Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears Read online

  Dostoyevsky

  Reads Hegel

  in Siberia and

  Bursts into Tears

  Dostoyevsky

  Reads Hegel

  in Siberia and

  Bursts into Tears

  LÁSZLÓ F. FÖLDÉNYI

  TRANSLATED FROM THE HUNGARIAN

  BY OTTILIE MULZET

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2020 by Ottilie Mulzet.

  © Földényi F. László.

  English-language edition published by arrangement with Eulama International Literary Agency.

  Earlier versions of these essays were originally published in Hungarian.

  For details, see the credits page.

  The credits page constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

  All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019947285

  ISBN 978-0-300-16749-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Mass and Spirit

  Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears

  The Globe-shaped Tower: The Tower of Babel at the Turn of the Millennium

  Belief in the Devil

  Happiness and Melancholy

  “For All but Fools Know Fear Sometimes”: Fear and Freedom

  The Shadow of the Whole: The Romantic Fragment

  “Only That Which Never Ceases to Hurt Stays in the Memory”: Variations on the Human Body, Subjugated by Fantasies of Power

  Sleep and the Dream

  A Natural Scientist in Reverse

  Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies

  The Fatal Theater of Antonin Artaud

  A Capacity for Amazement: Canetti’s Crowds and Power Fifty Years Later

  Notes

  Credits

  PREFACE

  “There are more mysteries contained in the shadow of a person who walks in the sunlight than in all the religions of mankind, past, present, and future,” wrote Giorgio de Chirico, sometime shortly after 1910. In his works of that period, which he termed “metaphysical paintings,” he grants a prominent role to the shadows cast by the monuments and the campanili on the piazzas, by the people and the columns of the arcades. And yet everything in these pictures swims in blinding sunlight; the light illuminating the spaces of these piazzas is as sharp and penetrating as the light in an operating room, where it is a question of life and death. But it is the shadows that are the main actors in de Chirico’s paintings. And no matter how paradoxical it may seem, these shadows also cast their darkness on the light above. Because it is in vain that light creates the impression that it will last forever, that nothing can ever extinguish it—in these images, obscurity, darkness, the shadows have succeeded in rebelling against it. Even so, they have not succeeded in eliminating light; they could not liquidate it—instead, the shadows have become its equal, emancipated.

  The belief in the omnipotence of reason that illuminates all phenomena—similar to the sun—is the great inheritance of the Enlightenment. Thinking, of course, ever since humans have existed, has always tried to disperse the darkness. Earlier individuals did not cherish the illusion that here on earth they would be able to liquidate every shadow and every darkness. During the Enlightenment, however, the conviction that only time and intellectual preparation were required in order to eventually cast light upon all things—with no dark corners remaining anywhere unilluminated by the light of reason—became ever more resolute. Nothing less was at stake than capturing the positions previously occupied by God. In the history of human cultures until that point, only God (or the gods) had the right to absolute autonomy. Humans could only compete for this right when they themselves had begun to consider themselves gods—or, at the very least, had begun to entertain the thought that their own power was divine (that is to say, unbounded). As a result of the process of secularization of the modern age, nondivine beings (humans) began to act as gods, believing themselves, in their restricted existence, omnipotent, believing that they would never have to confront the fragile condition of their seemingly absolute power.

  As with all great thoughts and aspirations, this too had its own shadow. William Blake had already written in 1791: “God, so long worshipp’d, departs as a lamp / Without oil.” Ever since the Romantic period, because of God’s absence an ever strengthening disquietude has predominated, not only in individuals but in the entirety of Western civilization. Those who sense this disquietude justifiably pose the question: What is the point of oil if there is no longer a lamp into which it can be poured? What remains to fill the place of God when God has been exiled, and history and progress have also proved undeserving of trust? How shall we practice freedom if there is no longer a transcendental shelter in the heavens above us? And if we no longer trust in a being whose blinding light can illuminate even the darkest corners, then how shall we deal with the darkness and its many shadows which have loomed continuously, ever since the Enlightenment, over our civilization? From the age of Romanticism on, if someone were to observe the vulnerability of obstinate trust in reason and historical progress, an observation exposing history as a mere construction, a mechanism of self-defensive blinding (and the protagonists of the following essays, including Dostoyevsky, Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, Antonin Artaud, Nietzsche, and Canetti, among others, did make this observation), then at the same time the increase of that shadow could be observed; the same shadow in which de Chirico glimpsed that mystery which is a priori connected to existence itself.

  When God, at the beginning of creation, created light, after the heaven and the earth, the darkness was born alongside it. It is true that Moses claims a previous existence for this when he says, “Darkness was upon the face of the deep.” But this was not what we call the darkness of humans. Darkness, to exist, requires light. And vice versa. Neither can be imagined without the other. Illumination existing without darkness is not a part of the human world, just as darkness without illumination is not. Moreover, the two cannot truly be differentiated from each other. “If there were only darkness, all would be clear.” This statement was made not by Moses but by Samuel Beckett, according to whom, because of the existence of this duality of darkness and light, nothing in human existence is clear, but all remains obscure, “inexplicable.”

  The following essays circle around this duality. More precisely they examine the experience of inscrutability to be found in the depths of all cultural phenomena. They deal with aspects of our culture which have been pushed into the background, or have remained unobserved by us, suppressed and concealed, or exiled to the very depths of consciousness. Often they have been considered dark, although certain German Romantics designated them Nachtseite, “the side of night, of darkness.” And yet this discussion is not really about darkness and the night, but rather about that mysteriousness of which de Chirico and Beckett both spoke. This mystery is not far away from us, residing at some unknown distance. On the contrary, it is here, in our immediate proximity. It makes itself felt in the most ordinary daily phenomena, as there is no situation in our lives which does not contain this latency, this possibility of genuine mystery. We do not necessarily have to think of the great enigmas of birth or death; from day to day, we live among mysteries. And they occur precisely when we are most likely barely to notice them. If you love someone, the world becomes a great enigma to you. If your love is consummated, everything becomes even more enigmatic. And if you suffer disappointment in your love, then a true mystery commences, as when, in the ancient mythologies, the death of the god is repeated in a contemporary setting. What happens when I concentrate on the work of art or listen to music during a recital, or if I observe another human being, trying to grasp the essence of that person’s face, or if I begin to wonder at something, if I am sunk in contemplation of the veins on a leaf, or if I simply forget myself? Or, for that matter, if I become immeasurably bored? At such times I am overpowered by the feeling that there is something incomparably greater than my own self. And without realizing it, I step out of my own self. I cross my own boundaries, and at the same time something begins to become clear. And yet this is not the light of reason, strictly segregated from darkness, but the light of a much deeper clarity. Carson McCullers called it illumination, a moment of
epiphany that comes to us “in a flash, as a religious phenomenon.”

  Indeed, these religious phenomena are experienced in countless situations in their lives by those who are otherwise not religious and not believers. There are mysteries which even those who are religious are not able to reach, wrote de Chirico in relation to shadows. The essays contained in this volume explore phenomena which perhaps could best be termed atheistic religiosities. What does this mean? It means that even if someone is not a believer in God, every human being undergoes certain recurrent experiences during which human life is revealed as deeply embedded in a series of profound coherencies pointing well beyond the manufactured structures (social, political and economic); these states, therefore, can reliably be designated metaphysical.

  Historically, the disposition of God from his throne began during the Enlightenment. Humans tried to base their foundation upon their own self, seeking no further external reference points. But the Enlightenment—while bidding farewell to traditional metaphysics—nonetheless preserved its own belief in a final Rationality, to be achieved in an unknown future, in which everyone would take part. This belief, as demonstrated by the Culte de la Raison introduced in Paris in the last decade of the eighteenth century, was the equivalent of a new faith. When André Breton and Marcel Duchamp organized the large exhibit they called Le Surréalisme en 1947, Georges Bataille wrote the text for the catalogue, “The Absence of Myth.” In this piece he writes, “The decisive absence of faith is resolute faith.” This thought practically rhymed with the idea, expressed in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (published a couple of years earlier), that the Enlightenment, while claiming to expose everything as a myth, itself towered over everything as a colossal unavoidable myth.

  Enlightenment, while depriving the world of its so-called metaphysical dimensions, applied newer metaphysical categories to it—and this was due to the simple reason that we cannot exist without metaphysics. Even in a secularized age, a sense for metaphysics can be maintained and nurtured: this is the sense for the uniqueness of our life, for the exceptionality of our existence within this universe, for the great wonder of the incomparability and unrepeatability of each moment of every one of our lives. Each human life emerges thanks to a fracture, a break—it plunges from nonexistence into existence—and traversing the same fracture and break, it is thrown back again: from existence it falls back into something that, for want of a better term, we are compelled to call nonexistence. These two unknowns—preceding and following existence—form the roots of susceptibility to metaphysics. It is not necessary to be a philosopher; this susceptibility resides in everyone; in certain situations it flares up, becoming an experience that sweeps everything else away. If for no other reason, then, it is because of the consciousness of our own mortality that we are doomed from birth to this homesickness for the metaphysical. As Vladimir Nabokov writes in the first sentence of in his memoir Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

  Light and darkness. Hegel and Dostoyevsky. Reason and the monsters. Happiness and melancholy. Faust and Mephistopheles. Lord Chesterfield and the Demon of Frankenstein. The Whole and the Fragment. The essays in this volume were written along the lines of these and other similar dichotomies. I did this not so that one side would necessarily defeat the other, but rather so that an argument for a multiplicity could be made: namely—while not disputing the intentions of reason, and its attempts to elucidate all—to draw attention to the importance of the opening to metaphysics.

  Dostoyevsky

  Reads Hegel

  in Siberia and

  Bursts into Tears

  MASS AND SPIRIT

  In memory of Elias Canetti on the ninetieth anniversary of his birth

  In Venice, in an of the out-of-the-way corner of the Piazzetta located at the corner of the basilica of Saint Mark, there is a statuary group depicting the Four Tetrarchs. Carved out of the hardest granite, the sculpture, dating from the beginning of the fourth century, depicts Diocletian with three of his chosen co-sovereigns. They huddle together as if ready to brave the incipient end of the world. But we cannot exclude the possibility that they might be looking at us—we who are still living—from beyond the end of the world. It is as if they had been frozen into stone from the gaze of an invisible Medusa. If a living person happened to look at them, he or she would be drawn into a kind of unknown circuitry, and from that single gaze would become numb. For the viewer will have gazed upon the forms of human beings who are in possession of the secret of that which is inhuman.

  What strikes one the most are the similarities among the four figures. Slightly smaller than human scale, they mutually embrace one another, their bodies clinging together, and they create the impression of being Siamese quadruplets emerged from a single ovum. Each draws our gaze; nonetheless, they are so uniform that no matter which one we begin to look at, we see the others as well. It does not matter with what small detail we commence our examination, we always perceive, involuntarily, the whole of the sculpture. Their shoes and their garments are uniform, their swords, crowns, and belts are uniform, the fabric on them is draped in a similar fashion, their foreheads are wrinkled in a similar manner, their gazes are uniformly careworn. There are four of them, and yet they appear to be one single living being. As if they were one body, grasping at each other, they melt into one another; they lose themselves within each other. And yet in no way are they destroyed; they simply continue being identical to their own selves. This is the secret of the strength that radiates from within them: the Four Tetrarchs truly become identical with themselves in surmounting their own selves, in the sacrifice of their own individuality. Each of them is who he is only through the others.

  If we were, in imagination, to somehow tear off any one of the figures from the group of statuary, this magnetic force of their existence within each other and for each other would become dissipated. We would stand not before a figure now on his own but in front of a mere stump of a being. Not an individual, but a cripple. All the same, this imaginary amputation would not separate these four men from each other but would instead separate them from an invisible body. And with that we would be annihilating the secret of their unity. Because the statue of the Four Tetrarchs is not composed of four men—somehow brought together by circumstance—who will then at one point separate, each one following his own path. For that to be the case, each of them would have to be an individual personality, and the sculpture would resemble Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. In this case, however, we perceive no separate personalities or individuals. The secret of their metaphysical unity is carved into the stone. And this unity is not a question of determination or a decision. It is

  Beyond thy lectures, learn’d professor,

  Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope, observer keen—beyond all mathematics,

  Beyond the doctor’ surgery, anatomy—beyond the chemist with his chemistry.1

  The oppressive similarity of the figures and their close physical proximity—unimaginable to anyone today, because such proximity would be unbearable—reveal to us that this unity is something both final and fateful, namely, it is also made up of a divine (or perhaps demonic) interdependence. Even if they wanted to, these figures could not become separate from each other. This is not because the Roman Empire would fall apart (a fact of which, looking at this group of statues, we are not necessarily aware), but because order itself would become damaged.

  This order is something that goes beyond every human intention and conception; it cannot be planned: rather, it itself renders all kinds of plans possible. Just like the movement of the stars in the sky or the passage of time, it can never be susceptible to influence. This order is cosmic; to revolt against it would be as futile as revolting against the rhythms of birth and death. The utmost it offers us is the possibility of not noticing it, of stifling within ourselves the experience of this order. And if we decide to do so, we might even believe ourselves to be freer for a while. The illusion might even arise that at last we are the masters of our own self, autonomous beings with no accounts to settle with anyone or anything. Refuting cosmic order, we try to create our own—which for all intents and purposes means that we wish to impose our own will upon the world—and we are therefore obliged to match our individual strength against the strength of all the others coming forward with their own similar desires.