Waxing lyrical: Moore and Schopenhauer

Caricature of Huysmans

In my previous post on Moore and Huysmans I suggested that A rebours (1884) and Confessions of a Young Man (1887) share a sense of equivocation or ambivalence that might be, in some respects, more truly Decadent than any reference to vice or excess. Another shared connection here is their relation to autobiography. Huysmans' creation, Des Esseintes was frequently taken to be modelled upon himself by critics. And Confessions of a Young Man presents itself as an autobiography - from the second English edition of 1889, the narrator even shared the same name as the author. In both cases, however, autobiographical identifications are important, but complex and hard to sustain at certain points.* 

So, in this post and the next, I'll explore some points around Confessions and its vexed and complex status as autobiography. My starting point is passage from early in chapter 1:

I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes.

The narrator begins, then, by telling us that identity is flexible - subject to change - and, in many respects, may be arbitrary: as a 'smooth sheet of wax' his 'nature' may be shaped by whatever chance influences he encounters. 

Arthur Schopenhauer

Behind this image are a number of possible philosophical sources and influences: this image of the wax sheet may recall the idea of the 'tabula rasa' that we find in the Greek philosopher Aristotle's De Anima. This is the notion that the human mind starts life empty of content or preconceptions (like a blank tablet), rather than containing any set of innate ideas. Moore may have known that some early writing tablets were covered in wax into which words or characters were inscribed with a stylus, but which could be heated, smoothed clear and used again. (John Locke gave fresh expression to this concept of the blank slate in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)). In this way, the image sets up Moore's novel as a species of bildungsroman, hinting that we're going to follow the narrator's formation and development, as his wax sheet fills with writing or images.

But the wax sheet image is suggestive in other ways too. For Moore, the reference here to the way that the wax sheet 'bear[s] no impress' may recall the Impressionists and anticipate his depiction of the third Impressionist exhibition that I discussed in a previous post. If so, the emphasis differs slightly from other readings - the Impressionists initially took their collective name from hostile criticism of their work (it offered merely the impression of something rather than a more worked-out version); but the term came to connote an approach to art that sought to capture the immediacy of experience, rather than approach life or nature through preconceived artistic tradition. Viewed in this way the image of the wax sheet evokes a complex debate about the falsifying nature of art and technique in relation to experience - a debate which lies at the heart of how we assess autobiography and its claim to present the author's experience with any authenticity.

Portrait of Edouard Dujardin
by Felix Vallotin

But there is another, more direct source for the image of the wax sheet with a specific contemporary resonance - that is the work of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). Twenty years after his death, Schopenhauer's writings underwent a particular vogue in Paris during 1880s and this proved important for Moore. (Schopenhauer, for example, is also credited as an important influence on Huysmans' A rebours.) Although Moore no longer lived in Paris at that time, he had befriended the novelist and editor, Edouard Dujardin, who was at the centre of the Parisian intellectual vogue for Schopenhauer. Indeed, Dujardin edited the Revue indépendante, where Moore would serialise the French translation of Confessions in 1888.  Moore would write about all this in article, 'Pessimism à la Mode' for The Bat in 1887.**

In a preface added to the second English edition of Confessions which appeared after the French translation, Moore explicitly claimed that his novel was indebted to Schopenhauer's work as: 

that philosophy which alone helps us to live while in the evil of living, that philosophy which alone shows us the real good and leads us from the real evil. 

Under the influence of Dujardin et al, then, this preface lays claim to the broader significance of Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy for Moore's novel. The most likely point of reference here is the philosopher's major work, The World as Will and Representation (1818). This unfolds an account of consciousness and perception alongside a critique of conventional moral judgement and a theory of existence over the course of four 'books'. Crudely summarised: we cannot know the universe through the limitations of our senses and the categories supplied by the intellect. The world as we experience it is a delusion; life is without meaning. But there is a transcendent force - the will - that is both within and beyond our experience, powering our bodies and the world around us. 

My own reading in Schopenhauer's work is, like that of Moore, patchy and incomplete. Whilst some critics have dismissed Moore's interest as merely a ‘Parisian fad’, his biographer, Adrian Frazier records that Moore had read at least an English translation of book four of The World as Will and Representation and that he was probably familiar with other essays and shorter works (p. 148). And this helps to account for the 'sheet of wax' passage, which can be traced to ‘On Thinking for Oneself’. In this essay, Schopenhauer argues that the waxen intellect is inferior: an original genius needs to actively shape its substance, to will its form into being. He compares reading other people's ideas to create an impress in wax with a signet ring.

The wax sheet allusion, then, provides a particular focus for understanding the influence of Schopenhauer upon Confessions, which may further adjust our sense of what is at stake in that passage. On the one hand, it hints at the broader importance of the German philosopher's work for Moore's novel. Schopenhauer provides Moore with an important model of the self or the individual subject as riven by forces beyond our control. His sense that life is meaningless and his refusal of moral imperatives may also inform the narrator’s malleable approach to ethics. But the specific effect of this allusion is curious. In Schopenhauer's essay the 'wax sheet' is not a positive model - it exemplifies a weaker intellect. Schopenhauer denounces reading as 'merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself'. But Moore's narrator seems to identify with the wax sheet image and the novel unfolds the narrator's reading and shifting literary affiliations in detail.

This opens up the complex possibility that the 'wax sheet' image has a strong dramatic value - that it is Moore as author signalling that Moore as narrator may not be very reliable. In other words, alongside all the other hints, resonance and values this image has, it may perform that sly Decadent  ambivalence that I've been describing in previous posts.

In my next post, I'll follow this one up, by looking at recent critical work on the idea of autobiography by Max Saunders.

* Unlike the leisured aristocrat, Huysmans worked for most of his life as a clerk in the Ministry of the Interior. There are even drafts of A rebours composed in official civil service ledgers.

** Due to COVID conditions, I'm still waiting for an opportunity to consult this article and confirm its importance to Confessions.