CONTENTS
Preface 000
Music, Myth and Psychology in Thomas Mann 000
Thomas Mann and Philosophy 000
Truth and Existence in T. S. Eliot 000
Rilke and the Birth of the Earth 000
Valéry, or on Construction 000
Proust's Man 000
PREFACE
While it is true that it is not possible to think without intuiting, it is also true that philosophy is in some way implicit in art. It is certainly legitimate, in fact necessary, to ask oneself what are the first principles--or the fundamental methodological principles--of a philosophy. But philosophy is not intellectualistic abstraction, and certainly it would not have arisen if man did not represent existence as [in?] image. Now, since to see is already in some way to know [conoscere e sapere], art, in its own form, offers us that initial vision which will make the philosophical construction of concepts possible.
The images of art, because they implicitly contain a philosophical vision, are myths. Thus, to say that philosophy is born from art, is to say that philosophy is born from myth. Isn't this precisely the fundamental teaching of Vico's work?
The philosopher who wants to hide behind his aprioristic constructions can reject the origin, so human, of his philosophy, but can not refuse to think, and thus to express himself. But expression is already myth, because myth, symbol is the word. The problem is then one of distinguishing philosophy and art. This is again a problem of expression, as well as a problem of logic, and therefore the problem of the logical principles of discourse, which Aristotle first posed. The very enunciation of such logical principles, however, can not avoid form, namely symbolic expression--not even mathematical logic can avoid symbols. As a consequence, once we are in the realm of discourse, nobody can prevent pure logical truth, which is to be discovered as truth in the coherence of the principles one enunciates, to be myth and image, even before being thought.
Thus philosophy appears here as a logical development of myth, as a logical verification of a mythological vision of the world, which obviously does not exclude that it may appear also under other guises--as critical speculation on science, for example. Perhaps philosophy remains only mythological vision if it remains dogmatic metaphysics and does not critically examine the gnosiological instruments it uses, if indeed it does not become method and does not clarify its own methodological principles. Can a philosophy of method renounce any metaphysics, and, by considering it as myth, hand it over to poetry?
It is well known that philosophy as method is the methodology of history, or of science, or experience (in the sense of Erlebnis), or life. In other words, it provides us with the categories necessary to the understanding of the various forms of culture and of so-called "reality." But what meaning can a methodological principle possibly have, which is not followed by its application? Would it not be a transcendent, metaphysical, dogmatic principle? The categories of aesthetics, therefore, are valuable insofar as they are applied to art. Method makes no sense if it is not filled in by experience, just as thinking makes no sense if it does not express itself in symbols and in words. This is precisely why one can say that method is transcendental: because, while, as a principle, it is independent of experience, it can only however be applied to experience and expressed in the word. Otherwise, it remains abstract, empty, transcendent.
The methodological categories of aesthetics are thus the principles which allow us to comprehend art. But they are also the ideal lines along which art is constituted and formed. Within art, they are operant categories, and thus they are felt by the artist as metaphysical principles, as the focal points of his vision of the world, and thus as philosophy. It must be noted that the aesthetic category is valid as method insofar as, like any ideal, it operates within art and constitutes its essence. How else could such category comprehend, as it should, the essence of art? Aesthetics is thus mirrored in art, the methodological principle in the metaphysical principle (since metaphysics becomes thus the concrete action of the methodology), philosophy in poetry, just as thinking is mirrored in the image, and only in the image it can express itself.
These considerations have guided me through the study, from the point of view of philosophy, of the writers and poets on whom I am presenting the essays in this book. We shall see how the metaphysics of the poets--precisely because they do not present themselves as logical constructions, are less "closed" than the dogmatic metaphysics of the philosophers--give body and life to the methodological principle of the transcendental, and how the latter, without abdicating its function--in fact, because it is used as method--is filled with concreteness.
These essays, therefore, have a philosophical rather than a literary quality. Their intention is to clarify why a work of art contains in itself, implicitly, a metaphysics which is not dogmatic, and why such metaphysics can not be, even in the infinite variability of its tone and form, anything but a metaphysics. Indeed, it is the image of the methodological principle itself, which, posited by philosophy as category, or as connection among categories, operates within the aesthetic world as operating principle, or is one prefers, as spiritual ideal. I have already had the opportunity of introducing this principle as principle of being and non-being, which is to say, given the identification of non-being as existence, as dialectical principle between existence and reality, between existence and truth. As a transcendental principle it is purely formal, but since the transcendental requires application in order not to remain trapped in its own transcendent abstraction, it is--as operating principle--a true and proper creative principle (in the sense in which the third hypothesis in Plato's Parmenides appeared to me "creative"), or at least a principle felt as such from within the concrete experience which is constituted according to its form. It is the principle of the metamorphosis of nothing[ness] into being, of feeling into form, of potentiality into act[ion], of existence into truth. It is the principle that Mann, heir of the rich experience of romanticism, presents to us with the myth of Joseph. It is Eliot's myth of time's encounter with eternity; Rilke's vision of the birth of the earth; Valéry's constructive act [?]; Proust's re-conquering of man's eternity. After all it does not seem strange to me that truth which reveals itself in art as vision and as form be the truth of philosophy.
Milan, February 20, 1947.
E.P.
MUSIC, MYTH AND PSYCHOLOGY IN THOMAS MANN
Thomas Mann and music, that is Thomas Mann and Wagner.[1] No other designation is possible. In his essay on Wagner, Mann recalls Wagner's time in Paris. Renoir and impressionism do not touch him--to him they are the voices of another era. We can say something similar about Mann: contemporary music is being born all around him, but has no effect on him. 1911 marks the birth of Petrouchka, but Stravinski's fresh sonority is to Mann as Renoir is to Wagner.
Mann is a nineteenth century writer living in the twentieth century. One of the most consistent themes in Mann is this: his awareness of belonging to änother" world, of being a conclusion. And then?
We do not know. Mann always leaves us with a nostalgic theme, like the theme of "redemption by love" at the end of Götterdämmerung and of Der Zauberberg: "Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?." [The Magic Mountain, translated by H T Lowe-Porter. Vintage Books, p. 716. Translator's Note] One senses the tension of a new world which must be born, but always within the closed circle of a world that is setting. For Mann, Wagner is the most typical, the highest expression of the nineteenth century, and as in the triumph of Siegfried's Rhine Journey one could already foresee the structure of the Funeral March, so in Wagner is implicit the self-destruction of the nineteenth century, its last farewell. Precisely as the dark themes of decadence, which will inexorably lead the family to its ruin, already appear in the most salient moment of the Buddenbrooks' story--the moment of power. Perhaps, for Mann, this is a problem of perspective: the moment of triumph is the point which ushers in decadence, when one looks at it from the other side.
The atmosphere conjured up by Mann oscillates between hope and nostalgia. More precisely, it is at the same time hope and nostalgia. It is the need to take an experience to its most extreme consequences, because only in this way new roads will open, and new lands will appear against its tempestuous horizon. But it always and only a need. The need to conclude a past with the fatality of the contradictions which have embodied its glory is pressing and consuming. but it is compromised by its very intensity, which takes this need back to the world it wants to escape, and characterizes it as its most necessary, most representative manifestatuion.
Nineteenth century, Wagner, Triumph and decadence of the bourgeoisy, Umility and honesty of the bourgeoise type. The man of form, order, discipline. Wagner too, dominated by the duty of his work, indefatigable, pedantic, precise. Like the old Buddenbrook. But already Thomas Buddenbrook replaces the serene discipline of work with a conscious will of preservation, while Gerda abandons herself to music, to an "ambiguous" music, which for little Hanno will represent the end: Wagner. Because Wagner was not simply the honest bourgeoise worker: he loved luxury, the silk chamber robes, the salons decorated in Makart's taste (and one must say that his music echoes such taste). Wagner carried within the desire to escape, to run away from order and from daily work, the nostalgia for something exotic, ambiguous and undefinable, a well-known morbidity. This is Gerda's ambiguity, Hanno's illness, and will become later the world of Tonio Kröger, of Gustavo von Aschenbach, the world of the artist.
Art and illness, art and decadence, art and nobility. Goethe's bourgeoise balance, and Schiller's difficult hour. Schiller: a painful life, an art that kills life, an austere nobility, a purity yanked from obscure origins. Goethe, the man of the world, who reproached Schiller fopr his passion for the freedom of the soul, "this idea which killed him."[2] Opposition between Goethe's "spontaneity" and Schiller's "morality," between a life that knows how to be and the breaking of the will's balance between conquering and preserving it, as in Gustavo von Aschenbach ("Aschenbach, you know, has always lived like this--and he showed his tightly clenched left fist--and never like this--and he would drop his right hand nonchalantly on the back of his chair" [check text]).
Thus Wagner: triumph and decadence, nobility and illness, the highest expression of the eighteenth century, of the end of the eighteenth century, the poet of bourgeoise heroism and of bourgeoise decadence, luminous and triumphant in his farewall to the world, dark and morbid in his passion for the night. Wagner, or about ambiguity. Wagner, who can push us to insanity, to the desperate acknowledgement of the vanity of life, to renounciation, to the degeneration of eros; but who can also reaffirm the meaning of strength, of spontaneity, of sanity, of life. Tonio to Lisaveta: "Take the most admirable product of the most typical--and therefore, the most powerful--artist, take a morbid and intimately ambiguous opera such as Tristan und Isolde, and notice the effect of such opera on a young, sane temperament with a solidly normal sensibility. You will see him rising, strengthening, burning with lively and loyal enthusiasm, perhaps finding the courage for 'artistic' creation...Innocent amateur! Within us artists things are quite different from what these 'burning hearts' and 'sincere enthusiasts' can fantasize..." [reference? check text]
Ambiguity of the spirit, and thus of the style, in Wagner and in Mann. The effects are too calculated; the public, the reader, are always present; theater, and not always in the best sense of the word. Rare are the moments of abandon, and amidst the luxurious riches, a hidden monotony, a secret poverty. Miraculous in Wagner is the homely and barely melancholic purity of Siegfried Idyll (even though it is constructed on the same themes of the second part of of the third act of Siegfried), and miraculous is the melodic sobriety of some of his minor compositions (for example some of the Songs for Voice and Orchestra [check]); miraculous in Man is the transparent serenity of Unordnung und frühes Leid and of Tonio Kröger, where each word is found easily, without that self-imposed stylistic discipline, without Gustavo von Aschenbach's "will." Von Aschenbach's very own ideal, "the miracle of a newly found spontaneity," is realized. But this is a miracle which is never posited as the prize for one's labors, no matter how honest they are.
It has been said about Wagner that he wants to take us to heaven on a rickety carriage. Now Henry Miller, always paradoxically, defines Mann as "an inspired donkey or workhorse."[3]
It is the painful, slow sense of a stylistic dignity conquered with incessant effort, of a classic form imposed on an irremediably romantic content. It is the sentence structure built with an almost scientific foresight, where expression and words internally refer to the preceding and following sentences, in a tight, solid linkage which never allows abandon, the freedom of the voice, the meaning that the word has by itself, in its pure expression and immediate evocation; it is a infinite regression that justifies the reference to Novalis and to the Wagnerian concatenation, but to a infinite melody intentionally rendered with modest tones, almost with worried diffidence and yet with ingenuousness. Wagner's heroic themes, but somewhere between the smell of "tomato ketchup" in the Buddenbrook's house and the small of the disinfectant in the Berghof. An excessively intellectualist complacency, which is suspect therefore of being intentionally heavy, bourgeoise, entrusted to worn-out and exhausted words, in the "slow" machinery of construction typified by the framework of Royal Highness, a novel which, despite being extremely cautious and detached, might perhaps be considered Mann's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
Prose therefore the value of which is never its finite expression, but the infinite call for a principle that can no longer be found, for a mysterious amd dark origin: the leitmotiv technique, in a word. Mann never abandoned it, because he could not have abandoned what for him is consciousness [?]. We can also note that, despite everything, consciousness does not [even] disappear behind Hemingway or Miller's prose.
Like Wagner, the whole Mann is to be found in each one of his works: none of his themes is ever forgotten, even when the reference is barely noticeable, almost as the product of a moment of distraction. Thus Wagner is present in Mann, in the structure of his narrative and of his style, even there where he seems to have been forgotten. Less so in those texts where references to Tristan and to Walk&uumal;re are explicit, than in other works, where Wagner's presence seems less evident, and is thus deeper.
As an example, let us take the first few pages of Death in Venice. "[Gustavo von Aschenbach] was overwrought by a morning of hard, nerve-taxing work, work which had not ceased to exact his uttermost in the way of sustained concentration, conscientiousness, and tact; and after the the noon meal found himself powerless to check the onward sweep of the productive mechanism within him...He had sought bout not found relaxation in sleep--though the wear and tear upon his system had come to make a daily nap more and more imperative--and now underook a walk, in the hope that air and exercise might send him back refreshed to a good evening's work." [Daeth In venice, transalated by H T Lowe-Porter. Vintage Books 1989. p. 3]
Nothing special, nothing suspect. Just as, on first listening to it, it seems impossible to uncover anything special in the opening of a wagnerian ouverture. Later, when one is familiar with the opera and listens to the ouverture again, one easily discovers that even the first few notes formed a theme, an inextricable tangle of themes. The same holds true for Mann. The reader who repeatedly reads Death in Venice will realize then that here too certain fundamental themes are already present, although under the intentional indifference of the prose and the ordinariness of the situation. One can safely scribble in the margins of Mann's pages (in the same way as in a thematic guide of a Wagnerian libretto): themes of "illness", of "art," of "discipline," of "flight." And it would be wrong to consider inoocent the background of the scene described further on: "Nothing stirred behind the hedge in the stone-mason's yeard, where crosses, monuments, and commemorative tablets made a supernumerary and untenanted graveyeard opposite the real one." [Op. cit., p. 4] This is the theme of "death." We can test this with the theme, which follows immediately, of the "escape," more insistent, more peremptory, which will lead von Aschenbach far from his work, to Venice; which will force the writer to abandon his will for for discipline and form; which will take him to the masked experience of the other side--the dark side of beauty; which will lead him eventually to his disintegration and to death: "He was brought back to reality by the sight of a man standing in the portico, above the two apocalyptic beasts that guarded the staircase...." [Op. cit. p. 4] A stranger, a wayfarer. "...he felt the most surprising consciousness of a widening of inward barriers, a kind of vaulting unrest, a youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes...True, what he felt was no more than a longing to travel, yet coming upn him with such a suddenness and passion as to resemble a seizure, almost a hallucination...This yearning for new and distant scenes, this craving for for freedom, release, forgetfulness--they were, he admitted to himself, an impulse toward flight...." [Op. cit. p. 5, 6]
"youthfully ardent thirst:" [Op. cit. p. 5] the thematic weave goes on: lost youth, false youth; desire typical and morbid of old age, nostalgia for what can not be found again, and which the artist perhaps never possessed. Thus the new theme is announced, a theme which will reappear in the encounter with the "young-old man" [Op. cit. p. 19] on the boat that takes Aschenbach from Pola to Venice, and is finally developed and resolved in the theme of "love," when the writer meets Tadzio and reconstructs within himself the motifs of Plato's Phaedrus, only to abandon himself to the wishes of the barber who, with a few clever touches, will prepare him with the false image of newly-found youth to the last hesitation and to death.
It is not necessary to insist nor to continue. A similar approach is possible with all of Man's works. This thematic web becomes more and more complex and tight, sometimes it is difficult to follow, but it is always present as a secret guide, as a necessary watermark. There are no links missing in this thematic chain, which is intimately connected to a total vision, to a metaphysics, to a judgment or to a hope.
Metaphysics, music, novel, theater. The connectedness of these forms of the spirit and of expression determine Mann's style and confirm a deep relationship to Wagner. The leitmotif technique is the synthesis of the metaphysical-romantic constraints and the myth of the theater and the transposition of musical expression by symbolic-cathartic means.
The content is always an active--not contemplative--vision of the world, which calls for a movement, for an experience in the sense that Dithey gave to the term Erlebnis. Such content can not be but romantic, if romanticism is the discovery of a dark, middle term in which the anxiety for the form is never resolved, and in which in fact, more than the presence of the spirit, what counts is the continuous approximation, the continuous tension of the spirit towards its realization in the new sense of the word. Erlebnis is not yet art, nor philosophy, nor music, nor perhaps life, but all of these things. That is why its [?] relationships and its [?] analogies are unlimited and undefinable. The more one can guess the secret connections of experience and culture, the more a unitary synthesis is urgent and necessary. But it is precisely such synthesis which leads to a musical, undetermined unification, achieved before form is conquered. Hence the tendency toward a philosophical and cultural Summa, characteristic of romanticism, in which nothing is lost and all the needs of culture and all the experiences of life are present. Typical examples: Frederich Schlegel and Novalis.