Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

The Awakening 13ears’). The ear gives the other access to us, allows it to enter us,occupy and obsess us . . . hearing means the loss of subjectivityand self-possession . . . [and] puts us in the mode of beingsummoned, of being answerable and having to appear. 19Bruns’s gloss on Heidegger’s On The Way To Language also applies toEdna’s response to Chopin: “the very first chords which MademoiselleReisz struck upon the piano sent out a keen tremor down Mrs.Pontellier’s spinal column . . . she waited for the material pictureswhich she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination.She waited in vain. She saw no pictures of solitude, of hope, oflonging, or of despair” (27).How to say something that cannot be said, that confronts uswith the inability to present it? The problem that has occasioned thediscourse and theory of the sublime is the same as that posed by TheAwakening: the difficulty of symbolizing an excess that resists visualor linguistic formulation but is there nonetheless. Edna’s experienceof what Hertz would call “blockage”—her inability to translatesense-impressions into images—calls for a radically different mode ofperception, but one that does not lead to an enhanced sense of self.Adorno’s conviction that music’s value resides in its ability to call “forchange through the cryptic language of suffering” is enacted by theprelude’s effect on Edna: she trembles, chokes, is blinded by tears, andthen, as if to seek deeper knowledge of the “cryptic language” she hasheard, she learns to swim. 20 The figurative parallel between the prelude,whose notes arouse passion in her soul, and the ocean, whose waveslike music beat upon her body, is established just before Edna, with theother guests, walks down to the ocean and swims for the first time.Edna’s first swim is neither an attempt to appropriate the ocean’spower nor a submission to it. It does not represent a struggle fordominance over a force that, as in Homer, has the power to engulf her,but rather, as in Sappho, allows a relation to “the unlimited” in whichshe seeks “to lose herself ” (29). Swimming offers a way of enteringawareness; finding her “self ” is, paradoxically, a matter of entering thewater of the Gulf of Mexico and learning how to lose that which shehas found:That night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutchingchild, who all of a sudden realizes its power, and walks for the