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Conclusion
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269 Conclusion The preceding chapters have argued that an aesthetic paradigm not previously considered by the secondary literature must be understood as central to the evolution of European Modernism. Distinct from the models of both autonomy and fragmentation that the field has traditionally relied on, this “aesthetics of dependency” combines attributes of both in a new organizational structure. Similar to the aesthetics of fragmentation usually associated with the avant-gardes, the aesthetics of dependency stages the inherent incompatibility of the constitutive elements of a literary work. But unlike the avant-gardes, and akin to the aesthetics of autonomy, the aesthetics of dependency also insists that a mediation of those incompatible elements must nevertheless take place. Such a mediation that does not reduce opposites to an underlying identity is made possible through the imposition of a criterion or ground for the relation between the incommensurable terms that transcends the logic of those terms themselves. In the aesthetics of dependency, the process of negotiating the gap between this specific criterion and the constitutive principles that cannot contain it becomes an end in itself and provides the necessity and justification for the work’s different parts. This analysis of aesthetic structures concerns primarily the organization of literary works as a whole, not the works’ individual thematic or formal components, or even the works’ specific meanings or ideological commitments. In the latter respects, accordingly, the texts dealt with in this study need not necessarily agree and, in fact, frequently do not. The notion of metaphor, for example, in Hofmannsthal’s The Conclusion 270 Lord Chandos Letter is not identical to that analyzed in relation to Joyce’s “The Dead.” Nor is the conception of the past-as-such in A Doll’s House similar to the notion of the past in Hofmannsthal’s text, or the representation of love in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge similar to that in James’s The Wings of the Dove. At the same time, in spite of such differences, it is clear that the works discussed in this study do share a great number of such text-immanent components. Most of the texts examined are concerned with the destabilizing function of capital and money, with the limitations of determined categories of identity and social roles, or with the difficulty of interpretation and language, and all agree on the problematic status of the past, irrespective of the different configurations that this temporal dimension receives in different works. Most significant for the present study is that among such shared text-immanent features in each of the works dealt with, the experience of linear temporality has played a central and constitutive function , expressly as a mediating principle. This mediating function is an effect of the consistent deployment of the trope of linear temporality as a specific moment in the structure of dependency that also links these works in terms of a shared aesthetic form. What is particularly interesting about this use of linear time is that it points to the way in which this shared aesthetic form itself is inflected in Modernist terms. As important figures such as Stanley Cavell and Theodor Adorno, among others, have argued, what is paradigmatically Modernist is the complete loss of traditional categories and criteria for meaning in art. In the works studied here, the mode of mediation provided by the aesthetics of dependency is similarly deployed against traditional structures of meaning, not as a support for them. The inability of inherited categories to grasp modern experience is explicitly enacted, and the need to transform them is asserted without providing a determinate result. Instead, the works aim to lay bare the condition of mediation itself, making the process of achieving meaning in the mode of linear time the focus of the text. In A Doll’s House, the moral categories of nineteenth-century drama are both subverted and subjected to reinterpretation, the success of which is left to us as audience. In The Lord Chandos Letter, the structure of science becomes the tool that we must both rely on and exceed in order to grasp the reality that grounds the purposeful relation of distinct parts. In “The Dead,” tradition and poetry must be reconceived if we are to understand the revelation that fulfills their respective needs but yet is incompatible [3.144.212.145] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:43 GMT) Conclusion 271 with their criteria. And so on. In each case, the formal organization constitutes a reconsideration of the notions of...