Notebook

Notebook, 1993- APPROACHES

Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. The Middle Ages of James Joyce. Translated from the Italian by Ellen Esrock. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 1989. - Return to the First Part

The Aesthetics of
Chaosmos [cont.]


It is clear, at least theoretically, that the dramatic form represents for Joyce the true and proper form of art. For such an assumption the principle of the impersonality of the work of art, so typical of the Joycean poetic, vigorously emerges. When he elaborated this theory, Joyce had already come into contact with the analogous theories of MallarmÚ [Hayman, 1956] and certainly had in his presence the English translation of a passage from Crise de Vers which bears a noticeable resemblance to Stephen's speech:

"L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poète, qui céde l'initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisée; ils s'allument de reflets réciproques comme une virtuelle trainée de feux sur les pierreries, remplacant la respiration perceptible en l'ancient souffle lyrique ou la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase . . . . [Oeuvres, ed. Gallimard, p. 336].

Undoubtedly, the problem of the impersonality of the artist had [p. 15] already been proposed to Joyce by other youthful readings, for we can easily recognize the ancestors of this concept in Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Yeats. [6] It is necessary to recognize how widely the idea circulated throughout the Anglo-Saxon atmosphere of the epoch, later finding its definitive arrangement in the writings of Pound and Eliot. [7]

From this poetic objective, the reference to Aristotle's Poetics comes spontaneously. Joyce was undoubtedly influenced by the tractional Anglo-Saxon critical method of considering art in Aristotelian terms. This is demonstrated in the diversity existing between the text of A Portrait and the probable Mallarméan source cited above. When Mallarmé speaks of the pure artistic work in which the poet disappears, he has in mind a Platonic conception in which l'Oeuvre aspires to become le Livre, the impersonal reflection of Beauty as an absolute essence expressed by the Verbe. Te Mallarméan work thus tends to be an impersonal, evocative apparatus which goes beyond itself towards a world of metaphysical archetypes. [8] On the contrary, the impersonal work of Joyce appears as an object centered and resolved in itself. References are located inside the aesthetic object, and the object aspires to be the surrogate of life and not the means towards a subsequent and purer life. The Mallarméan suggestions have deep-rooted mystical ambitions while the Joycean ones aspire to be the triumph of a perfect mechanism which exhausts its own function. [9]

It is interesting to note how the Platonic conception of beauty came to Mallarmé from Baudelaire and to Baudelaire from Poe. But in Poe, the Platonic element develops according to the ways of an Aristotelian methodology which is attentive to the psychological relationship of work-reader and the constructive logic of the work [consider "The Philosophy of Composition"]. Thus, starting from an Angel Saxon environment and the Aristotelian tradition, passing through the filter of the French symbolist poets, these and other ferments returned to Anglo-Saxon territory and were reconverted by Joyce within the ambit of an Aristotelian sensitivity.

The aesthetic formulations of St. Thomas were also influential. The quotations that Joyce had within reach nowhere discuss a work capable of expressing the personality of the poet. Joyce then realized that even Aquinas upheld the impersonal and objective work. This was not a matter of drawing a convenient conclusion from lack of contrary documents. Demonstrating a keen understanding of [p. 16] medieval thought, integrating the few texts with which he was acquainted, Joyce understood that the Aristotelian and Thomist aesthetics were not at all concerned with the affirmation of the artist's self: the work is an object which expresses its own structural laws and not the person of the author. For this reason, Joyce was convinced that he would not be able to elaborate a theory of the creative process on the basis of Thomist thinking. Scholasticism undoubtedly had a theory of ars, but this did not shed light on the process of poetic creation. Although the idea of ars, as recta ratio factibilium or ratio recta aliquorum faciendorum could be of use to him, Joyce reduces this to a concise formula: "Art . . . . is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end" [p 207]. By adding "for an esthetic end," a precision which is not considered in the medieval formula, he changes the meaning of the old definition, passing from the Greco-Latin idea of "techne-ars" to the modern one of "art" as exclusively "fine arts." [10] But Stephen is persuaded that his "applied Aquinas" can serve him only to a certain point: "When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience" [p 209]. In fact, the sporadic affirmations concerning the nature of the poet and his function that we find in Stephen Hero are completely foreign to the Aristotelian-Thomist problematic, as are certain allusions to the creative process in A Portrait.

The discourse on the autonomy of art is completely typical. Here the young Stephen reveals the formal nature of his adhesion to scholasticism. The formulas of Aquinas boldly smuggle in a theory of l'art pour l'art that Stephen assimilated from other sources. Aquinas affirmed that "pulchrae dicuntur quae visa placent,"noting furthermore that the artifex must interest himself solely in the perfection of the artistic work that he creates and not in the exterior ends to which the work can be used. But medieval theory refers to ars understood in a rather large sense, as the construction of objects, a handicraft, in short, as more than just the formation of works of art in the modern sense of the term. For such ars it establishes a standard of artisan integrity. In effect, a work of art is a form, and the perfection of a form becomes established as much in terms of perfectio prima as in terms of perfectio secunda. While the perfectio prima examines the formal quality of the object produced, the perfectio secunda considers the proper end of that object. In other words, an ax is beautiful if it is constructed according to the rules of formal harmony; but above all, it is [p. 17] beautiful if it is well-fitted for its final end, which is chopping wood. In the Thomist hierarchy of ends and means, the value of an object is established upon the relationship of means to ends: the entire thing is evaluated in terms of the supernatural ends to which man is oriented. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are reciprocally implicated. Thus, a statue used for obscene or magical ends is intrinsically ugly, reflected in the sinister light of its distorted finality. To interpret the propositions of St. Thomas in a rigorously formalistic sense [as has been done by many zealous Neo-Thomists] is to misunderstand the substantially unified and hierarchical vision by which the medieval man confronted the world. [11] Therefore, when Stephen argues with the professors of the college in order to demonstrate that Aquinas "is certainly on the side of the capable artist" and when he claims not to find in Aquinas' definition of the beautiful any necessity for learning or moral elevation, Stephen conceals with casuist ability, under medieval garments, propositions like those of Wilde, for whom "all art is perfectly useless." [12] The most curious fact is that the Jesuits with whom Joyce spoke felt a certain dissatisfaction but were not in a position to object to his quotations. They were victims of their own traditional formalism in which the words of the Doctor Angelicus could not be discussed. Joyce, reversing the situation in his favor and profiting form the congenital weakness of a mental system, shows that he finds himself completely at ease with the Catholic sensitivity.

On these grounds Stephen carries forward the systematic arrangement of his aesthetics. In discussing the nature of the aesthetic emotion he is still following his conception of the autonomy of art. In aesthetic contemplation the pornographic moment is as extraneous as the didactic one. Stephen then renews ties with Aristotle, assuming the cathartic theory of poetry. He elaborates a definition of pity and terror, lamenting that Aristotle did not give a definition in the Poetics but ignoring it in the Rhetoric. Joyce defines the aesthetic emotion as a sort of stasis, the arrestment of a sensitivity before an ideal pity and terror, a stasis provoked, protracted and dissolved into what he calls the "rhythm of beauty." [13] This definition would appear to have its roots in certain modern conceptions, were it not that Stephen's definition of aesthetic rhythm is of clear Pythagorean origin:

"Rhythm . . . is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part" [p. 206].

Such a definition is compared by Stuart Gilbert with an analogous one from Coleridge: The sense of beauty subsists in simultaneous intuition of the relation of parts, each to each, and of all to the whole: exciting an immediate and absolute complacency, without intervenence, therefore, of any interest, sensual or intellectual."14] [p. 19]

In A Portrait, Stephen must interpret the concepts of integritas, proportio, and claritas which he translates by "wholeness," "harmony", and "radiance."

"Look at the basket,"Stephen says to Lynch; and explains:
'In order to see that basket . . . . your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas . . . . [p. 212].

It is clear from these lines that the Thomist integritas is not the Joycean integritas. The former is a fact of substantial completion, the latter is a fact of spatial delimitation. The former is a problem of ontological volume, the latter is one of physical perimeter. The Joycean integritus is the result of a psychological focusing; it is the imagination that selects the thing . [Noon [1957, p. 113] suggests that there is a relationship between those ideas and Berkeley's philosophy.]

Because the possibilities of deformation are fewer, the Joycean interpretation of the concept of proportio is more faithful to its Thomist counterpart than his interpretation of integritas:

"Then . . . . you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is Consonantia . . . . . [p. 212]

The remarks concerning rhythm have been explained previously. The determination of claritas is longer and more difficult, and the Joycean texts that refer to it are more discordant. The final drafting of A Portrait reads like this: "The connotation of the word . . . . is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analyzed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing [p. 212-13]

The Joycean interpretation is quite subtle. He starts from the elementary and incomplete Thomist texts, uprooted from their widest context, and reaches an acuteness lacking in many authorized commentators. For as Aquinas, the quidditas is the substance in so far as it can be understood and defined. Consequently, to speak about quidditas is to speak about substance, about form as organism and structure. In Stephen Hero it is said more resolutely that "The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us [p. 21] radiant" [SH 213]. Here Joyce gives us an explanation that is truly congenial with Thomist thinking, without yet having extended the formulation in a personal direction. By his clear refusal of Platonic interpretations of the concept of claritas [when he speaks of "literary talk"], Joyce also wants to clarify his own position. In so doing, Joyce strikes the center of the issue.

Only in the passages that follow this interpretation will Stephen's discourse assume inflections of greater autonomy and thereby reveal that his fidelity to Aquinas is only a formal means by which to support a freer development of personal themes. The text from A Portrait reads:

"This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian phonologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelly's, called the enchantment of the heart [p 213].

In Stephen Hero the context is somewhat different. The moment of radiance comes to be defined more specifically as the moment of epiphany.

By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of a gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments [SH 211]

The expression "fading coal" and "evanescent state of mind" are too ambiguous to be adapted to a concept like that of Thomist claritas. Claritas is the solid, clear, almost tangible display of formal harmony . . . . [p. 20-22]




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