March 23, 31, Post 11; A. S. Pt. 1/?: Ruppert

I want to explore the idea of the "aesthetic solution," which I mentioned in my previous post.

I've been struggling with this concept (and this post) for a while now, and I think the only way to ever get into the idea is to post in sections. I've slowly come to the conclusion that it's too central a concept to my project for me to be able to address fully at this point in the process, since I haven't even looked at my second novel yet. That said, I did want to be able to post the work I've been doing on the subject soon so that I don't completely ruin the authenticity of my posted timeline.

That makes this "Aesthetic Solution Pt. 1/?".

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When I first saw the term in the title of Peter Ruppert's article, "The Aesthetic Solution in Nausea and Malte Laurids Brigge," I knew that I’d found a good resource. I’d never seen the term before, but I had an intuitive understanding of what “aesthetic” must mean in the context of a "solution" in Nausea and Malte Laurids Brigge, a novel by Rilke which Richard Howard mentions as being influential to Nausea in his introduction. My guess about Ruppert's meaning was a good one; the meaning I had automatically appropriated to the word worked for the duration of the article, so I assumed I had understood the idea being discussed. It was only when I started thinking about writing this post that I really began to question the word: what does it mean in the article (according to what I have guessed to be the author's intent), and, more interestingly perhaps, what could it mean beyond that? 

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"Usually what is meant by this term is that the protagonists, following disruptive experiences and recognitions, find sustenance or relief in art, specifically in the creation of literary art," (Ruppert 18).

This is the only consideration given to the meaning of the term before Ruppert launches into a discussion of Simone de Beauvoir's critique of this solution and his own application of the term to the novel. Because the term seems so useful and because he does say "usually," I assumed that Ruppert was not the originator of the term, but I've found that it's not as widely employed as I had expected; I've found it used in a handful of articles having to do with Nietzsche or the idea of evil. I've requested one article on Nietzsche and epigonism through an inter-library loan program since my school's own library doesn't have it, but I don't expect to receive that material for at least a couple of days, so, if that proves illuminating, I'll include it either in a later post in the A.S. series or as an amendment to this one. For now, I'm sort of limited to context clues and deductive reasoning to define the term.  

For his part, Ruppert follows Beauvoir's lead in condemning Roquentin for his appeal to aesthetics because he sees his solution as escapism. Beauvoir's critique of the solution is that it circumnavigates the subject/object relationship developed by Hegel which is necessary for "authenticity" in art, (18). This results in an inauthentic product and an inauthentic life experience. 

The way I understand it, this argument is founded on the assumption that the function of art is to reflect truths of reality. In order to do this well, the artist has to exist in the world he wants to represent (through whatever distortions he chooses in his fictionalization). This means being “situated in the world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men,” (Beauvoir 78, cited in Ruppert 18). This is a difficult thing for an artist to accomplish because of this conception of art as absolute; if art is absolute, what is the artist? He “justifies” the world (to himself), so he has no need of justifying himself to the world. According to Beauvoir (and Ruppert), this removes him from the world and makes his art and his living inauthentic.

Before I can consider the repercussions of Roquentin's solution, I want to answer two questions. The first one, I've already asked: is Roquentin’s solution really an “aesthetic solution,” in the way that Ruppert expects (what does "aesthetic" mean)? The second comes in response to Beauvoire's critique: what is an individual’s responsibility to the community? The first question's response will determine the degree to which the solution's adoption will destroy the individual's ability to participate in life authentically and the latter will help determine to what degree participation is necessary. 

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I'll start with the first set of questions, those about the meaning Ruppert attributes to "aesthetic" and its further potential meaning. As is indicated by the quotation given above, Ruppert used the phrase to mean the use of art, especially the act of creating written art, to ameliorate existential angst. It seems to me, however, that the word "aesthetic" implies more than just "art-related"; for me, it has to do with art and equally with he concept of beauty. After an uninspiring dictionary.com search, I asked my friend (a colleague, if you prefer) what she thought "aesthetic" meant, and she drew my attention to the connotations it carries of order and objective beauty. 

An aesthetic solution, then, should be a solution to the existential problem because it allows the individual to overlay a structure onto their lives that organizes the events and creates something beautiful out of what was previously an ugly chaos. 

The aesthetic solution in Nausea is a two-step process: Roquentin hears the song "Some of These Days" and discovers the potential of art to be absolute, then he decides to write. My question is whether or not the song's absoluteness presents the same kind of aesthetic solution as does the prospect of writing, and whether it is the process of writing which is the solution or it is the subject about which he will write which ultimately provides the sustenance.

The way I understand it, characters achieve the "aesthetic solution"in two distinct ways, though both are ways of escaping (or achieving, depending on how you understand "authentic", which I'll address later in this post) the existential responsibility of creating identity.

The first, of which he accuses Rilke's protagonist, Malte, is the overlaying of pre-established archetypical stories onto our life-experiences (I think Vladamir Propp had a good word for this, but I haven't been able to find it), effectively adopting the role of a character instead of living "authentically" in the world. Malte adopts the role of the "Prodigal Son" and "thus evad[es] responsibility for [his experience] as his own,"(34). This version of the solution seems primarily mimetic in kind, in contrast with the second version, which Ruppert explains in the example of Roquentin. 

Sartre's protagonist takes what I would call the "authorial route" to the aesthetic solution. Instead of choosing from the pre-established roles society offers, Roquentin decides to write his own story. This is, effectively, adopting the role of the writer, which makes this solution a sort of double-solution, but I think the emphasis is really on the creative aspect of the solution instead of the mimetic part. Roquentin adopted the position of "writer" before the novel even opens; he was originally involved in a biographical project of the Marquise de Rollebon, which he abandons when he realizes that the subject, an individual who had really existed, would not help him make sense of his own existence. As he begins to be disillusioned with his first chosen project, he says:

“For a long time, Rollebon the man has interested me more than the book to be written. But now, the man… the man begins to bore me,” (13).

Roquentin has done exhaustive research into this individual, the Marquis de Rollebon, but becomes tired of the project when he finds that facts don't write the story of a man;

"The facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination. And I am certain that the characters in a novel would have a more genuine appearance, or, in any case, would be more agreeable," (13-14).


At this point in the novel, Roquentin is still married to the idea that facts exist (whereas we've discovered that facts are only an individual's narrations of perceived events), even if he's begun to question their verifiability (13). This means that he is attempting to recreate Rollebon in his biography as he really existed, according to the facts of his life. The problem is that the facts are contradictory, and no overarching character is appearing from their aggregate, as he had expected it to do.

As a result, Roquentin's interest in the project shifts from the factual subject (Rollebon) to the process of creation (writing the story): 

"It is the book which attracts me. I feel more and more need to write- in the same proportion as I grow old, you might say," (13).

So it seems that Sartre, or at least Roquentin, rejects the first version of the aesthetic solution. Simply adopting a role isn't enough for him; it has to be the right role: that of the creator. 

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I asked in a recent post whether the aesthetic solution of the novel was important for its content or simply for the act of writing, and Ruppert suggests that it was the latter:

"Writing his book, which will be 'unlike life,' which will be the story of 'an adventure' (p. 237), will be in itself another adventure... The implication is that eventually he will not have to live in the present while working on the book. In the process of writing, he will escape consciousness by consuming it in an aesthetic relation," (24).

I'm not convinced that this is Roquentin's fate, because I believe Roquentin's novel must be autobiographical at heart. It would still be "unlike life," as Ruppert quotes as support of his escapist reading, because it would be recounted. That is, after all, what the whole book was about - the impossibility of adventuring/perspective self-consciousness during the activity which could later be considered adventuring; according to the novel's own credo, anything that includes adventure would necessarily be unlike life.

My reading of Roquentin's aesthetic solution is that he's chosen to write the story of his life, and I've come to that conclusion because of the source of inspiration he finds. The song is appealing to Roquentin because it is inevitable; once it begins to play, it follows the same pattern until it is finished; the end is prefigured as soon as the first notes play. For Roquentin, who has been searching for adventure and perfect moments, both of which require the end to be known to begin existing themselves, the song presents an aesthetic solution. But there would be no way for him to apply that solution to his own experience if he weren't writing about himself; writing a more pure fiction would allow him control over the characters' adventures and perfect moments, but only writing about himself allows him to personally have adventures and experience perfect moments. Autobiography is the existentially effective aesthetic solution.

It seems to me that Ruppert is missing the point; from this comment, it seems like he's only recognized Roquentin as accepting the first version of the aesthetic solution. He sees him as becoming a Writer who, because of his occupation, will not have to interact with the world. However, we've seen that "aesthetic" implies "order" in addition to "art." Consequently, my understanding of Roquentin's solution is much more focused on the new-found control he will have over his life, not because he's changing his daily activity to that of a hermit, but because he's gained the authorial position. If he writes typical fiction, then perhaps it is really only the occupation that saves him, so it is a mimetic solution after all, but if he writes autobiography, then he gains godly control over his life, making it a creative solution.  

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The remaining question is then what responsibility does an individual have to his community, and now, how does Roquentin's choice of aesthetic solution either fulfill or shirk that responsability?

I don't have an answer to the first part of the question. Perhaps to a French native the question is simple: an individual must uphold the laws and morals of his society. That's the correct republican response, but I grew up venerating Henry David Thoreau, so, for me, the answer is not evident. I don't know that an individual has a specific responsibility to his community, but I certainly don't believe that accepting an aesthetic solution, especially the second version that I've explained above, is necessarily a failure to uphold those responsibilities. If Roquentin has written an autobiography, he must not have titled it as such; an autobiography of a "nobody" won't sell, and we know from the fact that the journals exist as a collection that Roquentin is not a nobody. We also know that, having had the biographical experience of Rollebon, Roquentin would not have considered writing autobiography to be factual; it would be a fictionalization of his life, and would read like a novel. I'd suggest that Roquentin's solution has proved useful to his community, since its product, his book, has clearly been read. Though he may not be classically involved in the community in sense of having every-day interactions, I think that this means he's not evaded responsibility, if we consider responsibility only to be contribution toward the cultural richness or welfare of the community.

As far as I'm concerned, the only part of Beauvoir's critique that applies to Roquentin's unique solution is the divorce from subject/object relations he would suffer as a result of his hermit life-style. I'm sure this would be destructive to his self-hood, but plenty of other real-life writers live that way (my first thought is of Salinger),  so I'm not sure if this divorce is ultimately as dangerous for the individual's psychological well-being as theory would lead us to believe.

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From what I've seen/can remember, the authorial solution is actually the more commonly recognized route explored in fiction. I'd explain this in two ways: writers like to write about writers writing, and this kind of meta-literature doesn't require overt understanding of the existential crisis, whereas focusing on the archetypical stories version of the solution does. 

That's not to say there is a dearth of this first subject, though - since Don Quixote, authors have recognized the pitfalls of accepting one role as your way of life. As Peter Rabinowitz pointed out in his section on presupposition and misunderstanding in Before Reading, recent years have produced a plethora of novels critiquing the blind acceptance of role through faux mysteries (or what he calls the "grasping-at-straws-in-the-meaningless-abyss" novel), (179). 

The protagonists in these kinds of novel believe themselves to be on the trail of some crime, as Rabinowitz notes Revel believes of himself in Passing Time. In the typical novel of this type, it's clear to the intended audience that there is no such crime or mystery; the protagonists are playing detective because they believe (or want to believe) that the world is ordered in some meaningful way. They are metaphorically representative of the human experience in the postmodern world, where God is dead and the universe exists because of the accidental explosion into being of subatomic particles. As characters, though, they represent the first version of the aesthetic solution, as they've chosen the role of Detective rather than face the reality of a non-telos-driven world.  

For me, Nausea doesn't read like a "grasping-at-straws-in-the-meaningless-abyss" novel, so I can't believe that its function is to condemn Roquentin's aesthetic solution. I believe that Sartre wanted to communicate the existential crisis his generation was facing, which I think he achieved with astounding success, and to present a potential solution to the problem. It's worth noting that this philosophical text is presented in the form of a novel, not as an axiomatic text as was most of modern philosophy's writing. I don't think it's a coincidence that he chose this medium for this content.  It may not be a solution for everyone, but it's a solution that works, and consequently shouldn't be too quickly discredited.

Hospital cafeteria, TN/3rd floor KJ, Hamilton College, NY - 23, 31 March 2013.