Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce 9780823245352

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Marginal Modernity

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Marginal Modernity t he a est het ics of dependenc y f rom k i e r k eg a a r d to joyc e

Leonardo F. Lisi

fordh a m univ ersit y pr ess

New York

2 0 13

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or thirdparty Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lisi, Leonardo F. Marginal modernity : the aesthetics of dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce / Leonardo F. Lisi. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-4532-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Dependency (Psychology) in literature. 3. Aesthetics in literature. 4. Philosophy in literature. I. Title. PN56.M54L57 2013 809'.9112—dc23 2012027756 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

For Emily— Lad saa Gud beholde Himlen, naar jeg maa beholde hende.

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con ten ts

Acknowledgments Note on Citations Introduction: The Aesthetics of Modernism

ix xiii 1

part one Philosophical Foundations 1. Presuppositions and Varieties of Aesthetic Experience

23

part t wo Aesthetic Forms at the Scandinavian Periphery 2. Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the Autonomy of Art

57

3. Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt

87

4. Nora’s Departure and the Aesthetics of Dependency

117

part three Modernism and Dependency 5. Henry James and the Emergence of the Major Phase

169

6. Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Language of the Future

204

7. Conflict and Mediation in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

220

8. Intransitive Love in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

247

Conclusion

269

Notes Bibliography Index

273 301 331

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ack now l edgm en ts

It seems inevitable that a book concerned with the concept of dependency should be deeply conscious of the many debts it has incurred. The present project was begun in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University, where, from its inception, it received the invaluable support and encouragement of Pericles Lewis and Paul Fry. Many other members of Yale’s faculty were instrumental in providing feedback at early stages of the manuscript and in challenging me to explore some of these ideas in their initial form, including Karsten Harries, Katie Trumpener, Carol Jacobs, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Benjamin Harshav, and Moira Fradinger. No better beginning to this book could have been wished for, and I am deeply grateful for their continued interest and support. Early on in the research for this book, I had the great fortune of spending a summer as a visiting researcher at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, then under the direction of Niels Jørgen Cappelørn. The opportunity to use the center’s resources, to engage in discussion with the outstanding scholars it has gathered, and to benefit from its director’s extraordinary intellectual generosity and dedication proved a utopian experience. Additional research stays at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and at the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College were likewise critical in developing my work. I am grateful especially to Cynthia Lund for helping to make my stay at St. Olaf as productive as possible. The book obtained its final form after I had the privilege of joining the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. The vibrant intellectual life of this community is extraordinary, and the support and encouragement that my colleagues at the Humanities Center have

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Acknowledgments

offered me during this time have been invaluable. I am particularly indebted to Michael Fried, Gabrielle Spiegel, and Hent de Vries, who, with unlimited generosity, provided repeated guidance and assistance for this project during its concluding stages. Without them, my doubts about the possibility of finishing would certainly have been more frequent than they were, and the final product has benefited immeasurably from their involvement. More people than I can thank here have had the kindness to share their ideas with me on many of the topics that I develop in the pages ahead. Ruth Leys, Paola Marrati, and members of the Johns Hopkins Mellon Seminar led by Gabrielle Spiegel have patiently listened to my arguments and challenged me to think about them in new ways. Jon Stewart at the University of Copenhagen has repeatedly encouraged me to pursue my work on Kierkegaard and first suggested that I write on Heiberg. Tobias Boes arranged for me to present an early version of the material on Hofmannsthal to the German Department at the University of Notre Dame, where I benefited greatly from the audience’s comments. I had the opportunity to share an early version of the chapter on Joyce with the English faculty at Bowdoin College, and their remarks and questions likewise helped me clarify my argument further. Frode Helland from the Ibsen Center at the University of Oslo and Mark Sandberg from the Scandinavian Department at the University of California, Berkeley, offered me extremely kind encouragement and support at a very early stage of this project. Glenn Odom and Gísli Magnusson made me question my reasoning anew at a point when I already thought that it was settled. At Fordham University Press, Helen Tartar’s outstanding editorial guidance, and the help of Thomas C. Lay and Tim Roberts, among many others, made the process of completing the manuscript and preparing it for publication as effortless and pleasurable as I could possibly have wished. Laura Iwasaki provided scrupulous and excellent copyediting of the manuscript. I am also indebted to the referees for Fordham University Press, whose detailed comments and suggestions were extremely useful in bringing this project to its conclusion. Finally, my deepest gratitude is to my family. Dispersed across four countries and three continents, their love has been with me at all times. Emily, sola per cui . . . , shared every moment of this book. With infinite patience, she tested every thought that it contains and, in her superior intelligence, forgave the author for his failings.

Acknowledgments

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An earlier version of chapter 1 of this book was published as “Kierkegaard’s Epistemology of Faith: Outline towards a Systematic Interpretation,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2010, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Herman Deuser, and Brian Söderquist (New York and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 353–375. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in “Heiberg and the Drama of Modernity,” in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Litérateur, Dramaturge, and Political Thinker, edited by Jon Stewart (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), 421–448. An earlier version of chapter 3 was published as “Allegory, Capital, Modernity: Peer Gynt and Ibsen’s Modern Breakthrough,” Ibsen Studies 8, no. 1 (2008): 43–68. Different sections of chapter 4 were first published in “Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ibsen’s Form,” Ibsen Studies 7, no. 2 (2007): 203–226; and “Endelighedens æstetik: Modernismens problematik hos Kierkegaard og Ibsen,” in Kierkegaard, Ibsen og det Moderne, edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2010), 99–116. All previously published material has been substantially revised and expanded in the present context.

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not e on ci tat ions

Whenever possible, primary sources in languages other than English are cited first by page number in an English translation followed by a slash and the original-language edition. The only exceptions to this rule are references to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which follow the standard convention of giving the page numbers in both the first and the second edition, indicated by A and B respectively, and likewise are separated by a slash. References to foreign-language works in the main body of the text will use the established English-language version of the title or, for cases in which no translation exists, my translation of the original title (although parenthetical citations will be given to the original title if more than one work by an author appears in the bibliography). I have provided my own translations when an English translation does not exist or I have preferred not to follow previously published translations. English translations of secondary sources have been used when accessible, except when the original version differs in relevant ways, in which case, references to both translation and original have been provided.

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Marginal Modernity

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Introduction The Aesthetics of Modernism

Whatever else there might be disagreement about with respect to modernism, a consensus exists that “autonomy” is central to it. This is visible not only in those critics who see it as the pivotal category of modernist aesthetics1 but also in those who instead associate the movement with the principle of fragmentation that negates it, and which is habitually identified more strictly with the avant-gardes. 2 For all its prevalence, the very neatness of this opposition is suspicious. If the autonomy of modernism and the fragmentation of the avant-gardes are responses to the transformations of modernity in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, then surely alternative aesthetic structures must be possible, unless these two responses are somehow all-exhaustive. In this study, I trace one such alternative aesthetic structure, which I term the “aesthetics of dependency” and which arises not at the core of European culture but at its Scandinavian margin, in the works of Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen. Distinct from the modernism/avant-gardes binary usually relied on, this aesthetics of dependency not only provides a different formal organization of literary works but is also grounded on different philosophical assumptions, produced by different historical contexts, and has different sociological implications than those previously considered. By further mapping the dissemination of this aesthetics of dependency from Kierkegaard and Ibsen to authors at the center of European culture—Henry James, James Joyce, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke—this study also offers a new

1

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Introduction

understanding of the geography and cultural contexts of modernist literature more generally. In order to adequately clear the ground for such an investigation of alternatives to the standard conception of the literary aesthetics of European modernism, it is important to unpack more carefully the analytic scope of its central terms. With respect to the governing notion of autonomy, Friedrich Wolfzettel has usefully reminded us that it can be understood both in a sociological and in an aesthetic sense (432, 434). Sociologically, autonomy is a negative attribute and points to art’s independence from other ideological or disciplinary purposes or restraints, be they those of state, society, church, or party.3 Aesthetically, it refers to a positive, formal characteristic, which is most frequently described in terms of a work’s self-sufficiency, its unity as a self-enclosed totality or an organic whole, which has its organizing principle and meaning within itself.4 In a frequently quoted discussion in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus defines a work’s “integritas” in precisely such terms: “But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness” (230). As I will argue further below, it is important to insist on a conceptual distinction between these two kinds of autonomy (the sociological and the aesthetic), but it is notable that the historical origin of both has frequently been identified with Immanuel Kant and the idealist philosophy of the early German romantics.5 Unsurprisingly, the definition of the opposing aesthetics of the avant-gardes has consequently also centered on both of these concerns, emphasizing that its forms and strategies of fragmentation aim to break art’s isolation and to put it back in contact with everyday life.6 Implied in this kind of opposition between the aesthetics of modernism and that of the avant-gardes are two important points. First, it is clear that one must distinguish, as will be done from this point onward in this book, between the designation of a general period (“Modernism” with a capital “M”) and the designation of a particular aesthetic praxis (“modernism” with a lowercase “m”). The former term, on the one hand, in its broadest definition, is often taken to stretch from the middle of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II and includes a number of different aesthetic practices that share certain text-immanent characteristics. The latter term, on

Introduction

3

the other hand, refers to one of these aesthetic practices within Modernism, namely that defined in terms of the principle of autonomy, which has its origin with German idealist philosophy. The aesthetics of the avant-gardes that is defined in opposition to the mode of textual organization provided by autonomy therefore constitutes a rejection within Modernism of the idealist project as inadequate to properly represent the attributes of Modernist experience. Second, formulated in the above terms, it follows that the difference at stake between modernism and the avant-gardes is one of aesthetic principles, understood as attributes of the organization of the work as a whole, its total function or status,7 rather than of any particular aspect within it (on the basis of which they both belong to Modernism). Both of these points are crucial and can be usefully clarified by means of the further distinction frequently imposed between Modernism and realism. It will be apparent that one implication of the present discussion is that the repeatedly emphasized opposition between the respective representational techniques and devices employed by Modernism and realism is insufficient to provide a distinction between them at the level of their aesthetic structures as a whole.8 This point is made by none other than Georg Lukács, one of the strongest proponents of such an opposition. In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Lukács stresses that “[w]hat must be avoided at all costs is the approach generally adopted by bourgeois-modernist critics themselves: to seek the separation of paths [between realism and Modernism] in the formal aspects, particularly in the mode of writing, the literary technique” (The Meaning 17; trans. modified / Wieder 13).9 Instead, the difference between Modernism and realism must be located in what Lukács calls their opposing “worldviews” (“Weltanschauungen”) (ibid.; trans. modified). Thus, while both Thomas Mann and James Joyce make use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, in the former, it can be defined as realist because it is merely a part of an “objective totality,” which it helps represent by serving a specific function within that larger whole (18 / 14–15). In Joyce, in contrast, stream of consciousness is Modernist because it is an end in itself (“etwas künstlerisch Letztes”) (18 / 14) and, as such, serves exclusively as a means to celebrate the subjective and unmediated experience of capitalist society as fragmented and chaotic. In spite of Lukács’s vehement polemics against Modernism, his distinction between an analysis of particular literary techniques and an analysis of the function of those techniques in an aesthetic whole

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Introduction

opens the door for an assessment opposed to his own. Insofar as the depiction of an “objective totality” that for Lukács defines realism is not restricted to mimetic modes of representation, works habitually classified as Modernist on the basis of their text-immanent attributes can in principle also achieve it. Franco Moretti has in fact forcefully argued as much in his influential study Modern Epic. According to Moretti, far from a literary device merely aiming at chaos, Joyce’s stream of consciousness in Ulysses is actually subject to strict organization through the opposing devices of the “commonplace” (160–163) and polyphony (205). While stream of consciousness is theoretically able to bring into play endless amounts of material, the commonplace and polyphony nevertheless subject it to a hierarchical structuration that limits its otherwise potential anarchy. Moreover, Moretti sees this simultaneous collaboration of expansive and reductive techniques as a central feature of Modernism at large (227–229), which, contrary to what Lukács claimed, allows Modernist texts to represent a “social totality” proper to the capitalist world-system (142–143; cf. also 210–211, 214–215, 229). What is even more significant in the present context is that Moretti sees this feature of Modernism as a direct continuation of the aesthetic project of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman (194–195), which likewise, as he argues in his earlier study, The Way of the World (9–10, et passim), provides an ideological “compromise” between opposing forces in capitalist society. To be sure, Moretti and Lukács do not hold identical views about the nature of capitalism or of the totality represented in the works they analyze. But it is crucial to note that the aesthetic function of totality that serves each as a heuristic tool and standard of measurement is the same (as Moretti himself points out [Way viii]) and that it derives, moreover, from the same historical sources: the idealist aesthetics of autonomy developed by Kant and Schiller and associated with modernism.10 It should be noted that it is not important here whether or not one agrees with Moretti’s particular interpretation of Ulysses. Rather, what matters for the present argument is only that Moretti’s claim shows that, at the level of aesthetic analysis, it is possible to speak coherently of a continuous tradition of the aesthetics of autonomy that extends from German idealism, through nineteenthcentury realism, and up to twentieth-century modernism, in spite of all the differences in modes of representation and thematic concerns that this period contains. And in this, of course, Moretti is not alone: already some twenty years earlier, M. H. Abrams in Natural

Introduction

5

Supernaturalism (297–324) and Peter Bürger in Theory of the AvantGarde (15–54) had made similar claims. The latter work in particular is of interest here, since it continues to provide the most influential argument for the further distinction within Modernism between modernism and the avant-gardes. Although he does not sufficiently elaborate the point, Bürger’s argument relies on a distinction between particular artistic technique and overall aesthetic function akin to the one put forward by Lukács. As Bürger points out in a footnote much quoted for other reasons, “a common feature of all these [avant-garde] movements is that they do not reject individual artistic techniques and procedures of earlier art but reject that art in its entirety, thus bringing about a radical break with tradition” (109, n.4). The claim that the avant-garde movements seek to break free from modernism’s aesthetics of self-sufficiency and return to the praxis of everyday life is here likewise understood as a revolution not at the level of particular artistic techniques or contents but rather at the higher level of the aesthetic whole of the work as such.11 A distinction between avant-garde and modernism that is based on the primacy of autonomy in the aesthetics of the latter, therefore, cannot be refuted by showing that the content of modernist works also has strong ties to popular culture (as Michael North has sought to do [10–11, 206–209]). Despite the importance of such attempts to open up the literary and cultural canon of modernism, they fail to understand that the aesthetics of autonomy can accommodate popular culture in its composition as easily as it can any other material. The same must be said for the attempt to dismantle the distinction in the opposite direction, by showing that modernist works exhibit disruptive artistic forms as much as avant-garde works do (as Astradur Eysteinsson has done [170, 216]), since, again, any particular artistic technique can in principle be shown to find its place within a whole that in its totality conforms to an “organic” structure. The distinction between the avant-gardes and modernism at the level of their aesthetic form, that is, must be drawn on the basis that they constitute different ways of organizing the entirety of form and content components in a work, not on the basis of the nature of those components themselves. From this perspective, it is possible to draw the following conclusions: what frequently aligns modernism with realism is the similarity in their aesthetic structures, in spite of the differences in their

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Introduction

particular representational techniques and thematic concerns. Conversely, what distinguishes modernism from the avant-garde is the difference in their respective overall aesthetic structures, in spite of the similarity of their representational techniques and thematic concerns. What tends to separate both modernism and the avant-garde from realism, then, is primarily the representational and thematic components found within the works associated with them (that which makes them Modernist in a general sense), rather than the composition of these works as a whole. Unpacked in this way, it will be clear that to speak of an “aesthetics of dependency” in relation to Modernism is to posit a difference from both modernism and the avant-garde at the level of the aesthetic whole of the work, not at that of its particular formal or thematic components. Like the aesthetics of organic wholes and that of fragmentation, that is, the aesthetics of dependency designates a way in which the technical devices (anti-mimesis, semiotic ambiguity, fragmentation, etc.) and conceptual and thematic preoccupations (epistemological skepticism, crisis of modernity, relativity of values, subjectivity, modern urbanization, politics, etc.) habitually associated with Modernism are organized. More specifically, the aesthetics of dependency falls between both of its alternatives: like the aesthetics of the avant-gardes, it presents the work’s constitutive parts as ultimately irreconcilable, but like the aesthetics of autonomy, it insists that these parts must nevertheless be purposefully related. This mediation without unification occurs by formulating the principle according to which the work must be organized in terms incompatible with that work’s own representational and thematic structures, thereby making the purposeful relation of its parts depend on an interpretative perspective not coextensive with the logic of those parts themselves. The aesthetics of dependency in this way both provides a specific standard of measurement for how the work must be unified and prevents that unity from occurring by figuring it as wholly other to the structures at hand. It generates neither pure fragmentation nor organic harmony but rather makes the process of trying to convert the former into the latter the focus of the work.

Introduction of a further aesthetic category to the standard account of Modernism in these terms seeks to simultaneously deepen and widen the contemporary debate. With respect to the former purpose, it is

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important to point out that the centrality of aesthetics in the narrative of this book partakes of a recent “return” to the aesthetic in literary studies, exemplified by works such as Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999), Isobel Armstrong’s The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Peter de Bolla’s Art Matters (2001), and Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature (2004). Significantly, all these studies stress that the preceding decades witnessed an almost complete disappearance of the category of aesthetics from the field, which is frequently attributed to the reign of “theory” during that same period (culprits identified include deconstruction, Marxism, new historicism, and cultural studies).12 However, in their efforts to recuperate the notion of aesthetics, none of these works examines the discipline’s original philosophical context in the late eighteenth century. In contrast to this approach, the present study grounds its discussion in a reconstruction of the philosophical issues underlying the aesthetic categories that we use. This is not to say that Marginal Modernity constitutes a history of philosophical aesthetics; it does not. But it does offer at least a basic outline of the original debate, which is necessary if one is to take full advantage of the opportunities that the return to aesthetics can provide. Three basic reasons for this can easily be identified. First, if the aim of a return to aesthetics is, at least in part, to challenge the “theory” of the past thirty or forty years, then a return to the philosophical foundations of aesthetics is imperative. Aesthetics does not simply provide an alternative to “theory” that could allow us to sidestep its assumptions and concerns and to focus on other issues instead. Quite to the contrary, as a number of studies have pointed out (including Jürgen Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Robert Pippin’s Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, Manfred Frank’s What Is Neo-Structuralism?, Rodolphe Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute, to name but some of the most prominent examples), aesthetics and “theory” derive from largely the same philosophical context and debate. The project of a return to the aesthetic is thus also an opportunity to rethink the foundations of “theory,” the implications of finding different models for the formal organization of literary works also a way of finding conditions for reassessing the foundational questions of language and meaning, history and politics, with which “theory” has largely been concerned. Such a project already implies a second, more general reason for returning to the original philosophical context of literary aesthetics,

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one that seeks to move beyond the parameters set out by “theory.” If we define the aesthetic organization of text-immanent elements (in broad terms that will be justified more fully in the chapters ahead) as the artistic enactment or representation of fundamental forms of knowledge and experience, and thereby of the fundamental conditions for our being in the world, then an examination of the philosophical origin of our aesthetic categories serves to elucidate the conceptions of experience and knowledge that these contain. This is important not only because it allows us to see the possibilities and limitations of specific versions of the aesthetic but also because it helps us become receptive to forms of organizing our relation to the world that fall outside the structures theorized by the tradition and which literary works continuously provide. That is, the task of a return to the aesthetic is not simply to reevaluate the categories that have been attacked in the past decades, to show that beauty, for example, is not necessarily a tool of ideological coercion and injustice but also one of ethics and liberation.13 Unquestionably this is true, but it is equally important to show that the category of beauty that we have inherited presupposes a certain understanding of truth and experience and that, to the extent that other conceptions of the conditions for meaning and experience exist, aesthetic categories and experiences other than beauty must be available as well. And vice versa: to the extent that aesthetic categories and experiences other than beauty exist, conceptions of the conditions for meaning and experience other than those we are familiar with and presuppose must be available. Such a possibility is further confirmed by a third benefit of returning to the original discourse surrounding the emergence of aesthetics, namely, the way doing so makes clear that the tradition and concepts within which, knowingly or not, we have been operating are the product not only of specific philosophical questions and arguments but also of specific historical problems. The structures of meaning and experience with which aesthetics is concerned arise in particular social and cultural contexts, as responses to particular problems, and accordingly are unlikely to be absolute. This means not only that aesthetic forms will necessarily undergo historical change but also that different historical and cultural contexts are likely to produce different aesthetic projects, with different artistic, philosophical, and political implications. For example, as already indicated above, the aesthetic paradigm traced in this study, the aesthetics of dependency, is the outcome of the reception of German idealist aesthetics at the

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periphery of European culture, where it was able to develop and succeed largely because it emerged under a different perspective on the problems of modernity and in a different context in which to imagine a possible response. This last point also indicates the way the present study seeks to widen the contemporary debate on Modernism. The methodological shift it suggests, from an examination of the aesthetics of European Modernism at its core to its periphery, takes seriously the point made by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane almost forty years ago: “[W]hat is not always adequately acknowledged is that Modernism or the Modern, when viewed, say, from Berlin, or Vienna, or Copenhagen, or Prague or St. Petersburg, is a thing with a quite different chronological profile, with a rather different set of representative figures and influential precursors, with a very different group of origins” (36). Somewhat surprisingly, this view has still received scant critical attention. With respect to Scandinavia, there is a striking absence of sustained work on the importance of its literary archive for a proper understanding of the aesthetics of European Modernism, even if lip service is frequently paid to the fact that a number of Scandinavian authors were instrumental to its development (Ibsen, August Strindberg, J. P. Jacobsen, Georg Brandes, and Knut Hamsun are among the usual references). It is notable, for example, that the editorial board of the influential journal Modernism/Modernity, the publishing organ for the Modernist Studies Association, boasts special editors for Central Europe, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Latin America (two), the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom and Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States (two), and the United States and Germany, but none for Scandinavia. Unquestionably this is due not least to the decision of most scholars to make Baudelaire and Flaubert the point of departure for Modernism and thereby implicitly to pursue its evolution almost exclusively along Anglo-French lines.14 That this is not merely an effect of national bias is suggested by the fact that Scandinavian critics frequently make the same point.15 Indeed, within the field of Scandinavian studies, a consensus has emerged that Modernism only reached the Nordic countries after World War II, at a time when the cultural centers of the West had already begun to speak of a post-modernism instead.16 Only very recently has this view begun to be revised and reassessed, in the Anglophone world most prominently in Arnold Weinstein’s Northern Arts (2008) and Toril Moi’s Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of

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Modernism (2006).17 Like the present book, these works emphasize the pervasive neglect of Scandinavian literature in the scholarship and the need to overcome it.18 To do so, Weinstein in his study surveys an impressive range of authors and works with great mastery and knowledge, ranging from Kierkegaard’s 1843 Fear and Trembling to Lena Cronqvist’s 2001 Nurses, and including Ibsen, Strindberg, Hamsun, Edvard Munch, Pär Lagerkvist, Ernst Josephson, Ingmar Bergman, and Astrid Lindgren. In Weinstein’s view, all of these authors represent versions of “breakthrough” (“genombrott”), which he understands as the thematic and structural rupture with nineteenth- and twentieth-century assumptions: the negation of stable categories of subjectivity, meaning, religion, morality, and society, and the pervasive thirst for freedom. Although the concept of “genombrott” takes its origin from Georg Brandes’s 1871 lectures on modern literature at the University of Copenhagen, the breadth of Weinstein’s investigation makes it clear, as he himself points out, that he does not wish to write “literary history with its movements and schools and trends” (9) but rather traces a number of related concerns in vastly different media, styles, and periods. While Northern Arts provides a much needed rehabilitation of many of the central works of Scandinavian Modernism, it cannot be reduced to a theory of that period. In this regard, Toril Moi’s study is more immediately related to the one conducted here. Moi similarly seeks to rethink the nature of Modernist aesthetics more generally and does so in light of Henrik Ibsen (21–36). As I understand Moi’s argument, her view of Ibsen’s Modernism focuses on three central features of his works: their anti-idealism, their self-consciousness, and their turn to the everyday. These three features underlie Moi’s larger claim that Ibsen’s art evolves from the rejection of idealism’s traditional criteria for meaning, through the danger of skepticism and pure absence of meaning that accompanies that negation, to the turn to a new ground for meaning in an aesthetics of the everyday that is able to overcome the skeptical threat. Such a reconstruction of the evolution and nature of Ibsen’s art shares several essential points with this book, and the two can be seen as complementary in numerous ways. On a closer look, however, significant differences also become clear, and these result not least from the absence in Moi’s analysis of precisely the kind of broader contextualization that Weinstein’s work provides. In her crucial account of idealism, Moi thus explicitly chooses to ignore the Scandinavian reception of that tradition (74), and the aspects of idealist aesthetics

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that she decides to emphasize are accordingly very different from those studied here. To Moi, the relevant elements of idealism tend to revolve around its supposed rejection of sexual or social taboos. It is, for example, “Thomas Hardy’s fascination with the grotesque and the gruesome, his honesty about sex, and his uncanny grasp of women’s complexity” that “made his novels anathema to idealists” (100) or “Wilde’s brilliant paradoxes, his searing indictment of moralism” that “are as anti-idealist as Ibsen’s turn to the ordinary” (101). While Moi’s book provides an extremely rich and rewarding reading of Ibsen’s work, it fails to adequately recognize that the central aspects of his engagement with idealism are to be found at the previously discussed level of aesthetic form, the mode of organization and mediation of different thematic and representational elements, not in the presence of specific themes and technical devices in themselves.19 More importantly, Moi thus also fails to correctly identify the kind of response that Ibsen’s rejection of idealism finds in his Modernism, and of which the self-consciousness of his theater forms a crucial part. I explore the relation of Moi’s project to my own in more detail in chapter 4, in which their deeper philosophical differences will be put to interpretative use. What I would like to suggest here is that the striking contrast between the studies of Weinstein and Moi (the former emphasizing the rejection of realism and the break with the familiar and determined; the latter insisting on realism’s Modernism and the return to the everyday) might be due largely to their methodological divergences: where Weinstein emphasizes context and breadth at the expense of theoretical synthesis, Moi provides theoretical synthesis at the expense of context and breadth. My attempt to widen the standard image of European Modernism through a more productive incorporation of the Scandinavian context aims to combine the strengths of both approaches, providing both a theorization of the unifying characteristics of a specific marginal aesthetic project and its contextualization in the larger historical development that defined it. While I take this procedure to lay bare the complementarities of our studies, my results also provide a series of readings that differ from those of Moi and Weinstein not only in their understanding of individual texts but also in their view of those texts’ aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural importance in Scandinavia and Europe. In addition to recovering a specific historical archive, the argument for the significance of the Scandinavian corpus for European Modernism that I pursue in this book also requires challenging a recent,

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prominent tendency in the study of international literary relations more generally, exemplified most forcefully by Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters. According to Casanova, formal influence is a unilateral phenomenon, exercised exclusively by the central Western powers (specifically Paris) on the cultural peripheries. The power relations that underlie these laws are based on the uneven division of the world republic of letters into a center and its peripheral dependencies, with the former possessing the sum total of cultural capital and power that make international success possible (11–12). While the peripheries are defined in terms of their “political” and specifically “national” agendas and concerns (77), the center is characterized by its violent imposition of an opposing aesthetics of—significantly enough—“autonomy.” Casanova’s account, however, suffers from the fact that she describes the latter exclusively in negative terms as an “independence” from, or “irreducibility” to, “political” aspects (e.g., 37, 45–46, 115–116, 350). Since Casanova does not discuss what she takes to be the relevant political and historical circumstances at stake, both “political” and “autonomy” remain vague concepts. This absence of sufficient definition of her central terms would appear to be a consequence of Casanova’s chosen methodology, which deliberately aims at such a high degree of abstraction that any detailed analysis becomes impossible (cf. 175–176). Moreover, it also leads her deployment of the term “autonomy” into a crucial conceptual slippage between its previously discussed distinct sociological and aesthetic dimensions. On the one hand, Casanova makes use of the concept to characterize the institutions of consecration, embodied by translators, publishers, critics, academics, and the like, that are placed at the center of the world republic of letters and which supposedly exercise their power independently of actual political and economic relations between nations (e.g., 133–137, 143–153). On the other hand, Casanova also uses “autonomy” to describe the kind of aesthetic characteristics imposed by those institutions as the criteria of “literariness,” which are defined in terms of a radical “de-politization” and “universalization” of works of literature when viewed and produced according to the standards of the center (e.g., 154, 301, 353). This conflation of two distinct meanings of “autonomy” has at least three important consequences for Casanova’s argument. First, it is clear that even if the institutional mechanisms that confer legitimacy on literary works are taken to be nonpolitical in Casanova’s sense, it does not follow from this that the aesthetic criteria

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that they favor are equally so. As Casanova offers no analysis of the formal features of “autonomous” works, her claim would appear to depend on a transfer of the notion of “nonpolitical” from the sociological level of institutions to that of aesthetics, which remains without explicit justification. As I shall show at greater length, however, the aesthetics of autonomy—understood as a specific artistic paradigm that arises with German idealism and continues throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—is anything but independent of historical and political forces, which makes such a transfer highly problematic. Second, a similar transfer of attributes from the level of institutions to that of aesthetics is at work in Casanova’s claim that the autonomy of the republic’s center unilaterally coerces the peripheries into conformity with its own preferred standards (e.g., 154, 250). In the absence of formal analysis that supports this claim, it appears that Casanova assumes that the absorption of a work from the periphery into the center’s institutional framework ipso facto implies an analogous absorption at the level of aesthetic praxis. Again, however, the former does not necessarily imply the latter, and proper attention to the historical and aesthetic nature of the center’s paradigms makes it possible to trace the change and impact exercised by the periphery. A case in point is Casanova’s disregard for the possibility that Ibsen’s success on the French and English stages might have actively influenced them in any way (157–163), which prevents her from seeing the profound impact, traced in this study, of Ibsen’s innovations on writers such as Henry James. Third, and closely tied to the preceding point, a similar conflation of attributes means that Casanova has difficulties accounting for the changes that nevertheless clearly do occur in the center’s aesthetic preferences through the influence of peripheral writers. Because she assumes that the center’s institutions consecrate literary works on the basis of aesthetic criteria that have no grounding outside themselves (and thus remain autonomous), she is unable to provide an explanation for the predilection for one literary form over another. To Casanova, such changes can accordingly only appear “miraculous” (12, 304), since the notion of aesthetic autonomy on which she depends obscures the historical, philosophical, and literary conditions that influence the formal paradigms of both center and periphery. Only by taking such conditions into account, however, can the changes brought about by the periphery’s impact on the core be understood in

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terms of the contributions that the former can make to the perceived shortcomings of the latter.20 Casanova’s argument is an important contribution to the current debate on the structure of global literary space, but the problems it encounters stress that it is necessary to insist on a conceptual distinction between the sociological and aesthetic dimensions of autonomy. While it is arguably questionable that nineteenth-century Scandinavian literature exercised any influence on the sociological autonomy of art, this does not mean that it did not have important consequences for the aesthetic structures of Modernist works. The same, after all, as Richard Murphy points out in his critique of Bürger, must be said about the avant-gardes, which likewise did not undermine the institutions of art even as they challenged its aesthetic praxis (29, 32–33). Indeed, since it has been argued that the distance from everyday reality provides the very precondition for art’s capacity for critique, the loss of institutional autonomy may itself be a questionable aim. The problem to be investigated from the perspective of international literary space might thus be less what means are available to subvert the institutions of literature than what changes can occur within those very institutions when other aesthetic, sociohistorical, and philosophical traditions are introduced.

The aims and methods outlined in the preceding pages are pursued in the following eight chapters, divided into three parts. Part 1, “Philosophical Foundations,” consists of chapter 1, “Presuppositions and Varieties of Aesthetic Experience.” This chapter explores the philosophical origins of the three aesthetic paradigms at the heart of my narrative: the aesthetics of fragmentation, the aesthetics of autonomy, and the aesthetics of dependency. Common to all three is their indebtedness to the problems left unresolved by Kant’s philosophy. This legacy gives rise to two dominant reactions in the late eighteenth century. The first is the neo-skeptical position that rejects Kant’s entire project by insisting on the incommensurability of thought and sensibility, concepts and phenomena. This position stresses the inherently fragmentary and anarchic nature of experience and provides the foundations for the aesthetics of the avant-gardes. The second comes from the idealist thinkers who strive to complete Kant’s system by arguing that the apparent contradictions of existence in fact are grounded in an underlying unity. This unity is revealed most directly

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in the experience of beauty as an intuition of totality and lies at the heart of the aesthetics of autonomy. The chapter then turns to Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology as a third distinct position. For Kierkegaard, unlike the idealists, the possibility of productively relating the conflicting spheres of existence does not rest on discovering their original unity in the experience of our subjectivity’s self-sufficiency in art. Rather, such a productive relation becomes possible only through the awareness of our radical dependence on a divinity that is wholly other. Contrary to what is usually assumed, to Kierkegaard, God plays a specific epistemological function, since He constitutes the identity of thought and experience toward which all humans strive and in relation to which the limits and constitution of our faculties must be perceived. God is in this way both transcendent of our subjectivity and the standard for what that subjectivity should be, converting faith into a relation of continuously seeking a fulfillment that remains inherently beyond us. Instead of a failure, however, in Kierkegaard’s view, this infinite striving for a determinate though impossible goal is the highest perfection we can reach. Kierkegaard in this way both accepts contradiction as constitutive of our existence and insists that we must seek to overcome it. He does so through a notion of faith as a structure of meaning that rests on four terms: the two realms of thought and being that oppose each other, our attempt to transform that opposition, and the unity for which we strive that simultaneously eludes our efforts and justifies them as an end in themselves. It is this fourfold structure that underlies the aesthetics of dependency. Against this conceptual background, part 2, “Aesthetic Forms at the Scandinavian Periphery,” which encompasses chapters 2 through 4, examines the concrete workings of these three distinct philosophical positions in particular literary texts and traces how the shifts between them in nineteenth-century Scandinavia were grounded in the specific cultural functions performed by each. In chapter 2, “Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the Autonomy of Art,” I begin by showing how the now largely neglected Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the leading representative of the early nineteenth-century Danish Golden Age, embraced the aesthetics of autonomy, not only as an artistic principle, but with the explicit aim of using it as a means to contain the emerging forces of capitalism. To Heiberg, the anarchy and fragmentation that characterize the new social and economic system threaten to become incompatible with the traditional unifying political and

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cultural values of Denmark’s absolute monarchy. In the construction of organic works of art, this contradiction can be symbolically overcome by staging the ultimate identity of these opposing social spheres. Chapter 3, “Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt,” turns to the works of Henrik Ibsen and shows how his career as a playwright began by following Heiberg’s aesthetics of autonomy, only to turn away from the latter’s cultural politics of reconciliation in his mature production. Given the growing contradiction between capitalist economy and traditional aristocratic values in nineteenthcentury Scandinavia, Ibsen in Peer Gynt instead chooses to represent this conflict itself through the combination of two distinct literary modes: that of allegory, analyzed in the context of Karl Marx’s theory of exchange-value, and that of the fairy tale, associated with an older, stable worldview in the poem. The irresolvable contradiction between these two representational structures mirrors the avant-gardes’ insistence on the ultimate irreconcilability of constitutive parts within a work of art and finds its philosophical foundations in the neo-skeptical conception of experience as inherently fragmented and anarchic. Chapter 4, “Nora’s Departure and the Aesthetics of Dependency,” turns to an analysis of A Doll’s House, in which Ibsen makes the further move away from an aesthetics of fragmentation and toward the fourfold structure of the aesthetics of dependency. As in his earlier work, Ibsen here stages the contradiction between two dominant representational systems, which govern the construction of the play’s fictional world: the plot structure of the nineteenth-century well-made play and the allegorical deferral of meaning into a past that eludes all causal determinations. Nora’s infamous departure at the end of the play, however, not only breaks with these two textual logics but also retroactively provides them with a new standard of meaning. The proper relation between the two representational systems that structure the main part of the text is in this way made to depend on their shared relationship to a set of meanings embodied by Nora that they do not themselves have the means to motivate or understand. Like Kierkegaard’s notion of God, Nora’s final invocation of marriage, love, honor, and so on, simultaneously negates the use these concepts were given up until that point, by drawing on meanings incompatible with them, and provides a new standard for judging how the structures underlying those previous uses should be understood instead. The play thus leaves its audience to bridge a gap between the representational systems organizing the fictional world and the ideal meaning

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introduced from outside those systems at the end, thereby making the process of negotiating that gap itself the focus of the play. This interpretative condition is figured in the linear temporality embodied by the dying Dr. Rank, who serves to link all the play’s constitutive structures. Unwilling to accept either the unity of self-sufficient wholes or pure fragmentation as adequate responses to the conflicts generated by the social transformations of modernity, Ibsen’s late aesthetics follows the structure of Kierkegaard’s theology in making the productive tension between these alternatives the aim itself. Part 3, “Modernism and Dependency,” comprises chapters 5 through 8 and examines the dissemination of this aesthetics of dependency from the Scandinavian periphery among early Modernists at the European core. Chapter 5, “Henry James and the Emergence of the Major Phase,” traces the influence of Ibsen on James’s late work, arguing that James’s encounter with Ibsen’s plays in the 1890s led him to develop a new organizing structure for his novels similar to that of the aesthetics of dependency. Focusing on The Wings of the Dove, I show that this novel is centered on the contradiction between two distinct representational principles, similar to the oppositions found in Kierkegaard and Ibsen: one the explicit instability of semiotic systems that makes all characters and events inscrutable and beyond determination; the other the continuous deployment within the novel of cultural stereotypes that seek to stabilize this semiotic flux. The conflict of these two textual logics leaves the fictional world of James’s novel in a static and irresolvable contradiction, which nevertheless paradoxically culminates in Kate’s announcement at the novel’s end that everything has changed. Similar to Nora’s departure, Kate’s decision to abandon Densher introduces a new set of meanings and motivations that do not derive from the representational structures provided by the text up to that point. The reader must thus retrospectively reinterpret the relation between semiotic instability and stereotypes with a view to obtaining a result that does not relate to them organically but rather is imposed from outside. As in A Doll’s House, this tension between means and end is negotiated by the temporal progression that holds the novel together and makes the process of interpretation a constitutive dimension of the work itself. The detailed reconstruction of James’s reception of Ibsen in his critical and private writings serves as an example of the pervasive influence of Scandinavian literature on authors at the heart of European and American culture during the turn of the twentieth century.

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The discussion of the other authors dealt with in part 3, namely, Hofmannsthal, Joyce, and Rilke, draws more briefly on similar evidence. Chapters 6 through 8 offer close readings of three works that have traditionally been considered foundational for modernist literature and demonstrate that these, too, were written in the framework of an aesthetics of dependency. In chapter 6, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Language of the Future,” I show how the contradiction between style and conceptual content in Hofmannsthal’s The Lord Chandos Letter, which the secondary literature has frequently pointed to, must in fact be viewed as a constitutive moment in a structure akin to the aesthetics of dependency. From this perspective, not only does the elusive relation of parts to whole in the text become apparent, but The Lord Chandos Letter also shows itself to contain a previously unrecognized critique of modernity’s scientific turn. This critique is embedded in a mediation that inscribes the condition of contradiction in a positive evaluation of the sequence of past, present, and future on the basis of its relation to a transcendent telos. In chapter 7, “Conflict and Mediation in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’,” I use the aesthetics of dependency to question the relation between the ending of Joyce’s short story and the narrative of the Morkan sisters’ annual dance that precedes it. Reconsidering Roman Jakobson’s famous distinction between metaphor and metonymy, I argue that “The Dead” is organized by two separate narrative logics that also divide the text into an irreconcilable and ideologically charged opposition between past and present. This contradiction, in turn, is mediated not through a subsumption of its terms to a common identity but through the imposition of a distinct interpretative position that provides the conditions for a purposeful relation to the gap between sign and referent, concept and percept, that underlies Modernist experience more generally. As in the other works examined, this purposeful relation is enacted in the story through the constitutive function of a linear progression that negotiates the difference between its various terms. Chapter 8, “Intransitive Love in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” concludes this book with an examination of Rilke’s notoriously problematic novel. I begin by analyzing the function of a binary structure in the text between, on the one hand, the logic of fragmentation, which is associated with reality, isolation, and the encounter with death, and, on the other, the logic of unification, associated with conceptual determination, community, and art. I then show that a further representational principle is introduced in

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the novel’s second half, which combines the elements of fragmentation and unification and is associated with Rilke’s notion of “intransitive love.” This last representational principle, in turn, gains interpretative authority by positing a textual dimension that, in the manner of the aesthetics of dependency, underlies and connects the previous three without reducing their differences to a common identity: the diachronic, sequential logic of the novel that the secondary literature has so far always denied exists.

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ch apter one

Presuppositions and Varieties of Aesthetic Experience

As scholars of the history of philosophy have frequently pointed out, the extraordinary rise in importance of aesthetics since the late eighteenth century is due, not least, to the solution it provided to the epistemological problems inherited from Kant’s Copernican revolution. In order to properly understand the nature and function of aesthetics, as well as the possibility and structure of alternatives to the dominant model that has come down to us, it is therefore necessary to briefly elucidate this larger philosophical context. The dominance of the aesthetics of autonomy and the avant-gardes is due not least to the dominance of a certain conception of truth and experience. And it is only by understanding Kierkegaard’s challenge to that conception that the aesthetic implications of his reconsideration of the nature of truth and experience become apparent. Such an exegetical task, however, far exceeds the possibilities of this chapter, and only a study of its own can do it full justice. In the present context, I accordingly do not pretend to give an adequate representation of all relevant aspects of the extraordinarily complex and fascinating evolution of German philosophy between Kant and Hegel, nor of the full extent of Kierkegaard’s own complicated engagement with that tradition. Rather, with respect to the former, I will focus only on some aspects of the thoughts of a very few of the figures in that trajectory. While this is far from exhaustive, the aspects examined here are, in my view, both general enough in nature to serve as a characterization of a mode of thinking that extends beyond those thinkers explicitly discussed and sufficiently central to provide 23

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an understanding of the purpose and structure of the aesthetics of autonomy, its negation, and Kierkegaard’s own project. As such, this chapter provides a framework for understanding and identifying the distinctions between the various aesthetic models that the rest of the book will examine in their literary contexts and which constitute my focus. The argument in this chapter proceeds in two steps. In the first, I begin by outlining Kant’s epistemology and its failure, as perceived by one of his most important critics, Salomon Maimon. Maimon’s attack on Kant’s epistemology lays bare an important shift in the normative assumption of the nature of experience during the late eighteenth century, from one that views it as containing positive and necessary relations between representations, to another that can allow only for the negative and anarchic differentiation between terms. It is this latter view that provides the epistemological foundations for the aesthetics of the avant-gardes and which the aesthetics of autonomy developed in the 1790s attempt to overcome and thereby salvage Kant’s project from his critics. Focusing on Schiller’s influential Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, I examine both the way in which this resolution is conceived and the larger historical conflict that it is intended to resolve. I conclude with an examination of Hölderlin’s fragment “Judgment and Being,” in which Schiller’s argument finds its logical conclusion. As Manfred Frank has argued, with the latter text, most of the deep structure of the thought that followed was in place (‘Unendliche’ 751) and the foundations of the aesthetics of autonomy secured. Although my interpretation differs in its details, these claims about the overall trajectory of aesthetics after Kant are fairly uncontroversial. My argument about Kierkegaard, in contrast, radically reconsiders his relation to that tradition. I begin the second part of this chapter by pointing to Kierkegaard’s rejection of the solution to the neo-skeptical attack provided by the aesthetics of autonomy and its philosophical presuppositions. To Kierkegaard, the turn to monism that these entail ignores the constitutive nature of the conflict between thought and existence, which he equates with the condition of sin that cannot be resolved. This negative conclusion, however, which places Kierkegaard in line with the aesthetics of the avant-gardes, is complemented by a positive alternative that clearly sets him apart. Examining his philosophical anthropology in The Sickness unto Death, I show how Kierkegaard provides a new conception of truth

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and mediation intended to overcome the neo-skeptical conception of experience by simultaneously retaining and transforming the Kantian Table of Judgments and its title of modality. Like many of the idealist heirs to Kant’s thought, Kierkegaard conceives of the title of modality as the standard according to which the terms in a propositional judgment (its content) should be organized. But whereas for the idealists that standard is a positive ground coextensive with our subjectivity and accessible in the experience of beauty, to Kierkegaard this ground is wholly other. The relation to this transcendent criterion for the unification of terms is theorized by Kierkegaard as the condition of faith, which places us in a productive dependence on a transcendent point of view that simultaneously negates our representational structures and justifies them in their failure. This primarily theological and epistemic structure also contains an aesthetic dimension, which underlies the majority of the works examined in this study’s later parts.

the fr agmentation of experience and the aesthetics of autonomy The extraordinary success of the aesthetics of autonomy in postKantian philosophy rests on Kant’s effort in the first Critique to justify the possibility of synthetic a priori propositions.1 Propositions are a priori if they combine representations with absolute necessity and universality and therefore do so independently of experience, which is always contingent (B 4, A 9 / B 13). They are synthetic if the predicate of the proposition “lies entirely outside” the subject, that is, if the predicate is not constitutive of the identity of the subject (in which case we would have an analytic judgment) but is added to it and thereby expands it (A 6–7 / B 10–11). Kant’s favored example of such a synthetic a priori proposition is “Everything that happens has its cause,” in regard to which he claims that “the concept of a cause indicates something different from the concept of something that happens, and is not contained in the latter representation at all” (A 9 / B 13). Accordingly, insofar as we are to be able to claim universal and necessary force for any causal proposition, something all scientific inquiry presupposes, we must be able to explain the transcendental conditions for the possibility of such judgments. 2 Kant does so by abandoning the traditional supposition that “all our cognition must conform to the objects” and instead seeking to show that “we . . . get farther with the problems of metaphysics by

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assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition” (B xvi). Underlying this radical contention is Kant’s claim that human knowledge is “discursive” in nature, consisting of the interaction of two distinct cognitive faculties—sensible intuition and understanding—each with its own a priori structure (A 15 / B 29, A 51 / B 76). According to Kant, the specific contribution to knowledge made by the faculty of sensible intuition lies in its structuring of appearances according to the a priori principles of the pure intuitions of time and space (A 20 / B 34, A 22 / B 36). These are pure and a priori because they precede any particular appearance and therefore cannot be abstracted from experience (B 39, B 47). Likewise, they are intuitions because they do not contain representations under themselves (as concepts do) but rather within themselves, since each spatiotemporal determination is only a limitation of an “original representation” that itself must “be given as unlimited” (B 39–40, B 47–48). In spite of possessing this a priori order of relations, sensibility is described by Kant as passive and receptive (A 19 / B 32), thereby placing it in direct opposition to the understanding, which is defined as active and spontaneous (A 68 / B 93). The latter faculty Kant further describes as the “faculty for thinking,” where thinking, again in opposition to intuition, is defined as “cognition through concepts” (A 69 / B 94). Concepts, in turn, are strictly relational, which implies that we can use them only in judgments that unify several representations in a proposition (A 68 / B 93), making it possible for Kant to claim that “the understanding in general can be represented as a faculty for judging” (A 69 / B 94). Judgments, finally, can be exhaustively analyzed in terms of the four “logical functions” (quantity, quality, relation, and modality) that Kant claims constitute the fundamental forms of unification (A 69–70, B 94–95). Kant does not explain why these four titles, together with the three moments contained in each, should be considered exhaustive of the functions of human understanding. It would seem, however, that this claim rests on the view that the Table of Judgments represents the structure of categorical judgments on which, according to Kant, all other kinds of judgment are based (A 73–74 / B 98–99).3 From this view, the quantity of a judgment is concerned with the subject in a proposition, determining whether the predicate includes all, some, or only one of its subjects (e.g., “all S = P” [universal judgment], as distinct from “some S = P” [particular judgments]). The quality refers to the copula (e.g., “S is P” [affirmative]), while the relation has the

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predicate of a proposition as its theme, specifying the way in which a predicate is ascribed to a subject (e.g., “if X then P” [hypothetical judgments]). Modality, finally, determines the value of the proposition “in relation to thinking in general” (A 74 / B 100) (e.g., logical possibility [problematic judgments] as distinct from that which is judged to be the case [assertoric judgments]). From these four titles, Kant goes on to derive the “categories,” which constitute the functions according to which objects of experience are ordered, or, what amounts to the same thing, the concepts by means of which the manifold of sensibility is unified by the understanding (A 78–79 / B 104–105). While analytic a priori judgments are possible independent of sensibility, synthetic a priori judgments depend on the discursive interaction of our faculties (A 38 / B 55, B 73, A 158 / B 197; cf. also B 289). The latter kind of judgments, moreover, constitute the “principles of the possibility of . . . experience” (B 410; cf. also A 158 / B 197), where Kant defines experience as “cognition by means of connected perceptions” (B 161). The aim of Kant’s investigation, then, is to secure the objectivity of our experience by justifying how such discursive interaction is possible in light of the absolute difference of the faculties involved. Or, as Kant puts it, we must establish the legitimacy (the question, quid juris) of our actual use of such propositions (the question, quid facti) (A 84 / B 116). The Transcendental Deduction that seeks to provide this proof unquestionably counts among the most complex and fruitful arguments of modern philosophy, making it impossible to give an adequate account of its particularities here. For the present purposes, it is sufficient to note that Kant’s proof for the a priori relation between sensible intuition and understanding rests on the claim that the unity of a manifold of representations given to us in sensible intuition is made possible by the combination of those representations in the transcendental unity of self-consciousness (B 132–136). This means that we can perceive a manifold only insofar as we can in principle be conscious of the combination of its parts into such a whole, which is itself possible only if the same “I” can accompany each constitutive representation (B 133). The unifying activity of this “I” that underlies all manifolds is in turn determined by the logical functions, the applications of which to the manifold, in turn, are the categories (B 143). The reason we can claim objective validity for synthetic a priori propositions thus derives from the claim that the very possibility of objects in the world rests on the a priori application of the pure

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categories of the understanding to sensible intuitions in the transcendental subject’s activity of self-consciousness (B 141–142). Since there can be no experience that we cannot at least in principle be conscious of (B 131–132), and no self-consciousness without the synthetic unification of the manifold of intuition by means of the rules governing the understanding, there can be no experience that is not subject to the categories (B 160–161).

It is to Kant’s claim that these categories are constitutive of human experience that Solomon Maimon forcefully objects in his 1790 Essay on the Transcendental Philosophy. As scholars have pointed out, while Maimon willingly concedes that experience as Kant defines it indeed requires the a priori application of the categories to sensible intuition, he nevertheless rejects the claim that we in fact have such experience to begin with (Versuch 72, 186–187). As Maimon puts it in his later Brief Overview of Philosophical Systems, of 1793: “[I]n the sense in which the Kantian understands the concept of experience, I have no experience” (Kurzer 465). Drawing on the language of Kant’s own Transcendental Deduction, Maimon argues that while Kant may indeed deliver the quid juris he needs (the proof that the categories are constitutive of the universality and necessity of experience), he simply presupposes—without proving—the quid facti in question: that we have such universal and necessary experiences at all (Versuch 61, 70–71). Where to Kant experience inevitably involves some objective unity, to Maimon it has become anarchic. As he sums up the difference: “Mr. K[ant] presupposes as unquestionable the fact that we indeed have propositions of experience (which express necessity). . . . I on the contrary doubt the fact that we have propositions of experience itself” (Versuch 186). Maimon illustrates his point by means of the very category of causality that Kant thought had been salvaged from Hume in the Second Analogy section of the first Critique (B 232– A 211 / B 256). The problem, to Maimon, stems from the fact that Kant claims that the categories apply to intuitions in their pure spatiotemporal form. As such, however, there can be no intrinsic difference between different representations (Versuch 52–54) and therefore no way of determining which categories are to be applied to which intuitions, or even whether they are to be applied at all. As regards judgments of causality, for example, it is not possible to know why the sequence “A-B”

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is causal, in the sense of being necessary and universal, while a different sequence, “B-C,” is merely contingent (Versuch 71, 187–188). According to Kant, the schematism of the category of causality stipulates that the principle “for every event ‘B,’ a prior event ‘A’ must be presupposed as its cause” has to be applied under certain conditions, as when a temporal sequence places “B” after “A” (B 234–A 189 / B 235) or when the sequence “A-B” is irreversible (A 193 / B 238–A 194 / B 239). Yet Maimon’s point is that these criteria are themselves not determinable, since on the basis of our experience we cannot say that “A” will always and necessarily precede “B” or that their sequence is always irreversible. As Hume already pointed out, empirically we only ever find the constant correlation of events, and from this, no a priori certainty can be derived (Versuch 72–73). But if it is impossible to determine when and which categories apply to which intuitions, then the grounds for claiming that such application occurs in the first place likewise disappears. The only way to overcome this problem, so Maimon claims, would be if sensibility provided us with a priori criteria with which to determine when and which categories are to be used, yet it is precisely this that Kant makes impossible by insisting on an absolute difference between the two faculties (63). Kant’s discursivity thesis in this way reveals itself as merely another version of the classic mind-body problem, and the Deduction remains as incapable of solving it as ever (62).4 It is ultimately questionable if Maimon’s criticism of Kant is valid, since it seems to rely on a confusion of transcendental and empirical levels of analysis. As Peter Thielke maintains, what Maimon assumes is that Kant is required to explain how the categories are perceptible in experience, which would make it necessary for the Transcendental Analytic section of the first Critique, which includes the Deduction, to provide not only the necessary but also the sufficient conditions for the application of the categories (111–112). Henry Allison has forcefully argued, however, that this is not necessarily the case, since the transcendental rules (the categories and their principles) with which the Analytic is concerned are merely formal. As such, they serve only to preclude certain (logically) possible scenarios, such as changes that are not alterations of enduring substances or alterations without causes. Consequently, they may be said to provide the “norm” to which all empirical laws must conform in order to count as laws (A 128); for, as Kant himself notes, no cognition can contradict them without “at once losing all content, that is, all relation to any object,

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Philosophical Foundations and therefore all truth” (A 62–3 / B 87). Indeed, that is why they can be used as a “canon for passing Judgment upon the empirical employment of the understanding” (A 63 / B 88). It does not follow from this, however, that they suffice to ground any particular causal law or even to guarantee that such laws are there to be found. In Kantian terms, that would give them the status of an organon rather than merely that of a canon. (“Is the Critique” 80; my emphasis)

While transcendental laws provide regularity and unity for our experience at the most fundamental level, they in this way nonetheless “underdetermine the particulars falling under them, that is to say, these [transcendental] laws are compatible with any number of possible empirical laws and arrangements” (83–84). To claim that this invalidates the categories and their principles of application is accordingly, as Allison further points out, to “conflate the insufficiency of the transcendental principles of the understanding to account for the possibility of empirical knowledge with the inadequacy of the grounding of these principles themselves” (86). The chaos that Maimon postulates at the empirical level of experience is in principle compatible with Kant’s position, which simply denies such anarchy at the transcendental level that logically precedes it. For our immediate purposes, however, the validity of Maimon’s criticism is less important than the fact that it reflects a view of the shortcomings of Kant’s argument shared by many of his contemporaries.5 As such, it reveals an important shift in the normative conception of what constitutes experience, which also underlies the subsequent aesthetics of the avant-gardes. To Kant, undeniably, the result of the Transcendental Analytic proves that there is some positive, transcendental content to experience (the categories and the principles derived from them) and that this dictates the fundamental framework within which relations between representations can be established. In Maimon’s radical empiricism, however, no such positive frame is provided, which means that a given representation in principle can stand in any relation whatsoever to any other. This resuscitation of Hume’s skepticism nevertheless does not simply lead to a return to the latter’s theory of ideas as the ground of knowledge. To Hume, each simple impression is a self-sufficient and unanalyzable unit, which in its clear and distinct force is self-evident in its meaning (17–22). The problem for Hume, accordingly, lies not with the knowledge of our basic, individual impressions but solely with their combination. Kant, however, had shown precisely that knowledge can occur only in the process

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of synthetically relating entities in propositional structures (A 68 / B 93), making the determination of any term conditional on its concurrence with others. To the late eighteenth century, that is, Spinoza is correct in asserting that “omnis determinatio est negatio,” meaning that the definition of any term is conditioned by what it is not. By combining this transcendental requirement of the relational determination of terms with Hume’s empirical claim concerning the absence of any necessary structures in experience within which such relations can be established, the conclusion presents itself that the meaning of any object of experience lies open to, and in fact depends on, an infinite chain of contingent negations. If, to Kant, there cannot even be a manifold of experience without some rationally determined structure, experience following Maimon is opened to its equation with a manifold of sensibility in which representations are both independent of the determinate rules of understanding and dependent on their indeterminate relation to other such terms. This new, anarchic conception of experience is closely related to what Hegel would subsequently term the “bad infinity” (Wissenschaft 149–156, 193–203). As scholars such as Alfred Baeumler and Manfred Frank have shown, the epistemology of the bad infinity was pervasive throughout the late eighteenth century.6 More importantly for our purposes, it provides the foundation for the aesthetics of fragmentation habitually associated with the avant-gardes, and we will meet it again repeatedly throughout this study, in the forms of the infinite accumulation of capital and semiotic instability in particular. To Hegel, this condition must be overcome by transforming the bad infinity into the good, which consists instead of an organic totality akin to that of the autonomy of art (Wissenschaft 156–166; cf. also Encyclopädie par. 95). One of the earliest attempts at such a project, however, one that also takes into account its historical and political implications, is found in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, of 1795, which seeks to contain Maimon’s challenge through a reconsideration of the Kantian project.7 In that text, Schiller equates the problem of the interaction of the a priori faculties at stake in Kant’s Deduction with the empirical conflict laid bare by the French Revolution. To Schiller, the then current political crisis is one between “the lower and more numerous classes,” governed by “crude, lawless instincts,” and the “cultivated classes,” which in turn have lost touch with reality through an excess of culture (Letters 96 / Über die ästhetische 580–581). While holding the latter responsible

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for their inability to prevent the crisis (103–104 / 588), Schiller is concerned in particular with the danger of the former and unflatteringly describes man’s natural character as “selfish and violent, aiming much more at the destruction than the preservation of society” (92; trans. modified / 575). The traits characteristic of each class derive from their respective identification with the two “drives” (“Triebe”)8 that Schiller sees as exhausting human nature (121 / 606–607): the Stofftrieb9 and Formtrieb. The Stofftrieb is intended to map onto Kant’s concept of sensibility, and Schiller equates it with, among other things, temporality (115–118 / 601–603), differentiation and boundaries (118–119, 120– 121, 128–129, 133, 157 / 604, 606, 615, 620, 646), change (117– 118, 119, 121, 157 / 603, 605, 606–607, 646), contingency (102–103 / 587), the unorganized manifold of experience (93–94, 117–118 / 577–578, 603), particularity (93–94, 156 / 577–578, 645), and individuality (120–121 / 606). The Formtrieb, in turn, corresponds to Kant’s understanding and is defined in terms of its imposition of unity, necessity, and universality (120 / 606), the capacity to give objects their formal composition (127–128, 162–163 / 614, 652), the formulation of laws (119–120, 156–157 / 605, 646), and the organization of representations according to causes and purposes (159–160 / 649).10 The opposition between social classes mirrors the absolute gap between faculties that Kant insisted on and which Schiller accepts (cf. 137 / 624). Their current conflict, however, is not due to an intrinsic incompatibility but merely historically conditioned (100–101 / 584– 585). The problem, to Schiller, is that in modern society, each drive is permitted to encroach upon the domain of its opposite, thereby transgressing its intended boundaries (122–123 / 608–609). Neither the unilateral determination of sensibility by reason (which Schiller associates with Kant [“On Grace” 150 / “Über Anmut” 465]) nor the opposed coercion of reason by sensibility (to which Maimon opens up the gates) can be accepted. Both politically and epistemologically, that is, a mode of interaction between our faculties is needed that does not subordinate the nature of either to the structures of its opposite (Letters 121 / Über die ästhetische 606–607). In such a state, which constitutes our true perfection (127–128 / 614), man’s desires correspond to the demands of reason and his rational acts occur within, rather than against, the bounds of sense (143–144, n.1, 174 / 631, n.1, 664). The possibility of such a harmonious interaction between the opposed faculties of reason and sensibility is unquestionably the

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central concern of Schiller’s oeuvre at large. In his essay “On Grace and Dignity,” beauty itself is defined in such terms, as the unexpected recognition of the formal demands of reason in the raw matter of sensibility In grace . . . , as in beauty in general, reason sees its demand fulfilled in sensibility, and one of its ideas comes unexpectedly to meet it in the realm of appearance. This unforeseen coincidence of the accidental in nature and the necessity of reason arouses a feeling of great approval (pleasure), which is relaxing to sensibility, but stimulating and absorbing to the intellect, and an attraction to the sensuous object necessarily follows. This attraction we call pleasure—love; a feeling that is inseparable from grace and beauty. (“On Grace”; trans. modified / “Über Anmut” 482)

The definition of beauty as pleasure in finding the sensible world to be in tune with our cognitive structures has clear Kantian overtones (cf. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft 257–258). Yet the description of this pleasure as a kind of love also draws on the Platonic tradition that conceives of eros as reason’s recognition of itself in that which seemed to be other.11 The latter notion places the discussion of “On Grace and Dignity” in the vicinity of Schiller’s still earlier Philosophical Letters, in which the young poet describes love as the mind’s recognition of itself in nature, made possible by the fact that both are merely manifestations of a common essence (Philosophische 352–354). The possibility of combining the manifold of sensibility according to the principles of reason, then, derives from, and is secured by, the perception of the underlying identity of both faculties, which merely exhibit that common source in different ways. While such a claim for the ultimate identity of opposites avoids the problematic question of the possibility of their interaction, it is clearly incompatible with the Kantian doctrine of the discursivity of human knowledge (cf. Critique A 15 / B 29), which Schiller also adopts. Throughout his theoretical writings, as scholars have repeatedly pointed out,12 Schiller accordingly runs into the difficulty of having to explain exactly how this identity and recognition are to be conceived, given that, as the Letters on the Aesthetic Education puts it, “the distance between matter and form, between receptivity and action, between sensibility and thinking is infinite and can be mediated by absolutely nothing” (Letters 137; trans. modified / Über die ästhetische 624). In light of this difficulty, as well as his increasing, historically conditioned pessimism concerning the possibility of

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reason manifesting itself harmoniously in an anarchic world, it is no surprise that Schiller should change his argumentative strategy in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education. If beauty was earlier equated with the positive recognition of the identity of our faculties, it is now instead described as at most the negative condition for the possibility of such interaction (e.g., 143 / 631).13 This is only an apparent weakening of Schiller’s position, however, since the new function of beauty is defined as a transcendental ground for the possibility of “experience” (“Erfahrung”) (141 / 629), “reality” (“Wirklichkeit”) (142 / 630), and cognition in general (“Erkenntnis”) (162, n.1 / 651, n.1). The reason for this claim lies with Schiller’s strictly Kantian observation that the possibility of positively constituting objects depends on the interaction of the Stoff- and Formtrieb (139–140, 141–142 / 627, 629). Such interaction, in turn, is possible only through the power of judging, which is to be identified with neither sensibility nor reason but with the activity of relating a representation of sensibility to a corresponding representation of reason (139–141, 141–142 / 627–628, 629–630). Judgment, moreover, can only be exercised in freedom from either drive, since only then can it proceed according to its own rules (140, 142 / 628, 630). What beauty provides is not a bridging of the gap between the faculties but simply the condition of freedom within which judgments are performed and experience and cognition come into existence. The “aesthetic condition,” that is, does not determine judgment but simply frees it from extraneous constraints (140 / 628). Beauty is accordingly no longer seen as a positive identification of reason in sensibility, as it was in “On Grace and Dignity,” since such would constitute a judgment, but rather as a neutral state of complete indeterminacy of our cognitive faculties (145 / 633). Beauty brings such neutrality about through a balance of equal amounts of activity from the two drives in the apprehension of an object, which, in their equality, cancel each other out. As Schiller puts it: “The scales of the balance stand level when they are empty; but they also stand level when they contain equal weights” (ibid.). This condition is to be understood as one in which the manifold of sensibility does not lend itself to conceptual determination and yet is organized according to the requirements of understanding in general, therefore not losing itself in undeterminable anarchy either. Neither faculty, accordingly, gains the upper hand, and our power of judgment is instead left in a state of freedom from the demands of either

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(142 / 630). Yet insofar as the manifold of sensibility can be positively organized according to the demands of understanding only if the two realms are compared in such a state of balance prior to the identification of their corresponding representations, the aesthetic moment is not restricted to objects of beauty. Rather, as Schiller stresses, aesthetic experience is a necessary condition for the possibility of the determinate perception of any object and the positive determination of any thought (148, n.1, 162, n.1 / 636, n.1, 651, n.1).14 Schiller’s claim concerning the transcendental function of beauty has two important consequences, which effectively seek to reinscribe Maimon’s skeptical challenge in a Kantian framework. On the one hand, the positive relation of faculties that Kant had seemingly failed to deliver in the first Critique is secured by introducing a third, mediating condition able to relate the two faculties by canceling their differences. The criterion for the possibility of recognizing the structures of reason in sensibility, which Maimon had demanded, is provided in the concept of a state of balanced neutrality that through the sublation (“Aufhebung”) (137–138 / 625) of differences provides a negative form of identity. On the other hand, the fact that experience is not structured according to the rules of reason, as Maimon had pointed out, is also allowed for, since Schiller goes on to make clear that in actuality the condition of equality provided by beauty is always followed by a judgment that in effect is overdetermined by the principles of one or the other of our faculties and therefore leads either to an artificial, rational abstraction from experience or to the anarchic chaos of infinitely deferred impressions (148–149, 164 / 638, 654). While the aesthetic condition is a necessary component of all judgments, it can nevertheless cede either to a harmonious or an unharmonious relation between our faculties. It is due to the current historical context, then, that judgments of experience universally tend to be of the latter kind. The neutral state of beauty is not a guarantee of an actual, positive identity of the drives in experience, which would secure political and epistemic perfection, but only a “symbol” of such interaction (126 / 612).15 Schiller’s use of the term “symbol” draws on Kant’s definition of beauty as the symbol of morality in the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft 351–354). The latter depends on the claim that ideas of reason, to Kant, cannot find direct exhibition in sensibility and therefore can only be represented symbolically through a sensuous analogue (351–352). The claim, however, is not that there is a direct

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resemblance between the symbol and the idea symbolized. Rather, as Allison puts it, the analogy concerns the rule or organizing principle that governs reflection on the sensible and intellectual objects respectively. . . . Consequently, to claim that beauty symbolizes morality is to claim that there is a sufficiently significant isomorphism between reflection on the beautiful and moral reflection so that the former activity may be regarded as a sensuously directed analogue of the latter. (Kant’s 255)

The positive unity of faculties that Schiller sees as humanity’s highest perfection is incapable of exhibition to the extent that every empirical judgment is either rationally or sensuously overdetermined. The aesthetic condition presupposed by every such overdetermination, however, serves as a reflective isomorphism of this ideal, since both are governed by a principle of equality and harmony between the faculties. The difference between them stems from the fact that where the aesthetic condition establishes that freedom from constraints negatively, through the cancellation of all differences in a state of neutrality, beauty in the highest sense figures the same freedom positively, as the actual identity of terms. If the aesthetic condition cannot secure the latter for us, it nevertheless serves to encourage the pursuit of perfection by laying bare its analogue as a constitutive part of our human nature. It is in this context that Hölderlin’s proclaimed intentions for a work titled “New Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” become fully intelligible (Briefe 690). The central claim of Hölderlin’s fragment “Judgment and Being,” of 1795, is that the justification for the possibility of the synthetic combination of representations necessarily presupposes a previous unity distinct from that propositional structure—what Schiller in his text sought to provide in the notion of the aesthetic condition as the ground for beauty in the highest sense. While Schiller, in Hölderlin’s view, is right to reintroduce the conceptual need for two different levels of epistemic principles, his notion of an aesthetic condition is insufficient to justify the faculties’ positive interaction. Schiller’s solution, that is, does not go far enough in providing the criterion Maimon demanded for the possibility of the recognition of reason in sensibility necessary for propositional knowledge of experience to be possible. Doing so would require not merely a different kind of relation between the drives (that of neutral harmony) but an actual absolute identity in the form of a single source for both.

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As already pointed out in relation to Schiller’s own Philosophical Letters, such a common source for our cognitive faculties would clearly lie beyond the Kantian bounds of discursive knowledge, which Schiller had explicitly retained in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education. To Hölderlin, however, this transgression is necessary if the skeptical challenge that has haunted philosophy since Kant is to be adequately answered. In order to prove this claim, Hölderlin, in “Judgment and Being,” relies on a (false) etymology of the German word for “judgment” (“Urteil”)16 in order to argue that every proposition— on which, as Kant had pointed out, all knowledge depends—constitutes the “division” (“Teilung”) of an original unity (“Ur-teilung”). This is so because propositions both depend on and contradict the identity of their terms. They depend on it since a judgment always consists of the synthetic equation of two representations (S = P) and therefore points to their original unity, without which the subject cannot be recognized in its predicate. They contradict it, however, since the judgment does not present that unity as such but rather divides it into two distinct terms that are related by a copula. Judgments, in other words, express an absolute identity in their content, which their form divides into conditional relations. Schiller’s Platonic eros is in this way transformed from a regulative to a constitutive principle, making all knowledge into the recuperation of an original identity. The point, to Hölderlin, is exemplified in the proposition of selfconsciousness (“I am I”). This proposition divides the self in two (the “I” that knows, and the “I” that is known) and yet expresses the most certain form of identity that we possess. As Manfred Frank summarizes Hölderlin’s conclusion: If, on the one hand, I cannot gain cognition of a fact without judging it, which nevertheless means depriving it of its absolute identity, and if, on the other hand, the judgment, in order to constitute a relation (of something to something, e.g., of the I to itself), depends on a non-relative identity underlying it, then it is necessary to strictly distinguish the synthesis provided by judgment from a pre-judgmental and non-relative unity. This unity Hölderlin calls . . . “Being.” . . . It [Being] cannot be thought (for thinking is judgment, judging is differentiating), and yet I cannot do without it, for without postulating a foundational unity of the relating terms, the actual and evident experience that “I am I”—as the identity of the self—would have to remain inexplicable. (‘Unendliche’ 750–751)

To Kant, in the first Critique, the possibility of propositional judgments rests on the synthesizing activity of apperception that constitutes the

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transcendental unity of self-consciousness (B 132–136). What Hölderlin points to is that this foundational activity itself depends on a unity of Being that exceeds the discursive cognition it makes possible. If we do not already possess a knowledge of the relation between terms in an organic whole before we relate them in consciousness, then no such relating is possible since, as we saw, individual representations themselves possess no necessary criterion for the positive determination of their relation to other such terms. However, since we do have selfconsciousness, we must assume a pre-conceptual knowledge of such unity. As Frederick Beiser paraphrases Hölderlin’s point: “[W]e can search for unity, a pattern in particulars, only if we have already had some experience of that unity or pattern itself” (German 384). Nonetheless, such a preexisting unity is not conceptually available to us, since in that case it would itself be knowable only through the activity of our conditional relating of terms, which inevitably obscures the identity it designates and thereby seemingly falls victim to an infinite deferral of meaning. This inaccessibility of Being to discursive thought can be seen to follow from Kant’s own refutation of the ontological proof for the existence of God in the first Critique (A 592 / B 620–A 602 / B 630).17 As Kant points out there, “Being is obviously not a real predicate, i.e. a concept of something that could add to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing or of certain determinations in themselves” (A 598 / B 626). As something that does not contribute anything to the content of a proposition, the existence of entities falls under the title of the modality of judgments (its second moment: “Existence— Non-existence”), which concerns only the relation of the object of experience to the proposition as a whole (A 219 / B 266). The positing of the existence of an object is therefore the consequence not of conceptual determination but of a “sensation” (“Wahrnehmung”) (A 225 / B 272), which also means that the logical use of existence expressed in the copula “is” only is “that which posits the predicate in relation to the subject” (A 599 / B 627). As Kant has it in his earlier The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God, the existence ascribed in propositions is only a relative, not an absolute existence (cf. Der einzig 72–73). In the former positing of being, existence is ascribed to a term in relation to other terms (S is-a-P, determining its being-P), not in itself (S is). The absolute existence of entities, in contrast, is posited without reference to other entities, which is what makes it absolute, unconditioned, and to that extent autonomous and free.

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Hölderlin’s central point in this context is that the relative existence ascribed in logical propositions is derivative of this absolute, that it must be seen as the latter’s specification, and as such depends on it for its possibility. We judge not that a subject “S” with the predicate “P” has the additional quality of “Existence” but rather that what we perceive to exist has the characteristics of being a subject “S” to which a predicate “P” can be ascribed. The perception of the organic unity of Being in the absolute necessarily precedes the categorical determination of experience. The latter is possible, in fact, only to the extent that the synthesizing activity of the transcendental subject is guided by the intuitive perception of the relation of terms in the unity of Being. In order to be able to determine “P” as the predicate of “S,” we must first have an intuition of the whole of which these two terms are merely parts. As Frank puts it, echoing Marx and Engels in The German Ideology: “From now on it is not consciousness which determines Being, but Being which determines consciousness” (‘Unendliche’ 729). As already noted, insofar as the organic unity of Being that constitutes the absolute falls under the title of the modality of judgments, it is the object, not of a concept, but of an immediate intuition. Yet insofar as the unity that is intuited is absolute and autonomous, it transcends the differential structure of sensible experience and therefore constitutes a supersensible, intelligible idea. Combining these two characteristics, Hölderlin in “Judgment and Being” proclaims that our perception of Being is an “intellectual intuition” (“intellectual[e] Anschauung”). The definition immediately calls to mind Kant’s use of the same term to designate the precise opposite of human, discursive knowledge (Kritik der Urtheilskraft 405–410). Yet while Hölderlin does not specify this concept further in “Judgment and Being,” it is clear that he is not laying claim to divine cognition on our behalf. As he states in his letter to Schiller of September 4, 1795, intellectual intuition must be understood as an aesthetic mode of perception (Briefe 667), thereby making the Being that grounds experience accessible only in the pleasure of the beautiful. It is important to note that this conception of the function of beauty constitutes a marked departure from or radicalization of Kant’s project and his aesthetics, as formulated in the third Critique. The latter work is intended to bridge the systematic gap between Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophies (cf. Kritik der Urtheilskraft 179) and as such presupposes the results from the

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Transcendental Deduction in the first Critique that assures some interaction between our cognitive faculties. By instead arguing that this interaction must first be secured through the experience of the beautiful, however, Kant’s idealist successors make it depend on perception that follows rather than precedes empirical forms. Put differently, what Kant’s heirs do is take the solution offered in the third Critique (the free play of the faculties and the pleasure it affords) and apply it to the problem of the first Critique (how can sensibility and understanding interact?). In a sense, this simply constitutes a reinterpretation of Kant’s claim, in the first Critique, that the relation between universal and particular at stake in the Transcendental Deduction depends on the power of judgment that consists in the “feeling” for their fit (A 133 / B 172) by now making that feeling aesthetic rather than logical in nature. In other words, we “know” when the positive determination of a term has been established not when the relation to its necessary other corresponds to the structure of logical forms, as Kant would have it, but when it corresponds to the experience of aesthetic pleasure in organic forms. As such, the condition for truth is transformed from a particular kind of representing to a particular kind of freedom, which is supremely embodied in the activity of artistic poiesis.18 The autonomy of the latter serves as a Kantian symbol for the absolute of Being that provides the criterion for the relation between representations and, to that extent, makes the determinate cognition of entities in the world depend on the prior aesthetic perception of the fundamental identity of their differentiated parts. Foreshadowing Heidegger’s later argument, the experience of beauty becomes world-constituting insofar as it lays bare the absolute ground that guides the understanding’s relational unification of the manifold of sensibility.

kierkega ard and the structure of dependency The idealist aesthetics that finds its foundations in the attempt to complete Kant’s project during the 1790s, and which Schiller and Hölderlin exemplify, seeks to contain the conception of experience as anarchic by subordinating it to a pre-discursive unity of Being that is revealed in the autonomy of art. It is clear that to Kierkegaard this solution is unacceptable. Already in 1841, in his dissertation The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard dismisses the idealist unification of opposites on the grounds that it constitutes a false resolution of the

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fragmentary nature of experience. As he puts it, the poetry of German Romanticism provides a kind of reconciliation, but it is not the true reconciliation, for it does not reconcile me with the actuality [Virkelighed] in which I am living; no transubstantiation of the given actuality takes place by virtue of this reconciliation, but it reconciles me with the given actuality by giving me another, a higher and more perfect actuality. . . . Therefore, the poetic is a kind of victory over actuality, but the infinitizing is more of an emigration from actuality than a continuance in it. (Concept of Irony 297 / Om Begrebet Ironi 330–331)

To Kierkegaard, the spheres of cognition and experience are simply too different to make their subsumption under a common principle possible. The former is abstract, universal, and eternal (cf., e.g., Concluding 171, 314 / Afsluttende 158, 286), while the latter is concrete, particular, and in a constant process of becoming (cf., e.g., Concept of Irony 21–23 / Om Begrebet Ironi 81–85; Concluding 301 / Afsluttende 274). To the extent that the aesthetics of early romanticism and Hegel’s speculative philosophy both seek to reduce this difference to an underlying identity, they constitute two sides of the same coin (Concluding 121, 296–297 / Afsluttende 117, 270). Indeed, even though Hegel would reject such an equation of his system with Romanticism (cf. Vorlesungen 13: 93–99), he explicitly asserts that poetry is a form of speculative thought precisely due to its attributes of totality and unification (15: 240, 244, 254–255), which he, too, places at the heart of the category of beauty (13: 145–157). Kierkegaard’s polemic on this point, however, extends beyond his usual Hegelian and Romantic targets. From his perspective, in fact, any philosophical position, whether idealist or empiricist, that bases its definition of knowledge on the correspondence of thought and experience inevitably falsifies the nature of existence (Concluding 189–190 / Afsluttende 174). In a sense, Kierkegaard is returning here to the logic of Maimon’s critique of Kant: it may well be that the experience of beauty is a constitutive principle for the possibility of unified experience, as Hölderlin and others claim, but the point, to Kierkegaard, is still that we do not have such unified experience to begin with. What the aesthetics of autonomy and its accompanying philosophical positions justify is thus simply not existence as we know it. In Kierkegaard’s view, that is, the contradiction between thought and experience is not accidental (as Schiller argues) or merely apparent (as Hölderlin suggests) but an inherent part of what it means to be a human (e.g., 302, 350 / 275,

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320). In fact, Kierkegaard explicitly equates it with the condition of sin (267–268 / 243; Concept of Anxiety 19 / Begrebet Angest 326). This condition of sin, however, if inherent and not to be avoided, is nonetheless not something to which we simply must resign ourselves. On the contrary, sin must be overcome in some constructive way, and to that extent, Kierkegaard’s position also unequivocally differs from the neo-skeptical assumptions that underlie the aesthetics of the avant-gardes. The opening definition of the human being in The Sickness unto Death suggests what such an overcoming of the contradiction between thought and experience that is not the monism of the aesthetics of autonomy might look like: A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation [eller er det i Forholdet, at Forholdet forholder sig til sig selv]; the self is not the relation but is that the relation relates itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of infinitude and finitude, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self. . . . Is the relation that relates itself to itself posited by something other, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is then yet again a relation, relates itself to that which has posited the entire relation. (Sickness 13; trans. modified / Sygdommen 129)

For all the opacity of its language, two central points can easily be extrapolated from this passage in light of the preceding discussion. First, the self is defined not as a singular unit or substance but as a relation. This relation, moreover, does not consist simply of the dualism of the terms involved, which Kierkegaard on the same page defines as only a “negative unity” (“negativ Eenhed”), the mere possibility of a self, but rather of the relation to that relation, the self-consciousness of that relation, which is the positive third term. As in Kant and his idealist heirs, that is, the positive synthesis of our faculties depends on the unifying activity of self-consciousness. Second, and this in turn is a central difference from the idealist tradition, such a self is not a given, a quid facti from which philosophy can begin, but a result, the effect of relating to the relation in the correct way. To Kierkegaard, that is, the idealist assumption that cognition and existence are given as identical in the proposition of selfconsciousness (“I = I”) is unfounded, as it constitutes an abstraction from and negation of empirical attributes. The identity of thinking and acting selves in the idealist conception of self-consciousness is

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retained throughout and independent of any changes and modifications that an empirical self undergoes. The proposition “I = I” does not take into account my particular constitution but merely affirms my existence abstractly (cf. 93–94 / 145–146; cf. also Concluding 117, 196–197, 316–317 / Afsluttende 113, 180, 288–289). In explicit opposition to the first principle of modern philosophy, cogito ergo sum, Kierkegaard in The Sickness unto Death therefore proposes the alternative “to believe is to be” (The Sickness 93 / Sygdommen 206) as the point of departure for a productive synthesis of our faculties. The proper relation to the relation of terms constitutive of the human being inevitably depends on the incorporation of a fourth term, “that which posited [har sat] the entire relation” (13; trans. modified / 129), or, as Kierkegaard goes on to reformulate the proposition as a whole, “The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God” (29– 30 / 146). The various phenomenological distinctions between different kinds of selves that Kierkegaard maps in The Sickness unto Death ultimately depend on the differing relations to this fourth term, which stands outside and apart from the other three as their ground and possibility. In order to determine the implication of this departure from the idealist tradition, it is necessary first to point to a further important similarity with it contained therein. While, to my knowledge, this has never been noted in the secondary literature, the fourfold structure operative in this definition of the human being (finite, infinite, spirit, and God) should be familiar to readers of Kant by virtue of its similarity to the relation between the four titles in the Table of Judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the latter, too, as discussed above, we encounter three titles (quantity, quality, relation), plus one (modality), with the latter both standing apart from and grounding the rest. While the first three terms serve to determine the relation between subject, predicate, and copula (the finite, infinite, and their relation in Kierkegaard), the title of modality (as the concept of God) does not add anything to the content of a judgment but rather serves to determine its value as a whole. As Kant reminds us: The categories of modality have this peculiarity: as a determination of the object they do not augment the concept to which they are ascribed in the least, but rather express only the relation to the faculty of cognition. If the concept of a thing is already entirely

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Philosophical Foundations complete, I can still ask about this object whether it is merely possible, or also actual, or, if it is the latter, whether it is also necessary? No further determinations in the object itself are hereby thought; rather, it is only asked: how is the object itself (together with all its determinations) related to the understanding and its empirical use, to the empirical power of judgment, and to reason (in its application to experience)? (A 219 / B 267)

Such a structural similarity between Kierkegaard’s God and Kant’s modality suggests that the former might have to be seen less in a purely theological context and more as the epistemological condition enabling the possibility of a certain kind of judgment to obtain.19 This possibility suggests a further kinship between Kierkegaard’s God and a conception of the absolute similar to that of Hölderlin’s Being.20 As we saw, Being for Hölderlin constitutes the whole that serves as the necessary criterion and guiding framework for any determination of parts. Both of these characteristics are operative in Kierkegaard’s notion of God. First, as with Hölderlin’s Being, God in The Sickness unto Death is likewise defined as the highest possible “criterion” (“Maalestok”; more properly rendered as “standard of measurement”) (The Sickness 79–80 / Sygdommen 193) and serves to determine the self in its relations (cf. also Concluding 549 / Afsluttende 499). To be determined “for God” (“for Gud”) (Sickness 79–80; trans. modified / Sygdommen 193) is thus to relate to the relation constitutive of the human being with the absolute perspective of God as a standard of measurement for how to unify its parts. Second, Kierkegaard, too, conceives of this standard of measurement in terms of the subjectobject identity, the unity of thought and being that the idealist tradition associates with the absolute. While this point is largely passed over in silence by the secondary literature, which has tended to insist on a stark contradiction between Kierkegaard and his predecessors, it is in fact made amply clear. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, for example, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym proclaims: “A system of existence cannot be given. Is there, then, not such a system? That is not at all the case. Neither is this implied in what has been said. Existence itself is a system—for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit. System and conclusiveness correspond to each other, but existence is the very opposite” (Concluding 118 / Afsluttende 114). “System,” here, refers to the possibility of a conceptual determination of experience, its organization according to the principles of reason, and as such presupposes the identity of thought and being

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that the aesthetics of autonomy claims to lay bare. As Kierkegaard goes on to clarify: “The systematic idea is subject-object, is the unity of thinking and being” (123 / 118). As usual, Kierkegaard rejects the claim that such an identity can be established by humans, whether systematically or aesthetically, since concrete existence is always in the process of becoming. But he does not reject that such an identity exists for God. Quite to the contrary, as the above quotation shows, for God, the identity of thought and being is assumed to be actual, even if it remains inaccessible to human cognition and experience (cf. also 190, 196–197 / 175, 180). This makes it clear that Kierkegaard is simultaneously retaining and transforming the idealist project. On the one hand, he conceives of the relation between subject and God in terms similar to those of judgment and modality discussed above, making God a version of the absolute that provides a standard of measurement for the organization of representations. On the other hand, Kierkegaard rejects the possibility of a positive relation to this standard and conceives of God as a wholly other who remains fully inaccessible to our subjectivities. As The Sickness unto Death stresses: “As sinner, man is separated from God by the most chasmal qualitative abyss” (Sickness 122 / Sygdommen 233). Similarly, in Philosophical Fragments, in which the point, if anything, is only strengthened, God is defined as “the different, the absolutely different. But it is the absolutely different in which there is no distinguishing mark. . . . [T]he understanding cannot even think the absolutely different” (Philosophical 44–45 / Philosophiske 249). If God, so understood, is to serve as a constitutive principle in the relation between thought and experience that defines the human being, as The Sickness unto Death proclaims He should, this accordingly means that He must be at once absolutely different and just like us. That is, for God to serve as a measure of judgment, we must be able to know Him, which requires that He share something with the faculties of our subjectivity. But if we are to know Him in His transcendent nature, He must be wholly other. On these grounds, Kierkegaard rejects any relationship to the absolute that is conceived only negatively, since such a relationship lacks the equality necessary for knowledge and therefore only leads us into doubt (Philosophical 38–39 / Philosophiske 244; cf. also 46 / 251). 21 At the same time, Kierkegaard also rejects any attempt to relate to the absolute as ultimately identical to us, which in Philosophical Fragments is made to

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include both aesthetics and Hegelian philosophy (45 / 250), since such approaches deprive God of His difference. The difficulty involved in the simultaneous requirements for difference and equality arises from the fact, so Kierkegaard points out, that it constitutes an absolute Paradox (47 / 252). To Kierkegaard, the only event in world history that qualifies for this description is the incarnation, the absurd claim that the wholly other has become like us. 22 And after mysticism, aesthetics, and philosophy have been rejected, the only way left to relate to this claim lies in Kierkegaard’s conception of faith. The point is most fully elaborated by Kierkegaard in the “Interlude” (“Mellemspil”) to Philosophical Fragments, in his discussion of “historical faith,” which serves as an analogue to faith proper and which corresponds to what he elsewhere terms faith “sensu laxiori,” in distinction to faith “sensu eminentiori,” or Christian faith (Concluding 204ff., 323–324 / Afsluttende 187ff., 295). The “Interlude” arguably constitutes one of the most difficult passages in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, and the particularities of its argument need not detain us here. Kierkegaard’s discussion centers on the question of how we can relate to entities in the world as having come into existence. In the present context, it is important that, for Kierkegaard, this question explicitly involves the modality of judgments, the being of objects and occurrences, understood as their possibility, actuality, or necessity. If an object is perceived to have come into existence, this cannot constitute a change in its essence (“Væsen”), since in that case, the object that has gone from not existing to existing would not be the same but must rather constitute a change in being (“Væren”). To come into existence, accordingly, is a change from the being of an object as “possibility” to its being as “actuality” (Philosophical 73 / Philosophiske 273). To Kierkegaard, only that which is necessary does not come into existence, since the essence of necessity to him includes the modality of being: “the necessary is” (74 / 274). The past has occurred in a certain way (what Kierkegaard calls its “thus” [“Saaledes”; trans. modified]), but this “Saaledes” does not mean that it was necessary, since it could equally well have come into existence in a different way (77 / 276). Every “Saaledes” accordingly has several possible “hows” (“Hvorledes”) (77 / 277). That is, every occurrence either could have happened in a different way or context or could not have occurred at all. At the foundation of every coming into existence, then, there is

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a ground of radical freedom that dictates that something exists only because it might just as well not have done so or done so in a different way (75 / 275). The defining characteristic of the historical, as understood in the “Interlude,” is this radical freedom and uncertainty. To know something historically, therefore, would mean to know it as uncertain in this way. The “organ” (“Organet”) for the “aprehension” (“Opfattelse”) of the past must be able to grasp both the particular actuality of an occurrence and its infinite unrealized possibilities. To Kierkegaard, this organ (later he also refers to it as a “sense” [“Sands”; 84 / 283]) is faith, which is characterized precisely by the belief in the unseen, that which is not actual (80–81 / 280). Historical knowledge of something, that is, consists in the perception of its unrealized possibilities as just as much a part of it as its actuality (81, 74 / 280, 274). Even if we know, conceptually, that the unrealized possibilities of an occurrence are constitutive of its coming into existence, we relate to an object as historical only when we “see” these as aspects of its positive presence: The possibility from which emerged the possible that became actual always accompanies that which came into existence and remains with the past, even though centuries lie between. As soon as one who comes later repeats that it has come into existence (which he does by believing it), he repeats its possibility, regardless of whether there may or may not be more specific conceptions of this possibility. (86 / 284)

Faith, in this sense, is not an act of “cognition” (“en Erkjendese”) but “an act of freedom, an expression of will” (“en Frihedens-Akt, en Villiens-Yttring”) (83; trans. modified / 282). It consists in the inference from an actuality to its perceived possibilities that does not follow logically or empirically but must be asserted by an act of will. As Kierkegaard points out with a play on the Danish words, the result of faith is not a syllogistic “conclusion,” not a “Slutning,” but a “decision,” a “Beslutning” (84; trans. modified / 283). This does not mean, however, that faith is a merely arbitrary affair, in which we can will anything we wish. Far from it; Kierkegaard stresses that it is only possible to will something for which we already possess the “condition” (“Betingelsen”) (62 / 264). The distinction between historical faith and faith proper is located in this latter aspect. At the end of the “Interlude,” Kierkegaard explains that the difference between them lies in the fact that faith proper believes not only something absent but something that constitutes

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a contradiction (86–87 / 285). The unseen affirmed in faith sensu eminentiori, that is, is not simply something absent but possible but rather something absent and impossible, or absurd (Concluding 205, 208–209 / Afsluttende 188, 191–192). The object of faith proper does not stand in continuity with any rational or experimental structures that we might already have but rather transcends these altogether. In historical faith, for example, I can believe the coming into existence of an occurrence because I myself posses the ground of radical freedom that this category constitutes (cf. Concept of Anxiety 157 / Begrebet Angest 456). Similarly, in faith sensu laxiori more generally, I can believe in the existence of Providence or that I will have beef stew tomorrow evening, because these concepts are rationally coherent even if there is no empirical evidence at all as to their actuality or certainty. In both instances, the relation between actuality and possibility is one that is immanent to our own structures of experience and subjectivity, which thereby provide us with the condition, or premise, “Betingelse,” necessary for our “Beslutning.”23 The premise of faith proper, however, does not find its source within our subjectivity in this way. As Kierkegaard stresses, we cannot arrive at the absolutely unknown that is God by ourselves because even the attempt to think it in opposition to us would make it conditional on our attributes and thereby deprive it of its quality of absoluteness (Philosophical 44–45 / Philosophiske 249). The faith in a radical otherness instead constitutes a complete break with the immanence of our experience (Concluding 571 / Afsluttende 519) and can be received only in the manner of a gift. Faith proper must in this way be understood as the “organ” or “sense” for an absolute otherness that is received from outside of ourselves as a condition from God and in relation to which we must will to see a particular actuality. The act of faith is thus the “Beslutning” that the historical individual Jesus of Nazareth is also the absolutely unknown, in spite of the blatant absurdity of the claim. This affirmation is the particular contribution of my will (what Kierkegaard calls our “Zuthat” [43 / 248]), in which I also accept to subordinate my cognitive faculties to a criterion that they cannot comprehend. Like its analogue love, faith is therefore both a gift (“Gave”) and a task (“Opgave”) (cf. Either 57 / Enten 63). We receive the condition of the perception of absolute otherness but must affirm the reality of its relation to the wholly known and renegotiate our comprehension of the latter by the standard of the former. 24

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Although this point does not appear to have been made in the secondary literature, it is clear on the basis of this discussion that faith for Kierkegaard as an “organ” or “sense” constitutes a kind of intellectual intuition of the absolute. As Fear and Trembling famously puts it, faith is an “absolute relation to the absolute” (Fear 56, 62, 98 / Frygt 150, 155, 188, et passim) because it cannot be mediated by a discursive and conceptual understanding and therefore must be unconditioned, direct, and intuitive. As with the idealists’ intellectual intuition, moreover, faith provides us with the standard and criterion for the application of our cognitive faculties. As Kierkegaard further writes: “The paradox of faith, then, is this: . . . that the single individual . . . determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal” (70 / 162). Insofar as the “universal” is here defined as “mediation” (82 / 172), the “intermediary” (71 / 163), and “the ethical” (54 / 148), it is to be equated with the faculty of “understanding” (36 / 131). To have the relation to the absolute precede and determine the relation to the understanding thus means, as in Hölderlin, that the relation between terms within judgments is governed by the perception of the whole that is the absolute outside it. Kierkegaard no less than Hölderlin would agree with Manfred Frank’s already quoted claim that “it is not consciousness which determines Being, but Being which determines consciousness” (‘Unendliche’ 729). Where Kierkegaard would disagree, however, as the above discussion has equally made clear, is in his insistence that this absolute is not immanent to or coextensive with the structures of our subjectivity. To the extent that it is grounded on such an immanence, Kierkegaard in fact clearly rejects the notion of an intellectual intuition (cf. Concluding 105 / Afsluttende 102–103). The condition of sin that insists on an irreconcilable distance between ideal and real is not to be canceled as a misleading effect of our cognitive makeup that can be overcome in an undifferentiated origin; rather, it is fundamental and constitutive of our subjectivity, categorically severing us from the absolute. As such, the relation between judgment and modality that makes possible the productive synthesis of parts cannot be established through the exercise of an autonomy that would efface all differences. Instead, the absolute standard of measurement for the application of our faculties, to Kierkegaard, disrupts and negates our subjectivity, forcing us to adapt to a standard of meaning that it cannot reach. The subject’s “intimation” (“Anelse”) (Concluding 190 / Afsluttende 175)

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of the absolute unity of being and cognition remains inassimilable to our mode of experience, and the most we can do, therefore, is strive to meet this standard by constantly renegotiating the structures of our understanding with this criterion and aim in sight. The latter point is forcefully exemplified in another of Kierkegaard’s explorations of the analogy between faith and love. In the final sermon of the second part of Either/Or, “The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong” (Either 346 / Enten 326), true love is said to consist not in attempting to make the other conform to my standards of truth but in making those standards of truth conform to an other that I accept as justified before I understand its conditions for being so. In a remarkable inversion of the Platonic notion of eros that, as discussed above, underlies idealist thought and which conceives of love as the effect of the recognition of identity in that which seemed other, Kierkegaard insists that love is the discovery of difference in that which seemed the same: Your life brings you into a multiplicity of relationships with other people. To some you are drawn by a more fervent love than to others. Now, if such a person who is the object of your love were to do you a wrong, is it not true that it would pain you, that you would scrupulously examine everything but that you would then say: I know for sure that I am in the right; this thought will calm me? Ah, if you loved him, then it would not calm you; you would investigate everything. You would be unable to perceive anything else except that he is in the wrong, and yet this certainty would trouble you. You would wish that you might be in the wrong; you would try to find something that could speak in his defense, and if you did not find it, you would find rest only in the thought that you were in the wrong. Or if you were assigned the responsibility for such a person’s welfare, you would do everything that was in your power, and when the other person nevertheless paid no attention to it and only caused you trouble, is it not true that you would make an accounting and say: I know I have done right by him?—Oh, no! If you loved him, this thought would only alarm you; you would reach for every probability, and if you found none, you would tear up the accounting in order to help you forget it, and you would strive to build yourself up with the thought that you were in the wrong. (347–348 / 327)

Where in the Platonic tradition, love followed knowledge, in Kierkegaard, knowledge follows love, as the standards and rules of reason are here made subservient to the requirements dictated by our intuitive affection. The relation of love receives the beloved as the standard of our meaning. “Love” is whatever the other does, and if this contradicts

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our previous notions and criteria, they must be either rejected as false (since the other deceives me, it must be wrong that love is defined as the absence of deceit) or redefined (given that the other’s acts must count as loyalty to me, it must be that loyalty is not characterized by fidelity, concern for my emotions, rejection of other people’s sexual advances, etc.). The imposition of a standard of meaning by the other thus provides the criterion for the organization of our discursive world: on the basis of the other’s a priori justification, this emotion, event, pronouncement, and so on, must be classified in such and such a way (as “devotion,” “hatred” . . .), which can thereby enter into relation with these other concepts, events, or emotions and what have you, in order to be compatible with the one fact that I know to be the case beyond all doubt. Since I know the other is right, “devotion” is compatible with leaving me in despair, which in turn must be classifiable as “bliss,” which now receives as attributes emotions it did not previously contain, and so on. If the structures of our language start to break, they must be renegotiated until the aim is met. In our relation to God, this condition is not merely a desired possibility but an inevitable necessity. While among humans it is always possible that the other might be wrong as much as I am (we share the same ontological condition), in faith sensu eminentiori the other reveals itself as the paradoxical instance of a meaning that in principle we must fail to comprehend discursively and which nevertheless we are compelled to assert as unconditionally valid. Only what can agree with such a transcendent meaning can count as true, and to the extent that such agreement is impossible, our relation to it remains open only by always continuing to strive for it by renegotiating the structures of our knowledge and experience. To Kierkegaard, however, the relation at stake is not simply a onesided adoration of God by man. On the contrary, if it is by definition impossible for us to claim absolute value for any finite act of knowledge, then grace in the form of forgiveness from the other nevertheless makes possible finitude’s participation of eternity by placing our ideal justification in the attempt rather than the completion of that task. As a form of adoration of the other, an action is determined absolutely not when it achieves the proper unification of experience according to the standard of the absolute but when our infelicitous attempts in time to overcome this gap become the expression of our highest purpose and perfection. It is in this sense that the second section of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, “What We Learn from the

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Lilies in the Field and from the Birds of the Sky,” tells us that humans resemble God the most in their absolute difference from Him, when we are humbled in subjection and worship: To worship is not to rule, and yet to worship is what makes the human being resemble God, and to be able truly to worship is the excellence of the invisible glory above all creation. The pagan was not aware of God and therefore sought likeness in ruling. But the resemblance is not like that—no, then instead it is taken in vain. It truly is only within the infinite diversity, and this is why to worship is likeness with God, just as it is the excellence above all creation. The human being and God do not resemble each other directly but inversely; only when God has infinitely become the eternal and omnipresent object of worship and the human being always a worshiper, only then do they resemble each other. (“What” 193 / “Hvad” 290)

The relationship of equality that Kierkegaard claims emerges from this justification of difference constitutes the criterion for understanding as defined in Philosophical Fragments (Philosophical 25 / Philosophiske 232) and thereby overcomes the epistemological gap with which his notion of subjectivity began. If self-consciousness, in The Sickness unto Death, is the relation between thought and experience that also relates to that which posits it, then it is precisely the self in this labor of finitude that is justified here. This occurs, however, only by radically redefining the very nature of knowing and truth. As Concluding Unscientific Postscript makes clear, knowledge is not the correspondence or identity of one faculty with another but their dynamic simultaneity: Scientific scholarship orders the elements of subjectivity within a knowledge about them, and this knowledge is the highest, and all knowledge is an annulment of, a removal from existence. In existence this does not hold true. If thinking disdains imagination, then imagination in turn disdains thinking, and the same with feeling. The task is not to elevate the one at the expense of the other, but the task is equality, contemporaneity, and the medium in which they are united is existing. (Concluding 348; trans. modified / Afsluttende 318)

Knowledge, as traditionally understood, consists in the reduction of qualitatively different spheres to a common system that not only always falsifies the nature of existence but also remains unable to fully assimilate the opposite by which it is disdained. The dialectic of faith, in contrast, teaches that only the balance and simultaneity of all constitutive moments of experience in their irreconcilability constitute truth. That is, it teaches that “the truth is only in the becoming,

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in the process of appropriation,” and “that consequently there is no result” (78 / 78). Kierkegaard’s epistemology of faith can in this way be characterized as an attempt to think through the conditions under which the ineluctable conflict between thought and existence that constitutes experience in modernity can itself be justified as meaningful. His answer rests neither on an embrace of the anarchy and fragmentation of experience as good in themselves, as the avant-gardes would do (which would deny the requirement for meaning), nor in the resolution of that conflict in an underlying unity, as the aesthetics of autonomy attempts (since this would betray the commitment to reality in its fragmentary form). Rather, Kierkegaard formulates a conception of a productive relation to a transcendent absolute that remains only a negative and inaccessible ideal but which provides the guiding standard for the way in which we seek to organize the particularities of experience under the abstract principles of reason. Religious faith, in this way, performs the function for Kierkegaard that aesthetic experience did for idealist philosophy by laying bare the terms by which cognition must abide but also retains the gap between our constitutive faculties on which the neo-skeptical critique of Kant insists. If aesthetics during the Enlightenment takes on the function of theology, as Ernst Cassirer argued (151–153), then in Kierkegaard, theology again assumes the function of aesthetics. Described abstractly, the literary form to be derived from this conception of knowledge and experience can be summarized in terms of a fourfold structure. Any text in agreement with it will contain a simultaneity of two incommensurable representational principles (corresponding to the spheres of thought and experience in Kierkegaard’s anthropology) that are revealed to be incapable of providing the semiotic motivation for a determination of meaning that is nevertheless constitutive of their relation (the function of God as the title of modality). Insofar as this determination of meaning is not derived from or coextensive with the semiotic structures operative within the text, it is imposed on, not conditioned by, them and in that sense is absolute and incomprehensible from their perspective. At the same time, this autonomous and gratuitous event of meaning assumes interpretative authority by bringing into existence an additional fourth element that constitutes the link or relation between the other three terms (the activity of self-consciousness in Kierkegaard’s notion of the self). By grounding the relation between the text’s two dominant

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semiotic structures on their relation to a principle that is bound to a meaning that transcends them, the use and limits of those structures are made dependent on a standard that they fail to grasp. The relation of dependency to that extent suspends the rules habitually governing the text’s semiotic structures and forces us to reconceive what these would need to look like if they are to motivate that meaning. In agreement with Kierkegaard’s conception of truth, this dynamic process of reimagining the possibilities of our modes of representation with a specific end in view is itself the purpose of the text, and the analysis will be complete when its necessary conditions have been laid bare. In the chapters that follow, the specific textual implications of this overarching structure of the aesthetics of dependency will be investigated with regard to works by Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, James Joyce, and Rainer Marie Rilke. Before that, however, it is necessary to examine the specific historical and cultural context in which this aesthetic structure gained prominence in order to fully understand its implications and dissemination. Chapter 2 does so by examining the nature of the extraordinary success of the aesthetics of autonomy in Scandinavia during the early part of the nineteenth century, while chapter 3 proceeds to analyze its collapse. Against this backdrop, the remainder of this study traces the rise and diffusion of a Kierkegaardian alternative. The philosophical foundation of aesthetics constitutes only one aspect in the configuration of a phenomenon that must also be examined in its historical and textual transformations.

ch a p t e r t wo

Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the Autonomy of Art

The analysis in this chapter is governed by two overarching aims. First, I seek to establish the sociohistorical context for the reception in Golden Age Denmark of the idealist principles outlined in the previous chapter. Second, I lay bare the implications of these same principles for concrete textual organization. Succinctly stated, this organization consists in a balance between opposed formal and conceptual principles in a work of art through the revelation of their underlying compatibility or identity as parts of a self-sufficient whole. The elucidation of this structure provides an example of the kind of aesthetic form that, in the subsequent chapters of this study, I will argue Ibsen, James, Hofmannsthal, Joyce, and Rilke reject. In order to fulfill these aims, the discussion here focuses on the works of Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the most influential champion and practitioner of idealist aesthetics in nineteenth-century Scandinavia. Heiberg’s importance derives not least from his profound awareness of the sociohistorical function of idealist aesthetics, which, in his vaudevilles, provides him with the tools to resolve the difficult transition from feudalism to capitalism that dominates the Danish Golden Age. While Heiberg’s vaudevilles have traditionally been perceived to be mere “dramatic bagatelles,” which not even Heiberg is supposed to have taken “too seriously” (Fenger 87) and which simply reflect a general social complacency (Ebel 171–172), I show how they in fact represent a sustained attempt to develop a new dramatic form on the basis of idealist principles that is able to domesticate the crisis of modernity. 57

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The ideological function of reconciliation and compromise that is frequently associated with the aesthetics of autonomy thus finds a particularly illuminating illustration in Heiberg’s work. Further still, the tremendous success of Heiberg’s adaptation of this model can be seen to derive its own historical conditioning from what Paul Schroeder has shown to be a general shift in post-1814 international relations, from a system of balance of power to, precisely, a politics of compromise and mediation. What Heiberg’s trajectory suggests is that the aesthetic model formulated by post-Kantian philosophy in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution and the fall of the Holy Roman Empire gains general currency only during the subsequent period stretching from the Congress of Vienna until the 1840s that provides a more congenial ground for it. At the latter point, in turn, the breakdown of both the aesthetics and the politics of compromise begins to be apparent, leaving Modernism to grow out of their demise. As discussed in the introduction, at the level of aesthetic organization, this can be claimed to imply primarily a reorientation of the principle of autonomy that had won general acceptance in the preceding decades, so as to allow it to assimilate the open conflicts of modernity at a representational level. Yet it is also during that same period not only that the aesthetics of the avant-gardes gains wider currency but also that Kierkegaard’s aesthetics of dependency is first formulated and begins to resonate in other works. In order to support this argument, this chapter will proceed in three steps. First, I explore Heiberg’s view of the crisis of his age and argue that his theory of the vaudeville serves as an idealist model for sublating it. Second, I go on to support this claim through a close reading of Heiberg’s vaudeville The Danes in Paris and show how that play seeks to overcome the historical crisis of post-Napoleonic Denmark. Third and finally, I move from the consideration of the role of history and politics in Heiberg’s aesthetics to a brief consideration of the inverse role of Heiberg’s aesthetics in history and politics. This last perspective makes it possible to place Heiberg’s success within the general context of the mid-nineteenth-century transformations of European society and thereby facilitate the transition to the subsequent chapters of this study.

As already suggested, this approach to Heiberg differs significantly from the standard view in the secondary literature. At the opening

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of his influential study Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bruce Kirmmse, for example, makes the following claim: The fascinating thing, then, about Denmark in the first half of the nineteenth century is the increasingly evident contradiction between the changing social and economic realities, on the one hand, and the brilliant but blithely “conservative”—apolitical, really—cultural productions of the period, which are still revered under the name of the Golden Age. . . . When the tension between economy and ideology, between act and word, was finally released at mid-century, the Golden Age fairly burst like a bubble, or rather, faded like a dream which was no longer adequate to reality, and after 1860 or so the literature which had so dominated the first half of the century already seemed strangely dated and mannered. (2)

It is no surprise that Heiberg plays a central role in this assessment of the Golden Age, and Kirmmse subsequently identifies him with “the supreme example of the political (or anti-political) view of the ‘conservative’ Golden Age mainstream” (166). In contrast to the works of Søren Kierkegaard, which “reflect the real tension of his society” (2–3), those of Heiberg are said to “reflec[t] a hopeless misunderstanding of the realities of Danish social and economic life of the 1840’s” (167). In spite of the severity of his judgment of Heiberg and the culture of Golden Age Denmark, Kirmmse is far from alone in his claim. Already in his 1889 essay on Heiberg’s aesthetics, Brandes opens with the statement that “[o]ne can read through all of J. L. Heiberg’s Prose Writings without finding more than vague hints at historical or soul-searching criticism” (“Heibergs” 426). Similarly, in his biography of Heiberg, Morten Borup concludes: “By excluding himself from reality and living in the world of ideas [Heiberg] prevented himself from becoming the truly great poet. . . . Fatal, too, was his lack of a sense of history; he disdained the question of how things had actually come about, and, in the manner of the Germans, wanted to construct change ‘aus dem Inneren seines Bewusstseins’” (3: 189). More recently, Uwe Ebel has likewise argued that Heiberg’s dramatic production “avoided taking a social stance,” resulting in a stage production that was “in every aspect apathetic” and “which did not aim at the propagation of an ideological [weltanschaulichen] or even political agenda” (171). Even Vibeke Schrøder’s highly sympathetic study, which goes out of its way to claim Heiberg for the liberal cause, states that “in reality he was altogether apolitical” (9) and presumes that a

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general lack of political engagement resulted from Heiberg’s decision to leave it to others to discuss such matters. This scholarly consensus rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Heiberg’s aesthetics, as this chapter will show. Far from historically naive, apolitical, or blithe, Heiberg was in fact acutely aware of the conflict between ideology and economic reality that Kirmmse correctly perceives to be central to Golden Age Denmark. It is on this awareness, moreover, that his role as the pivotal figure of transition to Scandinavian Modernism rests.

the conflict of modernity and the task of the aesthetic Though largely overlooked in the secondary literature, the Danish reception of the idealist aesthetics traced in the previous chapter has a long and complicated history.1 It was not merely a matter of passive and belated assimilation of German philosophy by Danish thinkers but frequently one of an active and contemporary exchange. Important figures in Danish cultural life, such as the poet Jens Baggesen and the scientist and philosopher of nature Henrich Steffens, were integral members of and contributors to the post-Kantian community of thinkers in and around Jena. And it is worth recalling the importance of this relation even at a practical level, where Schiller’s seminal Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, for example, is a revised version of the earlier Augustenburger Letters, missives that derive their name from their addressee, the duke of Augustenburg, whose other titles included duke of Schleswig-Holstein and crown prince of Denmark, later King Frederik VI. For nineteenth-century Scandinavia at large, however, it is clear that no one had greater importance in the transmission of idealist aesthetics than the maverick Johan Ludvig Heiberg: dramatist, critic, philosopher, publicist, amateur astronomer, and more. 2 Born in 1791, Heiberg established himself as the leading figure in the culture of the Danish Golden Age by the 1820s, when he both enjoyed tremendous success with his vaudevilles on the stage and became the leading champion in Scandinavia of Hegel’s philosophy, whose emphasis on identity and reconciliation strongly appealed to him.3 Throughout the subsequent decades, the Heiberg circle constituted the premier cultural salon in Copenhagen, to which dilettantes such as H. C. Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard unsuccessfully

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attempted to gain admittance.4 At the heart of the circle was not only Heiberg but also his mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg, one of the leading prose writers of the period often credited with inaugurating the realist tradition in Danish literature (cf. Fenger 143–144), as well as Heiberg’s wife, Johanne Louise Heiberg, the most celebrated actress in Scandinavia during the nineteenth century. 5 Heiberg himself became director of Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre in 1849, a position he held for the next seven years, and throughout the century, his plays enjoyed virtually unmatched success. By 1889, at a time when modern drama was beginning to bloom throughout Europe, Heiberg’s twenty-four original works (and not counting his thirtyeight translations) had been performed 1,659 times at the Royal Theatre. In addition, the forty-two plays of Henrik Hertz, Heiberg’s closest disciple, came in second, with 1,102 performances during the same period. In comparison, the thirty-seven plays by Adam Oehlenschläger, the most important Danish Romantic, were staged only 694 times (Vinten-Johansen 353–354). Although he is known in the twentieth century almost exclusively through Kierkegaard’s scathing attacks on his Hegelian philosophy, Heiberg’s broader influence was in this way keenly appreciated until the late nineteenth century, when Georg Brandes and Henrik Ibsen would still refer to the difficulties of overcoming it.6 It is generally acknowledged that Heiberg’s overwhelming success was due not least to his skillful adaptation of Eugène Scribe’s dramatic techniques for his own vaudevilles.7 Less frequently noted, however, is the point that this fact alone already entails an engagement with the modern bourgeois world on Heiberg’s part over and above what the previously quoted scholarly pronouncements would seem to permit. After all, the unprecedented popularity of Scribe’s vaudevilles is due largely to his turn away from the genre’s traditional pastoral concern with shepherds and shepherdesses and toward the contemporary streets, salons, and shops for his material (Arvin 12–13). More important still, as Arvin points out, the frequently emphasized revolution in the structure of dramatic plots introduced by Scribe is based on the transformation of money as the medium of economic exchange in this society into a constitutive formal device: [M]oney takes the place of the fatum of Greek tragedy. Probably in no other dramatic literature does one find so many discussions of bank accounts, investments, loans, mortgages, dividends, and business failures. And just as Scribe succeeded in renewing the old love

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The notoriously intricate plotting of the pièce bien faite in this way depends on the logic of the financial interests of its characters, which organizes the events of the play. While it has been Honoré de Balzac who, ever since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s favorable comments,9 has usually been considered the first author of capitalism, Scribe can in fact be seen to provide the new emerging order with a literary form of its own two decades before La Comédie humaine. Heiberg, as we shall see in more detail below, makes ample use of Scribe’s economic motivation of plot,10 and his awareness of a link between the dramatic form he adopted and the emerging capitalist system is visible, interestingly enough, not least in his criticisms of the French author. While going to great lengths to defend him from charges of indecency, Heiberg, in the essay “Scribe as Moralist,” nevertheless admits that Scribe does fall victim to immorality in attributing absolute validity to merely relative values (“Scribe” 136–137). In Le mariage de raison, for example, which Heiberg repeatedly draws on in his discussion, Scribe mistakenly makes duty toward one’s parents take priority over love (“Scribe” 138–139). While only the latter constitutes an instance of “the good” to Heiberg, which alone is absolute (137), it is the former that determines the outcome of the play and has the author’s sympathy (138). In spite of Heiberg’s specific focus, it is important to note that this objection is clearly not directed at filial compliance as such, since it would be easy enough to imagine situations in which doing the good as defined here (marrying out of love) rather than the bad (marrying for reasons other than love) is performed out of obedience to one’s parents. (An obvious case in point could be found in Samuel Richardson’s vastly influential Pamela, translated into Danish as early as 1746.) Rather, the problem for Heiberg stems from the fact that the obligations that determine the action of Scribe’s plays are specifically “bourgeois” (“spidsborgerlige”) in nature (“Scribe” 140–141). That such “bourgeois considerations” (“Om Syngspillet” 145), in Heiberg’s view, furthermore tend to be of a financial kind is clear from his claim that the conflict between relative and absolute values is particularly prominent when the parents in the play are poor (“Scribe” 138).

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From this perspective, Heiberg’s problem with Scribe’s plays, in spite of all their merit, lies in the fact that they are structured solely according to pragmatic considerations and therein confined to a “realism” that inevitably falls short of the “idealism” that Heiberg saw as proper to poetry in a true sense. According to his definitions in “On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age,” realism “is the view which stops with things which are finite” (109 / 419),11 while idealism, in terms clearly reminiscent of the aesthetics traced in the previous chapter, “lets the finite lose itself in the infinite or presents the finite, not for its own sake, but as a vehicle for the presentation of the infinite” (108 / 419). As such, Scribe’s world, governed by merely finite concerns, fails to reveal the metaphysical order that determines the structure of reality and therefore inevitably proves itself essentially unpoetic and unworthy of so frequent repetition (cf. “En Lænke” 177). Toward the end of Heiberg’s life, his objections to Scribe were further elaborated by Peter Ludvig Møller, in the latter’s 1858 prizeessay The New Comedy in France and Denmark. While Heiberg’s and Møller’s polemics in the early 1840s are well known (cf. Borup 3: 49–52), it is in fact clear that the two largely shared aesthetic principles, and their views on Scribe and the French vaudeville can easily be seen as complementary. Like Heiberg, Møller repeatedly condemns contemporary French drama for focusing exclusively on plot and the construction of intrigues at the expense of characters, on the grounds that the latter constitute the source of art’s moral dimension. What Møller regrets, however, is not the absence of psychological verisimilitude in Scribe but, on the contrary, the lack of universal types whose validity is proclaimed as independent and transcendent of the particular times and spaces to which the modern vaudeville is restricted (42–43). For Møller, as for Heiberg, Scribe’s plays constitute a threat to any “noble” conceptions of life because their outcomes are determined not by the “aesthetic” morality of ideals but by the “bourgeois” and “philistine” morality that governs the “practical” life of the present (108). Although Møller admits that in the latter realm it may be beneficial and correct “to break off an amorous affair with a poor lady, whom one loves and who deserves it, in order to marry an unknown girl from a good family” (108–109), such conduct is nevertheless inadmissible on stage, where a higher and absolute morality must be retained. It is the representation of such ideals, which exist in “our interior, although not in our actions” (111), that “constitutes the soul of art and poetry” (109).

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What troubles the idealist sensitivity about the French vaudeville is thus not a lack of one-dimensional “character-types,” of which Scribe’s plays, with their clear allegiance to the melodramatic mode, are in fact full.12 Rather, what Møller condemns in Scribe, is the failure to represent a highest type that can serve as a standard of judgment against which to organize and evaluate all others. Without at least one character that fully embodies the ideal good and thereby “stands unconditionally above the rest” (221), the satire can only be negative and hence falls short of the truly comic (138–139). Significantly, echoing Heiberg’s earlier critique, according to Møller, the cause of this absence of structuring ideals in Scribe lies in the fact that his plays mistakenly restrict themselves to representing the sphere of “capitalists and affluent people” (“Capitalister og velhavende Folk”) (82), “whose characteristic trait,” in terms of moral absolutes, “is to be devoid of character” (91). The conflict between plot and character, finite and infinite, described by Møller and Heiberg, corresponds to what Henning Fenger has pointed to as “the theme upon which all [Heiberg’s] plays are based: the conflict between mindless, bourgeois reality and the poetic world which is the true and real one” (56). But its structure is also akin to the conflict between an anarchic sensibility and a disembodied realm of ideas of reason central to idealist aesthetics, as argued in the previous chapter. Indeed, the identification of the anarchy of the former sphere with the capitalist system of economic exchange is not unique to Heiberg and Møller. Not only does it echo Schiller’s conflation of the Kantian problematic with the events of the French Revolution, but it is deeply ingrained in the republican tradition of political philosophy to which Frederick Beiser has shown that Schiller, Hegel, and the Frühromantiker belong.13 According to J. G. A. Pocock, whom Beiser points to as the source for his own argument (Schiller 125, n.4), this tradition receives its modern formulation with the decline of the medieval world-picture and the emergence of secular time (Pocock 3–49). In the Florentine Renaissance, time in the guise of fortuna makes its appearance as chaotic and irreducible to the conceptual structures of philosophical and theological cognition. More importantly still for our present argument, Pocock demonstrates that the tradition of political theory that emerges from the Renaissance attempt to negotiate this aporia returns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the confrontation with the emergent capitalist system (462–552).14 In this new context, the conceptual function of

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time is imposed on modern commerce, which now becomes the locus of unpredictable anarchy and corruption, precisely the new fatum of Scribe’s plays. The perceived need of the individual to dominate the seemingly ungovernable sphere of economic exchange in modern political thought is thus figured in terms of the conflict between time and cognition, sensibility and understanding, that idealist aesthetics also sought to mediate. I will return to the implications of this conception of the modern capitalist world for Heiberg’s poetics, but what is of immediate importance here is that this contextualization lends support to Terry Eagleton’s identification of the social conflict from which idealist aesthetics arise: Facts are one thing, and values another—which is to say that there is a gap, at once troubling and essential between bourgeois social practice and the ideology of that practice. The distinction between fact and value is here one between actual bourgeois social relations, and the ideal of a community of free rational subjects who treat one another as ends in themselves. You must not derive values from facts, from routine market-place practice, because if you did you would end up with all the most undesirable kinds of value: egoism, aggressiveness, mutual antagonism. (Ideology 82)

Eagleton’s description of the opposition of facts and values recalls Kirmmse’s above-quoted claim about the centrality of the conflict between economic reality and conservative culture in Golden Age Denmark and thereby suggests its particular relevance to Heiberg’s own historical situation.15 Indeed, it is important to note that while Frederik VI began his effective reign with a series of agricultural reforms that spelled the end of the feudal mode of production, he also turned increasingly reactionary in his politics following Andreas Peter Bernstoff’s death in 1797. It was primarily as a consequence of the government’s antiquated political perspective and inadequate diplomatic decisions in the early nineteenth century that England stole the Danish fleet and bombed Copenhagen to pieces. When in 1807 Frederik VI decided to join the Napoleonic alliance in response to the latter disaster, he did so to the great disadvantage of the Danish economy and the bitter objections of its merchant class (cf. Hald et al. 45). This detachment of political decisions from economic realities eventually led to the monumental bankruptcy of the Danish state in 1813 and the loss of its Norwegian colony in 1814. During the following worldwide depression in corn prices and the implementation

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of the Corn Laws in Britain, the Danish economy went into free fall throughout the 1810s, reaching catastrophic depths in the years 1816– 1820. Once one of the most powerful merchant nations in the world, Denmark was in shambles when international corn prices finally stabilized at their lowest point in 1824 and England again eased its Corn Laws in 1828. The conflict between Denmark’s early economic modernization and its belated political reforms during the early years of the nineteenth century in this way marks the breakdown of the precarious balance that sustained the absolutist state in western Europe, as described by Perry Anderson: “For the apparent paradox of Absolutism in Western Europe was that it fundamentally represented an apparatus for the protection of aristocratic property and privileges, yet at the same time the means whereby this protection was promoted could simultaneously ensure the basic interest of the nascent mercantile and manufacturing classes” (40). It was only as the economic crisis made it increasingly clear that Denmark had effectively become dependent on the movements of the new, British-dominated world market that the government was forced to adapt to the situation and gradually liberalize its politics, culminating in Frederik VII’s abolition of the absolute monarchy in 1849. Heiberg’s claim that the “present age” was a time of crisis, in the sense of constituting the moment of transition between the old and the new (“On the Significance” 87 / 383), was anything but a theoretical abstraction. If the events of 1849 can be seen as the culmination of Denmark’s attempts to catch up at the level of values with the repercussions of the peasant reforms of 1788 and the new balance of powers in the West at large, it is clear that Heiberg was far from enthusiastic about this solution to the problems at hand. While Heiberg, too, insisted that the central task of the age was the mediation of finite and infinite, facts and values (98 / 402), he wished to achieve this not by conforming ideals to capitalist reality but, rather, by making the new economic reality conform to the seemingly doomed absolutist ideals. It is no accident, therefore, that Heiberg should end his most important defense of his innovative dramatic form, On the Vaudeville, by extensively aligning himself with and repeatedly quoting from the Danish poet of absolutism par excellence: Ludvig Holberg (Om Vaudevillen 72–111).16 Where the fascination of Scribe’s drama derives from a seemingly exclusive focus on plot construction, Holberg’s charm, on the contrary, stems from his inverse suppression of plot for the sake of

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character.17 In clear contrast to Scribe’s vaudevilles, the sole purpose of action in the tradition of character drama to which Holberg belongs is to provide the occasion for an analysis of personality types that remain static throughout and which are only contingently conditioned by the plot in which they move (cf. Hougaard 68–69). The little dramatic action that does occur in Holberg indeed tends to be securely placed within a fictional frame that assures that all changes in the condition of characters are merely apparent. The very comedy of the plays thus rests on the fact that, contrary to the main characters’ assumption, the world has not changed after all (as is the case, most famously, in Jeppe of the Hill and The Political Tinker, both written in 1722). Given the static nature of Holberg’s world, even these framed changes are accordingly not in the order of the society as such but only in the characters’ relation to that order, as they move up or down a hierarchical ladder that in itself remains untouched. Such bracketed social mobility serves to confirm the stability of the very structure that it seemingly subverts, and the plays’ conclusions unsurprisingly tend to involve a joyful return to the original order of things. Critics have noted that Heiberg draws heavily on Holberg’s character-types for his own plays.18 However, it is clear that his equally strong commitment to the present age, and to Scribe as its author, dictates that a straightforward return to Holberg is impossible, as Heiberg explicitly states (“Tre” 137). Instead, the aim is to “re-plant” (“omplante”) Holberg’s lessons in the present, finite world (138). As we shall see more clearly below, it is on the basis of such a synthesis that Heiberg can claim that the vaudeville, “[b]y in this way making the transient its object, [does not] exclude . . . the permanent on which it rests, but rather presents it with the greater force and energy” (“Om den nuværende” 119). What Heiberg’s conceived assimilation of Holberg into the present age might entail is suggested by his polemic with the influential (though now also largely forgotten) German playwright Friedrich Hebbel. Similar to Møller’s demand for a highest standard of judgment represented within the play, Heiberg’s claim here is that the logic of plot (“Fablen”) must be subordinated to that of character, which, in turn, must be subjected to the teleological order of the “idea” (“Det nyere” 346–347; cf. also 344, 348). Accordingly, although the action of his vaudevilles follows the intricate logic of social and economic interests hindered by mistaken identities, hidden information, and general confusion developed by Scribe, and therein pays tribute to the

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inevitably changed nature of modern society, Heiberg also relies on the function of Holberg’s character-types to order and control those actions. In spite of the rapid and overlapping sequences of events that dominate the plays, Heiberg secures the impossibility of any deeper change in the initial configuration of characters, which remain representatives of fixed moral and psychological categories rather than of the fluid social forces in which they seem to exist. Far from the metamorphoses produced by the desire and ambition of characters in Balzac’s universe, the potential anarchy of events governed only by a practical morality is defused by assuring that all seemingly contingent social movements ultimately reveal themselves to have occurred in accordance with a predetermined, just, and hierarchical system of values that assures that everyone receives his or her due. The danger of a logic of money as an end in itself and disengaged from all other concerns is thereby sublated in a perspective that transforms it into a mere tool for higher goods. Caught in the liminality between capitalism and feudalism during the very years of Heiberg’s breakthrough, the representation of Danish mores in a French plot frames and structures the logic of events constitutive of the new bourgeois world order within a value system distinctly aristocratic in nature. What the aesthetics of idealism provides Heiberg with, then, is the possibility of harmonically reconciling these two worlds and their distinct representational logics in one organic whole.

the tr ansformation of history in T H E DA NE S I N PA R IS The dramatic form at stake in such an aesthetic project can be exemplified by any number of Heiberg’s plays, but The Danes in Paris provides a particularly interesting instance in light of its historical backdrop. The play, one of Heiberg’s lesser-known works, written in 1832, is set in 1816, when Danish troops were briefly stationed in France as part of the occupation by the allied forces following Napoleon’s defeat. This historical occurrence provides the occasion for an otherwise fairly familiar vaudeville plot. The young Juliette is in the town of Bouchain visiting her great-aunt, who also lodges her godchild Ernest, who is in love with Juliette. Juliette, however, has been followed from Paris to Bouchain by her secret lover, Adolf, who is Danish but disguised as a Spaniard, since the great-aunt has such hatred for Danes that the mere knowledge of his nationality would

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make any communication with Juliette impossible. In the course of act 1, we discover that Juliette herself does not know the identity of her father and that he abandoned her and her mother in order to make his fortune at which time he would return. As the love triangle between Ernest, Adolf, and Juliette develops, the Major, who is with the Danish contingent of troops to be stationed in Bouchain, arrives at the great-aunt’s house. Juliette, who has been disguised as a boy in order to protect her from the dreaded Danes, engages in conversation with the Major, who discovers that the beloved wife he left behind in Paris many years ago is seemingly also the mother of this young lad. Unaware that he is in fact confronted with his beloved daughter in disguise, the Major assumes that his wife has been unfaithful to him and explodes in rage, bringing act 1 to a close. Act 2 opens in Paris, where all the characters have relocated. The Major seeks to confront his wife with her treachery, while Adolf reunites with his group of Danish artists and intellectuals who are living a bohemian life of culture in the metropolis. In the climactic final scene of the play, all the misunderstandings are cleared up as the Major discovers that the boy he met in Bouchain is in fact the daughter of his own faithful and beloved wife, and Adolf and Juliette can finally be married with the blessing of her father. As the play ends, all prepare to return to Denmark, where a comfortable inheritance awaits the Major, who is now able to support his family again. It should be clear even from this brief summary that The Danes in Paris, like the plays of Scribe, partakes of the melodramatic tradition and works with a number of its topoi. The very setting of the stage in act 1 makes this allegiance amply clear: A garden outside Madame Jaquelin’s house in Bouchain. In the background, a fence, in the middle of which a gate. Outside, along the fence, runs a road, which leads to the center of the city. Behind the road is a view onto a rural meadow. To the left (of the audience), in the foreground, lies the house; above the door, a canopy. In the middle of the garden, also in the foreground, a large chestnut, under which a table and bench. (De danske I. i. 229)19

As Peter Brooks has pointed out, Remarkably prevalent [in melodrama] is the setting of the enclosed garden, the space of innocence, surrounded by walls, very often presenting at stage rear a locked grille looking out on the surrounding countryside or onto the highroad leading from the city. Down this road, into this space, a villain, the troubler of innocence will come to

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Heiberg’s stage directions for act 1 fit this description perfectly, and as in Brooks’s characterization, the tranquility of the opening scenes will eventually be disturbed by way of the road leading from city to garden, when Ernest brings news of the Danes’ imminent arrival (De danske I. vi. 247) and the Major himself subsequently appears down this same path (I. viii. 250). These similarities at the level of scenography, moreover, find their thematic counterparts as well. Brooks again fruitfully summarizes the conventions of melodrama in the following terms: [T]he play typically opens with a presentation of virtue and innocence, or perhaps more accurately virtue as innocence. We see this virtue, momentarily, in a state of taking pleasure in itself, aided by those who recognize and support it. . . . So that, in distinction to tragedy, we do not begin at the point of crisis, the moment at which . . . the tragic mechanism ineluctably goes into action. Yet, typically, the first exchanges of the play, or even the title . . . suggest mysteries or ambiguities hovering over the world, enigmas unresolved. And there swiftly supervenes a threat to virtue, a situation—and most often a person—to cast its very survival into question, obscure its identity, and elicit the process of its fight for recognition. (Melodramatic 29)

Again Heiberg borrows heavily from these conventions, as the play begins with a literal viewing and celebration of virtue, as both Adolf and Ernest take pleasure in gazing at Juliette and compete in praising her beauty (De danske I. i. 229–235). In spite of the two men’s rivalry, there is a distinct sense of the harmony of the opening setting, which finds explicit formulation in the final verse of the opening song, sung in unison by all three: How the weather is beautiful and the sky blue! So freely can one breathe here. How delightful it is to walk in the shadow Of high chestnuts! They sway with familiar bows, In reply to the heart’s secret sigh, And hold the arm of blessing Over the wish in our bosom. Hvor Veiret er smukt og Himlen blaa! Saa frit kan man aande her. Hvor lifligt det er, i Skyggen at gaae

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Af høie Kastanietræer! De vifte med fortrolige Buk, Til Svar paa Hjertets lønlige Suk, Og over Ønsket i vor Barm De holde Velsignelsens Arm. (I. i. 231)

As in Brooks’s description of melodrama, however, the harmonic opening is soon challenged as the correspondence of nature and emotions, of outer and inner realms, celebrated in the song is questioned by the revelation that neither Ernest nor Adolf really knows Juliette very well (I. i. 233). Moreover, while this initial mystification is due merely to a contingent circumstance, the amount of time spent by either with Juliette, the ambiguity underlying the heroine rapidly shows itself to have a further, intrinsic cause. In scene 3, Juliette responds to Adolf’s inquiries by telling him that she cannot reveal the identity of her father out of filial duty, since the latter has decided not to return to France until he has recovered from bankruptcy and again is able to provide adequately for his wife and daughter (I. i. 237–238). There is in this way an inevitable opaqueness in Juliette’s character, which prevents her from obtaining the kind of self-transparency proper to idealist conceptions of virtue, insofar as the full revelation of her identity is prevented. Further, since the impossibility of revealing her father’s identity is what prevents the proclamation of her and Adolf’s love to the world (I. i. 237), the initial mystification takes on the form of an “immoral” situation as defined by Heiberg and discussed above: the subjection of the absolute value of love to the relative duty toward the parents’ bourgeois economic concerns. That the decision of Juliette’s parents to condition the realization of their love through economic circumstances implies such a corruption of a supposedly absolute value is clear from Juliette’s mother’s later figuration of her relation to her husband in strictly monetary terms. As she puts it, “I have a claim on a man in Denmark; perhaps the Major could tell me how soon I can expect it to be paid” (II. ii. 273). The consequences of these economic conditions are not, however, restricted to the particular problem of Juliette’s relationship to Adolf. On the contrary, as in Scribe, money reveals itself to be the principal determinant of all aspects of the plot. In a symmetry that serves to cement the force and pervasiveness of such conditions, we are told that both of Juliette’s parents had to keep the identity of their respective spouse secret under threat of losing the inheritance of the mother’s aunt and the father’s uncle (I. iii. 237–238; I. xi. 257). While the

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father lost his personal fortune in financial speculations (I. xii. 257), which led him to leave France and move to Denmark, the mother’s funds gradually ran out while she was staying in Paris (I. iii. 238). The former accordingly joined the army in order to work his way back into a respectable social position (I. xii. 257), while the latter likewise eventually joined the world of labor by opening a clothing store in order to survive (I. iii. 238). These economically motivated decisions in turn provide the immediate circumstances of the play: the mother’s store becomes the locus of Juliette and Adolf’s encounter and their subsequent love (I. iii. 236), while the father’s position in the military is the reason he is sent to France with the Danish troops in 1816, making possible his reunion with his wife and child (I. xii. 257). Moreover, it is the decision of Juliette’s great-aunt to include her in her will in spite of everything that is the cause of Juliette’s coming to Bouchain (I. iii. 236), with which the play opens. Likewise, the return to Denmark, with which the play concludes, is motivated by the father’s need to claim the inheritance left him by his suddenly deceased uncle.20 The framing of all action in terms of economic conditions is so pervasive in The Danes in Paris that it calls to mind Arvin’s previously quoted description of the function of money in Scribe as a kind of Greek fatum. And indeed, significantly, when summarizing the economically determined movements of his life, the Major himself cannot help but exclaim, “How strangely does fate play with us humans!” (I. xii. 257). That this is fate in the sense of an incalculable and anarchic fortuna is also stressed both by the play’s repeated need to summarize its own plot (e.g., I. iii. 237–238; I. xii. 257–258) and by the characters’ recurrent comments on the difficulty of penetrating the logic of events (e.g., I. xiii. 259; II. i. 272). Later in the play, the poet Schönemann in turn suggests what it is about the nature of modern economic exchange that makes its determination of occurrences so seemingly random when he ironically reproaches Adolf for not abiding by the law that “if you make new debt, [you ought to] use it to pay off the old” (II. vi. 282–283). The logic of an immanent sphere of capital accumulation is here presented as that of the addition of one qualitatively identical entity to another, in a potentially infinite process— something Heiberg, with his eternal financial difficulties, understood only too well. 21 The problem with an economically motivated plot à la Scribe, from this perspective, is that it does not provide a teleological development that would make it possible to determine when any given sequence of events has reached its appropriate and necessary

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end. Rather, any cessation of action is merely an arbitrary imposition that can easily be overturned and converted into a new beginning for further, similar series. Merely as moments in the movements of blind fate, the Major’s arrival in France and his subsequent return to Denmark do not contain any intrinsic qualities that can distinguish them as final and determinate in a process begun at a specific point in time and cannot, consequently, serve to expiate the original immorality underlying their condition. Rather, as Heiberg clearly holds, to have life be determined by blind fate is as immoral as to subject the absolute to relative concerns (“Om Syngspillet” 144) and therefore merely represents, as the generation of money for money invoked by Schönemann, the addition of same to same. The structure of a plot determined by solely finite concerns thus comes to resemble the bad infinity of the merely negatively determined sensibility that underlies Maimon’s critique of Kant, discussed in the previous chapter. Heiberg describes this structure in his aptly titled essay “A Few Words on the Infinite.” As Jon Stewart has recently explained, Heiberg there presents the bad infinity as “the notion of simply adding one over and over. This concept of infinity is never an organic whole since it is always a collection of entities or units indifferent to one another. For an organic concept to exist the individual units must fit together in some necessary way so that they can form a whole” (History 1: 319). The equation of the capitalist logic of accumulation with this structure of the bad infinity is congenial to the Republican tradition of political philosophy in post-Kantian thought mentioned earlier. In fact, it finds a predecessor in Schelling, who figures the infinite deferral of meaning proper to a merely negatively determined nature in similar terms. Offering a description of the bad infinity, Schelling writes: The single link in a chain has a value, but it has it through another, which again has it through another, and so on to infinity; the value of each link is accordingly conditioned through an infinite sequence, which itself is preposterous and which will never be actualized, and each link therefore only means something because one is certain that it will never be necessary to realize the value of the whole, or be possible to reach the final link, at which point the entirety of the supposed science would dissolve itself into a complete nothing.

In a footnote, Schelling proceeds to elucidate this structure through an economic analogy that is directly echoed by Heiberg’s Schönemann: “Like the English state debt. Continual borrowing from a

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second, in order to pay the first, from a third, in order to pay the second” (quoted in Frank, Einführung 242–243). If the impossibility of unifying entities in an organically structured whole that characterizes the bad infinity is in this way intrinsic to the economic order conditioning the events of the play, then this suggests that the interpretative opacity found in Juliette’s character is not restricted to her alone but rather grounded in a general epistemological crisis. That this is indeed the case is supported by the fact that the initial mystification of Juliette’s identity, the lack of familiarity with her that both Ernest and Adolf expose (De danske I. i. 233), is framed by a more encompassing discussion on the very nature and possibility of mimesis as such (I. i. 232–235). Nor is the play’s concern with the problematic relation between representation and object, sign and referent, restricted to these prominent opening passages. On the contrary, with the appearance of Juliette’s great-aunt in scene 4, for example, the same ambiguity continues to pervade the entire concomitant discussion (I. vi. 240–243), in which every character offers a mediated representation of Denmark (in terms of Cossacks, Great Danes, the account by Madame Jaqueline’s husband, Adolf’s account, Adolf’s paintings, Ernest’s geography books), the validity of which is not determinable and thus continually open to challenge. Even Adolf’s own account of his fellow Danes, which ought to be unmediated and true given that he himself is Danish and accordingly does not rely on secondhand information, is revealed to be merely a further representation of dubious value when he contradicts his own repeated assurances in two asides (I. vi. 248; I. vii. 250). This distance between sign and referent that obscures all meaning is drawn upon even further in the repeated, comic confusions generated by the servant Mikkel in his attempts to navigate in a country whose language he does not speak (I. 9. 255–256; II. iv. 277–279). And again, in Juliette’s first undisguised encounter with the Major, she even rejects the latter’s statements as a false representation of himself when they do not correspond to what she knows from his letters (II. ii. 275–276). Examples such as these can easily be multiplied and suggest that the epistemological condition of semiotic opaqueness that initially seemed restricted to Juliette is indeed general in nature, imbuing the world of facts at large with a pervasive uninterpretability that corresponds to and matches the randomness of the play’s plot. Similarly, on a moral level, and in a direct inversion of the opening song’s celebration of the harmonic correspondence of inner and outer, it is not

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only the recognition of Juliette’s virtue that is prevented. On the contrary, the play shows itself to generate an increasing proliferation of masking and deceit that lays bare a pervasive corruption of the realm of values: besides the deception of their aunt and uncle by Madame Jean-Brun and her husband respectively, we also find Adolf’s disguise as a Spaniard and deception of Ernest and Madame Jaqueline (I. i. 233), Juliette’s deception of Ernest (I. iii. 236), Juliette’s disguise as a boy and deception of the Major (I. vi. 248ff.), the Major’s disguise as a friend of himself and deception of Juliette (II. ii. 275), and Adolf’s deception of his friends in order to borrow their money (II. vi. 283). This corruption of morality through its contamination by a logic of accumulation similar to that prevalent at the level of plot is also visible in Adolf’s description of Juliette’s moral consciousness: “But do not forget that the moment you would get rid of this reproach, you would immediately get a new one; and I hope that your consciousness would not feel any less troubled by the new one than by the old” (I. iii. 235). Juliette herself goes on to place the immediate cause of this condition of a potentially infinite accumulation of guilt toward Ernest in her pursuit of her great-aunt’s inheritance (I. iii. 236), while the larger reason lies in her having to lead Ernest on, since she cannot reveal her engagement to Adolf. The latter, of course, is again conditioned by economic factors, insofar as it depends on her father’s recovery of his fortune and return to France (I. iii. 238). The consequences of the confusion and opaqueness at the three levels of the play emphasized here—action (facts), interpretation (epistemology), and deceit (morality)—are climactically brought to the fore in the encounter between Juliette and the Major at the end of act 1. It is, crucially, by following the logic of temporality, of plotting one moment in time after another, that the Major takes his disguised daughter to be his wife’s bastard son (I. xiv. 263). The play’s central intrigue thus brings together the characteristics of each of its corrupted levels in a single moment of judgment that generates a destructive misunderstanding as its inevitable outcome. The pervasiveness of the conditions that ground this outcome invite the suggestion that the play frames Juliette’s particular immorality in an intersubjective condition of evil, the very extent of which one might be tempted to see as historical in nature. Indeed, from this perspective, the setting of the play, the occupation of Bouchain by Danish troops in 1816, which critics unanimously dismiss as a minor detail, 22 takes on particular interest as a possible final ground for

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the various manifestations of the illegibility of the world enacted by the play. The historical event, after all, far from being “devoid of interest,” as Julius Clausen has it (149), constitutes the culmination of the already mentioned conflict between Denmark’s political and economic spheres. It was as part of the peace treaty at Kiel in 1814, in which Denmark lost Norway and other territorial holdings, that Frederik VI, until then Napoleon’s last ally, was forced to break with the latter and send troops to France. Insofar as the action of the play is directly made possible by these circumstances, the need to overcome the confusions generated by them and to reestablish the moral order of the world also partakes of an attempt to sublate this crisis of the present age. The historical context of the conflicts laid bare in act 1 is again emphasized at its close, in the march of the Danish soldiers across the stage (De danske, I. xix. 269–270). The opening of act 2 accordingly presents a deliberately stark contrast, as the setting shifts from Bouchain, with its ineluctable memories of war, defeat, and bankruptcy for Denmark, to the world of culture that is Paris. The latter entails a series of crucial inversions of the conditions central to the world encountered in act 1. Where transparency of character and economic concerns were sharply opposed in the first act, as exemplified most prominently in Juliette’s inability to name her own origin, the two suddenly appear commensurable in the second. The character Meingau in this way admonishes his companions that until now none of them have truly known Adolf, because only today has his character been revealed in his willingness to lend his friend three hundred francs (II. vi. 281). In sharp contrast to Juliette’s condition, money here presents itself not as an obstacle to the recognition of character but, rather, as its medium. Moreover, the semiotic relationship between the two even takes on a positive, symbolic dimension 23 when we are suddenly told that Adolf’s last name is Heller, and Schönemann, lest we miss the point, reminds us that the latter is also the name of a German coin (II. vi. 281–281). If Adolf’s relation to money is different, this is due to the fact that the source involved has changed. Adolf’s income, we are told repeatedly, unlike previous sources of money in the play, stems not from speculation, debt, or inheritance, nor from his participation in the labor force, but from the stipend he has received from “the foundation ad usus publicos” (II. 6. 284). The latter, being a reward from the king for special services to the state or in support of the arts, 24 is

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significantly presented as independent of the logic of an accumulation of capital that seeks to generate an addition of qualitatively identical units and in direct opposition to Schönemann’s principle of the generation of debt for debt (II. vi. 282–283). Rather, in the terms of the collective choral celebration of the foundation ad usus publicos in scene 8, the stipend constitutes an exchange between the two radically distinct entities of money for “honor” (“Hæder”) rather than money for money: Yes, let us all toast To Usus publicos! Its money was much needed; From us it receives honor. Ja lad os Alle tømme vore Glas For Usus publicos! Dens Penge kom tilpas; Den Hæder faaer af os. (II. viii. 294)

The distribution of money by the foundation ad usus publicos is dictated by the merit of its recipient rather than by the internal aims and mechanisms of an autonomous system that in its very self-sufficiency is comparable to the movements of a blind fatum. It is therefore anything but ironic that Adolf should make use of his stipend to pursue Juliette rather than to support the proposed study for which such rewards were usually granted, since honor, as an absolute value, is a category abstract enough to also encompass true love. There is thus an important inversion of the situation of Juliette’s parents at stake in this scenario, insofar as Adolf does not subject love to the vagaries of economic forces but, rather, is able to subject economic forces to the demands of love. Irrespective of the historical veracity of this view of the foundation ad usus publicos, it presents Heiberg’s attempt, as we shall also see at greater length toward the end of this chapter, to conceive of the financial market as subject to the rules governing the realm of values, rather than vice versa. As such, the dangers of action determined by a pursuit of money disengaged from all other concerns are replaced by action that makes use of money merely as a tool for higher goods. The symbolic form of representation encountered in Adolf’s sudden appearance as money incarnate in scene 6 significantly continues in the song contest in scene 8, in which the respective superiority of Paris or Copenhagen is put on trial. In that scene, the Major, as a representative of the world of act 1, is still presented as semiotically opaque

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and incomprehensible. As Adolf tells Schönemann immediately before the contest begins, “Yes, that is in truth a strange man; I cannot figure him out. Already in Bouchain he baffled me with his incomprehensible moods” (II. viii. 288). The characters of the Danish artists and intellectuals that belong to the Parisian world of act 2, in contrast, are fully transparent and determined by their social function. Far from the deceitful masking encountered earlier, each here is wholly what his job description claims and can accordingly be assigned his part in the ordered microcosmos of the song without difficulty: Adolf:

Yes, Hammer prefers Paris, Schönemann Copenhagen.

The Major: I find that to be in its proper place: a doctor can practice anywhere in the world; he must therefore be cosmopolitan; but a poet is dependent on language; he must therefore be a patriot. Adolf:

Indeed, that is a most suiting explanation. It seems to me that we can now begin our feud where last we left it with double interest, and that the cosmopolitan doctor and the patriotic poet now, in the presence of witnesses, should conduct their trial about Paris and Copenhagen, and which of the two cities should be considered superior.

Meingau:

Witnesses? Trial? This belongs to my trade.

Adolf:

Quite right! Then you, as jurist, can be judge in the case.

Meingau:

That now only depends on which parts the other gentlemen would please to take on during the trial.

Falbinger: I for my part will join the choir, in order to conduct it. Hammer:

Most suited! A musician does not need to make his voice heard; he is allowed to remain silent.

Falbinger: That is true, but I request the assistance from theology; there is something of the deacon in him, he belongs to the choir. Bernerup: I accept at once. Adolf:

No abuse of the choir, for I myself intend to join it.

Meingau:

And you, Major? Which side do you take?

The Major: With your permission, I will represent the audience. [Sits down on the chair by the furthermost table to the left.] Adolf:

Everyone is free to do as he wishes. (II. viii. 288–289)

Adolf’s final comment threatens to become ironic, given the static predetermination that governs the distribution of roles to each of the characters. More importantly, however, the fact that the Major is explicitly excluded from this self-transparent universe through his function of a mere observer is crucial in that it signals that the play’s central problem has become the unification of the two opposed worlds of act

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1 and act 2, with their respective Scribean and Holbergian structures. Insofar as the purpose of the idealist aesthetics underlying Heiberg’s project is the harmonization of such opposites through the revelation of their hidden identity, the play must somehow manage to subsume and contain the world of act 1 in that of act 2. The means for doing so lie once more with the problem of Juliette’s identity. Where the world of act 1 culminates in the obfuscation of her character in the final sequence with the Major, act 2 ends by establishing its transparency in a repetition of the same encounter. If the Major in act 1 fatally judged his daughter to be something different and other than herself by following the logic of chronological time, of the sequential relation of moments in the past, he here perceives two distinct appearances—the boy in act 1, scene 14, and the girl in act 2, scene 10—to be identical through the opposed logic of the present’s simultaneity. Significantly, while the former judgment was based on the principle of plot, the latter is grounded on that of verse, insofar as it is Juliette’s repetition of the opening lines of her song from their previous encounter that convinces the Major that she is in fact the same: Juliette: O how much I would like to see Zealand’s high birch grove From where longing looks Are sent across The Sound! Juliette: O hvor gjerne saae jeg ikke Sjællands høje Bøgelund Hvorfra længselsfulde Blikke Sendes over Øresund! (II. x. 297; repeating I. xiv. 260)

The a-b-a-b pattern of the verse is itself engaged in a rhyme on its previous appearance in act 1, and since rhyme always involves a principle of simultaneity in its dependence on the coexistence of two distinct moments in time, it contains, for Heiberg, an ideality opposed to the purely finite world. As he puts it in his famous review of Oehlenschläger’s play Dina: “Verse, on the other hand, which is already in itself an idealism and raised above prose, is at once raised above such prosaic concerns. In its universal rhythm, the differences of time and space, as well as multifarious other differences, are absorbed” (“Oehlenschlägers” 376). The poetic function of verse serves to lay bare the underlying identity of seemingly disparate terms.

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Only through this relation of two different moments to a common ideal ground located in Juliette’s character can the Major at last understand the song’s meaning, along with the world’s true state of affairs (De danske II. x. 298). The confusion that seemed intrinsic to the structure of history in this way reveals itself as merely a matter of mistaken perception, grounded in a moral flaw that sought to make the finite world absolute. As such, however, it is in itself remediable, and by changing the epistemological model, the confusions at the level of fact and morality also reveal themselves as insubstantial. The semiotic transparency provided in the unmasking of Juliette thus also proceeds to affect the earlier confusions concerning the nature of Denmark and its inhabitants, as first Ernest and then Madame Jaqueline accept that they were wrong (II. x. 298; II. xi. 299). And even the Major’s earlier invocation of blind fate is reversed as he perceives the governance of “divine providence” (“Himlens Styrelse”) in all the play’s events (II. xi. 299). As Heiberg had demanded in his polemic with Hebbel (“Det nyere” 346–347), referred to above, the play’s plot—which depends, as do all plots, on the succession of different moments in time—is here subjected to the unity of Juliette’s identity, which in turn grounds the necessary order of artists and intellectuals in Paris through her marriage to Adolf. The mistakes of the past are exorcised by the innocence and virtue of the present, and the crisis of history itself becomes part of a necessary whole. This prevalence of an epistemology of identity and its capacity to unify opposed worlds by means of the power of verse are further stressed in the combination of French and Danish in several of the songs in act 2. In each instance, two linguistically distinct registers are harmoniously combined through their identity at a purely phonic level (II. vi. 285–286; II. viii. 290–294). 25 Most interestingly, perhaps, this same principle repeats itself in the Major’s “Danish song to a French melody” (II. viii. 294), 26 in which not only the geographically distinct regions of France and Denmark are unified but also the historical difference between Denmark’s past glory and its present state is melodiously canceled (II. viii. 294–296, esp. verses 2 and 3). The effect of passages such as these, and, by extension, of the play at large, depends on the simultaneous perception of difference and identity, on the distance between the terms combined and the flawlessness of their combination. The reinscription of history in values, of the world of Scribe in that of Holberg, which the play enacts through Juliette, is not a blind suppression of the former terms by the latter. Rather, in

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the sense of “On the Significance of Philosophy in the Present Age,” it is a transformation of the difference of finitude into the identity of ideality that depends on the distinct nature of each for its full effect.

the vaudeville and the politics of compromise This reading of the text-immanent dynamics of one of Heiberg’s vaudevilles makes possible a further reconsideration of their intended function in their external, sociohistorical context. In his 1826 manifesto on the vaudeville, Heiberg famously describes the overwhelming success of his works in the following terms:27 I combined the vaudeville’s artistic form with [our] locality, and had the pleasure to see that my attempts won general applause, and that they, which is the main issue here, obtained a popularity which perhaps had not been granted any play since the time of Holberg. My first vaudeville, which, as ought to be the case, was the most popular, pleased not only the court and high circles, but was sung even on street-corners and in cellars, and provided the theater’s box office with an income even from the class which never or rarely goes to see comedies. At the same time, a large amount of cultured people, who had for years distanced themselves from the theater and its interests, were seduced by this play to return, and when they had seen it once, they wanted to see it again . . . to the benefit not only of the [theater’s] box office, but also to its honor. (Om Vaudevillen 71; my emphases)

According to Heiberg, this overwhelming success was the effect of a long-contemplated and well-executed “plan” (70–71). Henning Fenger has been generous enough to take this claim at face value, stating, “There is no better example in the history of Danish theatre of a calculated dramatic campaign based on a conscious esthetic program” (80–81). It is likely, however, that Heiberg’s success must instead be understood in the context of the above-mentioned stabilization of corn prices in 1824, which made possible a renewed investment in cultural activities. 28 That Heiberg himself was dimly aware of this is visible in the fact that his description clearly frames the vaudevilles’ success in terms of their suitability as a modern commodity, able to transcend the traditional divides of feudal society and appeal equally to all estates. If the vaudeville is a national art form, as Heiberg insists that it is, this is not because it makes use of a common cultural heritage, the way Oehlenschläger’s plays do, but because it establishes a single unified market, which is the very precondition for the emergence of capitalism.

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More interestingly still, Heiberg’s description of the vaudeville as a combination of artistic form with local content offers a textbook example of the workings of the modern international literary market as theorized by Franco Moretti. According to Moretti, the evolution of a literary form dictates that as soon as a “satisfying” paradigm has been found, all other models are gradually phased out (Atlas 190–191). With the rise of the novel, which accompanies the rise and consolidation of the capitalist world-system, such a model is generated by a distinct cultural and economic center, constituted by Britain and France, and is then imitated at the peripheries (185–187). Moretti frames the particular terms of such assimilation in a way that clearly resembles Heiberg’s description above: “The form comes from the center, and remains unchanging; while details are left free to vary from place to place. . . . On the one hand, the solidity of symbolic hegemony (one unchanging form spreading across the globe); on the other, its flexibility (details, that change with each different place, make the form recognizable and appealing to each national audience)” (193). Although Moretti focuses specifically on the novel, it will be apparent that his claim can be applied to Scribe’s vaudevilles, which likewise exported a model formulated at the core of the modern worldsystem to the cultural peripheries. As such, far from being the result of careful deductions in the eternal realm of aesthetic principles, as Heiberg liked to claim, the combination of Scribe and Holberg, of international artistic form with local, Danish content, can be seen to constitute a necessary compromise between core and periphery typical of the modern system described by Moretti. As the latter further puts it: “In the case of the less powerful literatures (which means: almost all literatures, inside and outside Europe)—in the case of these less powerful cultures, the success of the Anglo-French model on the international market implies an endless series of compromise formations; and fragile, unstable formations: impossible programs, failures, and all the rest” (194–195). What this also suggests is that Heiberg’s attempt to retain and contain the workings of the capitalist world-system within his plays is matched by similar effort outside of them. After all, insofar as his imposing authority in the nineteenth-century tribunal of aesthetic values rests on the exploitation of a modern literary market in Denmark, it is clear that an outright rejection of it would have been infeasible. Instead, to Heiberg, the power discovered in the wide public

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appeal of his works must be carefully controlled so as not to lead to a displacement of concerns of taste by those of financial profit (Om Vaudevillen 61). While the latter cannot be ignored insofar as the artist must obey the needs of his audience if he or she is not to become irrelevant, these needs must be made to merge with the demands of beauty in order to assist the public toward the recognition of the universal and objective ideals of truth, virtue, and justice embodied in all proper art (40, 66–67). Coherent with his idealist program, Heiberg clearly assumes that the demands of economic facts and those of aesthetic values are ultimately always compatible. Indeed, as he stresses repeatedly, it would be bad economic sense to ignore the requirements of taste, since the audience has an “unconscious demand to progress in the cognition of the beautiful” (“Om Theatret” 203), which the theater must merely know how to exploit. As Heiberg puts it at a further point: “Many attempts might fail, but at last poets, actors and audience would abide by the management’s demands, not for the sake of the management itself, but because its demands are saturated by true, objective reason, which is irresistible” (195). To Heiberg, accordingly, the greatest threat to the political and moral establishment that the theater represents does not derive from the economic system itself, on which, after all, the theater depends and from which it obtains its role as a national institution. Rather, as suggested in the above analysis of The Danes in Paris, instead of seeing the market as the determinant of taste, Heiberg insists that taste regulates the market and that the detrimental consumption of immoral plays results from a confusion of aesthetic values that precedes it. Unlike the foundation ad usus publicos celebrated in his play, the literary market offers no guarantee that traditional values will receive their adequate reward. The particular function of the vaudevilles therefore resides in their hoped-for ability to educate their audiences into a specific relation to the modern world that retains the feudal values that it threatens to dislodge. It is specifically this function of historical reconciliation between capitalism and feudalism that Ibsen will reject in Peer Gynt. Heiberg’s plays thus serve the same function as his lifelong virulent polemics against almost every figure of note, insofar as both delineate the difference between false and correct taste in order to safeguard the higher values of society from the potentially subversive force of its new economic foundation. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Heiberg ends up insisting that “the people’s taste can no longer be considered as

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separate from its morality and its political education; . . . the theater is, in our times and in large, populous cities, as important an object for the government’s attention as the educational system” (“Om Theatret” 182). 29 While unquestionably depending on the possibilities provided by the new international and domestic markets, Heiberg advocates anything but a laissez-faire approach. As within the plays, so outside them: the forces of history must be simultaneously exploited and contained.30

If Heiberg’s project was doomed to failure, as Kirmmse suggests, this is accordingly not due to the historical naïveté or political apathy usually ascribed to him. In a sense, indeed, it is because Heiberg was too conscious of the forces and dangers of modernity, too concerned with domesticating them and showing their continuing familiarity, that his particular compromise eventually became obsolete once the crisis of modernity seemed irrevocable. But this same historical situatedness of Heiberg’s work also makes it possible to offer a further hypothesis concerning the influence of the aesthetics of idealism more generally. If Heiberg managed to achieve such lasting success, this is arguably not only because his is a particularly accomplished instance of compromise and reconciliation between opposed principles but also because it comes at a particular point in history that is especially receptive to it. Where Moretti possibly goes wrong, in other words, is in his desire to raise to the status of “a law of literary evolution” (“Conjectures” 152) what is a historically specific aesthetic paradigm, which gains wide European currency at a specific historical moment, the early half of the nineteenth century, even, arguably, more so with one specific genre than with others: the novel, Moretti’s particular area of expertise. It is interesting, therefore, that Paul Schroeder, in a different context, has argued that precisely this same period witnessed a structural transformation of European politics along the lines that Moretti attributes to the aesthetics of the novel. Following the crisis of European politics that accompanied the wars of the French Revolution, the Congress of Vienna saw a shift in the principles governing international relations from those aiming at a balance of power to those seeking a state of equilibrium and compromise. In the former, international politics is conceived as a zero-sum game in which every player’s gain must be accompanied by someone else’s loss and the only way to

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remain even is to enter coalitions that will make an opponent’s move yield an equivalent advantage to counteract it (6–10). While war is intrinsic to the workings of the system in balance-of-power relations, the politics of compromise that came to replace it after 1814 seeks to avoid any direct confrontation by subjecting all powers equally to rules and laws designed to secure an international equilibrium that subordinates the interests of the individual state to the demands of the system as a whole. As Schroeder points out, the transformation from the former to the latter system was particularly necessary for the smaller states in Europe, such as Denmark, whose very survival in the balance-ofpower system became increasingly difficult throughout the eighteenth century (9–10). Up until its breakdown in 1814, Denmark’s foreign politics had in fact been dictated by the assumption that warfare among the major European states was to the advantage of its merchant fleet, thereby making its wealth dependent on remaining neutral during the struggles for balance of power. As Ove Høgh-Gulberg, head of the government until 1784, put it, Denmark’s economy could rest assured that international wars of 6.8 years duration would ravage Europe every 6.8 years in the course of a century (Vibæk and Brønsted 102). Yet as the nature of those wars changed and their scope increased in the postrevolutionary period, it was this same principle of economically motivated neutrality that ultimately made England destroy Copenhagen and force Denmark into war. The crisis between political and economic forces that led to Denmark’s collapse during the reign of Frederik VI was thus not simply (or at least not only) a result of bad political leadership but systemic in nature: the consequence of balance-of-power politics taken to their logical conclusion. The possibility of Denmark’s economic and political survival in the new world order of the nineteenth century was directly predicated on the transformation from a politics of conflict to a politics of compromise. What matters in this context is simply that such a shift “in the field of ideas, collective mentalities, and outlooks” (Schroeder viii), while not having to amount to the notion of an all-pervasive Zeitgeist, can be seen to provide the context in which one aesthetic model among untold many finds particularly congenial grounds for its increasing application and consumption. It thus also becomes possible to conjecture that when this period of political and cultural compromise came to an end (around the late 1840s, according to Schroeder [797–803]),

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the effect in the sphere of aesthetics, to the extent that the previous paradigm should then be considered insufficient, would most likely be one of two possibilities. Either the experience of conflict and crisis, returned to the forefront of political and cultural consciousness, would have to be accommodated within the paradigm of idealist aesthetics that had already established itself as the dominant form, thus giving rise to the modernist aesthetics of autonomy that is said to deploy formal and thematic fragmentation within a larger, organic whole, or this same experience would require a different aesthetics altogether, one that does not make the principles of identity and reconciliation the foundation of its project. Such new aesthetic paradigms could either be invented for the first time at this point or be retrieved from their displacement to the cultural periphery during the reign of idealism in the previous decades. The following chapters turn to the examination of this latter possibility.

chapter three

Aesthetics of Fragmentation in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt

This chapter traces Henrik Ibsen’s transition from an adherence to the principles of idealism in his early works to his rejection of the same in Peer Gynt. Its central purpose is thus twofold. On the one hand, it examines the sociohistorical critique of idealism entailed by Ibsen’s rupture with its aesthetic principles. On the other, it shows how that rupture leaves Ibsen’s text with a conflicting relationship between its constitutive principles that is fully resolved only in his subsequent turn to an aesthetics of dependency. In the terms of the discussion in chapter 1, the structure of Peer Gynt establishes the elements that constitute the content of an aesthetic judgment without yet having provided its modality. The latter aspect, the incorporation of a transcendent absolute that secures the productive relation between parts within the text through a relation of dependency to a point outside it, does not become a feature of Ibsen’s aesthetics until A Doll’s House (examined in chapter 4). The argument of this chapter proceeds in three steps. First, I explore Ibsen’s initial allegiance to idealism through his early play St. John’s Night. Second, the focus of the present chapter, I proceed to trace how Peer Gynt rejects this paradigm and redefines the structure of modern experience. Whereas the canonical reading of Peer Gynt would place that text squarely in the tradition of idealist aesthetics, I show that it in fact constitutes a direct challenge to Heiberg’s mediation of the forces of modernity, discussed in chapter 2. Instead of the struggle between opposed moral alternatives, which, traditionally, the text has been assumed to deal with, Peer Gynt stages a conflict 87

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between the system of morality as such and the new emergent capitalist world order, which no longer holds a place for it. This conflict manifests itself in the dialectical relation of two distinct literary modes within the text: that of allegory, which will be analyzed in the context of Karl Marx’s theory of exchange-value, and that of the fairy tale, which will be shown to pertain to an older, feudal worldview present in the dramatic poem. Third, I conclude the chapter by suggesting how the unresolved tension between these two representational principles in Peer Gynt might be seen to relate to the evolution of European Modernism more generally. From this perspective, the ambiguous ending of Ibsen’s dramatic poem arguably introduces a new structural principle of linear temporality that effectively rejects the primacy of aesthetic reconciliation. Peer Gynt in this way holds a central position in the evolution of European literature, as the point of transition to an aesthetic praxis distinct from that of idealism.

It might be noted that to read Ibsen in light of Kierkegaard, as I propose to do in the course of the next two chapters, is to move along a well-trodden path. As early as the 1860s, leading intellectual figures in Scandinavia, such as M. J. Monrad, F. Helveg, Georg Brandes, and Clemens Petersen, were drawing a link between the two authors. Since then, proclaiming the “meaning” of Ibsen’s texts in terms of Kierkegaard’s philosophy has been a recurring exercise, which would seem to find its way into a majority of Ibsen scholarship in one brief form or another. A more extensive comparison was undertaken for the first time as early as 1928, in Werner Möhring’s book-length study, which reads Ibsen’s concern with the conflict between reality and ideality in light of Kierkegaard’s three stages of existence and categorizes Ibsen’s oeuvre in their terms: the early aesthetic works (from the 1847 poems until Love’s Comedy), the following brief ethical period (partially Love’s Comedy and wholly The Pretenders), and the religious Brand and Peer Gynt. Möhring sees everything Ibsen wrote after the latter works as a strong reaction against what he takes to be Kierkegaard’s pietistic philosophy, which Ibsen is supposedly unable to overcome fully. More recently, Henrik Bandak’s study Syndefaldet—tænkning og eksistens has continued this tradition, reading Ibsen as a secularized version of Kierkegaard, who essentially substituted the latter’s religious categories for what Bandak takes to be their psychological and naturalistic equivalents. Similarly, Bruce Shapiro reads Ibsen’s

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Peer Gynt as a grand dramatic version of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, which he claims provides the code that can finally decipher the riddle of Ibsen’s text. Such approaches suffer from two serious shortcomings. First, their plausibility frequently depends on the assumption that Ibsen had a degree of familiarity with Kierkegaard’s individual works that seems highly unlikely given the historical data. Unquestionably, and even though Ibsen himself vigorously denied ever having been influenced by Kierkegaard,1 it is fairly clear that he read several of the Dane’s works during his years as an apothecary’s apprentice in Grimstad (1844–1850) and again during his time as a student in Kristiania (1850–1851) (Meyer 35, 39, 64). Equally important, two central figures in Ibsen’s later life, his mother-in-law, Magdalene Thoresen, and his close friend Georg Brandes, were deeply influenced by Kierkegaard’s thought and likely discussed it with Ibsen. 2 Yet it is unclear, to say the least, whether this amounts to a degree of familiarity with Kierkegaard’s thought sufficient to justify many of the claims for detailed influence made by comparative studies of this kind.3 Second, and more significantly, it should be apparent that what unites these approaches is an underlying presupposition that any similarity between Kierkegaard and Ibsen must be sought at the level of conceptual content. Such an assumption invariably does a heavy disservice to Ibsen by reducing the interest of his plays to a number of “meanings” that apparently might just as well have been obtained by simply reading Kierkegaard in the first place, which in turn is a disservice to the latter, whose works are always far more complex than these critics seem to grant.4 The present approach avoids both these pitfalls. In regard to the former, where previous studies tend to base their argument on a “contact relation” between Kierkegaard and Ibsen, to draw on Dionýz Durisin’s terminology (cf. Fokkema and Ibsch 16), I will instead assume merely “typological affinities” between them. The former concept presupposes that one author engages directly with another’s work, whereas the latter “applies to similarities between literary phenomena based on similar reactions to similar problems in comparable historical and social contexts.” For the present investigation, the most important of these common contexts is the influence of Heiberg’s idealist aesthetics, to which both Kierkegaard and Ibsen respond.5 This context also serves to change the perspective with regard to the second difficulty mentioned above. Rather than a strict conceptual

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correspondence, what Kierkegaard and Ibsen share, I argue here, is a similarity at the level of aesthetic form that dictates both the constitutive terms of a whole and the means of their mediation. Such a similarity is born from the shared need to rethink Heiberg’s project, making it Kierkegaard’s and Ibsen’s direct rejection of the aesthetics of idealism that stands behind the aesthetics of dependency in both.

idealist beginnings: ibsen and heiberg When J. L. Heiberg died in 1860, Ibsen, then still the young and unknown director of the Norwegian Theatre in Kristiania, published a poem of lamentation commemorating the momentous occasion. Opening with a long list of accusations against the Danish public for its failure to appreciate Heiberg’s genius, the poem quickly extends this conflict to characterize a larger pan-Scandinavian crisis. Heiberg was far from the only Nordic author maligned by an ignorant audience, we are told, and his fate points to a pervasive lack of support for national poetry (Dikt 274). The resentment expressed is transparently concerned less with Heiberg than with the difficulties experienced at the time by Ibsen himself, whose Norwegian Theatre would go bankrupt a mere two years later. Ibsen’s affection and admiration, however, appear to have been genuine enough, and as late as 1871, he still refers to Heiberg as “the great prophet” (“den store seer”) in a poem of gratitude to the critic’s widow, Johanne Louise (424). Indeed, in 1883, although with notably less admiration, Ibsen would still acknowledge Heiberg’s On the Vaudeville, along with his polemics against Oehlenschläger and Hauch, as the pillars of nineteenthcentury Norwegian criticism (Gildet 28). The epithet of “prophet” in Ibsen’s poem to Johanne Louise has acquired a degree of retrospective irony, given that Heiberg’s pronouncements on the literature of the future were mostly far from being that perceptive. Not least among them was his rejection of Ibsen’s own The Warriors of Helgeland for performance at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in 1858, which he justified to Carsten Hauch with the unfortunate verdict that “[a] Norwegian theater will hardly emerge from the laboratory of these experiments; the Danish luckily does not need it” (Heiberg, Breve 274). Heiberg’s rejection of Ibsen’s play came in spite of the fact that the two men had met under friendly circumstances in 1852, when Ibsen was visiting Copenhagen in his capacity as director and dramatic author for the theater in Bergen.6 It

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was during and shortly after this visit, moreover, when he was moving under the direct presence of the Danish sage, that Ibsen began work on St. John’s Night. The play thereby appears as a particularly inviting text by which to elucidate Ibsen’s early allegiances to Heiberg, something also suggested by the fact that St. John’s Night is the only play that the mature Ibsen chose to purge from all the editions of his complete works published during his lifetime.7 As he vehemently insisted to the editor of the German translation of his works in 1897: For the last time I must hereby categorically declare that I neither want nor can permit the play “St. John’s Night” to be included in the collection of my works. The play is a miserable product, which does not even derive from my hand. . . . Far from explaining any of my other productions, it stands thoroughly without any connection to these; I have accordingly already for years considered it as not written and not existing. (Brev 1884–1904 400)

To Ibsen himself, St. John’s Night clearly pertains to an aesthetic paradigm that he had come to reject, making its immediately apparent similarities to Heiberg all the more significant. In best vaudeville fashion, the plot of St. John’s Night is determined by a series of economic interests about which each character possesses only partial information.8 The estate on which the play takes place is owned by Mrs. Berg, who inherited it following her second husband’s death, but it gradually emerges that her wealth is in fact not secure since she has gained a large part of it (the Birkedal estate) through her late husband’s juridical prowess. At the time he was her suitor, Mr. Berg was also her lawyer and won the estate for her by hiding certain documents that would have turned the outcome of the case. After she married him in return for his services, Mr. Berg was guiltridden over his deceit and took it upon himself to support Birkedal’s son, Birk. The latter, not knowing the true nature of the situation, took Berg’s benevolence to be a purely unmotivated action and so felt himself indebted to the Berg family his entire life. Mrs. Berg, who in turn did not know of her husband’s relation to the young Birk, suspects that the documents that won the suit might not have been destroyed after all but, rather, are hidden in the cabin of her late husband’s father. The senile old Berg remembers that important papers concerning the Birkedal farm exist but has forgotten where they are. As he has inherited the cabin from his son, however, Mrs. Berg has no means of obtaining the documents and therefore sees no way of securing her wealth other than by marrying Birk to her daughter, Juliane,

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so that the estate might remain in the family even if the truth should be revealed. In the meantime, Birk and Juliane’s engagement has been kept secret, and the play opens with Birk and Juliane’s brother, Jørgen, arriving at the estate on the eve of St. John’s Night, the day before the planned public announcement of the impending marriage. Along with them comes the pompous poet Julian Poulsen, who does not know of the engagement and falls in love with the vain Juliane, who happily reciprocates his advances. Birk, in turn, upon meeting Anne, the simple and spiritually pure daughter of Mr. Berg’s first marriage, falls in love with her, and the two new couples make their respective ways into St. John’s Night. The intricacies of the plot begin to move toward their resolution as, before the couples’ departure, a nix spikes the punch they are drinking. The effect, the nix confides to the audience, will be that The mists that once did veil their eyes Will clear in the leaping flames of dreams; Then they will sense the inner power In the secret places of the mind. But he who has nothing to ponder on Will wander as blind as before and . . . sleep. (St. John’s 222; ellipsis in original) De Taager der har sig for Synet lagt Vil klares i Drømmenes spillende Flammer; Da føles med Sandhed den indre Magt— Der raader i Sjælens forborgne Kammer;— Men den som har Intet at grunde over, Han vandrer i Blinde som ellers og—sover! (Sancthansnatten 45)

As it turns out, only Birk and Anne fit the former requirement and thereby reveal themselves to be the true heirs of the Norwegian folk spirit. As a consequence, arriving at the mountaintop, they are able to perceive the fairy tale world within it, where the mountain-king and his court enact traditional tales and legends. Juliane and Poulsen, in contrast, fit the latter class of individuals (those who have “nothing to ponder on”) and remain stuck in their superficial environment, unable to understand the magical world that they also witness, poor city imitations of Norwegianness that they are. All four, however, undergo sudden changes during their excursion. Following their shared experience of the fairy world, Birk and Anne end the act unexpectedly recognizing in each other the long-lost

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childhood soul mate whom they had all but forgotten. Simultaneously, mirabile dictu, Poulsen and Juliane likewise come to realize that they met once before at a ball and have longed for each other ever since. The midnight excursion has further repercussions the next day when Anne finds that the “Nøgleblomst” (literally, “Key-flower,” the Norwegian name for primula veris) she picked the previous night has transformed into an actual key. She shows it to her grandfather, and the old man recognizes it as the very key that she had lost as a child and which opens up the chest that holds the papers concerning the Birkedal estate. After overcoming a few further complications, the papers finally make it into the hands of Birk, who thereby learns that his father’s estate rightfully belongs to him. He nevertheless tears up the papers after confronting Mrs. Berg and thus obtains his freedom from the engagement, paving the way not only for the happy union with his soul mate Anne but also for that of the appropriately matched Juliane and Poulsen. Echoing the idealist credo, the final symmetry of lovers secures the underlying order of the world. As Poulsen puts it at the end: “But what an agreeable situation it is to be engaged. It is as if all the puzzling contradictions of existence were resolved in a . . . a . . . a . . . let me call it a fragrance . . . Only then do we understand why we live” (261; trans. modified and ellipses in original / 91). The economic obligations and interests that initially seem suspend the requirements of Heiberg’s aesthetics by forcing the plot into an unharmonious union of spiritual and moral opposites are in this way defused at the end through the intervention of a fairy tale world in which character counts more than money. The symmetry of the final matchmaking serves to grant each character his or her necessary due and thereby suggests that only Mrs. Berg has needs base enough to stretch beyond such moral gratification; Birk, after all, can joyfully renounce his inheritance and live on love alone. Further, in strict agreement with Heiberg’s project as discussed in chapter 2, money is here shown not only to be less important than values but also ultimately to serve the purpose of the latter, given that Birk precisely purchases the freedom that makes the ending possible. It is by renouncing his claim to the estate that he can both free himself from his obligation to Juliane and pave the way for his marriage to Anne. Birk:

Secondly, I will sever all ties between us.

Mrs. Berg: You want . . . ? You mean . . . Juliane? Birk:

Correct! I will not marry her.

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Mrs. Berg. And you do not take her reputation into consideration? What about the gossip? Birk.

I don’t see that. After all, the engagement is still secret. I have only now really got to know Juliane and I have come to the conclusion that we wouldn’t be happy together. Besides [with emphasis] I scarcely need remind you of the part you have played in our engagement and . . .

Mrs. Berg [quickly]. Enough, enough . . . if that’s the way it has to be. But I expect you to keep silent, silent in all respects. (258; trans. modified and ellipses in original / 88)

Even after the only proof in existence has been destroyed, Birk’s rightful claim to the estate still serves as a means to coerce Mrs. Berg and free himself from his obligation to Juliane. As we saw in Heiberg, the potential threat of a self-contained logic of money is sublated by one that makes it only a tool for higher goods. Like The Danes in Paris, St. John’s Night operates with two distinct organizational principles: anarchic plot, on the one hand, and the ending’s transparent organization of abstract character-types, on the other. And as in Heiberg, this opposition is harmoniously reconciled through the individual characters’ embodiment of the principle of identity. It is the complete revelation of the latter that provides the perspective necessary for the true meaning of events to emerge, allowing seemingly blind fate to reveal itself as divine providence. It is this same imposition of continuity in difference that Peer Gynt radically disrupts.

PE ER GY N T

and modernity

Written in 1867, Peer Gynt is unquestionably one of Ibsen’s most complicated works, not least because of the amorphous nature of its plot. From the very outset, the reader is launched into a rapid sequence of events that lead the titular hero from his mother’s house to, among many other things, stealing the bride at a local wedding, having sex with a number of supernatural women, and building a house for the beatific Solvejg, with whom he also falls in love. Most importantly, as a consequence of some of these events, Peer in act 2 arrives at the troll kingdom, where he attempts to become a troll in order to marry the Troll King’s daughter. When he realizes that such a transformation would be irreversible, he changes his mind and narrowly escapes by magical means. At the end of act 3, Peer leaves Norway, and we encounter him again in act 4 as a rich, middle-aged citizen of

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the world on the shores of North Africa, where another sequence of tumultuous events follows (Peer as monkey, visionary, prophet, imperialist, and tourist, to name but some) before he finally ends the act in a Cairo madhouse. Act 5 in turn opens with the old Peer Gynt onboard a ship about to arrive in Norway. Just off the coast, a storm sinks the ship, triggering a new sequence of loosely connected events, most of which involve Peer meeting remnants from his past: funerals, auctions, disembodied voices, and spirits that speak to him. Toward the end, he is confronted by the Button-Molder, who has come to fetch his soul, and the remainder of the play consists of Peer’s frantic attempts to avoid his fate. Finally Peer arrives at the cabin he had built in act 2 and in which Solvejg has been waiting for him all along. Although the two are reunited, it nevertheless remains unclear if Peer is ultimately saved from the Button-Molder, who promises further encounters. In spite of the ambiguity of the ending, it is one of the least challenged suppositions in Ibsen criticism that Peer Gynt offers a satirical portrait of the titular hero’s escapist flights of fancy.9 According to this canonical view, Ibsen provides a stable hierarchical value scale in which Peer ranks on the lowest rung and the heroine, Solvejg, on the highest. The dynamics of Peer Gynt, from this perspective, reside in the tension between these poles and the hero’s gradual coming to consciousness and movement toward the spiritually higher position held by Solvejg.10 As such, Peer Gynt would fit the idealist model analyzed in chapter 2, both by providing an absolute standard of judgement in the figure of its heroine, as Møller demanded, and by subordinating the structure of its plot to that of character and idea, as dictated by Heiberg. Interestingly, the originator of this reading is none other than Peer’s own mother, Aase.11 In the play’s opening act, she famously narrates how she and Peer indulged in flights of fancy in order to escape the grim reality of the family’s economic downfall: Because, you know, my man—he drank, Roamed the parish with a line of bluff, Scattered and trampled our fortune to dust— While back at home my Peer and I sat. All we could do was try and forget; I’m no good when something has to be faced. It’s so painful staring fate in the eyes; You’d much rather shake your troubles off And just do anything not to think. Some turn to brandy, others to lies,

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Aesthetic Forms at the Scandinavian Periphery And we—well, we took to fairy tales Of princes and trolls and strange animals. (43; trans. modified)12 Ja, for du skal vide, Manden min drak, foer Byggden rundt med Daarskab og Snak, ødte og traadte vor Velstand under Fod. Og imens sad jeg og Vesle-Peer hjemme. Vi vidste ikke bedre Raad, end at glemme; for det falder mig saa svært at staa rigtig imod. Det er saa fælt at se Skjæbnen under Øjne; og saa vil en jo gjerne ryste Sorgerne af sig, En bruger Brændevin, en anden bruger Løgne! aa, ja! saa brugte vi Eventyr om Prinser og Trold og alleslags Dyr. (89–90)

The scholarly consensus surrounding the accuracy of Aase’s description of Peer’s escapism is, arguably, unsurprising. Peer’s celebrated linguistic and imaginative dexterity, after all, rests precisely on his capacity to disregard the contextual determination of events and his concomitant ability to transform their value and meaning by simply placing them in relation to a different frame of reference. Significantly, this tendency in Peer is particularly visible whenever external necessity imposes itself most strongly. For example, when Anitra abandons him to his fate in the empty desert in act 4, it takes Peer exactly two lines to re-signify the unmistakable defeat and humiliation he has just suffered as victory and salvation. The scene opens: Peer Gynt, solemn and thoughtful, is stripping his Turkish costume off piece by piece. Finally he takes his little traveling cap out of his coat pocket, puts it on, and stands once more in European dress. Peer Gynt: (hurling the turban far away) There lies the Turk, and here am I! This heathen existence just isn’t for me. Lucky it’s only the clothes I wore, And not, as they say, cut into the flesh— What did I ever want in that crew? It’s best as a Christian to live in This world, to stifle your peacock pride, Take law and morality for your guide, And be yourself, till at last you’re given, Praise at your grave and wreaths on your coffin. (130; trans. modified) (Peer Gynt, adstadig og betænksom, trækker Tyrkeklæderne af, Stykke for Stykke. Tilsidst tager han sin lille Reisehue opp af Frakkelommen, sætter den paa, og staar atter i sin europæiske Dragt.)

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Peer Gynt: (idet han kaster Turbanen langt fra sig). Der ligger Tyrken, og her staar jeg! Dette hedenske Væsen duer s’gu ej. Det var heldigt, det kun var i Klæderne baaret, og ej, som man siger, i Kjødet skaaret.— Hvad vilde jeg ogsaa paa den Gallej? En staar sig dog bedst paa at leve som Kristen, vrage Paafuglhabittens Pral, støtte sin Færd till Lov og Moral, være sig selv og faa sig tilsidst en Tale ved Graven og Kranse paa Kisten. (167)

The moment is a wonderful affirmation of univocal selfhood—a Gyntian “This is I, Hamlet the Dane!” Stuck in the desert, cut off from all relations with the world, Peer is robbed of all possibilities for action and completely reduced to the absolute present in which all theater occurs.13 This spatial restriction at the level of plot is powerfully coupled with Peer’s love of detailed description, yielding fifteen nouns and three adjectives in ten lines. As Aase points out at the very opening of the play (7–8 / 63), it is precisely such an agglomeration of details that defines Peer’s discourse, in which, as a version of Roland Barthes’s “reality effect,” the very excess and precision of the language seek to generate the “referential illusion” that the meaning of a sign is nothing other than its referent. Yet while Peer’s character is reified, the discourse also forces its relation to other temporalities at the very moment that it seems to affirm its self-sufficiency. The fourth line of the passage alludes back to act 2, scene 6, in which the Troll King attempts to convince Peer to have his left eye scratched a bit and the windowpane of the right cut out in order to complete the transformation into troll that he so willfully began (59–60 / 103–104). Likewise, the following line points us back to its previous verbatim appearance at the beginning of the Anitra sequence (117 / 155), in which Peer uses it to affirm the superiority of his newly gained role as prophet over his preceding one as successful capitalist. But the passage not only points us backward. The last line looks forward both to the Priest’s famous speech at the graveside of the loyal father in act 5 (166–169 / 200–203) and to the end of act 4 itself, when the mad Begriffenfeldt will crown Peer as “the Emperor of the Self” with a wreath (“Krans”) of straw in the midst of the insane asylum’s anarchy and violence (149; trans. modified / 186). Indeed, already the stage direction, with its description of Peer taking off his clothes “piece by piece” (“Stykke for Stykke”), points to act 5’s

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famous onion speech, in which Peer projects his different selves onto the layers of the onion that he peels “layer by layer” (“Svøb for Svøb”) (176 / 211), only to discover that he has no core at all. Insofar as such a parallel equates the exchange of one dress for another with the peeling of one layer of onion after another, the opposition between the clothing of the Turk and the Christian self that opens the passage is collapsed. We are instead asked to look back from a future standpoint and remotivate the demonstrative pronoun “This” (“Dette”) in the second line as referring to Peer’s Christian self rather than his heathen other and thereby transform its attributes of law and morality from essences to appearances—mere “pride,” too. On the one hand, the passage thus presents us with a radical reduction of semantic scope (immobility of plot, referential details) and, on the other, its radical expansion (intra-textual allusions). The interdependence of these will become clearer in a moment, but what it shows here is that the proliferation of semantic relations is not aimed simply at undermining Peer’s claim to authenticity, which is, of course, easily done. Rather, what matters is that an impasse at the level of plot, which seems to leave no more to be told by revealing all meaning as autonomous and immediately present onstage, is overcome at the level of discourse by making the passage depend on past and future contexts for its full signification, which can accordingly obtain only through time and further action. The relation between units of the plot, that is, depends not only on the logic of causality and probability proper to events in the world (as Aristotle demands in the Poetics [1451a–b]) but also on the relations established by Peer’s discourse. To that extent, however, it is clear that the latter constitutes a principle not only of escapism, a movement away from reality and action, as Aase and her critical disciples claim, but also of determination, a movement toward reality and action—which accounts for Peer Gynt’s amorphous shape. The tendency toward intra-textuality crystallized in Peer’s discourse pervades the work at large. Not only are we given a variety of plot summaries throughout the poem,14 but particular scenes and motifs as well as entire lines continue to recur. Peer’s opening account of his struggle with the Reindeer, for example, is repeated in his lifting Aase across the stream (14–15 / 69), which in turn transforms into his carrying away Ingrid from her wedding (38 / 86), which is again echoed in his ride on the pig with the Green-Clad Woman (53 / 98) that finds further incarnation in Anitra’s escape on the horse (130 /

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167).15 As the example suggests, each repetition always occurs with a difference, leading to a modification and even inversion of the situation from which it originally derives. In act 2, when Peer encounters the impenetrable and invisible Bøjg that blocks his way in every direction, he exclaims, “Forward and back, it’s just as far. / Out or in, it’s a narrow door” (“Atter og fram, det er lige langt; - / ud og ind, det er lige trangt”) (65 / 109), which is repeated verbatim at three more points in the play (132, 170, 207 / 169, 205, 239). Already in its next appearance (132 / 169), however, it serves to designate an excess rather than a lack of mobility, as Peer contemplates what uncharted avenue of experience to explore following Anitra’s flight. The two contradictory meanings can nevertheless be seen to intersect, suggesting that an actual excess in freedom of movement at the level of plot causes a limitation at the level of Peer’s “moral character”—a doubling of semantic layers that would seem to determine the subsequent two instances as well. The heavy reliance on the physical text that enables this proliferation of repetitions to work indicates the stark anti-performative nature of Peer Gynt, which continually asks us, quite literally and very tongue-in-cheek, to search for a line’s original location. What is particularly interesting is that the more the text commands us to do so, the more frequently those original contexts can no longer be remembered by Peer himself, who therefore stresses their existence in general terms: “Thus it is written, I think, in an enlightened text” (132; trans. modified / 169; referring to 65–66 / 109); “But it’s written” (113 / 152; referring to 56 / 101); or Enough! Himself—? Now where’s that written? It must be some classic that I read it in as a child. The prayer book was it? Or Proverbs then? Maddening; I notice that year by year My sense of time and space dims. (113; trans. modified; referring to 55) Nok? Sig selv—? Hvor er det, det staar? Jeg har læst det, som Gut, i en saakaldt Storbog. Var det Huspostillen? Eller Salomons Ordbog? Fatalt; jeg mærker at Aar for Aar min Sans for Tiden og Stedet forgaar. (151; referring to 100)

Even when the previous occurrence of a motif, line, or scene can be easily identified, the proper relation between them might not. Peer’s original adventure with the Reindeer, for example, which is the starting point for its long line of imitations enumerated above, is, as Aase

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indignantly points out (7–8 / 63), itself an imitation of events that she knows to have occurred to Gudbrand Glesne instead. Yet that character and tale are, in turn, taken from the collection of folktales published by Asbjørnsen in 1848, some fifty years after the events of Peer Gynt are set.16 While Aase can call Peer’s bluff by referring to an authentic and original event that his narrative counterfeits, that origin’s priority is itself suspended from the point of view of a future that paradoxically precedes it by reminding us that Aase’s Gudbrand, as all of Peer Gynt, is merely a variation on fictions in a book. As the relationship between terms becomes increasingly unstable, this is accordingly not due merely to Peer’s growing senility, as he himself would have it. Rather, insofar as it is impossible to discern which term takes priority over which and thereby decide where in the text an event’s real “meaning” is to be found, the effect approximates that of allegory, in which, as Paul de Man points out, it is the difference between signs that is thematized, rather than the reference to their respective signifieds (207, 209). De Man’s claim, in fact, finds striking confirmation from the mad Prof. Dr. phil. Begriffenfeldt, who points out that the ambiguity at work in the text is deeply rooted in the trope that dominates the play at large: Begriffenfeldt (with quiet admiration): Peer Gynt! Allegorical! That was to be expected.— Peer Gynt? Which is to say: the Unknown— That which is to come, the coming of which was foretold to me— (138; trans. modified) Begriffenfeldt (med stille Beundring): Peer Gynt! Allegorisk! Det var at vente.— Peer Gynt? Det vil sige: det ubekjendte,— det kommende, hvis Komme var mig forkyndt— (175)17

Begriffenfeldt’s insistence that an original meaning is to be found, coupled with the impossibility of properly determining it, corresponds to the structure that Franco Moretti attributes to allegory at a point in history when the shared traditional framework on which it depends has disappeared. No longer able to provide a link between its sensuous manifestation and the concept that it signifies, allegory loses its univocality and becomes instead “polysemous,” promising “certainty of meaning—and total freedom of choice” (Modern 84, 83). This specific historical qualification of the nature of allegory is suggestive in relation to Peer, who, appearing in all his wealth at the beginning of act 4, proclaims the continual openness to further possibilities that

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characterizes the trope to be the very principle behind his capitalist success: But to move with uncommitted feet Between the pitfalls dug by life— To know for sure that all your days Aren’t over on the day you fight— To know that behind you always lies A bridge secured for your retreat. This policy has built my name And colored all I’ve consummated. (99) Men at staa med valgfri Fod imellem Livets lumske Fælder, at vide visst, at alle Dage er ikke slut med Stridens Dag, at vide, dig staar aaben bag en Bro, som bære kan tilbage. Den Theori har hold mig frem; den har min hele Vandel farvet. (138)

The relation suggested here between allegory, capital, and reality is structurally akin to that between the bad infinity, money, and sensibility examined in chapter 2. Its importance for a proper understanding of Ibsen’s relation to modernity thus immediately suggests itself. And yet, amazingly, in a play whose very title and lead character’s name rhyme with “money” (Gynt-Mynt), as we are reminded no less than five times (64, 115, 131, 144, 190),18 and in which the language of money and other means of financial markers and exchange is used at least 189 times, critics have universally ignored the topic.19 Such an omission is even more striking given the fascinating suggestions, first put forth by Walter Benjamin and since systematically explored by Heinz Schlaffer, concerning the relation between the structure of allegory and that of Karl Marx’s analysis of exchange-value in Capital, published the very same year as Peer Gynt and, like it, deeply influenced by Goethe’s Faust and the idealist tradition. 20

What is at stake in the relation is Marx’s well-known claim that any object has a dual nature: on the one hand, its use-value, determined by its ability to satisfy human needs, and on the other, its exchangevalue. Only in virtue of the latter is it a commodity, and it is here that the allegorical structure emerges, since an exchange between

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qualitatively different objects requires their quantitative equality. Such an equation is possible only by reducing the two to a shared third term, which cannot be “a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities” (Capital 127 / Das Kapital 51). This abstraction from the concrete appearances of objects also implies an abstraction from their concrete mode of production, the different kinds of work required to produce different kinds of objects for different kinds of needs (128 / 52). What remains is therefore only “human labour as such” (135; trans. modified / 58), which measures the qualitative difference of commodities in terms of the different amount of such average work required for their production: Each of these units [of labour-power] is the same as any other, to the extent that it has the character of a socially average unit of labourpower and acts as such, i.e. only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society. (129 / 53)

In this suppression of sensuous in favor of abstract value lies the structure of allegory’s relation of literal to figural meaning. And yet, as in allegory, the abstract exchange-value of a commodity can express itself only in the sensuous use-value that constitutes its opposite. Insofar as the statement “20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen,” to use Marx’s own example, is a tautology (140 / 62), it is furthermore clear that a commodity can never express its own exchange-value but must rely on the particular and qualitatively distinct work of another commodity for that purpose. To claim that “20 yards of linen = 1 coat” means that the value of the former is “expressed by the physical body” of the latter and “the value of one [commodity] in the use-value of the other” (143 / 65). As this structure nevertheless implies that a commodity’s value can never be conclusively expressed, since it may continually enter into relations with further commodities that can serve as its body in new ways (156 / 76), a “general form of value” evolves, which raises a single commodity to the level of universal “equivalent form” of value. The logic of money in which this process culminates dictates that the use-value of a single commodity—gold—comes to express the exchange-value of all others (162–163 / 82–83). To Marx, the very artificiality of the relation in which one body lends expression to another’s abstract value, and therefore can be

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grasped only conceptually, generates the illusion that the value expressed in fact pertains to the use-value serving as vehicle, ignoring the tautology that the expression of one’s own value inevitably implies. This “fetishism of the commodity” obscures the dependence of value on relations beyond itself and thereby, ultimately, the fact that the values we covet are merely objectified expressions of our own average work (166 / 86). As in de Man’s description of allegory above, then, in the Wertform, too, we have “a relationship between signs in which the reference to their respective meanings has become of secondary importance” (de Man 207), since the use-value of each remains suspended by the abstraction that they serve. In the expression of value, Marx writes elsewhere, “the general abstraction does not count as an attribute of the concrete, sensuously-real, but rather, inversely, the sensuously-real counts as a mere form of appearance or determinate form of realization of the general abstraction” (quoted in Schlaffer 58). As Peer puts it in the above quotation, the abstraction operative in allegory, as that in exchange-value, effaces the sense of time and space (Ibsen, Peer Gynt 113 / 151). In these terms, Moretti’s critique of Schlaffer in Modern Epic seems misplaced. According to Moretti, Schlaffer’s reading of Marx’s theory of exchange-value in terms of the structure of allegory fails, since to Marx, commodities can be exchanged because they are qualitatively different, and quantitatively equal: in the semantic field, however, there is no way of reproducing the distinction between quantity and quality. Again, for Marx, the equivalence between commodities rests upon the equal quantities of labour embodied in them: but, once more, the idea of embodied labour has no meaning in the realm of allegory. And if this falls, the labour theory of value falls too, as does that of the fetishism of commodities. In other words, the whole of Marx’s theory (whether right or wrong) collapses, and only analogies of formulation remain. (80)

The assertion that nothing corresponding to embodied labor (understood as the abstract, average labor required for the production of any commodity) can be found in semantics would seem to rest on a disavowal of any underlying structure of language-in-general. The very idea of allegory, however, requires precisely such an underlying structure if it is taken to consist in the relation between two distinct signs made possible by means of a mediating relation of some sort (whether it be the relation of tradition that motivates signs positively

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or the negative relation of pure difference inherent in the system of language-as-such that the noncoincidence of terms reveals). If both signs and commodities have use-values that assure the uniqueness of each entity (the qualitatively different), qua commodities and signs they likewise participate in a system of relations that exceeds their particularity and makes their relation to other entities possible in the first place and prior to any particular manifestation (the quantitatively equivalent). The point, in fact, is emphasized by none other than Ferdinand de Saussure himself, who stresses that all values (linguistic as economic) “are always composed (1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined [the qualitatively different]; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined [the quantitatively equal]” (115). And again: “Here [in linguistics] as in political economy we are confronted with the notion of value; both sciences are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders—labor and wages in one and a signified and signifier in the other” (79). The meaning that allegory and exchange-value lay bare is their shared grounding on a system that transcends their own determinations. To this extent, they both partake of the structure of the modern episteme that Michel Foucault described as resting on “those never objectifiable objects, those never entirely representable representations, those simultaneously evident and invisible visibilities, those realities that are removed from reality to the degree to which they are the foundation of what is given to us and reaches us: the force of labour, the energy of life, the power of speech” (244). What money points to is not the shapes that it assumes in the world but the work that constitutes the precondition for such signification to occur.

The structure of commodity exchange in this way duplicates the process we witnessed in Peer’s discourse—on the one hand, exchangevalue: an expansion of semantic scope; on the other, fetishism: a reduction. The analogy between them is stressed in the fact that the most obviously allegorical part of the play is precisely act 4, scene 1, when, at the height of his capitalist success, Peer surrounds himself with his explicitly allegorical cronies: Master Cotton, Monsieur Ballon, Trumpeterstraale, von Eberkopf. 21 As a new version of Goethe’s “Mummenschanz,” moreover, Peer, as Faust, appears in the guise of

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the lord of the masque, dressed, like his predecessor, in the functions of Pluto, deity of wealth: Eberkopf:

You have an outlook on life’s course That ranks you with philosophers. For, while the common-sense observer Views the world in scattered scenes And gropes his stumbling way forever, You know to gather all into one. With one same norm you measure everything. (94; trans. modified)

v. Eberkopf: De har et Blik paa Livets Gang, der hæver Dem til Tænker-Rang. Imens en slett og rett Formener ser hver for sig de spredte Scener, og aldrig ender med at famle, forstaar De alt til et at samle. Med Samme Norm De alting maaler. (134)

Gynt-Mynt: like money, Peer unifies and homogenizes the disparate entities of the play, being the only figure who connects all others, the center through which all must pass, since it alone can bring them into relation with each other, by repetition, quotation, textuality. And like money, as Heiberg already feared, it is a process of circulation and exchange that can expand infinitely: any moment in the plot, no matter how autonomous and independent, can be brought into relation and exchanged with any other, no matter how distant and different, by passing through Peer. As in Marx, moreover, such a relation between qualitatively different units depends on a quantitative identity (“With one same norm you measure everything,” as Eberkopf stresses [94 / 143]), which, as with Peer’s discourse above, robs each of its qualitative particularity, its time and space (“My sense of time and space dims” [131 / 151]). The meaning of such allegory is not, then (and this, as Schlaffer underlines [61], is what distinguishes its ancient from its modern forms), metaphysical entities and abstractions but the structure of relations in reality itself, which have now become abstract. This point is made apparent in Master Cotton’s exclamation when he realizes that Peer will not aid the Greek struggle for independence: We’ve lost the most financially. Goddamn! So help me, I could cry! I saw Olympus all my own; And if that mountain’s what they say

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There ought to be some copper mines Still reworkable today. And the Castalia, that stream That’s talked about so much, with all Its falls—an engineer could pull Some thousand horsepower out of them—(106) Det værste Tab er det reelle. God Dam! Jeg kunde Taare fælde! Jeg saa mig som Olympens Ejer. Hvis Berget svarer til sit Ry, Saa maa der findes Kobberlejer, Som kunde tages opp paany. Og dertill denne Elv, Kastale, Hvorom der gaar saa megen Tale, Med Fald paa Fald, beregnet lavt Til mer end tusend Hestes Kraft—! (144).

The English translations of Peer Gynt across the board have lost the pun in the first line, 22 where “reelle” carries not only the financial signification of “material goods” but, more importantly, that of “reality”: that which is “real,” “virkelig,” “faktisk,” “håndgripelig,” according to one standard Norwegian dictionary (Norsk riksmålsordbok 1010). Master Cotton’s reduction of the Greek mythological geography to a landscape of commodities is thus in tune with the play’s larger allegorical structure and the relation of that allegory to the new world-system that constitutes reality. When further considering that, according to Eric Hobsbawm, the industrial revolution’s takeoff depended on the cotton industry (The Age of Revolution 33–37), and that in the span from 1850 to 1860, the decade immediately preceding the composition of Peer Gynt, cotton exports almost doubled (The Age of Capital 30), the significance of Master Cotton being the one to make this observation can hardly be ignored. Far from being a flight from the world, Peer’s discourse constitutes a way of capturing and laying bare a new kind of infinitely expanding reality. Yet while Peer can convert every dead end into a new beginning, he cannot secure his own endings. Devoid of an internal teleology that might be able to provide the organic culmination of the relation between textual units that Peer establishes, a point at which the tensions of the beginning have been resolved and put to rest, sequences of action can instead conclude only by means external interference, cataclysmic impositions of violence or grace that serve as sudden, deus ex machina endings: Peer’s abduction of Ingrid, the

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Troll King ordering his death, the Bøjg’s impenetrability, the salvific bells, the Green-Clad Woman’s sudden reappearance in act 3, Aase’s death, the explosion on Peer’s yacht in act 4, Anitra’s escape, the suicides in the Madhouse, the shipwreck in act 5, the grace granted by Solvejg at the end. Each marks the sudden conclusion to a thematically unified sequence of action, which will be followed by a new and unrelated episode brought about ex nihilo by Peer himself. The text is divided into a series of isolated incidents which, while they relate paradigmatically by virtue of repetitions, have hardly any necessary linear, syntagmatic, order at all. Why act 5, scene 3, precedes rather than follows act 5, scene 4, would be as difficult to explain as why the madhouse must come after the explosion on the yacht. Peer adheres not to the time of teleological history, then, but to the contingency of temporality as such. Not epic time but, as the cyclical structure itself suggests, the time of romance, with its “deliberately disconnected and aimless” narrative, its “dismantling of form itself,” which insists on the essential openness of history by showing, as David Quint has argued, the arbitrariness and instability of any achieved conclusion (Epic 34, 41, 46). 23 Traditionally the form of the losers of history, romance is able to adapt to the social changes of the seventeenth century and, in the process, transforms itself into the new master genre of the novel, not least, as Quint shows in relation to Don Quijote, through its encounter with money. 24 And it is the influence of the novel, as P. L. Møller assures us in The New Comedy in France and Denmark (232), which also underlies the detrimental aspects of Scribe’s vaudevilles that must be controlled: their excessive attention to plot, the merely pragmatic morality, the absence of organic and hierarchical unity.

Allegory, capital, romance: what is striking about their configuration is that they indicate the need to reconsider some of the most cherished idealist assumptions on Ibsen’s work. In act 5, Peer asks the Troll King to confirm that he indeed remained true to himself when offered the chance to become a troll, and the latter claims that Peer did no such thing but, rather, lived his entire life according to the definition of trolldom: “Troll, to yourself be enough!” (“Trold, vær dig selv nok!”) (192 / 225). The maxim points back to act 2, scene 6, where it was opposed to the human motto “Man, to your self be true!” (“Mand, vær dig selv!”) (55 / 100). The latter, of course, is a selfhood that Peer

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is now accused of lacking and is defined by the Button-Molder as a striving toward one’s ideally defined character (cf. 187, 195–196 / 221, 229). Yet it is striking that while critics have apparently always accepted the Troll King’s claim that Peer is indeed a sort of troll and insisted that the moral message of the play is to be found in the horror of this degradation of the human condition, 25 this contention is difficult to reconcile with the Button-Molder’s insistence that Peer is neither good nor bad enough to merit moral judgment of any kind and therefore must be merged with other equally undistinguished souls (184 / 218). If the trolls indeed represent the lowest of human qualities, 26 then it is unclear why Peer would not rely on the king’s testimony when he next meets the Button-Molder in order to obtain the place in Hell that he covets for the sake of preserving his individuality. The relation between Peer and his desired but elusive sinfulness is even more baffling when one considers that, on discovering that the Devil is looking for a certain Peer Gynt, who, it is said, might qualify for Hell, Peer chooses not to reveal his identity although he clearly still hopes for a place among the happy few of the netherworld (204 / 236). The Devil, after all, offers Peer precisely what he is looking for, not only in making entrance to his flock conditioned on having lived one’s life as the exact opposite of one’s ideal purpose (203 / 235), which would square with the trolls’ perceived morality and thereby secure Peer’s qualification, but also in making clear that membership in his club is not eternal but merely a temporary process, precisely as Peer wishes (cf. 186, 203 / 220, 235). Pace the critical tradition’s predilection, there is thus an inherent resistance in the text to identifying Peer with the sinfulness that he desires. As mentioned, the problem is not that Peer is good rather than evil but, as the Button-Molder explains from the outset, that he lacks the necessary moral commitment that would qualify him for either (184 / 218). What is particularly interesting about this claim is that it involves a substitution of the standard of judgment of morality for that of the economic market. If Peer is to be remolded with other souls, he is told, this is “aimed at preventing devaluation” (“beregnet paa at hinder Værdifortabelse”), in the same way that in Kongsberg they prevent inflation by reminting money that has become worn (185; trans. modified / 219). The incommensurability of Peer’s life with the structure of morality is couched in the opposition of a sphere of values to the world of economic facts to which it supposedly refers. The contrast is further expanded upon when Peer indignantly rejects the

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logic of the market and demands to be judged “in the old-fashioned manner, according to the law!” (186; trans. modified / 220), only to realize that he is “expelled . . . from the Self-owning-nobility [Selvejer-Adlen]” (204; trans. modified / 237). The designation of the world of the law as aristocratic and oldfashioned places the conflict at stake in the context of Heiberg’s attempt to merge particularly feudal values with a capitalist reality. Unlike Heiberg, however, Ibsen shows himself acutely aware of the approaching demise of the former, and the Devil must sadly confess to Peer that business is going very badly indeed: It’s shameful how business has fallen off; There’s not enough market to feed a dwarf— Souls aren’t moving; just now and again, A stray— (199) De kan ikke tro, hvilken Flauhed i Forrettningen;— det er gaaet saa rent tillagters med Omsætningen; ingen Tillgang paa Sjæle; kun i Ny og Næ en enkelt— (232)

The future clearly lies with Peer and his like, who are neither good nor bad, because they are lacking in “vigor and seriousness” and infinitely malleable, “average then, just middling fair” (185 / 218). The problem in reading Peer as an incarnation of the trolls’ maxim is that it precisely denies the possibility of such a malleability, which we have seen to constitute the principle of the new reality that Peer embodies. “To yourself be enough” is, after all, introduced exactly as an absolute distinction, a sign that “morning is morning and night is night,” and in direct opposition to Peer’s immediately preceding claim that “There is no difference at all, from what I can see” (55; trans. modified / 100). When the maxim reappears in act 4, it is likewise identified with the immediacy of animals, who cannot be anything but themselves (113 / 151). And later again, and most significantly, it returns in Begriffenfeldt’s description of his insane asylum, where “one is completely damned to oneself” (142; trans. modified / 178). While Peer thrives on the distance between himself and his roles, on the gap between sign and referent that constitutes the ground of allegory’s play, the inmates of the madhouse conflate the two. In direct opposition to Peer, neither the Fellah nor Hussejn can perceive their difference from the figure that they seek to represent and commit suicide as a direct consequence

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of this confusion (147, 149 / 183, 185). 27 To be oneself enough, then, implies an embodiment of the idealist principle of identity, which is achieved through abstraction and isolation from the allegorical structure of reality and which is embodied most clearly in the constancy of Solvejg. 28 Grouping the trolls and the insane together with Solvejg as part of one common aristocratic logic of selfhood clearly runs counter to a critical tradition that has tended to view her as Ibsen’s contribution to the pantheon of female purity. 29 But the commonality is visible not least in the fact that the three moral judgments passed on Peer in act 5—the Troll King’s claim concerning his trolldom, the Devil’s on his suitability for Hell, and Solvejg’s on his essential goodness—all are based on mediations of some sort. The Troll King’s claim rests on the newspaper clippings that he has collected over the years describing Peer’s faring in the world (192 / 226). The Devil, in turn, can only “hope” and “believe” that Peer is truly what he himself claims (“He swears that he is”) (202, 203 / 235, 236), although when that same Peer, unrecognized, recounts his life to him, he is not in the least impressed (233–234 / 201). And as for Solvejg, who supposedly loves Peer for his true self and has been keeping him alive, as she says, “In my faith, in my hope and in my love” (240 / 208), Ibsen goes out of his way to stress her lack of any real knowledge of the man for whom she lives her life. The decisive moment of her relationship to Peer is when she falls in love with him, not through direct interaction, but through Aase’s stories in act 2: Solvejg (to Aase): Tell me some more. Aase (drying her eyes): Of my son? Solvejg:

Yes;— Everything!

Aase (smiles and throws back her head): Everything?—You will weary of this. Solvejg: You’ll grow tired of talking long Before I’m done listening. (45) Solvejg (til Aase): Fortæl mig lidt mere. Aase (tørrer Øjnene): Om Sønnen min? Solvejg:

Ja;— alting!

Aase (smiler og knejser med Nakken): Alting?—Trætt blev du da!

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Solvejg: Før blir I trætt af Talen at føre, end jeg af at høre. (91)

Likewise, when she decides to leave behind her family and past and join Peer for good, she does so, as she stresses, because she is “sent for by message” (“Budsendt”), emphasizing again her reliance on mediated experience: Solvejg: You sent for me by message in my sister’s voice; More came on the wind and in silences. In your mother’s words I felt your message flame; And the message echoed out of my waking dreams. The heavy nights, the empty days Kept sending the message that now I should come. (74–75; trans. modified) Solvejg: Bud har du skikket med Helga lille; flere kom efter med Vind og i Stille. Bud har din Moer i alt hun fortalte, Bud som yngled der Drømmene dalte. Nætterne tunge og Dagene tomme bar mig det Bud, at nu fik jeg komme. (117; my emphases)30

To insist that Solvejg participates in such escapism is not to claim that she is in fact a troll. On the contrary, the two are still to be viewed as diametrically opposed on the moral scale, and they accordingly serve very different functions: where Solvejg constitutes the goal of Peer’s quest, the trolls are the obstacles that prevent him from obtaining it. But as functions, they belong to the same universe, which, precisely in virtue of the difference between them, suggests itself to be that of the fairy tale invoked by Aase at the beginning of the text. When Peer is told in act 2 that his mere desire has impregnated the Green-Clad Woman, it corresponds to Vladimir Propp’s function number VIII in his Morphology of the Folktale: “The villain causes harm or injury to a member of a family” (30). As in the latter, Peer’s involvement with the Green-Clad Woman constitutes the beginning of “the actual movement of the tale,” since it is the reason he will lose the possibility of living with Solvejg and be forced to travel out into the world to find another mode of access to her (121–123 / 80–81), which in turn corresponds to Propp’s function XI: “The hero leaves home” (39). All of act 5 can be read as made up of functions XX, “The hero returns” (55) (Peer’s voyage back to Norway in scene 1); XXI, “The hero is pursued” (56) (the Button-Molder’s persecution of Peer); and XXII, “Rescue of the hero from pursuit” (57) (Solvejg’s protection of Peer).

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What matters more than such local correspondences, however, are Propp’s initial theorems, which state that (1) “Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled”; (2) “The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited” (21); (3) “The sequence of functions is always identical” (22); and (4) “All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure” (23)—in other words, a radically reduced narrative complexity and, more importantly, increased predictability.31 If Peer’s doings in the world seem governed by the chance and freedom of romance, they thus occur within the rigid home-out-home structure of the fairy tale, which separates acts 1, 2, and 3 from act 5 with the long and convoluted wanderings of act 4. Indeed, lest we forget this overarching frame in the chaos of the latter act, it is stressed through the sudden, momentary shift between scenes 9 and 10, from the midst of the North African adventures to Solvejg’s calm cabin in Norway, reassuring us that she knows Peer will return, and then back again to Egypt (133–134 / 170–171). Where Peer’s allegorical structure is the principle of temporality, Solvejg is the principle of atemporality: when Peer abandons her in act 3, he leaves her standing “in the doorway,” as the stage direction tells us (81 / 123), only to find her again in act 5, 116 pages and oh so many years later, standing “in the doorway” (207 / 239) once more— or rather, still—and from where, significantly, she will not move for the remainder of the play. Solvejg is in this way deliberately presented as uninfluenced by the passage of time, not only in order to make a moral point about her constancy, but also because her permanence is what makes Peer’s continual flux readable. Against the static background form of Solvejg’s fairy tale, the formlessness of Peer’s romance is provided with the necessary predictability and structure that keeps it from total anarchy. The relation, however, is dialectical, insofar as not only does Peer’s narrative depend on Solvejg, but Solvjeg’s constancy in turn depends on Peer for her own readability. If Solvejg’s idealized character and the fantasy world of the trolls can exist in Peer Gynt’s otherwise familiar and modern universe, this is due not least to the fact that the latter’s allegorical structure teaches us to read them as something other than they appear—as the critical tradition’s pleasure in so doing amply demonstrates. But as this praxis itself makes clear, and directly contrary to Aase’s opening claim, it is thus Solvejg and not Peer who stands for fairy tale flights from the economic world.

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the break with autonomy The argument so far has shown that the central opposition to emerge in Peer Gynt is not that of good versus evil, as the critical tradition has preferred to claim, but that of the moral system as such in contrast to the world that grounds it, of fairy tale to romance. This opposition determines the macrostructure of the play and repeats on a larger scale the plot’s relation to discourse, symbolism’s to allegory, commodity fetishism’s to exchange-value. It also contains the clash of two worlds and their values, the feudal and the capitalist, which manifest themselves in these respective generic modes. Such simultaneity of feudalism and capitalism within Peer Gynt can be claimed to find its historical equivalent in the Europe of its time. As Arno Mayer argues in his seminal The Persistence of the Old Regime, far from dying with the French Revolution, the feudal order in fact coexisted with the bourgeois and capitalist revolution and continued to dominate the economy, politics, institutions, and cultural life of Europe until the end of World War II. This historical consideration has also led Frederic Jameson to claim, arguing from a similar position, that Modernism must be understood as the product of an incomplete process of modernization, which always displays the dialectical interrelation of two distinct temporalities: “that of the new industrial big city and that of the peasant countryside” (142). While this claim is directly applicable to the analysis of Peer Gynt offered here, it is clear, as Jameson himself points out (123), that this simultaneity is equally present in non-Modernist works from approximately the same period—as we saw in Heiberg. What distinguishes Peer Gynt (and Modernism) from the latter cannot, accordingly, be merely the presence of these two distinct temporal principles in the text (the capitalist time-as-such of Peer, and the feudal atemporality of Solvejg) but must rather reside in the specific mode of their relation. As we have seen, in the aesthetics of idealism, the mediation of such oppositional terms is grounded on the principle of identity that underlies them. Traditional readings of Peer Gynt have clearly favored such an approach, and in their effort to unify fairy tale and romance (or, rather, to reduce the latter to the former) have tended to ignore almost completely act 4, in which Peer’s modern, capitalist, and allegorical world is most prominent.32 Yet such attempts continue to be unsatisfactory to the extent that the ending persists in resisting any pretense of harmony. While Solvejg and Peer’s reunion is suddenly

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brought about in order to end all conflicts, it remains incapable of silencing the Button-Molder, who gets the penultimate lines of the play: “The Button-Molder’s Voice (from behind the hut): We’ll meet at the final crossroads, Peer; / And then we’ll see—; I won’t say more” (“Knappestøberens Stemme [bag Huset]: Vi træffes paa sidste Korsvejen, Peer; / og saa faar vi se,—om; jeg siger ikke mer”) (209 / 241). It is useful to note once more that the aesthetics desired by the secondary literature is clearly operative in St. John’s Night, in which, as we saw, the logic of economic exchange is ultimately defused by its subsumption in the logic of fairy tales. By allowing the world of nixes and elves to cancel the years intervening between Birk’s and Anne’s childhood and their adulthood, their mutual recognition serves to turn back time to a previous stage, which can now be resumed as though the economic difficulties separating the two moments never existed. Those difficulties, indeed, are proven insubstantial when compared to the timeless structures of the fairy tale that permit a return to an original Edenic state, symbolized by the institution of marriage. In Peer Gynt, however, and in spite of the proclamation of timeless values at the end, no corresponding cancellation of temporality occurs. On the contrary, if Solvejg affirms to Peer, “You’ve made my whole life a beautiful song” (207 / 239), the sense that she has wasted it waiting for him to return cannot be dispelled from the stage directions, which force us to acknowledge that her unsteady and blind body did not, as did her mind, remain constant. The tableau that closes the play likewise serves to emphasize the conflict between ideality and temporality, as Solvejg sings a lullaby to the Peer Gynt who is described in the beginning of the act as “a rugged old man with grizzled hair and beard” (150 / 187). Her insistent references to him as “little boy” in each of the six couplets that end the play inevitably stress the very distance between sign and referent that they seek to overcome. What can be seen to suddenly occur at the conclusion of the play is that the principle of linear temporality imposes itself as a third, alternative modality of time, which neither the openness and anarchy of Peer’s romance nor Solvejg’s stasis can control. Falling outside the structure of either’s representational sphere, it manifests itself— as the above summary makes clear—only in the stage directions that quite literally fall outside the boundaries of their worlds. Surprisingly, while its presence becomes constitutive and thus noticeable only at the very end when it makes the desired unity impossible, retrospectively it has in fact been present at the margins of the text throughout,

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marking the constant, linear passing of time against both Peer’s and Solvejg’s insistence to the contrary. Neither producing arbitrary leaps nor standing still, the stage directions at the beginning of each act perpetually mark the same rhythmic sequence. We open in act 1, scene 1, with summer, daytime, and Peer Gynt at twenty (3 / 60), which is followed by early morning (39 / 87), late in the day (46 / 92), sunset (48 / 93), night (50 / 96), pitch-blackness (64 / 108), and dawn (67 / 110). Next comes autumn (69 / 112), twilight (74 / 116), evening (82 / 123), and Peer at middle age and lunch time in act 4 (91 / 131), followed by night (107 / 148), daybreak (110 / 148), early morning (111 / 150), moonlit night (120 / 158), another summer day (133 / 170), and another morning twilight (134 / 171). We then meet Peer Gynt, at the beginning of act 5, as an old man, at dusk (150 / 187), moving through evening (176 / 210), at night (178 / 212), and finally with the rising sun (209 / 241). Biological growth, seasonal changes, times of the day: through all the jumps and gaps that Peer produces, through all the immobility that Solvejg displays, linear time progresses in a strict sequential manner at the margins of the text, without taking note. Diachronic experience thus serves the exact opposite aesthetic function to that of identity at work in idealism. Where Juliette’s and Birk’s characters are the means of establishing continuity between seemingly opposed representational realms, the time of the stage directions in Peer Gynt keeps the worlds of fairy tale and romance irreducibly apart and denies them their long-awaited synthesis. Neither Peer nor Solvejg can accommodate the logic of successive time, yet both are ultimately determined by the inevitable progression that simultaneously grounds and negates their representational structures.

For a consideration of the rise of Modernism more generally, what is particularly interesting about this final point is that Peer Gynt can be seen to provide a counter-instance to the role that Moretti has forcefully argued for Wagner’s Ring. The latter work, according to Moretti, first introduces the formula for reconciliation between the representational principles of expansion (in Wagner, the music of the Ring) and reduction (Wagner’s drama) that in Moretti’s view will also define the aesthetics of compromise in modernism (Modern 103–120). Peer Gynt, on the contrary, which was written only two years before the appearance of Das Rheingold, exploits these same principles not, as we saw, for the sake of their compatibility but in order to force

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their conflict and distance, in direct opposition to the idealist tradition. As such, Ibsen’s work could arguably be seen to serve a transitional function analogous to that attributed to the Ring by Moretti, but in the evolution of an opposed aesthetic trajectory. If Wagner and Ibsen are the most controversial artists in the nineteenth century, as Miriam Franc has claimed (24), then the cause may well be that they both provided new aesthetic structures for the experience of modernity as ineluctably fragmented. What Peer Gynt contributes in the evolution of the aesthetics of dependency more specifically is the discovery of the incommensurability of principles perceived to be constitutive of Modernist experience: anarchy, ideality, and linear temporality. Drawing on the language of chapter 1, these provide the titles that make up the content of an aesthetic judgment. What is needed for their productive relation, however, is the absent fourth term, the modality or absolute standard with which to determine their interaction. As I argue in the following chapter, Ibsen’s dialectical incorporation of such a principle as a means to overcome the impasse laid bare in Peer Gynt mirrors the aesthetics of dependency also found in Kierkegaard’s theology.

ch a p t er four

Nora’s Departure and the Aesthetics of Dependency

The preceding chapter has made clear that the breakthrough of Ibsen’s mature aesthetics cannot be defined in terms of his rejection of the idealist paradigm (as Toril Moi claims in Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism) or through his turn to an allegorical mode of representation (as Frode Helland has proposed in Melankoliens Spill), since both these aspects are present as early as Peer Gynt. Instead, this chapter argues that the innovation first introduced with A Doll’s House consists in a turn to an aesthetic structure akin to that of Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology, examined in chapter 1. This development provides Ibsen with the means to productively exploit the merely negative relation between opposed representational principles operative in Peer Gynt by making their interaction depend on an interpretative position transcendent of the text’s overt semiotic horizons. The reason for the notorious difficulty of classifying Ibsen’s Modernism can thus be seen to lie not least with the failure to correctly identify the nature of the aesthetic framework to be applied to his work. In what follows, I support this argument in four steps. First, I argue that Ibsen in A Doll’s House retains many of the central conventions of the nineteenth-century well-made play as a stabilizing principle in the narrative organization of his text. Second, I show how the play subverts those very conventions by introducing a second representational principle, similar to the allegorical structure in Peer Gynt. Third, I proceed to argue that A Doll’s House nevertheless differs from Peer Gynt by introducing a further interpretative position 117

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through Nora’s departure. The latter can be motivated neither by the logic of the well-made play nor by that of allegory, and as such constitutes a completely new ground for meaning. Drawing on the work of Toril Moi and Stanley Cavell, I argue that the ending of the play functions as the interruption of a new form of life transcendent of the conditions that organize the fictional world up until that point. Fourth and finally, I trace how this new form of life, in spite of its absolute otherness, derives interpretative authority by positing the constitutive value of the further structural principle of progressive temporality embodied by the dying Dr. Rank. In this way, the condition of finite temporality, which in Peer Gynt constitutes the obstacle to the rise of determinate meaning, is in A Doll’s House transformed into the condition for its possibility. Nora’s departure accordingly functions as an analogue to Kierkegaard’s conception of the title of modality by fulfilling two conditions simultaneously. On the one hand, it provides the standard for the unification of representations that itself transcends the organizational structures of the text. On the other, it posits a condition for the relation to the relation between the opposed organizational structures, which corresponds to the dynamic synthesis of faith.

The analysis offered here directly addresses one of the most persistent objections raised against Ibsen in the critical reception of his prose plays. As early as 1891, the thirty-two-year-old Knut Hamsun, who had caused a sensation the previous year with his novel Hunger, gave the first of a series of three lectures concerning Norwegian literature in the capital Kristiania. Opening his talk with the announcement that he would be “as aggressive, as destructive tonight as possible” (17), Hamsun delivered a sweeping condemnation of the pillars of nineteenth-century Norwegian literature: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Alexander Kielland, Jonas Lie, and Henrik Ibsen. Coming to the last of these, Hamsun proclaimed that Ibsen was essentially stuck in an antiquated conception of human character as determined by a single dominant trait. More than just a personal fault of Ibsen’s, this psychological simplicity was a result of the medium in question. As Hamsun put it, A play must always be intelligible, as easy to follow for the pit as for the stalls, which is why a figure that does not possess the necessary clarity and intelligibility simply fails to register. But a figure with

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clarity means a character and a type. . . . It is my opinion therefore that the kind of psychology which has to be clear enough, that is: shallow enough, to be understood and enjoyed on stage is an indefensibly crude and false psychology. . . . [A] play is, and always will be, too restricted a framework to be able to contain anything other than souls in outline. (32, 33)

Only a few moments later, however, in discussing Ibsen’s 1888 play The Lady from the Sea, Hamsun’s grudge seems to take a different turn: What is the lady from the sea? I do not know, I simply do not know. For the lady from the sea talks the most divine nonsense. No, this is truly a book for Germans. It is a book for a people already used to reading profound works of literature. Ibsen has written a book, that is enough. His entire congregation sits down to stare superstitiously at his words and finds them exquisitely obscure. And the Germans are delighted and rub their hands—ah, wunderschön! And I also sit myself down to read it, and I read and read . . . and I say in despair: the devil take you, why don’t you speak plainly, man! (37)

What is particularly interesting about Hamsun’s two pronouncements is not only that they are contradictory, insofar as the former complains of an excessive transparency in Ibsen’s work while the latter condemns its excessive opaqueness, but that they implicitly point to the cause of this difference as stemming from the difference in media through which the works are approached. As stage plays, they fall victim to psychological reductionism, while it is as a read text (“and I read and read,” as Hamsun emphasizes) that The Lady from the Sea becomes incomprehensible. Twenty-three years after Hamsun’s whirlwind lecture, another influential figure, the young Georg Lukács, was to make a similar objection in his Theory of the Novel. In an extended parenthesis in the fifth chapter of that work, Lukács points to “the essential inner stylelessness of modern drama, and of Ibsen in particular” as being due to its movement away from the relationship of hero and world that is proper to drama in a strict sense. In the latter genre, no antagonism can exist between the two, and the world serves merely as an occasion for the hero to attain his or her essence. In modern drama, in contrast, characters “sense within themselves the distance between themselves and their soul” (89), and as a result, “the length of the road which the hero must travel in his own soul before he discovers himself as a hero [is] at variance with the slenderness of construction

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which the dramatic form demands, and bring[s] it closer to the epic forms” (44).1 Lukács’s insight was further elaborated and cemented by what is still one of the most influential works on modern drama, Peter Szondi’s Theory of the Modern Drama, of 1956. Szondi there expands on Lukács’s observations by claiming that Ibsen’s specific role in the crisis of modern drama is his thematization of the past. Such thematization, however, is not like that found in, for example, Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus’s past killing of King Laius and marriage to Jocasta are constitutive of the present conflict and their analysis therefore a necessary requirement. The past that Ibsen evokes, on the contrary, is not a particular event but “the past-as-such” (“die Vergangenheit selbst”) (Theory 16; trans. modified / Theorie 28). I will return to what this enigmatic statement might mean later on, but what is of importance here is that it leads Szondi to point to the inherent contradiction of such a project, given that the medium of dramatic representation by definition can show only the present. As Szondi states, “the past-as-such” “[d]oes not lend itself to the dramatic present. Only something temporal can be made present in the sense of dramatic actualization, not time itself. Time can only be reported about in the Drama; its direct representation is possible solely in an art form that includes it ‘among its constitutive principles.’ This art form . . . is the novel” (ibid.).2 Ibsen’s problem according to this view, then, is that while he revolutionizes the content of modern drama by making the past-as-such its focus, he continues to make use of the form of the French nineteenth-century well-made play. This tension results in a failure to provide sufficient motivation for the endings of his plays, present to us as audience, through a past that cannot but remain absent. Accordingly, Ibsen ultimately stands on the wrong side of Modernism, as the swan song of “that postneoclassical era referred to as bourgeois” (88 / 147), rather than the birth of the modern. The latter role, for Szondi, belongs instead to August Strindberg, who already with his 1887 The Father translates the novelistic content of Ibsen’s drama into an altogether new dramatic form (cf. 22–32 / 40–56). It is thus Strindberg who initiates the path to the epic and subjective theater of the twentieth century that is finally able to overcome Ibsen’s contradictions. From the perspective of the present study, two observations can immediately be made with respect to this recurrent theme in the reception of Ibsen’s major plays. First, it is clear that the simultaneity of opposed organizational principles that these criticisms focus on

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indeed is central to the aesthetic tradition within which Ibsen is operating. The conflict pointed to, in fact, is akin to that already traced in Heiberg, even while the particular assessment of the well-made play has been radically transformed since the time of the latter’s concerned discussion of Scribe’s subversive qualities in the early 1820s.3 If Hamsun, Lukács, and Szondi no longer perceive the presence of a semiotic anarchy in the conventions of nineteenth-century drama, the agonistic opposition of transparency and opacity that they locate in Ibsen is nevertheless, as the previous chapter showed, a direct consequence of Peer Gynt’s immanent critique of the relation of constitutive terms in Heiberg’s aesthetics of autonomy. Second, from within this context, it is clear that the assumption that Ibsen’s insistence on the antithetical nature of the relation between opposed representational principles is a shortcoming of his poetics rests on the misguided application of precisely the kind of idealist standard of taste that he rejects as early as 1867. Placing Ibsen’s work in relation to the alternative aesthetics of dependency opens up the possibility of reconsidering the nature and function of this central opposition in his works. This is of particular interest with respect to A Doll’s House, where Szondi’s claim that Ibsen’s endings do not match the beginnings and middles that precede them underlies the persistent critique leveled at the play ever since its first production: that Nora’s change from complacent butterfly to New Woman is unconvincing and insufficiently prepared for.4 Showing that this particular problem in A Doll’s House can be answered from the perspective offered by the aesthetics of dependency also means showing that it engages in a mediation of the crisis of modernity distinct from what was previously assumed.

the persistence of the well-made play That Ibsen retains many of the conventions of the nineteenth-century well-made play in his mature aesthetics is clear from any plot summary of A Doll’s House. The play opens on the day of Christmas Eve with Nora and Torvald Helmer in happy anticipation of Torvald’s assuming the position of bank manager after New Year’s Eve, which will finally provide their blissful home with economic security. In stark contrast, Nora’s childhood friend, Mrs. Kristine Linde, arrives at the Helmers’ doorstep, looking for employment in the city now that her husband and mother have died and her two younger brothers have obtained apprenticeship positions. In conversation with Kristine,

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Nora confides that in her first year of marriage she secretly had to borrow money in order to pay for a trip to Italy, which was necessary to restore Torvald’s health. As chance would have it, the man Nora borrowed the money from, Nils Krogstad, is employed in the bank that Torvald will be managing, and he shows up at the Helmers’ home in an attempt to prevent his being fired due to his bad reputation for having committed forgery years back. Trying to persuade Nora to put in a good word for him, he reveals that he knows that she is guilty of no less a crime than he, since she faked the signature of her father, who was to stand in security for the loan but died several days before the date signed on the IOU. What follows is a series of frantic attempts by Nora to prevent Krogstad from revealing her crime and secret to Torvald, who suspects nothing. In the meantime, it turns out that Mrs. Linde and Krogstad were lovers in their youth and that she abandoned him for a wealthier man in order to support her family. Following their reencounter at the Helmers’, Kristine, who has now been promised Krogstad’s job, convinces Krogstad to give their relationship a second try, and the two are happily reunited. As a consequence, Krogstad repents of his blackmailing of Nora and of having sent a letter to Torvald revealing her deceit, but Kristine persuades him that it is best to let events run their course and let the truth emerge. Nora and Torvald return from a masquerade ball, Torvald finds the letter, and Nora, who always thought her husband would heroically assume all public guilt and shame, discovers to her surprise that Torvald is far from willing to do so. Instead, he launches into a scathing attack on her and lays plans to hush up the whole affair. At this point, a further letter from Krogstad arrives, returning the IOU and apologizing for everything. Torvald is ecstatic, but Nora, having seen the true face of her marriage and realizing that she has been living an illusion, decides to abandon her husband and children in order to go out into the world and educate herself. As this summary suggests, A Doll’s House draws on several of the mechanics of the well-made play, such as the late beginning of the action, the lengthy exposition of the preceding events, the competition among characters for information as the source of power, and the creation of suspense by means of miscommunications, chance encounters, and lost or stolen documents. 5 Moreover, the central conflict revealed by the play’s dramatic ending, between Nora’s romantic expectations of what Torvald will do, on the one hand, and the crude reality of economic and legal forces that determine the latter’s world,

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on the other, derives directly from the conflict between values and facts discussed in relation to Heiberg in chapter 2. In A Doll’s House, as is established early on when Nora reveals her secret sacrifice in paying off the debt, it is a logic of absolute altruism and self-sacrifice that counts as the highest moral excellence in the realm of values: Nora:

I know you rather tend to look down on me, Kristine. But you shouldn’t, you know. You are proud of having worked so hard and so long for your mother.

Mrs. Linde: I’m sure I don’t look down on anybody. But it’s true what you say: I am both proud and happy when I think of how I was able to make Mother’s life a little easier towards the end. Nora:

And you are proud when you think of what you have done for your brothers, too.

Mrs. Linde: I think I have every right to be. Nora:

I think so too. But now I’m going to tell you something, Kristine. I too have something to be proud and happy about. (A Doll’s 12–13 / Et dukkehjem 285)6

In contrast, as Krogstad reminds Nora later in the same act, the sphere of actions governed by the logic of the law is impersonal and objective, utterly unconcerned with motivations and the distinctions between people that they bring: Krogstad: Mrs. Helmer, it’s quite clear you still haven’t the faintest idea what it is you’ve committed. But let me tell you, my own offence was no more and no worse than that, and it ruined my entire reputation [borgerlige stilling]. Nora:

You? Are you trying to tell me that you once did something courageous to save your wife’s life?

Krogstad: The laws take no account of motives [bevæggrunde]. Nora:

Then they must be very bad laws.

Krogstad: Bad or not, if I produce this document in court, you’ll be condemned according to the laws. Nora:

I certainly don’t think so. A daughter should not be entitled to try and save her father from worry and anxiety on his deathbed? Shouldn’t a wife have the right to save her husband’s life? I might not know very much about the law, but I am certain it must say somewhere that things like this are allowed. (29; trans. modified / 303)

The opposition between the two perspectives played out in this exchange is further elucidated in Ibsen’s early draft of the play, under

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the heading “notes to the modern tragedy”: “There are two kinds of spiritual laws, two kinds of consciousness, one in man, and a completely different one in woman. They do not understand each other; but in practical life woman is condemned according to the laws of man, as though she were not a woman but a man” (368).7 While this passage opposes the contrasting positions along strict gender lines, it is worth noting that the melodramatic conflict between hero and villain, Nora and Korgstad, actually results from a conflation of facts and values common to them both. In the first act, during the above-quoted first conversation between Nora and Kristine, the latter asks the former whether she will not eventually tell Torvald that she secretly saved his life: Nora [reflectively, half-smiling]: Oh yes, some day perhaps . . . in many years’ time, when I’m no longer as pretty as I am now. You mustn’t laugh! What I mean of course is when Torvald should no longer find pleasure in watching me dance, and that I get dressed up and recite. Then it might be a good thing to have something in reserve . . . [Breaks off.] Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense! [Vås, vås, vås!] That day will never come. (15; trans. modified and ellipses in original / 287–288)

Nora assumes not only a correspondence between the world of facts and her values of chivalric love but also, secretly, the possibility of using values as facts, of transforming values into economic entities that can buy more love when other assets have been exhausted. A few moments later in the same act, Krogstad makes a similar, if inverted, assumption when trying to force Nora to help him maintain his socially respectable position in the bank by means of the IOU in his possession: “But now I have to get out of all this. My sons are growing up; for their sake I must try and win back what respectability I can. That job in the Bank was something like the first step on the ladder for me. And now your husband wants to kick me off the ladder again, back into the mud” (26; trans. modified / 299). Like Nora, Krogstad seeks to conflate the two realms by using economic and legal facts as a currency with which to obtain social values (cf. also 54 / 329), and like her, he must come to learn that the absolute gap between them makes such a move impossible. The third act accordingly opens and closes with two sets of Aristotelian “peripety” and “discovery,” in two parallel scenes.8 In the first instance, the discovery of the tragic distance between the spheres of facts and values becomes the very basis for the reunion of Krogstad

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and Kristine. The latter, unlike Nora, has no illusions about reality and yet offers herself in marriage to Krogstad in spite of his social and economic bankruptcy (64–65 / 339–340). It is by means of this free and spontaneous gift of trust and respect that Krogstad in turn discovers that his attempt to obtain these through legal and economic coercion was misguided (65–66 / 341–342), seemingly making possible the return of values to a world otherwise devoid of them. Kristine thus appears to achieve a positive application of the self-sacrificing female ideal that also allows her to step outside the logic of economic and legal dependencies by offering a free exchange of values, possible precisely because it is absolutely autonomous of the sphere of facts. As such, she could be said to guarantee the truth and moral superiority of Nora’s famous claim to Torvald that “hundreds of thousands” of women have given up their honor to save their men (84; trans. modified / 362). The claim that there is such a victory of female values in the play would appear to find further support in the fact that it is Kristine who dictates the final outcome of the plot by directly preventing Krogstad from retrieving his incriminating letter. As she categorically proclaims immediately before Nora and Torvald return from the masquerade ball: “Helmer must come to know everything. This unhappy secret must come out. Those two must have the whole thing out between them. All this secrecy and deception, it just can’t go on” (66; trans. modified / 341). Kristine’s direct authorial control over events is again suggested when the notorious final discussion between Nora and Torvald opens in terms that directly echo the preceding reunion between herself and Krogstad. While this point is strangely enough passed over in silence by the secondary literature, Nora’s famous command to Torvald, “Sit down. I’ll take some time. I have a lot to talk to you about,” and her concomitant claim “You don’t understand me” (79; trans. modified / 356) explicitly repeat Kristine’s previous words to Krogstad: “Well then, Nils. Let’s talk. . . . We have a great deal to talk about. . . . [Y]ou never really understood me” (62 / 337). This echo of the preceding happy resolution of Krogstad’s predicament through Kristine’s self-sacrifice might be seen to lend additional legitimacy to Nora’s expectations that her own crisis will follow similar rules. Even as Torvald’s final actions are dictated by the logic of the law and economy, and thereby negate her assumptions, it is therefore the realm of Nora’s betrayed moral view that would seem to win the day. Leaving, Nora proclaims:

126 Nora:

Aesthetic Forms at the Scandinavian Periphery . . . I now also hear that the laws are different than I thought; but that those laws should be right, that I cannot possibly get into my head. Apparently a woman has no right to spare her old father on his deathbed, or to save her husband’s life, even. I just don’t believe it.

Helmer: You’re talking like a child. You don’t understand the society you’re living in. Nora:

No, I don’t. But now I’ll get into that too. I must try to discover who is right, society or me. (83; trans. modified / 360)

From this perspective, it is not Nora and her values that fail the test but Torvald, in revealing himself not to be the man he ought to be, as Nora explicitly points out: “I realized you weren’t the man I thought you were” (84 / 361). It is important to note that this superiority of the realm of female values forces the sphere of the law that determines the plot to generate its opposite. By giving values rather than facts the moral and interpretative priority, the play, which seems to follow the law’s logic of necessity, becomes subject to a wholly particular and therefore contingent set of circumstances. If only Torvald would have been less of a prig, or if only women would be given their due, the conflict in Ibsen’s play would disappear. In this way, however, the play also loses any proper tragic dimension since, as George Steiner claims about Ibsen in his influential The Death of Tragedy, the conflict is not absolute and can be overcome by social or temporal improvements: But these tracts, enduring as they may prove to be by virtue of their theatrical vigour, are not tragedies. In tragedy, there are no temporal remedies. The point cannot be stressed too often. Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unfaltering bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world. But in these plays of Ibsen’s radical period, such is not the issue. There are specific remedies to the disasters which befall the characters, and it is Ibsen’s purpose to make us see these remedies and bring them about. A Doll’s House and Ghosts are founded on the belief that society can move toward a sane, adult conception of sexual life and that woman can and must be raised to the dignity of man. Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People are denunciations of the hypocrisies and oppressions concealed behind the mask of middle-class gentility. They tell us of the way in which money interests poison the springs of emotional life and intellectual integrity. They cry out for explicit radicalism and reform. As Shaw rightly says: “No more tragedy for the sake of tears.” Indeed, no tragedy at all, but dramatic rhetoric

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summoning us to action in the conviction that truth of conduct can be defined and that it will liberate society. (291)

Steiner’s argument assumes that Nora’s final departure is justified as a defense of “feminine values,” which serve as the master code through which the course of action must be understood and organized. In an extension of Heiberg’s idealist principles, the contradiction at the level of phenomena can be argued to give way to an order of essences, precisely because the conflict’s origin and comprehensibility lie with the characters’ failure to properly embody the values that govern their world.9 That such an interpretation is structurally akin to the aesthetic logic operative in the well-made play (even while it clearly differs in its evaluation of the relevant terms) can be seen from the fact that it also governs the 1884 adaptation of the text by Arthur Jones and Henry Herman, Breaking a Butterfly, which constitutes one of the very first performances of Ibsen on the English stage. Never published for the general public and existing only in the few copies printed for the Lord Chancellor’s Office, Breaking a Butterfly has not yet received adequate scholarly attention. Its significance lies, not least, in the fact that it offers a rewriting of Ibsen along the melodramatic principles of the well-made play. Particularly important in the context of this discussion is that Jones and Herman completely change the original ending by having Torvald (recast as “Humphrey Goddard”) act precisely in accordance with the expectations of Nora (“Flora”). When Krogstad (“Dunkley”) confronts Humphrey with the secret of Flora’s forgery at the conclusion of act 2, Humphrey’s response is radically opposed to Torvald’s: Dunk: . . . This woman, who is your pride and joy—I will make her your shame and disgrace! I will ruin her utterly! To-morrow I will have her arrested on a charge of forgery! Hum (very calmly): You make one mistake, Mr. Dunkley! My wife did not forge that note. Dunk: Not? Then who did? Hum: I did! Dunk: You?! Hum: Yes—I! Now do your worst to me. You shall not touch a hair of her head! Flora rushes forward from door with a shriek, and falls at Humphrey’s feet. (61–62)

In the following act, Nora’s dream is again lived out by her English double:

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Flora: Oh, Humphrey, I have been a poor, weak, foolish girl! I have been no wife for a man like you. You are a thousand times too good for me! Why don’t you hate me? Why don’t you curse me for spoiling your life? Why do you have anything more to do with me? Let me go! Throw me off, and don’t mind what becomes of me! I’m not worth your caring for! Hum. Hush! Hush! You have been my true dear wife all these years—the very wife after my own heart. Knowing what I do to-day, I would choose you again to-morrow. You have suffered with me, nursed me, sacrificed yourself for me. All you did was for the best—don’t chide yourself. What is past cure isn’t worth crying about. (65–66)

Eventually the crisis in Breaking a Butterfly is resolved when the loyal Grittle (part Mrs. Linde, part Dr. Rank) retrieves the note from Dunkley and neutralizes his threat (74–75). What is of interest in the present context is that Breaking a Butterfly is universally taken to constitute a travesty of Ibsen’s text.10 This fact suggests that reading the latter as a defense of the altruistic fantasies that Nora entertains clearly misses some fundamental point.

the origins of error Interpretations such as Steiner’s doubtless stem from the fact that the radical nature of A Doll’s House’s form has been somewhat lost to us due to the circumstance that few now would fault Nora for abandoning her home. Yet such sympathetic readings inevitably impose a motivation on Nora’s departure that is simply not supported by the play itself. If the sphere of female values that Ibsen singles out in the above-quoted notes to his draft of A Doll’s House does not receive its due in modern society, then neither can it ultimately explain Nora’s final departure, as Steiner would appear to think. While Nora invokes the self-sacrificing “hundreds of thousands,” she clearly does not act out of consideration for Torvald’s social standing, as that paradigm would demand, but rather assures his public disgrace by abandoning their home. That this point was not lost on Ibsen’s own contemporaries can be seen from two further, diametrically opposed literary appropriations of A Doll’s House. In his 1890 “A Doll’s House—and After,” written in response to the 1889 London premiere of the uncorrupted version of Ibsen’s play, Walter Besant provides an account of Nora’s life twenty years after she abandons Torvald. Far from seeing her departure as the realization of the female values best represented by Kristine, Besant imagines the outcome of Nora’s life as leading her

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children and Torvald into poverty and social downfall. While Kristine’s reunion with Krogstad has raised him to the level of mayor, Nora’s departure is grounded solely on selfishness. As Kristine tells Nora toward the end of Besant’s story: “When you left [Torvald] suddenly with the helpless children you destroyed his life. Did you never ask yourself what it meant for such a man to be deserted by his wife, and without a cause?” “Cause there was—and enough.” “Without a cause,” Christine repeated. “You told me why you left him. There was no cause. Did you never think what construction would be put upon your act? People look coldly on a man whose wife suddenly leaves him and returns to him no more.” “I cannot help that.” “You have not only destroyed his life, Norah, but you have destroyed the lives of your own children. You remember their names, at least. There was Einar, the eldest. You must remember that lovely boy. He is now a drunken profligate. He has been made reckless by the example of his father and the things said of his mother. There was little Emmy—you must remember her. She is a good girl, I am told, who lives apart and alone, condemned to loneliness, because a girl with such sad parents can have no friends. There is the youngest, Robert, whose way of life is well known, and whose end is certain. It will be—the prison. Does this move you?” “Not in the least,” she replied coldly. “You speak of unknown people—strangers. The sins of strange people are only interesting as forming data in the general problems of humanity. I have told you that a certain chapter of my life is closed for ever.” (321)

If Besant’s interpretation of Nora is clearly influenced by his opposition to the feminist movement of the day (cf., e.g., 320), Ednah H. Cheney’s opposed defense of Ibsen’s heroine, Nora’s Return, likewise published in 1890 and written in direct response to Besant (5–6), interestingly enough reveals a similar assumption about the nature of Nora’s departure. To Cheney, Nora does not turn into the heartless egoist of Besant’s tale but rather joins “the nurses’ training school” in order to dedicate her life to the service of others (24). Her new role eventually leads her back to the city of her husband and children, where she volunteers to help during a cholera epidemic. In the meantime, Torvald has come to realize that he treated Nora wrongly, and when he falls sick with cholera, Nora nurses him back to health. In the climactic reconciliation that follows, the possibility of a genuine coexistence, which Ibsen’s play at best presents as a utopian wish, is realized (cf. A Doll’s House 86 / Et dukkehjem 364). Torvald writes to Nora:

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Nora: — You have again saved my life. When I am worthy, I will lay that life at your feet in thankfulness. I have nothing to give now. I come to beg, to entreat of you to come back to your home, to your children. They need you. I will not be a stranger within your home, but without it. I cannot rob them of what they have a right to, and it is I who need to go away, not you. Thorvald Helmar.

To which Nora replies: Helmar: — If I have learned the meaning of truth and duty, and you a lesson of unselfish love, we may dwell together, not as strangers, but as friends, and bring up the children to live wiser lives than ours. If you will send the carriage on New Year’s evening, I will come and spend the next day with you and the children. Nora (56–57)

Cheney’s defense of Nora significantly depends on showing how her departure allows her to engage in the kind of Christian virtues that the realm of female values represents. The departure itself, that is, does not provide sufficient support for this assumption, as Besant well pointed out, and carries conviction only when supplemented with extensive narrative additions on Nora’s social service. It is important to stress that the unease surrounding the value of Nora’s decision to leave, revealed by both Besant and Cheney, finds ample support in Ibsen’s text. Where Kristine tells Krogstad, “There’s no pleasure in working only for yourself,” and begs him to “give me somebody and something to work for” (A Doll’s 64 / Et dukkehjem 339), Nora ends the play on the gospel of absolute individualism. The highest duty is no longer toward others but toward herself: Helmer: This is outrageous! You are betraying your most sacred duty. Nora:

And what do you consider to be my most sacred duty?

Helmer: Does it take me to tell you that? Isn’t it your duty to your husband and your children? Nora:

I have other duties equally sacred.

Helmer: You have not. What duties might that be? Nora:

My duties to myself.

Helmer: First and foremost, you are a wife and mother. Nora:

I don’t believe that any more. I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, just as well as you [ligesåvel som du]—or, in any case, that I must try to become one [skal forsøge på at bli’e det]. (82; trans. modified / 359)

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From the perspective of the female virtues of absolute altruism represented throughout the play, this cannot but be heresy and fully warrants August Strindberg’s objection: “Once she has discovered what a dolt her husband is, there is all the more reason for her to stay with the children” (quoted in Törnqvist 45). The fact that Nora’s final action cannot be understood through the categories of the female values that she herself invokes suggests that it is necessary to revise the assumption that the play’s events as a whole are determined through such codes. It is therefore important to stress that the well-made–play plot of A Doll’s House, which has been the focus up until this point, is, as already mentioned, constituted by the unfolding of the legal and economic consequences of Nora’s original tragic “error of judgment”: her forgery of her father’s signature.11 As such, it spans the only two specific dates that we are told in the play: September 29 eight years ago, when Nora’s father died, and the three days from Christmas until Nora leaves, which make up the dramatic present. Yet as the play evolves, this neat temporal frame is flooded when we begin to encounter a proliferation of past tragic errors that continue to defer the point of origin of the events through which Nora is now suffering. Besides her own forgery, there is Krogstad’s, without which, as he assures us, he would never have entered the money-lending business to begin with or resorted to blackmailing Nora (25–26, 29, 33 / 299, 303, 307). Krogstad’s own decline, however, is the result of Kristine’s abandonment of him for a wealthier man (63 / 338), which in turn seems due to her family’s lack of paternal support (11 / 283). In addition, Nora’s father was himself guilty of criminal behavior, which Torvald repeatedly invokes as the origin of her moral deficiency (5, 76 / 276 352). Yet Torvald himself also commits a tragic error, as becomes clear when it emerges that he was the one responsible for investigating Nora’s father’s crime and that he let her father off the hook in exchange for Nora’s hand in marriage (42, 76 / 316, 352). Further still, Torvald’s firing of Krogstad, which sets off the immediate catastrophe, is due not, as he confesses in the second act, to Krogstad’s past crime or any professional incompetence on his part but simply to the fact that he cannot stand that Krogstad addresses him with the second-person informal pronoun “du” instead of the formal “De” because the two were friends during their student years (42–43 / 317). Indeed, the possible source of corruption extends even to the minor characters, when we are told that the Nurse was

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abandoned by her lover and forced to give up her own daughter in order to take the job of raising Nora and the children (36 / 310). That this relation between past and present is antithetical to the logic of the well-made play is suggested by the fact that it is completely omitted from Jones and Herman’s Breaking a Butterfly. In that work, the origin of the present crisis is explicitly and exclusively located with Nora’s moral naïveté (6–7), while Krogstad’s villainy constitutes an absolute condition that has no cause outside itself (cf., e.g., 18–19, 60). Nor are these two characters any longer guilty of the same crime of forgery (cf. 45), thereby letting the difference between innocence and evil stand out with greater clarity. The purity of Helmer’s goodness is likewise secured by freeing him from any involvement with Nora’s father and by having it be, not he, but Nora who knew Krogstad in her youth (47, 59). The love affair between Kristine and Krogstad is in turn transposed onto the unmistakably good characters of Agnes and Dan, who can be reunited in a subplot that remains safely separate from the central action. In Breaking a Butterfly, that is, the all-pervasive implication of each character in the present circumstances that Ibsen creates is abandoned for the sake of a taxonomic purity that allows each to have a specific moral nature and narrative function. The difference at stake is also visible in Ibsen’s changes to the draft version of A Doll’s House, in which determinate, objective rationales still provide the motivations for actions. Here, Torvald fires Krogstad because the bank’s staff is in need of a general overhaul (Et dukkehjem 388), Nora cannot confess her past sacrifice because Torvald’s health continues to be precarious and he must be spared all anxiety (380, 402, 412), Kristine looks for a job because her family still requires economic support (380). All these causes are in principle open to improvements that would make the decisions to which they lead unnecessary. In the final version of the play, however, they are all substituted for subjective alternatives (Torvald’s vanity, Nora’s pride, Kristine’s lack of independence) that ground current events in an incalculable realm of past influences. If the past that Ibsen evokes, as Szondi claims, differs from that of nineteenth-century drama in being a “past-as-such,” I take it this is so because the present events we witness can find their point of departure in any of the histories that precede them rather than only in that of Nora’s forgery. And insofar as the past functions as the locus of meaning for the present, it becomes clear that a second, and

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competing, tragic paradigm is at work in this relation, which approximates that of allegory as previously discussed with respect to Peer Gynt. Like allegory there, the clearly defined unit of the well-made play in A Doll’s House is dislocated from the strict temporal and social environment that determines its causal and semiotic relations and is redefined anew. In allegorical representations, Walter Benajmin tells us, “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (152), and likewise here, Nora’s melodramatic fate can find its hidden causes in any of the moments of the past. If this allegorical structure at first appears to open up the signifiers of the well-made play to a plethora of signifieds, a dialectical inversion similar to that in the conflict between law and values takes place in that between the present and the past. By allowing any number of different points of origin for the present action, the difference between them also disappears, since the past does not offer a single action that might have led to an alternative happy outcome. The initial moment of interpretative freedom provided by the past-as-such generates the inevitability and homogeneity of Benjamin’s “facies hippocratica” (145), the mask of death, underlying all allegorical play. And this lack of distinction between particulars, of course, as Krogstad reminds Nora (A Doll’s 29 / Et dukkehjem 303), is of the nature of the law. The victory of the logic of values over facts staged by the well-defined boundaries of the well-made play, that is, transforms into the victory of facts over values in the expanded context of the past-as-such. Where the plot determined by the law gave way to contingency, the dimension determined by contingency gives way to the law. And if the former point of view dictates that phenomena are in principle open to improvement and tragedy is therefore impossible, the latter tragically reveals that no amount of change will ever be able to provide a different outcome of events. What was kept absolutely distant by the plot of the well-made play is thus shown as ultimately identical by the inevitable necessity of the past. Insofar as no action can be kept safely from its opposite, the logic of the values of altruism, of being for another, coincides with and always generates the logic of deceit, of being another.

the lion speaks The taxonomy of moral categories that governs the world of female values is in this way emptied of stable attributes, as the concrete

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phenomena it designates reveal themselves to be implicated in the very concepts they supposedly oppose. The conflict between these distinct representational principles—between the past-as-such and the well-made play—clearly recalls the one between romance and fairy tale in Peer Gynt. But if the former’s constant deferral of boundaries undermines the idealist project of a self-enclosed totality, in A Doll’s House, the principle of allegorical representation cannot ultimately claim primacy either, given that it, too, fails to determine Nora’s departure. The play itself makes this more than clear, since, if it is a fact that, as Krogstad puts it, “The laws take no account of motives” (29; trans. modified / 303), the ending forces us to do precisely that. The question that haunts the play, after all, is why Nora leaves, what her motivations are, returning us once more from the level of the abstract universality of the past-as-such to the concrete experience of this particular present. From this perspective, the final discussion between Nora and Torvald can be seen to perform two tasks simultaneously. On the one hand, it serves to empty familiar concepts of their established meanings by laying bare the allegorical relation underlying all present determinations. Nora no longer refers to her relationship to Torvald as a “marriage” (“ægteskab”) but as her “coming into your house” (“kom i huset til dig”) (80; trans. modified / 357), a phrase that in Norwegian not only designates the literal action of entering his abode but also refers to the beginning of a maid’s employment. The past that Torvald designates as “happy” (“lykkelig”) is to Nora now only “gay” (“lystig”), while their “home” (“hjem”) is redefined as a “playroom” (“legestue”) (80 / 358). On the other hand, such semiotic destabilizations are counteracted by an opposed imposition of new determinations that can find motivation through neither the representational code of the well-made play nor that of the allegorical past-as-such. While Nora’s departure, for example, is the means for our comprehension of the need to reject the value of the altruistic logic that would have us laud the “hundreds of thousands” of women who have given up their honor, it also re-signifies that statement from a position that exceeds it. After all, she is sacrificing her honor by leaving Torvald, and, as she herself points out, she does do so in order to save not only herself but him, too (85 / 363). In doing so, however, the concepts of sacrifice and honor have been radically changed from a perspective that they did not previously contain and which Kristine, among others, would never understand. If such new meanings for old concepts

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are opposed to the positive content provided for them by the wellmade play, the very use of them as determined equally opposes the principle of infinite deferral that governs the past-as-such. The point arguably finds its strongest exemplification in the final reference to a possible future reunification of Nora and Torvald as “the most wonderful thing” (“det vidunderligste”) (86; trans. modified / 364). The word “vidunderlige,” “the wonderful,” is introduced on two previous occasions in the play, both times by Nora. At the beginning of act 1, it designates the fact that Torvald’s new position in the bank provides them with an economically comfortable situation: Helmer: Oh, what a glorious feeling it is, knowing you’ve got a nice, safe job, and a good fat income. Don’t you agree? That’s a great pleasure to think about, isn’t it? Nora:

Oh, it’s wonderful [vidunderligt]! ...

Helmer: . . . But it is good that the hard times are over. Nora:

Yes, really, that’s wonderful [vidunderligt].

Helmer: Now I don’t have to sit here by myself and be bored; and you don’t have to strain your dear little eyes and work those dainty little fingers to the bone . . . Nora [clapping her hands]: No, Torvald, I don’t, do I? Not any more. Oh, how wonderful [vidunderlig] it is to hear that! (6; trans. modified and third ellipsis in original / 277–278)

In act 2, this threefold use of the word recurs in Nora’s description of what she assumes will be Torvald’s heroic response to the impending crisis. Faced with the possibility that Torvald will sacrifice his reputation to save hers, Nora plans to commit suicide in order to free him from such an act: Mrs. Linde: Nora, Nora! Are you out of your mind? Nora:

And if somebody else wanted to take it all upon himself, the whole blame, you understand . . .

Mrs. Linde: Yes, yes. But what makes you think . . . ? Nora:

Then you must testify that it isn’t true, Kristine. I’m not out of my mind; I’m quite sane now. And I tell you this: nobody else knew anything, I alone am responsible for the whole thing. Remember that!

Mrs. Linde: I will. But I don’t understand a word of it. Nora:

How should you be able to understand it? It is the wonderful [vidunderlige] that now is going to happen.

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Mrs. Linde: The wonderful [vidunderlige]? Nora:

Yes, the wonderful [vidunderlige]. But it is so terrible, Kristine,—it cannot happen, for no price in the world can it happen. (56; trans. modified and ellipses in original / 331)

In the first instance, “the wonderful” is associated with the logic of money and accumulation that underlies the allegorical structure of representation and which in A Doll’s House is associated with the male world of the law and exploitation. In the second, it is defined in explicit opposition to that same economy, being exchangeable for “no price in the world” (“ingen pris i verden”) and clearly pertaining to the female realm of moral virtues. The spheres of facts and values here confront each other again as seemingly all-exhaustive alternatives to the same phenomenon, and yet the third and final occurrence of “the wonderful,” which closes the play, falls outside both: Helmer: Nora, can I never be anything more to you than a stranger? Nora [takes her bag]: Ah, Torvald, for that the most wonderful thing [det vidunderligste] would have to happen. Helmer: Name this most wonderful thing [dette vidunderligste]! Nora:

For that both you and I would have to change [forvandle] so that . . . Oh, Torvald, I don’t believe in anything wonderful [vidunderlige] any more.

Helmer: But I want to believe in it. Name it! Change [forvandle] so that . . . ? Nora:

So that a life together [samliv] could become a marriage [ægteskab]. Goodbye.

[She goes out through the hall door.] Helmer [sinks down on a chair near the door, and covers his face with his hands]: Nora! Nora! [He rises and looks round.] Empty! She’s gone! [With sudden hope.] The most wonderful thing [det vidunderligste] . . . ! [The heavy sound of a door being slammed shut [slås i lås] is heard from below.] (86; trans. modified and ellipses in original / 364)

Torvald’s urgent desire to name the wonderful remains unsatisfied to the extent that the concept of “ægteskab” (“marriage”) has been emptied of its positive content in the preceding discussion and therefore cannot provide semiotic determination. Whatever “ægteskab” means here, it is clearly not the relation akin to master and maid that we have witnessed. Its association with “samliv” (“life together”), in turn, remains ambiguous: in the absence of contexts or examples,

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the ground of their equation is denied to us, and we cannot know the meaning of the terms. What would marriage have to mean for it to qualify as “samliv”? What must “samliv” look like if it is an “ægteskab” rather than simply coexistence? The redeployment of the concept of marriage in this passage simultaneously denies and affirms a meaning by speaking from a position that remains utopian both in the sense of providing a future-oriented hope and in that of being nowhere, lying outside the established semiotic boundaries that operate within the text. Neither economic accumulation nor chivalric values, the most wonderful remains elusive in its content at the very moment of its affirmation. There is a structural analogy, I would suggest, between the semiotic status of this final moment and what Kierkegaard ascribes to the binding of Isaac in Fear and Trembling. As Kierkegaard argues there, from an ethical, social, and human perspective, Abraham’s sacrifice can only be perceived as murder and therefore must mean that he hates his son (Fear 73–74 / Frygt 165, et passim). From a religious perspective, however, such a meaning is impossible, since God has explicitly asked Abraham to sacrifice the son whom he loves (Fear 74 / Frygt 165). The paradox at stake, accordingly, is that the act of murder must express love at the very moment that its articulation denies that meaning: In this connection, to say that it is a duty to love God, means something different from the above, for if this duty is absolute, then the ethical is reduced to the relative. From this it does not follow that the ethical should be destroyed, but it receives a completely different expression, a paradoxical expression, so that, for example, love to God can bring the Knight of Faith to give his love to the neighbor the opposite expression of what, ethically speaking, is duty. (70; trans. modified / 162)

This situation is akin, of course, to that of the Incarnation, in which, as we saw in chapter 1, the divinity of God must be combined with the humanity of this specific, lowly being, which can occur only on the basis of a unity of opposites accessible to God alone.12 What matters here is that for Nora, too, the meanings of honor, sacrifice, and love are no longer expressed according to the criteria and conditions that the play has previously established, not even according to any that we might extrapolate from them. The fact that, as Strindberg pointed out, Nora abandons her children makes her claim to also act for their benefit nonsensical: surely, no matter how inadequate she

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feels to raise them, the very experience of that inadequacy makes her more qualified than Torvald. And yet, if we accept her claim to interpretative authority, we must somehow accept that this act of cruelty expresses what it would seemingly deny, accept that some principle unknown to us makes possible the equation of abandonment with love, as it makes possible that of social disgrace with honor or the discrimination between marriage and coexistence.13

So far, I have argued that the aesthetic structure of A Doll’s House divides into two parts. On the one hand, the principal conflict of the play up until its final scene is dictated by the opposition between the structures of the well-made play and that of the past-as-such. On the other hand, in that final scene, a new understanding of central concepts such as sacrifice, honor, and marriage is deployed, which yet fails to find motivation from either of the preceding representational logics and therefore receives only negative figuration. It is important to note that the division between these two segments of the play, its ending and everything before it, is cemented through the meta-theatricality of the last scene. As Torvald celebrates the return of the IOU from Krogstad, Nora, having seen her expectations shattered and still dressed in her tarantella costume following the masquerade ball, leaves the room to change: Nora:

I thank you for your forgiveness.

[She goes out through the door, right.] Helmer: No, don’t go! [He looks through the doorway.] What are you doing in the spare room? Nora:

Taking off the costume-dress. (78; trans. modified / 355)

When Nora reappears onstage, she is dressed “in her everyday dress” (“i sin hverdagskjole”), and the monumental “settling of accounts” (“opgør”) between Torvald and herself begins (79; trans. modified / 356). The first notable point about this opening of the play’s last movement is that Nora’s appearance in a new outfit and her use of unfamiliar language explicitly enact the situation that, as we saw above, at the beginning of the play, she confides to Mrs. Linde constitutes her biggest fear: the day when Torvald will no longer find pleasure in seeing her “dress up and recite” (15; trans. modified / 288). But where Nora’s involvement in the logics of the well-made play and the

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past-as-such is aimed at preventing the possibility of this event, at the play’s end, she directly brings it about—that is, what was initially “[n]onsense, nonsense, nonsense!” and had to be repressed from within the play’s perspectives is here asserted and made the ground for dialogue and action. The second important point is that the rupture with the play’s previous structures that this signals is meta-theatrical in a sense beyond the merely superficial one of including a reference to the theater and acting. Rather, Nora’s reentry in her everyday dress carves out an ontological distinction within the text itself that mirrors the one between audience and drama outside it. The radically different rules that govern the construction of behavior and concepts in the final scene between Nora and Torvald establish a play within a play to the extent that they impose an intra-textual distinction between reality and fiction. As is common to such constructions, this implies an explicit acknowledgment of our role as spectators, which is now doubled within the play by Torvald’s relation to Nora. But unlike the usual relation between such embedded fictional frames, it is here the inner scenario, the discussion between Nora and Torvald, that is predicated with the attribute of reality, while the outer, their preceding conjugal life, emerges as fiction. The playacting that Nora dismantles at the end, after all, as she herself goes on to explain to Torvald, encompasses the whole of her life as her father’s and her husband’s doll (80–81 / 357–358). And insofar as it is Nora with her new appearance and her new way of speaking that constitutes the standard for reality and the everyday, she also deprives the semiotic codes previously provided for the audience by the play itself of any interpretative authority. The implication of this is crucial to the extent that the inability to determine Nora’s final departure that we share with Torvald in this way not only explicitly addresses our role of spectators but also lands our interpretative position in the same continuum of reality-turned-fiction as his. Such a view of the meta-theatrical dimension of A Doll’s House is significantly different from the one described by Toril Moi in her recent analysis of the play, in ways that have important implications for the present argument. As I understand Moi’s discussion, it operates on two distinct but related levels: one is concerned with the relation between characters within the play, the other with the relation between characters and the audience outside it. With respect to the former, Moi traces how Nora can be seen as subject to two opposed modes of existence. The first is her objectification as a doll, not only

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by Torvald, but also by herself. From this perspective, Nora is theatrical, acting out idealist clichés of docile femininity and reduced to mere body and materiality (232–234, 238–239). In the second, she instead enacts her authenticity and humanity, which Moi describes in terms of Stanley Cavell’s notion of “cogito performance”: “an arialike expression of her soul intended to proclaim, declaim, declare her existence” (236). Focusing on the tarantella dance in act 2, Moi argues that within the play, Torvald and Dr. Rank represent the first perspective on Nora, while Kristine represents the second, making it impossible to determine which is the correct one (240–241). At the same time, Moi clearly suggests that at the extra-textual level of analysis, that of the relation between characters and audience, one of the options should take precedence: The striking theatricality of the tarantella—the fact that it is such an obvious theatrical show-stopper—reminds us that we are in a theatre. Ibsen’s modernism is based on the sense that we need theatre—I mean the actual art form—to reveal to us the games of concealment and theatricalization in which we inevitably engage in everyday life. I do not base this claim only on Nora’s dancing. By placing two kinds of spectator onstage during the tarantella, Ibsen tells us that only the audience is capable of seeing the whole picture: seeing both the temptation to theatricalize others and the possibility of understanding and acknowledging Nora’s suffering. Admittedly, Mrs Linde knows more than the men do about Nora’s deal with Krogstad. The audience, however, knows even more than Mrs Linde about what is at stake for Nora, for it has just heard that she is determined to commit suicide when Helmer learns the truth. . . . By having Nora behave most authentically in what, from a formal point of view, are her most theatrical scenes, Ibsen signals, again, the power of theatre to convey the plight of a human being. Sitting in the audience, we are given a precious opportunity. If we will not acknowledge Nora’s humanity, then perhaps nobody will. (241–242)

The audience’s acknowledgment of Nora’s humanity involves its ability to see her behavior as a “cogito performance” rather than a theatrical objectification. It is unclear in the context of Moi’s discussion exactly what the possibility of such an acknowledgment depends on. The description of the audience as well as of Mrs. Linde (whose privileged position in Moi’s analysis clearly differs from the one that I propose above) would appear to imply that the issue is one of degrees of information: that it is a matter of how much we know about the plot that determines whether or not we might acknowledge a character. But the theoretical context of Moi’s argument, along with the very

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term “acknowledgment,” suggests that the logic at stake is intended to follow Cavell’s reading of King Lear in his seminal essay “The Avoidance of Love,” and that Moi’s analysis might best be elucidated through that text.14 Cavell’s essay is a highly complex, nuanced, and rich piece of philosophy, much of which can be fully understood only in the larger context of his work and its elaboration of the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and it cannot, therefore, be done justice here. I nevertheless want to draw out what I take to be some of its most important claims, not simply to spell out the differences underlying Moi’s reading and my own, but because doing so will serve to elucidate further the nature of the aesthetics of dependency and its larger implications. The key to Cavell’s reading of King Lear is his assertion that recognition of the other is preconditioned by recognition of the self. As Cavell puts this at several points in his discussion: “In each case, there is a condition necessary in order that the recognition take place: Gloucester and Lear must each first recognize himself, and allow himself to be recognized, revealed to another” (“Avoidance” 274); “Self-recognition is, phenomenologically, a form of insight; and it is because of its necessity in recognizing others that critics have felt its presence here” (ibid.); “But if the failure to recognize others is a failure to let others recognize you, a fear of what is revealed to them, an avoidance of their eyes, then it is exactly shame which is the cause of this withholding of recognition” (277–278); “Given our notion that recognizing a person depends upon allowing oneself to be recognized by him, the question becomes: Why is it Gloucester whose recognition Lear is first able to bear?” (279). These articulations of the issue immediately raise three important questions: First, what is the object of self-knowledge? Second, why is it necessary to know this in order to know the other? And third, how does self-revelation relate to selfknowledge and knowledge of the other? The answers to these questions are contained in nuce in the preceding quotations. With respect to the first, Cavell makes clear that the object of self-knowledge is that which the characters in King Lear seek to hide and which is the source of “shame” (277–278). Elsewhere, he associates shame with our experience of embodiment, of being material, finite subjects: “Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed, but yourself. It is a more primitive emotion than guilt, as inescapable as the possession of a body, the first object of shame” (278). And subsequently shame is described as residing in the

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fact of our individuality more broadly: “Shame, I’ve said, is the most primitive, the most private, of emotions; but it is also the most primitive of social responses. With the discovery of the individual, whether in Paradise or in the Renaissance, there is the simultaneous discovery of the isolation of the individual; his presence to himself, but simultaneously to others” (286). Cavell also describes the object of shame as the consequence or implication of the characters’ actions (280, 284, 297), which he further equates with their “meaning” (283). The relation between individuality, finitude, and meaning that this suggests is crucial in Cavell’s thought, and I will return to it below. What matters at this point is that the discussion already suggests an answer to the second question posed above, namely, why this knowledge of the self should be a precondition for the knowledge of others. The reason is that the content of self-knowledge is those aspects of experience—our finitude, the condition of our meanings—that are common to us all and in that sense possess a kind of universality (303–305). To know the other, from this perspective, is to recognize in him or her what we have found within ourselves. As Cavell points out, the tragedy of Shakespeare’s characters lies not simply in their attempts to conceal the object of their shame but in their efforts to substitute the mode of knowledge that is grounded on it for another (313). Instead of recognizing the other by revealing and recognizing themselves, Lear, Gloucester, Edgar, and Edmund all seek to be recognized by the other without being seen in their individuality and finitude (276, 279, 284, 298). Such a relationship fails to fulfill the conditions of real recognition (both of ourselves and of the other), since it is severed from the ground of our experience that provides the source of our identity, that which any specific determination of our personality must take into account. Without this source, our relation to ourselves and others will remain abstract and inauthentic: “an intimacy which requires no reciprocity with real men” (297). Further, it will also constitute an “avoidance of love,” the title phrase of Cavell’s essay, since love is directed at our condition of finite mortality (288–289), which is what Shakespeare’s characters seek to escape. Cavell’s analysis assumes particular philosophical interest in his additional argument that the characters’ refusal to take their condition of isolated individuality into account in their knowledge of themselves and others mirrors the structure of skepticism. According to Cavell, modern skepticism, which arises at the same historical

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moment as Shakespeare’s plays, is a consequence of the loss of our “presentness” to the world, of our immediate “absorption” in it, which guaranteed a “genuine connection”: At some early point in epistemological investigations, the world normally present to us (the world in whose existence, as it is typically put, we “believe”) is brought into question and vanishes, whereupon all connection with a world is found to hang upon what can be said to be “present to the senses”; and that turns out, shockingly, not to be the world. It is at this point that the doubter finds himself cast into skepticism, turning the existence of the external world into a problem. . . . [The skeptic] forgoes the world for just the reason that the world is important, that it is the scene and stage of connection with the present: he finds that it vanishes exactly with the effort to make it present. If this makes him unsuccessful, that is because the presentness achieved by certainty of the senses cannot compensate for the presentness which had been elaborated through our old absorption in the world. But the wish for genuine connection is there, and there was a time when the effort, however hysterical, to assure epistemological presentness was the best expression of seriousness about our relation to the world, the expression of an awareness that presentness was threatened, gone. If epistemology wished to make knowing a substitute for that fact, that is scarcely foolish or knavish, and scarcely some simple mistake. It is, in fact, one way to describe the tragedy King Lear records. (323–324)

Two points are of particular interest in this passage. First, it makes clear that the historical loss of our connection to the present and the world leads to a new project that seeks to reestablish that connection not through “absorption” but through “certainty” (cf. also Claim 238). Second, it is the failure of this project, the impossibility of the criteria for certainty to ever make the world present to us in the necessary ways, that leads to skepticism. In other words, skepticism results from the effort to overcome our alienation from immediacy in a specific manner and for that very reason does not in fact prove that such immediacy is in principle impossible. Rather, “what skepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged” (“Avoidance” 324). The shift from a mode of relation to the world and others that is based on absorption to one based on certainty is the shift from acknowledgment to knowledge. The mistake skepticism makes is to think that knowledge alone can serve to capture the relation to

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our world that we encounter as a given: “What we forgot, when we deified reason, was not that reason is incompatible with feeling, but that knowledge requires acknowledgment” (347; cf. also This New 42–43). The analogy between skepticism and the characters of Shakespeare’s play, then, resides in the fact that both seek to attain a mode of knowledge severed from the conditions on which it necessarily rests: recognition without being seen, certainty without acceptance or acknowledgment. The task of King Lear, as well as of philosophy, is accordingly to “overcome knowing” (“Avoidance” 325), to “learn that what we need is not more knowledge but the willingness to forgo knowing” (324). This implies not a turn to irrationality but rather a recuperation of the ground of acknowledgment from which modern epistemology has abstracted. As Cavell elaborates further in another closely related essay, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” acknowledgment must be understood not only negatively, as “a special concept of knowledge, or region of the concept of knowledge, one which is not a function of certainty,” but also positively, as an “expression” or “exhibiting of the object of knowledge” (258–259). Distinct from certainty, acknowledgment as exhibition is a form of behavior and of revealing something through it (262, 263), not a cognitive relation to an object but an enactment of that object. Such a description of acknowledgment begins to offer an answer to the third of the questions formulated earlier, namely, what the relation is between self-revelation and the knowledge of self and other. If recognition of ourselves and others depends on the acknowledgment of our finitude and individuality, then such acknowledgment consists in the exhibition of that ontological condition in our interaction with the world. It is in this context that the special status of theater becomes apparent. According to Cavell, there are three basic features of the relation between audience and characters. The first two, which are also discussed by Toril Moi (Moi 206–207), are “1. A Character is not, and cannot become aware of us . . . the audience is invisible . . . we are also inaudible to them, and immovable (that is, at a fixed distance from them). I will say: We are not in their presence” and “2. They [the characters] are in our presence. This means, again, not simply that we are seeing and hearing them, but that we are acknowledging them (or specifically failing to)” (Cavell, “Avoidance” 332). In her discussion of Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean, Toril Moi has glossed the first of these features in the following terms:

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Characters aren’t aware of us. They can go up to us, exhort us, speak to us, rush out among us, but when they do so, they are not relating to us as human beings; they are turning us into characters in their play. Since we, as the audience, are not in their presence, nothing we can do can impinge on them. If a character in a play comes up to us, we cannot reciprocate. Or rather, if we reciprocate, we either do so only on their cue and bidding, or we become like the Southern yokel who wants to rescue Desdemona. (207)

The characters’ failure to be in our presence is the failure to acknowledge us as subject to different conditions than they are (we become “characters in their play” or must act “on their cue and bidding”). By implication, this would mean that we as audience are able to acknowledge precisely such a condition of difference in our relation to the characters. On the basis of the structure of acknowledgment explored above, however, there is an obvious problem with this second claim: if self-acknowledgment is necessary for acknowledgment of the other, and self-acknowledgment depends on self-revelation, then how can we acknowledge the characters if we cannot be in their presence and therefore not achieve self-recognition by revealing ourselves through interaction? Cavell addresses this point directly: “But doesn’t the fact that we do not or cannot go up to them just mean that we do not or cannot acknowledge them? One might feel like saying here: The acknowledgment cannot be completed. But this does not mean that acknowledging is impossible in theatre” (“Avoidance” 332). If acknowledgment is possible in theater in spite of the fact that we cannot reveal ourselves to the characters, then this must be because theater provides a structural equivalent to being in another’s presence, something able to serve the same epistemic function. As Cavell words it: “Then what expresses acknowledgement in a theatre? That is, what counts as putting ourselves into a character’s presence? I take this to be the same question I asked at the beginning of this discussion: What is the mechanism of our identification with a character?” (333). The answer to this question resides in the third of the basic features of the relation between characters and audience that Cavell elaborates, which is the fact that we occupy the same time even if we cannot occupy the same space: I will say: We are not, and cannot put ourselves in, the presence of the characters; but we are in, or can put ourselves in, their present. It is in making their present ours, their moments as they occur, that we complete our acknowledgement of them. But this requires making their present theirs. And that requires us to face not only the porousness of

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our knowledge (of, for example, the motives of their actions and the consequences they care about) but the repudiation of our perception altogether. (337)

To share the same temporality as the characters means recognizing our limitations, realizing that we cannot know everything since we are constricted to our finite point of view.15 In a striking dialectical inversion, Cavell here suggests that theater makes the negative condition of alienation into the positive ground for recognition. The very failure to place ourselves in the characters’ presence constitutes the exhibition or enactment of our finitude and limitation, and that finitude and limitation are the objects of self-knowledge that we can acknowledge also in the other. We share a common present to the extent that we share this isolation. As Cavell elucidates the point: If the suggestion is right that the “completion of acknowledgement” requires self-revelation, then making the characters present must be a form of, or require, self-revelation. Then what is revealed? Not something about me personally. . . . What I reveal is what I share with everyone else present with me at what is happening: that I am hidden and silent and fixed. In a word, that there is a point at which I am helpless before the acting and the suffering of others. . . . In another word, what is revealed is my separateness from what is happening to them; that I am I, and here. It is only in this perception of them as separate from me that I make them present. That I make them other, and face them. (338)

Theater is the art of overcoming our difference (340) precisely because it exhibits our isolation from each other, our common experience of being finite, severed entities, which constitutes the deeper ground of our identity, knowledge, and meaning. As such, theater helps us “confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition” (339).16

It will be clear from the preceding analysis of A Doll’s House that my view of the relationship between audience and characters established there differs in significant ways from the one Cavell identifies in Shakespeare and which Moi seems to adopt. At the most immediate level, my claim that the ending’s play within a play structure forces us, as audience, to assume the same interpretative position as Torvald suggests that our condition external to the fictional world is broken down and that the stable opposition between characters and

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audience operative in King Lear is challenged by Ibsen’s play. This view is in fact one that Cavell’s own analysis would encourage, to the extent that he explicitly points out that the structure operative in Shakespeare’s play is rejected by Modernist drama, in which, instead, “our status as audience will have to be defeated” (349). In his essay on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Cavell elaborates this point in greater detail: Practically, or conventionally, “audience”—for theatre in the period after Shakespeare through, say, the 19th century—means “those present whom the actors ignore,” those beyond the fourth wall. Deny that wall—that is, recognize those in attendance—and the audience vanishes. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that if anything is sensibly to be grasped as “modern theatre” one of its descriptions would be the various ways in which modern dramatists have denied the wall. (“Ending” 157)

It is clear from Cavell’s discussion of Beckett, however, that the relationship established in Endgame by means of the negation of the audience’s position is an identity of ontological conditions akin to that in Shakespeare’s King Lear, what Cavell here calls “the brute metaphysical fact of separateness” (160). Our inclusion within the world of Beckett’s characters serves to neutralize all differences but that of our separation and thereby lays bare our fundamental equality: “It is a matter of our feeling that no one in the place, on the stage or in the house, knows better than anyone else what is happening, no one has a better right to speak than anyone else” (157). In A Doll’s House, however, as we have seen, the meta-theatrical acknowledgment and incorporation of the audience within the fictional world occur precisely by means of Nora’s appropriation of that right, by her insistence and enactment of the claim that she knows more and better than anyone else and that the criteria for reality and truth that we have been provided with are not the ones that count. It is useful, in this context, to recall Toril Moi’s above-quoted description of the difference between the audience’s reality and the fictionality of characters. The latter, it was clear there, reveals itself as the inability to acknowledge otherness and independence, the attempt to subject the people that it meets to its own rules and conditions. The condition of reality, on the contrary, exhibits itself in the acceptance of such otherness, of the fact that we may be subject to different criteria than those valid for the other (Moi 207; cf. also 217). Nora’s performance at the end of Ibsen’s play inverts this characterization.

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It is now she who asserts our difference, while it is Torvald and we who insist on seeing her as similar to us and on subjecting her to our rules. The latter point is visible not only in Torvald’s attempt to recall Nora to the demands of family, morality, and religion (A Doll’s 82–83 / Et dukkehjem 359–360) but also in the reception of the play traced above. The importance of responses to A Doll’s House, from Besant and Cheney to George Steiner, lies not least in their exemplification of the continual attempt to normalize Nora’s behavior. By finding a familiar and consistent logic able to explain her action, such approaches contradict her claim to difference and uniqueness and thereby reduce the break with our expectations and criteria that her sudden transformation represents. The failure of such readings makes clear that the offense of Nora’s departure is not merely a historically contingent effect (one no longer relevant in our more enlightened world) but rather is constitutive, an outcome of her inherent resistance to domestication by a refusal to speak in terms compatible with our previous usage, and of the assertion that this refusal makes us, not her, count as the fictions in the play.17 So far I have argued that the meta-theatricality of the ending of A Doll’s House has three effects: first, it explicitly addresses and incorporates our position as spectators within the play, thereby negating our privileged position outside of it; second, instead of laying bare a condition of equality within the play, as in Beckett’s Endgame, the play within a play structure reasserts an ontological divide between the outer frame of spectators (Torvald and ourselves) and the inner frame of the performer (Nora); and third, it inverts the ontological attributes of these two frames, making the spectators subject to the characteristics of fictionality and the performer to those of reality. These shifts find interesting contextualization in Cavell’s above-quoted remarks about the historical specificity of the category of audience that Ibsen cancels, its dominance from “the period after Shakespeare through, say, the 19th century” (“Ending” 157). As Anne Righter has shown in her seminal study Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, the tradition of mystery plays that preceded Shakespeare’s drama operates with the kind of structure that I have traced in Ibsen’s text. Not only, as Righter shows, was the audience of the mystery plays an integral part of the performance, but, more interesting still, the theological nature of those plays meant that it was the world of the spectator that was defined as fictional and finite in opposition to the reality and eternity of God represented on the stage (15, 20). It might well be that Ibsen’s

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Modernism is best described as a reappropriation of the conditions of drama that precede the audience’s long reign. Such an identification of Nora’s final dramatic position with the ontology of God in the pre-Shakespearean mystery plays suggests that the insistence on her otherness should be taken seriously and that this might best be done in a way that Cavell himself, significantly enough, gestures at with respect to Kierkegaard. Analyzing Kierkegaard’s method of “qualitative dialectic,” his exploration of “how the meaning of [a] concept changes, and how the subject of which it is the concept changes, as the context in which it is used changes,” Cavell points out: There is one dialectical shift which is of critical importance for Kierkegaard, that which moves from “immanent” to “transcendent” contexts. It is, I believe, when he is speaking of this shift that he characteristically speaks of a qualitative (sometimes he adds, decisive) difference in meaning. (This is the point at which his insistence on God as “wholly other” finds its methodological expression.) The procedure is this: he will begin with an immanent context, appealing to ordinary contexts in which a concept is used, for example, ordinary cases of silence, or of authority, or of coming to oneself, or of being shaken, or of living in the present, or of offence . . . ; and then abruptly and sternly he will say that these concepts are decisively or qualitatively different when used in a transcendental sense, when used, that is, to characterize our relationship to God. (“Kierkegaard’s” 170; ellipsis in original)

In an illuminating gloss on this account, Cavell goes on to state: “When I said that I thought this procedure was philosophically correct, I did not mean to suggest that I found it philosophically clear. As an account of ‘qualitative differences of meaning’ (in terms of ‘immanence,’ ‘transcendence,’ ‘qualitative,’ etc.), I find it all but useless” (171). If the notion of “qualitative differences of meaning” is to be useful, in other words, it cannot be understood in terms of concepts such as “immanence,” “transcendence,” and “qualitative.” This claim hints at the motivation for Cavell’s discreet but otherwise strange shift in the above description of Kierkegaard’s method from “transcendent” to “transcendental” (170). What Cavell approves of in Kierkegaard’s method, what he finds useful in it, this shift suggests, is the idea that religious meaning differs not in its relation to a context that is transcendent of all others but in its ability to reveal a transcendental ground, the conditions that underlie and make possible the meaning operative in all other contexts. It is this perceived

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capacity of Kierkegaard’s religious to directly reveal the transcendental that makes Cavell link it to modernist art later in the essay (175– 178). But in both cases, that of religion as well as that of modernist art, the silent shift away from the “transcendent” and the subsequent disavowal of the term as useless make clear that, to Cavell, this transcendental ground cannot be understood as wholly other in the strict sense, as something literally transcendent, outside the structures of human experience. The reasons for this revision of Kierkegaard’s project are suggested by the Kantian overtones of Cavell’s discussion, which are neither accidental nor superficial. Already in the title essay to the early collection Must We Mean What We Say?, from which the essay on Kierkegaard also derives, Cavell frames his version of ordinary language philosophy in highly Kantian terms. The focus of the question posed in that opening text is on the force of necessity (“must”) between a word and its meaning, when these do not stand in a relation of identity. In the principal example used by Cavell, it is clear that the word “voluntary” “does not mean ‘peculiar’ (or ‘special’ or ‘fishy’),” that is, that none of those attributes forms part of the dictionary definition of “voluntary” (“Must We” 9). And yet, when we ask if something was done voluntarily, we necessarily imply (mean) that there is something fishy about the situation (7). This is precisely the problem of how a subject can be necessarily related to a predicate that does not form part of its identity, which Kant, as we saw in chapter 1, investigates in the Critique of Pure Reason. Cavell makes this analogy clear when he explains that the dictionary definition of a word is its “analytic” meaning, while the phenomenon of a necessary yet nonanalytical attribute (such as “fishy” for “voluntary”) is formulated in terms of the synthetic a priori propositions analyzed by Kant (13).18 Further still, in his subsequent essay “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” Cavell explicitly equates Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations with Kant’s investigation of the categories (65), which solve the mystery of synthetic a priori propositions by justifying the relation between the understanding and sensibility in the Transcendental Deduction. As my previous discussion established, it was as an answer to the problematic of synthetic a priori propositions that the aesthetics of autonomy emerged, and it is significant that in Cavell’s solution to his version of Kant’s problem, the basic principles of that same aesthetic paradigm recur. As Cavell writes in a famous passage, the ground for

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the necessary relation between terms that are not logically identical, that which makes such propositions possible, is to be found in our “forms of life”: We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, sense of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation— all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.” Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less than this. (“Availability” 52)19

We partake of, and constitute, this dimension of existence in our condition as finite individuals (cf. This New 41–42), which is what the experience of King Lear and Endgame reveals. More importantly still, the perception of such forms of life as the transcendental ground of our meaning is linked by Cavell to the kinds of propositions theorized by Kant as aesthetic judgments in the third Critique (“Aesthetic” 86, 94). And akin to the notion of intellectual intuition developed by the early German Romantics on this basis, and discussed in chapter 1, such aesthetic judgments fall between knowledge and sensibility, combining both (“Music” 191–192). It is at this level, not that of rules and criteria, that the guarantee of meaning lies, of the necessary relation between synthetic terms; that is, while there can be no particular rules that guarantee in advance what will count as meaningful, or what meanings will be counted in a given case, our relation to a common transcendental ground assures that our utterances and criteria will be meaningful when we use them in the context of the conditions of our forms of life that we intuit. We do not know what will express the finitude that constitutes us, but that such expression will fulfill the conditions for our meaning is sure (cf. This New 44–45; Claim 83–84). Cavell’s conception of both the problem of and the solution to the possibility of meaning is thus structurally similar in a number of ways to that of the idealists examined earlier in this study. As is the case for the latter, for Cavell, the possibility of unifying representations in propositional statements depends on their relation in a ground that

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precedes and determines the possibilities of discursive reason and thus serves as the modality of judgments. Further, as in the idealist tradition, this ground is coextensive with the conditions of our subjectivity and accessible in an intuition that is isomorphic to the reflection on beauty as a necessary whole.20 From this perspective, if Kierkegaard’s notion of religious meaning is useful, it is because it brings us into direct contact with this fundamental dimension of our experience, the conditions that we share as humans and which determine and make possible our various worlds. Inversely, the reason Kierkegaard’s talk of a “transcendent” context is useless to Cavell is that it constitutes what he would call, again drawing on Kant, a “transcendental illusion”: a use of language independent of the conditions for the possibility of meaning, which is to say the conditions of our human subjectivity that ground our forms of life (our finitude and isolation) (cf. Cavell, “Preface” xxi; “Availability” 61–62, 65). To assert that there is something like a transcendent context is to assert that there is a modality or ground for meaning beyond the conditions stipulated by our human existence or that human existence necessarily involves a relation to conditions not originating in ourselves, which the idealist tradition strongly rejects. It is in this context, in my view, that one must understand Wittgenstein’s famous statement “If a lion could talk we could not understand him” (Philosophical 223 / Philosophische 568). Since the lion is not bound by the ontological and phenomenological constraints of our human subjectivity, its use of our language would not be grounded on the same transcendental conditions and therefore would be void of meaning for us.21 Yet, as I argued in chapter 1, Kierkegaard’s talk about the “transcendent” and of God as “wholly other” is fully meant and must be taken in the strongest sense, not merely in that of “transcendental” that Cavell attempts to give it. In the terms from our previous discussion, the latter would at best qualify as an instance of faith sensu laxiori, not the faith sensu eminentiori that Kierkegaard is most profoundly after. Or, put differently, what Kierkegaard seeks to envision is precisely what it would be like to hear the lion speak and to have to understand it when we can’t. 22 This is the way that Nora’s claim to difference and her association with the dramatic space the mystery plays reserve for God must be approached. By establishing an ontological distinction between the audience and herself, Nora opens up another form of life from which to speak. This is of course the case, first and foremost, in a literal

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sense, to the extent that the life that she picks up is one that falls outside of the social parameters envisioned and experienced by the other characters in the play. Her different use of language at the end can accordingly be seen as the product of a different mode of interaction with the world, one drastically distinct from the one underlying the norms and criteria previously at work. Wittgenstein in fact envisions such a circumstance in a passage frequently cited by Cavell: [O]ne human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country’s language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them. (Philosophical 223 / Philosophische 568)

As Cavell points out (“Availability” 67), the German for “We cannot find our feet with them” is “Wir können uns nicht in sie finden” (“We cannot find ourselves in them”). The failure of self-recognition in the other that this emphasizes signals the rupture of the Platonic logic of identity that, as we have seen, underlies idealism and which Kierkegaard’s conception of faith is meant to reconsider. The preceding discussion will have made clear, however, that from Cavell’s perspective, the extent to which such an experience of difference can be asserted is not absolute. Indeed, Cavell interestingly uses this passage in his discussion of Kierkegaard’s religious, in order to elaborate Kierkegaard’s claim that the present age is no longer receptive to Christianity (“Kierkegaard’s” 172). This argument assumes that to Kierkegaard, the reasons for the strangeness of the religious as a different form of life are empirical and accidental, products of history that could in principle have been avoided and eventually reversed. No matter how different the given form of life that we may encounter, it ultimately derives from the same fundamental facts of human nature, which we should be able to identify with (or, if we do not, this is due to reasons that are contingent on our particular situation, not intrinsic to the relation itself). To Kierkegaard, however, as he emphasizes most strongly in Philosophical Fragments, the difference that the religious constitutes is intrinsic to it, so much so that all ages are equally distant from Christ, even his contemporary disciples (Philosophical 55–71 / Philosophiske 258–271). The religious, that is, is inherently a foreign country, a condition for the possibility of meaning different from the one we hold as humans and as such equally difficult for all to access and acknowledge. The experience that Wittgenstein points

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to in his picture would accordingly be true for Kierkegaard only in the most radical sense: if the inability to find ourselves in this new form of life can in principle not be overcome. Nora’s departure is a different form of life in this stronger sense, too. What she provides is not simply a socially (empirically) different mode of existence, the way, say, that Mrs. Linde’s life is clearly socially (empirically) different from that of Torvald and of Dr. Rank, and on the basis of which difference they use words such as “sickness” and “health” in different ways (cf., e.g., Mrs. Linde’s discussion with Dr. Rank; A Doll’s 19 / Et dukkehjem 292). Such differences are clearly present in the play, and yet, to echo Cavell’s description of Kierkegaard, Nora’s difference is qualitatively distinct from them. Where the differences between Mrs. Linde, Torvald, and Dr. Rank are all possible within, and can be generated by, the conditions for meaning provided by the logics of the well-made play and of the pastas-such, Nora’s final perspective, as I have argued, cannot be derived from these, does not find its semiotic motivation from their terms, and thus remains inherently other to them. In Ibsen’s text, this is not so much to say that through Nora we come to know a nonhuman form of life (as would be the case for Kierkegaard) but that the notion of humanity is radically revised. Instead of conceiving of the human in terms of the conditions of my own existence that I can recognize in the other, the human now finds its source in the other rather than in me. This means that the acknowledgment that I withhold or grant the other no longer has as its content something coextensive with my subjectivity but is an intuition of a meaning or purpose qualitatively different from my own and not accessible through analogy with my experience. This strikes me as the implication of Nora’s famous statement to Torvald, quoted above: “I believe that I am first and foremost a human being, just as well as you—or, in any case, that I must try to become one” (82; trans. modified / 359). At first sight, it could appear that Nora is here asserting precisely the kind of identity between herself and Torvald that I have argued A Doll’s House rejects and that she grounds this identity on a shared humanity established in the first part of the play. The English translations of this passage tend to encourage such a reading. In James McFarlane’s version, Nora says, “I am an individual, just as much as you are,” which, with only very minor variations, is also the syntactical structure chosen by Peter Watts (228), Frank McGuinness (101), and Byrony Lavery (117). In

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this phrasing, Torvald becomes the standard of measurement by making the point of comparison the predicate of humanity that he already holds (“just as much as you are”; my emphasis). What Nora asserts here, then, is that she has just as much a right to that predicate as he does, although the qualification that follows this assertion (“or, in any case, that I must try to become one”) would also weaken her position: not quite yet in possession of Torvald’s attributes, Nora claims only that it is in principle possible for her to achieve what he already is, which now becomes her task. (This would also mean, to paraphrase and invert Sartre’s existentialist slogan, that being precedes becoming in the play.) But in the Norwegian original, the comparison between Nora and Torvald is in fact drawn without the use of the second verb: “I am first and foremost a human being, just as well as you” (“jeg er først og fremst et menneske, jeg, ligesåvel som du”); a point only Davis and Johnston’s translation has retained (62). In this formulation, Torvald’s position no longer takes precedence and does not serve as the standard of comparison. Indeed, the Norwegian “ligesåvel” does not even contain the positive qualifier “much” that the English translations use, which makes it clear that the equation between the characters might just as well be negative: Nora is just as little a human being as Torvald is. Or, put differently, the comparison here is not between Nora and Torvald at all but between, on the one hand, Nora and Torvald and, on the other, the notion of humanity, which is revealed only at this point and shows itself as equidistant to them both. From this perspective, the final clause, “or, in any case, that I must try to become one,” is no longer a weakening of Nora’s position but its strengthening: it makes clear that humanity is not a given, something always already present or inchoate in the opening of the play, but something only intimated now and still to be achieved, as only she is on the path of doing. (Becoming thereby takes precedence again over being.) Whatever the notion of humanity at stake might be, it is not what we have seen so far, which also means that the human is not singular, or that it is something other than we first assumed. The aesthetic function of Nora’s departure is thus to give us the experience of what it means to be confronted with a condition for the ways in which we mean and determine the world different from our own, which is an aesthetic effect (at this level) opposed to that favored by idealism. In this sense, she is the lion speaking, which strikes me as an image particularly suited to capturing not only the alterity of her

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epistemic ground but also the source of the fear, offense, and outrage that she has always caused. Nora achieves this effect of a constitutive otherness, we have seen, so far, in two ways (a third will be discussed in the next section): first, by instituting a radical rupture with the conditions that govern the construction of semantic space before her final departure and, second, by placing us in continuity with those conditions in withholding the principle for her use of language and making us spectators of her departure along with Torvald. The metatheatrical nature of the ending of the play ensures that the meanings Nora uses remain other to the conditions for the organization of relations between representational units in the work that we have been provided with and thereby are transcendent in the Kierkegaardian sense. The “wonder” (“vidunder”) invoked by Nora at the end, and distinct from all its previous meanings, as we saw, is grounded on this interruption of a new form of life. The latter, thereby, is available not through an organic “change” in our current situation (which would be “forandring”), but only, as the Norwegian text has it, through “forvandling”: transformation, with all its connotations of miracle and magic (A Doll’s 86 / Et dukkehjem 364). 23

the redemption of finitude Nora’s departure lays claim to the function of reality in the sense that it simultaneously constitutes the condition for meaning in our world and eludes positive determination by the structures of experience in that world itself. To this extent, it provides an analogue to the title of modality in Kierkegaard’s theology discussed in chapter 1. Contrary to the notion of experience in idealism, in which only those representations that can be reduced to the structure of our subjectivity are real, Kierkegaard’s God serves as the standard for the unification of representations that transcends and negates the discursive conditions for cognitive determination that we possess. If the aesthetic structure of Ibsen’s play is to be similar to Kierkegaard’s conception of dependency, however, the function of the title of modality must further be to posit the relation to the relation between the opposed principles constitutive of discursive cognition, which in Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology defines the self. The relation between ending and everything that precedes it, that is, cannot simply be negative, which would push A Doll’s House in the direction of an aesthetics of fragmentation and fully justify the

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charge of traditional scholarship outlined above: that Nora’s departure is unconvincing and insufficiently prepared for. Rather, the new form of life that Nora introduces at the end must posit the means by which a new purposeful organization of the text can be achieved even as it retains its radical alterity. It is ultimately in this way that Nora’s departure becomes more than just one among other forms of life and justifies its claim to serve as the standard of measurement for all other points of view. Unless it shows how the coherence of our world depends on its perspective, the lion’s difference may simply make us kill it off. It is therefore crucial to note that if Nora’s imposition of reality at the end of the play carries interpretative authority, this is not predicated simply on her performance of such an ontological claim. On the contrary, the modal value of that final scene derives from the fact that it raises to a constitutive level a further structural principle that productively links the distinct representational elements of the text traced so far, akin to Kierkegaard’s notion of the self. At stake here is that while Nora’s departure deliberately eludes the logic of both the well-made play and the past-as-such, it does find a precedent in the theme of her intended suicide. From act 2 onward, Nora repeatedly returns to this plan as a final means of escape from the clutches of Krogstad’s villainy and explicitly figures her death in terms of the absence from Torvald and her children that it spells. 24 In an important sense, the decision to leave at the end of the play therefore carries out the self-willed separation from her family that suicide entails at the very moment that its necessity has disappeared. Insofar as Nora’s departure constitutes a literal enactment of her social death, it becomes clear that it provides the conclusion and culmination of a temporal sequence marked by the dying Dr. Rank. In act 1, the latter is introduced in terms of his stark opposition to sickness and decay. Discussing Krogstad’s moral depravity with Kristine and Nora, Dr. Rank complains to the former: Rank:

. . . I wonder if you’ve got people in your part of the country too who go rushing round sniffing out cases of moral corruption, and then installing the individuals concerned in nice, well-paid jobs, where they can keep them under observation. Sound, decent people have to be content to stay out in the cold.

Mrs. Linde: Yet surely it’s the sick who most need to be brought in. Rank [shrugs his shoulders]: Well, there we have it. It’s that attitude that’s turning society into a hospital. (19; trans. modified / 292)

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In act 2, Dr. Rank’s initial opposition to sickness is undermined when it emerges that he himself is mortally ill. As he confesses to Nora, only the results of one last analysis are missing and he will have complete certainty as to the time of his own death: Rank: The whole damned thing is ghastly. But the worst thing is all the ghastliness that has to be gone through first. I only have one more test to make; and when that’s done I’ll know pretty well when the final disintegration will start. There’s something I want to ask you. Helmer is a sensitive soul; he loathes anything that’s ugly. I don’t want him visiting me . . . Nora: But Dr. Rank . . . Rank: On no account must he. I won’t have it. I’ll lock the door on him.— As soon as I’m absolutely certain of the worst, I’ll send you my visiting card with a black cross on it. You’ll know then the final horrible disintegration has begun. (45; ellipses in original / 320)

In act 3, the progression of Dr. Rank’s decline is completed as he stops by Nora and Torvald’s home and, unbeknownst to the latter, says his final good-byes before dropping off the promised card (73–74 / 349–350). Nora’s figurative enactment of her death onstage at the end of the play dovetails Dr. Rank’s moribund retreat to the solitude of his rooms by completing the sequence initiated by the latter: health in act 1, illness in act 2, imminent death in act 3, culminating in the consummation of mortality in the meta-theatrical enclosure of Nora’s departure. The organizational structure that relates Nora’s action to the events that precede it is in this way provided neither by the wellmade play nor by the past-as-such that underlie the central conflict of the play but by the linear temporality of finite time played out in its subplot by Dr. Rank. The profound pathos of the final exchange between the latter and Nora derives precisely from this transfer of temporality that brings us to the ending of the play: Nora:

Dr. Rank . . . you are very fond of masquerades, aren’t you?

Rank:

Yes, when there are plenty of amusing disguises . . .

Nora:

Tell me, what shall we two go as next time?

Helmer: There’s frivolity for you . . . thinking about the next time already! Rank:

We two? I’ll tell you. You must go as Lady Luck . . .

Helmer: Yes, but how do you find a costume to suggest that? Rank:

Your wife could simply come as she is . . .

Helmer: That was nicely said. But don’t you know what you would be?

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Yes, my dear friend, I know exactly what I shall be.

Helmer: Well? Rank:

At the next masquerade, I shall be invisible.

Helmer: That’s a funny idea! Rank:

There’s a big black cloak . . . haven’t you heard of the cloak of invisibility? That comes right down over you, and then nobody can see you.

Helmer [suppressing a smile]: Of course, that’s right. Rank:

But I’m clean forgetting what I came for. Helmer, give me a cigar, one of the dark Havanas.

Helmer: With the greatest pleasure. [He offers his case.] Rank [takes one and cuts the end off]: Thanks. Nora [strikes a match]: Let me give you a light. Rank:

Thank you. [She holds out the match and he lights his cigar.] And now, goodbye!

Helmer: Goodbye, goodbye, my dear fellow! Nora:

Sleep well, Dr. Rank.

Rank:

Thank you for that wish.

Nora:

Wish me the same.

Rank:

You? All right, if you want me to . . . Sleep well. And thanks for the light. (72–73; trans. modified and ellipses in original / 348– 349)

The consciousness of an imminent mortality that unites Rank and Nora in this exchange weighs down the dialogue with added meaning and allows the latter to adopt the former’s temporality as a predicament common to them both. The sequence of decline specific to Dr. Rank’s narrative is thereby transformed into the temporality governing the play at large. As Torvald notes when, shortly following this scene, he learns that he has seen his friend for the last time, Rank “with his suffering and his loneliness gave a sort of clouded background to the sunshine of our joy” (74; trans. modified / 350). Nora’s departure obtains interpretative authority with respect to the events that precede it by displacing this underlying background from the margins of the subplot to the center of the text’s aesthetic structure as a whole. By providing the perspective from which linear time emerges as the only principle able to link all the structural components of the play, the final departure becomes the standard of judgment for our relation to those structural components in turn,

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that is, Nora’s performance at the end is the position from which all the play’s structural principles become necessary and contributing elements to its fictional world. As such, Nora’s form of life is not merely one among many but the governing one, the moment without which the rest of the play would not cohere. If at first it might seem that Nora’s transformation has to be rejected because it cannot be explained by the intra-textual codes of the well-made play and of the past-as-such with which we have been provided, it now becomes clear that the relation is in fact inverted and that it is the limits of those codes that must be reconsidered on the basis of their failure to grasp what Nora means. To determine what sacrifice, honor, marriage are, what events they refer to, and where the limits of an action and occurrence designated in this way might lie depends on our ability to make those concepts and occurrences agree with the usage Nora gives them, not the other way around. This is the force, in my view, of the “must” (“skal”) in Nora’s claim that “I must try to become” a human being (82; trans. modified / 359), a nuance that, again, only Davis and Johnston’s translation has retained: without that utopian perspective, nothing connects, and it is therefore ineluctable. In this sense, Nora constitutes a ground for synthetic a priori propositions in the sense developed by aesthetics after Kant: the notions she deploys at her departure assert the ascription of the moral concepts of the well-made play to the events determined by the past-as-such. The fact that we must accept that synthesis as authoritative before the coherence of the text as a whole can manifest itself means that it is necessary, prior to any negotiation of the text’s meaning. And the inherent incompatibility of the terms related in this way makes their relation anything but analytic. Yet to the extent that the principle or ground by means of which the synthesis that Nora’s use of language exhibits is withheld and remains transcendent to the semiotic logics available to us, we can only strive to modify their boundaries without arriving at our aim; in more Kierkegaardian terms, we must “teleologically suspend” those boundaries for the sake of a perspective that eludes them. In this sense, the difference from Cavell traced above might arguably best be defined in the following terms: where, to Cavell, in theater, the experience of empirical difference gives way to transcendental identity, in the aesthetics of dependency, the experience of empirical identity gives way to transcendental difference. The aesthetics of dependency resides in the effort to apply the same semiotic codes that we have encountered in this particular

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world according to a condition for their possibility other than that which they contain. If this does not provide a positive determination of phenomena, neither does it simply deny its possibility. Rather, the existence of meaning is affirmed as a transcendent condition in relation to which alone experience can be justified. The labor of reinterpretation that this notion of experience contains corresponds to Kierkegaard’s conceptions of the self and truth and is echoed in A Doll’s House in the temporality that links and negotiates its different parts. To the extent that the division between fiction and reality in Ibsen’s play is also that between life and death, the temporal link between them is provided by the process of dying that constitutes existence. The finitude that we finally hold as audience is the finitude of linear time made constitutive of the dynamics of experience through its relation to a death that offers the transcendent condition for its justification to arise. Meaningful existence emerges in the linear progression of time that ties the epic past-as-such to the dramatic present of the well-made play by its relation to a radical futurity that provides it with a utopian telos. The temporality that in Peer Gynt was an obstacle to fulfillment has here become the necessary condition for its very possibility.

The preceding analysis has shown that A Doll’s House partakes of the fourfold structure that Kierkegaard deploys in his definition of the self in The Sickness unto Death and which chapter 1 argues lies at the heart of the aesthetics of dependency. A Doll’s House does so insofar as, first, it provides an opposition between the antithetical principles of epic and drama, which in itself constitutes the merely “negative possibility” of a positive relation described by Kierkegaard. The allegorical structure of the past-as-such and the conventions of the well-made play constitute semiotic analogues to the discursive faculties necessary for any cognitive determination of phenomena. Second, the end of A Doll’s House introduces a transcendent perspective that relates negatively to those same principles and which yet serves as an absolute standard and guide for their positive relation. Third, that absolute perspective posits the constitutive value of a linear temporality that relates the relation between epic and drama to the absolute itself. The purposeful relation between the distinct cognitive faculties that constitutes the minimum requirement for knowledge to arise thus emerges through the relation between them in the framework of

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a temporality oriented to a telos that exceeds it. The dynamic unity in difference that this establishes aesthetically in Ibsen’s play is of the nature of Kierkegaardian faith. In this context, it is clear that the recurrent criticism leveled at Ibsen and representatively formulated by Hamsun, Lukács, and Szondi fails to understand the proper aesthetic standard to be applied to his work. The negative relation between two opposed representational principles that they focus on is merely one element in a more complex configuration of relations that radically seeks to reconsider the aim and nature of aesthetic form. Where the aesthetics of autonomy that emerges with idealist philosophy seeks to overcome conflict by laying bare the underlying unity of experience, the aesthetics of fragmentation associated with the avant-gardes, and operative in Peer Gynt, denies any such reconciliation between incommensurable parts. The aesthetics of dependency combines these two perspectives, insisting that fragmentation is a constitutive aspect of modern experience but tying that conflict to a purposeful mediation by means of which the value of finite existence can emerge. This placement of the aesthetics of dependency between autonomy and avant-garde also mirrors its relation to the opposition between the ordinary and skepticism operative in the work of Stanley Cavell and drawn upon in the preceding discussion. The claim that Nora’s departure constitutes the aesthetic analogue to the experience of otherness as a break with the transcendental ground of human knowledge echoes Cavell’s description of skepticism. Like the latter, the organizing principle of the aesthetics of dependency abstracts from the conditions operative in normal interactions with the world (cf. Claim 202–203). But unlike skepticism, the aesthetics of dependency does not conclude from this negation of the grounds of human knowledge that all knowledge is impossible and that we can never know anything at all (or that all knowledge is equally valid). Rather, in the absence of a ground of knowledge coextensive with and immanent to the normal organizations of the world, the aesthetics of dependency posits a ground that is transcendent and absolute. Akin to Kierkegaard’s redefinition of the nature of truth and experience as a process of appropriation, it is in the striving toward such a determinate, if absent, standard of meaning that knowledge properly consists. In an important sense, the aesthetics of dependency thus shares with Cavell’s project the desire to overcome skepticism, even if its means for doing so are very different. Indeed, in a way, one could say

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that the two approaches are the inverse of each other. Confronted with the skeptical challenge that we might not know the other that faces us, Cavell seeks to return us to the ground of transcendental unity from which we have abstracted. The usual motivation for doing so is that the alternative would convert the other into an object, an automaton or machine: since we cannot know the other, it deserves less respect than we do. But for Kierkegaard, “the scandal of skepticism” is the opposite: the realization that our inability to know the other may make it more valuable than us and that we might therefore be forced to give up the ground from which we speak. As the “Ultimatum” to Either/Or discussed in chapter 1 makes clear, the challenge in Kierkegaard’s view is precisely to not see the other as human, in the sense of being just like us, which we almost inevitably do. On the contrary, the difficulty lies in having to accept the possibility that the other might hide a wholly different point of view that is more valid than our own. The threat of skepticism is here answered by going through with the specter that it raises and grounding a new principle of knowledge on the transcendence it invokes. The kinship with Cavell’s thought that such reconsideration of the challenge of skepticism constitutes can also be seen in the way Ibsen’s work, in the terms used above, echoes a number of Cavell’s most important observations about Modernism. To Cavell, Modernism is distinguished by the loss of legitimacy of traditions and conventions with which to express meaning (e.g., “Music” 200–201). No criteria any longer exist for what constitutes art and what rules it ought to follow. Instead, the only measure of the success and authenticity of a work resides in the “sincerity” or “intention” of the artist, whether he or she can truly mean what the work says (203). As Cavell makes clear, this is not a question of a particular or subjective intention that operates as a causal category, in which a previous mental event must find expression in the work (“A Matter” 225). Quite to the contrary, as with intention in spoken utterances, the artist may not be aware of the conditions for meaning that govern the given form of life in which he or she moves (cf. “Avoidance” 270; “A Matter” 236). The measure of intention and sincerity in art is accordingly not individual psychology but the perception of the necessary relation between entities that do not of themselves belong together, or, put differently, the perception of the principle that makes possible the synthetic a priori relation between terms. To Cavell, as already discussed, that principle is ultimately “the brute metaphysical fact of separateness,” and in the

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absence of tradition and convention, Modernism displays this transcendental ground directly. I have argued above that A Doll’s House does not perceive the ground for such synthetic a priori relations in the terms proposed by Cavell. But it is equally clear that it insists that such relations exist, that the constitutive terms of its structure both are not identical and necessarily belong together for their proper function. And further, this necessary relation is justified not on the basis of any tradition or convention but rather against it: the criteria of the well-made play and of the past-as-such are meaningful not in themselves but only on the basis of their relation to a ground that places them in a necessary structure. What differs, accordingly, are the terms in which intention and sincerity should be conceived but not that they are the only standards left in modern art. At stake with respect to the different views on the conditions for meaning traced so far in this study (autonomy, fragmentation, and dependency) is not a question of their relative truth or correctness as concerns the “real” world. Such a question lies outside the present purpose. What matters is only the ways in which these different modes of conceptualizing the conditions of truth and experience find expression in literary works of art and there give rise to different aesthetic structures and effects. There is no reason to assume that literature is subject to the same conditions of meaning and experience as those operative in the world outside it and that its value lies in confirming and revealing these. Quite to the contrary, I would argue that the fact that literature holds a different ontology than human existence means that it is able to imagine conditions for meaning other than the ones operative in our world and that this is one of its great strengths: to give us modes of knowledge that we could not otherwise encounter but which we may well desperately need. The three paradigms traced in part 2 of this volume constitute three ways of imagining the conditions for meaning under the pressures of modernization and the consolidation of nineteenth-century capitalism. So far, this examination has been confined to the Scandinavian context, in which a specific cultural and social configuration made possible the emergence and success of a paradigm not previously identified as part of European culture during that period, namely, the aesthetics of dependency. The question that remains to be answered is if this third aesthetic paradigm also influenced European Modernism more generally after its full articulation in Ibsen’s

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work. To the extent that this can be shown to be the case, it would be necessary to reconsider not only the formal constitution of Modernist texts more broadly but also their philosophical and sociocultural implications. It is to this task that the following chapters are dedicated.

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chapter five

Henry James and the Emergence of the Major Phase

In 1891, Henry James entered the “Ibsen Controversy” with a favorable review of Hedda Gabler, his first in a series of articles on the Norwegian dramatist. While James’s defense of Ibsen is an occurrence largely neglected by the secondary literature, in this chapter I will argue that he in fact derived from Ibsen both the constitutive terms of his late aesthetics and the form of their mediation. I do so by showing that James’s critical reception of Ibsen is organized around his perception of the latter’s successful synthesis of the opposition between epic and dramatic forms of representation, which also conditioned the response to Ibsen by Hamsun, Lukács, and Szondi, and the foundations of which I have traced in the previous two chapters. This aspect of James’s understanding of Ibsen is crucial since it takes place during the very period in which James himself was seeking a solution to precisely this formal problem. The frequent claim that it is James’s application of the principles of dramatic composition to the novel that leads to the works of his “major phase” can accordingly be reassessed in light of his study of Ibsen during the 1890s. In analyzing The Wings of the Dove, I show that James in that novel seeks to productively mediate the opposition between distinct representational principles in terms similar to those that define the aesthetics of dependency. To that extent, James’s major phase constitutes a shift to an aesthetic paradigm imported from Scandinavia to the cultural core of the Western world. To support these claims, the present chapter will proceed in three steps. First, I briefly retrieve the context of James’s intervention in 169

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the Ibsen Controversy, with respect to both the larger cultural battle being fought at the time and the particular formal problems then facing James himself. Second, I proceed to analyze the specifics of James’s critical pronouncements on Ibsen and show that he understands Ibsen in terms of the latter’s successful mediation of the distinct principles of dramatic and epic modes of representation. Third, I argue, finally, that the aesthetic structure of James’s The Wings of the Dove is organized around the productive mediation of this same opposition. Similar to the aesthetics of A Doll’s House, in The Wings of the Dove, the insufficiency of the two representational principles of drama and epic is laid bare by making their semiotic value depend on a perspective they cannot themselves motivate. Kate’s final pronouncement “We shall never be again as we were!” (509) is unjustified from within the logic of the dramatic and epic modes and yet derives interpretative authority by positing the constitutive value of the further structural principle of a progressive temporality that underlies and encompasses them both. As in A Doll’s House, this fourth structural element provides the ground for the mediation between epic and drama, the proper determination of which the novel both cannot contain and on which it nevertheless depends for its textual dynamics.

This reading departs significantly from previous approaches to the relationship between Ibsen and James. Indeed, so far the secondary literature has largely ignored this topic. In the authoritative Library of America edition of James’s critical writings on European authors, for example, not a single one of his articles on Ibsen has been included, and his discussion of John Gabriel Borkman has made its way into the companion volume of criticism on English writers merely because it occurs in a longer piece that primarily discusses authors more adequately suited to that national category. No less surprising is the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, only three sustained comparative studies of James and Ibsen exist in the vast body of secondary literature on either of these authors: Herbert Edwards’s 1952 article “Henry James and Ibsen”; Michael Egan’s short book from 1972, Henry James: The Ibsen Years; and Inga-Stina Ewbank’s article from 2002, “‘Strangely Inscrutable Art’: Ibsen, James and Early Modernism.” These studies, however, are almost exclusively concerned either with thematic correspondences between the two authors (comparing, for example, The Other House and Hedda Gabler or The Turn of the

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Screw and Ghosts) or with a supposed similarity in the use of “symbols” in both Ibsen and James. They do not, that is, consider the aesthetic dimension that is the focus here. The approach offered in this chapter accordingly extends the significance of the relation between James and Ibsen both in its scope and in its nature. Insofar as an aesthetics of dependency can be traced in James, it becomes necessary to reconsider the standard view of the latter as a representative of the aesthetics of autonomy and its principles of organic form. According to one version of this position, formulated by none other than René Wellek, “James alone in his time and place in the English-speaking world holds fast to the insights of organistic aesthetics and thus constitutes a bridge from the early nineteenth century to modern criticism” (321).1 If James, as a central figure in the evolution of Anglo-Saxon high modernism, can be shown to draw on an aesthetic paradigm other than that which has defined the critical approach of the secondary literature, then the standard view of that movement more generally in terms of the affirmation or negation of autonomy, of modernism versus avant-garde, is also thrown open to revision. In the chapters that follow, this possibility will be confirmed by examining the aesthetic structure in works by Hofmannsthal, Joyce, and Rilke.

henry james receiving henrik ibsen The Ibsen Controversy began with the performance of A Doll’s House at the Novelty Theatre in London on June 7, 1889. 2 This was not the first performance of Ibsen in England, nor even the first of that particular play: already in 1880, William Archer had helped produce a version of The Pillars of Society under the title Quicksands, or the Pillars of Society, and in 1884, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the heavily corrupted version of A Doll’s House by Arthur Jones and Henry Herman, Breaking a Butterfly, was performed at the Prince’s Theatre.3 The following year, a private performance of A Doll’s House was given in a Bloomsbury lodging house, featuring Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx as Nora and, “when not ‘chatting and munching caramels’ backstage,” George Bernard Shaw as Krogstad (Shepherd-Barr 26). Several samples from Ibsen’s oeuvre had likewise already been translated into English by 1889, including the complete Emperor and Galilean (in 1876), Pillars of Society (in 1880), Ghosts (in 1885, revised in 1888), and at least two previous versions of A

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Doll’s House (in 1880 and 1882). It was the 1889 production at the Novelty, however, that for the first time reached a wider audience and proved momentous in the history of British literature. As Shaw wrote with his characteristic bombast nearly a decade after the fact, the 1889 performance “struck the decisive blow for Ibsen—perhaps the only one that has really got home in England yet—I rejoiced in it, and watched the ruin and havoc it made among the idols and temples of the idealists as a young war correspondent watches the bombardment of the unhealthy quarters of a city” (“A Doll’s” 375). The bitterness of the dispute surrounding Ibsen’s work peaked in 1891, when A Doll’s House was revived twice, and Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and Hedda Gabler premiered in London. In a legendary article from that same year, William Archer, Ibsen’s principal translator and champion from 1880 onward, famously collected some of the more outraged abuses directed at the Norwegian dramatist in the contemporary press: ‘An open drain: a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open. . . . Candid foulness. . . . Kotzebue turned bestial and cynical. . . . Offensive cynicism. . . . Ibsen’s melancholy and malodorous world. . . . Absolutely loathsome and fetid. . . . Gross, almost putrid indecorum. . . . Literary carrion. . . . Crapolous stuff. . . . Novel and perilous nuisance.’—Daily Telegraph (leading article). ‘This mess of vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, and absurdity.’ —Daily Telegraph (criticism). “Unutterably offensive. . . . Prosecution under Lord Campbell’s Act. . . . Abominable piece. . . . Scandalous.’—Standard. ‘Naked loathsomeness. . . . Most damned and repulsive production.’—Daily News. ‘Revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous. . . . Characters either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent.’—Daily Chronicle. ‘A repulsive and degrading work.’—Queen. (“Ghosts” 209–210; ellipses in original)

Archer’s anthology far exceeds this brief selection, but the pervasive tone found throughout his samples is quickly caught. By 1893, however, and possibly in response to Beerbohm Tree’s production of An Enemy of the People (Egan, “Introduction” 21), the controversy seems to have begun to die out, and by 1897, even Queen Victoria and the Archbishop of Canterbury attended a performance of Ghosts. Two years later, the staunchest of Ibsen’s opponents, Clement Scott, theater critic of the Daily Telegraph, Theatre, and Truth, and thus the critic with the widest circulation in England, admitted defeat. At the opening of his 1899 memoirs, he laconically reflects:

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The Ibsen reaction, with its unloveliness, its want of faith; its hopeless, despairing creed; its worship of the ugly in art; its grim and repulsive reaction, regret it as we will, is a solemn and resistless fact. At the outset some of us, conscientiously and in the interests of the art we loved and had followed with such persistency, tried to laugh it out of court. But the time came when the laugh was on the other side. I own it; I admit it. (1: x)

Ibsen, it was clear, had come to stay.

James’s choice of sides in the dispute is arguably unsurprising: one of his closest friends since the early 1880s was Edmund Gosse (Edel, Henry James 294), who had almost singlehandedly introduced Ibsen to the English-speaking world in the preceding decade.4 In January of 1891, moreover, James began a long and intimate friendship with Elizabeth Robins, the most prominent interpreter of Ibsen’s heroines on the English stage, author of the landmark Ibsen and the Actress and leading star of the Hedda Gabler performance James reviewed. But James’s enthusiasm for Ibsen, after a brief hesitation, was clearly genuine, and when in 1892 the proofs for The Master Builder were reaching London in gradual installments, he was among the select inner circle who, over the course of several days, would impatiently gather at Robins’s home to hear her read out her translation of the play (cf. Robins, Theatre 80–81). Writing to his hostess on November 13, James’s excitement about The Master Builder is amply apparent: Dear Miss Robins, It is all painfully, terribly, interesting! I am fearfully impatient for Tuesday afternoon—and beside myself with curiosity as to who or what the ‘other woman’ can be. This reflection—however—is somewhat lurid—that Kaia, the black silk wife, another woman, must be (in a 3–act play and by the middle of the 1st,) the only woman, so that the ‘heroine’ is, of necessity, one or other of them. Perhaps she is the black silk wife. You don’t tell me whether the other woman is the wife of the ‘young couple’. . . . These things, however, I must curb myself to wait for till Tuesday at 5. (83)

James’s Hedda Gabler review was followed by a discussion of The Master Builder in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1893 (“Ibsen’s ‘New Play’”), a further review of Little Eyolf in Harper’s Weekly in January 1897 (“London”), and a final review of John Gabriel Borkman two weeks later. In the last of these, James notably singles out Ibsen among the writers of the age:

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The author who at the age of seventy, a provincial of provincials, turns out John Gabriel is frankly for me so much one of the peculiar pleasures of the day, one of the current strong sensations, that, erect as he seems still to stand, I deplore his extreme maturity and, thinking of what shall happen, look round in vain for any other possible source of the same kind of emotion. (364)

Nearly a month and a half before this statement, moreover, James made a telling entry in his personal notebook, which clearly shows that his interest in Ibsen was also of a more practical kind: I realize—none too soon—that the scenic method is my absolute, my imperative, my only salvation. The march of an action is the thing for me to, more and more, attach myself to: it is the only thing that really, for me, at least, will produire L’ŒUVRE, and L’ŒUVRE is, before God, what I’m going in for. Well, the scenic scheme is the only one that I can trust, with my tendencies, to stick to the march of an action. How reading Ibsen’s splendid John Gabriel a day or two ago (in proof) brought that, FINALLY AND FOREVER, home to me! (Complete Notebooks 167)

It is important to note that this entry places James’s reception of Ibsen squarely in the context of his “discovery” of the possibility of combining the dramatic and novelistic forms, which has repeatedly been pointed to as the most important artistic innovation in James’s later authorship, leading directly to the novels of the “major phase.”5 James’s efforts to unify novel and drama were first formulated during his reevaluation of the conclusive failure of his own experimentation with the theater during the 1890s.6 With the completion of The Tragic Muse in 1890, during the height of the Ibsen Controversy, James for a number of reasons decided to leave aside the novelistic form and fulfill his long-held ambition of writing for the stage. Of the numerous plays he composed from 1890 until 1895, only two were performed: his dramatization of The American, produced in 1891, and the original play Guy Domville. The latter premiered on January 5, 1895, and proved such a decisive failure that James fell into a serious depression and abandoned all hopes of ever writing for the stage again.7 Only a little over a month later, however, his notebook records a famous entry under the opening proclamation “I have my head, thank God, full of visions. One has never too many—one has never enough” (Complete Notebooks 114). The entry proceeds to outline the ideas that would eventually become The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl and leads James into more general considerations:

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Voyons, voyons: may I not instantly sit down a little close, clear, full scenario of it?8 As I ask myself the question, with the very asking of it, and the utterance of that word so charged with memories and pains, something seems to open out before me, and at the same time to press upon me with an extraordinary tenderness of embrace. Compensations and solutions seem to stand there with open arms for me—and something of the ‘meaning’ to come to me of past bitterness, of recent bitterness that otherwise has seemed a mere sickening, unflavoured draught. Has a part of all this wasted passion and squandered time (of the last 5 years) been simply the previous lesson, taught me in that roundabout and devious, that cruelly expensive, way, of the singular value for a narrative plan too of the (I don’t know what adequately to call it) divine principle of the Scenario? If that has been one side of the moral of the whole unspeakable the whole tragic experience, I almost bless the pangs and the pains and the miseries of it. If there has lurked in the central core of it this exquisite truth—I almost hold my breath with suspense as I try to formulate it; so much, so much, hangs radiantly there as depending on it—this exquisite truth that what I call the divine principle in question is a key that, working in the same general way fits the complicated chambers of both the dramatic and the narrative lock: If, I say, I have crept round through long apparent barrenness, through suffering and sadness, intolerable, to that rare perception—why my infinite little loss is converted into an almost infinite little gain. (115–116)

I will examine the possible implications of this outburst later in this chapter, but what is of immediate importance here is that it clearly shows how James conceives of the central aesthetic problem of two of his last and most important works in terms of the combination of the forms of drama and novel. The already quoted notebook entry on John Gabriel Borkman from late 1896, which likewise concerns the use of compositional principles derived from drama for the novel, thus strongly suggests that Ibsen served James as a possible model for the solution to this specific problem. This suggestion, as I will show in the following section, is amply supported by a closer analysis of James’s critical engagement with the Norwegian dramatist.

“str angely inscrutable art” James’s first statement on Ibsen of any significant interest is found in a letter to Gosse, dated 28 April 1891.9 Thanking Gosse for a copy of The Prose Dramas of Henrik Ibsen, to which Gosse had provided the introduction, James writes,

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The perusal of the dreary Rosmersholm and even the reperusal of Ghosts has been rather a shock to me—they have let me down, down. Surely the former isn’t good?—any more than the tedious Lady from the Sea is? Must I think these things works of skill? . . . They don’t seem to me dramatic, or dramas at all—but (I am speaking of these 2 particularly) moral tales in dialogue—without the objectivity, the visibility of the drama. They suggest curious reflections as to the Scandinavian stage and audiences. Of course they have a serious—a terribly serious, ‘feeling for life,’ and always an idea—but they come off so little, in general, as plays; & I can’t think that a man who is at odds with his form is ever a first-rate man. (216–217)

Ibsen fails, so James asserts, because he does not respect the laws governing his form, which demand, as he puts it here, “objectivity” and “visibility.” The presuppositions for this somewhat cursory dismissal are fruitfully elucidated by James’s earlier, 1875 review of Tennyson’s Queen Mary, which he subjects to a similar critique: The fine thing in a real drama, generally speaking, is that, more than any other work of literary art, it needs a masterly structure. . . . To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws, is always a strong man’s highest ideal of success. The reader cannot be sure how deeply conscious Mr. Tennyson has been of the laws of the drama, but it would seem as if he had not very attentively pondered them. In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work—it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous. “Queen Mary,” I think, has this fundamental weakness; it would be very hard to say what its subject is. . . . It cannot be called an intrigue, nor treated as one; it tends altogether to expansion; whereas a genuine dramatic subject should tend to concentration. (“Tennyson’s” 398)

What sets the drama apart as a literary form, in short, is its clear and distinct nature, its opposition to vagueness and digression, which does not allow for ambiguity in its subject matter. It is interesting that Leon Edel should have pointed out that James’s conception of the “rigid laws” underlying drama derives directly from the rules of the well-made play developed by Scribe, Sardou, and Dennery (“Henry James: The Dramatic” 35–36).10 Accordingly, if in his letter to Gosse, James is struck by Ibsen as being at odds with his form, it would seem to be the reified rules of this tradition that James takes him to violate

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through an excess of vagueness and unintelligibility, a claim that the previous chapter would amply support. In this light, it is significant that James modifies his opinion when discussing the performance of Hedda Gabler. Echoing Hamsun, Lukács, and Szondi, James begins his review with a consideration of the great difference between reading Ibsen and seeing him performed. As a read text, Hedda Gabler “left one comparatively muddled and mystified, fascinated, but—in one’s intellectual sympathy—snubbed,” whereas seen acted, “it leads that sympathy over the straightest of roads, with all the exhilaration of a superior pace” (“On the Occasion” 237). James still perceives the former attributes as in principle incompatible with drama. As in his earlier letter to Gosse, James in his review asserts that Ibsen’s drama “is essentially that supposedly undramatic thing, the picture not of an action but of a condition. . . . Hedda Gabler is, in short, the study of an exasperated woman; and it may certainly be declared that the subject was not in advance, as a theme for scenic treatment, to be pronounced promising” (240). James characterizes the subject of Ibsen’s play (Hedda’s character) in terms of its “infinitude,” “endlessness,” and “difficulty” (240), or as “various,” “complicated,” “ambiguous,” and “exposed to a dozen interpretations” (241), in stark opposition to the clarity and conciseness claimed for drama in the Tennyson review. Ibsen, indeed, “leans too far” toward such effects, so much so that he “loses sight too much of the type-quality” of his characters that would facilitate comprehension. Seeking to make his characters only individuals, Ibsen makes it impossible to classify them according to semiotically determined categories. As James admits toward the end of his review, “We are not at all sure, for instance, of the type-quality in Hedda” (243–244). James here clearly echoes that part of Hamsun’s contemporaneous critique that points to the opacity of Ibsen’s plays, but his appreciation of the relation of this quality to the opposed dramatic elements in Ibsen’s work is now quite different. Although in his letter to Gosse, he shares the view that Ibsen is inherently at odds with his own form, in the performance of Hedda Gabler the “supposedly undramatic” aspects that one would not “in advance” think of “as a theme for scenic treatment” are brought off with success. In watching Hedda Gabler, James writes, “we become conscious that he has mastered an exceedingly difficult form” (236). If reading the play leaves James “muddled and mystified,” watching the performance instead

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provides him with the “sense of being moved by a scientific hand” (237). The infinity of Hedda’s character is counteracted by Ibsen’s “curious and beautiful passion for the unity of time (carried in him to a point which almost always implies also that of place)” and through which he “condemns himself to admirable rigours” (240). The performance of the play thus serves as a “frame” to the play as text, as James stresses three times in a row (236–237), and as such lends the latter definition and boundaries that it otherwise would lack. The achieved effect, however, is not simply that of reducing character to plot, confining epic in drama; rather, the relation goes the other way as well, as is made clear by the persistence of a contradiction. If Ibsen’s rigorous adherence to the unities of time and space serves to limit the infinity of Hedda’s character, the motivation for the events unfolding in that frame is nevertheless found in the latter and therefore eludes direct representation: “We receive Hedda ripe for her catastrophe, and if we ask for antecedents and explanations we must simply find them in her character. Her motives are just her passion. What the four acts show us is these motives and that character—complicated, strange, irreconcilable, infernal—playing themselves out” (240–241). Since the plot cannot exceed the Aristotelian limitations to time and space to which the well-made play adheres, Ibsen does not give us the prehistory that would have made the action comprehensible (240). Instead, motivation for the plot must be sought in Hedda’s character. Yet insofar as the latter is defined in terms directly opposed to the laws governing the action in which she moves, it is clear that cause and effect can never meet on the same plane. If the infinity of character provides the explanation for action, the laws of action nevertheless dictate that character can never express itself in finite time and space. And if, in drama, character can be comprehended only through action, then the laws of time and space in turn imply that such comprehension cannot correspond to the character it seeks to represent. The problem at stake in this conflict is akin to that identified by Szondi in his claim that the epic dimension of Ibsen’s plays fails to motivate the endings that we witness on the stage. But in James’s more favorable assessment, this contradiction constitutes Ibsen’s defining characteristic: “It is the oddity of the mixture that makes him so individual—his perfect practice of a difficult and delicate art, combined with such aesthetic density” (238). The impossible combination of epic and drama here emerges as a strength rather than a liability of Ibsen’s work.

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James’s description of the simultaneity of opposed structural principles in his review of Hedda Gabler also constitutes the central insight of his following appreciations of Ibsen.11 In his article on The Master Builder, he returns to the question of Ibsen’s “strangely inscrutable art” in these precise terms (“Ibsen’s” 267). On the one hand, the play “eludes analysis” (267), and the character of Hilde Wangel, whom James reads as closely related to Hedda (269), is again defined as “mystifying,” creating “difficulty,” “obscurities and ironies” (268). On the other hand, and “in spite of” these qualities, “the action . . . takes its course by steps none the less irresistible” and is even “superficially simple, more single and confined than that of most of Ibsen’s other plays” (ibid.). An interesting elaboration of this simultaneity of distinct principles is provided in James’s review of John Gabriel Borkman, his final extensive statement on Ibsen. Returning once more to the mystifying and difficult in Ibsen, James points to Ibsen’s “dry view of life” and claims that his works thoroughly lack “the comic idea”: Comedy moreover is a product mainly of observation, and I scarcely know what to say of his figures except that they haven’t the signs. The answer to that is doubtless partly that they haven’t the English, but have the Norwegian. In such a case one of the Norwegian must be in truth this very lack of signs. [Ibsen’s characters] have no tone but their moral tone. They are highly animated abstractions, with the extraordinary, the brilliant property of becoming when represented at once more abstract and more living. (364)

The difficulty of Ibsen’s works, this passage makes clear, derives from the fact that the characters resist classification according to established semiotic categories. As James had already pointed out in his review of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s characters are individuals rather than types, and as such, they exhibit a “lack of signs” since they fail to present positively determined units of meaning under which the particular phenomenon can be classified. The abstraction they embody, accordingly, is not that of a general type under which particulars are subsumed but, on the contrary, that in which something becomes intangible precisely because it resists such an ascription of positive attributes. As I shall argue further below, this latter point is crucial in light of the fact that Seymour Chatman has defined James’s late style as abstract in precisely the latter sense rather than the former (4). In the present context, it should be noted that James again proceeds to

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contrast this undramatic abstraction in Ibsen’s work with his opposed dramatic qualities: [Ibsen] nevertheless arrives at the dramatist’s great goal—he arrives for all his meagerness at intensity. The meagerness, which is after all but an unconscious, an admirable economy, never interferes with that: it plays straight into the hands of his rare mastery of form. The contrast between this form—so difficult to have reached, so civilized, so ‘evolved,’—and the bareness and bleakness of this little northern democracy is the source of half the hard frugal charm that he puts forth. In the cold fixed light of it the notes that we speak of as deficiencies take a sharp value in the picture. (Review 364)

On the one hand, the civilized (presumably French) attributes of “intensity” and “form,” which James always associates with drama (cf. Wiesenfarth 5–14); on the other, the Norwegian “meagerness,” “bareness,” and “bleakness,” which pertain to abstraction understood as an absence of semiotic determination. The passage, moreover, provides an unequivocal approval of Ibsen’s combination of these opposed structural principles, stressing that while they contrast, they nevertheless support rather than interfere with each other. This unequivocal approval of Ibsen’s method makes it clear that he provides the refutation to the hypothetical “disdainers of the contemporary drama” to whom James lends his voice in the preface to the New York edition of The Awkward Age, written in 1908. James imagines such “disdainers” to claim that drama must choose either to be clear in its form but superficial in its subject or to treat a complex subject at the expense of the clarity of its form (1132). The “disdainers” invoke Ibsen “as a case in point,” since to them he only achieves either excessive superficiality and simplicity or excessive confusion and obscurity. From this, so they conclude, “you easily see all the conditions can’t be met. The dramatist has to choose but those he’s most capable of, and by that choice he’s known” (1133). In the preface, James significantly does not endorse this claim about Ibsen, and given that in his previous statements about the latter he had stressed precisely Ibsen’s ability to successfully fulfill both these conditions, it is unlikely that he would.12 What is particularly interesting in the context of the preface is that James goes on to elaborate the opposition put forward by the “disdainers” in terms of a difference in genres that recalls the distinction already drawn in the 1875 review of Tennyson: Exhibition may mean in a “story” twenty different ways, fifty excursions, alternatives, excrescences, and the novel, as largely practiced in

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English, is the perfect paradise of the loose end. The play consents to the logic of but one way, mathematically right, and with the loose end as gross an impertinence on its surface, and as grave a dishonour, as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry. (1134)

It should be noted that the distinction proposed here is not simply to the detriment of the novel, insofar as the latter’s amorphous and ambiguous form is the very means for the “emulation of life” that James also seeks to attain. It is significant, therefore, that in his critical writings, James describes Ibsen as possessing both the attributes of mathematical precision proper to the drama (Ibsen conducts his action with “a scientific hand” [“On the Occasion” 237]) and those of “life” that pertain to the novel (Ibsen “at any rate gives us the sense of life” [“Ibsen’s New” 267]). To the extent that Ibsen has bridged the gap between novel and drama, James implicitly presents him as having solved the problem posed by the “disdainers” as well as that which he himself had deemed unsolvable in his review of Tennyson. More importantly still, it makes clear that, to James, Ibsen holds the answer to the very challenge he was grappling with in the notebooks of the 1890s.

Two important implications can be drawn from the preceding analysis. First, if Ibsen serves James as a standard for the application to the novel of compositional principles derived from drama, as I have argued that he does and as the previously quoted entry on John Gabriel Borkman in the Notebooks suggests (167), it would seem that the standard view of the nature of James’s innovation following his experimentation with the theater must be reconsidered. Traditionally, the claim has been that what James achieves by imposing a dramatic mode of composition on his middle and late novels is an increased degree of “logical movement” (Wiesenfarth 30), or “clarity and economy . . . intensity and coherence” (Ward 33–34), which serve to “wash away all the expository freedoms and flexibilities of the traditional novel” (Ozick 108). As Leon Edel has argued in representative terms, after 1895, instead of digressive and expansive narrative, James’s novels have their “boundaries defined and within them the work built step by step in accordance with its particular substance and logic” (“Henry James: The Dramatic” 63). While many of these attributes remain somewhat vague, it is clear that the general tendency is to view James’s change as one that seeks

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to reduce the amorphous shape of the novel to the “rigid laws” of drama. The problem with such readings is twofold. On the one hand, they fail to do justice to the actual nature of James’s late novels, the opacity and sprawling size of which do not, as Edel himself admits (64), exhibit the formal rigor and transparency that the generalizations of the secondary literature would lead us to expect. On the other hand, as Macnaughton has pointed out (42–44), and as Edel (63) and Isle (37) also concede, dramatic principles such as “objectivity,” “scenario,” or “scene” are not confined to James’s late novels, being in fact present in the early works as well, and therefore cannot serve to distinguish between different stages in James career. By instead reading the logic of James’s adaptation of dramatic principles to the novel through the lens of his reception of Ibsen, it becomes clear that what is at stake is not a reduction of one form to the laws of the other but the achievement of a dialectical relation between both. What James is looking for in the mid-1890s is not a way to rid himself of the compositional principle of “life” but rather a way to reorganize its function in a new aesthetic whole. The second important point to be drawn from the analysis of James’s critical pronouncements on Ibsen supports the first and emerges from his reformulation of the central opposition between clarity and unintelligibility in terms of reality and symbolism. Discussing The Master Builder, James writes: The mingled reality and symbolism of it all give us an Ibsen within an Ibsen. His subject is always, like the subjects of all first-rate men, primarily an idea; but in this case the idea is as difficult to catch as its presence is impossible to overlook. The whole thing throbs and flushes with it, and yet smiles and mocks at us through it as if in conscious supersubtlety. (“Ibsen’s New” 268)

This passage is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, James’s identification of the dimension of action and character and their opposed structural characteristics as, respectively, “realist” (or, resembling “reality”) and “symbolist” suggests that he straddles the sharp distinction that is frequently drawn between the French and English receptions of Ibsen.13 In the English reception, Ibsen was primarily perceived to be a realist author, concerned first and foremost with social problems. When confronted with the overt opacity and ambiguity of plays such as The Master Builder, leading Ibsenites like William Archer accordingly felt compelled to defend their hero by claiming that any difficulties were only seeming ones. As Archer

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wrote in a review of that play on the eve of its London premiere, the strangeness surrounding Hilde and Solness’ relation can be explained easily enough as a case of “hypnotism, that incredible yet undeniable force” (“‘Diplomacy’” 58; cf. also “Master” 69). With such an interpretative key in hand, Archer is free to offer a thoroughly realistic retelling of the story, able to provide critical guidance for all prospective audiences (58–64). Archer’s early response to the play foreshadows his subsequent claim in the 1907 introduction to The Master Builder that “there is nothing in the play which has no meaning on the natural-psychological plane, and absolutely requires a symbolic interpretation to make it comprehensible” (xxix). It is clear from the above analysis that to James the unintelligibility and ambiguity of Ibsen’s plays are not accidental obfuscations of this kind, something to be clarified with the proper “scientific” tool, but rather constitutive principles of his particular aesthetics. Interestingly, this insistence on the inherent indeterminacy of the symbolic dimension (“the idea is as difficult to catch as its presence is impossible to overlook,” as the above passage puts it [“Ibsen’s New” 268]) also distinguishes James from large segments of the French reception of Ibsen, which is usually seen to favor a symbolic approach. William Archer’s counterpart, Count Prozor, who first translated Ibsen’s works into French, likewise seeks to disambiguate The Master Builder by providing it with determinate meanings. Prozor opens his preface to the play by announcing: This drama . . . is not difficult to understand, and the symbols found there are quite transparent. Master Solness is the poet himself. Hilde is youth, and also imagination, which it is dangerous to listen to. Mrs. Solness is the past with its sadness and its childishness. The old Brovik is the routine that Solness has destroyed. The young Brovik is modern utilitarianism, which has long been repressed by the ideal, by art, and now finally triumphs when art, carried away on the slope of dreams, taken away by a wind of folly, dashes towards the clouds. (5–6)

Prozor’s insistence that the symbolism of Ibsen’s play is semiotically transparent and thoroughly motivated allows him to provide determinate explanations for any number of difficult passages: the churches represent Ibsen’s early philosophical dramas (6), Solness’s burned house figures the death of old customs and traditions while his deceased children stand for national ideas (9), and so on. In spite

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of his insistence on the importance of “symbols,” Prozor’s exegetical attitude is thus fairly similar to Archer’s, since he, too, seeks to translate the play back into transparent and fully motivated signs. The fact that Archer in his subsequent 1907 introduction to The Master Builder actually adopts Prozor’s reading of the different kinds of houses constructed by Solness (“Introduction” xxviii), even as he retains his earlier insistence that symbolism is secondary and irrelevant to the play (xxviii–xxix), further testifies to this similarity. James’s use of the term “symbolism” with regard to Ibsen does not rely on such a use of images. In fact, in neither the article on The Master Builder nor the subsequent review of John Gabriel Borkman, in which he again speaks of Ibsen as “the sturdy old symbolist” (365), does James discuss the use of imagery at any point. On the contrary, as a continuation of his description of the infinity and mystery of Ibsen’s works, James’s use of the term seems instead to refer to something along the lines of what Maurice Maeterlinck had in mind in his own review of Ibsen’s The Master Builder. In a front-page article published in Le Figaro the day before the play’s premiere in Paris, Maeterlinck, arguably the leading symbolist author at the time, interestingly both acknowledges Prozor’s interpretation of the play’s symbols and dismisses it as being of merely secondary importance: “First of all, it is clear that the drama is a kind of allegorical autobiography. . . . Moreover, the allegories here are transparent, and the main ones have been elucidated by M. Prozor, in the excellent preface to his translation. . . . But there are several other neglected aspects.” Accepting Prozor’s interpretation of the semiotic status of symbols as transparent and fully motivated, Maeterlinck nevertheless proceeds to focus on those aspects neglected by such a perspective. Offering a reconsideration of the nature of tragedy, which would subsequently develop into his essay “Le tragique quotidian” in Le trésor des humbles, Maeterlinck claims that true poetry should focus not on paradigmatically heroic events but rather on the mystery of the everyday: “The poet adds to ordinary life a je ne sais quoi, which is the secret of the poets, and suddenly it appears in its prodigious grandeur, in its surrender to unknown forces, in its endless relations, and in its solemn misery.” It is this transformation of the everyday through the revelation of its relation to an unknown and infinite force that to Maeterlinck characterizes The Master Builder. It does so, moreover, not through an overdetermination of semiotic units, as Prozor and Archer would have it, but through their increased ambiguity:

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It even seems that what he was in fact compelled to say was much more than what he had intended to say. He has liberated certain forces of the soul that had never before been free. . . . [T]he poet has attempted to place within one and the same expression the internal and external dialogue. Who knows what new forces reign within this somnambulistic play. Everything that is said here at once masks and reveals the sources of an unknown life. And, if we are at times surprised, we only need not to lose from sight that our soul is often, to our poor eyes, a most mad force, and that there are in man many regions more fertile, more profound and interesting than those of reason or intelligence . . . (second ellipsis in original)

Maeterlinck, like James, insists on the constitutive value of the semiotic opacity of Ibsen’s play. This kinship in critical judgment is crucial since it suggests the misleading nature of the usual claim that what Ibsen teaches James is a use of “symbols” opposed to that of the symbolistes and Maeterlinck and akin to the kind that Prozor and Archer would accept.14 According to this view, which is a centerpiece of all the comparative studies of James and Ibsen to date, Ibsen’s late plays and James’s final novels both make use of concrete images (the wild duck, the dove, the golden bowl, etc.) as ways of positively determining abstract concepts.15 This argument, however, ignores the fact that James does not mention the use of imagery with respect to Ibsen and, more importantly, that he specifically claims that the latter’s symbolism impedes, rather than facilitates, determinate interpretation. It is therefore important to remember that the truly innovative aspect of symbolism in the 1890s resides precisely in the former qualities rather than in the full motivation of images favored by the secondary literature. As Edmund Wilson already warned: This name [“Symbolism”] has often been complained of as being inadequate for the movement to which it was given and inappropriate to certain of its aspects; and it may prove misleading to English readers. . . . For the familiar kind of symbolism is conventional and fixed; the symbolism of the Divine Comedy is conventional, logical and definite. But the symbols of the Symbolist school are usually chosen arbitrarily by the poet to stand for special ideas of his own—they are a sort of disguise for these ideas. (20)16

Wilson’s emphasis on the arbitrary motivation of signs and the difficulty of their interpretation clearly resonates with James’s own comments on the absence of semiotic determination in Ibsen’s works. In spite of the terminological confusions this inevitably gives rise to, it therefore lies at hand to see James’s reference to Ibsen’s symbolism as

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aiming at the aspect of Ibsen’s work that, in accordance with more recent critical usage, the previous two chapters have defined as allegorical. This also suggests that if a stylistic similarity between Ibsen and James is to be determined, it should be looked for not at the level of a common use of images but rather in James’s own turn to an increasingly abstract, allusive, and opaque style in his late novels. This style unquestionably constitutes the central innovation of James’s major phase, and Ibsen’s influence on the latter could accordingly be said to reside in the way his plays show James the possibility of increasing the allegorical dimension of his works by dialectically binding it to the opposed dramatic principles of transparency and unity. As I will show with respect to The Wings of the Dove in the next section, such a perspective is far more suited to an analysis of James’s late novels. More importantly still, from this perspective, it also becomes apparent that in James, too, the specific means of binding the dialectical opposites conforms to neither the logic of autonomy nor that of fragmentation but to the aesthetics of dependency, which Ibsen also practiced. T H E W I NGS OF T H E DOV E

and the legibility

of the world In his seminal study The Later Style of Henry James, Seymour Chatman has meticulously shown that James’s late novels distinguish themselves from his earlier works through an increased turn toward abstraction. The latter, as mentioned above, Chatman defines as the use of words with intangible, nonsensuous referents (4). James not only deploys such with greater frequency in his final works, Chatman points out, but also makes them syntactically more prominent. For example, James uses verbs of mental action more frequently than those of overt physical or visible action (10–22) and nominalizes the same so as to replace human actors with intangible abstractions (22– 34). The novels of the major phase in this way not only have their action displaced from an external to an internal realm (31) but also endow the latter space with a heightened ambiguity and illegibility. As Chatman shows, by substituting human and external actors for psychological nouns and linguistic shifters (such as third-person pronouns or abstract dietic nouns like “thing”), James allows the referents of his sentences to remain drastically underdetermined (40,

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57–58). According to Chatman’s painstaking analysis, a representative example of James’s stylistic abstraction can invest a single sentence with up to 960 different possible meanings (91). Two implications of Chatman’s study are of immediate interest here. First, the ambiguity at work in James is a result of a loss of contextual determination of semiotic units. The move away from the external world as a specified frame of reference means that the reader is forced to fill the gaps in the semantic ellipses by providing the missing referential information (100). As noted above, such an absence of determinate interpretative contexts is also what James associates with Ibsen, whose characters, according to James, exist independently of codified frames of reference and the positive semiotic relations that these bring. Second, to Chatman, and in opposition to the long tradition in the secondary criticism referenced above, this concern with abstract, intangible states rather than concrete, external actions means that James is radically at odds with the dramatic form (81– 83). In the present context, this remark is significant precisely because James himself identified Ibsen’s abstraction as the undramatic aspect of his art. Rather than a categorical negation of drama, as Chatman assumes, the style of the major phase is a constitutive part of a different kind of aesthetic whole that James first found in Ibsen’s plays. In this connection, it is interesting to note Peter Brooks’s claim, in his illuminating study The Melodramatic Imagination, that indeterminacy and unintelligibility of the kind traced by Chatman are not restricted to the stylistic level of James’s works but are in fact inherent in the composition of his fictional world at large (171–179). Support for this claim is especially visible in The Wings of the Dove, in which the characters are continually confronted with situations and persons that they cannot decipher. Kate in particular is repeatedly presented as illegible, as possessing a side that is “‘other’, the not wholly calculable,” making Milly think that “[s]he should never know how Kate truly felt about anything” (136). During the social gathering at the opening of Book Fourth, Kate again strikes Milly as “incalculable” (106) and as exhibiting an excess of semiotic stimuli: “[T]here were for example more indications than she [Milly] could reduce to order in the manner of the friendly niece [Kate]” (106–105). To Densher, famously, Kate is likewise “a ‘new book’, an uncut volume” (376), while Lord Mark, otherwise skilled in the art of social deciphering, must similarly confess, “No—I’ve failed with [Kate]. It’s no use. I don’t make her out” (117).

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The semiotic opacity in The Wings of the Dove, however, is not restricted to Kate alone. Lord Mark himself is introduced in the novel as being “so different” and “vague” (109) and as eluding stable classification: “It was difficult to guess his age—whether he were a young man who looked old or an old man who looked young” (108). Mark’s characteristic property, as Kate further suggests, is his lack of all semiotic attributes, the fact that “he pointed to nothing,” which serves to distinguish him negatively from people known “by something they had to show, something that, either for them or against, could be touched or named or proved” (127). Further, a similar absence of semiotic transparency is found in Densher, whose “personal marks” are likewise introduced as insufficient “to name his profession” and who is also defined as looking “vague” (34). The same vagueness is again encountered in Susan’s perception of Milly (83), which here, too, causes established interpretative frameworks to collapse: “[A]ll categories failed her—they ceased at least to signify” (76). No less is this the case with Aunt Maud, who also appears as a “riddle” (351) and whose very house remains illegible to Densher, making it possible for him to understand it in negative terms only, as a “merciless difference” to his own world (56). Susan’s remark to Milly shortly after their arrival in London rings true for all characters in the book: “My dear child, we move in a labyrinth” (133).17 The pervasive illegibility of the world of The Wings of the Dove, however, does not appear to be a consequence of the meaning of phenomena being in excess of their established boundaries, as Brooks argues (Melodramatic 171) and as he convincingly shows to be the case in the melodramatic tradition represented by Balzac. Rather, in the late James, the world’s opacity is akin to the opacity of his style in the sense that both derive from a lack of determinate semiotic boundaries.18 Similar to what I have argued is the case with the allegorical dimension in Ibsen, the interpretative difficulties encountered by the characters in The Wings of the Dove result from the difficulty of establishing the proper context of phenomena to begin with. As Lord Mark explains to Milly during their first encounter: “[T]here was no such thing to-day in London as saying where any one was. Everyone was everywhere—nobody was anywhere. . . . [W]as there anything but the groping and pawing, that of the vague billows of some great greasy sea in mid-Channel, of masses of bewildered people trying to ‘get’ they didn’t know what or where?” (107). Mark’s claim about this pervasive loss of defining context is amply corroborated by the

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characters’ own experiences. Not only have people in London arguably lost their sense of belonging, but so have Milly and Susan, who, given their American background, are even more out of place in England (cf., e.g., 96). As Milly significantly professes to Lord Mark at the beginning of the same conversation, “she scarce even knew where she was” (103), a sentiment she repeats two chapters later (143). Densher and Kate are also presented as lacking a determinate context in light of their upbringing and background. The difficulty of properly defining Densher is due not least to “his migratory parents, his Swiss schools, his German universities” (66), which lend him a sense of the foreign even in his native England. Importantly, Kate, too, is a product of a similar decontextualization, having lived “as a child, . . . with some continuity in the world across the Channel, coming home again still a child; and had participated after that, in her ’teens, in her mother’s brief but repeated retreats to Dresden, to Florence, to Biarritz” (ibid.). Such excess of contexts is also a lack of original determination that empties a signifier of the necessary relations that provide it with positive attributes. Kate’s mysterious nature stands in direct continuity with the absence of any such defining framework: She became thus, intermittently, a figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be waited for, named and fitted. This was doubtless by a way of feeling that it was of her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness; another of them would be for instance to say that she was made for great social uses. (151)

The emphasis in this passage on Kate’s determination by her “use” in different circumstances, rather than through any intrinsic attributes of her own, provides the further suggestion that the lack of determinate relations underlying the illegibility of the modern world finds its root in the logic of exchange that pervades The Wings of the Dove. Lord Mark’s statement is in this instance again indicative when he professes to Milly, “Nobody here, you know, does anything for nothing” (114), an opinion that Kate subsequently elaborates at greater length: [E]very one who had anything to give—it was true they were the fewest—made the sharpest possible bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing furthermore was that this might be in cases a happy understanding. The worker in one connexion was the worked in another; it was as broad as it was long—with the wheels of the system, as might be seen, wonderfully oiled. (127–128)

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This intersubjective network of mutual exploitation determines the relation between the novel’s characters, who continually approach each other in terms of the possible uses to which their counterparts can be put. This is, of course, most obviously the case in the central story line of Kate’s attempt to help Milly marry Densher so that the latter can inherit her money and in turn marry Kate once Milly has died. As Kate admits, this macrostructural transaction in the novel involves a use not only of Milly but of Densher (254) and, insofar as her actions are dictated by the desire to raise her family from poverty, even of Kate herself. But more peripheral interactions are no less dependent on this logic. If Aunt Maud helps Susan Stringham with Milly, then she does so because Susan can help Maud with Kate (299– 300), and if Kate sleeps with Densher, then Densher at the novel’s end gives Kate Milly’s letter in return (495). As the language of exchange continually recurs (cf., e.g., 12, 66, 166, 169, 201, 239, 254, 358, 383, 468), the all-inclusiveness of this logic becomes clear. It is important to note that in The Wings of the Dove, every entity in this way constitutes an undetermined abstraction until it is provided with a context through its appropriation by a specific use, and that every use in turn is established through a structure of exchange that in principle can extend infinitely. As such, the opacity of James’s fictional world is moving within the structure of the bad infinity that this study has traced as a constitutive feature of the experience of modernity from Maimon onward, and which in the nineteenth century is associated with the logic of capital in particular. It is significant, therefore, that James clearly emphasizes the role of money in the economy of relations governing The Wings of the Dove.19 As Milly remarks to Susan about their English acquaintances: “they appeared all—every one they saw—to think tremendously of money” (140). Milly’s innocent surprise at this fact signals an important difference in the nature of her own wealth with respect to everyone else’s preoccupation with it. Milly, as we are repeatedly told, already has “everything” (93, et passim) and to that extent, according to Susan at least, has no ulterior use for her money (140). Aunt Maud, on the other hand, “was keeping her wealth as for other purposes, imaginations, ambitions, that would figure as large, as honourably unselfish, on the day they should take effect” (ibid.). It is of course significant that Susan is only partially right, since Milly’s wealth is qualified by the fundamental lack that is the lack of time figured by her imminent death and which makes her complicit in her own exchange of money

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for “experience” and “life.” But this point serves to stress the conclusion implied by Susan’s distinction: that to James, it is not money in itself that engenders the logic of exchange but the even more fundamental dynamics of an original lack that must be satisfied. At the heart of the unintelligibility of James’s world, that is, lies an ineradicable nothingness that cannot be properly semanticized.

The discussion so far has established the presence in James of a representational logic akin to the allegorical structure at work in the epic dimension of Ibsen’s plays and shown that in James, too, this is grounded in a conception of the nature of modern society. In the context of an aesthetic analysis, however, it is of less significance whether James derives these specific features from Ibsen than whether he shares with him a larger textual structure in which such features are only part of the constitutive terms. If the unintelligibility in The Wings of the Dove tends toward the anti-dramatic qualities described by James in his reviews of Ibsen, it is therefore necessary to investigate whether the same novel in addition draws on the opposed dramatic qualities also operative in the Norwegian’s plays. From this perspective, it is important to note that while all semiotic determinations are continually modified in the economy of relations between characters, thereby generating the semiotic opacity of James’s fictional world, all characters in turn seek to counteract this fluidity by imposing reified determinations on their surroundings. When Densher is unable to decipher Aunt Maud’s parlor, he reconsiders it as a possible subject for an article in his newspaper, which provides him with the familiar context through which to domesticate the otherwise illegible world he has stepped into (56). Similarly, if Susan finds Milly too vague and alien for her “categories,” she takes “possession” of Milly (79) by recasting her as the heroine of familiar stories that “helped her read the meanings . . . of the relation in which she was now so deeply involved” (95). Such a subjection of Milly to preestablished types recurs in the repeated perception of her as a typical American girl by Mark (112–117), Maud (190), Kate (197–198), and Densher (e.g., 281, 371, 399, 400). Even Kate, in fact, in spite of all her illegibility, is forced to “represent” the “character” imposed on her by Maud (240; cf. also 20), no less than Densher ends up complying with the latter’s view of him as Milly’s lover (458).

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More importantly still, the semiotic determination made use of in instances such as these is governed by the attempt to establish organic unities resonant of the aesthetics of autonomy. In The Wings of the Dove, the very possibility of understanding is conditioned on making “pieces” fit together in a whole: “All her little pieces had now then fallen together for him” (174); “It was wonderful for Milly how just to put it so made all its pieces fall at present quite properly into their places” (185); “The parts, as he now saw, under her hand did fall more or less together” (226); “The pieces fell together for him as he felt her thus buying him off” (265); “‘I see again, as you say,’ Densher said after a moment. ‘It makes everything fit.’ ‘Everything.’” (381). As Milly recognizes during her first society dinner in London, it is when things organically cohere that they become legible and life itself is “justified”: “As Milly made out these things—with a shade of exhilaration at the way she already fell in—she saw how she was justified of her plea for people and her love of life” (105). The lack of contextual determination that operates on one level of the novel is continually counteracted by the opposed attempt to establish definite boundaries within which to organize phenomena. And if in the former instance it was the persistence of an ineradicable lack that governed relations, in the latter it is the opposed desire for “everything” that dominates, and which Maud (191, 301), and Kate (52), and Milly (94) all invoke as the motivation for their acts. Indeed, the two words, “everything” and “nothing,” occur with such striking frequency throughout The Wings of the Dove that they give the impression of dividing the novel between them. In the course of the 509 pages of text in the Oxford edition, “everything” is encountered at least 132 times, while “nothing” occurs no less that 144: a combined average of more than one occurrence every two pages. The fact that the desire for “everything” that underlies the positive determination of the world provides the motivating force for Milly, Maud, and Kate calls to mind James’s association of the use of character-types with the principles of drama in his review of Hedda Gabler (“On the Occasion” 243–244). It is interesting to note, therefore, that in The Wings of the Dove, the application of determinate semiotic categories is likewise figured as the condition for the possibility of action.20 This is striking given that the subjection to preexisting interpretative frames would intuitively seem to be a result of excessive passivity on behalf of the individual in question. As much, at least, is suggested by Milly herself: “It pressed upon her then and there that she was still in a

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current determined, through her indifference, timidity, bravery, generosity—she scarce could say which—by others; that not she but the current acted, and that somebody else always was the keeper of the lock or the dam” (195–196). However, in what is arguably the central instance of such a determination in the novel, Kate’s designation of Milly as a “dove,” Milly’s assimilation of that type provides her with the organic context that makes specific action possible:21 It was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration: she found herself accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath with relief, the name so given her. She met it on the instant as she would have met revealed truth; it lighted up the strange dusk in which she lately had walked. That was what was the matter with her. She was a dove. . . . Milly’s answer had prepared itself while Aunt Maud was on the stair; she had felt in a rush all the reasons that would make it the most dovelike; and she gave it, while she was about it, as earnest, as candid. ‘I don’t think, dear lady, he’s here.’ It gave her straightway the measure of the success she could have as a dove. . . . That, with a new day, was once more her law—though she saw before her, of course, as something of a complication, her need, each time, to decide. She should have to be clear as to how a dove would act. She settled it, she thought, well enough this morning by quite readopting her plan in respect to Sir Luke Strett. (202–203)

The opening of this passage again stresses how the application of a reified type provides the world with the conditions for its legibility by establishing the framework within which its parts can be understood. Further still, it goes on to make clear that accepting this particular framework leads Milly directly into active intervention in the complicated relations between Maud, Kate, and herself by deliberately lying to Maud about her knowledge of Densher’s whereabouts (cf. 195). This first lie is followed by a further deception immediately after the quoted segment, when Milly also decides to deceive Sir Luke by letting him believe that she is at home when in fact she will have left. The question of the relation between the concept of dove and these particular actions is less important than the fact that the former makes it possible for Milly to enter the economy of exchange surrounding her. The question of whether doves can be deceivers, or whether deception can be counted as such when coming from a dove, that is, is something that can be answered only after Milly has agreed to enter a semiotic relation in the first place. The very possibility of interpreting her actions depends on the imposition of a semiotic type that first allows for action to emerge.

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A similar and further illuminating point can be made with respect to Kate, whose actions in the novel, in spite of her supposed unintelligibility, are likewise clearly governed by the determinations imposed on her by others. In her plotting against Milly, she follows the logic of, on the one hand, the economic value that she holds for her family and, on the other, the value of Densher’s love, which is explicitly free of such economic concerns (cf., e.g., 227, 229, 369, 467). These two determinations again depend on the logic of organic wholes that in the novel characterizes the use of types in general. The decline of Kate’s family is described in terms of its dispersion into the kind of “loose end” that James defined as anathema to drama and which leads to semiotic opacity: “[T]he whole history of their house had the effect of some fine florid voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into words and notes without sense and then, hanging unfinished, into no words nor any notes at all” (2). To seek to reverse this decline, as Julie Rivkin has also forcefully argued (191– 193), involves the attempt to reinscribe her family in a self-sufficient whole that, like Milly’s wealth, can subsist independent of the logic of absolute exchange. Similarly, Kate’s relation to Densher provides one of the novel’s most forceful instances of harmonic plenitude during the couple’s engagement in Regent’s Park: “The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated nothing—couldn’t have thought of her face as distinct from the whole joy” (68). What is particularly interesting about these contrasting determinations is that they place Kate in the conflict that, as already discussed with respect to Heiberg in chapter 2, lies at the heart of the classical vaudeville: the relative duty toward economic considerations at odds with the absolute duty toward love. And as in Heiberg, it is Kate’s attempt to subject the latter to the former that provides the source of the novel’s plot. The logic of “everything,” that is, serves to generate familiar semiotic types and story lines that facilitate interpretation in the midst of an exceedingly opaque world. As in Ibsen, an increased representational complexity is made legible by the deployment of an opposed structural simplicity.

The preceding conclusion suggests that the relation between the principles of “everything” and “nothing” is not merely negative and simultaneous but of a dialectical interdependence. This point is particularly evident with respect to Milly’s determination as a typical

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American girl. This type, as Milly herself notes when she encounters three specimens in the National Gallery, is a paradigm of semiotic transparency: Recognition, for that matter, sat confessedly in her own eyes: she knew the three, generically, as easily as a school-boy with a crib in his lap would know the answer in class. . . . She would have been able to say where they lived, and also how, had the place and the way been but amenable to the positive; she bent tenderly, in imagination, over material, paternal Mr Whatever-he-was, at home, eternally named, with all the honours and placidities, but eternally unseen and existing only as some one who could be financially heard from. (207–208)

When, a few pages later, Milly suddenly sees Densher and Kate together for the first time, it is significantly enough her use of precisely this type that makes possible the continuing interaction between the three, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred: “She became as spontaneous as possible and as American as it might conveniently appeal to Mr Densher, after his travels, to find her” (211). This initial determination of Milly in her relation to Densher notably continues for the remainder of the novel (cf. 281, 341, 371, 399, 400), but already in the present context its implications are made clear: She could have dreamed of his not having the view, of his having something or other, if need be quite viewless, of his own; but he might have what he could with least trouble, and the view wouldn’t be after all a positive bar to her seeing him. The defect of it in general—if she might so ungraciously criticize—was that, by its sweet universality, it made relations rather prosaically a matter of course. It anticipated and superseded the—likewise sweet—operation of real affinities. (215)

If, on the one hand, Densher’s determination of Milly by means of universals allows interaction (its principal attribute is that it does not prevent her seeing him), on the other hand, it clearly signals a loss of reality. As the qualifier “superseded” makes clear, the application of types “anticipated . . . real affinities” not in the sense of heralding that which is to follow but in the sense of acting in advance so as to counter and prevent. Action without types is impossible, and yet typified action is false. A similar conclusion can be drawn from the novel’s ending, which on a superficial level is markedly determined by the principal characters’ conformity to their established roles. Indeed, the very fact that James returns us to the setting of the novel’s opening suggests that

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the events at its conclusion repeat already stable structures.22 Milly’s final act of “forgiveness,” as Kate and Densher point out (508–509), is determined in its possible significations by its relation to her type as dove. Yet that symbolic transparency is itself predicated on her death, which denies the possibility of any ambiguous reality to interfere and thus inevitably replicates the conflict that makes action possible only at the expense of an engagement with real life. More tellingly still, Kate, too, ends the novel by acting in conformity with her already discussed desire to fulfill her duty toward both family and love, which is the motivation for rejecting Lord Mark (who would have satisfied the former criterion alone) and which leads directly to her final break with Maud (cf. 475, 490–492). If this is intended to facilitate the combination of her contrasting roles, it instead generates the very opposite. Kate’s rejection of Lord Mark is the immediate catalyst for his second trip to Venice, which brings about Milly’s death and, consequently, Kate and Densher’s rupture, depriving the former both of money and of love. Densher’s ultimatum to Kate is similarly conditioned by his conformity to the values of gentlemanly conduct. As Kate aptly perceives, his demand that she choose between the money and himself is intended to test how far she will “depar[t] from delicacy” (504), a value that superficially defines Densher’s actions throughout the novel. Refusing to accept that his involvement in Kate’s scheme somehow makes him complicit in the deception of Milly, Densher repeatedly defines his actions as the attempt to “escape disobliging” any of the parties involved (267–268) or avoid being “indelicate” (272). His decision to stay in Venice, for example, is “a study of the question of how a gentleman would behave” (349), a view repeated in his claim, toward the end of Book Ninth, “that the only delicate and honorable way of treating a person in such a state was to treat her as he, Merton Densher, did” (407). Densher’s adherence to the “gentleman” type is again stressed toward the end of Book Tenth, where he still refers to his decision to stay in Venice after Lord Mark’s second visit as a matter of “propriety” (452). Interestingly, this type is also based on the logic of “everything,” to the extent that its governing rule is the inclusive purpose of “both-and” rather than “either/or.” The very principle of inaction that Densher adopts in Venice is thus a mode of procedure aimed at satisfying his obligations toward both Milly and Kate (398) and is in line with his earlier claim that “he liked too much every one concerned willingly to show himself merely impracticable”

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(268). Kate’s association of Densher with “all the high dim things she lumped together as of the mind” (35) is therefore presumably not to be read as a characterization of his intelligence, which, in light of his repeated inability to understand what Kate is saying, seems highly questionable (cf. 351, 357, 361, 376–377). Rather, “mind” here stands in opposition to “life” (36), which is defined as Kate’s principle and from which Densher is claimed to be detached. Given the emphasis on Kate’s ability to adapt to circumstantial determinations and to game the system of exchange to her own advantage (cf. esp. 343), it lies at hand to see the opposition in this case as a further instance of the “everything”/“nothing” binary, firmly linking Kate to the latter and Densher to a realm of values presumed independent of the same. This opposition, however, is also deconstructed by the novel to the extent that it again lays bare how neither pole is free of the other or possible without its opposite. It is thus important to note that Densher’s test of Kate’s delicacy at the end of the book clearly rests on a deliberate coercion that blatantly contradicts the very value it supposedly defends. More importantly still, this violence on Densher’s part is in line with his previous claim that his conformity with everyone’s demands, his adherence to the values of a gentleman, generates a lack of power and emasculation: As soon as Kate appeared again the difference came up—the oddity, as he then instantly felt it, of his having sunk so deep. It was sinking because it was all doing what Kate had conceived for him; it wasn’t in the least doing—and that had been his notion of his life—anything he himself had conceived. . . . His question connected itself, even while he stood, with his special smothered soreness, his sense almost of shame. . . . His question, as we have called it, was the interesting question of whether he had really no will left. (341–342, 343)

The shame Densher feels is caused not by what Kate makes him do, by the fact that he is deceiving Milly, but rather by the fact that Kate makes him act according to her will at all, a shame that therefore also returns with regard to his conformity to Maud’s and Susan’s wishes (366–367). Densher’s logic of taste and tact in this way generates its opposite in the desire to reassert his mastery over others in the sphere of exchange and exploitation and leads directly to his demand that Kate sleep with him. The latter is based not on physical desire but rather, as Densher repeatedly points out, on his need for “proof” (358), his wishing to “be sure” (361), which is a conquest not of Kate’s body but of her will and accordingly yields its reward even

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before its physical consummation: “They only told him, these indications, how much she was . . . feeling his; and it was enough for him again that her very aspect, . . . gave him back the sense of his action. It had never yet in life been granted him to know, almost materially to taste, as he could do in these minutes, the state of what was vulgarly called conquest” (372). Underlying the surface of determinate values and their logic of coherent wholes is always the abyss of nothingness that generates the negative conditions for exchange and threatens to subvert its opposite. As Densher imagines this precarious relation: “If he took off his hand, the hand that at least helped him to hold it together, the whole queer fabric that built him in would fall away in a minute and admit the light” (342). This simultaneous interdependence and contradiction between the principles of “everything” and “nothing” call to mind the problem inherent in the aesthetics of autonomy as defined by Kierkegaard and quoted in chapter 1: the construction of selfsufficient wholes cannot adequately grasp, and therefore continually falls victim to, the very anarchy and nothingness it seeks to overcome (Concluding 348 / Afsluttende 318). 23 The inability to reconcile the opposites at work within the text figures the failure of idealism at large.

Up until this point, I have argued that the logics of “everything” and “nothing” map onto those of drama and epic, of symbol and allegory, in virtue of the structures underlying their respective qualities of semiotic transparency and opacity. These two principles divide the text between them in a dialectical struggle that appears as irresolvable as it is constant. As such, however, this predicament would inevitably seem to negate Kate’s claim “We shall never be again as we were!” (509), with which the novel ends. While the critical tradition by and large appears to have taken this statement at face value, it becomes problematic at the point at which the fictional world of The Wings of the Dove is caught in an all-encompassing Manichean struggle that does not seem to allow for any change that would not simply be a continuation of either of its principles. The claim to the opposite, that an irreversible change has occurred at the novel’s end, is most frequently justified by reference to Densher’s supposed love for Milly and the “conversion” it is assumed to bring. 24 Such readings are clearly in agreement with James’s earliest

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notes on The Wings of the Dove (cf. Complete Notebooks 106), but it is worthwhile stressing that in the completed novel there is only one passage that would seem to offer it any actual support. This occurs at the opening of Book Eighth and concerns the increased interaction between Densher and Milly in Venice:25 He came back with his friend on each occasion to the blest miracle of renewed propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing himself, for her ear, to any such comment on Milly’s high style and state as would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance, which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know her. This was what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day at Mrs Lowder’s; and this was in especial what had made him feel its influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling carriage with them, from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if it had been a rug of softest silk. It had worked as a clear connexion with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had more than once recalled how he had said to himself even at that moment, at some point in the drive, that he was not there, not just as he was in so doing it, through Kate and Kate’s idea, but through Milly and Milly’s own, and through himself and his own, unmistakeably—as well as through the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time in New York. (350)

Even if the emotions displayed in this passage are not mentioned explicitly at any other point in the novel, the reference here to an “amount of recognition” exceeding public acknowledgment certainly rings true and might serve to support the claim for Densher’s ultimate conversion. The rationale given for this increased attachment to Milly, however, is equally important and in fact places Densher’s affection back within the ambit of previously established codes. What provides the catalyst for his supposedly changed view of Milly is “his renewed remembrance” of their first acquaintance in New York. But it is precisely this acquaintance that constitutes the source for Densher’s persistent view of Milly as a typical American girl. The latter, as I argue above, denies Milly any reality beyond the boundaries determined by that type, and what we are told of Densher’s response to her during his visit to America would seem only to confirm this very point: “Little Miss Theale’s individual history was not stuff for his newspaper; besides which, moreover, he was seeing but too many

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little Miss Theales. They even went so far as to impose themselves as one of the groups of social phenomena that fell into the scheme of his public letters” (222–223). If Densher’s encounter with Milly in New York does not seem to provide any alternative experience of her on which to ground a changed relationship, the end of the first passage presents the alternative option that the change in question is generated not by that original experience itself but by the fact that Densher now perceives its value anew. The temporal priority of his acquaintance with Milly over any of the schemes constructed by Maud and Kate makes his relation to her independent of “the circle of petticoats” (367) that otherwise determines his actions. From this perspective, the relation to Milly resembles his conquest of Kate insofar as it constitutes a valuable experience not in and of itself but through its use in the struggle for power with others. Densher’s love for Milly is predicated on the very fact that he is engaged in an economy of exchange with Kate and Maud and accordingly constitutes not a radical break with the logic of nothingness but an extension of its domain. The failure of the logics of “everything” and “nothing” to motivate and reinscribe Kate’s “We shall never be again as we were!” lends credence to Slavoj Žižek’s recent argument that Kate in this scene provides an instance of the “act” (Parallax 129–139). The “act,” as Žižek explores elsewhere, is the rupture with a given symbolic order that organizes the relation between particulars and universals in our world (cf., e.g., Enjoy 90–91). Kate’s pronouncement at the end signals the choice to break free of the coordinates stipulated by the symbolic field (by the possibilities entailed by the logics of “everything” and “nothing,” in my reading above) by asserting the impossible, that which that field excludes.26 Such an act constitutes an absolute negativity with respect to the existing communal order and opens up the possibility of radical change. Kate’s final pronouncement, however, is not only, or simply, transcendent of the novel’s symbolic field, as Žižek’s discussion would suggest. Rather, in a more strictly Kierkegaardian fashion, the final sentence derives its interpretative authority precisely because it retrospectively provides a positive structure that underlies and unites the novel as a whole. As J. Hillis Miller has pointed out, Kate’s final statement “signals the remorseless passage of time and the impossibility of ever recovering the past” (195). The interpretative primacy of Kate’s concluding point of view, that is, is based not on her correct

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designation of Densher’s affections but on the fact that it posits the constitutive value of a temporal dimension distinct from either of the two representational logics traced so far. Similar to the linear temporality of finitude in Ibsen, peripheral time in James underlies and encompasses all other structures and is displaced by the ending to the text’s aesthetic core. Kate’s affirmation of an irreversible temporality at the novel’s end brings to attention the latent division of the text as a whole into a tripartite structure akin to that of expositioncomplication-resolution. 27 In the first three books, we are introduced to the characters and their respective backgrounds, in agreement with the requirements of what Susan herself explicitly refers to as the story’s “exposition” (95). The complication of the novel in turn stretches over the whole of the London sequence (103–311), during which the relation between Milly, Kate, and Densher is placed on its inevitable course. With the shift to Venice at the opening of Book Seventh, chapter 3, the beginning of the final movement of the text is signaled most clearly through the appearance of Eugenio. The note of finality is repeatedly sounded when the latter’s services are proclaimed to have been acquired “during the last hours of all” (312), and his purpose is described as that of a “residuary legatee” who will “see her through” for “the final function” (313). This opening section of the third part of the novel also contains Milly’s realization that her death would be of value to anyone she might marry (324–325), as well as the first suggestion that Kate might love Densher in return (335–337). As such, by the end of Book Seventh, all the missing elements for the completion of the novel’s narrative have been provided. To point out that there is such a narrative progression underlying the developments of the novel is not simply to suggest that in The Wings of the Dove “things happen.” The latter is an obvious fact: Milly dies, Densher and Kate split up, Kate rejects Lord Mark and breaks with Maud, to name but some of the more momentous events. The progression from exposition to resolution, however, is not simply concerned with the constitutive parts that measure time but rather imposes the unidirectional framework within which any such delineation of change can occur. The latter provides a structure that remains qualitatively distinct from the means used to delimit segments within it. The overt changes that dominate the end of The Wings of the Dove are not the products of a unidirectional temporality in this same sense. Kate can return to Maud (as the text in fact strongly suggests will

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occur [497]) and thus begin again the pursuit of both family and love. Milly is dead, but even that most linear of human events is canceled as her wealth and type live on and continue to exercise their power in the economy of relations at hand. Densher breaks with Kate, but nothing in his immediate behavior suggests a change of heart that would justifiably count as an irreversible “conversion.” Occurrences such as these all stand in continuity with the logic of types and exchange discussed above and therefore do not constitute a qualitative rupture in the text, even while they signal its quantitative adjustments. The actors may well be substituted and their positions shift, but the system of relations remains, and the logic of its workings can in principle generate infinite more stories of this kind. From the perspective that Kate posits, however, this “shall never be again” what it was, making the sequence as it stands ontologically unique. 28 Nor does the structure of this linear temporality represent the temporality of dramatic plots as understood by James. In his review of Tennyson, James significantly notes that mere temporal progression does not constitute dramatic form. The problem with Queen Mary is that “[i]t has no shape; it is cast into no mould; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end, save the chronological ones. A work of this sort may have a great many merits . . . , but it cannot have the merit of being a drama” (398–399; my emphasis). The problem with a merely chronological progression of events, that is, is that it fails to unify its parts into a single whole and thereby deprives them of any necessary relation to each other over and above that provided by their temporal contiguity. Precisely this, however, is what occurs in The Wings of the Dove to the extent that the temporal progression only provides the ground in which the logics of events must shape occurrences without establishing an organic necessity under which such occurrences must fall. The arrival at a final resolution is not a dénouement that solves all tensions but simply the mark that time has stopped. Events can carve out segments of progressive temporality, but progressive temporality does not teleologically order events. The linear time of the work exceeds any of the particular plots constructed by its individual characters: the progression through exposition, complication, and resolution precedes all of these to the extent that it begins before any of the actors possess full knowledge of its component parts and ends without having fulfilled any of their plans. We have again arrived at the fourfold structure characteristic of the aesthetics of dependency. The claim for an irreversible change that

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is imposed at the very end of the novel constitutes a perspective that is absolute in the sense of being unconditioned and unmotivated by the logics that govern relations within the text itself. It remains authoritative, however, insofar as it displaces the marginal temporality of linear progression that grounds and precedes any particular perspective into the center of the text’s dynamic interaction. The opposition between “everything” and “nothing,” positive determination and negative deferral, is conditioned in its function by a further principle that provides the common ground for their relation. The possibilities of meaning for each of these organizational structures therein cease to be defined by the logic immanent to these themselves and instead become subject to the demands imposed by the absolute perspective to which they are tied through the progression of time. If change has occurred, then the structure of reification as well as that of deferral must be pushed beyond their usual workings until that fact can be explained. And that change has occurred is certain, since only then does everything relate.29 The productive interaction between “everything” and “nothing” in this way depends on their purposeful negotiation in time according to the standards of an absolute perspective that they fail to grasp. As in Kierkegaard and Ibsen, the dependence on a utopian other transforms the conditions for fulfillment by making the locus of perfection the temporal mediation of meaning itself. This reconsideration of the purpose of literary forms reflects a reassessment of the kind of existential mode best suited to the conflicts of modernity. Having lost the stability and certainty of organic wholes, and yet being unwilling to embrace pure fragmentation and deferral, the aesthetics of dependency points to the process of a meditation that cannot be obtained as the only possible justification. The three brief chapters that follow examine how this same vision underlies other Modernist works as well.

ch a p t er si x

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Language of the Future

Of all the authors dealt with in this study, Hugo von Hofmannsthal has a relationship to Scandinavian literature that is the most difficult to determine. To my knowledge, no study on the topic exists, and the archive is difficult to reconstruct. We know, however, that Hofmannsthal owned books by Kierkegaard1 and that he was familiar with a number of Scandinavian authors, including Ibsen, Strindberg, Georg Brandes, Herman Bang, Arne Garborg, and Amalie Skram, to mention only a few. 2 In addition, as Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin have documented in their study Wittgenstein’s Vienna, the influence of figures like Ibsen and Kierkegaard was pervasive in fin de siècle Vienna, and Hofmannsthal was closely acquainted with a number of the most important champions of Scandinavian letters, such as Rudolf Kassner, whose 1906 essay on Kierkegaard was enormously influential, and Stefan George, who translated some of J. P. Jacobsen’s poetry into German. Hofmannsthal’s most extensive engagement with a Scandinavian author, however, is likely his 1892 essay on Ibsen, “The People in Ibsen’s Dramas,” a remarkably early pronouncement on Ibsen’s work by the then only eighteen-year-old poet. Particularly striking in this text is Hofmannsthal’s analysis of Ibsen’s dramatic world in terms of three central categories: the characters, the mundane world in which they move, and the utopian alternative that they desire. Hofmannsthal describes the characters as highly self-reflexive, caught almost exclusively in a world of thought and moods (“Die Menschen” 150), devoid of all immediacy and naïveté to such an extent that they become 204

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mannered and clichéd (153). Like Nero and Don Quijote, Ibsen’s characters are poetic dreamers who try to give their lives an ideal style and meaning (152, 150). According to Hofmannsthal, the mundane world in which they move, however, directly negates any such poetic project. Far from receptive to idealized creations, the everyday Ibsen presents is unbearable, monotonous, gossipy, and trivial (151). The last category Hofmannsthal invokes, the utopian dream, is in turn described as the very opposite of both these modes of being: it is a “revelation” (“Offenbarung”), “unpredictable,” contained in Nora’s invocation of the “wonderful” (151), and is that which will “carry one away and give life a great meaning and all things a new color and all words a new soul” (150). The desired plenitude of life is simply “mysterious,” “outside,” and “other” (150, 151). To Hofmannsthal, the relation between these three principles is the central fact about Ibsen’s work, and the contradiction between them remains radically unresolved. As Hofmannsthal writes, there is essentially just one question in all of Ibsen’s plays: How does the Ibsenian person, the artificial [künstliche] egoist, the sensitive dilettante, with an excessive capacity for self-observation, with little will and a large homesickness for beauty and naïveté, how does such a person behave [verhalten] in life? . . . I think the answer is easy: he has no proper place among humans and can do nothing with life [und kann mit dem Leben nichts anfangen]. (156–157)

Ibsen’s plays destroy the possibility of community, of being at home in the world, the two functions that, since Edmund Burke (97), have been associated with the category of beauty and which stand at the heart of the aesthetics of autonomy. Refusing to resolve the contradiction on a ground of identity that would serve to keep us in the world, Ibsen’s characters must either abandon it or remain under conditions of alienation and bad faith. What is of particular interest in Hofmannsthal’s description of the three modes of being in Ibsen’s dramas is the way they immediately call to mind the central themes of Hofmannsthal’s own famous Lord Chandos Letter, from 1902. In that text, we have a similarly stark division between three different structures of experience: a subject-centered poetic reflexivity that abstracts itself from the world, a present that is devoid of meaning and steeped in monotony and triviality, and the “revelations” of a plenitude that is other, mysterious, and which the subject must passively accept in all its unpredictability. This resonance of Hofmannsthal’s most famous text with his

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interpretation of Ibsen is in itself highly suggestive. In the context of the present study, the presence of precisely these three categories of being furthermore invokes the component elements of the aesthetics of dependency, as they have been analyzed in previous chapters: a contradiction between two principles (reflexivity and life), distinguished from a utopian perspective that transcends them (the condition of meaning that escapes us). In The Lord Chandos Letter, moreover, as I will argue below, the relation between these terms is organized in terms akin to those found in Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and James, making this text a further instance of the same aesthetic structure. If Hofmannsthal in 1892 insisted that Ibsen’s art does not provide a solution to its contradiction that could reconcile us with the purposes of beauty, then ten years later, in The Lord Chandos Letter, he seems to have discovered that this failure can itself provide another kind of mediation.

Published in the Berlin daily Der Tag in 1902, Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter has long been considered one of the founding texts of European Modernism.3 The text is written as a fictional letter, divided neatly into three distinct parts, in which Philipp Lord Chandos seeks to explain to his addressee, the historical Francis Bacon, the reasons for having abandoned all literary activity after an otherwise successful start to his career. In the first part, Chandos provides a summary of his past achievements and the sense of cosmic order that clearly echoes the idealist aesthetics traced in this study and which in his youth made the world appear fully accessible to human language and cognition. The letter’s second part proceeds to chronicle the collapse of this worldview, when Chandos gradually comes to experience language as inherently incapable of expressing anything at all. As Chandos summarizes his predicament in a famous statement: “My situation, in short, is this: I have utterly lost my ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all” (19 / 45).4 A few pages later, he elaborates further: “Everything fell into fragments for me, the fragments into further fragments, until it seemed impossible to contain anything at all within a single concept. The individual words swam about me . . . : whirlpools they were, into which I could not look without dizziness, which turn incessantly and through which one reaches emptiness” (21; trans. modified / 48). In this way, isolated from the realms of morality, politics, and everyday life, Chandos

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becomes “uninspired” (“geistlos”) (22 / 49) and falls into a state of “numbness” (“Starre”) and “indifference” (“Gleichgültigkeit”) (28 / 55). In the third and final part of the text, Chandos describes the few and rare moments of “revelation” (“Offenbarung”) that occasionally break with this otherwise bleak monotony. These moments involve an overwhelming sense of empathy with the most mundane kinds of objects and a new kind of harmony and unity with the world. However, since these experiences remain inaccessible to language and cognition, Chandos’s relation to them is ephemeral and at best serves as intimations of some future state in which they might be adequately grasped. As Chandos says at the end of his letter, he will write no further works in any language known to him, for the reason that the language in which it might have been given me to write, and even to do my thinking, is neither Latin nor English, nor Italian, nor Spanish, but one of which I know not a single word, one used by the dumbest of things in speaking with me, and one in which, perhaps, I will someday be called to account for myself from my grave before an unknown judge. (32 / 60)

The canonical status of The Lord Chandos Letter rests primarily on its account of what has come to be known as “the crisis of language” in the letter’s second part, which clearly articulates a more pervasive condition underlying many of the experimental works of European literature written in the early twentieth century. Of the vast amount of critical attention that has been paid to Hofmannsthal’s text since its publication in 1902, almost all has consisted in thematic or conceptual analyses of the nature of this crisis, paying little heed to the text as a literary work in its own right.5 Any account of the text as a whole, however, necessarily faces two interpretative obstacles that significantly complicate this traditional approach. First, as David Wellbery has recently reminded us (204–205), the three parts of Lord Chandos’s letter are left without any transitional terms between them: we never learn why the condition of plenitude in the past leads to the condition of loss in the present or how this in turn gives way to the revelations of the future. Second, and this is a classical point of objection in studies of this text,6 there is a blatant contradiction in the very existence of a letter that describes with remarkable eloquence the inability of language to signify. In my discussion, I want to focus on The Lord Chandos Letter as primarily a literary text and thereby explain the constitutive function of these two interpretative problems in the work as a whole. In order to do so, this chapter proceeds in four

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steps. In the first three, I look at the characteristics of each of the three parts of Chandos’s letter, and in the fourth, I examine the aesthetic relation between them.

chandos’s past In the summary account of his past, Chandos lists five achievements and plans. First, at the age of nineteen, he authored three works that brought him fame at the court of Queen Elizabeth: “The new Paris, The Dream of Daphne, the Epithalamium” (12 / 38–39). Second, four years later, he produced a scholarly treatise on Latin syntax (13 / 40). This is followed by the description of his subsequently abandoned plans to, third, write a history play about Henry VIII (14–15 / 40–41), fourth, decipher the secret code of ancient myths and fables (15 / 41), and, fifth, compile under the title Nosce te ipsum, or “Know Yourself,” a collection of everything from notable statements by learned men and women, to maxims and reflections from classical and contemporary Italian works, to descriptions of architectural wonders (15–16 / 42–43). The scholarship that has focused on this list of completed and anticipated projects has tended to argue for a progression within them, which in various ways is supposed to culminate in the crisis that follows.7 Chandos’s own account, however, instead suggests an underlying attitude common to them all. As he writes at the end of his summary, To be brief, at that time, in a kind of perpetual intoxication, the whole of existence struck me as one vast unity. The intellectual and physical spheres did not appear to constitute an opposition, nor did the life at Court and that of animals, art and non-art, or solitude and society. I perceived [fühlte] nature in all things: in the aberrations of madness as surely as in the most exacting refinements of Spanish ceremonial, in the crudest antics of young rustics no less than in the sweetest allegories. And in all of nature I perceived [fühlte] myself. . . . Everywhere I was at the center [mitten drinnen]; never was I conscious of deceptive appearances. Or rather it seemed to me as though everything were simply metaphor [Gleichnis], each creature a key to the next, and that I was the one capable of snatching up one after the other by the scruff of the neck and with each unlock as many of the others as possible. (17–18; trans. modified and my emphasis / 43–44)

The unity of the world experienced by the young Chandos is predicated on the view that every entity in it can stand in a relation of

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“Gleichnis” to any other, what Russell Stockman here translates as “metaphor.” The scope of the German term is difficult to render in English, in which its standard translation would possibly be “allegory” or “parable.” Yet as Grimms Wörterbuch makes clear (8196), Stockman’s decision is legitimate, since similes and metaphors are also instances of “Gleichnisse,” a fact not unimportant given that these latter two are the dominant rhetorical figures of the text itself. I will return to this latter point in a moment. What matters for my argument at this stage is only what Grimms Wörterbuch describes as the central characteristics of “Gleichnis” in all its forms: “as different as the forms of Gleichniss as a figure of speech might be, they nevertheless all presuppose that a relation of similarity exists between two sizes or combinations of meaning, which makes possible the act of comparison” (8195). The capacity to relate disparate terms, which the young Chandos revels in, depends, that is, on his ability to discover a tertium comparationis, to use a term from classical rhetoric, a shared set of attributes that establishes a commonality between them and makes their comparison possible. (The claim that “love is a rose” is possible because both terms—love and rose—share certain attributes in spite of their obvious differences, such as the fact that both are beautiful and yet can cause us pain.) No less significant, to Chandos, the discovery of such common attributes is intimately tied to the structure of his own subjectivity, as he stresses in the above quotation: “Everywhere I was at the center” (17; trans. modified / 43) and “in all of nature I perceived myself” (17; trans. modified / 44). The implications of this aspect of Chandos’s early experience can be clarified in the context of a further dimension of the letter: the function of its addressee, Francis Bacon. As Stefan Schultz has meticulously shown (5–10), Chandos’s account of his early experience is littered with allusions to Bacon’s work. The idea for the encyclopedic collection of sayings and descriptions, for example, is taken from Bacon’s own Apopthegmes: New and Old, of 1625. The plan to write a play about Henry VIII echoes an unfinished work by Bacon on that same topic, and Schultz goes on to find additional echoes from Bacon’s De Augmentis Scientiarum in Chandos’s intended study of ancient myths and fables. There are further allusions of this kind, but so far the secondary literature has seemingly been unable to make much of these parallels or even of the historical setting of The Lord Chandos Letter more generally. Instead, this aspect of the text has been explained primarily with reference to Hofmannsthal’s claim, in

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a letter from 1903, that he had happened to be reading Bacon and wished to write something in that same “Sprechton.”8 Such an explanation reduces Bacon’s presence in the text to a pure contingency, since it suggests that if Hofmannsthal had been reading Montaigne or Plato, the letter would have been placed in that context instead. The feature of Chandos’s early experience that I have emphasized here, in contrast, namely, that the young lord views the world as structured according to a relation of “Gleichnisse” grounded on his subjectivity, makes it possible to establish a more motivated connection to Bacon on the basis of the two figures’ shared metaphysical attitude. That this is so can be derived from the fact that Bacon’s historical significance rests primarily on his insistence that science must be tied to technology and that it is the scientific experiment that constitutes the standard of all knowledge. What this claim indicates is that modern science operates with a conception of knowledge in which only that which we can reproduce counts as truth, a successful scientific experiment being a mechanical reproduction of a certain set of phenomena. The possibility of such reproductions of the world depends on the reduction of phenomenal experience to the rules of reason, or, more specifically, the rules of mathematics, as Heidegger stresses in “The Age of the World Picture” (80). These rules become the means by which we can abstract from the otherwise confusing multiplicity of differences that we encounter and organize them in a common system.9 The danger of illusion that the world of phenomena brings with it can be avoided only by recasting it according to rules that are located not outside but within us, making the rational subject the standard of the world (cf. Heidegger 88). Echoing Chandos’s poetics of “Gleichnisse,” modern scientific experiments thus consist in the unification and comparison of disparate entities on the basis of a shared set of mathematical attributes, thereby effectively converting the modern world into a reflection of ourselves. That this metaphysical attitude implicit in Bacon’s revolution is akin to that underlying all of Chandos’s youthful works is immediately apparent and makes it possible to establish their identity rather than their supposed distinctions. As Chandos points out at the end of the previously quoted paragraph, his intended encyclopedic collection was to be titled Nosce te ipsum precisely because all entities in the world could be seen as reflections of his own subjectivity (18 / 44). Similarly, the plan to decipher the ancient myths and fables is grounded on the assumption that their imaginative variety and

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difference hide an underlying system of knowledge common to them all. As Chandos tells us, “I wanted to unlock the fables and mythological tales . . . as hieroglyphs of an arcane, inexhaustible wisdom” (15; trans. modified / 41). A similar assumption can be identified in his projected work on Henry VIII, which was to organize the otherwise chaotic events of history according to a form expressive of their underlying order: “that form of which it is not enough to say that it lends order to its material, so completely does it permeate and transfigure it, creating poetry and truth [Dichtung und Wahrheit] together, a play of eternal forces, a thing as glorious as music or algebra” (14– 15 / 40–41). The statement here is revealing not only in its allusion to Goethe, which is pointed out frequently enough, but more importantly in its equation of art, history, and mathematics. That Chandos at twenty-three should have written a treatise on syntax also becomes significant from this perspective, since again it involves an attempt to discover the underlying commonality of different phenomenal manifestations: the linguistic architectonics grounding every Latin articulation, which Chandos, moreover, again discovers within rather than outside himself. As he writes, “[A]m I the man who . . . suddenly within himself hit upon the key to the Latin cadence, and then took greater delight in erecting a theoretical foundation and scaffolding for that structure than the buildings of Palladio and Sansovin rising from the sea?” (12–13; my emphasis / 39). Even the violence implicit in the modern scientific worldview, which seeks to subject the variety of nature to its unifying power, is implied by Chandos’s earliest works: “The New Paris, The Dream of Daphne, the Epithalamium” (12 / 38–39). What all these works share, after all, is not so much that they are all described by Chandos as “pastorals,” as the scholarship has been happy to repeat, but that they all deal with forms of violent desire for and subjection of the beloved object: Paris’s rape of Helen, Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, the groom’s traditional conquest of his bride on the wedding night.10

the sense of loss In both Chandos and Bacon, then, we find a metaphysical stance that assumes that all phenomena are relatable to one another through their reduction to a shared identity that finds its origin in our subjectivity and thereby involves a subjection to our cognitive powers of that which seemed other and impenetrable. The violence toward

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difference implied in this stance, and suggested in the titles of Chandos’s earliest works, indicates that this conception of the subject’s relation to the world involves a necessary loss of it as an independent other. It is therefore crucial to note that Chandos’s celebrated “crisis of language” is based on the impossibility of forming “judgments” (“Urteile”), which precisely consist in the ability to subsume a phenomenon under a given concept, and thus centers on the relationship of cognition to world. As Chandos describes in an often-quoted section of the letter: At first it became gradually impossible for me to discuss any loftier or more general topic, and in so doing to take into my mouth the words that everyone is in the habit of using without thinking. I felt an unaccountable discomfort simply to pronounce the words “spirit,” “soul,” or “body” . . . the abstract words that the tongue necessarily shapes when passing any kind of judgment simply fell to dust in my mouth like decaying mushrooms. . . . Only with great effort could I contrive to hide the unaccountable rage that filled me whenever I heard comments like: this matter turned out well or badly for this person or that one; Sheriff N. is a wicked man, Pastor T. a good one; Farmer M. is to be pitied, for his sons are wastrels, while some other one is fortunate in having such frugal daughters; this family is making quite a name for itself, but that one has had its day. All of this seemed so indemonstrable to me, so false, so hopelessly full of holes. (19–21; trans. modified / 45–47)

Significantly, this inability to relate abstract concepts to particular experience does not signal a loss of comprehension of the system of language in itself. As Chandos notes a few pages later: These concepts, I understood them well enough, I saw their wonderful interrelationships rising up in front of me like glorious jets of water tossing golden balls into the air. I could examine them from all sides and observe their interactions; but they only bore meaning for each other [aber sie hatten es nur miteinander zu tun], and my own most profound, most personal thoughts remained forever banished from their circle. (22; trans. modified and my emphasis / 49)

This point is of some importance since it makes clear that, contrary to what is frequently claimed, the problem Chandos faces is not that of the relativity of the system of language itself. At stake is not, that is, the view that language itself is inherently unstable, or that there are a variety of language games, none of which can claim priority and all of which therefore mutually negate one another. Rather, the problem is a consequence of the metaphysical stance of modern science discussed

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earlier, which reduces the world to a self-sufficient system of relations and therefore remains inherently unable to refer to any experience that falls outside the structure of its rules. To the extent that the poetics of “Gleichnisse” that characterizes Chandos’s early career is tied to the metaphysics of modern science, Hofmannsthal, in chronicling its failure, also provides a critical reassessment of the very foundations of modernity. The bankruptcy of Chandos’s poetic projects signals the perceived bankruptcy of the scientific revolution more generally: the solipsism of one mirrors the solipsism of the other. The importance of the setting of The Lord Chandos Letter thus resides in the way that it allows Hofmannsthal to probe the relation between what Frederic Jameson in a different context has called “the two moments or versions of modernity” (63): it is in the cultural critique of the historical foundations of the first modernity during the seventeenth century that the second modernity of the nineteenth and twentieth is born.

moments of revelation It is important to note that the negative critique of modernity that Chandos’s “crisis of language” entails is not the central focus of Hofmannsthal’s text. In fact, the section dealing with Chandos’s loss of the ability to think and speak coherently is almost three times shorter than the section concerned with his moments of revelation, which by itself composes roughly half the text. In light of this, it is surprising how little critical attention has been devoted to this aspect of the work, especially since Chandos here appears to be signaling a new kind of relation to the world able to sidestep the metaphysics of science that grounds modernity at large. Chandos begins his account of this new form of experience with the following description: It will not be easy for me to suggest to you what constitutes these good moments; again words fail me. For there is something completely ineffable, you see, something one could probably never define, that makes itself known to me at such times, filling like a vessel some arbitrary feature of my everyday surroundings with a prodigal surge of more exalted life. I cannot expect you to comprehend me without examples, yet I must beg your indulgence at the triviality of those I select. A watering can, a harrow left standing in a field, a dog in the sun, a rundown churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse—any of these can become the vessel for my revelation. Each of these objects,

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or for that matter any of a thousand others like them that the eye glides over with understandable indifference, can all at once, at some random moment which it lies beyond my power to produce [den herbeizuführen auf keine Weise in meiner Gewalt steht], assume for me an aspect so sublime and so moving that it beggars all words. (23; trans. modified / 49–50)

In this passage, there are four defining features of Chandos’s moments of revelation that I wish to emphasize. First, where Chandos’s early authorship is characterized by the modern scientific desire to become, as Descartes has it, the “masters and possessors of nature” (Descartes 119), in the experience of the moments of revelation, his subjectivity is instead a completely passive recipient, as he puts it in the preceding quote: “einem Moment, den herbeizuführen auf keine Weise in meiner Gewalt steht” (Hofmannsthal, Lord 23 / 50). Second, the objects that serve as “vessels” (“Gefäßer”) for these revelations are all “Albernheiten,” “trivialities” or “trifles”: “a dog, a rat, a water bug, a gnarled apple tree, a carriage track winding across the hill, a moss-covered stone” (26–27 / 54). That is, they fall outside the logic of the technological turn of modern science initiated by Bacon, in which each object is subjected to a specified human use and purpose. Third, as Chandos proceeds to stress, these experiences of the world as woven through by a new kind of harmony (28 / 55) are generated by a relation between terms that is explicitly not based on a tertium comparationis. Following his celebrated description of the killing of the rats in his milk cellar, Chandos qualifies his account of the animals’ suffering with the statement that his experience was not one of “pity”: “please do not assume that it was pity that then took hold of me” (25 / 52). He proceeds to gloss this claim by asking, “For how could it have had anything to do with pity, how with any conceivable conjunction of human thought” (“Denn was hätte es mit Mitleid zu tun, was mit begreiflicher menschlicher Gedankenverknüpfung”) (26 / 53). The relation at stake, in short, cannot be pity because pity is taken to involve precisely the identification of the object as similar to the subject on the basis of conceptually determinable shared attributes: “begreiflicher menschlicher Gedankenverknüpfung.” The moments of revelation, on the contrary, are based on a “juxtaposition of trifles” (“Zusammensetzung von Nichtigkeiten”): a relation between terms that have absolutely nothing in common and which accordingly do not reveal a positive identity, such as “watering can,” “walnut tree,” and “water skipper” (26 / 53). What the unity of such

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terms is grounded on, and what it lays bare, and this is the fourth point I wish to emphasize, is instead defined merely as a “presence” (“Gegenwart”) and “being” (“Sein”): These dumb, often inanimate creatures lift themselves toward me with such fullness, such a presence of love that my enraptured eye cannot light on any lifeless spot anywhere about me. And it strikes me then that everything, everything that there is [was es gibt], everything I can remember [entsinne], everything that my most wayward thought might touch upon, is something after all [etwas zu sein]. Even my own gravity, the accustomed heaviness of my brain, seems to be something for me. . . . (27; trans. modified and my emphases / 54)

The unity with the world that the moments of revelation represent is in this way defined in terms radically opposed to those of Chandos’s youth. It is a mode of experience in which the subject is passive, in which the objects involved fall outside the logic of use and purpose, and, most importantly, in which terms are related not on the basis of any shared set of attributes or common conceptual structure but rather on the basis of the absence of any such commonality, on a reduction of all attributes to a merely negative present, which Chandos also defines simply as “Dasein,” “Being” (27; trans. modified / 55).

the structure of the whole If Chandos in the description of his present life signals both a negative and a positive rupture with the logic of “Gleichnisse” that defined the sense of unity in his past, it is crucial to note that he nevertheless depends on that very form of language to do so. The projects of his past that he no longer believes in are said to “dance before me like miserable gnats in front of some dismal wall no longer warmed by the sunlight of happier days” (15 / 41); the categories of faith he can no longer relate to experience, in turn, are described as “a single, sublime allegory, arching across the fields of my life like a luminous rainbow, forever fixed distances away, always poised for retreat if I should be so rash as to fling myself forward in a desire to bury myself in the hem of its cloak” (19 / 45); while the loss of language itself is figured as “the sudden upward rushing of branches of fruit above my outstretched hands, the welling back of gurgling water from my thirsty lips” (ibid.). The use of such powerful similes and metaphors even continues in the final part, where the description of the moments of revelation as a mode of relation that is not

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grounded on the logic of a tertium comparationis is made precisely through these tropes. The objects that lay bare the infinity of being, as we have seen, are described as “vessels” filled “to the brim” with “divine feeling” (23 / 50), while the extended description of the dying rats is written entirely by way of similes and provides a whole catalog of rhetorical conventions. Such continuities with the supposedly bankrupt system of the past are cemented further by repeated echoes of descriptions in the first part of the letter in those in the third. Where the young Chandos in the already quoted passage planned to “unlock the fables and mythological tales . . . as hieroglyphs of an arcane, inexhaustible wisdom” (“die Fabeln und mytischen Erzählungen . . . aufzuschließen als die Hieroglyphen einer geheimen, unerschöpflichen Weisheit”) (15; trans. modified / 41), his older self in the moments of revelation feels “as though my body is made up of nothing but ciphers that unlock everything for me” (“als bestünde mein Körper aus lauter Chiffern, die mir alles aufschließen”) (27; trans. modified / 55). If in his past Chandos longed to delve into his objects of study, “[a]s the hunted stag into water” (“[w]ie der gehetzte Hirsch ins Wasser”), and wished “to disappear in them” (“in ihnen [zu verschwinden]”) (15; trans. modified and my emphasis / 41–42), then the supposedly different experiences of his present are described in remarkably similar terms as “an overpowering empathy, a kind of flowing into the hearts of those creatures, or a sense that some fluidium of life and death, of dreaming and waking, had for a moment flown into them” (“ein Anteilnehmen, ein Hinüberfließen in jene Geschöpfe oder ein Fühlen, daß ein Fluidum des Lebens und Todes, des Traumes und Wachens für einen Augenblick in sie hinüber geflossen ist”) (25–26; trans. modified and my emphases / 53). The very unity at stake in both instances is difficult to keep apart at a rhetorical level, where the statement describing the past, “at that time . . . the whole of existence struck me as one vast unity” (“Mir erschien damals . . . das ganze Dasein als eine große Einheit”) (16–17 / 43), sounds confusingly similar to that which characterizes the happy moments of the present: “this harmony that weaves through me and the whole of the world” (“diese mich und die ganze Welt durchwebende Harmonie”) (28 / 55). To the extent that the language associated with the past and the metaphysical attitude it entails persist in the description of the supposedly distinct experiences of the present, there is, as the critical tradition has frequently pointed out, a contradiction at work in

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Hofmannsthal’s text, which continues to rely on language to describe that which negates and exceeds it. As Chandos exclaims in despair: “But why resort to words again, the very words I have forsworn!” (24 / 51). The present ultimately remains severed from the unity promised in the moments of revelation because the language and cognition available to grasp it still pertain to the old order they deny. If the language Chandos knows fails to find determination in the world, the new world he encounters similarly fails to find articulation in language. The fact that the referential function of language is delegitimized by the experience of loss that dominates Chandos’s present thus also means that the experience of a new unity is unable to replace it, since it in turn remains without a form by which to manifest itself. The future that the moments of revelation promise is accordingly utopian in the sense both of being ideal and of being nowhere, since the unity of form and content, language and experience, necessary for its actualization is obstructed by the negative experience of loss that inserts a seemingly unbridgeable gap between them. Both the unity of the past and that revealed in the present, in short, remain incomplete by being severed from the opposite each needs in order to be real. However, and this is the crucial point in my larger argument, the impossibility of fully articulating the utopian ideal of a unity without identity that Chandos yearns for does not only provide the reader with a negative standard against which to measure the failings of the text. On the contrary, what it also makes visible is that this seeming contradiction in The Lord Chandos Letter in fact corresponds precisely to the kind of structure laid bare in the moments of revelation. As in these, we here find a combination of two absolutely distinct entities: the language of the past and the experience of the future. And further, in the structure of the text as a whole, these two moments are connected not on the basis of a shared set of attributes, a tertium comparationis, but through the account of a present defined only in negative terms, which occurs between them and thereby literally provides their link in the textual continuum. The unity of the text as a whole, then, which otherwise remains obscure, becomes comprehensible only by viewing the relationship of its three parts in terms of a utopian ideal that constitutes their standard of measurement. Only when viewed from the position of a mode of expression that cannot be articulated from within the text itself is the condition of loss that divides the text in two irreconcilable parts transformed from a negative principle of separation into a principle

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of positive relation able to provide the condition of nonidentity that makes possible a different kind of unity. This standard of measurement, which grants us the rules for the relation of parts in a whole, itself transcends the conceptual horizons of the text and relates to it only in negative terms as that which cannot be expressed by either its form (the past) or its content (the revelations of the present). Yet in that very negativity toward the text’s own structures, it acquires interpretative authority over them by positing the positive condition through which the text itself coheres (the sense of loss as gain). What it fails to do at the level of each of its constitutive parts, the text performs at the level of its structure as a whole. Or, put in more familiar terms, the text shows precisely what it cannot say.11 This also means that the form at stake is not simply that of the sublime as usually understood, and for two reasons. First, the transcendent idea does not just reveal itself negatively but rather is embodied in the very text that it denies. Second, and following from this, the contradiction in this way resides in the fact not merely that the idea of the whole cannot find representation in its parts but that this whole itself is contradictory when viewed from within the criteria provided by the text and, therefore, properly speaking, is absurd from that perspective (a structural equivalent to Kierkegaard’s faith sensu eminentiori rather than faith sensu laxiori). As such, Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter approximates the fourfold structure that Kierkegaard identifies with faith. On the one hand, its three constitutive parts, each with its own defining principle of representation, and which together provide the content of the aesthetic judgment to be performed: the solipsism of the past, the loss of the present, and the intimations of a different future. On the other hand, the modality of that judgment, which does not add anything new to the text but serves as a standard of measurement that dictates how these parts are to be organized: in this case, the fully articulated unity without identity that transcends and negates the former three and yet posits the possibility of their purposeful relation. As in Ibsen’s and James’s works, Hofmannsthal’s text enacts an alternative to the traditional poles of autonomy and avant-garde. Like the aesthetics of autonomy, The Lord Chandos Letter insists on the necessity of a productive relation of its parts organized by a unifying principle. Yet unlike it, this unifying principle is located not within but outside the conceptual horizons governing the work itself. The parts do not, accordingly, add up to the whole, and the discursive

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relation between them dictates that the perspectives offered from within the text itself remain irresolvably at odds with the absolute that grounds them. The contradiction between the different parts of the text is therefore constitutive of its structure and thereby denies us the satisfaction and harmony that autonomy seeks, instead approximating the aesthetics of the avant-gardes with its insistence on the primacy of fragmentation. In the tension between these two perspectives, a productive relation is established, a liminal space in which the conditions of possibility for new meaning emerge. By negotiating the distance between utopia and reality, the reader is invited to perform a teleological suspension of the text-immanent structures and to renegotiate their incomplete conceptual horizons with a view to a determined standard of meaning that they simultaneously cannot grasp and yet without which their necessary relation remains incomprehensible. The negative critique of modernity that Hofmannsthal’s text encompasses is in this way supplemented by a positive alternative that, although transcendent, provides a guiding principle with respect to which its liberated structures can be reorganized. If Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter is among the first to discuss the “crisis of language” and its ramification, it is no less significant for seeking to show a way in which that moment can be reinscribed anew.

ch apter seven

Conflict and Mediation in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

It must be one of the most cited facts in the scholarship on Joyce that he began his career as an author with a review of Ibsen’s final play, When We Dead Awaken. The review, titled “Ibsen’s New Drama,” was published in the Fortnightly Review in 1900 and was based on the talk “Drama and Life” that Joyce gave to the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin shortly beforehand in which he also defended Ibsen’s work. One year later, another brief notice followed, “The Day of the Rabblement,” in which Joyce again singles out Ibsen for praise and emulation and by which point Joyce had taught himself enough Norwegian to write a letter to the master in his native tongue (cf. Ellmann 90). This fascination with Ibsen’s work continued throughout Joyce’s life and makes its presence felt in Finnegans Wake, in which the Scandinavian invasion of Ireland plays a central part, as well as in Ulysses, which was originally conceived as a Dublin version of Peer Gynt (Ellmann 275). It is during the early years of his career, however, that Ibsen’s influence is especially visible in Joyce’s work. The Norwegian dramatist is mentioned explicitly in the collection “Epiphanies” that Joyce began composing during the early years of the century (171, 196), in Stephen Hero (e.g., 39–41, 52, 84–98) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (e.g., 190), and clearly constitutes the principal source of inspiration for Joyce’s 1914 play Exiles. The particular fascination that the intellectual encounter between the young James Joyce and the aging Henrik Ibsen holds for the secondary literature may derive in great part from the way the occasion 220

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seems to capture the nature of Joyce’s character and work: the interest in an obscure language, the clear perception of Ibsen’s importance for the literature to come, the cosmopolitan rejection of the Irish revivalist movement for the sake of European art, the admiration for Ibsen’s personality and life of exile, which Joyce would come to replicate himself. It is surprising, therefore, that the interest in the relation between these two authors, though continuous, has not been as sustained as one might expect. The most extensive examination of allusions to Ibsen in Joyce’s oeuvre, Bjørn Tysdhal’s seminal Joyce and Ibsen: A Study of Influence, was published as early as 1968 and has not yet been superseded. Another extensive study, Diana Fernham O Hehir’s 1970 PhD dissertation Ibsen and Joyce, argues that Joyce derived three central themes from Ibsen, which can be traced throughout his work: “the theme of the power of the dead in the life of the living; the theme of the special powers of aspects of women (woman as one who waits for the hero, woman as one who holds a secret, woman as an inspirer); and, finally, the theme of the wanderer” (iv–v). More general treatments have argued that Ibsen’s importance for Joyce lies in his delineation of a response to naturalism (Kenner; Olson 37–45), in his use of irony (Schenken), or in the combination of myth and the everyday (Ellmann 99). While these studies provide plenty of directions for more detailed examinations of the relation between Joyce and Ibsen, an important sense of the kind of aesthetic understanding that the young Joyce took from Ibsen’s work can be derived directly from his earliest essays, not least in light of their apparent contradictions. In “Drama and Life,” Joyce’s argument centers on the claim that “[h]uman society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap” (23). In this opposition between changeless laws and the “accidental manners and humors” of individual persons, drama is said to deal “with the underlying laws first, in all their nakedness and divine severity, and only secondarily with the motley agents who bear them out” (22–23). To this extent, Joyce proceeds to claim, drama “exists . . . independently; it is conditioned but not controlled by its scene” (23). That is, since drama deals with everlasting laws, the particular context and setting in which these laws are made manifest are only of secondary importance; it is the context and setting that must adapt to the laws, not the other way around. As Joyce reiterates later in the speech: “Drama is again the least dependent of all arts on its material” (26).

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In spite of this equation of drama with the representation of abstract universal laws, Joyce insists on the importance of the dramatist taking his material from the contemporary world rather than the world of myth and legend. The reason for this view is that the contemporary and mundane world, according to Joyce, can embody these laws as well as the standard stock of heroes. Toward the end of his discussion, Joyce provides a defense of the ordinary world along these lines that foreshadows his mature work: Still I think out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn. Even the most commonplace, the deadest among the living, may play a part in a great drama. It is a sinful foolishness to sigh back for the good old times, to feed the hunger of us with the cold stones they afford. Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery. The great human comedy in which each has a share, gives limitless scope to the true artists, today as yesterday and as in years gone. (28)

The emphasis on the validity of the everyday as an object of artistic concern naturally serves to justify the work of Ibsen, which is a central part of Joyce’s aim on this occasion. It should be noted, however, that the logic behind the justification is one that views the relation between universal and particular, law and accident, ideal and everyday, in terms of their harmony and unity. Ibsen’s work, that is, is presented in terms that sound profoundly indebted to the idealist aesthetics of unification and reconciliation: “Ghost, the action of which passes in a common parlour, is of universal import” (28–29). Where Hamsun and James see Ibsen’s plays as caught in an inevitable contradiction, to the young Joyce it would seem that the Norwegian has achieved a seamless synthesis. It is important to note in this context that Joyce’s earliest assessment of Ibsen in “Drama and Life” is deeply dependent on Richard Wagner. The terms of the distinction between drama and literature that Joyce invokes, as well as the harmonious relation between the universal and the everyday that he sets forth, are taken directly from Wagner’s 1849 essay “The Art-Work of the Future,” which Joyce repeatedly alludes to in his speech (cf. 24, 26, 28; cf. Wagner, e.g., 70–71, 137–139). The association of Wagner with the reinvention of the aesthetics of autonomy for Modernist art, argued for by Franco Moretti (Modern 101–120) and briefly discussed in chapter 3, makes Joyce’s reception of Ibsen’s work in these terms particularly intriguing. More

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interesting still, however, for the present argument, is that when Joyce turns more directly to Ibsen’s work itself in his Fortnightly Review discussion of When We Dead Awaken, the terms of his analysis differ significantly from the initial Wagnerian approach. At first sight, Joyce’s review of When We Dead Awaken could be taken to continue the terms of the discussion set forth in “Drama and Life.” Toward the end of the text, the young Joyce asserts: Ibsen’s plays do not depend for their interest on the action, or on the incidents. Even the characters, faultlessly drawn though they be, are not the first thing in his plays. But the naked drama—either the perception of a great truth, or the opening up of a great question, or a great conflict which is almost independent of the conflicting actors, and has been and is of far-reaching importance—this is what primarily rivets our attention. (“Ibsen’s” 45)

A few pages later, he repeats the point once more: “Ibsen’s drama, as I have said, is wholly independent of his characters” (47). What is striking about these claims in the context of this piece, however, is that they come in the midst of a discussion that would seem to directly contradict them. If we are told that the characters and action are of merely secondary interest, Joyce nevertheless proceeds to provide six paragraphs of character descriptions followed by a discussion of the stage setting, action, and relation between minor and lead roles (45–49). That the notion of drama as the representation of universal and unchanging laws might be invoked here more as a matter of form than of real conviction is further suggested by the fact that Joyce in his long and detailed account of the play that precedes this concluding section does not raise the issue a single time. Instead of the universal/quotidian binary from “Drama and Life,” Joyce here focuses on Ibsen’s deployment of an opposition between the characters’ present and their past. The former, Joyce explains, is constituted by the strikingly “confined” subject, the play’s clear setting, “apparently easy dialogue,” and “comparatively short space of two days” (31–32). Underlying this simplicity, however, is the hidden past with its “countless, indefinable complexities,” which gives us “the whole course” of the characters’ lives in a few words (31, 32), weighing down the dialogue with “hidden meaning” (40, 35), making it “enigmati[c]” and “remarkable,” and pushing the possibilities of the play’s performability to its very limits (38). What we see and what is hidden, the present and the past, in this way constitute two very different spheres, and their relation is one of contradiction and conflict: “there is something

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untrue lying at the root of their union” (32); Rubek “comes to realize that there is something lacking in his life” (35); “there are great gulfs set between his art and his life” (36); Rubek’s experience of life has made it necessary to alter his ideal (39); “there is a mighty problem to be solved” (42). If the universal and the everyday in “Drama and Life” were said to relate in positive terms, the latter instantiating the former in a transparent manner, in “Ibsen’s New Drama,” the constitutive terms of past and present relate only negatively and in conflict: the present of the characters can find no space for their past, which is different both in content and in form. If Joyce’s engagement with Ibsen’s play indicates a significant displacement of his initial Wagnerian aesthetics, the description of the relevant terms as those of past and present also suggests that the place to look for a more elaborate articulation of this new conception of aesthetic composition might be not the texts enumerated above but rather the short story “The Dead,” of 1907, the concluding text of his early collection Dubliners, and the one in which the relation between past and present is most extensively examined.1 This suggestion finds further support in Richard Ellmann’s early insightful observation in his biography of Joyce that “The Dead” in fact constitutes a version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in which “Gabriel also discovers his doll has a mind and heart distinct from his own” (140). As I will argue here, “The Dead” not only displays a structural contradiction akin to what Joyce found in When We Dead Awaken but also seeks to mediate that contradiction in terms similar to those of the aesthetics of dependency that we have seen organize A Doll’s House. That this specific aesthetic paradigm should be of relevance for Joyce’s own work is suggested by another observation toward the end of “Ibsen’s New Drama”: Again, there has not been lacking in the last few social dramas a fine pity for men—a note nowhere audible in the uncompromising rigour of the early eighties. Thus in the conversion of Rubek’s views as to the girl-figure in his masterpiece, ‘The Resurrection Day’, there is involved an all-embracing philosophy, a deep sympathy with the cross-purposes and contradictions of life, as they may be reconcilable with a hopeful awakening—when the manifold travail of our poor humanity may have a glorious issue. (48)

The syntax of the passage’s second sentence is labored and ambiguous, but it seems to me that we find here the central components of the aesthetics of dependency discussed in the present study: the

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contradiction between constitutive terms (“the cross-purposes and contradictions of life”), the presence of a utopian perspective (“a hopeful awakening”) that provides the condition for a reconciliation that simultaneously remains only a possibility, not an accomplished fact (“may be reconcilable”), and yet constitutes the condition for justifying our finite existence (“the manifold travail of our poor humanity”). It is clear, at the very least, that we are dealing here neither with the established identity of idealist aesthetics, in which universal and particular are made to coincide, nor with the absence of all reconciliation, as the aesthetics of fragmentation would provide. It is the space between these two that Joyce has stumbled upon. Two further important points can be made about this passage. First, the description of this mode of reconciliation in Ibsen’s late plays would appear to be less relevant to When We Dead Awaken than to A Doll’s House. According to Joyce himself, When We Dead Awaken ultimately does not provide a possibility of reconciling the contradictions of life through an awakening. Rather, in that play, “the mighty problem” is finally “solved” simply by the avalanche that kills off the protagonists and thereby stops short any further negotiation of its terms (42). In A Doll’s House, however, as we saw, Ibsen provides what is unquestionably the most startling enactment of a moment of “hopeful awakening,” which provides, precisely, the condition with and by which the “contradictions of life” may become reconcilable. It almost seems, that is, that Joyce is here reading the “all-embracing philosophy” of Ibsen’s late plays through the lens of Nora’s much earlier departure. Second, the fact that Joyce associates this aesthetic structure with an increased “sympathy” for humanity (the contrast to the plays of the early eighties refers to Ghosts and An Enemy of the People) is also significant for an analysis of “The Dead.” As Richard Ellmann points out, “The Dead” is itself the first text that Joyce wrote with a greater display of sympathy for his countrymen and for the world (252), marking a clear difference from the harsher depictions in Stephen Hero and the early stories in Dubliners. It lies at hand, therefore, to speculate that when Joyce decided to shift to a more sympathetic mode of representation around 1907, he would have done so with the aesthetic model in mind that he associated with that exact effect in the works of Henrik Ibsen.

It is worth pointing out that “The Dead” has acquired something like the status of a transitional work within Joyce’s oeuvre, paving

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the way from the early stories in Dubliners to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, more importantly still, Ulysses. 2 For such a significant role, “The Dead” has, at first sight, a rather innocuous appearance. The story recounts the events at the Morkan sisters’ annual Christmas dance, which is attended by family, friends, and the music students of their niece, Mary Jane. During the few hours that the narrative covers, seemingly nothing of particularly great importance occurs: Gabriel, the story’s central character, arrives late together with his wife, Gretta; Freddy Mallins shows up drunk; Mr. Brown makes an inappropriate joke to a group of young ladies; Mary Jane plays the piano; Aunt Julia sings; Gabriel has an uncomfortable conversation with Miss Ivors and gives an after-dinner speech—all interspersed with plenty of polite conversation. Only toward the very end of the text does the narrative take an unexpected twist. Having returned to their hotel room for the night, Gretta reveals to Gabriel that the song she heard before leaving the Morkans’ home reminded her of an admirer from her youth, Michael Furey, who tragically died after braving a night’s coldness for her sake and of whom Gabriel knew nothing. This revelation is followed by a concluding section, typographically separated from the rest of the text by a blank line, in which Gabriel considers “how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life” and watches Gretta “as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife” (223). This change is couched in the language of a more general existential epiphany, which in the final paragraph culminates in a vision of unity between the living and the dead. Secondary literature on Joyce’s “The Dead” has to an overwhelming degree tended to focus on this final part of the text and can easily be divided into three competing camps. According to the first, Gabriel’s epiphany constitutes a dramatic change in his character, which lets him see the falseness and superficiality of his previous life.3 The second, on the contrary, insists that this change is only a seeming one and that Gabriel in fact persists in his former selfish and selfsatisfying ways.4 The third, predictably enough, has sought to argue that both positions in a sense are right, since the ending of the text is inherently ambiguous in this regard.5 Undoubtedly much interesting work has emerged from these considerations. But the exclusive attention to the status of Gabriel’s character at the conclusion of “The Dead” has occurred at the expense of two other questions that, although perhaps less sophisticated in

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appearance because so obvious, in fact provide the necessary conditions for determining the function of the story’s end. First, what is the relation between the story about Michael Furey that Gretta tells and the narrative that precedes it? The former occupies no more than one-ninth of the entire text (six out of fifty-one pages in the Penguin edition), so that if the “point” of “The Dead” is to be found here, it inevitably invites the question of whether the description of the Morkan sisters’ party is not somewhat superfluous and could be radically cut. (The average length of the other stories in Dubliners, it must be remembered, is nine and a half pages, more than five times shorter than “The Dead.”) Second, what is the relation between the story about Michael Furey and Gabriel’s final epiphany? Even allowing for heightened Edwardian prudishness, the conclusion drawn by Gabriel—that, since Gretta had an admirer in her distant youth of whom he was unaware, he has never truly known his wife and his previous existence therefore is a sham—seems, well, somewhat disproportionate. If the ending is not to be mere melodrama, its motivation would appear to have to lie deeper than the biographical and psychological trajectory of Gabriel’s life. The search for an adequate answer to these questions leads to an analysis of the formal structure of “The Dead” as a whole, from which perspective alone the aesthetic function of the ending also becomes clear. In what follows, I will make this argument in three steps. First, I show how “The Dead” is composed of two separate narrative structures, which I map onto Roman Jakobson’s familiar distinction between metaphor and metonymy.6 Second, I proceed to examine how Joyce not only makes use of these different structures to organize his text but also lays bare their categorical incompatibility. In “The Dead,” that is, metaphor and metonymy are not simply two different ways of organizing the same semiotic material but rather two mutually dependent but fundamentally opposed first principles. Third, in the final two sections, I conclude by showing how this contradiction is nevertheless overcome in the text, through the introduction of an absolute standard of measurement and by positing a representational principle able to connect all the story’s constitutive terms. As in Ibsen, James, and Hofmannsthal, the relation organizing the text in this way resembles the fourfold structure that I have identified with Kierkegaard’s aesthetics of dependency, which provides an alternative response to the crisis of modernity not previously examined.

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telling “the dead” As mentioned, the central moment of narrative rupture in “The Dead” occurs toward the end, when Gretta suddenly reveals to Gabriel that she is thinking of her former admirer, Michael Furey (220). In terms of the story’s action, this moment is directly dependent on the previous scene at the Morkan sisters’ dance, when Gabriel watches Gretta listening to Mr. D’Arcy’s performance of the song that triggers her recollection: [Gabriel] stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (211)

Though crucial as a moment in the plot—without it, Gretta’s breakdown would not have occurred—this passage is no less significant because it explicitly points to the “symbol” as the rhetorical trope through which the story of Michael Furey should be read. As much can also be derived from Gretta’s subsequent account of Michael Furey’s fate, in which, as critics have frequently pointed out, imagery from Christ’s crucifixion abounds.7 Gretta states, for example, that Furey “died for me” (221), echoing Romans 5:8, and their final meeting occurs under a tree in a garden that bears a striking resemblance to Gethsemane (222–223). But the reference to “symbol” in the above passage is also central for understanding the relation of the story about Michael Furey to the thematically distinct party at the Morkans’ that precedes it. The central narrative elements of the former—Furey’s sickly constitution and employment in the gasworks, his beautiful singing voice, his beckoning of Gretta through her window the night before she leaves, their meeting in the cold and rainy garden, and his eventual death—can retrospectively be seen to be prefigured in the latter. For example, two references to gas lighting precede Gretta’s account (177, 207), while the inside/outside, upstairs/ downstairs configuration enacted when Michael Furey throws gravel at her window from the garden below is directly figured in the picture of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet that adorns the Morkans’

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drawing room (186). Gabriel himself repeats this theme when he worries about the possible success of his speech later in the evening. Approaching the window with “trembling fingers,” he thinks: “How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!” (192). The park, cold, and trees all connect with elements in Michael Furey’s story, and Gabriel repeats his longing thoughts twice more in the course of the text (203, 217). The relation of equivalence between these two exterior spaces is further stressed in the early statement that Gretta, in a direct echo of her former friend, would “walk home in the snow if she were let” (180). The image of snow, itself linked by analogy to the rain that Michael Furey braves, is repeated not less than nineteen times, with an additional nine references to the related image of Gabriel’s galoshes. Only the references to death (twelve times) and music (well over forty times) occur with comparable frequency, and both of these are likewise thematically tied to Michael Furey. The structure of these textual units is “symbolic” in the broader sense that they are linked into groups by relations of equivalence. As Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out (122–127), all language consists of two essential types of relation: one a paradigmatic relation of substitution between synonymous semiotic members within the code, the axis of selection of terms (“kid” rather than “boy” or “toddler,” for example), and the other a syntagmatic relation of combination between different units into a contiguous sequence (such as the statement “the kid ate the cake”). On the basis of de Saussure’s work, Roman Jakobson proceeded to argue that symbolic relations are part of the larger group of poetic structures qualified as “metaphoric” in virtue of their shared predilection for the paradigmatic relation of substitution over the syntagmatic one of combination. As Jakobson succinctly put it in a seminal paper, “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (“Linguistics” 71). In other words, a text can be defined as poetic when the combination of its units is governed primarily not by their difference but by their similarity. This is clear in the case of poetry, in which we join units primarily through rhymes or metrical patterns rather than their syntactical relations. But in “The Dead,” too, before Gretta’s revelation at the end, the narrative

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of Michael Furey is figured through the relation between semiotically similar terms, leitmotifs of sorts, that establish patterns of thematic equivalence in a paradigmatic structure that is independent of syntagmatic rules of combination. If the organization of the specific narrative patterns associated with Michael Furey is poetic in this sense, then the dimension of “The Dead” that directly concerns itself with the description of the Morkan sisters’ annual dance—by far the more immediately dominant aspect of the text—is clearly written in prose. Contrary to poetry’s reliance on metaphor, as Jakobson argues in another of his influential papers, the governing trope of prose is metonymy (“Two Aspects” 111), the syntagmatic combination of contiguous terms. The forward-moving account of the events, from Gabriel and Gretta’s arrival at the Morkans’ home until their return to the hotel, clearly follows this logic. It does so both to the extent that its mode of representation is determined by the rules of syntax that govern the combination of different terms into a consecutive chain and to the extent that its primary function is the referential description of phenomena placed contiguously in time and space. What is important about this duality of narrative modes is that the two stories of “The Dead,” that of the Morkans’ annual dance and that which culminates with Michael Furey’s life and death, in this way can be seen not simply to follow upon each other but in fact to coexist simultaneously. To the extent that each is associated with a distinct representational principle, metonymy and metaphor, it is not that we first read about the dance and only afterward learn of Michael Furey but rather that both are present and at work from the beginning. As Frank Kermode has argued, such a simultaneity of two different narratives in a text is a device frequently exploited by twentieth-century writers. In these instances, in addition to the capacity of literary texts to mean in terms of their narrative sequence, their “plot,” there also exist patterns of nonsequential units that combine to form “rhythms” not part of the primary story but nevertheless necessary for the meaning of the work as a whole (12–13, 22, 31). In the case of “The Dead,” however, this difference is one not only of narrative content (what the two stories are about) or narrative style (the representational systems they apply) but also of the values associated with each. If the metonymic narrative is concerned with the description of the present, the already mentioned relation of the metaphoric patterns to death signals their association with the past. In fact, at the opening of the text, we are told how the universe of the

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party that defines the present finds its point of origin in direct opposition to the death that constitutes the locus of the past: It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. . . . For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island. . . . That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. (175)

The present situation extends into a mythical continuum (“always,” “years and years,” “as long as anyone could remember”) that has as its actual limit and origin the experience of death (“after the death of their brother Pat”). This conception of the past as opposing the present as its boundary and other is also repeated through its associated images of music. Most notably, the song that Mr. D’Arcy performs, and which Michael Furey used to sing to Gretta in their youth, is “in the old Irish tonality,” causing Mr. D’Arcy to be “uncertain both of his words and of his voice” (211). In the discussion of opera that follows the dinner, the claim that the present cannot compare to the past in terms of musical skills is likewise repeatedly returned to. To Aunt Kate, the greatest tenor voice she knows lies so far back that no one else knows anything about it, while Mr. Brown proclaims the years are gone “when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin” (200). As he pointedly asks Mr. D’Arcy, “Why did they never play the grand old operas now . . . ? Because they could not get the voices to sing them: that was why” (ibid.). The view of the past as more musical than the present, contained in instances such as these, fits neatly with its “poetic” structure and receives a further layering when Aunt Julia performs one of her “old” songs (193). Listening to the latter, Gabriel feels that “[t]o follow the voice, without looking at the singer’s face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure flight.” The closing of his eyes signals the need to negate the present, that which stands in front of us, for the sake of unity, the “sharing” of an experience, through a medium from the past. In stark contrast to the unifying function of the metaphoric pole, the contemporary, unmelodic piece of music Mary Jane performs on the piano is incomprehensible: “Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing-room. He liked music but the piece

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she was playing had no melody for him and he doubted whether it had any melody for the other listeners. . . .” (186). This alienating effect in the present is not restricted to Mary Jane’s performance. On the contrary, the experience of cultural distance that Gabriel goes through in this instance is repeated in his own concerns about the speech he is to give, as he concludes when debating whether he should use a quote from Robert Browning: “The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous. . . .” (179). Similar distinctions of gender, politics, and religion among the guests are repeatedly stressed, as, for example, in Gabriel’s frequently discussed faux pas with Lily at the story’s opening (178), his subsequent clash with Miss Ivors (187– 189), and Aunt Kate’s critique of the pope in front of the Protestant Mr. Brown (195). The relation of difference between contiguous terms that defines metonymy is in this way enacted quite literally in the representations of the Misses Morkan’s annual dance, by stressing the various forms of distinction between the characters gathered in a common time and space. The extensive use of military language to describe the evening also finds its motivation from this perspective, since it serves to stress that the terms mapped out are inherently at odds.8 Aunt Julia’s performance is greeted by “[a]n irregular musketry of applause,” and she herself “attacked with great spirit the runs which embellish the air” (193). Gabriel’s tribute to the three hostesses is described as a “sally” (205), while Freddy Malins “captures” Aunt Kate and plumps her down on her chair (198). References to military leaders like Wellington (192) and Constantine (187) are combined with the dancing of Lancers (187–190), invocations of songs such as “Let Me Like a Soldier Fall” (200), and the story about Grandfather Pat, who wanted to go see a military review (208). Significantly, the bellicose undertone that the entire evening in this way receives reaches its climax in the text’s most extensively descriptive passage. In the lengthy account of the sumptuous dinner table, we read how between the “rival ends” of a “fat brown goose” and “a round of spiced beef” “ran parallel lines of side dishes,” while two decanters are placed “as sentries to a fruit-stand,” and “a huge yellow dish lay in waiting” on the piano together with “squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms” (197). If the description of details depends on metonymy, as Jakobson points out (“Two

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Aspects” 113), then it is here again made clear that this trope’s deployment of difference also entails conflict. The differences between the two narrative structures traced so far allow us to postulate a preliminary answer to the first of the two questions proposed at the beginning of this discussion, namely, how the story of Michael Furey relates to that of the Morkans’ Christmas dance. If the metaphoric pole is associated with the structures of identity and unity and the metonymic with difference and fragmentation, it would appear that the two stories are not simply simultaneous, as previously suggested, but in fact mutually dependent, to the extent that each provides what its counterpart lacks. It is not only the proper use of language that requires the interaction of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic functions, but narrative, too, depends on it, as Peter Brooks has shown: The very possibility of meaning plotted through sequence and through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending: the interminable would be the meaningless, and the lack of ending would jeopardize the beginning. We read the incidents of narration as “promises and annunciations” of final coherence, that metaphor that may be reached through the chain of metonymies: across the bulk of the as yet unread middle pages, the end calls to the beginning, transforms and enhances it. . . . [W]e read only those incidents and signs that can be construed as promise and annunciation, enchained toward a construction of significance—those markers that, as in the detective story, appear to be clues to the underlying intentionality of event. The sense of adventure thus plotted from its end, so to speak, has something of the rigor and necessity provided in poetry by meter and rhyme, the pattern of anticipation and completion which overcodes mere succession. . . . (Reading 93–94)

Metaphor links the end and the beginning as two versions of the same. Without such an identity, the merely metonymic relation between textual units in the middle of the text would reach no order but instead simply lead from one contiguous term to another in a potentially infinite sequence of equally significant events. Only the imposition of patterns within the text that recall beginning and presage end makes it possible to discriminate between levels of importance and generate an order. The narrative structures in “The Dead” that appeared to be distinct and separate must in this way be brought to cohere for a proper textual utterance to obtain.

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the structure of contr adiction The narrative holism that the productive interaction of metaphor and metonymy strives for, a kind of division of labor in which each part contributes to a harmonious totality, calls to mind the organic unity of the work of art favored by idealist aesthetics of autonomy. Such collaboration presupposes a common essence underlying the two distinct systems of representation that makes possible the translation of the narrative material from one into the other. That is, if “metaphor . . . may be reached through the chain of metonymies,” as Brooks puts it in the previous quote, this is possible only if the two are not in fact categorically opposed but can be reduced to a single structure. The apparent dualism of the text must be revealed to hide an actual monistic core. The theoretical foundation for such a reading has been provided by Umberto Eco in a study of metaphor that, significantly enough, draws its examples from James Joyce. According to Eco, rather than two distinct systems, “each metaphor can be traced back to a subjacent chain of metonymic connections,” so that it is only “through the exposure of a metonymic chain beneath the metaphoric level” that metaphors are comprehensible (“Semantics” 68). Eco’s theory of metaphor is based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of unlimited semiosis, according to which every sign constitutes a type, the meaning of which is based on other signs, its interpretants or tokens, each of which in turn becomes a new type with its own interpretants, and so on ad infinitum (cf. “Joyce” 143–1449). In such a semiotic universe, it is ultimately possible to begin from any given point and access any other through a metonymic chain of intervening interpretants. What occurs in a metaphor is therefore not that two terms are combined on the basis of analogy but rather that the metonymic steps separating them have been elided. Eco exemplifies his point by means of the semantic unit “Minucius Mandrake” from Finnegans Wake (“Semantics” 70–72). Minucius Felix is a father of the church, while Mandrake the Magician is a popular comic strip character. To Eco, the possibility of decoding the relation of these two terms depends on the additional familiarity with another comic strip character from the 1920s, a cat likewise named Felix. As Eco explains, Here, then, is the mechanism subjacent to the metaphoric substitution: Minucius refers by contiguity to Felix, Felix refers by contiguity (belonging to the same universe of comic strips) to Mandrake. Once

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the middle term has fallen, there remains a coupling that does not seem justified by any contiguity and thus appears to be metaphoric. The always possible substitution between Minucius and Mandrake is attributable no longer to the possibility of passing from one to the other through a series of successive choices but to the fact that they seem to possess characteristics which are ‘similar’ (advocates, rhetoricians, and so on) and thus ‘analogous’. (72)

By joining two terms whose contiguity is not established by our code, the creativity of a “metaphoric” relation resides in the way it forces us to trace metonymic paths not previously foreseen and thereby expand the interpretants that our semiotic system explicitly associates with each term. Leaving aside the particularities of Eco’s theory, it is interesting to note that in “The Dead,” Gabriel strives for a similar reduction of metaphor to metonymy. In his after-dinner speech, for example, he describes how the past and present, the respective domains of metaphor and metonymy, unity and fragmentation, are not separate after all but metonymically linked. Speaking of the tradition of Irish hospitality, Gabriel proclaims, Of one thing, at least, I am sure. As long as this one roof shelters the good ladies aforesaid—and I wish from my heart it may do so for many and many a long year to come—the tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and which we in turn must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us. (204)

The qualitative distinction between past and present that seemed to isolate each as separate is here envisioned as having been overcome. What makes this continuity possible is the reduction of all different events to their common denominator in tradition, which allows them to be mapped as coordinates upon a single line. In Eco’s model, too, it is the absence of qualitative differences, the fact that all terms exist at the same level within a single semiotic universe, that makes it possible to move metonymically from any one term to any other. Ironically, however, the structure at stake to this extent resembles the malaise that Gabriel associates with the present age, and to which he actually opposes the persistence of tradition as an antidote. As he puts it a few lines after the above-quoted passage, “But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age” (204). Skepticism, like the play of unlimited semiosis, can be understood as the impossibility of giving final

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authority to any one position because the qualitative difference between them has been lost. The link between metonymy and skepticism that this suggests makes it possible to provide a counterpart to Jakobson’s formulation of the poetic function, quoted above. At its furthest extreme, the function of prose would seem to consist in the projection of the principle of contiguity from the axis of combination to the axis of selection.10 In metonymy, that is, any term can ultimately be substituted for any other through the mere fact of its relation of proximity. The condition of possibility for the play of différance frequently associated with the structure of metonymy can in this way be seen to consist in a fundamental identity of all terms. That this structure underlies the narrative of the Morkan sisters’ dance is visible in a number of ways. First, the position of the present as a distinct moment in a sequence is compromised by the very insistence on its uniformity with other occasions at the beginning of the story. It is “annual,” “always a great affair,” “Never once had it fallen flat,” and always involves the same categories of guests: “members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too” (175). Freddy Malins, we are similarly told, “always came late” (176) and speaks with the “habitual catch in his voice” (185). Gabriel’s solicitude is “a standing joke” in the family (180), while he is set to “carve the goose as usual” (191) and gives his afterdinner speech “as in years past” (203), the way Aunt Julia performs her usual song (193–194). Like the story of Johnny the horse that goes round and round the statue of King William (209), the characters in “The Dead” are confined to the mechanical reproduction of their specific traits. Underlying the relation of differences across the narrative text, there is thus a homogeneity that makes the party we witness identical to, and substitutable with, all others that precede it. Second, as is made clear in the crucial scene of Gabriel’s sexual desire for Gretta on their return to the hotel, the difference between distinct terms within the present itself is likewise undermined. As Lacan famously argued, desire is governed by the trope of metonymy, the condition of “eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else” (158). The opposition to the narrative of Michael Furey that this suggests is, of course, supported at a thematic level through the contrast of Gabriel’s “lust” (221) to the pure poetic passion that finds its analogue in Romeo and Juliet. But formally, too,

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Lacan’s dictum is echoed in Gabriel’s return to the militaristic language that, as seen before, is associated with the present’s metonymic laws: The blood went bounding along his veins; and the thoughts went rioting through his brain, proud, joyful, tender, valorous. . . . She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something. . . . If she would only turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would be brutal. . . . He longed to be master of her strange mood. . . . He longed to cry to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her. (214, 218)

Further, Gabriel’s desire quite literally finds expression through metonymy: Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory. A heliotrope envelope was lying beside his breakfast-cup and he was caressing it with his hand. Birds were twittering in the ivy and the sunny web of the curtain was shimmering along the floor: he could not eat for happiness. They were standing on the crowded platform and he was placing a ticket inside the warm palm of her glove. He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grate window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace. (214)

The relation of part to whole, of particular image to the scene and their secret life at large, is one of contiguity and generates the forward movement of desire’s need for fulfillment of a lack. As in his afterdinner speech, moreover, Gabriel’s commitment to this structure supports a view of all differences as ultimately partaking of a qualitative continuum that makes it possible to bridge the most distant parts by mapping out their intervening links: For the years he felt, had not quenched his soul or hers. Their children, his writing, her household cares had not quenched all their souls’ tender fire. In one letter he had written to her then he had said: Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name? Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past. (215)

Similar to the common denominator of tradition that is claimed to underlie all different moments in time and to link forefathers to descendants, the persistence of “their souls’ tender fire” below apparently distinct experiences makes it possible to connect distant past to present. The seeming qualitative gap between them can ultimately be overcome, and ideal and quotidian be reconnected. Time as a state of

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alienation is replaced by time as a continuous present (the “always,” “year after year,” “as long as anyone could remember” with which the story opens), where no distance can be absolute. The reference to “distant music” at the conclusion of the preceding quotation, refers us back to the scene of Gretta listening to Mr. D’Arcy sing (211), which constitutes the narrative point of divergence of the two stories and with which my discussion began. Gabriel’s desire, it is clear from this echo, seeks precisely to read Gretta’s “symbol” in metonymic terms, to translate its metaphoric opacity into a language of contiguity that explains the present representation through its continuity with an accessible past. When the two are finally alone, Gabriel accordingly ventures to assume that he has understood her meaning: “Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?” (219). The attempt, of course, fails miserably: precisely at the point that Gabriel assumes that he is closest to his goal, Gretta reveals that she was in fact thinking of Michael Furey and imposes an absolute distance. If desire is like metonymy, this is so not only because it relates to whole through part or generates an agonistic world but also, as Hegel pointed out, because it is grounded in a solipsism that denies the world’s alterity (Phänomenologie 137–145). The logic of identity that underlies all metonymy shows itself here in Gabriel’s inability to perceive the actual difference of the symbolic logic that Gretta represents. The moment is telling in the present context because it makes clear that if, in “The Dead,” the play of difference that constitutes metonymy is ultimately grounded on identity, then the structure of identity that characterizes metaphor is inversely based on difference. What makes metaphor possible, that is, is not first and foremost the identity of its terms but rather their shared difference from the totality of the remaining semiotic system. We know that terms belong together in a metaphoric pattern not primarily because we identify their common attributes but because we first notice their shared rupture with the rules and structures organizing our habitual semiotic world. When Gabriel confronts Gretta’s narrative, it is the qualitative change in perspective that it provides that shatters him: While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to

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vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. (221)

Only after this qualitative gap between the perspective from the position of Michael Furey and that from the position of the Morkan sisters’ world has been imposed can the retrospective search for metaphoric patterns begin. We single out the images of music, death, snow, and so on, from the undifferentiated metonymic continuum of the description of the present and gather them into a separate group because, toward the end of the text, we have identified the categorically distinct existence of another narrative in which they are contained. Whereas in metonymy the relation between quantitatively different terms is made possible by a shared qualitative identity, in metaphor the quantitative identity of terms arises from a shared qualitative difference. The discussion up until this point makes it possible to reassess the preliminary answer provided at the conclusion of the previous section to the first of the two questions posed at the beginning of this chapter. The two narratives in “The Dead” are not only mutually dependent opposites but also structured in a chiasmus: difference is grounded on identity, identity on difference. Rather than generating their eventual unification, as demanded by the idealist aesthetics of autonomy, the text reveals their absolute incompatibility, in line with the aesthetics of the avant-gardes. The sphere of the present, desire, and the everyday can never reach fulfillment in the past or the ideal, nor can the past and the ideal ever find realization in the present, since these belong to absolutely different realms, with absolutely different categories at their foundation. To attempt to move from one to the other, to make metaphor map onto metonymy, as Gabriel does, is to commit what Kierkegaard would call a metábasis eis állo génos: an illegitimate leap from one conceptual or ontological sphere to another (Concluding 113 / Afsluttende 110; Philosophical 73 / Philosophiske 273). This interpretation of the relation between the two stories in “The Dead” also makes it possible to provide an answer to the second of the two questions that open this chapter concerning the further relation of the story of Michael Furey to Gabriel’s existential crisis. The latter, it is now clear, is not simply personal and biographical but expressive of the crisis that underlies Modernism at large: the confrontation with the irreversible chasm between concept and percept, sign and referent, facts and values, which makes any determination of meaning impossible. The constitutive incompatibility of metaphor

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and metonymy dictates that the goal of narrative unity, toward which all existence strives, cannot obtain.

the plenitude of dying So far, my analysis of “The Dead” has traced two dialectical relations between the governing representational structures of the text: first, the simultaneity and mutual complementarity of metaphor and metonymy and, second, their categorical incompatibility. The merely negative relation between terms, with which the latter moment in my discussion concludes, does not annul the first, in which the need for their interaction was established. The central conflict in Joyce’s text arises from the coexistence of these two mutually contradicting conditions. What the analysis has not yet done, however, is address the ending proper of “The Dead,” the final six brief paragraphs on which, as mentioned, the majority of the critical discussion has centered. In this last section of the story, the text follows Gabriel’s glances around the hotel room and the movement of his thoughts. From the sensation that he has never really known his wife, we proceed to his consideration of the reason for his own previous lust, to the thought that Aunt Julia will soon die, his imagination of the wake that is to follow, the awareness that all are slowly perishing, to a concluding, climactic description of the gradual dissolution of his own identity and the snow that, falling all over Ireland, covers both the living and the dead (223–225). From the perspective offered here, the most immediately apparent characteristic of this conclusion to the story is the intensification of the interdependence of the two representational principles that divide the fictional world in two. On the one hand, as the above brief summary suggests, the passage is organized along strictly metonymic lines, subjecting the movement from one frame of reference to the next to the laws of contiguity. We go from the opening statement “She was fast asleep,” to the description of Gabriel gazing at Gretta in the bed; from there, to the thought that he played no role in her life, to the related one that she is no longer as beautiful as she was in her youth. From this, Gabriel’s gaze wanders across the room over Gretta’s petticoat, which is connected by contiguity to the thought about his preceding “lust,” which moves him onward to its possible causes in the party, to Aunt Julia, to her death, to the

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death of all, and so on, in ever-expanding, but always metonymically linked, fields of discourse. On the other hand, however, the same passage is characterized by a radical increase in metaphoric relations. This is due not only to the continuing presence of the images related to the story of Michael Furey analyzed above, such as the images of snow, death, music, and the inside/outside configurations. In addition, there is also an increased invocation of equivalent frames of reference through intertextual allusions. In the second-to-last paragraph, for example, the statement “His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead” (224) invokes Dante’s vision of the crowds of the damned at the beginning of Inferno, which Eliot, too, would use to great effect in The Waste Land a few years later: and behind it came so long a line of people, that I never would have thought that death could have undone so many. e dietro le venìa sì lunga tratta di gente, ch’i’ non avrei creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta. (Alighieri, Inferno III, ll. 55–57)11

This echo, moreover, establishes the further relation of equivalence to the opening of Joyce’s own “The Sisters,” the first of the stories in Dubliners. In “The Sisters,” the first line reads “There was no hope for him this time” (1), which points to Dante’s gates of Hell and its famous inscription: “Abandon every hope, you who enter here” (“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”) (Aligiheri, Inferno III, l. 9). As in Finnegans Wake, the conclusion of Joyce’s work leads us back to its beginning, suggesting a closure of the narrative cycle of the kind that metaphor, as Brooks argues, always seeks to furnish. The same paragraph in “The Dead” also points to more recent literary analogues. The statement “Other forms were near” (224), for example, which describes the gathering of dead in Gabriel’s vision, is a direct allusion to the opening of Goethe’s dedicatory poem to his departed friends in Faust: “You come near again, you swaying figures” (“Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten”) (l. 1). In Goethe’s poem, as in the passage about Gabriel, there are tears and memories of first love, and the final stanza ends with the unforgettable description of Goethe’s passage into the realm of the dead, which clearly mirrors Gabriel’s own: “What I possess, I see as if from far

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away, / And what disappeared becomes reality for me” (“Was ich besitze, seh ich wie im Weiten, / Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten”) (ll. 31–32). The description, in this context, of Gabriel’s own identity as “fading out into a grey impalpable world” (225), coupled with the appearance of the literally dead, clearly and abruptly strains the conventions of realism that the story has so far strictly adhered to. In this sense, too, the concluding section of the text moves into a metaphoric structure. As Eco has succinctly put it: “The standard reaction to any instantiation of the symbolic mode is a sort of uneasiness felt by the reader when witnessing a sort of semantic waste, a surplus of possible and still imprecise significations conveyed by something that—in terms of conversational or narrative economy—should not be there” (“Joyce” 139). In the final section of “The Dead,” there is precisely such a semiotic dimension to the narrative that is not accounted for by the statements’ literal meaning and which generates the search for analogical frames of reference that might be able to contain it. While the claim that Gabriel’s identity is “fading” can be motivated by his gradual falling asleep (as we are told, a few lines later, “He watched sleepily the flakes” [225]), it also invokes a more abstract notion of passing out of his own personal experience into a different existential realm. Similarly, the claim “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward” (ibid.), on the one hand, can be metonymically linked back to the earlier exchange with Miss Ivors, in which Gabriel had refused to travel to the Aran Islands, but on a metaphoric level, the voyage is related to death in virtue of the setting sun’s equivalent trajectory across the earth. Along related lines, this final section of the text returns to the Christ symbolism first introduced by Gretta’s narrative, as in the repetition of the statement that “a man had died for her sake” (223) and the vision of “a young man standing under a dripping tree” (224). Even the description of the petticoat string and the boot placed next to it, themselves metonymically linked to female and male sexuality, receives a further relation of equivalence to the failure of Gabriel’s sexual passion in the description of the boot standing “upright, its limp upper fallen down” (223). The ending of “The Dead” in this way asks to be read in two directions simultaneously: the forward, horizontal relation between contiguous frames of reference and the upward, vertical relation to

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analogous fields of discourse. This simultaneity is particularly visible in the text’s concluding lines: The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (225)

Again, the passage is strongly structured along metonymic lines, tracing the contiguously related points of the Irish geography, and written with the syntactical rules for the combination of different lexical units into a consecutive sequence. Simultaneously, however, the metaphoric dimension is equally dominant through the prose’s strong rhythmic character. The heavy repetition of phonetic patterns like “al,” “of,” and “ow,” the use of sibilants (“swooned,” “descent”), internal rhymes (“snow” and “slowly,” “descent” and “last end”), alliterations (“crooked crosses,” “soul swooned slowly”), and inversions (“falling softly . . . softly falling,” “falling faintly . . . faintly falling”), all force the passage from prose proper into that strange thing of a poem in prose.12 The text in this way ends on a note that is neither fully metonymic nor metaphoric but between the two and is possible only because of their simultaneous collaboration. The forward, metonymic sequence depends on the upward, metaphoric movement, since it can no longer contain the excess of semiotic content on its own. Yet the metaphoric movement depends no less on the metonymic sequence, which weaves its abstract fields of discourse into the fabric of this particular narrative, binding, for example, Gabriel’s symbolic death to his mundane confrontation with Miss Ivors. In the final passage, that is, the positive collaboration of the two structures has become constitutive in the way their negative incompatibility was before. Up until this point in the text, the two narratives, the metaphoric and the metonymic, run parallel and separate, making it possible to read one without the presence of the other, even as each beckons to its opposite for conceptual completion. But in the final passage, that very division has been

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overcome in a literary tour de force that joins the terms at first established as categorically apart.13 If “The Dead,” as Richard Ellmann has suggested, is Joyce’s version of A Doll’s House, then this can be seen most forcefully in the way it stages a similar formal break at its conclusion. Like Nora’s departure, the vision of identity between all the living and the dead that it contains is grounded on a radical incommensurability with what came before. It is accordingly not the story’s female character but Gabriel who assumes the role of Ibsen’s heroine and, like her, takes leave of his family and prior form of life on discovering that he has been living an illusion. This also marks the difference of Joyce’s text from the other central literary model that it follows (besides Ibsen’s play), namely, George Moore’s novel Vain Fortune, from 1892. As Ellmann has likewise pointed out, the final setting of “The Dead” is taken from Moore’s work, which similarly ends with a bridal couple in a hotel room. Akin to Gretta and Gabriel, moreover, Moore’s Hubert and Julia are kept apart when their sojourn is interrupted by the news that the young girl Hubert has rejected has committed suicide, which brings him to the realization that his life is one great failure (Ellmann 259). But in Moore’s novel, and in stark contrast to the ending of “The Dead,” this recognition is the affirmation and culmination of the character that we have seen throughout the novel, and no change, stylistic or psychological, is recorded in the text. Interestingly, Vain Fortune also draws heavily on Ibsen and A Doll’s House, since Hubert is a playwright whose only success, Divorce, derives its notoriety from a social scandal resonant with the issues raised by the Ibsen Controversy raging at the time that Moore composed the novel. Indeed, in terms clearly intended to remind us of A Doll’s House, Hubert’s play is criticized for the way “the author makes the woman contradict her whole nature in the last act” (81). Where Hubert’s fate serves to reverse this stylistic feature, providing the coherence and consistency of character that Ibsen refused, Joyce deliberately returns Moore’s setting to its Ibsenian logic and retains Nora’s insistence on her difference.

time and mediation If the final vision of “The Dead” is utopian in that it provides an image of the fulfillment of the formal desire generated by the narrative that precedes it, it is also absolute in the sense that it is unconditioned, not a consequence or effect of, nor to be derived from, that which goes

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before. Since the section of the story culminating in Gabriel’s failure to correctly decipher Gretta’s symbol confirms the negative incompatibility of metonymy and metaphor, the ending does not follow from it but rather is suddenly imposed as a further qualitatively distinct narrative structure that finds neither motivation nor justification from what the text has shown us up until this point. Such a structural imposition may well fit the language of “epiphanies” that, following Joyce’s own lead (cf. Ellmann 87–89), has usually been taken to be central to Dubliners as a whole (although, more often than not, it is difficult to see how this concept is to be applied in the individual stories).14 But it does not solve the question of the text’s narrative unity, since it merely adds a further logic of representation to the first two, in a sequence that fails to establish any positive relation and therefore remains purely contingent. If the ending gains interpretative authority by providing the standard that both the logic of metonymy and that of metaphor strive for, this cannot therefore simply be because it lays claim to the enactment of their unity. Rather, as with Kierkegaard’s title of modality, it also posits a further, fourth representational principle able to provide the necessary common ground between the three identified so far. In the above quotation from the text’s final passage, the opening sentence points ahead to a future temporality in the “journey westward” that is about to begin, which has already been signaled three paragraphs earlier, in Gabriel’s anticipation of Aunt Julia’s wake (224). The sentence that follows, “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland” (225), further stresses the transformation at stake by pointing us back to Mary Jane’s earlier statement: “They say . . . we haven’t had snow like it for thirty years; and I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland” (212). “Thirty years” is also the time span we are given at the opening of the text, in the passage quoted earlier in this discussion, measuring how long the Morkan sisters’ annual dance has been taking place: “That was a good thirty years ago if it was a day” (175). The confirmation and vision of the snow falling all over Ireland at the text’s conclusion brackets the potential infinity of the metonymic present (“always,” “year after year”) by providing a counterpart to the death of “their brother Pat” that marks its beginning. Thirty years, the span traditionally associated with a generation, makes a middle of the merely present. The sequence of past-present-future that the ending enables is in this way also that of beginning-middle-end and recalls the linear

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temporality likewise identified as a constitutive aesthetic principle in Ibsen, James, and Hofmannsthal. In the context of “The Dead,” it is important to note that it combines both the continuity proper to metonymy and the imposition of divisions on which, as shown above, metaphor depends. The past and future, beginning and end, are categorically distinct from the present and middle and cannot be reduced to a common denominator, but all three are related in a continuum that exists only because each partakes of it. The temporality underlying the text at large and encompassing all its constitutive parts is in this way not the temporality of the merely dead that dominates the past, nor an infinite expansion of the same that characterizes the present, nor that of a utopian future that remains continually at bay. Rather, it is the temporality proper to human finitude as such, in which the present is always out of reach from a past and a future that nevertheless provide it with its necessary coordinates. Kierkegaard’s definition of the human subject as a mode of relation thus repeats itself in this fourfold structure of “The Dead,” which mirrors that of the aesthetics of dependency in general. As in the latter, the absolute vision of the unity of metaphor and metonymy provided by the ending is the standard of measurement for determining their relation because it posits the further means by which the elements of the text become necessarily related. The search to bridge the gap between metonymy and metaphor at the center of “The Dead” depends on the presence of such a necessary relation, even as the categorical difference between its constitutive parts makes impossible any ultimate achievement of that aim. We are invited, in other words, to negotiate the boundaries of metaphor and metonymy with a view to obtaining a specific unity by the necessity of their relation to that outcome, even while the attainment of the latter is not made possible or justified through their own internal logics. The activity of carving out the metonymic continuum by means of metaphoric patterns occurs with a specific telos as guide and measure, which transcends the conditions for the production of meaning that we have been given by the text itself. As in Kierkegaard, Ibsen, James, and Hofmannsthal, the function of the text lies not in the reduction of all parts to a shared essence, nor in a denial of their purposeful relation, but rather in retaining the conflict between them so as to make the process of negotiating their differences itself the focus. “The Dead,” that is, provides us not with a determination of its meaning but only with the means to make the attempt to reach it a justified relation in itself.

ch a p t er eigh t

Intransitive Love in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

It seems appropriate to conclude this study with an examination of Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, written between 1904 and 1910 and centered on a Danish character. Among the many Scandinavian authors that Rilke was closely familiar with (including figures such as Ibsen, Strindberg, Herman Bang, and Sigbjørn Obstfelder, to name but some), it was J. P. Jacobsen and Kierkegaard who exercised the greatest influence on him, and already in 1904 he began learning Danish for the specific purpose of reading these two authors in the original. Only shortly thereafter, Rilke had mastered this task sufficiently to produce an elegant translation of Kierkegaard’s correspondence with his fiancée, Regine Olsen,1 while his deep admiration for Jacobsen found its most famous expression in Letters to a Young Poet at around the same time. As Rilke tells Franz Kappus in that work: “Of all my books there are only a few which are indispensable to me, and two of them are actually always among my belongings, no matter where I am. I have them with me here, too, the Bible and the books of the great Danish poet, Jens Peter Jacobsen” (Letters 11 / Briefe 17–18). And a few lines later, Rilke proceeds to place the Danish author in what, to him, can only be still more exclusive company: “If I am to speak of the sources from which I learnt anything concerning the nature of creative work, concerning its depths and its everlastingness, there are only two names which I can mention: that of Jacobsen, that great, great poet, and that of Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, who has not his equal among all the artists who are living to-day” (11 / 18). 247

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Among Jacobsen’s work, as the following letter goes on to make clear (12 / 20–21), it is particularly the novel Niels Lyhne that captures Rilke’s praise. The importance of this text for Malte Laurids Brigge has frequently been noted (cf., e.g., Schoolfield), but beyond the novel’s Danish setting and its hero’s melancholic nature, the aspect of Niels Lyhne that Rilke draws on most explicitly is Jacobsen’s investigation of his characters’ self-alienation. In a crucial scene in Malte Laurids Brigge, this intertextual relation is emphasized in terms highly relevant to the present study. In a description of the young Malte’s games of dressing up in costumes and old clothes found in his family’s attic, the situation becomes nightmarish when Malte suddenly loses all sense of his own identity, culminating in his exclamation “I felt an indescribable, poignant and futile longing for myself” (32: Notebooks 70 / Die Aufzeichnungen 892). The statement is a direct reference to a recurrent topos in Niels Lyhne, which finds expression in, among other places, Miss Boye’s acknowledgment to Niels: “How strange it is to long for oneself!” (87). The sentence from Jacobsen in turn alludes to Kierkegaard, whose character Quidam, in Stages on Life’s Way, makes an almost identical assertion: “As for me, I feel homesick for myself, for daring to be with myself. It is shattering to have an imagination and an actuality so contrary to each other” (Stages 328 / Stadier 305–306).3 The conflict between imagination and actuality that here stands at the source of self-alienation is the dominant concern of Jacobsen’s text and, as I will argue in more detail below, is also at the heart of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke’s use of his favorite Danish authors taps directly into the contradiction between existential spheres that pervades the aesthetic tradition traced in the present book. Yet more important than Rilke’s turn to Scandinavia for models of how to articulate this contradiction between ideal and real is a further dimension of his understanding of Kierkegaard that can be derived from his private writings. As the choice to translate the letters to Regine Olsen already suggests, Rilke in his correspondences makes amply clear that he viewed Kierkegaard primarily as an instance of unhappy, “intransitive” love, the kind that he also associated with figures like Gaspara Stampa and Mariana Alcoforado. That this is not a merely sentimental notion is indicated by Rilke’s letter to Ilse Erdman, dated September 10, 1915. The letter centers on Kierkegaard’s “At a Graveside,” which had appeared in the Modernist journal Der Brenner earlier that year. As Rilke elucidates Kierkegaard’s text to Erdman:

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[B]ut to appropriate earthly means, to achieve a certain completeness of our relations to the world, to be here unsayably, indescribably, breathlessly: would that not be the only way for us finally to prepare to become more than just worldly? I mean, we must experience the immeasurable through our inability to measure even the measurable. That is why Kierkegaard brings us into the earnestness of death without attributing a time span or eternal future to us over and beyond it [Darum schließt auch Kierkegaard uns in den Ernst des Todes ein, ohne darüber hinaus uns Frist oder ewige Zukunft zuzuschreiben]. To understand and passionately exhaust being here as a side of Being in general, that would be death’s challenge to us, while life, when one is only conscious of it, is all of life at every point. (Rilke and Erdman 74–74)

The topic of death in Kierkegaard’s speech would naturally be of immediate concern to Rilke, who dealt with it throughout his oeuvre.4 But what interests Rilke in particular in this instance is the fact that Kierkegaard approaches death not as a passageway to another life beyond it but rather as an absolute end that can teach us how to live the lives we have on earth. What Kierkegaard’s condition of intransitive love provides Rilke with, that is, is a perspective from the inexplicable (“Unerklärlich” in Haecker’s translation of Kierkegaard’s text [Kierkegaard, “Vom Tode” 53]) that does not carry us beyond the world but returns us to it with renewed intensity. Rilke’s engagement with Jacobsen and Kierkegaard in this way exhibits two important features, both directly relevant to the aesthetics of dependency. First, an emphasis on the contradiction between two opposed and structurally distinct spheres of experience, reality and ideality, and, second, the notion that there is a transcendent point of view from which our existence, caught in this contradiction, can be properly determined.

In what follows, I will argue that these compositional principles not only are to be found in Malte Laurids Brigge but are furthermore organized in that text in the terms specific to the aesthetics of dependency. The importance of Rilke’s novel for Modernism, it should be noted, has long been acknowledged, 5 although the difficulties it poses have continued to prove resistant to interpretation. In seventy-one separate entries, the novel’s hero, the Danish youth of its title, records his impressions of life in the inhospitable modern capital Paris, snippets of his childhood memories, and historical

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sketches and meditations on topics ranging from life, literature, and death to the nature of love. Most problematic about this vast canvas of concerns covered by Rilke’s text is its notoriously difficult mode of representation. As critics have frequently pointed out, Malte Laurids Brigge appears to stage the very impossibility of narration. The novel, critics tell us, “has no continuous action” nor “a hero in the sense of an experiencing I that actively participates in the progression of a plot” (Merz 267–268). The “individual entries . . . reveal no unified form” (Gutjahr 370), are “not arranged in any narrative or causal sequence” (Ziolkowski 15), and negate “the real course of time and dimensions of space” (Schmidt-Bergmann 36). The text establishes illogical and nonempirical causal relations that break with our habitual structures of meaning and experience and abandon all criteria of the realist novel (Hoffmann 215–217, 219–220). As a consequence, the reader is left with isolated and individual impressions but cannot form “an overview of the whole”: “The organization of the sections seems mosaic-like, but on stepping back no larger, perspicuous image emerges” (Fülleborn 150). As Franco Moretti has powerfully argued, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is an instance of a new generic hybrid at the beginning of the twentieth century, “the lyric novel,” which abandons the account of personal development for the representation of isolated moments: “The novel’s meaning is thus no longer found in the narrative, diachronic relation between events, but rather within each single ‘present’, taken as a self-contained, discontinuous entity” (Way 236). The critical approaches that have tried to argue for a coherent structure to Rilke’s novel in spite of these challenges have tended to fall into two groups.6 The first argues that a “musical,” metaphoric, or associative structure organizing the relation between entries can be identified beneath their seeming chaos.7 Mostly, readings of this type focus on the claim that the opening entries relate to each other through a shared set of preoccupations: the first entry deals with the sense of sight, the second with the sense of hearing, the third with silence, the fourth again with sight, the fifth and sixth with fear, the seventh and eighth with death. By the end of the novel, “[e]ach gemlike scene thus becomes a stone in the elaborate mosaic of the whole” (Ziolkowksi 30). The problem with these readings is that they fail to provide an analysis that shows how this principle extends beyond the opening passages, and the claim that a whole finally emerges must be taken on blind faith.8

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The second approach claims that the text is divided into three parts, which are said to mirror the progression of Malte’s consciousness in a number of ways: an opening sequence set in Paris, a second sequence dealing with his Danish childhood, and a third sequence dealing with the representation of historical narratives.9 The difficulty with this interpretation, however, is that it does not correctly reflect the structure of the text. It is true that, of the first thirty-eight entries that constitute the first half of the novel, all but three of the initial twenty-six are set in Paris, while all but one of the remaining twelve deal with Denmark. This can be argued to give the beginning of the novel the strong sense of a shift from present (Paris) to past (Denmark). But in the thirty-ninth to seventy-first entries, which are supposed to focus on historical narratives, only four do so (the fiftyfourth, fifty-fifth, sixty-first, and sixty-second): a total of just twenty and one-quarter pages, or less than 20 percent. The remaining 80 percent moves back and forth between Malte’s personal past and present in no discernible order, making any claim for a direct progression highly problematic. In distinction to both these approaches, I argue that the organization of Malte Laurids Brigge is grounded on a fourfold structure analogous to Kierkegaard’s aesthetics of dependency. I do so in four steps. Rather than dividing the novel in terms of Malte’s biography, I begin by identifying a binary opposition between two distinct representational logics, akin to that in Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne: first, that of fragmentation, associated with reality, isolation, and the encounter with death, and, second, that of unification, associated with conceptual determination, community, and art. Third, I proceed to show that a further representational principle is introduced in the novel’s second half, which combines the elements of fragmentation and unification and is associated with the notion of intransitive love that Rilke also ascribed to Kierkegaard. Finally, I argue in the fourth step that this last representational principle gains interpretative authority by positing a fourth textual dimension that underlies and connects the other three: the diachronic, sequential logic of the novel that critics have so far always denied exists.

fr agmentation The narrative and semiotic fragmentation exhibited by Rilke’s novel are well known and reflected in the secondary literature’s verdicts,

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quoted above. In this respect, the opening entries do indeed set the tone for the remainder of the text. The novel begins: September 11, rue Toullier So, then people do come here in order to live; I would sooner have thought one died here. I have been out. I saw: hospitals. I saw a man who swayed and sank to the ground. People gathered round him, so I was spared the rest. I saw a pregnant woman. She was pushing herself cumbrously along a high, warm wall, groping for it now and again as if to convince herself it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind it? I looked on my map: Maison d’Accouchement. Good. They will deliver her—it is possible to do that [man kann das]. Further on, rue Saint-Jacques, a big building with a cupola. The map said: Valde-grâce, Hôspital militaire. I didn’t really need to know that, but it doesn’t hurt. The street began to smell from all sides. A smell, so far as one could distinguish, of iodoform, of the grease of pommes frites, of fear. All cities smell in summer. Then I saw a curiously purblind house; it was not to be found on the map, but above the door there stood, still fairly legible: Asyle de nuit. Beside the entrance were the prices. I read them. The place was not expensive. And what else? A child in a standing baby-carriage. It was fat, greenish, and had a distinct eruption on its forehead. This was evidently peeling as it healed and did not hurt. The child slept, its mouth was open, breathing iodoform, pommes frites and fear. It was simply like that. The main thing was, being alive. That was the main thing. (1: 13; trans. modified / 12)

The contrast between Malte’s particular subjectivity and the city’s alienating objectivity is starkly set in this passage. The description’s focus on generic buildings and locations—all defined by the fact that they do not pertain to specific individuals but can be inhabited by anyone—generates a sense of abstraction: hospitals, hotels, “All cities.” The orientation in this space, moreover, occurs by means of a map (“I looked on my map,” “The map said: Val-de-grâce,” “it was not to be found on the map”), another objective and abstracted mode of representation, while the streets themselves are characterized only through their names—no detailed descriptions here—and in a foreign tongue at that. Even the human components do not escape this quality, as we are again introduced only to generic types: “People,” “a pregnant woman,” “a man,” “a child.” The central experiences emphasized in the passage, birth and death, are likewise universal rather than particular. On the other hand, the strong emphasis on the subjectivity of the narrative consciousness is signaled in the repeated use of the first-person

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pronoun: “I would sooner have thought,” “I have been out,” “I saw,” and so on. Further, the abstraction of the city is countered by the specific time and space of the writing, “11. September, rue Toullier,” as well as the use of diexis, “here” (both as “hierher” and “hier”), which depends on Malte’s physical presence for its meaning. Similarly, opposed to the objectivity provided by the city map, the description is repeatedly limited by Malte’s embodied perspective, by what he can and cannot see, as in the group of people obstructing his vision or the wall surrounding the Maison d’Accouchement. The repeated note of fear and disgust, generated by the description of filth and decay, likewise gives the passage the inflection of a specific subjectivity. Further still, the meaning and implication of statements such as “it is possible to do that” and “I didn’t really need to know that, but it doesn’t hurt” are not explained or motivated by any causal logic an external observer might have access to and consequently remain opaque. Even the repeated change in temporal forms in this section, between present, perfect, and preterit, as Goheen has pointed out (256), prevents the emergence of a temporal continuum usual for the beginnings of realist works. The opening entry of Rilke’s novel in this way operates with a number of defamiliarizing strategies. The principles of abstraction and subjectivity provide us with partial, fragmentary representations of the fictional world, and the contradiction and conflict between self and other, inner and outer, remain both stylistically and thematically unresolved. In the entries that follow, these tendencies are accentuated and expanded through a number of additional devices. Not only is the motivation for the transitions between individual entries difficult to discover, but within each passage we encounter the radical confusion of distinct existential and conceptual realms: trains and cars drive through Malte’s room (2: 14 / 9); inanimate objects such as shards of glass (2: 14 / 10) and abstract concepts like emptiness receive human qualities (5: 16 / 12); faces and death are described as pieces of clothing (5: 15–16 / 11, 7: 18 / 13). As Malte catalogs at one point, the persistence of dread and disgust generates a loss of scale and blurs all semiotic boundaries: “the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, big and heavy; the fear that this crumb of bread now falling from my bed may arrive glassy and shattered on the floor, and the burdensome worry lest at that really everything will be broken, everything for ever . . .” (20: 60–61 / 56). The placement of these opening descriptions in the context of the Parisian metropolis invites the reader to posit a sharp distinction

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between this modern world and that of Malte’s childhood memories, which is dominated by a feudal, aristocratic environment in the far less modern Denmark.10 Such a distinction is of course crucial to the second of the two critical approaches mentioned above, which seeks to establish a progression between different stages in Malte’s consciousness. The text itself would seem to lend strong support for this reading in the first of the entries that deals with Malte’s past, in which he explicitly contrasts the mode of dying in modernity to the one he knew in his childhood: “When I think back to my home . . . I imagine that formerly this must have been otherwise” (8: 18 / 14). In the former case, everyone dies an anonymous and alienating death imposed by social institutions and undiscriminating diseases, mass-produced as in a factory and without any relation to the individual (7: 17–18 / 13), while in the latter, each death is claimed to be uniquely suited to, and an intimate part of, its victim (8: 18 / 14–9: 23 / 19). This distinction in dying, however, does not seem to translate into a difference in modes of experience.11 If the personal relation to one’s death at first suggests a higher degree of semiotic stability and existential authenticity in the past than in the present, then the further description of Malte’s childhood nevertheless contradicts this possibility. The masterful description of Grandfather Brigge’s dying, for example, which occupies the eighth entry, makes it clear that death here, as in Paris, is a socially disruptive and negative force: cows give birth to stillborn calves, pregnant women must be removed, the priest can no longer understand his God, and the peasants curse the count (8: 21–22 / 17–18).The same threatening nature of death characterizes the various ghost stories in Malte’s past,12 which always generate fear, disorientation, and conflicts. If death in the present is described as the loss of meaning (“Sinn”) and the process by which the world becomes “unintelligible” (“unverständlich”) (18: 51 / 46), then this is true no less of its manifestation in the past.13 In Malte’s subsequent account of his visit to his maternal grandfather, Count Brahe, the experience of fragmentation that dominates the present similarly reappears. Describing the castle at which they stayed, Malte explains: “As I recover it in recalling my child-wrought memories, it is no complete building; it is all broken up inside me; here is a room, there a room, and here a piece of hallway that does not connect these rooms but is preserved, as a fragment, by itself. In this way it is all dispersed within me . . .” (15: 30 / 25–26). Later on, Brahe is himself characterized as indefinable in nature, exceeding

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any particular name and personality (15: 33 / 28), and in the already mentioned scene in which Malte dons costumes and masks, he goes through his near-annihilating loss of identity (32: 93–96 / 87–90). The experience of isolation is thus also prevalent in Denmark and brings about the loss of orientation no less there than in France. It is in the former, Malte tells us, that “when one played alone . . . one might happen inadvertently to trespass beyond this prearranged, on the whole harmless world and find oneself among circumstances that were entirely different and by no means to be foreseen” (32: 90 / 84). From this perspective, as Malte himself points out, to have grown older has made no difference (20: 61 / 56).

wholeness Rather than a distinction between past and present, then, both stages of Malte’s life are characterized by a shared fragmentation, a common loss of stable identities, and division between opposed conceptual and existential spheres. If an opposition between representational logics is to be found, it cannot be based on this temporal divide in the novel. That an opposition nevertheless does exist is clear. As Moretti has argued, the “veritable semiotic anxiety” found in the “lyrical novels” of the early twentieth century “produce[s] its own form of regression: the yearning for a world freed from the plurality, and hence uncertainties, of signification: for a world of Un-signs, as it were” (Way 240). In Malte Laurids Brigge, this world is associated with “the thoroughly communal life” that stands in clear contrast to the dread of isolation. The former is where each wanted to be supported in the feeling that he was among people he knew, and where one so carefully got on together in the comprehensible [im Verständlichen]. If one expected something, it came or it did not come; there was no third possibility. There were things there that were sad, once and for all, there were things that were pleasant, and a whole quantitiy of incidental ones. . . . Into these agreed boundaries everything would then fit. . . . (32: 89; trans. modified / 83)

The communal world is known and comprehensible, fixed within determined boundaries, clear binaries, and finalized meanings. Earlier, Malte associates this same condition with the soothing presence of his mother, who in the third of Rilke’s Duino Elegies reappears in the same function (cf. Duino 163–165 / 162–16414):

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O mother: o you only one, who shut out all this stillness, long ago in childhood. Who take it upon yourself, say: Don’t be afraid, it is I. Who has the courage all in the night to be this stillness for that which is afraid and perishing with fear. You strike a light, and already the noise is you. And you hold the light before you and say: It is I; don’t be afraid. And you put it down, slowly, and there is no doubt: it is you; you are the light around these familiar intimate things, that are there without any hidden meaning, good, simple, unambiguous. (Notebooks 23: 69–70; trans. modified / 64–65)

The world in which everything is “without hidden meaning” (“ohne Hintersinn”), “simple” (“einfältig”), and “unambiguous” (“eindeutig”) is a thoroughly humanized world, both in the sense that it is the relation between people that generates it and in the sense that it consists in the imposition of human meanings on our surroundings. As Malte elaborates in the meditation on his Parisian neighbor, it is when objects correspond to our concept (“Begriff”) of them that they become “simple” (“einfach”) and “familiar” (“bekannt”) (51: 157 / 144). Earlier (29: 85 / 79, 32: 94 / 88), it is precisely the inability to “begreifen,” or understand, that generates the experience of fear, but here its success bestows objects with their “natural, silent purpose,” which is equated not with their independent meaning but rather with the “uses” (“Anwendungen”) that we have for them (51: 158; trans. modified / 146). What Rilke in the Duino Elegies calls the “interpreted world” (151 / 150) is the world as viewed from the perspectives of our purposes and uses, in terms that clearly recall the similar construction in James’s Wings of the Dove. In the Duino Elegies, moreover, such a world is explicitly linked to technology (189 / 188), in an association that also recalls the one already seen in Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter. In Malte Laurids Brigge, however, it is furthermore linked to art. This might seem a counterintuitive claim given our established association of poetry with ambiguity and the excess of meaning (an association that Rilke’s own poetic oeuvre would certainly confirm), but the link is unequivocal. The aesthetic experiences represented in the novel, for example, are described in terms of an organic unity in which everything is in its proper place. In Malte’s frequently cited vision of the moon over the Seine, which is explicitly compared to a painting by Manet, everything has become “distinct” (“deutlich”) and “simplified” (“vereinfacht”). As Malte goes on to elaborate: “And nothing is trivial and superfluous . . . everything harmonizes, counts, takes part, creating a fullness in which nothing lacks” (12: 25 / 20).

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This idyllic situation is echoed in the subsequent description of the poetry of Francis Jammes (16: 43–44 / 36–37) and Beethoven’s music, which is similarly said to create order out of chaos (24: 71 / 65–66). This function of art is reiterated in the story of Malte’s neighbor in Saint Petersburg, who has lost all temporal and spatial coordinates and manages to stabilize his world by reciting poetry: “When one recited a poem slowly like this, with even stressing of the rhymes, one had, to some degree, something stable on which to keep a steady gaze, inwardly, of course” (49: 152 / 139). The association of stability with poetry is further stressed in the account of the death of Felix Avers, who delays his final moment on hearing the nun nursing him mispronounce the word “corridor”: “At that Arvers postponed dying. It seemed to him necessary to put this right first. He became perfectly lucid and explained to her that it should be ‘corridor’. Then he died. He was a poet and hated the approximate [das Ungefähre] . . .” (48: 146 / 133). Even Goethe is claimed to be preferable to people because he is “clearer . . . than nature” (57: 175 / 162). The fictional world of Malte Laurids Brigge is in this way organized by two distinct structural principles, which not only oppose each other but directly conflict. As Malte emphasizes, echoing Densher from The Wings of the Dove: “But, alas, on what a ledge this security rests. Only the slightest movement, and once again vision moves out beyond the known and friendly, and the contour that was so consoling just a moment ago grows clearer as an outline of terror” (23: 68; trans. modified / 63). The realm of chaos is continually encroaching on that of order, because both are constituted by fundamentally different rules: “No, no, one can imagine [vorstellen] nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars [einzigen Einzelheiten] that cannot be foreseen. In imagination [Im Einbilden] one passes them over and does not notice that they are lacking, hasty as one is. But the realities are slow and indescribably detailed” (45: 138 / 127). The faculty of imagination (“Einbildung”), which belongs to the realm of poetry and art, is here clearly opposed to a reality constituted of particulars it cannot grasp. In a contradiction familiar from the other text examined in this study, all order and determination is seen as an abstraction that inevitably falsifies life, which, as Malte states, “took pleasure in making no distinctions” (43: 128 / 117). The Manichean struggle between wholeness and fragmentation, idealist autonomy and avant-garde, condemns humans to a perpetual vacillation between the construction of

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order and its demise. As Rilke puts it in the eighth of the Duino Elegies: “It fills us with abundance. We order it. It falls apart. / We order it again and fall apart ourselves” (“Uns überfullts. Wir ordnens. Es zerfällt. / Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst”) (195; trans. modified / 194).

intr ansitive love The critical tradition’s efforts and failures to trace the poetic patterns in Rilke’s novel that might provide it with an ultimate unification partake of the conflict between fragmentation and wholeness discussed above. The rhythmic recurrence of themes, metaphors, and images throughout the text continually promise an order that nevertheless cannot be properly established. That this fact is constitutive of its structure, rather than a failure, can be seen from Malte’s deliberate rejection of the poetic paradigm associated with the holistic determination of meaning represented by figures such as Manet, Beethoven, and Goethe.15 In the famous fourteenth entry, after all, in which Malte assumes the task of a new poetic project, he clearly states that no one so far has adequately grasped and represented life—a claim that clearly must include the artists he describes (14: 28–30 / 23–25). The praise of Baudelaire’s poem “A Carcass” eight entries later is likewise qualified by Malte’s explicit rejection of the final stanza (22: 67 / 62): Ah then, o my beauty, tell the worms That will eat you up with kisses, That I have kept the form and divine essence Of my decomposed loves. (Baudelaire 63; trans. modified) Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine Qui vous mangera de baisers, Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine De mes amours décomposés! (62)

The ideal of the poet as the keeper of divine essences, of a conversion of horror into order and beauty, which the formal purity of The Flowers of Evil achieves so brilliantly, is not, that is, Malte’s own.16 If neither fragmentation nor wholeness constitute viable alternatives for Malte, this does not mean that he is reduced to a merely negative conclusion, unable to commit to either. As he states in the already cited passage that describes the encounter with death as the loss of all familiar meanings, this experience need not be final:

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If my fear were not so great, I should console myself with the fact that it is not impossible to see everything differently and yet to live. But I am afraid, I am afraid beyond words [namenlos] of this change. I have, indeed, hardly got used yet to this world, which seems good to me. What should I do in another? I would so gladly stay among the significations that have become dear to me. . . . (18: 51–52; trans. modified / 46–47)

The negative disruption of our familiar determinations of the world that death constitutes is here figured as a “Veränderung,” a “change” or “transformation,” that brings with it a change of vision but not necessarily a loss of life. As Rilke would elaborate in the first of his Duino Elegies, the difficulty of dying is merely this change from a perspective governed by human purposes and meanings to a new one that escapes them: Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, to give up customs one barely had time to learn, not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future; no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy. Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity. (195) Freilich ist es seltsam, die Erde nicht mehr zu bewohnen, kaum erlernte Gebräuche nicht mehr zu üben, Rosen, und andern eigens versprechenden Dingen nicht die Bedeutung menschlihcer Zukunft zu geben; das, was man war in unendlich ängstlichen Händen, nicht mehr zu sein, und selbst den eigenen Namen wegzulassen wie ein zerbrochenes Spielzeug. Seltsam, die Wünsche nicht weiterzuwünschen. Seltsam, alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raume flattern zu sehen. Und das Totsein ist mühsam und voller Nachholn, daß man allmählich ein wenig Ewigkeit spürt. (154)

What this alternative perspective entails and what function it plays in Malte Laurids Brigge are suggested by the introduction of Rilke’s famous notion of intransitive love in the novel’s second part.17

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The theme is central to Rilke’s oeuvre and appears in ten of the final thirty-three entries in the novel (39, 40, 57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71), dominating all of the last six. In its essence, Rilke’s notion of intransitive love maintains that a number of (primarily female) historical figures—Sappho, Heloïse, Gaspara Stampa, Maria Alcoforado, to name some of his staple examples—achieved a new kind of experience through their unrequited love, which freed them from the determination of their emotion by a specific object.18 The novel’s specific articulation and function of this notion are possibly figured most clearly in the fifty-eighth entry, which is worth quoting in full, in both its English translation and the original: Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of a grandeur not fit for us. The saint, rejecting fate, chooses these, face to face with God. But the fact that woman, following her nature, must make the same choice relative to man conjures up the doom of all love-relationships: resolute and without fate, like an eternal being, she stands beside him who transforms. The woman who loves always transcends the man she loves, because life is greater than fate. Her devotion wants to be immeasurable; that is her happiness. But the nameless suffering of her love has always been this: it is demanded of her that she restrict this devotion. No other plaint has ever been raised by women. The two first letters of Heloïse contain only this, and five hundred years later it rises from the letters of the Portuguese nun; one recognizes it as one does a bird-call. And suddenly through the clear field of this insight passes the very distant figure of Sappho, whom the centuries did not find, since they sought her in destiny. (58: 176; trans. modified) Das Schicksal liebt es, Muster und Figuren zu erfinden. Seine Schwierigkeit beruht im Komplizierten. Das Leben selbst aber ist schwer aus Einfachheit. Es hat nur ein paar Dinge von uns nicht angemessener Größe. Der Heilige, indem er das Schicksal ablehnt, wählt diese, Gott gegenüber. Daß aber die Frau, ihrer Natur nach, in Bezug auf den Mann die gleiche Wahl treffen muß, ruft das Verhängnis aller Liebesbeziehungen herauf: entschlossen und schicksalslos, wie eine Ewige, steht sie neben ihm, der sich verwandelt. Immer übertrifft die Liebende den Geliebten, weil das Leben größer ist als das Schicksal. Ihre Hingabe will unermeßlich sein: dies ist ihr Glück. Das namenlose Leid ihrer Liebe aber ist immer dieses gewesen: daß von ihr verlangt wird, diese Hingabe zu beschränken. Es ist keine andere Klage je von Frauen geklagt worden: die beiden ersten Briefe Heloïsens enthalten nur sie, und fünfhundert Jahre später erhebt sie sich aus den Briefen der Portugiesin; man erkennt sie

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wieder wie ein Vogelruf. Und plötzlich geht durch den hellen Raum dieser Einsicht der Sappho fernste Gestallt, die die Jahrhunderte nicht fanden, da sie sie im Schicksal suchten. (58: 163)

The invocation of Heloïse, Maria Alcoforado, and Sappho in the entry’s second paragraph makes it clear that we are dealing with the topic of intransitive love. In the first three sentences of the opening paragraph, a distinction between “fate” and “life” would appear to be established: the former is “difficult” (“schwierig”) due to its complexity, whereas the latter is “difficult” (“schwer”) because of its simplicity. The fourth sentence proceeds to state that in addition to its simplicity, life also contains a few things that are not adequate to our standards, literally, of a size not measurable by us (“von uns nicht angemessener Größe”). In the following line, it is said that the “saint” chooses precisely these things not measured by our standards and that this constitutes a rejection of “fate.” This establishes an equation between fate and life, as opposed to the initial appearance of their opposition, in virtue of their common contrast to things not measured by our standards. In the context of the previous discussion, both fate and life thus suggest themselves to be instances of the principle that organizes the world according to our human purposes, which is also, as seen above, the principle associated with art. The latter point is suggested not only by the description of fate in terms of its “patterns and designs” (“Muster und Figuren”) but also by the association of art with “fate” made previously in the book (e.g., 16: 40 / 35, 42 / 37). The claim that life is “schwer” due to its simplicity should accordingly be understood not in the sense of “schwierig” (“difficult”), as Herter Norton has it, but in that of “heavy” or “burdensome.” That is, life weighs us down precisely because of the patterns and figures that it constructs according to our human measure, and which, as seen above, fail to adequately grasp experience. It is in opposition to this principle of art and determination that life is said to also contain things that insist on exceeding our purposes and which the “saint” chooses. The equation of women, the subjects of intransitive love, with the “saint” occurs on the basis of the claim that they, too, must make this same choice, likewise placing them, that is, in opposition to human purposes and fate. This is confirmed both in the subsequent description of the women as “without fate” (“Schicksalslos”) and in the explicit contrast of Sappho to destiny in the final line, as well as in the narrative of the Prodigal Son, another figure of intransitive love, who is also said to cast off his “Schicksal,”

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“fate” (71: 215 / 200), which concludes the book. Similarly, the further opposition between intransitive love and poetry that this analysis implies is confirmed in surrounding entries, as in the contrast between Bettina von Arnim and Goethe in entry 57 (57: 175 / 162) and the distinction, in entry 69, between the Italian song’s “manifest conventionality” (“deutlicher Übereinkunft”) and the unfamiliarity of the song about unrequited love that follows (69: 207–208 / 192–193). The negation of fate and art by the principle of intransitive love, however, does not mean that it is simply to be equated with the opposed principle of fragmentation and “unique particulars” (“eizigen Einzelheiten”) that constitute reality and life. As much is already signaled in the additional description of the woman as “an eternal being” (“eine Ewige”), which stands in direct contradiction to the “transformation” ascribed to the man. The latter clearly places the man in the realm of temporality, transience, and finitude, to which fragmentation and “particulars” would seem to properly belong. In contrast, as Judith Ryan has pointed out in a different context, the eternity of the women is doubly assured, both because their complaint persists throughout centuries and because they all ultimately are the same (365). The contrast of intransitive love to the realm of pure particulars that this suggests, and which complements the former contrast to the realm of fate and art, is in fact already implied in the description of the saint at the beginning of the passage as choosing those things in life that are not measured by our standards “face to face with God” (“Gott gegenüber”). That this qualification is central to the idea of intransitive love in Malte Laurids Brigge is clear from the fact that it returns in the description of the unrequited lovers in entry 66, “before them is only God” (“vor ihnen ist nur noch Gott”) (66: 198; trans. modified / 184), and 71, “at that time began the long love to God, the silent labor without goal (ziellose Arbeit)” (71: 214; trans. modified / 199). It is clarified further in entry 63: Outside much has changed. I don’t know how. But inside and before you, O my God, inside before you, spectator [Zuschauer], are we not without action? We discover, indeed, that we do not know our part [Rolle], we look for a mirror, we want to rub off the make-up [abschminken] and remove the counterfeit [das Falsche] and be real [wirklich]. But somewhere a bit of disguise [Verkleidung] still sticks to us that we forget. A trace of exaggeration [Übertreibung] remains in our eyebrows, we do not notice that the corners of our lips are

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twisted. And thus we go about, a laughing-stock, a mere half-thing: neither existing [seiende], nor actors. (63: 194; trans. modified / 180–181)

At first sight, this passage associates the relation to God with acting (God is “Zuschauer,” and the subject plays a “Rolle”), which would mean that the final line opposes it to existence. With a closer look, however, it is clear that the relation is in fact the inverse. That which prevents Malte from properly assuming a position “Gott gegenüber” is the persistence of the attributes of acting: “abschminken,” “das Falsche,” “Verkleidung,” “Übertreibung,” and the turned-down corners of the mouth that echo the Greek masks of tragedy. From this perspective, it is existence as we know it first of all and most of the time that in fact constitutes the illusion and is opposed to being “Seiende.” The “Rolle” that having God as a “Zuschauer” entails, then, would not be playacting, and arguably is not such, because, as Malte tells us later on, God is not an object at all: “Previously, sometimes, I wondered why Abelone did not use the calories of her magnificent feeling on God. I know she yearned to remove from her love all that was transitive, but could her truthful heart be deceived about God being only a direction of love, not an object of love? Didn’t she know that she need fear no reciprocal love from him?” (70: 208–209; trans. modified / 194). Intransitive love, that is, falls between and combines the logics of wholeness and fragmentation that otherwise govern Malte’s fictional world. To the extent that it is opposed to human art and fate, it aligns itself with the anarchy and chaos of pure particularity. Yet, simultaneously, it transcends the realm of immanence that governs the latter since it deploys the category of eternity, although one defined not by the stability and abstraction of human concepts but rather by a relation to a God who remains completely other. If it exceeds human purposes and meanings, it nevertheless also relates to particulars with a specific direction, or telos, in mind. The absence of human measurements does not simply make the women “immeasurable,” as entry 58 puts it (58: 176 / 163), but also gives them a different standard altogether: “It does not surprise him . . . that in this lover, so altogether of the future, they saw only excess, not the new unit of measure [Maßeinheit] constituted of love and heart’s distress” (68: 202; trans. modified / 188). Placed on the other side of death, “jenseits vom Tode” (66: 198 / 184), intransitive love both assimilates the negative destruction of human determinations and organizes the world anew.

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fabula /syuzhet So far, the analysis has revealed the presence of three distinct representational principles in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. As in the interpretation of previous works in this study, the third of these does not establish a textual unity even as it claims to provide a new perspective from which its structure must be seen. The notion of intransitive love, in fact, is presented as a fully self-sufficient experience that does not stand in relation to anything else: “Such love does not need a response, it has mating-call and reply in itself; it answers its own prayers” (57: 176; trans. modified / 162). As Ryan has argued, the women in this way constitute an ideal for Malte that is wholly other and exceeds any narrative approximation (364–365). Beyond the subject-object divide, their standard of measurement is an absolute that can be conceptually invoked but which transcends and opposes the representational structures available to Malte and his readers. As much is clear from the fact that the meditations on intransitive love with which the novel concludes do not seem to stand in any positive relation to the entries that precede them. Rather than a narrative culmination that follows from and explains what came before, as critics have repeatedly noted, the ending seems to be completely separate.19 As Ulf Zimmerman’s comments make clear, the story of the Prodigal Son in the novel’s final entry is paradigmatic in this sense: Malte’s reinterpretation [of the Prodigal Son] stands in complete contradiction to all we know of the narrator’s experience or his narrative intention, and [it is] quite idiosyncratically imaginary. Malte’s Prodigal Son has volitionally left home and family, volitionally rejected the identity that they imposed on him, and he is able at will to return to all of them again. If his story is to have any bearing on Malte in its new interpretation, it can only lie in the fact that it is the opposite of Malte’s: His family is long dead, the manorial home sold, and the identity that they provided him thereby extinct. (57)

Zimmermann’s remarks are telling, not only because they point to the persistent difficulty in finding a structure to the text able to explain the relation of its constitutive parts, but also because they emphasize the question of returning as the central obstacle involved. As Rilke makes clear, this question of returning and repeating is central to his version of the parable: Indeed, his inward composure went so far that he resolved to retrieve [nachzuholen] the most important of the things he had hitherto been

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unable to accomplish, those that had simply been waited through. He thought above all of his childhood, and the more calmly he reflected, the more unachieved [ungetaner] did it seem to him; all its memories had about them the vagueness of premonitions, and their counting as past made them almost future. To take all this once more, and this time really, upon himself—this was the reason he, the estranged, turned home. (71: 215 / 200)

At its conclusion, the novel is telling us, quite literally, to return once more to its beginning. This task, moreover, is characterized as a transformation of that which is merely intuited (“Ahnungen”) into a reality (“wirklich auf sich zu nehmen”), a change that involves a shift from a merely passive state (“einfach nur durchwartet”) to an active one (“nachzuholen”; literally “to bring back”). If the text appears to end on a note diametrically opposed to Malte’s situation, then, it nevertheless instructs us to return to the beginning in order to retrace the trajectory once more and transform that contradiction. And indeed, and although to my knowledge this has never been noted in the secondary literature, from here it becomes clear that the apparent chaos and rupture of all continuities are only apparent. At the margins of the text, tucked away among the large philosophical questions, the poetic manipulations of language and experience, the horror, filth, and death, a clear temporal sequence is indicated. The first entry, as seen in the quotation with which this discussion began, is the only one that provides us with a concrete date (“11. September”), which is furthermore designated as “Sommer” (1: 13 / 9). The latter context is at least implied in the following entry, where Malte describes sleeping with his windows open (2: 14 / 9), and in entry 4 we are told he has been in Paris for “three weeks” (4: 15 / 10). By entry 11, it is fall, “Today we had a lovely autumn morning” (11: 24 / 19), by entry 16 “carnival-time” (16: 41 / 36), and “spring” in entry 21 (21: 61 / 56), to name but some of the more obvious temporal indications. Further, not only the Paris entries provide us with explicit markers of this kind; the memories from Denmark carry similar distinctions. Entry 8, the first of the entries dealing with Denmark, for example, is explicitly said to occur during the summer (8: 21 / 17), while entry 36 deals with the death of Malte’s paternal grandmother in the spring and is said to precede that of his grandfather recounted in entry 8 and to follow that of his mother, which happened in the fall (36: 108 / 101). The last of these is itself recounted in entry 33, which in this way follows entry 28, set during the mother’s last years

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and also containing the still earlier story of the appearance of Ingeborg’s ghost. The first mention of Abelone in entry 37 is said to take place in the first year after the mother’s death and covers the period up until Malte’s return on vacation the following summer (37: 109 / 102, 110 / 103). The visit to his maternal grandfather, which covers entries 15, 34, and 35, is qualified as happening “several years” after his mother’s death (34: 98 / 92), when Malte is twelve or thirteen years old (15: 30 / 25). Entry 45, in turn, which deals with the death of Malte’s father, is stated to occur when Malte has already begun to live abroad (45: 136 / 124), a period in his life that clearly includes the stay in Paris with which the book begins but also covers his time in Saint Petersburg (49), Naples (47), Venice (69), and Orange (64). Already at this point, it becomes clear that, far from a negation of all diachronic continuity, the novel in fact covers a direct progression from earliest childhood, through Malte’s voyage out, to his arrival in Paris—although not in terms of a psychological progression, as previous scholarship has argued, but rather, familiar from the other texts considered in this study, in terms of a pure linear temporality. Mapped out with the full range of temporal markers provided by the text, the following sequence of entries emerges: 44, 28B, 62A, 29, 31B, 30, 31A, 32, 33A, 27, 28A, 41, 42, 43, 33B, 36, 8, 9, 37, 15, 34, 35, 54A, 56, 45, 46, 49, 47, 69, 64, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 38, 39, 40, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54B, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62B, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71.20 Not an absolute gap between past and present, then, as the critical tradition has preferred to claim, but, quite to the contrary, a temporal sequence that underlies and connects all entries, bringing a common ground to their constitutive representational principles. The chaos that we see on our first reading is inherent not to the fictional world but only to its narration, to the story’s syuzhet but not its fabula, in the familiar parlance of Russian Formalism. If the notion of intransitive love gains interpretative authority as the standard of measurement according to which the elements of Malte’s world must be determined, this is accordingly because it lays bare the principle through which its parts connect. The ending provides us with a new framework from within which to relate to the relation of the novel’s various constitutive terms. Rather than a distinct and isolated principle, the notion of intransitive love is placed teleologically with respect to the structures of fragmentation and totality. The dimension of biographical time that links all individual entries transforms the beginning of

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the text into a middle, which now, upon its repetition, receives its value and function from its relation to coordinates it did not previously possess. The labor of returning signaled by the Prodigal Son lies in the negotiation of this tension in the text. As in the aesthetics of dependency at large, meaning and justification are found in a process of living that consists in the goal-oriented attempt to negotiate our contradictions.

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Conclusion

The preceding chapters have argued that an aesthetic paradigm not previously considered by the secondary literature must be understood as central to the evolution of European Modernism. Distinct from the models of both autonomy and fragmentation that the field has traditionally relied on, this “aesthetics of dependency” combines attributes of both in a new organizational structure. Similar to the aesthetics of fragmentation usually associated with the avant-gardes, the aesthetics of dependency stages the inherent incompatibility of the constitutive elements of a literary work. But unlike the avant-gardes, and akin to the aesthetics of autonomy, the aesthetics of dependency also insists that a mediation of those incompatible elements must nevertheless take place. Such a mediation that does not reduce opposites to an underlying identity is made possible through the imposition of a criterion or ground for the relation between the incommensurable terms that transcends the logic of those terms themselves. In the aesthetics of dependency, the process of negotiating the gap between this specific criterion and the constitutive principles that cannot contain it becomes an end in itself and provides the necessity and justification for the work’s different parts. This analysis of aesthetic structures concerns primarily the organization of literary works as a whole, not the works’ individual thematic or formal components, or even the works’ specific meanings or ideological commitments. In the latter respects, accordingly, the texts dealt with in this study need not necessarily agree and, in fact, frequently do not. The notion of metaphor, for example, in Hofmannsthal’s The 269

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Lord Chandos Letter is not identical to that analyzed in relation to Joyce’s “The Dead.” Nor is the conception of the past-as-such in A Doll’s House similar to the notion of the past in Hofmannsthal’s text, or the representation of love in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge similar to that in James’s The Wings of the Dove. At the same time, in spite of such differences, it is clear that the works discussed in this study do share a great number of such text-immanent components. Most of the texts examined are concerned with the destabilizing function of capital and money, with the limitations of determined categories of identity and social roles, or with the difficulty of interpretation and language, and all agree on the problematic status of the past, irrespective of the different configurations that this temporal dimension receives in different works. Most significant for the present study is that among such shared text-immanent features in each of the works dealt with, the experience of linear temporality has played a central and constitutive function, expressly as a mediating principle. This mediating function is an effect of the consistent deployment of the trope of linear temporality as a specific moment in the structure of dependency that also links these works in terms of a shared aesthetic form. What is particularly interesting about this use of linear time is that it points to the way in which this shared aesthetic form itself is inflected in Modernist terms. As important figures such as Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno, among others, have argued, what is paradigmatically Modernist is the complete loss of traditional categories and criteria for meaning in art. In the works studied here, the mode of mediation provided by the aesthetics of dependency is similarly deployed against traditional structures of meaning, not as a support for them. The inability of inherited categories to grasp modern experience is explicitly enacted, and the need to transform them is asserted without providing a determinate result. Instead, the works aim to lay bare the condition of mediation itself, making the process of achieving meaning in the mode of linear time the focus of the text. In A Doll’s House, the moral categories of nineteenth-century drama are both subverted and subjected to reinterpretation, the success of which is left to us as audience. In The Lord Chandos Letter, the structure of science becomes the tool that we must both rely on and exceed in order to grasp the reality that grounds the purposeful relation of distinct parts. In “The Dead,” tradition and poetry must be reconceived if we are to understand the revelation that fulfills their respective needs but yet is incompatible

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with their criteria. And so on. In each case, the formal organization constitutes a reconsideration of the notions of truth and experience akin to that first formulated by Kierkegaard, which, in a Modernist vein, rejects traditional criteria for meaning, lays bare their fundamental conditions of possibility, converts them into a problem, and makes the process of achieving them into a purpose in its own right. But no less important, the ways in which such new notions of truth and experience challenge and transform the precise thematic and representational elements of each text are unique and particular to the given work. As discussed in the introduction to this volume, the presence of text-immanent elements such as the ones enumerated above can serve as a minimum condition for characterizing these works as Modernist. A maximum condition for doing so is provided by the way that the particular inflection of the aesthetics of dependency operative in these works makes the formal organization of those elements notably Modernist as well. To this extent, the aesthetic paradigm traced here is a crucial factor in a history and theory of Modernism, not only in virtue of its presence in works habitually associated with that movement, but also because it provides another instance of the way that Modernist experience can be organized and represented in specifically Modernist terms. Clearly this does not mean that the aesthetics of dependency is more privileged than others (autonomy and fragmentation can likewise be inflected in this way), nor is there a reason to assume that the three structures traced in this book exhaust the actual repertoire of Modernist aesthetics. Quite to the contrary, another central argument of the preceding chapters has been that the difference between such aesthetic structures is largely a result of the development of literary forms in different contexts, subject to different historical and social pressures, which they seek to resolve in different ways. I have thus proposed that the aesthetics of dependency on which this book focuses first emerges in the peripheral context of nineteenth-century Scandinavian culture. Although I have found no evidence to this effect, this is not to say that it is in principle impossible that such an aesthetic paradigm could, or did, develop elsewhere as well. To deny that possibility would inevitably involve a crude form of historical determinism. But it is to claim that the cultural setting of Scandinavia provided a particularly apt context for the development and dissemination of this aesthetic form. It would seem that it did so due to,

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among other reasons, the powerful legacy of Heiberg’s idealist aesthetics, which tied the principle of autonomy to a particular political and social structure that the most advanced Scandinavian authors were trying to reject by the 1870s. At the same time, the marginal position of Scandinavia and the persistence of premodern forms of culture made any unambiguous embrace of European modernity highly problematic. Already in the 1840s, Kierkegaard set out a path that tried to combine both options by tying them to a structure of knowledge that both reconsiders and has deep roots in the pietist tradition that pervaded nineteenth-century Scandinavia. The utility and appeal of this solution grew after 1848, when the aesthetics of reconciliation favored by Heiberg increasingly revealed itself to be outdated, and it is clear that by the time of Peer Gynt, the experience of fragmentation had become too prevalent in Ibsen’s work to be ignored or subdued in any traditional ways. As Franco Moretti has recently pointed out (although in the context of a very different reading), Ibsen’s prose plays, in which, I have argued, Kierkegaard’s aesthetics of dependency first find their full articulation, span the great economic crisis of 1873–1896 (“Grey” 121). It is also during this period and its immediate aftermath that those authors from the European core studied in the preceding chapters first encountered the works of Ibsen and Kierkegaard and reacted to them in terms strongly resonant of the aesthetics of dependency. It lies at hand, therefore, to suggest that the impact of this new economic crisis made the mediation and organization of modern experience found in that aesthetic model particularly inviting as a possible response and possibly also that the utility of that specific model exhausted itself with the further developments of European culture. What matters here is to insist that insofar as one can find textual, theoretical, and historical support for the existence of aesthetic models other than those prevalent in the standard accounts of European Modernism, it is clear that the archive and methodology of the field need to be radically expanded and revisited. Only by returning to the full historical context do the tools for new analyses and theorizations of literature emerge, and only by acquiring the theoretical tools for understanding literature in different ways can we discern new historical genealogies and literary forms. In an era when it appears increasingly difficult and important to identify and imagine the relation between events, the opportunity that literature affords for thinking relation as such and anew ought to be fully explored.

notes

introduction: the aesthetics of modernism 1. To name but a few, the centrality of autonomy is emphasized by Huyssen, After 7–8; Klinger 150–153; Adorno 325; Bürger, Theory 15–54; Ortega y Gasset 52–57; Eagleton, “Capitalism” 140; Friedrich 20; Poggioli 127, 201–202; Murphy 4–7; Plumpe 138ff.; Russell 11–12, 18–21; Falkenstrøm 263; Brostrøm 23; Einfalt 458–478; Johnston, “All” 153; and Butler 3. Cf. also the discussions in Jameson 161–179; Eysteinsson 9–18; Freedman xxv; and Moi 19–21. 2. Cf., e.g., Bürger, Theory 79–80; Perloff 102; Russell 34; and Murphy 13–23. 3. Cf. also Bürger, Theory 15–34; Plumpe 72–77; and Einfalt 459–478. 4. Cf. also, e.g., Huyssen, After 11; Bürger, Theory 70–73; Możejko 27; Russell 11–12, 24; Bradbury and McFarlane 25; Bradbury and Fletcher 407; Perloff 110, 228; and Murdoch 260. Cf. also Eysteinsson 11, 16, who nevertheless opposes this view. 5. Cf., e.g., Klinger 150–151; Wolfzettel 445; Einfalt 458; Bürger, Theory 26, 41–42; Plumpe 65–105; Poggioli 46–59; Freedman xxvi–xxvii; and Frank, Einführung 364–368, et passim. Equating early German romanticism with idealism is not unproblematic. In doing so in this study, I follow Frederick Beiser’s argument (German 349, n.2, 350) and seek to emphasize the basic underlying principles of the tradition that are central to the aesthetics of autonomy in spite of the many important philosophical differences that it contains. 6. Cf., e.g., Bürger, Theory 79–80, 35–54; Huyssen, After 7; Perloff 102, 38–39; Eagleton 131; Russell 33–34; Murphy 13–23, 11; and Hjartarson 183–184. The distinction between modernism and avant-garde is also discussed by Murphy, Russell, Huyssen, After 3–15; Możejko 19–30; Falkenstrøm 258–272; Shepherd-Barr 148–169; and Poggioli 222–231. 7. In this regard, cf. also Falkenstrøm 27. 8. The distinction between realist and Modernist modes of representation is made by, e.g., Eysteinsson 179–241; Możejko 27–28; Dahlerup 29; Gemzøe, “Modernism, Narrativity” 125; G. Larsen 169; Ortega y Gasset 63–64; and Fokkema and Ibsch 33–47. It should be noted that Modernist

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techniques have also been viewed as an extension of realist ones rather than their direct negation; cf., e.g., Lewis 44, 24; Auerbach 469–493; Watt 206– 207; and Bürger, “Moderne” 1295. 9. Lukcás in the original German uses the term “Avantgarde” rather than “Modernismus,” but this is due to the particularities of the German usage, where the latter term did not gain prominence until fairly recently and therefore does not imply the kind of aesthetic distinction between modernism and avant-garde outlined above. Indeed, as the present discussion will make clear, to Lukács, no work within Modernism achieves the kind of organic totality associated with modernism, or, phrased differently, any work that does would eo ipso be realist. For a useful discussion of the various meanings of the term “Modernism” in different linguistic and historical contexts, see Klinger 123–149. 10. That Lukács’s notion of the objective totality represented by realism derives from the same idealist aesthetics that are frequently associated with modernism is everywhere apparent in his oeuvre and has frequently been pointed out (cf., e.g., Bürger, Theory 84, 86, and Murphy 14–15, as well as Harries’s critique of Lukács in “Die Ungegenwärtigkeit” 245; for an account of the influence of German idealism on the notion of totality in Western Marxism in general and Lukács in particular, cf. also Jay). Moretti, for his part, develops his notion of compromise in a reading of Kant and Schiller in his early essay “The Soul and the Harpy,” 29–34. 11. On this point, cf. also Adorno 38. 12. Cf. Scarry 58; Armstrong 2; de Bolla 13–14; and Attridge 1. On this point, see also the earlier essay by Levine; more recently, Staten 226–227; and Anderson 249. 13. Cf., e.g., Scarry 62; and Armstrong 41. 14. Cf., e.g., Watten 227; Baer 308; Russell 7; Friedrich 35–36; Ortega y Gasset 83; and Bradbury and McFarlane 36. 15. Cf., e.g., Borum 13; Brostrøm 12, 24; Dahlerup 31; and Moi 90. 16. Cf., e.g., Dahlerup 31; Longum 97; Reuter 108; Jansson 841; Povlsen 856; Gemzøe, “Modernisme og mimesis” 53; G. Larsen 159–160; and Madsen 181. On this general neglect of Scandinavia’s role in the history of European Modernism, cf. also my article “Scandinavia.” A similar point has been made by Lothe and Tysdahl in their account of Norwegian Modernism: “It has sometimes been taken for granted that Norwegian writers were influenced by English and European modernism rather than the other way round, and that a significant modernist strand is only observable in Norwegian literature of the 1950’s and 1960’s. But the history of modernism in Norway is more extended and more nuanced than such a generalized point might lead one to expect” (867). 17. Recent treatments of the relationship between nineteenth-century Scandinavian authors and European Modernism can also be found in Tysdahl et al., English and Nordic Modernisms; Jansson, Lothe and Riikonen, European and Nordic Modernisms; and Annegert Heitmann and Karin Hoff, Ästhetik der skandinavischen Moderne, especially the contributions by Ewbank, Fjågesund, Rem, and Detering. Over and above addressing the

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particular question of Scandinavia’s relation to Modernism, the project of expanding the Modernist canon in the terms proposed here is also related to the examination of “alternative modernities” that has been put forward in recent years primarily in the context of postcolonial studies. It is similar to that project in that it shares the overarching theoretical aim, formulated by Parameshwar Gaonkar, to think through the Western understanding of Modernism “with a difference,” where this means “a difference that would destabilize the universalist idioms, historicize the contexts, and pluralize the experiences of modernity” (15). On the basis of my argument so far, however, it will also be clear that Marginal Modernity differs from the studies edited by Gaonkar (as well as those in related publications, such as the collection edited by Doyle and Winkiel and the September 2006 special issue of Modernism/Modernity: Modernism and Transnationalisms) in at least one, and frequently all, of the following three ways. First, the geographical and historical area I focus on is not that of postcolonialism but the margins of European culture itself. Second, the material that I draw on is first and foremost literary, rather than, for example, primarily anthropological or historical. Third, my object of analysis is aesthetics, the fundamental organization of literary works, which is to say the fundamental ways in which the components of modern experience can be made artistically significant, not primarily those components themselves. I am grateful to Glenn Odom for bringing this recent work in postcolonial studies to my attention. 18. Weinstein 2, 9; Moi 17–19. 19. To some extent it is questionable whether Moi in fact operates with an aesthetic notion of idealism at all, at least in the sense of “aesthetic” deployed above, as the structure of organization for the work as a whole. While Moi at times points out, for example, that idealism insists not necessarily on any specific content but only on a specific treatment or mode of representation that centers on “reconciliation” and “harmony” (95, 96), she does not sufficiently explain what such reconciliation and harmony might consist of, other than the absence of sex, poverty, and conflict among characters. This, however, clearly begs the question, since the mere presence of such topics has been said not to constitute the problem for idealism. Similarly, while Moi (rightfully, in my view) emphasizes the importance of the origins of idealism in German idealist philosophy (70), her discussion of this topic remains fairly superficial and boils down to the claim that idealist philosophy asserts the identity of beauty, truth, and goodness (e.g., 72, 74, 77–78). There is no analysis of the philosophical foundations for this equation, which accordingly does not shed any light on its formal implications and ends up making idealism sound like little more than puritanical prudishness (more what Bernard Shaw had in mind than what Kant and his contemporaries were concerned with). In my view, this has three important consequences for Moi’s analysis. First, it fails to properly account for the fact that idealist art frequently did not exclude the kinds of themes that Moi opposes to it. The statement, for example, that to Schiller and his idealist contemporaries, “sex and women . . . should never be treated realistically” (70) flies in the face of the controversy surrounding a book such as Schlegel’s Lucinde, or

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the explicit sexuality in Goethe’s Wilhlem Meister, or even Schiller’s own Braut von Messina (all authors that Moi associates with idealism). Second, at the level of aesthetic form, the claim that idealism had a continuous life from German idealist philosophy to the twentieth century is a less original argument than Moi assumes (ibid.). As pointed out above, the same claim had already been made in prominent accounts of modernism such as those by Abrahams, Moretti, and Bürger. And third, it prevents Moi from discussing the idealist origins of her own conception of Ibsen’s Modernism, which I trace in chapter 4. 20. An account of international literary relations similar to Casanova’s has in recent years also been offered by Franco Moretti, who likewise argues that literary influence is almost exclusively a question of the coercion of the periphery by the core (cf. “Conjectures”; “More Conjectures”; and Atlas 141–197). Interestingly, Moretti’s model resembles Casanova’s in that it, too, depends on a conflation of the sociological and the aesthetic dimension of the concept of “autonomy” (which, as mentioned above, he reconceives as “compromise”). Moretti in these recent studies transfers his previously text-analytic tool of the structure of “compromise” to the intercultural relations between different literatures, insisting that peripheral countries are almost always forced into a form of compromise with the textual structures imported from the core (cf., e.g., “Conjectures” 152–155; “More Conjectures” 75–77; Atlas 193). Significantly, this view contradicts that of Immanuel Wallerstein, on which Moretti’s model otherwise depends, insofar as Wallerstein perceives culture as precisely the one realm in which the peripheries can mount a resistance to the core’s economic and political hegemony (cf. The Modern World-System II 65). Moretti, however, both is more generous than Casanova in his allowance for the possibility that aesthetic innovations from the periphery might have an impact on the core (cf., e.g., Atlas 195–197), and provides more textual support for his claims. Moretti’s model will be discussed at greater length at the end of chapter 2. That formal innovations often originate at the periphery and from there travel to the core has also been persuasively argued by Katie Trumpener.

1. presuppositions and varieties of aesthetic experience 1. In addition to primary sources, the following discussion is deeply indebted to a number of the excellent studies on the history of post-Kantian philosophy that have appeared in recent years. These include, in particular, Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte; Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801; Beiser, The Romantic Imperative; Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik; Frank, ‘Unendliche Annäherung’: Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik; Dieter Henrich, Der Grund im Bewußtsein: Untersuchungen zu Hölderlins Denken (1794–1795); Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism; and Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism.

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2. As Kant explains, “I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects, insofar as this is to be possible a priori” (A 11–12 / B 25; cf. also A 56 / B 86). 3. The seminal interpretation of the Table of Judgments along these lines has been provided by Brandt in Die Urteilstafel. 4. It should be noted that Maimon’s philosophical project does not stop with his skeptical attack on Kant. Quite to the contrary, in light of the latter, Maimon also seeks to return to a metaphysical rationalism that rejects the Kantian dualism altogether. Since this dimension of Maimon’s thought is not directly relevant to the present purposes, I omit discussion of it here. 5. Among these, Beiser counts Hamann, Reinhold, Schulze, Platner, Ultich, and Titel (Fate 41, 43, 325). 6. Baeumler; Frank, Einführung 234–236. 7. On the influence of the Letters on Schiller’s contemporaries, cf. Beiser Romantic 93, 96, 100. On Schiller’s influence on post-Kantian philosophy more generally, cf. Beiser, Schiller 7, 84, 110, 129, 151, 215–216, 237; Beiser, German 382; Beiser, Hegel 40; Frank Einführung 102–103, 109; Dahlstrom 8; Larmore 141; Bowie 24; Henrich, “Begriff” 545; and Abrams 199. 8. The translation of “Trieb” is difficult; besides “drive,” it can also be rendered as “urge,” “desire,” or “impulse,” all of which are operative in Schiller’s use of the term. 9. “Stoff” again denotes and connotes various important English equivalents, such as “matter,” “substance,” and “content.” 10. It is important to note, as Beiser does (Schiller 139), that Schiller’s Stofftrieb in this way encompasses both intuitions and desires, while his Formtrieb covers both understanding and reason, whereas Kant distinguishes between all four. Accordingly, it is not only Schiller’s notion of sensibility that differs from Kant’s but also that of reason, insofar as the latter is conceived as the faculty of synthesis in general (cf. Schiller, Kallias 397; Letters 119 / Über die ästhetische 605; cf. also Beiser, Schiller 58–59, 61). 11. The influence of Platonism on Schiller’s conception of love as recognition has been stressed by Henrich, Hegel 13, 19; Henrich, “Begriff” 538; and Beiser, Schiller 84. The latter also emphasizes it as a central aspect of postKantian thought more generally; cf. German 354–355, et passim; Beiser, Romantic 56–72; and Beiser, Hegel 37–38, 40, 87. 12. E.g., Frank, Einführung 116–119; Henrich, Grund 222, 317–318; and Beiser, Schiller 105–106. 13. In this way, I agree with Beiser that it is necessary to distinguish between the notion of beauty in “On Grace and Dignity” and that of the “aesthetic condition” discussed in Letters on the Aesthetic Education (Schiller 154–155). However, as far as I can see, there is no support in the text for Beiser’s further claim (140–141) that the concept of beauty in “On Grace and Dignity” should be equated with that of the Spieltrieb also discussed in Letters on the Aesthetic Education, since Schiller clearly identifies the Spieltrieb with the “aesthetic condition” (Letters 154–155 / Über die ästhetische 644). In any case, Beiser subsequently contradicts his own distinction by equating

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the aesthetic condition with the concept of an organic whole attributed to the beautiful soul of “On Grace and Dignity” (Schiller 210). 14. I would accordingly disagree with Henrich’s statement that “The transcendental theoretical problem of the possibility of cognition has no real weight for Schiller. He acknowledges it, but is not guided by it” (“Begriff” 545). Likewise, Frank’s similar assessment that Schiller is concerned only with the relation between reason, as the faculty of morality, and already categorically constituted objects of experience (i.e., with the systematic, rather than the epistemological problem in Kant’s philosophy) (Einführung 132–133) is directly contradicted by this crucial discussion in Letters on the Aesthetic Education. Both Henrich’s and Frank’s interpretations would seem to derive from their failure to see that while Schiller retains Kant’s language, his conception of sensibility is nevertheless not the same. Rather, similar to the neo-empiricist position of Maimon, Schiller’s sensibility is constituted by representations without categorical determinations. 15. To this extent, I disagree with Henrich’s claim that Schiller fails to provide an explanation of the relation between the “aesthetic condition” and the “pure concept of beauty, in which humanity perfects itself” (Grund 317– 318). A relation similar to the one that I argue organizes Schiller’s conceptions of beauty is in fact also claimed by Allison for the relation between the conditions of the “free play” of the faculties and that of their “harmony” in Kant’s third Critique (cf. Allison, Kant’s 116–117). 16. Given the brevity of “Urteil und Sein” (840–841), references to individual parts of the argument will be omitted. 17. In drawing on Kant’s argument for an exposition of Hölderlin, I am following Frank’s lucid discussion in ‘Unendliche’ 662–689. 18. For this general shift in the conception of truth, cf. Frank, Einfürhung 42–43, 123–124; for the Frühromatiker’s concept of Poesie as the subject’s creative power, cf. Beiser, Romantic 15–18, and Larmore 154. 19. The extent of Kierkegaard’s possible knowledge of Kant is difficult to determine, and too strong an insistence on direct influence would therefore be useless. However, it is clear from his notebooks that Kierkegaard was at least familiar with Kant’s Table of Judgments (Notesbog 10 302), and, further, it is possible to argue for a similarity in this regard on the ground that both authors are drawing on a mode of conceptual organization that, as Reinhard Brandt has meticulously shown, is in fact pervasive in Western culture (cf. Brandt, D’Artagnan). For a discussion of Kierkegaard’s familiarity with Kant, cf. Greene. 20. That Kierkegaard was familiar with a notion of the title of modality similar to that in Hölderlin and others is clear from his strong interest in Adolf Trendelenburg’s Logische Untersuchungen. This is a topic that has only recently begun to receive attention in the secondary scholarship and requires a more detailed discussion in order to be properly assessed in the context of the present argument. It is only necessary here to point out that Trendelenburg also understands the title of modality as the perception of an organic unity that provides the ground for the relation of terms in a

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judgment (cf. Logische Untersuchungen 2: 97–138). For a recent study of Kierkegaard’s relation to Trendelenburg, cf. González. 21. The equation of Kierkegaard with negative theology, accordingly, seems illegitimate. For such readings, cf., e.g., Kangas’s otherwise highly insightful study, as well as Law. In this respect, cf. also Harries’s discussion in chapter 13 of Between Nihilism and Faith. 22. Kierkegaard’s reasons for conceiving of the incarnation as a unique and unrepeatable historical event are complicated, although far-reaching in their consequences. A proper examination of this issue cannot be provided here. Cf., e.g., Philosophical 109 / Philosophiske 305; Concluding 584, 613– 614 / Afsluttende 531, 557. 23. That Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments uses the word “Betingelse” not only in the sense of “condition” but also in that of “premise” is clear from, e.g., 40 / 245. 24. It should be noted that there is considerable lack of clarity in Kierkegaard’s discussion as to whether the condition (“Betingelse”) given to man by God is the intuition of faith, or whether it is simply the fact of the incarnation as a contradiction that generates infinite passion and on the basis of which faith emerges. In the former case, faith is the condition for the “Zuthat” that constitutes the leap, while in the latter, it is the result. Both readings, in my view, are possible in Philosophical Fragments, culminating in the definition of faith on 58 / 261, where faith is simultaneously characterized as condition and result. A more exhaustive analysis of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre is required to resolve this contradiction, which nevertheless is not necessary for the present argument. What matters here is only that faith is a transcendently derived intuition of absolute otherness placed in relation to actuality.

2. johan ludvig heiberg and the autonomy of art 1. Two notable recent exceptions to this general neglect are Koch, and Stewart, History 1: 69–114. 2. Heiberg has begun to receive renewed attention in recent years; cf., e.g., the studies by Kirmmse; Pattison, Poor; Stewart, Johan Ludvig Heiberg; Stewart, Kierkegaard’s; and Stewart, History, vols. 1–2. 3. For Heiberg’s own account of his life-changing encounter with Hegel’s work, cf. Stewart, History 1: 123–124. 4. For Andersen and Kierkegaard’s ambiguous love-hate relationship to the Heiberg circle, cf. Gorm Hansen. On the Heiberg circle as representatives of Danish Golden Age “culture of education” (“Dannelseskultur”) more generally, cf. also Garff, “Andersen.” 5. Kierkegaard wrote his 1848 text The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress about Johanne Louise Heiberg. 6. Cf. Brandes, “Heibergs” 426–427, 437; Brandes, “Johan” 443; and Ibsen’s 1883 preface to Gildet paa Solhaug 28. Ibsen’s relation to Heiberg will be explored at greater length in chapter 3. 7. Cf., e.g., Borup 1: 119–122; Borup 2: 37–88; Fenger 79–110. 8. For a summary description of Scribe’s plots, cf. Fenger 71–72.

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9. Cf., e.g., Engels’s famous letter to Margaret Harkness, in which he discusses Balzac’s “complete history of French Society from which, even in economic details . . . I have learned more than all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together” (Marx and Engels 91). 10. On the presence of money as a plot-resolving device in Heiberg’s vaudevilles, cf. also Borup 2: 79. 11. References are to Stewart’s translation, followed by the page numbers in the original Danish edition, as they appear in the English text. 12. On Scribe as part of a late variety of melodrama, cf. Brooks, Melodramatic 160. 13. Cf. Beiser, Schiller 124–129; Beiser, Hegel 10; and Beiser, Romantic 37. 14. It should be noted that Beiser does not draw on this aspect of Pocock’s argument. 15. Heiberg himself can be seen to do as much in “On the Significance” 98–100 / 402–406. 16. On the absolutist allegiance of Holberg’s dramas, cf. Hougaard 94. 17. The distinction between Holberg and the French vaudeville in terms of their respective focus on character and plot is explicitly formulated by Heiberg in “Tre” 139, among other places. 18. Fenger 56; Schrøder 466. 19. All references to The Danes in Paris will be indicated by act, scene, and page. 20. Cf. I. xii. 258, where it is clear that the Major has so far only received notice of the death of his uncle and permission to return to Copenhagen in order to claim his inheritance, without yet having done so. His declared purpose is thus from the start to get his family and move back to Denmark so that he can take possession of his newly gained property. 21. On Heiberg’s financial difficulties and perpetual debt, cf. Borup 1: 40, 76, 127, 134, 140–141; and Borup 2: 24. 22. Clausen 149; Borup 2: 72; Fenger 40–41; and Schrøder 261. 23. Unless otherwise noted, throughout this study I use the terms “symbol” and “allegory” along the lines defined by Jonathan Culler: “In the symbolic text the process of interpretation is made to seem natural. . . . It [the symbol] is a natural sign in which signifiant and signifié are indissolubly fused, not an arbitrary or conventional sign in which they are linked by human authority or habit. Allegory, on the other hand, stresses the difference between levels, flaunts the gap we must leap to produce meaning, and thus displays the activity of interpretation in all its conventionality” (229). 24. For a description of the historical origin and function of the foundation, cf. Clausen 151. 25. The linguistic specificity of these instances makes translation impossible. As a representative example, in the first song, the servant Mikkel thematizes the phonetic similarity between semantically distinct idioms in Danish and French. For example, the Danish “Hør, Mosjø, Klø’er til!,” approximately, “Listen, mister, hit it hard!,” is used with the semantic function of the French “Monsieur, quelle heure est-il?,” “Sir, what time is it?” (II. vi. 286).

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26. The melody of the song is the French “Vive le Roi, vive la France,” while the text is in Danish. 27. For an account of the immediate success and impact of Heiberg’s vaudevilles, cf. Clausen 1–28. 28. This point has been well argued in Vibæk and Brønsted 512–514. 29. The specific form of political attention that Heiberg thought necessary is spelled out a few pages later: “[I]n a city like Copenhagen, which is the center of the entire country’s culture, [there must] necessarily be a modeltheatre, where one has the required guarantees that the management is ruled by the will and capacity to educate public taste, rather than mere pursuit of economic gains. But such a guarantee can only be provided by a royal theatre, where the management has the same moral and political responsibility towards the government as any other state authority” (“Om Theatret” 191; my emphasis). Cf. also ibid. 200 for a further explicit formulation of the aristocratic nature of the control Heiberg would like to see exercised over the theater. 30. Interestingly, Wallerstein points out that such a protectionist and interventionist attitude toward the economic market is characteristic of the consolidation and expansion of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Modern World-System III 18–20).

3. aesthetics of fr agmentation in henrik ibsen’s peer gynt 1. In a letter to his publisher Frederik Hegel, Ibsen claims that he has “only read little and understood still less” of Kierkegaard (Brev 1844–1871 179), a claim he repeats three years later in a letter to Peter Hansen (ibid. 318). 2. Brandes wrote one of the first major works on Kierkegaard to appear in Scandinavia in 1877, Søren Kierkegaard, when he was already acquainted with Ibsen. For the early reception of Kierkegaard in Denmark more generally, cf. Tullberg 12–26. 3. Shapiro, for example, seeks to find a corresponding passage in Kierkegaard’s works for virtually every single line in Peer Gynt, drawing, as he triumphantly announces at the outset, on “more than twenty volumes of Kierkegaard” (xiv). A simple glance at the history of publication and distribution of Kierkegaard’s works, however, all of which, with the exception of Either/Or, sold very badly in the nineteenth century, makes it amply clear that it is near to impossible that Ibsen could ever have had access to so many of them. For an account of the sales of Kierkegaard’s first editions, cf. Garff, SAK 445–450. 4. The interest in the relation between Kierkegaard and Ibsen continues to grow: recent articles on the topic are Banks, Rasmussen, and Basso, while the first international Kierkegaard-Ibsen conference was held in Copenhagen in May 2006, with the second part hosted in Oslo in September 2008. Some of the papers presented on these occasions have been published in Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al., Kierkegaard, Ibsen og det Moderne.

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5. For an overview of Kierkegaard’s extensive relation to Heiberg, cf. Pattison, “Johan.” 6. For an account of Ibsen and Heiberg’s meeting, cf. Meyer 90–94. 7. That Heiberg is the central influence behind St. John’s Night has also been pointed to by Downs (32), without, however, elaborating the suggestion in any significant way. For the genesis and reception of St. John’s Night, cf. Bull, “Innledning” to Sancthansnatten. 8. Rather than “vaudeville,” Ibsen in fact designates the play a “Fairy tale-comedy in Three Acts” (“Eventyrcomedie i tre Acter”) (Sancthansnatten 23), a technical term he may have derived from the discussion of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a “romantisches Märchenlustspiel” in Hermann Hettner’s influential 1852 study Das moderne Drama (152–155). Ibsen, it is known, read Hettner’s work in Dresden that year, on the same trip that first took him to Heiberg in Copenhagen (Bull, “Innledning” Sancthansnatten 12). This fact, together with certain superficial similarities between Ibsen’s St. John’s Night and Shakespeare’s play, has led critics to claim that Ibsen’s work must be read as an exercise in the genre described by Hettner, rather than in Heiberg’s vaudevilles (e.g., Bull, “Innledning” Sancthansnatten 12; Meyer 99; Moi 159). However, contrary to what is frequently claimed, Hettner does not in fact “strongly recommend” (Moi 159) the genre of “Märchenlustspiel” for modern dramatists (which is usually assumed to be the reason that Ibsen chose to write in it) but on the contrary explicitly states that the form of Shakespeare’s comedies is outmoded and useless for contemporary authors (171–172). Instead, Hettner significantly points to Scribe (whom he takes to represent the “realist” tradition opposed to Shakespeare) as the model for any modern work (172–173). It may therefore be better to see Ibsen’s choice of the term “Eventyrcomedie” as a reference to Heiberg’s own productions in that genre (with plays such as Elverhøj and Alferne), which, as Borup has pointed out (2: 147), are simply vaudevilles under a different name and thereby still accommodate Hettner’s positive suggestions. 9. The claim that Peer’s imaginary flights are an effect of his incapacity to come to terms with reality has accompanied the play from its first appearance. In this connection, cf. the initial reviews by Brandes, “Første” (42; first publ. 1867), and Petersen 42 (first publ. 1867). The charge is thereafter repeated by other important figures in the early reception of Ibsen’s work, such as Bernard Shaw, “The Quintessence” 67, 70 (first publ. 1891), and Otto Weininger 15 (first publ. 1904/1907). The influence of this view on what seems to be virtually all subsequent scholarship is testified to by its inevitable centrality in studies of all stripes. Cf., e.g., Moses 211–212; Collin 267; Berteval 113, 120; Sturtevant 234; Bull, “Innledning” Peer Gynt 16, 31–33; Eikeland 21–24; Linge 59; Petit 130–131; Haaland 155–156; Haakonsen 43; Gravier 87–88; Aarseth, Dyret 77, 171–172, 175; Downs 96–98; Fjelde xvi; Merivale 137; Perelli 42–43; Brynhildsvoll 66, 69, 71–72; Christensen 147, 165; Blackwell 881–886; Alonge 36; Templeton 92, 107; Boccardi 36; Wyller 59; Shepherd-Barr 120; and Helland, “Om Peer Gynt” 11. To my knowledge, the only studies to date that seek to challenge this binary

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opposition of reality and imagination and Peer’s unproblematic equation with the latter are Jan and Rees. 10. Cf., e.g., Brandes, “Første” 42–43; Bjørnson 38; Shaw, “The Quintessence” 69; Weininger 4–5, 8; Gosse, Henrik 107–108; Bull, “Innledning” Peer Gynt 35, 39; Eikeland 26–28, 42–43; Linge 57; Collin 267; Aarseth, Dyret 43–44, 71, 141, 170, 198, 207, 216; Perelli 45; Boccardi 37; Downs 89–91; Moses 223–224; Berteval 116, 128–129; Blackwell 881– 882; Gravier 90–91; Hammer 54–55; Østerud 78–79, 84–85; Lanlan 172, 174, 176, 178; Shapiro 24–25, 199–200; T. O. Larsen 16, 33–34, 156–157; Gállego 55; and Fjelde xvii–xx. It should be noted that two important alternate lines of argumentation exist in the reception of Peer Gynt. One of these tends to view Peer as a national hero of sorts and accordingly argues that his flights of fancy must be read as a positive attribute. The other, predominantly feminist in inclination, rejects the view of Solvejg as an ideal. However, while these alternative interpretations may well invert the evaluation of the terms involved in the standard view, they are merely derivative of the latter, insofar as they remain caught in the same interpretative logic. They do so, on the one hand, by retaining the binary opposition between reality and Peer’s imagination and, on the other, by insisting, as does the standard view, that Peer and Solvejg must be read as terms on a single value scale. The readings that seek to view Peer’s character in positive terms simply celebrate his escapism by claiming it to be worthy of Solvejg’s love and thereby aligning it with the positive values of the latter’s ideality (e.g., Wyller 54–55, 59, 61; Christensen 153–154, 166–167, 171; and Haakonsen 50–54). Similarly, rejections of Peer’s final salvation on the grounds that Solvejg in fact does not represent a valid ideal just seek to undermine the validity of the heroine by claiming that she, too, is a product of Peer’s imagination, thereby inversely subjecting her to the negative criteria of Peer’s escapism (e.g., Blackwell 887; Templeton 101, 107; and, in modified form, Helland, “Om Peer Gynt” 41). The common presupposition structuring all these interpretations is thus the opposition of reality and imagination, the differences being merely a product of whether the ideal embodied by Solvejg is viewed as continuous with the former (the standard view) or the latter (the derivative positions). 11. That Aase is frequently the source of the standard view is visible in the fact that her description of Peer is repeatedly referred to for critical support. Cf., e.g., Brandes, “Første” 45; Petersen 42; Haaland 155; Eikeland 23–24; Linge 57; Perelli 42–43; Downs 97; Moses 215; Gravier 87; Haakonsen 44–45; Christensen 146–147, 165; and Fjelde xxi. 12. Unless otherwise noted, all references to the English version of Peer Gynt are to the Fjelde translation, followed by references to the Norwegian edition after the slash. 13. Much has been made of the fact that Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt as a “dramatic poem,” which, as he told Ludwig Passarge in 1881, “is not at all intended for performance” (Brev 1872–1883 435). This does not imply, however, that the genre Ibsen draws on dispenses with the performative dimension of drama. Rather, as with all closet dramas, much of the effect of Peer

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Gynt depends on the tension between performance and textuality. Related to this point, cf. also Blackwell 879. 14. E.g., 49, 80, 92–95, 121, 144, 176–177, 189–190, 200–202 / 94, 122, 132–134, 158–159, 181, 211, 223, 233–234. 15. The examples of such repetitions, both diegetic and mimetic in nature, are numerous, and only a few more will be indicated here: 3 / 59, 51 / 96, and 58 / 103; 56–57 / 101–102 and 111 / 149; 56 / 101 and 113 / 152; 84 / 115, 170–171 / 205, and 182 / 216. For a different discussion of the uses of such repetitions, cf. also Johnston, To the Third 185–186. 16. Cf. Ibsen’s letter to Frederik Hegel, August 8, 1867 (Brev 1844–1883 185–186). For the relevant passages, cf. Asbjørnsen and Moe 328–353. 17. The centrality of allegory in Peer Gynt was noted as early as in Petersen’s 1867 review (46), but has, to my knowledge, so far not received any sustained attention in the secondary literature. 18. Only references to the Norwegian text are given since the rhyme does not translate into English. 19. As a poetic pattern, the frequency of the imagery of wealth and economy thus by far exceeds that of the “animal” images, which Aarseth in his influential study takes to constitute the central archetype of the play on the basis of its approximately ninety appearances (Dyret 60). The following references indicate the page number followed by the number of times economic allusions appear on each. Given the linguistic specificity of these instances, only the Norwegian references are provided: 64: 4; 65: 2; 67: 1; 68: 2; 69: 1; 70: 1; 74: 7; 76: 2; 83: 1; 85: 1; 95: 3; 96: 4; 97: 6; 99: 1; 101: 2; 105: 1; 106: 2; 110: 2; 111: 2; 115: 2; 116: 1; 117: 2; 118: 3; 121: 1; 124: 2; 125: 1; 130: 1; 131: 1; 135: 2; 136: 2; 137: 2; 139: 2; 140: 2; 141: 2; 143: 3; 144: 3; 145: 3; 148: 2; 151: 1; 153: 5; 155: 1; 169: 1; 170: 1; 188: 1; 189: 5; 190: 5; 191: 2; 192: 1; 193: 1; 194: 1; 200: 1; 203: 1; 204: 1; 205: 4; 207: 6; 209: 2; 219: 6; 220: 1; 222: 2; 223: 4; 224: 4; 226: 1; 227: 5; 230: 1; 232: 4; 233: 4; 234: 1; 237: 4; 241: 2. 20. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that Ibsen ever read Marx or vice versa. A comparison of the two is therefore best grounded on a shared awareness of a common sociohistorical situation, which they responded to in similar ways on the basis of a common cultural heritage. The latter can be defined either narrowly in terms of the fact that both were drawing on Goethe’s Faust or, more broadly, that they were both working within the idealist tradition. As regards the similarities between Goethe’s allegory and Marx’s theory of value, Schlaffer explains it by arguing that Goethe at the time of writing Faust II was engaged in an extensive study of many of the same economists Marx would later draw on (54–55). This claim, however, has been refuted by Jens Kruse on historical grounds (82–83, n.108). Moretti in turn offers the inverse and perhaps more suggestive possibility of Marx coming to his theory of exchange-value by reading Faust II (Modern 79). It should be clear, in any case, that the comparison between Peer Gynt and Capital does not depend on the accuracy of Marx’s theory. What is at stake is only a common way of conceptualizing the condition of modernity, which in the case of both (as well as in the case of Goethe) can clearly be seen to

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derive from the post-Kantian shift in the notion of experience discussed in chapter 1. 21. The semantics of the English, German, and French are clear. The Swedish contains “trumpet” and “stråle,” which can be translated as “ray,” “gush,” or “spray,” and, according to Aarseth, is a play on the more obviously satirically named character “Bombenundgranatenstråle” in Wergeland’s opera Stockholmsfareren (Aarseth, “Kommentar” 209). Johnston sums up their allegorical meaning as “Teutonic aggression, Anglo-Saxon philistine mercantilism, French chauvinism, and Scandinavian pusillanimity” (To the Third 193). 22. In addition to Fjelde, cf. also Archer 138; Fry 337; McGuinness 57; and Northam 85. 23. In this respect, too, Peer Gynt reveals the influence of Goethe; cf. Koselleck 133. 24. Quint, Cervantes’s 106–107; cf. also Epic 266–267, 282. 25. Cf., e.g., Bjørnson 35; Petersen 44; Weininger 8; Haaland 155–157; Linge 59; Brynhildsvoll 67, 72; Meyer 272–273; Eikeland 30; Perelli 43; Downs 80; Moses 216, 220; Blackwell 882; Lanlan 172, 175; Gravier 89–90; Aarseth, Dyret 111; Hammer 47, 52; Larsen 59; and Christensen 154, 156, 159. To my knowledge, the only critic who is rightfully aware of the difficulty of such an equation is Helland, “Om Peer Gynt” 32–35. 26. Asbjørn Aarseth gives an extensive summary of past interpretations of the trolls, which confirms his own assessment of their meaning being, among other things, “evil,” “the opposite of ‘Christian values’,” and “the dark forces in man” (Dyret 100–125). For similar views, cf. also Eikeland 30; Lanlan 174; Hammer 49; T. O. Larsen 70–72; Wyller 62; Brynhildsvoll 72; and Fjelde xvii–xviii. 27. For a related reading of the madhouse scene, cf. Helland, “Om Peer Gynt” 35–36. 28. That Solvejg is to be read in terms of a flight from reality is also argued by Blackwell 884, although in terms unrelated to the present analysis. 29. Cf., e.g., Weininger 5; Downs 94; Moses 232; Merivale 129; and Bull, “Innledning” Peer Gynt 35. 30. A similar analysis is provided by Helland, “Om Peer Gynt” 40–41, who nevertheless draws a conclusion in line with the standard interpretations, as discussed above. 31. This function of the fairy tale genre has also been emphasized by Franco Moretti in relation to the nineteenth-century novel (Atlas 72). 32. The importance of the systematic neglect of act 4 by critics has been fruitfully discussed by Elizabeth Oxfeldt 133–141, who emphasizes it from the perspective of postcolonial criticism.

4. nor a’s departure and the aesthetics of dependency 1. Unless otherwise noted, I follow Lukàcs’s use of the term “epic” as designating the more general representational form that also encompasses the novel.

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2. The quotation in the passage is from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. 3. The question of how such a change in the evaluation of text-immanent characteristics occurs is a complicated one. In the present case, two answers suggest themselves. First, it seems clear that the novelty and incalculability of Scribe’s plots simply disappeared as the very success of the well-made play made the genre increasingly predictable and reified. (On this point, cf. esp. Taylor 15–16.) Second, the textual devices with which the Scribean plot was compared changed, from, for example, the Holbergian character-dramas that were much more static, to Modernist elements that were far more unstable and anarchic than anything Scribe had created. In relation to such new literary devices, Scribe’s plots clearly became the stabilizing principle in the work. This at least, as will be argued here, is the case with Ibsen. 4. The long history of this critical objection has been summarized by Templeton 114–115. 5. Ibsen’s use of the conventions of the well-made play has also been stressed by Aslaksen, Stanton xxxvii, and Mazer. 6. Unless otherwise noted, all references to the English text of A Doll’s House are from McFarlane’s translation. 7. The 1998 edition of McFarlane’s translation of A Doll’s House does not contain Ibsen’s drafts of the play; I therefore provide my own translation of these, indicated by the Norwegian page reference only. 8. For the relevant definitions of these terms, cf. Aristotle 1452a. 9. An idealist framework of this kind could also be used to further develop the frequent comparison drawn between Nora and Antigone by placing it in the context of Hegel’s reading of Sophocles’s play in his Lectures on Fine Arts (Vorlesungen 15: 549–550). There, too, the conflict at the level of individuated characters reveals a deeper underlying unity through their mutual destruction. As will become clear from my analysis, I think such an interpretation of the play would ultimately have to fail. For a general discussion of comparisons between Nora and Antigone in the secondary literature, cf. Durbach. 10. This assessment seems to be based largely on Archer’s more easily accessible 1884 review of the play. 11. Cf. Aristotle’s discussion of the proper cause for tragic action, 1452a. 12. I have explored this issue in relation to Fear and Trembling at greater length in my article “The Politics of Madness.” 13. Arnold Weinstein makes the important point that individual freedom in Ibsen almost always occurs at the expense of children (201–209). To Weinstein, however, this is a question of a simple contradiction, whereas I want to argue that Ibsen is actively combining them into a paradox that serves as a standard of measurement akin to the Paradox in Kierkegaard. 14. Moi explicitly links Nora to Lear on page 242 and discusses Cavell’s essay on King Lear earlier in her book (206–207). Her exposition of Cavell’s thought, however, often remains underdeveloped. For example, while Moi discusses the first two “grammatical” features that Cavell ascribes to characters in a play (that we are not in their presence while they are in ours), she does not mention the third (that we are nevertheless in their present) (Moi

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206–207; cf. Cavell, “Avoidance” 332–333). As I will argue below, it is the last of these that is the crucial element for an understanding of how acknowledgment is possible in theater. Similarly, while Moi often invokes acknowledgment and skepticism, she does not discuss the distinction Cavell draws between the two kinds of knowledge that these constitute. Omissions of this sort at times make it difficult to determine the precise nature and scope of Moi’s claims. 15. For this reason I find it confusing when Toril Moi in the above quotation suggests that Mrs. Linde and the audience are better positioned to acknowledge Nora because they have more information. 16. This exposition is compatible with Cavell’s insistence, in The Claim of Reason, that acknowledgment is not to be conceived as a reasoning by analogy, which assumes “that whatever one can know about the other one first has to find in oneself and then read into the other” (440). As far as I can see, Cavell uses “analogy” in two ways in that context. The first is as the projection of a similarity between my empirical experiences and that of another (his or her particular pain is analogous to my own) (cf. 444). This is clearly different from the kind of recognition of myself in the other discussed above, in which, as Cavell makes clear in the previously quoted passage, it is not “something about me personally” that is revealed and recognized but rather something common to human beings independent of and prior to such personal experiences (“Avoidance” 338). The second is as the projection of an incomplete perception of my finitude that underlies and precedes such empirical experiences (cf. Claim 442, 459). In this case the relation to the other in terms of an analogy to my own experiences simply replicates the relation between “I” and “other” without reversing it, without, that is, incorporating the other’s perspective, from which I am an “other” and he or she the “I.” This duality, that we are both I and other, is constitutive of our subjectivity, which accordingly still constitutes the ground for our recognition of the other in the terms elaborated here. 17. It is worth noting that this relation between inner and outer frames in the play within a play structure of A Doll’s House is echoed in Cavell’s discussion of Beckett’s Endgame. Comparing Beckett’s Hamm to Hamlet, Cavell argues that both “compose a play within the play, only Hamm’s is the entire play. The surrounding play is the mind to date, with its cursing self-performances, its inheritance of testaments, its ghosts and their tasks. The play within the play is to show us how to acquit ourselves” (154). In this scenario, the surrounding, external frame is associated with falsity or fictionaltiy, while the inner frame is the locus of authenticity. In Cavell’s reading, however, the audience and Hamm are placed with the latter, while in A Doll’s House, we find ourselves in the former, along with all the outdated meanings which Nora has deprived of value. 18. It should be noted that Cavell explicitly opts not to call this necessary but nonanalytic relation between subject and predicate “synthetic.” In my view, however, this rests on a misunderstanding of Kant’s terminology, since the reasons Cavell gives for not using the term “synthetic” make clear that he associates it exclusively with empirical and therefore contingent relations.

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On page 13, for example, Cavell asserts that the relations he is interested in cannot be synthetic because, first, that would mean that they were not a priori and, second, synthetic statements are based on empirical data, both of which conditions would miss the force of necessity that he is after (similar statements are found on pages 14 and 16). To Kant, however, the point is precisely that synthetic propositions are not necessarily empirical and a posteriori but rather can be a priori and transcendental (or, the point is to show how this is possible), and it is not clear why Cavell does not address this option. The term Cavell instead suggests for the kind of statements he is examining, likewise derived from Kant, “categorical declaratives” (31–32), strikes me as far less felicitous than the original Kantian formulation. 19. Another useful formulation of this same point can be found in The Claim of Reason 110; cf. also 208. 20. I therefore think that there is every reason to take seriously Cavell’s repeated claim that ordinary language philosophy partakes of the philosophical project running from Kant to Hegel (e.g., “Preface” xx; “Availability” 64–65; “Kierkegaard” 168; In Quest 38; and This New 5; cf. also Claim 77–78). It is a strange aspect of Toril Moi’s book, which is as deeply invested in applying Cavell’s work to Ibsen as it is in the argument that Ibsen’s Modernism resides in his negation of idealism, that she does not mention this aspect of Cavell’s thought. Although I am unsure about the reasons for this omission, I suspect it is due to her limited treatment of the philosophical foundations of idealism, which she nevertheless insists are central to its proper understanding (70). At the same time, I am not convinced that this necessarily undermines Moi’s argument. At some points, she states that Ibsen’s work in fact retains certain aspects of the idealist tradition, such as its “utopian vision of human perfectibility” (89), and it is possible that Moi has in mind something like, or something related to, the deeper kinship between Cavell’s thought and the idealist project traced here. 21. I am not aware of any sustained discussion of this passage by Cavell, although he does invoke it a number of times (“Preface” xxii; “Availability” 71; In Quest 69). My use of it here strikes me not just to follow from Cavell’s philosophical position but also to be compatible with what he says about animals and the difference between species at several points (e.g., This New 42–43; World 168–171; Claim 395–397). Elsewhere, however, Cavell moves closer to a position that views animals as subject to the same transcendental conditions as ourselves, making their forms of life “analogous” or “allegories of” ours (“Companionable” 108). In this sense “animals are also our others” (Claim 412), but this rests on an extension of the relevant conditions of human existence into a different realm that is at odds with Wittgenstein’s example and which does not ultimately change the argument here. At some point, such an extension would need to find its limit, and the lion simply serves as a mark of that moment (which also means that I am not concerned here with the question of what animal life in fact is like). 22. For this reason, I think that Michael Fried is on a more convincing path when he links Kierkegaard’s notion of the ethical stage of existence to Cavell’s thought rather than that of the religious (141–166). It is nevertheless

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the structure of the latter that underlies the aesthetics of dependency and, in my view, A Doll’s House in particular. 23. By the same reasoning, and as already suggested above, an idealist reading of the play would be one that postulates a single textual logic able to account for its meanings, such as Steiner’s. A more sophisticated interpretation along such lines seems to me to be implied by another dimension of Toril Moi’s analysis. Toward the end of her discussion of A Doll’s House, Moi quotes Cavell in support of the view that Torvald “after all loves [Nora] as well as he can. Cavell rightly notes that the ‘final scene is only harrowing if his live love for her is not denied. I have never seen it played so.’ Neither have I” (243). This (partial) defense of Torvald is surprising, not to say counterintuitive (as the absence of performances to this effect indicates), and it is not immediately clear how it should be understood. Moi treats the question at only one other point in her discussion, during her previous description of Torvald and Nora’s existence as caught in idealist clichés. As she writes there: “Because they are fantasies of rescuing the other, of doing something heroic for the sake of love, they reveal that Nora and Helmer love each other as well as they can” (234). The passage suggests that Moi takes Nora and Torvald’s mistake to lie with the manifestation or expression of their love, not with the source of those expressions. The nature of this claim can find further elaboration in Moi’s discussion of Nora’s departure, in which she concludes by stating: “Picking up from Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House insists that to love a woman, it is necessary to see her as the individual she is, not just as a wife and mother, or as a daughter and wife” (247). On the basis of this statement, it would seem that the view that Torvald loves Nora as best he can must mean that his relation to her involves such a perception of her as an individual, even when his treatment of her directly suppresses her individuality and humanity. (Perhaps, although Moi does not make this point, this is precisely because that treatment is a suppression of her individuality, which would imply an acknowledgment of its existence. Such a claim would find support from Cavell’s argument that “the concept of acknowledgement is evidenced equally by its failure as by its success” [“Knowing” 263].) More importantly, this also implies the continuity and compatibility between Nora’s departure and what precedes it. If Nora’s departure reveals the essence of love (to see the other as an individual), then the fact that Torvald has partaken of this love in some form or other means that the ending does not so much break with the world with which we started as lay bare its ground of possibility, the conditions that determined the situation that we witnessed. In terms similar to what Cavell ascribes to Modernist art and Kierkegaard’s religious, the ending would then be a direct revelation of the ground that all other (empirical and not a priori determinable) articulations of love must agree with or be derived from (positive as well as negative). The conditions laid bare by the ending are in that case already contained in the situation encountered at the start, even if in a suppressed or corrupted form. It is possible therefore to arrive at the end through the experiences at the beginning, the two being coextensive with each other;

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or, put differently, we are able to understand what Nora speaks about at the conclusion by means, or in terms of, the experiences the play has given us before. What appeared to be an aesthetics of rupture and radical incommensurability in this way would transform itself into a logic of identity and a self-sufficient whole. While this strikes me as qualifying squarely as an idealist reading of the text, I also think it runs into too many difficulties to make it viable. First and foremost, in the absence of any textual analysis on this point, it is difficult to see why Torvald should be taken to love Nora (his infatuation with idealist clichés could find many other motivations as well). Further, as to Nora, Moi herself points out (immediately before her definition of love as seeing the other as an individual) that she leaves Torvald because she does not love him any longer (Moi 247; cf. Ibsen A Doll’s 83 / Et dukkehjem 361). It is unclear how this situates Nora with respect to the ground that an idealist reading of the play takes it to reveal. Does it mean that Nora steps out of that transcendental condition completely, neither avoiding nor acknowledging Torvald as an individual? If so, then this would reintroduce a position external to the logic of the play up until that point, or, in line with the argument I have developed above, it would mean that if we are to speak of Nora’s action at the end as one of love, it must, as with the notions of sacrifice, honor, and marriage, be a notion of love that bears no positive relation to the mode of interaction laid bare by Torvald and that leaves us with a gap to bridge between the two. It should also be noted that Cavell himself provides two highly insightful readings of A Doll’s House, first in Pursuits of Happiness (19–24) and more recently in Cities of Words (247–264). In both these instances, Cavell’s argument is embedded in other topics (Hollywood comedies of remarriage and moral perfectionism, respectively), which, although relevant to the present discussion, cannot be treated in this context. My assessment of the difference between Cavell’s specific reading of Ibsen’s play and my own would in any case follow the more fundamental argument I have outlined here. For a lucid discussion of Cavell’s reading of A Doll’s House in Cities of Words and its relation to the “miraculous” transformation announced at the play’s end, cf. de Vries. 24. E.g., 36, 53, 54, 55–56, 68, 69, 84 / 310, 328, 329–330, 331, 344, 345, 362.

5. henry james and the emergence of the major phase 1. The persistence of the identification of James with an aesthetics of autonomy in the secondary literature has been traced by Freedman xiii–xv. Cf. also Sears 46 on James as a central transitional figure between the nineteenth century and Modernism. 2. For a detailed account of Ibsen’s early reception in the Anglo-Saxon world, cf. Franc, Shepherd-Barr, and Egan, “Introduction.” 3. For a list of early productions of Ibsen’s plays in England, cf. appendix B in Franc 168–185.

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4. Cf. Franc 11–23; and Lausund. 5. The claim is made by, e.g., Edel, “Preface” 1; Edel, “Henry James: The Dramatic” 59–66; Wiesenfarth xiii; Ozick 108–109; Stowe 132–134; Holland 87; Isle 2; Blackmur 274–276; Fogel 49; Ewbank 33–34; Egan, Henry James 24–33; Edwards 210; and Warren 551; cf. also Ward 4, 41–42; Brooks, Melodramatic 162; and Matthiesen 1. 6. James’s involvement with the theater has been documented by Edel in “Henry James: The Dramatic.” 7. The details surrounding the failure of Guy Domville have been discussed by Edel in his editor’s foreword to the play. 8. A “scenario” is the outline or synopsis of the plot of a play. 9. According to Egan, there are only two prior recorded statements by James on Ibsen, both of which likewise occur in correspondence with Gosse. The first is dated January 29, 1889, and the second October 17, 1890. Both of these are very brief, however, and, aside from expressing a general interest in Ibsen, are of little import in the present context. 10. James’s fascination with, and indebtedness to, the well-made play has also been discussed by Isle 25–30; Holland 85; Edwards 213; Ewbank 30; and Brooks, Melodramatic 160. 11. I thus disagree with Ewbank’s argument that there is an important evolution in James’s understanding of Ibsen (25, 28, 34–35), since, in my view, the essential terms of all of the subsequent reviews are clearly in place with the review Hedda Gabler. Further, to the extent that James’s review of Hedda Gabler is his most extensive engagement with Ibsen and lays the ground for his overall understanding of him, I see no reason for Holland’s claim that James concentrates “on [Ibsen’s] more enigmatic and symbolic later works” (85). The latter are traditionally taken to include only the last four of Ibsen’s plays, from The Master Builder onward, and therefore would not include Hedda Gabler. 12. James specifically writes that the objection put forward by the disdainers “still leaves, it will be noted, convenient cover for retort” (1133). I accordingly find it difficult to see the motivation for Egan and Edward’s assumption that the statements of the preface are also intended to express James’s own view of Ibsen (Egan, Henry James 37; Edwards 214). 13. For the standard distinction between the French and English receptions of Ibsen, cf. Shepherd-Barr 117–145 and Casanova 157–163. 14. James’s difference from the symbolistes is stressed by, e.g., Matthiesen 71–72; and Egan 68–69. 15. The claim that James derives this kind of symbolism from Ibsen seems to have originated with Warren, who makes some cursory remarks to this effect (551, 553). It was subsequently picked up and expanded by Edwards (220–221), as well as Egan (Henry James esp. 138–148), and recently again accepted by Ewbank (30–31), although the last questions whether Ibsen is the only source for it. 16. Deák is even more categorical in his distinction. Pointing to an “earlier interpretation of Ibsen as a symbolist,” which he associates with Prozor and contrasts with symbolisme proper, Deák points out: “This kind of

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interpretation, which directly connects a specific character or object to a specific abstract idea, is an allegorical interpretation that is not really compatible with symbolist theories of symbol as a literary sign that evokes reality without naming it. This pseudo-symbolic interpretation of Ibsen’s works was not specifically French, but was rather common outside of Scandinavia” (30). 17. For another recent discussion of this opacity of characters in The Wings of the Dove, cf. Miller 178–179. 18. Brooks dismisses Ibsen’s relevance somewhat hastily in an otherwise insightful comment: “Only Ibsen, who can be said to have reinvested in the structure of the ‘well-made play’ some of the intense ethical concern of melodrama—transmuted in his late plays into the melodrama of consciousness— offered a valid contemporary example, though one socially too foreign to James to be of immediate use” (161). I suspect that the qualifying clause at the end of this statement derives from James’s comments on Ibsen’s foreign qualities, the Norwegianness discussed in his review of John Gabriel Borkman. As such, however, Brooks fails to acknowledge that that foreignness for James plays the specific semiotic function of abstraction, which is very much of immediate use to him. 19. The importance of money in The Wings of the Dove, and in James more generally, has also been stressed by Pippin 40–48; Rivkin 83–121; Bell 291–299; and Miller 186–188. 20. A similar claim is also made by Bell x. 21. That Milly herself actively adopts Kate’s description of her as a dove has also been stressed by Macnaughton 96–97; Stowe 151–152; and, with particular lucidity, Freedman 214–217. 22. A similar claim has been made by Sears 94–95 and Ward 192 viii. The suggestion that in the conclusion to The Wings of the Dove we are witnessing an affirmation of determinate and predictable types of personality is also visible in the deliberate allusion to The American in the second to last chapter, when Kate burns Milly’s letter. At the end of the earlier novel, Christopher Newman likewise burns the incriminating evidence against the Bellegardes, only to have Mrs. Tristram explain: “Well then . . . I suppose there is no harm in saying that you probably did not make them so very uncomfortable. My impression would be that since, as you say, they defied you, it was because they believed that, after all, you would never really come to the point. Their confidence, after counsel taken of each other, was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good nature! You see they were right” (871–872). 23. In his insightful study Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, Jesse Matz makes a related claim about James’s inability to carry out the mediation of opposed structural principles dictated by Kantian aesthetics (85–120, esp. 90–91). From a different perspective, Sally Sears has also insisted that James fails to establish the unity he seeks. Both Matz and Sears, however, conceive of mediation only in terms of an organic unification, such as that formulated by idealist aesthetics, and fail to consider the possibility that an alternative kind of mediation might be at work in the text.

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24. Cf., e.g., Blackmur 275; Fogel 57ff.; Ward 182–183; Bell 309; N. Bradbury 72; and Stowe 168–169; cf. also Sears 93, who nevertheless disagrees with this reading. 25. Miller points to this same passage as the place in the novel where Densher “begins to be dimly aware that, to use Kate’s words for it, he is beginning to be in love with Milly” (189). 26. I have explored the relation between Žižek’s notion of the act and Kierkegaard’s theology in greater detail in my article “The Politics of Madness.” 27. The claim that The Wings of the Dove is divided into parts comparable to acts in a play is also made by Fogel 61–62 and Egan 129–131. Although these two critics differ to the extent that Fogel assumes that there are three such acts while Egan argues for five, they are akin in that they both take the individual books of the novel as their fundamental building blocks. My own reading differs both with respect to the particular divisions I propose and with respect to the aesthetic function that I take this tripartite structure to perform. In addition, unlike either Fogel or Egan, I distinguish the constitution of this structure from the kind that James would consider “dramatic” and therefore abstain from the specific association of it with the form of a play. 28. I therefore disagree with Miller’s argument that Kate’s final words could be applied after every speech act in the novel (cf. Miller 203, 195). 29. This analysis is both closely related to, and significantly different from, the one provided by Robert Pippin in his study Henry James and Modern Moral Life. As far as I can see, Pippin’s reading and my own agree with respect to our views of the problem that James confronts but differ in our interpretations of the solution that he finds. To simplify a rich and complex argument, James’s oeuvre, according to Pippin, centers on the impossibility of applying and defining traditional moral and epistemic categories in the changed context of nineteenth-century modernity. In Pippin’s view, the solution to this condition laid bare in James’s novels rests on the acknowledgment and acceptance of our necessary reliance on each other to construct new categories and criteria for meaning through our shared forms of life, which also means acknowledging and accepting the freedom and entitlement of others. This reading is closely related to Cavell’s position, analyzed in chapter 4 (although Pippin’s is more radically historicized; cf. 55–56), and, as Pippin emphasizes, also falls within the idealist tradition (9, et passim). Pippin’s argument is most persuasive in his reading of “The Jolly Corner” (111) and of Strether’s relation to Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors (162– 168). More frequently, however, he supports his interpretation by means of a negative inference that seems inconclusive. As he argues at several points, in James, the fact that the solution to the crisis of modern moral life resides in the acknowledgment and acceptance of our interdependence is revealed through the failure of intersubjective relations when that condition is ignored (e.g., 60, 77, 91, 136). This reasoning encounters two difficulties, in my view. First, even if we accept that James shows that the absence of mutual acknowledgment leads to a loss of meaning, this does not necessarily imply

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that the presence of such acknowledgment would inversely secure meaning (on the grounds provided, there seems to be no reason not to think that in James’s world, both the presence and absence of mutual acknowledgment might lead to failure). Second, it is not clear that a negative inferential argument of this kind can establish that James did not find other solutions to the loss of meaning in modernity, ones altogether outside the binary opposition on which that argument relies. My interpretation proposes such an alternative solution precisely by tracing the relation of James’s novel to a different philosophical aesthetics altogether.

6. hugo von hofmannsthal and the language of the future 1. Cf. Heiko Schulz 325, n.94; and Malik 365. 2. Cf. especially the recently discovered review by Hofmannsthal of Ola Hansson’s book Das Junge Skandinavien, first published in 1891. 3. Cf., e.g., Kovach 85; Sheppard 324–325; I. Jens 35–36; Härter 7; W. Jens 61; Kuna 85–87; Donahue 35; Kahler 19; and Adorno 31. 4. References to both the English and the German text of The Lord Chandos Letter are to the Marlboro bilingual edition, with page numbers to Russell Stockman’s translation given first. 5. Tellingly, in the first edition of Hofmannsthal’s complete works, Herbert Steiner included Ein Brief in the volume Prosa II, together with his essays from the same period, rather than the volume of fictional narratives, Erzählungen. 6. Cf., e.g., Broch 123; Morton 515; Bennett 318; Donahue 48, n.3; and Kovach 91. 7. Cf., e.g., Sommerhage 232–239; Morton 520–531; and Sandhop 140–147. 8. This critical view can be found in, e.g., Sandhop 136; Schultz 4–5; and Mathias Mayer 116. There are of course exceptions, such as Sommerhage 229 and Mazza 42–43, which explain Bacon’s presence in the text through the assertion that both the Renaissance and fin de siècle Vienna constitute periods of historical transition and change. A recent variation on this line of reasoning can be found in Santner (142–187), who likewise emphasizes the Renaissance’s historical importance in his reading of Hofmannsthal’s text. All of these approaches, however, rely primarily on evidence and frames of reference external to the text itself (in Santner’s case, most prominently Carl Schmitt’s reading of Shakespeare) and fail to properly explain why Bacon rather than any other Renaissance figure should have been of interest to Hofmannsthal. A text-immanent analysis is both more suited to provide an answer to this latter question and makes the former procedure unnecessary. 9. On this point, cf. also the discussion in Harries, Infinity 104–124. 10. The “Epithalamium” is a form of poem written for a bride on the way to her marital chamber. On the basis of this analysis, I disagree with Jacques Le Rider when, drawing on Hofmannsthal’s own “Philosophie des Metaphorischen,” he claims that metaphor in The Lord Chandos Letter is

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associated with Chandos’s moments of revelation during his present state of existence and is opposed to a rationalist use of language (219). In The Lord Chandos Letter, the logic of metaphor is rather associated with Chandos’s youth and stands in continuity with the structure of reason. Similarly, I also disagree with Andreas Huyssen’s claim that Chandos’s original state contradicts Renaissance philosophy (“Disturbance” 35–36). 11. The distinction between what Hofmannsthal’s text says and what it shows has also been made by Michael Morton (535–539), although in a fundamentally different analysis from that provided here. To Morton, what the text cannot say is the cause and nature of Chandos’s negative condition of loss, since any formulation of it by Chandos himself would constitute precisely the kind of coherent thought and language that he is supposedly missing (cf. 517). According to Morton, however, as readers, we can reconstruct this aspect of Chandos’s condition on the basis of his descriptions of it. Leaving aside the question of the validity of Morton’s analysis of specific passages in support of this view (which takes some strange turns), it is important to note that his hypothesis assumes that what the text shows is coextensive and compatible with what it says. In Morton’s discussion, the implication of this would appear to be that the opposition between the two textual levels is merely contingent, meaning that it is in principle possible to say what is here only shown (which is, after all, what Morton is doing for us), even if Chandos himself is unable or unwilling to do so. The contradiction between the text’s style and its content is accordingly reduced to merely an apparent one, which cannot take Chandos at his word when he states the impossibility of expressing his condition. My claim, on the contrary, is that the text shows the positive condition of a unity without identity and that this condition is intrinsically and constitutively incompatible with the structures of saying as conceived by the text itself.

7. conflict and mediation in james joyce’s “the dead” 1. That Ibsen’s influence is particularly visible in “The Dead” is also suggested by O Hehir xii. 2. Cf., e.g., Wheatley-Lovoy 190; Henke 48–49; and Avery 481. 3. E.g., Schwarz 67; Ellman 252; Henke 48; Tindall 42; and Balsamo. 4. E.g., Pecora; and Quinn 162–164. 5. E.g., Walzl; and Riquelme. 6. The claim that “The Dead” is structured by the tropes of metaphor and metonymy has also been argued from a gender studies perspective by Ingersoll. Ingersoll’s analysis nevertheless differs from mine both in its general assessment of the value and function of these tropes in Joyce’s text and with respect to the aspects of the text that he identifies with each. I am indebted to Benjamin Harshav for first alerting me to the importance of metaphor and metonymy in Joyce’s text. 7. Cf., e.g., Ingersoll 48; Ellman 259; Henke 45; and Walzl 27.

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8. The militarism of “The Dead” has also been discussed by Greg C. Winston. Winston’s study, however, only notes the presence of military vocabulary and its cultural sources without considering what textual implications this aspect of the story might have. 9. Eco’s “Joyce, Semiosis and Semiotics” is an expanded version of his earlier “Semantics.” 10. This formulation, in my view, finds support in Jakobson’s own description of “the similarity disorder” in “Two Aspects of Language”: “Such metonymies may be characterized as projections from the line of habitual context into the line of substitution and selection” (105). 11. Gian Balsamo has also argued for Dantean echoes in the final section of “The Dead,” without, however, identifying specific allusions. 12. In fact, Joyce subsequently made use of parts of this passage in his poem “She Weeps Over Rahoon,” which opens with the lines “Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling, / Where my dark lover lies. / Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling, / At grey moonrise” (Poems 650). For a similar reading of the poetic patterns of this passage, cf. Riquelme 226–227. 13. The claim that the ending of “The Dead” stages a unity of opposites has also been put forward by Wheatley-Lovoy 190 and Loe 492. Their views of what constitutes the terms unified as well as the nature of their relation, however, differ substantially from my own. 14. In Joyce’s early novel Stephen Hero, the title character provides the following definition of ephiphany: “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (211).

8. intr ansitive love in r ainer maria rilke’s the notebooks of malte laurids brigge 1. For an analysis of Rilke’s knowledge of Danish as well as a more detailed account of his reception of Kierkegaard, cf. my article “Rilke.” 2. References to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge are indicated first by the entry number in italics followed by the page number in the English translation and the German original. 3. For an examination of Kierkegaard’s relation to Jacobsen, cf. my article “Kierkegaard and Modern European Literature.” 4. The relation between Kierkegaard and Rilke in terms of their shared conceptions of death has been investigated by Schuelke. 5. E.g., Gutjahr 370; Schmidt-Bergmann 28; Bradley 35–36; Fülleborn 148; as well as Kittler 315–336. 6. For a similar assessment of the secondary literature, cf. Ryan 342–343. 7. E.g., Ziolkowski 27–28; Fülleborn 156–160; Hoffmann 221–222; and Merz 269. 8. This characteristic of the past also determines Malte’s historical narratives, which center on physical, political, and historical decay and collapse.

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In this sense, too, these sections of the text do not constitute a new literary mode, as much of the scholarship has claimed, but rather an extension of the paradigm of fragmentation into something like Malte’s prehistory, the historical decline of European aristocracy from which his particular position emerges. For a recent reading of the historical sections in Malte Laurids Brigge that in many ways seems compatible with this claim, see Santner 119–140. 9. Ziolkowski’s assurance after discussing the opening eight entries is characteristic in this sense: “It is unnecessary to pursue this stream of associations any further” (28). Hoffmann’s analysis is an exception to this rule insofar as he does try to extend the logic of association beyond the beginning of the novel. His descriptions nevertheless remain too abstract and unspecified to be fully convincing or helpful. In his classification of entries 37–55, for example, he states that “the theme of love dominates, then that of death, etc.” (226). As the ambiguous “etc.” suggests, the link between entries through a musical logic is not established here, neither by means of a concrete textual examination nor by means of an abstract compositional schema. On the following page, Hoffmann in fact admits: “With all such classification the conviction nevertheless remains that the actual impression the reader receives is far more diverse and differentiated, and that it is only reflected to a small degree, and poorly, in conceptual analysis. In addition, the larger groups of entries, which such an organization yields, remain unconnected amongst each other and the transition between them disjointed” (227). 10. E.g., Zimmermann 51; Ryan 346; Goheen 257; and Ziolkowski 14–15. 11. Cf., e.g., B. Kruse 54; Hoffmann 224; Gutjahr 382; Schmidt-Bergmann 32; Ziolkowksi 13–14; Bradley 42; and Blanchot 122–124. 12. B. Kruse explicitly acknowledges this problem (54), even while he draws the distinction between past and present. 13. Cf. 15: 36–40 / 31–35; 28: 80–81 / 74–76; 29: 84–85 / 78–80; and 42: 127–128 / 116–117. 14. References to both the English and the German text of the Duino Elegies are to the Vintage bilingual edition, with the page numbers for Stephen Mitchell’s English translation given first. 15. I thereby disagree with critics, such as Ziolkowksi 21–22, who argue that Malte is seeking an aesthetic structure similar to that associated with his predecessors. 16. That Malte rejects Baudelaire’s example is also pointed out by Bradley 49. 17. The concept of intransitive love is mentioned for the first time in entry 39 (39: 119 / 109), which is the first entry in the second part of the novel. If a distinction between the first and second part exists, it therefore strikes me that the introduction of this new theme is a more likely candidate than the supposed turn to historical narratives that has traditionally been claimed to define it. 18. That Rilke does not restrict his notion of intransitive love to women has been stressed by Komar and is of course also evident in the fact that he counted Kierkegaard among its representatives.

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19. E.g., Fülleborn 150; and Hoffmann 248. 20. The sequence is established by taking entry 1 as the central coordinate and indicating only the entries’ relation to Malte’s biographical trajectory (i.e., the time represented by the four historical narratives in the second half of the book are not mapped, even though they could, as suggested above, be counted as a kind of prehistory to Malte’s personal chronology). Each entry is placed according to its dominant temporal indicator, which can be either explicit indications of seasons or years or implicit markers such as “nun” and “jetzt,” when these refer to Malte’s location in the present and indicate the relation to preceding entries. Entries that contain more than one temporal dimension, either because they deal with more than one event or because they contain two embedded narratives (such as entry 28, in which Malte tells of his mother’s telling of the story of Ingeborg’s ghost), are listed twice (as A and B). Below, entries that clearly occur after entry 1 but do not have any more specific temporal coordinates are placed in hard brackets and in the position in which they occur in the textual continuum (as a moment in the time telling of the text). Entries that clearly occur before entry 1 but likewise do not carry any further specification are also placed in hard brackets below and positioned as precisely as possible. Entry 62A, for example, does not carry any specification beyond the statements “damals als ich klein war” (62A: 176) and “ich war ganz klein” (62A: 177), as well as telling us that Malte still has a tendency to cry. This suggests that it belongs to his earliest memories, together with entry 29, in which he still sleeps in a crib (29: 77) and certainly before entry 27, in which he is described as “schon ein bißchen erwachsen” (27: 72). Similarly, entry 41 lacks any specification, but its thematic concern suggests that it should be placed together with the related entry 28. The following is the sequence with all relevant temporal markers indicated and page numbers to the German edition given in soft brackets: entry 44: “Abelone . . . als ganz junges Mädchen,” “vor meiner Zeit” (118); entry 28B: Malte’s parents married and before his birth (72, 75–76); [entry 62A]: “damals als ich klein war” (176), “ich war klein” (177); entry 29: “Ein paar Jahre” before his visit to Urnekloster, “weit zurückliegt in meiner Kindheit” (76), “Winter” (77); [entry 31B]; entry 30: “und dann kam eine von diesen Krankheiten” (80); entry 31A: “am Morgen nach der schlechten Nacht” (81); entry 32: “Sommer” in Ulsgaard (83); entry 33A: “Die Zeit ging unberechenbar schnell, und auf einmal war es schon wieder so weit” (90); entry 27: Maman’s “letzten Jahren” (71), “schon ein bißchen erwachsen” (72); entry 28: Maman’s “letzten Jahre”; [entry 41]; entry 42: Maman “ging schon nirgends,” “Dezember” (112); [entry 43]; entry 33B: Maman’s death; entry 36: grandmother’s death, “Frühling,” grandfather’s death, “Herbst” (101); entry 8: grandfather’s death “Sommer” (17); [entry 9]; entry 37: Abelone’s first appearance, “in dem Jahr nach Mamans Tode” (102), Sorö, “Ferien,” “Sommer” (103); entry 15: Urnekloster, “Zwölf oder höchstens dreizehn muß ich damals gewesen sein” (25); entry 34: Urnekloster, “Mehrere Jahre” after Maman’s death; entry 35: Urnekloster; entry 54A: gift from Mathilde Brahe, “Ferienzeit auf Ulsgaard” (148); entry 56: “Damals in jenen Ferien auf Ulsgaard” (157), “dieses Jahr in Sorö” (158), “Sommer” (159), “Juli” (160); entry

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45: father’s death, “Ich war damals schon im Ausland” (124); entry 46: stay in Copenhagen; entry 49: stay in Saint Petersburg, “seit ich so vereinzelt herum komme” (134), “August” (135); entry 47: stay in Naples (131); entry 69: stay in Venice, “Herbst,” “in den letzten Jahren” (189); entry 64: stay in Orange; entry 1: “11. September” (9); [entry 2]; [entry 3]; entry 4: “drei Wochen hier”; [entry 5]; [entry 6]; [entry 7]; [entry 10]; entry 11: “herbstlicher Morgen”; [entry 12]; [entry 13]; [entry 14]; entry 16: “Fasching” (36), “vor zwei Wochen” (37); [entry 17]; entry 18: “denn es war Fasching” (43); [entry 19]; [entry 20]; entry 59: “es ging auf Frühling zu” (165); entry 21: “Frühling”; [entry 22]; [entry 23]; [entry 24]; entry 25: spring/summer; [entry 26]; [entry 38]; entry 39: “nun” (107); entry 40: “Aber nun”; entry 48: “Jetzt” (133); entry 50: “in diesen Tagen” (140); entry 51: continuation of previous entry; entry 52: “Jetzt” (146); [entry 53]; [entry 54B]; entry 55 “nun” (151); entry 57: “noch immer,” “nun” (161); [entry 58]; [entry 60]; [entry 61]; entry 62B: “Jetzt” (177); entry 63: “Aussen ist vieles anders geworden” (180); [entry 65]; [entry 66]; [entry 67]; [entry 68]; [entry 70]; [entry 71].

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index

Absolute, the, 36–39, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49–50, 51, 53, 62, 73, 80, 87, 95, 116, 161, 162, 203, 219, 227, 244– 245, 246, 249, 264 Adorno, Theodor, W., 270 Aesthetics, 1–9, 10, 12–14, 23, 24, 53, 54, 58, 85–86, 160, 162, 164, 171, 175, 182, 183, 191, 208, 218, 221, 227, 246, 248, 269–272, 275n17. See also Autonomy; Avant-gardes; Dependency Alighieri, Dante, 241 Allegory, 16, 88, 100–101, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 136, 184, 186, 188, 191, 198, 208, 209, 215, 280n23; as past-as-such, 132–135, 138, 139, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 270. See also Money Antigone (Sophocles), 286n9 Archer, William, 171, 172, 182–183, 184, 185 Aristotle, 98, 178 Autonomy, aesthetics of, 1–6, 12–14, 15, 16, 17, 42, 45, 53, 54, 58, 86, 121, 164, 171, 186, 192, 198, 205, 218, 219, 222, 269–272; as aesthetics of compromise, 4, 58, 82, 84, 115; as aesthetics of idealism, 2, 3, 4, 13, 23–24, 25, 31, 40, 41, 150, 162, 234, 239, 257; as sociological category, 2, 12–14, 276n20. See also Heiberg Avant-gardes, aesthetics of, 1–6, 14, 16, 23–24, 30–31, 42, 53, 58, 162, 171, 218, 219, 239, 257, 269 Bacon, Francis, 206, 209–210, 211, 214 Bad infinity, 31, 73–74, 101, 190, 233, 246 Balzac, Honoré de, 62, 68, 188 Baudelaire, Charles, 9, 258

Beckett, Samuel, 147, 148, 287n17 Benjamin, Walter, 101, 133 Besant, Walter, 128–130, 148 Brandes, Georg, 9, 10, 59, 61, 88, 89, 204 Breaking a Butterfly (Arthur Jones and Henry Herman), 127–128, 132, 171 Brooks, Peter, 69–70, 71, 187, 188, 233, 234, 241, 292n18 Bürger, Peter, 5, 14, 276n19 Burke, Edmund, 205 Capitalism, 3, 4, 15, 16, 57, 62, 64–65, 66, 68, 81, 82, 83, 88, 101–106, 109, 113, 164 Casanova, Pascale, 12–14 Cavell, Stanley, 118, 140, 141–154, 160, 270; and idealism, 150–152; and Kierkegaard, 149–154; and King Lear (Shakespeare), 141–147, 151; and Modernism, 163–164; and skepticism, 142–144, 162–163 Character, 17, 62, 63–64, 66–68, 71, 74, 76–81, 93–94, 95, 97, 99, 108, 112, 115, 118–119,177–179, 182, 191–198, 204–205, 223, 224, 244, 248 Cheney, Edna H., 129–130, 148 Core/periphery, 1, 9, 11–14, 15, 17–19, 82–83, 86, 169, 271, 272 Dependency, aesthetics of, 1, 6, 8, 14–19, 141, 160–161, 162–165, 202–203, 267, 269–272. See also Hofmannsthal; Ibsen; James; Joyce; Kierkegaard; Rilke Descartes, René, 214 Eco, Umberto, 234–235, 242 Engels, Friedrich, 39, 62 Epic, 107. See also Novel

332 Fairy tale, 16, 88, 92, 93, 96, 111–112, 113, 114, 115, 134 Feudalism, 57, 65–66, 68, 81, 83, 88, 109, 113, 254 Frederik VI (King of Denmark), 60, 65–66, 76, 85 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 101, 104, 211, 241–242, 257, 258, 262, 276n19, 285n23 Good infinity, 31, 73 Gosse, Edmund, 173, 175, 176, 177 Hamsun, Knut, 9, 10, 118–119, 121, 162, 169, 177, 222 Hebbel, Friedrich, 67, 80 Hegel, G. W. F., 23, 31, 41, 46, 60, 61, 64, 238, 286n9 Heiberg, Johan Ludvig, 87, 90, 105, 109, 113, 121, 123, 194; and aesthetics of autonomy, 15–16, 57–58, 79–81; as center of Danish Golden Age, 15, 57, 60–61; The Danes in Paris, 68–81, 83, 94; and Eugène Scribe, 61–64, 67–68; and idealism, 57, 58, 60, 63–65, 68, 79, 83, 84, 89, 127, 272; and Ludvig Holberg, 67–68; and politics, 58–60, 82–84; and vaudeville, 57–68, 81–82. See also Ibsen Heiberg, Johanne Louise, 61, 90 Heidegger, Martin, 40, 210 Hettner, Herman, 282n8 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1, 54, 171, 227, 246; and aesthetics of dependency, 206, 218–219; and Ibsen, 204–206; The Lord Chandos Letter, 18, 205–219, 256, 269–270 Holberg, Ludvig, 66–67, 79, 80, 81, 82. See also Heiberg Hölderlin, Friedrich, 24 36–40, 41, 44, 49 Hume, David, 28–29, 30–31 Ibsen, Henrik, 1, 9, 10–11, 13, 54, 61, 188, 191, 194, 201, 203, 204, 206, 218, 227, 246, 247; and aesthetics of dependency, 87, 116, 117, 121, 156, 161–162, 186, 271; A Doll’s House, 16–17, 87, 117–164, 170, 171–172, 224, 225, 244, 270; Hedda Gabler, 169, 171, 172, 173, 177, 179, 192; and Heiberg, 16, 89–91, 93, 94, 95; and idealism, 10–11, 93–94, 95, 107, 117; John Gabriel Borkman, 170, 173, 174, 175, 179, 181, 185;

Index and Kierkegaard, 88–90; The Master Builder, 173, 179, 182– 185; reception in England, 127, 171–173; reception in France, 182, 183–185; Peer Gynt, 16, 83, 87, 88, 89, 94–116, 117, 121, 133, 134, 161, 220, 272; St. John’s Night, 87, 91–94, 114; When We Dead Awaken, 220, 223, 225. See also James; Joyce; Kierkegaard Idealism, 8, 10 –11, 14–15, 40, 57, 65, 71, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 93, 101, 110, 113, 115, 116, 121, 134, 140, 153, 155, 156, 172, 198, 206, 275–276n19. See also Autonomy; Cavell; Heiberg; Ibsen; Joyce; Kierkegaard Ideology, 4, 8, 18, 58, 59–60, 65, 269 Intellectual intuition, 39, 49, 151 Jacobsen, Jens Peter, 9, 204, 251. See also Rilke Jakobson, Roman, 18, 227, 229–230, 232, 236 James, Henry, 1, 54, 218, 227, 246; and aesthetics of dependency, 169, 171, 182, 187, 202–203; The American, 174, 292n22; and drama, 174–182, 187, 191, 192, 201–202, 206, 222; and Ibsen, 13, 17, 169–171, 173– 186; and symbolism, 171, 182–186, 196, 198; The Wings of the Dove, 17, 169, 170, 174, 186–203, 256, 257, 270 Jameson, Frederic, 113, 213 Joyce, James, 1, 3, 54, 171; and aesthetics of dependency, 227, 246; “The Dead,” 18, 224, 225–246, 270–271; and Ibsen, 220–225; and idealism, 222, 225, 234, 239; A Portrait of the Artist, 2, 220, 226 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 4, 14, 23–40, 41, 42, 53, 64, 73, 150–151, 152, 160, 275n19; Critique of Judgment, 33, 35–36, 39–40, 151; Critique of Pure Reason, 25–30, 43–44, 150; Transcendental Deduction, 27–30, 39–40, 150 Kierkegaard, Søren, 1, 23–25, 40–54, 59, 60, 61, 88, 160, 169, 198, 200, 203, 204, 206, 227, 239, 272; and aesthetics of dependency, 10, 15, 17, 25, 53–54, 58; The Concept of Irony, 40–41; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 44–45, 52–53; Either/Or, 50–51, 163;

Index and faith, 15, 25, 46–51, 118, 153, 162, 218; Fear and Trembling, 49, 137; and Ibsen’s Nora, 137, 152–156; and idealism, 25, 40–45, 49, 50, 53; and love, 48, 50–51; and philosophical anthropology, 42–43, 45, 52, 117, 156, 157, 161, 246; Philosophical Fragments, 45–48, 52, 153; and the Paradox, 46–48, 51; and redefinition of knowledge, 52–53, 161, 162–163, 270; Sickness Unto Death, 24, 42–45, 52, 161; and sin, 24, 42, 49; Stages on Life’s Way, 248; Upbuilding Discourses, 51–52. See also Cavell; Ibsen; Rilke

333 Money: and allegory, 101–106, 136; as plot device, 61–64, 68, 71–74, 91–92, 93, 94, 122–126; and semiotic opacity, 71, 74–75, 76, 189–191, 194 Moore, George, 244 Moretti, Franco, 4, 82, 84–85, 100, 103–104, 115–116, 222, 250, 255, 272, 276n19, 276n20, 284n20, 285n31 Novel, the, 82, 84, 107, 120, 174, 175, 181–182, 250, 255, 285n31; as a form of epic, 120, 161, 169, 170, 178, 191, 198 Oehlenschläger, Adam, 61, 79, 81, 90

Lacan, Jacques, 236–237 Linear time, 17, 18, 19, 88, 114–115, 116, 118, 157–161, 200–203, 245– 246, 265–267, 270 Lukács, Georg, 3–5, 119–120, 121, 162, 169, 177 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 184–185 Maimon, Salomon, 24, 28–30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 41, 73, 190, 278n14 de Man, Paul, 100, 103 Marx, Karl, 16, 39, 62, 88, 171; Capital, 101–104, 105 Melodrama, 64, 69–70, 71, 124, 127, 133, 188, 227, 292n18 Metaphor, 18, 208–209, 215, 227, 229– 231, 233–235, 238–246, 250, 258, 269, 294–295n10 Meta-theatre, 138–139, 146–156, 158 Metonymy, 18, 227, 230, 232–246 Modality, 25, 26–27, 38–39, 43–46, 49, 53, 87, 116, 118, 152, 156, 157, 218, 245 Modernism: as general artistic period, 2–6, 9–11, 14, 17, 18, 50, 58, 60, 88, 113, 115–116, 117, 120, 147, 149, 163–165, 203, 206, 222, 239, 248, 249, 269–272, 286n3; as opposed to avant-gardes, 1–6, 18, 86, 150, 171 Modernity, 1, 9, 17, 18, 32, 53, 57, 58, 61, 63, 65–66, 68, 72, 82–85, 87, 94, 101, 104, 113, 116, 121, 162, 164, 189, 190, 191, 203, 213, 219, 227, 253–254, 272, 293–294n29 Moi, Toril, 9–11, 117, 118, 139–141, 144–145, 146, 147, 275–276n19, 287n15, 288n20, 289–290n23 Møller, Peter Ludvig, 63–64, 67, 95, 107

Peirce, Charles Sanders, 234 Periphery. See Core/periphery Pippin, Robert, 7, 293–294n29 Platonism, 33, 37, 50, 153 Plot, 16, 61–64, 66–67, 68, 71–75, 79, 80, 91–94, 95, 97–98, 99, 105, 106–107, 111–112, 113, 121, 125, 126, 131, 133, 140, 158–159, 178– 179, 194, 202, 228, 230, 233, 250. See also Money Propp, Valdimir, 111–112 Prozor M., 183–184, 185 Realism, 3–6, 11, 61, 63, 182–183, 242, 250, 282n8 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1, 54, 171; and aesthetics of dependency, 249, 251, 267; Duino Elegies, 255, 256, 258, 259; and J. P. Jacobsen, 247–248; and Kierkegaard, 247–249; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 18–19, 247–267, 270 Romance, 107, 112, 113, 114, 115, 134 Romanticism, early German, 2, 41, 64, 151, 273n5 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 155 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 104, 229 Scandinavia, 1, 14, 15, 16, 17, 54, 57, 60, 61, 88, 90, 164, 169, 176, 204, 220, 247, 248, 272; and Modernism, 9–11, 17–19, 60, 271– 272, 292n16 Schelling, F. J. W., 73–74 Schiller, Friedrich, 4, 24, 31–37, 39, 40, 41, 60, 64, 274n10, 275–276n19 Schlaffer, Hans, 101, 103, 105 Schlegel, Friedrich, 275–276n19 Schroeder, Paul, 58, 84–86

334 Scribe, Eugène, 61–68, 69, 71, 72, 79, 80, 82, 107, 121, 176 Shaw, George Bernard, 126, 171, 172, 275n19, 282n9 Skepticism, 6, 10, 14, 16, 24, 25–30, 35, 42, 53, 235–236. See also Cavell Steiner, George, 126–127, 128, 148, 289n23 Strindberg, August, 9, 10, 120, 131, 137, 204, 205, 247 Sublime, the, 214, 215, 218 Symbol, 35–36, 40, 76, 77, 82, 113, 228–229, 238, 242, 245, 280n23. See also James Szondi, Peter, 120, 121, 132, 162, 169, 177, 178

Index Tennyson, Alfred, 176, 177, 180, 181, 202 Utopia, 129, 137, 160, 161, 206, 203, 204–205, 217, 219, 225, 244, 246, 288n20, Wagner, Richard, 115–116, 222–223, 224 Weinstein, Arnold, 9–10, 11, 286n13 Well-made play, 16, 61–62, 117, 118, 120, 121–135, 138, 154, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 176, 178, 292n18 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 141, 150, 151, 152–154 Žižek, Slavoj, 200