I cannot claim here that I will facilitate the understanding of the text FA: M’AHNIESGWOW by interpreting it. Others, members of Helms’ circle of friends in Cologne, would be far more qualified for such interpretation, which would require a long period of immersion, than I; Gottfried Michael König has written an introduction to the work on the basis of intimate contact with it. Furthermore, the concept of Verstehen, interpretive understanding, cannot be applied without further ado to a hermetic text. Essential to such a text is the shock with which it forcibly interrupts communication. The harsh light of unintelligibility that such a work turns toward the reader renders the usual intelligibility suspect as being shallow, habitual, reified—in short, preartistic. To translate what appears alien in qualitatively modern works into current concepts and contexts is something of a betrayal of the works themselves. The more objective such works are, the less they concern themselves with what people expect from them or even with what the aesthetic subject projects into them, the more problematic intelligibility becomes. The less the matter itself accommodates to sedimented subjective modes of response, the more it lays itself open to the universal objection of subjective arbitrariness. Interpretive understanding presupposes a closed context of meaning that can be reconstructed through something like empathy on the part of the recipient. Not the least of the motives that gives rise to works like FA: M’AHNIESGWOW, however, is that of doing away with the fiction of such a context. As soon as reflection on works of art casts doubt upon the positive metaphysical meaning that crystallizes and discharges itself in the work, it also has to reject the techniques, especially the linguistic techniques, that implicitly draw on the idea of a kind of meaning that creates an integral and therefore eloquent context. The extent to which what happens in the interior of the work is open to reconstruction [Nachvollzug] by the recipient, and the extent to which such a reconstruction captures it accurately, is not certain. Almost a century and a half ago, arguing that the work’s effects on the contemplative recipient are contingent, Hegel’s aesthetics had criticized the use of the effects of art as the point of departure for a theory of art, something Kant had still assumed unquestioningly, and instead had demanded, in the spirit of dialectical philosophy, that the idea subject itself to the discipline of the work. Since then, this Hegelian demand has also destroyed subjectivist views that still stood firm for Hegel and that govern his own method naively, such as the view that the aesthetic object is intelligible in principle. Hegel saw that what effect which work of art had on which recipient was an accidental matter, and since then the belief that there exists a priori an immediate relationship between work and viewer, that the objective truth of a work also guarantees its apperception, has been abandoned. This is why I do not want to try to make Helms intelligible, nor to provide you with assenting judgments, or critical ones, but merely to discuss some presuppositions.
I am aware that by doing so I expose Helms’ work and my own stance on it to the triumphant scorn of all the right-thinking people who are already approaching, armed with the intention of waxing indignant about how this asks too much even of progressive and open-minded people. I can imagine what satisfaction some will find in inferring from my words that apparently I have not understood it either. But I would like to caution you away from this comfortable victory. In art—and not in art alone, I would like to think—history has retroactive force. Older works too are drawn into the crisis of intelligibility, which is far more acute today than it was fifty years ago. If one were to stress what intelligibility in art actually means, one would have to repeat the discovery that it deviates in essential respects from interpretive understanding as the rational grasping of something in some sense intended. One does not understand works of art the way one understands a foreign language, or the way one understands concepts, judgments, and conclusions in one’s own. All of that can, of course, also occur in works of art as the significative moment in their language or their plot or something represented in an image, but it plays a secondary role and is hardly what the aesthetic concept of interpretive understanding refers to. If that concept is meant to indicate something adequate, something appropriate for the matter at hand, then today it needs to be imagined more as a kind of following along afterward [Nachfahren]; as the co-execution [Mitvollzug]* of the tensions sedimented in the work of art, the processes that have congealed and become objectified in it. One does not understand a work of art when one translates it into concepts—if one simply does that, one misunderstands the work from the outset—but rather when one is immersed in its immanent movement; I should almost say, when it is recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorium speaks along with it. If the work is not to be disfigured rationalistically, Verstehen in the specific conceptual meaning of the word will emerge only in an extremely mediated way; namely, in that the substance grasped through the completed experience is reflected and named in its relationship to the material of the work and the language of its forms. Works of art are understood in this sense only through the philosophy of art, which is not something external to contemplation [Anschauung] of them but something always already required by their contemplation and something that terminates in contemplation. Unquestionably, the exertions involved in this kind of emphatic understanding of even traditional works of art equal those an avant-garde text imposes on the reader who co-executes it.
The fact that art eludes rational understanding as a primary mode of response to it has been exploited by vulgar aesthetic irrationalism. Feeling is to be everything. But it becomes crucial to understand this only when artistic experience turns into a bad, passive irrationality of consumption and is no longer relied upon. The specific co-execution that works of art require is replaced by a mere babbling along with the stream of language, with the rise and fall of tone, with the concrete complexion of the images. The passivity of that mode of response is mistaken for a praiseworthy immediacy. Works are subsumed under preformed schemata and no longer recognized for what they are in themselves. Works of art—and this is not new—must defend themselves against this and must compel a kind of follow-through on the part of the recipient that renounces understanding, which would constitute a non-understanding that did not recognize itself as such. The moment of the absurd, which is a constituent of all art but has hitherto been largely hidden by the conventional moment, has to emerge and express itself. The so-called unintelligibility of legitimate contemporary art is the consequence of something peculiar to art itself. Its provocativeness carries out the historical judgment on an intelligibility that has degenerated into misunderstanding.
Art has come to this point, to be sure, not so much through its polemic against something external to it, its fate in society, as through internal necessity. In literature the arena of this necessity is the double nature of language, as a means of discursive signification—of communication first and foremost—on the one hand and as expression on the other. To this extent the immanent necessity of radical linguistic arrangements does in fact converge with the social criticism to which language tends to cede the work of art. With utter integrity, Karl Kraus, who was hostile to Expressionism and hence to the unqualified primacy of expression over sign in language, in no way relaxed the distinction between literary and communicative language. His oeuvre persists in trying to produce an artistic autonomy for language without doing violence to its other aspect, the communicative, which is inseparable from transmission. The Expressionists, on the other hand, tried to jump over their own shadows. They championed the primacy of expression without regard for other considerations. They envisioned using words as pure expressive values, the way colors or tone relationships are used in painting or music. Language put up such sharp resistance to the Expressionist idea that it was hardly ever realized except by the Dadaists. Kraus was proved right in that he realized—and the awareness came precisely through his unqualified devotion to what language, as objective spirit, intends, above and beyond communication—that language cannot completely dispense with its significative moment, with concepts and meanings. Dadaism’s aim, in fact, was not art but its assassination. Perhaps no optical configuration can be imagined that would not remain tied to the world of objects through some resemblance to it, however distant. Analogously, everything linguistic, even in its most extreme reduction to expressive values, bears the traces of the conceptual. In view of that ineradicable residue of stark, objectively dictated unequivocalness, the expressive moment has to pay a price in arbitrariness. The more zealously literature tries to escape its affinity with the empirical world, an affinity that is foreign to its formal laws and can never be fully defined in terms of their inner organization, the more it becomes vulnerable to what condemned literary expressionism to obsolescence before it had really had its moment. In order to become pure expression, to become something that obeys its own impulse in pure form, such literature must take pains to shake off its conceptual element. Hence Mallarmé’s celebrated retort to the great painter Degas when the later told him he had some good ideas for sonnets: But poems are made of words, not ideas. In the previous generation, antithetical figures like Karl Kraus and Stefan George had both repudiated the novel, out of an aversion to the non-aesthetic quality of an excess materiality in literature, an excess that concepts had in fact already brought into lyric poetry. Prior to questions of narration about the world, concepts as such have something hostile to art about them; they represent the unity as sign of what they subsume, which belongs to empirical reality and is not subject to the spell of the work. There are good reasons why the term Sprachkunstwerk, linguistic work of art, derives from a much later phase, and sensitive ears will not fail to note something slightly awkward in it. Nevertheless, language cannot do without concepts. Even a stammered sound, if it is a word and not a mere tone, retains its conceptual range, and certainly the internal coherence of a linguistic work, without which it could not be organized as an artistic unity, cannot dispense with the conceptual element.
From this point of view even the most authentic works take on in retrospect a preartistic, somewhat informational quality. Literature gropes its way toward making peace with the conceptual moment without expressionistic quixoticness but also without surrendering to that moment. Retrospectively, one should grant that this is what great literature has always done; in fact it owes its greatness precisely to its tension with what is heterogeneous to it. It becomes a work of art through the friction between it and the extra-artistic; it transcends that, and itself, by respecting it. But this tension, and the task of enduring it, becomes thematic through the relentless reflection of history. Given the current status of language, anyone who still relied blindly on the double character of language as sign and expression as though it were something god-given would himself become a victim of mere communication. James Joyce’s two epic works form the line of demarcation. Joyce fuses the aim of a language rigorously organized within the interior of the work of art on the one hand—and it was this interior space, not psychological inwardness, that was the legitimate idea of the monologue intérieur—with great epic on the other, the impulse to hold fast to the content that is transcendent to art, the content through which it becomes art, even within the work’s tightly sealed immanence. The way Joyce brought the two to a truce constitutes his extraordinary status, the high point between two impossibilities, that of the novel today and that of literature as pure sound. His scrutinizing gaze spied a rift in the structure of significative language, a point where it becomes commensurable with expression, without the writer needing to stick his head in the sand and act as though language were directly equivalent to music. This opening revealed itself to him in the light of advanced—Freudian—psychology. The radical constitution of the interior aesthetic space is mediated by its relationship to subjective interiority, by which, however, it is not exhausted. In the sphere of detached subjectivity the work frees itself of what is external to it, of anything that eludes its force field. The objectification of works of art, as immanently structured monads, becomes possible only through subjectification. Subjectivity becomes what it has been in rudimentary form since autonomous works of art have existed—their medium or arena. In the process of aesthetic objectification, however, subjectivity, as the quintessence of articulate experience, drops to the status of raw material, a second-order externality that is absorbed by the work of art. Through subjectification the work constitutes itself as a reality sui generis in which the essence of external reality is reflected. This is both the historical course that modernism has followed and the central process occurring within each individual work. The forces that bring about objectification are the same as those through which the work takes a position on empirical reality, no part of which it can allow to remain within it untransformed. Elements of that reality, furthermore, are contained, dispersed, in the supposedly merely subjective materials with which the process works as it takes place.
If linguistic expression does not completely divorce itself from concepts, conversely the latter do not resemble definitions of their meanings, as positivist propaganda would have it. The definitions are themselves the result of a reification, a forgetting; they are never what they would so like to be: never fully adequate to what the concepts are after. The fixed meanings have been wrenched from their context in the life of language. The rudiments of that life, however, are the associations that can never be fully accommodated within conceptual meanings and yet attach themselves to the words with a gentle necessity. If literature succeeds in awakening associations in its concepts and correcting for the significative moment through those associations, then the concepts begin, so to speak, to move. Their movement is to become the immanent movement of the work of art. One must pursue the associations with such a fine ear that they adapt to the contours of the words themselves and not merely to those of the individual who happens to be involved with them. The subcutaneous context formed from these associations takes priority over the surface of the discursive content of the work, its crude material layer, without, however, the latter disappearing completely. In Joyce the idea of an objective physiognomy of words is linked, by virtue of the associations inherent in the words, with the rhythm of the whole, which is transposed into these associations and not ordained tendentiously from the outside. At the same time, Joyce’s position took account of the unattainability of the concrete material world for the aesthetic subject—an unattainability that can neither be reversed by a contrite realistic mentality nor posited as absolute in blind solipsism. When literature as expression makes itself the expression of a reality that has disintegrated for it, it expresses the negativity of that reality.
The autonomous structuring of literary products set forth something social, in monadological form and without looking directly at society; there are many indications that the contemporary work of art represents society all the more accurately the less it takes society as its subject and the less it hopes for immediate social effect, whether that effect be success or practical intervention. In Joyce, and in fact already in Proust, the empirical continuum of time disintegrates because the biographical unity of a life history is external to the laws of form and incompatible with the subjective experience through which form is developed; this literary modus operandi, which corresponds precisely to what the Eastern bloc calls formalistic, converges with the disintegration of the temporal continuum in reality, the dying out of experience, something that ultimately goes back to the atemporal technified process of the production of material goods. Convergences of this kind show formalism to be the true realism, whereas procedures that mirror the real as instructed simulate by doing so a nonexistent state of reconciliation between reality and the subject. Realism in art has become ideology, like the mentality of so-called realistic people, who orient themselves by the desiderata and the offerings of existing institutions, and do not thereby become free of illusions, as they imagine, but only help to weave the veil that the force of circumstances lays on them in the form of the illusion that they are natural creatures.
Proust had used the gentler technique of involuntary memory, which has a number of things in common with Freudian associations. Joyce uses associations in the service of the tension between expression and meaning—the association is attached to the meanings of words, for the most part isolated from their argumentative contexts, but it receives its substance from expression, particularly that of what is unconscious. In the long run, however, it is impossible not to see that there is something inadequate in this solution. In Proust it comes to light in the fact that, contrary to what was intended, in the context of the text as written the authentic involuntary memories move to the background in favor of much more concrete elements of psychology and novelistic technique. The reason Proust himself, and especially his interpreters, have devoted so much attention to the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea is that that memory trace is one of the few in the work to satisfy Proust’s Bergson-derived program. Joyce, the younger of the two, deals less cautiously with empirical reality. He stretches the associations out so far that they become emancipated from discursive meaning. He has a price to pay for that: the association is not always clearly necessary; often it remains contingent, like its substratum, the psychology of the individual. The Hegelian idea that the particular is the general, an idea granted Hegel’s speculative thought as the fruit of innumerable mediations, becomes risky when the literary work takes it literally. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. With heroic efforts, Proust and Joyce take on this risk. Through self-reflection, they monitor the course of the arbitrary moment in the text, tolerating contingency only when its necessity is evident at the same time. It is no different in modern music, where at the height of free atonality the Schönberg of Die Erwartung listened attentively to the instinctual life of sounds and thereby protected that life from the compromises art made later, when the catchword “automatic” became popular. The hearing that co-executes those sounds and their consequences becomes the court of appeals that decides on their concrete logic. In no aesthetic medium has it been possible to remain at this null point between the most extreme passivity and the most extreme effort. Probably this is not even because the demands of doing so would exceed the capacities of productive genius. Certainly the extreme philistine is wrong when he intones that after the swing of the pendulum to the extremes of unconstrained subjectivism it is time to think about a middle-of-the-road objectivity which in actuality has already condemned itself as mediocre. On the contrary, after the Second World War all advanced art is moved to abandon that position because the necessity in which the subject is fully present, a necessity that would be one with living spontaneity, contains a moment of deception. Precisely where the freedom of the artistic subject imagines itself to be secure, its responses are determined by the power of habituated aesthetic procedures. What the subject feels to be its own autonomous achievement, the achievement of objectification, reveals itself in retrospect, after more than thirty years, to be permeated with residues of history. But those residues are no longer compatible with the immanent tendency of the material itself, and this holds as much for linguistic material as for the material of music or painting. What once tried to guarantee logic becomes, when obsolete, a dilemma, something false; a lien of traditionalism in an art that is drastically distinguished from traditional art by virtue of the fact that it has become allergic to residues of the traditional, just as traditional art was allergic to dissonance. In its conception, the twelve-tone technique in music was itself intended to shake off the traditionalist burden of subjective hearing, as in the gravitation of leading tones and cadences. What followed registered the fact that people now suspected another regression to outmoded and inappropriate forms in the categories of objectification that the later Schönberg established. One can no doubt transpose that to literature without wandering off into the commonplaces of intellectual history.
Technically, Helms’ experiment—and the defamatory word “experiment” is to be used in a positive sense; only as an experimental art, not as a secure art, does art still have a chance—is based on experiences and considerations like these. He takes an interest in Joyce similar to the interest that serial music and theory, to which he is close, take in free atonality and twelve-tone technique. It is obvious that FA: M’AHNIESGWOW is descended from Finnegans Wake. Helms makes no attempt to conceal that; nowadays the only place tradition has is in advanced works. The differences are more essential. Helms takes the same steps in literature that contemporary music has taken in music, and his work presents the same difficulties. While his structures owe their space and their material to the most extreme subjectivization, they no longer acknowledge the primacy of the subject, the criterion of the subject’s living co-execution. They completely reject the cliché of the creative, which is in any case nothing but mockery when applied to human work. The necessity internal to the subjectively constituted domain is sprung loose from the subject and set in opposition to it. The construction no longer conceives itself as an achievement of spontaneous subjectivity, without which, of course, it would scarcely be conceivable, but rather wants to be derived from a material that is in every case already mediated by the subject. While Joyce already uses different configurations and layers in different parts of his work, degrees of discursiveness that are balanced against one another, in Helms such previously desultory structural elements become dominant. The whole is composed in structures, put together in each case from a series of dimensions, or, in the terminology of serial music, parameters, that appear autonomously, or combined, or ordered hierarchically. A model may help to clarify the affinity of this procedure with the serial technique in music. The crisis of meaning as a phenomenal whole perceptible in the texture of its parts did not lead serial composers to simply liquidate meaning. Stockhausen retains meaning, that is, the immediately apperceptible context, as a limit value. A continuum extends from this to structures that renounce the customary mode of hearing meaning, namely the illusion of a necessity linking one sound to another. These structures can be grasped only in something like the way the eye surveys the surface of a picture as a whole. Helms’ conception stands in an analogous relationship to discursive meaning. Its continuum extends from quasi-narrative portions intelligible on the surface to parts in which the phonetic values, the pure expressive qualities, completely outweigh the semantic values, the meanings. The conflict between expression and meaning in language is not, as with the Dadaists, simply decided in favor of expression. It is respected as an antinomy. But the literary work does not accommodate to it as a homogeneous mixture. It polarizes it between extremes whose sequence is itself structure, that is, provides the work with its form.
Nor does the moment of contingency, which is inherent in Joyce’s associative technique of linguistic construction, a technique inherited by Helms, fall prey to construction. Instead, the latter tries to accomplish what association alone could not, and what discursive language had previously seemed to provide, tant bien que mal, in literature. The structuring of both the individual complexes and their relationship to one another is intended to immanently guarantee the lawfulness of the literary work, something neither an alienated empirical reality nor the inconclusive play of associations can provide. But the work is free of the naiveté of believing that contingency has thereby been eliminated. Contingency survives, both in the choice of structures and in the micro-realm of individual linguistic configurations. Thus contingency itself—again, as in serial composition—is made one of the parameters of the work, to which complete organization corresponds at the other extreme. Contingency, to which universalia have sunk in a situation of consistent aesthetic nominalism, is to become an artistic technique.
That moment of self-emphasizing contingency, which is the absence of the subject’s full presence in the work, is what is actually shocking in contemporary developments, in tachism no less than in developments in music and literature. Like most shocks, this one too bears witness to an old wound. For the state of reconciliation of subject and object, the subject’s full presence within the work of art, was also always an illusion, and it is almost appropriate to equate this illusion with aesthetic illusion as such. From the point of view of the work of art’s formal law, what was contingent in the work was not only its objects, which transcended it, and with which, to use a barbaric expression, it dealt. There was something fictitious about the requirements of its own logic as well. There was an element of deception in the notion that something was necessary which, as play, was never completely necessary; works of art never inherently obey the same causality as nature and society. But in the last analysis the constitutive subjectivity that wants to be present and from which the work of art is ultimately derived is itself contingent. The necessity that the subject enjoins in order to be present in the work is bought at the price of the constraints of an individuation in which the moment of arbitrariness cannot be denied. The ego, as what is immediate and closest to experience, is not the essential substance of experience; experience strips off the ego as something derivative. Whereas traditional art tried to abolish or at least gloss over such subjective contingency in the work, even with respect to its own law, the new art acknowledges the fact that the first is impossible and the second a lie. Instead of contingency triumphing behind the work’s back, it acknowledges itself to be an indispensable moment in the work and hopes by doing so to rid itself of some of its own fallibility. Through this acceptance of contingency, hermetic art, which the realists condemn, works against its illusory character and approaches reality. Up to the threshold of the modern period, works’ readiness to open themselves to the contingency of life instead of banishing it through the density of their web of meanings was always the ferment of what figured as realism. The moment of chance is realism’s awareness of itself at the moment when it renounces empirical reality. What stands it in good stead is the fact that, aesthetically, everything that is internally consistent, even the strict negation of meaning through the principle of change, establishes something like a second-order context of meaning. That allows it to be brought into a continuum with other aesthetic elements. In the working hypothesis of this kind of production, something that no longer claims to be subject to the law of form is in harmony with it.
This hypothesis is in opposition to a widely accepted view of contemporary art: that the constructive tendencies—in Cubist painting and its derivatives—and the subjective-expressive tendencies—Expressionism and Surrealism—are mere opposites, two divergent possibilities for artistic technique. The two moments are not coupled in an external synthesis but rather dissolve into one another: the one could not exist without the other. Only reduction to pure expression creates space for an autonomous construction that no longer makes use of any schema external to the matter itself; at the same time it needs construction to fortify pure expression against its contingency. Construction, however, becomes artistic—as opposed to the literal mathematical construction of purposeful forms—only when it fills itself with what is heterogeneous and irrational with respect to it—with the material, as it were; otherwise it would remain condemned to spin its wheels. In psychoanalytic terms, expression and construction would belong together in the emancipated work like the ego and the unconscious. Where id is, there shall ego be, says modern art along with Freud. But the ego cannot be healed of its cardinal sin, the blind, self-devouring domination of nature that recapitulates the state of nature forever, by subjecting internal nature, the id, to itself as well. The ego can be healed only by becoming reconciled with the unconscious, knowingly and freely following it where it leads. Just as the true human being would be not the one who suppressed his drives but rather the one who looked them in the eye and fulfilled them without doing them violence and without subjecting himself to their power, so today the true work of art would have to adopt a stance on freedom and necessity that can serve as a model. The composer Ligeti may have been thinking of this when he pointed out the dialectical reversal of total determination and total contingency in music. Helms’ intention is not far from this. If I may speak in terms of literary history, it aims at something like a Joyce come into his own, self-conscious, consistent, and fully organized. Certainly Helms would be the last to claim that he had surpassed Joyce or, as the popular but revolting word has it, “overcome” him. The history of art is not a boxing match in which the younger vanquishes the older; even in advanced art, where one work seems to criticize another, matters do not proceed in so agonistic a fashion. Such fanfares in literature would be as foolish as praising a serial composition as better than Schönberg’s Erwartung, which is more than fifty years old. Greater consistency is not equivalent to higher quality. It is valid to ask, however, whether progress in the mastery of material is not bought at too high a price; whether the authenticity of Schönberg or Joyce does not stem precisely from the tension between their substance, which has not fully coalesced, and their material and technique. This question, however, cannot retard artistic praxis. That praxis has no choice but to fulfill needs that remained unfulfilled in the older works, and to fulfill them consistently, with integrity, and without looking back. It can only hope to annul, through its own consistency, something of the curse on those older works as it manifests itself in the relationship between construction and chance. But it cannot, mindful of the power of work that was not yet fully consistent, return to a position that is historically past. Rather than do so, it has to accept a loss of quality; in any case there is never a preestablished harmony between intention and quality. The tension between them and something heteronomous is the one thing that works of art cannot will of themselves, the one thing on which everything depends. It is what has become of what work were once said to be graced with, the truth content, over which the works themselves have no power.
Technically, Helms moves away from Joyce’s technique by subjecting psychological word associations, which he does not avoid, to a canon. That canon is derived from the inventory of objective spirit, from the relationships and cross-connections between words and their fields of association in various languages. They had already played a role in Finnegans Wake but are now part of the design. A philologically guided complex of associations, drawn from the material of language, is intended to take the place of the type of association familiar to us from the psychoanalytic technique that uses words as a key to the unconscious. Philology acquires a similar function in Beckett. But Helms aims at nothing less than breaking out of the monologue intérieur, whose structure is the prototype for the whole but which now provides not the law of the literary work but its material. The eccentric features in Helms’ experiments, the ones in which, as always in art, one can see the differentia specifica of his approach, are a result of that. He is something like a parody of the seventeenth-century poeta doctus, the poetic antithesis of the imago of the poet as the one who hearkens to the source—an image that has since degenerated into fraud. He expects knowledge of the linguistic components and elements of reality he employs and encodes. Such works have always been explicated through commentary, and this one too is designed for commentary, like the German Baroque dramas to which the learned Silesians appended their scholia. But this increases, to a bewildering degree, a quality long preestablished in modernism; aside from Joyce himself, whose Finnegan was never embarrassed about its need for explication, it is found in Eliot and Pound. Helms’ work provokes the objection of translatability. The plot that one can extract discursively from FA: M’AHNIESGWOW, the erotic scenes between Michael and Helène, are by no means so unconventional that they would of themselves require such intricate arrangements. König has already pointed out that the parameter of content does not keep pace with the parameter of technique; he explains that on the basis of the author’s youth. Why, however, encode something that by convention can be narrated? The objection stems from an aesthetics centered around the concept of the symbol. It attacks the excess of meanings over what is given contemplative form in accordance with the norms of that aesthetics. The hermetic claim, in this view, is nullified, in that it is dependent for its immanent development on something it cannot accomplish of itself. This much at least may serve as a rejoinder—that this failure to be fully absorbed in the content, a failure related to the spirit of allegory, is essential to this content. Like the conception of a work of art as an unequivocal complex of meaning, the fiction of its harmonious form and its pure, closed immanence is challenged, a fiction that has no grounds other than that complex of meaning. The unmediated identity of graphicness and intention to which traditional art aspired but for good reasons never realized, is given up, for good reasons. By breaking off communication, by being closed in its own way, the hermetic work of art puts an end to the closed quality that earlier works bestowed on their subject matter without having it fully themselves. The hermetic work, however, forms within itself the discontinuity that is the discontinuity between the world and the work. The broken medium that does not fuse expression and meaning, does not integrate the one with the other by sacrificing it but instead drives both to unreconciled difference, becomes the bearer of the substance of what is broken and distant from meaning. The rupture, which the work does not bridge but rather, lovingly and hopefully, makes the agent of its form, remains, the figure of a substance that transcends it. It expresses meaning through its ascetic stance toward meaning.