GESAMTKUNSTWERK: FROM PANPHILIA TO MNEMOPHOBIA: a study of Proust, Mahler, and Bergman

by Chris Via

Proust’s literary epic, À la recherche du temps perdu, Mahler’s third symphony, and Ingmar Bergman’s longest cinematic masterpiece, Fanny och Alexander, all attempt to capture the spectrum of human experience in a single artistic production. This aim, I argue, originates in the artist’s panphilia (love of everything) yet ends with an inevitable and somewhat antithetical mnemophobia (fear of memory)—specifically the losing of memory—typical of other large-scale artistic projects. This tension is distinct from the more deliberate aesthetics-driven dread of a given medium (products of the horror and thriller genres, for example), creating a bifurcation of tension: (1) the deliberately manufactured tension; and (2) an unintentional personal tension imputed to the work. In this study, the unintentional tension is seen as an inevitable by-product of any attempt to produce a work of totality—that is, a work trying to contain all of life. And regardless of the skill of the artist, there is an ineluctable limit to art concomitant to the human epistemological limit: No human can possibly know all there is to include. There is always something lacking, something that cannot be explored, thereby rendering the Gesamtkunstwerk incomplete, despite its scope. As Tom LeClair points out in The Art of Excess, the closest the artist can come to such a feat is through synecdoche. And it is when we bump up against this limit that we come into contact with the unintentional dread or tension. We can only replicate in art that which is borne out of memory—yet we are always in the panta rei of memory, and therefore we can never capture all that memory continually processes and rewrites. We have, in effect, gone from panphilia to mnemophobia.

76 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 7, 2018

About the author

Leaf by Leaf YouTube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/c/leafbyleaf

Discussion with The Great Concavity:
https://greatconcavity.podbean.com/e/...

Portfolio:
https://chrisviabooks.wixsite.com/chr...

Chris Via's work appears in Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Splice, The Arts Fuse, 3:AM Magazine, and The Rupture. He has contributed introductions and afterwords to several titles, and in 2018 he won honorable mention for Grove Atlantic’s national book review competition, featured on LitHub. He also hosts the growing literature-obsessed YouTube channel Leaf by Leaf. Chris holds a B.A. in computer science and an M.A. in literature and writing.

Reviews

[Greg Gerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A personal approach to art with a great introduction to the theories behind the large maximalist novels of the 20th Century. The key idea for me: "The personified book does not confer joys and sorrows on us; it sets them free within us. "