Response: The Far in the Near

Response: The Far in the NearAuthor(s): Karen LangSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Mar., 2007), pp. 26-34Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25067297 .

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25 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX NUMBER 1

is a certain notion of history's true "substance." So, too, in the

former case, what has come to an end, it turns out, is that

notion of its substance that prevailed in the West between the

Renaissance and Abstract Expressionism.

Hayden White is University Professor (Emeritus) of the Univer

sity of California and professor of comparative literature at Stan

ford University. He is the author of Metahistory and The

Tropics of Discourse. He currently resides in Bologna, Italy, and much prefers it to the United States in its present political condition [Department of Comparative Literature and German

Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305, hwhite@

stanford.edu].

Notes 1. Democritus junior [Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is,

with all the Kindes, Causes, Sympt?mes, Prognostickes, and Severall Cures of it. . . ., 16th ed. (1651; reprint, London: Printed for B. Blake, 13, Bell Yard,

Temple Bar, 1736), 70. Burton describes melancholy persons in a simile that seems particularly appropriate for this commentary: "they are like these double or turning pictures: stand before which, you see a fair

maid on the one side, an ape on the other, an owle: look upon them at the first sight all is well; but farther examine, you shall find them wise on the one side, and fools on the other; in some few things praisewor thy, in the rest incomparably faulty. I will say nothing of their diseases, emulations, discontents, wants, and such miseries; let Poverty plead the rest in Aristophanes Plutus."

2. Donald Preziosi, ed., introduction to The Art of Art History: A Critical An

thology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 25.

3. Michael Ann Holly, "Spirits and Ghosts in the Historiography of Art," in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective, ed. Mark Cheetham, Holly, and Keith Moxey (New York: Cambridge Univer

sity Press, 1998), 15.

Response: The Far in the Near

Karen Lang

To be modern is to know that which is not possible anymore.

?Roland Barthes, "R?quichot et son corps"1

Beholding April Gornik's Mirrored Trees, like writing about it, is to be beckoned into something akin to D. W. Winnicott's

"holding environment" (Fig. I).2 Painted on linen, in 2000, at human scale (76 by 55 inches), Mirrored Trees presents an

aesthetic experience of intimate immensity. The painting's

depicted world is opened toward me, the viewer; as I am

invited to move toward the middle of the painting, I am held,

like arms extended in embrace, by a meandering curve of

substantial, delicately traced greenery. Even the tall, some

what spindly trees enfold me between their luminous, cloud

like crowns?a relation echoed in the way that the long, slender branch on the painting's left leans out to shelter its

diminutive counterpart. At its center, Mirrored Trees offers my

gaze a lush place of rest.

In contrast to the aesthetic experience of a representation of the sublime in nature, the experience of intimate immen

sity does not commence on a note of surprise or terror that

robs the beholder of breath; it begins, instead, with a sense of

internal expansion. Gaston Bachelard characterizes intimate

immensity as "consciousness of enlargement" or internal spa

ciousness.3 For Gornik, intimate immensity refers to the way a natural or invented landscape?at once human-scale and

vast?invites us to enter into it and to breathe, to expand our

being in the aesthetic experience ofthat space.4 Perhaps this

is why the artist eschews the use of the human figure in her

landscapes. The human figure performs a necessary role in

representations of the sublime in nature: this figure not only sets the scale of the landscape, underlining, thereby, the

immensity of nature's appearance, but it also stands apart

from the scene of nature's vastness or might, demonstrating, in doing so, that the sublime, as Immanuel Kant stressed,

takes place from a position of security.5 Here, as in all

Gornik's works of art, we are drawn into the very heart of an

invented landscape, exquisitely rendered.

Held here, but where, exactly? For as much as Mirrored Trees

provides refuge at its center, it posits itself as a painted surface on which a landscape is depicted. The lilt of wind and water suggested through slight differences of stroke and

shape?a glint of white here, a loosening of form there?

remind us that natural reflection and artistic depiction are

subtle games. Mirrored Trees relies on painterly naturalism and

the genre of landscape for its effects. If these conventions

have traditionally been associated with the transformation of

the canvas into a window onto a world made "real" through the sleight of hand of illusionism, here they are pressed into the service of a world that is simultaneously "real" and

oneiric. The taut play between naturalism and invention in

Gornik's artwork lures us in like old-fashioned illusionism

and subtly reminds us that this is a painted world, a repre

sentational space separate from our own.

Even as it offers repose, Mirrored Trees solicits the move

ment of the eye. Entering the painting on the right, my gaze

is invited to course the curve of greenery or to traverse the

stepping stones furnished by the reflected shapes of the

treetops in the water. Either way, I come to that seeming still

point at the center of the painting where the outstretched,

sheltering branch mirrors, through metaphoric extension,

my own place under the trees. Yet even as that branch shel

ters, it extends, pointing my gaze beyond it, as do so many

fingers of greenery in the painting. An equipoise of rest and movement is also indicated in the overall composition. On

the one hand, the cluster of trees planted in the center of the

painting signals that a landscape has been arranged into a

view. On the other hand, the manner in which the depicted

landscape is cut off at left and right indicates a world beyond the frame. For its part, that rounded hint of a sun behind the

swath of green (or is it the crest of a hill bathed in sunlight?)



INTERVENTIONS: LANG RESPONDS 27

1 April Gornik, Mirrored Trees, 2000, oil on linen, 76 X 55 in. (artwork ? April Gornik; photograph provided by the artist)



2g ART BULLETIN MARCH 2007 VOLUME LXXXIX NUMBER 1

registers a recession of the landscape. Intimate immensity: in

the aesthetic experience of Mirrored Trees, in the timeless

moment it takes for my gaze to follow the painting's invita

tion to move through and beyond it, I am held within a

painted world, just my scale, that likewise extends beyond me and holds itself apart from me.

To be held within a "holding environment" that holds itself

apart from me, is this the melancholic art? As Michael Ann

Holly persuasively argues: yes, it is. Since the "'aesthetic mo

ment.' . . . sometimes empowers us," but so often "ails us," she

calls "our disciplinary companion: Melancholy.'' Searching out

the possible ways that melancholy figures our practices and

our field, she asks us to ponder whether there exists an

"'unconscious' of the history of art" and, if so, "What kind of

spaces, what kinds of time might it occupy?" I will suggest that the condition of the modern is the time of the "unconscious"

of the history of art. The phrase "condition of the modern"

folds within itself chronological reference (the modern) and

experience (modernity), as it signals a particular kind, or

quality, of time. The space of this so-called unconscious, I

believe, is a territory marked?in a host of ways?by the far in

the near. Since the time and space of this "unconscious"

cannot be held apart, one cannot write about the "scholarly commitment of writing art history" without addressing a ques

tion Holly poses, and which haunts her pages: "whence

comes the desire to write about these works in the first place?" Where Holly focuses on works of art "from worlds long

gone," I would like to extend her claims by arguing that for

contemporary art, too, "melancholy [comes] along in a dis

tinctly concrete way." This is not only because, as my col

league Richard Meyer asserts, contemporary art is itself his

torical,6 but also because, like objects from the past, works of

contemporary art are objects separate from me. Gornik's

artistic production demonstrates this relation in contempo

rary art of the object and viewer in a compelling and sophis ticated way.

For Roland Barthes, "to be modern is to know that which is not possible anymore."7 Rich in connotation, Barthes's phrase

registers a condition of ineluctable separation between the

subject and actual, mental, spiritual, or imagined objects? what I behold or hold in my hand is not me; the nation or the author is not me; nor is God or my lover?a condition of

disrepair that "myth today" endeavors to paper over, or at

least assuage.8 Charles Baudelaire's poetry captures the nu

ances of this modern condition. Where "Correspondances" tells of the poetic reverie inspired by experiences of inter

connection, in "Le go?t du n?ant" Baudelaire indicates that

it is the melancholy poet who contemplates the earth as an

object of reflection separate from him:

I contemplate, from on high, the globe in its round

ness,

And no longer look there for the shelter of a hut.9

Since a notion of separation folds within itself a sense of loss,

melancholy and nostalgia become linguistic and experiential markers of the modern. Set beside this, Baudelaire's and

Marcel Proust's efforts to recover what had been lost, like the

energy Franz Kafka expended in order to register this mod

ern condition, appear as inevitable responses to what the

nineteenth century had wrought.

Many artists, writers, and thinkers have claimed the sepa ration of subject and object as a condition and effect of the

modern. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise to dis

cover that the aesthetic experience begins to be codified at

the middle of the eighteenth century, a time that can argu

ably be termed the advent of the modern.10 The aesthetic

moment, akin to mythic experience, draws beholder and

object together in an imagined space of temporal suspension. This moment when "the two become one entity," as Bernard

Berenson put it, is a "fleeting instant," a moment "so brief as

to be almost timeless."11 The aesthetic moment is elusive not

simply in a temporal sense, however. While aesthetic experi ence might proffer intimations of the sublime and the beau

tiful, aesthetic judgment grants us no concept by which we

might know the objects that frighten or enchant us.

Kant, in his three Critiques, shows why philosophy involves the negotiation of near and far. In the Critique of Pure Reason

he elucidates how cognition relies on "two transcendentals,"

the standpoint of the finite and the infinite.12 According to the philosopher, the negotiation of these points of view lend truth content to our perceptions. Kant's 1790 Critique of

Judgment explains why the inquiry into aesthetic phenomena proceeds with knowledge as its imaginary focus. At the same

time, the philosopher establishes the impossibility of gaining conceptual knowledge of aesthetic phenomena. In this sense,

the aesthetic moment might be considered an occasion of the

far in the near. Where cognition relies on Kant's two tran

scendentals, in the aesthetic moment we cannot negotiate the finite and the infinite. As a result, aesthetic judgment eludes theoretical understanding: because we cannot know

the laws of aesthetic judgment, there exists no truth content

for our perceptions of aesthetic phenomena. Modern aes

thetics is "born as a nullification of transcendence"; as Gregg Horowitz tells it, so, too, is artistic modernism.13

To be sure, melancholy is not a strictly modern condition.

"For many thinkers," Holly writes, "the time elapsed between

the fourteenth century and the 'end' of modernism in the

twentieth represents the era of melancholy. . . ,"14 Taking

Petrarch (1304-1374) as an example, one could argue that

the beginning of the era of melancholy coincides with the

stirrings of a sense of history. Petrarch "discovered history" in

his promenades "through the wilderness of ruins then cover

ing most of Rome."15 At the time Petrarch rambled through

Rome, these ruins were considered "marvels [mirabilia]." The

term mirabilia, with its connotations of the divine and the

miraculous, effectively lodged the Roman ruins in an eternal

present. As Thomas Greene has proposed, Petrarch was the

first to notice that "classical antiquity was very different than

his own medieval world, and the first to consider antiquity more admirable."16 This shift in perspective required Petrarch to recognize the distance separating his world from

the past, and it was precisely this separation that enabled him

to discover a sense of history. Once the distance necessary for

history had been established, then a bridging between past and present could occur via an intellectual process of reflec

tion.

If a sense of history might be said to inaugurate the era of

melancholy, then does the "end" of modernism coincide with




its chronological end? T. J. Clark's Farewell to an Idea is a

memoir of this end, a requiem replete with all the signa tures?tones of mourning, resistance, persuasion, resigna tion?that characterize a sad good-bye to a cherished and

hopeful idea of what modernism and modernity were and

might have been.17 According to Clark, the bold and daring experiments of heroic modernism, those of Jacques-Louis

David, El Lissitzky, and John Heartfield, to name a few, are

ultimately unintelligible to us today. "The tears in the eyes of

Heartfield's new man [the larger-than-life protagonist of the

artist's 1934 photomontage] will soon be as incomprehensi ble to us as scratches on Mousterian bone," Clark writes,

because "modernism is our antiquity."18 On the Baku Palace

of the Press, which appears at the lower right of Heartfield's

montage, Clark ventures that "if it survives," then it is, meta

phorically speaking, "as overgrown and labyrinthine as Shel

ley's dream of Rome."19 The author's remark serves as a

rhetorical demonstration of the Baku Palace's pastness in a

double sense: a reminder that the palace is from the chro

nological past, and a sign that the Utopian impulse it repre

sented, the idea on which it rests, has become part of a

receded past.

Clark, in the 1970s and 1980s, could retrieve artworks from modernism's past, he could study and write about them

within a temporal space figured by the possibility of utopia, a

shared dream or idea of a future socialism that connected his

modernity with the modernity of his objects of inquiry. After the fall of the Wall, this illusion had no future. Farewell, then, to that idea, and with it, to the possibility of fully fathoming

works like Heartfield's. If Farewell to an Idea unabashedly mourns the end of a certain history of modernism, perhaps it

announces not the end of the era of melancholy so much as

melancholy without end.20

Modernity refers to more than a span of chronological or

historical time. In Futures Past, Reinhart Koselleck observes

that modernity designates a break between one chronologi cal period and another, as well as a qualitative transformation

in the sense of time itself. As a chronological marker and a

signature of experience, the concept of modernity thus

marks the difference between the character of its own time

and the time that preceded it. Moreover, since modernity

opens out onto an open-ended future, it carries within itself

its own past and present: the coinage, at the end of the

eighteenth century, of the phrase "newest time" attests to a

separating out of the newest time?the contemporary? within the time and experience of modernity.21 In 1863,

Baudelaire situated the experience of modernity along a fault

line between past and present, tradition and the new: "By

'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, and contin

gent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable."22 Even as Baudelaire's knowledge of what con

stitutes modernity is recent enough to require scare quotes, his definition makes clear that modernity entails a break

between past and present and an uncoupling from tradi

tion?precisely the features that make modernity "new."

Writing in 1986, Yve-Alain Bois would seem to find reverber ations of this uncoupling from tradition in so many "diagnoses of death: death of ideologies (Lyotard); of industrial society (Bell); of the real (Baudrillard); of authorship (Barthes); of man (Foucault); of history (Koj?ve) and, of course, of

modernism (all of us when we use the word postmodern)." This dramaturgy of the end also includes the death of ab stract painting. 'Yet what does all of this mean?" Bois asks.

"From what point of view are these affirmations of death

being proclaimed?" For Bois, there exists no "generic answer"

to these questions. While these "diagnoses of death" arise

from within a shared swath of chronological time, the "tone"

of each is different?so different, in fact, that it would be folly to subsume them within a "single paradigm of the apocalyp tic." Laying emphasis on the connotations of Jacques Derri

da's phrase "each time," Bois argues that rather than mix and

match these thinkers in a "theoretical potpourri," more to

the point would be to examine "in each instance . . . the tone

[and claims] of the apocalyptic discourse." "Each time" im

plies that shared chronological time cannot be constituted

into a paradigm. Here, then, death refers not so much to a

concept as to a failure of closure?a condition without end

from within which these "diagnoses of death" take on form.

Modernist abstract painting, for Bois, bears "the task of

mourning," the task of endlessly, each time, "working

through the end of painting."23

Writing on modernist art of the twentieth century, Horo

witz likewise conceives of the time and experience of this

modernity as one of "ceaseless rupture" and severance from

tradition. What Horowitz signifies by "failed inheritance" and its practice, sustaining loss, have deep and resounding impli cations.

While successful inheritance establishes the coherence of

a practice by locating its normativity in its relation to its

own proper past, failed inheritance, by contrast, charac

terizes practices cut adrift from possible sources of norma

tivity. If this is true, then failure to inherit cannot be an

identity-establishing feature of any historical moment whatsoever?our own, naturally enough, included.24

Horowitz's words have especial resonance for the discipline of art history, especially for the customary conception of

artistic modernism. Here, we might recall that modernism

brings in its train the idea of the avant-garde; in the story of

the avant-garde, failed inheritance is an agonistic force that

purportedly drives artistic modernism in its struggle against tradition and convention in art. It follows, then, that failed

inheritance rests within the idea of the avant-garde as an

"identity-establishing feature"?a feature that transforms fail

ure into a cause c?l?bre, the impetus for so much great art.

Horowitz implies, however, why this smooth move does not

tell the whole story. Baudelaire's "modernity" might comprise the contingent

and the immutable in equal measure. Yet by the time the

experience of modernity is established enough to lose its scare quotes, Baudelaire's balance between past and present is upset in favor of the "newest time," and with it, of the

ephemeral, the contingent, the "new" in art. Tradition, the

inheritance the past offers the present, cannot be inherited;

where normativity once located the present in relation to a

past, the present is now characterized by "practices cut adrift

from possible sources of normativity." Failure to inherit is,

then, not simply an "identity-establishing feature" of the mod

ern but its very condition. We "stand within?we are?the




discontinuity in question," Horowitz declares. Writing from

within this condition of discontinuity, Bois demonstrates why laments of the end cannot be gathered into a unifying para

digm, why modernist painting bears the task of an inescap able mourning. Horowitz continues: "It is our knowledge of

what we cannot remember that shapes our identity."25

Horowitz's words resonate with those of the melancholic

Clark, whose book is written from the point of view of a

present characterized by too far and utter a remove from

tradition and the past, or what he calls the antiquity of

modernism.

If modernist art fails to transmit the past, then art history is

also unable to transmit fully this past for the present. Art

history, after all, develops as a discipline in the wake of Kant's

Critique of Judgment. Erwin Panofsky's early theoretical essays (1915-32) convey that even "scientific," or systematic, art

history {Kunstwissenschaft) was haunted by the ultimate un

knowability of aesthetic phenomena. Panofsky sought to es

tablish the general principles that underlay the artwork; in this way, he hoped to arrest and array aesthetic phenomena

within a unified field of inquiry. At the same time, he well understood that the aesthetic nature of works of art posed

special problems for the "scientific" art historian.

Writing in 1940, Panofsky formulated the central question: "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respect able scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?"26 Whether one agrees or

not with Panofsky's characterization of the artistic process as

"irrational and subjective," a study of these early essays sug

gests the stakes for the art historian in search of systematicity. Whereas the sensuous experience of aesthetic phenomena can present merely an aggregate of individual experiences of

specific objects, it was thought that a systematic art history could furnish reasoned judgment of historical works of art,

along with a clear understanding of the system of knowledge to which these objects belonged. The struggle waged by Panofsky in his early theoretical essays makes clear, however,

that the art historian's pursuit of pure knowledge will never

yield the laws underpinning aesthetic phenomena. As a discipline, art history is a conceptual and theoretical

space figured through?perhaps even constituted through? the unknowability of its objects of inquiry. This failure to "know" our objects of study finds its analogue in the inability of current survey texts to contain the whole of the field.27

What is more, Holly reminds us that since its inception art

history writing has relied on reproductions of works of art

more often than it has on original objects. One could well say that "knowing" aesthetic objects in a scientific sense could

never be the point. If the young Panofsky sought, in the manner of an epistemologist, to discover the general princi

ples that underlay the artwork, in 1940 he outlined a crucial distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities:

"Scientia and knowledge, denoting a mental possession rather

than a mental process, can be identified with the natural

sciences; eruditio and learning, denoting a process rather than

a possession, with the humanities."28

Art history, a branch of the humanities, must accept the

fate it shares with its academic kin?the failure to mentally

possess its objects of inquiry. Nonetheless, Holly is right to

suppose that in the discipline of art history this failure to

possess lingers in a more palpable way than it might in other

fields of humanistic endeavor. The academic discipline of art

history has arisen alongside the development of psychoanal

ysis, a concurrence that Holly explores to great effect. As in

melancholia, so in art history we have "loss without a lost

object."29 On this account, too, the "end" of modernism does

not signal the end of the era of melancholy. Art history, it would appear, is shot through with melancholy.

Melancholy makes us aware of the far in the near. Holly remarks on the way old photographs "always bring melan

choly along for the ride." Taking a cue from Hans Ulrich

Gumbrecht, she mentions, as well, the way "Jules Michelet's

recounting the story of the old key to the Bastille, so dense

with stored meaning," renders the "'thematized world of the

past. . . metonymically present.'"30 These examples bring to

mind Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura. For Ben

jamin, "the word 'history' stands written on the countenance

of nature in the characters of transcience."31 Benjamin's

conceptions of the aura presuppose the destruction of the

modern idea of history evoked in this sentence of 1928. Here,

as nature holds sway, so-called history loses its integrity and its

capacity for permanent inscription. Petrarch's rambles

through Rome remind us that a separation between past and

present underlines the sense of history; similarly, the modern

idea of history rests on a supposed separation of subject and

object, a separation effected through protocols of objectivity that were, until very recently, standard fare in history writ

ing.32 In the aesthetic experience of the aura, by contrast,

subject and object are interwoven, providing Benjamin a

higher form of experience?an experience, as he described it

in 1918, of "the sphere of total neutrality in regard to the

concepts of both subject and object."33 Importantly for Ben

jamin, higher experience counters "the triumph of subjectiv

ity and ... an arbitrary rule over things."34

Listen to Benjamin.

What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time:

the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no mat

ter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer's noon,

to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch

that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment

or the hour become part of their appearance?this is what

it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that

branch.

Suffusing the scene in an atmosphere of light and dark, sun

and shadow render this appearance of nature distinct from

any other. When tracing the contour of a distant mountain

range, or a branch that "throws its shadow on the observer,"

Benjamin situates the beholder within a specific spaciotem

poral moment of aesthetic contemplation. Breathing in "the

aura of those mountains, that branch," the observer is drawn

into a "weave of space and time," of light and dark, which evokes

the idea of nature as a continuum. At the same time, Ben

jamin defines the aura through its distance from the perceiv

ing subject. Writing at a time when processes of mechanical

reproducibility threatened to divest the singular of its unique ness, the author celebrates the aura as an occasion of resis

tance to the passionate inclination to bring things closer.35

Here, the subject does not dominate nature, nor does



INTERVENTIONS: LANG RESPONDS <?\

nature dominate the subject. Rather, the observer is under

the sway of nature in the perceptual experience of the aura.

According to Benjamin, this is what Baudelaire's correspon

dences offer the modern reader. For the poet of "La vie

ant?rieure":

The breakers, tumbling the images of the heavens,

Blended, in a solemn and mystical way,

The all-powerful chords of their rich music With the colors of the sunset reflected in my eyes.

This is where I lived.36

Baudelaire's correspondences transcend the forms of earthly existence through a point of view that sees more deeply into

forms. This vantage point permits the poet to draw closer to

color, or the "echoes that blend from afar." Yet if the author

of the "Correspondances" transcends what Benjamin de

scribes as "the limits of earthly existence," he is not transcen

dental to this existence and its forms.37 Recall that in his

poem "Le go?t du n?ant" Baudelaire captures the melan

choly effects of the transcendental point of view as a contem

plation, "from on high, [of] the globe in its roundness." In his 1939 essay "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Ben

jamin comments on how the aura attracts the attention of the

observer. "Inherent in the gaze," he writes, "is the expecta tion that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed."

Where this expectation is met (which, in the case of

thought processes, can apply equally to an intentional

gaze of awareness and to a glance pure and simple), there

is an experience [Erfahrung] of the aura in its fullness.

"Perceptibility," as Novalis puts it, "is an attentiveness."

The perceptibility he has in mind is none other than that of the aura. Experience of the aura thus arises from the

fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and

inanimate objects. The person we look at, or who feels he

is being looked at, looks at us in return. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the

ability to look back at us.38

The author describes the experience of the aura as a moment

of interrelation between observer and observed, recalling his

earlier description of a mountain range on a summer's noon.

As he implies, the perceptibility that invests the object with the ability to look back is not marshaled toward the ends of the subject.39 On the contrary, this special kind of "attentive

ness" is intentionless?it is not engaged in transforming what

is looked at into an object of knowledge; instead, it allows the

object to come into its fullness as an end in itself.

According to Benjamin, endowing the object with "the

ability to look back at us in return" is an authentic experience

(Erfahrung). He adds, in turn, that the object's capacity to

return our gaze "corresponds to the data of the m?moire

involontaire [interiorizing remembrance]." Earlier he had de

fined the aura as "the unique apparition of a distance, how

ever near it may be"; here he "lends support" to this concep

tion insofar as the data of interiorizing remembrance are also

unique: "They are lost to the memory that seeks to retain

them."40 Like the data of interiorizing remembrance, those

figureless images that nestle in the folds of the fan of con

scious memory, the associations that seek to "cluster around

an object of perception," are "the aura of that object."41 The aura is, then, neither the object in the world nor the

object in the mind, but those associations?themselves de

posited through long experience?that draw the object, and

the beholder, toward the past. Holly evocatively describes the old key to the Bastille as "so dense with stored meaning." Translated into Benjamin's terms, the associations evoked

through the perceptual experience of that particular density is the aura of the old key to the Bastille. Gornik's Mirrored Trees prompts remembrance of the idea of nature as a con

tinuum, a feeling of being thoroughly akin to it all that invites an aesthetic experience of intimate immensity. Yet at the

same time as the aura of Mirrored Trees draws us toward the

past, the painting signals its separation from us. Benjamin uses the word ornament to characterize the thicket of associ

ations, the figureless images of interiorizing remembrance,

that are evoked in the experience of the aura.42 For Ben

jamin, the terms ornament and aura disclose a spatial and

temporal abyss that eludes the physical, mental, or mechan

ical grasp.

When the beholder invests the object with the ability to look back, the aura of the object, Benjamin writes, becomes

"the breath of prehistory."43 Breathing in the aura, the be

holder is suffused with the far in the near?with the idea of nature as a continuum or with interiorizing remem

brance?as the associations that cluster around the object

momentarily settle into the "apparition of a [spatial and

temporal] distance." Despite its charge, it is important to

underscore that the memory of this one-time oneness is not

only momentary but also imaginary: here, we might say, fans et origo have been uncoupled such that source and origin become two distinct?albeit related?terms. In regard to the

aura, the source that evokes interiorizing remembrance is the

object of perception. The origin of these figureless images, these associations, however, lies neither in the object of per

ception nor in the object of representation (the perceptual

object taken up in the mind of the beholder). Rather, as the

involuntary aspect of interiorizing remembrance suggests, this memory is marginal to the observer.

The beholder in Benjamin's account of the aura is there

fore not the Kantian originator or creator of mental repre

sentation. Instead of re-presenting an object derived from the

cogito, the observer breathes in the aura. If the beholder is an

actor in this experience, then the aura functions in a manner

akin to le souffleur (the prompter): the aura prompts the beholder with the "breath of prehistory," thereby enabling her to recollect what had been forgotten. Although interior

izing remembrance has no representational origin, and the

memory of a continuum exists without standing out in relief,

the aura nevertheless corresponds to interiorizing remem

brance in such a way that the beholder is affected in this authentic experience. Located in the interval between seeing and representation, the aura underscores the asymptotic

re

lation between prehistory and the present, involuntary and

voluntary memory, object and representation.44 As Benjamin observed of Baudelaire's love for a passerby, in the experi




ence of the aura, an "eternal farewell" coincides "with the

moment of enchantment."45

Benjamin wrote about the aura at a time when modernity was felt in the full measure of its break with the traditions and customs of the past, a time, as well, when the strains of

modernism changed the modes and meanings of works of

art. In contrast to certain of his contemporaries who la

mented the way modernity offered a condition of failed

inheritance, Benjamin set store by the way the perceptual

experience of the aura brought the past into the present while not allowing the present to subsume the past. If the

perceptual experience of the aura invokes interiorizing re

membrance, then, Benjamin persuasively argues, this remem

brance cannot be translated into voluntary memory, or con

ceptual thought, without distortion. In this way, the object defies our desire to capture it in words; to contain it within

the objective territory of traditional history or art history writing; to "know" it in a scientific, or systematic, sense.

Benjamin implies as much, I would contend, in the epigraph that introduces Holly's essay: akin to mourning's persistence,

melancholy's embrace of dead objects "is born of its loyalty to the world of things."46 Where the thinker may be driven to

grasp the object conceptually, or the consumer might desire

to hold the object in her hand, melancholy, mourning, and

the aura "redeem" the object by ensuring that it exists for us

qua thing, as an object separate from us.

It is interesting to note that the era of melancholy coin

cides with what John Berger calls the age of oil painting.4 Where the era of melancholy signals separation and loss, the

age of oil painting commences with the conquest of the vis

ible?a capturing of the "real" made possible through the

marriage of a technology of oil paint and a program of

painterly illusionism. For Berger, the conquest of the visible

refers to more than painterly practice; it also implies shifting modes of capital and expanding markets, colonial conquest and the colonization of peoples. The Thanatos of modernity hurtles us toward conquest; the Eros of modernity awakens

when, possessing what we desire, our desire comes to an end.

Eros then "jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start"

in order to "prolong the journey."48 Jean Baudrillard invokes

the Eros of modernity when he suggests that the completed collection signals death.49 Georges Perec alludes to the life

instincts, too, when he describes how loss of desire for things is tantamount to death.50 Somewhere in between the Thana

tos and Eros of modernity lies the far in the near, a steady reminder that "to be modern is to know that which is not

possible anymore."

Holly advocates for melancholy as "both a metaphor and

an explanatory concept" for the aesthetic experience of ob

jects from the past, and for our scholarly writing about these

objects. Yet in the aesthetic experience of contemporary art

we also encounter phenomena we can never entirely grasp.

Drawing on the work of Christopher Bollas, Holly notes the

way "the aesthetic moment of profound rapport. . .

gives the

viewer (art historian, aesthetician, critic, or other) the sense

'of being reminded of something never cognitively appre

hended but existentially known.'"51 Benjamin describes the

aesthetic experience of the aura in similar terms?as the

remembrance of a relation of identity that cannot be repre

sented without distortion.52 Writing about aesthetic objects,

past and present, is a form of representation. In art history

writing we relate aesthetic objects to concepts?genre, pe

riod, artist's style, you name it?through the medium of

language. As for this process, Benjamin clearly understood

the rub: in order for facts or objects to be meaningful, we

have to be able to relate them to concepts; conceptual think

ing, however, constrains what we might "know" about aes

thetic objects.

Making, experiencing, or writing about art serves as a

reminder of our condition of separateness and our ultimate

inability to grasp, in artistic representation, thought, or lan

guage, that which might engage us. In the process of making,

beholding, or writing we join with the objects or texts we are

fashioning. At the same time, the endeavor to represent the

world and our responses to it in aesthetic objects, the aes

thetic experience, or written form pushes "the raw phenom

enological experience further and further into the back

ground."53 As Derrida put it succinctly, representation is

death; making, experiencing, or writing about art does not

concede a relation of identity or a condition of restitution.

Nevertheless, "art is the supreme embodiment of the imagi

nation, for it 'enables a sublimation of the excruciating pain caused by separation from the lost object.'"54 In this way,

making, experiencing, and writing about art are acts of rep

aration, of "making whole once again." Asked when she knew a work of art was finished, Gornik

replied: "When a painting is done I feel it actually recedes from me. Everything coalesces and moves away, and I can no

longer focus on a single part of it."55 Gornik's words recall

the passage marked out in Baudelaire's poetry?from intima

tions of interconnection to the view, from above, of the globe in its roundness. And so it is for me as I experience or write

about Gornik's painting: Mirrored Trees offers my gaze a lush

place of rest even as it announces itself as an object separate from me; try as I might, I cannot capture Gornik's exquisite

landscape, or the aesthetic experience I have of it, in words.

The aporias between subject and aesthetic object, aesthetic

object and language, ensure that making, experiencing, and

writing about art depend on connection rather than posses

sion, on reparation rather than restitution. The far in the

near.

Karen Lang's research focus is modern German art and aesthetic

theory. Her book Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthet

ics and Art History appeared in fall 2006 with Cornell University Press [Art History Department, University of Southern California, VKC 351 MC 0047, Los Angeles, Calif 90089, [email protected]].

Notes 1. Roland Barthes, "R?quichot et son corps," in L'obvie et l'obtus: Essais cri

tiques III (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 211, quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, "Painting: The Task of Mourning," in Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent

Painting and Sculpture, by Bois et al. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 47.

2. D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environ ment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Hogarth Press, 1965).

3. Gaston Bachelard, "Intimate Immensity," in The Poetics of Space (1958), trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 184: "Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. ... In




analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the

pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, the real product is conscious ness of enlargement. We feel that we have been promoted to the dig nity of the admiring being."

4. April Gornik, "An Artist's Perspective on Visual Literacy," 2004, http:// www.aprilgornik.com/visualliteracyessay.html.

5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 100-101. See also Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794-1795), trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 185, letter no.

25, pt. 3.

6. Richard Meyer, Now-ism: The Invention of Contemporary Art History (forth coming). In a related vein, see also Claude Keisch, "The Making of the

History of Contemporary Art: From an Exhibition in Munich to a Mu seum in Berlin," in Spirit of an Age: Nineteenth-Century Paintings from the

Nationalgalerie, Berlin (London: National Gallery Company, 2001), 40 49.

7. Barthes, "R?quichot et son corps," 211. It bears saying along the way that this modern condition, like aspects of melancholy itself, is a partic ularly Western notion. Buddhism, for instance, assumes the interde

pendence of all things even as it acknowledges transitoriness. Begin ning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Buddhist writings were translated in the West, initially into French. It is interesting to note the influence of Buddhist ideas on modern artists of the time, such as Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, who

sought to convey the experience of existence. See Jacquelynn Bass, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

8. Designating mental or spiritual objects, I intend to imply the expan sive, manifold territory charted in the German word Geist. Roland

Barthes, "Myth Today" (1956), in A Barthes Reader, trans. Annette La vers, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 93-149. See also idem, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1988).

9. Charles Baudelaire, "Le go?t du n?ant," in Les fleurs du mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David Godine, 1983), 255.

10. Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) was the first to use the term aes

thetics, in his unfinished Aesthetica of the 1750s. This magnum opus "re mained incomplete, probably due to the author's long battle with tu berculosis. The two volumes of the Aesthetica that appeared in 1751 and 1758 represent only a fraction of the work as Baumgarten had con ceived it." Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Aesthetic Orientation in a Decentered

World," in A New History of German Literature, ed. David Wellbery and

Judith Ryan (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 351.

11. Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History (London: Constable, 1950); see

Holly, n. 3.

12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith

(London: Macmillan, 1978).

13. Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 2: "Death does not stay put in the modernist image; it fatefully penetrates the very medium of art, turn

ing that medium into the site of nontranscendence. Whereas the dead Christ was the very image of life eternal, Courbet's trout is the image of eternal death. And even the works of those modernist artists least

likely to have lingered with the dead?Henri Matisse, say, or Agnes Martin?carry with them in their practice the taint of a nonliving past that they do not quite overcome. In modernist art, death does not ap pear as the prehistory of the significance that will be unveiled in its

wake; it simply persists." 14. Holly indicates, rightly, that melancholy "reappears" in postmodern

theory and feminist thought. For the purposes of my argument, I will focus on "the era of melancholy."

15. Thomas Greene, "Petrarch and the Humanist Hermeneutic," in The

Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 81-103. See also David Galbraith, "Petrarch and the Broken City," in Antiquity and Its Interpreters, ed. Alina

Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni

versity Press, 2000), 17-26.

16. Greene, "Petrarch," 204. Greene credits Peter Burke (The Renaissance Sense of the Past [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970], 2) for noting how the Roman ruins were perceived prior to Petrarch.

17. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Clark attests (6) that he "could not

escape in writing this book from the dangerous (and no doubt absurd) idea that it was addressed to posterity. Of course, this was fantasy, not

prediction: it was a way of writing, or dreaming of writing; and from it

derives much of the book's basic form?its brokenness and arbitrari ness, and the accompanying effort at completeness of knowledge, at least in the few test cases I do present."

18. Ibid., 3, 4.

19. Ibid., 3.

20. Be that as it may, and apart from any criticism of what Farewell to an Idea fails to include or the claims it makes for the material it does ad

dress, Clark's book is a stellar example of art history writing. Here, as

always, Clark is an extraordinary guide.

21. Reinhart Koselleck, "'Neuzeit': Remarks on the Semantics of the Mod ern Concepts of Movement," in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Histori cal Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 231 66. See also Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).

22. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863), in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 23.

23. Bois, "Painting: The Task of Mourning," 29, 43. Bois quotes Jacques Derrida, D'un ton apocalyptique adopt? nagu?re en philosophie (Paris: Ga

lil?e, 1983), 65. See also Thomas Lawson, "Last Exit: Painting," Artfo rum20 (October 1981): 40-47.

24. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss, 19.

25. Ibid.

26. Erwin Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," in

Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15, originally published in Meaning in the Humanities, ed. T. M. Greene

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 89-118.

27. "The historical importance of the general survey texts, from 1842 on, is their role in having produced, and continuing to produce, the illuso

ry?viewable?realm of universal history." Dan Karlholm, Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 62.

28. Panofsky, "The History of Art," 25, continues: "The ideal aim of science would [therefore] seem to be something like mastery, that of the hu manities something like wisdom."

29. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 20, quoted in Holly, n. 19.

30. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 60; see

Holly, n. 11.

31. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1994), 177. The conception of history as a

process of decay also animates the ninth of Benjamin's theses on the

concept of history where, in an image that has been subject to much

interpretative labor, he characterizes the past and history as a great pile of debris?"one single catastrophe" rather than "a chain of

events"?being hurled at the feet of the angel of history. Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W.

Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 392.

32. See, for instance, Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stan ford: Stanford University Press, 2005); and Linda Orr, "Intimate Im

ages: Subjectivity and History?Sta?l, Michelet and Tocqueville," in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 89-107.

33. "The task of future epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regard to the concepts of both subject and object; in other words, it is to discover the autonomous, innate sphere of knowl

edge in which this concept in no way continues to designate the rela tion between two metaphysical entities. ... A way must be found in

metaphysics to form a pure and systematic continuum of experience; indeed, it seems that the true meaning of experience is to be sought in this area. ..." Further on, he says, "The failing of neo-Kan tianism can be suspected in its neglect of this continuity." Walter Benjamin, "On the Program of the Coming Philosophy," trans. Rodney Livingstone, in

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1996), 104-5, 109.

34. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 223.

35. Walter Benjamin, "Little History of Photography," trans. Edmund Jeph cott and Kingsley Shorter, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael W.Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith

(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 518-19.




36. Charles Baudelaire, "La vie ant?rieure," in Les fleurs du mal, trans.

Howard, 199.

37. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," trans. Harry Zohn, in Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 334.

38. Ibid., 336, 338. Benjamin quotes Novalis, Novalis Schriften (Berlin: G.

Reimer, 1901), pt. 2 (first half), 293. Georges Didi-Huberman explores this supposition of the aura in Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992).

39. Here I concur with Marleen Stoessel (Aura, das vergessene Menschliche: Zu Sprache und Erfahrung bei Walter Benjamin [Munich: Carl Hanser Ver

lag, 1983], who stresses the investment (Belehnung) of the subject in the experience of the aura over projection or possession. See also Bir

git Recki, Aura und Autonomie: Zur Subjektivit?t der Kunst bei Walter Ben

jamin and Theodor W. Adorno (W?rzburg: K?nigshausen und Neumann, 1988), 23-25. It is important to underline how investing the object

with the ability to look back enables the object to resist the physical and the conceptual grasp. It was precisely this type of resistance that Theodor Adorno had in mind with his plea for the autonomy of art.

According to him, the "two extreme forms" of the loss of art's auton

omy (Entkunstung) "are reification?art viewed as a thing among things?and psychologism?art viewed as a vehicle for the psychology of the viewer. The reified works of art, which have ceased to speak, are made to say the things the viewer wants them to say and which are the

stereotyped echo of himself." Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Len hardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 25.

40. Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc ibility," trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in Benjamin: Selected

Writings, vol. 4, 255; and idem, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 338. The author continues by equating this "unique apparition of a dis tance" to the ceremonial quality of the cult object, which is likewise defined through connotations of distance and unapproachability. It follows that a decay in distance results in the loss of the aura and the demise in an object's cult status. In his essay "The Work of Art in the

Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," Benjamin asserts that pro cesses of technological reproducibility?such as photography?have led to a decay of the aura, and hence to a decline in the cult status of the

object. WTien the object loses its cult value, it may then assume a politi cal function.

41. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 337: "If we think of the associations which, at home in the m?moire involontaire, seek to cluster around an object of perception, and if we call those associations the aura of that object, then the aura attaching to the object of a percep tion corresponds precisely to the experience [Erfahrung] which, in the case of an object of use, inscribes itself as long practice."

42. See Benjamin's essays "On the Image of Proust" (trans. Harry Zohn, in

Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2); and "Little History of Photography."

43. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 336.

44. This asymptotic relationship is best described through language itself. When Martin Heidegger describes "a recalling, remembering, memori

alizing, and responding to an original call coming from the central

living presencing of the being of the world," he uses the word anden ken. In German the prefix an- indicates approach, as the direction of

activity toward something. Hence, Andenken indicates something in the

vicinity of thought but not actually represented in thought itself. It is

interesting to note that interiorizing remembrance (Erinnerung) takes the preposition an, which indicates a remembrance on or about some

thing. Heidegger, "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Al bert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 163-86.

45. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 324.

46. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 157, quoted in Holly, n. 1.

47. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972).

48. Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920), in Freud: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966-74), vol. 18, 40-41, quoted in Holly, n. 60.

49. Jean Baudrillard, "A Marginal System: Collecting," in The System of Ob

jects (1968), trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 85-105.

50. Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep (1967; Boston: David Godine, 1990).

51. Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Un

thought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 16, quoted in Holly, n. 91.

52. In his 1910 study Substance and Function, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer discusses the role of representation for knowledge, noting how the "im

pression of the object and the object itself are separated from each other; instead of identity, the relation of representation appears. No matter how complete our knowledge may be in itself, it never offers us the

objects themselves, but only signs of them and their reciprocal rela tions. ..." Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein's Theory of Relativ

ity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (New York:

Dover, 1953), 303.

53. Holly here refers to Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other

Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981).

54. Holly quotes Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, From Klein to Kristeva:

Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Search for the "Good Enough Mother" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 68; see Holly, n. 90.

55. "Sally Gall, April Gornik: A Dialogue," Speak Art! The Best of Bomb Maga zine's Interviews with Artists, ed. Betsy Sussler (New York: G and B Arts

International, 1997), 181.

Response: Reasons to Be Cheerful

Stephen Bann

Melancholie knowledge is something like the prospective recognition of objects in the ruin of the system that rep

resents them.?Jean-Louis Schefer, "Panadis perdu"1

To be sure, "[l]anguage signifies . . . not the thing but the

absence of the thing and so is implicated in the loss."2 In

repeating Michael Ann Holly's quote from Richard Stamel

man, "echoing Blanchot," I am placing myself last, for the

moment, in a lugubrious procession that mourns the ineluc

table loss of presence and of meaning. How then should I

endeavor to elbow my way to the front of the procession,

given that there are so many substantial testimonies standing in the way? Not the least of them, from my point of view, is that of Jean-Louis Schefer, whose collection of essays on the

subject, L'esp?ce de chose m?lancolie, anticipated the sentence

quoted here as my epigraph by nine years, and had itself been

published several years after I heard him present one of its central essays at a conference held in London in the early

1970s.3 Walter Benjamin is, it goes without saying, the pres ence that cannot be gainsaid in all these instances. His Origin

of German Tragic Drama, originally published by Suhrkamp in

1973, is the initial reference cited in Schefer's opening essay, and it provides the epigraph to Holly's "intervention."

How then to get to the head of the procession, by hook or

by crook? Holly is surely right to acknowledge, though im

plicitly, that it is the quality of her own writing that will convince us that such hard-won priority has been achieved.

However, my own response is not intended to be an exercise



Response: The Far in the Near

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