Autor: Senior, John

Buch: The Death of Christian Culture

Titel: The Death of Christian Culture

Stichwort:

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: 36b In the work of Baudelaire, the first and greatest master of the Modernist movement, the poem is neither the expression of ideas, as the Classicist would have it, nor the expression of emotions, as the Romanticist would have it—the poem is the expression of nothing but the poem itself. This famous art pour l'art, announced but never tried by Gautier, was put into practice, though without success, by Baudelaire and the Parnassians. The slightest examination of the contents of such "pure poetry" shows that the poem is not really a thing in itself, as it claims, but rather a vehicle for the doctrine that poems ought to be taken as things in themselves. Modernists preach what they do not, and cannot, practice. Baudelaire's enameled verse states but never achieves its purpose because his poems do have meaning; the meaning is that there is no meaning to either poems or anything else. (Fs; tblStw: Kunst) (notabene)
Kommentar (13/08/11): Neoklassiker: Idee; Romantiker: Gefühl; das "gute" Gedicht, allgemein "gute" Kunst, ist Ausdruck der Realität, nicht der Realität, wie sich "zeigt", sondern der Realität, wie sie ist.
36c The Neoclassicist thought of poems as artificial constructions—as conventional systems of word and phrases. But he thought the function of this artificial convention was to carry true ideas; what was "often thought but ne'er so well expressed." The Romantic thought of himself as an Aeolian harp, a sensitive instrument tuned to the unseen presences in himself. The poem was to express "intense emotion recollected in tranquility." The function of the Modernist poem is to rid ourselves first of thought and next of emotion, so that we achieve that orthodoxy Orwell spoke of as "unconsciousness." And then, at the second stage, the poet, as magician, creates upon this absence of idea and emotion the pure artifice of the work of art as a thing in itself. (Fs) (notabene)
37a Compare the typical Romantic poem of the sea voyage with Baudelaire's major work, Le voyage. Alfred de Vigny in La bouteille à la mer, tells of a shipwrecked captain who in a final gesture of triumph over malevolent fate flings on the waves a sealed bottle containing the precious manuscripts of his intense if not tranquil recollections, which somehow, sometime, will find their way to port. (Fs)
Puis, recueillant le fruit tel que de l'âme il sort,
Tout empreint du parfum des saintes solitudes,
Jetons l'œuvre à la mer, la mer des multitudes:
—Dieu la prendra du doigt pour la conduire au port
Then plucking the fruit as it grows from the soul,
Marked with the perfume of holy solitudes,
Let us throw the work into the sea, the sea of multitudes:
— God will touch it with His finger, bringing it to port. (Fs)
37b Vigny's young, Romantic captain smiles at death. Baudelaire's Old Captain is Death himself. Victory, for Baudelaire, is the annihilation of success, because—and this is the really striking difference between the Romantic and the Modernist —Baudelaire's voyage never takes place. As Huysmans said, the best voyages are imaginary. At the very start of the Modernist arc we find this restlessness without purpose, as near the end it survives in the jargon of the beatnik motorcyclists: "Let's go, man, go"—nowhere in particular, but just go. Part pour partir is the theme of all true voyagers, Baudelaire says; or, as he said in another famous poem, quoting Poe, it is to go "anywhere out of this world." For Baudelaire the ship is not real. It is an imaginary projection of himself, as it is in Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, or Mallarme's Un coup de des, or Dylan Thomas' Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait. Baudelaire expressly says so:
Notre âme est un trots-mâts cherchant son Icarie ....
Chaque îlot signalé par l'homme de vigie
Est un Eldorado promis par le Destin;
L'Imagination qui dresse son orgie
Ne trouve qu'un récif aux clartés du matin.
O le pauvre amoureux des pays chimériques
Ce matelot ivronge, inventeur d'Amériques. (Fs)
Our soul is a three-masted schooner searching its Icaria ....
Each islet, signaled by the lookout,
Is an Eldorado promised by destiny;
The imagination that prepares its orgy
Finds only a reef in the light of dawn.
A poor lover of chimerical nations —
This drunken sailor, inventor of Americas. (Fs)
38a But why should we invent Americas? If everything is in one's head, why go on voyages at all, even imaginary ones? Des Esseintes never asked. But Baudelaire replies:
Au fond del' inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!
In the depths of the unknown to find the new!
38b Le nouveau! The motive force of Modernism is, as the name suggests, the perpetual urge for the new—not the real, not the true, not the ideal, not even the evil, not the power or the glory or the lust, but all these things for the sake of the new. Cut off from reality by "four hundred years of criticism and doubt," the Modernist, insisting on the new, very quickly exhausts the contents of his memory and proceeds to invent an artificial one. The image—that is, what the "imagination" produces—substitutes for Being. To the Realist, an image must necessarily be of something; and the something can be understood in terms of ideas and feelings. The Modernist, cut off from reality, has nothing but the image, nothing but the mental sensation. Huysmans never said he could imagine a real voyage; he said he could have all the sensations of a real voyage. The Realist asks, "What is the image of?" For art holds the mirror up to nature. The Modernist, a worshipper of Baal in more than one way, replies, "There is nothing but the image." He is a worshipper of images. (Fs) (notabene)
38c The "dis-realization" of the universe—the pursuit of artificiality—leads to the second of the marks of Modernism, sensationalism. The physicists, whom Aristotle lost his temper at, concentrated on truth as that which is sensed. They were drawn inevitably to the next step, the experiment. But experiment becomes an artifice. Empiricism began with an explicit rejection of Realism in the Renaissance—an explicit attack on Aristotle—and with the wholly unexamined assumption that the real is quantitative; that is, the real is what can be measured. At first sight, it would seem as if science were affirming Aristotle, affirming the evidence of the senses. Quite the contrary, however: it affirmed the evidence of appearances divorced from substance. By considering the truth to be only what is sensed, science lays itself open to the psychologizing of knowledge. If truth is only what is sensed, and sensations happen in the mind, then truth is in the mind—and not, as Aristotle said, a real relation of the mind and the thing. Orwell added: "And if the mind can be controlled—what then?" (Fs) (notabene)
39a The consequence of Empiricism is Phenomenology, in which the experiment itself becomes an hallucination. Though in the early stages of science an experiment was originally set up to test a reality supposed to exist outside the test, in the latest stage the test is often taken not as a result of anything, but the only actual reality there is, so that one cannot challenge the validity of an intelligence test, for example, because intelligence is by definition whatever it is that the test tests. Science at this stage has become magic, a false sacrament effecting what it signifies. It is no longer the "adequation of the mind to reality" but a mental construction for "saving the appearances" and finally an instrument of aesthetic pleasure. Science for science's sake. (Fs) (notabene)
39b Ernst Mach, for example, the founder of Empirio-Criticism and one of the great physicists of his day—the Mach unit of sound velocity is named for him—in his Contribution to the Analysis of Sensations denies the existence of the person experiencing the experiment:
The primary fact is not the I, the ego, but the sensations. The elements that constitute the I, "I have a sensation of green," signifies that the element green occurs in a given complex of other elements (sensations, memories). When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in their ordinary, familiar way of association. That is all. Only an ideal mental-economical unit, not a real unity, has ceased to exist. (Fs)
39c The divorce from Realism gives us two possibilities to exploit. First, the piling up of empirical evidence without regard to intelligence at all. Seeing is believing — that is to say, reality is appearance. Jean-Paul Sartre prints this phrase without a quiver in his essay significantly titled Being and Nothingness: "Appearance is essence." The word "existence" among such existentialists is used as the Party uses words like "love" and "peace"—to mean its direct opposite. The second possibility after the great divorce is Rationalism. Descartes, its progenitor, argues that we know nothing but what is in our minds, all sense experience being merely an extension of mentality. His metaphysics begins, opposite to Aristotle's, not with Being, but with the cogito — the thought. Sense objects are nothing but reified ideas. (Fs)
40a According to Whitehead, modern philosophy is the development of these two antithetical horns, both stemming from the one head of anti-Realism. Whereas Aristotelian tradition maintained that truth is the real relation between mind and thing, modern philosophy has maintained, from two different points of view, that truth is either mind or thing. What Whitehead calls "the great bifurcation" split the world into two quarreling but actually allied armies fighting on the same side against Realism—the Empiricist and the Rationalist. Kant lumped them together under "the Critical." In the Modernistic age the armies have at last been reunited as "Empirio-Criticism" or "Phenomenalism."
40b In a prophetic paragraph of that same Book IV of the Metaphysics, Aristotle fixes the necessary connection between sensationalism and non-being. Speaking again of those who argue that things can both be and not be, he says:
They say that the same thing seems sweet to some who taste it, and bitter to others; so that if all men were diseased or all insane, except two or three who were healthy or sane, the latter would seem to be diseased or insane, and not the others. [Orwell's Winston Smith had wondered about his sanity.] And further they say that many of the animals as well get the same impressions which are true or false; for one kind is no more true than the other, but equally so. And hence Democritus says that either there is no truth or we cannot discover it. And in general, it is because they suppose that thought is sense-perception .... The reason why these men hold this view is that.... they suppose that reality is confined to sensible things. (Fs) (notabene)
All these theories destroy the possibility of anything's existing by necessity because they destroy the existence of its essence; for the necessary cannot be in one way and in another; so if anything exists of necessity, it cannot be both so and not so. (Fs)
41a Art for art's sake, science for science's sake—the worshipping of graven images, and therefore the worshipping of unreality. An image is the mental reproduction of something sensed; its reality derives from two necessarily existing things: the subject who does the sensing, and the object that is sensed. The purely mental world of the image-sensation has no more being than an image in a mirror. The idea of what Ortega called the intrasubjective, or the "ideal object," is a fiction. If you cut off reality from the image and take the image in itself, you have not changed the nature of imagery but, transferring it from the garden to the parlor, have killed it and put it in a jar to new use. An image is still a mental sensation; you have become interested in the mental act rather than the purpose of the mental act. We become aware of sensation qua sensation only by reflection. Normally we go directly to the thing: we say ice is cold, not that we have a sensation of coldness, or, to use Orwell's examples, we say that "stones are hard, water is wet." Once the divorce is made, however, we can suspend the mind, hold it back forcibly from its completion in the object, and consider the sensation in itself. Art for art's sake is a sterilization of the mind so as to prevent "conception" while enjoying discourse. (Fs) (notabene)
41b But the nature of imagery is not changed by the use to which it is put. Utility is not function. A kind of Lamarckian naiveté pervades some schools of criticism as well as morality: If you use a thing long enough in a way contrary to its nature, they say, you will eventually change its nature, as if by sitting on tables you could make them chairs. This is a form of thinking makes it so. Phenomenalism is a resuscitated Nominalism which asserts that an image is a reality—that the imagination can construct a real life of its own. Of course it simply cannot. Any sensation divorced from its object withers. Huysmans learned this to his bitter despair, and so did Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Ortega evidently did not, nor have most Moderns, because they talk about it rather than doing it and so they still seek hallucination as a panacea. Those who have tried it know better. In real life ideas have permanence; emotions, durability. But sensations are instantaneous and must be renewed, and in the renewal itself is destruction, because repetition dulls. Thus the sensationalist is doomed to chase le nouveau which must always elude him. (Fs) (notabene)
42a Et puis? Et puis encore? "What next? And then what next?" cries Baudelaire's Old Captain. Ennui is the hell of Modernism. The aesthetic in the extreme is anesthetic: numb, having no sensation, unconscious. (Fs)
"What shall we do? What shall we ever do?" the ladies in The Waste Land ask. (Fs)
42b In what is perhaps the most famous of all Modernistic poems, Mallarmé's L'après-midi d'un faun, the Faun compares art to blowing up empty grape skins, which he holds up to the light:
Ainsi, quand des raisins j'ai sucé le clairet,
Pour banner un regret par ma feinte écarté,
Rieur, j'élève au ciel d'été la grappe vide
Et, soufflant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide
D'ivresse, jusqu'au soir je regarde au travers. (Fs)
Thus when I have sucked the brightness from grapes,
To banish a regret set aside by my pretense,
Laughing, I raise to the summer sky the empty cluster,
And blowing into their luminous skins, avid
For drunkenness, I watch through the skins until evening. (Fs)
42c Having sucked out the pulp of reality, he is left with the pure, detached image, not of anything. A logical extension of this idea is the enjoyment of the poem as typography, as the pure sensation of the skin of the printed page, in Mallarmé's last and most ambitious work, Coup de des, and the imitations by e. e. cummings and others. (Fs)
42d Less extreme, but with the same intention, is Imagism, the school of poetry devoted to surfaces in which neither thought nor emotion is supposed to interlude. When Archibald MacLeish says,
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
A poem should not mean,
But be. (Fs)
—he is reducing the poem to sensation, his globed fruit very like the Faun's empty grape skin. He has deprived the verb "to be" of its real pulp. He does not really mean "be"; he means "sensed."
42e Imagism is sensationalism. Baudelaire, its first and greatest practitioner, is more interested in his mistress' skin than in his mistress, and, even further, in her hair, her fingernails, finally in the polish on her fingernails, her jewels, her perfume. The scandal at the publication of Les fleurs du mal was misplaced because Baudelaire is not simply a great pornographic poet like Keats, for example. Baudelaire's poems do not use the senses to excite concupiscence. Quite the contrary, they detach sensation from both cause and consequence, from both the pulp of the grape and the wine. Baudelaire is, as the Modernist jazz musicians say, "cool." "All mastery is cold," said Mallarmé; and he speaks in his letters of having climbed "pure glaciers of aesthetic."
43a The most thorough experiment in sensationalism is Proust's. A la recherche du temps perdu is seven volumes of recaptured — not "remembered," but "researched" — sensations. Not intense emotion recollected in tranquility, but intense emotion tranquilized in recollection. The déjà vu experience of the notorious macaroon at the start of Swann's Way is the key to Proust's whole work. The philosophy behind it is Phenomenalism. Since reality is nothing but sensation, art can create reality by means of invoking sensations. Needless to say, the pitiful, debauched lives of his characters — they are caricatures, cartoons—prove their own vacuity; they are exhausted bladders, emptied skins, at the end, having collapsed into the Baudelairian ennui. The pathos of the dying Swann, left alone by his Duchess in search of a shoe, is the revelation that sensation cut off from reality is illusion. Swann is aptly named after the most widely used symbolist bird, whose meaning is "the artist," the fabricator of illusions. Swann's "way" is the via ludens, the way of the artificer, which is to say the magician who hallucinates sensations. (Fs) (notabene)