POETICS OF THE ELEMENTS IN THE HUMAN CONDITION:

THE SEA

AN ALECT A HUSSERLIAN A

THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME XIX

Editor-in-Chief

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Belmont, Massachusetts

POETICS OF THE ELEMENTS IN THE HUMAN CONDITION:

THE SEA

From Elemental Stirrings to Symbolic Inspiration, Language, and Life-Significance in Literary

Interpretation and Theory

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

D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY

A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP

DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER

ISBN 978-94-015-3962-3 ISBN 978-94-015-3960-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-3960-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Main entry under title:

Poetics of the elements in the human condition.

(Analecta Husserliana ; v. 19) Inlcudes index. I. Sea in literature-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Tymieniecka,

Anna-Teresa. II. World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning. III. Series. B3279.H94A129 vol. 19 142'.7 s [809'.9336) 85-18278 [PN56.S4)

Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.

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All Rights Reserved © 1985 by D. Reidel Publishing Company

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1985

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including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner

Dedicated to

Professor Manuel L. Hernandez-Avila, Director of the Sea Grant Project at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, whose inspiring love of the sea sustained the spirit of our work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Theme: Poetics of the "Elements" in the Human Condition xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv

INAUGURAL STUDY

ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / The Aesthetics of Nature in the Human Condition 3

PART I

THE POETICS OF THE SEA AS AN ELEMENT IN

THE HUMAN CONDITION: LITERARY INTERPRETATION

A. RESOUNDINGS OF THE SEA IN THE ELEMENTAL TWILIGHT

OF THE HUMAN SOUL

L. M. FINDLAY / Death or Life of the Spirit: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Thalassian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century 23

BEVERL Y SCHLACK RANDLES / The Waves of Life in Virginia WooIrs The Waves 45

VICTOR CARRABINO / On the Shores of Nothingness: Beckett's Embers 57

SHERL YN ABDOO / Ego Formation and the Land/Sea Metaphor in Conrad's Secret Sharer 67

MEENA ALEXANDER / Wordsworth: The Sea and Its Double 77 NESTOR EDUARDO TESON / EI mistico significado del mar (en el

lenguaje poetico) 85

B. MAN'S ELEMENTAL RESPONSE TO THE VITAL CHALLENGE

AT THE CROSS SECTION OF ANCIENT CULTURES

HORST WOLFRAM HUBER / Between Land and Sea: The End of the Southern Sung 101

viii T ABLE OF CONTENTS

VEDA COBB-STEVENS / Hesiodic Fable and Weather Lore: Text and Context in Figurative Discourse 129

GILA RAMRAS-RAUCH / The Response of Biblical Man to the Challenge of the Sea 139

VALDO H. VIGLIELMO / The Sea as Metaphor: An Aspect of the Modern Japanese Novel 149

C. THE POETIC INSPIRATION OF THE SEA IN

LlTERAR Y EXPERIENCE

CARMEN BALZER / The Poetic and Elemental Language of the Sea 171

HANS H. RUDNICK / The Sea as Medium for Artistic Experience 191 EDGARDO ALBIZU / Las dimensiones poeticas del mar y la idea

del tiempo 203 LOIS OPPENHEIM / The Oneiric Valorization of the Sea: Instances

of Poetic Sensibility and the "Non-Savoir" 213 JERRY L. McGUIRE / Figuring the Elements: Trope and Image in

Shakespeare 227

D. THE WATERY MIRROR OF THE ELEMENTAL

MARLIES KRONEGGER / Mirror Reflections: The Poetics of Water in French Baroque Poetry 245

CECILE CLOUTIER-WOJCIECHOWSKA I The St. Lawrence in the Poetry of Gatien Lapointe 261

PART II

THE ELEMENTAL THREAD IN THE TWILIGHT OF

CONSCIOUSNESS

The Ciphering of Life-Significance in the Poiesis of Art -From Interpretation to Theory

A. ON THE BRINK

ELDON N. V AN LlERE / On the Brink: The Artist and the Sea 269 ALPHONSO LlNGIS / The Rapture of the Deep 287

TABLE OF CONTENTS ix

HEATHER ASALS / The Voices of Silence and Underwater Ex-perience 299

YOU-ZHENG LI / A Contrast Between the Sea and the Moun-tain: A Comparative Study of Occidental and Chinese Poetic Symbolism 309

B. THE SHORELINES: ELEMENTAL MOVES IN THE TWILIGHT

OF CONSCIOUSNESS

SIDNEY FESHBACH / Literal/Littoral/Littorananima: The Figure on the Shore in the Works of James Joyce 325

GA YLE L. ORMISTON / Already Not-Yet: Shoreline Fiction Metaphase 343

CHRISTOPH EYKMAN / Thalassic Regression: The Cipher of the Ocean in Gottfried Benn's Poetry 353

RICHARD COBB-STEVENS / Derrida and Husser! on the Status of Retention 367

E. T. GENDLIN / Nonlogical Moves and Nature Metaphors 383

C. POETIC DISCOURSE: "REALITY" AND THE RETRIEVAL

OF LIFE-SIGNIFICANCE

YNHUI PARK / The Reading as Emotional Response: The Case of a Haiku 403

HORST RUTHROF / Literature and the Ladder of Discourse 413 WOLFGANG WITTKOWSKI / The Sea in Faust arid Goethe's

Verdict on His Hero 433

PART III

CREA TIVE ORCHESTRATION IN THE POIESIS OF

LIFE AND IN FICTION

MARLIES KRONEGGER / Preamble 449 EUGENE F. KAELIN / What Makes Philosophical Literature

Philosophical? 451 RICHARD T. PETERSON / Kaelin on Philosophical Literature 469

x TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAUL B. ARMSTRONG / The Hermeneutics of Literary Impres-sionism: Interpretation and Reality in James, Conrad, and Ford 477

A. C. GOODSON / Hermeneutics and History: A Response to Paul Armstrong 501

INDEX OF NAMES 505

THE THEME

POETICS OF THE "ELEMENTS" IN THE

HUMAN CONDITION

As a consequence of the extreme intellectual refinement of our analytic powers, which have come to dominate understanding and criticism, the authentic significance of literature and fine arts has been diffused into in­numerable interpretative methods and ultimately lost from sight. Its essential message of relevance for human life is either disintegrated into artificial distinctions or distorted by the intellect's destructurizing and inadequately reshaping manipulations. It is an irreplacable loss; man's creative endeavor brings in the significant guideposts for the specifically human business with life: Man's self-interpretation in existence.

Where do we have to turn in order to retrieve it? Where shall we find the pristine inspiration proposed to us by the work of art?

In our approach to literature through its dialogue with philosophy it has been argued that we may recapture the life-significance of literature by retracing step by step the creative itinerary along which the message of art has been taking shape prompted by the interplay of the forces of life with the virtualities of the Human Condition. The "creative forge," in which these virtualities work and which brings forth a work of art as the crowning point of all human endeavors, is the locus where we attempt to penetrate as a means to unraveling its progress. l

At the preceding step of our collective investigations we have pursued the three main lines of life-significance which the literary creativity establishes: tragic, epic, poetic. We have proposed them as the "existential coordinates of the Human Condition" with respect to which the poetic/aesthetic significance inspired by Imaginatio Creatrix is infused into human life. 2

Yet further questions emerge. Could the lmaginatio Creatrix bring its novel and original inspirations into human existence without being operative at the primogenital phase of the human self-individualizing progress in which the forces of life and the human genius diversify and commune? To what urgencies of life is the imaginative creativity of man a response? In what forms do these urgencies confront the human being with respect to the Human Condition? How do the Human Condition, on the one hand, and the human genius, on the other hand, reveal themselves in the interplay of life­forces?

xi

xii THE THEME

The conception of the "Elements" is proposed in the present collection of studies as the key to these questions. It is suggested that the Human Condition unfolds its virtualities precisely from the encounter of the elemen­tary forces of life with lmaginatio Creatrix. Imaginatio Creatrix, as the principal virtuality of the Human Condition, inspires and directs the con­structiveness of this encounter. As I unfold it in my own study, the brute forces of life take on in this encounter the significance of "Elements" or of primogenital factors mediating between the challenges of "external" cosmic powers and the "interiority" of the "twilight of human consciousness." Unlike the mute and numb vital energies, which do not reach the virtualities of the Human Condition, the Elements confront the experiential faculties of the human being and prompt him/her to raise basic questions concerning his/her survival, questions which Imaginatio Creatrix is alone capable of handling.3

I submit that the Elements challenging the creative imagination, in their encounter with it, establish the "poetic" sphere in the twilight of the human soul. In response to their pressures, imagination endows the mute "natural" stirrings of the psyche with the lyrical voice: for these resoundings of the vital forces of Nature within the poiesis of the human significance of life, the literary genius invents the ciphers.

The above explanation indicates that only a remote association can be made between the present notion of "Elements," understood as complexes of vital forces of Nature operating within the Human Condition, and the historical tradition that originates with Pre-Socratic philosophy, in which by "elements" were meant the metaphysico-physicalistic principles of the composition of objective reality. Nevertheless, our conception has to be explored further. With the progress of its understanding, exploration of the Human Condition will advance.

In the present volume we have approached one of the major Elements: the Sea. Through the multiple ways in which the sea appears in the poetic imagination, a thread may be followed. It combines the knots of great imaginary contrapositions between the sea-element and human existence; the human sense of life flows through the waves of life which stretch between life and death. The human being, existing "on the brink" between the incom­mensurable stillness of the sea space and the all-absorbing involvement in the life of the shore, releases from the neutrality of the natural stirrings the elemental poetic sound of the "human Voice". Within the encounter between the challenging Element of the sea and creative imagination, on the "brink" of exchange between "natural" forces and the promptings of the

THE THEME xiii

Human Condition, the human being constructs new avenues of life, the elemental stirrings of this voice surge on the "shoreline" between the elemen­tary stillness of the neutral sea and the demands which the poiesis of the human life poses. They are ciphered into the material of human discourse.

Let the book now speak for itself.

A-T. T.

NOTES

1 Cf. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 'Poetica Nova,' Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XII, 1982. 2 Cf. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 'Theme: The Poetic, Epic, and Tragic Genres as the Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition', Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XVIII, 1984. 3 Infra p. 5.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Warmest thanks are due to Professor Maria Teresa Bertelloni of the Recinto Universitario de Mayaguez, University of Puerto Rico, and to Professor Marcellino de Cisneros for having introduced us to their colleagues at Mayaguez and for their enthusiastic collaboration at our First International Phenomenology and Literature Conference (the 8th Annual Conference of the International Society for Phenomenology and Literature) which, sponsored by the Sea Grant Project of the above mentioned institution, took place 20-24 March 1983. At this conference we initiated the great theme of the present volume. This volume is completed by the research studies which were read at the subsequent congress of the ISPL, continuing this most fruitful approach to literature, of 5-7 April 1984, in Cambridge, Mass.

The part on literary theory has been enriched by the studies presented at a symposium on the 'Poetic Language,' held on 5 May 1983 at our Boston Forum for the Interdisciplinary Phenomenology of Man, as well as by studies read at the symposium held by our collaborators at the Michigan State University, the Department of Romance and Classic Languages, in East Lansing, 7 and 8 February 1982 which has been organised by Professor Marlies Kronegger on the theme: 'The Creative Orchestration of Human Existence and of Art.'

Professor Marlies Kronegger deserves our warmest thanks for her expert and dedicated collaboration.

The gracious hospitality of Mr and Mrs Richard Rosenfeld of Brookline, Mass., will not be forgotten.

What we owe to the Sea Grant Project at Mayaguez is best expressed in the dedication of the present volume.

A-T. T

xv