Rethinking the Arts after Hegel: From Architecture to Motion Pictures [1st ed. 2023] 3031355415, 9783031355417

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Rethinking the Arts after Hegel From Architecture to Motion Pictures Richard Dien Winfield

Rethinking the Arts after Hegel

Richard Dien Winfield

Rethinking the Arts after Hegel From Architecture to Motion Pictures

Richard Dien Winfield University of Georgia Department of Philosophy Athens, GA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-35541-7    ISBN 978-3-031-35542-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: “A Scene in Danakil”, 2015, photograph by Manas Samuel Winfield This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

In memory of Kenley Royce Dove (1936–2022), my Yale College undergraduate and abiding mentor, Dieter Henrich (1927–2022), my Heidelberg Magister Vater, and Louis Dupré (1925–2022), my Yale University PhD advisor.

Contents

Part I Introduction   1 1 The  Systematic Division of the Individual Arts  3 Introduction   3 The Differentiation of Artistic Media    6 The Senses and Sensuous Properties Appropriate for Fine Art    9 Differentiating the Arts Through the Media of Sight, Sound, and Language   12 The Differentiation of “Representational” and “Non-­Representational” Arts  16 Hegel’s Problematic Differentiation of the Individual Arts   18 Part II The Aesthetics of Architecture  21 2 The  General Aesthetics of Architecture 23 Architecture as the Starting Point for the Determination of the Individual Arts   23 The Aesthetic Enigma of Architecture   31 How We Can Remove the Category Confusion in Hegel’s Conception of Architecture   35 How Architecture Embodies the General Features of Fine Art   37 vii

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Engineering and Architecture   39 The Relation of Architecture to the Other Arts It May Contain   41 Community and Architecture   44 3 The  Aesthetics of Architectural Style 47 Tradition and Architectural Style   47 The Relation of Form and Function in Architectural Style   49 The Enigma of an Independent Symbolic Architecture   51 Classical Architecture as Uniting Form and Function   57 Independence and Function in Romantic Architecture   64 Part III The Aesthetics of Sculpture  75 4 The  Unique Aesthetic Achievement of Sculpture 77 The Defining Limits of Sculpture   79 The Creative Challenge Facing the Sculptor   84 5 The  Stylistics of Sculpture 93 How Sculpture Embodies the Symbolic Style   93 The Imperfect Perfection of Classical Sculpture   97 The Limited Idealization of the Classical Nude  100 Romantic Sculpture  109 From Kinetic Sculpture to Mime, Pure Dance, and Holography 113 Part IV The Aesthetics of Graphic Fine Art 115 6 Painting  as Paradigmatic Graphic Fine Art117 The Primacy of Painting in the Graphic Fine Arts  123 The Dual Limitations of Hegel’s Determination of Painting  125 Lessons from Hegel’s Analysis of the Generic Features of Painting  129

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7 Painting  and Artistic Style143 Painting in the Symbolic Style  143 Painting in the Classical Style  145 From Figurative to Abstract Romantic Painting  147 8 Photography  as a Graphic Fine Art157 The Aesthetic Challenges of Photography  157 The Vindication of Still Photography as a Graphic Fine Art  161 The Contrast Between the Still Photograph and the Non-­photographic Work of Graphic Art  165 The Genres of Photography as Fine Art  169 Photography and the Artforms  170 Part V The Aesthetics of Music 177 9 The  Distinguishing Aesthetics of Music179 The Elementary Material of the Medium of Music  183 How Music Unites Fundamental Meaning with the Configuration of Sound  186 The Role of Rhythm in Musical Expression  192 What Tonal Relations Contribute to Musical Art  194 Melodic Development and Musical Form  200 The Artistry of Musical Performance  204 Music as an Accompaniment of Dance, Lyrics, Theater, and Cinema  207 10 M  usical Style217 Music and the Artforms  217 Music in Realization of the Symbolic Artform  219 Music in Realization of the Classical Artform  220 Music in Realization of the Romantic Artform  222

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Part VI The Aesthetics of Literature 233 11 Literature  as Fine Art235 Language as a Medium of Fine Art  235 Guideposts for Drawing Upon Hegel’s Account of the Fine Art of Language  242 The Defining Form and Content of Literature as Fine Art  246 How the Literary Use of Language Differs from the Prosaic Use of Language  254 The Creative Activity of the Literary Artist  261 12 The  Aesthetics of Literary Genres265 The Fundamental Genres of Literature  265 How the Concept of Literature Grounds the Differentiation of Literary Genres  269 Epic Literature and Third-Person Narration  273 Lyric Literature and First-Person Narration  286 What Hegel Adds to Our Understanding of Lyric Literature  291 Dramatic Literature and Dialogue  299 The General Principle of Dramatic Literature  301 The Distinctive Unity of the Dramatic Work of Literature  305 Pathos and Dramatic Character  310 Catharsis and Reaction of the Audience to Drama  314 Dramatic Literature and the Public Performance of Drama  317 The Genres of Drama  324 Tragedy 327 Comedy 334 Tragicomedy 340 13 The  Stylistics of Literature343 Literature and the Artforms  343 Literature in the Symbolic Style  344 Lyric Literature in the Symbolic Style  345 Epic Literature in the Symbolic Style  347 Dramatic Literature in the Symbolic Style  350

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Literature in the Classical Style  364 Lyric Literature in the Classical Style  364 Epic Literature in the Classical Style  366 Dramatic Literature in the Classical Style  372 Literature in the Romantic Style  379 Lyric Literature in the Romantic Style  379 Epic Literature in the Romantic Style  381 Conceiving the Novel on the Shoulders of Hegel  386 Drama in the Romantic Style  403 Romantic Style Tragedy  406 Tragicomedy and Comedy in the Romantic Style  414 The Consummation of Drama in the Romantic Style  416 The Transitional Stage in the Self-Undermining of Romantic Style Drama  417 The Final Struggle of Modern Drama  421 Part VII The Aesthetics of Motion Pictures 429 14 Pure  Cinema as Fine Art431 Pure Versus Hybrid Cinema  431 The Pure Art of Moving Images and the Fine Art of Photography 432 What Motion Pictures Add to Still Photographic Artistry  436 The Fundamental Form Language of Cinema  442 Cinematic Content and Film Genres  447 The Limits of Abstract Non-Objective Cinema  449 The Aesthetic Challenges of Avant-Garde Surrealist Cinema  451 The Aesthetic Challenges of Non-Story Non-Fiction Films  452 The Aesthetic Challenges of the Fiction “Story” Film  455 15 The  Total Art of Hybrid Cinema463 The Fundamental Types and Stages of Hybrid Cinema  463 Silent Film  464 Sound Film  469

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The Role of Sound in Hybrid Cinema  471 The Internal Integration of Sound in Film  472 The External Addition of Sound to Film  474 The Interaction of Internal and External Sound in Film  477 The Role of Language in Hybrid Cinema  478 Film Adaptation of Literary Genres  482 Sound Film Versus Stage and Silent Film Acting  487 Cinema and the Artforms  490 W  orks Cited499 I ndex505

Part I Introduction

1 The Systematic Division of the Individual Arts

Introduction The final, most concrete, and most challenging part of aesthetics is the philosophy of the individual arts. Conceiving the individual arts concerns the different media made use of by artistic expression. Their investigation has aesthetic significance by addressing how different media distinctly embody the fundamental aspects of fine art. This involves determining how each medium gives special actuality first to what is common to fine art in general and then, secondly, to what is particular to the art forms, whose modes connect meaning and configuration in function of the world views that distinguish the basic options of civilization. In conceiving each individual art, we thus recapitulate everything that has gone before in the investigation of fine art in general and of the particular art forms, but as further concretized by their realization in a specific medium. If our investigation is to be genuinely philosophical, we must not only bring to bear the categories universal and particular to aesthetic worth, but also provide a necessary and exhaustive differentiation of the individual arts themselves. The philosophy of the individual arts must provide a systematic account of what they are in their totality, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_1

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as well as how each uniquely realizes art in general and each of the particular art forms. The two most prevalent aesthetic theories, the aesthetics of mimesis and the aesthetics of the reception of beauty, have little to say about the individual arts. Because mimetic aesthetics conceives artistic beauty to reside in the correct representation of given reality, neither the particular styles of artistic expression nor the distinct characters of the various artistic media have any bearing upon the achievement of artistic beauty. In every case, what matters is the accurate match of artistic portrayal with what it mirrors and whatever edifying effect this representation achieves. Since the object of mimesis is given antecedently to artistic creation and is the common standard for each and every work of art, mimetic success has nothing to do with the original, unique, and creative character distinguishing the object of beauty and its production and appreciation. Nor can any mimetic standard of beauty grant any aesthetic significance to differences of artistic style, for every stylistic variation constitutes a distinct departure from mimetic replication of the given objects allegedly providing fine art with its content.1 Nor can the distinct boundaries of artistic media warrant attention of their own when what matters aesthetically is always matching artistic representation with the object of mimesis. A similar lack of essential notice to differences in aesthetic style or media characterizes the aesthetics that repudiates the mimetic concern for objective measures of beauty and instead roots aesthetic worth in the subjective and intersubjective reception process of what is perceived to be beautiful. For this approach, which substitutes a transcendental construction of the beautiful for a metaphysical appeal to some privileged content worthy of mimetic representation, the same subjective or intersubjective process of aesthetic judgment is at work, no matter what individuates an artwork and the mode of expression and media at hand. Once more a common antecedent standard confers aesthetic worth, leaving out of account the specificity of artistic creation, artistic style, and artistic media. Whether appealing to objective givens or subjective/intersubjective  As Nicolai Hartmann observes, with regard to painting, “styles in painting are all essentially limitations of realism”, understood in mimetic fashion as “true-to-life”. See Nicolai Hartmann, Aesthetics, trans. Eugene Kelly (Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), p. 329. 1

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process, both traditions of aesthetic theory fail to grasp the constitutive individuality of fine art, so essential to its originality, creativity, and autonomy. Only the aesthetic theory that conceives beauty to lie in freely created works uniquely uniting sensuous configuration with fundamental meaning can concretely respect the exemplary singularity of beauty, the different modes by which meaning and configuration can be artistically united, and the specific ways in which various artistic media present different challenges for artistic creation and appreciation. Hegel, who pioneers this latter approach, is compelled to tackle all three levels of aesthetic investigation to an unprecedented extent. He duly develops his theory of the individual arts by exploring how the general and particular aspects of fine art are further concretized in the media in which works of art achieve reality. Hegel realizes that we can and must conceive aesthetic worth in general before we can address the particular art forms or any individual arts, for both art forms and individual arts cannot have any aesthetic identity without incorporating what pertains to beauty in general. Similarly, the art forms must be conceived before addressing the individual arts, since the latter cannot be or be conceived as embodiments of any determinate aesthetic style unless they contain the particular modes of uniting meaning and configuration that distinguish the art forms. Nonetheless, neither beauty nor artistic style comes into actual existence without taking shape in an individual art, and aesthetic theory remains incomplete unless it tackles this last, most concrete arena of beauty. In two previous books I have sought to renew and develop the systematic aesthetic theory pioneered by Hegel by critically thinking through Hegel’s determination of the general features of aesthetic worth and the fundamental artistic styles by which meaning and configuration are aesthetically united. In Systematic Aesthetics2 I attempted to show how Hegel overcomes the dilemmas afflicting metaphysical mimetic aesthetics and the transcendental aesthetics of reception and largely succeeds in determining how aesthetic worth resides essentially in works of fine art and in conceiving what universally pertains to the being, creation, and reception  Richard Dien Winfield, Systematic Aesthetics (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995).

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of artworks. In Stylistics3 I have critically reconstructed Hegel’s theory of the particular artforms, setting the stage for tackling the theory of the individual arts. In the work that follows, I build upon Hegel’s account of the individual arts, remedy its glaring inconsistencies and major omissions. In so doing, I draw upon more recent contributions, particularly regarding arts such as photography and cinema that Hegel had no opportunity to consider. In sum, I here offer a comprehensive and systematic outline of this third and final level of aesthetic theory.

The Differentiation of Artistic Media The necessity of the real embodiment of artistic beauty lies in the very nature of the work of fine art and any necessary differentiation of artistic media must be derived from this. To be manifest to an audience in general, a creation of fine art must present its unity of meaning and configuration in some enduring physical entity, whose sensuous appearance either directly conveys its aesthetic worth or provides the perceivable inscriptions of language with which linguistic imagination can entertain a literary work or contribute to an artistic media that combines words and non-verbal imagery.4 The systematic conception of different sensuous physical properties is provided by the philosophy of nature when it advances beyond the pure mechanics of undifferentiated matter in motion to the various perceivable physical properties made possible by the charge polarity of electromagnetism.5 Electromagnetic polarity allows atoms and molecules to have structures differentiated above and beyond those produced by gravitational and inertial force. These structural complexities then provide the basis for physical entities to have various tactile qualities, sonorities,  Richard Dien Winfield, Stylistics: Rethinking the Artforms After Hegel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). 4  “Imagery” here refers to non-verbal representations in general, including not only visual imagery, but any other types that properly enter into aesthetic representation. As we shall see, only auditory imagery has a role to play in defining a distinct artistic medium. 5  For a systematic exploration of the physical properties electromagnetism makes possible, see Richard Dien Winfield, Conceiving Nature After Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel: The Philosopher’s Guide to the Universe (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Chapters 7–10, pp. 199–354. 3

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smells and tastes, and diverse interactions with light (and electromagnetic radiation in general) that are exhibited in different qualities of color, translucency, transparency, reflectivity, and refraction. Similarly, the systematic account of the different senses is established within that part of the philosophy of nature that addresses animal life, with its defining sentience and motility, and then in that part of the philosophy of mind that addresses sense perception.6 If we base the differentiation of individual arts solely on the physics of sensuous material and the psychology of sense perception, we would distinguish artistic media in terms of tangibility, sound, taste, odor, and visibility (in the broad sense of manifest relations to electromagnetic radiation in general) and their apprehension by the corresponding senses receptive to these physical features. Admittedly, plant life, not to mention unicellular organisms, are sensitive to different physical properties and respond in function of their metabolic and reproductive needs. Sensation and motility proper do not, however, come into play in the sensitivity of plants to light and moisture and their local tropic movements. Only with animal life does a unified sensitivity with a correspondingly unified capability to respond emerge, bringing into being the sentient mind and subjective agency without which the creation and reception of any fine art cannot take place. The further psychological development specific to rational agents must also be at hand, since every fine art must unite sensuous, imaginative configuration with fundamental meaning. Such meaning is inherently universal, which is what allows fine art to move rational agents inhabiting any time or place. Universal meaning can only be apprehended in thought, which requires language for its expression. Hence, fine art requires the psychological reality of individuals with linguistic intelligence, as well as the intersubjectivity of a linguistic community. The comprehension of all these natural and psychological elements must be supplied to conceive the individual arts, and this is achieved not  For systematic treatments of these topics, see Richard Dien Winfield, The Living Mind: From Psyche to Consciousness (Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), pp. 159–177, and Richard Dien Winfield, Universal Biology After Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel: The Philosopher’s Guide to Life in the Universe (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 121–165. 6

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within aesthetic theory, but by the systematically prior investigations of the philosophy of nature and of mind. In addressing how the physical properties of things and the sense of rational agents supply constitutive material for the differentiation of individual arts, we must recognize that a philosophical account cannot properly limit itself to what Homo Sapiens contingently possess in the way of sense organs and biological capabilities of expression. To properly conceive the individual arts, we must consider what any artistic creators and audiences could sense, imagine, and exemplarily configure, no matter what their species being. In so doing, we must recognize that the world of fine art can involve rational individuals of the same species as well as different rational species with very diverse ranges of tactile, auditory, olfactory, taste, and visual (or more broadly, electromagnetic) sensitivity. Human beings have varying capabilities of sight and color perception, of hearing, of touch, of smell, and of taste. Moreover, terrestrial animals have sensitivities to sound and electromagnetic frequencies, not to mention taste, smell, and touch acuities, completely different from ours. We should expect that rational agents in other worlds will have their own distinctive ranges of sensory perception reflecting the specific environmental pressures to which their evolution has been subject. All of this will be reflected in whatever artistic creations they might produce and enjoy. Of course, in treating the sensuous physical and psychological materials that enter the differentiation of individual arts, we must not ignore the intersubjective interaction of language, in which any creators and audience of fine art must participate in order to access the fundamental meaning to which artistic configuration is constitutively united. Language provides an artistic medium of its own that may also combine with other media to form further hybrid arts. Artistic creations can thus involve not only sensuous configurations whose imagery is directly apprehended, but also intuited content that has symbolic and/or verbal meaning. When artistic representations serve as symbols, their sensuous content has an intrinsic connection to what they symbolize, as the image of a lion does in symbolizing rule or courage. By contrast, when artistic representations serve as signs, they have a meaning with no direct connection to their intuitive configuration. The purely conventional character of a sign’s tie to its significance is evident insofar as speech and texts can be translated

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into different languages, with varying sounds, orthographies, and types of inscriptions, including tactile systems such as Braille. Nonetheless, language, as an artistic media, still may make use of the intuitive content of its signs and give it an aesthetically expressive role, as in the sound of poetry. Given the differentiation of physical properties and corresponding senses, and the addition of language, we have an array of potential artistic media by which a systematic differentiation of individual arts may be made. At face value, these materials offer the basis for distinguishing tactile art, visual art, olfactory art, auditory art, an art of taste, and verbal art. Further, these divisions would apply no matter what range of tactile, visual (or more broadly, electro-magnetic), auditory, olfactory, and taste sensitivities apply to the rational species creating and appreciating fine art, as well as no matter what be the corresponding form of linguistic communication of which it is capable. Indeed, a rational species might lack a specific sense, preventing it from producing or enjoying a certain individual art. Nonetheless, we can still conceive the complete range of possible individual arts in light of the philosophy of nature’s and philosophy of mind’s accounts of the forms of physical properties, senses, and linguistic communication.

 he Senses and Sensuous Properties T Appropriate for Fine Art Can, however, every type of sensuous property and every corresponding sense provide a worthy material for artistic creation? The culinary arts and the art of perfume creation may produce works that exhibit a certain originality that elicits appreciation for the artistry of their makers, but these arts have never attained the stature of the visual arts or music or literature, either for the public at large or for the rare aesthetic theorist who addresses the differentiation of individual arts. Hegel, for one, dismisses smell, taste, and touch as senses that are inherently inappropriate for any direct appropriation for fine art. Although these senses perceive genuine physical properties, they do so in

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a manner that renders these senses “practical” in comparison to the more “theoretical” character of vision and hearing. Smell and taste both operate through processes which degrade the object in the course of its being sensed. Something can be tasted only by being dissolved in the saliva of the taster and then drunk, chewed up, or spit out, precluding a repetition of the same tasting experience with that morsel. What is smelled can only have its odor sensed by the emanation of particles that reach the olfactory organs of the individual who smells it. In both cases, the process of sensation literally demolishes the object that is sensed, either consuming or inhaling it and removing that matter from the field of perception of others. This prevents taste or odor to manifest the same objective appearance in any abiding way to an audience in common. The experience whereby taste and smell are sensed can no longer be duplicated by others, since what is tasted is consumed, just as the particles that are smelled are inhaled. Of course, recipes for specific tastes and odors can be rigorously followed to produce food and perfumes that can be sampled by many, with presumably similar results. Nonetheless, the experience of each remains a “practical” one, preventing whatever is actually sensed from being available to anyone else in the same way in the future. Moreover, the processes of tasting and smelling inherently limit how discriminately different flavors and odors can be apprehended in simultaneous and sequential relations. Although we can taste and smell immediately concrete sensations, to which all sorts of associations may be linked, there is no way to produce these sensations for an audience in general with any breadth of creative ordering comparable to what can be seen, heard, or read. Admittedly, an audience could be supplied equivalent items to drink and taste, or for that matter, to smell in various combinations and sequences, but in either case, the possibilities of form would be as impoverished as they are cumbersome to experience. Unlike taste and smell, touch need not significantly alter the object whose tactile properties it senses. Touch, however, has a practical significance insofar as it operates through immediate contact with the tactile object. Even if the pressure exerted leaves the object relatively intact, touch depends upon direct impression at the point of contact. For this reason, tactile sensation cannot be directly shared in a general manner. Admittedly, equivalent items to touch could be offered an audience in

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coeval combination or temporal succession, but unless these tactile sensations operated as signs for words, as in Braille, their ordering would be just as aesthetically constraining as comparable arrangements of tastes and odors. What is felt by touch might offer some tactile pleasure, comparable to the gratification of sumptuous tastes and odors, but hardly an aesthetic satisfaction rooted in the perceived unity of configuration and fundamental meaning. By contrast, the senses of vision and hearing operate at a distance, leaving visible and sounding objects both virtually unaltered and commonly perceivable by others at different locations and at other times. This detached character enables sight and hearing to accommodate most easily the aesthetic independence of the work of art, which warrants treatment as something whose appearance is of value in itself, rather than being consumed to gratify some desire. In addition, both vision and hearing can apprehend far more differentiated configurations, both simultaneously and in succession, and do so in a way that is readily available to an audience in general. When sounds and sights convey language, of course, the possibilities of artistic expression widen greatly, as our investigation of literary art will substantiate. This superior aesthetic suitability applies most evidently to “representational” artistic expression, for which visual art and literature provide incomparable resources. The greater availability of appropriately protean formal possibilities applies equally, however, to “non-representational” arts of sight and sound, namely, architecture, “abstract” sculpture, “abstract” visual art, and music. All have an aesthetically fit configurability outstripping what objects of taste, smell, and touch can offer in their own rights. Since the work of art unites fundamental meaning with sensuous or imaginative configuration, providing something of value to any audience of rational agents, it requires media that appropriately sustain that generality of appearance and provide sensuous resources rich enough to express our deepest concerns. The “practical” senses are unfit due to their difficulty in allowing the putative work of fine art to show itself apart from the single sensing of an individual and to provide meaningful forms, rather than gratifying sensations. Smell, taste, and touch cannot be used to convey an exemplary configuration whose combination of imagery

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and fundamental significance requires a fittingly abiding manifestation available to others with sufficiently determinate form. Vision and hearing do not suffer from this liability owing to their “theoretical” character. They leave what is seen and heard unaltered by the process of its sight and hearing, thereby letting it appear unencumbered to an audience in general, as fine art deserves. Consequently, the proper media for fine art seem limited to the “theoretical” media of sound and visual imagery, together with whatever type of sensuous intuitions are capable of conveying language. Sound and visual imagery, of course, are obvious candidates for linguistic expression, as audible speech and writing have long made evident. Tactile sensation, however, is also a viable means for language as Braille and equivalent writing systems for the blind have shown.

 ifferentiating the Arts Through the Media D of Sight, Sound, and Language So far we seem to be left with a differentiation of arts taking its cue from the two “theoretical” senses of sight and hearing, and from language, whether it be conveyed by visual, auditory, or tactile imagery. We have then the visual arts, using imagery conveyed through light, or more broadly, electromagnetic radiation, the art of music, using sound as its medium, and the verbal arts, encompassing literature as a fine art. These three media can, of course, be combined in multiple ways, but before considering the possible hybridizations, we must explore what is inherent in visual, auditory, and linguistic arts taken in and of themselves, and how they may be essentially divided. Even under the imperative of such an unmixed consideration, where all hybridization is precluded for later delineation, this three-fold differentiation is still just a beginning, inviting further division. This is particularly evident regarding visual art, which is readily distinguished into further media with respect to their qualification by space and time. Namely, visual art can be two dimensional or three dimensional, and, in both cases, it can be static or changing over time.

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Static visual art that restricts itself to images presented on a relatively flat plain include drawing, painting, still photography, and other forms of unchanging two-dimensional graphic art. Static visual art that is three-dimensional includes immobile sculpture and fixed holographic art. One can also add architecture as a static three-­ dimensional visual art with the distinguishing feature that its works of art are typically put to use as enclosures for human activity, broadly considered. This usage is reflected in the way in which architectural design can connect to the meaning of the activities for which it provides a fit space. To the extent that configuration and significance remain united, architecture can retain an independent aesthetic value that transcends its utilization for mundane or sacred ends. Two-dimensional visual art that is not static, but changes over time, includes motion pictures without sound or inscribed language, namely, untitled silent film or its broadcast and internet streamed equivalents. Three-dimensional visual art that changes over time include kinetic sculpture, changing holographic images, and immersive dynamic virtual reality panoramas, as well as dance, mime, and other live performances that retain their independent visual aesthetic worth without making use of sound and language. In the above differentiation of visual arts in respect to space and time, any combination with other media is methodologically excluded so as to focus solely on the inherent possibilities of visual art in and of itself. The same approach applies to determining what is essential to the individual arts of sound and language. They must each be considered first without combination with other media to conceive how their individual art specifically embodies the features general to beauty and particular to the artforms. Then we can conceive the fundamental hybridizations whereby individual arts can be identified that combine the varieties of visual art with music and/or words, music with the forms of visual imagery and/or verbal expression, and literature with the forms of visual imagery and/or music. Neither the arts of sound or literature can be further differentiated with respect to space and time in the manner of visual art. Spatial dimensions simply have no application to the taxonomy of music or literary art. Sound, like light, may indeed disseminate in three-dimensional space

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from spatially identifiable locations. Hearing, unlike echolocation, however, perceives not the spatial dimension of the resounding sources of heard vibrations, but the sounds themselves, which are received at a distance by this “theoretical” sense. Literature, for its part, may be presented in audible speech or in inscriptions perceived by sight or touch, but in all cases, the physical vehicle of its transmission is essentially indifferent to the imagery and meaning it conveys to semiotic imagination. Although there may be hybrid cases in which the sound of speech or the shape and arrangement of inscribed language have aesthetic significance for the work of art, literature per se makes use of signs whose meaning has no necessary connection to their configuration. For this reason, it makes little sense to speak of music and literature distinguished by spatial dimensions. The arts of sound and language do have a connection to time, but not one allowing a contrast between static and changing music and literature. To be perceived, sound must have duration, but to be more than a pleasant sensation, music must combine differentiated form and content and develop in time. Spoken language equally unfolds in time and speech cannot achieve any unity of unique configuration and fundamental meaning if it simply enunciates an unchanging verbal expression. Although inscribed language has a static reality in the book or computer file in which it resides, literature can only manifest itself in the temporal process of its successive reading (either silently or enunciated), which forfeits any aesthetic worth it if consists in an unchanging repetition of the same verbalizations. Consequently, types of music and literature are not distinguishable in terms of those that are static and those that undergo change. The physical character of sound might, however, offer some possible divisions of auditory art with respect to the source of sound production. Types of music can, of course, be classified in terms of the different instruments that are employed, as well as the different types of ensembles in which such instruments are grouped together. These instruments can be products of manufacture as well as natural endowments of voice, trained in the cultivation of sound that distinguishes musical tone from noise. This classification by instrument can make room for electronic music of different sorts. In addition, one might entertain an art of sound that

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dispenses altogether with the artificially purified regularities of tone, tuning, harmonization, and rhythm that music employs, using instead brute noises, both natural and artificial, subject to selective aesthetic appropriation and arrangement. Literature has no equivalent varieties of linguistic instruments, unless one were to distinguish literary art with respect to the language and dialects of its expression. If language differences could have aesthetic significance, then it might be meaningful to classify literature by linguistic community, and differentiate literature as English, French, German, Chinese, etc. What undercuts such differentiation is the very conventionality of signs and languages, which ensures the correlative translatability of all literature. This renders the content and meaning of literature always indifferent to the particular language in which it is presented. Every language and dialect can serve to convey literature of any origin and type. Classification by language community thus offers no basis for aesthetically distinctive embodiments of what is general and stylistically particular in fine art. Each language community may develop literature in every fundamental genre and style, such that its tradition offers a particular embodiment of what other traditions may equally produce, albeit with their own culturally specific stamp. With these considerations in mind, we can anticipate how the “pure” individual visual arts, the art of sound, and literature can be combined to produce such hybrid arts as talking pictures with musical accompaniment, song and opera, immersive virtual reality with music and language, and theatrical performances drawing upon language, music, dance, and two- and three-dimensional scenery. The systematic conception of the individual arts then has the following order. First, we must examine each of the pure, “unmixed” individual arts: the visual arts in their respective division, music, and literature. These come first, since any hybrid forms presuppose them in both thought and reality. Accordingly, we next conceive the possible combinations of these pure arts. In examining each differentiated art, we must address how their defining media gives specific embodiment to the features general to fine art and then to each of the fundamental artistic styles, every one of which incorporates what is universal to aesthetic worth. Whether it be architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature,

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theater or film, we must begin by considering how their individual medium bears upon the being, creation, and reception of the work of art, followed by examining how the fundamental styles for combining meaning and configuration work themselves out in each specific individual art.

 he Differentiation of “Representational” T and “Non-Representational” Arts The differentiation of the arts by sensuous properties and corresponding media appropriate for aesthetic employment leaves us with “pure”, non-­ hybrid varieties that broadly correspond to the traditional array of the five fine arts of architecture, sculpture, painting (and all other two-­ dimensional graphic art), music, and literature, including the “still” and “moving” options that leave room for kinetic sculpture (and dance) and cinema. We shall see that these individual arts have unique boundaries that affect what form and content they support, as well as how they actualize the fundamental styles of artistic construal. Employed as an artistic medium, each kind of material allows only certain subject matter to be expressed in varying degrees with only a particular range of configuration.7 Nonetheless, this “material” differentiation ignores a divide that many view as more relevant to the aesthetic character of the individual arts – namely, the divide between “representational” and “non-representational” arts. Typically, those who invoke this divide group sculpture, two-­ dimensional visual art, and literature as “representational” arts, while relegating architecture and music to the “non-representational” arts. This classification, of course, depends upon regarding sculpture and two-dimensional visual art as wholly “figurative” in character. Thinkers can readily embrace this assumption when they have not been exposed to the “abstract”, “non-representational” sculpture and painting that emerged in the twentieth century. These non-figurative works give  As Nicolai Hartmann observes, “each kind of material allows only a certain kind of construction, and in that kind only certain contents can be captured, that is, brought to “appearance”” (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 102). 7

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embodiment, as we shall see, to the type of Romantic style that can no longer find any given physical reality sufficient to express the autonomous subjectivity it celebrates. Hegel, for one, addresses sculpture and painting as if both were exclusively figurative in approach. Certainly, up until modern art embraces abstraction, sculpture and two-dimensional visual art have been virtually entirely figurative. Sculpture has focused on representing preeminently the bodies of Gods and human mortals, whereas painting and drawing have represented the wider field of visual appearance in their reach, including still-life, landscape, and the broad range of situations in which secular and sacred conduct proceeds. Yet, as modern art testifies, both sculpture and two-dimensional visual art can be non-figurative, even if this option may be viable aesthetically only for a certain development of the Romantic style. Indeed, even experimental literature can depart from “representation” in any familiar sense, as certain modern examples can testify. What further complicates any division of arts into “representational” and “non-representational” varieties is the way in which “pure” music and architecture can be regarded as representing very real human and divine contents. Plato and Aristotle had little difficulty associating certain musical modes, harmonies, and rhythms as expressive of specific types of character.8 Of course, since both adhere to mimetic aesthetic theory, they must consider any work of art to mirror the realities worthy of attention to qualify as an object of beauty. Still, even without adherence to mimesis, one can view “pure”, non-programmatic unaccompanied music as commanding aesthetic value by fittingly representing the fundamental human emotions that concern secular and sacred affairs of the highest importance. Similarly, even architecture can be accorded a representational character. By shaping spaces for use in our most essential human activities, architectural creation represents a fundamental self-understanding of a form of life, rather than simply designing a purely abstract construction, definable in geometric and mechanical terms. Just as our fashion of  See Plato, Republic, Book III, 398d-400e, 401d-404c in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), pp. 1035–1038, 1038–1040; and see Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, Ch. 5, 1340a19-23, 1340a39-1340b14, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Volume II, p. 2126. 8

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clothing can be the conscious public self-presentation of an individual (at least in epochs where we have the freedom to choose our dress), so the design of a home can display how a family represents its domestic life to its community, just as communal edifices can represent the self-­ understanding of a civilization, which may leave little else behind for posterity.9 This is not to deny the difference in what contents and forms are available to music and architecture in comparison to those at the disposal of sculpture, painting, and literature. Nonetheless, the divide of “representational”/“non-representational” media does not do proper justice to the boundaries of these individuals arts. As Hartmann acknowledges, “Perhaps one should say rather that there are no nonrepresentational arts. Humankind represents something in all artistic construction – itself.”10

 egel’s Problematic Differentiation H of the Individual Arts Although Hegel’s treatment of the individual arts ends up following much of the above itinerary, he considers it to be deficient. He maintains that a differentiation of individual arts that attends only to the physical, psychological, and linguistic aspects of artistic media ignores a further connection essential for understanding the proper identity of each art. Namely, Hegel maintains that each individual art has a special affinity to one of the fundamental artistic styles, which Hegel earlier distinguished as the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms in conceiving the fundamental modes of aesthetically uniting meaning and configuration. He  As Nicolai Hartmann notes, “Very definite forms of human life are tied not only to churches, temples, palaces, to open stairs or battlements, but also to half-timbered homes or farmhouses in a local style. … A house stands to the domestic and personal family life of people as clothes do to the public person. We know that clothing constitutes the public and usually conscious self-­presentation of a man; it expresses how he wishes to appear, and thus is the expression of his idea of himself. … A house is, in a certain sense, the garment of the individual’s most intimate life within the community …. In this way historical peoples and epochs “appear” in their architecture, and by no means only in the monumental ones” (Hartmann, Aesthetics, pp. 136–137). 10  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 121. 9

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presents architecture as having a special connection to the Symbolic form of art, describes sculpture as inherently linked to the Classical form of art, and determines painting, music, and literature as essentially fit for the Romantic form of art. In so doing, Hegel collapses the systematic demarcation of the particular and individual dimensions of fine art. Instead of operating within a three-fold division of visual art, music, and literature, Hegel reorganizes the individual arts under a different three-fold division corresponding to the three-fold differentiation of particular artforms. On these terms, we have the Symbolic individual art, architecture, distinguished from the Classical individual art of sculpture and the Romantic individual arts of painting, music, and literature. Hegel ends up largely refuting this confusion of levels by showing how every individual art is able to give each artistic style an aesthetically worthy embodiment. He himself, for example, extensively analyzes Gothic Architecture as a paramount expression of the Romantic style, acknowledges the achievement of Renaissance sculpture, and examines how literature has attained aesthetic greatness in both Symbolic and Classical styles. Nonetheless, Hegel maintains that each individual art is specifically suited to give superior aesthetic realization to just one of the artforms. Architecture can best be Symbolic, sculpture can best be Classical, and painting, music, and literature can best realize the Romantic style. These claims are hardly benign. Not only do they call into question the aesthetic capabilities of each individual art, but they end up limiting the form and content of individual arts in ways that are insupportable. Despite these problems, Hegel’s development of the individual arts remains the most significant systematic philosophical treatment, which we ignore at our own peril. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we will proceed to think through the differentiation of individual arts, drawing upon Hegel’s achievement where possible, exposing its pitfalls when necessary, and striking beyond as required to complete in outline this ultimate and most encompassing frontier of aesthetic theory.

Part II The Aesthetics of Architecture

2 The General Aesthetics of Architecture

 rchitecture as the Starting Point A for the Determination of the Individual Arts A systematic investigation of the individual arts must begin with all the conceptual resources necessary to determine any individual art whatsoever, but not presuppose anything specific to an individual art. On the one hand, aesthetics must already dispose of two philosophical endowments. First, aesthetics must have at its disposal the entire gamut of logical, natural, and psychological determinations presupposed by and incorporated in the conception and reality of fine art. Second, aesthetics must have already established the features universal to aesthetic worth and the fundamental particular modes by which meaning and configuration can be united in the being, creation, and reception of fine art. Otherwise, the philosophy of fine art is in no position to comprehend what constitutes any individual art. On the other hand, the starting point for conceiving the individual arts must not already presuppose and invoke determinations specific to any individual art. If aesthetics did so, those illicitly employed specifics would be assumed rather than established within the account of the individual arts. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_2

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As we have seen, the general and particular dimensions of fine art narrow the possible media of the individual arts to three basic options, which then can be combined in hybrid forms. These primary options are specific to the two “theoretical” senses, vision and hearing, and to linguistic imagination. The three resulting individual arts are, broadly speaking, visual art, music, and literature. These must all be determined in their own rights before the philosophy of individual arts can address the hybrid arts that combine them. The combinations constituting these hybrid arts cannot be comprehended without the prior determination of these “pure” arts. Although music and literature cannot be further differentiated into separate arts in terms of relations to space and time, visual art can be divided into two- and three-dimensional types (e.g. painting and drawing vs. architecture, sculpture, and embodied performance) and into static and changing types (e.g. still pictures and still sculpture versus kinetic sculpture, moving pictures, and dance). Although the conceptual priority of the pure individual arts over any of their hybrid combinations is obvious, it is not at all clear that their antecedent systematic treatment has some necessary order of its own. Visual art, music, and literature seem to be coevally given as artistic media options by the common prerequisites provided by nature and mind. Although individual rational agents my lack sight and/or hearing, be mute, and live in communities without inscribed language, the general natural, psychological, and linguistic conditions on which the arts depend do not mandate any necessary sequence in the constitution and historical development of the arts. Linguistically competent rational animals who have sight, hearing, and voice are just as able to draw, sculpt, and aesthetically construct, as to make music or use language as an instrument of beauty. Further, the same order indifference applies to the division of visual arts by space and time. Talking animals may just as well begin their artistic career by drawing on bark or cave walls, crafting figures in clay, wood, or stone, bursting into song and dance, or reciting stories. Although technological developments may underlie access to certain media, such as photography and cinema, the fundamental options for the individual arts are perennial avenues for creative fulfillment.

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Nonetheless, Hegel, who considers artistic media in unparalleled detail, insists that the philosophy of the individual arts should begin with architecture. He makes this claim in connection with three considerations of very different but interrelated significance. To begin with, Hegel maintains that architecture is the first art with respect to history.1 He does not supply either historical evidence to support this claim or an argument for why this need be so. The historical primacy of architecture can easily be doubted by considering how nomadic peoples may have lived for uncountable millennia preceding the emergence of settled communities. Did they, do they, and could they not wander the earth without constructing buildings, while painting caves and inscribing stones, carving figures, adorning pottery and animal skins, weaving textiles, reciting poems and tales, and otherwise engaging in artistic creation while abstaining from practicing architecture? Even if history be limited to communities who undergo novel development and record their own destinies, this hardly precludes nomadic peoples from being historical without architecture. Nor does it exclude the possibility of history applying to communities in which other arts are at hand from the moment architecture arises.2 Architecture could be ascribed historical primacy if all other arts somehow depend upon its existence for their own being, creation, and reception, without it returning the favor. Of course, evaluating whether this is true depends upon conceiving what these other arts are. If architecture were a condition for the existence of the other arts, then it would come first historically, or alternately, always accompany all the other arts. Georg Lukács contests Hegel’s assignment of historical primacy to architecture, not just noting how other arts have preceded it, but suggesting that architecture cannot come first in art history.3 First, he points to the paleolithic and anthropological evidence of archaic and 1  Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 631. 2  Walter Benjamin ignores these considerations when he claims that architecture’s “history is longer than that of any other art”. See Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin; trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 40. 3  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2 (Berlin und Weimar: Aufbau Verlag, 1981), p. 394.

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“primitive” human communities that produced no works of architecture, but much painting and drawing, adorning cave walls and pottery, much sculpture in wood, ceramics, and stone, and much music and dance, at least as witnessed in historical and contemporary testimony. One may question Lukács’ adherence to the Marxist notion of a proto-communist original society of hunters and gatherers, but he is far from alone in recognizing how people have practiced many of the individual arts without having first or ever engaged in architecture. More significantly, Lukács rules out architecture as the first art to arise by attending to two aspects essential to its aesthetic reality. He notes that the building of structures for purely pragmatic use precedes the construction of proper works of architecture, whose design offers a configuration expressing some fundamental self-understanding worthy of display. This precedence is both historical and conceptual, for the work of architecture incorporates the design imperatives of some useful function, which can be embodied without any aesthetic superimpositions.4 People can construct dwellings for shelter and safety, erect stockades, palisades, moats, walls, and gates to protect their communities and derive satisfaction from viewing how their efforts provide security. Yet, this does not yet involve any production or appreciation of architectural achievement, for all it concerns is utility. Admittedly, a work of architecture does not “represent” the use it serves, but rather fulfills it.5 To be a work of art, however, a construction of architecture must provide a visual configuration that means more than its utility, that gives expression to what its builders and users regard as the fundamental concerns of themselves and their community, concerns deserving to be memorialized potentially for centuries to come. As Lukács observes, first comes the engagement in purely utilitarian building and the development of construction techniques that open the way for freer explorations of meaningful design. Secondly, comes the development of the response to the shapings of space by which  As Lukács notes, unlike other works of art whose non-fulfillment of aesthetic norms undercuts their very being, a building can fulfill its social function without any aesthetic contribution. See Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 387. 5  Hartmann makes this point, writing that “the practical purpose in architecture is distinguished from a “theme” in that it is not “represented” in a building; it is instead realized, is implemented by an actual construction” (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 137). 4

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people move from works of utility to buildings whose function is incorporated into an aesthetic creation.6 As Lukács notes, this involves the development of emotional responses to building design that proceed from non-aesthetic gratification for the fulfillment of survival needs to genuine aesthetic appreciation.7 The latter involves feelings savoring how the appearance of an artificially crafted space commands normative significance by properly housing secular and sacred activities essential to a life worth living, as understood by builders and users alike.8 Moreover, buildings of such significance are essentially communal undertakings affirming what a community values in common and for whose expression it has come to devote sufficient resources.9 Other arts can be practiced without any comparable communal mobilizations, as well as long before a community is able to unite around such undertakings. The resulting constructions of these communal efforts possess an accordingly universal meaning, that, if infusing their configuration, secures their aesthetic worth. Nonetheless, other arts may already be long developed with much more limited resources before building advances from utilitarian design to architectural beauty. On all these accounts, the emergence of architecture can not be first among the arts, but rather arises as a late comer, as the pre-historical and historical record confirms. If architecture does not come first in historical genesis, it may still warrant treatment at the beginning of the system of arts for a very different reason. Hegel offers such a rationale with his second ground for architecture’s primacy – one that is not historical, but conceptual. He maintains that the conception of architecture comes first among that of the other arts insofar as it wields the most minimal, elementary embodiment of beauty. It does so because architecture fulfills fine art’s vocation of giving sensuous configuration to humanity’s self-understanding in the most rudimentary way by shaping the most elementary physical reality: sheer heavy matter that need not be otherwise differentiated.10 Although  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 394.  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, pp. 396, 400. 8  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, pp. 406–407. 9  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 405. 10  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 630–631. 6 7

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architecture configures three-dimensional structures that must be seen to be available for aesthetic appreciation, it does not essentially require the use of materials with differing physical properties of texture, elasticity, color, transparency, translucency, reflectivity, or properties of refraction. Architecture may employ such physical variegations for purposes of its design, but it can also do without such differences and make use of physically uniform material. In this respect, architecture per se makes use of heavy matter in general, accommodating the mechanical requirements of support, rigidity, and weight in the configurations it creates. All the other visual arts incorporate some coming to grips with heavy matter, whether it be in the materiality of two-dimensional surfaces for drawing and painting, the three-dimensional moldings of sculpture, the static and dynamic representations of architectural forms in graphic art and holograms and film, the resounding bodies of musical instruments, the embodiment of live performance, or the verbal imaginings of the architectural settings pervading literature. This elemental feature of architecture provides Hegel with a third, and for him, decisive justification for making it the first art to be determined. The heavy matter that provides architecture with its defining medium is incapable of giving direct expression to the subjectivity of humanity and its fundamental concerns. At most, the architectural shaping of heavy matter can only allude to the proper meanings fit for artistic configuration.11 The basic incommensurability between undifferentiated matter and human self-understanding leaves architecture basically condemned to operate within the symbolic mode of artistic construal, where meaning and configuration are essentially at odds owing to the discrepancy between the minimalism of the medium and the significance it grapples to express. This alleged affinity between architecture and the Symbolic artform provides the capstone for Hegel’s answer to the question, with what must the philosophy of the individual arts begin? The third and final level of aesthetics must begin with architecture because it is essentially tied to the symbolic artform and the symbolic artform comes first among the particular modalities of artistic style. These, according to Hegel, themselves develop from the Symbolic artform to the Classical  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 633.

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artform, which paves the way for the Romantic artform, which brings the possibilities for artistic construal to a self-undermining end. The necessity of this ordering of artforms can be disputed as one might dispute an ordering of individual arts – namely, by regarding their differentiation as a taxonomy of fundamental possibilities whose historical emergence and sequence are contingent.12 The advent of artforms is tied to the genesis of fundamental forms of human self-understanding, broadly considered, by which civilizations can be distinguished. These present conditions in which the meanings that art finds fit to configure can be too abstract to achieve any congruent sensuous embodiment (as in the Symbolic artform), sufficiently concretely natural to have perfectly adequate sensuous embodiment (as in the Classical artform), or too concretely subjective to be limited to any sensuous configuration (as in the Romantic artform). Whether the emergence of these types of self-­ understanding can occur only in the order that Hegel proclaims is certainly questionable. Leaving aside these misgivings, two further factors undercut Hegel’s invocation of the symbolic artform as a basis for primary treatment of architecture. First, when Hegel defines the Symbolic artform, the discrepancy between meaning and sensuous configuration that calls for symbolic allusion is rooted in the abstract character of the meaning to be portrayed, not in the abstract character of the sensuous material to be shaped. The Symbolic artform expresses a self-understanding that regards what is Divine to be ultimately beyond all determinacy and all human striving to be an epiphenomenal delusion that ought to be cast aside to achieve true unity with what is absolute. Sensuous configuration, however, can never take the form of pure matter, which lacks all physical properties by which it can be perceived. That is why the Symbolic artform must always employ sensuous configuration to point beyond its own all too determinate and finite limits. This discrepancy applies equally to architectural design, which, despite the abstract character of heavy matter, can never escape being a determinate structure with a determinate visual appearance.  For a detailed critique of Hegel’s argument for the historical sequencing of the artforms, see Richard Dien Winfield, Stylistics: Rethinking the Artforms After Hegel, pp. 17–26. 12

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For just this reason, the Symbolic artform is not limited to architecture. All the artistic media can give expression to an abstract human self-­ understanding, as Hegel himself will show at length in his account of the other individual arts. This potential presents the second major pitfall of Hegel’s attempt to give primacy to architecture through its connection to the Symbolic artform. Precisely because the artforms are distinguished in terms of how meaning and configuration are connected, without reference to any particular media, they can and have taken shape in each individual art. The rationale for beginning the examination of the individual arts with architecture cannot be rooted in any purported affinity with the Symbolic artform. Hegel’s whole emphasis upon the “heavy matter” of architecture might appear suspect since sculpture gives shape to that same abstract materiality, with no more essential concern for its other physical qualities, such as color differentiation. Hegel dismisses this objection by maintaining that sculpture does not limit itself to the mechanistic, geometric design regularities with which architecture copes with weight, rigidity, and support. Sculpture instead transcends those formal restrictions by molding matter to represent the configuration of living beings, and, particularly, of human figures and embodied divinity. Yet, if, unlike Hegel, we allow for abstract, non-representational sculpture, the strict divide between architecture and sculpture collapses. Moreover, Hegel subverts this demarcation himself, when he acknowledges the “independent” architectural works of the Symbolic style, whose colossal figures, such as the ancient Egyptian Memnons and Sphinxes, might be considered gargantuan sculptures.13 There is, however, another feature that Hegel acknowledges to set architecture apart from sculpture. Whereas both arts mold heavy matter, architecture builds structures that serve a purpose that is not merely aesthetic. Unlike sculpture or any other fine art, architecture provides an  As Hegel himself points out, what makes these sculptural giants works of architecture is how their placement shapes an artificial real space in which significant human activity is intended to proceed (see Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 637–638). Works of sculpture are in space, but do not, as merely sculptural, create an artificial space fittingly enclosing secular and sacred conduct. As Lukács puts it, sculpture is “ein Gegenstand im Raum, nicht ein Prinzip zur Konstituierung eines eigenen Raums” (Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 422). 13

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artificial environment that has the express purpose of housing significant human activity, be it sacred or profane. Combined with the non-­ representational character of architectural design, this external instrumentality seems to call into question the very aesthetic credentials of architecture, especially on Hegel’s own terms.

The Aesthetic Enigma of Architecture The two features distinguishing architecture from the other three-­ dimensional visual art, sculpture, present an aesthetic enigma that must be resolved for architecture to retain its place as an individual fine art. On the one hand, architecture’s largely mechanical shaping of heavy matter leaves it ordinarily without any express representational content. Directly denoting no identifiable subject matter, architecture shares the aesthetic challenge of other abstract visual art as well as music and dance without programmatic content. To retain aesthetic worth, these non-­ representational arts must involve a beauty bereft of immediate representation, yet still uniquely conveying the fundamental meaning that a work must possess. On the other hand, unlike any other non-representational arts, architecture typically serves an external purpose, serving to house some activity or object. Architecture thereby diverges from other arts, whose works and performances we shelter from use and interruption to enjoy their sheer appearance as something independently worthy of our attention. As Benjamin notes, buildings are experienced in a twofold manner: by perception that is primarily visual and by use that involves a habitual tactile reception, where optical contemplation is joined by the practical application of touch.14 Can the philosophy of fine art then make room for architecture, let alone begin the investigation of the individual arts with it, while still upholding the significance and autonomy essential to aesthetic worth? This question has crucial importance for the systematic aesthetics 14  Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, p. 40.

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pioneered by Hegel, even though that aesthetic approach repudiates both mimetic imitation and any formal embrace of art for art’s sake that separates aesthetic configuration from meaning. Unlike metaphysical mimetic aesthetics and the transcendental aesthetics of reception, systematic aesthetics does not ignore how the beauty of fine art is essentially suffused with an individuality inextricably wedding shape and significance. Only with due recognition of this ubiquitous individuality of beauty can one appreciate how the aesthetic value of an artwork depends upon the concrete unique details of its appearance, rather than upon its embodiment of a universal form, for which everything singular is incidental. Only through acknowledgment of this individuality can aesthetics comprehend how fine artistry, unlike routine craft, subordinates the given rules of technique to the originality of creative genius. Finally, only through due attention to the individuality of beauty can the critical connoisseurs of fine art avoid blinding themselves to the genuine aesthetic character of an artwork by evaluating it in comparison to separate, independently given, criteria.15 Precisely because individuality is essential to aesthetic worth, fine art cannot merely imitate given contents, in the manner of an artisan production, which impresses the same design upon innumerable material exemplars. Instead of re-presenting antecedently existing subject matter, fine art must transfigure what it presents. Only then can its created work have an appearance that in all its singular respects is tied to a meaning that cannot be separately displayed without loss. Though transcending mimesis, the transfigurative creativity of fine art does not exclude meaning from its work. Rather, fine art must give expression to those meanings capable of artistic configuration, for beauty requires a significance sufficiently concrete to fit its sensuous and imaginative individuality. Further, creative originality is not enough to attain aesthetic worth. For the artwork to have a significance worthy of display to any possible audience, it must not cater to contingent interests and standpoints, but address the abiding concerns fundamental to humanity, broadly considered. Fine art

 All these points are made by Michael B. Foster in The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 185–187, 201. 15

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must not just configure a suitably concrete meaning, but give shape to what contributes to an essential self-understanding of rational agents per se. Among the endeavors of rational agents, four stand out as having an unconditioned significance: ethics, religion, philosophy, and fine art itself. Because philosophy confines itself to pure reason’s pursuit of truth, its abandonment of imagery for the universality of conceptual determination fundamentally deprives philosophy of the concrete dimensions suitable for sensuous configuration.16 Ethics and religion, however, are intrinsically immersed in sensuous reality through the actuality of conduct and of religious representation, ritual, and community. The activity of artistic creation can, of course, enter the domains of ethics and religion, and in this respect, it too can share in their concrete endeavors. Consequently, when fine art melds fundamental meaning and sensuous/imaginative configuration, it will give expression to the unconditioned concerns of ethics or religious faith, offering a unique, transfiguring self-understanding that is worth the attention of rational agents, whatever be their own experiences or culture. Further, to the extent that ethics and religion themselves have fundamental options that can be conceived, fine art will exhibit corresponding fundamental styles, each constituting a particular mode of artistic construal providing a congruent aesthetic form for the basic ethical and religious world views that are possible. These key strictures of systematic aesthetics pose formidable challenges to architecture that might seem insurmountable. To have aesthetic worth, architecture must not only provide meaning without mimesis, but express a significance worthy of art, somehow displaying a fundamental self-­ understanding of humanity in a unique sensuous configuration of architecture’s elemental medium. Nelson Goodman has observed that architecture can refer without denotation by literally or metaphorically expressing contents with

 This is why “conceptual art” is afflicted with a self-annulling character that reflects the final paroxysms of the Romantic artform, which, as Hegel observes, brings fine art to an end by condemning artistic configuration to insignificance. Tom Wolfe wryly depicts the self-elimination of modern painting at the hands of conceptual art in The Painted Word (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), p. 103 ff.

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references of their own.17 Granted that this is true, it still does not explain how architecture can express anything of fundamental significance, nor do so in a manner that is specifically aesthetic. Compounding the difficulty is that architecture must achieve independent aesthetic individuality while fulfilling the function of providing an artificial environment for activity and artifacts. This functionality threatens to reduce architecture to an exercise of artisan production, where art ceases to be “fine” by imposing antecedent design upon materials, making an artifact whose unique individuality is incidental to the function that fits any embodiment of that same design. How can architecture configure heavy matter to express fundamental truths with creative individuality while being both functional and non-representational? Moreover, how can architectural design possibly realize the distinctive modes of artistic construal by which the different world views of civilization gain fit stylistic embodiment? As Nicolai Hartmann observes, the instrumentality of architecture and the obdurate rigidity of its material seem to render it the least free of the arts. Artistic creativity here seems doubly shackled by being a slave to use and being bound to heavy matter that challenges not only the expression of worthy content but any free play of form.18 Somehow, architecture must surmount these obstacles and subsume them into a creative achievement worthy of fine art. If we were to accept Hegel’s claim that the determination of the individual arts must start with architecture, then architecture’s failure to resolve these crucial challenges would signify that we are beginning at a dead end. Such an impasse is suggested by Hegel’s guiding assumption as to why architecture is a preeminently symbolic art: that a medium defined by constructing static, solid masses governed by the laws of gravity cannot configure subjectivity, but only allude to it with symbolic elusiveness. Yet this limitation does not present an insurmountable obstacle if we take into consideration the other looming liability – the functionality of architecture. Architecture may be restricted to shaping heavy matter in a  Nelson Goodman “How Buildings Mean”, in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, edited by George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Roblin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 544–555. 18  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 134. 17

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non-­ representational, mechanically constrained manner. Nonetheless, architecture can use this very instrumentality to erect uniquely created environments for sacred and secular conduct, building upon this specific functionality to imbue its individual design with the essential concerns it houses. Thereby architecture’s instrumentality can serve as the foundation for an independent aesthetic worth that architecture can stylistically develop to express different world views wedded to the configuration that makes them manifest. How this is so is what we must now decipher.

 ow We Can Remove the Category Confusion H in Hegel’s Conception of Architecture By linking architecture to the Symbolic artform, sculpture to the Classical artform, and music, painting, and literature to the Romantic artform, Hegel has succumbed to a category confusion, conflating two distinct levels of aesthetics: the differentiation of the artforms, which give the general features of beauty particular stylistic treatments, and the development of the different arts, which actualize the general and particular features of fine art in individual media appropriate for artistic creation. Because the artforms are determinable by nothing but the general features of fine art and how meaning and shape unite in ways reflecting the fundamental world views distinguishing civilizations, the artforms cannot have any necessary tie to different individual arts. Although the different media distinguishing the individual arts impact upon how they bring artistic beauty to actual existence, they all embody the being of the artwork, the process of its creation, its reception, and the stylistic options made imperative by different worldviews. More than any other philosopher of fine art, Hegel details how this is case, starting with none other than architecture. Despite identifying architecture as an essentially Symbolic art, Hegel develops architecture in a succession of Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic stylistic forms, just as he will do in varying detail in subsequently determining sculpture, painting, music, and literature. In each case, Hegel will appropriately begin by examining how the individual art in question realizes the general features

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of fine art and then show how these general features get stylistically particularized in that art. Hegel even maintains that the artforms are all more fulsomely exhibited in architecture than in the other arts, allegedly because those arts are more dominated by one artform at the expense of other stylistic options.19 Hegel still invokes the linkage of architecture to the Symbolic artform by insisting that Symbolic architecture attains an aesthetic merit surpassing Classical and Romantic constructions, but his own accounts of the Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral contradict any such verdict. By showing how these Classical and Romantic edifices creatively unite architectural design with their distinctive world views, Hegel demonstrates how fine art of any medium and style can achieve true beauty. Even when meaning and configuration are bound to be incongruent, as Hegel’s account of the Symbolic and Romantic artforms confirms, aesthetic greatness can be achieved by expressing that incongruence in both the form and content of the artwork. This achievement calls into question another central claim of Hegel regarding the ranking of the artforms, that carries over into his account of the individual arts. Hegel will maintain that the Classical artform most perfectly realizes beauty because it operates with a self-understanding of humanity that can be adequately expressed in appropriate imagery, unlike the discrepancies in meaning and configuration with which Symbolic and Romantic art grapple. Although the self-understanding of Romantic art will come first with respect to truth by giving proper due to the inwardness of subjectivity that can have no adequate external embodiment, the Classical artform will be the paramount vehicle of beauty. This will carry over to a ranking of the aesthetic achievement of the individual arts, for Hegel will maintain that sculpture is the exemplary Classical art, suggesting that it will preeminently embody beauty in comparison with architecture, music, painting, and literature.20 Although the different media of individual arts may impose diverse limits on their expression of fundamental world views, so long as their works can qualify as fine art, they succeed in expressing an essential human self-understanding in an appearance tied to the meaning it  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 634.  For a critical examination of these claims and rankings, see Winfield, Stylistics, pp. 17–26.

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presents. We can therefore utilize the categories of systematic aesthetics pioneered by Hegel to rethink the individual arts without subsuming them under any particular artforms and without ranking them accordingly. In so doing, we can begin by analyzing how each individual art embodies the general features of fine art and then examine how each individual art actualizes the different artforms in its distinctive medium, without prejudice to its aesthetic achievement. In that way, we can overcome the category confusion tarnishing Hegel’s determination of the individual arts and build upon what deserves retention in his account.

 ow Architecture Embodies the General H Features of Fine Art The being of a work of art must give appearance to a sensuous imaginative configuration whose every appreciable detail is linked to the fundament meaning it expresses. The meanings in question are those with which religion and conduct are most concerned. Because the work of art offers something whose appearance is of unconditioned value, it must be tailored to be manifest to its audience in an abiding, universal way. Architecture, whose medium involves heavy matter, must accommodate these requirements. The constructions it produces must be able to stand and appear to the rational beings for whose religion and conduct it provides a fit artificial environment. Given architecture’s functionality, two considerations apply. On the one hand, the material shaped by architecture must have sufficient durability, rigidity, and scale to fulfill the use to which it is put in housing religious and ethical activity. Whoever be the rational animals who make, use, and appreciate architecture, their constructions must employ solid materials that maintain their rigidity and impenetrability within the range of pressure and temperature variations of the biosphere in which those individuals live. Materials that are in gaseous or liquid states within that range can also be used, both to insulate solid exteriors and interiors, as well as to inflate and fill them. Architectural constructions must also have sufficient chemical neutrality and weather resistance to maintain

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their shape for a duration fitting the longevity of their makers and of presumed future users and audience. In addition, the constructions must be of an appropriate size to be useable and viewable by those individuals. On our lonely planet, such building materials as stone, wood, sod, thatch, adobe, concrete, cast iron, steel, aluminum, and glass have all been enlisted by architecture, and the specific qualities of these materials have had implications for what architectural functionality they can feasibly support. On the other hand, because architecture, as a work of art, has an appearance that is worth viewing for its own sake, the construction must be designed with respect to how it appears to its audience. This involves giving special attention to the surfaces of constructions that can be seen, as opposed to those that cannot. Accordingly, certain materials, such as aesthetically prized stone, wood, metals, and glass may be used as veneers, covering over unseen brick and concrete. The concern for appearance may also involve alterations in dimensions so that certain desired shapes are maintained for the view of individuals despite the changes wrought by perspective. For example, the columns of ancient Greek temples were often widened towards the top so that they would appear to be more uniform in diameter to viewers on the ground. Another important aspect of the being for the viewer of the work of architecture is how the construction shows itself to individuals as they enter and navigate its environment. This dynamic aspect applies both to the movements of participants in the religious or secular activities housed by a construction, as well as of those exploring the unfolding of its beauty. From no single position without or within a work of architecture can the design of the whole be visible. In order for an architectural work to be seen, let alone, to be used, in its totality, individuals must move without and within it, combining their present view with past memories and imagined future vistas in a synthetic compilation carried out in their imagination.21 Other arts, like music, literature, dance, theater, and film, entail somewhat analogous synthetic experiences encompassing a sequential unfolding. In their cases, the sequence is determined by the work of art itself, which imposes its order upon the listening, viewing, or reading  See Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 134.

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audience. The created enclosures of architecture, by contrast, can be explored in various sequences, although the possibilities are circumscribed by how architectural spaces flow from one to another.22 Architecture thus elicits a self-directed movement upon the part of its viewers and users, without which they cannot partake of the artificial space it creates to appropriately house our significant activities. Despite the relative freedom of viewers and users to choose how they navigate a building, the manner in which architectural design guides their pathway options can have significance both with regards to the function of the building and to the meaning it expresses. Museums may require visitors to exit by the giftshop, just as a retail establishment, like Ikea, may direct visitors on a path taking them by every object for sale. Yet, more aesthetic considerations may lead an architect to link spaces together with specific connections and contrasts in mind. Lukács ignores the possibilities this allows by claiming that architecture’s immobile configuration of heavy masses prevents it from expressing any conflicts and resolutions that other arts can depict, owing to the sequential character of their unfolding. He alleges that this deprives architecture of any power to negate, leaving architects only able to affirm the self-understanding of the community whose activities their buildings serve.23 Admittedly, music, dance, literature, and cinema all have any easy time expressing the shifting tides of human struggle, yet a building can lead its users and viewers through a series of environments of contrasting character. The interior may purposively subvert expectations raised by the exterior, just as one room may lead to others in a manner that alludes to conflicts and makes a statement of some significance.

Engineering and Architecture Architectural construction does have a mechanical aspect, due to the requirements of fashioning heavy matter into self-supporting structures. Like music, whose tonal systems are governed by specific mathematical 22 23

 See Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 134.  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 420.

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relations, architectural form cannot escape embodying geometric and arithmetical proportions in dealing with the engineering imperatives of weight and rigidity. Nonetheless, just as sound design forfeits genuine musicality when it becomes completely formulaic, so architectural form loses all aesthetic value if it be reduced to mathematizable harmonies, susceptible of rote embodiments lacking creative individuality, as well as any concern for the fit of meaning and configuration. Vitruvius’ all too celebrated classic, The Ten Books of Architecture, perpetrates this mechanical reduction by distilling the beauty of the ancient Greek temple into a catalogue of harmonies and proportions. Their specification by Vitruvius ignores the significance of the design for the sacred and secular concerns it configures.24 Still, the creation of the work of architecture must incorporate due respect for and expertise in the engineering challenges of construction. The formulas that engineering employs must be observed if any architectural design is to produce a structure that can duly support itself and enduringly fulfill its function of serving significant activities. Yet architectural design cannot simply amount to engineering if beauty is to be achieved. In every art, technique must be subordinated to creativity, and this applies to architecture despite its functional aspect. If form fits function in bonafide architecture, it will do so in an aesthetically purposive way, where fundamental meaning and configuration are united. Admittedly, a building can be constructed simply to fulfill the design requirements of its designated use, which do have a specific content. Such purely pragmatic design, however, is devoid of any truly aesthetic style and it fails to give expression to anything more than its immediate purpose. A work of architectural fine art must incorporate the design necessities of whatever use it serves, but these leave undetermined the further possible shapings of space that enable a construction to unite configuration and fundamental meaning and elicit an aesthetic experience. The architect must therefore create a meaningful unique design while satisfying all the engineering requirements for shaping suitable materials into the desired structure. Given the complexity that a building may  Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, trans. by Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960). 24

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involve, the architect may need to employ assistants or artificial computational assistance to specify the design in all the needed detail. Then, once the design is created, the construction of the intended structure must be carried out. This building activity can be regarded as an exercise of craft, where the design that builders receive from the architect is imposed by them upon appropriate materials. The creation of the architect here operates as a given blueprint that builders follow, using their construction expertise to erect the finished building. That completed work represents an artifact of their artisan activity embodying the creation of the architect. This relation between builder and architect is like that between foundry workers who cast a bronze sculpture and the sculptor. It is different from the relation between a performance artist and a choreographer, composer, or playwright. Although performance artists, like builders, consummate a created work using a certain technique, their artistry commands independent aesthetic value by adding a creative element of their own, distinguishing their “interpretation” from those of other performers of the same piece. Accordingly, when viewers and critics appreciate the beauty of a work of architecture, the craft of the builders is purely subsidiary to the artistic achievement. What counts preeminently is how the original individuality of the design fits a significant meaning, something that cannot be measured by invocation of external standards, including given formulae of harmony and proportion.

 he Relation of Architecture to the Other Arts T It May Contain Because architecture creates an artificial space serving to house significant secular and sacred activities, what it builds may contain works of other arts, such as painting and sculpture. Their placement on the surfaces and niches of buildings or within the courtyards or alleys they surround are not necessary to architectural design, but their presence may contribute to the use to which edifices are devoted, as well as the meaning they

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express. This is obviously the case in museums, concert halls, and theaters, which are designed to exhibit works of other arts, including performances, both live and recorded. In these cases, the works on display are not themselves part of the building but are housed by it. By contrast, sculptures and paintings can adorn a building as integral elements of a structure so designed to contain human activities. In these cases, the architectural unity of the construction can sustain itself only if it succeeds in subordinating these artworks to the significant spatial organization it comprises. As Hegel notes in respect to the “independent” constructions with which he associates the inauguration of Symbolic architecture, arrangements of colossal figures can transcend their individual sculptural occupation of space by circumscribing an artificial environment for human activity and thereby obtaining an architectural character.25 The rows of gigantic Memnons and Sphinxes of ancient Egypt, like the boulevards of large elephant and bull figures at ancient Indian temple complexes, directly integrate their sculptural configuration with the architecture of the plazas they encompass. Alternately, sculptures of Gods, prophets, and other holy figures can inhabit central places both on the exterior and interior of buildings, as focal points of an architectural design that celebrates a religious self-­ understanding for which such representations are essential. Whether profusely cladding the outer walls of Hindu temples, surmounting the towers of churches, standing within the open space of a Greek temple, or occupying niches inside the soaring interior of a Gothic cathedral, religious sculptures can subsume their own shaping of an individual body into an architectural scheme, whose unity cannot be perceived from any one vantagepoint. Due to sculpture’s three-dimensional character, it can integrate itself easily into an architectural setting, seamlessly fitting into the formed mass of the edifice and sharing the dispersion of light on its exterior and

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 633.

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interior.26 Non-abstract painting, and more generally, two-dimensional figurative art, poses more of a challenge to architectural unity. Figurative painting projects an ideal space of its own using perspective and the modulation of color. In so doing, figurative painting casts an ideal light, whose play of illumination and shadow has nothing to do with how light actually falls within and without the building in which it may hang. Of course, the real light that falls within a building provides an illumination necessary for the ideal light of a painting to show itself, however it be depicted. For this reason, Vasari can suggest that a painter can only ensure that a picture presents its “true and proper lights” by painting it on the wall where it will hang.27 Nonetheless, the “real” light conditions for best exhibiting the “ideal” light of a painting are still just as distinct from the painting’s own illumination as the real space encompassing a picture is distinct from the projected space within the picture. Consequently, there is a two-fold discrepancy between architectural design and pictorial projection that poses a challenge for artistic integration far more formidable than that presented by placing sculptures in buildings. Aesthetically viable solutions are not, however, impossible, as some unforgettable examples demonstrate. Two such cases are provided by Raphael’s Stanza frescoes and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and Last Judgment frescoes. Anyone who has walked through the Vatican Museum in the one permitted direction has experienced these overwhelming resolutions, first in the penultimate chambers covered by Raphael’s work, and lastly, in the culminating space of Michelangelo’s two gigantic fresco creations. As Lukács points out, these works solve the problem of architectural integration in two different ways. Raphael’s Stanza frescos overcome the incipient conflict of painterly and architectural light and space by stretching across each entire wall. This allows the frescoes from having any frame that might emphatically divide ideal from real space and allow architectural design to oppose pictorial projection. Michelangelo’s vast Last Judgment fresco similarly fills a whole wall of the  As Lukács notes, “Das architektonische Raumschaffen is deshalb prinzipiell stets in der Lage, die kubisch-plastischen Gegenstände also organische Bestandteile der von ihm hervorebrachten räumlichen Totalität unterzuordnen, sie in diese organisch einzufügen” (Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 422. 27  Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Volume 2, p. 1047. 26

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Sistine Chapel, but his mammoth ceiling fresco benefits from something else to achieve its resolution of any tension between painterly and architectural intent. As Lukács observes, because the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is as flat as its walls, Michelangelo can use two-dimensional perspective without it being disrupted by curvilinear surfaces. Moreover, because Michelangelo brings an unparalleled plasticity to his painted figures, they have a sculptural heft that diminishes any clash between ideal and real space.28 These triumphs of the integration of painting with architecture might suggest that success is achievable only when buildings have the simplest of rectilinear forms. Such limitation is dispelled by two successes of human artistry. One consists of the paintings covering the entire cupolas of Rococo churches, where artists have succeeded in projecting figures in a celestial expanse matching the curvature of the dome. Another consists in the vast murals of Mexican painters Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros that climb the sweeping walls, ceilings, and stairways of buildings, matching the architectural design in the ideal space projected in their creations. A prime example is Rivera’s The History of Mexico Mural that monumentally transforms the main stairwell of the National Palace in Mexico City.

Community and Architecture In contrast to other arts, architecture has a decidedly direct impact and significance for the community in which it is created, used, and appreciated. This applies to the architecture of private residences as well as public constructions, including commercial buildings, schools, religious edifices, museums, performance halls, palaces, and government facilities. Even in the case of isolated homes off the beaten track, works of architecture generally intrude upon the environment of a community, both by imposing their visual appearance upon their neighborhood and anyone who comes their way, as well as by enduring for centuries to come. Moreover, the use of works of architecture makes experiencing them an  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, pp. 424–425.

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unavoidable part of daily life, whether secular or sacred. Whereas we are rarely compelled to read a poem or novel, to view a painting or sculpture, to hear a piece of music, to attend a performance, or to see a film, we can hardly spend a day without encountering our architecture, as well as that of our predecessors. Owing to the ubiquitous and lasting public display of architectural creations, their builders and users must embrace or at least endure whatever felt meanings their spatial organizations evoke. Whether constructions be battlements, bridges, palaces, markets, places of worship, or just personal dwellings, their architecture will likely give identifiably common stylistic expression to the cultural unity of the civilization to which they belong.29 Just as individuals with any freedom of dress present to their community a vision of themselves in the clothing they wear, so architecture puts on display a design reflecting a form of life whose fundamental values its possessors seek to show others, today and tomorrow.30 A private dwelling shows off how a household projects itself in a manner worthy of public view.31 When buildings are the work of religious communities or ruling regimes, they express an inherently broader shared vision, where the concerns being served are more universal in scope. This is particularly true when architecture creates works whose construction mobilizes the resources of an entire community in building public edifices around which their members can all unite in reverence and use. For this reason, Lukács, for one, maintains that in architecture the universal dominates the particular to such a degree as to exclude individuality from its domain. Other arts may express the tension between universality and individuality, develop the resulting conflict, and exhibit  As Hartmann observes (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 136), “Very definite forms of human life are tied not only to churches, temples, palaces, to open stairs or battlements but also to half-timbered homes or farmhouses in a local style.” 30  Hartmann draws this parallel between fashion in dress and architectural style. See Hartmann, Aesthetics, pp. 136–137. 31  As Hartmann writes (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 136), “a house is … the garment of the individual’s most intimate life within the community (family, relatives, domestic life); for that reason it is an even stronger expression of his self-understanding … within his larger circle of friends and associates. And that is all the more true because a house is less ephemeral than clothing; it is built to endure even for generations, and receives for that reason something like the character of a monument.” 29

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what resolution may be achieved in uniting universal and individual in particularity. Architecture cannot do this due to both the frozen rigidity of its medium and architecture’s direct connection to the universal powers of human life in their mastery of nature and their achievement of collective aims.32 As a result, tradition governs architecture with a hand so heavy that a whole civilization will be pervaded by a recognizable building style for centuries.

 Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 421.

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Tradition and Architectural Style Lukács is not alone is singling out architecture for a special attachment to universal “social” interests and a corresponding adherence to artistic tradition. Nicolai Hartmann makes a similar argument. Given the ubiquitous need for buildings, the collective effort underlying architectural design and construction, and the public impact of architectural creation, it is particularly difficult for creators of architecture to deviate from established norms of design. As a consequence, Hartmann maintains, architects, more than sculptors, painters, or writers, find themselves compelled to operate within the style their community has embraced, rather than breaking free in a completely novel direction.1

 Hartmann accordingly maintains (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 136) that “there is hardly another art in which the element of style plays such a dominant role as in architecture. The reason for this may lie in the element of practical use a building possesses; not everyone needs to write poetry or to paint, but all of us must have a roof over our heads and may therefore come to a point at which we must build one, and to do so without being an artist … he falls back into the architectural style of his times … In that way, that particular style becomes characteristic and dominant, and we recognize it everywhere as the expression of its epoch. An entire world of the appearing background is thereby given in architecture.” 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_3

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What further accounts for the alleged “peculiar dominance of style in architecture” is the limitation of the architectural play of form upon the technical resources at hand. According to Hartmann, “with every new architectural invention there is a change in what appears in the visible – a change of style”. Admittedly, every advance in building technology opens avenues of design that may not have been previously available. Nonetheless, in every case, engineering breakthroughs leave undetermined which of the design options they make feasible will be creatively realized. What Hartmann here ignores, as does Lukács in proposing the predominance of the universal in architecture, is how architectural fine art, like any other genuine fine artistry, must find a way of uniting configuration and fundamental meaning in original works exhibiting an individuality that is not extrinsic to their aesthetic value. The prevalence of stylistic tradition in architecture, as in other arts, may reflect how public support and approval can condition artistic undertakings and their completion. This will be particularly true for arts that cannot be produced, let alone, presented to an audience, without resources that go beyond the effort of a single creator. Architecture shares this burden with every performance art (live, on screen, or streamed) that must enlist the energies of entire armies of collaborators. Tradition will also weigh especially heavily upon artistic creation in communities who predominantly invest normative value in the privileged givens of hallowed custom, rather than in the foundation-free validity of institutions of freedom. There is, however, an internal aesthetic imperative pushing stylistic convergence that cuts across all artistic creation, no matter what be the fundamental values that prevail in some time and place. This stylistic anchoring lies in how the fundamental options in human self-­ understanding mandate specific modes for uniting meaning and configuration in each and every fine art. These modes comprise the basic styles that necessarily distinguish artistic production in history so long as artists fulfill their aesthetic vocation of autonomously producing works whose individual appearance gives fit expression to a world view grappling with the basic normative questions of the human condition. As we have seen, Hegel characterizes the fundamental modes of joining artistic meaning and configuration as the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic Styles, wherein, respectively, ultimate value is too abstract to fit any sensuous or

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imagined form, completely congruent with sensuous and imagined shape, or too concrete to be limited to any sensuous or imagined configuration. Within each of these modes, artists from various peoples and nations have forged their own unique stamp, showing how such style need never be a formulaic straitjacket, stifling artistic creativity. Yet how is architecture able to produce traditions of style that bring meaning and configuration into any unity that can visually evoke a fundamental world view that needs to be seen? It is hard enough to comprehend how heavy masses can be molded, with the additional constraint of use, into an aesthetically valid creation. Harder still is to conceive how all the general features of architecture can achieve realization through the stylistic prisms of the fundamental artforms.

 he Relation of Form and Function T in Architectural Style Hegel provides us with the most ambitious attempt to show how architectural design can particularize itself into the fundamental styles of art. We must now seize the opportunity of critically thinking through and drawing upon his achievement. Significantly, Hegel differentiates Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic architecture in respect to how each style specifically relates instrumentality and aesthetic independence in the work of architecture. Hegel grants that architecture, unlike the other fine arts, has an express function of producing an artificial environment for secular or religious activities. He recognizes that the use of buildings always has some implications for their design, but he acknowledges that the fine art of architecture attains aesthetic worth only by creating constructions that further give expression to what their producers and users understand to be of fundamental human significance. Nonetheless, Hegel opens his account of architectural style insisting that architecture begins, both historically and conceptually, with symbolic constructions that do not have any external use. Instead, the first works of architecture in the Symbolic style are artificial structures intended to be independently appreciated for their appearance, like immense sculptures. Some are abstractly natural, like

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obelisks and lingams, some are figurative, like Memnons and Sphinxes, and others, like the Tower of Babylon, are mammoth monuments to a people’s common endeavor, lacking any interior spaces for use.2 These are followed by transitional architectural works, such as the Pyramids of Egypt (and, one might add, some of those of pre-Columbian America), where the function is hidden from view in the sealed core of the massive edifice. Then, the Classical style takes architectural shape with a new relation of form and function, where these are united in buildings serving ends external to them. Lastly, architecture exhausts the artforms by taking on Romantic style, combining the distinct paths of Symbolic and Classical architecture with a form independent of its function, yet still serving an external purpose.3 In presenting this differentiation of architectural style in relation to functionality, Hegel has achieved a certain logical closure, exhausting the options for how a building can relate to eternal purpose: a work of architecture can be independent, serve an external purpose, or both. Yet are these three alternative relations of form and function at all inherent in how architecture embodies the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic styles? Does Symbolic expression of an Absolute too abstract to have any adequate sensuous representation entail an “independent” architecture, whose form has no connection to function? Does the Classical ideal of a human spirit whose essence is as it appears mandate a union of architectural form and function? Does the Romantic configuration of a subjectivity whose essential inner freedom cannot be fully manifest in any external embodiment require architecture to take a shape that combines function and independence? If not, has Hegel exposed how the artforms have no necessary architectural expressions, relegating stylistic analyses of architecture or, for that matter, of any other individual art, to the empirical judgment of art historians and art critics? Or has Hegel provided us with some fruitful guideposts for conceiving architectural styles a priori, that is, philosophically?

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 638.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 633–634.

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 he Enigma of an Independent T Symbolic Architecture As the first salvo in conceiving how architecture gives embodiment to the artforms, Hegel’s commencement with an independent Symbolic architecture seems as enigmatic as the works themselves. The defining character of this first candidate in his development of architectural style appears to violate the bounds of architecture. As Hegel admits, because such Symbolic architecture erects structures with no function of housing religious or secular activity, they verge on being monumental sculptures.4 After all, if these works just shape heavy matter without serving an external purpose, how can they retain any distinctively architectural character when works of sculpture equally mold material with respect to its static three-dimensional form? Hegel seems to evade this problem thanks to his restriction of sculpture proper to the plastic configuring of the human form. This restriction is rooted in his suspect identification of sculpture as a Classical art, centering on making manifest the Classical ideal of a human essence at one with its outer manifestation in body and public action. Under this limitation, both abstract, non-figurative sculpture and independent architecture would fall outside the domain of sculpture proper. Both might then count as architectural works, so long as independent architecture foreswore any representation of the human body. For as Hegel notes, although buildings without any aim of enclosure would resemble massive works of sculpture, the absence of any depiction of spiritual and subjective content would set them apart from sculptural creations.5 Hegel, however, admits into the realm of independent Symbolic architecture works that represent human figures in combination with other animal forms, such as the Egyptian Sphinxes, and in purely human guise, such as the ancient Memnons. How then can these creations escape relegation to sculpture, instead of retaining their place as primary forms of architectural style? What gives these figurative shapes an abiding architectural character transcending sculpture is, on the one hand, the immensity of their size,  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 632, 638.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 637.

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and, on the other hand, their setting into mammoth arrangements whose plan is non-representational. In both respects, Hegel suggests, the independence of these monuments does not prevent them from constituting vast environments providing a backdrop for conducting religious and secular affairs. They may not individually enclose such activities, but as constructions too big and too proliferated to leave their surroundings unaltered, these independent monuments retain an architectural significance, which they share with independent structures that have abstract natural forms, like obelisks and lingams, or that present the common work of a nation, like the Tower of Babylon.6 The independence of these structures may not bar their entry into the realm of architecture, but does it specifically embody the Symbolic mode of joining configuration and meaning? There is a rationale for answering affirmatively in line with Hegel’s application of the relation of function and form in his analyses of Classical and Romantic architecture. To begin with, we must admit that the limitation of architecture to arranging heavy masses does prevent it from directly expressing the free subjectivity of rational agency. Consequently, when a culture regards autonomous subjectivity to be of foremost value, architecture will best serve the requirements of beauty not by being independent of external purpose, but by fulfilling two alternative functions. On the one hand, architecture will serve to house artworks of other media, such as painting and sculpture, which more adequately express independent agency in its fundamental truth. On the other hand, architecture will aim at providing a proper environment for the activities, both religious and secular, in which free individuality realizes itself. Architecture here embraces its functionality, in due conformity with the world views defining the Classical and Romantic artforms. A very different role for architecture is mandated when a civilization rejects the primary value of independent subjectivity, investing ultimate meaning instead in divine power that absorbs and extinguishes finite individuality as an illusory phenomenon. Then the abstract resources of architecture can directly express the truth of our being in all its diminished stature. Architecture is thereby independent, expressing the world  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 636, 639–643.

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view underlying the Symbolic style by manifesting the self-understanding to which static, inorganic forms can fittingly allude precisely in their exclusion of free subjectivity. The above reasoning may link independence in architecture to the Symbolic style and functionality in architecture to the Classical and Romantic styles, but it does not establish how these relations to independence and functionality bear upon the specific design of these architectural types. Need the independence or functionality of a building automatically affect its configuration in some specific fashion? Although the plan of a functional construction must accommodate the use to which it is put, a building could have the same plan whether it is constructed for some external use or for its own sake, just as it can serve an external use by taking indeterminately many shapes. Hegel acknowledges a certain formality in the link between the independence and design of Symbolic architecture, noting that there can be no exhaustive or systematic presentation of its variety of form and content.7 The Symbolic style, Hegel explains, can have no set designs or contents due to the abstract universality of its fundamental meanings. No sensuous configuration can fit the inchoate generality of what its world view takes to be of highest significance. The artist can express such privileged meaning only by haphazardly and capriciously borrowing from elementary physical processes, plant and animal organisms, and spiritual reality, imaginatively employing their imagery to point beyond their finite limits, rather than integrating them into an individual subjectivity, whose freedom might then be affirmed.8 Nonetheless, Hegel distinguishes three basic forms of independent architecture that might substantiate the possibility of rationally identifying fundamental options of Symbolic style building.9 The first consists of edifices that unify a nation by drawing the population into the common work of their construction and by becoming a focal point of national spirit upon completion. One might think this anticipates Karl August Wittfogel’s interpretation of the vast construction  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 637.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 637. 9  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 637–638. 7 8

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projects upon which “oriental hydraulic civilizations” centered their national unity.10 Wittfogel, however, has in mind very functional undertakings, such as building immense irrigation systems, whereas what constructions Hegel describes, most notably, the Tower of Babylon, qualify as “independent” architecture by merely “symbolizing” national unity, rather than serving an external purpose. The second form of Symbolic independent architecture produces sculptural structures with inorganic and organic shapes that house neither other arts nor sacred or secular activities, but merely allude to ultimate meaning. Finally, Hegel offers a third form of Symbolic independent architecture that excludes any sculptural representation but employs a completely abstract, artificial shape to enclose matters of highest significance that its configuration does not directly manifest, but rather conceals. The first of these varieties of Symbolic independent architecture displays little indication of how the relation of meaning to independence bears upon architectural design. To identify a work of architecture as a symbol of national unity leaves its “independence” all too burdened by that external aim and all too undetermined with respect to architectural design. The appearance of the work of architecture should be the focus of its aesthetic worth, especially when the structure has no direct use. The very opposite is the case when an edifice unifies a people in the toil of its construction, as Hegel reckons the Tower of Babylon did.11 Then the very completion of the building renders its appearance superfluous, since the only meaning it has dwells in its genesis, which its actualization has consumed. If, on the other hand, the completed construction unites the nation as a point of gathering, the fulfillment of this purpose appears to leave open the design of the monument, other than that it has sufficient gravitas and unobstructed surroundings to be seen by those who come to it to celebrate their community. A huge tower might serve that aim, but so might any other monumental structure, since, as Hegel admits, the

 See Wittfogel, Karl August, Oriental Despotism: a Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 11  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 638–639. 10

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shaping of such a construction can only symbolize its unifying function in a literally external fashion.12 By contrast, the second type of independent architecture presents a visible tie between building design and symbolic meaning. In the case of independent monuments like obelisks and lingams, simple concrete forms symbolize the abstract natural powers (e.g. of light and reproduction) to which absolute worth has been ascribed.13 When, alternately, symbolic architecture takes shape in independent monuments sculpting organic forms, it transgresses their natural configuration and size, magnifying and combining animal and human features in ways expressing the sublime power of an absolute in which finite subjectivity relinquishes its independence. Although these constructions are like figurative sculpture, they obtain architectural stature in two ways. As Hegel notes, their creators enlarge their figurative shapes to colossal dimensions that render them towering static, lifeless hulks, while placing them in vast arrangements that compose an inorganic architectural environment.14 Hegel, of course, is describing historical instances for each of these options, but the types of independent architecture they exemplify can be conceptually identified. Obelisks and phallus columns are examples of non-figurative monuments with no other aim than symbolizing abstract natural powers to which ultimate meaning is tied. As symbolic in nature, such constructions have something in their shape that alludes to the powers they denote, but they remain largely abstract representations. Sphinxes and Memnons, by contrast, are figurative free-standing constructions with no purpose but to symbolize divinities for whom finite subjectivity has no independent significance. This is achieved in architectural terms by mixing brute and rational animal features, minimizing the individuality of the figures, enlarging them into monumental fixtures, and ordering them in schematic arrangements.15

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 637, 638.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 641–643. 14  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 638, 644. 15  Other examples of such “independent architecture” may include many of the petroglyphs scattered across the globe, the rows of massive heads on Easter Island, the totem poles arrays of North America, and the massive animal figures lining numerous ancient Hindu temple sites. 12 13

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What Hegel identifies as a third, “transitional” type of independent architecture presents a different design prerogative that displays some connection to its meaning, enigmatic as that may be. As exemplified by the Egyptian Pyramids, this form consists in another type of monumental building expressing a world view in which the truth of existence does not accord essential stature to finite subjectivity in its mortal activity. Here a purely artificial, geometric simplicity excludes all figurative detail, while containing burial chambers hidden from view. The present life is shut out from any further contact with an after life provisioned within. This housing of a secret dwelling for an existence beyond our own may seem to undermine the independence of this type of symbolic architecture. The functionality in question, however, has no present or future worldly reality for the living. The sealing of interior passages and the external concealment of their layout expressly bars anyone alive from making use of what lies within. Nonetheless, the structure retains the significance of containing such a hidden sanctuary for the dead, and this is an essential part of the meaning of its design.16 As much as these second and third options exhibit a determinate design connecting symbolic meaning and architectural independence, there is still reason to wonder whether buildings of use for sacred and secular activities could also realize a distinctly symbolic architecture. Can there be, and, indeed, have there not been, palaces, temples, and other constructions housing significant activities that conform to the world view expressed by the Symbolic artform? Whether it be in Mesopotamia, dynastic Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, pre-Columbian America, ancient India, ancient East Asia, and Polynesia, do we not encounter useful buildings that are fundamentally distinct from Classical or Romantic structures? Hegel himself discusses Symbolic works in other artistic media that depict religious and ethical activities in settings appropriate to their spirit. Could there be a functional Symbolic architecture or would the Symbolic style be fundamentally incapable of forging useful shapes that could achieve a genuine aesthetic union with the meaning of its world view?  Similar massive pyramids with hidden internal chambers can be found among the “pre-­ Columbian” stone-faced pyramid complexes found today in Mexico and Guatemala and the Native American earthen mounds in the South and Midwest of the United States. 16

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Help in resolving these questions comes from drawing upon Hegel’s analyses of form and function in Classical and Romantic architecture, which provide contrasting boundaries to what Symbolic architecture can entail.

 lassical Architecture as Uniting Form C and Function Whereas Symbolic architecture can, at least in part, create “independent” constructions that express its defining world view, does the Classical artform achieve architectural realization by building useful structures in which form and function are united? Hegel maintains as much in offering the ancient Greek temple as paradigmatic of how architecture gives shape to the Classical art form. His description of this exemplary example of Classical architecture, however, immediately raises questions as to its stylistic specificity. What Hegel here examines as the very model of a Classical building is a structure using severely simple geometric forms to house a way of life confident of the supreme value of its humanity as fully manifest in its bodily appearance and public conduct. In proceeding to present the details of this spare design as perfectly uniting form and function, Hegel’s account seems to converge with the programmatic recipes of architectural modernism. This convergence not only threatens the stylistic divide between Classicism and modernism, but risks excluding modernism from the stylistic domain of Romantic architecture, to which Hegel ascribes not a union of form and function, but a combination of functionality and independence. How can we distinguish the geometric simplicities of the Classical style embodied in the ancient Greek temple from Bauhaus functionality, where architecture, to quote Walter Gropius, turns a new leaf “starting from zero” and constructs its mechanical purities under the motto, “Art and Technology – a New Unity.”17 Where can we draw the line between Hegel’s mandate for Classical architecture and Le Corbusier’s manifesto for a new architecture serving the instrumentality of modern 17

 Wolfe, Tom, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Bantam Books, 1999), pp. 8, 17.

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technology?18 How can it be set apart from Frank Lloyd Wright’s radical vision of a natural house fitting human dimensions to the exclusion of all superfluous ornament and shape?19 The answer lies in further identifying Classical architecture’s unity of form and function, taking proper note of the function in question and the specific form that fits. Hegel’s success in fulfilling these tasks lies in his deconstruction of the ancient Greek temple, which provides the centerpiece of his conceptualization of Classical architecture’s defining unity of meaning and shape. The Greek temple, of course, is a building housing religious activity. To exemplify the Classical style, the ancient temple cannot merely serve as a dwelling for worship in general. Since any religious building can serve that purpose whatever be its architectural form, that function is too indeterminate to mandate any specific stylistic realization. Instead, we must take account of the particular religious spirit of the Classical world view and the correlative self-understanding of the individuals who partake in that spirit. Unlike the type of religion with which Symbolic art conforms, the religion of the Classical world view takes the Divine to be perfectly embodied in the figure of finite rational agency, which on our lonely planet takes the form of the human body. The religious self-­understanding of Classicism thus embraces an anthropomorphic polytheism. To understand how the ancient Greek temple exemplifies the Classical style, we must grapple with how it houses this form of religion. In so doing, we must recognize that the Classical spirit, congruent with its religious conception, locates what is essential to human life in the public strivings of individuals. It seeks neither to escape phenomenal selfhood to unite with an indeterminate Absolute nor to affirm an inwardness of mind that does not fully appear in outer existence. What does not manifest itself to the gaze of others simply does not fall within the arena in which Classical civilization finds fundamental value.  Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, trans. by Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover Publications, 1966). 19  Wright, Frank Lloyd, “The Natural House”, in Frank Lloyd Wright, Collected Writings, Volume 5: 1949–1959, ed. by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli International, 1995), pp. 77–127. 18

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These dual sacred and secular aspects of the Classical world view should find a fit expression in an architecture of the Classical style and if that fit creates an architectural form at one with its function, this should be evident in the design of the Classical temple. Hegel attempts to show that this is precisely the case. Although the heavy masses of functional temple architecture remain resistant to directly representing the Classical ideal, figurative art can convey the Classical image of divinity within the temple precincts. Since the Classical divine has adequate embodiment in the physical shape of finite rational agents, sculpture provides a proper vehicle for bringing its representation into the environment provided by Classical architecture. Figurative sculpture is essentially limited to presenting the immobile outer surface of its subjects. This may not suffice to convey the concrete situation of action, nor directly express the inwardness of the individuals it captures, as two-dimensional visual art, music, and literature more readily can do. Nonetheless, sculptures of Classical religion’s anthropomorphic gods can adequately exhibit the ideal of an agency whose outer deeds contain what is of fundamental significance. Further, since the Classical worldview affirms the independence of humanity from subservience to natural powers with anthropomorphic gods who have overthrown natural deities, the proper enclosure for their statuary will be an artificial environment with no natural inorganic or organic trappings. This provides an architectural mandate for the Classical temple to provide a fit home for appropriate statues of the Classical divinities and the form of activity specific to their worshippers. Instead of subjecting humanity to natural powers or an Absolute whose infinity excludes independent finite agency, the Classical self-­ understanding grants highest value to the worldly, sensuously manifest, public engagements of autonomous individuals. Therefore, the Classical temple cannot unite meaning and configuration by housing the place of worship in a closed chamber, secluded from the secular public world. Instead of shutting off the religious community from the public world and its secular strivings, the Classical temple will fulfill its aesthetic mission by being open to the outside, enabling worship and the conduct of public life to be mutually visible.

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Once these specific functional considerations are recognized, it becomes evident how Classical architecture unites form and function to produce the salient design hallmarks of the ancient Greek temple. To begin with, as Hegel acknowledges, the stylistic signatures of Symbolic architecture must be relinquished if a building is to house coherently the divinity and rational agency that is truly exhibited by idealized human statues and by the public involvements of members of an ethical community that sees itself as the fulfillment of human nature. There can be no place for either independent inorganic shapes, symbolizing abstract divinities in which human individuality is absorbed, or for motifs of plants, animals, or non-human spirits whose representations allude to sublime powers transcending all given sensuous, let alone human, embodiment.20 All these architectural motifs can, of course, be found in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, and Mesopotamian buildings, in pre-Columbian temples and palaces, and in the Hindu and Buddhist temple complexes of Asia. There, one finds functional buildings in an identifiably Symbolic style, whose edifices contain inner sanctums shut off from the prosaic world, enclosing idols symbolizing a divinity that cannot be embodied in an individuated human form, and where devotion involves annulling the “illusory” strivings of finite existence. The towering stupas of Buddhist temples point beyond everyday life, just as the statues of Boddhisatvas proliferating on temple walls all wear the same calm countenance in which every individual passion is superseded. Similarly, Hindu temples soar above mundane activities, covering their facades with countless figures illustrating ancient epics and tantric exercises where individuals inure themselves to worldly attachments. These structures suggest that although the Symbolic style of architecture may foster “independent” works that do not house essential activities, the same worldview these structures express can be embodied in buildings that do house activities, both sacred and secular. Contra Hegel’s primary association of Symbolic architectural design with independent structures, form and function can be united in Symbolic architecture that alludes to the specific self-understanding at stake in such civilization. Hegel himself discusses such creations in which the Symbolic style is architecturally  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 660–661.

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realized in subterranean structures in ancient Egypt and the Ellora and Mithra Caves in India and Persia, structures built for religious assembly with designs that he acknowledges duly express their specific worldview.21 He labels them transitional forms because they are constructions designed to house essential activities. Nonetheless, they constitute functional architecture that fits the Symbolic spirit, demonstrating how the Symbolic style can be embodied in buildings that have a use. The Greek temple breaks with every last vestige of Symbolic architecture, whether independent or uniting form and function. This paradigmatic example of Classical architecture does so by enclosing in a purely instrumental way the focal point of its Classical worldview: statuary of anthropomorphic deities so housed as to enable any worshipper to venerate them without leaving behind the public world of ethical conduct. The Greek temple provides this service, uniting form and function in an architecture strictly designed to support an edifice letting appear those physical shapes that transparently manifest what is of supreme significance: the ideal human spirit as immediately visible in its external embodiment.22 Thus, when we face the Parthenon, Le Corbusier observes, “we are in the inexorable realm of the mechanical.”23 Seconding Hegel’s recognition of the classical temple’s departure from the Symbolic style, Le Corbusier states the obvious, “There are no symbols attached to these forms … no symbolical description, no naturalistic representation, there is nothing but pure forms in precise relationships.”24 Whereas temples in a Symbolic style retain natural motifs that express the bondage of humanity to forces beyond itself, the geometric simplicity of the Greek temple displays the elimination of the hold of alien nature upon what is of human significance. Its very severity provides an explicitly artificial, non-­ natural housing for a dually liberated spirit: a spirit religiously manifest in sculpted anthropomorphic deities that confirm the value of what is human, and a secular spirit whose worldly activities command essential

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 648–650.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 661. 23  Le Corbusier, Towards New Architecture, p. 211. 24  Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, pp. 211, 220. 21 22

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significance acknowledged in being open to view through the colonnades of the temple. The classical column is the architectural element that perfectly serves the dual aim of enclosing anthropomorphic divine statuary while preserving access to the public life of a natural ethical community.25 Unlike supports with natural designs, classical columns have a completely artificial geometric profile reflecting that they are produced by the human spirit to house a human spirit confident of its own ultimate significance. Rising on their cylindrical bases, the columns ascend as free-standing fixtures that provide support while circumscribing a space for worshipping the sculpted deities without obstructing the public scene outside, as an uninterrupted wall would do. Whereas supporting stanchions with flat surfaces can be joined together to form a continuous wall, cylindrical columns cannot. The temple columns further unite form and function in two respects. On the one hand, they progressively narrow as they ascend, showing in their tapering how the bottom has to support all the rest of the pillar. On the other hand, the columns have a spacing and breadth strictly appropriate to their task, being no more crowded and wide than necessary to bear their load.26 Although these design features reflect engineering necessities, they have a supervening aesthetic significance, bound up with the meaning of the temple as a space fit for celebrating the Greek spirit. Moreover, as Hegel points out, the columns also restrict their narrowing so that seen from below, they appear to have a uniform breadth.27 The unity of form and function in architecture is, as duly aesthetic, always determined in light of how the building appears to its users. This aesthetic concern bears upon the cohesion of the structure as a whole. Like any creation of fine art, a work of architecture must be a totality of which no part must begin and end arbitrarily. As Hegel notes, this imperative of aesthetic unity, which renders every detail significant,  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp.  657, 666. The ethical community of the Classical worldview is “natural” in the sense of having a given character rooted in some tradition, in contrast to the normatively modern ethical community of the emancipated family, civil society, and self-­ government, whose institutions of freedom involve roles that are not defined by antecedent tradition, but by the universal practices of self-determination in which they consist. 26  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 657, 666, 669. 27  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 677. 25

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applies to the columns of the temple. Each column achieves functional closure with the addition of a base and capital, which define its height in line with the requirements of support, unlike the indefinite length of a post, whose subterranean extension is not indicated by what protrudes above the ground.28 To complete the temple structure, a roof surmounts the rows of columns, purely serving its sheltering function by coming to a point. This design feature is not dictated by utilitarian concerns, such as dealing with snow that must be able to slide off a roof, instead of accumulating upon it and collapsing the structure. Snow was hardly an issue affecting the construction of the Parthenon in Athens, but what mattered then as always is the meaningful completeness of architectural design. The pointed roof of the Greek temple is something upon which nothing more can rest. By contrast, a horizontal roof offers a building summit that is functionally arbitrary insofar as it can just as well support additional stories.29 Any further upward striving is unnecessary, however, to fulfill the Greek temple’s dual function of enclosing the statues of anthropomorphic deities and promoting the interplay of worship and public ethical conduct. Accordingly, the Classical temple comes not only to a point, but to one that does not ascend above prosaic life like its towering Symbolic and Romantic counterparts. Whereas Buddhist and Hindu temples climb vertiginously upwards, only to be outstripped by the soaring heights of Gothic cathedrals, the Classical temple, like its secular classical counterparts, extends horizontally. Firmly at home in the outer manifestation of human activity, Classical buildings offer a façade whose design can be taken in without having to gaze above and beyond our worldly affairs.30 Here the demands of the classical ideal achieve a unified architectural embodiment. With horizontal beams connecting the rows of columns, upon which friezes and cornices underlie a peaked roof, the Greek temple altogether constitutes an artificial space in which a substantial

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 666, 668.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 670–671. 30  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 674. 28 29

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subjectivity31 can affirm its ultimate value. Its stylistic imperatives can readily be carried over to secular buildings, which can use the same geometric purities, open colonnades, peaked roofs, anthropomorphic statuary, and horizontal profile to house the activity of an ethical community that holds the outer public presence of humanity to be of ultimate value. The resulting edifices may well exhibit some of the spare severity of modernist architecture, with its elimination of organic forms and ornament. Although modernists like Le Corbusier celebrate the design affinities they see in the Parthenon, the Classical temple’s open rows of tapering columns, peaked roof, and enclosed statuary are worlds apart from the soaring glass facades and sterile plazas of the unadorned Bauhaus boxes that fill contemporary cityscapes across the globe. Whether modernist construction achieves a fit of form and function worthy of expressing our self-understanding is something we must consider in addressing the Romantic style in architecture. What should be clear right now is that the unity of form and function in Classical architecture specifically provides housing for the form of civilization that finds supreme value in a rational agency whose outer appearance is at one with its essence.

Independence and Function in Romantic Architecture If the Classical ideal achieves architectural expression in the Greek temple’s specific unity of form and function, can the self-understanding of Romanticism find its signature architectural embodiment in works that vindicate Hegel’s claim that a Romantic architecture unites independence and function? In departing from Classical architecture, Hegel glances at the buildings of the Roman empire as transitional anticipations of a new aesthetic grappling to express a revolutionary human self-understanding in which  The subjectivity prized by the Classical ideal is substantial in the sense that it has a given character, whose essence is transparently manifest in its external conduct. By contrast, the subjectivity of normative modernity, in which the Romantic worldview culminates, is not substantial, always actualizing what it already is, but rather self-determined, becoming what it has determined itself to be. 31

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subjectivity lays claim to an inward autonomy that cannot be reduced to any outward realization. Although Rome may continue to emulate the artistry of ancient Greece, a new architectural vocabulary gets introduced in which supporting columns, open colonnades, and peaked roofs surmounting flat ceilings give way to huge arched and vaulted spaces enclosing a life of imperial magnificence and private indulgences.32 Enduring construction no longer focuses on housing religious statuary and a public ethical domain, but instead erects monumental private palaces, bathhouses and amphitheaters for diversion, and a Pantheon that may be the first building fully enclosed by its dome.33 When Hegel finally addresses the new architecture embodying the Romantic self-understanding, he vindicates the allegedly characteristic connection of independence and function by focusing on just one example: the Gothic cathedral. Hegel explains this restriction by dismissing the secular castles, fortifications, bridges, markets, housing, and other constructions as generally purely prosaic in character, serving mundane ends without any noteworthy aesthetic creativity.34 That global dismissal is highly questionable, in face of the proliferation of palaces, such as Versailles, whose architecture can hardly be called utilitarian. Nonetheless, what most challenges Hegel’s exclusive focus on the Gothic Cathedral is his own division of the Romantic artform into three principal developments: one configuring the sacred self-understanding generic to a religion like Christianity, another embodying the self-directed adventurous spirit of chivalry, and a final stage expressing a formally independent character no more at home with any given tradition than with any specific imagery. At best, we can acknowledge that Hegel has grappled with how architecture can fit the religious spirit of the Romantic worldview and then build upon his analysis of the Gothic Cathedral to consider the other principal options of the Romantic style in architecture. Whereas Classical architecture expresses the identity of the human spirit with its worldly manifestation, Romantic architecture faces the mission of giving external shape to a worldview that affirms a free  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 680–681.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 682–683. 34  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 698. 32 33

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individuality whose independent subjective life cannot be reduced to its expression in any given appearance, including the surface of the human body and the public engagement of conduct. Each self ’s inner autonomy must now be granted fundamental respect by being recognized to transcend each and every outer embodiment. Accordingly, the Romantic style of architecture cannot emulate the ancient Greek temple and build an enclosure for statuary whose anthropomorphic shape expresses all that is fundamentally important. Nor can the Romantic style configure its places of worship to offer open views of secular activity, as if the public affairs of individuals exhibited what is truly good in human existence. A religion like Christianity fits the Romantic worldview by identifying the Divine with a real human individual, while treating the soul of every person as something of infinite value and regarding the inner commitment of faith as more authentic than any outer observance of law. How can architecture give shape to these injunctions in a specific style? And does the successful architectural configuration of this Romantic self-­ understanding involve the union of independence and function that Hegel attributes to it? The answer to these questions is provided by Hegel’s analysis of the Gothic Cathedral. His investigation delineates the signature features with which these towering constructions from the thirteenth century onwards fashion a congruent space for the religious spirit of the Romantic worldview. The Gothic Cathedral serves the function of providing a place large enough for the entire local religious community to come to worship. At the same time, Hegel maintains, the Gothic Cathedral expresses a meaning transcending that use, and indeed, transcending any finite activity, however shared it be. The first distinguishing design characteristic with which the Gothic Cathedral achieves this dual mission lies in how its soaring exterior entirely surrounds a huge cavernous space for worship, completely shut off from the affairs of mundane life.35 Instead of connecting inside and outside through open rows of supporting columns, as does the Classical temple, the Gothic Cathedral takes form as what Hegel calls “a fully  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 685.

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enclosed house”, sealing off its entry with massive solid doors and ­imprisoning the interior within vast walls that block out the external world.36 These walls are punctuated by immense curtains of stained glass that replace every trace of natural light with a distinctly “spiritual” illumination filtered through depictions of holy narratives.37 Hegel identifies these light-punctuated walls as the prime element in Romantic architecture because they inform the whole just as the column provides the determining factor in Classical design.38 The walls do so by communicating their total enclosure of the interior to the external facades of the building, whose shape manifests the internal structure in its outer configuration. Not only does the external footprint of the cathedral match the crosswise alignment of its interior, but the facades have patterns and buttress extensions reflecting the interior construction of the walls. Thereby both sides of the supporting walls signal the architectural priority of the spiritual life sequestered within over nature and the mundane affairs of secular life without.39 This emphasis is carried through in the second distinguishing hallmark of Gothic Cathedral architecture: how the interior space is enclosed in a manner that masks the supporting function of its walls. Instead of using free-standing columns that hold up a separate roof just high enough to house anthropomorphic sculpted deities, the Gothic Cathedral eliminates all divide between supporting structure and ceiling, transforming its enclosing walls into engines of an enormous elevation soaring above any rectilinear functional requirement.40 This transfiguring overcoming of the separation of support and load is made explicit in two design departures from Classical architecture. Columns curtailed by base, capital, and surmounting cross beam are replaced by huge pillars that branch into ascending tendrils that meet those of their counterparts to form the apexes of a soaring vaulted ceiling, into which every climbing element merges.41 Eliminating any perpendicular transition from supporting  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 685–686.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 686. 38  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 666. 39  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 687, 690. 40  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 688. 41  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 688–689. 36 37

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walls to supported roof, the Gothic Cathedral seamlessly joins pillar and peak. The pointed vaults into which the pillars culminate serve not to support something more, but simply to lead all eyes upwards to take in the view of a constructed spatial ascent expressing a spiritual elevation above nature and mundane concerns.42 At the same time, the load-­ bearing solidity of the soaring walls is architecturally transcended by the vast tapestries of stained glass and ornament that pierce and punctuate them, suggesting a gravity defying lightness appropriate to their elevating function, pointing the human spirit above material necessity.43 With these specific stylistic innovations, the Gothic Cathedral architecturally expresses the religious spirit of the Romantic world view, which locates ultimate value beyond the sensuous reality of human existence in an autonomous interiority dwelling in all. The Gothic Cathedral literally offers all walks of life of the local populace an inner sanctum vast enough to elevate them all together in worship of the religious self-understanding it affirms. Just as Hegel succeeded in connecting the architecture of the Greek temple with the Classical Ideal, so he here has confirmed how the Gothic Cathedral architecturally matches the religious spirit of the Romantic world view. Once again, Hegel refutes his own category confusion of artform and individual art, with which he claims that architecture is preeminently fit for the Symbolic style. Instead, his own analyses demonstrate how the unity of meaning and configuration in which beauty resides can equally be achieved in architecture that embodies Classical or Romantic style. Has Hegel’s analysis of the Gothic Cathedral, however, corroborated the unity of independence and functionality with which, he alleges, Romantic architecture exhausts the logical options of architectural style? Unlike independent Symbolic constructions, which have no use other than to allude to something unconditioned, the Gothic Cathedral directly serves the function of bringing together an entire community for sacred devotion. The design of the Gothic Cathedral, however, does much more than serve this purpose of housing religious activity. In contrast to the  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 688–689.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 691, 696.

42 43

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Greek temple, the Gothic Cathedral design does not simply wed form and function, honing to the geometric engineering imperatives of support and enclosure. Instead, Gothic architecture exhibits an independence from functional mandate by transcending the practical necessities of worship with soaring pillars converging into vaulted apexes and curtains of stained glass and stone ornament. These signature design features take on an elevating spiritual meaning of their own, congruent with the religious practice they house and the Romantic worldview expressed in such faith. As Le Corbusier exclaims, the whole Gothic Cathedral affirms this independence in shaping “a fight against the force of gravity, which is a sensation of a sentimental nature.”44 Of course, the Gothic Cathedral is not the only religious architecture that arises in post-Symbolic and post-Classical civilization. Byzantine, Romanesque, Renaissance, and Rococo churches are just some of the architectural constructions housing forms of Christian worship that Hegel ignores. All exhibit kindred features to the Gothic Cathedral, fully enclosing worship within a building whose walls, vaults, and cupolas draw its viewers upwards beyond the requirements of support in recognition of an elevation of spirit transcending worldly affairs. Hegel is equally silent on the architecture of Moslem mosques and Jewish temples, whose religions both worship an immaterial absolute spirit, incompatible with any sculptural embodiment or pictorial representation, or any architectural motifs that draw from nature or other “spirits”. Both traditional mosque and temple designs incorporate the divisions of men and women worshippers and the spaces for prayer, but also provide, especially in the case of mosques, towering minarets, soaring walls with stone curtains of cut through designs, and elaborately vaulted ceilings and domes, all of which point beyond the finitude of prosaic life in ways that resemble aspects of the Gothic Cathedral. Because, however, both Islam and Judaism subscribe to a divine law that directs worldly conduct, their congruent architectures need not shut houses of religious worship off from the outer world with the same completeness as does the Gothic Cathedral. Huge open gateways can invite entry through looming facades leading to vast courtyards for prayer under the sky. 44

 Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, p. 30.

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These omissions in Hegel’s treatment of architectural style can be remedied, but what about modernist and “post-modern” architecture? Hegel’s stylistic scheme would have to place them within the final development of the Romantic artform, where artists grapple with a world view affirming an autonomous subjectivity for which no sensuous configuration can provide a consummate realization. Modernist architects might appear to revert to the Classical style’s fit of form and function with their renewed call to liberate building design of all unnecessary ornament and traditional motifs. Classicism, however, employed its geometric simplicities as a stage for the worship of anthropomorphic deities and the ethical activity of a community that understood its humanity to be fully manifest in its bodily public appearance. The modernist turn to unadorned, non-natural geometric shapes is hardly intended to provide an artificial environment for a human meaning fit for figurative configuration. Instead, modernist architecture employs its spare forms in direct departure from all given tradition and any natural appearance.45 The Bauhaus minimalism that typifies so much modernist design architecturally shapes the same worldview as abstract painting and sculpture, atonal music, and “pure” non-narrative dance. This worldview is a Romantic self-understanding of what Hegel’s calls the “formal independence of character”, which affirms a free agency that cannot find ultimate meaning in anything already given in nature or tradition, but only in what its own creativity produces.46 Negatively speaking, the architectural affirmation of this worldview frees buildings of all extraneous trappings that reflect submission to nature and pre-modern tradition. Positively speaking, the new architecture shows its creative autonomy in forging shapes that are novel, despite their satisfaction of the functional requirements that any building must fulfill. The resulting modernist architecture can, of course, harden into a stylistic orthodoxy that imposes upon all new development a spare,  The instrumentality of the Greek temple is thus completely different in character from that of Le Corbusier’s “house-machine”. See Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, p. 7. 46  For an extended discussion of this shape of the Romantic artform, see Richard Dien Winfield, Stylistics: Rethinking the Artforms After Hegel, pp. 86–89. 45

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mechanical, monochromatic monotony of glass sheathed or concrete boxes and cylinders, looming over empty plazas whose own brutal severity offers no comfort for any shared activity. It can foster an all too familiar new urban landscape: row after row of sheer unadorned facades and flat roofs, devoid of cornices or protruding eaves, and containing interiors of muted color with low hanging ceilings, narrow hallways, white and beige rooms lacking all moldings, casings, pilasters, or covings, windows without drapes, and spare unupholstered furniture in “honest” plain materials of canvas, leather, tubular steel, bentwood, and cane.47 For Gropius, Le Corbusier, and other pioneers of this modernist style, all these hallmarks of their spare new design for living represented a break from bourgeois obsession with grandiosity and the ornate products of skilled craftsmanship.48 Instead, the “International Style” would aim at producing the most machine-made housing possible, perfect for workers, who would live in what looked no different from the factories that swallowed up their working days.49 The problem that undermines unremitting embrace of this new orthodoxy has not just been the anomaly of Bauhaus boxes warehousing welfare recipients in blocks of public housing projects and accommodating the rich in towering glass apartment buildings, while workers flee to suburbs to live in houses with pitched roofs and eaves.50 Rather, the “International Style” has an inherent aesthetic limitation: the Romantic  Wolfe describes the resulting “nonbourgeois” look of Bauhaus dwellings: “flat roofs, with no cornices, sheer walls, with no window architraves or raised lintels, no capitals or pediments, no colors, just the compound shades white, beige, gray, and black. The interiors had no crowns or coronets, either. They had pure white rooms, stripped, purged, liberated, freed of all casings, cornices, covings, crown moldings (to say the least), pilasters, and even the ogee edges on tabletops and the beading on drawers. They had open floor plans, ending the old individualistic, bourgeois obsessions with privacy. There was no wallpaper, no “drapes”, no Wilton rugs with flowers on them, no lamps with fringed shades and bases that look like vases or Greek columns, no doilies, knick-­ knacks, mantelpieces, headboards, or radiator covers. Radiator coils were left bare as honest, abstract, sculptural objects. And no upholstered furniture with “pretty” fabrics. Furniture was made of Honest Materials in natural tones: leather, tubular steel, bentwood, cane, canvas.” See Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Bantam Books, 1999), pp. 25–26. 48  Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, p. 17. 49  Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, p. 53. 50  Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, p. 54. 47

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world view from which it arises can regard no positive design as definitively shaping its formal autonomy. Consequently, modernist architecture can just as readily turn away from Bauhaus perpendicular purities to the non-linear curves and undulating shells of architects such as Antoni Gaudí, Erich Mendelsohn, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, and Frank Gehry, whose constructions have become much more feasible thanks to computer modeling. “Post-modern” architecture may fashion itself as a fundamental departure from modernist design of every stripe, but it is clearly just a variation on the modernist architectural agenda. In place of building new purified shapes, be they perpendicularly rectangular or curvilinear, the post-­ modern architect ironically quotes past styles, recycling them in a way that shows that they are not being naively embraced as privileged signatures of beauty. Instead, the post-modern architect uses them in ironic abandon as if to demonstrate how all style traditions are relegated by history to be arbitrary playthings of the creative self, for whom no shape can be essential.51 As Tom Wolfe puts it, post-modern architects tell us “what you were leaving without committing you to any particular destination.”52 Post-modern architecture may reject modernism’s purified abstractions as one more stipulated “essentialism” of another self-deluded tradition. Nonetheless, the post-modern quotational distancing from every given style only reaffirms the modern Romantic outlook’s overcoming of privileged foundations by embracing creative autonomy as the unique foundation-free alternative to tradition. Post-modern architecture, like post-modern art in general, affirms self-­ determination in a perilously formal manner, however. Since the post-­ modern ironic play with every tradition can arrive at no determinate shape that can give adequate realization to its own governing autonomy, it can readily amount to a repudiation of the universal validity of self-­ determination. Post-modernism then reverts to an embrace of an arbitrary particularism, where the alleged groundlessness of every configuration  David Kolb similarly discusses how the “ironic historicism” of post-modern architecture is merely an extension of the same modern self-understanding that motivates modernism’s search for pure form. See David Kolb, Postmodern Sophistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 87ff. 52  Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, p. 101. 51

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gives way to the conviction that no value can be affirmed that is not a willful imposition of some particular agency. In this way, the post-­modern ironic distancing from every tradition becomes an acceptance of what Nietzsche called the “will to power”, according to which every positing of norms, be they standards of truth, right, or beauty, is unmasked as a power play by its proponent, who asserts something as a privileged value, to which all are to be subordinated. A consistent will to power will then turn out to be nothing other than a recipe for fascism’s naked assertion of the particular volition of some group at the expense of any aspiration of universal right. It should be no surprise that the “master thinkers” of post-modernism, such as Heidegger, Paul de Man, and Carl Schmitt, could welcome Nazism. This is not to say that the post-modern architecture that has proliferated across the globe in ostensibly democratic nations is stylistically kin to the buildings constructed under state sponsorship in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Mussolini’s regime left behind one of the world’s largest troves of modernist Art Deco architecture in the Eritrean capital of Asmara and built a new city outside Rome, EUR, whose buildings display the spare neo-classical geometric purities of the cityscapes in a De Chirico painting. Similarly, Albert Speer’s partially implemented designs for a new imperial Nazi Berlin banally inflate ancient Greek and Roman designs, as do post-revolutionary public buildings in the Soviet Union and its satellites, as well as contemporary government buildings in the United States. The lack of any firm stylistic imprint for post-modern architecture is indicative of its independence to function and its inability to furnish an “essential” style of abiding meaning, features that are shared by the modernism against which post-modernism sees itself rebelling. Once more, building design transcends the use it serves, since every shape can be replaced by some other design quotation. Across the board, contemporary architecture expresses the Romantic spirit that Hegel identifies with the independent formal character of the modern self. Whether superseding all traditional design with new artificial abstract purities or acknowledging traditions’ contingency by arbitrarily recycling their motifs, the architecture of our day reflects how modern humanity can no longer invest ultimate meaning in any particular sensuous configuration. If

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architects are to recognize the universal validity of free agency, they face the challenge of housing the life of a free community in new constructions whose design is liberated from both complete subservience to function and slavish bondage to established configurations. We shall see how the restlessness of this challenge will be shared by all the other arts in their own distinctive modalities.

Part III The Aesthetics of Sculpture

4 The Unique Aesthetic Achievement of Sculpture

The individual arts each seem to be a perennial option for artistic creation, at least so long as the means for producing them are available. The contingencies of technological development have spawned new arts, such as still photography, film, and video, which increasingly attract armies of practitioners, bountiful resources, and eager audiences, while other arts struggle to be practiced and noticed. Sculpture stands out as an art that seems to have lost the commanding presence it once enjoyed. Sculptors have not ceased to work and the turbulent rise and fall of new world orders has toppled many statues off their pedestals and pressed artists to replace them with new occupants. Nonetheless, few would deny that the stature of sculpture has starkly diminished compared to its venerated position in the Classical age of plastic creation. Then no temple could fail to enclose majestic statues, no battlefield could be left without a memorializing sculpture, and no artist could be more honored than a Myron, Polykleitos, Praxiteles or Phidias.1 And few could dispute that the

 Santayana supports the view that it was natural for the Ancient Greeks to privilege the making of statues by pointing to these phenomena. See George Santayana, “Sculpture”, New England Magazine, N. 5, Vol. 38 (1908), p. 105. 1

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accomplishment of such sculpture far eclipsed that of its contemporaneous painting.2 Is sculpture the prime example of an art whose career has come to a veritable end by ceasing to be a medium capable of giving adequate expression to the self-understanding of our modern age? Today as always sculpture can furnish the gratifications of plastic shaping of any sort. By impressing matter with its most minimal form, spatial configuration, sculpting secures the rudimentary satisfaction of subduing material to our imagination and craft. And if the pleasure of making plastic objects fades, sculpture can always still add charm to natural or architectural settings by decorating them with abstract, non-­ representational ornaments.3 It is another matter for sculpture to provide a genuinely aesthetic satisfaction by giving plastic embodiment to a fundamental self-understanding of humanity. This is particularly true when the world view is such as underlies the Romantic style that culminates in modern art, where non-figurative expressions proliferate. If sculpture remains figurative, can it create any plastic shape whose immobile surface adequately affirms a modern self-understanding that cannot ignore the importance of private concerns, psychological reflection, and the inner life of conscience? If, alternately, sculpture produces abstract, non-­ representational works, can these provide more than plastic gratification and decorative charm? Might they achieve genuine aesthetic worth by displaying an absolute subjective creativity for which no imaginable configuration can retain essential meaning, embodying in plastic shaping what abstract painting and serial music do in their respective media of two-dimensional static visual art and sound? Or does non-figurative sculpture succumb to a self-destruction of its own artistic worth by showing the superfluity of any sensuous shape for expressing what is of genuine human significance? The key to assessing these questions and determining whether the career of sculpture has come to an end lies in two investigations. The first consists in examining the constitutive boundaries of sculpture. The  Hartman observes that “Sculpture was once already quite developed in its capacities for grasping things in their essence and portraying them while painting was still laboring in its wretched infancy” (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 333). 3  Santayana considers these two limited gratifications to be the only contributions that purely formal, non-representative sculpture can provide. See Santayana, “Sculpture”, p. 103. 2

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second involves exploring whether the bounds of sculpture allow it to provide a viable medium for all the fundamental styles of artistic expression. The completion of these investigations, of course, is equivalent to a systematic treatment of the art of sculpture.

The Defining Limits of Sculpture The art of sculpture is constitutively defined in a twofold contrast to the art of architecture. On the one hand, both sculpture and architecture shape heavy material in a three dimensional, essentially static way. As a result, works of sculpture and architecture appear primarily to vision,4 provided sufficient light is available, although they can be appreciated by the blind using touch or by rational beings that have sufficiently accurate echolocation. Whatever sensory apparatus may be relied upon, works of sculpture and architecture cannot be taken in as a whole by any single reception. Instead, both arts invite a viewer to move around their configurations in order to appreciate each work’s form in its appearing totality. Although works of architecture and sculpture may have moving parts, these are not necessary, but incidental aspects. Similarly, buildings and statues may be made of contrasting materials and have color applied to them, but these are also contingent accessories that are not intrinsic to each art.5 Moreover, works of sculpture and architecture may be adorned by texts and/or accompanied by music, projections, and live performances, but none of these supplementary factors belong to the nature that any work must have to qualify as sculpture or architecture. Indeed, a work of sculpture, or for that matter, a building, may be in the shape of a word, as is Robert Indiana’s famous Love statue. Nonetheless, sculpture, like works of architecture, need not be colored, need not have any verbal content, need not be associated with music, and need not be tied to a performance of any sort. Sculpture and architecture, considered as such, share in shaping  Vision here broadly signifies sensing electromagnetic radiation in general, whatever be its frequency, as long as it is reflected by the surface of a sculpture. 5  The free-standing sculptural form may actually be undermined by coloration when that coloring is applied in a representational painterly way to indicate perspective and the contours of pictured figures, as well as to cast an ideal pictorial light separate from that which falls upon the sculpture. 4

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undifferentiated heavy material in a static, silent, non-verbal, three-­ dimensional configuration. On the other hand, sculpture is distinguished from architecture by neither having the function of providing an environment for activity or by creating an artificial space within which such activity can meaningfully proceed. Sculpture fills its own space to be seen for its independent aesthetic worth. Comprising a free-standing plastic configuration to be regarded solely for its appearance, sculpture does not forge an encompassing enclosure for activity and other art works, an enclosure whose interior regulates its own dispersion of light. Because architecture does create a distinctly human backdrop fit for a life worth living, it will serve as a ubiquitous environment for the display of other arts, such as sculpture, painting, photography, cinema, musical performance, and all forms of theater. In some cases, some of these arts may be incorporated into architectural design, but this does not account for their own distinctive character, which must be determined in and of itself. The independent reality of sculpture thus seems to be a relatively open receptacle for any plastic shaping that might be presented for aesthetic consideration. Not surprisingly, sculpture has been the most accommodating medium for “found” art. Any three-dimensional object that is susceptible of visual exhibition seems ready for a sculptural “framing”, where, put on a pedestal or in a display case, its mundane surface appearance becomes formally transfigured by its “artist” into something now worthy of aesthetic reception. Fetish objects whose producers held them to have magical properties and mundane artifacts can equally be repositioned as works of sculpture, taking their place in museum displays of “primitive” art and industrial design. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal can stand together with one of Damien Hirst’s mammoth shark tanks as welcome inhabitants of the arena of sculptural art. Whatever “ritual cult value” or prosaic use such found objects may have originally possessed here gets supplanted by their “exhibition value” as objects to be considered from an aesthetic point of view as bonafide works of sculpture.6  Walter Benjamin contrasts the ritual cult value of fetish objects used for magical manipulation of nature with the exhibition value ascribed to objects given the aura of a work of fine art. See Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin; trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 24–25. 6

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Nonetheless, the independent breadth of sculpture has been obscured by its own historical development, which, as we shall see, is connected to how the different artforms give distinctive stylistic configuration to works of sculpture. Historically speaking, sculpture has been predominantly figurative in character until relatively recent times. Plants, animals, humans, human artifacts, and divinities with animal, human, or hybrid forms have been the prevailing subjects of sculptural work on our lonely planet. Although some ancient sculpture has abstractly represented natural powers of fertility and emanation in such forms as lingams and obelisks, only in our modern age have sculptors created completely non-representational works. Consequently, it has been easy for aesthetic theorists of the past to regard architecture and music as the only non-figurative arts and conceive sculpture as essentially figurative in character. Moreover, the predominance of sculptural representations of the human body has encouraged many, including Hegel, to regard sculpture as fundamentally concerned with shaping the figure of rational agency in plastic static majesty. This construal of the essence of sculpture has important ramifications for conceiving both the limitations and the strongpoints of sculpture relative to the other arts. Lacking color differentiation, verbal representation, and the temporal development to which music, literature, and theater have access, sculpture must somehow achieve an exemplary unity of configuration and fundamental human meaning in a free-standing, static, mute, wordless, materially undifferentiated plastic shaping. Since the concerns of unconditioned value that are susceptible of sensuous and imaginative construal revolve around conduct and religion, sculpture faces the challenge of distilling ethical and religious meaning into a frozen moment of plastic configuration, whose motionless surface must convey everything of significance. As free-standing statuary that is representational, sculpture can offer one or more figures depicting rational agents and/or the divine or divinities at one moment of their activity. Sculpture can also accompany such figures with plastic depictions of plants or animals or artifacts that are attached or in proximity to them. What figurative sculpture cannot do is display the situation encompassing these figures, which the graphic arts, cinema, and literature can

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describe.7 Nor can figurative sculpture depict the development and resolution of significant conflicts, as can any of the arts that have time at their disposal, such as music, dance, cinema, and literature. Restricted to the plastic undifferentiated surface of its statuary at one frozen moment, sculpture must shape that immobile surface into something exemplary and revelatory of our human condition, whether regarding our relations to one another or our relation to the Divine as we understand it. Hegel is well aware of these limitations, which apply generically to sculpture, whether it be figurative or completely abstract. Figurative sculpture, particularly sculpture that shapes the human figure or its analogue on galaxies far, far away, may seem to have a significant advantage over abstract sculpture or sculpture that configures inanimate objects, life forms without mind, or brute animals. In all these latter cases, statuary cannot directly express what pertains to humanity, but only allude to it through plastic creations whose shape is other than that of finite rational agents. Although this involves aesthetic challenges, it does not rob such sculpture of the possibility of giving plastic expression to the human condition. This is especially true when sculpture stylistically affirms the self-­ understanding of the Symbolic and Romantic artforms, which locate what is fundamental to humanity in what cannot be adequately contained on the surface of the human figure. When, however, sculptors focus on the human figure for their statuary, assisted as it may be with non-human objects, both alive and artificial, sculpture still confronts all the restrictions mentioned above. Even when molding the human body, sculpture remains unable to configure the encompassing situation of essential human endeavors owing to its limitation to free-standing figures; unable to capture the development of human strivings in any temporal succession given the frozen immobility of sculpture; unable to use verbal expression given the extrinsic character of speech to plastic shaping; and unable to employ any inner glint of light to reveal the passions of the soul, given that sculpture per se shapes undifferentiated material, on which light falls from without.8  A relief can be regarded as a transitional form of sculpture in which somewhat flattened figures are set against a backdrop indicating the situation of their activity. The relief brings sculpting towards a flattened two-dimensional surface, which graphic art will employ in its specific artistic medium. 8  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 703. 7

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Duly recognizing all these limitations, Hegel regards them as nonetheless endowing sculpture with a supreme aesthetic advantage. Only sculpture can present us with the real contour of humanity. Architecture at best provides an enclosure for human activities. Music can only create non-verbal modifications of sound. Painting is bound to the illusions of flat picturing. Literature is confined to words whose communicated representations lack any actual corporeal reality. Does not sculpture’s three-­ dimensional shaping provide the sensuous configuration most faithfully confronting humanity with its own truth? In particular, do not the limitations of sculpture enable sculptors to perfectly embody the Classical Ideal of a human subjectivity whose essence is as it outwardly appears? Appropriately molded by artistic genius, the fixed surface of the sculpted human body can best capture this “substantial” human essence, be it manifest in the figure of a public hero or an anthropomorphic deity. This facility, Hegel alleges, renders sculpture a fundamentally Classical art, just as architecture’s non-figurative constructions of heavy material left it a Symbolic art, whose creations can only allude to a human condition they can never directly configure.9 Once more Hegel conflates the individuality of an art with the particularity of an artform, treating the individual art of sculpture as if it were intrinsically linked to the particular style of Classical artistry. On this categorially confused basis, Hegel ascribes sculpture an aesthetic perfection beyond the reach of any other art, for human statuary can achieve an allegedly incomparable unity of form and content, of configuration and meaning. On the other hand, Hegel thereby relegates sculpture to an inferior revelation of human truth, for the Classical Ideal fails to acknowledge the full scope of self-determination, which cannot be confined by the given traditions of a “natural” ethical community and which includes the rights of conscience, of private life, and of the pursuit of particular interests. At the same time as Hegel commits the category mistake underlying these claims, he ends up refuting his error. He does so by showing in key detail how sculpture, like architecture, can achieve the unity of meaning and configuration in which beauty resides not just in one privileged  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 708.

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artform, but in all the fundamental styles by which imaginable form and content may be aesthetically joined. For this reason, we can build upon Hegel’s account and systematically address the aesthetic challenge specific to sculpture.

The Creative Challenge Facing the Sculptor The limits of sculpture confront the sculptor with a formidable challenge. Somehow the sculptor must solve the mind-body dilemma that has haunted philosophers who have struggled to conceive how consciousness and material objectivity can commune with one another. The sculptor must overcome the looming divide of mind and body not in philosophical argument but by infusing the most minimal feature of physical reality, extension, with the animating spirit of rational agency. The sculptor must triumph over dualism by creating a plastic figure whose immobile, uncolored, mute material surface is penetrated by the human spirit so as to confront its viewers with an individual revelation of fundamental concern. In certain respects, the difficulties seem incomparable to those facing creators in the other arts. Walter Benjamin points to a formidable part of the sculptor’s challenge in comparing film and sculpture. Whereas filmmakers are dealing with a medium in which editing and reshooting always allows for further reworking, sculptors are stuck with a medium that offers the least possibilities for improvement. Sculptors are condemned to produce a work all of one piece, which, once shaped, cannot be changed in any but a negative way, removing some part with the risk of destroying whatever is left.10 Vasari points to this liability in considering the artistic ranking of sculptors versus painters. In the Preface to his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vasari imagines a debate between sculptors and painters, where the sculptors affirm their creative superiority with arguments all revolving around the special limits of sculpture.11 Because  Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, p. 28. 11  Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Eugene Gaston du C. de Vere (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), Volume I, pp. 14–22. 10

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sculptors shape heavy material, they must have strength and endurance superior to that of painters, who wield merely a brush, chalk, pen, or charcoal. Further, because sculptors create three-dimensional works that must appear properly from every point of view, sculptors must have a superior apprehension of and facility for capturing the total form of things compared to painters, who are restricted to the one plane of their two-dimensional surfaces. Above all, because sculptors have the least opportunity to remedy any mistakes, they must have a more infallible creative imagination and skill to guide and execute their plastic shaping. Since painters can always paint over what they have done, their artistic foresight and skill can be markedly inferior to what sculptors must possess to contend with their most unforgiving art. While a painter can patch up every slip of brush and every error of composition, a sculptor risks “blunders which have no remedy, and which, when made, bear witness for ever to the slips of the chisel or to the small judgment of the sculptor”.12 Admittedly, the comparative irrevocability of every act of sculpting may apply to works of stone and wood, but not to those of clay and other malleable materials that can be reworked at will. And, as Vasari notes in his imagined response of the painters, those who create frescoes must not only get everything irremediably right before the fresco medium dries. They must also finish their work in far less time than sculptors have to chisel away at their slabs of stone. Further, as Vasari’s painters reply, although sculptors must master the form of their three-dimensional subject matter, painters must understand perspective, be able to represent not just solid opaque objects, but also those that are transparent and intangible, and command all the subtleties of color from which three-­ dimensional plastic shaping abstracts. In addition, painters must know how to organize and depict the multiplicity of things filling the limitless expanse of their projected vistas, which requires facility with representing the entire breadth of nature with its flora and fauna as well as populated locales full of human activities and architectural constructions of all sorts.

12

 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vol. I, p. 16.

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And painters can even depict an object from all sides by picturing its reflection in mirrors or pools of water.13 Vasari considers this whole controversy moot, insofar as “sculpture and painting are in truth sisters, born from one father, that is design, at one and the same birth and have no precedence one over the other”.14 The living proof for this strides the earth before Vasari in the person of Michelangelo, whose incomparable works of sculpture, painting, and architecture demonstrate how artistic genius can triumph equally in each medium.15 Whether we give special rank to sculpture or not, we must marvel at the “miracle” of how a sculpture, such as Rodin’s The Thinker, can unite the most abstract, autonomous activity of spirit with the frozen, mute surface of a statue. Thinking may be the most immaterial of mental activities, free of the impressions of sense organs and the feelings of bodily appetites. Nonetheless, the thinking of a real subject involves a physical effort and that psychophysical relation can be exhibited by the outer appearance of the body. The psychic engagement within can be revealed through the stance of the body and the gestures and expression of those bodily features most bound up with communicating the activity of the mind. It may seem unfeasible to represent thought in stone, but a sculptor like Rodin can make the impossible possible by relying on these aspects of mental embodiment that manifest the inner life on the outer surface of the human body.16 More than this, however, is required to enable sculpture’s plastic shaping to achieve that blending of exemplary meaning and configuration by which a statue constitutes a work of fine art. To do so, sculpture must allow mind not just to shine through an immobile physical shape, but to give expression to the secular and sacred endeavors of rational agency that have fundamental importance. Somehow a colorless mute frozen figure must express a character alive with some significant passion connected to conduct essential to the human condition. Sculpture’s aesthetic vocation  Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vol. I, pp. 16–21.  Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vol. I, p. 22. 15  Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vol. I, p. 23. 16  See Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 201. 13 14

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might seem crippled by its generic inability to depict concretely the situation of action and the development and resolution of essential conflicts. How can the paralyzed momentary pose of a free-standing body provide any manifestation of these dynamic aspects so crucial to making the content of a work of art sufficiently meaningful to warrant aesthetic worth? How can the rigid shape of a single isolated moment express the development of a living action, immersed in the changing context with which it contends?17 As Hegel notes, sculpture simply cannot present anything that does appear on the surface of a body with the trembling and twitching vacillation of outbursts of anger and passion.18 The portrayal of changes of countenance is better left to painting and other more suitable arts. Should sculpture not recognize its limitations and focus upon capturing what is universal and permanent in the individual unity of body and spirit that its statue’s frozen pose might manifest?19 Although the statue is immobile and gives permanent display to the moment it captures, that moment can still express a phase of the striving and engagement to which it belongs. As Hartmann observes, a statue of Apollo in its very static rest can still present “the pulsing life of the figure, the dynamics of the action and its resolution, and, still more, the superior bearing of the god, its gravitas and powerful freedom.”20 In so doing, the stationary free-standing statue can indicate a background that is not given direct sculptural embodiment.21 This is especially evident when the figure is adorned with equipment and accompanied by mascots that identify the represented human or god and the episode in which its frozen action may be located. Thereby a statue can encapsulate in its individual plastic shaping a view of our human condition that deserves to be seen by generations to come.

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 703.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 715. 19  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 718. 20  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 103. 21  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 104. As Hartmann writes, “the ontologically unreal stratum of the work of art is therefore not only motion and life, but also the specific space that belongs to it” (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 105). 17 18

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How sculpture can distill exemplary configurations of life and action in the “suspended animation”22 of its static plastic configuration is difficult to delineate without delving into the particulars of how Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic styles achieve sculptural realization. Nonetheless, it is worth exploring Hegel’s general, but concrete suggestions of how sculpture must transfigure the surface of the human body to manifest the vital spirit within. He can consider these imperatives as emblematic of sculpture insofar as he regards sculpture to be essentially figurative and no less essentially focused upon depicting the body of rational agency, which, on our lonely planet, so far amounts to the body of homo sapiens. Hegel can also consider these imperatives as determinative of Classical sculpture, whose ideal adequately resides on the exterior of a human body, be it that of a hero or an anthropomorphic god. Systematically speaking, if we are to avoid these all too narrow assumptions, we must reconsider these imperatives as emblematic of how sculpture can configure human concerns when it makes use of the human body, understanding humanity in the broad sense of finite rational agency, whatever be its natural species and planetary abode. Figurative sculpture in general takes as its point of departure objects whose plastic surface configuration is already given in nature in the contours of the things whose sculptural transfiguration aims to present fundamental matters of conduct and religion. When the self-understanding at issue subjects humanity to non-human natural powers, sculpture may model that subjection in the portrayal of spirits that have plant or animal form. Since animal, rather than plant life has mind, animal figures can better serve to embody natural powers lording over human existence. To convey that power, the portrayals of animal forms cannot simply duplicate their merely natural shape. They must instead involve transfigurations that convey the intended spiritual or divine majesty. As we shall see, these transfigurations of the given configuration of animal life take various forms in embodying the Symbolic style in sculpture. When the human body is the subject of sculptural configuration, the form given by nature need not be comparably modified to express what is fundamental in conduct and religion. The natural physique of the  Santayana, “Sculpture”, p. 110.

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human being, or that of any other terrestrial or extra-terrestrial rational animal might seem to provide exactly the shape that is needed to convey the exemplary meaning of fine art. Nonetheless, the immediate surface appearance of the human body is not in and of itself adequate to display what matters in ethical and religious endeavors. The anatomically intact surface of the human body may be indistinguishable from a fresh cadaver, the paralyzed pod of a comatose human vegetable, or the blank covering of a human animal, lacking linguistic intelligence and will. The sculptor must transfigure the given appearance of the human body to enable its sculpted representation to make manifest its living being, either as currently active or in traces of a life that has been snuffed out, be it in battle or on a cross. The animation of the human body is not manifest equally in all its parts, nor by all the positions it can take. Vitality is on display in more differentiated respects. On the one hand, certain parts of the human body, such as the limbs, eyes, and mouth most evidently express the waking animated state by their individual gestures and expression. On the other hand, the general posture of the body, with the supporting muscular and circulatory exertions, visibly exhibits the vitality that underlies all behavior, including conduct, be it secular or sacred. The vitality at stake that figurative sculpture must focus upon, however, is not that of a brute animal, but rather the animation of a rational agent, whose intelligent mind and will must be expressed in the sculptural handling of the body’s surface. As Hegel points out, although rational agency permeates the entire body, it is primarily concentrated in the expression of the face, whereas the other corporeal appendages express thinking, willing, and emotion only through their posture.23 Sculpting these psychophysical manifestations of the human spirit thus requires dealing with both the relevant outwardly animated parts of the body and the distinctive posture of the human individual. The bodily parts in question may equally serve the life struggles of a brute animal, but to express the human spirit, they must be configured in ways that display their involvement in distinctly human endeavors. The facial expression of a rational being engaged in the striving for a good life is fundamentally different from the facial expression of a brute animal in 23

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 727.

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its battle for survival. As Hegel notes, human facial features and gestures take visible configurations that specifically communicate the universal concerns that require language and thought to be understood and expressed.24 The eyes and mouth can non-verbally express emotions that are concerned with normative purposes and not just animal desire. They also can be visibly employed in linguistic communication. Sculpturally conveying this involves focusing on the configurations of facial expression that are not tied to animal activities of nutrition and sexual reproduction. Instead, the sculptor must present the expressions, gestures, and postures that display human love, human ethical concern, and human religious devotion, both in its fulfillment and betrayal. Whereas animals may have mouths like snouts with drooping upper lips that serve the purpose of devouring their food, the human face has a less protruding jaw, with lips, teeth, and tongue that are fit for speech. The human eye is not limited to the cold concentration of a predator or prey. It can communicate emotion concerned with purposes that matter for the quality of life. Similarly, the human body can make gestures and take postures that have nothing to do with biological function, but that display engagements in ethical and religious matters. Consequently, any sculptor who uses the human form to create an exemplary shaping of essential truths for humanity will not treat all parts and all possible positions with indifference. Instead, the sculptor will transfigure the given natural physique of the human body to highlight what best expresses the worldview that the sculptor shares. As Santayana writes, “sculpture is not a matter of surfaces; the muscles … must first have been taught to relax or strain … to some purpose ... to mean something to the beholder”.25 This expression of significant human purpose will involve a certain idealization that transfigures what is immediately given by nature, but not necessarily limited to a Classical ideal. Admittedly, the sculptor may adopt a completely prosaic naturalism in which surface details are captured in an equal attention that masks the animation of rational agency. The human figure may then be offered simply as a pure form or as an exhibition of a creative power to duplicate  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 728–729.  Santayana, “Sculpture”, p. 108.

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outer appearance in ironic contempt of the soulless humanity that is being displayed. Such is the case in the plaster cast figures of George Segal and the fully dressed and coifed gallery occupants of Duane Hanson, where surface fidelity devoid of spirit confronts the viewer. These sculptors’ indifferent replications of the entire bodily surface can serve the aesthetic agenda of that form of the Romantic style which affirms how rational agency cannot be tied to any sensuous configuration, leading to a vacillation between rote immersion in the facticity of outer appearance and abstraction from all given natural forms. So too can a modern sculpture that completely dispenses with figurative depiction and becomes completely abstract.

5 The Stylistics of Sculpture

How Sculpture Embodies the Symbolic Style Hegel considers sculpture to be so fundamentally suited to the Classical style that he dismisses any Symbolic or Romantic sculptural efforts as devoid of aesthetically noteworthy achievement.1 Nonetheless, Hegel himself describes statuary embodying Symbolic and Romantic styles in ways that do unite meaning and configuration in accord with their underlying worldviews. Although these descriptions are much briefer than Hegel’s extensive account of Classical sculpture, they provide us with important guideposts for conceiving how sculptors can, and, of course, have created works of true artistic genius in Symbolic and Romantic styles. Sculptors giving expression to the worldview congruent with the Symbolic style face the generic challenge of capturing on the plastic surface of one frozen moment what is of essential human importance. They must somehow work within these limits to configure all the varieties of the type of worldview that understands humanity to attain its true essence by submitting to powers that are vested in nature or in an indeterminate absolute transcending human agency.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 708.

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To express the self-understanding of communities that locate their essence in natural powers external to humanity, so-called “primitive” sculpture has employed anatomical distortions, hybridizations of human and animal features, and typical physiognomies paying little attention to human individuality. To convey natural spirits to which humanity must orient its life, such “primitive” sculptors cannot duplicate given natural anatomies, but they must push their forms into unnatural shapes that exhibit powers beyond mere animal existence. In so abstracting from given natural appearance, such “primitive” sculptors can provide an inspiration to modern artists, such as Picasso and Matisse, who will adopt their abstracted, geometrically stylized forms for a very different agenda. “Primitive” works such as these have been made throughout the globe, from the totem poles of North America to the massive heads of Easter Island to the stone and ceramic works of pre-Columbian empires to the wood carvings of Polynesia and Melanesia and to the vast creative flowering of figurative sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa. An alternate sculptural configuration is needed when the Symbolic self-understanding locates the essence of humanity not in the natural powers of animist religion, but in an indeterminate absolute with which we can obtain our true being only by detachment from the finite strivings of our phenomenal existence. This drive for spiritual purification can be given plastic shape in the type of sculptural configuration that proliferates in the courtyards, interiors, and over the soaring exteriors of ancient Hindu temples. Arrays of multiple human figures and incarnations of Hindu deities are portrayed in activities that often draw from the great epic sagas of the Ramayana and the Mahabharat. Some of the figures are vividly erotic, some portray battle exploits, and others depict individuals engaged in spiritual devotions. In every case, the figures follow different paths to unite with the Divine by acting with an express detachment, displaying how they are on a path of overcoming their individual strivings to leave behind the finite world of illusion. In accord with this relinquishment of selfhood, human faces and bodies are configured as types, lacking any portrait-like, differentiated individuality. The representations of divine incarnations often involve an unnatural proliferation of limbs that express how the human figure must be pushed beyond its natural bounds to display a divine true

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essence. The sculpted Hindu deities may be dancing figures moving multiple arms and legs with miraculous dexterity, but always an all-­ encompassing balance absorbs every exertion in a timeless grace. The Symbolic spirit can also achieve consummate artistic expression in the typecast sculptures of tranquil Buddhas and Boddhisatvas, sometimes as monumental standing and reclining giants, sometimes as miniature fixtures innumerably chiseled into temple walls and niches. Large or small, their serene, idealized faces display the absorption of all finite, desire-stricken individuality into a relinquishment of self to an indeterminate absolute beyond all conception, for which rational agency is an illusory epiphenomenon. Not only is the placid face of every such statue bereft of passionate contortion, searching eyes, or mouths communicating any strivings, but the body is in a posture of complete repose, with no sign of any departure from rest. The Buddhist sculptor thus has no difficulty putting to artistic service sculpture’s restriction to largely isolated, motionless figures. With its appropriately stylized spiritual serenity of face and posture, this form of Symbolic sculpture can achieve the fit of exemplary meaning and configuration in which artistic beauty resides. Hegel has little to say about the above Symbolic forms. Instead he limits his few remarks on Symbolic sculpture to ancient Egyptian statuary, which he presents as the “imperfect art” that serves as the necessary precursor to Classical sculpture.2 Ancient Egyptian sculpture is the “preamble” to ancient Greek sculpture because only by overcoming the former’s defects can sculptors attain the true Classical Ideal.3 In considering the Symbolic style architecture of ancient Egypt, Hegel already remarked upon the immense Sphinxes and Memnons, which he considered works of architecture due to how their gigantic size and distant placements rendered them huge environments enclosing religious and secular activity. Both Sphinxes and Memnons, however, were also crafted in smaller sizes, giving them an unequivocal status as works of sculpture. The Sphinxes large and small combine human and animal form in expression of a worldview in which humanity has not liberated itself from the hold of nature. The same world view is expressed in those ancient Egyptian  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 708.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 708.

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sculptures that use independent animal shapes to portray divine power. The sculpted figures have a great degree of fidelity to the animal forms they shape, whose natural being can be displayed without conflicting with any limits on depicting human freedom.4 In every case, these figures have a majestic stolid repose and detachment that fittingly expresses the immortal spirit to which they allude. Moreover, as Hegel observes, the Egyptian images of these gods have a settled uniformity that persists for many centuries, with sculptors working in anonymous fulfillment of these traditional designs. This reflects how individual creative freedom is little honored by a civilization in which a priesthood dictates fixed norms of portrayal and sculptors practice their art with perfected technique under a hereditary caste assignment of crafts.5 When Egyptian sculptors depict pharaohs and queens on tombs and in free standing statues, their mastery in capturing a portrait-like verisimilitude is evident. As Hegel notes, this is particularly true of how the head is shaped, but the entire figure, whether seated or standing, has a stiff, flattened appearance, where shoulders and hips are in rigid line with one another.6 What is lacking in this inflexible symmetry is the fluid dynamic grace that could display the animated human personality lurking within. The head of these statues may retain a fully realistic breadth, but the expression of eyes and mouth and the general posture of the head and neck has an emotionless, passive cast, congruent with the wooden bearing of the rest of the body. Instead of fluidly expressing any organic, animal vitality, these human figures have little indication of muscles, bones, veins, or nerves. The joints of fingers and toes are hardly depicted and the sculpted bodies sit or stand completely straight in a forced, stiff posture, with feet clamped together and arms hanging straight down pressed against the body.7 This rigid severity precludes not only the expression of life, but that of freedom and the strivings in which it could be embroiled. The stationary cast of both gods and mortals in ancient Egyptian sculpture leaves no action to be depicted by the expression of  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 783.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 781. 6  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 781–784. 7  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 782. 4 5

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facial features, the gesture of limbs, and the posture of the body. The pervasive immobility of the figures blocks any indication of a situation precipitating human activity of any essential significance. Hegel maintains that these features display an enigmatic association between universal meaning and individual shape, characteristic of the Symbolic style of artistic configuration.8 Far from undermining the aesthetic achievement of Symbolic sculpture, ancient Egyptian statuary thereby embodies the unity of exemplary significance and configuration in which beauty resides. As Hegel’s own discussion shows, the underlying worldview of ancient Egypt is fittingly reflected in the plastic shaping of its figurative sculpture. Hegel has here undermined his own claim that sculpture in the Symbolic style lacks aesthetic viability.

The Imperfect Perfection of Classical Sculpture The restricted stature accorded human subjectivity in Symbolic sculpture does have to be surmounted if sculptors are to create works in a Classical style, which express how the essence of humanity can be adequately manifest in the outer appearance of the human body and public conduct. Less evident is whether this overcoming crowns Classical sculpture as paramount among stylistic embodiments, validating the preeminence accorded it by Hegel and Santayana, among others. To warrant any aesthetic privilege for Classical sculpture, the Classical spirit must have a special affinity for the defining limits of sculpture as an individual art. That affinity will rest upon the Classical ideal affirming the type of rational agency that can be portrayed in a purely visible sculpted shape, without color, sound, movement, or verbal content.9 Since sculpture can directly depict rational agency only by shaping its bodily form, whatever self dwells within must show itself on the entire surface. Its spirit cannot be focused in some evanescent appearance, as a painting might display in the pictured gleam of an eye. Paralyzed in a solitary permanent embodiment, the subjectivity that is sculpted cannot  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 783.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 710.

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be displaying a particular emotion whose significance lies in its contrasted being within a series of different phases of action. Nor can the subject of the statue be a character exhibited in all the fluctuations of its ethical and religious involvements. Although sculpture may capture a single frozen moment of its subject, to be aesthetically worthy, that subject should be depicted in the repose of its essential being or poised at the threshold of a meaningful action to which its own outer appearance can allude. By contrast, the vicissitudes of the subject’s inner life cannot properly be displayed in any single plastic shaping.10 The general self-repose of the sculpted figure, Hegel maintains, renders sculpture specially fit to present the self-understanding of that form of human civilization which views what is essential to rational agency to lie in its bodily external existence, which manifests the abiding universal substance of its ethical and religious community. Sculptors can be the privileged artistic creators for this civilization because its worldview does not recognize the validity of a rational agency that withdraws into a subjective immersion in personal motives and inner conviction.11 For Hegel, sculpture’s restriction to a solitary mute spatial form makes it unable to express adequately a rational agency that is unfulfilled by the outer corporeal reality of conduct and seeks meaning instead in an inner world of fleeting inclination and caprice. What sculpture can do is give exemplary shape to the persisting, objective, and substantial being of a rational agency that is essentially as it appears on the surface for the world to see. This outer, public manifestation does not lack self-consciousness and an inner life of passions and beliefs. Rather than being a soulless Zombie, the substantial agency in question has no need to give separate expression to its subjectivity. Permeated by what is substantive and objective, this is a subjectivity that can be fully exhibited in the fixed corporeal figure that sculpture can shape.12 If the objective, substantial dimension of rational agency is not shared by every form of humanity, but rather distinguishes a particular type of civilization, then figurative sculpture of the human body could be a  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 705–706.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 710. 12  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 711–712. 10 11

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privileged artistic avenue for that human community. Such sculpture would be supremely fit to present that objective, substantive rational agency with an exemplary vehicle for self-understanding on several salient counts. To begin with, a rational agency that considers its outer actuality to encompass its essential identity would judge itself and others by the public manifestation of conduct, where what matters is what the body shows. Although this external display includes public discourse disclosing what individuals think and feel, unexpressed emotions, convictions, and motives would not essentially concern these individuals. Their ethical and religious standpoints see no genuine validity in anything merely subjective or in any beliefs investing fundamental value in subhuman entities or powers that transcend human configuration. Human fulfillment here lies in active membership in an ethical community, carrying out the public roles sustaining the good already manifest in the institutions such conduct upholds. The individuals of this type of civilization would not submit to any inner tribunal of conscience but rather judge themselves by how adequately they fulfill the visible public roles constituting their community membership. Since what members do in publicly sustaining their ethical community are tangible activities appearing to sense perception, the identification of essential value with their objective manifestation renders the normativity of ethics and religion something paradigmatic in character. Their good and religious truth cannot be captured in the universality of pure thought, apart from the imagery of sensuous particulars. The nature of what is normative cannot here be defined by the abstract principle of law; it must rather be accessed in the concrete appearance of exemplary figures and the given communities to which they belong. Consequently, the members of such civilization can only comprehend themselves in imaginative, sensuous configurations that focus everything of meaning upon the outer appearance of their agency. This locks the expression of such individuality into fixed human manifestations of the supreme values at work in the existent ethical community and its given religious pantheon of humanly configured gods. The rational agency of such civilization is thus a plastic individual. Its character is all of one piece with its

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outward corporeal appearance, inhabiting a specific public world embodying the norms its conduct sustains. Hegel may regard this type of rational agency to be specially suited for sculptural treatment, but the affinity to which he points does not render sculpture a Classical art, nor make it preeminent among the arts, nor even establish the figurative shaping of rational agency as the generic subject of sculpture. It does, however, bring us to the point of conceiving how sculpture embodies the Classical style. This is because determining just how such a plastic, substantial individuality achieves sculptural embodiment turns out to be equivalent to conceiving the fundamental anatomy of Classical sculpture.

The Limited Idealization of the Classical Nude Historically Classical sculpture may not be limited to nude statues, but the nude figure plays a paradigmatic role in displaying the transfiguration with which Classicism idealizes the human body and its specific unity of form and content. In general, the nude statue most purely exhibits the bounds of figurative sculpture in modeling the body of rational agency. Stripped of all clothing, implements, and other adornments, the nude focuses all attention upon the surface of the body, as that alone which must manifest what is worthy of expression. By default, this simple corporeal exterior must entirely depict the essential substance of the self it embodies, all in its isolated immobile shape. These prerogatives hold true of any naked sculpture. They leave completely undetermined what type of rational agency is displayed, as well as how the captured moment connects to any context of ethical or religious significance or any passion within the sculpted subject. Nakedness in and of itself does not affirm any unity of spiritual significance with the outer surface of the human body. To give exemplary embodiment to the distinctive spirit of Classical civilization, the sculptor must transfigure nakedness into an appropriately idealized form. Without such an aesthetic transfiguration, sculpture risks succumbing to the empty formalism of neo-classicism or the rote replication of naturalism. In the former case, the neo-classical sculptor

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depicts physical perfection in detachment from any congruent spirit,13 whereas in faithful naturalism, the sculpted figure imitates just another immediate appearance, whose every detail carries the same indifferent presence of being. Moreover, the melding of corporeality with spirit is not equally visible over all the body surface. The infusion of body by rational agency is instead most evident in the demeanor of facial features, the gesture of limbs, and the posture of the figure. Consequently, manifesting the harmony of mind and body, of inner and outer, does not require unclothing all parts of the body.14 Those whose nakedness is irrelevant for revealing facial expression and bearing can be clothed. As Hegel notes, as much as ancient Greek sculptors may esteem the human figure to be the most beautiful embodiment of what is worthy in rational agency, they are not being inconsistent in covering parts of their nudes.15 Admittedly, the Greek cult of nakedness, paraded in all its Olympic glory, may celebrate the union of spirit and body.16 Nonetheless, the nude cannot express the Classical Ideal unless it transfigures the natural shape of the human body and focuses upon those features that most clearly express our humanity. The Classical agenda mandates that the sculptor configure the nude to capture the abiding fundamental substance of a human individuality for which everything essential is displayed in the public corporeality of conduct and anthropomorphic divine embodiment. To enable the bodily contour of rational agency to manifest this Classical self-understanding, the nude must depart from other naked statuary by distinctively stylizing the figure. As Kenneth Clark notes, in sculpting the nude, the Classical artist aims “not to imitate, but to perfect.”17 As a work of artistic creation, the nude is never a mere subject matter of art, defined by its human shape with indifference to any specific meaning. Rather, the nude is, as Clark

 Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, p. 26.  Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, p. 26. 15  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 744–745. 16  Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, pp. 24–25. 17  Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, p. 12. 13 14

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duly insists, a form of art whose content always goes hand in hand with its treatment.18 The Classical nude’s signature features have been acknowledged over many centuries, but not until Hegel pioneered systematic aesthetics has any adequate attention been paid to the connection of these features with the fundamental meaning they express. This inattention reflects the formalism afflicting the aesthetics of mimesis and of taste, neither of which can take account of fine art’s exemplary unity of form and content and the different modes this unity takes in the styles of the particular artforms. That same formalism underlies the approach of art critics who neglect the essential aesthetic challenge of joining shape and significance by analyzing artworks either in reference to types of configuration or to types of meaning. Among philosophers of fine art, Hegel has provided the most searching exploration of how the Classical nude unites form and content. His catalogue of the congruencies in shape and meaning have been reaffirmed in Kenneth Clark’s more recent analysis of the Classical nude. The stylization of the Classical nude becomes coherently meaningful if we draw upon the insights of Hegel and Clark. Not surprisingly, the Classical nude idealizes the naked body by focusing upon the configuration of the face, the gesture of the limbs, and the posture of the whole figure. These, after all, are the aspects of the body surface that visibly reveal the infusion of rational agency without any addition of color, motion, sound, or language. Classical statues may have often been multi-chrome, but coloration is not an essential part of sculpture. It can interfere with a statue’s plastic shaping by displaying gradations of color shading and saturation that conflict with the fall of light upon the figure and that indicate a contrary, painterly projection of three-dimensional space. For this reason, the nude’s sculptural unity of meaning and shape is not at all diminished by considering the Classical statue in the pure, undifferentiated tone of its marble or bronze.  Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, p. 5. Clark can make this claim in reference to the nude in general, for, as his own discussion of Michelangelo’s David and Pisano’s Venus, confirms, the nude, as a proper genre of art, always forges a unity of meaning and configuration, even when not in a Classical style. See Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, pp. 61, 95 ff. 18

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We may be left with largely uncolored figures, which often have broken limbs and missing heads, but these wounds have not diminished the impact of the Classical nudes that have survived the ravages of history. It almost seems that the face of the Classical nude is a dispensable, secondary appendage. When the face remains intact, it resembles an archaic vestige possessing little of the animation and free spirit infusing the other parts of the figure. Invariably, the surviving headless nudes, be they the masterpieces of the Elgin Marbles or any lesser figure, have seemingly sacrificed none of their beauty by terminating at their fractured stumps. Indeed, the nudes that retain their heads seem to suffer by crowning their dynamic, yet supremely balanced torso with a youthful head that is placid, impassive, blank, and utterly shallow in demeanor. As Clark notes, the “expressionless, time-free pumpkins of antique sculpture” heads compel any sober critic to wonder whether the greatness of the Classical nude starts from the neck down.19 It would be a mistake to succumb to such misgivings and regard the Classical nude head as an inconsistent anomaly, reflecting a failure to break completely from the stiff, lifeless treatment of ancient Egyptian sculpture. Rather than dispose of that head, we must recognize instead that the stylizations of the face that characterize the Classical nude are actually at one with the idealization of its torso. The incompatibility of the classical head is not with the Classical ideal, but rather with the independent, inward subjectivity of the modern self. As Clark observes, the unity of the Classical face and body has no stronger proof than the ludicrous ceremonial statues that anomalously put a portrait head atop an ideal nude torso.20 These sculptural incoherencies populate many a pedestal not only in Hellenistic and Roman worlds, but into modern times, where the Napoleons of our era betray their classic pretensions. How does the head of the Classic nude display the same basic idealization pervading the rest of the figure? In departure from any portrait-like fidelity, the face has a surface just as unblemished, unscarred, unwrinkled, and bereft of any imperfections as that of the limbs and torso. This lack of veridical detail is hardly a technical matter of accommodating the 19 20

 Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, p. 102.  Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, p. 49.

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limits of marble, let alone of bronze. Even if such materials resist embodying natural irregularity, that cannot explain why Classical sculptors would have used them to shape their ideal. Moreover, neither marble or bronze could resist the consummate ability of a Phidias to make them capture the supple flow of flesh, blood, and bone, as well as the fall of drapery and hair. It is clearly an aesthetic choice, rather than a problem of material or technique, that leads the Classical master sculptors to avoid the slavish attention to anatomical surface minutiae that obsesses modernists like Duane Hanson, Philip Pearlstein, and Chuck Close. The spirit permeating the Classic nude requires abstraction from the contingent “imperfections” afflicting any actual human body. For its external shape to convey the perfect embodiment of rational agency, the Classical nude must dispense with all the irrelevant accidents of natural physiognomy. To express the unity of human corporeal configuration and spiritual significance, the Classical nude must purge itself of any physical mark that is indifferent to public conduct and divine anthropomorphic embodiment. The situation is very different for the Romantic modern self-understanding of rational agency, which embraces an inward subjectivity for which no embodiment suffices. This civilizational project can charge its sculptors to leave every contingent physical detail in place in testimony to humanity’s independence from and indifference to every particular given. The Classical transfiguration of the face conforms to that of the naked body by not only excluding non-essential physical marks. It also carries forward the idealization of the nude by capturing the healthy maturity of the prime of life, unmarred by any sign of physical decline. The unity of body and spirit thus cannot here be conveyed through mimetic fidelity. To perfectly serve the aspirations of mind and will, the face, limbs, and torso must not appear tainted by physical failings that make the body unresponsive to the endeavors of rational agency, both secular and divine. Nor can the facial demeanor, any more than gesture and posture, be encumbered by any pathos that is irrelevant to public and divine conduct. To give expression to an individuality that has full mastery of its body and seeks only what can be achieved through external activity, the Classical nude must be devoid of physical imperfection on any part of its visible surface.

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This ambition is fulfilled in the Classical configuration of facial features, which seems so unsatisfactory to a modern point of view. Any sculpture of humanity starts with the given natural contingencies of natural evolution and the results of historical ethnic and racial reproductive isolation. These given human appearances retain their traces in how sculptors shape face and figure. Nonetheless, to make facial configuration express a particular worldview, sculptors must depart from any slavish naturalist fidelity and appropriately transfigure facial anatomy. Accordingly, while the Classical nude of ancient Greece will partly embody physiognomic features that presumably pervaded the ancient Greek population, it will modify that ethnographical material in a distinctive aesthetic idealization. The governing imperative is that the face of the Classical nude display the same type of ideal physical perfection that casts its defining unity of body and spirit over the entire surface and contour of the figure. This requires taking into account how different parts of the face play greater or lesser roles in the conduct of human affairs. Those that are most crucial for the expression of mind and will must be appropriately configured to indicate their service to those essential endeavors. Facial features that serve mere natural functions should appear secondary to those that discourse and conduct most depend upon. For we humans, the primary facial vehicles of conduct are the mouth, eyes, and ears. These display their distinctly human role by being configured in ways that orient them to human interaction and away from serving biological necessity. Animals have snouts and drooping upper lips displaying how their physiognomy serves the physical need of devouring nourishment. In express departure from such animality, the Classical profile, Hegel points out, eliminates almost all independent protrusion of mouth and nose by setting in line the forehead, eyes, mouth, and chin, while further emphasizing their continuity by letting the bridge of the nose descend straight from the forehead, whose projection is accentuated by setting the eyes deeply on either side.21 Unlike the animal snout, the Classical face has a fuller lower

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 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp.727–728, 734.

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than upper lip, freeing the mouth from the alimentary necessities of the brute muzzle and giving it a form designed for speech.22 These idealized transfigurations of the human face give the Classical visage an express affinity with reason and ethical will, while consigning its merely natural aspects to the background. At the same time, however, the Classical face displays two signature features that limit human agency in ways that define Classical individuality and make it deficient for a modern worldview. First, the eyes lack any sculpted differentiation of iris and pupil. This leaves the eyes with a mute blankness, incapable of disclosing any inner reaction to what the agent sees or any inward feeling or conviction that might deviate from the outer bearing of the figure.23 Admittedly, as Hegel acknowledges, in some ancient temples, statues had painted eyes, whose color differentiation could only conflict with the fall of light on the plastic figure.24 Their sculptural treatment, however, remains devoid of any plastic unveiling of the inner soul that a glance could display as chiseled into the contours of iris and pupil. Second, the whole face of most Classical nudes lacks any concentrated expression that discloses particular thoughts or emotions or reflects any context of action. Together, the blank eyes and impassive demeanor of the face display a durable self-repose. This conveys an individuality with a persisting fixity of character, lacking inner strife. There are exceptions to this prevailing stolid equanimity, such as in the famous tortured Lacoon ensemble of father and sons, but these are found in sculptures of groups of figures, who are depicted in the throes of some ordeal. In its own solitary majesty, the Classical nude offers a face whose blank tranquility strikes a modern eye as lacking depth. Nonetheless, this apparent shallowness is not equivalent to the rigid mortification of an ancient Egyptian figure or the serene selflessness of a sculpted Buddha. Instead, the Classical facial self-repose conveys a unity of spirit and flesh, of divinity and humanity, of individual and given ethical community by which the Classical self-understanding affirms itself. Rather than being an archaic  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 736.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 731–733. 24  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 731. 22 23

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anomaly, the Classical treatment of the face is the congruent counterpart of the idealization infusing the rest of the figure. What joins head to torso is the expression of the same type of rational agency that displays itself from neck to toe. The Classical nude leaves behind the constricted, flattened shaping of ancient Egyptian and archaic torsos25 as well as the untensed placidity of Buddhist figures. Breaking with rigid symmetry, the Classical sculptor configures the line of the shoulders akimbo from the line of the hips, creating a fluid balance of tension and control. This dynamic balance expressly combines the unimpeded, effortless vitality of the body with the controlling repose of the rational agency that dwells within. The idealized physical expression of this active independent unity of body and self is the cuirasse esthétique, the accentuated belt of muscles connecting torso to thighs, which crystallizes the dynamic alternation of body planes. It makes manifest an internal balance by which the figure enduringly exerts itself to maintain its own posture. The Classical nude thereby avoids embodying a contortion imposed by an external force or a fleeting pose of no substantial weight. Instead, it presents the same animating spirit pervading the fixed gaze of the Classical face, in which nothing lies concealed. Here we have a rational agency whose vitality fully expresses itself in its dynamic infusion of its body, whose harmonious pose displays the self ’s abiding universal character. There is no division between body and spirit, as would be disclosed by a posture that appears forced. The vibrant internal balance of the Classical nude presents a figure that instead takes its own stance in effortless harmony with its indwelling spirit.26 Sustaining its dynamic poise in and of itself, the Classical nude no more points to any natural power to which it must bow than to any transcendent after life or any unresolved inner strife. The sculpted figure conveys everything humanly important in its permanently reposing exterior. Hegel can affirm that sculpture has here fully fulfilled its vocation, allowing a worldview to express everything it holds essential in the contour of a nude figure. Whether depicting god or hero, the Classical sculptor has transfigured the human body so as to display the type of rational agency that Classical 25 26

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 781–784.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 740.

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civilization will imaginatively put before itself in whatever fine art it tackles. So long as the Classical Ideal holds strong, portrait-like sculpture will have at best a peripheral, or, as well shall see, a subversive character. As Lessing notes, “a portrait, although admitting idealization, is dominated by likeness. It is the ideal of one particular man and not of man in general.”27 The Classical Ideal, however, does not elevate the particularity of the individual to supreme importance. In only one reported instance was portraiture sanctioned: whereas each victor at the Ancient Olympics received a statue of common design, the three-time winners received a unique portrait-statue to honor their public bodily triumph. In this special case, the portrait could capture a living embodiment of the Classical Ideal.28 The aesthetic achievement of the Classical nude has an emblematic harmony, but one that is definitive not for sculpture in general, but for the classical worldview it embodies. The Classical nude can completely convey a human individuality in which body and rational agency can be seamlessly united, but that is because the subjectivity it shapes takes the public world of ethical and anthropomorphic deities to be the true substance of its being. The presence of emotions, personal convictions, and inner turmoil is just as much a part of the Classical world as of any other civilization. Oedipus can torment himself for his transgressions, Achilles can ignore his martial duty and sulk in his tent, and Socrates can question the dogmas on which authority rests. Yet nowhere is conscience granted independent standing against ethical duty, nowhere does rational agency command worth apart from its corporeal embodiment, nowhere is ethical community and religious practice freed of given traditions, whose particular customs foster irreconcilable, tragic conflicts between ethical associations with incompatible demands. In a Classical world, the good of the individual is nothing separate from the good of the community, knowledge and virtue go together, wisdom can be an object of love, and beauty and truth go hand in hand. These may be the strictures of a civilization to which sculptors can offer works bearing essential insight, but  Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, p. 14.  Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, pp. 13–14.

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they are not the parameters to which the aesthetic worth of sculpture is confined. The achievements of Symbolic sculpture already demonstrate this and none other than the putting of Socrates on a pedestal indicates how sculpture has new paths to forge when the Classical Ideal can no longer bring satisfaction. As Bruno Snell points out, Socrates is “the first Greek of whom we possess a faithful portrait bust”.29 Described by Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium as “incomparable”, Socrates breaks the Classical mold with his unique and “incomprehensible” individuality, which calls into question Classical religion and ethical community. Socrates therefore requires a very non-ideal portrait-like portrayal in all his ugliness to do justice to the new independent subjectivity he pioneers. As thinker in the clouds and as sculpted figure, Socrates leads on to a new turn in plastic depiction, of which the very profane portraits of ancient Rome provide a transitional manifestation. The triumphs of Romantic sculpture will prove even more emphatically that sculpture has a life after Classicism.

Romantic Sculpture As much as the constitutive boundaries of sculpture give the Classical style a fertile terrain for creative achievement, they do not preclude the plastic embodiment of the Romantic self-understanding. Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance sculptors have found a way of expressing a human individuality with an infinite worth transcending natural differences and possessing an inner life whose essential significance is not undermined by an inability to achieve full realization in the external appearance of conduct. In this way, they all can surmount the deficit in expressing subjective individuality that afflicts the Classical Ideal. Although Hegel maintains that Romantic religious sculpture never achieves more than the decorative charm of adorning architecture,30  Bruno Snell, Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature (New York: Dover Books, 1982), p.  210. Lessing’s three-time Olympic victors presumably remain shrouded in sculptural obscurity. 30  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 789. 29

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neither Byzantine, Medieval, nor Renaissance religious sculpture can be denied success in shaping figures whose plastic individuality reveals a soul whose devotion transcends worldly external matters. Although Hegel devotes almost his entire account of Romantic architecture to an analysis of the Gothic Cathedral, he has little to say about the positive achievements of Gothic sculpture. The sculptures of figures from the Old and New Testament exhibit a very different spirit from the statues that adorn the friezes and interior of the ancient Classical temple. Both the configuration of mouth and eyes, the gestures of hands and arms, and the postures of the figures all convey inner religious feeling and acknowledgment of the frailty of worldly affairs. Instead of capturing the eternally youthful, perfectly poised balance of the heroic or divine idealized Classical nude, Gothic sculpture depicts the very differentiated individual mortal bodies of the faithful and of their human God in all the suffering that they endure and with all the casualty that time impresses upon the human body. The Gothic tombs of Kings and Queens are similarly enhanced with sculptures that offer a portrait-like verisimilitude, imprinted with expressions that reflect a departed inner life. Renaissance sculpture might be thought to return to Classical idealizations, with less emphasis upon an otherworldly salvation. This conjecture may be convenient for those, like Hegel and Santayana, who celebrate the incomparable achievement of ancient Greek sculpture, but cannot disregard how Michelangelo’s statues hold their own against any work of Phidias or Praxiteles. Hegel suggests that the beauty of Michelangelo’s David lies in nothing but a reappropriation of the Classical Ideal.31 Yet, as Kenneth Clark points out, Michelangelo’s David breaks the Classical mold with “the strained, defiant neck, the enormous hands, and the potential movement of the pose”,32 all of which express a very different spirit from that of the Classical nude. The same departure from classicism is evident even when Renaissance sculptors take classical divinities as their subject. When Pisano sculpts Venus, a very non-classical

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 708, 789.  Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, p. 61.

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other-worldly longing shines through the facial expression, gesture, and posture.33 Post-Renaissance Romantic sculptors, like Rodin, go even further in shaping the human spirit without any of the deficit of individuality of the Classical Ideal, which stares at us in the vacant eyes of ancient Greek statues. Rodin’s Balzac gives us a very different, inner, searching gaze that no Classical statue can possess and be true to its governing worldview. Subsequent Romantic sculptors provide mounting demonstrations of how the beauty of a statue does not depend upon an idealization of the human figure that removes imperfections, paralyzes facial expression into a depthless self-repose, and dynamically balances a body in its unblemished prime. Romantic sculpture can affirm human subjectivity confident of its independence and inner worth by depicting the entire gamut of human existence in all its varied imperfection, with finely individuated faces and postures that evoke personal conviction and the inner trials of conscience. They demonstrate, contrary to Hegel,34 that the eye’s expression, as a window to the soul, can be captured in plastic terms by sculpture, provided the sculptor has chosen to treat the inner depths of individuality as something of essential importance. Hegel may be correct in insisting that ancient sculptors avoided portraying the glance of the eye. The entire history of figurative Romantic sculpture, however, shows how sculpture can evoke the demeanor of the soul through the eyes. Romantic sculpture takes on a very different shape when it gives embodiment to the “formal independence of character” that Hegel describes as the final development of the modern aesthetic spirit.35 It underlies the modernist view for which no external appearance can adequately express the freedom of our individuality. The resulting mandate for the fine artist is either to create configurations that represent nothing objective, but display only the formal subjectivity of artistic genius, or to use given appearances in express repudiation of their spiritual character. Modern Romantic sculpture embodies these options in two polar  Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, p. 95 ff.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 733. 35  For further discussion of this “formal independent subjectivity” and its artistic depiction, see Winfield, Stylistics, pp. 86–89. 33 34

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extremes. On the one hand, there is the rote naturalism of a George Segal or Duane Hanson, who mechanically reproduce the surface of persons with topographical fidelity, but without any spark of spirit, and the commercial mimicry of Pop Artists, like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, whose Brillo boxes and soft commodities display the vacuity of consumer culture. On the other hand, there is the emergence of a non-figurative, abstract sculpture. The move to abstraction can develop in stages. To begin with, there can be such figurative abstractions as the works of Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi, Barbara Hepworth, Jacques Lipchitz, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Alexander Rodchenko, where shapes still represent tangible objects. These can be followed by completely abstract works, such as those of Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, and Vladimir Tatlin, and their minimalist successors, whose “non-objective” sculptures can still fit within the exhibit conventions of galleries and museums. Finally, these last accommodations to artistic tradition can be jettisoned with outdoor “Earth Art” environmental constructions, like Robert Smithson’s Great Salt Lake Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative Nevada desert excavations, whose remote locations leave them to be viewed mainly through photographic documentation.36 All these developments put sculpture before the looming challenge facing the contemporary arts, the challenge of configuring a humanity that can no longer be at home in its body or find fundamental meaning in any external shape. Today, when the arts may have already realized all the basic options of style, sculpture, like every other media, must struggle to prevent the unconstrained license of form and content from undercutting fine art’s human significance.

 Tom Wolfe discusses this turn in non-figurative sculpture in The Painted Word (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), p. 102 36

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F rom Kinetic Sculpture to Mime, Pure Dance, and Holography Sculpture as such has no necessary kinetic character, but sculptures that move have been produced, particularly in modern times, albeit with modest results. Kinetic sculpture adds to stationary statues the dimension of motion, with involves time. Artforms, such as music and literature can employ their temporality to give expression to the development of fundamental ethical and religious endeavors, from the outbreak of conflict to its resolution. The temporal change of kinetic sculpture can do little in this regard, given its limitation to movement, that most rudimentary form of alteration. Kinetic sculpture simply allows the three-dimensional construction to face the viewer with a changing surface. Minimally, this motion can involve the mere axial rotation of a sculpture or the movement of the entire sculpture around the space in which it is located. In both cases, these motions leave the sculpture’s own configuration unaltered. What the viewer sees is no different from what is visible by moving around the sculpture in a corresponding manner. Kinetic sculpture can further be constructed with parts that move independently of one another, so that the viewer faces a construction whose whole shape alters as it passes through its phases of motion. It is difficult for figurative sculpture to obtain any aesthetic benefit by rotating in place or moving around its exhibition floor. Moreover, it is both technically and aesthetically challenging for a figurative statue to contain parts that move in independent ways that enhance, rather than undermine its plastic integrity. Alexander Calder’s circus kinetic sculptures manage to meet these challenges in a genial manner, but it is no surprise that the most striking kinetic sculptures, including Calder’s own, consist of largely abstract works, where the pure movement of plastic forms can express the formal subjective mastery that Romantic style displays. Mime and dance that forsake music and verbal narrative amount to a performance kinetic sculpture, in which living human figures transform their position and posture over time. Mime performers offer a mute mimetic transfiguration of the movements of objects, be they natural, artificial, plant, animal, or, in most cases, human. Mime performance can

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be limited to a single sketch or to an interconnected series of sketches that together form a narrative story. It is not hard to imagine, by borrowing from sculptural examples and literary narrative, how each of the fundamental artforms can be embodied by mime in their distinguishing styles. The same applies to pure dance, when, without musical accompaniment or verbal expression, it incorporates elements of mime and conveys a narrative through the dancing of its performers. As Aristotle observes, the rhythm of dance movements can represent “men’s characters, as well as what they do and suffer.”37 When pure dance dispenses with the representational aspect of mime and narrative it becomes a performance equivalent to a kinetic abstract sculptural art, whose plays of form most readily fit the independent formal character of the Romantic style. Examples of these non-objective, non-narrative dance performance include the work of Alwin Nikolais and George Balanchine, who both ordinarily add the element of music, which makes the performance a hybrid art. This, of course, is true of most dance performance, which, whether non-objective or narrative, has a musical accompaniment that is integral to its aesthetic achievement. Holography now adds a further variant of kinetic sculpture, using light projections rather than tangible material to create three-dimensional appearances. These can be figurative or non-objective and stationary or moving. Consequently, like mime and narrative dance, figurative holography could be enlisted by all the artforms to display their characteristic styles, drawing from their corresponding realizations in sculpture, two-­ dimensional visual art, and literature. Holography, like its precursors, photography and cinema, has arisen in modern times, where the Romantic style prevails. When we turn to these precursors, it will be worth investigating whether photography, cinema, and holography could exist in civilizations congruent with Symbolic or Classical art or whether they are arts whose media have an intrinsic connection to the Romantic Style.

 Aristotle, Poetics, 1447a26-27, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, ed. by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 2316. 37

Part IV The Aesthetics of Graphic Fine Art

6 Painting as Paradigmatic Graphic Fine Art

Graphic art, broadly considered, includes all fine art that creates static visual images on a two-dimensional surface. These creations include paintings, drawings, all types of prints, etchings, and lithographs, tapestries, mosaics, computer made pictures, and works of still photography. Graphic art can be made on canvas, wood, paper, animal skins, textiles, and digital devices, as well as directly adorn the walls of buildings and caves, as well as the surfaces of artifacts, such as pottery, armor, weaponry, and vehicles. In every case, the graphic artist modifies some surface to alter its reflectivity of light so as to produce a visual image for an audience who can see it. What frequencies, intensities, and acuities of reflected light are visible to rational agents is a contingent matter of evolution. Whatever be that range, graphic artists can produce within it visual images on a two-dimensional surface that are differentiated by the fundamental properties of light. These include the contrasts of light and shade, as well as the further distinctions of color. A graphic work minimally makes use of light and shade, in which case its images employ white, black, and various shades of grey. Some graphic media are restricted to these colorless differentiations, such as drawings with uncolored pencil, chalk, and charcoal, as well as black and white photography. Other © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_6

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graphic media offer the artist the full range of color, with all its further relationships of primary colors, color complementarity, and color harmony, as well as differences of saturation and intensity. Artists have all these color variations at their disposal when they use colored pencils, chalks, inks, pastels, watercolors, textile threads, mosaics, color film, digital pixels, and the varieties of paint, such as oil, tempera, and acrylic. In addition, whether graphic artists use merely light and shade or the full range of color, they can modify the light reflectivity of their two-­ dimensional surface to produce the illusion of a projected three-­ dimensional “picture space” together with a projection of light internal to the created picture.1 Although the ambient light of the real space in which their creation is exhibited makes it possible for “picture space” and internal light to appear, these illusions have an independent being of their own, which can be apprehended by viewers who are properly positioned before the work and are aware of the artistic conventions that allow these ideal projections to be made and recognized.2 One such convention is the picture frame that marks off the pictorial expanse, setting off the boundaries of the picture space and light from the surrounding ambient environment.3 Only such framing can counteract non-aesthetic illusions, such as “trompe d’oeil”, where a picture masquerades as a real entity, instead of appearing as a genuine work of art, to be viewed as such.4  As Hartmann writes, “The ‘picture space’ into which we peer is entirely and only an apparent space. For that reason, it separates itself unmistakably from the real space ‘in’ which it appears – that is, from the space in which the picture hangs and where the observer stands before it.” See Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 107. 2  As Hartmann notes, “the ‘light in the picture’ that falls upon the represented objects and makes them appear in different degrees of shade is not the same light as falls through the window or the ceiling of the real space that surround the picture. …. Only in one respect is the appearing light dependent upon the real light: the latter is the condition of the appearance of the former. If no real light falls upon the picture, the light in the picture disappears…. Yet … the apparent light remains different one from the real light.” See Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 108. 3  As Hartmann observes, “The effect of the frame is essential, however it is achieved … it does not just set off the content of what appears in the picture, … but it sets the appearance as such off from the real as such. … For that reason, the presence of frames in painting is not extrinsic to it, but essential” (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 109). As we shall see, certain strains of modernist painting will seek to eliminate all framing as part of an attempt to eliminate any illusions of “picture space” and “picture light”. 4  As Hartmann notes, “the presence of frames in painting … works against the creation of illusions of a non-aesthetical sort. … If one willfully blurs the boundary that separates it from the real environing world … then it becomes nothing more than a feigned reality. (Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 109). 1

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Properly framed, the “picture space” can convey a projected three-­ dimensional vista thanks to drawing that employs linear perspective, foreshortening, and a diminishing clarity for whatever is pictured at a distance. Such drawing can also manipulate light and shade to produce an internal illumination that corresponds to and upholds the three-­ dimensional picturing. Color variation can add to the three-­dimensionality of the surface image by helping to shape the projected spatial vistas and whatever objects they contain, as well as by employing the variations in color intensity and saturation that convey an “atmospheric perspective”.5 Using these resources to create on a flat surface visual imagery that has a light and space of its own, the graphic artist is able, as Hegel puts it, to combine the fundamental aspects of architecture and sculpture.6 On the one hand, the graphic artist can depict three dimensional figures as their outer surface appears, picturing in a pure appearance what the sculptor shapes in a free-standing material object. On the other hand, the graphic artist can create an environment for significant human activity, as architecture does in actual constructions of heavy material, by pictorially portraying the surrounding vista in which three dimensional objects are situated. In combining both aspects, graphic art can fundamentally extend what sculpture and architecture can separately or together achieve. On the one hand, the graphic artist can use light and shade, as well as color variations, to go beyond the limits of the essentially undifferentiated, homogenous surface of sculpture to depict the movements of soul that from within lighten and darken and color the surface of a body. In this manner, the graphic artist’s control of light reflectivity can extend the expressive possibilities of visual art. On the other hand, the graphic artist pictures objects in a projected three-dimensional vista, which allows for concretely depicting the situation of secular and sacred conduct as neither sculpture nor architecture can provide. A building may house a­ ctivity  As Hegel points out, whereas “linear perspective primarily concerns only the differences of size made by the lines of the objects in their greater or lesser distance from the eye. But this alteration and diminution of the form of the object is not the only thing that painting has to copy. For in reality everything undergoes a different sort of coloring owing to the atmosphere which pervades and differentiates objects and their difference parts. This tone of color, diminishing with distance, is what constitutes atmospheric perspective.” See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 845. 6  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 798. 5

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in a meaningful way, but graphic art can picture an expanse encompassing any and every visible object in its external relationships, including rational agents, their artifacts and constructions, animals and plants, land, sea, and sky, and imagined versions of any visualizable setting, on our lonely planet or in galaxies far, far away. In so doing, graphic art as such must rely on visual imagery rather than verbal expression. A picture may include writing on or as captions of the objects it depicts. Indeed, graphic works of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and of Islamic Arabic religious texts may restrict themselves to picturing ideograms and letters. In addition, hybrid forms of graphic art do employ text, such as comics and graphic novels with words. Nonetheless, graphic art, taken in and of itself, has no necessary connection to linguistic expression. This is partly why Hegel can point out that a work of graphic art must be seen individually to be properly appreciated.7 A work of architecture can be largely conveyed through a blueprint or a description of its geometric forms, to the extent that a building has sufficient regularity to be geometrically delineated. A sculpture can in large part be described by identifying the object sculpted, its posture, the style, and the material. A work of literature can verbally describe a situation, but any attempt to put the full individuality of a scene into words becomes a tiresome, unending exercise. Putting in words every detail of a picture requires an account that goes on and on, without ever exhausting everything, whereas a painting instantly presents all its content in the simultaneity of spatial adjacency.8 A graphic work can contain so much in the way of differentiated light and shade and color, so much in the way of individuated drawing, and so much of a detailed vista, as to defy any other type of formulation. For this reason, Simonides of Ceos is wrong to say “that painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture”.9 Admittedly, the work of graphic art must still concentrate its depiction of figures and situations into one composition, where each drawn image  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 855  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 855. 9  Cited in Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. by Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), footnote 2, p. 4. 7 8

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is captured at one moment from one fixed vantagepoint.10 The figures in a painting cannot be observed from all sides as can works of architecture or sculpture. Nor can the graphic artist utilize time to portray the changing vicissitudes of life that arts like music, literature, and cinema can express in their temporal unfolding. Admittedly, painters, like the Cubists, can depict different parts of a single figure from multiple perspectives, but each remains fixed in that angle in face of the viewer. Similarly, a painting can combine sequential movements in a single image, such as Marcel Duchamp does in a Nude Descending a Staircase and Futurist painters, like Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini do in their vortex concoctions of spatialized motion. Alternately, graphic works can attempt to depict the development of the human condition in series of individual pictures. This, of course, has been done in such serial works as the Disasters of War prints of Goya, the Migration Series paintings of Jacob Lawrence, and the wordless woodcut novels of Lynd Ward (such as Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, and Vertigo). Nonetheless, each work in such series must accomplish what every free-standing picture must do – encapsulate in one pictured composition an exemplary individual visual image of matters of humanity that will deserve attention for centuries to come. Graphic art can make use of its possibilities in varying degrees, which reflect in some cases the graphic medium that is used. Regarding purely visual resources, the graphic artist can employ a limited color palette or forego color completely. Artists can restrict their work to black, grey, and white, or just black and white no matter what graphic media they use. This may not be a matter of choice for artists employing India ink, graphite pencil, white chalk, charcoal, or black and white photography. It may be a chosen colorlessness for those who use other graphic media in which color can have play, as exemplified by the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt (which exhibit subtle variations in black). Alternately, graphic artists may restrict their use of color to a relative monochromaticism, as in the blue  As Lessing emphasizes, “If the artist can never make use of more than a single moment in ever-­ changing nature, and if the painter in particular can use this moment only with reference to a single vantage point, … then it is evident that this single moment and the point from which it is viewed cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect.” See Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, p. 19. 10

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paintings of Picasso, or to a severe restriction to one hue, as Yves Klein does in his Blue Monochrome abstract painting. Moreover, graphic artists may purposely forego the various techniques of three-dimensional illusion, abandoning linear perspective, foreshortening, and “atmospheric” distancing in order to present a flattened pictorial space. Similarly, graphic artists can make use of the full pictorial possibilities of their art in varying degrees of content abstraction. Instead of depicting concrete situations full of rational agents, building interiors and exteriors, artifacts, animals, and cultivated and wild landscapes, graphic artists can restrict what they portray according to the boundaries of different pictorial genres. They can make portraits, which largely restrict themselves to a single rational agent, with little if any hint of a defined situation. They can simplify the tasks of capturing light and dark and color by picturing a nude, whose relatively homogenous skin approaches the undifferentiated surface of sculpture and makes the nude a favorite subject of drawing classes. Alternately, as in early Byzantine and Medieval painting, a figure can be pictured standing alone in an architectural niche, like a sculpture in a cathedral. Graphic artists can further entirely forego depicting rational agents. They can portray landscapes, some touched by human cultivation and construction, some completely wild. These landscapes can include cityscapes devoid of inhabitants, such as portrayed by some Edward Hopper paintings and the Paris photographs of Eugène Atget. Graphic artists can also limit their gaze to rooms within buildings, without any persons, such as Van Gogh’s paintings of his meager dwelling. So too, they can narrow their depiction to still-lives, some with mixtures of artifacts and plants, others with mere crockery. Finally, some modern artists have abstracted from all objective pictorial representation, offering us a play of visual forms, light and shade, and sometimes also color, a frozen music in which all projections of a three-dimensional space and inner light have given way to a flat surface. Usually, graphic artists have sequentially or simultaneously tried various of these pictorial and abstract genres, just as they have tried out different graphic media. Some, however, like Giorgio Morandi, have expended a whole career on paintings depicting one set of bowls after another.

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No matter how much artists may refrain from engaging the full possibilities of light and content in graphic art, they must somehow offer their audience a meaningful self-understanding in the form of an exemplary visual image. No matter what they depict or express, it is always a manifestation of how they the artists view the human meaning of their subject matter. A portrait is not just a faithful glimpse of a person, a landscape is not just scenery, a still life is not just fruit and plates, an abstraction is not just a flattened colored surface. All these works must have more to offer, like any other artistic creation.

 he Primacy of Painting in the Graphic T Fine Arts Philosophical treatments of the graphic arts have tended to consider painting as the emblematic embodiment of visual art that creates static two-dimensional images. Hegel and Hartmann, for example, both focus on painting in considering the aesthetic character of graphic art. In so doing, they treat other forms, such as drawing, prints, mosaics, and tapestries as subsidiary phenomena that add nothing fundamental to the specific nature of this artistic medium. Their focus upon painting is justified because painting can most fully embody all the resources of immobile, non-verbal, mute pictorial form and content. Painters can use all the shades of black, white, and grey and every color, as well as utilize all the devices for creating “pictorial space” and “light in the picture”. They can depict the most encompassing contents of nature and humanity. Moreover, painters can also refrain from using any of these resources with every degree of abstraction, limiting their palette however they see fit, abandoning linear perspective, foreshortening, and “atmospheric” distancing, photo-realistically restricting focus to mimic camera focal length, and forsaking objective picturing for completely abstract expression. In these respects, painting encompasses all the aesthetic possibilities of graphic art. It is the total graphic art and in conceiving its aesthetic ramifications one is covering the field of everything that pertains to the visual art of graphic creation. For this very

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reason, it can be no surprise that painters have ordinarily tried their hand at many of the other graphic media, both for preliminary studies to paintings and independent, albeit restricted, graphic creation. Painting can be considered in generic terms as involving any “painterly” medium that allows all the resources of graphic art to be employed. One can paint on a canvas with paints of varying compositions, one can “paint” using textiles and mosaics, one can paint on a computer screen using a “painting” program. Each of these options allows artists to use as much or as little light and shade and color, perspective, and objective depiction as they desire. Hegel privileges oil painting above all other forms of painting for capabilities no other painting medium can match. Oil paint has two signature features that uniquely empower the artist: oil paint has a relatively slow drying time and a translucency that together allow layers of color to be applied on top of one another and to shine through one another and seamlessly blend. As Hegel points out, fresco and tempera paint dry too quickly to allow for this blending, which is a drawback afflicting today’s acrylic paints, of which Hegel had no knowledge.11 Mosaics and tapestries cannot achieve any comparable melding of colors since they are composed of discrete elements.12 The same can be said of the pixels of digital art and the dots of modern lithographic printing. Although their discontinuities become less noticeable with distance, they lack the continuity of analog coloration that oil paint supremely achieves. Oil painters can and have duplicated the limitations of fast drying paints and discrete color elements. Departing from the uninterrupted color shading of chiaroscuro, modernist painters, like Milton Avery, have laid down their oil colors in separate areas without any melding. Georges Seurat and other pointillists have used discrete dabs of paint to construct their composition. Impressionists like Claude Monet and Pierre Bonnard have applied separate dashes of color to create vibrant landscapes and interiors, just as painters like Van Gogh and Alice Neel have used bold discretely colored strokes to depict the human character. And pop artists  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 847.  As Hegel notes, although mosaics have the advantage of relative permanence, their dependence on juxtaposing stones or pieces of glass or ceramic precludes “the flowing fusion of the ideal shining of one color through another” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 847). 11 12

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like Roy Lichtenstein have used oil paints to mimic the Ben-Day dots of offset printing. All these ventures in using oil paints to replicate the limits of other graphic media only support Hegel’s claim for the preeminence of oil painting. Just as painting in general can encompass every other graphic art achievement, so oil painting in particular can alone do it all when it comes to “painting”.

 he Dual Limitations of Hegel’s Determination T of Painting Hegel’s philosophical investigation of painting in his Aesthetics is more substantial than that of any preceding philosopher who has conceived the fine arts. Nonetheless, Hegel’s account is marred by two major shortcomings that truncate his examination and require reworking and rectifying additions. First, Hegel restricts painting to figurative work, ignoring the possibility of a non-objective, abstract graphic art of genuine aesthetic worth. As we have seen, Hegel similarly admits of no genuine non-figurative sculpture, relegating abstract plastic constructions to ornament or symbolizations of natural powers. Although Hegel further restricts sculpture by making its proper subject the human body, he recognizes that painting can legitimately picture anything visible whose portrayal might convey an exemplary image of human concern. Painting may depict human beings (and their rational agent counterparts on other worlds, past, present, and future), but it may equally portray wild brute nature, cultivated landscapes and cityscapes, interiors of human habitation, artifacts, still lives, and concrete situations of secular and sacred endeavor. In picturing all this range of content, painters confront their audience with a view of what is worthy to appear to rational agents today and tomorrow. What Hegel does not take seriously as contents of painting are non-figurative abstractions in which configurations of line, shade, and color serve in and of themselves as expressions of beauty. These may gratify our vision and decorate the surfaces on which they extend, but they cannot provide us with any fundamental self-understanding as a work of fine art should do.

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Hegel does, however, take a step towards acknowledging non-objective painting when he celebrates the magic of sfumato, with which painters achieve a “magical effect of coloring”, where the pure appearance of color takes over the work, while “the substance and spirit of objects has evaporated”.13 In such painting, “it may be said that the magic consists in so handling all the colors that what is produced is an inherently objectless play of pure appearance which forms the extreme soaring pinnacle of coloring, a fusion of colors, a shining of reflections upon one another which become so fine, so fleeting, so expressive of the soul that they begin to pass over into the sphere of music.”14 As we shall see, Hegel has no problem granting genuine aesthetic worth to music’s non-objective expressions of our inner life. His acknowledgment of the magic of sfumato should open the door for a painting whose frozen musical play of line, shade, and color very well fits the stylistic demands that Hegel attributes to the ultimate stages of the Romantic form of art. Hegel did have a chance to view the sfumato enchantment of Joseph Mallord William Turner’s seascapes, as well as the playful use of color by Dutch masters like Frans Hals. Hegel did, however, die before he could experience the sfumato of Claude Monet’s lily pond landscapes and the full blown sfumato of abstract painters from Wassily Kandinsky to Mark Rothko. Although Hegel did live to see the Romantic form of art take hold in each of the individual arts of his day, he did not live long enough to see the developments of modernism that brought abstract art to proliferate in both sculpture and painting. As we shall see when we investigate how the individual styles are realized in graphic art, abstract painting, like abstract sculpture, has a place in the final forms of the Romantic style that have fueled modernism in the arts. We can now build upon Hegel’s account to rectify his omission of abstract painting. By incorporating the essential core of his development of figurative painting and extending it by applying his conception of the Romantic style to graphic art, we have all the conceptual tools we need to bring the outline of graphic art to completion.

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 848.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 848.

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Achieving this involves, however, also overcoming the second major shortcoming of Hegel’s treatment of painting. We must remedy another replay of his categorial conflation of artform and individual art. Just as Hegel mistakenly identified architecture as an intrinsically Symbolic art and sculpture as an intrinsically Classical art, he characterizes painting as a fundamentally Romantic art. Whereas Hegel designates architecture as the only art that is Symbolic and sculpture as the only art that is Classical, he introduces painting as the first of three arts that are all specially tied to the Romantic style. Hegel will continue his conflation of artform and individual art by branding music and literature as two more essentially Romantic arts. He connects artistic medium and style in the most extreme way with painting, however. As we have seen, Hegel describes how architecture embodies the Classical and Romantic styles, as well as the Symbolic style. He also analyzes ancient Egyptian sculpture as the Symbolic precursor to the emergence of Classical sculpture, while acknowledging the Renaissance sculpture of Michelangelo as a repackaging of Classical motifs. With painting, however, Hegel makes no mention of works in a Symbolic or Classical style. Consequently, when he delineates the general features of painting he does so as if they were expressly connected to Romantic construal. When Hegel then examines the development of painting, he completely restricts his discussion to an historical survey of Romantic works, starting with Byzantine and early Medieval European paintings, proceeding to Renaissance religious art and portraiture, and concluding with modern European pictures of secular subjects. Hegel locates the alleged affinity between painting and the Romantic style in two features that are essential signature elements of graphic art in general. One is the reliance of painting upon the modification of the light reflectivity of a two-dimensional surface, with which painters can project their own “light in a picture” using light and shade and color, as well as project a three-dimensional expanse by means of perspective, foreshortening, and “atmospheric” coloration. Hegel maintains that painters’ ability to configure light on a two-dimensional surface allows them to do something the sculptors’ plastic shaping of a homogenous material cannot  – express the momentary movements of the soul that inhabits a depicted body. Whereas sculpture must allegedly content itself with representing a self-reposing subjectivity, whose fixed outer appearance is at

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one with its substantial essence, the painterly use of light allows the transient passions of the mind to shine through. This ability to capture the fleeting inner life of the individual is, Hegel maintains, essential to painting’s affinity with the Romantic style, for it renders graphic art intrinsically suited to convey the inwardness of spirit that the Romantic world view cherishes and that both the Symbolic and Classical self-­ understandings consider superfluous.15 The second signature feature of graphic art that Hegel considers Romantic in character is the encompassing scope of painting’s picture space, which allows depicting the entire breadth of human experience, in all its contingent particulars, provided they can be visualized.16 Whereas architecture can only house activity in constructions of heavy matter and sculpture can only shape a free-standing figure, painting can picture in detail the concrete interactions of human endeavor, as well as every object and scenery that fills its projected vista. This range of depiction liberates painting from the confining idealization of Classical individuality, as expressed in the fixed character of its anthropomorphic gods and heroes. Instead, painting is enabled to mine everything high and low in which the independent subjectivity of the Romantic world view may affirm its inner worth and struggle with its lack of fulfillment in what is externally given. The mobilization of light in the picture and the free range of pictorial depiction certainly can serve to express the Romantic self-understanding, both in respect to religious and secular meaning. Yet, the same signature resources of painting can equally provide visual imagery fit to embody the Symbolic and Classical styles. Every civilization acknowledges the phenomena of human subjectivity and the contingent multiplicity of existence. What distinguishes civilizations from one another is how they assess the ultimate meaning of our individuality and our worldly entanglements. Painting can use light to express the emotions and thoughts of pictured individuals and concretely portray the situations in which the human condition fills a visual world, and these efforts cannot fail to be perennial tasks of graphic artists no matter what world view they share.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 804, 836.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 803, 812, 858–859.

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We shall substantiate this detachment of painting from exclusive bondage to the Romantic style in two ways. First, we will draw upon Hegel’s detailed consideration of the distinctive features of painting and explore how they are generic to graphic art and not exclusive to the Romantic style. Second, we will then turn to consider how painters are able to create paintings in all the basic artforms. In so doing, we will consider how Symbolic and Classical painting can achieve the unity of fundamental meaning and configuration in which aesthetic greatness resides. On this basis, we will rethink Hegel’s development of Romantic painting as one stylistic variety among others and supplement it with an exploration of how the Romantic style pushes towards a non-objective abstract painting.

L essons from Hegel’s Analysis of the Generic Features of Painting In addressing the generic features of painting, Hegel first considers its “general” character and then tackles its “particular” characteristics. In each of these successive discussions, Hegel begins by considering the subject-­matter specific to painting, which he identifies with that of the Romantic style, then tackles the sensuous material of the painting medium, and concludes by examining the nature of painterly artistic treatment, including how painters compose and characterize their pictorial content. It makes more sense to begin with the sensuous material of painting, since this defines the medium of its graphic art, which then determines how the content generic to fine art can fit within the painterly form. On this basis, we can consider how painting unites meaning and configuration in its individual actualization of artistic treatment. In considering these three aspects of painting, we do well to draw upon the details of Hegel’s “general” and “particular” determinations together, for the latter basically further develops the former. What then can be said about the sensuous material of painting as it bears upon the aesthetic challenges of graphic art? Generally, painting

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modifies a surface to apply light and shade and color to it. The spatial extension of the surface leads whatever visual configurations it contains to connect with those that are adjacent to them and through them to the rest of the entire surrounding expanse. This encompassing use of the surface plane nevertheless involves a contraction of space from the three dimensionality of architecture and sculpture to the two-dimensionality of graphic configuration. As Hegel points out, a complete contraction of spatiality would reduce extension to a point, where all juxtaposition is eliminated, leaving no other external relation other than the temporal connection of one point in time to another moment before or after.17 Although music will carry out the contraction of space fully, creating a temporal flow of sound with no inherent adjacent extension,18 painting operates with a contraction of only one dimension of spatiality, taking the painted surface as the vehicle of its picturing. In so doing, painting is more abstract and interiorized than sculpture,19 but this “interiorization” is not itself equivalent to a restriction of its subject matter to the inwardness of subjectivity. Contra Hegel, artists do not opt for the two-­ dimensional surface of graphic art because they seek to express a Romantic ideal. Artists can turn to painting no matter what their worldview, for as Hegel will himself emphasize, the plane of a painting allows figurative depiction to extend well beyond the human body and whatever inwardness shines through its surface. Hegel may maintain that the spatial contraction of painting upholds the principle of inwardness embraced by the Romantic art form,20 but painting’s “interiorization” has much more general consequences for subjectivity in its relation to fine art. Whether the surface appearance of painting depicts a three-­dimensional picture space and inner light or presents a flat abstraction, the plane of the painting must face its viewer to appear properly. Whereas a building and a sculpture leaves its viewers free to wander around and take in its various sides, a picture has a direct unequivocal relation to the viewing subject that must be satisfied if the work is to show its true mettle. This  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 804.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 804. 19  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 805. 20  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 802. 17 18

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imperative applies no matter what form and content painting may have. It supports Hegel’s claim that paintings have a far closer relation to the spectator than do works of sculpture, which have a self-reposing independence indifferent to the placement of their audience.21 Paintings need only provide a pure appearance to the individuals facing them,22 whose imagination participates in transforming the two-dimensional surface into a pictured world of unlimited depth and breadth. The appearance of the painted surface is, of course, creatively modified through liquid and powdered coatings, solid collage applications, and other materials, including textiles and tiles, that can alter the surface’s reflectivity with respect to light and dark and color. All these modifications can serve to configure abstract, flat designs as well as figurative depictions that create the illusion of three-dimensional “picture space” illuminated with an ideal light projected from within that picture space. The application of light and dark and color allows for a freedom of representation that sculpture cannot achieve, even when it moves in the direction of painting by contracting its own three dimensionality by sculpting figures in relief. As Hegel points out, if the relief figures are to be handled as free-standing bodies, they must be presented in a linear procession all in one plane, enabling every figure to be equidistant from the viewer.23 Otherwise, their depiction will require foreshortening, which subverts the independent spatiality of the figures and renders the relief a quasi-surface in which the illusions of perspective predominate. As Hegel notes, pure light and pure darkness are equally undifferentiated.24 Pictorial representation can overcome an otherwise blank surface appearance only by contrasting light and dark to create a determinate configuration, whether abstract or depicting spatial objects in a definite setting. The addition of color adds further possibilities and imperatives of visual configuration, owing to the specific relations between colors. The three primary colors can be combined to create any visible shade and the relations of complementary colors introduce additional aspects of “cool”  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 806.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 806. 23  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 771. 24  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 809–810. 21 22

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and “warm” visual contrasts that enrich the visual display and play an important role in depicting the color interaction of objects and their environment in a figurative picture space. In any work of art, the unity of individual configuration and meaning demands that nothing in the work’s appearance for the viewer be unnecessary and unrelated to the whole. This applies to the use of light and dark and color in painting. A restriction in light and shade and palette must have some justification. Purely black and white configurations, devoid of any intermediate grey, should have a coherent impact, rather than reflect an inability to handle the nuances of light and shade. Similarly, a failure to employ the full resources of color must have some justification, tied to the meaning of the work. Otherwise, coloration is inexplicably abridged, tending towards a mono-chromaticism that undercuts the very use of color, virtually imposing the colorlessness of sculpture upon painting. As Hegel maintains, painting fully uses its color resources only when it observes relations of color balance and harmony, ignoring none of the primary colors and color complementarities.25 Otherwise, painting’s use of color forfeits its luster and obstructs its own expressive power. The failure to maintain the luminosity of color ensemble and resist unnecessary retreats to mono-chromaticism is all too often on display in paintings where shadings and illuminations are deficiently depicted by using darker or lighter tones of the same color, instead of drawing upon color complementarity. Color balance and harmony cannot, however, be utilized in a formulaic, mechanical manner. Doing so sacrifices the individuality of artistic creation to routine craftsmanship. For this reason, every genuine painter will have a unique palette as well as a unique manner of draftsmanship. The demand for completeness in the use of color is not simply a psychological imperative, reflecting how color perception affects the viewer. It is equally a matter of objective depiction, for the relations of color are inherent in physical reality. This may be ignored by early modern philosophers, who reduce physical reality to a mechanism of undifferentiated matter in motion, but, as Berkeley noted, there can be no perception of material bodies and movement without perception of the physical  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 843–844.

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qualities to which our senses respond.26 Light is precisely what brings us out of the reductionism of mechanism, for the polarity of electromagnetism allows for nature to have differentiated bodies with the sensuous physical properties that distinguish the different media of fine art.27 Consequently, artists who ignore the totality of color relations are in peril of undermining the pictured objectivity of their transfigured representations. The use of light and shade and color serves painting whether it be abstract or figurative. Figurative painting, however, can use its mastery of light reflectivity on the painting surface to two-dimensionally portray the three-dimensionality of objects, including human figures, in an equally three-dimensional setting. Here the graphic artist exercises a draftsmanship in light, where light and shadow and color differentiation create a picture space in which a painted illumination falls upon objects in conformity with their pictured corporeality. As Hegel details, graphic artists can create a three-dimensional “picture space” with its own three-dimensional dispersion of light by using linear perspective, foreshortening, and “atmospheric” distancing.28 Linear perspective follows the laws of optics as they apply to the ray-like dispersion of light, guiding artists to depict the alterations in the size of pictured objects in proportion to their virtual distance from the viewer. So long as the depicted objects and their surroundings are rectilinear, the demands of perspectival draftsmanship can be satisfied by following geometric simplicities. When, however, objects and backgrounds are curvilinear or irregularly shaped, a more complex challenge of foreshortening confronts the graphic artist. This is particularly true in picturing the three-­ dimensionality of living things in general and human beings in particular. Their contours defy any easy algorithms, especially when they are

 Berkeley, George, Principles, Dialogues, and Philosophical Correspondence, ed. Colin Murray Turbayne (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 25–26. 27  For further discussion of the distinction of mechanical and physical natural processes, which Hegel is a pioneer in conceiving, see Richard Dien Winfield, Conceiving Nature After Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel: The Philosopher’s Guide to the Universe (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 199–398. 28  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 837–841, 845–846. 26

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captured in movement.29 For this reason, even the greatest artists will rely upon live models to picture human figures, using various measurement techniques to capture all the ins and outs of the face and body. Admittedly, graphic artists can execute linear perspective and foreshortening by simply outlining figures. Although they thereby depict the boundaries of objects in three-dimensional picture space, the continuity of line contradicts the light in the picture, which cannot fall uniformly on all edges of the objects it depicts. Some artists, such as Matisse and Picasso, may use outlining for purposes of relative abstraction, just as others, such as Georges Rouault, may heavily outline figures for expressive purposes, emulating the lead borders of stained glass. Otherwise, however, the draftsmanship of a painter will transcend outlining and involve a play of light, shade, and color to shape the contours of figures and settings. This play with light and color is indispensable in carrying off what Hegel calls “atmospheric perspective”.30 As Hegel notes, the depiction of three-dimensional picture space is not fully achieved by relying on progressively diminishing the size of objects in function of their projected distance. What also is required, both as a matter of objective representation and expressive mood, is use of a progressively lessening acuity of forms and decreasing intensity of color as proximity diminishes. This fading of color saturation and general definiteness requires diminishing the contrast of light and dark and the progressive washing out of hues. With these means, the painter creates a virtual extension of space that artistically replicates the diffusion of light through the atmosphere. Thereby the foreground, middle-ground, and background of the picture space all become distinguished. What is pictured to be nearest has the strongest contrast of light and shadow and greatest clarity, whereas the opposite applies to what is farthest away. For, as Hegel observes, “the further objects are removed from the eye all the more do they become colorless, vague in their shape, because the opposition of light and shadow is more and more lost and the whole thing disappears into a clear grey.”31  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 838.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 845. 31  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 845–846. 29 30

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Linear perspective, foreshortening, and atmospheric distancing all empower figurative painters to produce a magical projection of transfigured reality, but something more lies at their disposal of crucial significance for the specific achievement of painting. Graphic artists can further use paint in a manner that supervenes upon the pictured external illumination of objects to depict an inner subjective illumination of rational agents. This is accomplished through a further modeling and coloration that reveals what pictured individuals are thinking and feeling through the physiological manifestations of their inner life. Artists can thereby show the cast of mind by picturing pulsing blood vessels and muscle contractions and alterations of complexion, all of which indicate the movements of the soul. These visual manifestations of mental activity involve shadings and colorations that spring from within the pictured individuals, subject to the visual impact of the projected external ambient light of the picture space. The soul that shines through can, of course, be just a brute animal soul, striving to survive and reproduce. It can, however, be a rational soul, which reveals itself through the pictured coloration of those aspects of the body in which gleams the inner light of ethical and religious passion. A key part of the use of color in depicting the inner illumination of the body by the workings of rational agency is what Hegel calls “carnation”. He identifies carnation as the very summit of the painter’s use of color, for it tackles “the greatest difficulty for portrayal in a picture”32: revealing on the body’s surface the throbbing activity of the soul. This is what distinguishes the use of color to portray the surface of a grape from the portrayal of the inner animation shining through human flesh.33 Hegel describes how carnation uses the full repertoire of color balance and harmony to capture the translucency of human skin, revealing the red arteries and blue veins underneath. The particular color of skin, let alone of the circulatory system, are all contingent matters of evolution. Indeed, the very visibility of human flesh on the face and limbs is itself a species specific accidentality that need not be shared by every rational being that could be the subject of artistic portrayal. Others could be covered by fur, 32 33

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 846.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 847.

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or scales, or feathers, or a carapace that conceals much of the psychophysical excitations that our relatively hairless and largely uniformly colored skins allow to show themselves. However rational agents be naturally covered, carnation addresses the challenge of capturing how the coloration of their body’s surface can reveal the inner mental life as it engages with matters of fundamental concern, be they secular or sacred. Hegel treats these painterly expressions of human inwardness as confirmations of the Romantic character of graphic art. Yet, Symbolic and Classical arts are hardly oblivious to the mind and will of agents, human and divine. The individuals portrayed in Symbolic and Classical style are not mindless Zombies, but rational agents whose inner life has a specific connection and valuation with respect to their outward deeds and religious life. Their view of human inwardness is certainly different than that of the Romantic self-understanding, but it retains recognition of the phenomenon of subjectivity and how it makes itself visually manifest. For this reason, the ability of painting to express the inwardness of individuals through a double light in the picture is not an exclusive boon of Romantic art, but an instrument that can be used by every style of artistic construal. A final aspect of the painterly use of color is what Hegel celebrates under the heading of sfumato, where the painter’s free play of coloration takes on an expressive independence. Through their magical fusion of color, which oil painting is best suited to achieve, the substance of whatever objects are still pictured “evaporates” before the display of the frozen “music” of subjective artistry. Hegel finds this color magic at work in the chiaroscuro mastery of Leonardo da Vinci and Correggio, who capture the greatest contrasts of shadow and light and colors without any noticeable transitions, as well as in the free use of color by the Dutch Old Masters. Through the complete fluidity of their luscious illumination of figures, interiors, and landscapes, these painters achieve an “objectless play of pure appearance”,34 which, unacknowledged by Hegel, sets the stage for a non-objective, abstract painting. The objective sensuous features of painting and the resources of light and shade and coloring that create picture space and illumination, as well  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 848.

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as flat abstraction, do not impose much in the way of definite rules for the creative activity of the painter. Admittedly, the use of each instrument and material of graphic artistry will involve some technique and the understanding needed to wield such skill. That technical knowledge can be imparted by teaching and honed through practice. When it comes to draftsmanship and using light and shade and color, the only arena in which rules have any application is that of linear perspective, where geometrical laws of light diffusion guide the artist. Nothing else in drawing or coloration can be governed by rules without sacrificing the individuality and originality inherent in the aesthetic unity of form and content and succumbing to stale routines of formulaic hackwork. Instead, individual artists must put their own unique stamp upon how pictured objects are configured, how light and shade are contrasted, and how hues and color harmony are used in providing atmospheric distancing, carnation, and the magic of painterly play. All the preceding aspects of painting’s sensuous materials and artistic resources do have implications for what content painters can configure. Hegel delineates the principal implications, but he mistakenly connects them exclusively to the Romantic world view, rather than recognizing how they apply equally to what painters can depict in a Symbolic or Classical style.35 In following Hegel’s account of how painting accommodates the content fit for artistic construal, we can easily remedy this illicit restriction. To begin with, painting’s use of light, both with respect to the contrasts of light and dark and color harmony, enables it to express something more than what is manifest on the undifferentiated plastic shape of external things. Whether painting be abstract or figurative it can display the manifestation of subjectivity as exhibited in the play of light on a surface. Although Hegel associates this with the inner shining of subjectivity in pictured figures, it applies generally to the way in which the totality of the painted surface transcends the substantive self-repose of a fixed material construction. With a potential surfeit of differentiated visual features, a painting can express individuality in all its concreteness and transient contingency whether it be figurative or not. The “frozen 35

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 814.

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music” of abstract expressionist painting can just as well present an individuated subjective feeling as can paintings of objects and their setting, where the addition of light and shade and color to drawn contours transcends both the plastic limits of sculpture and architecture and the descriptive capabilities of literature. Hegel insists that painting’s infusing of configured surface with the added dimension of light and shade and color renders its central content the human “heart” as projected on pictured external objects.36 Yet, the ability to convey subjective animation through the internal light of depicted figures does not, and should not deter painting from connecting that animation with all the concrete aspects of reality, as well as the different construals of ethical and religious value that concern the human self in relation to its world. Indeed, for any portrayal of subjective feeling to be worthy of aesthetic value, the feelings in question must somehow reveal objective concerns of fundamental importance to the human condition. Satisfying this aesthetic requirement is more obviously feasible in virtue of painting’s other signature feature, which only figurative painting fully realizes. This pertains to the specific scope of the content of painting that comes into full play when painting transforms its work surface into a “picture space” with an illumination of its own. When painting thereby transcends the flatness of abstract graphic art by picturing a three-­ dimensional expanse filled with three-dimensional objects, it opens its imaginative field to include the situations of human endeavor in all the particular detail that neither architecture nor sculpture can convey. The contiguity of surface extension and the projected three-dimensionality of picture space together enable figurative painting to both directly and indirectly depict the engagements of ethical and religious conduct in the encompassing context in which conflict and resolution proceeds. This contextual portrayal can operate with varying degrees of indirect reference. Paintings that depict still lives of plants and artifacts and natural landscapes can transcend mere mimesis by infusing their subject matter with the significance that it has as interior and exterior environments for human life. Paintings that depict the artifacts of secular and ethical activity or the dwellings of individuals or the human transformations of our  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 803.

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biosphere can more directly allude to the fundamental strivings of humanity. Direct reference is, of course, readily available when paintings depict individuals in action in the very specific circumstances to which their activity responds. Painting, unlike sculpture, can freely include the widest and most filled of expanses, including all the particulars that give what is depicted its individual contextualized reality. Hegel associates this extended intensive reach to the Romantic world view’s turn away from fixed ideals of beauty to the most mundane circumstances and contingent self-selected pursuits of individuals. The free scope of picture space can, however, equally serve Symbolic painters in depicting the fantastical sagas of divinities and their avatars that stretch the boundaries of animal and human nature, the austerity ordeals of individuals who seek detachment from subjective illusion, and whatever other situated endeavor displays the submission of the human spirit to powers alien to it. So, too, Classical painters can just as readily use the projected expanse of painterly picture space to portray the exploits of idealized heroes and anthropomorphic deities. In every case, painters must find a way of taking advantage of the extended depiction possibilities of figurative painting, while concentrating their portrayal into the one concretely pictured moment that a painting fixes before its viewers. To every artist of any civilization painting offers the means to configure a wealth of content inaccessible to architects and sculptors. This includes, as Hegel puts it, “the whole range of religious topics, … the realm of nature outside us, human life down to the most fleeting aspects of situations and characters – each and everything of this can win a place in painting.”37 Given these pictorial extremities of great depth and minute contingent detail, painting, Hegel duly notes, navigates between two poles of artistic treatment. On the one hand, painting can tackle matters of the highest religious and ethical gravity, enriched with the gleam of subjective feeling and a world of concrete scenery. On the other hand, painting can present the artist’s view of the most mundane aspects of nature and human activity, depicting them in their incidental setting with all its immediate

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 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 803.

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particular character.38 Both of these avenues of composition can be pursued with greater or lesser degrees of pictorial detail. As Hegel observes, painters may least depart from the limitations of architecture and sculpture by restricting their composition to individual figures, pictured in isolated self-repose, set against a blank background or nestled in an architectural feature like a sculpture in an alcove.39 Byzantine and early Medieval European painting exhibit this compositional contraction, where pictured figures combine a fixed typicality with the stiff immobility of a statue. In such works the light in the picture has a flat uniformity reflecting the lack of any cohesive perspective and foreshortening.40 The use of color is accordingly crudely restricted to simple hues unmixed with complementary contrasts and displaying any variation in intensity and saturation that atmospheric distancing would require.41 Still lives and portraits in general retain the abstraction from concrete situation, although they may inject visual clues of the wider world and add a more developed palette, including, in the case of portraits, the inner light of soulful animation. Landscapes confined to nature can reflect the vision of the painter, but only when landscapes depict the imprint of human activity in a specific setting do they begin to take fuller advantage of the pictorial capabilities of painting. These capabilities become more duly engaged when painters tackle compositions in which figures relinquish their “situationless self-repose” and become pictured in specific situations, pitting them against “one another and their environment” in sacred and secular entanglements in which fundamental matters lie at stake.42 Whereas sculptors must contend with expressing the indwelling spirit through the contour of mouth, eyes, and posture,  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 811–812.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 850–851. 40  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 851. 41  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 851. 42  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 853. As Hegel writes (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 854), “painting … only begins on its proper task when it departs from the relationless independence of its figures and from lack of definiteness in the situation, in order to be able to enter the living movement of human circumstances, passions, conflicts, and actions, in steady relation to their environment.” 38 39

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­ ainters can not only add the shimmer of color and inner light, but the p entire scene in which individuals have their personal strivings reflected in the reactions of others.43 In these concrete compositions, the full subjective depth of feeling can be pictured, not as a fleeting personal idiosyncrasy, but as an essential passion, connected to objective reality and worthy of artistic portrayal. Here, with situations opening up to include a whole world of engagement, where what precedes and what follows are concentrated into a single pictured interaction,44 painting can achieve a “dramatic liveliness”45 transcending the relatively isolated self-repose of sculptural configuration. To do so successfully, painters must mobilize all their resources of light and shade and color to create an adequately vibrant picture space. This is true all the more so when painters take in the detail of the most mundane activities and use them to illuminate what concerns our humanity. In every case, painters must find sufficient pictorial means to make the situation portrayed intelligible in all its fundamental human significance. To this end, painters can employ the recognizable iconography of religious tradition and national epics, as well as historical subject matter that has not fallen into oblivion. When it comes to picturing the anonymous phenomena of everyday life, mundane familiarity can suffice to secure understanding of what is depicted, both today and tomorrow.46 Whatever be the scope of pictorial depiction, in every case the demands of aesthetic unity challenge artists to fit everything together into a coherent whole, joining meaning and configuration. Further exploration of the fulfillment of this challenge requires tackling how the different fundamental artistic styles give their distinct understanding of human value fitting painterly depictions. Although Hegel limits his treatment of this fulfillment to a survey of the history of  As Hegel puts it, “In painting … mouth, eye, and posture are insufficient for expressing the inner life; only a total and concrete object can have value as the eternal existence of the inner life” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 858). 44  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 854. 45  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 853. 46  Hegel makes these points. See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 859–860. 43

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European painting up to his day, we must breach the limits of his consideration. To do so, we must consider in outline how Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic graphic artists express their world views in figurative paintings, as well as how abstract painting finds a place in the ultimate developments of the Romantic style.

7 Painting and Artistic Style

Painting in the Symbolic Style The possibilities of painting in the Symbolic style obviously build upon the shapes taken by Symbolic sculpture. The way Symbolic sculptors give plastic configuration to their worldview of the divine and human has an elemental role to play in Symbolic graphic art. This is because what sculptors isolate in free-standing forms painters transpose into a contiguous picture space that contextualizes figures in pictorial detail and adds to their contours the inner light of an animated subjectivity. Accordingly, such landmark sculptures as the ancient Egyptian statues of gods and royalty, the fantastical figures of Hindu epics, the serene Buddhas of ancient India and the Far East, and the deities of pre-Columbian America become recreated in the pictured light and dark and color of painted walls, tombs, scrolls, and fabrics. Moreover, Symbolic painting, like Symbolic sculpture, can draw upon the stories of religious texts and national epics, both written and oral, and visually recreate such verbal creations. Painters can illustrate them in pictorial representations that visually capture the same spirit that literature depicts in its linguistic imagination. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_7

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Ancient Egyptian tombs, temples, and palaces are covered with painted representations of figures that are equally depicted in free-standing statuary. As painted, these figures are now integrated into scenes of groups of individuals engaged in a myriad of activities both sacred and profane. The resulting visual stylization is analogous to that of its sculptural counterpart. Just as ancient Egyptian statues, for all their anatomical mastery, leave the pulsing animation of the soul undepicted, while setting figures in rigid postures with hands at sides and feet stuck together, so the painted parades of individuals leave them fixed in flattened profile, as typical figures performing their roles with no evidence of independent freedom and any uniquely differentiated character. Deities combining animal and human shapes, so monumentally shaped in free-standing Sphinxes and other hybrid statues, can be comparably pictured in settings that reveal their relation to people, whose own portrayal will express the submission of humanity to powers that cannot be adequately embodied in purely human form. Similarly, the Symbolic world view of ancient Hinduism gains expression in graphic art that adds to the plastic depictions of temple statuary the enrichment of color and contextualization in scenes that bring out all the immensity and sublimity of an absolute lording over phenomenal existence by exploding the limits of natural configuration and leading humanity to overcome the paltry limits of finite human striving. In innumerable works on scrolls, tapestries, and dwellings high and low, artists have pictured the religious and secular dimensions of this world view. Drawing upon the vast epics of Valmiki’s Ramayana and Vyasa’s Mahabharata, graphic artists have tackled century after century the fantastical exploits of godly incarnations and royal dynasties. To fit their subject matter, these artists have portrayed the splendor and nature-­ bending forms and powers that godly avatars exhibit in the mammoth struggles and ordeals that follow one another in profligate succession. This is a world in which humanity serves the dharma of eventually passing through the four stages of life, the ashramas, beginning as an unmarried brahmacharya engrossed in education, to a grihastha dealing with being a householder, to a vanasprastha, retreating to the forest to live as a hermit, until finally becoming a sannyasa, completely severing all worldly attachments to unite with the absolute. Painters here face the task of

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picturing all these stages of human existence as links in the self-annulment of phenomenal endeavor. To this end, everything pertaining to the unique individuality of persons will be treated as superfluous and figures will accordingly have a typicality, rather than a portrait-like verisimilitude. This overcoming of individual contingency is all the more pronounced in the Symbolic art of Buddhist painting, which carries over into graphic expression the serene spirituality of Buddhist sculptures. Painters have added color and encompassing scenery to portray the life of the Buddha, as well as to depict demons and other aspects of Buddhist folk lore. To capture the proper spiritual significance of a life devoted to bringing humanity to recognize the illusion of finite selfhood, painters must depict the self-effacement of individuality as it occurs in the more concrete contexts of religious narrative and secular life. The Buddhist paintings in the Ajanta Caves are prime examples of how artists have successfully pictured the life of Buddha and the activities of his followers in accord with their underlying understanding of the human condition. The scenes are full of highly decorated figures and luxuriant color, the depicted individuals have a serene typicality, and the overall effect is one of extolling the Buddha and his mission to overcome the illusions of independent striving. A secular expression of this spiritualization of finite existence is captured by the classical Chinese landscape painters, on whose scrolls a sublime natural setting includes a diminutive human figure engaged not in transforming nature for mundane ends, but in calmly meditating upon the place of humanity in a world of appearance. The majesty of nature here looms above the peripheral placement of the individual, in marked contrast to the Romantic landscapes of Breughel, in which human efforts to transform nature are depicted, in recognition of the value of the independent initiative of free individuals.

Painting in the Classical Style Hegel may have no more to say about painting in the Classical Style than he does about Symbolic style graphic art, but we can draw upon the stylistic shaping of Classical sculpture to extrapolate how painting can

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picture the Classical ideal, just as we could consider Symbolic painting in light of sculpture in the Symbolic style. There is little surviving graphic art from Classical Greece other than paintings on ceramic vessels and, perhaps, the Roman copies of Greek works that adorn the walls of Pompei villas and other ruins. We have references to ancient Greek painters like Apelles and Protogenes, to whom “lost writings on painting” are attributed,1 but none of their graphic works are known to have endured as originals or copies. Nonetheless, the content Classical painters will configure is already established: on the one hand, the pantheon of anthropomorphic deities and the “myths” that give their histories, and on the other hand, the secular exploits of heroes whose public deeds crystallize the objective value of ethical community. Classical painters presumably confront the depiction of both these content arenas in the independent efforts of sculptors, dramatists, and epic poets, whose plastic and literary works present their own media-specific renditions of the Classical world view. Taking Classical sculpture as a starting point, Classical graphic art finds before it a plastic rendition of a classical ideal in which the outer surface of the human figure is imbued with sufficient idealization to express how the external reality of humanity is of fundamental value, both as the proper configuration of the Divine and as the vehicle of public conduct. Classical painting can appropriate the idealized figure of the Classical nude, with its youthful, unblemished physical perfection and its balanced vitality as the epitome of independent rational agency. Although many a Classical sculpture may have been polychrome, what Classical painters will add is a picture space with its own light in which color will illuminate figures from within in perfect harmony with their pictured three-dimensionality. In addition, Classical painters will be able to group figures in all sorts of situations of both divine and human interaction, adding a suitable environment concretely contextualizing the pictured moment. There is no reason not to expect the painted figures to have the same facial and bodily idealizations that Classical sculptors use to emphasize the expression of rational agency. Nor should one expect Classical painters to fail to depict their figures with the supple, dynamic postures that distinguish Classical  Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, pp. 3, 246.

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Greek from Ancient Egyptian statues. The heroes, Gods, and athletes painted onto ancient Greek amphoras exhibit some of what Classical painters can accomplish, although these depictions are limited by lacking any painted background. We will have to use our imaginations to picture the full achievements of painters in a Classical mold. It is worth noting how the Ancient Greeks are reported to have dealt with paintings that deviated from classical idealization by depicting mundane affairs in all their portrait-like ugliness. As Lessing tells us, “Pauson, whose subjects did not even have the beauty of ordinary nature and whose low taste made him enjoy best the portrayal of what is faulty and ugly in the human form, lived in the most abject poverty. And Pyreicus, who painted barbershops, filthy workshops, asses, and kitchen herbs with all the zeal of a Dutch artist – as if such things in nature had so much charm or were so rare! – acquired the name of Rhyparographer, or the painter of filth.”2 Theban law mandated the idealization that Classical beauty required and punished any painter who deviated towards mimetic ugly authenticity, as well as towards any caricaturing, for whose very non-­ ideal exaggeration of facial features the Greek Ghezzis was condemned.3

From Figurative to Abstract Romantic Painting Hegel does provide an extensive treatment of painting in the Romantic style, but the very reason for which he focuses upon Romantic to the neglect of Symbolic and Classical style painting calls for building upon his analysis with qualification. We must remove the exclusive tie between painting and the Romantic style that Hegel affirms and instead recognize that the ability of Romantic painters to unite meaning and configuration is something they share with their Symbolic and Classical counterparts. Moreover, we must extend the exploration of Romantic painting to consider how the ultimate developments of the Romantic world view drive painters to relinquish figurative depiction and pursue the various possibilities of non-objective painting. Here we will be tackling how the  Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, p. 13.  Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, p. 13.

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frozen music of sfumato, which Hegel acknowledges, becomes independently embraced as a vehicle for configuring the Romantic spirit. What Hegel has to say about Romantic painting can readily be drawn upon to examine the signal features of figurative graphic art that gives expression to the world view that celebrates the ultimate value of human freedom in both its outer and inner realizations. For this Romantic self-­ understanding, the truth of humanity is not fully honored in anthropomorphic gods and public action in a given ethical community. Human freedom is not exhausted in the outer appearance of the human figure and external activity. Autonomy also involves the inner determinations of conscience and self-selected private interests. Similarly, religious faith in due accord with self-determination must go beyond external compliance with religious law to involve the subjective feelings of the believer. Consequently, the religious and ethical concerns that furnish the essential content of artistic representation have the following distinctive content: First of all, the religious faith that fits the Romantic world view will not invest divinity in natural powers, an indeterminate absolute, or anthropomorphic deities, but instead worship a god that elevates human subjectivity in its individual finitude to ultimate significance. Christianity is a terrestrial example of such religion insofar as it treats an actual human being, Jesus Christ, as divine, not in being a godly personification who struts the earth with absolute power, but as a mortal individual who only exhibits unity with the divine in death. The focus of sacred devotion is not observing religious law in external conduct but instead filling oneself with love of this mortal savior and one’s fellow mortals, in due recognition of the value of every person’s rational agency. Romantic painters face the challenge of picturing this religious spirit. They can draw upon the narratives of the life of the human mortal god and the subsequent religious figures who propagate the creed, all of whom are individual human beings operating in specific situations with other mere mortals. Since the faith concerns religious feeling and conscience, the depiction of scenes from the lives of the Christ and his followers must somehow give expression to the inner love that defines the bonds of this religious community. As Hegel points out, in the specific narrative of Christianity, the various incidents in the life of Christ provide appropriate material for such expression, particularly in scenes depicting the relations of Christ to his

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followers and in the suffering and compassion revolving around the Crucifixion. The mortal god will not have the idealized appearance of an anthropomorphic deity, but an all too human, vulnerable, and wounded physique, whose torments become pictured in excruciating immediacy in the hands of painters like Matthias Grünewald. Unlike the Classical ideal’s impassive typical faces and dynamic self-reposing posture, the figures of Christ and his disciples will have individuated features and affected poses expressing the emotional passion that they are undergoing. In contrast to Romantic sculptors, Romantic painters can accentuate the subjective feeling of these figures with the use of color and situate them in scenes making intelligible and all the more moving the concrete context of the religious narrative. These compositional options can be pursued with greater or lesser employment of painterly resources. As Hegel notes, the earliest religious painting in European Christendom, as exhibited in Byzantine and early Medieval art, pictures its religious figures either alone or in small ensembles, framed like sculptures in a niche, with the crudest use of light and color and hardly any perspective, foreshortening, or atmospheric distancing.4 These limitations begin to be overcome by Giotto, “who banished completely that rude Greek manner and revived the modern and good art of painting, introducing the portraying well from nature of living people”, to quote Vasari.5 Giotto achieves this by creating a more realistic picture space with more individuated characterizations, more nuanced hues, and more integrated placement of religious subjects within their environment. As Hegel observes, a new aesthetic challenge arises from the attempt to merge pictorially inner religious devotion with a fuller living reality in which surrounding landscapes, streets, and dwellings become transfigured into expressions of beauty. The required harmonization of the “soulful depths of feeling, the seriousness and profundity of religion, with that sense for the liveliness of the physical and spiritual present of characters and forms”6 becomes an artistic reality in the hands of subsequent Italian Renaissance painters. Leonardo Da Vinci and  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 871–872.  Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Vol. I, p. 97. 6  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 880. 4 5

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Correggio push the envelope of painting with their supreme mastery of chiaroscuro, applying light and color in a seamless contouring of figures and their surroundings, where the outer and inner illumination of individuals achieves a new enrichment, both physical and spiritual. And artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo employ all the means for capturing the complicated interactions of groups of individuals in religious narratives with a plastic grandeur that defies the plane of the painted surface. Religious painting in a Romantic spirit cannot, however, be satisfied with picturing the expressions of faith in a world alien to the present and its realization of freedom. The works of the Dutch and Flemish Old Masters reflect this imperative in how they picture religious narrative in the trappings of their own time, fusing together the appearance of everyday contemporary life with that of the gravest moments in the narratives of faith. This manner of treating religious subject matter is indicative of how Romantic figurative painting approaches secular content in its own right, leaving behind the worlds of Symbolic fantasy and self-abnegation and Classical idealization. For the Romantic painter, the entire wealth of nature and human activity is worthy of picturing so long as every incidental detail can be illuminated with the spirit of a rational autonomy that seeks to vindicate itself, without being confined to any specific outer manifestation. As Hegel notes, the Dutch masters are pioneers in showing how painting can bring all its enchantment to the mundane affairs of people confident of the dignity of their own endeavors. These artists picture not myths, fables, or religious solemnities, but “what man is as man, what the human spirit and character is, what man and this man is”.7 Landscapes and still lives can be made in expression of how they reflect both the creative mastery of their painter and the relation to the world of a free subjectivity. Rational agents can be pictured in a portrait-like fidelity that presents the face of humanity in all its imperfect individuality. These depictions may at times disproportionately focus on the high and mighty, particularly when painters depend upon their patronage, but Romantic artists betray their world view by restricting their subjects to any privileged sector of humanity. To be true to the affirmation of freedom, they must paint the  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 887.

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whole spectrum of human activity and human agency, capturing the independent worth, finitude, and travails of every subject they picture. This radical inclusivity challenges Romantic artists to enlist the fullest repertoire of painterly resources to create a picture space concrete in its encompassing detail as well as in its external and inner illumination of the visualizable reality of rational agency. The Romantic painter is free to depict historical subjects as well as anonymous scenes of everyday life, at home, at work and play in society, engaged in political life, immersed in scientific and artistic endeavor, or just taking respite outdoors. Perhaps the greatest, most expansive examples of Romantic figurative painting at its inclusive best are the murals of Diego Rivera, which re-create the entire world of his people, past and present, in monumental beauty. The very inclusivity of figurative Romantic painting reflects an underlying indifference to any specific configuration as a privileged vehicle of beauty. The expression of this indifference comes to a head when the Romantic world view affirms what Hegel calls a “formal independence of character”.8 This viewpoint recognizes how freedom in its full outer and inner realization cannot be confined to any particular sensuous appearance. Romantic painters are at pains to fulfill this embrace of self-­ determination by merely forsaking any idealizations in objective depiction, by picturing human existence in all its contingent particularity with a portrait-like fidelity to immediate appearance, or by comic depiction that employs irony to unveil the superfluity of given existence for a free inner spirit. All these efforts remain limited by their dependency upon a mimetic residue of objective representation. To escape this bondage to the external given, painters find themselves driven to push beyond all figurative representation to display the full autonomy that the Romantic style ultimately seeks to put before the gaze of humanity. The resulting move away from figurative painting can and has proceeded in stages. Hegel himself describes the initial turning point in the independent assertion of painterly sfumato, where the artist achieves such a “magic of the pure appearance of color” that the “substance and spirit of objects has evaporated.”9 Painting here remains figurative, but the play  For a detailed account of this stage of Romantic art, see Winfield, Stylistics, pp. 86–92.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 848.

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of light and shade and color has become so dominant in its own right that the projection of an objective picture space has been subordinated to expressing the creative mastery of the artist. Hegel could encounter this in his own day in the works of Turner, whose seascapes and harbor scenes dissolve into dynamic swirls of color. Similar “evaporations” of objectivity are achieved in the masterworks of Impressionist painters, like Monet, whose shimmering depictions of haystacks, cathedrals, and lily ponds dissolve the substance of their subject matter in the play of light and color that the artist masterfully captures. The triumph of sfumato, is, however, not the only way in which figurative painting can push beyond its own mimetic dependencies without completely leaving representation behind. Figurative abstraction provides another transitional avenue for Romantic painting. This involves a simplification of coloring and draftsmanship that reduces the illusory three-­ dimensional substantiality of pictured objects and their surroundings. Relinquishing the elaborate nuances in hue of chiaroscuro and the detailed depth creation of perspective, foreshortening, and atmospheric distancing, painters such as Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and their Fauvist and German Expressionist counterparts picture their subjects in rudimentary outline and solid colors that flatten the picture space and its figures, hollowing out any natural fidelity, as well as any figurative gleam of indwelling subjectivity. The graphic artist here feels free to manipulate figures in a conscious aperspectivism and anatomical distortion for the sake of an independent artistic creativity liberated from the mimetic bounds of naturalism and any residual ideals of beauty.10 Two further forms of abstraction that retain figurative content are found in photo-realist and Pop Art painting. Photo-realist paintings meticulously reproduce photographic images, which have themselves a figurative content. In so doing, photo-realist painters duplicate the focus variations of camera focal length, while capturing the flat surface of the  Peter Szondi compares these developments to the literary experiments of James Joyce, writing that “Just as this stream of consciousness style was prepared for within the traditional narrative, so too Cézanne’s painting (to give an extraliterary example), which finally, maintains the principle of direct observation of nature, already contains the roots of aperspectivism and the synthetic quality of later styles (e.g. the cubists).” See Szondi, Peter, Theory of Modern Drama, ed. and trans. by Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p 48. 10

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photograph, suppressing all painterly texture and visible brushstrokes. What photo-realist painting offers is not a projected picture space of three-dimensional objects, with any inner light of their own, but a flat depiction of another flat surface. The same is true of those Pop Art paintings of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol that depict flat representations, such as flags, comic strips, and commodity wrappers. Once more, figurative painting is pushing to undercut its subservience to representation of actual three-dimensional objects in three-dimensional settings. These developments pave the way for the complete abandonment of figurative depiction and the pursuit of an entirely abstract painting. No better display of this development can be seen than in the evolution of Wassily Kandinsky’s works, which move from simplified figurative abstraction to complete abstract expressionism, where line, shade, and color no longer serve to represent objects. Now, the words of Georges Braque achieve a realization he himself never implemented, due to his retention of figurative abstraction: “The painter thinks in forms and colors. The aim is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact.”11 This pictorial fact is nothing other than the configuration of light, shade, and or color that occupies the surface of the painting. Together with any attempt to picture any objects, all projections of “pictorial space” and “pictorial light” have been relinquished in favor of the artist’s play with pure visual configuration. The flatness of the painted surface reigns supreme.12 The retention by early irresolute abstract painters of differentiations between “foreground and foreground, figure and field, line and contour, color and pattern”13 must be abandoned as inconsistent residues of the three-dimensional effects of figurative representation. So, too, any breaking of the surface of the painting by thick brushstrokes and layering must be removed. The destruction of “picture space” requires eliminating any boundaries or

 Georges Braque quoted in Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), p. 9.  Tom Wolfe develops all the following points in describing the new “flatness dogma”. See Wolfe, The Painted Word, p. 50. 13  Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, p. 95. 11 12

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surface irregularities that could conjure a visual illusion of plastic shaping. Carrying through this agenda takes various now familiar forms. Carried to the limit, abstraction encourages the most minimal use of color and form, bequeathing us with canvases covered by a single color or punctuated with the most basic abstract configurations. To prevent any violation of flatness, resolute abstract artists like Morris Louis will banish the use of thick oil paint and even of gesso priming and instead apply the thinnest of paints directly to unprimed canvas, which absorbs them with no residue left on top of the surface.14 And some of these purists will even deny the value of the finished product with its independent objective being. They will affirm not “what was to go on the canvas” but rather the “event” that its creation involves.15 So the Romantic style generates the “action painting” of a Jackson Pollock, whose residual sin of flicking thick globs of paint is overcome by a Helen Frankenthaler, whose action painting consists in pouring thin paint over unprimed canvas. Of course, if the independent “picture space” and “picture light” are to be overcome, so too must the frame that sets off the picture surface from the wall on which it hangs. To breach the framing barrier, abstract painters such as Robert Hunter and Sol Lewitt will paint directly on gallery walls.16 Some will go even further and sprawl their visual composition over ceiling, wall, and floor, not as spectacular mural painting uniting picture space with architectural design, but as “installations” that viewers may all too likely wander across. Even the convention of gallery installation can next be overridden by visual “documentation” of abstract “earth art” that excavates remote wastelands (e.g. Michael Heizer’s Mojave Desert diggings). With representation gone, with all three-dimensionality collapsed into the flattest picture plane, with paint and drawing and coloration reduced to a minimum, with frames discarded, and with galleries left behind, the abstraction of Romantic painting reaches its final frontier: leaving visual configuration entirely behind by embracing “conceptual art”. The expression of freedom here achieves complete liberation from any pictured  Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, p. 59.  Tom Wolfe, quoting art critic Harold Rosenberg, in Wolfe’s The Painted Word, p. 51. 16  Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, p. 100. 14 15

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image, save for the words that face their audience. These words are not symbols, whose visual configuration is connected to their meaning, but merely signs, whose meaning has no tie to their shape and color. These words comprise “conceptual art” rather than literature because they are not a poem, a story, a play, an epic, or any other literary work. Instead, “conceptual art” presents the documented farewell of painting from visual non-verbal expression. The painted words may have a visual impact, but their configuration is meant to be irrelevant to what they say. Lawrence Weiner’s 1970 conceptual art piece drives this home with a vengeance, declaring no more and no less than, “1. The artist may construct the piece; 2. The piece may be fabricated; 3. The piece need not be built.”17 Painting, grappling with the Romantic spirit, here annuls itself. With the turn to conceptual art, the frozen music of abstract painting goes silent, as modern music did when it arrived at the comparable cul-de-sac of John Cage’s 1952 composition, 4′33″, which offers us a timed interval of silence.

17

 Wolfe, The Painted Word, p. 108.

8 Photography as a Graphic Fine Art

The Aesthetic Challenges of Photography Photography has had no trouble sweeping the modern world as a mass instrument of public and private reportage and memorialization, but it has never ceased facing special challenges to qualify as a bonafide branch of graphic fine art. To begin with, photography, whether relying on light-sensitive chemicals or electronic sensors, uses a mechanical apparatus, a camera of some sort, that reproduces the visual image that is reflected off objects and is received through its lens. The camera’s automatic reproductive receptivity stands in decisive contrast to the creative process of all other arts. Admittedly, artists in the other media all use tools, be they devices of architectural draftsmanship, chisels for sculpting stone, brushes to apply paint, instruments to make music, or pens or keyboards to write literature. These tools, however, produce no work of art unless the artist applies them in a creatively constructive manner, independently giving the work of art its form and content. A photographer need only push a camera button to have it automatically reproduce whatever given visual image is reflected through its lens. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_8

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Photography seems thereby to embody in the most literal way the mimetic theory of art, which mistakenly regards the creation of beauty to consist in putting a mirror up to the world and producing an accurate imitation of what faces it. Precisely by seemingly depriving the photographer of any creative initiative, photography’s mechanical reproduction appears to achieve a completely objective replication.1 The camera lens lets the laws of optics govern the transmission of an optical image whose capture of its visually reflected subject matter has as much detail as the resolution of its chemical or electronic recording material allows, as much depth of field as the lens aperture permits, and as much illumination as the shutter and film speed make possible. Photographers may lack the freedom of other visual artists to create shapes and spatial relationships springing from their inner vision, but photographers gain an apparent objective authority as accurate documentarians of how given reality immediately appears.2 For this reason, Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) could prefer to use “photographs to engravings and snapshots to time exposures, arguing that he was concerned with truth rather than beauty.”3 The mechanical, seemingly soulless accuracy of this imitation may satisfy die hard positivists, who confine synthetic knowing to sensible appearances, but it falls prey to all the limits of mimesis that Socrates exposes in the Republic.4 He there condemns mimetic art for offering no benefit from its purely redundant mirroring of sensible phenomena, which fails to penetrate the true essence of reality that underlies what immediately appears. Little did Socrates know that his critique might have its most thoroughgoing application in the photograph.  As Stanley Cavell writes, “Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction … Photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it.” See Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p.  23. Cavell here completely ignores the ineliminable formative dimension of photography. 2  Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 4. 3  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 5. 4  Plato, The Republic, in Complete Works, ed. by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 597e-599a, pp. 1202–1203. 1

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Nonetheless, the mechanical “objectivity” of photography has accorded the photograph a semblance of faithful reliability, as if its reproduction of appearances involved no “interpretation”, “evaluation”, or “transfiguration” of them. By being “the registering of an emanation” of “light waves reflected by objects”, the photograph is “a material vestige”, not a mere image interpreting the real, but rather an objective “trace” of what is given to the camera.5 The very objectivity of photographic images, whereby they are “material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them”,6 however, challenges photography to transcend rote mimesis and vindicate its status as a genuine fine art. To have aesthetic worth, photography must not just automatically reproduce optical imagery, but somehow display an artistic creativity that sheds light on the human condition by producing exemplary appearances whose individuality is wedded to fundamental meaning. Only by wielding this transfigurative freedom can photography take its place as a graphic fine art. Secondly, photography challenges how the different artistic media embody not only the general features of fine art, but the basic styles of artistic configuration. Photography, both still and moving, has arisen on our lonely planet only relatively recently in our modern era from whose slaughterhouse the worldview expressed by the Romantic style has become the order of the day. All the other fine arts have been practiced by every civilization, which each have had at hand tools and materials sufficient to produce works of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature (whether oral or written). As a result, any attempt to tie an individual art exclusively to a specific style founders in face of the creative achievements of artists working to configure every fundamental world view. We have seen Hegel undercut his own efforts to connect architecture with the Symbolic style and sculpture with the Classical style by acknowledging the triumphs of Classical and Romantic architecture and Symbolic and Romantic sculpture. Although Hegel barely mentions painting in a Symbolic or Classical mode, his account of painting fails to  Sontag, Susan, On Photography, in Sontag, Susan, Essays of the 1960’s & 70’s, ed. David Rieff (New York: The Library of America, 2013), pp. 635–636. 6  Sontag, On Photography, p. 655. 5

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restrict the distinguishing features of graphic art to the artistic construal of a Romantic worldview. The historical emergence of photography, however, might seem to vindicate, at least in its singular domain, the conflation of particular artform and individual art that Hegel has perpetrated with respect to architecture, sculpture, and painting, and, as we shall see, continues to perpetrate in treating music and literature as ultimately Romantic arts. Given the lack of any evidence of photography in those pre-modern civilizations in which Symbolic and Classical art predominate, one wonders whether this absence is contingent or tied to the very nature of those civilizations. Are these civilizations unable to generate the technology of photographic reproduction or are they at least unwilling to put that technology to use for artistic purposes serving their self-understanding? The normative project distinguishing modernity and to which the Romantic style corresponds validates the totality of freedom, including the inner autonomy of conscience and the particular self-seeking of market activity. Modernity’s unleashing of economic freedom is certainly connected to the mobilization of ever-growing resources to develop the technological innovations that become imperative for surviving market competition. It thus cannot be surprising that the development of chemical and digital photography, still cameras, and cinema all occurred in modern times with its “industrial revolution”. Nonetheless, it is far from impossible that the pre-modern civilizations to which symbolic and classical art belong could have discovered how to produce still photography and film and made use of these media for their artistic expression. What is more decisive in determining whether the historical emergence of photography and cinema reflects their identity as Romantic arts is an investigation of the artistic boundaries of these media that explores how they might be enlisted by artists of a Symbolic and Classical mold. With regards to still photography, what must first be established is how it can vindicate itself as a graphic fine art despite the mechanical reproduction of visual imagery with which it operates. Only then can it make sense to investigate the boundaries of its artistic creation.

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 he Vindication of Still Photography T as a Graphic Fine Art From its very beginnings in the nineteenth century, photography has struggled to validate itself as a fine art. For better or worse, photographers have grappled with the mechanical reproduction of visual imagery at the core of their medium, some celebrating the new unposed, objective, true-­ to-­life glimpse it allegedly provides for understanding our world, some trying to compensate for photography’s automatic verisimilitude by injecting a subjective artistry that treats the photograph as if it were a painting, artificially posed and configured. Both approaches cannot hide from themselves how photography has two defining aspects, which always operate together. On the one hand, photography does automatically duplicate the given image reflected through its lens in mechanical accord with whatever aperture, shutter speed, sensitivity, and resolution the camera and its chemical or electronic recording media provides. For the camera to deliver its photograph, nothing need be posed, nothing need be pictured from imagination, nothing need be interpreted or evaluated. Whatever happens to fall within the view of the lens, whether posed or unposed, will get reproduced on the surface of the photograph. Just as the visual reality that is photographed seems to present itself without any creative imagining on the part of the photographer, so the camera eye seems to have an independence of its own. It sees immediately through its technical apparatus without any premeditation, eyeing whatever passes before it as its shutter physically or electronically opens and closes. Moreover, the camera eye appears to be superior to the rational animal eye, that is, on our lonely planet, to the human eye. The camera can freeze movement that we cannot see unaided. The camera can take a “bird’s eye” view of cities, landscapes, and the whole earth that few humans can ever see on their own. The camera can take photographs that can be enlarged to reveal details otherwise hidden from our view. And generally, the camera can vastly expand our visual experience by furnishing photographs through whose mass reproductions any individual can view virtually every corner of the planet.

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On the other hand, the camera is an instrument of the photographer and for this reason, what it produces is subject to artistic control by its creator at every stage of the photographic process. To begin with, the photographer chooses the camera, the camera lenses, and the film or electronic sensors that will be employed. These choices set the visual possibilities at the disposal of the photographer, including whether imagery will be in color or black and white, what field of vision will be available, what light conditions will be feasible, what speed of action can be captured, and what types of focus and resolution will be possible. Secondly, the photographer determines what will fall within the field of vision of the camera and be photographed. Minimally, this consists in pointing the camera at whatever externally given scene the photographer chooses to capture. This can be the Civil War killing fields that Mathew Brady snapped, the empty streets of Paris that Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget immortalized, the natural vistas that Ansel Adams focused upon, or the teeming open pit mines that Sebastião Salgado shot. Even in merely photographing what is immediately given, it is always up to artistic initiative to select what unposed subject matter to photograph, as well as how to frame the picture. Alternately, the photographer can pose subjects before the camera, both on the street with an unaltered background or in a studio with a backdrop the photographer has created. These subjects can be captured at home in a documentary way, as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White photograph their Great Depression victims, or in an unadorned studio setting, as August Sander uses in cataloguing the bread winners of Weimar Germany. We see this artistic initiative at work in Brassaï’s graffiti and Edward Weston’s nudes, where “unposed” walls and posed models become transfigured into abstract compositions that subordinate the camera’s mechanical fidelity to the artist’s non-objective conjury. Also, from photography’s earliest days, some photographers have used the artifice of soft focus, smeared lens, and elaborate lighting effects to make their cameras emulate the painterly chiaroscuro of old masters. Moreover, after the push of a button has put all the selected unposed and posed material into the artist’s grasp, the photographer now can crop away, make negatives into positives or positives into their reverse, alter

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contrast, resolution, and coloration, blow up or shrink pictures, or use collage to combine photographic images. All this has been possible with the technology of chemical film and the advent of digital photography has only made such transfigurations of photo images easier than ever before. The vindication of photography as a fine art rests upon how both these constitutive aspects of its medium can be combined to achieve the unity of form and meaning in which aesthetic worth resides. The history of photography offers, of course, a wide array of artistic options, many of whose practitioners have polemically claimed an exclusive validity for their photographic approach, as if photography could ever be wholly mechanically mimetic or constructively formative. On the one hand, there are the “realists”, who maintain that the integrity of photographic art resides in the ability of the camera to focus on immediate appearances and reveal what is true to life in a way that escapes ordinary vision. Here what counts is bringing to view the unposed, contingent, raw reality that the prosaic eye ignores, doing so with as much authenticity as possible. The photographer achieves this revelation of truth in a unique configuration by shooting away and finding among the myriad snapshots one that frames its subject matter in a composition that holds together its moment as a discrete concentration of the world of human concerns. The “realist” uses as little “formative” manipulation as possible, even embracing in the name of objective immediacy photos whose focus, resolution, contrasts, and color fidelity may be wanting.7 In so doing, the realist photographer, like any artist of the camera, is not holding up a mirror to nature, but transfiguring the given phenomena that are photographed in three basic respects. First, the subjects of the photograph are transformed from three-dimensional objects to images on a two-dimensional surface. Second, they are severed from their surroundings by the boundaries of the photographic image. Third, the object’s actual reflection of light is modified in its photographic  As Sontag puts it, embracing this one-sided view, “the painter constructs, the photographer discloses. That is, the identification of the subject of a photograph dominates our perception of it as it does not, necessarily, in a painting… Hence, the formal qualities of style  – the central issue in painting  – are at most of secondary importance in photography.” Sontag, On Photography, pp. 592–593. 7

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“reproduction” by either the substitution of black and white for the color spectrum or the particular color sensitivity of the film or electronic sensor.8 Nonetheless, the realist photographer seems to lay privileged claim to what Siegfried Kracauer identifies as the “four affinities” of photography that distinguish it from the other graphic arts.9 To begin with, photography’s mechanical reproduction of imagery gives it special access to unstaged reality, taking in worldly phenomena “in the raw”, as they exist independently of the artist’s creative formation. This enables the camera to capture, as no other graphic art can do, the “ephemeral configurations” of reality that cannot be staged, let alone noticed by the unaided human eye.10 Secondly, photography’s special access to unstaged reality puts it in special relation to what is random and fortuitous. The snapshot takes whatever passes before the camera. Consequently, when realist photographers turn their cameras to nature or to the artificial scenes of human habitation, it can be no surprise that they revel in picturing “chance meetings, strange overlappings, and fabulous coincidences”.11 Thirdly, photography captures a degree of “endlessness” that other media cannot attain.12 Whereas other arts produce creations with an integral completeness of their own, terminating in the boundaries of their works, photography always presents “fragments rather than wholes”, reflecting the fortuitous and ephemeral character of its unstaged content. Whether a photograph frames an action shot or a motionless portrait, it is always a provisional framing pointing to contents outside it in both time and space.13 Fourthly, all these features photography imbue photography with “an affinity for the indeterminate”, for that diffuseness and lack of premeditated organization that marks the photograph as a record of what is contingently given.14 Whereas a painting may display a definite significance thanks to all the artistic control of its configuration, the p ­ hotograph  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 15.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 18–19. 10  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 18. 11  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 19. 12  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 19. 13  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 19–20. 14  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 20. 8 9

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inevitably possesses a vague fringe of multiple meanings suggested by its incomplete, unbounded, and happenstance capture.15 Although all four of these features are particularly evident in “realist” photography that emphasizes the “unstaged”, “ephemeral” “happenstance” dimension of photographic content, they apply no less to the “formative” photography that emphasizes “staged”, “posed” subject matter, and uses photographic effects to simulate the “constructive” efforts of non-photographic graphic art. Such photographs may intentionally or unintentionally achieve “painterly” results, but they still always involve a mechanical reproduction of whatever appears to the camera eye in all its received plenitude. The formative dimension can never exhaustively determine photographic content. The camera eye always takes in everything allowed by its receptivity to the reflected light of its subject matter. Conversely, no matter how unembellished and raw a “realist” photograph may be, it always involves the formative initiative of the photographer in choosing the camera apparatus and its sensors, in framing the subject matter, and in manipulating what results in the process of chemical or digital “development”. Although “realists” and “formative” photographers continue to oppose one another in polemical struggle, they both fail to appreciate how photography not only combines mechanical reproduction with constructive creation, but does so in a way that distinguishes photographic art from both rote imitation and “traditional” visual artistry.16

 he Contrast Between the Still Photograph T and the Non-photographic Work of Graphic Art To understand the specific nature of still photography as a fine art, we must recognize its similarities and differences from non-photographic graphic creation. 15 16

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 20.  Kracauer makes this point in his Theory of Film, p. 7.

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A still photograph and a non-photographic graphic work both present a two-dimensional visual creation involving light and dark and/or color differentiations. Both types of visual art may present a two-dimensional image that offers no illusion of three-dimensional space, nor any figurative representation. This may occur even when a photograph uses mechanically reproduced three-dimensional reality to present an abstract two-dimensional composition. Examples of this are found in the “abstract” photographs of Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, who compose these photos to capture the surface patterns that emerge from an array of photographed objects. Moreover, both photographic and non-photographic art may combine three-dimensional representation and two-dimensional abstraction, using figurative depictions for the sake of their abstract composition. Edward Weston provides a prime example of such combination of representation and abstraction in his photographs of nudes and vegetables, which highlight the powerful sweep of their “found” abstract forms. The photographer and non-photographic graphic artist have very different paths to follow when they use two-dimensional imagery to conjure up a three-dimensional reality. The photographer can avoid all the artificial transfigurations upon which a painter must rely and merely set in motion the camera’s mechanical reproduction. Whereas the painter must employ foreshortening and atmospheric “perspective” to convey three-­ dimensionality, the photographer can let play the geometry of optical relations and the physical attenuation of illumination, clarity, and color intensity over distance, all of which automatically appear through the camera eye. Similarly, a photograph can capture the glow internal to its image through the camera’s automatic reception of how light falls upon and/or emanates from its subject, whereas the painter must employ all the artifice of chiaroscuro to achieve any comparable effect. In other respects, still photographs and non-photographic graphic works converge. Both are essentially limited to what can be conveyed in the two-dimensional immobile single image they produce. Both can make use of this field to represent not just figures, but the concrete situation in which they stand, doing so with as much detail and extension as their respective means allow. Moreover, both can use the variations in shade and color and the depiction of inner light to reveal something of

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the psychological life of whatever individuals may be captured by the camera eye or the artist’s brush. Finally, both may accompany their work with captions or titles, but these verbal supplements are not intrinsic to either visual art.17 Of course, the limitation to a single stationary image can be partly surmounted when photographers and non-photographic visual artists use collage to combine separate images into a single work or create series of works that are related to one another. The possibilities of photographic collage have been explored to stirring effect by John Heartfield (Helmut Herzfeld) long before digital technology made the seamless combination of photographs an easy matter. Photo series can, of course, incorporate photos that include collage, just as non-photographic graphic works can include non-photographic collage. What such series add to the single work is exhibited in several ways. On the one hand, the graphic series may form a narrative, which might or might not be accompanied by text. Duane Michals has pioneered this approach in photography with his evocative narrative photo sequences, often accompanied by texts. On the other hand, series of works can be united through a “sociological” mission, whereby they convey a visual panorama of some slice of the human world. Lewis Hines’ photos of American child laborers, Walker Evans’ and Dorothea Lange’s photos of Great Depression victims, and August Sanders’ albums of Weimar bread winners all bring to photographic documentation what multiple paintings and drawings have brought to comparable creation in such series as Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, Georg Grosz’ Das Gesicht der Herrschenden Klasse, and Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series. Nonetheless, the still photograph, unlike a motion picture, has no intrinsic sequential character and the key to its signature identity must be found elsewhere. Some thinkers, like Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag, have located the defining distinction between photography and non-photographic graphic art in the reproducibility of photographs. Although the early daguerreotype cameras produced a unique photo print, like the Polaroid  Moreover, given the inherently vague fringe of meaning of the photograph, as well as the concrete individuality of a genuine work of fine art, any caption presents “only one interpretation, necessarily a limiting one” (Sontag, On Photography, p. 605), with which the significance of the work cannot be identified. 17

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camera would do a century later,18 the typical photograph is one copy among innumerable others, all indistinguishably originating from the same chemical negative or digital file. This indefinite, if not limitless, reproducibility allegedly deprives the photographic work of the “aura” of singular originality possessed by non-reproducible artworks, substituting “mass existence for a unique existence”.19 For this reason, it almost seems to be “bad taste”, at least for Sontag, for a photograph to be signed.20 There is, however, a positive dimension to the quasi anonymous “mass existence” of photographs. Their reproducibility equally enables them to democratize image creation, disseminating views of the world to the masses, while furnishing the market with an ever-expanding supply of duplicate appearances to satiate public imagination and erode all hierarchies of selectivity. Of course, similar effects are produced by the technological reproducibility of motion pictures (be it on film, television, or internet streaming) and of sound recordings (including music and spoken texts), as well as the ever-expanding access to their duplications. The photograph may be technologically reproducible, but is it any less a novel unique creation than an etching of Rembrandt or a lithograph of Daumier,21 or a musical composition, a dance, or a drama that is indefinitely performable or a work of literature that can be read in indefinitely many “hard” or electronically “published” exemplars? Admittedly, performance arts come to life through an additional creative initiative on the part of the performer. Something similar may apply to photographs when the “developing” of a chemical negative or digital file involves the unique artistry of the “developer” of the finished “print”, who may or may not be the original photographer. These supplementary artistic engagements, however, do not detract from the creative process of the artist who has  Sontag, On Photography, p. 616.  Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin; trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 22. 20  Sontag, On Photography, p.  622. Nonetheless, Sontag does acknowledge a difference between “original” prints made from the original negative and subsequent copies. See On Photography, p. 626. 21  As Lukács writes, “Stiche von Rembrandt, Lithographien von Daumier besitzen die Aura ihrer Einzigartigkeit und strahlen sie aus, ganz unabhängig davon, in wieviel Exemplaren sie existieren” (Lukács, Georg, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 468). 18 19

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taken the photograph, composed the music, choreographed the dance, or written the literary work, nor from the individuality of these works of art themselves. Contra Benjamin, their aesthetic “aura” does not fade away through their mass reproduction. Admittedly, the proliferation of photographic images, musical recordings, literary publications, and motion pictures does allow for an unprecedented access to these arts that may reflect a democratization of culture. It may also, however, serve the oppressive designs of authoritarian regimes who control what works are reproduced and who has access to them. Either way, the mass reproduction of photographs, as well as other art works, does not itself determine what distinguishes them and wherein their aesthetic worth resides. Instead, we must return to the basic character of photographic fine art to determine its possible genres, as well as how these might be enlisted to embody the fundamental world views distinguishing the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms.

The Genres of Photography as Fine Art Photography as a prosaic art has various “genres” defined by the uses to which it is put to work. Commercial photography employs photography for economic gain, which can be achieved by using photographs in advertising, in registering information for business, in providing portraits for private individuals, in journalism, in medicine, in entertainment, and in scientific investigation of nature and the human world where visual imagery provides a source of knowledge. Of course, political regimes can also employ photography for purposes of governance, surveillance, and control. Although photography, like any visual fine art, claims an aesthetical value apart from any such prosaic uses, photography as fine art can be categorized in terms of the subject matter it represents or expresses. Just as paintings can be distinguished as still-lives, portraits, landscapes, genre studies, battle scenes, historical tableaux, and so forth, so photographs can be grouped in terms of the different contents they represent. As for those works that express, rather than represent, these can be distinguished

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as abstract photographs, distinct from figurative works, just as abstract paintings are distinguished from representational works. Another categorization that is specifically rooted in the dual character of photography is one that treats the contending approaches of “realists” and “formative” creators as distinct genres that encompass within their divide that between expressive and figurative work, as well as that between the different contents of representation. Although both “realists” and “formative” photographers cannot exclude mechanical reproduction and constructive artistry from any of their works, they do bring a different emphasis, whose aesthetic credentials need not be rejected nor privileged one over the other.

Photography and the Artforms One gets a better sense of how the form and content of photography can be distinguished when one considers how photographs can embody the different artforms in expression of their distinctive worldviews. Admittedly, on our lonely planet, photography, both chemical and digital, only arose in modern times, when the self-understanding of the Romantic artform made itself a global phenomenon. There is no doubt that we can look at modern photography and examine how its various forms have expressed the unities of meaning and configuration that distinguish Romantic style art. Can, however, photography artistically embody the worldviews driving Symbolic and Classical style art? If we were to give a camera, for example, to the great graphic artists of sub-Saharan Africa, of pre-­ Columbian America, of ancient Hindu civilization, or of Buddhist Tibet and China, could they create photographs just as representative of their Symbolic styles? Similarly, could the graphic artists of ancient Greece make use of chemical or digital photography to produce works fit to express the Classical ideal? On the one hand, the mechanical reproduction of photography gives artists of a Symbolic of Classical bent an easy resource for configuring what they regard to have ultimate meaning. Namely, they can simply photograph works of sculpture and two-dimensional visual art in their

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respective styles and thereby photographically transmute the characteristic configurations that fit their worldviews. The formative dimension would still be at hand, insofar as such photographs would inevitably reflect the framing and choice of lens, aperture, camera speed, and mode of development. On the other hand, photographers with a Symbolic or Classical aesthetic agenda would use the full formative resources of staging and “painterly” technique to photographically transfigure what their respective sculptures and paintings have achieved. Artists expressing animist world views could assemble masked and costumed figures to be photographed, just as Buddhists artists could arrange a human figure with the same serene equanimity captured in non-photographic visual art and let the camera eye reproduce what it can see. So too, Hindu creators would take a camera and photograph staged scenes from the great Sanskrit epics, using masks, makeup, costumes, and scenery to capture a world of fantastical divine embodiments, dharmic devotion, and the ordeal of austerities. So too we can imagine how classical Chinese artists could stage scenes of a solitary scholar surrounded by a sublime landscape and let the camera reproduce the photographic equivalent of what a painter would create. Similarly, the ancient Greek artist could stage appropriate scenes of the anthropomorphic gods and epic heroes, using figures with the youthful perfection and dynamic posture of the Classical nude and let the camera bring the classical ideal to photographic realization. So, too, figures could be posed in the same costumes and masks used in the Classical theater to freeze a moment of tragedy or comedy for photographic representation. Admittedly, both Symbolic and Classical style artists would find it hard to employ a predominantly “realist” approach that did not reproduce sculptures and other graphic works, but instead photographed the ephemeral, unstaged, openended appearance of given phenomena. Nature in its contingent facticity cannot manifest the divine significance that animism imbues in non-human, natural entities, nor exhibit an illusory emanation of the transcendent infinity of the Hindu and Buddhist absolute. Nor can the prosaic face of humanity as it appears to the camera eye express the dharmic strivings to unite with an indeterminate divine.

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Although the Classical ideal elevates the human form to a divine configuration and ennobles ethical activity, it still cannot model itself upon the immediate appearance of humanity in all its imperfect contingency. Consequently, the Classical style artist will have difficulty employing a predominantly “realist” approach to photography. The situation is very different for a photographer in the Romantic style because the Romantic self-understanding attributes normativity to self-­ determination in all its inner and outer manifestations, while acknowledging that no sensible or imagined configuration can adequately express the full reality of freedom. For such a self-understanding, no human appearances and no human situations, however non-ideal they may be, can be off limits to photographic capture, nor can any image pretend to have paradigmatic finality.22 Consequently, the Romantic style photographer can use either a “realist” approach or a full-blown “formative” creativity to plumb the full range of given or staged imagery, as well as to repudiate representation entirely with photographic compositions that abstractly express an inner freedom that can find no adequate existing embodiment. The wide-open options of the Romantic style “realist” photography are circumscribed by the diametrical extremes of the globally panoramic 1955 photographic exhibit, The Family of Man, organized by Edward Steichen, and the parade of human margins in the works of Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. Steichen’s exhibition brings together photographs documenting how common human activities and relationships appear around the world. Susan Sontag lambasts The Family of Man for denying the “determining weight of history”,23 but the camera does not allow any such denial. Although the assembled photos capture people from every corner of the earth engaged in similar endeavors and interactions, the mechanical  Sontag observes that “beauty has been revealed by photographs as existing everywhere”, whereas “the traditional function of portrait painting, to embellish or idealize the subject, remains the aim of everyday and of commercial photography” (Sontag, On Photography, pp. 601, 602). Sontag, of course, is generalizing about photography with respect to its historical existence as a modern art, without considering the possibilities of any fine art photography that serves the Symbolic or Classical worldview. 23  Sontag, On Photography, p. 550. 22

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reproduction of photography ensures that we are confronted by a very historical “here and now” in every shot. Admittedly, some photos document tribal peoples who may still retain an animist tradition corresponding to the Symbolic artistic style, but they, like every other occupant of The Family of Man, inhabit the mid-twentieth century world in which the trajectories of internal and external modernization have become genuinely global. The panorama of The Family of Man is that of world in which the nations that independently modernized have just emerged from the greatest war in human history, a war pitting post-modern fascists against the competing visions of capitalist and socialist blocs, setting the stage for a wave of post-colonial “liberations” and a Cold War threatening nuclear Armageddon. Whether documenting East or West or North or South, The Family of Man puts before the camera eye this historical epoch in all its global daily reality. What we see is a combination of our anthropological commonality and what we all have become in the midst of the contemporary global battle over the normative project of modernity. Of course, neither The Family of Man’s selection of photos nor the individual photographs themselves have any blatant axe to grind, other than affirming the universality of the human quest for freedom and dignity in our global contemporaneity. The photo collections of Diane Arbus and Robert Frank focus upon a different part of our modern facticity, with emphasis upon the tawdry, the desperate, and the lonely human extremities. Once more, the camera eye brings into view individuals and interactions that are all too familiar in the contemporary world inevitably shared by photographer and subject alike. Here, however, the gaze of Arbus and Frank focuses upon, to quote Sontag, “a world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identifies and relationships”.24 Arbus gives us a sideshow of marginal figures “who are pathetic, pitiable, as well as repulsive”, coldly displaying their solitary oddity without compassion.25 Admittedly, Arbus’ assortment of freaks and misfits exhibits an alienation that seems just as completely removed from historical specificity as the earnest satisfactions of 24 25

 Sontag, On Photography, p. 550.  Sontag, On Photography, pp. 550, 557.

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the members of The Family of Man. Once again, however, the mechanical reproduction of the camera eye cannot excise the visible facticity of our modern world, with all the residual alienations that reflect the contested, incomplete establishment of the totality of freedom. Arbus and Frank may not explicitly ground the alienations they highlight, but that does not mean that the extremities of “realist” photography do not shed light on how such specifically modern alienation resides in the impairments of freedom in colonial and post-colonial conditions, in the tyranny of post-­ modern regimes that replace rights with ethnic privilege, in the state socialist monopolization of social and political power by “vanguard” party elites, or in the clutches of oligarchy that haunts “liberal” regimes which neglect the household and social rights on which self-government depends. The more explicitly “formative” trend in modern photography has similar latitude to explore. Heartfield’s photographic collages manipulate images drawn from documentary photos, giving them a new searing impact, confronting us with the looming assault upon the modern project of emancipation. On a much more private level, the posed costumed impersonations of Cindy Sherman give literal expression to Dorothea Lange’s insight, that every portrait of another is a self-portrait,26 where the reproduction of objective reality through the mechanical camera eye is still the expression of the artist’s own view, “evidence of what an individual sees, not just a record, but an evaluation of the world”.27 In Sherman’s case, her staged costume party becomes a wry photographic reinvention of the same modern world that “realists” like August Sanders and Walker Evans sought to document in their art. All these efforts of “realists” on the one hand and “formative” creators on the other have their artistic comeuppance in the photographic pursuit first, of abstract expression, and, finally, of “conceptual” art, which may involve documentation of visual art that can only be accessed through

 Sontag, On Photography, p. 613.  Sontag, On Photography, p. 589.

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photos.28 Both these developments exhibit the aesthetic impasse to which the Romantic self-understanding leads once artists recognize how their mission to create sensible configurations with fundamental meaning becomes undermined when freedom can no longer manifest itself in any given image. Just as figurative painting gives way to abstract expressionism, so “experimental” photographers (as well as “experimental” filmmakers) repudiate any mimetic representation by producing non-figurative visual forms that emerge from the reproductions made by the camera mechanism. And just as erstwhile painters abandon sensuous configuration entirely by making their work a mere vessel of “theory”, so photographic “conceptual art” subverts photography’s mechanical reproduction of reflected imagery, as well as its formative creation of visual content. Arriving at these cul-de-sacs, where the aesthetic unity of configuration and fundamental meaning has vanished, photography ends up canceling its hard-won vindication as fine art.

 Sontag cites, as subjects of such photographic documentation, Christo’s mammoth wrappings of buildings and landscapes and the remote massive earthworks of Walter De Maria and Robert Smithson, which are theory-laden conceptual artworks whose configuration claims aesthetic significance only on the basis of a separately expressible idea. See Sontag, On Photography, p. 632. 28

Part V The Aesthetics of Music

9 The Distinguishing Aesthetics of Music

Music, more than any other fine art, seems to have a direct hold on our humanity. Whereas we can walk through buildings with little notice of their architecture, ignore sculptures and paintings that surround us in a gallery, disregard dance and theatrical performances we attend, and leave texts unread, the presence of music can immediately move us whether we like it or not, just as we may find ourselves breaking out in tune almost unconsciously. Music’s soundscape penetrates our soul so long as it can reach our hearing with sufficient artistry to make it a vessel of beauty, but understanding how it does so poses a perplexing challenge that the philosophy of fine art has labored hard to surmount. Whereas brute animals are impervious to music’s aesthetic effect, music itself need not have any verbal, conceptual content. Music may have been born in accompaniment to song and dance, but musical art can dispense entirely with words and bodily movement and still move us to the depths of our human spirit. On the other hand, music does not intrinsically represent the world we confront. Composers like George Gershwin and Edgard Varèse may include in their compositions An American in Paris and Amériques the sounds of car horns and sirens, respectively. Others may incorporate © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_9

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other musical pieces with historical meaning, as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky does in his 1812 Overture, which quotes from the French and Russian national anthems. Many composers have written program music, attempting to give musical expression to scenes and narratives, like Beethoven in his Pastoral Symphony, Tchaikovsky in his Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, and Hamlet orchestral suites, and Richard Strauss in his tone poems. And some composers have gone to the mimetic extremes of Arthur Honegger, whose Pacific 231 orchestrally replicates the sounds of a diesel locomotive. Yet all these efforts are essentially peripheral to music as such, which can entirely dispense with any representation of independently given objects or events. For this reason, aestheticians who ignore the reality or artistic validity of abstract sculpture and graphic art group music with architecture as a fundamentally non-representational art. Yet, unlike architecture, music does not intrinsically serve as an instrument for other human activities. Music is instead doubly free, as Nicolai Hartmann notes, free from subordination to any practical ends and free from depicting any externally given subject matter.1 Nonetheless, from Plato and Aristotle to thinkers of today, music has been recognized to have a content specific to its medium. That content is the passions of the soul worthy of aesthetic expression. How this can be and how this content can achieve determinate configuration in musical composition is something that the philosophy of fine art must address. Hegel stands out among philosophers of fine art in providing us with the conceptual resources for understanding the specific aesthetic reality of music. Hegel’s account of music in his Aesthetics: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art has its limitations, however, as he himself in large part recognizes. From the start, Hegel acknowledges that he lacks the musical expertise to comprehend fully the structure of music.2 Nonetheless, as we shall see, Hegel does provide us with an understanding of why and to what extent music has a technical side, for which special knowledge is required. Secondly, Hegel gives no account whatsoever of how the different artforms achieve distinct stylistic realizations in music. This neglect is rooted  Hartmann, Aesthetics, pp. 102, 124.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 893, 930.

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in Hegel’s judgment that music is fundamentally tied to the Romantic style of artistic configuration.3 This judgment rests upon the same conflation of artform and individual art that has marred Hegel’s treatment of architecture, sculpture, and painting, whose arts he tied to the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms, respectively. As we have seen, Hegel still acknowledges how architecture and sculpture could be created in Classical and Romantic styles, and he at least examines the development of figurative painting in its successive Romantic style embodiments. In his account of music, however, Hegel make no mention of Symbolic style music at all and refers to Classical style music only in passing, noting that ancient Greek music used far fewer keys than modern music, although the Ancients “wrote much about the difference of keys and used and developed them in various ways.”4 What these ways were is not discussed. Instead, Hegel dismisses Classical Greek music as failing to reach the level of harmonic and melodic development of music in Christian times, leaving Ancient music a mainly “rhythmical … enhancement” of the “musical sound” of the poetry of Greek tragedy.5 One would expect Hegel to develop at some length how music in a Romantic style unites musical form with the meaning specific to the latter’s world view. Hegel, though, closes his discussion of music without addressing how music embodies that one artform with which he exclusively identifies it. A third, less significant problem, is the ordering of Hegel’s discussion. He appropriately begins his examination of music by addressing the basic character of its medium and what content its medium can properly express, doing so first in preliminary contrast to the other artistic media and then in more detail by itself. Next, however, Hegel turns to examine how music operates as an accompaniment to words, before examining how music becomes fully realized as an independent medium.6 This may correspond to historical development, but, as Hegel acknowledges, the investigation of the musical accompaniment of words systematically presupposes the conception of literary art, which Hegel will address only  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 889.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 926. 5  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 950. 6  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 937. 3 4

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after his treatment of music.7 Music with lyrics is as much a hybrid art as the dramatic spectacle of opera and operetta, dance accompanied by music, or film with musical accompaniment. In every such hybrid art, a proper aesthetic determination requires that the arts therein combined are already comprehended in their independent being. For this reason, we must reverse the order of Hegel’s treatment and address “pure” music before considering how it must be composed as an accompaniment to words, or, for that matter, to dance, theatre, and cinema. Further, when Hegel does tackle “pure” music he characterizes it as “instrumental” in the narrow sense of excluding vocal music.8 He thereby assumes that vocal music is always verbal, rather than being able to be “pure”, wordless music. Contra Hegel, the voice can be used in a purely instrumental fashion, vocalizing without any words. Voices have been used as wordless instruments in such largescale orchestral works as Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé. The scat singing of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald has pioneered wordless vocalizations in which their voices figure as integral “pure” instruments of jazz ensembles. And Bobby McFerrin has shown how the single voice can morph into an entire orchestra without singing any words. Consequently, when we consider music in its own unaccompanied and unaccompanying independence, we must include the voice as one possible instrument among others within the domain of “pure” “instrumental” music. With these qualifications in mind, we can now tackle the aesthetic challenge of music by building upon Hegel’s efforts, as supplemented by other helpers. Following Hegel, we begin by thinking through the basic materials out of which the musical soundscape is created.

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 949.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 953.

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 he Elementary Material of the Medium T of Music The distinguishing medium of music is sound, determined in respect to the physical process of its production and propagation as well as the biological and psychological process of its hearing by a rational animal. Physically considered, sound emanates from a vibrating body, whose vibrations are transmitted through other contiguous materials. To be heard, these vibrations must end up conveying their motions to the auditory sense organs of those rational animals who are music’s audience. Sound has multiple quantitative determinations. The vibrations of sound have specific frequencies, specific intensities, and specific durations, all of which have a quantitative measure. In addition, sound diminishes as it propagates in a mathematically determinable manner in function of the physical character of the intervening material through which sound waves are transmitted and the distance over which they travel. As Hegel notes, sounds do not stand in any organic relation to one another, whereby the character of one is intrinsically connected to that of others. Instead, sounds are external to one another and subject to a purely external production and arrangement, where what accompanies or follows one sound is essentially undetermined by its own physical nature.9 A rational agent who has mastered the means for producing certain sounds can therefore have a relatively free hand in their creation and organization. Sound, however, may just be noise, whose vibrations have no identifiable order, but assault our hearing with an inchoate mass of distinct frequencies, distinct intensities, and distinct durations which defy any discriminating appreciation. The “disorder” of noise reflects the character of the impulses from which vibrations emanate, as well as the physical material and configuration of what vibrates. For this very reason, it is possible to “purify” the impulse producing vibrations and the material that resounds to allow the resulting sound to have a predominating frequency, whose pitch can be recognized by a rational animal with a suitably discerning auditory apparatus. The hearing of pitch will itself be  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 910–911.

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contingent upon the biologically determined range of frequency and frequency intervals that a specific rational animal can hear and discriminate. Whatever be that range and acuity, once sound has been purified into distinct pitches, it can be ordered into specific tonal intervals, producing perceivable harmonic relationships of consonance and dissonance. Once more, the ability to hear intervals and identify their distinct range depends upon the biological auditory endowment of the rational animal in question. The external determinability of sound allows for completely conventional orderings of intervals, but the physical nature of sound plays an enabling role. Once an instrument for making sounds has itself been crafted to produce determinate pitches rather than noise, halving the length of the vibrating element of the instrument, be it a string or a column of air, will produce a pitch at twice the frequency of the original tone. Other divisions of the vibrating element will produce variations of frequency that are also mathematically simple and easily recognizable by an appropriately endowed rational animal. Moreover, the mathematical relation of the different frequencies of tones will determine which will reinforce their respective vibrations with a resounding consonance and which will produce wave interferences that make them dissonant. Through such interval relationships, sounds can be ordered in octaves, which terminate in a frequency double that of the octave starting point. These octaves can then frame different scales, dividing the octave in a series of tones with similar and/or varying intervals. From these scales different keys can follow, each initiating an octave of its own on the successive notes of the scale, provided, of course, that the intervals in question are appropriately regularized or “tempered”. In addition, the frequencies that accompany the predominating pitch, that is, its overtones, may themselves be subject to a purification that allows the sound to have a distinct, identifiable timbre, which different properly crafted types of musical instruments can reliably possess in common. Then the alternation and combination of different timbres can be added to the orderings of pitch to enhance the range of sound manipulation at the disposal of music makers. Moreover, the intensity of sounds can be regularized so that they have a distinct range of “dynamics”. These sound dynamics can be reproduced

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by properly trained voices and appropriately designed instruments, specified by composers in their compositions, and recognized by rational animals, provided their hearing can register those variations of volume. Finally, the duration of sounds can also be ordered so that sounds can be produced in determinate rhythmic organizations that capable instruments and performers can produce. All of these possibilities, all grounded in the external determinability of sound, allow music to create an artificially purified and differentiated soundscape, sufficiently endowed to transform sound into a medium of fine art. In this regard Max Weber speaks of the “rationalization” of sound reflecting two coordinate features of music.10 On the one hand, music can modify sound for the purposes of artistic expression. On the other hand these modifications are not simply arbitrary, although they have a non-natural, conventional character. Modifications can be “rational” to the extent that they endow music makers with the sonic resources to mobilize sound as a medium for expressing individually configured meanings as fundamental as those provided by any other fine art. As Weber points out, the “rationalization” of sound operates on three fronts. First, it involves the “purified” regularization of pitch, pitch intervals, timbre, dynamics, and duration, providing music makers with an artificial soundscape adequate for artistic expression. Second, it involves the creation of musical instruments, including sufficiently trained voices, that can produce that artificial soundscape in a reliable fashion. Third, it involves the establishment of a musical notation that can capture all these aspects of the musical transfiguration of sound and allow musical composition to be registered, both as an aid to composition itself, and as a vehicle for future performance.11

 See Weber, Max, Die rationale und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr {Paul Siebeck}, 1972), pp. 9, 27. 11  Weber, Die rationale und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, pp. 27, 53, 55, 59, 62, 67. 10

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 ow Music Unites Fundamental Meaning H with the Configuration of Sound Hegel provides an important contribution to understanding how all the preceding aspects of the artificial soundscape of music both circumscribe the content that music can express and enable the artistic shaping of sound to achieve the unity of form and significant meaning in which aesthetic value resides. He does so first in the course of contrasting the visual arts with music in regard to the temporal, non-spatial character of its sound medium. Architecture, sculpture, and graphic art all convey the content worthy of artistic expression through the fixed visual image they furnish in producing persisting external material objects, be they three-dimensional constructions or two-dimensional surfaces. Architecture provides an abiding spatial enclosure for essential sacred and secular activity, sculpture shapes a figurative plastic embodiment of the human spirit in divine or mortal guise, and representational painting projects an illusion of light and space in which the whole situation of meaningful activity can be pictured in a frozen moment of the painting’s virtual spatial projection. In all these cases, the visual arts depend upon the enduring spatial configurations they create to express something essential to humanity’s outer and inner life. The sound world of music, by contrast, consists in an evanescent series of tones, whose every moment is instantaneously replaced by another, leaving nothing behind but the concluded passage of the entire piece, which must be played again to spring back to life as an actual sonic phenomenon rather than as a recollection of a former listener. The work of music has an objective composition, in whose totality sounds are organized in a temporal process in which rhythms, dynamics, harmonies, and melodic development unfold. Yet the work is never present as a whole at any moment, nor abides as a self-reposing object when it arrives at its end. None of its elements stand in any essential spatial relationship, as extended entities outside one another. Rather, every note, every beat, every accent, and every interval occur in fleeting simultaneity or in

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succession, leaving nothing afterwards to face the listener.12 What sounds at any moment does not by itself possess any rhythmic, dynamic, harmonic, or melodic musical meaning. The sound rather bears all of these essential musical features in virtue of its relation to what precedes and follows in the total composition.13 The listener can only apprehend each of these aspects of music’s artificial soundscape by engaging in a complex psychological synthetic activity drawing upon what has already been heard and anticipating what is to come.14 The rhythm of notes can be heard only in experiencing their successive temporal durations and contrasting accents. The dynamic character of notes is equally perceivable only by hearing them in comparison to the intensity of those that precede them and in view of what is likely to follow. So, too, the harmonic identity of notes, even when some are heard simultaneously, is comprehensible only by experiencing the succession of interval changes, just as any melody, let alone any melodic development, can only be experienced by keeping in mind what notes have preceded any moment in the piece and what further sequence is expected. The forward-looking experience of hearing rhythm, dynamics, harmonies, and melodic themes may, of course, involve false anticipations. This is especially the case since a musical composition, as a genuine work of art, cannot be completely formulaic and predictable. The “surprise” that inevitably erupts in a work of music is inherent in musical experience and a  Theodor Adorno accordingly contrasts music with painting, writing that “All painting – even abstract – has its pathos in that which is; all music purports a becoming.” See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. by Anne G.  Mitchell and Wesley V.  Blomster (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 191. 13  In this connection Hartmann explains that in genuine “musical” hearing, a composition “is apprehended as interconnected, as a whole …. as a coexistence of its parts – not as parts that are temporally simultaneous, but as belonging to each other as a unity. This unity … is not produced in sensible hearing, but rather only in the execution of a synthetic act that must occur in musical hearing… it is … only the whole in the unity of its succession that constitutes the musical organization of the movement’s tones. Only out of this whole do the details built into it – the elements that can be sensibly heard together – acquire meaning. … It is just this that constitutes an objectively structured interconnection of elements, a construct in which every detail refers forward and backward from itself, and these references are apprehended, of course unreflectively, but with complete clarity.” Only thereby “do we understand the work musically.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, pp. 125–127. 14  For this reason, as Hartmann writes, “music itself – a “piece”, a composition, a “movement” – is not simply what is sensibly audible, for above and beyond that there is the “musically audible” that requires a synthesis by the consciousness that receives it, one that is quite different from what can be produced in a purely acoustical perception.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 125. 12

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constitutive element in its expressive power.15 This is why sounds obtain their identity as the beginning, middle, and end of a musical composition only in the objective unfolding of their temporal succession and in the corresponding subjective syntheses by which the structure of music can be appreciated. Literature and performing arts with speech share in this temporal becoming that is both objective and subjective in character, but they possess the representational capacities of words that music lacks. A wordless performing art, like non-narrative dance, may depict nothing but the sheer play of its three-dimensional forms as they develop in time, but unlike pure music, pure dance always operates with the self-reposing presence of its living kinetic sculptures. The dynamic temporal sound world of music is free of any residue of spatial externality or discursive description. The soundscape of music therefore has three basic features that, as Nicolai Hartmann points out, render it homogenous with the soul. First, music’s sound world and the inner emotional life are non-spatial, although both have enabling material embodiments, vibrating bodies and the animal organism, respectively. Secondly, both music and the soul are in temporal flux, without which silence and mindlessness prevail. Thirdly, both music and the emotive soul are pervaded by non-verbal oppositions, where tension and release, excitation and relaxation alternate.16 Thanks to these congruities and how the sound world of music reveals itself only through an active listening, Hegel can identify music’s distinguishing character as “the art of the soul that is directly addressed to the soul”.17 The wordless sound of music can only express in its temporal dynamic unfolding the inward contents of mind for which words are inadequate and do so in a way that is manifest only within the mind of its listeners, whose internal recollective and anticipatory imaginative  As Hartmann notes, “A musical work requires the listener to anticipate and to recall, and, in every stage of his hearing of it, to have an expectation of what is coming, to anticipate the specific development that the music requires. That is true even when the actual development of a piece reveals itself as a different one than expected. For the resolution of tension aroused by music can be different from the one expected, and the exploitation of unexpected (innovative) musical possibilities is an essential element of surprise and enrichment.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 127. 16  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 219. 17  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 891. 15

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activity is co-constitutive of the composition’s being for its audience. As Hegel notes, music thereby does not so much make the objective world resound, but rather gives expression to how our inward self is moved by the matters of fundamental importance that concern any rational animal.18 This involves sonically expressing feelings, as well as imparting feelings in moving listeners in their psycho-physical being. Not any feelings, however, can satisfy the requirements of artistic expression. Genuine musical feeling cannot just express our brute animal passions or purely superfluous desires. Music may titillate and entertain, but it cannot achieve artistic worth if it expresses nothing but sensuous desire and gratification. The shrieks of animals may allow such feelings to be expressed, but music must deal with feelings that are distinctly human in the broad sense of those passions with which our souls are moved in response to concerns of universal value.19 For any art, the contents worthy and able to be imaginatively configured revolve around the fundamental issues of religious and ethical life. What music can therefore duly express is how our feeling mind reacts to these concerns of inherent significance. The feelings in question are therefore emotions, practical feelings, that consist in how we are inwardly moved by conditions confronting us with respect to the fulfillment of ends that truly matter. Hegel emphasizes that the wordless, nonspatial, temporal sonic element of music is only fit for expressing the “object-free inner life, abstract subjectivity as such … our entirely empty self, the self-without any further content”.20 Nonetheless, it would be wrong to consider the subjective life at issue to be utterly divorced from the fundamental entanglements of the human condition. When Hegel tells us that the “chief task of music consists in making resound not the objective world itself, but, on the contrary, the manner in which the inmost self is moved to the depths of its personality and conscious soul,”21 he is effectively acknowledging that  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 891.  As Hegel notes, “purely natural expression in the form of interjections is still not music … music must bring feelings into specific tone-relationships depriving the natural expression of its wildness and crude deliverance and mitigate it.” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 903.) 20  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 891. 21  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 891. 18 19

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the inner life revealed in music is something of substantial universal significance. For this reason, we cannot accept the formal, completely worldless, ultimately solipsistic reduction of music to, as Kant maintains, “a beautiful play of feelings”.22 Instead, we must tackle the challenge of understanding how music can give expression to fundamental concerns of humanity. Georg Lukács helps us to understand how this can be so in describing musical expression as a double mimesis, in which the musical soundscape represents the emotions that themselves subjectively reflect our engagement with the objective predicaments of our human condition.23 Artistic expression can never be merely mimetic, but always involves a transfiguration of content in which the individuality and creative originality of the work of art can exhibit itself. The “double mimesis” to which Lukács refers contributes to our understanding of musical expression so long as we regard each “mimetic” aspect as involving not a rote mirroring of what is, but an artistic reimagining in individual configurations whose every detail is connected to the significance of the whole. Lukács adds one further important qualification to music’s “double mimesis” that helps us build upon Hegel’s account: musical expression in and of itself can only convey an “undetermined” objectivity.24 This “undetermined” objectivity follows necessarily from how music’s mimesis of a mimesis is a tonal expression of how the soul is moved by objective concerns, confined to using the homogenous material of sound, which lacks both discursive and spatial determination. All given objects, all given relationships, and all other aspects of objective actuality are transmuted into the sonic medium of music via how they affect the emotional inwardness of individuals. This transfiguration leaves their objectivity undetermined in that their specific character cannot be directly conveyed by the music that reflects their impact upon the inner self. Nonetheless, in so

 Lukács quotes this remark, citing sections 16 and 51 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 335. 23  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, pp. 345–346. 24  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, pp. 359. 22

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doing music expresses human inwardness in a purified world of its own, whose every movement is inherent in its artificial soundscape. The totality of musical creation carries with it an internal compositional necessity that allows for there to be talk of the “truth” and “untruth” of music, just as one can speak of the “truth” or “falsity” of any work of fine art with respect to its achievement of an exemplary thoroughgoing unity of configuration and meaning. As Hartmann observes, music has a “truth” of its own to the extent that it unfolds with an integrity of form, where every detail of the composition follows from the autonomy of its own musical development. This very autonomy allows the music to both express and move the soul in a truthful manner, insofar as it achieves congruence with the autonomy fundamental to the identity of the emotive self. When instead, a musical composition lacks immanent cohesion and proceeds with arbitrary or formulaic routine, it lacks musical truth and fails to express the actual selfhood of the emotive life. It instead resounds with a travesty of inward life, either disjointed or predictable, and leaves its listeners unmoved.25 A genuine integral musical reality can produce a catharsis in its listeners insofar as they hear a sonic totality expressing what is essential to their inner life in contrast to the contingent given passions of ordinary experience.26 Music thereby makes our deepest emotional inner life intelligible to itself and moves us in so doing.27 To fully comprehend how music achieves its aesthetic effect, we must grasp what the nonverbal, non-spatial, temporal process of music must do to render in sound the “indeterminately objective double mimesis” that expresses the significant emotional life of rational animals. Hegel supplies much of what is needed in exploring how the passions of our souls are congruently conveyed by the musical purification and ordering of rhythm, dynamics, harmony, and melodic development. The key that Hegel provides is an explanation of how these aspects of music exhibit the universal, particular, and individual dimensions of the emotive self.

 Hartmann, Aesthetics, pp. 338–339.  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, pp. 377–378. 27  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 903. 25 26

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The Role of Rhythm in Musical Expression The rhythmic organization of musical sounds provides the most elementary, basic expression of inward subjectivity. As Hegel points out, an unordered, random temporal succession of noises provides nothing that can reflect the unity of the self, nor any movements that can exhibit the life of a self.28 The purified notes of music, however, can present an enduring unity that persists through sonic change when music’s tones have durations that fall within a recurring mathematically ordered temporal pattern that is recognizable by the listener. Music structures its temporal flow in a persisting unity integrating each tone to the extent that it has a recurring beat, dividing the succession of note durations into recurring measures or bars made recognizable by some audible pulse or accentuation. This audible rhythmic pattern underlies all the other movements of the musical soundscape, including changes in dynamics, tonal intervals, harmonic cadences, and melodic development. The notes need not, and indeed, should not mechanically fall on beat, but can deviate through syncopation and moments of sonic “rest”. Furthermore, although each measure will have a certain accented count of its own, music may interpolate measures with different meters, as in classical Indian music, jazz pieces of Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk, and works of Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky. Moreover, different rhythms can be played simultaneously to produce a polyrhythmic texture, as practiced in classical Indian percussion, West African traditional music, and Afro-American music in the different syncretic musical traditions emerging in the New World. Whatever be a composition’s rhythmic organization, it will have musical integrity to the degree that it forges a temporal framework with an enduring recognizable unity that persists through change. Such a persisting, yet dynamic order fits the emotional process of the self, Hegel observes, because it involves the recognizable integration of all the music’s changing temporal sonic content into an underlying, self-identical framework.29 To hear this rhythmic “selfhood” the rational animal must be able  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 914.  As Hegel writes, here “different divisions of time are bound together into a unity in which the self makes itself aware of its self-identity”. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 915. 28 29

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to engage in the synthetic activity of keeping in mind the sound durations that have gone by and recognizing the temporal organization that rhythmically connects them with the successive duration of every sound to come until the piece arrives at its conclusion. This complex recognition of the temporal structure of tones can be lacking in some human beings, such as Che Guevara, who was famously rhythmically deaf, as well as tone deaf.30 The audience of music, however, must have this basic competency to be properly moved by the underlying rhythmic process of its artificial soundscape. Hegel associates the measured pattern of musical rhythm with the characteristic unity of a self, which exhibits the universality of being self-­ identical in all the particularizations of its mental flow.31 In so doing, Hegel anticipates the thought experiment of P.  F. Strawson, who, in Individuals,32 explores how an “auditory world” could provide a recognizable unity of selfhood, provided the succession of sound always involves a recurring reference tone to maintain an enduring identity in all the flux of its temporal process. Whereas Strawson is concerned with providing an explanation of how self-consciousness can be constituted, Hegel hardly considers the experience of musical rhythm to be constitutive of self-awareness. Che Guevara could be self-conscious and rhythmically deaf because hearers of music must already be self-aware in order to distinguish themselves from the work of art that music comprises, as well as from the composer, musicians, and other listeners. Nonetheless, the encompassing temporal unity of rhythm does confront the listener with a minimal soulful sound experience because of its recurring beat. Unlike any other primates, virtually all healthy humans, save those who are rhythmically deaf, find themselves moved by and moving with the beat of music.33 Yet this psycho-physical experience is just the beginning of how sound becomes transformed into music and listening  Sacks, Oliver, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 99.  As Hegel puts it, “in this uniformity self-consciousness finds itself again as a unity, because for one thing it recognizes its own equality as the ordering an arbitrary manifold” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 915). 32  Strawson, P.  F., Individuals: An Essay In Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 1959), pp. 59–86. 33  Sacks, Musicophilia, p. 242. 30 31

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becomes an appreciation of fine art. Although both Plato and Aristotle associate different rhythms with different types of character,34 the very mathematical regularity of rhythm involves too abstract a unity to do justice to the concrete strivings and conflicts reflected in the emotions of individual human personality. The rhythm of notes is at best the formal scaffold on which music plays itself out. As Hegel recognizes, the relations of pitch between notes, as supervening upon rhythm, enable music to express a far less abstract and impoverished inwardness than beat alone can reveal.

 hat Tonal Relations Contribute W to Musical Art The ordering of discrete notes in different tonal relations, superimposed and integrated with rhythmic organization, provides music a rich palette with which to mold sound into a fit vehicle for expressing the movements of significant emotion in an artistic whole. As we have seen, this further soundscape creation is bounded by physio-psychological limitations of the hearing of rational animals and the physical ordering of sound itself. At this time on our lonely planet, we humans comprise the audience for music. At our youthful physiological peak, our ears can hear sound frequencies between twelve and thirty thousand vibrations per second, which extends to ten octaves. Within that range, we can discriminate 1400 pitches, with the average human able to distinguish tones that are separated by one seventeenth of a whole tone on our modern Western scale.35 The physical nature of sound, for its part, relates pitch frequency to the length of the vibrating body producing tone intervals according to simple mathematical proportions that the human ear can readily recognize. The simplest of all is the octave, which begins with a tone whose frequency is half that of its end, which is produced by halving the length  See Plato, Republic, Book III, 399a-d, Complete Works, pp. 1036–1037; Book III, 400d-401a, Complete Works, pp. 1037–1038, and Aristotle, Politics, Book VIII, 1340a19–23, 1340b8–9, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, p. 2126. 35  Sacks, Musicophilia, p. 132. 34

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of the vibrating body (be it a string or column of air) that resounds with it. The beginning of each octave is recognizably similar with that of the octaves below and above it. Consequently, if each octave is divided into the same number of tones with proportionally equal intervals, the musical space gets organized into scales that ascend or descend into further scales in which the same notes (e.g. C, D, E, F, G, A, and B in our modern Western octave) are recognizable in higher or lower registers. The octave and other simple proportionally equivalent intervals, such as “fourths” and “fifths” with frequency ratios of 3:4 and 2:3 respectively, are given by the physical nature of sound.36 So, too, the distance between audible pitches is limited by the physiological acuity of our hearing. Nevertheless, it is a matter of convention how each octave and each scale are divided. Our modern Western musical canon has come to divide the scale into twelve “chromatic” “half-tone” intervals, which themselves have been organized into several scales in which whole and half-tone intervals alternate in terms of seven different notes (C, D, E, F, G, A, and B). Most commonly, so-called major and minor scales are employed, although other scales (so-called modes) with a different assortment of whole and half-note intervals have been used in both ancient Greek and modern music. In the major scale, the first three notes are separated by a whole tone interval, the third and fourth are separated by a half tone, the fifth, sixth, and seventh are separated by a whole tone, and the seventh note is separated from the beginning of the next octave by a halftone. In the ascent of the minor scale, the first two notes are separated by a whole tone, the second and third are separated by a half tone, the third, fourth, and fifth are separated by a whole tone, the fifth and sixth are separated by a half tone, and the sixth and seventh are one and a half tones apart, and the seventh tone is a halftone lower than the octave termination. These differences in note intervals have consequences for harmonic and melodic development that are absent when all scale intervals are equivalent, as in the purely chromatic scale that modern “twelve tone” music adopts. In particular, the difference in scale intervals allows notes to have different harmonic meanings in different keys, enabling them to serve as pivots for modulations from one key to another. Other musical traditions 36

 Weber, Die rationale und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik, p. 5.

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have used smaller intervals, so-called microtones, which have been carried over into the “blue notes” of Afro-American music, while others have used so-called pentatonic scales composed entirely of whole tones. And we don’t have to listen in to a Star Wars café to imagine how rational animals on worlds elsewhere in the Milky Way or in galaxies far farther away may create music with different tone intervals and different scales and keys, partly reflecting different ranges and acuity of hearing. Whatever be the actual embodiments of all these tonal determinations, they endow music with factors crucial for its aesthetic expression. As Hegel recognizes, the organization of tones in octaves and scales with identifiable pitches at similarly proportional intervals creates a soundscape whose tone intervals possess recurring quantitative unities analogous to the temporal unities of rhythm.37 Just as rhythms can be added upon one another to create a polyrhythmic texture, so tone intervals can occur simultaneously and in succession. In other words, a plurality of different tones can be played at the same moment in chords, just as different tone intervals can be presented in succession as an arpeggio. Moreover, once instruments have been developed to produce reliably equivalent pitches, the sonic domain of qualitatively different timbres becomes available to music makers, given how different instruments, including different human voices, produce the same pitch with distinct overtones. Then, a plurality of instruments, both similar and different, can simultaneously play in unison or play different tones, which may or may not be the same note in a different octave, and do so with a distinct sonic character. All these possible arrangements of different musical instruments thereby provide a growing arsenal of expressive resources. As Hegel notes, different instruments, thanks to their distinct timbres, can be used, “as in the symphonies of Mozart, … as a dramatic concert, a sort of dialogue in which the character of one sort of instrument proceeds to the point where the character of others is indicated and prepared”.38 Such interaction of musical voices is hardly limited to Western Classical music. We find it in the musical dialogues of sitar, santoor, and tabla in Classical

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, p. 923.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 923.

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Indian music, as well as in the call and response of different instruments in much jazz ensemble improvisation. What gives the musical arrangement of tones a qualitatively different unity than rhythm is not just the utilization of physically distinct timbres. Music gives itself a much richer unity through the tonal relation of notes to one another. These relationships endow the artificial soundscape of music with a new expressive profundity because tonal intervals involve relations of consonance and dissonance comprising a system of harmony. Hegel observes that “notes that harmonize directly and whose difference in sound is not perceptible as an opposition are those in which the numerical relation of their vibrations is of the simplest kind, whereas those that do not harmonize naturally have more complex proportions.”39 Although this may reflect how the consonance or dissonance of tonal relations is connected to the physical wave interference patterns of sound frequencies,40 musical convention plays a significant role in determining how consonance and dissonance are distinguished.41 The history of the Western musical tradition exhibits this conventional aspect of the consonance/dissonance divide.42 As Charles Rosen notes, only since the fourteenth century have thirds and sixths been consonant, whereas fourths have become dissonant only since the Renaissance. Decisive for how consonance and dissonance are distinguished is how harmony determines “the movement from tension to resolution” and thereby governs what tonal intervals operate in the prevailing musical grammar as

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 925.  Hegel observes that “notes that harmonize directly and whose difference in sound is not perceptible as an opposition are those in which the numerical relation of their vibrations is of the simplest kind” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 925). 41  As Charles Rosen writes, “Harmony is not a natural attribute of sound but a way of giving significance to sound.” (Rosen, Charles, Arnold Schoenberg {New York: Viking Press, 1975}, p. 25) Still, “Harmony is of course based on some of the natural acoustic attributes of sound, but they are carefully selected, some musical systems leaving out – or even deforming – attributes basic to others.” See Rosen, Charles, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking Press, 1975), footnote 2, p. 25. 42  As further evidence of the conventional aspect of dissonance and consonance, Adorno observes “that the trained ear is able to perceive harmonically the most complicated overtone relationships as well as less complex relationships. The listener, thereby, feels no particular urgency for a “resolution” of the alleged dissonances, but rather spontaneously resists resolutions as a retrogression into less sophisticated modes of listening.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 33. 39 40

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dissonances.43 A consonant interval generally is one on which music may begin or end, whereas a dissonant interval is one that calls for “resolution”, requiring a transition to a consonant interval.44 Musical cadences consist in these interval transitions and they ordinarily play their roles as resolutions of dissonance that bring a movement or an entire composition to its end. The contrast between consonance and dissonance is essential for music to convey changing passions, since if music remains completely consonant, there is no tension, no striving, no conflict that needs to be overcome. The same stasis prevails when music embraces a pervasive dissonance without any transitions to and from consonance. In that case, the enrichment of harmonic dynamics is equally annulled. Accordingly, a harmonic system that presents the rules for what tone intervals are consonant and dissonant and what cadences provide resolution, entails a certain symmetry in musical organization, where a musical composition will begin with a consonance calling for disruption by dissonance and end with a resolution of dissonance into consonance. In this way, harmony allows a piece of music to have a beginning, middle, and end that is determined in a purely musical way inherent in the governing principles of composition. The abstract unities of rhythm by themselves provide no basis for such concrete musical organization, which is why rhythm alone cannot suffice as music. The recurring beat of rhythm may reflect the abstract unity of self-­ consciousness, but only the harmonic development of musical tension and its resolution can give music the means to express the fundamental emotions that arise in the conflict between right and wrong or between faith and its violation. As Hegel writes, “if music is to express artistically both the inner meaning and the subjective feeling of the deepest things, … it must possess in the sphere of its notes the means capable of representing the battle of opposites”, for there “is only genuine subjectivity if it enters into this opposition and overcomes and dissolves it”.45 Music gains these means in the harmonic opposition and resolution of consonance  Rosen, Charles, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 24.  As Charles Rosen observes, “It is precisely this effect of ending, this cadential function, that defines a consonance” (Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 24). 45  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 928. 43 44

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and dissonance. Although Hegel specifically invokes the “dissonant chords of the seventh and ninth” which “keep opposites, even in this form of contradiction, within one and the same unity” by containing tonic triads as well,46 the possibility of other harmonic systems with different scale intervals leaves open what specific chords and chord sequences will embody the dynamic unity of concrete subjectivity. Whatever form it takes, the musical realization of harmony, like the musical realization of rhythm, does not reside in any single moment of music, but rather in the total sequential process of its unfolding. The hearing of harmony, like that of rhythm, resides in an ongoing subjective synthesis by the hearer, who can only comprehend harmonic relations by keeping in mind the tone intervals that have preceded what is presently resounding, while anticipating what is to come. Only then will the listener comprehend what scale and key the notes belong to, as well as what is consonant and dissonant to them. The hearing of musical harmony depends first on an ability to recognize different tone intervals of pitches. This may be associated with perfect or “absolute” pitch, where an individual can identify the precise notes of intervals, but it only requires “relative” pitch, where a listener can distinguish the different intervals themselves, without necessarily knowing each note they contain. Absolute pitch is notably associated with early blindness, as well as with speakers of tone languages such as Chinese. As Oliver Sacks reports, some studies attribute absolute pitch to half of all people who become blind early in life, whereas 60% of Chinese music students have absolute pitch compared to only about 14% of US non-­ tone language speakers.47 Although tone deafness or the lack of either absolute or relative pitch recognition “afflicts perhaps five per cent of the population”,48 an inability to hear harmony and distinguish consonance from dissonance afflicts a larger group who cannot carry out the syntheses of past and present pitch sensations on which perception of harmonic relations depend. To hear the differences in timbre that accompany pitch and tone intervals, thereby distinguishing the sound of one type of  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 928.  Sacks, Musicophilia, pp. 126–127. 48  Sacks, Musicophilia, p. 100. 46 47

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i­nstrument from another, listeners must further be able to execute the auditory syntheses that do for hearing what the visual syntheses do in enabling viewers to recognize color constancy under different light conditions.49 In addition, if listeners have not been acclimated to the harmonic system that governs a piece of music, they will have difficulty perceiving on first hearing the harmonic transitions that rule its structure. Musical pioneers will thus be met with incomprehension until their innovations in harmonic structure become second nature to their audience. All the basic psychological and cultural endowments on which hearing pitch and tone interval depend indicate how harmony adds to music a far more concrete unity than that entailed in rhythmic organization. The mathematical constancy of beat may convey the formal self-identity of self-consciousness, but the dynamic transitions and compositional symmetries of harmonic process convey a more material self-identity, in which the significant turmoil of emotional life can be reflected.

Melodic Development and Musical Form Hegel is aware of these enrichments in the conveyance of inwardness that harmony adds, but he also recognizes that the rules of harmony do not yet provide the full individualization of musical structure on which music’s “non-objective mimesis of mimesis” ultimately rests. Harmony may add the parameters in which the dynamics of inward striving can be musically embodied, but only melodic development can unite the totality of musical expression in an individual creation congruent with the individuality of the emotive self. As Hegel notes, music’s unfolding of melody incorporates rhythm and harmony into a musical whole in which every moment should exhibit the general features of rhythm, harmonic, and melodic development, while fitting into a unique musically coherent composition that no formula can exhaustively determine. In so doing, melodic development provides, as Hegel puts it, the “first genuinely free  Sacks, Musicophilia, p. 107.

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development and unification of the notes”,50 giving music composition the independently determined totality that pervades all its elements and holds them together. The melodic development of music is not simply a statement of a melody, nor can music achieve its proper expressive potential by so limiting itself. As Hegel points out, a melody by itself may express a particular feeling, but music only captures the life of the emotive self by expressing the vicissitudes of feeling in the oppositions and resolutions of passion.51 This requires a richer musical soundscape in which melody is modified and contrasted in a thematic unfolding that mobilizes all of music’s expressive arsenal. In providing music with its fully concrete structure, melodic development brings with it a further differentiation of musical forms. Music can develop one melodic theme with its own independent harmonic and rhythmic character, develop different melodic themes in succession with different harmonic and rhythmic contrasts, or weave together independent melodic themes simultaneously in a polyphonic tapestry, with varying progressions of harmony.52 Each melodic theme can be played with varying dynamics and varying instrumentation. Since each melody contains rhythmic and harmonic relations, these can be altered while retaining some recognizable thematic identity. Themes can be presented in major and minor modes, as well as in modulations to other keys. Themes can be inverted and played backwards as well as forwards. Music can present a melody with no further development or repeat a melody with or without alterations in dynamics or instrumentation. In these cases, the contrasts on which musical expression relies are restricted to what is contained in its rhythmic, harmonic, and timbre relations. Music flexes its creative muscles more fully when melody is modified and contrasted in richer, more complex musical forms. Composition can take the form of theme and variations, where a melody is presented in an initial statement and then modified in any variety of ways before  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 929.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 940. 52  Hegel describes these options of melodic development in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 932. 50 51

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achieving some sort of closure by a return to some semblance of its original form. Polyphonic compositions can develop a plurality of independent melodic statements, starting with the simple form of a canon, where a theme is accompanied after some interval by a restatement of the same theme. Fugue can take this simultaneous development of polyphonic melodic theme to a more complicated configuration, in which intervening episodes lead to a concluding return of the initial contrapuntal themes. Alternately, musical composition can take the rondo form, beginning with a theme that is interpolated between one or more contrasting themes, before concluding with a reiteration of the original theme, which can be schematically represented as A-B-A, A-B-A-C-A, A-B-A-C-A-B-A, etc. The classical sonata form brings further expressive breadth to the handling of contrasting melodic themes. A sonata form movement begins with the statement of a theme, then introduces an opposing theme in a different key, varies them both in a development section, then restates the first theme and the second theme, both in the original key, before concluding with a coda. In this way, the sonata form unfolds a musical conflict that achieves resolution. In all these forms, the musical composition embodies a governing symmetry that enables it to a achieve a closure by which a sufficiently dynamic development comes to some recognizable resolution. Every form of thematic melodic organization can be implemented in written compositions provided sufficient musical notation is available, in improvisations by sufficiently imaginative virtuosos, and in combinations where written works leave room for improvisation in designated intervals, such as the cadenzas of concertos. What is crucial for the artistic creation of music is that these forms of melodic development allow for sufficient dynamic interplay of thematic contrasts and resolutions to express an individual’s significant emotional inner life and elicit such emotions in the listener. This is achieved when music attains a self-generated totality, where it proceeds from a definite beginning to arrive at an end that returns to its commencement through a middle that mediates start and finish by fostering and resolving oppositions that it produces within its unfolding. As Hegel acknowledges, such dynamic musical development is fit for eliciting a meaningful emotional catharsis, for “only as this movement, which

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never runs into vagueness but is articulated in itself and returns into itself, does melody correspond to that free self-subsistence of the subjective life which it is its task to express.”53 If instead a musical composition lacks the self-developing internal shaping, whereby its thematic organization captures every detail of its dynamic movement, the musical totality cannot be experienced as such. Listeners are left unable to feel any inward connectivity. They experience the piece “as insipid and without character”, as lacking “the unity of an inner form” that makes a work a genuine musical creation.54 Given the contribution of musical form to musical significance, does musical expertise make possible an aesthetic experience different from that of a musical “layperson” who may be acquainted with the musical language of a piece, but lack technical knowledge of how its harmonic and thematic development is structured? The musical dilettante will be receptive to the emotional impact of the music, but blind to “the inner musical relations and the artistic use of harmonies and melodious interacting and changing forms” of which the musical expert will be familiar.55 Do these different apprehensions, however, limit the perception of musical beauty, and, conversely, will performers without expertise in music theory and composition be less capable of bringing a piece to genuine life? If, as Hegel points out, the implicit musical architecture of the work be made predominant in playing and listening, the music will be stripped of the imagination and emotion, for whose expression and reception no expertise is needed.56 This is why, Hegel notes, musical prodigies, with little in the way of formal training, can compose and perform masterly at “the most tender age”, while “very talented composers” and performers “frequently remain the most ignorant and empty-headed of men.”57 To be aesthetically successful, the structure of a composition must elicit profound emotion, without separately intruding on the musical experience.

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 933.  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 129. 55  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 954. 56  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 954. 57  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 954. 53 54

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The Artistry of Musical Performance The creation of music can be at one with its performance when musicians improvise on the spot or make “electronic music” that has no antecedent written composition. In these cases the act of composition is performance and the performance is a completely free exercise of musical creativity. Here, the same individual or individuals both imagine and execute the work of art completely, as in sculpture and painting. Alternately, the creation of music may occur in the writing of a musical composition, which may then be performed at any subsequent time. This situation may seem analogous to that of architects who need numerous artisans to build their design. As Hegel points out, however, there is a fundamental difference between architects and composers of written music. Although such composers also depend upon others to bring their work to living actuality, the performers who do so are not merely craftsmen, but musical fine artists.58 A more appropriate analogy seems to hold between the writers of drama and composers of written music, since the live performance of a play is executed by dramatic actors who are no more mere craftsman than musicians. There is a significant difference, however, between written music and written drama in regard to their audience. The play has an aesthetic reality as a piece of literature that can be enjoyed by a reading public independently of any stage performances. By contrast, a piece of written music is not musically accessible to a broad audience unless it is subsequently performed by musicians. This is true whether the performance is available to the public live or through some recording media. Admittedly, some phenomenally gifted composers may be able to compose music without ever hearing it played along the process of composition, just as they and other exceptional musicians may be able to read a musical score and hear it in full in their imagination. The rest of us must rely upon subsequent performance to listen to a written musical

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 936.

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composition.59 Nonetheless, everyone, including the Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, and Shostakovich’s among us, can savor the musical art of the performers of written music, which makes an aesthetic contribution of its own. In addition, there is a fundamental difference in how the vital presence of the actor and musical performer operate in bringing a play and a musical composition to life. In drama, as Hegel notes, “the whole man comes on the stage, fully alive, and is himself made into an animated work of art”.60 Although the musical performer also comes forth in full person in a live performance, the musician is not representing any characters, as do dramatic actors. The musical performer is instead an interpreter of an acoustical reality.61 Consequently, what is essential to the musical actuality of the performance is not the visual appearance of the performer, nor whatever incidental expressions and utterances the performer makes (such as Glenn Gould’s or André Watts’ almost continual mutterings during their piano playing), nor even the visual cues given by a conductor. Rather, what counts is the auditory presentation of the music itself.62 This is why a recording or broadcast of a live performance can bring the music to full actualization without including any visual presentation. The aesthetic contribution of the performer of written music is admittedly circumscribed. Unlike improvising musicians, performers of written music are limited to bringing to hearing a composition that is antecedently created. Although they therefore do not have full responsibility for what they perform, their performance of a written work is more than the mechanical reproduction with which a player piano brings a piano roll to life. This is because a musical composition can never  As Hartmann explains, whereas “any one can “read” a play, and, if a person has a little imagination, he can “see” the piece inwardly. To “read” a piece of music is quite different; it requires a specialist’s professional training and a great deal of practice. Ordinarily an amateur musician can “play” the music before he can “read” it without playing it.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 130. 60  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 955. 61  As Hartmann writes, “The musician has received from him [the composer] a work that is shaped only in part (still in a relatively general way) and he completes the process…. He does not proceed through the medium of his own person, but through the instrument. For he is not, like the actor, “representing” characters, but is the interpreter of music.” See Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 131. 62  As Hartmann observes, “this is true even where the “visible” energies in movements of the musicians who execute the piece or even those of the conductor make an essential contribution in our understanding of the music.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 130. 59

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exhaustively determine how it should sound. Tempos, dynamics, rhythmic emphases, phrasing, and the articulation of harmonic transitions and melodic developments are all inevitably subject to interpretation by the performer. Consequently, the musician exercises a supplemental independent creativity in bringing to an individual realization all these aspects of the written composition. It is here that the unique genius of the performing musician shows itself. The musical performer navigates between two extremes. One consists in a rote immersion in the given composition, where performance seeks to render as little as possible beyond what the written work dictates. The other pole amounts to drawing as much as possible from the performer’s own genius, largely transcending the composition as its composer has left it.63 In either case, performers cannot fail to take initiatives of their own in determining tempo, dynamics, phrasing, and structural emphases, simply because the written composition leaves these in some respect undetermined. In this respect, musical performance can never, properly speaking, be mechanical. On the other hand, for the performance to be a performance of a given piece, it must limit its interpretive license to a shaping of the notes that the composer has inscribed in the score. Whatever be the performer’s particular range of changes of tempo, rubato, dynamics, and thematic clarity, a successful performance must maintain its own coherence and that of the composition it brings alive in its unique incarnation. Virtuoso bravura has its place, provided it enhances rather than sabotages the vital objective unity of the composition. Technical mastery is an enabling condition for interpretive freedom, but no less a servant of compositional integrity. A written composition may include interludes, such as cadenzas or more extended intervals in “aleatory” pieces, where the performer has complete liberty to improvise and put on display both the greatest technique and the most inspired musical imagination.64 Even here, the demands of musical unity subject these creative outpourings to the imperative that they not erode the dynamic cohesion of the piece.  Hegel points to these extremes in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 955.  As Hegel observes, “here the bravura of the virtuoso is in its right place”. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 956.

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Live or recorded performances of written music therefore confront the listener with a double dose of musical creativity: first and foremost, the unconditioned compositional freedom of the composer, and secondly, the interpretative autonomy of the performer, who brings the written composition to an individualized realization. Musical ensembles bring an added complexity to the creative contributions of their members. Ensembles without a conductor must somehow achieve sufficient consensus to weave their interpretations into a cohesive whole. A conductor, on the other hand, shapes the performances of the members of the ensemble according to a single governing vision. Even then, however, the musicians follow a direction that still leaves room for some degree of interpretative license. Each performer will now be in a position of subsuming their creative autonomy within the boundaries of the written composition and its interpretation by the conductor. Consequently, recordings of a piece with different conductors will vary, as will the recordings of the same piece by the same conductor with different ensembles. With the advent of ever-changing technologies of sound reproduction, exposure to music no longer depends upon making the music one hears or attending a live performance. Instead, those who have access to these technologies and the performances they disseminate can experience at their personal convenience a range of music of unprecedented scope. Universal availability can, however, foster an indifference, where music becomes relegated to Muzak, as a barely noticed backdrop to daily living.

 usic as an Accompaniment of Dance, Lyrics, M Theater, and Cinema From its very beginnings, music has served to accompany not just the mundane activities of human existence, but the creations of other fine arts. Dance and the art of words have enlisted music as a support, perhaps before or at least coevally with music’s assertion of itself as an independent fine art. In our time, music has been mobilized on a massive scale to accompany cinema, including video. A proper consideration of how

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music fulfills its role as an accompaniment to other arts requires that the specific nature of these arts be already duly conceived. In considering the plastic visual art of sculpture, we have addressed some of the basic features of dance as kinetic living sculpture. Dance can be purely abstract or narrative in character. Why, in either case, should dance virtually always bring music to its aid? The answer to why dance almost invariably enlists music as an accompaniment should reside in what dance lacks that music, more than any other fine art, can contribute to dance performance. Although narrative dance may have, from the earliest times, as Lukács suggests, mimed the maintenance, protection, and defense against enemies of life’s most important endeavors, dance’s fluent gestures cannot further articulate what inwardly most concerns humanity.65 Music, of course, cannot supply verbal support, bringing the wealth of words to convey the thoughts of individuals or the concrete situation and character of the action that narrative dance portrays or that abstract dance might indeterminately evoke. Music, can, however, surmount the limits of dance expression by adding an emotive soundscape that directly resonates with the innermost depths of the soul. Without music, dance’s only resource to express feeling is its mute gallery of changing postures, expressions, and leaps and bounds. The emotional resound of music can deepen all these indirect plastic evocations of feeling. To do so in a way that affirms the unity of the hybrid work as whole, music’s contribution must be brought into coherent combination with the kinetic sculpture of dance. Then, to paraphrase Lukács, these two different types of expression merge into a new unity where each completes and complements the other, where dance leaves feelings necessarily undetermined, while music’s indeterminate mimesis of mimesis leaves its objects undetermined.66 Rhythm provides the most basic connection between the two arts, for it is simple to correlate and contrast the beat of movements and sound. Whether falling on the beat of music or relying on a syncopation of dance gesture and rhythm, the rhythmic interplay of music and corporal movement can obviously enhance the emotional effect of the dance. Rhythm  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, pp. 327–328.  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 328.

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alone, however, provides only the most abstract unity for the expression of the self. It is music’s contribution of melodic development, concentrating rhythm and harmony into a concrete saga of the emotional struggles of individuals that gives dance an accompaniment that can bring to the abstract or narrative dynamic of choreography the fullest depth of feeling. To take advantage of the complete power of musical form, dance must go beyond an aping of rhythm and somehow create forms of dance that achieve a shaping of bodily movement that can complement the total thematic development of the music. If the music is to retain artistic integrity, its correlation to the choreography must not undermine the cohesiveness of the music with extraneous accommodations to the abstract or narrative dance movements. By the same token, choreography can preserve the coherence of its own kinetic sculpting of living bodies only if its movements appear to follow from themselves, without bending to a sonic onslaught imposed from without by the musical composition. Lukács maintains that choreography is subordinate to music, placing the mimetic moves of dance at the service of music’s evocation of the shape of feeling.67 Yet, if dance is to retain any indispensable aesthetic worth in combination with music, it must not forsake the imperative that choreography maintain its own, albeit complementary, integrity. The success of dance and music in combining into a hybrid performance without sacrificing their own aesthetic worth is confirmed by how the triumph of modern ballets on the stage have not prevented the music they enlist to become staples of independent concert performance. Although the great ballet music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky has been abridged into selfstanding ballet suites for orchestral performance, the complete musical scores of Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring continue to enthrall listeners as works of fine art in and of themselves. When music accompanies the spoken arts, be it in song, oratorio, musical theater, or opera, the challenge to musical integrity is more  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 329. Lukács compares the subordination of dance to music to the subordination of the art of scenery to drama without music, where once more an art of pure temporality dominates (Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen  – Band 2, p.  329). Dance, however, is more of an equal player, given its own kinetic character, which allows dance’s own movement to go toe to toe with that of music. 67

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imposing. To understand the difficulty, we must have some comprehension of the aesthetic boundaries of the arts of words themselves, which, at this stage of our investigation, has not been systematically provided. Nevertheless, we can consider the problem here with some basic anticipatory guideposts that our subsequent examination of the literary arts can vindicate. The combination of music and words confronts the general aesthetic imperative that each party to the hybrid merger of arts bring something to their unity that enhances the resulting work of fine art. The musical composition must gain something with the addition of words that its “non-objective mimesis of mimesis” cannot secure, just as the literary work must not be so complete as to make the emotive revelations of music unnecessary superfluities. As Hegel observes, this signifies that the literary text to which music is added must not be of such depth or intellectual abstractness as to render musical accompaniment gratuitous, but the text must still retain enough inherent significance to avoid sabotaging the music with verbalizations of “self-complacent and worthless feelings” that are “flat, trivial, trumpery, and absurd”.68 The words to which music is added must not be so emotionally insipid and empty or so dramatically complicated and precipitous as to resist an accompaniment that retains musical integrity.69 For its part, the music must avoid two complementary extremes. Musical accompaniment must not forego any genuine musical incorporation of texts by leaving them expressed in musically indifferent recitatives and declamations. On the other hand, music must not weave its melodic development in a way that floats indifferently above all verbal detail. Rather, as Hegel notes, musical accompaniment must find a middle way, combining the two elements of musical form and discursive expression.70 This middle way must reflect how music itself “can only say what can be said in tones and that is never any given content-laden theme”. Music can only provide sounds that “express the feelings appropriate to the theme”.71 Such sounds can never  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 945–946.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 946. 70  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 943–944. 71  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p.  223. As Hartmann notes, “music expresses precisely in all thematic materials only the accompanying psychic dynamics.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 342. 68 69

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independently unambiguously evoke those contents to which musically expressed feelings are related. For this reason, program music is afflicted with an indeterminacy of reference, even if a title has been given to a piece, like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. As Hartmann observes, no one can expect that a listener to that symphony or any other titled, but wordless program composition can guess the title solely from hearing the piece.72 Music that accompanies text, however, can evoke feelings with a more unequivocal reference thanks to the words that are sung in direct connection with the musical development. There must be a meeting of arts, both complementing and bridging the divide between the rich specific inner and external content that literature verbalizes and the “direct profound expression of the soul” with which music can resound.73 How broad or narrow the concord between words and music can be depends in important ways upon what type of verbal expression is at stake. The different genres of the art of words, the lyric, the dramatic, and the epic, pose distinct challenges to musical accompaniment given the nature of their voice and the scope of their subject matter. Of the three basic literary genres, lyric seems most accommodating to musical accompaniment. Lyric uses the first person voice and gives verbal expression to how one feels about oneself in connection to matters deemed worthy of artistic conveyance to other subjects in general. Although lyric may verbalize how the individual feels about any and every external concern, the focus is not on the objective character of these worldly or otherworldly entanglements of the self, but on the subjective reaction of the individual whose voice demands hearing. Whether lyric takes for its occasion a Grecian urn, a serene landscape at dusk, the sublimity of the divine, or the loss of a loved one, it uses the first person voice to explore what is most personal, yet significant – the emotions of the individual that concern what is of fundamental value. Lyric’s focus upon expressing the inner life of subjectivity puts it in direct thematic congruity with music’s resounding unveiling of our emotional inner life. The verbal expression of lyric may have a meter of its own that readily maps onto musical rhythm, just as the descriptive “color” of its words may offer 72 73

 Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 223.  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 344.

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a ready, at least virtual, synesthesia, where timbre and melody can musically translate the particular feeling those words evoke. What, however, secures the possibility of resonance between the total musical form and lyric verbal composition is the common aesthetic vocation of distilling the emotional life of the individual in an integral development uniting meaning and configuration. In so doing, each can complement and complete its partner, music providing the direct wordless tremor of the soul, lyric sketching in words the thoughts and external objects and situations that move the voice to sing. Successful achievement of this merger of sonic and verbal of inner life can cut across all the fundamental artforms, as well as all cultural “levels” high and low. From Sanskrit classical Bhajan to Urdu ghazal to Rabindranath Sangeet, from Medieval motet to classical Leider to the Blues Ballad, lyric and music have succeeded in fusing into song that profoundly moves the heart. The literary form of drama presents hurdles to musical accompaniment that have proven more difficult to surmount. Drama consists in the speech of several figures, interacting through their conversation and the actions to which it alludes. It may include lyric interludes where a monologue breaks the interaction with avowals of personal feelings as well as epic moments of third person descriptions where a dramatic character narrates from without the actions and thoughts of others. Drama might appear to present no special challenges to musical accompaniment since the individual voice of each character seems to require nothing more for musical presentation than any single lyric voice. As for distinguishing dramatic voices from one another, music seems to have an easy solution by availing of the distinct timbres of different voices and instruments. Musical composition, however, is not simply a matter of varying timbre and orchestration, but of providing a coherent thematic development that mediates a piece’s beginning and end in a musically compelling unity. Here the requirements of dramatic development can present a formidable obstacle. The introduction of characters, the breaching of the dramatic conflict, and the resolution of the opposition, be it tragic or comedic, may not easily fit the dynamic unfolding of any musical forms,

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especially when dramatic shifts are sudden and plentiful.74 In reflection of this discrepancy, dramatic speech may break into song only intermittently, leaving long intervals where characters interact without any musical accompaniment. Operetta and the popular musical, be it live or filmed, will often consist of unaccompanied dialogue punctuated by separate vocal as well as purely instrumental musical numbers.75 Alternately, Western classical opera, particularly in its earlier stages, often scatters full-blown arias and ensemble vocal pieces among long stretches of intervening recitatives, where characters declaim rather than sing with the most perfunctory and minimal keyboard accompaniment.76 And, not infrequently, whenever music accompanies the dramatic action, characters who do not burst into song stand awkwardly aside, with neither acting nor singing to do.77 To overcome the clash of drama and musical form, composers like Wagner assign each character a distinct musical “leitmotif ”, which is heard whenever the designated characters enter the dramatic fray.78 The musically external character of such proliferation of “leitmotifs” clashes

 As Hartmann points out, “shifts of dramatic situations do not allow any longish passages for the development of the music, as would be necessary for making greater profundities accessible.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 344. 75  Hegel considers this hybrid form “a rather trivial intermediate sort, which mixes up, quite disconnectedly, speech and song, the musical and the unmusical, prosaic words and melodious singing.… its juxtaposition of prosaic chatter in the dialogue and artistically treated interludes of song always remains an impropriety.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 951. 76  Hartmann describes the unsatisfactory result and its upshot as follows: “In this manner, the “plot” was covered over by style to such an extent that it served merely as a kind of occasion for an order of things quite external to it…. But dramatic sensibility demanded more, and therefore a new direction took hold at the end of the eighteenth century. Now people wanted to put the plot to music, or, perhaps better said: to dramatize music itself.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 224. 77  As Hartmann wryly notes, “stage apparently does not take easily to music’s waste of time: characters stand idly on sidelines and do not know what to do with themselves while another sings. This is not due to a lack of “drama”, it is unavoidable, and is caused by the nature of opera itself.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 224. 78  As Hartmann observes, “the content associated with the motifs is not at all expressible by music, and … no listener could recognize it in the music as such.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 225. 74

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with any internally determined musical development.79 Wagner can inject “leitmotifs” with full dramatic liberty precisely because he ­simultaneously undermines the strict imperatives of harmonic development by constantly modulating from one key to another. He thereby undercuts the harmonic identity of chords and phrases, and with it, the large-scale symmetries of thematic organization. Since rhythm can also be tied to cadential resolutions of dissonance, Wagner’s “leitmotif ” attack on harmonic structure equally weakens the rhythmic structure of his music, leading Nietzsche to complain of its shapeless, pulseless monotony. There have, however, been operas whose dramatic development has been crafted to fit the demands of musical integrity, treating “one entire action musically throughout”.80 The results, from Mozart81 to Mussorgsky to Alban Berg, have demonstrated that music and drama can, with sufficient musical and verbal creativity, merge into a total work that adds the emotional power of music to the cathartic release of dramatic action. Epic literature presents musical accompaniment with a different challenge, since the epic third person voice can describe scenes and interactions as an omniscient spectator, who can equally present dialogues and inner monologues of the characters who parade through the epic saga. When the epic narrator reveals the feelings and thoughts of protagonists, music can revert to the measures taken in accompanying lyric first person narration. Similarly, when the epic depicts spoken interactions among its characters, music can use the modes of accompaniment it employs to complement drama. In every case, however, music must contend with the overarching epic viewpoint that always concretely encompasses the reflections and actions of its manifold characters. The ancient epics present the fundamental mythic and historical turning points in the life of an entire people, whereas the modern epics of novel and cinema take an individual  As Hegel presciently observes, “the union of melody with characterization involves risk that the more specific sketching of content may overstep the delicately drawn limits of musical beauty, especially when it is a question of expressing violence, selfishness, wickedness, and other extremes of one-sided passions.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 948. Hartmann states the difficulty more directly in his confrontation with Wagner’s use of leitmotifs, observing that it “results in a drastic conflict of two requirements, one dramatic and one musical”. Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 225. 80  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 951. 81  Hegel cites the “‘bungling compilation’ libretto of The Magic flute” as “amongst the finest opera libretti”, giving Mozart a compositional opportunity he has fulfilled. See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 946. 79

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life as a window for presenting how the struggles of a particular person reveal the fundamental challenges of finding significance in the world they inhabit. Whether ancient or modern, Symbolic, Classical, or Romantic in style, the epic calls upon music to use all its resources. Hegel points to the oratorio, to which one can broadly include the Mass in B minor, St. Matthew’s Passion, and St. John’s Passion of J. S. Bach, as the hybrid musical form that tackles the challenge of accompanying an epic portrayal, combining instrumental interludes, arias, duets, and choral pieces to cover the extended reach of epic totality. Although some early Western classical oratorios have recitatives interrupting the full musical flow, others put the entire text in full-blown vocal music, with instrumental introductions and interludes. To achieve this complete integration, the text must have the simplicity that makes musical expression a meaningful addition, just as the music must adapt its thematic development to complement all the discursive depictions that the epic includes. Hegel affirms that this has been achieved in the Western classical religious oratorios that draw from religious texts that “set forth in the greatest simplicity and brevity the most general doctrines of the faith and the corresponding essential stages in the feelings and minds of the congregation of the faithful”.82 Since oratorios, unlike opera, do not provide the full visual scenery and acting that opera delivers, the music must be sufficient to sustain the aesthetic appreciation of the audience throughout the performance. The situation is different with cinema. Here visual artistry is always on display and the acting of filmed characters is ordinarily seen as well as heard. Not surprisingly, films with musical accompaniment can often forego continuous music and relegate the musical accompaniment to an intermittent emotional trigger that has no more large-scale musical form than the interpolation of leitmotifs. Film musicals give music a more prominent position, but usually as a series of separate pieces, with varying degrees of integration with the dramatic flow of the film. The Bollywood Cinema may invariably pause for song and dance intervals, but how well these fit into the action as organic developments is always a challenge for music, choreography, and cinematography. 82

 Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, p. 947.

10 Musical Style

Music and the Artforms All the preceding considerations apply to music as an individual art and are ingredient in any of its stylistic realizations. The systematic consideration of the musical medium must determine how these generic features of music become specifically actual in the different fundamental styles of the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms. Although Hegel, more than any other historical aesthetician, has investigated these particular modes of joining meaning and configuration, he has virtually nothing to say about how music takes on the stylistic forms expressing the fundamental world views that distinguish civilizations. In part this reflects his categorial conflation of artform and individual art, which leads him to identify music as an art essentially wedded to the Romantic artform. This explains why he makes no mention of music in a Symbolic style and only refers to music in a Classical style as an aesthetically deficient phenomena that at best serves to accompany Classical drama. As we have seen, Hegel does mention how ancient Greek music used certain modes, mentioned by Plato and Aristotle, but Hegel does not consider how these modes are employed in Greek music, let alone how their specific musical development has any connection to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_10

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Classical world view. If he did discuss that, as he does regarding Symbolic and Classical style architecture and Symbolic and Romantic style sculpture, Hegel would be undermining his claims that all these arts are exclusively tied to a single artform. Hegel should, however, be expected to explore how music translates the Romantic style into its soundscape, but Hegel offers no separate investigation of the musical realization of the one artform he associates with music. In illustrating generic features of music, Hegel does cite various examples of medieval and modern Western music, from Christian church music to contemporary orchestral and opera works. He does not, however, examine how any works in a Romantic style specifically exhibit its mode of joining meaning and configuration. This lapse may be explained by Hegel’s admission of his lack of musical expertise, which he acknowledges limits his ability to understand how music is structured by harmony, counterpoint, and thematic development. Our ability to provide what Hegel does not is hampered by significant gaps in available music whose presence would give us more to reflect upon and facilitate moving from representation to conceptual determination. The lack of empirical examples applies above all to music in a Classical style. Although references to ancient Greek music are plentiful, with mention of its different modes and rhythms, little else remains to substantiate how it musically embodied the Classical ideal. Music from civilizations espousing world views congruent with the Symbolic artform abounds in the continuing musical performance of contemporary tribal groups and the preserved study and performance of ancient music traditions from such places as India, Indonesia, and the Far East. What abounds by far, both in contemporary study and performance and in surviving musical notation, is music in the Romantic style, including syncretic fusions in improvised performances and written compositions combining modern Western musical forms with African or Asian traditions. What can be said in the broadest way to distinguish music embodying the Symbolic artform from that embodying the Classical and Romantic artforms?

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Music in Realization of the Symbolic Artform All music of any civilization expresses the depths of human emotion in its artificial soundscape of rhythm, tone, timbre, and melodic development. What distinguishes music in one artform from another is how humanity construes fundamental value and how its emotive response resounds in a fit musical expression. Whether or not inwardness is put on a pedestal, emotion always plays a role in registering the strivings of humanity for whatever it takes to matter. The worldview fueling the Symbolic artform may not give conscience or the pursuit of self-selected particular ends the highest value, but it does contend with how the feeling self struggles to align itself with norms both sacred and ethical that subordinate humanity to cosmic natural powers, be they physical, biological, or sublimely indeterminate. On this self-understanding, neither the external appearance of humanity nor its independent public life can suffice to embody what is of fundamental worth. Nor can the personal strivings of individuals to be autonomous inwardly and outwardly command anything more than an illusory, epiphenomenal stature. How can musical form express this attunement of the soul to higher powers that are incongruent with and transcendent to its finite subjectivity? Music in a symbolic vein will not lack feeling nor emotive conflicts and resolutions. It will, however, somehow convey that the inward movements of the soul respond to what is of ultimate value either by falling prey to the force of cosmic power or by voluntarily relinquishing aberrant passions, accepting prescribed duties, and undertaking the austerities by which the self unites with what is absolute by renouncing its own finite strivings. These imperatives put a damper on the free-wheeling development of thematic oppositions, since the self-directed exertions of the individual are understood to be ultimately superfluous. There is no need to develop complex musical forms that give extended room for the turmoils of subjective striving. Nor is there need to enlist massive instrumental and vocal ensembles that provide the resources for the greatest

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degree of tonal and melodic contrasts.1 Instead, music can capture the triumph of natural and sublime power by evoking emotions that arrive at a serene resolution. Repetitive rhythm, be it mono- or poly-rhythmic, can provide the temporal underpinning for such inward reconciliation. Microtonal or pentatonic scales can provide the harmonic framework in which the contrast of consonance and dissonance is diminished, or, in the case of whole tone pentatonic octaves, entirely eliminated. Such tonal organization reduces the complexity of musical symmetries that harmonic resolutions entail. Accordingly, melody can be repeated and answered back in relatively unaltered form. Where improvisation rules, as in Indian Classical music, variation may serve the overriding purpose of resolving thematic innovation into a numbing minimalism, where the recurrence of rhythm and melody predominates. The ragas of Hindustani classical music do not bear the authorship of any individual composers, but instead comprise melodic developments allegedly rooted in cosmic nature and ascribed to different natural periods, be they morning or evening or monsoon season. The improvisation of the musician gives the melodic development of the raga of fittingly unique musical expression, but one bounded by compliance with a natural soundscape enlisted for spiritual unification with the indeterminate absolute. Such music achieves what yogic meditation attains in reducing the stream of consciousness to a repetitive renunciation of self-determining subjective individuality.

Music in Realization of the Classical Artform By contrast, the Classical ideal calls upon music to express and evoke emotions that reflect the sagas of anthropomorphic deities and heroes whose public deeds uphold a natural ethical community. The pantheon of humanized gods has overthrown the rule of natural powers and  The traditional Indonesian gamelan orchestra may seem to violate this limitation of the musical arsenal, but the music played by gamelan ensembles does not exploit the thematic development of harmonic contrast to the degree that modern orchestral ensembles do. Gamelan ensembles are composed primarily of percussion instruments and gamelan music involves a degree of repetition that squelches the oppositions of orchestral forces that characterizes music in a Romantic style. 1

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sublime abstractions, and ethical value here centers on achieving virtue paradigmatically exhibited in the political life of citizens whose externally visible actions in support of the community are what count. What can this mean for musical configuration? In the absence of surviving written compositions or performance traditions, we find an important clue in what Socrates tells us in Plato’s Republic about how different rhythms and modes are to be favored for music.2 What makes them mandatory for music is that they both represent and instill in the listener the ethical character that citizens should have to sustain the body politic. To fit the Classical artform, music must not evoke each and every depth of the human soul, but only the ideal passions. These ideal passions are not associated with a dharma, whose duty complies with a cosmic order aiming ultimately at unification with the absolute through the suspension of subjective striving. Rather, the ideal emotions fit for music in the Classical style are those tied to an ethical character given not by birth but by proper habituation to the norms that bind together a public community that transcends kinship and caste by joining together free citizens in the pursuit of justice. This community, however, as well as the anthropomorphic religious representations that suits it, guides itself by the physical, sensuously given embodiment of human agency, leaving out of account the inner dimension of freedom that cannot be reduced to any outward, public expression. Accordingly, the musical expression of the Classical ideal will be tied to specific types of rhythm, mode, and melody, rather than leaving at the disposal of composers the use of any musical element for integration into a freely developed musical composition. Just as the Classical ideal will find sculptural expression in bodies of a certain narrowly defined corporeal perfection, so the Classical ideal will achieve musical expression in a limited array of privileged rhythms, modes, and melodies, none rooted in nature, but all tied to the types of character that are connected to a life of virtue. Musical composition in the Classical style will still exhibit the individuality required of any true work of art, but the genius of the composer and performer will expend its creativity within the boundaries of  Plato, Republic, Book III, 399a-d, Complete Works, pp.  1036–1037; Book III, 400d-401a, Complete Works, pp. 1037–1038. 2

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the musical tropes identified with ethical character and its religious counterpart. Such music will not be devoid of thematic oppositions, but these will be correlated to the emotions at play in the ethical strivings of heroes, both epic and tragic, for whom the struggles of outer conduct and public life are paramount.

Music in Realization of the Romantic Artform The Romantic artform calls for a very different musical expression than either the Symbolic or Classical world views require. A much wider emotional world awaits musical expression, for here the full breadth of freedom, both inner and outer, is embraced, together with the passions that self-determination unleashes. Like all music, that in the Romantic style will exhibit the natural physical relations of sound frequencies and their most easily heard ratios, such as octaves and fourths and fifths. Unlike music in a Symbolic style, however, Romantic style music will not constrain itself to rhythm, scales, harmonies, and melodic developments that are ascribed to nature or to the austerities whereby the individual submits to sublime power. Nor, like music expressing the Classical ideal, can Romantic style music confine its creativity to privileged rhythms, modes, and melodies that are tied to ethical character molded to embody virtue. Instead, the Romantic style music maker will need to employ rhythms, modes, and melodies without restriction and integrate them in thematic musical forms capable of expressing the emotional conflicts that embroil the full scope of human striving in its pursuit of all its freedoms. This pursuit of freedom is not equivalent to all human endeavor, for freedom is tied to rights, not license, and rights have a normative character that must be accommodated by the religion conforming to the Romantic worldview. The emotions that music in a Romantic style can express and elicit, like that of all genuine music, are those that reflect ethical and religious matters of ultimate significance. What distinguishes Romantic style music is that it furnishes the musical configurations fit for expressing the emotional world in which self-determination has gained recognition as the fulcrum of normativity. This mandate underlies both how sacred and secular music develop in the Romantic style.

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On our lonely planet, Christianity provides a paradigmatic religious embodiment of the Romantic world view, representing the divine as united with an actual human individual. Christ’s “passion”, encompassing crucifixion and resurrection, represents a range of human emotion, both in the Christ figure and in his opponents and followers, that sacred music can seek to express and elicit. That range of feeling is very different from what fits in the compass of emotional response to natural powers, the conflict of desire with dharma, or the abandonment of passion to austerities in pursuit of moksa. The emotional territory of the Passion is also very different from that of Classical heroes and anthropomorphic deities, whose ideal characters elicit a very different pity before the hands of fate and the intractable conflict of competing ethical spheres, such as family and rule. The religious narrative of the actual individual who embodies the supreme value of humanity at the expense of his own mortality elicits a very non-ideal spectrum of feelings of contempt and hatred on the part of the opposing community, of fierce conviction, moments of doubt, and forgiveness on the part of the man-God, and love and heartbreak on the part of the family and band of followers, none of whom are other than all too mundane, very unique individuals. Sacred music in a Romantic style will tackle this emotional landscape, in all its non-typical, non-idealized specificity. Since such music will address a spectrum of feeling that will equally pervade the secular life of individuals for whom freedom is central, the “sacred” identity of the music will largely rely on the accompaniment of religious texts. Music in a Romantic style can and does involve solo works, duets, trios, quartets, chamber ensembles, and other relatively small-scale compositions with few parts and limited musical arsenals. The Romantic artform also drives its music to mobilize the largest orchestral and choral forces to tackle the wide-ranging expressive territory that its world view encompasses. The same imperative applies to the complexity of musical form. Romantic style music can use a simple song, the simplest polyphony of a canon, a rudimentary theme and variations, or the most elementary rondo A-B-A structure. The musical incarnation of the Romantic artform can also push thematic development to the most complex and large-scale forms to express the emotional conflicts and resolutions that

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reflect the inward lives of individuals in very walk of life and in every sphere, both private and public, in which human value is at stake. The Western “Classical” music has created in this vein an unparalleled flowering of musical composition employing the widest variety and complexity of musical ensemble and musical form. Although its discrimination of consonance and dissonance has altered in the course of the development of its system of harmony and thematic composition, it has built an edifice using scales and tempered tunings that allow for maximum compositional freedom. Instead of constructing scales out of uneven microtones or all too even whole tones, the Western Classical tradition has developed scales with both whole and half tones that foster strong contrasts of consonance and dissonance, while allowing modulation into other keys that extend large scale form and musical expression. Bringing polyphonic expression to the complexity of the fugue and driving thematic development to the expressive heights of the sonata form and multi-movement structure, Western Classical music has engendered a rich tapestry of musical composition that allows the individual stamp of composers and performers to be immediately recognizable in the most complex of soundscapes. No longer can “nature” or “ethical tradition” imposed fixed forms upon musical genius, leaving its creations in relative anonymity. Now, in both “classical” and “popular” music, the Romantic artform gives the fullest opportunity for composers and performers to make their name. And with modernity rendering the pursuit of freedom a global striving, albeit contested by pre-modern and post-modern reaction, modern music has turned the Romantic artform into an international style, where the “Western” label loses its significance. The liberating enrichment of musical form and resources in modern “classical” music has, however, brought with it the seeds for its own subversion from within. The modern “classical” harmonic system, with tempered scales of whole and halftones, allows any note and any chord to be a pivot for modulation into another key, in which tones have a different harmonic significance. This harmonic plasticity, which equally involves the greatest melodic freedom, makes possible compositional innovations that undermine the harmonic framework, and with it, the symmetries of musical form that the transitions from consonance to dissonance to consonance entail.

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Beethoven brings the modern “classical” harmonic framework to an expressive height by freely injecting theme and variation and fugue into the sonata form, while transforming the simplest of themes in astonishingly fertile development, as in such works as his Fifth Symphony and Diabelli Variations. Here harmonic and thematic development are joined together, allowing large-scale musical form to retain a powerful, immanent unity.3 Modern music begins to subvert that unity with the very resources provided by the then “Western” classical music. Franz Schubert, especially in his late piano sonatas, takes hold of melodic freedom and weaves massive movements out of long, extended themes, whose “development” largely consists of repeating these themes, but modulated into different keys. Conversely, Robert Schumann and Frederick Chopin put melodic invention at center stage, undermining the harmonic symmetries on which large-scale form owes its unity, producing works that appropriately take on a miniature scale, standing on their own, or strung along in series. Composers like Anton Bruckner, Richard Wagner, and Franz Liszt take advantage of the ability to modulate freely from key to key, creating music in which the harmonic identity of tone intervals becomes equivocal. This free chromaticism begins to put all twelve tones of the chromatic scale on an equal footing, setting the stage for the experiments in atonality and serial composition to come.4 The increasing ambiguity of  In this regard, Adorno writes, “In Beethoven, … the development – subjective reflection upon the theme which decides the fate of the theme – becomes the focal point of the entire form. It justifies the form by engendering it anew and spontaneously …. In music before Beethoven – with very few exceptions – the procedure of variation was considered to be among the more superficial technical procedures, a mere masking of thematic material which otherwise retained its essential identity. Now, in association with development, variation serves the establishment of universal, concretely unschematic relationships. The procedure of variation becomes dynamically charged with newly gained dynamic qualities.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p.  55. Beethoven’s use of imposing fugues in the last movements of his Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106 and Sonata 31, Op. 110, reflect another aspect of his genius as he pushes the limits of classical harmony. As Adorno observes, “Late Beethoven, Brahms, and, in a certain sense, even Wagner have paid their respects to polyphony, if only to compensate for the fact that tonality has sacrificed its constructional force and grown rigid as an empty formula.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 59. 4  As Peter Szondi points out, “Wagner’s late romantic music tends toward a thoroughgoing chromaticism and thus, toward a full acceptance of the twelve-tone scale, thereby preparing for Schönberg’s atonality.” See Szondi, Peter, Theory of Modern Drama, ed. and trans. by Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 48. 3

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tonal intervals erodes the symmetries that depend upon harmonic resolutions of dissonance, rendering musical form more amorphous. This erosion allows Wagner to sprinkle his operatic scores with character leitmotifs, without conflicting with any organic thematic development. The weakening of the harmonic basis for contrasts and resolutions of consonance and dissonance leads these composers to rely upon dynamic, rhythmic, and orchestral “color” to compensate for the relinquished expressive force of unambiguous tonal intervals. In this vein, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Maurice Ravel have made use of whole tone pentatonic scales, in which dissonance is virtually absent, putting all the weight of expression on musical coloration, which is at pains to generate any internally determined compositional form. In face of this internal collapse of “classical” harmonic and thematic development, composers have sought succor in borrowing from pre-­ modern musical traditions. Bartok and Kodaly, for example, have imported Eastern European folk rhythms and modes into compositions pushing the boundaries of “Western” tonality. Igor Stravinsky, above all in The Rite of Spring, has relied upon fusing “primitive” rhythmic and tonal patterns with rote repetition to provide the musical alternative to the crumbling edifice of the Western classical framework.5 Others, under the banner of minimalism, have retained a rudimentary obedience to tonality, but sacrificed the thematic development wedded to harmonic resolutions. Instead, minimalists such as John Adams, Terry Riley, and, above all, Philip Glass, have created works consisting in waves of slightly varied repetitions, simplistically borrowing from the patterns of classical Hindustani music, as if their minimalism could coherently support extended works, as massive as full-scale operas. For a time, some composers have dispensed with all tonal harmony, creating completely atonal music. Refusing to resolve erstwhile dissonant intervals, these atonal compositions might seem fit to express the deepest anguish and alienation. Yet, as Charles Rosen points out, “the expressive  Adorno observes that in Stravinsky’s Sacre, “Rhythm is underscored, but split off from musical content. This results not in more, but rather in less rhythm than in compositions in which there is no fetish made of rhythm; in other words, there are only fluctuations of something always constant and totally static – a stepping aside – in which the irregularity of recurrence replaces the new.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, pp. 154–155. 5

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role of dissonance has meaning only as part of an opposition consonance-­ dissonance.”6 By relinquishing any basis for distinguishing consonance and dissonance, these composers confront a self-inflicted challenge of creating some alternative basis for musical tension and release and the expressivity that sustains. To do so, they have either depended upon residual musical memories of tonal relations to retain some harmonic contrast in their compositions or, more consistently, relied exclusively on contrasts of rhythm, dynamics, and timbre. With melodic development completely denuded of any harmonic contrasts of consonance and dissonance, atonal composers face the empty indeterminacy of absolute compositional freedom.7 How can they develop music whose composition is not entirely arbitrary and meaningless, expressing and eliciting feelings of equal inanity? They face the same artistic abyss as those aleatory composers who hand music over to pure chance, “writing” music that assigns timed intervals for designated performers to play whatever they want. In response to these cul-de-sacs, modern composers have launched two complementary rescue missions: neo-classicism and serial “twelve-tone” music, neither of which offers a compelling solution. Neo-classicists have attempted to retain musical significance by resurrecting the large-scale forms of musical symmetry that harmonic thematic development fosters, but without retaining the tonal harmony on which that structural unity had rested. Composers like Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and Benjamin Britten have renewed the sonata form in keyboard and symphonic composition, while composers like Paul Hindemith have renewed polyphonic Baroque musical forms. What they all have failed to supply is sufficient harmonic integrity to remove the externality of the classic forms and make them  Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 26. As Rosen continues, “the elimination of consonance, of resolution, then destroys the basis for expression, making dissonance itself meaningless” (Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 27). 7  Adorno compares the development of atonality to the rise of non-objectivism in painting, suggesting that “the liberation of modern painting from objectivity … was to art the break that atonality was to music.” (Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 5). In both cases, the liberation of artistic subjectivity from any intersubjectively given objective content threatens to condemn artistry to a solipsist solitude. As Adorno puts it, whether in abstract art or atonal music, such “expressionism remains … loneliness as style.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 46. 6

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immanent to dynamic movements of dissonance and consonance that provide an emotional selfhood to the musical composition.8 Arnold Schoenberg repudiates the path of musical half-measures and compromise that afflicts neo-classicism. He himself pushed the limits of tonal chromaticism in early works like Guerrelieder, Verklaerte Nacht, and Pelléas und Melisande, and then experimented with atonalism in Erwartung and Pierrot Lunaire. In the latter work, Schoenberg introduced Sprechstimme, whose “half-speaking, half-singing” vocalizations expressly nullified the “omnipotent status of pitch” on which tonality relies.9 Yet, Schoenberg felt the need to provide an entirely new musical grammar that could supplant tonal thematic development without succumbing to the anarchy of atonalism, in which singular feeling resounded as it pleased. To this end, he created so-called serial, twelve-tone music, initiating the Second Viennese School that sought to save musical expression from meaninglessness in the wake of the breakdown of Western classical harmony. Schoenberg does not revert to pre-modern soundscapes, nor jettison the modern pitch divisions of well-tempered tonality. Schoenberg instead enlists the chromatic scale with all of its twelve pitches at halftone intervals to establish a new compositional grammar, completely indifferent to contrasts of consonance, dissonance, and key signature. The new music he initiates revolves around a so-called tone row, a series of all twelve chromatic pitches in any order the composer chooses. This tone row forms the pervasive basis of “serial” musical composition. Whatever tone row is created must be played from beginning to end, but then can be played backwards or inverted, and its inversion can be played backwards as well. The same series of intervals of all twelve

 As Rosen observes, these composers “returned to the language of tonality purified of chromaticism”, but not “as a natural language but always as a quotation, as a sign”. Stravinsky’s neo-­ classicism, Rosen notes, treats “tonality as it if were an archaic and foreign language”, using “nonchromatic tonal relations ruthlessly, disrupting their harmonic and rhythmic aspects”. Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 71. 9  Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 51. 8

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chromatic pitches can also be “transposed”, starting on any other note.10 Moreover, each statement of the tone row can have varying rhythm, dynamics, and timbre. In the absence of any harmonic grounding, none of these incarnations of the chosen tone row have any privilege over any other. For this reason, there is and can be no development properly speaking.11 The embrace of the utter indifferent equality of each tone is enforced by requiring each tone row to contain all the chromatic notes just once, so that there are no repetitions that might lend greater weight to any of them in particular.12 Taken together, these rules do not provide any basis for distinguishing an interval as consonant rather than dissonant, nor establish any cadences that would signal the resolution of tension and the closure of musical development, nor mandate any determinations of rhythm such as those that harmonic changes can entail.13 As a result, the twelve-tone system does not engender any further symmetries of musical organization that would immanently provide for large-scale musical form.14  As Rosen notes, this leaves forty-eight versions of each tone row at the disposal of the serial composer, who has rarely used more than a few (Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 85). Given the complete lack of any possible ranking of their differentiation, there is no reason to employ any particular variety of them. Once the tone row has been posited, every manipulation of it seems equally indifferent to musical significance. In other words, every motivic variation is as inexpressive as any other. 11  As Adorno points out, “Twelve-tone technique … devaluates the concepts of melos and theme, and thus eliminates the actually dynamic-formal categories of motivic development, thematic development and transition.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 99. 12  As Adorno writes, “that the row uses no more than twelve tones is a result of the endeavor to give to none of the tones, by means of greater frequency, any emphasis which might render it a “fundamental tone” and thereby evoke tonal relationships.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 72. 13  As Adorno notes, “the specifically melodic factor in rhythm is devaluated. In traditional music a minimal intervallic deviation not only had a decisive effect upon the expression of a specific spot, but even upon the formalistic meaning of an entire movement. Twelve-tone music, by contrast, manifests total crudity and impoverishment.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 76. 14  Adorno observes, “Twelve-tone music has not produced any type of large form unique to itself; this is by no means coincidental … The construction of truly free forms, delineating the unique nature of a composition, is prevented by a lack of freedom ordained by the row technique – by the continual reappearance of the same elements. … For twelve-tone symmetries are without essence, without depth. The result is that these symmetries are produced by force, but are no longer of any purpose. Traditional symmetries are based upon symmetrical harmonic relationships which they either articulate or create. The function of the classic sonata-reprise is inseparable from the schema of modulations in the exposition and from the harmonic digressions of the development: it serves to confirm the major key area which was only “stated” in the exposition.” See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 97. 10

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If there is any musical dynamic that Schoenberg’s rules of serial composition entail, it is the drive to fill out the chromatic space in whatever order an individual tone row mandates in its various transfigurations. This imperative of “chromatic saturation”15 could be said to provide for an “objective” thematic development, in contrast to the arbitrariness of atonal music and the formal, extraneous compositional unity plaguing the various irresolute departures from Western “classical” harmonic development. Yet does the rule-governed scaffold of twelve-tone composition provide sufficient resources for achieving musical expression of emotions reflecting the depths of the human condition? Without any available contrasts of consonance and dissonance with which to forge outbreaks and resolutions of musical tension, serial music must rely on the same limited arsenal to which the irresolute undertakers of tonality turn: contrasts in rhythm, dynamics, and timbre or musical “color”. Each of these factors certainly plays a role in musical expression, but can they suffice to reflect and elicit the movements of the emotive self as it grapples with fundamental questions of our existence? The tonal system that serial music seeks to replace has all these musical elements at its disposal, but also can integrate them into the supervening thematic development whose harmonic embodiment of opposition and reconciliation can capture in transfigured form the meaningful emotive life of the self. In this respect, twelve-tone composition is fundamentally lacking. Hobbled by an inherent deficit in musical expressivity, serial music cannot satisfactorily remedy the problems afflicting modern music. Nonetheless, all these developments beyond the crumbling framework of “classical” tonality are not just errant options, founded in the self-­ subverting possibilities that that framework itself fosters. They all reflect an aesthetic imperative built into the Romantic artform when it seeks to express the “particular independent subjectivity”, as Hegel calls it, which recognizes that self-determination cannot adequately affirm itself by being limited to any sensuous configuration. Even if Western classical harmony provides a musical framework in which genius can express the full breadth of meaningful human emotion, the free self is still compelled to seek expression in other musical idioms, without limiting itself to any  Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg, p. 82.

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single one. Music is not immune to the same drive that leads architecture to develop the abstract purities of an “international” style only to cast them aside for post-modern style quotation, and that leads sculpture and graphic art to become abstract and eventually “conceptual”. From melodic excess, to chromaticism, to fusions with pre-modern musical tropes, to minimalism, to atonality and aleatory experiment, to neo-classicism, and serial composition, music of the Romantic artform gives expression to the very same truth of a free subjectivity that must gain objective realization, but cannot be completely fulfilled by any given sensuous reality. We confront this in its starkest resonance in John Cage’s 4′33″. Here musical composition annuls itself, giving way to a timed “silence” during which we hear only the subway rumbling under Carnegie Hall, the sirens of police cars racing through the streets, and the coughs of our fellow concertgoers.

Part VI The Aesthetics of Literature

11 Literature as Fine Art

Language as a Medium of Fine Art Language poses great challenges and great opportunities as a medium of fine art. These challenges and opportunities apply to both form and content. The form of language is radically distinct from that of the visual arts and the art of sound because language is a purely conventional medium whose sensuous appearance consists of signs. The visual arts present viewers with visible imagery whose shape, shades, and colors directly convey either a pictorial transfiguration of reality or an expression of the artist’s emotions that have significance worthy of aesthetic appreciation. Music confronts its listeners with a soundscape whose rhythm, pitch, timbre, harmony, and thematic organization give direct expression to the profoundest movements of the soul. By contrast, language appears to its audience in intuitable marks that signify meanings that have no connection to the intuitable appearance of the signs that convey them. Symbols symbolize a meaning that is connected to the intuitable content of the symbol, as, for example, a lion, as apex predator of the savannah, can convey the royalty of a monarch. Signs, unlike symbols, have an intuitive content that bears no connection to what they signify. What signs mean © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_11

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is purely a construct of semiotic imagination, which chooses to connect a sign with a certain meaning. To become intersubjectively intelligible, that semiotic connection must be available to a plurality of rational animals who comprehend its semantic relation of sign and object signified. Consequently, unlike the visual arts and music, the fine art of language must rely upon semiotic imagination, shared by a linguistic community, to comprehend the meaning and imagery that words represent.1 The sensuous appearance of signs can be manifest to different senses. Rational animals who can hear, produce sufficiently nuanced sounds, and dwell in environments where the propagation of sounds is practicable can develop language in the form of speech. Rational animals who lack hearing, cannot sufficiently control their utterances,2 or inhabit biospheres in which sound propagation is obstructed, can use visual signs for linguistic communication. These can comprise a “sign language” consisting in the visible configurations of appendages, such as fingers on a hand, or of bioluminescent displays, such as a rational incarnation of squids and octopi might possess. Alternately, rational animals who lack sight can rely upon touch to recognize linguistic signs, such as Braille systems make possible. Whatever be the sensuous medium in which language appears, its apprehension has a temporal character. Speech presents a sequence of semiotic sounds that the listener hears in succession. Sign language “signs” its words in a visual temporal procession, just as a “reader” of Braille touches the embossed signs of words one after another in time. Although the appearance of language may be fleeting, disappearing into memory like a musical performance, the signs by which language is conveyed may be “inscribed” in a relatively enduring medium allowing works to be available when their original linguistic communication is no more. This inscription can take multiple forms, depending upon the  As Hartmann observes, literature “cannot address itself directly to perception but instead has to call upon a substitute stratum where imagination takes the place of perception”. Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 115. 2  Our simian relatives lack this ability to produce sounds sufficiently differentiated to sustain speech, but some have the ability to sign and humans have taught chimpanzees to communicate hundreds of meanings with sign language. 1

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sensuous endowment of its audience and the materials of their biosphere. On our lonely planet, linguistic inscription has taken the form of incisions in stone or wood, marks of chalk, charcoal, pencil, and pen, printing using woodcuts or moveable type, and electronic records that can be heard, seen, or felt whenever the appropriate display equipment is available. However signs be presented, their appearance has a purely conventional, arbitrary relation to what it signifies. Nonetheless, the sensuous appearance of signs may be utilizable as an element in the expression of the fine art of language. When, for example, language takes the form of speech, the syllables of words and word phrases may have a pattern of long and short sounds, as well as accented emphases, producing a verbal rhythm that can be exploited for expressive purposes. In addition, the sounds of words or, alternately, the visual or tactile character of their signs may exhibit similarities and differences that can also be exploited as a supplementary resource for artistic effect. Meter and rhyme are examples of such effects, whose availability depends upon language taking the form of speech and the language in question having a sufficient repertory of temporal pattern, sounds, and word endings to allow for employing meter and rhyme as expressive instruments. Highly inflected languages, like ancient Greek, may resist rhyme formations, whereas a language with little variety in word endings, like Italian, may make rhyming too omnipresent to serve artistic purposes. In any event, the use of such effects rooted in the sensuous character of signs is of at least ancillary significance, since language cannot be apprehended without sensuous intuition of its signs.3 The conventional diversity of language might lead some to suspect that different languages will be better or worse suited for utilization by fine art, just as some undertakers of philosophy have argued that only languages like ancient Greek and German are capable of fully expressing

 As Hegel notes, “the tempo of words and syllables, rhythm, and euphony, etc. … remain not as the proper element for conveying the subject-matter but as a rather accidental externality which assumes an artistic form only because art cannot allow any external aspect to have free play purely by chance, arbitrarily, or capriciously.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 963–964. 3

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philosophical argument.4 Both of these suspicions are refuted by the essential autonomy of linguistic expression. Two essential factors of ­language guarantee that it cannot impose conventional limits on artistic expression or reason. First, the freedom of semiotic imagination to connect signs to meanings at will and make new connections intersubjectively intelligible enables every language to introduce new words and give old words new meanings. Consequently, the given lexicon of any language cannot bar artists or philosophers from using it to create new individual works of art or thinking new meanings. Second, any language proper has a generative grammar that allows members of its linguistic community to produce an infinite number of new expressions that will be, in principle, comprehensible to their fellow speakers. Of course, no language consists simply of names that apply to given objects according to certain grammatical rules. Language further develops meaningful connection between words that allow for judgments and inferences in which conceptual determinations are made thinkable and communicable. Consequently, although language may use words to signify general representations, drawn from experience, it can equally use words to express conceptual determinations that are a priori. This allows language users to question the given and engage in discourse about what is true, what is right, and what has aesthetic worth. Precisely because no language can determine what its users think to be true, right, or beautiful, none can restrict the autonomy of reason and will and cancel the universality of thought and conduct. Accordingly, every language is inherently translatable. Finding equivalents of the rhythm and rhyme of speech may be a challenge for translators, but no language can be a “black box”, hiding its discourse and literary achievements from rational animals who communicate with different linguistic conventions. Although every language exists in relation to a linguistic community, alive or dead, that community may or may not coincide with the boundaries of a people or political community. Communities may involve different language groups, members who are multilingual, and relationships  Martin Heidegger is a proponent of such a view, which is not unconnected to his endorsement of Nazism. 4

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in which different languages are used. This may also be the case of artistic works of language. Classical Sanskrit drama, for example, uses both Sanskrit and Pakrit languages in a single work, distributing them to different types of characters.5 Similarly, Shakespeare will use both verse and prose in his plays, often letting nobles speak in verse and commoners speak in prose, while sometimes having a commoner declaim in verse on matters of more than prosaic significance. Whatever be the language or languages employed in a creation of fine art, the “voice” used has three fundamental forms of narration. First, the voice can be a first-person voice, where the individual “I” expresses its own thought and feelings. Second, the voice can be a part of a discourse with one or more other speakers, whose linguistic interchange comprises the content of the work. This can include interludes of soliloquy, but these situate their first-person speech within the ongoing discourse between individuals. Third, language can take the form of a third-person narrator, who describes affairs that can include narrated first-person expressions of individuals, as well as narrated discussions among a plurality of interlocutors. As we shall see, these options will have an important role to play in differentiating the fundamental genres of literature. Finally, language always has something universal to say, both insofar as its meanings are intersubjectively intelligible and insofar as its words express concepts, be they empirical or a priori. This poses a challenge to the fine art of language since aesthetic worth always requires the creation of unique exemplary imagery whose every detail exhibits the unification of fundamental meaning and individual configuration. Nouns that are not proper are universal and qualifying them with adjectives and prepositions cannot achieve the individuation essential to the creations of fine art. Although thinkers like Bertrand Russell believe that definite descriptions, qualifying subjects with predicates, can individuate them, all such qualification only designates a subgroup, but not a unique individual. As Georg Lukács points out, this failure to achieve individuation through nouns and adjectives can only be surmounted when language refers to  The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller, trans. Edwin Gerow, David Gitomer, Barbara Stoler Miller (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1999), p. 20. 5

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relations to concrete individuals, which, in the case of fine art, involves relations to the affairs and concerns of individual rational animals.6 The first-person locution of lyric may not involve the concrete situation of dramatic dialogue or of narrated epic, but the thoughts and feelings it expresses retain individuality only so long as the “I” who speaks is individual. This is not the empty, hopelessly formal “I” that Kant alleges accompanies all our representations. That “I” can be any “I”, and indeed, fails to qualify as an actual “I” since nothing about it distinguishes it from other such accompanying representations. An “I” whose voice enters literary art must instead be individuated or forfeit its aesthetic merit. We see this imperative at play in the self-subverting literary experiments of Samuel Beckett, in whose trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, the voice becomes progressively disembodied to the point of utter solipsism, where its speech loses all situation and ends up babbling on for no good reason. By the same token, the language of fine art must not adopt the prosaic description of historical narrative or the abstract conceptualizing of science and philosophy. Historical prose can follow the contingent detail of actual events, without need of achieving the unity of meaning and configuration that enables literary narrative to count as fine art. Here, historical narrative succumbs to recording what happens in its given particularity, without transfiguring its depiction into exemplary imagery whose every detail is imbued with universal significance. As Aristotle puts it, the statements of literary art are “of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars”. Although literature is thereby “something more philosophic and of graver import than history”, it “affixes proper names to the characters” it portrays, always combining the universal and singular by describing “not the thing that has happened” in historical verisimilitude, “but a kind of thing that might happen, i. e. what is possible as being probable or necessary”.7 Consequently, when Tolstoy conversely interrupts the narrative of War and Peace with an analysis of how individual responsibility plays out in the context of historical  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, II pp. 170–171.  Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a36–37, 1451b5–6, 1451b10, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, ed. by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 2322–2323. 6 7

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events, he abandons the concrete individuality of literary fine art for abstract theorizing. This interlude may contribute nothing to the artistic integrity of his epic masterpiece, but it does not subvert it. This is because War and Peace, as Lukács observes, persists in individuating what is ­universal in the narrative it presents, completely independently of the prosaic theoretical foray of its author.8 All these aspects of linguistic form have as their counterpart the unparalleled extension of content that language can convey as a medium of fine art. Words can express all the mental content from thoughts to feelings that an individual can verbalize. Although music can give direct expression to the nonverbal emotions that roil the soul, language can express emotion indirectly by manifesting how feelings get expressed in the speech and writing of the voices venting in lyric, dramatic, and epic literature. Admittedly, a picture is worth more than any number of words in its ability to paint a scene in all its contiguous visual detail. No verbal description can capture every shape, shadow, and color, nor can literary art save itself from abject tedium by trying to describe one visual detail after another. Nonetheless, linguistic art can take advantage of its dynamic, temporal unfolding and transcend the fixed gaze of static visual art. The wordsmith can verbalize from any and every vantagepoint and survey anyplace and any time in any order literary imagination may mandate. By employing language as a medium, the fine artist can address all the content suitable for artistic configuration, both religious and ethical, and concretely tackle every significant human endeavor from within and without, unveiling the situations in which meaningful action unfolds, following out the struggles of human life in every sphere, and imagining their itinerary from beginning to end with the concentrated individuality that unites meaning and configuration. In so doing, the literary artist liberates language from its prosaic use as “bearing witness to reality”,9 as persuading others to action, as serving the satisfaction of needs, or as conducting our mundane interactions. Without having to abide by literal fidelity to what is, literary language can use all the freedom of verbal flair to create an imaginative  Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, II p. 178.  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 111.

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transfiguration of our humanity that appears for its own sake, giving a heightened disclosure of our fundamental strivings.10

 uideposts for Drawing Upon Hegel’s Account G of the Fine Art of Language No past thinker has provided a more extensive and systematic conception of the fine art of language than Hegel. He addresses this art in the final and by far the longest section of his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. In developing his conception of the fine art of language, Hegel follows the general itinerary that a systematic account requires. He begins by sketching out the general position of the art of language among the other non-­ hybrid individual arts, indicating the basic ways in which its medium distinguishes it from them. Next, he duly proceeds to develop in more detail how the medium of language gives specific embodiment to all the general features of fine art. In conclusion, Hegel addresses how the different artforms express their defining world views in the medium of language and its various literary genres. All these stages of investigation provide important insights that are indispensable for determining the fine art of language. Nonetheless, Hegel’s account is hobbled by certain ambiguities, omissions, and categorial conflations that must be alleviated. Some of these shortcomings have already marred his treatments of the other arts, but others pertain specifically to the fine art of language. Before drawing upon Hegel’s account in earnest to conceive the specifics of the fine art of language, we must put ourselves on alert to the features of his treatment in need of remedy. To begin with, Hegel’s positioning of the fine art of language among the other individual arts is plagued by an ambiguity that we have seen afflicting his accounts of architecture, sculpture, painting, and music. On the one hand, Hegel contrasts the non-hybrid arts in terms of the basic physical and perceptual specifics of their different media, grouping them under a threefold division of the visual arts, the art of sound, and the art  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p, 112.

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of language. In so situating the art of language, Hegel tends to privilege speech as the primary form of language, from which writing and all other forms of linguistic communication derive. This privileging of speech will have significant ramifications for how Hegel conceives the way in which language becomes transfigured as an instrument of artistic expression. On the other hand, Hegel extends his conflation of artform and individual art to the fine art of language, grouping it with painting and music as one of the Romantic arts, in contrast to the Symbolic art of architecture and the Classical art of sculpture.11 Under this division, the fine art of language enjoys the dual ranking that Hegel applies to all the Romantic arts. Although the Classical art of sculpture allegedly achieves the most complete unity of configuration and meaning in which beauty resides, the Romantic arts allegedly produce the most truthful artistic creations because the worldview they configure gives the fullest due credit to the self-determination of rational animals in which fundamental value ultimately lies. Among the Romantic arts themselves, Hegel ascribes pride of place to the fine art of language because it allegedly is the most universal of the individual arts on two counts. First, the medium of language can configure most exhaustively all the content that is worthy of artistic presentation.12 The fine art of language can transfigure in linguistic imagination both the profoundest depths of our inward subjectivity and all the concrete reality of our strivings in the world, be they in pursuit of religious salvation or ethical right. Second, the fine art of language is the most universal of arts in being most able to give expression to each of the artforms. This last universality seems to undermine the identification of the fine art of language as a specifically Romantic art. To vindicate that abiding conflation of artform and individual art, Hegel must demonstrate that literature in Romantic form has an aesthetic primacy over literature in either a Symbolic or Classical form. As we have seen, Hegel undermines his identification of architecture with Symbolic art and sculpture with Classical art by showing how both 11 12

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 960.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 960–961.

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these visual arts succeed in uniting configuration and fundamental meaning in works expressing the world views of other artforms. In Hegel’s treatments of painting and music he has largely ignored actual or possible works that express Symbolic or Classical styles. Moreover, what he identifies as the general features of these arts fail to have an exclusive restriction to the Romantic artform. In the case of the fine art of language, we shall see that Hegel’s own extensive treatments of literature in Symbolic and Classical styles will put into question any conflation of literary art and the Romantic style, as well as any aesthetic privileging of Romantic style literature. A further problem in Hegel’s account of the fine art of language is his identification of it as poetry in distinction from prose. Hegel uses the German terms, Poesie and Prosa, in making this identification. He bases this identification on how language becomes an instrument of fine art only by undergoing a transfiguration that enables linguistic expression to transcend the prosaic contingencies of ordinary speech that prevent it from uniting configuration and meaning as aesthetic worth demands. As we shall see, the requirements to which Hegel alludes in distinguishing artistic from prosaic language do not fit the ordinary differentiation of poetry and prose. Nonetheless, Hegel privileges the transfigurations in language he imputes to poetry as essential to any use of words that is artistically viable. Just as music creates an artificial soundscape using rhythm, purified tones and timbre, harmony, and thematic development to escape reduction to noise, so Hegel takes versification, involving meter and, in some cases, rhyme, as key to the artistic configuration of language. His characterization of poetry might itself seem overly narrow, since it excludes free verse, where meter as well as rhyme is largely absent. It also, of course, ignores the distinction between prose works of literature and the prosaic prose of speech and writing that is not fine art. As we shall see, Hegel himself acknowledges the artistic worth of literature that uses prose in a manner that allows a work of language to have the distinctive unity of an artistic creation. For this reason, we must refrain from identifying the fine art of language as poetry. Instead, we must acknowledge the aesthetic worth of literature, be it versified or prose, in distinction from the prosaic use of language, which may include versified jingles

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and doggerel as well as prose. We will see that the fine art of language is literature, which encompasses both aesthetically worthy poetry and prose. In tackling the genres that are endemic to literary art, we find much to draw upon in Hegel’s account. We must, however, question both how he relates literary genres to one another and how he associates some with particular artforms and ranks them accordingly. Hegel duly takes the form of voice as crucial for determining the fundamental literary genres and presents a typology of epic, lyric, and dramatic forms of literature. In so doing, however, he adds a partly genetic, partly conceptual ordering. Hegel suggests that epic literature precedes lyric and that drama arises last. This sequence reflects a conceptual ordering whereby Hegel characterizes dramatic literature as uniting epic and lyric, and thereby presupposing them as constituent elements. We must examine whether Hegel’s account suffices to rule out the possibility that epic, lyric, and drama are coeval options of literary creation. In addition, Hegel distinguishes three fundamental forms of drama: tragedy, comedy, and a third type that seems to be tragicomedy, although it is not conclusively identified as such. Hegel tends to describe tragedy in terms that best fit ancient Greek tragedy, which raises the suspicion that he is linking tragedy with the Classical style. This linkage, however, is cast in doubt by Hegel’s further analysis of how tragedy in the Classical style differs from tragedy in the Romantic style. Contrasting the Attic tragedians with Shakespeare, Hegel indicates how both Classical and Romantic artforms can contain tragic drama with no aesthetic compromise, albeit in distinct forms. Nonetheless, in distinguishing the fundamental literary genres and the forms of drama, Hegel extends his suspect conflation of artform and individual art. He claims that not all the genres can equally serve the purposes of the different artforms. Hegel suggests that epic has a special connection to the Classical artform, that ancient Indian Sanskrit drama cannot take a truly tragic form, and that lyric is most suited for the Romantic artform. In examining the particulars of each genre and each dramatic form we will need to assess whether they have been conceived in their proper universality and whether they can possibly have any special affinity to one artform rather than any other.

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 he Defining Form and Content of Literature T as Fine Art To further determine the defining form and content of literature as fine art, we do well to build upon Hegel’s characterization of literary art as a totality. All works of fine art are totalities in the specific sense of having an all-pervading unity in which every detail of their configuration is essential to their significance. All artistic creation must begin so that what follows is immanently connected to this commencement and any termination must bring to an end a development that closes with itself in a non-arbitrary manner. When Hegel identifies literature (albeit under the misleading label of “poetry”) as a totality, he is referring to something more, something that is a unique possession of literary art. The totality in question both involves literature’s special relation to the other arts and its own internal identity. The art of literature is a totality, Hegel maintains, that unites what appears in music with what appears in the visual arts.13 Music presents a self-­ apprehension by the musician and composer of that inner life whose emotions are worthy of being appreciated for their own sake in artistic transfiguration, which elicits comparable emotions in the cathartic inner life of the audience. Literature incorporates the expression of those emotions in verbal form, both through the language of depicted individuals, be they subjects of narration or narrators themselves, and through words conveying actions and non-verbal expressions that convey the inwardness of individuals. These verbalizations cannot replace the musical experience of rhythm, tone, timbre, harmony, and thematic development, which is why there remains room for hybrid arts in which music and words supplement one another. Literature, however, can communicate what can be said about a musical composition and the emotions it evokes, as well as take advantage of the temporality of literary appearance to express all the movements of feeling that the flow of music conveys. At the same time, literature incorporates into its verbal expression what the visual arts present us with in immediately visible imagery. Literature can depict in words  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 960.

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the architectural design of buildings, cityscapes, and gardens, the plastic shapes of inanimate scenery, flora and fauna, and the bodies and creations of rational animals, including works of architecture, sculpture, and graphic art. Authors can describe every individual, every action and event, every setting of conduct and worship that visual arts may house, sculpt, or paint. Taken together, literature’s unification of the inner and outer dimensions of musical and visual creation signifies that literary art achieves a totality of artistic expression, combining the full inwardness of the rational animal and the full objectivity of human endeavor that is susceptible of imaginative transfiguration. Literature can portray the world condition in its encompassing concretion, the specific situation within that world that occasions significant action, and the individuals who manifest their character in such conduct. Literature can do this not only from beginning to end, but by simultaneously presenting the inner struggles of thought and emotion of those individuals. This totality endows literature with much of the aesthetic achievements of music and the visual arts, but it also brings into play expressive possibilities beyond their reach. Literature, like music, can take advantage of its temporal presentation and overcome the limitation to a frozen moment that afflicts static visual arts. Whether literature uses meter or not, it can verbally reimagine the unfolding of significant conduct, both sacred and profane. Although music can track such movements as they are reflected in the tides of emotion, literature can express the vicissitudes of thought as well as emotion, while creating verbal transfigured representations of the sweep of worldly events and the personal actions they contain. Architecture can provide a suitable artificial environment for meaningful activity, but literature can discursively create such enclosures in words, with descriptions covering the construction, use, and destruction of any number of such buildings, as well as all the events related to them that deserve imagining. Sculpture can capture the mute isolated outer appearance of figures in one stationary or kinetic procession, but literature can describe that surface manifestation together with all the inner subjective life and external situation that concretizes what it expresses from within and without. And although graphic art can picture the visible appearance of individuals in their settings, literature can add all the preceding and subsequent transformations that add meaning to

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that moment of visibility, as well as plumb the depths of the souls that inhabit or express themselves in that vision. Admittedly, a picture can contain a wealth of contiguous, simultaneous visual detail that would overwhelm any attempt to describe it fully. Although those visual details should all contribute to the pictorial impact of the graphic composition, they are not all essential to the shape or meaning of their transfiguration into a work of literary imagination. For this reason, it is fitting for literature to refrain from tedious descriptions of visual appearance. As Lessing points out, Homer usually uses only one adjective to describe his characters, including Helen, whose beauty supposedly launched the entire war on which the Iliad and Odyssey revolve. Instead of loading on verbal descriptions to paint a picture, Homer takes proper advantage of literature’s ability to describe the successive stages of action, running down the details of the armor of his heroes in the process of its construction and later, in the process of its parts being put on for battle.14 The same is true of Valmiki, whose Ramayana,15 more vast than the Iliad and Odyssey combined, never gives more than the most limited picture of its chief protagonists, Rama, Sita, and Ravana, instead focusing on depicting their words and actions in the twists and turns of their ongoing saga. In this regard, Lessing is right to point out the mistake of Simonides of Ceos’ famous saying that “painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking painting”. Simonides ignores how the visual arts and literature differ both in the objects they configure and the manner of their artistic presentation.16 Lessing foreshadows key elements of Hegel’s account by noting how painting’s use of figures and colors in space limits it to objects very different from what literature can address, given its articulation of signs in time. The pictures of static graphic art, given their own coeval contiguous spatiality, can only configure visible objects that coexist in whole or  As Lessing notes, “Homer represents nothing but progressive actions. He depicts bodies and single objects only when they contribute toward these actions, and then only by a single trait … he places this single object in a series of stages, in each of which it has a different appearance. … And when Homer wants to show us how Agamemnon was dressed, he has the king put on his garments, one by one before our eyes.” Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. by Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 79–80. 15  The Valmiki Ramayana, trans. by Bibek Debroy (Gurgaon, India: Penguin Classics, 2017). 16  Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, p. 4. 14

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part, whereas “signs that follow one another can express only objects whose whole or parts are consecutive”,17 including objects that have both visible and invisible dimensions. Since physical bodies are those objects that exist in space, the genuine objects of graphic art are “bodies with their visible properties”. By contrast, since “objects or parts of objects which follow one another are called actions, … actions are the true subjects of poetry”.18 As Lessing notes, actions do not exist independently of bodies, but poetry, or more generally, literature, can properly depict bodies only in their relation to actions. This relation involves something that graphic art cannot directly picture, namely the thoughts and emotions that words can express in conjunction with verbally describing the outer dimension of actions, their precipitating situation, and the world condition within which they proceed. The totality of content that literature uniquely encompasses is all transmitted through the sensuous material in which the signs of the literary creation have their intuitable appearance, which then is transformed by semiotic imagination into an imagined created world where, as Hegel puts it, the human “spirit becomes objective to itself on its own ground.”19 This common ground, most proper to rational animals, is the artificial realm of linguistic communication wherein each consciousness directly experiences its universal humanity. As Hegel notably points out, undercutting any literal identification of the fine art of language with poetry, this inner sanctum of discursive imagination is where the work of literature essentially manifests itself. For this reason, “it is a matter of indifference whether we read it or hear it read; it can even be translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value, and turned from poetry into prose.”20 The sensuous externalities of the work’s communication are peripheral to its literary being. Hegel recognizes that the semiotic indifference between the sensuous appearance of language and its meaning leaves no scope for restricting literature “to any specific subject-matter and a confined sphere of  Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, p. 78.  Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, p. 78. 19  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 964. 20  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 964. 17

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treatment and presentation.”21 Language can lay hold of all aspects of the human condition to the extent that they possess any universal significance worthy of artistic presentation. For this reason, the content that is susceptible of being the subject matter of fine art in general is the content that literature can put into words.22 By contrast, architecture possesses the most abstract, impoverished medium, restricted to tying meanings to the geometric ordering of heavy material into enclosures for activity. Figurative static sculpture is confined to plastic shapings that must concentrate all configuring upon the surface of frozen figures. Figurative painting widens the reach of subject-matter, by being able to picture an ideal space and light in which figures can be depicted in the concrete situation of endeavor, with an inner illumination reflecting one moment of their internal life. Music can use its temporal soundings to shape the non-­ objective, non-verbal movements of the passions. Although the increasing “ideality” of these media enlarge the range of configurable objective and subjective contents, they all retain limitations that the freedom of semiotic imagination and generative grammar overturns.23 Hegel regards this universal reach of semiotic imagination as liberating literature from confinement to any one of the artforms, while relegating all the other arts to subservience to one, be it the Symbolic, Classical, or Romantic styles of artistic construal.24 Rather, as we have seen, all the arts can find ways of successfully uniting form and content, configuration and fundamental meaning to express the world views that distinguish the artforms. Literature may have no difficulty giving the Romantic artform fit artistic expressions, but as Hegel will himself show, literary art can equally triumph as a vehicle for Symbolic art and the Classical ideal.25 The  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 967.  Hegel accordingly acknowledges that to “specify the conception of poetry, … we would have to repeat everything already expounded in our First Part about beauty and the Ideal as such. For the nature of poetry coincides in general with the conception of the beauty of art and works of art as such.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 971. 23  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 966. 24  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 967. 25  Hegel grants this universality of literary achievement, albeit as the exclusive boon of the art of language, writing that “poetry … enjoys its periods of brilliance and success in all nations and at practically every period which is productive of art at all.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 977. 21 22

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universality of literature in respect to artistic content rather empowers the fine of art of language to capture the fullest breadth and depth of the human condition within its creation, no matter what artform it serves. As Hegel notes, the content-encompassing totality of the art of language justifies conceiving literature after all the other non-hybrid arts have been considered.26 Literature can not only address the entire scope of subject matter suitable for artistic configuration, but also incorporate all the other arts in the imaginatively transfigured world it puts into words. Architectural constructions, sculptures, paintings, and music can all figure in literary depiction, and for this reason, a proper treatment of literature is only possible once the other arts have been considered in their own right. Precisely because literature can have as its subject matter the entirety of what fine art can address, it is important to keep in mind how that content is not coextensive with what can be put into words. As the “direct property of spirit”, of universal rational intelligence, language is “the most malleable material”, offering the least resistance to expression,27 whether artistic or prosaic. Language can address objectivity in general, describing aspects of the world that are unconnected to the religious and ethical concerns that allow for exemplary configuration in works of art. Language can narrate the course of events in all their contingency, which resists the unity of form and content that literature must achieve to be an artistic creation. Although historians organize their accounts to uncover what is salient in the life of a nation or nations, they cannot be true to their history without describing the play of chance and the arbitrary element in the succession of events.28 Although biography may unite all its descriptions around the life of an individual, what happens to that individual remains fraught with external contingencies, just as that individual displays thoughts, passions, and actions that lack any universal significance.29 In these respects, the content of national histories and  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 967. As Hegel observes, literature “can harbor the entire content of art and all the forms of art.” See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 968. 27  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 972. 28  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 987–989. 29  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 989. 26

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biographies are inherently prosaic, lacking the union of universality and individuality that characterizes a work of literary art. So, too, language can be used to persuade individuals to carry out specific acts and policies, regarding matters both religious and secular. Although literature, like any other fine art, can and should move its audience, its purpose is not to edify, instruct, or to incite. Rather, a literary work is to appear for its own sake, as a creation presenting an exemplary configuration of a fundamental self-understanding. If literature were just an oratorical vehicle of persuasion, its specific words would be dispensable, since the intended aim can always be forwarded by other means of practical utility. Whereas oratory has its fulfillment outside itself, literature has its value in its own achievement.30 Language can equally present purely theoretical abstractions, some involving an understanding of phenomena in their relative conditioned character, some involving a speculative philosophizing about what is unconditioned. In either case, language puts a subject matter into words that is inappropriate for artistic construal. The labors of physical science are concerned with distilling the abstractions of law from empirical observation, or, in the case of the biological sciences, unveiling the workings of teleology in combination with contingent evolution. Neither the external necessity of physical law nor the given ends informing biology can provide a subject matter adequate for literary treatment. Both lack the free unity of artistic content, which combines configuration with meanings that no audience can ignore.31 On the other hand, philosophical language expresses a purely conceptual development with no inherent relation to the imagery on which artistic creation depends.32 Platonic dialogues may intermittently break for mythic tales, but these narratives serve only to illustrate or point towards universal truths that ultimately require image-free thought.

 As Hegel writes, “the poetic work of art has no aim other than the production and enjoyment of beauty; in its case aim and achievement lie directly in the work itself, which is therefore independently self-complete and finished;” whereas oratory is always concerned with its effects and subjects itself to external circumstances. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 992. 31  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 975. 32  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 976. 30

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Literature must instead focus on the concretely individuated concerns of humanity as they relate to what lies within our common spirit and in the individuated world in which humanity struggles to find meaning and validation. Although these matters can also be tackled with purely prosaic language in histories, scientific studies, or philosophical treatises, to be contents for literature they must possess the special totality in which every detail is significant, a totality that eludes prosaic approaches. Whether the literary subject matter be an emotion or an action or encompassing event, it must be a concrete whole, whose aspects are immanently connected. This requires, as Hegel notes, that universal significance and the individuals whose feelings and actions are at play must be “vitally interwoven”.33 Every individual part of the content must have an independent integrity, reflecting its indispensable contribution to the whole, and equally connect with the other elements without sacrificing any of its individuality.34 Accordingly, the development of the whole cannot be formulaic, exhibiting a form that can be expressed apart from the particular content it governs. Nor can literary content be teleologically ordered, since a teleological end is given prior to and independent of the development in which it is realized.35 In a work of literature, the journey from beginning to end is just as essential as its terminus. Because form and content must be united in literature, as in any art, the form of literature must be just as distinctive as the content it expresses. Consequently, literary usage of language must be distinguished from prosaic use not merely in terms of content, but in terms of form.36

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 979.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 982–983. 35  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 983. Teleology here signifies the external teleology in which means and ends are distinguished, rather than the internal teleology that animates an organism. 36  As Hegel writes, since “this same subject-matter is treated also by the prosaic mind … the question arises as to the general difference between prosaic and poetic modes of conception, granted a possible similarity of the subject-matter in both cases.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 973. 33 34

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 ow the Literary Use of Language Differs H from the Prosaic Use of Language To configure the content worthy of aesthetic creation, literature, like every art, must use its signature medium in a specifically artistic manner. The form of literary language cannot be identical to that of language in general. Although language is a convention produced by communities of rational animals, it is not itself a work of fine art. Unlike linguistic usage in general, the artistic form of literary creation must be connected to the content it expresses, even if each individual linguistic sign is indifferent to what it signifies. How then can we draw the line between the form of literary language from the form of prosaic language, be it spoken, signed, or written? There are two levels of literary determination that pertain to this question, one that concerns the form of language in its general use in fine art and another that incorporates this form but adds what relates to the different types of voice as they underlie the general literary genres. At this juncture, what needs to be addressed is how language is specifically literary in form, independently of its differentiation into distinct genres of literary expression. The general character of literary expression must be examined first because the differentiation of literary genres falls within the domain of literary expression, which it presupposes. Literary expression itself has two sides because literature employs words that have a diction of their own at the same time as they signify general representations and concepts with which verbal imagination creates a transfigured inner and outer world. Both these sides must be distinguished from their prosaic counterparts. On the one hand, we need to determine what is the specifically literary way of imagining the inward and external dimensions of our human condition. On the other hand, we need to determine what is the specific type of diction, or ordering and selection of words, by which literary language differs from prosaic language. As Hegel points out, linguistic imagination operates prosaically by following two extremes that both exclude the unity of form and content, of meaning and configuration, of universal and individual that literary

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imagination must achieve. Ordinary prosaic linguistic consciousness either imagines its objects in the form of immediately given, accidental phenomena without laying hold of their inner essence or it imagines concrete existence in terms of abstract universals, whose shared generalities apply to things with indifference to their individuality.37 By contrast, genuinely literary imagination escapes these pitfalls by keeping undivided what prosaic imagination separates. To do so, literary imagination must always be figurative, conveying the concrete reality of individuals, whose inner life combines what is unique and universal just as do their external relations to the world.38 Literary imagination can never afford to lapse into descriptions of abstract essences that lack individuality, nor of given feelings, acts, or relationships that have no essential significance. In every case, literature must imagine its verbalized subject matter as a free-standing totality, whose beginning, middle, and end form a self-developing whole, where no stage in its unfolding is arbitrary with respect to what follows or precedes. Whatever genre literature may take, literary imagination must infuse its voice with a concrete treatment that retains a thoroughgoing unity. Hegel somewhat narrowly defines the manner of literary imagination as involving a free use of metaphor and simile that goes beyond their use in prosaic ordinary language, intimating that poetry, as opposed to prose, gives them their proper play.39 When Hegel presents as a general rule for prose that “literal accuracy, unmistakable definiteness, and clear intelligibility” must prevail over the relative unclarity and inaccuracy of “what is metaphorical and figurative”,40 he is mandating a rule that truly applies only to prosaic prose, but not to literary prose. Since the literary imagination must combine what is individual and universal, it cannot simply imagine phenomena in their literal immediate singularity, but it must connect them to what gives them universal significance. Metaphor and simile are ready vehicles for making such connections, but their employment will only serve the purposes of literature if their associations both  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1001.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1002. 39  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1005. 40  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1005. 37 38

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cohere and contribute to expressing fundamental concerns of humanity in exemplary configuration. Admittedly, poetry, and particularly, lyric poetry, can use metaphor and simile in particular concentration.41 Nonetheless, the proliferation of metaphor and simile need not contribute to the fine art of language, nor is their due artistic use something that only poetry, and not also prose literature, can possess. Although Hegel suggests that metaphor and simile will be employed to the greatest degree by both Symbolic style Eastern poetry and Romantic style poetry,42 will shall see that literary imagination can depart from literal depiction in all its styles, whether they express themselves in poetry or prose. Hegel’s identification of the fine art of language with poetry (Poesie) and prosaic language with prose (Prosa), if taken literally, is false in ways that his own discussions quickly reveals. Although Hegel begins his analysis of literary expression by distinguishing “poetic” and “prosaic” treatments of content, he immediately proceeds to address what distinguishes “poetic” and “prose” works of art, clearly extending the fine art of language to prose literature.43 That extension is hard to avoid. First, poetry, narrowly understood as versified language, is not all worth counting as fine art. Conversely, some un-versified language is prose that qualifies as fine art.44 Moreover, there can be so-called “free verse” poetry that differs from prose without involving either meter or rhyme. In addition, meter and rhyme both depend on language taking the form of speech, which is far from necessary for linguistic communication or the creation of literature. Nonetheless, part of the answer of what distinguishes literary from prosaic diction can involve what distinguishes poetry from prose in respect to the narrow distinction between versified language, with or  Hegel maintains that this is particularly true of Eastern poetry. See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1004. 42  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1004–1005. 43  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 972 ff. 44  In this connection, Aristotle observes, “The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse – you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be.” See Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a37–1451b5, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, ed. by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 2323. 41

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without rhyme, and language without versification. Given the contingencies of spoken language, speech may provide linguistic material that can be organized so that temporal patterns of short and long syllables, together with patterns of emphasized and deemphasized syllables, create versified language exhibiting at least determinate meters. An accommodating language can also supply the linguistic material making possible schemes of rhyming, where words that begin or end with similar sounds are arranged in patterns of rhyme. Rhyme can accompany verbal rhythm, but literature can also embrace one without the other. Accordingly, Hegel delineates three fundamental forms of versification, distinguishing poetry from prose: rhythmic versification, versification with respect to the qualitative relations of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, and versification that combines the quantitative temporal ordering of rhythm with the qualitative organization of language sounds.45 Versified speech that uses meter, but not rhyme, introduces into literary language a verbal rhythm comparable to musical beat, in which constantly recurring measures provide an abiding rhythmic framework that exhibits in sound the formal unity of a self that hears its underlying presence sustaining the measured flow of musical time. The elementary building block of verbal rhythm are simple units, so-called metrical “feet”, which contain a basic pattern of long and short syllables, on which accents may also fall. Familiar examples are the dactyl (one long, two shorts), the anapest (two shorts, one long), the iambus (short, long), the trochee (long, short), the cretic (long, short, long), and the bacchius (short, long, long). Verse need not simply repeat or alternate similar metric feet. Metric versification can further be organized into lines that contain specific numbers of such arrangements of metric feet, such as iambic pentameter, with a pause inserted within a line (i.e. a caesura) or following the end of a line. Certain numbers of lines can then be further grouped into stanzas and strophes, which, like movements of a music composition, can be further symmetrically ordered.46

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1014.  Hegel discusses all these metric versification options. See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1016. 45 46

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The addition of alliteration, assonance, and rhyme to meter injects a qualitative ordering of consonant and dissonant verbal sounds, analogous to the consonance and dissonance of different tonal intervals in music. Standing alone or laid upon the formal unity of the self that meter and rhythm express, this qualitative versification adds a more material verbal patterning in which the recurring syllabic consonance of rhyme offers a verbal cadence, bringing further contrast and unity to the flow of words. Alliteration and assonance express the qualitative similarity and diversity of consonants and vowels, often at the beginning of a line of verse. By contrast, rhyme ordinarily involves patterns of like or unlike syllables, usually falling at the end of a line of verse. Alliteration, assonance, and rhyme schemes can have varying patterns, which can remain the same throughout a work, alternate like the A-B-A scheme of a rondo, or follow some other order, such as prescribed by the sonnet or other forms of poetry. Symmetries of differentiated alliteration, assonance, and rhyme schemes can then underly the unity and closure of the work of literature, supplementing the patterns of meter that contribute their own formal organization. Hegel suggests that “rhyme belongs to the form of romantic poetry which demands a stronger pronunciation of the independently formed sound because here our inner personality wishes to apprehend itself in the material medium of sound.”47 Once again, Hegel ignores how subjectivity enters the content of every artistic style. Moreover, he here presumes that rhyme has some essential connection to the literary diction of Romantic literature, as if the prose of modern drama and the novel were incapable of expressing the Romantic world view. The dispensability of versification for literature reflects the limits of its contribution to literary diction. Whatever the arrangement of meter, alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, it offers a comparatively impoverished organization of temporal flow and consonance and dissonance compared to what music has thanks to the intricacies of scales, harmony, and melodic development. Unlike music, however, literature hardly need rely exclusively, let alone, primarily, upon meter and rhyme for its expression.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1024.

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Whereas music must move our souls solely through the wordless play of rhythm, pitch, timbre, harmony, and melody, literature adds to any meter and rhyme it may possess the discursive meanings that its language expresses.48 Speech and writing that is versified may have rhythms and patterns of syllabic consonance unlike “ordinary language” in daily prosaic life. Versification alone, however, cannot give language any genuine literary value. Versification must combine with choices of words and phrases that convey matters of essential significance in some voice or other whose every expression contributes to the meaning of the work’s imagined narrative.49 Then the meter and any rhyming scheme must be fashioned to intensify the expressive significance of the work. Otherwise, versification remains a formal adornment of negligible aesthetic worth. Verse that is mere doggerel and jingle, serving instrumental ends of commerce, edification, or entertainment is completely prosaic.50 What decisively distinguishes prosaic from truly artistic speech and writing is thus not the divide between versified language and prose. The crucial difference rather lies in the distinction between language that serves to communicate, persuade, titillate, philosophically or theologically argue, or scientifically understand, and language whose verbal tapestry deserves to appear for its own sake in virtue of creating an imagined world with imagined voices that confront us with an exemplary configuration of matters of fundamental concern. The language that achieves the latter creation may lack rhyme and not be versified at all. It may incorporate language that, taken in isolation, is indistinguishable from prosaic speech, but so integrated into a wider narrative as to take on a  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1017.  As Hegel puts it, “Just as in musical declamation, the rhythm and melody must take on the character of the subject-matter, … so versification too is a music which … makes re-echo … the course and character of the ideas in question. To this end, the meter must announce the general tone and spiritual touch of a whole poem; and it is not a matter of indifference whether iambics, trochees, stanzas, alcaic or other strophes are adopted as external forms for a poem.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1013–1014. 50  So Aristotle can observe in connection to drama that “the diction of the personnages, i.e. …. the expression of their thoughts in words, … is practically the same thing with verse as with prose.” See Aristotle, Politics, 1450b13–14, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, ed. by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 2321. 48 49

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significance that informs all its details. The literary work can present speech that is crafted to fit different characters, reflecting their age, mental condition, levels of education, social position, and dialects, as do William Faulkner’s novels, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and The Fury, in which each chapter is written in the distinct voice of a different character. An author can also, like James Joyce in Ulysses, use a different literary style in each section of the work, employing language that radically varies from chapter to chapter. Alternately, writers can include “naturalist” reconstructions of ordinary speech, as in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Emile Zola, Richard Wright, and John Steinbeck, or attempt to put the stream of conscious thoughts in words, as in Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway or Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart. Or a writer of prose can produce a literary creation in the language of a scholarly commentary to a short poem, as Vladimir Nabokov does in his novel, Pale Fire. In all these cases, language that resembles purely prosaic speech is elevated to an aesthetic pitch by presenting narratives in which an imagined world of thought, feeling, and action is brought before us with no wasted words. At the other extreme, writers can use prose in an artificially modified language for aesthetic effect, provided it is sufficiently recognizable to be comprehended by readers. Anthony Burgess gives us his own invented “Russified” dialect to portray the imagined world of A Clockwork Orange, whereas James Joyce pushes his readers to search desperately for some skeleton key to decipher the linguistic concoction of Finnegan’s Wake, whose wild transfiguration of existing language brings literature to the brink of incomprehensibility. When Hegel distinguishes poetic from prosaic treatment of subject matter, he ends up presenting the general strictures of the aesthetic unity of form and content, of meaning and configuration, which apply equally to versified and prose literature. The defining factor is that language as fine art “does not yet separate the universal from its living existence in the individual”, taking “something already known independently in its universality and merely express it in imagery. In this way of looking at things, poetry presents all its subject-matter as a totality complete in itself and

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therefore independent.”51 By contrast, prosaic language fails to maintain the unity of universal and individual, but instead either speaks in abstractions or describes phenomena in their immediate contingent singularity. In suggesting that literature does not yet make that separation of universal from “living existence”, Hegel intimates that poetry precedes prosaic language, serving as “the original presentation of truth … which does not yet oppose law to appearance, end to means, and then relate them together again by abstract reasoning, but which grasps the one only in and through the other.”52 In a more narrow vein, Hegel further maintains that versified literature precedes prose literature.53 Neither of these claims commands any necessary truth. The very transfiguration of given language in which literature always engages presupposes the presence of prosaic linguistic interaction. Indeed, it is only the contrast between literary creation and “ordinary” language that “frames” the words of literature as something to be considered for aesthetic appreciation. Even if one imagines humanity to begin its career with a sacralized world in which spirit is omnipresent, that does not mandate that all language will be artistic, let alone versified.

The Creative Activity of the Literary Artist Of all the fine arts, literature is least encumbered with the technical challenges of configuring an external perceptible material. The architect must contend with the engineering challenges of designing buildings whose construction out of heavy matter will literally stand the test of time and gravity. The sculptor must acquire the strength and skill for shaping plastic materials, where, in the case of stone carving, every strike of the chisel may irrevocably ruin the work in progress. So, too, the graphic artist must master the techniques of preparing surfaces for tapestry, engraving,  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 973  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 973. 53  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1009. 51 52

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lithography, drawing, painting, and murals; the crafts of drawing and perspective; the skills for mixing paints and painting mediums; and whatever other techniques must be conquered as graphic arts technologies develop. Musicians and composers must learn how to play instruments and become versed in the basic skills of musical composition, from rhythm to harmony to counterpoint and large-scale musical form. In all these cases, the challenge of embodying artistic production in a particular sensuous material demands two things that are hardly universal endowments of prospective artists: a talent for handling “this and no other mode of portrayal” and “the skill in technical execution that runs parallel to this.”54 Because the non-literary arts depend upon grappling with a specific naturally given medium, the facility required to master this medium depends upon equally natural aptitudes, as well as upon acquired habits and skills that training and practice can furnish. With literature, however, the medium is immaterial semiotic imagination itself, assisted by whatever physical effort may be required to express language in a form perceivable by others. The ability to learn, use, and communicate language is a common possession of anyone who exercises rational agency, including creating or appreciating fine arts of any sort. Literary capability does not require any special training or any special skills other than those that are general acquisitions of rational animals who are mentally and physically unimpaired, and who have had the opportunity to grow up as a member of a linguistic community, which, in the case of literate societies, provides universal instruction in writing. What creators of literature must additionally obtain, however, is literary imagination and the literary technique to embody it. This goes beyond mere linguistic competence, but it involves no mastery of any further material. The prerequisite techniques of other arts are straightforward enough. Schools of architecture know how to teach the crafts of architectural draftsmanship, be it by hand or computer, and of building and landscape engineering. Schools of the visual arts can teach sculptors and graphic artists the crafts involved in physically forming their respective materials. Music schools can instruct their students in the performance of different instruments and in the techniques of rhythm, counterpoint, harmony,  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 997.

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and musical form. By contrast, creative writing programs have little to teach in the way of material technique. Creativity cannot be acquired through practice or instruction, and any school that pretends to mold artists of any art cannot expect to make them creative geniuses. Nonetheless, artists, including writers, can benefit from aesthetic criticism and self-criticism that evaluates their work in light of the fundamental imperatives for creating beauty in their respective medium. Whether fostered by critique and self-critique elicited by formal “creative writing education”, the literary artist must wield a talent that is both independent from specific material conditions and more general than that of artists in other media. Because literature can encompass every content worthy of aesthetic treatment, the literary creator must have the most wide-ranging and rich imagination, rooted in the most concrete and comprehensive immersion in the life of inward subjectivity and the outer world of human endeavor. Although, as Hegel notes, the creative writer may be exempt from having to conquer the technical difficulties of the other arts, the task of literary creation is beyond compare since the artist must rely entirely upon the depth of imagination to transfigure the widest breadth of significant subject matter.55 To this end, creative writers will do well to gain acquaintance with the varieties of versified speech and prose that their predecessors and contemporaries have employed, as well as with the different genres of literature and their intrinsic limits. Since every artist will inhabit a civilization whose worldview they confront, writers can benefit from seeing how others have struggled to find the appropriate literary form to express that fundamental self-understanding. There have been writers who produced masterpieces in early adulthood, like Georg Büchner, whose plays were all written before he died at age twenty-three, Thomas Mann, who published Buddenbrooks at the age of twenty-six, and Stephen Crane, whose Red Badge of Courage appeared when he was twenty-four. Nonetheless, literary prodigies are nowhere to be found who can equal the musical achievement of a child Mozart or Mendelssohn. This is understandable due to how creative writers cannot succeed at the fine art of language unless they are sufficiently acquainted 55

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 997–998.

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with the broad reach of internal and external human experience and sufficiently adept at its imaginative verbal formulation. Time is on their side, for, as Hegel observes, “contrary to the usual opinion that the glow and warmth of youth is the finest age for poetic production, the precise opposite may therefore be maintained from this point of view, and we may assert that old age is the ripest period if it can preserve energy of insight and feeling.”56

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 999.

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12 The Aesthetics of Literary Genres

The Fundamental Genres of Literature Lyric, Epic, and Drama have perennially been acknowledged to be the fundamental genres of literature, but their defining identity and status has been embroiled in controversy. Although the division of literary genres may seem to be a simple matter, with lyric consisting in short poems, epic consisting in long narrative poems, and drama being literature that is presented on a stage, these identifications cannot suffice. Not all short poems are lyric in character, for some, like ballades, narrate stories in a very non-lyrical fashion. Nor can literature preclude prose pieces that are as lyrical as versified texts. Not all epic consists in long narrative poetry, for epic narratives can come in varying lengths. Further, much, and, indeed, more and more of epic literature is prose, such as the short story, novella, and novel. Finally, not all drama is fit for stage presentation, nor are lyric and epic works strangers to the theater, given the performances that poets and rhapsodists can deliver. Indeed, in the wake of

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Chekhov and Brecht’s “epic theater”, it has become commonplace for plays to be considered more lyric or epic than dramatic.1 To end confusion, three basic approaches to categorizing literary genre have been followed. One consists in distinguishing lyric, epic, and drama in an a priori way, deriving their differentiation from the concept of literature as fine art. This approach requires locating necessary features in the specific medium of literature that engender these genres. A second a priori approach consists in locating the division of literary genres not in features that apply to literature in general, but rather in how the fundamental artforms, the Symbolic, the Classical, and the Romantic, achieve literary expression. On this account, the different literary genres will each have a special relation to a particular artform. A third approach abandons any a priori derivation of literary genre and instead treats them as contingent historical forms of literary production. An analogous tripartition of options applies to how subgenres of literature can be and have been categorized. Among the most prominent and most discussed subgenres are those that apply to drama, namely, tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy. One option roots these genres of drama in the a priori concept of drama in general. Another option links tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy to the a priori particular artforms. A third approach identifies these forms of drama as contingent historically given phenomena. Among past philosophers of fine art, none has provided a more extensive and systematic account of lyric, epic, and drama, as well as of the dramatic genres, than Hegel. His account, however, is fraught with ambiguity, consisting in the same tendency to conflate what distinguishes aspects of the individual arts with what distinguishes the modes of artistic construal of the artforms. In Hegel’s general differentiation of the pure individual arts, we have seen how, on the one hand, he derives their  In this vein, Emil Staiger writes, “Poems, it is said, are lyric, that is to say, poems of limited dimensions. … Stage plays, it is said, belong to the dramatic genre. … But how many playwrights must put up with hearing critics say that their work is not markedly dramatic? … Longer verse narrative is called an epos. Is every longer verse narrative epic? No. … A novel is no verse narrative; therefore it is no epos, yet it is still an epic work. The situation is no better with lyric poetry. Poems are termed lyric but there are poems that are not lyric.” See Staiger, Emil, Basic Concepts of Poetics, trans. Janette C.  Hudson and Luanne T.  Frank (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), pp. 196–197. 1

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identity from the fundamental options of artistic media, while, on the other hand, he ascribes to each art a special affinity to one of the artforms. Hegel undercuts his own conflation of individual art and artform by acknowledging how each art can be and has been enlisted as a fit vehicle for expressing all the fundamental artistic styles. This holds true of Hegel’s account of literature, which he expressly acknowledges is most able to embody every artform, given the freedom of literary art from the physical limits of the other artistic media. Nonetheless, Hegel extends his conflation of individual art and artform to his differentiation of literary genres and of the dramatic genres of tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy. Just as he maintains that literature as a whole has a special affinity to the Romantic artform, he suggests that Lyric literature best fits the Romantic spirit, that Epic literature can have its supreme expression in the Classical style, and that Drama, and in particular, tragedy, achieves its greatest beauty in expressing the Classical Ideal. With respect to tragedy, Hegel goes so far as to maintain that the Symbolic artform, as exemplified by ancient Sanskrit drama, is simply incapable of producing true tragedy. Although Hegel’s differentiation of individual arts and artforms are both a priori categorizations, his connection of literary genres to specific artforms has led literary theorists, like Peter Szondi, to regard the division of lyric, epic, and drama as a fundamentally historical categorization.2 Although Szondi admits that each genre can be found historically in all the civilizations to which the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms can be attributed, he regards the pure, canonical forms of each to lie in a particular historic period. He points to the ancient Greek epos, as embodied in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as the paradigmatic model of epic literature, although he acknowledges that the novel can be considered a modern form of epic literature, embodying the worldview Hegel attributes to the Romantic artform.3 Similarly, he regards the pure form of drama to be introduced in the European Renaissance, which focuses entirely on the dialogue among characters, while jettisoning such features

 Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, p. 4.  Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, p. 6.

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as a Chorus, a Prologue, and an Epilogue, which burdened Classic drama with residual aspects of epic stylization.4 Admittedly, the different literary genres may be embodied in literature that encumbers works that are predominantly lyric, epic, or dramatic, with aspects of the other genres. Indeed, as we shall see, these combinations may themselves reflect aesthetic imperatives connected to the type of world view that is being expressed. Nonetheless, the very possibility of identifying such “impure” mixtures depends upon distinguishing lyric, epic, and drama from one another.5 Another issue that hinges upon the connection of literary genre to artform is whether there is any necessary genetic ordering to lyric, epic, and dramatic literature. This question has structural implications, for if one genre does not depend upon the others, but they incorporate aspects of it in their own constitution, that most minimal genre can come to be without the others at hand, whereas they will depend upon its presence as a prior or at least coeval reality. Hegel suggests that drama combines the subjective and objective dimensions that allegedly distinguish lyric and epic literature, entailing a genetic ordering where drama will emerge subsequently to lyric and epic. This ordering can then be mapped onto the alleged sequence of artforms, built on the notion that the Classical artform arises out of the Symbolic artform and that the dissolution of the Classical artform generates the Romantic artform. To decide what defines the literary genres, whether they have any genetic ordering, and what status they have, we must first examine whether the concept of literature as such provides a basis for their differentiation. If so, each genre will be available to every artform. In this connection, we can assess whether lyric, epic, and drama are coeval possibilities for literary expression or whether they have any intrinsic genetic ordering. Then, we can assess whether lyric, drama, and epic have any special affinities to the different artforms, or whether each artform can employ  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, pp. 5, 7–10.  As Emil Staiger explains, although “it has become senseless to attempt to describe all categories in which literary works can be placed … it is not senseless to ask about the essence of the lyric, the epic and the dramatic. For these qualities are simple and their stability is not disturbed by the shimmering and wavering character of particular literary works.” See Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 199. 4 5

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the full breadth of genres and subgenres. Answering these questions will decide whether an a priori theory of literary genre is warranted, or whether literary theorists must resign themselves to corrigible labors of empirical modeling. Therefore, we must begin by asking, what, if anything, in the defining media of literature can provide a basis for differentiating literary genres?

 ow the Concept of Literature Grounds H the Differentiation of Literary Genres To locate the origin of literary genres in signal features of the medium of literature, factors must be identified that, although common to both prosaic and artistic language, can serve to distinguish literary forms from one another, independently of the further stylistic transfigurations of the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms. These linguistic factors must themselves be sufficient to give embodiment to all the features constitutive of literary fine art, including the defining content, imaginative construal, and diction with which literature distinguishes itself from verbalizations lacking aesthetic value. Conversely, every genre that derives from them must thereby command the resources to provide all that literature need possess to be fine art. These requirements are not fulfilled by the attempt of Emil Staiger to distinguish the literary genres, lyric-epic-dramatic, in terms of the linguistic factors of syllable-word-sentence. The syllable, Staiger alleges, is the actual lyric element in language because it designates nothing, thereby lacks intentionality, and solely resounds with a cry of feeling. The word, by contrast, designates an object and thereby allegedly grounds the epic, which, unlike the lyric, uses the fullness of words to present the things of the world in their visible totality. Finally, the sentence, Staiger, asserts, provides the functional relations of parts on which drama depends, relating subject to predicate and dependent clauses to main clauses, giving expression to the logical and purposeful connections that fuel dramatic collisions.6  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 178.

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Moreover, Staiger maintains that the structural dependence of sentence upon word and word upon syllable mandate an analogous order of dependency between the dramatic, the epic, and the lyric. Supposedly, drama cannot develop its problems and passions without the world of objects designated by the words of epic, just as the epic cannot present the visible domain opposing us without the lyric having expressed feelings that make worldly things matter to us.7 This supposed structural hierarchy entails a genetic ordering thanks to how the sequence syllable-word-sentence supposedly corresponds to the stages in the development of language, both in the individual language learner and in the linguistic community that is forming its language. Drawing upon Ernst Cassirer, Staiger claims that the syllable basis of lyric ties it to the initial phase of language as emotional expression, the word basis of epic ties it to the following phase of visible expression, and the sentence basis of drama ties it the final phase of conceptual thinking. These stages allegedly model the linguistic development from toddler to child to adult and from an undeveloped linguistic community to one that advances to representational designation and lastly to conceptual discourse. Supposedly, these parallel movements from the emotional to the visual to the conceptual underly the development of the “feeling-­showing-­ proving” literary ventures of lyric-epic-dramatic.8 Admittedly, Staiger qualifies his own genre account by acknowledging that literature from the start has at its disposal syllables, words, and sentences, as well as the ability to verbalize the feeling of emotion, the presentation of the objects of the world, and the conceptual and purposive relations on which thought and action revolve.9 He accordingly retreats from maintaining any strict genetic ordering that could be confirmed by the actual history of literary forms, especially given his acknowledgment that individual works of literature contain not just one pure genre, but combinations of the lyric, epic, and dramatic.10

 Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, pp. 179–180.  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, pp. 181–182. 9  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 178. 10  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 178. 7 8

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Nonetheless, Staiger’s whole account fails to capture the type of linguistic factor that could support a division of literary genres. Feeling, intentionality, and discursive thought cannot fail to be at the command of the creator of literature, on display in the work of literature itself, and endowed to its reader or listener or theater audience. Although a mere syllable may express an inchoate cry of feeling, lyric literature can never be reduced to expressions of emotion that fail to verbalize meanings about the self, others, and the world at large as the lyric voice thinks and feels about them. The lyric “I” must be concrete, an individuated person whose words give expression to matters that are not just about the feeling “soul”, wrapped up in its own sensations, but about “spirit”, the individual who has universal concerns worthy of the attention of others. Whether lyricizing about a Grecian urn, a nightingale, a silent evening, friends lost on the battlefield, a love that is alive or gone, a world in turmoil, or a religious savior, the lyric writer must use syllables, words, and sentences to express feelings concretely rooted in the world and the normative concerns that only thought can access. The lyric, in other words, cannot be specially tied to the syllable, mere feeling, or the emotive stage of language. Similarly, epic writing must equally use syllables, words, and sentences to invoke emotion, depict the world, and tackle the religious and/or secular values that make that world and its heroes worthy of epic presentation. And, of course, dramatic literature, must use the same full command of language to bring passion and projects before us that have comparable significance to deserve an audience today and tomorrow. We are in a very different predicament when we attempt to ground the literary genres upon the familiar linguistic factor that distinguishes forms of speech without depriving any of the full wealth of linguistic material that literature must employ to be fine art. This factor is the voice or form of narration that literature uses to express its content with all the imaginative creativity and diction that applies to the fine art of words. Language has three basic forms of narration. First, there is narration by an individual voice that describes and expresses what it feels and thinks about whatever falls under its consideration. This voice speaks in the first person, explicitly or implicitly. Secondly, there is the voice that narrates what it presents with a third person omniscience, standing over and

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against its subject matter. This type of voice may narrate the first-person thoughts and feelings of individuals it depicts, as well as narrate conversations between individuals. It is possible for this narrator to intermittently address the reader directly or to insert his or her own persona into the narrative that is presented. Nonetheless, the narrator retains a distance from what the narrative presents, unlike narration that proceeds exclusively as first person speech. Thirdly, there is the form of narration that consists in the independent interchange of different voices, whose conversation is directly presented so that no separate voice narrates their dialogue. All these types of narration can be used in prosaic language that has no aesthetic pretensions, but simply involves mundane exclamations or descriptions, labors of instruction, attempts at persuasion, or efforts to entertain or titillate. All the narrative forms, however, can be a vehicle for literary fine art. In this endeavor, their distinctive voices give a special mold to all the features that literary art must possess. Only in this respect, can we understand how the first person voice can distinguish the lyric genre, the third person voice can distinguish the epic genre, and the dialogue of multiple voices can distinguish the dramatic genre. Aristotle’s Poetics pioneers differentiating literary genres in terms of the fundamental forms of narration, primarily focusing upon drama, with secondary attention to epic, and passing mention of what amounts to lyric under the heading of dithyrambic poetry. Significantly, Aristotle admits that he and his Greek compatriots lack any term for the art of language11 and his Poetics presents its unevenly developed discussion of genre without addressing how the literary genres become further transformed in the service of different artistic styles. Aristotle’s account operates as if what is immediately exhibited in the Classical literature of his time perfectly illustrates what defines the different genres of drama, epic, and lyric, as well as the principal subgenres of drama: tragedy and comedy. Aristotle duly recognizes that literary genres can be derived from the different forms of narration only insofar as the latter “differ in their  Aristotle notes, “There is further an art which imitates by language alone, and one which imitates by meters, either one or a plurality of meters. These forms of imitation are still nameless today. We have no common name.” See Aristotle, Poetics, Book I, 1447a23–25, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2316. 11

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means, or in their object, or in the manner of their imitations”.12 Due to the narrow scope of Aristotle’s analysis, however, we must be wary of how his derivation of the literary genres from narrative forms involves implications that are limited to how the Classical ideal achieves lyric, epic, and dramatic embodiment. Hegel also roots literary genres in the different narrative forms, but, unlike Aristotle, he distinguishes them from their embodiments in the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms, despite suggesting affinities between certain genres and stylistic modes. For this reason, we can fruitfully draw upon Hegel’s discussion of genres to expand upon what Aristotle provides. Our aim is to determine what is truly generic to lyric, epic, and drama in function of the three basic forms of narration. On that basis, we can then address whether there is any genetic ordering to the literary genres or whether they are coeval artistic options for all civilizations, equally capable of aesthetically configuring the worldviews that underly the fundamental artforms: the Symbolic, the Classical, and the Romantic. We will begin by considering lyric, epic, and drama as minimally distinguished respectively by the narrative forms of first-person voice, third-person voice, and dialogue, considered broadly as conversation between individuals. To this end, however, we will follow Hegel’s order of treatment, starting with epic, then examining lyric, and concluding with drama. This order will prudently allow us to evaluate Hegel’s claim that epic is the first literary genre, from which lyric and drama allegedly emerge.

Epic Literature and Third-Person Narration The epic genre of literature employs the framework of the third-person voice, which narrates an imagined objectivity independently facing the narrator. This is true even when the narrator enters the imaginary fray, as in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, whose narrators all describe themselves as part of the depicted story, using an epic, rather than lyric “I”. In 12

 Aristotle, Poetics, Book I, 1447a17–18, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2316.

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every case, the epic can count as fine art only insofar as it narrates a content rife with the normative quests of humanity, be they secular or sacred. Moreover, the epic narrative retains aesthetic worth only by shaping its story into a totality whose unfolding possesses sufficient unity to meld meaning and configuration. The objective development that is imagined must have universal significance, but this meaning must be interwoven into the activities of distinct personages, determinately situated in a concrete world. Epic narration can omnisciently describe the innermost thoughts and feelings of the inhabitants of the world it imagines, just as it can present their conversations as they are imagined taking place. The third person voice can thereby contain lyric avowals and dramatic dialogue as elements of its narrative, while encompassing them in an objective world, whose surrounding nature and conventional setting are made manifest in a distinctly “epic” portrayal, whether they be “true” to nature and history or transfigured into a world of fantasy. Epic narration can employ the fullest reach of verbal virtuosity, with metaphor and simile, rhythmic and rhyme versification, and prose, maintaining a constant or alternating diction. The ancient Indian and Homeric epics both use verse, as do the Christian epics of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, the medieval Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, Goethe’s Faust, and Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin, and its latter-day reincarnation, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. Yet classic Chinese novels and most modern novels dispense with verse and employ prose without forsaking literary art. Whatever the case, the use of language must fit the voice of the narrator, as well as the voices of the personages who are imagined. When the epic narrator remains unchanged throughout the work, the narration should reflect that constancy, whereas when the individuals portrayed are diverse and undergo transformations, the manner with which they speak as part of the epic narrative must express these characterizations. For this reason, Hegel maintains that Homer’s constant use of hexameter verse properly suits the detached unchanging external stance of his epic narration.13 A work of epic literature can also present a succession of different narrators, who each have a distinctive voice reflecting their identity. The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1020, 1136.

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Chaucer and The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio both present their Medieval worlds through the stories of a multiplicity of speakers, journeying together on pilgrimage or seeking refuge together from the Black Death, respectively. So too, William Faulkner, in such works as As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, presents his third-person narrative through a succession of different characters, who each continue the story in their own language from their objectively distinguished point of view. And James Joyce will push the narrative envelope further by presenting his epic portrayal of a day in the life of some denizens of Dublin, changing his style with each episode of his characters’ odyssey. These possibilities of epic narration are left out of account when Hegel begins his treatment of the general features of epic. Hegel instead introduces determinations of content and form that seem to fit specifically the epos, the type of epic literature that gives expression to the Classical Ideal. Hegel has no apologies to make, for he maintains that Homer, the pioneer of the epos, has given us in his Iliad and Odyssey what is truly paradigmatic for the epic.14 Hegel maintains that the epos has a threefold paradigmatic role to play that determines the entire treatment of literary genres. Not only does the epos typify what is essential to epic literature, but it has a genetic primacy, making it the initial form of literature on whose basis lyric and then drama can arise. Finally, although the epos comes first and lays the ground rules for all epic literature to follow, Hegel insists that the canonical achievement of Homer’s epos represents the highest aesthetic attainment that epic literature can achieve. This alleged aesthetic preeminence will redeem Hegel’s suggestion that the epic has an affinity with the Classical style, even if Symbolic and Romantic art will find ways to shape the epic to express their fundamental self-understandings. The genetic primacy and aesthetic preeminence that Hegel attributes to the epos both rest upon features of form and content that he, paradoxically enough, offers as essential aspects of epic literature in general and not just as special signatures of the Classical epic. Obviously, what pertains to the epos must include features essential to epic in general. Moreover, what is common to all epic forms might provide factors on 14

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1051.

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which the other literary genres depend, both genetically and structurally. If, however, such features are specific to the epos, their genetic primacy will be questionable so long as epic in the Symbolic style can arise either before or independently of the Classical epic. The key move in Hegel’s elevation of the epos to paradigmatic status is his claim that epic proper addresses occurrences of action that reveal in the unfolding of their “rich event” the “total world of a nation and epoch”.15 Although every literary work must combine matters of fundamental significance with concrete individuation, the third person narration of epic literature has an unparalleled scope. Whereas lyric must concentrate upon what the first person expresses of its own feeling and thoughts, and drama must focus its depiction of concrete action in the dialogue of its characters, the wider narration of epic can depict not only the thoughts, feelings, and conversations of individuals, but the entire situation and world condition encompassing the events it chronicles. Epic’s concentration of a total world in the lives it presents accordingly does not take the form of the sporadic, transient reflection of the lyric subject or the driving univocal trajectory of dramatic conflict. Instead, the parts of an epic have a relatively greater independence, consisting in a looser string of events external to one another, which nonetheless remain grounded in the objective course of the imagined world to which they belong.16 These basic parameters of epic content and form can be interpreted to accommodate all epic literature from the Ramayana and Mahabharata to the modern novel, as we shall see. Hegel, however, adds two qualifications, that underlie the epic’s genetic primacy among literary genres. As the artistic testament of the total world of a nation and epoch, the epic is the “Saga, the Book, the Bible of a people” that enables it to become conscious of its own defining spirit.17 This, of course, does not mean that the foundational religious texts of a community count as epic literature, for, as Hegel acknowledges, such works as the Torah, the New Testament, and the Koran do not have the thoroughgoing unity of meaning and  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1044.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1044–1045. 17  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1045. 15 16

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configuration that would qualify them as works of fine art.18 Nonetheless, the epic’s portrayal of individual lives as expressive of the total world to which they belong presents an “immediate unity of feeling with action, of inner aims logically pursued with external accidents and events” that allegedly occurs “only in the earliest periods of poetry and a nation’s life.”19 Only when this original unity becomes disrupted and individuals develop attitudes and engage in deeds that conflict with aspects of their national organism, and begin to find their emotions and will at odds with them, do the conditions arise that foster first dramatic literature and then lyric.20 In making these claims, Hegel presumes that the world situation of epic contains no opportunity for a lyric voice to express its thoughts and feelings about its world or for a dialogical voice to dramatize how individuals enter conflicts with either tragic, comedic, or tragic-comedic outcomes. Yet, as every epic will substantiate, the events that reveal an encompassing human world always involve individuals who feel and think about their situation and enter opposition through their volitions. The values that underlie their reflections and conflicts may differ, in function of the diverse world views that distinguish the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms. In every case, however, the conditions of human life in both its sacred and secular dimensions provide opportunities for each of the three basic forms of literary narration. Admittedly, Homer gave the ancient Greeks an imagined pantheon to which their subsequent creations would refer, but even he depicts legendary events long gone, from a later world in which only historical obscurity may conceal literary efforts in the other genres. Does the epic still have a special relation to a particular kind of world situation that has privileged significance for one artform rather than the others? Hegel maintains that a genuine epic is tied to the general state of civilization that has special meaning for the Classical world view, but that has lost currency for the modern world in which the Romantic artform is at home. The proper world situation for epic, Hegel maintains, is not a  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1045.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1046. 20  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1046. 18 19

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heroic age, in which some legendary individual founds a new community through an individual exertion. That situation revolves too much around the subjective exceptionalism of the hero, whose founding endeavor cannot exhibit an objective way of life that already pervades the world. Heroic foundation is too much of a moral situation, where an agent seeks to bring into existence a good that is not yet at hand, rather than an ethical engagement, where individuals are defending and sustaining an order that already exists.21 In order for the epic narrative standpoint to be aesthetically motivated to depict action in intrinsic connection to an entire objective human reality, the institutions of ethical life must be present. Hegel in particular points to existing bonds of family and the body politic that unite the entire nation in some ethos in relation to which the strivings of individuals can have substantial significance.22 His focus on household and state reflects the ethical community of the Classical world, whose division into oikos and polis precludes ascribing any dignity to a separate social realm, such as that community of particular interests that civil society will honor. Hegel justifies this restriction by maintaining that truly epic events cannot take place in a world of objective ethical institutions that have obtained a self-sustaining constitutional reality, with norms enforced through duly elaborated laws, effective courts, and an administration of justice, whose operations do not hinge upon the exertions of any single individuals. The same is true of the economic activity of the civil society that such an order contains, where industrial market conditions remove any space for individuals to have a vitally significant relation to nature.23 The epic world situation does require existing ethical institutions, but these must give room for individuals to take actions that are crucial to the affirmation of that world, and that, Hegel claims, can only prevail in the pre-modern world situation that Homer canonically portrays.24 This world situation is intermediate between an age of founders of states and the prosaic world of a self-sustaining institutional realm in which  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1052.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1052. 23  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1053. 24  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1053. 21 22

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individual action has no essential importance. Only here can imagined individuals freely exert themselves in actions on which the entire fate of the community is concentrated. Only here can there be epic figures who combine independence with substantial meaning. Hegel sees this ­perfectly exemplified in the characters of the Iliad. Homer’s Greek combatants have independently chosen to join forces with Agamemnon, just as their own subjects voluntarily follow them, without being compelled by an existing institutional machinery. Moreover, instead of relying upon market mechanisms to fulfill their needs, they take pride in slaughtering oxen and preparing their own food, and the Gods they honor exhibit the same independence and substantial connection in their dealings with Zeus.25 There is little need to quibble with Hegel about how the world situation of the Homeric epos provides a suitable environment for literature that is epic in both form and content. Is this world situation, however, exclusively fit to realize the aesthetic mission of epic literature or necessarily preeminent among the other contenders? Hegel acknowledges that the world situation in which epic events unfold must be concretely individuated and no less enmeshed with concerns of universal human significance.26 On this score Hegel acknowledges that the mammoth Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, succeed in imaginatively creating an entire cosmos of Symbolic meaning that captures the national spirit of ancient India, but he complains that these epics lack sufficient universality to retain aesthetic interest for other civilizations.27 As we shall, a case can be made that the world they create, as fantastical as it may be, revolves around normative questions that have an abiding importance for any human self-understanding. Similarly, we shall see that the modern world of established institutions and a civil society provides a fit setting for a novel epic quest, embodying a very different view of human freedom, which would not be opaque to Homer or Valmiki, even if they would doubt its authority. Hegel’s privileging of the world situation specific to the epos carries over to how he privileges the type of collision to which it gives rise. Hegel,  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1053–1055.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1056–1057. 27  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1058. 25 26

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however, identifies this collision as not just specific to the Classical epic, but as paradigmatic of epic collisions generally in their distinction from dramatic collisions.28 War comprises, on Hegel’s account, the epic ­collision par excellence because it most fully merges individual initiative with the ethical unity of a nation, leaving the public good hinging upon the independent action of combatants. Certainly, war is an appropriate collision for the epos, since in warfare, individuals must exhibit the bravery by which their own personal effort has vital public value in defending the entire body politic, with all its sacred and secular relations. And certainly, war is not a privileged theme for lyric or drama. In the field of war, the volitions of participants get bound up with the accidents of external occurrences, as is appropriate to epic narration of actions and their encompassing circumstances. Although war may be reflected upon by the lyric voice, its subjective frame cannot properly situate itself to capture the objective expanse of warfare. Similarly, although drama my allude to war, dialogue can only directly embody the conversations of protagonists and not the immersion of their actions in the contingent happenings that fall within the scope of epic narration.29 Hegel further narrows proper epic conflict to war between nations of differing ethical character rather than civil war. Struggles between civil factions and dynastic claimants are more appropriate for dramatic portrayal since they can be conveyed in the direct interchange of competing representative individuals. War between nations with clashing values, by contrast, pit individuals as defenders of the total national spirit, rather than some particular interest. For this reason, Hegel insists, conflict with a foreign enemy is the genuine theme of epic depiction. Admittedly, such warfare can provide conflicts for epic treatment, and as Hegel points out, this is eminently demonstrated by Homer’s Iliad. Whether foreign conflict is the only genuine theme for epic is another matter. Homer’s Odyssey presents a more dubious support for Hegel’s claim, since Odysseus embarks on a series of adventures that do not involve warfare before finally returning to Ithaca to save Penelope from the onslaught of suitors who are despoiling his kingdom. Although none of Odysseus’ exploits  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1059–1060.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1060.

28 29

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put him in battle against foreign nations, Hegel insists that his whole journey is predicated upon the Trojan War.30 Hegel even applies the thematic privilege of war between nations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, as if the Devil were engaged in continual warfare with the will of God and those following Divine command.31 This application is indicative of how war can enter into epic treatments that are not specific to the epos. The Symbolic artform can create epics that revolve around war, as exemplified in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which contain elements of both foreign conflict and intra-national struggle. Similarly, the modern novel can treat of war, even though depicting a very different role for its characters than those of the Iliad, as shown by William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, both of which narrate events that embroil their protagonists in the Napoleonic wars. Despite Hegel’s protestations, civil war and revolution have provided a fit setting for such modern novels as Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, André Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope, and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. In all these cases the world situation of the epos has been supplanted by the emergence of public institutions that give little scope for a Homeric hero, but the slaughterhouse of warfare, both foreign and civil, still situates individuals in predicaments where they must grapple with the most fundamental concerns of their human condition. Hegel provides us with a more generally applicable guideline for the content of epic literature when he addresses the defining character of individual epic action, which the epic world situation occasions. Whether imagined individuals are involved in the national undertaking of the epos, the more fantastical saga of the ancient Indian epics, or a wandering through the prosaic world in which the modern novel casts them, some aim must grip them in which the ethical and/or religious strivings of their world are ingredient. The resulting pursuit of this aim in the narrative of the epic takes the specific form, Hegel duly shows, of an event.32 The event at the heart of epic narrative has two sides, one inner and one outer.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1059.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1059. 32  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1063. 30 31

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The inner side consists in the aim that the epic individual knows, embraces, and seeks to achieve in responsible action. The outer side consists in the encompassing objective world of human institutions and nature in which all action must proceed. The epic narrative takes in both sides and, in so doing, the epic portrays individuals embroiled in an event in which their purposeful activity contends with all the contingencies of their world condition.33 To achieve the exemplary individuality of artistic configuration, the epic event must be entangled with a concretely depicted individual, as well as situated in circumstances that are no less individuated. Nevertheless, the epic event is not a biographical account, where the chronicled person remains the constant thread of unity to which every happening is externally and accidentally attached.34 Even though the external world is fraught with contingency, the event must join the intentional actions of individuals with the situations in which they are immersed and to which they respond. As Hegel acknowledges, events are not the sole preserve of the epic, for lyric literature can reflect upon them, just as dramatic dialogue can allude to them, most feasibly as offstage occurrences.35 Consequently, we must further specify how the epic event presents individuals in distinction from how they wax lyrically about their feelings and thoughts and how they present themselves in dramatic interplay. To be manifest in the epic narrative of events, the epic character is, as Hegel duly notes, a whole individual, whose entire inwardness and external appearance and embeddedness in the world is accessible to the third-person voice of the epic narrator.36 Epic individuals are present at once in the feelings and thoughts that are described in the conversations that occur in the course of epic events and in the concrete world situation, whose incipient conflicts encompass and instigate their actions. Whereas the lyric character is entirely enclosed in the subjective frame of the lyric reflection, epic characters disclose their thoughts and passions in the midst of all the various worldly entanglements that epic events and conflicts entail. Whereas  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1063.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1066. 35  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1067. 36  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1067. 33 34

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comic and tragic character is focused upon the opposing passions on which dramatic conflict arises and resolves, epic characters are prey to a much wider personal development in function of their immersion in the totality of worldly conditions that epic narration addresses. The greater expanse of the epic character follows most clearly from the contrast between epic event and dramatic action, which Hegel clearly draws. As Hegel observes, and as we shall confirm in greater detail when we turn to the dramatic genre, the entire course of a drama follows from the pathos, the inner will and aim of the character, whose devotion to that resolve generates the opposition whose development drives the drama to its dénouement.37 The characters of epic certainly have their own aims as well, but epic narration encompasses all the worldly contingencies that epic characters encounter in pursuing their goals. Whereas in drama, everything that enters the narrative is driven by the characters’ opposing pathos, in epic the surrounding world condition is just as determining of the course of events as the epic individuals’ independent activity. Admittedly, external circumstances do figure in drama, since genuine characters are concrete individuals who inhabit a determinate situation and world. Nonetheless, the dialogical focus of dramatic development only allows these circumstances to matter through the reaction of dramatic characters to them. In epic, “circumstances and external accidents count just as much as the character’s will, and what he achieves passes before us just as what happens from without does, so that his deed must prove to be conditioned and brought about just as much by his entanglement in external circumstances.”38 The epic event’s combination of individual pursuits and immersion in worldly externalities does not just apply to the Classical epos. The Symbolic sagas of ancient India and the personal odysseys of the modern novel all fit within the parameters of the epic event precisely because it is rooted in the form of epic narration, as mediated by the demands of aesthetic creation. Just as Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey will fall prey to series of incidents without any univocal origin in his own resolves,39 so too will  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1070.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1070. 39  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1069. 37 38

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Rama in Valmiki’s Ramayana and Pierre in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The different forms of epic will each give their own imprint to the epic world condition, the epic character, the epic action, and the epic event, but the general distinction between epic event and dramatic action will persist. This is inevitable, for when an artist puts into words what is inner and outer and uses this widest of vantagepoints to imagine exemplary configurations of ethical and religious concerns, the transfiguration of action and conflict must break the limits of what can properly be conveyed by lyric revery and dramatic dialogue.40 Whatever world view gains expression in epic literature, the resulting epic will be what Hegel calls a “fully unified whole”,41 whose totality distinguishes it from the unities that lyric and dramatic literature possess. This distinctive expansiveness is exhibited in the totality of content that epic narrates, the totality of the development by which the narrative unfolds, and the totality of concrete unity with which the epic unites its distinctive content and form. The epic world condition, the epic situation, the epic conflict, the epic character, and the engagement of action in the epic event all draw together the “greatest variety of topics” in the presentation of the entirety of a world in the inner and outer breadth of its encompassing of individual actions.42 The lyric voice may express feelings and thoughts about any aspect of reality that holds its attention, but not in any great multiplicity in the course of the brief, concentrated reflection of a single work. Drama may touch upon conflicts in diverse corners of human life, but the world of the stage is a hugely constricted platform limited to those matters that arise in the conversations of interacting protagonists. Whereas drama must draw from the pathos of dramatic character, the epic draws from both what moves each of its personas and from the external circumstances that impact them and that their actions affect.  Lukács describes the resulting narrative imperative of the epic as follows: “Since epic … must both render this world of ‘things’ and ‘circumstances’ in their most extended fullness and yet all the time translate them into the activity of men, it needs a story which will lead its characters through this entire world in the course of an unending struggle.” Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 146. 41  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1077. 42  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1078. 40

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The more extensive totality of epic content directly entails the greater expansiveness of the form of epic narration. The development of epic narrative cannot be confined to the unities of time and place that restrict drama. Whereas drama drives inexorably to its dénouement on the strength of each ramification of dialogue, the epic can only do justice to the interconnection of event and external circumstances by allowing for prolongations and detours and leisurely explorations of situations and individual accommodations to them. The epic creator can linger over the description of settings and activities of every sort, as well over the inner reflections of characters, while introducing obstacles to the pursuits that bring its narrative to an end. As Hegel notes, a single individual cannot be the sole center of narration, both because not all that individual does need be of significance to the epic collision, nor can epic events be limited to the participation of a single agent.43 Nonetheless, epic narrative cannot wander aimlessly and revert to a chronicle of mere happenings in which the prosaic infinity of antecedent causes and future consequences is followed in all its contingency. Instead, the narrative bounty of epic must waste nothing in presenting an artistically transfigured reality in which the series of independent episodes has a relative and not indifferent independence. The epic characters must be in pursuit of aims of universal significance and their adventures must reveal how the entire world in which they operate both elicits their strivings and brings them to a meaningful resolution. This world may be a national whole at war with another or a society at peace but convulsed with ethical and religious challenges of its own. The epic will achieve the totality uniting its form and content when the development of the narrative shapes events into a living whole, whose animating characters grapple with the world in which they live, charting paths that reveal the complexities of meaningful endeavor in their concrete circumstances. Such three-fold totality will characterize the artistically successful masterpieces of epic literature in every style, but in ways that properly suit the self-understandings distinguishing the Symbolic, the Classical, and the Romantic artforms.

43

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1088.

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Lyric Literature and First-Person Narration Unlike the epic, lyric literature speaks always in the first person, framing its words as the language of an “I” who narrates its own thoughts and feelings on anything worthy of artistic construal. To qualify as literature, the lyric voice addresses what is of fundamental concern to humanity in an exemplary verbal imagining by which it unites form and content, universal and individual, and meaning and configuration on which aesthetic value depends. As any art, lyric literature must express what has essential sacred or ethical value. It can do so in imagining natural objects and artifacts that do not directly involve religious and ethical affairs, but which literary art transfigures to resonate with these ultimate matters. The lyric voice, as a first-person narrator, always communicates what it individually feels and thinks, but this does not render it merely a mouthpiece of subjective meaning. Subjectivity is always present in every artistic creation and appreciation, and the narrative forms of epic and drama contain subjectivity no less. What distinguishes lyric is that its entire expression takes the form of an individual speaker, who, to deserve and move an audience, must express what that subject feels and thinks about concretely configured matters that count for any rational animal. Lyric may express the mood of its author, identified as such, but that mood cannot just be a brute feeling, with no universal intelligibility and consequence. The words that give it expression cannot fail to have a communicable commonality and their statement of emotion warrants attention by making manifest something that can touch anyone with humanity. As always in fine art, the subjective and objective must go hand in hand and in lyric the individual voice of the narrating “I” must express what is at once subjective and objective, singular and universal. To do so, the lyric “I” cannot be an abstract, unworldly cipher, trapped in solipsist solitude. The lyric author’s very act of externalizing its words to an audience carries with it immersion in an intersubjective world, with an objective biosphere transformed by some history of civilizations. All this will be inevitably reflected in the emotions and thoughts that the lyric voice sees fit to enunciate, however closely these be held by an individual author.

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Consequently, it is fundamentally mistaken to characterize lyric as subjective, epic as objective, and the dramatic as synthesizing the subjective and objective by presenting as its object the interaction of conversing subjects. Hegel might seem to be doing this when he characterizes the content of the lyric as the inner world of the subject, that of the epic as the world made objective, and that of drama as combining the subjective and objective contents of both lyric and epic by presenting as an objective development what lies in the pathos of subjects.44 Yet in each genre, as Hegel’s own discussion ultimately shows, subjective and objective dimensions are present, albeit in different ways. As Emil Staiger reminds us, the lyric voice is both subjective and objective, immersing its thought and feeling in the object on which it reflects.45 The “Stimmung” or mood of lyric expression is as much in the author’s voice as in the subject matter of its musings.46 Whether lyric dwells on past, present, or future, it internalizes the object of its words into the imaginative realm of its reflection without sacrificing its worldly significance. The “interiorization” of the lyric voice does not eliminate objectivity, but rather removes the “distance between subject and object”.47 So, too, the epic presents a world of feeling, thinking, and acting individuals where subjective and objective interpenetrate, just as drama sets objects before us that are persons putting their passions and projects before one another and interacting through their words. The three genres do have different frames of narration, one of a subject who verbalizes the emotions and ideas that it possesses in reflecting on its world, one of a narrator who describes a human world at a disengaged distance, even when recounting its own exploits in that world, and one that lets characters speak before us, their audience. In all three cases, subjectivity, objectivity, and their unity are at hand, just as is the case with truth, the good, and beauty itself. Truth unites subjectivity and objectivity in conceptualization, the good unites subjectivity and objectivity in the transformation of

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1037–1038.  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, pp. 79–80. 46  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 81. 47  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 52. 44 45

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objectivity, and beauty unites subjectivity and objectivity in the imaginative configuration of the work of fine art. Typically, lyric literature has taken the form of relatively short works that are in verse. Moreover, lyric verse usually exhibits a fulsome freedom of diction, involving a profusion of metaphor and simile, together with variations in rhythm and meter as well as in rhyming scheme, at least where rhyme is used. It is understandable how these features go together, even if not all are necessary features of the lyric genre. On the one hand, lyric literature has tended to be briefer than epic or dramatic literature owing to the narrower focus of its voice. Although the lyric writer can express feelings and musings about topics as diverse as any that epic and drama concern, what provides the boundary of an integral lyric creation is the extent of some unitary, independent reflection on the part of the author. The subjective frame of lyric narration tends to limit itself to verbalizing a mood or insight or remembrance that comes and goes, but which the author sees fit to disclose to present and future humanity. The content of lyric expression is not an ongoing narrative of a people, or a fateful period in collective history, or a life in the making, as the third-person voice of epic narration presents. Nor does lyric expression encompass the development of the dramatic collision and resolution unfolding in the dialogue of protagonists. Like epic and drama, lyric must have a beginning, middle, and end that have some intrinsic connection to maintain the unity of meaning and configuration of a genuine work of fine art. Lyric, however, expresses in the brief lapse of its statement what may only be a single momentary emotion, memory, or thought, rather than the extensive narrative necessary to chronicle the epic sagas of heroes or mundane individuals or to follow dramatic twists and turns. All that lyric requires is to encapsulate what holds the momentary attention of the subject for an imaginative utterance of a meaningful feeling and insight. For this reason, lyric expression usually needs far less verbal space to create an independent work of first-person narration than even the shortest examples of epic, such as ballades and short stories, or of drama, such as one-act plays. A lyric work can be just a few lines, as compressed as a Haiku, a short Lied, or a brief sonnet. This comparative paucity of narrative extension does not mean that lyric creation lacks profundity or the successful melding of meaning and

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configuration. Rather, the very brevity of lyric creation heightens the importance of the imaginative flair and memorable diction of its stingy arsenal of words. With less language needed and permissible to express aesthetically what the single subject entertains, the lyric author must rely upon the most intensive use of word play, armed with all the imaginative connections of metaphor and simile. This applies whether lyric employs prose or verse. Although verse may predominate among lyric literature, versification is not mandatory, and there can be and have been prose pieces, often mislabeled “prose poems”, that fulfill literary art in lyric first-person narration. If the lyric writer does use verse, the narrating “I” need not restrict itself to a constant persisting diction, reflecting the narrator’s abiding distance from what it narrates. The epic narrator may stick, as does Homer, to unchanging hexameter. This is consonant with how Homer is not part of what the Iliad and Odyssey recount and thus has no reason to alter his diction to express any changing moods and reflections of his own. Dramatic narrative, for its part, must stick to consistently portraying the voices of its interacting characters as they fuel the drama. Although these voices may have distinctive dictions, both with respect to their use of metaphor and similes, meter, and rhyme, what determines the diversity of their voices is the clash of characters around which the drama revolves, be it tragedy, comedy, or tragicomedy. Because the lyric voice, by contrast, narrates its own emotions and thoughts, it is free to alter its feet and meter, as well as to vary its rhyme schemes, as fits whatever fleeting subjective states it wishes to convey. In order, however, for lyric literature to maintain the unity of its composition despite embracing “as many metric structures as there are moods to be expressed”,48 lyric authors can and do avail themselves of repetition of phrases and stanzas evoking the same emotion and insight that provides the pervading substance of their imaginative reflections.49 Significantly, these signal features of lyric voice apply to its first-person narration whether it expresses the world view of the Symbolic, Classical, or Romantic artforms. In every case, lyric literature distinguishes itself

48 49

 Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 50.  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 54.

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with the brevity of its expression and the intensity of its imaginative configuration and diction. Hegel amplifies all these signature features of lyric literature, albeit with periodic suggestions that the lyric genre has special affinity with the Romantic artform. Hegel begins by emphasizing the subjective frame of the lyric voice. Lyric literature has for its content not the objects of human significance, but the inner world of the human subject. This is the rational mind focusing not on taking action, as an epic hero or dramatic character, but on disclosing a voice that “remains alone with itself as inwardness”, taking “as its sole form and final aim the self-expression of the subjective life”.50 Instead of putting in words the external events of a human community or a dramatic conflict, the lyric narrator reveals its own intuitions, emotions, and considerations of topics that enter its creation singly and in isolation. The content has this transient abstracted character because it is the subjective attention of the author that decides what and in what order topics will be addressed. However substantial and worldly the objects of lyrical musing may be, the lyric voice aims to communicate its own mood, passion, and reflections upon these matters.51 If it were instead to narrate the exemplary configuration of sacred and ethical developments in their own objective unfolding, the lyric voice would relinquish its defining identity and become an epic or dramatic narrator. It would be a mistake to conclude that Hegel here affirms the erroneous view that lyric literature is merely subjective in character, both with respect to form and content. Admittedly, the form of lyric narration is an individual subjective voice meditating on its own mental contents, just as its content consists in those feelings, remembrances, imaginings, and thoughts themselves. Nonetheless, what makes the lyric voice a creator of fine art is that the inward life it discloses has an essential substance of its own residing in the universality of its linguistic intersubjectivity and its expressed concern for the fundamental objective strivings of humanity from which there is no asylum. Hegel recognizes that an inner life divorced from universal objective matters is too empty and insignificant  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1038.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1038.

50 51

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to deserve a hearing by an audience seeking literary satisfaction. The great artistic challenge of the lyric genre is precisely to infuse the subjective inwardness it discloses with universal substance worthy of aesthetic value. In all its concentrated, isolated musings, the lyric voice must reveal a subjectivity that is a totality of its own in virtue of sharing in the world of others and the strivings that make that world humanly significant. As Hegel insists, “however intimately the insights and feelings which the poet describes as his own belong to him as a single individual, they must nevertheless possess a universal validity.”52 By articulating the most inward sentiments and thoughts, the lyric author raises the immediate contents of subjectivity into a self-conscious communicable form, purifying itself of merely accidental, inchoate moods. In so doing, the lyric writer serves “to liberate the spirit not from but in feeling,”53 enabling both author and audience to recognize the universality and substantiality of the lyric voice’s innermost life. In proceeding to treat lyric literature, Hegel moves from a general characterization of lyric to elaborate the signature character of the lyric poet, the lyrical work of art, and the types of lyrical literature, before concluding with an examination of the historical development of lyrical literature in which the different artforms come under consideration. We will now plumb Hegel’s general and particular characterizations to determine further the nature of lyric literature, but we will leave the treatment of Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic lyric literature to our subsequent examination of how the artforms make literature their own, an examination that depends upon the prior determination of the literary genres in and of themselves.

 hat Hegel Adds to Our Understanding W of Lyric Literature Although Hegel suggests in his treatment of epic that epic literature arises from conditions that antedate those from which lyric and dramatic 52 53

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1111.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1112.

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literature emerge, he refutes this genetic primacy of epic by admitting that the lyric is “producible at almost any date in a nation’s history, while epic proper is always bound up with specific primitive epochs, and in later periods, when nations have developed a prosaic organization, it falls short of success.”54 The lyric voice can always achieve literary success because it satisfies the perennial need to engage in the self-expression by which rational animals recognize and communicate to others the humane significance of their own individual feelings and thoughts. Whether the epic narrator can only achieve aesthetic greatness in a pre-modern world, as Hegel suggests is something that we will examine when we turn to the stylistics of the literary genres. The content that defines lyric expression may reflect the subject’s inward response to its world condition and situation, but this applies to every predicament the lyric voice confronts. Lyric may be confined to voicing an individual’s inner life, but the concrete individuality of that life entails that what lyric literature reflects upon can include any aspect of nature or national life that moves its spirit in some fundamental way. Nonetheless, as Hegel duly points out, whereas the expansive scope of epic portrayal can successively depict the entire gamut of a community’s life, a single lyric work can only contain a small slice of all the contents that might fall within its subjective reflection.55 Whatever content may occupy a lyric work, it will exhibit the dimensions of universality, particularity, and individuality that any artistic creation must contain to unite unique configuration with significant meaning. Whether the lyric author expresses feelings and thoughts about a serene landscape, a Chinese vase, an eagle, a fallen hero, a painting of Brueghel, or a crushed rebellion, these will merit aesthetic attention only if they disclose universal concerns susceptible of exemplary configuration. Abstract philosophical, mathematical, and scientific truths may elude such configuration, but ethical and religious commitments can be presented in imagined verbal expressions and convey as well as elicit emotions that resonate in the inmost depths of any rational animal.56  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1113–1114.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1113. 56  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1114. 54 55

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The universal significance of lyric expression cannot be imaginatively manifest, however, without a particularization in a concrete verbalized image, feeling, or insight that possesses an essential character shared by other exemplars. If particularity is absent, the verbal expression reverts to a prosaic abstraction, lacking the combination of universal and particular in which the individuality of artistic creation resides. Individuality must also be present simply because the manifestation of particularity requires that the exemplar of significant meaning cannot be particular without being distinguished from other examples. Without that differentiated particularity, or individuality, the expression is indistinguishable from an empty abstraction of formulaic typicality. For this reason, the content of lyric literature must be just as individual as it is universal and particular. Only then will the lyric voice be a living subject, distinct from all others, whose feelings and thoughts are communicable and significant, yet creatively unique. Hegel points out that the topics of lyric literature are wholly accidental and that what alone merits attention is how the lyric author treats and presents them.57 This claim does not vitiate the universality and particularity of lyric content, but only acknowledges that what the lyric voice chooses to put into words is dependent upon the subjective reflection of that voice, which nonetheless must ensure that what it waxes lyric about discloses concerns both universal and particularized. The form of the lyric work is mandated by the first-person mode of its narration, which frames every content as an expression of the inner insights and emotions of the lyric voice. As Hegel points out, this gives the lyric creation a specific starting point: the particular mood and inward condition of the lyric creator, which then discloses itself through whatever topic the lyric takes as its occasion. This cannot be a merely prosaic inner state, immersed in singular feelings and thoughts of no inherent interest to others. Instead, the inwardness from which lyric arises must be artistically pregnant, both “rich in imagination and feeling, or splendid, with profound meditations and thoughts” and comprising an

57

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1115.

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independent “enclosed inner world from which all the dependence and mere caprice of ” prosaic “prose has been stripped away”.58 This subjective substantiality leaves the development of the lyric at the mercy of the inward freedom of the lyric author, who is at liberty to begin addressing whatever draws its interest in its own inner or outer world and to turn to something else as its attention dictates. Whereas the epic narrative follows a route dictated by the demands of portraying individual strivings contending with the external circumstances of an objective world, and the dramatic narrative is constrained to trace the immanent development of the opposition and resolution of the pathos of its characters, the lyric is unconstrained by any objective course of events. Nonetheless, the lyric must shape its form to fit its content, which involves subjective disclosures that no less illuminate the objective reality of ethical and religious life. Whatever beginning a lyric makes must proceed to an exposition whose termination is not utterly arbitrary and senseless. If lyric reflection passes from one topic to another and then brings its words to an end, this must be grounded in the independent unity of the feelings and insights it discloses. As Hegel notes, lyric may include miniature narratives of episodes of life, but these have their place “as a revelation of an inner attitude of mind”,59 whose expression provides unity for the work. What determines the form of the lyric is the same principle that frames its content: the disclosure of a personal inwardness, grappling with what has essential significance for it in its world. Although such disclosures may be “especially opportune in modern times when every individual claims the right of having his own personal point of view and mode of feeling”, Hegel reiterates that lyric “can flourish abundantly in the most different epochs”.60 Wherever and whenever rational animals emote and reflect on the meaning of their lives, artistic creation can avail of lyric expression. Because lyric creators express in words their personal feelings and thoughts as both individual and universally significant, they do not remain hidden as do the detached narrators of epic events, whose  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1115.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1120. 60  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1123–1124. 58 59

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personal character ordinarily never gets directly depicted.61 We can wonder who Valmiki and Homer were apart from their works and even question whether they even existed. Lyric creators, by contrast, put their personal inner lives before us, so that we can acquaint ourselves with what Sappho and Pindar and all their lyric successors say about themselves that is worth our remembering. As Hegel observes, the very center and proper content of lyric literature is the concrete person of the author, not as performing deeds amidst external circumstances or participating in dramatic conflicts, but as disclosing an inward life sufficiently imaginative and meaningful to be expressed in words as a work of art.62 Although the subjective plenitude of lyric expression leaves little in the way of formal strictures to shape it, lyric literature has a distinctive unity, manner of development, and verbal material, for which Hegel contributes key precisions. The unifying principle of lyric is, it warrants repeating, the inner life of its first person voice, as having attained sufficient imaginative and substantive concreteness to provide an independently bounded subjective totality. To achieve such unity, the lyric creator must possess a determinate mood and insight, reflecting specific situations, with which that creator identifies its unique individuality.63 Only then can the unity of lyric expression have universality, particularity, and individuality as aesthetic creation requires. The subjective life of the lyric voice must infuse itself with the objective predicament on which it reflects and inwardly reacts, but avoid either didactic expressions whose universal message is all that counts or soulless descriptions of what it confronts. Lyric’s concrete unity does not preclude independent sections and episodes, but their independence must be based on the specific inward movement of the lyric self rather than on the independence of external circumstances that gives epic narration its circuitous route. The inwardly determined movement of lyric, however, cannot just follow the prosaic caprice of contingent  An exception is Dante in The Divine Comedy, who describes his epic journey through Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. In the many other cases where the epic involves a narrator who is a character in the story, such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, that narrator is a creation of the author, who does not appear in the narrative. 62  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1129. 63  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1133. 61

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f­eelings or the necessities of logical inference and philosophical conceptualization. It must be an integral itinerary of feelings and thoughts that contend with particularized matters of universal importance.64 Because what unites these first-person expressions is a particular transient movement of thought and emotion, the lyric cannot linger with the world encompassing expansiveness of epic narration, nor match the extended development of dramatic collision and resolution. Lyric instead has, as Hegel puts it, “concentration for its principle”.65 With the briefest verbal expressions of any literary genre, the lyric must plumb the depths of human feeling and insight with sufficient imagination and concreteness to move its audience with the same inner movement to which it gives expression. This combination of expressive concentration and subjective totality mandates the intensity of verbal virtuosity that lyric creation mobilizes. Lyric simply has no time to let descriptions linger over the temporal and spatial expansiveness of the world of events that epic transfigures. Instead, lyric must artistically configure the momentary emergence of feelings and notions in a living subject, conveying their origin and consummation in the transient field of inner experience.66 To this end, all the resources of verbal rhythm and rhyme can be employed, together with the freest use of metaphor, simile, and verbal imagery. Since it is the movements of the lyric voice’s own spirit that are thematic, the form of expression must find the proper verbal means to match those transformations of content. Instead of sticking with the perennial hexameter of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which suits the unchanging stance of the epic narrator, the lyric voice can vary its meter and rhyme in tune with the dynamic alterations of its feelings and thoughts. Hegel maintains that “strictly speaking, the poetic use of assonance, alliteration, and rhyme may be confined to the sphere of lyric”.67 It would be more correct to acknowledge that lyric is well suited to their employment, as shown by how lyric literature has

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1134–1135.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1133. 66  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1136. 67  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1137. 64 65

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been predominantly versified, although both epic and drama can use these forms of artistic diction with aesthetic integrity. Given the subjective freedom of lyric composition, can there be any necessary differentiation of lyric genres, apart from considering how the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms create lyric in their defining styles? Of course, one can classify lyric works by content, distinguishing those that are devotional from those that are secular, while dividing secular lyric works among folk-poetry expressing national customs, paeans to love relations, lyrical reflections on specific objects (such as Grecian urns and nightingales), and memorials to individuals and events. Since the lyric voice can express its emotions and ideas about anything in its inner and outer worlds, division by content results in a very contingent taxonomy, with little inherent relation to differences of form. Although Hegel acknowledges that nothing “specific can be laid down in general terms” about the development of lyric literature,68 he does suggest that there is a genetic sequence in the type of lyric creation, starting with folk poetry grounded in given custom and followed by works produced entirely from the inward thought and feeling of the author, whose imagination has freed itself from dependency upon external content.69 Yet, as Hegel himself acknowledges, lyric literature can never be a slave to prosaic existence, but also operates with creative initiative, transfiguring whatever inner or outer subject matter catches its attention.70 Admittedly, lyric literature must never flee from the world into an empty solipsism with only personal meaning, but it must always put its own stamp upon what is no less universal and objective. Given Hegel’s claim that epic precedes lyric and that drama arises by unifying their respective objective and subjective voices, he places the development of lyric literature between the prior emergence of epic and the subsequent birth of dramatic literature. If one considers this sequence as a transformation of literary genres into one another, rather than as a birth of genres that coexist, one might follow Hegel in presuming that lyric first arises in a transitional hybrid form that combines epic and lyric  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1133.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1127–1128. 70  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1127. 68 69

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narration and ends in a complementary hybrid form that combines lyric and dramatic narration. The first hybrid form would be lyric works that include objective narratives through which the author discloses personal feelings and ideas, whereas the final hybrid form would be lyrics that proceed as conversations through whose dialogue the author expresses subjective moods. Although Hegel points to such transitional works, he acknowledges that these do not represent developments of lyric proper.71 Instead, when Hegel offers a typology of “kinds of lyric proper”,72 it combines divisions of content with differences in the predominance of the author’s subjective personality. He begins with devotional works in which the lyric voice expresses how its inner life is pervaded by its feeling for the Divine, however divinity be construed. Hegel acknowledges that this “class” of lyric literature takes multiple forms, such as “hymns, dithyrambs, paeans, psalms”, all of which are developed differently by authors of different communities.73 In other words, this “class” of lyric has no appreciable connection to literary form proper and is purely nominal in that respect. Hegel identifies the “ode” as a second class of lyric literature, which similarly is distinguished by its content.74 What allegedly distinguishes this class of lyric is that the subjective personality of the author is given pride of place, no matter what topic it puts into words. Here, the lyric voice uses heightened language and imagery to express the substantial profundity of its subjective inwardness, allowing it to either outshine the objective stature of its topic or display itself on the occasion of an intrinsically inane subject matter. Thirdly, Hegel offers the song (das Lied) as the final type of lyric work, which, may be fit for musical accompaniment, but has little restriction as to content. This third class of lyric can put to words folk song themes of national memory, cultured songs full of the “greatest variety of wit, graceful turns of phrased, little incidents and other expressions of gallantry”, or songs of religious edification. Perhaps fitting its ill-defined content,  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1138.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1138. 73  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1139. 74  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1140. 71 72

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this last lyric class has little to distinguish it in terms of literary form, besides possible invocation of stanzas, refrains, and choruses. Hegel includes under its umbrella such diverse tropes as elegies, epistles, sonnets, and sestinas, as well as the philosophical musings of a poet like Schiller, whose “Ode to Joy” will be remembered less for its words and versification than for the unforgettable music with which Beethoven accompanies it.75 We shall see whether lyric literature has more credible modalities when we examine how the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms achieve lyric expression.

Dramatic Literature and Dialogue Literature that employs the narrative mode of dialogue is inherently dramatic in form and content. By using dialogue as its overarching frame, such literature limits itself to presenting what can be revealed in the linguistic interaction of conversing individuals.76 The characters of its dialogue narrative must obviously be linguistically competent beings, who can speak and think, and thereby entertain all the universal normative concerns that rest upon rational autonomy. These interlocutors may be finite rational animals or divine, but they must be so individuated as to interact in dialogue that must further suffice to present the exemplary configuration of a work of fine art. The form of that dialogue must accordingly have the independent totality that unites fundamental meaning with narrative development. Nothing in the flow of conversation can be superfluous to the melding of shape and significance. The dialogue must therefore have a beginning, whose aesthetic necessity is vindicated by what follows from it. The opening of the dialogue must set the stage for a meaningful interaction that precipitates a conflict of essential interest, whose resolution brings a non-arbitrary closure to the work. Everything that drives the ensuing dialogue narrative must be revealed in  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1143–1145.  For this reason Hannah Arendt can duly observe that drama “is the only art whose sole subject is man in his relationship to others.” See Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 188. 75 76

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the speech of its participants, whose individual character must be and can only be disclosed through what they say and so do in relation to the other participants in the interaction. For their interaction to be something that matters to all rational agents, it must be driven by engagements for which the participants are responsible. What sets in motion the conflict must be commitments voluntarily embraced by the chief interlocutors, and these must generate the opposition whose resolution brings their interaction to a meaningful conclusion. The protagonists must be motivated by a pathos, that is, a passion of universal importance, that sets them in conflict with others who are motivated by an opposing pathos of similar significance. Otherwise, the action is trivial and fortuitous, and thereby lacking artistic merit. Moreover, that pathos must be expressed in nothing other than the dialogue in which characters and plot are fully revealed and entwined. Characters may engage in soliloquies in which they wax lyrical, expressing their feelings and thoughts to the audience, but these departures from dialogical interaction only fit into the totality of the work if they serve to drive the conflict further. This dramatic requirement can and should be satisfied whether soliloquies occur with the parsimony of Shakespeare’s usage in Hamlet or with the continual asides in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, which disturbingly express the modern split between inner and outer. So too, characters may take the stance of an epic narrator and describe events apart from their linguistic interaction, but these descriptions will have artistic integrity only insofar as they contribute to the unfolding of the characters’ dialogical engagement. Such epic description will be duly appropriate when it depicts battles and other events that defy dialogical presentation but serve to advance the drama. In these basic ways, the narrative form of dialogue constitutes the literary genre of drama. In the Western philosophical tradition, Aristotle has played a pioneering role in conceiving dramatic literature in his fragmentary Poetics, but it is Hegel who has provided the most extensive treatment in the annals of aesthetic theory. Unlike others in the tradition, Hegel has attempted to conceive not only the general and particular aspects of drama, including the dramatic genres themselves, but also how drama embodies the fundamental stylistic modes of uniting form and meaning constituting the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms.

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Although Hegel examines at length how all these artforms make drama their own, he still associates certain general aspects of drama with particular artforms. Hegel ties the emergence of drama to a specific world condition, in line with his claim that dramatic literature is genetically and structurally posterior to epic and lyric literature. He privileges the aesthetic achievement of Classical drama just as he privileges the beauty of Classical sculpture, and he maintains that the Symbolic artform is incapable of producing dramas that are genuinely tragic or comedic in character. In drawing from Hegel’s discussion to determine the aesthetics of drama, we must put all these claims to the test.

The General Principle of Dramatic Literature Attempts to conceive the general principle of dramatic literature have been plagued by a failure to free themselves of historical limitation. Aristotle might be suspected of failing to grasp drama in its universality insofar as his account in the Poetics exclusively focuses on the tragedies and comedies of the Classical world to which he belongs. Hegel, on the other hand, might be suspected of distorting the general principle of drama by treating dramatic literature as if it arises only in an historical period with a certain type of civilization. This seeming identification of the genre of drama as an historical phenomenon has led Peter Szondi to draw from Hegel’s analysis and locate the defining features of drama in Renaissance dramatic literature, which allegedly most purely embodies them.77 These historicizing suspicions need not be warranted, for what Aristotle uncovers in ancient Greek drama may be just as paradigmatic of dramatic literature as what Szondi attributes to Renaissance drama and what Hegel delineates in his account of the general and particular features essential to the dramatic work of art. What removes some of the obstacles to confirming the non-historical status of dramatic literature is the weakness of Hegel’s claim that drama is both structurally derivative of epic and lyric literature and genetically 77

 Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 5.

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posterior to both. If that dual claim were vindicated, the emergence of drama would be tied to a specific epoch with a particular world condition, connecting it to the artforms that fit or follow from that type of civilization. Hegel observes that drama structurally unites the objectivity of epic with the subjective character of lyric by displaying a complete action taking place before us that originates in the minds of the characters who animate the dramatic conflict by pursuing opposing passions of substantial significance. Thereby combining the inner life of characters with the worldly reality of their interaction, drama, Hegel suggests, structurally presupposes what lyric and epic have produced. Admittedly, epic and lyric literature may contain objective and subjective elements that get incorporated in the dialogue of drama, but these aspects of dialogue are inherent in the linguistic interaction upon which all rational agency and, with it, all artistic creation is predicated. To put into words imagined dialogue that presents dramatic conflict does not require that artists have previously waxed lyrical or created epic literature. Utilizing the dialogue form of narrative for artistic purpose presupposes nothing other than the endowments of linguistic competency and the normative intelligence it involves. These provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for any literary creation and for this reason all forms of narration and their corresponding literary genres are available to talking animals inhabiting any civilization on our lonely planet or elsewhere in the universe. Consequently, Hegel cannot legitimately support his corollary claim that “drama is the product of a completely developed and organized national life” that “presupposes as past both the primitive poetic days of epic proper and the independent subjectivism of lyrical outpourings.”78 As we have seen, it is both conceptually and factually questionable whether epic and lyrical literature are in any way unfit for a world of “completely developed and organized national life”, as the modern novel and lyric can testify. The narrative forms of third person and first person voice can be employed to give expression to the self-understanding of any civilization precisely because all forms of convention involve objective interactions of individuals whose subjectivity is always at hand, no matter  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1159.

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how it be evaluated. Similarly, authors can be inspired to use dialogue as their narrative framework in imaginatively configuring the world view of any world condition. Although Hegel suggests that the turn to drama results from dissatisfaction with what epic and lyric can achieve, it can be no surprise that there have been and always can be literary giants such as Alexander Pushkin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Rabindranath Tagore who straddle all three literary genres, giving due respect to each in their creative accomplishments. Just as epic and lyric literature will take different forms in expressing and illuminating the quests for fundamental meaning in different civilizations, so drama will exhibit different types of character, conflicts, and dramatic developments in dramatizing the various world conditions with which humanity grapples. Admittedly, as Hegel reiterates, epic brings events before us in which the aims and volitions of characters contend with external circumstances that hinder their efforts, whereas lyric presents the independent inwardness of the author’s voice as it puts into words those of its personal feelings and thoughts that warrant disclosure to humanity at large.79 Indeed, dramatic dialogue presents both the objective interactions of individuals and their spoken expressions of their aims and ideas, but it does so within the limits of its narrative frame, which has less objective expanse than epic narration and less patience for the free lyric musings of an individual. For these very reasons, the motivation to produce epic and lyric literature is never supplanted by drama. It rather represents an enduring literary option that has unique possibilities to offer a dramatist, while leaving other possibilities to writers of epic and lyric. Drama of any epoch is both more abstract than epic and more concrete than lyric.80 On the one hand, because drama proceeds through dialogue, it cannot directly present the expansive view of the objects of the world provided by epic description of events with all the natural and historical circumstances that encompass them. Drama focuses on what its imagined characters say to one another and everything of aesthetic import must be contained in their conversation, whose unity rests upon what  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1160.  Hegel writes, “drama is, in the first place, more abstract than epic”. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1161. 79 80

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conflict they enter owing to what they resolve to do given the significant passions that impel their action. Moreover, because dramatic speech is what builds the play, dramatic diction must reflect how it is what interacting characters say in the moment, rather than what someone might deliberately and leisurely compose in isolation. This does not mean that dramatic speech must be prosaic and purely “naturalistic”. Because dramatic speech serves the action, what characters say must have the non-­ prosaic, artistically concentrated impetus where nothing said does not serve the expression of the pathos and advance the conflict. Dramatic diction can be versified or not, but whatever form it takes must be appropriate to the character, whose persona is intrinsically linked to the action. By contrast, the language of epic can linger over all the happenstance and detours that enable events to exhibit the entanglement of its characters in the totality of their world. Drama’s narrative confines itself to the spoken interaction of its protagonists in which its movement is concentrated. Although dramatic personae may indirectly refer to what lies outside their own passions and ensuing conflict, such description has aesthetic validity only insofar as it discloses and drives the drama to its denouement. Accordingly, drama revolves around not the expansive circumstantial web of an event, but the action of its protagonists, as entirely revealed in their dialogue. As Hegel duly notes, the action (die Handlung) of drama is not any action that can be presented in spoken dealings. The aims and passions of specifically dramatic action have two constitutive features. First, dramatic aims and passions expressly pit a protagonist against others with opposing aims and passions. Secondly dramatic aims and passions possess a universal normative value that makes them inherently gripping to any rational animal inhabiting any possible civilization. What drives dramatic action is thus a pathos that meets these dual requirements, engendering a conflict that Hegel suggests has two basic possible resolutions, one tragic, the other comedic.81 The pathos may precipitate a hostile opposition in which the dramatic protagonists either succeed or fail in achieving their goal, with one side or the other prevailing, or the pathos may turn out to be self-dissolving, undermining itself in its own pursuit by disclosing its own insubstantiality. Hegel maintains that in both cases  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1162.

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the “pathos” of drama has a one-sidedness that is overcome in the resolution of dramatic conflict.82 As we shall see, Hegel regards this one-­ sidedness to entail the destruction of the tragic hero and the unmasking of the comedic hero, while affirming the ultimate values that are at stake. Whether these outcomes apply generally to drama or only to drama serving the Classical ideal is something we must examine in considering what genres are inherent in dramatic literature.

 he Distinctive Unity of the Dramatic Work T of Literature The dialogic frame of dramatic narrative entails a specific unity of form and content distinct from that of epic and lyric literature. Hegel describes this unity of the dramatic work of literature as fundamentally concentrated in a way that neither epic narrative nor lyric musings can be, despite the latter’s comparative brevity.83 The third person narrative of epic presents events on the extended field of national life, with manifold episodes exhibiting a relative independence reflecting the happenstance of external circumstances. The personal voice of lyric, on the other hand, can wander from one feeling and thought to another, as the subjective mood of the author dictates. By contrast, drama must focus completely upon the spoken interaction of characters embroiled in action that impels itself towards conflict and resolution owing entirely to their expressed goals and passions. Although dramatic action is rooted in the subjective commitments of its characters, their pathos is dramatic only insofar as it precipitates dramatic conflicts of significance that drive towards a denouement impelled wholly by what the dialogue delivers. The drama therefore can neither involve the expansive episodic wanderings of epic narration nor the subjectively determined lyric disclosures of personal moods and reflections. Instead, the action of dramatic interaction is the unifying thread that brings plot and characterization into tight connection.84  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1163.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1164. 84  As Hegel writes, “the truly inviolable law is the unity of the action” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1066). 82 83

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Aristotle recognized the concentrated scope of drama, maintaining that it present “a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself, with beginning, middle and end, so as to enable the work to produce its own proper pleasure with all the organic unity of a living creature”.85 Whereas histories “deal not with one action, but with one period and all that happened in that to one or more persons, however disconnected the several events may be,”86 drama must have a focused plot, avoiding any proliferation of loosely connected episodes and characters. Dramatic presentation of character must serve the plot,87 which should be concise enough to be taken in by memory, not simply to address the practicalities of theatrical performance, but the purely literary concern of maintaining a “complete whole” whose beginning, middle, and end contain nothing extraneous.88 The one action of the drama may involve successive incidents, but these must be “so closely connected that the transposition or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole”, “for that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole”.89 The unity of action to which drama owes its “tighter consistency” is, as Hegel emphasizes, “both objective and subjective.”90 The action is objectively unified in that opposing passions that drive the dramatic conflict are rooted in fundamental concerns connected in the fabric of the world to which its characters belong. The action and reaction of the dramatic conflict and its resolution are grounded objectively in the concrete reality of the dramatic characters, whose aims and passions are significant because of their substantive worldly importance. Nonetheless, the objective unity of dramatic action is no less subjectively unified. This is because dramatic action is purposely engaged in by the opposing characters, who independently identify themselves with the pathos that precipitates a course of action predicated upon the incipient conflicts of their situation and world condition. The subject that presents itself in dramatic dialogue  Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a19–21, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2335.  Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a22–24, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2335. 87  Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a38–1450b1, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2321. 88  Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a5–15, a33, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2322. 89  Aristotle, Poetics, 1451a33–36, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2322. 90  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1164. 85 86

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is wedded to the action and this intrinsic tie between character and dramatic development ensures that their objective interconnection is just as tightly imagined as the subjectivity they exhibit through their spoken interaction. The classical unities of time and place give expression to the overarching subjective and objective unity of dramatic action, but they do not literally rule the composition of drama, as “tragédie classique” rigidly maintained. Aristotle and Hegel both recognize instead that the unity of action that does rule drama may involve a development of conflict and resolution requiring changes of setting and intervals of time that transgress the “classical unities”. Certainly, such spatial and temporal unities have hardly been strictly obeyed by classical tragedy or comedy, let alone by their symbolic or romantic style counterparts, nor should they be. What counts is sustaining the “totality of movement” that distinguishes dramatic unity from the “totality of objects” that can be said to govern the epic narration of events in the world.91 This “totality of movement” consists in the subjective and objective unity of dramatic action, which, as Lukács observes, quoting Hegel, “rests essentially upon colliding actions” whose “true unity can have its basis only in total movement” wherein “the collision, in accordance with whatever the particular circumstances, characters, and aims, should turn out to conform so very much to the aims and characters, as to cancel out its contradictions”.92 In this total movement, drama concentrates the competing resolves of individuals to the essential problems they confront, crystallizing them in the collision to which everything in the drama must connect to deserve inclusion. No character nor any psychological feature deserves a place in the dramatic narrative unless it contributes to the unfolding action of the drama. This all-pervading focus is what makes the movement of the

91 92

 Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, pp. 93–94.  Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, p. 93.

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dramatic narrative a totality, encompassing every detail into its dynamic collision and resolution.93 Peter Szondi helps us to understand the totality of dramatic movement by exploring how drama is absolute in character. Although Szondi frames this characterization as applying preeminently to Renaissance drama, which he thinks most purely exhibits it,94 what he elaborates derives from drama’s dialogical narrative and therefore applies to dramatic literature in general. Drama is absolute, Szondi affirms, because in form and content it is “purely relational,” concentrating everything in the spoken interaction of its characters.95 “To be dramatic”, drama must “break loose from everything external” to that interaction and properly “can be conscious of nothing outside itself.”96 Precisely by confining its narrative to spoken interaction, drama can have nothing intra-personal or extra-personal conditioning its course independently of its interpersonal movement, which thereby remains absolute.97 Whatever psychological factors or objective circumstances come into play do so only through the dramatic dialogue, which “alone engenders the dynamics of the work.”98 Unlike the lyric voice or the epic narrator who might narrate events in which the narrator figures, the dramatist never appears as speaker or character. The author of dramatic literature instead generates the dialogue, whose participants disclose their own feelings and thoughts in the linguistic interaction in which their dramatic being consists. The drama  As Lukács writes, “By concentrating the reflection of life upon a great collision, by grouping all manifestations of life round this collision and permitting them to live themselves out only in relation to the collision, drama simplifies and generalizes possible attitudes of men to the problems of their lives by concentrating the reflection of life upon a great collision. The portrayal is reduced to the typical representation of the most important and most characteristic attitudes of men, to what is indispensable to the dynamic working-out of the collision, to those social, human and moral movements in men, therefore, out of which the collision arises and which the collision dissolves. Any figure, any psychological feature of a figure, which goes beyond the dialectical necessity of this connection, of the dynamics of the collision, must be superfluous from the point of view of the drama. Hence, Hegel is right to describe a composition which resolves itself in this way as the ‘totality of movement’.” Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, pp. 94–95. 94  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, pp. 5, 8. 95  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 8. 96  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 8. 97  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 46. 98  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 46. 93

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certainly owes the entirety of its being to its author, but its connection to the author never appears within its own unfolding.99 This is so even when, as in some modern plays, a character takes the stage as the play’s author, for what the dramatically portrayed playwright says still derives from the script that the author antecedently supplies. The drama exhibits its absolute internal independence equally in respect to its audience, whether as reader or spectator of a dramatic performance. What is spoken in the drama are words that are essentially addressed by characters to one another and not to the audience. The audience is rather a pure spectator, who cannot react as the characters do by speaking words that are part of the drama itself.100 As far as dramatic dialogue is concerned, the audience is a silent, passive onlooker, as extraneous to the work as the viewer of a sculpture. The audience will react to the extent that drama succeeds in moving its audience, but that reaction, as cathartic as it may be, is not part of the dramatic development itself.101 The unities of time and place, as properly understood, give expression to the absolute character of drama as well. As Szondi observes, drama “generates its own time”, for the unity of dramatic action requires that “every moment must contain the seeds of the future.”102 That pregnant futurity carries with it a unity of place consisting in confinement to not one setting, but a spatial itinerary that fits the dynamic movement of the drama’s spoken interaction. Every scene takes place in the dramatic here and now, but as intrinsically connected temporally and spatially to its dramatic antecedents and results. When dramatic literature is performed, the absolute character of drama exhibits itself in salient features of staging. As Szondi notes, the  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 8.  This is true even when certain modern dramatists, such as Brecht, have characters break the third wall and address the audience directly. The reaction of the audience to such address is still not itself part of the drama, but rather part of the viewing experience that Brecht would have supersede traditional catharsis. Even when experimental theater groups, such as The Living Theater, bring audience members up on stage and actors descend into the theater seats, the interaction remains a framed theatrical spectacle. The police may intervene to stop the supposed public indecency of disrobing actors and audience members, as happened in a New Haven performance of The Living Theater, but such police intervention is either extraneous to the drama or incorporated into its anticipated plot. What happens is still viewed by an audience not entirely incorporated in the action. 101  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 8. 102  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 9. 99

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“picture-frame” stage serves the absoluteness of drama, just as the frame of a painting appropriately sets off the projected space and light of graphic art. Only with the rise of the curtain does the dramatic world of the play first appear, ready to be seen and heard in its own self-contained realm of spoken interaction. Stage lighting allows the drama to present an illumination of its own, distinct from the prosaic environment of its audience. And when the drama ends and the curtain falls, the stage disappears from view, leaving its spectators with memories of a performance whose drama has no other being than that which belongs to its own dramatic development.103 The absoluteness of drama equally extends to the relation of actor to dramatic role. To be a vessel of dramatic presentation, the actor must become the personage and leave behind any identification that is not wedded to the spoken interaction of the drama. Acting must unite actor and dramatic character, whether achieved by the emotional reincarnations of appropriate personal experiences through Stanislavsky method acting or through the studied art of a Laurence Olivier, and whether behind a mask, as in Classical Greek theater, or not. What makes the unity of actor and dramatic character an aspect of the absolute character of drama is that the dramatic character itself must be absorbed into the play’s total movement without remain, together with the actor, at least for the duration of the performance.104

Pathos and Dramatic Character The intimate connection between pathos and dramatic character and dramatic plot has been recognized by all great drama theorists, East or West. Ancient Sanskrit theater acknowledged the central role of pathos in drama, characterizing it as the emotional state of rasa. Rasa is acknowledged to have different varieties (the erotic, heroic, comic, pathetic, furious, horrible, marvelous, disgusting), which lend every drama and dramatic episode its dominant tone and dramatically distinguish the  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 8.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 9.

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character who it impassions.105 Not surprisingly, the erotic and heroic rasas predominate in Sanskrit drama since they are more likely to ­generate conflicts of desire (kāma) and duty (dharma) in which ethical and sacred matters are at stake.106 Aristotle, too, ties dramatic character to a consuming pathos and makes both integral aspects of dramatic development, in whose movement they are fully integrated. He recognizes that character in drama should never express itself on purely indifferent matters, but must instead always serve to reveal the normative purpose and passion in which pathos consists.107 This should not involve, however, any external imposition upon the living integrity of the character. To retain aesthetic value, the dramatic figure must have a concrete individuality that essentially belongs to the drama. Accordingly, as Aristotle affirms, “whenever such-and-such a personage says or does such-and-such a thing, it shall be the necessary or probable outcome of his character.”108 This is what allows the drama to unite character and pathos tightly to its plot. Since the unfolding of a drama accordingly revolves around the expression of the pathos in action and the conflict and resolution that follows, Aristotle duly acknowledges that the dramatic effect rests preeminently on the plot and not on such accessories as the spectacle of a stage performance.109 All these features of the total movement of drama mandate the basic form that dramatic literature will possess, no matter what dramatic genre is at stake. Since the spoken interaction of drama has its defining unity in the dynamic process of a definite collision tied to the pathos of its characters, its play will have a beginning, middle, and end that are  The Nāṭyaśāstra, trans. Adya Rangacharya (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1984), pp. 53–63. 106  Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller, trans. Edwin Gerow, David Gitomer, Barbara Stoler Miller (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1999), p. 14. 107  As Aristotle writes, “Character in a play is that which reveals the choice of the agents – hence there is no room for character in a speech on a purely indifferent subject.” Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b9–10, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2321. 108  Aristotle, Poetics, 1454a35–37, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2327. 109  As Aristotle writes with respect to tragedy, “The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play – which is the better way and shows the better poet. The plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents.” Aristotle, Poetics, 1453b1–5, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2326. 105

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determined by that trajectory. The appropriate commencement of a drama will thus lie in the spoken interaction that presents the determinate situation from which the dramatic conflict arises. Since that conflict consists in the opposition that the protagonist encounters by proceeding to act upon a passion aspiring to essential significance, a play must begin by setting the stage for that antagonism by disclosing the contrary aims and passions of the parties to the drama. On that basis, the drama will present the development of the conflict that this opposition foments. The play will come to its self-engendered denouement when that dramatic conflict arrives at some sort of resolution, providing a self-propelled closure to the drama. Accordingly, as Hegel notes, “in every drama it suits the subject-matter best if the acts are three in number: in the first the emergence of the collision is explained; in the second, the collision comes to life as an encounter between interests, as struggle, difference, and complication; and then finally in the third, when contradiction is at its peak it finds its necessary resolution.”110 Hegel’s proviso should not be taken literally, for plays with one act or more than three can still follow this triple path, so long as they retain the dramatic total movement in which character, pathos, and plot are united. Dramatic form will undergo further modifications that reflect transformations in the content it orders when the different artforms adapt drama to their respective worldviews, but all those modifications will involve recognizable variations upon the universal core of dramatic interaction. Dramatic literature has at its disposal all the purely literary resources of diction, including prose and verse, as well as the diverse forms of narration. Since drama consists of the conversation of its characters, as wholly expressive of their dramatic interaction, there is generally no single voice or third person narrator who monopolizes the use of language. Even when a play takes the form of a single actor drama, that character must impersonate other characters in order for there to be any of the spoken interaction in which dramatic literature consists. This plurality of voices distinguishes how dramatic literature employs its language.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1169.

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Epic literature can maintain a consistent diction in conformity with the continuous presence of the narrator. This holds true even when a novel, like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, lets each chapter be narrated from the point of view of a different character. Then, the diction of each chapter retains its own constancy, even as it differs from that of those told by some other personage. Lyric, by contrast, can vary its diction in accord with the shifting moods of its personal voice. Dramatic literature, however, must capture the distinct speech of each one of its characters, who speak as themselves in the dialogue in which they participate. Doing so need not involve imagined fidelity to the prosaic speech that might be attributed to each character. It can just as well involve switching from prose to verse, as often occurs in Shakespeare’s plays when nobles take the stage from commoners or when matters of greatest significance are discussed. It can also involve switching from one language to another, as when, in ancient Sanskrit drama, the Sanskrit spoken by the director in the Prologue and by characters in verse dialogues is complemented by the Pakrit spoken in the Prologue by the assistant and actresses and in prose dialogues and songs.111 Equally, drama can use a very non-prosaic prose diction, as well as use verse exclusively. In every case, the dramatist can vary the use of metaphor and simile, of alliteration and assonance, of meter, and of rhyme as appropriate to depict different characters in their dramatic truth.112 Whatever diction is employed, its use must serve the progress of the dramatic interaction. This imperative applies to the employment of different modes of expression. A drama can contain intermittent monologues, in which a character speaks its mind out of the earshot of other characters, so long as these lyric interludes advance the disclosure of the pathos that drives the drama forward. As Hegel points out, monologues, where “the inner life of an individual …. becomes objective in a specific situation … have their genuine dramatic place at those moments especially when the heart  Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, pp. 20, 24.  Hegel maintains that the hexameter of Homeric epic verse is too “quiet and uniform” for drama, whereas the syllabic measures of lyric are too “jerky and metrically broken” for dialogue. The meter that serves as an appropriate mean between these extremes, Hegel alleges, is iambic verse (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1173). Drama, however, need not use verse at all, nor need it confine itself to one  meter, when different personages must express their contrasting characters in speech. 111 112

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simply sums itself up after earlier experiences, gives itself an account of its difference with others or of its own inner discord, or brings to final decision resolves either slowly ripened or suddenly made.”113 Similarly, third person narration can enter the drama when a chorus comments on the spoken interaction or when a character describes external events that still bear upon the dramatic conflict and incite the characters who hear of it to further their resolves. Although Hegel notes that the use of a chorus, so common in Classical theater, has tended to disappear in modern drama,114 this is not because a chorus is essentially extraneous to dramatic interaction, but that what the chorus expresses as a voice of the community is spoken by individual characters. The totality of dramatic movement or the absolute character of drama mandates that when lyric and epic narrative enter a play, they must do so in supporting the primacy of dialogue. Only in that imagined spoken interaction do individual protagonists meet in person, expressing their own conflicting pathos and constituting the dramatic narrative itself.115

Catharsis and Reaction of the Audience to Drama The work of drama, like any creation of fine art, has a relation to its audience conditioned by its mode of appearance. As a genre of the fine art of language, drama appears minimally to the linguistic imagination of rational animals who can gain exposure to it as soon as it is made public, as well for years to come so long as it is made available. Drama can be created originally in either oral or written form, without a staged performance. Just as epic literature can be delivered to an audience, both illiterate and literate, by a rhapsodist, and a lyric poem can be recited, so a play can be delivered by a single speaker to listeners or written and then read individually by a literate audience. Moreover, a play that is performed can be improvised to greater or lesser degree by actors. Given these possibilities, the relation of drama to its audience is different from that of music to its listeners. Although musical geniuses like  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1172.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1172. 115  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1172–1173. 113 114

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Mozart and Beethoven can read musical scores and “hear” their music in their auditory imagination, the vast majority of music’s potential auditors cannot perceive a musical work without listening to an actual performance, be it live or recorded. By contrast, any literate individual can read a written drama and appreciate it in linguistic imagination, just as any individual, literate or not, can appreciate its delivery by a single speaker, without any actual dramatic performance with actors playing the different parts. Indeed, such works of dramatic literature as Goethe’s Faust Part II,116 George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and the Ulysses in Nighttown excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulyssses may be better appreciated by being read rather than performed owing to the huge demands they place upon theatrical staging. How then, does drama relate to its audience in its minimal form as literary art, without stage performance? As Aristotle acknowledges with respect to tragic drama, the effect that is central to experiencing dramatic art lies preeminently in the words that present the incidents of the plot, which should be so constructed that the additional visual and auditory effects of stagecraft provide a purely accessory and unnecessary enhancement.117 The dramatic work of art, like any other artistic creation, confronts the challenge of contending with a specific public while maintaining accessibility to any potential audience of fine art. The work of drama must itself have sufficient concreteness of situation, pathos, character, and conflict to unite meaning and configuration, while shaping a drama of sufficient significance to move any audience that can be enabled to follow its total movement. Hegel presents this challenge as having two aspects. The pathos driving the drama must either have an interest universal to humanity or at least a passion that is of substantive importance to the nation for  Goethe’s Faust may be considered to straddle both epic and dramatic literary genres, just as might Joyce’s Ulysses, given the “Ulysses in Nighttown” section. 117  It is worth repeating Aristotle’s words with respect to tragedy, “The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the spectacle; but they may also be aroused by the very structure and incidents of the play – which is the better way and shows the better poet. The plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents.” Aristotle, Poetics, 1453b1–5, The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, p. 2326. 116

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which the dramatist is writing.118 These concerns are hardly separable, for what any human community invests with normative significance are those fundamental human concerns that occupy all civilizations, however they construe what is true, right, and sacred. Hegel disputes this linkage when he dismisses Kalidasa’s ancient Sanskrit play, Shakuntala, and Calderon’s dramas of personal honor for revolving around concerns that cannot move individuals of other nations with different worldviews.119 Hegel effectively admits the connection, however, by treating the lack of universal appeal of these dramas as signs of aesthetic deficiency, preventing them from providing “genuine” works of tragedy or comedy. When drama combines universal significance with the individuality of concrete characterization in the total movement of pathos and plot, the dramatic experience communicates in words some resolution of conflict, whether tragic, comedic, or tragi-comedic, that cannot fail to touch the hearts and minds of an audience, be it reading the text in isolation or viewing a stage production in common with others. Whatever fate awaits the protagonists of drama in virtue of their pursuit of their animating pathos, it will move the spectator because it involves a destiny to which any rational animal is connected as a possible encounter with the central normative issues of human existence, broadly speaking. It does not matter how religious and ethical matters are framed in the dramatic conflict; so long as such affairs are the driving force of the action, they weigh upon the normative concerns from which there is no asylum so long as one retains one’s humanity. The universality of such concerns is what allows the audience of drama to always be able to identify with the trials and tribulations of its characters and undergo a catharsis in which they emotionally share in what they well know to be the imagined experience of conflict and resolution. In A Short Organum for the Theater Bertolt Brecht questions the cathartic identification of the audience with the ordeals of dramatic characters on the grounds that theater should aim at not an unthinking emotional response, but a critical reaction that depends upon maintaining a certain

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1175.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1176.

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distance to the dramatic movement.120 If drama were to depend upon a literal identification of spectator and dramatic character, drama would have to abandon concretely portraying different types of characters and world conditions and reduce everything to the uniformity of the present, as if it were permanent and beyond alteration. Instead, drama must prevent spectators from being able to identify immediately with characters and their actions by using various “alienation” effects that allow the audience to appreciate their unfamiliar historical specificity and comprehend their true impermanence. Brecht ignores how the vicarious identification of spectator and dramatic character is never equivalent to someone’s immediate emotional reaction to an actual person’s life experience. The catharsis of the theatrical spectator is a relation to an artistic transfiguration of human reality and the play’s artificial artistic character is preserved throughout the dramatic experience by all the “framings” that detach the written and performed play from prosaic reality. The “alienation” effects of Brecht’s “epic theater” are only specific forms of such theatrical “framings” and do not differ in kind from the artifices of the “traditional” theater he repudiates. To undergo a catharsis, spectators must know that what they read or observe is only a dramatic creation, which, as a work of fine art, is to be appreciated in terms of the unity of meaning and configuration generic to aesthetic productions. The specifics of spectator reaction reflect the genre at stake, as we shall see when we examine what distinguishes tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy.

 ramatic Literature and the Public Performance D of Drama Although the task of drama is to put before us the spoken interaction of characters grappling with conflicting aims of universal importance, drama unfolds through the verbal expressions of the passions of the characters, which, as Hegel observes, can be completely captured in words  Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. & trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 181, 182, 192–195. 120

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constituting a literary work experienced in the inner world of linguistic imagination.121 Nonetheless, the dramatic action takes place in the external reality of a particular situation, involving characters who are living beings with distinct physical appearance and dress, whose spoken interchange occurs with whatever bodily movements and facial expressions can be imagined to accompany their verbalizations of their thoughts and feelings. The setting of their dialogue may be imagined to be a natural and/or architectural setting under specific illumination, where additional noise and/or music may be heard. All of this makes possible the external execution of the work of dramatic literature in a live performance with made-up costumed actors strutting on a stage, adorned with scenery and, as the occasion warrants, interludes of music, dance, and projections. Moreover, since the dramatic work as literature cannot fully specify how actors act, or how they are made up, costumed, surrounded by scenery, or engaged in music and dance, the execution of these aspects of performance involves a creative engagement falling beyond the artistry of the dramatist as a creator of dramatic dialogue. For this reason, it makes sense to distinguish, as Hegel does, between the character of drama as a literary work merely to be read and the character of drama as a performance work, adding, on the one hand, the art of actors performing the dramatic text, and on the other hand, the theatrical means of make-up, costuming, scenery, music, dance, and projection that independently contribute on their own.122 It may well be that plays were performed before the text of the drama was made available to the public to be read as a literary work. As Béla Balázs points out, “in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance the written play was always a product of a later differentiation” and “there had been great playwrights for centuries before plays began to be written down and made available for reading outside the theater.”123 Nonetheless, the literary text of drama has a being of its own

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1181.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1182. 123  Balazs, Bela, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (London: Dennis Dobson LTD, 1952), p. 247. 121 122

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and can be appreciated independently of theatrical performance.124 Although theatrical performances can incorporate improvisation, so long as actors perform with any script whatsoever, the creation of the literary text of the drama precedes its performance. This is true even if that text is first presented exclusively to theater directors and actors, whose performance than transmits it to any further audience before eventual publication. Given the antecedent character of the dramatic text, it is understandable that the dramas of Greek antiquity and French neo-­ classicism can have no stage directions despite being written for theatrical performance.125 Any performance of a dramatic text will, however, involve a double transfiguration where directors and actors furnish a creative interpretation of an already independent work, whose artistic transfiguration is complete in itself.126 The transformation of drama from literary work, unpublished or not, to theatrical performance nonetheless can have textual ramifications of its own. These are recognized by the ancient Sanskrit dramatic tradition, which specifically distinguishes between the text of the drama as a work of literature (the kāvya), and the dramatic text as specifically adapted for performance (the nātya).127 The latter is subsequently described as “visual poetry”128 insofar as it prepares an audience for a performance that is no longer just available to literary imagination, but also a perceivable spectacle that, as adorned with costumes, makeup, scenery, music, and dance, delights our vision and hearing. Hegel nonetheless seems to suggest that this distinction is ultimately illusory, for it is mistaken to regard a dramatic work as “merely to be read,  Lukács similarly insists that the dramatic text has a complete aesthetic existence independently of whether it is performed, just as does a poem serving as the lyric of a song. Lukács criticizes Bela Balazs for maintaining that a film script has the same independence and represents a discrete literary genre. Instead, Lukács maintains, the film script serves only as an occasion for the visual and auditory realization of the film. See Lukács, Georg, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 487. 125  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 147. 126  Lukács makes this point using the misleading category of mimesis, even though his understanding of mimesis involves some degree of transfiguration. He writes, “Indem der Schauspieler dieser Mimesis eine lebendige Verkörperung gibt, entsteht eine doppelte Mimesis, jedoch mit der deutlichen Nuance: sie ist Interpretation einer bereits selbständigen, in sich vollendeten Mimesis.” Lukács, Georg, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 488. 127  Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 17. 128  Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 17. 124

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in the belief that this has no influence at all on the nature of the composition.” Admittedly “it should not be maintained that a drama cannot be satisfying poetically on the score of its inner value alone, but this inner dramatic value is only to be provided by a treatment which makes a drama excellent on the stage.” Shakespeare’s plays could thus be produced in his own day without any scenery, for the words and characterizations can sustain the dramatic impact without much need of spectacle.129 On a superficial level, the relation between dramatic text and its theatrical performance is exhibited in the various stage directions that are textually incorporated, including specifications of the costume and physical actions of characters and the setting of each scene. More essential textual modifications involve how stagecraft considerations determine how the dramatist structures the dramatic interaction. As Hegel notes, to this end a dramatist must be aware of the varying conventional conditions of theatrical arrangements and accordingly pace the script to provide sufficient time for actors to rest and change costume and for scenery alterations to be made.130 Nonetheless, when Hegel alludes to what makes a dramatic treatment adequate for theatrical performance, he refers to the “inner dramatic value” of the play, which, as Aristotle duly affirmed, does not reside in the accoutrements of theatrical spectacle, but in the validity of the plot, which unites character and pathos in the total movement of the drama. This is something that lies above all in the text as a literary creation. With this is mind, we can retain the distinction made by ancient Sanskrit dramatic theory between the text of the drama as a work of literature (the kāvya), and the dramatic text as specifically adapted for performance (the nātya). That distinction does not remove the limitation of a mere recitation of drama compared to theatrical performance proper. Recitation is a comparatively unsatisfying medium for dramatic presentation both for the ear and the eye. Although a single voice may modulate and alter itself to portray different dramatic characters, it cannot convey the spatial relations of actual dramatic voices, nor deliver the added auditory enhancement of background noises and the song of multiple singers. Nor can  Balazs, Bela, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, p. 229.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1183.

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mere recitation achieve the visual impact of the bodily movements and gestures of multiple actors in different costume, or of the scenery and dance that theatrical spectacle adds. All these additions carry an artistry of their own that is worth viewing in its own right. For this reason, theatrical performance is not a superfluous addition to drama. Although drama can fulfill the demands of fine art without performance, we have an aesthetically legitimate desire for staging, since, as Hegel affirms, “if we listen to an action, we also want to see the agents, their demeanor, and surroundings, etc.”131 Among the enhancements provided by theatrical staging, the performance of actors is of paramount importance since it directly embodies every twist and turn of the dialogue of dramatic interaction. This primacy is reflected in how there can be satisfying stagings of drama with no or the most minimal use of makeup, costume, and scenery. Nonetheless, the art of acting must take into account how actors can take advantage of all the resources of theater, when they are provided. This imperative is followed in Bharata’s NāṭyaśāstraI, which analyzes acting in terms of the total production of stagecraft, distinguishing acting in its use of the body (involving all the gestures and movements of eyes, hands, and the whole physique), acting in its use of speech (including the handling of intonation, recitation, and singing), acting in its use of stage accessories (such as costumes, jewelry, and makeup), and finally acting in its use of specifically emotional expression (including hand and eye movements, vocal outbursts, tears, blushing, and fainting). Scenery and props are not mentioned since traditional Sanskrit drama evoked scenes primarily through spoken descriptions and the other means of acting.132 Moreover, certain sectors of the stage were designated as the locations of action in the different realms of heaven and the human world, including separate zones for the forest and the city.133 The relation of drama to performance is different from that of music to performance and acting must accommodate itself to all the elements of  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1185.  The Nāṭyaśāstra, trans. Adya Rangacharya (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1984), pp. 78–111, 174–184; Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 18. 133  Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 21. 131 132

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stagecraft. Nonetheless, the artistry of acting is analogous to that of musicians who are playing a musical score. In both cases, the performing artist works from a text, one verbal, one musical, and the realization of that text in performance necessarily involves an independent creative contribution pertaining to every aspect that is left undetermined by that text. In addition, when musicians perform under a conductor and actors perform under a director, both sorts of performers must implement their respective instructions with the inevitable creative initiative that gives those instructions an individual living reality. Each actor has a distinct appearance and voice, to which must be added the unique way actors deliver the words of their character with bodily movements and gestures to which they give a stamp of their own. Moreover, each performer makes use of makeup, costumes, props, and scenery in an individuated manner that can never be exhaustively dictated by either the dramatic text or a play director. Consequently, following Hegel, we can distinguish two aspects of acting, that must be seamlessly integrated. One is the artistic delivery of the script, where the actor’s declamation uses tone, intonation, rhythm, and variations in volume and emphasis to express the dramatic pathos animating the character’s dramatic action. The other is the physical movements and gestures that add to the impact of the modulations of voice and enunciation.134 The universality of dramatic pathos makes it possible for actors to draw upon the Stanislavsky method, which encourages them to draw upon similar personal emotional experiences to shape their dramatic characterization. Nonetheless, reliving personal experience can never suffice to guide a dramatic performance since the play must have a unique concreteness of its own, into whose total movement the actors must fully integrate their living embodiment of the script. The play is the thing in its own self-contained imaginative world and the artistry of acting must transcend personal experience in order for the actor to become the dramatic character in full. This can involve an expressly theatrical characterization, whose poetic enunciation and movements explicitly deviate from prosaic behavior, but it can also involve a familiar “naturalness” that serves the play. Both extremes can be carried too far, for the dramatic  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1186.

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unity of meaning and configuration can be undermined “either by pure naturalness and its living routine or by pure intellectualism and skill in characterization.”135 Pure naturalness fails to rise above contingent immediacy and exhibit universality, whereas pure intellectualism offers form without sufficiently individuated content. Hegel laments especially those actors of his day whose “naturalness” has “gone so far that droning and mumbling words, intelligible to nobody, is allowed to count as an excellent play.”136 Instead, any immersion in natural fidelity and personal emotional experience must be tempered by the artistry that always joins universal and individual. Whether Marlon Brando or Charles Laughton, Falconetti or Sarah Bernhardt, actors must channel the traces of their personal passions and their performance technique to create a stage presence whose own unique characterization wholly fits the fabric of the drama that they bring alive for their audience. Bertolt Brecht ignores this perennial imperative by decrying any theatrical performance in which actors aim to identify with the character they portray. Although the “method acting” of the Stanislavsky school may invoke drawing upon personal experience as a model for inhabiting a character, a dramatic character is always a product of artistic imagination that involves the transfigured unity of configuration and meaning distinguishing fine art from prosaic reality. Brecht regards any verdict that an actor “didn’t act Lear, he was Lear” to be “an annihilating blow”, as if actors needed to do something special to always appear “on the stage in a double role, as Laughton and as Galileo”137 as in Charles Laughton’s performance in Brecht’s play of that name. In reality, a performer is always perceived to be a performer playing a role. Inhabiting that role never eliminates the dual character of that recognized theatrical illusion. Hegel suggests that only in modern times has the art of acting been fully developed, pointing to how Greek classical theater put masks on actors hiding any facial gestures, while limiting the range of declamation and movements to a statuesque simplicity.138 These restrictions may fit  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1191.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1190–1191. 137  Brecht, Bertolt, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, pp. 193–194. 138  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1187. 135 136

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the Classical ideal, but they do not apply to ancient Sanskrit theater, which called upon its performers to employ an arsenal of oratorical, facial, and bodily movements that few modern performances can rival. The actor of modern drama may indeed tackle characters who embrace the entire range of human freedom in its outer and inner expressions, so fully presented in the rich figures of Shakespeare. Nonetheless, the personages of Symbolic and Classical theater are never less than concrete individuals, even if they struggle with norms that confer diminished significance upon aspects of human subjectivity. In every case, theatrical performance calls upon its actor “not only to penetrate profoundly into the spirit of the poet and of the part assigned to him and entirely adapt to it his mind and demeanor, and his own personality, but he should also be productive on his own account by enlarging many points, fillings gaps, and finding transitions; in short in playing his part by explaining the author through bringing out into something present and alive, and making intelligible, all his secret intentions and the profundity of his master-strokes.”139

The Genres of Drama Are there genres of drama that derive from the universal principles of dramatic literature or are dramatic genres either historically given contingent phenomena or expressions of how the artforms realize their stylistic modalities in drama? The latter two options appear to draw support from how the classical representatives of dramatic theory diverge, at least on the surface, in their typology of dramatic genres. On the one hand, the ancient Sanskrit treatise on drama, the Nāt ̣yaśāstra attributed to Bharata, differentiates ten genres of drama (Nataka, Prakarana, Samavakara, Ihamrga, Dima, Vyayoga, Anka, Prahasana, Bhana, and Vithi). They are distinguished by whether the theme is well-known or invented, by what kind of characters it involves (divine or human, noble hero, Brahmin, trader, officer, women, courtesans, and/or slaves), what kind of calamities it contains, whether it has  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1189.

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one or more personages, whether it is satiric or not, and whether it has one or more acts.140 Of these ten types of plays, only three have actually dominated Sanskrit theater: the nātaka, prakarana, and prahasansa. Of these, the first two can both be called “heroic romances”, where the chief protagonist usually grapples with a conflict of erotic desire (kama) and ethical duty (dharma).141 In the case of nātaka, the hero is a legendary figure drawn from the great Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, whereas in the prakarana, the hero is a worldly figure, animating a dramatic plot that is invented by the author, rather than drawn from epic tradition. Whereas the heroic romance typically leads to a resolution in which the hero overcomes a discord between love and duty, there are Sanskrit dramas, such as Viśākhadatta’s Rākshasa’s Ring, in which struggles for power, such as portrayed in the epics, end with the destruction of the leading character. The prahasansa by contrast is a comedy, whose hero is entangled in farcical intrigues. On the other hand, Western theater theorists from Aristotle to Hegel have tended to divide dramatic genres principally into tragedy and comedy, with tragicomedy acknowledged as an intermediary form. The differentiation of tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy might seem to fit the divide of nātaka, prakarana, and prahasansa, provided the “heroic romances” and struggles for power could correspond to tragedy and perhaps tragicomedy. If not, this discrepancy might partially vindicate Hegel’s claim that the Symbolic world view of ancient Sanskrit drama cannot support true tragedy and comedy. Of course, if this were so, tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy would cease to be fundamental genres of drama, deriving from the universal features of dramatic literature. Instead, they would be relegated to historically contingent forms or, at best, genres that fit only particular artforms, namely, the Classical and the Romantic. Any necessary division of dramatic genres must be based upon the essential options with which the fundamental aspects of drama can operate. Hegel locates the universally necessary, a priori differentiation of dramatic genres in the basic ways in which the total movement of drama can  The Nāṭyaśāstra, trans. Adya Rangacharya (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1984), pp. 148–156. 141  Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 43. 140

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develop, which encompasses how characters pursue their aims, how their pursuits determine the dramatic conflict, and how that conflict arrives at some resolution.142 The resulting division of dramatic genres consists in tragedy, comedy, and a third form that combines the two modes of tragic and comedic treatment, which Hegel identifies as “drama” (Schauspiel).143 The latter may better be called, “tragicomedy” to avoid confusing Schauspiel with drama in general. It is not uncommon nor entirely inappropriate to describe works of epic and lyric literature as exhibiting tragic and comedic aspects. If, however, tragedy and comedy and tragicomedy are to be understood as genres of dramatic literature, we must comprehend them in their specificity to that form of literature. Individual epic works may contain both tragic and comedic elements (e.g. Homer’s The Odyssey), and others may have a generally tragic (e.g. Richard Wright’s Native Son) or comedic (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones) or tragicomedic tone (e.g. Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote). So, too, lyric works may express an author’s feelings and thoughts about matters that are tragic, comedic, or tragicomedic. Nonetheless, the division of epic and lyric genres does not fall along these divides, especially since aspects of more than one such mode may fall within a single epic or lyric work. Instead, as Hegel suggests, we can distinguish epic literature into national epics, such as the Homeric epos and Valmiki’s Ramayana, that depict a substantive world in its universal totality, and novels that describe the events embroiling individuals as they make their way through a world in which their actions are not immediately joined with the fate of a nation.144 As for lyric, its manifold varieties are distinguished by how their personal disclosures via various subject matters are more or less tied to the individual author.145 By contrast, the essential distinction between dramatic genres rests upon the primary features of dramatic interaction itself: on the one hand, the substance of the pathos around which the conflict revolves and, on the other hand, the dramatic character, the subject, at the center of the  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1193.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1193. 144  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1193. 145  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1193. 142 143

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play.146 The substance of drama consists in what has fundamental value, be it sacred or ethical. This provides the basis of everything of universal interest in the dramatic figure’s aims and passions, to which its character is wedded. Hegel maintains that there are two fundamental ways in which the subject can relate to the substance of the dramatic conflict. Dramatic subjects can be driven by their pathos to advance some fundamental interest with due commitment and insight and endure the consequences of that resolve. Alternately, dramatic subjects can pursue aims that have the appearance of fundamental value but be mistaken about their significance or advance them in a way that undercuts itself by succumbing to self-delusion, venality, and arbitrary whim. Thirdly, the dramatic character can forge a middle ground between these extremes, pursuing aims with a misleading understanding and hapless effort, but still contributing to a conflict in which serious issues are at play and have a significant outcome.147 These are the three options that Hegel takes to be inherent in drama and in turning to his further characterization of them, we need to examine whether they really are essential and exhaustive. In doing so, we must ensure that they are determined sufficiently universally without being pigeon-holed by features limited to certain artforms.

Tragedy Tragedy, so distinguished, concerns aims that constitute a specifically tragic pathos pursued by specifically tragic figures. Their driving passion is genuinely substantive, regarded by the tragic character for what it is, a truly fundamental pathos that cannot be abandoned without sacrificing all integrity. As Hegel notes, the content of such pathos must involve the independently justified powers with whose substantive concerns conduct must contend.148 These can be either ethical or religious. Significantly,  As Hegel writes, “granted the cleavage of dramatic poetry into different genres, it is only these two fundamental features of action which can confront one another as a basis of such genres.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1199. 147  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1194. 148  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1194. 146

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Hegel mentions only two specifically ethical domains, which fit the ancient Greek community of oikos and polis. First, there are the ethical family relations between spouses, parents and children, and siblings. Second, there are the ethical bonds of political life, involving the relations between officeholders, those between rulers and ruled, and the patriotic commitments of its citizens.149 In describing these substantive political interactions, Hegel omits relations between the body politic and its foreign enemy, which he regards as a more proper theme for epic, and in particular, the epos where national life is at stake. What Hegel more importantly ignores are conscience and the social freedoms of civil society, where civil legality and economic justice are at stake. Although the moral conflicts rooted in conscience and struggles over social justice may be specific to modern times, where the Romantic artform has its place, tragedy must not close its doors to those matters if its pathos and conflict are to be sufficiently universal to cover tragic drama in general. Whatever the case, the pathos of tragedy must involve some such substantive concern with which the conduct of the tragic character is preoccupied. Emil Staiger is therefore not off the mark in extending tragedy to encompass dramas in which generally “the framework of the world” of the protagonist, which may be that of an entire class or people, faces destruction.150 This framework is the normative substance with which the protagonist identifies and so long as the dramatic conflict revolves around its very existence, a tragic outcome hangs in the balance. What is at stake is not the thwarting of some hope, but the destruction of the “foundations of all meaning, of the world” of the tragic character.151 Such destruction, however, is not genuinely dramatic unless it is tied to strivings of the tragic character in face of powers that have some normative power of their own. Otherwise, the catastrophe is no longer tragic, rooted in our human condition, but a matter of extraneous horror, fit for the entertainments of “disaster” tales. For the pathos and the dramatic figure to be properly united in the total movement of tragedy, the protagonist must have a character that, as  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1194.  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 165. 151  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 166. 149 150

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concretely vital as it must be, is driven to make the pathos the consuming focus of its agency. The expansive reach of epic events allows epic characters to possess multiple qualities and related aims that get expressed in separate episodes involving various events in its looser narrative. The concentrated dynamic of tragedy, however, requires the character to be entirely wedded to the aims and passions that dramatic dialogue makes manifest in its seeding and resolution of the tragic conflict. Hegel suggests that the domination of tragic character by tragic pathos eliminates from view all “the mere accidents of the individual’s purely personal life”, rendering tragic heroes “works of sculpture”,152 fixed upon one essential action that must entirely capture the substance of their personage. Although Hegel relates this sculptural rendering to the statuesque handling of actors in ancient Greek theater, it does not exclude the concentration of characterization in other modes of tragedy. Hegel would be the last to deny that Shakespeare’s tragic characters are richly drawn, with internal struggles that burst forth in their spoken words, while still intensely focused upon the pathos that drives them to their destiny. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear are no mere statues, anymore than are Oedipus and Antigone. Tragic figures, like all dramatic characters, cannot remain silent or stationary. They must speak their passion and participate in the changing interaction in which they come alive. Whatever be the substantive content that tragic pathos contains, the protagonist’s expression of this pathos to others must elicit opposition that engenders a conflict on which hangs the fate of the tragic character.153 To be genuinely tragic, the opposition cannot be devoid of substance of its own. If only one side of the struggle possesses ethical or religious value, the conflict and its resolution lack any genuine aesthetic character. The play becomes a perfunctory triumph of good over evil or evil over good where the destiny of the protagonists is of no challenge and the whole development of the drama reveals nothing of intrinsic interest to add to the initial contrast of right and wrong. Each side must have a justified aim that can only be upheld by preventing its counterpart’s justified aim from prevailing. The existence of these correlative substantial 152 153

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1195.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1196.

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interests is precisely what makes the conflict necessary and unavoidable, rather than a superfluous and contingent anomaly. The necessity of the tragedy is thus both subjective and objective, rooted in fundamental normative commitments embodied in existing cultural realities that the protagonists have chosen to embrace. In conceiving how the tragic conflict of opposing pathos sets up an opposition demanding resolution, Hegel emphasizes that what enables there to be a contradiction between forces both advancing valid aims is that the tragic characters pursue ethical and/or religious commitments one-sidedly.154 Instead of recognizing how the substantive interests of both sides of the opposition deserve to be respected and somehow reconciled, tragic characters embrace one to the exclusion of the other and that one-sidedness is the ultimate cause of their tragedy. Insofar as their character cannot relinquish its pathos in all its exclusive partiality, tragic heroes cannot escape being consumed in a conflict in which they are at once innocent of transgressing the substantive aim they defend and guilty of violating the valid interest they oppose. On this basis, only two outcomes can save the tragic protagonists from destruction without ignoring the gravity of the conflict. One is for tragic heroes to abandon the fulfillment of their one-sided pathos in face of overwhelming opposition, without renouncing the validity of its frustrated aims. The other alternative is a reconciliation in which the opponents recognize the one-sidedness of their mutual hostility and acknowledge the validity of one another and the possible coexistence of the different substantial powers they represent. There is another basis of tragic conflict that Hegel does not explicitly acknowledge, although it underlies some of the plays he discusses in illustrating tragedy. Tragic conflicts can indeed be incipient in the distinct ethical spheres of a single world condition, especially when these spheres have traditional boundaries that do not automatically harmonize, as do the spheres of freedom of the institutions of self-determination at the core of the normative project of modernity.155 Tragedy can also break out  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1197.  For a systematic account of how and why the different spheres of self-determination form a coherent system, see Richard Dien Winfield, The Just State: Rethinking Self-Government. 154 155

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in times of world-historical change, when a form of life with one set of values is undergoing an internal metamorphosis in which a new ethos is challenging the old. In such cases, the dramatic destiny of a tragic hero may personify the opposition of old and new. What allows the conflict of “traditional” and “revolutionary” values to escape reduction to an ­undramatic struggle between absolute right and absolute wrong is that the old order is recognized to contain certain values that the new strives to achieve more fully. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a prime example of such tragedy, where the assertion of the freedom to love and marry contests the bonds of feudal kinship privilege in a world on the threshold of transformation. With such conflict at work, the destruction of the tragic heroes can be avoided if they succumb to opposition and live with defeat or the conflicting powers accept a reconciliation that somehow acknowledges their respective integrities. The full sense of tragedy might nevertheless seem to demand the inexorable destruction of the tragic hero, as occurs so frequently in ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. In both cases, the tragic conflict proceeds in a situation and world condition in which ethical or religious powers oppose one another with no reconciliation easily available. In the case of ancient Greece, the household and political association present distinct ethical spheres whose different traditional commitments can conflict with little means to bridge the gap between the pathos of an Antigone and that of a Creon. In Shakespearean tragedy, the conflicts revolve around personal battles for power in ancient or feudal settings or in conflicts between love and feudal loyalties, with little possibility for reconciliation in either case. The nature of tragic conflict, however, cannot preclude the possibility of tragic heroes escaping destruction either by relinquishing their struggle and suffering the self-imposed shame of defeat or by reconciling the substantial powers they personify. Hegel acknowledges these options, writing that “in tragedy the individuals destroy themselves through the one-­ sidedness of their otherwise solid will and character, or they must resignedly accept what they had opposed even in a serious way.”156 If such alternatives are to retain dramatic viability, they must not destroy the 156

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1199.

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living unity of the dramatic figures and the connection between their character, pathos, and plot. Any withdrawal from the conflict must have sufficient ramifications for the character of the protagonist. Whereas reconciliation might be consonant with an honorable redemption of the tragic character, living with the abandonment of pathos should involve a pitiable blow to the tragic figure’s integrity. Hegel cites two Greek tragedies in which the tragic protagonist escapes destruction through reconciliation, Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Aeschylus the Areopagus’ Eumenides. Hegel notes, however, that the reconciliation in these works does not properly arise through the action of the opposing parties, as dramatic movement requires, but enters through a literal deus ex machina, where the gods impose their resolution.157 By contrast, modern tragedies, Hegel observes, not infrequently come to denouements where the protagonists end their conflict and reconcile their competing aims and passions through their own initiatives. He attributes this to the modern emphasis upon subjective independence in face of external substantial powers,158 but this need not limit tragedies with surviving heroes to plays of the Romantic artform. Not only might the Classical Ideal support such accommodation, but, as we shall see, the characters of the ancient Sanskrit heroic romance dramas escape destruction through reconciliation. Given the character of tragedy, what is its distinctive impact upon its audience, be it readers or theater spectators? Hegel joins Aristotle in identifying the true effect of tragedy upon its audience as a catharsis of emotions, where vicariously experiencing the fate of the tragic hero arouses pity and fear in the spectators.159 Whereas Aristotle’s account of tragic catharsis is presented in relation to tragedy embodying the Classical ideal and the clash of oikos and polis, Hegel helps us understand how a catharsis with pity and fear can have an application to tragedy per se and not be limited to just the Classical artform. The fear aroused by tragedy is not trepidation of an alien power and the oppression it wields upon the tragic hero and vicariously upon us.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1204.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1203–1204. 159  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1197. 157 158

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Rather, Hegel points out, it is fear of the might of a substantial order whose validity one freely recognizes and cannot conscientiously ignore.160 The fate of the tragic hero puts before us something to which we cannot help but be vulnerable: facing the authority of a normative power that confronts us when we embrace aims essential to ourselves that put us in opposition to it. The plight of the tragic hero is something we must fear for ourselves because it is rooted in the inescapable strivings for worth essential to the human condition. The pity aroused by tragedy is something very different from the prosaic empathy we have for the victims of misfortune. The latter empathy would be aroused by a drama in which good individuals suffer at the hands of scoundrels or chance. That interaction of good and bad or good and accident is not tragic and cannot evoke genuinely tragic pity. Tragic pity rather consists of empathy with the tragic hero for having a substantive pathos that puts him or her in fateful conflict with an opposing pathos of comparable validity. Tragic pity concerns only genuinely tragic suffering, which, as Hegel notes, is “only inflicted on the individual agents as a consequence of their own deed which is both legitimate and, owing to the resulting collision, blameworthy, and for which their whole self is answerable.”161 For this reason, the tragic hero is both innocent and guilty, both admirable and deplorable. The plot of genuine tragedy makes this manifest, as Aristotle explains, by avoiding depicting the passage of a good individual from happiness to misery, a bad individual from misery to happiness, or an extremely bad individual from happiness to misery. In the former case, the path of misfortune is merely odious, whereas the latter two scenarios present perfunctory outcomes of undeserved good fortune and deserved misfortune. None of these scenarios can inspire tragic fear or pity, which depend upon vicariously suffering misfortune that is bound up with acting upon a pathos of substantial value. The tragic figure is instead of an intermediate character, neither preeminently virtuous nor vicious, but one, like us,

160 161

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1197.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1198.

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who can bring misery upon oneself by pursuing an end one knows to be admirable while erroneously judging it to be faultless.162

Comedy Comedy involves a very different character and plot than tragedy. Aristotle identifies the protagonist of comedy as someone “worse than the average” whose action becomes ridiculous through “a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others.”163 The comic figure, like the comic mask worn by the ancient Greek comedian, is ugly and distorted, exciting laughter “without causing pain”,164 let alone fear and pity. Aristotle has little more to tell us about the genre of comedy and we might wonder what in the depiction of the ridiculous and its elicitation of laughter could command aesthetic worth. In this connection, it is important to distinguish humor from the comical and the humorist from the comedic character. As Hartmann notes, the comical is a quality of the object of laughter, whereas humor concerns how we look upon the comical.165 Whereas we laugh at the comic character, we do not laugh at humorists but laugh along with them at the objects of their humor. Humor intentionally aims at laughter, but is not itself comical, whereas the comedy of comic figures in a literary work is always unintended. A humorist tells jokes and anecdotes for laughs, but the characters of comedy evoke laughter because of how they behave irrespective of seeking the mirth of a spectator.166 Certainly, a mistake or deformity that produces pain or harm to others is nothing to laugh about. Anyone who seeks to evoke laughter by presenting such infliction of suffering is as odious as a would-be tragedian who plots the misery of guiltless protagonists. Yet not all harmless mistakes or deformities are ridiculous and laughable, let alone suitable for comedic fine art. What type of harmless mistake or deformity is not only  Aristotle, Poetics, 1452b34–1453a11, The Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 2325.  Aristotle, Poetics, 1449a32–35, The Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 2319. 164  Aristotle, Poetics, 1449a36, The Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 2319. 165  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 448. 166  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 449. 162 163

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ridiculous and laughable, but worthy of occupying an entire genre of drama? A deformity for which the harmless comic character is not responsible hardly seems deserving of ridicule, let alone dramatic depiction, unless we debase comedy to a celebration of mean-spirited contempt for human responsibility. The ethos of comedic laughter cannot be “purely negative, loveless, and heartless”167 if comedy is to be viable genre of literary art. To move us in an aesthetic manner, comedy must evoke an empathetic laughter, one with which we can “feel solidarity even with the foolish and petty in human affairs”,168 because we, too, can behave ridiculously in grappling with matters of genuine importance. For this reason, a harmless mistake will not deserve laughter worthy of dramatization unless the ridicule concerns the comic figure’s benign engagement with matters susceptible of artistic configuration, namely significant ethical or religious concerns. Aristotle’s definition of the comic lacks something crucial to the role of the harmless mistake in comedy. He fails to specify the nature of the reversal that the comic figure experiences in the dramatic interaction of the comedy.169 This reversal has typically been characterized as a confrontation with the unexpected. Hobbes ties the unanticipated twist to a devaluation of the comic figure, as if our laughter was but a confirmation of our own superiority.170 Kant expresses the reversal more forgivingly, writing that “laughter is an effect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing”.171 Since not deformity, but only a mistake can properly be worthy of an aesthetically meaningful laughter, it is important to consider the nature of the comic mistake and how the reversal with which it becomes entangled retains connection to the substantial affairs that genuine drama concerns. To merit aesthetic worth, the comedic action must proceed with some semblance of a significant pathos, impelling the comic figure into an  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 454.  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 454. 169  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 456. 170  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 457. 171  Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 209. 167 168

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opposition that gets resolved.172 Although the comic figure will prove to be ridiculous, at the outset the comic character’s quest must find enough acceptance to be taken seriously.173 Contrary to tragedy, the comedic resolution does not involve the destruction of the protagonist or the reconciliation of conflicting powers, but rather an unexpected reversal through which the semblance of significance evaporates without substantial harm to any parties to the action. Thereby comedy discloses an irrefutable truth that holds sway for all civilizations: we are finite beings, subject to self-delusion concerning the worth of our ends and how we pursue them. That we can laugh at this truth carries with it the knowledge that we need not always be ridiculous.174 Hegel helps clarify the course of comedy and the nature of the comic mistake and its reversal. He introduces the dramatic genre of comedy as complementary to tragedy, based on their correlative emphasis upon the “two fundamental features of action” that confront one another in drama: the substance of objective value and the subjectivity of the dramatic character.175 The objective normative powers prevail in tragedy by overcoming the defective one-sidedness of the tragic hero through the hero’s destruction or resigned acceptance of their affirmative conciliation. In comedy, the subjectivity of the hero dominates the stage, strutting with infinite assurance of its designs and behavior, until these innocuously self-­ destruct, leaving the comic figure subject to ridicule but retaining self-­ respect.176 Despite the laughter at the collapse of the “unsubstantial” aims and manner of the comedic character, Hegel still describes comedy as  Hartmann identifies the four “essential elements of the comical” as “nonsense (the φαυλότερον, weakness), the semblance of significance or importance (which must be there at least at the outset), the self-resolution of semblance (it vanishing into a nothingness), and the unexpected.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 458. 173  Hartmann writes, “ridiculousness is not rooted in deficiency alone, but in the claim made by what is deficient to be in fact of a normal measure or even of an excessive one. And if comedy is to become vivid, the claim must first find a certain acceptance.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 458. 174  Staiger similarly describes the comic denouement as follows: “in the laughter that the comic provides lies an enormous triumph, an irrefutable truth. Again man is made aware of the limits of his finiteness, but only in such a way that he cannot get around affirming this finiteness.” Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 174. 175  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1199. 176  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1199. 172

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presenting the “victory” of its hero’s “subjective personality”.177 This is because comic figures survive the inner contradiction of their strivings, bear the frustration of their goals and undertakings, and emerge neither bitter nor miserable in the end.178 To understand how and why this is so, we need to consider how Hegel distinguishes the laughable in general from the comical. Any situation is laughable, Hegel maintains, when it involves the appearance of something of purported value that annuls itself or the pursuit of an end that undermines that very end.179 Both these contradictory circumstances are insufficient to make something comical because the nullity of unsubstantial undertakings can incite laughter that is merely nasty and derogatory. To elicit laughter as comic figures, characters must not be embittered or saddened by the inner contradictions of their ridiculous endeavors, but instead retain an inner bliss and unperturbed ease of someone of abiding confidence and resilient hope for their future pursuits.180 Only then can we laugh at their predicament in due appreciation of the harmlessness of their action and the durability of their humanity. Hegel accordingly identifies the soil for comedy to be a world in which individuals act as the arbiter of what matters for themselves and pursue self-destructive aims precisely because they are prone to identify with goals that lack actual objective substance. This characterization might seem to fit only a modern world condition recognizing the freedom to pursue self-selected particular aims and conscientiously decide what is good. Hegel himself counters that narrow identification by acknowledging the accomplishments of Ancient Greek comedy, but he does also seem to limit the ground of comedy by calling into question the possibility of genuine comedy in ancient Sanskrit drama. If comedy is only available for certain world views and corresponding artistic styles, then it ceases to be a genre of drama per se. Do the dual worldly requirements that Hegel introduces as the basis of comedy really apply to only certain civilizations? The construal of what is  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1199.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1200. 179  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1199. 180  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1200. 177 178

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objectively valid may vary from one world view to another, but rational animals always possess the ability to judge for themselves what they regard to be essential and how to achieve what they value. They can always be deluded, bloated with self-importance, and foolish in choosing the means to their ends. On the other hand, they can always experience the harmless collapse of their unsubstantial endeavors without permanent damage to their self-esteem simply by recognizing the ridiculous character of what they have done. Due to the very absence of any tragic consequences, comic figures can always brush themselves off and set out once more with sanguine spirits on their next escapades, like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp as he wanders off into the sunset to close a film. When Hegel proceeds to define further the situation of comedic action, it retains a universal applicability in all three varieties of comic situation that he distinguishes. In the first, the protagonists of comedy, unlike those of tragedy, have passions for aims devoid of genuine normative substance, but make a show of their supposed importance. Their pursuit is therefore inherently contradictory, leaving the comic figures unable to achieve anything they set out to do.181 If these individuals were seriously, rather than comically committed to such intrinsically null aims, and consumed their lives in their pursuit, they would become more and more wretched, and laughter at their predicament would be purely malicious and callous.182 As comically committed, however, such individuals cannot be ruined when their goals are thwarted since what they seek is of no real import.183 This holds true under any world condition, no matter how ultimate ethical and religious value be determined. Whether being ridiculous in a Sanskrit farce or a comedy of Aristophanes or Shakespeare or Neil Simon, the comic figure can always surmount its reversal of fortune “with cheerfulness undisturbed”.184 The same generality applies to the second comic situation that Hegel identifies, where comic figures aspire to aims and characters that are  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1200.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1201. 183  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1201. 184  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1201. 181 182

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genuinely worthy, but how they undertake their noble quest is a ridiculous travesty of what is required. They suppose that they are embodying what is of substance, but their pretensions are “purely imaginary”.185 Since the comic situation resides in the ridiculous manner by which normative ends are advanced, it can apply to any such ends, and therefore to any world condition. With comic situations so far distinguished by what and how aims are pursued in comic action, Hegel offers a third final possibility. Instead of depending on the nature of the comic figures’ own action, this third option is defined by the ridiculous complications of external contingencies that leave the comic figures laughably unable to achieve their designs, with no dire consequences. Since chance circumstances can always foil action, no matter what its aim may be, this comic situation can occur within any world condition. In all three of these basic options of comedy, the drama comes to an equivalent denouement. Although comedy, like tragedy, involves a conflict between individual character and matters of substance, the comic movement does not cause damage to either. Comic figures may experience the collapse of their endeavors through self-delusion regarding their validity, the ludicrous manner of their pursuit, or unforeseen laughable complications, but objective values are never endangered,186 nor do comic characters come to true grief. What suffers destruction are the inane follies of the comic figures, which, because they contrast with genuine normative concerns, command an aesthetic interest, even if, in the end, they amount to much ado about nothing. The comic reversal does not lead to the triumph of falsehood and injustice, nor to the eradication of every last redeeming quality of the ridiculous protagonists. What suffers collapse is instead the unsubstantial endeavors of the comic figures, whose resilient escape affirms that they need not be only ridiculous because they  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1201.  As Hegel observes, “Aristophanes, for example, did not make fun of what was truly moral in the life of the Athenians, or of their genuine philosophy, true religious faith, and serious art. On the contrary, what he does put before our eyes in its self-destructive folly is what was real, i.e. the downright opposite of the genuine actuality of state, religion and art, i.e. what he exhibits is sophistry, flighty gossip, litigiousness, etc., and the aberrations of democracy out of which the old faith and morals had vanished.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1202. 185 186

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retain the human possibility of living a life worth living. Comedy exposes the foibles of our finite undertakings, unmasking what is a mere show of significance, but in such a way that our normative aspirations need not be in vain. We can thus understand why, at the conclusion of Plato’s Symposium, Socrates is described as “trying to prove” to his listeners “that authors should be able to write both comedy and tragedy: the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet.”187 The very predicament that fosters tragedy equally allows for the comic relief of figures who cannot rise to tragic greatness, but act with a semblance of serious pathos, whose unmasking lets us laugh at their hapless escape from a tragic fate. There is, however, another possibility, where ridiculous action leads to unexpected harm of tragic potential. After all, if tragic dramatists can also author comedies, they can then intertwine tragic and comic elements into a third dramatic genre of tragicomedy. We can thus revise Socrates’ proof to challenge tragedians to create tragicomedy.

Tragicomedy Tragicomedy interweaves the comic element of ridiculous deficiencies with serious ramifications disproportionate to the subjective failings of the protagonist. That disproportion is crucial, for without it, the comic mistakes would be essentially linked to great harm and forfeit their laughable character. In tragicomedy both aspects can be at play insofar as a ridiculous character elicits tragic outcomes through otherwise inconsequential foibles.188 Here we can laugh and cry at the same time, acknowledging the humanity of the laughable personages, while fearing for and  Plato, Symposium, 223d, in Plato, Complete Works, p. 505. Staiger cites this text as signifying “that the tragedian can only pursue his task to the destructive end when ultimately, instead of falling into the void of nothingness, he falls on the ground of the comic and incites the elemental laughter of the one who knows” (Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 176). 188  Hartmann observes that tragicomedy depicts how “man can, by pure stupidity or other weaknesses that are laughable in themselves (conceit, arrogance, stubbornness, anxiousness) produce consequences whose serious and far-reaching implications stand in no relation to the triviality of his failings. Then his fate is truly tragic, but the consequences of the events remain infected with an irremediable comical element that lies in their disproportionality.” Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 476. 187

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pitying their fate. Hartmann points to Shakespeare’s King Lear as a rare tragicomedic masterpiece, which combines the ridiculous conduct of the aged King in mistaking the integrity of his truest daughter and accepting the duplicitous assurances of those he should suspect, with a tragic ­outcome that otherwise could be avoidable.189 One encounters tragicomedy also in the plight of Falstaff across Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV and Henry V plays, where the bawdy companion’s ludicrous scheming comes to a pitiable end as the new king leaves past follies behind. Any doubt of its intermediate drama is refuted by Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight Falstaff distillation, which brings into cinematic focus that very tragicomic character. Hegel acknowledges this third dramatic genre lying “in the center between tragedy and comedy”.190 He is at pains to provide it a proper name because the defining limits of this intermediate genre are “less firm than those of tragedy and comedy.”191 Accordingly, he gives it the vague label of “Schauspiel”, although he acknowledges that tragicomedy may be included in this genre to which he also ascribes the Greek and Roman satiric dramas.192 Although Hegel cannot deny that comedy flourishes before modern times, he suggests that modern drama tends to intermingle tragedy and comedy more than ever because free subjectivity, which runs riot in comedy, displaces conflicting objective ethical powers as the focal point of tragedy as well.193 Is tragicomedy, however, a perennial third option for dramatists, no matter what civilization they inhabit? Hegel presents the possibility of this intermediate genre as depending upon a blunting of the opposition between tragedy and comedy that allows for sufficient reconciliation to permit their interweaving. On the one hand, the erstwhile comic individuals must temper their insubstantial aims and manner with “more stable concerns and stable characters”. On the other hand, the intractable fixity and depth of tragic conflict must diminish so that a resolution can  Hartmann, Aesthetics, p. 477.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1202. 191  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1204. 192  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1203. 193  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1203. 189 190

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combine the seriousness of normative oppositions with the inconsequential outcome of ridiculous aspirations and action.194 Hegel acknowledges that tragicomedy will develop conflicts that end in a peaceful resolution, where ridiculous pursuits are undermined in combination with a conciliation of objective powers that have real substance. Hegel fears that the absence of sharp conflict may lead authors either to focus on the purely subjective inner struggles of the dramatic figures, reducing the drama to an extended character sketch, or, given the inconsequence of the characters, to attend to external circumstances and events, depicted without intrinsic connection to the characters.195 Both options may entertain if sufficiently adorned with theatrical effect, and the dramatization of external occurrences may edify the public, but genuine aesthetic achievement will be lacking due to the failure to maintain the totality of the dramatic movement with its unity of meaning and configuration. An artistically successful tragicomedy will meld the ridiculous with a clash of significant concerns such that the characters serve the action and the resolution arises out of their dialogical interplay. Since comedy and tragedy both involve relations of subjective passions to objective concerns that are endemic to the human condition, the intermediate form of tragicomedy cannot be restricted to one artform and its characteristic worldview. In every world condition the follies of individuals can have serious consequences and those consequences may, given the limits of folly, allow for reconciliations that escape tragic destruction. As we turn to examine how literature embodies the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic options of artistic construal, we will see whether the candidates for literary genres vindicate their universality.

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1203.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1204.

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Literature and the Artforms Despite the universal scope of literature, every literary creation makes use of languages that belong to specific linguistic communities, whose shared values are reflected in the works of fine art that express or challenge the world view that there prevails. Linguistic communities may encompass politically united peoples or include a plurality of nations that may or may not have fundamental self-understandings in common. In all these cases, the subject matter of literature and the corresponding forms that give it fit artistic expression will be particularized. Until a global culture arises that embraces universal institutions of self-determination, literature will appear as bodies of national or linguistically defined literary tradition, distinguished by the different local culture that temporarily

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pervades its creations.1 These particular differences have a philosophically determinate character only insofar as the distinctions of literary communities map onto the fundamental world views with which rational animals can construe their ultimate condition. Whether this happens is a contingent matter of history. Consequently, the realization of literature in the different fundamental artforms is not equivalent to a differentiation of “national” or linguistically distinct literatures. Hegel acknowledges this, noting that “the same variety of differences is prominent also in the case of the historical periods in which poetry is composed”,2 since the world view and corresponding conventions of a nation or supra-­ national linguistic group can develop historically, engendering transformations in literary treatment. Accordingly, to conceive philosophically the particularization of literature, we must address not a division by national or linguistic identity, but a division in terms of the fundamental modes of artistic construal, the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic styles.

Literature in the Symbolic Style The Symbolic artform grapples with the problem of finding the appropriate imaginative configuration for a world view that invests ultimate significance in what cannot be embodied in finite rational agency but resides in natural powers or an absolute that transcends any human endeavor. Lyric, epic, and dramatic literature can all be mobilized to give expression to this fundamental self-understanding, and the way in which each of  Consequently, Hegel can observe that literature “cannot dispense with the specific national character from which it proceeds; its subject-matter and mode of portrayal are made what they are by the ideas and ways of looking at things which are those of that character. This is why poetry has such a wealth of particularization and originality. Eastern, Italian, Spanish, English, Roman, Greek, German poetry, all are different throughout in spirit, feeling, outlook, expression, etc.” Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 977. On the other hand, Hegel suggests that the “Eastern mind is on the whole more poetic than the Western, Greece excluded” because “in the East the chief thing is always the One, undivided, fixed, substantive”, whereas in the “West, on the other hand, especially in recent times, starts from endless dispersal and particularization of the infinite.” See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 978. We shall see how, in respect to the different artforms, literature is able to develop both in the East and West. 2  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 977. 1

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these genres joins its specific shape to such meaning is what now must be considered.

Lyric Literature in the Symbolic Style Although Hegel at times suggests that lyric literature has an affinity with the modern world view that honors subjective freedom, he otherwise recognizes that the first-person voice of lyric can be employed to express every artform.3 Subjectivity cannot be expunged from the reality of any civilization and the first person voice of lyric can present the thoughts and feelings of the individual with regard to any world view, no matter how it evaluates the significance of subjective freedom. When a civilization invests ultimate significance in natural, non-­ human entities or powers, it must transfigure them so that their finite given character does not limit the supreme importance they are alleged to have for humanity. The lyric author faces the challenge of expressing personal notions and feelings giving due reverence for such transfigured natural powers. This requires employing all the verbal resources to characterize this devotion to powers that transcend the ordinary natural phenomena with which they are associated. Since a prosaic description of what is given by nature cannot suffice, the lyric voice must make free use of metaphor and simile to convey its embrace of something to which worldly phenomena can only allude. Nature as it exists, together with the prosaic life of humanity, can only symbolize an ultimate reality to which the lyric voice gives its subjective adoration. Hegel acknowledges this specific challenge of lyric literature in the Symbolic style. He finds it manifest in “Eastern poetry especially”, whose “magnificence and richness in images and similes” is necessitated by Symbolic art’s “wide search for kinships” to signify what escapes any given configuration.4 When the Symbolic world view embraces the sublimity of an absolute whose transcendence of everything finite reduces the phenomenal world to illusion, the lyric voice is led, Hegel observes, “to use  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1123.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1004.

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the whole vast variety of brilliant and magnificent superlatives to adorn the One being who alone is there for the mind to praise.”5 The lyric voice can equally reflect upon the vanity of its own desires, the insignificance of our finitude, and the challenge of overcoming our illusory strivings through detachment and austerity. Since the lyric author inhabits a civilization that may already enjoy epics in the Symbolic mode, the lyric voice can express its transient reflections and feelings about the imagined exploits that have become national legend. In every circumstance, what comes to the fore is the power of a substance that remains alien to the individual and calls for annulling the independence of the finite self in face of what it venerates. The substance of the Symbolic world view does so because it remains too sublimely abstract to possess a content in which “something free and individual may emerge.”6 Accordingly, as Hegel observes, what the lyric voice reveals “is not the poet in his inner life and its reversion from externality but only his self-­ cancellation in face of external objects and situations.”7 This gives the Symbolic lyric a “more objective tone”8 than its Romantic style counterpart, even though it remains a disclosure of what the lyric voice feels and thinks. Lyric works in the Symbolic style may anonymously proliferate in the form of “folk-poetry” and “folk songs”, but their presence can no more exhaust the need for new lyric creation than does the presence of epic and dramatic works grappling with the same fundamental values. Even though the Symbolic world view diminishes the independent stature of personal subjectivity, it cannot annul the unique artistic achievements of the lyric authors who voice their feelings and thoughts on the most sublime objects for that self-understanding. They can distinguish themselves and their lyric artistry in just as singular creations as those of Classical and Romantic writers.

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1004.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1149. 7  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1148. 8  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1148. 5 6

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Although Hegel associates rhythmical versification with Classical poetry and rhyme with Romantic style versification,9 there is nothing about the Symbolic world view that prevents its literary expression in rhythmic verse with or without rhyme, with free use of alliteration and assonance, or in imaginatively un-prosaic prose. Whatever literary resources are employed must be tailored to capture the spirit of a humanity that seeks true being in what eludes finite agency and natural phenomena.

Epic Literature in the Symbolic Style To give literary shape to the Symbolic world view, epic narrative faces the challenge of depicting the saga of individuals who struggle to achieve something of fundamental significance in a world in which human striving is subordinate to powers that transcend our finite subjectivity. These powers oppose humanity with fabulously transfigured natural forces or an abstract sublime absolute for which phenomenal reality is a playground in which individuals must overcome their prosaic attachments to achieve anything of genuine substance. Like any epic narrative, the Symbolic epic involves agents embroiled in events against a concrete backdrop in which a whole world reveals itself through manifold circumstances that lead both sequentially and in parallel from one episode to another, beginning and ending with some struggle whose emergence and resolution provides the overarching unity of the saga. Because the Symbolic world view does not celebrate individual autonomy, its epic cannot take the biographical form of a Romantic epic in the mold of the modern novel. Because the Symbolic world view also cannot ascribe to any human society an independent substantial being, the Symbolic epic cannot be a national epos depicting how a people defends itself against a foreign enemy, affirming the ethical substance of human community as the heart of the matter. Instead, the Symbolic epic will involve figures who combine both human and transcendent divine powers in a fantastical conflict in which the human participants must grapple with  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1023, 1027.

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overcoming their personal desires for love and domination by submitting to norms that lead them beyond attachment to their illusory aims. The ancient Sanskrit sagas, Valmiki’s Ramayana and Vyasa’s Mahabharata, bring the Symbolic epic to monumental realizations exceeding all others in sheer length, scope, and imaginative riches. Both are composed in verse couplets or shloka, with fulsome use of metaphor and simile to convey the fantastical world that breaches the limits of prosaic phenomena. The incomparably mammoth Mahabharata comes closest to an epos by depicting the power struggle between competing royal houses, the Kaurava and Pandava family branches. The Ramayana begins with a similar conflict over royal succession, where one of King Dasharatha’s wives demands that his designated successor, Rama, be banished to the forest so that her son, Bharata, can take his place as ruler in waiting. This conflict quickly recedes into the background as the demon king Ravana kidnaps Rama’s wife Sita, takes her to his realm in Lanka, and sets off a fabled struggle where Rama enlists an army of apes led by Hanuman and the ape king Sugriva to help retrieve Sita and destroy Ravana and his demon kingdom. Throughout the saga, Rama, Sita, and other lesser figures of full or part human and animal ancestry pursue the call of dharma, the code of ethics that provides a pathway to release from finite attachment. Each individual character has a dharma attached to a specific station in life, which fits into the cosmic fabric that ensures that the essential functions will be performed enabling the transient strivings of humanity to be transfigured into an eventual unification with what is absolute. There can be no genuine political philosophy under such a world view, for the design of human institutions is governed not by our joint enactment, but by the eternal norms of dharma and the hierarchy of functions it ratifies. On this basis, Kautilya’s Arthashastra,10 the great ancient Sanskrit manual on statecraft, cannot be an ethical inquiry into what the body political should be. It is rather a compendium of advice for how rulers can prudently maintain the prosperity of their kingdoms in accordance with eternal dharma. Unsurprisingly, throughout the Ramayana there is never any question of whether the duty of fulfilling dharma will be observed. None of the principal figures battle demons  Kautilya, The Arthashastra, trans. by L. N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1992).

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within themselves or undergo any personal development by which they come to be something they are not from the outset. Similarly, in the famous Bhagavad Gita interlude of the Mahabharata, where Krishna discusses with Arjuna the importance of observing dharma even if it means going to war with another branch of one’s own family, there is little doubt that cosmic duty will prevail over personal sentiment. The other side of the submission of human initiative to dharmic obedience is the divine endowment of characters with fantastical tools and abilities that far outstrip the potencies of ordinary human life. Rama, like his assisting brother Lakshmana, and his ape allies and demon opponents, wields fabulous powers far beyond human capability, and hardly seems ever in genuine peril. Rama does suffer loss at the banishment by his father, who then succumbs from sorrow at their separation, and Rama laments at length the disappearance of Sita. Yet, once Sita is located, her rescue is just as certain as Rama’s victory over Ravana. The epic saga is not the story of a nation’s struggle for existence through the independent effort of distinctly human endeavor, but rather a tale of individuals playing their proper role in a world dominated by transcendent power, for which everything given by nature is fantastically superseded. Hegel praises the Ramayana and the Mahabharata for capturing the “entire outlook of the Indians in its whole splendor and magnificence” with both “its overwhelming delightfulness and also the individual fine traits of the feeling and heart”11 of the spiritual characters it depicts. Hegel acknowledges how in the recounted sagas “the action of human individuals either appears as an incarnation of the gods, or disappears as merely something accessory or is described as an ascetic elevation into the life and power of the gods”.12 As the depiction of Rama illustrates, here the “saga-like human deeds are expanded into the actions of incarnate gods, whose action hovers vaguely between divine and human nature, and individual figures and deeds are no longer limited but enlarged and expanded immeasurably.”13 All this fits the Symbolic world view and Hegel only confirms the congruence of shape and meaning by admitting  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1095.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1072. 13  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1095. 11 12

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that we, who share a modern Western outlook prizing moral autonomy and ethical institutions of freedom, can neither sympathize with nor feel at home in the dharmic realm of these vast creations. Indeed, if normativity resides in self-determination, the Symbolic outlook does lack real truth. Although Hegel questions whether the “whole character of Indian life” as portrayed in the Ramayana is so particular that it presents an insurmountable barrier to “what is really and truly human”,14 he himself has shown how it presents a fundamental option in the construal of meaning and value and acknowledges its creation of colossal literary epics that imagine a fictional world in consonance with its defining self-­ understanding. We can acknowledge its difference without ignoring its beauty and artistic achievement. And because the travails of Rama and Sita are the tribulations of individuals who seek truth and right, their epic saga cannot fail to retain an appeal today and tomorrow.

Dramatic Literature in the Symbolic Style The self-understandings of Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic artforms seem to be just as expressible in the dialogue narrative of dramatic literature as in the first-person voice of lyric literature and the third-person narration of epic literature. No matter how ultimate values are viewed, the spoken interaction of dramatic characters should be able to convey the challenges that individuals face in trying to act towards one another in a meaningful way. Hegel acknowledges the historical existence of drama in all three styles, but he undercuts that acknowledgment by addressing Symbolic style drama only in passing. He instead devotes his analysis of the concrete evolution of dramatic style solely to Classical and Romantic drama, explicitly excluding “oriental beginnings”.15 Hegel does not deny that Eastern poetry has contributed to epic and lyric literature and he does admit that the beginnings of drama are to be found “only in China and India”.16 Judging by the few samples with which he is acquainted, Hegel finds that these seminal works do give “life  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1058.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1208. 16  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1206. 14 15

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to events and feelings in specific situations presented successively on the stage”,17 but something is lacking and this lack is not a matter of the contingent availability of deficient representatives of Eastern drama. Rather, Hegel asserts, the “whole Eastern outlook inhibits ab initio an adequate development of dramatic art”.18 What could it be about the Symbolic world view espoused by ancient Chinese and Indian civilization that would preclude dramatic excellence but not impede epic or lyric literary achievement? Hegel locates the crux of the matter in the requirements of truly tragic and truly comedic action, which supply drama with its two fundamental genres, whose integration makes possible the third genre of tragicomedy. Genuine tragedy, Hegel insists, rests upon the engagement of independent individual freedom, at least as exhibited in the spoken interaction of dramatic characters who freely accept responsibility for their own deeds and their consequences.19 Without that free advance of passions with a firm commitment to take ownership of their ramifications, any subsequent misfortune will not have tragic significance. Similarly, for dramatic movement to involve comedy, individuals must possess the self-assured confidence to pursue subjective quests that can be ridiculous.20 Only by being endowed with that resilient independence can comedic figures emerge from the hapless intrigue of their deluded aspirations without coming to harm. Hegel maintains that the Symbolic worldview of the East lacks these prerequisites by subordinating individuals to a sublime absolute.21 Individual freedom and independence is not needed for the first-person voice of lyric poetry to express devotion to transcendent powers, fabulously describe how these push beyond all given natural and human forms, and express feelings for the austerities by which an individual overcomes personal desires. Nor is such freedom and responsibility necessary to imagine the fantastical adventures of epic heroes within a cosmic order that affords them powers that surmount any human  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1206.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1205. 19  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1205. 20  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1205. 21  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1205. 17 18

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capabilities. But is such independent resolve inadmissible to the dramatic territory of the Symbolic style of Eastern literature? Hegel substantiates his rationale for ignoring Symbolic style drama in briefly discussing one celebrated classic of ancient Sanskrit theater, Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā. Although Hegel recognizes the existence of Sanskrit plays and the long tradition of Sanskrit theater, he calls into question their genuine dramatic achievement by what this play allegedly makes manifest. Hegel maintains that Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā demonstrates how the world view underlying ancient Sanskrit drama is simply incompatible with true tragedy and comedy. Sanskrit drama may produce plays in form, with all the vivid characterization and feeling of Kālidāsa’s work, but these creations lack the bonafide dramatic movement that can contain the tragic or comedic or tragi-comedic dynamics that enables drama to fulfill its aesthetic ambition. Hegel does not deny that ancient Indian civilization contends with the phenomenon of personal independence as must any community of rational agents. Hegel rather maintains that the culturally constitutive beliefs of its world view devalue that phenomenon in accord with Hindu strictures about divinity and its relation to humanity. The divine is here understood to be an ultimately indeterminate absolute that cannot be adequately embodied in anything finite, even though the phenomenal finite world is nothing but an illusory expression of the divine, with no independent substance. Humanity is understood to be bound by birth to different groupings or castes, with duties of their own (dharma) regulating all aspects of life. The fulfillment of these duties has positive value only as a means to achieve ultimate release from finite existence through self-less unification with the indeterminate absolute. Despite caste divisions, all individuals can aspire to obtain their ultimate essence in the divine. This is because caste divisions are wedded to a belief in reincarnation and a hierarchy of dharma, where individuals advance one step closer to ultimate release from the cycle of rebirth by fulfilling their caste duties. Given the indeterminate nature of the divine and its manifestation in the illusory being of phenomenal existence, the path to ultimate release from finite selfhood deprives individuals of any affirmative independence and instead mandates that they achieve truth only in pursuing the elimination of their own subjectivity. This self-understanding applies to all

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spheres of the human condition. No matter what station in life one has, one should follow the Bhagavad Gītā’s famous injunction to act without heed of consequences, not to fulfill a Kantian categorical imperative of self-legislating autonomy, but to uphold the dharma of caste norms in face of competing desires, some aiming at material gain (artha), others at pleasure (kāma). Only then does one succeed in overcoming the passions of self-imposed aims and move closer to self-annulling moksa. These beliefs give religious imagery a fertile field for artistic imagination, since the very indeterminacy of the divine requires that its infusion of mundane phenomena be manifest through fantastical expansions of natural shapes to indicate an absolute that transcends any finite embodiment. Similarly, all prosaic activities, as given in history, are subject to similar imaginative distortion. Since human affairs here represent epiphenomenal illusion without independent significance, any depiction of events as purely finite realities conceals their genuine character. Consequently, as much as the Mahabharata and Ramayana may reflect historical conflicts of ancient kingdoms, the Hindu self-understanding has little use for chronicling their prosaic history. Instead, these epics transform the historical phenomena into a fantastical saga whose heroes continually overstep the limits of human capability. In so doing, the Mahabharata and Ramayana share features with the Homeric epos that distinguish both from the novel’s narration of a problematic individual’s quest for meaning in a world of prosaic distance fraught with contingency. Like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the ancient Sanskrit epics depict leaders of nations whose exploits unveil the full life of their communities, while combining divine with human action. The heroes, the divinities, and actions are, however, very different. In the Homeric epos, divinities operate as all too human figures, expressing very finite concerns, while the human heroes concentrate on sustaining their ethical community, either by fighting with honor against foreign enemies or in rescuing their kingdom from the venal suitors of a long-suffering queen left behind. By contrast, in the Mahabharata and Ramayana divine incarnations dominate the action as fantastical personages whose stupendous feats exceed all shape and measure of natural and human endowment. Instead of standing on their own, the human figures are immersed in the fantastical exploits of divine incarnations, while submitting to the

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demands of dharma, austerities, and selfless union with the absolute on which all meaning ultimately rests. As Hegel puts it, in the ancient Indian epic, human endeavor either directly materializes the gods, serves as a subsidiary accessory of divine deeds, or withdraws into ascetic oneness with divine power.22 These contrasts have their counterparts in the stylistics of lyric literature, as Hegel himself shows. Whereas the Classical lyric expresses the author’s personal thoughts and feelings about public freedom and the quest to maintain it under a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods, the ancient India lyric gives personal voice to the poet’s own veneration for a transcendent power, the struggles to fulfill dharma, and the ultimate quest to achieve selfless union with the absolute. Ancient oriental lyric poetry will therefore, Hegel notes, strike a more objective tone than the modern romantic lyric, turning away from what is personal and singular in the author’s heart and instead give inner testimony to a self-effacement of desire and external attachments, in search of a liberating unification with the absolute.23 Since that absolute transcends any finite phenomena, lyric must strive to express devotion to it in, as Hegel puts it, a hymn-like exaltation abundantly and freely using metaphors and similes to allude to a divinity too sublime to have any definite form.24 If we are to judge adequately Hegel’s denial of ancient Indian civilization’s capacity to create genuine dramatic literature, we must ask how, as Hegel himself acknowledges, epic and lyric literature can embody the distinctive world view of that same tradition, but dramatic literature cannot. Hegel presents his answer in an analysis of Kālidāsa’s play, Śakuntalā, which hinges upon Hegel’s unfavorable estimation of it in comparison to the literary accomplishment of ancient Indian lyric. We moderns, Hegel maintains, do not experience any repugnant strangeness in ancient Indian lyric literature, whose tenderness, grace, and charm cannot fail to captivate us. With Kālidāsa’s drama we encounter something very different.

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1072.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1149. 24  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1149. 22 23

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Although we can appreciate its “wonderfully attractive composition”,25 the dramatic movement cannot command our interest. The problem lies in the inconsequential character of the play’s central collision. As Hegel accurately reports, the conflict on which the drama hangs arises from the fortuitous occurrence of Śakuntalā passing by the great sage, Durvāsas, without noticing his presence and failing to make the expected gesture of respect. The enraged Durvāsas puts a curse upon Śakuntalā that makes king Dushyanta entirely forget that in the preceding episode the king had met, fallen in love with, and arranged to marry Śakuntalā. Thanks to the curse, the king is shamelessly unable to recognize the young beauty who comes to his palace expecting to be his bride. Thanks to an equally fortuitous chance event, a fisherman discovers the ring that Śakuntalā had received from the king but subsequently lost. Then, just as unexpectedly, the fisherman is arrested for harboring the royal ring. As soon as the recovered ring is given back to the king, the curse is broken and Kālidāsa’s play comes to its happy conclusion, where reconciled bride and regent consummate their marriage. As charming as this denouement may be, the whole dramatic movement that terminates in it has no genuine impact upon us because, Hegel insists, the occasion precipitating the whole conflict, the curse of the sage, must strike us as completely absurd.26 Does this “absurdity” really undermine the play’s dramatic achievement and, more importantly, demonstrate the fundamental inability of ancient Sanskrit drama to remain true to its world view and create genuine drama, be it tragic, comedic, or tragicomedic? The “absurd” occasion would not be dramatically destructive if it were a chance event setting in motion a conflict of powers with sufficient substance to warrant the universal, unqualified attention necessary for aesthetic worth. As Hegel well knows, innumerable Classical and modern tragedies, comedies, and tragicomedies proceed upon contrived coincidences that vindicate themselves by producing oppositions of passions sufficiently significant to move any audience. In Śakuntalā, however, nothing much stands in the way of the happy conclusion except for more completely superfluous accidents. The two lovers are immediately enraptured by one another. A 25 26

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1176.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1176.

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looming caste incompatibility might seem to put their marriage in jeopardy since Śakuntalā has been raised by a Brahmin ascetic. She turns out, however, to be an adoptee with the right pedigree to marry the king. No problem is presented even by the circumstance that the king already has another wife, for no one objects to his polygamy. On all sides, the only obstacle is the curse of the sage, which is no more than a completely fortuitous personal irritation. Kālidāsa may draw the characters and intrigues in a lively, entertaining, and poetic way, but from beginning to end, the drama is too much ado about nothing to evoke fear and pity, let alone laughter at characters who aim at something substantial but make themselves ridiculous. To object that the “absurdity” of the collision is a liability merely for a modern audience is not sufficient to deprive a work like Śakuntalā of aesthetic value. Admittedly, if a drama can appeal only to a particular culture and leaves all others unmoved, it lacks true artistic merit. The world views that distinguish the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic styles are incompatible, but any artistic creation that depicts normative conflicts inherent in a civilization cannot fail to resonate with any audience once it is made apparent that what is at stake are fundamental values and their essential implications. Accordingly, if we moderns judge a work to be artistically deficient, it must be aesthetically dissatisfactory for members of the culture to which that work originally belongs, as well as for any other possible audience. A play is essentially lacking if its dramatic movement hinges on matters devoid of real significance for its own protagonists and the world view that they embody. The absurdity of the collision in Śakuntalā should therefore be problematic for Kālidāsa as well as his contemporaries. For the dramatic deficiency of Śakuntalā to demonstrate a limitation applying to ancient Sanskrit drama in general, Hegel must be able to show that the self-­ understanding of its Hindu civilization cannot take seriously any true dramatic collision. Hegel does not examine any other Sanskrit plays to substantiate such a general claim, but we have seen him make analogous judgments concerning the nature of the conflicts portrayed in the ancient Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. He frames his critique once more in respect to what a modern world view can take seriously. Because the conflicts and resolutions occupying these epics are

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dominated by incarnate gods whose actions are fantastically magnified beyond any human measure, they are too incommensurate with the genuine problems of freedom and ethical life to grip a modern readership.27 When the human characters do not operate as accessories of these divine exploits, they submit to the dharma of caste duty or engage in austerities aiming at ultimate withdrawal from all striving. In both cases, the normative value of human conduct is undermined.28 Hegel’s response to this problem is doubly ambiguous. On the one hand, he treats it as an obstacle to aesthetic appreciation of the ancient Indian epics by a modern audience, when it should equally damage the significance of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata for the civilization of their authors, Valmiki and Vyasa. On the other hand, Hegel does not rescind his acknowledgment that ancient Indian writers have succeeded in producing genuine epic, as well as lyric literature embodying the Symbolic style. What Hegel does admit is something that bears crucially upon both the stature of ancient Indian epic and drama. He acknowledges that collisions of fundamental significance remain possible within the ancient Indian world view. There can be conflicts between dharma, caste duty, and very human ends rooted in love or the desire for wealth and power. As Hegel explicitly notes in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, the “cosmic” divisions of caste provide a world condition pregnant with possible conflicts between the station that individuals have by birth and the passions and strivings that arise from their personal subjectivity.29 Śakuntalā may not develop at any length the tensions such conflicts can engender, but it does depict how love may transgress caste divisions and lead smitten individuals to defy their dharmic group obligations. Certainly, ancient Indian dramatists confront the opportunity to consider other conflicts that might ensue between personal aspirations for wealth, power, artistic achievement, or education and the confining limits of dharma and ascetic withdrawal from worldly attachments. Moreover, conflict may not just pit personal ambition against dharma. Entire caste groups can fall into  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1095.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1072. 29  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 209. 27 28

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conflict over the boundaries of their complementary duties, just as intra-­ caste disputes can erupt when caste members compete over leadership roles, marriage prospects, lovers, or other goods within their sphere. These oppositions may lack the national scope of epic battles between kingdoms and pretenders for rule, but why should they not supply ample ground for conflict and resolution suitable for dramatic movements of tragedy, comedy, or tragicomedy? To answer this question, we must address what significance these possible collisions have for the ancient Indian world view, rather than how they would be judged and dramatized by a civilizational perspective that rejects traditional Hindu norms and accords independent value to romantic love, the autonomous exercise of social and political rights, and other modern emblems of emancipation. The latter perspective can and has generated drama of its own that confronts the struggles over values afflicting communities that are undergoing external modernization through colonialism, imperialism, post-colonialism, and revolution. In that situation, literature contends with the drama arising within an embattled traditional society, where two discordant values systems, one “pre-modern”, the other “modern”, are vying for supremacy. What is relevant here, however, is how possible collisions figure within the yet unshaken value system of the world of ancient Sanskrit theater. Challenges to caste duties and ascetic austerities offer little dramatic opportunity from an ancient Indian perspective. This is not because such challenges are unimaginable, and indeed, it is not uncommon in Sanskrit plays “for circumstances to draw the hero away from strict adherence to his orthodox role as embodiment of duty and deep into the realm of emotions”,30 where kāma clashes with dharma. The problem is that such challenges ultimately command so little importance. As Hegel has duly emphasized, tragic conflicts have their constitutive power only insofar as both opposing sides have a recognized value. If not, the collision is a perfunctory clash of right and wrong of no particular interest. Because worldly attachments that collide with caste and ascetic obligations have no legitimacy for the ancient Indian world view, they cannot provide the occasion for genuine tragedy.  Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 37.

30

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Could, however, the very insignificance of such attachments foster comic, if not tragicomic possibilities for Sanskrit dramatists? To do so, the dramatization of how characters pursuing such attachments come to grief must involve some positive aspect that can allow us to laugh with them, rather than to castigate their downfall with nasty derision. To be ridiculous in a comic manner, characters must aim at something of substantial value, even if in a delusional way, and exhibit a subjective resiliency that allows them to survive their failed intrigue and meet life’s challenges anew with an unbent spirit. Nothing of the sort is possible here because, on the terms of the ancient Hindu self-understanding, the illicit worldly aims of the characters have no more value than the initiative they wield in their pursuit. Once more, the Sanskrit dramatist is left with the unproductive, one-sided spectacle of a peremptory triumph of traditional norms over an empty failure of illusory strivings. Despite the unsuitability of these prospects, there remains one avenue for dramatization: a conflict whose opposing parties possess sufficiently comparable substance to warrant staging. Such is the case when characters collide over commonly valued aims, such as ruling authority or a marriage candidate, without violating dharma. Oppositions of this kind are the motors of collision in the celebrated Sanskrit dramas, Viśākhadatta’s Rākshasa’s Ring and Bhavabhūti’s Mālatī and Mādhava, of which Hegel never makes any mention. Supplementing Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā, these plays more fully illustrate what ancient Sanskrit drama can and has achieved. Viśākhadatta’s Rākshasa’s Ring paradigmatically demonstrates how Sanskrit theater can enlist political rivalries to dramatic effect. It does with special authority because it directly dramatizes the masterful plottings of Kautilya. In Rākshasa’s Ring the character Kautilya puts into imagined practice the very advice for maintaining political power that the historical Kautilya classically lays down in his Arthaśāstra, ancient India’s paramount political treatise. Significantly, Rākshasa’s Ring concerns a conflict not of opposing visions of how government should be organized, but of political rivals vying for power. Within the cosmically determined order of caste division and dharmic duty, there can be no place for a ruler to wield the sovereign power to determine the design of conduct and institutions. Rulers are instead obliged to carry out their own caste duties

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to maintain the entire caste order, which the divine nature of existence eternally mandates. Human endeavor is simply unable to alter that order. Consequently, there is and can be no place for a normative political philosophy in the world view of ancient India. Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra never inquires into what ends the body politic should bring into being, but instead limits its political counsel to advising rulers on how to best hold onto power and uphold the eternal fabric of caste community. For the ancient Indian world view, political thinking can do no other than supply pragmatic recommendations on how to keep power and efficiently wield it to uphold the natural framework of caste. Anything else lies beyond the power of human agency. The politics of the ancient Indian world thereby becomes a purely Machiavellian competition, where the shrewdest councilor prevails.31 There may be different varieties of rule, such as monarchic, monarchic and ministerial, and ministerial rule, as Rākshasa’s Ring repeatedly mentions, but they all fall under the same caste order. Dynastic rulers may give greater or lesser authority to their ministers, but governance invariably concerns the same perennial ends. Under such circumstances, where the design of government and political ideals lie beyond human initiative, conflict between political opponents can only have dramatic weight due to the imposing character of the competing adversaries. Viśākhadatta’s Rākshasa’s Ring generates dramatic power in just this way by pitting Kautilya himself as the unrelenting spinner of the political web that captures and consumes all other characters. No matter how faithful and upstanding they try to be, each without exception either capitulates to Kautilya’s schemes or goes to ruin. Viśākhadatta brings to fervent life the supreme cunning and forcefulness of Kautilya by opposing him not to cringing subalterns but to the eminently noble figure of Rākshasa. Although Kautilya eventually overcomes the defiance of Rākshasa, Rākshasa still keeps his dignity when he finally submits, accepting appointment as chief Minister to King Chandra Gupta. The stark collision of memorable personalities, of the relentless Kautilya and the resolutely resistant Rākshasa, comes close to bringing Sanskrit  B. N. Ray provides an insightful discussion of how Kautilya’s political pragmatism rests on a very different basis from that of Machiavelli. See B. N. Ray’s Tradition and Innovation in Indian Political Thought (Delhi: Ajanta Gooks International, 1998), pp. 104–105. 31

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drama to the threshold of Shakespearean tragedy.32 Classical Greek tragedy is a completely different matter, where antagonists, such as ­ Antigone and Creon, come to grief as representatives of conflicting ethical powers. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, individuals clash over self-imposed aims, reflecting the modern embrace of personal freedom that is divorced from any communal substance. What brings Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear to their tragic ends are not collisions of equally valid ethical spheres, but personal resolves that give rise to implacable conflicts. This seems similar to the dramatic conflict of Kautilya and Rākshasa, in which the collision of personalities also predominates, but there is a fundamental difference. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Lear, and every other tragic hero of Shakespeare are riven by internal conflicts and the advance of their drama is just as much a development of inward torments as of external opposition. No inner demons torture Rākshasa, let alone Kautilya. Rākshasa may suffer under the inexorable morass of his scheming adversary, but his conflict is not with himself, but with the net entrapping him. As for Kautilya, he remains steadfastly determined throughout the drama, never disturbed by any doubts or hesitations. If instead inner turmoil played any significant role in the dramatic movement, personal passions would have to be accorded sufficient importance to deserve center stage. In that case, the development of individual character would become central to the dramatic movement. Yet, in Rākshasa’s Ring, as well as the other classic Sanskrit plays, character is constant.33 Inner strife and personal transformation cannot be coherently displayed when the prevailing world view considers the attachments of the self to be illusory phenomena and regards the individual to be bound to the fruits of dharma. That determines the course of life, which may be  Barbara Stoler Miller maintains that “in the microcosm of Indian theater, the resolution of psychological, social, and religious disharmonies is enacted by characters who represent generic types. They are not unique individuals with personal destinies, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Lear. Indian characters live within stylized social contexts that reflect the hierarchical nature of traditional Indian society” (Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 26). Kautilya and Rākshasa may lack the inner strife with which Hamlet and Lear struggle, but Viśākhadatta succeeds in giving each a very vivid individuality. 33  As Edwin Gerow observes, “The idea that character is constant is reinforced by many facets of Indian social and religious custom, especially the notion of karma, with its attendant corollaries that every action bears inescapable fruit and that this life is not the only theater in which the drama of karma is played out.” See Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 47. 32

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temporarily diverted by transient illusions, but which ultimately plays itself out through actions to which each character is fundamentally ­suited.34 Deprived of any conflicts of ethical domains or Shakespearean ordeals of a divided self, the dramas of Hindu political rivalry are left with no other center of interest than the appeal of the personalities of the opposing protagonists. At best, their depiction can entertain and dazzle with the eloquence of their rhetoric and the cleverness of their intrigue. Bhavabhūti’s Mālatī and Mādhava illustrates how comparable limitations apply to ancient Sanskrit theater’s ability to dramatize rivalries over love and marriage. With the colliding parties both being legitimate with respect to caste identity and dharmic observance, nothing of universal substance is at stake in their conflict. Dramatic significance has nowhere to lie but in the personalities of the characters, the charm of the plot, and the decorative appeal of its dialogue. If, however, mundane attachments lack intrinsic value, the personality and passions of the protagonists have no more essential interest than the resolution of the barriers to the fulfillment of their love. Bhavabhūti does everything he can to clothe his drama of love interrupted with theatrical appeal. Not just one, but three sets of romantic infatuations come to an interwoven consummation by way of nothing less than a battle with a wild tiger, the interruption of a human sacrifice, the King’s suspension of a promised marriage, and the rescue by an ascetic with magic powers of the principal heroine from the clutches of a Karālā worshipper. As in the love story of Śakuntalā, none of the enamored pairs in Mālatī and Mādhava have troubled infatuations. Mālatī and Mādhava, Mādhava’s friend Makaranda and Mālatī’s friend Madayantikā, and Mādhava’s servant Kalahamsaka and the servant girl Mandārikā are all fervently enraptured with one another. The only obstacles that obstruct their successful pairings are external circumstances. In face of the seeming insurmountability of these hindrances, the distressed lovers literally pine  Edwin Gerow writes, “The idea that a certain kind of hero is essential to the play reflects the Indian view that character and action are not adventitiously related. In an important sense, nothing ‘happens’ to the hero, for he is suited to the action that constitutes the play… the ‘best’ hero is by nature possessed of an action that entirely suits him. It would be jarring for the Indian audience to find that it did not, or that something ‘happened’ to him to deny him the fruits of that action, or that he was prey to forces beyond his ken, as in many kinds of modern antihero drama and in Greek tragedy.” See Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, p. 46. 34

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away, while their allies prepare to sacrifice themselves to escape their pain. Again, as in Śakuntalā, the barriers to amorous fulfillment are completely arbitrary – Mālatī’s seizure for sacrifice by two Karālā devotees is just as fortuitous as the King’s decision to betroth Mālatī to his minister Nandana. When Mādhava and Makaranda act to rescue their loves from peril, these deeds not only proceed upon extraneous circumstances rather than firm resolves, but they fail to bring about any resolution. Instead, the dramatic denouement hinges upon the scheming of the mendicant nun Kāmandakī, who enables Mādhava to meet Mālatī, and the unexpected rescue of Mālatī by Kāmandakī’s protégé, Suadāmanī, who facilitates the happy ending as if out of nowhere. These machinations may drain Mālatī and Mādhava of convincing dramatic necessity, provided one considers that to be driven by the action of the protagonist. They do express the ancient Indian self-understanding for which human striving is insufficient to create and resolve meaningful conflicts and that miraculous interventions hold sway over human destiny. To be true to this world view, Bhavabhūti cannot make the inner resolves of his characters the determining factors of his play’s dramatic collision and resolution. To do so would confer fundamental worth to the self-directed agency of independent personalities and render their autonomous strivings worthy of aesthetic configuration. The orthodox Hindu doctrines of dharma and release from worldly attachments cannot consistently accommodate that option. For human conflicts over love to be appropriately dramatized, the phenomenal strivings of mundane attachment must be subordinated to the serendipities that Bhavabhūti so vividly lavishes upon his play. What the three plays of Kalidasa, Viśākhadatta, and Bhavabhūti each confirm is that Sanskrit drama can create dramatic configurations appropriate to the ancient Indian world view. They thereby vindicate both the genuine aesthetic achievement of ancient Indian drama as well as the ability of the Symbolic artform more generally to make dramatic literature its own. This does not, however, undermine Hegel’s more specific challenge to ancient Indian drama – not that it is an impostor of dramatic literature, but that the traditional Hindu world view is fundamentally unable to confer real substance to the worldly strivings that propel

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tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy along their inexorable dramatic movements in Classical or Romantic style. Yet can Sanksrit drama still be granted its own versions of tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy, albeit distinctly different from those of the Classical or Romantic artforms? Even if the ancient India world view will not allow conflicts over political power and love to hinge upon the independent resolve of competing characters, these characters still act and find their aims frustrated or fulfilled thanks to all the extraneous machinations to which they are prey. These conflicts can lead to the destruction or disempowerment or impoverishment of protagonists, to the unmasking of their ludicrous pursuits of their aims, or to a combination of serious misfortune and laughable antics. Viśākhadatta’s Rākshasa’s Ring can then qualify as a distinctly ancient Indian tragedy, whose collision involves neither the clash of different ethical spheres or internal division of its tragic figures. So, too, Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā and Bhavabhūti’s Mālatī and Mādhava can claim the status of Symbolic style tragicomedies, where comic intrigues and looming misfortune come to a resolution, albeit thanks to powers that transcend mundane human deeds. The tragic and comic dimensions are certainly different from those of ancient Athens and Elizabethan England, but they retain the identity of dramatic genres in which collisions bring characters to the edge of ruin, to liberation of their inconsequential illusions, or to a mixture of both.

Literature in the Classical Style Lyric Literature in the Classical Style The lyric voice can express its mood and thoughts in relation to the Classical ideal without the profusion of metaphor and simile that Symbolic lyric employs to allude to an absolute transcending the phenomenal world of nature and human community. Instead, the Classical lyric author faces the challenge of putting into first person speech personal feelings and reflections upon the public appearance of ethical affairs and the human guise of an anthropomorphic pantheon. Since here

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essence and appearance stand at one, the Classical lyric voice can reflect upon worldly events and divine fable without need of fabulous metaphorical allusion. What truly matters appears in outward sensuous form to the Classical vision, leaving lyric imagination in direct possession of the literal imagery with which to express its soul. As Hegel observes, when the ancient Greeks sang praise of their gods, they could express their religious feeling by describing the concrete subject matter of mythical situations and actions instead of elevating their words to metaphorical paeans of lyrical sublimity.35 Similarly, when they waxed lyrical over the deeds of their heroes, their odes could express an inner life enraptured by what appears on the fields of debate, battle, and athletic competition. Whereas the Symbolic lyric celebrates an essence to which no adequate shape can be given, the Classical lyric pays its homage to what has a plastic, outward reality in public life and in the perfectly imaginable escapades of the gods. Classical lyric authors neither submit their subjectivity to something alien and opposed, nor transcend their own personality in veneration of a sublime substance. Instead, Classical lyric authors know the ideal to be present in the universal bonds of the household and polis they inhabit, which forfeits none of its dignity in relation to the anthropomorphic affairs of the gods. The Classical lyric author therefore, Hegel notes, associates “himself freely with the universal as the substance of his own spirit and brings this unification with himself as an individual into consciousness of himself as a poet.” What does not become a preoccupation of the Classical lyric are the subjective musings of moral conscience, private love, and the pursuit of particular ends that are not already embodied in the fabric of the community. These inward passions that stand apart from public life do not yet command the significance that a Romantic world view will grant them. To move in that direction, the artistic spirit must sever the Classical ideal’s plastic unity of essence and appearance. Hegel notes that lyric poetry in ancient Rome prepares the way with bitter satire that unmasks the rot of a Classical world unable to sustain adherence to its values.36

35 36

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1139–1140.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1152.

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Epic Literature in the Classical Style The epic configuring the world of the Classical Ideal is a different story altogether from that shaping the Symbolic world view. On our lonely planet, Homer is its initiator and unmatched proponent, and his Iliad and Odyssey peerlessly embody epic literature in the classical style. The Iliad and Odyssey are united in character and action by following events in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans and in the subsequent voyage home of Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, where his wife Penelope awaits him after 20  years away. Despite this thematic connection, the works are very different in construction. The Iliad depicts 51 days of the Trojan War, whose events are rooted on the shore before the city battlements, framed by Achilles’ withdrawal from the fight and eventual return to avenge the death of his lover, Patroclus, by slaughtering Hector, whose burial brings the work to a close. The Odyssey follows Odysseus’ decade of wandering from one island to another, enduring wildly diverse tribulations as he makes his way back to Ithaca to reclaim his wife and throne. Although the Iliad depicts the action of the Greek city states in their joint assault on Troy, whereas the Odyssey traces the isolated struggles of Odysseus to survive his journey and make it home, both sagas portray the entire fabric of the ancient Classical world through the lens of the independent exertions of their heroes. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the anthropomorphic Gods make intermittent interventions that push events in a certain direction, but none of the protagonists enjoy the fantastical, supra-human powers of the heroes of the Symbolic epic. Instead, what the Homeric figures achieve falls within the literal capabilities of human individuals, motivated by ethical concerns that ultimately uphold the political community to which they belong. Achilles spends the entirety of the Iliad in the precincts of battle, where Greeks defend their collective honor, fighting the Trojans to achieve retribution for Paris’ theft of Helen. All of Odysseus’ ordeals in his odyssey are consequences of his participation in the Trojan war, but they are also preliminary steps in his campaign to reestablish the ethical life of his kingdom that has fallen into decay during the years of his absence. Never are Achilles, Odysseus, or any of their compatriots in doubt about the

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valid substance of their community, or about the essential significance of their public engagement in its defense. Whatever help the Gods may provide, these Greek heroes ultimately rely on their own tenacity, intelligence, and courage to prevail. Although Achilles may sulk in his tent, he is driven by anger at his public treatment, not by moral quandary or psychological anguish. Odysseus is not searching for himself in quest of self-understanding, nor wandering in pursuit of something to give meaning to his life. Like Achilles, Odysseus inhabits a world in which what appears in outer life is invested with significance that is not in question. The independent strivings of the Homeric heroes are directly at one with the substantial order that is unalterably present in their national life and represented in their religious belief. Consequently, neither Achilles nor Odysseus undergoes any transformative development in the course of their adventures. We see Achilles over only 51 days, but Odysseus passes before us during 10 more years of wandering, years that are merely added on to a figure who remains throughout a man in mid-life. All that passage of time has left Odysseus just as unchanged as Penelope.37 When Odysseus returns to Ithaca two decades after his departure, he is the same figure, weathered and bedraggled but recognizable to his old faithful dog and finally to Penelope. Homer can repeatedly use the same formula to describe his characters, “Hector readied for battle, fleet-footed Achilles, owl-eyed Athena, Zeus, the ruler of thundering clouds”, for they are all fixed once and for all in the completed world of the epos.38 Hegel celebrates how the epos of Homer achieves a beautiful unification between the individual character of its protagonists, exhibited in their actions across the panorama of events, and the ethical life of family and state together with its religious outlook.39 There is no imbalance between their human spirit and what is actual, no gap between impassioned “action and external outcome,” no separation between the  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, pp. 127–128.  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 102. In pointing this out, Emil Staiger notes that such repetition serves the improvised oral delivery of the Homeric epics, for “the rhapsodist needs a large store of ready-made verses, which he occasionally inserts, so that in the meantime he can reflect on what is to follow. But this historical explanation does not exclude the aesthetic interpretation” (Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 102). 39  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1098–1099. 37 38

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“national ground of undertakings and the intentions and deeds of individuals”.40 Homer succeeds in depicting the whole national spirit of the Greek people in the vital energetic strivings of individuals who aim to abide by the ideals that are already manifest in the community they serve. Homer’s world is a “heroic” world situation, where ethical community has already come into being, but the upholding of the valid institutions of the nation hangs directly upon the individual initiatives of exemplary figures, rather than upon the anonymous lawful operations of a fully developed constitutional regime.41 Achilles and Ajax do not join the battle in following any law or administrative directive, or in service to some ideology. They act upon their own sense of honor as a member of the Greek community.42 Moreover, as Hegel notes, Homer’s heroes not only sustain their nation in battle, but provide for their own needs, slaughtering livestock, preparing them for consumption, and otherwise taking all affairs of the community in their own hands, while retaining their independence in face of their gods.43 Their visible activity is the life of the nation and their world cannot fail to be of worth for them so long as they can fulfill their undertakings, which their character is fit to do. In The Theory of the Novel Georg Lukács captures the specific character of epic literature in the Classical style in ways that help distinguish the epos from the modern form of epic, the novel. Lukács does so under the confusing rubric of the epic per se, which he contrasts with the novel as if they represented distinct genres rather than forms that epic literature takes in embodying the Classical and Romantic styles. Lukács does, however, acknowledge that the novel can be considered the modern form of epic44 and what he says about the epic in contrast to the novel is crucial for comprehending the Homeric epos.

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1099.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1052. 42  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 125. 43  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1055, 1071. 44  He writes, “The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given” (Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 56). In a similar vein, he adds, “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 88). 40 41

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Lukács points out that the saga of the epos is not a tale of a personal destiny detached from a national destiny. The epos rather always presents a national destiny, but one that unfolds through a heroic destiny that co-­ determines the destiny of the community.45 This merging of heroic and national destiny reflects the key feature of the world of the epos – it is, as Lukács puts it, an integrated civilization in which the meaning of life is wholly immanent to public endeavor, where self and world are never strangers.46 Ultimate value lies not in some transcendent nirvana or afterlife, but in the sensuous here and now of the public interrelationships of the members of the Classical nation. The epos is the artistic answer to how life can become essence, for it portrays how the actions of the epic hero are at one with the substance of the ethical community.47 The ideal of the Classical Ideal is not an ought to be whose specification and realization depends upon subjective moral initiative. The heroes of the epos are unproblematic individuals because their aims are given to them with “immediate obviousness”48 in the existing fabric of their public institutions and corresponding religious beliefs. The Homeric heroes must exert all their powers in defending their community, but the actuality of the world built upon these accepted values “never poses any serious threat to” their “interior life,”49 which is consonant with them. Neither madness nor crime has any but the most marginal presence in the epos,50 for these deviations from rational rectitude are besides the point of the endeavors around which epic events revolve. Nor is love a preoccupation of the Homeric hero, for private attachments are peripheral to the unity of heroic and national destiny.51 The escapade of Homeric heroes is not an “adventure of interiority”, where individuals need to prove themselves and vindicate their personal aims to establish meaning for their lives. The world of the epos rather possesses an “inner security” where adventure is  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, pp. 68–69.  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 29. 47  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 30. 48  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 78. 49  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 78. 50  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 61. 51  Staiger, Basic Concepts of Poetics, p. 108. 45 46

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always an affirmation of the realizability of given norms that are never in doubt.52 The Iliad need not have a beginning and end that corresponds to the start and finish of the Trojan War for what Homer portrays is a “rounded universe” that “blossoms into an all-embracing life”,53 whose totality of meaning is always present. M. M. Bakhtin adds salient supplements to Lukács’ characterization of epic, identifying epic, like Lukács, with the Classical epos, while treating the novel as an independent genre, rather than as the shape epic takes in modern times in expression of the Romantic self-understanding.54 Bakhtin emphasizes three features of the classical epic, whose convergence is important to recognize. First, the subject of the classical epic is a privileged past of the nation, one in which prevailing traditions have their beginnings and exemplary embodiment. The source of the epic accordingly lies not in an author’s personal experience or free invention, but rather in the national tradition to which the epic gives paradigmatic expression. Accordingly, the epic world is fundamentally separated from the contemporary world of its author and audience, even if it gives that contemporary world the imagined fountainhead of everything noble in its tradition. The classical epic thereby retains an absolute distance from the present in stark contrast to the modern epic, the novel, which can be rooted in the personal experience and imagination of its author, and thereby partake in what is contemporary.55 This absolute distance of the classical epic past reflects how that past is both complete and normatively sacrosanct. The world of the classical epic therefore has no room for any basic “openendedness, indecision, indeterminacy”, nor is its epic world accessible to anyone’s personal experience or susceptible of any merely personal evaluation.56 It is the closed world of accepted national tradition, excluding any alteration either in its

 Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 89.  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 55. 54  See M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel”, in Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist & trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 3–40. 55  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 13–14. 56  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 16. 52 53

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legendary content or in the meaning and value of what it presents.57 For this reason, the epos author can, and indeed, must begin and end in midstream of the action, as Homer does in both the Iliad and Odyssey. On the one hand, it is impossible to retell the absolute past of national tradition in its entirety in a single work. On the other hand, each part of that past is just as closed and complete as the whole, and therefore any section can be selected for epic narration and stand on its own.58 By contrast, the modern epic, the novel, will need to provide a unity generated by the independent invention of the author, who is no longer retelling commonly known sagas of national tradition, but speculating about an imagined incomplete present.59 The classical epic’s absolute distance has important implications for the character of its protagonist, which all amplify how Hegel and Lukács conceive the classical epic hero. Inhabiting a world that objectively embodies everything of fundamental human significance, the epos hero is just as complete and fully externalized. “All his potential, all his possibilities are realized utterly in his external social position, in the whole of his fate and even in his external appearance”, leaving nothing of significance that is not “exposed and loudly expressed”.60 Just as the encompassing classical epic world is closed and complete, so the epos hero is “absolutely equal to himself ”, not only incapable of undergoing any significant development, but unable to view himself in any way that diverges from how others view him.61 There can be no hidden inwardness worth plumbing, no personal mysteries to be explored, no quest of meaning to be undertaken. Acting in complete consonance with the single unified ethical tradition of his completed world, the epos hero cannot have any independent “ideological” axe to grind,62 nor any genuinely subversive, questioning role to play. The same holds true for the Gods, whose

 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 17.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 31–32. 59  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 32. 60  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 34. 61  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 34–35. 62  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 35. 57 58

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classical anthropomorphic identity ties them to the common national tradition, its values, and its closed fate.63

Dramatic Literature in the Classical Style In contrast to the wide ranging narrative scope of the epos, drama in the classical style focuses the fundamental strivings inherent in the Classical self-understanding through the concentrated lens of dramatic interaction in tragic, comedic, or tragicomic shape. The general connections of character, pathos, and dramatic plot here become particularized in terms of the classical worldview for which the unity of human essence and appearance finds expression in the paramount significance of public action, the incipient clash of tradition-bound ethical spheres, and the externalities of fate from which none can escape be they mere mortals or the mutually limiting anthropomorphic divinities. Hegel details how this particularization determines the form and content of classical tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy, and we can apply much of what he specifies in conceiving the classical style of drama. We must, however, beware of how he also privileges classical drama as if it supremely realizes dramatic literature. This privileging entails two correlative category confusions that must be overcome. On the one hand, Hegel treats classical drama as if its achievement excludes other styles from obtaining genuine dramatic realization. As we have seen, Hegel fails to bar the Symbolic style from dramatic achievement, although he does properly indicate certain limitations facing Symbolic tragedy and comedy. On the other hand, Hegel tends to conflate the general features of drama and dramatic genres with the particulars of classical configuration. We have already detailed the general features of dramatic literature and its fundamental genres in ways that avoid that conflation. The following treatment of Classical and Romantic style drama will further vindicate the distinction between what is general and particular in the realizations of dramatic literature. We will do so by substantiating how drama obtains

 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 34.

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distinct unities of meaning and configuration in the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic styles. Hegel’s account provides us with much of what is needed to grasp the particular form and content of Classical drama. As Hegel recognizes, the character, pathos, and plot of Classical drama always revolves around the unity of human essence and appearance in the public strivings of individuals whose character is fully absorbed in those efforts. The resulting conflicts, be they tragic, comedic, or tragicomedic, arise from real or imagined oppositions between different ethical spheres, often reflected in the competing interventions of anthropomorphic gods, whose own disputes project those of the mortals they plague and protect. Always at stake are essential universal concerns that preoccupy the community to which the protagonists belong.64 Never does the action rest “on purely private interest and personal character, on thirst for power, lust, honor, or other passions, the right of which can be rooted only in an individual’s private inclination and personality,”65 as will figure so prominently in Romantic style drama. What allows Classical dramatic characters to directly embody the clash of universal ethical powers is that, as Hegel points out, they inhabit a world situation of a “heroic age”, where relations of kinship and rule have arisen, but impersonal legal institutions have yet to become entrenched and the fate of the community still rests upon the deeds of “heroes”, engaged in those same legendary struggles that occupy the Homeric epics.66 Consequently, it can be no surprise that the same characters who appear in the Illiad and Odyssey take the stage in the Classical dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Hegel appropriately points to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone as paradigmatic embodiments of classic tragedy on two correlative grounds. In both plays, the characters are driven by a pathos that directly exhibits the conflict of oikos and polis, of family and political duty. These ethical spheres can conflict due to the traditional character of each, which leaves them burdened with features extraneous to the compatible bounds of  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1206.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1212–1213. 66  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1208. 64 65

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household and political freedom, whose full realization requires the emancipation of rule from kinship and of household affairs from economic and political activity. Sophocles’ characters can readily embody such conflict because they are members of ruling families whose political power still rests on kinship. It is thus no accident that in these plays and all the other extant dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the mortal protagonists are members of royal households, whose legendary triumphs and travails have already populated the Homeric epics. Given how ancient Greek women are excluded from politics, it is not surprising that in most cases the character who defends family bonds against violation by political power are women of royal families, such as Antigone, Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, Phaedra, Electra, Medea, Helen, and Hecuba, whereas those they oppose are men, such as Agamemnon, Menelaus, Creon, Odysseus, and Polymestor. Since the dramatic conflict always revolves around characters driven by a pathos rooted in one ethical sphere as opposed to its counterpart, the protagonists are always both objectively guilty and innocent, justified by the norms of the ethical power they defend and condemned by the ethical power they challenge.67 Their struggle is not an inner one that tears them apart and precipitates some personal transformation. Instead, each protagonist is firmly rooted in the particular pathos that drives his or her action, maintaining a fixed identification with that pathos, unlike the more wavering and concrete personality of the characters fit for dramatization in the Romantic style.68 Nonetheless, the classical protagonists are not mere abstractions, for they must exhibit the individuality of any genuinely artistic configuration, even though they lack the rich complexity and wavering inner turmoil of a Hamlet, Othello, or Lear. As finely carved as the classical protagonists may be, they remain “firm figures who simply are what they are, without any inner conflict, without any hesitating recognition of someone else’s ‘pathos’”.69 Accordingly, the resolution of Classical tragedy affirms the validity of the ethical powers, which does not become undermined when  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1214.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1209, 1214. 69  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1209. 67 68

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protagonists risk their own destruction by asserting one at the expense of the other. The tragic characters may resolutely lose their lives, as in Antigone, or survive their tragedy, as in Oedipus Rex and the Eumenides of Aeschylus. In either case, the tragic denouement ratifies the reconciliation of ethical antagonisms through the failure of either protagonist to achieve a triumph of good over evil. The fate of the protagonists retains a rational character by instead showing how their one-sided commitment to a single ethical power cannot subvert the unity of the entire community, whose abiding legitimacy depends upon maintaining the balance of oikos and polis.70 The other salient feature of classical dramatic characters and their interaction is that what counts is exclusively the outer reality of their actions, for which they are held responsible no matter what their motives may be. Oedipus falls prey most piteously to this exclusion of the right of conscience, but nowhere else does the classical protagonist find relief from accountability due to ignorance, madness, or discrepancy between consequences and intentions. The situation with Classical comedy and tragicomedy is somewhat different, since here, as in all comedy, the protagonists act ridiculously by either pursuing ends whose substance is illusory or aiming at meaningful goals in ways that are completely unsuitable. For this reason, the comedic or tragicomedic “hero” need not be of royal stature. Hegel points to Aristophanes as the paradigm creator of Classical comedy.71 Although his characters often come from very non-regal milieus, such as Socrates and Aristophanes’ fellow playwrights, what Aristophanes skewers are their ludicrous contradictory attempts to deal with the fundamental issues of philosophical, artistic, and political concern in the Classical world. This is what gives ancient Greek comedy its distinctly classical character. As Hegel notes, such comedy remains just as rooted in the truth of ethical substance as does Classical tragedy. Classical comedy may expose the foibles of characters pursuing merely subjective intrigues under the guise of substantial endeavor, but the comic dissolution of their schemes does not subvert those substantial matters themselves. Instead, the intrigues of 70 71

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1215–1216.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1220.

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classical comedy unmask the corruptions of public values that its audience can all too well recognize.72 The use of a chorus, especially in ancient Greek tragedies, is another noteworthy feature that Hegel cites in distinguishing Classical drama from its Symbolic or Romantic counterparts. The chorus comments upon the action and at times participates therein. It never operates as a third person epic narrator, describing the action from without. Instead, it maintains the absolute unity of the dramatic action by presenting the public spirit of the Classical community as it grapples with the conflict that ensues within its own bounds. Unlike any of the contending protagonists, the chorus can speak on behalf of the entire community, in which the conflicting ethical spheres of household and politics are held together.73 Its encompassing unity presents the possibility of ultimately reconciling the contending ethical powers with whom the classical dramatic personae identify themselves and confront one another. Hegel regards the chorus as an emblematic dramatic expression of the universal values of a heroic age. In that world situation, the ultimate secular and religious norms have yet to be codified and prosaically embodied in legal institutions. The chorus fittingly dramatizes those values in the living individual form of its collective agency. Modern plays, such as Henry V of Shakespeare and Boris Godunov of Pushkin, may have their crowd scenes, but, as Georg Lukács notes, these are no more than “isolated factors” of a drama in which public life and personal struggles are not immediately conjoined. By contrast, the classical chorus “is omnipresent”, reflecting how the pathos of the protagonist is directly tied to the community, albeit by embracing one ethical power against another.74 The chorus can play an  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1206. The classical comedic greatness of Aristophanes resides precisely in putting “before our eyes in its self-destructive folly … what was real, i.e. the downright opposite of the genuine actuality of state, religion, and art, i.e. what he exhibits is sophistry, the deplorable and lamentable character of tragedy, flighty gossip, litigiousness, etc. and the aberrations of democracy out of which the old faith and morals had vanished” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1202). 73  At times, the chorus speaks in the name of a particular group within the community, as in Euripides’ The Trojan Women, where the chorus personifies the enslaved Trojan women in their entirety. In every case, however, the chorus offers a voice that transcends the singularity of a protagonist and brings to bear upon the action a more general ethical interest. 74  Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 135. 72

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integral role in Classic drama due to how the Classical spirit identifies the substance of freedom with public life, in which rule and family are manifest. This does not mean, however, that every Classical drama must contain a chorus. There is no fundamental reason why the dialogue of specific characters cannot suffice to express the conflicts of ethical powers embroiling Classical individuality.75 The same optional appropriateness applies to a second feature of Classical drama that Hegel points to as a distinguishing mark of its characteristic performance style. This is the presumed historical practice of ancient Greek actors performing wearing masks that gave them a fixed outer expression corresponding to their tragic or comic character.76 That frozen facial demeanor does not and cannot eliminate the dynamic movement of the drama or the living individuality of each voice that the text presents. The immobile mask is, however, consistent with how classical drama never revolves around a development of a persona, as in a modern Bildungsroman. Rather, the vicissitudes that befall tragic, comedic, or tragicomedic characters no more transform their personalities than does the odyssey that Odysseus undergoes. The tragic characters remain bound to their governing pathos, whereas the comic figures survive their foibles, resiliently unchanged for better or worse. The use of masks can accordingly serve to configure the world view of Classical drama, but, like the use of a chorus, it is not indispensable. What is ineliminable is the general “statuesque” manner of acting that Hegel attributes to ancient Greek theater.77 This mode of performance, which may or may not employ masks, theatrically animates the characteristic plasticity of figurative sculpture in general, and particularly of Classical sculpture, where what appears on the surface conveys everything of significance and every character remains true to the pathos that governs what each does. Such “sculptural” portrayal appropriately  Hegel acknowledges that the chorus became “an unnecessary ornament” in the development of ancient Greek drama, but he regards this as signaling the decay of ancient tragedy (see Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1212). Suitable as it may be to the Classical spirit, the use of the chorus is not essential to dramatizing the classical worldview. Classical protagonists can exhibit the clash of ethical powers in their totality in the dramatic movement itself, which can retain its organic closure without a chorus adding its comments. 76  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1186. 77  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1186–1187. 75

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conveys the special unwavering character of classical individuality, where outer and inner are joined and no hidden fluctuations of inwardness command essential importance. With or without masks, Classical theater consistently distinguishes itself with a performance practice which emphasizes that unity in the moving “sculpture” of speaking characters, who thereby bring to life what Pygmalion conjured in legend. As Hegel notes, this can be achieved through the relatively constant, unmodulated manner of the Classical actor’s delivery, who clearly enunciates the pervading pathos with a suitable rhythm.78 To compensate for the statuesque simplicity of classical acting, ancient Greek theater added a musical accompaniment to enrich the rhythm and articulation of the delivery.79 Not surprisingly, the use of masks and the general rigidity of performance has left individual performers with little chance for notoriety, and this, Hegel observes, is why we have no knowledge of any individual Greek actors.80 By contrast, the actors of Romantic style drama, as we shall see, are charged with giving vent to the totality of a character’s personality, in all its contingent subjectivity, allowing performers to step into the limelight as singular artists in their own right.81 Presaging the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando, Hegel laments that this may leave the modern thespian falling prey to a prosaic naturalism where actors go around mumbling so that the audience can barely hear them.82 The Classical actor makes his character distinctly heard in all its fixed yet transparent humanity. Such acting gives Classical drama its imposing force, but also indicates its limits. The relation of Classical drama to its audience reflects both these aspects. On the one hand, the performances of ancient Greek drama were, at least in Athens, a very public celebration, in which the leading playwrights competed for prizes on a regular basis. These theatrical festivals could command the enthusiastic attention of the entire populace precisely because Classical drama presented the essential challenges  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1188.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1186. 80  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1187. 81  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1189. 82  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1190–1191. 78 79

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confronting the life of the community. Moreover, as Hegel notes, the text of dramas were not published in ancient Greece, but only held in manuscript by directors and performers, leaving the theater festivals the sole venue for public access.83 There, the cathartic experience to which Aristotle alluded could take immediate hold of the inhabitants of the Classical world, whose substantial individuality could fear and pity and laugh with those personae grappling with the tensions of traditional ethical powers and the burden of unmitigated responsibility for the consequences of their actions. We inhabitants of a modern world cannot relate in the same way to theater in general nor Classical theater in particular since the unity of human essence and appearance is not the beginning and end of our experience. Still, because Classical theater, like all genuine literature, addresses in a particular manner the ethical and religious strivings common to any rational animals seeking normative meaning, we can be moved by Classical dramas, while at the same time apprehending their different world view.

Literature in the Romantic Style Lyric Literature in the Romantic Style Unlike the Symbolic and Classical self-understandings, the Romantic world view grants individuals the freedom to determine for themselves a conventional world whose faith and institutions honor self-­determination in all its dimensions. The first-person disclosure of lyric literature here has an open field to express personal feelings and ideas with the confidence that they are worthy of attention. Romantic lyric literature that expresses religious devotion will neither offer veneration of a sublime absolute alien to finite subjectivity nor literal imaginings of the outward doings of anthropomorphic gods. Instead, Romantic devotional lyric will focus upon the expression of the personal feelings of the author for a faith that acknowledges the infinite worth of individuality by worshipping a divine that represents the unity of infinite 83

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1184.

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and infinite personality in a God that is an individual human. Here the lyrical expression of religious devotion will center upon love rather than awe and austerity, with emphasis on personal pious feeling rather than submission to external command. Romantic lyric literature that expresses personal feelings and ideas about secular life will have an almost limitless breadth, since nothing high or low can fail to occasion the deepest sentiments of a heart that affirms its autonomy in every domain. Anything in nature, in history, in other works of art, in friendship, family, society, politics, international affairs, in simply the most mundane of daily activities can be reflected upon in inner awareness and generate subjective states that lyric narrative can then express. Or Romantic creators can simply focus upon the movements of their own mind and find something worthy of voicing as a work of art. Although Romantic lyric literature has this free range of content, it must, like every artistic endeavor, transfigure what it finds into a universally significant matter whose form of expression can match its meaning. No longer restricted to an ideal subject matter, Romantic lyric runs the risk of divulging purely singular feelings of no intrinsic interest to others and of failing to rise above purely prosaic descriptions and confessions that hold a rote mirror to everything outer and inner. The open expanse of content has its counterpart in the openness of literary form that Romantic lyric can employ. Rhythmic versification, rhyme, “free” verse, and mere prose are all possible instruments, useable with varying application of assonance and alliteration. What counts is always conveying the depth and imaginative freedom of the lyric voice as it discloses its own subjective spirit grappling inwardly with the wider world and the fundamental concerns that no individual can escape. This wider world may be one in which institutions of freedom have hardly come into being and the only solace for an autonomous spirit is in awaiting a transcendent after-life in which all souls are free and equal, in treasuring the free offering and receipt of private love, in the celebration of personally initiated quests of chivalry, in reveries of a future liberation, in reflections on the tasks of revolutionary activity, on laments on the persistence of oppression, and on the aftermath of securing the institutions of freedom where the operations of a constitutional order leave little

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room for exemplary individuals to hold the destiny of a nation in their hands.

Epic Literature in the Romantic Style The third person narrative voice of epic literature always faces the challenge of configuring events in specific situations of a concrete world to give exemplary individual embodiment to the fundamental issues that embroil a specific form of civilization. The affirmation of self-­ determination by the self-understanding distinguishing the Romantic artform mandates a form of epic literature very different from that of the fantastical sagas of the Symbolic style and the national epos of Classical literature. The failure to recognize this specific imperative has plagued some prominent examples of epic literature since the ancient Greek world could no longer maintain the immanent meaning of its ethical life and the unity of appearance and essence. Hegel points out these anomalies in respect to Virgil and Milton. Virgil’s Aeneid appropriates the form of the epos, but because the Roman viewpoint of the author diverges from that of the national saga he describes, the depicted gods lack genuine vitality, failing to match the inner life of the mortal heroes, who, like their gods, lack any firm basis in the substance of their world.84 As for Milton’s Paradise Lost, the epic portrayal of humanity’s genesis in a Judeo-Christian creation is plagued by a cleft between the religious subject matter and the poet’s personal reflections and the difficulty of giving the immaterial spirit of God the Father an imagined individuation for which the Homeric Gods are so fit.85 No solution can be achieved by the glaring anomaly of a work such as Luiz Vas de Camões’ The Lusíads, which portrays Vasco de Gama’s epochal voyage to India as if it could be coherently depicted as a Classical epos, including the intervention of the Greek gods. Camões may be depicting a clash of nations,86 such as served Homer in the Iliad, but  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1074.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1075. 86  Hegel points this out in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1062. 84 85

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the conflict of Portugal and India involves values very different from those embraced by the Homeric heroes. Hegel himself casts doubt upon the prospects for epic literature in the Romantic style. He warns us to “dismiss out of hand the idea that a truly epic action can take place on the ground of a political situation developed into an organized constitution with elaborate laws, effective courts of law, well-organized administration in the hands of ministers, civil servants, police, etc.”, as if only the heroic world of the Homeric epos could fit epic narration. Admittedly, the Romantic self-understanding cannot express itself in the valiant exploits of an Achilles and Odysseus and recreate another epos, but it does allow for and demand a different kind of epic narrative with a different type of story, conflict, and characters. Hegel himself describes how the Romantic artform has created a distinctive epic literature in various forms that correspond to the different stages of the religious and secular development of post-Classical civilization. These all pertain to the autonomous cultural transformation of the civilizations that modernized themselves in a struggle to enact institutions of freedom, with respect for conscience, household emancipation, the pursuit of particular interests in civil society, and self-government. We can extend the options of the Romantic epic to include the authors who are depicting the transformations of pre-modern societies that are undergoing modernization from without through colonization and imperialism, but first let us explore how Hegel classifies the literary territory. Hegel regards the epic poetry of the Medieval Christian world as providing a third-person narrative literature that begins to embody a Romantic world-view in both religious and secular terms. A secular example cited by Hegel is El Cid, which portrays the national conflict between Spanish nobility and the Moors but, unlike the Homeric epos, focuses on personal engagements revolving around love, family pride, and knightly honor. What is at stake is not an ethical community whose given traditions are unquestionably upheld, but self-imposed loyalties of a medieval world in which there is no substantial totality other than what awaits in an imagined afterlife. Consequently, the narrative can follow all the contingent adventures that occupy chivalry, wherein particular

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figures win or lose love and power depending upon their own initiatives and the external circumstances that befall them. The national conflict of El Cid is completely attenuated in the medieval epics of chivalry, where, as Hegel notes, the narrated adventures involve no national interests, but only affairs of love and honor.87 In these tales of chivalry, the substance at stake is the individual integrity of the adventurer who has independently decided what to make a matter of honor and who to choose as an object of love. The heroes of the ensuing sagas stand on their own feet as completely independent persons making their way through a world that has yet to consolidate itself into a national prosaic regime with objectively functioning institutions.88 The bonds there still rest on freely engaged private feudal loyalties that are always particular and upheld by personal honor. The characters, conflicts, and tales of such an epic of chivalry mandate a narrative form different than that of either the Symbolic epic or the Homeric epos. Hegel points to two options. On the one hand, the epic of chivalry can be given a ballad treatment, where one episode follows another without any strict unity.89 The ballad narrative fits how the hero follows a path dependent upon completely independent decisions regarding honor and love in a world whose lack of a substantial order leaves everyone prey to unexpected contingencies. A variant on the episodic ballad-like epic not explicitly discussed by Hegel is exemplified by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. In these kaleidoscopic works, tales of different characters are masterfully delivered by various individuals brought together by pilgrimage (in the case of the Canterbury Tales) or flight from the plague (in the case of the Decameron). The overarching connection of each collection is the narrative of the occasion for the sequential storytelling. What supplies a truly epical majesty to these works is the breadth of the tales and the diverse manners of their telling. These together recreate an entire objective world that Chaucer and Boccaccio each richly reimagine.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1104.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1104–1105. 89  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1105. 87 88

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On the other hand, the epic can proceed as “something like a novel”.90 Hegel has little to say about what this means in distinction from the loose episodic form of the ballad, other than suggesting that it has a more robust connecting thread despite weaving its tale against a backdrop lacking “a fixedly regulated civil organization and a prosaic march of events”.91 In the absence of a national destiny with which to lend substance to chivalric adventure, the epic of chivalry is at pains to provide compelling interest for its hero’s adventures. As Hegel notes, the story may latch onto great historical figures, pivotal battles, religious quests, or sheer fantasy of dragons and wizards to add weight to a saga92 that otherwise may seem forgettable arbitrary entertainment. The Medieval religious epics, by contrast, at least are rooted in theological representation of a substantial world to come. Dante’s Divine Comedy manages to capture the transience of the world of mortals in a totality framed by the hierarchy of divine judgment. Although Dante inserts himself into the narrative as our guide through the realms of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, we encounter a gallery of mortal individuals of all caliber and situation, whose personal histories offer a complete spectacle of humanity’s struggle for meaning as evaluated through the lens of the religious view of Christendom that confers divinity to an actual finite individual. Dante thereby gives an epic totality to the quest of the Romantic self-understanding, poetically recreating “the entirety of objective life” filled by “characters who have produced their situation for themselves, as individuals”, but are held eternal in “realms fixed once and for all.”93 Hegel has more mixed thoughts about the later religious epics of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Klopstock’s Messiah, which have difficulty providing sufficiently individuated characterizations for figures at the very center of Biblical narrative. To some extent the difficulties of Milton and Klopstock foreshadow the pitfall of any writer of an historical novel who allows central characters to be world historical figures themselves. In that case, as Lukács points out in The Historical Novel, epic narration falls  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1105.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1105. 92  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1105. 93  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1104. 90 91

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prey to psychological reductionism, where the immediate appearance of the character is directly identified with universal significance.94 In the Homeric epos the heroes could directly unite national destiny with their own, but in the world of the Romantic self-understanding, the individual character is on a self-directed quest that cannot begin in unity with what already has recognized normative substance. Hegel acknowledges this problem as it plays out in the secular epics that address the great national upheaval of his day, the French Revolution. Goethe’s epic poem, Hermann and Dorothea, is Hegel’s prime example. Its story unfolds against the background of this “greatest world-event of our time”,95 but it focuses on characters with no link to the revolutionary struggle. Instead, Goethe’s plot revolves around a domestic romance of individuals fleeing the revolution, engendering not a national epic, but an epic that “has become idyllic”.96 Hegel acknowledges that these forms of epic narration do not exhaust the options of Romantic literature and he abruptly ends his discussion by alluding to “an unlimited field for romances, tales, and novels” whose vast history he is “unable to pursue any further”.97 Hegel has, however, given us a tantalizing sketch of the “romance”, which foreshadows the type of Romantic epic that will dominate modern literature. Hegel introduces the romance as the “modern popular epic” in a brief discussion of “subordinate collateral branches of epic.”98 The romance, Hegel tells us, presupposes a world that has long ago superseded the “primitive poetic general situation” that fits the epos.99 Instead, the romance confronts a prosaically ordered world in which there is no opportunity for individuals to possess the exemplary national significance of the heroes of yore. To retain literary beauty in this modern world, in which the institutions of freedom are becoming a reality, the romance opens epic narration to the entire wealth of prosaic life, with all its manifold interests, circumstances, personalities, and relationships and creates a narrative in which  Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, p. 45.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1110. 96  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1109. 97  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1110. 98  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1091. 99  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, p. 1092. 94 95

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individuals seek meaning in a world in which ideal configurations are absent. In this world condition, the most common and appropriate collision for romance to narrate is that between the inward yearnings of the individual and the “opposing prose of circumstances and accidents of external situations”.100 The ensuing conflict can be resolved tragically, with the downfall of the protagonists, or comically, with the unmasking of their ridiculous but harmless quests. It can also lead to a reconciliation that can take two alternate forms. On the one hand, the characters who oppose the status quo with subjective aims of presumed substance learn by their experience how their prosaic world embodies what is genuinely of value. On the other hand, the characters come to understand how their own action and achievements are not devoid of meaning, but contain what is worthy of beauty and artistic configuration. All these different scenarios have a distinctly dramatic character, but their application to epic narrative implies that events rather than actions reign supreme, with the meandering of contingent circumstances and multiple characters and conflicts stretching beyond the relentless march of dramatic movement. Precisely because the romance immerses itself in “the prose of real life”, it risks losing its way in the commonplace, without infusing its narrative with “the entirety of an outlook on the world”.101 Hegel presents this difficulty as the abiding challenge that romance authors must surmount to save their modern epic from artistic failure.

Conceiving the Novel on the Shoulders of Hegel If we look back over Hegel’s taxonomy of Romantic epic literature, we find a succession of forms that follow the progressive realization of self-­ determination in which the Romantic world view locates normative validity. Negatively speaking, the world condition of the Romantic artform begins with the collapse of the Classical world, which can no longer sustain coherent embrace of its traditional ethical community and corresponding anthropomorphic pantheon, which itself arose in repudiation  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1092.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1093.

100 101

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of the Symbolic world view. In the trinitarian representation of the Divine, the religious representation of the Romantic world view can and does arise prior to the secular embodiment of the autonomy, which that representation sanctifies. This situation challenges Romantic authors to create the epic works, epitomized by Dante’s Divine Comedy, that give the human condition a new totality anchored in the religious representation of an afterlife situating all secular lives in a hierarchy of religious fulfillment. So long as the institutions of freedom have yet to be enacted, Romantic authors confront a prosaic landscape, historically exemplified by Medieval Europe, in which ethical community has lost its substance and individuals face a world where secular loyalties are privately enacted and non-religious meaning can only be found in the pursuit of personal love and honor. Such is the world condition that the secular epics of chivalry address in works that are inherently episodic given the absence of an overarching worldly substance. Hegel next points to the asymptotic conclusion of the history of freedom in the Romantic world-condition, where the institutions of freedom have come into being leaving individuals inhabiting conventions where property rights, moral accountability, family freedom, social autonomy, and political freedom are all at hand, comprising a system that upholds itself without depending upon the initiative of any one individual. Here the Romantic author is at pains to achieve the unity of individual configuration and universal significance, since no individual action can carry the fate of a nation, or, more appropriately, be that on which the defense of freedom hinges. On this ground, Hegel offers us the options of the romance, which amount to alternate forms of a Bildungsroman, where an individual seeks meaning in a world whose destiny seems unrelated to any personal striving. Here the protagonist discovers either that that world is a genuine home for autonomous individuality or that the engagements of the searching individual within that world have a validity that was initially hidden. What Hegel neglects is an intermediate stage in which the enactment of free institutions has become the order of the day, yet remains a contested agenda in the slaughterhouse of modern history. The cause of self-determination is challenged by fundamentalisms who advocate a return to pre-modern tradition, both secular and religious, and by post-modern Fascists who reject the universality of thought and action as a hypocritical mask of a

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will to power and seek to replace rights with the domination of a particular group identity. Within the nations in which the value of self-­ determination predominates, the achievement of equal opportunity within the household, society, and politics remains unfulfilled under regimes of free enterprise, where equal social opportunity is wanting, or of state capitalism, where “socialist” dictators wield monopoly power over nationalized enterprises and government alike. These struggles over the realization of freedom have two major arenas: those communities that have modernized themselves and those whose pre-modern conventions have been subject to an external modernization through colonial and imperial domination. The persistence of such situations presents Romantic authors with another literary challenge of reimagining the quest of individuals in a world condition where the institutionalization of freedom remains incomplete and in jeopardy. This is not the world condition of an age of heroes, who stand on the uncontested ground of an existing ethical community whose destiny is shared by their own. It is instead a world condition in which the enactment and defense of the institutions of freedom can never be directly united with the action of any single individuals. The novel is the modern epic that creatively explores the human condition in a world where the totality of the institutions of freedom is beginning to emerge in varying degrees of realization. Hannah Arendt describes the novel as “the only entirely social art form”,102 as if it only addressed the sphere of civil society, which indeed first arises in modern times. The novel, however, explores not just the challenges of making one’s way in the contingent interdependencies of social autonomy, but those that apply to the struggles of conscience, the emancipation of the family from traditional hierarchies, and the enactment and preservation of political freedom. Hegel’s sketch of the romance points to some of the novel’s possibilities, but we need to stand on Hegel’s shoulders and go further to consider the full promise of this consummate form of Romantic epic literature. To this end, we do well to draw upon key insights that M.  M. Bakhtin offers in his essay, “Epic and Novel”, and the more  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 39.

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extensive conceptions that Georg Lukács provides in such works as The Theory of the Novel, The Historical Novel, and Realism in Our Time. Like Lukács, Bakhtin identifies the epic with the Classical epos and does not explicitly acknowledge how the novel is the modern epic, which brings the genre of epic literature to embody the Romantic self-­ understanding. Indeed, Bakhtin falsely insists that the novel, as a new form still underway developing, cannot be integrated into a theory of the totality of literary genres.103 Nonetheless, the salient features with which Bakhtin distinguishes the novel from the “epic” are central aspects of this consummate form of the Romantic epic that substantiate how the novel does fit within systematic aesthetics. Whereas the epos retells exemplary parts of a national heroic past, set in a world that is complete and of unquestionable stature, the novel, Bakhtin emphasizes, independently creates its narrative in “the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness”.104 Confronting the aesthetic task of configuring what is of ultimate meaning when classical ideals no longer suffice, the novel employs all the multi-languaged diction (polyglossia) it can use to weave a narrative that is “on the same time-and-value plane as oneself and one’s contemporaries”, including those of other cultural origins.105 Instead of recounting what is already known to members of a common national tradition, the novel explores all the incomplete and unresolved challenges that individuals face when they must determine for themselves what matters in a world where the burden of freedom weighs globally upon everyone. In this here and now, personal experience and thinking are fit to be a source of novelistic invention.106 That does not prevent the novel from treating the past, but when the novel does so, it portrays the former time not as some inaccessible ideal age, but as a transient historical moment from which the present has emerged in all its unfinished perplexity.107

 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 4.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 11. 105  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 12. 106  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 14. 107  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 29. 103 104

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Exploding the closed, completed classical unity of essence and appearance, of inner and outer, and of being for other and being for self, the novel revolves around a fundamentally different type of character than the steadfast heroes who animate the national fate of the epos, always at one with themselves and with how others view them, always constant in their commitments, always fully objectifying what drives their action. The hero of the novel is just as incomplete and unrealized as the unfinished present that the novelist imaginatively transfigures. Unlike the single unified world view of the epos, the here and now of the novel confronts its characters with roles, situations, and fates in which their essence can never be completed identified and exhausted.108 They confront a fundamental cleavage between their potentiality and their reality, between what lurks in their interior and how they show themselves to others, between what they seek and what they find given. As Bakhtin puts it, the protagonists of the novel are “heroes of free improvisation and not heroes of tradition, of an absolute past”.109 Consequently, the novel will address something absent from the epos: “the theme of the hero’s inadequacy to his fate or his situation”,110 a theme endemic to the Romantic self-­ understanding of human freedom as something that can never be fully realized in the external existence of any one occupation, endeavor, or event. This is what makes the present of the novel something inconclusive, something in which individuals always face unrealized challenges, always navigate a tension between their inner and outer selves, always confront the looming “incongruity of a man with himself ”.111 Bakhtin here says little about how these basic aspects of the novel generate specific types of literary configuration, but Lukács does provide important explorations of how such signature features determine the development that this modern epic can take. In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács expands upon Hegel’s outline of Romantic epic literature by focusing on the contrast between the Classical epos and the novel, paralleling what Bakhtin has noted. Whereas the epos  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 34–35.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 36. 110  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 37. 111  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 38. 108 109

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gives expression to a “closed” world with “a rounded totality of being” in which meaning is completely present in the given fabric of human community,112 the novel configures the quests of “problematic” individuals whose interiority cannot find fulfillment in what is immediately external to them. The world condition with which the novel grapples no longer unites essence and existence, enabling its inhabitants to be always secure in “acceptance of ready-made, ever-present meaning”.113 Instead, the world of the novel has ceased to possess essential value in its given outer reality and thereby is populated by individuals for whom “the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem”.114 This is a world condition of distance,115 not that “absolute” distance of a Classical national tradition that is complete and sacrosanct, but one in which the individual begins with an awareness of the lack of any spontaneous harmony between the objective conditions of life and their relation to the subject. Meaningful goals and the roles by which they can be fulfilled are neither dictated by the Divine nor directly given in the contingent circumstances of convention. Accordingly, the characters of the novel are fundamentally seekers,116 for whom meaning must be created through their own self-directed quest through the happenstance of the world. The “basic a priori constituent, the fundamental structural element of the characters and events within” the novel is this “absence of any manifest aim, the determining lack of direction of life as a whole”117 and the reliance of individuals upon their own autonomy, which cannot be adequately embodied in any given actuality. Lukács maintains that the novel’s narrative of the quest of problematic individuals in a world of contemporary distance no longer fits the constant, objective versification of the epos. Instead, the voice of the novelist will either borrow the form of lyric poetry or rely on prose. Such modern epics as Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Lord Byron’s Don Juan can avail themselves of lyric verse modified for epic description because  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 17.  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 32. 114  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 56. 115  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 59. 116  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 60. 117  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 62. 112 113

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the lyrical expression of subjective mood suits their narratives of the personal quest of heroes whose inmost feelings put them at odds with their surroundings.118 On the other hand, the use of prose, which dominates the modern novel, fits the immersion of its searching characters in the prosaic contingencies of a world whose given ideals have lost their luster. The novel must not only dispense with the versification of the epos but also adopt a very different narrative form. As Lukács points out, the hero of the epos is never an estranged individual, whose destiny is distinct from that of the community.119 The Homeric heroes are nobles, if not kings, who directly hold the fate of their cities in their hands.120 By contrast, the hero of the novel is very much an ordinary individual whose interiority is never absorbed in public engagement and whose quest for meaning has no direct connection to the destiny of a nation or divine providence. What alone gives the novel’s hero any significance is the hero’s striving for a life worth living in a world that offers no externally prescribable answers. For this reason, Lukács duly recognizes, the novel has an essentially biographical form.121 The novel’s content is an “adventure of interiority”, “the story of the soul that goes to find itself ”, that “seeks adventures in order to be proved and tested by them, and by proving itself, to find its own essence.”122 The guiding thread that unites all the events in the novel’s narrative is the life of its hero to the extent that it comprises the quest for meaning of an autonomous individual in a world in which the realization of freedom has become the order of the day. This is not biography in the prosaic sense of an account of the entire life history of an individual. It is instead the imagined story of a character whose personal experiences are so configured as to highlight the fundamental challenges of life in the world of the Romantic self-understanding, a world defined by the complementary interrelation of contingent circumstances and the problematic individual.123 As Lukács notes, the novel need not begin and end with the birth and death of its protagonist. It can instead focus on a  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 59.  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 29. 120  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 67. 121  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 77. 122  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 89. 123  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 78. 118 119

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certain period of life in which the defining quest of its hero plays itself out.124 To possess sufficient significance to warrant literary treatment, that quest must focus the essential problems of the age as they inform the lives of the novel’s characters. Otherwise, the novel risks falling into the pitfall of which Hegel warned, of being captive to personal adventures of insufficient substance to retain aesthetic value. The framework of a world of distance, in which problematic individuals search for fulfillment, and where the divide of given externality and inwardness mandates a biographical itinerary, all give the novel its identity as the consummating “modern” epic of Romantic self-understanding. Can we, on this basis, further concretize the fundamental structural forms that the novel can take? In The Theory of the Novel and in Realism in Our Time Lukács offers us two complementary taxonomies that extend the options that Hegel sketches for the romance. In the earlier Theory of the Novel Lukács distinguishes four forms of novel under the heading of an “Abstract Idealism”, “the Romanticism of Disillusionment”, “an attempted Synthesis” epitomized by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, and “an attempt to go beyond the social forms of life” exemplified by Tolstoy’s renewal of epic literature. By contrast, in the later Realism in Our Time Lukács counterposes the realist novel to the modernist novel, in which epic literature allegedly undermines itself. Lukács introduces the novel of abstract idealism and the novel of romantic disillusionment as the two primary novelistic forms, from which the others spring as efforts at remediation of the unresolved problems these two forms present. The structural differentiation of novel forms issues from the two possible incommensurabilities that apply to the relation between the interiority of the novel’s hero and the adventures that that hero engages in amidst the contingent circumstances of the world. The novel’s world of distance pits an inwardness that is either narrower or broader in its strivings than the outside world in which it acts. The novel of abstract idealism consists in the “demonism of the narrowing of the soul”,125 where the hero remains committed to subjective 124 125

 Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 81.  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 97.

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yearnings that cannot be realized in the contrary expanse of prosaic reality. Due to the lack of any possible reconciliation, the hero’s “psychological rigidity”126 can only lead from one adventure to another, with no appreciable progress and no end in sight until the hero’s strivings becomes unsustainable. Lukács cites Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote as the classic example of the novel of abstract idealism, with a hero whose inner ideals lead him into battle with “the prosaic vulgarity of outward life”, whose continually victorious resistance never robs the hero of his personal valor and confidence in his quest. Honoré de Balzac presents, on Lukács’ account, another version of the novel of abstract idealism, narrating in his epic series, La Comédie Humaine, an endless interweaving stream of personal destinies that leave individuals at cross-purposes and in ultimate solitude as they face the end of unfulfilled lives in a mass society undergoing modernization.127 What gives the novel of “abstract idealism” aesthetic success is the unflinching depiction of the discrepancy in subjective aims and objective circumstances and the achievement of a meaningful closure by narrating a breadth of incident sufficient to convey how an entire world is crystallized in the strivings of its hero. Dickens, Lukács complains, fails in the former regard by letting his heroes abandon their strivings due to some contrived accommodation with the world that had implacably resisted them.128 The opposite novel form, presenting the “romanticism of disillusionment”, plots the converse discrepancy of soul and world where the hero’s subjective aspirations are greater in extent than the destiny that life offers. Here the protagonist is not gripped by a monomania too narrow for the world to fulfill, but rather confidently pursues a life full of personal ambition whose conflict with the constricted realities of external existence provides the saga of the novel. The interiority of this individual stands as an independent totality of its own, aiming to make the world its oyster. The existing conventional relations of marriage, parenting, occupation, class, ethnicity, and nationality are matters of extraneous limitation in face of the personal autonomy of the hero of this novel. Yet, the fulsome  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 101.  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 108. 128  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 107. 126 127

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subjective aspirations of the protagonist cannot help but encounter disillusionment in face of the indifference of the world to their realization. Here the interiority of the hero launches a utopian quest and the novel of the Romanticism of Disillusionment tells the story of how the consuming personal pursuit of an ideal life grapples with the crushing recalcitrance of prosaic reality. Given the unlimited scope of personal ambition and its flagrant incommensurability with mundane circumstance, the novel of romantic disillusion risks disintegration into a formless litany of frustration with no compelling development.129 With no reconciliation in sight, the novelist must bring totality to the story by depicting the richness of subjective aspirations and the immensity of objective obstacles to bring home the compelling significance of the frustration awaiting this mode of modern individuality. The novel of abstract idealism and that of the romanticism of disillusionment both lack the reconciliations that Hegel ascribes to the dual forms of the romance. Their problematic quests, however, are precisely what get resolved in Hegel’s twofold recipe for the romance. Although Lukács does not explicitly refer to Hegel’s account of the romance, Lukács presents their equivalent as the third form of the novel, which attempts a synthesis bridging the oppositions of the two previous types. Goethe’s novel, William Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, serves as Lukács’ model for this form of novel, which embodies the Bildungsroman par excellence. Goethe’s hero sets out in the world as a problematic individual, but through the experience of attempting to fulfill his ideal aspirations, he forges a place for himself in society, achieving a genuine reconciliation between his inward aims and the way of the world. Lukács describes Wilhelm Meister’s interiority as halfway between idealism and romanticism,130 for it pursues a subjective mission but widens it so that it accommodates the concrete imperatives of social life. Through this synthesis, the “inherent loneliness of the soul is surmounted” as the hero of the novel enters the ranks of society, pursuing an occupation and joining a class through which the strivings of his personality become objectified. All this presupposes the emergence of a civil society, in which hereditary 129 130

 Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 130.  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 133.

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privilege has been overthrown and individuals confront the necessity of navigating the demands of the market. In this emergent sphere within which individuals can contribute to the welfare of one another by pursuing self-selected interests of their own, the concrete possibility of a reconciliation of universal ties and independent particularity has actuality. As Lukács points out, the hero’s position in forging this reconciliation is “merely accidental”, for in a civil society, the hero is one of an unlimited number of individuals who aspire to self-directed occupation that achieves its aims in the contingent web of interdependence. What grounds the “relativity of the hero’s position is the possibility of success of aspirations aimed at a common goal linking the individual to this community of destiny”,131 and this ground is the historical formation of a new structure of social freedom that no Homeric hero ever had to accommodate. Such is the fabric of the “novel of education”, the Bildungsroman, in which the hero learns to fulfill his subjective aims by molding his activity to fit the universal forms of social interaction in civil society. Hegel alludes to just this process in describing how the romance charts the way self-seeking individuals discover that the world they confront is one in which they achieve actual fulfillment, as well as one in which their activities end up socially validated through their integration into the web of interdependent community. Nonetheless, the achieved integration into the ethical community of civil society not only depends upon the contingencies of the market, but also entails a leveling of individual significance that extends to the administrative workings of constitutional self-government. Hegel pointed to this mundane anonymity of a post-revolutionary condition, where no individual action can pretend to unite personal and national destiny in the plastic unity of the heroic age of the epos. This predicament poses a challenge to artistic construal, which must always imbue concrete individuality with universal significance. Such a challenge is addressed by Lukács’ fourth form of the novel, which, as exemplified in Tolstoy’s epic masterpieces, “attempts to go beyond the social forms of life” without

 Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 134.

131

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falling back into “abstract idealism” or the “romanticism of disillusionment”.132 Here, in the world-encompassing expanse of War and Peace, searching characters strive to find some meaningful place amidst the upheavals of the Napoleonic era, where feudal society has become a hollow shell and the hopes of a new social order have faded. The anti-hero Pierre, the disillusioned and idle noble, has wandered through the turmoil of the day, expended his passions and higher quests, and, as the “profoundly disconsolate” epilogue recounts, retrieves a semblance of “an essential life … beyond conventionality” in the “nursery atmosphere” of domestic private life.133 Similar paths have been narrated by novelists who reimagine the search for meaning in communities whose pre-modern institutions are under assault from the external modernizations of colonialism, imperialism, and the inequities of the post-colonial condition. Rabindranath Tagore in Home and the World and Gora, Premchand in Godan, and Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart all wrestle with the challenge of living a life of value in face of the advancing onslaught of the mundane world of an externally imposed modernity. Various sagas of post-colonial, post-revolutionary life present analogous narratives of how the new institutions remain fraught with challenges that no Bildungsroman can surmount. Whether it be V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and Bend in the River, Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and In the First Circle, the novel has taken a form where characters face the dilemma of finding meaningful aspirations to pursue in a world who’s incompletely realized institutions of freedom diminish the significance of individual action. Lukács presents us with an additional formal option in Realism in Our Time, where he critically examines the modernist novel in contrast to the “realist” novel. In so doing, Lukács helps us fill out the typology of the novel in a way that reflects Hegel’s premonitions of how modern art subverts itself when it acknowledges how no individual configuration can adequately express the normativity of freedom.

132 133

 Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 144.  Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, p. 148.

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To comprehend the distinguishing character of the modernist novel, we cannot rely upon formal criteria. As Lukács notes, we run amiss if, for example, we focus on narrative techniques that have a distinctly personal and subjective character. James Joyce may make use of the interior monologue of Molly in bed to conclude his very modernist novel, Ulysses, but Thomas Mann makes equally fulsome use of such subjective stream of consciousness in Goethe’s interior monologue in the very realist novel, Lotte in Weimar.134 Just as subjectivity can never be absent in any human reality, so the first-person voice cannot be alien to the literature of any artform or to any literary genre. What matters is how it is handled and what content it expresses. Lukács notes that Joyce makes the stream-of-­ consciousness technique “the formative principle governing the narrative pattern and the presentation of character”,135 while focusing his stream of consciousness narration upon the details of feeling, sense impressions, and memory, rather than upon ideas and emotions that have objective substance. The former may be powerfully evoked, but they have an “aimless and directionless” character, yielding a narrative that is essentially static and immersed in the immediate flow of psychological phenomena.136 By contrast, Mann uses that same stream-of-consciousness technique to reveal Goethe’s dynamic and developmental engagement with his world. In so doing, Mann exemplifies the defining feature of realism, that it regards the subject as fundamentally interconnected with the objective institutions of the day, even if that interconnection takes the form of the problematic individual who is in search of how to make life meaningful in that historical environment.137 By contrast, the modernist novel depicts human subjectivity as literally “thrown-into-the-world”,138 rendering individuals inherently solitary, asocial, ahistorical, and generally “unable to enter relationships with other human beings”.139 Realist literature can portray the loneliness and  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, trans. by John and Necke Mander (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 17. 135  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 18. 136  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 18. 137  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 20. 138  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 21. 139  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 20. 134

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alienation of characters in specific situations that are themselves social in character, as do Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Tagore. The modernist novelist, however, treats such isolation as ineluctable to the human condition. This negation of the historical, intersubjective character of humanity results, as Lukács points out, in the modernist novel characterizing its hero in two corollary ways. On the one hand, the hero is trapped within the precincts of his or her own memories and experience, with no independently given reality intruding upon or being altered by the hero. On the other hand, the hero is thrown before us without any personal history, let alone one that has left its trace upon the world the novel depicts.140 Either way, objectivity is attenuated, together with the concrete potentialities that reside in external actuality. As a result, subjectivity is itself denuded of any determinate anchor in the world that could bring substantial concerns into its interiority. Aims, projects, goals are merely subjective possibilities in the mind of an individual whose personal life has become an impoverished island, with no effective meaningful interaction with the life of others. Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities typifies this modernist reduction of individuality to an “active passivity” and an objectively indeterminate “existence without quality”.141 As Lukács notes, the attenuation of objectivity and concrete individuality is intensified when the medium through which reality is presented is the stream of consciousness in all its immediate, fragmentary phenomenality.142 Whether employed in novels by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or Clarice Lispector, stream of consciousness narration results in an absorption of the life of the hero into “spontaneous” subjective impressions that lack the objectively compelling shape of first person narratives, such as those of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Caruso, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which situate the narrator’s adventures in very concretely defined external situations. The subjective reductionism of stream of consciousness narration is carried to a literally absurd extreme when the interior monologue  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 21.  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 24. 142  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 26. 140 141

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is a blithering tale told by an idiot (as in the first part of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury) or a consciousness progressively losing all its active footing in the world, together with any determinate identity (as in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable).143 An analogous, but less extreme hollowing out of objectivity is followed by novels, like Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, that make the subject’s perusal of personal memories the structuring principle of the narrative. Here what moves the novel along are chance encounters with objects and situations eliciting remembrances according to psychological associations rather than by any actual dynamics of the hero’s relation to others and the encompassing environment. Another variety of this abandonment of any objective dynamic is the endlessly digressive play of the novel’s narrator, foreshadowed in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and reengaged two centuries later in G. V. Desani’s All About H. Hatter. Here it is the stream of consciousness of the omniscient author that dissolves all narrative progress with its unceasing capricious chatter. The removal of any real interrelation between the strivings of individuality and its world condition is equally achieved in the corollary modernist approach that uses a completely impersonal descriptive narration to depict solitary characters devoid of personal history and meaningful interactions, leaving them in face of a wholly anonymous regime whose authority lacks concrete identity just as much as the individuals who confront it. Such is the modernist path of Franz Kafka, whose cipher of a character, “K”, is drawn into a completely opaque and impenetrable legal process in The Trial and a similarly frustrated attempt to connect with the ever-elusive authorities in The Castle. Lukács considers Kafka’s coldly alienating narratives as allegories of social domination in capitalist society,144 just as Hannah Arendt regards Kafka’s novels as parables of the bureaucratic regime of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, whose authoritarian government rules over its subjects with the purely instrumental rationality she associates with modernity.145 Kafka’s novels have their  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 26.  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 77. 145  Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism – New Edition with Added Prefaces (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1973), pp. 245–246. 143 144

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haunting power because, as Lukács notes, they describe their world with enough concrete physical detail to make their living nightmares palpably real.146 Nevertheless, the reality Kafka conveys is more of an effect than an artistic revelation of the quest for meaning in a modern world because he fails to give any compelling individuality to the opposing protagonists – the anonymous hero and the anonymous regime. Kafka’s modernism may be completely “impersonal”, but it lacks the unity of universal and particular on which individuality depends, as well as the unity of meaning and configuration essential to aesthetic worth. As Lukács points out, Kafka presents us with bare, formal particulars on the one hand and empty universals on the other – characters who are substitutable ciphers and suffocating institutions that fail to be animated by concretely identifiable agents. The result is all too much of an allegory.147 Albert Camus’ The Plague is another example of the modernist novel, which, as Lukács observes, veers close to the rote “authenticity” of naturalism, which reimagines what is supposedly immediately given without revealing the essential mediations that determine the dynamic of its characters and institutions. Camus’ novel depicts a calamity that is simply there, with as little possible development as the characters who face it with no sense of direction or meaning.148 Like so many other dystopic novels, The Plague describes its static, inescapable situation with as much verisimilitude as Émile Zola will lavish upon the mining community feverishly depicted in his naturalist novel, Germinal. The major novelists of naturalism, who retain at least a rhetorical commitment to justice, fall into the aesthetic trap of conflating human objectivity with the facticity of persons and society as it directly appears. This approach renders humanity captive to an immutable present precluding historical development and the self-determination of human agency. Naturalist novelists may seek to unveil the actuality of modern society, but their approach deprives them of capturing the vitality of individuality, undermining their ability to give concrete shape to fundamental meaning and depict the reality of freedom.  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 48.  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 45. 148  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 59. 146 147

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The modernists of “impersonal” description replicate the leveling of phenomena in naturalism by eliminating the possibility of distinguishing what is senseless from what is meaningful, what is solitary from what is intrinsically tied to community. Instead of employing selectivity and perspective in introducing the impressions, memories, desires, and aspirations of characters and focusing on events that involve essential human values, modernists wield an inward reductionism and outer indifference that vacates character and its external situation of any “hierarchy of significance”.149 By contrast, realist literature selectively portrays the contents of subjectivity and objectivity so that both contain what is “individual and typical”,150 instead of bare particulars devoid of any universal significance and formal universals with no concrete identity. This does not require the identity of essence and appearance, of personal and national destiny as embodied in the Classical ideal and its epos. It does, however, require a recognition of how the modern human reality consummating the Romantic self-understanding has not given up on searching for inherent meaningfulness in a world in which the institutions of freedom are coming into being. The modernist novel gives up on any expression of human significance. It leaves subjectivity without any objective footing in the world, empties the human environment of any normative substance, or reduces personal striving to completely private gratification, such as in D.  H. Lawrence’s and Henry Miller’s celebrations of sexual fulfillment.151 The “magic realism” of such novels as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Toni Morrison’s Sula, does not bridge the chasm between modernism and realism. Magic realism instead continues the modernist erosion of the concrete vitality of individuality in its immersion in the world by arbitrarily transgressing the limits of actual possibility and the real hold of human community upon the strivings of individuals. The magic of magic realism evaporates the bounds of human  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 35.  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, p. 43. 151  Lukács, Georg, Realism in Our Time, pp. 74–75. 149 150

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interaction and undercuts the coherent agency of individuals by shielding them from the real challenges of modern life, turning their character into a caricature, no more convincing than the fantastical world they inhabit. In all its forms, the modernist novel is not just deficient in comprehension by presenting an untenable contraction of the human predicament in the modern world. It is also aesthetically lacking, for the form and content it employs fails to achieve the unity of individual configuration and fundamental meaning on which aesthetic worth depends. Hegel anticipates the aesthetic impasse of the modernist novel in pointing to how the Romantic self-understanding drives literature to push against its inherent limits by narrating a freedom that can never find adequate embodiment in any particular events. The corollary subjective and objective formalisms of the modernist novel exhibit that difficulty.

Drama in the Romantic Style Authors and performers of drama in the Romantic style face a creative challenge very different from that confronting their Symbolic and Classical counterparts. Because Romantic dramatists artistically express a world view that invests normativity in all the domains of self-­ determination, the form and content of their theater can no longer abide by the imperatives of the Symbolic and Classical dramatization of action. Romantic drama cannot affirmatively present humanity bending passion to dharma and embracing austerities to unite with an absolute transcending all sensuous embodiment nor comply with the Classical ideal through which characters regard human essence and appearance to be one, public life to exhaust everything of fundamental meaning, and responsibility to extend to everything we cause, irrespective of our knowledge and intentions. Romantic drama instead contends with a human situation in which religious, moral, and social autonomy are just as much the order of the day as the ethical bonds of an emancipated household and body politic. The pursuit of these autonomies may face opposition from persisting traditional conventions, both in communities underway modernizing themselves and in those struggling with an external modernization imposed by imperialism and colonialization. In situations where

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emancipation has been fully achieved, individuals face the challenge of forging a meaningful life in a world whose institutions of right no longer depend upon the “heroic” endeavors of any single person. As we have seen, these options open the whole wealth of inner and outer human experience to imaginative transfiguration in narratives of Romantic style epic literature, which depicts the most wide-ranging events wherein individuals grapple with the challenges and burdens of affirming their autonomy in every sphere of their existence. Drama in the Romantic style faces a similar breadth and variety of depiction, but it must distil and concentrate this widened scope within the confines of dramatic interaction, where what characters say to one another must carry the burden of artistic presentation. In every genre of Romantic drama, characterization takes on a new and unrivalled breadth. Protagonists can be drawn from any walk of life and no aspect of their inner and outer existence is off limits to dramatization, provided it contributes to an interaction in which individuals grapple with some aspect of their freedoms. Although characters always act in a world condition with a specific situation, Romantic drama creates characters who are not consumed by fixed passions rooted in given norms of their community, like the “statuesque” protagonists of Classical drama. Instead, the personae of Romantic drama independently determine what will be their driving passion, choosing what counts for them as the locus of their loyalties, the boundaries of honor, and the objects of their love. Since these commitments have a subjective source, protagonists can withdraw and replace them at any time. Moreover, dramatic characters may be torn asunder by competing, conflicting passions that they have simultaneously embraced. The protagonists of Romantic drama are thereby fluid, vacillating personalities, who confront the reactions of others who are just as problematic. Whereas the protagonists of classical drama are fixedly driven by a pathos rooted in existing ethical powers, the characters of Romantic drama are prey to internal division and to transformative development. The incorporation of such subjectively generated dynamics entails a “looser” dramatic movement, in which the action can involve individuals of any status, with ensuing conflicts and intrigues taking twists and turns reflecting the self-imposed flux of its personae. The challenge facing the Romantic dramatist is to maintain the encompassing dynamism of the

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movement. In the absence of the Classical ideal’s clashing pathos of fixed characters representing conflicting ethical spheres, Romantic drama must find its gravity, as well as its comic relief, in the self-selected pursuits of individuals, who struggle with the challenges of inner and outer freedom in their totality. Problematic as their pursuits may be, what gives them dramatic worth is the aspirational greatness of personal strivings for fundamental meaning.152 This requires avoiding corollary pitfalls to which, as Hegel notes, a mass of modern plays have succumbed. On the one hand, the Romantic style drama must not become reduced to a depiction of the inner life of the protagonists, where, instead of character being at the service of the action, the course of the play serves to sketch the psychology of its personae.153 On the other hand, the widened scope of external contingencies in Romantic drama must not submerge the play in the “situations and customs of the period” to such an extent that it ends up relying upon “complicated and thrilling events” to entertain the public or reverting to didactic instruction to reform society.154 On either account the dramatic impact forfeits its aesthetic character for purely prosaic results. To overcome these pitfalls, the drama must transfigure both the subjective strivings of its protagonists and their contingent circumstances so that they exhibit the essential problematics of human life in a world in which the enactment of freedom in all its spheres is the order of the day. When Romantic drama fulfills its due parameters it gives performers a very different opportunity than that of the masked actors of the ancient Greek amphitheater. As Hegel notes, whereas the classical actor embodies a vitalized statue, expressing an unalterable pathos with unwavering resolution, the actor of Romantic tragedy must mobilize every thespian  As Hegel writes, “In modern, or romantic, poetry, on the other hand, the principal topic is provided by an individual’s passion, which is satisfied in the pursuit of a purely subjective end, and, in general, by the fate of a single individual and his character in special circumstances. Accordingly the poetic interest here lies in the greatness of the characters who by their imagination or disposition and aptitude display the full wealth of their heart and elevation over situations and actions, as a real possibility (even if this be often impaired and destroyed solely by circumstances and complications), but at the same time they find a reconciliation in the very greatness of their nature” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1206–1207). 153  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1204. 154  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1204–1205. 152

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resource to convey the total inner and outer life of its character through all the transformations it undergoes in arriving at the denouement.155 Liberated from the confines of mask and plastic characterization, the Romantic performer must enter into the full subjectivity of its personae and use the entire individuality of facial expression, posture, gesture, and declamation to convey the developing inner and outer struggles that embroil the protagonist. Liberated from having to focus upon clarity of declamation behind the fixed veil of mask and statuary resolve, the actor now must bring before the audience the full vitality of its character, enlisting “all outward appearance, and inner attitude of mind too” in behalf of truly portraying its dramatic figure.156 This creative scope allows actors to step out of anonymity as artists in their own right. No longer in need of musical and dance accompaniment to compensate for a sculptural rigidity, the Romantic style actor can use his or her whole living vitality to put a unique stamp upon the performance. Nothing less can realize the integrity of the richly concrete individual the Romantic dramatist has put in words for the actor to bring to theatrical life.157 To succeed in so doing, the Romantic actor, as Hegel warns, must avoid falling prey to a rote naturalism, sacrificing artistic transfiguration for prosaic authenticity. The individuality of the Romantic protagonist, as fulsome as it may be, is still an artistic creation, whose every detail must brim with significance, unlike the given facticity of an actual individual.

Romantic Style Tragedy Can there be tragedy in the modern world where, at least in the most normatively modernized communities, the impersonal operations of established institutions maintain the reality of freedom without depending upon the “heroic” exertions of any single individual and without any irreconcilable conflicts of different spheres of right? Hegel raises this problem in comparison to the world condition of the Classical ideal,  Hegel accordingly notes that “the art of … the actor … has been completely developed only in modern times” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1185). 156  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1189. 157  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1188. 155

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where a heroic age still has meaning and wherein the traditional boundaries of ethical powers can pit individuals in conflicts that consistently inspire tragic dramatization. Hegel provides his own answer. Although he may question whether modern times are inhospitable to tragedy, he not only acknowledges that the Romantic world view has found expression in tragic drama, but he provides us with key features that distinguish Romantic from Classical tragedy. Indeed, tragedy in the Romantic style fundamentally differs in both form and content from classical tragedy. As Hegel points out, Romantic tragedy has a much more varied subject matter than classical tragedy and this more extensive scope entails a looser unity in its dramatic movement.158 Whereas classical tragedy revolves around a conflict of existing ethical powers, embodied in the one-sided pathos of opposing protagonists, who come from royal families combining kinship and personal rule, Romantic tragedy dramatizes oppositions deriving from the independent subjective resolves of its characters, who may come from any part of their communities. They choose what to make a matter of highest concern and in acting upon the passion they give themselves, they enter into conflicts reflecting all the contingencies of a world that neither already fulfills or welcomes their aims. Their driving passions may proceed from whatever they make a matter of honor, faith, or love and in so doing, they must contend with the equally contingent passions of others. Not only are the possible oppositions fraught with endless complications, but the subjective nature of the passions deprives them of the steadfast rigidity of the pathos of Classical tragedy. As a result, the movement of Romantic tragedy does not have the univocal, unwavering direction of Classical tragedy, but rather can involve all the episodic meanderings following from the vicissitudes of its characters’ self-imposed resolves. Nonetheless, the movement remains a dramatic development of spoken interaction rather than an epic saga of events, so that the “looseness” of Romantic drama is still more concentrated than the worldly expanse of the Romantic epic, namely, the novel.

158

 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1167.

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The great challenge facing Romantic style tragedians is how to invest the conflicts of its characters with the gravity worthy of dramatic depiction. In showing how this can be done, Hegel appeals to Shakespearean tragedy as exemplary of the distinctive content of romantic tragedy. Admittedly, in plays such as Troilus and Cressida, Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar, Shakespeare locates the tragic situation in the ancient world of Greece and Rome. In all these dramas, the conflicts that drive the tragedy are not the Classical conflicts of ethical powers as embodied in steadfast protagonists of an unwavering pathos, where responsibility extends to actions no matter what motives accompany them. Instead, the protagonists oppose one another based on struggles over personal power, revenge, and the fulfillment of love in which matters of ethical substance are absent. Although Shakespeare follows the general plot of the Iliad in depicting the conflicts among the Greek camp as they fester before the walls of Troy, he focuses upon the manipulations of Odysseus and the petty feuds of the Greek leaders, while introducing a tale of a problematic love between the Greek Troilus and the Trojan Cressida, which does not originate in any conflict of ethical spheres. Similarly, in Titus Andronicus, the gory tragedy revolves around the vengeance of the Goth queen for the execution of her son by the Roman general Titus. Unlike the Classical tragedies, such as the Oresteia, where revenge issues from human sacrifices rooted in the clash of polis and household, here the contagious recourse to violence is most personal. So, too, in Antony and Cleopatra the conflict revolves around competitions for power and love in which no ethical powers oppose one another. And when Julius Caesar falls prey to his assassins in Shakespeare’s play of that name, the protagonists are motivated by a thirst for power with no ethical ideals at stake. In all these dramas, the tragedy revolves around very personal quests and their problematic ramifications. In other words, the tragic conflicts of these “classical” Shakespearean plays are anachronistically rooted within the human quandaries proper to Romantic drama. Although Shakespeare’s other tragedies leave the ancient world behind, they remain populated by remnants of pre-modern feudalism, where rule and kinship are still joined, and conflicts involve royal families and clans. Nonetheless, the drama does not involve oppositions of ethical spheres or

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personal embodiments of national destinies, but rather the predicament of nascent modern freedoms rubbing up against hostile tradition. In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the feud of families may lay the ground of the tragedy that follows, but what drives the drama to its tragic end are the passions of the lovers for one another, who put their personal relation above all other considerations. What gives their love its dramatic power is that it bears the moral weight of an assertion of personal freedom transgressing the kinship loyalties of fading, but persisting feudal bonds, from which the enraptured Romeo and Juliet cannot escape alive.159 That conflict is what drives the tragedy and, as Hegel observes, Shakespeare does not draw attention to how the bloody conclusion might resolve the family feud, as a classical chorus might do.160 Instead, Shakespeare leaves us with the inevitability of the lovers’ demise, who meet destruction because they cannot tear themselves away from their personal passions nor escape the unrelenting opposition of clan animosities. In Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, Shakespeare gives emblematic realization of the “formal greatness” of character of protagonists161 whose struggles do not directly embody the substantive aims of given ethical spheres, but rather grapple with pathos of their own invention, whose wavering development comes to grief in a world where personal conflicts over love, loyalty, and ambition have become the focal point of human aspiration. Given the subjective source of what matters, incipient conflict is inescapable, and these tragic characters cannot withdraw themselves from the oppositions that ensue. What makes their drama more than much ado about nothing is the normative challenge of grappling with freedom and responsibility that never fails to remain in view. All these tragedies concern figures belonging to the elites of hereditary royal regimes, but their conflicts do not directly concern the fate of the  As Béla Balázs observes, “The amorous dialogue of Romeo and Juliet is one of the most epic scenes in the dramatic literature of the world, for in this most intimate, private dialogue a historical turning-point is reached: the revolt of individual personal love against the fetters imposed by the feudal, patriarchal family and the tribal laws.” See Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), p.  267. Properly speaking, the scene is epochal more than epic, for it remains true to the dialogical dynamic of drama. 160  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1167. 161  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1207. 159

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nation, as in Classical tragedy. Instead, their drama revolves around personal engagements in which loyalty and betrayal, love and jealousy, and hunger for power drive tragic oppositions to which their protagonists succumb. The greatness of character of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear resides in how their personal resolves consume them in ethical tribulations from which they cannot escape alive. In each case, the characters wrestle with not just what they and others cause to happen, as in Greek tragedy, but the purposes and intentions that should be determining the moral dimension of action. Lacking the fixed unwavering pathos of the Classical protagonist, Hamlet tears himself apart over his own subjective vacillation. Unlike Orestes, Hamlet contemplates killing his stepfather and mother for personal retribution, rather than as an inevitable outcome of the conflict of household and political values. As Hegel notes, there is no ethical justification to Hamlet’s father’s murder, as there is for the killing of Agamemnon, so Hamlet confronts not any opposing ethical power, but only an atrocious crime of fratricide.162 To wreak revenge on someone so unworthy of respect might seem to rob Hamlet’s resolve of any dramatic interest, but the turmoil of Hamlet’s inner hesitations offers a tragic playing field owing to the moral depth of Hamlet’s anguish over his own indecision. Similarly, Macbeth comes to grief through the self-inflicted torments of guilt, once more regarding a murder with no ethical justification. Othello strangles his love Desdemona due to enflaming himself with the “green eyed monster” of suspicion of her fidelity, just as Lear drives himself to madness through his gnawing doubts about the loyalty of his most faithful daughter, Cordelia. These Romantic tragedy protagonists do inhabit a concrete world, whose forms of rule, family, and society provide the ground on which they act. Nonetheless, in all these cases the tragedy proceeds from the subjective resolves of the protagonists instead of from any objective conflicts of ethical powers.163 Tragic consequences follow because of the inescapable moral significance their resolves possess, given their recognition of the normative burdens of freedom.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1225.  As Hegel puts it, here we find something absent from Greek tragedy, namely “a decision or a deed resting on purely private interest and personal character, on thirst for power, lust, honor, or other passions, the right of which can be rooted only in an individual’s private inclination and personality” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1212–1213). 162 163

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Although crowd scenes may at times occur, there is no place for an omnipresent chorus to speak on behalf of the substantial interest of the community, for the conflicts ravaging the Romantic world of Shakespearean tragedy revolve around the convergence of accidental occurrences and the personal passions of problematic characters.164 Instead of focusing on the inevitable clash of characters unwaveringly committed to norms rooted in unquestioned institutions, Shakespeare plumbs the personal depths of his greatest tragic figures as they contend with the torments of their inner life facing a contingent world whose traditions are losing their objective mooring and rule has become a formal power lacking substance. These figures’ strife may oppose competing dynasties, vassals against their lords, or members of the same royal house, but never are alternative ethical ways of life at issue.165 Instead, purely personal endeavors come into conflict and the majesty of the drama hangs upon the unforgiving moral integrity of the tragic figures. The Shakespearian world does not yet contain the full establishment of an emancipated household, of civil society, and of political freedom. Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s tragedies exhibit how the vestiges of pre-­ modern families, estates, and hereditary monarchy can no longer stifle the right of subjective freedom to make the self-directed aims of individuals the locus of what truly matters.166 Hegel acknowledges a different path for Romantic tragedy when the pursuit of freedom draws protagonists into the struggle for universal ends of revolutionary significance. He points in this regard to Goethe’s Faust on the one hand and Schiller’s Robbers and Wallenstein on the other. Faust grapples with the pursuit of truth and the establishment of works that retain universal significance, but what distinguishes his personal quests is how the sought-after enactment of a world of freedom is incongruent with the heroic deeds of Classical protagonists, where national substance  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1212.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1223. 166  As Hegel puts it, “it is the right of personality as such which is firmly established as the sole subject-matter, and love, personal honor, etc. are taken as ends so exclusive that the other relationships either can only appear as the eternal ground on which these modern interests are played out or else stand on their own account in conflict against the demands of the individual’s subjective heart” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1224). 164 165

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and individual action could be directly united. Instead, Faust must reconcile himself with how the realization of the regime of freedom is a common work in which no action by a single agent retains essential importance. Similarly, in Schiller’s Robbers, the rebel Karl Moor may aim at subverting the oppressive institutions of his day, but he comes to grief by presuming that his individual rebellion could produce what only established institutions of freedom can collectively achieve. Wallenstein similarly cannot forge the unity and emancipation of Germany, for he presumes that he can achieve his universal aims by subordinating others to his designs, instead of being one among many co-determiners of a new order of freedom.167 The contrast between these tragic situations and those of Shakespearean tragedy highlight a signal feature of modern tragedy: it is a contingent matter whether the protagonist of tragedy in the Romantic style is “gripped by a” pathos of substantial, “intrinsically justified” character or rather one that leads to “crime and wrong”.168 As Hegel points out, the Romantic tragic character may opt for an ethical end, but “this coincidence is not the essential foundation and objective condition of the depth and beauty of a [modern] tragedy”.169 Rather what counts is that the passions driving the dramas express the inner subjective autonomy of the character, as he or she grapples with how to achieve fundamental meaning in a world in which the responsibilities of freedom have cast adrift the certainties of tradition. What then are the fundamental forms that tragedy in the Romantic style can take? Besides referring to how modern tragedy can involve characters whose self-selected passions coincide with ethical ends and those who do not, Hegel points to the contrast between formal and concrete characterization, and between characters who are “firm or inwardly hesitant and discordant”.170 French and Italian modern drama provide the principal examples of what Hegel labels “formal” characterization. They adopt a hollow  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1224.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1226. 169  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1226. 170  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1228. 167 168

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“classicism” in which protagonists abstractly personify passions such as love, honor, fame, and ambition. In so doing, they fail to impart the organic individuality that can bring a character to dramatic life.171 By contrast, modern drama of the sort supremely pioneered by Shakespeare achieves a concrete individuality that depicts the inner and outer struggles of the modern self with an unforgettable depth and power.172 Shakespeare, like any great dramatist of the Romantic style, thereby renders his characters “free artists of their own selves”, instead of typical ciphers.173 This contrast between formal and concrete characterization is not so much a taxonomy of modern dramatic form as a condemnation of the aesthetic failure of the formal sort and a praise of the genuine tragic achievement of its “concrete” counterpart. Hegel’s distinction between modern tragedies with firm as opposed to wavering and discordant characters is equally unproductive in clarifying the options of tragedy in the Romantic style. A firmly motivated protagonist will fit the Romantic style provided that univocity of pathos is not comparable to a fixed Classical ideal embodied in unchanging tradition, but rather a subjective obsession, whose pursuit retains gravity through the moral crises it generates. Shakespeare, Hegel observes, provides “the finest examples of firm and consistent characters who come to ruin simply because of this decisive adherence to themselves and their aims.”174 Dramas of hesitating and discordant character may seem poles apart from those of rigid monomania, but they reflect the contingencies of the same subjective anchor of the tragic individual of theater in the Romantic style. Thus, it should be no surprise that the author of Hamlet can straddle both character types, without need of creating different dramatic forms. Rigid, wavering, or discordant, the figure of modern, Romantic style, tragedy confronts the same perplexities of meaning in a world where given foundations can no longer provide guidance. Whether firm, dithering, or at odds with itself, the dramatic figure must retain a concrete individuality,  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1227.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1228. 173  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1228. 174  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1229–1230. 171 172

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for otherwise, the inward passions of the protagonist are so arbitrary as to render “this personality … only an empty indeterminate form instead of forming into a living way along with determinate aims and a defined character”.175

Tragicomedy and Comedy in the Romantic Style Although Hegel has little more to say about the essential developments to which tragedy in the Romantic style is driven, he does indicate how the worldview it configures provides a ripe arena for dramas midway between tragedy and comedy. This is because the full embrace of inner and outer freedom entails a contingency of external circumstances and subjective resolves allowing outcomes avoiding the tragic destruction of protagonists. Everyday concerns of “money and property, class-differences, unfortunate love affairs, mental wickedness in trifling matters and narrow social circles and the like” can all figure in the moral quandaries of modern life.176 Because the passions of characters, if firm, need not be rooted in conflicting ethical powers, there is no unyielding objective opposition to confront. On the other hand, if the passions are vacillating or discordant, the protagonists can escape inevitable calamity by freely withdrawing from the pathos they have imposed upon themselves. On either count, Romantic drama can avert the self-sacrifice of a tragic denouement and instead accommodate reconciliations fit for tragicomedy.177 Similarly, the Romantic style offers a wide field for dramatic comedy. Symbolic comedy may focus upon ridiculous intrigues pitting love and worldly desires in harmless conflict with dharma and the achievement of nirvana, just as Classical comedy can display the benign foibles of figures making a comical travesty of ethical tradition. By contrast, Romantic style comedy can draw upon the complete expanse of human character and human endeavor, exposing the laughable exertions of figures of all walks of life who haplessly attempt to give significance to their subjective strivings for love, recognition, wealth, power, and ambition.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1229.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1232. 177  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1233. 175 176

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Hegel suggests that modern Romantic style comedy differs from Classical comedy on whether the “folly and one-sidedness of the dramatis personae appears laughable to the audience only or to themselves as well”.178 Whereas Aristophanes located the comedy in the ability of the comic characters to mock themselves, the Greek and Roman satirists began directing laughter at the hapless figures themselves, and, Hegel maintains, this approach has become the universal defining feature of modern comedy.179 Molière’s Tartuffe exemplifies for Hegel this transformation of comic drama under the Romantic style, presenting us with a protagonist who is so “deadly serious” in his aims as to be incapable of sharing in the mirth when his ridiculous endeavors are unmasked. Molière may well make his characters the “butt of the laughter of others, often mixed with malice”, but can this prosaic ridicule really be the defining feature of Romantic style comedy? Does it not rather exhibit the odious misanthropy of a playwright who fails to fulfill the generic mission of dramatic comedy, which is to portray the harmless self-deceptions of individuals who retain the moral resilience to laugh at their own folly in cognizance of their ability to carry on? The very scope of configuration of the Romantic worldview allows ample opportunities for true comic drama that does not mock its characters with derisive venom, but depicts how we can engage in ridiculous machinations in exercising our inner and outer freedoms, laugh at our own folly, and emerge ready for another day. As Hegel acknowledges, the field of private interests in love, honor, and ambition all permit true comedy to be dramatized whenever their pursuit lacks real substance and collapses from its own absurdities.180 Leaving prosaic ridicule behind, dramatists in the Romantic style have successfully created “what is truly comical and truly poetic”, whose “keynote is good humor, assured and careless gaiety despite all failure and misfortune, exuberance and the audacity of a fundamentally happy craziness, folly, and idiosyncrasy in general”.181 Hegel has his proof in the “brilliant example” of the comic  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1233.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1233–1234. 180  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1235. 181  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1235. 178 179

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plays of Shakespeare,182 who has given new life to Socrates’ demand that tragedians try their hand at comedy.183 At the very end of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, he declares that the development of the forms of comedy brings the philosophical inquiry into fine art to an end and at the same time leads to the “dissolution of art altogether”.184 Romantic style comedy does this, allegedly, by presenting the self-destruction of the significance of fine art by reducing it to a display merely of “what is accidental and subjective”.185 This outcome is questionable not simply because new forms of art, namely photography and moving pictures, have continued to emerge, but because comedy, as fine art, never fails to present something of fundamental significance to humanity. Moreover, there is a development of Romantic style drama that Hegel has not completely presented and this development, rather than comedy itself, brings us to the limits of what dramatic literature can achieve.

The Consummation of Drama in the Romantic Style To conceive the further developments to which drama in the Romantic style drives itself, we must leave Hegel behind. Instead, we do better to draw upon the insights of dramatic theorists who have had a chance to consider the more recent transformations of modern theater that Hegel never could witness. Foremost among these theorists is Peter Szondi and in his Theory of Modern Drama he sketches out evolutions of form and content that bring drama in the Romantic style to the same aesthetic problems with which modern architecture, sculpture, visual art, music, and the novel continue to struggle. Although Szondi presents his analysis as an historical investigation of modern theater, what he addresses is the fundamental challenge that the Romantic worldview presents to fine art, no matter what medium is at  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1236.  Plato, Symposium, 223d, in Plato, Complete Works, p. 505. 184  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1236. 185  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 1236. 182 183

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stake. This challenge consists in finding adequate aesthetic embodiment of a self-understanding of the exclusive normativity of freedom whose meaning cannot be fully expressed in any sensuous or imagined configuration. In the case of drama, this challenge pushes artistic creation to transfigure its form and content in ways the undermine the fundamental core of dramatic configuration: the spoken interaction of individuals. Whereas drama, in distinction from lyric and epic literature, makes such interaction the method and theme of its production, the Romantic style’s embrace of the full breadth of inner and outer freedom pushes drama to introduce more and more lyrical and epic aspects at the expense of purely dramatic dynamics. Szondi analyzes these developments in three stages: a transitional phase, in which dramatic interaction still retains its predominance despite lyric and epic incursions, a phase in which lyric and epic aspects gain ascendancy, and a rescue phase, in which dramatists struggle to alter dramatic form to save drama from the self-destruction it is undergoing. Our task will be to explore how these categorizations unveil the limits of drama in the Romantic Style, that is, of modern drama to the extent that modernity, as a normative project, is committed to the institutionalization of self-determination.

 e Transitional Stage in the Self-Undermining of Romantic Th Style Drama Modern drama begins to undercut the interaction at its own core with the transitional works of such playwrights as Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. What makes their work transitional is that it introduces lyrical elements in which personal reflections assert themselves as the focus of the drama without eliminating the framework of conversation in which multiple characters react to one another. In such Ibsen plays as John Gabriel Borkman, as Szondi observes, the remembered past of the protagonist is that on which the drama revolves, instead of the dramatic present of the spoken interaction itself.186  Szondi, Peter, Theory of Modern Drama, ed. and trans. by Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 16. 186

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First-­person narration of memory here drives the action. In so doing, it does not function like the intermittent monologues of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which must be spoken as an aside to shield Hamlet’s plans from his adversaries.187 In Ibsen’s case the disclosure of memory is made openly to the other interlocutors and thereby serves to move the dramatic action along as an integral part of their conversation.188 The scenario does develop through the resulting interpersonal dealings, but it remains rooted in the “innermost being” of characters who thereby are ultimately “estranged and solitary figures”, whose tribulations cannot be given “direct dramatic presentation”.189 The plays of Chekhov bring the subversion of the dramatic present to a double extreme. In The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, for example, Chekhov gives us a tableau of individuals plagued by loneliness whose interactions focus upon personal revelations of remembrances of the past and dreams of a utopian future. This “double renunciation” of the present “in favor of memory and longing” would seem to render interaction and dialogue superfluous, canceling the very core of dramatic form.190 Yet Chekhov’s characters express their lonely fixation on past and future in conversation with one another. A drama therefore remains, but it is perched “midway between the world and the self, between now and then”, where the “resigned self-analyses” of characters are not soliloquies spoken to the audience, but parts of a dialogue arising from the inner depths of the subjects rather than from any situation of objective conflict.191 Of course, the very situation of an immobilized present and a fixation on past and future has its roots in the idle world of a fading gentry in a Russia creeping towards revolutionary convulsion. This background gives the focus on subjectivity an objective grounding, which allows Chekhov’s drama to have a powerful substance, reflecting the normative struggles of the Romantic self-understanding, navigating a world  As Lukács notes, “Hamlet hides his feelings from the people at court for practical reasons … because they would all too readily understand that he wishes to take vengeance for his father” (cited by Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 20). 188  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 16. 189  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 16. 190  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 19. 191  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, pp. 19–20. 187

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in which the challenges of emancipation and modernization have become the order of the day. Nonetheless, the dialogue in Chekhov has a lyric character insofar as what is spoken to others are personal disclosures of memory and longing that isolate the speaker from the present situation. In these “lyrics of loneliness”, monologue and dialogue are merged, enabling the dramatic form to survive the contradictory tension between “monologic thematic and dialogic declarations”.192 Analogous transitional developments of a subjective theater, rooting dramatic development in individual perspective rather than interaction, are found in August Strindberg’s plays. They dramatize the equivalent of a psychological novel that depicts the history of an individual soul, subordinating dramatic situation to an inner autobiography.193 What provides the dramatic unity in such plays as The Father, To Damascus, and The Ghost Sonata is the perspective of the central figure, whose psychological development frames the dialogue that is presented. Instead of capturing a dramatic movement that issues from and in the spoken interaction, these plays present scenes that are tied together by what the central figure experiences without and within. Although the unity of the self here replaces the unity of action as the principle of dramatic form, it involves not just a lyric element in the expressions of inwardness but also an epic aspect. This epic dimension enters insofar as the subjective point of view of the central character operates as a third person narrator, presenting events that that character has experienced. As Szondi observes, this epic opposition between “the isolated I and the alienated-reified world” is most pronounced in Strindberg’s A Dream Play.194 In A Dream Play otherwise unconnected scenes follow one another as events observed by someone who is not part of them. The intrusion of epic elements in modern transitional drama is further exhibited in the “social drama”, of which Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers is a seminal example. “Social drama” attempts to represent fundamental societal conflicts by dramatizing typical events, such as the  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 21.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 22. 194  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 29. 192 193

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weaver’s uprising that Hauptmann puts on stage. As Szondi points out, this endeavor goes against the grain of drama, which treats its interaction as absolute in itself, rather than as a particular, substitutable embodiment of something that exists beyond itself. Although drama proper does not forsake the real world by providing a unique, individual, self-driving interaction, it transgresses its aesthetic mission if it depicts formulaic characters and conflicts that stand for everyone living in similar social straits and for situations uniformly identified by the same economic dynamics.195 As Szondi notes, The Weavers represents a popular explosion that, with the exception of a single scene in the last act, never unfolds through interpersonal conflict developed through dialogue. Because the thematic content is a matter of typical social forces at work, it rubs against dramatic form, which concentrates all action in dialogic interaction. To develop such an intrinsically undramatic content, The Weavers must introduce external figures, a local draftsman and a commercial traveler, to describe the weaver’s predicament in the epic mode of third person narration. The play thereby takes its form through the descriptions of events provided by an unengaged epic “I” and not by the indwelling dynamic of dialogic interaction.196 Nonetheless, the work remains transitional by inserting the epic narration into the dramatic dialogue as conversation contributions by the characters who describe the events they have witnessed. Such descriptions do occur in non-transitional dramas, particularly when characters describe off-stage events such as battles, which are subordinate to the dialogic interaction. Here in the social drama of The Weavers epic descriptions are central to the dramatic movement, which primarily proceeds apart from dialogue. Why should “social drama” arise as a form of Romantic style theater? Its recourse to social forces and typical social actors reflects the very modern situation of an emerging world of institutions of freedom in which no individual agent can play an essential role, as did the heroes of Classical legend. The fate of society and of the nation can no longer hinge upon any single character and the “social drama” reflects that situation of modern agency, which challenges the parameters of dramatic movement.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 36.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, pp. 39–40.

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What connects the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, and Hauptmann as transitional dramas anticipating a more fundamental stylistic upheaval is that all retain the formal framework of interpersonal relations to express a content whose lyric and epic aspects involve a subject-­object opposition rather than the dialogic interaction specific to drama. The content in question saps the interpersonal present of its determining movement by displacing it with the “intrapersonal” dominance of psychological reflection immersed in past memory and future longing, internal transformations, and the extra-personal dynamic of social forces.197 Modern drama thereby imposes upon itself an internal contradiction that is both “overcome and maintained” by configuring a thematic monological content with lyric and epic aspects in a dialogic dramatic form.198

The Final Struggle of Modern Drama To resolve this internal contradiction, modern drama has left behind the old traditional form of interpersonal dialogue and attempted to forge new dramatic configurations that better fit the transformed content. These involve “rescue attempts” and “tentative solutions” that can be characterized, following Szondi, as lyric, expressionist, constraint, epic, and conversation play theater. The new lyric drama, emerging in the early work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, centers on a dramatization of mood in which monologue and dialogue lose their distinction and speech and action no longer coincide.199 Although more than one speaker may participate, their interplay does not drive the movement. Instead, one lyric reflection follows another, compiling a tapestry of subjective thoughts and feelings.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, pp. 45–46.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 46. As Szondi writes, “the principle of dramatic form clearly represents the negation of any separation between subject and object. According to Hegel’s Aesthetics, ‘this objectivity which proceeds from the subject together with this subjectivity which gains portrayal in its objective realization and validity … by being action provides the form and content of dramatic poetry’” (Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 46). 199  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 49. 197 198

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Expressionist theater, as exemplified by Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight and Bertolt Brecht’s early play, Drums in the Night, provides a variation of lyric drama’s focus upon the individual subject, whose detachment from meaningful interpersonal relations renders the course of drama “a journey through an alienated world.”200 Like lyric drama, expressionist theater is at pains to generate a compelling dramatic movement in which anything of objective substance is at stake. So long as the abstract subject of expressionist theater has no essential connection to others, the whole interaction of dramatic dialogue becomes as problematic as the unmoored subject itself.201 The theater of constraint, exemplified by the existentialist dramas of Jean Paul Sartre, bridges the opposition between the isolated self and dialogue by appealing to situations that externally compel individuals to interact, even if they lack any immanent drive to do so.202 Taking “a prison, a locked house, a hideout, or an isolated military post” as a dramatic setting,203 these plays depict how the inmates of these accidental confinements either seek to escape their commingling or resign themselves to its complete indifference to their individual search for meaning. Under these conditions of entrapment, their dialogue is forced just as their interaction is completely alienating. “Having been thrown” into plural existence, to paraphrase Heidegger, the protagonists of the theater of constraint exemplify a human condition in which dialogue and interaction lack any essential significance.204 To quote Sartre in Huis Clos (No Exit), “Hell is other people”.205 Here we have a theater that calls into question the interpersonal relations at the core of drama, and with it, the very possibility of meaningful drama.206 Treading a parallel path to restructuring Romantic style drama, the new epic theater dramatizes what is not genuinely dramatic by bringing a “naturalism” to the stage with greater stylistic consistency than the  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 63.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 65. 202  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 57. 203  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 59. 204  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 61. 205  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 62. 206  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 62. 200 201

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transitional “social drama”.207 The new epic theater treats the action it stages as a “fait divers”, an event of general interest, but of no singular importance to the individuals involved. The action is “essentially ­ anonymous”,208 severing the traditional dramatic connection between action and character in favor of the objective neutrality of third person narration. Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater resolutely reshapes the theatrical framework to fit the third-person perspective that addresses such “objective” content. Expressly rejecting traditional dramatic form and the experience of “catharsis”, Brecht charges his epic theater with “narrating” rather than “embodying” an event. He expressly precludes any vicarious empathic relation on the part of the audience, doing everything to render its theater experience an external observation that conveys critical social understanding to the viewers and arouses their capacity for transformative action.209 The dramatic focus on character and pathos and the indwelling dynamic of plot movement is here suspended, with epic theater interrupting the flow of events with various “estrangement effects” calling upon the audience to stop and reflect upon the social roots of the action and possible remedies to the problems it unmasks. These “estrangement” devices suspend the “absoluteness” of the drama as a self-moving totality and bracket the action through prologues, curtain raisers, and projections of captions and films. All these theatrical interventions prevent dialogic interaction from being the all-inclusive form and content of the drama. Instead, they make the dramatized events objects of “representation” by an external epic standpoint that controls the narrative.210 In addition, “estrangement” extends to how actors perform their roles. On the one hand, actors step out of their personae and address the audience directly to describe their character in the third person. On the other hand, the actors “estrange” themselves from their roles, refraining from emotionally submerging themselves in their character and maintaining a detached critical distance. Similarly, the makeup, costumes, and decors exhibit  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 50.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 52. 209  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, pp. 71–72. 210  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 71. 207 208

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“estrangement” as well, making evident that they are not elements of an “absolute” dramatic space with independent verisimilitude, but rather contrivances of an explicitly represented spectacle. Even the lighting contributes to the “estrangement effect” by leaving lamps on among the ­spectators, as if to disrupt the independent dramatic frame of a lit stage and make clear that the show is for them at an epic distance.211 Brecht’s efforts to explode dramatic form from within by recasting it in terms of third person narration have their parallel in the theater experiments of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.212 Although neither Pirandello nor O’Neill nor Wilder share the political agenda that too often intrudes formulaically in Brecht’s work, each introduces a formal device to bracket the dramatic action as something represented by an epic standpoint. In Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, we have actors both rehearsing a play and figuring as characters who question what role they should play. The rehearsed play may be a dialogue in form and content, but it is something reflected upon by the players as an object of their self-exploration. This occurs not in the manner of Hamlet’s play within a play, which serves to move along the drama, but rather as an external conundrum that paralyzes the drama of the rehearsed play and detaches the characters from their theatrical role. An analogous variant of epic intrusion into dramatic movement is found in O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, whose characters continually interrupt their dialogue to turn to the audience and express their inner thoughts, treating the just transpired interaction as an object of their reflection. These asides do not function as the occasional monologue, which serves the dramatic flow by allowing characters to disclose key feelings and thoughts that drive the action forward but cannot be spoken aloud to the other figures without revealing what must be hidden from them. Far from contributing to an immanent dramatic movement, O’Neill’s continual use of psychological asides in Strange Interlude subordinates the entire dialogue to an ongoing autonomous epic commentary  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 72.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, pp. 77–83.

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from the point of view of each character’s disengaged “I”.213 The play turns into “a montage constructed of dramatic and epic parts”, where the epic standpoint provides the continuity of the play, which “can no longer be derived from the dialogue itself.”214 Epic theater takes further shape in Our Town, where Wilder guides the drama through the third person narration of the Stage Manager. He “stands outside the thematic space”, determining the order of the scenes, binding them together as objects of his narration.215 Whereas the transitional plays of Strindberg and Hauptmann had relied on characters within the dramatic interaction to describe past events and social circumstances, here Wilder places an epic narrator entirely outside the dialogue as its master manager, wielding the absolute power to “reach back in time and make the past present once more”. This epic narrative control over time is equally exhibited in the “memory” play of Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. As Szondi observes, Miller does not make the interpersonal dialogue generate this play’s frequent recourse to the past. Instead, Miller gives the psychological state of his protagonist the power to take hold of the dramatic movement, leading it instantaneously into scenes depicting past experiences from his point of view.216 Through this intrusion of epic form, Miller’s play simultaneously represents the present reality of its characters’ interaction and the reality of their past as imagined in the episodic memory of its struggling protagonist. This conjunction is inherently problematic, for the dramatizations of remembered scenes exist only for the single awareness of Willy Loman, falling outside of and apart from the rest of the action. Once more, the epic standpoint strikes at the heart of the absolute stature of dramatic interaction, whose dialogue unites form and content.217 All these purveyors of epic transformations of theater ultimately struggle with an inability to locate sufficient aesthetic substance in what dramatic movement can independently provide. The ensuing erosion of  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 83.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 83. 215  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 84. 216  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 92. 217  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 95. 213 214

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theatrical form and content is brought to its limit in the “conversation” play, whose master is Samuel Beckett. Here modern drama arrives at the ultimate extreme to which all the innovations of lyric and epic intrusions have led. This new conversation play takes the very core of drama and brings it to self-nullification. Unlike lyric and epic drama, the conversation play operates entirely through interpersonal verbal exchange, with neither lyric monologue nor estrangement effects nor epic narration. The conversation, however, is one in which the dialogical present is completely aimless. The dialogue has no inherent relation to the specific character of its participants, nor does it entail conflicts that propel any further action. Instead, the conversation has a meandering, inert independence of its own, hovering between “people instead of uniting them”, with “no subjective origin and no objective goal”.218 Detached from personal pathos and interpersonal activity, the conversation passes idly by, citing matters of the day, quoting “real social types”, but conversing without any motivation rooted in the individual interlocutors and without precipitating any specific denouement.219 Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is the supreme example of the conversation play, dryly showing how form and content get equally eviscerated when drama restricts itself to such conversation. In Waiting for Godot, the characters Vladimir and Estragon have nothing but empty, pointless conversation to engage in. Consequently, their very being as people waiting “for Godot – this deus not only absconditus but also dubitabilis” consists in nothing but their continual flight from the precipice of silence to renewed futile dialogue.220 Drama here has collapsed into the senseless continuance of conversation, whose form is just as hollowed out as its content. Beckett will push this collapse even further in such plays as Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Not I, where meaningful interaction is progressively eliminated, first with characters losing their ability to physically interact by being planted in the ground (Endgame), then where one  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 53.  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 53. 220  Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, p. 54. 218 219

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speaker comments upon recordings of his own voice, and finally where just a mouth appears on stage babbling away. Dialogue, human interaction, and dramatic form itself have all effaced themselves, pushing to its theatrical limit the aesthetic problematic of the Romantic self-­ understanding, which is at a loss to find an imagined configuration that can meaningfully capture self-determination in its full inner and outer reality.

Part VII The Aesthetics of Motion Pictures

14 Pure Cinema as Fine Art

Pure Versus Hybrid Cinema Few can deny that today motion pictures have become an art of unrivaled public attention and unrivaled mobilization of creative resources. Whether relying upon chemical or digital photography and video, with distribution through cinemas, television, and internet streaming, motion pictures have achieved global preeminence as the most popular and influential contemporary art. With the advance of sound recording technology, motion pictures have displaced opera and musical theater as the modern world’s dominant “total” art, combining the temporal sequencing of two-dimensional images with music and the spoken and written word. Cinema now kinetically encompasses not only the visual imagery of two-dimensional graphic art and photography, but that of architecture and sculpture, as well as that of mime and dance. Further adding music and language, cinema now “adapts” every musical and literary form to its motion pictures. The art of the moving image has thus become a total hybrid art, whose character cannot be understood without first comprehending the “pure”, unmixed arts of which it is composed. The systematic theory of the individual arts, which conceives the “pure” arts in their undivided singularity, provides the theoretical prerequisite for conceiving the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_14

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aesthetic reality of the art of moving images in its full-fledged hybrid actuality as a “total” art that draws upon visual artistry, music, and literature. Our task in the current work is to differentiate the arts through the fundamental media of artistic creation and determine how these individual arts specifically embody the features of art in general and of the particular artforms. Although motion pictures have come to combine their visual dynamism with music and the spoken and written word, there is a basic, uncombined core of the art of making images kinetic that falls within the general orbit of pure visual art to whose imagery it adds temporality and change. This primary, purely visual dimension of motion pictures comprises the “pure” cinema that does fall within the systematic theory of the arts, prior to any determination of how these arts can be combined in hybrid ways. It nonetheless allows for a proper theory of the total art of moving images, when supplemented with the conception of “pure” music and “pure” literature, as well as an understanding of how these three media can be aesthetically integrated. We therefore begin with the theory of “pure” cinema, examining what motion pictures specifically achieve as a fine art. This investigation, combined with the accounts of the other “pure” arts, provides the prerequisite for properly understanding the hybrid art of motion pictures. As we shall see, the form and content inherent in “pure” cinema both underlies how the other arts can be drawn upon in the syncretic creation of hybrid cinema and provides aesthetic grounds for why cinema has been driven to add sound and word from its very beginnings.

 he Pure Art of Moving Images and the Fine T Art of Photography Motion pictures have arisen primarily as a further development of photography, made possible by the invention of the movie camera and movie projector. Earlier moving images had been produced by flipping bound pages of drawings or spinning slitted wheels with images distributed around their inner circumference. These devices provided more of an

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entertaining curiosity than a media for fine art. Moving images could obtain a medium sufficient for genuinely aesthetic purposes only after Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and their counterparts invented cameras that could sequentially shoot pictures on a continuous movie “film”, which, after development, could be shown through a movie projector. It must not be forgotten, however, that the invention of the apparatus of motion pictures, like the invention of photography, only set the stage for the development of film and photography as fine arts, which required the aesthetic innovations that enable each new medium to become a bonafide vehicle of artistic creation. Of key importance for film artistry is that the abiding technology of motion pictures grounds its moving images in the still photograph no matter what form movies take. The device by which images are recorded in temporal sequence allows for perception of their ceasing and coming to be, their duration, and their change in time. It does so by recording still images at successive moments that are both sufficiently regular in their temporal spacing and sufficiently close in time so that whatever device displays their flow allows the viewer to perceive their sequence as a continuous movement in which the simultaneity, duration, and change of the imagery can be experienced. The more “frames per second” pass in view, the less “jumpy” and “discontinuous” the flow of imagery will be. The more constant the speed of recording and projection, the more regularized will be the perceivable temporality of the world of imagery presented by the motion picture. This is true whether each “frame” consists of an image produced by using light sensitive chemicals or digital sensors or a computer simulation of either. In every case, the resulting moving imagery will be composed of the equivalent of discrete photographs, whose succession in recording and playback constitute the kinetic two-­ dimensional visual creation. Like the works of any other temporal art, such as dance, music, and literature, the so created motion picture will be appreciated as such only through the synthetic mental activity of its audience, whose members must connect their present perception with memory of what went before and anticipation of what is to come. The fundamental relation between movie and still “photograph” applies whether the recording device or “movie camera” captures the reflections of unposed, unscripted appearances, of staged arrangements of

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subjects, or of drawings done by hand or computer. Moreover, the work of moving images consists of a series of still visual images whether the resulting movie consists of a photographic sequence representing the world as seen through the camera eye, a figurative animation using drawings, computer generated imagery, or stop action manipulations of inanimate models, or a completely abstract expression, using figurative and/or abstract images for its successive frames. Always, the motion picture consists of recorded still images, equivalent in chemical or electronic or computational reality to individual photographs, taken at temporal intervals and viewed in whatever sequence the movie maker chooses for the final work of cinema. Insofar as motion pictures thereby consist of temporal integrations of photographs broadly speaking, “pure” cinema incorporates all the features of still photography, while adding those that depend upon the sequential ordering of individual photographs. As we have seen in the account of photography as a graphic fine art, the still photograph has two dimensions, one “mechanically reproductive” and the other “formative”. Both are incorporated in motion pictures. On the one hand, motion pictures contain the seemingly mimetic mechanical reproduction of the visual imagery reflected off the surface of phenomena and passing through the camera lens onto the chemically or electronically light sensitive factors that capture those reflections in black and white or color with the help of further “development”. The un-­ staged, ephemeral, happenstance fidelity of such photographic still images can, and have been simulated by animated movies, whose individual frames may be drawn by hand or by computer assisted technology that either supplements photographic imagery or supplants it entirely. Such mechanical reproduction enables the motion picture single frame to capture sights that elude ordinary natural vision.1 The movie camera eye, with or without the assistance of animation, can reveal small and large details, as well as fortuitous combinations that otherwise remain unnoticed. So too, the movie frame can take advantage of those “bird’s eye” and extraterrestrial perspectives that lay beyond ordinary view. Thanks to  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 46. 1

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the apparent reproductive fidelity of all these photographic revelations, film can imbue whatever it captures with the authority of “unstylized naturalness”,2 appropriating photography’s facility in recording instantaneous visual reality.3 On the other hand, motion pictures incorporate all the “formative”, creative, non-mimetic, transfigurative aspects of still photography. Even the most unposed snapshot will exhibit the artistic choices of the photographer for a lens with a specific aperture, focal length, and speed, a type of chemical film or electronic sensor with a particular light and chromatic sensitivity, a particular framing of the picture, and a subsequent processing that will determine how the finished photograph appears. All these choices have been simulated by animators in their drawings, stop-action compositions, and computer-generated imagery. In addition, the movie will contain all the positive constructions of visual imagery that explicitly “formative” photography provides. This includes the artistic staging and posing of objects and figures, as well as the use of artificial backdrops. The photographic simulations of animation can take all these content constructions to an imaginative extreme, with the burden of having to replicate the exhaustive detail of photographic mechanical reproduction. This challenge becomes most evident when the human figure is animated through drawing, stop-action, or CGI (computer generated imagery), which all too often rob this most concrete of visual subjects of its individual authenticity. Whereas the graphic artist can lavish creative attention upon a single image, animators must economize their representations to make feasible the production of the vast number of stills out of which an animated movie is composed.

 Balázs, Béla, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (London: Dennis Dobson LTD, 1952), p. 268. As Balázs points out, however, “even completely unstylized naturalism is a style” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 269. 3  In this respect, Siegried Kracauer observes that film’s “basic properties are identical with the properties of photography.” See Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 28. 2

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 hat Motion Pictures Add to Still W Photographic Artistry Motion pictures compound all the foregoing “mechanically reproductive” and “formative” aspects of still photography by using the succession of frames to provide a new dynamic arena of specifically cinematic artistry. Generally, this arena is the kinetic visuality of phenomena in space-­ time, which cinema captures and transfigures through both the “mechanical reproduction” of the movie camera and the “formative” constructions of the movie makers. The new capabilities of cinematic “mechanical reproduction” are evident in considering what the movie camera eye can see that the still camera eye cannot. A “still” photograph can “reproductively” picture all that can visually appear to the camera’s fixed vantagepoint at a single moment in time. By contrast, the cinematic succession of images can “reproductively” track all that passes through the movie camera lens during its operation, whether from a fixed position or from a succession of vantagepoints to which the movie camera may move without otherwise altering its configuration. Even when the formative impulse is reduced to a minimum, leaving the movie camera in place without any changes in lens, focus, aperture, speed, or film sensitivity, and the film is developed with no editing, the succession of images reproduces whatever “real” time interval has transpired during filming, as exhibited in whatever contrast of movement and rest has been recorded. The film renders the immobile “here and now” that the still photograph reproduces a dynamic moment of a motion picture, passing from past to future, and, potentially, from place to place. Whereas “life in motion” eludes still photography, film is specially suited to picture the “flow of life” in the broadest sense.4 Capturing movement as still photography can never do, film has an affinity for everything kinetic that appears to sight. The visual flux of celestial orbits, geological upheavals, weather convulsions, life processes, and all the activities of persons in the pursuit of a meaningful existence are

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 60.

4

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uniquely accessible to film in both its mechanically reproductive and formative capacities. Motion pictures can reveal phenomena so transitory that they would remain unseen if not for two converse cinematic techniques. Thanks to accelerated-motion, film can reveal processes, such as plant growth, that are too slow to be observed, just as, thanks to slow-motion, film can capture movements too fast to be noticed, achieving in “temporal close-­ ups … what the close-up proper achieves in space.”5 By varying the speed of successive film frames, motion pictures wield the power to compress and dilate time, putting at cinema’s artistic disposal dimensions of human reality that cannot otherwise by visualized. Owing to the mobility of the movie camera lens, film can survey worldly happenings too enormous to fit on a stage or into a still photograph. Using panning, zooming, tracking, and montages of close and long shots, movies can capture vast events from natural disasters to mass actions.6 Moreover, film can reveal unnoticed fortuitous sequences, both worldly and in our imaginings, that no single photograph can unveil.7 Every accidental, haphazard event that takes place on the “street” may become grist for the serendipitous attention of the movie camera.8 In short, what film essentially can do that still photography cannot “is picture movement itself, not only one or another of its phases.”9 For this reason René Clair hits the mark in insisting that “if there is an aesthetics of the cinema … it can be summarized in one word: ‘movement’”.10 The movement in question, however, need not be merely physically objective. It can just as much be the visual flux of a subject’s roving point of view or dynamic imagination and recollection. Moreover, film’s capture of physical and psychological movement is not a mere replication of that which the prosaic eye sees. With reproductive and formative powers lording over space and time and  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 53.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 50. 7  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 53. 8  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 62. 9  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 34. 10  Cited by Kracauer in his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 34. 5 6

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psycho-physical appearance, the movie camera eye can reveal kinetic imagery that transcends the limits of ordinary conscious perception.11 Admittedly, the movie camera’s mechanical reproduction can capture as little as the virtual catatonia of an Andy Warhol film, where the filmed subjects are just as frozen as the camera work. This cinematic minimalism may achieve in film the same self-impoverishment that John Cage achieves in music by composing an interval of silence, but in both cases, the duration of time through outer or inner experience is still expressed through some barely perceivable flux. By the same token, the immobile movie camera extends the un-staged objectivity of photographic mechanical reproduction even when it rotely records a scene of movement, whose alterations reveal themselves with a putative authenticity guaranteed by the lack of editing. Whereas the single fixed image can reveal a field of human concern against a backdrop as detailed and extensive as the camera perspective allows, the most “non-­ formative” motion pictures can capture the vicissitudes of life as given in their immediate visual appearance. When the movie camera is set free to move from place to place, cinema gains new opportunities for exploring the dynamic world at its “reproductive” disposal. Now the successive frames of the motion picture can record the spatial-temporal lay of the land along the trajectory of the movie camera eye. This can reveal moments, places, and vantagepoints otherwise unavailable to the spectator, who now is transported through the visible dynamic world, experiencing how it changes at various times and locations. Eschewing any editing, the entire film can comprise a “single-­tracking” shot, whose uncut, uninterrupted navigation vouches for the authenticity of the recorded spatial-temporal continuum. Pretenders have tried to simulate such maniacal fidelity to continuous filming, as has Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu in his 2014 film, Birdman, which is edited to appear to be filmed in a single uninterrupted shot. Yet, the real feat has been accomplished by Alexander Sokurov in his 2002

 Walter Benjamin can thus suggest that through the movie camera eye “we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis” (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, p. 37). 11

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film, Russian Ark, which actually consists in one amazingly choreographed ninety-six minute continuous shot. Once the movie camera becomes mobile, the movie maker can make use of panning shots. Here the movie camera uninterruptedly scans a scene from one end to another, disclosing a putatively faithful panorama of un-staged reality. When the panning camera conveys the viewpoint of a filmed character, it equally inserts the viewer into the changing view of that figure. This can bring cinematic movement into a completely confined space, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, whose room-bound action is enlivened by panoramic shots that alternately place the audience within the eyes of its different characters.12 If the movie camera is equipped with interchangeable lenses or lenses that can zoom continuously in or out, motion pictures can dynamically explore the most intricately detailed or most grand encompassing vistas. With close-ups, the movie camera can bring the spectator into the recorded action with an intimacy otherwise unavailable to theatrical performance. Zooming in and out, the motion picture shows the “microphysiognomy” of each figure,13 as well as what is visible at nearest hand from any place in time, as if transporting the spectator into the world of cinematic reality and the viewpoint of each filmed figure. Whereas the still photography close-up shows the same magnified detail frozen in time, the cinematic close-up leads the spectator directly into the scene following whatever movement the movie camera eye projects. All these ways in which the movie camera brings a new dynamic visuality to photographic “mechanical reproduction” are compounded by the constructive creativity afforded by movie makers’ control over the succession of frames. Whereas cinema can incorporate all the formative prerogatives that the still photographer wields in choosing the camera lens, setting its aperture, speed, and focus, framing the picture, and deciding whether to photograph unposed or posed subjects, movies add the completely novel ability to determine how individual frames will succeed one another.

12 13

 Balázs, Béla, Theory of the Film, p. 140.  Balázs, Béla, Theory of the Film, p. 65.

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This formative control minimally involves determining how the movie camera will be oriented from shot to shot, whether remaining fixed, panning from one direction to another, changing the camera angle, or tracking its prey by moving through the reality that the movie camera eye mechanically reproduces. It further involves decisions on how to vary the movie camera lens and its settings during filming, including zooming in and out, as well as using camera techniques such as fade outs and dissolves. All these creative initiatives can be taken without dividing the camera shoot into multiple takes, which are afterwards cut and connected. What gives the movie maker the greatest creative license and one that most fundamentally transcends the limits of still photography is the “post-production” opportunity of film editing. Thanks to film editing, the movie maker can create a motion picture freely integrating the widest possible range of different shots. The restrictions imposed by filming in a single continuous take are removed, giving the motion picture creator the maximum autonomy in shaping the visual flow, whether it draw upon the unposed objectivity of photographic “mechanical reproduction” or the formative constructions of posed photography, animation, and computer-­generated imagery. Film thereby takes control over time and space. Whereas each continuously shot scene of a film unfolds in a real unbroken time within a unitary space, editing allows film time to jump from moment to moment and place to place, be it in the past, present, or future of filmed reality or of filmed imagination. Through editing, the movie camera eye can move from the vantage point of one character to another, both in a common space and across the widest distances. This dramatic use of camera space, where dialogue proceeds from the literal point of view of each participant, can even merge viewpoints, as in Irvin Kershner’s 1978 film, The Eyes of Laura Mars, where Faye Dunaway plays a fashion photographer who acquires the horrifying ability to see through the eyes of a serial murderer. The movie camera’s assumption of the point of view of film characters can also be supplemented or entirely supplanted by an “epic” standpoint, where the roving movie camera eye takes its position outside of each character, as mobile composition and editing determines. Finally, with dogged devotion to the viewpoint of a first-person narrator within the movie camera

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world, film can be edited so that every shot presents what that character sees amidst the action. This “lyric” first-person approach to film editing is brought to an extreme by Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, in which every shot is seen through the eyes of the hero, who never himself appears except in three mirror reflections he momentarily glimpses. Time enjoys similar plasticity at the hands of film editing. With great ingenuity and discipline, an edited film may have a duration equal to the time of the action it portrays, as in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon. This creative choice is, however, anything but typical of the cinematic handling of the unities of time and space. Ordinarily, film transfigures time in a threefold manner relative to the duration and speed of the action and the speed of the cutting and montage. First, there is the actual duration of the entire action that is filmed. Second, there is the depicted duration of an individual film scene. Third, there is the actual duration of the film that includes its different scenes, which, through various collations of shots, may just as well abbreviate the time portrayed as drag it out through various close-ups and reaction shots.14 Carefully interpolated fade-outs can also provide a ‘filmic time’, analogous to the spatial distancing provided by perspective and the atmospheric desaturation of color and the blurring of detail. A ship can be filmed gradually receding, but if its picture progressively fades away, that fade-out can suggest a passage of time extending beyond the actual duration of its disappearance from view.15 Weaving time and space with abandon, editing thus provides the final crowning creative process in filmmaking, assembling and combining the individual shots into a unified sequential whole, capable of fulfilling the requirements of a work of fine art, for which no aspect of configuration can lack significance.16 Through the montage of separate shots, each obtains its ultimate meaning within the work as a whole, just as the integration of musical notes gives them their rhythmic, harmonic, and

 Balázs, Béla, Theory of the Film, pp. 129–130.  Balázs, Béla, Theory of the Film, p. 145. 16  Balázs, Béla, Theory of the Film, p. 118. 14 15

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thematic value.17 The resulting film can thereby show something that none of its individual shots can express by themselves.18 The final creative synthesis of editing thus renders “the finished film ... the exact antithesis of a work created at a single stroke.”19 By wielding the freedom of choosing and assembling film shots as aesthetic considerations demand, the master of the final cut is always able to do what a sculptor of a marble block is least capable of – remedying previous artistic blunders. Although Walter Benjamin claims that editing makes film “the artwork most capable of improvement”,20 the movie editor still must use what shots are already available, unlike a composer of music or a creator of literature, who can effortlessly replace notes and words with better new options.

The Fundamental Form Language of Cinema Taken together, the novel aspects of the “mechanical reproduction” and “formative” dimensions of cinematography constitute a new form language specific to the art of motion pictures. This form language was not immediately launched with the invention of the movie camera and movie projector. The first cineastes used their cameras in a rote photographic way, taking motion pictures from a fixed vantagepoint without any successive changes in camera settings. This lack of camera mobility applied to the early film counterparts of both the photographic realists and the formative fabulists. The Lumière brothers simply placed their movie camera in front of the un-staged phenomena they wanted to film, recording whatever movements came their way to the astonishment of viewers who for the first time faced the image of a train speeding towards them. Other early cineastes filmed stage performances, setting their cameras in a stationary position, recording what they saw as if the movie camera were a  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 119.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 123. 19  Benjmain, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, p. 28. 20  Benjmain, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, p. 28. 17 18

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theater spectator seated at a particular distance from the stage, which dictated at what angle the action could be properly seen. Former conjurer Georges Méliès, on the other hand, filmed the most fantastical and magical illusions, using basic cinema techniques such as multiple exposures, superimpositions, masks, and lap-dissolves to enable objects and people “to disappear, to fly through the air, to change into each other”.21 Although Méliès thereby created a “cinematic illusion that went far beyond theatrical make-believe”,22 he did all this while keeping his camera firmly rooted in place, producing what remained equivalent to “photographed theater”.23 Only decades later did the new form language specific to cinema become developed by the pioneers of the burgeoning film industry emerging in Hollywood and its competitors.24 Joining the upheaval of calcified tradition sweeping their new societies,25 the likes of W. D. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein Serge Eisenstein began discovering the possibilities of camera movement and montage, inaugurating a genuinely new artistic medium. The key to the new cinematic art is the “mobile composition” specific to film.26 Wielding an architecture in space-time, it makes use of the changeable viewpoint of the moveable cinema camera to create living dynamic scenes.27 These scenes are composed of ‘shots’ or sectional pictures that do not break up a previously taken photo into separate details, but rather combine these shots through editing into a total scene, which is ultimately woven with others into a unitary film.28 In so doing, the  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 29. Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 33.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 33. 23  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 29. 24  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 47. 25  Balázs maintains that Hollywood could be the cradle of cinema because the old world of Europe was “unfavorable ground for the sudden leap into the completely new twentieth century art which the traditionless and unbiassed Americans could lightly accept” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 49). 26  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 52. 27  Balázs speaks of this “mobile composition” as an “architecture in time, not space” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 52), but properly speaking the constitutive mobility of the movie camera is spatial and temporal at once, as Balázs himself shows in discussing how the viewpoint of the camera changes with the flow of shots. 28  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 52. 21 22

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filmmaker does not merely display photographic details, but integrates them in a dynamic sequence that puts emphasis where the editor sees fit, enabling the filmmaker to “interpret” each frame as it figures within the newly constructed whole.29 Salient features of the resulting kinetic composition are the changing distance and orientation of the cinematic viewpoint, the dynamic unveiling of details through close-ups and zooming, the cutting from one shot to another, and a new type of identification of the viewer with the living spectacle.30 Unlike any other visual art, cinema puts the viewer in its mobile composition by enabling the spectator to see what is seen from the variable vantagepoint of the movie camera.31 That dynamic viewpoint allows the viewer to look at what can be seen from any place to which the camera travels, be it the most remote or concealed outposts of un-staged reality or the most unworldly viewpoints overlooking whatever constructed fantasy the cineaste may render visible. The changing set-up of the movie camera or its animated simulation thereby introduces a whole new creative avenue that the fixed viewpoint of still photography and theater cannot provide. Each new positioning of the movie camera shows not only a different “piece of reality, but a point of view as well”.32 In determining the mobile composition of each shot, the variable camera set-up equally discloses the inner point of view of the movie maker. At the same time, the mobile set-up puts the audience in a completely new situation. Because the film spectator directly experiences the changing view of the camera, that spectator can share to an unparalleled extent the perspective of any characters within the movie camera reality to whose virtual position the camera navigates.33 In this way, the  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 32.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 46. 31  As Balázs observes, “in cinema the camera carries the spectator into the film picture itself. We are seeing everything from the inside as it were and are surrounded by the characters of the film. We see what they see and see it as they see it. Our eye and with it our consciousness is identified with the characters in the film, we look at the world out of their eyes and have no angle of vision of our own. We walk amid crowds, ride, fly or fall with the hero. If one character looks into the other’s eyes, he looks into our eyes from the screen, for our eyes are in the camera and become identical with the gaze of the characters.” Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 47. 32  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 90. 33  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 90. 29 30

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vicarious experience of a theatergoer or reader of literature gets visually energized in the dynamic identifications into which the film draws its viewers. This experience may lack the positive feedback of virtual reality devices, where the viewer can actively alter what is seen, but it brings to bear all that a cinematic passive involvement can convey to a spectator. Enhancing cinematic immersion for the spectator is the darkening of film theaters during projection,34 the cinema etiquette of silent viewing, and the suggested sequestering of each viewer in a separate cubicle excluding perception of others during screening.35 Even though the newly invented movie camera may have initially been often used to record stage performances, the form language specific to film immediately sets cinema free of the fundamental confines of theater viewing.36 In the theater, the spectator views the performance as a spatial whole, always framed by the architecture of the stage, whatever form it has. Secondly, theatrical spectators view that spectacle from a set distance mandated by the location of their seat or standing room position. Thirdly, the vision with which they view the stage performance has an optimal angle and peripheral reach determined by their fixed position and the given geometry of the theater. All these limitations are overthrown by the mobile composition of motion pictures, with important implications for every aspect of cinematic art, even at its purest visual minimum. A stage production must take special measures to project whatever it wants to display to the fixed positions of its spectators. Scenery, costumes, and makeup must be designed to be visible at precisely that distance and orientation, just as any theatrical performance style must be sufficiently demonstrative and directed to be seen by the theater audience. Moreover, the time and space of the theater piece must observe the continuities of the performance space. By contrast, the peripatetic movie camera can reveal its content from any distance and direction, with as much and as little detail as desired, and travel along space and time with whatever connections editing may create. Consequently, every accoutrement of the  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 159.  Henri Langlois, the co-founder and manager of Cinémathèque Française, is reputed to have advocated such immersive cubicle film viewing. 36  Balázs describes all the three following limitations in his Theory of the Film, p. 30. 34 35

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filmed activity must be presented with no more and no less visibility than the mobile composition requires. If the film captures any acting, this must conform to the new dynamic intimacy that the movie camera eye, live or animated, can convey. To the extent that closeups, tracking, and zooming allow every figure to be seen right in the viewer’s face, the “microphysiognomy”37 of the film character looms large, giving the visible appearance of any living actor a prominence beyond what theatrical distance provides, while allowing the smallest nuances of expression to be captured. As a result, when film uses living actors with any realistic intent, they must tone down their gestures and facial contortions from what a theater performance could consistently permit. So too, the audience must adapt itself to the new viewing experience of cinema and come to understand how its form language specifically transfigures space, time, and the dynamic world into which the movie goer is imaginatively inserted. The film audience must become accustomed to the significance of fadeouts, dissolves, cuts, flashbacks, and other forms of montage. In this respect, the emergence of the new art of motion pictures fosters the development of a new parallel aesthetic sensibility acquiring a distinct cinematic vision and appreciation, conversant in film form language.38 Part of the new cinematic experience is that the viewer no longer confronts a stage in which living actors interact amidst dead, inert scenery. Instead, film allows the visible reality of objects and environments to have just as much dynamic life as any individuals that appear. In cinematic reality, everything is a moving image, whether foregrounded actor or background landscape. This allows the expressive mood of cinema to extend to everything that crosses the screen. Whereas a stage performance is inevitably fixated upon the actors, the movie camera is free to explore every corner of both animate and inanimate reality with as much roving attention as serves the living whole that the motion picture creates.39 Of course, a filmmaker may choose to truncate the possibilities of mobile composition and use scenery that is more theatrical than  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 65.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 34. 39  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 45. 37 38

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cinematic. The stylized scenery of many a German Expressionist film displays the aesthetic anomaly of failing to extend cinematic dynamism to the entire film frame. Robert Wiene’s 1920 silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a prime example of this appeal to scenic stylization that contradicts the dynamic reality that cinema’s mobile composition is suited to present. Wiene takes such stylization to an extreme, absorbing almost the entire film background into what amounts to a fixed set whose filming renders it a picture of a painting, where scenery painters rather than the mobile camera are responsible for every slant of walls, floors, ceilings, lampposts, and trees.40 Such static scenic stylization conflicts with cinema’s “art of motion”, even when it is carried out on a smaller scale, as in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, which uses backdrops that are painted replicas of Medieval Flemish landscapes. That is not to say that artificial scenery cannot play a consistent role in cinema, but to do so, it must somehow incorporate the dynamic movement of film, as do some of Federico Fellini’s artificial sets in such movies as And the Ship Sails On, Juliet of the Spirits, and Satyricon. In general, however, the burden of cinematic stylization falls most consistently in the hands of film specific technique, namely in the set-up, manner of shooting, and editing of creative mobile composition.41 Of these three elements, editing has the final word on stylization, for the set-up and cinematography of any single shots are always subordinate to the encompassing montage of scenes, which consummates their meaning and configuration.42

Cinematic Content and Film Genres The form language of motion pictures, as the formal principle of a cinematic fine art, is not indifferent to the content that it puts in visual motion. Because aesthetic value always revolves around the unity of  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 106.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 107. 42  As Balázs writes, “The most expressive set-up is not enough to bring on to the screen every significance of the object. This can be achieved in the last instance only by the combination of shots, their assembly in sequence, their fitting into the unity of higher organism. The last process in creative filmmaking is the crowning job of editing” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 118). 40 41

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meaning and configuration, every artistic medium has a range of content that is distinctively suitable for its creative transfiguration. This does not mean that general types of content cannot be shared by different arts, including objective phenomena portrayed by various visual arts and stories retold by different narrative arts. The unity of form and content is not thereby violated because the raw material (or relatively unformed content) that different artistic media transfigure is not identical with the content that ends up being present in each specific artwork. The content to which form is wedded in any creation of fine art is already modified to undergo its specific artistic shaping.43 For example, Tchaikovsky’s opera, Eugene Onegin, has a libretto distinctively different from the Pushkin novel from which it is adapted. In the case of film, the content susceptible of cinematic treatment falls into two broad categories that equally apply to non-kinetic visual art. On the one hand, there is imagery that is abstract and non-objectively expressive as well as imagery that is figurative and representational broadly speaking. Because film has a moving composition whose spatial-temporal flow can convey narrative development, the content of objectively “representational” film can be divided between that which depicts visible phenomena independently of an invented story and that which creates a filmable story. Non-story cinema can record purely factual occurrences in the prosaic, informational manner of newsreels and instructional films, whose status as fine art is questionable. Non-story cinema can, however, pursue two more expressly artistic avenues: documentary cinema and cinema that plumbs the inner moving imagery of the inchoate “unconscious”. Film that brings story to its mobile construction may draw upon all the types of narratives that the different literary genres put in words. These possibilities are inherent in the basic visual dynamic of cinema and therefore apply to pure cinema as much as to the various hybrid forms that add sound and words. They define the fundamental genres of cinema, which will be further supplemented by the types of film that depend upon the hybrid additions of sound and language.44  Balázs, Theory of the Film, pp. 260–262.  Kracauer analogously identifies the “story film and the non-story film” as the “two most general types of composition”, further differentiating the non-story film into “the experimental film and 43 44

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All film genres confront the basic challenge of making their distinguishing content amenable to shaping by the form language of cinema. How does non-story as well as story film content manage to attain successful cinematic treatment? Success involves, on the one hand, suitability for the dynamic visualization of motion pictures, without which film content fails to be genuinely cinematic. On the other hand, it requires providing a sufficient unity of fundamental meaning and configuration to achieve aesthetic worth in general as well as to embody the distinct stylistic configurations with which the basic worldviews gain expression in an appropriate artistic mode. These aesthetic challenges have distinct implications for the film genres distinguished by content.

The Limits of Abstract Non-Objective Cinema The form language of film, with its mobile control of camera angle and position, close-up and zoom, and cutting and montage, offers such novel creative power that motion pictures might seem capable of achieving aesthetic majesty without need of any externally constructed ‘plot’, as might be scripted from a pre-existing literary work. Rather than visualize stories, plays, or novels, cinema seems more than capable of simply relying on its form language to directly transfigure the visual flux of raw life, just as painting had abandoned any guiding “theme” from its static creation. Such formal self-reliance fosters two complementary film genres. On the one hand, it constitutes a recipe for turning the movie camera eye on given phenomena with no narrative intent, devoting film to pure documentary reportage. On the other hand, it leads to jettisoning all objective representation in favor of concentrating expression upon mere visual form.45 These converse options cinematically reincarnate the one-sided opposition pitting “realist” photographers who invoke the camera’s mechanical reproduction as if it had no “formative” dimension against those “formative” photographers who attempt to make the constructive dimension reign supreme. In these parallel attempts to free film of the film of fact,” containing “such subgenres as the film on art, the newsreel, and the documentary proper” (Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 35). 45  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 159.

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i­ndependent literary content, we have the film documentarians seeking to capture the dynamic reality of objects without form opposing the cinema “purists” who film forms devoid of objects.46 In the latter case, the resulting “subject-less”, “absolute” film gives a dynamic twist to the analogous turn of modern painting to non-figurative abstraction.47 Just such abstract non-objective moving imagery constitutes the distinctive content of that brand of so-called experimental or avant-garde film that rejects all representation. This film genre can aptly be described as visual music insofar as it expresses our inward emotive life in a continuous flux of non-objective imagery. To escape the solipsism of feeling, abstract expressionist film can purport like music to transcend the limits of purely subjective emotion by expressing movements of the heart that reflect the fundamental concerns of humanity and thereby command the universal attention worthy of a work of fine art. This “visual music”, like analogous “abstract” photography, can draw upon the mechanical reproduction of the camera eye to provide images whose objective facticity is subordinated to the abstract form of their shape, illumination, and color. Abstract film adds the temporal flux of these visual dimensions, whereby the change in shape, illumination, and color can serve to express comparable fluctuations in our emotive life. Fernand Léger does just this in his short 1924 film, Ballet Mécanique, which uses rapid montages of photographic film shots of facial features, mundane objects and activities, and, above all, machines in movement to bring to cinematic motion the same mechanical forms that his paintings abstract from modern life. So do some of the exponents of “found footage” experimental film, such as Bruce Conner’s 1958 A Movie, which assembles a seemingly random heap of film scraps for their non-narrative “abstract” effect. Alternately, the abstract avant-garde film can create its “visual music” by drawing upon all the formative resources of photography and cinema’s mobile composition. This can include altering mechanically reproduced film images through chemical and digital processing and editing or by

 Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 174.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, pp. 156–157.

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using animated drawings, “stop-action”, or CGI exclusively or in combination. Can reliance on any such non-objective film imagery, however, provide expressive resources comparable to what music possesses through rhythm, harmony, and thematic development? Without appeal to visual representation and all its resonances with outer and inner life, can the abstract film sufficiently disclose the essential strivings of the human spirit and affect an audience in the profound manner of music? Visual imagery can be altered to mimic rhythm, but light and dark, color combinations, and abstract visual forms offer little to match the concrete dissonances and resolutions and melodic development with which music can both express and move the soul. This deficiency is manifest in how abstract non-objective film, like abstract dance, almost always seeks to enhance its artistic achievement with musical accompaniment, provided the means to do so are available. It suggests that “absolute” film is at pains to escape collapse into an extreme solipsism, not unlike the arbitrary solitude of purely atonal music.48

 he Aesthetic Challenges of Avant-Garde T Surrealist Cinema Motion pictures that represent but lack story are often thought to be restricted to films of fact, which either instruct and inform or seek to move their audience as any works of art aim to do when they transfigure the objective reality they depict.49 There is, however, another non-story representational film type that leaves worldly reality behind, offering instead moving images of a fantastical dreamscape, visually disclosing  Although Balázs maintains that “this style of the ‘absolute’ is obviously the result of an extreme subjectivism which is undoubtedly a form of ideological escapism characteristic of decadent artistic cultures” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 176), it can be aesthetically grounded in the struggle of the Romantic artform to express how self-determination cannot be adequately embodied in any sensuous configuration. 49  Siegfried Kracauer divides non-story and story films in this way, placing surrealist cinema besides abstract expressionist film under the heading of “experimental” movies. Surrealist cinema, however, is representational, but refrains from organizing its flow of images in an intelligible narrative. See Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 187–192. 48

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otherwise unconscious desires and fears without any discernable narrative thread. This is avant-garde surrealist cinema, exemplified by René Clair’s Entr’acte, Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, as well as by post-WWII examples such as Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man series. Surrealist cinema, like its avant-garde abstract expressionist companion, does not depict the objective, factual movement of human life. Unlike the abstract avant-garde, surrealist cinema does use all the mechanical reproductive and formative capabilities of film to present the un-staged and staged phenomena of life in a freely associating subjective amalgam, where the most repulsive and alluring shots cascade upon the audience in a bewildering order and profusion, devoid of any factual or fictional unity. Although surrealist cinema is not restricted to the impoverished “visual music” of abstract experimental film, the representational imagery that gushes from the surrealist imagination is at pains to achieve any thoroughgoing unity of meaning and configuration. More a dream enigma than an intelligible narrative, the surrealist film has little rhyme or reason for where it begins or ends or why it traverses the specific scenes that follow one another. To some degree, this mystery is essential to its very rationale, but can the disclosure of subterranean absurdity be sufficient to produce a work of art in which shape and significance go together? Is the “pictorial hallucination” of surrealist film not just another “heightened form of subjectivism” lacking sufficient substance to warrant genuine aesthetic merit?50

 he Aesthetic Challenges of Non-Story T Non-Fiction Films Non-story non-fiction representational film that serves to train or inform falls prey to the converse problem of subordinating cinema to the purely  Balázs condemns surrealist films as joining their “absolute” film partners in avant-garde cinema in being “undoubtedly symptoms of decadence in a degenerating culture”, where “artists frightened or weary of reality stick their heads into their own selves like a hunted ostrich into the sand” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 181). Or do they reflect what Hegel saw as presaging the end of fine art in the ultimate battle of the Romantic artform to configure the full meaning of freedom? 50

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prosaic concerns of providing information or instructing viewers on how to perform practical functions. Training films can, of course, be filmed with greater or lesser skill, drawing from the arts of photography and animation. No matter how visually appealing these works may be, their subordination to the external end of instruction conflicts with the independence of a creation of fine art, which mandates that every aspect of its appreciable configuration have an essential role in expressing the meaning contained within itself. The same problem applies to prosaic informational films, such as newsreels, that consign their cinematic artistry to reporting on the facts, however contingent these may be. Once more the extraneous purpose of such filming conflicts with fine art’s transfiguration of the world it discloses, where given appearance is reconfigured to produce the heightened unity of form and content. Non-story non-fiction documentary film may have a more genuine aesthetic ambition, but it too is at pains to create a series of moving images whose content and order possess an essential significance for the work as a whole. To escape reduction to a prosaic history, biography, or current exposé, a film documentary must avoid succumbing to the contingent simultaneities and successions that afflict faithful factual mimesis. Instead, a non-story documentary must draw upon its un-staged footage and edit it into a flow of visual imagery whose beginning, end, and middle have an immanent connection joining shape and significance. Otherwise, the documentary forfeits its aesthetic worth and must content itself with an instrumental validity fulfilling prosaic concerns of edification and education. Non-story documentaries have tried various approaches to escape their entrapment in the contingent movements of phenomena. Some have presented representational “visual music”, offering a wordless “tone poem” of a city, such as Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, or of the entire globe, such as Godfrey Reggio’s mesmerizing 1982 Koyaanisquati. Although these efforts surmount the impoverished content of abstract expressionist cinema, the absence of any self-­ developing narrative thread leaves the barrage of worldly sights too arbitrary in detail and succession to provide aesthetic satisfaction. Consequently, it is no surprise that documentary filmmakers, such as Robert Flaherty, have retrieved a story element picked out from the given

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facticity of their documentary footage. Typically, the “story” revolves around the battle of an individual with nature in a struggle for survival. Here, as documented in such films as Nanook of the North and Man of Aran, Flaherty captures a seemingly universal plight of the human condition. The plight, however, is one of man and nature, not one involving the normative reality of ethical life and religious concern, in which relations between individuals come into play. The setting is typically a mercilessly primitive situation, in which largely isolated individuals and families battle with necessity more than with struggles of right and faith. The situation is different when the documentary film focuses upon such normative concerns of human affairs. Then, intrigues between individuals necessarily come into play on a small or large scale. The problem facing the documentary film addressing such activity is how to transcend the prosaic contingencies of reportage and secure a unity of form and content without relying upon the free-wheeling transfiguration that a genuinely aesthetic “story” provides. The temptation is to document some arena of essential human affairs by concentrating upon the experiences of some actual figure or figures, but then the filmmaker must avoid remaining faithful to the happenstance that distinguishes prosaic biography from the always significant episodes of a “story” worthy of fine art. Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary, Harlan County, USA effectively treads this line. She mixes mass action with parallel individual stories to weave a moving account of a Kentucky coal miner strike with much the same energy and power that Sergei Eisenstein achieved in his dramatized film, Strike. Another option is using the framework of a travelogue, where the documentary unites the episodes of its reportage in function of the wanderings of the filmmaker or, alternately, the itineraries of its filmed subjects. So, for example, in the powerful 1933 documentary short, Land of No Bread, Buñuel films his small film crew’s journeys through the impoverished Spanish backwater of Las Hurdes. This may seem to duplicate the form of a picaresque novel, but the travelogue remains burdened by the contingencies of what intrudes in each step of its journey. Filmmakers of the most divergent ideologies have produced non-­ fiction documentaries of riveting political impact, from Leni Riefenstahl’s Wagnerian Triumph of the Will (1935), which operatically celebrates

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Hitler’s 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nürnberg, to Octavio Getino’s La Hora de los hornos (1968), which presents the rise and fall of Peronism as an invitation to Argentinian revolution. Both these works are cinematically gripping in their use of visual movement and dynamic editing, but each succumbs to the instrumentalities of political advocacy, undercutting its aesthetic independence. All these cinematic documentary endeavors contend with the same sort of aesthetic challenges that non-fiction literature has tackled in such works as the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, William H. Prescott’s The Conquests of Mexico and Peru, Mark Twain’s Roughing It and Innocents Abroad, The Education of Henry Adams, Primo Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Nadeszhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Like these works, whose artistry brings putatively factual narrative to the highest thresholds of literature, documentary filmmakers have tried again and again to transcend the liability of contingent visual appearance and allow the filmed world to metamorphize into a vital work of fine art.

The Aesthetic Challenges of the Fiction “Story” Film It is not impossible for non-fiction material to yield a “story” of sufficient visual dynamism that creative editing can shape it into a seamless film creation, whose every visible detail contributes to its aesthetic meaning. Nonetheless, narrative fiction offers a much more malleable film content, not only unlimited to un-staged phenomena, but unencumbered by the irrelevant contingencies of mechanically reproduced given appearance. The fictional story of a film may have no antecedent written form but may exist in the minds of its filmmakers or simply be generated in serendipitous improvisation. As Bela Balázs notes, “when the film began there was no script, the director improvised each scene on the set, telling each

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actor what to do during the next shot.”51 When silent film began to add inter-titles, these were composed and cut in after filming was completed.52 Even though a film script becomes much more imperative when movies become talkies and audible speech becomes an integral cinematic element, the wordless utterly silent flow of a motion picture can still be anticipated in a written plan with which filmmakers guide their creation. Bela Balázs maintains that the film script is a literary form of its own precisely because it must verbally specify the visual movement of the film as it advances from scene to scene.53 This involves much more than the occasional brief specifications of scenery and character appearance that may accompany a play or the visual descriptions of nature, human habitations, individuals, and actions that more extensively intrude in epic literature. In all these literary genres dynamic visual appearance is only an intermittent part of what words describe, whereas in film the visible action is continuously the center of artistic attention. For this reason, the film script cannot be reduced to a dramatic form centering on dialogue but has an epic dimension that encompasses the extensive panorama of a third-person viewpoint.54 Accordingly, the film script cannot confine itself to the tight centralization of dramatic development, but must be open to all the parallel and sequential events that give the epic its relatively dispersed breadth, with the qualification that everything scripted be seen and heard on screen.55 The fact that film scripts are mostly not available in print need not undermine their literary stature, since the same lack of publication was shared by the texts of ancient Greek Classical theater, as well as by the plays of Shakespeare, which long existed only in the parts given out to the director and actors of the Globe Theater.56 Yet, as Georg Lukács observes, the film script cannot stand on its own as an independent aesthetic creation because the film of which it is a part does not exist without the  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 247.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 247. 53  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 246. 54  “In this respect”, Balázs writes, “the film script is related to the epic rather than the dramatic form” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 253). 55  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 250. 56  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 247. 51 52

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activity of the cinematographers, actors, scenery builders, costumers, and the final editing process.57 Novels stand on their own as complete works of art, as do written plays, which can be read and appreciated without any performance precisely because drama preeminently consists in dialogue. The film script, by contrast, is constitutively a subordinate fragment of an artistic whole, not a new literary genre. Whether or not there is a film script at hand to guide movie making, the invented story might not be original, but be adapted from a preexisting work of literary fiction, be it a ballad, a drama, a mythic saga, epos or novel. The possibilities of adapting an antecedent literary text are, of course, most feasible when film has left behind the purities of visual dynamics and added the hybrid element of language. We can more concretely address the challenges that such adaptation faces when we turn to examine the hybrid forms of silent and sound film. Nonetheless, some general points are worth noting regarding what requirements a fictional story must meet to be susceptible of cinematic treatment. The key requirement mandated by film’s minimal character as a motion picture is the continuous presence in the story of activity manifest in dynamic visual appearances. This does not rule out fiction in which the interior life of characters is narrated so long as the stream of consciousness can be visualized in a comparable flow of visible phenomena. If, however, inner monologue predominates, the task of meaningfully filming such inner life falls prey to the vagaries of abstract “visual music” if it does not present a connected story with an external reality of its own. Since the visual appearances of filmed fiction can enjoy the worldly authenticity of the movie camera’s mechanical reproduction of the flow of life, a story might seem most cinematic when it can be shot on location with non-actors. By using scenes of street life, of crowds surging through railroad stations, subways, bus terminals, and airports, of filled theaters, nightclubs, cinemas, and sport stadiums, of busy courts and offices, and of teeming parishioners in and around places of worship, the fictional story film can directly enlist the concrete visual appearance of actual life in the service of an otherwise constructed narrative. Such an option is followed by Italian neo-realist filmmakers like Roberto Rossellini in 57

 Lukács, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 488.

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Rome: Open City and Paisan, and Vittoria De Sica in Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D., who bring their stories to a vividly convincing visualization without succumbing to the contingencies of documentary footage. Sergei Eisenstein pushes this drive for dynamic visual realism to a further extreme by not only using non-actors and actual settings but centering the story on mass action rather than on the personal struggles of a protagonist. Cinema can capture crowd scenes and the tumult of mass action with an authenticity that eludes the confines of a theater stage. Moreover, when film focuses on the activities of groups of individuals rather than a single character, it addresses a subject matter that is more fully disclosed in visible activity than the psychological life of an individual. Consequently, Eisenstein finds the most amenable material for the full development of his montage innovations in stories without a hero, in which mass activity takes center stage. In such films as Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October: Ten Days That Shook the World, and The General Line, Eisenstein uses non-actors and real settings to film the mass struggles of worker revolution and collectivization. Although individual characters will become the focus of the narrative at certain points, the unifying thread of the story always revolves around a collective enterprise that is fully manifest to the movie camera eye. What Eisenstein sacrifices is something Rossellini and De Sica retain, namely the immanent dramatic development that a story with a hero can possess. Instead, Eisenstein’s films come close to being documentary reenactments of historical events in which mimetic fidelity undercuts the aesthetic unity of form and content. Crowd scenes and group activity are not the only story elements that suit cinema. All engagements that inherently involve movement provide cinematic grist for fictional storytelling. Chase scenes are a familiar staple, cropping up in the earliest silent films of W.  D. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, as well as in almost every Western, crime caper, and science fiction adventure film. So too journeys of every kind provide a kinetic visuality that film can most easily accommodate. The same can be said of scenes of warfare and natural disasters that no stage can hold, and that no purely verbal description can render with comparable immediate impact.

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Sleuthing can also provide grist for filmmakers owing to its peripatetic search through otherwise accidental locales to uncover visible physical evidence to solve its mystery. This provides ample opportunity to exploit the form language of cinema, as panning, closeups, and montage uncover clues and eventually chase down whoever is sought.58 Orson Welles offers us spectacular cinematic sleuthings as director and protagonist in both Citizen Kane and Mr. Arkadin, and Carol Reed follows literally in his footsteps in The Third Man, where the solving of the mystery leads us to none other than Orson Welles, playing the elusive black marketeer, Harry Lime. And let us not forget the films of Alfred Hitchcock, who has made sleuthing the cornerstone of his cinema output.59 Dancing is another cinematic subject par excellence, provided it foregoes the stage-bound isolation of a theater performance and melds into the dynamic physical reality of film space and time. Fred Astaire well recognized how dance could thus be properly cinematic, preferring “impromptu performances to stage choreography”.60 To fit the film medium, Astaire himself notes, “each dance ought to spring somehow out of character or situation, otherwise it is simply a vaudeville act”.61 So, too, is sport fit for film, given the virtually non-stop kinetic visuality of sporting life, with the exception of the sometimes interminable intervals between moves in a chess or bridge match. Sporting events may figure in prosaic newsreel or documentary footage. To deserve place in a work of cinematic fine art, sport must play a role whose significance goes beyond mere gaming and physical prowess. It must express something that bears upon the essential concerns that make a film more than much

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 275–276.  Kracauer observes that Hitchcock himself attributes his “habitual recourse” to “suspense-laden sleuthing” thrillers “to his search for stories which will best suit the film “medium””. These “satisfied his demand in two ways. Their suspense-laden sleuthing processes cause a stir in the region of psychophysical correspondences and thus challenge him to indulge his uncanny sense of interplay between moods and surroundings, inner excitation and the look of objects. But even more important, precisely because of their insignificance thrillers permit him to highlight these moments of photographable reality without any regard for the obligations which intrigues with substantive issues might impose upon him.” Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 277. 60  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 43. 61  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 43. 58 59

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ado about nothing.62 Sometimes this significance may reside in the struggles of an individual in pursuing the sport, struggles that may reflect fundamental issues of national significance. Such is the case of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s 2013 film, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, which portrays the challenges facing the runner Milkha Singh under the subcontinent Partition and its aftermath. Sometimes, sport figures as a worthy subject when a whole sports team finds its contest meaning much more than a game. Two prime examples of this are the cricket match in Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2001 film, Lagaan, on whose outcome hangs a village’s bondage to a British colonial tax, and the soccer game in John Huston’s 1981 film, Escape to Victory, in which allied prisoners grapple with combatting Nazi propaganda by defeating the opposing German team or making their escape from the playing field. We should not forget the eminently cinematic topic of filmmaking itself. Guru Dutt’s 1959 Kaagaz Ke Phool and Federico Fellini’s 1963 8 ½ present visually sweeping accounts of the struggles of film directors like themselves for artistic achievement amidst the personal and commercial pressures that they cannot escape. A lighter touch is found in such films about filmmaking as Gene Kelly’s and Stanley Donen’s 1952 Singing in the Rain, which sends up the rocky transition from silent to sound films, and François Truffaut’s autobiographical 1973 movie, Day for Night, which wistfully reimagines all the on and off-screen intrigues of the participants in motion picture creation. As all these films demonstrate, the life of cinema is a dynamic process as much about what can be seen and heard as about what can be read in a script. Although film’s ability to convey the dynamic reality of physical existence with all the reproductive fidelity of photography lends authenticity to its creation, this does not limit cinematic subject matter to phenomenal reality. Rather, it empowers film to use all its cinematic resources to give fantasy a believable visual actuality that no stage-bound production can equal. This applies to the filming of not only entire worlds of fantasy but of the day and night dreams of characters in an otherwise realistic story.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 137.

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Such authenticity conferring power also facilitates the use of film for propaganda purposes, where all the truth bending formative resources of cinema can be given a photographic and sonic veneer of believable reality. After all, every documentary film uses these resources to appear “to be true to fact and is not truth the best propaganda weapon?”63 In words that Goebbels could echo, Lenin accordingly maintains that “the cinema is for us the most important instrument of all the arts.”64 Admittedly, animated motion pictures have more difficulty than photographed films in presenting the exhaustive visual detail that the movie camera eye can effortlessly record. The drawn animated Disney films may simulate all the devices of mobile composition, panning, zooming in and out, and cutting from scene to scene, but the visual reality of a Snow White, a Bambi, a Dumbo or a Cinderella remains an abstraction compared to a “live action” movie.65 Stop-action animation and computer generated imagery can compensate for some of this lack of visual authenticity, but the relative rigidity of stop-action figures and the current state of CGI fall far short of any convincing picturing of human individuals. Kracauer regards the relatively impoverished detail of drawn animation as an artistic liability, maintaining that “Walt Disney’s increasing attempts to express fantasy in realistic terms are aesthetically questionable precisely because they comply with the cinematic approach”, which “inexorably stifles the draftsman’s imagination.”66 Admittedly, the comparative abstractness of drawn animation may diminish fidelity to physical phenomena, but this need impede neither the aesthetic unity of meaning and configuration nor the cinematic dynamism of animated moving images. Whether live action or animated, movies can creatively visualize a story in all its significant movement, taking full advantage of the signature capabilities of cinema’s mobile composition. Of course, even when filmmakers enlist stories that are visualizable in cinematic terms, they will not achieve the aesthetic unity of configuration and fundamental meaning if the film content can provide little more  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 161.  Cited by Kracauer in his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 160. 65  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 90. 66  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 89–90. 63 64

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than entertainment and sensuous gratification. Hard and softcore pornography that revolves around sexual titillation, horror movies that primarily revel in the sensationalism of fright and gore, caper and adventure films whose point is the thrills they deliver, “super-hero” movie franchises whose ludicrous stories are excuses for CGI extravaganzas, and whodone-­it mysteries that are movie equivalents of crossword puzzles67 all fail to provide the substance that fine art must shape to be worthy of aesthetic appreciation. The same is true of all those Westerns and police movies that attempt to find some situation in the modern and modernizing world in which the activity of an individual is imbued with essential significance. Although the hero of these films may bring to justice individual criminals, their activity pales in significance to the epic struggles of classical heroes, on whose exploits the whole fabric of ethical community depends. The same is true of James Bond and his cinema fellow travelers, all of whom may save us from world maiming masterminds, but only under completely implausible and unchallenging conditions that give excuse for gorging on skin, gadgets, exotic locales, and violence that always leaves the hero unscathed. In addressing a world of established institutions of freedom, where civil legality and political institutions carry on no matter what happens to any individual person, officeholder or not, the exploits of crime fighters and super-agents offer a pat satisfaction that may entertain, but not supply sufficient aesthetic nourishment. In our day, a film has more artistic integrity in picturing the struggle of individuals to find fundamental meaning in any individual endeavor.

 In this regard, James Agee writes that “Hitchcock uses a lot of skill over a lot of nothing” (cited by Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 277). 67

15 The Total Art of Hybrid Cinema

 he Fundamental Types and Stages T of Hybrid Cinema All the preceding specifications of film and film genres pertain to pure cinema, that is, to motion pictures independently of any admixture of other artistic media. Consequently, these specifications all are incorporated in the hybrid forms of movies, where sound and language are added. Not only are they ingredient in every type and stage of hybrid cinema, but they set an aesthetic proviso. Namely, whatever other artistic media become conjoined to film, they must do so in ways that are compatible with the essential features of motion pictures as fine art. Moreover, the very limits of pure cinema provide the basis for the addition of sound and language. The visual movement of film is susceptible of aesthetic enhancement by auditory and linguistic accompaniment precisely because of how these supplements mitigate the restrictions of motion pictures in and of themselves. Although the flux of visual images can express some of the inner thoughts and feelings of the filmmaker and of the pictured characters, sound, and in particular, music, can manifest the movements of the heart in the non-verbal sweep of rhythm, harmony, and melodic development. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4_15

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The addition of sound enables motion pictures to become not only more expressive, but more life-like and natural, obtaining “an acoustic background and perspective” that provides “a sort of third dimension added to the two dimensions of the screen”.1 Visuals without sound and sound without visuals are equally deficient in terms of conveying the world of human concern in full physical actuality.2 Other than in the depths of outer space, there is no pervasive silence. For those of us who have both sight and hearing our everyday experience constantly mingles visual and auditory impressions, and a strictly silent film leaves us in the limbo that is “a common sensation of people stricken with deafness”.3 Language, for its part, can directly communicate the inner thoughts of filmed actors and film narrators. Words, whether spoken or texted, can also clarify pictured action and allow that action to contain speech in a fully comprehensible manner.

Silent Film It can be no surprise that film, from its earliest days, has sought to add sound and language to its moving images. Although historically cinema technology arose on our lonely planet without the capability of recording sound directly onto film, the emerging silent film medium accompanied the projection of its movies with live sound effects and musical accompaniment, as well as live speakers. From the beginning, movie halls would employ organ and piano players to add appropriate music to their silent films, while sometimes including commentators who would interject spoken clarifications.4 Admittedly, these sound and verbal supplements were added by film theaters without any direct control by the filmmakers themselves.5 Filmmakers did, however, early on insert into silent film  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 280.  As Balázs writes, “We never perceive reality by one sense alone. What we merely hear or merely see, etc. has no three-dimensional reality for us” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 280). 3  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 134. 4  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 133. 5  As Kracauer puts it, “film music was originally an ingredient of film performances rather than an element of film itself ” (Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 134). 1 2

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inter-titles that would interrupt the visual flow to clarify the filmed action and inform audiences of what characters had said. Later, when film became able to record sound, early silent movies often were remastered to include musical accompaniment directly on the projected film stock, while those made in the era of sound film included recorded music, such as Charlie Chaplin composed for his own later silent films. The silent film is therefore not just pure cinema, but a hybrid form that adds sometimes live sound and language, sometimes recorded sound and written words, but without relying upon speech that can be heard directly on the film. Is silent film a disposable historical accident, predicated upon the contingencies of film technological development, or a hybrid form of cinema that has aesthetic merits of its own worthy of pursuit even when movies can directly record sound? Bela Balázs suggests that if movie picture technology was able to record sound from the beginning, silent films would never have been made. Had the Lumières “constructed a sound camera at the same time as the silent camera – a supposition not impossible in principle … no one would have conceived the crazy idea of presenting dramatic scenes in dumb-show”.6 Admittedly, silent films might have then been a lesser companion to sound films, but film history demonstrates that the availability of sound recording technology does not eliminate the aesthetic, let alone commercial viability of silent filmmaking. This is demonstrated by how Charlie Chaplin and René Clair continued to make films that were by and large silent well after talkies made their debut. Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936),7 and The Great Dictator (1940), like René Clair’s À Nous la liberté (1931), all provide masterstrokes of silent film creation following the proliferation of sound films. Long after these landmark living dinosaurs, Jacques Tati made Jour de fête (1949), Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1953), Mon oncle (1958), Play Time (1967), and Trafic (1971), all of which are essentially silent films, despite the sporadic appearance of dialogue. The same can be said of the works of Tati’s protégé, Pierre Étaix,  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 221.  As Balázs notes, in Modern Times, when Chaplin breaks into audible song, he sings gibberish, producing “a grotesque caricature in the sphere of sound which harmonizes well with his visual appearance and manner” (Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 237). 6 7

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whose films The Suitor (1962), YoYo (1965), and The Great Love (1969) all give continued life to silent cinema. Nor need we forget Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie (1976), whose only deviation from mute cinema are the few final words spoken by the mime, Marcel Marceau, or Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (2011), which won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, without breaking silence for more than a few transient moments. Some of these later silent films were able to make use of color film technology, which was unavailable during the heyday of the silent cinema. Then any coloration had to be added by hand, as was done by Chaplin in Modern Times when the Tramp stumbles into leading a workers demonstration with a visibly red flag. By contrast, within a decade of the inception of the sound film, it would enjoy the choice of black and white or color photography, or the use of both, as in The Wizard of Oz. The key issue concerning the independent aesthetic significance of silent film thus pertains not to any inability to use color photography, but to the exclusion of audible speech. The positive significance of this exclusion is exhibited by the misgivings widely felt regarding the advent of sound films. Despite silent film’s adoption of musical accompaniment and inter-titles, directors and critics alike were wary of relinquishing important strengths threatened by the conversion to “talkies”. First, by foregoing recorded speech, silent film escapes the pitfall that looms large over the new sound film media – namely, that of reverting to a mechanical reproduction of theater, where spoken dialogue predominates at the expense of cinematic mobile composition. Silent film never has the “luxury” of being able to rely directly upon dramatic performance. Sound films, however, must always be wary of allowing film dialogue to trap the action in a stage-bound repartee, for which cinematic form language is fundamentally alien. Sergei Eisenstein was so worried of this threat that he joined Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov in issuing a manifesto against sound film, insisting that the inclusion of recorded dialogue would end up reducing cinema to “photographed performances of a theatrical sort”.8  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 103.

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Secondly, the moment film gives speech center stage, film loses the global accessibility that allowed silent film to transcend all linguistic barriers and conquer the world with its visual dynamism. Precisely because silent film renders human experience “immediately visible without the intermediary of words” thanks to “the universal comprehensibility of facial expression and gesture”, it is “free of the isolating walls of language differences” and able to command a global audience without any modification.9 The “talkies”, by contrast, reside in the Babel of separate language communities, requiring either subtitles or dubbing to be universally accessible. Granted these potential liabilities, what can be said of the signature aesthetic contribution of silent film? To begin with, it must be recognized that the silent film is not a mime show. A silent film might have moments of pantomime, but the silent screen can just as easily film people speaking and singing as making mute gestures. Every shot in the silent film may indeed be silent, but very rarely is silence depicted.10 Whether filming quiet or the visual appearance of sound, the silent film must provide a cinematically dynamic creation in which visible movements express fundamental human concerns. By contrast, pantomime exclusively uses mute characters because it is “not only a silent art, but it is the art of being silent, expressing what rises from the depths of silence”.11 Generally, the silent film brings to bear the form language of cinema to the different contents film can address under the restriction of not employing recorded speech. When silent film partly mitigates this restriction by using inter-titles, it does inflict upon itself a conflict between motion pictures and written words, manifest in how the visual movement must be repeatedly interrupted every time captions are projected for the audience to read. The inter-titled silent film thus suffers from a recurring break in the “rhythm of cutting” that sound film need never experience,12 although directors like Jean-Luc Godard would resurrect intertitles in  Balázs, Theory of the Film, pp. 43–45.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 226. 11  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 71. 12  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 223. 9

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sound films such as Vivre sa Vie and Masculin/féminin, precisely to take advantage of its disruptive effect. The silent film can escape this problem by dispensing entirely with captions and there are silent films that have taken this route.13 Nonetheless, the addition of inter-titles, as well as musical accompaniment, is optimally handled by ensuring that their employment serves to communicate the full significance of the action that is visualized. Effort was made in this respect in shaping inter-titles, which sustained the visual continuity of the film atmosphere by such conventions as having written alarms rapidly increase in size.14 By operating under the exclusion of recorded speech, the silent film must primarily rely upon the language of facial expression and gestures, which is inherently more personal and individual than the universality of words.15 Language can of course be spoken with a unique intonation and emphasis, not to mention accompanying gestures and facial expressions, but speech has a verbal meaning that is completely independent of the conventional signs and sounds that express it. Gestures and expressions too have a universal comprehensibility, which is what enables silent film to put before the public of every linguistic group an “international universal humanity” in all its dynamic activities.16 Nonetheless, in silent film, the significance of gestures and facial expression must be fully revealed in their concretely individual visual movement, except when qualified by inter-titles and musical accompaniment. Accordingly, silent film acting must put everything into facial expressions and gestures. Thanks to closeups and zooming, silent film actors need not over-emphasize their language of gesture and expression to reach the back of the theater, but they must use these non-verbal resources with sufficient visibility to communicate all their character’s relevant thought and emotion. This is true even when actors are filmed speaking or singing. Whereas sound film stars can let their audible words do much, if not most of the talking, silent film actors must let their physiognomy express what unheard words cannot. This has a certain temporal  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 224.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 183. 15  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 44. 16  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 45. 13 14

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advantage, for gestures and facial expressions can immediately convey emotions, whereas the most rapid speech lags the outbreak of the feelings and thoughts it communicates.17 Silent film can thereby more directly show the flux of emotions as they occur.18 What silent film cannot do is establish the continuity of successive shots and scenes by relying upon the thread of audible dialogue, and/or, in some cases, persisting background music. The silent film must therefore take special precautions to ensure that cinematic unity is maintained. With no continuous dialogue or sound to connect different cuts, the silent filmmaker must depend upon the visual content of each to tie it to what comes before and after. As Balázs points out, this silent continuity can be achieved by “including in every shot a movement, a gesture, a form, a something which refers the eye to preceding and following shots.”19 In all these respects, the physical realism that film can draw from photographic mechanical reproduction is artistically modified by the specific constraints of silent film.

Sound Film With the advent of “talkies”, film acquired the audio recording technology enabling motion pictures to enlist the arts of sound and language and fulfill hybrid cinema’s potential to become a total art, integrating architecture, sculpture, graphic art, music, and literature in service of film’s dynamic visual imagery. This allowed film to not only enlist the expressive capabilities of other media, but to escape the cumbersome measures that silent film was forced to employ to tackle complex narratives. With audible speech at hand, the sound film could convey on screen the most intricate and nuanced plots without the burdensome inter-titles and elaborate explanatory visuals on which silent film ever more depended.20 Moreover, by combining kinetic visuality with the movements of sound,  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 72.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 73. 19  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 53. 20  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 102. 17 18

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music, and speech, sound film can readily give expression to the highest spiritual life of rational agents.21 At the outset of sound film, however, many “talkies” succumbed to the uncinematic path of what amounted to filming stage works of theater and music. Entrapping motion pictures in the confines of dramatic and musical performance, such films did what the opponents of sound film feared: they eviscerated the form language of cinema in service to the incompatible immobility of live theater. Many early Hollywood talkies did this by filming their speaking characters in close-up throughout the movie, as if the cinema camera occupied a front row theater seat.22 Moreover, when the great stars of silent cinema first spoke in the early talkies, there was all too often an unsettling discrepancy between the expressive power of their gestures and facial movements and the banality of the words that script writers now put in their mouths. Suddenly, these stars’ audible speech destroyed the majestic illusion of their visual aura.23 A similar problem afflicted the sound film debuts of silent film comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, whose audible speech fell flat against the hilarity of their visual antics.24 Nonetheless, the subsequent development of sound film has demonstrated how these difficulties are not inexorable and that movies can use sound and audible speech in accord with the mobile aesthetics of cinema.25 To some degree, the overcoming of the initial stage-bound character of early sound film was facilitated by how sound recording technology quickly eliminated “the actor’s stiff bondage to the microphone”, leaving the movie camera “free to stray again”26 and empower the directors of sound film to use all the devices of mobile composition. To understand  As Lukács writes, “Als Kunst der bewegten Visualität, der ein ebenfalls bewegter Komplex des Auditiven beigesellt ist, vermag der film has höchste geistige Leben des Menschen” (Lukács, Georg, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 484). 22  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 222. 23  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 225. 24  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 234. 25  The task will require recognizing that, as Lukács notes, “Aus der auditive begleiteten visuellen Bewegtheit des Films, in welchem notwendiger- und konsequenterweise dem Wort nur eine sekundäre, eine aushelfende und ergänzende Rolle zukommen kann” (Lukács, Georg, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 485). 26  Cavell, The World Viewed, Enlarged Edition, p. 147. 21

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how film then can successfully accommodate sound and language, we must go beyond the partial efforts of hybrid silent film and examine how sound film brings this integration to completion.

The Role of Sound in Hybrid Cinema The advent of sound film enables cinema to take full advantage of how noise, music, and audible speech can enhance the visual dynamics of motion pictures. All three of these types of sound can be part of the filmed action or function as external accompaniments. In the former case, the sound may or may not be in synchrony with the screened images of what produces it. In the latter case, the sound may or may not express what the simultaneously screened objects signify. The externally added sounds may either parallel the mood or meaning of the passing imagery or serve as a counterpoint.27 Film seems able to use all these options, but Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov insist in their Joint Statement of 1928 that “only a contrapuntal use of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentiality of montage development and perfection” consistent with cinematic aesthetics.28 Pudovkin justifies privileging asynchronism and counterpoint due to their alleged conformity to the actual flow of life, where parallel and synchronic correlations between visuals and sounds less frequently occur. As Kracauer explains, when we listen to a conversation our eyes ordinarily wander from the speakers, just as when we look out a window, we hear street noises and exclamations that come from sources not in view.29 Yet, as much as cinema is specially suited to capture the visual flow of physical reality, film as fine art cannot just be mimetic, but must transfigure what it represents to achieve the genuinely aesthetic unity of meaning and configuration. Consequently, motion pictures are not bound to correlate sound and image in a purely prosaic,  Kracauer delineates these options in his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 112–113. 28  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 115. 29  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 115. 27

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“real-life” way, but are free to use synchronicity as well as asynchronism, parallelism as well as counterpoint to serve the meaningful artistic creation of cinematic movement. This can involve interspersing any of the types of sound with silence for purposes of generating suspense30 or other emotive effects. The general possibilities of the “internal” and “external” use of the types of sound in movies are by now familiar to any filmgoer.

The Internal Integration of Sound in Film The noises of nature can be recorded directly during filming as they occur on location or they can be added later as sounds seeming to be present in the world captured on film. So, too, can the noises of convention, of the non-natural, historical products and activities of rational agents, be they terrestrial, extra-terrestrial, or sheer creatures of fantasy. These non-natural noises can be filmed either on site or through subsequent edited insertion as part of the audible reality of what comes on screen. Both natural and artificial noises can provide another layer of perceivable physical continuity and realism to what the succession of visual shots contribute on their own. Music can also figure as an element of filmed reality in the same two respects. On the one hand, music can be played or sung by visible performers or resound from visible mechanical and electronic devices. On the other hand, music can seem to emanate from sources that are offscreen but connected to the time and space of what is filmed. In both cases, the internal presence of music can involve scenes of “a casual performance embedded in the flow of life (e.g. a fiddling beggar or an errandboy whistling a tune”)31 or full-fledged musical production numbers that figure in the movie story, as in Sam Wood’s Marx Brothers comedy, A Night at The Opera. Beyond such bare audible presence, music can figure as a central element in the film story, as in Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar: The Music Room, where an aging Zamindar struggles to retain the tradition of classical  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 135.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 143, 146.

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Indian music performances in his crumbling mansion. A tune can also play a key, but very intermittent story role, as does the melody whistled by the child murderer, played by Peter Lorre, as he prowls the streets of Berlin in Fritz Lang’s M. Even a single moment in a piece of music can become the pinnacle of film suspense, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 and 1956 versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, where the cymbal crash at a Royal Albert Hall concert signals the firing of an assassin’s gun. Alternately, the very identity of the film protagonist can lie in his or her own music-making. The film can make musical creation the crux of the movie by focusing on the struggles of composers, as does Ken Russell in his fevered portraits of Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Liszt in The Music Lovers, Mahler, and Listzomania. Music can equally take center stage when a film tackles the trials and triumphs of a performer, as in Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, Sidney J. Furie’s Lady Sings the Blues, or Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Alternately, the presence of music in the film’s pictured reality may reside not so much in its subject matter as in the form of presentation. Movies may develop their story entirely or largely in the sung interaction of their characters. This may involve screen adaptations of stage operas and operettas (e.g. Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones and Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute) or theater musicals (e.g. James Whale’s Show Boat, Robert Wise’s West Side Story, and George Cukor’s My Fair Lady). Films may also take an un-adapted musical form in which much if not all dialogue is sung (such as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman is a Woman) or forge a cinema tradition of frequent song and dance interludes, as distinguishes Bollywood Cinema. The movie musical, whether adapted from the stage or an original film creation, must avoid capitulating to theatrical modes that conflict with movie camera reality and the form language of cinema. This will be hard to forestall if the film musical follows the stage bound pattern of interspersing songs with dance numbers, incidental music, and dramatic and comedic interludes, all proceeding within patently artificial settings.32 The movie musical overcomes uncinematic staginess only if its action is filmed with sufficient mobile composition and camera realism to make 32

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 146–148.

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the contingent life activities of its protagonists seamlessly engender the flow of dance, song, instrumental, and spoken dialogue scenes. Then, the musical redeems itself as a bonafide screen genre, successfully balancing the realistic and formative dimensions cinema acquires from photographic art and renders kinetic.33 Realism is manifest in how the successful film musical roots its song and dance numbers in the life-like flow of visualizable events, weaving a story embedded in the contingent contexts of film camera reality. The formative dimension, on the other hand, takes over whenever the action on screen erupts with music and dancing, not as performances belonging to the story content, but as transfigurations that ordinary action takes on under the creative spell of the movie musical. Audible speech without song for its part can of course figure within filmed action, both in the on-screen dialogue of movie actors and in conversation that is heard to emanate from places that the movie camera is not directly filming. This may involve the adaptation of independent literary works, which requires modifications meeting the requirements of cinematic movement. Alternately, the speech on screen can be drawn from an original script or improvised on the spot during filming.

The External Addition of Sound to Film Whatever sound may be internal to a film, all three sound types can be added as external accompaniments of the filmed action to express further some cinematically appropriate mood or narrative purpose. In all these cases, the external character of the sound addition depends upon it not appearing as emanating from the filmed reality itself, which, in the case of sound film, already incorporates noises, audible speech, and perhaps music in the screen action. Noise, both natural and artificial, can play this external role as a counterpoint to what occurs on screen, often to comic or haunting effect, but the opportunities to do so are markedly more limited than those available to musical or spoken accompaniment. Special situations may make this

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 148–149.

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tenable, such as when movie characters are experiencing auditory hallucinations. Music is much more generally suitable for external background enhancement of cinematic mood, especially when the action on screen goes beyond mere dialogue. Musical accompaniment can follow and intensify the swings of emotion that film action makes visible and audible. Accompanying music can also markedly contrast with film action to frame that action in a new light. Striking examples of the latter are found in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, where Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries cheers on an American helicopter attack in Vietnam to satirical effect, and in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a Johann Strauss II waltz frames the grace of a revolving spaceship in the deep silence of the interplanetary void. Those filmmakers and theorists who follow “realist” photography by privileging the mimetic fidelity of movie camera mechanical reproduction might object that external musical accompaniment subverts the natural true-to-life character of film in its faithful capture of visual reality and ambient sound. Such an objection ignores the creative dimension of mobile composition and editing, as well as the formative aspect of photography itself. Most importantly, it ignores how the creative transfiguration of given appearances by fine art can reveal the true essence of reality more than can any mimetic reproduction of external phenomena. Far from subverting the realism of a film, musical accompaniment can thus intensify its real impact for the filmgoer, who need never forget that cinema is a work of art. Musical accompaniment can bring into cinematic focus which moving images and recorded sounds deserve emphasis and clarify what they signify.34 The added music can counter the weight of words, as well as sustain cinematic continuity when speech is absent and non-verbal noises cease or become inaudible. Moreover, musical accompaniment can sustain the emotive depth of the entire film, such as when a haunting melody recurs, as does Anton Karas’ zither theme in Carol Reed’s The Third Man.35

34 35

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 139.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 140.

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As much as added music may enhance a work of cinema, the accompaniment of film action with external audible speech has the further capability of explaining the connections of scenes and directly voicing the thoughts and feelings of the omniscient director or a narrator who may also appear on screen. In both cases, the external commentary can not only clarify the motivations of characters and the context of events but express a viewpoint that casts the entire filmed reality in a revelatory way. External narration powerfully frames the action in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, adding both historical and psychological insights that enhance, rather than usurp the impact of the scenes it introduces. Stanley Kubrick adds an arch commentary to his film, Barry Lyndon, that heightens the satirical edge of the film without merely restating what the filmed action conveys on its own. So, too, an external narrator accords with cinematic art in François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim by introducing the characters, commenting on their concerns, and moving the action along, helping to maintain the continuity of the casually constructed action. In Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder lets his movie protagonist figure as offscreen narrator, but speaking from the dead, in the first case, using a Dictaphone recording completed moments before his demise, and in the second, using a voice whose ghostly character becomes evident only in the penultimate scene. In both films, the spoken commentary reflects sardonically on the intrigue in which the hero entraps himself, adding both psychological depth and a touch of irony, enriching what is heard and seen directly on screen.36 Martin Scorsese, who uses a single continuous voiceover narration in Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, cinematically adapts the narrative multiplicity of William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, in his 1995 film, Casino, letting the chief characters alternate in narrating the action, including one whose narration ends in midsentence when being killed on screen. All these examples show how external narration can enrich the internal visuals and sounds of a film, rather than stifle its cinematic momentum.  Sunset Boulevard is an example where a character’s voice-over narrates events that could not have been witnessed by that character (in particular, his own murder). Another such case is Sacha Guitry’s The Story of a Cheat, which visualizes the fictional narrator’s life story with incidents that could not have been directly seen by him. Whether this is artistic license or an incoherent defect depends on how the voice-over narration is to be appreciated. 36

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Whatever form they take, the contributions of sound accompaniment must serve the totality of the cinematic creation. Even when entire pieces of music and entire literary works are added to a film, these must fulfill a role in the movie that they do not achieve on their own. Otherwise, they bring nothing to the film itself and remain a completely extrinsic appendage. Since their cinematic contribution depends upon fitting the visual dynamics of film reality, only on the rarest of occasions can verbal and musical accompaniments achieve that integration without significant cuts and abbreviations. Of course, it is possible to reverse the order of integration and subordinate film imagery to the integral identity of a musical composition. Walt Disney’s 1940 animated film Fantasia does just this in providing animated story visualizations of pieces by J. S. Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Ludwig van Beethoven, Amilcare Ponchielli, and Modest Mussorgsky. Bruno Bozzetto’s 1976 film, Allegro non troppo, hilariously parodies the Disney Fantasia, perhaps inadvertently unmasking the quixotic hope of concocting a visual story that can express every twist and turn of a piece of pure music, which, despite some programmatic gestures (as in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony), has an essentially independent musical development.

The Interaction of Internal and External Sound in Film Noise, music, and audible speech can interact in different ways both as internal components of on-screen reality and as external accompaniments. All these sound types can, of course, occur singly or simultaneously, as well as in varying successions. They can be employed alone or together with the equivalent of a sonic close-up or zooming, which picks out certain sounds by making them relatively louder or softer. Moreover, when different sounds and sound types overlap, they may harmonize or conflict, depending upon the desired effect their relation can produce. A memorable example of sonic conflict is the gripping scene in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, when Marlon Brando’s character confesses his complicity in the murder of the brother of Eva Marie Saint’s character. Using an on-location realism that no stage production can duplicate, Kazan lets

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the background harbor sounds completely drown out Brando’s spoken words, indelibly intensifying the power of the two actors’ expressions at that moment. Another striking use of sonic conflict is the pivotal scene in Akira Kurasawa’s Ikiru, when the protagonist, having just learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis, wanders into the middle of city traffic to suddenly find himself engulfed in the cacophony he and the soundtrack had ignored.

The Role of Language in Hybrid Cinema Sound films not only give audible speech a place on screen but allow the art of language in general its fullest entry into hybrid cinema. There are conditions, however, that speech as well as text must meet to enhance rather than undermine film artistry. Like noise and music, dialogue is not specific to film and for it to become an element of cinema consistent with the “spirit of the medium”, film dialogue must be rooted in the moving images that comprise the essential core of motion pictures and whose gaze extends beyond the verbal interaction of characters.37 This is true whether the speech in question is audible or transmitted through texting visible on screen. Despite the presence of both visuals and audible speech, the sound film runs into trouble if it gives primacy to the soundtrack rather than the flow of motion pictures. Many of the early “talkies” succumbed to this tendency of being “speech-mad” by giving dialogue the lead, privileging closeups of conversing actors, “exiling inanimate nature to the background”, and following dramatic intrigues that depend more on the course of words than on dynamic visualizations.38 In all these respects, such sound movies reduce cinema to “a matter of photographing a play”.39 Certain film adaptations of classic plays attempt to mitigate the primacy of spoken language over mobile imagery by employing distinctly cinematic resources, while retaining play-bound plot. Max Reinhardt’s  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 103.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 104. 39  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 104. 37 38

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1935 early sound film adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings Hollywood stars to the rescue, including Joe E. Brown, James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, and Mickey Rooney. Their movie acting, however, cannot overcome the film’s relative fidelity to the play, the artificial lifelessness of the studio sets, and the largely static camera work.40 Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet sticks with theater trained actors, but gives the movie camera a greater mobility, while freeing film imagery from strict synchronicity with spoken words. Olivier achieves a striking cinematic effect by having Hamlet speak his soliloquies off camera while the camera wanders over his silent face and elsewhere about the scene.41 Nonetheless, the film remains captive to the highly abbreviated Shakespearean text and the constricted setting of a stark studio castle, from which all dynamic interaction with external life has been excluded. Olivier is more cinematically successful in his 1944 Henry V adaptation, which begins and ends with scenes of the play’s start and finish in the London Globe Theater of Shakespeare’s day, but then quickly puts this theatrical framing42 aside to open up into vibrant indoor and outdoor spectacles, sometimes with artificial backgrounds in the style of Renaissance Flemish painting, sometimes with on-location battle scenes of epic proportions. To integrate spoken words in a manner consistent with the form language of cinema, film must sustain the primacy of moving imagery by diminishing the preeminence of dialogue. In departure from theater drama, movies must limit the amount of dialogue and achieve a more natural flow of language, with all the wordless interruptions and intervals that the flux of life entails.43 The movie camera cannot spend all or even most of its time fixed on actors in conversation but must instead move freely about and capture all the epic extension of genuinely cinematic subject matter, whose action unfolds within the encompassing movements of natural and human events.

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 105.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 105. 42  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 260. 43  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 106. 40 41

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On the other hand, for speech to be truly cinematic rather than merely dramatic, it must arise out of the dynamically visualizable flux specifically captured by motion pictures.44 Just as Shakespeare’s Hamlet can have a play be performed within the play to advance its own dramatic movement, so a motion picture can contain a complete speech, appropriately visualized for the sake of the film movement. Then the oratory serves the cinematic sweep of a story words alone cannot adequately present. A telling example of just such an integration is the scene in Leo McCarey’s 1935 film, Ruggles of Red Gap, where the entire Gettysburg Address is recited by Charles Laughton, playing a British gentleman’s gentleman serving rustic Wild West millionaires due to a lost poker bet. That speech, of course, can stand on its own. Here it plays an integral cinematic role thanks to Laughton’s masterful oratorical and visual “metamorphosis into a self-reliant American”45 delivering Lincoln’s words in consummation of Ruggles’ picaresque adventures in the rude, uncouth new world of his reinvention. Ensuring that speech fit the visual dynamics of film may be an artistic imperative, requiring a transfiguration of given appearance, but it hardly runs against the grain of cinematic subject matter. Audible speech and now, increasingly, visible texting, is embedded in the “accidental flow of life”46 that motion pictures are especially suited to capture. Spoken words are physically present at least intermittently in both the foreground and background of ordinary human activity of any period, and in our age of ubiquitous internet interconnectivity, small screen texting is becoming an ever more pervasive visual phenomenon. Consequently, movie camera reality can readily include speech and texts as constituents of a believable creation. Kracauer maintains that how speech is synchronized with motion pictures reflects whether visuals properly predominate or verbal communication improperly subordinates the kinetic imagery. Kracauer claims that when spoken words are in the lead, “imagery will parallel them”, which is certainly the case when film reduces itself to photographed theater.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 106.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 107. 46  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 111. 44 45

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Conversely, when audible speech is de-emphasized, asynchronous counterpoint will be favored, since such asynchrony frees visuals from any direct connection to spoken words.47 Although these considerations may reflect whether film narrative is beholden to visual or verbal determination, they leave out of account how mobile composition and montage can enable both parallel and counterpoint synchronization to serve motion picture aesthetics. A film may exclusively use parallel synchrony when actors engage in dialogue, but this does not prevent the cineaste from filming their conversation with the most mobile camera work as well as interspersing other visuals that diminish the predominance of speech. A telling case of such non-­theatrical filmmaking is Orson Welles’ Othello, which not only films the dialogue in spectacular real architectural settings in which the protagonists move around as they speak, but continually intersperses the dialogue with silent intervals that focus on the visual appearance and mobility of the characters as they walk along together.48 As Kracauer himself admits, both parallel and counterpoint synchrony can be employed in anti-cinematic as well as cinematic ways. Parallelism of image and speech is uncinematic when the visuals of the actor speaking contribute nothing to the significance of the scene. Counterpoint asynchrony between spoken words and accompanying visuals is equally pointless when the images provide no enhancement of the impact of the speech. Equally, counterpoint can be positively destructive of the moving images when spoken commentary drowns them in distracting extraneous discussion. On the other hand, parallelism between spoken words and moving images can perfectly serve cinematic aesthetics when the synchrony compounds the realism and emotional impact of the scene. The same is true of asynchronous counterpoint so long as the audible words and contrasted visuals each make an irreducible contribution to the mood and meaning of the scene.49

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 116.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 121. 49  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 117–123. 47 48

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Film Adaptation of Literary Genres The film adaptation of literature attains its greatest reach with the full integration of language into cinema by the hybrid sound film. Empowered with noise, music, visualized text, and audible speech, both within and accompanying the filmed action, the sound movie can tackle literary works that divulge the inner thoughts of characters, present dialogue, depict the visual and audio appearances of individuals, and describe the dynamic flux of the natural and historical world that encompasses them. Nonetheless, not all literary genres and narratives are suitable for cinematic treatment. Lyric literature, which employs the first-person voice to express its thoughts and feelings about what should deserve the attention of an audience in general, offers the most restricted of film possibilities. This is due to both the narrow monological scope of lyric reflection and the relatively limited magnitude of its musings. Movie camera reality is hard pressed to confine itself to a nightingale, a Grecian urn, and other singular objects of lyric outpouring. Nor can a motion picture of the flow of life easily shut out from view and hearing the perspectives and agencies of other individuals and the disseminating peripheries of their activities. It should thus be no surprise that lyric literature has hardly ever been the animating soul of a film, although lyric can make its appearance as a subordinate element within a cinematic story that embodies a more extensive literary form and content. Dramatic literature, on the other hand, may ordinarily break the monopoly of the single narrative voice, but the concentration of dramatic movement in dialogue presents a challenge to cinematic freedom from the relative immobility of the stage. Although every play inhabits that fixed arena, not every drama is an irrevocably “theatrical story” that resists subordinating its spoken interaction to the visual dynamic of a truly cinematic narrative. To be adaptable to the screen, a theater story must be made to loosen the strict bonds of dramatic development, open its dialogue to transfiguration by mobile composition and montage, and allow interludes for other strands of visual and audible activity. A play with

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extended dialogues obstructs film specific narration50 that freely cuts from shot to shot and uses montage to capture the flow of the extensive life of movie camera reality. Most challenging for film adaptation is a play whose entire action is essentially confined to a single interior space with a small cast. Conversely, a theater piece with frequently changing scenes and many entering and exiting characters offers much more cinematic possibilities. Epic literature offers the most amenable genre for film adaptation because it incorporates first person narration, dialogue, and third person descriptions of both psychological and interpersonal activity and their encompassing natural and mythological or historical reality.51 Film, however, has emerged on our lonely planet in modern times, where what predominates is the embrace of both inner and outer freedom configured by the Romantic style of fine art. Consequently, the film we know of will not be able to adapt the epics of pre-modern civilizations embracing the ideals of the Symbolic and Classical artforms without either transforming their meanings or putting them at some framed distance. B. R. Chopra’s ninety-four-episode television series Mahabharat (1988–1990) may be thought to exemplify the former effort, stressing what allows a contemporary Indian audience to identify with the epic saga, while retaining its ancient setting. So too do those adaptations of pre-modern epics that film the ancient epos in a thoroughly modern milieu, with very modern protagonists and situations. Examples of this anachronistic “modernization” are two films that loosely adapt Homer’s Odyssey. In one, Joseph Strick works from James Joyce’s own novelistic transfiguration of Homer’s epic and films Ulysses (1967), trying hard to duplicate in motion pictures all the stylistic variations with which Joyce distinguishes each chapter of his novel. In a later attempt, Joel and Ethan Coen reimagine the Odyssey in their 2000 film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, leaving little trace of the  As Kracauer notes, “complex units interfere with cinematic narration” (Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 220). 51  Lukács seconds this point, writing that “Die höchste Affinität zur Literatur besitzt der Film zweifellos gegenüber der Novelle, der Erzählung”, but with the qualification that this is “Ebenfalls nur eine Möglichkeit. Denn es wäre dogmatisch, die Inhaltlichkeit des films ausschliesslich in Richtung der Novelle auszubauen” (Lukács, Georg, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, 487). Indeed, film can not only use an original story, but adapt drama provided it makes those modifications necessary to comply with the form language of cinema. 50

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Classical Ideal. Federico Fellini’s Satyricon is an example of the latter distancing approach, reimagining Petronius’ picaresque ancient Roman narrative in its alien character. A different situation applies to the modern epic, the novel. It is directly suitable for adaptation by contemporary filmmakers insofar as it offers the full living breadth of epic narration while grappling with the same fundamental self-­understanding that underlies the cinema of our day. Like motion pictures, novels transcend the narrow concentration of dramatic development and cover an extended panorama of events in which a multiplicity of characters contend with the contingencies of life in diffuse episodes in which the wider environment streams in.52 Both novel and film thereby challenge any closed completed world with an “endlessness” of possibilities, which can leave their characters in search of ultimate meaning in conditions they find problematic. Nonetheless, both novel and film must create a living whole in which the “loose ends” of their stories come to some meaningful resolution, without, however, reducing themselves to a “theatrical story” in which one central dramatic conflict strictly determines every incident.53 It might seem, however, that certain differences between novel and cinema narrative pose significant problems for film adaptation. For example, cinema appears to be much more limited than the novel in dealing with time. The novelist can jump back and forth from the past, present, and future at will, as well as leap from place to place without regard to their temporal position, all without any special notice to the reader. By contrast, the visual realism of film tends to restrict the filmmaker to make successive shots follow one another in the time of the filmed narrative unless the movie explicitly invokes the device of flashback or time travel to bring the past and future into view.54 Similarly, the predominantly visual material of movie camera reality seems to put film at significant difficulty in presenting the immaterial invisible domain of thought and feeling to which the novel has such easy access.

 Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 255.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 232–233. 54  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, pp. 234–235. 52 53

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Both these issues are hardly implacable obstacles to film adaptation of novels. First, film can cut from one time to another, as well as from place to place, however it chooses so long as that spatial-temporal sequence serves the expressive purpose of the film narrative and is made intelligible on screen through visual and audible indications. Similarly, film can rely upon visual nonverbal cues as well as visible texts and audible speech to express the feelings and thoughts of its characters as well as of an omniscient narrator. In the rigorously spare film adaptation of Georges Bernanos’ novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, Robert Bresson focuses on the facial expression of the young priest to make visually transparent the spiritual struggle to which the voice-over readings of his diary entries allude. In doing so, Bresson brings the direct visual impact that cinema can provide, whose immediacy goes beyond what a novel achieves by putting in words descriptions of the visual and audible appearance of its characters and their surroundings.55 Despite these qualifications, Kracauer maintains that the novel is “not a cinematic literary form” because it is “primarily a mental continuum”, bringing to words our inner life of thought and emotion, where film is “predominantly a material continuum”, focused on what can be put on screen.56 Yet, as Kracauer himself admits, not only do novels describe the outer world in which its characters are immersed, but film has no problem putting itself within the mental perspective of its characters, both by filming shots from where they stand in the movie camera reality and by recording their speech, be it on screen or as voice-over narration. Far from failing to match the plasticity of the novel, film can command “an absolute freedom of narrative”.57 Although the novel is therefore cinematically adaptable, some novels are more filmable than others. Those novels in which visual action drives the narrative more than dialogue are most easily transformed into movie camera reality. A memorable case in point is John Ford’s film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s narrative  Kracauer complains that Bresson’s resort to the priest’s journal calls “to mind many a silent film crammed with captions”, suggesting that his adaptation is uncinematic. See Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 242. 56  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 237. 57  Cavell, The World Viewed, Enlarge Edition, p. 156. 55

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primarily consists in descriptions of the collective journeys and tribulations of Dust Bowl refugees making their way to the promised land of California, whose promise is fraught with disappointment. Since “group experiences exceed individual experience in visibility because they manifest themselves in group behavior”,58 they are particularly cinematic. Moreover, Steinbeck conveys his characters primarily through their physical actions, rather than through their unspoken ruminations.59 It is no accident that Ford’s film very much puts in motion the Depression victim still photographs of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Margaret Bourke-White, for what Steinbeck’s novel sets in words is a living tableau of what they captured on camera. Nonetheless, there are tendencies, particularly in “modernist” works, that obstruct cinematic treatment by allowing an unworldly subjectivism to dominate the narrative and collapse the epic expanse of the novel. The problem does not automatically reside in narratives that take the form of reminiscences or personal fantasies. Cinematic possibilities abound so long as these subjective reflections contain dynamic episodes in which visualizable circumstances predominantly drive a filmable movement. Such is the case in innumerable films in which a character’s voice-­over introduces flashbacks or imaginings that provide epic descriptions of not only the thoughts and feelings of the narrator, but the worldly or world-like occurrences that occupy their reflection. Marcel Proust may engender his vast narrative of À la recherche du temps perdu through reminiscences occasioned by haphazard perceptions, such as of his madeleine. So long, however, as the resulting tales take us through a changing vista of multiple characters and situations, there is opportunity for a film adaptation using all the resources of mobile composition and montage.60 The  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 240.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 240. 60  Kracauer notes “Proust’s ambiguous relation to cinema. On the one hand, he insists that insignificant physical and physiological events – a madeleine dipped in tea, the peculiar position of a limb, the sensation of slightly uneven flagstones – touch off momentous involuntary memories; and it goes without saying that, because of their material character and their very smallness, these events are a natural for the camera. On the other hand, he follows the train of memories, reveling in experiences and thoughts which no longer have an equivalent in the visible world. They are languagebound; even the most ingenious camera work would be only a poor substitute for the visions roused by the words.” See Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 238. 58 59

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thoughts and feelings of a particular individual can always be depicted on screen with imagery accompanied by voice-overs. So, too, the different subjective perspectives of multiple characters can be dynamically visualized, as does Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon, where a putative crime is retold via the conflicting memories of each participant. Even the most personal stream of consciousness can be powerfully filmed so long as moving images can capture its content with sufficient visual continuity to allow for cinematic, rather than merely literary unity. Joseph Strick rises to this challenge in the lengthy concluding section of his film adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses, where Strick pictures the moving reminiscences of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy with sweeping visual energy. More challenging are novels, such as The Trial and The Castle of Franz Kafka, whose protagonist K is a cipher in a world of unrelenting anonymous administration. Kafka does give a very graphic physical description of the situation and occurrences that befall K, and this allows Orson Welles to film The Trial with striking actors, awesome sets, and unsettling camera movements and montage. Nonetheless, the individuality of the protagonist and his mysterious nemeses remains elusive and problematic as much for movie camera visualization as for novelistic description. What does most entirely block an effective film adaptation are those novels in which subjective reflection so dissolves the fabric of objectivity as to leave us with a solipsist stream of language that defies cinematic transfiguration. Such is paradigmatically the case in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable, in which the narrator loses any determinate place in the world and any determinate identity by reverting to a ceaseless eruption of words that lead to nowhere and to no one.

Sound Film Versus Stage and Silent Film Acting The dynamics of motion pictures no more leaves acting unmodified than it does the literary sources from which film narrative may be adapted. Film’s use of close-ups and zooming both enables and requires the film actor to diminish all those theatrical “‘unnatural’ surplus movements and stylizations” needed to project a characterization from the stage to every

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spectator in the audience.61 Silent film actors, however, must still artificially enhance their visible facial expressions and gestures to communicate their thoughts and feelings without the help of audible speech. By contrast, the actors of sound films can make use of their voice and perform as if they “were a real-life person caught in the act by the camera”.62 Although Eisenstein employs non-actors in his mass action silent films, Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October: Ten Days That Shook the World, and The General Line, their use is most feasible in leading roles in sound films, where an untutored non-professional performer can be “natural” and readily fulfill cinematic demands, as Italian Neo-Realist filmmakers like Rossellini and De Sica triumphantly demonstrated. The “natural” character of sound film acting is equally reflected in the performance of Hollywood stars, who can just “be” themselves from one role to another.63 Cary Grant, Clarke Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Sidney Poitier, and other such screen luminaries never relinquish their unique persona no matter what character they play.64 Conversely, film actors such as Lon Chaney, Paul Muni, Charles Laughton, Alec Guinness, Marlon Brando, Joanne Woodward, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, and Forest Whitaker can inhabit completely different personas with convincing verisimilitude, simulating a perfectly “natural” visual and audible appearance in each case. This Protean plasticity need not depend upon artificial devices, such as the fake noses that Laurence Olivier puts on himself to become Richard III, a fugitive Nazi, or a fading vaudevillian.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 94.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 95. 63  As Kracauer observes, “the typical Hollywood star resembles the non-actor in that he acts out a standing character identical with his own or at least developed from it, frequently with the aid of make-up and publicity experts.… He affects the audience … for being a person who exists independently of any part he enacts in a universe outside the cinema which the audience believes to be reality or wishfully substitutes for it.” See Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 99. 64  As Balázs points out, these film stars “were no creators of characters. Their names, costumes, social positions could be changed in their various parts, but they always showed the same personality and this personality was their own. For the dominant element in the impression they made was their personal appearance.” Balázs, Theory of the Film, pp. 284–285. 61 62

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After all, the physical appearance of an individual is not automatically linked to any specific character identity, provided certain explicit boundaries are not transgressed. Nonetheless, in film, and particularly in sound film, the natural physical appearance of actors, including the timbre of their voice, has a more important role to play in cinematic than theater casting. Every visual and auditory closeup reveals the “nature in the raw” of the perceived being of the actor.65 Whereas theater actors are planted on the stage at a relatively remote distance from the audience, the mobile camera brings film actors into such intimate proximity that their whole physical appearance comes into play, with the aesthetic proviso that every detail be expressive of their film characterization.66 On the other hand, because the sight and sound of film actors is always immersed in a visually and audibly dynamic situation, their expressions and speech must reflect the changing contingent circumstances captured by motion pictures. Instead of exhibiting the inextricable advance of dramatic movement, film acting is better suited to a fortuitous casualness, kinetically exhibiting “that fringe of indeterminacy or indefiniteness characteristic of photography”.67 Each engagement in screen acting is a fragmentary effort, caught in the shots of a scene within a movie, reflecting the diffusion of contexts out of which and towards which it proceeds. This diffusion can be visually reflected in cuts between successive and simultaneous characterizations, as well as by the sight of other action in the background. It can also be audibly presented by filming the simultaneous speech of multiple actors. Robert Altman brings this cinematic naturalism to such films as Nashville, where actors speak amidst the ordinary cacophony of concurrent conversation, unlike the artificially alternating speech of theater dialogue. This fragmented character of film acting reflects the working predicament of movie actors. Whereas theater actors perform before an audience of random theatergoers, film actors perform before a motion picture  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 95.  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 96. 67  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 95. 65 66

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apparatus being operated by a team of film specialists including the director, makeup, costume and lighting designers, a cinematographer, and perhaps sound specialists and produces, all of whom can interrupt the performance at any moment to suggest changes for further retakes.68 This contributes to a situation where actors perform before the camera without having access to the completed work. Not only may any of or all their shots be dropped from the final edit, but not even an antecedently available script can inform them of the finished product, which only final shooting and editing can determine. Stage actors can read the entire play ahead of time and tailor their performance with their understanding of the whole, including a full comprehension of their character as revealed in the entire dialogue. Film performers are at pains to identify with their role,69 since they are condemned to act in relative ignorance of how each shot fits within the entire movie.70 Instead, they interpret each scene often on the spot, subject to the guide of a director whose own vision may change during filming and editing, or be usurped by meddling producers, as Orson Welles suffered in losing final editing of The Magnificent Ambersons. Even if film actors’ performances make it to the final cut, they cannot know how it will appear, for that footage may be visually altered in film processing and/or sonically transformed through dubbing and sound effects.

Cinema and the Artforms Unlike architecture, sculpture, graphic art, music, and literature, cinema, like photography, has an origin that is not shrouded in prehistoric mystery. We know that motion pictures arose in the late eighteen hundreds,  Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, p. 30. 69  Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, p. 32. 70  As Pudovkin writes, “the film actor is deprived of a consciousness of the uninterrupted development of the action in his work. The organic connection between the consecutive part of his work, as a result of which the distinct whole image is created, is not for him. The whole image of the actor is only to be conceived as a future appearance on the screen, subsequent to the editing of the directory.” Cited in Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 97. 68

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following the advent of photography a half century earlier, and we can identify the inventors of its technology and the pioneers of its artistic infancy. From its beginnings, cinema benefitted from both the industrial development that made possible photographic film, movie cameras, and movie projectors, and the emergence of a new branch of commerce, a film industry, that could fund movie making and movie distribution. All these technological and economic innovations occurred with the rise of a civil society in modern times. Through this historical transformation, the household, the economy, and the state became demarcated from one another as distinct institutional spheres in which different rights and opportunities lay at stake. The independent realm of economic relations engendered a competitive process of enterprises, both private and public, where viability depends upon acquiring ever more capital for new innovative investment to enhance production and marketing. Consequently, our modern times have been an epoch in which technological development has raced ahead driven by market competition, as well as by the military rivalries in which modern states are embroiled. The fine art of motion pictures, like that of photography, has received its equipment from this distinctly modern process, which has equally supplied the vast amounts of capital with which the movie industry has been able to fund the production and distribution of its films. In general movie making has required much greater productive assets, including diversified labor, than any of the other fine arts, with the exception of architecture when engaged in large scale constructions. A film director is a veritable commander of an army of collaborators, including actors, cinematographers, costume and scenery designers, editors, and increasing multitudes of CGI technicians and animators. Film distribution for its part, reaches its audience thanks to a massive commercial infrastructure of movie theaters, television broadcasters and cable distributors, and internet streaming. Due to the vast resources that are ordinarily needed to create a film, movie makers, more than any other contemporary artists, are prey to pressures from their benefactors, be they private investors or state sponsors. Certainly, this has resulted in copious film production that sacrifices aesthetic integrity to provide, on the one hand, kitsch

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entertainment serving commercial interests,71 and, on the other, ideological edification under strict political guidance. Of course, there need not be any inherent conflict between artistic integrity and commercial success nor any insuperable barrier between cinematic artistry and the tolerance of a political regime that subsidizes film. Nonetheless, there is no shortage of filmmakers, such as Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick, whose efforts have been stymied by a failure to get private backing for their film projects, just as there have been many others, living under authoritarian state “socialist” or fascist regimes or under “private” but politically inspired blacklisting, who have had to put their film careers on hold or capitulate to politically expedient compromise. Admittedly recent developments in smart phone technology, film editing software, and internet posting have made it possible for cineastes to make and distribute films on a relative shoestring. This possibility, however, is just as dependent upon the modern developments fueling motion picture technology. It is therefore understandable to regard film, as well as photography, as a quintessentially modern art, tied to the world view that invests fundamental value in the reality of inner and outer freedom and finds its artistic fit in what Hegel characterizes as the Romantic style of art. Many of the prominent film theorists have accepted this characterization. Lukács maintains that film is spiritually, as well as technologically, from beginning to end, a product of capitalism.72 Bela Balázs proclaims that cinema is “the first and only bourgeois art” in the broad sense of expressing modern freedoms. This, he notes, is exhibited in the “radically democratic and progressive” content that the nascent Hollywood film industry found fit for the new film language it was inventing.73 Charlie Chaplin always sympathetically depicted the adventures of “a ‘Lumpenproletarian’ who defends himself with charming cunning against the heartlessness of the

 Lukács emphasizes this aspect. See Lukács, Georg, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 469.  Lukács writes, “Der Film geistig wie technisch von vornherein ein Produkt des Kapitalismus ist.” See Lukács, Georg, Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen – Band 2, p. 469. 73  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 50.

71

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rich”.74 In the mammoth four-part silent classic, Intolerance, W. D. Griffith created “the most courageous pacificist manifestation of the time and turning against imperialist chauvinism he depicted the methods of big business” as fraudulently promoting its charity efforts at the expense of the livelihood of its workers.75 Siegfried Kracauer joins in celebrating the progressive content of Griffith’s films, noting how in Broken Blossoms, Griffith “juxtaposes the noble unassuming face of the film’s Chinese protagonist with the close-ups of two missionaries whose faces exude unctuous hypocrisy”, thus confronting the “belief in the white man’s superiority with the reality it allegedly covers and through this confrontation denounces it as an unwarranted prejudice”.76 Yet, one has only to view Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to see how a milestone in the development of cinematic form language can configure a content virulently championing the triumph of white supremacy over the thwarted emancipation of Reconstruction, which promised a new birth of freedom for black and white Americans alike. The examples of certain films of Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl equally show how Marxist-Leninist and Nazi ideology can make powerful use of cinematic expression. Although these extremes seem to counter the allegedly “democratic progressive bourgeois” character of cinema, the advocacy of the dictatorship of the proletariat is just as much a modern phenomenon as the rise of Fascism, both of which define themselves by their rejection of a civil society distinguished from a sphere of democratic government.77 Moreover, both these movements invoke mass action, which is not only a cinematic subject matter par excellence, but something by which the masses thereby “come

 Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 51.  Balázs, Theory of the Film, p. 51. 76  Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, p. 307. 77  This is perhaps reflected in how the architecture of Mussolini, new city, EUR, is just as modernist as that created during the early years of the Soviet Union. 74 75

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face to face with themselves”78 in the collective viewing of images in cinema halls the world over.79 Accordingly, the historical advent of film within the slaughterhouse of modern times, where emancipation is the contested order of the day, may appear to give belated support to the thesis that Hegel applies to all arts with which he is familiar, that each has an intrinsic affinity to one of the fundamental art forms. Hegel’s own analyses, as we have seen, undercut his privileging of architecture as a Symbolic style art, of sculpture as a Classical style art, and of painting, music, and literature as arts that are most suited to the Romantic style. Nonetheless, might film vindicate the tie between art and artform by being an artistic medium that is essentially tied to the modern self-understanding and its Romantic style, to which the novel gives a characteristic literary embodiment? It would be futile to dispute the historical fact that on our lonely planet, cinema, like photography, has arisen in the modern world, making use of technological and economic developments fueled by the dynamic of modern civil society. Moreover, the history of cinema has proven how the form language of cinema is amenable to shaping the contents that figure in the specific unity of meaning and configuration that define the Romantic style. The extensive reach of film’s reproductive and formative capabilities is well suited for a world view that embraces neither the transcendent allusions of Symbolic style absolutes or the perfections of a Classical ideal but is ready to explore the life of freedom in its totality in every corner of  Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, note 36, p. 54. 79  Stanley Cavell alludes to the affinity of cinema towards democracy and equality, as well as fascist populism, based on the alleged primacy of individuality over social role, writing, “The general difference between a film type and a stage type is that the individuality captured on film naturally takes precedence over the social role in which that individuality gets expressed. Because on film social role appears arbitrary or incidental, movies have an inherent tendency toward the democratic, or anyway the idea of human equality. (But because of film’s equally natural attraction to crowds, it has opposite tendencies toward the fascistic or populistic.)” See Cavell, The World Viewed, Enlarge Edition, pp. 34–35. Cavell here presumes the opposition between individuality and social role, which is symptomatic of an ignorance of ethical community, in which the two go together, as well as an ignorance of how democracy is itself a form of ethical community in which individuality and the role of citizen are integrated. Innumerable films have not ignored that inherent connection, nor is it one that applies only to democratic government and institutions in which equality reigns supreme. 78

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existence, high or low. The movie camera can readily capture this widened field of human concern and bring to view both aspects of life and groups of individuals who have heretofore often been neglected by fine art. Film can also visualize the struggles of individuals to assert their autonomy in situations where the freedoms of modernity are either inadequately realized or under assault. So, too, film can and has followed the novel in depicting problematic individuals who aspire to wield a freedom that cannot be fully embodied in any given sensuous reality. Moreover, film is fully capable of addressing the plight of individuals in a world of settled institutions of freedom who try to find some individual endeavor that retains fundamental significance for the fabric of their community. So too, film can follow the flight of modernist art away from objective representation by becoming an “avant-garde” “experimental” cinema in which motion pictures exhibit their own difficulty at creating any imagery that can adequately express self-determination. Do these familiar aspects of modern cinema, however, demonstrate that motion pictures could not develop in civilizations whose self-understandings gain artistic expression in Symbolic and Classical styles? To begin with, is it inconceivable that pre-modern communities could obtain the means for filmmaking, either through their own ingenuity or by recovering technologies that coexisting or extinct modern societies had produced? Can we really be certain that civilizations like those of pre-Columbian America, ancient Egypt, the India of Ashoka, imperial China, or Classical Greece could never have invented photography, film cameras, and motion picture projectors? Even if this were the case, can we preclude situations where pre-modern communities coexist with those that have modernized themselves and obtain from the latter the technology and equipment needed for filmmaking? Moreover, can we really discount the possibility of a modern society like our own extinguishing itself, but leaving behind retrievable resources for a successor community to engage in filmmaking? Help in imagining such an outcome has been provided by not so few dystopian films, which picture how those who follow our self-inflicted demise stumble upon our remnants and build upon them. Who can forget Charlton Heston’s cry when, in the last scene of Planet of the Apes, he comes upon the Statue of Liberty torch

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protruding from the shore and realizes that a new type of rational animal has inherited our civilization’s remains? A deeper question is whether film as a medium is simply unusable by anyone who does not share the self-understanding of modernity, for which the totality of freedom has an albeit contested validity, and who’s appropriate artform is the Romantic style. In the preceding discussion of photography, we have explored how photographs in a Symbolic or Classical style could readily be taken. The animist photographer can simply take a snapshot of sculptural artifacts, ritual dancers, or griots to capture graphic expressions of the world view that subordinates humanity to natural powers that transcend given life forms. So too, Kālidāsa, Vyasa, or Valmiki could take a camera and photograph sculptural and painted depictions of the characters of their dramas and epics as they fulfill their dharma and undertake austerities to escape worldly attachments and achieve unity with the ultimately indeterminate absolute. Nor is it hard to imagine Phidias or Apelles of Kos taking photographs of preexisting Classical sculptures, painted amphoras, and murals, or of Olympian athletes, masked actors, public orators, and philosophers to give expression to the Classical Ideal using both the “realist” and “formative” dimensions of photography. Analogous options are available to filmmakers in the worlds of Symbolic and Classical art. Although cinema undermines its own mobile aesthetics by simply shooting dance or drama performances from the fixed position of a theater spectator, a filmmaker could express the selfunderstanding of pre-modern communities by using mobile composition and montage to capture such spectacles with a genuinely cinematic visual dynamic. If Kālidāsa obtained a movie camera, why could he not adapt his play, Śakuntalā for the screen, taking advantage of all its multiple characters, scene changes, and varied settings? How could Vyasa and Valmiki not find innumerable visually dynamic events in the Mahabharata and Ramayana suitable for a film adaptation true to their spirit? Would not all the cinematic resources for picturing fantastical activity serve well to depict the stupendous exploits abounding in these Sanskrit epics? By the same token, would not the dynamic worldly action of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey provide eminently cinematic material that could be adapted for film with fidelity to the self-understanding of an age celebrating

15  The Total Art of Hybrid Cinema 

497

anthropomorphic gods and heroes? And could not the Greek tragedies and comedies supply abundant intrigues that could be opened up for cinematic treatment, while remaining true to the governing ethos of the Classical Ideal? Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides may have strictly limited the number of actors on stage at any time to one, then to two, and finally to three and seldom more, while ancient practice masked theater actors. Yet all these conventions might be loosened on behalf of a more movie camera friendly panorama, without sacrificing the substantial concerns of competing ethical powers and the priority of what appears in public life over conscience and problematic characters alienated from ethical community. In these ways, the art of film can accommodate all the artforms, even if our earthly experience provides no evidence of anything other than modern, essentially Romantic style movies. For all we know, in galaxies far, far away, rational beings of very different evolutionary ancestries are creating works of cinema, no matter what world view they profess. The philosophy of the arts can anticipate these possibilities, while we lonely planet inhabitants make do with our truncated film heritage.

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Hegel, G.  W. F., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. by H.  B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Hegel, G. W. F., Gesammelte Werke, Band 25,1: Vorlesungen Über die Philosophie des Subjektiven Geistes, Nachschriften zu den Kollegien der Jahre 1822 und 1825, ed. Christoph Johannes Bauer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2008) Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, Volume III, edited and translated by M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1970a) Hegel, G. W. F., Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V.  Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977a) Hegel, G. W. F., Philosophy of Mind, being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. by William Wallace together with the Zusätze in Boumanns Text (1845) trans. by A.  V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977b) Hegel, G. W. F., Science of Logic, trans. by A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1976) Hegel, G. W. F., Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. Michel, Werke in zwanzig Banden, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970b) Jonas, Hans, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press: 2001) Kālidāsa, The Plays of Kālidāsa: Theater of Memory, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller, trans. Edwin Gerow, David Gitomer, Barbara Stoler Miller (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1999) Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 209 Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.  J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964) Kautilya, The Arthashastra, trans. by L.  N. Rangarajan (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1992) Kolb, David, Postmodern Sophistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990) Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) Le Corbusier, Towards A New Architecture, trans. by Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover Publications, 1966)

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Index1

A

Abstract art, 126 Abstract experimental film, 452 Abstract expressionism, 175 Achebe, Chinua, 397 Achilles, 108, 366–368, 382 Acting, 94, 213, 215, 287, 310, 321–323, 333, 371, 377, 378, 407, 446, 468, 479, 487–490 See also Drama, acting in; Motion pictures, acting in Adams, Ansel, 162 Adorno, Theodor H., 187n12, 197n42, 225n3, 226n5, 227n7, 229n11, 229n12, 229n13, 229n14 Aeneid, 381 Aeschylus, 332, 373–375, 497

Aesthetics mimetic, 4, 5, 17, 32 systematic, 5, 31–33, 37, 102 transcendental, 5, 32 Agee, James, 462n67 Ajanta Caves, 145 Aleatory music, 227 Alexandrov, Grigori, 466 Allegory, 401 Altman, Robert, 489 Ancient Rome, 365 Anger, Kenneth, 452 Apelles of Kos, 146, 496 Arbus, Diane, 172 Archipenko, Alexander, 112 Architecture, 79, 180, 242 aesthetic enigma of, 31–35 Classical, 19, 35, 36, 50, 57–65, 67 community, 44–46

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 R. D. Winfield, Rethinking the Arts after Hegel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35542-4

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506 Index

Architecture (cont.) and engineering, 39–41 Gothic, 19, 69 post-modern, 70, 72, 72n51, 73 Romantic, 49, 52, 57, 64–74, 110, 159 Symbolic, 36, 42, 51–57, 60, 61 and tradition, 48 and use, 35 Arendt, Hannah, 299n76, 388, 400 Aristophanes, 338, 375, 415 Aristotle, 17, 114, 180, 194, 217, 240, 256n44, 259n50, 272, 272n11, 273, 300, 301, 306, 307, 311, 311n107, 311n109, 315, 315n117, 320, 325, 332–335, 379 Poetics, 272, 300 Armstrong, Louis, 182 Art Deco, 73 Artform, 169, 180, 243, 266 Classical, 243 Symbolic, 169, 243, 345 Artifact, 34, 41, 80, 81, 117, 120, 122, 125, 138, 286, 496 Artistic media, 4, 6–9, 18, 24, 25, 30, 56, 159, 181, 267, 448, 463 Arts division of into “representational” and “non-representational”, 11, 16–18 by senses and sensuous properties, 9–12 fine vs. edifying art, 252 unity of form and content in, 102 Ashoka, 495

Astaire, Fred, 459 Atget, Jean-Eugène-Auguste, 122, 162 Atmospheric distancing, 133, 140, 149 Atonalism, 228 Augustine, Saint, 455 Avery, Milton, 124 B

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 215, 477 Bakhtin, M. M., 370, 388–390 Balanchine, George, 114 Balázs, Béla, 318, 319n124, 409n159, 435n2, 443n25, 443n27, 444n31, 445n36, 447n42, 451n48, 452n50, 455, 456, 456n54, 464n2, 465, 465n7, 469, 488n64, 492 Ballad, 383 Balzac, Honoré de, 394 Bartok, Bela, 192, 226 Bauhaus, 57 Beauty, 287 artistic, 4, 6, 35, 95 natural, 6, 152, 250n22 Beckett, Samuel, 240, 400, 426, 487 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 180, 225, 299, 477 Benjamin, Walter, 25n2, 31, 80n6, 84, 167, 438n11, 442 Berg, Alban, 214 Bergman, Ingmar, 473 Berkeley, George, 132 Bernanos, Georges, 485 Bernhardt, Sarah, 323 Bhagavad Gita, 349

 Index 

Bharata, 321 Bhavabhūti, 359 Biography, 251, 392, 453 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 275, 383 Boccioni, Umberto, 121 Bogart, Humphrey, 488 Bollywood Cinema, 215, 473 Bond, James, 462 Bonnard, Pierre, 124 Boswell, James, 455 Bourke-White, Margaret, 162, 486 Bozzetto, Bruno, 477 Brady, Matthew, 162 Brakhage, Stan, 452 Brancusi, Constantin, 112 Brando, Marlon, 323, 378, 477 Braque, Georges, 153 Brassaï, 162 Brecht, Bertolt, 266, 309n100, 316, 317, 323, 422–424 Bresson, Robert, 485 Breughel, Pieter the Elder, 145 Britten, Benjamin, 227 Brooks, Mel, 466 Brown, Joe E., 479 Brubeck, Dave, 192 Bruckner, Anton, 225 Büchner, Georg, 263 Buddhas, 95, 143 Buddhist temples, 60 Buñuel, Luis, 452 Burgess, Anthony, 260 Byron, George Gordon, 391 C

Cage, John, 155, 231, 438 Cagney, James, 479 Calder, Alexander, 112

507

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 316 Camera, 161 Camões, Luis Vas de, 381 Camus, Albert, 401 Capital, 63, 67, 71n47, 73, 491 Capitalism, 388, 492 Capote, Truman, 455 Carnation, 135 Cassirer, Ernst, 270 Caste, 352 Categorical imperative, 353 Catharsis, 191, 202, 309n100, 314–317, 332, 423 Cavell, Stanley, 158n1, 494n79 Cervantes, Miguel de, 326, 394 Cézanne, Paul, 152 Chaney, Lon, 488 Chaplin, Charlie, 338, 458, 465, 465n7, 466, 492 Character, 4, 29, 51, 80, 98, 123, 144, 164, 181, 221, 236, 265, 310–314, 344 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 274, 383 Chekhov, Anton, 266, 417 Chiaroscuro, 124, 150, 152, 162, 166 Chivalry, 382 Chopin, Frederick, 225 Chopra, B. R., 483 Chorus, 376 Christianity, 148, 223 Christo, 175n28 Cinema, 207 content of, 447–462 documentary, 448 experimental, 495 fiction “story”, 455–462 form language of, 442–447, 449, 459, 467, 470, 473, 479, 483n51, 494

508 Index

Cinema (cont.) genres of, 447–462 hybrid, 431–432, 448, 463–497 pure, 431–463, 465 surrealist, 451–452 See also Motion pictures Civil legality, 278, 328, 462 Civil society, 62n25, 278, 279, 328, 382, 388, 395, 396, 411, 491, 493, 494 Clair, René, 437, 465 Clark, Kenneth, 101–103, 102n18, 110 Classical column, 62 Classical ideal, 103, 146, 305, 365, 403, 406, 494 Classical Ideal, 275 Classical nude, 103 Classical Sanskrit drama, 239 Classical Style, 145 Classicism, 413 Close, Chuck, 104 Cocteau, Jean, 452 Coen, Joel and Ethan, 483 Colonialism, 358, 397 Comedy, 171, 245, 266, 267, 272, 289, 301, 307, 316, 317, 325, 326, 334–342, 351, 352, 355, 358, 364, 372, 375, 376, 414–416, 472, 497 See also Drama, comedic Comics, 120 Computer generated imagery (CGI), 434, 435, 440, 451, 461, 462, 491 Conceptual art, 154 Conduct, 17, 30n13, 33, 35, 37, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64n31, 66, 69, 81, 86, 88, 89, 97–101,

104, 105, 109, 119, 138, 146, 148, 222, 238, 247, 327, 328, 341, 357, 359 Conner, Bruce, 450 Conscience, 78, 83, 99, 108, 111, 148, 160, 219, 328, 365, 375, 382, 388, 497 Consciousness as discursive, 249 as identified with mind, 444n31 opposition of, 198 as reason, 187n14 Contradiction, 199, 307, 312, 330, 337, 421 principle of, 130 Coppola, Francis Ford, 475 Correggio, Antonio da, 136, 150 Crane, Stephen, 281 Crosland, Alan, 473 Cuirasse esthétique, 107 Cukor, George, 473 Culture, 33, 52, 112, 169, 343, 356, 451n48 D

Da Vinci, Leonardo, 136, 149 Dance, 13, 15, 16, 24, 26, 31, 38, 39, 70, 82, 113–114, 168, 169, 179, 182, 188, 207–215, 318, 319, 321, 406, 431, 433, 451, 459, 473, 474, 496 Dante, Alighieri, 273, 274, 281, 295n61, 384, 387 Darwin, Charles, 158 Daumier, Honoré Victorin, 168 David, 110

 Index 

Davis, Bette, 488 de Chirico, Giorgio, 73 de Man, Paul, 73 De Maria, Walter, 175n28 De Sica, Vittorio, 458, 488 Dean, James, 378 Debussy, Claude, 226 Deconstruction, 58 Defoe, Daniel, 399 Democracy, 376n61, 384, 387, 339n186 See also Self-government Demy, Jacques, 473 Desani, G. V., 400 Dharma, 223, 348, 403 Dickens, Charles, 273, 281, 394 Diction, 254 Disney, Walt, 461, 477 Divine Comedy, 273, 274, 281, 295n61, 384, 387 Donen, Stanley, 460 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 399 Drama, 205 acting in, 287, 310, 321 Classical, 217, 301, 372, 373, 376–379, 404 comedic, 301, 316, 326, 351, 352, 355, 372, 414 (see also Comedy) genres of, 266, 272, 300, 301, 324–327, 335, 337 modern, 258, 314, 324, 341, 412, 413, 417, 421–427 modern drama, 341 performance of, 317–324 Romantic, 350, 403–405, 407, 408, 414 Symbolic, 300, 301, 352 tragic, 245, 315, 328, 407 (see also Tragedy)

509

tragicomedic, 316, 352 (see also Tragicomedy) unity of, 306, 307, 309 Dualism mind-body, 84 Duchamp, Marcel, 80, 121 Dukas, Paul, 477 Dunaway, Faye, 440 Dutch Old Masters, 136 Dutt, Guru, 460 E

Economic freedom, 160 Edison, Thomas, 433 Eisenstein, Sergei, 443, 454 Elgin Marbles, 103 Ellison, Ralph, 399 Emotion, 17, 89, 90, 98, 99, 106, 108, 128, 189, 190, 194, 198, 202, 203, 211, 219–223, 230, 235, 241, 246, 247, 249, 253, 270, 271, 277, 286–290, 292, 293, 296, 297, 332, 358, 398, 450, 468, 469, 475, 485 Epic, 60, 94, 141, 143, 144, 146, 155, 171, 211, 214, 215, 222, 240, 241, 245, 265–292, 266n1, 268n5, 294–297, 295n61, 300–305, 303n80, 307, 308, 313, 313n112, 314, 315n116, 317, 325, 326, 328, 329, 344, 346–351, 353, 354, 356–358, 366–374, 367n38, 376, 381–404, 407, 409n159, 417, 419–426, 440, 456, 456n54, 462, 479, 483, 484, 486, 496 of chivalry, 383

510 Index

Epos, 266n1, 267, 275, 276, 279–281, 283, 326, 328, 347, 348, 353, 367–372, 381–383, 385, 389–392, 396, 402, 457, 483 Étaix, Pierre, 465 Ethical community, 60, 62n25, 64, 83, 99, 106, 108, 109, 146, 148, 220, 278, 353, 368, 369, 382, 386–388, 396, 462, 494n79, 497 Ethics, 33, 99, 348 Euripides, 373, 374, 376n73, 497 Evans, Walker, 162, 486 Extraterrestrials, 89, 434, 472 F

Falconetti, Renée Jeanne, 323 Family, 18, 18n9, 45n31, 62n25, 223, 278, 328, 348, 349, 367, 373, 374, 377, 380, 382, 387, 388, 407–411, 409n159, 454 The Family of Man, 172 Fantasy, 460, 472 Fascism, 73 Fate, 223, 225n3, 279, 316, 326, 329, 332, 333, 340, 340n188, 341, 371–373, 375, 387, 390, 392, 405n152, 409, 420 Faulkner, William, 260, 275, 313, 400, 476 Fauvism, 152 Fellini, Federico, 447, 460, 484 Feudalism, 408 Fielding, Henry, 326

Film documentary, 453 Film script, 319n124, 456 Fitzgerald, Ella, 182 Flaherty, Robert, 453 Ford, John, 485 Foreshortening, 133, 149, 166 Frank, Robert, 172 Frankenthaler, Helen, 154 Freedom, 18, 39, 45, 48, 50, 53, 62n25, 87, 96, 111, 131, 144, 148, 150, 151, 154, 158–160, 172–175, 206, 207, 221–225, 227, 229n14, 238, 241, 250, 267, 279, 288, 294, 297, 324, 328, 330, 331, 337, 345, 350, 351, 354, 357, 361, 374, 377, 379, 380, 382, 385, 387–390, 392, 396, 397, 401–406, 409–412, 414, 415, 417, 420, 442, 452n50, 462, 482, 483, 485, 492–496 See also Self-determination Free verse, 256 French Revolution, 385 Fugue, 224 Furie, Sidney J., 473 G

Gable, Clarke, 488 Garbo, Greta, 488 Gaudí, Antoni, 72 Gehry, Frank, 72 German Expressionism, 152 Gershwin, George, 179 Getino, Octavio, 455 Ghezzis, 147

 Index 

Giotto, 149 Glass, Philip, 226 Godard, Jean-Luc, 467, 473 Goebbels, Joseph, 461 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 274, 303, 385, 411 Good, 66, 89, 99, 108, 149, 278, 280, 287, 329, 333, 337, 358, 375, 415 Goodman, Nelson, 33 Gothic cathedral, 63 Gould, Glenn, 205 Gowariker, Ashutosh, 460 Goya, Francisco, 121, 167 Grammar, 197, 228, 238, 250 Grant, Cary, 488 Graphic art, 126 Graphic fine art, 117–142, 157–175, 434 Graphic novels, 120 Grass, Günter, 402 Greek temple, 57 Griffith, W. D., 443, 458, 493 Gropius, Walter, 57 Grosz, Georg, 167 Grünewald, Matthias, 149 Guevara, Che, 193 Guinness, Alec, 488 Guitry, Sacha, 476n36 H

Hals, Frans, 126 Hanson, Duane, 91, 104, 112 Hardy, Thomas, 260 Hartmann, Nicolai, 18, 34, 47, 48, 87, 123, 180, 191, 211, 334, 341

511

Hauptmann, Gerhart, 419 Havilland, Olivia de, 479 Hazanavicius, Michel, 466 Heartfield, John, 167 Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 25, 48, 81, 93, 119, 145, 159, 180, 217, 237n3, 266, 344, 452n50, 492 Lectures on Fine Art, 180, 242, 357, 416 Heidegger, Martin, 73, 238n4, 422 Heizer, Michael, 112, 154 Hemingway, Ernest, 281 Hepburn, Katherine, 488 Hepworth, Barbara, 112 Herodotus, 256n44 Heston, Charlton, 495 Hindemith, Paul, 227 Hinduism, 144, 352 Hindu temples, 60, 94 Hines, Lewis, 167 Hirst, Damien, 80 History, 25, 25n2, 48, 72, 103, 111, 141, 146, 163, 172, 173, 197, 240, 251, 253, 256n44, 270, 274, 286, 288, 292, 306, 344, 353, 380, 384, 385, 387, 392, 399, 400, 419, 453, 465, 494 Hitchcock, Alfred, 439, 459, 473 Hitler, Adolf, 455 Hobbes, Thomas, 335 Hoffman, Dustin, 488 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 421 Holography, 113–114 Homer, 248, 248n14, 267, 274, 275, 277–280, 283, 289, 295, 296, 326, 366–368, 370, 371, 381, 483, 496

512 Index

Honegger, Arthur, 180 Hopper, Edward, 122 Hugo, Victor, 281 Hunter, Robert, 154 Huston, John, 460 I

Ibsen, Henrik, 315, 417 Iliad, 248, 267, 275, 279–281, 289, 296, 353, 366, 370, 371, 381, 408, 496 Imperialism, 358, 382, 397, 403 Iñárritu, Alejandro Gonzalez, 438 Indiana, Robert, 79 Individuality Classical, 106, 128, 377, 378 modern, 395 Romantic, 19 Symbolic, 19 Industrial revolution, 160 Intention, 324, 368, 375, 403, 410 International Style, 71 Internet, 13, 168, 431, 480, 491, 492 Inter-titles, 465 J

Jazz, 197 Jesus Christ, 148 Jewish temples, 69 Johns, Jasper, 153 Joyce, James, 152n10, 260, 275, 315, 315n116, 398, 399, 483, 487 Judgment, 4, 50, 85, 181, 238, 356, 384

K

Kafka, Franz, 400, 401, 487 Kaiser, Georg, 422 Kālidāsa, 316, 352, 354–356, 359, 361n32, 363, 364, 496 Kandinsky, Wassily, 126, 153 Kant, Immanuel, 190, 240, 335 Karas, Anton, 475 Kautilya, 348, 359–361, 360n31, 361n32 Kazan, Elia, 477 Keaton, Buster, 458, 470 Kelly, Gene, 460 Kershner, Irvin, 440 Klein, Yves, 122 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 384 Kodaly, Zoltan, 226 Kopple, Barbara, 454 Kracauer, Siegfried, 164, 448n44, 451n49, 459n59, 461, 464n5, 471, 480, 481, 485, 485n55, 486n60, 488n63, 493 Kubrick, Stanley, 475 Kurasawa, Akira, 478 L

Lacoon, 106 Landscapes, 140 Lang, Fritz, 473 Lange, Dorothea, 162, 486 Langlois, Henri, 445n35 Language art of, 236, 237, 239, 242–245, 249, 250n25, 251, 256, 263, 272, 314, 478 artistic, 269 See also Literature

 Index 

Laughton, Charles, 323, 480 Lawrence, D. H., 402 Lawrence, Jacob, 121, 167 Le Corbusier, 57, 61, 64, 69, 71 Legality, see Civil Legality Léger, Fernand, 450 Leitmotif, 213 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 461 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 108, 109n29, 121n10, 147, 248, 248n14, 249 Levi, Primo, 455 Lewitt, Sol, 154 Lichtenstein, Roy, 125, 153 Lingams, 52 Lipchitz, Jacques, 112 Lispector, Clarice, 260, 399 Liszt, Franz, 225, 473 Literature, 188, 210, 245 and the artforms, 343–344 creative activity, 261–264 dramatic (see also Drama) Classical, 217, 272, 300, 301, 325, 372, 373, 375–379, 381, 404 Romantic, 300, 325, 350, 403–405, 407, 408, 414 Symbolic, 300, 350–364 epic (see also Epic; Epos; Novel) Classical, 275, 276, 280, 370, 371 Romantic, 347, 382, 385, 386, 388–390, 407 Symbolic, 347, 348, 366, 383 as fine art, 235–264, 266 genres of, 239, 263, 265–269 lyric Classical, 291, 354, 364, 365

513

Romantic, 291, 354, 379, 380 Symbolic, 291 The Living Theater, 309n100 Lloyd, Harold, 470 Lorre, Peter, 473 Louis, Morris, 154 Lukács, Georg, 25–27, 26n4, 39, 43–45, 43n26, 47, 48, 168n21, 190, 208, 209, 209n67, 239, 241, 284n40, 307, 308n93, 319n124, 319n126, 368–371, 376, 384, 389–401, 418n187, 456, 492 Lumière brothers, 442, 465 M

Machine, 450 Magic realism, 402 Mahabharat/Mahabharata, 94, 144, 276, 279, 281, 325, 348, 349, 353, 356, 357, 483, 496 Mahler, Gustav, 473 Malraux, André, 281 Mandelstam, Nadeszhda, 455 Mann, Thomas, 263, 398 Marceau, Marcel, 466 Marie Saint, Eve, 477 Market, 45, 65, 160, 168, 278, 279, 396, 491 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 402 Marx Brothers, 472 Mask, 377, 406 Matisse, Henri, 94, 134, 152 McCarey, Leo, 480 McFerrin, Bobby, 182

514 Index

Mechanism, 132, 133, 175, 279 Medieval Europe, 387 Mehra, Rakeysh Omprakash, 460 Méliès, Georges, 443 Melville, Herman, 273, 399 Memnons, 50, 95 Memory, 38, 227, 236, 288, 298, 306, 310, 398–400, 402, 418, 419, 421, 425, 433, 486n60, 487 Mendelsohn, Erich, 72 Mendelssohn, Felix, 263 Metaphor, 255, 274, 345 Meter, 237, 288 Michals, Duane, 167 Michelangelo, 43, 44, 86, 102n18, 110, 127, 150 Microphysiognomy, 446 Milhaud, Darius, 227 Miller, Arthur, 425 Miller, Henry, 402 Milton, John, 274, 381, 384 Mime, 13, 113–114, 431, 466, 467 Mimesis, 158, 190, 453 Mimetic theory of art, 158 Miró, Joan, 112 Mo Yan, 397 Modernism, 57, 126, 402 Modernity, 64n31, 160, 173, 224, 330, 397, 400, 417, 495, 496 Modernization, 394, 403, 419 Moholy-Nagy, László, 166 Moksa, 223, 353 Molière, 415 Monarchy, 400, 411 Monet, Claude, 124, 126, 152 Monk, Thelonious, 192

Montgomery, Robert, 441 Moore, Henry, 112 Morandi, Giorgio, 122 Morrison, Toni, 402 Mosaics, 123 Moslem mosques, 69 Motion pictures, 13, 28, 77, 118, 158, 182, 319n124, 432–440, 438n11, 442, 443n27, 445–447, 449, 451n49, 456–458, 460–465, 472–480, 482–485, 487, 489–491, 494n79, 495–497 acting in silent film, 13, 447, 456, 458, 464–471, 487–490 sound film, 457, 460, 465–471, 474, 478, 479, 482, 487–490 adaptation of literary genres in, 482–487 and the artforms, 432, 490, 492, 495 silent, 465 sound, 478, 482 See also Cinema Movies, see Motion pictures Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 205, 263, 315 Muni, Paul, 488 Music/musical, 179, 213, 235, 451 as an accompaniment of other arts, 15, 25, 79, 179, 181, 182, 207–215, 406, 475, 477 and the artforms, 35, 127, 181, 217–231, 243

 Index 

atonal, 70, 226, 227n7, 230, 451 Classical, 19, 35, 36, 181, 192, 196, 212, 217, 220–222, 224–226, 472 harmony in, 15, 17, 181, 186, 187, 191, 192, 198–201, 203, 209, 214, 218, 220n1, 222, 224–227, 235, 244, 246, 258, 259, 262, 463 and meaning, 130, 136, 182, 183, 189, 231, 475 melody and melodic development in, 181, 186, 187, 191, 192, 195, 200–203, 206, 209, 210, 219, 220, 222, 227, 258, 451, 463 vs. noise, 14, 15, 318, 475 performance of, 15, 45, 79, 80, 113, 114, 179, 204–209, 215, 218, 236, 262, 315, 318, 321, 322, 470, 472–474 and representation, 122, 180, 218, 450, 451 rhythm in, 15, 17, 186, 191–194, 197–200, 208, 209, 211, 218–222, 226, 226n5, 227, 229, 230, 235, 244, 257, 259, 259n49, 262, 378, 463 Romantic, 19, 35, 127, 160, 181, 215, 217, 218, 220n1, 222–231, 243, 416, 494 serial, 78, 227, 228, 229n10, 230, 231 Symbolic, 35, 181, 215, 217–219, 222, 244, 494 tonal, 39, 190, 194–200, 220, 225–228, 230, 258 Musil, Robert, 399

515

Mussolini, Benito, 73, 493n77 Mussorgsky, Modest, 214, 477 Myron, 77 N

Nabokov, Vladimir, 260 Naipaul, V. S., 397 Naturalism, 90, 100, 101, 112, 152, 378, 401, 402, 406, 422, 435n2, 489 Nature inorganic, 53–55, 59, 60 organic, 54, 55, 59, 64, 96, 183, 215, 226, 306, 413 Nātyaśāstra, 311n105, 321n132, 324, 325n140 Nazism, 73, 238n4 Neel, Alice, 124 Neo-classicism, 100, 227, 319 Nevelson, Louise, 112 Newsreels, 453 Nietzsche, F., 73, 214 Nikolais, Alwin, 114 Nirvana, 414 Noguchi, Isamu, 112 Non-story non-fiction representational film, 452 Normativity, 99, 172, 222, 350, 397, 403, 417 Novel, 214, 258, 347, 368, 457, 484, 494 Bildungsroman, 377, 387, 395–397 modernist, 393, 397–399, 401–403 naturalist, 401 picaresque, 454, 480, 484 realist, 393, 397, 398

516 Index

Nude, 100–104, 102n18, 107, 122, 162, 166 Classical, 100–110, 146, 171 O

Obelisks, 52, 81 Odysseus, 366 Odyssey, 248, 267, 275, 280, 283, 289, 296, 326, 353, 366, 371, 373, 483, 496 Oedipus, 108, 329, 375 Oldenburg, Claes, 112 Olivier, Laurence, 310, 447, 479 O’Neill, Eugene, 300, 424 Opera, 213 Operetta, 213 Oratorio, 215 Orozco, Jose Clemente, 44 P

Painting, 123, 159, 164, 186, 242 abstract, 16, 70, 78, 122, 126, 129, 136, 142, 153, 155, 170, 450 Byzantine, 140, 149 Classical, 129, 146 figurative, 43, 126, 133, 138, 139, 142, 150–153, 175, 181, 250 Medieval, 140, 149 non-objective, 126, 147 oil painting, 124 photo-realist painting, 152 Pop Art painting, 152 Romantic, 129, 147–155 Symbolic, 129, 143, 146

Pantheon, 65 Paradise Lost, 274, 381, 384 Parthenon, 61 Particularity, 46, 83, 108, 151, 240, 292, 293, 295, 396 Pathos, 104, 187n12, 283, 284, 287, 294, 300, 304–306, 310–316, 320, 322, 326–333, 335, 340, 372–374, 376–378, 404, 405, 407–410, 412–414, 423, 426 Pauson, 147 Pearlstein, Philip, 104 Perspective, 38, 43, 44, 79n5, 85, 119, 119n5, 121–124, 127, 131, 133–135, 137, 140, 149, 152, 166, 262, 358, 402, 419, 423, 434, 438, 441, 444, 464, 487 Petronius, 484 Phidias, 77, 104, 110, 496 Philosophy, 240 of mind, 7–9 of nature, 6–9 of right, 24 systematic, 3, 6, 6n5, 7, 7n6, 9, 15, 19, 23, 24, 31–33, 37, 53, 79, 102, 217, 242, 266, 330n155, 389, 431, 432 Photography, 77, 157 and the artforms, 6, 13, 18, 170–175 Classical, 18, 19, 28, 29, 35, 36, 48–53, 56–58, 68, 88, 159, 160, 169–172, 172n22, 215, 217 formative, 165, 449

 Index 

genres of, 169–170 as a graphic fine art, 117–142, 157–175, 434 realist, 163, 449 Romantic, 18, 19, 29, 33n16, 35, 36, 48, 50, 52, 53, 56, 63–73, 82, 88, 91, 151, 169, 170, 172, 175, 181, 215 Symbolic, 18, 19, 28–30, 34–36, 42, 48–58, 60, 61, 63, 68, 82, 83, 88, 93–97, 109, 114, 127, 128, 136, 137, 142, 170, 171, 172n22, 173, 181, 215 Picasso, Pablo, 94, 122, 134, 152 Pindar, 295 Pirandello, Luigi, 424 Pisano, Andrea, 102n18, 110 Plato, 17, 109, 180, 194, 217, 221, 340, 340n187 Republic, 158, 221 Poetry, 9, 47n1, 120, 181, 244–246, 248, 249, 250n22, 250n25, 255–258, 260, 261, 265, 266n1, 272, 277, 297, 327n146, 344, 344n1, 347, 350, 351, 354, 365, 382, 391, 405n152, 421n198 vs. prose, 245, 249, 256 Poitier, Sidney, 488 Politics, see State Pollock, Jackson, 154 Polykleitos, 77 Ponchielli, Amilcare, 477 Pornography, 462 Portraits, 140 Positivism, 158

517

Post-colonialism, 358 Post-modernism, 72, 73 Poulenc, Francis, 227 Praxiteles, 77, 110 Premchand, 397 Preminger, Otto, 473 Prescott, William H., 455 Prokofiev, Sergei, 227 Propaganda, 460, 461 Prose, 244, 274, 313, 392 Protogenes, 146 Proust, Marcel, 400, 486 Psyche, 82, 106, 110, 111, 119, 126, 127, 135, 179, 180, 188–191, 208, 211, 212, 219, 221, 235, 241, 248, 259, 271, 365, 380, 392–395, 419, 451, 482 Psychology, 7, 405 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 466 Pushkin, Alexander, 274, 303, 376, 448 Pyramids, 50 Pyreicus, 147 R

Rākshasa’s Ring, 325, 359–361, 364 Ramayana, 94, 144, 248, 276, 279, 281, 284, 325, 326, 348–350, 353, 356, 357, 496 Raphael, 43, 150 Rasa, 310 Ravel, Maurice, 182, 226 Ray, Man, 166 Ray, Satyajit, 472 Realism, 398

518 Index

Recitation, 320 Reed, Carol, 459, 475 Reggio, Godfrey, 453 Reinhardt, Ad, 121 Reinhardt, Max, 478 Relief, 131 Rembrandt, 168 Representation, 4, 6n4, 8, 17, 28, 31, 33, 42, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59–61, 69, 81, 83, 89, 94, 122, 131, 133, 134, 143, 144, 148, 151–154, 166, 170–172, 175, 180, 218, 221, 238, 240, 247, 254, 384, 387, 423, 435, 449–451, 495 Revolution, 281, 358, 385, 455, 458 Rhyme, 237 Rhythm, 288 Riefenstahl, Leni, 454 Right, 388 economic, 160, 169, 278, 328, 374, 420, 491, 494 family, 45n31, 62n25, 223, 278, 328, 348, 349, 367, 373, 374, 377, 380, 382, 387, 388, 409, 410 genesis of, 29 Riley, Terry, 226 Rivera, Diego, 44, 151 Rodchenko, Alexander, 112 Rodin, Auguste, 86, 111 Roman empire, 64 Romance, 385 Romantic style, 147, 159 Rooney, Mickey, 479 Rosen, Charles, 197, 197n41, 198n44, 226, 227n6, 228n8, 229n10

Rossellini, Roberto, 457, 488 Rothko, Mark, 126 Rouault, Georges, 134 Rousseau, J. J, 455 Rule, see State Rushdie, Salman, 402 Russell, Bertrand, 239 Russell, Ken, 473 Ruttmann, Walter, 453 S

Saarinen, Eero, 72 Sacks, Oliver, 199 Śakuntalā, 352, 354–357, 359, 362–364, 496 Salgado, Sebastião, 162 Sander, August, 162 Sanskrit drama, 245, 267, 311, 313, 319, 325, 352 Santayana, George, 77n1, 78n3, 90, 97, 110 Sappho, 295 Sartre, Jean Paul, 422 Satie, Erik, 226 Satire, 365 Schiller, Friedrich, 299, 411 Schmitt, Carl, 73 Schoenberg, Arnold, 228, 230 Schubert, Franz, 225 Schumann, Robert, 225 Scorsese, Martin, 476 Sculpture, 79, 186, 242 abstract, 11, 82, 112, 126, 180 ancient Egyptian sculpture, 95, 103, 127 Classical, 88, 93, 95, 97–100, 127, 145, 146, 301, 377, 496

 Index 

figurative, 17, 55, 59, 81, 82, 88, 89, 94, 97, 98, 100, 113, 377 Gothic sculpture, 110 kinetic, 13, 16, 24, 113–114, 188, 208 non-representational, 16, 30 Renaissance sculpture, 110, 127 Romantic, 109–112, 159 Symbolic, 19, 95, 97, 109, 143 Segal, George, 91, 112 Self-determination and normativity, 172, 222, 350 political, 343 Self-government, 62n25, 174, 382, 396 Senses and the division of arts, 17 of hearing, 10–12, 14, 236 of sight, 11, 12, 14 of smell, 9, 10 of taste, 7, 9, 10 of touch, 9, 10, 14 Sensibility, 213n76, 446 Sensitivity, 7–9, 161, 164, 435, 436 Serra, Richard, 112 Seth, Vikram, 274 Seurat, Georges, 124 Severini, Gino, 121 Sfumato, 126, 136, 148, 151, 152 Shakespeare, William, 239, 245, 300, 313, 320, 324, 329, 331, 338, 341, 361, 361n32, 376, 408, 409, 411, 413, 416, 418, 456, 479, 480 Shaw, George Bernard, 315 Sherman, Cindy, 174 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 205

519

Sign, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 95, 104, 155, 228n8, 235–238, 236n2, 248, 249, 254, 316, 468 Simile, 255, 274, 345 Simon, Neil, 338 Simonides of Ceos, 120, 248 Singh, Milka, 460 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 44 Slavery, 34, 297, 324 Smithson, Robert, 112, 175n28 Socrates, 108, 109, 158, 221, 340, 375, 416 Sokurov, Alexander, 438 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 397, 455 Sonata, 224 Sontag, Susan, 163n7, 167, 167n17, 168, 168n20, 172, 172n22, 173, 175n28 Sophocles, 332, 373, 374, 497 Soul, see Psyche Sphinxes, 50, 95, 144 Speer, Albert, 73 Spontaneity, 197n42, 225n3, 391, 399 Sport, 459 Staiger, Emil, 266n1, 268n5, 269–271, 287, 328, 336n174, 340n187, 367n38 Stanislavsky method acting, 310, 322 State, 8, 26, 32, 37, 61, 73, 89, 137, 174, 198, 200, 214n79, 220, 223, 229, 230, 238, 245, 255, 275, 277, 278, 307, 310, 339n186, 358, 360, 366, 367, 373, 374, 376, 377, 380, 388, 400, 407, 408, 410, 411, 425, 461, 491, 492

520 Index

Steichen, Edward, 172 Steinbeck, John, 260, 485 Stephen Crane, 263 Sterne, Laurence, 400 Stewart, Jimmy, 488 Stone, Oliver, 473 Strauss, Richard, 180 Strauss II, Johann, 475 Stravinsky, Igor, 192, 209, 226, 226n5, 227, 228n8, 477 Strawson, Peter, 193 Streep, Meryl, 488 Strick, Joseph, 483 Strindberg, August, 419 Surrealist cinema, 452 Swift, Jonathan, 399 Symbol, 8, 54, 61, 155, 235 Symbolic style, 143, 159 Szondi, Peter, 152n10, 225n4, 267, 301, 308, 309, 416, 417, 418n187, 419–421, 421n198, 425 T

Tagore, Rabindranath, 303, 397 Tapestries, 123 Tati, Jacques, 465 Tatlin, Vladimir, 112 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 180, 448, 473 Technology, 48, 58, 160, 163, 167, 431, 433, 434, 464–466, 469, 470, 491, 492, 495 Teleology, 253n35 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 281 Theme and variation, 225 Thinking, 5, 49, 86, 89, 135, 182, 238, 270, 287, 360, 389

Time in cinema, 39, 82, 114, 121, 207, 436, 437, 439, 441, 446, 459, 484 in literature, 13, 14, 24, 82, 114, 236, 241, 248, 254, 257, 367, 379, 389, 404 in music, 13, 14, 24, 39, 82, 113, 121, 181, 188, 194, 204, 226, 246, 438, 472 Tolstoy, Leo, 240, 281, 393 Tower of Babylon, 52 Tragédie classique, 307 Tragedy, 171, 181, 245, 266, 267, 272, 289, 307, 311n109, 315n117, 316, 317, 325–334, 336, 338–342, 351, 352, 358, 361, 362n34, 364, 372–375, 376n72, 377n75, 405–414 See also Drama, tragic Tragicomedy, 266, 267, 289, 317, 325, 326, 340–342, 351, 358, 364, 372, 375, 414–416 See also Drama, tragicomedic Trompe d’oeil, 118 Truffaut, François, 460, 476 Truth, 33, 34, 36, 52, 56, 73, 83, 86, 90, 99, 108, 148, 158, 163, 191, 231, 252, 261, 287, 292, 313, 336, 411 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 126, 152 Twain, Mark, 455 U

Universality abstract or formal, 53, 99 class membership, 99

 Index 

concrete, 33, 99 of genus and species, 135 of language, 238, 243, 260 as misidentified with essence, 51

Valmiki, 144, 248, 279, 284, 295, 326, 348, 357, 496 Van Gogh, Vincent, 122 Varèse, Edgard, 179 Vasari, Giorgio, 43, 84–86, 149 Verse, 239, 244, 256n44, 257–259, 259n50, 266n1, 274, 288, 289, 312, 313, 313n112, 347, 348, 367n38, 380, 391 Versification, 244, 257–259, 259n49, 274, 289, 299, 347, 380, 391, 392 Video, 77 Virgil, 381 Viśākhadatta, 325, 359, 360, 361n32, 363, 364 Vitruvius, 40 Vocabulary, 65 Voice, 271 Vyasa, 144, 348, 357, 496

Ward, Lynd, 121 Warhol, Andy, 112, 153, 438 Washington, Denzel, 488 Watts, André, 205 Weber, Max, 185 Weiner, Lawrence, 155 Welles, Orson, 341, 459, 476 Weston, Edward, 162, 166 Whale, James, 473 Whitaker, Forest, 488 Wiene, Robert, 447 Wilder, Billy, 476 Wilder, Thornton, 424 Will natural, 90, 106, 148 to power, 73, 388 self-determined, 343 Wise, Robert, 473 Wittfogel, Karl August, 53, 54 Wolfe, Tom, 33n16, 71n47, 72, 153n12 Wood, Sam, 472 Woodward, Joanne, 488 Woolf, Virginia, 260, 399 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 58, 72 Wright, Richard, 260, 326

W

Z

Wagner, Richard, 213, 214, 214n79, 225, 225n3, 225n4, 226, 475

Zinnemann, Fred, 441 Zola, Emile, 260, 401

V

521