Ariane Mildenberg1
(1)
School of English, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Ariane Mildenberg
Email: a.mildenberg@kent.ac.uk
In the preface to Ideas, Husserl’s comments on the incompleteness of his own phenomenological project:
The author sees the infinite open country of the true philosophy, the ‘promised land’ on which he himself will never set foot. This confidence may wake a smile, but let each see for himself whether it has not some ground in the fragments laid before him as phenomenology in its beginnings. Gladly would he hope that those who come after him will take up these first adventures, carry them steadily forward, yes, and improve also their great deficiencies, defects of incompleteness which cannot indeed be avoided in the beginning of scientific work. 1
Phenomenology, however, remains incomplete and inconclusive in the hands of those who come after Husserl. It is this incompleteness that becomes the main theme of Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology: ‘the incompleteness of the reduction . . . is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being,’ which ‘is to be understood not as an imperfection . . . but as a philosophical theme.’ 2 Since phenomenology itself knows that a final conclusive analysis would clash with its own interrogative mode and openness to the world—‘since our reflections are taking place in the temporal flow that they are attempting to capture . . . there is no thought that encompasses all of our thought’ 3 —I want to conclude by starting again. I want to end this book by reflecting upon beginnings.
Towards the end of ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ Merleau-Ponty observes: ‘Only one emotion is possible for this painter—the feeling of strangeness—and only one of lyricism—that of the continual rebirth of existence.’ 4 This lyricism lies in the pre-reflective engagement of the embodied subject with the world: since the body (as consciousness) is in the world, the creative process correlates with the ‘continual rebirth of existence’; hence the artist is a ‘perpetual beginner.’ 5 Anticipating the aims of the Cubists, who ‘produced many-faceted interpretations of their chosen subject matter, taking the viewer’s eye around it,’ 6 Cézanne painted the same blue carafe, sugar bowl, vessels and apples over and over again in his still lifes. Similarly, he painted the famous Mont Sainte-Victoire at least sixty times:
Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without changing place, by turning more to the right, now more to the left. 7
In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe echoes this view when reflecting upon the impossibility of catching ‘all of’ Mrs Ramsay in paint: ‘One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.’ 8 Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ a poem that refuses to decide between different viewpoints, is a response to and reflection upon the creative mind’s interaction with the fluid quality of nature. Once again, we are presented with the concept of free variation, as Husserl thought of it, 9 challenging us to play with the ‘open infinity’ of the essential possibilities of the phenomenon, opening up ‘new aspects of the experience.’ 10 Stevens’s poem is about multiple and various ways of looking at a single thing—a blackbird, who, significantly, is always on the move—and ways of looking at poetry while highlighting its own process of becoming in the middle of a world which is always becoming. Kate Bush’s ‘Fifty Words for Snow,’ a modern-day homage to Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ and ‘The Snow Man,’ also presents us with 50 free variations on snow, the temporarily frozen form of the intangible condition of water, recalling the Heraclitean fluidity of water in which Bergson saw ‘the sensory image of lived time.’ 11 Nothing endures, according to Heraclitus, everything is in flux. The impossibility of ‘freezing’ and portraying in paint, poetry or music a complete, objective view of the thing as experienced should not be taken as a sign of inconclusiveness but as a perpetual genesis of creativity: ‘Our openness to the world is conditioned by our changing perceptions.’ 12 We learned from Phenomenology of Perception that the kind of attentiveness and wonder found in the work of for instance Cézanne and Proust, and their ‘will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state’ is a characteristic of modernist aesthetics in general. 13 Wonder in the face of the world always includes the possibility of doubt; ‘[o]ur interactions with the world and Others provide that “fundamental interrogation that animates the world from within.”’ 14 We exist, change and interact in a world of constant change; thus, experience cannot but be interrogated and this never-ending interrogation is at the heart of the modernist aesthetic project. The modernist artist is a ‘perpetual beginner’ and his/her process of meaning-giving is ‘an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning,’ 15 which is directly connected with the impossibility of recapturing the Husserlian pre-relational ‘thing itself’ or what Merleau-Ponty thinks of as the ‘pre-reflective zone’ of ‘perceptual faith’ 16 : ‘The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.’ 17 In Merleau-Ponty’s final work, The Visible and the Invisible, this impossibility culminates in the notion of ‘hyperdialectic,’ a dialectic ‘without synthesis’ which is not a sign of futility but of ‘a good dialectic,’ 18 recalling Phenomenology of Perception: ‘the unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoate style in which it proceeds are not the sign of failure.’ 19 Rather, impossibility of reduction becomes the theme of phenomenology itself and a constant reminder of the pre-reflective dimension of experience, the ‘first philosophy’ embedded within daily life. This incompleteness becomes a continual point of departure and point of return for Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic concerns and ontology of the flesh, explaining its underlying interlacing of separation and interrelation, distance and closeness.
I want to end this book by reflecting upon beginnings via the hyperdialectic, a dialectic without synthesis demanding a radical open-endedness at the heart of which lies the impossibility of complete reduction. Hyperdialectic pre-empts some of the aims of Derridean deconstruction and its impossibility of capturing the Husserlian ‘thing itself.’ 20 As Len Lawlor suggests, ‘[a]t almost the exact same moment, in the late Fifties, Derrida and Merleau-Ponty have stumbled upon the same structure of experience, and, most generally, we can call this structure the structure of the experience of intersubjectivity.’ 21 Not only is hyperdialectic grounded in our perpetual questioning of experience, it is always inscribed in what Merleau-Ponty terms ‘écart,’ which, as we have seen in Chapter 3, is the temporal divergence between pre-linguistic perception and expression that is also the ground of meaning-giving. 22 Because of this temporal distantiation, ‘hyperdialectic’ is aware of the impossibility of completely grasping the ‘thing itself.’ Reynolds stresses that this ‘impossibility of any absolute presence-to-itself is not a derivative accident, or fall from grace, but is symptomatic of a constitutive divergence (écart) that can never be assuaged.’ 23 Although there are differences between the philosophers’ enquiries, the overlap between Merleau-Ponty’s écart and Derrida’s différance is clear: both ‘discern a necessary divergence within our everyday embodiment’; ‘subjectivity, for Merleau-Ponty, and the perspective, for Derrida, are both made (im)possible by this very divergence (écart) which cannot simply be characterized as yet another dualism.’ 24
As Merleau-Ponty writes in The Visible and the Invisible: ‘The world is what I perceive, but as soon as we examine and express its absolute proximity, it becomes, inexplicably, irremediable distance,’ 25 recalling the ambiguous experience of the phenomenological concept of horizon, the simultaneous joining and separation of earth and sky that is an imaginary line which seems to recede as we approach it. As perceptual consciousness is subject to change and ‘remoulding us every moment,’ 26 as William James would have it, the spatial-temporal horizon is never fixed and remains beyond our grasp. This is one of the epistemological dilemmas central to phenomenology which also challenged James and his student, Gertrude Stein. The former proposed the following: ‘The condition of the experience is not one of the things experienced at the moment; this knowing is not immediately known. It is only known in subsequent reflection.’ 27 Let me repeat a passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception that takes James’s idea one step further: ‘If the thing itself were attained . . . [i]t would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment that we believed we possessed it. What makes the “reality” of the thing is therefore precisely what steals it from our possession.’ 28 One of the doctrines the philosophers seem to have in common, then, is this fate of perception. Theorised reflection, such as writing, is grounded in the ‘unreflective life’ of experience, 29 but because of the temporal distance between experience and expression, it cannot grasp it as such. Yet, although it is aware of and cannot overcome the écart, reflection can only ever be
hyper-reflection (sur-réflexion) . . . [which] must seek in the world itself the secret of our perceptual bond with it. It must use words not according to their pre-established signification, but in order to state this prelogical bond. It must plunge into the world instead of surveying it, it must descend toward it such as it is instead of working its way back up toward a prior possibility of thinking it—which would impose upon the world in advance the conditions for our control over it. It must question the world, it must enter into the forest of references that our interrogation arouses in it, and it must make it say, finally, what in its silence it means to say. 30
Reflection, then, must question foundations. It must reflect upon and be critical of itself, question its own sufficiency and ‘plunge’ into that pre-theoretic and silent region where ‘inside and outside are not yet distinguishable.’ 31 From the ‘hyper-reflection’ that highlights our pre-predicative, corporeal ‘bond’ with the world emerges a ‘hyperdialectic,’ ‘a dialectic without synthesis’ grounded in our continual questioning of experience:
What we call hyperdialectic is a thought that . . . is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. . . . Being is not made up of idealizations of things said, as the old logic believed, but of bound wholes. . . . what we seek is a dialectical definition of being that can be neither the being for itself nor the being in itself . . . that must rediscover the being that lies before the cleave operated by reflection, about it, on its horizon, not outside of us and not in us, but there where the two movements cross, there where ‘there is’ something. 32
Breaking with forms of dialectical thinking that are imposed upon the world, hyperdialectic, then, arises from continual questioning. A product of our ever-changing experiences of the lived-body, for Merleau-Ponty, dialectic does not rely upon dichotomies or a process of reconciliation of polarised terms in dialectical tension, as in, for instance, the work of Hegel and Sartre, both of whom Merleau-Ponty critiqued. 33 While the complexity of both Hegel’s and Sartre’s arguments cannot be penetrated in the space available, the essential point to extract is that in both welcoming and accommodating difference, 34 hyperdialectic ‘introduces the shift from the philosophy of negation to a philosophy of interrogation and the shift from a Hegelian-Sartrean negative philosophy of desire to desire as a productive shape and opening onto the world.’ 35 It also introduces phenomenology as an embodied praxis, which is what has been referred to as a ‘non-philosophy—thought becomes the texture of an interhuman world of experience.’ In this way, hyperdialectic surpasses dichotomies and is instead committed to a reversibility of the flesh in a perpetual process of emerging, questioning and openness where ‘experience is not “in between” (dia) Being and beings, but rather “throughout” it.’ 36 Reflection, Merleau-Ponty tells us, is never terminated but always keeps the crossing paths of the pre-reflective and the reflective open, for this is the very crossing— the ‘there where “there is” something’—where meaning is produced. This ‘there is,’ Patrick Burns observes, is ‘the originary openness of what is there before it is “there” for reflective consciousness, before mind and world have been set apart by reflection.’ 37 Thus the ‘good’ dialectic that Merleau-Ponty promotes is ‘essentially and by definition unstable’ and is non-totalising 38 ; it is a ‘hyper’ dialectic because it always ‘criticises and surpasses itself as statement.’ 39 The lack of synthesis or closure in hyperdialectic, then, should not be taken as a sign of futility or inconclusiveness but, rather, as a reminder of the perpetual genesis of lived experience, the ‘global and primordial cohesion of a field of experience wherein each element opens onto the others.’ 40 Serving as a constant opening onto the underlying ground that makes experience possible, never allowing us to lose sight of wonder and the ‘first philosophy’ embedded in daily life, the emphasis of the philosopher’s modernist lesson, then, is not on result but on the how of the result, not on ‘the reflection of a prior truth, but rather, like art, the actualization of truth,’ 41 that is, the act of meaning-giving itself.
Stein’s ‘If I Told Him’ and NDT’s Shutters Shut
This is where I want to return to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a work which is auto-critical in nature. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the double meaning of Stein’s slippery ‘Buttons,’ her strange prose poems, is underscored by the word ‘Tender,’ which, when understood as the verb ‘to tender’ derives from the Latin tendere, meaning on the one hand ‘to stretch out, extend’ or, on the other hand, to ‘direct one’s course’ at. If we place the verb ‘to stretch’ next to ‘button,’ the result is a process of oscillation, of continual stretching and shrinking through switching on or switching off, opening or shutting. 42 Notably, intendere in Latin means to stretch (tendere) toward (in-) which is also the meaning of intentionality: the stretching towards or directing of one’s attention at the intentional object. 43 Stein’s ‘Buttons’ are ‘Tender’ because they, through our necessary participation as readers, are stretched back and forth between the pre-reflective and the reflective, the ‘thing in itself’ and the object as named, ‘perceptual meaning,’ as Merleau-Ponty calls it, and ‘language meaning.’
The process of reading/eating Stein’s ‘Apple’ in Tender Buttons, which we attempted in Chapter 2, then, is tantamount to a passage through Merleau-Ponty’s écart and can be described as a hyperdialectical process without synthesis, a movement beyond simple dichotomies through an ongoing ‘stretching’ back and forth between pre-reflective experience and the surface of language, between the appleyness of the apple and its outline, the lid of a box and its contents (as in Stein’s ‘A Box’), a cushion cover and its substance (as in Stein’s ‘A Substance in a Cushion’), the peel of an orange and its leaking centre (as in Stein’s ‘Orange’). 44 The cushion covers, box lids or fruit peel in Tender Buttons refer to our usual mode of discourse, a form of clothing in itself, which Stein’s radical compositions loosen, so that the essence of the thing can show itself. 45 What we end up with is a continual opening and questioning of perceptual experiences that avoids a totalising understanding. The engine of this process is a shift of standpoint tantamount to phenomenological reduction, always leaving the reader with a feeling of what Stein in ‘Composition as Explanation’ calls ‘beginning again and again.’ The reader of Stein’s text is a perpetual beginner.
In her study of Stein, Berry notes that Stein’s reader must adopt ‘a paradoxical split of attention—a relaxed hyperattention, an unconscious hyperconsciousness, a borderline state of awareness a little like insomnia.’ By contrast, ‘hyperdialectic’ sheds new light on the auto-critical ‘hyper’ attentiveness of Stein’s reader and grounds her compositions in the ‘unreflective’ but material life of embodied experience. ‘Beginning again and again,’ Stein’s writing lays bare the usually unperceived divergence between perceptual meaning and language meaning where ‘hyperdialectic’ occurs, a passage that cannot be closed, according to Merleau-Ponty, as it is the necessary ‘process of coming into appearance . . . grounded in the specific things themselves.’ 46
As pre-reflective engagement with the world is always rooted in the materiality of the body, I want to demonstrate the occurrence of ‘hyperdialectic’ by briefly turning to Paul Lightfoot and Sol León’s 2003 dance production Shutters Shut as performed by Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) to the remarkably soothing voice of Gertrude Stein reading her own ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ (1923). 47 Like Stein’s ‘Apple,’ ‘If I Told Him’ expresses the interaction and interdependence of words as they oscillate between shaping and re-shaping meaning, reflecting the dynamic nature of perceptual experience. Once again, the phenomenological horizon is perpetually extended and meaning is constantly decentred as language is being interrogated:
If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutter shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutter shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because. 48
If we think we are going to get a literary portrait about Picasso, then we are mistaken. Likewise, Shutters Shut is not about anything but the movement of the two bodies, a modern day Adam and Eve from a pre-linguistic, purely gestural world who have not yet eaten the apple. Stein is not interested in description, that is to say, objectivising interpretation. Instead her composition is eidetic, expressing essence as opposed to external identity. For instance, the essence of Picasso resembles that of Napoleon who is mentioned several times. Much like Napoleon and ‘[e]xactly or as kings,’ ‘Picasso ha[d] his splendour,’ Stein tells us in Picasso, and, much like Napoleon, Picasso was the embodiment of imaginative greatness and took risks—he was a genius and had ‘another vision than that of all the world [which] is very rare.’ But if Picasso is the modernist ‘king’ of visual portraiture, Stein is the ‘queen’ of an inverted vision of verbal portraiture, which is equally rare; ‘I was alone in understanding [Picasso],’ Stein stresses, ‘perhaps because I was expressing the same things in literature.’ 49 The variations of inverted parallelisms or rhetorical ‘chiasms’ that characterise ‘If I told Him’ in the first six lines—‘If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.’—is mirrored by the dancers in Shutters Shut whose synchronised movements mirror each other chiasmatically in inverted parallels that are almost ‘exactly resembling.’ 50 As mentioned earlier, Merleau-Ponty also uses the notion of the ‘chiasm’ as a key figure in The Visible and the Invisible. As we are all caught up in the flesh of the world as both perceiving and perceived beings, the structure of all experience is an intertwined ‘chiasm,’ indicating an event that is neither a complete separation nor a complete unity between mute perception and speech, the sentient and the sensible. Rather, it is that ‘general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea.’ 51
It is because Shutters Shut, like Stein’s portrait, unfolds in this usually unperceived crossover space that it seems at once absurd and truthful. As one journalist put it, this ‘dance of gestures’ was ‘making sense in the same way its text score, Gertrude Stein’s “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” does: not at all, and completely.’ 52 ‘Mean[ing] names without naming them,’ in a truly Steinian manner the dancers are literally moving through the écart, the ‘eternal dehiscence’ 53 and temporal space in which hyperdialectic is inscribed, where purely gestural meaning and language meaning cross. But, as ‘one thing is as important as another thing,’ so too are the processes of watching Shutters Shut and of reading Stein’s text tantamount to a passing through the écart that perpetually opens onto meaning and yet shuts out totalising meaning: ‘Shutters shut and shutters and so shutter shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutter shut and shutters and so.’ Underlining that ‘insistence is alive’ and that ‘exact resemblance,’ the mimetic representation known from nineteenth-century realism, bringing into being an ‘exact’ portrait of reality, can never be attained, the rhythm of Stein’s words is, as pointed out in ‘The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans,’ ‘endlessly the same and endlessly different’: ‘Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling.’ Knowing that the flow of perceptual consciousness is ‘remoulding us every moment’ and that we cannot escape the fate of perception, the ‘now’ of portraiture is always already a belated ‘not now’:
· Now.
· Not now.
· And now.
· Now.
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘hyperdialectic’ emphasises the importance of experience as praxis: experience is not ‘“in between” (dia) Being and beings, but rather “throughout” it . . . For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy moves toward and becomes the experience of the world.’ 54 Visualising Stein’s modernist project, expressing the ‘rhythm of the visible world’ and literally ‘acting within [the word],’ 55 Shutters Shut is the physical experience as the bodies live through the rhythm of Stein’s words. Just as the meaning of the portrait emerges through the different levels of ‘insistence’ placed on each word as Stein reads it—thus taking her bearings from Cézanne and allowing each part of the composition to be as important as the whole—so meaning emerges through the moving bodies. What we see is a Kafkaesque, topsy-turvy and ‘inverted’ world like that of Gregor in Metamorphosis. The NDT performance is truly a presentation of ‘the speaking word’ (la parole parlante), as Merleau-Ponty called it, ‘in which the significant intention is at the stage of coming into being.’ 56
Shutters Shut is the flesh of the world laid bare. The purely ‘fleshy’ communication of the dancers in Shutters Shut expresses beautifully how Stein’s portrait of Picasso pulls the protective layer off our everyday world of communication, opening onto to the silent but expressive life of the bare bodies inhabiting them. Thus, presenting us with an anti-intellectualism directed against static and formal aspects of knowledge, the aim of Stein’s modernist composition is to embrace language from within. Stripped of the ‘clothes’ of ready-made reality, the words of this empress of the modernist composition reveal, as Stein puts it, ‘how you are feeling inside you to the words that are coming out to be outside of you.’ 57
Rhythms of Hyperdialectic: Woolf
We begin again with Woolf’s waves in a sea: ‘Another general awakening.’ 58 ‘I am writing to a rhythm and not to plot,’ wrote Woolf about her play-poem. The rhythmic pulse of hyperdialectic is at work in Woolf’s The Waves, just like waves in a sea fold over themselves, break and vanish only to emerge again from below; ‘immanence and transcendence are intertwined with each other, and neither is given totally in any single experience.’ 59 The six essences in the play-poem are neither identical nor completely opposed; rather, they are free variations of the ‘flesh of the world,’ which expresses itself through the never-ending wave-like movement of mutual alterity and convergence.
I have used Merleau-Ponty’s notions of ‘interworld’ and ‘flesh’ to shed a new light on the ‘unsubstantial territory’ of The Waves, the crossover territory between seer and seen, and between touching and touched which is ‘not an obstacle between them; it is their means of communication.’ 60 Embracing pluralism and denying both dualism and monism, the structure of flesh, I have stressed, is chiasmatic, referring to a folding over of the sentient and the sensible, the very ‘there where the two movements cross, there where “there is” something.’ 61 Conveying the polyphony and polysemy of reality, Woolf’s book presents us with ‘an intersubjective field of different bodies, each with its own distinct but overlapping history.’ 62
Central to the tensions between reduction and expansion, mutual separation and interrelation in The Waves is the silent figure of Percival. It is through the death of Percival that Bernard rediscovers a more original vision of the ‘thing itself.’ At the time of Percival’s death, Bernard’s own child is born, making him sense the ‘two sides of [his] body’ and wonder: ‘Which is happiness?’ … ‘Which is pain?’ 63 This double feeling adds to our understanding of the pattern of ‘perpetual beginning’ at the heart of hyperdialectic. Percival’s death primarily leaves Bernard with a feeling of doubt, recalling Lily Briscoe’s paralysing doubts after Mrs Ramsay’s death in To the Lighthouse about how to make her first ‘mark’ on the blank canvas in front of her. 64 Like Lily’s sense of ‘nakedness’ when faced with the blank stare of her canvas, 65 Bernard is overwhelmed by a lack of creative ideas: ‘Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea.’ This doubt and despair, however, is combined with an experience of wonder and joy, making ‘the landscape return to [Bernard] . . . but with this difference.’ 66 Recalling the ‘snowfield’ in ‘On Being Ill,’ 67 Bernard now moves about in a fresh ‘wintry landscape,’ a ‘new world, never trodden,’ and ‘is unable to speak save in a child’s words of one syllable’: ‘So I went out. I saw the first morning he would never see—the sparrows were like toys dangled from a string by a child. To see without attachment, from the outside, and to realize their beauty in itself—how strange!’ 68 Objectification is put out of play and the wonder at presence takes over, ‘the strangest of all experiences’ 69 that is the condition of possibility of the ordinary. Once again, the doubt that Woolf presents us with ‘has its place in the realm of our perfect freedom’ 70 : doubt is not a dead end but a sign of openness to the world, a ‘dawn . . . some sort of renewal.’ 71
We begin again at the end of Woolf’s short story ‘An Unwritten Novel.’ Just a split second after the narrator realises that there are in fact no stories, that ‘Life’s bare as a bone,’ the visible world ‘floats [her] afresh!’ 72 The ‘white light’ that illuminates the ‘carnations’ and ‘chrysanthemums’ 73 of this short story’s end scene recalls the ‘chrysanthemums,’ and the ‘light upon the page’ that opened ‘The Mark on the Wall.’ 74 The light and whiteness bring to mind the creator’s ‘never-resting mind,’ 75 to borrow from Stevens, and the blankness of the writer’s new page.
It is often from behind a window, a threshold of perception, that a certain double vision of Woolf’s creative selves unfolds, where the perceiver moves towards and yet self-consciously withdraws from the world, standing neither quite inside nor outside their own position. While looking down upon the world ‘from an upper window,’ the narrator in A Room of One’s Own wonders how the human mind can both ‘separate itself from the people in the street,’ and ‘think with other people . . . as, for instance, in a crowd.’ 76 This brings us back to a moment in Mrs Dalloway where Clarissa ‘slice[s] like a knife through everything’ but is ‘at the same time . . . outside, looking on.’ 77 It is also from behind a window that Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse moves into and yet self-consciously away from her object, the rhythmic, flashing light of the lighthouse, constantly sending signals from the island to the mainland through the ‘stream’ of ‘life itself going on.’ 78 The six essences in The Waves are, on the one hand, part of this surging stream, but are, on the other hand, above it, looking down from their dry ‘islands of light.’ 79 Just as the moth in the essay ‘The Death of the Moth,’ which flutters about at ‘the bottom of the window-pane’ but fails to fly across it, 80 symbolises the creative artist’s simultaneous withdrawal from and connection with the world beyond its window, so Woolf’s moth-like essences fly about in endless circles of perpetual beginning; oscillating between moving towards and withdrawing from the world, they ‘expand, contract and then expand again.’ 81 This movement of withdrawal and return is, moreover, conveyed by their suspended present tense soliloquies, pulling us, the readers, in and then pushing us out. Much like Lily Briscoe, we are challenged to ‘[g]et that and start afresh, get that and start afresh’ and become ‘perpetual beginners.’ 82 Just as Stein, in ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ stresses that ‘writing should go on,’ 83 implying that the artistic process is a part of the whole, that it corresponds with the continuity of the world within which we exist, so Woolf points out in ‘Modern Fiction’: ‘All that we can do is keep on moving, now a little in this direction, now in that . . . It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon the vantage ground.’ 84
What emerges from my discussion, then, is that the impossibility of the complete reduction, that is to say, the impossibility of fully grasping what Woolf calls ‘the essential thing,’ should not to be taken as a ‘product of crisis’ or a sign of futility. Rather, it is the key to a ‘paradoxical interrogative openness’ 85 around which Woolf’s work gravitates. Beginnings are full of promise and the creator’s only hope in a modern, broken world—a world of what Bernard calls ‘odds and ends, sticks and straws, detestable little bits of wreckage, flotsam and jetsam, floating on the oily surface.’ 86 As Patrick McGee perceptively remarks, ‘Bernard’s discourse is the fin of The Waves: to exploit the bilingual pun in fin, it is le fin—the end, the aim, the conclusion’ 87 —an end which can, however, never offer closure but only a new opening. Thus Bernard attempts to express the world he experiences, to ‘ne[t] [it] under with a sudden phrase,’ like a ‘fin’ can be netted in ‘a waste of waters’: ‘“Fight! Fight!”. . . it is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together—this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit.’ 88 Setting this fight against ‘the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again’ of a horizon of continuity, which is too ‘gigantic’ to be fully ‘coax[ed] into words,’ 89 Woolf directly expresses the rejection of totalisation and returns to her own beginning—her own lifelong quest to express a pre-linguistic ‘fin . . . far out.’
Stevens’s Never-Ending Meditation
For Wallace Stevens, ‘the central poem, is the poem of the whole, / The poem of the composition of the whole,’ a ‘composition’ in which every ‘poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res and not about it.’ 90 Being ‘Part of the res,’ Stevens’s poems call attention to ‘a total double-thing,’ 91 which has much in common with the ‘double nature’ of both Merleau-Ponty’s hyperdialectic and Derrida’s deconstruction, philosophies that remains aware of but ‘can never recapture the pre-reflective faith.’ 92 Stevens’s ‘Notes’ in ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,’ signifying both the musical notes of his ‘Supreme Fiction,’ his poetry, and the note-taking phase of aesthetic production, lie in the perpetual movement ‘toward a Supreme Fiction,’ in between ‘an original past, a past that has never been a present’ and what is still to become. 93 Like Stein’s ‘buttons’ and Woolf’s ‘marks’—the ‘mark’ as creative starting point in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and Lily Briscoe’s first mark on her blank canvas—Stevens’s poetic ‘notes’ are fissures that simultaneously divide and join, bringing to light the passage of creative production itself—that fertile passage between pre-reflective intentionality (the ‘first idea’) and articulation; between the ‘poem of the idea’ and ‘the poem of the words.’ 94 Double in nature, they open up a creative process while pointing back to the pre-communicative source of this creativity.
In the final stanza of ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’ the poet writes: ‘It is not in the premise that reality / Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses / A dust, a force that traverses a shade.’ 95 Poetry, Stevens taught us in Chapter 3, ‘has to be living.’ It has to reflect the ‘living’ experience of a world of perpetual change. Hence, ‘Supreme Fiction,’ which is part of the fluctuation of the whole of reality, can never be a ‘solid.’ Rather, it lies neither in the written nor the unwritten, but in the living movement between mute perception and words, and ongoing movement toward, unfinished and infinite, between ‘that ever-early candor’ of the ‘first idea’ and the ‘late plural’ of poetic trope. 96
So, ‘does the poet / Evade us, as in a senseless element?’ as ‘the poem goes from the poet’s gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again’? 97 From our discussion we can conclude that he does not. His poems’ emphasis on interaction between ‘ever-early candor’ and ‘late plural,’ leading the reader into an ‘a perspective that begins again,’ is neither ‘structureless, fluid, and volatile,’ 98 nor a sign of imaginative limitation, leaving the poetic self in isolation, despair or self-enclosure. On the contrary, it ‘satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning,’ suggesting that the poet’s domain is one of perpetual opening. 99 As Merleau-Ponty taught us, the impossibility of complete reduction becomes a philosophical theme and should not be taken as a dead end but as a means to an end. Similarly, in Stevens, the never-ending oscillations between ‘an immaculate beginning’ and ‘an immaculate end’ should not to be taken as a sign of futility but as a perpetual opening onto ‘the giant himself,’ 100 the infinite ground of expression. As ‘the partaker partakes of that which changes him,’ the self in Stevens is always in an implicit relation to a pregiven and infinite world of change; as ‘Sailing After Lunch’ reminds us, he is ‘a pupil of the gorgeous wheel,’ which turns and turns and is ‘part of the never-ending meditation / Part of the question that is a giant himself.’ This, Stevens asserts, is a ‘final good.’ 101
Readiness for Questionability: Kafka
Kafka’s Gregor Samsa awakes one morning and begins again but in an entirely new way. Our objective notions about experience and certainties of common sense are never rejected in Metamorphosis; rather, ‘because, precisely as the presuppositions of every thought, they are “taken for granted” and they pass unnoticed . . . we must abstain from them for a moment in order to awaken them and make them appear.’ 102 Thus, in Metamorphosis we scrutinise hitherto taken-for-granted familiarity. In Chapter 2, we were introduced to Gregor’s inverted world through a radical questioning. Responding to Husserl’s cry for ‘Back to the things themselves’ in his return to pre-theoretical ‘matters themselves,’ 103 Heidegger presents us with ‘authentic philosophizing’ through questionability, a countermovement to the Ruinanz of factic life, disclosing ‘a radically temporal thought enacted before the constructed regions of the objectification of being’ that is outside the frame of common time. 104 Heidegger’s readiness for questionability as an encouragement to openness anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s hyperdialectic. Patrick Burke writes:
This primitive interrogation of wonder is the strangest of all experiences because it is openness upon the strange. It is strangeness itself. Merleau-Ponty resumes Claudel’s analysis of the strange as it appears in banal questions as ‘What time is it?,’ ‘Where am I?’ As long as we feel ‘at home,’ as long as one consults a watch or a map for the ‘answer,’ these questions are not strange. But there are moments when the sense of home becomes infected by a kind of disease . . . , when the clock and the map suddenly become conspicuous in themselves, stand out against a background in terms of which they appear to have been arbitrarily placed, when the questions find themselves animated by a deeper questioning. . . . These are the questions of the sick or threatened individual beyond the frontiers of the familiar world who, wanting to ‘situate his levels and measure his standards’ in order to dissipate the strangeness, ends up increasing it. For there is no end to the process, there is no absolute dimension in terms of which everything else can be determined or measured; and so the imagination, in search of totality, finds itself flooded by something wild and unseen, by the simultaneity and eternity of everything, by an abyssal presence, both visible and invisible, out of which (the imagination) arises but which it cannot frame. 105
The abyssal in this sense, Burke explains, is ‘the most rudimentary openness at the core of perception,’ 106 the ‘wonder’ before the world that Fink spoke of and that is the most exact formulation of the reduction. 107 ‘What has happened to me?’; ‘Will you give a true account of all this?’ Gregor Samsa’s unheard questions, unlocking the door of the rabbit hole through which we fall with him down an ‘abyssal presence,’ are questions that open onto ‘brute being,’ 108 a wild and unframed experience. But I primarily read Kafka’s novella in dialogue with Heidegger, not Merleau-Ponty. The former’s re-evaluation of phenomenology in terms of questioning does not offer an exploration of reversibility between the sentient and sensible that is the structure of Merleau-ponty’s flesh. Significantly, the Samsa family, trapped in everyday habits, have lost ‘all the sense of their difference and that of others.’ 109 Unlike Gregor, they have lost the ability to question and to wonder, which is only made possible by the reversibility of the flesh. Gregor’s own questioning is no longer heard, just like he is no longer really seen. What Kafka shows us is that without reversibility, without true intersubjectivity, humans become what Hannah Arendt calls ‘tool[s] of active destruction.’ 110 Yet, to turn the everyday, banal world on its head and scrutinise its ‘necessity,’ while dangling upside down from the ceiling, offers a brief moment of light and a glimmer of hope. Another such moment occurs when Gregor hears his sister playing the violin—‘Was he an animal, when music had such an effect upon him?’ 111 —which, like Proust’s little phrase, ‘doubles up lights and sounds from beneath,’ illuminating an ‘opening of a dimension that can never again be closed.’ This opening residing within Kafka’s bleak tale points to a rhythm that not only exists in musical phrases but that ‘lies at the origin of all art’ and corresponds with ‘the rhythm of being.’ 112 Herein lies the potential for counter-ruination and self-recollection.
‘Man is Half a Prisoner, Half Borne on Wings’: Klee, Hopkins
Painting always begins again, according to Klee, through some ‘primordial cell set in motion by fertilisation.’ 113 The idea of motion is foundational for Klee’s philosophy:
Movement is inherent in all becoming, and before the work is, it must become, just as the world became before it was, after the words, ‘In the beginning God created,’ and must go on becoming before it is (will be) in the future. 114
Klee’s angels, we saw, are unfinished, forever in a ‘transitional realm.’ There is, however, a one-winged creature from Klee’s earlier work that seems to bring together the paradox of his intellectual approach and that is the etching ‘The Hero with the Wing’ (‘Der Held mit dem Flügel’) from 1905. 115 This half-figure is commented upon in one of Klee’s diary entries:
Berne, January 1905. The tragicomic hero with the wing, a modern-antique Don Quixote. Unlike the divine creatures born with only one angel’s wing, this man is forever trying to fly. He keeps breaking his arms and legs, but that does not prevent him from clinging to his idea of flight. I wished to capture the contrast between his monumental-solemn attitude and his already ruinous state. 116
In 1922, Klee reflects upon a similar theme: ‘The source of man’s tragedy is the contradiction between his physical weakness and his ideal ability to measure both the earth and the cosmos at will. This conflict between power and weakness is the dichotomy of human existence. Man is half a prisoner, half borne on wings.’ 117 We are reminded of such ‘neo-heroic’ modernist figures as Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, both of whom fail more than they succeed but remain some of the most human figures of the modernist period. We are also reminded of the doubleness and necessary moment of ‘buckling’ in Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover,’ in which the catcher of the flight of a bird was both ‘impassioned [passionelle]’ and passive, in possession of his desires for complete creative freedom and flight and yet dispossessed because of pre-established significations. The ‘living’ art of Hopkins’s poetry, I noted, is a form of parole parlante, an operant and fertile language in the making. This art can only be living if there is a hyperdialectical coming and going between sedimented or ‘constituted’ language and that operative language that is an ‘unthought,’ 118 continually criss-crossing the body-subject and world, the pre-reflective and the reflective, without subsuming one by the other. 119
‘What then is Freedom?’ asks Merleau-Ponty in the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception. It is found exactly in this interlacing of the passive and the impassioned:
To be born is to be simultaneously born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted. In the first relation we are solicited, in the second we are open to an infinity of possibilities. Thus, there is never determinism and never an absolute choice; I am never a mere thing and never a bare consciousness. . . . We choose the world and the world chooses us. 120
It is in the reciprocal openness between the world and the individual, and between the creative and the sedimented, that freedom is found. And perhaps this is what it looks like: a poet who continues to catch the epiphanic moment regardless of the buckling under of that moment; a one-winged hero refusing to give up the dream of flight despite his fragile body’s broken limbs.
From our first encounter with tempting apples through creative flight with birds, the hesitation of earthly angels and the intersubjectivity of humans, we have reached that ‘unlimited’ and ‘strange domain to which interrogation . . . gives access’ and ‘once we have entered this strange domain one does not see how there could be any question of leaving it.’ 121 It is the domain of flesh and primordial faith lying at the heart of modernist texts and artworks—a domain that never ceases to question itself and returns us to the fruit of knowledge but in a secular way, designating the wonder of creativity itself. The phenomenological lesson at the end of this modernist adventure, braiding together strands of literature, philosophy and art history, is that we exist as both pre-reflective and reflective beings simultaneously; both open to the world and free to influence change while shaped by the pre-established meanings of that same world. This is why the fine balance between rigour and freedom in approaching the modernist text or artwork remains so important. Our final image is that of a one-winged neo-heroic angel-man, ‘condemned to being-at-the-world-from-within-it,’ 122 who will always fail to fly and yet continues to question and choose his world within this world.
Notes
1.
Husserl, Ideas, 29.
2.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 178.
3.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxviii.
4.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt,’ in Sense and Non-Sense, 18.
5.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxviii.
6.
Cahn, Paul Cézanne, 125.
7.
Cézanne, Cézanne’s Letters, 327.
8.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 214.
9.
Husserl, Ideas, 198.
10.
Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 161.
11.
Bourne-Taylor and Mildenberg, ‘Introduction: Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond,’ in Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, 10.
12.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,’ 407.
13.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxv.
14.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,’ 405.
15.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxviii.
16.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 52, 103.
17.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.
18.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94, 95, 94.
19.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxv.
20.
See Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, xv, 62–63. See also Rodolphe Gasché, Inventions of Difference (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), 33–35.
21.
Len Lawlor, ‘The Need for Survival: The Logic of Writing in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,’ Tympanum 4 (2000), accessed 20 January 2016, http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/4/lawlor.html. See also Lawlor, ‘Verflechtung,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ix-xxxvii.
22.
Gary Brent Madison, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: La différEnce,’ in M.C. Dillon, ed., Écart and Différance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997), 104.
23.
Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, 58.
24.
Ibid., 74.
25.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 8.
26.
James, The Principles of Psychology, 234.
27.
Ibid., 304.
28.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 242.
29.
Ibid., Ixxx.
30.
Ibid., 38–39.
31.
Kaushik, Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty, 4.
32.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94–95; my italics.
33.
As M.C. Dillon explains, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that ‘it is possible to do perceptual justice to both history and perception without lapsing into the framework of dualistic ontology,’ in M.C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 213.
34.
See Jacques Taminiaux, ‘From Dialectic to Hyperdialectic,’ Research in Phenomenology 10.1 (1980): 76.
35.
Galen A. Johnson, ‘Merleau-Ponty and Kant’s Third Critique: The Beautiful and the Sublime,’ in Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception, 50.
36.
Hugh J. Silverman, ‘Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Interpreting Hegel,’ Research in Phenomenology 7 (1977): 223, 222.
37.
Patrick Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, eds. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 90.
38.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 94, 92.
39.
Diana Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 141.
40.
Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 204.
41.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxxiv.
42.
See my article ‘Seeing Fine Substances Strangely: Phenomenology in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,’ Studia Phaenomenologica VIII (2008): 259–282.
43.
In Ideas, Husserl writes that in intentional experience ‘the subject “directs” itself … towards an intentional object’ (121).
44.
Stein, Tender Buttons, 3, 4, 6, 38.
45.
The cushion covers, boxes, fruit peel or concealing garments in ‘A Box,’ ‘Orange,’ ‘A Long Dress’ and ‘A Substance in a Cushion’ in Stein’s Tender Buttons refer to our usual mode of discourse, a form of clothing in itself, which Stein’s radical compositions loosen, so that the essence of the thing can show itself.
46.
Kaushik, Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty, 12.
47.
See the NDT production at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK2UCuVLi_E, accessed 20 January 2016. I want to thank Vanessa Mildenberg for reminding me of this performance.
48.
Gertrude Stein, ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I Am, 218. Gertrude Stein’s ‘If I Told Him’ is quoted with permission from Peter Owen Publishers.
49.
Stein, Picasso, 50, 16, 43.
50.
For more on the phenomenology of dance, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).
51.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 264, 139.
52.
Claudia La Rocco, ‘The Fires of Youth on a Restless Night,’ Dance Review: Nederlands Dans Theater II, in The New York Times (10 April, 2009), accessed 15 April 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/arts/dance/11neder.html
53.
Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ 97.
54.
Silverman, ‘Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: Interpreting Hegel,’ 222.
55.
Gertrude Stein, ‘A Transatlantic Interview 1946,’ 18.
56.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 197.
57.
Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I am, 123.
58.
Woolf, The Waves, 247.
59.
Berman, ‘The Hyperdialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,’ 412.
60.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 135.
61.
Ibid., 94–95; my italics.
62.
Lisa Guenther, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Sense of Sexual Difference,’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 16.2 (2011): 29.
63.
Woolf, The Waves, 219.
64.
Lily Briscoe feels that ‘the urgency of the moment always missed its mark’ and that ‘there was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas, and actually taking the brush and making the first mark’: ‘But … Where to begin? … at what point to make the first mark?’ See Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 240, 213.
65.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 215.
66.
Woolf, The Waves, 238, 239, 237.
67.
Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, 46.
68.
Woolf, The Waves, 239, 220.
69.
Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ 93.
70.
Husserl, Ideas, 107.
71.
Woolf, The Waves, 247.
72.
Woolf, ‘An Unwritten Novel,’ in Selected Short Stories, 36.
73.
Ibid., 36.
74.
Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall,’ in Selected Short Stories, 53.
75.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 194.
76.
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 96.
77.
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 10.
78.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 228.
79.
Ibid., 229.
80.
Woolf, ‘The Death of the Moth,’ in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, 180.
81.
Woolf, The Waves, 76.
82.
Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 261.
83.
Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar,’ in Look at Me Now and Here I am, 130.
84.
Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction,’ 5.
85.
Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ 89.
86.
Woolf, The Waves, 225.
87.
McGee, ‘Woolf’s Other,’ 242.
88.
Woolf, The Waves, 225, 157, 225.
89.
Ibid., 247, 175.
90.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 442, 473.
91.
Ibid., 472.
92.
Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, 61.
93.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 252.
94.
Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 174.
95.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 489.
96.
Ibid., 382.
97.
Ibid., 396.
98.
Theodore Sampson, A Cure of the Mind: The Poetics of Wallace Stevens (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2000), 170.
99.
Stevens, Collected Poems, 382, 528, 382; my italics.
100.
Ibid., 465.
101.
Ibid., 392,121, 405.
102.
Merlea-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.
103.
Luchte, Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, 31.
104.
Ibid., 11.
105.
Burke, ‘Listening at the Abyss,’ 93; my italics.
106.
Ibid., 94.
107.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Ixxvii.
108.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 57, 97, 110, 211, 168.
109.
Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 68.
110.
Arendt, Reflections on Literature, 101.
111.
Kafka, Metamorphosis, 53.
112.
Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature and Music after Merleau-Ponty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 123.
113.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, 6.
114.
Ibid., 355.
115.
See Grohmann, Paul Klee, 108.
116.
Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, 162.
117.
Klee, Notebooks, Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, 407.
118.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 118, 119.
119.
Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, 142.
120.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 480–481.
121.
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 140, 152.
122.
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, ‘Translators’ Introduction,’ in Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, xxvi.