Phenomenology and Cultural Difference in High Modernism [1 ed.] 1527504921, 9781527504929

Table of contents :
Contents
Argument
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
References
Index

Citation preview

Phenomenology and Cultural Difference in High Modernism

Phenomenology and Cultural Difference in High Modernism By

Maria-Ana Tupan

Phenomenology and Cultural Difference in High Modernism By Maria-Ana Tupan This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by Maria-Ana Tupan All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0492-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0492-9

CONTENTS Argument .................................................................................................... vi Chapter I ...................................................................................................... 1 The Making of Modernist Aesthetics I.1. Problems of Canonization I.2. Generative Depth Models I.2.1. The Deconstruction of the Logic of Identity 1.2.1.1. John Stuart Mill 1.2.1.2. Wilhelm Wundt I.2.2. Reasoning through Images 1.2.2.1. Imagist Poetics 1.2.2.2. Spatial Form: Metaphor and Metonymy. 1.2.2.3. The Constructivist Association I.2.3. The objective correlative – an eidetic constitution? I.2.4. Metaphysics, or the Philosophy of Consciousness. Presentative and Representative Consciousness (H.L. Mansel) I.2.5. Phenomenal and Real (F.H. Bradley) I.2.6. Max Dessoir and the Distinct Phenomenology of the Art Object 1.2.7. Mrs. Dalloway under Psychoanalytic Grid. 1.2.8. Appearance as Reality: Flann O’Brien Chapter II ................................................................................................... 81 Cognitive Hybridity and Birth of Discourse Chapter III ................................................................................................. 89 Historicizing the Aesthetics of Genre Chapter IV ................................................................................................. 97 From Barbarian to Citizen: The Constitution of the Racial Other Chapter V ................................................................................................ 104 The Otherness of the Sexed, Raced, and Classed Body in Mircea Eliade References ............................................................................................... 122 Index ........................................................................................................ 135

ARGUMENT Born at the intersection of literary analysis and cultural history, the present study is collecting evidence in support of the idea that the turn of the twentieth century art was not decadent, in the sense of the gratuitous pursuit of beauty, of apathy and perverse refinement, but, on the country, energised by a will to meaningful form grounded in current epistemology, especially of the science maitresse of the time, psychology, and its kindred disciplines – psychological phenomenology and phenomenological existentialism. There is continuity between the impressionistic poetics flourishing in the last two decades of the nineteenth century (correlated subject and object of perception) and the modernist aesthetics (of the subject detached from reality and constructing his own object) which was mainly the work of Theodor Lipps, Max Dessoir, and Wilhelm Worringer. The dilemmas which the literati were facing in the early twentieth century originated partly in the realization that the narcissistic, islandish, landscape of an art considered to be its own end was suddenly invaded by discourses from other disciplines whose relevance or late acquisitions had earned them enough prestige to accede to the centre of public discourse. Such were the new theories of relativity and quantum physics, psychology, anthropology, and Empire policy within the context of the rise of national and independent states. Influential groups of reflective minds shaped by academic education, such as The Bloomsbury Circle or The Cambridge Heretics, or gathering round editors of books and journals, such as The Criterion, were neither members of Bohemian clubs or occult societies, nor warrior artists like the numerous French and German coteries of the avant-garde. The newly founded societies were closer to what today we call interdisciplinary groups of reflection, open to a graft of aesthetics on other branches of the bulging sphere of the humanities. The disciplines allowed by T.S. Eliot in his Republic of Letters focused on ”general ideas” (we could call them epistemic foci) of ”contemporary work in history, archaeology, anthropology, even of the more technical sciences when

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those results are of such a nature to be valuable to the man of general culture [...]” (Eliot 1926: web). In the first issue of The Criterion, T S Eliot ponders on the advisability of an editorial policy that could go beyond “the nature and the function of a literary review”. Setting out to redefine the notion of literature, Eliot is trying to avoid both extremes, that is, of editing a review which was “too strictly literary”, as well as one overloaded with the irrelevant issues of “current political and economic controversy”. T S Eliot is, however, moving away from the aesthetics which had been limited to ”beautiful expression of particular sensation and perception, general emotion and impersonal ideas” – the fin-de-VLơFOH aesthetics of Flaubertian beautiful form (decadence), Mallarméan impersonality and impressionistic records of synaesthetic perception. Eliot believes that defining the frontiers of literature is impossible that even “the purest literature is alimented from non-literary sources, and has non-literary consequences”. Historical materialism is now rushing in through the back door with its accumulation of historical facts and events, proposing issues of political economy or working with categories falling out of the sphere of culture (modernism, for instance, defined as the effect of material processes, such as industrialization and colonialism rather than characteristic narratives). There is much rewriting of history to do justice to the marginalized communities of the past. Language-oriented, New Historicism is a critical theory which studies discursive negotiations, capable thereby to cast light on the way in which the minds of Europe and beyond connected, borrowed or influenced the resources of an amazingly unitary culture which seems to have had a life of its own across national borders. An intellectual history and a procession of forms have thus been constituted within which similarities and distinctions contribute to a conversation of mutual understanding rather than a clash of incomprehensive monologues. Canons, however, keep changing in light of new research. An extension of the map of modernism, for instance, seems to us justified, if we start tracing back the genealogy of the parameters consensually accepted as defining the modernism of the earlier half of the last century. T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, or Wallace Stevens are among its central figures, whereas Flann’O Brien and Mircea Eliade fill in

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positions on the outer fringes of Europe. Did the Irish and Romanian writers experience a sense of otherness or did their genius bloom forth in an atmosphere felt to be congenial? Had there been created in the capitals of modernism valences to which they could attach the objects of concern in their own culture? Were they aware of any hierarchy of power or of prestige, or were they simply and naturally caught in the whirling galaxy of a European representation of art? Can they be shelved in the same library and read through the same grids? An international space was certainly created at the time, the congress as an institution being a form of intellectual bonding with open doors to the whole world. Given their prestige among other disciplines, psychology and aesthetics were among the first to hold meetings at the initiatives of C.G. Jung and Ernest Jones (1908) and Max Dessoir (1913), respectively. References to non-literary sources in a discussion of modernist aesthetics are not optional though and by far not just a matter of “general culture”. The new philosophy of art was grounded in non-artistic areas: phenomenology, psychology, linguistics. The period was dominated by phenomenology, which is usually classified as a triad: transcendental phenomenology (Edmund Husserl), hermeneutic phenomenology (Heidegger) and perceptual phenomenology (MerleauPonty). Their origins however can be found in the latter half of the nineteenth century when they were also more overtly associated with issues of language, facilitating epistemological grounding of the characteristic tropes and rhetorical structures of modernist discourse. This book is an interdisciplinary approach to the construction of selfhood and nationhood in key figures of modernism. Among them, T.S. Eliot, who turns to world culture with the self-confident and self-assured manner of a citizen of a great metropolitan centre, Flann O’Brien, whose fragmented selfhood bespeaks the experience of a colonized nation, and Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions who migrated from Romania to America shortly before the onset of the totalitarian regime and spending the rest of his active life teaching the history of religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. In the interwar period he was the leader of a generation that promoted an agenda of synchronization with the West,

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militated for change in all walks of life (they were the Romanian “Heretics”), emulating especially T.S. Eliot’s model of learned writing and of the institutionalization of art through editing journals (the Romanian Criterion) and gathering round them some of the brightest minds of the moment in various disciplinary fields (the Criterion conferences). Encyclopaedic fiction (O’Brien and Eliade) and learned poetry were the expression of ambitious designs concerning the shaping of imaginary communities – whether the nation (O’Brien) or international webs of shared anthropological representations (Eliade) and cultural narratives (T.S. Eliot). Modernism is thus cast into a broader picture where its much commented aestheticized and closed spatial form opens to utopian projects, down-to-earth politics, and cross-cultural differences. Cultural anthropology places in relation distinct areas of European modernism, divided between central and peripheral, metropolitan and colonial, nationalist and universalist, yet they appear to be unified by a common poetics of fragmentation of reality and constitution of the narrative subject. Much has been written on significant form in modernism, but what that form was meant to convey was the meaningmaking of the mind in relation to the world. Identifying the ideas which fed into canonical modernism may be equally important for interpretation and even for the building of the canon itself.

CHAPTER I THE MAKING OF MODERNIST AESTHETICS I.1. Problems of Canonization Period terms have become increasingly unstable since the rise of literary theory, which is, more or less, the work of the last generation. The dependence of canons on critical theory and epistemology parallels the way methods and equipment affect results in quantum experiments. Coming in handy at this point are two revisionary books on the long eighteenth century, which has ceased to be perceived as the iconic picture of modernity. Revision which gets into academic curriculum has a very big impact on public reception of cultural phases. Such is The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830, edited by Thomas Keymer and John Mee, which came out from Cambridge University Press in 2004. The crisis of the Augustan culture with Fielding and Richardson seen as the beginning of a pre-romantic age, in which Laurence Sterne’s erudite writing, in the spirit of the French Encyclopaedia, is reclassified as “Romantic autobiography”, politics, issues of national identity and Empire replace M.H. Abrams’s secularized theology (Natural Supernaturalism, 1971), William Blake turns away from Eleusinian mysteries and Biblical figures of authority getting enthusiastically absorbed in the revolutionary events in France, while Jacobin writing and supernatural fiction receive due attention. New meanings are showing through the grids of New Historicism, Postcolonial Studies, Gender Studies, Genre Studies, a.o. The idea of a “new eighteenth century,” which presumably extended from about 1660 to 1830, had already been launched by a revisionist collection of essays edited by Felicity A. Nussbaum & Laura Brown: The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (1987). These essays are tracing a genealogy of romantic poetics, which extends the canon as early as the mid-eighteenth century, the gothic imagination

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running in parallel to the luminaries’ brighter and domineering culture until de eve of the French Revolution. The Global Eighteenth Century (2005) is a quantitative approach which works with plenty of historical details, reports on civilization, and other such foci of present critical theory. Although reflecting on a previous stage of combined critical theories, the former book seems to have been more consistent, as the area of interest was confined to the history of ideas which elicited responses from contemporary discourse makers, adding up to an epistemological grounding of period terms A new genre, critical global studies, serves editor Felicity Nussbaum and her twenty one contributors of essays to The Global Eighteenth Century to widen the area of research on this “long” century (so labelled on account, not only of its epoch-making events, but also of its combination of opposite cultural patterns ranging from the cult of reason and classical poetics to the wild imaginative hunts of prophetic books and gothic fiction). The essays provide a “broadening scholarly perspectives beyond Europe,” the new narrative of the 18th century covering subjects as diverse as global systems, economic and cultural linkages across the world, paradigms of modernity, the establishment of hierarchies of world power, advancement to colonialism and industrialization, cultural mixture, transnational and transcultural questions about human and social difference. The building of canons on historical rather than categorical landmarks, such as colonialism and industrialism, replaces legitimating narratives with thick description of historical facts. By placing together heterogeneous materials of global culture - world history, art history, environmental studies, geography - the book capitalizes on the time’s favourite encyclopaedic lore, casting new information into a genre created by the living conditions of a globalized world and answering the demands of a postcolonial political agenda. From an empowering strategy, meant to provide a more explicit interpretative frame, multidisciplinarity may tempt researchers into a sort of data analysis or history of civilization instead of reaching a synthesis or rule-structured whole. Interdisciplinary, in our

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acceptation of the word, means crossparadigmatic. What intelligible designs originating in non-literary disciplines underwrite literary texts? The space may be “global”, but also chartered. Similarly to the revisionary criticism which pushed romanticism back to Young, Sterne and the mid eighteenth century are we tracing the ideas germinating into modernism back to the middle of the nineteenth century, in that long Victorian Age, as the other side of the positivist, realist and naturalist dominant. We are thus following in the footsteps of Isobel Armstrong who, in Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), characterizes Victorianism as the passage to phenomenology. Could generic types follow separate trajectories in an archaeology of knowledge? Hermeneutic doubt and suspicion continued to be woven into the literature of the century from Carlyle to the post-romantics, the world appearing as an enigma which invited questions and offered few keys to probing minds. If the outbreak of the French Revolution had inspired Jacobin writing satirizing oligarchy’s occult power (such as William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794), its termination had left behind a sea of doubts, including the possibility of identifying agency in history (as in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge). To Thomas Carlyle, history was just an alphabet in need of interpretation (“On History”, 1830), while the French Revolution had simply vanished under contradictory interpretations (The French Revolution, 1837). Could the mind make sense of personal or collective experience in light of what the new, physiological psychology, revealed about the mind’s reasoning through images rather than concepts? Immanuel Kant had wondered whether, in the post-metaphysical, postteleological age, metaphysics was still possible, and he had located its inquiries within the Transcendental Dialectic. In mid-nineteenth century H.L. Mansel relocated metaphysics within a Phenomenological Dialectic (Metaphysics; Or, The Philosophy of Consciousness, Phenomenal and Real, 1860), in which representation replaced transcendental concepts.

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I.2. Generative Depth Models To those immersed in the controversy over the epistemological/ phenomenological divide in the nineteenth century it should be reminded that both originated with Immanuel Kant. Reputed for the epistemological turn in philosophy, Kant was also the author of an Anthropology from a Physiological or Pragmatic Point of View (1898), and it was from this last book of the Königsberg philosopher that his successor, J.F. Herbart, launched the century’s developments in the direction of physiological psychology (pragmatism, anthropology). Unlike Kant, who had dismissed the egotist individual of his own making through free associations of the mind in favour of the Critiques’ transcendental subject, Herbart lent anthropology scientific dignity by allying research in the field with mathematical calculus of the mental flow. In Kant, physiology and the labour of thought (Denken) over the immediate data of consciousness are, as we have seen, a matter of either remaining a prisoner of an associative mechanics of perception or serving the construction of a hierarchy of concepts: Eine Lehre von der Kenntnis des Menschen, systematisch abgefaßt (Anthropologie), kann es entweder in physiologischer oder in pragmatischer Hinsicht sein. — Die physiologische Menschenkenntnis geht auf die Erforschung dessen, was die Natur aus dem Menschen macht, die pragmatische auf das, was er als freihandelndes Wesen aus sich selber macht oder machen kann und soll. (Kant 1898, p. 3)1

The physical/ metaphysical dyad of a long tradition in philosophy was now being replaced by the opposition between perception (a psychological activity of the subject) and apperception (not metaphysically but psychologically grounded, that is, in the processing of the data originating in the senses). Katherine Arens sees Kant and Herbart as the initiators of a new scientific paradigm, which she calls “conceptual psychology.” The 1

A study of the knowledge of man, formulated systematically (anthropology), may be either physiological or pragmatic. The physiological knowledge of human beings is based on the investigation of what nature makes of man, the pragmatic, on what he, as a free-acting being, makes or can and should make of himself. (Unless otherwise stated, the translations in this book are mine – M.-A. Tupan)

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relationship explored by Herbart between environment and the train of thoughts generated through associative processes - Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegrĦndet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik, und Mathematik (1824–25) (Psychology as Knowledge Newly Founded on Experience, Methaphysics, and Mathematics) - is identified in the late Kant of the Anthropology as well, who related the world and the psychology of the thinker: Kant's new “capacities of the mind,” therefore, refer not to a finished knowledge in the human mind, but rather to a capacity for the interaction between the world and the mind in specific areas of private and social existence. Here, Kant introduces a second key aspect leading to a new paradigm: the question of mental context, that is, the environment in which the mind is functioning. In this instance, each region of data may correlate to a different aspect of a world view. (Arens 1989, p. 60)

In Kant, however, the interaction between world and mind is still controlled by concepts; whereas perceptions tend to connect under a common concept, not only through similarity (monotony) but also distinction or difference, contradiction separates perceptions governed by different concepts. The logic of identity prevails over associative psychology: Abstechung (Kontrast) ist die Aufmerksamkeit erregende Nebeneinanderstellung einander widerwärtiger Sinnesvorstellungen unter einem und demselben Begriffe. Sie ist vom Widerspruch unterschieden, welcher in der Verbindung einander widerstreitender Begriffe besteht. (Kant 1898, p. 59)2

It was Wilhelm Wundt who, limiting his argument to mental processing of the immediate data of consciousness, let apperception in through the back door. The mind’s interpretation of sense perception within a certain environment which leads to the constitution of an eidetic object, purified of the transitory and irrelevant properties in an open-ended activity of reduction is the primary scene of modernist writing. The art for art’s sake 2

Distinction (contrast) is the attention-grabbing juxtaposition of mutually repulsive sense concepts under one and the same concept. It is distinguished from contradiction, which is the combination of conflicting concepts.

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slogan, or the priority of art over life were not tokens of moral relaxation or decadence but epistemologically grounded assumptions. It was in this progress from physiological psychology to phenomenology that we can discover the generative depth models of the literature of modernism, which, in our line of argument, emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The realist poetics of the novel was not dependent on interpretation, George Eliot considering, for instance, in a late essay, first published by K.K. Collins in 1980, that language means the same to all speakers and the world is given in common to all the members of a community: ”above & below, light & dark, fast & slow, warm & cold, sweet & sour, hard & soft, smooth & rough, heavy & light, noisy & still, cloudy & clear, wet & dry, far & near, & so on, would be the same qualities for each group” because ”the main elements of grammar are simply indispensable facts of human existence.” (Collins, “Questions of Method,” p. 388). The “indispensable facts of human existence” are the embodied schemata situating the self in the world through polarities of the kind listed by George Eliot. Cognitive psychologists and linguists, such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, John R. Taylor, a.o., define this embodied hermeneutics as mapping of physical perceptions onto epistemic ideas through cognitive metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980). The process is unconscious, whereas pragmatist psychology studies the way the mind is intentionally trying to make sense of the object of perceptions. Eliot’s polarities do not belong to open-ended chains of differences but to the order of concepts, to binaries based on logical contrast. As we have seen, the Immanuel Kant of the Critique of Reason remained faithful to the logic of identity even in his Anthropology (the distinction/ contradiction polarity). The modernist codes and mind styles are generally seen as dominated by epistemology. Dick Higgins (A Dialectic of Centuries, 1978) and Brian McHale (Postmodernist Fiction, 1987) posit the question in very similar terms:

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I will formulate it as a general thesis about modernist fiction: the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological. That is, modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as those mentioned by Dick Higgins in my epigraph: “How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?” Other typical modernist questions might be added: What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of the knowable? And so on. (McHale 2004, p. 9)

Immanuel Kant did indeed make room for the three types that are currently mentioned in connection with epistemology - pragmatism, positivism, and hermeneutics – but his understanding of the first placed it in opposition to the physiological psychology which fuelled modernist writing. As we go back to the Preface of his 1798 book, Anthropologie in physiologischer oder pragmatischer Hinsicht as its full title reads, we see him setting in opposition the two kinds of man’s acquisition of knowledge: the transcendentalism of pure reason versus man’s making of himself through the individual and unreliable perceptions of an “egotistic” self which relies only on its idiosyncratic perceptions and chance associations. We see in Kant the philosopher of the epistemological turn (after the cognitive turn, from the pre-modern theosophical ontology to modernity’s gnoseology – probing into the conditions and validation of knowledge), who distrusted the physiological/ pragmatic mode of inquiry which would be practiced by his successors: Herbart, Wilhelm Wundt and William James. While reading modernity in the key of epistemology, we see in the first phase of late modernity (modernism) the rejection of that universal rationality enshrined by Kant in his categorical imperative. No universally valid perspective is affordable to the mind which derives all its knowledge from bodily impressions and its judgment upon their interaction. The threshold to the new repertory of questions – How does this world appear to me? How is my mind derived from the body? How do I relate to the world around me? - seems to us to have been passed by J.S. Mill through his attack on classical syllogistic reasoning whose conclusion did nothing more than confirm the truth of the generic in the first premise. His alternative, reasoning “from particulars to particulars without passing

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through generals,”3 resembled Leibniz’s logic of indiscernibles or nonidenticals which applied to the empirical world, where no two things share all their properties so that we might call them identical. The way Wilhelm Wundt and Alfred Binet elaborated on Mill’s critique of syllogistic reasoning replacing it with reasoning through images provided the schema that lies embedded in the structure of modernist literature, whether in prose or verse. Experience continues to be internal, but the subject is not the consciousness of its permanent interiority. It becomes one more object along the others in the world of its representations. The labour of thought (French pensée, German Denken) on the immediate data of consciousness allows a mediated knowledge of the world: the object is a manifold of properties and states which are perceived with certain constancy. A concept is no longer produced by the thinking subject; it is the result of the connection or interaction between thought (pensée) and its objects. The sense of inner duration depends on the interaction between psychical laws and the complex of the physical connections of substance. These ideas deployed by Wilhelm Wundt in Elements de Psychologie physiologique (1886) contain in a concise form the conceptual array of modernist philosophy: phenomenological constitution of subject and object, imagistic poetics, Bergson’s philosophy of the immediate data of consciousness and duration, the poetics of symbolist synaesthesia, Pound’s images and T.S. Eliot’s objective correlatives, a.o. The paradigm of physical psychology or pragmatism inspired the aesthetic paradigms of art history around the turn of the century. The mere description of characteristic tropes and linguistic structures will not suffice for an understanding of the artists’ rhetorical manipulation which is part of the meaning of their works. Modernist aesthetics was very far away from what the eighteenth century consumer of art found to be picturesque, harmonious, civilized, urbane etc. No matter how rebellious modernists 3

J.S. Mill, A System of Logic, Book 2. Of Reasoning. Chapter 3. Of The Functions and Logical Value Of The Syllogism. https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/online-ebooks/john-stuart-mill/system-oflogic/book-2-3.html

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might appear to us nowadays, they did not create in the teeth of what their contemporaries thought fit to fulfil the aesthetic function. The birth of a new spirit in mid-twentieth century took art away from a perceptualist and into a constructivist direction. Gestalt psychology reactivated the notion of organic form (as conceived by Goethe among others), with all the elements of an art work converging towards some allinclusive structure and meaning. Oskar Walzel reconsidered the relationship between form and content (“Gehalt und Gestalt im Kunstwerk des Dichters”, 1923), Ernst Cassirer worked out his own version of Gestalt as symbolical form (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 1923), Roman Jakobson developed a theory of the “dominant” (1935) which presumably grants a work of art structure and hierarchical arrangement of component elements, etc.: The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure...a poetic work [is] a structured system, a regularly ordered hierarchical set of artistic devices. Poetic evolution is a shift in this hierarchy... The image of... literary history substantially changes; it becomes incomparably richer and at the same time more monolithic, more synthetic and ordered, than were the membra disjecta of previous literary scholarship. (Jakobson 1981: web)

Formalism in writing and literary theory represented a mid-twentieth century island in between modernist psychology-grounded models and the rise of postmodernism in the 60’s, whose inspiring philosophical sources were Nietzsche’s legacy of deconstructionism (See the third ontological order of reified forms of subjectivity in Karl Popper’s Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972). In the latter half of the century the reflective mind turned from a phenomenology of perception to a philosophy of language as ontological mediator and operator. With its distrust of ontological certainty and emphasis upon the self-reliant structures of language, analytical philosophy lies in between the two camps, offering epistemological support to mid-century formalism.

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I.2.1. The Deconstruction of the Logic of Identity I.2.1.1. John Stuart Mill The logic of identity packed down to modernity in the garb of syllogism entered into a binary with Leibniz’s law of indiscernibility of identicals (Leibniz, 1969, 308). Identicals, that is, things sharing all their properties (A = A and A  B), are only possible in formal language. In the empirical world, there are no such things, they sharing with others a part of their properties (A is partly B, which shares some properties with C, etc.). The existence of a logical dualism was speculated by John Stuart Mill in his critique of syllogisms. After centuries of syllogistic reasoning, parodied by Hamlet in Act 3, Scene 1 (Self-slaughter is punished with eternal damnation/ People fear damnation/ Hence people refrain from committing self-slaughter despite the misery they have to cope with), Mill asks the commonsensical question whether that kind of reasoning led to an increase in knowledge: We have now to inquire, whether the syllogistic process, that of reasoning from generals to particulars, is, or is not, a process of inference; a progress from the known to the unknown; a means of coming to a knowledge of something which we did not know before. (Mill 1846, p. 122)

The answer is no: “When you admitted the major premises, you asserted the conclusion.” (Ibid., p. 124) The argument is grounded, as in Leibniz, in empirical experience: To our impression of the way a person acts on some particular occasion, we bring our previous impressions about the way others acted in different circumstances as well as our encyclopaedic resources (what we know about similar cases or about ourselves). Present experience is thus informed by our general store of knowledge, and the existence of typical situations/ characters grants validity to our generalizations. Positivist philosophy served a realist poetics.

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I.2.1.2. Wilhelm Wundt Auguste Comte’s positivism, emerging from a nebula of scientism, utilitarianism (John Stuart Mill) and socialism (Henri de Saint-Simon) lent its spirit to the realist manifesto made public by painter Gustave Courbet in 1861 (Realist Manifesto: An Open Letter). Empiricism, determinism and social activism (Courbet was a member of the Paris Commune) shaped a mindset which dominated the mid-nineteenth century. A poetics of mimesis recommending the “slice of life” version of art separated thus the escapist agenda of both romanticism and modernism on either side of realism. The two phases of art history may be said to share, not only an anti-realist and anti-historical agenda, but also an understanding of the creative act as a kind of revelation. The romantic idealist philosophy, however, looked upon the art object as an embodiment of some Hegelian, universal spirit, whereas the modernist artist reflected upon the art object as the constitution of form born of the relationship between the mind and the world. Let us compare two poems which, at a surface level, seem to imagine a similar scene. The Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth about a woman singing while working in the field, whose song lingers in the mind of the narrator long after it is heard no more, was written as an object lesson of the autonomy of imagination in its relation to empirical reality and sense perception. Subjectivity is the domain of transcendental experience. In The Idea of Order at Key West, Wallace Stevens imagines a different scene. The woman’ song is working its magic while the singer is immersed in the natural landscape which it seems to shape into an orderly object in the narrator’s mind. As Wundt says4, there is no thought without 4

“Da es aber kein Denken ohne Inhalt gibt, sind diese Anschauungs- und Denkgesetze nichts anderes als die allgemeinsten Gesetze des Gedankeninhalts oder der Dinge selbst.” (However, since there is no thinking without content, these laws of intuition and thinking are nothing other than the most general laws of the content of thought or of the things themselves.” (Wundt, Wilhelm. Logik. Eine Untersuchung der Prinzipien der Erkentnis unde der Methoden wissenschaftlicher Forschung. Erster Band: Erkenntnislehre. Zweiter Band, Methodenlehre. Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke,1880, p. 387).

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a content derived from the immediate experience of the physical object which is present to the intentional consciousness of the subject, shared with other subjects in an intersubjective order. The narrator of Stevens’s poem is not the solipsistic romantic but a subject who seeks eidetic confirmation in an intersubjective relationship. The artefact is like an attractor which changes the properties of the colonised space: It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

The experience can be very well defined in the terms used by Wilhelm Wundt in one of his essays for the description of the aesthetic experience. The woman’s singing renders “geistliche Zustände in sinnlichen Formen” (spiritual states in sensuous forms), which are transmitted to observers who experience them as if they had been produced by their own sense organs. These “mimische Bewegungen” (mimetic movements of the body or of the spirit) are generated in the outer observers (“ausseren Beobachter”) who feel the same as us (“dieselben mit uns empfinden”). (Wundt 1885, p. 231) In the aesthetic perception, Wundt says, feelings do not depend on the immediate perceptions but on their relation, sometimes unconscious, to previous representations stored in a backfiring

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consciousness. (Ibid., p. 210). The perception of order in the artefact, experienced and induced in the observers, lends them a similar state of mind which filters the new scene giving it form (portioning out, emblazoning, fixing, arranging, setting in polarity). Unlike the romantics’ godlike creation out of the void, Wundt’s disciples saw the genesis of the work of art in the exchanges between mind and environment: “In der Vorstellung selbst finden immer nur die unmittelbare Wechselwirking des Bewusstseins mit der Aussenwelt ihren Ausdruck.”5 Although less studied, Wilhelm Wundt’s influence, especially in France, England, and later in America, as William James’s European foil, was probably as famous in the age as Schopenhauer’s. His works which popularized the results of his research in Leipzig, where he founded the first laboratory for psychological research, were translated into several languages, and his presence at the meetings of the British Psychological Society in London was greeted as a momentous event. Frederic W.H. Myers, a founder of The Society for Psychical Research, drew attention to the Copernican turn effected by Wundt’s theories in epistemology: the relationship between reality and its representation in the mind changing in favour of the latter (Myers 2018, XXXVIII). Both Walter Horatio Pater and Oscar Wilde elaborated on this new psychology in their poetics of life imitating art (Oscar Wilde, “The Art of Lying”) and of each individual living imprisoned in his dream of the world (Pater, Postface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance). An encyclopaedic spirit, Wundt created a disciplinary mix whose paradigm crossed psychology, philosophy, biology, physiology, anthropology and aesthetics. In his book of Essays (1885), he refutes Darwin’s mechanic theory of the nervous system (pp. 230-31), sets out to overthrow natural philosophy (p. 131) and replace it with experimental psychology, pronounces phrenology a pseudo-science which could profitably be exchanged with the aesthetic interest: how could we make a man’s character known better than by drawing his portrait? (p. 227). Dorian Gray’s character cannot be known by looking straight into his young and beautiful face but by contemplating each of his vices showing off in his more truthful portrait. It is as if Wilde had written the 5 It is in representation that the immediate interaction of consciousness with the outside world finds its expression.

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novel according to Wundt’s aesthetic recipe. Echoes of Wund’s writing on the Vampire myth can be found in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Wund’s Ethik, Eine Untersuchung der Thatsachen und Gesetze des Sittlichen Lebens (1886) is his exploration of the relation to an other, as implied in the etymology of this branch of philosophy, but that other is the primitive man, the archaic community, the gloss on morals swerving to phenomenology and anthropology. It is not the individual’s conduct in a society of peers that comes into focus but the war of civilizations. How is a myth born? The undead is constituted from superstitions, fleeting impressions or changes in luminosity, sudden disappearances, nightmares etc. Traditions are those which count most in shaping a people’s world outlook, as are the spirit of caste, of revenge among barbarians. Stoker’s Dracula is obsessing with his rights handed down from ancestors (lordship), with the primitive thirst for revenge, for sucking the enemy’s blood. The Asian spirit of conquest and the European civilized and peaceful mind (Eudaimonismus) of the civilized individual, thinking of the common good, is set in polarity with the daimonic egotist whose mind is pivoting solely around his clan (Stamm), his descent and the inherited blood revenge duties. Mina and Hacker standing for Kulturgemeinschaft (p. 213) – the community built through culture, from readings about other nations in the British Museum to cooking recipes of different nations – and Dracula lusting after lordship in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the vampire boasts his ancestry and plans the conquest of the West, carry undoubtedly the stamp of Wundt’s anthropological refurbishing of the romantic myth. The German philosopher was appealing to images of conquerors at the time of migrations when the Asian hordes had marshalled over Europe, but in his time the conquest wars were being waged by Europeans for lordship over colonies. The new interest in anthropology, the construction of the primitive man manifested by thinkers as diverse as Wundt, Freud, Frazer, Worringer, or the Cambridge Heretics might have been used to justify the Empires. Invited to make his research known in France6, Wundt published a book in French, where one can see his evolution from the study of sense 6

Wilhelm Wundt, Éléments de psychologie physiologique, tr. Élie Rouvier. Introd. par M.D. Nolen, Paris: Felix Alcan, 1886.

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perceptions, of their synthesis (synaesthesia) and association, to an approach closer to phenomenology, creating a vocabulary which anticipates Husserl’s. Wilhelm Wundt’s phenomenology was meant to correct the limits of positivism but also the randomness of empirical psychology. The WundtJames school of pragmatism allowed the subject to let itself be borne upon the tide of associations in the absence of any transcendental reflection. Actually, the self is constituted by the objects present to its senses. It is through the pattern of recurrent impressions that the self finds itself at a remove from the immediate world of sensorial impressions (Wundt and Bergson: “the immediate data of consciousness”). Husserl’s subject is immersed into his field of perception in three ways: unmediated perception of object, memory of previous experiences triggered by associations, and imaginative elaborations: “inventive phantasy, what goes on in the phantasied world” (Husserl 1983: §80. The Relationship of Mental Processes to the Pure Ego, p. 190). Wundt’s description of the phenomenological constitution (Die Gewissheit constituiren – Wundt 1880, 378) proceeds from unmediated sensations and mediated perception, inner and outer experience (Innere und aussere Erfahrung). All objective certitude is of a mediated nature being the result of the labour of reasoning over the immediate data of consciousness: the multiplicity of properties and states which are found on repeated occasions (with certain regularity). To Wundt, in contradistinction to Mill, the object is not found by reason or sense organs but given (p. 379). Perception is a representation corresponding to a certain object. The representation of the seen (perceived) Object is one with it. A later reflection will differentiate it from the subjective picture (Bild). Afterwards the separation of outer from the inner perception of the object depends on our consciousness, being counterpoised to the inner flow of our representations (the results of our previous perceptions). It is the constancy of features with which the same object in different perceptions corresponds to our Wahrnehmungsresultaten (the results of

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our previous perceptions – pp. 379-380). Perceptions go under related categories, our knowledge of the object being guaranteed by the “Konstanz der Veränderlingen/ der Erscheinungen” – the constancy of changes/ appearances” (p. 435). Our certitude depends on three conditions: x The force of our exterior (outer) perceptions. x The correspondence between our successive perceptions. x The correspondence of various subjects (what others perceive). Wundt is a phenomenologist who sees the experience of an object as progressive but an endless process, and the subject as a dynamic entity placed in a context and in relation to others (being with others in the world). Certain features (constitutive) of an object are those which are given in different perceptions, on various occasions: gewiss ist was es sich in aller Wahrnehmungen gegeben bewahrt (p. 382), that is, “konstant bleibende Gegenstände des Denkens als fest Punkte” (objects of thought which remain the same as fixed landmarks – p. 435). Perceptions go under related categories, our knowledge of the object being guaranteed by the “Konstanz der Veränderlingen/ der Erscheinungen” – the constancy of the changing objects which appear to us under different appearances” (Ibid.). That is why time needs to be recovered or, better said, redeemed. Proust’s narrator, Marcel (Remembrance of Things Past), or Woolf’s narrator, Bernard (The Waves) need to set their memories in order, in the intelligible pattern of a narrative. T.S. Eliot urges redemption of time in several of his poems, the one in “Little Gidding” (Four Quartets) being very explicit by setting in polarity the chaotic flow of historical events and their constitution into patterns:

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A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments.

Inside consciousness, the representations of external objects obey psychological laws, the laws of thinking (Denken). The inner experience takes priority over the external one. Thinking will distinguish between Passenden Gattungsmerkmale und charakteristische (unpassende) Eigenschaften (random and characteristic features, those which remain unchanged in the chain of experiences). The characteristic features will serve the constitution of a concept (p. 543). Apperception unites representations according to determined laws. For instance, the perception of Aufeinaderfolge (consecutive events) will lead to the idea of causality. Wundt sees psychological processes only in connection to physical processes. The origin of apperception is sensation and perception even if psychological laws grant the mind a certain freedom from the immediate data of consciousness. In the third chapter (Proteus) of Ulysses, Joyce seems to be defending the idea of art as phenomenology rather than transcendence of the world of things. Who is he referring to in the opening of the chapter? We think the allusions to Walter Horatio Pater are too numerous to be overlooked. INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the

18

Chapter I dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'. Won't you come to Sandymount, Madeline the mare? Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare. Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see. See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

It is not only details - such as being rich (while preaching otherworldliness and sanctity), being bold, or being the author of an essay entitled “Diaphaneitơ” (1864), knowledge of Italian art -, but the logic of the whole argument that makes us think of Pater. As well as Pater in the aforementioned essay, in fact, alluding to it, Joyce sets in polarity the coloured sensuous world of material things and transcendence, composed of its main attributes: eternity (“walking into eternity”), absence of colour (which is the effect of the light of creation), invocation of Jesus and of the gnostic Demiurgos), absolute knowledge. By diaphaneitơ, Pater understands the art which redeems matter, which shows things to be translucent with meaning, transferring them to a higher, spiritual order. He bemoans the inevitability of the fall into the world and division of the artist or the thinker who aspire to the oneness of the supreme being (Imitatio Christi meaning the ideal of being: “Sibi unitus et simplificatus esse,”) Diaphane versus adiaphane: transcendental or thisworldly, the concrete, physical world. Joyce is defending a Wundtian philosophy of the subject’s self’s relationship to the world. He suggests the impossibility of validating a metaphysical position. The topic is the acquisition of knowledge, expressed both in Italian - maestro di color che sanno – and in Gaellic –

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Dominie Deasy kens them a (Schoolmaster Deasy knows them all). The subject is suspended between idealist Pater and the pragmatic, down-toearth Deasy. The former had set limits to representation as diapahneitơ. The latter was an expert who worshipped food and money. Stephen gives them a metaphorical garb: diaphaneitơ is like a gateway to the invisible. Adiaphaneitơ is like a door that shuts one up on this side of experience. Is the former possible? Is the latter satisfying? Stephen wonders, how had [Pater] come to know about bodies if not by perceiving them as coloured and hard to the touch. He had read about the Scriptures as God’s signature, yet he catches Pater mentioning the word “bodies”. Could he have known about them if he had pointed his sconce only upwards, to the sky, without lighting the world beneath? But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure.

The improper use of the pronoun suggests that a word having only a grammatical meaning depends for meaningful reference upon its initial association with a class of real objects (them bodies .... them coloured). Nebeneinander and nacheinander – German words – point to a Wundtian positioning of objects in space sublimated into concepts of placement in space and distribution in time. The concrete/ abstract scheme is also used in other binaries such as: shells/ money (the former is a slang word for the latter), both of which can be found on headmaster Deasy’s table, who is ignorant of categorical distinctions, or Jesus (Redeemer of man) and the gnostic Demiurgos, creators of the material world in which man is imprisoned, or Madeline the mare (harlot Madeleine of the Bible) versus Mary’s immaculate conception which Stephen is symbolically alluding to by his invention of a ride on a mare as pure act of language: A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare. Acatalectic, adiaphane, agallop ...The passage seems to have a basso continuo on the letter [a], the first letter of the alphabet. In imitation of Christ who had redeemed Madeline, Stephen redeems the mare, “delineating” it, producing an artifice. He positions himself thus,

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neither in the material world, nor in its diaphanous sublimation, but in a sphere of language – letters, rhythms, pronouns, poetry – of his own making. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce alludes to Yeats in the final scene of his hypostasis as artist, replacing the symbolist poetics of his predecessor with the reified objectivity of his language, which turns on itself in narcissistic self-sufficiency. His progression from synaesthetic perception to apperception and artefact follows Wundt’s description of psychological processes in his Essays (from synaesthesia to Lessing’s gloss on Laokoon): He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: —A day of dappled seaborne clouds. The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

The same poetics underwrites Joyce’s Ulysses. Diaphaneité means transparency, showing through or across (phainesthai: "to appear”). It is not the world that comes forward into view, though; it is the work of art. Stepehn’s poetics follows the phenomenological process described by Wilhelm Wundt in his 1885 Essays: The exchange between his body in movement and consciousness generates a flow of representations combined through “ähnliche GefĦhle und Empfindungen” (similar feelings and sensations). Movement implies awareness of both changes in space and of deferral in time: “A very short space of time through very short times of space.” His “ineluctable”

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imprisonment in the world of the senses (because the refusal to take notice of it by shutting his eyes could cause his fatal downfall) brings to his mind the idea of the ineluctable immersion in the world of the senses deplored by Pater. The emotion experienced in the present is enhanced by the presence of similar circumstances in memory: “[…] die neue Vorstellungen die älteren in das Bewusstsein hereinrufen” (“the new representations call to mind the old ones” – Wundt 1885, 211), strengthening the associated feelings. Stephen reflects upon these overlaid representations, pitting Pater’s option (bracketing the sensuous body of reality and letting the spirit show through) and his own solution, which is Wundt’s as well. The aesthetic feeling is aroused by synaesthetic combinations, the disorder of the senses which is the preliminary act of liberation from the immediate connection with things. Stephen forces conventional meanings upon concrete things (shells and money, mare and mistress etc.) The next step on the way to the subject’s emancipation from the concrete object of knowledge (not the knowledge of a particular, which depends on indefinitely other points of view coming with new experiences thereof, but knowledge “of everything”, stabilized in a representation) is language. It is language that renders spiritual conditions in sensuous forms, combines the movement of states of mind with sensuous impressions. Stephen’s inner vision is reified in iambic four-stress verse, maybe an allusion to the tetrads of the scale out of which the universe was created (Plato, Timaeus). The symbolist cult of synaesthesia had been meant to create a parallel world to trivial reality through art. Rimbaud’s Vowels (1871) is, according to the generic tradition, a sonnet, a song of praise. Associated through a long tradition with the multiplicity of reality and the delusion of the senses, colours are here transferred to language – letters in the alphabet, abstract signs divorced from reference. By constantly alluding to the fin-de-siơcle symbolism and impressionism, Joyce defines his own aesthetics. Pater too had proceeded in polemical fashion. In the “Diaphaneitơ” essay, he launches his manifesto in opposition to the previous concept of the aesthetic feeling as a matter of taste. He demanded a superior, intellectual, moral, spiritual fibre.

Chapter I

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Joyce too defines his style in opposition to what had preceded him: his poetics is poietics, the art of making, while the artist is supposed to be an artificer, a Daedalus figure.

1.2.2. Reasoning through Images 1.2.2.1. Imagist Poetics Although leaving behind the body/ mind dualism of Cartesian philosophy, the modernist outlook continues to be dualistic. The binary consists now of the mind’s exposition to the flow of sensations, a concept borrowed from Hume’s associationist psychology, and its freedom from the “immediate data of consciousness” through their processing in consciousness. Henri Bergson (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1888) imagines a double self, one attuned to the multiplicity of phenomena perceived through the senses, and a profound self which governs them through discursive reason (the juxtaposition or dissociation of the heterogeneous states of consciousness generates codes, their symbolical representation: words, the letters of the alphabet). Whereas Immanuel Kant had removed pure reason from time (duration), Bergson proposes two layers of existence with both situated in the “concrete reality”: Au lieu d'une durée hétérogène dont les moments se pénètrent, nous aurons alors un temps homogène dont les moments s'alignent dans l'espace. Au lieu d'une vie intérieure dont les phases successives, chacune unique en son genre, sont incommensurables avec le langage, nous obtiendrons un moi recomposable artificiellement, et des états psychiques simples qui s'agrègent et se désagrègent comme font, pour former des mots, les lettres de l'alphabet.7

7

Instead of a heterogeneous duration whose moments penetrate each other, we will then have a homogeneous time whose moments line up in space. Instead of an interior life whose successive phases, each unique in its own way, are incommensurable with language, we will obtain an artificially recomposable ego, and simple psychic states that aggregate and disintegrate as they do, to form words, the letters of the alphabet. (Henry Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Paris : Les Presses universitaires de France, 1970, p. 104).

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In the opening of “Proteus”, Stephen spatializes the duration of his successive steps. The multiplicity of steps in time is reduced (in a phenomenological sense) to the homogeneous expanse of consciousness by shutting his eyes and concomitantly shutting out the show of the visible whose mode of existence is succession: “A very short space of time through very short times of space”. Bergson’s double self had its roots in Wilhelm Wundt’s Logic, as does Husserl’s constitution of the eidetic object (phenomenological reduction). Knowledge, in a scientific acceptation, is the result of the mental processing of the immediate data of consciousness. (Wundt 1880, 379). The control over our perception presupposes the possibility to distinguish between its objective ground and the subjective elements. The fundamental condition of an objective concept is the constance of its appearances. (p. 435). This constance can be seen in a moving object. Our successive perceptions will end up in a series of representations. When features are regular (periodical), they will be noticed in the similitude of successive phases. This constancy implies two conditions; the representations of the constantly remaining objects of consciousness should belong to lines which belong together. Secondly, the constant laws of change established by our consciousness should not be subjective reproductions but reflections of an objective phenomenon. (p. 435). Causality is not seen as an a priori concept, as in Kant, but an inference from the Aufanderfolge (succession) of events in the phenomenal world. The objects serving the building of concepts should be grouped together according to characteristic features, whiler the transitory ones are overlooked (p. 543). Unlike syllogistic reasoning, this constitution of concepts is based on the analytical comparison of a great number of objects which belong together (sharing a middle term): A has the feature M B has the feature M A and B have a common feature (p. 324) Or: M shows feature A M shows feature B A and B are related. (p. 325)

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Similarity and contrast are the features that serve the constitution of a purified object of consciousness, a concept. Modernist metaphors are therefore cognitive metaphors, being images mapped onto epistemic ideas. 1.2.2.2. Spatial Form: Metaphor and Metonymy Alfred Binet may be said to have put psychology in the service of aesthetics. Whereas Wundt made cognition dependent on the strength of sensations – the beginning of the process of conceptual constitution - , Binet diminishes their effect on consciousness in favour of the images they give rise to (Binet specifies that by image he means what in German is called “representation”.) He appeals to Helmholtz, who compares the perception of exterior things to the interpretation of signs. (Binet 1886, p. 13). Our spirit grants them no more attention than the one needed to catch the sense they are triggering. While reading a book, we are preoccupied by meaning not by the printed letters. Actually, the interpretation of a new sensation is much influenced by others stored in memory. Images are grouped, organized in memory, reasoning or imagination, where they may enter into new relationships, different from the ones in the object world (p. 15). The perception of an object is trailing with it a retinue of images through subconscious associations with previous experiences. Our world of representations is therefore an illusionary one, because sensations are forced into a mental instead of a motor channel. F. Galton’s Mental Imagery is read for examples of the priority of the mental over the physiological response to external stimuli (for instance, the impression that the members of a group in a photograph resemble one another). Sensations and images are not distinct from any other state of consciousness. Binet considers that Wundt is right in asserting that resemblance is the only way of uniting states separated in time. He goes on to say that the very working of our minds implies the two opposite and inseparable elements. The present image, A, calls to mind a similar image from memory, B. But B is associated with another image, C, which makes C directly associated with A: (A = B) – C

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Association through resemblance introduces an association through contiguity, for how could we come to associate A with C if not through B (Wundt’s middle tem)? In conclusion, “l’acte de perception deviant une transition du connu a l’inconnu au moyen de la resemblance.”8 (p. 134) Binet’s psychological explanation of the way our mind filters experience for the acquisition of new knowledge may be used to explain the mechanism of the logic of imagistic poetry. In the following poem, for instance, T.E. Hulme progresses through resemblance and contiguity of images to build the image of a cosmic phenomenon, the sunset, through the binding metaphor of seduction. Alluring-seducing: the impressionistic picture is transmuting an observation of the setting sun into a state of mind. The notion of seduction connects the luring view of the sky, the goddess of love, Baudelaire’s Cythera, and the voluptuous lover of King Charles II. The vividly coloured painting of Lady Castelmaine, brought to mind by the memory of her numerous portraits, resembles the way the light of the sinking sun trails over the roofs of the city. As the sun is going to its bed, so are street walkers heading home, with the exception of a modern version of a female seducer (a vain maid, lingering, loath to go.): Alluring, Earth seducing, with high conceits is the sunset that reigns at the end of westward streets. ... A sudden flaring sky troubling strangely the passer by with visions, alien to long streets, of Cytharea or the smooth flesh of Lady Castlemaine. ... A frolic of crimson is the spreading glory of the sky, heaven's jocund maid flaunting a trailed red robe along the fretted city roofs about the time of homeward going crowds — a vain maid, lingering, loth to go. ... ( Thomas Ernest Hulme, “A City Sunset”)

8

“The act of perception becomes a passage from the known to the unknown through resemblance.”

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A similar chain of ideas structures Virginia Woolf’s first story, “The Snail on the Wall:” The narrator notices a mark on the wall; she’s trying to remember the date, but, in keeping with the precepts of physiological psychology, thoughts cannot be separated from sense impressions: “In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw.” She remembers the fire and what the sight of the red coals automatically stirred in her memory: […] my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps.

The narrator reflects upon the associative working of her mind: “How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it...” All of a sudden she realizes the wild wondering of her thoughts triggered by her effort to guess the identity of the mark on the wall: Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker's Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can't remember a thing. Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing.... There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying– "I'm going out to buy a newspaper." "Yes?" "Though it's no good buying newspapers.... Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war!... All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall." Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

Summoned to reality by a person telling her he/she was going out to buy a paper, she connects it with news about the ongoing war. As the superstition goes, a black snail is of bad omen: Ancient Legends, Mystic

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Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland by Lady Wilde (1887) suggests that the key to reading your future is to utilize the common or garden snail: Another mode of divination for future fate in life is by snails. The young girls go out early before sunrise to trace the path of the snails in the clay, for always a letter is marked, and this is the initial of the true lover’s name. A black snail is very unlucky to meet first in the morning, for his trail would read death; but a white snail brings good fortune. (Wilde 1887: web) The narrator finds out the identity of the black spot, not by direct observation, but by association with a fantasy or a reading memory. 1.2.2.3. The Constructivist Association The need to revise formal logic in light of the new science of psychology which brought with it a distinct map of the mind had been felt earlier, Binet acknowledging his debt to Mill and other English philosophers. They had become known in France especially after the publication of Théodule Ribot’s book, La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine (1870), and Louis Liard’s, Les logiciens anglais contemporains (1878), mentioned in La psychologie du raisonnement (p. 128). To Liard, English logicians “font date dans l'histoire de la science” (are landmarks in the history of science) (Avant-propos) and cannot be ignored. At a surface level, Binet does not seem thus to have invented anything, his argument following pretty close the method of William Stanley Jevons, a disciple of Boole’s, as presented by Liard in his book (pp. 147- 177). This method consists mainly in “substitution des semblables” (p. 157) (substitution based on similarity). It is through partial identity that new knowledge can be added to old: a class of objects is included in a more extensive one. For instance: A = B (Mammals are Vertebrates). A connection becomes possible between A and a C denoting vertebrates which are not mammals, with vertebrates as middle term.

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Chapter I Il en résulte que le raisonnement, ou processus de rapports connus à des rapports inconnus, consiste à remplacer, dans une proposition ou dans un système de propositions, l'identique par l'identique, l'équivalent par l'équivalent, le semblable par le semblable.9

Stanley Jevons’s mediated resemblance may be related to Binet’s correlation of similarity and contiguity: INFÉRENCES MÉDIATES. — Premier cas—Inférence tirée de deux identités simples : A=B, B = C; dans l'identité A =B, à B substituons son identique C, et nous avons : A = C. La capitale, de l'Angleterre = Londres, Londres= la cité la plus populeuse du globe, Donc la capitale de l'Angleterre = la cité la plus populeuse du globe.10

England’s capital and London are fully equivalent, whereas, in the predicate “the most populous city on the globe”, England’s capital is only partially/ metonymically represented (only one out of a multiplicity of other predicates). Ribot comments on the laws of associations as he found them in Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect (1855). Associations are said to be of three kinds: simple (either by contiguity or by resemblance), 9

It follows that reasoning, or the progress from known to unknown relations, consists in replacing, in a proposition or in a system of propositions, the identical by the identical, the equivalent by the equivalent, the similar by the similar. (Louis Liard, Les logiciens anglais contemporains, Paris : Librairie Germer Baillière et cie, 1878, p. 156). 10 MEDIATED INFERENCES. — First case—Inference drawn from two simple identities: A=B, B=C; in the identity A=B, for B we substitute its identical C, and we have: A=C. The capital, of England = London, London = the most populous city in the world, So the capital of England = the most populous city on the globe. (Liard 1878, p. 158)

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composed (by both contiguity and resemblance) and constructive (new sensations created by the imagination). Association by contiguity engages a manifold of sensations perceived simultaneously or successively, so that when one is experienced in the present or remembered, the others present in memory are also activated. The descriptions of homes, characters or scenery in realist fiction is usually based on an association of mixed sensations – visual, auditory, tactile, etc. – meant to reproduce the variegated show of life. Contiguity allows of further acquisitions, whereas resemblance demands the intelligence of discovering profound resemblance despite dissimilar appearances. Baroque poets delight in such far-fetched associations (conceits), achieved, as Eliot says in his essay “On the Metaphysical Poets” (1921) through the mixed sensibility of fusing thought and feeling. The third kind of association is of the constructive kind, characteristic of the imagination: La constructivité (constructiveness) nous permet, par des associations de sensations, d’imaginer des sensations nouvelles11 (Ribot 1914, 287-288) The interior monologues in the third person of a stream-of-consciousness narrative are filters of the scene reflecting back, not on what is actually going on, but on the narrators’ psychical activity. The communion cup is the inverted symbol of the central panel of the Christian mass, the Eucharist. He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn’t know what to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S. Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in. ((Ulysses: web)

In Joyce’s novel, Bloom watches the priest before Dignam’s funeral service, imagines an accident – the bishop losing his pin – by association with the pin he had removed from Marta’s letter, and misinterprets the 11

Constructiveness allows us, through the association of sensations, to imagine new sensations.

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acronyms of Jesus’ sacred names, failing to remember what his wife had said they meant. Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum is made to refer to what was going on at that moment – the hic et nunc of an empirically-minded man (Iron nails ran in), while Iesus Hominum Salvator is mistaken for his private obsession with the failure of his life (I have sinned and I have suffered). The religious, transcendental, signifiers are sliding under circumstantial and self-centred signifieds. Bloom’s mundane meanings sound like a methodical anti-mass: being locked away in the coffin instead of being freed from the grave, sinning and suffering instead of finding redemption and victory. Modernist poetics was not a matter of communality of style or fashion but of ideas launched into public discourse, especially by psychologists, logicians, anthropologists and phenomenologists. Art was stepping beyond its shadow, borrowing the instruments of science and troping on its concepts. The catechism scene in Ulysses, for instance hinges upon the distinct operations of formal logic, supported by pragmatic Bloom, and reasoning through images practised by artist Stephen. Asked whether he believes in the possibility of a human race inhabiting other planets, Bloom comes up with a syllogism which ends up eating its tail: if the race of men changed its physiological data so as to survive under those conditions, that would be possible, otherwise, all is vanity. Stephen reminds him of the other half of the question about the time taken for a redeemer to show up on those planets, Bloom including the answer in the syllogistic conclusion: And the problem of possible redemption? The minor was proved by the major.

Stephen’s next question is what Bloom believes about the affinities between the moon and woman. Surprisingly, Bloom launches himself in a cascade of metaphors into which he pours the similarities he establishes between the heavenly body and a female human being:

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Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency […]

What follows is a masterful exercise in intersubjectivity. Unlike the dazzling and purposeless display of Bloom’s knowledge about the planetary system, this time his imagination is kindled by his association of woman with Molly. Stephen realizes he is thinking of her, that his attention is drawn to the “light of a paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen of roller blind,” signalling Molly’s presence. Joyce pressures the reader to interpret the scene the way he wants him to: How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?

As Wundt says (1885, p. 235), inner feelings produce SinneseindrĦcken (sensory print, bodily expression) which are read by an outward observer, determining in him a mimetic state of mind, so that he feels the same way as we do. The scene is speechless, the characters’ communality of thought being caused by the situation given in common, by their being together (mitsein) in a world of associations dictated by mental laws. Joyce goes on, as usual, to constructiveness, the creation of a parallel reality of language. Compound words, the superposition of contrary states convey the sense of the two protagonists becoming one: Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.

Bloom’s world is folded unto itself. His passion for advertising and consumer goods – to the point where he considers the possibility of selling telephones to be buried in graves for conversations with the dead – is refined in taste for art objects, even if accompanied by a canvasser’s

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precise purchasing details: Frank O’Hara, the manufacturer of his wife’s window blind, curtain pole and revolving shutter manufacturer living in 16Aungier street, or the statue of Narcissus, purchased by auction from P. A. Wren, 9 Bachelor’s Walk. Bloom calls Stephen repeatedly “professor and author” in his narrative of the day’s events to his wife. The portrait of the combined talents of writing and teaching can be found in a book famous at the time by Karl Hermann Scheidler: Grundlinien der Hodegetik oder Methodik des akademischen Studiums und Lebens. A great writer is the best teacher of language, if ein glückliches Zusammentreffen (a fortunate reunion) can be secured to teach in universities (Scheidler 1839, p. 210). The artist’s vision derealizes Bloom’s discourse which flows forth especially through association of signifiers rather than meanings or coherent network of references. Bloom becomes a split personality, depending on whether he considers himself under the multiple determinants of his empirical self or as identical to himself. The predicates of synthetic judgements are replaced with analytical definitions: Why solitary (ipsorelative)? Brothers and sisters had he none. Yet that man’s father was his grandfather’s son

Built according to strict grammatical rules, Bloom’s sentences are semantically void, on the plane of empirical reality, which vanishes in the non-locality of the free-floating interrogative adverb “where,” but conveying grammatical and symbolical meaning: the protagonist has been displaced from his reality as canvasser and identified with a legendary trader figure, Sinbad, to be further alienated into letters – which carry no meaning. This is, however, a laying in the abyss of Sinbad of One Thousand and One Nights, where there are two men by this name, and one of them narrates his story to the other. The rich Sinbad tells his story to poor Sinbad, as if he were speaking to himself in a mirror. Imaginatively enriched by Stephan, possessed of an improved command of language after the exercise in catechism, Bloom emerges as a figure of discourse. His exit from the Dubliner world is a sort of anti-genesis, an undoing of

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creation out of the egg – the eggs of the extinct species of birds called “auks of the rocs,” to which he compares his own obsession about his son’s death as sign of the extinction of his race. It is an apocalyptic show, a semiotic outburst wreaking havoc upon the physical world, leaving scorched ground behind: He rests. He has travelled. With? Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer. When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?

Constructiveness, Ribot’s third kind of association, allows of the emergence of a “new heaven and earth,” – a postapocalyptic world, born through language’s immaculate conception. No matter how defamiliarized it is, the end of the journey reads approximately: “the walker in broad daylight is going to bed in the increasing darkness.” Bloom is colonizing the span of a day – the duration of the plot – disappearing into the mix of light and darkness preceding Creation. Becoming narrator would barely justify this cosmic hyperbolism. The enhancement of his status has a different origin. In his Aesthetics (1906), Max Dessoir speaks about the theory of empathy which had recently risen along with the philosophy of identity and anthropomorphism. The artist is in retreat from the world. Überwindung der Wirklichkeit (Victory over reality) is the ground of art (Dessoir 1906, p. 74). Beauty flows out from within, not inwards from the world outside the mind. Bloom had felt consolation while contemplating the statue of Narcissus; consolation from his many disappointments with his life of loss and frustration. He turns away from the world towards himself, telling his

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story, casting in his own words the events of the day over which he had had no control. In his story, he can leave aside the unpleasant moments, he can rewrite the plot of his adventures, make life suit his desire – that “desired desire.” To Max Dessoir, that seemed to be the portrait of the artist: Wie Narkissos sich im Quell bespiegelt und liebt, so bespiegelt sich das anthropomorphe Denken in der ganzen Natur. Dieser Narkissos ist das Vorbild und das Symbol des Künstlers. Denn wo an der äußeren Welt die menschliche Persönlichkeit zur Selbstempfindung gelangt, da tritt sie ein in den ästhetischen Zustand. Die Schönheit kommt mehr von innen heraus als von außen hinein. Wir ergreifen das Schöne von den Formen unserer Seele aus, durch ihr Leben, Wachsen, Vergehen.12

1.2.3. The objective correlative – an eidetic constitution? As well as Mansel, Edmund Husserl sees the worldly Object as part of the ego’s internal life: “a complex of data of sensation and a complex of acts:” objectifying, imagining, thinking, valuing or validating through evidences and grounding acts (Husserl 1982, p. 31). With the criticism of transcendental experience or cognition, the validation of the flow of conscious life on apodictic principles, the psychologist makes room for the philosopher. Phenomenology becomes the experience of otherness par excellence. By bracketing the objective world, the Ego becomes aware of himself as constituting both everything that is objective to him and also his I as identical ego. The ego in which he is constituting as correlate the world which exists for him as phenomenon (not that which exists in or for itself, but that which appears to the intentional subject) has undergone a mundanizing self-apperception (p. 99). What is constituted of the objective world in him is his ownness, his psyche, his transcendental field of experience, in which he has screened off everything that is other, that is not himself: 12

As Narcissus loves his reflection in the fountain, so is anthropomorphic thinking reflected in the whole of nature. This Narcissus is the model and the symbol of the artist. For where the human personality has attained self-awareness in the outer world, it enters the aesthetic state. Beauty comes more from the inside out than from the outside in. We seize the beautiful from the forms of our soul, through its life, growth, and journey. (Max Dessoir, Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Stuttgart, Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, 1906, p.83).

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Whatever the transcendental ego constitutes in that first stratum, whatever he constitutes as non-other, as his "peculiarly own" that indeed belongs to him as a component of his own concrete essence […] it is inseparable from his concrete being. Within and by means of this ownness the transcendental ego constitutes, however, the "Objective" world, as a universe of being that is other than himself and constitutes, at the first level, the other in the mode : alter ego. (Husserl 1982, p. 100)

Nevertheless, this otherness does not apply to a community of pure Egos of communalized constitutive intentionality (in the order to culture), of transcendental intersubjectivity, “sharing a sphere of ownness, in which it constitutes the Objective world” (p. 107). In a sense not completely different from that of Schopenhauer’s World as Idea, Husserl too speaks about the Objective world as an idea for a transcendental intersubjectivity: The Objective world as an idea the ideal correlate of an intersubjective (intersubjectively communalized) experience, which ideally can be and is carried on as constantly harmonious is essentially related to intersubjectivity (itself constituted as having the ideality of endless openness), whose component particular subjects are equiped with mutually corresponding and harmonious constitutive systems. (Ibid., pp. 107-108)

“Idea” is the word used also by Washington Allston in his Lectures on Art (1850) to denote a phenomenological object as Husserl would do later: an object for consciousness, to be distinguished from the object in the world which exists for itself: An Idea, then, according to our apprehension, is the highest or most perfect form in which any thing, whether of the physical, the intellectual, or the spiritual, may exist to the mind. By form, we do not mean figure or image (though these may be included in relation to the physical); but that condition, or state, in which such objects become cognizable to the mind, or, in other words, become objects of consciousness. (Allston 1850: web)

The idea is what remains valid about an object of perception under phenomenological variation – a process named, also in anticipation of Husserl, “constitution”. As well as in Husserl, an object may be just “manifestation of objective realities”, or “the reflex product, so to speak, of the mental constitution.” It is this constitutive process that relates

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consciousness to an “objective correlative”. It is very important to emphasize the epistemological implication of correlation. The objective correlative is not a chance association between an idea in the mind and an external object swimming into the field of perception but the product of acts of consciousness which parenthesize unessential aspects of the object in the world: Ideas are of two kinds; which we shall distinguish by the terms primary and secondary: the first being the manifestation of objective realities; the second, that of the reflex product, so to speak, of the mental constitution. In both cases, they may be said to be self-affirmed,--that is, they carry in themselves their own evidence; being therefore not only independent of the reflective faculties, but constituting the only unchangeable ground of Truth, to which those faculties may ultimately refer. (Ibid.)

Ideas have a potential existence before being activated in our consciousness by an object called “assimilant.” The phenomenon triggers a crisis of identity: “what we call ourself must have a dual reality” (Ibid.). The ego is divided, oriented, on the one hand, to objective realities, and, on the other hand, to consciousness. When an idea is thus realised and made objective, or when an object is presented to the mind, a psychological content emerges “from the dark potential into the light of reality.” The essence of the object comes forward, is revealed (phainómenon, “thing appearing to view”). This is not an epistemological process, a subject’s appropriation of a passive object but a phenomenological event, the object appearing to the subject’s view, affecting his consciousness. Sensing – the apprehension of an object through the senses - is a different process, because an impression of the sense organs is not an idea. The duality is only absent in God, who is a unified subject and object, Nous contemplating himself, outside which nothing exists, thinking the archetypes of the universe of his own creation, self-subsisting in his perfect unity. The object is stripped of its relation to the environment - the surrounding inorganic elements of air, earth, heat, and water produce its peculiar form

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which is distinct from others living in the same environment: “No possible modification in the degrees or proportion of these elements can change the specific form of a plant,-for instance, a cabbage into a cauliflower; it must ever remain a cabbage, small or large, good or bad.” Allston seems to have in mind an eidos, an eidetic object stripped of accidental variations, the definition resembling that of a topological space which remains the same (preserves essential properties) under deformations. This intentional relation is established by Allston between the mind and the external world: So, too, is the external world to the mind; which needs, also, as the condition of its manifestation, its objective correlative. Hence the presence of some outward object, predetermined to correspond to the preëxisting idea in its living power, is essential to the evolution of its proper end,--the pleasurable emotion. (Ibid.)

Eliot uses the same words, and even quotation marks for the phrase, as if acknowledging it to be a loan: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (Eliot 1920, 92)

Instead of originator of experience, or sovereign subject, the mind becomes a site of the encounter between the world of objects and an impersonal subjectivity: objective correlative

Mind

specific emotion

In the opening of Virginia Woolf’s homonymous novel, Mrs. Dalloway’s memory of her discussion about cabbage and cauliflower with Peter in their youth, mentioned in a text which was current reading of the intellectual elites at the time, may carry a deliberate association with some stable self that was being resurrected by his return.

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Eidetic constitution purifies immediate experience of whatever is accidental, what is not related to the essence of the object as it exists for the subject of observation. Epoché is the process whereby the world phenomenon is reduced to elements constitutive of its essence, the noemata. The twosidedness in the sphere of other mental processes involves a subjectively oriented side and an objectively-oriented side The pure ego is intentionally related to the object which is raised from the level of existence to that of object constituted for the subject (the phenomenal object stripped of irrelevant aspects and reduced to the intelligible content of noema, content of consciousness, the way it is present to the subject, in a never-ending process of appropriation or constitution). The intentional relation of mental processes (the orientation of the ego to some object) creates “intentional correlates”. Eliot’s objective correlatives are of this kind, this phrase occurring in Washington Allston’s lectures in a context anticipating Husserl’s notions of reduction and constitution. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” is built as a dyad of the Phenomenological and Cosmic Time: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know. Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

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Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool. Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. “Burnt Norton” (No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

In his General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Husserl glosses on the difference between phenomenological time and objective time: We must carefully note the difference between this phenomenological time, this unitary form of all experiences within a single stream of experience (that of one pure Ego), and “objective”, i.e., or “cosmic” time. (Husserl 2012, p. 164)

In mental processes, time is given as moments ordered by the succession of experiences, which call up others on the time line, allowing comparison

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between Now and Before or After. Such temporal distinctions cannot be measured “by any position of the sun, by any clock, by any physical means.” (165). In Four Quartets, T S Eliot refers apparently to an object he had really seen, a sundial at Burnt Norton, with an inscription, not uncommon on these pointers of cosmic time: “Redeem the time.” The refuge into mere possibility, which is never realized in the material world, doomed to irreversible passage, is unsatisfactory, because the mind will find no pleasure in pure speculation. As well as W.B. Yeats in Among School Children, Eliot will not abide by ghostly paradigms: the burnt leaves in an urn, an emblem of death. The second variation is an imaginary world of what Freud calls Deckerinnerungen – screen memories of acts which never happened. Nevertheless, the paradoxical memory of an imaginary world is no longer a claustrophobic prison of one’s mind as long as it is shared with other pure Egos in the intersubjective act of reading: the poet’s words echo in the reader’s memory, opening gates to correlates of escape from time. A new ontological possibility is thus open, a new reality is emerging: the rose which has only petals, at whose core there is nothing – an overlap of presence and absence - , voices of children and song of birds – tropes of Creation. The pond is emptied out of elemental water and filled with water from light (correlative for God creating light, for the separation of water from land, etc). Running away from objective, unbearable reality, humans find themselves in a new world of their own making (noetic constitution). The physical object is no longer something independent of the ego, divided between physical existence and essence. It is constituted as noematic objects by a pure ego of a sublimated physical reality (no longer seen and heard) merging into an intentional relation (attention directed at) with the correlates of the constitutive process. The post-apocalyptic flowers looking and being looked at, accepted and accepting, are not at the centre of a single centre of consciousness. The speaker refers to what Husserl calls a “community of pure Egos,” of an “intersubjectively communalized experience” in Cartesian Meditations (1982: p. 107), or “we-subjectivity” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental

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Phenomenology (Husserl 1970: p. 109) Intersubjectivity is constituted as “having the ideality of endless openness” (Ibid.): The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting. So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

The intention has been realized: running away from the immediate reality of the present moment, a synthesis is achieved between possibility and reality, “what might have been and what has been.” This is not the priority of apperception in relation to perception as conceived by William James. The eidetic construction correlates the object’s constitution (never exhausted by the ego’s noesis) and its presence for the ego as eidetic object (noematic content). It is shared with other pure Egos, the common ownness being the product of its meanings written by the poet into the common, sundial scene. The poem reflects upon its own constitution. Our first Edenic garden, light, birds and children are emblems, correlates of the noematic sense of Creation – of the world as of the poem. Eliot is transmuting ideas into sensations, an observation into a state of mind.

1.2.4. Metaphysics or the Philosophy of Consciousness. Presentative and Representative Consciousness (Mansel) Although all the branches of philosophy acknowledged at the time are mentioned in the title of Mansel’s 1860 book – Metaphysics or the Philosophy of Consciousness. Phenomenal and Real – neither metaphysics nor ontology appealed to the nineteenth- and early twentieth century philosophers, who were either psychologists or phenomenologists, or both. Mansel’s “phenomenal and real” dyad, or Wundt’s “physical and psychological” image (Bild) (Sinnliche und übersinnliche Welt, 1913) were

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actually studying the way the “naïve world picture”, or the unmittelbare Wirklichkeit (immediate/ unmediated Reality) was transferred to a begriffliche Konstruktion (conceptual construction), emptied out of sensuous content (Wundt 1923, p. 11). Although published within half a century from each other, Mansel’s and Wundt’s books seem to share a common feature, which is an active exchange of psychic energy on both sides of the subject-object relationship. The subject’s Aufmerksamkeit (attention) (intentionality, attention to the object) is the condition for the relationships which remain constant under variation (Variation der Bedingungen, p. 89) to come forward on the stage of consciousness and add to the previously formed Bild (picture, p. 94). Wundt insists that he does not have in mind a processing of reflective thinking but the constitution (Konstitution, p. 89) of the intentional object the way it appears (Entstehungsweise), the way it is given to the intentional subject. Ontology, in Mansel, is a concept employed by a metaphysician, not by a materialist philosopher. The phenomena of consciousness (which are the domain of psychology), by being perceived intuitively and conceived reflectively, may throw light on “the real existence of the subject or object to which they are related.” (Mansel 1860, p. 158). At a remove from both idealism and materialism, Mansel focuses on the primary scene of phenomenology: the constitution of the object as the referent of an intentional subject. For an object to be stored in memory, it is necessary for the subject to be intentionally directed to it: “Attention as Consciousness in operation relatively to a definite object.” (p. 136). Mansel puts into brackets the pure ego and the thing in itself, which cannot be known. The object given to the senses, not to thinking, is an object of presentative consciousness. It is not the object in itself but the phenomenon that counts in the twin ontogeny of subject and object: [Subject and object] are correlative to each other, and imply each other. The subject is a subject to the object, and the object is an object to the subject. The subject can only be conscious by knowing itself to be affected in a particular manner by an object; the object can only be known as affecting the subject in a particular manner. (p. 55)

The subject’s objective correlative is something of which it is conscious, and which it calls to mind out of memory when it is no longer there – as an

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image. The image, therefore, is the object of representative consciousness. But an image cannot be separated from an individual present in time and space. However, when taken as a whole and in separation from everything around it, the object “is thought under a concept” (p. 206). The trivial thing, as Eliot says in his essay on Hamlet, will be lifted from the real world and associated with an idea in the mind. In anticipation of Eliot’s objective correlative, let us read Mansel’s definition: “We need a term which shall indifferently express the presence of an individual sight or sound in the eye or ear, and of an individual emotion or volition in the mind.” (p. 54) Images will depend on the number and nature of our previous experiences of the object; they also differ depending on the state of my sense organs or state of mind, and they will differ from one person to another in the way they are presented, represented or summoned from memory. The existence of several focalizers (as in Henry James’s fiction) or of several centres of consciousness (Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Lawrence Durrell …) shows the authors’ psychological relativism and scepticism: We know the object only as it stands in relation to our faculties, and is modified by them. We are not sure that, if our faculties were altered, the same things would appear to us in the same form as they do now we are not sure that they do appear in the same form to all existing intelligent beings ; for we know not how far the faculties of other beings resemble our own. (p. 56)

The phenomenology of the work of art is, on the contrary, grounded in the trust in language for its capacity to generate an intersubjective order given in common: the perspectival narratives are finally replaced by a narrative, usually, the story/ novel which we have just read or interrupted by metanarratives or self-referential address to the reader (André Gide, Les Fauxmonnayeurs, 1925). What is present in an individual’s consciousness is shared in common once it is re-presented in language: No matter how little resemblance there might be between objects constituted by different subjects, “there is still one point in which they are identical, namely, that both are denoted by the same word.” (Mansel 1860, p. 240)

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Summing up, Mansel’s view of the phenomena of consciousness invests language with the role of an ontological operator: Every phenomenon of consciousness consists of two elements, a matter, derived from experience; and a form, dependent on the original constitution of the mind. But the matter and the form are given in conjunction, and require an effort of analysis, aided by language, to separate them. (Ibid., p. 273)

The aesthetic experience may be the release of an act of presentative consciousness, or picturesque poetics, for instance, instituting norms of what passes for consummate art. The revisiting poems of romanticism (such as Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey), although depending on memory for the comparison of past and present selves, also need the actual presence of the object/ landscape, “occupying a definite position in time, or in space, or in both;” Modernist poetry is pre-eminently phenomenological, an object of intuition appearing in consciousness. The difference is that, in the former two cases, “it is given to, in the latter it is given by, the conscious act.” (p. 53) The poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins are for the most part exercises in phenomenological variation, where language constitutes “the connecting link between various attributes,—the frame, as it were, in which they are set.” (Ibid., p. 201) One word will thus hold in place the result of free variation yielding the constitutive features of the object. The psychological synthesis of what Hopkins calls “inscape” (interior, essential design) will be summed up by a word. The progress of sounds, bound together through alliteration is the accumulation of successive acts of reduction (epoché) of the empirical attributes of the thing in the world to what constitutes their essence for the observer. The poems are usually a scene of observation. Hopkins coined the word “inscape” for Mansel’s “internal intuition” – representation of an object through the fusion of sensation and thought (p. 146), - because, although we may form a notion of an object, one can only represent it as a phenomenon individual and external to consciousness, “having its own definite position in time: “A perception cannot be conceived except as the perception of some object ; an object of perception cannot be conceived

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except as in relation to a perceiving mind.” (p. 148). For the way the object affects consciousness, Hopkins coined the word “instress.” The object of contemplation undergoes variation: a falcon riding the air, striding, hurling, gliding, rebuffing (The Windhover). The perceiver feels his heart stirring at the show. The representation of the bird in consciousness remains to the end a perception (windhover – that which hovers in the wind), it will not be reduced to a concept. No matter how rich the knowledge about the bird might grow, the result of intakes (instress, the object affecting the perceiver’s mind) will not end up in a concept divorced from intuition. Mansel’s refutation of transcendentalism is categorical: “the distinction between an act of consciousness and its object, though logically valid, has psychologically no existence.” (p. 147). He uses, maybe for the first time, the phrase “objective correlative” for the reciprocity between affection of the mind (sensation) and thought (idea): In no actual operation of consciousness can the act be separated from the object, or the object from the act. By no mental abstraction can either of these correlatives be conceived apart from the other […] (Ibid., p. 147)

The extinction of the variegated show of life rather than the revelation of the disembodied spirit is Hopkins’s idea of the Apocalypse. Why should he have chosen as a reference text a sibylline oracle instead of the Bible? It was probably because, as well as Mansel, he could not believe in a purely and thoroughly spiritual divinity which was removed from the field of perception. The nineteenth century poets seemed intent upon deconstructing the traditional/ dogmatic idea of God. In the romantic Keats or Parnassian Gautier, even the dynasties of gods perish one after another. Art alone survives. Hopkins can only think of an art which is both stress and inscape, noesis and noematic content, thought and image, vision and form. A poem is inner intuition in a concrete form explored in its entire potential of sounds, letters, generic conventions, difficult grammatical forms which force the mind to rest on each trying to work out their meaning, far-fetched tropes.

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The scene in “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” might have been suggested to Hopkins by a fragment from the Sibylline Oracles (Fragment 3 in Theophilos)13, where there is an intimation of gods too being born in the introductory words: “Also in regard to those (gods) who are said to have been born, she thus speaks.” The Prophetess sees via vitae as a stretch between birth and death, the end of the world implying the loss of colours, of the variety of things, reduced to the black and white of the Genesis, going all the way back to nothingness, with God acting as judge, dividing humans into good and evil. Written in the form of a sonnet, the poem sounds like an anti-blazon. Nevertheless, the generic convention of the sonnet in which he casts the Sibylline prophecy is observed as a meaningful form. In Petrarch, the quatrain/sestet division symbolizes the opposition between cross and Trinity, the ninth verse announcing a turning point. The same happens here, the word at the beginning of the ninth line, only, causing a break between the initial show of dissolution (where, again, Mansel’s disciple matches thought and image: dis-remembering, dis-membering) and the object, leaf, which, by being written on, allows thought to coalesce in a sensuous form (language). In the Sibyl’s oracle, the idea of God being born is refuted: It is not possible for God to be Formed from the thighs of man and from a womb; But God alone is one and all-supreme, Who made heaven and the sun and stars and moon,14

13

Theophilos: a bishop of Antioch, who lived in the latter half of the second century. (THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES. TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK INTO ENGLISH BLANK VERSE BY MILTON S. TERRY PROFESSOR IN GARRETT BIBLICAL INSTITUTE NEW.EDITION REVISED AFTER THE TEXT OF RUCH. NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS CINCINNATI: CURTS & JENNINGS [1899] {scanned at sacred-texts.com, December, 2001} https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/sib/sib.pdf 14 Milton S. Terry. The Sibylline Oracles, Fragment 3. Altenmunster: Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck. https://books.google.ro › books

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In Hopkins’s sonnet, the dazzling play on sounds and meanings in the end suggests an imitation of divinity in the metalepsis (troping of a former trope) of the poem’s creation: God as self-sufficient, non-contained, noesis noeseos (only thinking of himself as there is nothing outside him), as a mill grinding thoughts-sounds: , selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grind: Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous Evening strains to be time’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us, Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being as unbound, her dapple is at an end, astray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steepèd and páshed – quite Disremembering, dísmémbering, ' áll now. Heart, you round me right With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us. Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety ' upon áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd. Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves

The narrative form becomes sequential, as if listing a succession of acts of consciousness. Things are bereft of dappled plenitude, but transferred to language – the sound/thought correlates. The correlation of subject and object in the intentional relation is found illogical by Bradley, our next reference in the survey of the genesis of modernist aesthetics. Nevertheless, the intentional relation is not abandoned but rather

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radicalized. The farther from the physical object is its subjective constitution, the more relevant is it from the aesthetic point of view.

1.2.5. Phenomenal and Real (F.H. Bradley) The title of Francis Herbert Bradley’s Appearance and Reality sounds like an echo of Mansel’s “phenomenal and real”, but the latter’s correlation of subject and object in the intentional relation is turned on its head by the former. The two notions actually form a polarity, an opposition, with the former taking precedence over the latter. The more purged from the world of objects, the more valuable is its representation in art. The modernist cult of art being superior and in opposition to reality and their opposition may have found one of its roots in this treatise. Bradley’s philosophy breaks up with psychology opening a new path to modernist aesthetics. The assumption of the finite character of a system under observation seems to Bradley illogical, because it would have to be defined from some external point of view. Only a description from inside an infinite universe would eliminate the confusion caused by double standards (the existence of a series of objects and the way they affect us), or as Th. Lipps says, “zwischen meinem freien subjektiven Vorstellen und einem übermächtigen Fremden, Objektiven”15 (between my free subjective imagination and an overwhelming, objective, stranger). Bradley also objects to the premise that the intentional objects are given, his arguments anticipating by less than two decades Husserl’s critique of transcendental phenomenology16 which ignored the importance of context. 15

In Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978 16“I experience the motivation of the apparent object because — at some time in the past — an associative connection or link was established between this object and another object.1 Once that link has been solidified, when the one object is apparent before me, that is, intuited, the link is reawakened and I experience an associative motivation to become aware of the other object, which is not currently apparent.” (Thomas Byrne, ”The Evolution of Husserl’s Semiotics:The Logical Investigations and its Revisions (1901-1914)).” DOI:10.25518/1782-2041.1029

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The laws of judgment and the psychological experimentation of psychological variation in different contexts were difficult to reconcile. Once the categorical object, Bradley remarks, has been taken out of the physical object, the latter could not be the same any longer, and was not, therefore, logically justified: The background therefore must be taken as a condition of the conjunction’s existence, and the intellect must assert the conjunction subject in this way to a condition. The conjunction is hence not bare but dependent, and it is really a connection mediated by something falling outside it. A thing, for example, with its adjectives can never be simply given. It is given integrally with a mass of other features, and when it is affirmed of Reality it is affirmed of Reality qualified by this presented background. And this Reality (to go further) is and must be qualified also by what transcends any one presentation. Hence the mere complex, alleged to be given to the intellect, is really a selection made by or accepted by that intellect. An abstraction cuts away a mass of environing particulars, and offers the residue bare, as something given and to be accepted free from supporting conditions. And for working purposes such an artifice is natural and necessary, but to offer it as ultimate fact seems to me to be monstrous. (Bradley 1897, P. 359)

Setting out from the commonsensical statement that existence cannot be the object of an individual experience, that it cannot be reduced to “the collection of things and persons which makes his world”, Bradley proposes what he himself qualifies as a “revolution”. The language he uses sounds familiar to citizens of the quantum world. Appearances are defined in a way which allows them to pass for realities, receiving an ontological rather than psychological status. Why not allow each appearance to be real as an independent state in a time-series, he wonders, building a model similar to a wave function. His hypotheses concern the existence of: x

That many material systems should exist, without a material centralpoint, and with no relation in space—where is the self-contradiction? (p. 148)

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(There is no localized centre and no outside observer, what in physics is called an isolated system) x

It is not hard to conceive a variety of time-series existing in the Absolute. And the direction of each series, one can understand, may be relative to itself, and may have, as such, no meaning outside. And we might also imagine, if we pleased, that these directions run counter, the one to the other.

Here, if you consider the contents, you may suppose the whole to be stationary. It contains partial views, but, as a whole, it may be regarded as free from change and succession. The change will fall in the perceptions of the different series. And the diverse directions of these series will, as such, not exist for the whole. The greater or less number of the various series, which we may imagine as present, the distinct experience which makes each, together with the direction in which it runs --this is all matter, we may say, of individual feeling. (p. 149)

(In a quantum system of particles described by a wave function, the trajectory of the particles are different but undefined. The properties of these time-series sound similar to the Eigenstates of a quantum system.The exchange of eigenstates leaves the system unchanghed.) x

Now without any question these perceptions must exist in the whole. They must all exist, and in some way they all must qualify the Absolute. But, for the Absolute, they can one counterbalance another, and so their characters be transmuted. They can, with their successions, come together in one whole in which their special natures are absorbed. (p. 149)

(The diverse directions of these systems, following various vectors, will determine a “distinct experience in each.” The description does not concern a present, immutable state of the system, but one probabilistically unfolded in time according to their interferences). x

And, if we chose to be fanciful, we might imagine something more. We might suppose that, corresponding to each of our lives, there is another individual. There is a man who traverses the same history with ourselves, but in the opposite direction. We may thus imagine that the successive contents, which make my being, are the lives also of one or

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more other finite souls. The distinctions between us would remain, and would consist in an additional element, different in each case. And it would be these differences which would add to each its own way of succession, and make it a special personality. The differences, of course, would have existence; but in the Absolute, once more, in some way they might lose exclusiveness. And, with this, diversity of direction, and all succession itself, would, as such, disappear. (p. 149)

(This is a surpising intimation of the existence of a multiverse, of parallel worlds, and of me-copies across the multiverse). The “scheme” of a series provided by Bradley (Fig. 1.) is the result of the application of a permutation operator. His formalism allows him to account for “transmutations” of the series succeeding one another in time, transmutations which impact the Absolute which absorbs their ”special natures.” abcd badc cdab dcba Fig. 1: Bradley’s series of “transmutations.” ܲ෠௜௝ ݂൫‫ݍ‬ଵ … ‫ݍ‬௜ … ‫ݍ‬௝ … ‫ݍ‬ே ൯ = ݂ ൫ ‫ݍ‬ଵ … ‫ݍ‬௝ … ‫ݍ‬௜ … ‫ݍ‬ே ൯. Fig. 2.a: Permutation operator for an antisymmetrical wave function. ෡ ൫‫ݍ‬ଵ … ‫ݍ‬௜ … ‫ݍ‬௝ … ‫ݍ‬ே ൯ = ‫ܪ‬ ෡ ( ‫ݍ‬ଵ ... ‫ݍ‬௜ ... ‫ݍ‬௝ … ‫ݍ‬ே ). ܲ෠௜௝ ‫ܪ‬ Fig. 2.b: Hamilton permutation operator for a symmetrical function.

Bradley’s picture of four permutations would imply that he is having in mind a permutation operator similar to the one which produces antisymmetrical wave functions (Fig. 2.a.), and not the Hamilton operator (Fig.2.b.), which remains invariant with respect to the permutation operator producing only symmetrical functions. The “counterbalancing” may thus produce states which are antisymmetrical with respect to the whole system (the “Absolute”). Through permutations, particles may

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occupy different levels of energy. It is these differences that lead to the appearance of new states. Using such language to comment on Bradley’s ideas may seem audacious or inappropriate; we do not claim that he is a pioneer of quantum physics, we are merely drawing attention to a kind of reasoning which was at the time radically new and surprisingly similar to later developments in physics. Appearance, in this new context, is not a mode of coming into view or of categorical constitution but of coming into being: the realization of vectors of states, including their interacting which affects the whole system qualitatively. Bradley refutes the argument about the object of experience being given through a conjunction between it and an idea which would always remain the same, because an object is given in a context, it depends on something outside it: For the background is present, and the background and the conjunction are, I submit, alike integral aspects of the fact. The background therefore must be taken as a condition of the conjunction’ s existence, and the intellect must assert the conjunction subject in this way to a condition. The conjunction is hence not bare but dependent, and it is really a connection mediated by something falling outside it. (p. 355)

An abstraction will not take into account the Real in its multiplicity but only what the intellect finds acceptable. The operation of abstraction (not of constitution) will intervene removing from the Real what is lacking, what runs counter the intellect’s sense of harmony, because, as he has argued, “to have existence need not mean to exist, and (...) to be realised in time is not always to be visible by any sense,” (p. 241). Bradley has practically sunk the phenomenal world beneath a level of invisible states. What surfaces is the “co-presence of appearance and ideality,” coincidence of surface and depth or, better said, surface charged with meaning – the Bible of symbolist Art. Like a balloon released from the ground, art turns away from objects in the world, assuming an artificer’s role of embedding an idea into a sensuous

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complex that corresponds to no real object – Mallarmé’s flower absent from all bouquets.

I.2.6. Max Dessoir and the Distinct Phenomenology of the Art Object The fable of art being radically different from or ontologically distinct from reality was told by modernism in many versions: the same plot narrated in objective form versus imaginative, fictional representation, the disintegration of the unified psycho-physical self into split personalities, confusion between author and characters, face and mask, experiments meant to destroy the order of time or of reality etc. Still indebted to psychology, the aesthetics of empathy and impressionism, which had replaced the realist relational aesthetics, received a wide popularity in the first decade of the century with Lipps, Dessoir and Worringer. Max Dessoir, who had himself started from a psychological conception about art (Abriss einer Geschichte der Psychologie, 1911), moved progressively towards an aestheticizing position, institutionalizing the discipline through theoretical and critical work, by placing himself at the centre of a group of professional writers, who contributed to his journal, at international meetings, and congresses. Founded in 1908 under the editorship of Max Dessoir, which lasted until 1943, the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft was an early model of interdisciplinarity, which was to characterize, not only societies of leaders in various disciplines, such as the Cambridge Heretics, but also publications, such as T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion (1922-1939). Eliot defends himself in an editorial against the criticism of those who blamed The Criterion for not being literary enough, saying that, in isolating the concept of literature, they destroy the life of literature, that it was impossible to define the frontiers and limit the context of literature, which was actually “alimented from non-literary sources” and had “non-literary consequences.” At the other pole from Marinetti’s injunctions in his Manifesto of 1909 to the demolition of academies, libraries and museums,

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Eliot supported, not only literary tradition but also ideas from history, anthropology, archaeology or even technical sciences which were of interest to the man of general culture. In its negotiations with other disciplines, the aesthetics of Dessoir or Eliot was still one of disruption but in the very opposite direction of the avant-garde cultural impoverishment of art. (Eliot 1939: web) In 1890 Max Dessoir published Das Doppel-Ich about the existence of an unconscious self revealed through hypnosis: although the patient obeys the commands of the psychiatrist, no memory remains thereof after returning to conscious life. There is such a case in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), this new, scientifically based version of the double adding a new chapter in the history of a famous and recurrent literary motif. In 1908 Max Dessoir founded the “Vereinigung für ästhetische Forschung“ (1908-1914), which extended internationally and inspired other initiatives, such as the organization of aesthetics congresses. The one held in Paris in 1937, where Dessoir was invited as a honorary guest, was presided over by Bergson, Valéry and Claudel, aesthetics being still seen as the “science of art.” Dessoir’s Vereinigung, Eliot’s Criterion, or the Pen Club advocated by E.M. Forster, among others, were as many attempts to back up the international art of modernism through the creation of a European community of shared ideas and values. Scientifically-minded Dessoir found support in science for his dualistic aesthetics of art versus reality. No organic body can ever display the perfect symmetry, the pleasure-producing repetition one finds in a geometrical figure, and this command of space, this repetition is an encoding element in a work of art (Fig. 3 and Fig, 4). (Dessoir 1906, p. 127) The exterior form is determined from within in a relationship bespeaking that between form and function. It is the gradual repetition of similar substructures that elicits aesthetic pleasure.

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Figs. 3–4: Max Dessoir pitting geometry against organicity (structural proportions versus irregular variations).

According to aesthetic formalism, the artist only speaks through forms, giving the observer pleasure through the order which resolves into unity the manifold stuff threaded into the art object. The objects of aesthetic pleasure are not material units as such, but their relationships, following a logic which is not dictated by the content. (Dessoir 1906, p. 70). Including T.S. Eliot in his study, Modernism in Poetry (1995), Rainer Emig makes subtle distinctions among versions of modernism, such as that between the “hermetic textual closure” of an imagist poem and T.S. Eliot’s use of metaphor in the “The Waste Land” which is metonymically distributed along the poem. In this way, he constructs a new unity, not a linear structure, but a network (rhizome). (Emig 1995, p. 81). Max Dessoir (Ibid.) compares the formalism that should characterize any work of art to music, where neither feelings nor purpose count in any way, its essence lying in toning and moving forms that may be compared to the still forms of the arabesques. T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Portrait of a Lady”, about the manqué relationship between a man and a refined woman uses music as imagistic resource for a theme with variations similar to the dialectical metaphoric-metonymic networking of The Waste Land. The key to the frustrated love relationship

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is struck by the “dead wench” in the epigraph, the comparison between the ominous “scene” of the first meeting feeling like Juliet’s tomb, the dying fall of the musical phrase, the intimation of the lady’s death like the development of a melodic idea with reappearance of the theme. Another textual layer is built upon the narrator’s uneasiness, hesitation, to the point where he looks at himself in a glass as if to a stranger, speaking about himself in the third person, listening to broken tunes, an out-of-tune violin, fancying himself spoiling the supreme art of harmony: dancing like a bear, crying like a parrot, chattering like an ape, exchanging Chopin with the latest news in cheap newspapers. The aestheticism of Dessoir’s Heidelberg circle found expression in the rejection of individualism as well as the pursuit of other purposes alien to art, such as politics. Richard Hamann saw individualism as an attitude sparkled by romanticism and perpetuated along the nineteenth century as an attempt to step aside from the community and live a self-centred life. The philosopher of the twentieth century, according to Hamman, wanted to create values, not to earn respect from people. Individualism is not exchanged with communality of feeling but with the shaping of the aesthetic self. He no longer lives in himself but for himself. His objectified self is the result of his effort to give a unified structure to the manifestations of his life, to build a “coherent picture of himself in which all parts fit together.” That means replacing the ethical with the aesthetical self. The Bildungsroman becomes a Künstlerroman: Die Analogie mit dem Kunstwerk springt ins Auge (The analogy with a work of art is striking) (Hamann 1906: web) In the same issue, Hugo Spitzer17 shows his disapproval over the attempt of a French critic, Ernest Seilliơre (Apollon ou Dionysos. Etude critique sur Frédéric Nietzsche et l'utilitarisme impérialiste, 1905), to read political and ethnological contents into Nietzsche’s works (on “apollinische und dionysische Kunst”) who presumably had produced in his later life texts fuelled by imperialist and racist ideas.

17

Hugo Spitzer, “Apollinische und dionysische Kunst”, [1]. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik Und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 1:216-248 (1906).

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I.2.7. Mrs. Dalloway under Psychoanalytic Grids Written one year ahead of the publication of her novel, “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf’s essay on “Character in Fiction” (1924) bears some semblance of a realist concern about true-to life representation, which thus differs from the outlook in “Modern Fiction,” her 1919 poetics of Bergsonian intuitionism. In a draft of the essay presented before The Cambridge Heretics, Woolf pretends to be looking around for the way humans see themselves and their interactions, remarking that her contemporaries had developed an interest in the emotions and true motives of their fellow human beings to a much wider extent than their predecessors. Woolf traded with current theories, especially in the rising field of psychoanalysis, as a grounding principle for her construction of characters. The attention recently paid to Woolf's confession that she only started reading Freud in 1939 invites an inquiry into the true sources of her character construction which programmatically exceeds the limits of the rational, unitary self of the realist tradition. By digging into Woolf's connections with the Heretics as well as the recently founded London Psychoanalytical Society (1913), which included not only visits but also Woolf's contribution of papers to the meetings of both societies, undeniable traces of the influence exerted by Arthur George Tansley, Alfred Adler, and Sándor Ferenczi on Woolf's simulation model of a modern" mental make up can be brought to the fore. The Bloomsbury Group and the Cambridge Heretics brought together some of the most prominent figures of the interwar British intellectual elite to whom Virginia Woolf turned for the “weaving of words” - Plato's “intertwining of [the] woof and warp” (Statesman, 283b2) of human society - which is the Statesman's art of shuttling between conceptual frameworks and empirical data of experience. In her attempt to raise individual character to paradigm, Woolf was actually looking into the latest speculations of what George M. Johnson (1994, p. 139) calls “the second age of psychology,” that is, psychoanalysis, which, along with quantum physics, indeed represented the new “spirit of the age.” It was before the Cambridge Heretics that she first made her essay, Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown, public, including what she herself characterizes as a “disputable assertion”: “on or about December 1910 human character

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changed” (Woolf 1924, p. 4). She was obviously referring to new representations of human nature, markedly defamiliarized by postimpressionism. Founded by Charles Kay Ogden, the Cambridge society of The Heretics, so called on account of their rebellious attitude to traditional values, such as devotion, held its inaugural meeting in December 1909. It is interesting to find out what the members understood by “heresy”, the word chosen as an identification marker. In her 7th December, 1909, address to the newly founded society, “Heresy and Humanity”, Jane Ellen Harrison reversed the commonly accepted meaning of the word, what used to be a disturbing impurity in society being now perceived as the norm of civilized humanity: To be a heretic in the days of Latimer and Cranmer was to burn. To be a heretic in the days of our grandfathers was to be something of a social outcast. To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation. The gist of heresy is free personal choice in act, and specially in thought—the rejection of traditional faiths and customs, qua traditional. When and why does heresy cease to be dangerous, and become desirable? It may be worth while inquiring. (Harrison 1911, p. 4)

Harrison's ban on the “most dire and deadly of all tyrannies, an oligarchy of old men” (Ibid.) was not, however, symptomatic of a generational bias, which could also be suspected in Woolf's demonizing of the Edwardians. Another address concluding that meeting, by John Mctaggart Ellis Mctaggart, quoting in the title Immanuel Kant's “Sapere Aude” (“Dare to Be Wise”), fashions these Cambridge dons rather as heirs to the Königsberg philosopher's epistemological revolution. Anthropology, sociology, history, ancient and modern, political philosophy, economics and finances were the topics of papers contributed by what looked like an interdisciplinary group of researchers. Gaston Bachelard's definition of poetics in relation to the recently launched theories in relativistic and quantum physics (Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 1934) deepens the impression that the “weaving” of language in the earlier twentieth century used threads from multiple disciplines in search of epistemological

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legitimation. The “interwoven cultural discourses” of the new “schools of thought” fostered “a pluralistic view of the world.” (Franke 2008, XIII) The twelve members of a group of undergraduates at first, but of leading figures in various disciplinary fields later in the 1920s, somehow resembled the Cambridge Apostles (founded in 1820) of Arthur Hallem and Alfred Tennyson, who had similarly been the hub of the innovative thinking of the age (Endres 2015, web). The Heretics' academic and cultural lectures and meetings went on into the early 1930s (Franke, 2008, XIII) . The group is credited with the introduction of psychoanalysis to Cambridge, represented by Freudians, such as uyjkjand Ernest Jones, but also by Independents including W. H. R. Rivers and Arthur G. Tansley, who declared that Freud had but little influence on him (Cameron & Forrester 1999, p. 79), and Alfred Adler. The fact that Woolf addressed a society of pioneers of new ideas in economy, psychology, philosophy, or literature (a heterogeneous society similar to her own Bloomsbury Group) confirms her reliance upon nonliterary sources in the construction of characters. Two opposite vectors lie at the origin of Woolf's writing: on the one hand, there is her intuition that social phenomena are rooted in modes of vision: All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910." (Woolf 1924, p. 5)

On the other hand, a shift has been noticed to have occurred from logic, metaphysics and philosophy to epistemology about 1910: The turn from logic to theory of knowledge was thus bound up with a kind of university extension. But if the audience for the Home University Library was identified as “shop assistants'' or “working men,'' there is evidence it importantly consisted of the women largely excluded from Cambridge. (Woolf does place ``a woman'' together with ``a working-man, a negro'' as members of classes who have reason to resent their exclusion (CE, II, 144).) The claim has been made that Russell's own turn from the work of Principia to epistemology was an attempt to address himself to the

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Chapter I woman as lay philosopher, even to plan a collaboration. The woman in question was Ottoline Morrell, but that does not undercut the argument that Russell's epistemology was elaborated in a deliberately widened philosophical arena, in contrast to his logic. (Banfield 2000, p. 19)

To say that the revolutionary changes in science (the most prominent being the rise of quantum physics) determined a concomitant turn to epistemology out of the necessity to find explanatory narratives for the new theories is not enough. Of more importance was the search for scientific grounds outside a certain disciplinary field. Max Dessoir's Aesthetics (1906) was grounded in psychology; Wilhelm Worringer's (1906), in anthropology, the Bloomsbury's, in G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903), etc. Woolf's reliance on psychology coexisted with other investments in sociology, political philosophy, or anthropology. Although immersed in the latest events and politics, Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is not a historical but a historicist one, trading in simulation models of human character with the new discourses of psychology with which she got a first-hand acquaintance through members of the Bloomsbury Group, her brother Adrian, and his wife Karin, and also during calls on Freud and Melanie Klein, which probably stimulated her own participation in at least two meetings of the British Psychoanalytic Society founded by Ernest Jones in 1913. Much of Woolf's writing is patterned discourse, the resonance chamber of the institutional bodies she got entangled with: the People’s Suffrage Federation, The Women's Service League, which she addressed with a speech on “Professions for Women” on Jan 21, 1931 (published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, 1942), the women-only Cambridge colleges of Girton and Newnham, where she read a draft of A Room of One's Own, the world of journalism as book reviewer (Inquiries Journal) and international politics (through her husband, Leonard Woolf). Simulation Models of Character Construction Sigmund Freud: A Late Revelation? The psychoanalytical approaches to Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf 1925) have so far relied on Sigmund Freud, whose works were published by Leonard

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Woolf and who was indeed very influential at Cambridge in the 1920s (Forrester and Cameron 2017). References to Freud serve mainly as a discussion of the homosexual drives or self-splitting of both protagonists—Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith. Neurosis induced by shell-shock was a topic of major concern after the end of World War 1. Thousands of discharged soldiers appeared to be affected, experiencing dumbness of the senses—sight, hearing, taste—and fixation on the original scene of the traumatic event. In the preface to the second edition of the proceedings of the Fifth International PsychoAnalytical Congress at Budapest, September 1918, Freud explains neurosis in terms of the conflict between self-love or wish for preservation and the super ego that demands repression of desire for the sake of social values or taboos (Jones 1921). The psychopathology of shell-shock seemed to fit into this scheme. It was not so much a debilitation of the body as a psychological disturbance. Two selves were considered to have been conflicting at the moment of the explosion: the one fearing loss of life and the one governed by the commandment of self-sacrifice for king and country. At a closer look, however, it comes out that Septimus had neither been afraid nor suffering for Evans’s plight (Woolf 1925). On the moment of the explosion, he indulges in dreams of glory and official recognition. He is satisfied that he has survived, while the other got killed by the bomb. The first time he experiences anxiety and even panic is when he looks at his fiancé making hats, lost in a chaos of cloth, threads, and scissors, and realizes that he feels nothing and is emotionally dead. The sight of the textile mass out of which the girls are fabricating the lifeless dressing of the head had probably reminded him of his commander’s body and uniform turned to pieces, the way they were emptied out of the real man. From now on, he will be haunted by that horrible show and by his commander’s figure that had gone the way of nature and will now address him from trees or in birds’ songs. Furthermore, a recent paper on Woolf’s late life writing (Bugliani 2020), of Roger Frye’s and her own, mentions Woolf’s explicit confession in

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December 1939 of just having read Freud for the first time concomitantly with giving up on fiction for a while: No more controversy for a year, I vow. Ideas about writers duty. No, I’ll shelve that. Began reading Freud last night, to enlarge the circumference. to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective; to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things. Break the rhythm &c. Use this page, now & then, for notes. Only they escape after the morning grind. (Woolf 1985, p. 248)

In the 1940s, we conclude, Freud was “a new thing” that Virginia Woolf was taking on. Who were then the other Virgilian guides casting their shadows upon her 1925 novel? Her own language can be the key, as around that time she was speaking about a changing human nature defending her new character construction in light of a new psychology. Arthur George Tansley (1920) and Alfred Adler (1923) published books on a “changing human nature” and on a new psychology that was no more concerned solely with pathological cases. The study of human character was now focused on the workings of the mind, applying to normal humans as well in their everyday lives. Arthur George Tansley’s “Combustion Chambers” Arthur George Tansley (1920) turned this ecological view into a well-knit theory of the brain as an associative network of mental elements (“combustion chambers”) grouped in complexes, some of which are in a state of activity (see the heavily lined spot in Figure 1) while others produce unconscious energy. External stimuli trigger stored energy, bringing past images into consciousness, while others are driven from the fore conscious into the subconscious and released through substituted complexes as symbolic representations of repressed content (see, for instance, Clarissa’s scissors and Peter’s flipping knife, along with several other images charged with sexual connotations during their meeting over the years, when their mutually repressed attraction is coming to the surface in indirect ways (Woolf 1925). Fig. 5 is an illustration of the associative mechanics of tubes within the brain.

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Fig. 5: Relationships among Complexes. Source: Tansley 1920, p. 51

The content of C, for instance, is repressed by d’ and C finds an outlet through c’ (a “shell” of repression). The shell-shock, in the case of Septimus Warren Smith, becomes a shell of repression under the pressure of the two psychiatrists, Dr. Holmes, and Sir William Bradshaw, to bar any attempt at introspection, an interdiction which his wife observes by permanently interrupting his chain of thoughts and drawing his attention to the world outside (Woolf 1925). He imagines he sees Evans behind the railings in the park—almost a literal metaphor of him repressing traumatic content. Contrariwise, Clarissa manages to release the repressed traumas through introspection, which rise from the unconscious into clarified vision— another literal metaphor being her revelation to Peter at the end at the top of the stairs (Woolf 1925). She understands not only herself but Septimus as well, as his death drive resembles her own. Her empathy saves her from loneliness as she sees an act of defiance in his suicide, whose reasons she can understand. The “embrace in death”—getting lost into cosmic nothingness—is salvation from an alienating kind of socialization:

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A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. (Woolf 1925, pp. 131–132)

The opening of the novel precisely suggests these explosive intrusions of past images into the present consciousness—a network of complexes (systems of associated mental elements, the stimulation of any one of which tends to call the rest into consciousness through the medium of their common affect) for which the cauliflower is an apt metaphorical representation (Fig. 6):

Fig. 6: Associative Network of the Mind with Some Clusters in Activity. Source: Tansley 1920, p. 48 What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said,

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“Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocketknife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages. (Ibid., p. 3)

Alfred Adler’s Web of Connectivity Alfred Adler was long in touch with the Cambridge Heretics, who, along with the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group (common membership was often the case), launched most of the ideas of modernism. His book, Understanding Human Nature, was first translated into English in London in 1923. He did indeed speculate on the necessity of a new approach to human nature, which was the pivot around which gravitated mankind’s whole life. Woolf’s (1925) innovative narrative voice—interior monologue in the third person—narrative structure, and characterization are in keeping with Adler’s ideas (1923). Adler saw humans living in isolation from one another and their lack of empathy more than ever before. His remark that “parents cannot understand children [and] children [are] misunderstood by their parents” (Adler 1923, p. 4) is an appropriate description of Clarissa’s isolated life in her own home and her sense of being estranged from her daughter (Woolf 1925). Her remedy was that of wandering through London, as the tramp figure was exalted by Woolf in her non-fiction as well. Her first step into writing was a report for The Guardian on her visit to the Brontës home, “Haworth, November 1904” (Woolf 1904), on which occasion she beheld the oak stool Emily Brontë took with her during her tramps on the moors, an occupation which would be one of Woolf’s favorite pastimes through the rest of her life. As well as a Baudelairean modern painter, Virginia Woolf covered her canvases with tramps experiencing the anonymous noise, moving air, or crowded streets of the modern metropole. Her essay, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” published in 1930, links vagabonding to adventurous enterprises, to running into unexpected and exciting events. The desire “to go street rambling” is compelling, and

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although the expected company is going to be a crowd of strangers, “that vast republican army of anonymous trampers” (Woolf 2012: web) confers a paradoxical sense of belonging, a kind of identity and empathy. As one keeps roaming, present perceptions intermingle with memories through association. According to Adler (1923, p. 17), “there is a strict corollary between movement and psychic life.” Movability stimulates and intensifies psychic life: “All the difficulties that are connected with change of place demand of the soul that it foresee, gather experiences, develop a memory in order that the organism be better fitted for the business of life” (Ibid.). In Adler's intersubjective psychologist view, by mixing up with other people in “communal life” (30), individuals satisfy their desire for togetherness as social beings, but this need for connections is not limited to proximity. Social interest will move the individual into a nexus of relationships which expand into wider and wider circles so as to include “his clan, his nation, and finally, the whole of humanity.” He may even reach out to “animals, plants, lifeless objects, or finally towards the whole cosmos." (Adler 1923, p. 43) As the narrator of “Street Haunting” progresses across the streets, the present sights, especially of books on shelves that open into parallel worlds, bring up past events from memory, not only from one’s own experience but also those read or heard. Nature and culture, vegetation and civilization, city, nation, and peace for the whole world are crammed into a few lines: But this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light–windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars–lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences. (Woolf: web)

Human nature is precisely this being unstuck in time and place which ushers man into a web of connectivity, as she goes on wondering: But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to buy a pencil. How, then,

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are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature’s folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? (Ibid.)

Published six years after Adler’s (1923) book, Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) bears evident traces of Adler’s theory of the sexes, especially his allegations about the presumptuous and false idea of man’s greatness built on the assumed inferiority of women. Similarly, the character patterning in To the Lighthouse (1927), does the same, with Mrs. Ramsey fostering family cohesion and Mr. Ramsey being one of Adler’s male figures: “something purely egoistic, something which satisfies selflove, gives a feeling of superiority and domination over others, all with the aid of seemingly ‘active’ characteristics, such as courage, strength, duty, the winning of all manners of victories, especially those over women, the acquisition of positions, honours, titles…” (Adler 1923, p. 128) Woolf’s society is indeed afflicted with an “artificially nourished delusion of grandeur” (Adler 1923, 128). The “new human nature” was paranoid. The cure of individualism lay in a “love life directed towards others, not, as Freud would say, upon his own body” (Adler 1923, pp. 42–43). Social feeling means “the ability to act and feel as if we were someone else.” (Adler 1923, p. 61). The individualism of the interior monologue (what the character perceives or thinks as center of consciousness) is lost in the distancing third person, or, as in The Waves (1931), the characters' soliloquies turn out at the end to have been embedded in narrator Bernard’s , reminiscing, who had identified himself with his friends in order to tell their collective story (one of their shared experiences rather than records of separate lives).

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Adler was focusing on an individual’s whole personality, not just on sexuality. In like fashion, the characters in Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf 1925) share their concerns among the three components of an achieved life according to Adler: career, society, and love. All the characters in the novel ponder on human relationships and are defined accordingly while their lives fail because of broken relationships (Clarissa, Peter), traumatic cessation of relationships (Smith-Evans), or misunderstandings and incongruity of vision (Clarissa and Richard or Miss Kilman and her daughter, Septimus and his wife). In a paper read before the Cambridge Heretics in 1924, Woolf claimed that no previous generation had thought or known so much about character as her own, probing into “real emotions and motives” (Johnson 1994, p. 139). Sándor Ferenczi's “Dialogues of the Unconscious” Virginia Woolf had written about Sigmund Freud in the twenties when psychoanalysis had risen to international fame due mostly to the way it had proved its efficiency in treating war neurosis caused by shell-shock. She had dismissed a model of the mind that reduced everything to libidinal instincts, to sexuality, unofficially subscribing to the other party, the Independents, influenced by Otto Rank, Sándor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, and Harry Stack Sullivan (Fang 2018, pp.15-21). Ian Suttie popularized Ferenczi among British psychoanalysts, managing to convert Ronald Fairbairn and Donald Winnicot to a psychoanalytical model launched by Otto Rank, combining the intrapsychic model with the interpersonal object relations (Kohon 1986, 21, 274). Ferenczi came to be known in the West also through his collaboration with Freud as member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, his co-authoring with Otto Rank of The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924), and his contributions to the British Journal of Psychology, edited by Charles Samuel Myers, whose content consisted mostly of translations from psychoanalytical works in Central Europe. Migrations from this geographical area contributed to the reconfiguration of the Western cognitive map in the earlier twentieth century. (ErĘs 2013). It seems that Sándor Ferenczi, the master mind of Hungarian psychoanalysis and President of the International Psychoanalytical Association since

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1918, was behind much of Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, about World War I. His vision of war as a return to primitivism, born of direct experience of the second world conflagration as a military doctor, resembles Woolf’s own jotted down in her diary on Monday, 5 September, 1938: What would war mean? Darkness, strain: I suppose conceivably death. And all the horror of friends: & Quentin:…All that lies over the water in the brain of that ridiculous little man. Why ridiculous? Because none of it fits. Encloses no reality. Death & war & darkness representing nothing that any human being from the Pork butcher to the Prime Minister cares one straw about. Not liberty, not life…merely a housemaid's dream. And we woke from that dream & have the Cenotaph to remind us of the fruits. Well I can’t spread my mind wide enough to take it in, intelligibly. If it were real, one could make something of it. But as it is it merely grumbles, in an inarticulate way, behind reality. We may hear his mad voice vociferating tonight. (Woolf 1953, p. 291)

In Ferenczi's “The Ice-Age of Catastrophes,” the social abyss (butcher, servant) imaged in Woolf's entry in her Diary takes a nightmarish dive through geological strata and eras of reversed Darwinian evolutionism: War is one of those laboratory experiments taken to a cosmic level. The human psyche presents multiple layers, the culture is just a prettily decorated shop-window while at the back of the store the more primitive merchandise is piled up. War has brutally wrested off this mask and has shown us man in his deepest, truest nature at the heart of man, the child, the savage, the primitive… It is in this way that the catastrophes of the iceage have forged long ago in the first familial and religious society, the basis of all subsequent evolution. War has simply thrown us back into the ice-age, or rather, it has unveiled the deep imprints that is had left in the psychic universe of humanity. (Ferenczi 1999, p. 125)

That was the image Ferenczi was carrying in his mind after his personal involvement in action and observation of shell-shocked soldiers returning from the front to face everybody’s contempt for their cowardice. In 1914 he volunteered to join the Royal Hussar Regiment stationed in the small garrison of Pápa in Western Hungary (ErĘs 2019:85). In 1916 he was summoned back to Budapest and appointed in charge of the war neurotics

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treated at the Maria Valeria Barrack Hospital (Ibid.). His medical experience was the source of his paper read at the Fifth Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, held in Budapest in 1918 (Leys 2000, 22), which he organized and where he was elected President of the society. Ferenczi Sándor, Karl Abraham, Ernst Simmel, and Ernest Jones published their papers in Psycho-Analysis and the War Neurosis in 1919, whose second edition was prefaced by Sigmund Freud and published in London in 1921. (Ibid.) Notabilities of the town and high rank military officers joined the event hoping for a solution to the psychotic soldiers who could neither return to the battlefront nor get integrated in civil life, which are some issues in the context of the recently established academic eugenics that also bother the mind of Lady Bruton in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Ferenczi’s literature review opposes conservative psychiatrists, such as Hermann Oppenheim, to the efficient psychoanalytic methods, which worked precisely because, as well as Septimus Smith, there was nothing physically wrong with those patients; they were just psychologically disturbed. The same argument is dramatized by Virginia Woolf (1925) through old-fashioned psychiatrists, such as Bradshaw and Holmes, who led Septimus into suicide, and the characters themselves who work on their repressed desires through introspection until they come to the surface of consciousness like fish swimming in the deep and coming up for air, as in Peter’s metaphorical picture. The object relations theory alleges that the individuals’ unconscious is influenced by relations with others within family and society rather than by what goes on inside their own bodies. In 1915 Ferenczi published a paper on this topic “Psychogenic Anomalies of Voice Production” (Ferenczi 1969), in which the connection between one mind and another was conceived rather as “dialogues of the unconsciouses” than simply a relation between “sender” and “receiver,” as Freud did in his technique of transfer from the patient’s abysmal self to the analysand’s intellectual processing. Of particular importance for an understanding of Ferenczi's originality is an edition of his diary (1988), edited by Judith Dupont on the basis of three sources: the original manuscript in German, most of which is in the author's own hand, a typewritten transcription and an English translation by Michael Balint, and published in 1988. The idea of a

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Dialogue of the Unconsciouses had probably first occurred to Ferenczi during his own clinical activity as it envisages “a combination of the unconscious contents of the psyches of the analysand and the analyst”: The analyst is able, for the first time, to link emotions with the above primal event and thus endow that event with the feeling of a real experience. Simultaneously the patient succeeds in gaining insight, far more penetrating than before, into the reality of these events that have been repeated so often on an intellectual level. (Ferenczi 1988, pp. 13-14) A narrative from an external observer could no more catch the flux of intuitions and emotions born of the communication between the characters engaged in dialogue as both subject and object of observance. No wonder that, within the context of postwar theories of intersubjectivity—a word coined by Gabriel de Tarde in Les lois de l’imitation (1890), Ferenczi came to be seen as “the first intersubjectivist” (Szecsödy 2007, pp. 31–41; Lum 1988, pp. 317–347). In his diary, Ferenczi goes on to say that: Here, as the sole thread offered by previous analytical experience, is the idea (launched, if I remember correctly, by me): the dialogue of unconsciouses. When two people meet for the first time…an exchange takes place not only of conscious but also of unconscious stirrings. Only analysis could determine for both why, quite inexplicably to either of them, sympathy or antipathy has developed in them. Ultimately I meant by this that when two people converse, not only a conscious dialogue takes place but an unconscious one, from both sides. (Ferenczi 1988, p. 84)

Here is a dialogue of the unconscious—a counter transfer in technical terms—between Clarissa and Peter, conventional at the surface and tensed in what they manage to communicate to each other without words (Woolf 1925). She regrets reminding him of his abortive marriage proposal, and Peter replies “Of course I did,” as if he had read her mind. Peter is thinking of sitting on the same terrace with Clarissa in moonlight, and she starts speaking about it as if she had guessed his thought. Both of them are denying being a failure as if in answer to the other’s unexpressed scorn: “I often wish I’d got on better with your father,” he said.

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The Waves is based on the same model of character construction, with Bernard as that unconscious or psychic field in which all humans meet and which differs from C.G. Jung’s only by being social instead of universal and archetypal. An awareness of the epistemic models that served Virginia Woolf in the delineation of her characters influences the balance of probabilities in the reconstruction of the meaning structures of her novels. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the subconscious varies widely from the theories of mental processes evolved by Arthur George Tansley (1920), Alfred Adler (1923), and Sándor Ferenczi (1915 a, 1988) who are deemed here to be looming behind the mental make-up of Virginia Woolf’s characters. Our survey of psychoanalytic theories supposed to have fed into her novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), has revealed verbal echoes and exchanges of semantic energy between her narratives of human nature and theories of the new psychology disseminated among a group of thinkers who turned London into a laboratory of academic and cultural work that went down into history as canonical modernism.

1.2.8. Appearance as Reality: Flann O’Brien Statistics would probably confirm that, after about a century of physiological psychology, the verb to “appear” occurred more frequently in modernist philosophical discourse than the verb to “be”. Whether as “cogitated,” noematic, object of phenomenological reduction, removed from empirical reality (Husserl), or an object as “tool” (Heidegger), existing for the subject, embedded in a context or situation, the intentional object was always emergent, coming into view. The post-1900 scientific revolution with radical shifts in epistemology was challenging the validity of this appearance versus reality binary, and not in favour of the latter. Packed up with the object of its attention, the subject had lost the dignity it had enjoyed since the age of reason. Psychoanalysis had pathologized consciousness, pragmatism had reduced it to a stream of thoughts and feelings, and phenomenology, to the position of an ideal observer. The new spirit of the age went all the way dismantling the very notion of individual as psychological, empirical subject. Looking into the genesis of

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the human being, eugenist Francis Galton stated bluntly: “Individuals appear to me as finite detachments from an infinite ocean of being, temporarily endowed with executive powers.”18 Scientists of the day seemed to enjoy the shocking effect on laity, Heisenberg reporting Niels Bohr’s comment on this in Physics and Beyond (Heisenberg 1971, 206): “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” Not only was there no more “criterion for physical reality,” but the concept of reality itself had become inoperative as long as even the appeal to experiments and measurements could not yield unambiguous knowledge thereof. (Bohr 1935, 696) Again, if what they say is true, it seems that, while instilling fear and trembling among the devotees of humanities, Werner Heisenberg took time memorizing poems by Goethe, and, exhilarated upon finding the formulation of matrix mechanics, spent the rest of the night waiting for the sunrise on a rock in Helgoland. In The Serial Universe, published in 1934, J. W. Dunne poured out his revolt over the invented irrational algebra” and the “strange “phantasmagoria” of the “Quantum” – not just a mix of specks and waves, but both at the same time. The solid atoms fled away. In their places lay voids tenanted by minute specks too unreal to possess both precise position and precise velocity. Did I say ‘specks’ ? They were not specks, but waves filling all space. Photographs proved it. Worse, each of these wave entities needed a whole threedimensional world to itself, so that no two could be together in the same ordinary space. Did I say 'waves'? I am sorry, they were specks in one and the same space. Experiments proved it, and they could be even counted by a specially designed apparatus. They were not mixtures of specks and waves: each was, definitely, both. A strange phantasmagoria. It was founded upon the

18 Francis Galton, “Studies in National Eugenics.” Communicated at a meeting of the Sociological Society held in the School of Economics and Political Science (diversity of London) on Tuesday, February 24th. https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/1003/Essays%20in%20Euge nics%20-%20Galton%20-%20Part%202.pdf?sequence=1

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indubitable existence of a tiny, irreducible, four-dimensional magnitude called the ‘Quantum’ - itself the very acme of irrationality. And the behaviour of this irrational universe could be calculated only by the aid of a specially invented 'irrational’ algebra. (Dunne 1934, 19)

There were reasons for anxiety, for artists needed a new language to speak about the new picture of the universe. Until then change in science had been change in the world humanity had always known. They could be disappointed at Newton’s discovery that colours were just effects of light, but consolation was soon found over the mind’s capacity to project a world of its own. Quantum physics was posthuman. Bachelard was right in his apprehensions about a major crisis: Quel poète nous donnera les métaphores de ce nouveau langage ? Comment arriverons-nous à imaginer l'association du temporel et du spatial ? Quelle vue suprême sur l'harmonie nous permettra d'accorder la répétition dans le temps avec la symétrie dans l'espace ?19

Irish Flann O’Brien, who knew Schrödinger personally in 1939 (the year he started writing The Third Policeman) when the Austrian physicist was invited to teach at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, accepted the challenge. The novel was finished one year later but was to be published posthumously in 1967. Obviously, the whole story is not about a bicycle – the question which leaves the plot open at the end – but O’Brien may have ironically associated Schrödinger’s daily cycling from his Clontarf home to the Institute and the New Physics’ theory of the cyclic model of the universe expanding and contracting intimated as early as the 20s by Willem de Sitter, Alexander Friedmann, and Georges Lemaître. The novel invites a reading in the key of a parody of the latest scientific developments through too many elements for the reader to ignore them. The unnamed narrator is the accomplice of a criminal and maybe his victim, as, upon asking where he had hidden the box which had been the 19 Which poet will give us the metaphors of this new language? How will we manage to imagine the association of the temporal and the spatial? What supreme view of harmony will enable us to accord repetition in time with symmetry in space? (Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique. Paris : Les Presses universitaires de France, 10e édition, 1968, p. 76).

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motif of the crime, he is sent out to retrieve it from beneath a board in the floor of the assassinated owner. The moment he opens the box, he becomes confused, and he is heading towards strange events in unfamiliar places. It seems that the box had exploded the moment he opened it, which sent him in all directions through space-time. At the end he returns home only shocked to realize that his three days of wondering and perilous adventures in the parish ill matched a time span of sixteen years on earth: He seems to be moving along the world line, the bidimensional hypersurface in between the past and the future light cones. [...] Bidimensionality, actually a sort of hologram, is also the feature of the police barracks, situated at the intersection of the cycles repeated ad infinitum by the universe. […] The events in the protagonist’s life, or rather after-life, following such an explosion, are defined in relation to two different reference frames as in Albert Einstein’s Paradox Twin Theory of 1911: his accomplice, Divney, is like the twin who remains in a stationary position on earth, while his brother is moving at a very high speed in the outer space. The timespans of the twins’ lives no longer overlap. The brother left behind will age at a more rapid speed than his twin whose life time is slowing down with the increasing speed of his rocket. (Tupan 2013, 75-81)

The narrator has just one obsession: the work of a scientist, De Selby, the author of two books, The Country Album and Golden Hours. The latter echoes the golden hours when Afrodite brought Adonis back to life in Theocritus’s fifth Idyll. The title of the former is ironic, as De Selby can only see the black holes of the volcanoes or caused by ... the plague of industrialim. The pastoral intimations in the title are unawaringly corrected by the author of a book about De Selby: Le Fournier, De Selby - Lieu ou Homme? The mock scientists’ theories, parodying the New Physics, have murdered Man, focusing on subatomic matter spatially and temporally distributed. The name of the victim is Mathers – matter had been vapourised, and, along with it, what matters for humanity. The allusions can easily be identified. According to the “atomic theory” (based on Feynman’s diagrams of atomic interaction) there is hybridization of rider and … bicycle, a descent of man into insensitive

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nature (the narrator himself has a wooden leg, like Melville’s Ahab imprisoned by his obsession with a creature of the leviathan): ‘The Atomic Theory,’ I sallied, ‘is a thing that is not clear to me at all.’ ‘Michael Gilhaney,’ said the Sergeant, ‘is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the Atomic Theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?’ ‘It would surprise me unconditionally,’ I said. ‘Michael Gilhaney,’ said the Sergeant, ‘is nearly sixty years of age by plain computation and if he is itself, he has spent no less than thirty-five years riding his bicycle over the rocky roadsteads and up and down the hills and into the deep ditches when the road goes astray in the strain of the winter. He is always going to a particular destination or other on his bicycle at every hour of the day or coming back from there at every other hour. If it wasn’t that his bicycle was stolen every Monday he would be sure to be more than half-way now.’ ‘Half-way to where?’ ‘Half-way to being a bicycle himself,’ said the Sergeant.

The whole of existence has been reduced to an invisible substratum, omnium, out of which any existent is created. A policeman explains to the narrator the two ways in which reality is created. On the one hand, the wave function of quantum mechanics (all the states of a system out of whose interference the eigenstates are realized): ‘Did you ever see a piece of it or what colour it is?’ MacCruiskeen smiled wryly and spread his hands into red fans. ‘That is the supreme pancake,’ he said. ‘If you could say what the shouts mean it might be the makings of the answer.’ ‘And storm-wind and water and brown bread and the feel of hailstones on the bare head, are those all omnium on a different wave?’ ‘All omnium.’

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The other formulation of quantum mechanics, matrix mechanics, is based on matrices of a particle’s measurable physical properties. Heisenberg was describing quantum systems by observables (whose values were expreessed by the Fourier series) when he discovered the possibility of using instead matrices whose set of eigenvalues were understood as the set of all possible values which the observables could have (between the first and the last state). In this way, a probabilistic model emerged whose results coincided with those of the probabilistic wave function. Measurement collapsed the system to one of its possible states (described by an eigenvalue of the observable). If the wave function and matrix mechanics were formulated by two physicists, policeman MacCruiskeen masters both. He has laboured in years to produce empty chests, absolutely identical and formally perfect, from one which is a foot in height to others beneath the level of direct observation: At this point I became afraid. What he was doing was no longer wonderful but terrible. I shut my eyes and prayed that he would stop while still doing things that were at least possible for a man to do. When I looked again I was happy that there was nothing to see and that he had put no more of the chests prominently on the table but he was working to the left with the invisible thing in his hand on a bit of the table itself. When he felt my look he came over to me and gave me an enormous magnifying glass which looked like a basin fixed to a handle. I felt the muscles around my heart tightening painfully as I took the instrument. ‘Come over here to the table,’ he said, ‘and look there till you see what you see infra-ocularly.’

The third policeman, Fox, living in the walls of the victim’s house and looking like the owner of the box with the infinite omnium, is a god-like figure, omniscient, powerful, capable to mess with the other two policemen’s calculus and measurements. He is God but not a judge. He knows how the narrrator has come in posession of the box with omnium, but his only concern is to return it to him, without considering or punishing his guilt. He can influence measurements but he has deprived humans of knowledge, because upon measurement, the equipment

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interferes with the system and changes its state. Empathy was once the guarantee of reciprocation between mind and object. Epiphany has been replaced with collapsing or decoherence. There is no way of knowing the state of a system without measuring its impulse and momentum, or, the intervention of the observer’s equipment collapses it, decoheres it. The science of the day is made responsible for man’s sense of alienation, confusion, dehumanization.There is in the protagonist indifference, estrangement, loss of any feeling, even of the greed for money which would not justify but would explain his crime. The novel was completed two years ahead of The Stranger by Albert Camus but did not go into print. The loss of affect is carried to its last extreme: there is nothing left out of what makes a human life worth living, whether love, beliefs, or rites: Then a certain year came about the Christmas-time and when the year was gone my father and mother were gone also. Mick the sheepdog was very tired and sad after my father went and would not do his work with the sheep at all; he too went the next year. I was young and foolish at the time and did not know properly why these people had all left me, where they had gone and why they did not give explanations beforehand. My mother was the first to go and I can remember a fat man with a red face and a black suit telling my father that there was no doubt where she was, that he could be as sure of that as he could of anything else in this vale of tears. But he did not mention where and as I thought the whole thing was very private and that she might be back on Wednesday, I did not ask him where.

Physics looks on high, knows the movements of the entire universe, but the novel is not about its cycle of expansion and shrinking back to the quantum singularity. It is about a piece of bicycle that has been used for committing a crime. About man becoming man’s most ferocious enemy. a thing. Flann O’Brien (the pen name of Brian O'Nolan, who, in modernist fashion, adopted rhetorical masks, being known, as a columniust of The Irish Times, as Myles na gCopaleen) is building the horrific image of a soulless society, in which knowledge has been replaced with useless information about an invisible, subatomic world. Knowing had yeielded to

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policing a dead elemental space. The trinity of knowledgeable policemen was a ludicrous parody of the divine Trinity. His social criticism got even more acrimonious accents in his Cruiskeen Lawn column: On 10 April 1942, Cruiskeen Lawn attacked the work of two wellknown scholars of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS): Celtic Studies scholar, Thomas O’Rahilly and Austrian Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist, Erwin Schrödinger. 2 Myles reported on the accomplishments of DIAS, stating that all it had done since its establishment in 1940 had been to show ‘that there are two Saint Patricks and no God’. 3 He went on to say that ‘the propagation of heresy and unbelief has nothing to do with polite learning and unless we are careful this Institute of ours will make us the laughing stock of the world.20

In a way, George Berkeley’s radical idealism - “to be is to be perceived” had received confirmation from physicists who alleged that appearance, the collapsed state, becoming observable, phenomenal, is the only present, ineluctable reality.

20 Alana Gillespie, “‘B ANJAXED AND BEWILDERED.’ Cruiskeen Lawn and the role of science in independent Ireland”. In Borg, Ruben & Fagan, Paul & Huber, W. (2014). Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies, edited by Ruben Borg, Paul Fagan and Werner Huber, Cork: Cork University Press, 2014 (pp. 169-180).

CHAPTER II COGNITIVE HYBRIDITY AND BIRTH OF DISCOURSE The interwar period of the last century knew a gradual departure from the Kantian epistemology of the fundamental opposition between science and humanities. Informally speaking, this polarity was based in the mental activity required by either. Einbildungskraft, imagination, was necessary, Kant thought, to the scientist as well as to the artist, but the former aimed at conceptualization, whereas art is essentially reliant on the phenomenal, the sensuous impression. By creating a new epistemology of reasoning through images, psychology had overridden this divide. Art had acceded to a new dignity, that of a form of cognition. Wilhelm Wundt, the erudite and dominant figure of the later nineteenth century, had set a role model, that of the scientist doubled by the scholar, the experimentator of the first laboratory of psychology being also a persuasive commentator of myth and art works. The fact that attention paid to both fields was part of discursive protocols is confirmed by the kind of public speeches delivered on various occasions, such as the meetings of the Cambridge Heretics Society. Defining for the mental make-up of the newly founded society was an address delivered on the 7th December 1909 by Jane Ellen Harrison entitled “Heresy and humanity”. Although a classical scholar and the first English female academic, Harrison was an impassioned advocate of social and cultural change in the sense of breaking up traditional modes of thought and action. Her characterization of what the nineteenth century had left behind was a depressive picture of a society “non-reasonable, prereasonable, […] hypnotised by herd-suggestion.” To be a heretic, it seemed to her, had become a duty for all those who refused to go on living a “good soldier life” of obeying commands and observing an ossified tradition. Two solutions she could envisage: science and humanity. Ten

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years after the miraculous 1900 which had meant a new beginning in several branches of sciences and especially in the study of the subatomic world Harrison saw the role science could play in the emancipation of the collective mind of her contemporaries. Science had become a question of attitude, habit of mind, ideology, and as such, common property of the whole intellectual community: Science is from the outset the sworn foe of herd-suggestion. Herdsuggestion, being a strange blend of the emotions and imaginings of many men, is always tolerant of contradictions; religion revels in them; with God all things are possible. Science classifies, draws ever clearer distinctions; herd-suggestion is always in a haze. Herd-suggestion is all for tradition, authority; science has for its very essence the exercise of free thought. (Harrison 1911: 8)

Humanity, in her acceptation of the world, referred to the modern life, which – what was least expected from a classicalist – was falling under the economic consequences of a marked off division of labour. It was in this way, out of quite practical reason, that people needed one another for their current needs, which forced them into mutual cooperation. Modernism lived by permanent resurrection, rebellion being often an end in itself. Although Harrison saw in fashion what it was, “a new and modified collectivism”, “foolish and light-headed”, it was accepted merely for being only a matter of “temporary associations,” such was the general impatience felt by everybody with the conservative spirit of Victorianism. The enthusiasm stirred by the new physics, especially, was just because it seemed to break up in an abrupt and radical way with tradition. Gaston Bachelard started his career as poetician of the elements – the field wherein he was to become a world celebrity – from close observation of the new “spirit of the age”, essentially characterised as non-Cartesian epistemology (the last chapter of his book, Le nouvel esprit scientifique, 1934). Bachelard was not simply trying to write papers popularizing the new theories, such as J. W. N. Sullivan’s “Three Men Discuss Relativity” (1925) doing in the twentieth century what Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle had done with his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes) in 1686.

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Bachelard is speaking as of right, from inside the new epistemological frame which was offering schemata for interpreting issues in his own field of studies. The new scientific thought was not merely a matter of technicality but of ontology, with the concept of matter thoroughly compromised: La force mécanique devient aussi métaphorique que la force d'une antipathie ou d'une sympathie ; elle est relative à une composition, non pas à des éléments. L'intuition mathématique avec son souci de la complétude remplace l'intuition expérimentale avec ses simplifications arbitraires.21

Affected with the passion for literary quotations were speakers from various disciplinary fields. An Address by Lord Rosebery at the annual meeting of the Edinburgh Savings Bank was entitled “Thrift” and it was a quotation from Shakespeare (“thrift is blessing”), the speaker interpreting the passage from the Merchants of Venice in his particular way: “what comprehends, after all, the whole root of the matter, that 'thrift is blessing,' not merely because of the accumulation of substance, but because of the foundation and strengthening of character.” 22 Lecturing on Modern Views on Matter in the Sheldonian Theatre of Oxford University on June 12, 1903, mainly in reference to Ernst Haeckel, Sir Oliver Lodge quotes Ruskin's preface to Sesame and Lilies serving as his own apologetic diminution over discovering “the whole verity of the universe”.23 His reading list is a blend of ancient and modern philosophy, philosophy, religion and science.

21

“The mechanical force becomes as metaphorical as the repulsive or the attractive force; it is relative to a structure, not to elements. Mathematical intuition with its concern for completeness replaces experimental intuition with its arbitrary simplifications.” (Gaston Bachelard, Le nouvel esprit scientifique. Paris : Les Presses universitaires de France, 10 e édition, 1968, p. 124 (First published 1934). 22 Lord Rosebery, “Thrift.” An Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Edinburgh Bank. December 28, 1908. Edinburgh: David Douglas 1909. 23 Sir Oliver Lodge, Life and Matter. A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's “Riddle of the Universe.” The Project Gutenberg eBook of “Life and Matter” by Oliver Lodge, 2008 ( https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26321/26321-h/26321-h.htm (First published 1906 by London: Williams & Norgate).

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Addressing the subject of literature and science, as if their relationship needed to be redefined, writers of various commitments tended to ignore the Kantian dualism, looking rather for their common properties. Of particular relevance is in this context Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetics (1908), as the author not only methodically deconstructs the idea of literary genre in his “Historical Summary,” but also smoothes over the disciplinary frontier between art and science: If we have shown that the aesthetic form is altogether independent of the intellectual and suffices to itself without external support, we have not said that the intellectual can stand without the aesthetic. This reciprocity would not be true. What is knowledge by concepts? It is knowledge of relations of things, and those things are intuitions. Concepts are not possible without intuitions, just as intuition is itself impossible without the material of impressions. Intuitions are: this river, this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water; the concept is: water, not this or that appearance and particular example of water, but water in general, in whatever time or place it be realized; the material of infinite intuitions, but of one single and constant concept. (Croce 1920, p. 22)

By minimalising the relevance of formal differences, Croce, as well as Bachelard, emphasizes the necessity for an adjustment between thought and aesthetic expression. Well-formed sentences are an inevitable standard of scientific discourse as well. One can see normative aesthetic writing exchanging the time-honoured tradition of literary genre with that of discourse. Actually, something in the way of a typology of genre is now the scientific/ literary binary. A.I. Richards swerves from psychological to linguistic perspective, preparing the ground for New Criticism and formalism. The truth-conditions of Predicate Logic lose their relevance. Richards mocks the attempt to put make-believe to the door of objective realism, such as “Mr Yeats trying desperately to believe in fairies or Mr Lawrence impugning the validity of solar physics.” Richards builds his typology on a hybrid referential/ emotional binary: [..] A statement may be used for the sake of the reference, true or false, which it causes. This is the scientific use of language. But it may also be

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used for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude produced by the reference which it occasions. This is the emotive use of language. (Richards 1930, p. 267)

In her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), Doris Lessing seems to have been influenced by the New Critical theories. The characters of medieval moralities are no longer literary types but embodiments of moral commitments and existential attitudes: Mr Dogma and Mr I-am-Free-Because-I-Belong-Nowhere, Miss I-MustHave-Love-and-Happiness and Mrs I-Have-to-be-Good-At-Everything-IDo, Mr Where-is-a-Real-Woman? and Miss Where-is-a-Real-Man?, Mr I’m-Mad-Because-They-Say-I-Am, and Miss Life-Through-ExperiencingEverything, Mr I-Make-Revolution-and-Therefore-I-Am, and Mr and Mrs If-We-Deal-Very-Well-With-This-Small-Problem-Then-Perhaps-We-CanForget-We-Daren’t-Look-at-The-Big-On. (Lessing 1962, VII).

Unlike Free Women, which is “a conventional short novel,” written in the referential style of realist fiction, the notebooks into which Anna has put her life in order reflect on her attitudes and emotions: her love life in a meta-narrative, her life as social activist, her biography in the traditional genre of a diary. Deconstructed along with anything else in postmodernism, literary generic conventions have been rendered nonsensical by Jacques Derrida in an essay ironically entitled “The Law of Genre.” There is, of course, no law, because the very ontology of writing is being questioned: It is thus impossible to decide whether an event, reed, rick of event or event of recit took place. Impossible to settle upon the simple borderlines of this corpus, of this ellipsis unremittingly canceling itself within its own expansion. When we fall back on the poetic consequences enfolding within this dilemma, we find that it becomes difficult indeed to speak here with conviction about a récit as a determined mode included within a more general corpus or one simply related, in its determination, to other modes, or, quite simply, to something other than itself. All is récit and nothing is; the exit out of the récit remains within the récit in a noninclusive mode, and this structure is itself related so remotely to a dialectical structure that it even inscribes dialectics in the ellipsis of the récit. All is récit, nothing is: and we shall not know whether the relationship between these two

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The ontological indeterminacy of most of postmodernist fiction does indeed suspend the issue of generic identity, as there is no fixed ontological reference. The wheel of author as historical person, paper author, figure of the author, characters, narrator, etc. keeps turning without stopping. The permutations operated by J.M. Coetzee in Robinson Crusoe to generate his Foe are not simply of the reversal or rewriting wrong kind. Foe emerges from the inter-dicta of the original, from what was omitted, from the absence and invisibility of the empire’s subjects, of patriarchal society’s women, of slaves’ illiteracy. Nevertheless, if no longer a picaresque novel, Coetzee’s Foe does belong to a corpus of texts referred to as postcolonial fiction. Ontological uncertainty is another theme which brings together an enormous body of literary works whose conceptual background deliberately tapped is either quantum uncertainty, non-locality, or superposition, or Baudrillard’s simulacra and hyperreality. Mutant characters, multiple worlds, and subjects, multiple epic trajectories and ends fill in a fictional world in perpetual emergence as is the physical universe of quantum description. The textual world is often extraneous, a supplement to an indescribable reality (Graham Swift, Out of this World, 1988, or Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places, 1998), while their superposition is known as historiographic metafiction. We may conclude that it is epistemological foci rather than formal differences that serve as a more effective criterion for defining corpora of texts in modernist and postmodernist literature. Formal anarchy and chance experimentation seemed to be the distinguishing mark of modernism until Joseph Frank identified what was common, not only to literature but to the structuring principle of the canonical works of the period in all the arts: the absence of depth (bidimensionality) or of the illusion of tridimensionality in the arts and the spatialization of time in poetry and fiction (“Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” 1945).

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At the same time, Wilhelm Worringer’s confidence, expressed in the Foreword to the 1948 edition, that his 1906 doctorate thesis, Abstraction and Empathy A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, had influenced […] the spiritual life of a whole era. Far beyond professional and national boundaries. It became an Qpen Sesame' for the formulation of a whole range of ·questions important to the epoch. (Worringer 1997, p. 15)

is simplifying the general picture from several points of view. A single voice cannot produce the polyphonic score of a phase of culture. The spontaneity of an Abracadabra may work the magic, but otherwise the order of discourse is the result of multiple negotiations, and, as we have already seen, of cross-disciplinary interrelations. That the primitive man drew abstract designs out of a desire to create a parallel reality to the threatening one he was facing and not out of skill and lack of exercise is just a conjecture. That the same intentional subject stands behind the prehistoric cave drawings and works shaped according to the Fibonacci numbers or the golden proportion is highly unlikely. The will to abstraction of modernist artists, such as Picasso or Gauguin, might very well have been the effect of the European othering of tribal life: […] some degree of cultivation, or, more properly speaking, of development by the exercise of its reflective faculties, is obviously essential ere the mind can attain to mature growth, we might almost say to its natural state, since nothing can be said to have attained its true nature until all its capacities are at least called into birth. No one, for example, would refer to the savages of Australia for a true specimen of what was proper or natural to the human mind; we should rather seek it, if such were the alternative, in a civilized child of five years old. Be this as it may, it will not be denied that ignorance, brutality, and many other deteriorating causes, do practically incapacitate thousands for even an approximation, not only to this, but to many of the inferior emotions, the character of which is purely mental. And this, we think, is quite sufficient to neutralize the objection, if not, indeed, to justify the application of the term to all cases where the immediate effect, whether directly or indirectly, is such as has been described. But, to reduce this to a common-sense view, it is only saying,--what no one will deny,--that a man of education and refinement

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Forms develop out of the gradual sedimentation and coalescence of ideas which know a wide circulation at some time in history. The flight from reality, the subjectivity of the mind’s representation of the world rather than its objective validity had been upheld both in academic circles and in the publishing world. Before being a standard for art, the idea was the conclusion of experiments conducted in laboratories which had proved the priority of mental over sensory contents.

CHAPTER III HISTORICIZING THE AESTHETICS OF GENRE The aesthetics of modernism is commonly discussed by quoting the statements in poetics of the most representative artists – Yeats, Eliot, Woolf, Pound, Forster, D.H. Lawrence – and the way they fed into their writings. By searching the non-literary contexts, however, which were influential at the time among the literati, one might come up with relevant grids of interpretation of their literature as well. Elements which are considered unimportant may, on the contrary, reveal their significance in the time’s corpus of knowledge underwriting a certain understanding of the human condition, as well as disclose an intentional meaning behind what had been taken for subliminal or random details. One of the most authoritative figures in the earlier twentieth century was Theodor Lipps, whose aesthetics was emulated, among others, by Roger Frye who may be credited with writing the aesthetic constitution of the Bloomsbury Group. Less popular today than Worringer’s “Abstraction and Empathy”, the 1905 Psychologische Forschungen by Theodor Lipps earned him a huge international reputation at the time due to his theory of empathetic aesthetics. Lipps refined on the psychology of correlation between an intentional subject and an external object of observation. The objective correlative places the two factors on a par, or even granted priority to the object. An object could affect the mind in various ways, including the rise of an epistemic idea. Lipps distinguishes between objects with an autonomous existence, to which we are indifferent, they simply swimming into our awareness, and the objects which become the props of our projection of an inner content (our feelings, emotions, etc.). Lipps is probing into the conditions and effects of our experience of objects or events. Our memory

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treasures not only these objects of experience but also the complex of feelings and emotions associated in the context. What we remember, is it the emotions and feelings we experienced back then, or a new experience of past contents of consciousness? In Proust, for instance, the taste of a certain tea or muffin revives in his memory his childhood experience as if he were carried back in time. On the contrary, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen’s epiphanies – moments of revelation, of intense realization of the meaning of a scene – along his life are as many steps away from his initial beliefs and commitments. This novel is not only Künstlerroman but also a Bildungsroman. The pain of not being able to recover past emotions, the motif of the impossible return is running through Thomas Wolfe’s entire fiction. A more important effect on literary form which can be associated with the aesthetics of empathy is the doubling up of the plot according to different generic conventions. Books written in parallel, as fictional and nonfictional narratives, go under different period terms, and different is also the poetics underlying them. Let us compare, for edification, three authors aware of genre theory in their signifying practices: Thomas Wolfe (Lippsian content of consciousness), Doris Lessing (New Criticism), and Jacques Derrida (Maurice Blanchot’s deconstructionist textualism). Having maybe a point of departure in Hegel’s process of Aufhebung, Theodor Lipps divides the objects of experience according to the way they are experienced: neutral or subjective. Things may exist in themselves (an sich) or for the subject thinking them (fĦr mich), experiencing a sensation, or a representation (Vorstellung) in consciousness. The blue colour, for instance, may be to us a notion like any other, the signified whose meaning depends on its systematic opposition to words denoting other colours - green, red, etc. Will ich dies Blau, d. h. das Blau »selbst«, oder das Blau und »nur« das Blau, beschreiben, so sage ich, es sei blau, oder es sei das, was jeder meine, wenn er das Wort Blau ausspreche, oder von einem blauen Dinge rede ; es sei dem Grün und dem Violett nächst-verwandt; es sei heller oder dunkler, gesättigter oder mindergesättigt, leuchtender oder minderleuchtend. In solchen Wendungen beschreibe ich vielleicht das Blau vollständig. Alle

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diese Wendungen aber tragen in ihrem Sinn nichts von dem, was das Wort »Bewußtsein« meint. 24

Or, on the contrary, it may be meaningful in relation to the subject, HIS subject: Dies hindert doch nicht, daß in diesem Erleben die zwei Seiten unterschieden werden können, nämlich einmal das Erleben des Inhaltes und zum anderen der Inhalt des Erlebens. Und ich kann die beiden Seiten in meiner Betrachtung scheiden. Ich kann mein Interesse richten das eine Mal auf den Inhalt, der erlebt wird, zum anderen auf das Erleben dieses Inhaltes. Wir könnten diese beiden Seiten auch unterscheiden als die objektive und die subjektive Seite der Inhalte der Empfindung und Vorstellung. [...]Das Empfinden und Vorstellen wird also nicht ebenso »erlebt«, wie die Inhalte des Empfindens und Vorstellens erlebt werden« 25

In a letter dated 8 November 1924 to his friend, George McCoy, who was working for “The Asheville Citizen-Times”, Thomas Wolfe confesses, to his worse interests, his disdain of journalism, from which he had learned less than by watching a confrontation between a Cockney and an English aristocrat on the boat carrying him to England. In Look Homeward, Angel, he experiences the emptiness of returning to a space which lacked meaning, affecting him more like an alphabet (the leaf, the bud, the wheel, the blade) whose letters never combined into 24 “Do I want to describe this blue, that is, the blue ‘itself,’ or the blue and ‘only’ the blue, I say, it is blue, or it is what everyone means when they say the word blue, or talk about a blue thing; let it be closest to the green and the violet; let it be lighter or darker, more saturated or less saturated, more luminous or less luminous. In this way have I probably described the blue completely. But all these twists and turns carry in their meaning nothing of what the word ‘consciousness’ means.” (Theodor Lipps, Psychologische Untersuchungen. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1905, p. 3) 25 However, this does not prevent the two sides of this experience from being mutually distinct, namely, the experience of the content on the one hand and the content of the experience on the other. And I can separate the two sides in my contemplation. I can focus my interest either on the content that is being experienced or on experiencing this content. We could also distinguish these two sides as the objective and, respectively, the subjective side of the contents of sensation and imagination. […] The sensing and imagining are not “experienced” in the same way as are the contents of feeling and imagining. (Ibid., pp. 5-6)

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meaningful sentences. As well as Bradley, he believes in discovery and form, that appearance in consciousness which collapses into revelatory form. He believes in the empathetic intensity of experience as stored in memory. Backward looking, Look Homeward, Angel opens with the sense of loss experienced by all those who look backward on their lives, the experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life, and ends with Eugene Gant’s realization that enduring life is only that which passes into vivid memories of intensely lived moments. It is only the content of consciousness that escapes prodigal time and the violence of the physical universe: Dwaney de clangay genett, argereoyo beeoyo—above the whistle’s shriek, the harsh scream of the wheel, the riveter’s tattoo, the vast long music endures, and ever shall. What dissonance can quench it? What jangling violence can disturb or conquer it—entombed in our flesh when we were young, remembered like “the apple tree, the singing, and the gold”? (Wolfe 1929, p. 48)

The quote from Hippolytos Stephanophoros by Euripides seems to suggest the symbolical identification of the artist with the Hippolytos figure – the son of Theseus who refuses the pleasures of the body choosing to worship the statue of Artemis, the goddess of chastity. Stephanophoros, the wearer of the crown (the garlands worn by Hippolytos as worshipper of Artemis) is also the name given to Dedalus by mocking boys in the scene of his realization that he loved a beautiful phrase more than the nature it described. Like a pulley, Gant’s existence vacillates between the maelstrom of wasteful life and the compensating upsurge of aesthetic representations experienced in the immaculate body: But that which remained most vividly, later, in the drowning years which cover away so much of beauty, was the vast sea-surge of Homer which beat in his brain, his blood, his pulses, as did the sea-sound in Gant’s parlor shells, when first he heard it to the slowly pacing feet and the hexametrical drawl of Buck Benson, the lost last weary son of Hellas. (Ibid., p. 49)

What Gant remembers over the years is the Homer buried in his flesh together with the intense feelings aroused by his Greek professor’s reading which had enticed him to read Euripides. His school memory combines the

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sensations produced by Benson’s reading and the sensations experienced from inside his own body – the very definition of empathy. Modernist writers had various names for this empathetic experience – a revelatory one of meaningful moments: moments of being (Woolf), epiphanies (Joyce), living moments (D.H. Lawrence). Empathy, Einfühlung are known mainly as the dominant features of expressionist painting, but fiction also employed the concepts as structuring elements. The aestheticizing drives of the fin-de-siơcle art had aspired to diaphaneité, transparency, derealization. Coming under the influence of phenomenology and physiological psychology, the literature of the earlier twentieth century recovered a sense of embodiment, but the focus was not on the anatomical body but on disconnected bits of its physiological life. In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe is sketching a portrait of the poet as weaver of life-stories out of inwardly experienced events of consciousness. His narratives intrigued critics, particularly from the New Criticism camp, who were looking for formal propriety in his selfreflexive fiction, drawing on psychology, but not of William James’s school. The double scheme of his story, “The Return of the Prodigal,” is playing with styles, narrating the same story, once in lyrical fashion, and once in the rhetorical manner suited for a realist plot. The common part is a meta-narrative in which the making of the story is disclosed to have been all invention, a mental content which had gradually been taken for the writer’s real past life luring him to revisit his home town. The story also contains its mise-en-abyme – a quote from a sonnet by Thomas Kyd (They flee us who beforetime did us seek …) composed by the poet after falling in disgrace and being deserted by those who had once courted his company. Eugene Grant, the writer who returns to his home town, experiences alienation both in his social life, in the realist version, and in his home, haunted by his brother’s ghost revealing to him the truth about the impossibility of ever going home again, meaning of ever being able to revisit one’s past.

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The author seems to be deliberately (because repeatedly) refuting the objective correlative psychology in favour of the subjective, empathetic kind. Realism is structured according to the logic of propositional identity: Eugene Gant was a writer, and in the great world he had attained some little fame with his books. After a while, indeed, he became quite a famous person. His work was known, and everywhere he went he found that his name preceded him. Everywhere, that is, except where he would most have wished it—at home. (Ibid., p. 542)

The imaginary narrative is characterized by a logic of appearance: how do objects of perception show up in the narrator’s consciousness? He sees the once familiar things scattered about, having lost their function, meaning, use. Instead of stirring ideas in his mind, these dead things frighten him precisely because of their fragmentary displacement and stubborn refusal to come out into the open of the former homeliness. These things which had belonged to him are not HIS any longer, he feels nothing in their presence except estrangement: What things are these, what shells and curios of outworn custom, what relics here of old, forgotten time? Festoons of gathered string and twines of thread, and boxes filled with many buttons, and bundles of old letters covered with scrawled and faded writings of the dead, and on a warped old cupboard, shelved with broken and mended crockery, an old wooden dock where Time his fatal, unperturbed measure keeps, while through the night the rats of time and silence gnaw the timbers of the old house of life. (Wolfe 2016, p. 544)

Past emotions, feelings, sensations only survive as mental content. If his memory is a screen memory, a memory of things that never happened, the old woman who has spent her whole life there is actually living in memories, not in the meaningless present. Her mind has stored images and representations which only make sense in the perceptual context that accompanied them back then when they were all part of an empathetically bonded “house of life”. The impersonal verb forms and agentless events symbolize her emotional dispossession of her home which has become a rental house, no longer feeling to be her own. The iconic language (the form itself is meaningful) is remarkable for its condensed phrasing exploding with meaning (the word is spoken by no one, the step is taken

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by a ghostly walker, the chain of events involving familiar actors being replaced with an impersonal subject of a non-finite verb). Being alone, outside any human contact and connection, changes a human being into an inert object. A woman sits here among such things as these, a woman old in years, and binded to the past, remembering while storm shakes the house and all the festoons of hung string sway gently and the glasses rattle, the way the dust rose on a certain day, and the way the sun was shining, and the sound of many voices that are dead, and how sometimes in these mid-watches of the night a word will come, and how she hears a step that comes and goes forever, and old doors that sag and creak, and something passing in the old house of life and time in which she sits alone. (Ibid.)

The Real Thing is a picture of precise spatial and temporal props, a familiar map of the Altamont, but the detailed scenery and polyphony of voices are only the sound and the fury of a present disconnected from the emotionally experienced past. The perceived things do not affect the sense organs in the present as Sosein (being one way or another), they are indifferent objects, commonly shared with all observers. They only trigger their past representations, lively with sounds, smell and consistency, as they got imprinted in the consciousness of a mentally active subject: And with the echoes of his mother's voice, that had seemed to fill all the days of his childhood with its unending monotone, there returned to him an immediate sense of everything that he had ever known: the front porch of the old house in Altamont where he had lived, the coarse and cool sound of Black's cow munching grass in the alleyway, along the edges of the back yard fence, the mid-morning sound of sawn ice out in the hot street of summer, the turbaned slatterns of good housewives awaiting noon, the smell of turnip greens, and upon the comer up above, the screeching halt of the street car, and the sound of absence after it had gone, then the liquid smack of leather on the pavement as the men came home at noon for dinner, and the slam of screen doors and the quiet greetings; and, inside the house, the cool, stale smell of the old parlor, and the coffined, rich piano smell, the tinkling glasspoints of the chandelier, the stereopticon of Gettysburg, the wax fruit on the mantel underneath its glass hood, and he himself reclining on his father's couch, buried in a book, his imagine

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CHAPTER IV FROM BARBARIAN TO CITIZEN: THE CONSTITUTION OF THE RACIAL OTHER It is hard to produce a coherent narrative of the savage in the Western tradition, in whose mirrors he appears in turn as monster (The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 1357 and 1371), royal slave of Western Empires (William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, 1688), the first brutal, natural state of man (Thomas Hobbes) or, on the contrary, Rousseau’s first but pure and noble state of mankind. To the scientist and the philosopher of modernity, primitive man was generally the racial foil of the civilized European, inspiring repulsion or pity. In the Leviathan, Hobbes draws a picture of humanity with black gaps marked by deficient natural man on the normative white map of civilization, due in no way to inborn inferiority: “Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of nature body, and mind.” (Hobbes 1965, p. 94). All the more persuasive is the sense of primitive man’s lack in being in the century which absolutized the value of a civilized life: 96-97. In such condition, there is no place for Industry ; because the fruit thereof is uncertain : and consequently no Culture of the Earth ; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea ; no commodious Building ; no instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth ; no account of Time ; no Arts ; no Letters ; no Society ; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death ; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Hobbes, Ibid., pp. 96-97)

Unlike Hobbes, Montesquieu refutes Hobbes’s thesis on the violence of primitive man but, along with John Locke, denies the savage the capacity for speculative, abstract thought (Montesquieu 1949, Book I, Ch. 2, p.4):

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In the psychology-dominated nineteenth century it was the (non)reflexive capacities of the savage that served the binary of human response to the world. H.L. Mansel argued that the barbarian’s incapacity for abstract reasoning was a proof of Locke’s denial of innate ideas: A savage may never have contemplated the notions, one, two, three, four, etc., in the abstract: he may not know as an universal truth that two and two make four. But he knows the difference between a man and a tree, and he knows the difference between one man and many; and his knowledge contains the same ideas in the concrete. He embraces various sensible phenomena under the single notion of a man, though he has never asked himself the abstract question, How can the one be many and the many one? (Mansel 1866, p. 274)

The mental impoverishment of the savage is stated as such in midnineteenth century by art critic Washington Allston: “No one, for example, would refer to the savages of Australia for a true specimen of what was proper or natural to the human mind; we should rather seek it, if such were the alternative, in a civilized child of five years old.” (Allston 1850: web) Taken for granted, the idea of the primitive man as degenerated, violent, promiscuous became a commonplace employed as a trope. In Darkest England and the Way Out published in 1890 by William Booth was a nod to Henry M. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa (1890), the metropolitan state in its decayed condition being compared to the jungle world. Intimations of savagery steal into the description of dissolute life in the suburbs haunted by a decaying Dorian Gray or in Jekyll/Hide’s prowling in low life. Similarly, the often invoked measurement of the brain in the later nineteenth century in support of the theory of racial inferiority was in no

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way limited to non-European races. In his 1907 Herbert Spencer lecture in Oxford, Francis Galton elaborates on the importance of the new science of eugenics which, among other considerations, recommended restriction of marriage when feebleness of the offspring was suspected “at various times and places.” (Galton 1907, p. 26) Even in a piece of writing against imperialism as Virginia Woolf’s “Three Guineas” is usually interpreted, her political unconscious wrenches from her the following passage: “And still the tradition, or belief, lingers among us that to express worth of any kind, whether intellectual or moral, by wearing pieces of metal, or ribbon, coloured hoods or gowns, is a barbarity which deserves the ridicule which we bestow upon the rites of savages.” (Woolf 2012, p. 19) Nietzsche’s subversive treatment of European orthodoxy was so remote from the hegemonic spirit of the age that Ernest Seillière went to all extremes to find in his later writings signs of a defence of European rationality, imperialism and utilitarianism: Dionysos est le symbole des tendances orgiaques de l'Orient tropical, qui énervent et passionnent leurs adeptes. Apollon est le dieu impérialiste de ces conquérants doriens (1) qui apportèrent, dans la nuit de désordre et de dérèglement du monde titanesque, leur sévère discipline militaire et leur ferme organisation civique, retardant par un moyen âge quasi-féodal de cinq siècles la floraison séductrice et passagère de Tatticisme ionien.26

The turn of the century bred an atmosphere famously characterized by Verlaine as “the Empire in its apathetic decline” - of unrest and concern. Notorious speakers were invited to deliver public lectures on what they deemed to be a solution to the crisis of the relationship between the metropolitan state and its colonies. It was not simply a question of politics

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Dionysus is the symbol of the orgiastic drives of the tropical Orient, which impassion and incite their adepts. Apollo is the imperialist god of these Dorian conquerors, who brought in the night of disorder and disruption of the titanic world, their severe military discipline and their firm civic organization, delaying in a quasi-feudal Middle Ages of five centuries the seductive and fleeting bloom of Ionian Tatticism. (Ernest Seillière, Apollon ou Dionysos. Etude critique sur Frédéric Nietzsche et l'utilitarisme impérialiste. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1905, p. 29).

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but of a philosophy of history. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad seems to suggest that being conquered by a great Empire may mean the start on the way to a great civilization, as tribal Britain had known through the Roman conquest. Two perils were attending the conquerors though, judging by the novel’s fictionalizing of the subject: that the Empire man, instead of bringing enlightenment, descends to the barbarians’ primitive state until his personality is disintegrated and his language disarticulated, and secondly, that of failing to see in the natives human beings like himself and of savagely exploiting them. There is, on the one hand, an overbearing attitude among the British speakers on the subject at the time, the savage/ civilized binary being the object not only of eugenics but of one more science, anthropology, as well. On the other hand, there was the … Empire writing back through representative voices of the professionals in the colonies. In the Lecture delivered before the University of Liverpool, on May 14th, 1908 J.G. Frazer defined the new discipline of anthropology as an attempt to study “man as a whole, to enquire not merely into the physical and mental structure of the individual, but to compare the various races of men, to trace their affinities, and by means of a wide collection of facts to follow as far as may be the evolution of human thought and institutions from the earliest times.” (Frazer 1908, p. 3) The beliefs and customs of savages were no longer Herder’s “voices of the peoples in song” reaching us from times immemorial but the “embryology of human thought and institutions.” The customs and beliefs of the savages and their relics surviving among modern nations were not going to be studied together but by two departments, one of social anthropology, and the other o folklore. The profits were several in kind. The savages were to serve as an object lesson, for instance to explain “why it is that superstitions of all sorts, political, moral, and religious, survive among peoples who have the opportunity of knowing better.” (Ibid., p. 14)

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As the primitive superstitions and customs of the natives disappeared shortly after the coming of the British flag, officials, traders, missionaries etc., and before they heard the English tongue, there was no other way for them to know in the future what their past had been like, had not anthropologists collected samples in museums. Warming up to his own ideas and quoting Horace’s Exegi monumentum, Frazer concludes that the monument of prehistoric cultures was to be a monument of the British Empire: The voice of England speaks to her subject peoples in other accents than in the thunder of her guns. Peace has its triumphs as well as war: there are nobler trophies than captured flags and cannons. There are monuments, airy monuments, monuments of words, which seem so fleeting and evanescent, that will yet last when your cannons have crumbled and your flags have mouldered into dust. (Ibid., p. 22)

The voices from the colonies have at least one common trait, that of showing an in-depth knowledge of British culture, especially of the socially-oriented Victorian literature, often quoted to illustrate their ideas. They show otherwise different degrees of awareness of their identitarian status in relation to the metropolitan state. The way English authors were quoted in public discourse across the Empire, most often without having their names mentioned, proves the existence of a deeply rooted order of values shared in common by colonies and the metropolitan state, which, no doubt, acted as a powerful bond within the intellectual collectivity. Self-critical accents, an awareness of the wrongs done are not missing from Marlow’s report on the Thames (Heart of Darkness), London’s real and symbolical connection with the world, yet Conrad’s allusion to Rome seems to imply that civilization is not born out of the void, a foundation ought to have existed or a mould to be filled in. Such had been England’s progress from Rome’s colony to the colonizing “errant knights” whose descendants, the “Under-Secretaries of State,” were compared by J.H. Shaw (University of Melbourne) in a speech delivered in April 1906 to “Zeus of old” on account of their good governance. Mentioned was also the Roman Senate, and it was clearly

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stated that “In whatever change may be made or whatever new organ of State may be created the Colonies must be represented.”27 The future was not seen as fitting into the picture imagined by Lucretius in De rerum natura: “Inque brevi spatio mutantur secla animantum,/ Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt.” (And in a short time the living ages are changed, / And, like runners, they hand over the torches of life.) No bitterness spoiled the Empire-as-Family narrative, in which colonies appeared as children brought up and finally left to their own devices.28 A public lecture on “Ideals of Empire”, delivered by Barrister W.C. MacGregor at the Athenæum. Dunedin on 5th May, 190829 is likely to delight a discourse analyst, as much more is implied than what is being said, and sometimes the opposite seems to have been intended. There is no captatio benevolentiae in the opening, the humble positioning of the speaker hiding in the anonymity of an impersonal passive construction contrasting with the heroic and magisterial end. It is a typical example of dissemination, the discourse of modesty taking an unexpected upsurge at the end: We have recently been, told on very high authority that it is our duty, as subjects of the British Empire, to “think imperially.” (MacGregor 1908: web)

How could a subject think as if he were the master? The following explains why Lord Chamberlain’s injunction to the subjects in the colonies to think imperially could not possibly be obeyed: it is by the mode of living that someone’s identity is constituted. What agency was there to

27

John Henry Shaw, “A Council of State for the Empire”, The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 80. https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout80.html 28 See Ansgar Nünning and Jan Rupp, “The Dissemination of Imperialist Values in Late Victorian Literature and Other Media,” in Ethics in Culture, edited by Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes and Ansgar Nünning, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2008, pp. 255-278. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110206555.2.255 29 W.C. MacGregor, ”Ideals of Empire”, DUNEDIN: Otago Daily Times and Witness Newspapers Company, Limited, 1908. https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout80-t6.html

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perform this imperial thinking? There was only something they were just “pleased to call [their] minds.” The colonial’s subjectivity is the correlative of his environment: his vision is unaccustomed with the ironically called “dazzling glimpses of Imperialism.” MacGregor is quoting from several authors showing himself familiar with English literature. He is at home when it comes to the subtle use of language or quoting from relevant authors, and it is obvious that his personality has been shaped by the best education available in England, yet he sides with the colonials’ protest against the “most stringent laws for excluding the black and yellow races from our shores” – an act which he condemns for the “selfish and unjust spirit towards some hundreds of millions of our coloured fellowsubjects in India (not to speak of our Japanese allies!” (Ibid.) MacGregor was born in Scotland, studied in England and settled in New Zeeland. We may say, quoting Robert Frost, that the land was his before he was the land’s. To him, identity is not sharing in the same culture but a form of embodiment. He has become the land’s though, adopting the colonial point of view and responding to the notification that he must think imperially with a pragmatist project of everybody in the Empire feeling like a working partner and a citizen with equal rights.

CHAPTER V THE OTHERNESS OF THE SEXED, RACED, AND CLASSED BODY IN MIRCEA ELIADE For a long time modernists were blamed for their aloofness from the world of common people and from lived history, willingly shutting themselves up in ‘Axel’s Castle’ - the title of Edmund Wilson’s negative assessment of high modernism at the end of the decade which had seen its bloom (1931). Recent revaluations, however, such as Christopher Butler’s Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916 (1994), have focused on an underlying ideological agenda which shows modernist artists’ involvement in current issues, such as Empire politics, gender conflicts, race prejudices, apprehensions about revolutionary threats to the existing class hierarchy and property ownership or the consequences of the Great War. Revisionary readings of Mircea Eliade’s works have reclassified his work as that of a cultural anthropologist rather than a dogmatic historian of religion.30 Even his inroads into the fantastic are accompanied by echoes of the tensions working up people in an age of tremendous changes in politics and social relationships. Probing into the ideological unconscious of three of his fantasy writings: Mademoiselle Christina (the classed body), “The Gypsies’ Way” (raced bodies), and “Les trois grâces” (the textual body), we come upon a polar representation of woman’s body cast in flesh or in word. The encounter of characters belonging to different categories of social class and status plunges into trauma and spectrality. The gypsy skin carries signs of witchcraft, irrationality, libidinal energy, and the intersection with civilization causes exit from history. The eternal femininity is associated with sin, seduction, 30 See John A Saliba, Homo religiosus in Mircea Eliade: an anthropological evaluation, Leiden: Brill, 1976; David Carrasco and Jean Marie Swanberg (Eds.) Waiting for the Dawn: Mircea Eliade in Perspective. Boulder: Westview Press, 1985; Q. Elmi., “Mircea Eliade and Anthropology”, Religious Anthroplogy, 13(36), 2017, pp. 5-29. doi: 10.22034/ra.2017.24401.

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doom, and a male’s need of escape from its calling is the otherness of signs, of meaning and semiotic ubiquitousness, which ranks the same and follows the same logic as the Biblical trinity. No wonder if the complexity of works thematising this semantic field invites a discussion in terms of what Jonathan Hart calls “poetics of otherness” (Hart 2015: web). Its definition is etymologically derived from the Sanskrit – tara, an Indo-European suffix expressing the differences between two things in terms of location. The author will study the making of words, language, in light of a poetics of space (of here and now) and a poetics of time, of now and then, otherness referring to the “hiddenness” of place and the unknowingness of the future. The conclusion is that there is a part of language woven into text which lies outside the area perceived as other, that othering, therefore, being a question of deictics. The meaning of otherness adopted here is closer to Lacan’s theory thereof in the Seminar XIV, “The Logic of Fantasy”). In his 16.11.1966 lecture, Lacan considers that the Other […] is eliminated “qua closed and unified field” (Lacan 1966-1967, p. 69): What is this Other, the big one, there, with a capital O? What is its substance? Huh? I allowed myself to say - for in truth, even though in truth, you must believe that I allow myself to say it less and less, because one no longer hears, anyway, I no longer hear: it no longer comes to my ears - I allowed myself to say, for a time, that I camouflaged under this locus of the Other, what is called agreeably and, after all, why not, the spirit. The trouble is that it is false. The Other, when all is said and done, and if you have not already guessed it, the Other here, as it is written, is the body! (Lacan 1966-1967, Ibid., p. 129)

The other is not the spirit reified in language, but the body inscripted by the intersubjective order of discourse, the Law of the Father, a normative language whose letter is written in the unconscious. It is only the pre-

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linguistic human beings that cherish illusions of autonomy while contemplating their body in the mirror. After joining the discourse community, one’s own body and any other body is written over by anthropological narratives, ideological stereotypes, cultural constructs, etc. This seems to have been the philosophy behind Mircea Eliade’s representations of the body in three of his stories written according to generic scripts of fantasy or even science-fiction. Unlike the romantics’ utopia of a Universal Spirit informing individual souls like an all-inclusive monad, although with them the prioritization of the subject over the other was rather the case, modernists exchange, under the influence of physiological psychology, Hegelian universality with Jamesian multiplied versions of the self as perceived by social others with whom they interact. Or, as Nicolas Bourriaud comments on Gombrowitz’s Ferdydurke, “This form comes about in the borderline area where the individual struggles with the Other, so as to subject him to what he deems to be his ’being’. So, for Gombrowicz, our ’form’ is merely a relational property, linking us with those who reify us by the way they see us, to borrow a Sartrean terminology. When the individual thinks he is casting an objective eye upon himself, he is, in the final analysis, contemplating nothing other than the result of perpetual transactions with the subjectivity of others.” For Machado, for instance, the Narcissus figure of the self contemplating itself is replaced with a reified version of the self as a site of the encounter of the self and the other, of the one objectified in a body which is to be read, and the other reading that body and being read in its turn: Dedicated to Jose Ortega y Gasset I The eye you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you. II To talk with someone, ask a question first, then — listen. III

The Otherness of the Sexed, Raced, and Classed Body in Mircea Eliade 107 Narcissism is an ugly fault, and now it’s a boring fault too. V Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it. VI This Narcissus of ours can’t see his face in the mirror because he has become the mirror. Antonio Machado (“Proverbs and Songs,” from Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, translated by Robert Bly, 1983)

The third one who walks by your side is also mentioned in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, identified with Jesus on the way to Emmaus. Christ’s body in this passage is post-apocalyptic, purified, but semiotic: the signs of crucifixion on his body are the only hints he offers to his disciples’ recognition. Between the ideal realm of dream, and the factual reality, there is this third ontological level: the symbolical. The body displayed for reading may thus be removed from actuality, its existence being relegated to a realm of fantasy as the trysting place of life and death, of sanity and madness, of myth and reality. In the Machado poem, the repellent Narcissistic body, delighting in its own image, is displaced by the locus of inscription whose meaning is shared by the self objectified in it and the other contemplating it. This troping coincides with the birth of Bloom as narrator in Joyce’s Ulysses (the Ithaca episode). Narcissus is no longer his own image in the mirror, but an artefact, a statue in his room. This semiotic third, a Hermeneutic mediator, may have had several epistemological roots: Peirce’s Interpretant, William James’s social self and symbolic interactionism, or the Vienna Circle of annalytical philosophy – Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, a. o.

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As well as functionalism, the language philosophy of pragmatism and semiotics differed from the specifically modernist, structuralist, binaries and cult of the autonomous, self-sufficient spatious form. By contrast, the fantastic is based upon conventions of openness, vagueness, metamorphoses, split personalities, unbounded bodies that transgress not only their limits but the frontier between life and death, races, ontological levels, etc. A typology of otherness similar to that identified by John Jervis in the western tradition (Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness, 1999) can also be used as interpretive frame of Mircea Eliade’s inroads into the world of fantasy, gothic and the supernatural. John Jervis equates otherness first of all with carnival pleasure and the spectre of misrule threatening social order. Next in line come modernity’s others –uncivilized nations, women, nature - in the name of the European civilization, patriarchic values and cult of technological progress (conquest of the physical world). Thirdly, the othering experience is triggered by non-European races, blacks and hybrids. Eliade’s exercise in fantasy entitled “Les trois grâces” (1976) is an ingenious intertext whose allusions are not random but generative of a semantic field centred on an incremental motif: the unity and diversity of being, the vacillation between monad and sprawl, coherence and chaotic proliferation. The unity vector is confined to the realm of culture. Bookish allusions are replications of an original, core meaning. Uncontrolled proliferation emerges in the realm of nature. The conflict between the two is never resolved. The natural body will always resist rationalization, patterning. Eliade’s title, “Les trois grâces,” aplies both to myths and to women in the world. The former are stable in their meaning and representation: the Three Graces (Euphrosyne, Aglaea and Thalia ) the Fatal Sisters (Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos) sending further reverberations into the resonance chamber of Paul Valery’s La Jeune Parque. The cultural object will always carry with it some justification, it will not yield to randomness, and the attempt to extrapolate this etiology to the realm of nature is absurd.

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The four male protagonists – scientists who had once yielded to the lure of writing poetry – are trying without success to remember an event of their student years in Switzerland: their encounter with three young women whom they had baptised the three graces. Their falty memory causes contradictions, among which a remark about the story not being possibly real before the publication of Two or Three Graces by Aldous Huxley. Their reconstruction of those scenes is unconsciously driven by the desire to make it fit into the Huxley precedent. In Huxley’s story, the four male characters enter upon various relationships with a woman, Grace, who does not seem to have a stable character of her own. She changes radically as she passes from one lover to another, and, as in the absence of a male’s influence she lacks any distinctive features, it is impossible for her companions to say whether there is a third Grace after all. Eliade uses the Huxley plot as an allegory of life’s uncertainties and lack of substance. His male chracters, Professor Filip Zalomit, a specialist in plant physiology, engineer Hagi Pavel and two doctors, Aurelian Tătaru and Nicoleanu, are the erudite members of a circle of narrators, the narrative scene being often dramatized in modernist novels (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Joyce’s Ulysses, Edith Wharton’s The Eyes) as a display of male love of the intellect in counterdistinction to women’s domestic or sexual concerns. Tătaru is a Faustian figure, a doctor doubled by a researcher obsessing with the possibility of healing cancer. He believes that the chaotic proliferation of tumours is due to a loss of the cells’ teleological drives. The opposite case is the replication of an archetype, such as Goethe’s Urpflanze. His experiments in forcing cells back into their teleological evolution are analogous to the alchemist’s search for the elixir of life. He manages, not only to heal tumours, but even to reverse the process of aging. It happens, however, that the dogmatic and atheistic political regime in Romania at that time, acting through the secret police, is alarmed at the Professor’s mythological talk about the eternal youth of Adam and Eve before the fall. The experiments come to an end, and Tataru’s patients’ condition is arrested middle way between youth and old age. For half a year they look old, whereas the other half restores them to their youthful look and desires. The three patients are nature which is but an imperfect copy of the prototype. Their

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names sound similar to those of the mythological Graces, but with a difference: Aglae, Frusinel, and Italia instead of Aglae, Euphrosyne, and Thalia. In this way they too may be said to be “two or three Graces...” Euphrosyne is modelled on Huxley’s heroine: “Frusinel, that is, Euphorsyne, used two or even three names. She had been married twice, divorced the first time, but the second man hads kept her, and Comrade Euphrosyne31 changed her ID as she saw fit.” (our emphasis) One more triad paralleling the Three Graces is what Shakespeare calls “Hecate’s triple team”: Cynthia (the moon), Diana (on earth) and Hecate (in the underworld). They are believed to enter the world of mortals as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that is, at the summer solstice. One of the three patients, Euphosyne, imagines herself as one of the Whitsun Rain Makers. As she feels the vigour of youth breathing life into her aged body at Pentecost, she advances “naked, like a mad dandelion, with dishevelled hair, with her dress clutched in her hand” scaring Dr Tataru who takes a step back falling to his death down a sloping path. As well as Frankenstein, he is killed by his own unwise creation. Stuck at the chalet by the ensuing inquiry, Zalomit takes a walk nearby coming upon a copper tablet which reads: Les trois grâces. He feels relieved: “Obviously, I understand now!’ he whispered happily. ’They are three and yet one; same body, although they are separate. A perfect, serene beauty; no other name would have suited them ...” Eliade introduces his character into a semantic field serving as hermeneutic key: as botanist and poet, Zalomit is open both to life and art. His favourite poet is Valéry, and reality is allowed to exist only as shadow of an eidos: if Huxley’s book, Two of Three Graces, had not been translated into French at the time that male company had met the three women in Switzerland, then Dr. Tataru could not have called their three female acquantances by that name... The three words - les trois grâces- are also only reported, not heard, to have been Tataru’s last ones.

31

“Comrade”: the appellative for men and women in the communist regimes.

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The “one and the same body,” though, is not of flesh and blood but a semiotic body, an inscription. It is the phrase designating them - Les trois grâces – that resolves multiplicity of meaning into unity of the signifier. The second text we are having in view is his 1936 short novel, DomniЮoara Cristina (Mademoiselle Christina). The plot is based upon a historical event, the peasants’ uprising of 1907, when the landlady going by this name is killed, apparently not by the rebellious mob, but by a steward jealous of her lecherous ways. Mademoiselle Christina has been haunting her family for some time when a painter and an archeologist are invited to visit their house. Possessed by the sexually aroused ghost, Simina, a nymphet, is herself playing a game of seduction on the painter. Eliade is once more faithful to the ambiguity of the natural/ supernatural superposition in a fantastic plot. Haunting, is suggested, may vey well be a local superstition, lying in the abyss of the human psyche in the same way in which archeological findings of prehistory had been collected by Romanian historian Vasile Pârvan – the archeologist’s mentor. The whirlpool of embeddings (the decay of a family, symptomatic of its vanishing social class, against the background of the entombed life searched by the archaeologist) follows an archetypal plot, of rise and fall, growth and decay, Eros and Thanatos, lurking in the collective unconscious. The ordering power of myth, identified by T.S. Eliot in Joyce’s Ulysses, was a common feature of modernist art influenced by Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. Mircea Eliade inclined to apply the structure of myth (present rite as repetition of the illo tempore miracle) to profane life as well. The plot of Mademoiselle Christina is cast on a scale similar to a story in the author’s Memoirs (1980); as a teenager he had competed for a literary award writing a piece of fantasy whose holistic ambitions set our minds thinking about Borges’ Aleph: [...] începusem un roman fantastic, planuit pe dimemsiuni ciclopice: Memoriile unui soldat de plumb. [...] Era un roman de nesabuite proportii, înglobînd, nu numai Istoria Universala, ci întreaga Istorie a Cosmosului, de la începuturile Galaxiei noastre, la alcatuirea Pamîntului, de la originea vietii pîna la aparitia omului. [...] Fragmente din plumbul din care fusese alcatuit soldatul fusesera martore la cele mai importante evenimente din istoria omenirii: cucerirea Indiei de catre

112

Chapter V arieni, distrugerea Ninivei moartea Cleopatrei, rastignirea lui Iisus, devastarea Romei de catre Alaric, Mahomed, cruciadele si asa mai departe, pîna în zilele noastre [...]. Dar, înainte de Istorie, plumbul se aflase - sub formă de gaz - în feluritele conflagratii ca acelea care au dus la alcatuirea sistemului solar si a Pamîntului ‫܈‬i îsi amintea de milioanele de ani fara viata, îsi amintea de aparitia primelor vie‫܊‬uitoare, de luptele între mon‫܈‬tri preistorici, si asa până la aparitia omului si zămislirea primelor civilizatii.32 (Eliade 2003: web)

It is not the painter’s fear of Christina that prevails as the worst of all in his unusual experience of the supernatural. He feels he is being looked at by an absolute other, “unseen and unknown.” As he recovers the strength of his will, the terror of the other subsides, which means that the other is buried in his unconscious. The novel ends with a repeat situation – a threat of the peasants’ rebellion as in times of old – and an apocalyptic fire. The painter feels he is being carried on some strangers’s arms through the rooms of that boyar’s mansion and his visions are scenes of the life that had been lived there a long time before the Parliamentary reform had dispossessed the big

32

“Soon after that I started a fantastic novel, planned on cyclopean dimensions: Memoirs of a lead soldier.[...] It was a novel of reckless proportions, encompassing not only universal history, but the whole history of the cosmos, from the beginnings of our galaxy to the present. The earth, the origin of life and the appearance of man. [...] For fragments of the lead of which it was made had witnessed the most important events in human history: the conquest of India by the Aryans, the destruction of Nineveh, the death of Cleopatra, the crucifixion of Jesus, the devastation of Rome by Alaric, the flight of Muhammad to Medina, the first two crusades and so on, to this day,when I also introduced recent events; for example, the battle of Marasesti. But before history, lead had existed - in the form of gas - in various cosmic conflagrations that led to the composition of the solar system and of the Earth. He remembered the millions of years without life, he remembered the appearance of the first living things, the battles between the monsters of the Tertiary era and so on, until the appearance of man and the birth of the first civilizations ...” (Mircea Eliade, Memorii 1907-1960, Bucharest, Editura Humanitas,1991-1997. https://www.scritub.com/literatura-romana/carti/Memorii-de-MirceaEliade1312292213.php)

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landowners of their lands and before they themselves had decayed in dignity and morality: Îl duceau pe braĠe. În jurul lui, odăile se schimbau vrăjite. Trecu la început printr-o mare sală de bal, cu policandre aurite, de care atârnau vârfurile săgeĠilor de cristal, întâlni perechi elegante — oprite parcă în acea clipă din dans — care îl priveau nelămurit, mirate. Domni cu haine negre, femei cu evantaiuri de mătase... Apoi, o sală ciudată, cu multe mese verzi, úi oameni necunoscuĠi jucând cărĠi, fără să-úi vorbească. ToĠi îl priveau miraĠi, aúa cum era purtat pe braĠe de niúte bărbaĠi nevăzuĠi. Iată, acum urcă treptele către o sufragerie cu veche mobilă de lemn.[…]— A luat acum foc úi casa ailaltă! auzi el un glas. […] Închise ochii. — Cum s-a prăpădit neamul boieresc!...33 (Eliade 1980: web)

A whole social class had departed to another world: the painter and the boyars were strangers to one another. The apocalyptic fire reveals to the protagonist the reality that had vanished into empty images with a legend sounding like an epitaph. Christina’s body has become spectral like the collective body of the social class she represents. The third text under consideration is the story La аigănci (“The Gypsies’ Way”) which was written in Paris in 1959. The nature/ culture conflict is still in place. The script of the protagonist exiting the historical world and turning back much later to an unfamiliar environment where nobody recognizes him is known from works as different as Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, by William Austin, Rip Van Winkle, by Washington Irving, A Pebble in the Sky, by Isaac Asimov, or

33

Around him, enchanted rooms kept changing. He passed through a large ballroom with gilded polycandres and crystal arrows, [...] he met elegant couples loooking as if they had just stopped dancing, who looked at him confused, surprised. Gentlemen in black clothes, women with silk fans ... Then a strange room with lots of green tables and strangers playing cards without talking. Everyone looked at him in amazement, watching how he was being carried in the arms of some unseen men. Now they were going up the stairs to a living room with old wooden furniture. [...] "The other house has caught fire now!" he heard a voice saying.[...] He closed his eyes. “Consider the boyars, how they have all perished! ..”

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La planète des singes (1963) by Pierre Boulle. All of them are allegories of some wrong political choice: they remain royalists in a country which had become a republic, free from the king’s rule, they expose humanity to extinction through dangerous technological experiments, or allow themselves to sink to a subhuman condition. Borrowing the main narrative thread, Eliade plays on the wrong choice as well, which this time is of an ethical nature. A young piano teacher, Gavrilescu, leaves his sheet music behind at his pupil’s home. The incident already suggests departure from art, from harmony and creation. He gets off the tram planning to return and recover his scores. On his way, he stumbles into a place he had already heard about as being some brothel run by gypsies. He goes inside thinking he might escape the hot air outside. He is invited to stay and choose a mistress. He chooses three women who ask him to guess their ethnicity. Gavrilescu applies his list of stereotypes, and is surprised to be told that he had guessed wrong. Nature is unpredictable: Caci, fireste, le ghicise de cum daduse cu ochii de ele. Cea care facuse un pas spre el, pe de-a întregul goala, foarte neagra, cu parul si ochii negri, era fara îndoiala tiganca. A doua, si ea goala, dar acoperita cu un voal verde-pal, avea un trup nefiresc de alb si stralucitor ca sideful, iar în picioare purta papuci aurii. Asta nu putea fi decât grecoaica. A treia, fara îndoiala, era evreica: avea o fusta lunga de catifea visinie, care-i strângea trupul pâna la mijloc, lasându-i pieptul si umerii goi, iar parul bogat, rosu aprins, era adunat si împletit savant în crestetul capului.34 (Eliade 1981, p. 23)

Of course he guessed them the moment he saw them. The one that stepped towards him, completely naked and very dark, with dark hair and dark eyes, was undoubtedly the gypsy. The second, also naked, except for a pale green voile, had an unnaturally white body, shining like ivory and was wearing golden shoes. This could only have been the Greek woman. The third was the Jewish woman. She had a long skirt of dark red taffeta which squeezed her body in the middle, leaving her chest and her shoulders naked. And the thick hair, bright red, was bound and luxuriously braided at the top of her head. 34

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If the natural body is permanently breaking loose from patterns and attempted order and signification, a dead body in a grave will be marked by a sign, sema, as in ancient Greece. Gavrilescu’s death is an allegory of his meaningless life since the moment he had drifted away from the righteous course. For the third time otherness takes the form of a negatively assessed body, whether gendered, classed or raced. Radical othering in Mircea Eliade involves not only the antagonism of nature but of the self as well, divided as it is between a matrix of conflicting tendencies and the emergent one, aware of its being an elective mask rather than an authentic, unitary self. In Isabel si apele diavolului (Isabel and the Devil’s Water), his 1930 novel, Eliade works with preexisting schemas, such as Kierkagaard’s existentially anxious self in search of an identity, or his own concepts as historian of relgions, such as the dialectic of the sacred and the profane, the superposition of the thisworldly and the otherworldly, the violent intrusion of timelessness into historical time (time kairos), a.o. The book was written after his return from India, but nothing of its reality has gone into the novel, although the author learned Sanskrit, lived among European and Indian celebrities, or solitary among hermets, reading old manuscripts and practising Yoga and and Tantra, delivering lectures and even going on a diplomatic mission to Nepal. Eliade did nevertheless write correspondence and travel literature with remarkably vivid descriptions of landscape, people and manners, which were collected in a book published in 193435. The real thing, however, was no longer considered fit for a novel. The similarity between Eliade’s ekphrasis and other exercises in verbal paintings to be found in the India novels of the time is striking. Louis Bromfield’s novel, The Rains Came (1937), is breathing out the vitality mixed up with rottenness of the Indian landscape, stretching between the built area, including the relics of colonial domination, such as the fake gothic architecture in honour of Prince Albert, who had revived the style, and the jungle, half tamed in the Maharajah’s zoo garden or in the mythology of beasts (monkeys assured of protection for having joined

35

India, Bucuresti: Editura Cugetarea, 1934.

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God Rama in battle...) which impacts social life (assassinations of Europeans for having killed monkeys). Eliade is striking the same key: Urci crestele unde vegetatia seamana mai mult cu un cimitir decât o grădină – pentru că copacii se ridică deasupra tufi‫܈‬urilor zdrobi‫܊‬i, târâtoarele înăbu‫܈‬ă florile, iarba cre‫܈‬te la fel de înaltă ca spicul de porumb ‫܈‬i oriunde via‫܊‬a moare ‫܈‬i reînvie, putrefac‫܊‬ia se transformă în humus, pastă vie pentru încălzirea altor semin‫܊‬e ‫܈‬i lupta continuă cu spasme ‫܈‬i extaze în acel ocean de seva. Plantele devin mon‫܈‬tri aici, florile sunt otrăvite de cadavre peste care au trecut ‫܈‬i din care s-au născut, rodnicia te întăre‫܈‬te, căci ghici‫܊‬i în spatele milioanelor de organisme care au supravie‫܊‬uit, alte miliarde care mor în fiecare oră, ‫܈‬i acest gest al naturii care aruncă constant via‫܊‬a, fără sens, acest gest al crea‫܊‬iei pentru bucuria de a crea, pentru bucurie.să sorbi soarele ‫܈‬i să-i sărbătore‫܈‬ti victoria – te ame‫܊‬e‫܈‬te, te copleseste.36

Bromfield’s eye is attracted by the same essentialised picture of India as an oriental mother-goddess, as an excessive, ungoverned and endless process of creation and destruction, Forster’s “passage to India” never takes him completely to his destination. He remains in between, looking both ways, permanently pitting the East versus the West, the Indian mud, hierarchical arrangement of landscape, with the British institutions at the top, the deficient symbolical codes with wrong spelling, the juxtaposition of contrary belief systems, the closed in, incomprehensive, maybe pathological, core of social relationships, of human contact.

36 You climb the ridges where the vegetation is more like a cemetery than a garden - because the trees rise above the crushed bushes, the creepers smother the flowers, the grass grows as tall as the ear of corn and everywhere life dies and is born again, putrefaction turns into humus, living lime for the heating of other seeds, and the struggle continues with spasms and ecstasies in that ocean of sap. Plants turn into monsters, flowers are poisoned by corpses of creatures which once had walked over them and from which they were born, all this sprouting hardens you, because you guess behind the millions of organisms that have survived, other billions which die every hour, and this act of nature which constantly and meaninglessly wastes life, this act of creation as its own end, for the joy of sipping the sun and celebrating its victory, makes one dizzy, overwhelmed. (Mircea Eliade, India, Bucuresti: Editura pentru Turism, 1991, p. 31).

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Bromfield’s Indian novel is not free from ideological design, but there is in the story the impartiality of an outside observer who sums up his version of India as an undecisive moment, when, quoting Arnold, a world is dead and another unable to be born. There is death, though, of what was stagnant, old, exhausted in the metropole and there is rebirth through the encounter of two apathetic and amoral English aristocrats with the pure and energetic American missionary and a humanitarian and dedicated Indian doctor. Mircea Eliade had the same feeling that only a revolutionary insurrection could end the critical state of things in India, and it was not an outsider’s refusal to commit himself to the cause which he defended on so many other occasions that precluded references to the Indian background of his fictional plot in Isabel. The explanation is the kind of novel he set out to write, a modernist one, whose poetics was the “ghostly paradigm of things,” haunted by Søren Kierkegaard and entering the canon as one of the earliest examples of existentialist fiction. The metaphor in the title, “the devil’s waters”, bespeaks the essence of the plot which stages a young man’s war with the lust of his flesh and a declarative rather than convincing final conversion. Eliade probably shared Bromfield’s impression that, in comparison to the Christian world, Indian rituals, especially the cremation of the dead, showed complete indifference to the body and contempt for libidinal instincts: In their detachment there was a kind of reality never attained by any Christian. Here they believed that the body was nothing and refused to honor it. In the West they only pretended to believe that the body was dust. In the West the clodlike body held people forever in subjection. (Bromfield 1937, pp. 10-11)

Eliade’s story is a process of individuation, the deliberate shaping of the protagonist’s self which is modelled on Kierkegaard’s aesthetic/ religious polarity. The opening of the novel was going to become common rhetorical strategy of the existentialist novel in its canonical form (Albert Camus, The Stranger).

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A split in his life (the departure for India) throws him into an existential void which severs him from the one who had grown spontaneously and forces him into reinventing himself: “I don't know how old I am. I don't remember my childhood. I forgot the language of my people" (Eliade). Included among Eliade’s works of Indian inspiration, the novel however remains in the European frame of reference. He lives in the homes of clergymen and attends university and artistic circles whose members are Europeans. He writes his life into existence, feeling as if he had just been born, carrying no memories or identification marks. Although cut off from his past – the word tinerete (youth) has been emptied out of meaning, turned into an empty signifier, a string of pohonemes, ti-ne-re-te (y-u-th) – the narrator still possesses in his unconscious, like Henry James’s Strether (The Ambassadors), interpretive schemes from his original space. Here they are, the topoi of European modernism: o being is redefined as being in language. The narrator feels newly born. He is addressed in the language of the land he had left behind, but does not understand what is being said. Like Alfred Jarry’s Dr. Faustroll or Flann O’Brien’s John Furriskey, Eliade’s narrator is born at the same age as his paper self: “In braĠele cuvântului nou, creúte o făptură nouă.” 37 o nature’s inferiority in relation to artefacts. Walking about a city or watching living people can be profitably replaced with reading and visiting museums. At this stage the narrator rejects the aesthetics of the objective correlative opting for Dessoir’s praise of forms: “Cine a citit pe Roland Dorgeles nu trebuie să se mai oprească în Port-Said”38 or: E penibil să descoperi în afară proporĠiile intime, spasmul vegetal, goana animală în afară de mine, în obiecte — iubesc proporĠiile juste, casele, úoselele sau echilibrele rupte, groteúti, sau stampele. A‫܈‬tept “In the arms of the new word, a new self is growing.” (Eliade 2014: web) “Who has read Roland Dorgelơs does not need to make a stop in Port-Said.” (Ibid.)

37 38

The Otherness of the Sexed, Raced, and Classed Body in Mircea Eliade 119 nerăbdător Indian Museum. Atâtea dibueli ale gustului meu de artist incorect îúi vor găsi calea în bronzurile cu pântec obscur úi cu zeci de braĠe împietrite spre nori.39

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are the shadows behind the narrator’s selfconstruction rather than self-discovery. The unitary self, firmly fixed within the perimeter of its properties, disintegrates. The will to power manifests itself through the desire to project oneself into the consciousness of those around him and shape their identity. At the same time he himself feels destabilized by the relationship with Isabel, the hosts' daughter, which is mutually invasive, the young man coming to feel inhabited by the one he had tried to mold to his taste like Pygmalion. The narrator will experience a Kierkegaardian progress from an aesthetic self (the given one, doing as it well pleased, pursuing only the realization of its ambitions), to the ethical self, the one emerging in relation to an other. Isabel is raised from the mass of anonymous, common individuals (the title of the second chapter is "One Among Ten Thousands") and rendered unique (the title of the third chapter is "Isabel"). Insufficiently imagined at the beginning, a common girl whose inexpressive language he cannot remember, Isabel is constituted by his writing about her in a new diary, the worded Isabel partaking now of what phenomenologists call "transcendent intersubjectivity.” At the same time, he himself, in order to break through to the others, has to ape their image of him, again intersubjectively formed: ”the pattern grown from their dreams, films, novels.” Convinced that “light does not come from light but out of darkness”, the protagonist decides to take the way of sinful flesh in order to free himself from stupid orthodoxy, from demons. His sinning is deliberate, working like an ambiguous pharmacon. In this way he becomes a Don Juan figure in Kierkegaard’s version of the famous womanizer: he does not find 39

It's embarrassing to discover outside of me, in objects, the intimate proportions, the vegetal spasm, the animal rush—I love the right proportions, houses, roads or broken equilibriums, grotesqueries, or stamps. I’m looking forward to the Indian Museum. So much fumbling of my incorrect artistic taste will find its way out into bronzes with obscure bellies and dozens of stiff arms reaching to the clouds. (Ibid.).

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pleasure in his vices, he sees in sexuality a path to love: ”Don Juan may be seen as a representative of a spiritual sensuousness or desire for communion with others in love.” (Utterback 1979, p. 627) The narrator afirms his unsensuous sexuality repeatedly: ”the whole range and the pomp and the picture of sensuality are indifferent to me.” He feels no pleasure in his debauchery which is an exercise in exorcism. It is in this way he creates the possibility of opting for good or bad discussed by Kierkegaard in Either/Or: In another sense, however, the absolute either/or first appears with the choice, for it is now that the options of good and evil appear. But this choice posited by and in the first choice need not detain me here, I would merely press you to the point where the choice proves necessary and after that consider life under ethical categories.[…] The aesthetic factor in a person is that by which he is immediately what he is; the ethical factor is that by which he becomes what he becomes. (Kierkegaard 2004, p. 428)

The narrator’s aesthetic self allows himself to become that which he feels to be his desire at the moment. Like any existentialist character, he is freely spinning versions of himself: desiring first to live through his books, then to become immortal by shaping people’s characters, and finally pleased to find regeneration in his son. His free choice also multiplies the end of the plot. In one of the variants, the hero marries Isabel and lives a simple life on a farm, forgetting about books, museums, concerts - the whole order of culture. The episode is entitled “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. It is this living in the embrace of nature that generates a desire similar to that of man in his natural state, of a fusion between his mind and the world. In other words, the objective correlative as a mode of existence, not just of perception: Trăiam atunci în nespusă intimitate cu miturile. Nu mă înălĠăm deasupra lumii, ci lumea primea oaspeĠi pe împăraĠii úi săracii visului. Vedeam în lucruri sensurile lor; firesc, continuu, fără efort. Nu exista, pentru mine, hiatus între lume úi mit, nu există dialectica. Obiectele erau obiecte úi, în acelaúi timp, simboluri, semnificaĠii, îndemnuri, probe,

The Otherness of the Sexed, Raced, and Classed Body in Mircea Eliade 121 lupte, idei. Cat de mult ar trebui să spun ca să se înĠeleagă “în acelaúi limp!”...40

A narrative artifice, the pretext of having fallen ill with malaria, which had caused his “midsummer dream,” opens him the possibility of entering another reality, in which a religious self is freed from sins, knowing redemption. Coincidences between the supposedly real life and the dream experience maintain an ontological uncertainty to the end, as if to minimalize the importance of the plot in comparison with the drama of the “trembling and fear” in his consciousness. He expiates his sin by marrying Isabel who was pregnant by another man under confusing circumstances. She finds redemption in refusing the consummation of their wedding. Isabel dies in childbirth, the narrator seeing in the child the offspring of an immaculate conception whom he will raise as if he were his son, hailing him as the Redeemer.

40 I lived then in unspeakable intimacy with myths. That did not mean that I exalted myself above the world; instead it was the world that received the visits of the kings and the poor of dreams. I could see in things their meanings; natural, continuous, without effort. To me, there was no hiatus between the world and myth, no dialectic. Usually they were objects and, at the same time, symbols, meanings, exhortations, battles, ideas. How much should I say to make this "at the same time" understood!” (Mircea Eliade, Op. cit., web).

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INDEX

A Abraham, Karl 71 Abrams, M.H. 1 Adler, Alfred 57, 59, 62, 65-69, 74 Allston, Washington 35-38, 87-88, 98 Arens, Katherine 4-5 Armstrong, Isobel 3 Arnold, Matthew 115 Asimov, Isaac 113 Austin, William 112 B Bachelard, Gaston 59, 75-76, 82, 83 Bain, Alexander 28-29 Baudelaire, Charles 25 Baudrillard, Jean 86 Behn, Aphra 97 Bergson, Henri 8, 22, 23, 29, 54 Binet, Alfred 8, 24, 25, 27, 28 Blake, William 1 Blanchot, Maurice 90 Bloomsbury Group 59, 65 Bohr, Niels 75 Boole, George 27 Booth, William 98 Boulle, Pierre 112 Bourriaud, Nicolas 106 Bradley, F.H. 48-53, 92 Bromfield, Louis `114-116 Brontë, Emily 66 Brown, Laura 1 Bugliani, Paolo 62 Butler, Christopher 104 C Cambridge Apostles 59, 65 Cambridge Heretics 14, 54, 57, 58, 59, 65, 69, 81

Cameron, Laura 59, 61 Camus, Albert 79, 116 Carrasco, David 104 Carlyle, Thomas 3 Carnap, Rudolf 107 Cassirer, Ernst 9 Claudel, Paul 54 Coetzee, J.M. 86 Collins, K.K. 6 Conrad, Joseph 100, 101, 109 Comte, Auguste 11 Croce, Benedetto 84 Courbet, Gustave 11 D Deleuze, Gilles 9 Darwin, Charles 13 Derrida, Jacques 9, 85-86, 90 Dessoir, Max 34, 53, 54, 55, 60 Dickens, Charles 3 Dupont, Judith 71 Durrell, Lawrence 43 Dunne, J.W. 75 E Eliade, Mircea 104 Eliot, George 6 Eliot, T.S. 8, 16, 29, 38-41, 54, 55, 56, 89, 107 Emig, Rainer 55-56 ErĘs, Ferenc 69, 70 F Fairbairn, Ronald 69 Fang, N. 69 Faulkner, William 43 Feynman, Richard 77 Fibonacci, Leonardo 87 Fielding, Henry 1

136 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 8283 Forrester, John 59, 61 Forster, E.M. 54, 89 Foucault, Michel 9 Frank, Joseph 87 Franke, Damon 59 Frazer, James George 14, 100, 101 Freud, Sigmund 14, 40, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 71 Friedmann, Alexander 76 Frye, Roger 61, 62, 89 G Galton, Francis 75, 99 Gauguin, Paul 87 Gide, André 44 Gillespie, Alana 80 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 75, 109 Goldwin, William 3 Gombrowitz, Witold 106 Graham, Swift 86 H Haeckel, Ernst 83 Hahn, Hans 107 Hallam, Arthur 59, 81 Hamann, Richard 56 Harrison, Jane Ellen 58, 81-82 Hart, Jonathan 105 Hegel, G.W.F. 106 Heidegger, Martin 74 Heisenberg, Werner 75 Helmholtz, Hermann von 24 Herbart, J.F. 4,7 Higgins, Dick 6 Hobbes, Thomas 97 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 44-48 Horace 101 Hulme, T.E. 25 Hume, David 22 Husserl, Edmund 15, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 74 Huxley, Aldous 109

Index I Irving, Washington 112 J Jakobson, Roman 9 James, William 7, 13, 29, 41 James, Henry 43, 106, 107, 116 Jarry, Alfred 116 Jervis, John 108 Johnson, George M. 58, 69 Johnson, Mark 6 Jones, Ernest 59, 60, 71 Joyce, James 17- 22, 30-34, 43, 90, 93, 107, 109 K Kant, Immanuel 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 22, 23, 58, 81 Keymer, Thomas 1 Kierkegaard, Søren 113, 115, 116, 117, 118 Klein, Melanie 60, 69 Kohon, Gregorio 69 Kyd, Thomas 93 L Lacan, Jacques 105 Lakoff, George 6 Lawrence, D.H. 89, 93 Leibniz, G.W. 8,10 Lemaître, Georges 76 Lessing, Doris 85, 90 Leys, Ruth 70, 71 Liard, Louis 27 Lipps, Theodor 53, 89, 90-91 Locke, John 97, 98 Lodge, Sir Oliver 83-84 Lum, William 72 M MacGregor , W.C. 102-103 Machado, Antonio 106-107 Mallarmé, Stéphane 53 Mandeville, Sir John 97 Mansel, H.L. 34,42-48, 98 McCoy, George 91

Phenomenology and Cultural Difference in High Modernism McHale, Brian 6 McTaggart, J. M. E. 58 Mee, John 1 Melville, Herman 77 Mill, John Stuart 8, 10, 11, 15, ,27 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat 97 Moore, G.E. 60 Morrell, Ottoline 60 Myers, Frederic W.H. 13 Myers, Samuel Charles 69 N Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 99, 117 Nünning, Ansgar 102 Nussbaum, Felicity A. 1,2 O O’Brien, Flann 43, 74-80, 116 Ogden, Charles Kay 58, 81 O’Hara, Frank 32 Oppenheim, Hermann 71 P Parvan, Vasile 110 Pater, Walter Horatio 13, 17, 18, 19, 21 Peirce, Charles Sanders 107 Picasso, Pablo 87 Plato 57-58 Popper, Karl 9 Pound, Ezra 8, 89, 103 Proust, Marcel 16, 43 R Rank, Otto 69 Ribot, Thơodule 27,28, 33 Richards, A.I. 84-85 Richardson, Samuel 1 Rimbaud, Arthur 21 Rivers, W. H. R. 59 Rosebery, Lord 83 Rupp, Jan 102 Ruskin, John 83 Russell, Bertrand 60

137

S Saint-Simon, Henri de 11 John A Saliba, John A. 104 Sartre, Jean Paul 106 Schlick, Moritz 107 Schopenhauer, Arthur 13, 35 Schródinger, Erwin 76 Seillière, Ernest 57, 99 Shakespeare, William 83, 97, 110 Shaw, John Henry 101 Simmel, Ernst 71 Sitter, Willem de 76 Spencer, Herbert 99 Spitzer, Hugo 57 Stanley, Henry M. 98 Stanley Jevons, William 27 Stephen, Adrian 60 Stephen, Karin 60 Sterne Laurence 1, 3 Stoker, Bram 14, 54 Stevens, Wallace 11, 12 Sullivan, Harry Stack 69 Sullivan, J.W.N. 82 Suttie, Ian 69 Jean Marie Swanberg, Jean Marie 104 Swift, Graham 86 Szecsödy, Imre 71 T Tansley, Arthur George 57, 59, 62, 63-65, 74 Tarde, Gabriel de 71 Taylor, J.R. 6 Tennyson, Alfred 59, 81 Tupan, Maria-Ana 76-77 U Utterback, S. W. 118 V Valéry, Paul 54, 108 Verlaine, Paul 99 W Walzel, Oskar 9

138 Washington, Irving 112 Wharton, Edith 109 Wilde, Lady Jane Francesca Agnes Speranza 27 Wilde, Oscar 13, 98 Wilson, Edmund 104 Winnicot, Donald 69 Winterson, Jeanette 86 Wolfe, Thomas 90-96 Woolf, Leonard 61 Woolf, Virginia 16, 26-27, 43, 57-

Index 74, 89, 93, 99 Wordsworth, William 11, 44 Worringer, Wilhelm 14, 53, 60, 87, 89 Wundt, Wilhelm 5, 7, 8, 11-15, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 29, 31, 42, 81 Y Yeats, William Butler 20, 85, 89 Young, Edward 3