Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
Loading next page...
/lp/de-gruyter/phenomenology-and-the-transformation-of-the-modern-novel-kAyQe0LyE4
- Publisher
- de Gruyter
- Copyright
- © 2021 Arthur Cools, published by Sciendo
- eISSN
- 2183-0142
- DOI
- 10.2478/phainomenon-2021-0014
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
This article examines in what way and to what extent phenomenological philosophy has given rise to a new understanding of the modern novel and to a transformation of its narrative techniques. The starting point for this examination is the claim, made by Merleau-Ponty in “Metaphysics and the Novel”, according to which, in phenomenological philosophy, the task of philosophy is inextricably bound to that of literature. I examine this claim in two ways. First, I situate it historically with regard to the modern novel’s characteristic realism. Then, I show how the phenomenological attitude – formulated by Husserl as a methodological device in distinction with the natural attitude – transforms the novel’s narrative technics. Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée, constitutes an exemplary case to assess this transformation. Combining these two ways, I argue that the claim made by Merleau-Ponty is paradoxical: on the one hand, the intrinsic connection between phenomenological philosophy and literature promotes the cognitive value of the modern novel, but on the other hand, it breaks with the conventions of the novel form and initiates a fragmented writing. Keywords: Phenomenological attitude, existence, narrative techniques, realism, Sartre 1. Introduction The origins of the modern novel are usually associated with a new interpretation of realism, which is no longer based on the ontological meaning of universal concepts, but on the experience of individual, ordinary life (Watt, 1957: 12). The rise of the modern novel and its success in modernity thus appear to have been inspired by an avant la lettre phenomenological attitude. The manner in which the world is revealed was no longer determined by the pre-specified metaphysical order (still at work in Dante’s Divine Comedy), but by the fates of humans in the world and the accurate description of individual ISSN: 0874-9493 (print) / ISSN-e: 2183-0142 (online) DOI: 10.2478/phainomenon-2021-0014 86 Arthur Cools experiences of existence (as in Goethe’s Leiden des jungen Werthers). The development of the modern novel did not call into question the distinction between philosophy and literature – between rationally substantiated discourse, which seeks certain knowledge and conceptual clarity, and literary prose, which describes the fates of individual humans – except in the brief early romantic period in Germany, which welcomed the mingling of all genres in the rise of romanticism. In contemporary times, in which philosophy is dominated by cognitivism, those looking back on the history of the modern novel might be surprised to learn that, not very long ago, the novel made a claim to truth that is reserved to philosophical discourse. This occurred in existential philosophy, and particularly in the context of existentialism. For example, in “Le roman et la métaphysique”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to the far-reaching association between philosophy and literature stemming from the “phenomenological or existential philosophy” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 27-28). It is irrefutable that this moment was relatively unique in the history of Western philosophy, which has its ground in the basic distinction between mythos and logos, between appearance and reality and between fact and essence. The novel’s claim to truth did not repeat the basic principles of early romanticism, which remains poetic in its consideration of the novel, but emerges from a development within phenomenological philosophy, the exact content of which is not immediately clear. In the notion of phenomenology as a strict science, Husserl aimed to lay a foundation for scientific rigour, modelled after the precision of mathematics. References to literary texts are almost absent in his writings. It would thus be wrong to attribute to Husserl the idea that phenomenology contributed to manifest the epistemological value of the modern novel and to assess the novel’s asserted truth claim. However, in his letter from 1907 to the German fin-de-siècle literary writer and essayist Hugo von Hofmannsthal – whose “Chandos Brief” (1902) became famous as representant of the Sprachkrise th at the turn of the 20 century –, Husserl points at a structural analogy between the artist and the phenomenologist: Der Künstler, der die Welt ‘beobachtet’, um aus ihr für seine Zwecke Natur- und Menschen‘kenntnis’ zu gewinnen, verhält sich zu ihr ähnlich wie der Phänomenologe. Also nicht als beobachtender Naturforscher und Psychologe, nicht als practischer Menschenbeobachter, als ob er auf Natur- u. Menschenkunde ausgienge. Ihm wird die Welt, indem er sie betrachtet, zum Phänomen, ihre Existenz is ihm gleichgiltig, genauso wie dem Philosophen (in der Vernunftkritik).” (Husserl, 1993: 135) The reason for this analogy is based upon the similarity that Husserl establishes in this same letter between what he calls “the phenomenological attitude” and the aesthetic attitude: Sie [die ‘phänomenologische’ Methode] fordert eine von der ‘natürlichen’ wesentlich abweichende Stellungnahme zu aller Objectivität, die nahe verwandt ist derjenigen Stellung u. Haltung, in die uns Ihre Kunst als eine rein ästhetische hinsichtlich der dargestellten Objecte und der ganzen Umwelt versetzt.” (Husserl, 1993: 133) Husserl is not interested in considering the literary technics in order to assess this claim with regard to the literary work of Hoffmansthal and he does not take into account the historical transformation of th the novel form in the 19 century. His claim remains on a general level and has its limit in the distinction that he makes explicit at the end of his letter between the task of philosophy – which is to Phenomenology and the Transformation of the Modern Novel 87 ground and to define objective knowledge – and the task of the artist – which is to create and to collect aesthetic figures (cf. Husserl, 1993: 135). Meanwhile, since the rise of phenomenological philosophy, references to literary texts in order to clarify philosophical notions have become commonplace within the phenomenological movement. Emmanuel Levinas concludes his analysis of the experience of existence without being (which he refers to as the «il y a») with a reference to the second chapter of Blanchot’s novel Thomas l’Obscur (Levinas, 1993: 103). More recently, Claude Romano begins his analysis of the «there is» of the occurrence with a quotation concerning a metaphor of the human mind from Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the volcano (Romano, 2003: 21). The body of Proust’s work, in particular the detailed descriptions of the protagonist’s experience of existence, has been the subject of more than one philosophical examination inspired by the phenomenological philosophy. In these references, the novel is attributed an epistemological relevance which has a philosophical meaning. They seem to imply a new, more intimate relationship between philosophy and literature. My claim in this article is that phenomenological philosophy has contributed to this new understanding. Therefore, I examine the connection that Merleau-Ponty draws between the philosophical promotion of the modern novel and phenomenological philosophy. I will first try to understand how this connection historically became possible. In the first part of this article, I will therefore refer to the modern novel’s characteristic realism. In The Rise of the Novel, that has become a main reference in narrative studies, Ian Watt has already shown that (and how) the question of method is part of the narrative techniques of the realism of the novel. I will argue that the question of method is a necessary, though not a sufficient condition to understand the philosophical promotion of the novel in the phenomenological movement. In that respect, it is important to consider as well the phenomenological method and to ask whether and to what extent phenomenology might have altered th the narrative techniques of the modern novel. At the end of the 19 century, the realistic novel gave rise to the naturalistic novel and to the psychological novel. The latter is based on introspection and the knowledge of the mental life of the other person. Husserl’s discussion with naturalism and his attempts to separate phenomenology from empirical psychology are well-known. Amongst other results, his lines of thought led to a break with the method of introspection. The project of phenomenology as a strict science depends upon this break and starts with the possibility of an epoché – a reduction that no longer interprets the conscious life as a mental object, instead reducing it to its intentional structure. In the second part of this article, I will thus examine whether such a reduction can play a meaningful role in the narrative techniques of the modern novel and in what way it transforms the realism that is characteristic of the modern novel. I will assess this examination by readings of La Nausée, Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel published in 1938. Early critics, such as Maurice Blanchot (cf. Blanchot, 1995: 34), and more recent critics, such as Jean-François Louette (Louette, 2009: 39), recognized the influence of the phenomenological philosophy on this novel, the redaction of which is contemporary with Sartre’s first articles on the phenomenology of Husserl and constitutes therefore an interesting case in order to analyse the influence of the phenomenological method on the transformation of the modern novel. 2. The realism of the modern novel There has been considerable discussion concerning whether the novel should be referred to as a new specific literary genre. At the very end of his historical overview of the development of art forms, 88 Arthur Cools Hegel mentions the novel as the art form that ushers in the end of what he refers to as romantic art (Hegel, 1970: 220f.). According to this analysis, one characteristic of the novel form is that it absorbs and dissolves the rules that have determined the organisation of various genres since Aristotle’s Poetics. In the novel, anything can be made into the object of the story (simple, low characters, as well as lofty ones; the associated faits divers of ordinary life, as well as the events that are necessary to construct the dramatic course of the action), and in a manner that allows the event to be presented in either direct speech (as in drama) or in indirect speech, from an external narrative perspective (as in the epic). According to Hegel’s interpretation, the openness and indeterminacy of the novel form gives expression to the freedom of the prose writer, who becomes aware of the choices made in the creation of the fictional world, thereby divesting this world of any opaqueness. What Hegel describes here in continuity with and as the definitive dissolution of classical poetics can be explained in an entirely different manner. The theoreticians of the novel have defined the specificity of this new genre in terms of realism. In his classic study The Rise of the Novel, Watt notes that this term is used with a connotation that differs from the implication that, unlike other genres, the novel should devote particular attention to the seamy side of life and the lower classes of society. The innovative feature of the novel form is not that the literary creation reveals an aspect of life that had previously been regarded as unimportant. The novel form more fundamentally introduces a new understanding of reality which is based upon the human experience in all its aspects. This definition of the novel’s realism does not stand in contradiction to Hegel’s account of the novel as a new art form. Hegel explicitly mentions the «Nachahmung des Vorhandenen […] Stoffe des täglichen und alltäglichen Daseins» (Hegel, 1970: 224-225), which is not exclusively applicable to the novel – Hegel refers in particular to the Dutch School in painting. Watts’ definition of realism is able to demonstrate moreover the importance of an epistemological dimension at the historical origins of the novel as a consequence of which the relationship between literary work and reality is defined in th a new way. In his introduction to the innovation of the Anglo-Saxon novelists of the early 18 century, including Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, Watt clarifies this epistemological dimension by referring to the influence of modern philosophy. In modern philosophy, Descartes’ Discours de la méthode serves as a model for an investigation of truth that is no longer based on interpretations from the past, but on the thought experiment of doubt that can be verified by any individual. Similarly, the innovative aspects of the novel form include the fact that romantic narrative no longer proceeds from the traditional canon of characters, actions, fables, poetic rules and plots from the past, proceeding instead from individual experience. One direct consequence of this new method is the tendency in romantic fiction for the construction of the plot to be subordinate to the detailed description of individual experience (Watt, 1957: 13). The further elaboration of the analogy with the basic principles of modern philosophy (in which Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is also an important reference) makes it possible for Watt to bring to light the new epistemological claim that is envisioned in the novel form and that he compares to the procedures followed in the search for the true facts in a legal case. According to the classic interpretation, which is purported to have had an important influence through Neo- th Platonism until far into the 19 century, the literary work is charged with capturing the essential and the universal (i.e. turning away from the one-time and the singular in order to express the meaning of human existence sub specie aeterna). The novel form reverses this movement, seeking to describe the innovative and one-time character of individual experience. Phenomenology and the Transformation of the Modern Novel 89 This attention to experience has an immediate impact on the formal characteristics of the novel. The character is no longer presented as a type – as one predestined by fate – but as an individual characterised by all aspects of personal identity derived from life: the unique, defining and recognisable name, the self-awareness that is situated in time and space, the concrete historical and local context of actions and events, the continuity of the identity in the involvement with the world and the events occurring despite the changes in self-experience. The language is no longer expected to arrive at an eloquent and figurative translation that conforms to the rules of rhetoric and that is suited to the topic. Instead, it is expected to provide the most authentic account of the experience as possible. It is approached as a strictly descriptive and referencing tool for ensuring that the correspondence with the actual experience is expressed as clearly and as appropriately as possible. It is thus possible to establish a direct connection between the changes in the narrative that have given rise to the emergence of the novel form and the application of a new method that has philosophical origins, in that it corresponds to the intellectual movement that Descartes inaugurated in Discours de la méthode. Nevertheless, it is not possible to assert that, for this reason, the novel has itself become philosophy. The object of philosophy differs from that of the novel: the former investigates the foundation, the reality and the validity of the concepts that we use to understand ourselves and the world, while the latter describes singular experiences and events from ordinary life. There is no confusion between the two. For Descartes, the method of philosophy searches to articulate initially unquestionable insights that can serve as the foundation for the deductive derivation of true propositions. The novel can only describe subjective experiences. If art loses its relevance in the novel form, as argued by Hegel, it is not because the novel causes art to be incorporated into philosophy. Quite the contrary: it is because the novel is not capable of philosophy. The topic of the novel is random and thus unreal and uninteresting. In the novel, art loses its meaning and, by implication, its appeal to a true knowledge that is relevant to the manifestation of the Mind. Watt’s statement that the formal characteristics of the novel form exhibit similarities to the procedures in a legal case, does not imply the claim that the novel form is able to deliver insight into true facts. The connection that relates the rise of the modern novel to the philosophical method, as inaugurated by Descartes, does not constitute sufficient grounds for suspending the epistemological difference between them. At first sight, phenomenological philosophy does not change this: its goal is to articulate the eidetic structure of consciousness. However, one may ask whether and in what way phenomenological philosophy concerns the realism and the narrative technics of the modern novel. In his lectures from 1907, which appear under the title Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Husserl refers to phenomenology primarily as a special philosophical method (Husserl, 1986: 23). This method is characterised by its radical Voraussetzungslosigkeit. It does not take the epistemological principles and achievements that are used within the various sciences as evidently given in order to answer questions concerning the use and possibility of objective knowledge. These principles are “prejudices” with a “dogmatic” character, as they circumvent the critical test of philosophical interrogation concerning the possibility of knowledge and its definition (Husserl, 1986: 24). In contrast, the philosophical method has an entirely different scope and its own unique dimension, which consists of bringing to light the intentional act through which an object is given. To elaborate this method, Husserl makes the famous distinction between the natural attitude, which concerns our obvious relationship to the world and which is characteristic of the various types of scientific practice, and the phenomenological attitude, which corresponds to what he refers to as the specific philosophical method. According to this view, the method underlying the development of the novel is particularly 90 Arthur Cools capable of expressing the natural attitude. In the novel form, reality is unquestionably presented in an obvious manner within the context of individual, sensory experience. The art of the modern novel consists of presenting a realistic and detailed description of this experience at a given moment and from a given perspective. Without this intended realism, the novel form would not have been able to develop. In this respect, what Husserl refers to as the natural attitude is a fundamental characteristic of the novel’s description of reality. Husserl’s distinction between natural and phenomenological attitude may be thus at the origin of the philosophical promotion of the modern novel. For the idea that the novel’s form and its narrative techniques express the natural attitude, implies the possibility of reconsidering the novel (and its narrative techniques) in an epistemologically relevant way, namely as the articulation of the (naturalist) presuppositions in the description of experience. Moreover, it creates the possibility of critically re- examining the narrative techniques of the novel in order to avoid these presuppositions. It is my contention that Husserl’s basic distinction can be used as a key to understand Jean-Paul Sartre’s particular interest in and critically examination of the narrative technics of novelists such as Faulkner, Dos Passos, Camus in Situations I. In his short introduction to phenomenological philosophy “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité” (1939), Sartre testifies that he is well aware of the new possibilities of Husserl’s distinction for literary experiments when he states: “We are delivered from Proust. We are likewise delivered from the ‘internal life’: in vain would we seek the caresses and fondlings of our intimate selves, like Amiel or like a child who kisses his own shoulder, since everything is finally outside, everything, even ourselves. Outside in the world, among others.” (Sartre, 2002 : 384) Sartre announces here in fact the possibility of another technique inspired by and in accordance with the phenomenological method. Yet, the phenomenological method is based on a radical change in the natural attitude. The phenomenological reduction “disables” (ausschaltet) the fundamental thesis, which determines the natural attitude, placing it in parentheses (einklammert) (cf. Husserl, 1976: 56). The term of parenthesis indicates that the phenomenological reduction does not necessarily eliminate the focus on reality, nor does it bring the existence of the world into question, but it suspends the fundamental assumption implicit in the realism of the novel – in which reality is presented as evidently given within the context of individual sensory experience. Is it possible to import this suspension into the narrative technique of the novel? What are the implications of such a reduction for the novel form? 3. Towards a typology of the phenomenological novel These questions are not trivial. The overview of literary streams and the classification of the romantic genres do not mention the phenomenological novel. For Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Louis Chrétien, both th of whom identify as phenomenologists, the development of the psychological novel in the 19 century serves as the model for their studies of narrativity and consciousness (cf. Ricoeur, 1984 and Chrétien, 2009, 2011). Neither of them questions the specificity of the phenomenological novel. They also do th not investigate the transformations of the narrative that occurred in the course of the 20 century under the influence of the phenomenological school. In «Le roman et la métaphysique», Merleau-Ponty is using the term “metaphysical” when expressing the opinion that, in existential philosophy, the task of Phenomenology and the Transformation of the Modern Novel 91 philosophy is inextricably bound to that of literature (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 28). In “Littérature et métaphysique”, Simone de Beauvoir too does not speak of the phenomenological novel, but of the «metaphysical novel» (Beauvoir, 2005: 270). It seems as if the category of the phenomenological novel is too specific to clarify the association between the romantic narrative and the philosophical articulation of reality. More recently, Jean-François Louette mentions the notion of phenomenological novel with regard to Sartre’s La Nausée and refers explicitly to Sartre’s readings of Husserl and Heidegger in the thirties (Louette, 2009: 40) meanwhile interpreting La Nausée as a contestation of the phenomenological method by means of the novel’s main figure Antoine Roquentin (Louette, 2009: 47). Phenomenological philosophy nevertheless makes an important contribution to the emergence and delineation of what Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir refer to as the metaphysical novel. The novel form does not attain philosophical relevance because of expressing ordinary life in light of an already given theory of metaphysical essence: as such, it would make literature unnecessary, as the essential has already been established through metaphysics, while the novel can refer only to individual and situated experience. The opposite is true, as it reverses the relationship between metaphysics and individual experience. Metaphysics is no longer the realm of ideas that are positioned outside of time and in opposition to the contingent and individual experience of existence – it is manifest in the experience of the world. It is only through the careful analysis of this experience that the metaphysical meaning of the condition humaine can be presented: ”Man is metaphysical in his very being, in his loves, in his hates, in his individual and collective history. And metaphysics is no longer the occupation of a few hours per month, as Descartes said; it is present, as Pascal thought, in the heart’s slightest movement. From now on, the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated.” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 28) Phenomenological philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty points out, has made possible this change which allows the essence of truth to be found by analysing the experience of the world (which remains individual and perspectivist). It follows directly from Heidegger’s new concept of being. At the beginning of his Dasein analysis, Heidegger notes that the essence of Dasein is to be found in its existence (Heidegger, 1986: 42). It is only by analysing Dasein’s way of being – its state of being in the world – that the meanings and the essential features of its existence can be illuminated. That which Heidegger defines here in ontological terms is formulated epistemologically by Husserl. For Husserl, the philosophical method proceeds from individual consciousness in order to investigate the essence of an object. The objectivity of knowledge is given in the manner in which the object appears to consciousness. The analysis of essence therefore proceeds from the pre-scientific stream of experiences. Each in his own way, Husserl and Heidegger thus point to a pre-philosophical experience of the world, in which the concepts of philosophy and the sciences acquire their purpose and meaning. In this way, they make it possible to understand in what way the novel gains particular attention in existential philosophy. The novel is the literary art form that is in an eminent way capable of investigating and describing the (dis)appearance of meanings within the individual experience of existence. Is this association sufficient to explain the philosophical relevance of the novel? In itself, the anchoring of the philosophical and scientific conceptual device within a pre- philosophical experience of life does not imply the clarification of all implicit and/or explicit naive interpretations of conscious life. In other words, it does not call into question the natural predisposition 92 Arthur Cools that characterises the realism of the modern novel. Husserl’s phenomenological method changes this, as we said at the end of the first part: it requires a methodological operation on the content of natural conscious life. For Husserl, this operation – the “phenomenological reduction” – is meant to disclose pure conscious life, with its experiences and correlates of experience: “the fully conscious effecting of that epoché will prove itself to be the operation necessary to make ‘pure’ consciousness, and subsequently the whole phenomenological region, accessible to us.” (Husserl, 1983: 66) In this respect, consciousness is «pure» because, after the application of phenomenological reduction, it is no longer interpreted as an element of reality – a factual given within the world – as is the case with the natural attitude. Instead, world appears as related to consciousness. In the same way, experience (Erlebnis) is «pure», because it is no longer understood as a state of affairs that occurs in the world, but as an orientation through which the object of the experience can appear in a particular manner. Obviously, when related to the novel form, this phenomenological approach directly touches upon some central aspects of the narrative technique in the novel: the instance of the narrator, the description of the individual experience, the mental «I» and the construction of the plot. In the remainder of this article, I will examine how these technics are transformed by the phenomenological method and I will draw therefore upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée, which can be considered an exemplary case for this kind of examination. The realistic novel gave rise to narrative techniques that are capable of expressing the new interpretation of reality. These techniques have an epistemological function: they are used to provide an adequate description of the correlation between individual sensory experience and objective, given reality. The report can be considered as the model for the narration. A report is intended to relay the facts and nothing but the facts. It is thus no coincidence that, in the narrative of the novel, this objective is sometimes explicitly stated at the beginning of the story. This way of presenting the story can be realised through a variety of narrating entities. The omniscient narrator (as in the novels of Honoré de Balzac) is in a position that is not part of the story, but from which the psychology of the characters and the entire course of the narrated event (whether it has already occurred, is in the process of occurring or has yet to occur) is presented. In contrast, the engaged narrator (as in some novels by Thomas Mann) is involved with its characters, intervening at the level of the narrated event by commenting on their mental states and/or evaluating their choices, actions and desires. The distant narrator (for which Gustave Flaubert is known) is absent from the narrative and appears to assume the position of an unknowing, anonymous observer, allowing each character and event to speak for itself. However different these techniques might be, and despite the changes operating within them with regard to the historical development of the novel form, they all share the task of presenting an adequate description of the narrated events. This commonality is determined by two characteristics: the creation of a recognisable, objective reality that is realised by describing the events as a state of affairs within the world and the privileged position of the narrating entity, which remains the same throughout the narrative and which is not open to discussion in its relationship to the world. From the phenomenological attitude, however, both of these characteristics appear as presumptions of the natural attitude. In “the natural attitude”, so Husserl, “th[e] world is there for me not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world. I simply find the physical things in front of me furnished not only with merely material determinations but also with value-characteristics, […]. The complexes of my manifoldly changing spontaneities of consciousness then relate to this world in which I find myself and which is, at the same time my surrounding world – […].” (Husserl, 1983: 53) The general feature Phenomenology and the Transformation of the Modern Novel 93 of this natural attitude is the consciousness of the real surrounding world as a world that presents itself “as a factually existing ‘actuality’” (Husserl, 1983: 57). It is this positing of world in the natural attitude that is parenthesized in the phenomenological attitude: “We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being: thus the whole natural world which is continually ‘there for us’, ‘on hand’, and which will always remain there according to consciousness as an ‘actuality’ even if we choose to parenthesize it.” (Husserl, 1983: 61) In the narrative, inspired by the phenomenological method, the experience of the world and of the events in this world have lost their factual evidence and the task of the novelist can no longer be to create a representation that can compete with the experience of the factual world, as is the case in the realistic novel. Moreover, the narrator no longer possesses a pre-determined position, whether external (omniscient or unknowing) or internal (perspectivist) to the world. The narrator is not a narrative means that can be used to register events and to report experiences; it is an orientation to the narrated experience/event that is involved in the manner in which it appears. Although this may seem vague, it specifically means that narration becomes a search, an investigation or, as described by de Beauvoir, an “authentic adventure of the mind” (Beauvoir, 2005: 272), in which the narrated experience itself is explored in and through the narrated experience, and in which its meanings are gradually clarified along the way. In this respect, the narrating entity is uncertain. The narrator is captured by an experience that has not simply happened in the world, but that is invoked in the narration and that seems to become accessible only in the narrative. The opening sentences of La Nausée testify this change in the narrator’s position: Le mieux serait d’écrire les événements au jour le jour. Tenir un journal pour y voir clair. Ne pas laisser échapper les nuances, les petits faits, même s’ils n’ont l’air de rien, et surtout les classer. Il faut dire comment je vois cette table, la rue, les gens, mon paquet de tabac, puisque c’est cela qui a changé. (Sartre, 1938: 11) For Husserl, one way to describe the change of attitude that follows from the phenomenological reduction is to imagine “a stream of consciousness in which the intentional unities of experiences, organism, psyche, and empirical Ego-subject did not become constituted, in which all these experiential concepts, and therefore the concept of mental process in the psychological sense (as a mental process of a person, an animate Ego), were without any basis and, in any case, without any validity.” (Husserl 1983: 127-8) This change provides a new understanding of the act of narrating, which might best be described by proposing that the primary duty of the novelist is not to unfold a fictional world with recognisable characters, places, events, states of affairs or other features (i.e. a world that can serve as a mirror of the real world), but to clarify an experience, the factuality and objectivity of which cannot be assumed to be obvious. It is the suspension of factuality that allows the novelist to investigate the manner in which the experience occurs. One characteristic of the phenomenological attitude in romantic narrative is that the actual experience appears along with a certain estrangement. In this context, estrangement should not be confused with alienation in the Marxist, Hegelian sense, as this notion of alienation in itself assumes an entire theory of human interactions and society. Estrangement is the manner in which the experience appears: what occurs in 94 Arthur Cools experience is not necessarily accessible to the narrator, and it is not clarified by referring to it in known, obvious concepts (e.g. love, hate, infidelity, honour). In relation to the experience, concepts have lost their evidence. Only the detailed description and the progressive clarification of everything that appears in the stream of consciousness allow the constitution of meaning for the concepts to be clarified from within the experience. In La Nausée, the narrator expresses time and again that the words have lost their meaning with regard to the experience that haunts him. La racine du marronier s’enfonçait dans la terre, juste au-dessous de mon banc. Je ne me rappelais plus que c’était une racine. Les mots s’étaient évanouis et, avec eux, la signification des choses, leurs modes d’emploi, le faibles repères que les hommes ont tracés à leur surface. (Sartre, 1938: 178) For this reason, the technique of description also changes. The traditional techniques provide a description of the experience either as an objective state of affairs in reality or as a subjective reality in inner life. The former assumes an external narrative perspective: the mental state (e.g. emotion, feeling, intention, conviction) of a character in a third-person narrative is presented from within the sensory description of character’s behaviour. The latter assumes an internal narrative perspective, with the mental state being described in the first person (or, in the case of indirect speech, in the third person) as an object of introspection. Both of these techniques appear in light of the phenomenological attitude as an expression of the natural bias: they present the experience without examining how it discloses an entire world. The external narrative perspective creates abstraction from the experiential aspect of the narrated experience, and the internal narrative perspective regards the experience as an aspect of the human psyche. They both assume that it is possible to describe the experience from within a privileged, immutable standpoint that is not dependent upon the world that is being described. In light of Husserl’s concept of intentionality, however, consciousness is not an immanence, and it is also not an object in the world: it is an orientation towards the world in which the world appears in a particular manner. It is this novelty in Husserl’s phenomenological approach to consciousness that Sartre has described in “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité” as follows: So all at once hatred, love, fear, sympathy – all those famous ‘subjective’ reactions […] are simply ways of discovering the world. Things are what abruptly unveil themselves to us as hateful, sympathetic, horrible, lovable. […]. Husserl has restored to things their horror and their charm. He has restored to us the world of artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous, and with its havens of mercy and love. He has cleared the way for a new treatise on the passions that would be inspired by this simple truth, so utterly ignored by the refined among us: if we love a woman, it is because she is lovable. (Sartre 2002: 383-4) Especially in Husserl’s description of the pure Ego, as it remains after the parenthesizing of the psychological ego, Sartre welcomes a descriptive technique that allows the clarification of the world- disclosing dimension of the experience. After carrying out this reduction we shall not encounter the pure Ego anywhere in the flux of manifold mental process which remains as a transcendental residuum – neither as one mental process among others, nor as strictly a part of a mental process, arising and disappearing with the mental process of which it is a part. The Ego seems to be there continually, indeed, necessarily and its continualness is Phenomenology and the Transformation of the Modern Novel 95 obviously not that of a stupidly persistent mental process, a ‘fixed idea’. Instead, the Ego belongs to each coming and going mental process; its ‘regard’ is directed ‘through’ each actional cogito to the objective something. This ray of regard changes from one cogito to the next, shooting forth anew with each new cogito and vanishing with it. (Husserl, 1983: 132) In the narrative of La Nausée, Sartre has practiced a new technique which appears in the narrator’s attempt to describe the experience that haunts him, a technique that is inspired by this “regard directed through each cogito to the objective something”: La Nausée n’est pas en moi: je la ressens là-bas sur le mur, sur les betelles, partout autour de moi. Elle ne fait qu’un avec le café, c’est moi qui suis en elle. (Sartre, 1938: 36) What is referred to here as experience is not the same as what is understood under this term in the realistic, psychological or naturalistic novel. The latter can only report experiences, register events and make judgements on states of affairs. It does not consider the manner in which the narrator is involved in the narrated event and the manner in which the world appears in the experience. The narrative technique in La Nausée is capable of doing this. The experience of nausea does not define an experience of the ’I’ who is disgusted. It thematises a change in the experience of the world that the writer cannot immediately clarify, but which the writer gradually attempts to approach and describe during the course of the narrative. This description is characterised by a persistent uncertainty on the part of the narrator, a persistent questioning of the nature of the change that has occurred, as well as with regard to the writer’s tools for describing the change. This uncertainty leads to interrupted sentences, missing words (or words whose meaning is called into question), retracted claims, unanswered questions, convoluted descriptions that lead nowhere (e.g. the detailed elaborated reflections and considerations at the occasion of trivial, irrelevant facts). As a consequence, the influence of the phenomenological method leads the narrative technique to initiate a break with two basic assumptions of the traditional novel that guarantee the internal consistency of the narrative, particularly the unity of the character and the unity of the plot. The evolution from the realistic novel to the psychological novel and from the latter to the naturalistic novel has only strengthened and added depth to the unity of the character. In the realistic novel, the character is endowed with an identifiable identity through the use of recognisable proper names and positioning within recognisable places. The psychological novel adds mental depth and internality to this identity, such that the character acquires an individual personality and fate. In the naturalistic novel, the character receives an identity that is causally determined by societal context and physical condition. In light of the phenomenological attitude, however, this is a misrepresentation of what causality is and of what experience is: In a countersensical manner one thus connects by causality things pertaining to the senses and physical things as determined by physics. As a consequence, in the usual realism, however, one confuses the sensuous appearances by virtue of their ‘mere subjectivity’, i.e. the appearing objects, as appearing […], with the absolute mental processes of any appearing, of any experiencing consciousness whatever, which is constituting them. Everywhere this confusion is perpetrated in at least this form: one speaks as though Objective physics were engaged not in explaining the ‘physical thing-appearances’ in the sense of the physical things appearing, but in the sense of the constituting mental processes of experiencing consciousness. Causality, which belongs essentially to the context of the constituted intentional world 96 Arthur Cools and has sense only within that world, is now made not merely into a mythical bond between the ‘Objective’ being which physics determines and the ‘subjective’ being which appears in immediate experience […]; rather, by the illegitimate shifting from the latter to the consciousness constituting it, causality is made into a bond between the being which physics determines and absolute consciousness and, specifically, the pure mental processes of experiencing. (Husserl, 1983: 122) In La Nausée, Sartre does not describe the main character as a unity of mental states and he does not present it as an individual identity determined by a social context. True, he does not go so far as to unmask the unity of the character as a literary construct. The narrative is the account of a period from the life of Antoine Roquentin, as documented in journal entries. In this sense, the novel’s realistic illusion is preserved in this narrative. Nevertheless, the examination undertaken in the journal entries does not result in a reflective self-analysis nor in the presentation of a supposed psychological or contextual identity (with its individual facets and problems). Instead, it results in kaleidoscopic and fragmentary descriptions of various situations in which the character experiences the world each time in a new way. A similar break can be ascertained with regard to the construction of the plot. In the traditional novel, the plot is subordinate to the character, but this does not eliminate it. The plot is the event that brings the story lines together and allows for a conclusion. In the plot, the character undergoes a change: through all of the wanderings and setbacks, the stated goal is achieved, or the character gains new self-insight or dies. These various plot structures can be perfectly combined with each other. The plot is always intertwined with the acts performed by the character and their consequences, which provide a determination. In this way, the romantic construction of the plot connects the character’s experience to a denouement (i.e. the moment at which the character’s identity is established). However, from the perspective of the phenomenological attitude, the teleology implied in the literary construction of the plot and the connection between actions and mental states that this teleology presupposes do not appear “as coming from the given factual circumstances and according to the laws of Nature. Rather, the transition to pure consciousness by the method of transcendental reduction leads necessary to the question about the ground for the now-emerging factualness of the corresponding constitutive consciousness.” (Husserl, 1983: 134). The construction of a denouement appears to be a consequence of the novel’s realism. For this reason, the subjective experience is the privileged object of the classic novel, described as the unity of the character’s mental states. This unity nevertheless loses its evidence under the influence of the phenomenological innovation in the description of the experience: the narrative no longer seeks to establish the synthesis between actions and mental states. In La Nausée, the narrator is aware that he fails to establish the connection between the events that he narrates (cf. “Le mieux serait d’écrire les événements au jour le jour”) in the same way as is he is aware that he fails to establish the synthesis between his actions and intentions when he describes in detail the bodily movement that corresponds to his intention to pick up a sheet of paper without being able to achieve this intention (Sartre, 1938: 22). The plot thus loses its narrative function and disappears from La Nausée. The acts that Roquentin performs have no special meaning with regard to the story line. The descriptions, documented as journal entries, have merely an external, empty connection (a date). Without this date, there remains only an incoherent succession of descriptions and considerations. The end of the narrative is an interruption, not an ending. Phenomenology and the Transformation of the Modern Novel 97 4. In conclusion Let us recapitulate. An unstable narrator, the estrangement of self-experience, fragmented descriptions, the absence of a denouement: the impact of the phenomenological attitude on the development of the modern novel appears extremely paradoxical. On the one hand, the phenomenological attitude relates to the realism of the modern novel, which seeks to provide an authentic expression of the individual experience of existence. On the other hand, however, the suspension of the natural world required by the phenomenological method calls the basic principles of romantic narrative into question and initiates a break with the literary conventions of the novel form. In the historical development of the modern novel, the phenomenological attitude appears to usher in the end of the novel form. This could be the reason why it is so difficult to speak of ’the phenomenological novel’: the phenomenological attitude confronts the romantic genre with its limits and transforms the novel’s characteristic narrative, which describes the experience of existence from the individual perspective of the character, into fragmented writing. There is still another dimension to the paradox. Husserl’s phenomenological method made it possible to explain the possibility of knowledge or, in his own formulation, “wie sie [Erkenntnis] eine Objektivität, die doch in sich ist, was sie ist, treffen kann [how it (knowledge) can possibly reach an objectivity which, after all, is in itself what it is]” (Husserl, 1986: 25). The analysis of the individual experience of existence serves the function of a Wesensschau – the formulation of universal insight into the essence of a particular act of consciousness (e.g. observation). The impact of the phenomenological attitude on the narrative techniques in the modern novel primarily leads to the destruction of a number of literary conventions – but does this destruction have any epistemological relevance? When de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty speak of the “metaphysical” novel, they signal their awareness that the transformation of the psychological and naturalistic novel do indeed constitute an appeal to truth and that this appeal to truth entails a new approach to truth: the truth can be found only in the singular manifestation of the actual experience of existence – “an experience of the world […] which precedes all thought about the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 28) – or, as formulated by de Beauvoir, “appearance is reality, and existence is the support of essence; a smile is indistinguishable from a smiling face, and the meaning of an event indistinguishable from the event itself” (Beauvoir, 2004: 275). Such formulations are inspired by Husserl’s phenomenological method, but they concern more than only the literary expression that is referred to as an authentic search for the essential. They also concern the philosophical articulation of the experience, which – like the literary expression – is confronted with the unclarifiable ambiguity and opacity of existence. The appeal to truth, to which the metaphysical novel aspires, is not directed towards the knowledge of the factual nor towards the certainty of the access to objectivity. This appeal to truth has a transcendental meaning, as it indicates the limits and the relativity of any factual knowledge – of any indisputable foundation that is invoked in order to claim clarity and objectivity. The transformation of the romantic genre in the wake of the phenomenological method demonstrates that it is not sufficient to appeal to the laws of mental, economic and/or neuronal processes in order to explain the essential character of the human condition of existence. The metaphysical novel has therefore not become a new metaphysics, but it has assigned to philosophy a limit that it cannot exceed without becoming a dangerous fiction. 98 Arthur Cools Bibliography Beauvoir de, S. (2004). “Literature and Metaphysics”. In: M.A. Simons (ed.). Philosophical Writings. Transl. by V. Zaytzeff and F.M. Morrison. Urbana-Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 269- Blanchot, M. (1995). “The Beginnings of a Novel”. In: M. Holland. The Blanchot Reader. Transl. by M. Holland. Oxford: Blackwell, 33-34. Chrétien, J.-L. (2009). Conscience et roman. I. La conscience au grand jour. Paris: Minuit. Chrétien, J.-L. (2011). Conscience et roman. II. La conscience à mi-voix. Paris: Minuit. Hegel, G.W.F. (1970). Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II. Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Band 14. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, M. (1986). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Klosterman. Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining To a Pure Phenomenology and To a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction To a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague / Boston / Lancaster: Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1986). Die Idee der Phänomenologie: 5 Vorlesungen. Hamburg: Meiner. Husserl, E. (1993). Briefwechsel. Husserliana Dokumente Band 3. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Levinas, E. (1993). De l’existence à l’existant. Paris: Vrin. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). “Metaphysics and the Novel”. In: Sense and Non-sense. Transl. by H. L Dreyfus & P.A. Dreyfus, Evanston (IL): Northwestern University Press, 26-40. Louette, J.-F. (2009). Traces de Sartre. Grenoble: ELLUG Université Stendhal. Ricoeur, P. (1984). Temps et récit. 2. La configuration dans le récit de fiction. Paris: Seuil. Romano, C. (2003). Il y a. Paris: Puf. Sartre, J.-P. (1938). La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J.-P. (2002). “Intentionality: a Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”. In: D. Moran and T. Mooney (eds.). The Phenomenology Reader. London-New York: Routledge, 382-384. Watt, I. (1957). The Rise of the Novel. London: Chato and Windus.
Journal
Phainomenon – de Gruyter
Published: Dec 1, 2021
Keywords: Phenomenological attitude; existence; narrative techniques; realism; Sartre