Dissonance (if you are interested)

order.

I

APPRENTICESHIP AND AFFINITIES

The limits of one’s writing are the limits of one’s reading.

—Norma Cole

The mind has no edge, but the folds of the brain afford both the maximum surface for touch and the possibility to fall between them inexorably like the sequence of seasons.

—Friederike Mayröcker

The Urge to Abstraction

When I began graduate studies at the University of Michigan in 1959 New Criticism was in full swing. For me it was an exciting change from the biographical criticism that had been the dominant mode at the Universities of Würzburg and Freiburg (although a few Anglisten had begun to talk of the new trend under the solemn name of werkimmanente Interpretation). New Criticism and the Russian Formalists to whom it introduced me taught me the invaluable skill—maybe I should say art—of close reading, close attention to texts, to details. As we know, God (or the devil!) is in the detail, no matter how thrilling the large sweep of recent theory.

I had the good fortune to study with Austin Warren, one of the subtlest and most erudite among the New Critics. Only the poor practitioners did what all of New Criticism has been bashed for: disregard context and history. For Austin Warren it was unthinkable not to put the work in its context of history, other arts, philosophy, and religion, though the currently privileged areas of sociological and political thought were less present. He taught me that we must always take everything into account, though there is freedom and variety in where we place our emphasis. I am amused to find that in recent theory, detail has been devalued as a women’s concern. If it is indeed necessary to assign gender roles, I propose to amend the phrase to "valued as a women’s concern" and to welcome men like Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin as honorary women.

My first published essay was originally titled "Monsieur Teste and Der Ptolemäer: Abstractness in the Fiction of Valéry and Benn" and appeared in The East-West Review 1, No. 3 (winter 1965). It now seems strange to me that I wanted to compare two works so different, written in different countries and in times that were separated by two World Wars. The oldest part of Monsieur Teste, The Evening with M. Teste, goes back to 1895 (though the last fragments were added to the volume as late as 1946). Benn’s novella was written in 1947.

It is true that the two works illuminate each other, but I was mostly interested in the way that both go against the grain of narration, against the norms of genre. I now think I was also fascinated, at least subliminally, by the way they illustrate the essential relation with death inherent in writing, art, knowledge. As Hélène Cixous says in her discussion of Poe’s Oval Portrait, "Life cannot be on both sides. Double bind: either you do not render life or you take it. Everything is a failure, everything is crime."¹

The following text is somewhat revised.

The Urge to Abstraction stands at the beginning of every art.

—Wilhelm Worringer

Islamic art is the textbook example for abstract art. The religion’s taboo on representation explains it to some extent, but not sufficiently. André Malraux does better. He sees abstraction as a rejection of the human in favor of cosmos, fate, God. Islamic art is abstract because Islam—all of Asia maybe—was interested in God, but never in man.² This is a better explanation because it also applies when there is no taboo on representation. The method, then, is to isolate things from their human context and place them in a sacred one. This is the principle of ritual and therefore, in literature, closest to drama. Even without considering the origins of drama, we can find plenty of examples for a tendency toward ritual in contemporary plays—most striking in those of Jean Genet. Les Bonnes, for example, consists entirely in the rehearsing and enacting of a murder in which it does not matter who is killed.

In seeming opposition to Malraux, Wilhelm Worringer defines abstraction as man’s rejection of nature, as the result of a conflict between man and the natural object which he sought to wrest from its temporality and unclarity by giving it a value of necessity and a value of regularity.³ Really, the difference is slight. It is one of emphasis—and of secularization.

Testimonies to this nonacceptance of nature abound in literature, at least since the second half of the nineteenth century, from Arthur Rimbaud’s dérèglement de tous les sens to Malraux’s Our art seems to me a correcting of the world (Noyers 90). Though the alternative is not necessarily abstraction. In poetry, attempts at abstraction have gone as far as destroying the relation of the words and their denotation, which, in the extreme, leads to the isolation of syllables and even of letters, as in the lettriste experiments of Isidore Isou and his followers.

Among literary genres, fiction seems the most remote from abstraction, for it usually depends on the presentation of a series of events happening either in the physical sphere (as in the adventure novel) or on a psychological level. Even novels that are primarily concerned with intellectual problems are usually careful to provide a physical balance: the dialogues of Malraux’s characters are embedded in action; the treatise on the disintegration of values in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is cut into pieces and interleaved with narration.

The abstractness of Monsieur Teste and Der Ptolemäer (The Ptolemean) lies not so much in the subject, which is thought or, rather, thinking, but in Paul Valéry’s and Gottfried Benn’s refusal to give it this balance with action.⁴ As for its emphasis, it is not Malraux’s abstraction, not a rejection of the human, at least not of the human mind, and certainly not in favor of the sacred (even though Benn’s protagonist briefly flirts with mysticism). Both seem closer to Worringer’s definition, although neither novel phrases its rejection in terms of nature, but rather of the material world generally, of so-called reality.

In both novels external events are reduced to a minimum. In Monsieur Teste we are given an evening with a visit to a theater, some conversation fragments, and M. Teste’s going to bed; two letters with hardly any events; and a logbook of thoughts. This is hardly enough for the reader to get caught up in his life, hardly enough activity to energize a narrative. In The Ptolemean we see the ruins of World War II, a change of seasons, and the business of a beauty shop, but these are either static background or a cipher for something else.

We do get some physical description of Teste, but it is mostly given in abstract terms or in connection with them: This skull that made acquaintance with the angles of the capital (21) or "When he talked he never lifted an arm or a finger: he had killed the marionette (17). The same may be said for the physical details in the panopticon of the Ptolemean’s mind: The Occident! Born out of the Western Mediterranean, then some terrestrious gains—a prow in Amalfi, a kiln in the Ardennes—amphibious: scales, but at the same time feet—: a dragon! Continental gravity and urge towards the sea" (216).

These quotations also show the difference in style. Valéry works by restriction to essentials and achieves a somewhat dry, skeletal effect.⁵ Benn, although he elaborates, makes his language abstract by extensive use of scientific terms. We could almost think of the difference in terms of neoclassical and Baroque styles if Benn’s Baroque were not overlaid with the hard-edged abruptness of Expressionism.

The main characters themselves reject materiality. The difference here is that Teste has already completed his rejection, whereas the Ptolemean’s is in process. It is this process that takes up most of the novella. Both reject action, which, as expenditure of energy, is most closely connected to life and nature. It is mentioned only in the subjunctive: If he had turned the steady power of his mind against the world (Teste 19). Of course, one could bring it to the attention of the public (Ptolemäer 207). For everything else, their manner of negation is different and in proportion to the degree of rejection completed. In Monsieur Teste’s world the negated things are simply annihilated. In this respect he is the heir of Stéphane Mallarmé’s bibelot aboli, even though Valéry denied any connection with Mallarmé and claimed the character was closer to his idea of Edgar Degas as a person reduced to the rigor of a hard drawing, a Spartan, Stoic, Jansenist artist.⁶

In Monsieur Teste the historical situation is ignored. Teste exists in a vacuum, in timelessness. There is no mention of a detail that could be used as chronological indication, not even the toilettes of the ladies at the opera. And while one of M. Teste’s great subjects of research is the delicate art of duration, time, its distribution and reign (17), it is the abstract notion of time, not the historical one. We would look in vain for traces of the Dreyfus Affair or, in the later parts of the story, of World War I.

The same holds for society. Contact with people cannot be altogether excluded from the novel, because Valéry needs a narrator of sorts, a person to tell about Monsieur Teste. But Teste himself ignores people to a large extent—He did not smile, said neither good morning nor good evening; he did not seem to hear the ‘How do you do?’ (17)—unless he uses them as objects for observation, as he does with the crowd at the opera. His attitude makes the narrator feel confounded with things: one felt pushed back, a part of the houses, of the hugeness of space, of the bustling colors in the street (18).

Monsieur Teste’s voluntary isolation seems to stem from immoderate pride: What, this block ME finds parts outside itself! (41). Even though his logbook admits that his solitude—the lack over the years of friends known long and deeply—costs him dearly (45), his solipsism seems absolute: "what do I care about others . . . I am chez MOI, I speak my language, which is later called the language Self (42). The monster of isolation (33) is aware of the limitations of such a retreat into himself: I know myself by heart. The heart too" (24), but it seems to be the necessary laboratory condition for his mental operations.

It is in his intellect that M. Teste concentrates all of his energy, paying little attention to the body (he ate as one would take a purge [17]), or to the emotions, which he has disciplined to a point where he can play with them (He became passionate at will and in order to attain a definite goal [18]). His goal is to explore all the possibilities of consciousness by way of precise logical thinking—without realizing that this is a contradiction in terms, that his commitment to logic will be an obstacle and limitation rather than an aid to exploring all the possibilities. The preferred procedure of his intellectual gymnastic (17) is classification, expressed in his motto, "To die learnedly . . . Transiit classificando. These views [capable of generalization] kill the others which cannot be extended to the general (39). He finds his beauty in clarity, in the general, in abstract laws—as if to illustrate Worringer’s urge to abstraction, which tries to wrest the natural object out of its natural context, out of the unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependence upon life, i.e. of everything about it that was arbitrary, to render it necessary and irrefragable to approximate it to its absolute value."⁷

In all of his operations, M. Teste is extremely careful not to attach himself. He detaches himself even from all he knows. Only unsolved problems interest him, and of those, only "the ease or the difficulty of knowing them (19). He finally draws back from even the supreme thought that he had prayed for, because no other can follow it" (37).

He wants to stay always upright on the cape Thought (39), independent from any condition outside his intellect, independent especially from contingency and change. By bringing everything under the control of his will, he becomes free to experiment with ideas as with chemicals, now manipulating and mixing, changing, putting in communication (19), now treating them with repetition: he watered them with numbers (17). Finally, he lives not just in the midst but "by means of rare states, in a perpetual supposition of purely ideal experiences; continually using borderline conditions" (43, my italics).

In this personal game (44), things outside his thoughts have no function except to provide material for experimental transformation. Hence his close observation: he did not lose an atom of all that became perceptible (21). Even his wife—how amazing that he has one—does not know whether he loves her, or whether he studies her, or whether he studies through her (31).

In the course of the experiment, the material is destroyed by the intellect, the object his eyes are fixed on is the object that his mind wants to reduce to nothing (26). His wife thinks that this destruction is unconscious, that he does not know what he petrifies. But Teste’s words I obliterate the quick (17) seem to indicate the contrary. In any case, this destruction is a quality inherent in intellectual power in Valéry’s sense. As he says in Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, The character of man is consciousness, and that of consciousness a perpetual exhausting, a detaching without rest or exception of all that appears, whatever it may be.⁸

In Benn’s novella the case is different. The negation of reality is not yet complete. The historical situation, winter 1947, a winter during the occupation time (205), impinges with its postwar confusion and chaos, its ruins, heaps of rubble, frozen bodies lying in the streets—and the corpses of recent history in the minds. It makes all too understandable a striving for abstraction as the only possibility of repose, as the means to get out of contingency into a realm of clarity and necessity. At the beginning of the story, the Ptolemean, our first-person narrator, felt the material and social world so unbearable that he tried to annihilate it by force: Finally alone! At last even the ringing and knocking at the door began to annoy me; I aimed a machine gun at the street of approach and shot down all suspects (205). This entails, naturally, a discussion of morality or, rather, its absence. Monsieur Teste, too, is detached from any moral issue (an Abbé tells his wife that he abstracts himself terribly from good, but luckily he abstracts himself from evil also [33]), but it is a personal, individual detachment. In the Ptolemean’s world, such an attitude is part of the historical situation:

Today the moral evaluation of deaths—whether so-called normal or induced—was completely irrelevant, as out of date as weeping women and stand-up collars⁹ . . . If there had once been a specifically moral aura to mankind—and reading of old writings makes it appear likely—by our time it had waned altogether. (206)

After the two World Wars, it is romanticism to imagine an individual corpse.

The Ptolemean’s act of violence seems completely out of character. He emphatically does not want to act. Even on a symbolic level, action would involve him in his society, in all he wants to get away from. We quickly come to suspect his alleged taking to the machine gun as rhetoric, a device to introduce the comment on morality. It is also a metaphor for what he does in the course of the novella: looking at the physical ruins around him, he makes all of Western culture pass in review and proceeds to reject and destroy it in his mind.

His profession of beautician is part of the general ironical relativization. Although Benn takes some pains to reconcile the Ptolemean’s profession and his intellectualism by making him an autodidact, we are not to take this seriously. The protagonists of Benn’s earlier prose writings are almost always physicians, so the hairdresser seems to signal withdrawal from meaningful action. It seems a self-irony of the physician Gottfried Benn—perhaps also of the writer Benn, who for a while tried to put a good face on the Nazi state. But it is definitely emblematic of the Ptolemean’s view of the world: he sees it as a sham surface on something no longer curable but, rather, ready to be destroyed:

To give advice concerning a broken fingernail, to evaluate combs, to recommend Birkenbalsam Hair Restorer, while in my mind thinking destroyed and destroying things: this paradox I had developed to the point of virtuosity. (225)

What respect he might have left for accepted values and institutions—the state, for instance—crumbles when a close look shows it to be empty behind a facade of excess administration: "It [the state] tracked down rabbits and had tooth-fillings registered. . . . In concert halls and lecture series it processed the beautiful, made it fall into line: the bow of Philoctetes and the ‘Parzenlied’ well behind the Weisse Flieder and the Caprifishers (213), the latter two titles being popular songs. Likewise, he attacks the idea of progress, demonstrating that history is a series of contingencies, and ironizes science by relating it to cosmetics. More seriously, he sees our defining reality in terms of the empirical sciences as the definitive obstacle to the constituting of a new cultural consciousness" (215).

Monsieur Teste does not question the intellect. The Ptolemean does not stop his demolition here. Not that he denies intellect as such, but he scorns its present historical stage, where he claims cerebralization has reached a point—the Monsieur Teste point—where its only relation to things is to define and turn them into concepts.

When he calls the intellect lethal and bionegative, we may be tempted to think he is on the side of life, a Bergsonian.¹⁰ But we find he sneers at life even more:

Life—this spittoon they all spat into, the cows, the worms, the whores—life that they all devoured down to its last idiocy, its lowest physiological forms of digestion, sperm and reflex—and then they serve it up garnished with eternal purposes. . . . Life shows procreation to be the center of its attention, and that is easy enough to manage as experience has shown. (214–15)

Yet there is this difference: life is devalued in general, the mind only in its present European manifestation.¹¹ Modern European life has ganged up on the spirit, tried to tame and disinfect it, subject it to disciplines and methods, has made it scientific, i.e. not suspect, and covered up its lethal bionegative traits (216). For this variety of mind there is no future. No shift of worldview will be able to change this. The dogma of homo sapiens has had its day. The Ptolemean speculates that the coming era might tolerate only two types of men: those who want to get on and act, and those who are silent and wait, criminals and monks. In this era he envisages a Monsieur Teste: The only others would be a few remnants of lonely souls, a very conscious, deeply melancholic spirit experiencing itself in silence (219).

Unlike Teste, the Ptolemean questions the Occidental, analytical way of thinking while feeling trapped in it. It is not enough to isolate himself in skeptical solipsism, in the Ptolemean region, where nothing turns except around itself. It is not enough, for it is no way to escape his stage of cerebralization. Hence the repeated cry: Is thinking compulsory?

Throughout the novella, but especially in the first chapter, Lotus Land, Western thought stands in tension with the desire for a more immediate union with the world of things (240), for the anorganic, the horizontal, the amorphous, the Asiatic: regaining former states of existence: becoming water, going to the lowest level which all avoid—an altogether anti-European tendency, near the Tao (240). This opposing tendency is summed up in the cipher of the Lotus Land, where nothing happens, where everything stands still, where there will be a non-evolving consciousness, introverted among squalls from Nirvana (251 K/W). It is a surprise that this hard-boiled skeptic should fall for such well-worn nostalgia and irrationalism. However, Lotus Land is also the name of the protagonist’s beauty shop, which rather undercuts the turn to the East from the start. Looking at both Occidental and Oriental forms of thinking, the Ptolemean finds that he is not capable, nor willing, to adopt either one of them. He lives between the two.

This disillusion with Western rationalism, this temptation of irrationalism seems to describe Benn’s own state of mind in 1933 that drove him—temporarily—to declare for the new [Nazi] state because it is my people that is trying to make its way here. Who am I to exclude myself?¹² He did not resign from the literary academy when writers like Heinrich Mann were kicked out. Though by 1935 the romance was over; Benn retreated into the position of an army doctor, and the Nazis banned his writings.

The imaginary Lotus Land is likened both to Meister Eckhart’s concept of the silent desert of the godhead and to similar concepts of Indian mysticism, just as the lake where the Ptolemean wants to live borders both Jordan and Ganges. Does this mean that all this elimination and relativization leads to mysticism, in either Western or Eastern form? This view seems supported by the fact that the Ptolemean claims at times to hear the voice of the infinite.

In Monsieur Teste, too, there are suggestions of mysticism. One is Teste’s remark that there are moments when my body becomes luminous (24), which is one of the physical phenomena of mysticism. His wife calls him a mystic without God (34), and his logbook contains paradoxes that resemble those of Saint Teresa: What I see makes me blind. What I hear deafens me