Beethoven vii (on the sublime)

Certain art forms may seem broken up into juxtaposed fragments and are yet still capable of developing, something like a plowed field that is simultaneously upturned and the site of possible growth. The upturning exposes the disruptions and actualities beneath the surface, and it simultaneously readies the field for new growth. Such a process can be likened to what happens in Beethoven’s late works, which unite an exposure of basic ordering forms (an upturned baring of essential conventions) with unconventional lyric upwellings and improvised-seeming imaginative eruptions. Before considering that process in more of the late works, I’d like to explain as clearly as I can the relevance of an idea I’d mentioned in one of my earliest posts, the idea of the sublime.
Recently I taught a “Senior Scholars” course to a group of about forty or so people, some of whom are retired, some nearing retirement, and some widowed; early on in the course I tried to suggest the bearing of the idea of the sublime on modernity and specifically on Conrad’s evocation of the jungle and sea among other vistas and also on Freud’s idea of sublimation (Walter Kaufmann, Stanley Cavell, and Harold Bloom among others have of course made the connection between sublimation and the sublime in Nietzsche and others).

Examples of the sublime in Romanticism are a storm at sea or the dwarfing vista of the Alps, as in Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting “Wanderer above the Mist” – the untethered human here is dwarfed by the snowy peaks and the seemingly limitless power of external nature. However, the human imagination is not simply “dwarfed” but is stirred to witness and give form to this power; "sublime" then is the name for both a particular occurence and a particular form of imagination, which heeds the call to create “sublime” art or, in Freud’s terms, to sublimate the power of such vistas. To mention Freud is to register that those "vistas" or forces exist not only externally in nature but internally in the psyche, in the instinctual forces of erotic love and of aggression, of Eros and of Thanatos (or the death instinct). So it is that the looming and supercharged forces of both nature and human myth can be termed sublime and are subject to sublimation. For example, in 1900 (the year Freud published “The Interpretation of Dreams”) Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” gives form and voice both to the primeval jungle and to the figure of Kurtz, with his nearly mythic god-like arrogance – both contain emanations of the sublime. Similarly the sublime force of Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818-19) evokes the terror both of the encompassing sea and of the dying and dead men stranded on the raft.

Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” codified (in 1790) this idea of the sublime as a “representation of limitlessness,” existing in a region outside the normal bounds of beauty and beyond the reach of reason – a region of “chaos,” “the ugly,” and “the negative.” A storm’s threat of chaos and terror, for example, evinces an absence of the rational, a negation of order which challenges the imagination to encompass it. In its turn, the sublime work of art then “represents” such a vista of infinite power in order to draw the phenomenon into the compass of autonomous art. In a sense God-like nature meets its match in the Kantian “genius,” whose transformative representations reveal the existence of “soul” in nature. The composer of the Fifth Symphony and the Appassionata Sonata (circa 1805) embodies a version of that “genius.”

At one point in “Critique of Judgment” Kant writes that “perhaps there has never been a more sublime utterance than the inscription from the Temple of Isis” evoking the sublime as the infinite power of nature: “I am all that is, and that was, and that shall be.” It is no accident that Beethoven kept this Kantian inscription in his rooms during his “heroic” period, for the immense power of his middle-period symphonies and sonatas projects this form of encompassing sublimity. Late Beethoven, however, explores a different form of the sublime, one associated more with torn-apart Osiris than the earth-goddess Isis – a sort of sublimity of dismemberment.

Beethoven’s late works thrive in the midst of disparity and open-endedness. It is as if a bargain is being made: organizing forms become more and more objective, the ordering conventions of fugue or variation are made more and more explicit, while the driven process of “heroic” mastery and the will undergoes a sort of disappearance and death and gives way to a new musical process. Beethoven’s “objectifying” of his earlier subjective mastery is – in Hegel’s thinking – to confront death. Hegel’s ideas, developing beyond Kant, can help further to illuminate Beethoven’s late music.

What emerges amid this new “objectivity” is, in Hegel’s conception, a new comprehension of “incompleteness,” “fragmentation,” and “process” – an opening up to another way of being. These qualities well characterize Beethoven’s late aesthetic yielding newly improvisatory invention, a sort of sublimity of “dismemberment.” “The life of the spirit,” Hegel writes in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), “endures and maintains itself” in the face of the death of the self, of identity; the spirit “wins its truth only when it finds itself in utter dismemberment.” Here then is the Hegelian sublime, which can help us comprehend what Beethoven is composing in the last decade of his life as he embraces objectivity and passes through the negation of his earlier aesthetic. To endure the death of the form to which the grand, heroic self had been committed yields “the magic power” which converts the “dismembered” self into sublime form: such at least are some Hegelian terms to describe Beethoven’s wonderful late productivity, and these terms help also to illuminate elements of the creative process in modernity (not least in D. H. Lawrence’s explicit evocation of Osiris in his late novella “The Man Who Died”).

Beethoven - v

I want to apologize for the typos in the previous four posts. When one writes “adults like children” when one meant to write “adults act like children,” you know that proof-reading is needed.

The open-ended exploration of motifs, structure, and harmony notable in late Beethoven applies also to the exploration of rhythms; I’m thinking, for example, of opus 111’s final Arietta variations taking apart the rhythmic impulses of the theme – for example, in the second variation’s searching out the pressure points in the quickly pulsing fast sixteenth and thirty-second notes; or in the third variation’s locating the jazzy off-beats, the jetting sixty-fourth notes teasing out a hint of rhythm embedded in the original melody; or in the fourth variation’s transformation of these fast notes into hovering, trembling triplets which decompose rhythm into a sort of pure stillness. (Such explorations and disintegrations are, of course, apparent also in the wonderful Diabelli Variations, opus 120.)

Also, earlier I noted the idea that Beethoven’s late works are witnesses to catastrophe, baring conventions at the skeletal moment of their demise, rather than imbuing conventions with a masterful subjectivity, whether heroic (as in the middle-period works) or ironic. Of course, for the late works, ironic is a pertinent description because the appearance of willful mastery, for example in the first movement of the opus 132 quartet in a minor, is undercut not only by the earlier-mentioned passage beginning in measure 92, but by oddly inflated jolts of false rhythmic closure or by peculiarly inflected melodic gestures, uncanny and off-beat. Such ironic exposures and juxtapositions and such exploratory and often playful open-endedness in late Beethoven refuse any taming of the above noted “catastrophe;” they refuse any faith (in Adorno’s view, any ontological, Heideggerian faith) in the taming of the catastrophe by means of a subjectivity resuscitating the Romantic symbol or the idea of “organic” beauty.

The sense of being witness to apocalypse is especially apparent in the Grosse Fugue, opus 133, the first-written finale to the great, continually exploratory opus 130 string quartet. The ferocity of its fugal theme and of much of its subsidiary material insists simultaneously on fracture and control, violence and ordering form. A similar effect is achieved by the fugue ending the Hammerklavier sonata, opus 106. There is the constant insinuation of fragmented phrases taken up and repeated and repeated, for example, the implacable unfolding of sixths beginning in measure 97, or the especially puncturing trills repeatedly suffusing the sonata’s sound, starting for instance at measure 119. These fragmenting motifs are joltingly integrated into the unfolding fugal form. There is a sort of double violence in such passages, that violence intrinsic to the fragments themselves, which are ferocious in themselves, and the violence of their insistent repetitions, as part of the relentless working out of the ordering fugue.

Again, much of what I’m trying to describe is related to Beethoven’s prefiguring of an idea of modern form – what Benjamin and, then, Adorno called “allegory” (in Kafka and earlier, for Benjamin, in the seventeenth-century German tragic drama). This form represents the break with Romantic organicism (in which form is invested with the sense of passionate inevitability, with subjective will). That “break” establishes a move toward abstraction and the conflict that embodies between objective technique and eruptive expression. In the dynamic operating in abstract form (whether in Picasso’s Cubism or in Beethoven’s Great Fugue), there are fracture points, the cracks and fissures built into the objective form (indeed, into fate itself), which are sites of the abrupt breakthrough of subjectivity. The double violence I mentioned operating in this break or conflict is at work in modernist form: First, there is the inevitable violence of the eruptions from the primal well of feeling, a violence which no form can suppress completely. Second, there is the violence which results from the imposition itself of objective, controlling form. (I’m reminded of Freud’s late notions [1] of the destructiveness associated with Thanatos – the death instinct arising from the depths of the psyche – and [2] of the second destructiveness wrought by the conscience – by the super-ego – in strictly suppressing rather than sublimating the destructive impulse. Forgive this last comment; I just finished teaching a peculiar but intriguing course on Freud and Conrad, born in 1856 and 1857 respectively, each so different from the other and yet both darkly tragic-minded in many respects).

I’ll offer further commentary on Beethoven in my next post, on the objective forms (I almost wanted to write “juxtapositions”) and the subjective intensities which coexist strangely in his late works, and I’ll start with the Cavatina movement in the opus 130 string quartet and the return of the Arioso’s Adagio ma non troppo in the last, fugal movement of the opus 110 piano sonata.

Notes on the Modern period - 7 - on Freud

Reading through these notes, I realize they are very rough drafts needing later revision, for there are many typos, inadvertent mistakes, and awkwardnesses in the wording and ordering of sentences, for all of which I apologize. My basic feeling has been that it’s best for me to get these drafts out, rather than waiting for the ideal circumstances in which to refine and revise; otherwise, I might never attempt to work out some of these formulations, incomplete as they are.

Freud wrote a series of short books after World War I, in the two decades before he died in 1939, and they respond to the pervasive sense of disillusionment and the reality of death resulting at least partly from the Great War and from the possibility of the coming cataclysm, from 1939 to 1945. In “The Ego and the Id,” “Civilization and Its Discontents,” and other works, he explores how civilization struggles to control the irrational passions which can erupt in society and particularly in war, i.e., the mad destructiveness of the “death instinct.” In this period, Freud lifts the veil covering the irrational and unconscious forces at work in the human community, just as he had lifted that veil with regard to the individual psyche in his earlier work, for example “The Interpretation of Dreams” and the “Dora” case in 1900. His work is in this way related to that of Marx and Nietzsche, for all three attempt to reveal “the real conditions” of our lives and the forces which shape and deform our “relations” to each other – socio-economic forces for Marx, “the will to power” for Nietzsche, and the irrational instinctual drives for Freud.

Studying Freud in my teens, I was grateful for his understanding of the instincts and for the language he offered to portray the irrational as part of human experience. When I read “The Ego and the Id” I marveled at his inclusion of the death instinct in the gamut of instinctual drives, for his recognition helped me clarify the sense more and more apparent to me in these years, from 1959 to 1962, that the instinct to destroy could threaten to well up in our lives as self-destructive rage, let alone in our society as the menace of nuclear weapons. And I was drawn to Freud’s conception of the ego’s capacity to transform those instinctual forces, to sublimate them into a livable and affirmative life, into something potentially “sublime.” The neurotic deformations or “complexes” of feeling – mirroring the mythic patterns of Oedipus, Electra, etc. – were illuminating for me, as was the notion of therapeutic intervention through the manipulation of a person’s transference of his primal feelings onto an objective person, the therapist who would help to bring the transference to the patient’s awareness and thus potentially to heal the wounds.

By the time I entered college, I hoped to become a psychiatrist, and in my freshman year, I enrolled in pre-med and psychology courses. I also found that there was a course on psychotherapy listed in the catalogue. Without hesitation, I went to the first evening meeting, stood outside the door of the classroom, and waylaid the professor; he talked to me for five minutes and permitted me to join the graduate class as an auditor. There were only two students enrolled, both interning at local hospitals, and the psychoanalyst initiated our little group into the mysteries of how to treat schizophrenics, manic-depressives, alcoholics, and other sufferers from maladies of the mind. Needless to say, I no longer wanted to be a psychiatrist after my freshman year; part of my disillusion derived from what I came to feel was the Draconian or at least all-too-confident application of Freud’s ideas, a reductive tendency in practice which of course could also beset Freudian interpretation generally. Recognizing how simplistic the use of Freud can be does not diminish, however, his significance in the modern period.

As I wrote in my previous post, some of the primary characteristics of modern thought – promoting radical change, assuming destabilization, and proposing an alternative order – are evident in Freud’s thinking, with its assignment of rational power to the ego, its recognition of the unconscious irrational flux of the id, and its analysis of a three-part mechanism operating in our minds, comprised of the ego as reason, the id as the erotic drive, and the super-ego as the death instinct or “thanatos.” He constructs his scientific theory of the mind by conceptualizing those “forces” as abstract and somewhat mechanistic psychological structures, and it is clear that Freud’s abstractions are means to achieve control and detachment in the face of the turbulence, threat, and compulsion of the irrational in human life. He developed his theories first amid the suffocating repressions and hypocrisies of fin-de-siècle Vienna and then in the wake of the murderous First World War. His theories about the neurotic complexes are in some respects attempts to cope with the sense of the immanent death of “the self” in the period, and his understandably desperate struggle to develop modes of healing and reassembling his patients’ identities find expression in certain controversial conceptions of child abuse, female sexuality, and other matters. Nevertheless, he brings a remarkable moral impetus to his conception of psychology as an objective science and to his affirmation of the self’s capacity to confront the forces of the id, the super-ego, and hostile external reality. The Ego and the Id, Civilization and Its Discontents/Standard Edition

The modernist dynamic – the use of critical self-consciousness as a means both to lift the veil obscuring modern reality and to confront the revealed forces – is at work in Freud’s thought as it is in Marx’s and Nietzsche’s. In my next post, I hope to explore some other examples of that ‘dynamic’ at work in the modern period.