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