115 Augustine 59, 217, 219–27, 231 Bachelard, G. 211 Bakhtin, M. 327 Balzac 272 Barthes, R. 311, 313, 318 Baudrillard, J. 67 Beckett 151 Bellairs, J. 210–1 Berger, P. 159 Bergson, H. 361–2 Berkeley, G. 270 Berlioz, M. 349 Bernhard, T. 226–31, 234 Blake, W. 44 Blanchot, M. 12–3, 65, 69, 71 Bo¨ll, H. 316 Borges, J.L. 85, 91–7, 99–100, 103–110 Bowra, C.M. 331 Brentano, F. 31 Breuer, J. 48 Brown, M.W. 210 Browning, R. 40–1 Bulgakov, M. 349–56 Bultman 238 Burke, K. 80 Burkert, W. 85, 324 Burton, R. 103–4

Caillois, R. 94–5 Camus, A. 149 Ce´line 196–7, 203, 212 Ce´zanne 272 Chapman, J.J. 82 Chatman, S. 183 Chomsky, N. 255 Christy, A. 350 Clayton, J. 290 Coelho, P. 99 Coetzee, J.M. 125–6, 129–31 Congreve 323 Conner, W.R. 326 Conrad 44, 306 Craig, G. 314–6 Creon 57, 59 Crotty, K. 337 Daguerre 314 Dante, A. 115, 117 Davidson, D. 248–9 de la Cruz, J. 121 Derrida, J. 65–72 Descartes, R. 37, 234 Dickinson, E. 40, 44, 294 Dolezˇel, L. 272 Donlan, W. 331 Donne, J. 40 Dostoyevski, F. 149, 351 Doyle, A.C. 145, 148, 154, 164, 169–70, 178–9, 350–1 Dryden, J. 321 Eco, U. 87 Edmundson, L. 51 Einstein, A. 35 Eliot, T.S. 265, 306–7 Emerson 121, 283 Eurydice 10–1, 20–1 Evans-Pritchard, F.E. 245–7 Faulkner, W. 42

371

372

INDEX OF NAMES

Fernandez, R. 276 Feynman, R. 35 Fink, E. 270–1 Fitzgerald, W. 324 Fiumara, C. 15 Fontenrose, J. 326 Ford 237 Forster, E.M. 189 Fox, R. 250 Freud, S. 23, 48, 134 Frost, R. 44 Fry, P 321–3, 325

Ibn-al-Arabi 117 Ingarden, R. 361 Irwin, R. 91–2 Isocrates 47 Itkonen, M. 359, 361, 365

Gadamer, H-G. 87, 133, 137–8, 141, 238, 245, 290, 293, 295 Gatheru, R.M. 189 Goethe 350, 364 Golden, L. Bernays, J. 48 Gombrowicz, W. 312 Griffith, R.D. 334, 339 Grossvogel, D. 145–6, 148–9, 151–7, 160–75, 178–9

Kafka, F. 92 Kant, I. 134, 349, 355 Kantor, T. 311–8 Kearney, R. 125 Keats, E.J. 205–6, 208–9 Keats, J. 44, 46 Kendrick, S. 146, 148, 151, 153–4, 156, 160–2, 175, 179 Kierkegaard, S. 31, 35 Klee, P. 198 Knox, B. 48, 52, 54 Koop, V.D. 21 Kripke, S. 250 Kruglikov, V. 136 Kurke, L. 331, 335, 340

Habermas, J. 245–7, 253–8 Hafiz 123 Hallam 66, 68, 70 Hamlet 40 Hawthorne, N. 91, 107 Heath, M. 326 Hegel, G.W.F. 57, 134 Heidegger, M. 7–16, 31, 46–7, 52–9, 99, 133–6, 138–9, 141, 263, 266, 268, 270, 272–3, 285, 295, 299–307, 361 Heisenberg, W. 35 Heraclitus 34, 53, 202 Herbert, Z. 131 Hesiod 355 Hesse, H. 354 Hitler, A. 227 Hoffman, E.T.A. 316 Ho¨lderlin, F. 56–9, 299–301, 303, 305–8 Holthusen, H.E. 24 Homer 51, 285–6, 291 Horace 323 Hurd, C. 210 Husserl, E. 19–20, 27, 31, 77–82, 133, 199–200, 203, 263–71, 276, 278, 281, 283–7, 295, 360

Jalal-ad-Din 118–23 James, W. 263–4, 277, 283–8, 295, 361 Jocasta 59 Joyce, P.W. 193 Judas 351 Juliet 40, 289

Lang, E.S. 145 Laye, C. 183, 188–91 Lefkowitz, M. 322 Levin, J. 283 Levinas, E. 125, 127–8, 269–71, 295 Lewis, C.D. 162 Libby, A. 264 Lincoln, A. 77–82 Lionni, L. 198, 204, 212 Lobel, A. 210 Losev, A.F. 348–9, 352, 355 Lotman, Y. 349 Luckmann, T. 170 Lukes, S. 245–6 Lyotard, J-F. 47 MacIntyre, A. 245–50, 252–4, 256–7 Maildun 193–6, 204–5 Malraux 313

INDEX OF NAMES Mamardashvili 133, 135–7, 140–1 Mann, T. 354 Mansell, D. 70 Marston 237, 239, 241, 243 Marx, L. 306 McCann, J. 264 Merleau-Ponty, M. 270, 272–6 Middleton 237, 240 Miller, E.H. 80 Mohammed 108, 117 Monet, C. 45 Moore, T. 94 Mozart 227 Mphahlele, E. 183–6, 188 Nash, J. 38, 42 Nietzsche, F. 32–3, 37, 46, 49, 134–5, 139, 224–6, 231, 263, 277–80, 291–2, 295–6 Niven, A. 188 Nnolim, C. 189–90 Oedipus 47–8, 50–2, 54, 56–9 Orpheus 7–16, 20–1, 24–7, 348 Otto, R. 324–5 Parmenides 53–4, 58, 202 Pascal 306 Penelope 289 Pericles 326 Perrault 323 Peters, E. 87 Piaget 201–3, 210 Pilate, P. 35, 349–52, 354, 356 Pindar 322–5, 327–43 Plato 34–5, 48, 285–6, 326 Plotinus 118–20 Poe, E.A. 87, 316 Pratt, L.H. 336 Protagoras 48, 57 Proust, M. 39, 272 Putnam, H. 248, 254 Quine, W.V.O. 249 Rae, P. 288 Ricoeur, P. 15, 86–8, 98–9, 237–8, 241, 243

Rilke, R.M. 7–10, 12, 14–16, 20–7, 44 Rockev, R. 211 Romeo 40, 289 Rorty, R. 248, 254 Rothstein, E. 290 Rumi, J. 115–8 Rushdie, S. 93 Said, E. 92 Sana’J 115 Sandys, J.E. 341 Sartre, J-P. 36, 39 Scheler, M. 270 Schelling 57, 134 Schopenhauer, A. 134 Schutz, A. 145–7, 150, 152, 155–6, 163, 167, 170–1, 175–9, 363, 366 Shakespeare, W. 40 Shelley, P. 121, 123 Silvey, A. 211 Simenon, G. 87 Sinfield, A. 72 Snow, C.P. 34 Socrates 34–5, 48, 285–6, 326 Sophocles 47–9, 51–4, 56–8 Soyinka, W. 183, 186–8 Spariosu, M. 271, 290 Spinoza, B. 231 Steiner, G. 226, 231–4 Stendhal 39 Stevens, W. 263–5, 269, 272, 274–90, 293–5 Swedenborg, E. 107 Symonds, J.A. 123 Tabriz, S. 115, 123 Taminiaux, J. 57 Tennyson, A. 40, 44, 65–72 Thomas, D. 44 Tingley, E. 137–8 Tiresius 47, 58–9 Tolstoy 354 Trilling, L. 306 Troeltsch, E. 245 Turner, V. 271 Turner 237 Twain, M. 306–7

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INDEX OF NAMES

Tymieniecka, A-T. 7, 13, 15, 193, 199, 202–3, 211 Ulysses 289 Valery 272 von Kleist, H. 316 Weber 237 Webster, J. 237 Whitman, W. 77–82

Winch, P. 245–7 Wittgenstein, L. 44, 247, 255–6 Woolf, V. 215 Wordsworth, W. 41, 44, 70–1, 121 Wunderlich 256 y Gasset, J.O. 353 Yeats, W.B. 44, 312 Zweig, S. 216

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

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, Belmont, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

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Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Volume 1 of Analecta Husserliana. 1971 ISBN 90-277-0171-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Later Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology. Idealism – Realism, Historicity and Nature. 1972 ISBN 90-277-0223-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenological Realism of the Possible Worlds. The “A Priori’, Activity and Passivity of Consciousness, Phenomenology and Nature. 1974 ISBN 90-277-0426-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana. A Spectrum of Specialised Studies Establishing the Field of Research. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0628-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Crisis of Culture. Steps to Reopen the Phenomenological Investigation of Man. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0632-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Self and the Other. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part I. 1977 ISBN 90-277-0759-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Human Being in Action. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part II. 1978 ISBN 90-277-0884-3 Nitta, Y. and Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds.), Japanese Phenomenology. Phenomenology as the Trans-cultural Philosophical Approach. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0924-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology. The Irreducible Element in Man, Part III. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0981-5 Wojtyła, K., The Acting Person. Translated from Polish by A. Potocki. 1979 ISBN Hb 90-277-0969-6; Pb 90-277-0985-8 Ales Bello, A. (ed.), The Great Chain of Being and Italian Phenomenology. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1071-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature. 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 Kaelin, E. F., The Unhappy Consciousness. The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett. An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and literature. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1313-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The 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

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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 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Soul and Body in Husserlian Phenomenology. Man and Nature. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1518-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue Between Chinese and Occidental Philosophy. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1620-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic – Epic – Tragic. The Literary Genre. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1702-8 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 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Moral Sense in the Communal Significance of Life. Investigations in Phenomenological Praxeology: Psychiatric Therapeutics, Medical Ethics and Social Praxis within the Life- and Communal World. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2085-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human Condition. Part II: The Meeting Point Between Occidental and Oriental Philosophies. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2185-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Morality within the Life- 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 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 Tymieniecka, A-T., Logos and Life. Book I: Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2539-X; Pb 90-277-2540-3 Tymieniecka, A-T., Logos and Life. Book II: The Three Movements of the Soul. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2556-X; Pb 90-277-2557-8 Kaelin, E. F. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), American Phenomenology. Origins and Developments. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2690-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man within his Life-World. Contributions to Phenomenology by Scholars from East-Central Europe. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2767-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Elemental Passions of the Soul. Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, Part 3. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0180-3 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 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

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Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Moral Sense and Its Foundational Significance: Self, Person, Historicity, Community. Phenomenological Praxeology and Psychiatry. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0678-3 Kronegger, M. (ed.), Phenomenology and Aesthetics. Approaches to Comparative Literature and Other Arts. Homages to A-T. Tymieniecka. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0738-0 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 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Turning Points of the New Phenomenological Era. Husserl Research – Drawing upon the Full Extent of His Development. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1134-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserlian Phenomenology in a New Key. Intersubjectivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere, Human Encounter, Pathos. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1146-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserl’s Legacy in Phenomenological Philosophies. New Approaches to Reason, Language, Hermeneutics, the Human Condition. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1178-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), New Queries in Aesthetics and Metaphysics. Time, Historicity, Art, Culture, Metaphysics, the Transnatural. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1195-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Elemental Dialectic of Light and Darkness. The Passions of the Soul in the Onto-Poiesis of Life. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1601-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Reason, Life, Culture, Part I. Phenomenology in the Baltics. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1902-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Manifestations of Reason: Life, Historicity, Culture. Reason, Life, Culture, Part II. Phenomenology in the Adriatic Countries. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2215-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Allegory Revisited. Ideals of Mankind. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2312-2 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 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): From the Sacred to the Divine. A New Phenomenological Approach. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2690-3 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Elemental Passion for Place in the Ontopoiesis of Life. Passions of the Soul in the Imaginatio Creatrix. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2749-7 Zhai, Z.: The Radical Choice and Moral Theory. Through Communicative Argumentation to Phenomenological Subjectivity. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2891-4 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Logic of the Living Present. Experience, Ordering, Onto-Poiesis of Culture. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2930-9

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Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Heaven, Earth, and In-Between in the Harmony of Life. Phenomenology in the Continuing Oriental/Occidental Dialogue. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3373-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life. In the Glory of its Radiating Manifestations. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book I. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3825-1 Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life. The Human Quest for an Ideal. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book II. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3826-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life. Phenomenology of Life as the Starting Point of Philosophy. 25th Anniversary Publication. Book III. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4126-0 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 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Laying Down the Cornerstones of the Field. Book I. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4445-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative Virtualities. 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 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Ontopoietic Expansion in Human Self-Interpretationin-Existence. 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 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative Virtualities in Human Self-Interpretation-inCulture. Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition. Book IV. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4545-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Enjoyment. From Laughter to Delight in Philosophy, Literature, the Fine Arts and Aesthetics. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4677-7 Kronegger M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life. Differentiation and Harmony... Vegetal, Animal, Human. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-4887-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. and Matsuba, S. (eds.): Immersing in the Concrete. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Japanese Perspective. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5093-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life - Scientific Philosophy/Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Ontopoiesis of Life and the Human Creative Condition. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5141-X Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): Life - The Outburst of Life in the Human Sphere. Scientific Philosophy / Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Book II. 1998 ISBN 0-7923-5142-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts. Breaking the Barriers. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6006-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Creative Mimesis of Emotion. From Sorrow to Elation; Elegiac Virtuosity in Literature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6007-9

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Kronegger, M. (ed).: The Orchestration of The 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 Tymieniecka, A-T. and Z. Zalewski (eds.): Life - The Human Being Between Life and Death. A Dialogue Between Medicine and Philosophy, Recurrent Issues and New Approaches. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-5962-3 Kronegger, M. and Tymieniecka, A-T. (eds.): The Aesthetics of Enchantment in the Fine Arts. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6183-0 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Origins of Life, Volume I: The Primogenital Matrix of Life and Its Context. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6246-2; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Origins of Life, Volume II: The Origins of the Existential Sharing-in-Life. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6276-4; Set ISBN 0-7923-6446-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): PAIDEIA. Philosophy / Phenomenology of Life Inspiring Education of our Times. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6319-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Poetry of Life in Literature. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6408-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Impetus and Equipoise in the Life-Strategies of Reason. Logos and Life, volume 4. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6731-6; HB 0-7923-6730-8 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Passions of the Earth in Human Existence, Creativity, and Literature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-6675-1 Tymieniecka, A-T. and E. Agazzi (eds.): Life – 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 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life – The Play of Life on the Stage of the World in Fine Arts, Stage-Play, and Literature. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7032-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life-Energies, Forces and the Shaping of Life: Vital, Existential. Book I. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0627-6 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Visible and the Invisible in the Interplay between Philosophy, Literature and Reality. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0070-7 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Life – Truth in its Various Perspectives. Cognition, Self-Knowledge, Creativity, Scientific Research, Sharing-in-Life, Economics...... 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0071-5 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): The Creative Matrix of the Origins. Dynamisms, Forces and the Shaping of Life. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0789-2 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Gardens and the Passion for the Infinite. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-0858-9 Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Does the World exist? Plurisignificant Ciphering of Reality. 2003 ISBN 1-4020-1517-8

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Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.): Phenomenology World Wide. 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

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