PHENOMENOLOGY AND AESTHETICS

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1 PHENOMENOLOGY AND AESTHETICS

2 ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME XXXII Editor-in-Chief: ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Belmont, Massachusetts a sequel to: Vol. XII : The Mirror of Man in Literature Vol. XVIII : The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition Vol. XIX : Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: The Sea Vol. XXIII : Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: The Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination Vol. XXVIII: The Elemental Passions of the Soul in the Human Condition Vol. XXX : Ingardeniana II, and Other Approaches to Aesthetics, Literature and the Fine Arts

3 PHENOMENOLOGY AND AESTHETICS APPROACHES TO COMP ARA TIVE LITERATURE AND THE OTHER ARTS Homages to A -T. Tymieniecka Edited by MARLIES KRONEGGER Michigan State University Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON

4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phenomenoldgy and Aesthetics / edited by Marlies Kronegger. p. cm. -- (Analecta Husserllana ; v. 32) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Phenomeno logy in 1 i terature. 2. Phenomeno logy and 1 i terature. 3. Phenomenology. 4. Aesthetics. 1. Kronegger, Marl ies, II. Series. B3279.H94A129 vol. 32 [PN49J 142'.7 s--dc20 [809' J ISBN -13: I e-isbn-13: DOl: / Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press Sold and distributed in the U.SA. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands Printed on acid-free paper All rights reserved 1991 by Kluwer Academic Publishers Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1991 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS THE THEME / Vindicating the Enjoyment of Literature MARLIES KRONEGGER / Phenomenology and Aesthetics - New Approaches to Comparative Literature and the Other Arts: Introduction ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix xi xv PART ONE THE LIFE SIGNIFICANCE OF LITERATURE A. History and Phenomenological Literary Theory WOLFGANG WITTKOWSKI / The Concept of Autonomous Art and Literature Within Their Historical Context 3 B. Time and Description in Fiction W AL TER BIEMEL / On the Manifold Significance of Time in the Novel 17 MARJORIE H. HELLERSTEIN / One Autobiographer's Reality: Robbe-Grillet 39 PETER MORGAN / Heidegger and English Poetry 49 MICHAEL E. MORIARTY / Expressionist Signs and Metaphors in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time 61 PART TWO PHENOMENOLOGY AND LITERATURE: THE HUMAN CONDITON A. The Primeval Sources of Literary Creation CHRISTOPHER S. SCHREINER / Faulkner/Levinas: The Vivacity of Disaster v 71

6 vi T ABLE OF CONTENTS ANDRE A. ACIMAN / The Recursive Matrix: Jealousy and the Epistemophilic Crisis 87 WILLIAM S. HANEY II / Phenomenology and the Structure of Desirability 103 B. The Experience of the Other ROSEMARIE KIEFFER / The Voice of Luxembourg Poets 115 E. IMAFEDIA OKHAMAFE / The Ramatoulaye-Aissatou Styles in Contemporary African Feminism( s) 131 MARK W. ANDREWS / Nature and Civilization as Metaphor in Michel Rio's Dreaming Jungles 149 HARLAN R. PATTON / Problems of Literary Expression in Les Nourritures Terrestres 157 ARON AJI / Lucie Sebetka: The Phenomenon of Abandonment in Milan Kundera's The Joke 165 PART THREE AESTHETIC RECEPTION A. Life-Reverberation and Aesthetic Enjoyment MU YUN LING AND JESSE T. AIRAUDI / "Essential Witnesses": Imagism's Aesthetic "Protest" and "Rescue" via Ancient Chinese Poetry 181 BABETTE E. BABICH / Towards a Post-Modern Hermeneutic Ontology of Art: Nietzschean Style and Heideggerian Truth 195 CYNTHIA RUOFF / Le Veritable Saint Genest: From Text to Performance 211 B. The Existential Significance of Aesthetic Enjoyment THOMAS RYBA / Husserl, Fantasy and Possible Worlds 227 ROBERT R. ELLIS / Phenomenological Ontology and Second Person Narrative: The Case of Butor and Fuentes 239 BERNADETTE PROCHASKA / Modifications: A Reading of Auden and Iser 249

7 T ABLE OF CONTENTS vii C. Aesthetic Reception and the Other Arts JOSEPH KRAUSE / A Study of Visual Form in Literary Imagery 259 SITANSU RAY / Indian and Western Music: Phenomenological Comparison from Tagore's Viewpoint 267 INDEX OF NAMES 273

8 THE THEME VINDICATING THE ENJOYMENT OF LITERATURE This collection of essays presented at one of our conferences continues the research program in which we are unraveling the deepest impulses, tendencies and inspirations that animate the literary work. The present studies only vaguely refer to our own systematic views about the ways in which literature and the fine arts spring forth from the interplay between the creative imagination and the proficiencies of the Human Condition. Their main thrust is to inquire into the ways in which the literary work can be approached. This inquiry, however, exemplifies in its main lines our chief contention, the one which I have been forcefully advocating for some two decades in lectures and studies published in our book series. In my most recent monograph ("The Elemental Passions of the Soul and the Life-Significance of Literature," Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXVIII, 1989) I substantiated this contention in extenso. First, it is through marveling/wonderment that art, and in particular literature, takes off and, second, that it is through aesthetic enjoyment - as one of the primogenital factors of the Human Condition - that literature, and the fine arts are generated.* The conclusion is obvious: it is in enjoyment also that lies the key to their being received and appreciated by the reader/spectator. This is not the place to dwell on the innumerable ways in which aesthetic enjoyment is ciphered in the life-significance of the literary work; we refer the reader to our above-mentioned study. What, however, is manifest in the different approaches to literary works and the varied points of fascination to be found in them as displayed in the present collection is that though techniques of interpretation and hermeneutics possess some validity in that they help dissect complexities and can enhance understanding by throwing side lights on the make-up of the particular literary work, it is not intellectual interest and the need to satisfy curiosity about structural puzzles or abstruse linguistic games that * Cf. A-T. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life, Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Book I, Kluwer, 1989, and, The Passions of The Soul and The Ontopoiesis of Culture: The Life Significance of Literature (Logos and Life, Book III), ix

9 x THE THEME ultimately carry the work and it is not the quest for these that should inform any interpreter who would truly convey the meaning of the literary work to the reader or audience. The literary work is not meant to be a game played with words, concepts, historical puns. It calls for enjoyment at the level of its essential concern: the vision of life that it crystallizes. The royal approach to it is through the channel of the direct spontaneous enjoyment it gives or is apt to sustain. This aesthetic enjoyment is analogous to the reader/spectator's life-enjoyment as he/she salvages meaning within his/her own framework of life experiences. Thus, the uniquely personal, spontaneous/resonance of the work with the experience of the recipient is the surest guide to the retrieval of the life-significance of literature. The large spectrum of personal fascinations manifested in the present collection shows how the literary work stands out and becomes alive within the perspectives of each of us. It is aesthetic enjoyment that gives us access to these perspectives. Through their opening the lifesignificance of a work and the vision of life it intimates are glimpsed. Filtered through literature this vision enters, expands, and enriches our lives and our very beingness, for though only glimpsed there it is seen the more profoundly for being woven into the tapestry that first caught our eye. The master weaver of tales can thus inform a whole culture, can inspire age upon age. It is just this vision that a focus upon structures and techniques of any sort on linguistics will miss. ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

10 MARLIES KRONEGGER PHENOMENOLOGY AND AESTHETICS - NEW APPROACHES TO COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND THE OTHER ARTS Introduction Our investigations show us ways of orchestrating human existence and aesthetic enjoyment. Aesthetic enjoyment and phenomenology imply one another. They take us away from sclerosed, jaded artifices of literary analyses based on artificial forms, structures, and devices, and bring us back into the real world of all there is alive. In opposition to the view that sees the literary text basically as a system of meanings, A-T. Tymieniecka and our investigators propose that it is a specific pattern of life-significance, universal and uniquely personal at the same time, that matters. In the drama of being, each life is an open and unfinished book in which the unfolding and perfecting universe has recorded its cosmic biography. Each life is at a given time a summation, a living history of ebbs and flows of the ocean of being. So situated, each individual is caught between the cosmic self and social mould and toils to break out and away in order to further cultivate his or her cosmic heritage. Creative subjectivity cannot awaken itself except in communion with Nature. It is not enough to consider the mutual entanglement of Nature and man in relation to aesthetic feeling or the perception of beauty. What matters to us, is the mutual entanglement of Nature and man, the coming together of World and Self, in relation to artistic creation. Then, we truly enter our subject matter, asking ourselves with Tymieniecka, what is the creative act? The papers presented here show why the aesthetic significance of life, which enters into the existential self-interpretation of the human being, is at its roots poetic. With Tymieniecka we realize that the creative process is not limited to literature, the arts and thought, but is as wide as life.! Creativity in literature, the arts, and thought is part of the creativity of life, a transforming factor of life, making us participate in a whole, a unity, of everything there is alive. We are born together with everything that exists - with all that is alive. Creativity is the irreducible element of the human condition, the Xl

11 xii MARLIES KRONEGGER freedom to transcend our ties to Nature and the conditions of our own life world achieving the full potential of human personality. Her distinct, unique voice sustains the reader, teaching us nothing, except the significance of life, a means to life more abundant, more immediate and spontaneous, taking us on a voyage of discovery - a voyage of acquiring a total, rather than a partial view of the universe. Tymieniecka's life-world conception challenges Husserl in the evolution of its forms, and lays the cornerstones for a specifically human self-individualization-in-existence of which the creative act is the vortex. It is the creative orchestration of human existence and of everything there is alive, which is Tymieniecka's path in order to become the path herself. In her opening lecture of the Symposium she knew how to lift philosophy and literature out of time and space, and how to integrate them into the whole cosmic process. There is one element of human experience which remains almost identical, in origin and effect, whether it is turned into poetry, painting or music. It is.the experience which Tymieniecka has called a moment of vision. The metaphysics underlying her vision is an aesthetic and unifying experience, seeing all things in the cosmos as part of a vast general order in the act of creation. Vision is the spontaneous response of the poetic imagination to the challenges which life puts on man. Her poetic approach to Nature and the Human Condition relates to the primacy of the poetic sense over the intelligible sense. The poetic sense is the first epiphany of the creative intuition, imaginatio creatrix. The marvel of great creations is their radiant communicativity by virtue of the poetic sense, a charge of poetic knowledge and free, autonomous existence expressing the inner song of the work, the soul of the poet, artist and musician. We are seeking the Human Condition in the plenitude of works of the mind in which every tone of the past raises an echo in us today. Aesthetic experience of a work of art takes place in the orientation to its aesthetic effect, in an understanding that is pleasure, or rather "aesthetic enjoyment" in Tymieniecka's terms. Aesthetic enjoyment occurs before there is cognition and interpretation of the significance of the work. It was Kant who raised the aesthetic to an authority of mediation between nature and freedom, sensuousness and reason, yet also denied any cognitive function to the subjective aesthetic judgment. The German poet Goethe distinguished three kinds of readers: one which enjoys without judgment, a third that judges without enjoyment,

12 INTRODUCTION xiii and the one in the middle which judges as he enjoys and enjoys as he judges. This latter kind really reproduces the work of art anew. The division of our Symposium into three sections is justified by the fact that phenomenology, from Husserl, Heidegger, Moritz Geiger, Ingarden, in Germany and Poland, Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, E. Levinas in France, Unamuno in Spain, and Tymieniecka, in the United States, have revealed striking coincidences in trying to answer the following questions: What is the philosophical vocation of literature? Does literature have any significance for our lives? Why does the lyric moment, present in all creative endeavors, in myth, dance, plastic art, ritual, poetry, lift the human life to a higher and authentically human level of the existential experience of man? Our investigations answer our fundamental inquiry: What makes a literary work a work of art? What makes a literary work a literary work, if not aesthetic enjoyment? As much as the formation of an aesthetic language culminates in artistic creation, the formation of a philosophical language lives within the orbit of creative imagination. In sum, our investigation focuses, first, upon the ramified workings of the poetic imagination; second, we seek to exfoliate the Human Condition, expanding our metaphysical vision, a most intimate penetration into the nature of things as we participate in their constructive becoming; third, it seems that words and sounds of a poem, or the rhythm of dance, are only the small, visible aspect of a far greater mystery that lies beneath and beyond the audible and visible. The aesthetic language of writers functions in harmony with their feelings and ideas, reflecting the primal process of life which is holistic and formative. It is not imprisoned in a linear uni-verse of theories and grammar, but free and open to an interdependent world. Aesthetic pleasure and phenomenology imply one another; they are interrelated. We make poetic sensibility and intuition the heart of our quest. In the open field of purposeful experience, our commitment is not to conquer the world, but to explore and find ourselves, to restore the self we are. The specific objective of our Symposium is to establish the phenomenological basis for aesthetic reception, and demonstrate the force, originality, and international impact phenomenological aesthetics has had on East and West. The present collection of phenomenological investigations includes the creative quests of both philosophy and literature to reveal, interpret, and communicate the enigma of human existence. In this light, both disciplines are a creative function of

13 xiv MARLIES KRONEGGER humanity, and both at their best not only enrich but enhance the highest level of human functioning, wherein creator interprets the self and receiver of said interpretation is self-illuminated. NOTE 1 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Logos and Life. Creative Experience and the Critique of Reason, Book I. Dordrecht, Boston, London, Tokyo: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988, and, The Passions of The Soul and The Ontopoiesis of Culture: The Life Significance of Literature (Logos and Life, Book III), 1990.

14 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We deeply appreciate the financial and academic support of Michigan State University, and especially of the following departments: Romance and Classical Languages, English, Humanities, Philosophy, Music, Religion, and Lifelong Education. To Professor George P. Mansour, and Provost David K. Scott our gratitude for their enlightening opening addresses. Thanks to our respondents, Profs. Mechthild Cranston (Comparative Literature), Surjit S. Dulai (Humanities), Kenneth D. Harrow (English), Bruce L. Miller (Philosophy), Jeanne Nelson (Poet), F r a n ~ Ravaux o i s e (Romance Languages and Literatures), Richard T. Peterson (Philosophy), Kurt Schild (Linguistics), A. C. Goodon (English), Joseph I. Donohoe (Romance and Classical Languages), Eldon and Beth Vanliere (Art) for their vital contributions. Most cordial thanks for about 120 books received from authors in Luxembourg, a gift to the Michigan State University Main Library. Professor Marlies Kronegger, the president of The International Society of Phenomenology and Literature, an organ of The World Phenomenology Institute, has inspired, organized and directed this beautiful conference with skill and gracefulness. She deserves our profound appreciation. A-T. T. xv

THE AESTHETICS OF ENCHANTMENT IN THE FINE ARTS

THE AESTHETICS OF ENCHANTMENT IN THE FINE ARTS ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH VOLUME LXV Editor-in-Chief: ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological