Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung. On a Hidden Potential of Literature

Abstract

Mironescu reviews Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung. On a Hidden Potential of Literature written by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and translated by Erik Butler.

Hans Ulrich GUMBRECHT, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung. On a Hidden Potential of Literature, translated by Erik Butler, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2012, 140 p.

In this book, the prestigious German-American scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht collected a coherent series of articles published first in the "Feuilleton" of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Thanks to this, they make up a highly readable and enjoyable series of essays, a sort of "introduction" or "digest" for the lay reader who hasn't yet approached Gumbrecht's important volumes, more theoretical in nat ure, In 1926. Living at the Edge of Time, Production of Presence or The Powers of Philology. This is the American translation of the volume Stimmungen lesen, first printed in Germany in 2011.

By way of analyses (or, as Gumbrecht prefers to call them, "readings") performed on several important literary texts, but also other forms of artistic manifestation, this book makes a good illustration of the direction of thought Gumbrecht opened two decades ago. The Introduction of the present book, titled "Reading for Stimmung: How to Think about the Reality of Literature Today", discusses the importance of looking at literature from the point of view of "atmosphere" or "mood", as a way out of the current blockage in the discipline, as he sees it. (Being an American academic, Gumbrecht refers to the situation in the USA). He swiftly reviews the situation of the last decade in literary studies, culminating with the divide between deconstruction and cultural studies. The author introduces then a "third way", presumably not trying to convince his deconstructivist or culturalist oponents, but attempting to pursue the hesitant mass in between, the adepts of "common sense" who feel univited by both camps. His solution is "reading with Stimmung in mind", that is applying the outlook of the "aesthetic of presence" school (better illustrated, on the level of theory, in the earlier book Production of Presence, 2004). Stimmung is atmosphere or mood, the state where one is being affected by sound or weather, but it is more aptly described by Toni Morrison's phrase "being touched as if from the inside". The fact that Stimmung comes as a result of a physical, concrete encounter is essential for Gumbrecht, in light of his emphasis on the "effects of presence" that literature seeks to convey in a far larger measure than everyday life experience, and also because the concreteness of aesthetic experience restores, in his view, the relevance of literature and art to humans. In the same vein, Gumbrecht stresses the importance of prosody in making a literary text more "present" to its reader: "the sounds and rhythms of the words strike our bodies as they struck the spectators of their time. Therein lies an encounter - an immediacy, and an objectivity of the past-made-present - which cannot be undermined by any skepticism". However, in this book very few are the prosodic analyses or at least observations, and most of the texts analysed are written in prose.

The history of the concept starts with Goethe, who saw Stimmung as the expression of cosmic harmony that included human existence, and ends with the turn to a bleak, existential Stimmung, but a Stimmung nevertheless, in the post-World War II period. But Stimmung existed at least since the Renaissance, when literature is to be read in a décor and with musical tuning, and especially strong in the Romantic period and at the turn of the 20th century. "Every Stimmung is historically and culturally unique", Gumbrecht insists, and in the description of each there is something important to be found out about the intimacy of a certain historical period and cultural region. There must also be a specific Stimmung, we may jokingly add, to the age that so strongly advocates Stimmung; and Gumbrecht does indeed explain the emergence of his own aesthetics of presence today by referring to the fusion of "consciousness and software" in the virtual reality of our everyday lives. Reading for Stimmung, then, expresses "a yearning for presence" on the world of today.

The book is divided into two parts of unequal size: "Moments" and "Situations". The first discusses various writers and works of the ages as expressions of something particular to the feeling, mood or atmosphere of the age in relation to political, economical or social conditions. Thus, for instance, "Fleeting Joys in the Work of Walter von der Vogelweide" ventures as far back as the Middle Ages to discuss what the mood of a courtly minnesänger in the 12th century might have been. Taking all precaution not to mistake mere verbal ritual for personal feeling, Gumbrecht sees the description of the hardships of winter as something very near to the poet's heart. The Renaissance, on the other hand, with its stylish manners and studied pose, makes a convincing exemple of Stimmung. In "The Precarious Existence of the Picaro", Lazarillo de Tormes is presented as illustrating the plebeian feeling of a deeply devious character that internalizes duplicity as a way of making it in a thoroughly hierarchical, violent and arbitrary world. Gumbrecht makes a masterful reading of the final pages of the novel and thus manages to explain why Lazarillo de Tormes is the main example of the Spanish picaro literature we all know about. A dedicated analysis of Shakespeare's sonnets ("Multiple Layers of the World in Shakespeare's Sonnets") insists on the "density and immediacy" they approach when talking about the (Elisabethan) experience of loving a man or a woman. Meanwhile, in discussing "Amorous Melancholy in the Novellas of María de Zayas", Gumbrecht talks about the descriptions an d deliberations in the 17th century Spanish writer's work, which make clear how the "different configurations that occur between past and future horizons" create a specific atmosphere of melancholy. In Diderot's Le Neveau de Rameau, the critic sees the mood of irrational, aggressive instability preceding the French Revolution, and thus dismisses the view that Stimmung only characterizes states of harmony. Romanticism is illustrated by a commanding commentary on the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, by stressing the presence of "second-order observers" (Niklas Luhmann) in his work, reflecting a distrust in the human capacity to ever really approach a true object of experience. A very competent analysis is made to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a veritable "atmosphere piece", where moods prevails over plot and ultimately even determines it ("Stimmung is the most concrete - and, for this reason, perhaps the most «literary» - dimension in which Aschenbach's passion occurs"). Machado de Assis' novel Diario de Aires gives the occasion to analyse "beatiful sadness" as an expression of loss experienced as something envelopping human experience in general. The section is concluded with an empathic commentary of a musical track, Janis Joplin's Me and Bobby McGee, discussing the Stimmung of freedom and melancholy from the explosive chorus down to the last murmurs caught on the registration made by the artist a few days before her untimely death. The chapter is conceived (together with the one on Caspar David Freidrich) as a proof that literature can and should be seen in the context of the arts and that the aesthetic approach ensures such a perspective.

The second section, "Situations", includes only three essays. The first, "The Iconoclastic Energy of Surrealism", sets to discuss the differences between French, respectively German Surrealism, insisting that they should be seen as distinct, culturaly specific phenomena that have more to tell us if considered on their own (an idea penned first by Walter Benjamin, one of Gumbrecht's champion philosophers). French Surrealism expresses the French philosophical perspective of seeing human experience as an encounter with the other, for instance with the materiality of things. The Spanish experience, present in the works of Picasso, Garcia Lorca or in Ortega y Gasset's La dehumanisación del arte, is one where the form is never altogether broken and done away with. The German experience, on the other hand, is characterized by using Hugo von Hofmannstahl's phrase "Conservative Revolution", stripped of its political (Nazi) overtones that were added later. The difference is evident in Heidegger's resistance to the translation of his early work, Sein und Zeit (attempted by Paul Nizan), into the terms of French Existentialism, precisely because he saw it as taking part in another philosophical project. However, later, after what has been called "the Turn" in Heidegger's thought, he seems to come to a conclusion that is more convergent with the French Surrealists's vision of "prophane epiphanies". He is now talking about Selfunconcealing-Being, the being of individual things in their material and substantial concreteness, unframed by any particular context, that "shows" itself intermitently, independently from the people's desire to see it. Like revelation, it "belongs to the dimension of epiphany". Thus, Heidegger assimilated some of the insights of French Surrealism (the idea of influence is here not in question), without using its "energy" and adding a culturallyspecific, German dimension to it.

The second essay in this section, "Tragic Sense of Life", refers to the Stimmung of the third decade of the 20th century, with was subject to another important book by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926. Living on the Edge of Time (1997). The "roaring twenties", with their frenetic dance, dispairing uncertainty and deep disorientation were a result of the discouraging postwar atmosphere, when not only heroism, but also the philosophical "subject" seemed to have vanished under the fire of relentless machine guns. Although the essay's title calls forth Miguel de Unamuno's book Del sentimiento tragico de la vida, the focus is more likely Heidegger, Gumbrecht's foremost reference as the precursor of several of his own thesis on the aesthetics of presence. Since the mood of the twenties was the tension between vitalism and reason, the only two solutions presented were either sobriety or ecstasy (happiness being considered, suggestively, unaccessible by all the actors of the period). Sobriety is to be found in the concept of Gelassenheit in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, while ecstasy is suggested by a wide array of acitivities characteristic to the period, such as bullfighting. The evolution of these societies towards extremist ideologies such as Communism, Fascism and Nazism is accounted for as a consequence of the "exiling of happiness" from the perception of life in the twenties. As one can see, Heidegger is present at all levels in this book.

Finally, the essay on "Deconstruction, Asceticism, and Self-pity" makes a brief history of the appearance and sudden disappearance of an aesthetic theory of Stimmung (because, Gumbrecht thinks, Stimmung itself never goes away). From Alois Riegl in the last years of the 19th century, who expected modern art to be an art of mood, to Leo Spitzer and Gottfried Benn in the 1940s, who thought that any description of harmony in the world was prohibited in art, Stimmung lived its career as a concept. But even after it was proclaimed dead, Stimmung resisted in the existentialist novels of Sartre and Camus and lives on even today. The final part of the essay, a polemical attempt to discuss the deconstructivist "energy" as also having its own Simmung, may be enjoyed for its irony, but is, in my opinion, irrelevant to the point this book is trying to make. Anyway, the battles of deconstruction are lost since the wartime journalism of Paul de Man came to public knowledge and there isn't much to add to that.

One more word about Gumbrecht's book. The German American scholar doesn't encourage one method or another to approach more "truthfully" the literary text. He prides himself in his own distrust of theories and, of course, claims he did not ellaborate one: "I am skeptical about the power of «theories» to explain atmospheres and moods, and I doubt the viabily of «methods» to identify them". There is no method of analysis that he recommends, and his rejection of the specialists' jargon is very "American" itself: "I believe that researchers on the terrain of the «human sciences» should rely more on the potential of counterintuitive thinking than on a pre-established «path» or «way»". Reading for the Stimmung, in Gumbrecht's opinion, does away with method and with the ambition of reading for the truth in the text - rather "it seizes the work as a part of life in the present". Hopefully, this lack of commitement to method will not encourage uncritical impressionism in its readers and followers; one must remember that aesthetic and epistemologic ignorance are the exact opposite of what this book is trying to encourage. Hopefully, Stimmung will provide a stimulating perspective, one that researchers will be able to make the most of.