While Gadamer’s interest in “tradition” and in the historical rootedness of understanding is a frequently acknowledged point of discussion, his concern with what he calls “tarrying” in our experience of the work of art is relatively under-represented. This section aims at showing how thinking style through Gadamer involves considering these two, closely related aspects of temporality: firstly, how it is reductive to think of style as a static aspect of a work since understanding always involves the fusion of horizons within tradition but also across temporalities; and, secondly, how in the encounter with the work, style functions as a moment of intensification that urges us to linger and tarry with the work thus somehow shifting the axis of time from linear horizontality to what can be called a vertical axis of experience.
In “The Relevance of the Beautiful” Gadamer writes that “the essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry” (RB 45). Extending and fine- tuning the implications of this essay, Gadamer later argues that works “are marked by an immediate presentness in time and at the same time by a rising above time.” On the one hand, there is something in a literary work worthy of this designation that transcends temporality and “speaks to us across all temporal distance”; on the other hand, the work of art “affect[s] us immediately” through a process that involves “that one tarry with its form” and that “directs our thinking” to something “that is completely unnameable” (AWI 58). The tarrying with form—an intensification of the presentness of the event—gives way to an opening that transcends temporality, the “truth” of the work of art.
The experience of a literary or pictorial work involves what Gadamer calls “Gleichzeitigkeit” (“simultaneity” or “contemporaneousness”) in the sense that “one does not have to know at all from what distance in the past, from what foreignness, what one encounters comes” (AWI 60). While, as Richard J. Bernstein points out, Gadamer is sometimes “criticized for engaging in a sentimental nostalgia for past traditions and epochs,”19 far from treating “tradition” conservatively as determining the
19 Richard J. Bernstein, “The Constellation of Hermeneutics, Critical Theory and Deconstruction,” in
experience of art, Gadamer speaks of how one is drawn into the “path” of the work in the present. Rather than trying to reconstruct the historical reality from which a work might have arisen or, as Gadamer puts it, “see the artistic creations of a past age through the eyes of a past age” (AWI 61), Gadamer thinks of “the absolute presentness of art to all times and places” (AWI 60). Indeed, Gadamer sees “something repellent in the very idea that art, which possesses such a captivating presentness, could become a mere object of historical research” (AWI 61). Seen in the light of the subject of this dissertation, Gadamer’s emphasis on contemporaneousness redirects attention from a reconstruction of the origins of style (man, ideology, reader, content) to a consideration of the eventhood of style in the presentness of the encounter. More specifically, it is in the experiential moment of tarrying with the work that one can locate the importance of style as an aspect of poiesis in Gadamer’s ontology of the work.
The Greek term, “poiesis,” is used by Gadamer to talk about that which makes something a work of art in the “absolute presentness” that grips us. The word, as Gadamer explains, has the double meaning of “to make” and “the art of composing poetry” (AWI 62) and Gadamer retains this ambivalence to think of poiesis in terms of how “poetry is the making of a ‘text’” (AWI 63). Building on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”—even if Gadamer thinks of temporality differently20—Gadamer speaks of poetry by “echo[ing] the religious concept of the Creation,” as a “making” which allows “whole worlds […] to rise up out of nothingness, and non-being [to] come […] to be being” (AWI 63). Our experience of art lets the work be and this, in turn, captivates us and immerses us in the work. Art, for Gadamer, is not an object that we admire from a distance but a process and an experience:
When a work of art truly takes hold of us, it is not an object that stands opposite us which we look at in hope of seeing through it to an intended conceptual meaning. Just the reverse. The work is an ereignis—an event that “appropriates us” into itself. It jolts us, it knocks us over, and sets up a world of its own, into which we are drawn, as it were. (AE 71)
In thinking of poetry as the creation of something out of nothing and as not being directed at anything predetermined, Gadamer is also appealing to the Kantian premise of the beautiful being something “about which it is never appropriate to ask what it is ‘for’.” Referring to the contrast between the Greek concept of kalon (fine) and chrēsimon (useful), Gadamer thinks of poetry non-teleocratically as “a producing that
20 Gadamer assimilates several aspects of Heidegger’s work on the ontology of the work of art, claiming
that art is “its own origin” and “affirms itself” (TM 119). However, while for Gadamer art brings its own world into existence, it does not found a new historical “epoch” (RB xii).
brings about nothing useful” (AWI 64). If art has a telos or “goal,” this telos is immanent to itself. Temporality, therefore, is thought of not in terms of “a one-after- another sequence” but in terms of the “temporal structure of tarrying,” an immanent contemporaneity of duration (AWI 70). Tarrying refers to the experience of literature. It is like a conversation that absorbs us and through which the truth of the work emerges. At the heart of this experience but not its telos, there is an intensive (vertical rather than horizontal, an intensification rather than a progression) awareness of form, of style, of sound, of the presentness of the work. To describe what I have been calling the verticality of the experience, Gadamer uses the term “volume” and he contrasts this amplification of intensity to “duration,” a term that “means only further movement in a single direction” (AE 76–77). As Sheila Ross puts it, “during this tarrying experience an awareness of ‘time passing’ is absent.”21 It is perhaps in this sense that, in “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” Gadamer claims that tarrying “is the only way that is granted to us finite beings to relate to what we call eternity” (RB 45).
Along with tarrying, another fundamental notion relevant to Gadamer’s view of the temporality of the work of art is his “profoundly participatory” understanding of tradition.22 For Gadamer, the work cannot be conceived as a static object for our consumption and detached analysis—a text with a content and a style that we can dissect and classify through scientific observation—as that would involve “rais[ing] ourselves above the course of events” (CON 237–238). Tradition, for Gadamer, is “not just the careful preservation of monuments, but the constant interaction between our aims in the present and the past to which we still belong,” including the works of art we encounter (RB 49). Following Heidegger, Gadamer deems our understanding of the world to be always “finite” and one cannot face the “other”—be it a historical event, another person, or a work of art—objectively and in an unconditioned way. Moreover, the lingusiticality of our being-in-the-world means that “fore-knowledge […] is and remains the vehicle of all understanding” (TM 564). Tradition does not simply “limit” our understanding of the world but actually “makes it possible” (TM 354). The encounter with the work allows us to, every time singularly and differently, “grasp and express the past anew” (RB 49). Style, then, is not a fixed aspect of a work to be reconstituted through careful analysis—the signature of a writer, the reflection of
21 Sheila Ross, “The Temporality of Tarrying in Gadamer,” Theory Culture Society 23.1 (2006): 101–123
(106).
content, a particular manifestation of generic norms—but something that arises singularly, every time as if for a first time, in the eventhood of the work being read.
The understanding of historical events, works of art, or texts from the past is a form of dialogue. Understanding a text, therefore, also involves being aware of one’s own consciousness or “horizon of understanding” and the way this horizon “re- awaken[s] the text’s meaning” (TM 390). It is this co-implication in the eventhood of work that, according to Gadamer, the traditional notion of style as a normative and descriptive term fails to capture. If style is understood as teleocratically originating from a source—an author, a genre, an era or a subject matter—then, style is “inconsequential” for Gadamer, as it would be for Heidegger, in speaking about the work of art as an event (OWA 39). However, one may think of style as an aspect of poiesis, something which makes us linger and tarry with the work as it comes into being. While the “truth” of the work transcends style, it can only arise or become visible through this tarrying with the materiality of the work rather than through a transparent transmission of a pre-existing truth.