In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

474 FRAMES
pate in the vibrant superficiality of "negro life" without falling victim to
it. And in contrast to Mary Love, Olive and Howard feel no need to
devote themselves to the profound values of authenticity, though they
are quite capable of appreciating them. What Van Vechten seems to
advocate (and what he refers to with the term "vital instinct") is a mode
of life that avoids the choice between authenticity and the artifice of
surface worlds. This mode of life keeps the authentic and the artificial
simultaneously present. A worthwhile life, at least according to Van
Vechten's understanding, is achieved by opting not to opt between the
two values. [see Authenticity = Artificiality (Life)] We can assume that
many contemporary American intellectuals shared this attitude, especially
those whose quest for "true" authenticity had been frustrated by
their travels in Europe. There, "opting not to opt" between authenticity
and artificiality was probably a much less popular attitude. Occasionally,
however, in texts written by European authors, non-opting is an attitude
that emerges under specific circumstances: as an unattainable ideal in
Schickele's Maria Capponi, for example, and as a strategy for survival
under the imposed-upon life conditions of the big city, in the concept of
Existenzfreudigkeit which Martin Heidegger recommends to his friend
Elisabeth Blochmann.
Making Present a Field
The texts and the worlds of Martin Heidegger, Hans Friedrich Blunck,
and Carl Van Vechten have brought us back, perhaps surprisingly, to a
classic concern in the writing of history. They have brought us back to
the questions of historical totality and historiographic totalization. In my
analysis of Sein und Zeit, I tried (both willingly and with the fear of
violating the premises underlying this book) to show that Heidegger had
combined and woven into a complex structure a strikingly broad range
of cultural codes from the worlds of 1926-so broad a range, indeed,
that it ended up including all the individual codes that I had identified
in my historical research. To underscore this experience is of course not
to say that the object-side of what I describe as the year 1926 constitutes
a unity or a totality independent of any particular perspective or position.
It does imply, however, that it was possible, from within the year,
to see the worlds of 1926 as a totality. By trying to show, subsequently,