The Fleeting Promise of Art by Peter Uwe Hohendahl

Author:Peter Uwe Hohendahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

PART II

4

REALITY, REALISM, AND

REPRESENTATION

The specter of realism haunts Adorno’s theory. The concept is both used and rejected in his theory of the novel, which is available mostly in the form of isolated essays that focus on individual novelists. Adorno’s resistance to the notion of realism is grounded in his concept of the artwork, in particular its emphatic distance from empirical reality.1 This aspect is forcefully articulated in his understanding of poetry. In his seminal essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957; NL 1:37–54) Adorno attempts to persuade an audience of educated German listeners that poetry, while first and foremost determined by the formal organization of its language, is somehow also connected to the social conditions of its time.2 Rhetorically, he uses the supposed suspicion of the audience that he might intend to impose on poetry a sociological approach from the outside, in order to argue for the possibility or even necessity of an intrinsic sociology of literature. While his listeners or readers might have granted the feasibility of a sociology of the novel, they would have most likely rejected a sociological approach to poetry because the content of poetry, it seems, does not lend itself easily to such a method.

The underlying assumption of this argument is that a sociology of literature is based on a comparison between the content of the artwork and the social phenomena surrounding it. In other words, the investigation seeks to uncover the reflection of the real world in the artwork. The fictional world of the novel, for instance, is supposed to mirror the historical conditions. By deliberately choosing poetry rather than the novel or the drama, Adorno makes his case more difficult to argue, but he also raises the stakes. If one can demonstrate that a connection between the poem and its social environment does exist, the legitimacy of a sociological approach becomes apparent and a broader use of the method can be considered. Adorno seeks to win his argument by laying out the conditions for a persuasive procedure. First of all, the relationship to the social has to be substantive, that is, explicating an essential element of the poem; second, the expressive moment of the poem must be connected to the universal (das Allgemeine). Yet Adorno immediately qualifies this statement by suggesting that the universal is not the same as the universality of the concept but a particular moment transposed to a higher level. Third, the procedure of reading must not look at the social position of the poem or its special social interests (for instance, speaking out for a revolutionary or conservative political cause).

How would a sociology of poetry operate and succeed if these conditions were met? Its point of departure would be formal analysis, exploring the language of the poem, because it is through the medium of language that both subjective expression and the objective articulation of the social problematic are generated. Yet this objective aspect cannot be defined in terms of reflection (mirror). Adorno is adamant that such a procedure would miss the essential meaning of the poem and degrade it to the level of ideology.

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