1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance

Abstract

1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance. By Thomas Harrison. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. [xii, 264 p. ISBN 0-520-20043-8. $30.00.] It is a delicate business, the history of ideas, and more delicate stilt to extract from its flow a moment of equilibrium between what was and what would be. Beginnings and endings are seldom tidy, and ideas are promiscuous, not crystalline and chaste. Nevertheless, it is tempting to reconstruct a sense of that mood of an era commonly known as its Zeitgeist. Around 1910 central European artists and intellectuals, poised between the languorous malaise of the tin de siecle and some dimly perceived catastrophe looming on the horizon, had reached a point of crisis. or about December. 1910, Virginia Woolf once observed, human character changed. In 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance Thomas Harrison attempts to explain how and why. Harrison's focus is narrow: central Europe, principally Germany, Italy, and the Hapsburg Empire, and those artists and thinkers who shared a sense that they were living on the cusp at a moment of near unbearable tension when both a death and a birth seemed to have taken too long in coming (p. 8). This is a diverse collection of minds--ranging from composers (Arnold Schoenberg) and artists (Vasili Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka) to poets (Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dino Campana) and philosophers and aestheticians (Giovanni Boine, Georg Lukacs, Martin Buber)--and for better or worse Harrison chooses expressionism as the aesthetic denominator for their commonly held insights. The central figure in Harrison's narrative is Carlo Michelstaedter, an Italian poet, painter, and philosopher, whose dissertation, Persuasion and Rhetoric, was completed in 1910 on the very day he took his own life at the age of twenty-three. If his death is symbolic of the impasse to which his ruminations had led him, the circumstances of his life are less emblematic of those tensions that set him and his contemporaries on their path. As an Italian Jew raised in the Adriatic port of Gorizia, where Italian, Slovene, and German cultures competed for dominance. Michelstaedter experienced firsthand the widening fissures of a multiethnic empire. As with so many thinkers of his time, Michelstaedter meditated upon the discrepancies between authenticity and language, poles that he represented as persuasion, the repose of being, and rhetoric, the continual agony of becoming. It is the recognition of the perpetual dissonance between the two that brought Michelstaedter and other expressionists of this study to the realization that dissonance itself lay at the core of being and of expressive necessity. In four chapters Harrison identifies the stages through which Michelstaedter and others passed on their way to this emancipation of dissonance. From a heightened awareness of a disrupted world of irreconcilable difference (The Emancipation of Dissonance) emerges a despair over those negative forces--chaos over order, death over vitality--that threaten disintegration (The Deficiency of Being). The paralysis of despair is overcome through inner resources of subjective insight (The Hole Called the Soul) that lead, finally, to a realization of the limits of language and rhetoric (An Ethics of Misunderstanding). In the end this recognition that no expression can be more than a form for pregnant but impregnable contents (p. 17) throws the project of self-realization back on the experience of self-loss from which it springs (p. 16). Common to all the figures Harrison treats is the feeling of disjuncture between the inner self and the outer world. Disgust with the materialism of the nineteenth century and a concomitant distaste for those related aesthetic movements of realism and naturalism was exacerbated in those regions where ethnic and cultural identities called into question the relevance of existing political and ideological institutions. …