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ENJOYMENT
ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA
THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
VOLUME LVI
Editor-in-Chief:
ANNA- TERESA TYMIENIECKA
The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning
Belmont, Massachusetts
For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.
ENJOYMENT: FROM LAUGHTER TO DELIGHT
IN PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE,
THE FINE ARTS, AND AESTHETICS
Edited by
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
The World Phenomenology Institute
Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning
A-T. Tymieniecka, President
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Enjoy•ent : Fro• laughter to delight In philosophy, literature, Fine arts, and aesthetics I edited by Anna-Teresa Tymlenlecka.
p. em. -- <Analecta Husserllana : v. 56> Includes Index. ISBN 978-90-481-4889-9 ISBN 978-94-017-1425-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-1425-9 1. Co•lc, The, tn art. 2. Arts. I. Ty•tentecka, Anna-Teresa.
II. Sertes. B3279.H94A129 val. 56 [NXSO) 700 • . 47--dc21
ISBN 978-90-481-4889-9
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Robert J. Wise
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 1998 Springer Science+ Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1998 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1998
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice
97-22549
may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ~
THE THEME I The Rainbow of Enjoyment: From Elementary Laughter to the Swing of the Human Spirit xi
PART I
CELEBRATING LIFE: JOY, LAUGHTER, MIRTH,
AMUSEMENT, THE SMILE OF THE SOUL
MARLIES KRONEGGER I The Feast of Life, Joy, and Love: The Laughter and Smile of the Soul 3
JUDD D. HUBERT I The Merchant of Venice: A Triumph of Discrepancy and Mirth 33
CYNTHIA OSOWIEC RUOFF I The Smile of the Mind: From Moliere to Marivaux 43
LOUISE SUNDARARAJAN I Reveries of Well-Being in the Shih-p'in: From Psychology to Ontology 57
MERRILL HORTON I Bergsonian Laughter in Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah 71
NANCY CAMPI DE CASTRO I G. Cabrera Infante and Lewis Carroll: The Aesthetics of Laughter in Contemporary Latin-American Literature 77
PATRICIA TR UTTY -COOHILL I Bracketing Theory in Leonardo's Five Grotesque Heads 87
PART II
AESTHETICS OF THE COMIC
ROB K. BAUM I Not Funny: Metaphor, Dream and Decapitation 105 JADWIGA s. SMITH I Exploring Aesthetic Discomfort in the
Experience of the Comic and the Tragic: John Marston's Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge 127
PATRICIA RAE I Cannon Aspirin: Wallace Stevens' Defense of Pleasure 137
v
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
RAYMOND J. WILSON III I The Comedy of the False Apperception: Wilde, Maugham, and Stoppard 153
MARA STAFECKA I Irony as a Phenomenological Technique 165
PART III
THE CIRCUITS OF LAUGHTER
LAWRENCE KIMMEL I Philosophy, Literature, and Laughter: Notes on an Ontology of the Moment 175
PATRICIA TRUTTY -COOHILL I Comic Rhythms in Leonardo da Vinci 185
VELGA VEVERE I Plastic Expression and Intuition of Being in Paul Tillich's Theology 203
MARY ELISABETH MCCULLOUGH I Laughter and Enjoyment: La Fontaine and Fragonard 209
PART IV
LAUGHTER AND AESTHETIC ENJOYMENT
JAMES B. SIPPLE I Endgame: Beckett's Oriental Subtext and the Prison of Consciousness 229
BERNADETTE PROCHASKA I Language and Enjoyment -Heidegger and Eliot 237
WILLIAM D. MELANEY I T. S. Eliot and Metaphysical Laughter: A Phenomenology of Reading 247
HANS H. RUDNICK I Joyless Laughter: Sophocles- Hesse -Beckett 257
PART V
CREATIVE PERSPECTIVES OF ENJOYMENT
I. GILLET I Inter-Relation Between Music and Literature and Between Silence and Music in the Novels by J. M. G. Le Clezio 269
GIOVANNA COSTANTINI I The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Entr'Acte as Comedic Interlude 281
MAO CHEN I Lu Xun's Allegory of Realism: Psychology and the Aims of Writing 293
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
SERGE MEITINGER I Naissance du Poeme, Naissance au Poeme: La Fabrique du Pre de Francis Ponge 301
INDEX OF NAMES 319
Fro
m r
igh
t to
lef
t: H
endr
ik H
outh
akke
r, C
ynth
ia R
uoff
, C
harl
es W
. H
arve
y, J
udd
Hub
ert,
Vei
ga V
ever
e, J
adw
iga
Sm
ith,
Mer
rill
H
orto
n, L
ouis
e S
und
arar
aja n
, B
ob B
aum
; in
the
seco
nd r
ow: R
. Dud
man
n, S
teve
n G
ille
s, G
iova
nna
Cos
tant
ini,
Pat
rici
a T
rutt
y-C
oohi
ll,
A-T
. T
ymie
niec
ka,
and
Wil
liam
Mel
aney
at
a re
cept
ion
at t
he W
orld
Phe
nom
enol
ogy
Inst
itut
e he
adqu
arte
rs i
n B
elm
ont
(199
5).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to express my appreciation for the precious cooperation of Professor Marlies Kronegger, the Executive Vice-President of the World Phenomenology Institute and President of our International Society of Phenomenology and Literature. All of us know how much we owe to her dedicated work and inspiring ideas! I also thank my assistants Robert J. Wise Jr., Isabelle Houthakker and Mitchell Seagrave for their editing and other help.
A-T. T.
ix
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LVI, ix.
THE THEME
THE RAINBOW OF ENJOYMENT:
FROM ELEMENTARY LAUGHTER TO
THE SWING OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT
It is interesting to note that in literary criticism the painful, mournful, morose, tragic in general attracts much more careful and solicitous interest than mirth, joy, healthy laughter, in short, the entire gamut of feelings and emotions that express in some way or other the joy of existence. Comedy, as a literary genre, may in fact receive as much attention as tragedy. However, it would seem that it is more appreciated for wittiness and skillful construction of the intrigue than for its aesthetic values.
Let us remember that Greek comedy was enjoyed chiefly as political satire. And what a scandal erupted in the literary circles of Paris when Comeille gave a "happy ending" to Le Cid!
Could it be that comedy, the comic in general, is seen as appealing rather more to popular taste, carrying a lower, more "shallow" artistic and poetic value than tragedy? What then could be the criterion by which aesthetic "depth" and value are to be measured? Undoubtedly it is in experience and its modalities, the experience of the receiver, first, and of the author second, that we have to anchor our inquiry into the profound roots of this contrast. In the case of the tragic, the experience of the recipient manifests itself by reaching to the very depths of subliminal emotions and bringing them to the surface; in other words, tragedy allows us -through an emotive identification, empathizing with heroes and heroines - to crystallize our own latent feelings, which are dispersed in various networks of significance playing there a chaotic role, bringing them into focus so that our entire personality may distill their deepest and most essential, experiential material. From a brute sensible mould they pass through the subliminal work of the creative forge and acquire an aesthetic spread tending toward the sublime.
However, what seems to make tragedy, the tragic conflict, tragic feelings so universally appealing is that this awakening by participation in empathetic experience, first reaches our being at its deepest, and binds together those moments of pre-experience which are latent and yet form the feeling ground of our being. It also ties them into the sub-
xi
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana. Vol. LVI, xi-xiv. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
xii THE THEME
liminal, elevated modes according to latent tendencies and attitudes also flowing from our own personal existence - our personal history. Lastly, because in the interplay between the significant experience of the protagonist of a drama, and our own, fully awakened experiential framework, we realize a crystallization of our own. This is an ex perience of bringing to the surface and forging our very own intimately personal response to the tragic conflict, its protagonists, its unfolding and its unavoidable denouement.
In this experience we have aestheticized our own deeper self, which, raised from oblivion to our awareness, becomes present to us. If this bringing forth of material out of the limbo of our own self is characteristic of tragedy, we cannot say the same of comedy. In the spread of various kinds of comedy, there is an aim set for the writer, the performer, as well as for the participant. It is not to reach the deepest feelings and to crystallize them in a personal subliminal experience (what corresponds to what in Aristotelian theory is called 'catharsis'), but it is to slide over the surface of things, selecting those which are most striking in order to present them to us in an enjoyable, entertaining way. It is enjoyment, mirth and laughter that the spectator expects from a comedy. Would these explanations, as contrasted with those of tragedy and its being more appealing to the public at large, who favor entertainment of the moment rather than the stirring of deep emotions, indicate that there is a lesser aesthetic, that there is less of an existential significance invested in mirth and laughter than there is in grief and struggle for the sake of ideals?
Does this indicate that the tragic and the comic come from different circuits of the human creative orientation? Or, are they meant to play different roles in human self-interpretation-in-existence while being, however, equal to each other in life significance?
These questions amount to saying that it is to the very crystallization of the human condition, in its creative unfolding and maintaining of its course, that we must descend, in order to treat them. The present selection of studies is an attempt to probe various angles of the aesthetics of comic enjoyment, its genesis, its life significance as well as its life function. From laughter as pleasure, having roots both in the elementary moves of physiological functioning as well as in the aesthetics of enjoyment through which it is expressed: the grotesque, the comic, the "smile of the mind", irony, the bizarre, mirth, joy, and aesthetic delight, we move to the aesthetics of the "celebration of life".
THE THEME xiii
We investigate here not only literary comedy but some works of the fine arts and music.
I submit that within the perspective on the Human Condition coming into focus here, these explorations will yield the view that the comic in its aesthetics belongs to our primordial network. I propose, first, that it is aesthetic enjoyment understood as the enjoyment of life and of existence that is at stake here. Beginning in our elementary "enjoyment" of our vital acts, our psychic moves, our swings of imagination, aesthetic enjoyment spreads throughout all the lines of our human functioning and assumes innumerable experiential modalities dispensing to our experiences a measureless medley of valuative rays endowing experiencing with felt significance. This felt significance is what reverberates in our entire beingness; and our being alive in turn reverberates through it. Pleasure and pain, remorse and satisfaction, a simple lightness of being, despair and joy, contentment and disappointment, chagrin, sadness and delight are some of these innumerable significant emotions which are carried by aesthetic enjoyment. In short, aesthetic enjoyment is the enjoyment of being alive!
Coming back to our initial question, which now can be formulated more clearly, namely, in which way and according to what criteria do the aesthetics of the tragic differ so strikingly from those of the comic, I submit that it is the diverse roles of enjoyment of the tragic and of the comic that differentiate them - although not radically, since at the fringes one may turn into the other. Each kind of aesthetic enjoyment promotes and carries human existence onward.
The inquiry presented in this volume probes in a penetrating way the various perspectives of the comic and aims at bringing to light the intricacies of comic enjoyment in its spread from the most primitive, physiologically conditioned laughter, through mirth, joy, amusement, etc. to the "smile of the soul" and the swing of the human spirit towards the sublime.
Life enjoyment carries the dynamic unfolding of life, first, in its elementary function of exfoliating feeling and conscious acts, something essential to their advance and maintenance, as well as in all the circuits of its creative unfolding; it is the role of specifically aesthetic enjoyment to safeguard the balance of emotional modes between the pain, sadness and depression that debilitate human beings, weaken their forces, and hinder their progress, and to answer the need for vital reinforcement, courage, soothing and calming which this progress requires.
xiv THE THEME
Our investigation will corroborate further our hitherto exfoliated ideas in bringing forth the eminent role of aesthetics in the Human Condition, by revealing essential pointers for the clarification of the role of enjoyment with respect to the human self-individualisation-in-existence.
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA