Commenting on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes:
What is important is not that Julien Sorel [i.e. the protagonist], after he has learned that he has been betrayed by Madame de Rénal, travels to Verrière and tries to kill her. It is that silence, that dreamlike journey, that thoughtless certainty, and that eternal resolution which follow the news. But there is no passage where these things are said. There is no need for “Julien thought” or “Julien wished.” […] As though in a second life, [Stendhal] makes Julien’s voyage according to the cadence of a cold passion which selects for itself the visible and the invisible, what is to be said and what is to remain unsaid. The desire to kill is nowhere in the words. It is between them, in the hollows of space, time, and the significations they delimit, […] the way the letters in some advertisements are made less by the few black lines than the white pages they vaguely indicate – blank, but full of meaning, vibrating with lines of force, as dense as marble….(*)
We find immensely interesting the attribution of “meaning” – the meaning, in this case, of an episode in a novel – to that which is therefore absent: “[t]he desire to kill is nowhere in the words […] [but] between them.”
Similarly, it can be argued that the final crescendo of the first movement, “From Dawn to Noon,” of The Sea – Debussy’s symphonic poem – reflects the rise of the sun to its zenith, which is not there in the music but confers an aesthetic sense to the music, thus making it aesthetically meaningful. And the same can be said – to give a third example – of Oteiza’s sculpture Empty Edge, with its reflected, yet absent, edge.
The problem, then, is how to understand such reflections.
One option would be to say they are imaginary. Yet this would amount to simplify the problem before acknowledging there is one. For the absent edge makes sense of what we perceive in its being perceived. Put differently: it gives it the meaning it would otherwise lack.
Such, therefore, is the manner in which we sense what we cannot perceive.
Corollary: there is what one perceives and, thereby, feels; and there is what one feels or senses but one does not exactly perceive. In other words, there is the “sensuous” and there is the “sensible.” And they are inversely proportional to one another.
(*) Maurice Merleau-Ponty-Ponty, The Prose of the World, pp. 88-89.
Oteiza. Arista vacía (1958). Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid