Ariane Mildenberg1
(1)
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk
The original version of this chapter was revised. The incorrect text on page 45 has been corrected. A correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-59251-7_6
When Virginia Woolf first laid eyes on one of Paul Cézanne’s still lifes with apples in April 1918 she wrote in her diary: ‘There are 6 apples in the Cézanne picture. What can 6 apples not be? I began to wonder. Theres their relationship to each other, & their colour, & their solidity.’ 1 Cézanne wanted to ‘astonish Paris with an apple.’ 2 Astonishment—‘“wonder” before the world,’ 3 as Eugen Fink called it—is the motive for phenomenology, recalling Aristotle’s claim that ‘wonder is the source origin of philosophy itself, because it represents man’s primary thirst for knowledge.’ 4
Virginia Woolf’s wonder, her astonishment with Cézanne’s apples and their ‘relationship to each other’ recalls another essay on the relations between things, her oft-mentioned 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ previously published under the title ‘Character in Fiction,’ in which Woolf noted that something had happened in the early twentieth century, something that has broken the continuity and framework of tradition. Not only had ‘human character changed,’ but there had been a shift in the relations of things:
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. 5
A shift of relations resulting in a blurring of subject/object dichotomies favouring neither immanence nor transcendence has also been marked by Stephen Kern in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918:
As the public became more intrusive, the individual retreated into a more strongly fortified and isolated private world. That is why we can observe in this period both a greater interpenetration and a greater separation of the two worlds. 6
The art and texts I discuss in this chapter were produced within this time frame: 1880–1918, a period during which the scientific, religious and political beliefs that had previously asserted a free-standing, objective reality were breaking down. Witnessing a loss of old certainties and traditional values; responding to capitalism, industrial acceleration, the destruction of reason and meaninglessness of World War I, and the world changed by Darwin, Marx and Freud, early and high modernist art is engaged with identifying the multiplicity of the world in which we live. Facing the challenge of the crisis of rationality that runs through the twentieth century, and exploring the uncertain as well as the possible, Paul Cézanne’s still lifes with apples and vessels painted between 1890 and 1900, Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book of strange prose poems Tender Buttons, and Franz Kafka’s 1916 novella Metamorphosis are concerned with recovering a primitiveness of experience as untouched by subject/object reasoning.
In her 1938 book entitled Picasso, Gertrude Stein portrayed the ‘twentieth century’ as ‘a time when everything cracks, which is a more splendid thing than a period where everything follows itself.’ 7 Stein’s ‘splendid’ twentieth century evidences a time of radical change, of a ruptured linearity and totality—a ruptured framework—showing forth what lies beneath the cracked surface of habituality. 8 Cézanne, Stein and Kafka evidence Husserl’s ‘crisis’ of modernity and present us with new artistic models embodied in a shift of perspective, uncovering a pre-theoretic foundation for artistic inquiry. Re-evaluating both the traditional mind/world split that informs Cartesian dualism and extant views of modernism as upholding a mind/world opposition, 9 the modernists explored in the following pages present us with a radical shift of attitude—an ‘unfamiliar gaze’ as Merleau-Ponty calls it in his 1948 The World of Perception, which does not reject the real world; rather, it paves the way for restoring what Eugen Fink called an ‘uncaptivation and openness to everything that . . . “is.”’ 10
Breaking the Frame: Cézanne’s Secret Folds and Faithful Apples
When Paul Cézanne in a 1906 letter to his son wrote ‘it is all a question of putting in as much interrelation as possible,’ he spoke of incorporating, in his art, not only the ‘interrelation’ between himself and his object-world, but also the ‘interrelation’ of objects. 11 He explained this to Joachim Gasquet: ‘Those glasses and plates are talking to each other, endlessly exchanging secrets … They do not stop living … They spread imperceptibly around each other, through intimate reflections, as we do through glances and words.’ 12 It is the exchange of secrets I like here, the gentle blessing of the space that Merleau-Ponty terms ‘l’intermonde,’ an ‘intermundane space … where our gazes cross and our perceptions overlap,’ revealing our common world of ‘flesh.’ 13 ‘What, then, is this secret science, which [the painter] has or which he seeks?’ asks Merleau-Ponty more specifically in ‘Eye and Mind.’ 14 It is one that must perform reduction, that ‘must suspend the faith in the world only as to see it, only so as to read in it the route it has followed in becoming a world for us; it must seek in the world itself the secret of our perceptual bond with it.’ After all, ‘the visible things are the secret folds of our flesh’ in that they come into being through our unspoken experience of and contact with them. 15 Performing a transubstantiation of sorts, the painter must, ‘dra[w] from this world’ by ‘lending his body to the world.’ 16 It is exactly this ‘exchange between the world and our embodied existence … that forms the ground of every deliberate Sinngebung,’ that is to say meaning-giving. 17 The ‘secret folds’ of our flesh, the ‘umbilical,’ ‘living’ and ‘pre-logical bond’ of body and world; perceiver and perceived, are usually out of sight, hidden beneath the polished and ironed seal of language and living. 18 It is this ‘invisible’ dimension of experience that the modernist painter exposes through paint:
The preceding lectures have tried to bring the world of perception back to life, this world hidden from use beneath all the sediment of knowledge and social living. In so doing, we have often had recourse to painting because painting thrusts us once again into the present of the world of lived experience. In the work of Cézanne, Juan Gris, Braque and Picasso, in different ways, we encounter objects—lemons, mandolins, bunches of grapes, pouches of tobacco—that do not pass quickly before our eyes in the guise of objects we ‘know well’ but, on the contrary, hold our gaze, ask questions of it, convey to it in a bizarre fashion the very secret of their substance, the very mode of their material existence, so to speak, stand ‘bleeding’ before us. This was how painting led us back to a vision of things themselves. Reciprocally, a philosophy of perception which aspires to learn to see the world once more, as if in an exchange of services rendered, will restore painting and the arts in general in their rightful place, will allow them to recover their dignity and will incline us to accept them in their purity. 19
This is how Cézanne’s art, according to Merleau-Ponty, performs a phenomenological reduction of sorts, bracketing our habitual and geometrically correct ways of seeing. Emphasising experience as praxis, Merleau-Ponty insisted on grounding his philosophy in the lived and therefore open-ended experience of what he termed ‘flesh’ (la chair) 20 —his idea of materiality as the ‘intertwining’ (entrelacs or Verflechtung) of the body and the world—and proposed that Cézanne’s compositions were the embodiment of this phenomenological perspective:
Cézanne’s difficulties are those of the first word. He considered himself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was not God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world, to change it completely into a spectacle, to make visible how the world touches us. 21
But, for the painter, this process was littered with doubt; ‘[w]hat you have is certainty,’ he told Henri Gasquet once, ‘[t]hat’s my great ambition. To be sure! Every time I attack a canvas I feel convinced, I believe that something’s going to come of it … But I immediately remember that I’ve always failed before. Then I taste blood.’ 22 A fundamental doubt about translating pre-reflective experience, ‘the unreflected in myself’ is what Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ stands for. 23 The doubts of the artist’s expression are ‘those of the first word,’ of making the first mark. 24 Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty claims, ‘speaks as the first men spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before.’ 25 As Husserl points out, ‘[t]he attempt to doubt everything,’ which is connected with Cézanne’s own questioning of experience, ‘has its place in the realm of our perfect freedom,’ 26 that is, the attempt to doubt is part of our freedom at all times. 27 Doubt is not a dead end but a sign of openness to the world and can therefore be treated with wonder, the ‘“wonder” before the world’ that ‘Husserl’s assistant Eugen Fink … spoke of,’ which is also ‘the best formulation of the reduction.’ 28 A return to primordial wonder in the face of the world through reduction is a return to pre-reflective, lived intentionality (the ‘thing itself’), to a reciprocity between the individual and the world; to creative freedom, openness and possibility.
The painter was, in his own words, ‘germinating’ with his object-world, tracing the growth of his own creation. 29 Wanting to ‘astonish Paris with an apple,’ Cézanne gave the apple new life and painted it as if it had never been seen before: ‘Fruit are more faithful [than flowers],’ he wrote, ‘[t]hey love having their portraits done. It’s as if they’re asking to be forgiven for fading.’ 30 In Still Life With Apples (1893–1894), he gives form to a slanting table, vessels and fruit that do not seem accurately elliptical. Distorting the surface, the famous apples that ‘en[d] up swelling and bursting free from the confines of well-behaved draughtsmanship,’ 31 seem too solid to balance on the tilting plate and almost roll out of the picture surface itself, beginning to break the boundary between seer and seen.
As Hilton Kramer observes, Cézanne’s ‘late painting … is based, like Turner’s, on the dynamics of the pictorial process. The motif is the painting’s support but no longer its raison d’être.’ 32 According to John Berger, J.M.W. Turner, at once proud and critical of the tradition into which he was born, ‘stopped painting totalities. The Snowstorm is the total of everything which can be seen and grasped by the man tied to the mast of that ship. There is nothing outside it’; in fact, ‘[i]f one really allows one’s eye to be absorbed into the forms and colours on the canvas, one begins to realise that, looking at it, one is in the centre of a maelstrom: there is no longer a near and a far.’ 33 The room of Turner paintings entitled ‘Finished or Unfinished’ at the 2002 exhibition Turner at Tate Britain in London exhibited paintings without frames, echoing the framelessness of Turner’s non-totalising scenes. The removal of the material frame around and glass covering the painting reflected the phenomenological notion of reversibility, that our vision frames and is framed, that the ‘frame’ of the individual perceiver’s views are already an integral part of a world of other visible and seeing subjects, thus revealing a simultaneity and reversibility of seer and world. 34
Thus, Cézanne’s apples begin to fight against their own frame; ‘refus[ing] to be contained any longer,’ 35 their attempt to break out of and move beyond the painting’s frame paved the way for the framelessness of Picasso’s cubism: ‘the framing of life, the need that a picture exists in its frame, remain in its frame was over. A picture remaining in its frame was a thing that always had existed and new pictures commenced to want to leave their frames.’ 36 As the twentieth century was a time where ‘everything crack[ed],’ meaning, Gertrude Stein suggested, no longer framed the work from the outside; rather, meaning was made and re-made from within through the event and movement of reading or viewing. Meaning-giving, then, relied on the participation of the viewer or reader. The breaking of the frame, the Cézannian ‘free[ing] of the line from the imitation function, from the mimetic operation based on the prosaic conception of the line,’ 37 and the distortion of the perfectly balanced ‘objective’ representations of reality known from nineteenth-century realism, marks the beginning of the modernist composition of which Cézanne was the ‘one and only master!,’ according to Picasso: ‘Don’t you think I looked at his pictures? I spent years studying them … Cézanne! … he was like our father. It was he who protected us.’ 38 Stein shared Picasso’s admiration of the characteristically distorted surfaces and tilting objects in Cézanne’s paintings:
Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and that impressed me enormously, and it impressed me so much that I began to write Three Lives under this influence and this idea of composition. 39
If ‘in composition one thing [is] as important as another thing,’ the reader’s or viewer’s response to the composition should be as important as the creator’s process. 40 Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology stresses that perception and creation alike are mobile activities, revealing the living experience of the embodied subject: ‘Philosophy is not the reflection of a prior truth, but rather, like art, the actualization of a truth.’ 41 Hence the meaning of an artwork—visual art or text—is never fixed but perpetually renewed in the space of the perceiver; it ‘undergoes a continual birth’; ‘at each instant it is something new.’ 42
The tilting and almost animated objects in Cézanne’s many still lifes with apples, painted between 1890 and 1900, bring into focus the immediate nature of perceptual experience before our knowledge of gravity and geometry begins to order it: ‘If many painters since Cézanne have refused to follow the law of geometrical perspective, this is because they have sought to recapture and reproduce before our eyes the birth of the landscape.’ 43 Challenging our usual way of looking, the painting enacts the reduction, returning us to the ‘lived perspective’ from which Cézanne painted: ‘I paint as I see as I feel,’ he said. 44
Gertrude Stein, Fringed Experience and an Apple
Much influenced by Cézanne’s famously decentralised paintings that paved the way for what Clement Greenberg has called the ‘“polyphonic” picture that relies on a surface knit together of identical or closely similar elements which repeat themselves without marked variation from one edge of the picture to the other,’ 45 Gertrude Stein’s own de-centralised and un-framed compositions have ‘no beginning or middle or ending,’ 46 for ‘[e]ven the very master-pieces have always been very bothered about beginning and ending because essentially that is what a master-piece is not.’ 47 On the contrary, a ‘master-piece’ according to Stein is a non-hierarchical composition, like Cézanne’s, promoting ‘words of equal value’ in which ‘one thing is as important as another thing.’ 48 Such a composition has a non-totalising function that highlights the lived and therefore de-centred organisation of sense impressions and the gradual emergence of meaning.
Cézanne’s insistent approach to painting—he needed ‘one hundred working sessions for a still life, one hundred and fifty sittings for a portrait’ 49 —evidences that he anchored his work in the perpetual interrogation of what he actually perceived. Since ‘existence simultaneously generalizes and particularizes everything that it intends, and can never be complete,’ 50 he knew that ‘[e]xpressing what exists is an endless task’ and an uncertain one. 51 Phenomenology deals with this non-totalizing existential process of lived experience, which is always grounded in what Husserl called ‘things themselves,’ that is, the ‘emotive coloration or “boundary” character’ of an experience, a pre-reflective ‘“borderline” experience’ 52 laid bare through the method of phenomenological reduction, the abstention from conventional ‘objective’ ways of seeing in order to attend phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness. Through reduction, ‘[t]he phenomenon is seen, but it is seen in the sense that what is seen discloses the very possibility of the phenomenon.’ 53 This process of self-reflection highlights what William James, Stein’s teacher in experimental psychology at Radcliffe College, famously termed the ‘fringe of the object,’ the ‘dimly perceived’ and still ‘unarticulated affinities about [a thing],’ that pre-conceptual dimension of experience that is peripheral to what he called ‘the mind’s object’ and what phenomenologists would come to call the noema, the object of consciousness. For James the ‘mind’s object’—whether that is the object of a sentence, a real object or an imaginary object—is never perceived in isolation but is always circumscribed by a ‘dimly perceived’ ‘fringe,’ an indeterminate framework of relatedness that can never be pinned down in its totality. 54 James’s thought process regarding the ‘fringe’ or ‘horizon’ of experience is echoed 13 years later in Husserl’s previously mentioned observation that concrete objects are surrounded by a ‘distinct or indistinct co-present margin, which forms a continuous ring around the actual field of perception’; perceptions are ‘partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality.’ As noted, the flow of consciousness is immersed in an infinite ‘misty horizon’ 55 which exists before reflection and can never be fully expressed. The meaning of any object of experience, then, does not stem from the object in itself but from its spatial-temporal horizon, the framework of relatedness within which it comes into being. In other words, whenever we experience, we experience within a temporal horizon of unlimited possibilities that we never reflect on but are pre-predicatively aware of.
Although the relationship between William James’s work on what he termed ‘pure experience’ 56 and European phenomenology has been explored since the 1960s and proved to be of ‘great philosophical significance’ for new developments within phenomenological thought, 57 similar developments have not been sufficiently examined within the kind of modernist literature that, like Stein’s, returns us to the structure of experience itself. ‘[I]t is startling,’ writes Bruce Wilshire, ‘that [James’s] pioneering work in phenomenology and his influence on Husserl went without proper notice for seventy years and has only recently gained recognition.’ 58 This might explain why the related patterns between phenomenological thought and Stein’s work have received little attention. Rejecting the traditional mind/body and subject/object splits that inform Cartesian dualism, phenomenology lays bare pre-reflective perceptual experience of the embodied subject, that is, the primordial bond of the subject and the world. James also rejected dichotomous thinking, but his exploration of ‘pure experience’ lacked an analysis of the reflexivity of the body subject that would become the focus of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh.’ In the working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty reflects on how we are all caught up in the ‘flesh of the world’ as both sensing and sensed beings, at once objectivising and intertwined with experience. 59 Where a Jamesian reading of Stein would help shed light on the primordial dimension of pure experience and its ‘fringes’ that Stein, paradoxically, tried to express through words, phenomenology can help us write the reflexive body back into Stein in an entirely different way. Stein repeatedly challenges her reader to develop a certain phenomenological attentiveness open to the passage between pre-reflective, corporeal experience and reflection, the pre-linguistic essence of things and language: ‘As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known.’ 60
Stein’s preoccupation in Picasso with the objects of immediate experience—‘not the things interpreted but the things really known at the time of knowing them’ 61 —which she shared with both Cézanne and Picasso, is one of the many examples demonstrating that her thoughts on modernist composition, which were influenced by James, can be incorporated into the larger framework of European phenomenology. When Husserl wrote about the ‘crisis of European existence’ 62 which, according to the philosopher, had hit philosophy in the first third of the twentieth century, the Paris-based Stein was preoccupied with a ‘mimetic crisis.’ 63 Through encrusted forms of representation, meaning, Stein felt, had become detached from its original foundation. Thus Stein described the twentieth century as a time where things ‘crack,’ ‘where everything is destroyed, everything isolates itself.’ 64 Yet neither to Husserl, for whom the philosopher was ‘a beginner as he reflects upon himself,’ 65 nor to Stein, for whom ‘[b]eginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing,’ 66 was the crisis of modernity ‘an obscure fate, an impenetrable destiny.’ Rather, both saw it as a ‘cry for origin,’ 67 for getting back to the pre-conceptual ground of experience from which man had become estranged, resulting in the loss of the idea of philosophy (according to Husserl) and the loss of the value of words (according to Stein). In their search for radical new beginnings, a pre-requisite for capturing the ‘primal ground’ 68 for perception and expression alike, the modernist projects of the phenomenologists and Stein can be considered as attempts to reconstruct a European world in crisis.
Like James’s non-focal ‘fringe’—that dimension of experience that is peripheral to our conventional ways of seeing, habits, acts and expression—in Tender Buttons, Stein leads us away from those particularities that are usually central to daily life—its ‘Objects,’ ‘Food,’ and ‘Rooms,’ the titles of the three subsections of Stein’s book—and back to the non-focal periphery of perceptual experience; away from usual modes of expression and back to a pre-structural form of expression before the habits of grammar take over, revealing ‘things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them.’ 69
Recalling Cézanne’s plump apples that break out of the picture frame, thus reproducing the chaotic birth of perception itself; and like his portraits of inanimate people with stiffened faces which ‘hesitate as at the beginning of the world,’ 70 a ‘pre-world,’ 71 calling attention to the origin of the painter’s creative process, Stein’s cry for origin calls to mind man before the fall in the Garden of Eden, which is ‘not a place, but a stage of consciousness “prior” to the introduction or development of reason.’ 72 The eating from the apple, the fruit of knowledge, occasioned the insurmountable divide between primal man and reflective man, the experiential world and human understanding, pre-theoretic meaning and representational language. All of this offers an apt context for reading the first half of ‘Apple’ from the ‘Food’ section of Tender Buttons:
Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam, colored wine, calm seen, cold cream, best shake, potato, potato and no gold work with pet, a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready, a little piece a little piece please. 73
As we take our bite out of ‘Apple,’ its pre-linguistic essence or ‘appleyness’ 74 gradually unfolds, like ‘the impression of an emerging order,’ as Merleau-Ponty has it, ‘an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.’ 75 Meaning is made through the movement of reading. There is no frame. And, as we read, Stein’s ‘Apple’ is experienced as ‘fringed,’ that is, from related perspectives. What her little prose poem highlights is the relationality and interdependence not only between seer and seen, words and reader, but also between the single words, their sights and their sounds: each word, each sight, each sound is as important as another. What our reading of this unusual combination of words allows for is a form of free imaginative variation as Husserl thought of it, 76 challenging us to play with variations of the essential characteristics of the phenomena. ‘Apple’ is primarily described by what it is not: ‘Apple plum, carpet steak, seed clam.’ ‘Apple plum’ makes one think of small apples that look like plums and ‘carpet steak’ recalls the unusual recipe for carpet bag steak, the kind of steak that is slit through the middle, opens like a book and is filled with oysters, just as the clam, to which the oyster is related, is filled with seeds. The shells of clams are made up of two halves, which can open like a book, each of which contains seeds, just as the two halves of an apple contain the seeds of the same core. But, just as Stein claims that in order to be ‘really and truly alive’ one must be ‘at once talking and listening, doing both things,’ so should we, the readers, listen while reading and pay attention to the sonorous interdependence of words through alliteration: ‘apple plum’ or ‘carpet,’ ‘clam,’ ‘colored,’ ‘calm,’ ‘cold cream’; through assonance as in ‘seed clam,’ ‘calm seen’ and ‘cold cream’; and through rhyme: ‘carpet steak’ and ‘best shake.’ This multiple relativity at a purely sonorous level is part of the fringe of possibilities of ‘Apple,’ forming the spatial-temporal ‘misty horizon that can never be completely outlined,’ 77 but which is never out of sight throughout the durational event of reading this prose poem. The word ‘potato’ brings to mind, as Margueritte Murphy notes, the French ‘pomme de terre, apple of the earth.’ 78 But, as soon as this meaning seems to have emerged, it extends the phenomenological ‘horizon’ of another possible meaning through a repetition of ‘potato’ in a new context: ‘potato and no gold work with pet.’ The ‘little piece’ recalls ‘a green seen is called bake and change sweet is bready,’ implying yet another framework of relatedness for ‘Apple,’ the ‘green seen,’ which becomes the ingredient of a ‘sweet’ and ‘bready’ ‘bake,’ a cake. We could go on and on. What the flow of words exactly refers to remains necessarily uncertain, but what Stein’s poem does make us reflect on is how ‘the single mind . . . directs an apple,’ as she puts it in ‘Rooms,’ for ‘[a]ll the coats have a different shape,’ 79 suggesting that the ever-changing meaning of this ‘composition’ depends on how it is ‘directed’ by the single mind of each reader. Just as ‘the horizontal structure of experience always implies more than itself,’ 80 there is always more to be said about this ‘word-object.’ 81 The insistence and assonance in ‘a little piece a little piece please’ reinforces that we could ‘piece’ together the poem, again and again, in an infinite number of ways, revealing possible and multiple variants of this fruit, the ‘invisible component of meaning’ of the object presented. 82 Between the metonymically linked words in ‘Apple,’ as in each part of Tender Buttons, there is an existential communication as words ‘endlessly exchange secrets,’ the full meaning of which can never be exhaustively expressed. The contours, sight, and sound of each word is being caressed in the poem; each word is at some point centre stage, at some point the guest of honour at this party. Stein’s open-ended, decentralised and non-hierarchical composition in which words have equal value promotes ‘meaning as an “open structure” … which can be approached perspectively from an indefinite number of possible viewpoints but which can never be “possessed” wholly and completely under any one aspect.’ 83 What emerges from this, then, is that Stein’s phenomenological interaction with ‘word-objects’ grew out of an urge to ‘re-capture the value of the individual word’ in a manner that would not reflect possession: ‘Was there not a way of naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them.’ 84 What Stein thought of as the ‘rhythm of the visible world’ 85 cannot be possessed for ‘we are always already in . . . [and] of it.’ 86
Drawing upon what Fredric Jameson, following Jean Baudrillard, thinks of as a ‘postmodern hyperspace,’ the perplexing space of late capitalism, producing constantly searching and bewildered subjects incapable of locating themselves, Ellen E. Berry has offered a beautiful reading of Stein’s experimental poetry as a postmodern ‘new aesthetics of fragmentation’ and places emphasis on what she calls the ‘cognitive incapacity’ of Stein’s reader, thus joining forces with what extant Stein scholarship interprets as postmodern groundlessness, fragmentation, or indeterminacy. 87 By contrast, I want to call attention to how Stein’s work grounds her reader in the pre-predicative dimension of experience. Just as Merleau-Ponty plunges back into the ‘flesh of the world’ 88 to disclose the condition of possibility of perceptual experience, so Stein delves into the texture of language to question the underlying structures of our usual modes of discourse, which, she felt, had to be recaptured:
You had to recognize words had lost their value in the Nineteenth Century, particularly towards the end, they had lost much of their variety, and I felt that I could not go on, that I had to recapture the value of the individual word, find out what it meant and act within it. 89
Freeing her compositions from the ‘imitation function’ of the ‘mimetic operation’ of nineteenth-century realism, and an overlay of descriptive knowledge, 90 Stein seeks to ‘express not the things seen in association but the things really seen, not things interpreted but things really known at the time of knowing them,’ 91 an impossible project, some may argue, as her emulation of immediate pre-thematic experience—an indivisible self-presence—relies on the virtues of a language that is always already a belated version of the actual experience. And yet, ‘to attempt to express immediate experience is not to betray reason but, on the contrary, to work toward its aggrandizement.’ 92 Rather than anticipating a postmodern hyperspace, Stein’s writing, then, opens onto a non-hierarchical free zone, as it were, inviting us to continuously ‘see’ the world/word anew (while welcoming and accommodating difference). Examining the experiencing of experience itself, the non-totalising function of Stein’s decentralised composition produces not postmodern bewilderment but continual questioning. 93
Kafka’s Metamorphosis: A Rotten Apple
It was an apple; a second apple followed immediately; Gregor came to stop in alarm; there was no point in running on, for his father was determined to bombard him. 94
Apples are equally essential to the unfolding of Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa, Kafka’s protagonist, who wakes up one morning realising he’s turned into a giant insect, is hit by an apple, thrown by his father, which ‘force[s] its way into Gregor’s back’ upon which ‘the apple remain[s] embedded in his flesh as a visible souvenir’ and rots. 95 A souvenir of what, one might ask? Of modern man’s rotten moral condition? ‘It is very sad to have a rotten apple stuck in one’s back,’ a friend of mine commented recently, and it is unbearably sad, for Gregor lives through a strange inversion of the fall of man on the most basic, corporeal level. The apple is thrown back at him, making him carry the burden of his family’s failure, which is what makes him one of modernism’s most unforgettable anti-heroes and martyrs. The eating from the apple was the Original Sin causing the eternal chasm between immediacy and reflection, but, although a fallen immediacy is restored for Gregor, it is not Gregor himself but his family that have fallen: their rotten habits and the general ‘sickness’ of modernity are brought into relief in this novella. To fall or plunge is to ‘Sturz,’ writes Heidegger, 96 the Latin counterpart of which is ‘ruina—collapse.’ 97 In Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: An Introduction to Phenomenological Research, a series of lectures from 1921 to 1922, modern man’s existence commonly takes the shape of a Ruinanz, a falling or fall, into ruin, from the Latin ruere, ‘to fall down, rush.’ 98 Ruinanz is a form of corruption or ruination by way of modernity and technological progress, which later becomes ‘falling,’ indicating a ‘falling prey [verfallen]’ to the world in Being and Time. 99 Now consider the following passage from Metamorphosis:
Oh God, [Gregor Samsa] thought, what an exhausting job I’ve picked on! Travelling about day in, day out. It’s much more irritating work than doing the actual business in the warehouse, and on top of that there’s the trouble of constant travelling, of worrying about train connexions, the bed and irregular meals, casual acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate friends. The devil take it all! 100
Heideggerian Ruinanz gives expression to a ‘natural’ sort of ‘fallenness’ in us, a ‘self-forgetful plunge into the world’—an inclination in us to be caught up in its ruinant movement toward ‘worldly entities’ allowing everything to subside into ‘an enabling, though concealed, emptiness’ while betraying our actual hopes and desires. 101 While ‘radically distinct from any “myth of a fall,”’ 102 ‘falling’ in this way, then, is ‘an ‘idle’ yet natural absorption in the incessant repetition of factic life 103 —like Gregor’s ‘trouble of constant travelling, of worrying about train connexions, the bed and irregular meals’—but at the same time it is, ‘a falling away from myself as authentic,’ for ‘being absorbed in our comportment to entities … we are not mindful of what makes such comportment possible.’ 104 In this way, Ruinanz is also the prerequisite for what Heidegger calls a ‘counter-movedness,’ 105 the possibility of a ‘counter-ruinant motility’ and ‘self-recollection’; which, as Heidegger writes, is ‘the continual struggle of philosophy against its own factic Ruinanz, a struggle carried out simultaneously with the actualization of philosophy.’ 106 This counter-ruinant movement is a ‘coming-to-oneself’ and ‘form of finding’ based on a ‘readiness for the questionable’ and curiosity about life itself. 107 In short, questioning and curiosity serve as counter-ruinant movements against the emptiness of the ‘idle’ repetitions of factic life in which we, as human beings, are absorbed. 108
Connections have previously been made between Kafka and phenomenology. 109 Terri J. Hennings writes that ‘whereas Heidegger holds out the possibility of a non-alienated being in the world, Kafka seems to suggest that this is not obtainable.’ 110 A more hopeful approach is offered by Cyrena Norman Pondrom in a comparative analysis of Husserlian phenomenology and Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka’s K., she argues, ‘continues from the “Who are you?” of his first words to the end of the novel to ask countless questions of all he meets, and he comes to the end of his life with the tormented resolution of a man who has not ceased to value reasonable questions even when they have not been answered.’ 111 But, Pondrom concludes, K’s ‘refusal to accept the ambivalent answer to his questions’ can be seen as ‘a failure to recognize the real significance of the process of asking questions.’ 112 As in The Trial, a suspension of ‘Da-sein in its everydayness’ also happens in Metamorphosis, and the process of asking questions is equally important. What I want to call attention to, however, is how Kafka from the very beginning of this novella highlights questionability, the possibility of a ‘counter-ruinant motility’ and a strange ‘form of finding,’ which are the opposite of failure. My approach in what follows is indebted to Maurice Natanson’s extraordinary reading of Kafka’s novella, in The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature (1998), which gravitates around Gregor’s questions. Whereas Natanson relies upon his wide knowledge of Husserl and Alfred Schutz, I want to focus on Kafka’s collapse of the taken for granted frame of everydayness that humans have fallen prey to—what Derrida calls the ‘chronological and topographical marks … which are said to be “objective,” “in the world,”’ 113 — that has striking similarities with Heidegger’s notions of Ruinanz as a pre-requisite for a counter-ruinant motility, leading to less of a finding of ‘absolute and eternal’ answers than ‘a form of finding.’ As Gail Weiss observes, in an essay on Kafka written in honour of Natanson, Gregor never quite ‘abandons the [Husserlian] natural standpoint despite the fact that his metamorphosis directly challenges the standpoint and all it presupposes about his everyday existence’ and yet, she argues, he is ‘on the verge of making’ a discovery of an ‘unknown nourishment’ which is ‘never successfully brought into fruition.’ 114 I am interested in this sliver of potential for discovery conveyed through the form of Kafka’s narrative. In collapsing the taken-for granted frame of the natural attitude, Kafka both builds upon and takes issue with aspects of representational and relational meaning known from the mimetic trends developed by nineteenth-century realism. Recalling the work of Cézanne and Stein, Kafka’s strange story is ‘freeing the line,’ so that our experience of the text itself becomes a metamorphosis of taken-for-granted modes of representation. 115 ‘What has happened to me?’, Gregor asks himself in the opening paragraph of the novella. ‘Will you give a true account of all this?’, 116 he asks the chief clerk, his immediate boss at the sales firm where he works, who comes to his house on the morning of his transformation and attempts to communicate with Gregor through the door of his bedroom. Despite his unfamiliar body and an unrecognisable voice, destroying the familiar ‘sense’ of words through ‘a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it,’ 117 the otherness of which fuel the family’s hostility, Gregor’s new existence as an insect who does not speak in a human tongue is ‘counter-ruinant’ in that it reclaims a fallen immediacy, curiosity and questioning. Gregor’s everyday being is suspended, giving way to that mute foundation of experience from which signification arises but about which it never speaks. 118 ‘Within a logically disciplined “system of consciousness,”’ writes James Luchte,
the question of an ‘intimacy’ or pre-understanding, and therefore, of a radical phenomenology of original temporality is rendered mute (or shifted into the realm of practical reason). From the turrets of Leibniz, Kant and Husserl, intimacy is guaranteed into those makeshift domains of private languages, poetry and madness, such as was done with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1928), ‘silent’ de facto in the sense of the logical proposition. Consciousness is suspicious of discourses which fall away from the rhetorics of logical formalization, routine clarity and generic precision. Heidegger contends that phenomenology must be a vital response to this ‘crisis,’ one which will allow us to break through our ‘rote’ procedures, and to re-acquaint ourselves with our be-ing after the fall. 119
Sharing a sense of the crisis of rationality that runs through the modernist period, the passage sheds a new light on the fact that the simple, but unheard, opening question in Metamorphosis—‘What has happened to me?’—is never answered, instead triggering a suspension of logical notions of the real and breaking through the door to its usually invisible dimension, its strange underside not unlike the tunnel under the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The ‘gaze’ in Kafka’s inverted world, then, is ‘unfamiliar,’ 120 presenting us with an abstention from the ordinary, a phenomenological reduction exhibiting the strangeness of experience itself that we have lost sight of in the repetitive ruination of everyday, logical affairs. Aristotelian wonder as an instigator of questioning is the way in to Metamorphosis: we ‘catch sight of this strange domain to which interrogation, properly so-called, gives access.’ 121 Kafka presents us with the topsy-turvy and inverted world of Gregor who literally crawls across the walls and ceilings in his room. Although Kafka insisted that the insect could not be depicted, Nabokov claimed otherwise. 122 What is important, however, is that Gregor is never described to us by others but only sensed from within his own radically changed, bodily experience, from a certain ‘primitive stage of Dasein,’ to recall Heidegger. Yet, as Paul L. Landsberg observes, there is an absence of lyricism in Kafka’s prose here due to ‘an extreme objectivity in the recital, into which the narrator and his sentiments are not allowed to intrude even through the tone of the report.’ 123 While I agree with this observation, I would like to stress that this extreme objectivity is the remains of the voice of man in what phenomenologist Hannah Arendt calls ‘his role as functionary of necessity’; the bureaucratic ‘machine’ in Kafka’s The Trial, she writes, is ‘kept in motion by the lies told for the sake of necessity’ and the ‘power of the machine that grabs and kills K. lies precisely in the appearance of necessity that is caused by the way in which human beings admire necessity.’ 124 Being ‘a creature of the chief’s, spineless and stupid’ 125 and thus a ‘functionary of necessity’ 126 or natural Ruination, in his day job Gregor’s voice loses a sense of self and becomes a voice of objectivity. What is so interesting about Kafka’s choice of narrative style in Metamorphosis is that it is free indirect discourse, that is, third person narration where the narrative voice places itself ‘directly into the experiential field of the character, and adopts the latter’s perspective.’ 127 As frames in modernist works were breaking and a ruptured image of the world took over, the novel’s well-known omniscient narrator and its god-like and objective overview of events was replaced with a shifting point of view and disjointed picture of consciousness often constructed through the free indirect discourse already used by the romantic and realist writers, but ‘not as systematically’ as in modernist works. 128 Taking issue with the classical idea of reason, in Signs, Merleau-Ponty precisely describes phenomenology as ‘the exact opposite of a philosophy of God-like Survey,’ 129 an idea that is echoed in The World of Perception: ‘We can, no longer, flatter ourselves with the idea that, in science, the exercise of a pure and unsituated intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it.’ 130 Instead of objective truth, then, ‘the absolute’ looked for ‘beyond our experience’ is always already ‘implied within it,’ 131 giving way to a non-totalising and open view of the world, conditioned by constantly changing perceptions where ‘immanence and transcendence are intertwined within each other, and neither is given totally in any single experience.’ 132 Such an interlacing of the immanent (that which ‘dwells within’) and the transcendent (a ‘going beyond’) lies at the heart of modernist free indirect discourse. Working back from this, in Metamorphosis, the perspective is neither fully subjective nor fully objective, placing the whole story not at the ‘root’ of things, to borrow from Kafka himself, but ‘by some point or other situated toward the middle of them,’ 133 an unsettling and unsettled in-between of sense and non-sense. Doubt takes over. Gregor’s unanswered questions become ours.
Much like Cézanne, Kafka, in other words, is not interested in presenting us with ‘the skin of things,’ 134 their outline. Thus, the question ‘Will you give a true account of all this?’, which Gregor asks the chief clerk, but which nobody can actually hear, is ironic. Kafka’s novella, offering a radicalisation of common modes of representation, makes us reflect upon appearances and multiple truths and interpretations. The difference from the ‘ordinary’ in Metamorphosis is baffling, shocking us back into a more primal dimension of experience—‘What has happened to me?’—as Gregor’s worries about everyday affairs are reduced to a purely physical and pre-linguistic experience of things, rendering the familiar strange, also turning the reader to the attitude of the questionable. If the gaze in Metamorphosis is unfamiliar—for both Gregor and the reader—it is only because the ‘truths’ about this strange event are merely ever indicated, never offered as a fixed and ready set of definitions. There is no frame. Like Gregor, who, self-reflexively, interrogates his embodied experience and the experiencing itself, we, the readers are challenged to embrace ambiguity and openness ‘grounded in our continuing interrogation of experience.’ 135 We become questioners. Indeed, ‘there is something healthy about this unfamiliar gaze,’ writes Merleau-Ponty, because what has been ruptured or counter-ruined in order to expose its ‘underside’ is the world of objectification, the ‘sickness’ of the modern world, ‘the carapace of customs’ that society is ‘trapped in,’ 136 in which individuals are ‘a creature of the chief’s, spineless and stupid’; day in, and day out suffering the torture of ‘constant travelling, … worrying about train connexions, the bed and irregular meals, casual acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate friends.’ As objectification is withheld through an epoché of sorts, an unfamiliar light is shed upon the nature of Gregor’s most basic, bodily and (since he has lost the ability to speak) purely gestural experience. His only mode of communication with the world and focus of his existence are his body and movement: ‘Gregor took refuge in movement and crawled up and down the room.’ 137 In The World of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Our era is destined to judge itself not from on high, which is mean and bitter, but in a certain sense from below.’ 138 In our daily lives, no one has a ‘me-walking-across-the-room’ sensation when walking across a room but, rather, an ‘I-need-to-get-that-book-by-Kafka-over-there-on-the-shelf’ sensation. The room and the act of walking across are not strictly speaking ‘there’ in experience. Paradoxically, however, it is the very act of walking across that is highlighted in Kafka’s novella as Gregor finds an ‘almost blissful’ freedom in a moment of inversion and phenomenological ‘suspension’:
For mere recreation he had formed the habit of crawling criss-cross over the walls and ceiling. He especially enjoyed hanging suspended from the ceiling; it was completely different from lying on the floor; one could breathe more freely; one’s body swung and rocked lightly; and in the almost blissful absorption induced by this suspension it could happen to his own surprise that he let go and fell plump on the floor. Yet, he now had his body much better under control than formerly, and even such a big fall did him no harm. 139
Dissolving any mind-body problems, in this moment Gregor’s ‘crawling-criss-cross-over-the-walls-and-ceiling’ action becomes his existence. He even recaptures an unrestricted joy—a ‘paradisal initial condition of enjoyment,’ 140 to borrow from Levinas—and complete liberation in ‘hanging from the ceiling,’ which is ‘completely different from lying on the floor.’ While Gregor gains an entirely new awareness of the ceiling and the floor, and the space between the two, the habitual frame of everyday life (that of clock time, travelling, catching trains and work schedules) is also brought into relief and loses its function, so that Gregor’s primordially expressive body is literally and physically ‘freed of the shrouding cover of human being [Menschsein].’ 141 Like Cézanne’s broken frames and the framelessness of Stein’s poems, the frame and foundation of everyday affairs in Metamorposis, collapse! Momentarily a liberating ‘uncaptivation and openness to everything that … is’ is restored, 142 a ‘blissful absorption induced by this suspension’ as he dangles upside down from the ceiling before letting go and falling ‘plump on the floor.’ Gregor is, borrowing from Husserl, a zero-point or ‘nullpunkt’ for all perception and orientation. 143 And since objectification is suspended, Gregor cannot possibly be represented and drawn. What is foregrounded instead is the invisible dimension of what is immediately given and lived: ‘he now had his body much better under control than formerly.’
Although there have been many interpretations of Kafka’s insect, none of them offer a ‘final’ conclusion. Kafka merely ever indicates, like Heidegger merely ever indicates in his circular ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1950). Such a phenomenological procedure based on carefully indicating rather than defining concepts avoids the trap of the mentioned ‘carapace of customs’ by bringing to fruition a process that tentatively discovers conceptual complexities in an encircling manner. What is lost in Metamorphosis, then, is not the essence of Gregor, but the blind form of day-to-day survival where individuals are ‘spineless’ and mere ‘creatures of the chief’s.’ Instead, Gregor is turned into what Fink thought of as a phenomenological ‘onlooker’ (a non-participant in ‘world-constitution’), seeing his own family and taken-for-granted existence from the outside. 144 Infinitely more human than his sister and parents, of whom he thinks ‘with tenderness and love’—thus refuting the very master-slave dialectic that his family upholds—only seconds before his head ‘s[inks] to the floor’ as he breathes out ‘the last faint flicker of his breath,’ 145 it is clear that Gregor never changes; rather, it is the morally sick world that is the target! It is not Gregor who has undergone a metamorphosis; it is the metamorphosis of modern civilisation (its ‘natural’ ruination) that Kafka highlights. Kafka ‘precisely makes the world questionable.’
Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 work The Human Condition, makes reference to Heidegger’s notion of a natural ruination: ‘The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted.’ 146 In her own critical engagement with Kafka upon a reading of his novel The Trial, in ‘Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew’ (1946), Arendt notes: ‘[Kafka’s protagonists] discove[r] that the normal world and society are in fact abnormal, that the judgments of its generally accepted and respectable members are in fact insane, and that the actions complying with the rules of this game are in fact ruinous in everyone.’ 147 Remaining innocent and full of love for others until the very end, Gregor never discovers this; rather, he is the one who ends up carrying the burden of modernity’s sickness in the shape of an ‘inflamed path around’ an apple in his back, a remnant of the Original Sin. 148 And yet, despite his tragic fate, offering us ‘[t]error and pity without catharsis,’ 149 Gregor’s story remains counter-ruinant in essence. Just as Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is, for all its hopelessness, a life-affirming song, Metamorphosis is, for all its bleakness and terror, a tale of neo-heroism. 150 If Gregor had been able to recognise the full potential of his own ‘unfamiliar gaze,’ he would have been set free from preconceived notions about living, just as the inability to reach a final conclusion about his inverted world sets free our preconceived notions about reading and interpretation. As Stephen Kern observes, ‘Kafkaesque came to signify the alienation and anxiety of the modern age, but for Kafka, personally, writing was a restorative act because he believed that by capturing the terrifying aspects of the age, his work would help meliorate it.’ 151 To look at our world and at other humans from the outside in, to shift the perspective from the taken-for-granted frames of daily life to the unframedness of the unreflected depths of the world as lived, which can never be fully articulated in a human tongue, is necessary for self-criticality—it is what keeps us sane. Despite our unanswered questions, this is a form of finding.
Notes
1.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, 140. In a 1918 letter Woolf reflected on the same apples: ‘They are really very superb. The longer one looks the larger and heavier and greener and redder they become.’ See Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (London: The Hogarth Press, 1976), 230.
2.
Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 30.
3.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.
4.
Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Duckworth, 1986), 75. For a recent examination of the notion of ‘wonder’ in phenomenology see Mark Kingwell, ‘Husserl’s Sense of Wonder,’ The Philosophical Forum 31.1 (Spring 2000): 85–107. Other recent approaches to the concept of wonder include Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Wonder,’ in ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighboring Fields (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984); and Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience (Cambridge Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998).
5.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,’ in A Woman’s Essays, vol. 1, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 71. The essay was originally published as ‘Character and Fiction’ in Criterion, July 1924 after which it was published separately in pamphlet form as ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.’
6.
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 191.
7.
Stein, Picasso, 49.
8.
The word ‘splendid’ derives from the Latin ‘splendidus,’ meaning ‘bright, shining, glittering, brilliant, . . . illustrious, showy.’ See Morwood, ed., The Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary, 130.
9.
According to Andreas Huyssen’s well-established diagnosis of Modernism in After the Great Divide (1986), the ‘core of the modernist aesthetic’ upholds an ideal of ‘genuine art’ against the ‘anxiety of contamination’ by ‘inauthentic mass culture.’ The Modernist artwork is in this sense ‘the expression of a purely individual consciousness,’ which is ‘totally separate from the realms of mass culture and everyday life.’ See Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 53, vii, 53. Christopher Butler also makes reference to Eagleton’s description of the modernist artwork: ‘the modernist work brackets off the reference or real historical world, thickens its textures and deranges its form to forestall instant consumability, and draws its own language protectively around it to become a mysteriously autotelic object, free of all contaminating truck with the real.’ This definition of the modernist work is, as Butler observes, ‘very reminiscent’ of Peter Bürger’s oft-mentioned political interpretations in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) that ‘see the artist’s techniques as symptomatic of larger, all-embracing cultural forces, which it tends to hypostatize as “discourses,” which are curiously independent of the individuals using them.’ See Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 273, 269, 274, 273, 269. Other scholarship since the work of Bürger and Huyssen has, like Butler, opposed the notion of a genuine high art and low mass culture divide. Mark S. Morrison, for instance, offers a ‘“revisioning” of modernism,’ which argues for an interdependence of modernist art and the commercial mass market press. See Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 5. See also Kevin J.H. Dettmar and Stephen Watts, eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, and Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
10.
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Mediation, 42.
11.
Paul Cézanne, Cézanne’s Letters, ed. John Rewald (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1976), 323.
12.
Isabelle Cahn, Paul Cézanne: A Life in Art (London: Cassell, 1995), 71.
13.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 48.
14.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind.’ in The Primacy of Perception, 161; my italics.
15.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 38, 118, my italics.
16.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception, 161, 162.
17.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 466.
18.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 107, 27, 38.
19.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 69–70 (my emphasis).
20.
Ibid., 139, 248, 249.
21.
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 19.
22.
Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 206.
23.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 257.
24.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 19.
25.
Ibid., 19.
26.
Husserl, Ideas, 107.
27.
As Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen explain, ‘Husserl’s procedure of epoché is deliberately modelled on Cartesian doubt. Through his sceptical doubts, Descartes put the very existence of the world in question in a radical way. Husserl refers to Descartes’ “quasi-sceptical epoché,” but he emphasizes that this phenomenological epoché is different from Cartesian doubt (Ideas I § 32) in that the actual, historical Cartesian doubt involved a dogmatic denial of the existence of the world,’ in The Husserl Dictionary, 79. As stressed in this book, Husserlian bracketing never denies but merely suspends the ‘natural attitude.’
28.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.
29.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 17.
30.
Cézanne as cited in Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne, 220.
31.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 39.
32.
Hilton Kramer, The Age of the Avant-Garde 1956–1972 (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 29.
33.
John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists (London and New York: Verso, 2015), 208, 207.
34.
See Brendan Prendeville, ‘Merleau-Ponty, Realism and Painting: Psychophysical Space and the Space of Exchange,’ Art History, 22. 3 (Sep. 1999): 364–88.
35.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 7.
36.
Stein, Picasso, 12.
37.
John Sallis, ‘Freeing the Line,’ in Kascha Semonovitch and Neal DeRoo, eds., Merleau-Ponty and the Limits of Art, Religion and Perception, 25.
38.
Picasso as cited in Judith Wechsler, Cézanne in Perspective (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 18.
39.
Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946,’ in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), 15.
40.
Note that Wolfgang Iser’s reading response criticism is based on Husserlian phenomenology. See Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,’ in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1988), 212–228; and Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
41.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxiv.
42.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work,’ trans. Arleen B. Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, 6.
43.
Merleau-Ponty elaborates: ‘The lazy viewer will see “errors of perspective” here, while those who look closely will get the feel of a world in which no two objects are seen simultaneously, a world in which regions of space are separated by the time it takes to move our gaze from one to the other, a world in which being is not given but rather emerges over time,’ in The World of Perception, 41.
44.
Cézanne as quoted in Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 343.
45.
Clement Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture,’ in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 155; here Greenberg refers to the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock.
46.
Gertrude Stein, ‘Lecture 2’ in Narration: Four Lectures (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1935), 20.
47.
Gertrude Stein, ‘What are Master-pieces and why are there so few of them,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909–1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Peter Owen, 2004), 150.
48.
Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946’ in A Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, 17, 15.
49.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 9.
50.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 481.
51.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 15.
52.
Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 9–10.
53.
Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology: A Study of The Principles of Psychology (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1968), 160.
54.
James, The Principles of Psychology, 258, 259, 275–276.
55.
Husserl, Ideas, 11, 102.
56.
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 39–91.
57.
James M. Edie, ‘William James and Phenomenology,’ Review of Metaphysics 23.3 (1970): 486. See also Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology; Hans Linschoten, On the Way Toward a Phenomenological Psychology: The Psychology of William James, trans. Amedeo Giorgio, (Pittsburgh, 1968); and James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University press, 1987).
58.
Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology, 4. Wilshire also points out that although James never called his method phenomenological, ‘his actual practice points in the direction of what Husserl later explicated’ (6). See also Wendy Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978). Steiner notes but leaves unexplored the fact that ‘the influence of William James is probably the significant factor in any relation between Stein and the phenomenologists, since he is in part their precursor’ (54).
59.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.
60.
Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I am, 126.
61.
Stein, Picasso, 36.
62.
Edmund Husserl, ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science,’ in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 78.
63.
The term ‘mimetic crisis’ is Adam Katz’s in ‘From Habit to Maxim: Eccentric Models of Reality and Presence in the Writing of Gertrude Stein,’ Anthropoetics 15.2 (Spring 2010), accessed 2 August 2015, http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1502/1502Katz.htm
64.
Stein, Picasso, 49.
65.
Husserl, Ideas, 17. This is related to Husserl’s notion of phenomenology as a ‘first philosophy.’
66.
Gertrude Stein, ‘Composition as Explanation,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I Am, 23.
67.
Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 172, 207.
68.
Edmund Husserl, Husserl’s Shorter Works, eds. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), 10.
69.
Stein, Picasso, 15.
70.
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 16.
71.
F. Novotny as cited in Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 337.
72.
Blum, ‘Emmanuel Levinas’ Theory of Commitment,’ 159–160.
73.
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (New York: Dover Publications, 1997), 187. Stein’s ‘Apple’ is quoted in full by permission of Dover Publications.
74.
Gilles Deleuze refers to D.H. Lawrence’s term when describing the apples in Cézanne’s paintings: ‘What is painted on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation (what [D.H.] Lawrence, speaking of Cézanne, called “the appleyness of the apple”),’ in Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 35.
75.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 14.
76.
Husserl also spoke of ‘free variation’ as ‘free fancies,’ in Husserl, Ideas, 198.
77.
Ibid., 11, 102
78.
Margueritte S. Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 145.
79.
Stein, Tender Buttons, 46.
80.
Enrique Lima, ‘Of Horizons and Epistemology: Problems in the Visuality of Knowledge,’ Diacritics 33.3, New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, National Trajectories (Autumn–Winter 2003): 30.
81.
The term ‘word-objects’—a suitable name for Stein’s perceptual reconstructions, which reflect on the relation between the experience of our object-world and language—is Frederick J. Hoffman’s, as cited in Bruce F. Kawin, Telling it Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1972), 127.
82.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,’ 418.
83.
James M. Edie, ‘Expression and Metaphor,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 23.4 (June 1963): 544.
84.
Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ 139.
85.
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 130.
86.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.
87.
Ellen E. Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism (Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1992), 18, 30, 9, 30. For one of the first interpretations of Stein’s work as a postmodern collapse of our usual ground of identification, see Neil Schmitz, ‘Gertrude Stein as Post-Modernist: The Rhetoric of Tender Buttons,’ Journal of Modern Literature 3.5, From Modernism to Post-Modernism (July, 1974): 1203–1218. Marianne DeKoven approaches Stein as an ‘experimental writer’ along the lines of structuralist linguistics and especially gendered aspects of deconstructivist theory. The ‘moving in and out of focus’ of meaning in Tender Buttons, she argues, ‘functions anti-patriarchally, as presymbolic jouissance and as irreducibly, multiple, fragmented articulation of lexical meaning.’ See DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing (Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1983) 44, 79. For another interpretation of Stein’s work as postmodern indeterminacy, see Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
88.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 248.
89.
Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946,’ 17–18.
90.
Sallis, ‘Freeing the Line,’ 25.
91.
Stein, Picasso, 36.
92.
Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 22.
93.
Here I am indebted to Berman’s observation that hyperdialectic is a ‘non-totalizing movement of constant decentering, that is continual questioning.’ See Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,’ 409.
94.
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 44.
95.
Ibid., 29.
96.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 148.
97.
Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 98.
98.
In early lectures Heidegger uses ruinant(e), Ruinanz, ‘falling, fall, into ruin,’ from the Latin ruere, ‘to fall down, rush.’ See Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 65.
99.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 130, 169. Also see Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 147.
100.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 9–10.
101.
Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 150.
102.
Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, 152.
102.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 169.
104.
Paul Gorner, Heidegger’s Being and Time: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 110.
105.
Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 99.
106.
Heidegger as cited in Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 148, 150.
107.
Ibid., 148, 150. Such ‘questionability,’ Heidegger writes, is ‘put ... into effect indeed not in such a way that it pretends to be able to find, from its own resources, an absolute and eternal decision, but simply such that it concretely brings the questionability to maturation and maintains it in concretely available directions. Thereby, however, it precisely keeps alive the actualization of the access to factical life,’ in Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 113.
108.
‘It is possible to take Kafka as paradigmatic of “epiphanic modernism,”’ writes Roger Griffin in Modernism and Fascism, and relates the epiphanic to ‘a sudden sensation of “standing outside” normal time—“ecstatically” in its etymological sense’ (63). Griffin might have thought of Heidegger for whom being-in-the world is grounded in an ‘ecstatic and horizonal temporality,’ which is the foundation of our existence. (See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 337). We have already seen that phenomenological reduction lays open Husserl’s ‘misty horizon.’ In a further elaboration of the Husserlian horizon, Heidegger writes: ‘The concept “horizon” in the vulgar sense presupposes precisely what we are designating as the ecstatic horizon. There would not be something like a horizon for us if there were not an ecstatic being-open-for.’ (Heidegger as cited in David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 68). Etymologically the Greek ‘ecstasy’ implies a standing outside of one’s conventional, ‘static’ attitude to daily life. In this sense, an epiphanic moment of what Heidegger would call ‘ekstasis’ is a moment of openness to the horizon, which is normally hidden from us, but which in reality underlies the ruinant world of factic life, the ‘natural’ fallenness in us.
109.
The most recent book-length study on phenomenology and Kafka is Neil Allan’s Franz Kafka and the Genealogy of Modern European Philosophy: From Phenomenology to Post-Structuralism (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), which explores the influence of the early phenomenology of Franz Brentano upon Kafka’s own work. Allan explains how Kafka joined the ‘Louvre-circle,’ a Brentanian discussion group, from 1902, promoting Kafka’s reaction to the Brentano School as a heretofore overlooked basis for recent post-structuralist interpretations of his work. ‘[T]he narrative technique of Kafka’s work, and in particular the representation of consciousness and its “world,”’ writes Allan, ‘is derived from Brentanian thought, and ... this influence is modulated in a specific direction, which renders these texts so singularly amenable to post-structuralist thought’ (4 and xi). While the intersections between post-structuralism and phenomenology have been previously explored, Allan sheds new light on how these intersections may help us tackle Kafka’s enigmatic work.
110.
Terri J. Hennings, ‘Heidegger and Kafka before the Law’ in Hans Rainer and Ion Copoeru, eds., Phenomenology 2005: Selected Essays from Northern Europe, Part 1, (Zeta Books, Electronic Edition, 2007), 295. Hennings explores Kafka’s perception of Being in The Trial against a backdrop of Heidegger’s ontology, making clear the differences and similarities between the two thinkers notions of ‘guilt.’
111.
Cyrena Norman Pondrom, ‘Kafka and Phenomenology: Josef K’s Search for Information,’ in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 8.1 (Winter 1967): 80–81.
112.
Ibid., 90.; my italics.
113.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime,’ trans. Nicholas Royle, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 421.
114.
Gail Weiss, ‘Anonymity, Alienation, And Suspension in Kafka’s Metamorphosis,’ in Steven Galt Crowell, ed., The Prism of the Self: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Maurice Natanson (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 223, 229.
115.
Deleuze and Guattari also ‘ask us to be attentive to the labor of the “dismantling or demolition of forms and categories that determine the “great literature” in Kafka.’ As Réda Bensmaïa writes in her Foreword to the two philosophers’ Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, ‘the authors show that referring Kafka’s work to an idea of failure [as Walter Benjamin does] necessarily implies the full-fledged return of literary and philosophical categories that presuppose a logical, even ontological, priority of content over form: “since the content is given in a given form, one has to find, discover, or see the form of expression appropriate to it.”’ See Bensmaïa, Foreword to Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xix, xvii.
116.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 9, 22. Natanson stresses these questions in his reading of Kafka’s novella in The Erotic Bird.
117.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 11.
118.
See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 97.
119.
Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, 28.
120.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 68.
121.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 140.
122.
See Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980), 250–83.
123.
Paul L. Landsberg, ‘The Metamorphosis,’ trans. Caroline Muhlenberg, in Angel Flores, ed., The Kafka Problem (New York: New York Directorions, 1946), 123.
124.
Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007), 97, 96.
125.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 11.
126.
Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 101.
127.
Roy Pascal, Free Indirect Discourse and its Functioning in the Nineteenth Century European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 7. For a more in-depth exploration of free indirect discourse, see Chapter 4 of this book.
128.
Stephen Kern, The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 85.
129.
Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 21.
130.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 36.
131.
Kearney, Anatheism, 92.
132.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,’ 412.
133.
Claude Lefort, ‘Editor’s Foreword,’ in Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, xxvi.
134.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ in The Primacy of Perception, 181.
135.
Berman, ‘The Hyper-Dialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,’ 10.
136.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 68.
137.
Ibid., 27.
138.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 68.
139.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 36, 37. Maurice Natanson highlights this passage in his reading of Kafka’s novella in The Erotic Bird, calling it the reader’s one ‘moment of fond recollection … the enjoyment of what Hegel called “the inverted world,”’ in The Erotic Bird, 126.
140.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 136. As Laura Batnitzky explains, ‘in attempting a phenomenological analysis of contentment, which he also calls “enjoyment,” Levinas stretches the limits of Husserl’s notion of intentionality, claiming that the self senses itself as a separate, isolated and independent self in a non-cognitive way.’ See Batnizky, ‘Encountering the Modern Subject in Levinas,’ Yale French Studies 104, ‘Encounters with Levinas’ (2004): 15.
141.
Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, 40.
142.
Ibid., 42.
143.
Husserl’s metaphor of the ‘“zero” or “null-point”’: ‘Husserl uses the term to mean that all sense of space, time, orientation, movement, and so on, takes its reference point from the lived body of the perceiver … Husserl speaks about perception as beginning with a “zero-point” that is nothing other than one’s own body in space.’ See Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 348.
144.
Ibid., 20.
145.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 58.
146.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 247.
147.
Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, 104.
148.
Note that Heidegger’s notions of ‘fallen’ existence and Ruinanz should not be understood as a fallenness from the original sin; rather, ‘ruinanz’ is a ‘natural’ losing of oneself in the world of everyday living. Emil Lask, however, in Die Lehre vom Urteil (1923), ‘speaks in religious metaphors about the “original sin” of knowledge (judgment) that interposes itself between us and the “lost paradise” of the fully determinate paradigmatic object.’ See Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning, 272n34.
149.
Natanson, The Erotic Bird, 26.
150.
Stephen Kern writes: ‘Modernist protagonists are rather neo-heroic, that is, admirable in new ways even when they are physically unattractive, sexually unconventional, impotent, cowardly immoral, or even dead.’ See Kern, The Modernist Novel, 34.
151.
Ibid., 215.