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Thus literature necessarily gnaws away at existence and the world, reducing to nothing (but this nothing is horror) these steps by which we go along confidently from one result to another, from one success to another1_.

A historical overview of the aesthetic category of Stimmung has unearthed the most significant inflections this concept has developed in the context of European thought. From the Pythagorean notion of a universal harmony to its redefinition in the modern age, Stimmung has remained intimately connected to its origin in the musical context where it designates, first and foremost, a relationship and a process. After its successive subjectivisation throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the emergence of urban modernity has, once again, uncovered that relationality inherent in the notion of attunement. Heidegger’s ontology and subsequent enquiries into the nature of the subject and the conditions of human existence underline the ontological primacy of Stimmung and the subject’s contingency on its attunement to the world and to other subjects. At the same time, literary articulations of a novel mode of experience that are related to the modern have given prominence to the key role this phenomenon plays within modern aesthetics.

The readings in this study, though by no means exhaustive, have given us an overview of pivotal modes and manifestations of the aesthetic category of Stimmung in modern literature. Since the scope of my analysis has been confined to – in the broadest sense – European works of narrative fiction ranging from the mid- nineteenth to the late-twentieth century, it covers only a very specific and historically limited view on the aesthetics and philosophy of mood in the context of modernity; and yet, the authors chosen represent a movement central to the reflection on and literary articulation of aesthetic and existential forms of attunement within the paradigm of modernity. In this context, I have conceptualised modernity as an epistemological category that has established a new way of thinking about experience and existence specific to the European post-Renaissance age.

1 _{Georges Bataille, ‘Molloy’s Silence’, trans. by Jean M. Sommermeyer, in Samuel Beckett by Birkett and} Ince, pp. 85-92 (p. 92).

Through an interpretation of three principal works by Dostoevsky, we have first encountered a concept of Stimmung that embeds this phenomenon deep within the urban space of nineteenth-century Petersburg. Echoing Baudelaire’s originary definition of modernity as a sense of fleetingness and contingency engendered by the novel urban environment as well as Dickens’s depiction of the city as a space of uncertainty and alienation, Dostoevsky’s works were complicit in heralding a new response to the material and epistemological vicissitudes of modernisation and in shaping literary modes and themes that would influence principal writers of literary modernism, such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and William Faulkner. According to André Gide, Dostoevsky’s works open up an aesthetic discourse on ‘the individual and his self’2 _{that had previously been absent in European literature. Both Notes from} Underground and Crime and Punishment depict protagonists that are symptomatic of a modern pathology uncovering fundamentally disturbed grounds of existence and thus initiated a literary existentialism that is intimately connected to the emergence of the modern age. Raskolnikov and the underground man equally represent the curse of modern subjectivity and of radical individualism; at the same time, their subject positions are fundamentally contingent on material space and affective ‘climate’ as a mode of transsubjective historical attunement.

In The Idiot,then, a shift towards intersubjectivity takes place: the intensity of affect both depicted and created by the novel posits the paradigm of mood as its organising principle, thus establishing a poetics of anti-rationalism, volatility and affectedness which radically foregrounds the dimension of aesthetic immediacy. Dostoevsky’s notion of ‘fantastic’ realism portrays a narrative world in which dislocation and dissonance – generated by the modern condition and a detrimental capitalist ethos – become part and parcel of a new existential status quo. As a result of this perception, The Idiot develops an aesthetic structure in which the reader is thrown into this very dislocation since she consistently needs to attune to the rapidly changing atmosphere, tone and genre of the text. Due to the intense affective involvement the novel causes in its readers, de Jonge views Dostoevsky’s œuvre as a significant element of a new literary movement in which the intensity of experience

provokes a ‘pure aesthetic response’3_{, thereby marking a move away from pure}

semantics and towards the experiential dimension of art.

Beckett’s narrative fiction continues Dostoevsky’s enquiry into the nature of affect and attunement. The notion of harmony – which, according to Leo Spitzer, has dominated Western philosophy from the Pythagoreans to the Renaissance age and which had long been fashioned as the main objective of art – lies at the heart of Beckett’s early reflections on Stimmung in Murphy and Watt. In these works, attunement is approached through its etymological origin: the musical. Both Murphy and Watt represent an existential form of being that is defined by its fundamental dissonance with the world. The search for harmony – both existential and aesthetic – results in a futile pursuit of ‘Apmonia’ as Murphy’s inability to fruitfully integrate the Pythagorean concept of harmony into his skewed sense of being is, from the start, doomed to fail since the world around him is marked by an element of discordance and dissonance. Subsequently, in Watt the metaphor of attunement manifests itself through a literal tuning incident: the piano tuners’ visit early in the novel proves that the establishment of an attunement has, by definition, become impossible. No material basis remains that would allow for the creation of harmony, both in a musical and in a transcendental sense; any attempt to induce a harmonious form of

Stimmung – such as equal temperament –is fundamentally flawed, basing a perceived sense of attunement upon a corrupted system.

These reflections on the conditions of attunement are, then, complemented by a more affect-driven understanding of Stimmung in the trilogy. In Molloy, Beckett’s dictum ‘[a]ll I am is feeling’ translates into a hermeneutics of reading in which the reader’s central role in generating textual meaning through affective experience supplants the paradigm of representation. As the characters in the novel see, first, a degradation of their subject position and then the loss thereof, the reader’s position is progressively approximated to a form of existence that is predicated upon the notions of displacement and transsubjectivity. This dispossession of self continues in Malone Dies and The Unnamable, in which the dispossessed subject makes way for a mode of intersubjective affectedness that becomes the new status quo of human existence. In these texts, and in Company, Beckett poses the fundamental question of whether we can ever be truly alone, unattuned to others, and whether art is capable of producing

such a state. No definitive answers are given: on the one hand, virtually all of Beckett’s narrators speak from a place of all-encompassing solipsism; but on the other hand, their need for company governs the fact that they are forever seeking to speak to, entice and attune their readers.

Bernhard, the third author in this compendium of modes of Stimmung in modern literature, invigorates the aesthetic reflection on the preconditions of existence and aesthetics through the affective extremes his texts generate. The mock genre of the Erregung is emblematic of his poetics of intensity, rendering it impossible for the reader to encounter his texts with indifference and, further, overriding traditional genre conventions and preconceived notions of aesthetic reception. Constituting Bernhard’s most overt comment on the nature of art, his 1980s trilogy juxtaposes the author’s trademark narrative devices – obsessive narrators displaying a propensity for monomania, spiteful rants about the Austrian state, its Nazi past and Catholicism, incessant repetitions, narrative circularity, minimalistic plot development – with a reflection on art that is framed through an analysis of three art forms: music, theatre and visual art. Bernhard’s own understanding of Stimmung as a crucial element of artistic production and reception deeply informs all three novels as they interrogate the nature of existence and the modes of being with others as fundamentals of aesthetic theory.

In line with Beckett’s exploration of musical attunement, Der Untergeher

revolves around the realm of the musical and the parallels between musical and existential structures. Bernhard’s musical prose here avails itself of structures borrowed from Bach’s Goldberg Variations and other classical pieces to depict the relationship between its three protagonists as a quasi-contrapuntal attunement, creating a semiotic plane of meaning that emancipates itself from the semantic. Creating an opposition between the perceived form of perfection in art and a sense of failure, contingency and insufficiency in life, the eponymous ‘Untergeher’ ends his life to fulfil his contrapuntal ‘role’; however, fractures in the tapestry of musical and artistic harmony expose the very insufficiency of art in relation to life.

As we have also seen, subsequently, Holzfällen shifts its focus to the performing arts and creates a forcefully immediate spectacle that is reminiscent of the dramatic genre. The nameless narrator’s irritation steadily increases in the course of the odious

artistic dinner, and while his rage is overwhelmingly internal, the reader is included in this intense affective state through a dialectical relationship with the narrator.