Love of the Other as Other: What is Enchantment and Wonder?

We in the West and those societies worldwide have been disenchanted over the last century seem to be in especial need of re-enchantment and a renewed sense of wonder. Thankfully, a new book by Patrick Curry, Art and Enchantment, does precisely that. Early on Curry makes clear his intentions, “This book celebrates and defends the experience of wonder in art, and of art in enchanting. It explores the characteristics, conditions and dynamics of artistic creativity and appreciation. But it also concerns the absence of enchantment, and the reasons for that.”

Thus when Curry talks about the later works of Mondrian and their intense abstractness, which he calls “an ascetic geometry” I am reminded of Pascal’s comparison of geometry and finesse by which Pascal means to draw attention to something missing rather as when Curry asks, “where is the in between, liminal metaphoric space in Mondrian’s abstracts that enchantment needs [?]…its lack of tensive truth?” Readers of Eric Voegelin and William Desmond will immediately feel on familiar ground here: this in-between quality, our metaxic condition itself, the tension between our coming to be from a source beyond ourselves and our finally passing out of our temporal state is the very mystery of life itself which can be experienced as both a source of wonder or enchantment or a most definitely terrifying and disenchanting fear as, again, Pascal, was equally aware of.

Curry doesn’t especially pursue the philosophical line of inquiry here: his approach will be the artistic texts themselves and he will ask does this painting, piece of music or song, poem or novel enchant, or not.

In some ways I found this an unsatisfying approach. I always wanted more explanation of why an artistic creation did or did not enchant even as I of course knew that no such explanation (which would in every case amount to a geometrical deconstruction in which finesse would have been among the first casualties) was possible; Curry, too, will confirm near the book’s end, “But none of this is meant to be an ‘explanation’ of artistic wonder, rather a way to think about it which respects the phenomenon and perhaps even deepens it.” Indeed, when I was reading I somehow knew, at some deeper level, what Curry was getting at. For example, when he talks about “new voices of enchantment” in folk-rock music I can certainly understand what he means as he describes none as having

…been more distinctive than that of Joanna Newsom, and here’s a paradox that should alert us to the presence of a truth. Newsom’s particular concrete magic is undeniable, whether it appeals to you or not, and her relative success confounds any final despair about the dominance of commercially driven pop. I don’t mean only her singing voice, which matured in her later work, but her sensibility and style, both musically and poetically lyrical. (I feel her lyrics bear comparison with Wallace Steven’s poems.)

Yes, I agree! I feel much the same thing about Newsom’s work, but that, of course, doesn’t actually mean that ‘her magic is undeniable’. You may find it quite unpleasant (she does have a very singular singing voice!).

I feel in almost every example from all the fields of artistic expression that he alludes to, that Curry is somehow saying the right thing, and I know that precision is impossible. Curry, too, is well aware of an inescapable subjectivity to all feelings of enchantment: it is inevitably personal – part of one’s own inner narrative – of which something will be lost in any attempt at communication; although attempting that communication may be irresistible, even necessary. Of Mondrian again, and as an example of this, we know that Curry finds little that enchants in his paintings, and after delivering a talk on this he tells us that, nevertheless “…a friend objected afterwards that he found Mondrian’s abstract paintings thoroughly enchanting. This was bound to happen, of course.” Because…”the temperament and knowledge of the viewer, listener, or reader of art can open or close doors to its enchantment.” Knowledge is important here, as Curry explains, as he tells us about his friend,

He was also a visual artist and intimately acquainted with the development of modern abstract art, which he found realised one day upon entering the room of Mondrian’s work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In other words, his knowledge of that story – together with his own particular self-story – opened a door to the enchanted potential of those paintings: a door that in their absence remains close to many people; myself included.

And as an example of music that does not enchant, Curry says of Schoenberg, “The composer decided it [tonality] should be replaced with a new system, one which imposes on the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, refusing to settle on any key, scale or tonic, and using mathematical means to achieve that end”. Rather too much geometricism and too little finesse! What this removes is the very human itself, in all its vulnerable mortality, and later, when discussing Tolkien, Curry will describe the folly “…trying to literally live forever – whether as a cyborg, uploaded software, cryogenic zombie or some other post-humanist – can only result in the hideous parody of immortality that he [Tolkien] calls ‘endless serial living.”‘ The point being that the human cannot be mathematicized into immortality and that this is mathematicism of the worst kind.

However, there could seem to be a danger here of the specter of pall of relativity so smothering that these personal narratives – “self-stories” – seem to be mere irrelevancies in a world where finding enchantment a value in itself is rendered a meaningless kind of subjective, even solipsistic, selfishness. Yet, if this was the case, we would be obliged to call an author like Proust (much admired by Curry) rather self-obsessed, even to the point of writing a 4000+ page novel about his own loosely described personal experiences. Why should anyone else find it worthwhile spending a considerable amount of time and effort reading about someone else’s experiences?

Perhaps Curry’s comments on the “little phrase” that haunts Charles Swann in the first book of In Search of Lost Time will help us here. Curry notes that many attempts have been made to identify the actual source of the fictional Vinteuil’s five-note sequence. This is interesting, but for an understanding of Proust irrelevant, as Curry explains,

In any case, by keeping the identity of the music fictional Proust intelligently refused the reassuring but misleading closure that would have resulted from being able to identify what it is in ‘real life’. Only that way can its potential universality be saved from being put in a precisely-de-limited historical box, ‘known’ and then forgotten.

Universality is the key here. Not in the sense of generality, rather in the sense of intensely meaningful personal experience – which we all surely have – but which nonetheless can, especially if related with sufficient artistic skill, be shared with others. When we read a great writer like Proust we enter the communicative tones, timbres and melodies of the text which, Curry’s words again (on the poetry of music), “fits my own experience of music, and it accords with what we know of enchantment: finding the musical idea already in one’s personal inner citadel – the humility required to be in its service rather that the performer’s own – and its unbiddability.”

When we experience art that moves and enchants us it is this innerness—what William Desmond would call our passio essendi in (com)union with the intimate universal (Curry’s notion of  “concrete magic” resonates with this) that enables us to transcend the temporal limitations of our individual lives and experience, often only momentarily, often surprisingly, what we call (and know as) wonder. This sense of the intimate universal in forms of enchantment in which our personal passions resonate, the feeling, so to speak, of an otherness absolutely other, a sense of a transcendence in which we are both ourselves personally and universally intimate with that which must still be in excess of our personal experience. This is a positive experience – possibly even a kind of immortalizing – and, as such, it is enchanting.

Further, Curry has many illuminating things to say about literature especially, perhaps, children’s literature, and it is when discussing Tolkien (an author who clearly transcends any confinement to the genre of children’s literature) that I find him most compelling. He suggests interestingly of “appreciating The Lord of the Rings, not uncritically, but post-critically” and that this “could almost be a test of the seasoned naïveté needed to apprehend this truth.” This truth being that “Great books…allow readers to achieve their own personal experience more fully and directly.”

Curry compares Tolkien to George R. R. Martin, perhaps the contemporary world’s most famous fantasy writer. Curry sees the latter’s Game of Thrones as the antithesis of Lord of the Rings. For Curry, Martin’s works are anything but enchanting. As such, they reflect the loss of enchantment, the very antithesis of the fantasy genre and a manifestation of the dead, sterile, unimaginative world of modernity:

Martin’s stories concentrate relentlessly on the opposite of enchantment in all respects: violence, cruelty, misogyny and power (political, ethnic, sexual). It fascinates some of us and can even enchant as skillful narrative. However, we are apparently also supposed to respect it more ‘real’. But are wonder, delight and kindness any less real than squalid power-ploys? And why is nihilism truer than Tolkien’s qualified affirmation of life?

The point, here, is well made. Curry asks rhetorically of Middle-Earth “Do I need to add that this is a world still open to enchantment?” and refers to Tolkien’s “sense (despite the lack of formal religion, which Tolkien deliberately excluded) of a cosmic dimension to life.”

In the final sentence of his book Curry states: “The enchantment of art must be allowed to stand on its own terms: a unique and precious voice in the human conversation which needs, and indeed will bear, no further justification.” And yet I find myself thinking that it will bear more justification, and that Curry has already shown us how this might be the case when he reminds us of Tolkien’s “definition of enchantment as a love of the other as other.” Perhaps “the human conversation” must finally be further justified in its relation to this other?

My point here is a complex one and yet I don’t want to detract from my review of Patrick Curry’s book as it stands, beyond this final observation. Curry quotes Karen Blixen’s comment that ‘It would be terrible if the explanation of the work [of art] were outside the work itself’” and he adds, “It would indeed be fatal.” But would it be fatal? If so where or what, then, would be the “cosmic dimension to life” (which great art must surely invoke) let alone any relation to “a love of the other as other.” Earlier Curry observed, when talking about Mikhail Bulgakov, a “creative confusion of levels or worlds that are normally kept distinct and apart [as] a key dynamic of enchantment…It works in the same way as encounters when perspectives meet, and gaps are bridged.” Could this suggest, though, that the “distinct and apart” dynamism by being “bridged” is also, as it were, rendered indistinct, even reduced to a flat univocalism? We seem to need a more robust sense of otherness.

From the perspective of a liminality that focuses on boundaries, which perhaps suggests an in between that is in between two ‘entities’ that could recognize and even in a sense become each other, in comparison with a metaxological perspective which would rather see the incompleteness of our state as unsurpassable from any human perspective. And that is a good thing because it confirms the irreducible mystery which is existence itself as forever (i.e. temporally) beyond us: it (the mystery) is in a sense this transcendence itself, that from which we come to be and to which we finally return. This is the heteroarchic Other, radical and absolute, and all our “love(s) of the other as other” are, so to say, grounded in this (what Voegelin would call First Reality). I’m tempted to wonder, pardon the pun, if enchantment, rather than as a bridge across two distinct ‘objects’ would be more like standing in a Heraclitan river, always the same (it is bound to be my or your perspective, after all) and yet always different, and when we are enchanted, as we may be by art, perhaps we can for a moment feel, sense or even see a vision of that which always exceeds, is absolutely other to, our perspective(s)? We would be:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor
fleshless:
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance
is,
But neither arrest nor movement.

Eliot’s comparison’s (from Burnt Norton) continue, and they culminate when

All shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of fire are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

This con-fusion, a coming together of opposites is the “concrete magic” of the “intimate universal” – not a condition of aporia, but rather a dynamism, possibly paradoxical to us, but which nevertheless we can sense and make sense of. Perhaps we do something like this when we experience enchanting art, an encounter which is a-temporally beyond paradox and also, incidentally, beyond the temporal tyranny of the iron fist of the law of contradiction: a place where A can be both A and not A. Yet Curry had earlier observed that

…enchantment often has a bittersweet, poignant, even melancholy undertow. It can, perhaps perversely, induce pre-emptive nostalgia for something present but whose absence is already palpable. ‘Even in Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo’s cry,’ writes Basho, I long for Kyoto’. How much art is an attempt to freeze the moment of presence and thereby defer that absence? And doesn’t the very success of the few masterpieces which pull this off (Vermeer comes to mind) inadvertently remind us that it is ultimately impossible?

Nevertheless, in the lines by Eliot quoted above (from Little Gidding) we may feel the enchantment of the beatific vision: this vision/description of the impossible entwining of opposites (fire and rose) that can only take place at the “no-place” of the Beyond; and in this (metaxological) sense the “explanation of the work” of art is and must be always “outside the work itself”: the most dynamic element of enchantment would then indeed be the ability to take us beyond the merely human to a sense perhaps, at least, of the sublime Beyond itself. To paraphrase William Desmond, this would be a companioning between our freedom of being and a being together with the other (even the “big” Other – the absolute heteroarchic Beyond, the very source of our coming to be) beyond the dyadic opposition of (our) autonomy and heteronomy. If art can do this, and Curry’s book provides many apposite and persuasive examples that demonstrate that it sometimes can, then the case for the value and use of art, a value and use that is utterly unlike any conceived of in any utilitarian sense, is proved. Just possibly, in moments when we are wonderstruck with enchantment, we could find ourselves, in a sense, both in Kyoto and, knowing it for the first time: one would be in Kyoto and Kyoto would be present in oneself and thus both would be simultaneously beyond any singularly separate or univocal status. That would be a true sense of presence, not in any way dyadic and, as such, ultimately possible, and art would indeed have succeeded in “freezing the moment of presence.”

I enjoyed Patrick Curry’s book and can recommend it to readers. It deals with an important theme that our world desperately needs. Thanks to him (and many others like Bradley Birzer) I no longer feel that indulging my love of Tolkien is quite a guilty pleasure as I previously thought. Further, I can add the names of many artists, writers and musicians whose work Curry has persuaded me I ought to be more familiar with – and I look forward to my encounters with them. We in the West, perhaps most especially, need to re-invigorate our sense wonder/enchantment/astonishment or whatever appropriate signifier we use because in our world of distracted desires and their deflection so often onto merely material things, and thus the ever-widening dominance of a crass utilitarianism with its constant deferral of ends to means, we need to do it now. This book is a welcome addition in support of that need.

Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works
By Patrick Curry
Abingdon: Routledge, 2023; 244pp

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