To pursue the issue, related to Wilson's
criticism of "Bend Sinister," when he exaggerates Nabokov's lack
of information and knowledge about political issues, I tried to
read other works which dealt with the meanders
in the relationship between art, metaphysics and politics.
Off-list I was offered the opportunity to read
James Bonney's
M.A. Thesis (December 2008) about "Solipsism and the Poetics of
Power: Tyranny and Narratological Impasse in Some Fictions of Vladimir
Nabokov," which offers an ellucidative perspective on solipsism,
its link with tyranny and its impasses.
In his article James Bonney analyses various novels -written by
Nabokov while he lived in Germany at the time of Mussolini's, Stalin's and,
particularly, Hitler's, ascendancy to power - in order to trace
narratological shifts, from the "deus ex machina" stance adopted by
Nabokov, to the solution of narratological dead-ends. Bonney demonstrates how
the latter is achieved by a move from the representation of "external"
tyrannies, towards the "private" tyranny practiced by some of
his characters, like Humbert Humbert in "Lolita." In "Lolita" it
is no longer the victim, but the torturer who is allowed to narrate
his experience.
Bonney also indicates how the
individual reader is entrapped by solipsism, blinded by a social
discourse or by a character's self-absorbed reductive perception (of the world,
of people and of himself). He then indicates how
Nabokov manoeuvers the reader into breaking away from his spell,
to broaden his perspective following the aesthetic values he professes
(curiosity, kindness...),.often only discovered in opposition to
and "outside" a literal rendering of the novel's ideology and
plot.*.
How a
victim "may become a victor," another issue which has been raised in the
List, connected to VN's assertions in Pale Fire, is here explained from the
literary standpoint and not recurring to ethical systems or metaphysical
ellaborations.
........................................................................................................................................
* Excerpts from James Bonney's
thesis:
According to Bonney, Nabokov's control over the terms by which his work
should be read, and his statements about his rejection
of political, moralistic and didactic intentions
(although true in
a limited technical sense), have created a critical bias towards his
aesthetic and moral positioning. Bonney believes that Nabokov's works reveal particular
ethical and political concerns in connection with philosophical
preoccupations related to them. For him, Nabokov's idea of solipsism
became "something of a canon-defining topos" and his "ethics of
perception," directed the readers to an "epistemological
scale" which helped them to evaluate how his
fictional characters recreated "reality" and their positivie or negative
states (such as curiosity/incuriosity, tolerance/intolerance, kindness/cruelty
). For Bonney, the lower end of the scale entails perceptual or
metaphysical blindness to reality ( solipsism). This
overall destructive state is represented
both by individual criminal characters and by totalitarian
political structures. For Bonney "Nabokov situates solipsism at one end of an epistemological
scale, and his representation of criminals like Lolita’s Humbert Humbert's
obsession, is closely related to his representation of totalitarian
regimes, the actions of which are rooted in an almost
identically degraded and constricted engagements with reality." In
opposition to "solipsism," we find that imagination and criativity are
fundamental qualities in Nabokov's epistemological
schema.
Martin Amis's description of Lolita
as “a study in tyranny.” helps Bonney to conclude that "Humbert’s
solipsization of Lolita is the mechanism by which the asymmetrical and
oppressive power relations that define their interactions are ultimately
effected." Humbert's kind of
solipsism, for Bonney, is also present in the corpus of
narratives that have actual tyrannies (in the form of repressive state or social
apparatuses) as their subjects: “The Leonardo,”; Invitation to a Beheading;
“Cloud, Castle, Lake”; “Tyrants Destroyed”; and "Bend Sinister."
He finds in the temporal concentration of texts about tyranny within
the period of Nazism’s ascendancy, an indication of Nabokov's particular
engagement with the historical processes around
him.
To be able to determine art’s
position relative to history, through plots
that describe tyrannical powers entrapped Nabokov in a
problematic of representation, which he was unable to resolve when he departed
from a perspective related to the public dimension of "tyranny."
For Bonney, it's Lolita who will mark a narrative inversion that will
enable Nabokov "to abstract and
resolve those same conflicts on the more manageable level of private
relations." A useful model stems from Isaiah Berlin’s abstract account of the mode of
power relations in public and private spheres which will
exemplify the direct assaults on human agency and the autonomy of the
self.Bonner connects Berlin’s analysis to the representations of tyrannical
power to Nabokov’s work and to his
idiosyncratic conception of solipsism.
In Humbert's narrative, by
solipsizing Lolita, Humbert degrades and destroys external reality while, at the
same time, he turns Lolita's subjectivity and behavior into an
epistemic nullity, an unreadable referent, to narrator and reader
alike. Lolita is “encased” by Humbert's solipsizing discourse, which serves "the double purpose of
imprisoning the actual person in an artificial, constructed non-self, and
establishing something of a lacuna in his narrative," which will
eventually entrap the reader. Following Leona Toker's exposition about "distribution of
emphasis," he sees in Humbert’s verbal (in a grammatical sense) coinage of
solipsism a transplantation of this resource from the abstract realm of
epistemological theory, to that of praxis. Apart from canceling Lolita’s reality
within the space of the narrative, his hegemonic discursive strategy is defined
by an effort to cancel her reality within the mind of the reader.
In Nabokov's early
novels, solipsism is characterized by violations of individual autonomy and
violent suppressions of difference, with a degraded and constricted construction
of reality as their precondition:
In "The
Gift," Nabokov’s final Russian novel, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the novel’s
narrator and protagonist, writes a biographical monograph on Nikolay
Chernyshevski, who expresses what had been Nabokov’s primary
objections to materialism, with its generalizing tendencies and failure to
account for the pluralizing effect of subjective
perception. Chernyshevski,
in Fyodor's biography is presented as someone who is cognitively and
congenitally incapable of differentiating or accurately describing physical
objects and phenomena in an utopian quest for ‘coherency,’. The
consequent reduction of diversity to uniformity results from
Chernyshevski's effort to achieve harmony, in both the social and
epistemological fields (the reverse of
“specialization”).
The
metaphysical fantasy in "Invitation to a Beheading" serves as an
example of the "outside of History." It antecedes Bend
Sinister's recontextualization within a concrete political
apparatus. Bonney
quotes Brian Boyd, for whom Invitation to a
Beheading, was partially developed out of the disgust. Nabokov
experienced by the cruelties to which Chernyshevski had
been subjected and they trace a parallel between the imprisonment and impending execution of
Cincinnatus C. and Chernyshevski's ordeals.
Bonney will not only rely on the
metaphysics of power, but also examine the congeries of works in which
Nabokov dramatizes and explores the suppression of the private self, by a
totalizing and overtly tyrannical public institution. For him "although Amis is
correct in characterizing Lolita as a 'study in tyranny,' a careful distinction
must be maintained between representations of politically determined tyranny, as
it occurs within the public sphere, and asymmetrical and solipsistic power
relations at the level of the private exchanges." Bonney describes
how Nabokov will remove the constraints of history from his novels, to
make way for a wider range of significations and possible resolutions, by
articulating conflicts and practices emplying metaphysical fantasies
.
Cincinnatus C. had been convicted of
“the most terrible of crimes, gnostical turpitude," because he kept an
individuated, private self despite the uniformity and metaphysical transparency
decreed by the state as a condition of existence. Cincinnatus represents a
principle of difference and he must be either be mastered or
suppressed.. For Alexandrov, Invitation to a Beheading
is an account of “the individual’s relation to a metaphysical reality” while his
subjection to the carceral regime represents "a politically defined
institution of juridical power." Cincinnatus's belief in a reality beyond that to which he is
condemned generates a binarial tension between "here" and
"there" since, within the metaphysical schema of the narrative, history has
an outside, and this makes it possible for Cincinnatus to transition from the
“horrible here” to a transcendent “there.” "Imagination (a fundamentally
Romantic epistemological model) will save Cincinnatus, at the moment of his
execution, because he is able to assert the comparative strength and
reality of his consciousness, over the haphazardly constructed, pasteboard
abstraction that surrounds him.
For Bonney, although Cincinnatus had, in
effect, been solipsized by the institutional arrangements of the state—insofar
as his reality was canceled and his self suppressed—he is successful in
reversing this tyrannical structure of existence through a final act of
consciousness and imagination (his or the
author's?).
James Bonney believes
that the problematic of representation found in the structures of
tyranny becomes more complex when "Invitation to a
Beheading" is considered alongside “The Leonardo”—a short
story written less than a year before it. One of the most salient
differences between the two texts is that the first one is situated
within a historically determined time and place: Germany in the early 1930s (it
should also be noted that Nabokov lived in Berlin at the time of his
writing). Romantovski's so-called eccentricities and unsociable habits
lead two of his neighbors to monitor his habits and
to force their company on him, in a gradually escalating
harassment. because "he moves and breathes differently from other people; the
trouble is that we just cannot put our finger upon the difference, cannot catch
the tip of the ear by which to pull out the rabbit. Hateful is everything that
cannot be palpated, measured, counted." Like Cincinnatus,
Romantovski is regarded as a figure of inscrutability whose mysteriousness is
perceived as an existential threat to the “coherency” of a particular order of
existence. The persecutional harassment that the two
bullies unrelentingly inflict upon Romantovski eventually turns to
violence, and Romantovski is beaten to death. As noted above,
Nabokov’s reference to the rising power of the Nazi regime makes it clear that
this narrative, unlike "Invitation to a Beheading," is situated
within a particularized historical order. Therefore it lacks "a
metaphysical order that allows history to have an outside."
Priscilla Meyer reads the
violent persecution of Romantovski as occurring specifically within the context
of the regime, of which the brothers are essentially proxies to develop the
“theme of the artistic personality hounded by thugs” also found in
Nabokov's “Cloud, Castle, Lake.”
Nabokov’s unease with the indeterminate
position of art in relation to history and historical processes is signaled,
however, by the narrator’s efforts, in his subsequent novel,to displace and
diminish the reality of the story. He will strive after a historical
transcendence, such as what constitues the resolution of
"Invitation to a Beheading," which
begins with the narrative agent
self-consciously setting the stage for the events that'll follow, and the manner
in which the narrative space is dissolved once the story is concluded:
"the world again irks me with its variegated void." As noted by
Pifer, the artist may have little or no power within the field of history, but
"his or her power within the circumscribed space of art is total,
evidenced by the narrator’s ability to assemble and destroy a world." Pifer
reads this differential as itself constituting "an ethics of art, meant to
demonstrate that the power inevitably held by the artist over his or her
fictional constructs does not translate into power over people outside the
narrative space... however, this raises some supplemental questions concerning
the relationship between art and reality."
Totalitarianism, as it manifests itself in
Nabokov’s work, is a problematic of representation itself,
stimulating Nabokov to experiment with a range of possible
resolutions. In “Cloud, Castle, Lake” the conflict is strikingly
similar to that of “The Leonardo”; and an analogous narrative strategy is
employed. As Maxim D. Shrayer notes ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake,’ ..makes
explicit the most noteworthy feature of a narrative strategy, the one
Nabokov refers to as “an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by [the
author].” For Bonney, although all narratives require impersonations, the prominence given
to an expressly deific narrative agent as a plot device has the effect of
placing him in a position of extreme liminality—simultaneously inside and
outside the narrative space—while at the same time granting him the ordinarily
withheld ability to stage direct and determinative interventions within the
world of the narrative for the purpose of overtly arbitrating, or simply
dissolving, its structures and systems of
relations. “Cloud, Castle, Lake” features an extradiagetic
narrator who inserts himself into the texture of the narrative.
Ellen Pifer writes that, in "Invitation to
a Beheading," Cincinnatus’s consciousness is “the locus of reality in an
otherwise false world”; and, although that might offer a practicable resolution
in the context of a narrative, situated within a fantastic metaphysical order,
it offers no such solution to the other stories, discussed above, located
as they are within a narrative approximation of history. These
stories instead must rely upon an uncharacteristically heavy-handed
use of deus ex machina devices, which locate transcendence outside the
space of the narrative, in the hands of an extradiegetic narrator, vested with
godlike powers of creation and destruction: the narrator - without
any adequate means of redressing the politically-inflected cruelties suffered by
Vasiliy, nor having access to the same kind of metaphysical
transcendence available to Cincinnatus - because he is
situated within a historically determined order of existence, has to
operate from the outside and simply dissolves his
character.
The same theme and problematic
will be rehearsed again one year later, in 1938’s “Tyrants Destroyed,”
in which Nabokov temporarily abandons the extreme narrative interventions,
already discussed opting, instead, for a more modest but equally uncertain
resolution. For Bonney, "
'Tyrants Destroyed' represents a temporary departure from the strategies
and claims of the earlier texts, in that it features a first-person narrator who
is situated directly and unambiguously within the world of the narrative. By
suppressing the presence of an omnipotent narrative agent operating above the
diagetic plane, the perspective is shifted in such a way that the possibility of
metaphysical transcendence implicit in the earlier narratives is denied. The
story instead seeks to resolve the representational problematic of totalitarian
power structures by making an almost equally strong claim for the transcendent
qualities of art, particularly its capacity to turn victim into victor." The
novel is composed by an unnamed narrator who describes life in a
totalitarian state. The tyrant is a mediocrity whose rise to
power is attributed to “the kind of somber, concentrated will deeply conscious
of its sullen self, which in the end transforms a giftless person into a
triumphant monster.” For
Elen Pifer, apud Bonner, the narrator characterizes the source of this
monstrosity as the “profound and fatal” disjuncture “between dreaming of a
reordered world and dreaming of reordering it oneself as one sees
fit.” This reordering is achieved by an inherently solipsistic move
(according to Nabokov’s use of the term), causing the impoverishment of
“average reality” through the violent infliction of ideological and
epistemological abstractions. The most substantial portion of the story is
devoted to chronicling the narrator’s evolving obsession with the tyrant, which
initially leads him to compulsively fantasize about assassinating him. Quickly
concluding that murder is “insufferably trite," the narrator instead settles on
suicide as a solution, rationalizing his decision as follows: “By killing myself I would kill him, as he was totally inside me,
fattened on the intensity of my hatred.” Suicide is abandoned as a
potential resolution to both the speaker’s predicament within the space of the
narrative, and the narrative itself when, having re-read what he has
written, the narrator concludes that his account has captured the truth with
“artistry and inventiveness” and made the tyrant seem absurd—an object of
ridicule rather than terror—which prompts him to describe his text as “an
incantation, an exorcism, so that henceforth any man can exorcise bondage.” This
resolution, while eschewing the more extreme narratological and metaphysical
interventions of the earlier texts, stakes a problematically strong claim for
art. Can a tyrant be said to have been destroyed simply because a narrative
construction semantically reduces his cruelties to the level of
“annoyances”—particularly when the structures through which he exercises his
power remain intact? This question is perhaps best answered by Lucy Maddox’s
comment on Bend Sinister’s “inability, as a work of art, to come to terms with
the irrefutable reality of the least aesthetically pleasing of all
things—willful human cruelty.” In terms equally applicable to “Tyrants
Destroyed,” Maddox writes the following: “The difficulty, of course, is that
real dictatorships are not plays on words or absurd mirages that will go away
when we stop thinking about them.”
The thematic concerns and narrative impasses that begin to manifest
themselves with “The Leonardo”—at least insofar as they are represented in
overtly political contexts—culminate in "Bend Sinister," a novel
which amplifies both the structural and thematic tendencies of the earlier
works and establishes a more explicit link between solipsistic habits of
thought. The course traced by the series of
narratives that begins with “The Leonardo” suggests a trend towards increased
specificity, from the wholly fantastic "Invitation to a Beheading" to the
historically concretized "Bend Sinister." While the earlier fictions dramatize
the effects of repressive political ideologies as they are translated into
practices of power, "Bend Sinister"’s Ekwilism presents a fully elaborated
example of such an ideology, which allows for a more precise understanding of
what Nabokov saw as the specifically epistemological failings of totalitarian
political philosophies.In narrating Krug’s youthful association with Paduk, the
latter’s commitment to precisely this mode of solipsistic thought is made
apparent. Consistent with this ideal of total uniformity, Paduk, like
Chernyshevski, claims that “two pairs of eyes looking at a boot see the same
boot since it is identically reflected in both,” with no place for the
subjective perception that Nabokov regarded as essential to the animation of
“given reality.” The novel's narrator posits that the "padograph"
was “a proof that a mechanical device can reproduce personality, and that
Quality is merely the distributional aspect of Quantity." Tellingly,
adds Bonney, the device lacks a question mark, due to an engineering
oversight, which seems to allude to the incuriosity and aversion to ambiguity
that Nabokov includes as a characteristic feature of solipsistic
thought. For him, the political implications of such a difference-eliding
epistemological disposition are clearer when read in conjunction with passages
from an earlier novel, "Despair," This novel features a mentally ill
narrator, Hermann, who believes that he has found a perfectly identical double,
named Felix. Soviet-style Communism being a frequent target of Nabokov’s, his
political leanings are made to reflect this. Hermann has a “faith in the
impending sameness of us all,” and he believes that “Communism shall indeed
create a beautifully square world of identical brawny fellows.” This is similar
to Paduk’s anagrammatic notion of individual selfhood, and the association
between solipsism and substitutability is made even more obvious in Hermann’s
utopian reverie. Although Hermann’s pronouncements are a symptom of his
distinctly solipsistic insanity, his sentiments are echoed in Paduk’s speeches
and writings, particularly in the following distillation of his political
philosophy: The sexualized rhetoric of Paduk’s
speech evokes a sense of violation, while the language of transparency recalls
the metaphysical arrangement of Invitation to a Beheading. Paduk’s belief in the
interchangeability of selves obliterates the integrity of the private self,
reducing the individual to a means by which the power of the state—which is, in
essence, an abstract aggregate of “average” selves—can augment itself. The
citizen is now recast as a mere appendage of the totalizing will of the
state. Krug’s resistance to Paduk’s attempted subornation is a refusal to permit
his self to be abstracted, or solipsized, by the ideological apparatus of the
state. Krug’s general epistemological disposition is also situated at the
higher end of the scale by which Nabokov evaluates his characters’ ethics of
perception. Despite this, Krug’s “conception of practical politics is romantic
and childish,”as his friend Maximov informs him. When the narrator
intervenes and dissolves the world of the narrative, he explains his
intervention by saying that he “felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards
him on an inclined beam of pale light—causing instantaneous madness, but at
least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate.” Prior to this,
the “anthropomorphic deity” who narrates "Bend Sinister" signals his presence in
the world of the narrative through an oblique system of signs, while Krug
is dimly aware of this otherworldly presence from the start. This device
enables Nabokov to suggest Krug’s transcendence, constructing the
narrative space in such a way that it has an outside—the reality of the
narrator—which constitutes an order of existence wholly independent of the world
of the novel. Whereas the outside of history present
within the narrative space of "Invitation to a Beheading" had
been essentially comprised by the world of the novel—as a result of its
uniquely metaphysical arrangement, the “here” and “there” to which Cincinnatus
refers coexist within the same space—the world of the narrator of "Bend
Sinister," roughly corresponding to the reality of the reader, constitutes an
order of metaphysical transcendence, relative to the action of the
novel. And yet, the narrator ultimately acknowledges that Krug’s
transcendence is a dead end, characterizing it as “a slippery sophism, a
play upon words.”
While some critics, such as Morton, characterize
Nabokov’s extreme narrative incursions as an assertion “triumph of the powers of
consciousness,” others read them as despairing admissions of the inadequacy of
art, in the face of brutal historical processes. For Moynahan, these
interventions “reflect a bottomless pessimism about politics and the social
process in our time,” and that the “absolute individualism of Nabokov’s world
view tends to deny him the consolation of belief that any agency, operating in
or beyond history, will eventually redeem the sufferings inflicted on innocent
and decent people by savage and incompetent ideologues and power brokers in this
century.” For Moynahan,Nabokov’s continued reliance on a “slippery
sophism” suggests that the problematic of representation generated by tyrannical
power structures has not yet been resolved.
For Bonney "the problematic of
representation and narratological resolution that distinguishes Nabokov's
former works can be understood, at least in part, as resulting from
attempts to elude the comprehensive grasp of history, so it is significant that
Nabokov seeks to rhetorically establish historical processes that comprise
totalitarian power structures as something other than history." And
yet "the historically determined space of the narrative generates the same
narratological blockages and forces the same extreme interventions that we find
in the earlier texts." Lolita, which
also explores the solipsistic exercise of tyrannical power, resituates
it in the sphere of private relations. "While this transposition from
public to private does not obviate history as a contextual consideration, it has
the effect of displacing it from the foreground of the narrative.
One of the
most salient structural differences between the earlier fictions and Lolita is
that the latter is marked by a narratological inversion: while the preceding
works are focalized through the experiences of the victims, Lolita is narrated
from the perspective of the 'tyrant'.”
Although Nabokov’s representations of solipsism
are largely uniform, the shift towards the private that occurs in Lolita allows
solipsism to be constituted as an epistemological and ethical mechanism that
ultimately makes possible a successful narrative resolution, while the continuum
of narratives with more overtly political subjects are distinguished by their
failure to resolve similar conflicts..."In essence, Lolita offers a
dramatized redemption rather than an artificial transcendence based on
narratological design; it also forces the reader to directly confront a form of
the solipsistic epistemology upon which Nabokov’s tyrannies are invariably based
and develop his or her own strategy of resistance... For the duration of
the novel, the reader is presented with Humbert’s “schematic” Lolita: a
“solipsized” eidolon drained of all but those generalized nymphetic qualities
that Humbert falsely imputes to her." It
is only as Humbert relates his gradual and implicit emergence from his
solipsistic condition that those qualities of “curiosity” and “tenderness”
concretely manifest and fully reveal themselves as antithetical and antidotal to
the state of tyrannical cruelty that he otherwise shares with Nabokov’s other
“torturers.” Humbert’s awakening to the “given world,” and his realization
that he has stolen Lolita’s childhood by estranging her from this reality serves
as the measure of his redemption by the "the melancholy and very local
palliative of articulate art.”
Citing Rorty, who distinguishes between
novels with clearly defined social intentions, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that
endeavor to dramatize the cruelty of certain social and institutional practices
and arrangements, and novels that attempt to demonstrate the cruelties that can
arise from our personal idiosyncrasies and obsessions, Bonney believes that
Rorty offers a deeply ethical reading of Lolita, applicable as much to
Humbert as it does to the reader, upon whom Nabokov places the implicit
obligation to penetrate the narrator’s obfuscatory rhetoric and “distribution of
emphasis” and truly become aware of the suffering of the novel’s “poor little
girl.”
Although Nabokov may not believe that the
suffering of innocents can be redeemed, as Moynahan maintains, by
displacing tyranny from the overtly political context of the public and
inscribing it, within the context of a closed narrative circuit, in the space of
the private, he finds an ethically determined resolution that makes a more
modest claim for art and proposes a pragmatic solution to the problem of
solipsism that does not depend on a formally constructed transcendence. Lolita
is not saved by the intervention of an extradiagetic narrative agent; nor is art
presented as powerful enough to destroy tyrants and reduce regimes of cruelty to
the level of “annoyances.” It can instead serve as a “very local palliative,” as
Humbert comes to realize, and a means by which readers might be taught to
recognize cruelty in its virtually endless manifestations, as Rorty argues. The
narrative structure of Lolita forces the reader to read over the tyrant’s
shoulder, in a manner of speaking, and the and the ethical work that this
requires the reader to do assumes the place of the quasi-metaphysical work
performed by the “anthropomorphic deity” who narrates the earlier texts.
For Bonney, Nabokov explores the
epistemological dimensions of tyrannical power structures as they manifest
themselves within various orders of magnitude—ranging from the casual,
politically-inflected brutality of “The Leonardo” to the ideologically and
historically determined repressive state apparatus of Bend Sinister, and finally
the private realm of personal obsession in Lolita—revealing solipsistic
engagements with reality as the foundation common to each. By representing
the ethical redemption of a tyrant, however, rather than the transcendence of a
victim that amounts to a “despairing trick of fiction,” Nabokov suggests a way
beyond such practices of power. The desired escape from history that manifests
itself in the earlier fictions derives from a sense of art’s ultimate
ineffectuality when confronted by brutal historical processes, as Maddox and
Moynahan suggest; that desire—and the narrative distortions that go along with
it—is largely absent from Lolita, in large part due to its position within a
postwar private sphere.
More important, however, is the fact that Lolita
is given an ethical function that attempts to obviate the ineffectual despair
that determines the narratological forms of the earlier texts: by forcing the
reader to read through and around Humbert’s generalizing, solipsistic discourse
in order to know Lolita as a uniquely individuated subjectivity rather than an
abstraction, the novel seeks to effect an epistemological reorientation towards
specificity and the type of ethical cognition described by Rorty. In Nabokov’s
formulation, cruelty on any scale inevitably has a solipsistic epistemology as
its foundation; and by replacing the merely formal reassurances offered by the
metaphysical interventions of the earlier texts and instead addressing the
sources of solipsism as they are manifested in private relations, this newly
centralized ethical function puts art into a more modest yet less ambiguous
position with respect to
history.