Promise & perdition in the Rosean comedy

Promise and perdition are themes inseparable from the advice of Siloun the Athonite to ‘keep your mind in hell, and despair not’ that adorns the entrance to Gillian Rose’s final book, Love’s Work. With this epigraph Rose gives notice that hers will not be the hell of Dante’s divine comedy where it is necessary to ‘abandon all hope you who enter here’. But in spite or perhaps because of its solemnity, Rose found Siloun the Athonite’s sentence comic, and not only in the Hegelian sense of the comic, but also as just stand-up perversely funny. When reading Love’s Work aloud she would declaim the epigraph with raised eyebrows and a grin, seeing it as a perfect shibboleth or doorkeeper standing before the law or rather revel of Love’s Work. Anyone approaching that book with what Rose called ‘brutal sincerity’ – an oxymoron for her – would disqualify themselves from entering the revel of sin, for the object was less ‘despair not’ than ‘despair better’.

Rose was a close student of Hegel’s Aesthetics and was highly attuned to his distinction between ancient and modern comedy. After the ‘new art form’ of Aristophanic comedy in which ‘what is brought into the artistic portrayal is reality itself in the madness of its ruin, destroying itself within’ and its successor in the prosaic new comedy, Hegel ends his lectures musing that ‘the modern world has developed a type of comedy which is truly comic and truly poetic. Here once again the keynote is good humour, assured and careless gaiety despite all failure and misfortune, exuberance and the audacity of a fundamental crazy happiness, folly and idiosyncrasy in general.’¹ With this intimation of a modern comedy Hegel seems to anticipate the ‘careless gaiety despite failure and misfortune’ programmatically staged in Love’s Work. Surprisingly for readers of the Aesthetics who remain until the end, but not for readers of Love’s Work, Hegel sees this comedy as allying with philosophy in bringing on ‘the dissolution of art altogether’ and intimating a new, future philosophical comedy.

Rose’s compositional process from the Dialectic of Nihilism onwards was especially attentive to the poetic aspect of her writing, perhaps stung by criticism of the ‘severe style’ of Hegel Contra Sociology. She would send typescripts, sometimes manuscripts of her latest writing, to people she trusted, and two of them – myself and her genial cover designer Greg Bright – would be summoned to what she called, in deference to Greg Bright’s rock’n’roll past, a ‘soundcheck’. This involved reading her drafts aloud and revising them so that they sounded right. Greg brought his experience as a songwriter to bear on the rhythm and metrical signatures of Rose’s sentences. He taught us how attention to rhythm and metre could intensify, undo, or in the best of cases both intensify and undo, the expression of a thought. And the intense self-dissolution of a thought through rhythm and metre, undoing the ostensibly conveyed meaning, conforms perfectly to Hegel’s understanding of both the comic and the poetic.

The found object of the English translation of Siloun the Athonite’s sentence is a perfect example of rhythm and metre working against ostensible sense. It is composed of nine syllables, six of which are trochees: keep your mind in hell, and with the last accent heavily accented by the comma after hell. These are followed by the flat, unaccentuated triplet of despair not. Three intensifying prosodic falls announce the constant falling and failing of Love’s Work followed by the despairing monotony of ‘despair not’. And the highest point of the deepest prosodic fall is ‘hell’, effecting a Blakean (and Swedenborgian) inversion of Heaven and Hell. Prosodically ‘hell’ is the high point of this sentence, making it sound the opposite of what it seems to say. This is the kind of mischief Rose aspired to in her later writing, the sin of language and lips in which sound comically belies meaning. This in itself is funny, but there is of course more to the thoughtful comedy in which the Athonite’s sentence finds itself unwittingly implicated: for isn’t despair – abandoning all hope – what makes for hell? How can you be in hell and not despair?

Siloun the Athonite’s sentence makes sense in the context of Greek neo-Orthodox and Protestant Christianities that refuse the elaborate schema of a way of being in hell without despairing provided by the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. Throughout her authorship Rose would return constantly to Max Weber’s savage description of the despairing Calvinists whose very predestined lives were hell, in the footnotes to The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, who sought to ‘despair not’ through the perverse ‘love’s work’ of vainly seeking to labour in their calling. And she followed Hegel in seeing the ironies of despair as a new ‘divine comedy’.

Rose introduces this thought in Love’s Work through a characteristically cunning act of indirect communication on Dante’s Divine Comedy. But she initially mentions only the ‘eternal terraces of the Paradiso and the Inferno’ turning only then to Hegel in order to rethink the absent Purgatorio. The Hegelian comedy that takes the place of Purgatory is the philosophy as social theory that appears here as the purgatorial working through of despair in love’s work: ‘It is power to be able to attend, powerful or powerless; it is love to laugh bitterly, purgatively, purgatorially, and then to be quiet.’² There is of course all the difference in the world between a silence before despair and one after it has been worked through bitter laughter and carried beyond it to a new, unencumbered and perhaps quiet laughter.

Love’s Work understands itself as a purgatorial comedy, a whisky-driven bacchanalian revel in which ‘suffering may be held by laughter which is neither joyful nor bitter…’³, an unaccentuated laughter of purgatory without purgation. It is a purgatorial comedy that is explicitly continued after Love’s Work, for Rose did not follow her own advice to ‘be quiet’ but embarked on a modern Paradiso that would succeed her modern purgatory. It was a missed opportunity not to publish Paradiso alongside Loves Work in the recent Penguin edition since it offers a glimpse of the indispensable incompletion of the former work.

Yet Paradiso is neither bacchanalian revel nor repose, neither laughter nor silence, but like Hegel’s logic of the concept it holds the contradiction disjunctively. Still back in the purgatory of Love’s Work, Rose describes Hegel’s laughter at all the falling and failing and all the ‘crazy happiness’ he speaks of; his finding ‘the mismatch between aim and achievement comic, not cynical; holy not demonic’.⁴ In Paradiso, purgatorial negations such as ‘despair not’, ‘not cynical’ and ‘not demonic’ are suspended even if Rose’s Paradiso is not short of cynical and demonic laughter, nor of comic holiness. All is permitted in Rose’s Paradiso because there is nothing to be lost or gained through purgatorial ascesis. There is no hope to abandon nor need for hope to be gained since Paradiso remembers that hope is the last and worst evil to be released from Pandora’s box. This is an emancipated despair or liberation from hope, precisely the Gelassenheit or ‘letting go’ that is forbidden to the purgatorial consciousness of Love’s Work.

There is holy comedy in the beautiful leave-taking framed in a metrical ascent of falling upwards. Rose tells us in the ‘Mystical Theology’ section of Paradiso that the book itself was born out of rhythm, the rhythm of ‘think of sister Edme’ chanted on the last London Euston to Coventry train – a line not otherwise renowned for its philosophical epiphanies:

The beat of the train takes up your name … [and] I will write a Paradiso that will be a series of descants on friends and family who have somehow passed beyond purgatory, who have dwelt in the abyss, in hell, and have undergone purgation.⁵

Then the rhythm dissolves as ‘now the train lopes balmily homeward’ in a now or eternal present that joins night and noon in a journey without end.

The last words of the last completed episode of Paradiso take distance from Simone Weil’s inversion of the tree in The Need for Roots. This time riding the bus, Rose calls on the properties of the iambic metre to raise the Earth itself:

The three lights of the future, the eternal present and the past: the promise of the candelabrum, the blazing fulfilment of the chandeliers, the sky guarding over gravestones and drawing trees. Three gates to heaven bestow their virtue onto the Earth.⁶

Rose’s last words offer an ascending Earth placed before and beyond promise and perdition; the future first, the present forever and the past as poetic landscape of sky, graves and trees. All three lights issue from gates to heaven which it is no longer necessary to enter since they serve to raise and make of the Earth a Paradiso.

This fröhliche Wissenschaft that remains true to the Earth seems a fitting end to an authorship that began with a commitment to Melancholy Science.

Footnotes

1. 1. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, pp. 511 and 1135. ↩

2. 2. Gillian Rose, Love’s Work, Chatto & Windus, London, 1995, p. 126. ↩

3. 3. Ibid., p. 134. ↩

4. 4. Ibid., p. 125. ↩

5. 5. Gillian Rose, Paradiso, Menard Press, London, 1999, p. 22. ↩

6. 6. Ibid., p. 63. ↩