The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature. (Literature and Philosophy) by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Abstract

MLR, 104.2, 2009 539 The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature. By Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. (Literature and Philosophy) University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007. ix+268 pp. $55. ISBN 978 0-271-03227-6. The question ofwhether, or how, to value the quotidian has been a key strand in modernist and postmodernist culture, in a period when everyday experience has been put at risk by regimentation, technology, and other ills. This is a prime area for exchanges between philosophy and literature, and in her stimulating and wide ranging study Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei argues cogently thatphenomenology, literature, and the visual arts have often been in concert, homing in on moments when familiar routines are briefly suspended and we see the ordinary world in a differentway. Instances ofwhat she calls the ecstatic quotidian' come about when we step outside the familiarity induced by the 'natural attitude'. Yet it is crucial toGosetti-Ferencei's argument that such ruptures are not breaks with the every day but revelations of a tension latentwithin it.Heidegger understood Dasein to comprise both average everydayness' and moments that transcended it,seen not as extraneous but as part and parcel ofwhat makes up the quotidian. In a brilliant set of readings Gosetti-Ferencei creates pathways linking Husserl, Heidegger, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard with Rilke, Frost, Proust, Sartre, Ponge, and Robbe-Grillet, beforemoving on to consider visual art. She demonstrates convincingly that the enduring vitality of childhood experience isoften a key factor inmoments when everyday life reveals itsVulnerability to transformation', and its capacity to be revivified but not necessarily transcended. Rilke's essay on dolls or Frost's 'Birches' reveal how childish play and fantasymaintain openness and recep tivity that can be drawn on in adult life. Likewise, the poetic image, understood by Bachelard to be 'inherently variational', and to engender what he called reten tissementy becomes inRilke or Frost an instrument of 'deep existential probing of imaginative variation' that can open up the folds of lived experience by prompting a shift inour perception. In the last three of seven chapters Gosetti-Ferencei moves, via Rilke's passion forCezanne, and Heidegger's famous analysis ofVan Gogh, into the realm of art, examining thework of Cy Twombly, the colour field' painting of Morris Louie and Barnett Newman, and finally the long tradition of trompe Vceil painting from Zeuxis to a video Still Life by Sam Taylor-Wood. Phenomenology helps us to understand what is at stake in theway Rilke attends to themodulations of colour in Cezanne's paintings, and practises a kind of seeing that apprehends the temporality of the painterly image, opening onto theWeltinnenraum where the mystery of the quotidian ismade palpable. In Twombly's work, the withdrawal from discourse enacted by his scribbles points to an ecstatic muteness rooted in the non-purposiveness of childhood play. If still lifes have always reflected art's fascination with the quotidian, the perceptual illusions engendered by trompe Vceil painting often jolt us into seeing the familiar differently. As Gosetti-Ferencei points out in conclusion, fertileexchanges between art, litera ture, and philosophy do more than remind us ofwhat we tend to forget: they can 540 Reviews help to heal and revitalize a shattered quotidian'. Her own book, an outstanding contribution to the dialogue of literature and philosophy, contributes magnificently to this end. All Souls College, Oxford Michael Sheringham Wanderers across Language: Exile inIrish and Polish Literature of theTwentieth Cen tury. By Kinga Olszewska. (Studies inComparative Literature, 12) London: Legenda. 2007. xii+186 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-1-905981-08-3. In her afterword Kinga Olszewska quotes Seamus Heaney (from The Government of theTongue (London: Faber, 1988), p. 161) about the need, in poets, to 'survive amphibiously, that is to say, 'in the realm of "the times" and the realm of their moral and artistic self-respect'. This, writes Heaney, is 'a challenge immediately re cognizable to anyone who has livedwith the awful and demeaning facts ofNorthern Ireland's history over the last couple of decades'. Much of the time,Olszewska, who has written about Heaney elsewhere but not in thisvolume, positions her argument between perceptions taken from The Government of the Tongue and, not infre...