Modernism and Phenomenology: Literature, Philosophy, Art

The exultant final chapter of Ariane Mildenberg’s Modernism and Phenomenology is an upbeat and celebratory interrogation of the doubleness of experience and its expression. Through Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the hyperdialectic, she explores various ‘wavelike movement[s] of mutual alterity and convergence’ (149), what she calls elsewhere ‘fissures that simultaneously divide and join, bringing to light the passage of creative production itself’ (152). This paradoxical seam is linked to the base structures of experience, such as the difference between the experience of eating an apple and the memory of eating an apple; but through this, the core pistons of many of the great works of modernism—such as Cezanne’s apple-paintings that interrogate the experience of apples even as they appear to reproduce it—are explored in the double pulse they share with phenomenological thought. This open fissure within experience is used to bring light to the mechanics and aesthetics of many modernist painters, including Cezanne, Klee and Matisse, and writers, including Kafka, Woolf and Hopkins.

This core doubleness of interrogative openness to the strangeness of experience is explored as the heart of both modernism and phenomenology and the book does an excellent job of tracing this pulse in the work of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and showing how it beats in time with many of the central texts and paintings of modernism. The book is worth reading for its triumphal last chapter alone, but it arrives at its conclusions through a series of explorations of modernism and phenomenology whose freshness bears testament to the precision of the model.

The book opens setting out Mildenberg’s reading of phenomenology—in which she takes issue with Terry Eagleton’s characterisation of phenomenology as trying ‘to achieve a complete objectivity and disinterestedness […] an idealist, essentialist, anti-historical, formalist and organicist type of criticism’ (4). Rather than framing Husserl’s phenomenology solely through his eidetic turn towards absolutes, or on his bracketing of everyday assumptions as an attempt to negate the critical faculties, Mildenberg focuses on phenomenology as a tool of fractured openness to the Heraclitean flux of experience. As much as from Husserl, she draws from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a sense of explorative wonder at the polyvocal textures of experience, or Heidegger’s phenomenology of being as perpetually ‘on the way’, never achieving its destination. With a useful quote from Patrick Burke’s essay ‘Listening at the Abyss’, her phenomenology might best be framed as a ‘paradoxical interrogating openness’ (151). This openness becomes a powerful tool for illuminating the mechanics of modernist texts and paintings, as well as the phenomenologists themselves.

In a series that seeks to link modernism with other schools of thought, the worth of such a doubling might be measured in the richness of the readings it illuminates. Mildenberg’s readings of her chosen writers and painters here are consistently bright and fresh. There are many metaphors of doubleness running through the book: ‘Writer/painter, reader/viewer and text/painting’ (127); humans/angels; Cezanne’s painting of apples or Stein’s poem ‘Apple’/the experience of eating an apple. In many cases, as in the exegesis of the word ‘buckle’ in Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’, what lies at the heart of the paradoxical interface of the intimate opposition of the double is not an immutable barrier but rather a moment of buckling—a soft breaking of the surfaces of each in a mutually plosive collision. But of course there are other ways of framing doubleness: two poles of separate magnets could be considered a double, even as they repel each other, for example, or one part of the double might be eclipsed by the other as in a line for a bus, or one may be altered to fit its double’s mold, like a child squeezing into a sibling’s hand-me-downs. And of course this is the risk of any study that seeks to link two schools of thought. There is always a risk that the doubling becomes a violent and reductive pairing—where literature is made dance to the philosopher’s tune—or even of making connections where they strain the reader’s eye. Perhaps some readers could question how such writers could share the same urgent pressures, in the absence of direct communication, connected mainly by history and cultural influence.

Mildenberg avoids these pitfalls neatly. She does not shy from the fact that many of her writers show little direct critical engagement with the work of phenomenologists and vice versa; but by including the work of Cezanne and Matisse, she finds a common bridge of cultural reference from which many of her phenomenologists and the modernist writers drew. Likewise, the modernists are not simply viewed through a phenomenologist’s lens—which would force the relationship in one direction—but rather the work of modernists as often helps elucidate the thought of phenomenologist as vice versa. For instance, at one stage in her nuanced reading of Woolf, Mildenberg rather ingeniously compares Husserl’s ‘bracketing’ in the epoché of phenomenological reduction, where the phenomenologist must ‘bracket’ their casual unexamined assumptions in order to examine experience, to Woolf’s idiosyncratic use of literal brackets on the page in To the Lighthouse.

This doubling—of the phenomenologist’s theoretical brackets in the epoché with Woolf’s odd inclusive/disruptive use of brackets—captures both the aptness of the link and the wit of the analysis, re-reading the philosophical term in its literal sense.For Mildenberg, phenomenology does not seek to deny prior knowledge but rather, becomes what she calls an ‘embodied praxis’ to disrupt the formative hierarchy between context and phenomenon; what Husserl would ‘bracket’ is not negated but is left on the page, still legible, only slightly muted. But at the same time, the double relationship of the thinker and artist is not held in hierarchical opposition, whereby the thought is a tool through which to explain the art; rather they buckle into one another in a plosive illumination of each. In this way, form matches content: Mildenberg’s own scholarship here does not only describe a hyperdialectic critique of mutually interpenetrative surfaces of experience but enacts such an interface of text to theory to painting.