Scenographies of Perception: Sensuousness in Hegel, Novalis, Rilke, and Proust. By Christian Jany. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2019. xv + 253 pages. $99.00.

Christian Jany’s Scenographies of Perception situates itself on well-traversed philosophical territory, but with a freshness unusual in a volume devoted to longstanding issues in the history of philosophy and theories of poetry and literature. In an ancient register, Jany’s overarching question concerns the relationship between aisthêsis and nous, perception and thought, but in the more contemporary shape of what we might call the bearing of the poetic word upon ostensibly given worlds of perceptual life. The volume argues against the well-entrenched views of such theorists as Paul de Man, according to which the world woven of perception is irrelevant to the work of making sense of literary and poetic works of art. Drawing from the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty and building upon the insights of such theorists as Ingarden and Iser, both of whom have roots in the phenomenological tradition, Jany argues that perception and narration are intertwined ways of making sense of what the world has to give, both of which are necessary conditions of our sense-making practices: perception itself invites the composition of scenographies, modes of writing that draw our attention to features of the visible that would not be available without the help of more creative ways of voicing perception. In this respect, the book should find a welcome place among an expanding body of literature dedicated to establishing the relevance of poetry and literary narratives to the development of philosophical theories of human cognition and perception. In Jany’s view, we do well to recognize “the necessity of perception in literary comprehension and […] the inherently sensuous potential of [the] literary text” (8). From this perspective, the poetic and literary offerings of Novalis, Rilke, and Proust—the three authors who play exemplifying roles in the second half of the volume—should themselves be seen as philosophic achievements or, if not quite philosophical in the technical sense, at least relevant to concerns that have earned a rightful place in the history of philosophy.

In keeping with Jany’s well-articulated philosophical ambitions, the first part of the book is devoted to a close and careful summary of Hegel’s theory of perception in the sections on sense-certainty and perception in the Phenomenology of Spirit. At first blush, Hegel might seem an odd choice: the opening moves of Hegel’s discussion of “consciousness” move toward the conclusion that sensation and perception are inferior modes of awareness, destined to yield to the various shapes of conceptually mediated self-consciousness and, in the long run, to the more socially inflected forms of Geist with which the bulk of the Phenomenology has to deal. But Jany makes a convincing case for the intertwining of perception and conception in Hegel’s philosophical reconstruction of the march of spiritual life and, more importantly still, for the role of narrative stage-setting in what Jany sees as Hegel’s story of perception. The reconstruction of Hegel’s arguments in these opening chapters (1–3) is unlikely to surprise the informed student of Hegel’s thought. But if Jany is right, Hegel has presented us with various scenographies of consciousness that underwrite the movement from forms of (alleged) immediacy to the explicitly mediated ways of life that take up the longest stretch of the Phenomenology. In this respect, Jany’s study makes an important contribution to ongoing scholarly debate in the secondary literature over Hegel’s methodology in the Phenomenology. And questions concerning how best to interpret Hegel’s often complex and shifting theory of Sinnlichkeit remain open.

The second part of the book deals more concretely with the status of the sensuous in the writings of Novalis, Rilke, and Proust. Jany’s discussion of Novalis is exemplary. In opposition to a longstanding tradition—traceable back to Novalis’s earliest editors—that sees the poet’s contribution to the history of post-Kantian thought in mystical terms, and his theory of “magical idealism” as a case of wishful thinking, Jany recognizes the importance of the given and givenness in Novalis’s account of our relation to the world. In this view, the power of poetry in Novalis does not carry us beyond the world of everyday life toward “some fairy-tale world of higher mystery but always points back to the concrete world of sensory experience” (140). This is consistent with the general drift of thought already on display in Novalis’s youthful Fichte-Studien and developed at greater length in conversations on the nature of the poet in the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Jany’s discussion of the figure of the Blue Flower makes a compelling case for a view of perception as a scenographic depiction of the relation between sensation and thought, and one that insists upon the grounding of poetic conception in concrete worlds of perceivable reality.

Rilke’s relation to philosophy is now well-canvassed territory, thanks partly to Heidegger’s complex and ambivalent discussions of the poet’s philosophical significance in what the poet Hölderlin called a “destitute time.” In Heidegger’s polemical view, Rilke remains entangled in the metaphysics of subjectivity and so fails to answer to our contemporary need for a vision of life, or being, that stands beyond the technological disclosure of the modern or post-modern world. Drawing from the Note-books of Malte Laurids Brigge and other sources (especially the well-known “Archaic Torso of Apollo”), Jany argues for a view of reality or “things” in Rilke as imprinting themselves on human subjects. Far from it being the case that human beings impose themselves upon a world in a way that bears no relation to what the world has to give, our relation to the world at its best combines perception and poetic conception in one, undivided accord. Digging more deeply, Jany provocatively argues that the subject of perception in Rilke is anonymous (181).

The final chapter takes an odd turn toward Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. To be sure, the discussion of Proust’s relation to Wagner and the leitmotif is helpful, along with Jany’s account of Proust’s relationship to musical paradigms more generally. And persistent worries that Proust has a projective theory of perception and value are capably addressed. But the final chapter strikes this reviewer as tacked on to an otherwise more integrated analysis. To be fair, Jany himself recognizes that some readers will find the chapters of his book “to amount to no more than a series of loosely connected essays” (xi). The volume presents itself generally as a coherent whole, and the chapters on Novalis and Rilke alone are worth the price of admission, but the inclusion of Proust still has the feel of what we might call, cribbing from a remark in Michael Forster’s study of Hegel and skepticism, the arbitrariness of the ‘Laurel and Hardy’ variety.

In any case, Scenographies of Perception does a fine job of bringing certain philosophical concerns to bear upon literary and poetic texts. There are claims worth contesting (that, e.g., Novalis is not a philosopher, on 127, begs important questions concerning what philosophy is or should aspire to be), but on the whole, the volume furnishes a thought-provoking, cross-disciplinary account of the relationship between thought and perception that ought to appeal to students of German idealism and romanticism and their aftermath in the 20^th century, and in a way that stays admirably close to the relevant texts and the concerns that animate them.