LITMIR.BIZ

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extreme terms, one either changes or dies, possibly both. The logic of the Biblical call to die to be reborn can be ruthless.«13

      Eigen raises the question of whether the strain of the encounter with mystery, as he calls it, can be sustained, whether we will survive it. The same question arises with the aesthetic encounter. It exposes us to the infinite and the abyss. Can we bear it?

      Exposure to the infinite threatens to destroy the mind with its limited powers of coherence and control. The work of art can arouse emotions of such overpowering intensity that we feel brought to the brink of madness. The abyss and the most primal are close. Shakespeare’s King Lear is a case in point. Not only does the old King Lear go mad in the course of the play, but in the final scenes of the play, confronted with Cordelia’s death, Lear is so undone by overwhelming grief that he can only howl. If he had words, he says, he would »use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack«14 – in other words, so that the abyss he is exposed to would be laid bare.

      The threat of madness also takes the form of feeling invaded by the forces the work of art stirs up. Earlier I compared the work of art to a Venus fly trap. We can also compare it to a Trojan Horse: something that presents itself as a gift unleashes a swarm of conquerors. As we all know, the approach of madness is often experienced as an infestation of bugs or worms. Adorno points out that the tendency of modern artworks to be composed of multiple small pieces that are not readily grasped as a unity is disturbing in precisely this way. He uses the word Gewürm, a multiplicity of creeping things.15 This is what is evoked in the disturbed mind of the listener, he says – masses of creeping, crawling things, maggots swarming in carrion. The old mutilated mind is prey to the fear that it itself has become the carcass.

      The Brink and the Enigma, Truth and Constellation

      If the aesthetic encounter brings with it violence, terror and suspicion, surely the question arises, How does this terrifying violence and suspicious seductiveness differ from the ordinary violence and deception that pervade the totally administered society, sometimes in naked form and sometimes clothed in the garb of »fun«? Put in a different way, what makes the aesthetic encounter worth the risk?

      Certainly the shock and terror of the »aesthetic arrest« are a far cry from the pleasure and enjoyment promised by the culture industry. But the violence of the work’s impact is accompanied by a promesse de bonheur, a promise of a different kind of happiness. That happiness is intimately connected with truth. If, as Adorno says, the more works of art are understood, the less they are enjoyed, it is because what opens up to and overpowers the beholder is their truth.16 Truth flashes out as the abyss opens before us. Or as Charles Williams says, writing about the figure of Beatrice in Dante, beauty »arrests« us because it presents a glimmer of truth, something that is far beyond our grasp, but nevertheless awakens, as he puts it, a »noble awe« and a »noble curiosity«17. In other words, the shock that shakes the subject to his foundations is the shock of an intimation of truth that both exposes horror and points to freedom from it.

      But though the glimpse promises truth, the artwork does not fulfill this promise. The truth is never fully conveyed to us. The work hints, but it does not speak clearly. If in some sense the scales of mutilation are ripped from our eyes, still we are left, so to speak, on the brink. Adorno refers to this essential characteristic of the artwork as the enigma. »Enigmaticness,« he writes, »peers out of every artwork with a different face but as if the answer that it requires – like that of the sphinx – were always the same, although only by way of the diversity, not the unity that the enigma, though perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether the promise is a deception – that is the enigma.«18

      The enigmatic quality of art is related to the way it brings the subject to the brink of the abyss and gives him a glimpse into it. The truth that inheres in the artwork is a truth intimately related to the subject himself. To echo Michael Eigen writing about Flannery O’Connor, the mystery it seems to convey seems at the same time to arise inevitably from our very nature and what we have become. Standing at the brink and looking down into the abyss, we are aware that the sword of grace, in Eigen’s phrase, hangs over our heads. The experience is shot through with infinitude. We realize that we will not escape. The question is, will we survive, and in what form? It is those very questions that the artwork will not answer. We are left in the arena of aesthetic experience with that uncertainty.

      For Adorno, it is the brokenness of the work of art, its inherent fragmentary quality, that signals the presence of the enigma and the abyss it points to. Despite all resolutions, all happy or tragic endings, Adorno says, every artwork breaks off. It is fragmentary. Modern works point up the fragmentary quality with their discontinuities and ruptures. Such works, Adorno says, are organized paratactically. What this means is that the work is a set of fragments arranged in and around a space – the same space that becomes the arena of aesthetic experience in which subject and object are merged. The abyss is at the center of the work, and the work’s fragmentary quality points to it.

      Freud notes something similar in his book on the interpretation of dreams. Every dream, he says, has a point where it is unplumbable, a tangle of dream thoughts that cannot be unraveled. This is the dream’s navel, the point where its origin meets the infinitude of the unknown which is the ground from which it emerges.19 For Adorno too, Erschütterung includes a terror that extends to the depths of the primeval fear of the dark or the unutterable grief into which Lear is plunged. But for him the abyss is not only the darkness of the archaic or the unconscious but also the infinitude of the heavens, the realm of Geist or spirit, a realm that is terrifying in its own right.

      Adorno often uses the image of a constellation to convey the enigmaticness of the artwork, the way it hints but does not speak directly. In these terms, the work of art consists of a grouping of stars, points of meaningfulness, arranged around something that is invisible but that the particular grouping points to. Adorno describes such a grouping when he writes of his attempts to organize his book Aesthetic Theory. He found, he says, that the book had to be written in »equally weighted, paratactical parts that are arranged around a midpoint that they express through their constellation […]. Their constellation, not their succession, must yield the idea«20.

      The constellation is not meaning itself; it is a figure of meaning. There is no constellation without the space in which it appears, the void of heaven’s cracked vault, to echo Lear. Each star in the constellation is in fact only a fragment of a whole that cannot be fully grasped, since it includes the void. Further, for Adorno, it is not simply that the full meaning cannot be grasped and veers off into the infinite the way for Freud dreams point down into the impenetrable underworld. The fragments themselves, scintillating though they may be, bear the marks of violence. They are broken off. Blank spaces forcibly intervene to interrupt their continuity with one another.

      Tour de force

      The artwork is fragmentary and broken because it has tried to incorporate into itself the violence done to the subject; but it is also fragmentary and broken because it, like the subject, is finite and cannot be pure spirit. A force or forces beyond the grasp of the work breaks it apart, leaving it in fragments. Conversely, the artwork attempting to encompass truth within itself becomes a tour de force. In this sense every artwork, Adorno says, is a tour de force. This does not mean that it requires expertise and displays its virtuosity to an impressed public. Rather, this means that immense force is required even to achieve the work’s broken and fragmentary enigmaticness. It is as though the artwork reaches toward the abyss in its attempts to bind something into its constellation, but as it approaches its utmost capacity it has to bear an immense strain.

      Like the subject within the arena of aesthetic experience, the work as tour de force is always in danger of being overwhelmed. After listening to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, a friend said to me, weeping, »I’m not sure I can survive this.« If my friend was worried about whether he would survive the excruciating beauty of the Hammerklavier sonata, conversely the pianist Arthur Schnabel commented that the idea of the Hammerklavier went beyond anything Beethoven could actually write. The composed piece, in other words, is incommensurable with its own idea. »The experience of art as that of its truth or untruth«, Adorno writes, »is more than subjective experience: it is the irruption of objectivity

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