Conclusion: Art and Life Rhythms

Abstract

In this book I argued that aesthetic experience is rooted in, and stems from, a negotiation between the energies of two different realms which, although essentially opposed, must converge in order to produce that experience. One is the realm of historical time, of objective, measurable time, the other is the realm of subjective experience, of intuition which is not amenable to measure. Aesthetic experience is the result of an interaction between the two realms, which are signposted in an art text through its metaphoric and metonymic order, to borrow the terms Roman Jakobson defined in his 1956 essay, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’ (Jakobson, 1990, p. 129). In the terms of the present study, the metaphoric order of literary discourse gives a text’s poetic dimension, as Jakobson argued, but also the religious character of the aesthetic experience the text engenders, which in older times was connected to myth and ritual, making aesthetic experience an experience of the sacred or of the subliminal night-mind. The metonymic order of literary discourse gives a text its prosaic dimension, but also gives an ironic character to aesthetic experience, which in older times was connected to logos as opposed to mythos, making aesthetic experience an experience of the profane daily life transposed in a negotiation or carnivalesque contestation of authority, including the authority of mythos. In Yeats’s texts the metaphoric order prevails, whereas in Joyce’s texts the metonymic order gains prominence, but in both cases the texts have metaphoric as well as metonymic dimensions.