I’ve
been curious about the following question, although I expect it’s very well
researched and theorised: At what point in (literary) history does the movement
of consciousness, the activities of the mind, become a principle theme of a
literary work, as in, for example, the examination of memory and temporal
awareness in Proust. When I posed this question (on Twitter) the name of Defoe
was suggested, and the link between the Protestant examination of conscience
and the examination of consciousness. The latter at some point breaking free
from the former.
I’d
like to think briefly and at a slightly oblique angle about this issue via a
number of things Hegel discusses in his Lectures on Aesthetics, from 1818.
Out
of the dull strength and power of the animal the human spirit tries to push
itself forward, without coming to a perfect portrayal of its own freedom and
animated shape, because it must still remain confused and associated with what
is other than itself.
This
is in some respects the exact opposite of modern art which begins in
spirit and then seeks embodiment in external form. So, in one we move
from external form to Spirit; in the other from inner Spirit to external form.
More
specifically, for Hegel, modern art is characterised by a kind of surplus of
spirit over external shape, consciousness over material, the discovered freedom
of spirit attempting to find some object adequate to itself:
The
standpoint of most recent times, the peculiarity of which we may find in the
fact that the artist’s subjective skill surmounts his material and its
production because he is no longer dominated by the given conditions of a range
of content and form already inherently determined in advance, but retains
entirely within his own power and choice both the subject matter and the way of
presenting it.
There
is always something nomadic and dissatisfied about the modern artist, searching
for some adequate object or material. One thinks of Yeats: “I sought for a
subject and sought for it in vain.” Yeats resents the contingency of modern art,
i.e., having no natural subject. But in some sense, the very notion of ‘subject
matter’ implies a division between an artist on the one hand, and a range of
potential objects on the other. It is this very division, Hegel implies, which
did not previously exist, at least in the same form. There is in Yeats,
certainly, the longing for and coveting of a ‘necessary’ art, an art fully part
of a pre-modern tradition or form of life. (Nationalism perhaps offers the spectre
of such a “necessary art”).
For
Hegel, the artist tries a number of ways to lend shape and form to this
disembodied consciousness, such as the adoption, on a purely aesthetic level,
of “past world views” and the symbolic arsenal of now superannuated or devalued
religions. But this cannot work, for these materials are now only the
externalised objects of aesthetic appreciation rather than the very medium of “innermost
belief”.
It is for this reason that the modern artist
“turns inward”. What defines the modern artist, says Hegel, is that the
‘necessary substance’ of his art is now (what we would call) the
movements of his consciousness as such – i.e., the material or subject matter
is selected in so far as it ‘serves’ those movements. Nature, for example in
the Romantics, is commandeered by the artist as a metaphorical ‘picture’ of the
artist’s mind. The Modern emphasis on Style, as the signature of a particular
individual consciousness, although emerging after Hegel, can certainly be seen
in these terms. In lieu of traditional objects, the artist's own Stylistic
signature becomes object like, something he or she works on and perfects.
However, Art, freed from necessary content,
dwindles to a brittle subjective inwardness:
If the ego remains at this standpoint, everything appears to
it as null and vain, except its own subjectivity which therefore becomes hollow
and empty and itself mere vanity. [..] it now feels a craving for the solid and
substantial.
And so the point about the modern artist
is that when art does become pre-occupied with the movement of consciousness
and seeks only to objectify this movement it also begins to yearn for something
else, for some jagged piece of Chaos, some Otherness, the Outside of consciousness.
There is a passage in Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value where he remarks (vis a
vis apples) how everything becomes a metaphor (a “picture”) for his own
thought, but he says this with a certain weariness, chagrin even, as if he wanted
to find in the world something other than his own thought. And there is
certainly a similar weariness in Yeats. “Another emblem there!” is both
triumphant and exasperated, as if he would like to discover in nature something
other than the mind’s emblem book.
And so what this Modern consciousness
craves is not confirmation, but resistance, something foreign which
might ‘reawaken’ and galvanise-into-being the tired involuted subject. We are
back to J.M Synge’s contention that “style comes from the shock of new material”.
Before Synge follows Yeats’s advice and goes to the Aran isles, he was
precisely one such modern artist:
Synge in 1898 was a dilettante, self-consciously cherishing
his `impressions,' at his most imitative when he tried hardest to express his
own reactions. Yeats’s recollection of Synge's early work gives us an acute
image of his failings: `I have but a vague impression, as of a man trying to
look out of a window and blurring all that he sees by breathing upon the
window.' Synge at this stage was indeed a prisoner of his own
self-consciousness, and the window had to be shattered before he could develop
into a creative artist.
The “new material” that shocked him into
style was of course the peasantry of the West of Ireland, and their rude unselfconscious
speech. Other Modern writers and artists similarly gravitated to traditional
forms in order to thicken their Style, to deliver a creative rebuff to their Modern
mind. Some sought shock in the “insistent jerky nearness” of the Modern city,
or introduced foreign elements via mathematical abstraction, chance, and-or
arbitrary rules (Oulipo).
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