Negatively capable dialectics: Keats, vendler, adorno, and the theory of the avant-garde

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 354-384

  Kaufman, Robert ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61449516236     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/449012     Document Type: Review

References (99)

1. For a trenchant essay on allegorical application/assimilation of Frankfurt theory to inapposite literary cases, see Marcus Bullock, "Benjamin, Baudelaire, Rossetti, and the Discovery of Error," Modem Language Quarterly 53 (June 1992): 201-25. I use allegorical here not in the usual Benjaminian or deconstructive sense of oppositional corrective to an illusory symbolic unity, but more loosely to designate interpretive applications made between parallel objects of study where the contextual, artistic, and theoretical materials themselves may not ultimately justify any necessary structural and/or historical connection
2. Palmer framed the talk with two recent events, the collapse of "really-existing socialism" and the Gulf War; see Michael Palmer, "Some Notes on Shelley, Poetics, and the Present," Sulfur, no. 33 (1993): 273-81
3. and Keats-Shelley Journal 42 (1993): 37-47;
4. Robert Kaufman, "Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley's Defence of Adorno," English Literary History 63 (Fall 1996): 707-33
5. Palmer, "Some Notes on Shelley, Poetics, and the Present," Sulfur, pp. 280-81
6. see Palmer, "Some Notes on Shelley, Poetics, and the Present," Keats-Shelley Journal, pp. 46-47
7. Just how materially Shelley himself makes that link is subject to never-ending dispute; see Kaufman, "Legislators of the Post-Everything World."
8. See Arthur Henry Hallam, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson," The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York, 1943), pp. 182-98
9. T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays (New York, 1950), p. 246;
10. quoted in Carol T Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago, 1984), p. 53, to which my discussion is indebted
11. See also Hallam, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson," pp. 186-87, 191-92, 194-95
12. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, 1974), p. 332
13. quoted in Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics, p. 78.
14. On Yeats's rethinking of Hallam and poesie pure, see Christ, Victorian and Modem Poetics, pp. 73-82
15. See, for example, James Chandler, "Hallam, Tennyson, and the Poetry of Sensation: Aestheticist Allegories of a Counter-Public Sphere," Studies in Romanticism 33 (Winter 1994): 527-37.
16. For an instance where Hallam does briefly surface in contemporary poetry and poetics, see Norma Cole, "Ten Minutes to Talk about Experimental Writing," Quarter after Eight 5 (1998): 18-26
17. See, for example, Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London, 1980)
18. Nicholas Roe, John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford, 1997), as well as the essays edited by Roe in Keats and History (Cambridge, 1995)
19. Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton, N.J., 1998)
20. Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, 1997)
21. Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, Calif., 1997)
22. Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and Their Circle (Cambridge, 1998)
23. Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998)
24. John Kandl, "Private Lyrics in the Public Sphere: Leigh Hunt's Examiner and the Construction of a Public John Keats,'" Keats-Shelley Journal 44 (1995): 84-101
25. David Bromwich, "Keats and the Aesthetic Ideal," in The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald A. Sharp (Amherst, Mass., 1998), pp. 183-88
26. and "Keats's Radicalism," Studies in Romanticism 25 (Summer 1986): 197-210
27. and Tilottama Rajan, "Keats, Poetry, and 'The Absence of the Work,'" Modern Philology 95 (Feb. 1998): 334-51. Chandler, Rajan, and Bromwich particularly stress not only the participation of Keats's poetic materials and achieved poems in concrete sociopolitical contexts; they emphasize too how Keats makes poetic form work philosophically and psychically as a means for registering (and in that sense, allowing engagement with) the historical itself
28. See Sidney Finkelstein, "Beauty and Truth" and Fredric Jameson, "Criticism in History," in Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, ed. Norman Rudich (Palo Alto, Calif., 1976), pp. 51-73, 31-50.
29. Jameson's "Criticism in History" has been republished in his Ideologies of Theory, 2 vols. (Minneapolis, 1988), 1:119-36
30. See too Finkelstein's earlier, intriguing decision to align the indubitably romantic-symbolist Keats with a critical-realist aesthetics in Finkelstein, "Realism and the Crisis in the Arts Today," Art and Society (New York, 1947), pp. 104-26
31. The Marxian-and deconstructionist-derived (often Frankfurtand Adorno-citing) critique of aesthetic ideology runs something like this: At a foundational moment for modern-bourgeois, desocialized, representationalist ideologies of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, Kant's third Critique and the art contemporaneous with it establish an essentialist or transcendental theory of cultural value, a theory based in literary or aesthetic experience and form. This theory's other, from romanticism through the twentieth century, will be the material, the social, and the historical, all of which are erased by or made subservient to artistic-philosophical form. Thus emergent aesthetic formalism ideologically deforms material, sociohistorical reality, turning it first into art and then into art theory. For an argument that a crucial strain of Marxian criticism (starting with Marx and Engels, and most fully elaborated by Adorno) carefully distinguishes between aesthetic and aestheticization and for an examination of the critique of aesthetic ideology's founding but highly problematic brief for application of Marx and Engels's The German Ideology to the realm of literature, art, and philosophical aesthetics see Kaufman, "Red Kant, or The Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson," Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000): 682-724
32. Derek Jarman, War Requiem, Anglo International Films/BBC/Liberty Films, 1988
33. see too Jarman's companion book War Requiem (London, 1989)
34. and see Benjamin Britten, War Requiem, London Records, 414 383-2, 1963. Jarman's painting, design, and film careers have almost from the beginning put aesthetics together with gay and Left commitment; for a compact and provocative reflection on this braiding, see Jarman's Blakean hommage to Eisenstein, "Imagining October," 1984. For a very brief but interesting attempt to understand Jarman's and Stan Brakhage's cinema as belonging to different moments in modern art's experimental efforts to measure the socioeconomic with implicit reliance on these filmmakers' histories of engagement see Jameson, "Culture and Finance Capital," Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 262-64
35. Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (London, 1988), pp. 28, 36
36. hereafter abbreviated KLA; see also pp. 12-15, 23-24, 26-28, 31, 36, and 43-44 n. 34, and p. 40 n. 13, where she cites Adorno, "Valéry Proust Museum," Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (1967
37. see Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkriiik und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1955). Levinson subsequently redirected her attention to Adorno, making valuable suggestions about his renewed importance to nineteenthand twentieth-century poetics and theory
38. see her "Romantic Poetry: The State of the Art," Modern Language Quarterly 54 (June 1993): 183-214, esp. 211-13
39. excerpted in At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington, Ind" 1994), pp. 269-81
40. Clearly expressed differences between the two critics seem not to have ended with Levinson's Keats volume; see the critique of Levinson's important contribution to Words-worth studies, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge, 1986), in Vendler, "'Tintern Abbey': Two Assaults," Wordsworth in Context, ed. Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy (Lewisburg, Penn., 1992), pp. 173-90
41. The point is made across Adomo's career, never more so than in the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. For commentary on the role Adorno accords a classically formalist aesthetic phenomenology, see, for example, Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), esp. chap. 1, "Subjective Aesthetic Experience and Its Historical Trajectory."
42. For an efficient charting of these stylistic techniques in the odes, see Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 495-500
43. See also Jack Stillinger's introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes, ed. Stillinger (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968), pp. 1-16
44. and Stillinger, introduction, John Keats: Complete Poems, ed. Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. xiii-xxviii.'
45. Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 8; hereafter abbreviated OJK
46. Keats, "Ode to Psyche," The Poems of John Keats, ed. Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 1. 60, p. 366.
47. On Mallarmé's rewriting of the "wreath'd trellis" and for an overview of his relationship to Keats, see Robert Greer Cohen, "Keats and Mallarmé," Comparative Literature Studies 7 (June 1970): 195-203
48. Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford, 1986), p. 66
49. See also Vendler, "Keats and the Use of Poetry," The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 118
50. See Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, 18 Mar. 1936
51. Adorno and Benjamin, Briefwechsel, 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), pp. 169-70
52. trans. Nicholas Walker, under the title The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940, ed. Lonitz (Cambridge, Mass, 1999), pp. 128-29.
53. This letter also appears in Adorno, "Letters to Walter Benjamin," in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Harry Zohn et al., ed. Ronald Taylor (London, 1977), pp. 121-22
54. See also Adorno, "Der Artist als Statthalter," Noten zur Literatur, 1:187-92
55. Adorno, "Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg's Moses und Aron," Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London, 1992), p. 229
56. Quoted in Adorno, "Arnold Schoenberg: 1874-1951," Prisms, p. 148
57. "Valérys Abweichungen," Noten zur Literatur, 2:54
58. "Valérys Deviations," Notes to Literature, 1:145
59. and "Schöne Stellen," Gesammelte Schriften, 18:718. For a virtuosic reading of how "Ode on a Grecian Urn" affiliates internal, expressivist silence with form-construction and a reading, not coincidentally, of the sort of Keats-Mallarmé affinities remarked above see Marshall Brown, "Unheard Melodies: The Force of Form," PMLA 107 (May 1992): 465-81
60. Vendler quotes at length Fischer's most important work of literary-aesthetic theory, The Necessity of Art, trans. Anna Bostock (1957; London, 1963), p. 17
61. See Vendler, The Music of What Happens, pp. 1, 5
62. See also Vendler's paeans to Adorno in her "Feminism and Literature," review of Feminism/Poslmodemism, by Linda J. Nicholson, New York Review of Books, 31 May 1990, pp. 19, 20
63. see also Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 140-63, 174-75
64. Ästhetische Theorie, pp. 211-44, 260-62). Generously, Adorno remarks that Valéry is on some level aware of this shortcoming. Valéry's consciousness of the problem is shown, Adorno adds, by Valéry's preference for mimetic behavior over straightforward copying or transcription; Valéry adheres to the idea that at the heart of aesthetic experience is an imitation or imaging of a process of creation (rather than an imitation of some entirely known object or objectlike formal law)
65. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984)
66. See also, for example, Lambert Zuidervaart, Adomo's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)
67. Martin Jay, "Hierarchy and the Humanities: The Radical Implications of a Conservative Idea" and "Mass Culture and Aesthetic Redemption: The Debate between Max Horkheimer and Siegfried Kracauer," Fin-De-Siècle Socialism (New York, 1988), esp. pp. 37-40,49-51, 82-96
68. and Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge, 1998)
69. For the powerful (if compressed) version of the schema summarized and quoted above, see David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 154, 156-57
70. see Kaufman, "Red Kant." On Shelley's version of purposiveness-without-purpose (which matches Keats's Shakespeare-identified negative capability by projecting a Miltonic bold neglect of direct moral purpose), see Kaufman, "Legislators of the Post-Everything World," pp. 716, 721-22, 724
71. See, for example, Philip Fisher, "Thinking about Killing: Hamlet and the Path among the Passions," Raritan 11 (Summer 1991): 43-77
72. see too the texts mentioned in Kaufman, "The Sublime as Super-Genre of the Modern, or Hamlet in Revolution: Caleb Williams and His Problems," Studies in Romanticism 36 (Winter 1997): 541-74
73. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2d ed. (New York, 1997), 1.5.81, 91, 111, p. 1198
74. Keats, "Ode on Indolence," The Poems of John Keats, 11. 30, 13, 19-20, pp. 376, 375, 376
75. Keats, "Ode on Indolence," I. 51, p. 376
76. Keats, "Ode to Psyche," The Poems of John Keats, 1. 17, p. 365
77. Keats, "Ode on Melancholy," The Poems of John Keats, II. 21-23, p. 375
78. See Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, pp. 83-84
79. See also, among other important interpretations of "To Autumn" since the 1970s, Geoffrey Hartman, "Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's 'To Autumn,'" The Fate of Reading (Chicago, 1975), pp. 124-46
80. Jerome J. McGann, "Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism," The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford, 1988), pp. 15-65
81. and Paul H. Fry, "Nil Reconsidered: Criticism, Actuality, and 'To Autumn,'" A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford, Calif., 1995), pp. 108-32.
82. On Hartman's interesting positionings of Adorno in "Poem and Ideology," see Kaufman, "Red Kant"; for Hartman's later, fuller engagement with Adorno, see his The Fateful Question of Culture (New York, 1997). Fry's A Defense of Poetry features, for its part, one of contemporary Anglo-American criticism's most important treatments of Adorno, "Rede über Lyrik und Gesell-schaft," Noten zur Literatur, 1:73-104
83. Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale," 11. 41-50, pp. 370-71
84. See, for example, Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York, 1974)
85. See Eliot, "Hamlet" Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York, 1975), pp. 45-49. This essay originally appeared as "Hamlet and His Problems," review of The Problem of "Hamlet," by J. M. Robertson, Athenaeum 26 (Sept. 1919): 940-41. Eliot's essay is still generally known by and frequently reprinted under its original title; see, for example, Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (Fort Worth, Tex., 1992), pp. 764-66
86. See, for example, the exquisite (purposefully off-center, almost erased or negated) weaving of Keatsian and symbolist strains into a historical matrix for modern African-American culture in Amiri Baraka, "Miles Davis (1926-1991): When Miles Split!" Eulogies (New York, 1996), pp. 143-46. For further thoughts about late twentieth-century explorations of Keatsian-Hamletian form, see Kaufman, "A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest's Recent Poetry," American Poetry Review 29 (July/Aug. 2000): 11-16
87. See the history recounted and works cited in Neil Fraistat, "Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance," PMLA 109 (May 1994): 409-23
88. For a typical instance of how Shelley, hovers around the generally French and German literary histories invoked in these debates in a manner paralleling Adorno's linkages between Keats and an otherwise French-German tradition of constructivism see the way Adorno (following Brecht and Benjamin) connects Shelley to a poetic of symbolist dissemination and expression in Adorno, "Parataxis: Zur Späten Lyrik Hölderlins," Noten zur Literatur, 3:174
89. "Parataxis: On Hölderlin's Late Poetry," Notes to Literature, 2:122
90. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York, 1977), 11. 573-74, p. 210
91. Ästhetische Theorie, p. 335 ("Einzig durch ihre gesellschaftliche Resistenzkraft erhält Kunst sich am Leben; verdinglicht sie sich nicht, so wird sie Ware"). For comparison/alignment of Keatsian and Adornian objectification, see Bromwich, "Keats and the Aesthetic Ideal," pp. 186-88. Levinson's own sense of the potentially critical and proto-Marxian register that selfconsciously literary style's self-reification-with-a-difference may carry is perhaps conveyed in the subtitle of Keats's Life of Allegory, namely, The Origins of a Style. It so happens that the same subtitle belongs to Fredric Jameson's first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New Haven, Conn., 1961). (
92. For a preliminary sketch of Brecht's translations of, essays on, and rewritings (into his own poetry) of Shelley and for the immediate influence of Brecht's Shelleyanism on Benjamin and, through Benjamin, Adorno see Kaufman, "Intervention and Commitment Forever! Shelley in 1819, Shelley in Brecht, Shelley in Adorno, Shelley in Benjamin," Romantic Circles Praxis (Winter 2001): http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/
93. Given his great, retrospective importance to early twentieth-century attempts to develop firmer grounds for English-language lyric, Robert Browning's distinctions between the objective (Shakespearean) and subjective (Miltonic) poet would seem particularly relevant here. Not coincidentally, Browning makes the distinction in his 1851 "Essay on Shelley" (first published as the introductory essay to Edward Moxon's 1852 Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley); see Robert Browning, "Essay on Shelley," The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1981), 1:1001-13. For all its praise of Shelley, the essay is generally read as Browning's attempt to step away from his former model in favor of the more objective poetry that Browning hopes to create
94. Hölderlin may be the most fascinating figure in nineteenth-century poetry to read comparatively with Keats and Shelley. Some two decades older, his revolutionary sympathies are as ardent as theirs (as are his hopes that poetry can have sociopolitical effect). Moreover, his poetic experimentalism embodies (as so much Hölderlin commentary has noted, though sometimes in a different vocabulary) both the disseminative-expressivist and constructionist elements at issue between Keats and Shelley. In the context of German history, however, Hölderlin could not quite articulate the tension between those two elements as part of a modern postrevolutionary dilemma since German revolution, let alone its aftermath, simply had not occurred. The historical ground thus would appear to play no small part in the absence, in Hölderlin, of expression-versus-construction as a political concern about correlating specific, nonnäive experiments in poetic form with critical/political agency (not to mention the absence of a twinned, Keats-Shelley type debate between Hölderlin and some allied but distinct figure in German poetics). Nor do overlapping GoetheSchiller disagreements over poetic form really map onto the expression-construction problematic, or at least not onto that problematic's interactions with specific progressive or Left critical-political agendas. The point is that fully articulated disputes about the roles of these two poetics or aesthetics vis-à-vis their inculcation of protocritical, protopolitical agency does not really happen in German art until the twentieth century (and in the French tradition, not until Baudelaire). Alternately, one might say that the belated publication and reception of most of Höld' erlin's work in the twentieth century's first few decades curiously meant that sociopolitical circumstances had in a sense been able to catch up to his poetry, so that Hölderlin's explorations of expression-construction could now participate in the burgeoning (and more properly modern) avant-gardist versus modernist controversy about certain versions of artistic form and critical-political agency. In that light, it's instructive to review the interpretations of one of the Hölderlin critics best known to Anglo-American audiences, Paul de Man. In a representative essay, "Patterns of Temporality in Hölderlin's 'Wie wenn am Feiertage .. .,'" de Man remarks the ways in which Hölderlin projects and then unsettles notions of both organic form and subjective expressivity; de Man observes too the complication or self-deconstruction of the poet's desire that the poems expressively enact his radical political stance. Tellingly, de Man virtually ends the essay by approvingly quoting Adorno's comments (from "Parataxis") about the importance in Hölderlin "'of the relationship that the content, including the intellectual content, maintains with the form.'" On this score, de Man briefly notes Adorno's interest in Hölderlin's nonorganic, paratactic constructions, including Hölderlin's almost magical passing without transition among distinct tonal levels (Paul de Man, "Patterns of Temporality in Hölderlin's 'Wie wenn am Feiertage ...,'" Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin New-mark, and Andrzej Warminski [Baltimore, 1993], pp. 71-73). But, unlike de Man, Adomo does not stop at the issue of deconstructive interference between the expression of intellectual, philosophical, or political content and poetic form. While assuming this fundamental aporia, Adorno's "Parataxis" goes on to see construction, in its interaction with expression, as central to Hölderlin and modernist critical aesthetics (that is, the very tradition that Bürger will rehearse in its differentiation from anti-aesthetic avant-gardism)
95. The inability of avant-gardist anti-aestheticism itself to supersede or destroy the role of auratic aesthetic autonomy has, of course, been pointed out time and again by artists who are generally if hastily classified as avant-garde. For one recent instance, see the wellknown experimental French poet Jacques Roubaud's "Du geste avant-gardiste," "D'un exemple," and "Quoi!" in Roubaud, Poésie, Etcetera: Ménage (Paris, 1995), pp. 169-75
96. trans. Cole, under the titles "On the Avant-gardist Gesture," "An Example," and "What!" Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, ed. Cole (Providence, R.I., 2000), pp. 134-37
97. The teasing allusion is again, of course, to "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity" (Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," 11. 44-45, p. 373).
98. The torn halves that do not reunite as one allude to Adorno's recurrent invocation of the torn halves of a freedom that do not add up to a whole. For reflection on Adorno's frequent use of this metaphor, see Jay, Adomo (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 163, 187 n.5. For two important expressions of Adorno's idea (both cited by Jay), see Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 18 Mar. 1936, in Adorno and Benjamin, Briefuechsel, 1928-1940, p. 171
99. See also Adorno, "Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik," pt. 5 of Musikalische Schriften, in Gesammelte Schriften, 18:734; trans. Wes Blomster, under the title "On the Social Situation of Music," Telos 35 (Spring 1978): 132: "Hälften eines Ganzen, das freilich durch deren Addition niemals rekonstruierbar wäre" ("halves of a totality which to be sure could never be reconstructed through the addition of the two halves")