Love’s Shadow 9780674247635

Citation preview

love’s shadow

LOV E’S SH A DOW

PAU L A . B OV É

Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts London, ­England 2021

 Copyright © 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printing Cover art: (top) turtix/iStock/Getty Images Plus; (bottom) Rembrandt van Rijn (1609-1669), Young woman sleeping on her right arm (Hendrickje Stoffels), c. 1654. Brush drawing in brown wash, with some white bodycolor. © The Trustees of the British Museum Cover design: Jill Breitbarth 9780674249875 (EPUB) 9780674247628 (MOBI) 9780674247635 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Bové, Paul A., 1949– author. Title: Love’s shadow / Paul A. Bové. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020011256 | ISBN 9780674977150 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Criticism. | Intellectual life. | Poetry. | Melancholy. Classification: LCC PN81 .B62 2021 | DDC 808.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011256

 For the reader within

Contents

Preface  ix

1. The Path of Sorrows: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory: The Misprisions of Utopia   1 2. The ­Will to Destruction as the Basis of Allegory: With Creativity and Love   25 3. A Socratic Interlude   69 4. Wallace Stevens and the Confidence of Imagination   111 5. Adorno  135 6. An Interchapter  185 7. “The Auroras of Autumn”   213 8. Rembrandt, Bathsheba, and the Textures of Art   283 9. “What Think You of Falling in Love?”   333 Notes  379 Acknowl­ edgments  429 Index  433

Preface

Freud’s essay on melancholy makes two points helpful to understanding the work I have done in this book. First, melancholy persists when desire has lost its love object, even or especially when the object has perhaps only died to the consciousness of the desirer. Second, melancholy becomes an affliction when the subject unable to reproach the lost love object turns reproach upon itself to dwell in misery and abjection. Walter Benjamin created the most dominant critical and intellectual myth of the twentieth ­century, namely that in a secularized creation, history becomes merely natu­ral history, and melancholy becomes the ruling emotion of even the most contemplative life. All this took place in the space of what once had been Chris­tian­ity. In a creation bereft of a creator, melancholy is not merely inescapable but essential and permanent. The stylistic name Benjamin gave to this state is “Baroque,” and its narrative experiential mode is allegory, reduced especially in the American acad­emy to the redundancy of allegoresis, the reading of all materials as allegories. Fredric Jameson’s commitment to allegory and the willingness of the university literary profession to award him all the honors offered by the Modern Language Association and far more—­this marks the generalized absorption of a scholastic opinion within the guardian institutions of culture and society. According to this story, all humanity is abject, and all history is ruination. ­Human agency is suspect or pointless, and the divine is ­either beseeched or its absence lamented. Utopia subsumes desire to its own ends, which substitute for politics, while happily wrapping itself in the rhe­toric of “the po­liti­cal.” Imagination falls to the tertiary role of cleverness, that ix

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is, the finding of new ways to allegorize, to recommodify the already known and given within a sad but permanent and profitable embrace of belatedness. Profits come with the academic demand for production, fa­cil­i­ty of circulation, transparency of common style, and the general ac­cep­tance of academic literary work as commodified, as only internally responsive, and as responsible. Having heard my talk against allegoresis as the standard within much of American Studies, questioners surprised me by asking what to do other than allegorize. The simplest Google search returns thousands of blog postings, book titles, and essays debating the excess or insufficiency of melancholy in con­ temporary culture. Academic articles debate the power or weakness of left melancholy, commodified melancholy, and comparable topics. Scholars take on the dizzying task of explicating Benjamin’s deepest thinking about history, ruination, and melancholy, tracing sources and contemporaries, working out the consequences of 1940 thinking for twenty-­first-­century desperation. This book does not engage with ­these symptoms but exhibits and rewrites the tropes and figures under­lying melancholy and its modes, to explore its dangers, its repressions, and its willed amnesia. I try to remind us against the allegorists and melancholics, against the peddlers of abjection and enchantment alike, that secularized humanity possesses the resources to sustain life, humanity, and responsibility to creation without God and without the affect that takes away freedom and leaves us vulnerable to tyranny and defeat. The extraordinary melancholy of con­temporary culture and society is one of the most astonishing facts of recent intellectual and artistic history. Melancholy ties itself to a view of culture as ruined and expresses itself in images and ideologies of ruination drawn not only from the battlefields of war and bombed cityscapes but also from the dominant psychological and po­liti­cal abjection in our worldviews. Influential intellectuals have universalized the direst circumstances of twentieth-­century Eu­ro­pean catastrophes and recent global financial and po­liti­cal crises. As a result, we have lost sight of how ­human imagination and intelligent criticism can create alternative worlds and minds. This book shows the long history of gnostic and messianic concepts and figures, which express a deep fear of ­human finitude and search for salvation in some sort of super­natural or metaphysical intervention. It poses against this tradition, which has origins in Athens as well as Jerusalem, another tradition of historical humanism, which recogx

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nizes that the untethered function of imagination and criticism can f­ ree us from melancholy and its apparatus. It can show us that we have sufficient ­human resources to defend the h ­ uman, to live responsibly on this planet, and to nurture the ­human itself, guiding its transformations as histories require. Anthropologically, the h ­ uman depends for its freedom and survival on the ­free play of imagination and critical thought, which are essential constituents of the species. The book probes some of the Western world’s ­great art to show the truth of this secular humanist tradition while arguing for not only the possibility but the necessity of its work in our time. This book adapts the work of Theodor Adorno on the essay to tie the ­free movement of critical thought to the creativity of poiesis, of poetry. It objects to the ossification of the acad­emy even as neoliberal economics and management crush the humanities, where intellect should protect the ­human. It resists the allure of allegoresis as the dominant activity in a melancholic ruined world. It poses the imaginative achievements of Wallace Stevens, Rembrandt, and Shakespeare against a consolidated vision of abjection. In ­these artists, the book finds proof that the melancholics and allegorizers are wrong conceptually, wrong historically, and death-­dealing. In t­ hese artists lies the evidence for the necessity of critical imagination and imaginative intelligence to freedom, life, and love. The opening of Chapter 8 tells the story of the book’s beginning. Visiting Rembrandt in the Louvre, I realized the relative poverty of even the best academic criticism and accepted the primacy of art and criticism over the professionalized shibboleths of neoliberal university practice. The moment led me away from the intellectuals our culture embraces to express and justify its melancholy t­oward the loving freedom implicit in artistic imagination and critical writing. It led me to see the ­human as a species that can imagine alternatives to its own circumstances if only it would listen to and accept the gifts offered by the imagination in the creative arts and the thoughtful judgment alive in critical essays. The final assumption of this book is s­ imple. Freedom depends on poiesis and criticism. The humanities exist to advance and protect both of ­these. Poets and critics are the persons in whom imagination and thought live in special and necessary ways. Our society and intellectuals should embrace, defend, and learn from poetry and criticism rather than live in melancholy among the ruins.

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chapter one

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The Path of Sorrows Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory: The Misprisions of Utopia

The young are not able to discern what is and what is not allegory. —­Socrates, The Republic (II 378e)

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his chapter’s subtitle points to a productive intersection of concepts, figures, and theories, which embody a major contribution in the critical humanistic thinking of the past eighty years. This contribution eases a substantial body of writing and an intense development and elaboration of questions and practices essential to especially Western thought and writing for two thousand years. Among the most influential critics who have written on ­these ele­ments are Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, William Empson, Angus Fletcher, Northrop Frye, Fredric Jameson, and C. S. Lewis—­very much a boys’ club, which ­matters deeply. On the margins of critical writing sit such scholars as Benedict Anderson and nearer neighbors among the psychoanalysts.1 While the nonliterary critics whose writings make allegory central to their thinking draw on recent and classical critical theories, academic critics have, in turn, added ­these nonliterary developments to their own practices.2 Especially in the United States, this cluster of concepts has played a substantial role in academic literary studies’ organ­ization and authority.3 The sheer mass of this writing is symptomatic of changes in the acad­emy and the society it serves. The iteration of t­ hese motifs depends on an e­ arlier inventive deepening of the key concepts and figures that came from work done within well-­ developed traditions of thought, technique, and writing that belonged to 1

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e­ arlier social formations.4 Importantly, t­ hese writings explain and often lament the death of ­those formations, of the productive contradictions that enabled their own compensations and transformations. Often the work of life crises, of deeply reflective historical transformations, became the anonymous work of academia. The conjunction of all the terms I designate in my subtitle is a historical link between the pre­sent moment (and recent past), especially in the acad­emy, and the long traditions of Western criticism and poiesis, especially as ­these include subservient verbal formations such as religious writing, confessions of belief, and popu­lar or mass cultures. As the university assumed the crisis work of the early and mid-­ twentieth c­ entury, it became responsible for curating and developing the creativity of its traditions. Yet the university, by its nature, could not honor that obligation. The humanistic acad­emy suffers from that inability, damaging itself as a trusted curator of imagination’s best work by iterating and so normalizing and alienating its pathos-­ridden inheritance rather than imitating its creative invention. Fi­nally, without the needed thoughtful reflection on its inheritance, the acad­emy often forwarded concepts and methods that screened our world from view and produced results harmful not only to the humanities and the acad­emy but also to the society for which they should serve as reservoirs of poetic effort and value. The most impor­tant word in my subtitle’s conjunction is, then, “misprisions,” since it describes the general failure that I have just mentioned. Writing in the early 1970s, Harold Bloom made misprision a familiar prob­lem. In The Anxiety of Influence, he theorized that each poetic successor survives and achieves creative authority by misreading the pre­de­ ces­sor figures whose imaginative power summoned the successor to poetic life. In this theory, misprision is creative defense, a transgressive misunderstanding that veils the disabling power of a poet’s priority from the youthful imagination emboldened but also threatened by that power.5 In a less esoteric sense, a misprision is a crime at law, the hiding of or failure to report a felony or greater offense. A misprision is an act of judgment, normally an error—­a mistaking of one t­hing for another—­and so my subtitle suggests dual possibilities. I indict not only ­those who are preoccupied with utopia within the larger nexus of my subtitle—­messianism, allegory, and apocalypse—­but also my scornful self for failing to appreciate a value that every­one but I can see.6 I indict both the g­ reat intellectual originators of this cluster early in the twentieth ­century and the academics 2

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who misappropriate and evacuate their work. I build on Edward Said’s analy­sis in “Traveling Theory.” Said showed that academics’ adoption of a theory produced by ­others, elsewhere, for specific reasons would and did reduce the weight and consequence of that theory. Moreover, he noted, such adoption is highly productive for the heirs within the filiative structure of such iteration. How did this structuring pro­cess come about? ­There is a brutal ele­ment to the answer: intellectual laziness and inadequate reflection. “It is impor­tant,” Said writes, “that as a critic who has learned from someone e­ lse’s theory he should be able to see the theory’s limitations, especially the fact that a breakthrough can become a trap, if it is used uncritically, repetitively, limitlessly.”7 The essence of the critical act is to avoid this trap in all pos­si­ble ways, including, as Said says, refusing iteration and repetition while turning a strong critical eye on the theories that are most useful for professional practice. In this book, for example, we ­will see how Benjamin’s im­mensely creative invention of the messianic intellectual, done ­under enormous historical and conceptual pressure, was “during its peregrinations . . . ​reduced, codified, and institutionalized.”8 I ­will make a version of this case by commenting on Fredric Jameson, precisely b ­ ecause of his productive ­career and achieved status in the field.9 His work illustrates recent values and practices in the profession. His writing is a reservoir of figures presenting itself as the embodied consequence of developments that should concern us. Said’s thinking helps us understand how institutional work, what Adorno calls the “schema,” transforms original and demanding thinking and writing into categories, easily applicable like ­counters to productivity. The acad­emy does not curate or create when it does ­these adaptive and productive tasks. Said had a deep ethical and humane concern with the fate of original thinking in the acad­emy, although as a person of the university, he held back from the nearly all-­embracing scorn Adorno often cast when considering the schema of institutional work. Said added to our understanding by showing that material iteration made inheritances “too inclusive, too ceaselessly active and expanding a habit of mind.”10 In other words, the very fact that terms and figures sustain a widespread conversation within a field of writing and research is evidence of its habituation, a fact that seems almost to summon the antifoundational position that was once widely held in the profession.11 Effectively, that position justified the separation of t­hese ongoing (tribal) conversations from the secular world’s demands and thinking’s 3

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own unceasing requirements. The speed of production within the categories of conversational habit has had dire consequences. “It risks becoming,” as Said writes, “a theoretical overstatement, a theoretical parody of the situation it was formulated originally to overcome.”12 He does not study the damage that results from misprizing this schema’s nonrelation to its outside or, more impor­tant, the vulnerability of ­these reductive and displaced iterations to the ruling ideologies that surround them—­even as ­these iterations, within their confines, justify themselves by their own self-­ defined at-­risk opposition to the dominant powers. In other words, the ­great originals—to adapt Harold Bloom’s term for poetic pre­de­ces­sors, figures such as Benjamin—­supply Romantic legitimacy to their heirs who suffer none of the crises that elicited the original’s concepts and figures. Heirs often strug­gle to claim the original’s authority and benefit from secondary figures who mediate between the original figure’s inventions and their wider adoption. Moreover, it is the nature of official culture that the mediating figure can get a false authority by screening the original from careful study. Most impor­tant, the heirs burdened by their reduced and codified inheritance neither curate the significant effort of its creation nor match its originality and specificity. Said’s emphasis on the mechanisms of conceptual, imaginative, and historical impoverishment does not speak directly of the direst result: the abdication of imaginative and creative responsibility in an unreflective and po­liti­cally vulnerable academic enclave such as the US university, which has come ­under po­liti­cal and economic pressure since 2008. We can describe ­these pro­cesses easily. More difficult and impor­tant to describe are the undesirable consequences of inherited concepts and figures, as ­these suggest the dangers that unreflected criticism and weak imagination pose to us all. ­These consequences often result from an inadequate critical sense. We cannot always foresee t­ hese consequences, often b ­ ecause they come packed in the genealogy of our own creativity. I hope to leave us with a clear sense that g­ reat art engages creatively and with supreme awareness the complex necessities and burdens involved in inheritance. From this point of view, Said’s writing about beginnings is his greatest achievement. I begin my analy­sis with what w ­ ill seem to many readers as perhaps too negative or ungenerous a study of allegorical utopianism in recent critical writing, before extending my study to its originals and some ele­ments of their own longer traditions. Allegorical utopianism, I w ­ ill show, 4

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names a ­family of key terms with unfortunate conceptual, methodological, and po­liti­cal consequences. This ­family of terms, extensively elaborated, categorized, and repeated, creates several professionally useful categorical shibboleths; it preserves the order of ­things, even as it declares its own oppositional function.13 It preserves the status quo by posing as an alternative, whereas, in fact, it obstructs the work of conceptualization and poi­ ill ask if such a claim is not always true of any (failed) esis. Some readers w effort. That might be the case. I am concerned, however, with the absence of critical awareness on an institutional as well as individual scale that would alert scholars to the prob­lems this c­ auses—to evade and correct when pos­si­ble. I ­will clarify the structuring of official culture that displaces critical awareness, especially in my discussion of Adorno and the essay in Chapter 5. For the moment, I ­will focus on the tendency to allegorize that has influenced so much intellectual work that took place in the disciplinary areas of literary theory. Modern criticism adds enormously to the traditional theories and accounts of allegory, with the result that allegory has become a disproportionately used functional category—­a tool—­for describing and treating literary and cultural texts of all kinds. In fact, following especially on the work of Benjamin, recent criticism believes that allegory is a historically inescapable mode of writing criticism, excepting only some intense lyrical poetry. This allegorical tradition is old, long preceding its status in recent de­cades or its prominence especially among Eu­ro­pean modernists, who intensified thinking about the concept. Adorno, having read Benjamin early in his own c­ areer, discussed allegory in his 1932 paper “The Idea of Natu­ral History,” wherein he aimed at a dialectical overcoming of the antithesis between history and nature, ­toward the end of which he tells us that allegory is the nonaccidental playing out of a particularity.14 More impor­tant, he introduces allegory to his discussion of death and art in his 1934 note on Beethoven’s late style, a topic to which we w ­ ill return. Having discovered that “the content of art always lies only in phenomena,” he concludes that the “relationship between conventions and subjectivity” is the “formal law” of late works’ content.15 Given the omnipresence of death to the artist and biographical, historical, and psychological scholars of that art, in late style this formal law manifests itself in a distinct way—­“precisely in reflection on death.” Against all t­ hose scholars of late art, who do the work of death against art in general, Adorno moves to a proper, formally aware 5

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theory of art. He assimilates lateness to the extremely specific par­tic­ul­ar function of allegory as appropriate to this art: “If the legitimacy of art is abolished before death’s real­ity, then death can certainly not be assimilated by the work of art as its ‘subject.’ It is imposed on creatures alone, and not on their constructions, and thus has always appeared in art in a refracted form: as allegory.”16 Setting aside the fraught question of Adorno’s relation to Benjamin’s thinking on allegory, note that Adorno’s experience of Beethoven’s late works leads to an insight about how art manifests its formality in the particularity of its circumstance, death’s real­ity. Allegory is not a universal condition of all art, and Adorno does not allegorize a text that appears as something other than allegory. This is a vital point, in the spirit of the Saidian comments. As we w ­ ill see, allegoresis, making an allegory of texts and objects by hermeneutic method, degrades conceptual breakthroughs. In Adorno’s notes on Beethoven, he discovered the particularity of allegory making manifest the landscape of art when the subject withdraws—­this is a richly specific act of critical poiesis far from the standardization of practical allegoresis, so common especially among academics dealing with cultural politics. The tendency to allegorize, that is, the assumption of allegoresis as a dominant hermeneutic mode, has not only lost track of allegory’s formal and conceptual particularity but also blurred the necessary if difficult distinction between allegorical lit­er­a­ture and critical allegorization.17 In the tradition of Northrop Frye, Maureen Quilligan has argued that allegorizing readings derive their content and authority from extraliterary sources, ­whether they are philosophy, politics, or other discourses of the h ­ uman sci18 ences. Simply put, allegorization is an interpretive act that treats a text as if it ­were an allegory, asserting its right to do so ­because of an implied understanding among professional readers that allegorizing w ­ ill “write into” a consensus of agreed issues. If allegory once masked from dangerous readers the expression of unauthorized ideas and if allegorization often worked to uncover the unrecognized against a consensus, now allegorization is an act of double legitimation that creates a self-­confirming pro­cess. Angus Fletcher recognizes that the double mode of allegorical expression can function po­liti­cally, ­either in the form of newspeak or Orwellian dystopic decreations of the same. Fletcher’s insight opens a path to Leo Strauss’s notorious theory of reading between the lines, a method of decoding that reveals esoteric knowledge against consensus.19 When we 6

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examine Morton Bloomfield’s research into allegory, we ­will see more clearly the link between allegoresis and private knowledge among initiates. Even if allegorization engages the text “historically,” at a metatheoretical and po­liti­cal level, it does so ahistorically, that is, with insufficient skepticism about the sources of allegorization’s seeming necessity and with an inadequate consideration not only of its long-­standing genre prob­lems but also of the dangers inherent in the iteration of or commitment to a consensus formation. Often, when critical theorists and practical critics speak of allegory, they are in fact defining textuality as that which they can allegorize. As a result, bound­aries blur, and u ­ nder the sign “allegory,” critics r­eally speak of their own practice and intent. They call texts or textual pro­cesses allegories. This naming allows for allegoresis that, in turn, places t­hose texts and pro­ cesses in the ser­vice of nonliterary, extratextual programs. ­These programs displace critical study into debates on the terrain of nonliterary, often tribal agonistics. The specific capacities of careful study die down into domains of social and professional belonging that hide themselves from critical investigation and, as a result, trivialize desire.20 I w ­ ill try to make some of ­those hidden domains available for critical discussion by analyzing the close conceptual and practical relationship between utopian desires and allegorical theories.

Fredric Jameson as the Hope of Allegory Fredric Jameson often links “utopia” to allegory in his work.21 Jameson’s theory of allegory had considerable influence b ­ ecause of his success in making allegoresis seem necessary and universal as a mode of critical interpretation. He argues that history, especially the effects of capital, make allegory historically inescapable. He polemicizes that it is po­liti­cally and intellectually unacceptable to be antiutopian. This under­lying assumption results in his embrace of an anti-­antiutopian position. Despite such potential judgments, The Po­liti­cal Unconscious has played a significant role in changing the discourse and concepts of con­temporary criticism, often with its conclusions and terms mattering more than its considerable scholarship in traditions that its ephebes have found unproductive. The Po­liti­cal Unconscious is a turning point in the recent history of criticism.22 It puts Jameson’s considerable reputation in the ser­vice of allegoresis, a move that his anti-­interpretive pre­de­ces­sor, Northrop Frye, might well have scorned. In The Anatomy of Criticism, Frye famously 7

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wrote, “It is not often realized that all commentary is allegorical interpretation, an attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic imagery. The instant that any critic allows himself to make a genuine comment about a poem . . . ​ he has begun to allegorize. Commentary thus looks at lit­er­a­ture as, in its formal phase, a potential allegory of events and ideas.”23 Jameson might agree with Frye’s conclusion that all textual readings are allegorical, but his value scheme is not Frye’s scheme. Frye did not value commentary. He understood that allegoresis made imaginative verbal expression into a servant of favored ideological discourses. In effect, he licensed Jameson’s inversion of Frye’s deepest worry. Jameson became a power­ful improviser, searching for modes and movements that legitimated new academic ways of speaking. ­These in turn presumed the truth of certain extraliterary po­ liti­cal and economic beliefs. Of course, improvisation has goals, and Jameson’s ­career suggests two words for his: hope and allegory. Building on ele­ments of a long and complex set of traditions in religion, psychoanalysis, utopian writing, and critical theory, Jameson and o ­ thers put together hope and allegory to advance ideas that became impor­tant to academic politics and activists. For example, the public conflicts between Cornel West and Ta-­Nehisi Coates circling around Barack Obama’s politics are very much about the differing valences they place on hope as a po­liti­cal, moral, and anthropological, indeed perhaps ontological, category of ­human existence.24 Hope names an anthropological quality of the ­human that rests in turn on an implied promise of ­futures. It defines the temporality of the species as active in the pre­sent, as a motive for strug­gle. Hope assures a form of activity in the pre­sent in a species ontologically marked by desire for freedom that sets its satisfaction in a ­future tense. It can form a narrative unit of pre­ sent and ­future as a fundamental ­human ability motivates re­sis­tance as well as acts of cultural creation.25 Hope also allows the per­sis­tent reading of all history as manifestations of such a permanent dialectic of ruination now, resisted by strug­gle and in active creation, itself pointing to ­futures never guaranteed, as it ­were, to come. Hence, messianism and hope appear as cousins within a certain expansive diegetic development that would enable but, as I argue, also limits and circumscribes h ­ uman possibility. I am using Jameson as a figure whose professional success illustrates the dominance of allegoresis within the literary acad­emy over a period of years. He is an example and test case. His success also ties the acad­emy’s allegorizing to the ruling cultural mode of melancholy. In his influential essay 8

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“Utopianism ­after the End of Utopia,” Jameson inscribes allegory as the historically inescapable mode of reading in our period. Jameson claims this fact as a “symptom” of our age, of the time of late capital, that f­ uture historians ­will recognize as characteristic and worth speculative analy­sis.26 He asserts that certain utopian texts, particularly Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, point to a new culture, far beyond the reaches of modernism’s vanguardism, ideology of style, and individualized utopian aspirations. In their place, almost ­because of socialization within industrial capital, comes a new aesthetics of collaboration: “Collective work is . . . ​affirmed as something other than mere period likeness or the anecdotal meeting of the minds between individual paint­ers or architects” (167). The “ultimate meaning” of this social aesthetic phenomenon is an “enigma,” according to Jameson, and while a reader cannot find a final expression of that meaning, a theorist ­will see the essential reading cognate to the enigma itself. That cognate is “the reinvention in some unexpected form, of allegory as such” (167). Each step of Jameson’s pro­gress through t­ hese pages is recognizable, but scholars doubt the basis for his conclusion that ­because he can conduct an act of allegorization, the materials u ­ nder hand are in fact allegories. To defend his model, Jameson feels he must ward off threats to allegory’s primacy, especially that posed by irony and particularly within academia. Jameson’s first strug­gle is for predominance in the acad­emy. For this reason, in Postmodernism, he brands Paul de Man’s thinking about irony as in alliance with the cap­i­tal­ist money proj­ect. Jameson poses a life-­ and-­death strug­gle of allegorization against irony. But why? Gordon Teskey shows that the relation between irony and allegory has been theoretically ambiguous from the time of Quintilian, who demonstrated their common foundation on a structuring use of “grammatical meta­phor.”27 As a result, irony and allegoresis are antipodes, with irony always harassing the never-­ extinguished desires of allegory. Teskey puts it this way: In the classical account of tropology as deviation it is pos­si­ble to imagine getting back, by interpretive correction, to the upright position of a linguistically omnipotent self, one that both intends and deflects its intentions in a language it “uses.” Irony upsets this account b ­ ecause it speaks not from an angular but from an opposite position, where the continuity of the circle is broken: “I” and “Not I.” E ­ very ironic statement says both of ­these ­things, and says that it says them. . . . ​Out of that abyss of the infinitely pos­si­ble is generated e­ very possibility of figurative language.28 9

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In the acad­emy and in educated culture, de Man’s deconstructive thinking, which puts irony at its center, competes with Jameson for influence by disabling his need to link hope, utopia, and allegory. The threat inheres in two points. First, allegoresis never rids itself of irony—­they are joint expressions of the same tropological system of creativity and expression. In fact, they are inseparable ele­ments in the creation and expression of linguistic structures. Second, when allegorizing critics attempt to suppress irony’s troubling effects, their pragmatics reduce the range of species possibility to ­those that they take to be the irony-­safe belief systems of the extraverbal (hence one source of recent academic distaste for the verbal). The diegesis of hope, figured as allegory, hinges on a reductive temporality no ­matter how thick the allegorical work might be in each act of interpretation. The radiant texture of crossed times, valences, meanings, and experiences registered finely (if ironically) in the complexity of act or experience exceeds the axes of time or­ga­nized by the recursive idea of hope’s per­sis­tent presence. The essay “Introduction: Utopia Now” is recognizably Jamesonian in theme and mode.29 He associates criticism of the allegorical utopian imagination with conservative politics, with pessimism or despair—­just as he associated de Man on irony with the money power. The injunction “always historicize” becomes the countersymbolic value in the name of which allegoresis thrives. It gains its authority, however, on the basis of weak claims: that current social arrangements are not fixed, that the ­orders of power are not inflexible, that we should not treat the social as natu­ral rather than as ­human. In the essay, Jameson also asserts that critics of utopia come in essentially two forms, ­those who serve the interests of the status quo and ­those wary of utopia’s ambiguities as form and practice—­which is to say ­those frightened by the prospect of an uncertain ­future, perhaps of revolution. He argues that the wary should be on his side. He invokes Sartre’s advice to the fellow travelers of the Communist Party, urging the wary to become anti-­antiutopians as their pre­de­ces­sors might have become anti-­ anti-­Communists. In 2005, Jameson baldly writes, “Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a po­liti­cal slogan and a po­liti­cally energizing perspective” (Archaeologies, xii). Older Marxism decried the utopian as right wing, idealist, and in­effec­tive. The Historikerstreit of 1986 and beyond, which para­lyzed German national and intellectual life in debate about historical memory, paralleled the po­liti­cal effect of the antirevolutionary 10

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French intellectuals. Taken together, ­these stand for a general right-­wing shift prior to the end of the Soviet Union, which altogether throw into crisis the realist possibilities of a Marxist diegesis. A ­ fter 1989 and 1991, when actually existing socialism came to its end, liberals and conservatives alike—­and this might include Eu­ro­pean postcommunists as well—­attached the utopian to totalitarianism, tracking deaths ­under Stalin and Mao as the result of utopian thinking and po­liti­cal terror. What­ever energy or desire escapes repression resists and acts against the dystopia that is capitalism in its neoliberal and neoconservative forms, with its ubiquitous traces in po­ liti­cal organ­ization and cultural production. Once uncovered, t­hese resistant energies and hopes reinforce each other and, allegorically, provide the claimed historical ground for the massive narrative of Jameson’s expansive book Archaeologies of the F ­ uture, which is the fullest if not most complex expression of his hope. In the simplest of terms, this allegorical account does not hold. ­Were Jameson a more thorough scholar, one who took seriously alternative accounts and critiques, he would know this. The work of Philip Mirowski, for example, offers not only an entirely dif­fer­ent account but also one based on thorough historical documentary research into the actually existing operations of neoliberalism. This last appears, ­because of analy­sis, not as a respite for frustrated desire seeking utopian grounds for its own promise. Rather, building on and setting out from Foucault, it ties neoliberalism to promises of freedom and autonomy, the effect of which is to unmask the utopian hope placed in utopian desire by allegorists outside real politics and unable to imagine defeat.30 In other words, utopian allegorizers practice complex hermeneutics to gain authority by claiming to see what ­others can and do not. Morton W. Bloomfield elaborated this point and explained its consequences. In “Allegory as Interpretation,” he wrote, “The prob­lem of interpretation is the prob­lem of allegory ­whether historical or ahistorical. . . . ​Allegory is that which is established by interpretation, or the interpretative pro­cess itself.” Bloomfield summarized his research with this remark: “Allegory is . . . ​that which conquers time, that which perpetually renews the written word.”31 Allegory never asks what the relation is between renewal and return. Return is nostos, while renewal is a turn in a seemingly dif­fer­ent direction. Nostoi are tales of compulsive return, tales of rescue and rebirth, as Odysseus cleans the hall with ritual bloodlettings and renews himself with yet another mandated wandering away, only then to return ­later once more. Renewals are actions within a 11

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field of failure and disconnection, of loss and the need to restore, even if only that which the original act aspired to conduct. The first act fails, or time passes, and circumstances change, and a second act follows, gesturing ­toward a ­future, often unseeable but compelled equally by a necessity to leave an undesirable pre­sent. The motives for allegory and nostalgia coalesce in the allegorists’ vision of the barren and unbearable order of history and the ruins of past actions. Hope surfaces as the name ­under which their nostoi happen. ­Under this sign, the past is perpetually renewed and the ­future perpetually ­imagined as the temporal locus where meaning inheres as evidence of desire at work to transcend or overcome a ruined and unjust pre­sent. Time and utopia cross to produce a nexus of “meaning potentiality” in which the anxiety crises of anomie and disjunction assure the progressive ambitions of a species that can turn its desiring energies into ­imagined forms of alternative communities and life practices. In Jameson’s exemplary logic, this leads to the concept of utopia. All t­hose who are alienated from capital’s horrifying practices and differentiated as well from its totalizing modalities into segments and pro­cesses of willed emergence might well find themselves mirrored in allegorical form, which displaces politics as a form of agency. In part, as Jameson concedes, this is true ­because ­there is nowhere ­else to look: “Late capitalism seems to have no natu­ral enemies.” It is, as he writes, “not only the invincible universalism of capitalism which is at issue” but the belief that “this tendency is irreversible, . . . ​that no other socio-­economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available” (Archaeologies, xii). From within this gloom, he claims, what rises dialectically is the utopian, for him the only imaginable virtue in an age when we can imagine no alternative, “which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from the comet” (xii). “Utopians,” on this view, serve the species and history by “offering to conceive of such alternate systems” (xii). Jameson finds in Utopian writing the same pragmatics that he finds in allegory: “Utopian form is itself a repre­ sen­ta­tional meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality” (xii). The task of interpreting ­those new realities falls to allegoresis. The new realities emerge as enigmas, and allegoresis, always available for restorative interpretation, serves as their corollary. Allegoresis hinges, for Jameson, not on its relation to irony but gnostically on enigma’s mysteries b ­ ecause ­these permit diegetic accounts. 12

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This relation between enigma and allegory assures productive narrative and the agonistics of authority. The long classical tradition helps us understand the consequences and possibilities of such ideas. In book 8, chapter 6, of Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian describes how enigmas extend their main idea ­because they close themselves off from lucidity. As a result, enigmas “cannot be understood ­unless they are interpreted.”32 Allegory and enigma are almost the same: “a too frequent introduction of [meta­phors that] obscures [language] and renders the perusal of it fatiguing.”33 They collapse into each other, creating an interpretive opportunity for the allegorizer to occupy the ground of textual expression in the ser­vice of an extratextual set of beliefs.34 Jameson’s writings on utopian science fiction are the preeminent example of such work in our time. He evacuates utopian science fiction of all substantive historical content, reducing it to the pure abstract concept of hope, placed beyond the need for hope. At first, his gesture seems bold, but it is both old and a sign of his continual strug­gles against the authority of irony. Quintilian showed that Latin writers translated the Greek Αλληγορία by the Latin inversio, the same word that Latin sometimes used to translate irony. As inversio, for Quintilian, allegory “pre­sents one ­thing in words and another in sense, or sometimes a sense quite contrary to the words.”35 ­Here is Jameson ­doing just this ­simple ­thing but to his own extraliterary purpose: “All ­these formal and repre­sen­ta­tional questions lead back to the po­ liti­cal one with which we began: but now the latter has been sharpened into the formal dilemma of how works that posit the end of history can offer any usable historical impulses, how works which aim to resolve all po­liti­cal differences can continue to be in any sense po­liti­cal, how texts designed to overcome the needs of the body can remain materialistic, and how visions of the ‘epoch of rest’ (Morris) can energize and compel us to action” (Archaeologies, xii). The answer of course is in the substitutive allegorizing he calls “transcoding” that is the rest of the book—an encyclopedic effort that history itself would seem to demand.36 In the end, all of history dis­appears over the horizon, cast t­ here by allegoresis.

Walter Benjamin and the Onset of Modern Allegoresis No critic’s writings on allegory w ­ ill have more long-­standing merit and influence than ­those of Walter Benjamin.37 His early analy­sis of allegory 13

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linked it irrevocably to the messianic through the recession of the divine into a dark background. The merely h ­ uman appears as a desolated landscape where “ruined forms of the redeemed work of art have always stood out clearly.”38 Bloomfield’s linguistic approach to allegory similarly claimed that allegory always confronted what had become a ruin and was able to return meaning to it by its rehistoricization, a movement that made the work of art always capable of universal value. “Allegory is,” he writes, “that which conquers time, that which perpetually renews the written word.”39 Ruination leads to allegory for its own purposes, and yet, as Benjamin shows, allegorization contributes to the very pro­cess of ruination on which its own authority and necessity depend. Allegory is like philosophical criticism when it transforms the material content of the work into “truth content,” for in so d ­ oing, it “entails the weakening of effect whereby the attractiveness of ­earlier charms diminishes de­cade by de­cade, providing the basis for a rebirth in which all ephemeral beauty completely falls away and the work of art asserts itself as ruin” (Benjamin, Origin, 194). Bloomfield’s insight is a fundamental contribution to understanding the functionality of allegoresis in producing the real as well as topical consequences to which it claims itself to be a cure. Allegoresis destroys beauty, transforms it into the abject, while it also designates the enigma as the legitimation of its own operations. Allegory’s complicity in creating ruins of the h ­ uman world, leaving it as nature chock-­full of ruins, has its technical literary-­critical counterpart in a moment of de Man’s research that Bloomfield cites: “Paul de Man has written, ‘All repre­sen­ta­tional poetry is always also allegorical, ­whether it be aware of it or not, and the allegorical power of the language undermines and obscures the specific literal meaning of a repre­sen­ta­tion open to understanding. But allegorical poetry must contain a repre­sen­ta­ tional ele­ment that invites and allows for understanding, only to discover that the understanding it reaches is necessarily in error.’ ”40 De Man had produced a new allegorical reading of Stéphane Mallarmé, diabolically reversing that symbolist ideal that had worried Edmund Wilson for its atemporality. De Man concluded that this reading taught criticism an impor­ tant lesson, namely, that all allegory had a repre­sen­ta­tional ele­ment about it, which, when it guided reading as understanding, always resulted in error. This conclusion reinforces the allegorist’s assumption that allegory deals with ruins, but it also confirms the complicity, the active role allegorical criticism plays, in the despoiling of lit­er­a­ture and reading into ruin. The 14

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close tie of allegory to error as necessity is not only an ele­ment of ruination, an insight de Man perhaps derives from reading Benjamin, especially on the Baroque. It also suggests de Man knew something of the weak nominalist truth I am asserting throughout this book, namely, that allegorical critics ruin to sustain themselves and their proj­ects. Bloomfield’s rigorous research into allegory demonstrates that “in this view of allegory, which does not set it against a repre­sen­ta­tional or mimetic reading, and which sees it as the mode of understanding the significance of texts, most scholars and literary critics are allegorists.”41 Taking a dif­fer­ent direction from de Man, Bloomfield offers a civic justification of allegory’s necessary resurgence in con­temporary criticism: “A society cannot exist without criticism and its use of allegorization.”42 If true, this leaves us with utilitarianism, a disregard for the lived particularities to which art finds formal modes of tribute, a morally suspect reductive method, to which Kant long ago had posed a strong critique.43 Bloomfield’s study of allegory takes careful note of how allegory often attaches to the notion of secrecy, hidden knowledge, and elite skills of interpretation. His work shows that ­these notions arose in the Eu­ro­pean Re­ nais­sance and rested on a sort of Gnosticism, a belief in “an ancient, restricted body of knowledge accessible only to an élite,” whose aim is to reveal lost, forgotten, or obscured meaning.44 He points out that Leo Strauss and Maimonides thought this was true and a necessity. In fact, especially in Maimonides, Bloomfield saw that when allegorists, proceeding on the basis of secret knowledge or its technical equivalent, preternatural interpretive techniques, worked to revive the historicality of ruined texts with an eye ­toward the ­future, they produced what he calls “prophetic or horizontal allegory.”45 At this point, Bloomfield’s research moves ­toward a conclusion, as I w ­ ill show in Chapter  2, similar to the one drawn by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis from his analy­sis of the Elohist’s style. A longer historical view, a deeper sense of the tradition of allegoresis and of research into that tradition, allows us to judge the consequences and complicities of an intellectual commitment to it as method and ethic. We must see some of the negative consequences so our intellectual energies may move in directions that are more desirable. Michael Löwy says that Gershom Scholem is “universally recognized as the greatest authority” in the study of Jewish messianism.46 He sees a need to take seriously Scholem’s extreme if sympathetic claim that “socialism is 15

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only a secularized form of Jewish messianism.” He cites a key sentence from Lucien Goldmann’s study “Economic Democracy and Cultural Creation” as an instance of the clarity that might emerge from his contention: “Lucien Goldmann is one of the rare Marxists who was ready to assume this pos­ si­ble heritage in positive terms: ‘It is repre­sen­ta­tions like the coming of the Messiah, the Kingdom of Heaven, ­etc., which are found devoid of any transcendent or super­natural ele­ment in this immanent religion called socialism, in which they take the form of hope and faith in an immanent historical ­future that men must realize by their own action.’ ”47 Given Goldmann’s indebtedness to Georg Lukács, his willingness to praise theoretical adaptations of messianic thinking does not surprise us. The complexities involved in the transmissions that underlie Goldmann’s thought lets us see how, in part, allegorization justifies the hope that grounds it by an act of faith: interpretive rhe­toric can convince ­those who desire that ­there is reason in hope, the proof of which is nearby in the messianic traces deposited in the pre­sent. In 1961, Goldmann drew another conclusion that he repeated in 1978: “Socialism is precisely the hope to create one day an au­then­tic culture that has a categorical structure sufficiently vast to understand and integrate all the cultural creations of the past.”48 This sounds like the critical program that links allegory and utopia, or interpretation and hope, in the faith of advanced left criticism, especially in the acad­emy.49 Löwy concretizes Goldmann by pointing to intellectuals in the Workers Councils of Bavaria and Hungary who “­were convinced of being called to carry out the mission of the redemption of the world and belonging to a collective messiah.”50 Said’s analy­sis of Goldmann’s softening of Lukács’s urgent Marxism to traveling theory at the Sorbonne and Yale helps us understand the acad­emy’s faith in a reified, allegorized utopia as a crisis concept adequate to dire moments of late capital. More impor­tant to our conclusions, however, are the genealogical burdens that enable hope as the limit itself. As the limit, hope linked to allegoresis and utopia defines that beyond which thought need not continue and beyond which, in general, the intellectual need not or cannot go. Facing the unutterable dominance of late capital, the hopeful utopians who believe in the value of desire and agency always assume that the socialist alternative can be only ­after a temporal or historical coupure. Allegorical utopians do not embrace evolutionary po­liti­cal or social development; mostly, they are the enemies of po­liti­cal slow time, or gradualism.51 16

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(One feels in the back of this claim the strong presence of the Leninist Lukács, insisting on the special knowledge of the vanguard elite intellectuals with their special scientific knowledge.) This is not only ideology at work. This is, as we w ­ ill see when we discuss Auerbach in Chapter 2, a classic gesture of esoteric writing and the authority of its priestly classes. If we recall the well-­established belief that the crises of capitalism w ­ ill end e­ ither in revolution or in catastrophe, then we see the relevance of Scholem. According to Benjamin’s study of the Trauerspiel and the Protestant Baroque, divinity retreated over the horizon or into the background of art that foregrounded not merely the h ­ uman but the ­human in the scenery of ruin. Unlike the aesthetic humanism of the Italian Re­nais­sance, for example, where the ­human, the subject, and the beauty of art restored the classicism recovered through the Arabs, the Baroque demystifies the combine of the subject, humanism, and beauty, substituting the ruinous finitude of the h ­ uman in sceneries that left the divine pre­sent but looming, distant, not quite beyond recall. Of course, in a complex set of still poorly understood interpretive maneuvers, Benjamin had the allegorical Baroque recover beauty in and as, if not ­after, the formations of ruin. His work left the h ­ uman positioned in a profane world to which divinity might return, redeeming past and f­ uture, together. Benjamin changed our thinking of history from unidirectionality to reversibility and produced an impor­tant theory of the event as a redemptive intrusion into and outside time. Almost a parody of the Incarnation, congruent no doubt with the weakness of Catholicism that accompanied the weakness of the Catholic Eu­ro­pean empires, the event became the name for a potential divine intervention that might redeem history from the seemingly ruinous situation. Whereas the Incarnation made God always and everywhere immanent and central to history, Benjamin’s critical genius saw at work the dialectical potential in which the ultimate symbol, divine and h ­ uman as one, served as the basis for its own de­mo­li­tion and restoration—­ruin and redemption, this time of the Redeemer. One of my motives for this book is the ­simple truth that not all is ruin, that the angel of history’s vatic view as it swept forward in time is wrong. Rembrandt, as we ­will see, did the work of the very humanism that commerce and capital had abrogated and Benjamin declared impossible. If capital opened the questions, What is the h ­ uman? or, better, Is t­ here still a ­human? making the art of Michelangelo no longer a functioning poetics 17

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for new art, then Rembrandt found the ­human again within a domain that seemingly excluded it.52 Rembrandt’s g­ reat works are not ruins. Their place in narratives of ruination is an example of diegetic vio­lence within allegoresis. Rembrandt’s greatest works evade the g­ rand allegories of destruction. They testify to another impor­tant topic of this book: the capacity of strong imagination to produce poetic alternatives to the inherited and in the face of claims made to limit imagination by the real. ­These g­ rand diegetic forms and motives for ruination have an exceptionally long history, often intertwined with religiosity. We can see an instance of this in Saint Augustine, whose writings brought together such end-­of-­ history forms and the shape, in confession, of the ­later Bildungsroman. (This theme ­will recur in Chapter 9.) Augustine set up the Christian narrative of Imitatio Christi as the public and private fact that all history and all experience are Christocentric; the Baroque, however, did something quite dif­ fer­ent in continuing his form. It submitted the Augustinian story—­with what irony!—to allegorical interpretation: “Even the story of the life of Christ lent itself to that turning of history into nature that is fundamental to the allegorical” (Benjamin, Origin, 194). It is hard to specify the exact relations involved between the work of Benjamin and Bloomfield, or indeed Angus Fletcher, but Benjamin certainly anticipated Bloomfield’s point that allegorical historicization recovered the ahistorical universality and even beauty of what became for the allegorist only ruin. This single gesture embodies the redemptive ambition of allegoresis over and against the universal enigmatic ruin, which it sets out as the result of all merely ­human poiesis. Against the claim to redemption, however, stands the very art that exemplifies the allegorists’ unjustifiable claims to authority and knowledge, gnostic and perhaps messianic and melancholic but always privileged and esoteric. In The Origin of German Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin articulates one of his most influential formulations of this nexus, one result of which is the seeming desirability and inescapability of allegoresis and allegory. Benjamin makes explicit that the Baroque shows allegory as a response to every­ thing unsatisfying in history and to the ultimate disappointment of nature, that is, death. The Romantics, in differentiating allegory from the symbol, contributed the dialectic to understanding the concept, and so what Benjamin calls “the vio­lence” of allegory appears as always already pre­sent “as primal history of meaning or intention” (Origin, 173). 18

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In one complex paragraph, Benjamin intertwines the concepts of “time” and “history” within his theory of allegory. “Time” is “the decisive category . . . ​which it was the ­great Romantic insight of ­these thinkers to have introduced into this this field of semiotics.” “Time” allowed a sharp demarcation between symbol and allegory, according to which the symbolic idealizes destruction and redeems it and nature in “the light of salvation” (Origin, 173–174). By contrast, “in allegory ­there lies before the eyes of the observer the facies hippocratica [the face of near death] of history as petrified primal landscape” (Origin, 174). Although Benjamin regularly notes that the Baroque discovers allegory with a new visionary rigor, augmented by the work of the Romantics in dialectics and comparison, he does not pre­sent his historicism as a weak perspectivism, contextualism, or relativism. The movement from antiquity to Re­nais­sance, Baroque, Romantic, and fi­nally modernity is a path that dialectically discloses the allegorical within historical emergence and transforms the results of that emergence into an instrumental truth claim of knowledge about history, nature, meaning, and other topoi. This passage describes the emergence of allegory’s truth in a Baroque icon: “History, in every­thing untimely, sorrowful and miscarried that belongs to it from the beginning, is inscribed in a face—no, in a death’s head” (Benjamin, Origin, 174). Allegory’s truth has two components: first, what this icon stands for and, second, the iconicity itself. No ­matter ­whether the allegory is Baroque or Baudelairian, part of its truth is the formal and technical production of the iconic image of historical ruination. The icon is the opening movement in the emergence of the dominant dialectical image so strongly associated with modernity, and it is the palimpsestic displacement of the h ­ uman, which allegory cannot tolerate, create, embrace, or protect. This last fact about allegory shows that its nostalgia is motive for its reappearance. Given its resentment at the failures of history, nostalgia becomes the hidden name of the regrettably impossible to which no return is pos­ si­ble, precisely ­because all such return is always already h ­ uman and symbolic. Benjamin is quite explicit on ­these m ­ atters: “And though it is true that to such a ­thing all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression, all classical harmony of form, and every­thing h ­ uman is lacking” (174). Habitually, criticism rests on this distinction between the associated tropes of allegory and symbol just as it might stumble on the relation between allegory and irony. Given Benjamin’s dialectical historicism, no alternative emerges to this 19

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paired oppositional hierarchy between symbol and allegory and their associated clusters. Benjamin’s continuation of this line of analy­sis reveals his motives: “in this figure, the most fallen in nature, is expressed meaningfully as enigma not only the nature of h ­ uman existence in general but the biographical historicity of an individual” (174). Dialectics always elicit the charge of metaphysics, and that is proper to the phrase “the nature of ­human existence as such.” Allegory presumably would redeem this metaphysics by its interpretive nature—­a claim Nietz­sche would mock—­and this is the conclusion that Adorno, whom Benjamin influenced on this issue, certainly draws. “Enigma” is a complex sign in Benjamin’s writings, which Adorno stabilizes in his Aesthetic Theory: “The need of artworks for interpretation, their need for the production of their truth content, is the stigma of their constitutive deficiency. Artworks do not achieve what is objectively sought in them. The zone of indeterminacy between the unreachable and what has been realized constitutes their enigma. They have truth content and they do not have it.”53 We w ­ ill see what Adorno calls indeterminacy in the tentative tensions that make up the style of Wallace Stevens. The historicality that constrains artworks to the necessary complementariness of conceptual hermeneutics is at first Baroque and secondly allegorical—no ­matter the historical period. “This is the core of the allegorical vision,” Benjamin continues, “of the Baroque, profane exposition of history as the Passion of the world—­meaningful only in the stations of its decline” (Origin, 174). “Stations of decline” refers of course to “stations of the cross,” or the via dolorosa of Christ’s crucifixion, which takes iconic form in vari­ous media from bas-­relief to paint or glass. While allegory’s importance resides solely in the secularizing explanation of history consequent on this movement of decline from arrest through torture and hanging death to entombment, Benjamin’s dialectical account leaves open the final movement in the secularized Passion, which is the movement that redeems history by conquering death, filling time, and banishing sin. The greater the significance, the greater is the subjection to death, b ­ ecause death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance. However, if nature has always been subject to the power of death, it is also true that it has always been allegorical. Significance and death both come to fruition in historical development, just as they are intricately linked as seeds in the creature’s graceless state of sin (Origin, 174). 20

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The symbol not only belongs to the past, especially to the Re­nais­sance and the time of the h ­ uman, but is also, as such for Benjamin, a historical and metaphysical error. Allegorical truth is the truth of continual ruination of historical culture and fallen nature and depends on ruination for its own repetitive victories over time. It is the only posthumanist form available to the belatedly posthumane intellectual’s pathos. Immersed in the permanent strug­gle to remake ruins for already-­ruined immediate purposes, this pro­ cess does not so much show the death of the ­human as generate it conditionally within its works. This would be a mere weakness of culture and a mark of crisis in Benjamin’s imagination w ­ ere critics not claiming for it also the disclosure of a dialectically inescapable limit of historical possibility rather than the projected vision of nostalgic loss. Allegoresis produces not only ruin but also the end of the ­human. The supersession of the symbolic / ­human by the allegorical / iconic image has about it nothing more convincing or necessary than the habitual rhetorical construction that this opposition repeats. Troubling as it is within the long traditions of Western writing, it is not the only such construction, and the existence of alternatives mocks its demands as inescapable, indeed, as a secularized and dialectical substitution for a metaphysical, sometimes sacred, but always permanent truth. While the stations of decline along the via dolorosa in their secular form seem to strip the Passion of its redemptive outcome, the fact is that choosing the stations as the iconic imagery of allegorical hermeneutical necessity does nothing less than draw insistently into consciousness the open possibility of messianic redemption achieved by resurrection. We understand that allegory does not make this error of faith and accepts the historical damnation of the Sisyphus-­like proj­ect of permanent ruination. The critics of secularism, however, might be right to see the inescapable traces of an enabling sacred belief at the very basis of even demonic allegory. In Scholem’s essential essay “­Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” he clarifies the essential, indeed inescapable, combination of allegory, utopia, messianism, and catastrophe. His work also helps us hypothesize why theories of “the event” have been winsome in the time of late capital’s naturalism and neoliberalism’s poptimism and why even catastrophic utopianism is a movement away from secular politics.54 Scholem’s essay rewards the very deepest study, for the implications of his historical survey resonate in key areas of humane letters. It makes an 21

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impor­tant differentiation between two distinct forms of Jewish messianism, limning their borders where they intersect. ­These dif­fer­ent strains of thought have a common origin, which Scholem sums up: “Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature—­this cannot be sufficiently emphasized—­a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic ele­ment in the transition from ­every historical pre­sent to the Messianic ­future. This transition itself becomes a prob­lem in that . . . ​the r­ eally non-­ transitional character of it is pointed up and emphasized.”55 Scholem offers no precise way forward as a transition to a utopian ­future. The “how” of moving from where we are to the ­imagined ­future(s) emergent in the differentiated collectivities of postglobalization leftism and end-­of-­history utopianism is a belated form of the problematic transition. The only possibility, even for a retrospective allegorical futural reading of the trace, is a rupture. Moreover, that rupture is catastrophic, more than transitional, a move to the now unimaginable, to that place where t­here is no way forward.56 Scholem’s research and his interpretation of its results allow for the clear conclusion that catastrophism is always already messianic. History awaits redemption faintly echoed in the allegorical placement of the divine over the horizon in a profanation that ironically restores and preserves the godhead. What is this in secular language? It is the event, or if you w ­ ill, more mundanely, it is the Pauline once-­and-­for-­all conversion. The absolute effect of this allegorical utopianism that creates the hope and faith that distrusts politics and realism is apo­liti­cal status-­quo-­ism; it is the preservation of what is, even as it declares the critical work of real analy­sis and pos­si­ble imagination invalid and co-­opted. Utopian allegorists do not recognize their own evil. This is an insight into allegory that its adherent prac­ ti­tion­ers forget was one of Benjamin’s established hypotheses. If, however, we recall tropes other than ­those that contrast allegory to symbol, we find alternative assurances that the h ­ uman can manage relations to nature, time, and death in ways other than t­hose inhering within the inverted nostalgia of amor fati. Frances Yates, for example, has written about the Greek poet Simonides as the mythic originator of the arts of memory.57 His story is a ­simple one: drawn to the ­house of a rich man who promised to pay for verses celebrating a victory in wrestling, Simonides, cheated of his pay, steps out of the h ­ ouse just as it collapses. Saved by the gods, Simonides remembers the position of all the men at the ­table and names their bodies, recovering their biographical historicity from within 22

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and ­under the ruins that in burying them seem also to erase their individuality. The corpses w ­ ere so mangled, Yates tells us, that their relatives could not name them, but Simonides could place them. Such a successful troping on death and ruin is not metaphysical or dialectical. It stands completely ­free of the binarism of secularized messianic nostalgia and the mechanized ruination better called allegoresis. This triumph of memory sets in motion the development of an impor­tant trope, the “Memory Palace,” that offers a noninterpretive, creative, spatial rather than sequential act of imagination as the ­human response to loss, death, and injustice. Against ­those who are indebted to the allegorical utopian model and its offshoots, the Memory Palace proves that alternatives to the tribal consensus exist. Furthermore, this alternative is a leap away, is deeply discontinuous with the allegorists’ endless internal strug­gles for refinement. It promises not quite freedom but the fact that a careful look at history as achievement rather than ruination offers solid evidence that the allegorical utopian has about it no necessity at all. In other words, it points to an entirely dif­fer­ent ethos of imagination’s relation to life. It is easy for critics to keep their focus purely on the technical and rhetorical instrumentalities of Simonides’s accomplishments. Cicero’s recovery of Simonides pointed in just such a direction.58 As we see in Yates’s version of this story, however, Simonides’s motives for recalling and repositioning the dead are ser­vice to the other—­the families and friends of the dead, that is, to the biographical and genealogical specificities of t­ hose who ­were only recently mangled and disfigured. That ­those aesthetic technical abilities of creative memory serve such interests shows both that the tradition contains alternatives to the symbol / allegory binary and that they persist in active practice across ­those very periods that the Baroque and modern assign to the domains of allegoresis. The Memory Palace rests on learning, ordering—in this case, itself an act of high creation—­and selecting. In place, it enables individual, group, and cultural creations that life experience provokes, and it affords an inaugurating response to the prob­lem of relating tradition and innovation, continuity and break, self and other. Such a demanding and rigorous discipline, so much more difficult than the relatively facile repetitive deployments of allegoresis, opens the question of its own motives and the sources of its energies.59 Allegorists are and must be catastrophic messianists. They cannot believe in history, in experience, in their entanglement. They must legitimate their practice in the confidence of their superior preternatural scientific 23

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knowledges. They speak to each other and praise collectivities. They remake popu­lar and mass subgenre into the obscure texts of new Gnosticisms. They leave the pre­sent to its dystopic fate. Moreover, in the United States, especially, they leave us all to the world of faith, the real forms of which we find everywhere in and outside religions, including the hopeful ambitions of the utopian allegorists themselves and their compulsive, habituated insistence on allegory everywhere. Fate’s forms, like God himself, are effects of words, works, and styles. Ironically, they are, as we all know and often admit, textual effects, denied their tentative tensions by the desire for nontextual solidities, stories reified in elaborating and diminishing academic form. The priestly desire for authoritative command grows from and supports t­ hese forms—­Adorno’s schema—­and they appear as the hermeneutics of allegoresis, always selling itself as redemption from ruin.

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chapter two

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The ­Will to Destruction as the Basis of Allegory With Creativity and Love

How the beloved grows distant and lustrous, how her ­minuteness and her glow withdraw into name . . . —­Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus” (1931)

Auerbach, Style, Authority In “Odysseus’ Scar,” the famous introductory chapter to Erich Auerbach’s critical masterpiece Mimesis, the author compares Homer’s poem to the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac to “reach a starting point for an investigation into the literary repre­sen­ta­tion of real­ity in Eu­ro­pean culture.”1 This modest remark sets in motion Eu­ro­pean modernity’s greatest critical accomplishment, in which the task of criticism ramifies far beyond the literary to characterize the cultures, modes of knowledge, and intellectual practices in socie­ties spanning centuries and continents. On its basis, we can recognize forms of critical thinking and writing with demanding but promising implications, consequences, and catachreses. Auerbach was so profound a historical humanist that his philology led him to daring and radical conclusions that we must always keep in mind. ­Here is a chief example of his daring: “The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing t­ hings” (Mimesis, 8). Auerbach asks a question that might find an anthropological answer: “How is the Jewish concept of God to be explained?” (8). But his answer comes from his new science. The Jewish God is an accident that befalls a population contingently. It is not an effect but a symptom, and as such, it exposes a manner of h ­ uman feeling, 25

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comprehension, and repre­sen­ta­tion. ­These primal ­human qualities and actions result in a style, the consequence of which, in this case, is a “concept of God” best read as a historical accident of that p ­ eople’s style, their fundamental way of being ­human. From this basic insight of historicist philology, several t­hings follow, not least the implied priority it gives to its own science in the knowledge of society and h ­ uman nature. On this base lies the analytic reach of Auerbach’s claim: Western lit­er­a­ture represents real­ity not only by doubling its presence or absence but by extending socie­ ties’ articulations of their basic modes of being. Lit­er­at­ ure perceives socie­ ties’ most fundamental forms of creativity and destruction.2 Auerbach’s humanistic and philological procedure proves the need for a literary criticism to analyze and pre­sent results of a style’s “basic impulse” and its symptomatic elaboration in works of culture and politics. When Auerbach says that the Jewish “concept of God” is not a prior cause in scriptural repre­sen­ta­tion but a consequence of a “basic impulse,” he opens an investigation into foundations embodied in style. He limns the emergence of consequential symptoms as they expand and extend to order the social worlds made within the contingencies of h ­ uman finitude by acts of ­will, prejudice, understanding, and desire. In the opening chapter, for example, Auerbach notes how Chris­tian­ity and historical institutions adapted interpretive methods from Judaism: “As a result of this claim to absolute authority [inherent in scripture’s theocentric universal history], the method of interpretation spread to traditions other than the Jewish” (Mimesis, 16). The Elohist’s style created complex ­human psy­chol­ogy, motives entangled with emotions, o ­ thers’ actions and feelings, and ­others’ histories. The style invited attempts to understand and to structure action in relation to a God-­motivated truth. That truth, emergent in a style, narrated action to an end or set of ends, inevitably obscured as part of a suspense story. This style places almost every­thing in a background. ­There, individuals’ relations to God await elaboration and exposition, and ­there, nations’ actions and values await direction and judgment from that same God—­all of which required or invited interpretative skills not only to understand but also to claim to understand authoritatively by knowing the truth. The Elohist’s style serves a creation narrative, of course, that places events in a universal history: “The Old Testament . . . ​begins with the beginning of time, with the creation of the world, and ­will end with the Last Days, the fulfilling of the Covenant, with which the world ­will come to an 26

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end” (14). This summary is impor­tant for the issues at stake in criticism and poiesis. As critics, we need not invoke Hegelian or Whiggish notions of history to have concerns over totalization and the vio­lence of pro­gress. The messianic and apocalyptic ele­ments of the Elohist’s style, adapted and ­adopted broadly, created “a general method of comprehending real­ity” that takes a certain methodological form: “interpretation in a determined direction” (16). Auerbach famously distinguished the Greek and Jewish styles as modes of perspective. In Homer, every­thing is in the foreground, illuminated, a mode epitomized by the Shield of Achilles on which Hephaestus lays out in the light, si­mul­ta­neously, all the modes of ­human being: age and youth; war and peace; economy and sex. Auerbach says the Homeric style is “ ‘of the foreground’ b ­ ecause, despite much g­ oing back and forth, it yet c­ auses what is momentarily being narrated to give the impression that it is the only pre­sent, pure and without perspective” (12). By contrast, the Elohist’s style is purely “of the ‘background’ ” (12). What is true of the Elohist’s protagonist, Yahweh, is also true of the minor characters, the h ­ uman beings. “The Elohistic text teaches us that our term is capable of a broader and deeper application. It shows that even the separate personages can be represented as possessing ‘background’; God is always so represented in the Bible, for he is not comprehensible in his presence, as is Zeus; it is always only ‘something’ of him that appears, he always extends into depths” (12). The Elohist’s style entangles singular acts of representing and understanding. The classical notion that repre­sen­ta­tion makes pre­sent again something that is absent gives way to another original idea, that repre­sen­ta­tion stands in for and can be no more than a metonymy become catachresis, the effective creation of a presence elsewhere. This partiality tempts to universality, especially by accretion. When I turn to Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath, Iw ­ ill show how Rembrandt works away from the Elohist’s style, setting the temporal, textured, and illuminated flesh of Bathsheba against a darkness that banishes David. The Elohist’s background, which summons priestly allegorical authority to interpret the God-­made shadows, Rembrandt sets back by a luminous imagination that celebrates the all-­too-­human. As I w ­ ill suggest l­ater in commenting on Adorno’s reading of Goethe, Rembrandt gives us not the illuminated but the poetic light that illuminates. With the minor characters, the ­human beings, the Elohist’s style creates the effect of psychological complexity through a device that defers absent 27

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parts of the character pre­sent in the scene to the preceding and succeeding memories and visions that we “understand” to exist as the total creature. The Elohist’s sense of ­human temporality within a divine frame shares a common temporal structure of promise emergent in his priestly hermeneuts: “Abraham’s actions are explained not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by his character, . . . ​but by his previous history; he remembers, he is constantly conscious of, what God has promised him and what God has already accomplished for him—­his soul is torn between desperate rebellion and hopeful expectation; his s­ ilent obedience is multilayered, has background” (12). Literary historians might hypothesize that Auerbach’s conclusions reflect the modernist interest in consciousness and its streaming repre­sen­ta­tion, but his claim pointedly has a much longer historical field. “The Jewish writers,” he says, “are able to express the simultaneous existence of vari­ous layers of consciousness and the conflict between them” (13). ­These stylistic devices entice readers and hearers with the pleasures of complex simultaneity and the creation of inwardness, of interior real­ity. They invite interpretation, leading to a hermeneutic that is psychological and cosmological. The Abraham story has no contingencies. History is the effect of interiority created by the tropes of memory and promise, most especially, by the master trope of remembering the promised ­future. Rather than anticipation, the faithful who know their place within the Covenant’s cosmological regimes experience “hopeful expectation.” Willard Trask’s decision to place the Latinate word “expect” ­here ­because of its etymological meaning of seeing and vision derived from spectare, to look or to see, gives us a quick ­handle on the under­lying bias of the Elohist’s style. Rather than create a psyche that anticipates, that is, engages in an act of willful patience orienting itself t­ oward a contingent ­future, expectation catches the dominant power of the master-­trope to displace, to remember futural promises. Auerbach engages Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur and the aesthetic speculations of German poets and critics from Friedrich Schiller on through the nineteenth ­century. Near the opening of Mimesis, he pauses over a vestibular moment in Goethe and Schiller’s letters that opens the body of early Western texts to his historicist philology. Reading Homer together, the two poets note “the retarding ele­ment,” that is, “the ‘­going back and forth’ by means of episodes,” and Auerbach counterpoises it to “suspense,” a word his pre­de­ces­sors did not use (5). His two ­great poetic pre­de­ces­sors 28

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note that modes characterize the effects and intents of style. Their exchange opens the texts’ styles to comparative analy­sis, which in turn reveals that style creates symptoms that seem to be primary, requiring critical judgment of their consequences. Auerbach counterpoises “suspense” to the poets’ “retarding ele­ment” or, if you w ­ ill, the Elohist to Homer, thereby explaining not only the emergence of a literary mode but the symptoms of critical desire equally if belatedly emergent as a symptom of the same under­lying “manner of comprehending and representing ­things” that gave us the Elohist. This last has long-­standing consequences for thinking about power and truth embodied in acts of interpretation. The Homeric “back and forth” stands “opposed to any tensional and suspensive striving ­toward a goal, and doubtless Schiller is right in regard to Homer when he says that what he gives us is ‘simply the quiet existence and operation of ­things in accordance with their natures’; Homer’s goal is ‘already pre­sent in ­every point of his pro­gress’ ” (5). Auerbach historicizes their remarks, insisting that Homer could not have had the aesthetic princi­ ples or desires represented by Goethe and Schiller’s epic theory. The aesthetic is itself an anachronism and could not supply a motive for Homer’s style. “The true cause of the impression of ‘retardation’ appears to me to lie elsewhere—­namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized” (5). The contrast with the Elohist’s style is absolute. A critical mode evolves from the Elohist’s style; Auerbach calls it “interpretation” and claims that it got status ­because it gave authority to the priests. This authority is a double consequence of the Elohist’s style: the created need to assem­ble as a vis­i­ble constellation all the background material—­memories, promises, visions, and psychological simultaneities—­ that make up a character, a character’s history, or the history of a nation recomposed by the same pro­cesses of assemblage. The Elohist’s style leaves “it to the reader to visualize,” to picture, ­because backgrounding characters, events, and motives contradict Yahweh’s ruling command, “Behold me ­here,” that is, “Hinne-ni.” The contradiction has productive results. Auerbach hypothesizes that the Elohist’s success comes from a deep correspondence between the text and the reader: this is a symptom of the under­ lying attitudes. The style creates background fraught with mystery and “a second, concealed meaning” (15). Taking the story of Abraham and Isaac as paradigmatic, Auerbach concludes that the Elohist’s tales “require subtle 29

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investigation and interpretation, they demand them” (15). Furthermore, “since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon” (15). This insistent perpetual system intertwines with several other critical categories, some of which persist at the center of our own practices. It is helpful to know our genealogy. “The Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning” (13). They make no claim to truth, or better, they do not exist ­under the sign of truth. “It is all very dif­fer­ent in the Biblical stories. . . . ​Their religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth” (14). Necessarily, this restricts and enables the Elohist, who “had to believe in the objective truth” of the stories he told. Why? ­Because “the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth” of ­these stories (14). In other words, “the Biblical narrator was obliged to write exactly what his belief in the truth of the tradition . . . ​demanded of him . . . ​His freedom in creative or representative imagination was severely ­limited” (14). Auerbach dares to claim that Yahweh is an effect of style consequent on an orientation to the world. He dares even to say that “the Bible’s claim to truth . . . ​is tyrannical” (14). This creates a parallel double effect on our understanding and method. First, the Elohist’s stories claim more than their historical truth, in contrast to Homer’s legends; they insist that their “historically true real­ity . . . ​is the only real world, is destined for autocracy” (15). Schiller had noted the power of the Elohist’s tragic style and, as Auerbach notes, generalized it as the goal of all tragedy: “to rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual and spiritual powers . . . ​in one direction, to concentrate them t­here” (11). This doubled parallel returns us to the idea of authority and the desire for tyrannical authority inherent in the interpretive modes enabled and required by this style and its readers’ desires. As we ­shall see in a discussion of Carl Schmitt on Hamlet, Schiller’s insight into the Elohist’s position reemerged in a fascist thinker’s decision to make ­human experience unidirectional within the frame of tragedy and myth. I treat Schmitt on Hamlet to extend the critical point that the authoritarian priestly practices consequent on the god-­effect of style help explain the predominance of tragedy and Trauerspiel over romance and comedy among the crisis critics I treat in this book. Schiller’s belief that the Elohist’s tragic style laid claim to “absolute authority” results from the 30

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“doctrine and promise” that is essential to ­these stories. Unlike Homer’s tales, which seduce us into their own plural realities, offering us chances to “forget our own real­ity for a few hours,” the Elohist’s style “seeks to overcome our real­ity: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be ele­ments in its structure of universal history” (15). Genealogical thinkers taught us to remember the long continuities that create our histories and their pre­sents. The Elohist is a resource for allegorists who assert interpretive unitary narratives and for thinkers of the tragic, who impose the stories of ruin on history through the tragic or mournful forms that Schmitt, Benjamin, and ­others advanced as keys to understanding a normalized ruined history—­and redeeming it. This account comes from an exiled Jewish con­temporary of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, each of whom plays a role in what follows in this chapter. Benjamin and Scholem together wrote some of the best criticism of Franz Kafka, and if we read their exchanges even generally, we see that the effects of the Elohist’s style persist in their thinking and writing. Specifically, they read Kafka, despite their differences, in terms of the felt crisis of tradition. Hand in hand with the so-­called crisis of Eu­rope expressed by Edmund Husserl and ­others in the early twentieth ­century, Benjamin and Scholem allegorize Kafka as the focal point, the defined experience of tradition’s end. Auerbach argues that over the years, with increasing distance from the environment “of the Biblical books,” this tradition sustained itself by adapting “through interpretive transformation” (15). The crisis of Eu­rope, which for Benjamin and Scholem is the crisis of Judaism in Eu­ rope and Germany, means that this interpretive transformation no longer adapted the Elohist’s tradition to living conditions. Auerbach’s explanation is secular, and it has implications for Benjamin’s theory of the Baroque: “When, through too ­great a change in environment and through the awakening of a critical consciousness, this [adaptive interpretation] becomes impossible, the Biblical claim to absolute authority is jeopardized; the method of interpretation is scorned and rejected, the Biblical stories become ancient legends, and the doctrine they had contained, now dissevered from them, becomes a disembodied image” (15–16). Benjamin’s esoteric messianic ambitions illustrate how intellectuals could generalize the Eu­ro­pean crisis to authorize ways of speaking and thinking that constrain the ambitions of advanced criticism and theory to the confines of self-­authorizing esotericism. The poetic relations between art and criticism, essential to the 31

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making and sustaining of the historically ­human, fell into disrepair ­behind a veil of ruin begging redemption from above. The Elohist’s tyranny mea­sures all historical life in doctrinal terms and directs all actions ­toward certain goals. It also structures a narrative around a specifically constraining set of temporalities—­memories and the visionary promises unifying past and ­future—­all this tyrannizes criticism that desires in its shadows. Yet this esoteric temporality is supremely incapable of representing historical environments that cannot take the form of tyrannical truth oriented and directed narratives or interpretations. This is a general prob­lem for the authority of the Elohist’s style, and its priestly authority depends on t­ hose “evolving interpretations.” As the ­human environment moves away from scriptural stories—­certainly, this had happened as early as the Baroque—­ that authority weakened, and the esoteric practices of interpretation grew more burdensome and in­effec­tive. Fi­nally, National Socialism desiccated that authority completely and utterly. The disaster was unspeakable, but in the years ­after the war, Auerbach reminds us that ­those who witness history such as this cannot evaluate ­human lives, institutions, or be­hav­iors in terms of a universal history, not even one that rests its own authority on the ruination of that previously authoritative tradition. Witnessing such history tells us that legend cannot contain it, nor can any interpretive tradition or style that tries “to represent historical themes in general” (20). Anyone who tries this, Auerbach ­gently remarks, “­will feel how difficult it is” (20). The prob­lem, we might say, is historical humanity in two separate ways. First, experience is too complex, and promissory visions as displacements into futural temporalities cannot deliver any f­uture and numb the h ­ uman responsibility for futurity. The unity narrated as the memory of a promised f­ uture has no standing in ­human history, in which motives and actions take the form of “hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups” as much as individuals (20). ­Will has no memory of promised ends except in the form of coercion. Second, the strain of esoteric interpretation, of pyrotechnical inventions within the crises of such failure, is nothing more than a burden imposed on a species already creating textured lives in the complex and vari­ous practices of ­human love and destruction. The esoteric desire to read all in terms of the failure of that authority, to lament its defeat, and to make that defeat, spectrally, we might say, the substance of all that is, this is a gruesome and deceitful burden for h ­ umans who live in time 32

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and place, who love and create, even as they destroy and harass. The madness of contradiction and complexity is a burden made more gruesome by the lament that insists delivery and redemption are themselves still values inhering alone in esoteric inventions rung on the Elohist’s symptom. Universal or utopian history and vision in such times is no dif­fer­ent from “the slogans of propaganda,” that is, such history could “be composed only through the crudest simplification” (20). Auerbach gives us an impor­tant hint when he reminds us that although Homer has l­ittle comedy, which is the genre “of daily life,” he is nonetheless closer to it than is the Elohist, who allows the domestic only in the shape of the tragic and universal. In an explanatory remark that contests the necessity of Schmitt’s theory of politics and enemies, Auerbach notes that in the Elohist, the combination of God stories, universal history, the prominence of ­family life, and the resultant link “between the domestic and the spiritual” leads “to daily life being permeated with the stuff of conflict, often with poison” (22). Hence, this narrative that makes all of life conflict and sets aside all that does not belong successfully to the universal authoritative story of Yahweh sets all this out as “­enemy” and sets it aside as ruin. For such believers, without the Elohist’s stories and authorities, ­there is nothing but ruin; ­after the Elohist, history waits for redemption, meanwhile, life is a burden and a tragedy yet always sublime ­because, abject, it is God’s history—­and his priests’. Every­ thing that might be other belongs to comedy, and that has no place in the Elohist or his heirs, no m ­ atter how enervating his authority. From the Elohist’s position, ­human history devoid of his authority is empty. In just this sense, Elohism is a nihilism that evacuates the world and empties history of all but the fullness of its own wisdom. Auerbach did not introduce this complicated and difficult subject to make a s­ imple contrast between biblical and Homeric modes. Writing during the tyranny of fascism and noting, via Schiller, its connections to liberal cultural formations that celebrated culture—as in the Goethe craze—­Auerbach explored the depths of tyrannical possibilities within traditions that proffered always hope and redemption.

A Contrast of Angels In 1903, an angel come to earth, androgynous, wounded, dirty head bowed, staring at the ground with flowers in hand, sits uncomfortably astride two 33

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poles carried by boys marked by all the demands and drudgery of daily life. The landscape is unmarked, in the muted palette of northern skies, grayed by clouds that with a ridge of low hills foreshorten the horizon and close us in a natu­ral space given ­human scale. Did some Miltonic ­battle injure the angel or simply the mythological cosmic fall? The boys resent the burden of this no-­longer-­airy creature, and it has no choice but to depend for survival itself on t­ hose very h ­ uman qualities that lustrous creatures and their lovers deride as slavish. The battered angel is abject, and the full force of abnegation appears in the weight, the burden, that this per­sis­tent mythic figure imposes on the h ­ uman. The trailing boy stares at the viewer. Does he direct his anger at a world that wounds this esoteric creature and makes it exotic? Does he aim his anger at the burden, and does his scowl knowingly share with the viewer a sense of how unfree the per­sis­tent demands of the esoteric make us? When the esoteric arrives back in h ­ uman life, as it seems always to do, it does not, despite promises and hopes, bring messianic redemption from history but adds itself—in its perpetual failure—as a ruin to the very world it scorns and hopes to redeem. Yet the image knows all too well how the angel’s plight invites the fantasist, unable to tolerate death and ­human life, to try, once more, to breathe transcendent life back into the creature so it can prove the inspiration that the fantasist needs to do its dystopic work. Paradigmatically, the esoteric allegorical messianist denies the anagogic power of ­human imagination to dream the world and to create it without the priestly guidance of transcendent authority, whose legitimacy depends on the degradation of poiesis in and of itself. The imagination dies down into the messianic, allegorical cults of Elohist fantasies, disabling the species despite more than adequate evidence that the historically ­human made and can remake itself and, in so d ­ oing, draw nature and the world into its own dreams. Hugo Simberg’s Wounded Angel (1903; figure 1) contests not Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) but Walter Benjamin’s melancholic aspiration of the figure in 1940.3 This book explores melancholy as the defining affect of an intellectual program whose success emerges from the ruined world that elicits melancholy as the historically necessary symptom of a fallen world. Melancholy marks the ethos of a worldview that sees the imagination as so weak as to need redemption from beyond, as to hitch the work of critical mind especially to the ser­vice of utopian, allegorical, and messianic forces mysteriously hidden within the traces of failed effort.4 As Keats shows us, the 34

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Figure 1.  Hugo Simberg’s Wounded Angel (1903),  Finnish National Gallery

melancholic, often a nostalgist, experiences finitude and responds with attitudes that near the pleasures of despair, pleas­ur­able ­because sublimely affective and endlessly productive of the same song. Melancholy, seen differently, is nihilism, the assignment of permanent failure and misery to merely ­human poetics always shadowed by time, finitude, and death. Simberg’s painting stands for the material burden of gnostic aspirants’ esoteric claims to priestly authority become the deadly burden, which shapes and limits ­human efforts to imagine the world. His androgynous angel is all too fleshy as its ­bearers plod ahead, burdened by the weight of an all too bodily mythic figure. The wound reveals Gnosticism’s paradox: the immortality of a creature bogs down ­human effort and earns the dislike of ­those who are burdened by the desires that simply w ­ ill not allow the creature to die. Their distaste is not melancholic, not aimed at a world that neither celebrates nor nurtures the angelic. Nor is this distaste nostalgic for a lost reincarnation that would redeem Earth with an infusion of Godhead. The 35

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impatient look is angry, turned ­toward the viewers in a shared social world that contains both ­those who sympathize with the ­bearers and ­those whose own desires and fears compel them to “breathe life” into the succubus, posing as a needed promise and a place of inspiration. The b ­ earers’ resentment turns into anger aimed at Benjamin and far more so his heirs who find in the resources of their esotericism satisfactory compensation for the asserted poverty of an imagination that starts and ends in the feeling that the world is justly called fallen and ruined. ­These ­bearers turn the ­tables on Benjamin, who thought he had understood the mythic nature of modernity by exposing the equally mythic burdens he accepts and reiterates as the basis for a transformational writing and imagination at the core of which stands a dystopic disdain of the strug­gles and endurance of ­human history.5 Benjamin’s angel “sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet,” whereas Simberg’s ­bearers find a wounded angel itself thrown at their feet, in a truly mundane landscape, demanding succor, become a burden from which they cannot escape.6 Simberg’s b ­ earers create a clear static image of repetition, from which we derive our knowledge of how mythic and primitive are the desires of esoteric messianism from the Elohist to Benjamin. The first ­bearer moves ahead, eyes steady from long knowledge of the route; the trailing b ­ earer, equally timeless in a Beckettian repetition, shows energy and deep disgust with an experience that has the tedium of esoteric beliefs and their figures. In parallel to the death mask of the Baroque, Benjamin poses his angel as the proof of historical ruination. His angel has the classical metaphysical viewpoint, able to see every­thing all at once—an image ironically associated with the very Symbolist aesthetic he so often deplored. (Recall Yeats’s “Golden Bird” sitting on a golden bough to sing of what is past, passing, or to come.) While Klee’s copperplate image is akin to Rilke’s angels, part of their common ancestry is the unironic Symbolist effort to reestablish the ideal unities of religious aesthetic order from the time before the schism in Eu­ro­pean religion that ­matters so much to Benjamin and his interlocutors.7 The opposition between Benjamin and the Symbolists had a clear po­ liti­cal motive and profile. His antagonism to Stefan Georg made this clear enough. The conflict between symbol and allegory is, however, a genealogical f­amily strug­gle that has to do with temperamental responses to the 36

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same judgment and experience of history and h ­ uman historicality.8 Benjamin’s angel expresses his own failures, sense of situation, and ambition. He defines a circumstance, and the question is how to live and respond to it. “The angel,” he writes, “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make ­whole what has been smashed.” This frustrated desire expresses itself in the figure of a helpless creature, unable to direct its own motions and actions, tossed by the w ­ ill of heaven before the fate that is humanity itself: “But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the ­future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows t­oward the sky” (392–393). This mythic figure, this residue of ritual and art, comes “naturally” as an expression of Benjamin’s felt circumstance. This is a compensatory masquerade of mythic god-­ making in the image of a h ­ uman fear, which wants redemption by a power made to meet its own dread in the face of what it cannot master or endure. The overwhelming erudition under­lying it, the Bildung without which Benjamin could not portray this image, allows scholars to account for it in complex and often productive terms. If we know anything, however, surely we know that we cannot overcome the burden of the past—­that seems included in this image too—­and that what­ever enables restricts. We should discuss more of the costs, the burdens carried by ­those who cannot escape the imposition of the esoteric desire to speak in terms of angels. “We” are the audience, the viewers of Simberg’s staring boy. We are all ­humans inflicted with a burden of an esoteric elite whose mythic imaginings w ­ ill not let this angel die, but we are also the critics and creators who have an obligation to describe the costs that the insiders impose or would impose on us all. ­Were we to put this in idealist terms, we could say that this is a conflict between t­hose intellectuals who accept the finitude of ­human time and existence and t­ hose whose aspirations and pains rest in a desire to achieve, recover, remember, or induce a transformation of the ­human into infinitude.9 It is an old question, of course, with its metaphysical roots in Platonic philosophy and in most versions of mono­the­ism. It persists in certain aesthetic practices, especially ­those art proj­ects that take themselves as substitutive continuations of religion in a disenchanted world. It also persists in certain more intellectually ambitious fundamentalisms that contradict the pop­u­lism of many such movements. Most impor­tant, for the purposes of critical intellectuals, it persists in one strain of the 37

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­ nlightenment’s heritage—­the vari­ous modalities of secular messianism, E some of which align themselves with allegoresis as a mode of knowledge. Secular messianism, no m ­ atter how it calls itself, has a special prob­lem to overcome, namely, its esotericism. We need only remember the etymology: έσω means “within,” and as the OED reminds us, Pythagoras taught secret or esoteric doctrines only to his ephebes, the elite among his disciples. Always, this origin sets the esoteric ambition to infinitude and utopia against the demos, against that knowing, as Aristotle taught us, which is exoteric, that is nontechnical, in a language available to all. This prob­lem always arises when working within the languages of esoteric messianism. In previous writing on Kant, Foucault, and Auerbach, I analyzed the per­ sis­tent conflict between the linked binary of finitude and infinitude in concepts of time and figurations of the h ­ uman.10 Importantly, the same conflict exists even in attempts to reform or discontinue the Enlightenment strug­gle with this binary. Some of the most rigorous and analytically severe criticism has tangled with this strug­gle, ­either as a historical alert or to try its overcoming to enable the presumed benefits of especially esoteric messianism without its costs. Influential efforts to reestablish ­these rewards depend on success in emptying the form or concept of the messianic of its esoteric threats to the demos and civic discourse. Success in such efforts is impossible, even within deconstruction, precisely for the reasons deconstruction and other advanced thinking about the intersection of knowledge, history, ­will, and judgment in language make clear. In the very moment of ironic play, for an instant, a writer might destabilize—­but can never end—­the restraints esoteric messianism imposes on ­those who are mesmerized by its apparent transfigurative resources. Some restraints are po­liti­cal. In a way that resembles Lukács in History and Class Consciousness—­a book Benjamin much admired—­Benjamin’s esoteric messianism, as we see in “Surrealism,” wishes for a po­liti­cal program that entices the “masses” to satisfy their desire in the leadership of a revolutionary elite.

Abject (Exceptions) ­ hose who experience the world as disenchanted think in terms of comT plex dualisms; they designate the historical world as fallen and in need of redemption. Benjamin and Scholem have their ­great debate over Kafka

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about the utility of tradition, law, the book, memory, and experience in a world that does not have the conditions for such possibilities any longer. In other words, speaking of the world as disenchanted is a choice, consequent perhaps on complex experiences and judgments infused with ideological and psychological pressures, but it is a willed decision to represent the world, history, and humanity in a general manner and one with unfortunate consequences. Rather than orient their work, their judgment, and their imaginations ­toward history, finitude, and the ­human to give the demos voice in the pre­sent, ­these intellectuals choose, no ­matter how power­fully, to treat actually existing humanity and the actually existing finitude of time and history as abject ruins. They assume the task of making this case and offering impossible solutions to and as universal fantasies. T ­ here is no power in the claim that t­ hese minds find the traces of hope, utopia, and messianism in and among the ruins. That claim too is a weak, repetitive, and burdened choice of approaches that emerge from the kenosis and make the ­human abject, ­unless and u ­ ntil ­these minds can figure the ­human as the reservoir of something other than the historically ­human. ­There is nothing redemptive in the recovery of traces from the ruined remains of aspiration. Such a repetitive assertion of a need that t­ hese minds can meet on the basis of their resurrection of ruins degrades the sphere of historical ­will and life, making the species valuable only insofar as it transcends not only the ruination of capital, let us say, but also the degrading fact of ­human finitude itself. The sphere of the ­human finite loses its value as a sphere of life, politics, strug­gle, and imagination. It dissolves in the retrospective of universal ruin, leaving b ­ ehind the very possibility of alternative f­ utures, obstructing the task of imagining or building them. In Chapter 3, we w ­ ill see how the phi­los­o­pher denigrates as “­women’s work” ­those men “pregnant with ideas” who would build cities and customs. The world, bereft of ideas, can only be abject.11 Artists became aware of “abjection” as a motif in recent interpretive and theoretical work and as a reaction began revisiting the world made abject. The Whitney Museum’s 1993 exhibition Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art illustrates the artistic turn on the fash­ion­able terms of horror and abjection circulated by Julia Kristeva.12 As the Tate Modern suggests, however, the term rapidly appropriated older work, from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox to Cindy Sherman’s famous photos of disarticulated bodies, themselves strong plays against the fragmentation of ­women

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in pornography.13 T ­ hese artists show the nonnecessity of the messianic response to its seeming absolute condition, abjection. As is often the case, even a brief turn to ­actual work often undermines the categorizing and nominalist work of the allegorists. It reveals the functional unexamined biases among them. The allegorists’ universality is utterly Eurocentric, inescapably embedded within the long traditions that formed what we call “Eu­ro­pean” or even “Western culture.” Grosso modo, the long scholarly and intellectual traditions leading up to ­these debates, emerge from the joint origins of Western imaginative life identified so consistently with Athens and Jerusalem.14 One effect of globalization in the critical humanities has been the growing tendency to generate new universalizing models of humanistic production such as “Global Lit­er­at­ ure” or “Global Studies” and to weigh them, despairingly at times, against the national models they seemingly replace.15

Benjamin / Schmitt Walter Benjamin had ­little status or influence in North American criticism for quite a long time a­ fter his suicide.16 With the appearance of several translations and impor­tant commentaries, culminating in the ­great Harvard University Press edition published ­under Lindsay ­Waters’s auspices, Benjamin became for some time a defining figure for academics with aesthetic interests and melancholic mores. Recently, less aesthetically minded critics have taken a g­ reat interest in Carl Schmitt.17 Many intellectuals borrow certain of his key notions, such as “state of exception,” hoping to adapt them for purposes not his own or more generally to extend his objections to liberalism for their own normally Left purposes.18 Benjamin and Schmitt ­were sometimes in dialogue, and Benjamin’s admiration for Schmitt c­ auses embarrassment for some of Benjamin’s own admirers. Horst Bredekamp has researched and analyzed their relationship starting from the moment when the g­ reat Judaist Jacob Taubes invoked Benjamin’s admiration for Schmitt as partial legitimation of his own admiring visit to Schmitt.19 Taubes said that the letters revealing Benjamin’s embrace of Schmitt’s work ­were a mine that “explodes our conception of the intellectual history of the Weimar period.”20 Bredekamp argues that Taubes’s meta­phor applies only ­because he misunderstands the entanglements of Weimar politics. Taubes wrongly “presupposes fixed 40

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bound­aries between Left and Right, the avant-­garde and its reaction, that do not exist in monolithic form.”21 Even if this w ­ ere true, I am not sure how it exonerates Benjamin for his admiration of Schmitt. Together they shared objections to liberalism and had common familial interests in Romanticism, which w ­ ere not strong enough to bind them together to Nazism. Weimar’s history is too complex to analyze ­here as a basis for the issues that ­matter for criticism’s adoption of t­ hese figures and their work. In t­ hese authors’ writings and in t­hose they influence, however, traces appear of vari­ous pressures that helped form their works and afforded them opportunities to develop their responses to crises and creations for their desired ­futures. The weakness of liberal ideas and institutions prior to World War I and then during the Weimar period, as we know, induced many courageous, profound, and terrifying proposals for alternatives to ­those institutions. As recent debates about the influence of Leo Strauss in the United States show, the consequences of ­those inducements remain alluring and worrying.22 While Schmitt certainly had his admirers during the Cold War, literary and cultural scholars seem to have attached their work to his thinking and categories once the end of the Cold War had seemingly invalidated Marxism and Leninism.23 If Husserl thematized the crisis of Eu­ rope belatedly and too narrowly, Schmitt, Benjamin, and ­others also experienced and thought their worlds as crises, despite the differences in their positions and desires, showing significant similarities. Bredekamp convincingly demonstrates that Benjamin’s interest in Schmitt resulted not from common objections against po­liti­cal liberalism but from “the way in which he saw his own concept of art clarified in the latter’s po­liti­cal theory.”24 I suggest that serious readers of Schmitt should then focus first on the aesthetics if they care about his politics. More specifically, as I w ­ ill discuss at greater length, Benjamin opposes all conceptions of continuous time, which he associated with liberalism and positivism. In addition, he hopes that by obstructing contextualization and categorization that integrate phenomena to social segments, he could explain how art opposed an endless continuity of time. In other words, Benjamin’s presumably secular catastrophism found allied resources in Schmitt’s po­liti­cal thinking. “This is the point,” Bredekamp concludes, “at which the ideas of Benjamin and Schmitt converge. Schmitt’s theoretical association of the po­liti­cal, art, and time appealed to Benjamin and fi­nally ensnared him.”25 41

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Yet, in 1956, Schmitt went out of his way to cast off Benjamin, especially by contradicting one of the latter’s principal claims. Schmitt’s essay on Hamlet, now a book published in En­glish by Telos Press, ends with a second appendix titled “A Response to Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Trauerspiel.”26 For the moment, Schmitt’s objections to Benjamin ­matter less than the area of the discussion. Benjamin believed he had found a compatibility that Schmitt denied, and while the distinctions involved ­matter, the grounds for Schmitt’s objections ­matter more. The first ground is fundamental and involves the relation between myth and history. The second is contingent and involves the Eu­ro­pean religious wars. Schmitt and Benjamin choose to secure this terrain, and Schmitt chooses to mark his priority over and around the figure of Hamlet and so the prob­lem of tragedy or, better, the differences between tragedy and Trauerspiel. Since I w ­ ill conclude this book with a turn to the very dif­fer­ent genre of romance and romantic comedies within Shakespeare’s corpus, I quote h ­ ere Schmitt’s abrupt if undemonstrated assertion that most of Shakespeare’s plays are mere “play,” that is, e­ ither Trauerspiel (tragic plays) or Lustspiel (comic plays), while Hamlet is, of course, the exception—­a tragedy turned myth. I have no desire to let Schmitt and his often-­early-­modern commentators draw me into a discussion of t­hese issues on his (or their) terms. My concern is with the continuing effect of a cluster of figures—­dominated by Schmitt and Benjamin—­whose invocation defines too large a swath of “intellectually serious” critical work, at a time when hyperspecialization and the corporatization of the acad­emy make safe and detached work normative for tenure and promotion in the university system, as part of official culture. Schmitt and Benjamin’s differences over Hamlet result from their mutual preoccupation with the religious wars of Eu­rope. That historically specific event or set of events functions as the immediate origin in Schmitt’s po­liti­cal writings for his account of the state and for his theoretical distinctions about emergency, state formation, secularism, myth, which are now common notions. For Benjamin, ­those religious wars serve as the original point for his study of the emergence of modernity as Baroque, as allegory, as the state of melancholy. Benjamin has been the more promising and creative figure, and more explic­itly than Schmitt, he makes metaphysics of ­those religious wars. In Origin of the German Trauerspiel, Benjamin gives the name “Baroque” to the period of t­ hese wars and their aftermath, saying, “For if the 42

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secularization of the Counter-­Reformation pervaded the area of both confessions, nowhere did it make the religious concerns feel less weighty.”27 With t­ hese lines, Benjamin articulates his own permanent concerns and can locate them within one specific narrative of the origins of Eu­rope’s crisis. No ­matter how varied the personal, friendly, or scholarly accounts of influences and contexts for Benjamin’s work, this moment marks a double point of departure that limits and enables all that follows. Facing what he understood to be the inescapably escalating disasters of Eu­ro­pean life, taken of course as ­human life, Benjamin had no choice but to find a starting point for the crisis that defined his world, his thinking, and his experience. Like Schmitt, Benjamin took the religious wars that ruptured the putative unity of the Catholic period in Eu­rope as a permanent historical prob­lem requiring overcoming. Schmitt and Benjamin looked for dif­fer­ent solutions, but we can read each of them as rejecting the secular solution, which stood out as a historical consequence of disaster, as a fraction of modernity’s burden manifest as melancholy, allegory, and messianism. Part of my concern is with intellectual and academic influence and so the fate of the liberal humanities. Often what is enabling, to use Edward Said’s terms from Beginnings, is also constraining.28 Said’s study of beginnings makes clear the inescapable logic and power of beginnings, which always have doubled consequences. Said shows how a choice to begin, to step out, as we might translate Auerbach’s figure of the Ansatzpunkt, both sets writing in motion and si­mul­ta­neously closes off vari­ous other options that ­until the moment of beginning, of the first act of willful choice, w ­ ere as real in potential as t­hose chosen. Benjamin’s response to the crises of modernity and the horrors that too often became only the “crisis of Eu­ rope” articulated a permanent state of melancholy as the requirement for hope that sought fulfillment in its embrace of messianic utopianism. Aspirations to make secular the messianic possibility are a par­tic­u­lar reversal of Benjamin’s judgment that the secular solution to the crisis of Eu­rope, the abject spiritual state of the Baroque, is no escape from it. In this case, as in many ­others, Said’s analy­sis of beginnings implicates not merely the individual ­will of the writer—­constraint follows from finitude—­but also the genealogical constraints of discourse, tradition, inheritance, and influence. In other words, in a way that keeps faith generally with a spectrum of critical writings reflecting on the limits created by dynastic inheritance, we should say that Benjamin could not pro­gress in the beginning he chose, 43

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but t­ hose who choose his founding initiative equally constrain themselves and their society. T ­ here is no defense against this indictment in the initial or consequent productivity of the constraint, for enablement within such a genealogy, no m ­ atter the proliferation of results, is in the end ­little more than iteration of images, ideas, and figures that escape examination only ­because of their productivity. Foucault said several times that intellectuals cannot know the episteme in which they work. In part, this abstract claim rests on the quite material act of institutional and archival repetition, a pro­ cess infused with both the desire to adumbrate and the now-­neoliberal market demands for content and commodity. The crisis rhe­toric of Benjamin, Schmitt, Husserl, and (as we ­will see) Scholem takes the form of a competition for distinction and priority. To acknowledge this fact in no way diminishes the intellectual achievement and influence of their writings. To recognize that part of their crisis rhe­toric is also part of their self-­declared sense of themselves as belated, as latecomers in their own dramatic historical narratives—­this recognition gives us a sense of how to value their efforts and how to judge their influence and to judge our own desire to play on their terrains. T ­ hese are all figures who belong to the period we call modernist, which scholars have long identified with certain characteristics, among which is a sense of what critics of Anglo-­ American high modernism used to call a “fall into history.” Schmitt and Benjamin have an analytic anxiety resulting from their mutual understanding of Eu­rope’s loss of a unified Catholic culture that resulted in vari­ous melancholy secular solutions to the crises marking the Baroque fall. In this context, Schmitt studied Hamlet closely and insistently separated himself from Benjamin over the play. The Catholic Schmitt wanted to define tragedy to assert that a­ fter the religious wars and outside the Continental state system, the exceptional (primitive?) En­glish po­liti­cal and aesthetic arrangements embodied in Hamlet could create myth. Schmitt contended that the liberal state system of Continental politics could not produce such needed material precisely ­because of its confidence in demythologization. Benjamin, of course, famously claimed for Shakespeare’s art, uniquely in tragedy typified by Hamlet, a rearticulation of culture unified with Chris­tian­ity. For a moment, the melancholy mode gave way to Shakespeare’s astonishing talent and vision. No doubt, many readers think t­ here are considerable consequences at stake in this difference between Schmitt and Benjamin. Materially, however, the common terrain ­these two pio44

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neered, with their va­ri­e­ties of tropes, figures, and concepts, became high-­ value resources for heirs intent on legitimating and expanding this terrain while iterating the tropes in vari­ous configurations. Benjamin not only helped inaugurate such an expansion but also theorized its nature and possibility. Formal similarities or, as Benjamin would put it, constellated concerns and figures make a mash-up of inherited tropes, which return to a terrain meant to compensate for the developments of secularism, the forces of disenchantment and demythologization, as well as the historical obligations that the death of God imposes on h ­ uman ­will and 29 imagination. We need to judge the motives under­lying the intellectual developments that laid out this terrain as a field of life choices and values—­ which requires that we sketch and analyze the motives involved.30 ­Unless we expose ­these motives, we w ­ ill miss the aims and consequences of recent work that extends t­hese very developments. Moreover, since heirs among postsecularists and reenchanters of the world admit their ambitions extend across the life world of values and ­imagined horizons, we must recover the tentative and textured qualities of ­these developments, precisely to contest their unreflected instrumentalization. In Poetry against Torture, reading Vico against Descartes, I contrast two tropes, which work as gerunds: prospect and pioneer. I introduce t­hese terms again ­here ­because the prob­lem is the same. If we concern ourselves with criticism’s obligation to defend and enact imagination for the sake of the species and the f­uture, then a­ fter comparative study, we must decide among diverse ways of conducting the task. We must sharply separate out the masked play of reaction and nostalgia that often subtly dematerializes the real­ity of the f­ uture or makes inescapable their own deterministic sense of inevitability. It is impor­tant to take Schmitt’s comments on Hamlet and Benjamin as an example of their under­lying motives. Schmitt is not an intellectual with a prospective imagination; t­ here is nothing proleptic or emergent about his work. His own imagination is compensatory, angry, frustrated, and hectoring. His mode is always to correct o ­ thers’ insufficiencies and his tone always regretful if seductive. Schmitt’s influence appears everywhere ­these days, a fact so inescapable if still surprising that Tracy Strong’s extended foreword to The Concept of the Po­liti­cal takes on the fact at length. U ­ nless we understand the motives as well as motifs of Schmitt’s work, we cannot judge the consequences of 45

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extending it. By motives, I mean something Vichian, a notion of w ­ ill and agency familiar to recent English-­language criticism in Said’s elaboration on the topic from his dissertation on Joseph Conrad through to his final work on late style, to which I return in Chapter 7 in a discussion of Wallace Stevens’s “Auroras of Autumn.” Reading Schmitt on Hamlet, we have a clear sense of how small a role poetry plays in his discussions and perhaps formation. His introduction starts off characteristically, with unsupported assertions and a set of key terms that together make quite clear his motives, define the terrain on which he intends to work (and induce our consent), and limit the questions asked. “The drama Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” Schmitt writes, “has been the subject of an endless number of interpretations. The mournfully dressed, melancholy prince has become in the end a primal image of the h ­ uman condition. The symbolic force of this figure has produced an au­then­tic myth that finds its justification in a pro­cess of inexhaustible transformation” (Hamlet or Hecuba, 7). Goethe makes Hamlet into a Werther, as Freud makes him an alternative completion of the Oedipus story. Schmitt would have us conclude two ­things: Hamlet emerged as the material necessary to satisfy a primal urge, formed in large part by German poets and their heirs; as a result, and predictably, commentary on the play is a labyrinth of excessive psychologizing. Schmitt notes that Hamlet “has become . . . ​a primal image of the ­human condition,” but despite his references to his German pre­de­ces­sors, he has no interest in reconstructing that “becoming.” His phrase “has become” is an anonymous passive that not only hides the pro­ cesses and agents involved in this becoming but makes clear Schmitt’s disinterest in and hostility to the modes of knowledge that seemingly might explain the how of such becoming. Schmitt’s originary figure is Hegel. Although in his introduction, Schmitt makes Goethe the seeming target of his disagreement, he engages Hegel indirectly. In The Philosophy of Fine Art, Hegel made two points essential to Schmitt’s essay. First, Hegel claimed that “Hamlet’s m ­ other is innocent,” the very solution Schmitt could not tolerate; second and consequentially, Hegel claims that the source of the tragedy turns “on the par­tic­ul­ar personality, the inner life of Hamlet.”31 Like Schmitt and Benjamin a­ fter him, Hegel differentiates tragedy—­ especially Shakespeare and particularly Hamlet—­from e­ arlier forms of classical and revenge drama. Hegel’s well-­ known claim starts the modern preoccupation with subjectivity that Schmitt 46

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wants to displace. Contrasting modern tragedy with the work of Calderón, a playwright central to Benjamin’s considerations of the Baroque, Hegel summarizes developments leading to his own work: “Generally speaking, however, in modern tragedy it is not the substantive content of their object in the interest of which men act, and which is maintained as the stimulus of their passion; rather it is the inner experience of their heart and individual emotion, or the par­tic­u­lar qualities of their personality, which insist on satisfaction.” In ­earlier tragedies, heroes pursued what Hegel calls “world-­wide policy,” of a sort that an individual cannot accomplish: “they [­these policies] carry themselves into effect partly with the ­will of many, partly against and without their knowledge.” In modern tragedy, “the content of their [the tragic heroes’] ultimate ends is so essentially of a personal character that the rights and obligations deducible from the same are able to fuse in direct concurrence with the individual desires of the heart.”32 The modern emphasis on the subject and the subjective—­which makes Hamlet an image of primal humanity taken as pure subjectivity—­appears in sharp outline when Hegel contrasts Hamlet to classical theater. Aeschylus and Sophocles disperse justice among all the characters—­killing Agamemnon in revenge for the death of Iphigenia illustrates the nonsubjective origin of classical tragic action—so that the regicide, Clytemnestra, has “a certain ethical justification.” Hamlet differs in two ways at least. “­There is nothing in [Claudius’s] character that possesses any real claim to [Hamlet’s] re­ spect,” b ­ ecause t­here is no “justice” in this killing. Moreover, Hamlet always intends to avenge his ­father not for the regicide but for the fratricide, a characterization of the event that leaves Gertrude innocent of crime. What interests us, therefore, according to Hegel, is “the par­tic­u­lar personality, the inner life of Hamlet,” and this becomes the origin of the tragic action. The motive for the play’s tragic action consists in the “collision” between the “noble soul” and the demand for “energetic activity.”33 The conflict exposes the fundamental irresolvable issues of the h ­ uman that lead to ruination and, hence, melancholy. Moving ­toward this conclusion, Hegel pauses over Schiller to show that the mature Schiller could not reestablish the modalities of classical tragedy, even though he had discovered the insufficiencies of the modern mode. The early Schiller paradigmatically combined “the individual desires of the heart” with a “continual insistence upon Nature, rights of man, and a converted world.” Hegel concludes that Schiller’s proj­ect “savours of the 47

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excess of a wholly personal enthusiasm” but adds that Schiller’s attempt to reestablish the classical form of tragic pathos failed impossibly.34 Hegel’s remarks m ­ atter for several reasons. He is the originary figure ­behind Schmitt’s attack on excessive psychologizing in critical interpretation. We might well sympathize with Schmitt on this point ­because we do not intend to reduce Hamlet merely to the conflict between noble soul and energetic practical action. We might also sympathize with Schmitt’s distaste for the bourgeoisie that finds so much narcissistic satisfaction in the navel gazing of psychologism and subjectivism. The Schiller references interestingly confirm this but also help us see the po­liti­cal motive in Schmitt’s work, a pioneering effort against the liberal regimes associated with the bourgeois subject made primal mythically for the psychologized ­human subject in Hegel’s Hamlet. The willingness of leftists to embrace Schmitt’s undermining analy­sis of the liberal state and liberal politics helps us understand just how militaristic Schmitt’s work is. He saps the liberal institutions of their legitimacy, especially among and for ­those who believe their legitimacy irrelevant to what­ever aspirations a nontotalitarian Left might have. Consider Adorno, who in Aesthetic Theory makes a direct and rigorous critique of ­these same ele­ments and moments in Hegel and Schiller. By contrast, Adorno’s rigorous consideration clarifies not only the stakes but also the motives of Schmitt’s dissatisfactions. Hegel’s remarks on Schiller subsume the prob­lem of nature into the prob­lem of the subject, or to put it differently, as far as t­here is nature, it is as the mediated pre­sen­ta­tion of immediacy and as such dismissed as excess, leaving only the subject itself as the topic of art. Hegel’s Hamlet is ­free, a fact defined by the conflict of his tragedy. Freedom is the terrain of ­human existence as marked by Schiller and Hegel’s Hamlet. Adorno and Schmitt agree that Hegel’s Hamlet “blocked out reflection on what is located beyond aesthetic immanence” and established as “complete” the “identity of the artwork with the subject.”35 From this comes easily the endless psychologism that makes the myth of Hamlet the story of the subject, as it explores itself as alone a m ­ atter of interest. Psychoanalysis, for Schmitt, would be a late complete fulfillment of this self-­interest, noteworthy precisely for its scientific and hermeneutic profligacy. Schmitt claims quite simply that subject-­oriented psy­chol­ogy cannot catch the tragic motive for Hamlet’s action or form. Without making the point explicit, Schmitt rests his claims not only on the privilege of his own 48

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discovered truth about the motive and action but on the a­ ctual incapacity of liberal bourgeois criticism to do more than repeat itself in elaborating the myth ­toward a false but seemingly permanent dead end. Psychologism, without the ability to understand its own ideological construction, presumes the permanence of forms to which it is, bubble-­like, permanently relevant. Schmitt notes ­there is an outside to the psyche of Hamlet, an “aporia” of sorts that is not psychologistic, historicist, or metaphysical. It is the po­liti­cal unnameability of James and his ­mother’s pos­si­ble involvement in murder. It is the En­glish “exception” to the Eu­ro­pean po­liti­cal solution to the religious wars just as British barbarism created a sea-­based colonial empire. Not so far out of sight, then, stands Schmitt’s dislike of Eu­ro­pean politics as the liberal state solution. Clear is his interest in another form of exception to what we know as the much discussed “state of exception.” Curiously, not the often-­agreed form of En­glish civil liberties, liberal formations, or even market choices draw Schmitt’s interest but the barbarism of ­England’s responses to religious schism and embrace of po­ liti­cal vio­lence. Adorno unpacks much that stays unclear in Schmitt’s pre­sen­ta­tion. Schmitt and Adorno each note the importance not only of Hegel on tragedy but also of Schiller. Adorno draws an impor­tant historical lesson from this duo’s development of a Kantian idea: “Natu­ral beauty vanished from aesthetics as a result of the burgeoning domination of the concept of freedom and ­human dignity, which was inaugurated by Kant and then rigorously transplanted into aesthetics by Schiller and Hegel; in accord with this concept nothing in the world is worthy of attention except that for which the autonomous subject has itself to thank. The truth of such freedom for the subject, however, is at the same time unfreedom: unfreedom for the other.”36 Schmitt universalizes tragic motive—­that which is beyond the reach and control of the autonomous subject—as in itself the need for myth in a postreligious society. A pseudo-­or proto-­religiosity underlies Schmitt’s argument that secular socie­ties, despite their commitment to demystification and demythologization, need not only the mythic but also a form of enchantment. He hopes to make of Hamlet a strong rebuke of the Enlightenment and liberalism’s reliance on freedom; he also wants it to show that modernity never can or should not try to evade the mythic. From outside the long po­liti­cal pro­cesses of nation-­state formation through the Enlightenment and its developments, the reiterated return to Hamlet marks the 49

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making of myth—­a fact marked and masked by liberal psychologistic ­demystification of Hamlet. Adorno’s and Schmitt’s thinking coalesce on this point. ­After Kant and Schiller and what Hegel calls “the ideological art religion,” liberal society achieved “the identity of the artwork with the subject.” Adorno elaborates this identity in an almost Schmittian way as “the liberation of the art from the heteronomy of the material”—­except, of course, that Adorno’s sense of heteronomy is far more heteronomous than Schmitt’s.37 Schmitt concludes his introduction by posing the question that w ­ ill give him the conclusion he wants: “When one considers the extent to which the Eu­ro­pean spirit has demystified itself since the Re­nais­sance, then it is in fact astonishing that such a strong and canonical myth as that of Hamlet could have emerged in Eu­rope and from out of the essence of the Eu­ro­pean spirit. What caused a play of the last years of the Elizabethan age to produce that rare case of a modern Eu­ro­pean myth?” (Hamlet or Hecuba, 10). Schmitt is not ironically invoking spirit in this sentence. He argues within the history of Eu­rope, of Eu­ro­pean spirit and myth, and the crisis rhe­toric of Eurocentrism. Schmitt aimed to delegitimize Eu­rope’s po­liti­cal forms, to show the repressed per­sis­tence within the statist solution to fratricidal and tribal conflict of mythic (and so primitive) forms. He insists that the Eu­ro­ pean spirit delivers this myth from within its barbaric British sibling, producing a topos ­adopted and absorbed by Eu­ro­pean liberal faith in freedom and autonomy that deludes itself about itself, as its own psychologistic (and historicist) modes of hermeneutics make clear. ­These modes, like demystified Eu­rope itself, can never understand their own origins in the need for myth, the impossibility of erasing mythic production, and their own hidden commitment to keeping myth alive—as Hegel himself commenting on Hamlet had made clear. Schmitt aimed to “transcend” psychologizing and historicizing to discredit not just t­hose practices and their perspicacity but the very socie­ties they inhabit. He had his own authoritarian tribalist preferences for the organ­ization of power. Schmitt has no self-­consciousness in speaking of the Eu­ro­pean spirit, of invoking the very idealism that, as Adorno lays out elegantly, corresponded exactly with the aesthetics of the autonomous subject and its concept of freedom. Adorno studied Karl Kraus’s efforts to recover art from “the terror of idealism’s scorn,” a­ fter which he augmented his remark that art liberated itself from the heteronomy of the material by sharply noting 50

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how idealism “first made art master of itself and expunged from it the rawness of what is unmediated by spirit.”38 Schmitt has no intention to recover Hamlet from “idealism’s scorn,” for his very thesis depends on the centrality of the play and the blindness of liberal hermeneutic modalities to the deepest issues confirmed, in his view, by the play’s per­sis­tence as a myth. To put it differently, Schmitt’s antagonism to the liberality of Idealist and post-­Idealist Eu­rope depends on the very idealism that identifies and creates the Eu­ro­pean spirit whose identity—­misperceived by idealism’s liberal heirs—­appears clearly to Schmitt himself, that is, to a mind not part of idealism’s pro­cess of demystification. The pro­cesses of demystification do not provide universal enlightenment since they cannot account for ele­ments of their own origins or for the needs they themselves meet by sustaining, despite themselves, required mythic satisfactions. Schmitt’s narrative, in abbreviated form, is ­simple: the Eu­ro­pean wars of religion result in the displacement of clerical authority by po­liti­cal authority, especially in France and on the model of the then emerging nation-­ state formation. In ­England, that solution to the wars was not available, but their real­ity remained active through the strug­gles over confessional succession. As a result, E ­ ngland in Shakespeare’s play could produce an emergent myth out of its own relative primitivism or barbarism. Allegorically, Schmitt’s claims for the invisible or unspoken but well-­known crisis of succession and murder involving King James, represented in silence by the plot of Hamlet—­allegorically ­these stand in both for the per­sis­tent power of the unspoken and unrecognized and for the foundational societal importance of the mythic primitive in all socie­ties no ­matter their commitment to demythologization. In other words, the general po­liti­cal liberal state order emerging from the solution to the religious wars, established by treaty, practice, and law as well as developed by thought and culture—­all this is illegitimate, a charade that occludes the per­sis­tent origin and work of the mythic and primitive. Schmitt’s motive h ­ ere, the movement of this rhe­toric, elides nicely with postsecularists and several strands of post-­Enlightenment thought but above all with resurgent authoritarian antiliberalism across the globe. Especially among the religious-­minded postsecularists, many of whom draw on or align themselves with Schmitt’s po­liti­cal theology, his attack on the Eu­ro­pean state solution to barbaric religious warfare with its ­great stress on the per­sis­tent necessity of myth emerging from unhidden primitive or barbaric sources—­this line finds sympathy. Although Schmitt 51

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stands substantively against allegorists, especially Benjamin, who believe in the primacy of the “symbolic force of this figure,” Hamlet, to produce “an au­then­tic myth,” his own assertions about the play themselves allegorize, as Strauss might say, indirectly revealing a po­liti­cal motive through codes known only to the cognoscenti. How to reverse the seductive mystification that Schmitt’s imitation of a hermeneutic intends to impose on his readers and through his ephebes on the intellectual polity? Not surprisingly, the answer lies in demystifying his coded desires and intentions. His general comments on art are useful to a theme I develop throughout this book, namely, that the social contextualization of art as the defining method for its study can be inherently limiting and antagonistic to art’s work. Speaking again of Hamlet, Schmitt writes, It is ­here that the limits of the invention of the writer become clear. An author of plays intended for immediate per­for­mance before a familiar audience not only enters into a psychological and so­cio­log­i­cal interaction with this audience but also shares with it a common public sphere. Through its concrete presence, the assembled audience establishes a public sphere that encompasses the author, the director, the actors, and the audience itself and incorporates them all. If the audience does not understand the action of the play, it simply does not remain engaged and the public sphere dissolves or ends in a mere theatrical scandal.39 (Hamlet or Hecuba, 35)

In the subsection of Hamlet or Hecuba devoted to “play and tragedy,” Schmitt concedes that the theater has its own codes that offer freedom from the audience’s knowledge and psy­chol­ogy. Although the public sphere is the most encompassing and determining horizon for an artwork, the theater has ­limited freedom within it. Schmitt concedes the playfulness of the theater, the possibilities of aesthetic invention, and the value of play conceptualized by a line of ­great thinkers from Martin Luther, whom Schmitt directly invokes, to Johan Huizinga. This concession only occasions Schmitt’s desired result, namely, the definition of tragedy as precisely the genre that starts at the very limit where play and the freedom to play end. In the complex tradition formed by such figures as Schmitt and Benjamin, the extraordinary preference given to tragedy over other genres’ more often sexual-­signed successes of ­human resolution—­this preference affords an in­ter­est­ing sphere of investigation. At this point, as Schmitt’s

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claim for the tragic exemption suggests, the preference given to the tragic form or the genre of “tragedy” belongs to the visionary distaste for h ­ uman finitude from which the messianic tradition revulses. Having exaggerated Aristotle’s theory of tragedy to arrive at a social theory of constraint on aesthetic possibility, Schmitt denies the desirability of freedom and ­human joy in its own finitude: The knowledge of the spectators is not the only essential f­actor in the theater; it is not only the audience that pays attention to the observance of the rules of the game and the language. The theater itself is essentially play. The play is not only played out on stage, it is play in and of itself. Shakespeare’s plays, in par­tic­u­lar, are true theatrical plays: comic plays [Lustspiel] or tragic plays [Trauerspiel]. The play has its own sphere and creates a space for itself within which a certain freedom is maintained both from the literary material as well as from the originating situation. Thus it creates its own field of play in both space and time. This makes pos­si­ble the fiction of a completely self-­contained, internally self-­sufficient pro­cess. (Hamlet or Hecuba, 37)

­ hese claims are all only commonplaces. The theater not only dramatizes T play but is itself play. The audience, the playwright, and the play itself all pay attention to the rules of the game. Numerous studies of En­glish Re­ nais­sance theater have emphasized the continuity of per­for­mance and performativity between the society itself and its theatrical events. Theatricality has become itself a topic of social as well as individual and cultural self-­ making. Furthermore, such commonplaces allow scholars to agree with Schmitt that the f­ ree play of performativity has its constraints in the codes of social and cultural formation as well as economic and po­liti­cal force, with the result that no claim for the autonomy of the artwork or the artist can stand.40 The challenge for ordinary academics, however, is to drop historicist reasons from their account of t­hese limiting constraints if they plan to agree with Schmitt that play finds its own limit at the very base, where its origins lie unseen and necessarily unrecognized. For Schmitt, historical circumstances and contexts do not essentially constrain aesthetic freedom. That it is not it at all. Reading Schmitt, we should look for motives rather than trying to find in his texts repeatable resources that many seem to believe stand apart from

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his purposes. The commonplaces in this passage point to one direction, often on grounds that are still undemonstrated. For example, Schmitt offers no proof that the declared proprietary sphere for “play” enables the idealist, romantic, and authorial claim to aesthetic freedom. Rather, he organizes t­hese two “facts” sequentially to earn a passing consent without argument. Schmitt intends his readers to accept a weakly grounded evolutionary narrative that, in the moment, seems unimportant. Given, however, that Schmitt’s motives include campaigning against aesthetic ­free play and given what Adorno shows, namely, the post-­Schiller alignment of aesthetics and the concept of freedom, then Schmitt’s rhe­toric is hardly innocent. Yet Schmitt’s arguments, precisely b ­ ecause assembled from commonplaces, carry the marks of positions he invokes to leave b ­ ehind. His claims for moderns’ belatedness and historical ruination are without melancholy ­because they serve his po­liti­cal ambitions. They are an excellent example of how closely academic ideas and politics (not “the po­liti­cal”) intertwine. As he develops his argument in this l­ittle book, his differences with Benjamin over the relative status of tragedy and Trauerspiel stand out and lead readers to accept that distinction as the proper terrain for work. Trauerspiel are, in Schmitt’s formulation, “true theatrical plays.” As he advances his forces in this section, Trauerspiel’s difference from tragedy becomes impor­tant, and it leads to the claim that tragedy is a defining limit. “It is still necessary to distinguish between Trauerspiel and tragedy to separate them so that the specific quality of the tragic is not lost and the seriousness of a genuine tragedy does not dis­appear” (Hamlet or Hecuba, 38). This specific quality is identical with seriousness of the genuinely tragic. Tragedy is not a fungible form of play. Perhaps Schmitt’s ­legal training makes him want a stable sense of the word “play,” for his next advance enumerates the ambiguous uses of the word in German—­children and musicians play, and objects are playthings. He asks what we are to conclude. “Thus all t­ hese pos­si­ble and contradictory meanings—­from the dispensations of an omnipotent and omniscient God to the activity of irrational creatures [­ little c­hildren and frisky cats]—­can be circumscribed by the concept of ‘play’ ” (40). Literary critics especially have a strong stake in Schmitt’s next claim, which not only draws a strict line between play and criticism but also aligns the latter with the tragic: “We must insist that—at least for us poor ­humans—­there is in play a fundamental negation of the critical situation [Ernstfalles]. The tragic ends 54

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where the play begins, even when this play is tearful—­a melancholy play for melancholy spectators and a deeply moving Trauerspiel. It is with Shakespeare’s Trauerspiel, whose ‘play’ character also appears in the so-­called ‘tragedies,’ that we can least afford to ignore the unplayability [Unverspielbarkeit] of the tragic” (40). Any given Ernstfall is an emergency, and it is not surprising that Schmitt alludes to his most famous topos in defining what is “ernst,” or serious. Play negates or evades the fundamental facticity of any Ernstfall. Play is like the freedom of liberals. Perhaps it cannot see the fundamentally serious case or event; perhaps it simply obscures it in order to rely on it. What m ­ atters in this translation is the alignment between “the critical situation” and “tragedy” over and against play and melancholy. Play is negation, and what it negates is tragedy, the critical, and the fundamental case—­the occasion (der Fall). Consider how Hamlet becomes tragedy and leaves b ­ ehind the forms of Trauerspiel. For Schmitt, this has nothing to do with the effects of religion as it does for Benjamin. Rather, it has to do with the way two Ernstfallen shadow Shakespeare’s art and raise the play to tragedy. Schmitt ties t­hese two shadows indisputably to King James and Queen Mary, to their ­careers and sectarian involvements, and to murder. Specially, they are both “intrusions” on the play’s art. Schmitt starts by contradicting no less a reader of the play than Hegel with his assertion that the play is ambiguous about Gertrude’s guilt; as a result, t­ here is “a taboo surrounding the guilt of the queen” (44). Also, the heroic quality of the brooding Hamlet character whose conflict between reflection and the need for action Hegel understands as the source of the tragedy becomes in Schmitt the distortion of the “avenger” in the revenge genre, and with the taboo on the queen, it creates “shadows, two dark areas,” that haunt the play (44). Of course, for Schmitt ­these are not just historical contextual events but the foci of the transformation of Hamlet to the transcendent status of tragedy and myth. T ­ hese shadows “are in no sense mere historical-­political connections, neither ­simple allusions nor true mirrorings, but rather two given circumstances that are received and respected by the play and around which the play timidly maneuvers” (44). Schmitt’s focus on Hamlet and his valorization of tragedy over and against other poetic genre have profound implications for how we do critical work. Do we follow the predisposition to make tragedy the ascendant and necessary form? If so, do we realize how we diminish the capacities of 55

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imagination? Do we willingly exclude poetic possibilities that do not represent the world as dearth, death, ruin, and the disenchanted? Have you grasped po­liti­cal desires inherent in following along? Have we lost our suspicion of fascist intellectuals? Are we satisfied in the age of resurgent fascist and near-­fascist authoritarianism to see Schmitt as the best questioner of the liberal state—­presumably ­because his questions help us see how fascism emerges from liberalism? Have we no suspicions of the easy and constructive adaptation of Schmittian concepts to the world, where like all concepts they change the world in a dance of adaptation? This book does not assume any innocence in the Schmittian questions about liberalism but suspects that his concepts enabled the developing of fascism from the liberal state. Would it be wrong to believe that his thinking aimed to ease and legitimate the transformation from the liberal to fascist state? His writings on tragedy reveal how his work has po­liti­cal consequences within the intellectual community, not merely by expanding his thinking to the world of real politics but by inhabiting minds, closing the mind to concepts of other poetic and so po­liti­cal realities. Over and against Schmitt on tragedy stands Shakespeare himself in The Winter’s Tale, just as over and against Benjamin on ruination stands Rembrandt, and tellingly over and against the idea of a diminished imagination stands Wallace Stevens, especially in the major poems. This book aims to explore some of ­these relations and to argue for one side rather than the other in this account and turns now from Schmitt to Benjamin.

Catastrophe Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin had an unfortunate view of catastrophe’s virtues.41 Writing from Jerusalem on April 13, 1933, Scholem tells Benjamin, “although the extent of the catastrophe is of historic proportions, and it can teach us something about 1492, the stuff of which re­sis­ tance is made has been reduced in German Jewry to a very small fraction of what existed in ­those days. The magnitude of the collapse of the communist and socialist movements is frightfully obvious, but that of German Jewry certainly does not pale by comparison.” For the moment, this is fair enough, and Scholem’s specific judgments can stand. Scholem adds, however, this far more unsettling and revealing remark: “The horrible t­hing

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about it, though, if one dares to say so, is that the ­human cause of the Jews in Germany only stands to benefit if a real pogrom w ­ ere to take place, instead of the ‘cold’ pogrom that they ­will be trying to restrict themselves to. It represents almost the only chance of bringing about something positive from such an eruption.”42 From Benjamin in reply on June 16, 1933, comes the following sympathetic response: “I already yearn for ­those saturated shadows with which the wings of bankruptcy ­will bury this ­whole glorious paradise of narrow-­ minded shop­keep­ers and vacationers within a few short years” (Correspondence, 58). Detlev Claussen helps us understand how this sentence reflects the nostalgia and melancholy accompanying the loss of an entire order of educated life in liberal cultures. Benjamin shifts Scholem’s address of world-­historical catastrophe for the po­liti­cal Left and Eu­ro­pean Jewry to the real-­estate and tourism b ­ ubble that envelops Ibiza. We see the continuum of Nazism and middle-­class materialism and mercantilism; in both, we see the fate of Eu­rope and the vampire nature of modernity, the prob­lem of the commodity. In this figure of satirical nostalgia, we see the catastrophe of intellectuals caught, as Anson Rabinbach shows, “between apocalypse and enlightenment.”43 As a response to catastrophe, apocalyptic messianism, nevertheless, has had dire effects on literary study, on criticism, and on culture.44 We cannot deny the power of Benjamin’s and Scholem’s contributions to our lives, but we should worry about the costs of the worldview that made pos­si­ble so much of that work.45 We should also think of the cost we pay in transmitting their inheritance to our own time and practice. Their concept, catastrophe, is an immediate adaptation to an or­ga­nized disaster on a massive scale almost unknown. It deranged worlds with a brutality that made adaptive conceptual responses im­mensely difficult. Yet more sophisticated and poetically creative versions of the concept “catastrophe” inhered in their traditions and lived among their contemporaries. ­Later in this book, I ­will elaborate on Adorno’s and Said’s thinking about late style as catastrophe to show how within the German tradition especially, catastrophe did far more complex work in critical thinking and in imaginative artwork itself. Adorno, for example, discovered that late works are catastrophes in how they tear apart subject and object precisely to preserve them “for eternity.”46 Refusing to allow h ­ uman finitude to dictate the questions for art or to

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subsume art to the “realities” of finitude, Adorno discovered how art become catastrophe offered the freedom to display and express, to illuminate without melancholy or messianism. The cost imposed by Scholem and Benjamin’s concept of catastrophe is greatest where it is least obvious. Scholem’s fatalistic belief that something positive could come, and come only, from the apocalyptic disaster of “a real pogrom” might yet attract religious and epochal thinkers who despise the voluntarism of politics or any form of h ­ uman agency and subsume it to some transcendent or Incarnational power. (Accelerationists might like it.) No doubt, allegorizers could find a critical resource in Scholem’s dread, a rhe­toric that desires a better politics that might transform historical real­ity or transcend it. More impor­tant than Scholem’s faith in apocalypse is his willingness to embrace the putative necessity of catastrophe as the only means e­ ither to redirect history or to transcend it. Scholem’s writing embraced cataclysm with its im­mense ­human costs, if it would clear the terrain of obstructions to the messiah as the means to complete history. In effect, he devalued the ­human and ­human history as an immanent abject, a domain inevitably abject and best when utterly ruined, a figure for history paradigmatically voiced by Benjamin in his famous image of the angel in his ­Theses on History. No m ­ atter the visionary achievement assured only by cataclysmic disruption and overcoming, the cost, if willingly embraced, might well be the extermination of millions and the fundamental devaluation of the h ­ uman, of h ­ uman agency, of h ­ uman creativity—­all in the name of a view, no doubt, summoned by the disasters of war, nationalism, capitalism, and anti-­Semitism. Scholem and Benjamin shared an aesthetic and ethic of destruction. ­Those readers of Benjamin who deny Scholem credibility as an interpreter of his friend’s work go too far. No doubt Scholem’s antagonism to historical materialism, to Marxism and Communism, and especially his competition with Bertolt Brecht for influence—as Scholem saw it—­over the independent-­minded Benjamin, make Scholem a less-­than-­complete reader of Benjamin’s use of the Marxist tradition. Devoted as he was to a messianic view of the world, he was importantly unable to gain a distanced view on the constraints Benjamin faced in attempting to transform the po­liti­cal theology of messianism into a secular messianism of aesthetic, po­liti­cal, and cultural force. 58

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Nonetheless, Scholem is not always wrong in his judgments, no ­matter how unhappy this makes Benjamin’s more Left po­liti­cal heirs. In Scholem’s 1964 lecture “Walter Benjamin,” he not only reveals his own ethical, aesthetic, and po­liti­cal commitments to the apocalyptic but rightly emphasizes its centrality to Benjamin—­and in terms that are as secular and materialist in their implications as they are theological and messianic. Benjamin does his best critical work in writing on Goethe and Proust, Karl Kraus and Franz Kafka, although his conceptual invention and influence is perhaps greater in the famous essays on translation, Baudelaire, and cinema. Scholem emphasizes what he calls “the Jewish ele­ment” not only in Kraus—­which distinguishes him from Stefan Georg—­but in Kafka, whom, he asserts, Benjamin should analyze “on the categories of the halakhah and haggadah.”47 Scholem claims that Benjamin bases his most power­ful critical readings on ­these Jewish categories and si­mul­ta­neously asserts that Benjamin’s most characteristic essay—­and by that he means Benjamin’s most programmatic pages—is “Der Destruktive Charakter.”48 This short feuilleton-­style piece, only two pages long, Scholem makes the key to Benjamin’s effort, insisting that it defines and reveals Benjamin’s sensitivity to the greatest writers drawing his attention. Scholem has noticed a profound truth about his friend’s writings, even if he characteristically arrests Benjamin’s fluid conceptual movements in a series of static categories. In this case, Scholem does not merely proj­ect his own apocalyptic fervor but suggestively links destruction to a foundational apocalyptic messianism that, not surprisingly, elicits allegoresis as the mode of textual apprehension and recasting. Commentary—­a troubled notion in the conversations of ­these friends—­often stands only for allegorization in the practical sense that they give the term. The ­great essay on Kraus suggests that Benjamin identified all aesthetics and ethics of creativity with vari­ous romantic and postromantic abominations, some of which w ­ ere the 49 pre­de­ces­sors and enablers of state power and Nazi tyranny. Scholem downplays ele­ments of po­liti­cal pressure on Benjamin’s sensitivity and writing, a fact many of Benjamin’s heirs find troubling. Generally, however, he illuminates and revalues the theology, ethics, and aesthetics of destruction as the expressive equivalent of messianic insight into the ruinous nature of historicity and the supposed barbarism of all ­human creativity: “In addition [to the halakhah and haggadah], an apocalyptic ele­ment of destructiveness is preserved in the metamorphosis under­gone in his writing 59

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by the messianic idea, which continues to play a potent part in his thought. The noble and positive power of destruction—­too long (in his view) denied due recognition thanks to the one-­sided, undialectic, and dilettantish apotheosis of ‘creativity’—­now becomes an aspect of redemption, related to the immanence of the world, acted out in the history of ­human ­labor” (“Walter Benjamin,” 194–195). Benjamin’s call for “a history of esoteric poetry” forces on us the clear fact that the ruling ethos of normative research writing is neither intellectual nor po­liti­cal; in short, it is neither creative nor responsible.50 In “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Eu­ro­pean Intelligent­sia,” Benjamin contrasts André Breton and the art-­for-­art’s-­sake movement and brings his readers to a historical critical opportunity: “This is the moment to embark on a work that would illuminate as has no other the crisis of the arts that we are witnessing” (212). What sort of work? “Written as it demands to be written—­that is, not as a collection to which par­tic­u­lar ‘specialists’ all contribute ‘what is most worth knowing’ from their fields, but as the deeply grounded composition of an individual who, from inner compulsion, portrays less a historical evolution than a constantly renewed, primal upsurge of esoteric poetry—­written in such a way, it would be one of ­those scholarly confessions that find their place in ­every ­century” (212).51 Around the En­glish word “demand” in this quotation and the ­earlier one about the demand to reread Brecht lies a potential confusion and so the chance for clarity. “Brecht’s thinking on modernism thus demands to be umfunktioniert”—­this demand has the force of economy, of command, of necessity.52 More to the point, as the OED makes clear, when “demand” is a transitive verb used before an infinitive phrase, it carries the force of right: “To ask for (a t­hing) with ­legal right or authority; to claim as something one is legally or rightfully entitled to.” The subject’s demand seems inescapable, but for the reasons I mentioned ­earlier and ­others, this is a rhetorical effect that assigns what seems to be inescapable priority and originary force to a figure whose authority as a field-­organizing figure comes into existence as a mode of intellectual domination, as a ­career task. By contrast, when Benjamin writes of “demand,” he says this: “Denn sie zu schreiben, wie sie geschrieben zu werden verlangt,” giving us verlangen (to demand or ask for), a verb the substantive cognate of which is “desire” (Verlangen).53 Benjamin might have written “fordern” to strengthen 60

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the sense of command, of arrogation, of insisting on this task as required. Rather, he chooses a word that suggests a dif­fer­ent location in the complex of emotional and ethical attitudes that might embrace a reader. The En­glish “demand” includes an old sense of something given in charge—in this case, Brecht’s work given in charge to his heirs for preservation and revitalization. As a result, it imposes authoritatively an inescapable obligation. Historically and po­liti­cally, Brecht’s work makes the demand that we rewrite it. The rhe­toric of a command economy, of an authority, requires demand rather than a creativity that seduces or lures. This is a perfectly apt and illuminating verbal location to grasp Benjamin’s thinking and feeling in “Surrealism.” Reading Benjamin’s image of responsive criticism affords its own pleasures and promises greater resources for f­ uture creativity. Verlangen stands opposed not only to the En­glish “demand” but also to Scholem’s decision to emphasize destruction as the center of Benjamin’s ethics, aesthetics, and writing. Benjamin’s writings are extremely varied and nuanced, carefully nonprogrammatic, so much so that, among ­others, Scholem and Brecht (and their allies) by emphasizing their preferences for ele­ments of his work sharpen our sense of how its motility evades their dogmatic ideals. A full critical reading that showed the same fluid plasticity as Benjamin himself would require a Borgesian authorship that we w ­ ill not see, but this shortcoming need not blind us to the possibilities that Benjamin’s allure demands his readers explore. Illuminating what Benjamin calls the crisis of modern art, he says, requires a history of esoteric poetry. The claim is daring b ­ ecause he rests it on both a careful and clear analy­sis of selected surrealist figures and works. In addition, it rests on the scholarly and readerly absorption of the esoteric tradition to which Benjamin insists the surrealists belong. He proposes his own eccentric version of modernity’s figural relation to tradition. Rather than place surrealism within a socially or culturally dominant, that is, historically demanding, set of pre­de­ces­sors, he responds to it from within the allure of its achievement with subjective illumination itself dependent on his experience as their reader and con­temporary. Fully learned historical experience as scholar-­critic and po­liti­cally historically aware subject—­this alone enables his inventive response to the surrealists’ reinvention of materials that have in prior circumstances done work that now, rewritten, illuminates the pre­sent. In this way, esoteric poetry does quite profane 61

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business and does it within what Benjamin also calls “a dialectical optic” (“Surrealism,” 216). Unlike ­those who conceive history’s forces as alone the determinant condition for intellectual and critical work—­“the intellectual and the socioeconomic situation of the writer u ­ nder capitalism”—­Benjamin knows that another form of much-­needed critical work is rare.54 It occurs once ­every hundred years and depends on what the Brechtian dogmatist would call, no doubt, sentimental or bourgeois subjectivity. It can only be “the deeply grounded composition of an individual who, from inner compulsion,” composes in response to tradition and the new (212). While Benjamin counterpoises such writing to the academic mode of specialized knowledge—­“das Wissenswerteste beisteuren”55—we must add an update, that it also stands against the commodified conceptualization of dogmatic academicism that has acquired authority quite hostile to Benjamin’s own way of being a critic and writer. Lukács’s hostility to Benjamin, coming despite the latter’s own plea­sure in reading History and Class Consciousness, results from at least one misperception, that Benjamin had less interest in the ­human than Lukács did—­a claim so astonishing it could only rest on a unique sense of the ­human ontology.56 Unlike ­those critics who allegorize all texts and histories and who aspire to authority by masking, perhaps in imitation of Lukács and his forebears, the mechanical authority of the category encircling an authorial figure, Benjamin understood and spoke honestly about the mechanics of allegory. In Origin of the German Trauerspiel, he illuminates both the duplicity of allegoresis and authority as its motive: “Allegorical personification has always pretended that its task was not to personify the ­thing but rather, by fitting it out as a person, to give it a form only more imposing.”57 Surrealists do not set ­things up as persons. Breton, Benjamin writes, “is closer to the ­things that Nadja is close to than to her.”58 This is a doubly in­ter­est­ing statement. With it, Benjamin opens the path ­toward weighing surrealism’s success in illuminating its own age and the possibilities of creativity in criticism, lit­er­a­ture, and politics. Moreover, it follows from Benjamin’s extensive study of a long Western tradition of thinking about truth and sexuality that separates love from sexuality, truth from the body, and reproduction from thinking. That tradition extends from what I w ­ ill show in Chapter 3 is the Socratic turn away not only from bodies touching but also from ­women and the values of bio62

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logical reproduction as the foundational metonymy of secular abjection. Paradoxically, Socrates both understood the long institutional social history of heteronormativity, its “universal” appeal as the place of h ­ uman agency, and at the same time its historically specific and unnecessary formation.59 Benjamin’s writings, from at least One-Way Street, resonate with variations on the theme of love. The relationship of Breton and Nadja is dif­fer­ent from that between Benjamin and Asja Lacis, although that affair defines the possibility of creative perception and writing in his ­earlier work. “This street is named Asja Lacis Street ­after her who as an engineer cut it through the author.”60 Such a Romantic trope—­repeating the feminized etymology of “machine”—­depends on the author’s desire for proximity and immediacy that inspired and can alone now read the formerly invisible or uncreated. Benjamin describes his lover as an engineer so that love and the figure of the beloved intersect with his meditations on technology and sexuality. Before writing on Breton, Benjamin had already made Nadja of his own “Asja,” as he would perhaps l­ater repeat the gesture with other w ­ omen.61 We can see this in how he or­ga­nized “Surrealism” so that his critical ideal, the “confessor” of esoteric poetry, emerges from the figuration of love and lovers e­ arlier in the essay. The donnée for this crucial series of figural movements is a sense of love that he first derives from Breton and then substantiates from the writings of Auerbach (“Surrealism,” 210).62 Auerbach had written that for all the poets of the “new style,” “Amor bestows or withholds gifts that resemble an illumination more than sensual plea­sure.” Between lovers, Amor creates a “secret bond that determines their inner and perhaps their outer lives.” In such love, the lover can only “possess a mystical beloved,” but this in an esoteric context where the word “only” is inappropriate.63 With the kept w ­ oman, Nadja, whom Breton possesses in this way, the poet, like Benjamin before him in One-­Way Street, finds not only a street cut through him but, with and through his new possession, a view of ­things and of the city that not only illuminates but does so in the ser­vice of revolution. (It is Benjamin’s aim to assess the revolutionary potentialities of surrealism in this reading.) Seeing not the w ­ oman but the t­hings that ­matter to the w ­ oman—­“­woman” as now a figure of mediation between subject and object as well—­moving past the mystical ecstasy of esoteric love, Breton could bring ecstasy to revolutionary fervor and that in turn to the ser­vice 63

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of revolutionary discipline. Such love is a new form of technology, as Benjamin puts it, a new capacity “of ­peoples to order their relationships to one another.”64 In keeping with the Platonic sources near the origins of esotericism, Benjamin opens one of his greatest critical passages with a s­ imple declaration: “The lady, in esoteric love, ­matters least” (210). He has come to this with Breton, who confesses to his own romance with the era of Louis VII (early twelfth c­ entury), through which, like Pound at about the same time, he discovered the attractions of “courtly love.” Unlike Pound, however, Benjamin, reading Breton and Auerbach, takes an interest in the period’s “very curious experience of love” (210) that combines materialism and mysticism in the ecstatic transport of chastity. Of course, the lady of courtly love, of the Minne that attract Breton, is a trope and not in any way the sexual, physical ­woman who becomes Breton’s beloved, even if only long enough to distance himself from her. Nonetheless, having become “lady,” Nadja, no longer beloved but “optic,” loses her value in the games of love and politics and loses all her flesh in a transcendentalizing act that transfers ecstasy from sensuality and intoxication to chastity and discipline.65 The lady, in esoteric love, ­matters least. So, too, for Breton. He is closer to the ­things that Nadja is close to than to her. What are ­these t­hings? Nothing could reveal more about Surrealism than their canon. Where ­shall I begin? He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded.” . . . ​ The relation of ­these ­things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than t­ hese authors. No one before t­ hese visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution . . . ​can suddenly be transformed into revolutionary nihilism. . . . ​Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert every­thing that we have experienced . . . ​into revolutionary experience, if not action. . . . ​The trick by which this world of ­things is mastered—it is more proper to speak of a trick than a method—­consists in the substitution of a po­liti­cal for a historical view of the past. (210)

Standard masculinist, indeed heroic and militant, motifs attract Benjamin as he conceptualizes the dynamics of eros and politics. Knights-­errant took the frustrated ecstasy of sexual fulfillment into the chaste arenas of combat and glory. Other modernists, indeed, other surrealists, thought Breton and his allies practiced sublimation that produced a uniform and subordinated 64

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art.66 Benjamin followed the same path as Breton’s critics. He, however, recognizes his move away from the body and the base as a successful tactic for attaching the ecstatic to revolution precisely by turning the ­woman from immediacy to mediation (as “the lady”) to an optical canal for delivering the erotic charge to a “higher” aim. What does this achieve? It accepts that the world in which Breton and Nadja move is a metonymic world, fragmented into ­things that not only are commodities but, as such and more, carry all the invested traces of life and experience within destitution and detritus or, to use a more familiar phrase, “among the ruins.” Moreover, taking the chaste ecstasy that comes with distance from the enabling but no longer beloved, Breton can both assume a perspective on t­ hese metonymic ruins that affords a sense of their unity and, like Baudelaire, sense the energies’ potential within them, trapped as “mere experience” within the apo­liti­cal life of destitution. As Scholem insists, and as Benjamin’s texts show in numerous places, “destruction” keys the politicization of Benjamin’s aesthetic, both as a turn from the presumed cohabitation of creativity with capital and as the material means to sweep away, as in a pogrom, actually existing conditions, ruins, and tendencies to illuminate the enormous permanent crises that the “­human” ­faces in its historicality. In his extraordinary essay on Karl Kraus, which we should read with the yet greater essay on Kafka, Benjamin touches on ­those base and basic forces that Breton has sublimated into revolutionary experience. Kraus, an admirer of Adalbert Stifter, rediscovers how primitive forces become law and articulates for Benjamin a distanced superveillant perspective that lets us see not only the unfortunate circumstances of the “­human” but the value of such “humanity” and its “historicality.” “Cosmic man has won them [primitive forces] back for creation by making them its world-­historical answer to the criminal existence of men. Only the span between Creation and the Last h ­ ere finds no redemptive fulfillment, let alone historical overcoming.” As a result, metonymized modern Austria is like the World War I battlefields so well described in Benjamin’s fascism review, “a landscape of hell.” He never repudiates or turns away from Kraus’s “defeatism,” which is “supranational” and so “planetary.”67 Benjamin would never call Breton’s ability to distance the “kept w ­ oman” become “lady,” Nadja, “defeatism,” yet imagination achieves the same outcome in this case as in Kraus. Kraus / Stifter and Breton / Nadja (or 65

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Breton / Auerbach) are “visionaries and augurs.” They perceive “destitution.” They seize the potential to “transform” away from history, creating a functional equivalence despite apparent ideological differences between their “tricks.” Breton tricks revolutionary experience into action by abandoning history, as Kraus overcomes the criminality of history by removing creation and creativity from it, by inherently separating the creation and creative from “the criminal existence of men.” Benjamin’s final remark on Breton’s trick—­“this world of t­hings is mastered [by] the substitution of a po­liti­cal for a historical view of the past”—­should sharpen Breton’s difference from Kraus: politics substitutes for the historical rather than the cosmic view. Yet what has Breton achieved but the same cosmic, transcendent, and antihistorical viewpoint, one with a politics that is as real as it is dif­fer­ent from Breton. In other words, t­here is scant difference between the achieved result of Breton’s esotericism and that of Kraus. Or, put differently yet again, “revolutionary nihilism” and “defeatism” fall within the larger set of apocalyptic messianic antihumanisms that all of ­these writers articulate, universalize, and instantiate in a very specific but widely distributed trope, “the crisis of Eu­rope.” Sadly, critics and writers have extended that trope of “crisis” across institutions, practices, and values with ­little regard for their origins and differentiating circumstances.68 The desire substitutes revolutionary possibility for ­woman as it does “the lady” for Nadja and as it substitutes male esoteric eroticism for heterosexual reproductive normativity—as we ­shall see, a gesture as old as Socrates’s remarks in the Symposium. What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of this gesture? In its original form, this topos allows Socrates to create the phi­los­o­pher as the object of love, a pro­cess that depends on arousing desire and redirecting it to games of truth rather than games of love. In the Lukáscian moment that ends Benjamin’s essay on surrealism, he replays this topos, directing eros to the vanguard leaders of a Leninist party. According to the Socratic narrative, games of love and games of truth are no dif­fer­ent if one does not “­settle for” the sort of love that leads to reproduction in the body. When Breton falls for Nadja—is it love?—­reproduction is not a goal, although the satisfaction of physical desire and the transcendence of isolation of the intellectual self ­were lofty ambitions briefly achieved. Nadja, ­after all—­and this is what Benjamin admires—­comes from and brings to Breton both ele­ ments of the city that in their ruined state pre­sent the rec­ord of experience 66

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and the failed promise of possibilities not seized, blocked in their emergence. Nadja remade is a channel, and most impor­tant to the narrative play with desire, she becomes a canal that leads Breton away from love for the lady ­toward the seemingly larger if more abstract conceptual task of revolutionizing desire within the seductive necessities of discipline. In Benjamin, especially, even a­ fter 1917, it is not hard to admit the fact of a revolution deferred as the paradigmatic arousal of a redirected desire. Given the failures of such attachments, the permanent parabasis of melancholy characterizes the ruined critic—­against the masculine ground of nostalgia, messianism, and utopia.

Tragedy and Ruin While several dominant critical writers in the period from 1920 to about 1990 turned their attention repeatedly to tragedy, “the tragic,” and to Trauerspiel—­often debating the borders among t­hese terms—­they collectively set aside alternative genres as uninteresting or more precisely unser­ viceable to their gods. We need only recall Benjamin’s thesis, his adaptation of Schmitt, and Schmitt’s rebuttal to feel a need to inquire, What about comedy or romance? We might ask, Why Hamlet and not The Winter’s Tale? Alternately, we might ask, Why the history plays? Why not the comedies? What are we to say about the prominence of tragedy and its cousin, Trauerspiel, in this intellectual tradition, in this critical archive? We can ask why t­hese critics prioritize tragedy in their view of the world and society—­and establish Hamlet as a promontory in their work. We can also ask what they achieve by it, posing the subsidiary question, Did they reach their goals? We must ask about motives to judge the value of their valuations. ­Unless we ask, we might miss alternative possibilities hidden in and by what they do and say. I argue that history offers far more than ruin, that Benjamin’s desires blind Klee’s angel, and that imagination—­a fundamental quality of being ­human—­has poetic capacities for creative renewal against even its own productions. Moreover, I ­will point to works of art that are not ruins, tragic myths, or traces of the messianic but that are ­human efforts embedded within the burdens and demands of historicality. Even if we concede the “Hamlet” prob­lem as the tragic crisis of modernity, unlike Benjamin or 67

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Schmitt, we ­will look at art’s own solutions, its i­magined alternatives to the melancholy avatars that critics proj­ect to authorize an escape from their own despair. The Winter’s Tale is Shakespeare’s solution to what­ever the Hamlet or tragic prob­lem might be, and As You Like It is the riposte to the masculinist antihumanism of the esoteric or Elohist gambits of utopian allegorists. At the beginnings of t­hese stories of ruination sits an impressive document that shows the insufficiency of secular and imaginative h ­ uman efforts in the world, namely, Plato’s Symposium. We must account for how Plato abuses Agathon and poetry so that we do not lose track of qualities essential for the tradition that has led to our modern allegorists. To do that and before turning back to Benjamin, I ­will write about the Symposium in Chapter 3. We can then turn to alternatives to this tradition—to Adorno in critical writing, to Wallace Stevens in poetry and on poetics, to Rembrandt in painting, and fi­nally to Shakespeare in comedy and romance. By force of logic, we ­will develop a motif on late style to regain the authority of imagination from the fantasists of belatedness who would have us succumb to nostalgia and melancholy to assure the narcissism of their own value in a “ruined world.” We ­will try to point a path out of their unloving shadow.

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chapter three

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A Socratic Interlude

If the end of the phi­los­op ­ her is despair, the end of the poet is fulfillment. —­Wallace Stevens (1944)

I

n the symposium, Socrates leads the prize-­winning tragic poet Agathon into admitting that he knows nothing about love or desire, that he speaks ignorantly if mythically and beautifully. He accepts correction, as almost all of Socrates’s interlocutors eventually do. In 416 BCE, the year in which Plato sets this dialogue, Agathon wins a prize for his first tragedy at the annual Athenian festival the Lenaia and with it considerable admiration. Plato sets the dialogue at a banquet in Agathon’s honor, where the eve­ning’s topic is love. Plato sets out the dinner events in a double frame, a narrative ploy that tells the story from the end, set in Athens’s past, a­ fter the death of Socrates. The dialogue has historical and mythic ele­ments, a sort of storytelling that invites readers to admire Plato’s own poetic talents. History involves the po­liti­cal past, when tragedy, sponsored by state and society a major ele­ment of official culture, or­ga­nized Athenian sentiment and ideology. As with so much ­else about Plato’s ­career, the historico-­ political fulcrum is the state’s murder of Socrates, whose love for wisdom and the active social life of inquiry this dialogue displays. The dialogue develops as vari­ous illustrious figures, including Aristophanes, discourse on eros before their old unthought beliefs wither ­under the illuminating light of Socrates’s elentics. The dialogue’s agon reaches its seeming culmination when Socrates’s questioning brings Agathon to say, 69

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“It looks, Socrates, as though I d ­ idn’t know what I was talking about then,” before adding, “I ­can’t argue against you, Socrates. . . . ​Let’s accept that ­things are as you say.”1 Socrates responds that Agathon cannot argue with the truth, but he could argue against Socrates. This delicate moment, confirming the dream of philosophy, is a gateway to the dialogue’s larger drama, in which Socrates becomes the phi­los­o­pher, the object of an often-­sexualized love, and the impersonal seducer of young men to the only fulfillment life offers, the path of philosophy itself. The careful differentiation between Socrates and truth stays in place only for a moment while the distinction between Socrates and phi­los­o­pher, the seducer who leads to truth’s loving ser­vice, closes entirely—or seems to. Philosophy then has the privilege to expound the values and lessons that the dialogue sets along the path, and most, if not all, questions come to the dialogue from within philosophy itself. Where ­else might a person stand to pose questions? Outside philosophy? Recent theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze make clear how foolish it is to believe in or even to find a place outside philosophy. All of Derrida’s work rests on the endless task of negotiating that impossible and often-­undesirable task. Il n’y a pas de hors-­texte is only a slogan for the plea­sure posed by not believing in an outside-­text.2 Therefore, to ask if other questions might come to us would seem to require setting nonphilosophical questions, that is, historical and literary questions. As a ­matter of history, of course, the Symposium illustrates the displacement of tragedy from its leading po­liti­cal, social, and cultural roles in Athens before its defeat in the Peloponnesian War. In a word, the central art form of classical Athens bore responsibility for failure to educate a population that chose democracy of a sort, empire, and war as a fatal path to defeat. Even worse, from Plato’s point of view, the residues of that culture in a diminished Athens killed Socrates, discrediting itself fi­nally as a safe place for reason and truth or the social agents of the same. Philosophy should displace tragedy (and most poetry) as the educational medium wherein, as we see from Euripides, traditional culture modernized could not negotiate the dangers created by the distance between inherited beliefs and new realities. The exchange between Agathon and Socrates is a touchstone in Western philosophical writing and the subject of intense scholarly discussion. For example, John P. Anton, in an article entitled “The Agathon Interlude,” argues that the Symposium displays Plato’s ­great skills in poetry, politics, 70

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and philosophy, all of which adumbrate “the conciliation of poetry and philosophy,” while concluding, “the latter became the real victor.”3 Philosophy’s victory over poetry in the Symposium is fundamental to the story of my book. In Plato’s own terms, Socrates successfully shows that only philosophy can fulfill h ­ uman life by showing that the path to truth alone satisfies desire—­eros—­which is ontologically fundamental to the ­human. Philosophy’s avatar is, of course, Socrates, whose elentics establish not only the errors of o ­ thers’ opinions but the consequent impossibility that the ways of life associated with t­hose opinions could rise to the heights linked with the phi­los­o­pher’s mode of life. In effect, Socrates’s victory over especially Agathon shows not only the intellectual errors of t­ hose whom he debates but the foolishness of their customs, beliefs, and institutions. No ­matter the energy or function of their practices and beliefs, they give way in the agon, leaving rubble ­behind where ­there used to be proven notions and customs. (An heir to the Socratic tradition might say that thanks to Socrates we see they ­were always already ruins resting on confusion and contradictions.) Inherently, we see the tensions that Socrates represents for Plato: customs and beliefs that proved their dysfunction in recent history and that emerge from failures of reason and misdirected desire should happily give way to a higher mode that clarifies truth and error while leading to (mystically) higher visions. Yet Athens killed Socrates for corrupting the young, that is, for undermining the manifest establishment of misbelief. The result of this ­simple story is that Socrates’s victory and death seal the primacy of philosophy, setting all other modalities of h ­ uman being into secondary and tertiary positions that neither satisfy the ­human anthropology nor produce a successful society. Philosophy surpasses poetry and politics in a revolutionary gesture within thought. I discuss the Symposium’s agon ­because it represents, with the Elohist’s stylistic creation of God and the authority of priests, another domain of authority that claims esoteric knowledge capable of redeeming or fulfilling a world and species other­wise abandoned to finitude, error, and ruin. Taken together, t­hese stories and tropes are old foundations for modern crisis stories and concepts. We can see how the play of such terms as “tragedy” and “the real” or the disdain for a world left to a finite species unguided by a transcendent leads to utopian and allegorical overreach, in terms of which h ­ uman love for the world, for each other, and for the species’ own self-­making dis­appear into melancholy and destruction. 71

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We might best approach some of ­these claims by looking first at typical philosophical discussions of the dialogue. Philosophy’s victory in the Symposium becomes a starting point for philosophical explication that elaborates its importance in Plato’s thinking and its contribution to our wisdom. For example, again, Anton notes that Plato prepared for the Socrates-­ Agathon “encounter” in “Socrates’ exchange with Callicles in the Gorgias.”4 In Plato and the Hero, Angela Hobbs in an entirely dif­fer­ent context and for substantially dif­fer­ent reasons, makes a similar point, that Socrates’s debate with Callicles establishes the basis for philosophy’s priority over politics and art.5 Anton notes that Diskin Clay had privately argued that Socrates’s encounter with Agathon shows Plato’s primary concern with Agathon’s conception of eros rather than with character. Anton responds in terms consistent with Plato’s internal logic that mistaken ideas arise in relation to character. For Plato, Anton argues, Agathon “violates the rule of coherence in conduct and prevents the person from maintaining unity of character.” How do we know this? In the Gorgias, Socrates had argued for the “intimate relation” between person and idea “to meet the demand for coherence of character.”6 Anton slides entirely out of and away from the dramatic agon of the dialogue, forgetting as irrelevant the staged setting and the historical social realities involved. Rather than read the exchange as a strug­gle between poetry and philosophy—­a strug­gle conducted, let us recall, entirely in terms of philosophy’s elentics—­Anton assumes the settled case of Socrates and philosophy’s victory and develops concepts from that starting point. Hobbs makes a dif­fer­ent point similarly. She starts her book Plato and the Hero with reference to the Gorgias, where she finds Plato’s “most impor­ tant question of all: how one should live.”7 When we turn in Chapter 4 to Wallace Stevens’s lecture “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” with its opening allusion to the Phaedrus and Plato’s myth of the chariot, we ­will see an impor­tant connection between the issues I am developing ­here and in the book as a ­whole. Stevens follows Coleridge to call such meta­ phors “Plato’s dear, gorgeous nonsense.”8 The Symposium’s logic disqualifies t­ hese phi­los­op ­ hers’ voices in kind when Agathon admits he agrees with Socratic truth. Hobbs, like Anton, shows the intellectual effect of such victories. Like Anton, Hobbs turns to the Gorgias to set up the fundamental Platonic truth that philosophy supplies greater fulfillment than politics. Albeit that Hobbs notes Plato improves his psy­chol­ogy in The Republic by 72

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locating all desires in the psyche rather than in the body, she leaves untreated the very idea that philosophy needs to establish itself as the object of desire and so must successfully seduce if it is to subsume or displace its competitors. Callicles is a braggart but a man of affairs, crude but largely successful in evading Socrates’s arguments and seductions. Set aside Callicles’s formal concession to Socrates at the end of the dialogue and focus instead on the fundamental fact that Callicles, unlike Agathon and Alcibiades in the Symposium, does not take Socrates as an object of desire. Philosophy fails and so steps back to regroup, to make stronger arguments. While I suggest we read the Symposium as a rhetorical and dramatic contest, an agon in which Socrates’s elentics overmaster especially Agathon and so the position of tragedy in an Athens caught in a disastrous war, Frisbee Sheffield’s extremely useful reading of the dialogue as a dramatic ­whole takes a dif­fer­ent approach. Sheffield brilliantly reads Socrates as the privileged figure in the dialogue, whose philosophical conclusions permeate the entirety of the drama. Each position on eros prior to Socrates’s own takes its place within the evolving demonstration of philosophy’s ability to fulfill by surpassing all pre­ce­dent positions. Yet Sheffield’s conclusion is familiar, even if we accept that Socrates dramatizes the philosophical resolution to “many of the puzzles that emerged from [his pre­de­ces­sors’] speeches.” In a chapter entitled “Shadow Lovers,” Sheffield writes, “In this dialogue Plato not only explains why, but also shows that, it is only in philosophical erόs that one can be truly productive.”9 Claims such as this emerge from and add to a long tradition of extremely valuable explication of the consequences of Plato’s thinking in establishing the primacy of philosophy. Sheffield’s work stresses the importance of understanding the erotic interactions among characters in the dialogue: “It is ­because Apollodorus perceives Socrates as an exponent of the happy life that he is drawn to him and encouraged to try to embody that value in his own life by adopting Socrates’ characteristic philosophical lifestyle. . . . ​­These Socratic intimates also perceive something valuable about Socrates and this basis for their attraction makes them realize something they themselves lack and strive to achieve.”10 A literary critic would remember that this dialogue is a textual creation of an author who makes excellent use of rhe­toric and form to achieve the internal dramatic arrangements of which Sheffield speaks h ­ ere as if they w ­ ere extratextual or natu­ral phenomena. Apollodorus loves Socrates ­because Plato has created him as a character so inclined. To put it differently, ­these 73

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are fictional creations, and the retrospective form of the dialogue—­a settled w ­ hole precisely as Sheffield senses—­offers us m ­ atters already settled. All retrospective forms pre­sent the illusion of completion, which a decent reader always doubts. Sheffield and o ­ thers concede the rhetorical and dramatic authority of this text in a way they would not, for example, that of The Oresteia. Plato, however, made a dangerous ­gamble in the Symposium. He allowed the brilliantly complex Alcibiades a late entry to warn all auditors against Socratic and so philosophical seduction. From Socrates’s position, Alcibiades’s frustrated efforts to seduce Socrates with his physical beauty and sexual energy make Alcibiades an example of inconstant philosophy. Martha Nussbaum offers the exemplary account of this position, in a way that Hobbs relies on. In the revealingly entitled book The Fragility of Goodness, Nussbaum writes this: “Socrates’ pupils, inspired by personal love, tend not to follow his advice. Instead of ascending to an equal regard to all instances of value they, like Alcibiades, remain lovers of the particulars of personal history.”11 Plato gambled that he could introduce Alcibiades’s objections to Socrates’s way of life without damage to the plot outcome that Plato sought. Alcibiades has the markings of a melodramatic villain—­drunk, accompanied by w ­ omen and m ­ usic, excessive, and soon known as a traitor to the state, a man whose personal ambition has no limits. He perfectly fits the line of interpretation that sets the Agathon-­Socrates debate in the context of Callicles and the Gorgias. No character would better illustrate the prob­lems of incoherence, in Platonic terms, than Alcibiades. Yet, in 416 BCE, Alcibiades is not yet the corrupt traitor he becomes. Consider the quite dif­fer­ent figure who appears albeit briefly in The History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides introduces Alcibiades to his history in 420 and notes how his personal vanity and arrogance did not weaken but in fact strengthened his powers of po­liti­cal analy­sis concerning the war with Sparta.12 Prior to the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, for which Alcibiades has partial responsibility, ­these same qualities of character and intelligence let him see off his less-­than-­admirable antagonists who attempt to remove him from power for their own purposes. Thucydides also rec­ords his tactical and rhetorical brilliance in keeping command of Athenian forces. Thucydides’s text supplies historical evidence that in 416, around when Plato sets the Symposium, Alcibiades is not merely the drunken failed initiate he appears to be in Nussbaum and o ­ thers. Truly, he is not a com74

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mitted phi­los­o­pher. He is, like Callicles, a man of affairs whose desires are, among other ­things, personal and bodily and who interprets Socrates’s seduction of ephebes in terms not unlike t­ hose he himself understands. So he cautions against Socrates as a seducer, a warning that Kierkegaard considers. Thucydides’s Aristophanes as historical presence also recalls some of the complications that surround the dialogue but are absent from discussions of primary themes presaged on the victory of philosophy. For example, 416 / 15 sees Athens involved in an attack on Melos at the time when war with Sparta resumes. Thucydides has made the Melian conflict immortal in his book. He carefully introduces the “Melian Dialogue” with a paragraph that briefly situates the siege of Melos in relation to Alcibiades, who not only advocated the resumption of war but also led the Athenians’ major effort in Argos to ally with that city and seize Spartan sympathizers. The Athens of the Melian siege is arrogant, murderous, and realistic in its politics. Aside from showing many of the h ­ uman failures of Athenian po­liti­cal concepts, culture, and practice, the Melian Dialogue dramatized profoundly dif­fer­ent understandings of ­human life and its fulfillment. The key topic in the debate between the besieged Melians and the power­ful Athenians is the value of hope. Daniel Boyarin’s thorough research on the relation between Thucydides and Plato has results that come into play ­here: The elenchus, Socratic dialectic par excellence, is not only an attack on doxa, on that which appears to be true to the Athenian citizenry, the foundation of their ­legal and po­liti­cal decisions, but also an attack on the speech-­institution, the debate, in which doxa is both maintained and modified for the purpose of demo­cratic deliberation. It is thus part of Plato’s general attack on Athenian institutions tout court, homologous with his attack on Athenian eros in the Symposium. Plato’s near-­obsessive disdain for rhe­toric and his near-­obsessive insistence on dialogue as the means of exposure of doxa as false, on this reading, constitute a sustained attack on democracy.13

Boyarin’s conclusions are convincing and valuable. ­There is an impor­tant connection between them and the position that Nussbaum, Hobbs, and ­others take on Alcibiades in the Symposium. Boyarin’s comparative research shows that Plato’s efforts to overthrow the entire constitution of Athenian cultural practice emerged from his antidemo­cratic aspirations. It follows that Plato would exclude as illegitimate Alcibiades’s per­sis­tent and 75

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traditional if transactional relations to persons in their particularity from the new order Plato supports, at the center of which, we see from the Symposium’s drama, is philosophy’s new claim to authority in the state, ideas, and society. In other words, to discredit Alcibiades’s warnings to the other guests at Agathon’s dinner against Socrates’s seductive success is to prevent the critical choice of taking seriously Alcibiades’s reservations from within about the entirety of Socratic aspiration in the banquet’s drama. Consider, for example, Socrates’s decision to engage Agathon the tragedian rather than Aristophanes the comedian. Hobbs’s typical but general argument about the inclusive evolutionary superiority of Socrates’s position to ­those taken by ­others at the banquet would no doubt include Aristophanes. While Hobbs’s closer reading makes Socratic supersession of traditional Athenian ethics and customs voiced by o ­ thers at t­able less of a rupture with them than Nussbaum’s reading leads us to conclude, Hobbs gives no serious attention to the implications of Socrates’s disregard for the comic genius in the room or his presumably inadequate but competing myth of eros. Since phi­los­op ­ hers such as Hobbs, Nussbaum, and Anton explicate this dialogue as a moment within Plato’s general lines of reasoning and development, they omit critical consideration of extraphilosophical or, if one wants to concede a point, prephilosophical orientations. Plato certainly knew Aristophanes’s dramatization of Socrates in The Clouds and would have seen the play ­either as contributing to the climate in which citizens killed Socrates or as emerging from a po­liti­cal and cultural worldview that would not tolerate the disruptive Socrates’s per­sis­tent decreation of Athenian culture and practice as acceptable or desirable. To a critical reader, Alcibiades and Aristophanes, each a figure outside the penumbra of Socratic seduction yet within the text itself, remind the reader that Platonic developments and positions cannot achieve priority u ­ ntil and ­unless a reading of the text shows ­these outsiders to be useless in casting doubt on Socrates’s per­for­mance. Why would Socrates choose the tragedian Agathon rather than the older and more difficult Aristophanes as a direct antagonist? I put the question this way ­because Plato scholars can easily claim that Socrates’s words and actions leave the Aristophanic position in the background by the end ­because, for example, Diotima offers a more persuasive and fulfilling image of h ­ uman desire satisfied along the path of philosophy than does Aristophanes’s madly brilliant myth of broken selves. However, where is the elenchus in this case? How can the satirical 76

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comedian, known for his public mockery of Socrates, a greater challenge than Agathon, a representative of a comic worldview—­how can he be set aside, and how might he not have yielded to the elenchus? Agathon, the young tragic poet, was an easier but more impor­tant target than Aristophanes was. Furthermore, the comic sense of t­ hings, embodied literally in a story making ontological romance of desire, stands as a strong ­counter to the renunciatory position of Socrates and Diotima. Aristophanes plays precisely against the central Platonic point that the ­human’s best fulfillment lies in the love of wisdom rather than the sexual need for ­wholeness and quest for same resulting from some primeval deficit in the ­human. We ­will return to this in a moment. In an equivalent way that closes the link back to Boyarin and Alcibiades, a more critical-­minded reader would recall that Thucydides’s introduction of Alcibiades in the large context of po­liti­cal betrayal and the ­Sicilian disaster introduces the Melian Dialogue with its brutal discussion of hope. For the utopian Plato, hope is an impor­tant category of thought and written form, as any reader of The Republic knows. Moreover, research shows that utopian imaginaries had a basic place in Greek lit­er­a­ture and po­liti­cal aspiration from at least the eighth ­century BCE, when the Homeric texts settled into their codified forms.14 If we grant the idea that Socrates disrupts the established conventions of Athenian concepts, customs, and social practice, then we need to sense the irony that the utopian Plato, envisioning the cosmic order that Diotima voices, embraces the traditional value of hope when Athenian imperial vio­lence denigrates the rationale for hope as a conceptual basis for po­liti­cal action. In the Melian Dialogue, of course, the Melians defend hope as a motive within a po­liti­cal situation. They appear admirable in their strug­gle, and they win a point: hope gives them extra months of life and freedom before Athenian brutality destroys them and makes mockery of hope as the basis for a sustainable politics. It seems, then, that Plato’s embrace of utopian thinking and the hope or desire that ontologically undergirds it would indeed place him against the disastrous and tyrannical ruling ethos of warlike, imperial, and defeated Athens. Yet Thucydides himself had already written this strug­gle over hope and po­liti­cal vio­lence into the historical, practical politics of Athens and the highest geopo­liti­cal questions about the possession and dispossession of power. Furthermore, Thucydides had elided the question with Alcibiades himself, in terms far from utopian or mythic. To see Plato, then, 77

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as decreating Athenian customs and concepts is to see him also standing against such complex and competitive thinkers and writers as Thucydides for whom myth and hope, trust in the evolutionary work of reason ­toward the unities, provides no assurance of life’s sustainability on Earth in real lived po­liti­cal and cultural workings made by h ­ umans. Callicles is a tough nut for Socrates and a prod to l­ater Platonic development. Thucydides is far more than that, as would Aristophanes be. This dialogue treats Socrates as an agonistic figure who pursues authority, even if as a decreation of failed Athenian institutions. In a text that sets competition as the issue and authority as the prize, Socrates’s bare indirect engagement with the satirical and experienced comedic playwright arouses a reader’s suspicions. I take this seriously for reasons beyond the dialogue itself. Two ele­ments of Socrates’s success m ­ atter to my book: First, he achieves authority through his access to esoteric knowledge, available to ­others only through him as the sole repre­sen­ta­tion of the desired outcome. Second, in the act of overcoming inherited traditions and practices, he overthrows ele­ments of life without which culture is much poorer. The Melian Dialogue is far from an achievement to be decreated, as is in general the vast Thucydidean invention of careful investigation into ­humans as historical actors making worlds and practices complexly and repeatedly. In addition, Thucydides is far greater than Alcibiades is, but in Thucydides’s portrayal of the Athenian traitor, he invests intellectual energy in the particularity of the specific embodied person. Without this complex figure of Alcibiades, exactly con­temporary with the date of the Symposium, intellectual life would be impoverished by a discipline that regulates the mind’s work to the supposedly highest aims of reason moving t­oward truth. The ideal figuration of a ­later psy­chol­ogy that gives us the beautiful nonsense of the Phaedrus stands for the aim to rein in the complex play of desire ontologized dualistically within the psyche. Plato might be right or wrong. In a profound way, this does not m ­ atter. Rather, as we see in the Symposium, the mode of intellectual aspiration to dominant authority achieved by turning intelligence to tactics of victory over competing operations of mind and poiesis—­that pattern is a danger to the ­human as such. In The H ­ uman Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that the “phi­los­op ­ hers discovered . . . ​that the po­liti­cal realm did not as a ­matter of course provide for all of man’s higher activities.”15 The Socratic tradition, according to Arendt, freed the mind from its ties to one mode of activity, to one 78

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mea­sure of h ­ uman accomplishment—­namely, regulation of the polis. While this Socratic discovery is liberating and fulfilling, Arendt notes that at the very moment of this discovery, philosophy created a hierarchical binary between the contemplative and active life. Augustine and other Christians reinforced this order so that the active life, abased, settled into “its derivative, secondary position” (16). Epistemologically, this hierarchy differentiated “contemplation (theōria) as a ­human faculty, distinctly dif­fer­ent from thought and reasoning” (16). Arendt notices that traditional thought has accepted and repeated this binary—it “ruled metaphysical and po­liti­cal thought throughout our tradition” ­until the age of Marx and Nietz­sche (16). Modernity reversed the hierarchy but preserved the binary. Arendt aimed to dissolve the epistemological and anthropological rigidities of the binary, without concern to the state of its hierarchy. I borrow a related ele­ment of Arendt’s thinking on this point to reinforce my sense of the Symposium as a beginning text in the authoritarian interpretive politics of the Socratic tradition. Arendt shows that the long traditional dominance of the contemplative turn did not originate in Chris­tian­ity. “We find it in Plato’s po­liti­cal philosophy, where the w ­ hole utopian reor­ga­ni­za­tion of polis life is not only directed by the superior insight of the phi­los­op ­ her but has no aim other than to make pos­si­ble the phi­los­op ­ her’s way of life” (14). The Socratics wanted freedom from need but then also “freedom and surcease from po­liti­cal activity (skholē)” (14). The ­Human Condition’s intellectual proj­ect begins from the conclusion to Arendt’s introductory identification of this issue. Arendt worries that the prob­ lem of domination percolating through the intellectual life embodied in this hierarchy, no ­matter which ele­ment—­active or contemplative; modern or traditional—­has the upper hand. In substance, Arendt aims to essay making the “active life” a more fluid, creative, and freer concept, enabling a clearer, more precise view of the active life. In form, Arendt warns that the hierarchy “presupposes that the concern under­lying all [the mind’s] activities” are the same and that “the same central ­human preoccupation must prevail in all activities of men,” ­whether active or contemplative, “since without one comprehensive princi­ple no order could be established” (17). Arendt has sensed the same intellectual schema at work in the grandest philosophical traditions that I have tried to show in somewhat more detail in critical thinking during the past few de­cades, back through certain of its genealogies. The schema that Arendt describes in this binary of active and contemplative 79

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is in form more impor­tant than the dominance of e­ ither ele­ment in the binary in po­liti­cal terms. The binary itself and the under­lying intellectual effort on ­either side to reduce all h ­ uman capacity to one “comprehensive princi­ple” to achieve order are a g­ reat ­human failure and risk, authorizing as they do a level of po­liti­cal domination predicated on a fundamental failure of Western thought from at least Plato. More specifically, and more immediately relevant to my purposes in this book, Arendt notes that the binary controlling metaphysical and po­liti­cal thought since Socrates reflects “the time honored resentment of the phi­los­op ­ her against the h ­ uman condition of having a body” (16n15). Arendt links this resentment to the Socratic tradition’s desire to surpass politics as a fulfilling form of life. From the point of view of literary study, I am interested in two specific consequences of this resentment: a turn against poiesis and the misogynistic figures of this turn. When the intellect seeks “order” via the dominance of the schematic binary active / contemplative, it always carries with it the philosophical desire to be f­ree of finitude, of the body, of its movements and creations. Since finitude is necessity, the Socratic tradition also makes the body abject and its historical world of works ruination. Arendt did not call herself a po­liti­cal phi­los­o­pher for t­hese reasons: “The phi­los­o­phers since Plato added to the resentment of being forced by bodily wants the resentment of movements of any kind. It is ­because the phi­los­o­pher lives in complete quiet that it is only his body, which, according to Plato, inhabits the city. ­Here also lies the origin of the early reproach of busybodiness (polypragmosynē) leveled against ­those who spent their lives in politics” (16). Unlike Nussbaum, for example, who sees Alcibiades from the perspective of a conquering Socratic narrative, Arendt helps support a reading of Alcibiades as a legitimate critic of Socrates’s movement of desire along the freely chosen but highly seductive path of pursuing truth and beauty away from the body and especially away from reproduction. In Arendt’s thinking, Diotima’s fantasy of h ­ uman satisfaction in the apperception “of that pure appearance the Greeks called beauty” is an antipolitics designed as an active politics that plays on the fear of death to make all abject and itself the only promised fulfillment (16n15). In such beauty, ­there is utopian eschatology and promise masked as reasoned hope. Arendt rightly insists that an inversion of the contemplative / active binary does not mitigate t­hese pro­cesses. The paradigm schematizes and directs resentment t­oward a utopian order along the same lines of desire 80

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esoteric knowledge had promised to a few. Akin to pure beauty as the highest goal of desire, as the outcome that transforms desire away from the body, sits the eschatological desire for eternity. This last, for Arendt, is what the Socratic tradition discovers as a new mode of ­human desire, a guide for life, and a pre-­Christian assurance of transcendent possibilities for order and freedom more than fearful ­human finitude and natu­ral necessity. Once more, Arendt draws far enough back from the Socratic tradition she so admires—­Socrates was the first public intellectual—to see the world-­historic po­liti­cal consequences of a humanly motivated and so finite gesture against politics and so finitude itself. The Socratic tradition defines politics as the domain of movement, body, finitude, and mortality. In that secular domain, immortality appears as compensation achieved through ­human action mea­sured in terms of cultural norms as a fulfillment to life. We think of the Homeric heroes’ pursuit of fame. We also think of Achilles’s debunking of fame in Hades when he meets Odysseus, himself destined for immortality. Achilles’s debunking of fame is not evidence against Arendtian readings. On the contrary, Achilles recognizes that fame is no compensation for death from the point of view of the dead—­dead, he prefers even abject life. Alive, however, he strives for immortality. This complex of values and emotions does not ground a Platonic claim that immortality is a false compensation for finitude or a deceitful promise of fulfillment. On the contrary, Homer puts all ­these issues on display to the culture that absorbs the codified poems and educates in their light, up to and including Sophocles in his recasting of Homeric materials. Against Homeric education in ­these issues dramatized in secular terms, Plato’s advocate, Diotima, mythologizes philosophical ladders to utopian satisfaction assured for the initiates who sublimate desire to the fantastic eschaton of ideas. Coleridge calls all this Plato’s nonsense. Arendt puts it this way: “However, when the phi­los­op ­ hers discovered— and it is probable though unprovable, that this discovery was made by Socrates himself—­that the po­liti­cal realm did not as a m ­ atter of course provide for all of man’s higher activities, they assumed at once, not that they had found something dif­fer­ent in addition to what was already known, but that they had found a higher princi­ple to replace the princi­ple that ruled the polis” (18). Academic philosophical commentary on the Symposium seems to confirm Arendt’s reading, although one can imagine qualifying objections such as the notion that moving along the pathway laid out by 81

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Diotima to the highest knowledge and good preserves what had come before. A ­simple reading of Diotima’s account of a phi­los­o­pher’s life does clearly show a movement from the particulars of bodily life through developing skills of reflection to integrate character to a mythic leap that is hard even for Socrates. Alcibiades w ­ ill never complete the path, nor would Thucydides. We might read the g­ reat historian as a devotee of immortality, an heir of Homeric fame. In book 1 of The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides justifies his effort and his ambition by saying this: “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.”16 This is nothing more or less than testimony to the research results and art of his work, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, his strong developed intellectual judgment that he had come close enough to permanent prob­lems of ­human life that his book could and would continue to do work across socie­ties and eras. Per­sis­ tence in historical life is one of the imaginative acts that created the species as h ­ uman—­this is the understanding we would give immortality in Thucydides’s sense. Arendt justifies the desire to get a distanced look at the dialogue, but her reading depends on a dramatic sense of concepts’ invention, iteration, and function in history. For a literary critic, the dramatic sense in turn comes from and depends on reading immanently to track the agonistics in the texts that form the tradition that worries her. For example, although Arendt does not mention it as far as I can tell, Agathon’s concessions to Socrates require close reading as dramatic conflict to understand the mediated po­liti­cal and historical relations at stake, a few of which I mentioned ­earlier. The Socratic assault on the tragic poet, a longtime cultivating figure in Athenian culture, not only sets the phi­los­o­pher in the educator’s place but also displaces poetry into the domain of the body and movement—­for what is poetic tragedy but movement, the evocation of pity and fear, as Aristotle tells us? What e­ lse is poetry except the pure Apollonian lyr­ics that The Republic would allow, but motion in and as work, as creativity along the life patterns of living beings? Virgil, as we ­will see, makes clear that poiesis is cultivation and, that as anagogy, at the highest level, makes nature the content of h ­ uman dreams. Po­liti­cally, that means not only empire, as in The Aeneid, but cultivation in the most fundamental anthropological sense, as in Virgil’s e­ arlier poems and the Lucretian tradition to which it belongs, in part. For Virgil, one figure of cultivation as h ­ uman pro­cess is Orpheus himself. 82

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A closer look at the Symposium’s language also makes clear the specifics of misogyny, which, not surprisingly, Diotima relies on to rank the steps ­toward truth and beauty. Diotima uses pregnancy as a meta­phor to grade the soul’s stages of development along the path of philosophy to eternity. The denigration of w ­ omen, of w ­ omen’s bodies, and of w ­ omen’s essential place in the species’ sexualized reproduction is the essential marker of the impoverishing masculinist ­will to ruin, melancholy, and domination that defines this tradition from Plato to the crisis critics of the twentieth ­century—­and their academic reiterations: “ ‘Men who are pregnant in body,’ she said, ‘are drawn more ­towards ­women; they express their love in trying to obtain for themselves immortality and remembrance and what they take to be happiness forever by producing ­children. Men who are pregnant in mind—­there are some,’ she said, ‘who are even more pregnant in their mind than in their bodies, and are pregnant with what it is suitable for a mind to bear and bring to birth. So what is suitable?’ ” (46). Diotima moves through the ranks of achievement. Poets bring forth wisdom and virtues; artisans innovate. Politics is “the most impor­tant and finest type of wisdom” “brought forth” by men pregnant in mind. A youth who has had no partner but had had “the desire to give birth and reproduce” would see beauty “in which to reproduce,” and b ­ ecause “he’s pregnant,” he seeks beautiful bodies and hopefully “a mind that is beautiful, noble, and naturally gifted” (47). Rising along the path of beauty through contemplation to eternity: “‘Anyone who has been educated this far in the ways of love, viewing beautiful ­things in the right order and way, ­will now reach the goal of love’s ways. He ­will suddenly catch sight of something amazingly beautiful in its nature; this, Socrates, is the ultimate objective of all the previous efforts’” (48). The “ultimate objective” of all previous education is the realization that beauty is not to be found “ ‘in a living creature’” but “‘absolute, pure, unmixed, not cluttered up with ­human flesh and colours and a ­great mass of mortal rubbish’” (48). This is good evidence for Arendt’s claim that philosophy resents the body itself. For example, it helps us understand why Julia Kristeva aligns the abject with ­women’s bodies or the idea of w ­ oman itself. In the Symposium, all that is not philosophy or not committed to philosophy as a regime for pure beauty is abject rubbish, no ­matter the nobility of its goals or achievements. Men pregnant with ideas—­Solon and Lycurgus or Callicles and Alcibiades—­ might earn monuments that mere f­athers w ­ ill not, but even they are tinged 83

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with the feminine and the abject finitude that philosophy alone decides and avoids. Having seduced lovers to Diotima’s mode of love, Socrates subsumes all ­human effort to desire marked by hope and utopian ambition, which, as such, has only one way forward. In fact, about the dialogue’s drama, that one way forward requires frustrated male physical arousal. Alcibiades criticizes Socrates for being a tease, a seducer who never provides physical satisfaction or sexual release. Agathon asks in openly erotic terms for Socrates to sit by him at dinner. Socrates agrees but not before making the idea of touch and bodily proximity a lesson on love and education. Sexual allure demands its recognition as philosophical allure, as elite leadership and training translated into education.17 Socrates’s version of homosocial figuration has no place for sex and only for one gender, and that marked as male via its belittlement of w ­ omen and pregnancy. The Nussbaum / Hobbs positions, which reproduce Diotima’s narrative, see ­these moves as superseding the conventions of culture and politics in a new pedagogy. The binary Arendt describes means that Diotima, aspiring for leadership, considers neither that she is confusing her own concept with the real nor that her concept, as an adaptation to that real, might have consequences she apparently does not intend. To justify her leading position, Diotima must conceive the historical ­human and the natu­ral pro­cesses of life as abject. While she offers her own concept as an adaptive escape from that abject condition, she gives no thought to how her notions once established would make the world abject by devaluing it, its pro­ cesses, and its achievements—­all of which are mere rubbish. Diotima’s rubbish anticipates the moderns’ ruination, and we would be foolish to ignore that. The Socratic concepts might be a complex adaptation to the crisis of Sparta’s victory, the weaknesses of democracy, and the killing of Socrates himself, but as far as they are effective, they damage the lives and diminish the achievements of imagination and of love, which are not theirs. Consider, for example, the structural and figural misogyny of Diotima’s visionary offer and, if necessary, recall the dramatic pre­sen­ta­tion of its effects on t­hose made abject. We appeal to a tragedy to recover some of what is lost. We can mea­sure the costs sustained by Diotima’s concepts if we set her against the pre-­Homeric hero Jason, as Euripides creates him. The comparison helps us see, ironically, that Diotima’s feminization of the abject, of the bodily, is as conventional and conformist as any pattern Socrates and 84

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philosophy might hope to disrupt. To put it another way, if the Socratic tradition, as Arendt calls it, is adaptive in its resentments, then consider what it preserves to protect itself with its new conceptual adaptations. ­Diotima’s myth not only recharacterizes the homoeroticism of o ­ thers’ speeches in the dialogue but also stays firmly within the general misogyny of a broader Athenian culture. Euripides’s Medea is a document of such misogyny. In the play, Jason’s explosive assault on his ­children’s ­mother exposes an ugly part of the Socratic play on pregnancy and the feminization of the abject: If only ­children could be got some other way, Without the female sex! If ­women ­didn’t exist, ­Human life would be rid of all its miseries.18

­ hese are Jason’s most brutal remarks, and they suggest the cultural symT bolic value preserved by Diotima’s diegesis. Her story starts from the mere biological necessity of w ­ omen who interest men only at the lowest level of development, for as Jason does in part, they deceive themselves in seeking immortality through reproduction. This narrative always masculinizes pregnancy, giving it a place only within a male’s tale. Men whose life practices and desires fall within the masculinized account of pregnancy as metonymy are feminized. The masculine lives only in the escape from pregnancy, biology, and history that a desire redirected ­toward eternity misrepresents as somehow outside gender too. Jason is a man of politics and business. He is not Solon and closer to Callicles and Alcibiades but, nonetheless, recognizably “pregnant with ideas”: to make himself immortal through f­amily that has a place in the polis. Medea, the non-­Greek ­woman from an eastern mythological past, an “Oriental,” has no place in a polis. In her most abject position, he assaults her before she, of course, exposes his hy­poc­risy and hate. Euripides does a remarkable job of decreating the very misogyny we find in Diotima’s play with pregnancy. Jason accuses Medea of “ungoverned rage,” of being “a fool” for not “quietly accept[ing] the decisions / Of ­those in power” (30). By contrast, his actions w ­ ere “wise” “and directed t­ owards / [Her] interests and [his] ­children’s.” Jason tells Medea, “I admit, you have intelligence. . . . ​ / your gifts are widely recognized, / You are famous” (33). Her flaws, though, are egregious, and despite or b ­ ecause of her magical intellect, 85

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­ ill, and knowledge, she is unacceptable in a civilized Greek world: she sufw fers from “helpless passion,” and she comes from “a barbarous land” (33). In her descent, she is not worthy of Jason or his sons—­nor any place in a Greek city where, as a barbarian, she cannot be at home, entitled to the security offered Greek-­born ­women in city-­states. I introduce Medea ­because Euripides’s characterization and situation of this pre-­Homeric figure bring together and dramatize the entangled cultural values philosophy inherits and iterates in such texts as Diotima’s remarks to Socrates. In Medea (431 BCE), Euripides maps out the fear and threats abiding in Athenian culture twenty years before its defeat by Sparta. Medea symbolizes the chthonic past not left ­behind by Athens’s modernity. She is an heir of magic, the niece of Circe, who turns men into swine. She comes from the East, which Athenian writing often uses to name a barbaric, pre-­ Olympian past left b ­ ehind by cultural, po­liti­cal, and technological advances. Orientalist figures are gendered female and, like Aeschylus’s Furies, appear from ancient under­ground worlds to sustain premodern forms of life and value, often requiring the h ­ umans’ contract with the Olympian gods. In the play, Jason and other regal males see her admitted intelligence as a threat to their stable po­liti­cal and domestic plans. Her power is to disrupt entirely the established logics, sometimes by fulfilling their hypocritical premises. If, for example, her ­children are Jason’s—as the law claims, he alone has “bred them” (61)—­then her infanticide fulfills the disowning of her c­ hildren that Jason and the law had begun. If Aeschylus helps launch Athenian tragedy with The Oresteia, a trilogy that establishes the virtue of law in judgment and persuasion in politics, then how ironic that the sun god saves Medea and transports her to a kingly Athens for refuge. Closing the play, the chorus of w ­ omen chants, “The ­things we thought would happen do not happen; / The unexpected God makes pos­si­ble” (61). Jason’s words subsume all of Medea’s dangerous qualities into her being a w ­ oman, whose sole value lies in the inescapable necessity of supplying sexual plea­sure and ­children—­and so immortality and fame. Euripides lets us see what Jason ignores, the enormous cultural freight placed on w ­ omen by a regime frightened by the return of the repressed, by biological necessity, and the finitude that threatens politics’ reason for order and self-­interest. Medea lets us put Jason and Diotima together in a way that does not set out from the idea that philosophy, as Diotima pre­sents it, is always the best ending to such a gendered story of masculinist desire for fulfillment in 86

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eternity. Jason and Diotima similarly make abjection universal and female. They make it universal differently, one from the contemplative side of Arendt’s binary and the other from its active or po­liti­cal side. Regarding ­women, pregnancy, and the f­uture, the result is the same—­these are figurations of abjection rooted in primitivism, Orientalism, and fear of the repressed. In each case, it embodies a desire for dominance developed along rigorous intellectual lines. Of course, Jason’s barbarism, so horrendously punished by Medea and Euripides, is quite dif­fer­ent from the alluring intellect of Socratic wisdom and aspiration. The phi­los­o­pher, Diotima tells us, is always in need, like desire, always poor, wanting and so aspiring to what cannot be. If inhabited by a daemon, the phi­los­op ­ her is a ­middle figure—­without the perfection of wisdom but at best its lover and as such the beloved of all who aspire and hope to know. In Euripides’s Medea, by contrast, Jason’s aspiration is materialistic, narcissistic, and yet an outgrowth of normal and traditional Athenian aspirations to the city, to the community and leadership of the polis. Jason is not too far from the Aeneas who feels Carthage’s attraction as a perfect city just on the other side of the hilly prospect from which he first sees it emerging from the waste. When the imperial poet calls Aeneas to his historical senses and obligations, to his urban and dynastic responsibilities, like Jason he turns from one ­woman who sacrificed all for him—­who also dies—to another who ­will give him new sons and a new country. Jason and Aeneas ­mistake the object of their ambition for the good, and each destroys a loving ­woman for that good. One claims the offspring of that relationship, while the other escapes, ­free of c­ hildren, leaving Dido with the thought that if only she had been pregnant, she might have been able to keep him. That Ovid in The Herodias imagines precisely a pregnant and suicidal Dido lets us see how that satirical reader of Greek deeply appreciated and precisely articulated the dangers to ­women, to physical love, and to reproduction inherent in narratives that set them all aside as minor values, thereby also sacrificing all forms of creativity save ­those of empire and philosophy. Socrates had claimed that love (eros) is the one ­thing he understands—­a pun played also in the Cratylus around the etymological links between eros and questioning, that is, ta erôticka. When the vulgarly intelligent and tactically threatening Alcibiades charges Socrates with teasing the boys to become the object of desire, he accuses Socrates of violating civic and 87

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po­liti­cal norms of educational function in its most erotic resources. We might read Alcibiades and Socrates back and forth against the pair of Medea and Jason, with each sharing a characteristic function with one or another but shifting according to situation and point of view. Alcibiades insists that Socrates betrays the erotic expectations in his simulation of pederasty ­because Socrates refuses bodily love, even during the intimacy of touch in naked wrestling. To be pregnant in mind, as Diotima puts it, makes abject all physical love, gendering all bodily love—­not only normative heterosexual practices aimed at plea­sure or reproduction—as feminine and all its male prac­ti­tion­ers as abject as secondary females. In a horrible irony, Diotima and Socrates’s insistence on mind, on the desire of certain men to unburden themselves of their conceptual pregnancies, their ideational fixes, fulfills Jason’s crude desire to eliminate ­women from humanity by eliminating sexuality and the erotics of physical love from the domain of the male. ­Women and men who love ­women and, indeed, men and boys who love each other in the practices of pederasty are all abject even if and except as they are on the way up to eternity. They stay at best several hard steps away from fulfilling what Diotima says and Socrates repeats is the highest ambition of desire—­the supersession of the bodily, of its secular and worldly inscriptions, of its pleasures and its productive as well as reproductive abilities. Proper men desire properly. The excursion into Socrates both suggests the long history of several themes that preoccupy this book and leads the way to some modern repetitions of ­these old motives. In this iteration, we find good evidence that Arendt justifiably names long-­lasting binary concepts that enable and constrain a g­ reat deal of thinking across time and places in the West. In addition, as I ­will show in discussing Adorno writing on the essay form, certain long-­lasting conceptual structures existing as modes of ­human adaptation to circumstance thrive in institutions like the acad­emy that prolong and defend the schema, to use Adorno’s word, that censors and exiles movements of thought associated with the essay and the poem. Not surprisingly, the schema genders its enemies feminine and resists the disruptive fluidity of imagination that might supply substantial alternatives for ­human adaptation to and modification of its circumstances. Perhaps surprisingly, but importantly, I think, Walter Benjamin—­whom I consider the leading critical theorist of Western culture in the mid-­twentieth ­century—­reiterates the schema, the binary, albeit in brilliant colors and ideas. 88

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If proper men must desire properly, as Diotima makes clear, then for men who desire poiesis, it cannot be as w ­ omen. In Benjamin’s 1929 essay “Surrealism,” his citation of Auerbach on the dolce stil novo opens up a path worth exploring if we intend to understand how concepts and modes of thought essential to tradition weigh on the most imaginative minds, especially in times of crisis. For the moment, Benjamin’s reasons for replaying a version of this Socratic myth ­matter less than the fact that he does and the consequences of so ­doing. For the esoteric Diotima, pregnancy m ­ atters least, while for Benjamin, citing the long history of such t­hings, “The lady, in esoteric love, m ­ atters least.” He tells us at once, “So, too, for Breton.” He draws this conclusion by citing Erich Auerbach, who helps recall the long-­standing tradition that Benjamin joins. He quotes Auerbach’s 1929 book on Dante: “All the poets of the ‘new style’ . . . ​possess a mystical beloved; they all have approximately the same very curious experience of love. To them all, Amor bestows or withholds gifts that resemble an illumination more than sensual plea­sure; all are subject to a kind of secret bond that determines their inner and perhaps their outer lives.”19 Benjamin allegorizes Breton’s relation to Nadja on this model: he moves from sensual plea­sure to illumination in a secret bond that, if po­liti­cal, is mystical in its displacement of eros from the body and plea­sure to “esoteric love,” the final aim of which is to win desire’s replaced allegiance to revolution and po­liti­cal leadership. This careful set of critical moves around philosophy, poetry, and philological criticism recall the much-­less-­subtle Lukáscian articulation of a similar plan in the “secular messianism” of History and Class Consciousness, in which Lukács rationalized the scientific leadership of history by the intellectuals of the Communist Party.20 The image of sensual renunciation for higher good in Plato’s text foreshadows the sensual asceticism required to embrace the po­liti­cal good that also promises happiness, if more collectively and materially. Etiologically, the movement is the same. The content is not what ­matters ­here but the filiation of tropes and their staying power within the philosophical modalities of intellectual seduction, in Diotima’s words, the genealogy of figures and figuration. Diotima tells Socrates that love has rites, and they have a purpose: “to reach the final vision of the mysteries” (Symposium, 47). Diotima teaches Socrates the only way to achieve this vision, always starting out “by being drawn ­towards beautiful bodies” (47–48), themselves a step to seeing the beauty of all beautiful bodies, the pettiness of 89

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attraction to one, and then the superiority of a beautiful mind to beautiful bodies. Even a man as ugly as Socrates was, but beautiful in mind and filled with discourses to attract and guide the young, should and could guide the young man to see beauty in “the forms of knowledge.” This would engender an educated desire that allows the initiate to produce “many beautiful and magnificent discourses and ideas” and so prepare himself for the final visionary moment when “he catches sight of one special type of knowledge” (48)—­the one immutable beauty itself. Diotima and Socrates, her maieutic pupil, cathect on the way the “staircase” that rightly traveled leads to the perfect congruence of discipline with goal: “From forms of learning, he should end up at that form of learning which is nothing other than that beauty itself, so that he can complete the pro­cess of learning what beauty ­really is” (49). Literary scholars would recognize Plato’s narrative pattern as an old one common to classical Western autobiography and the nineteenth-­century novel, from Augustine’s Confessions to Dickens’s ­Great Expectations. The compound figures of Diotima and Socrates pre­sent themselves to the symposium, to Alcibiades the seducer, and to Plato’s readers as the guardians of the way and as the embodiment of its success. Poets are not the proper teachers and certainly not the proper lovers. Poets fall short b ­ ecause they do not know how to begin and b ­ ecause no m ­ atter how many words they produce, t­ hose words are not discourses or ideas. I take very seriously Frank Kermode’s comment from the 1980s that academic critics find philosophy easier and more at hand than poetry, which marks not only the acad­emy’s growing disinterest in lit­er­at­ ure but also the fact that the tradition enables the move away from poetry to the authority of philosophical style and diegeses.21 Phi­los­o­phers become the object of pedagogic desire, and for them desire becomes the final productive vision in which transformed they join eternity, leaving ­behind not only finitude but also the Olympian aspiration to immortality. More to the point, however, the phi­los­op ­ her properly trained in love not only sees beauty with the mind but shares “its com­pany” (Symposium, 50) and so completes the reproductive urge of all ­human desire and can “give birth not just to images of virtue . . . ​but to true virtue” (50). Keeping com­pany with beauty itself in mind and reason, giving birth to virtue, must also “bring it up” in the rigorous practices of life. Philosophy maieutically seduces ­others from their own loves to commune with beauty 90

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in mind and to join the cohort of phi­los­o­phers, a “sect” dif­fer­ent in kind but derived genealogically from the likes of Pythagoras and o ­ thers but persisting through the Socratic tradition to Benjamin. Diotima uses erotic language to make attractive the desensualization of desire. Her remarks are an anticipatory gloss on Benjamin’s apothegm, “The lady, in esoteric love, ­matters least” (“Surrealism,” 210). Joseph A. Mazzeo suggests in his study of Plato and Dante that parousiacal visions of the godhead such as Dante’s at the summit of the Paradiso share a common ritualistic source and pattern with Platonic ascetic aspirations to become intimate with the eternal unity of beauty.22 Dante, of course, wrote poetry guided by such a visionary goal, but as a vernacular love poet, he inscribed the full historical existence of carefully differentiated h ­ uman characters and circumstances into the passageways of his texts.23 As we have seen, by contrast, Diotima’s wisdom derogates the body, already abject, that is, far from the plenum of divinity and beauty. The body is the insufficient place for the mind and soul to dwell. Diotima represents the abject body as “low and small-­minded slavery” (Symposium, 48). Therefore, when two ­people meet and fall in love, the meaning and fulfillment of their love lies neither in their life nor in their offspring—in a way, Simberg visualizes ­Diotima’s diegesis—­but only in the gnostic illumination, in the light from the end of the esoteric tunnel. Diotima admits, like Jason, that reproduction is necessary for h ­ uman survival, but she reads the relations among lovers as a sign of the finite ­human’s mistaken and ignorant aspiration to immortality. In other words, Diotima allegorizes the love of the body retrospectively and erases the texture and tentative accomplishments of love. ­Human love and entangled bodies have no value except as steps on an allegorical ladder that subsumes all life to philosophy’s finality. B ­ ecause ­human love rather than the retrospective concept “love” has no status ­until transformed by the work of the concept, ­human life and experience in general exist, at best, as husks dropped ­behind as the psyche moves to its fulfillment with eternity. In this esoteric fantasy, so well set up as “philosophy” by its tradition and our acad­emy, actually existing biological life is always already only ruination, valued if at all only as it is left ­behind. Once we enter within philosophy, the goal is always eternal—­truth, beauty, and the good. The motive, of course, is to establish philosophy as frame for ­human intellectual work, as the style in which mind works, thereby not only preempting other mechanisms of mind but also displacing 91

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all other ­human actions for making without the concept mind. The ­human is ontologically motivated by fear of death and oblivion to seek fulfillment in order and the eternal, in transcendence represented and perhaps achieved varying forms. Consider the world against which the Socratic turns. Achilles fights and dies hoping to live on in fame forever. The lesson in the Odyssey might be that life, the biological fact itself, is the essential value revealed when aspiration to immortality fails. At least this seems to be the wisdom Achilles offers Odysseus, whose games of love with Penelope represent the entangled complexities of lived beauty, love, sex, and ­family—­all within the long meditations in that poem about home, politics, voyage, and death. The entire range of lived h ­ uman possibility offers itself through the poetic texture of Homer’s lines, styles, and inheritances transformed. Achilles’s immortal ghost seems closer in its spectral thinness to Diotima’s eternity than to the fulfillment promised by the exclusive authority of philosophy over life made ruins. Diotima and Socrates draw a dif­fer­ent lesson than Odysseus and that Homer offers: “ ‘Do you think,’ she said . . . ​‘that Achilles would have added his death to that of Patroclus . . . ​if [he] had not thought that the memory of [his] courage . . . ​would last forever?’ ” (Symposium, 46). In other words, Achilles’s love for Patroclus did not motivate his attacks on Hector; rather, fearful of death, he sacrificed his own life for the barren terrain of immortality. In a good academic classroom, teachers would object that Diotima takes her scene out of context and forgets the lesson drawn by its hero, Odysseus, who enters b ­ attle for the love of a ­woman, whose pregnancy gave them their son, Telemachus. Homer offers the best evidence for what ­humans feel when finitude and mortality press the hardest on feelings and consciousness. H ­ ere is Achilles worried about Patroclus: Dear gods, ­don’t bring to pass the grief that haunts my heart— The prophecy that ­mother revealed to me one time . . . She said the best of the Myrmidons—­while I lived— Would fall at Trojan hands and leave the light of day. And now he’s dead, I know it.24

Of course, Homer registers the fear of death but as the cost of fate beyond ­human control. Diotima promises a discipline to redirect the motives and desires under­lying fear and poetic efforts to remake them, but her solution starts from the presupposition that in themselves such experiences have no 92

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value ­unless they move the ­human ­toward the philosophical path. She must impugn from the start the worth of even the most complex h ­ uman be­hav­ior, emotions, exchanges, rituals, and arts. In effect, Diotima offers a single ruling narrative to displace all other narratives and works of ­human mortality and finitude. With philosophy, history ends as ­humans now have satisfactions on offer. Philosophy’s seductions would be authoritative enough to mask while displacing the motivating force of the aboriginal story of finitude and death, which itself makes all mortality abject. Homer has no such thin presupposition, and the extraordinary tragic richness of Achilles’s pathos in lines of unequaled poetic beauty put the lie to Diotima’s insistence that fear of death—­which is the making of h ­ uman life abject—­must welcome displacement in the one promised form of fulfillment, the one redemptive narrative that alone overwhelms finitude. Socrates and Diotima imagine no way in which ­human love and creativity, imaged as ­women and poetry, might satisfy or indeed be the ­human. For them, reproduction, the creation of cities, the writing of poetry, and exercises of love—­none of ­these have value in the face of their postulated fear of death except as steps on the staircase that offers pos­si­ble immortality and seductively gives the phi­los­o­pher authority as beloved and as sole ethical ideal. Even worse, to the sensitive and educated soul, they promote (learned) dissatisfaction with all that ­humans create in step with or over against mortality. Homer creates differently: A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles. Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth, He poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face And black ashes settled onto his fresh clean war-­shirt. Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust, Achilles lay ­there fallen . . . Tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ​he wept his proud heart out— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Achilles suddenly loosed a terrible, wrenching cry And his noble ­mother heard him, seated near her ­father, The Old Man of the Sea in the salt green depths, And she cried out in turn.25 93

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Thetis’s explosive song of mourning, love, and frustration—­“nothing I can do can help him”—­makes a very high bar indeed for Diotima’s esoteric partners to surpass in their proj­ect of “bringing up a child” that springs from a joint proj­ect of ethical formation ­toward eternity.26 If “love is the desire to have the good forever,” as Diotima says (Symposium, 49), then Thetis’s love for Achilles must be flawed in its tragic pathos ­because no magic can save her “flawless, mighty son,” not even its transformation into an art that endures, that effects emotions, forms natures by experience of word and song.27 If life itself is abject as ­women and poetry are abject, then a fleshly ­mother’s mourning is also abject. When an aesthetic masterpiece creates or gives life, then all that art too is also abject, in comparison to and in the eyes of philosophy. Socrates, speaking for and embodying philosophy as educational ideal, understands himself as offering the best way to discipline desire, to place the body, and to guard against the seductions of poetic voice—­which crucially, in this instance, shows how the lady can ­matter least only when love is esoteric. In fact, Homer “writes” or, better, “sings”; he makes something of an erotic union—­for even Socrates thinks poetry is erotic—­the value of which is not a step on the staircase to visionary perfection. The Socratic tradition conceives of aesthetic arousal achieved by tentative form and textured stylistic effect as always failed and dangerous. Aiming to supersede the polis and action as frames of value, the Socratic tradition devalues art and social practice as ways of being ­human and indeed as ways in which the species makes and transforms itself as well as its relations with the natu­ral world in which it lives. If we grant Arendt’s conclusion that the Socratic tradition would replace the polis-­centered educational, pedagogical, and anthropological sense of the species with the vision expressed by Diotima, then we might easily accuse the latter of returning to the ahistorical mythical forms of static ­human identity that the development of especially Athenian culture left ­behind. From Aeschylus to Thucydides, the Athenians grew aware that humanity was historical, not mythical as in the Homeric texts. It grew aware that the species could alter the worlds in which it lived. Thucydides draws no less a conclusion than this from the staged debates in Sparta about the Athenians who are a new form of ­human life beyond the understanding of traditional minds.28 The Socratic tradition is antihistorical in a way that conceives ­human ontology as that which cannot be historical or in control of its own historicality. If the Shield of Achilles 94

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represents the mythic forms of an ahistorical traditional culture, then the Athenian theater and Thucydides’s g­ reat history represent a development of consciousness into historicality and into the notion that the ­human can modify itself by imagining alternative ways to be especially in relation to the world in which it dwells. Achilles’s mourning is such a relation. Odysseus imagining the island of the Cyclopes as a frontier for agriculture, technology, and trade is another. The Socratic model, for all its courage and success, is an arresting of such imaginings to move the work of mind along a path called philosophy, which circumscribes the poetic abilities of the ­human within a field of ruin—­from Homer to Alcibiades to the death of Socrates. Plato shows considerable restraint in his portrayal of Aristophanes in the Symposium.29 Aristophanes played some role in Socrates’s death. The Clouds portrays Socrates as a cynical peddler of professionally marketable skills—in other words, as a petty opportunist within the new media of his time. Although the play did not do well in competition, its revivals suggest it reflected an Athenian suspicion that Socrates damaged traditions. Socrates mentions Aristophanes very early in his defense before a court, as almost at the same time he denies that he is a teacher, a denial central to the case against him.30 Plato’s introduction of Aristophanes as a character in the Symposium is apt ­because Aristophanes would have been an impor­tant person at the time, likely to be in a cele­bration of Agathon’s victory. Moreover, on Diotima’s evidence, Aristophanes stands for a foolish viewpoint on the assigned topic of love, which scholars agree Diotima’s vision would transcend by ­either incorporating or leaving ­behind. Yet Aristophanes was a satirist and a comic playwright, a key figure in the Old Comedy, and even on Plato’s own evidence, Diotima’s glancing dismissal of Aristophanes’s story at the banquet is at best thin. “ ‘The idea has been put forward,’ she said, ‘that lovers are ­people who are looking for their own other halves. But my view is that love is directed neither at their half nor their w ­ hole ­unless, my friend, that turns out to be good’ ” (Symposium, 42). What is her evidence for this? “ ‘­People are even prepared to have their own feet or hands amputated if they think that ­those parts of themselves are diseased’ ” (42). Her aim is to show that loving oneself cannot supply fulfillment. One cannot love the self, only the good. Aristophanes had not quite said this in his remarkable tale of ­human beings split in two along complex and varied gender and sexual lines. The undivided and self-­loving h ­ umans ­were fulfilled. For Aristophanes, the happy 95

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complete aspirant and active ­human species arouses the envy and fear of the gods, whose thunderbolts divide them and commit them to recovery, desire, and nostalgia. They fall into a permanent state of melancholy. Moreover, Aristophanes portrayed an original h ­ uman weakened by the same gods for whom Diotima’s love and phi­los­o­pher is hermeneut or priest. Aristophanes, like Alcibiades, opens pathways to read the Symposium against itself. Aristophanes’s fable represents ­humans searching in and among other ­humans for ways forward, not merely returns to mythic origins. T ­ hose origins now lost ­were threats to the transcendent order that always makes the secular world abject. Aristophanes represents the very forces by which the gods and their intermediaries would create abject circumstances, solidifying the sense that philosophy, in this instance, does not merely conceive what is but brings about or would bring about what it believes and teaches. Without the gods, t­ here is no abjection, no desire, no limits on h ­ uman possibility to imagine. Transcendence, as we saw the Simberg painting suggests, is the burden of the past always revived by the hermeneuts of a special gnosis. Fi­nally, consider that Aristophanes imagines sexuality and coupling as precisely the mode by which the species, by definition originally active, imagining, and creative, moves along, looking not only for another half but for what that represents, namely, the equivalent between love or coupling and poiesis, the act of making thoughtfully and imaginatively—­and not as a feminine made abject as pregnancy. Aristophanes committed to action, movement, and the body stands for the po­liti­cal and poetic in a far fuller way than Diotima’s modest attempt can dismiss. Socrates, of course, outdrinks Aristophanes, and reason walks off as comedic imagination and its bodily realities of love, reproduction, and renewal slumber. Is this wakefulness such a victory? If we mea­sure it by the glorious nonsense of the Phaedo, then yes. In a word, Aristophanes has a far richer and more complete sense of the h ­ uman, even in Plato’s own text, than Socratic tradition affords. In Arendt’s terms, the g­ reat comic playwright has no resentment against the body or life in finitude. Satire escapes containment: in Aristophanes’s story, ­those on the gods’ side have no special right to authority or admiration. H ­ uman historical life is not abject but filled with the love of comic repre­sen­ta­tion aware of the cruel consequences of esoteric efforts in the finite world. If philosophy is as it must be a historical act of finite creatures, it has a place among ­those split persons seeking. Its desires have no exceptional value as just one among 96

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many, not when its claim to priority comes from the devices on display in this text. Of course, their desires conceptualized and narrated are dangerous to the ­human, to knowledge, and to creativity. They promise dire constraint ­because they fear love and imagination. Kierkegaard, who became newly impor­tant to Benjamin and some among his contemporaries, understood the issue of Socrates to be the issue of the ­human. Benjamin’s luminous insight coalesces with Kierkegaard’s work. His master’s thesis, The Concept of Irony, is a compendious book.31 In general, Kierkegaard researches how we should conceptualize the h ­ uman given the fact of irony. He historicizes his thinking by stressing certain features of the intellectual, spiritual, and imaginative world in which he lives as the prob­lem pre­sents itself to him. He names the chief characteristics of that world as the death of the gods, the role of secular knowledge, the nature of historicity itself, and the value of philosophy versus thinking in terms that belong to faith. Aristophanes’s comedic repre­sen­ta­tion of Socrates is at the center of Kierkegaard’s thinking in this book: “Aristophanes’s conception of Socrates ­will provide the necessary opposition to that of Plato, and by this very opposition bring about the possibility of a new direction in our calculation” (158). Kierkegaard analyzes the complex conceptual interactions and consequences of the relationships among irony, philosophy, and history. In a word, he aimed to overmaster irony’s Socratic antagonism to history and Hegel’s historical dialectic by this new irony.32 As Kierkegaard deepened his understanding of irony’s per­sis­tent antagonism to history, in substantial part by reading Socrates and Hegel as genealogical relatives, he discovered that Socrates’s insistence that he knew nothing was a figural and logical necessity for an essentially antihistorical hermeneutic, the aim of which is to empty history and make its contents abject. The textual rec­ord suggests that Arendt learned a ­great deal about the Socratic tradition’s resentment of the body, of movement, and of history from Kierkegaard, on whose writings she meditated for much of her life.33 Her objections to the contemplative bias of philosophy and her discovery of the schematic binary owes a good deal to Kierkegaard’s analy­sis, carried out in a fully historical way, with an eye on Plato and si­mul­ta­neously the modern culture developing in Eu­rope. Kierkegaard both traced the emergence of subjectivity to the existence of Socrates as daimonic irony and theorized a path to its necessary obliteration. Thucydides had linked subjectivity to the state, and Euripides, whom Socrates apparently admired 97

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over Aristophanes, had shown the power of subjectivity’s relation to the gods and the crises attendant on the abrogation of that relation—as in The Bacchae. For Kierkegaard, Socrates appears as the subject’s fate. In the Apology, Socrates strongly insists on his ignorance but requires we listen to his wisdom. The power of this complex position appears in the rhe­toric of hinting at positivities that it at once negates, refusing them existence. Contrasting himself to o ­ thers, Socrates insists, mockingly, that they have positive knowledge that allows them to charge for teaching. He, by contrast, has only “­human wisdom,” a claim that both offers and retracts positivity while allowing ironic ascesis to appear as liberation. Kierkegaard summarizes Socrates’s tactics this way: When subjectivity with its negative power has broken the spell in which ­human life reposed ­under the form of substantiality, when it has emancipated man from his relationship to God just as it liberated him from his relationship to the state, the first form in which this appears is ignorance. The gods flee away taking with them all content, and man is left standing as the form, as that which is to receive content into itself. In the sphere of knowledge such a condition is correctly apprehended as ignorance. Again, this ignorance is quite consistently designed as h ­ uman wisdom, for with this man has come into his own right: the right not to be, as such. (Concept of Irony, 197)

Despite Socrates’s value in the strug­gles for intellectual freedom and the right to critique, he is an original antihumanist. Edward W. Said, in “On Lost ­Causes,” notes that “most of official culture is dedicated to proving that if, like Socrates, you are put to death for your virtues, which remain intact, you are the victor, your cause has won out, even though, of course, the obvious winners thrive on.”34 Said writes primarily as a literary scholar and historian who understands the work done by aesthetic and intellectual culture. It might seem ironic that official culture would make a defeated martyr the carrier of its own values, but critics should not deceive themselves. Arendt’s binary or Adorno’s schema and now Said’s official culture together let us see the deep resources in our traditions that obviate the values of ­human life and experience. We should expect to find the force of authority and domination in what we think are the highest peaks of cultural achievement. It would be foolish to ignore their established authority. In light of Kierkegaard’s profound sense of Socrates’s spiritual and cultural 98

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consequence, we can conclude that in the Symposium, philosophy emerges as the sole and authoritative antagonistic fulfillment of death ­because Socrates figures death as the pre­sent voiding of the ­human and desire as the ­human compulsion to avoid its own ruination. On the one hand, following the staircase of love to beauty is the perfection of subjectivity, but in the compulsory subsumption of student and teacher alike in the desire for and achieved presence of the immutable One, subjectivity ends. Desire turns away from the ­human and from history, leaving all ­behind as already ruined metaphysically by the mortality consequent on nature. By also educating the young in the task of ruining, of making ruin of all—­women, poetry, heroes, history, cities—­based on its own originary but highly metaphysical imperfection, the Socratic tradition not only names but also enacts the destructive aesthetic, or the aesthetic of destruction. The po­liti­cal implications of this model for conceptual dominance over aesthetic and poetic forms of a humanly expansive sense of lived values and strug­gles should be clear. While ­there is no certain or ­simple correlation with the intellectual modeling of dominance by an authoritative class of priestly or vanguard intellectuals, guarding a gnosis, we must see that such intellectual dominance, varying in its embodied forms in history, invariably strug­gles against the proliferation of alternative imaginings and possibilities of life inherent in the body, love, imagination, and freedom.35 Kierkegaard’s interest in the historically embodied, often-­quotidian forms of fundamental ­human strug­gles and expressions of lived experience made him sensitive to the consequences of Socrates’s achievement. Kierkegaard understood that Socrates had to separate the subject from politics, aesthetics, and poetics as a first step in evacuating the subject of all traces of what it is like to live and love as a finite but imaginative creature. Although official culture, starting with the Apology, makes Socrates a victim who strug­gles for truth and the freedom to think, Kierkegaard studies just what it is that Socrates offers prior to his death. I have tried to describe parts of the agonistics of the Symposium to disturb some of the established valorization of “philosophy,” which is official culture in this case. Many moderns such as Adorno, Arendt, and Said have worried about the sort of intellectual tradition that might deny life and its creative po­liti­cal strug­gles the meaningful recognition and encouragement that society, the species, and the Earth require. Yet ­others among the moderns and their progenitors have worked against this recognition and sometimes responded to crises 99

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so overwhelming as to require modes of intellectual life that make rubbish of secular creativity. Some leading academic figures often marked as oppositional if not revolutionary have led humanistic and academic minds and work away from the issues of the lived world that should occupy a scholar’s life. Deeply invested in official culture and profiting from the academic schema, some impor­tant professionals have cordoned off criticism and the humanities from conceptual efforts that recognize the complexities of poiesis and eros as the basic fact of finitude and have settled into predictable rhe­torics and patterns of speech. Academic intellectuals can be doubly at fault. We all embody to some degree the official culture in its academic schematic, but we need not solidify the melancholic, nostalgic, or messianic antagonism to life, love, and imagination. I point to allegoresis and its associations with messianism, melancholy, and so on as a well-­established high schema that enables complex and rewarding work, thereby d ­ oing precisely the role of official culture, which demands the resignation of intellectuals to preaching some sort of defeat, abjection, and secondariness overmastered by a permanent hope offering redemption on the other side of strug­gle. Basic literary and aesthetic history helps us see that an allegoric politics rests on lies and misrepre­sen­ta­tions, on the intellectual laziness of categorical thinking, and on the indulgence of achieving authority in the nominalist act of convincing all that indeed all is ruin. Critical intellectual work and life degenerate into postcriticism movements that essentially give up to the ordinariness of machined culture, bowing acceptably in resignation to defeat—­and celebrating that resignation as a new way, which means no more than a new way to keep ­doing work adapted easily for the official culture.36 Throughout history, not only have artists, intellectuals, and politicians moved in ways quite ­counter to ­these strong theories of ruin and abjection, but also several thinkers have directly challenged t­ hose theories to reveal their consequences and displace them. One of the most impor­tant voices in this countertradition to that represented by Diotima belongs to Giambattista Vico, whose research found and opposed the iteration of Diotima’s protocols at the onset of advancing modernity in the seventeenth ­century. Vico wrote The New Science, his g­ reat articulation of the essential links among history, experience, institutions, and language, to rebut Descartes’s offer of another contemplative intellectual paradigm based on geometrical analy­sis. Vico took very seriously 100

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Descartes’s preference for method over knowledge, rigor over reading, and analy­sis over poetry. Arendt’s insight that the Socratic tradition loathes movement and the body is quite like Vico’s reasons for writing often and powerfully against analytic philosophy. Descartes insisted that knowledge and language, clearly forms of movement rooted in the body and finitude, ­were residues to leave b ­ ehind with the achievement of his philosophy. Vico’s thinking, which pointed the way to study of language and the formation of philology as well as notions of ethnos, insisted on the priority of poiesis in the ontology of the species as a creature living in time. His ­great study of Homer accepts the Socratic position that the epics are “primitive” but derives from their study his conclusion that language is poetic. As such it is two other t­ hings in its essence. It is both the depository of ­human work in the world, and of the ­mental and imaginative motives compelling that work. To think other­wise is vain, futile, and vacuous. Not accidentally, two major poets, Coleridge and Wallace Stevens, had a ­great interest in Vico. His thinking supports Coleridge’s warnings that allegoresis threatened to damage imagination and Stevens’s vari­ous writings on the importance of poetry over philosophy. The Socratic tradition had ridiculed knowledge and adapted irony as the ascetic device to empty knowledge of value. Socrates, in his own defense, ridicules teachers for selling knowledge, but that defense is damning. Aristophanes staged Socrates peddling not the positive content of knowledge but elentic skills as a valued commodity in a modern society. To Socrates’s defenders, Aristophanes’s satire seems unfair, but it helps explain the success of his enemies at trial. In form, Socrates seemed to be quite like all the ­others selling their knowledge and skills. Indeed, the skill he “sells” not only allows his followers to undermine the settled knowledge of official culture but also undermines the very possibility of searching for a settled culture outside, of course, the utopian program of the phi­los­op ­ her’s vision. We must accept Arendt’s conclusion that Socrates would make all h ­ uman acts of making and imagination invalid in their own terms, leaving only himself as icon in place. He embodies an ideal official culture secure in its purpose and method, e­ ither erasing or absorbing all alternatives. Against this coup, Athens rebels and in that instance leaves in place a no-­doubt-­unsatisfactory culture but, nonetheless, one that held Thucydides, Euripides, and many ­others. Socrates is dangerous. His retrospective judgment that all is ruin and ­will continue to be without the wisdom philosophy affords is a pre­de­ces­sor 101

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for many similar grandiose gestures and the intellectual basis for an official culture among the intellectual elites that does not, despite its claims, contribute to the poetic work of movement, body, and cultivation. Many of Socrates’s heirs admire him for his stand in death—­his holding to truths more impor­tant than his or any other body. Putting the m ­ atter of courage aside, they admire him for proving the hopeless ruination of living movement. They love him for the hope his death promises that truth w ­ ill out. The official story told by intellectuals is not surprisingly a beginning instance of a common way of thinking and ­doing intellectual work. Socrates’s stand against knowledge leads many ­people to disparage ­human knowledge, ­human touch, ­human love, ­human experience, and ­human creativity as at best steps on the way to a transcendence that dismisses not only their pains but also their tentative achievements as part of the texture of the historical species at work. Descartes carefully studied the history of philosophy before producing his major texts. Notoriously, Descartes also advocated historical and linguistic ignorance, claiming that knowledge of Latin produced as l­ittle as Cicero’s servants had achieved. Vico sensed a considerable hy­poc­risy in Descartes, who having studied believed he had come to a position that o ­ thers might adopt, freeing themselves of study for time spent learning to master analy­sis. While moderns such as Walter Jackson Bate and Harold Bloom see the figure of the latecomer as melancholy, weak, and belated, figures such as Diotima and Descartes would turn their belatedness performatively into strength. They pre­sent themselves as having come at the end of history and, thankfully for all ­others, as offering exclusive new ways forward, new visions to satisfy what Diotima feels in the always unfulfilled lives (tragic? mournful? melancholy? ruined?) of ­humans. Vico, who lived in the midst of the Inquisition, which burnt his friends and silenced his colleagues, did not see a path to freedom in the Cartesian way and opposed to it the loving obligation to study the works of h ­ umans deposited in the ­orders of words from the mythical to the modern periods.37 Like Stevens, he believed that in words, poiesis created the world and species, a fact and prob­lem so rich and difficult that it should be the subject of all our efforts.38 We recall, however, Frank Kermode’s apothegm that poetry has become so hard for the acad­emy that it prefers the ease of philosophy. ­These ancient paradigms are part of not only Western genealogies, in ways scholars should consider as they conduct their own work, often as heirs to their own ­great 102

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pre­de­ces­sors. We have good examples of critics studying the consequences of such ­family relationships so that we might hesitate to iterate turns of phrase and concepts that enable us. For example, Charles Rosen, in an impor­tant and still underappreciated essay, “The Ruins of Walter Benjamin,”39 remarks that Benjamin’s thinking, from Origin of the German Trauerspiel on through his developed c­ areer, appears as a straightforward form of Platonic realism. Rosen quickly adds, however, that Benjamin’s work is odd and jagged in ways that depart from a strict orthodoxy, in part b ­ ecause of neo-­Kantian influence in his studies.40 No ­matter how heterodox Benjamin’s concepts are in their extension of Platonic realism, in even his most power­ful moments, his practice subsumes works of art and lit­er­a­ture into philosophical traditions that transform the work into the play of concepts. Rosen puts it this way: “­Every au­then­tic work of lit­er­a­ture, for Benjamin, was a meta­phorical embodiment of philosophical ideas. E ­ very critical reading should move t­oward that moment when the work appears to exist for the sake of the philosophical truth within it: it no longer exists for itself, and it therefore loses its charms. It reaches the condition of the inexpressive. As a ruin, the Trauerspiel is an allegory of art in general.”41 Rosen avoids the middlebrow notion that Benjamin destroys the work’s charm, or the charm of all h ­ uman work, to clear the grounds for something better. Rosen understands that ruination of all objects, arts, creations, and actions is the intended goal, the telos, of all philosophically inflected critique. In its commitment to negation, or to ruination, each act of reading, each theory of art, each judgment of history, each characterization of history—­each is merely an allegory of the already ruined that forces the mind to the seemingly only remaining task. That task is the perception, recollection, and freeing of the idea or philosophical truth that other­wise incarcerated has no visits from ­human reason. The truly critical question, of course, is ­simple: Is it worth this ruination to achieve such a single end? The truly magnificent and elegant opening paragraph of Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” starts by separating commentary from critique by telling us that a commentator is like a chemist and the critic an alchemist. Benjamin’s prose very subtly traces the phenomenology of reading a work of art as it moves from the fullness of its own time (its content or substance) through a conflagration in and over history that allows the alchemist to see the truth inherent but other­wise unavailable in the text. 103

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Fi­nally, the chemist—in the context of Vico, we might call this person a philologist—­studies merely the “wood and ash” while for the alchemist “only the flame itself preserves an enigma.”42 Benjamin writes in such a way as to assimilate the critic to the alchemist, but we must remember what he means by criticism. “The writings we have on works of lit­er­a­ture suggest that the minuteness of detail in such studies be reckoned more to the account of the interests in philology than of critique” (297). While the essay he has written on Goethe’s novel “could appear to be commentary; in fact, it is meant as critique” (297). Even this early in his ­career and at the start of a ­great twentieth-­century literary essay, Benjamin’s sense of his own circumstances and the fate of the book in the world has him on the path of a destructive aesthetic and messianic theory as the sole basis for criticism. He assumed criticism into critique—­a move now commonly reversed as ­those who are opposed to critique slide into opposition to criticism43—­and earned Rosen’s sobriquet of Platonic realist by making “inquiries into the truth, the living flame” (298), the newly redefined critic’s unique task. What was left? “The heavy logs of what is past and the light ashes of what has been experienced” (298). From Diotima’s version of the Socratic tradition through Vico’s objections to Descartes’s methods to this version of the critic, whose relation to the enigma makes him authoritative? His attention to the work is esoteric and privileged; he is willing to destroy to find the kernel worth preserving by his own special abilities. The Benjaminian critic regrets whenever the content or substance of the work asserts itself and draws attention away from “eternal being” (298). Benjamin knows that with Goethe and his contemporaries, something like a Vichian investment of value in quotidian t­hings becomes a conceptual path to growth and perfection. Kant could not think through the real­ity of marriage that Goethe dramatizes in his novel. Goethe was d ­ oing something completely new, which Kant could not have ­imagined. Nonetheless, Benjamin still uses Idealist language with a Platonic tinge to describe how a critique of the novel solves the prob­lem posed by the relation between materialities and ideas: “the content [of the novel] is graspable only in the philosophical experience of its divine imprint, evident only to the blissful vision of the divine name” (300). Vico, by contrast, took all language not as rubbish, as logs and ashes, but as the action of humanity in history. Donald Verene has defined philology for Vico as “the study of all t­hings that depend on ­human choice, . . . ​the study of all the ‘certains (certi), or particulars, of the life of nations, the ­great 104

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city of the h ­ uman race.’ ”44 The literary critic or philologist has a permanent scholarly and h ­ uman interest in h ­ uman action and joins in the poetics of such species being. By contrast, Benjamin rules out the possibility that a philological or a genealogical study of the novel as a study of motive could get at what m ­ atters—­the idea of divine imprint, the messianic itself. Benjamin does a strange ­thing to literary scholarship and philological criticism, abandoning them and their topics for a higher purpose, a gesture familiar from the Symposium. Only the conflagration gives value, “the philosophical experience of its divine imprint,” and only to the initiated, whose embrace of the philosophical protects the reader and the text from the “foreign” notion “that the most essential contents of existence are capable of stamping their imprint on the world of t­ hings” (“Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 298). This last remark is an extremely specific objection to a Vichian or even Thucydidian view of ­things. We must understand that Benjamin does not mean “impor­tant” when he writes “essential” h ­ ere; he means essential in a stronger philosophical sense. If that is how he sees ­things, then the rite of destructive purification leading to the final discovery of eternity’s imprint has a compelling logic. Long before the Angel of History sees ruin everywhere, Benjamin’s essay on Goethe shows that he was thinking in terms of a hierarchized binary. He saw essential contents and divine imprints over and against a world of t­hings, which in themselves cannot hold “the essential contents of existence.” He was always a thinker of abjection, who resigned the works of ­human motive to the rubbish heap, ­unless redeemed by the initiate. The form of his remarks and the worldview they express echo Diotima’s positions, albeit without their explicit pedagogical seduction. Benjamin is, ­after all, looking for the most power­ful intellectual devices to adjust to a then-­disappearing culture.45 As we noted ­earlier, Canguilhem taught that intellectuals conceptualize in response to environments, to accommodate for survival, and inevitably to alter that environment—­ even if in unintended ways. Like Plato and o ­ thers in such situations, Benjamin sought authoritative devices not necessarily to remake the world but to survive in it. Messianism, changing word and work to the imprint of the divine in the idea—­this adaptation enabled his work, but it required melancholy as the objective correlative to the permanent face of ruin. It left him in no more than an allegorical state. Rosen ends the first half of his study on Benjamin with a similar insight. “The business of the critic, for Benjamin, is not to resuscitate the dead, or 105

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to reconstitute the original which now stands before us fragmented, but to understand the work as a ruin, and in so d ­ oing paradoxically to awaken the beauty pre­sent in it as a ruin.”46 Benjamin’s proj­ect turned the artwork into a philosophical idea that alone fulfills and preserves the work. As a result, the work stays b ­ ehind, in ruins with the “critic’s” insight its replacement. This structure and motive are an intellectual ground for the authority of allegoresis, which displaces value from the poetics of the work to the esotericism of the reader, who allegorizes it and passes it on not as a concept but as a category. The work need not be revisited except on the model of this “critique.” Rosen, a virtuoso pianist, dreaded the loss of the work to a tradition of beliefs that reduces the work and its sensual and intellectual perception to a step on the ladder to eternity or apocalypse. As Rosen says, Benjamin begins with the desire to treat all works, actions, and perhaps lives as ruined vessels, not to reintegrate them in a Lurianic or Lucretian re-­creation.47 Rather, critique would break the vessel always already ruined to release the eternal idea. The Benjaminian intent, Rosen shows, results in the Trauerspiel book, which transforms a minor genre into an allegory not only of all art but also of all value, of all experience, of the ­human itself. Along with the elaborated modalities of Idealist, Jewish, and Marxist colors that enrich and enable Benjamin’s palette, Rosen also catches the classical tradition to which he belongs. Perhaps we need to consider certain historical parallels between Socrates and Benjamin, similarities that account in part both for our admiration of their superb achievements and for their f­ amily resemblance within a tradition that denigrates the historicality of the merely h ­ uman, the reproductive, the poetic, the so-­called feminine, and the mortal. Although Plato’s well-­known objections to poetry in The Republic, the Ion, and elsewhere exist in deep tension with his own rhetorical ability, especially in dramatic and argumentative forms, the agonistics of the Symposium display the power­ful purpose to which he puts t­ hose skills. Rather than take Plato as torn between his admonitions about poetry and the temptations he suffers when hearing Homer’s verses—­consider the end of The Republic as an instance of this notion—­consider him rather a traitor to the poetic. His skills serve the death of poetry in an act of transmutation not unlike, according to Benjamin’s claims, Breton’s transmutation of Nadja from ­woman in love to lens that focuses on ruins that the (sometimes besotted) philosophical Breton other­wise would not see. Perhaps better, in Benjamin’s reading of 106

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Nadja, Breton’s narrative ability to take possession of w ­ oman and love, Nadja, to move away from her, from touch and the exoteric—­this allegorizes the Platonic pro­cess of verbal talent alienating itself from poetry in a self-­interested if well-­considered act of legitimation of the antipoetic. To put the ­matter yet another way, within Plato’s deep meditations on the image, on repre­sen­ta­tion, and on imitation rest wariness about imagination’s strength. In effect, for the Socratic tradition, imagination uncontrolled by the discipline of philosophy cannot achieve e­ ither beauty or truth, the fulfilled happiness that philosophy assumes the ­human always pursues and should or must pursue along only its own path. In a word, imagination is too dangerous. So we return to Coleridge’s and Stevens’s wariness of Plato’s gorgeous nonsense. We can see more of ­these tendencies if we read Benjamin’s essay on Karl Kraus. Given Benjamin’s deep-­seated suspicions of magical thinking, especially the demonic ele­ments of fascism, it surprises a ­little that he adapts Kraus’s admiration for archaic thinking to his own ends. As Socrates modulates the strength and success of reason through the energies of erotic desire, so Kraus dramatizes the dangerous weakness of reason alone: “night is the mechanism by which mere mind is converted into mere sexuality, mere sexuality into mere mind, and where ­these two abstractions hostile to life find rest in recognizing each other.”48 Contextually, this quotation comes, as we would expect during a discussion of education and love and as in the Symposium, to the conclusion that this movement is esoteric love. Kraus’s assertion of “pure mind” is what Benjamin takes up in his figure of a “worthless chimera” (447)—an unnatural and entangled monster—­and ­these together might appear as a joint criticism of Platonic aspirations. Benjamin means it, however, as a criticism of art for art’s sake, of the purity of imagination as Kraus and Benjamin find it in the work of their bête noir, Stefan Georg. In other words, Benjamin makes Kraus the figure and occasion for an objection to “classical concepts of freedom,” which are not only left objections to bourgeois notions derived from the French Revolution and Enlightenment but the incapacity of ­human creativity within the historicality of the species’ premessianic existence. (This combination of politics and aesthetics makes Benjamin’s work powerfully attractive.) We can see the specificity of Kraus’s thinking if we recall Pascal as an example of intellectuals who believe we must share a careful commitment to the humility of reason. “For this reason, none of the motives for his development is more 107

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impor­tant than the constant curbing and checking of mind” (447). Mind exists and takes place in the world, in a species too historically indebted to its own archaic origins in magic and vio­lence to be successful on its own. Kraus finds several openings within what are undeveloped marginal existences within modernity to recover lost possibilities residually pre­sent. T ­ hese residues or ruins, like ­those lost chances seen by Breton following Nadja, correct ­those who believe in e­ ither mind or senses—­for caricature’s sake, let us say, Gottlob Frege or D. H. Lawrence. Kraus no more aims at a consolidation or synthesis of the ­mental and sexual than Benjamin’s Breton aims for a subjectivity or love that sustains the joint possibilities of being pregnant in mind and body. Breton, on this reading, follows the Troubadour, and degenders Nadja and resexualizes himself as the conduit directing rearoused desire to the ser­vice of revolution u ­ nder the direction of the beloved leaders. Kraus prefers the prostitute and the dog,49 taking each as an instance of what “­people” usurp. Unlike Deleuze, for example, who tried to theorize the “being animal” of the h ­ uman, Kraus sacramentalized the dog for the traces of the archaic the creature preserves and the critical function Kraus thought the dog might perform. “The dog,” Benjamin writes, is “for him creation’s true mirror of virtue, in which fidelity, purity, gratitude smile from times lost and remote” (438). Benjamin’s sympathy for this witty archaism disappoints us. He too easily accepts this allegoresis, which promotes the idea that t­ here is, and we need, an outside to the critique of the modern, the end of Eu­rope, the end of capital, and so on. How such allegoresis might belong to such structures themselves is a question he does not ask; it is a question ruled out of order in advance by the presumptuous dismissals of “historicism” and creative imagination as the allies of their enemies. Benjamin’s Kraus has a mind of winter; but his wintry mind is merely seasonal. Hy­poc­risy is his easy target: “To fail to recognize the beauty of feminine stupidity was for Kraus always the blackest philistinism. Before its radiance, the chimeras of pro­gress evaporate” (448). Just as pure mind and pure body find rest in confronting each other in dream, Kraus aims to rest in the overcoming of the ­human. Benjamin’s own pointed detesting of all stories, concepts, and ideologies of “pro­gress” accommodates itself in Kraus’s satire. “The beauty of feminine stupidity,” often figured in both writers by the whore or prostitute, not only opens a critique of hy­poc­risy, but also allows Kraus to “defend the moral order,” as in his admiration of Offenbach. 108

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More to the point, especially for Benjamin, who established this position as essential to his work on the Trauerspiel, this complex figure with its Socratic heritage affords Kraus the devastating critique, the utter destruction, of the classical ideal of humanity, which Benjamin asserts, following ­Kierkegaard, the press had already destroyed. “Through the newspaper, says Kierkegaard, ‘the distinction between public and private affairs is abolished in private-­public prattle’ ” (448). Kierkegaard mounted a dual assault. First, he mocked and regretted the bourgeoisie’s yielding classical humanity to its own economic interests—­a humanity barely won by the Enlightenment and Napoleonic Wars. Second, he mocked Hegel for his theorized distinction between the private and public, an ethical claim about the state and civil society that assumed and hoped to perpetuate the ideal of classical humanity in a formation that, as Kierkegaard saw, wrecked the ideal itself. Benjamin’s Kraus, however, has none of Kierkegaard’s regret, for like Benjamin in his own reading of the Protestant Baroque, Kraus discredits the very classical ideals of humanity and ­human freedom as not only untenable but undesirable. Belief in this ideal, ac­cep­tance of its narratives, would require critics to fly in the face of hypocritical embodiments of its ruination. Moreover, Kraus, like Benjamin, finds in this critical figure, in the destruction of its antagonist’s hypocritical embodiment, the chance fundamentally to destroy the ­human and all its idealized narratives and images.50 What is wrong with all this? In a word, it is the arrogant security of presuming to know both the ­enemy and the proper means of its “critique.” Never does this sort of work worry about the historical motives of its own enablement or the detailed circumstances of o ­ thers’ lives and motives. Nor does it worry that the modes of knowledge it willingly excludes as complicit with or structural components of the “enemies” it configures might have value as instruction. The aesthetics of destruction, the allegoresis of history, the devastation of all h ­ uman works—­all this hateful and frustrated energy emerging from frustration and dissatisfaction—­all this is ultimately impoverishing no m ­ atter how heroic and resourceful it appears in wit. The sources of the wit m ­ atter ­little. ­There is nothing certain and secure in the messianic traditions or ­those of German Idealism, especially as Benjamin intertwines ­these with vari­ous forms of memory, Marxism, and speculations on technology. The entanglements result in nodes of interest that followers adapt but equally without concern for their sources or consequences. 109

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As Auerbach suggests about the Elohist, the historical burden of style and inherited knowledge, the devices of chosen enablement for rhe­toric and image, carry forward consequences. Choosing t­hese styles requires ­either extraordinary work to manage their effects or an embrace, often ­silent, of their purposes as one’s own. In any case, their choice is a choice against other resources, a decision to exclude, to reduce to ruin all other results of ­human creativity. This move is completely unjustified no m ­ atter the pathos or melancholy that attends it, no m ­ atter the displacement for responsibility of such ruination on an ­imagined other.

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chapter four

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Wallace Stevens and the Confidence of Imagination

A poet’s words are of t­ hings that do not exist without the words. —­Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (1942)

The Work of the World Wallace Stevens’s poetry does not require redemption, and it does not offer itself as such. I take up Stevens, as I w ­ ill ­later Rembrandt and Shakespeare, to illustrate the errors of making all into ruin. It would take considerable dishonesty to claim that t­hese artists’ works are ruins waiting for readers to allegorize them and so save them from the ruined quietude of their own wasted existence. Moreover, master works of the imagination repudiate the authoritarian attitudes of the critics we have discussed and, indeed, make clear they are unjustifiable in the face of artworks’ greater and more varied creativity. Works by these artists and many o ­ thers at all social levels of ­human creativity are secular evidence of humanity’s sufficiency in the finite strug­gles to live, albeit as mortals, within an often far from perfected historical world. In this chapter, I ­will work out many of the conceptual, aesthetic, and po­liti­cal strug­gles entangled in the conflicts between such art and the long authoritarian intellectual traditions tied to eternity and abjection. We w ­ ill see the tradition to which Stevens and the o ­ thers belong has more than enough strong answers to the voices of ruin who rubbish the world to legitimate their own ambitions and conceptual responses to historicality and finitude.

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I stress the concept of redemption ­because an impor­tant faction of modern Western theory and literary criticism from Benjamin through Derrida and beyond has had redemption as its principal conceptual instrument. Believing that the world and history are in ruins, that humanity is abject and in need of redemption, it adapts messianic notions to its purposes. Its leading figures assign themselves a priestly role, assuming priority over art and poetry, allegorizing it as evidence of transcendent presence in a fallen world. Wallace Stevens’s writings neither support the basic claims of this tradition nor offer it the solace of resources and materials. One of the crucial ele­ments of Stevens’s work is confidence in imagination and poetry as the work of poiesis. He understood poiesis in a sense that tied the work of concepts to the species’ work in the world. In “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” immediately ­after explaining how Plato’s myth of the char­i­ot­eer in the Phaedrus declines to Coleridge’s “dear gorgeous nonsense,” Stevens embraces Vico as a counterpoint to Plato and as an emblem of his own practice.1 Setting up a stark contrast between poetry and philosophy, Stevens embraces Vico’s insight “that the true history of the ­human race is a history of its progressive m ­ ental states” (645). Plato’s figure is lacking in two ways. First, he created something unreal and, having done so, “adheres to it and intensifies its unreality” (645). Second—­and this comes almost as a direct indictment of Diotima’s interest in the eternal—is a loss of “vitality”: “What happened, as we ­were traversing the ­whole heaven, is that the imagination lost its power to sustain us” (645–646). Stevens warns us that the Socratic, allegorical, messianic, or utopian traditions displace the poetic function to the detriment of imagination and the species to whose survival it is essential. Stevens’s poetic is very much about this essential prob­lem, namely, how imagination sustains us, nourishes our lives, and nurtures our cultivation of the world as a dwelling for an imagining species. Stevens’s critics often trivialized his work by drawing it into endless epistemological debates—­for or against imagination versus real­ity. The issue is false more than it is badly presented. If we take seriously Arendt’s worry that the binary itself—­active / contemplative—no ­matter the hierarchy, is the consequence of the Socratic tradition, then Stevens’s remarks ­here stand forth as a dismissal of the very grounds on which the epistemic banalities rest. To anticipate and recall, Stevens would then also stand against the academic schema, as Adorno calls the normative cultural work of the 112

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university. Fi­nally, of course, it stands against and throws considerable light on the traditions, often embedded in but far older than that acad­emy, which would destroy the nourishment of imagination. Diotima’s rubbishing of ­women, pregnancy, bodies, and mortality now appears as what it is: the rubbishing of the ­human, an effort to substitute gruel for nourishment, and a fatal weakening of mortal capacity to fit “the true history of the ­human race.” Stevens’s confidence in h ­ uman imagination and poiesis is an essential alternative to the messianic and related authoritarian traditions that exist to deny the very possibility of alternatives to themselves. In Stevens’s notion, the poet is the creative archivist of the h ­ uman dream, whose writings do the work of what I ­will call throughout secular anagoges, in contrast to messianic or utopian allegoresis and untainted by the rhe­toric of philosophy or transcendence. Northrop Frye provides a useful starting point when he defines the anagogic in this way: “Lit­er­at­ure imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a ­human mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of its real­ity.”2 To this g­ rand capacity of ­human imagination, I w ­ ill return conceptually and critically.

Crises Remade Amid crises across the world, in a letter of 1935, Stevens wrote, “We are not beginning to get out of the world what it w ­ ill ultimately yield through poets.”3 Stevens’s writings are not personal statements or statements of belief. They are individual gestures, parts of an ambitious proj­ect to create the poet and poetry again within the long archive of such proj­ects. His imagination never doubts e­ ither the vital importance of poiesis or the survival of poets in modernity.4 His expanding, maturing imagination gave frequent ad hoc expression to its strength and aspirations. Indeed, no individual textual moment is final or complete. In this way, Stevens’s work has something of Shakespeare’s g­ reat virtue: infinite variety. “­There is no reason why any poet should not have the status of the phi­los­o­pher,” Stevens wrote in 1935, “nor why his poetry should not give up to the keenest minds and the most searching spirits something of what philosophy gives up and, in addition, the peculiar ­things that only poetry can give” (Letters, 292). (Peculiar ­things exceed philosophy. I ­will return to the peculiar and par­tic­ul­ ar in a l­ater discussion of Adorno and Stevens.) Before telling us about t­ hese peculiar ­things, however, Stevens makes a surprising comment: “Very likely 113

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the mere delineation of the poet would help to bring him into being, now or ­later” (Letters, 292). The defense of the poet, his delineation, giving him line and shape, is an essential peculiarity of poetry and a necessary prelude to the poet’s work. “Mozart, 1935” works out the delineation Stevens has in mind. In it, a young pianist sits in a garret practicing “arpeggios,” while “they throw stones upon the roof . . . ​­because they carry down the stairs / a body in rags” (107). From the beginning, death, poverty, and hostility surround the practicing artist, setting his scene of work, but while “the snow is falling,” the artist must “Strike the piercing chord,” sounding the ­great per­sis­tent creation of the past: That lucid souvenir of the past, The divertimento; That airy dream of the ­future, The unclouded concerto . . . (107)

The speaker urges the “Poet, seated at the piano,” to play the past, imagine the ­future, sound the imagination—­and most impor­tant, abandon the subject, the mere object we critics fantasize as the self-­made figure, the self-­fashioning man. Be thou the voice, Not you. Be thou, be thou The voice of angry fear, The voice of this besieging pain. (107)5

The poem’s title date, 1935, brings the period’s crises into its imagination. This is a thoroughly secular poem, with the work and lives of h ­ umans intertwined with anger, art, beauty, and ritual—­all ­these the marks of finitude. It delineates the poet, not only disciplining the poet into the proper art but also enacting, in voice and line, the proper poet already formed, the Mozart of song, staging the scene of poetic formation and function. In the face of finitude, to be “poet” the ephebe at the piano must first learn discipline and responsibility. Stevens’s readers expect to be told that a poet must have a mind of winter, and so it comes as no surprise that in ­these verses, the voice dictates, “Be thou that wintry sound / As of the g­ reat wind howling / By which sorrow is released / Dismissed, absolved / In a starry placating” (107). The motif is 114

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familiar but attenuated yet focused—­the poem is an urban pastoral lament, in which Virgil tutors the young creator into being. In the face of finitude, facing the broken promises of economy and history, perhaps echoing Joyce’s “The Dead” with its universal snow, we see not ruin but permanent forms of imagination, of poiesis in history, leaving its effective and forceful artifacts at work in the world, sustaining themselves and f­uture generations, calling yet ­others to their own inspiration: We may return to Mozart. He was young, and we, we are old. The snow is falling And the streets are full of cries. Be seated, thou. (107)

The language in the poem is very severe, with s­ imple rhythms, strong accents, and monosyllables, rather than the effusive lines, the lavish imagery, and the elaborated musical sensuality of the Harmonium poems. In a short poem from that volume on somewhat similar motifs, “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Under­neath the Willow,” Stevens also plays his musical card in conclusion, but rather than ending with “streets full of cries,” he gives us “bliss submerged beneath appearance / In an interior ocean’s rocking / Of long, capricious fugues and chorals” (63). This poem is in a style and voice familiar in the early Stevens. It is sensuous, musical in phrase, synesthesia-­ like in its embrace of perception and creation. It heightens the gathered senses by sound and tonic color. It appears easy, ­free of anxiety, enjoyable, and startling in its beauty. The poet is profligate. This poem opens with a brazen declaration of original poetic in­de­pen­dence that, nonetheless, feels it must account for its enemies while overwhelming them: “My titillations have no foot-­notes / And their memorials are the phrases / Of idiosyncratic ­music” (62). T ­ hese lines are in the most characteristic mode of Stevens’s style. The chief characteristic is the assertive authority of the style itself as a needed creativity, as the proper mode of poiesis. If, as I argued in the second chapter, Auerbach raises style to the power of creating God as the expression of a mode of life, as a mode of apprehension—in both senses of that word, as a taking on and as a state of fear—­then we should read like Auerbach and take seriously Stevens’s assertive poetic style. We can ask a s­ imple question: What does the poetry say in defense of its “idiosyncratic m ­ usic”? The two central three-­line stanzas (they are near 115

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tercets) give a condensed answer to this question, building t­oward the poem’s final image of “capricious fugues and chorals”: The love that ­will not be transported In an old, frizzled, flambeaued manner, But muses on its eccentricity, Is like a vivid apprehension Of bliss beyond the masters of plaster, Or paper souvenirs of rapture, (62)

This defense of poetry in a specific style pivots on a simile: “Is like.” T ­ hese lines share the double-­edged potentialities of Ezra Pound’s modernist ethos, “make it new.” If Pound translates the Chinese through the French, as we have good reason to believe, then “make it new” is also “do it again.”6 Translation, as so often and especially with Pound, has a Janus-­like quality that in this instance helps us grasp something about Stevens’s delineation of the poet. ­These lines embody precisely how making it new and ­doing it again coexist. To do again is not to iterate but to create anew along the line of such creativity. It is to make anew again. It values tradition in a more complex way than is often associated with Pound and suggests a range of value associated with the poet making anew again. “Love” is the highest of ­these values, the most precious power, real­ity, and experience in Stevens’s poem, but the poetry’s greatest responsibility is not love’s creation but its “transport.” The “old, frizzled, flambeaued manner”—­given that manner is style—­can no longer do the work or job of transport. The poet must not make the old manner new; nor must the poet simply make a new manner. Rather, Stevens delineates the poet making “manner” itself anew as that which is and does poetic work, a pro­cess more foundational, creative, and loving than the newness of an old manner.7 Whence the energy for that work? It is love, which muses on its own eccentricity. What is its goal? It is the expression of the species’ dream, actuated in the earthly world. Love is eccentric in being outside the old and frizzled styles, and, being always itself, it is the only motive for the muses’ work, leading to the final gift of “capricious fugues.” As Stevens draws the poet, the two essential foundations of poetics appear in style: love and transport. The latter is many ­things that help a poem configure eros as style. Idiosyncrasy and eccentricity metonymize transport as the work of style and its substance. 116

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“My titillations” seek and find their memorials in “idiosyncratic ­music,” which means that eros always finds a place in memory and language ­because it is the source for as well as the result of their creative work. Transport is a meta­phor for poiesis, which is to say the double movement of rapture and conveyance. Ecstasy is always eccentric in putting the self beside itself, into the world as part of its dream. The old styles no longer meet the very compulsion of love or poetry to be ecstatic; they can no longer transport it. Love is just that which is not narcissism, not self-­absorbed, and so it is poetry, even in this instance in a seeming post-­Romantic lyric, but it is not a work of or for the self, or selfhood. The self is the old, exhausted style. The renewed style of eccentric love requires the completion of transport. In this minor poem, style carries over love and art. The poem pivots on a simile, which seems so slight a figure that it invites critical objection that it is flighty, unserious—­objections common to ­those who dislike Stevens’s style. Simile is, indeed, highly eccentric at this point, and Stevens’s use is idiosyncratic, especially since literary modernism was an era that admired the meta­phor of Donne and Baudelaire.8 Simile belongs to epic, of course, and not to the romantic. I do not mean that the works of Words­worth, Keats, and their contemporaries do not have similes. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats uses one simile weakly: “Thou, ­silent form! dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!”9 The main movements of the ode, however, through the major stanzas closing ­toward its conclusion, rest entirely on power­ful implicit extended meta­ phors, conceits as complex as any we find in Donne or Milton. Stevens was an avid reader of Keats, and critics often discuss Keats as an influence, noting sometime similarities of style and motif. “The Eve of St. Agnes” is a better instance of Keats’s regular use of similes to produce minor and local comparisons to express a quality appropriate to his major figure: Half-­hidden, like a mermaid in sea-­weed, Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees, In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed, But dares not look ­behind, or all the charm is fled. (202)

Stevens’s simile is more daring. The grammar lets us abridge it: “The love that ­will not be transported . . . ​Is like a vivid apprehension.” Transport and apprehension balance in parallel, as if each completes the other. More accurately, though, the two are not outside each other as supplements, in 117

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a movement of expression and comprehension. “Love that ­will not be transported” in old styles is recalcitrant, hard, and complete, d ­ oing its own business of rapture, eccentricity, displacement, and translation. Transport is a means and a content—­a ship and its criminal cargo. In all that complex recalcitrance, love, which motivates creation and as such does real work in the world, overcomes its own incommensurability through the congruence of a knowable likeness: love that cannot be transported Is like a vivid apprehension Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster, Or paper souvenirs of rapture, (“Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts,” 62)

Now, the poem completes the essential task of transporting its erotic origins and forces to what seems another place, already waiting in and as the world. What­ever once motivated the souvenirs of rapture, vividly displayed, is an erotics, which makes itself known as a hidden motive in all the art we inherit. The mutes of plaster, the paper souvenirs—­these are not ruins at all. Apprehension in this case, while inescapably tinged with fear, achieves the ideal of art and its worldly work: proximity to the force that motivates the creation of ­things and expresses the energies of ­human creation in the world. Untransportable love is like the bliss we would apprehend ­behind—­and that is the force and motive not merely of art, which might appear to be capricious in the face of finitude, but also of all ­human works. The poem achieves its victory over the false prob­lem of the untransportable in the “bliss submerged beneath appearance,” for that submerged bliss is alone what gives the world “long, capricious fugues and chorals.” The musical motifs link “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts” of 1923 with “Mozart, 1935.” In the m ­ iddle of the Depression, with Hitler and Stalin in power, death and ruins appear more forcefully. The “paper souvenirs of rapture” had once been enough, but in 1935, the poet, love, and transport confront “a body in rags” and streets “full of cries.” “Mozart, 1935” challenges the poetics of love, which demand a new transport to a new name: That lucid souvenir of the past, The divertimento; That airy dream of the ­future, The unclouded concerto . . . (107) 118

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The ­later poem seems to answer, almost to reprimand the e­ arlier, to let the first poem’s motive dissolve in the second poem’s incomplete sentence, the absence of a predicate, the loss of verbal motive. Nevertheless, ­these lines, ­after their caesura, renew the forward movement in a diminuendo: “The snow is falling.” Stevens’s poetry is famous for working with the motifs of cold and winter; so when snow falls, whereas in a lesser poem or to a lesser imagination defeat might loom among the ruins, from the elder poet, however, comes the command, “Strike the piercing chord.” The young poet, the ephebe, becomes “thou” by discipline, in embracing the task of love: “Be thou . . . ​ / The voice of angry fear, / The voice of this besieging pain” (108). “Mozart, 1935” has all the superficial marks of personal lyric. The “scene of instruction” in this poem, however, is explic­itly worldly, and it comes in the form of stones raining down on the head of the apprentice poet sitting at the piano.10 Before the poet becomes “thou,” while “seated at the piano,” he plays “the pre­sent, its hoo-­hoo-­hoo, / Its shoo-­shoo-­shoo, its ric-­a-­nic, / Its envious cachinnation” (107). The poem’s “they” greet this playing with a shower of stones, Golgotha-­like, moving together in their own rhythm with ragged body down the stairs. The body moving down the stairs, the real and finite played over and against the “practice arpeggios,” brings the earthly with its hard, inescapable mortal rhythms down on the seated youth, who sitting in the midst must learn the art of ritual transport. This image is part of the poem’s inheritance. Walt Whitman uses the same image in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass to represent the movement of old styles, especially Eu­ro­pean styles, from the ­house of poetry. Whitman transforms the dead body moving away from the poet into an image of the sublime, the brilliant sun of a new day. Stevens does more and better than the Whitman of 1855 does. In 1935, the young American poet no longer has by birthright the privilege of a barbaric yawp. Even the practicing student is old, like the speaking voice. The young traveler to the wise Virgil of this poem—­each separately and the two figurally together are already belated like the nation, compared to the mythically young Mozart. The long, youthful Whitmanic cata­logues of American scenes return in this poem as merely “streets . . . ​full of cries.” The profligacy of youth, w ­ hether Whitman or Mozart, did its work in the world, in expressing the ­human dream, creating resources of imagination, specific imaginative figures—­such as the body moving from the house—­that remain active in the world, as part of the archive of poetry. That profligacy 119

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transports itself, becomes resident in its world, and does its erotic and creative work enabling new figures. Stevens said repeatedly that delineating the poet was a key step in setting up the poet. Each time the poet delineates the poet, poiesis does its primary job. It never creates the final and complete figure. It never achieves or aspires to that Emersonian fantasy of the Central Man. Rather, it adds another item to the memory palace of culture. It expresses, metonymically, the anagogic desire of all poiesis. This mannered poem is, of course, the delineation of the poet as a figure who can appeal to all fine minds in the ways of poetry. More specifically, it delineates the figure of the poet, anagogically, in the crises of its moment controlled by art. That delineation takes the form of a command, an injunction to find the style that meets the erotic demands of the now. So the speaker sings to the ephebe, to himself, and to all: Be thou that wintry sound As of the ­great wind howling, By which sorrow is released, Dismissed, absolved In a starry placating. (108)

Poetic ­music, the poet singer of songs, assumes the community’s traditional obligation to rec­ord its history, transform it into art or myth, retain and transmute it, sublimate its pain, by appeasing the forces that cause pain—­ primitive-­like, in creating the placating sky. Indeed, poetry’s ­great primitive power lies in being like ­those primary forces to challenge them as one of them, making them habitable despite the terror and misery they inflict. The formal imperative “Be Thou” tells us that Stevens knows that poetry, perhaps like philosophy, when it is itself, distinguishes itself from its social real­ity precisely as the necessary mode of its relation to it. To be an austere and very other “thou” rather than the youthful “you” moves the poet to placate a sky that in its natu­ral finitude and social occlusion represses freedom and joy. No m ­ atter how tragic the fate of art might be for many modern critics, in this poem Stevens displays and insists on the imaginative strength to prevail over existing conditions that repeat themselves direly across society. The poem is compensatory, competitive, critical, exemplary—­engaged with its world, naming what other­wise would not exist, and so instantiating the possibility of alternatives to what is. This is the work of joy, not defeat, tragedy, or ruin.11 120

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Even such a small poem as “Mozart, 1935” shows how Stevens worked with the resources of classical tradition more than the ego symbolism of the Romantic lyric. This poem’s donnée is epic. The key is daringly used similes. The frame of “Mozart, 1935” is classical, not Wordsworthian.12 Its patterns emerge from the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedy. Its key materials are classical. The dangerous winds of winter come from Aeolus and his epic cognates, which so many heroes must flee or master in song if not by acts of physical courage. The strongest classical cognate in “Mozart, 1935” and several other poems is the Virgil-­Dante relation from the Comedy. This brings impor­tant ­things about Stevens’s poetic ambition into sight, t­hings that are essential to the value of his poetry and, if we judge him successful, essential to how we think of the fate of poetry and the nature of criticism. Stevens relies on Virgil ­because they have an anagogic poetics in common. Stevens’s similes are a figural link to Virgil’s extraordinary breadth. When Northrop Frye took up the g­ reat classical epics t­oward the end of The Anatomy of Criticism, his Christian humanism s­ haped the results of his investigations and influenced his judgments. He claimed to find the superiority of biblical to classical writing in the breadth of the latter’s vision, insisting that the Hebrew Bible contains the epic devices within a larger frame and, with Milton in mind, that “­there is, as we go from the Classical to the Christian epic, a pro­gress in completeness of theme,” if not in value.13 Frye is wrong in his comparative evaluation, which we see reading with Stevens and other ­great poets in mind. Virgil’s extensive use of simile throughout the Aeneid is an impor­tant pre­ce­dent for Stevens’s use of the figure. A Virgilian simile links Stevens and Virgil in a secular proj­ect of poetic anagogy that Frye did not consider. When Frye discusses Virgil, he writes mostly about the Aeneid and mentions the Eclogues in passing. In Anatomy of Criticism, however, he never touches on the Georgics. Had he done so, he might have found a way to theorize anagoges as a worldly proj­ect that does not lead to or require transcendence to complete its horizon. For example, in one vital early scene in the Aeneid, an impressive simile directly echoes the Georgics, especially its fourth book. In this moment, poetry appears, in Frye’s terms, as the working rec­ord of poiesis as the externalization of the ­human dream in culture. If we keep the Georgics in sight, as Virgil’s simile demands, we have no choice but to remember the close association between culture and agriculture, cultivation, and the ­human reshaping of the natu­ral world. 121

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In the Aeneid, book 1, Virgil ties the building of cities, the cultivation of nature, and the pro­cesses of visionary poiesis together so that, from a certain height, the unified ­human effort to make nature the container of the ­human dream leaves nothing beyond itself. In book 11 of Paradise Lost, Milton also writes a “prospect poem,” in which, from a height overlooking all of h ­ uman history to the parousia or eschaton, the Archangel Michael lays out for Adam all God’s plan for humanity. In book 1 of the Aeneid, more briefly, Aeneas from a (lower) height overlooking the building of Carthage sees the ideal of classical culture, the perfectly or­ga­nized city-­state, the paradigm of ­human dreams and culture, emerging from purely ­human effort, which in turn contains the institutions of transcendence. At first, Aeneas describes what he sees, reflecting on the realization of this new city. Aeneas is, of course, the perfect lens to idealize this imaginatively demanding act. Nonetheless, Virgil develops this prospect poem surprisingly, setting aside Aeneas, the view, and the city. If we read the poem for meaning, we might say that ­after detailing the work of law, commerce, religion, and art, Virgil makes the listener or reader grasp a parallel to nature’s ways. H ­ umans as a part of nature would appear to do at their level what nature, in its ways, does without ­human agency. Along such lines, Virgil’s simile is no more than a lengthier version of Keats’s in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” that is, the appending of qualities to the major figure. Allegory is, however, an inadequate category for grasping t­ hese lines. Virgil is not satisfied with parallels, balances, and elucidations or elaboration. ­Here is how the narrator describes the work Aeneas see in the new city: As hard at their tasks as bees in early summer, that work the blooming meadows ­under the sun, they escort a new brood out, young adults now, or press the oozing honey into their combs, the nectar brimming the bulging cells, or gather up the plunder workers haul back in, or close ranks like an army, driving the drones, that lazy crew, from home. The hive seethes with life, exhaling the scent of honey sweet with thyme.14

In this simile, the natu­ral world comes to the comparison already marked by personification, which helps us see that the bee world is a double culture, the cultivation of honey and the ­human cultivation of the bees, ­expressed as 122

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a world already literary. Virgil’s simile at first sight clarifies the complexity of h ­ uman ­labor by drawing it into parallel with natu­ral ­labor, showing us the reach of natu­ral life across the species. In this simile, however, the hive is already humanized, that is, already appears invested with the same dream of ­human life as the creation of the city. Nature, if you ­will, comes to the comparison with city building already transformed by culture into the landscape that holds ­human dreams—of cooperation, unity, sensuality, and reproduction. The bees “escort a new brood out” (cum gentis adultos / educunt fetus)—­education, reproduction, generation are all part of the same perfectly or­ga­nized and easily manifest surface of cultivated life. In this moment, Virgil makes us aware that all that can be seen or known is cultivated, made in poiesis by giving names, all on the model of ­human dream. The founding of the city is the most profound ritual; in a way, it is the basis of all other rituals; they exist only and always within a culture that provides institutions for their repetition. The city is the ­human dream, but the poem, in presenting all the ele­ments it can name as already the result of h ­ uman acts—­the poem contains the entire world transformed into the expression of ­human dream. This is the burden transported by the simile. Virgil’s achievement, as we see in such small scenes as this, is to make poetry anagogic, that is, to make it clear that the mind of the poet can contain even nature transformed. The h ­ uman is not contained within the natu­ral, as a meaningful reading of the bee simile might suggest. On the contrary, the bees are already within nature as an item of the h ­ uman dream, as one figure archived, that is, named, by poets. Metonymically, this means that the natu­ral is inside the ­human dream, in the memory palace of poiesis, already transported by imagination. Perhaps, as Frye suggests, the poet is at best on the circumference of this real­ity in the work of imagination, but nothing, neither poet conceived as Central Man nor any form of transcendence, is ­either external to it or redeeming it from within. As Stevens asks in 1935, “­Isn’t a freshening of life a t­ hing of consequence?” (Letters, 293). Stevens understood and aspired to poetry within this anagogic proj­ect. If he succeeded in freshening life, then his work should be a vital resource for readers and critics.15 His language was per­sis­tent. He often spoke of poetry as a h ­ uman practice with an essential quality outside the reach of personal psy­chol­ogy and historicism. “Poetry itself is unchanged.”16 The status of poetry changes, so that its work includes the necessary remaking of the poet, in form and function. Such remaking is not, however, merely a response to 123

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changed historical circumstances. The poet’s remaking is consequent on poetry’s own function as the articulation in situ of the externalization of ­human dream in culture. As such, the act of poetry and the creation of the poet are inseparable, since the poet is not outside the dream but is rather the locus of imagination’s own self-­annunciation, self-­pronouncement. In Stevens’s best American, the idea goes like this: “Very likely the mere delineation of the poet would help to bring him into being, now or l­ater” (Letters, 292). The poet needs no angelic visitor to announce his joyous necessity. Moreover, rewriting the Evangelist himself in John 1, Stevens’s poet comes incarnate in the grace of h ­ uman love, finitude, and poiesis.

Imagining Poets During Stevens’s study of Vico, he wrote the line, “scienza nuova a g­ reat liberation of creative power.”17 In Parts of a World (1942), he published a short poem, “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun,” an emblem of all that is left out by the allegorical ruinizers: Some ­things, niño, some ­things are like this, That instantly and in themselves they are gay And you and I are such ­things, O most miserable . . . For a moment they are gay and are a part Of an ele­ment, the exactest ele­ments of us, In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own. It is ­there, being imperfect, and with ­these t­ hings And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned, That we are joyously ourselves and we think Without the ­labor of thought, in that ele­ment, And we feel, in a way apart, for a moment, as if ­There was a bright scienza outside of ourselves, A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing, The ­will to be and to be total in belief, Provoking a laughter, an agreement, by surprise. (224–225)18

The poem is an education, a letter to a young person. It offers wisdom, a proper attitude to what we should cherish as the remarkable t­hing about 124

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us that we might too easily lose or forget: “O most miserable . . .” It recommends that we embrace the gaiety that is ourselves and the t­hings that are gay, quickly and in the instant. Gaiety? During the world war, ­after depression, during a Holocaust, and while bombs destroy cities and millions? “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun” appears in Parts of a World, in which Stevens also published “The Man on the Dump” and “Connoisseur of Chaos,” titles that—in the big picture—­put a chill on all that gaiety. Critics could read t­hese poems against each other, hoping to find a complex vision, a worldview marked by the contrapuntal musings of imagination over the themes, forms, and materials of a mind’s movement. This mind would be ideal, b ­ ecause it is unsettled, probing, disclosing, making movement and the pro­cess of discovery a necessary and revelatory virtue. It would become the virtue of musing, a gallery of moods, and ready for many—­but not all—­readers. It would be wrong to follow this path ­because the poems are created objects, not what they seem to be. When we learn from Words­worth that a lyric poem is overhearing a poet speaking privately, what we have also learned is that a poem is a mimesis, an acting of what could or might be said or heard. Talent and affect lie in the arrangement. The poem imitates not only the private voice secretly overheard but also the voice in per­for­mance. The poetry is staged work controlled by the poetic arts and crafts of imaginative invention and rhetorical skills. Thinking other­wise, readers allegorize the writing into immediate expression, uncontrolled, while critics must accept the poet as aware of inheritance, effect, and what is needful. Poetry is always written ­after the archive to which it belongs and from which it steps out. When Stevens imagines a course of poetry and poetics at Prince­ton, he specifically excludes the teaching of already-­written texts as the teaching of poetry but marks it nonetheless as essential to the work that is poetry. Belatedness is inescapable and enabling rather than a psychodrama of decay or an allegory of social ruin and economic dehumanization. “The Man on the Dump” illustrates this creative dynamic, which sustains gaiety. By 1942, Benjamin was dead; the Nazis ­were in Paris; Auschwitz began its exterminations; and the Manhattan Proj­ect had begun. In such a moment, the very traditional phrase “down in the dumps” became the modest figure of the torn poet, thrown out on the junk heap of ruins, “The Man on the Dump.” ­Here is a sharp counterpoint to Apollinaire and the even darker Benjamin. “The Man on the Dump” is a figure of depression, of 125

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melancholy, placed on the ash heap of history, circumscribed by the detritus of war, nightmare, and history’s failed proj­ects. In an odd way, the man on the dump is Apollinaire’s Dionysus and Benjamin’s angel, but unlike the latter, he is strong enough or arrested enough to find a still moment in the midst of and ­after the fact, to take stock. How can the poet educate the niño without first coming to sit down in the dumps? Stevens is repeating the motifs of “Mozart, 1935” but on a grander scale and against the even greater and more dreadful pressures of the real than he had seven years ­earlier. Rather than the ­simple but demanding instruction required by the e­ arlier poem, a passing over of enabling tradition, moving the young to create the new, the ­later poem puts the poet through the dark ele­ments of learning so that he cannot stay above the noise and the dead. The literality of the real and the residues of past creations—­all ­these are the ­actual base, close and in contact with the poet, often even as a result of his and his pre­ de­ces­sors’ best acts of creation. What is the new passage of the ­later poem? A necessary moment, to be torn and blown, but not an ultimate point if ­there is enough imaginative strength to overmaster the temptation to abjection, gnosis, and “redemption” that the scene so often offers. The poet crafts the staged circumstance and possibility so art might work its way to poiesis in the transformation of expected markets of affect, form, and garbage. In a word, the issue is imaginative strength, the most impor­tant quality of worldly humanity. Conventionally, the imagination tests itself in an agon of its own worst fears. (Stevens’s “Auroras of Autumn” is among other ­things an essential staging of t­ hese vast scares.) “O most miserable” names the temptation, which is not death, ruin, or the absence of God. The worst fear is yielding to the tug of defeat to which all t­hese and more invite the poet, the maker. The convention is an old one, common in English-­language poetry, in many forms and locales, at least since Milton’s “Lycidas” and Keats’s “Ode to Melancholy.” In modernist poetry, Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” comes to mind. The temptation is to yield to the allure of defeat, to the power inherent in the images and stories of ruin and abjection, to the anxiety (historical or not) inherent in ­human finitude. “The Man on the Dump” is the rec­ord of a strong imagination trained by the genre to expose the mechanisms of temptation. The poem is not merely the belated exposition or reenactment of the mode but the anatomy of the imagination’s movements t­oward the strength that, once heard as a call, always remains as the first quality of ­human making. 126

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Since to be in the dumps is an old, long-­standing colloquialism for melancholy and depression, for the dark night of the soul, then fittingly the poem opens as an Abenlied—­“Day creeps down”—­echoing a long mystical tradition that finds its solutions in the transcendent, formed as divine eroticism. Think simply of the ending to Dante’s Paradiso or the ­great mystic accomplishments of George Herbert and Teresa of Avila.19 Phi­los­o­phers of weak thought and critics of weak imagination—to say l­ittle for the moment of “marketplace” artists and critics—­thoroughly expect that no modern poem, no work by a secular poet, can complete the traditional form.20 T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets, a postconversion poem, can stand as the counterpoint to the dump. Religious and social conservatives can take plea­sure from the success of “­Little Gidding,” and postsecularist contemporaries— if they are not antielitists—­should relish its renunciation of liberalism, secularism, and modernity in the name of mystic enthusiasm and a state of grace. Most impor­tant, perhaps, the enthusiasts of weakness, especially if they are or ­were religious, can find comfort in the poem’s success, offering its achievement as proof that in a secular nihilistic world—if we set aside faith—­art, thought, and society must resolve themselves into the smallness of low ambition.21 The Four Quartets is an astonishingly strong imaginative act. Eliot, albeit in diminished lyrical form, reprises abstractly the epic achievement of his paragon, Dante. He closes a circular form, mythically, upon itself, finding ­there a solution to melancholy and ruination in a personal vision unavailable to critics and poets of lesser strength: And the end of all our exploring ­Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.22

We should remember that Eliot comes to this condition of achieved vision and redemption, of renewal in this life, only by giving it the conditions of death as passage to a new life. Renunciation above all, but at least Eliot has the courage to name death as the passage one must embrace if one hopes for a utopian ending, an allegorical redemption: “­Every poem an epitaph /  . . . ​ / We die with the ­dying” (38). It is deeply ironic that Eliot, often maligned for his conservatism, should be so emblematic of a critical proj­ect that cannot embrace his open solutions to the crises of modernity, especially the crises of Eu­rope. For his 127

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utopia, he renounces all. In fact, “­Little Gidding” makes us understand the poet’s knowledge that achieving desired utopian messianic redemptions requires renouncing the world and all its works. Eliot had become an Anglican with a voluptuary’s taste for the Book of Common Prayer, echoes of which we hear in the final lines of “­Little Gidding”: Quick now, ­here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing nothing less than every­thing) And all ­shall be well and All manner of ­thing ­shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-­folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the ­rose are one (39)23

“Quick” is a cognate for life, of course, not just for speed, but also for movement, the capacity for the same. The grammar is a command: “Quick now”; but it is also a substantive clearly modified by itself: having died to death, we are quick now, in the now, h ­ ere, and always. In studies of Anglo-­ American high modernism, aware of Catholicism in its many modes, critics often call moments such as this in Eliot an instance of “sacramental aesthetics.”24 In Eliot’s very capable hands, the incarnation established the presence of the divine in all historical times and places. In this context, we should see, of course, certain contacts with the messianism of Benjamin and his heirs, if not in po­liti­cal ambitions then in motive and orientation ­toward modernity or more generally the worldly situation of finite humanity. Eliot might have established the modernist preoccupation with ruins and ruination in The Waste Land, when he used fragments from vari­ous religions and myths. “­These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”25 The line, often taken to refer to the entirety of the poem, would then embody the presumed modernist formalist aesthetic by which extended meta­phor, ironized across time and space, globalizes the plastic order inherent to poetic form. Specifically, at the end of the poem, ­these lines belong to the voice of a fisher king, sitting on a “shore,” with aridity ­behind him. Myths and rituals of renewal fascinated readers and critics, and rightly so b ­ ecause Eliot’s use belonged, as we see in Apollinaire, to the modernist fascination with ­these topics. The final fragments, the shoring against ruin, come from many Eu­ro­pean languages and traditions, nicely in the postwar of its time 128

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anticipating and embodying the ceaseless intellectual preoccupation that became the crisis of Eu­rope. Eliot, the American, fled his homeland’s aridity for the spirituality of Eu­rope, with its old ruins and cultures. As in so many other ­things, however, Eliot set the pace among the moderns, experiencing the break between the book and the ­people, between the tradition and the now. Worrying the emptiness of history presented by the culture of the commodity, he shored his ruins with the remnants of gospel and mysticism, especially in his own Orientalist fashion, the mysticism of “eastern religions.” Stevens was no admirer of Eliot. In 1942, Eliot might have served as one model for the man on the dump, himself a faint echo of Keats listening to the nightingale. In The Waste Land, before his conversion, Eliot already had the instinct of weakness. Notoriously, he had made poetry’s value dependent on its ties with religion. On this point, we must exercise critical care. For some, religion is no dif­fer­ent from poetry, that is, as we have seen in Auerbach’s work, mono­the­istic gods are effects of style so that a continuum ­houses poetry and gospel.26 Auerbach, like Vico his pre­ de­ces­sor, understood primitive spiritual expression, including the creation of the mono­the­istic gods, as worldly acts of ­human beings. Although, as Vico makes clear (and Nietz­sche follows in part on this), ­these creations emerge from primitive emotions including fear, the very force and power of the gods, rituals, and spirits so created speak to the strength of h ­ uman imagination not only in defense but in the creative reimagining of the world. Oddly, vari­ous Christian-­influenced poets and critics accept the trope that h ­ uman imagination completes or extends the work of God, remaking the creator’s nature. In most of ­these stories, however, the poet, the ­human imagination, occupies a secondary position. T ­ here ­were, as always, alternative traditions. Philip Sidney, for example and by contrast, adapted the Christian motif to extend the power of ­human imagination to something primary, something strong enough to stand in the face of dumb nature and not only imitate or perfect it but challenge it with its own productions.27 Sidney’s work takes up prob­lems that are still essential to our own time but that involved debate from the Italian High Re­nais­sance onward to the seventeenth ­century at least. Sidney comes near to the paint­erly question of w ­ hether to work from life or the ideal, a question that m ­ atters, as we ­shall see, to Rembrandt’s art. Sidney’s lines are famous: 129

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­ here is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the works of nature T for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend. . . . ​Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making ­things e­ ither better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such a never ­were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclopes, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.28

Sidney had a poet’s mea­sure of ­human imagination as it worked in history to perfect the inherited world and reimagine within it.29 Sidney places his primary dramatic and critical emphases on the ­human imaginative power to rival, to complete, or to perfect not only the first creation but also the first creator. Indeed, the logic of his figure is inescapable: in poiesis, the creator is a secondary figure, at best the name that poets should give to the creation done prior to their own work. Nature becomes in this figure, then, the rec­ord of work, the given of the world that—­like Virgil’s beehive—­always carries the marks of creation and work that is incomplete. At the same time, this figure does not prophesy or foreshadow a completed world. It has no need for instruments to discover ­human historical capacities legitimated by a messianism that inherently solves, en avant, all metaphysical prob­lems and eases the profound anx­ie­ ties looped to ­human finitude. In addition, nature is never dumb, always carry­ing the marks of ­human adaptation. Moreover, Sidney’s complex figure generalizes imagination and poiesis from the poet to the species, while stressing the variable and fragmented but encircling nature of “wit.” In this case, wit is not merely irony. It is a pre­de­ces­sor to Stevens’s gaiety. It is the joy of creation, the generosity of play that depends on the given while accepting, happily, the circumstantial situation of such wit. Indeed, wit is strength but, in the world, as a mode of creative operation within a nature made as creation and remade constantly as such, thanks to the high power of work, of poiesis. If ­there is an originary or first creator, then it exists only as a primary name for a ­human historical pro­cess. How ­else should we explain Sidney’s proto-­Vichian invocation of early or primitive heroes, demigods, and the like? Of course, Sidney’s references are literary, that is, they postdate ­those primitive moments Vico cites in which ­humans create gods and myths. Sidney loses no force on this point. The literary specifics, familiar 130

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from classical texts, belong as well to the age of the epic, to the lost organicism so regretted in the nostalgic crises of Eu­rope. Moreover, Sidney’s invocation of literary creations—­are the Greek gods literary creations?—­ stresses the continuity of poiesis across time and space, grounding thereby the value of historical and geo­graph­i­cal comparative knowledge. Fi­nally, in the ­human imagination lies the capacity for joyous, per­sis­tent making and revision, happy in the power of wit to work within circumstances that require improving. The ­human maker is not ashamed by finitude and does not search for sinks to hold its desire, to which to sublimate its erotic capacities.30 As Stevens’s line in “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun” puts it, “A gaiety that is being, not merely knowing” (225). In the spirit of Vico, however, or of Sidney and many o ­ thers, when appreciating Stevens, we should speak in terms of strength, for surely imaginative and critical confidence should interest us now as what is needful. In “The Man on the Dump,” Stevens dramatizes all the gestures in and by which the imagination keeps and cherishes its strength. Given Stevens’s readings in Keats and the poets’ sometime similarity in motif, we cannot get a good sense of what Stevens accomplishes in this poem ­unless we resist the temptation to assign him the magical ­human power that Keats called “negative capability.” Coleridge, it is true, lacked in Keats’s eyes the courage and strength to confront the uncertainties and fragments that finitude pre­ sents to the mind. Yet Coleridge believed in the strength of mind and imagination, even though the quality of his aesthetic and his imagination’s love for the symbolic resolution of par­tic­u­lar into universal led Keats to judge him poorly. Keats, in other words, criticizes Coleridge’s anxiety but he also criticizes him for seeking strength elsewhere than in poetic imagination. Keats’s famous formula has led readers to see an ethical and phenomenological openness in his work, a necessary availability to the given world that is not, however, in many readers’ eyes, congruent at all with the strength of Stevens’s imagination, at least not the Stevens who pushes back against the pressures of the real.31 The real’s pressures come from and are themselves the result of imagination’s previous works. The poem makes this point about lateness quite strongly. “The Man on the Dump,” in its final stanza, has the poet sitting, beating “an old tin can, lard pail” (185). What is the poet ­doing? What are all ­humans ­doing keeping rhythm and making noise using the ruins deposited on the dump? “One beats and beats for that which one believes. / That’s 131

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what one wants to get near” (185). The stanza consists of quick citations, of figural fragments of imaginative belief and desire; suddenly, it pauses long enough to give us Keats directly: “Did the nightingale torture the ear / Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear / Solace itself in peevish birds?” (185). (In the closer shadow of Keats, in The Waste Land, Eliot’s Philomela, tongueless but transformed, tosses “Jug Jug” into the air [“The Waste Land,” 54.]) Several ele­ments of Stevens’s art appear ­here. Of course, he is late in the tradition of Keats. He has already told us that “the dump is full / Of images” (184). He is sharper, shorter, and more modern and biting as Keats’s “light-­winged Dryad” becomes peevish (“Ode on a Nightingale,” 207). Stevens and Keats share a universal condition. Stevens, however, puts aside Keats’s opening fascination with the affective state of his own subject—­“My heart aches” (“Ode on a Nightingale,” 207)—­and gives us instead a more classical and yet recognizably romantic nature trope: “Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up” (“Man on the Dump,” 184). (Stevens is also alluding to and rewriting Keats’s Endymion, where Selene having become Cynthia loves the young shepherd.) Moreover, in Keats, the nightingale “wast not born for death” (“Ode on a Nightingale,” 207), whereas in Stevens, “the moon creeps up / To the bubbling of bassoons” (“Man on the Dump,” 185), which is the best meta­phor that the secular imagination can make of the erotic sensuality of creation and survival. Stevens’s imagination did not need grounding ­either in metaphysical or cultural authority, no m ­ atter the form or content of e­ ither. (This is why critics who worry about epistemological questions cannot read Stevens.) Two ­great students of poetry, Vico and Auerbach, who read Homer and Dante very deeply, give us a sense of how Stevens’s imagination worked on life and the products of its actions and desires. Stevens always found life ­there before him, not in the form of ruins awaiting allegorization or nostalgia and regret. Stevens is inhabited by imagination, the pro­cesses of creation, making, ­will, and action everywhere potential but especially vibrant in the arts of creation, no ­matter their venue or form. Keats stands in melancholy before what one of his antithetic heirs calls “a heap of broken images” (“The Waste Land,” 51), and Benjamin ­settles for self-­destructive exhaustion before the final destructive image of his own weakness.32 Stevens, however, represents the secular imagination, facing and embracing the contingencies of finitude, the details of life already being lived, and the imagination’s own worst threats to itself and its obligations. The secular 132

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imagination does not take the form of the Emersonian self, the G ­ iant One, so admired by messianist, idealist, or post-­Emersonian. The last stanza of “Man on the Dump” makes clear that it is not an Emersonian poem of self-­making. Stevens’s turn from Keats’s subject-­centered departure of writing into and out of self-­crisis makes precisely that point. That last stanza is interrogative; the questions seem to allow for yes-­or-no answers, but they do not. Rather, each question raises and recalls realities and pre­de­ces­sors’ responses and creations, not to give them all new meaning again as ruins of failure. The effect is to move through and above the accumulations to the original of imagination that left all ­behind. “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the” (186). The poem comes to this point having first emptied out the mise-­en-­scène of the poetic ego, the exhausted familiarity of self-­discovery or self-­making—­whatever one wishes to call it. The poem cannot stand any longer as a device that brings experience of ruins into relation with egoism’s needs. The scene is clearly set: “One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. / One beats and beats for that which one believes” (185). This is an impor­tant moment in Stevens, reproduced elsewhere in his writings but easily stressed ­here. It helps us sweep aside ­those poets and critics—­Emersonians, neopragmatists, and new historians all together—­who make belief the central act or fact of poetic desire and critical commitment. “One beats and beats for that which one believes” is ­either a heroic figure or an expression of enthusiastic princi­ple or even a shorthand for the lifelong pro­cesses of truth finding that pragmatists might like. The poet admits, but with some edge to his voice, “That’s what one wants to get near” (185). How impersonal and precise is that “one”! It puts the trope on display as such without any ele­ment to close the distance between it and a desiring subject. It is as if this wanting is so much the norm that the commonplace needs noting as well as debunking. The edge also tells us that we “want to hear” not only the beating of the heart but the very image, that is, precisely the belief that we beat for what we believe. All of that is noted and on display, debunked. Regrettably, official academic criticism needs to learn from poetry again. If it did so, scholars would take seriously, that is, allow to affect their practice, the poetic imagination’s movement through the desire for compensatory iterated and banal simplicities. Scholars might not care very much that Stevens’s speaker acknowledges the Keatsian nightingale’s presence on the dump, but to be critics, they should not ignore the comic divertimento of 133

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this line: “Is it a phi­los­o­pher’s honeymoon, one finds / On the dump?”—­a question nicely placed to put t­hose who seek for it “among mattresses of the dead” (186). (This mocks Diotima’s view of all the noneternal as rubbish.) This is an easy reprise of the poetry / philosophy opposition, but more impor­tant, it is an alert that the phi­los­o­pher’s honeymoon sits with the “peevish birds,” whose ruination melancholics (and academics) might not regret. ­These lines create a nice effect: the wisdom of poetic transport not only drives the mind out its evasions but also offers its own hard ideas as creative resources—­hence, not ruin or philosophy but the foundation of the “The the,” the place where “one first heard of the truth.” My argument presumes the existence of criticism and the interaction between the critic and the literary imagination as an essential scene of creation, judgment, and value formation for a society and culture. In so d ­ oing, it confronts con­temporary and long-­term trends that have diminished the role of criticism, especially in the US acad­emy, and the value of poetry. Criticism, as an act of judgment, yields to academic practices that would happily dispatch it: digital humanities, expert scholarship, narrow subfield specialties, and other especially anticritical modalities such as the history of the book and “how to do t­ hings with lit­er­at­ ure,” certain forms of translation studies, and so on and so forth.33 As a poem like “The Man on the Dump” helps us see, academic studies in what used to be called “Lit­er­a­ture Departments”—we now have Departments of French Studies, for example, rather than French Departments or Departments of French Lit­er­a­ture—­ move everywhere, especially outside poetry, in search for profit and legitimacy. In the postcritical phase, they pretend to move back into lit­er­a­ture but too often, even with po­liti­cal intent, from subject-­centered therapeutic and coping models of accommodation.34 In the spirit of Stevens’s poem, but in a minor key, we must ask, what do academics do that “men” on the dump always do? They search for the beat of what they desire as how they should live in a conservative world, to be “merely oneself.” Stevens’s often-­anthologized poem, collected in 1942, offers an anticipatory lesson, the rejection of which has something to do with the rhetorical turn against his work. When Frank Kermode remarks that even philosophy is easier for academics than poetry, he could not have ­imagined how much easier yet would be other forms of discursive practice or subdisciplinary theories.35

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chapter five

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Adorno

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dorno ends his 1949 essay “Cultural Criticism and Society” saying that “to write poetry ­after Auschwitz is barbaric.”1 Hardly any North American writing on poetry since its appearance has had the fateful force of Adorno’s statement. It has evoked comment and response from many major critics during the postwar period, and as is characteristic for such influential remarks, we have no consensus on its meaning or value. Perhaps a single sentence from another famous essay w ­ ill help us approach his “nach Auschwitz” remark: “we are concerned not with the poet as a private person, not with his psy­chol­ogy or his so-­called social perspective, but with the poem as a philosophical sundial telling the time of history.”2 Only an heir to German Idealism could write such a sentence. How can we understand this? Another example might help. In “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Adorno chooses “to use a few poems to concretize the relationship of the poetic subject, which always stands for a far more general collective subject, to the social real­ity that is its antithesis” (46). He then reads (aloud presumably on the radio) “Auf Einer Wanderung,” by the Romantic poet Eduard Mörike. His commentary starts with a general paraphrase, followed by remarks on linguistic effects that recall classical models, and concludes with high praise: “the lyric succeeds in ­doing what the German epic attempted in vain” (48). With ­these remarks, Adorno has fulfilled his critical proj­ect, to show that the poem is a sundial of history. Therefore, he starts his next paragraph this way: “The social interpretation of a success like this is concerned with the stage of historical experience evidenced in the poem” (49). Adorno shapes the remainder of his essay within a s­ imple historical narrative that proceeds from this early nineteenth-­century lyric to a second and final example, Stefan George’s “Im 135

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Windes-­Weben,” which typifies “the frightful cultural conservatism of the George circle” (50), a judgment shared by Walter Benjamin. Although, “fi­ nally,” we might say, Adorno’s dialectic w ­ ill afford a vastly dif­fer­ent judgment of George, what most interests us is how the path to that conclusion begins. Adorno uses Mörike to set a base line for his proj­ect. Although he introduces Mörike midway through his essay, the poet is his starting point. Adorno’s work is so familiar that t­here is, paradoxically, reason to enumerate certain of its basic ele­ments. Since Mörike is Adorno’s Ansatzpunkt, his opening remarks about the poem set up both the path along which he ­will continue and the presumptions he requires. He sets in motion a long and profound meditation on a set of interlocking concepts and figures that carries across several impor­tant papers: In the name of humanity, of the universality of the h ­ uman, German classicism had undertaken to release subjective impulses from the contingency that threatens them in a society where relationships between h ­ uman beings are no longer direct but instead mediated solely by the market. It strove to objectify the subjective as Hegel did in philosophy and tried to overcome the contradictions of men’s real lives by reconciling them in spirit, in the idea. The continued existence of ­these contradictions in real­ity, however, has compromised the spiritual solution: in the face of a life not grounded in meaning, a life lived painstakingly amid the bustle of competing interests, a prosaic life, as artistic experience sees it; in the face of a world in which the fate of individual h ­ uman beings works itself out in accordance with blind laws, art, whose form gives the impression of speaking from the point of view of a realized humanity, becomes an empty word. (49)

Concepts are fundamental ele­ments of knowledge and knowledge production ­because they are ontological ele­ments of thinking and life itself.3 Concepts appear by necessity in m ­ ental work, functioning as descriptors, analytic tools, naming devices, and—­near to belief—­within ideology, intellectual practice, and common sense. Often, in nonepistemological m ­ ental work, the status of concept is itself stabilized instrumentally or indifferently. Always concepts represent the species’ inventive and adaptive ability to survive in and change an environment, generating a feedback loop that perpetuates the pro­cess. Arresting the concept arrests life. Vari­ous classical and traditional theories of “concept,” from Kant and Hegel through Gottlob 136

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Frege and beyond have lost status or suffered revaluations ­under the withering but productive analyses of more modern and con­temporary logicians and epistemologists along with psychologists and linguists. I raise all ­these well-­known facts ­because Adorno and ­those whom he has influenced rest their rhe­toric on concepts, the idea of which recognizably derives from Hegel’s logic, especially its third part. No ­matter the materialist transformations within that tradition, the instrumentality of “the concept of the concept” provides cultural analysts and critics fecund instruments for a line of thought and jargon complete with exacting standards of admission and productivity. Over the postwar period, Adorno rethinks the concept, especially its potential to ossify thought, to find means that sustain the higher creative and imaginative power inherent in the movement of thought that produces concepts as the depository of its work. Adorno’s ­career is in per­sis­tent relation to this tradition and doubtlessly results in the most creative oeuvre derived from the Hegelian model modernized. In his opening sentence, Adorno writes, “German classicism had undertaken to release subjective impulses from the contingency that threatens them in a society where relationships between h ­ uman beings are no longer direct but instead mediated solely by the market.” The concept “German classicism” is an old-­fashioned instrument assuming the much-­ challenged definition of knowledge as a true belief justified by what­ever mode of certification the method prefers. Adorno expects we know what German classicism is. For our purposes, it makes no difference if ­later in the same essay Adorno dialectically differentiates moments within classicism that break out capacities obscured by its seeming definition—as in this very instance. What ­matters is the gesture in which Adorno sets down as his own Ansatzpunkt a concept the very nature of which is that it w ­ ill (or might) allow itself to do its own proper work. Similarly, the clause “where relationships between ­human beings are no longer direct but instead mediated solely by the market” conceptualizes on the broadest scale, making a truth claim that is indubitable and total. It is not surprising that Fredric Jameson, early in his study of Adorno, embraces as “indispensable” the truth stated in this concept, that is, “analy­sis in terms of the economic system or mode of production.” In his introduction, “Adorno in the Stream of Time,” Jameson extends the interpretive model of The Po­liti­cal Unconscious and concludes, predictably, that Adorno’s “originality” exists on what Jameson calls his “third level,” which is an 137

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allegorizable figure of relations mediated solely by the market. Equally predictably, Jameson finds that Adorno’s third-­level moment of originality is a confirming prefiguration of Jameson’s own self-­defining category, late capital. Jameson’s Adorno sounds very much like Jameson: Adorno’s originality “lies in his unique emphasis on the presence of late capitalism as a totality with the very forms of our concepts.”4 In the first two chapters of this book, I showed that rhetorical moves such as this typify the creation of closed tribal systems of jargon that effectively legitimate notions first as knowledge and as truth claims. It makes no difference whatsoever that such structures, once set in place, allow their builders obsessively and repetitively to claim the dialectical opening or breaking of the very categories they set up. The prob­lem is professionally typical, and the polemical antagonist makes it easy to see t­ hese ­things as official culture. “Cultural Criticism and Society” dates from 1949, the year in which Adorno first presented what became “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” In the postwar, Adorno’s thinking had turned profoundly to poetry. He wrote and rewrote “The Essay as Form” between 1954 and 1958, which appeared first in Noten zur Literatur.5 He commonly reworked and delayed publication during ­those years; “On Lyric Poetry and Society” went through dif­ fer­ent versions and did not appear u ­ ntil 1957. In t­ hese three essays, Adorno’s foci are nothing less than criticism, culture, poetry, and the essay.6 Their style is dense, textured, equally certain and hesitant, tentative and confirmed, as such the marker of a mind at work.7 Adorno gives us the authority to speak in ­these terms ­because throughout the central passages of “Cultural Criticism and Society,” his concerns are mind and critical work. If we think our way along this line, we must read Adorno for his style. The texture of the critical mind formed or expressed in the dense word forms make Adorno so differently difficult to many readers.8 Adorno found himself in an extremely complicated position in the 1950s.9 The essays show us several ele­ments of that position as he thinks his way through them. Reading “Cultural Criticism and Society” too quickly, we might miss the complexities. Certainly, ele­ments of that essay align easily with the ­earlier book The Dialectic of Enlightenment in its analyses of culture, of excessive rationalization, and so on. Adorno’s critique

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of cultural criticism and the personality of the culture critic come as no surprise to a reader of that book. If we read on the level of the familiar stable concept, missing its play and logic, then we ­will miss the work Adorno does in writing this piece and the work it does in our world. We w ­ ill miss many of the qualities of the essay form. Style embodies the motion of thought, tracing work on his own inheritance, including his own e­ arlier work, in his new context, “nach Auschwitz.” T ­ hese essays, then, call for something like Adorno’s own highest first step in all thinking and writing, immanent criticism. Critics who evade that demand, rewriting his canon contextually, philosophically, or allegorically, betray the essay and criticism. No m ­ atter how pathos-­ridden or knowledge-­like such distanced readings might seem, their status, confirming the allegorists’ tales, turns Adorno into an icon, into a plate on a building the fixity of which is imprisonment, no m ­ atter the 10 avowed politics of the betrayer. “Nach Auschwitz” is insurmountable, but not for the barbarians: “Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter” (Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 34). In the space of this one paragraph and, in truth, the space opened between t­ hese units of meaning sits Adorno’s thinking. In trying to understand the meaning and significance of Adorno’s remark, scholars have created an archive of humanistic whisperings. Some of their studies have been literal-­minded. For example, George Steiner literalizes Adorno’s “­after.” ­There never was a modern culture without barbarism, Steiner discovers, and so ­there is no ­after. For Steiner, history is a linear movement. Surely no one believes that the writing of poems ­after 1945 refutes Adorno, nor is the suicide of a poet its confirmation.11 “Nach Auschwitz”—­the phrase conjoins poetry, criticism, and barbarism. In Adorno’s 1950s essays, we find a much more ­human, immediate guide to reading a struggling mind that leaves subtle as well as broad traces of its own efforts and passions. At moments in t­ hese pieces, poetry and the essay share qualities around which Adorno’s thinking moves as he unsettles the concepts his mind pre­sents him as he thinks. Adorno’s prose might be difficult for some readers, but it is deeply textured, resonant, circuitous, reflective—­and no sooner settled than it turns upon itself for its own dissatisfaction with settled belief.12 It demands careful and patient reading. Its difficulty is not abstraction or jargon but a style that convolutes, refusing

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to let itself s­ ettle ­until the instant the demands of the thought have turned as completely as they can in a moment: The fact that theory becomes real force when it moves men is founded in the objectivity of the mind itself which, through the fulfillment of its ideological function must lose faith in ideology. Prompted by the incompatibility of ideology and existence, the mind, in displaying its blindness also displays its effort to f­ree itself of ideology. Disenchanted, the mind perceives naked existence in its nakedness and delivers it up to criticism. The mind ­either damns the material base, in accordance with the ever-­ questionable criterion of its “pure princi­ple,” or it becomes aware of its own questionable position, by virtue of its incompatibility with the base. As a result of the social dynamic, culture becomes cultural criticism, which preserves the notion of culture while demolishing its pre­sent manifestations as mere commodities and means of brutalization. Such critical consciousness remains subservient to culture in so far as its concern with culture distracts from the true horrors. From this arises the ambivalent attitude of social theory t­owards cultural criticism. (Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 28)

The opening sentence in this quotation is typical of Adorno’s style. ­There is no jargon u ­ nless the phrase “objectivity of the mind” demands specialized knowledge of readers. The sentence is declarative and explanatory. Mind can become a real force that moves men.13 This fact Adorno gives us conditionally. Theory moves men when it rests on and emerges from the objectivity of the mind. ­There is such a ­thing as objectivity of the mind, a figure that names the power of theory to move men. It is, however, when pressed hard, an entwined mind, for when true to itself, it not only moves men but also loses faith in ideology precisely in enacting its moving role as ideology. Adorno has this idea b ­ ecause he is a dialectician for whom the same ability to create and imagine can produce results that harm its own best products. In the 1950s, given the evident corruption of the Soviet Communist Party (evinced by Lukács), mind producing ideology to move men can become the very means by which men and mind solidified in and by ideology can arrest men, society, and mind. We could press this passage against Benjamin’s decision in “Surrealism” to turn erotics to the seduction of “men” to the leadership of the Party. The remaining sentences in this passage work in similar ways. “Dialectics” translates into textured movement of thought rather than a rigidity 140

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of opposites that moves forward to some higher level. In the style, we see an anticipation of Edward Said’s sense of counterpoint as the ideally productive texture of intellectual expression. For all this essay’s expressed hesitations about criticism within a post-­ Auschwitz cap­ i­ tal­ ist modernity marked, in Adorno’s terms, by insufficient enlightenment, social theory’s attitude, he tells us, is still “ambivalent.” Criticism itself names the circumstance of history’s secular truth: “The procedure of cultural criticism is itself the object of permanent criticism. . . . ​A dialectical theory [and style] . . . ​ must absorb cultural criticism, the truth of which consists in bringing untruth to consciousness of itself” (28). Historical,14 Adorno’s research shows that criticism arose in relation to a specific philosophical formation, Idealism, which had lost its intellectual centrality. Adorno takes a historical view of German Idealism, tracing it through its heirs and derivatives, to conclude that it is “the philosophical form which reflects the fetishization of culture” (29). Adorno’s thinking proceeds with rigor ­here. He does not concede that ­because some few thinkers continue to use Idealism’s conventions and concepts, it should remain a serious critical concern. Rather, he notes Idealism’s fundamental displacement by phenomenological and specifically Heideggerian philosophies. His research shows that ­these lack a critical moment and dispense “with all consciousness which does not conform to existence” (29). They are continuations of Idealism, despite themselves. While within the “history of philosophy” the differences between Idealism and phenomenology ­matter, historically and critically their emergence does not develop criticism. The older philosophical moment confirmed commodification, while the newer moments similarly support the pre­sent order and have no critical potential. Nonetheless, despite the passing of criticism’s original context, it is still an active force in thought and essential to the social order despite its entanglements with culture at a time when the latter has become a managed ele­ment of the totality. It is particularly impor­tant to note that Adorno does not conclude from this entanglement that criticism is hopelessly contaminated or historically belated or lost to intellectual and po­liti­cal work. On the contrary, his own thinking turns criticism dialectically to draw from its historical location a thought possibility essential to h ­ uman freedom: “Criticism retains its mobility in regard to culture by recognizing the latter’s position within the ­whole. Without such freedom, without consciousness transcending the immanence of culture, immanent criticism itself would be 141

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inconceivable; the spontaneous movement of the object can be followed only by someone who is not entirely engulfed by it. . . . ​But the unideological thought is that which does not permit itself to be reduced to ‘operational terms’ and instead strives solely to help the t­hings themselves to that articulation from which they are other­wise cut off by the prevailing language” (29). The key term h ­ ere is “mobility,” which he also names “freedom.”15 Consciousness can transcend the immanence of culture, an impor­tant claim for criticism’s power and for its very possibility and necessity in a managed or neoliberal society. Criticism depends on the fact that consciousness need not be or perhaps never is totally absorbed by and into culture. Adorno offers a theory of culture’s limits and of mind’s difference from it, which he believes justifies the possibility and obligation to educate mind to the act of criticism. The inevitable nonidentity of mind and consciousness is the condition for the possibility of criticism and the disciplining of the critic as what Adorno describes as a site of intellectual experience. The obligation of criticism is coincident with the emergence of the subject-­formation that might become a venue of intellectual experience. Of course, the investment of resources in such formation ethically compels critical work, but more to Adorno’s point, the discipline that forms that subject has within it the obligatory moment of criticism. Criticism inheres within the movement of thought that occurs as intellectual experience. Throughout “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno reflects on “mind” as an agency with qualities that assure freedom within constraining historical circumstances. Theory can become real force b ­ ecause it “is founded in the objectivity of the mind itself” (28). The historical ­whole circumscribes mind, and so finitude obliges it to serve an ideological function, which ­causes mind to despair of ideology. Adorno constantly associates mind with freedom, as when he says, “in displaying its blindness,” mind “also displays its effort to ­free itself of ideology” (28). During the 1950s, confronting the totalization of society and the formation of a managed society, Adorno returned repeatedly to this quality of mind called mobility. Jameson acknowledges as much even as he insists, wrongly, that Adorno’s mind is itself more thesis-­like than essayistic. During this period, Adorno kept mind, criticism, mobility, freedom, and poetry carefully in his thought. Indeed, Adorno describes one aim of nonoperational thought in terms that precisely elide with Wallace Stevens’s thought 142

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about poetry. Poetry names ­things that other­wise would have no name or might, indeed, have no existence. For Adorno, similarly, nonoperational thought—­and ­here he is discussing criticism primarily but not exclusively—­ “strives solely to help the t­hings themselves to that articulation from which they other­wise are cut off by the prevailing language.” In this context, Adorno declares that “to write poetry a­ fter Auschwitz is barbaric” (34). We must ask why this is so, at this moment, in this essay. The essay’s primary anxiety is ­simple. Its source lies as much within mind itself as in the tendencies that circumscribe it. ­There is a ­simple periphrastic explanation of that anxiety’s source: the loss of mind’s freedom within the developing totalization that not only constrains it simply but dialectically makes use of its own previously critical articulations for its own end. Yet Adorno does not conclude the essay pessimistically. This means that despite appearances, Adorno’s “nach Auschwitz” does not elide with other con­temporary or consequent fatalistic expressions of imaginative weakness. On the contrary—­Adorno’s work throughout this period focuses on the need to recognize the essential strength and creative necessity of imagination. Adorno ends the “Cultural Criticism” essay by temporalizing the apparent conclusions: “Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge [reification’s absorption of the mind] as long as it confines itself to self-­ satisfied contemplation” (34). The mind must remain actively creative. It cannot be architectonic or repetitive, for as we ­shall see, Adorno assigns categorical thesis building to the authorized schema of established knowledge systems—as in the Jameson figure, once so popu­lar in the MLA. He ends his essay where he began, devastating cultural critics and their work for its immobility, for its arresting of mind. In “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno had thought through the relationship between criticism and freedom, and he had adapted a dialectical humanism to his task. Inherently, he developed an anthropological sense of the ­human to ground the critical potential for freedom, arguing that no m ­ atter how severely social power constrains mind and imagination, the quality he called “critical intelligence” can “be equal to this challenge.” In other words, Adorno’s essay is a crisis-­driven thought experiment that we should not confuse with a document available solely for historicist interpretation. In this experiment, poetry that appears as an object of categorization that emerges from an uncritical imagination within the naïve antagonism of symbolic contemplation—­this is barbarism precisely ­because 143

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it forgets barbarism and cannot recognize itself as barbaric, as the result and extension of the same. Mind names qualities necessary for h ­ uman freedom within the worst imaginable nightmare of society. Of course, that nightmare takes the form of the worst possibilities historically knowable at the time, especially the tendency, not unique to Adorno on the Eu­ro­pean left, to bring Nazism and Americanism close together. This gesture clarifies the context in which, writing on lyric poetry, Adorno stands against precisely all dogmatic work. As Adorno begins “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” he stages a typical anxiety or doubt in his listeners who, rightly it turns out, fear a method that destroys the uniqueness of poetic art objects: You ­will expect a so­cio­log­i­cal analy­sis of the kind that can be made of any object, just as fifty years ago ­people came up with psychologies, and thirty years ago with phenomenologies, of every­thing conceivable. You ­will suspect that examination of the conditions ­under which works are created and their effect ­will try to usurp the place of experience in the works as they are and that the pro­cess of categorizing and relating w ­ ill suppress insight into the truth or falsity of the object itself. You w ­ ill suspect that an intellectual w ­ ill be guilty of what Hegel accused the “formal understanding” of ­doing, namely that in surveying the ­whole it stands above the individual existence it is talking about, that is, it does not see it at all but only labels it. (37)

Adorno does not trivialize the attitude he imputes to his radio audience. He has a decisive moment to consider the relationship between the individual, the lyric, criticism, and society. He dismisses the intellectual work of formal understanding to which Hegel objects, for not d ­ oing the slow and detailed work essential to grasping the textured relation between lyric and social world inherent in individual expression. “The substance of a poem,” he writes, “is not merely an expression of individual impulses and experiences. ­Those become a ­matter of art only when they come to take part in something universal by virtue of the specificity they acquire in being given aesthetic form. . . . ​Immersion in what has taken individual form elevates the lyric to the status of something universal by making manifest something not distorted, not grasped, not yet subsumed” (38). In this “not yet,” we hear an echo of “as long as it confines itself,” which closes “Cultural Criticism and Society.” 144

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The universality of a par­tic­u­lar art form—we should not elide it with the pseudo-­Kantian formalism of “Concrete Universals” in the New Criticism—is an instrumental step in Adorno’s anthropology, which is both historical and humanist. It puts us in mind of a potential implicit in Plato’s Symposium. Rather than repudiate the poetic to transduce desire into the love of truth, Adorno elegantly defends poetry as a form of freedom. The lyric poem, he concludes, “anticipates, spiritually, a situation in which no false universality, that is, nothing profoundly par­tic­u­lar, continues to fetter what is other than itself, the ­human” (38). The lyric, like criticism, serves the essential binary of h ­ uman freedom. Are t­ here difficulties for the lyric? If the poem is mere individual expression, as such it offers only and at best a guarantee of authenticity. That means in its moment as individual expression alone, no value inheres: “It has no say over ­whether the poem remains within the contingency of mere separate existence” (38). Such universality oppresses ­because it makes the “profoundly par­tic­u­lar” a fetter of the h ­ uman that dialectically results not from mere high-­pressure individuation but from lived social context: “The universality of the lyric’s substance, however, is social in character” (38). Wallace Stevens’s “Mozart, 1935” achieves itself within such insight. The populist charge against such lyric art sins as egregiously against h ­ uman freedom as the elite claims to individual privilege that the populist abhors. The extended (and now buried) modern and postmodern discussion of high versus low culture is irrelevant to Adorno’s range of concerns. “Only one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can understand what the poem is saying” (38). The atomism of expression, which some call the individual voice, is consequent on the atomism and massification of administered and colonizing socie­ties and economies. Characteristically, Adorno turns around the truth of this sentence. The cogency of the work, in turn, depends on this individuation, which is the historical possibility of the existing moment. It is, as it w ­ ere, the definition of current history, of intellectual courage within finitude. Yet within that history, not just over the horizon in some bodiless deferral of hope and utopian desire, lives the creative and critical work of mind and imagination. We must learn from and embrace the temporal structure of Adorno’s difficulty, of his writing style, and of his thinking. The 1950s essays I have mentioned in recent pages direct their antagonism against both the massification of a US-­style administered society and the purely administered form 145

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of Soviet life. Of course, the former has intensified as neoliberal management. Concerning the latter, Adorno speaks against Western theories that echo the Soviet version of administration. In “Cultural Criticism and Society,” he names the Soviet East as the worst offender against the memory of history, of achieved culture, of au­then­tic art. The USSR Potemkin state parallels the US Disney world. In each of t­ hose cases and in several derivative critical theories, speed is common. In vari­ous forms of Western populist criticism, precisely the slowness of Adorno’s reflection, the qualification, the erudition, the seeming hesitation—­all this disqualifies him from a seemingly easier ambition to remake the social world.16 In t­ hese early passages from “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Adorno clusters concepts that result from his thinking and form a valuable depository for ­others’ work. Adorno clusters “immersion” with the “profoundly par­ tic­u­lar,” and ­these in turn with “specification” and “immanence.” In the “Essay as Form,” Adorno w ­ ill name the essayistic as the mind not settled into the concept, no m ­ atter how par­tic­u­lar, profound, and universal it might be. Po­liti­cal defeat, that is, the defeat of the h ­ uman as freedom, has not yet come, even though barbarism’s power can hide the very possibility of freedom from the ­human. The lyric, like criticism, or better, the lyric read critically, can resist (but not overcome) the fact of barbarism. Freedom to resist requires the critical discovery of h ­ uman possibility in the very forms of historical work that are alone within the almost totally administered world. The lyric is a work of atomism, but as Stevens’s Virgilian poet tells the ephebe in “Mozart, 1935,” he must learn to work t­ oward ends within that horrible normal that it would prevent. Moreover, Adorno, like Stevens, in his critique of pop­u­lism and the practices of actually existing socialism, shows us that sentimental aspiration to social reform belongs as well to the atomized administered society. “Mozart, 1935” brings Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetry and Society” into sharp view as Adorno reminds us that the universality of the lyric is social. He then writes this Stevensian line: “Only one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can understand what the poem is saying” (38). Adorno opens an impor­tant corridor for replacing poetry in the value schema of thought and society. Allegoresis substitutes the instrumentalities of certain theorists for the greater imaginative resources of poetry and the work of criticism. The allegorists, no m ­ atter their avowed claims to materialism, history, and Left politics, often belong to “gnostic” modes of 146

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worldly renunciation that prefer the quick abstractions of concepts become ­counters to the slow work of learning from textured imagination. Adorno put it this way: when critics deal with poetry, “the approach must be an immanent one.” He insists that “concepts should not be applied to works from without but rather drawn from an exacting examination of the works themselves” (39). A critical reading requires imaginative erudition, not an arsenal of allegorical ­counters floating as essential concepts. Adorno’s insistence on immanence and his clear opposition to allegoresis has as much relevance now as it did in the 1950s. ­Today’s allegorists are academics for whom the profound particularity of the work of art is anathema for vari­ous self-­avowed reasons too many to list. We have known for de­cades that academic success depends on meeting the expectations of an industrial-­become digital-­age speedup in output, which in turn requires a conformity with the established ­counters or ways of talking within the fields, perhaps especially as ­these are crisscrossed by group desires. Publication in the leading journals depends on it. Particularized research takes its own time, of course, but information pro­cessed through concepts or figures functioning as c­ ounters within allegories—­national or other­wise—­supplies the speed the profession requires. Slowness, “an exacting examination of the works themselves,” resulting in the derivation of concepts specific to their profound particularity—­ this temporality defies the fit between allegoresis and professionalism within an acad­emy that insists on productivity and territorialization. This line of thought is not in­ter­est­ing, but it does open the question of why, among the many pos­si­ble resources that might emerge from the history of critical studies, allegoresis got its status. What made it fit the current regime? “Mozart, 1935” dramatizes the social aesthetic learning pro­cesses involved in becoming poet. Become thou, says the elder poet. The artisanal model this implies, the years of dedication to the master, namely, what has gone before, and to the social and so together to the permanent art—­this does not yield the fantasy of knowledge produced by the allegorist. Ideology critique, for example, is merely the mechanical application of a concept become c­ ounter. Does it offer truth? No, if we understand ideology critique as demystification, as an exposition of how “some ­human beings . . . ​falsely pre­sent some par­tic­u­lar values as general ones” (“On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 39). Rather, ideology critique “is intended to unmask 147

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spirit that is specifically false and at the same time to grasp it in its necessity” (39). Adorno’s perfectly clear statement, assigning critique a requisite historical duty, one that even utopians can accept, immediately yields to the greater power of poetic imagination: “The greatness of works of art, however, consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides” (39). Critique comes, thereby, to a place of secondary authority, but one allegoresis cannot concede since allegorists must insist on the absolute ruination of ­human life and creation as a condition of their own work. The allegorizers belong to a long Western tradition that devalues the artistic imagination as a ­human resource in the strug­gle for freedom and humanity. I have suggested that in the modern world they have a certain set of prejudices about style, about reading, about categories and concepts. I have made an excursus into some of Adorno’s essays ­because t­ hese hold truths and critical resources that we lose at our own risk. I have also returned to Adorno ­because Fredric Jameson’s writing about Adorno, Late Marxism, typifies some of the very dangers Adorno recognized and against which he cautioned. We should not relegate to literary history the consequences of Adorno’s devastating review of Lukács. Adorno’s work leaves us with certain firm and necessary results that we must engage and keep if we intend to sustain and advance critical writing. Adorno’s review of Lukács is passionate and rigorous, certainly angry and intent on sweeping Lukács from the field of legitimate discussion. We could pretend that his objections are not personal, but clearly ­there are some very personal ele­ments in his relentless attack. Adorno finds Lukács repulsive ­because he has betrayed and corrupted the function of the intellectual. “Lukács as a person is above suspicion,” he writes, referring “to the crimes of the Stalin era.”17 His circumstances are, however, the result of his own choices. ­Earlier than some ­others, Adorno understood the deadening realities of Soviet power on intellectual and creative life. In Lukács, as he said, “one still sensed the old talent” (216), but unable to see a way forward far from orthodox positions, he could do no more than try to find a small space for reform. He hoped to create space for good works of socialist realism, “to make room in it for more than the most miserable trash” (217). How had he come to this position? The long story is irrelevant b ­ ecause, as Adorno says, Lukács had destroyed his own reason by 1952.18 Adorno’s objections to Lukács seem irrelevant to our situation. The Soviet Union is gone, and in neoliberal and neoauthoritarian arrangements, 148

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intellectuals are, as such, an endangered species. We are all aware of how intellectuals in the so-­called liberal states served state and economic interests, from serving as policy instruments to proselytizing the digital lifestyle of corporate behemoths. Yet Adorno’s anger and criticism have a place in our toolbox for their motives rather than their contexts. At first, Adorno criticizes Lukács for having put himself in a position that required him to betray his own creative formation as an intellectual. No doubt, Lukács, like o ­ thers, believed that his own imagination and interests ­were ­matters of purely subjective importance and, as such, on the wrong side of history. For Adorno, to whom the individual and the subjective w ­ ere essential ele­ments of ­human freedom and art within our historical formation, Lukács had committed the worst of sins, one that came from his inability to recognize the similarities on the two sides of the same Iron Curtain. In recent terms and recalling Jameson once more, we might say that Lukács believed that Marxism (of the Soviet variety) was alone capable of an extension ­grand enough to parallel the trenches of capital in its latest phases. As a result, for Lukács, the surrender of reason and intelligence that went with the delegitimation of his own subjectivity threw him into horrible contradictions, not one of which Adorno allows to pass. For instance, Lukács knew that official socialist realism produced and allowed only bad art. That he tried a reform to encourage decent work within a deadening frame shows how he could discard his sense of taste, his well-­formed aesthetic judgment. No m ­ atter how he might argue that the best socialist realist art would complete the reunion of difference and identity, the ability to distinguish work from policy depended on a discrimination that his own position had denied legitimacy. Adorno concludes that Lukács knew better than official policy and might have wanted that policy reformed to follow his own thought. His situation became pathetic. “Lukács would like to broaden the concept of socialist realism, which for de­cades had been used to strangle ­every unruly impulse, every­thing the apparatchiks find unintelligible and suspect” (217). Entrapped by the consequences of his own desires, “he ventures a timid opposition, crippled from the outset by a consciousness of his own impotence” (217). Adorno hypothesizes that the Hungarian events of 1956, which threatened Lukács with execution ­after the Soviet Union suppressed the Nagy regime, led him to formulate even this l­imited revision of his positions. “His timidity is no mere tactic,” Adorno writes (217), and considering 149

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Soviet suppression of Hungarian ambitions to self-­determination, this is clear enough. Yet Adorno’s analy­sis of Lukács rests on the latter’s pre-1956 ethical errors. In fact, the Hungarian events could only lead Lukács to hesitant proposals ­because he had assented, prior to that date, to a position that denied him any in­de­pen­dence or critical thought. In other words, physical or mortal risk might have cautioned Lukács to say nothing stronger about Soviet policy than his proposed ambition for a reformed sense of socialist realism. More impor­tant, however, to Adorno and to us now was Lukács’s decision to abandon not just his ethical responsibility but the intellectual virtues as such—an issue I put this way to emphasize its agonistic nature. Lukács had lost himself before 1956: “the conceptual structure to which he sacrificed his intellect is so constricted that it suffocates anything that would like to breathe more freely in it; the sacrifizio dell’intelletto does not leave the intellect unscathed” (217–218). Adorno had examined the prob­ lems and contradictions in Lukács’s sacrifice long before writing this critique. In his book on Kierkegaard, Adorno explored the conceptual and historical entanglements inescapable in any such sacrifizio dell’intelletto. Lukács, like many of the ­others I discuss in this book, had embraced a utopian ambition that devalued the contingency of historicality. Kierkegaard gave Adorno the opportunity to analyze the irrational side of this tradition, especially along messianic or faith-­based lines of thought. In Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic,19 Adorno carefully studied the logic and entanglements of experience, a term central not only to ­Kierkegaard but also, perhaps through Heidegger, to the modern existentialists. At a crucial point in Adorno’s own argument against Kierkegaard’s apparently avowed positions, he gives attention to a moment in thought typified by Kierkegaard’s recasting of the Abraham and Isaac story. It concerns the leap of faith, which is the paradigm of sacrifizio dell’intelletto. Adorno thinks his way through an issue that inheres in Kierkegaard’s theory at a certain point, but the importance of the issue far exceeds the inescapable limitations of subjectivity. In other words and simply, Adorno takes up the contradictions, failures, and undesirable consequences of such gnostic acts of ascesis formed as the denial of intellect. “Sacrificed reason governs as a demigod” is how Adorno concludes his analy­sis of Kierkegaard’s drama of reason, faith, and passion against the normal backdrop of nature and myth (119). Adorno began his line of 150

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analy­sis this way: “The model of this sacrifice is paradoxy: a movement of thought, completed in pure thought, and negated as totality in this movement of thought, in order, sacrificed, to draw itself t­ oward the ‘strictly dif­ fer­ent,’ its absolute contrary” (113). Kierkegaard deserves much more careful thinking than Lukács does. For that reason, though, Adorno could see in Lukács’s sacrifice, so sadly typical of the moment, a failure of critical mind deeper and more consequential than anything plain in Lukács’s writing could reflect.20 Adorno’s clear discovery of the workings and consequences of the intellect’s sacrifice stands as a permanent truth, a profound par­tic­ul­ar in his terms. For us, it resonates across history, finding instances specific to times and places of the same gesture and results. Kierkegaard himself invokes Socrates and Christ as figures of comparative differentiation. The Incarnation paralleled by the leap of faith structures a real without “concrete time” and leads his thought, consequent on its ambition to self-­sacrifice, to sink “into the imageless my­thol­ogy of pure negation” (117). Adorno sees how the sacrifice of the intellect, so often made b ­ ecause thought knows its own limits, knows that t­ here is something beyond thought, believes itself to set aside my­thol­ogy in the clarity of its modesty—he sees how in this very gesture, the sacrifice of intellect falls victim to my­thol­ogy, an act of its own making. Adorno convincingly argues that when the intellect sacrifices itself as its own act, its messianic desires, having taken form as absolute negation, must “plunge into the blind relentless context of nature in which the immanent follower is to procure assurance of the transcendent ascension” (118). Adorno exposits the secular motives, choices, and consequences of t­hose who martyr the intellect: “In the demonic sacrifice of consciousness, man is still the ruler of a sinful creation; through sacrifice he asserts his rule, and the name of the divinity succumbs to his demonic nature” (118). Given Kierkegaard’s guarded aversion to Socrates, the irony of Adorno’s close reading is to narrow the distinction between the two, restoring the demonic as the key closure to the transcendentalizing ambition of ascetic or nihilistic sacrifice and renunciation. Kierkegaard often put the pro­cess in terms of seduction. Adorno traces that figuration in the corpus and so helps us see how Kierkegaard set himself in an overdetermined relation to the Symposium, in which, of course, we see the grandest seduction searching for the transcendent in the renunciation of body as well as intellect, insofar as 151

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the latter distances itself as philosophy guided by myth. Kierkegaard’s writing would recast the latter in a space that philosophy cannot reach any more than can theology. In that space of the unknowable, modesty and renunciation reappear as mastery and demonics. The distance from Socrates closes, and the long tradition reemerges. Lukács’s sacrifice is a sad and pathos-­ridden variation on a truly ­grand tradition. Benjamin’s ruining angel, the osteology of allegoresis as the pro­cess of its own messianic redemption, is in t­ hese terms a sacrifice of intellect.21 That angel stands as the emblem of a profoundly par­tic­ul­ar story of universal ruination with the promise of the messianic within; its key terms are not only of the ideological impossibility of bourgeois capitalism but also of the melancholy residues of a mythic time. In 1940, Benjamin created the materialist historian to sketch the presence of the messianic in ruined desires and fragmented temporalities. As it ­were, without the discovered trace of the messianic, Benjamin’s reason, as he and Scholem so often agreed, was committed to destruction and would be returned to myth not only “by its claim to universal sovereignty” but “through universal annihilation” (Adorno, Kierkegaard, 119). The messianic trace saves ­human history from universal annihilation of all its quotidian realities dissolved in a soup of avowed frustration determined by finitude and capital. For Kierkegaard, Lukács, and ­others who sacrifice intellect to renunciation, not only nature and myth but also the worlds of ­human history lose their desire and “eloquent consciousness” (122). As we might say of Socrates in the Symposium, sacrificing intellect means “finding the reconciling word,” a messianic or gnostic or incarnational “reconciliation.” Ironically, despite Kierkegaard’s and ­others’ claims to honor the modesty of intellect, mind escapes nihilism when it works “­free of resignation,” aware that myth, like nature, “cannot be driven out with a pitchfork” without its overcoming, that is, “­until genius is reconciled with it” (122). “­Until” then, intellect resides in the form of melancholy “concentrated in the image of catastrophe as the extreme limit of its own potential” (124). Kierkegaard has missed his own conclusion, which should be that although hope is frustrated in the “factual world,” it still grasps what an alienated world does not grant it. “Decisiveness”—is this a glance at Schmitt?—­would sacrifice what­ever ­humans might grasp, rather than nourishing it dialectically. Such is the motive and logic of melancholy that it acquires the devastation it fantasizes as its real ground. Adorno is extremely sharp on this point. He notices that when Kierkegaard 152

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thinks he has found a formula “to restore lost immediacy and the fullness of life” (125), he puts the case allegorically in terms of Hebrew letters. Adorno realizes that this is a double figure, not only the one Kierkegaard intends, to restore the lost potentiality of the soul to “work ­toward the ‘original script of h ­ uman existence’ ” (125). It is also a figure that would legitimate allegoresis as the essential pro­cess of intellection in any such effort: “It is perhaps not by accident that the meta­phor chooses Hebrew letters, the signs of a language that theologically makes the claim to being the true language. Theological truth, however—­and h ­ ere, beyond the paradoxical sacrifice, Kierkegaard’s own ontological position presumably lies—is guaranteed precisely by its encipherment and distortedness; the ‘collapse’ of fundamental h ­ uman relations reveals itself as the history of truth itself” (125). The final clause in this quotation has a figured concept that is a genealogical pre­de­ces­sor of Benjamin’s figure of ruin and ruination. It also prefigures ele­ments of Benjamin and Scholem’s discussion of Kafka. Moreover, the ­earlier clause in this quotation invites allegoresis as the intellectual, ideological, and subjective response to the “collapse.” In terms that Adorno develops at some length, it is the production of myth. Throughout his considerations of Kierkegaard at this point in his thesis, Adorno stresses that Kierkegaard’s vari­ous efforts at demythologization rebound, dialectically but blindly, to re-­create myth, to reestablish its priority, to show the difficulty of its escape. Adorno gives considerable attention to paradox as the device that would overcome philosophy, nature, and so myth. In part b ­ ecause of Adorno’s work in the section entitled “Mythical Sacrifice,” paradox, like enigma, could become a power­ful device in the hands of scholars. Adorno traces the logic of Kierkegaard’s figures with an effect that has not yet resonated enough in critical research. I conclude that Adorno’s analy­sis implicates much of the now common sense in vanguard and normative academic work. The main point is ­simple. Adorno’s analy­sis of Kierkegaard’s vari­ous figures and narratives of sacrifice, each of which involves some constellation of nature, myth, discontinuity, and paradox, shows that at its center stands unreformed the mythos and ethos of the dominant individual or group subject and l­ ittle more. This is enchainment to the false universality of the profoundly par­tic­u­lar. Not only does Adorno specify the near impossibility of escaping the mythical, but also he does so in the m ­ iddle of a major Eu­ro­pean intellectual fascination with the topic embodied in work 153

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by psychoanalysts, colonialists, postcolonialists, historians of religion, cultural anthropologists, and literary artists of the first order. He also does this on the eve of myth’s po­liti­cal reemergence in the savagery of Nazism. Domination and subjectivity as forces of nature are continued by the very critique that claims their displacement. Moreover, the gnostic and messianic insistence on the ruination of the world appears as the world’s annihilation by the domination of the natu­ral subject precisely b ­ ecause that figuration of the world in ruins is a necessity for mythical subjective per­sis­tence. Adorno moves his analy­sis from the topic area “Mythical Sacrifice” to that of “Gnosis” precisely ­because in this context, his reading of Kierkegaard requires clear thinking about the alignment between sacrificial renunciation and annihilation—­ which might be called “destructive aesthetics”—­and modern forms of gnosis, all of which involve recursive thinking about hope, utopia, and so on. In the act of self-­sacrifice or sacrifice—­for example, Abraham and Isaac or Jesus Christ or Odin or any totem—­the hero “consecrates” himself. In addition, as Don Juan’s “Commander” evinces, this hero “can withstand every­thing, except the replication of natu­ral life” (109).22 Don Juan might be pure sensuous immediate life and, seemingly, omnipotent, but he is vulnerable to annihilation by spirit as the negation of natu­ral life’s renewal. Adorno concludes for the moment, “Thus power over natu­ral life remains dedicated to its annihilation in spirit rather than to reconciliation” (109). Kierkegaard aspires to the negation of philosophy and nature as myth, but Adorno’s research into his writings shows that the movement of Kierkegaard’s concepts goes in the opposite direction, outside their author’s seeming desire. Adorno’s thinking results in a conclusion with per­sis­tent value: “spirit itself is annihilated natu­ral life and bound to my­thol­ogy” (109). Spirit is the named ­counter in logic of concepts moving within Kierkegaard’s textual style, his repertoire of categories and figures. Spirit is not relevant in itself but as the name for a cherished outside in all motivated systems of utopian and gnostic desire. Spirit names the double and relentless pro­cess and result of annihilation. What­ever seems to stand, as in the Symposium, as the other to the natu­ral and sociopo­liti­cal world of reproduction, sexuality, comedy, and politics—in short, to the so-­called ruins of finitude—is spirit, which is the embodiment of the annihilation it requires for its own nihilistic and inhuman existence. Adorno’s work sets up that no ­matter the narrative or 154

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mythic form intellectual work takes along the path to ruins, all specific forms of this work function as he shows in Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. In the first two chapters, I suggested that a similar logic of concept and imagination links inseparably the annihilation of ruin and the infinite despair of utopian hope. Hope always appears, counterintuitively to common sense, when the imagination has no confidence, when the h ­ uman lacks confidence in imagination, or when intellectuals lead away from that confidence ­toward weakness. Adorno’s demonstration of this link in Kierkegaard is a remarkable display of his analytic abilities linked to a lucidity expressed in precise language. He shows that Kierkegaard at once moves from the place of annihilation in spirit, via his Chris­tian­ity, to the figure of hope as the positive concluding result of spirit’s pure negativity. “And next the spirit brings hope,” Kierkegaard writes, opening a dense paradoxical figure linked to the utopian assurances of the Messiah. “This hope . . . ​is hope against hope” (quoted in Adorno, Kierkegaard, 109). He explains his own paradox in a way that elucidates the per­sis­tent turn to hope among allegorists, gnostics, messianists, and the like. Kierkegaard had a dreadful preoccupation with death, something that made him ideal for existentialist and some phenomenological believers. Beyond the narrow confines of ­those groups, however, his dread m ­ atters ­because it makes clearly manifest the intolerability of h ­ uman finitude at the origin of the multiple myths designed to redeem a fallen or ruined world. “Into this night of hopelessness (it is in fact death we are describing) comes then the life-­giving spirit and brings hope, the hope of eternity” (quoted in Adorno, Kierkegaard, 109). Kierkegaard repeats the best description: this moment is hope against hope. “In spite of its forcefulness,” Adorno writes, “this image of hope is false” (109). Adorno has a reputation for difficult prose, yet ­here is a clear and ­simple judgment f­ree of jargon or dialectic. This image is false means not just that this version of this image is false but that all its variants are. Adorno clearly knew the importance of this conclusion, and we should not continue without remembering it. It is one of the established research discoveries of recent years in the humanities, and it pertains no ­matter the subdiscipline or tribal myth, that is, group jargon, which ignores it. Adorno establishes that the aspiration to hope, even hope against hope, emerging from within the mythologic of ruination and allegoresis is itself a necessary step in the mystified establishment of myth that alienates nature, even within a narrative of salvation, and so returns hope to alien nature as 155

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one of the tools of its own per­sis­tence. “Hope does not unfold in this image in the absurdity of a life that is natu­ral, fallen to nature, and yet at the same time created” (109). With such lucid and definite statements, Adorno steps aside from the endless movement of dialectical thought to draw conclusions. The most essential and consequential result of his work is this sentence. Gnostic and messianic or utopian and apocalyptic narratives image life as merely natu­ral and yet historical, that is, created b ­ ecause of culture. In its entirety, the structure imaged this way is absurd. The result is the ­human as ruin, no better than nature alienated and finite, decayed and ruined, unsaved by the action of ­human creation within ­those ruins. Indeed, altogether, this imaged pro­cess leaves the residue called ruination that equally declares the tragic incapacities of finitude and the absurd attempt to overcome or redeem the ­human from a position achieved outside or beyond the structure the image postulates. Allow Socrates to put all e­ lse to rot as he nearly does in the Symposium and the rest is the absurdity of mind attached to myth—as in Schmitt on Hamlet. We are left with the embodied mind loved and desired by the other­wise ruined and unhappy rest—or at least that remnant seduced, à la Diotima, into wanting such alterity. We must recall the sad conclusion of Benjamin’s life and work when we read the pages Adorno wrote on Kierkegaard, so close upon studying Benjamin’s Trauerspiel. Just as the pure negativity of spirit moves hope to the fore as a salvational concept, hope against hope ­frees hope of its mythical constraints. In this freedom, hope acquires the allure of salvational promise even as pure possibility.23 The logic of ruination is such, however, that within the antifinitude of redemption narratives, the “polemic against mythical hope becomes mythical hopelessness just as the movement of existence changes into the despair that initiated its flight into the labyrinth” (110). Adorno shows that hope offered against myth, as the alternative to ruination, is the mythological formal repetition of alienated finitude, of “death,” that Klee’s angel sees as the ruins of history. This is the result of a mistaken false first step, the initial flight into the labyrinth that so tires out the ­human and worldly victims of gnostic messianism, the young peasants whom Simberg’s Wounded Angel so beautifully portrays. The resignation of intellect assures ­these fatal consequences. Adorno’s detailed analy­sis of Kierkegaard is an ideal instance of why he insists on the immanence of criticism. It is too far beyond the limits of this 156

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chapter to engage with the richness of his work. I hope that readers ­will not presume that topics omitted from discussion hide away contradictions fatal to my conclusions. The last chapter of Kierkegaard, entitled “The Construction of the Aesthetic,” is rich and essential for an understanding of Adorno and Eu­ro­pean modernity’s critique of its own mind’s limits within its circumstances. Its opening pages have several remarks that confirm that we should read Kierkegaard not as an analyst or rec­ord of a crisis but as a symptom within a genealogy of which we have seen several ­grand examples. Readers often take Adorno as explicating Kierkegaard’s analy­sis of what is, that is, something like a state of ruination, itself the consequence of a subjectivity no longer reconciled to nature or the social world. Adorno’s reading is far dif­fer­ent from this, explicating as it does a crisis narrative that typifies the modern versions of such narratives that follow Kierkegaard’s, often invoking while differentiating themselves from his. Adorno’s topics help us see this. Early in his closing chapter, he exposes the emergence of melancholy as a category within the narrative “concentrated in the image of catastrophe as the extreme limit of its potential” (124). He explains that Kierkegaard’s “commentary helplessly missed the point of his own narrative” (124), that is, Kierkegaard stresses that his hopelessness arises “in the autonomous, infinite wish” (124), whereas Adorno stresses that Kierkegaard’s hopelessness—­I would say that of all the ­others who invoke hope in the face of ruin—­arises “in the finite” (124). Adorno turns forcefully against the motive within Kierkegaard’s error, his méconnaissance. Kierkegaard’s commentary obscures how the utopian messianic allegorist creates a myth that emerges from an inability to live, work, and create within a finitude that frustrates an idealization of desire and subsists on fear of death and failure. Kierkegaard’s character “the girl” allegorizes the allegorist who, “frustrated in the factual world,” achieves a hopelessness that results from her per­sis­tent utopian desire “that is denied to it by the world of alienated objects” (124). Let us recall the moment when Benjamin admires Breton for loving not the fleshly Nadja but the visionary who sees what history had frustrated. Breton and Benjamin have moments of mournful impatience in the face of that finitude and then yield to its inescapability, its determinateness, by becoming “decisive,” precisely the category so impor­tant to Schmitt and other authoritarians. As Adorno concludes at this moment of his reading, mournful impatience leads to decisiveness that destroys the “impulse” to hope by refusing to nourish it 157

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dialectically. The Lukácsian command that ends Benjamin’s essay on the surrealists is an instance of just such decisiveness. Not surprisingly, as Adorno argues in reading Kierkegaard, and as I think we see in the pro­ gress of Benjamin’s ­career, such an imaginative and conceptual logic leads to a final mythical horror—­even if not especially when overridden by pathos. It is the conclusion to a chain of imagination that leaves it and the ­human in a vastness of ruin: “the ‘collapse’ of fundamental ­human relations reveals itself as the history of truth itself” (125). Over and against such impatience, such a frustration with finitude, as we see in Stevens, poetic imagination establishes a confidence in the pro­ cesses of h ­ uman life, the textured experience of creation, love, and misery that alone subtends and nourishes, dialectically, the movement of image and thought. Lukács made a far more ordinary ­mistake than the error deeply embedded in the movement of thought Adorno researched in Kierkegaard. Lukács made a willful commitment to subsume himself to the authority of a leading power. Benjamin had concluded his surrealism essay with the idea that desire could lead to intellectual and po­liti­cal investment in a vanguard elite. Lukács had influenced Benjamin ­toward that authoritarian Platonic notion. Adorno’s severe judgment on Lukács shows no mercy ­toward an intellectual who had theorized the necessity of subsuming the subject entirely to an irrationality. Lukács not only advocated but also believed that such an act retrieved and superseded the ideal conjunction of subject and society, of part and ­whole, which Adorno had shown to exist for a moment in the ­middle period of Beethoven’s writings.24 At the head of “The Essay as Form,” Adorno places this epigraph from Goethe’s incomplete Festspiel, Pandora: “Destined, to see the illuminated, not the light” (3). I am tempted to say that every­thing required of a critical intellectual is in this phrase and that Lukács’s crime is a double version of it. The critical intellectual’s obligation is to stand against “destiny,” or what­ever belief a person holds in the moment as the direction of history, especially as if it w ­ ere nature. So destined, the believer sees what appears, but the apophantic is an illumination that obscures. Schematic readers find satisfaction with what­ever the rules illuminate, with the power to show, to display, to summarize, or to retell, to retail. Adorno’s thinking allows us to see how this Platonic figure, which cried out from Goethe’s classicism, has a critical rather than merely epistemological value. Plato’s cave dwellers escape into the light and no longer confuse the real with the shadow, thereby 158

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opening the path of philosophy. The critical intellectual, by contrast, looks to a text to see what work it does, what it creates as opposed to what it seemingly illuminates. The critic looks at the work as a light of a specific kind, with motives, aimed to par­tic­u­lar ends. As such, and in t­hose pragmatic terms, the critic must examine the light. For example, in reading Kierkegaard, Adorno understands how the light thrown by such complex thinking and style creates not only the epiphanies its readers see but also the unseen, blinded as they are by the light they throw. By studying the forms, motives, and effects of such work, the critical intellectual can derive truths about the movement of thought and the logic of imagination in history. Substantively, this means that the critical intellectual can exposit the pro­cesses of self-­making in the very moment of creating and changing the ­human itself. Is the h ­ uman an allegorizing creature in a ruined world? It would seem so from the stories that “illuminate” that world. Yet the critical intellectual does not grant the authority of ­those illuminations but takes them and their movements, their motives, their effects, and their judgments as the field of study. The critical intellectual makes no commitment to them ­because they are no more than the best workings of finite humanity. Adorno’s insight led, for example, to Edward Said’s oft-­quoted comment that if a Palestinian state appeared, he would be its most severe critic. Writing on Kafka, Adorno reminds us, “The artist is not obliged to understand his own art.”25 This leaves the critic the task of understanding the art, not ­either its symbols or its repre­sen­ta­tions. Knowledge exists in the art itself, and that art is what reflects the history in which the h ­ uman finds itself as it helps make and remake the historically ­human itself. Lukács and ­others like him suspend the movement of critical intelligence, putting the mind in ser­vice to a light beyond question and confusing the illuminated with a real that is stable enough for thesis and repetition. Lukács should have seen that, among other t­hings, such a suspension leads to iterative and anonymous intellectual work as surely as a commodification pro­cess in mass culture and its institutions. The sacrifice of the intellect is an ancient trope and practice of ascesis. At times, as in Pascal, it suggests the limits of reason, of mind, even when, as in the case of psychoanalysis, it produces knowledge of t­ hose limits. The same tradition, however, cautions against the error of such sacrifice. In Kierkegaard, despite his extraordinary intellection, following Adorno’s research, the sacrifice of intellect goes too far or, more accurately, sits too 159

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deep, summoning as the controlling light such notions as the leap of faith and the prob­lems of paradox and the enigma. Again, Lukács is not as in­ ter­est­ing as Kierkegaard is or as complex and illuminating of error. His ­mistake is grosser and had its correction long ago. For Adorno, Lukács had always shown a tendency to error of this sort. Adorno opens “The Essay as Form” with the lines from Goethe and moves rapidly to cite Lukács from “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” as proof that in Germany the essay had not yet acquired in­de­pen­dent status and remained fenced off from art and science with dire consequences all around. “The essay form,” Adorno quotes Lukács as writing, “has not yet, ­today, travelled the road to in­de­pen­dence which its s­ ister, poetry, covered long ago; the road of development from a primitive undifferentiated unity with science, ethics, and art” (3).26 Lukács also calls the essay “an art form,” a méconnaissance that confounds its medium with the putative irrationality of art. In Germany, for Adorno and despite the best practice by Benjamin and ­others, the essay form suffers at the prejudiced hands of “the academic guild,” which bars the essayist (an “écrivain” or a man of letters) from membership (3). ­Unless betrayed, the essay cannot work as a mode of knowledge production in such a guild. Adorno makes a compelling point with considerable con­temporary consequence. Adorno’s remark on the exclusion of the essay from the acad­emy, developed in a par­tic­u­lar way, has broad implications for current academic scholarship in the cultural humanities. To put it simply, Adorno began by noting the structural consequences of the academic division of knowledge that separates art and science, the irrational and reason, and the thesis and the essay. He makes a crucial point about the dishonest positivist practice of the academics who, calling themselves phi­los­o­phers, assume any ele­ment of culture for reflection. Adorno speaks of philosophy in his remarks, by which he means the systematizers who clothe their beliefs “in the dignity of the universal and enduring” (3). I extend this term to include not only ­those “critics” and “scholars” who, in the period since the end of the theory movement, embrace this or that “theory” but also the tendency to search among academically certified if mostly Eu­ro­pean Continental phi­los­o­phers for new figures of speech. Philosophy in this extended and somewhat-­cheapened sense “gets involved with par­tic­u­lar cultural artifacts only to the extent to which they 160

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can be used to exemplify universal categories, or to the extent to which the par­tic­u­lar becomes transparent when seen in term of them” (3). This is a prescient description of a good deal of con­temporary academic work that applies theories and methods, at best varying them to treat what­ever subject m ­ atter is at hand. For example, in Jameson, Adorno’s critical reflection on the essay becomes an instance of “Jena Romanticism” (Late Marxism, 247), a claim primarily symbolic of value that in turn rests on a tribally well-­known narrative. Jena Romanticism is a stable and tranquil category that unintentionally mocks the universal in its only seeming solidity. More to the point, however, this stolid category intends to make the density of Adorno’s reflection transparent by making it familiar and giving it a place in a pure act of allegoresis. This is an act of illumination for which many might be grateful. In its terms, Adorno’s essay appears as yet another ruined moment easily placed, deriving its value from the distanced transposing machine that does not bother to read it. In other words, Jameson’s reaction to Adorno m ­ atters symptomatically as well as particularly. Left critical thought becomes allegorical and obscurantist. I do not allude to style only at this point. I allude rather to Adorno’s next careful analytic objection to such posed thinking. Adorno begins “The Essay as Form” noting reluctance to change circumstances and structures that inhibit the efficacy and diminish the status of the essay despite compelling evidence of its intellectual and imaginative value. Next, he questions the motives enmeshed in and revealed by this reluctance: “The stubbornness with which this schema survives would be as puzzling as the emotions attached to it if it ­were not fed by motives stronger than the painful memory of the lack of cultivation in a culture in which the homme de lettres is practically unknown” (3). For the forces holding this schema in place, the uncultivated culture in which it functions is, in its disability, a weaker force than the alternative. This is a crucial point. “Philosophy,” understood as its own discipline and as the metonym for the tripartite scheme that holds the essay aside, no ­matter its putative concerns, shelters culture from cultivation. The institutions and practices of this schema offer, at best, a simulacrum of cultivation. It would, then, be an error to read Adorno h ­ ere as an advocate of Bildungsbürgertum. During the postwar German economic miracle, liberals’ nostalgia for Gymnasium “culture” sometimes i­magined, despite history, that the schema of such culture contained defenses against barbarism.27 Despite radicals’, especially 161

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students’, objections to Adorno in the late 1950s and 1960s, the coauthor of Dialectic of Enlightenment never had such a view of that culture. Characteristically, rather, Adorno conceptualizes the c­ auses and consequences of that uncultivated culture, taking its disrespect of the man of letters as a mark of structural intent to preserve the uncultivated. If we keep in mind the instance of Walter Benjamin’s banishment from the acad­emy, we have part of the structure at hand. The Goethe University at Frankfurt rejected Benjamin’s Origin of German Trauerspiel for not meeting the criteria expected of a Habilitationschrift. Adorno had already marked Benjamin’s use of the essay to produce “telling insights,” having “entrusted to the essay as speculation on specific, culturally pre-­formed objects” (“Essay as Form,” 3). The acad­emy, as the policing institution of uncultivated culture, excludes and delegitimizes the essayist and the essay, leaving its development outside the institution to fulfill its role as bastion of the schema. In the acad­emy ­after Margaret Thatcher, in which quantification of articles and grants normalizes the institutional work of this less in­de­pen­dent bastion, Adorno’s analy­sis makes claims anew. I have already suggested that the hegemony of allegoresis, the trouble-­free application of tribal practices called theories, and the ever-­strengthening commitment to subspecialized publication within authorized fields paralyze the acad­emy in the perpetual motion of uncultivation. I have suggested as well that what m ­ atters in dealing with ­these topics is not specialized engagement as an expert within them but rather criticism as an analy­sis of motive through gesture. Adorno finds a fundamental and long-­standing motive against cultivation and against the essay, the desired practice of the écrivain whom the disciplines banish. “In Germany,” he writes, “the essay arouses re­sis­tance ­because it evokes intellectual freedom” (3). This is the same key topic to which Adorno had turned in writing on cultural criticism, on lyric poetry, on Kafka, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s especially. This is no minor ele­ment in his thinking. ­Those who cannot assent to this part of Adorno’s thinking deny it b ­ ecause their motives are congruent with Lukács’s, with the vanguardist policy to which he surrendered, and with the satisfactions of ruling at least some quadrant of an acad­emy set not to cultivate, except the tribal desires of initiates. The essay is an essential device of creative critical work, so essential that its exclusion by policing institutions is, despite any contrary claim, a sign of their disinterest in h ­ uman cultivation and their deep disregard of all ­human capacities developed in the essay form. Minus 162

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the intellectual freedom of the essay, the acad­emy is set against cultivation and the ­human. Adorno contended that the Enlightenment had not developed sufficiently before its deviation produced horrendous results. “Since the failure of Enlightenment that has been lukewarm since Leibniz, even ­under present-­day conditions of formal freedom, that intellectual freedom has never quite developed but has always been ready to proclaim its subordination to external authorities as its real concern” (3–4). What is intellectual as opposed to formal freedom? How can freedom depend on and derive from authority? What are its qualities? How does intellectual freedom practice and achieve? Adorno chooses to write across the prob­lem of cultivation, mind, freedom, and the intellect through the figure of the essay. The essay is a metonym of desired and needed h ­ uman life practices, impor­tant for their register of the species’ status and vital for judging the development of its pos­si­ble ­futures. The first quality that intellectual freedom demands is in­de­pen­dence from previous circumscriptions of thought. “The essay,” Adorno writes, “does not let its domain be prescribed for it” (4). Nothing could be more dif­fer­ent from two normative modes. In the first, an already existing philosophy—­ which is, in real­ity, a method, a theory, a way of speaking28—­takes up a cultural artifact and runs over it, making it an illustration of the philosophy’s explanatory power. The density of the artifact, its textured particularity, so illuminated dis­appears within the power of the already known. In the second, mind rationalized works within borders set up by e­ arlier work in the field. Not long ago, Michel Foucault made a considerable effort to expose the constraints consequent on disciplined and authorized knowledge formations. He drew attention not only to systems of regularity within a discursive order but also to the effects of that order and its apparatus on and throughout the social world, the world of knowledge and practice, and above all the possibilities of h ­ uman imagination. Regularized disciplines, newly reauthorized within the consequences of Thatcherite reforms, have academics work within the confines that they find already existing precisely as the sole condition of their work. We might call ­those confines actually existing conversations, debates within the field, normative disciplinary standards, or any other phrase that names the policing structure of the schema. The essay is that act of mind that does not begin from within the bounds and that, indeed, in its essence asserts its own domain against prescription. For this among other reasons, the results of 163

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essays have no philosophic, scientific, or field status. They appear subjective and are, in fact, unavailable to judgment by normative standards. To represent Adorno’s thinking about the essay as marginal is to represent freedom as secondary to the civility if not conformity labeled “disciplinary advance.” Adorno wants his readers to concede that the essay’s accomplishment is neither scientific nor artistic. Dialectically, the essay opens a path that normalizing has not already categorized, a quality that the essay form shares with few other modes of thoughtful creative cultivation but that, as I w ­ ill argue, we also find in such places as the art of Wallace Stevens. The essay has a special and valuable relation to concepts, and that fact requires as literary a mode of figuration as pos­si­ble. The essay’s “efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what o ­ thers have done before him” (4). Inspiration is not obedience, of course, and it is inescapably subjective, existing within the personal emotions of courage. Moreover, inspiration is not polite engagement with the found object, on the model of a civil conversation.29 “The essay reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic” (4). Seen ethically, the essayist reflects the humility of mind, but that is ­because the essayist’s humility does not stem from a negation of intellect or imagination. On the contrary, the essayist, like a child, is without qualms in accepting his or her own position within the already existing and knows that his or her intellect and work require the allure of or the repulsion from an already existing, perhaps found or collected other. Better the essayist thrives in the midst, rather than within e­ ither the defended domain of the known or the aspirant delusion of a meta-­position about history. The essayist stands against the gnostic or systemic elites, especially as their works are commodities within the bastion. In the era post-­ Thatcher and Reagan, the antifoundationalists conceded the impossibility of thinking ex nihilo, as it ­were, but to avoid the creative and critical possibilities of the essay adduced the containment of conversation to achieve similar effects within institutions newly saved and salved by their apparent openness and civility.30 For ­there is no term other than “civility” to name the social allure of conversationalism as a marker of proper be­ hav­ior in an intellectual schema that ­after the loss of Idealism needed a self-­legitimating account of its own normative practice. The essay lacks the manners and value of conversation. 164

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The very nature of the essay as work excludes it from the domain or requires its exclusion by the police who refuse to take seriously its nature and value. “Luck and play are essential” to the essay (4), which is to say finite contingency and imaginative invention, flexibility, but within the disciplined mind and character of the essayist. Play means the rules of the game, of course, so the essay is not, as the police would have it, merely anarchic or inconsequential. To approach a sense of t­hose essential rules of conduct that the mind calls essay, Adorno must firmly place the essay against the qualities and character of its antagonists. To define the rules of play hidden b ­ ehind all the strict interdictions institutionalized by an unenlightened culture requires agonistics. The essay, by contrast, is the work of the mind producing its own products and their results. The essay pre­sents the mind as always amid what is loved and hated. It is extremely in­ter­est­ing that Adorno explains the academic preference for a mind at work ex nihilo in terms of “an unrestrained work ethic.” Consider ­Virginia Woolf’s character of Mr. Ramsey in To the Light­house as a cartoon version of such a mind.31 We recall not only that Mr. Ramsey is an academic with gradu­ate students and followers but also that he believes he can summon an advance in knowledge by the Herculean effort of concentration required to move thought from Q to R. The narrator tells us he cannot quite make it, that in his own judgment, his mind is not good enough. He is a plodder and has made it as far as he can plod. He is not a genius who in a flash can seemingly ex nihilo leap from A to Z. Mr. Ramsey cannot get to R, which means that he cannot get to himself, to his own subjectivity, to its expression, or to the end of a well-­made life. Woolf dramatizes beautifully the sad intolerance of such minds that know the permanent failure of their ungraced state and of such characters—­the evidence we see in Mr. Ramsey’s unloving cruelty to his young son and his utter inability to appreciate his wife’s perception of life’s textured spectacle u ­ ntil ­after her death. Mr. Ramsey is an intelligent figure of a plodding work ethic that would—­but cannot—­speed thought ex nihilo. Consider, however, the inverse of the figure. The unrestrained work ethic could produce one of two results: ­either the mass production of articles and books facilitated by painting within the lines of normalizing practices or a monstrous effort to demonstrate the all-­inclusiveness, the encyclopedic embrace of a system or repertoire of figures and concepts.32 Of course, ­these two reinforce each other. The repertoire extends its reach by massification within normal 165

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­ ractices, within the “field journals” that h p ­ ouse the valued expert opinion, the scientific truth results certified, at least outside the natu­ral sciences, by the assent of o ­ thers within the self-­confirming jargons and associations that all too often have no answer to the cui bono of their investments. Alternatively, they feel no attraction to the ideal product of mind and love formed, emergent in its own in­de­pen­dent and demanding way. How does the essay work? The essay has no presumed point of departure, no origin from which it must set out or which it assumes. Nor does it try to set up its own origin, take its own first move as an original one. This is not merely a metaphysical or epistemological point but a social one as well. The essay never sees itself as part of culture, as building on a previously told or worked-­out princi­ple, and never sees itself expanding a regime or domain—­continuing a conversation. “The essay reflects what is loved and hated,” which means its legitimacy emerges entirely from a cultivated subjectivity fully and inescapably among the passions aroused when intellect meets contingency, which is more often its own than circumstance. A schema that denies legitimacy to the essay reproduces impoverished culture and the or­ga­nized intellect. It gets results, moving from “A to Q.” The essay is never a result, no ­matter how completely it meets its own demands. It is finished, as in its root, finire, “to end.” Not only does it start “with what it wants to talk about,” but also, as Adorno continues, it says only “what occurs to it” (4). In turn, the essay is inherently suspicious. Excluded by a schema that denies the essay seriousness, the essay is inherently critical of all official seriousness, while not looking for its own. As Adorno puts it, “seriousness” is “false profundity” (5). Yet suspicion is easy, cheap irony and no surety against “slick superficiality” (5), a point tied to Adorno’s critiques of the culture industry and cultural criticism. Outside the schema, inherently critical, always striving toward a f­uture, the essay nonetheless cannot avoid ­these risks, which ease the schematic exclusion of the essay. They do not blunt its utility in marking the limits of the schema in two senses—­that is, the areas of investigation made off-­limits by the schema and the demands of thought (or mind), the practices of intellectual freedom, it represses and excludes. If the essay begins where it w ­ ill, pulled and pushed by love and hate, it ends not with a conclusion but “when it feels finished rather than when ­there is nothing to say” (4). The essay is always tense and tentative, its style tensile, that is, strong but bending. Edward Said’s elaborate analy­sis of 166

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“beginnings” in substantial part developed t­hese Adorno-­like reflections and deepened them as an account of how the w ­ ill to begin harasses itself in the very act of taking a step, which also accounts for what it means to feel finished. The essay’s end has no scientific basis; it is not “definitive and conscientious” (4). The essay is always expressive ­because passion moves it even though it sometimes orients itself with an object already ­there. The schema’s serious moralists call the essay’s work overinterpretation, for this is what they know “according to the mechanized verdict of the vigilant intellect that hires itself out to stupidity as a watchdog against the mind” (4). Writing in 1954, “nach Auschwitz,” Adorno dares to characterize intellectual vigilantes as marking “with a yellow star” (4) the essay’s efforts and results. Adorno began by defining the essay as the form of intellectual freedom, which obliged him to explore the motives ­behind its repression within culture. At this point in his analy­sis, Adorno’s thinking about the essay and the need for immanent analy­sis coincide.33 They have warnings for ­those who allegorize or digitize according to system and t­hose who schematize according to subfield. Members of t­hese groups brand the essay “as irrelevant” for its lack of expertise or its subjectivity outside system. In each case, and again we feel the presence of Nietz­sche in Adorno’s reading, objects exist layered by interpretation and scientific findings. They believe the object is unavailable b ­ ecause it is unavailable “in itself,” or they believe considerations of the object depend on an elucidation that exists already in potential within the expertise of reference and footnote or a coherent system of concepts or conversations. All of ­these vigilantes have a “fear of negativity” (4) precisely ­because the intellect at work in the essay does not accept, in advance, the strictures declaring its work impossible, for example, beginning in immanence and knowing its betrayals. More precisely, the essayist is a subject with unsacrificed intellect serving freedom. What does the existing schema fear and repress? “The subject’s efforts to penetrate what hides ­behind the façade ­under the name of objectivity” (4). Normatively, vigilance demands conformity with method or congeniality with ongoing conversations within a field, a goal institutionalized by notes and citations. At times, it requires friendly and supportive subservience to a jargon, a tribal discourse, and ­those familiars who speak it. Ideally, the vigilant schema, the Geisteswissenschaften, which Adorno literalizes as “science of the mind” (8), “fails 167

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to deliver what it promises the mind”; that is, it cannot “illuminate its works from within” (9). It has lost sight of light, preferring the illumination. It is extremely in­ter­est­ing and impor­tant that Adorno always presses on the centrality of mind, freedom, and works in a tense and tentative style aware of what cannot be illuminated, which dwells as the caesura or pause or appears online in showing the expressed as the limit case of the unexpressed. The schema does not illuminate the mind as it illuminates its works; that is, in contradistinction to Goethe’s plea, it searches the illuminated and not the light.34 On the contrary, it represses the light and obscures the mind’s ­free and loving expression. The essay is mind at work ­toward freedom and its metonym, just as it is the intellect trying to be f­ ree, while the essay itself enacts the strug­gle for freedom. Perhaps we can best understand some culture critics’ desires to minimize Adorno’s embrace of the essay when he writes that the essay “draws its fullest conclusions from the critique of system” (9), a claim that has its parallel in the essay’s exposé of method. “In the realm of thought it is virtually the essay alone that has successfully raised doubts about the absolute privilege of method. The essay allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly; it is radical in its non-­radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to a princi­ple, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character” (9). No doubt, for many academic eyes, Adorno’s worries about method might appear naïve or out-­of-­date. Yet, given the current fashion of invoking theorists such as Agamben, Badiou, Schmitt, et alia, even hyperspecialized articles (and their authors) stand in close proximity to very systemic writings, each with its own methods and consistent jargons. The essay, in other words, is dif­fer­ent not only from philosophy, that is, the systemic modes of knowledge produced within the ­human sciences, but from the ­orders of regularity that manage the journals, the conversations, the jargons, the areas of specialization, that make up much of the current institutionalized schema. In this, the essay also differs from the scholarly article. By definition, the article is a part of a larger w ­ hole, a fragment of a book perhaps or one of a series within a disciplinary field or part of a conversation within a journal or among a set of intellectual workers.35 Its starting conditions are always set, and it is incomplete in a way dif­fer­ent from the sudden finish of an essay.

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The essay and the poem have in common a point of profound importance that the academic critical profession should adapt as a guiding protocol. Indeed, this point extends to thought and intellectual work throughout a ­great deal of intellectual and critical culture with dire effects of exclusion and selective legitimation. In a word, as we saw with Benjamin and Schmitt, exemplary and dominant figures among the crisis critics, who have had continuing influence among academics, model tragedy and mourning plays to establish normative priorities over comedy and romance not only as genres but also as forms and objects with access to under­lying pro­cesses. The textured construction of life dis­appears ­under the weight and b ­ ehind the thick curtains of certain dominant notions and figures. Adorno turns to Spinoza to deepen his thinking about the essay. “The essay does not play by the rules of or­ga­nized science and theory, according to which, in Spinoza’s formulation, the order of ­things is the same as the order of ideas” (10). Intellectuals serving the schema cannot tolerate breaking the link between t­ hing and thought or between topic and abstraction. The positivism of field-­specific work, with its internal dialogics and appeals to expertise, more naïvely, feels the same repulsion. The essay always comes close to its object, but relying on subjectivity of intellect, making the contingent essential to the act of mind, and freeing the textured life of the par­tic­u­lar from the abstraction of dogma and positivism. We might even say—­since passions such as love and hate are the motives of the essay (as Stevens shows they are the motives of poetry)—­that the object calls to the essayist. This is, however, a dangerous idea. Benjamin, writing about Paris in the nineteenth ­century, made the daring claim that the commodity is a vampire. This warning about the deadly allure of the object cautions against the essay’s love and hate. Yet, as Adorno acknowledges, Benjamin’s own daring as an essayist proves the value of the form, suggesting something quite profound about the essayist’s courage in modernity, over and against both the system builder and the expert. We might call this, with Woolf in mind, the courage of the contingent. From within the ­family, Adorno works against the inheritances of Hegel’s logic, that is, with the deepest sense of its limits and productivity. Yet his thinking poses fundamental questions to itself. How does the essay escape the fate of death or its own commodification? Alive, what is its afterlife? An inherent criticism of culture and its alternatives, culture and its immanence

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threaten it. Does the essay become, like art, something of a world, as art is, for example, the world for Valéry? The essay is contingent and, as the art of the mind in the world, tense, tentative, and contingent too. Adorno’s questions tilt into ­human time, without melancholy, precisely the imaginative opposite to ruination.36 Nonetheless, especially for t­hose who need a Marxist-­Hegelian Adorno in some stripe, his willingness to rethink the status and value of the concept precisely b ­ ecause the essay as form inherently does so stands as a remarkable example of Adorno’s own courage. Building on Spinoza, Adorno shows key qualities of the essay, of a power of mind that is other­wise, except in poetry, forgotten and repressed. “­Because the unbroken order of concepts is not equivalent to what exists, the essay does not aim at a closed deductive or inductive structure” (10). This sentence develops given claims about beginning and end and the incommensurability of word and ­thing. It also expresses an essential ele­ment about the essay that is commonplace since Montaigne. Adorno puts it this way ­later in the essay: “The word Versuch, attempt or essay, in which thought’s utopian vision of hitting the bullseye is united with the consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional character, indicates, as do most historically surviving terminologies, something about the form, something to be taken all the more seriously in that it takes place not systematically but rather as a characteristic of an intention groping its way” (16). This last figure recalls Montaigne, who reminds his readers in “On Idleness” that writing essays brings order to the superfluity of imagination. Moreover, it repeats and extends Montaigne’s perfect description of the essayist at work. In “Of Democritus and Heraclitus,” he writes this: “I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the ­whole of anything; nor do t­hose who promise to show it to us.”37 Like Montaigne, Adorno attaches the essay, as its very form requires, to the subject’s expressive w ­ ill, contingencies of judgment, of intention and desire. Adorno adds the quality of courage, especially for the intellectual who knows the dangers of such acts and beliefs, that is, the dangers of vampires, the dangers of superficiality and commercialization, the dangers of narcissism, and the dangers of false belief about the efficacy of the subject.38 On this last point, reading Adorno on Beethoven’s late style should remove all doubts. In its simplest form, Adorno’s argument in his stunning notes on Beethoven’s final works reflects the impossibility of the 170

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subject-­object synthesis in the sonata form, a synthesis that had once existed for a brief historical moment. The result is a ­music complex in its or­ga­nized relation to the craft and conventions that once succeeded, producing a sense of musical art thoroughly illuminated by a light of final crisis.39 In other words, we must recognize and accept the inevitable expressive and postexpressive subjectivity of the essay just as we do in the final works of Beethoven or as we w ­ ill see in the late poems of Wallace Stevens. Adorno has created a complex figure of the subject and the essay form as an irreplaceable ability of ­human mind at work in knowledge and experience, exposition and negation, love and secular life, that is other­ wise unavailable in the schema of official culture and knowledge production. The academic humanities, alienated from their avowed aims, should ­free themselves from this authority in and through the essay form. Almost any academic reader or publishing scholar, especially in the literary humanities, knows that regular production often includes references, directly or second­hand, to a set of concepts inherent in some theorist’s widely circulated work. This is the standardization of conversation, of accelerated production (of scholars as well as scholarship), and of agreed concepts and jargons for specialization and analy­sis. ­After deconstruction and as part of the long campaign against metaphysics, scholars agree not to search for primordial givens—­“always historicize”—­but they repeat for utility concepts made categories essential for their work, figures and ­counters as empty signifiers applicable almost everywhere. The best result is illumination of materials and, so, modification or extension of the categorical tool. T ­ here is also a positivism in ­these pragmatics, which the essay exposes and escapes. The essay not only rejects origins, but also “it rejects definition of its concepts” (12). Variation on a concept, achieved by its application and repetition, adds nothing to thought, even if it adds to an index of illuminated familiarities—­consider the now exhausted meme “the site of negotiation.” The use of arrested concepts characterizes both scholasticism and, as Adorno suggests, neopositivism, pointing to the uncritical relation between positivist traditions and academic practice. Implied throughout this analy­sis is an ethical obligation to thought, which cannot exist in the practice of iteration, variation, extension, illumination, and entrancement. ­There is more than an analogy between Stevens’s poetry and Adorno’s work on the essay. Each form is motile, with the ability of thought and imagination to move of itself and to make the best pos­si­ble results of that 171

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ability. I draw “motile” from Montaigne’s “On Idleness.” He writes out a brilliantly condensed figure in which cultivation depends on enthusiastic imagination engaging with the given superfluity of finitude.40 In poetry, we have Stevens’s exploration of transport; in Adorno, the thinking made pos­ si­ble by “essay.” Together, t­hese practices teach intellectuals the fundamental value of the basic work done by mind and imagination in society. To denigrate t­ hese, to reduce the value of their textured emergence to fixed categories or historical contexts arrested in repetition, is an ethical failure that betrays and limits ­human possibility to engage, survive, and alter its tentative relationships to the world. To ­these devices as events of ­human imagination and thought, critical intellectuals must turn, adapting them as the proper sources of authority, as the best and most needed examples. The challenge is intense. What Foucault used to call anonymous work, that is, the normal product of clerks who do not rupture old or invent new discourses—­anonymous workers cannot easily alter their game to become essayists and poets. They can, however, internalize the ethics of the essay and re­spect the value of imagination that is not their own. Academic organ­izations of knowledge and ­career structures insist on the schema, but this does not require, in turn, ethical consent to its solidity. On the contrary, a fundamental contradiction appears at the point where the humanist intellectual assumes the role of schematic. Indeed, recent transformations have diluted the value previously granted to the figure of the critical intellectuals, whose decline Adorno had traced through the twentieth c­ entury. In the pro­cess, he showed the need for and possibility of the critical mind within the very terms of its constraint. The schema is a principal device by which the intellectual takes part in the suppression of the intellectual’s critical and so imaginative and thoughtful responsibility. Just as Stevens’s short poems of the mid-1930s depended on exact language and form, so the essay gives similar attention to language and deals with the concept with rigorous precision. Not surprisingly, the iteration of concept and figure, no ­matter the effort at definition, does not specify a concept precisely. In the literary humanities especially, scholars ­will speak of figures or concepts as floating signifiers, acknowledging the seeming paradox that their lack of content makes them widely applicable, useful in vari­ous contexts and for multiple motives. This reflects the utilitarian centrality of pure rhe­toric in such work. Adorno’s thinking leads him to a 172

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deeper, less rhetorical valuation of the concept and its symbiotic relation to the essay. We must keep in mind the contingent nature of the essay. It starts with what­ever it finds. The same is true in its relation to concepts. The essay is unsystematic and disbelieves definition. To the methodical or disciplinary eye, its procedures look unjustified. Reading an essay, the schematic eye sees the unmotivated, the surprising, and the unprepared appearance of concepts. “The essay . . . ​introduces concepts unceremoniously, ‘immediately,’ just as it receives them” (12). Adorno finds an old insight useful when he explains that, nonetheless, the essay achieves precision. Vico had ­earlier proven that comparison alone produces precision of judgment and understanding. Benjamin had extended Vico’s insight with his notion of a constellation, a mapped set of relations that together form an image or concept that is more precise (more real?) than any defined concept might offer. The essay, which we must take as capacity as well as pro­cess and form, achieves precision b ­ ecause in the essay concepts “are made more precise only through their relationship to one another” (12). The schema might believe that it achieves the same result by applying or iterating terms and notions across fields of objects—­for example, “national allegory” across all “national lit­er­a­tures”—­but Adorno shows that this belief is “mere ­superstition” (12). It contradicts the nature of the concept. If we recall ­Adorno’s consistent emphasis on immanence in relation to the object, we can foresee the next step in his research. That next step involves showing nothing less than the movement of thought, which always occurs critically within the individual, in forms that we call essay. The movement of criticism is always immanent, and dialectically the essay ideally offers a home to understanding and enacting thought and criticism. The relationship between concepts is not a static geometric one. “Constellation” implies spatial or fixed relations, but only if we forget the movement of ele­ments, the dance of events, which form the constellated relation. Furthermore, in Adorno, relationality produces precision not abstractly, but only within the immanent pro­cess of reading language. “All concepts are already implicitly concretized through the language in which they stand” (12). This insight does not demand a genealogical or ge­ne­tic account of that standing. Rather, it requires an act of thoughtful reading, motivated by love or hate, of the contingent object or event that attracts the ­will and desire of the critic. 173

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What happens in the transport of enthusiastic reading? What work does the essay do at this point? In a moment, it needs not to prove the concretization of the concept through language. That meta-­position comes prior. Rather, in the immanent moment, thought assumes its own freedom and obligations to liberate the concept from its categorization. In this moment, transport begins from the edges and depths of the concept moving to relations with ­others, or ele­ments of ­others. Thought makes its own formal demands for freedom of motion. This helps language along, and so the inherited resources that had before concretized in the abstract. In this, the essay is like the Stevens poem. The essayist begins with, comes to, and revitalizes the meanings that concretized in the concept. It reveals again, tentatively, the depository of resources—­ tradition, archives, silences, all themselves the results of life, work, and art. “The essay starts with ­these meanings,” Adorno writes, “and, being essentially language itself, takes them farther” (12). In keeping with the notion expressed in Adorno’s citation from Goethe, we must keep an eye on the source of light. Throughout ­these pages, that source of light exists, metonymically and nominally, as the essay, a principal form of poiesis. “Essay” names a set of ­human capacities that the equally ­human schema occludes at ­great cost. The essay is language especially in its dramatic mode of pre­sen­ta­tion.41 The essay, “being essentially language itself,” would save the concept not only from its naïve definitional fate within science but also from its arrested development in the philosophical systems that extend and apply it abstractly, as an instrument of explanation. In the systemic and definitional quadrants of the schema, language arrests the concept. By contrast, the essay “wants to help language in its relation to concepts, to take them in reflection as they have been named unreflectingly in language” (12). Concepts are one depository of thought’s work, but they can only exist as resources for, as transformational possibilities of, new thinking if the concepts still are motile. In this, concepts are for critical intellectuals in par­tic­u­lar resources parallel in kind to the achievements within poetic tradition for any writer, such as Stevens, hoping and able to make use of the complex results of ­human effort embodied in history within their own time and for our ­futures. In helping us understand the need for the essay, Adorno makes excellent use of Montaigne’s extensive linking of the essay not only to the contingent but also to skepticism, a dangerous but unavoidable potential for thought conducted within the secular and finite. The essay has a form, 174

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which is the result of its work. Form is Adorno’s device for managing the potentially dire effects of skepticism, especially ­those that would negate the value of achieved work. (It is worth pointing out that schematic and systemic theories and artifices abstract from achieved work.) If the essay is a form of work, its formal goal is its value achieved and preserved. As form, the essay becomes something like a poem, in that it is a depository of work, active in its moment and risking itself in and for ­futures. It makes use of skepticism to create and preserve. His thinking about the essay’s achieved form shows Benjamin’s influence on Adorno or, in the terms of Adorno’s essay, shows how Adorno, drawn passionately to Benjamin’s image of the constellation, transforms it into an analogy for the essay itself. Within the essay, concepts move, play, and position in relation to each other; this is the essence of their motility, and the result and goal of immanent reading is assaying passion and thought. “All its concepts,” Adorno writes of the form, “are to be presented in such a way that they support one another, that each becomes articulated through its configuration with the o ­ thers” (13). We w ­ ill return to Adorno’s explanation of this support, which inherently rests on immanent reading. Most in­ter­est­ing is that readability is the intended result, the gold standard of achieved work in and by the essay form. “In the essay discrete ele­ments set off against one another come together to form a readable context; the essay erects no scaffolding and no structure” (13). In other words, Jameson’s recasting of the medieval four-tier system of reading as a machinery of explanation—­this ménage and ­others like it are anathema to reading, readability, and creativity. “But the ele­ments,” Adorno continues, “crystallize as a configuration through their motion. The constellation is a force field, just as e­ very intellectual structure is necessarily transformed into a force field u ­ nder the essay’s gaze” (13). In this way, Adorno returns to thinking’s dialectical obligation assumed in the essay form to preserve for transport what it finds entombed within structure. The depository created by the essay, like the form and function produced in a Stevens poem, is motile, preservative, and focused on the source of light—­imagination—­ that dissolves structure to release the living work deposited, paradoxically, securely within a frame that intends its vitrification. The schema of modern knowledge systems historically marginalizes the essay. Importantly, the essay transports its results and its effects by the art and rigor of its own per­for­mance rather than by and within the mechanics of science, system, and discipline that depend on definitions, structures, and 175

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iterative apparatus. Montaigne began by apologizing for the presumption that writing attached to the passions of hate and love unguided by structure could make a claim on readers. Montaigne was a g­ reat ironist, of course, as befits any essayist, but his apology contained not only an ele­ ment of sincerity but also a deep truth that Adorno explores to make clear the risks involved and in­de­pen­dence required to assay the truth. The essay is skeptical about the concept, but it is also skeptical of its own necessary embrace of “the relationship of concepts to language,” which in modernity other analytics “fetishize” (12) especially phenomenologies and formalisms. ­Because the essay requires immanent reading of the language deposit of creative thought, it must risk the errors of such fetishization and must enact as well as acknowledge the need for skepticism about its own primary instrumentality. “The essay is as skeptical about this as it is about the definition of concepts” (12). Within the schema, such skepticism would make impossible the discovery of knowledge or the advance of thinking, precisely b ­ ecause it neutralizes the expansion of an already authorized paradigm or, more profoundly, make dubious the schema that generates paradigms, the paradigm itself. The essay is that form of thought, of loving and hateful imagination, which responds creatively within the difficulties it acknowledges rather than avoids or suppresses. It runs the risk of celebrity exploitation, a widespread but not deep prob­lem; more impor­tant, it transforms the dangers inherent in skepticism into its own creative strength. Responding to the contingency that attracts and repels the essay also risks the aesthetic as the legitimation of its own per­for­mance. Such justification affords no protection against error, although the work of form, the force field of transformative effect, guarantees an escape from error. The essay not only risks itself in f­ utures i­magined and not but begins in the risk of contingent secular finitude. Its beginning conditions guarantee this. Fundamental risk to its thinking lies only in a linear movement that rushes, retrospectively, to secure the beginning as a foundation. The effort to do so is an understandable ambition of knowledge and anxiety, especially among ­those who are uncomfortable with the tentativeness and texture of contingency. The essay’s beginning risk must remain open all along, in a way that inherently supports and challenges Edward Said’s dialectical understanding of beginnings as authority and molestation. Said theorized comprehensively and showed by a series of close readings how the inaugural act of ­will in writing elicits inevitably a limitation of w ­ ill inescapably 176

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consequent on the foundational act’s strictures. Adorno, closer on this point to Stevens than to Said, has it that the essay is the mind of winter always and everywhere, except of course when in defeat it yields to commodification, aesthetics, or finality. As Adorno, doubtlessly echoing Montaigne, makes truly clear, the essay “unapologetically . . . ​lays itself open to the objection that one does not know for sure how one is to understand its concepts” (12). Within that danger, however, lies the opportunity to reactivate in the poet’s transport all the properties of thinking, passion, and imagination. The critic’s task is to parallel the creative success of the poet. If the latter confronts an inherited archive of figures, tropes, and poems that, in their beginnings, ­were successful as transport, then the critic confronts a similar prob­lem—­how the critic works with ­earlier results, how the inherited and the con­temporary might enable rather than restrict ­future creation and pre­ sent work to that end. Said theorized not only how an individual act of beginning authorized the next step in a pro­cess of creation but how, dialectically, that step hindered or harassed the ­will along the path of succeeding steps. In Adorno, as in Stevens, the movement of imagination confronts an archive of e­ arlier work by tossing freedom of mind against t­ hose enabling restraints. For the critic, t­ here is a doubled confrontation. The academic critic works surrounded by a schema that would minimize, hold, or direct the creative possibilities in any moment. The schema can colonize t­hese potentialities for po­liti­cal and economic purposes. Ruth Y. Y. Hung’s study of “global spectacle” makes this point. An active party-­state embodies the material ambition of schema, shaping ­human desire ­toward utopian possibilities propagated precisely to foreclose any in­de­pen­dent act of creativity. In effect, the party-­state, following on the directive pro­cesses of marketization, preempts the twentieth ­century’s theoretical faith in utopia as the basis for po­liti­cal re­sis­tance, for popu­lar efforts at in­de­pen­dent creation. A long-­ standing strug­gle between desire i­ magined as the basis of alternative f­ utures and as material for manipulation and control has ended, as Hung shows, in a result that disables leftist confidence in the utopian moment.42 In addition, and in a way more insidious than the open actions of a censorious party-­state, the schema also depends on science to define concepts and on philosophy, that is, systematic structures of categories and methods, to arrest the concept and regularize the work done in its formation, its relations, 177

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and its potentialities. In all t­ hese systems, transport gives way to iteration, ideally to the smoothness of abstraction made victor over the textured qualities of lived experience, of mind’s work, and of language’s potential within the motives of hate and love. Adorno shows us how the essay does work against barbarism. Within the schema of academic and intellectual life, “the demand for strict definition has long served to eliminate . . . ​the irritating and dangerous aspects of the ­things that live in the concepts” (12). Given Adorno’s strict sense that the contingent calls to the essay along the lines of passion, and his equally strict sense that the concept relates always to the profound par­tic­ u­lar, definition selects out lived experience, contradictions of passion, textures of contingent life, and the mind’s play around and out of all this. Definition has a referential and limiting function. Of course, it refers to an ­actual material practice, a demand from authority and protocol, which asks, what do you mean by “concept.” It also names an existing functional complex of mind, desire, and power that characterizes an unfortunate potential within the working of the ­human itself. The conceptualizing mind generates uncomfortable and disorienting effects on the living being and its social formations. Intellectuals and often academics, defenders of culture and schema, extend and enhance mechanisms and theories, cognitive devices and structures that the irritating aspects of illuminated t­ hings buried within the imprisoned concepts. The twentieth ­century saw several intellectual gambits aimed at thinking without the concept. For some intellectuals and writers, the concept produced unavoidable results, closing down e­ ither the play of imagination or the call of Being.43 Adorno by formation and commitment could not imagine thought without concept, at least not thought in working form with effects he desired. The essay became the place where his own thinking digs into the very limits of concept to find thoughtful creative possibilities that could c­ ounter barbarism. The essay “does not make do without general concepts, . . . ​nor does it deal with them arbitrarily” (12), no more than a poet deals arbitrarily with inherited structures of transport in his song. The Virgilian poet tells the ephebe to study the tradition to learn to sing the song of his community, placing all emphasis on traditional practice, knowledge, and the proper role always potential if not always actualized in verse.

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Like the g­ reat poet, the essayist performs, with concepts and the reservoir of per­for­mance that composed the textured linguistic figure that the concept is. Consider in practical terms the scientific or medical researcher who can assign the task of writing up a research article based on lab notes to a hired hand (or machine). Unlike the articles, the essay “takes pre­sen­ ta­tion more seriously” (12). The article separates “method and object” and is “indifferent to the pre­sen­ta­tion of [its] objectified contents” (12). This remark merely deepens Adorno’s analy­sis of how ossification works. Necessarily, such disinterest in all but approved style exists in the internally regularized productions of anonymous workers, just as it does in the heady ambitious application of the same conceptual structure and jargon created in the work of experts and academic leaders.44 “Pre­sen­ta­tion” is not the vanity of an aesthetic vision or an ethos of subjective expression or self-­fashioning. Pre­sen­ta­tion is the ability of the mind working in concepts to nourish and promote the capacities that do such creative work and to preserve it, emergent in the form we call concept. For Adorno, the concept is an instrument of advance but also of historicality, of the mind, the h ­ uman at work in history, among the contingencies, while hating, loving, and re-­creating. Foucault once spoke of the mind’s need to work within the limit rather than making a foolish ahistorical attempt to think outside or beyond it.45 Implicitly, Foucault understood the value of the achieved limit as well as its restrictive danger. Careless ambition, the hope to overleap the limit— or, as Adorno said ­earlier, to begin ex nihilo—­always ends wrongly, no doubt ahistorically furthering amnesia and encouraging facile operations of mind. Like Foucault, Adorno wants a name for the achieved form, the results and consequences of intellectual creative work. For him, the proper name, the inherited form, is concept. For ­those who believe the concept is a fixed tool for illuminating application, a settled gain in philosophy, or worse a free-­floating signifier in need of (varying) definitions or illuminating application, the essay—­like the poem—­lacks seriousness and purpose. For such believers, the essay is en dehors des limites, out of bounds. Style and per­for­mance are suspect at least and outlawry and indulgence at worst. Indeed, for articles, the banal is the proper and appreciated absence of style.46 Auerbach’s discussion of Yahweh as an effect of style should have foreclosed all theories that tie style irrevocably to hypothesized heroic modernism

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or to bourgeois subjectivism. Adorno, of course, as we know from his writings on Beethoven, had both studied the rupture of the subject from the social world and examined subjectivity’s vital role in the critique of culture and illumination of conventions’ shards. Scholars cannot dismiss Adorno’s emphasis on per­for­mance or style on ­either of ­these grounds or absorb it into some sort of unexamined assertion about the necessity of difficult prose. Per­for­mance is a h ­ uman capacity, the value of which is primary. As Adorno uses the word, per­for­mance stands against barbarism ­because it achieves results essential to ­human creativity and passion without falling victim to predictable results: The manner of expression is to salvage the precision sacrificed when definition is omitted, without betraying the subject m ­ atter to the arbitrariness of conceptual meanings decreed for the last time. In this, Benjamin was the unsurpassed master. This kind of precision, however, cannot remain atomistic. Not less but more than a definitional procedure, the essay presses for the reciprocal interaction of its concepts in the pro­cess of intellectual experience. In such experience, concepts do not form a continuum of operations. Thought does not pro­gress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet. The fruitfulness of the thoughts depends on the density of the texture. The thinker does not actually think but rather makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it. (13)

Adorno does not speak of or in defense of per­for­mance theory, which had an academic phase during and ­after the Culture Wars of the 1980s and which helped s­ ettle the new frontier of “early modern studies.”47 That self-­ fashioned academic mode made the personal narrative, the scholarly memoir, the condition of work. In contrast to Adorno, it made it seem as if the life story of an academic’s accidental circumstances mattered to the operations of thought. It literalized and reduced to self-­indulgent common sense the idea that the essay responds to the contingent and degraded the passions of love and hate into a fair story of recognizable personal experience. “I was finding my own voice all right, but that voice could not float ­free of a power­ful set of institutional, intellectual, and historical forces. On the contrary: ­those forces, experienced both in plea­sure and pain, helped to give my voice its resonance and pushed me in directions I could not have anticipated.”48 This sort of talk made for easy ac­cep­tance at the highest 180

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levels of the schema’s institutions, from university to tele­vi­sion life, making such work representative and leading. Adorno had none of this in thinking about the essay and the concept. The essay works against atomism, despite presumptions. Moreover, and this is more difficult for the common sense to accept, the essay is not welcomed by the schema except as and ­unless it is made personal in just the sense we see in this last academic citation. The category of the personal essay is a solecism, a breach of its fundamental nature, a misrepre­sen­ta­ tion. It is a return to nature, to a myth of the self, and a profoundly ahistorical notion that has contributed to the selfie culture of the new digital world and its extravirtual counter­ parts. The cool acknowl­ edgment of every­thing that harasses the subject and the right to rest knowledge on it does nothing to legitimate the knowledge produced or to help solidify the relevance of critical thinking. On the contrary, b ­ ecause such gestures appear to have wisdom about the trou­bles we face, they substitute pretense for serious work. To take seriously the realities that harass the cool acknowl­edgment would heat them up in a cauldron of difficulty and slow down the prose that flows from their evasion. Adorno credits imagination and intelligence with creative tasks that are other than, if not more than, the effects of evasion. Once critical intellectuals step away from this last all-­encompassing frame of reference with its seemingly all-­powerful explanatory power, we not only escape its determinations but see its effect as a depository of the concept’s value. Adorno’s power­ful invention of the essay as precisely that form which elicits systematizers’ rejections makes a case for the creativity and power of h ­ uman imagination. The essay is not atomistic, and, by definition, it does not evade the complex prob­lems of inheritance, history, or reification. It knows the dialectical results of thought and imagination at work. Its aims are also dialectical in that its results are si­mul­ta­neously the movement of thought and the work of form, the latter of which implicitly always risks the ossification of movement and the reduction of its own complexity. Concepts hold the play and movement of thought, depths and relations unavailable and purposely evaded or elided by institutions, discourses, and modes common to the schema. They preserve the play and the worked results of thought, saving them all from the threat the schema magnifies in conducting its own regularized productive policing functions. 181

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The essay does the work of thought and of the concept in its performative precision that “presses for the reciprocal interactions of its concepts in the pro­cess of intellectual experience” (13). As Adam Phillips makes clear, the Freudian insight inherits the gnostic and messianic narrative of contempt for the secular and quotidian, for finitude itself.49 Freud is more stoic than are ­others in the position he sometimes advocates in the face of the global ruination of which he makes ­human life in finitude. Nonetheless, even allowing for such notions as sublimation and its long-­standing relation to the my­thol­ogy and machinery of the sublime, Freud does not concede the capacity to make anything credible or valuable that might escape the reach of ruination.50 Endless riffs that spin their wheels in working through this truth do not change it—­and I say this against consensus.51 Decline—­ ­ the constant basis, warning, and lament of all such narrators. Adorno, by contrast, contends with the accomplishments of h ­ uman life in finitude, noting all the inherent threats and difficulties, but aspires not to deepen the gloom, as it ­were, by telling a self-­fulfilling story of de­cadence, melancholy, and nihilism. Imaginatively, he makes of the essay the named possibility of experience and work the result of which is other than the end or contents of a tale of ruin. Although the essay harasses its own efforts to work and preserve, that fact no more justifies a narrative of end days or calls for a messianic guarantee than it justifies a narrative of optimistic pro­ gress. Real­ity exists less melodramatically than such images of ruined angels require. Crisis is the doubled existence of effort within the limit rather than dismay at the limit and aspiration to or regret for its transcendence. Adorno specifically warns against systems and narratives that do not reflect or in fact deny the nature of thought and the depository form of the concept and its adjacencies. “In such [intellectual] experience, concepts do not form a continuum of operations” (13). Adorno’s formulation solidifies and extends his secular anthropology. The essay works in ways that prove the falsity and expose the motives of allegorizing narratives and schematizing discourses and institutions. Relatively speaking, they are in the world and of it but give form to per­sis­tent fears and errors that generate the gnostic and messianic modalities that underlie vari­ous efforts to turn away from the capacities of the finite ­human. Indeed, they reduce ­those capacities to the one-­note narrative of decline and ruin, spending substantial energies in ringing variations on that story.

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The essay, in Adorno’s hands, is evidence of the h ­ uman multiplicity and creativity within realities that are multidimensional and offer riches of creative imagination wider and deeper than linear narratives can support. Indeed, Adorno shows us that systemic exclusion of the essay has the motive, no ­matter the form, of constraining the ­human’s possibilities within a historically secular world. The essay is the perfect instance of ­human enthusiastic creativity and imagination within finitude. It is responsive and inventive. The profound par­tic­u­lar draws imagination to work in thought, depositing its results in the form proper to the work at hand. Furthermore, the essay does not ­settle for the form achieved, as if it ­were a final and arrested end. It understands the active potential of thoughtful imagination staying in the formed concept and allows that potential to play without loss of the achieved, deepening and widening ­human achievement. The essay is not only the medium for such possibility, waiting as it ­were for Adorno’s and ­others’ theorization and discovery. The essay is also the name for the ­human capacity of imaginative creativity moved by passion that authorized managed modes of schematic life exclude and repress. As we would expect less, though, the essay reveals the gnostic and its cognates to be also an ­enemy of love, of finitude, and of creativity. The phrase “intellectual experience” is a nominalism of sorts. It is an invention; as such, it names an essential creative ­human ability for which critical imagination constantly strug­gles. The essay is, as such, the place for such naming, for forming the deposits of thought without arrest. “Thought does not pro­gress in a single direction; instead, the moments are interwoven as in a carpet” (13). The figure in the carpet is an aesthetic device, familiar to moderns from Henry James. The result of the essay and the disclosures that result from Adorno’s meditations on it are not aesthetic in nature any more than they are personalist. Rather, they are deeply historical and anthropomorphic, species-­ based self-­reflections that add to and insist on the creative abilities of the ­human in a diverse, rich, complex, and yet finite world. This vision is, indeed, the condition for the critical work that Adorno w ­ ill do throughout his c­ areer. Thought and imagination gain precision in the essay. It is the embodied venue for passionate creativity. Even more, it preserves the pure historicality of thoughtful imagination, the secularity of creativity’s work in the making and remaking of the cultured world—­especially in its critical

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encounters with the schematic devices that would constrain that creativity and dehumanize its purposes and results. Adorno consistently emphasizes and explores the function and nature of the subject in ­these pro­cesses: “The thinker does not actually think but makes himself into an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it” (13). This is a remarkable idea. T ­ hose who are trained in Hegelian philosophy might well interpret this as a variation on the notion that Geist does the work of history through the mediation of h ­ umans. Such a notion does not hold, however, in face of the detailed and careful work in “The Essay as Form.” Adorno has written to the point of this claim, and if we keep in mind other essays, such as that against cultural critics, we understand his effort to deter barbarism especially a­ fter the disasters of midcentury. Practically, Adorno comes around Stevens ­here, bodying the essay and poem in poiesis. Each places considerable effort on discipline, on the pro­ cesses of learning and writing that bring the subject to the point where individuality dis­appears and the impersonality of the subject as the “arena” of creative thoughtful imagination occurs. The secular ­human in history through discipline, within the inheritance of ­earlier secular creative work, sustains and extends cultivation through the very pro­cess that transforms an ephebe into a master. The master is not, as many ­people might have it, an elite figure with special privileges but an essential side of the species and far outside the mere social and more properly social category of privileged elite. Training, passion, thoughtful imagination—­and the historical work of all t­ hese in the arena of the individual—­this is “intellectual experience,” and its rec­ord is its result, the tradition, the archive, of deposited ­shaped concepts and figures that contain as their very possibility their own ongoing survival and extension. “The essay, however, takes this experience as its model without, as reflected form, simply imitating it. The experience is mediated through the essay’s own conceptual organ­ization; the essay proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically” (13). The essay is a profound par­tic­ul­ar, thought on the way to ­imagined form. It is like a poem, a creative work done from passion in the secular midst. To know any or all of this, one must merely be a critic d ­ oing an immanent reading of an essay as a profound par­tic­u­lar, writing an essay and so as a result transporting its par­tic­u­lar over to any other that attracts and motivates it profoundly.

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chapter six

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An Interchapter

The poet refuses to allow his task to be set for him. —­Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”

B

enjamin’s “angelus novus” (1940) is the knowledge of fallen man, the emblem of melancholy, redeemed from the high point of its own anagogic knowledge. A metonymy for Benjamin’s own late vision, it shares the shards of art and conventions as the figure of a final vision. It also repulses biographical or subjectivist hermeneutics, which mistakenly personalize and contextualize the achievement of late style, reducing it to the act of documentation. It is the perfect image of what we come to know, of what we come to see—­even if often too late, a­ fter the fact, and even if we soon forget. Blown into the ­future while facing the ruin that is the ever-­expanding past—­this is the fixed emblem of a permanent state of wisdom, misery, and melancholy. It is the proof that all that seems to be joy suffers the mournful story of time and finitude. Moreover, it puts on display the very nature of the h ­ uman temporality of lived experience so we see it, supposedly, as it is and for the tragic disappointment it must always be. It is the permanent lesson taught by historicality as it comes to its inescapable and all-­encompassing moment of fulfillment and revelation. An image within aphaeresis, it is a “dissimilar similitude”; it works from achieved heights as a visual device correcting the mimetic fallacy to endorse only images or constellations that work from the pinnacles.1 It notes the contamination of joy by knowledge, of part by w ­ hole, and the moment of its own pastness. It acquires some of infinity’s glow, which it represents as 185

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apart. It is the ground of our own permanent melancholy. We cannot get over it. The “Angelus Novus” is Benjamin’s hard-­earned achievement. It is an emblematic enigma concluding a long speculative-­temporal analytic hung on the spine of a narrative account. It authorizes a permanent hermeneutic in search of promised intelligibility. It would change the sensible into the suprasensual. As such, it does not signify a “mood” or emotion; it is not “affect,” a mark of bodily reaction within a traumatic space. It is the negation of the psychological as the emerged distillate of historicality itself. Yet, if ever an “overdetermined” spot presented itself for reflection, this is one, for it emerges as a density lit from elsewhere than history, returning mimesis in an enlightened form that has many names. It is a large object with massive gravitational pull, just as easily the residue of historicality or the alternative to history itself. For t­hose who are in its orbit or drawn to its center, the emblem is an inescapable fact, a starting and ending point of differentiation, a pathos-­saturated, satisfying source of doubtless authority. Not only its qualities but also its consequences require analy­sis.2 It even has pre­de­ces­sors in poetry and philosophy. In 1820, following the Napoleonic Wars, famine, mass unemployment, and the Peterboro Massacre, John Keats came upon one version of the emblem’s potential, a fact that helps us see its iterative place within a well-­stocked, available, and assertive imaginary: “the downy owl / A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries.”3 In Berlin, also in 1820, Hegel gave philosophy the apothegm of its posteriority: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”4 We need look back only a few sentences to find Hegel’s gloss on this firmly stated axiom: Philosophy cannot give “instruction as to what the world ­ought to be. . . . ​As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already t­ here cut and dried a­ fter its pro­cess of formation has completed” (12). Hegel made it philosophy’s assumed mandate both to think and to be the thought of the world. History must pre­sent the world complete to and as philosophy for understanding. The codicil is only an apparent humility—­philosophy cannot instruct, a claim famously rebuked by Marx. To the point, then, philosophy internalizes as its own condition the melancholy of spread wings, the falling motion of dusk. Mundanely, as it ­were, philosophy can understand the world, but despite utopian ambition, philosophy cannot rejuvenate it—­a state of abjection corresponding to the permanent empowerment of melancholy. Benjamin embraces the 186

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necessity of this line, while Keats, as we w ­ ill see, has mined its dangers to ­counter its seductive powers with alternative forms of imagining. Hegel not only stresses but also embraces the pure posteriority of thought to historicality. Understanding succeeds in “understanding” the substance of the real world and shapes it as an “intellectual realm”—­but only belatedly and as a mark of being always a­ fter the fact. When the emblem appears as the embodied permanence of understanding, then, Hegel writes, “has the shape of life grown old” (13)—­a shape that Benjamin sets u ­ nder the sign “pro­gress.” Benjamin’s “New Angel” is the concept-­image of life grown old and as such the culmination of the Hegelian notion in the mind of a messianist. To put it differently, in Benjamin’s angelic recast of Hegel’s owl, the permanent melancholic belatedness that is the condition of philosophy has become both the par­tic­ul­ar incarnation of philosophy’s glorious weakness and its finality. Benjamin gives his image the form of a classical topos, a mythical figure outside of time, a form of what h ­ umans know as “fate”— of destiny the destroyer. More precisely, Benjamin’s rhe­toric echoes that of fallen archangels surveying their estate in Milton’s Paradise Lost, wherein hope and despair are the same coin.5 Regardless of circumstances’ pressures, Benjamin’s writing is controlled artifice, s­ haped expression, and a carefully limned rec­ord of lucid perception. Like Hegel, he knows the archival sources that are his materials. We must see that his incarnate angel is a type freighted by the interaction of history and imagination wherein the strug­gle of freedom and fate lies. In this deeper and longer context of literary history, Keats’s line is a poetic caution against what appears to Benjamin as not only a proper but a necessary tropological choice at the precise moment of his writing. Keats’s poems belong to the same effort to sustain and develop the archive of poetics as Milton and Benjamin. “Ode on Melancholy” is as aware of itself as a crafted result of l­abor over inherited materials as are Benjamin’s final “notes” on history. The small cautions against the inevitably strong and overwhelming powers of melancholy. Its tactics are the lucid display of melancholy’s working as allure, and its materials are the inherited commonplaces remade and long developed in En­glish and Western writings. T ­ hese mix traditional medical, psychological, erotic, and natu­ral tropes to display and, by drama, inoculate. The poem’s motive is to end the power of melancholy’s attractions. 187

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“Ode on Melancholy” opens with warnings against despairing attempts to alleviate melancholy. This tactically brilliant caution against the major poetic and critical desire to dwell permanently and indulgently in the sweetness of misery shifts the ground away from a trope that has crippled poiesis by constraining its power to transform the given. The melancholic iterates within a circumference ordained inevitable. The poetic ability to combine and compound spins along within limits, and the critical mind, seeing novelty, takes it for interest. The opening stanza of the “Ode” moves through an arcade of classical dangers that promise relief from melancholy but are, in fact, like the owl, “partner in your sorrow’s mysteries.” Neither death nor forgetting—­“not your rosary of yew-­berries”—no gnostic or religious allure to deadly escape serves as a belated cure or response (220). The poem moves through the “resources” by which tradition transports the imagination’s resources, especially as t­hese threaten the death of imagination itself—­always, we might say, the final goal of melancholy. The “Ode” challenges the death dealing of tradition’s transport, a test poem and, in my opinion, a victory. The poem’s addressee, an anonymous second-­person universal inheritor of poetry’s laws, stays in place as the poem parabolizes the archive of thought and figures rearranged on the poem’s alternative landscape. In book 2 of Paradise Lost, for example, especially in Pandemonium, the fallen angels argue the value of iteration in a landscape of loss and ruination that extends to infinity. Fi­nally, they ­settle on a strategy of perpetual warfare, displacing the same—­with its compound motives of hope and despair—to the terrain of ­human history, which in Milton’s imagination becomes the transformative linchpin of his own grander shift of the epic to the universal. Milton’s fallen angels, caught in the pain of self-­imposed ruination, recall ancient legends of another species, humanity, and enter its history to ­battle mournfully against omnipotence. In other words, Keats knows, and his poem displays and enacts, the truths of melancholy, which are so easily available and so seductive to the self-­imagined ruined. Keats’s “Ode” is a directed rearrangement of the archive, a map newly made by a poiesis able again newly to combine and compound—if not beyond, then at least within—­the limit itself of what poetry has already achieved. The poem prospects in this world of ours, wanting to remap our apprehensions, joys, and sufferings, giving new and alternative forms to what is already archived and emergent. 188

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“Ode on Melancholy” pivots on the suddenness of classical misfortune, one fate familiar dropping in its medical and psychological form: “But when the melancholy fit ­shall fall / Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud” (220). For the melancholic, all is gray, but the poem neither exposits nor mines the subject, its experience, or the structure of its “affect.” Rather, it notes for its audience how fate’s sudden strike is synecdoche for an entire library of tropes that configure the world as hidden and in decline. The established codicil to fate’s fall, the internal “pivot” to its “when,” is the internal point of its owl “then”—­“glut thy sorrow on a morning r­ ose.” The poem’s double movement shows the established imaginative archive of poetic creation by which we know and experience melancholy. It exposes the corresponding array of tropes and experience so that nothing should come upon us unknown in the f­uture. The poem is the display case for a device whose motions, while variable, conform predictably to the poetic transport of tradition. It allows a lucid understanding, to use Hegel’s term more modestly, that delivers a seemingly inescapable lesson. Once a mind enters the medium of melancholy, the historical logic of tropes, the burden of the past, and the endless productivity (highly approved) of the same more or less assures the mind’s permanent place within a field. Melancholy is a perfect medium to assure the status quo. Po­liti­cally and imaginatively, it is at least reactionary and at worst nihilistic. The archive is no solution. It can be a resource for iteration if not transported by the poetic imagination that first summoned its contents into being. So, for example, à la Keats, the melancholic, who might be the psychological subject in therapy or the thinker operating its verbal machinery or the chaos maker in apocalyptic politics, emptied of meaning and separated from the hidden “green hill” b ­ ehind a “shroud,” turns first to the senses and then to desire and fi­nally the two together. From roses and “global peonies,” the melancholic turns to “thy mistress,” so vampirish to “feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes” (220). This is a deadly and enlightening trap, as proven perhaps by the effective allure waiting to nurture vari­ous melancholic critical minds in Mina Harker’s erotic display of love and death.6 For “she dwells with Beauty”—­the inescapable link of the feminine to loss, finitude, and insufficiency (abjection) is the very trope of experience that invited kenosis as an alternative.7 “Melancholy” is a field of play, ably nurtured in mainstream Western culture at least since Plato’s Symposium: “Beauty . . . ​must die” and “Joy . . . ​ 189

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Bidding adieu” turns to poison, as both become pathos-­ridden, misdirected, and wrongly anticipated objects of desire. As such, they waste the arduous work of creating alternative f­ utures in the iteration of the indulgent same, a form of catastrophic nihilism; they become the narcissism of defeat. In Keats, melancholy “veil’d” “has her Sovran shrine” “in the very t­ emple of delight” (220). Melancholic waste and defeat—­these are more than topics of critical interest, more than a summary reprise of such commonplaces as Donne’s puns on the ­little death of sex or the anxious mourning making of “Epithalamion Made of Lincoln’s Inn.” The temporality of the latter poem is akin to Yeats’s quotation from “Leda and the Swan”: “Did she put on his knowledge with his power?”8 Whereas for Keats, the answer already exists within the archive, and his poem reimagines its existing foreknowledge as a mythic, tropic, and behavioral form of “fate” as tyrannous as the “fit’s” original fall from the sky. To put it more simply, not to have learned from the archive that the tropes of melancholy are a fatal allure and to repeat them as the basis of criticism or creativity is itself dangerous to the ­human, to the world, and to imagination. It reduces the abilities of ­human creativity within its own alluring weakness, and it puts the world at risk by affirming, helplessly, a status quo that makes the allure seem tragically natu­ral and necessary, fated to be the ­human state in its historicality. Not coincidentally, it carries with it the felt obligation to displace politics and creativity over a horizon within the impossibility of utopia, messianism, and the gnostic. Equally, it justifies for some the parallel allure of catastrophic fantasies and disruptive or apocalyptic politics. The third stanza of “Ode on Melancholy” is startling for a sexuality that stands for the imagination’s own danger to itself. Keats’s lines image the compensatory masculine response to the fatal fit of melancholy. I have argued throughout that the combination of melancholy, messianism, and Gnosticism has had, since the Symposium, an antagonism to the feminine that has located all ­matters of cultural importance within the exclusive asexual masculinity of Socrates, which subsumes erotic energies to the purposes of truth.9 Not only fixed deep on his mistress’s “peerless eyes” and imprisoning “her soft hand” but that hand “ever at his lips” makes Joy bid adieu (220). The masculine auditor, the poet-­manqué, counterattacks with force, imprisoning, undoubtedly hoping to “conquer,” the very act that brings the ­little death (220). The imprisoned hand that is “ever at his lips” is so frustrating that “aching Plea­sure” turns “to Poison” (220). This sharp 190

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truth merits the turn of desire to the sublimated utopia called philosophy, or more exactly in Plato’s tradition, love of and desire for the phi­los­o­pher as the sole figure of truth and the way. Where does the poem place this figure and his love? Precisely in the rhyme of his lips and ships, the poem follows the mythic topos of desire’s suicide. “Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine” “in the very ­temple of delight” (220). Only the most exquisite sensibility, the most sensitive and determined lover can know this: “Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” (220). The tongue’s work belongs to the “skilled lover,” the poet-­manqué and the phi­ los­o­pher whose reward is controlling insight, not plea­sure (220). The strenuous tongue worships at the shrine of his lover, privileged to see and taste “Joy’s burst against his palate” (220). Such a synesthetic Dionysian victory delivers only the fatal knowledge “of her might” and “His soul ­shall . . . ​ / be among her cloudy trophies hung” (220). The narrative organ­ization of tropes as “movement” within a memory palace appears as an imaginative act writing out the task of its own function. The memory palace stocks the rec­ords of cultural formations or­ga­ nized archetypically by the patterns and intensities of their own reproductions. It is as if the poem ­were saying, “Behold! ­Here is the machinery of culture created by imagination, formed as the force of the world—­now taken, incredibly, as natu­ral and obligatory rather than contingent, power­ful, and dangerous within iteration.” Such a fact alone allows for both the shock at and admiration for the inventiveness of the poem’s profound familiarities—or “old truths,” as William James might call them.10 Keats’s poem fundamentally displays imagination’s effort to bring nature and time—­ fate—­within the ­human dream of its own desires. Of course, ­there are dangers of repetition in all this and hardly ones overcome by “difference.” The poem repeats a familiar structural agon of spirit and nature or reason and finitude. It develops images of mouths and inserts, ending the series in a perverted pastoral echo. Plea­sure taken—­“ever at his lips”—­“Turning to Poison while the beet-­mouth sips” (220). Keats passes through Milton’s “Il Penseroso” and Donne’s “To Mr. E. G.” to return to Virgil’s Georgics. With Milton’s poem, we see why Northrop Frye believes anagogic poetry reaches its fulfillment in Christian epic vision wherein the goddess Melancholy ­will “Dissolve me into ecstasies, / And bring all Heav’n before mine eyes.”11 Keats’s “Ode” echoes not the final sepulchral if ecstatic tabernacle of 191

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Milton’s final lines but the erotic dream that precedes them and requires of the speaker a forced call back to “the studious cloister’s pale” (220). In his sleep, hidden from the “profane eye” and “Day’s garish eye,” a “strange mysterious dream” keeps time with the wings of honeybees that work in the light of day: “While the bee with honied thigh / That at her flow’ry work doth sing” (220). Perhaps Milton’s speaker requires the safety of distance, hidden from light, dreaming of honied thighs. Keats’s “Ode” closes distance as “aching Plea­sure nigh / Turning to Poison while the bee-­mouth sips” (220). Keats also echoes Milton in his final line, turning bee mouth sipping at “her Sovran shrine” into one of “her cloudy trophies hung” (220). The bee—­ thigh and mouth—is erotic and sexual in a long tradition that has made of itself the entire tapestry of classical, religious, and mythical materials through which “Il Penseroso” passes on his way to that bee. In “To Mr. E. G.,” for example, John Donne satirizes his own early and o ­ thers’ poems as “lame ­things” thirsty “for perfection.” He cautions his friend to “retrieve Plea­ sure” but not to restrict himself: “Gill not like a bee / Thy thighs with honey, but as plenteously / As Rus­sian merchants, thyself’s ­whole vessel book” (ll. 15–18).12 Around the honeybee should abide caution with knowledge, temptation, and despair—­conditional on plea­sure. The supping thigh-­filled honeybee figures the ­human work of culture, driven by desire, attached to knowledge, intent on poetic transformation and combination—­processes always at risk and always risky. ­There are two dangers: the first is to freight oneself fully, as Mr. E. G. might on coming to the city, parading the Miltonic cata­logue of literary culture before the poet’s eyes and through him across the world. The danger is surfeit, especially with the ephemeral, and it leads Il Penseroso to Melancholy’s bower and earns a place in Donne’s satirical letter. Too much of ­human strength in making and enjoying is too ­little, even as Temptation. In Keats, the second danger is clearer and is the outcome of history, the very historicity that appears full-­blown in Benjamin’s angel. Furthermore, it is the outcome of work done by Milton, Donne, and many ­others. Keats’s sipping bee, so tied to the lips that escort the strenuous tongue to “Joy’s grape,” is the belated emblem, the end of history in the melancholic mode. Its stories are told, and repetition cannot exceed it. Milton and Keats each propose Melancholy as fate but in diverse ways; each poem dramatizes a “choice” made for her. Yet Keats dramatizes the choice as an inevitability 192

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within the confines of Melancholy as far as this is itself a ­human concoction within the sphere of cultural imagination. In Milton, the choice freely and rightly made comes of necessity. In Keats, once taken up as a necessary trope, a figure of necessity in response to ­human finitude, we readers see how it costs us our choice and our freedom. Melancholy may not lose its “necessity,” but its necessity loses its appeal. In a poetics of fateful seduction, this is a considerable advance to freedom within finitude. This book is in part about how we have come to lose freedom in this self-­made tragic necessity. Lit­er­a­ture is one sphere of this self-­making; it is one archive of ­human effort to set up the species’ dreams and desires. For example, Keats’s adoption of the bee figure for his own erotic purposes develops a tradition as old as Western lit­er­a­ture itself. Famously, Milton in Paradise Lost recasts the epic bees of Homer and Virgil to describe the fallen angels in Pandemonium. Far more in­ter­est­ing for our purposes, however, is another ele­ment of the literary archive, not the epic but the Georgic, not only in Virgil but ultimately in Lucretius.13 When Virgil writes his ­great Georgic on bees, already at that early point, it assem­bles foundational ele­ ments essential to the workings and products of literary imagination. The basic trope is as familiar as a cliché—­conjoining bee and Orpheus, Virgil gives us the inseparable culture and cultivation. As Richard Jenkyns argues significantly in his magisterial study Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History, “it is hard to make much sense of this” if we think “Virgil is embarking upon allegory.”14 This point is impor­tant, not only ­because this book argues against recent criticism’s tendency to allegoresis as a master trope. Jenkyns stresses Virgil’s commitment to the conjunctive and transformative powers of poiesis, the power of meta­phor and analogy, which we see in Stevens’s poetics and “Auroras of Autumn.” ­These powers are essential to the poet’s task of imagining alternatives to what is, which requires knowing what is and grasping the archive that has come to seem natu­ral. In the latter are still emergent possibilities. Therefore, Jenkyns adds, “No sooner has he introduced the bees—as bees—­than he is decorating them by meta­phor and analogy. And for the next two hundred lines the hive w ­ ill be recurrently likened to a ­human polity. . . . ​But the charm of this is precisely that the bees are not ­human. . . . ​The verse is freshly and momentarily lit by an amusing thought that seems to have flashed newly across the poet’s mind.”15 Jenkyns’s critical quality appears in the “seems.” He understands that the lines, the effect, and the work are ­under the artist’s 193

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control. This understanding ends the value of psychologistic approaches to the work just as it rules out the legitimacy of allegorizing readings. Jenkyns sees Virgil as an experimentalist of forms and worlds i­magined for that time and place; Virgil tests of what is pos­si­ble in response to what is needed. Jenkyns puts Virgil with Shakespeare, Milton, and Wagner as “an artist, composer, or writer [who] might ‘try out’ a par­tic­u­lar view of ­things.”16 Experiment is not only vanguardist. It can be obvious in its use of matched alternatives, as with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” It can be, however, on a grander scale that approaches the secular anagogy that this book finds in­ter­est­ing. “Even a work on the very largest scale,” Jenkyns writes, “may be a construction—an experiment—in this sense: Wagner’s Ring creates an entire h ­ uman and cosmic order which is evidently to its maker a fiction, an idea of how t­hings might be, not of how they are. We could indeed reflect on how far even the Aeneid might be understood on ­these terms.”17 The lyric poem is not merely the simulacrum of a voice speaking to itself, overheard. The form has experimental capacities more than the psycho-­ subjective mimetic limits suggested by Words­worth’s thinking about the lyric. Northrop Frye, writing on the lyric as a “rhythm of association,” acknowledges Words­worth’s basic claim that a poet is a man speaking to men to say “that apart from metre the lexis of poetry and of prose are identical.” In other words, according to Frye, Words­worth’s aesthetic, questions of rhythm aside, “is a low mimetic manifesto” (271). Yet Frye develops his analy­sis along lines that reinforce the Virgilian or classical ideal of the poetic experiment. “The lyric is the genre in which the poet, like the ironic writer, turns his back on his audience” (271). As we know, in Wordsworthian tradition, the poet often speaks to “men” by being “overheard” in private conversation within the self. Frye takes seriously the art of rhythm; as he says, “It looks as though the lyric genre has some peculiarly close connection with the ironic mode” (271). Readers should not rush to dismiss this remark as typical of the Age of Eliot, with its modernist interests in ironic form. Frye is a­ fter something closer to the center of literary art, which I describe as secular anagogy, which is the world made into the dream of ­human desire. Thinking of Words­worth’s “Preface” moves Frye another step along the path of his theory. The lyric is “the genre which most clearly shows the hy­po­thet­i­cal core of lit­er­a­ture, narrative and meaning in their literal aspects 194

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as word-­order and word-­pattern” (271). Always following Aristotle’s foundational notion that poiesis is mimetic, Frye’s prose imitates consciousness thinking or consciousness itself, as it w ­ ere. In verse, meter is a form of “rhetorical organ­ization,” freeing the poet to think without concern for consciousness (271). The poet, if you w ­ ill, can then tell stories. As Frye says, however, “Neither of ­these by itself seems quite to get down to what we think of as typically the poetic creation, which is an associative rhetorical pro­cess, most of it below the threshold of consciousness, a chaos of paranomasia, sound-­links, ambiguous sense-­links, and memory-­links very like that of the dream” (271–272). From this associative pro­cess comes a “distinctively lyrical u ­ nion of sound and sense” (272). More impor­tant, however, the dream-­like association confronts a “censor,” as in any dream-­work, but in this case, the censor is the art of poetic making, the task of which is testing form for its ability to expose and transport its content.18 Poetic art has and is the difficult task of making its own intent from the linked materials of memory, knowledge, rhe­toric, and the senses. The censor, poetic art, is test and experiment; it subjects the random archive of materials to “the necessity of shaping itself into a form acceptable to the poet’s and reader’s waking consciousness, and of adapting itself to the sign-­meanings of assertive language well enough to be communicable to  that consciousness” (272). Poetic work is not merely, as this might seem, shape-giving to random materials but the ability to transport the results of the associative rhetorical pro­cesses of poetry to the imagination of the other, of the audience, a task that requires accessibility and power. Alternatively, as Frye says of the lyric, “The associative rhythm seems to retain a connection with dream corresponding to the drama’s connection with ritual” (272). This requires an artistic fit between the archived reworked and the sign-­meanings of an audience’s language, which is the imaginative form already given by culture’s chronicles. Experiment might then be large in external scale, as with the development of “­free verse.” It might equally well be specific and investigative. Keats reworks melancholy in part as an exposé of its allure, of its danger to the very possibility of poetic art, the experimental imagining of transport and alternatives. To put it very simply, then, in this view the poet is an artisan and the poem craft, a material practice organ­izing, analyzing, and displaying the interwoven resources of tradition, experience, and knowledge to sustain 195

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love, imagination, and so, the h ­ uman. It makes the universe intelligible to life and life responsible to habitat. When successful, new poetry solves old prob­lems and surpasses former ­great achievements, putting in place again the working value of g­ reat art and reor­ga­niz­ing its archive, the memory palace of cultural achievement and failure. Each case metonymizes the imagination’s task to bring the world into the h ­ uman dream of culture, the world as “nature” itself ­imagined now as the contained within ­human dream. In each instance, the successful poem instantiates the dream’s artful effort and weighs what has been done—­its values, dangers, plentitudes, and needs. Such poems are never “about” poetry; in their work lies the function of poetry at any time. Poetry’s founding story is Orphic, a per­sis­tent cultural symbol of failure and excess, of silence and death, that force does not dismember into muteness but distributed and mysterious song. Orpheus is the always-­existing potential for the diegetic re­sis­tance to melancholy. Keats’s phrase “the bee-­mouth sips” turns back through Milton, Donne, and o ­ thers to Virgil’s Georgics, where, in book 4, the paradigmatic trope of poetic melancholy, the story of Orpheus, appears from the tale of a hive’s death. On Orpheus hangs all the basic motifs—­death and finitude, the refusals of each; art’s ­battle with transience and the intense melancholy of lost love; above all, the inability of the poet to make the world the container of the ­human dream. The bathos of the last appears in Orpheus’s impetuous glance back over his shoulder to Eurydice, the beloved sign of his triumph. From his failure to make nature take the form of h ­ uman dream flows texts such as Euripides’s Alcestis (one source for Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale), Romeo and Juliet, and Stevens’s “Man on the Dump.” Keats cautions against the passion of melancholy, the failure to force nature to accommodate our desires. Melancholy is the imagination’s too weak and so dangerous (to itself as well as o ­ thers) response to what­ever it fears as the material of its own defeated desires. Keats was not the first to accept this caution. In the Georgics, Virgil envelops the Orpheus story in the pastoral narratives of life and death among bees, animals, and ­humans. (Jenkyns’s insistence that book 4 is not an allegory is impor­tant at this point.) Virgil’s topic is always cultivation, resting in turn on observation and joy in the given world and the patient if sometimes frustrated disciplines of culturing. Virgil wrote the Georgics during the early days of

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imperial Rome’s emergence from its complex republican collapse into civil war. He wrote while near to power­ful po­liti­cal figures, anticipating his coming proximity to Augustus in writing the Aeneid. Virgil seems to write the Georgics across the historical transformation of Rome, addressing Maecenas (book 1, l. 2), his patron and ally of Augustus, recording the death of Caesar (book 1, l. 466), through to Augustus’s ­great victories near the Euphrates. When Jenkyns demonstrates that the Georgics are not allegorical, he means that the poems keep focus on the quotidian with a fully secular sense of the universe’s won­ders. The result is not, however, a clichéd sense of the pastoral admiration of “nature.” On the contrary, Virgil succeeds in drawing nature into the dream h ­ umans have of a world satisfying the forms and needs of their (constantly transported) desires. Virgil succeeds in setting the natu­ral world within the arc of his narrative, moving consistently to the circumflex of his final lines. ­These lines contrast Augustine’s martial successes with the pastoral leisure (“ignobilis oti”; book 4, l. 564) of the poet. Such leisure implies the freedom and obligation to be creative, a version of its etymology, the privative form “to be permitted,” as the OED puts it. Virgil’s envoi is not a compound unity of two themes or motifs, resolved in polyphony. Rather, it is a complex, not complicated, counterpoint of synecdochic topoi—­war / peace; action / ­leisure; ­will / play—­linked semantically and formally. This is something like the heart of poetry that Frye looked for. Therefore, of Augustus, the poems sings, “bello victorque volentes” (book 4, l. 561), and of Virgil, “qui lusi pastorum audax” (book 4, l. 565). Virgil’s skills are so fine that several threads assem­ble ­these lines’ effect. The few semantic instances of verbal balance and entanglement discredit the normal account of t­hese lines as a contrasting dualism.19 This dramatic counterpoint elaborates in the progressive movement of “chords” or tropes within the envoi. For a time, we hear the theme of empire, of the emperor become ­great ascending to the gods—­why? For having put the conquered on the higher path of law set by Olympus (book 4, ll. 560–562). The counterpoint shifts abruptly but in balance as the strongly sounded “Haec” that ­will lead to the imperial theme meets its abrupt ­counter in “Illo,” which places “dulcis” against “bello.” ­These lines move from one point to another, as it ­were, but each has markers that intertwine it with another, producing unanticipated effects that seem to emerge, unbid,

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from the poet’s mastery in experiment. This display of shards and conventions also unfolds the artifice of subjectivity and objectivity in synthesis. Structurally, “Haec” sets off the scene of the poet’s singing and is already a place set against the temporal distance of “meanwhile” (“dum”; book 4, l. 56). Yet the poet ­here and the emperor meanwhile are in past tenses, which close the envoi’s mea­sure. This final harmony sounds something like a fugue. In The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens elaborates a very complex theory and pedagogy of poetry and poetics that belongs within this long tradition.20 During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stevens’s friend and correspondent Henry Church wanted to endow a chair and fund a university program in poetics and the theory of poetry. To this end, Church urged Stevens to speak at Prince­ton. ­After much re­sis­tance and hard work, in 1942, Stevens accepted the invitation and read his paper “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” the opening chapter of The Necessary Angel.21 This essay prepared for the g­ reat poetic achievements of Auroras of Autumn (1950) and The Rock (1954). At first, Stevens had three excuses not to take part in Church’s plan: he is not a good speaker; he knows too l­ittle; and he has too g­ rand a vision of poetry. His first refusal suggests the importance of this proj­ect in anticipation and accomplishment. In July 1942, two months a­ fter reading his paper at Prince­ton, he wrote this: “No one would be likely to suppose from that paper what a lot of serious reading it required preceding it, and how much time it took. It was worth d ­ oing (for me).”22 In December 1940, Stevens had hesitated to commit. “It would take a g­ reat deal of time for me to prepare something I thought suitable.” What defines suitability for Stevens? “To most p ­ eople poetry means certain specimens of it, but t­ hese specimens are merely parts of a ­great ­whole. I am not thinking of the body of poetic lit­er­a­ture, ­because that w ­ hole body is merely a group of specimens. I am thinking of the poetic side of life, of the abstraction and the theory. This sounds rather mussy, but I ­shall not stop to bother about that.”23 Church had already aroused Stevens’s interest enough for the insurance executive to send him a memorandum on founding a “Chair of Poetry.” Stevens began with a set of privatives: “One does not intend a literary course, except as a theory of poetry is a part of the theory of lit­er­a­ture. The intention is not to read poetry from archaic to con­temporary; nor is

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the intention to teach the writing of poetry.” The rest of Stevens’s memorandum is a start to the “mussy” he needs to clear up. It is at best a remarkably in­ter­est­ing beginning: What is intended is to study the theory of poetry in relation to what poetry has been and in relation to what it ­ought to be. Its lit­er­at­ure is a part of it, and only a part of it. For this purpose, poetry means not the language of poetry but the ­thing itself, wherever it may be found. It does not mean verse any more than philosophy means prose. The subject-­ matter of poetry is the t­hing to be ascertained. Off-­hand, the subject-­ matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August . . . “Thou art not August, ­unless I make thee so.” It is the aspects of the world and of men and ­women that have been added to them by poetry. T ­ hese aspects are difficult to recognize and to mea­sure.24

Poetry is not its lit­er­a­ture. Poetry is the act of making t­ hings so or at least of adding aspects to what poiesis has already made. Poetry is not the archive of poems or, in fact, its subject ­matter. Stevens, for all the critical claims about his romanticism and visionary status, is severely classical in thinking of poetry as making. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, Erich Auerbach had daringly concluded his reading of the Torah, especially of the so-­called E-­text, with the claim that the Hebrew God is an effect of style. In this “memo” on the theory of poetry, Stevens approaches Auerbach in daring to say that God is an aesthetic effect of poiesis: “The poetry that created the idea of God ­will e­ ither adapt it to our dif­fer­ent intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make it unnecessary.”25 ­Human making in poetic form creates the idea of God as an aesthetic effect. Frye helped criticism understand that anagogy requires a raising up beyond the sublime level of poetic content that is the result of the greatest poetic invention (for that is merely sensible)—­and the transformation of the given world into the contents of imagination wherein ­human desire satisfies its dreams. At moments, Stevens has the same understanding and, as we have seen, since his youth aspired to embody the poetic act of such creation. His aim was to write the anagoge that would adapt, displace, or substitute for poetry’s e­ arlier anagogic creation, God. In the g­ reat late poem “The Auroras of Autumn,” Stevens would part from 199

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Frye ­toward a humanistic creativity that held the shards of mystical anagogy within the secular pro­cesses of the worldly imagination. ­After Keats, Stevens represents the imagination as strong against the ancient temptations of ruination and melancholy—­strong precisely ­because subject ­matter and archival pressure afford occasions, resources, and lessons for experiments in raising up the anagogic structure of a world made by the poetic word. What other evidence do we have for this extreme idea? The memo insists that “the comedy of life or the tragedy of life” is simply “the material of an art.” More impor­tant, “the mold of life as the object of its creation” is the center of poetic art and the subject of study.26 If we adapt Northrop Frye’s terms, we would say that Stevens’s poetics are not low mimetic. This separates him from and makes him the object of attack by t­ hose who would place the poet functionally among demo­cratic masses or movement politics. ­These critics might say that a poet should be a “partner in . . . ​sorrow’s mysteries,” whereas for Stevens, t­ hose are at best the materials of art that should not be confused with the purpose and essence of poetry. To put it differently yet again, for Stevens, the poet cannot yield to melancholy justified by an ontology of ruination and finitude. Nor can dreams of justice tempt the poet out of the frames of leisure into the militarism of combat. The poet’s work is to bring that all within the raised vision of an i­magined alternative strong enough to summon it into being. In “The Noble Rider,” Stevens works his way ­toward a poetics of imaginative transport, a concept that, in its spatiality, shares qualities with the archives of tradition and experience represented as a memory palace. He begins by stressing the in­effec­tive­ness of Plato’s glorious nonsense. Why does he do this? First, Stevens recognizes the im­mense power of Plato’s imaginative act. Second, he queries the per­sis­tent endurance of that act as an ele­ment of “tradition.” Third, given that this imaginative act has lost its credibility, that is, its ability to lay claim to our imaginations, Plato’s original invention enters an archive available for use, always in memory, sometimes burdensome just as it is sometimes an energizing resource awaiting transport. Fi­nally, for the moment, Stevens vivifies the archive, including its dangers to imagination’s continuity of transport and the poet-­critic’s role in judging, in alerting us to the dangerous allure of exhausted archival residues, waiting impoverished iteration. In miniature,

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not only does Stevens’s riff on Plato’s silliness help us remember that poetics involves judgment on the dangers and possibilities of the imagination’s own creations, but this opening run on Plato, before Stevens’s long essay into poetics, also tells us how fundamental, primary, and per­sis­tent wariness must be. ­Because Stevens wanders among the figures and images that enliven and sustain the concept of “nobility” in this essay, we see how in the memory palace of poetic archives, the critical imagination constantly multiplies the directions in which thought might move. For example, ­after considering Plato’s nonsense, his essay invites his hearers and readers to question the commonplace according to which poetry, poetics, and the poet must be “socially responsible.” In an era of melancholy asked for by a marked sense of ruination and its attendant loss of experience, of injustice, in­equality, and empire, some critics make a direct response to the pressures of real­ity an im­mense and inescapable obligation. By contrast, in “The Noble Rider,” imagining the figure of the poet is the primary act in the theory of poetry and poetics itself. A defense of poetry, as it w ­ ere, requires transporting the poet yet again. Stevens’s poet exists over and above and, indeed, against social obligation. In conceptualizing the poet, Stevens thinks the figure as autonomous—an idea often keeping with tradition but also often opposed by moral and ideological critical programs. For Stevens’s poet to sustain the anagogic capacity that Virgil’s Georgics instantiates, the theory of poetry must hold a subtle account of imaginative in­de­pen­dence as a species function of the ­human in relation to its own finitude and the external or natu­ral world. Moreover, any such account must survive what Stevens calls the pressures of the real and especially so in times of the greatest pressure. We cited the lesson from Virgil’s push against the imperial and military authority’s claims to primacy. In the modern United States, the pressure of the real is as ­great, protean in po­ liti­cal terms, and similar if not greater in the social, cultural, and intellectual arenas.27 Stevens makes his points metonymically, figuring the pressures of the real in particulars abstracted to prob­lems and pressures. The poet owes no social obligation; for many critics, now as in 1942 and other times, this is an intolerable and privileged claim. Stevens set Stalin in 1942 against the general background of war and Soviet purges to make what is for many readers a troubling statement: “No politician

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can command the imagination.”28 Stalin might “excite” an imagination— or purge it—­but he could not command it. Stalin was a con­ve­nient figure of real­ity and the power of external command; Stevens’s mention would have been more pleasing as an essay on Boris Pasternak and Dmitri Shostakovich.29 Stevens’s habit of metonymic abstraction to figure moments of thoughtful imagination requires us in this case to read his “Stalin” as a sign of “the po­liti­cal” as that which is alien to poetry’s essential freedom—­ especially if and as we consider “the po­liti­cal” as command or decision.30 Just as in the Georgics Virgil posed the didacticism of imagination against the imaginative power of Caesar, so in “The Noble Rider,” Stevens counterpoises the poetical imagination’s anagogic function against competing po­liti­cal and social forms of power (domination) and obligation. Concerning the latter two, for Stevens, t­here is small difference in their effect on the poet’s essential species function. Stevens steps ­toward an explanation of that function by an abstraction or subtraction that allows the self-­defining and self-­dependent poetic proj­ect to appear in its nature. First, we remove po­liti­cal command from the heights of power to summon poetic imagination. The state as sovereign dictator is to the poet a “cult of pomp,” but what “means as much as anything to us,” he argues, is the poet’s “freedom” from the cult, “the comic side of the Eu­ro­pean disaster” (660).31 Stevens anticipates the moral objection to this claim, which reflects itself in a broad body of critical attitudes and theories, especially but not exclusively tied to notions of melancholy, allegory, and ruination. Against a tradition that disparages comedy, Stevens advances another substantial abstraction. “The truth is,” Stevens writes in the next sentence, “that the social obligation so closely urged is a phase of the pressure of real­ity which a poet . . . ​is bound to resist or evade ­today” (660). Clearly, for Stevens, politics places command by the sovereign and dictator in the same field of (“comic”) constraint as “social obligation,” the pressure of ideas exerted within civil society by agents of real­ity that press on, direct, and constrain poetic imagination as they do power relations ­until they culminate in dictatorship. Stevens’s thinking touches on both the immediate po­liti­cal prob­lems of the 1930s—­the dictatorships in Eu­rope and the felt over-­and underreach of the New Deal—­and the emerging po­liti­cal prob­lems associated with the welfare state. In other words, Stevens’s writings on poetry stand in relation to vari­ous po­liti­cal writings central to the crises of his time. Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny comes to mind 202

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as a variation of Stevens’s writing about the tendency of democracy to dictatorship, while the Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt’s conceptual linking of the state of exception within liberal democracy as the final form of tyrannical sovereignty looms as a perfect name for the threat to poiesis in modernity. On the Anglo-­American side, as it ­were, ­after the war and the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the ministry of Aneurin Bevan, Kenneth Arrow wrote his famous paper of 1950, “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare.” Arrow asks if rational consistency could “be attributed to collective modes of choice, where the w ­ ills of many ­people are involved.”32 In an ­elegant and influential demonstration, he answers no, ­unless members agree to restrict their aspiration to “attainable” results. To achieve this result, Arrow defines the domain of pos­si­ble choices as unlimited; he places choice in “the idea of citizens’ sovereignty.”33 Not surprisingly, he both sets aside dictatorship as a condition outside the prob­lem he hopes to solve and defines dictatorship as a pos­si­ble “social welfare pro­cess,” albeit one that requires setting aside since its emergence overrules all other conditions for generating a social welfare pro­cess within a democracy. Stevens’s thinking about poetry is far from po­liti­cally naïve. He is not retreating from the large pressures of the time. Rather, he incorporates them within thinking about poetry and poiesis. He reflects the light of poets and imagination on ­matters of ­human experience too often expropriated by rhetorical hermeticism, po­liti­cal theology, neoclassical economics, and symbolic sociology.34 For ­those who would make poetry and its critical study competitive forms of life practice in a world that has marginalized their highest forms, Stevens agonistically exposits the poet’s function against pressures inescapably related to authoritarianism and tyranny. Objections from the “Left,” such as ­those of Stanley Burnshaw, resign poetry to ideas, making it subservient to notions raised in the “real world,” as it w ­ ere, or better the world of naïve repre­sen­ta­tion and so make poetry as secondary as Schmidt and Arrow do.35 On each side of this “class conflict,” justification lies in a moral sense of justice and a desire for power, often within structures that control and put it on offer as such. A proper take on Stevens’s essay requires a first abstraction of the imagination from ­these pressures distributed as common sense, as necessary materialities, and as high concepts and knowledge systems. Stevens’s essay is more agon than exposition. Over and against the universal aspirations of the po­liti­cal command and as the exception it would forget, Stevens poses 203

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the exiled Dante, who “in Purgatory and Paradise was still the voice of the ­Middle Ages but not through fulfilling any social obligation” (660). Properly abstracted, this Dante is the poetic imagination assured of its own species and institutional function to operate in its own terms and to its own end, as a needed, indeed central capacity of the h ­ uman to make and remake the world as its own and as a world properly ­shaped to embrace the nonhuman species as well. Stevens’s mind has so far essayed “the poet” in a primitive mode, but only to leave open the question that command and obligation would preempt. “Since that is the role most frequently urged, if that role is eliminated, and if a pos­si­ble poet is left facing life without any categorical exactions upon him, what then? What is his function?” (660). In 1929, in “Surrealism,” as I discussed in Chapter 2, Benjamin gave an answer to this question that moved the Dionysian to the Apollonian. The intoxication and ecstasy of poetry would lead to the Lukácsian embrace of leadership. In this movement of desire from revolt to revolution, u ­ nder the guidance of the vanguard class, Benjamin argues, the surrealists had found a radical form of freedom—­from the viewpoint of which Stevens’s poet, without place or function, would at best embody an anarchic but more likely bourgeois humanist concept of “freedom.” Benjamin’s answer to the question “What is the poet’s function?” does not address Stevens’s foundational question, which concerns the “pos­si­ble poet.” Stevens’s language is exact at this moment. Vari­ous theories—­moral, social, or political—­would cause the pos­si­ble poet to function by “categorical exactions,” which are nothing less than the power of finitude oppressing Orpheus, Alcestis, and o ­ thers. R. P. Blackmur’s 1930s studies show how concrete is Stevens’s language and how its materiality effects meaning, emotion, structure, and history.36 In such poetic language, in such a poet, we must take very seriously the etymology of “exaction”—­ex-­agěre, that is, “to drive or force out.” When “the po­liti­cal” or the “social obligation” rises to intellectual dominance, then the poetical succumbs to e­ ither categorization or exile—or stillbirth. (The long tradition degrading childbirth echoes ­here from the Symposium to Nadja.) In Keats’s “Ode to Melancholy,” the poet’s eyes, near to the sighted sources and object of desire, taste of what enables and dies forever into melancholy. Where is the ­great danger for the “pos­si­ble poet”? Keats’s “Ode” gives us a clear lesson, and Stevens adds the further 204

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clarification of the relationship between the po­liti­cal field—­command and obligation—­and the seductive sweetness of deadly melancholy. As it w ­ ere, the categorical sweeps the “pos­si­ble poet” into the ser­vice of the real and melancholy. Unaware and self-­assured, driven out of pity into the secure melancholy of ready categories, into the well-­prepared, seductive deadly space of ascetic nostalgia, filled nonetheless with satisfying riches, the pos­ si­ble poet dies away. The pos­si­ble poet’s function, Stevens insists, “certainly . . . ​is not to lead ­people out of the confusion in which they find themselves” (660). To occupy such a secondary position vis-­à-­vis “the ­people” would satisfy only the “pos­si­ble poet” from whom imagination ­were exacted, from whom categories exacted the surrender of imagination in exchange for place and function, moral approbation, within the already known to be true, that is the iterated. (Recalling Adorno, we would say the poet then joins the schema.) In a remark that might ­counter Benjamin’s position at the conclusion of “Surrealism,” Stevens writes that the pos­si­ble poet’s function is not “to comfort them while they follow their leaders to and from” (660), a remark that echoes Virgil himself on the poet and the Caesar. Thinking “the po­liti­cal” as an encompassing concept effectively extracts the poet from the field of h ­ uman work, admitting at best (or most often) a simulacrum set in the categorical. Adorno’s thinking opens the essay as a judgmental practice, a strong critique of the normal, even as scholars and “critics” explore or celebrate it especially as the popu­lar. Two points appear h ­ ere: strong critique does not occur, first, when the categorical is itself undertheorized, given no concept of its own, and, second, when assaulting the critical hides the postcritic’s embrace of the (necessarily market) norm. The rhetorical style of the second is “freedom,” caught in such expressions as “surely, criticism need not be any one ­thing,” the same sort of abstract vacuity inherent in all rightist manipulations and evacuations of settled meanings. Criticism need not be any one ­thing, but to be criticism, ­there are ­things it must be—­chief among which is exile from and hostility to the normal and the schematic market practices of selling a new norm, a new professional rhe­toric in the form of a new and improved category set.37 One of the most recent examples of this last mode of academic marketing would be Rita Felski’s advocacy of ­doing t­ hings with lit­er­a­ture.38 Once Stevens has criticized and cast aside the normal mode of exile and extortion, the question is ­free for an answer. The pos­si­ble poet presses back 205

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against real­ity and raises imagination to the anagogic level of imagining creation as contained by the h ­ uman dream. In “The Noble Rider,” Stevens’s first answer is a bold statement of poetic capacity. The poet’s “function is to make his imagination theirs and . . . ​he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of o ­ thers” (660–661). As Adorno reminded us via Goethe, critics too often study the illuminated and ignore the source of light, to the culture’s peril. Not only has Stevens struck a blow against the state, the po­liti­cal, and the obligatory categorical exactions that have become “real­ity” by power and iteration, but he has returned us to the importance of poiesis as the illumination of both what is and what might be. Adorno’s discussion of the essay helps us see another crucial ele­ment in Stevens’s poetics. Stevens brings us back to the source of light by using an ancient trope according to which the poet’s imaginings spark the minds and imaginings of ­others. His turn on this figure is openly insidious. “To make his imagination theirs” involves gifting, vio­lence, or seduction, a form of colonization but also a willing embrace, an ac­cep­tance of self-­transformation within a sphere ­imagined as an alternative to the deadly and melancholy ruminations that w ­ ere ­there before. (Socrates fears this poetic capacity.) The poet is this transitional type, a figure of “transport” in the complex sense of his 1930s poems. Yet this transport does not intoxicate, arrest, or etherealize—as apparently does Socrates’s famed daemon. It binds the ­others to the fundamental necessary ability of ­human being, imagination’s re­sis­ tance to the real’s pressures. Imagining alternatives to the species’ dream as it then stands before them, it illuminates in turn the light of thought’s indispensable abilities and demands. “Anagogic transport” is the imagination’s movement from one world embodying creation as culture to another or yet o ­ thers. The poet is the name for this necessary (if muted ability) and its accidental agent within a long memorial string of such figures. Stevens’s poetics is fundamental, so we find impor­tant traces of it and similar thinking in the voiced poetics of all serious poets. For example, Claudia Rankine’s much-­celebrated Citizen: An American Lyric, among its many accomplishments, materializes the deadly weight of a repressively uniform cultural imaginary within and on populations, which suffer unequally from a naturalized vio­lence to which ­there seems to be no alternative. Rankine insists that she must hear the opinions, the beliefs, and the worldview of ­those who resist the truths of her work. Like Stevens, she as206

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pires to displace the forceful, blind, and violent imaginary that e­ither cannot or ­will not hear the lyrical moments she transports. Not as explic­ itly as Stevens does, Rankine hints repeatedly at the poet’s pos­si­ble aim of displacing that ­imagined but all-­too-­real world with a new world, summoned through and against the residues and traces of vio­lence against black bodies. In her interview in The Paris Review, Rankine says this: The key is that the anxiety, the stress, ­isn’t a narrative. It’s what interrupts the narrative, what stalls mobility. It’s an invisible sensation that requires adjustment by the body, beyond the space of words. As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling. I’m less interested in stories. That’s one reason I write poetry. Often when p ­ eople are speaking with me, I feel what they are saying is the journey to how they are feeling. I mean, it’s not that I’m not interested in what ­they’re saying, but I feel like what t­hey’re saying is a per­for­mance. In many conversations I realize that the t­ hing that’s being said is ­really not the point at all, ­there’s this subterranean exchange of contexts, emotions, and unspoken signals. I think a lot about how white dominance is part of this invisible and unmarked dynamic.39

The ­imagined world of white privilege is the deposited real­ity that pressures the poet as the consciousness of her audiences. A result of power’s alliance with the long-­term work of imagination in vari­ous institutions and interests, white privilege is a murderously ossified and actively resisted corrupted version of poetic work. It lacks love, the erotic, and saturated with fear, melancholically refuses a world re­imagined. In Rankine’s thinking, white privilege is the absence of imagination, the world in need of poetic calling out—­correction, consciousness, and decreating. Her unvoiced desire, made “unreal” in the face of whiteness, must be the transformation of the real imaginary away from its murderous, solipsistic degradation. Her poet not only listens but also transports, serving as the vehicle or vessel for taking what is heard and letting it cure ­until ready to carry its erotic energy into novel words. “How do you get the work to arrive at readers in a way that allows them to stay with it and not immediately dismiss it?” Carrying over—­this sort of trafficking in transport—is the work of art crafted against the pressures of the real. Having something to transport over, though, is the hard, engaging, and erotic work of time and silence. In her writing and poetics, the pos­si­ble poet must break the narrative, which is the normalization of an abnormal real­ity. 207

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The pro­cess is a time-­consuming one, unseen and unpredictable. The poet does not “nurture” experience but notes fragments or shards often unnoticed and without a place in the reality-­pressured narratives, which iterate the arrested imagination. Rankine tells of listening “to the recording of the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota.” She “writes down” her ­daughter’s words of love in an unimaginable circumstance: “It’s okay, Mommy, I’m right ­here with you,” says the four-­year-­old. Rankine responds with pitiful horror to what should be an impossible scene, but she does not rest in the liberal melancholy and despair at the encounter with this iterated cruelty. “I hear that l­ittle girl, and I am transported to a place beyond my intellect. . . . ​When a moment enters me that profoundly, I know I can wait to write ­because I’ll be forever in dialogue with the moment.” The critique, as it w ­ ere, would be the easy part. Social consciousness, the social gospel, is aghast, protests, and weeps. The poet, who also cries and protests, however, does not “interfere with . . . ​that part of the pro­cess.” The poet “­will be surprised and ready to begin when her voice makes its way into a piece.” This last remark needs careful reading. Rankine is always about transport, a voice making its way into. She retells the word meta­phor as traffic and breaking through as surprise, preparing not for its own emergence but for the second but most impor­tant transport, the making of art. The pro­cess has a name; we call it poiesis. Rankine’s interviewer is curious: “And you might sit on that line for . . .” The interviewer has misheard. Rankine does not sit on a line. Poetic imagination is a transformative pro­cess the result of which is art. The question would better have been how long might that line take to surprise you. Not surprisingly, Rankine’s patient answer is, “Months. Or a week. Or a day more. Or years. Once it’s on the page, I feel like that’s when the writer shows up.” So, what­ever the poet is, she is not the named authorial subject. Rather, two other ­things stand out at once. First, poiesis in part precedes writing and crafting, which have their own time but depend greatly on what comes before; second, Rankine (and many o ­ thers) know that they are the waiting venue of poetic pro­cess, that they are poets, with indwelling imaginations who as pos­si­ble poets are not the same as writers who only listen and wait. Mundanely, Rankine knows she is a poet. She is confident in that identity, which is as a responsible reservoir or vessel of imagination not solidified in the pressure of real­ity. What the poet wants, says Rankine, is “for the text to be as alive and mutable as pos­si­ble,” a goal that depends 208

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on a reader who activates the poetic field. To put it differently, not ­until the poet’s imagination becomes the readers’ imagination has poiesis done its work. Activated and alive—­these signs are the markers of transport and love, of substitution and creativity. What once was ­there as a pressing real­ity the artist’s craft, remaking inherited and obstructing materials, positions as a new vehicle of transport, taking what­ever is found and remaking it ­there and handing it over. The entire “field,” as Rankine says using Charles Olson’s ­great poetic figure, becomes active. The poet becomes anagogic as the imaginative field raises the world into the new dream of humanity made, not found, in the poet’s patient, loving, and erotic imagination. Melancholy amnesia—as for white privilege and / or utopian possibility—­ does not more than force us into the l­imited possibilities of our own circumscribed—­because inherited and enforced—­point of view on what we think (or wish) the world ­really is. The poet’s role, Stevens writes, “in short is to help ­people live their lives” (Necessary Angel, 661). This is not a “New Age” formula. Stevens’s thinking brought him to a basic insight about poetry and poetics. Real­ity and its pressures cannot constrain the species’ ability to imagine the criteria remade to meet h ­ uman dreams. Poiesis ferments the alternative dreams that assume nature against the death-­dealing real­ity that would commit the “pogrom against poets” that Aragon so feared. Real­ity’s pressure would set up the normalcy, the inescapability of what is or, more precisely, what appears to be, including especially obscured vectors directing or supporting the real at any time. By itself, the stance of “critique” from within the real—­let us recall Burnshaw’s objections to Stevens—is a form of po­liti­cal or social obligation, especially when offered from the vantage of utopian desire apocalyptically deferred into the achieved pre­sent of narcissism and melancholy. All this is pressure to naturalize rather than historicize the real—­and often in categories that occlude attention to spoken lines and other shards that smother silently within the pontificated generalization. Several scholars claim that Stevens is a de­cadent aesthete uninterested in the real. This is an untenable claim b ­ ecause it rests on incomplete evidence and a reductive sense of the concepts involved. In “The Noble Rider,” Stevens develops a careful prospectus on the poet and the real, on the poet’s metonymic role in sustaining the historically h ­ uman capacity to imagine, enfigure, and embody creation differently, not over some displaced horizon, saved from capital or another form of ruination, but in the here-­and-­now 209

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livid imaging and strug­gle. The poet, as the local name for this h ­ uman ability, never floats metaphysically above the world in a Huysman-­esque sensory delirium confused with freedom. Other worlds, as it ­were, ferment in the time and poiesis that make the writer appear. Within Stevens’s poetics, his poet has a moment in which helping “­people to live their lives” makes the poet a gift giver: “He has had im­mensely to do with giving life what­ever savor it possesses” (660). In a “helping society” or “therapeutic culture”—in the long history of the Protestant social gospel—­critics who customarily derive their habits and categories from popu­lar culture or engagements with popu­lar culture (and social media) might not pause over the long history of this founding act in lit­er­a­ture. Apologists from Horace to Sidney created a resounding poetics of gift giving from myth and originary poetic creations.40 Book 8 of the Odyssey ends with Alcinuous begging Odysseus to sing his own story at ­table in exchange for shelter, nourishment, and transport gifted by the famously generous hosts, the Phaeacians. Odysseus’s song is not only early in a tradition of poetic gifts, of “gift cultures,” but also typical of poetry’s foundational sense of its own status as gift—­not market. As Alcinuous puts it, “Let us all enjoy ourselves, / the hosts and guests together.”41 The bard Demodocus has gloriously sung the adventures of Agamemnon and the rest before Troy, pleasing the hosts but paining the still anonymous Odysseus. In exchange for his gifts, Alcinuous presses Odysseus to sing: “Fair is fair! . . . ​But come, my friend, / tell us your own story now, and tell it truly.”42 The materiality of this gifting society allows the song’s movement to the recursive and didactic moment of poetics, when Alcinuous brings the particularities of his guest’s experience to the shared finite humanity of experience made song literalized as transport: That is the gods’ work, spinning threads of death Through the lives of mortal men, And all to make a song for ­those to come . . . ​43

­ rand poetic acts recursively carry over foundational instruction on the G value of art and the poet as species agent in a spot of time and place, along with the permanent freedom of poiesis in memory, transformation, and creation. In Homer and Stevens, the lesson is in the metonym: the poet as the necessary ­human capacity to “help ­people live their lives,” to give “life

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what­ever savor it possesses,” and “to do with what­ever the imagination and senses have made of the world” (Necessary Angel, 661). All this is only an early if not first moment in the poet. It is far from the fullest expression of the poet’s function, which is to achieve a secular anagoge not in a “visionary expression” but in an embodied and actively enfiguring creation within the world of h ­ uman imagination as the living form of ­human dreams. The poet is a principal locus of this ­human potential to culture; the poet, as metonym for the ­human, becomes a historically self-­ aware species, always threatened by the apparent naturalized fixity of the latest real, the locus of the real as not yet fully poetic. The ­human has no need for redemption in this model, and history has no need for penetration by an incarnating messianic time. All temporalities are h ­ uman made and with specific agonistics of their imaginings—­including the possibility that each ­imagined real stands ready to press against the hard-­earned historicality of humanity’s discovery of its own self-­making. It is this, grosso modo, that Adorno found in the work of official culture and the academic schema as commodification. Culture had given itself over to its own enemies and lost even the imputed value of its name, inducing the melancholy we associate with Adorno. To imagine alternatives to the real is the work of essayists and poets against e­ arlier and current formations, especially against the frustration that leads to universal melancholy and / or decisionist politics. Each of t­ hese, as we w ­ ill see in “The Auroras of Autumn,” is an indirect threat to the species’ imagination, exactly as imagination can be a naturalizing, iterative, and despairing threat to itself. If the poet “fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of ­others,” then poetics must explore the condition of this possibility. In “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Under­neath the Willow,” as I suggested in Chapter 4, Stevens’s poetry worked the themes of tradition and transport within the lyric but as traces that echo the scale of the epic. In ­those early poems, transport meant emotion, sensibility, and tradition—­the latter as transmission, as carry­ing over, and as per­sis­tent creative originality, ­those “long capricious fugues and chards.”44 In “The Noble Rider,” Stevens exposits the transformation of imagination. We should keep in mind Socrates’s and Plato’s mockery of Agathon’s desire to receive by proximity, touch, and hearing the wisdom of Socrates’s daemon, when we see Stevens work out the pro­cess and figure of address.

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“The Noble Rider,” itself an address to poets, academics, and critics, pivots abruptly from the poet’s function “to help p ­ eople live their lives” to the angry, heavi­ly accented tone of this new sentence. “Time and again it has been said that he may not address himself to an élite. I think he may” (Necessary Angel, 661). Stevens is aware of the po­liti­cal pressures that enforce the shibboleth against the elite audience as a proper target for the poet—­not only in a liberal democracy. To move from being a “pos­si­ble poet” requires taking seriously the mechanism of transport if the poet, fulfilled, becomes the light in o ­ thers’ minds—as, for example, Rankine’s Citizen has become for many p ­ eople. The poet cannot be without the elite, for without it, address becomes echo, the error of narcissism. The only alternative is Shostakovich, the artist who may “content himself with pretence” and whose 1936 withdrawal of the Fourth Symphony made Stevens’s point. Of course, Stevens means an aesthetic or intellectual rather than moneyed or po­liti­cal elite when he writes, “­There is a not a poet living t­ oday that does not address himself to an elite” (661).

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chapter seven

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“The Auroras of Autumn”

Poetic Seasons In 1951, Wallace Stevens explained to Charles Tomlinson that (about 1946) he had written “Credences of Summer” at the time when his “feeling for the necessity of a final accord with real­ity was at its strongest.” He added that “real­ity was the summer of the title of the book in which the poem appeared”: Transport to Summer.1 Despite excellent critical writing on Stevens, readers can forget that his best poetry was a mea­sure of his feeling. Remembering that fact is not, however, license to speak of him as an impressionistic or carelessly emotive writer. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mind and imagination ­were the bastions of his feeling and registered his poetic sense of the most impor­tant strug­gle of his time: how would imagination stand in the face of the real and its pressures. Stevens could write the most settled sentences. Their declarations ­were firm and unambiguous, factual and seemingly fixed. They can distract from the tentative texture of his style. The feelings they reported w ­ ere often complex and unsettled, while the facts existed in some slightly displaced other place or time, in some spot dif­fer­ent from the moment of composition, even if within an archive of consistent reflection. The past moment was home to the “strongest feeling” of accord with real­ity and notably not a moment to which that feeling resigned. In that time, he also looked for a finality to the ongoing strug­gle; it was ­toward that finality that his feelings ­were strongest. The desire for accord is not necessarily gone from the ­later now of 1951, but then again it is not necessarily persisting in the ­later pre­sent. The sentence only sets the strongest feeling for the necessity of a final accord in the past time, now recalled as 213

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a working motive for “Credences of Summer.” The opening stanza of the poem has all the characteristics of a weaker Stevens, of lines that need each other to make the oscillations and agitations of his imaginative work apparent. The poetry is rhetorical and almost bombastic: “the mind lays by its trou­ble and considers.” Whitman is a pre­ce­dent for this sort of line, and this poem depends on the style: “The fidgets of remembrance come to this.”2 Stevens’s comment to Tomlinson strongly suggests that this weakness is not merely technical but a result of a temptation that calls the imagination to terms it cannot accept without surrender: necessity, finality, and accord. “Credences” is, as it w ­ ere, a poetic experiment with the terms on offer. ­Keats’s “To Autumn” is an obvious and inescapable reference for “The Auroras of Autumn,” but it lurks too in this e­ arlier poem, perhaps b ­ ecause, like “Credences,” “To Autumn” feels the temptation of a final accord. Keats shows the pull of that temptation with his fruit filled “with ripeness to the core,” his swollen gourds and “plump . . . ​hazel shells.” In sum, for the classically minded Keats comes the dangerous figure, “Drows’d with the fume of poppies.” The opium eaters from Homer to De Quincey have a “patient look,” but Keats, unhappy always with the temptations of necessary accord, knows that they see “the last oozings hours by hours.”3 “Credences” invited misunderstanding. In a long letter of May 3, 1949, to Bernard Heringman, Stevens explains that he was “not d ­ oing a seasonal sequence” but admits that his next book w ­ ill have the title The Auroras of Autumn. He says, “What underlies this sort of t­hing is the drift of one’s ideas” (Letters, 636). “Credences” opens with midsummer in line 1, spring in line 2, and autumn in line 3. It gestures ­toward a wintry death—­not the wintry exile of “The Snow Man’s” remarkably enabling austerity but the residues of the first stanza’s driftings. “This is the last day of a certain year / Beyond which ­there is nothing left of time” (CP, 322). Keats’s oozings have come to this, but in the mind now of the poet and not as an externally dramatized distanced undesirability. Nothing more develops than this resignation: “It comes to this and the imagination’s life” (322). This sentence states the poem’s prob­lem in a way that its grammar obscures. The “and” gives us something like alternatives combined: this and that. The conjunction is also a fulcrum, which means the prob­lem is, as the letter to Tomlinson points out, how to balance the relation between real­ity’s necessity and imagination in a new accord. The “and” sets up the search for harmony, a solution to tensions in a lasting balance. If Keats shows how the desire for 214

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such finality is the static stare into the ooze, it is no surprise that Stevens almost proses the same idea: “­There is nothing more inscribed nor thought nor felt / And this must comfort the heart’s core against / Its false disasters—” (322). Accords are not only the chords of m ­ usic but also the laws of states. As summer, they become “the natu­ral tower of all the world / The point of survey . . . ​ / a tower more precious than the view beyond, / A point of survey squatting like a throne, / Axis of every­thing” (323). Like opium, summer, thrones, and towers are the satisfactions offered in exchange for the compromises or surrenders of accord. What comes of this? Stevens has nothing more or less on offer than the images on Achilles’s shield: “And happiest folk-­land, mostly marriage hymns” (323). Where does this leave the poet in the poem, this feeling of the necessity for accord at its maximum? He stands happy, old, ruddy, and appeased atop the tower. The image unavoidably brings Yeats to mind for readers of modern poetry. The image of the old man standing ruddy on a tower, “Who reads no book” (323), also reminds us of Whitman’s solar images of the sublime poet, the figure that Harold Bloom, in his vatic Emersonian mode, explicates repeatedly as the Central Man, the major strain of ­great American poetry. Stevens’s version of this Central Man, in this poem, is less than Bloom’s visionary. Admittedly, the poet reads no book, but he lacks ambition, tempted by a false sufficiency: “His ruddy ancientness / Absorbs the ruddy summer and is appeased, / By an understanding that fulfills his age, / By a feeling capable of nothing more” (323). Such a faint echo of the creator’s power is, as Bloom might say, in the Miltonic tradition a mark of failure and weakness, a figure of secondariness. Stevens’s normal ironies do not work well h ­ ere. A feeling appeases the imagination’s appetite or ambition, when viewing the creation—­perhaps its own creation—to do more. Of course, the poem develops as the working out of the first balance of this and imagination in the second stanza and the poet’s appeasement by a feeling ­there is no more to do. It works its way through “the limits of real­ity,” which result from its existing fullness so complete that it is “too ripe for enigmas.” Real­ity is “too serene” for “the clairvoyant eye” (323). “Credences of Summer” is a useful stopping point along the way to “The Auroras of Autumn.” It helps us to see how many impor­tant critics have set up fundamental limits in the readings of Stevens. Given that literary historians, at least ­ until recently, have judged Stevens one of the major 215

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English-­language poets of the past one hundred years or so, we must take as severe and demanding an approach to his work as pos­si­ble.4 Stevens himself did nothing less. “Credences of Summer” is a relatively weak poem about the civilizational failure that comes from the imagination’s sometime seduction not by real­ity but by feeling, by subjectivity. Opening canto 7, for example, the poet sings ­these lines: Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs, Secure. It was difficult to sing in face Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves Or ­else avert the object. Deep in the woods They sang of summer in the common fields. (325)

The poem hinges on “secure,” of course, an apposite that almost apostrophizes an imagination fleeing the pressure of the real. Security requires aversion, a turn not only from the real but—­and this is key—­not from the self but from poetry. For who sings t­ hese lines but would-be poets who, to sing, avert themselves? Stevens often adapts obsolete grammatical forms to specific, concrete, material ends of the sort R. P. Blackmur identified as a basic ele­ment of his style. “Avert” in this transitive form means not only to push away the object—­“themselves”—­but also, as the OED makes clear, to alienate or estrange. Security, if desired, requires the self-­alienation of the poet. This line dualizes the poet’s predicament: world or self; imagination or the real; reason or sensorium. The poetic prob­lem is not that, as so many of Stevens’s critics suggest, the poet oscillates in choice between t­ hese poles. The prob­lem, as the poem makes clear, lies in the figure of the choice, of the poles themselves. Critics might enjoy the easy dualism of subject / object, self / other, and imagination / real ­because this set of seemingly irresolvable conflicts allows endless debate. Moreover, taking up this set of “dualisms” places readers and the poetry within an easygoing, familiar subject-­centered kind of talk, one that sometimes m ­ istakes itself as epistemological rather than habitual and ideological. To talk this way is to sing of summer in “common fields.” As we learn from Stevens’s poetics and poetry, iterability and iteration mark the imaginative failure that puts civilization at risk. Creativity and affection, the erotic and the comedic, turn away from the iterable as itself a melancholiac’s practice of the same. 216

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“Secure” requires of poet and critic the iterability of repeated dualism as a prob­lem. Put simply, this means that t­hose who dwell within and on the endless oscillations of t­ hese lines are secured by failure. Their songs are “unreal” not ­because they are songs of imagination, songs turned away from the object. They are unreal ­because they rest unconsciously on and repeat a pattern of language, a cadaver from the archive. They repeat the real as it pressures the singer not to be the pos­si­ble poet but to ­settle in the satisfied state in “which desire no longer moved” (325). “Secure” implies not only safety and confidence but also nonchalance and a kind of indifference (OED). We might admire Stevens for his seeming unwillingness to choose between the real and the ­imagined or, differently, for being unable to ­settle on one or the other side of this dualism. “Credences of Summer,” precisely ­because of its prose weaknesses, turns away from this set of false choices. In a commonplace, we might have said that this poem reflects its own creative practices and attitudes. Canto 10 begins to conclude the poem with t­hese lines: “The personae of summer play the characters / Of an inhuman author” (326). The poem then appears openly to be about itself, about the poet—­ “inhuman author”—­staging a drama with a set of characters. As far as this goes, such a reading is secure. The poem appears as an allegory of its own creative nature, akin to Yeats’s “Circus Animals’ Desertion,” putting familiar tropes on display as in a marionette theater. The poem has an odd weakness at this point. Its own doubling makes it too weak, as readers then say the poem puts even the master trope on display, allowing them voice as characters who “speak ­because they want to speak.” The poem and its drama become then the anguished agon of poetic creative strug­gle. The characters in this trope, which displays figures such as ­those secure in the woods of alienated iteration, are like t­ hose secured. The master trope and its minor key become nearly the same. In the master trope of agonistics, the roseate characters, ­ ree, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry, F Completed in a completed scene, speaking Their parts as in a youthful happiness. (326)

“­Free” leverages this canto as canto 7 pivoted on secure. The latter repeats the former in a louder and broader chorus. Nothing changes. This is a poem of stasis, of surrender at its time to the real. Ways of speaking about Stevens often belong to this real, to the very rhe­toric and categories readers 217

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require to draw Stevens and power­ful poets into a normalizing pattern of familiar concerns. In 1974, Lucy Beckett, writing of Stevens’s late ­great period of The Auroras of Autumn and The Rock, did not have a theory of late style, but she nonetheless characterized his achievement in terms that belong to such a theory. “What is surprising,” she wrote, “even in a poet of Stevens’s self-­ discipline and strength of character, is the freshness and vigour, the refusal to give up his openness of mind, the advances in thought and feeling that he was able to produce in this late period of his life.”5 T ­ hese lines encapsulate a familiar form of humanist criticism common before (and against) the theory movement of the last c­ entury. To readers in Beckett’s tradition, Stevens offers an opportunity to secure the heroic subject figure that creatively overcomes dissociated sensibility by thriving in the separate spheres of thought and feeling—­all the while, bringing the two inescapably together. Poets become persons or feeling ­human subjects in this frame, and poems are, no ­matter what ­else, expressions of that subjective success on offer therapeutically to o ­ thers. Beckett asserts that The Auroras of Autumn is “shadowed by the sadness of old age and the consciousness of approaching death. . . . ​The imaginative response to real­ity is as unexpected and vari­ous as ever. . . . ​This frightening background throws into new relief the frailty and impermanence of what­ever it is that now and then, in one set of words or another, for a moment satisfies the poet’s needs.”6 Adorno analyzed the ideological bias, historical unconsciousness, and analytic failure in such statements about an aged artist’s work. Critics normally try to gain access to finitude and death in a late art, ­either to celebrate, as h ­ ere, a poetic victory over impermanence or to transform the late work into documents of biography and circumstance or context. Adorno developed his theory of late style against such readings, attending to the result of subjectivity’s withdrawal from art itself.7 At least since the Romantics and increasingly since Freud and his heirs, critics have approached poetry as lyrical self-­expression understood in individual personal or subjectivist terms, even as ­these have morphed into discussions of staged or structured affect and trauma that do not accept the undeconstructed subject as such. Vari­ous socially, po­liti­ cally aware critical movements have depersonalized writing through the categories of ideology, class, and capital. Among critics who adapt t­hese larger frames of research is a tendency to make the issues ­matters of person, as if class position or some other structural real­ity appears as such in the 218

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person. In almost all ­these cases, as Adorno points out, the poems—­the art—­become documents and ­little more. Fifteen years a­ fter Lucy Beckett, Alan Filreis, for example, made the most thoroughly researched and strongest argument to alter the personalism of Beckett’s humanism. In 1989, Filreis introduced his study of Stevens as an attempt to correct scholarship that had not achieved proper distance from Stevens’s own claims of unique interiority. Filreis adapted “critical biography” to the larger purposes of “American literary historiography.” Practically, he read the “historical and po­liti­cal forces pressing on Stevens from outside [his] c­ areer,” shifting critical research to historicism and away from the frame of lyrical interiority. The individual becomes a screen for the forces of history and the ­limited ability of individual bourgeois subjects to grasp, supersede, or create in their face.8 This means that Filreis often places Stevens’s poems within other documents, reading them as responses to questions and pressures. The poems in situ are agons of bourgeois strug­gles to assert individual in­de­pen­dence that experiences crises when challenged by external pressures and demanding questioners. Filreis convincingly and revealingly rebuts Beckett’s account of Stevens’s major effort at public poetry, “The Sail of Ulysses.” Filreis re-­creates the history of public and po­ liti­cal expectations that circumscribed Stevens’s efforts, fi­nally to show the limits of creative in­de­pen­dent interiority in the face of social responsibilities and uncongenial genre obligations. Beckett thought it “an occasional poem on an unpromising subject” (Filreis’s emphasis), whereas Filreis would teach a fundamental lesson about Stevens and his bourgeois defenders in the poem’s failures: “In fact, issues of knowledge and freedom, mutually abridged rights, w ­ ere just then so utterly promising as subjects for public oration that, if anything, Stevens was disappointed that he could not meet the ­matter’s ­great potential and offer a poem to be deemed Stevensian.”9 Despite Filreis’s efforts to remove Stevens from the personalized humanism typified by Beckett’s research, his own arguments depended as much if not more on personal ele­ments of Stevens’s feelings and judgments as his pre­de­ces­sor’s work had done. Filreis argued convincingly that a critical humanism assuming the pose of aesthetic sensibility as the mea­sure of poetic accomplishment left several methodological questions unanswered, but his own historicism, inflected by a nostalgia for a Left social engagement, required merely a filtering of the poet’s sensibility in terms the critic takes to be more public and po­liti­cal than private and interior. This assumed 219

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contrasting dualism eludes easy justification. Importantly, Filreis substituted emotion read po­liti­cally for feeling read aesthetically. (We could work out the roots of this opposition in T. S. Eliot’s contrast between feeling and emotion.) Filreis’s work built on initiatives in the writings of Randall Jarrell and Roy Harvey Pearce, whose extremely impor­tant arguments rested on modernist motifs, albeit with results inflected to the realist side of the supposed imagination / real dichotomy. In other words, what had been a m ­ atter of humane poetic explorations of complications within the sensorium of individuals became for Filreis the material for an allegorical retelling of national history. Filreis accepts the critical aesthetic humanists’ view of Stevens as real in import and motive but troubled and failed in ambition, an ambition he denominates po­liti­cal within the national strug­gles of real pressures on a poet who would be an isolato. By several mea­sures, Helen Vendler has led the field of Stevens study for nearly five de­cades. Arguably, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire is the best book on the poet of its de­cade.10 The quality of Vendler’s work results from her high skill as a careful reader of complex texts. Unlike her contemporaries such as Harold Bloom or Joseph Riddel, Vendler had no overarching theoretical apparatus to rest on, to assert, or to justify. Her criticism is classically an immanent formalism, the far opposite of Filreis’s allegoresis, of distance reading, or of the digital humanities. Literary and ­human value results from the formed experience of the reader meeting the formative and well-­formed art of verbal expressive order. This technique defends specific values, of course, and asserts the impor­tant consequence of its own efforts. Such criticism would assure the unique place of poetry in a cultural proj­ect of education in high sensibility and intelligence while at least indirectly legitimating claims for the unique achievements of high art. Vendler’s writings result from extended careful study of Stevens’s works that is itself supported by exhaustive study of English-­and European-­ language poetry since the Re­nais­sance. Much like her critical antagonist Harold Bloom, Vendler understands ­great poetry to depend on tradition and variation, as ­great criticism requires im­mense careful reading and mapping of the canons that art and criticism create. The complicated nature of Vendler’s work resulted nonetheless in clear and sharp statements of intent and value. In “Stevens’ Secrecies,” for example, we find this declaration of formalist desire: “Form in Stevens, including the secrecies of form, is always a carrier of meaning” (52). Soon a­ fter this nearly gnostic remark, 220

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Vendler writes, “Stevens’ poetry is a poetry of feeling pressed to an extreme; the pressure itself produces the compression and condensation of the work” (53). The critic’s task is to unpack this density and expose the hidden achievements of form. Vendler’s terms are exquisite if old and for some readers familiar. Compression and condensation, as we know from Auerbach’s studies of the Elohist, authorize something like the tyranny of interpretation. An unfriendly student might claim, by analogy, that Vendler’s art replaces the Elohist’s God—­and, in so saying, the student would repeat a centuries-­old assertion that art replaced God in Western culture. As we know from Benjamin, such an assertion emptied itself in a moment long before the pogrom of poets began. Considering the naïve student’s question, Vendler testifies for poetry to refute the banal version of Adorno’s apothegm, that ­there can be no poetry ­after Auschwitz. One of many reasons we should have an interest in Vendler’s work is her general ac­cep­tance of something like Adorno’s challenge. In 1991, Filreis introduced Auschwitz directly into the reading of Stevens’s poetry in a chapter revealingly called “Formalists u ­ nder Fire,” to trace the likely material and textual encounters of Stevens with the death camps. His research showed how Jean Wahl’s poetic transformation of pain and body into formal art was so impor­tant that it triggered experiments and reconsiderations within Stevens’s US ensconcement.11 In the 1980s, when Paul de Man’s work on allegory helped spread knowledge of Benjamin’s theories of allegory, when Jameson adapted allegoresis as a critical mode leading to utopia, Vendler decoded the secrecies of Stevens’s forms as secrecies of the symbol—­that is, the perfected synthesis of the subjective and objective. We must accept Vendler’s judgment that ordinary professional academics, having taken Stevens as a “symbolist,” “produced some commentary of extraordinary banality” (53). To take Stevens as a symbolic poet, as she did, carried the full pathos of history as well as the armature of combat against ­those theorists who have relegated the symbol to the protofascist poetics of the early twentieth c­ entury and the faux rituals of Nazi heroic displays. The symbol and its complex secrecies, which demanded the educated hermeneut, dis­appeared in the uniform historical and po­liti­cal assault on an aesthetic but not abject capacity for imagination’s work. Above all, in the hands of the proper reader, the secular poet’s adoption of formal secrets embodied in symbolic images would pack the density 221

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of complex h ­ uman life for a culture that needed its formalization and elucidation. Such poetry re-­created the authoritative place not only for poets but also for teachers.12 Although Vendler knew the work of Adorno and Benjamin, in this book she takes no explicit notice of their and ­others’ exposition of culture’s end, which not only broke the symbolic synthesis but also nullified the possibility of lived experience. Vendler has made vital contributions to understanding Stevens’s poetry. She has identified his use of classical tropes and analyzed his methods for modernizing ­those materials, a capacity that we ­will see he shares with Rembrandt as a mode of transport (52). Vendler ­mistakes Stevens’s use of the figure for symbols and so finds but misunderstands “his wish for an impersonal lyric voice.” Grammatically and rhetorically, he avoids the first person, “­whether singular or plural” (55).13 She has corrected the all-­too-­ common research trend in the relatively strong critical work of Lucy Beckett. Confronted with the massive intellectual and linguistic complications of Stevens’s major poems, standard critical practice “has perhaps led us into a reduction of his poetry into ‘the ­imagined and the real, thought / And the truth, Dichtung and Wahrheit.’ T ­ hese anti­theses are then seen to lead inexorably to a synthesis” (57). She replaces this trivialized approach with a weightier, more impersonal and classical frame that carries the full marks of High Romantic work in a late modernist mode.14 The agon of her Stevens is nothing as ­simple as the weak epistemology of real­ity and imagination. She comes to her Stevens by careful and thorough reading of magnitude as his inaugural prob­lem: “The difference in magnitude between the single mind and the limitless universe it contemplates is Stevens’s earliest prob­lem of magnitude. One of his first responses to the disproportion of what he would ­later represent as the single candle of the mind fearful of the power­ful auroras stretching across the heavens is simply to deny any disproportion, and find a perfectly congruent relation—an exquisite fitting, we might call it from Words­worth—of the mind to the external world” (62). Paul de Man’s attack on Romanticism, which took the form of a critique of professors, argued the virtues of allegorization against symbolism during the years preceding Vendler’s ­counter assertion of Stevens’s symbolism as the solution to the prob­lems of magnitude.15 In classicism, of course, t­hese prob­lems appear as fate, provoke tragic forms and notions, or tend to melancholy and stories of ruination—­that is, a sense of history as empty without redemption. In this way, Vendler offers a (dis)solution to 222

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the allegory of death in the poem, which, if we recall Beckett’s comment on what we understand as late style, is the mortal fact of death itself. My defining claim is that Stevens’s poetry needs no redemption, and Vendler’s research and conclusions support my claim, although I also note one impor­ tant dissent. Whereas Vendler limits her conclusion to the symbolic identity of mind and world, Stevens’s poetics and poetry advance t­ oward a more ambitious anagogic conclusion than Vendler draws. The monumental emphasis on the weight and seriousness of magnitude does not adequately catch the tentative texture of Stevens’s style in his most successful poems. Despite my reservations, along the way of Vendler’s analyses, she advances a necessary case for Stevens. I emphasize t­hese three points of agreement with her reading. First, Stevens “suspected . . . ​that ­there may be no o ­ rders of magnitude at all” (71). Vendler carefully traced Stevens’s rhetorical formations through a series of poems that display his thematic engagement with comparative magnitudes—­“Infanta Marina,” “The Ordinary W ­ omen,” “The Idea of Order,” and ­others. Suspecting ­there might be no order of magnitude at all required the imaginative proof of a poem that could master the disequilibrium that evokes vari­ous formations—­such as melancholy or despair—to demonstrate, poetically, the solubility of a foundational fact of imaginative strug­gle to bring the world into h ­ uman desire. In the early Harmonium poem “Gubbinal,” for example, Stevens contrasts the sad, ordinary ugliness of this built world with the sublime grandeur of cultured nature. The final lines convey a tone of resigned disgust: “The world is ugly, / And the ­people are sad” (CP, 69). In such poems of comparative magnitudes, Vendler identifies a mark a universal revulsion that the poet must overcome if the conflict that ends in abjection and invites melancholic Gnosticism ­were not to defeat imagination in the weakness of its own efforts. The equally early poem “The Ordinary W ­ omen” “betrays revulsion,” in Vendler’s terms, “at the fact that ­music is of no greater magnitude than nature”—­this, she rightly insists for Stevens, “cannot be allowed to prevail” (Wallace Stevens, 72). In Vendler’s essay, the imaginative proj­ect of Stevens’s poetry emerges along the trajectory of rhetorical, archival, and grammatical attention to comparative textual per­for­mances. As a result, Vendler has justified her claim that Stevens never accepted the tragic or melancholic logic of magnitude but ­imagined a solution to a prob­lem as old and ­great as the resignation of Homeric heroes to war and fate in the Iliad. Vendler closes the argument 223

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for the first of her three impor­tant conclusions in this essay with the best available study of what she calls “the g­ reat hymn ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ ” (72). This im­mensely beautiful and demanding poem from The Rock, set between “The Planet on the ­Table” and “Not Ideas about the ­Thing but the T ­ hing Itself,” concludes Stevens’s strug­gle to “write the true poem of equilibrated fact, without resentment, giving each equal order of magnitude its due” (72). Her first conclusion is s­ imple and fundamental: Stevens is a poet for whom art is the try for solutions to long-­lasting imaginative prob­lems, which are prob­lems for a historically h ­ uman species. His work is a strug­gle for the imagination and not only against its own weaknesses and the pressures of the real but against the burden of its own achievements, especially as ­these tempt the imagination to reside in the forms of its ­earlier dreams. The second and third of Vendler’s conclusions entangle each other and elaborate the first. Each of them is a substantial contribution to my general argument in this book on behalf of love and against the banal but destructive modernist preoccupation with the tragic, a motif as diabolically disabling as its sibling, melancholy. Vendler’s Stevens arrives at what she calls, no doubt echoing Nietz­sche, “pure gaiety” (73)—­a name for the ­great achievement of “The River of Rivers” over resentment and melancholy. This is the second conclusion, for gaiety names the tonality of poetic achievement that discards the touts on offer in the archive. In its full Nietz­schean sense, carry­ing forward the motifs of On the Genealogy of Knowledge, gaiety f­ rees imagining from demands that it be “an ethical or practical act” (73). As we have seen, “The Man on the Dump” is not pathetic or redeemed. If he speaks from a sort of afterlife, as “Large Red Man Reading” dramatizes, it is, as in the form of that poem’s narrator, an effect of pure impersonality that can even hypothesize a lyrical voice: “And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked” (CP, 365).16 In a word, Stevens’s poems contain fate, often as their own creation and the inheritance of past poiesis. To contain is neither to escape nor to overcome. The experimental poet’s imaginings show fate as a ­human image and as a no-­ longer-­working, if ever it was, form of imaginative transformation of the world into the ­human dream. “The Noble Rider” says that Plato’s meta­ phors are, as Coleridge wrote, “gorgeous nonsense.” In a similar way, Homer’s version of fate figures a h ­ uman effort to dream a world for the men who inhabit the dream. Homer’s figures, though, might also have 224

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become glorious nonsense, antiquated and in­effec­tive. The achievement of Stevens’s containment lies in its “ease” more than in its “fortitude” (Vendler, Wallace Stevens, 77). Vendler’s third conclusion identifies the motive of this poetic act. She calls it love. Throughout this essay, Vendler wanders among vari­ous texts, making definitive links where most readers would not find them. Her tactic, as we saw on the topic of magnitude, is to show the emergence of imaginative strength during the long pro­cesses of poetic experiment. She follows love from “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” where the speaker tells us he pursued and still pursues “the origin and course / of Love.” Her trip ends with “The Dove in the Belly,” where “we cannot be worldly and skeptical too long in the presence of love; we become instead its celebrators, glad when the dove who has built his nest in the belly is placated at last” (55). “The Dove in the Belly” is so close to Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” that the older poem might have been the stencil for its design. The Whitmanic nationalist expansion helps Stevens confidently adapt the topics of eros, ruin, and democracies to find the end of ruin in the “brave salut!” of the poor. The “deep dove” achieved against h ­ uman poverty, potential always in poiesis, is the permanent basis of creative action—­“deep dove, placate you in your hiddenness” (56; CP, 318). Not surprisingly, Vendler brings Stevens’s motives to ground in love, but love persists only when achieved in the very art that legitimates its claims and acts. Vendler’s research into Stevens supplied the strongest con­temporary justification for a trope as old as Orpheus, which, in turn, grounds a familiar universal humanism. Furthermore, in the end, the act of love does no more than solidify this general humanism by returning the poems and this humanism to the real­ity of the individual subject. Vendler draws a conclusion for which she does not quite argue. She leaves her readers with “the poetry of the subject” (75), which she has not shown is the only or necessary result of Stevens’s proj­ect.17 Vendler comes to this rather surprisingly familiar place by forgetting gaiety and allowing Whitmanic motifs to lead her from the placating deep dove to a hypothesized individualized humanity—­without a proof for necessity. Despite the rigor of her work, Vendler iterates a familiar trope, perhaps ­because it beckons too strongly: “Real­ity offers us, over and over, dif­fer­ent ­faces of itself, soliciting our adjustments to it in ­those re-­shiftings of perception and thought and desire that for Stevens define poiesis, imagination, the construction of meaning and value. It cannot be said too often that this is an 225

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activity that e­ very ­human being engages in at e­ very moment. . . . ​We live out each poem as we live inside it” (57). Vendler argues that she had found the correct explanation for Stevens’s Shakespearian variety, the constant seeming motility and variety of his positions on fundamental topics. Keeping this in mind, scholars can better understand her argument with Rita Dove over the latter’s downgrading of Stevens. Vendler had found, she claims, in Stevens’s love, mastery not only of the same but of infinite variation, the proof of permanence. Vendler calls it “that refusal to become obsolete” (79). Vendler has all the knowledge and skills she needs to avoid this familiar conclusion. The word “permanence” invites more thinking than we have ­here. This is, with Frank Kermode’s book, the best book on Stevens and among the most demanding and rewarding engagements with his extremely hard writing. Vendler should have resisted this final temptation to elide general humanism with the dense classical magnitude of Stevens’s work. The latter should have made her more cautious, and her perception of his deep classicism—­not only the long history of his tropes but the weight of his topics—­should have led to see the higher aspirations of g­ reat poetic art caught perfectly by her recognitions of his devices, especially his profound impersonality. ­Great poetry is far more than the “poem-­as-­passage” (57), which names the practical utility of a moral art left for t­ hose who consume it. Stevens’s impersonality leads to higher ­things. We see this in an encounter with “The Auroras of Autumn,” which Vendler describes as “Stevens’ ­great poem of the void” (49). It is not that. Rather, it is Stevens’s ­great poem of poetic necessity, as it evokes from the imagination—to overmaster them— the greatest challenges to itself. In “The Auroras of Autumn,” the poet lets the world appear within the ­human dream as its own. “The Auroras of Autumn” is an exceedingly difficult poem. It does not easily yield its meaning to even several close readings. Among major American long poems, it has the fewest sustained readings. More impor­tant, the poem does not prosaically account for its own form or purpose. Just what kind of poem is this? What are its aims? Which are its motives and resources? ­There is considerable disagreement among scholars about the poem’s fundamental nature, and critics are as likely to characterize it in a freighted phrase as to attempt an explication or account of its workings and consequences. Altogether, the poem’s difficulties make pos­si­ble some remarkably clever critical writing that probes specific verbal and epistemological questions around 226

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Stevens’s poem.18 A substantial number of essays make ­limited contributions to our understanding of this poem and its importance.19 Reviewing Harold Bloom’s magisterial Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Frank Kermode makes the still essential point that of “a w ­ hole shelf of books, only a very few contain good or even tolerable criticism of Stevens.”20 Kermode emphasizes that Stevens has not found his critic, in that no one has written the definitive book on his poetry, which means a book that o ­ thers for a generation at least must engage. Kermode admits his admiration for Vendler but is reviewing Bloom and assigns him the honor of near critical excellence. I join entirely with Kermode and Bloom on an essential point. Kermode puts it this way: Bloom “is right to say that ‘Notes ­toward a Supreme Fiction,’ ‘Auroras of Autumn’ and ‘An Ordinary Eve­ ning in New Haven’ are the g­ reat central poems, and he understands as few have understood the peculiar majesty of the very late poetry.” Kermode modifies this essential point a dozen years l­ater: “The last poetry of Wallace Stevens, which may be his greatest, seems not to have found the critic who can speak for it.”21 Kermode chooses to sidle up to Stevens’s poetry and poetic proj­ect rather than read ­these last poems, although he ends his essay with the near final tercet of “The Auroras of Autumn,” as if his own closeness to Stevens, paralleling Stevens’s closeness to the commonplace, had culminated in ­these lines: he meditates a ­whole, The full of fortune and the full of fate, As if he lived all lives, that he might know . . . (CP, 363)

Of course, though, the poem does not end ­there. Kermode brought together Stevens, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Hölderlin in his 1989 essay. The essay is oddly ahistorical on its surface. Concerned to place Stevens within the ordinariness of his life’s circumstances, Kermode anomalously presses analogies with Heidegger’s meditations on dwelling, world, and earth, suggesting parallels in Stevens’s tropes of earth and mundo. Kermode’s is the best essay yet on Stevens ­because it catches the full stakes of Stevens’s postwar art and b ­ ecause it does so acutely and ­gently. If much of the finest modern critical writing often has baroque qualities to its style—­often when its ascetic approaches mannerism—­then we should note that Kermode’s essay steps away from the baroque and Stevens’s enormously elaborated if abstracted images, vocabulary, and style 227

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to offer a closer picture, taking Stevens at his word on analogy. “It is like a play of thought, some trophy we ourselves gather, some meaning we ourselves supply. It is like a pleasant shadow, faint and volatile” (CP, 709). The ever-­subtle Kermode draws Stevens and Heidegger together through Stevens’s sentence, written to Peter Lee in 1954: “At the moment, he [Heidegger] is a myth, like so many ­things in philosophy” (Letters, 839). Heidegger and philosophy are just other t­ hings, in their own ways, in Stevens’s circumstances. Given that Stevens is a poet of circumstance,22 Kermode’s treatment makes t­hese ­things newly in­ter­est­ing ways into the especially complicated late writings. In September 1948, Stevens read a paper in the En­glish Institute, which met at Columbia University in New York (Letters, 605–606n8). He included his talk, “Imagination as Value,” in The Necessary Angel. He says many ­things in this paper that would arouse the disapproval of some recent scholars of poetry. For example, he writes, “The imagination is the only genius” (CP, 728), a statement available for objection from so many points of view that listing reasons seems counterproductive.23 Perhaps, though, such a statement opens a good path for thinking about Stevens and creativity.24 Kermode’s essay seems ahistorical, but it is not. Unlike Adorno, who asked if poetry ­after Auschwitz ­were pos­si­ble, Heidegger, the impossibly unrepentant Nazi, began on an even more basic question from a longer view: in a time of poverty, when the gods have fled, what are poets for—­ “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit.” In this way, Heidegger crosses the threshold to his remarkable essays on Hölderlin.25 Albert Hofstadter translates dürftiger Zeit as “a destitute time,” whereas Kermode renders it as a “the time of poverty” (“Wallace Stevens,” 84). Kermode’s translation comes from Wallace Stevens’s per­sis­tent use of “poverty,” which appears over twenty times in his poetry. Through this word, Kermode links Stevens’s late-­ career proj­ect to Heidegger’s profound meditation on Hölderlin’s poem “Bread and Wine.”26 Kermode’s e­ arlier accounts of Stevens needlessly invoked the modernist motif of the death of God.27 In his mature thinking on Stevens, which wrestles with Heidegger and Hölderlin to specify both Stevens’s f­ amily resemblance to t­ hose imaginations of crisis and the American modes that save him from the same, Kermode returns to that motif in a power­ful and evocative form. Kermode’s work in building this differentiating conjunction is careful, deep, and illuminating. In some ways, it precedes my own questions, worked through with Adorno and Stevens, about 228

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the viability of poetry a­ fter Auschwitz. Kermode, the g­ reat modern critic, the more expansive and equally subtle heir to William Empson, suffers some classic modernist anx­i­eties. Stevens’s poverty is not destitute time but closer to the literal sense, as it ­were, of “what poets are for when times are hard.” In Hölderlin’s poem, ­there is an answer to the question, What are poets for? For the narrator of “Bread and Wine,” the question is hard, but the poet assents to his addressee’s answer: “Yet they are, you say, like the holy priests of the wine-­god, / Moving from land to land, on through the holy night.”28 Despite all efforts to bring Hölderlin, Heidegger, and Stevens into a Benjaminian constellation of strug­gle with destitution, all Kermode’s explicatory brilliance does not mask the fact that Stevens has truly ­little f­ amily resemblance with this Idealist or post-­Idealist crowd. Destitution and poverty are not the same; they do not echo the same way in dif­fer­ent narratives. Stevens’s “Man on the Dump,” as we have already seen, works poverty as a resource of creativity transformed or transported in the poetic act, the capacity and necessity of which his poetry never doubts. In “Esthétique du Mal,” Stevens expresses a Keatsian warning not to indulge in the melancholic narratives of loss and mourning: Softly let all true sympathizers come, Without the inventions of sorrow or the sob Beyond invention. Within what we permit, Within the ­actual, the warm, the near, So ­great a unity, that it is bliss, Ties us to ­those we love. (279)

In this poem, both the narrator and the addressee are “Exquisite in poverty,” which is precisely what the Germans, by contrast, would call “destitute,” a world minus gods. The speaker first excludes t­hose who would invent the sob and then declares for the exquisite poverty of being “against the suns /  . . . ​ / With which we vested, once, the golden forms.” Perhaps ­because this is not a ­great poem, the narrator then adds of ­those times invested in golden forms, “Before we w ­ ere wholly ­human and knew ourselves” (279–280). Like Lucy Beckett, Kermode turns to Stevens’s “The River of Rivers in Connecticut” to identify the ­dying greatness of the late poems as a turn to the commonplace transfigured by imagination into a sublime share of the (distant) transcendent, “an unclassifiable, fire-­fangled bird,” as Kermode 229

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puts it (“Wallace Stevens,” 96). This judgment reflects a surprisingly inadequate understanding of both Stevens’s poetic imagination and his importance to us. Kermode’s reading of Stevens’s poetic work as a recovery of the same transfigurative power associated with failed religion—­the substitution of art for belief, the maintenance of visionary power in secular writing—is familiar and uncreative. Kermode would have it that Stevens’s work sustains poetic imagination by successfully exercising itself in the work of redemption ­after the gods have gone. Kermode’s redemptive humanism, despite his loving attention to poetic detail and to Stevens’s attention to the specificities of the created world, leads us back to the gnostic neighborhood of messianic necessity. An Appetite for Poetry offers more evidence of this tendency in Kermode’s criticism of Stevens, a gesture that fi­nally inhibits both the best reading of Stevens and our much-­needed secular poetics. We should take seriously Stevens’s youthful self-­identification with the ­great masters of tradition. Even his early poetry worked within a humanistic imaginary without anxiety over the death of gods or dread in the face of a destitute world. The poet who writes on the dump is far more confidently creative, has a greater capacity to imagine in the face of ruin, than the poet who reactively heaps broken images. Despite Kermode’s profound admiration for the late Stevens, certain roots in T. S. Eliot frame his judgment. Following his remarkable essay on Stevens, he argues a very recognizable and nostalgic claim for Eliot in a chapter called “T. S. Eliot: The Last Classic.” Kermode feels deep affection for Eliot, as we see in his visionary judgment of Eliot that closes the Stevens essay: “But disparate, banished ideas can be held together—­about past and pre­sent and exiles—­and we should give our exile [Eliot] the last word. . . . ​Perhaps, b ­ ecause one spirit animates the ­whole, that past was not lost but transformed, and the absent is somehow made pre­sent, the exile momentarily at home in his memory, or rather, in his poem” (“T. S. Eliot,” 115). He then (mis)quotes “­Little Gidding”: See, now they vanish, The places and the ­faces, with the self which, as it could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. (115)29

Resting on Eliot’s notion of the “classic,” Kermode has told a seemingly classical story of poetry’s responsibilities to speak back to the resistant 230

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corruption of modernity from within the exiled poet’s memory of civil order in the republic of letters. Eliot’s faith, however, derails Kermode’s attempt. Without mentioning Eliot’s late turn to Anglicanism or the incarnational vision emergent in Four Quartets, Kermode brings his Eliot to an apotheosis with this ill quotation from “­Little Gidding.” ­Others, however, remember that this poem culminates in Eliot’s greatest effort to emulate Dante in the Paradiso, as the Tuscan imagines the Trinity in a final crystalline image. In “­Little Gidding,” Eliot draws together the doctrinal tropes of Paul’s First Corinthians and Augustine’s Confessions in his own beautiful and consummate image of divine assurance: Quick now, ­here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than every­thing) And all ­shall be well and All manner of ­thing ­shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-­folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the ­rose are one.30

Even more than the beauty and joy of ­these assurances, we see the im­mense energy required to imagine the achievement to which ­these lines show the aspiration. “­Little Gidding” is a poem of per­sis­tent commitment, of discovery hard achieved, dependent on all the master tropes of individual salvation derived from the very Pauline tradition that sustains it: We ­shall not cease from exploration And the end of our exploring ­Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.31

The Auroras The brilliance of earth is the brilliance of ­every paradise. —­Wallace Stevens, “Three Academic Pieces” (CP, 690)

“The Auroras of Autumn” is a masterwork of poetic creation. It is an anagogic reduction to first princi­ples. In Stevens’s terms, it “resembles” what our entire poetic experience has been about (686), and it imitates our desire to 231

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have nature take the shape of all our dreams. It is as dense as any substance and as intense as concentration can make language. It recasts poetry’s force and materials. It comes before dualisms, raising symbols to heights vis­i­ble from their foundations. It writes from an edge where it sees the media of centrality as a­ fter images of poetry, its mere effects. “This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless” (“Auroras of Autumn,” CP, 355). The serpent draws the cosmos into an image. The two-­part constellation Serpens, head and tail, “bodiless,” bookends the explosive bends of light looming over the ­human settlements. Physics and my­thol­ogy bring first ­things together. The serpent is bodiless ­because the constellation Ophiuchus sits between the head and tail, hiding the body as it carries the snake and with it the symbols of medicine, death, and rebirth.32 Charged particles from the sun itself, blown across the solar system, pivot along the atmosphere, ­shaped by magnetic powers, creating unstable but dominant colors. The poetic image invokes poiesis itself in its earliest mythical forms as ­these entangle the fundamental electro-­chemical pro­cesses that make Earth uniquely capable of sustaining mammalian life in our solar system. The poem sets its point of view, its speaker’s voice, and its reader’s gaze at the edge of the universe, where the h ­ uman dream and natu­ral possibilities and limits coincide. Far from an origin story, this is a vision of poetry’s natu­ral goal within the culturing pro­cesses of h ­ uman life. It is the permanent state of secular life, which itself produces multiple images of nature filled with ­human content. The poem relies on ligatures for movement, as the second tercet starts with, “Or is this another wriggling out of the egg” (355)—­and so it begins with stories of beginnings, morph­ing the fundamental into figures that linger, transporting the fundamental into h ­ uman tradition. This is the stripped figure of the ur-­gesture of ­humans singing songs of creation. In this way, the poem is abstract, the trope purified by intensity. It is anagogic, retrieving fundamentals throughout the complex images of the poem’s cantos and tercets. The circumference of the ­human dream exposed as nature containing ­human desire as its own aims—­anagogy proves the possibility of poiesis and subsumes the demands of the real as sometimes-­threatening aftereffects within the work of imagination. Faced with such art, the critic’s work must be banal. The poem’s abstract intensity invites explication and elaboration. Its density promises to reward the patient reader with pages of resources for secondary prose. In this sense, the poem is and is not difficult. It is not difficult b ­ ecause it offers to sustain 232

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any account of itself since it is anagogy in its circumferential view of a cosmos made h ­ uman as nature. It pre­sents and tests the master tropes, the symbolic modalities made by poiesis into tradition and the world. The poem is extremely difficult, however, ­because it performs the basic critical task. It weighs the values of poetic imaginings, including the irredentist consequences of what once ­were and perhaps remain essential and basic tropes. In other words, it assumes the belatedness of its readers. In my discussion of Stevens’s critics, I have tried to show something of how this is true. Stevens’s readers tend to account for his work in terms of well-­known paradigms of imaginative forms narrativized into critical accounts. The essence of allegoresis is coming ­after and saying again the already known. The poem raises an impor­tant secondary question: How should the critic judge the poetic act when it organizes its materials as a display of figural, symbolic, and historical resources? How could critics read but as willing players within the established archive of known intellectual and symbolic possibilities themselves made pos­si­ble only by the transformative work of anagoges? The poem’s difficulty is the obverse of its own seeming accessibility to critics who ­mistake its content for the intellectual seriousness of its art. The proper response of critical consciousness when it finds itself in such a place should not be melancholy, which despite its commonality is only one pose within the repertoire of poetic creation and response. Keats gives form to the historical contingency of melancholy, as I tried to show in reading his poem in relation to Stevens’s poetics. As I argued in Chapter 6, with the help of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” melancholy ­matters b ­ ecause it is a threat that imagination poses to itself. By exposing the belated position of readers and critics, from within its own first gestures, “The Auroras of Autumn” shows us the reasons we give ourselves for our melancholy. If the serpent is “form gulping a­ fter formlessness. / Skin flashing to wished­for disappearances” (355), as the poem unveils ele­ments of the serpent’s symbolic value, then the deep melancholy of permanent dissatisfaction and finitude shows itself as a settled fundamental potential within an anagogic reduction. The inhuman power of the symbolic natu­ral, over and against the staged h ­ uman desire for settled appearances and satisfying disappearances—­over and against this set of ­human wishes on the stage of cultured nature—­glows the inhumane itself, beyond reach: “the serpent body flashing without the skin” (355). 233

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Canto 1 of “Auroras” sets the drama of melancholy within the mythological and poetic resources of origins, collapsing biology, philosophy, and theology in a matrix that is Old World and New. The serpent anchoring the aurora has its eyes always open to “fix on us in ­every sky” (355). This first tercet closes to another ligature, the carefully balanced question of the next line: “Or is this another wriggling out of the egg” (355), which puts the profligacy of uncertainty, of doubting, of not knowing, and of asking into play for the poem as another mode of fundamental creation. The question continues, “Another image at the end of the cave, / Another bodiless for the body’s slough?” (355). Productive iteration—­marks of finitude and enclosure—­invites melancholy in defeat. The poem, however, knowing the incompletion of anything pressing as real­ity on imagination, counterpoises ­these threats of imagination to itself with available alternatives. As the canto turns from “slough” to the next tercet, not only does it recall the ­great En­ glish text by John Bunyan, “The Slough of Despond” in The Pilgrim’s Pro­ gress; it also puts the phenomena of time and space, of movement and geographic place, together as fabulous necessities of poetry.33 Having done so, the liaison from the fifth to the sixth tercet in the first canto shifts place and focus: “In the midmost midnight and find the serpent ­there, / In another nest, the master of the maze” (355). The poem’s point of view is always from the edge, a perceptive glance at the forms of order, the contents of imagination, and the transformative nexus of desire and nature. The poem is not an allegory of its own creation or a story of the “creative pro­cess.” It is not a tale of its own imagining. W ­ ere it any of ­these, it would be an example of the weak imagination against which Stevens and ­others I have discussed would inveigh. The poem is the anagogic rec­ord of imagination’s reduction to its own working place within the catechetic but ordered intersection of nature and culture. Following Goethe’s gentle guidance, we see the sideways vision as the source of light not merely on the content or images before us but as the illumination of all the entanglements at the foundations of poiesis. “In another nest,” what we see is “the master of the maze / Of body and air and forms and images” (355), an ordered, enabling, but entrapping archive of created resources and powers. The poem so acutely abstracts the figures and tropes that compose its view that we might, in this instance, follow the maze through the archive back to Ariadne, her bull, and her thread. A long tradition of symbolic culture, caught in myth, transformed in poetry appears as a line of 234

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reading, a thread through the mass of forms and images. It is itself, however, only one of ­those very images. It is typical of this poem that it always doubles its own accomplishment with the resources from which it abstracts its own work. If it transports its inheritance, it does so from a knowledge prior to ­those resources themselves. Yet what follows in the poem countermands the allure of melancholy while explaining and judging it. “The master of the maze,” the poem tells us, is “Relentlessly in possession of happiness” (355). The anagogic reduction reveals the fullness of joy, plea­sure, and accomplishment that come with the master of the maze who “is the height emerging and its base” (355) of Serpens and the aurora. From the base, in “another nest,” the master is relentlessly happy in the memory palace of creations in space, in sound, in form, and in vision—­all the classical arts. Then how amid this demonstrated satisfaction and completion might come melancholy, the constantly pre­sent iteration of the threat to the happiness the serpent possesses? The answer lies, as it ­were, in the next movement in the motion across the stage of this canto: “This is his poison: that we should disbelieve / Even that” (355). Belief tied to affect requires anagogy to reduce to the fundamentals, one of which is the poison implicit in the archived contents of the maze. Melancholy lies as a form among ­others within the maze, part of the serpent’s mastery and plea­sure. “We,” by contrast, disbelieve the relentless happiness on offer b ­ ecause part of the offer is, on the quotidian level of disappointment and desire, an embrace of melancholy as the pleasure-­giving embrace of iterated failure, the feature of mortality and finitude. Faith, as it w ­ ere, the cognate of missing belief, demands the poet’s wisdom to see the melancholic from the side as one of many marked as poisonous precisely b ­ ecause it skeptically misperceives the created and mastered form of affect. In the terms of this text, we might say that the melancholic falls for hope and utopian desire as the counterweight to the much-­harder-­to-­know faith in the possession of happiness in the maze of forms, media, and arts. On the point of judgment, we see too how the poem works. Not all the tropes amassed in tradition have equal value. The consequences of some, such as melancholy, break faith, result in disbelief, create misperceptions, and culminate in lies about happiness and misery. They falsify what poetry might see when it gazes on the very foundation from which it emerges, even as poetry cultivates that very foundation. 235

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Stevens lets us know both how imagination can create its own self-­ threatening consequences, in that melancholy, for example, is one of its effects, and how the imagination most profoundly turns us away from belief in its own mastery—­ perhaps rightly so at times—­ while providing knowledge of its own workings in relation to what­ever it calls the real. The poem is not a Romantic text at this point. It is not speculating on the power of imagination in itself to modify real­ity, to substitute for religion in a movement of transcendence, nor is it promising plenitude in­de­pen­dently of the finitude of nature and beings. On the contrary, the poem exposes the complex function of creativity within the largest frames of civilization, involving the work of imagination, mind, and emotion in relation to what we might still call nature. It is neither a paean to subjective priority nor a worrying of the subject / object prob­lem, which so much Stevens’s criticism assumes in its reading of him as an epistemological poet. Among the poets, ­those of the sort we might find in Dante’s limbo—­where Virgil resides with Plato, among ­others of the “­great tradition”—­art always moves anagogically to the foundations while raising to the heights of poetic transformation the potentiality of cultivation. In this poem, the topic is foundational while the art is intense, abstract, and elevating. The writing disposes for critical perception and imaginative effect the simultaneous truths of poetic knowledge and the ecstatic achievement of aesthetic effect. We see the potentiality actualized in rare works drawn to and from the perpetual bases of creativity to the task of organ­izing an always-­poeticized world that is always cultured, even to the point where nature seems the ­mother of cultural creations. “The Auroras of Autumn’s” par­tic­ul­ar interest in essential symbolic structures—­ family, dwelling, w ­ ater, sea, and so on—­illustrates the possibility of a world poem in which nature seems to give the basics of culture, of ­human work and dream. We call ­these seemings “nature” ­because the work of poetry has made them seem prior to their cultivation. The importance and difficulty of “The Auroras of Autumn” come from its anagogic nature. The poem’s content—if we consider techniques of image, movement, and so on—­gives us a condensed vision of poiesis at work in poetry and the other arts so that we understand two t­ hings. First, the poem lets us see, figurally, the overarching pro­cesses of poiesis as they take on or give shape to the symbolic values of creativity and transformation. Second, the poem makes manifest the foundational tropes emergent in the first moments of poiesis. In this way, poiesis offers the brightest view 236

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of itself as the source of life. It does so by illuminating the created, the cultivated world of primary colors and what look like natu­ral symbols, which have become essential to the social world. In the power of anagogic reduction and elevation, we understand why tyranny cannot command imagination, although a tyrant might command a given worker in the arts and society—or accept the artist’s voluntary work. For the poem to show clearly that is has foundational knowledge, for example, of when the word called the cosmos into being and order, it must be both reductive and aspirant. The poem must be intense, dense in allusion, verbally hard and abstracted from particularities of time and place.34 In the symbolic movement of canto 1, the poet seems to prepare a familiar turn to an old idea—­the transformative and creative power of imagination working on nature. That possibility, however, at once dissolves in the anagogic reduction to first explanatory princi­ples, which means, in the art of this work, the essentially doubled movement of abstraction and intensification. The penultimate tercet of canto 1, having warned us of imagination’s poison, the melancholy of its own finitude, shows extreme verbal skill when it tropes on “disbelieve,” the poison of melancholy, by sounding again the theme of uncertainty in a sentence that crosses to the final tercet: His meditations in the ferns, When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun, Made us no less as sure. (355)

The serpent master of the maze, settled in the nest, moved to the sun for the certainty of warmth and light. Consider how powerfully transformative the poem has been to come to this point. Serpens, in a dark sky, anchoring and outlining the aurora, becomes pure trope for the foundations of illumination, for the interaction of inhuman natu­ral force and the possibility of mammalian life. Serpens becomes the trope as master figure of all creativity, a moment reprised in canto 4. It is a named image for the foundational. It does not need warmth in this sense, for even the sun’s warmth is an aftereffect of its originary power—as we w ­ ill see in canto 3. Yet, as a trope naturalized, a figure that can work within the symbolic order, Serpens reacquires the naturalism of life and so needs the warmth of the sun. In a double move, then, the line gives us “surety” as the certainty of nature naturalized within the symbolic and scientific cultures of h ­ uman 237

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society, but it also assures the sun as what it is as nature, seemingly available as such for the meta­phoric work of h ­ uman imagination as it sustains life on Earth. This small set of interplays typifies the poem’s working and, in miniature, the work of anagogy. Of course, such a miniature enables and summons the extended doubling represented by commentary, reading, and the poetic transport of its original work to elsewhere. It is the means and content of eros. The movement to assure the sun “Made us no less as sure,” a figural account of our own certainty as a species within the g­ rand interactions that the serpent enables and transforms. Yet at the same time, the final half line opening the final tercet of canto 1 tropes on disbelief and leaves us all less sure, alive and sustained, guaranteed in the ambiguity of complex knowledge. We have come to know the happiness, the plethora, in which lies the poisonous lure of melancholy—­the us that is less sure of creativity. The canto ends by offering what seems to be a transcendental poetics designed to redeem the real within the aura of the ­imagined. What­ever the snake dreams, even the sun and us, exists only in a field of appearances that might well be or become all that ­there is, and so quite real: We saw in his head, Black headed on the rock, the flecked animal, The moving grass, the Indian in his glade. (355)

Lesser poems, even among Stevens’s best writing, might at this point invite speculative lines on the aesthetic and psychological possibilities inherent in the recovered power of the imagination. Importantly, in this anagogic moment, however, the poem refuses the invitation to transform itself into an allegory of “creative pro­cesses.” If we turn to a slightly e­ arlier major and much-­admired poem, we can see Stevens leaving b ­ ehind all t­hose temptations. In consequence, readers and critics should refuse invitations and set aside ­these temptations as approaches to art itself. In “Notes t­ oward a Supreme Fiction,” Stevens writes an allegory almost ready-­made for critical paraphrase of the dualistic interchanges between “real­ity” and “imagination.” The poem is one among many major statements that allow critics to transform Stevens into an often-­repetitive inquirer into the seeming conundrum over the relative priority of real­ity and imagination in poetry. Of course, this basic approach to Stevens repeats itself in the sociopo­liti­cal objections to Stevens’s writings. 238

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The poem “It Must Be Abstract,” the first of three sections in “Notes,” consists of ten cantos each of seven tercets. The first canto sets in motion the poem’s pedagogy: “Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea / of this invention, this in­ven­ted world, / The inconceivable idea of the sun” (CP, 329). Readers notice Stevens’s use of the classical “ephebe” to designate a trainee, the young poet familiar in his work from such early poems as “Mozart, 1935.” Stevens sets the poem in motion as a story of formation, a narrative framing device that allows exploration of the multiple components of aesthetic, cognitive, and artistic creation. He follows the path of familiar ritual. In this recognizable narrative, the first step in creating the poet is ascesis: “You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it” (329). At this point, we must recall that the title of this poem is “It Must Be Abstract.” The poet’s formation requires skill in abstraction, in reducing the ephebe’s unformed or inherited formation to a pure eye, a figure that, since Emerson, has become a common American poetic trope. Abstraction, in this case, also requires reduction to an idea, and the sun is both the metonymy and the symbol in and of the abstract. The sun is the ­thing that makes pre­sent what­ever confronts the mind and is in­de­pen­dent of it. As such, it exists as pure idea, as that which comes before. It is that, too, which the ephebe must see as pure idea in its own ideality. The ephebe must “Never suppose an inventing mind as source / Of this idea” (329). We showed e­ arlier that Stevens’s weaker poems, weak despite their greatness, proceed in narrativized ways, allowing commentators to allegorize and double their story, working into a tale lines from the poem that illustrate the explicator’s claims. In reading poetic lines of this sort in this way, we not only enact allegoresis but believe ourselves to display the allegorical nature of the text represented. We believe we have made the text “our own.” We thank the poem for being available, or we congratulate ourselves for mastering it. According to such an allegorical reading method, the text conveys a set of moral and intellectual lessons, which give themselves to paraphrase of a kind that escapes their demands as poetic creation while subsuming their art into mere allegory. I have suggested the close correlation between allegoresis and redemption throughout this book, a correlation confirmed by the poem in one moment of its development. “The Auroras of Autumn,” specifically the ending of canto 1, comes near to this moment. The poem invites the ethos contained in ­these lines from “Notes” but forcibly turns away from the 239

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l­imited lesson of “Notes” and the value of allegory, which, it shows us, is a poisoned temptation lurking in the imaginative master’s archive within the maze. In “It Must Be Abstract,” canto 3 opens with the alluring conjunction of aesthetic redemption and allegorical pedagogy: “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea . . . ​It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning” (330). In a way, this intermittent moment is a payoff, a nearly orgasmic satisfaction for the bereft, for ­those who would have poetry magically replace the failures of Western theocentrism. In addition, it is a moment essential to several narrative accounts of poetry’s value, including secular-­seeming stories of imagination’s power to transform or convert the humdrum into wondrous rewards, into enchanted or reenchanted nature.35 Most impor­tant, following this allegory, poetry and the poet returning to origins establish the very conditions for redeeming a world not only bereft by gods but also commodified totally into a sum of market relations often glossed with melancholic nostalgia for times when such redemption was not needed. Note as well that this ascetic recovery of the origin creates something like a po­liti­cal delusion, a sense that we share a refreshed life. The poem is itself so abstract at this point that we could enumerate large numbers of ethoi, which find their names in vari­ous g­ rand narratives—­Marxism, ontology, nationalism, differentiated identities, and so on. Allegoresis allows us to generalize the “we share” along an axis of utopian desire, and we would then say the phrase points to the habit of mind that finds a mix of utopian desires within an allegory of redemptive reenchantment. Why is this allegorical moment h ­ ere? ­Because it is part of the ephebe’s constant instruction to see what “poison,” to cite “The Auroras,” imagination creates to draw away from the truths of anagogy. In the anagogic lies an ethos of insight and poetic ambition far beyond the personalizing or redemptive modes that the comforting subjectivized stories allegory allows. The ­human is not power­ful in the thin way such allegories imagine. To want and attempt shared refreshment, to mislead a civilization to believe that poetry is merely the achievement of shared refreshment, of a compensatory plea­sure, might satisfy po­liti­cal and moral impulses within certain circumstances. Indeed, poetry too often offers such a possibility as its own, to propose such satisfaction and effort as its value and ambition. The ephebe must accept a harder set of paths, the first of which is the most chal240

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lenging ascesis—to renounce the poisoned well demanded by the real­ity of ­those who are unable to imagine alternatives, who dwell in the melancholy that their belief in universal ruination entails. Canto 3 starts with this temptation but quickly moves to another lesson for the ephebe, that the power of poetry can restore “candor” (331), which lets us see the vari­ous fantasies we proj­ect as hooing and howling. In sum, the canto ends, “Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation” (331). The pedagogical and developmental allegory built into this poem, coincident perhaps with the ideologies that give priority to ­either bourgeois subjectivity or class and other forms of group identity, also makes it a ­grand resource for critical allegoresis. Some of ­these readings embrace the poem for its vibrancy, wisdom, and illumination, while ­others condemn it for vari­ous moral and po­liti­cal failings along lines from Burnshaw to Filreis to Rita Dove. How should we assess the poem, then? Should we acknowledge its technical wizardry and theoretical insight into pro­cess and its limitations? Should we decide that despite its accomplishments, the poem is ­either morally or po­liti­cally weak? Should we draw ­battle lines over its value to one or another camp in an ideological strug­gle between foci of a common ellipse? Perhaps we should ­settle for reading the poem in terms of its own epilogue. Soldier, ­there is a war between the mind And sky, between thought and day and night. It is For that the poet is always in the sun, Patches the moon together in his room To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up down. It is a war that never ends. Yet it depends on yours. The two are one. They are a plural, a right and left, a pair, Two parallels that meet if only in The meeting of their shadows . . . (351–352)

As basic as this poem appears to be, it is very much a poem about a secondary quality of poetry and the poet. As we have seen in The Necessary Angel, Stevens believed that to put in place again poetry’s importance and authority required setting up both an understanding of the poet and legitimating the poet’s in­de­pen­dent authority. ­These final lines recall the Virgilian 241

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task of forming an ephebe, from the short poem “Mozart, 1935,” as we discussed in Chapter 4. Moreover, the soldier who in his Virgilian cadences moves “up down, / Up down,” in a “war that never ends,” cannot but remind us of book 4 in the Georgics, as I discussed in Chapter 6. Virgil set this trope in place, and Stevens sustains and extends it in “The Noble Rider,” as we have seen, to meet the poet’s need for legitimacy, which seemingly suffers from a contrast with the po­liti­cal and state power of the conquering emperor Augustus, Virgil’s sponsor. (In this context, we should recall again Stevens’s insistence that a tyrant cannot command imagination.) For Stevens, the poet is in an uneven conflict with the pressures of real­ity, a conflict that in this poem forces Stevens to transfer the military meta­phor to the ephebe-­becoming poet. In so d ­ oing, Stevens has recovered an original sense of the ephebe as a young man in formation as warrior servant to the state. Inherent in this transference of Augustus’s power to the sphere of poetry, which Virgil worked so hard to sustain as apart and superior, the Stevensian ephebe finds himself defeated. Nonetheless, as the epilogue concludes, in form also echoing the closure of Georgics, book 4, for a moment it seems to guarantee that the poet and poetry w ­ ill synthesize the opposites, requiring endless strug­gle between art and power. The Virgilian conquest of poetry’s inferiority to imperial power dissolves away in a weaker imagining, assuring the ephebe that the strug­gle w ­ ill end—­ephebe then becomes poet—­because “The soldier is poor without the poet’s lines” (352). A near apotheosis appears: “the fictive h ­ ere becomes real; / How gladly with proper words the soldier dies / If he must” (352). ­These are nearly sentimental lines, far from the classical difficulty of the Virgilian models so impor­tant to Stevens. The poem, even in its coda, remains doubly pedagogical, instructing its audience as it instructs its ephebe, who, fi­nally, may move past the military origins of the discipline required to become poet. All along, the poem’s illumination of the possibilities and limits of poetic formation have defined a sense of poetry itself. The poem functions as a kind of allegory, providing meaning and moral value to readers who paraphrase and recast the verse as narrative of their desires. Of course, to an extent, I have done this too. As a resource for such allegoresis, however, the poem must be valuable and a success no m ­ atter one’s final ideological judgment on its vision and practice. The poem is the basis for readerly and critical productivity. 242

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A counterreading would suggest, however, that the poem ends in a way more complex and ironic than my comments on the epilogue so far suggest. Given Stevens’s extraordinary ability to use the varying surfaces and undertows of verbal history, this suggestion is not surprising. For example, the line “how gladly with proper words the soldier dies” pre­sents readers with the richness of the word “proper” and helps us understand the transformation of soldier to poet, as the words of death become the soldier’s own, more than just his epitaph. Stevens’s poetry is never verbally thin. It always rewards readings that are attentive to movements and ligatures within the settled density of language. Grammar and syntax also compound the richness of language. The line turns from “the soldier dies” to the phrase “If he must,” making it pos­si­ble to dispose the tragic fatality that ends in the soldier ­dying into poetry as a challenge to necessity. In other words, we could find h ­ ere a shadow of Virgil’s victorious Georgic. The narrator is not done yet, of course; and as so often in a Stevens poem, the poetic voice pivots on a rhetorical “or,” and we discover that one alternative for the living soldier who no longer dies gladly with proper words is now rather to “[live] on the bread of faithful speech” (352). The poem and the transfigured soldier become poet acquire the characteristics of manna, of the Eucharist, and of the staff of life. Poetic lines become a viaticum, sustaining the poet-­soldier with “the bread of faithful speech” (352).36 Stevens authors several major long poems in Dante-­esque tercets, arranging them in cantos. The tercets are fairly regular although unrhymed; the poems are formally classical and traditional, even when they seem Romantic in their thematic concern with creation or poetic subjectivity. This combination allows Harold Bloom to place t­hese long poems in the subgenre of the internalized quest romance.37 As in a traditional romance, the poem moves from nature fallen to nature redeemed; it climaxes in a victory over the division just before its transformative, almost Eucharistic ending. The “war between the mind and sky” resolves into the remade poetic subjectivity that finds life in its own lines. Yet Stevens’s irony does not allow this ­simple conclusion, which would repeat the apocalyptic redemption that Bloom asserts characterizes the form.38 “How simply the fictive hero becomes the real” (352) is how the final tercet turns to the ambiguities of life and death, necessity and transfiguration. The poem does not end in the massive extension of the ego absorbing nature into poetic redemption. Rather, it leaves us with the learned mockery of “how simply” matched 243

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with “how gladly.” The internalized quest romance is not dissolved in the acid of modernist irony; rather, the ending suggests that the subgenre is false, a fraud perpetrated on the permanently nostalgic and frustrated effort to make poetry a compensation for tragic finitude and the hard work of living in uncertainty. As I mentioned in Chapter 4, Stevens set out on his ­career by marking the g­ reat tradition from which he would learn and which he hoped to join.39 At certain moments, we see his mastery of vari­ous tropes, skills, forms, and devices that transport par­tic­u­lar resources of poetic art’s possibilities and nature. By the relatively late time of “Notes,” having absorbed his inheritance, he can display the fragments of g­ reat traditions to expose their history, their meaning, and their utility to an imagination working to create art. Stevens’s learned control allows him to raise up his inheritance while putting it on display anagogically. “Notes,” then, is a poem about poetry but not about becoming a poet. Rather than exploring “dualist epistemological dilemmas,” a bourgeois subjectivity common to post-­or late-­ Romantic criticism, the poem displays a summa of techniques. In the end, as with the “how ­simple” and “how glad” tropes that mar the Eucharistic enthusiasm of the final tercet, the poem shows that it must pre­sent a view from the edge so ­others can see the created world, the real­ity that has become too real. The pressure of the quest-­romance form and all its derivative tropes of self-­acquisition and expansion are the pressures of real­ity known thoroughly and, ­because displayed, distanced and set aside. The poem turns immediately to the opening lines of “The Auroras of Autumn,” to the densest and most abstracted cumulative image of beginning, of power, and of desire marked by frustration found anywhere in his work and perhaps in modern poetry in En­glish. The first canto of “Auroras” closes with unresolved contrapuntal chords roughly sounding facts of poiesis: happiness, poison, finitude, and overarching power. All this “Made us no less as sure,” the voice says (355). Even this moment of knowledge is not self-­consciousness but a classical knowledge of species situation in culture that seems at first made of nature. We might think of such primal images as the Shield of Achilles as a good analog. The canto’s opening had taught the lesson that culture made of nature is a first idea enfigured by a potential represented by Serpens. What differentiates “Auroras” from what comes before is its starting point at the anagogic level of visionary understanding. It knows and displays in 244

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form the pro­cesses of poiesis and the aftereffect of its own productions, all of which function both to create and to destroy, to bring happiness tinged with poison. Given t­ hese first moments in “The Auroras of Autumn,” one question presses hard on its anagogic achievement. Does it put a new order of imagination in o ­ thers’ minds, displacing what we might still call culture, or does it function only as a wake-up call, a demystification of poisons embodied within official culture’s respected and respectable desires? In The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye concluded that only religious poetry (he is thinking specifically of Paradise Lost) could achieve anagogic status.40 I argue that Frye makes an essentially religious or ideological claim disguised within a theory of lit­er­a­ture. On the most straightforward level, Virgil’s Aeneid meets the standards Frye sets for the anagogic, a fact that Dante’s absorption of the master’s text more than suggests. Frye’s dense but brief discussion of the anagogic characterizes the mode in several ways, one of which I have already drawn on in this book: “In the anagogic phase, lit­er­a­ture imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a ­human mind which is at the circumference not at the center of its real­ity” (119). Frye’s postulate sets aside all readings of Stevens’s poetry as resting on the Emersonian notion of a Central Man.41 Harold Bloom and I agree that “The Auroras of Autumn” is “a poem of the circumference,” but I differ from Bloom, who sees the poem as a Wordsworthian play of gain and loss, of the difference between primary and secondary imagination (38). Bloom’s reading prematurely decides that “Auroras” “is primarily a poem of loss,” in the face of which Stevens forces himself “to attain” what Bloom calls a “fresh innocence” (38). Bloom takes this position against a reader he calls “a forcing ironist, determined to confront an unqualified hopelessness” (38). As I have just suggested, however, this “forcing ironist” rhe­ toric is a thin effort to retain the compensatory powers of poetic imagination within a long tradition that rests on a melancholy mood about the ­human in time, among “the ruins.” In the terms I have developed in this book, Bloom reads Stevens’s masterpiece against critics who, like Benjamin, dissolve poetic creation into irony and allegory of ruination, into the modalities of despair. As I showed e­ arlier, Stevens’s writing confounds the Benjaminian ethos, but it also significantly incorporates and moves beyond the tropes that enable narratives of redemption, new beginnings, and hopeful renewal as much as it does the figuration of universal ruin and melancholy allegoresis. 245

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I read the contrapuntal movements of “Notes,” a poem assembled from the fragments of vari­ous recognized pre­de­ces­sors and their traditions, as a putting on display of the tempting normative narrative of renewal centered on the poetic subject, born transcendentally but in tutelage to masters. Seeing the poem as it moves against the narrative allegory that it makes easily available gives us a Stevens beyond the narratives. He does not ­settle for art reduced to stories, such as ­those we find in Bloom’s heightened anx­i­eties of compensatory synthesis embodied in the image of a sublime Central Man. Stevens is not a relentless ironist who would dissolve the poetic ­will to happiness and innocence into fragments. He is rather a studious master for whom all he has learned exists as fragments, as metonyms of traditions and possibilities, which newly assembled disport knowledge and enable re­sis­ tance to poisonous real­ity. We must read him as we read the ­great, learned masters of creativity. In the sense that I give Frye’s use of “circumference” as a postulated viewpoint in anagogy, Stevens’s art is analogous to qualities we have seen Adorno discover in the late Beethoven. Reading Kenneth Clark, we also see this quality in Rembrandt.42 Moreover, we see it, archetypically, in Virgil. To adapt Frye’s terms once more, we would say that “Auroras” pre­sents not only “a self-­contained literary universe” but si­mul­ ta­neously the reduction of poiesis to its first princi­ples and the elevation of poetic art to its pinnacle, imitating “the total dream of man” (Anatomy, 118, 119). Bloom’s work is sometimes close to that of Frye. Each considered poetry and criticism essential ele­ments of the species’ effort to make itself ­human. Of course, each gave a specific and dif­fer­ent content to that claim. Bloom, writing on Stevens, importantly before his turn to the Kabbalah as a source of imaginative figures, relied heavi­ly on Emerson to understand the essentially redemptive and creative relation between the lapsed human— the tragic ­human of finite time—­and “death-­in-­life.” For a time, Bloom would make Stevens the culmination of the Emersonian mode: “Emerson warns us against death-­in-­life, the life without imagination that is not worth living. What­ever the dangers of the Emersonian vision of the center, we have no choice but to seek the light of that vision, for it is the major example yet given us in Amer­i­ca of what Stevens might have called the h ­ uman making choice of a ­human self” (“Central Man,” 42).

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I am profoundly sympathetic with the humanistic goal expressed ­here.43 I disagree, however, with recommending any transcendental, gnostic, or utopian modality as an essentially negative motive for a redemptive retrieval that draws the h ­ uman into some form of kenosis or abjection. The h ­ uman alone, without the imputed light of vision, is enough for the secular proj­ect of worldly self-­making in the historical species. Poiesis, a ­human capacity operative within the finite species giving shape and density to time and history, comes to self-­awareness in lit­er­a­ture and knows its own imaginings in the field of its real­ity seen from the circumference. Stevens is far less visionary than Bloom sees, in part ­because Bloom cannot credit a humanism that does not place the theological modes, even in their fragmented and allegorical forms, at the center of the ­human proj­ect. His visionary would displace Theos into the Central Man. Frye has taught us that lit­er­a­ture imitates “the thought of a ­human mind,” and while we know that mind can imagine its own poison, the transcendental conceived as the utopian answer to the felt tragedy of finitude and poverty, we know that poiesis makes art of that poison and offers it as experience. The epilogue to “Notes” is a supreme working out of the falsity of the transcendental ambition and the poison of its temptations. Simberg’s angel is an apt emblem of the burden it places on life. “Auroras” could satisfy Stevens’s ambition for poetry only if, in terms taken from “The Noble Rider,” it displaces the real, which presses against the poet, and if in putting itself in place of that real, it also can “make his imagination theirs” (CP, 660). Stevens knows that re-­creating the poet is essential to re-­creating the functional place and effect of poiesis, taking the poet as the paradigmatic residence of poiesis. The poet “fulfills himself as he sees his imagination become the light in the mind of ­others” (660–661). The poem is not instrument but, as we have seen, transport, the carry­ing of eros and world making into time as new events. “The Auroras’s” success requires that it proffer a newly i­magined real­ity, a new form in and by which not only does society contain the powers of nature but nature cultured gives to formed h ­ uman desires the facticity of nature itself. Put simply, anagogy regathers fundamentals. It lets us see “lit­er­at­ ure is a total form,” as Frye puts it (Anatomy, 118), and makes poetry and the h ­ uman one. It brings the ­human back to its high but always dangerous potential as the ­house of poiesis.

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Frye tried extremely hard to analyze how lit­er­at­ ure conducted this glorious if risky task. His few pages on anagogy are quite rich. His dense meditations on lit­er­at­ure as in toto a form of h ­ uman imaginative effort aimed not only at a science of lit­er­a­ture but also at the definition of this science’s object in its ideal form. Frye rewrites Dante’s theory of four-­fold interpretation so he might define the shape and nature of poetic art if the critic rightly applied the analytic terms of its understanding. His most impor­tant contribution to this large effort was his inaugural decision not to interpret the meaning of individual works of art as a means into understanding lit­ er­a­ture. By taking this decision, Frye set himself apart from the Elohist’s ethos. He also imitated the action of poetic anagogy in the form of critical anagogy. His anatomy is nothing less than the attempt to see the world of lit­er­a­ture from its circumference. He did not try a totalization of poesy or culture in aspiring to such a view. Rather, he tried to learn enough to lay out the contours and characteristics of an object that we might call lit­er­a­ ture. The Anatomy of Criticism is not, therefore, an anatomizing of criticism as a body of work laid out before us. On the contrary, it establishes the anatomy of criticism as a mode equipped to take a view of criticism’s object. Frye offers us an analog to Stevens. For Stevens, poetry did not consist of the body of texts; poetry is not the sum total of all poems. Frye’s position is similar and impor­tant for critics. Lit­er­a­ture is “not simply the name given to the aggregate of existing literary works” (Anatomy, 118). Frye’s writings on this topic can disorient his readers b ­ ecause, as is often the case with words such as “lit­er­a­ture,” which might become free-­floating signifiers, his attempts to delineate objects are often privative. That lit­er­a­ ture is not the totality of works is one example. It is not that which impels readers and critics “to keep on talking about the subject” (118). From the circumference, Frye would argue, the critic sees not only that lit­er­at­ure is an “order of words” but that “­there is a center of the order of words” (118). We understand, as no doubt Frye also must have felt, that the asserted center to the order of words that is lit­er­a­ture is a conceptual necessity that allows readers and poets to adapt successfully to their object and to the world in which it works. Criticism can misconceive the work of lit­er­a­ture, a fact we have already suggested in commenting on “Notes ­toward a Supreme Fiction.” The allegorical possibilities that poem offers to normative expectations reflect a critical misconception that imitation is an act of lit­er­at­ ure reduced to a form 248

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of doubling. In certain forms, criticism can conceive of lit­er­a­ture or even some literary works as totalizing imitations, as repre­sen­ta­tions that gain authority and use from their embrace of nature. Such criticism, which is allegorical, apocalyptic, and utopian, has what it believes is an ambitious understanding of lit­er­a­ture’s work, but it is in fact very reductive. Such criticism understands lit­er­a­ture as a “conception of an order of nature as a ­whole being imitated by a corresponding order of words” (118). Lit­er­a­ ture in its anagogic phase does this but much more. Anagogy involves not only a reduction to first princi­ples and fundamentals but also a consequential raising up from t­ hose observations to a poetic reordering of what seems to be nature and what seems to be art. The very prob­lem of belatedness dis­appears in anagogy. Not only does creative work come before that which it represents in an act of imitation, but it also exists si­mul­ta­neously in relation to the anagogic realities of poiesis apparent in other works. Allegories of decline, tales of anxiety, the painful virtues of kenosis and abjections dis­ appear as weak conceptual adaptations inadequate to the work of imagination, albeit products of its poisoning self. Frye would say that this consequence is the effect on critics of not realizing that ­there is and must be a center to the order of words that is lit­er­at­ ure. Ever since the theory movement of the 1970s, with the rise of deconstruction and Heideggerian critique, the notion of a center is taboo as a controlling notion within criticism. Perhaps postcritique and postsecularism sometimes coalesce, albeit puzzlingly, around the necessity for that taboo. It is also easy to imagine how critical work done in archives and on bodies of texts and privileged concepts would also demythologize the workings of any center within the increasingly unjust and unequal socie­ties post-2009. For Frye, however, the center to the order of words is a place-­holding control aligned with ­human forces, individual and social, that can push back against realities that despoil civilizations while pushing ahead ­toward more satisfying moral and po­liti­cal arrangements. Frye develops this notion at a highly abstract level, far from the immediacies of social strug­gle and po­liti­cal theory. If the long and widely held idea of poetic art, the fantasy of the totality, believes that the highest achievement of art is to represent the order of nature in a corresponding order of words, then we should see the need to discard this critical mode and its tropes. Such a claim would be open to all objections to notions of correspondence. The primary issue h ­ ere is not, however, epistemological. Socially, of course, which is to say along the lines of race and 249

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gender denotated by power—­and that power now is often located outside the white-­dominated Western world—­special interests assure that certain ­people and their lived realities have no place in the totalized imitation.44 As awful as such a poetic politics might be,45 we should recall Stevens’s discussion of how tyranny does not control imagination, a point I commented on in Chapter  6, taking Shostakovich as a troubling example. Power cannot coerce imagination into its ser­vice along any line of po­liti­cal strug­gle. Imagination itself sets up power formations’ interests and the re­ sis­tances thereto. Moreover, the anagogic imagination reveals itself as prior to and beyond the immediacy of such conflicts. As far as the pressures of real­ity are the cultivated effects of imagination’s lesser works, then imagination’s strug­gles against the pressure of real­ity necessarily admit that it strug­gles against material forms that assume the shape of its inventions—­ often to the detriment of its own creative agency.46 As I showed in Chapter 6, poiesis achieves its ends when it replaces the real that presses on it with its own alternative, when the alternatives it creates to the threatening stasis of established real­ity not only displace the given but create a new world in the imaginations of all. This building a world from the foundations is one essential goal of anagogic work. Another is to fulfill the poet’s claim to be the residence of such transformative work in the materiality of h ­ uman life and practice. An old, ­great tradition has supported this claim, but several not-­quite-­so-­old traditions have resisted the poet’s claims and so denied imagination its role in generating alternatives to the real pressing down on it.47 As we have seen, Stevens insisted that poetry exceeded the importance of philosophy, and he strug­gled against ideological efforts to determine the tracks of legitimacy for poetic work. In 1951, he said explic­itly, in “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” “it is the identity of poetry revealed as between poetry in words and poetry in paint” (CP, 740).48 “The Auroras of Autumn” opens by assuming the circumferential position from which readers can see the created world and the creative imagination at work across worlds as the poem both displaces and cultivates the ongoing work of poiesis. “­There is a universal poetry,” Stevens writes, “that is reflected in every­thing.” Why is this so? “The poetry of humanity is, of course, to be found everywhere” (“Relations,” 740). Yet, despite t­ hese universal claims, t­ here are also broad and constant threats to destroy and obstruct that ongoing work to set a par­tic­u­lar real­ity as final. 250

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For Stevens, particulars serve better than ­these generalities. The universals appear best and first in Baudelaire, but in this paper, Stevens moves through discussions of Picasso, Leo Stein, and William Blake. He begins by citing Roger Fry on Virgil and Claude, and he adds Rembrandt himself to this mix. “We find the poetry of mankind in the figures of the old men of Shakespeare, say, and the old men of Rembrandt; or in the figures of Biblical ­women, on the one hand, and of the madonnas of all Eu­rope, on the other” (740). ­Those who think of Stevens as a late Romantic must reckon with his strong re­sis­tance to the idea that the figure who creates the poetry of “mankind” is not primarily a figure of sensibility. Stevens is much closer to another more classical tradition, to use perhaps too easily this long-­worn word. Leo Stein stands for all ­those aesthetes who define art in terms of individual achievement and privileged subjectivity. Stevens, like the Rembrandt he introduces, worked extremely hard to learn and master the dif­fer­ent forms and technical skills he needed; he was an omnivorous reader and thorough student. Stevens was a relentless student who became masterful. He made no investment in notions such as inspiration for the basis of ­great writing. For Stevens, the term “sensibility” is too vague to mean much. We need to consider the context of his thinking. When T. S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism had considerable status and influence especially within the acad­emy—he had won the Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture in 1948—­Stevens’s decision to attack a widely known and influential term in Eliot’s criticism is more than an accident.49 Eliot used the term “sensibility” to define the poet, presenting the poet who sustained a unified sensibility as the highest exemplar of the type. Stevens’s decision to debunk the term is clever and far-­reaching: “It is commonly said that the origins of poetry are to be found in the sensibility” (“Relations,” 743). (A reader feels the cut of “commonly” as an arrow aimed at the royalist Eliot.) Stevens could perfectly well imagine the poet as a specially enabled subject who could both see the world and master the traces left by its impact; “Notes t­ oward a Supreme Fiction” is a perfect example of his power to do so. As we have seen, he realized that figuration of poetic sensibility or subjectivity was too easy, too thin a version of the poet as a basis for the highest poetic art. As a counterpoint, Stevens proposed a poet more like himself and his g­ reat predecessors—­Virgil, Shakespeare, Leonardo, and Rembrandt. From Leonardo and his tradition, for example, Stevens learned how to create humane forms, impor­tant “on 251

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the edge of the world in which we live t­oday” (CP, 646).50 More importantly, in the tradition of Leonardo and the ­others, he embraced the value of study, of learning. In Leonardo’s treatise on painting, for example, he posed this ­simple challenge: “How to discover a young Man’s Disposition for Painting.” Disposition determines fitness, and we can mea­sure it in turn by “perseverance.” The lack of “proper disposition” reveals itself in d ­ oing “every­thing in a hurry, never finishing, or shadowing.”51 Stevens knows the potential danger in transferring paint­erly biases to the discussion of wordsmithing, but he saves himself by an appeal to the obvious. W ­ ere technique and art the same, a disembodied technique could create art. The ­human creator would lose its necessary place.52 At this point, he takes the opportunity to distance himself again from the notion of sensibility as the defining quality of poetic creation. This term with dif­fer­ent valences had played a role in critical and aesthetic thinking since at least the eigh­teenth ­century, long before it found a firm place in Eliot’s influence. In post-­ Romantic culture, the term extended the dogma that art did not require the mind, learning, or knowledge of other ways to conceptualize real­ity in the world. “Sensibility” is also a dangerous term for criticism. It draws judgment into the false understanding based on analogy and the unreflected passions. Stevens concerned himself with the consequences of critical and artistic development and always questioned the established dogma of criticism and the habitual consensus of agreed-on style and motif. Of course, he learned from all t­ hese but weighed their value, once mastered, against the outcomes of their development. In this, his ethics had a Darwinian side: what value lies in the concepts and forms available for intellectual and artistic work. We see his questioning concern in his decision to challenge the dogma of sensibility: “Yet if one questions the dogma that the origins of poetry are to be found in the sensibility and if one says that a fortunate poem or a fortunate painting in a synthesis of exceptional concentration . . . ​, we find that the operative force within us does not, in fact, seem to be the sensibility, that is to say, the feelings. It seems to be a constructive faculty, that derives its energy more from the imagination than the sensibility” (“Relations,” 743). He believed that poetry came from the work of the mind undisturbed by the particularities associated with sensibility or, as we might now say, with subjectivity. We can imagine the assertion that only a certain kind of subject, positioned in particularly advantaged ways and formed 252

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in the habits of privileged subject-­formations, could assert the possibility “of the mind not dependent on the vicissitudes of the sensibility” (744). (An objection that Stevens is merely turning away from rather than engaging the vicissitudes of sensibility, practicing an art of evasion, is merely naïve and inattentive.) Stevens’s vision of the poet, of imagination, and of subjectivity requires hierarchizing the vari­ous components that contribute to the accident of a ­great work and the critical response to art in general. Stevens questions the dogma of sensibility, but he does not deny its place in the constructive arts. “The mind retains experience, so that long ­after the experience . . . ​that faculty of which I have spoken makes its own constructions out of that experience” (743–744). Herein lies the difference between memory and art, a difference that subsumes memory to the artistic pro­cesses. Vari­ous suspicious hermeneutics have denied art the ability constructively to control art’s materials, especially ­those that fall within vari­ous critical discourses that speak of the subject in terms of experience, memory, and formation.53 Stevens’s emphasis on the artist’s learning and intellect preempts the suspicion that the artwork does not know its origins or its effects. Stevens assigns to memory the errors that suspicious hermeneuts assign to art: the constructive faculty or imagination, firmly in mind, “makes its own constructions out of that experience” (743–744). The mere reconstruction of experience or sensation, which would be the reproduction of real­ity without judgment or analy­sis, is memory. Art is active w ­ ill; it uses experience “as material with which it does what­ever it ­wills” (744). The poet’s freedom to act on materials “makes use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar” (744). In other words, Stevens sees the conjunction of sensibility, memory, and reproduction as the area of suspicion, while art combines ­will, thinking, and learning. In effect, suspicious hermeneutics, writing on poiesis, confuse memory and art, and in so d ­ oing they extend the pressures of the real against imagination. They extend the unthought and deny the species value of poiesis to civilization. The anti-­Romantic ele­ment in Stevens extends his objections to sensibility to inspiration since it, too, naïvely conceived, makes art the servant of circumstance and contextualized individuality. The category of inspiration, and of hermeneutics derived from it, admiringly or critically, would negate the very possibility of being poet, by negating the role of thinking and learning in the creative pro­ cesses. Above all, they deny the relative freedom of the poet as such in the act of poetic creation. Stevens emphasizes the uniqueness of the poet as 253

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one location for the creative activity of poiesis common throughout the species but intensified in certain persons and practices. Society knows the dramatics of the alienated and isolated artist, the figure in exile or at the margins. The motif is a commonplace but nonetheless impor­tant. James Baldwin, for example, a figure with experience far dif­ fer­ent from Stevens’s, no more than twelve years a­ fter Stevens wrote his essay, makes a moving point of the general unknowability of the artist, of the inescapable and perhaps inexplicable function of the artist active in a society or set of social groups.54 Addressing a live audience, Baldwin concedes that he dislikes words such as “artist” or “nobility” yet unapologetically embraces ­these as inescapable terms of self-­description. “­Whether I like it or not, for example, and no m ­ atter what I call myself, I suppose the only word for me, when the chips are down, is that I am an artist. T ­ here is such a ­thing” (50). Moreover, Baldwin sees the artist’s strug­gle to maintain integrity, to be true to the functional identity of art, as essential to the universal ­human proj­ect. “The artist’s strug­gle for his integrity,” Baldwin writes, “must be considered as a kind of meta­phor for the strug­gle, which is universal and daily, of all ­human beings on the face of this globe to get to become ­human beings” (50–51). The poet’s relation to the strug­gle and to ­those who strug­gle to become h ­ uman is, however, both privileged and burdened: “Poets (by which I mean all artists) are fi­nally the only p ­ eople who know the truth about us. Soldiers ­don’t. Statesmen ­don’t. Priests ­don’t. Union leaders ­don’t. Only poets” (51). Baldwin’s principal worry in this talk is for the dangerous decay of a civilization “when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way what­ever to believe in the report that only poets can make” (51). Baldwin can seem surprisingly Romantic at this point. The poet not only is a truth teller but is inescapably so. Baldwin has a dif­fer­ent version of Stevens’s claim for the essential role of the poet and for the inescapable function of being poet. Baldwin’s emphasis on the select individual—­the almost mysterious identity of poet—is dif­fer­ent in kind from Stevens’s immediate stress on the poet as learned intellect. In common, though, they insist on the estrangement from the poet that ­others feel in an unhealthy society. Baldwin is quite clear on a point that had troubled Stevens during the 1930s, when, as we have seen, Burnshaw made his ideological case against the poet’s freedom and creative necessity. For Baldwin, the poet’s sense of exile does not ­matter most in the relation of poet to the real. Rather, Baldwin worries the cost to 254

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the collective proj­ect of becoming ­human when the real indicts the poet, wrongly, as dreamer. Baldwin’s poet does indeed move “to what looks like the edge of the world” and has no choice in the ­matter. His poet aspires by nature to the circumferential view that “Auroras” embodies and that Frye describes as anagogic. Frighteningly, the society that assaults Baldwin, who is the metonym for the poet in his talk, commits a crime against itself and the species; its accusations are the work of a real that w ­ ill not hear the poet’s report. “The crime of which you [the poet] discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other ­people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, ­because it testifies to the fact that they are not” (52). Baldwin and Stevens coalesce h ­ ere in their quite-­different jargons. Poetry is essential and resisted. Indeed, real­ity often charges it with crime for being itself, which is “the idea of an effort of the mind not dependent on the vicissitudes of sensibility” (Stevens, “Relations,” 744). Stevens worried that modern art had become uncompromising (745). He acknowledged its necessity and potential for abuse. Abuse lay in hyperindividualization, in the branding we see now in markets. Restrictions grow from the uncompromising modernity of arts that become responsible to their “precincts,” as Stevens puts it (745). His strong objections to dogma in criticism and theories of poetics have their parallel in Baldwin’s lesson, learned from poetry as it resists real­ity: Conrad told us a long time ago (I think it was in Victory, but I might be wrong about that): “Woe to the man who does not put his trust in life.” Henry James said, “Live, live all you can. It’s a m ­ istake not to.” And Shakespeare said—­and this is what I take to be the truth about every­ body’s life all the time—­“Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” Art is ­here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system what­ever. (“Artist’s Strug­gle,” 51)

This quotation is more than evidence of a ­simple point. Poets are anarchists in opposition to any system, ­whether it be the dominant or a minor one. Baldwin shows that the poet shares the essential species quality, the strug­gle to be fully ­human. The poet, however, must act freely of pressures that would constrain the leading role that poets play in that strug­gle. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin dramatized the poet’s temptation to join a social group with a vision that would guide strug­gle against domination. Fi­nally, 255

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Baldwin resisted the temptation and wandered alone into the night. He felt the classic tug between “love and power, between pain and rage” in his meeting with Elijah Muhammad.55 Their encounter gives Baldwin the chance to externalize this per­sis­tent strug­gle, the desire to choose rage and power, over and against love and pain. Each moment brought the need to choose again: “the grinding way I remained extended between ­these poles” (321). Baldwin seems to have made the final (Virgilian) choice. Exposed to the purposive ignorance and futile desires of the Nation of Islam’s members, he turns away and heads back to his own secular and integrated world. Drawn by the members’ understandable ambitions and desires, he is struck by guilt, by the inability to ease “the social worse,” which he sees on Chicago’s South Side (321). Nonetheless, in this moment, he chooses against the movement, against consensus, and against activism. “But this choice,” he says, “was a choice in terms of a personal, a private better.” The ground for this choice is ­simple: “I was, ­after all, a writer” (321). The in­de­pen­dence of the anarchic poet who sees from the circumference coalesces with the artist who rises above sensibility and transforms experience into “the unfamiliar,” which o ­ thers always need (Stevens, “Relations,” 744). Stevens and Baldwin, as poets, contribute to the strug­gle to live as ­humans, albeit the content of each effort, the scene in which their efforts play out, differ substantially. Each artist insists on both the poet’s absolute necessity to the species and the correspondingly necessary in­de­pen­dence of the poet. Like Stevens, Baldwin insists on the poet’s need to learn, to self-­ educate, and his writings trace his learning from dif­fer­ent pre­de­ces­sors such as church preachers in Harlem or Dostoyevsky (Fire, 306–307). Stevens’s ­career shows he carefully studied the work of significant pre­de­ces­sors and contemporaries. His own writing assumed a place within the traditions to which ­others belonged, and together they create the transport of imagination and love that is the poet’s obligation to the species. G ­ reat achievement, the sort of poetry that interested Stevens from his youth, also requires elite distinction. For Stevens, learning and intellect combine: “the greater the thinker the greater the poet. It would come nearer the mark to say the greater the mind the greater the poet, b ­ ecause the evil of thinking as poetry is not the same ­thing as the good of thinking in poetry” (“Relations,” 744). Just as Baldwin derived his greatest truth from Shakespeare, so Stevens concludes that Shakespeare teaches him the lesson of mind’s importance in poetry. He derives it from Shakespeare’s reactivation of the fundamentals 256

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of poiesis to produce works of highest joy. “It is so completely pos­si­ble to sit at one’s t­able and without the help of the agitation of the feelings to write plays of incomparable enhancement that that is precisely what Shakespeare did. He was not dependent on the fortuities of inspiration” (744). “Notes ­toward A Supreme Fiction” laid down Stevens’s law that poetry must be abstract. In the book The Auroras of Autumn, he published an impor­tant poem ­under the title “The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract” (CP, 369). This poem plays across all the themes I have touched on up to now. The poet exists at the circumference, “Helplessly at the edge,” where he and we believe it would be nicer to be “at the ­middle, fixed / In This Beautiful World of Ours” (370). To be in the m ­ iddle tempts the ego with enjoyment of the cultivated world that ­humans have made, but only as we might briefly embrace an illusion. From the circumference, the poet sees all, including the temptation, which is itself an imaginative creation to dwell within the world of our own making. In the perfectly ironic sense of Stevens’s anagogic wisdom, the desire to be so out of time within the field of our own mastery is the ultimate testimony to the poverty of h ­ uman finitude. The Ultimate Poem never takes this form and never satisfies this desire, which is low and rooted in weakness, in a secondary aspiration to flee from rather than embrace the fundamentals from which poiesis emerges, including death and finitude. The aspirant to the ­middle, as we see from the circumference, cannot stand too much real­ity and cannot achieve the virtues of art. In the first canto of “It Must Be Abstract,” in “Notes t­ oward a Supreme Fiction,” the poetic voice urges the ephebe to begin “by perceiving the idea / Of this invention. This in­ven­ted world, / The inconceivable idea of the sun” (329). The voice insists on the centrality of “idea,” troping through the visionary possibilities on offer for the ephebe if he would only learn. Each of cantos 2–4 of “The Auroras of Autumn” begins with the same ritualized half line, “Farewell to an idea . . .” (355). The poet moves along a path learning what the poet must to write the anagogic text. Explic­itly, “Auroras” rejects the call to vision. Specifically, it examines the grounding symbols of social life denying to the poet the meta­phoric potential resident in each symbol that takes its form as a metonymy. The first farewell is to a cabin, “Deserted, on a beach. It is white, / As by a custom or according to / An ancestral theme or as a consequence / Of an infinite course” (355–356). The farewell is not only to the starting lines distanced from the farewell by the 257

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ellipsis. The entire canto pre­sents an idea, to which the poet and poem say good-­bye. ­Unless readers understand that the canto is itself an idea, t­here is a danger of misreading the poem as yet another narrative movement from and t­oward a conclusion. If, however, we take the canto as the figural idea, a commonplace, then we must identify the idea itself while coming to grips with the space and time emptied by the act of saying good­bye. “Farewell to an idea . . .” is an injunction as well as a stage direction. It is, if you ­will, something like a command in that the setting aside of the idea has a consequence for readers and ­later poets who might want to assume this commonplace. How to legitimate or justify the use of an aesthetic device with deep ritualistic and social value once Stevens has removed it from the armature and archive of poetic creation? The poem is fraught with vari­ous traces of the banished idea’s effort, naturally, as part of its own figural function, to resist its own exile. The flowers against the wall of the cabin are “a kind of mark / Reminding, trying to remind, of a white / That was dif­fer­ent” (356). The canto quickly adds to this beckoning the predictable turn that empties its allure of promise: “The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.” With the memory of a dif­fer­ent time and function comes the immemorial fact of finitude: “The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach” (356). The second canto is a poem of loss, of the sharp perceptions of loss, and its effects on the emotions. It is also a call to reprise stories of such loss, with the promise, as to the soldier in the epilogue to “Notes,” of manna, but this time in a cold desert: The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand. He observes how the north is always enlarging the change, With its frigid brilliances, its blue-­red sweeps And gusts of ­great enkindlings, its polar green, The color of ice and fire and solitude. (356)

This is a far more complex image than the famous early line from “The Snow Man,” who “nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not t­ here and the nothing that is” (CP, 8). The man walking, an heir to Emerson’s transparent eyeball, is a counterpoint to the origin of that visionary tradition so long rooted in Eu­rope and made new for American letters. The man walking does not become part of God. The cosmos does not circulate through him. Rather the opposite: the man’s “vision” weakens—­“the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall” (356)—no symbols pre­sent themselves, no 258

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sacramental traces of the infinite. As a point of view on what once was nature believed sacred with the marks of divinity—­now grown less vivid— the man “turns blankly,” without the force of imaginative transfiguration, reduced to mere observation of an enlarging change. The force of winter, its barren apocalyptic embrace encompassing increasingly more, reduces all to change. The poem then turns back to the overarching and ruling meta­ phor of the aurora now marked by “frigid brilliances.” The poetic idea that is this canto completes itself with another familiar turn. In the devastating and widening embrace of blank, dull, and inhuman cold lie the marks of potential relief and promise: “its blue-­red sweeps / And gusts of ­great enkindlings, its polar green, / The color of ice and fire and solitude” (356). ­These colors, though, appear as part of the ever-­expanding change that comes with winter whiteness. The solitude that shows all that cold auroras reveal does not proffer them as a promise of renewal—­quite the opposite, ­because the final line, leading to solitude, is a clear allusion to Robert Frost’s short apocalyptic poem “Fire and Ice,” where the speaker says directly and fi­nally, “I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also ­great / And it would suffice.”56 As the Frost example makes clear, the idea to which canto 2 says farewell has taken form in major poems. T. S. Eliot, in “The Hollow Men,” repeats in Anglican clothing a movement similar to that in this canto. Eliot does not say farewell to the idea but makes a pathos-­laden poem of a world bereft of gods, a world where apocalypse threatens. Eliot’s poem closes as the Shadow falls “Between the desire / And the spasm,” leaving the door open for the memory of prayer: “For thine is the Kingdom,” which gradually declines into famous Eliotic fragments aligned aesthetically against ruin. Yet the poem collapses u ­ nder the weight of its insights, and the prayer turns into the thrice-­repeated apocalypse: “This is the way the world ends.”57 To this poetic idea, the poem bids farewell. In the pro­cess, it shows the world cultivated and the cultivators’ despair resulting in the thin imaginative gruel of poems made from the blank widening whiteness of apocalypse. Frost and Eliot do other t­ hings in other poems. Just as canto 2 bids good­bye to one idea, that is, to one full set of movements essential to the practice of modern poetic art, it leaves other ideas alone. Cantos 3 and 4 w ­ ill deal with two o ­ thers. In canto 2, the idea is a common one of modern writing: the confrontation with poverty, with the world abandoned by God, a world that offers no enchantment in symbolic or ritual form but at best 259

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only the allure, which memory traces put on offer to art and reading alike. In terms of anagogy, such ideas as this already occupy the imagination of poets and of the o ­ thers to and for whom they speak or tell a truth. The truth they tell, however, has become part of the real­ity that presses against imagination and indeed prevents the emergence of an anagogic accomplishment. Frye’s intense discussion of poetry reaches its epitome in comments on Paradise Lost; at one point, however, Frye dares to posit the essential quality of anagogy. For a moment, he leaves b ­ ehind the privative outlining of anagogy to gesture ­toward its essence: “In its anagogic phase, then, poetry imitates ­human action as total ritual, and so imitates the action of an omnipotent ­human society that contains all the powers of nature within itself” (Anatomy, 120). Allegoresis provides a reading method for par­tic­ u­lar texts or bodies of materials, no m ­ atter if described as an archive or 58 as a canon. Anagogy is a quality of poesy per se, which perhaps explains the relative paucity and poverty of “anagogic readings” of literary materials.59 Frye’s thinking on ­these topics reveals a strain that he manages to support with a rhetorical and conceptual device familiar from other critics in his own period as well as from the power­ful influence of a Hegelian inheritance. I take this up b ­ ecause Stevens believes poetry is not the sum total of all existing poems, a turn on the part / ­whole distinction, a belief he requires to think through the very ontology of poesy. If “The Auroras of Autumn” is fundamentally an anagogic poem, then it must inherently form and enact the ambitions of imagination when working at its most fundamental and so highest level. I am building on Frye’s basic work in this area while revising him away from his prejudice that locates anagogic function necessarily in the theocentric and mono­the­istic qualities assigned to poems that are both epic and religious. For Frye, three examples stand out: Judeo-­ Christian scripture, Dante’s Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. As I suggested in Chapter 6, however, Virgil, a thoroughly secular poet of empire and culturation, would meet the standards of anagogy without the requirements of the theocentric. Frye could claim that in the Aeneid, “Classical my­thol­ogy” serves the same function as theocentric religion to establish the anagogic foundation and aspiration of the epic (Anatomy, 120). The myths and founding rituals that undergird the Aeneid would achieve the goals of religion, that is, enable “a mixture of the imaginative and existential” (120). Although Frye unexpectedly introduces historicist concerns into 260

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his anatomy to prop up his theocentric understanding of anagogic poiesis, he does open the door, despite himself, to the notion of secular anagogy. Chris­tian­ity, Frye tells us, displaced classical my­thol­ogy as a system of belief that could combine existential and imaginative ele­ments, essentially leaving only Christian belief and culture as a context for understanding anagogic imagination as a constituent ele­ment of species formation. His historicist explanation does not hold conceptually. It weakens his claim that since Chris­tian­ity, poetry can complete its anagogic ambitions only in a theocentric frame. Historicist necessity is mere contingency and, by analogy, like Adorno’s controversial claims about poetry nach Auschwitz, which I discussed in Chapter 5, restores the concept of secular anagogy. Frye’s notes on anagogy conform to the form of argument a posteriori, or, to put the ­matter less purely, they emerge from a commitment to his own idiosyncratic but fundamental Protestant worldview. The ending of his essay “The Responsibilities of the Critic” returns to the basic issues he raised in his notes on anagogy in The Anatomy of Criticism. The essay transforms the anagogic vision into a secularized mode of culture remade, resting itself on an almost utopian moral vision: “That time comes when in the age of the p ­ eople the gods become names for h ­ uman powers that belong to us, and that we can in part recover.” Frye stands with his master, T. S. Eliot, on the idea that “creative imagination” brings the times when “gods become names for h ­ uman powers,” but he reserves for the critic the moral and social responsibility “to ensure that something at least of the essential act of creation does bear fruit.”60 If his ­great book is a handbook for critics, that is, an anatomy of the object-­field to make criticism pos­si­ble, then this final comment on the moral and social responsibility of the critic is merely a late expression of a religio-­secular vision of the sort that has, as I have suggested, merely historicist force. Critics can and have preserved the fruit of creativity in the essential acts of judgment and strug­gle in­de­ pen­dently of the prophetic mode on which Frye and his heirs rest their case. More impor­tant, at the end of this essay, Frye nicely reverses the seeming priority of Theos to poiesis. At this moment, not only does he allow us to read Milton seemingly against the grain, as a secular poet making use of the theological and religious in the ser­vice of artistic h ­ uman creativity. He also allows us to understand the prophetic as a h ­ uman creation, the mechanism of which, when achieved in part by criticism in the ser­vice of lit­er­a­ture, brings about a full anagogic concept aligning the realities of 261

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historical humanity and h ­ uman acculturation. The prophetic is in lit­er­a­ ture; it is a literary effect. For Frye, in this essay, as in The Anatomy, lit­er­ a­ture is the order of words, but moreover it includes “all structures in words which come to be literary in the course of time.”61 The seeming opposition of finite and infinite, of morality and immortality, of h ­ uman and the godhead, is all literary effect, culminating in the h ­ uman possession of gods’ names as the externalization of ­human power. The final achievement of lit­er­a­ture as the residence of h ­ uman creativity is the fundamental elevation of the merely ­human to its fulfillment in a culture that takes the form of its ­labor in words. It is this fruit bearing that the critic must guard as the product of creative imagination. It is the intersection of the essay and the poem. In “The Auroras of Autumn,” cantos 2, 3, and 4 begin by saying “Farewell to an idea,” each time reworking a basic symbol of cultural formation. Canto 3 brings us “The ­mother’s face,” while canto 4 brings us the ­father sitting like a king in an ancient c­ astle poem. “Farewell” is a formal and perhaps ceremonial leave taking, as the OED tells us, but at its root, “farewell” belongs to the same imaginative complex as that word “transport” that we saw defined much of Stevens’s poetics in the mid-1930s. We have seen Aristotle’s fine example of the secular use of anagein, as the word to describe a movement back to fundamentals. Anagein also, however, refers even in Aristotle to a lifting up, as of a ship. So materially and at its classical root, anagogy has the double motive, to retrieve foundations, from which imagination elevates by transformative renewal of materials through craft, knowledge, and thought. Inherently, then, “farewell” memorializes that to which it wishes “a fare way.” The OED establishes the root identity between “farewell” and “transport” by working back to the Sanskrit “par, pr to carry through or across,” through the Greek πόρος to the Latin portāre, which is, of course, “to carry.” “Farewell” is not only a trope continuing the ­ earlier figurations of transport in relation to the erotic, meaning, and tradition but in itself the semiotic equivalent of the sense conveyed by the tropes. In the late poem, Stevens’s farewell to an idea is a doubled movement of wishing well and setting a beloved on their way not to their disposal but their new point or place of arrival. Yet, of course, the plain meaning of “farewell” remains with us. Good-­bye to an idea belongs to the ethos of anagogy, which cannot support iteration or boredom, t­ hose ­things Stevens 262

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has called the pressures of real­ity. Yet, as part of the universal seen from the periphery, anagogy incorporates the norms of finitude, loss, and symbolic compensation in its transport of love. It does not flee them to utopian or apocalyptic fantasies. Rather, it inscribes them within the permanent order of words in which we create the species we are in history, while in d ­ oing so, we recognize the limiting interaction of our own structured powers and ambitions of creativity. Seeing from the circumference reckons with the anthropos in its desire to make the nonhuman the natu­ral form of ­human dreams. The poem’s dense abstraction allows “Auroras” to replicate, trace, and display constituent symbolic operations of this aspirant anagogical desire at work through the poetic devices of tradition, transported again in their farewell. In the first two cantos, the poem has worked with the modes of originary creativity, the founding stories of creation, and the fatalities of nature—­the derelict effects of the symbolic winds, lights, cold, and change arrested within a story of “ice and fire and solitude” (356). “Auroras” pivots, developing brilliantly throughout, from solitude and ice to the warmth of a room and a “­mother’s face” (356). “Farewell to an idea . . .” is the balance point in the poem’s play with emotion and meaning. As the transitional phrase, as an opening line marked with a fixed ellipsis, it waves farewell to the solitude and canto before, as it also prepares itself and its readers to wave farewell to the entire constellation of affect and poetic resource that the poem ambitiously condenses in the following tercets. This is a fine rhetorical instance of how the etymological and tropic function of farewell does its work in the poem. It gives us the circumferential view of each poem opening a win­dow onto the anagogic totality as it takes up specific and l­imited tropes and circumstances. “Auroras’s” turns are always to the fundamental constituents of the symbolic order. “The m ­ other’s face,” coming ­after ice, fire, and solitude, has its purpose in organ­izing a realm of emotions and relations that provide basic turns on the understanding of foundational scenes. Canto 2 had a deserted cabin on a chilled beach as its set. Canto 3 has a room, the purpose of which is “the ­mother’s face,” which “fills the room.” By the canto’s end, the ­mother’s face is a memory, a loss, the marker of death, as the wind returns from canto 2, this time knocking “like a rifle-­butt against the door” (357). The military echo of “Notes” and its pre­de­ces­sors is a ­simple instance of how the poem transports by condensation the formative creations of previous masters that have come, ­after 263

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the fact, to exist as lit­er­a­ture. The poem’s difficulty lies in its abstract density of larger tropes, of poetic scenes, which, in what­ever specificity they might have, work as purifications of varied tropes that poets transformed into traditions, archives, and realities. The ­mother’s face, to which a room is dedicated, fills the space, but for ­others. The poem pluralizes the agency of its scene: “They are together, ­here, and it is warm, / With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams” (356). We understand the symbolic order expressed ­here: a ­family, at least ­mother and ­children, assembled forming a basic ele­ment in the structure of symbolic value. The scene has its functional content on this level. Yet the “They” is ambiguous or polyvalent, since this “They” is also the ele­ ments of the scene itself. All t­ hese verbal units that form or express the order of symbolic value—­they are all ­here together for the affect and meaning they offer, posed abstractly as the derivative of a large number of variations, of turns, on the creation of purpose, warmth, relationships—­all set in a double-­jointed farewell against the idea of ice and solitude. This small moment lets us understand how the fully anagogic poem sees from the poet’s ultimately necessary and privileged position on the periphery, at the circumference of h ­ uman poiesis and acculturation. If we recall the early and often repeated gesture of the prospect poem in Virgil, Dante, and Milton, we ­will recall how even ­those g­ rand poems that Frye designates as anagogic incorporate moments of seeing historical culture formed before the readers’ eyes. Stevens ­here does nothing less. Rather than seeing only Carthage, for example, rising before Aeneas’s eyes, Stevens’s readers see the abstracted double trope of cultural creation, of h ­ uman ­will and desire struggling with the nonhuman to produce the symbolic value it needs. As Aeneas sees an entire civilization rise in the creation of Carthage, the f­uture rival of Rome’s imperium and the place of his seduction not only by Dido but by the in­de­pen­dence of ­human creativity, so we see too the architectonics of families, affections, and the symbolic value attached to and derived from their function. The ­mother is dead, but remembered by ­family who warm in the prison of their recollective dream. Caught ­there and then, they cannot foresee coming dreams. In a gesture recalling Eliot’s The Waste Land, the poem turns from the myopia of warmth to “the violet hour,” when all changes: “It is eve­ning” (356). If Eliot elaborates the timeless tragedy of a lonely w ­ oman’s exploitation by “the young man carbuncular,” a crime universalized through the point 264

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of view of the androgynous sight of the blind Tiresias, then Stevens does far more.62 Whereas Eliot required a mythic figure to focus the fragments of London into a narrative of waste, Stevens concentrates resources of the culturally symbolic forms on which many stories and images rest, themselves defining or constituting the experiences of t­ hose for whom, myopic, ­these transient but iterated symbols are real­ity. Eliot’s narrative is one iteration of the density in “Auroras’s” third canto. To write canto 3 requires more knowledge and mastery than to write the Tiresias scene in The Waste Land. Despite the notorious difficulty of The Waste Land, especially as a school text, it offers itself for allegorical decoding that can unify its fragments into tall tales of modernity.63 In contrast, “The Auroras of Autumn” offers no specific narrative hooks on which to hang a reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the shards it assem­bles and condenses within its art. Adorno showed that Beethoven’s last style shifted among inherited fragments of the classical tradition as rapidly as he shifted tonalities. He also showed that Beethoven did this ­because the integrated cultural subjectivity into which he wrote his ­earlier contrapuntal dramatic m ­ usic no longer existed, leaving him without an addressee for art resources that seemed belated. Most importantly, Adorno’s Beethoven, in his late style, did not treat the situation mournfully. He exposed the fragments and shifted their relations rapidly and repeatedly to maintain creativity without melancholy. Tragic loss did not silence but enhanced the intense demands of Beethoven’s late works. Stevens’s late poem is not in the same position as Beethoven’s last quartets. Stevens did not experience the decay of a social symbolic order, as Beethoven had done. Stevens comes not only a­ fter that crisis but also in the midst of l­ ater crises, which we might understand as consequent on the disruption Beethoven experienced, exposed, and reor­ga­nized. Stevens’s crisis is then twofold. First, he comes ­after the poetic inventions that had attempted to compensate for the circumstances that forced Beethoven to such extremes of invention in the name of freedom.64 Moreover, he comes ­after the exhaustion of t­hose inventions, a­ fter their inadequacies appear especially in and through their iterability. Second, he very much wanted, as we have seen throughout, to join the line of ­great poets from Homer, whose tradition of invention in the face of tragic finitude had sustained the species in a clearheaded encounter with the duality of its own imaginative force and its apparent antagonists, the worlds of nature and created real­ity. 265

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Canto 3 begins with a trope reversing the cold and wind of solitude, which ends canto 2, with the warmth of a room filled by a ­mother’s face. Canto 3 ends, however, with another turn back to the vacuity of canto 2, transforming the opening statement that “The ­mother’s face, / The purpose of the poem, fills the room” into the tragic finality of time’s effect on the canto’s own opening image (357). Not only does time delete the affect of warmth—­“The ­house ­will crumble” (357)—­but as it passes, we realize that the ­mother’s face is the purpose of the poem only as it launches the per­sis­ tent fatal interaction between loss and memory—­the “fragments shored against our ruin.”65 In the terms Stevens develops in his writings on painting and poetry, in this canto what might be mere memory becomes the work of imagination on experience as all that is at home in the warm room, inevitably crumbling and burning away, remains nonetheless “at ease in the shelter of the mind” (357). This possibility, it turns out, was always the purpose of the poem and room ­because, as the poet tells us, “the ­house is of the mind and they and time, / Together, all together” (357). The daily rituals of life in which the social symbolic invests itself do not escape, are not alternatives to, the finitude induced by time and change. On the contrary, ­these are the embodiment of social symbolic rituals precisely ­because the imagination transforms life into the complicated image set before the reader as the condensate of h ­ uman experience made on the face and from the resources of nature. In this canto, the m ­ other falls asleep, the f­ amily says good night. The auroras, however, return, pressing on the small effort of world making on Earth. Had Frank Kermode wanted to extend his discussion of Stevens and Heidegger, he might well have taken up the set of images Stevens set in motion ­here. In the second tercet, Stevens had already begun to transform the warm room into “oncoming dreams,” but not from an interest in the impressionistic witching hour of the eve­ning. Rather, in the context of Serpens and auroras, he knows the fate that works on the h ­ uman and fabricated. He accepts the artist’s challenge in the face of ­these incontrovertible fundamentals. “The h ­ ouse is eve­ning, half dissolved. / Only the half they can never possess remains, / Still-­starred” (356). We might read the poem as the imitation of a narrative coming-­to-­ awareness, which stars quotidian but ritual creativity’s work to remake nature. If so, we would then have a poem that tries to make of itself aesthetic compensation for truths it discloses as a motif. The canto, however, does not develop in this sort of linear and reflective mode, as familiar to 266

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readers of poetry since such poems as Words­worth’s sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3 1802.”66 Fragments abut on each other, including the then fragments of the modern or post-­Romantic therapeutic or compensation poem, thus creating a texture sometimes fine and sometimes gross. Stevens, always interested in the ­great varying effects of the major forms, such as the Virgilian epic, creates a prospect at the circumference from which we can see, hear, and follow the motions of variable creation and invariant iteration. He takes up a point of view on all the pro­cesses of creative imagination interacting not only with nature but also with its own past effects. That is to say, we see imagination’s interactions with what we used to call nature; Stevens foregrounds this set as a concentration of normal dramatic gestures, as that set becomes itself the inescapable object of our attention, knowable in the condensation of imagination. We can experience and weigh the gestures it contains in their abstracted density, as the poem’s structure and textures display them emergent from his own new condensation of imagination. The poem gives us this set of transported material in a par­tic­u­lar form, like a long vestibule, giving us a focused but distant look at anagogy, the changing of natu­ral powers into h ­ uman ­will. At the end of canto 3, for example, the death-­ dealing and military wind that smashes with the force of the Borealis against the ­house and its win­dows becomes “The wind” that “­will command them with invincible sound” (357). In terms of the most fundamental expression of poetic power, this line is another retrieval of origins. It invokes the undefeated Orpheus, whose “invincible sound,” as I suggested in Chapter 6, carries over from the founding moments of song and art. The pro­cess reminds us how such songs not only embody but also create the pathos of fatal winds smashing against the h ­ uman frame as it dissolves. Where once ­there was the ­mother’s kiss, in the poem’s now t­here is only a memento: “The necklace is a carving not a kiss. / The soft hands are a motion not a touch” (357). The pathos of life made into the drama of imagination playing games of transformation and preservation—­the religion of art, if you ­will—­all emerge as well-­known fragments, condensed within Stevens’s effort to display the totality of h ­ uman circumstance in relation to its inescapable ritualization of t­ hose circumstances. The anagogic vision emerges ­here, raising up the complexity of creativity in relation to itself. Anagogy stands always in relation to what is not itself, ­whether it comes before us as our own dignified or pathetic remains or as nature. We must admire the 267

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supreme clarity of this poetry’s work clustering the condensates of imaginative life across the fields of ­human experience in history. “The Auroras of Autumn” is as comprehensive as the most expansive memory palace and as final in its account of the world as was Virgil’s Aeneid in making Rome the end of history. Canto 4 moves to the next turning point in Stevens’s arcade of significant tropes: “The ­father sits / In space” (357). He is of “bleak regard,” but he is so strong as to say “no to no and yes to yes. He says yes / to no; and in saying yes he says farewell” (357). The ­father absorbs the gesture of farewell, which he has made part of his own saying. Stevens’s f­ ather is not only Olympian but also Miltonic, as Stevens sets him leaping “from heaven to heaven more rapidly / Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames” (357). ­These lines are more discursive than most that come before in the poem, itemizing the pre­de­ces­ sors from Homer and Yahweh to Milton and Blake. Lines such as t­hese tempt readers to describe Stevens, as Bloom has done, as a poet of Central Man. F ­ ather abstracts the collective figures of rule and knowledge while accumulating ­earlier incarnations. This ­father has “the highest eye,” sits as the still point in the turning world. Fittingly, the ­father’s capacities are enigmatic, “the deep ear that discerns, / At eve­ning, ­things that attend it u ­ ntil it hears / The super­natural preludes of its own” (357–358). The central cantos turn around the enigmatic ­father enthroned. Of course, the central thought is about ritual, myth, and power. The readerly temptation is, as we have seen in ­earlier scholarship on Stevens, including Kermode’s, to find the enigma’s key in the death of god. Canto 4’s ending invites the temptation, but the poem immediately discourages that oncoming sacralizing anthropocentric event. The poem is neither for nor about the ­father’s ­children but the crisis of his own being as a foundational trope in the archive of our poiesis. The enthroned father-­king listening hears in the end only echoes, past and ­future, of his own unique loneliness. At best, his attendants—­ defined by “the angelic eye”—­are “actors approaching, in com­pany, in their masks” (358). The poem’s rhe­toric emphatically sets off this f­ ather as a figure alone, as Stevens takes full advantage of a long-­standing poetic and rhetorical trope. The final two tercets begin with an apostrophe following a full stop, “Master O Master seated by the fire,” which itself ends with a question that brings canto 4 back to the closing motifs of wind in the preceding cantos. “What com­pany, / In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?” (358). The last canto to begin with the slogan “Farewell to an idea . . .” ends 268

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with the wind, a now familiar emblem of emptiness and natu­ral power, but adds to it the primordial trope, the Orphic force of sound or song. The apostrophe sets off the f­ ather from the spinning world to acknowledge he is the still point in this turning wheel, “motionless and yet / Of motion the ever-­brightening origin” (358). The canto poses a specific prob­lem, consistent with its own circumferential view on the basic workings of aspirant imagination on nature and itself. How can the origin find attendants except in its own creation? This seems to repose the founding question of the aurora in canto 1, but it does not, b ­ ecause h ­ ere, as in the other cantos just preceding it, the poet does not restate or return to an origin; rather, he organizes the pre­sen­ta­tion of a prob­lem and retrieves the power and forms of imagination to alter it. T ­ hese prob­lems are so foundational to creation stories that they almost form an archetype. Who attends the all-­powerful ­father but his own creations? In the most anagogic gospel, Saint John’s, the ­Father is from before the origin attended first and only by his own Son, the Word.67 In this canto, the attendants are, in a typically Stevensian image and in keeping with deep and long tradition, themselves the consequence of a creature, actors masked, “approaching, in com­pany,” having found their definition in the action of “the angelic eye” (358).68 As we know from Paradise Lost, the creature is always insufficient, hence the final query: “What com­pany, / In masks, can choir with the naked wind?” Insufficiency, of course, creates the question (358). The naïve response must be that the secondariness of the creature is never adequate to the worship of the primal, original creator. This ancient motif appears among the Greeks even before Chris­tian­ity.69 Precisely b ­ ecause the prob­lem put this way is old, it cannot carry the poem. As an iteration, it simply bores us. ­These closing lines are an apostrophe, and they turn us away from iteration. Often, such an address aims at a pre­sent person or object. At least since “Lycidas,” however, in English-­language poetry the apostrophe is just as often an aversion, a way of turning one’s eyes and attention, a general turning away, which is, according to the OED, the root of apostrophe in Greek (ἀποστρέϕειν).70 Stevens’s anagogic purposes in “The Auroras of Autumn” require such rehabilitation of the basic verbal gestures of language itself. (Early on, Blackmur had noticed such concrete materiality in the historical quality of Stevens’s language, as I have pointed out in Chapter 6 and elsewhere.) Moreover, Quintilian noted apostrophe’s function as diversion from the (sometimes-­personified) question before us.71 The 269

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apostrophe is the perfect rhetorical figure to signify the circumstances that concern Stevens. It creates a speech act that si­mul­ta­neously addresses a pre­ sent / absent figure while turning away, leaving the “Master” unattended by a creature incapable of adequate worship or song. The apostrophe does not bring the Master into view, b ­ ecause no creaturely act can do so, but it wonderfully lays out the dynamics of the Master’s unknowable power and need. Of course, to continue the paradox, the speaker cannot know the need or power and so anthropomorphizes the unknowable in such a way that the center remains pre­sent and absent in the founding narratives of origin. The still point in the turning wheel, this mythic image of the creator dis­appears into the strangest uncertainty facing a poet—­can the creature sing “the naked wind” as a way to “choir” the Master? In moments such as ­these—­especially in the first half of “The Auroras of Autumn”—­the poem displays the first characteristic of the anagogic mode, the retrieval of fundamentals. The poem not only shows us the myths of the origin, the stories of first creation, but also transports and preserves them to prepare the second moment of anagogy. It raises to view a new imagination, which, as Stevens argued in The Necessary Angel, ­will become the imagination of o ­ thers. The poem must or­ga­nize several totalities: first, the archive of originary movements within the history of poetics; second, the extensive variations on and elaborations of t­hese tropes as imagination reworks them; and third, the h ­ uman dream embodied in a “natu­ral world” that does the bidding and is the embodiment of ­human desire and power. We have discussed instances of Stevens’s retrievals of the transported archives of ­human desire from the circumferential position an anagogic poet takes on the inheritance creativity provides. We have noted the doubled writing, which brings us back to the basic modes of creativity—­often in very dense abstracted forms—­and the writing again of the basic figures as prob­lems with still-­felt consequence. How can ­these prob­lems, often pre­ sent in an archive of tropes exhausted by iteration, remain impor­tant and active? The answer is that they resonate with the emotions of readers as themselves figures of the species and expose what seem to be per­sis­tent prob­lems. The doubled writing makes clear, as with the apostrophe in canto 4, that t­ hese per­sis­tent prob­lems seem permanent only as the work of imagination and rhe­toric in which the prob­lems exist. Indeed, transport precisely carries over the prob­lems, requiring increased elaborations and differentiations in attempts to complete, satisfactorily, the therapeutic desire 270

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for especially metaphysical and social solutions to prob­lems of fate, tragedy, and finitude. Anagogy in Stevens’s hands lets us see how much of the poetic archive has become a fruitful but unhappy strug­gle to compensate for or offset the facts of tragic finitude. He turns criticism away from the melancholic mode, making a major defense of the new imagination he offers. In the ­earlier chapters of this book, I hint at the idea of reading Stevens as an heir to Virgil. Stevens refers to him at least eleven times in The Necessary Angel, and Virgil opens part 4 of “The Noble Rider,” where Stevens reconstructs the poet for us. The poet is not a metaphysical figure, “a char­ i­ot­eer traversing vacant space, however ethereal.” That would be to repeat Plato’s gorgeous nonsense. Stevens outlines the poet in opposition to the exhaustion of that philosophical mode of expression in a passage of ­great complexity and prose beauty: He must have lived all of the last two thousand years, and longer, and he must have instructed himself, as best he could, as he went along. He ­will have thought that Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton placed themselves in remote lands and in remote ages; that their men and w ­ omen ­were the dead—­and not the dead lying in the earth, but the dead still living in their remote lands and in their remote ages, and living in the earth or ­under it, or in the heavens—­and he ­will won­der at ­those huge imaginations, in which what is remote becomes near, and what is dead lives with an intensity beyond any experience of life. He w ­ ill consider that although he has himself witnessed, during the long period of his life, a general transition to real­ity, his own mea­sure as a poet, in spite of all the passions of all the lovers of the truth, is the mea­sure of his power to abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his abstraction the real­ity on which the lovers of truth insist. He must be able to abstract himself and also to abstract real­ity, which he does by placing it in his imagination. (CP, 657)

I know no other modern poet with such a clearly i­magined ambition for the art or such a profound grasp, such a complex concept, of poiesis. “The Auroras of Autumn” is anagogic in that it possesses several of the qualities Stevens names as essential to the poet’s unique place in the work of the species, indeed, in the work of imagination. Imagination is sometimes so power­ful an agency in Stevens’s thinking that it might be in­de­pen­dent of the species. Indeed, the poet in this passage looks like the mere residence of imagination, the location of imagination’s work within the world. Should we take such an idea seriously, as I think this expansive image of 271

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the poetic imagination more than implies we must, then we ­shall see Stevens recovering for us the huge imagination resident in Virgil and the rest. I have already emphasized the poet’s power to abstract in reproducing the inherited or learned products of such imaginations. Stevens adds to that the notion that we must mea­sure the poet’s success in terms of the “power to abstract himself.” The sources of this power are love and imagination. ­These last two are nearly identical in their value to poetry, but they are not the same. Stevens spoke eloquently and passionately of the necessary links between imagination and love in 1948, as he was writing The Auroras of Autumn and as the world was contemplating the horrors that brought Adorno to his infamous remark that ­after Auschwitz ­there could be no poetry. Stevens read the paper “Imagination as Value” to an audience at Columbia University in September of that year. He begins by posing a conundrum, which eventually he solves: “It does not seem pos­si­ble to say of the imagination that it has a certain characteristic which of itself gives it a certain single value as, for example, good or evil” (CP, 724). As “Auroras” puts the prob­lem, “Is ­there an imagination that sits enthroned / As grim as it is benevolent, the just / And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops / To imagine winter?” (360). “Pascal called the imagination the mistress of the world,” wrote Stevens in 1948. “He did not use this phrase to speak well of it” (724). With Pascal, Stevens joins the issue. Desire, exchange, the erotic, and fi­nally love peek through this ­little reminder. Stevens ­settles with Pascal rather quickly, if savagely, finding in Pascal’s “act of ­dying” an embrace of what he had called “the delusive faculty” (725). Pascal had taken imagination as the ­enemy of reason, but “in a moment of indifference, he said that the imagination disposes all t­hings and that it is the imagination that creates beauty, justice and happiness” (725). This is a crucial step t­ oward the emergence of imagination as love. Stevens takes from Pascal’s work and life license for the broadest claim about imagination, especially understood in the sense of a secular anagogy, which I am trying to dispose. “The imagination,” Stevens writes, concluding this section of his paper, “is the power of the mind over the possibilities of t­ hings; but if this constitutes a certain single characteristic, it is the source not of a certain single value but of as many values as reside in the possibilities of ­things” (726). “The Auroras of Autumn” not only bids complex farewell to ideas but also weighs the specific h ­ uman prob­lems of happiness and knowledge across 272

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several variations. The poem opens its final canto assessing the conclusions of what is known, asking a­ fter the right values for h ­ uman life best served by imagination. The movement h ­ ere is like that of the poem in general, a movement down to fundamentals, and a retrieval of ascesis as capacity rather than reduction. The variations are stark: “An unhappy p ­ eople in a happy world. . . . ​ / An unhappy ­people in an unhappy world. . . . ​ / A happy ­people in an unhappy world. . . . ​ / A happy ­people in a happy world” (362). At first glance, we are back in a world of ruination and melancholy, toned differently from Stevens’s remarkable ability to absorb the gravest into the lightest tones. In a Benjaminian register, of course, a happy ­people and a happy world would be impossible, mocked into dismissal: “A happy ­people in a happy world—­ / Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar” (632). T ­ hese words, so eco­nom­ically associated, evoke pasts that w ­ ere and images now unreal within cinematic fantasies. We might En­glish “Buffo” as “buffoon,” and the buffo is a jest, which is to say just a puff of air.72 As early as Harmonium, Stevens began his recurrent mockery of the male narcissist, loving the self in destruction, who misplaces eros and desire. In an early take on Whitman’s famous poem, in “Last Looks at the Lilacs,” Stevens asks of the “Poor buffo,” so near “the divine ingénue,” “To what good, in the alleys of the lilac /  . . . ​do you scratch your buttocks?” (CP, 39). The buffo’s frustrating, infertile, melancholic view of a ruined world turns all desire in on itself and not only turns away from beauty and desire but repels eros, leaving “her” to ­others “who ­will embrace her”: “say how it comes that you see / Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel / Her body quivering” (39). The poem and poet do not tolerate the empty breath of wind, the buffoon, with utopian confidence or faith in pro­gress, who might mischaracterize the results of g­ reat victory and g­ reat sacrifice. The narcissism of melancholy, the infertility of ruination, “a picture wholly favorable to what is real” (“The Noble Rider,” CP, 649)—­Stevens’s brief passing slap at this posed judgment sets aside an entire cultural mimesis common to his period and throughout Western history. The melancholiac’s pose embraces what is real as a necessary condition of its purposes, ­whether they be allegoresis or ­simple self-­importance. The narrator turns back “to where we ­were when we began,” that is, began the canto and, indeed, the poem, and even more the state of the h ­ uman in the most power­ful accounts of its being: “An unhappy ­people in a happy world” (362). 273

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“Auroras” moves to its end in a profound engagement with the deepest recurring imaginative and intellectual ele­ments of Western historical humanism’s engagement with its own place and pro­ cesses in the world. “Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference,” the poet demands almost of himself in the moment when we must see the distinction between an unhappy ­people in an unhappy world and an unhappy p ­ eople in a happy world. The former is a world of infinite reflection, in which the poet could do nothing but iterate the commonplaces of the fall, of ruination, and of a world too barren even ever for apocalypse—­a world that invites utopian desire in desperation. That pose, however, is only one of the unproductive mirrors of total misery. For in a world of universal unhappiness, ­there can be only “too many mirrors for misery.” This is the inverse of the buffo world, without possibility for imagination or creativity. It is far from the impossibility of a happy ­people in an unhappy world, of which the poet says simply, “It cannot be.” He means this impossibility not as ontology but as a final blockage to poiesis: “­There’s nothing ­there to roll / On the expressive tongue, the finding fang” (362). Stevens’s final canto moves brazenly in front of a background filled by Virgil and Dante and their heirs. The poem’s movement completes a remarkable internal transformation of considerable imaginative power and grace. Once the opening lines have removed the vari­ous impossibilities and return to the start, they bring us to the fateful and perhaps tragic vision of an unhappy p ­ eople in a happy world. The happiness of the world is the necessity for an unhappy p ­ eople. Or so it seems necessary. The poem commands the rabbi to read, which means to count the differences that follow and to absorb the differences the poet delineates. The rabbi is both a momentary version of the poet and not. He is a priest and teacher who must learn the limits and possibilities, the placement of his own role. The rabbi is a version of the priestly figure I described e­ arlier via Auerbach’s account of interpretation, for reading in one sense means to interpret. This rabbi, like any priest, must interpret the dark mysteries of fated humanity in a happy world. The poem explic­itly links the rabbi to the kabbalistic act with its second firm command, “solemnize the secretive syllables” (362). A third command follows, repeating the order to read a story that is permanent in all times and places—­“for ­today / And for tomorrow” (363). The overarching story, we must recall, is of an unhappy ­people in a 274

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happy world, which requires a universal point of view, the viewpoint of God made manifest through the priest’s utterance of the word. All anagogy returns to the fundamentals and, in this case, to the base of mono­the­istic narratives, each of which provides its own sacred account of the totality seen and enacted by a transcendent that requires or positions a priest to explain and justify. The rabbi ­will speak, allegorically, of the totality of happy and unhappy, which is, the poem tells us thrice, a “contrivance.” The allegorical tale is contrived, and according to it, so is the totality a contrivance “of the spectre of the spheres” (363). The rabbi doubles the contrivance of his master, accounting for his own authority in an imitation of the creator’s act. We recognize such gestures in the opening of John’s gospel, where the word stands with and acts for God. This poetic image abstracts and condenses that refounding gesture, which itself rewrites Genesis as an account of origins. The rabbi’s account, his reading, gives us “the never-­ failing genius, / Fulfilling his meditations, ­great and small” (363). This creator who guarantees the happiness of the world echoes the Olympian myths and reminds us too of the deistic god of enlightened Eu­rope as much as it echoes the Puritanical God disinterested in works and love. “In t­hese unhappy he meditates a ­whole, / The full of fortune and the full of fate, / As if he lived all lives, that he might know” (363). With the word “fate,” the poem moves completely beyond any socialized category of interpretation, placing its own g­ ambles at the highest level of intellectual and imaginative virtue. The tragedies of fate lie within the Olympian and mono­the­istic tropes, which the rabbi sings encapsulating the dangerous motifs that run throughout the patterns that defeat the creativity of imagination and the light of intellect as they reside in the species and its poets, all their acts of poiesis. The poem has told the rabbi to sing a song it identifies as “this extremity,” a phrase that introduces the emergency nature of the myths that propound fate as the excuse for their own resignation of the imaginatively ­human to second status within a world of mock assurances guaranteed by transcendentalisms and their profiteers. Speaking “this extremity” as the poem ends naturally recalls the poem’s opening, its speaking from a circumference, and it suggests false continuities and creates impor­tant contrasts. The last canto makes the normative tragic accounts of fated h ­ umans within the meditated plans of all contriving powers, and all the variations thereon of which this book speaks, nothing but another allegorical idea to which, farewell. 275

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In a remarkably daring conclusion, Stevens rushes the rabbi and his God to a new form of knowledge, one far from the ­music of the contrived spheres, “that he might know, / In hall harridan, not hushful paradise” (363). The poem revokes the exquisite peace of Dante’s ending. “Harridan,” which Stevens might have had from Pope, or Swift, or even Emerson, points us back to the erotic failures of the narcissistic buffoon, to a figure who tells of ruination. Harridan is an odd female, the beloved ruined, leftover, “a haggard old w ­ oman.” Stevens’s close interweaves ­these with some of his repeated poetic ideas. They draw into his poem not only the gorgeous but ­simple moments of Eliot’s Quartets but their greater pre­ de­ces­sor, Dante’s Paradiso. That rabbi, reading his own allegory to the world, comes to the eternally youthful, beloved Beatrice, whose rediscovery in the luster of the godhead’s agapé is perfect proof of a happy world contrived for a fated ­people meditating as a ­whole. Beatrice is now a harridan, an aged shrew, even as she might have been a vixen. She is no longer a figure of fate fulfilled in agapé as displacement of eros. Dante’s alter ego could approach the ecstasy of satisfaction, could find the proper way to approach the master seated by the fire, only through a beloved ­woman whose erotic realities became fleshless, abstract, vestibular values, allowing distant access to a satisfaction impossible to the species except as it comes from the fantasy of its fulfilled desires. In this sense, the rabbi sings in extremity. Canto 10 is a rewriting not only of Dante’s extraordinary final canto, closing the Paradiso and the Comedy but also, ­because of that poem’s own Christian anagogy, a recasting of the traditions it summarizes and restores. Frye reads Dante as the ­great mythopoetic imagination making anagogy from the “encyclopedic.”73 Stevens reads him this way as well. It is the tapestry unwound and remade in “Auroras.” Of course, Stevens’s style is dif­ fer­ent from Dante’s, but ­there are considerable parallels beginning with the canto and tercet form of both poems. More impor­tant, perhaps, is the general analogy between the condensation and abstraction of Stevens’s style and the well-­studied creation of historical depth of textured character in Dante, especially but not only in the Inferno.74 In addition, both poets make extraordinary use of the resonate richness of words in their most concrete form—­this is the quality in Stevens that Blackmur had noticed in 1931 and 1943.75 Fi­nally, Stevens’s abstraction and condensation of tropes and

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ideas in this poem intensify only the same qualities of style Dante disposes in the dense solidity of his own highly intellectual and sharply drawn tropes. ­Here is the Dante: Qual è ’l geomètra che tutto s’affige per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, pensando, quel principio ond’ elli indige, tal era io a quella vista nova: veder voleva come si convene l’imago al cerchio e come vi s’indova.76

Dante’s final canto emphasizes the intellectual qualities of light and the ineffability of the poet’s conceit: “Oh quanto è corto il dire e come fioco / al mio concetto!”77 This ineffability is the expressive form of hushful paradise. “Auroras’s” canto disposes the remaining fragments of Dante’s devices, staged in the rabbi’s command per­for­mance. It overlays its own insights onto the qualities attending the residual forms. No longer able to give us an ­imagined “­whole,” the poem exposits another embodied ­human dream cast within the natu­ ral world. The all-­ knowing creator now “might know /  . . . ​not hushful paradise” but “a haggling of wind and weather, by ­these lights / Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter’s nick” (363). T ­ hese lines condense basic motifs of the entire poem, for example, the play of imagination in the brief fires of winter. The concrete simile echoes the traditional imagery of inspiration, redemption, and sacramentalism pre­sent in Dante’s final one hundred lines. They demystify the solemnized secretive syllables of the learned rabbi as impossible masks of a desacralized world. Nonetheless and more impor­tant, they dramatize both the displacement and substitution of one poetic view for another in the imaginations of ­others—­whose imaginations ­were arrested as real­ity. The hall harridan is not, however, some more basic “real” shown by demystification, although it is that in rhetorical relation to the transcendental tropes that unwind in this canto. Rather, the hall harridan names a new secular view of the totality of the world as dream raised to the heights needed to make a complete imaginative view. In the harridan hall, the hagglings of change—­these are metonyms, they are “lights,” albeit temporary in their dialectic: summer straw, dried, preserved, and used up—­these illuminate (but only?) in “winter’s nick.” Dante’s light in his final canto is the divine itself: “O luce

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etterna che sola in te sidi, sola t’intendi, e da te intelleta / e intendente te  mi e arridi!” (O Light Eternal, who alone abides in Thyself, alone knowest Thyself, and, known to Thyself and knowing, lovest and smilest on Thyself!).78 The straw fire is a nick in winter; so is Dante’s light, which flares up ­after hard work to light and lift the depression of a dark wood—­ except that Dante’s nick is timeless and eternal, waiting to be found by ­those in the godhead’s entourage. Stevens condenses and abstracts in this learned, historicist, and technically remarkable way throughout his best poetry. The writing is dense with allusion and plays with the resources of language to produce remarkable effects. All together, they are the new anagogy on offer by poiesis resident in the poet, who, learned and gifted, can manage the highest tasks of imagination. The arduous work that Dante and Stevens share is twofold in character: im­mense learning in the techniques and resources of their arts and languages and disciplined mastery of the extremely arduous task of technique, the dense texture of condensation and creativity on offer. This last means, as we recall from “The Noble Rider,” success in having ­others accept the poet’s imagination as an alternative to the real, in other words, success in pushing back against the pressures of the real in an answer to the call of imagination, to recall the ­human capacities in poiesis. In other words, ­there is no reason to be imprisoned. Dante and Stevens together bring their poems to end on the essential link between love and imagination. This is why freedom ­matters ­here. Poiesis aims at the gift of ­imagined alternatives pressing against the (always) unacceptable real. The poets properly call the motive love. Dante’s transumption of erotic love into the Christian desensualized love of agapé allows Stevens to reverse that hierarchization, to reactivate the bodily and sensual forms and practices of love—­all that belongs to the hall harridan and the blaze of summer straw—­all the moments of passion, all that which agapé in its eternality would oppose. Yet agapé names, not only in Dante but especially in his g­ reat pre­de­ces­sor Paul, the universal capacity of the h ­ uman to be loved and the material fact of a force called love that descends on and resonates within the species. Paul famously makes love divine, the guarantor of Chris­tian­ity’s appeal. In First Corinthians, he poses agapé as the culmination of, although it is the unjustified assumption for, his anagogic view of the immanent remade as a paternal creation. Stevens exploits this use of agapé, its naming of the impersonal force called love as a potential, 278

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as the basis for gift, the graceful offering in poiesis of freedom for the species to imagine alternatives for itself and its own history; he also uses it to designate the poet’s responsibility as the habitus of such poiesis in the species. Stevens’s abstractions exist only as verbal condensation. The straw fires making a nick in winter not only recall the flares of passion, the facts of ­human transience, but the fact of ­human love as erotic and bodily. Poetry of course is always erotic, and Stevens’s mockery of the buffo is a mockery of the poet become manqué in his or her narcissistic commitment to the combination of ruination (abjection) and melancholy. The poet manqué, unlike the man on the dump, does not see, feel, or understand all the values of romance or comedy. Stevens reverses Paul’s famous mandate that it is better to marry than to burn by insisting that it is better to romance and consummate than to burn or feel the necessity to marry as a mark of melancholy and resignation.79 To marry, as Paul would have it, is to bring law ­under the guise of solemnized secretive syllables to remove eros as a threat to the order of real­ity. Erotic love, for Paul, is not only sinful transgression against universal paternal love, which must come to order, but a quality of ­human life that can generate alternative ways of life, alternative dreams of the world re­imagined to allow the satisfaction of h ­ uman desire. “To marry” means to abandon the desire that might culminate in a remade order and to forfeit the chance to see the Pauline or any other such order from its edge, a perspective on the totality that offers itself as without alternatives. The difference between Paul and Stevens is markedly s­ imple. Paul would establish an imagination arrested in only one vision and would place himself at the center of it, with his own imaginings as their necessary basis. If ­there is freedom of any kind, it is within the ruled machinery of this paternalistic legality. Stevens can have none of this. The poet is always antagonistic to real­ity’s pressures to arrest imagination in a putative final arrangement. The poet is one possibility of freedom, of imagination’s role in being the source of alternatives needed to guide the species to its best fulfillment. Of course, this opposition admits and takes as a central prob­lem the possibility that the imagination can produce its own worst antagonists. To reactivate the imagination’s best self in the species’ historicality is Stevens’s aim in the secular anagogy this poem creates. Hall harridan is a kind of fate, but it is neither the fatalism of closed circles nor the tyranny of arrested and legalized imagination that wants to arrest its own critical 279

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functions, its own historical awareness and judgment, and most impor­ tant, it ability to offer what might be other­wise. “Auroras” not only abstracts the movements of poetic need and possibility but also embodies the forms of erotic life in its most evocative moments, complicating love and loss in transience. Admittedly, it puts t­hese figures within the domain of marriage, but not in the primary relation between lovers but among members of ­family with ritualized roles, satisfactions, successes, and failures. The m ­ iddle cantos’ turn on the ­mother and the ­family catches the details of love, death, and transience in the marks of memory, the traces of ­human experience made art, the shaded echoes of the fires that burnt but eventually died in the impersonal forces of the aurora. As the poem moves from the m ­ other and ­family to the ­father who commands entertainments, it moves closer to the central facts of the older patriarchal anagogic order. In canto 7, the poem forcibly dismisses both the desirability and possibility of “an imagination that sits enthroned / As grim as it is benevolent” (360). It seems a paradox that such a figure cannot “imagine winter.” We know that winter is the necessity for the physical nick of love burning, whereas the high-­rooted figure of paternal imagination, “the white creator of black,” is the destroyer: “Extinguishing our planets, one by one” (360). It leaves us, in the truest spirit of the allegorizing believers in universal ruination, with only “A shivering residue,” which stands in place of an old world, where “We knew each other and of each other thought” (360). The tyrannical ambition of the enthroned imagination that wants only to extinguish in the name of its own “mystical cabala” leaves us only “a flippant communication ­under the moon” (360). Canto 8 rehearses a similar tale across the mixed vocabularies of philosophy and faith, innocence and knowledge. The longing for a place and time of innocence, of the unfallen and unhappy, can only end in an “as if,” in this case, “As if the innocent m ­ other sang in the dark” (361). The “as if” empties the solace created in finitude where the greatest and smallest imaginings are as ifs, the creating from the circumference in song. So the ­mother singing in the darkened room, “half-­heard, / Created the time and place in which we breathed . . .” (361). This is not a mere nothing. It is the very possibility of love and life as imagining and as a relation in the world. A ­ fter ­these ellipses, the next lines follow on, opening canto 9: “And of each other thought—in the idiom / Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth, / Not of the enigma of the guilty dream” (361). Nowhere ­else in Stevens is ­there 280

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a more complete yet compact dismissal of the dangers inherent in the unnecessary ambitions of the imagination that would extinguish in the name of its own sense of rule. ­These lines might read as if Stevens knew Schmitt or Benjamin and understood the intellectual effort to make tragedy the exclusive high form of imagination proper to modernity in that it alone represents the need for itself. The next lines of canto 9 turn to Hamlet. In the guilty dream, against which stands the as if of the ­mother’s song, “We ­were as Danes in Denmark all day long.” As we would expect, as the poet moves to the final demand that the rabbi read, the voice asks, “­Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring? / Of what disaster is this the imminence: / Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt.” From the enigma of guilt, the Dane, the counterpoint to the elliptical, as if of the ­mother’s song, comes only the sense that the bareness of winter is the imminence of disaster. Of course, as the canto turns to its own end, the imminent disaster coming tomorrow constellates itself as stars “glittering.” The Stevensian dialectic of light and dark plays, but this time, in the Dane’s dream of guilt, “Like a g­ reat shadow’s last embellishment” (362). Always able to turn the density of expression and intellectual resource to its own contrapuntal alternative, the poet imagines that this last embellishment of the guilt dream, of disaster, might return—­and this is another move to the fundamental within anagogy—­ “Almost as part of innocence, almost, / Almost as the tenderest and truest part” (362). All of this is the hall harridan. ­There is no hushful paradise, nor is its image pos­si­ble except as already-­existing real­ity. Therein lies the guilt, the enigma, the allegoresis, the dream of ruination, and the ac­cep­ tance of abjection—­even all this from which the poet might move to let the imagination make a new regime of the desired. Stevens’s remarkable ability to abstract and condense produces remarkably textured language. He writes out images of ritualized be­hav­ior, which reflect the dense texture of life and experience. Canto 3 does tell the tale of finitude, of death’s destruction of the rich relations ­imagined as fixed. The dense abstractions of the poem’s tropes also represent the rich textures of life to which they help give meaning and motion. “The m ­ other’s face, / The purpose of the poem” is one side of the poetic h ­ ere (356), but with it comes memory transformed into experience as art and art as experience. The ­mother’s face is the purpose of the poem, which means of this poem as it moves forward but also of the poem, which is or was the scene her face 281

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made. The close alignment of poetic trope and the experience of its mimetic figures reminds us that poiesis distributes itself across the species in acts of imagination and in the realm of the ­imagined, which is at any time felt as the pressure of the real. “They are together, ­here, and it is warm, /  . . . ​ / It is eve­ning . . . ​ / It is the ­mother they possess, / Who gives transparence to their pre­sent peace” (356). Generative powers of loving creation are embodied metonymically in the ­mother’s face. We have the pure pre­sen­ta­tion of an effective appearance, an organ­izing creation. In turn, it creates both against and within the harridan of wind that which batters “like a rifle-­ butt” against the room (356–357). The contrast between vio­lence and love, between power and the poet, between imperial arrest and emergent culture—­these Stevensian themes sound traditional wisdom from Virgil and against not only the likes of Augustus but Paul and Schmitt as well. The poem leaves us with the textures of h ­ uman creativity and experience as forms of imaginings with potentialities in need of defense, of activation against overwhelming forces. The need to defend the imagination and love, powers inherent in the humanity of art and making, raises the poet to the traditional task of embodying the species’ highest capacities in a finite and still yet unhappy world. The texture of love for the h ­ uman, especially as we see it marked across the body in time as the marker and register of lived possibility—­this is where the poem leaves us, with a total view of nature redreamt as the place within ­human dreams.

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chapter eight

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Rembrandt, Bathsheba, and the Textures of Art

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he louvre’s permanent collection of Rembrandt’s paintings pre­sents an overwhelming imaginative intelligence, which occupies the thoughts and feelings of anyone who waits for it to do its work. Unlike in the far larger collections in Amsterdam and Saint Petersburg, the Louvre concentrates several major late works to compel a response to Rembrandt’s passionate, empathetic, and masterly pre­sen­ta­tion of thought in the experiences of art and secular life. From The Slaughtered Ox to The Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias’ F ­ amily, across a range of subjects, ­these paintings together impose the almost discredited possibility of thinking in and through art, especially an art like Rembrandt’s, which depends on close study of both his life and his pre­de­ces­sors’ devices.1 This room makes us aware of the potential for high art as an essential quality of the species, one without which it not only ­will end in ruin but ­will also destroy other life and its own habitus. In 1637 and then again in 1641, Rembrandt created two works centered on Raphael in the moment when the archangel leaves Tobit and his ­family.2 Calvinists had an ambiguous theological attitude t­oward the Apocrypha, but the artists of the period made ample use of apocryphal stories. Rembrandt’s two works point ­toward book 12, verses 16–22, of Tobit. In both his painting and e­ tching, Rembrandt poses Raphael in the upper-­right quadrant, flying away from Tobit’s ­family, leaving the Earth, and returning to his heavenly ­Father. Raphael has been in the midst of worldly domestic and po­liti­cal ­matters, but as Tobit discovers, the friend he thought he knew is not of the Earth. In fact, just before leaving, Raphael explains that despite what his friends saw, he never ate, and he created for the ­family the illusion of eating ­because angels have nothing earthly or needy about them. In 283

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other words, Rembrandt paints the transcendent archangel in a moment of revelation, departing from a world in whose imaginary he plays an essential part. Art historians and theologians try to clarify Rembrandt’s relation to this biblical narrative’s meaning, searching for sources of his paint­ erly inspiration in religious faith. T ­ hese works raise impor­tant questions about Rembrandt’s relation to Baroque style: its strong emotions, scenes of violent or extreme movement, and brilliant colors. Often, especially in early works, he arrays t­ hese ele­ments against chiaroscuro, the per­sis­tent darkness grounding his magical management of light. Modern intellectuals have thought hard about the Baroque (often in relation to the Reformation). Some have taken a long historical view, analyzing the style’s emergence for what it tells us about large shifts in Eu­ro­ pean cultural politics, one that leaves ­behind the humanism of the High Italian Re­nais­sance, with its classicist affections, for a ­later style rooted in Italy and developed not only in Spain but also in northern Eu­rope. Modern thinkers of the Baroque have had a single impor­tant question, to which their general answer has been yes. Does the Baroque offer a par­tic­ul­ar insight into the nature of “early modern” Eu­rope, and does it characterize socie­ ties over periods long ­after ­those of Caravaggio, Rubens, and Calderón? For many moderns, then, the task has been to explain the meaning of the yes to the question their stories ask. Walter Benjamin developed an especially profound theory of the Baroque, which included his thinking about melancholy, allegory, and ruination. In fact, in his sustained discussions of Baudelaire and Paris, he did more than any other intellectual has done to ­settle the idea that our own period remains profoundly and necessarily Baroque, while exploring the consequences for our lives and ­futures.3 In the Louvre’s collection, Rembrandt’s paintings certainly make use of Baroque ele­ments in ways that point us to aesthetic and h ­ uman possibilities, which impor­tant theories of the Baroque often miss. By coincidence, I walked into the Louvre having spent one morning rereading Walter Benjamin’s notebooks of 1940. Always, ­these materials move me ­because of this generous yet suicidal man’s extraordinary image, developed ­under extreme existential and intellectual pressure, of an angel blown backward by history’s winds, seeing before him nothing but ruination. Suddenly, however, that morning, I was caught by an even more moving work, Bethsabée au bain tenant la lettre de David, the work of a far greater imagination than Benjamin’s. I saw a much more expansive consciousness of ­human life and 284

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experience, and I felt the limits of Benjamin’s apocalyptic formulation and began to worry the consequences of its influence. On the landscape of imaginative earthly life, this painting is not a ruin, nor are several other efforts of earthly life and creativity. It requires a certain angelic view, a final panoramic version of life seen from the heights—­even as that life is lived in devastation—to portray it as such. The image became the basis of admittedly complex and, for many ­people, attractive opinions and stories that suit the generalized catastrophes of Eu­rope in the twentieth ­century. As I have suggested throughout the e­ arlier parts of this book, Eu­ro­pean culture (but not alone) offered many available resources for summoning this ­grand image in the very moment when it seemed most expressive of a need. The horror of Eu­ro­pean circumstance (of which Benjamin’s theory of the Baroque would provide a longer-­term account) drove Benjamin to extremes of action and thought, the potential for which inhered in the vari­ous traditions within which he worked and adapted. We must not forget how extraordinary the act of imagination recorded in his final notebooks was, in the transformation of the long-­brooded image of the Angelus Novus in that last extreme moment of personal and seemingly historical life. (Does his thinking allow us to describe him as historical?) Conceding all ­these truths about Benjamin and historical ­human experience, the Rembrandt painting nonetheless provokes a series of lingering questions. Was it best to follow, as many critics have done, the Benjaminian image ­toward its universality, its messianic conclusions about the state of earthly life in the most extreme of Baroque worries, the state of exception itself? Was it right to accept the generalization of the state of exception as seemingly always and everywhere pre­sent, a fact without any but perhaps revolutionary alternatives? In addition, could the twentieth c­ entury even give such assurances in the face of ruination across the European-­Asian landmass, during and a­ fter what seemed to be effective revolutions? Was the painting a sign of other than ruination? Did the Rembrandt painting offer a path not taken by the theorists of ruin—­the catastrophists, the melancholics, and the allegorists? Art scholars suggest that Rembrandt moved away from the Baroque l­ater in his ­career, following his bankruptcy and the death of his wife, Saskia, although ­these are associational, not causal, notes.4 Also, his l­ater art absorbed the colorist lessons of the Venetians, with the classical leanings of the High Re­nais­sance, but nonetheless kept his distance from the differently idealizing tendencies of both the Baroque and the Greeks, especially around 285

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the nude. The Louvre’s collection confronts us with Rembrandt’s concentrated capacity to think and imagine as and in relation to the facts of experience within aesthetic traditions. He took from his pre­de­ces­sors and contemporaries what­ever he needed (including the Baroque), enabling his own work to grasp the fit between technique and purpose, between device and thought in what­ever he acquired. His way of working opens the possibility that specialized researchers, in religious and academic, historicist or semiotic disciplines, could furnish their own proj­ects by searching his ­career for what­ever their own needs. Our analy­sis of Auerbach’s discussion of the interpretive arts has shown some disturbing implications of such disciplinary and discursive practices, as does our reading of Adorno’s worries about “official culture” and its inevitable, perhaps welcome or necessary, collapse.5 Yet, in a room in the Louvre, Rembrandt’s works remain untouched except by time, which has transferred ­these paintings from royal and private collections to a state museum and has often shadowed them in varnish. Of course, their visitors change always and not only according to the ruling order or idea of their times and places. Bourgeois connoisseurship and touring have given way to tourist cameras and phone addicts, clicking away at the objects often before or in the place of seeing them. In this case, passengers neither visit nor tour, enjoying (uploading?) the brand and frisson of Rembrandt, Paris, and the Louvre. Yet the works stay shielded in their own way. Oddly enough, to the works, ­little of this ­matters any more than does the academic contests over them—­although all of ­these may bother many ­people, who take the change around the works as a substitute for and supplement to their own interest(s).6 Neither the passersby nor ­those who accept and elevate their existence are critics. While Cicero shows us how the phrase “cui bono” can indict a person, he allows us to adapt the phrase to other purposes.7 In whose interests (or to whose benefit) have the Rembrandts in the room led to answers found only in the market? We can make aesthetic historical answers to the question, cui bono? We can say t­hese paintings are in the common and significant interest not to mere persons but to the living world, in precisely the spirit of anagogy that Stevens i­magined. The value of Rembrandt’s work is first for himself, but for him, the values must be more than for himself—­for his vision and for imagination, which reside in him in complicated ways, which we ­will discuss. 286

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The imaginative intellect is impor­tant for and is a fundamental fact of species existence—we have seen this explic­itly throughout Stevens’s greatest works. Moreover, t­hese values extend to the entire habitat, to the ground itself from which the earthliness of life, its finitude and creativity, emerge. We have also learned this from Stevens’s profound anagogic interest in the fundamentals of creative and critical art, which alone allows an imagination that can resist the given, the pressure of the real. Rembrandt has this same interest, in diverse forms, one of which we s­ hall accept, namely, the artistic engagement with flesh and the body. The Bathsheba is one of Rembrandt’s greatest inventions (see figure 2). In and through this work, he puts into play intellectually profound possibilities while providing a design vocabulary

Figure 2.  Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654),  Musée du Louvre (Scala / Art Resource, NY)

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from which ­later artists might draw devices, even if no more, for their own creations. Van Gogh writes of Rembrandt as a critic should write, finding in his art an achievement that, when known, redirects the imaginative thinking of t­ hose who can and do come to know it. Van Gogh helped reassure me in the moment when I felt the injustice of Benjamin’s angel, while standing before the Bathsheba in the Louvre. Writing to Émile Bernard in July 1888, Van Gogh, tired from painting a portrait, writes out the effect of looking at Rembrandt in the Louvre. His comments have a significant focus, which regrettably he did not develop. Had he done so, his comments might have altered modernist theories of the modern itself, to say nothing about theories of ruination and practices of utopian messianism. Writing to Bernard, Van Gogh reflects on the fact of Baudelaire’s prominence in the creation, pre­sen­ta­tion, and embodiment of modernity’s sense of its own aesthetic and its relation to historical change. In so ­doing, he joined a developing consensus on Baudelaire’s almost unique importance, which Walter Benjamin transformed and elevated in his remarkable writings on Baudelaire and Paris.8 Van Gogh, however, also realized that the force of Rembrandt, so palpable in the Louvre, was absent from Baudelaire’s thinking, a fact that dangerously damaged the poet’s work and made him a poor guide to Rembrandt. “With all due admiration for Baudelaire,” Van Gogh writes, “I venture to presume, especially ­going by ­those verses, that he knew virtually nothing about Rembrandt.”9 Van Gogh’s remark is a question about recent thinking about life and art in modernity: How might it be dif­fer­ent if, for example, Walter Benjamin had felt the caution of Van Gogh’s admonition about Baudelaire? In ­simple terms, vis-­à-­vis Rembrandt in the Louvre, Baudelaire, the famous flâneur, is merely in a hurry. To Bernard, Van Gogh writes, “You ­haven’t taken a r­ eally good look at them, and Baudelaire infinitely less so.” Van Gogh imagines himself as a docent: “standing in front of the paintings, I should be able to point out the miracles and mysteries.” Van Gogh is not looking for classical ideals or primitive gestures in t­ hese Rembrandts, and he asks, “Have you ever taken a good look at the ‘Ox’ or ‘The Interior of a Butcher’s Shop’ in the Louvre?”10 About such paintings and in support of his fundamental analy­sis, Benjamin would have several ideas, many of which culminate in his 1940 image of the angel’s view of historical ­human ruin. In Origin of the German Trauerspiel, he links the style of Baroque painting to the notion of “state of 288

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exception,” a gesture in tune with his slightly older con­temporary Carl Schmitt and his own concern with catastrophe. Each of t­ hese complex notions deserves the monographs dedicated to their meaning and genealogy. A brief citation from Benjamin, however, suggests something s­ imple at stake in Baudelaire’s too-­fast walk past the Rembrandts. In the chapter “Theory of Sovereignty,” Benjamin writes, “The religious man of the Baroque thus holds fast to the world b ­ ecause he feels himself being driven along with it ­toward a cataract . . . ​The beyond is emptied of every­thing in which even the slightest breath of world can be felt.”11 A massed cultural feeling of this sort founds the po­liti­cal danger of the moment, the dual risks of tyranny by direction and the state of exception. In the latter, a ruler or a tyrant, prince or sovereign, sets aside law and pro­cess to protect order in and from catastrophes of war or collapse. The dictator stabilizes order in a theological and po­liti­cal “restoration,” finding legitimation in the semiotics of (massed) anxiety, which fears catastrophe. For Benjamin, the Baroque face is always turned ­toward catastrophe, and, as in “Rubens’s royal pro­ cessions” or their “bourgeois counterpart,” the Baroque embodies and accommodates to the “decelerating hypertension of transcendence” with its surface substance, the style of “provocative this-­world accents” (50). As a result, heaven is set aside, detached from the world, “as vacuum,” as an apocalypse in waiting: “in a condition to swallow up the earth one day with catastrophic vio­lence” (51). Against this, but futilely, stands the sovereign supreme dictator whose aim is “to avert this state” (49). Critics and historians study Rembrandt’s changing relation to Baroque style. His ­earlier works are closer to the mode Rubens embodied—­rich colors, bold motion, melodramatic action, and vio­lence close to that of Jacobean theater. The Blinding of Samson (1636) is perhaps the clearest example of the style that might draw Rembrandt into Benjamin’s purview. The painting is a ­simple allegory; following the biblical narrative, it sets aside a heaven waiting to swallow the Earth in a catastrophe that fulfills the prophecy of renewal within God’s plan. Each ­thing, person, and action in the painting acquires and fulfills prophetic value only as an apotheosis, yet the work also “expunges” the “luster” that in classical or High Re­nais­ sance art transfigured ­people and ­things.12 Of course, we could extend the ­simple allegory into a tale of the artist’s anxiety, as the tyrant “expunges” the eyes and sight, despite the return of Samson’s strength in an act of messianic justice and apocalyptic revenge. The sheer brutality of the acts, clear 289

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from the horror on the perpetrators’ f­ aces, is the perfect emblem of the imbalance between worldly and heavenly that Benjamin notes. In the painting’s center, a foot, toes curled in the agony of pain from newly experienced powerlessness, gives the viewer a focus on the world bereft of God’s ­favor, of the ruinous nature of life without divine grace and sustenance. Allegorically, the foot is the ridged and rippling curl of finitude in a merely ­human, devastated, and devastating world. As is typical of Rembrandt’s remarkable intelligence, the astonishing foot concretizes the point of view we need to see how a biblical or religious story become image exists fi­nally as a secular fact of ­human life and experience. The painting is profoundly secular in the face of its own genre. Keeping Benjamin in mind, we might say that the Baroque shows its own lack of any continuing, balanced, or unified harmonious connection between the worldly and the heavenly. It abandons the world to allegoresis, to unfortunate and unbeautiful traces, to the ruins of what can no longer be—or what might come a­ fter the end. Now, art and life exist, in this theory, in the world as such, with only the permanently looming state of threatening catastrophe in our earthly home in an alienated universe. The pain is thoroughly religious, mystical, and metaphysical. Yet the foot makes the painting do secular work in this earthly setting without the rush to the high ground that turns mere ­human experience into a tale of metaphysical importance. At some point in Rembrandt’s c­ areer, he moves further from the (Rubensesque) Baroque in ways that Benjamin should have considered, just as Baudelaire should have slowed down in the Louvre. It is extremely in­ter­est­ing and rewarding to see Rembrandt move away from the Baroque, on which Benjamin and o ­ thers rest their sense of the modern. Rembrandt intensified the imaginative capacities potential in Samson’s all-­too-­secular foot. I find it especially in­ter­est­ing and part of my original worry about Benjamin when I visited the Bathsheba a­ fter rereading the 1940s notebooks. Why did he not follow Rembrandt in his own effort to strug­gle against the style that, we might say, following Simon Schama, made him a painter? Why do ­these critics move away from the artist, whose work confronted the Baroque with dissatisfaction, with a creative imagination offering new ideas and experiences? Why the devaluation of the artist as a source of innovative ideas? Are the latest ideas incon­ve­nient to the latecomer’s invested tale? What consequence is ­there for stopping short in the look at materials relevant to the story witnessing 290

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the massive changes and final devastations of the Earth? Rembrandt de­ cided to move away from the l­imited capacity of the Baroque, and he ­imagined a way forward not bound by its restrictions. Thinkers might well follow artistic solutions to prob­lems theorized as inescapable but not final to the masters of imaginative intellect. In addition, as I ­will show in Chapter 9 on Shakespeare, masterful artists often find ways to advance their art beyond the prob­lems achieved by their imaginations. Phi­los­o­phers, ­lawyers, and theorists develop prob­lems, often only in relation to a slice of the cultural archive, to imagination’s possibilities. Having taken up positions that delegitimize art—or, as some p ­ eople might say now, that are woke to its privilege—­they no longer look to masterful imaginations for alternatives to prob­lems named in secondary texts. On the contrary, too often they refuse the idea that the imagination exists in higher forms in (some) individuals or other forms. The tendency to turn away from the works of artists often leads to intellectual errors that have terrible real-­world consequences. Sometimes, the tendency results from recognizable and interested bias. One example illustrates both risks. Carl Schmitt, the leading l­egal phi­ los­o­pher of the Nazi era,13 in his highly influential writings on tragedy and Hamlet, gives no attention to Shakespeare’s comic and Romantic writing. Moreover, he ignores The Winter’s Tale, which as Shakespeare’s rewriting of Euripides’s Alcestis is an imaginative act beyond tragedy as posed by Hamlet and theorized by Schmitt as the modern (psychologized) myth. In a dif­fer­ent but impor­tant way, Rembrandt’s painting The Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias’ ­Family (1637; Louvre; see figure 3) is a step beyond the Baroque, even though it has many of the same stylistic marks as the 1636 Samson. With someone like Schmitt in mind, we insist that details ­matter. The ­later painting appears to conform more closely to Benjamin’s thinking about the Baroque than the Samson does. It has an ele­ment of what critics call Rembrandt’s naturalism, which might also appear to interfere with the Benjaminian account of modernity as Baroque. In all fairness, Benjamin included the fact of Dutch naturalism within his story, taking it as a stylistic and ideological expression of the circumstances he narrated. In this painting from Tobit, however, which rests on a biblical narrative and allegory, what looks like naturalism is a marker of a dif­fer­ent imaginative construction altogether. It has ele­ments in common with Samson’s foot, although Benjamin’s theory more easily accounts for the heroic form 291

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Figure 3.  Rembrandt’s The Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias’ ­Family (1637), Musée du Louvre (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

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of that painful bodily expression that does what scholars think of as the naturalistic gesture in this ­later painting. The Tobit has an annunciation, an apotheosis, and the recovery of vision. If the painting narrates the biblical event, even allegorically, then affairs on Earth find their light in the departing archangel’s luster. The painting also shows—­and this is in keeping with Benjamin—­the potential distanced alienation between heaven and Earth, as the angel shows his winged back to the families below. In turn, Tobit and his wife look down and away from the luminous Raphael, while Tobias and Sarah stare up and marvel. Structurally, this is Benjamin’s tension between heaven and Earth in a fragile stasis. The picture pre­sents the back-­and-­forth of God and Man, which, of course, the book, the biblical text, does not suggest—­a difference that marks the historicist insight of Benjamin’s thinking about the Baroque as the cause and sign of this difference of Holland from the revelation. In the Apocrypha, in contrast to the painting’s narrative pre­sen­ta­tion of distance, on Raphael’s departure (book 12, ll. 20–22), Tobit becomes a psalmist and sings t­ hese lines: Blessed be God who lives forever, ­because his kingdom lasts throughout all ages. . . . ­there is nothing that can escape his hand. (book 13, ll. 1–2)

Indeed, nothing could be less catastrophist in its metaphysics than t­hese lines’ vision of the covenant’s guarantee of relations between God and his ­people. In Benjaminian terms, the painting would embody the anxiety of a world without such assurance, of loss, and the threat of finitude, which po­ liti­cally invites the unacceptable state of exception as a tyrannous device of sovereign management. With all the terror God creates as Raphael reveals himself, poised to dis­ appear, the painting carries the mark of Rembrandt’s secular humanism, an ethic of loving creativity sustained by imaginative intelligence in densely detailed abstraction. As I ­will show, an actually existing criticism supports the truth of my claim about Rembrandt. We need and have a criticism to learn from him and to value what he makes precisely b ­ ecause neither the “ruination of history” in Eu­rope’s religious wars—­which extended from the sixteenth to the eigh­teenth centuries—­nor the development of slavery capitalism account for or made impossible his work.14 For the moment, however, we must study two ele­ments of this art, which Benjamin’s and 293

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similar ways of speaking set aside with ­little regard for the cost or consequences. First are the individual ethical decisions, the artistic intent expressed in creative thought in par­tic­u­lar works. Second are the details of the work as embodied acts of ethical imaginative thought. Take a small point in Benjamin’s theory. Considering the famed naturalism of seventeenth-­ century painting, which represented given object life in dramatic detail15—­ Rubens’s landscapes paradigmatically or any number of domestic scenes—­ Benjamin draws a conclusion from Wilhelm Hausenstein’s study Von Geist des Barock. “Baroque Naturalism is,” Benjamin quotes, “ ‘the art of least distances. . . . ​In ­every case, the naturalistic means serves the reduction of distances. . . . ​In order to leap back the more surely into the hypertrophy of form and into the forecourts of the metaphysical, it seeks its springboard in the region of the liveliest objective actuality’ ” (Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 51). Rubens’s Landscape with the Ruins of Mount Palatine in Rome (ca. 1615; Louvre) could be the perfect instance of Benjamin’s thinking on ­these questions.16 (His theory would also indict the works by Vermeer.) As a historical allegory, the painting combines the real­ity of finitude and catastrophe with a residual world prepared to nurture the h ­ uman even in its most basic, least “cultured” or “cultivated” forms. Benjamin insists, in a counter-­Enlightenment gesture, that such pre­sen­ta­tions of nature (the same would be true of domestic paintings) do not assure ­human happiness but stand ready to contain meaning and mystery, waiting for revelation. In this attitude, we have anticipations of Benjamin’s thinking about messianic history and allegorization. As we have seen in ­earlier chapters, it rests on the interpretive model that Auerbach pre­sents, for nature needs its rabbis to unlock what is distantly near. “Devoted neither to the earthly nor to the moral felicity of creatures,” Benjamin writes, “it [naturalism] is concerned solely with their mysterious instruction. For, in the Baroque, nature is considered as functioning for the purpose of expressing its meaning, for the emblematic pre­sen­ta­tion of its sense, which, as an allegorical pre­sen­ta­ tion, remains irreparably severed from its historical realization” (179). Remarks like ­these have been central to a good deal of advanced academic writing in the past half ­century. They are forceful, integral, and resourceful expressions of felt disasters within cap­ i­ tal­ ist modernity, which grow more closely catastrophic in almost ­every way. The reasons for their adoption are self-­evident, but as I have tried to suggest in this book, they often lack necessity, and for other reasons outside the original motives of 294

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their invention, they have undesirable consequences when ­others extend and repeat them. In The Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias’ ­Family, Rembrandt leaves dirt on the shadowed s­ oles of Raphael’s feet as he flies off, illuminated in glory. Passing by the painting, one sees the dramatic action, the melodramatic emotions, and the re-­created narrative events of the Bible. Slowed down a bit, the viewer sees light across a large muscular calf, a strong and sharply ­shaped ankle, and then dirty feet. The angel who tells us he only pretended to eat—­this to explain away all traces of his apparent earthliness as a fallen creaturely being—is h ­ ere on the canvas with dirty feet, carry­ing soil, the created, to the creator. Van Gogh had rightly said ­there are mysteries in ­these paintings. They are mysteries of device and design, not of messianic significance. They require a docent and not a priest, a creative critic to guide the view of specific images, not a guardian of mysteries and master of their enigmatic authority. Dirty feet on the s­ oles of an archangel famous for his annunciations give the viewer a point of view on the inescapably ­human nature of the narrated God. Raphael may not eat. He may believe he creates an illusion to satisfy the religious desire for mythological consistency, but even archangels deceive themselves as well as ­others. ­Humans sometimes do the same in inventing the transcendence they need or think they want—­creating a regime from which the priestly classes rule, even theorizing the alienation of the divine. Deceit is an essential device of cultural adaptation. It constructs needed beliefs that at high and low levels of thought or action complement their existence with modes of self-­defense, which protect them from not only needed analy­sis but also the importance of failure. Rembrandt’s soiled angelic feet wittily recall the importance of humility, of the values inherent in the hesitant truths of comedy, which disassemble the official positions and advance needed alternatives. T ­ hose soiled souls let us laugh at some of the all-­knowing stories catastrophists and the all-­knowing innocents tell from the confidence of their own echo chambers. ­Those soiled feet give us to see how the built-up tales of apocalyptic cultural collapse deserve the smile of ­those who knew better all along. Of course, dialecticians of a kind can turn the tragic and comic into the inside / outside of each other but only against that privileged idealist background of history, even when they deny the concept’s essential link to the logic of the spirt.17 While their idealism lets many ­people say general t­ hings about the time when Pantagruel and Falstaff roamed the Earth, Rabelais 295

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and Shakespeare might themselves have said other t­hings. Therefore, ­Rembrandt’s soiled ­soles say something to ­those who stop to watch and move slowly, humbly reserving or setting aside their acquired instruments for absorbing the dirty feet into stories that come from and appear to meet their own exigencies. Of course, the joke in Rembrandt’s painting is that making g­ rand stories out of needed deceit should stop within sight of ­human frailty, with a sense of humility even and especially when mere ­humans offer ­grand accounts. ­Those dirty feet warn the passersby not to forget the humanism essential to thinking about, to perceiving, and to experiencing life in a finite world. Van Gogh knew that t­ hese mysteries would appear as mysteries to anyone who would take the time out of a finite span to marvel and learn. He would have taught Bernard, a remark that tells us how impor­tant it would be for the critics to be properly h ­ umble and willing to be educated by an art like Rembrandt’s that does not lose itself in paint­erly tradition, in the deceits of its arts and formations. The critic has a vital role to play in the transmission mechanisms of a culture aware of the mysteries of creation, the powers of imagination, and the earthly humility fit to a finite world. Rembrandt’s imagination is secular and worldly; it does not reflect a naturalistic need for art to serve regimes that his love for the h ­ uman, his sense of its l­imited possibilities, and its state of being cannot endorse. If Samson’s agonized foot is too far from the point of view this love offers, precisely ­because it rec­ords the murderous vio­lence of a transcendent God and a po­liti­cal tyrant, then the archangel’s dirty sole gives the viewer and the species a point of view outside the traps so well theorized in the official Baroque. If Rembrandt, in this instance, is the artist as exception to the ruling forms of his art, then he is also the figure who reminds us that the talk obsessed with the official regime against which he turns cannot be a home to his work. As a result, it cannot be e­ ither a proper judge of the official, no ­matter how well it theorizes it, or the adequate amanuensis of a species that needs to learn what poiesis might create and offer. Fortunately, Rembrandt has had critics who paused with his work and let its effects, in Stevens’s phrase, replace their own imagination. John Berger is one of ­these critics, and he notes that while Rembrandt “profited by the liberties won by the Baroque, the dislocations in his paintings are in no way similar, for they are not demonstrative: they are almost furtive.”18 Berger’s comments come from a careful look at especially Rembrandt’s l­ater works; he makes 296

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a comparative differentiation between Rembrandt’s aesthetic and ethics from the then dominant style of his peers and pre­de­ces­sors.19 This is the sort of criticism Rembrandt’s work wants to evoke. H ­ uman humility, no ­matter if seen as a Christian or secular virtue, disallows grandiose self-­ contained uses of o ­ thers’ efforts and experiences, revealing them as e­ ither sin or vio­lence. If the message of the ­soles in Tobit is the inescapability of earthly limits and the fitness of art to its truths, it is also the conundrum that finite h ­ uman possibilities, the limits of earthly life, can produce, with all due humility, masterful works, which require learned criticism, happy in its secondary position. As we ­will see, Berger, perhaps precisely ­because he is commenting on and helping to exposit the Rembrandt from whose work he learns, is a useful example of what such a criticism might do, happy in its secondariness, rather than melancholy in its limits and ambitious to exceed them. Rembrandt is a masterful artist, which means that his creations exceed the aims and control of the traditions that trained him. He stands out from and at his most significant, taking an in­de­pen­dent position against the defining forms of tradition, draws himself into position with the other significant originals in the fields of art. In this, he was like Stevens, who, as we have seen, spoke of his desire to be in the com­pany of ­those who ­were outstanding in relation to the embrasures of their arts. In this desire, we come near again to the conundrum of the artist working with a vision of humility. T ­ here is no doubt, for example, that Rembrandt knew and desired to master all the devices his pre­de­ces­sors provided. Sometimes he worked in direct competition with the highest achievements of ­those he studied. Kenneth Clark makes this point about Rembrandt in his Wrightsman Lectures on Rembrandt, stressing its importance, noting that Rembrandt not only took from the tradition what­ever he could but painted especially in sympathetic competition with his greatest pre­de­ces­sors, the ones from whom he learned the most. Clark showed that Leonardo’s Last Supper mattered most to him, precisely b ­ ecause Rembrandt did not attempt a painting on this theme, despite at times drawing it and at other times taking from it inventions he reworked for the originality of his own paintings.20 When we notice that Rembrandt moves away from the Baroque, when he gives us soiled souls rather than g­ rand pro­cessions or metaphysical angst, we see a cadre of similar figures across time and distance, perhaps as we saw Stevens draw his alliances with Orpheus, Virgil, Dante, and so 297

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on. We are all rightly suspicious of the privilege and power attached to canons and their formation, which requires careful delineation. In the case of the late Rembrandt, given general scholarly agreement that his work moved away from the Baroque, we could rightly say that it is through Rubens, the most impor­tant example, that the canon and tradition pass. Having studied Rubens’s style and success, as Simon Schama exhaustively shows, Rembrandt worked competitively in the vari­ous modes he adapted, but only to move on to an entirely dif­fer­ent and, to some extent, sui generis, form of work. As modernity advanced with the market, and what Adorno called “official culture” took over the acad­emy as well as museums and private collecting, a class of writers did not lose track of the close connection between culture and the dominant forms of po­liti­cal economic interest and power. Rather, they lost track of how t­ hose who w ­ ere celebrated for the fit of their work to dominant cultures became naturalized as “impor­ tant” so that difference from the culture’s traditions dis­appears. So anxious are some writers to disable the authorized forms of art and education that they miss the internal relations between such figures as Rembrandt and the canon from which, in this case, he differentiates himself. Such an opinion has intellectual and ethical consequences, which we might see more easily in a case with stakes closer to our own interests. Official culture embraces transgressive art normalizing its place within traditions, in terms of which alone this transgression appears. An ideal con­temporary instance of this pro­cess appears in the case of Andy Warhol. Robert Hughes notes that, beginning in the 1960s, Warhol began to wear down the distinction between high and popu­lar art, a fact that sped his ac­ cep­tance among cognoscenti and ­later academic critics. Warhol’s work, Hughes writes, “depended on the assumption, still in force in the sixties, that ­there was a qualitative difference between the perceptions of high art and the million daily diversions and instructions issued by popu­lar culture. Since then, Warhol has prob­ably done more than any other living artist to wear that distinction down.”21 The dominant culture has found it difficult to sustain the distinction Hughes mentions, and indeed, many writers and artists believe ­there are good reasons to rid the society of belief in such a ­thing. Celebrating Warhol’s work, which belonged to the pro­cesses of celebrity, advertising, and journalism, instantiated that culture’s desire to drop a nonprofitable distinction that might escape the reach of its own control.

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Class analy­sis, studies of prejudice and privilege in creating canons and standards, and the imputed realism of scholars who give priority to the market above other forces have settled the question, more or less, against the value of such a distinction except as a form of privilege and oppression. In relation to art as to much e­ lse that might ­matter in the po­liti­cal strug­gles of social life, the economism under­lying such notions preempts, many times, the value in h ­ uman actions, of h ­ uman poiesis in its quotidian 22 and aesthetically segregated forms. It has resulted in a kind of fatalism, which finds it easier to imagine, as the saying goes, the end of the habitat and species than the end of capitalism.23 Furthermore, and added to this position as a form of defense, sits a body of opinion that confuses the deadenderism of the fatalist economistics and Warholists among us for the ­actual impossibility of poiesis and its values.24 Of course, it does not end self-­referential conversation about the circumstances of such apocalyptic catastrophes and their i­magined c­ auses and blockages. The conversation on such t­ hings and the work it enables goes on, implicitly normalizing the real­ity it imagines in its vari­ous forms. Imagination itself is a victim of this constellation of practices and presumptions, which officially would exclude an outside to its own beliefs. Nevertheless, other forms of intellectual imagination do exist and have always done, even in the catastrophic centuries of early and late capitalism and modernity. We can find this not only in art and in poetry but also in criticism created outside this consensus. Writing on Rembrandt, John Berger gives us an a­ ngle on the creativity of art so that we can see the valuable results of ­human beings who work rigorously and carefully with and within the possibilities offered. Berger has no hesitancy to use the word “masters” for ­those who w ­ ere once the officially declared “supreme representatives” of a tradition (Portraits, 140). He is not so naïve to forget the forces that create hierarchies or the impor­tant fact that their power masks the nominalism of their pyramids.25 With no anxiety or melancholy, for vitally impor­tant reasons, Berger embraces a very traditional sense of what a master is and does. “Certain exceptional artists,” he writes, “in exceptional circumstances broke f­ree of the norms of the tradition and produced work that was dramatically opposed to its values” (140). How do we tell the master in Berger’s sense from the manufactured masters of commodity canon making? How should we insist on the difference between

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the masters, who exist as type and value across historical periods, and t­ hose of only market interest? Berger does not forget that t­hose with market value often fit easily into structured stories of universal ruination. How to tell the impor­tant from celebrated masters? For Berger—­who on this aligns with Edward Said—­the influential figures have no ephebes. Berger puts it this way: when “the tradition closed around their work, incorporating minor technical innovations, and continuing as though nothing of princi­ple had been disturbed” (140). When this happens, the rigorously creative critic and the imaginative artist see importance differently than do the market and its intellectual avatars in culture industries and their official icons. Berger speaks for and embodies a critical ethic with poetic force, the humanism of which recognizes the species importance of art: “The two categories of exceptional and average (typical) works are essential to our argument. But they cannot be applied mechanically as critical criteria. The critic must understand the terms of the antagonism. E ­ very exceptional work was the result of a prolonged successful strug­gle. Innumerable works involved no strug­gle. T ­ here ­were also prolonged yet unsuccessful strug­gles” (140). ­These remarks are not mere cautions against the likes of Warhol’s industrial-­scale production based on the speed of factory techniques. Berger’s ethic does not find its critical caution in Luddite opposition to innovative technologies. Consider Picasso, whose im­mense production might have exceeded Warhol’s output.26 Berger defines the seriousness of Picasso in a brief look at his last obsessively sexual works. In his old age, ­after prolonged strug­gles with art and his own talent, he was a specific version of the impor­tant master, with peculiar specifics, a personal type of the ­great master: “He was unmitigatedly alone ­because he was cut off from the con­ temporary world as a historical person, and from a continuing pictorial tradition as a painter” (288). Picasso’s prolonged strug­gles placed him with Rembrandt and Titian but made him original. Their late styles provided wisdom against desolation. He discovered that painting could swear at itself. “Nobody before ­imagined how painting could be obscene about its own origin, as distinct from illustrating its own obscenities” (288). The remarkable (in quantity and quality) 180 drawings of his nude model together with the nude painter produced between November 28, 1953, and February 3, 1954, Berger tells us, we must cherish for their understanding of love and “­human plight” (289).27 Clark had already seen in them Picasso’s proof that an art could make itself in its fundamental relation to 300

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the body, despite the breaking of the classical nude, of drawing from life, and indeed, even from his own destruction of the quickly clichéd modernist substitutions for what he had helped destroy. Picasso’s mastery is as a tradition-­soaked iconoclast who “hated the inherited half-­truths of the cultured classes” (288). Berger sees in Picasso a strong possibility in our recent world of the critical and aesthetic ethic he offers as a generality for our work and lives. Picasso had done what Rembrandt had done e­ arlier, which is what all masters do and which all critics must study and defend. Picasso is one of the extreme cases of a paint­erly master who, having absorbed what he studied, set his work against the tradition, against his art in its most material forms. Writing of Rembrandt, Berger strongly objects to the post-­ Romantic Western image of the heroic self-­consuming artist, struggling with his own psyche and circumstances.28 Dutch seventeenth-­century paint­ers especially did not avoid the truth that painting was “a cele­bration of material property and of the status that accompanies it.” Whenever the painter grew dissatisfied with this ­limited role, “he inevitably found himself struggling with the very language of his own art as understood by the tradition of his calling” (140). For Rembrandt, paint­erly language was not merely the market-­friendly styles con­temporary to the maker. As we know from scholars’ careful examination of Rembrandt’s habits, like Wallace Stevens, he studied the long history of his art, from Apelles to Rubens. Of course, a g­ reat near con­temporary like Rubens also had studied and adapted as much as he needed from the archive of paint­erly imagination. Rembrandt studied every­thing he could to draw from the archive of creative achievement to use its materials for his own art. When Rembrandt, prefiguring Picasso on this point but in a minor key, turns against the language of his art, he turns against its ability to contain his imagination to practices of iteration, familiarity, to the real as imagination or­ga­nized it within the circumference of culture—­the product and misconstruction of the ­human dream. In other words, and to follow Berger in his radical humanism on Rembrandt’s work, a position close to Van Gogh’s distaste with Baudelaire’s too-­rapid modernism, Rembrandt is, like Stevens, an anagogic figure by means of creative humanism. If Stevens pointed to Orpheus, Homer, Virgil, and Dante as the cadre that he hoped to join, then Berger’s point on mastery helps us with Rembrandt b ­ ecause, as Berger stresses, the critic must understand the antagonism in the relation between the master and the 301

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mastered materials. Without the fundamental and original gesture of turning away from the mastered, mastery has no meaning. Without a criticism committed to learn from and defend imaginative achievement, a good deal of the species’ capacity for poiesis dies in the shadows of ruination talk, the attitudes of structural melancholy, and the temporal postponement of utopian thinking that at best sets value somewhere and sometime ­else, an object of mere gesture. Rembrandt’s Bathsheba is not a ruin or a s­ imple example of an “unwoke” privilege. Criticism must study and write out what­ever overmasters the norm precisely to understand the experience involved in anagogic acts of poiesis, which does not imply in any way a separation of the masterwork from sources of pollution and infection. Importantly, “mastery” is dif­fer­ent when we speak of the master and the mastered. As Berger has it, the master “needed to recognize his vision for what it was, and then to separate it from the usage for which it has been developed” (140). This last phrase makes the point critics must accept as a starting point, as for example with Bathsheba and the nude. Tradition works to enable the master and so absorb the work into itself. The student comes to learn the art that would supply the skills to sustain and renew the educating tradition, to serve the masters who control the circulation and reception of the work. ­Those who are masters to the canon more rarely master the apparatus of tradition to exceed the limits of canon formation. In such cases, then the established cannot or does not want to learn what t­ hese masters teach; in turn, they overwhelm the work by placing it in a circle of praise that contains its pos­si­ble effects. Even the most masterful works cannot resist the containment that does away with the intent of their creation, the power of the artist’s vision, or the complex ­human domain of experience, which ­these works imagine. Berger has a highly individualized sense of mastery, but the ambivalence at the heart of the word as well as the per­sis­tent countertraditions of artists who strug­gle to overmaster their art—­all this suggests the broader and more critical point. Imaginative intelligence makes itself plain by inhabiting certain creatures. Stevens’s “Auroras,” as we recall, poses the scene of frustration in which the creator can do no better than create his own beings to worship and praise him. Stevens gave us an impor­tant topic for meditation. Berger is thinking through a version of this deep prob­lem. He is not discussing an opposition between individual and collective creativity, of the sort that the 302

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cultural ethnographers of the late eigh­teenth ­century and their heirs developed. He, however, does re­orient criticism to the experience that moves the student to mastery in a way that seems magical and does, indeed, embody the mystery that Van Gogh finds in the Louvre’s Rembrandts. Unlike the creator who produces choirs to adore him, the master cannot produce ephebes. This is a keyway to recognize masterly creativity. T ­ here are no creatures adequate to the founding act. As the opening of Saint John’s gospel puts it, the creator cannot reproduce. The master cannot summon originality again into being. In fact, the master has no interest in such echoing. The creative master is at war with iteration, which can be no more than unsatisfactory or simply uninteresting. Berger learned this from his study of mastery as one of its defining characteristics. In this disinterest, a space opens for the required and responsible critic. The artistic master cannot play the critical role, which is inescapably secondary. “To be an exception,” Berger writes, the artist must not only have a vision but also see it for what it is. In that moment begins a complex of experience that requires the fact of permanent strug­gle. “Single-­handed,” Berger continues, “he had to contest himself as a painter in a way that denied the seeing of a painter. This meant that he saw himself ­doing something that nobody ­else could foresee” (140). This last quality, the knowledge of uniqueness, accounts for the master’s disinterest in heirs as an inherent impossibility. The canon, the tradition, the institutions of official culture may appropriate the master’s work and build stories about it—or marginalize and exclude it. T ­ hese forces never alter themselves in light of the master’s unique achievements or urge the development of similar masterful practices and qualities. Of course, by inversion, this fact raises the question to which the answer seems to be no—­ could ­these official institutions nurture mastery when inherently mastery results from strug­gle against the education they offer and the archives they sometimes against themselves preserve? As far as we know, Rembrandt did not write out his own aesthetic. He left us only a small remark about his youthful motives but developed no expression of his own vision or its relation to painting. In a letter from 1639, written to Constantin Huygens, “he described his endeavors as observing . . . ​‘the most natu­ral (e)motion,’ by which he meant the lifelike expression of emotion through natu­ral movement of the h ­ uman body.”29 This naturalist claim does not rest easy with the stylized Baroque. Even the Samson reveals the tensions in Rembrandt’s interests in the natu­ral body’s motions as markers of emotion. Fi­nally, of 303

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course, his emphasis on motion as a marker of emotion comes up against the extremely still figure of Bathsheba, whose settled body somehow in itself creates new truths. I have s­ topped with Berger in ­these pages ­because to understand Rembrandt requires that we turn back to the works themselves, rather than absorb them into an external narrative or search for their intent in a written text. Having explained some of what he has learned about mastery in art from Rembrandt, Berger turns to two paintings, which illuminate “the degree of effort required” to achieve the doubled position of the master (140). Berger looks at ­these works to help us see how Rembrandt came to understand and manage the complexity of his position. In his work, we see how he came to recognize his vision and the purpose of his training and cultural tradition—to be a painter while not accepting painting’s embrace. This is a crucial point. The master is dif­fer­ent not only from the institutions of tradition and official culture. Mastery comes in successful re­sis­tance to the art itself, to the abilities archived from Apelles to Titian, as it ­were. Strug­gle is not the ­simple socioeconomic or po­liti­cal one with the guardian institutions of market and culture. Strug­gle is with the art and the restraints of its capacities. Perhaps the Rembrandt critics, such as Kenneth Clark, who often speak of his rivalry with ­great pre­de­ces­sors do so ­because they partly see and narrowly understand the strug­gle with the imagination’s own most power­ful creations and means to create. The line from Rembrandt to Picasso, then, would be straightforward. We could say that Berger finds “evidence” for his claims about mastery in the two Rembrandt paintings he discusses. That would not be in­ter­est­ing. Rather, Berger pre­sents the paintings as some of the art that has led him to an insight into the nature of mastery, the role of criticism, and the values of each to the species and its habitat. In other words, I pause with Berger ­because he shows us not only how an artist studies and learns but also that to be a critic, one must learn from the art one studies. The masters leave a unique space for criticism. Berger shows us how to learn from art, how to adapt a position of humility in the face of what the critic discovers and perhaps helps establish as a mastery, a magic, from which the rest might learn. Moreover, what we might learn is both how to be a critic and how to accept the humility of secondariness. In the pro­cess, the critic learns ­things about art and life that take the form of clearly stated insights, which also provide loving responses to all that which masterful works create and 304

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leave for us. From such works come poetic possibilities, the evidence of imaginative intellect, easily overlooked or overseen by t­ hose who rush by. The mysterious power to put in place new conceptions of the world, to understand and represent the complexity of historical experience, dis­appears in the tertiary work of official culture. Masterful works in their diverse ways wait to continue the work that set them into being. They do not need the reporters from official culture, who leave them waiting. Of the two paintings from which Berger learns, the second is Rembrandt’s 1658 Self-­Portrait, which is now in the Frick Collection in New York City: “In the ­later painting he has turned the tradition against itself. He has wrested its language away from it. He is an old man. All has gone except a sense of the question of existence, of existence as a question. And the painter in him who is both more and less than the old man has found the means to express just that, using a medium which has been traditionally developed to exclude any such question” (142). Berger has considerable authority as an artist, critic, and sophisticated Marxist thinker about existence within capitalism. His sense of experience, of the value artists create in the strug­gle not to fall within the culture’s forces of normalization, comes with a full sense of the economic realities within which ­these strug­gles occur. About the late Rembrandt portraits, Berger writes, “He grew old in a climate of economic fanat­i­cism and indifference—­not dissimilar to the climate of the period we are living through” (143). ­Here is a double lesson especially for ­those who support the economic fanat­i­cism of the moment with stories that would lock up creative work and poiesis within the seemingly inescapable forces of what­ever we call this fanaticism—­market dominance, late capital, neoliberalism, and so on. Berger had read his Benjamin, as Ways of Seeing shows us.30 In other words, Berger knew and agreed with the basic claim in Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel that the Baroque developed as a response to the fact that “the ­human could no longer simply be copied (as in the Re­nais­ sance), the h ­ uman was no longer self-­evident” (Portraits, 143). Nevertheless, Berger does not point to an outside to this crisis, does not search for a lesson in messianism or utopian melancholy. Nor does he s­ ettle for a ruling economism, the power of which allows no creative escape, offers all the accounts needed by the stories of futureless ruination. Rather, Berger correctly looks to ­human capacities themselves active in persons within history. Accounts of late-­capitalist dominance reducing culture to allegory (in 305

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their latest forms, stories of the world’s end) do not constrain the imaginative intellect we find in poiesis, especially in masterful works, the existence of which proves the blindness of such accounts to h ­ uman capacities in the 31 play of creativity and love. Berger admits the prob­lems that Rembrandt confronted and that the Baroque embodied as an advance and an inheritance. A good critic and a committed humanist, Berger turns to the masterful artworks of ­humans for alternatives to the catastrophes, which in the opinions and stories of many intellectuals have no workable alternatives. Rembrandt knew that the ­human “had to be found in darkness. Rembrandt himself was obstinate, dogmatic, cunning, capable of a kind of brutality. Do not let us turn him into a saint. Yet he was looking for a way out of the darkness” (143), and he found it. “It is the space of each sentient body’s awareness of itself” (144). Of course, Berger’s notion of corporeal as opposed to subjective space could become the target of several critiques. What would ­these objections cost? What consequences follow from putting the stories of such critique into official culture? For one t­ hing, they would close off access to extraordinarily impor­tant efforts of intelligence and imagination to create, to deal with the world, and to provide alternatives to the sense of the real that so easily swallows up even the most self-­defined radical oppositional story lines. That Rembrandt might have created beautifully, successfully, originally, and as part of the ­human effort to dream the world—­this possibility dis­appears in stories of ruination and, in the specific case of Rembrandt, the common tales of market and economic dominance. The brutality with which the dominant culture reinforces its own naturalization through the insufficiently critical, which means loving, practices of its avowed opponents appears in cases such as t­hese. The nonacademic critic and artist is an impor­tant alternative to and rebuke of opinion makers whose judgment does not consider the costs of their competitive spirit in the norms of official culture. The dirty s­oles of Raphael’s feet reveal the imaginative intelligence in all Rembrandt’s major late works. They crack open the frames of conventional genre to offer a glimpse of the mind at work. The dirty and calloused angelic feet are a joke, of course, an example of Rembrandt’s wit, which includes defecating dogs in narrative paintings of the Good Samaritan. Art historians and students of Rembrandt’s beliefs point to ­these t­ hings as examples of an artistic temperament committed to a naturalist rather than 306

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idealist or classical vision of art’s purpose, as well as a sign of his Calvinist belief in a fallen world. This sort of incongruous intrusion into the sublimity of the image has pre­de­ces­sors, of course, and given Rembrandt’s absorption of his art’s resources, he would make par­tic­u­lar use of ­those materials to create designs specific to his own vision.32 In a painting like The Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias’ ­Family, Rembrandt displays all the skills and learning essential to success in the principal genre in which he works. This is the result of his art having summoned him to its practices. His talent and study, his weighing of expectations and traditions, are all on display, but the feet, designed as an insult to heaven’s claims to transcendence, ­matter most. T ­ hose ­soles are bold and bodily, completing and leading the eyes to the muscled legs of a corporeal angel whose clothing, as he flies, impresses with the folds and textures of manmade work. Their effect is direct. ­There is nothing enigmatic. They require no post-­Idealist story to see that Rembrandt has humanized the archangel with a body, which should be, on Raphael’s own biblical testimony, unnatural and unsoiled by flesh or contaminated by earth. They bring the painting in its entirety back to Earth, pointing away from any dualist tension between heaven and Earth or, more impor­tant, any belief system that reconciles ­these two in some larger unity. In other words, they point entirely past the prob­ lems of the Baroque back to life as lived, back to the purely earthly nature, the sources of all marks of and desires for transcendence. As Berger suggests, they draw all back to the body and to our need to see it, to see it as the recorded embodiment of experience, imagination, and intelligence. ­Those soiled ­soles are a mark of wit, not only of knowing but also of transforming, of humor and finitude—­the type associated especially with the limits of knowing, limits that m ­ atter especially near to what h ­ umans call transcendence. Clark notes that Rembrandt’s early ­etching of The Good Samaritan, with its far-­from-­ideal defecating dog in the foreground, might have had a pre­de­ces­sor in Michelangelo, but that speculation, remotely pos­ si­ble as it is, does nothing to dull the sharp intelligence in Rembrandt’s image, which returns the ­matter to the foundations of art and life.33 Rembrandt’s reputation includes terms like “brooding,” “dark,” “reflective” and his dramatic chiaroscuro and impasto, and especially his late self-­portraits have not led writers, even t­ hose consumed by his humanism, to give wit much of a place in their sense of him. We need not be post-­ Freudians to know that wit is more than superficial humor. Indeed, in the 307

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hands of a master, it is more than the unconscious work of desire or frustration.34 The OED tells us that from Boethius through Francis Bacon and beyond, wit referred to “the seat of consciousness or thought, the mind.” Albeit in En­glish, the sense of this word, with its northern Eu­ro­pean roots, persisted into the seventeenth ­century and was alive in Dutch, as it might well now be in verstand or even wijsheid. T ­ hese notions easily point to the related meaning, “the faculty of thinking and reasoning in general; ­mental capacity, understanding, intellect, reason.” Rembrandt’s clever play on Raphael’s insistence to Tobit and Tobias on the antithetical nature of his higher creation to ­human earthliness opens our eyes back to the intellect that Berger gets at when he tells us that masters stand apart and that they see themselves as alone able to do what they foresee. In other words, this wit opens our eyes to the capacity of imaginative intellect at play in t­ hese last paintings. It is what makes them masterful over and beyond ­people with influence and over and beyond the status assigned by the canon makers (and breakers) of mass opinion and official culture. “Wit” has root relations not only to foolishness (aphrosuné) but also to ignorance (άγνοια). The humor of the (perhaps unknowing) artist who soils the ­soles of an archangel gives us a chuckle but offers quite a bit more. He gives us the fool’s wisdom, close to the ground and expressed f­ ree of constraints, always at the edge of risk. This sort of gift is another opening onto the daring of Rembrandt’s fights against the darkness that would suppress his work. The Origin of the German Trauerspiel thinks about comedy, as we have seen, in terms of the plotter, of socially destabilizing figures. No doubt, the comic is always somewhat destabilizing, although Greek comedies suggest a conservative edge to some examples of the genre. Critics need another thought about comedy than this. If the same wit that is consciousness, morals, knowledge, and creativity is also ignorance and foolishness, then the master is another sort of comic than a plotter. Benjamin and Schmitt have good reasons for their preoccupations with tragedy and Trauerspiel. Nonetheless, thinking about comedy and even romance might have turned attention in other directions. The mastery that comes with wit—­indeed, wit seems to be the trope of mastery—­requires a sense of comedy richer and more original than the two terms that t­hese writers’ works have set as the frame for modern thinking about our historical situation.35 The comic wit of an archangel’s dirty ­soles turns our thinking back, as Van Gogh and Berger suggest, to the mysteries, of bodies, of earthly life, of the ­grand fact of imaginative 308

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intellect, which, Rembrandt helps us see, has created not only the world but the ­human itself. “You have spoken about this painting and never mentioned that she’s nude,” commented an audience member in Hong Kong apropos the Bathsheba. This was before the #MeToo movement but not before foundational writings by feminists had unpacked the profound misogyny of the male gaze in art and quotidian life.36 Of course, a debate followed on ­these analyses of male power, hoping to aestheticize the female nude especially in a postmodernist dialectic of distance and per­for­mance.37 #MeToo has made the aesthetic argument hard to sustain, with activists and artists calling for serious revamping of the Western tradition of the nude, especially in its officially established venues. Yet intense debates about the nude continue, about the nature and universality of misogyny, about the forms of masculine vio­lence and authoritarianism, and about the possibility of art apart from the practices of social justice.38 It should be impossible for anyone to look at the nude without a strongly resistant suspicion that the genre extended, aestheticized, and so normalized forms of sexual and gender repression and injustice. In a way, the ­great female nudes in Western tradition crystallize the civilizational intersectionality of w ­ omen’s objectification. In recent years, since feminist theorizing of the male gaze combined with the still-­too-­limited successes of feminism in academic disciplines to force a realignment of intellectual work, mainstream scholarship has made some effort to study the nude as a device within misogyny. We can see this in studies of Rembrandt as scholars work to understand something of the dynamic of desire, power, and historical circumstance at play in his works and the contexts that precede and surround them. Rembrandt painted two monumental nudes, Bathsheba and Danae, considered among the most impor­tant and successful instances of the genre. Eric Jan Sluijter’s book Rembrandt and the Female Nude is a prominent example of mainstream Rembrandt scholarship’s efforts to reconsider Rembrandt in the context of feminist-­inspired discussions of the nude. Sluijter’s book carefully details the traditions in which Rembrandt worked and lays out the literary, theological, and moral context in which the sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Protestant cultures would have enabled and received the female nude. Moral and religious sentiment often opposed the nude as a genre, but not for its injustice to w ­ omen. On the contrary, Protestant worries about the nude depended on Judeo-­Christian beliefs about “beautiful 309

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nude ­women who aroused male voyeurs” (360) and made ­women’s bodies the locus of moralistic demands for the protection of men and society from erotic danger. Of course, as Sluijter details, the market for the nude rested on the eroticism of a mode, which objectified w ­ omen entirely to arouse feelings of lust and desire, to domesticate sin among t­hose who could afford the images. (For the less well-­off, openly lascivious materials catered to the men who wanted naked ­women for their visual and bodily pleasures.) Sluijter adopts both modern theories of the gaze and a sincere form of moral outrage in his analy­sis of the nude as a form. He comprehensively describes the social and psychological functions of the nude in the Lowlands. About the specific subgenre of narrative biblical paintings to which Rembrandt’s Bathsheba belongs, he writes this: “Their essential character would have been clear to the public for which ­these paintings ­were meant: a seductive beauty is preening herself for her lover, and this lover is, in fact, the beholder, who is like ‘David’ ” (344). Rembrandt’s painting removes David entirely from its repre­sen­ta­tion, leaving the viewer alone in his place. The moral indictments of David then fall on the viewer. The logic of the Bathsheba narrative requires that she be the most beautiful and dangerously seductive of all ­women in this mode. While she is not beautiful in the classical style, nothing like Titian’s Venus, for example, the Louvre’s late Bathsheba is at least a version of what she must be, “the summit of physical beauty” (361). Sluijter lets the importance of this insight pass too easily. Bathsheba tempts King David, the favorite of God and the prefiguration of Christ himself, to the most serious sins of adultery, rape, and murder. His sin is fundamental; that is, he breaks the covenant with Yahweh. In the words of God’s messenger Nathan, David has “despised the word of the Lord”: “You have utterly scorned the Lord.”39 Calvin blamed David more than Bathsheba for his crimes but nonetheless branded Bathsheba “unchaste” ­because, considering her beauty, she lacked discretion in her bath. Prefiguring Christ in the desert, confronted by Satan’s temptation in the form of w ­ oman, David falls. As David is the favorite of God, his sin requires the greatest of temptations, the most dangerous of allures, and so the most beautiful seductress. Bathsheba is Eve yet again. The Louvre’s Bathsheba did not need to be a coquette of the type Rubens painted around 1635 or the willing seductress whose frank or even brazen look at the viewer Rembrandt painted around 1643. In the Bathsheba, Rembrandt paints a ­woman thoroughly victimized not only by David 310

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but also by a cultural and religious tradition that denuded her of w ­ ill, thought, and feeling. In 1646, the Dutch Jesuit Adriaan Poirters summarized the severe ­because ­simple version of the story: “How is it pos­si­ble that David could fall so deep? He went to his Belvedere, and let his eyes roam, and his eyes played freely with Bathsheba. He besmirched his soul; she washed her body, sitting in the w ­ ater, his fire was kindled; beholding generated desire, desire consent, consent adultery and adultery manslaughter” (quoted in Sluijter, Rembrandt, 363). The passive voice—­“was kindled”—is the key to this text. It does not m ­ atter, with regard to paint­ erly tradition, if Bathsheba is a coquette. To be seen defines her place in the drama of David. The consent to desire, Poirters mentions, is, of course, David’s consent to his own desire against the w ­ ill of God. It is not Bathsheba’s consent to her own adultery, ­because this is the story of David’s fall, in which her body has a nonspeaking, nonthinking, unfeeling part. The paint­erly tradition could represent a Bathsheba victimized by power, a ­woman raped, made pregnant, and left a w ­ idow by unbridled tyrannical power. Such a Bathsheba would share in the innocence of other victimized ­women such as Susannah. Sluijter comes near to this point when he explains that Calvin could not blame Bathsheba for bathing ­because then he would need to blame the innocent Susannah. Rather, Calvin blames her judgment, her indiscretion. Modern scholars debate if David raped Bathsheba or if she angled for the king. Some won­der if she is stupid or cunning.40 2 Samuel 11 leaves much unsaid but clear. “So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her” (verse 4). Between the messengers sent to get her and her coming to him, ­there is no space for her consent, no space for her existence as a being other than seen object commanded by his desire. ­Those who see her as setting a trap for David must displace Bathsheba’s criminality and intelligence outside the narrative altogether since 2 Samuel supplies no basis for such views. Ironically, this is ­because David sees, takes, and makes her pregnant. In this clear narrative, ­there is ­little ambiguity and no testimony to Bathsheba’s interiority or even to her bodily register of ­these experiences. Being sent for and taken reduces her to stillness, to arrest, ­because nothing about Bathsheba moves; no emotions or thoughts surface even as David takes her body. The Bathsheba story is a clear tale of brutality and vio­lence, an easy allegorical fulfillment of analytic warnings of the consequences of the male gaze, a vio­lence extended even into academic journals’ proposals that she 311

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is a cunning ­woman who perpetrated vio­lence against the soul of David— an idea that once more makes her Satan’s Eve. The Bathsheba is an astonishingly splendid work of art, well regarded and praised as perhaps the finest nude in the Western tradition. Given the biblical narrative, recast by reformers and scholars alike, we might say, with some hostility, that the painting’s avowed greatness among many shows only the intersectional nature of misogyny and art’s place in it. We could find some evidence for such a position among Rembrandt admirers who see the painting as an exemplary erotic achievement, best for arousing male desire. This is the idea that accepts Rembrandt positioning the viewer in David’s place as offering the viewer the same experience David had on seeing and taking her. Sluijter’s thorough work shows that men held this view. ­Others, however, especially figures such as Sluijter, do not accept the notion that the discourses and practices, the semiotics, of intersectional misogyny alone account for the work’s importance. In his opinion, Rembrandt embraces the established tradition of Bathsheba but revises it so that viewers empathize with Bathsheba in her bath. In this way, the viewer is no longer the hypermasculine David but a figure reformed into sympathy with her suffering. Sluijter contributes to how we should think about this painting, and his work is the basis for a more comprehensive sense of its importance. We could describe his position as that of a moderate liberal, unwilling to accept the critical challenge the painting represents. W ­ ere ­there no more to the Bathsheba’s importance than an ability to develop viewers’ empathy with an abused ­woman, other works would come to mind as impor­tant for the same reason. Indeed, the general liberal argument in ­favor of reading fiction has to do with readers developing empathic skills in relation to created worlds and persons. Before we discuss the greater complexities of this painting, the kind that led Van Gogh to speak of mysteries in the late Rembrandts, we need to rec­ord and analyze a part of the rec­ord ­behind a consensus that this is a particularly impor­tant work. I set aside as disgraceful and illegitimate any claim that it is impor­tant ­because it best provokes erotic arousal in viewers. This requires that I also set aside negative judgments of the painting on the basis of the same reasoning. In the latter case, the opinion is wrong even if thoroughly understandable in a culture of intersectional misogynic abuse. Some of it ­settles for too-­rapid thinking about the consequences of even imaginative intelligence. The painting is impor­tant as a ­grand act of

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imagination far beyond the reduction that motivated judgment imposes on its qualities. Sluijter believes the Bathsheba is impor­tant as a unique achievement far beyond the limits of the traditions to which it belongs. His sense of that achievement is too parochial, however, despite his exhaustive scholarship and programmatic effort to correct the aesthetically disinterested theory of the nude that had held for a long time a­ fter Kenneth Clark’s writing in The Nude. Sluijter delays his discussion of the Bathsheba to the conclusion of his book. (Not coincidentally, so too had Clark.) Sluijter sets up a clear contrast meant to displace Clark’s reading of the painting. The latter saw the Bathsheba as the highest repre­sen­ta­tion of the intellect’s power in art to abstract almost entirely from the body. Faced with the inescapable fact that Rembrandt forced the body on the viewer, Clark made two adjustments to his thinking, only one of which weakens his argument. First, he made the still infamous distinction between naked and nude,41 according to which design (disegno)—he adapts Michelangelo’s aesthetic paradigm as related by Vasari—­would contain “the contingencies of nature,” as Sluijter calls them (Rembrandt, 313). Given the priority of design in classical and pre-­Venetian art, Clark emphasizes that artists can strictly formalize “the female body . . . ​and preserve some tremor of its first impact.” A work of this sort can be far “from actuality,” yet we can say that it still “achieves its ends with remarkable assurance” (Nude, 137). Design contains enough to make the naked nude and, in so d ­ oing, makes the nude erotically effective for the male viewer. Color defined the Venetian aesthetic of Titian and Raphael, which Rembrandt studied and mastered as he challenged the priority of design on which Clark’s argument in defense of the nude rests. The materiality of paint (associated with the Venetians) along with the growing custom of painting from life countered the “severe formal discipline” that Clark required “the naked body must undergo if it is to survive as art” (142). The emphasis on color brought the flesh of the nude ­woman into a dif­fer­ent pro­cess of simulation than design favored.42 The Louvre’s Bathsheba brought the colorist arts to an apogee, resulting in an absolutely original and unreproducible work. At this point, Clark nearly contradicts his position on the priority of design in holding and directing the erotic. The painting’s success forces him to offer a dif­fer­ent account of its mastery than that of other nudes; he makes it sui generis. The painting’s

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power to draw Clark away from a consistent moral and aesthetic position, other­wise sustained over hundreds of pages, testifies to the effect such works have when given the attention they reward. By contrast, the work of Mieke Bal, which academics much admire, tells us nothing about the painting and does not respond to it in any way. Bal’s work defends against the possibility of viewing the work. Her writing is in fact not about the painting at all. In a ­simple reading of such textualizing storytelling, it often seems the painting does not exist; only ways of talking about it exist, and they exist as objects of semiotic analy­sis. Bal’s title, Reading “Rembrandt,” means the book takes the reading of Rembrandt as its topic. The story develops along two lines: first, an analy­sis of the semiotics of Rembrandt reception; second, an attempt to establish a mode called “reading for the text.” For ­those who spent time working in the theory and posttheory years, elaborate attention to the modes of pro­cessing art objects, canons, discourses, and so on normalized the turning away from art into the narcissism of closed chambers of tertiary speculation. In effect, such work quickly became predictable and boring.43 Van Gogh’s first warning to Bernard applies ­here as well. A self-­styled theorizing designed to suppress the existence of art except as the play of social knowledge formations has less ­human value than the forced change in Clark’s position, no ­matter how undertheorized and misogynist we might consider his efforts. Sluijter both builds on and revises Clark on the nude. His position consistently builds ­toward the Bathsheba as the completion of Rembrandt’s aesthetic and ­human ambition “to incite the greatest pos­si­ble empathy in the viewer” (Rembrandt, 368). Rembrandt takes the nude, perhaps the most controversial and potentially reifying mode of aesthetic expression, as the necessary vehicle for his ambition. If Rembrandt’s adaptation of Venetian color troubled Clark, it fits Sluijter’s thinking ­because it allows for a naturalistic pre­sen­ta­tion of the flesh and the body. (We cannot confuse the anti-­Idealism of naturalism with realism.) Clark argued that Rembrandt’s Bathsheba had to abandon classical design ­ because the “conventional nude” projected neither thought nor interiority. Taking Clark and Sluijter together, we would say that the Bathsheba weakens the rule of design to make the body as flesh immediately pre­sent for view to portray ­human thought and experience as the basis for ­human empathy. Especially in Rembrandt’s nudes—­male and female—he painted h ­ uman bodies in their specificity, with a realism that sometimes upset viewers not comfortable 314

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with the “ugliness” he pre­sents.44 A Benjaminian line, as we have seen, accounts for this naturalism as within the transition from the Re­nais­sance to the modern Baroque. As Clark and Sluijter suggest when they agree, t­ here is an alternative to this line, one much closer to Rembrandt’s art specifically and one that explains both the deep interest of major critics in the Bathsheba and its effect on them. While this alternative often begins with the concept of interiority, it develops into a more comprehensive account of the painting as art, as itself a solution to prob­lems taken up by Benjamin and ­others defining modernity as ruination. Hélène Cixous, for example, writes that the Bathsheba does not belong to the tradition of the nude at all. This extreme claim, from an author of écriture féminine,45 ­matters not only ­because it would move the painting from within the ongoing debates about the nude as form but also ­because it tells us again that this painting presses on critical and creative intelligence precisely ­because it exists beyond the traditions and training that enabled it. “This female nude is not a nude,” Cixous writes. “Not the object of desire, and of murder. . . . ​Every­thing is in the interior. No repre­sen­ta­tion.”46 Other prominent critics have stressed this interiority in separate ways. Robert Hughes simply says that in this “imperishable masterpiece,” Rembrandt “portrayed a w ­ oman thinking while naked—an almost unheard-of achievement in the art of the nude. Bathsheba clearly has an internal life.”47 Hughes’s direct statement removes the Bathsheba from the enigmatic world that invited gnostic interpretations while inviting us back to secular history. Hughes adds to what we have already seen. Sluijter tells us that Rembrandt forces the viewer “to contemplate the vis­i­ble . . . ​as well as the invisible,” that is, “her thoughts and conflicting emotions” (Rembrandt, 367), while for Kenneth Clark, the painting is, as have seen, an unrepeatable miracle: “the naked body permeated with thought” (Nude, 342). In T. J. Clark’s more expansive critical vision, he won­ders “if ­human beings are properly equipped to deal with intensities of this kind. But it is worth the risk.” T. J. Clark speaks of the “feats of empathy,” which lie at the heart of Rembrandt’s vision, like a paradox.48 What is t­ here about the painting that elicits ­these diverse accounts of its uniqueness and importance? What ­else might it have to offer ­those who give it enough time? I have referred to Berger, Sluijter, and T.  J. Clark ­because together they give us a way to understand and value the Bathsheba. Berger, having read his Benjamin, stresses that Rembrandt broke through the prob­lem 315

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represented by the Baroque. As I have suggested, this is a doubly key point. Not only does Berger look to the art for solutions to prob­lems described by some theorists as insurmountable in culture, except perhaps by arcane and messianic means, but he also returns to us a humanistic secular criticism in­de­pen­dent of the undesirable consequences of stories he knows well and re­spects. According to Berger—­and he says this ­after reading Benjamin—­ Rembrandt strug­gled mightily in the darkness to find and bring from it a solution to the loss of the h ­ uman as it was known in and created by the Eu­ro­pean High Re­nais­sance. For this insight alone, Berger is a historically impor­tant critical intellectual relevant to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Rembrandt brought the body, not the subject, out of darkness. Moreover—­and this is why the Bathsheba ­matters so much—­ Rembrandt’s body is sentient and pensive, setting awareness in the space of the body.49 Berger’s criticism is an advance on the combined Clark / Sluijter position. From Berger, we take away the lesson that a criticism concerned with feelings and morals rushes by the secular poetic accomplishment of this painting. Sluijter brings to bear a ­simple moral category when he allows that Rembrandt aimed to have viewers empathize with the complex ­human experience represented on a canvas. Furthermore, he repeats the conventional mind / body dualism of Kenneth Clark. With Clark, the body image lets us follow Bathsheba’s thoughts. For Sluijter, it lets us feel thoughts and emotions caused by her dilemma. Perhaps ­because ­these scholars write art history, unlike Berger’s comments, their remarks are ahistorical. For them, the value of Rembrandt’s work lies in some sort of universality detachable from the strug­gles that led to it. Even Cixous, whose thinking is far more in­ter­est­ing, allegorizes the painting and adapts details to a fragmented narrative about a diverted gaze, ­women’s interiority, and so on, which ends in its own universality. “He paints the precise passing instant, the instant that is the door to eternity. In the instant is the eternity.”50 I submit that Rembrandt’s achievement in the Bathsheba is not in a moral, psychological realism or a high-­modernist epiphany. The painting is a nude, all other comments aside, which is neither realist nor naturalist nor epiphanic. Berger’s emphasis on Rembrandt’s successful strug­gle to bring the h ­ uman back from the darkness in the form of bodily space is an extremely impor­tant insight on which we must build if we are to approach the mysteries Van Gogh saw in this and other Rembrandts in the Louvre. We should follow Berger for his more complete sense of the ­human in the 316

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world and, by implication, his understanding of poiesis as a secular activity of world making in time, a pro­cess that also inevitably makes the ­human constantly, certainly not for the last time. The critical field gives us room to develop this rich line of thinking and to establish that the Bathsheba in a time called catastrophic by many p ­ eople embodies the special possibilities of imaginative intelligence to create needed alternatives to the real. Scholars note that the painting lacks many signs of the biblical narrative, especially the presence of David. Nonetheless, the w ­ oman bathing, the “crone”-­like servant tending her feet, and especially the letter in her hand convince us this is a Bathsheba. The letter is a genre addition from late in the tradition rather than from the original text. According to the biblical narrative, David sees and wants the bathing Bathsheba. He takes and impregnates her and, a­ fter a failed plot to hide his paternity, o ­ rders the killing of her heroic husband on the battlefield. Her first child dies, a divine punishment, so we are told, inflicted on David, for his crimes. Married and pregnant again, she ­mothers Solomon and successfully maneuvers to have her son become David’s heir and the wisest of sovereigns. Desire first as sin and then at work in sexual reproduction and patriarchy moves this narrative forward across po­liti­cal and personal histories serving the interests of several regimes. While the Bible might have made of this the story of David and so the Christ, Rembrandt placed Bathsheba in the foreground. Not only did he set David in the darkness and distance, but he cut down his original painting to its pre­sent size, bringing Bathsheba forward, to dominate the entirety of the canvas. Her body sets the plane of the painting. Her stomach sets the axis for the movement needed to view the canvas, leading the eyes upward past her breasts fi­nally to her head and face, to a diverted gaze, meditating or ruminating on the unbearable situation she confronts. She cannot say no, ­because no has no meaning in a situation without freedom. Does she consent to her rape, committing only adultery with the king, or does she resist and meet the force of men whom David sent to her with the letter she sits reading? The paint­erly convention dramatizes David’s distanced view of the bathing ­woman. When Rembrandt cuts David from the image, he unambiguously places the viewer in his place. The nude is inseparable from desire, so Rembrandt not only directly makes desire the topic of the work but also raises questions about the operations of desire among varying viewers. Cutting the canvas to bring the body closer to the foreground, the 317

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chiaroscuro from which the flesh emerges, the extraordinary luminosity of certain high points of light and color in the image—­all ­these technical decisions make Bathsheba’s nude almost entirely fill the field of vision. In a most material sense, Rembrandt achieved the victory that Berger judged his historical success—­the ­battle to bring the ­human out of darkness as bodily. Kenneth Clark and Jan Sluijter conclude in their separate ways that Rembrandt managed to pre­sent a thinking body, a body having thought and feeling. The Bathsheba achieves much more than this rather-­ conventional humanistic aim. Van Gogh spoke of Rembrandt’s mysteries. Yet the body could not be more directly pre­sent, less mysterious, than its overwhelming presence makes it. T ­ here is nothing enigmatic about it; it requires no interpretation. Bathsheba’s body is not a unified marker of fate, thought, or feeling. Writing of Rembrandt’s portraits specifically and the absorption of his art with ­faces, T. J. Clark invokes Erich Auerbach’s writing on the historicality of the Hebrew Bible to place the emergence of bodies from darkness as an analog to the visit of Yahweh’s voice from “some unknown heights or depths.”51 Pictorially, Clark argues, a body like Bathsheba never occupies a foreground ­because the darkness from which it seems to come is no background. Rather than speak of a foregrounding, then, we should speak of such a body as absolute in its presence. The darkness actively proj­ects the body t­oward the viewer on the plane of the canvas, creating a proximity, which is “the most extraordinary aspect of Rembrandt’s staging of presence.”52 While Kenneth Clark, Sluijter, and other scholars draw attention to the luminous body, a flesh so real and close that Bathsheba becomes a ­human for whom the painter evokes the very possibility of empathy from viewers, whose habits make them indifferent to her (nude) suffering humanity, T. J. Clark makes two advances on this impor­tant moral claim. First, he explains how Rembrandt creates h ­ uman presence, the visionary ambition that paint­erly technique serves and instantiates. Second, he establishes that art’s contribution to the creation of the ­human in its world is a secular act, the nature of which requires that we see it over and against, indeed reversing, the materiality of presecular modes of ontology. What had been a universe mysteriously divine, with hidden energies and emergent demands, becomes via Rembrandt’s strug­gle with the darkness a fully ­human world, in which the power to create the h ­ uman as pre­sent in the world is itself a capacity of the species. 318

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Had T. J. Clark pursued his insight into Auerbach, he would doubtlessly have come to the truths that Auerbach left us ­after studying Dante’s work. Dante gives his characters the presence of individuals standing out in time as historical and h ­ uman, emerging from within the chiaroscuro of God’s universe. Benjamin argues that the Baroque period into which we live made this impossible. Berger asserts that Rembrandt strug­gled through the darkness to the body. T. J. Clark explains in terms relevant to Benjamin’s account that Rembrandt did this precisely by drawing ­human presence, as the creation of ­human imagination, from the darkness. Rembrandt’s success shows that the Hebrew God depends on the darkness, which Benjamin believed and which led him to the conclusion that God’s withdrawal left us with trauma as the Baroque. The e­ arlier, Catholic Dante does not leave the world in the uncertainty of divine willful darkness. His ­humans are fully and dramatically pre­sent, articulated in their bodily experience, ironically in their disembodied selves. In their fixed afterlives, Dante’s characters rec­ord the marks of experience on their bodies, even as God’s punishments deepen wounds that mimic experience. Moreover, experience becomes the rec­ord of life, of poiesis lived communally and individually within the historicality that ­humans make and remake, even when they long melancholically for utopian escape from the ­imagined total ruination of all history (capital).53 Rembrandt’s Bathsheba is the ­human pre­sent in the world as such, as the body and mind together being ­human, embodied, thoughtful, pained, and facing undecided f­ utures. Bathsheba’s f­ uture is only fated for t­ hose who know the Bible’s version of David’s story. In this painting, if ­there is futurity, it depends entirely on the thought and feeling moving in her as a ­human. In this sense, we can return to Cixous and say that this is not a nude. The genre of the female nude, by convention, does not create the presence of the h ­ uman. On the contrary, it violently removes from w ­ omen the possibility of presence and, g­ oing not too far from the obvious, removes ­women from humanity. The Bathsheba re-­creates and redirects an entire art form, restoring the h ­ uman in and through the trope of the nude. In a revisionary return to origins, Rembrandt makes us recall that painting, as in the legends of Apelles, took the female nude as the study that best trained the artist in representing life and form. Rembrandt’s daring is greater than Sluijter could conceive precisely ­because his moralistic account of the nude stops short of the obvious 319

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extreme consequence of the nude’s dehumanization of ­women. Kenneth Clark, astonishingly, notes that Rembrandt had to move away from the classical nude ­because that figure could not become thoughtful. In effect, the female classical nude, no ­matter what ­else might be said, represents the ­woman not as a ­human ideal but as an inhuman idea, a nightmare’s version of a desired object. When Rembrandt paints Bathsheba, he does a far more demanding t­hing than make a viewer won­der at her body or empathize with her moral dilemma. Rembrandt, in a firmly anagogic mode, returns to the most fundamental of t­hings. Apelles’s originary status stems from the female nude he created, which became the touchstone for artistic excellence before it became the device academies considered best for training paint­ers to represent life as a member of the guild.54 Rembrandt, in Berger’s sense, becomes a master in the Bathsheba, as he breaks f­ ree of tradition and training to express his own vision, which is nothing less than a poetic invention unseen by anyone before him.55 Even though Berger puts the value of mastery in individual terms, its consequences can have species-­wide importance, despite the fact that normative modes of practice and reception minimize the stakes. As I have been arguing throughout this book, the imaginative intellect, which is a species quality, resides in poets’, artists’, and communities’ life inventions.56 Western culture alone, to restrict the terms of discussion, has since Plato’s horror at the execution of Socrates had a strong intellectual tradition set against the normalcies of po­liti­cal cultural life in what­ever ideological and institutional forms they appear. The Bathsheba is an instance of how imaginative intellect lives and appears in artworks scattered across time and space. The imaginative intellect becomes responsible to itself in what Berger calls mastery. T. J. Clark discusses Rembrandt as a person infected with the bourgeois individualism of the Dutch Golden Age, a period that models the cap­ i­tal­ist individual as much as any other. Yet, for Clark, something about Rembrandt inescapably demands a critical account of h ­ uman capacity at work within and yet beyond the scope of circumstance. Furthermore, when he won­ders if h ­ uman beings “are properly equipped to deal with intensities of this kind,” he insists on the foundational importance and almost ontological difference of the masterful artists whose works, for ­those who give them time, produce such effects.57 Reading T. J. Clark strictly, the critic teaches us that t­ hese intensities exist in the work in­de­pen­dently of audience, the product of imaginative intellect in itself, emergent from the darkness in 320

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the work of t­ hose whom critics call masters. T ­ here is no won­der, then, that such works have no influence and such masters no ephebes, at best poor répétiteurs. In the Bathsheba, Rembrandt gathers the intensities of full ­human presence with two specific consequences: that the arts can, first, counteract the normative modes of history and be the location of imaginative intellect and, second, bring the fullness of ­human presence into history, always t­here even when most pass it by. When the full humanity of bodies dis­appears into state and racist vio­lence, when murderers and politicians make ­humans, including themselves, merely abject, then the imaginative intellect seems lost. Reducing the ­human to categories and corpses destroys life, of course, but it also destroys what makes life ­human and the ­human committed to life—­especially the viability of the entire habitat. Rembrandt’s Bathsheba exists with the full marks of ­human possibility vis­i­ble in the techniques that made the image. During the high-­theory period from the 1960s through to the 1990s in the North Atlantic world especially, the letter in Bathsheba’s hand would have drawn considerable attention.58 ­After Jacques Lacan especially, the letter in Bathsheba’s hand, with its invisible or unwritten text, a message from David hidden in plain sight, as it ­were, would become a source of enigmatic speculation. The letter would then become the key to an allegorical reading that made the text a play, formulaically wrapped around writing, the invitation to a semiotic or post-­ Freudian story.59 Such readings come from the long ascetic and gnostic traditions against which this book argues in defense of secular ­human poiesis and criticism’s obligations to this. Such readings rest, often explic­itly, on the ruination thesis, which makes allegoresis and utopian messianism attractive. Such readings are acts of ascesis. They empty the ­human, as concept and real­ity, approaching terms of near despair, which find in “hope” the mechanism to defer a desire off into an indefinite and most likely impossible time.60 They easily degrade any named ­human aspiration into a crude and minimalist category, making it pos­si­ble, for example, to invent the normative conventions of social practice but impossible to imagine legitimately other possibilities on the part of persons or groups. The rec­ord of experience, the fact of experience, and the archives of history fall into the dump or ­under the shadow of hope, always ­under the shadows of inevitability or determinism. What is lost if we read the Bathsheba away from the h ­ uman, which Rembrandt (and his sitter) worked so hard to bring to presence? First, we 321

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would forget the pro­cesses by which the species brought historicality into consciousness as an original contribution to the ecosystem. Second, we would forget the importance of h ­ uman experience as the basis for the posthumanist ambitions of new intellectual movements.61 Third, but not last, we would neglect the specific form of intellectual imaginative agency embodied in ­human poiesis, neglecting the making for the materials. The Bathsheba’s mystery is quite specific. How does art create the ­human in a place where imaginative intellect dwells and works on the imaginations of ­those who stay with it awhile? The more traditional scholars, Kenneth Clark and Sluijter, look for in the painting’s ability to create empathy, the moral commonality of h ­ uman being. In order to do so, however, they impose unhesitatingly on Rembrandt the notion that the h ­ uman is the expansive individual subject, capable of reaching through and across space to combine with other subjects. We could call this love as easily as we could call it empathy, especially given how desire enables such contact. John Berger’s primary emphasis, by contrast, is not on empathy but on the materiality of Bathsheba’s body. ­Human bodies have laws, which determine their borders and rec­ord the facts of experience. Berger reads the Bathsheba phenomenally, using bodily pain and plea­sure to involve consciousness of its space and h ­ uman experience to prioritize the circumscribed material that is the h ­ uman body. His terms and method lead to the interpretive crux of most sympathetic accounts of this painting, the point Kenneth Clark had made, that Rembrandt creates a body thinking, specifically a ­woman embodied and circumscribed by male desire and law, worrying her fate as the fate of her raped body. “She sits t­ here life-­size and naked. She is pondering her fate. The King has seen her and desires her,” is how Berger puts it (“Rembrandt Now,” 5). The creation of her body, material not in the history of canvas, pigment, and varnish but historical in the art of experience, demands an account of how the image moves from nakedness to “pondering.” Berger ­angles his answer. Viewers see her “nubile stomach” first: “She ­will become pregnant” (5). The servant cleaning her feet, a version of the old crone in many nudes of seductive ­women, has eyes at the level of her stomach. As we know from Simon Schama’s ­great book on Rembrandt, the drama of Bathsheba’s tragic situation follows the cir­cuit of eyes and vision: from the absent David to the viewer to the devoted servant and fi­ nally to Bathsheba’s own eyes turned down contemplatively, woefully, ­toward the ­woman bathing her. Her body, purified according to the logics 322

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of culture, matrimony, and biology, sits waiting a fate that pollutes her as well as David’s kingdom. Schama eloquently expresses the pathos of the humanistic view of this painting: “Bathsheba is burdened by thought, the lines of the body evoking, for once, the self-­containment of classical friezes to suggest Bathsheba’s fatalism: The mood intensely self-­interrogatory.”62 Schama moves too quickly, despite his understanding of the painting’s dramatic value. Berger’s impressionistic take on the painting keeps our eyes focused on the work itself: “­There i­sn’t another belly in Eu­ro­pean art painted with a fraction of this devotion” (“Rembrandt Now,” 5). Of course, the “belly,” soon to be pregnant, localizes David’s violent and consequential desire, so that “it has become the center of its own story” (5). Suddenly, the possessed and possessive individual subject returns in Berger, in a way that threatens his own fundamental claim about the painting. The Bathsheba generates a consistent prob­lem for viewers and critics who try to stay with it long enough to appreciate its mystery. On the one hand, as T. J. Clark puts it, the painting is pure presence, while on the other hand, it sets up bonds of h ­ uman emotion. Berger presses this conundrum to as sensible a conclusion as he can. The pre­sent material body closed off in its own space has and represents the fullness of a set of h ­ uman experiences, a story of pathos and importance. The art is humane and complete, so that ­humans retain not only the capacity for complex experience but also the ability to recognize it (and care about it) in o ­ thers. This art forms a bond of commonality that produces a recognition of common humanity, the values of which stand out in the image and its elicited relations. The ­great Rembrandt paintings, for Berger, exist as “dialogues” centered on the parts of bodies existing in space. Artistic success lies in an almost moral skill to be “faithful to a corporeal experience,” so that t­ hese paintings and the parts of bodies, with their stories, “speak to something every­body carries within them.” Rembrandt’s mysteries dissolve into recognition and memory, the reinforcements of common humanity: “Before his art, the spectator’s body remembers its own inner experience” (5). Berger prepares for a more impor­tant conclusion than he expresses h ­ ere. Had he taken the next step in his thinking, the painting, more than linked to an external experience other than its own, would appear as the art object that creates the very fact of experience shared in bodily terms. For example, Kenneth Clark’s and Sluijter’s notions of empathy depended on ideas of individualized subjective interiority, a dialectic of memory and recognition. Berger’s emphasis 323

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on the fact of bodily space as the basis for presence emerging from darkness would uncover the pro­cesses by which the historically h ­ uman material beings who share each other and experience come into being by virtue of imaginative intellect. The work creates precisely what Berger believes it depends on for its own success. Berger returns Rembrandt to an ancient account of h ­ uman being, one suggested comically by Aristophanes. The work creates via the texture of bodies the fact of desiring to be with the “interiority” of the other. This is love. If the Rembrandts, Berger concludes, “reveal an ‘innerness’ it is that of the body, what lovers try to reach by caressing and by intercourse” (5). Berger should have pressed the gross vio­lence of Bathsheba’s rape on his readers. David violently reaches inside Bathsheba in a massive transgression against what Berger ­here means by love. Unwittingly, perhaps, he naturalizes the identity between intercourse and vio­lence more than his sentiment would like. Berger should have understood the interrelationship between (heteronormative) intercourse and vio­lence in this setting, played out across this ­woman’s body, and the histories it entangles. He should have tossed away his sense that “love,” the desire for touch and intercourse, is an always-­tolerable fact or meta­phor. Berger’s hope to enlist Rembrandt into a moral humanism, for t­ hose who stand facing the Bathsheba, fails at his conclusion: “For Rembrandt, the embrace was synonymous with the act of painting, and both ­were just this side of prayer” (5). The painting is very much about the betrayal of t­ hese values that Berger wants to yoke into a redemptive account of masterful art. Mastery, in this case, w ­ ere we to proceed along Berger’s humanistic line, would require an awareness of good and evil together in the same acts and gestures. It would realize the near impossibility of separating love, desire, crime, death, transgression, and history. It would see the painting as the staging of all ­these conflicts, reflected in Bathsheba’s pondering as her fated body carries the crossings of all ­these facts and possibilities. Berger should have also taken more seriously the creative power of poiesis, the ability to generate, according to his own theory, something new, something no other artist could generate. Jean Genet offers Berger a potential solution to his own wants. He could have said that Rembrandt, in the purity of his art itself, creates the good. “The morality that guides the artist,” Genet writes, “is not the vain quest for a proper apparel for the soul; it is the métier itself, insisting on goodness, or rather, bringing goodness in its wake.”63 T. J. Clark begins h ­ ere, intensely interested 324

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in making Rembrandt the g­ reat artist of the hidden God. “He is the purest of believers in a hidden God.”64 As a result, the unknown and unknowable motives of the Auerbachian Hebrew God confine the figure in the Bathsheba. Nonetheless, Rembrandt draws her out from darkness into presence. But what is this creature, and how does she emerge? Clark should have followed Auerbach into the Dante chapters of Mimesis. Had he done so, he would have stressed, as Berger should have done, ­ uman, the being of which is an open the role of poiesis in producing the h question. Unfortunately, t­hese critics assume the question and conceptualize art as secondary to the created. The God of Abraham put in place the ­humans who obeyed. Wallace Stevens’s basic point—­that creators cannot produce creatures adequate to their own needs—­makes the ­human secondary, a fact that enables the long tradition of ascesis to which many of the intellectual movements studied in this book owe their origin. By contrast, we must see that Rembrandt, like Dante, produces the h ­ uman along lines ­these ­great critics notice but misplace. Bathsheba’s stomach may be lovingly painted, but it is not a realistic repre­sen­ta­tion of any ­woman’s stomach. This nude achieves its realism effect by tricks of proportion, placement, and shadow that separate this body from any anatomically or biologically existing body. The twisted left arm, in a posture that the ­human body cannot assume, tells the story of art’s unfaithfulness to the given. It stresses the imagination’s desire to achieve the goal of its own intelligence, which is importantly in­de­pen­dent of the given. The ­human, in the Abrahamic stories, might be secondary, but Bathsheba is not. The craft of the stomach, of the body itself, as the vehicle for innerness or experience has value in its texture, not only in its formal design. Rembrandt’s impasto combined with the rough traces of brush strokes to create the thigh and hip, as they are. His technique created the bodies marked by their physicality and position as well as by the traces of experience, motion and emotion, on their flesh and bones. If ­there is love, it exists as Genet’s goodness exists, ­because of art. Love comes out from the shadow of hope when we see again that not every­thing is ruination, when we accept the value of creating the ­human in acts of intelligent imagination, when the artist provides a new imagination in creations that produce what the ­human might be. The act of love is not the embrace between the creature and her watchers. Love is in the creation, which traces in detail all ­human capacities, both in the form of experience 325

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reflected in thought and motion and in the work of poiesis, which defines itself as essential to the species and its habitat. Messianic hope looks over the horizon or has no reason to exist except as disappointment. The Bathsheba forecloses the horizon, focusing on the knowable as the emergent creature loved in detail by artist and student alike. Love has no purity from vio­lence or defeat, no evasion of vio­lence or death. Bathsheba is by virtue of what Rembrandt makes her in the immediacy of a near f­ uture she ponders, as its vio­lence looms over her watched body. Where is love, then? It is in the immediate creation, which poiesis dwelling in the master of the imagination puts on offer as a mystery of the ­human, shadowed by the darkness of its own complex emergence, the burdens of its own imagination and its remains. We recall “The Man on the Dump” as an exemplary tale. Love and poiesis produce far more drama than the sentiment of embrace, which Berger surprisingly thinks is the virtue of Rembrandt’s art. We know the vio­lence of embrace and see it t­ here in the prefigured marks across the materials that give us Bathsheba’s body. It carries past and f­uture, a function of art as it strug­gles to bring into sight what has been and what certainly ­will come, albeit in some not-­yet-­known form. It is love acting in finitude, at the best level of the species’ capacities, fully aware of darkness that can be historical, moral, or both. Imagination as love does not turn to religion, as Paul would have had it. Nor does it turn to religion, as Kant might have hoped. This is something ­human that lives in the species, a potential that creates what was not ­there before, including humanity now fully as meditative, trapped, betrayed, and yet creative, full of beauty, and inescapable. In large, this ­human can create the world as the dream of its own desires, fully aware that secular finitude precludes perfection or escape from its own ­limited but loving nature. In other words, Rembrandt has fought his way through to love and beauty without at all the need for the divine.65 The painting is a gift to the species from its own existence as the venue for poiesis. It does not sit ­there in the museum, fixed as an object, settled as the echo of some subject set before us. Rembrandt’s impor­tant early commitment to match motion and emotion continues in this most still of canvases. All its best viewers—­those who notice its effects on viewers, its ability to induce sympathy, and so on—­all t­ hese viewers testify to the motion and emotion created in this work. Many of the them psychologize the work, making psy­chol­ogy the normative albeit limiting way to address the work 326

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done by the imagination in art. What are they noticing? The mystery of which Van Gogh speaks lies in the shimmering, trembling flesh and thought embodied in the ­human presence Rembrandt found himself able to entice from darkness. We can borrow a phrase to describe the exceptional quality of this creation. Bathsheba is “shifting uncrystallized life.”66 Rembrandt’s broad and vis­i­ble brush strokes set the canvas in motion, moving the eyes across the space. His decision to center the image on her stomach and to develop horizontal lines curved and turning with her anatomy not only shape the biological image but also create the malleability of flesh. The academies felt that painting the female nude would best train paint­ers to represent the lines and light of life b ­ ecause ­women, they believed, more softly presented the ­human than did the muscular skeletal ideal male. In this painting, the exemplary brush strokes creating Bathsheba’s left hip, the movement of eyes away from her thighs upward and back, lead to other strokes. Rembrandt fills t­ hese with light that moves directly upward ­toward her shoulders and head as well as more curved strokes, turning her stomach, arced in another set of upward movements. The play of light, the guidance provided by the line of the brush—­these deposit a texture of movement and shimmer that creates a full ­human presence trembling with the emotions and life that the painting pre­sents to so many viewers as Bathsheba thinking. Her contemplation, her rumination, and her weighing the full force of fate come to viewers b ­ ecause the body’s lines and light move the view ­toward a head turned away from the viewer ­toward the play of power, misogyny, and futurity that enmeshes her body and mind. Bathsheba has the wit to make her son Solomon king by tricking her husband and rapist, David. In this moment of extreme vulnerability for Bathsheba, the figure of power lurks in the painting with the ability to crystallize the temporality inherent in the unsettled, open emergence of her tragic reflection and suffering. In other words, not only does Rembrandt strug­gle through the darkness to achieve the presence of the ­human, a trick Dante had carried out in the Inferno. He also creates an emerged ­human presence that is full precisely ­because it is unfixed, not defined by a settled portrayed character set in time for eternity. His art inserts her fully in history as the luminescence of her flesh, leading to the repre­sen­ta­tion of emotion and the movement of thought, making her an agent in the very moment of her victimage. Unlike the arrested beauty of David’s desire or the viewer become voyeur’s view of her 327

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nakedness, this figure is emergent as historical and ­human in capacity. Her thinking and reflection require a knowing imagination of what w ­ ill be her experience. She understands her immediate fate with David’s letter in her hand. Her gaze is not fixed metonymically on the fate David decrees, to satisfy his desire alone, but its stressful and fearful stare, with its eyes turned down, staring into herself in her situation—­this is the presence of a fully ­human agent in history. This is the imagination taking hold of the moment as the body experiences the very qualities of her own identity and position. Rembrandt has made a full h ­ uman presence in a ­woman victimized by male desire, who knows she is about to be raped and forced into adultery and who experiences as injustice and cruel vio­lence the inescapable fallen world of sin and crime. Her vulnerability is the first quality of Rembrandt’s ability to make this still body move with emotion. The long history of gnostic, allegorical, and utopian thought has been overwhelmingly masculine, as I have suggested in the e­ arlier chapters of this book. Rembrandt’s painting is not another nude in a long tradition. He paints a ­woman in all the specificity of her circumstance, as we know this narratively as well as through the painting’s iconography. Her particularity is not, however, the result of circumstance or context. Rather, her existence is as a body unrealistically—­not naturalistically—­represented as an assemblage of ner­vous flesh and apprehending and apprehensive mind, given creatively to history as a unique configuration of historical experience. Indeed, with the paucity of biblical and genre repre­sen­ta­tions of Bathsheba’s experience in the David story, Rembrandt creates Bathsheba as a complete h ­ uman being in and through the mastered techniques of tradition, put to a transformative end. Unlike even Dante’s characters, however, Rembrandt’s Bathsheba has agency in history in the very moment when she most lacks power and control. The idea is difficult at this point. Rembrandt has created a figure not historical b ­ ecause a character fixed in history by past ­human actions and circumstances. He has created as a ­woman the historical possibility of changing with history and changing history itself. Bathsheba is fully t­ here, not as arrested but as a w ­ oman victimized by the overwhelming force in the pre­sent. Her body might seem to lack finality ­because of that vulnerability. Since the play of line and light creates her as the shimmering luminosity of her body and thought, and since this quality persists, as it must as the definition of the image and its mystery, her vulnerability cannot define the figure as such. To do so, it would paradoxically 328

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need to fix her and dull that luminosity. Rather, Rembrandt tells the horrible truth that imaginative intelligence, beauty, and love cannot survive in the moment against power any more than it can against finitude itself. Yet ­those moving and evocative qualities like light creating new possibilities are the essential ­human quality of poiesis, of creativity in time. The child of her rape dies, as God punishes David, according to the Bible. Yet she makes her Solomon king. The narrative supplied Rembrandt the basis for creating the exquisite complexity of suffering and creativity of life in time. He looked for such an image to represent the fullness of ­human experience and capability in a world without God, a world not threatened by apocalypse but left as the space of h ­ uman possibilities. That he makes a w ­ oman the embodiment of h ­ uman knowledge and aspirations—­this threatens the order of gnostic knowledge, folded into tragic stories and stories of secular historical ruin. Bathsheba is how imagination disproves the belief in ruination and apocalypse and disqualifies messianic and utopian stories. Moreover, like a ­great comedy, Rembrandt’s Bathsheba fi­nally also drives off empathy or exhausts it in higher ideas and ambitions. Just as Dante’s Virgil regularly tells Dante the Pilgrim to suspend his sympathy for suffering souls ­because higher values, ideas, and emotions are at stake, so Rembrandt’s nude sets aside, with finality, the male-­inspired translation of Bathsheba’s suffering and intelligence into a story that saves them from their own inhumanity, the vio­lence of their gaze. She teaches a much higher set of qualities, and their fulfillment is not in forgiveness or instruction in liberal morality. Empathy is an authorized form of reduction away from the embodiment of h ­ uman imagination. The Bathsheba embodies all the humanity lost in such efforts to bury the creative mystery of the painting, the artist, and poiesis in the ordinariness of a recovered virtue. Rembrandt’s venture, like imaginative intelligence itself, is much greater and stranger than the pieties of middle-­class everyday life. The painting has wit, which means it sets aside the normalcies of moral culture. Such notions as learning the art of listening, of talking to o ­ thers to make them friends—­these and other such reductions of ­human historical circumstance and creativity to the thinness of sentiment create bad politics. They destroy the ­human, which never waits in the sentimental any more than in the more vis­i­ble forms of vio­lence and bondage. Many justifications of this painting transform its art form into the showing of pathos to elicit and perhaps create ­human empathy. ­These claims slice art 329

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into forms that official culture can approve. Rembrandt’s unique creation of Bathsheba’s suffering makes clear the falsity of viewers who find in her experience the justification for their own fantasy desires. The empathetic critics have not done enough to understand how Rembrandt has placed them as voyeurs. The Christian-­minded writers on Rembrandt especially emphasize the importance of humility to his view of the world and his art’s dynamics. Consistency would require humility among the viewers of this art. To read the work’s intention or result as the production of empathy lacks humility. Male critics in par­tic­ul­ar but not exclusively should confront the fullness of this Bathsheba as a judgment on the officially safe habits of mind brought to encounters with this art.67 William Empson, writing of pastoral in his meditation on “proletarian lit­er­a­ture,” characterizes the proper tone of humility before a work: “I now abandon my specialised feelings ­because I am trying to find better ones.” Imagining the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another fully pre­sent is essential to learning strength from weakness, which is to say, “sociability in isolation,” which in turn allows for the proper valuation of values.68 How does this take place? Empson’s critical account correlates with the imaginative intellect’s return to foundations to proj­ect a new imagination that ­others can accept for their own. “The refined t­ hing must be judged by the fundamental ­thing,” writes Empson,69 and nothing more or less should be said of the Bathsheba than that it creates fully emerged a fundamental ­thing, which in this case is the basic truth that ­human waste and ­human potential inevitably conflict. In the bodied mind and contemplative body of this image, the humbled viewer confronts as emerged from the darkness the panoply of intertwined experiences that make up ­human life in finite time, in its imperfections, vio­lence, resolutions, wit, and love. Rembrandt leaves us with a ­great deal that is basic and necessary to understand as species and planetary inhabitant. Should we expect more from imagination than the achievement of his strug­gle so gloriously on offer in the Louvre? In Shakespeare, Rosalind and Paulina embody the transformative powers of controlling imagination, which the poet embodies in the old forms of comedy and romance. In As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale, ­women become masters and magicians. Rosalind exists as the figure of imaginative possibility itself. In the ­grand complexity of her ability to imagine and induce almost anything, she is a figure of Shakespeare’s own imagination. She is gloriously in control, even as the form of her play sets her into shimmers 330

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of emotion and instability wonderfully attached to the play of gender and the wisdom of her wit, which accepts love and redeems it with warnings. ­These complexities are not only examples of the unruined but also the corrective to the very notion of ruined history as such. They f­ree us from melancholy, allegory, and any felt need to delay our engagement with the world to some off-­in-­a-­distance time / place over the horizon. The Winter’s Tale has Paulina, who helps us see that sympathy and sentiment neither have power against vio­lence nor differ much from it. Weakness is imagination that sets its desires in­effec­tively over the horizon. In other words, the texture of Rembrandt’s technique and materials creates and sustains the emotive tension, the futural openness of Bathsheba as she—­complete in body and mind—­experiences the horror of David’s assault, which immerses her fully into history, with the complex historicality of both victim and agent. Motion from emotion, as it w ­ ere, is the tension of texture. Poets, as we see in Homer, found a meta­phor for their art in weaving, the figure in the carpet, made up of intention and material.70 Homer’s Penelope weaves and unweaves her creation in the perfect figure of how art sustains itself in a sort of finality—­her craft never changes—­ while the pro­cess and effects of figuration remain open.71 If you w ­ ill, the Bathsheba reproduces both the texture of artistic intent and the historicality of ­human tension. It creates the fixity of h ­ uman presence in an art that, consistent to itself, represents the truth of ­human experience in time, the permanence of strug­gle in the play of power and agency exposed in the body as a set of felt emotions. Having passed beyond sentimental weakness and having disproved the story of universal historical ruination,72 not only does the painting move critical response and cultural practice beyond melancholy, but it also asks about the status of tension. The melancholic would resolve it in some form of transcendentalism masked even by claims to utopian materialism. Having strug­gled to bring the fully h ­ uman into view from the darkness, having created the ­human resonant in history, Rembrandt leaves open another fundamental question: if the secular resolution of ­human tension is pos­si­ble and, if so, how. For all Bathsheba’s success in establishing the line of kingly succession, implied perhaps by the evident intelligence of her contemplative face, Rembrandt imagines a dramatic emotion, a full h ­ uman presence, which begins in a s­ ilent ­woman’s extraordinary suffering. Could strug­gle lead to a better form, a better imagination to leave to o ­ thers, in the spirit of Stevens’s discussion of poetic purpose? 331

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Would such a form require a victorious transformation of such vio­lence, a movement away from its dominant genres to achieve a less costly imagining? Is t­ here a meaningful solution to tension in a differently or­ga­nized texture, or does the texture of art’s embodiment of experience, if it is true, make such an imagining impossible? Where lie the limits of a secular anagogy? Bathsheba is a ­simple concentrated ­thing, an ultimate expression of poiesis and proof of its value, qualities that define Stevens’s poetics. Empson, who took ­these qualities also as essential facts of poetic invention, thought they ­were also “a pastoral pro­cess.” His insight turns us from Bathsheba to As You Like It and to Rosalind, who is Shakespeare’s figure for the power of his own wit. It also leads us to The Winter’s Tale and an older ­woman, Paulina, whose imaginative intelligence overmasters male cruelty and reorders the tragic relation between waste and potential along the lines of humility and love.

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chapter nine

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“What Think You of Falling in Love?”

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ere is rosalind’s first thought when Celia suggests they flee to the Forest of Arden: “Alas, what danger ­will it be to us, / Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! / Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.”1 When Leontes first sees his infant ­daughter, Perdita, t­ hese are his lines: “This brat is none of mine. . . . ​ / Hence with it, and together with the dam / Commit them to the fire.”2 ­Women’s fear of assault, the fact of ­women’s murder by their husbands, and the ruthless anxiety of male desire—­these plays imitate all ­these abominations. They show us how improper imitation and inadequate criticism encourage such abominations. Aristotle began his effort to bring poiesis within philosophy with the concept of imitation as a first princi­ple rooted in ­human nature: “Imitation is natu­ral to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation.”3 Anthropology and epistemology come together in thinking about mimesis, which is a first approach to thinking about poiesis. ­These lead at once to the quality of delight, as that found by spectators of “the most realistic repre­sen­ta­tions” in art. Of course, Aristotle writing in the era of masks and ritualized theater does not mean realism of a naïve sort.4 Significantly, delight comes from the desire to learn through and from imitation: “to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the phi­los­o­pher but also to the rest of mankind.”5 So impor­ tant is imitation as a root of poiesis that knowing rests on it. Aristotle answers what motivates the effort to learn, even in the face of imitated abominations. “The reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning—­gathering the meaning of ­things.”6 Imitation is the 333

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quality that binds poets and audiences in the possibilities of plea­sure and learning. Its workings can educate artists and audiences. More impor­tant, its proper working enhances the humanity in which imagination has residence. In Aristotle, we see that art and criticism are pro­cesses that raise the prob­lem of the h ­ uman and open the question of what the h ­ uman could or should become. Of course, the desired outcome of their working is not assured. For Aristotle, imitation and criticism work on a spectrum, from one pole with the phi­los­o­pher best able to learn and take plea­sure to a second pole with p ­ eople of lesser capacity for delight—­those furthest from curiosity, ethics, and the love of truth. Wallace Stevens, as we have seen, assumed that the power­ful poet could transfer an imagination to ­others so that it would become theirs as part of a transformative pushback against the regnant inadequacy of real­ity to the potentiality of ­human possibility. As we see in jealous Leontes’s actions and words, the imagination distorted, without criticism, produces abominable results in ordering the real. Consequently, we come to two responsibilities conjoined—to what Aristotle called “the most realistic repre­sen­ta­tions” and to the very ­human capacity involved, poiesis. (We ­will see that Adorno and Stanley Cavell assume ­these basic prob­lems.) We have already seen that Rembrandt’s Bathsheba is a truth-­telling instance of our responsibility to poiesis, without which ­there would be no imitation, no delight, and no learning. His strug­gle to achieve a work drawn out from the darkness exercises and preserves ­human poetic being, and it leaves a mystery to learn from in delight, demanding time to transform horrors into historical beauty. The strug­gle comes from love not only of the truth but also of poetic possibility, of the ­human as that which cannot be without the developed use of this possibility, which in turn produces the mysterious gifts to which critics alert us. As I have shown throughout this book, academic critics come to work on art and culture prepared with ways of speaking that are recognized within official culture. One of the most prominent features of such work in recent de­cades has been the rhe­toric of re­sis­tance that is so familiar across the cultural fields of critical and especially postcritical opinion. While arguing against capital from within the richest elite institutions in the most inhumane cap­it­ al­ist society history has known, such rhe­toric has garnered all the official awards on offer from the most established professional organ­izations and liberal institutions in the United States and elsewhere. What it has not done, however, is come to works of art ready to be driven from approved 334

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positions by t­hose works. In ­earlier chapters, I showed that official culture has prioritized itself in such a way that the deep curiosity Aristotle understood as emerging from imitation as the essence of ­human and humanistic life lost its importance. The works of imitation and imitation itself have become objects to ever-­expanding and necessarily self-­revising and defensive modes of life and thought far from what Aristotle thinks ­matters most to the best minds—­and ­matters to all. Academics make an intellectual and po­ liti­cal ­mistake, compounding an ethical failure, when they decide to throw every­thing they can at a body of art or an archive of cultural materials. They compound the error when they not only argue a priori that no work is accessible except through one or more already authorized and sometimes invisible codes of apperception but also make the study of t­ hese codes the sole object of their attention, drawing intelligence away from the delightful study of imitation. The very force of imitation and imagination is to vitiate such coding, and the proper work of the critic is to learn to see what is given, not to deny the very possibility of the offer, and to serve as a docent to ­others. We cannot accept claims to the impossibility of such work or devalue the best results by declaring them so encircled that decoding the enabling social systems becomes the scholar’s work. Criticism shares the same obligation to the creative potentialities of proper mimesis as art and artists.7 Critics cannot work settled into the given and enabling habits of mind, especially when t­hese take the easy form of demystifying the supposed means of access. This is merely to work uninterestingly on the weak nominalist assumption that we create what we name—or that we should find comfort in totalizing understanding. Such work, at best, creates the simulacrum of criticism. Critics must know humility, that is, the limits of what they perceive and bring. Criticism, like poetry, presses back against real­ity, including especially the concepts and practices that buck up the social and intellectual arrangements from whose training they come. For Aristotle, the highest intellectual virtue is to shape oneself from the delight in imagination and its responsible acts of mimesis. (Cavell, writing on Hamlet, w ­ ill help us on this fraught topic.) Aristotle began critical reflection on poiesis by tying together the act of imitation and the act of study. The critic has a primary responsibility to the best of imitations and a basic regard for all imitative acts. In other words, the critic’s role is defined first and fundamentally by being a secondary but essential part of a primary h ­ uman material quality embodied in the action of imaginative 335

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intellect. The job of the critic is the task of becoming the equivalent of Aristotle’s phi­ los­ o­ pher, the mind most interested in and capable of learning from as well as, by implication, the mind most responsible to and for the secular h ­ uman capacities to imitate and imagine. Stories of ruination ­either deflect imagination into a permanent messianic state not yet achieved or defer its work over a millennial postapocalyptic horizon—­these are equally destructive of criticism’s primary work no m ­ atter how pathos ridden or how accurately they seem to address their age. From all of t­ hese, as I have shown throughout, comes productive iteration and more official culture.8 If we ­were to quote Shakespeare on this, we might recall, “Sweets growne common loose their deare delight.”9 The knowledge in art’s work is greater than the knowledge of a positive discourse, let alone a so­cio­log­ i­cal or pseudoscientific one, put in place to surround and avoid that work. Poetry’s language contains truths of experience and meaning with which positive academic discourse is unconcerned—­all to the detriment of art, language, society, and the historical species and its habitation.10 The tradition of masterful criticism has examples we must remember to draw on. In Some Versions of Pastoral, for example, William Empson gives two pages to As You Like It. He turns to act 3, scene 3, an exchange between Touchstone and Aubrey, to develop his study of puns. His analy­sis reminds us of the point R. P. Blackmur made about Wallace Stevens’s language, which always used words’ concretely material constituents to make dense abstractions for his readers. Empson writes that puns “insist on relics of primitive thought in civilised language, and thereby force the language to break down its l­ater distinctions and return to ideas natu­ral to the h ­ uman 11 mind.” For a critical humanities interested in poetry as a high art of h ­ uman poiesis, this is an impor­tant pre­ce­dent. Empson brings together two essentially correlated facts of g­ reat poetry and its criticism: the poem operates at a very high level, thus showing the vital importance of art as the means to mirror the world while at the same time satisfying the curiosity of minds searching for the fearful and delightful lessons in imitation. Moreover—­and this is why Empson’s example is so impor­tant—it shows how essential poetry is to elaborating language as the means to take part in being ­human. Touchstone and Audrey give ten lines to the questions of what poetry is, what its value is, and how it stands with love and desire. Empson follows the intertwined words “fain” (to desire) and “faign” (to pretend). In love poetry, the link between “pretend” and “desire” is familiar and ines336

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capable as well as obvious, so clear that its pretenses are honest. Shakespeare’s pun comes from and returns to a fundamental or root situation: “a physical desire drives the ­human creature to a spiritual one.”12 If we ­were discussing Dante, we would easily recognize this truth. As Audrey and Touchstone play out their desires, probing the value of being or not being poetical as lovers, as the condition of loving, the words offer a lesson. Empson draws attention to what t­hese lines give: “To write poetry is not the quickest way to satisfy desire; t­ here must be some other impulse b ­ ehind the convention of love-­poetry; something feigned in the choice of topic; some other t­ hing of which they are fain.”13 This remarkable summary proposition recognizes and builds on the characters as poets and lovers, on the way each way of being conditions the other. Returning to the fundamentals of language, “ideas natu­ral to the h ­ uman mind,” Shakespeare’s poetry instances how impor­tant is language in imitating well the world and the ­human. Shakespeare offers the truth that Empson teaches, namely, that words used properly create the species as ­human. In this perfect example of the most fundamental truth, the poem offers the additional truth that desire for the beloved in the making of love poetry is a displaced and delayed expression of a desire for something so fundamental that it can only appear masked as love. The object of that desire is the making ­human of the species, with its complementary truth, that without the achievement of this end, from the species come abominations. In t­ hese few lines lie the foundation of the anagogic possibility Stevens worked through in “The Auroras of Autumn.” Frye and ­others had not explained the force or motive ­behind the anagogic impulse of h ­ uman imagination or given good evidence of its roots in the species. Shakespeare directly pre­sents the very ground on which the anagogic compulsion works itself out in imagination. The punning conversation between Touchstone and Audrey works t­oward an unnamed but spoken motive and purpose in poetry moving among the fundamentals of life and imagination. The pun elaborates itself even if it makes no effort to name that for which it stands. Love poetry is imitative, but the desire that it imitates, the aspiration to a more spiritual quality ­toward which it builds—­these are imitations standing in for something so fundamental that poetry cannot imitate it directly. It can only give evidence of its workings at the base of the h ­ uman as it conducts its most complex movements of imitation, as art gives them to ­those who would know. In a doubled root, 337

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if you ­will, lies the art emerging from that which is material possibility enabling what art and poiesis create as most fundamental—­love, marriage, reproduction, and the play of power.14 Moreover, with art, as Aristotle suggested early on, is the equivalent desire to learn from imitation, to do the work of the critic, coming near to the best that poetry offers. In act 3, scene 2, Touchstone puns again, calling Corin “a natu­ral phi­ los­o­pher” (l. 30). The Arden editor marks a three-­part pun: “natu­ral” as in the “uneducated” meme of pastoral; a stoic or epicurean phi­los­o­pher who values reason over revelation; and, fi­nally, the natu­ral phi­los­op ­ her as scientific man. The revelatory delight of the pun is more than its polyvalence. It follows on Corin’s declaration “that he that hath learned no wit by nature or art may complain of poor breeding or comes of a very dull kindred” (ll. 27–29). C. L. Barber showed that Shakespeare transformed the inherited convention of the clown into the theatrical figure of the fool. (Barber’s discovery has implications for Schmitt’s and Benjamin’s thinking about tragedy and Trauerspiel, as I have discussed it in e­ arlier chapters and to which I w ­ ill return ­later in this chapter.) In the sense Empson gives to natu­ral ideas in language, through the play of Corin and Touchstone in this scene, moving through Corin’s denials and Touchstone’s polyvalent play, Shakespeare gets us once more to a basic idea, already suggested in a way by Aristotle. Not only does ­every mind have the potential to take delight in learning from proper imitation, which means acting as a ­human being to enhance and preserve that humanity, but in Shakespeare’s scene, the wit unlearned by nature or school is like the unnamed motive in the love poetry Empson has unpacked. Corin’s wit is unmade by nature or schooling. What­ ever that is—­and that it is Touchstone’s pun testifies as well as our eyes and ears—it is a fundamental shared, although reflected or, if you ­will, conceptualized, by the fool’s higher learning. As Barber says of this fool as a type, “with his recognized social role and rich traditional meaning, [he] enabled the dramatist to embody in a character and his relations with other characters the comedy’s purpose of maintaining objectivity.”15 Constantly, this play, with its formal ele­ments of comedy, pastoral, and romance, along with its higher ele­ments of law, courtly per­for­mance, and po­liti­cal restitution, keeps before its public the fact and importance of a fundamental ele­ment that drives imitation ­toward its species goal through the arts of language. As You Like It also pre­sents as fully as pos­si­ble the embodied form of such a force or impulse in the imaginative intelligence of Rosalind, whose 338

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magical and magisterial control of events and words brings forward and embodies what­ever we might call Shakespeare’s plastic imagination. On the surface, Aristotle’s thinking about imitation and its development into the forms of poetry gives surprisingly ­little attention to what­ever the impulse to imitation might be. We must recall that for Aristotle, in setting up the science of poetry and poetics as social forms, imitation developed into poetry, but in ­doing so, Aristotle also established that poiesis as such is foundational to the ­human as species in its habitat. Furthermore, in its best forms, imitation satisfies curiosity for even the strongest of minds. Language emerges from the same foundation as imitation itself; it is not merely the instrument of imitation but the location of such possibility. Imagination must be the means both to proper intelligent imitation and to the delight that minds find in imagination’s productions across history—as far as they are fit imitations. With impunity, we cannot discredit this fundamental species quality without which t­ here is no question of the h ­ uman, no responsibility of life in a cultivated habitat. Moreover, without minds responsive to the offerings of intelligent imagination in imitations formed in words, the ­human proj­ect is incomplete. To put it bluntly, criticism, the primary h ­ uman relation to imaginative imitation, is essential to the species’ identity and responsibility on the planet, in any habitat real or conceived. Critics have sometimes thought of t­ hese basic t­ hings, and just as we discover in Empson a princi­ple we must not abandon but build on and just as we saw Stevens insisting on his own primary relation to the masters of imagination, so we must recall masterful critics who engaged at equally profound levels with ­these issues. Writing on Shakespeare, Coleridge interrupts his essay “Pro­gress of the Drama” to caution against the categorization of poets and poetry. He says it is absurd to classify “the works of a poet on the mere ground that they have been called by the same class-­name with the works of other poets in other times and circumstances.”16 The academic response to this caution is, of course, differentiation, as we see it in anthologies of articles, which define a genre or type.17 Coleridge expands his warning against a gathering of poets and poetry “on any ground,” b ­ ecause such categorization would be like a zoology “without reference to the life and being of the animals themselves.”18 Coleridge creates a basis for John Berger’s efforts to identify mastery in certain artists over and against not only context and tradition but also the demands of the art itself. For Coleridge, who is the ­enemy 339

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of allegoresis, categorization is “inappropriate” to poets’ “own end and being,” the very quality Berger’s masters possess believing in their capacity to do what no one ­else can do.19 This quality is a ­matter of person but more importantly a ­matter of the ideal achievement of imitation. As Stevens found his own canon of imaginations among which he confidently planned to place his own, so Coleridge requires that critics work with an obligation to intelligent imagination, especially in the locales called masters. Coleridge stresses the critic’s responsibility in such a way as to make clear that ­those who do other­wise are not critics; they are not fulfilling the demand Aristotle assigned to the best minds learning from imitation, ­those he chose to call phi­los­o­phers in relation to ­great poetry. Coleridge puts it this way: “O! few have ­there been among critics, who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry through its vari­ous metempsychoses, and consequent metamorphoses;—or who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with each new birth, with each rare avatar, the h ­ uman race frame to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity!”20 Reading Shakespeare brings Coleridge to the discovery of this set of remarkable truths. Criticism suffers from scarcity, but we learn from Coleridge that even the best criticism is secondary. Yet the condition of its possibility, and h ­ ere we are back to Aristotle on mimesis, is an intellectual imagination shared with poets. The rarity of criticism teaches an impor­tant lesson similar in kind, perhaps, to Adorno’s preference for the essay against the practices of academic official culture, a point of vital importance, to which we w ­ ill return near the end of this chapter. Vari­ous positive attempts to represent the world in stories derived from secondary models with their own origins in official culture and belated forms of inactive repre­sen­ta­tion do the work of intelligent imagination’s enemies.21 The poetic imagination that Coleridge finds in Shakespeare’s works reaches the anagogic heights that Stevens also sought. First, the imagination resides in the species, where it has the ability to make and remake the ­human in history and as historical.22 The Bathsheba shows that the imagination bodies forth the ­human in an act of proper imitation given to intelligence in its critical form to complete the emergence of the new ­human body. That body, almost as it ­were in evolutionary terms, summons its 340

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world into being and adopts a form necessary to survive, which means—­and this has impor­tant ethical and po­liti­cal implications—­finding modes of action appropriate to the habitat that hosts it.23 Poetry and criticism together not only bring h ­ umans and worlds into being but, as we saw in “The Auroras of Autumn,” take on responsibilities for the universes in which they are power­ful agents. ­Because of Shakespeare, Coleridge lays out another fundamental princi­ple for the work of anagogic imagination. The ­human agent does not create itself ex nihilo but in relation to and b ­ ecause of the agential qualities of the worlds in which it acts. H ­ uman invention works within already-­defined circumstances, a position from which mimetic theories obviously begin. Aristotle started by acknowledging the shared relation between the ­imagined and the imagination in the cultural pro­cesses that led to poetry. Coleridge, reading Shakespeare, adds to this a near biological sense that the ­human summoned as an avatar to its world can only form itself from the extrahuman agencies that enable it and with which imagination works. Shakespeare deeply imagines the place of the h ­ uman, entwined within networks of life and inertia that make worlds, species, and individuals. In genre terms, he shapes that entanglement via pastoral and bucolic forms and motifs. ­Doing so allows him to set ethical and po­liti­cal questions in what seem like domains of innocence and retreat. As in The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare’s creation of Edenic settings inscribes a world for viewing within a space thought to be apart from that world. The interaction between the thought-­to-­be-­separate spheres of the ­human and nonhuman set out prob­lems, all of which, fi­nally, implicate the basic question, What is the ­human? In As You Like It, for example, Duke Se­nior and his forest followers eat meat while regretting the taking of animal life (act 2, scene 1). This scene, which sets a quandary for supposedly sympathetic persons, has qualities of the masque, the pastoral, and homosocial bonding rituals.24 While relying on hunting for food—­implicitly aligning itself with antihunting ele­ ments in E ­ ngland—it articulates a certain sense of an ideal society, marred by the demands of natu­ral limits and ­human needs; it represents a seemingly normative politics of citizenship, equality, and communal interests. It accepts as given a realistic requirement to consume nature for ­human life, hoping to make merely sentimental Jaques’s reflections on a stag’s slow, cruel death. Nonetheless, we should weigh the fact that Jaques politicized 341

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the killing of this stag not only as an analog to Frederick’s usurpation of Duke Se­nior but also as a graver offense on the part of Duke Se­nior. Jaques, easily dismissed as an amusing melancholic outsider to the acceptable mainstream, points out a crime more fundamental to ethical and po­liti­cal enactments of the h ­ uman than Frederick’s usurpation of Se­nior. In Rosalind’s exchange with Jaques, she aligns the extreme melancholic with extreme foolery: “­Those that are in extremity of e­ ither are abominable fellows and betray themselves to ­every modern censure worse than drunkards” (4.1.5–7). Their dialogue displays an in­ter­est­ing set of value choices. Jaques pre­sents himself as a traveler, whose experience “wraps [him] in a most humorous sadness.” Rosalind tropes on the image, accusing Jaques of selling his own lands to see other men’s (4.1.16–23). He is left with no possession, alienated into a melancholy exile, a man at home nowhere. The Arden editors historicize t­ hese remarks, alluding to Ralegh as background to the exchange.25 Poetically, of course, t­hese lines give us a sense that Jaques’s judgments are hard earned, costly, and valuable despite the damage they inflict on him. He has seen a world of ruination. Rosalind’s wise characterization does nothing to devalue his experience or judgment. Rather, she makes truly clear the cost paid by ­those who are alien to home and property, who end degraded in mere melancholy. Her task, as we s­ hall see, is to overcome the melancholic by imagining a world that does not deserve his judgment. That, however, w ­ ill be a world of the f­ uture, of i­magined alternatives, dif­fer­ent from the world as real, as it presses on melancholic and audience alike. In other words, nothing in Rosalind’s lines ­causes us to doubt the legitimacy of Jaques’s judgment, but rather, she ­causes us to regret the sort of ­human he has become, futile in his sadness and desolation. “Why then,” she tells him, “ ’tis good to be a post” (4.1.9). We need this fuller sense of Jaques to weigh his judgment on Duke Se­nior’s regretful slaughter of animals, which is part of the long-­standing Western belief in the domination of nature. Jaques exposes a far darker side to this hunting for food than any unavoidable necessity to survive; he touches on the values of a per­sis­tent belief system in Duke Se­nior’s seemingly benign and, of course, content exile in Arden. The First Lord reports to the Duke that Jaques “swears you do more usurp / Than doth your ­brother that hath banished you” (2.1.27). Throughout the play, Shakespeare inserts what we used to call darker truths into the

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play of light, which seems to dominate the Arden scenes. For the purposes of this book, we must keep this clichéd fact in mind. I have pointed to the character of Jaques as melancholic with my long critique of melancholy in mind within the formations of modern criticism. I have done so to instance a larger topic, central to this book as a defense of poiesis. We must address how art works beyond the often polemical and partial view of highly interested writers and critics. We must keep in mind the darkness of the Arden scenes b ­ ecause in so d ­ oing we see Shakespeare working at issues, which the l­ ater critics take on as the basis of their own claims. Writers such as Schmitt, at times Benjamin, and many ­others who have come ­after might moderate the bases for their authoritarian po­liti­cal desires or salve their melancholy if they follow Shakespeare working t­ oward solutions they refuse to see and do not conceive. For example, Shakespeare stages a scene, Hamlet, reflecting qualities ­later historicized as given, as unsurpassable. Yet neither the poet nor this play arrest imagination or life possibility along vectors the ­later theorists take as the given of our situation and their work. The text editor’s historicization of Jaques as Ralegh is analogous to the infamous Schmittian historicization of Hamlet in terms of courtly murder. At this moment in As You Like It, the maladjustment of the socially benign to in­de­pen­dent life is one such dark spot affiliated with critical nightmares of ruin and tyrannical politics. In Stevens’s terms, the bucolic set against the traveler’s experience displays the power of “real­ity” to impoverish the imagination. Duke Se­nior calls the forest “this desert city”—an image whose motives deserve explication—as he explains it “irks” him to kill “the poor dappled fools” who are “native burghers” of the wood (2.1.22–23). By comparison with his b ­ rother, Duke Se­nior, a comparatively gentle and humane figure in this play’s po­liti­cal games, misprizes his circumstance, which means not only that he makes a ­mistake in his meta­ phorizing but also that he commits an offense. He lacks understanding of his own formation and proj­ects a violent and colonizing imagination. In exile, he has none of the traveler’s wisdom of experience. Banished, he cannot think or speak except in terms that come from and belong to his lost elsewhere. The play does not pre­sent banishment as an epistemological or anthropological break or even as the potential for linear learning. Oddly, banishment is a place proper for repetition. Shakespeare’s Duke speaks sentimentally, showing that the bucolic’s utility lies at the disposal

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of urban and courtly power. As C. L. Barber concluded, the woods are a place of release, which serve a required order by containing what seems to be its opposite. Apropos Duke Se­nior, he is a figure who iterates the speech and structures of the misplaced exile, which is how Amiens helps us see him following the Duke’s famous speech on the sweetness of exile from “painted pomp.” The Duke’s pastoral sense reveals and enacts his strong tendency to po­liti­cal dictation as he defines his place of exile in well-­established terms that provide comfort and content: “Are not ­these woods / More f­ ree from peril than the envious court? / ­Here we feel not the penalty of Adam” (2.1.2–5).26 This same Duke easily accepts again the “crown” his converted ­brother had stolen, so that his final speech reenacts the settled rhetorical modes of po­liti­cal courtly per­for­mance (5.4.164–177). Amiens, having heard Duke Se­nior’s unimaginative imposition on Arden of categories that conform to his own (inept if, for some readers, benign) politics, confirms the power inherent in the Duke’s word and desire. “Happy is your grace,” he says, “That can translate stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style” (2.1.25–26). In the realm of language and politics, almost no word carries the freight of translation, as I tried to hint in my first discussion of Stevens’s 1930s poetry. Translation preserves and changes or, in this case, repeats the original by adaptation. Its highest achievement might be nothing more than a style that quiets inquiry and gains ac­cep­tance, as in this very case. As we know from Stevens and ­others, such adaptation is a conservative gesture, a preservation of the real as a form of pressure on circumstance. Jaques’s comment on the Duke’s usurpation of a realm not his, a realm invaded as he transforms it into a home that ­houses his banished self, contradicts the First Lord’s praise and exposes the normativity at work in the benign themes of real­ity’s pressure on imagination and the seemingly nonhuman. The play’s lengthy pre­sen­ta­tion of the stag’s killing followed by Jaques’s lines and their contrast with praise for the Duke should have a principal place in thinking about this play’s evaluation of the world as i­magined within the pressures of real­ity. In a small way, we see that the Duke lacks imagination and intelligence. He lacks creativity and critical sense. Prospero, the most famous banished figure in Shakespeare’s canon, gathers power and eventually wisdom from travel, power, and ­battle. He learns also from love,

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translated from anger and revenge. Most impor­tant, he knows the pressures of the real for what they are. Not only does he demystify Miranda’s sense of a new world, sounding a note quite like Jaques in his exchange with Rosalind, but Prospero stands as a sharp contrast to the content Duke Se­nior. In his benignity, we see the dangers of real­ity threatening ac­cep­tance of real­ity. Admiring him, we too accept not to see the world and the ­human dreaming it from the circumference. An adequate understanding and judgment of the Duke’s poise and politics must include a strong criticism of his intelligence and values. We can derive our criticism from Aristotle’s and Coleridge’s princi­ples about mimesis and poetry. In ­simple terms, Duke Se­nior is a failure as a poet. Renato Poggioli points to this fact about the Duke, and by developing his ­insight, one might build a more extensive account than his, one that supersedes the genre considerations that define Poggioli’s analy­sis. The Duke and his followers, “in flight, not a retreat, . . . ​make a virtue out of necessity. They look at their refuge with neither illusion nor pretense, and this saves them from the delusion that pastoral life is heaven on earth.” Arden is not an eternal spring but a place of winter, hardship, and work. The result, for Poggioli, is “a happy paradox, inspiring the lovely songs of the play, which are at once charming pastorals of winter and lively idylls of the north.”27 For Northrop Frye, one of Poggioli’s rough contemporaries in the last c­ entury, the North is the domain of winter, of ritual and artistic movements along lines of realism across the lines of tragedy, irony, and satire. The Miltonic Frankenstein is a prime example. Poggioli advocates for a poetry that mixes the pastoral lyric, the beauties of song, with the historical memory of other muses. Stéphane Mallarmé is his best example. Poggioli traces the per­sis­tence of what he calls “pastoral oases” throughout imagination’s history to explain part of how poetry manages its life even in the Iron Age.28 In As You Like It, however, Poggioli m ­ istakes Shakespeare’s portrayal of the Duke’s metonymic demystification of pastoral ideals for a universal license to draw all poetry into the shrouds of winter. In this moment, Duke Se­nior comes closer to Rosalind’s Jaques than most readers sense. The sharpest difference between the two male characters is Duke Se­nior’s satisfaction with the real­ity he insists on as a necessity against the pastoral ideal. In Poggioli’s terms, the Duke’s demystification brings winter’s light into

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Arden. He mentions that the play’s lovely songs are part of winter’s pastoral, a version of northern lights. The play’s final song, however, is most definitely no such a ­thing. It is a song of marriage, of renewal, of universal regeneration via the God-­like figure of Hymen, who has just affirmed Rosalind’s complicated settlements of desire and real­ity. About this song, ­there is no trace of winter, even though the completion of Rosalind’s magical plans seems to require the Duke’s license: “Proceed, proceed!” (5.4.195). Had Poggioli recast this song against his own memory of Homer’s Shield of Achilles, he would have sensed the final song’s confirmation of a large po­liti­cal vision of imaginative potential for alternatives to the disorders requiring a mind of winter but all of which lie within a circumscribed order of real­ity. The play might be read as achieving a Christian-­like transformation of politics—­the sudden conversion of Duke Frederick by “an old religious man” (5.4.158)—­a position that Benjamin advocates in his differences from Schmitt about Hamlet. The deus ex machina of this hermit in Arden wood does nothing but draw attention to itself as an arbitrary solution to a prob­lem that would have left the work of Hymen literally out in the woods.29 The most in­ter­est­ing question at this point concerns the pos­ si­ble difference between what Rosalind has magically managed, on the one hand, and, on the other, her ­father’s unimaginative return to the status quo ante in his moment of restoration. Duke Se­nior offers no new imagination of the world ­either in the wood or in his court. The most he can do is offer license. “Forget this new-­fall’n dignity,” he says ­after learning of his renewed power and fortune and directs the celebrants to “fall into our rustic revelry” (5.4.174–175). Jaques’s parting blessing confirms what would be Duke Se­ nior’s virtue and the politics of restoration: “You to your former honor I bequeath: / Your patience and your virtue well deserves it” (5.4.184–185). It is most apt that melancholy’s lines bring us closer to the state of Duke Se­ nior than do most ­others’ remarks. As the OED reminds us, “bequeath” is fraught with l­egal meanings, of course, but also with an ethical charge to tend well to what­ever is left. “Bequeath” is a verb of transport, of arriving and departure. It assigns, in this case, Duke Se­nior to a deserved return. It signifies rather than means, with the implied force of knowing experience beyond law. It signifies repetition, the uninteresting and already known of Sonnet 102. The word does the work of melancholic belatedness perfectly, of the mind tired by the familiar. The word links the Duke’s iterations with ­futures that bind within their predictability. 346

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How does this stand with Rosalind, not only with her plans but also with her powers to proj­ect and or­ga­nize the newly pos­si­ble? If the Duke is a failed poet or no poet at all, then Rosalind in the movement of mind, language, and desire is the imaginative intellect remaking the imitated world for ­humans with curiosity. If t­ here is nothing about which to be curious in the Duke’s restored Duchy, around Rosalind and the world emerging from her wit and magic, ­there is every­thing to be curious. From the first exchanges with Celia following her exile to the final declaration of paradoxes to lords and lovers near the end of the play, her expressions draw phi­los­o­phers, in Aristotle’s now apt term, to learn from the imitative art evolved for proper social purposes. “­Were it not better, / ­Because that I am more than common tall, / That I did suit me all points like a man?” (1.3.111–113). With this small gesture, Rosalind sets in motion the almost infinitely complex mirror games of gender, imitation, and per­for­mance for which the play is so famous. We must recall that one motive for this doubled play of deception is fear of rape, a fact played against Rosalind’s assumed name of Ganymede, who in some repre­sen­ta­tions is the raped victim of Jove’s lusts.30 In any case, Ganymede’s exquisite beauty draws divinity’s transformative attention, making the mortal beauty into an immortal beloved. Rosalind’s chosen name puts into play, next to the play of gendered costuming and per­for­mance, an im­mensely complicated set of pos­si­ble significations, from which she can distribute a range of potential emergent outcomes. The Arden editor notes that Ganymede “hints” not only of homoerotic passion enough to confound the antitheatricalists of Shakespeare’s time but also marks of symbolic omnipotence, extending from Jove to his boy lover.31 ­These bits draw our minds more to the figure of Rosalind as creator than as performer. Throughout the historical study of Shakespeare, Rosalind is the master of per­for­mance. As creator, however, she is one of the poet’s supreme achievements, ­because she is a metonym of imagination, of intelligent imitation raised to artistic function in social worlds, a kind of work that invited Aristotle’s curiosity. In turn, of course, her character invites the curiosity of critics, whom she creates as we or they rise to the challenge of what she is, does, and offers. In further turn, this means Rosalind is a name given to that anthropologically definitive quality of the species homo that Aristotle began to think in answering the questions about h ­ uman formation via a meditation on mimesis become ritual and art. 347

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Rosalind cannot and does not conjure from nothing. She is not creator ex nihilo but a creator from exile and love. If, in Coleridge’s terms, Duke Se­nior is not a poet ­because he has no desire to see or nourish a new avatar of the species, then we must weigh Rosalind as his counterweight in lucidity of vision, illumination of new bodies fit to new spheres of life and power.32 Rosalind acquires two definitive qualities as the play develops, and perhaps given the opening worries about male assault, we should consider their source. One is a normative heterosexual desire for Orlando—­this despite the play of gender as a given—­which is a condition for working through the complexities of nonnormative gendering. The other is Rosalind’s per­ sis­tent description of Ganymede as the learned magician, heir to learning from a master magician—no doubt, an echo of Ganymede’s powers gotten from his (rapist?) lover, Zeus. Love and magic, the elixirs of romance, combine within the comedy of pastoral, bucolic stories. At the play’s heart, too, given Rosalind’s exile and Orlando’s threatened life, it is a classic comedy with new generations obstructed by old in satisfying desire and renewing the world. In other words, against the factual presence of vio­lence threatening ­women and youth, against the vio­lence of power politics, and against the power of nostalgic iteration, Rosalind promotes alternatives resting on wit, magic, love, and the consequently serious promulgation of socio-­sexual (re) arrangements. Duke Se­nior cannot imagine a way to do ­others good, as Jaques’s remarks on the usurpation of the stags makes clear. He can do no more than iterate the gentleness of courtesy when he welcomes Orlando and Adam, but he neither sees nor nurtures a new avatar, to use Coleridge’s wonderful word. The extraordinarily learned Coleridge would know the historical material freight of “avatar,” as it comes from the Sanskrit.33 Not only is an avatar a manifestation, in Coleridge’s passage of the h ­ uman race framed to a “new body,” but in its root sense of “descent,” an avatar is also a passing over, which idea entwines with the poetic function of transport, translation, and tradition, while in the best anagogic sense expressing a new incarnation. ­These senses of avatar, noted as nineteenth-­century usages by the OED, carry one additional sense: the “pre­sen­ta­tion to the world as a ruling power” (OED). And it is this last we must hold in thinking of Rosalind as the metonym of nothing less than Shakespearean imagination. In the final act, Rosalind tells Orlando, “now I speak to some purpose,” declaring not only an end to the wide-­ranging game that has kept Rosalind 348

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as Ganymede and Orlando physically apart. At this moment, she also identifies Orlando as a figure parallel to Aristotle’s curious phi­los­o­pher, as “a gentleman of good conceit,” to whom she prepares to unveil both purpose and power. This line places her as an antagonist to Duke Se­nior and his gentility: “Neither do I ­labour for a greater esteem than may in some ­little mea­sure draw a belief from you, to do yourself good and not to grace me” (5.2.55–57). The antagonism to the benevolent Duke is not particularly subtle, for the man who offers equality of address in banishment acquires admiration that graces him. Rosalind becomes the loving giver, yearning for consent to her active w ­ ill to gift the beloved with a greater good. If we recall the association of Ganymede with power and the Coleridgean notion that the poet is an avatar of imagination at work framing the ­human body, then it is sensible that Rosalind earn belief in her love by invoking her own perhaps-­still-­hidden powers. “Believe then,” Ganymede says to Orlando, “if you please, that I can do strange ­things. I have since I was three years old conversed with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable” (5.2.57–60). Loving poiesis is a magic, played against the fable of Faust as well as the reputed plethora of conjurers living in forests. The grandeur of ­these lines plays against the common or folk motif of forest conjurers, whom the play sets against the hermit who converts Duke Frederick; it also plays against the ­great Satanic darkness, perhaps irredeemable despite his love, set in Faust’s magical fears. Together, ­these are significations of mimetic power played out in the ritual magic of avatars, which themselves nominate, precisely in the sense Coleridge and ­later Stevens assign to the poet. What does Rosalind promise Orlando? We must be careful not to think too mundanely on this point. If he finds faith in her powers, Ganymede ­will make Rosalind an avatar, a manifestation to satisfy Orlando’s love: “I know into what straits of fortune she is driven and it is not impossible to me, if it appear not incon­ve­nient to you, to set before your eyes tomorrow, h ­ uman as she is, and without any danger” (5.2.63–66). Christianized readings of the play see this exchange as a test of faith in traditions dating to Paul. Nothing in the text, however, requires this pseudotheological historicist sense of ­things. A longer memory, not only back to Aristotle in Greece but also, for example, via Frye and many other scholars, would remind us that t­hese theologized stories are mere avatars of an under­lying poiesis, found among individuals and communities. Historicism, however, has l­ittle re­spect for the autonomy or primacy of 349

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poiesis and an oddly short memory. In The Necessary Angel, Wallace Stevens asked, “do we come away from Shakespeare with the sense that we have been reading con­temporary commonplaces?”34 Orlando properly responds to Rosalind’s demand for faith with this line, which suggests mythical notions older than Christian belief: “Speak’st thou in sober meanings?” (5.2.67). Orlando reminds us not only of Dionysian sources in the long ritualistic histories of theater but also of the vari­ous forms of inebriation by drink and love, many of which lead to disaster. The founding story of poetry, Orpheus’s recovery and loss of Eurydice, shadows this moment of doubt and fear. Rosalind assures with the highest stakes she can summon: “By my life I do, which I tender dearly, though I say I am a magician” (5.2.68–69). Rosalind brings about the marriages she sings and desires, making her a successful version of the Orphic figure. C. L. Barber wrote intelligently about Rosalind, advancing our understanding of her importance to poetry and imagination. Barber saw, as in the line from Ganymede I have just quoted, how Shakespeare made Rosalind a figure bringing together the fullness of life experience with the ambition of magical transformation in imagination. Barber made his contribution through genre theory. As I have suggested throughout this book, the fact that Schmitt and Benjamin made much too l­ittle of comedy requires me to make my own genre-­like emphases. The focus on tragedy and Trauerspiel has had dire consequences. Barber should have had more of a following among the ephebes who followed the Germans. He had a clear sense that Shakespeare had transformed comedy via Rosalind into a genre deserving high seriousness from critics. Rosalind’s style and tone bring him to his conclusions. In this fact lies an impor­tant lesson for ­those who degrade immanent and careful reading as insufficient. They should see it as basic and necessary. Rosalind’s tone evaluates her own romantic and sexual sentiments in lines that say and weigh. “She realizes her own personality for herself, without being indebted to another for the f­ avor.” Barber is not satisfied with bourgeois notions of “self-­making” or even historicist notions of “self-­fashioning” as par­tic­ul­ ar ele­ments in a po­liti­cal culture of “performativity.” His interest lies in art and its developments, its transformative nature vis-­à-­vis its own capacities as a transport for the ­human world. “This control of tone,” he writes, “is one of the g­ reat contributions of Shakespeare’s comedy to his dramatic art as a w ­ hole.” Mastery in the control of tone is an art, which mimics h ­ uman experience and relationality, even the 350

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relation to the naïve. In the spirit of Aristotle, Barber profoundly senses that the Rosalind figure is an instance of “the shifting, uncrystallized life which motivates what is said.”35 Even so, Barber does not draw the full conclusion from his study of Rosalind. Had he kept Coleridge in mind, Rosalind as Barber describes her, the avatar not only of her own proper self but as such, the figure of imagination’s play would have emerged more fully. Barber and many ­others note how often the word “wit” appears in this play, as it does many other of Shakespeare’s works. Wit is a minor name for “shifting, uncrystallized life,” for which a stronger name might be poiesis or imagination. The g­ reat Auerbachian contribution to the study of Dante, the recognition that the damned imitate not only morally flawed characters but the fully embodied and materially formed lives of historical ­human beings—­with that recognition set in our critical tradition, Rosalind emerges as the materially embodied figure of imagination resident in wit, art, and magic. In this sense, Rosalind is at least the metonym of Shakespeare’s imagination—­her mastery is his—­but also the location of imagination within the fevered and yet controlled play of intelligent imitation and curious explication. She figures as false the necessitarianism of the melancholic, messianic, and tragic lines. What comes from this display of imagination personified? Barber understood Rosalind as the mechanism by which imagination produces the impossible society into which poetry and its audience come into a real relationship. In this version of Rosalind, we approach the allegorization of comic creativity, a reversal in genre terms of the darkness associated with tragedy and especially with Hamlet.36 Along ­these lines, Rosalind becomes the comic muse, the agent of mythic renewal and social legitimation. Northrop Frye’s thinking about comedy moves along both of ­these lines. Frye’s Green World notion joins Barber’s idea of the Festive World, while in Frye’s genre theory, comedies with masque ele­ments exist in the arena of dianoia and as such flatter an audience or its leading member. In the case of As You Like It and its per­for­mance history, this audience of one would have been Queen Elizabeth. The ideological result of the play, along Frye’s lines, would be “an idealization of the society represented by that audience.”37 Unlike Rembrandt, who strug­gles through the darkness to the illumination of Bathsheba, Rosalind as Shakespeare’s uncrystallized imagination comes to a ­humble unity in peace without the agony of pushing past the Baroque darkness induced by the Hamlet effect. 351

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Although As You Like It has ele­ments of the masque, it does not reach the apogee of the genre’s art. For Frye, Mozart’s Don Giovanni occupies the heights, with the exhilaration of spectacle and ­music lifting the audience beyond tragedy and comedy.38 Spectacle, it turns out, is for Frye the best mechanism for confirming an audience precisely by lifting it past the dianoia of comedy or tragedy. This is an Aristotelian position: in the Poetics, spectacle is not essential to tragedy; and Frye, building on this insight, gives us an account of spectacle’s effect as the outside to ­these art forms. Rosalind is not, however, a figure of spectacular state manipulation to confirm authority in the audience’s society.39 In the play, the benevolent Duke Se­nior represents a social politics symbolically and materially in opposition to the desires and values inherent in the play as projected by Rosalind’s imaginative mastery. We must accept Jaques’s objections to the Duke as part of the play’s judgment even as melancholy leaves the stage. Jaques sees the Duke’s restoration as a reinscription of the already well-­ known forms of (boring b ­ ecause familiar) injustice, imaginative poverty, and amoral self-­confidence associated with both Dukes. Furthermore, in sharp contrast to Duke Se­nior’s way of life in the forest, Rosalind observes and understands the makeup of life in the Arden world. She imagines it as remade to fulfill a vision of the universe as the pastoral world would envision it. In other words, Rosalind is the side view not into Arden’s social being but into Arden as a made work, a vision of the universe as the dream of ­human desires fulfilled. While the Duke hunts, Ganymede and Aliena practice animal husbandry. The Duke acts on a real­ity taken as given and available, as a resource. He presumes the superiority of the court, forgetting the way of life the court supposedly has left b ­ ehind. The debate between Corin and Touchstone raises this motif (act 3, scene 2). Rosalind gives us this world as dream or, if you w ­ ill, as anagogy from two perspectives: first, as the pastoral and bucolic worlds i­magined by the audience and oft acted in by Elizabeth; and second, as an i­magined world dreamt (or recollected), as it w ­ ere, by the desires of t­ hose who live it as their form. In this, Rosalind is a benign version of the early Prospero’s powers in his mastery of the island’s ways of life. Duke Se­nior’s usurpation of the forest comes nearer the vengeful Prospero’s domination of Ariel, Caliban, and the rest. Rosalind is imagination as sympathy but more impor­tant as focused lens with multiple views, as also aware of its own function as viewer. Yet more, 352

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however, lies in that uncrystallized imagination of ­human experience as possibility: the magus whose powers not only set stages and manage desires but also proj­ect for her audiences the world as their dreams would have them inhabit it.40 As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale end with staged per­for­mances, rituals of love, forgiveness, social and po­liti­cal renewal masterfully designed and enacted by the power of w ­ omen. Comic accounts of the e­ arlier play stress renewal symbolically represented by marriage, the displacement of the ruling old by the new, whose sexual ­unions through reproduction promise renewal. Of course, this heteronormative myth barely stands in the face of the play’s extraordinarily layered gender play: a boy actor playing a young ­woman playing a young man playing a ­woman beloved—­all revealed and reversed in a gender-­transforming epilogue. Turn attention to power, to act 5, scene 2. In lines 105–116, Rosalind still as Ganymede shifts rhetorical modes and issues strong commands to all about her, laying out a set of puzzles to which she demands assent precisely as they take on the subtle form of mysterious promises. The power and command inherent in ­these lines lead the play to its vari­ous ends. Rosalind repeatedly says that she is the heir to magic, especially concerning the secrets of love. This passage opens with the command “Pray you no more of this,” but it ends with “I have left you commands” (5.2.105, 116). In Arden, magic is more likely to win assent and have effect than in a modern rational situation. Perhaps the recent historicist tendency to Christianize Shakespeare, a tendency aligned with Benjamin’s version of Hamlet over and against Schmitt’s sense of the play, would entice us to theologize Rosalind’s magic as a m ­ atter of faith. Social anthropology has a long history of linking magic to religion, if not always to Chris­tian­ity. Bronislaw Malinowski famously differentiated between science and religion by associating science’s action in the world with technique and religion’s powers with magic.41 As You Like It does not configure Rosalind’s magic within a ritualized religious setting or expression of beliefs, despite the echoes found by scholars of vari­ous Christian texts throughout her verse and prose. In Rosalind’s directions to the lovers in act 5, the rhetorical emphasis is on the “I,” the speaker, the uncrystallized imagination and experience, which ­will bring about all that is desired by ­others on her own terms. In ­these lines, she issues doubled commandments: do what I wish and accept what I offer to meet your felt desires. T ­ here is no strong presence of Chris­tian­ity as source 353

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within ­these lines. The Arden editor refers to a set of classical and literary sources to thicken the readers’ sense of Rosalind’s phrases. Ovid, for example, as the Arden editor notes, is an ancient source for sex change by magic in Ganymede’s promise to satisfy Orlando (5.2.110–111).42 In other words, Rosalind’s lines, culminating the developed quartet of exchanges among lovers in this scene, enact transport and enfigure its possibility, with no regard for a Theos to ground their authority. Rather, at this moment, the traditional association of poiesis and metamorphosis, inherent in Aristotle’s account of mimesis, asserts the source of magical power in the purely secular act of imagination, resident as it happens to be in Rosalind, herself a figure of Shakespeare as the metonymy for imagination itself. It is as if Shakespeare ­were putting on display or working out the powers of imagination as he had become able to externalize their existence as himself. Malinowski thought he was offering a social account of magic when he described it as supplement to rational and pragmatic means to solve a practical prob­lem.43 In an artwork, the imitation of magic might well appear as just such a social act.44 In As You Like It, Rosalind’s transformative magic aims not at a mere comedic regeneration of the given world, as we might see it ritualized on the Shield of Achilles. Nor does it aim at the concretization or materialization of another world, an i­magined utopian alternative to the given structures of power represented by the entire play of politics in the contest between the two Dukes. Rosalind’s magic is not substitutive. Rosalind is not melancholy or utopian, nor is she programmatic; she has no allegorical vision. She is the pure enactment of mimesis transforming and transformed into art as that which a secular society needs and produces. She is at worst the secondary imitation of poiesis as at the beginning Aristotle or Ovid thought and represented it. She has the curiosity of Aristotle’s phi­los­o­pher, or my critic, and the power of transport that makes mimesis and metamorphosis art. If we search for her power’s source, we might find it in the way she turns to Orlando, not only echoing his desire—­“ ‘Why blame you me to love you?’ ”—­but by insisting, “I ­will satisfy you, if ever I satisfied man” (5.2.103, 110–111). Critical accounts of the play’s performative gender formations make the hy­po­thet­ic­ al end of her remark dominant. Stress rather the opening clause, in which the speaker insists that satisfaction ­ will come, with the same certainty that satisfying desire has always come before. The hy­po­thet­i­cal becomes more confirming, more of 354

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a promissory note offered to the audience, which includes the quartet onstage. The under­lying hy­po­thet­i­cal of the “if” loses some of its uncertainty in the s­ imple past of the “satisfied.” The line could then read, “Given that I have satisfied men so well and certainly, then I promise to satisfy you in the same way.” The gender formations and deformations invite a certain literalism, as we see in the Arden editor’s note to “satisfy.” “Satisfy” leads Dusinberre to repeat a binary and perhaps heteronormative sense of how “Rosalind” must be sexed to satisfy the seemingly unambiguous Orlando. I see no reason for such a reading, which in turn produces the uncertain and melancholy hy­po­thet­i­cal. Rosalind seems certain of satisfaction and satisfying. In this moment and given the Ovidian power to rearrange sex invoked in this play as one of imagination’s metamorphic powers, I see no reason to draw Rosalind’s promise back into the limits of nature and convention. Her powers positioned as secondary to the social norm and the sexually “natu­ral” lose their specificity and in­de­pen­dence. Rosalind, like the Shakespeare she metonymizes as uncrystallized, evades such capture. Rosalind in love, sourced in the erotic, motivated to transformation in sex and gender, aiming for satisfaction and the completion of her promise—­ Rosalind is the poet who, to invoke Frye once more, “imitates the total dream of man.” This is Aristotle raised, as in keeping with anagogy itself: Rosalind “imitates the thought of a h ­ uman mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of its real­ity,” a position that allows for a reimagining that becomes the audience’s imagination.45 Rosalind is the name for the transformative pro­cesses of poiesis that Aristotle began to think and that artists like Shakespeare or Rembrandt or Stevens think in the power of poetry itself. Frye, as we have seen, restricted anagogic achievement to religious epics, paradigmatically Milton’s Paradise Lost. Against Frye, we must see anagogy as a poiesis in­de­pen­dent of religion, which itself is at best a text of imagination. Frye’s sense of magic is analogous to Dusinberre’s sense of sex and gender. For Frye, the imitation of nature—­which is essential to the founding of the h ­ uman in mimesis transformed in art—­not only “has a strong ele­ment of what we call magic in it.” It is also “a voluntary effort to recapture a lost rapport with the natu­ral cycle.”46 To believe this is also to believe in “the poignant evocation of the hy­po­thet­i­cal in which the poet challenges the audience to trust the truth of his fictional Rosalind” (note to 5.2.110–111). Frye or Dusinberre weaken Rosalind as imagination, ­either limiting her as magus or encircling her within a set of normative 355

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assumptions about the power of imagination as well as the necessity of gender and sexual norms. To f­ ree poiesis from the priestly inscriptions that normalize it by making it secondary to other ­human actions—­this is a basic tenet among historicists, moralists, and ideologues who stop at a too-­ shallow level of anthropology and poetics. I invoked Aristotle not ­because, as we well know, he is the end but b ­ ecause he is a beginning where thinking about the ­human and poiesis, about knowledge and curiosity, about the pro­cesses of making and remaking the species and its cultures on a world not its own—­these questions remain too often left aside. Dusinberre’s note on Rosalind’s promise to satisfy Orlando, normalized and naturalized as it is, usefully points to The Winter’s Tale to augment our sexual understanding of the “satisfy” in Rosalind’s speech. “In WT 1.1.232–4,” Dusinberre writes, “Leontes takes the word in its sexual sense, also hinted at ­here” (note to 5.2.110). Surely, Rosalind’s use of “satisfy” more than hints at sex, but the link to the Winter’s Tale is fortuitous ­because it draws to the surface the dark side of Rosalind’s metonymic powers. In short, the imagination that creates Arden disposes the powers of poiesis to create the darkness of Hamlet, which Leontes threatens to bring once more onto the stage. That same imagination, knowing its powers can and ­will produce dangerous impasses, strug­gles with itself to reverse or work through the darkness, precisely in a winter’s tale. As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale end with dramatic stagings ­under the command of magical ­women, albeit confronting dif­fer­ent challenges. As Rosalind metonymizes poiesis uncrystallized, Paulina, experienced in Hamlet’s darkness, embodies poiesis freeing itself from its own threatening effects. In form, the ­later play rewrites Alcestis while enacting creativity ­after the darkness of Hamlet. It does so knowing the latter as a prob­lem for imagination precisely b ­ ecause it is such a power­ful creation that it threatens imagination itself with the final ruination of all the world. In The Winter’s Tale, even the possibility of Rosalind is at stake. This means not that she is at stake in her truth claims on an audience, which notion returns us to the weakened hy­po­thet­i­cal. Rather, it means that the imagination is at stake b ­ ecause of the risk it runs in threatening the conditions of its own survival as embodied in the species and the world it inhabits. Hamlet’s play within the play raises our consciousness of t­hese stakes—­and might lead some critics to welcome the end of h ­ uman imagination—­just as Paulina’s mastery of the final staged scenes of The Winter’s Tale claims the 356

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imagination’s power to reclaim itself from the dearth it imposes on itself. Stevens’s lesson that the pressure of real­ity emergent from the once i­magined threatens the possibility of imagining alternatives—­that lesson has its purest literary formation in Hamlet and its consequences. One of the most impor­tant differences between Schmitt and Benjamin over Hamlet concerns Benjamin’s insistence that in this play, uniquely, Shakespeare managed to conjure “the h ­ uman figure that corresponded to the disjunction of neo-­antique and medieval illumination in which the Baroque viewed the melancholic.”47 At stake in his disagreement with Schmitt is Benjamin’s fundamental belief in the universal status of melancholy. Throughout this book, I have tried to make clear that t­ here is no necessity to the claim that melancholy is the proper and inescapable attitude and affect for our age. I have argued that this notion rests, in some considerable part, not only on traditions of gnostic and utopian belief but also on misprisions of the traditions in which the believers in melancholy find their evidence. In par­tic­u­lar, Benjamin, so intensely sensitive a critic, does not deal with the movements of imagination that might solve or ameliorate the felt necessity of melancholy, which he represents as inescapable. For Benjamin, Hamlet is the “unique spectacle of the overcoming” of melancholy and its fundamental ­causes. Alone, Hamlet redeems life from ruin, makes experience reflected as life “turn into blessed experience.” As a melancholic, Hamlet finds only his own fate in­ter­est­ing, and only ­because by God’s grace does he become the spectator of his own life. “Only in a life of this princely sort is melancholy, on being confronted with itself, redeemed.” For Benjamin, a unique event occurred with Hamlet: “Shakespeare alone was capable of striking Christian sparks from the baroque rigidity . . . ​of the melancholic.” What of the world in which this somewhat-­redeemed prince exists, and what results as the aftereffect of this redemption? “The rest is silence. For every­thing not lived goes irreparably into ruin in this space, where the word of wisdom haunts only equivocally.”48 Hamlet’s likely composition date is between 1599 and 1601, while that of As You Like It is between 1598 and 1600.49 While Benjamin insists, “Only in this prince does melancholy immersion attain to Chris­tian­ity,” he ignores the near con­ temporary comic romance, a mode of life and imagination, which confronts the melancholic but surpasses it with Rosalind.50 The tragic masculine victory over melancholy seen in Hamlet emerges as a result of Benjamin’s decision to theorize Trauerspiel so deeply while giving no equivalent 357

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attention to the other genres active at the same time or at any time in tradition. As I suggested e­ arlier, Benjamin’s remarks on comedy are cursory. As a result, Shakespeare’s own alternatives to the Hamlet prob­lem play no role in Benjamin’s story, which leads him and some of his followers to the presumed necessity of universal melancholy as the defining modern life-­form. Two errors ­matter ­here. First, tradition contains alternatives to the melancholic and the correlated figure of ruination, on which in turn a ­great deal of modern criticism built its own messianic, apocalyptic, allegorical, and utopian practice. Second, critics who, for vari­ous reasons, embrace the nearly universal darkness and melancholic response to the Hamlet prob­lem refuse to consider that poiesis contains alternatives not only to their historical narrative but also to the prob­lems that, for ­these critics, define ­human fate and underlie their own practice. N ­ eedless to say, for Benjamin in par­ tic­u­lar, the almost incomprehensible genocidal politics of fascism, close to us again at least in foreboding, accounts for the near despair of the angel’s vision of historical ruination, which retrospectively might necessitate the messianic vision. As Howard Eiland explains, however, Benjamin’s failed Habilitationschrift, written in the early 1920s, predates and at best anticipates the abominations of the 1930s. Benjamin’s immediate goal for his thesis was the recovery of “the idea of allegory” via an appropriation of the Baroque. As Eiland puts it, Benjamin reinterpreted the concept of the Baroque “as a category having an intimate anticipatory relation to certain con­temporary developments of the critic’s own day.”51 Benjamin’s prolepsis justifies for many intellectuals his choice of materials and concepts as adequate to his own age—­and, by force of logic, much of our own. For Schmitt, however, the desire to undermine the liberal state system in ways that advanced the po­liti­cal power of the Far Right and eventually the Nazis has no claim to the agony of Benjamin’s thinking. American academics have facilitated the resurrection of Schmitt’s authority.52 We should try to remove the Schmittian (and Benjaminian) Hamlet, with its attached meta­phorics of ruin, melancholy, haunting, and other variations, from its influential place in our discourse.53 Coleridge provides a strong counterstatement to the melancholic attitude normalized with the practice of allegoresis. Coleridge’s objections to allegorizing represent a lost opportunity for criticism, a possibility forgotten by the supersession of symbolic modes. In the pre­sent context, however, 358

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we should focus on a dif­fer­ent but related ele­ment of his example. Coleridge’s point is that poets exceed the posteriority of secondary historicist narratives, which to meet the demands of their own interests crystallize poiesis into fixed forms. We can see Coleridge’s influence on Stevens in his assertion that through poets, “the ­human race frame[s] to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity.”54 Recalling Aristotle once more, this claim implies the possibility of curiosity learning from the poetic creation, as Van Gogh, lamenting Baudelaire’s speed before Rembrandt, insisted on the per­sis­tent value of studying his pre­de­ces­sor. As such, it is a corrective in the name of ­human imagination to the mode of work that Eiland, for example, assigns to Benjamin or that I have presented in the case of Jameson, as an avatar of official culture. I am charging that certain practices of especially but not only academic criticism do not learn from the objects before them. I counterpoise a single example of a critical proj­ect that begins intent on such learning and concludes with a full change in belief. Discussing Rembrandt, I alluded to Stanley Cavell’s critical approach for its willingness to learn from art, in his case, the study of Shakespeare. In Disowning Knowledge, Cavell admits to being an amateur in the study of ­these plays. Moreover, as he says in his essay “Hamlet’s Burden of Proof,” he turns to Shakespeare ­because philosophy has not assessed its own intellectualization of prob­lems such as skepticism, which happens to be the topos of his own studies.55 Cavell adds a point that is impor­tant to my argument. Poetry provides an outside; it offers the circumferential view on not only high discourses such as philosophy but also the more narrowly focused proj­ects of a Schmitt or Benjamin. In other words, it offers a ground for criticism, and in Aristotle’s best sense, learning beyond the assumptions at work in even well-­ constructed but not especially curious forms of knowledge. Above all, it calls us back to the question of how best to be h ­ uman, which requires constant slow work on imagination’s gifts—­especially to resist and evade abominations, which emerge. Cavell’s interest in poiesis as a criterion for the judgment of philosophy stands out against the Socratic moment in the Symposium. It also illustrates the Aristotelian claim for the evolution of mimesis into art as a source of knowing that is impor­tant to politics and society. Contrary to the customary 359

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practice, which Frank Kermode lamented, that sees academics choosing philosophy rather than poetry as an impor­tant interest, Cavell rejects the practice of bringing a formed external theory instrumentalized as discourse or method to the study of art. Indeed, some methods deny the artistic nature of art itself, transforming it, as positivists do, into mere documentation within an archive or data within a bank. Taking poetry seriously means seeing it as a specific form of poiesis outside institutionalized or official philosophy, method, or culture. It means taking it, as does Cavell in keeping with Aristotle, as a scene of learning, a ground for judgment, b ­ ecause it dramatizes the strug­gles of experience over hard-­to-­avoid truths.56 Referring to the ­great tragedies and to the potential for tragedy in The Winter’s Tale, Cavell writes, “that tragedy is the result, and the study, of a burden of knowledge, of an attempt to deny the all but undeniable” (179). (In The Winter’s Tale, this means Leontes’s attempt to deny he is the f­ather of his own ­children.) In addition, Cavell plays the game of poetic art against the game of philosophy, in a spirit that Wallace Stevens might have endorsed. Cavell himself and philosophy as tradition have a g­ reat interest in skepticism, which phi­los­o­phers argue makes up “inescapably, essentially, ­human possibility” (179).57 Cavell reads the Shakespeare tragedies to evaluate the adequacy and value of his own understanding of skepticism. He accepts that poetry is a fair mea­sure in this pro­cess for two reasons. For the mind to play across the mimetic achievements of art is a social, intellectual, and po­liti­cal act outside the easy reach of naïve condemnations of aestheticism. Poetry also can meet the highest standard of intellectual responsibility in its practice of proper mimesis, a quality he ­will clarify as his study advances. Cavell’s encounters with Shakespeare lead to another impor­tant discovery that m ­ atters to the normative theories of ruination and melancholy. I have objected to the iterative per­sis­tence of t­ hese stories and the practices attached to them by suggesting that they are unnecessary in the strongest sense that no necessity of any kind attaches to them, especially not in the face of h ­ uman creations not included in t­ hose stories. I want to pause for a moment ­here, lest I seem to imply a s­ imple opposition between open and closed stories. In part, I do make this contrast, but I do not s­ ettle on it any more than on the naïve idea that imagination cannot create deadly obstacles to its own per­sis­tence. Cavell helps us recast this situation ­after his own rather-­uncharacteristic Freudian encounter with Hamlet. He reminds

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us that “it is no more characteristic of the chains of significance to be theoretically open than it is, at each link, for them to close” (191). The ­grand categorizations of historicist narratives close down this complex possibility, which Shakespeare’s dramas show is a ­matter of moment-­to-­moment action and strug­gle: “each step is a form of life” (191)—­a position that requires politics and not just the theorization of g­ rand narratives of “the po­liti­cal.” If imitation as forms of art and in turn as forms of learning, knowing, unlearning, and unknowing is a strug­gle of imaginative intelligence, then poiesis and criticism are essential material qualities of being ­human and, as such, necessary to all forms of responsible species being in a world not the ­human’s own. To expand meaning to see such ­things is a strug­gle blocked not only by the potential for closure but also by the concrete enactment of closure by positivisms and dogma. T ­ hese last solidify the moment by moment into set iterative allegories. In “The Man on the Dump,” melancholy is an abiding but fatal temptation. Cavell learned from reading Shakespeare that he had made himself victim to the art of philosophy, a sort of trap from which Rembrandt had to remove himself, that is, from the catch of his own art and his own formation. (Berger’s thinking about the masterful artist applies to the critic as well.) Cavell confessed in his preface to Disowning Knowledge to making of philosophy a defense against defeat by “claiming to possess some privileged access to or mea­sure of truth.” He learned the general lesson that in his well-­developed defense, he was “nowhere more needful of timely aid and encouragement,” a lesson he credited to Empson (ix). At the end of Cavell’s essay on The Winter’s Tale, he comes to an essential insight about poetry. He places his essay on The Winter’s Tale immediately ­after his reading of Hamlet. The l­ater chapter ends by moving far from the tragic vision of that play ­toward a dif­fer­ent understanding of the nature of the h ­ uman and the play of imagination and criticism within it. He finds in the ­later play not only an alternative to the Hamlet but a broader lesson into the value of art and criticism and their place in the worldly habitat. He reads The Winter’s Tale, with the help of Hamlet, as Shakespeare’s proof that poetry is not bound to the fatalistic ruin or dark vacancy required by the ­earlier play. In The Winter’s Tale’s formal potential, it is a tragic play for at least its first half. Leontes has all the qualities of a Shakespearean tragic hero, with

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traces of Macbeth and Othello obvious in action and Hamlet in verse. The play sets in motion all the mechanisms of tragedy to bring them to a counterconclusion that disproves the inescapability of tragedy in the period Benjamin calls the Baroque. In effect, Shakespeare poses the Hamlet prob­lem to overcome it with what look like movements of redemption or resurrection. In a Benjaminian sense, Leontes does not achieve the position Hamlet acquires of making himself a spectator of his own spectacle. In Leontes’s case, in a consciousness lacking reflection and awareness, the spectator position depends on the power of another. Shakespeare gives us Leontes at first searching for reflection in the shadow of his face, the image of his son: “I am like you, they say,” Mamillius answers him (1.2.205). Then, Leontes turns to Camillo as he refuses to see himself. Camillo does not see what Leontes commands he see, but he sees Leontes well enough to flee, to save Polixenes. Camillo, however, flees the metaphysical horror as much as he does the criminal and po­liti­cal abomination that Leontes becomes ­because of his own unschooled imagination: jealousy, desire, revenge. Camillo cries to him, “Good my lord, be cured / Of this diseased opinion, and betimes, / For ’tis most dangerous” (1.2.294–296). Shakespeare juxtaposes ­these lines to Leontes’s expression of the world that his own actions would rather bring about as an alternative to not only what he fears for himself but also what is, to all o ­ thers, the self-­evident truth. This is the Hamlet moment in this play, as it comes near to naming, in Lear-­like language, the final vision of the ­earlier play and its motives’ goals. Is this nothing? Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have ­these nothings, If this be nothing. (1.2.290–294)

Reflection fi­nally comes to Leontes as the counterweight to the tragic momentum in his character, from Paulina, a ­woman whose words and actions echo in a dif­fer­ent tone Rosalind’s magical powers of transformative determination. Paulina’s powers, and certainly their significance, ­matter more forcibly to the large story of intelligent imagination and imaginative critical intelligence than even Rosalind’s powers. Cavell is certainly helpful in weighing her importance as he sets the ending of The

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Winter’s Tale against the lessons derived via Hamlet from the play within the play of Hamlet itself. Throughout this book, I have objected to the stories of universal ruination prominent in much discussion of lit­er­at­ ure, culture, and politics. I have noted how tragedy plays the central genre role for thinkers like Benjamin ­because the tragedy brings us near to universal ruination as part of its narrative logic, a ruination implicit in the traditions ­behind the work and appropriate to the age’s abominations. Hamlet ends with the literalization of tragic-­centric logic, as piled corpses represent a fully destroyed polity, with no promise of vision, leadership, or renewal and visions of cosmic meaninglessness. The ending invites the cataclysmic readings of universal ruin. Beckett’s Endgame, with its version of annihilation, imitates King Lear but echoes Hamlet.58 Cavell, influenced by an ele­ment in Nietz­ sche, concludes from reading the tragedies that humanity would rather w ­ ill nothing than accept obvious truths. If Othello, Macbeth, and Leontes enact the desire for nothingness over and against the claims that nearly self-­evident truths make on tyrannical ­will and desire, Hamlet elevates the specific to a general prob­lem of art, and in this way, it poses a special nihilistic threat via imagination to the species, the world, and of course imagination and art themselves. If Benjamin retrieves Hamlet uniquely for a Christian moment that lightens the melancholy darkness of the Baroque, Cavell echoes Benjamin by making Hamlet into the figure of mourning. Cavell ties the play within the play to the Freudian classical sense of Hamlet as a play of birth and rebirth. If this seems to lead to maturity, it also leads to personal, po­liti­cal, and cosmic disaster. Hamlet must accept his m ­ other’s in­de­pen­ dent sexual identity and his f­ather as a (sexual) dependent whom the son cannot revive. The play pre­sents this movement of doubled loss in the tragic action. More generally, however, its tragic quality leads to this conclusion: “the play interprets the taking of one’s place in the world as a pro­cess of mourning, as if ­there is a taking up of the world that is humanly a question of giving it up” (Disowning Knowledge, 189). Melancholy and ruination emerge together in this double moment, which is why “mourning,” a term of Trauerspiel, appears in Cavell’s account at this point. In quite a startling conclusion, Cavell asserts that Hamlet’s actions “are our dreams,” in what now appears as the nightmare version of Stevens’s anagogic hope to make his imagination our own (190).

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Yet Leontes does not become a tragic hero. If Hamlet’s corrupting, impossible motive is revenge, leading to the darkness of his mourning and the play’s desolation, given that Leontes’s motive, apparently at least, is jealousy, we might expect similar development within genre terms. Leontes might have to accept his own sexual dependence and Hermione’s sexual in­de­pen­dence. He might then willingly embrace his ­children as his own. The plot, however, develops differently. Critics who take a political-­theological position and who concern themselves with sovereignty tend to read the play and Leontes’s actions as lessons in the reach, limit, and cost of sovereign desire. This criticism has made valuable contributions to the play.59 A more traditionally aesthetic criticism draws our attention to the play’s conscious demonstration of the powers of repre­sen­ta­tion, per­for­mance, and spectacle.60 Recent scholarship has also invaluably shifted attention from Leontes’s motives to the figure of Hermione, which effectively shifts terms of reading from tragedy to re-­ creation.61 In relation to The Winter’s Tale, scholars have thought about many of the most pressing issues of modern imaginative life, in art and politics, within varyingly wide and defined horizons. Po­liti­cal sovereignty has come to the fore in a post-­Straussian and postsecular academic era. Much good scholarship sees Leontes less as the defining figure in the play and shifts our attention ­toward Hermione, a move rightly if partly inspired by the success of feminist thinking and politics. In addition, we see at least a new interest in an old prob­lem, the genre form of the play, often called a romance, a tragic romance, a tragicomedy, or some other varying term. All ­these interests allow for a strong insight into the importance of The Winter’s Tale in long-­standing conceptualizations of not only Shakespeare and vari­ous genre but also philosophical thinkers who have laid out a sense of our past as our burden. Anselm Haverkamp is one of the most in­ter­est­ing of ­these scholars and so a perfect test case for my study. He has proposed his own term for the form of The Winter’s Tale and, more impor­tant, as the “attitude” embodied in the play. Haverkamp worries about the way post-­Romantic thinking has encircled itself in the attitude of melancholy via readings of Hamlet, especially the play’s ending and the character’s defining final nihilistic vision of abomination. Haverkamp describes our self-­created conundrum nicely as “a melancholy vis-­à-­vis the inescapable irony of the tragic as tragedy’s ineluctable past.” Against this iterative, exhaustive, and self-­created prison, 364

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Haverkamp finds in The Winter’s Tale “another, new aesthetic pre­sent and new actuality of tragedy” in the late Shakespeare.62 The last plays offer a new mode, according to Haverkamp, “tragic humor,” a term he derives in part from Heinrich Heine to replace “tragic irony” as the defining mode of Shakespearean tragedy. For Haverkamp, tragic humor eases the burden of melancholic entrapment in something like an aesthetic and affective iron cage. Haverkamp’s variation on the old story is at best an echo of Lear speaking to Cordelia of how they w ­ ill live as prisoners, apart, singing. Its misprision comes from and proves the existence of a sense of inescapable historical circumstance. As misprision, its crime is blind iteration with variation. Just as in As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale’s final scene does not close the action’s horizon. Aristotle’s Poetics gave us the basis for understanding the impossibility of finality in action, precisely b ­ ecause of catharsis’s social value. More impor­tant than an immediate social effect of tragic action, however, in Aristotle are two other ele­ments: first, the temporality opened by the structure beginning, m ­ iddle, and end; second, the continuity of mimetic action in the eliciting of plea­sure and curiosity on the part of mind and imagination. Haverkamp and Cavell, differently, emphasize the importance of Mamillius (and through him Polixenes as Leontes’s young “­brother”) to the structural action of the play. Mamillius’s whisper to his ­mother sets the Oedipal scene, with its po­liti­cal prob­lems of inheritance and po­liti­cal order set against the strug­gles of power and desire in Leontes. When Leontes’s f­ ather forces his separation from his m ­ other, which is a form of murder, opening the way for Perdita to become what the action recovers, Leontes not only echoes the risks in Hamlet, that is, the evocation of darkness and melancholy fatalism, but also opens futurity itself as a prob­lem and fact of the action as pre­sent and promise. (His actions echo Hamlet’s own discoveries about futurity in his strug­gles for replacement in descent.) Of course, promise offers both a sense of the better other and the repetition of the same. The contrast between Rosalind and Duke Se­nior is one version of this promise. In other words, ­these plays, in their differently vestibular endings, threaten or promise a return to the same with at best, as Haverkamp might put it, a dif­fer­ent attitude and an almost Nietz­schean sense of the tragically comic sense of repetition. Cavell’s figure of Leontes—he who must accept that he is the ­father of his own ­children rather than induce nothingness—­metonymizes the form 365

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of tragic action ending in Hamlet’s projection of a world frame consequent on its action.63 Haverkamp’s impor­tant explication of the play emerges from German traditions, starting from Heine and Marx (with Hegel nearby), referring back to Friedrich Schiller and forward to Benjamin. Tragic humor names the best attitude to the Augustinian fatalism that Haverkamp sees in not only the play but also the world and history. He hopes to preserve Shakespeare’s imaginative intelligence and in­de­pen­dence of mind in relation to the species being of tradition. Shakespeare, for Haverkamp—­and I think with Stevens that this is a proper take on his art—­“economizes, negotiates and makes a business out of the myth that he stages” (98). In other words, and as I have argued about Rembrandt, we must accept the distanced mastery necessary to the works that m ­ atter over extended periods. Marx, Haverkamp recalls, had a keen sense of masterworks beyond the limits of historicism. “In Marx’s contention,” he writes, “of the supra-­ historical interest of literary works like Homer’s and Shakespeare’s, some new sense of the po­liti­cal comes to the fore that distances itself from the melancholia of tragic irony” (87). Haverkamp’s central concern is to displace tragic irony and in so ­doing to give a fuller ground to the regnant attitude of melancholy. Given Shakespeare’s mastery, we cannot and should not accept, a priori, as Haverkamp has done, that he could not also overmaster Augustine’s (Protestant) vision of a dark fatalism induced by a city without God. Augustine’s is, like any myth, subject to Shakespeare’s economic control of materials for the disposition of his art’s proper pre­sen­ta­ tion of his unique creations. Melancholy is unnecessary, and the invention of tragic humor is de trop. In a g­ reat deal of modern scholarship, the ending of The Winter’s Tale took on the status of comic or romantic ending to a tragic action, a notion developed if not put in place by Barber and Frye. In such a binary view of the play, the pastoral scenes with Perdita and Time’s monologue represent a structural break or turn, when we should see them as a caesura. Rather than accepting that t­here is a redemptive rupture between the logics of tragedy and romantic comedy, pivoting on Perdita’s love and marriage—­ restoring the theme of recovering and regeneration through procreation so troubling to the first acts—­seeing the caesura in t­ hese scenes reawakens us to the play of tropes throughout the action. The play does not end as the actors leave the stage. Darkness persists in the actions and words of the play’s latter half. Tragic potential is everywhere, including lines echoing 366

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from tragedies and motives forcing repetition of threats from the early acts. Taking the pastoral and the monologue as caesura does not remove them from the continuity of action as pivots between two contrasting forms. Instead, as a pause, a place of breath, the caesura lets us see, as in As You Like It, the play of uncrystallized imagination, that is, the power of pure imaginative play ­under a master’s control. It gives us the sort of time Rembrandt required of Baudelaire and found in Van Gogh. Shakespeare not only replays older formal gestures with the pastoral and comic. In so ­doing, he also illustrates his own distanced control, his masterful art’s display of itself as central to the dramatics of the play. If you w ­ ill, the play is about the anthropological nature of imagination and its essential quality in h ­ uman life and action, in summoning, imitating, and weighing experience—in making it available for learning. I submit that this quality of Shakespeare’s art exceeds the conceptual reach of any par­tic­u­lar genre definition. As Coleridge understood, art of this importance is outside categorization. Rather than draw out the internal meta­phorics, the conceptual topics, of the scenes that Shakespeare puts into play, as Haverkamp does brilliantly, I prefer we notice the supersession of such issues as they come u ­ nder the mimetic control of a mastered art working to ends that are more fundamental. The monologue by Time, one moment among many, does not make this a play about h ­ uman finitude and fate. It does, however, contain a s­ imple expression of dispository power, of imaginative in­de­pen­dence and the necessary freedom of intelligence to accomplish its task. “Time”—­easily made an allegorical figure—is an inhuman and not-­quite-­disembodied master trope across and within which the play of figures is an unhindered possibility. Its function does not depend on its place in a prior narrative of classical or Christian origin. As an act of imitation and a platform where tropes imitate, it enfigures the masterful control that many developed readings of Shakespeare assign to him as potentiality: “it is in my power / to o’erthrow law, and in one self-­born hour / to plant and o’erwhelm custom” (4.1.7–9). Haverkamp says that Prospero leaves his powers on the island and knowingly returns to the iterative real­ity of politics. Time’s lines, by contrast, incarnate an unresignable power to create that echoes, in Western traditions, the earliest stories of power from Hesiod to Saint John’s gospel. Importantly, at no point in the play do we see an allegorization of this power at work, producing a new world or promising a looming utopia. 367

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I have spent this time with Haverkamp to show how per­sis­tent is the melancholic sense in modern criticism and to show how brilliantly productive it can be. I take it up near the end of this book to emphasize the trap of that productivity even when aimed at a progressive or liberatory end. Haverkamp stresses that “the republican fraternity of b ­ rothers” is threatened by the per­sis­tent tragedy that Heine and ­others found in winter’s tales, in which spring always becomes fall (105). As Haverkamp fits the play in a specific genealogy leading to Benjamin, he comes to the final place that moderns find themselves, a place they believe is inescapable, mournful, and melancholic. Cavell insisted rightly that semantic chains are as likely to open as close or vice versa in any moment. Haverkamp, in his own terms, finds some ease in Empson’s term “ambiguity” to describe “the ambivalence of emotional impulses” responding to a wisdom older than the Enlightenment. In a lucid summary of this line of thought in his own work and our near past, Haverkamp concludes that this ambivalence “prescribed for Benjamin a ‘heroic melancholy’ to the triumph of time” (106). This metaphysical anxiety in the face of finitude meta­phorized a nonmetaphysical fear: “of the civitas terrena with its history of fratricide and revenge” (106). He takes an all-­too-­common position, ironically against not only Cavell but also Empson. T ­ hese last words, with their allusions to Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale, or at least the motives of their tragic actors, tend to timeless universalization, to allegories of ruination, to Benjamin’s angel of 1940. Given that ­these plays’ horizons do not close as their dramatic action ends, had Haverkamp been concerned with melancholy, he might have offered a view of what they might frame as they open beyond the actors’ exits. His article does not do this. Rather, it ends looking backward and forward within its own tale of perpetual winter, backward via the Holocaust to ritualistic understandings of fate and forward to the interminable warfare and anomie promised u ­ nder the sign of apocalypse. “Shakespeare’s last plays,” he writes, “gave a first, unquiet warning: in a theater bordering, though not without grace, the rough and cruel of times to come” (106). Given Haverkamp’s embrace of Augustine as a necessary figure for Shakespeare and so for us on the edge of this first and yet final theatricalization of our times, he unexpectedly leads grace forward as a new character in the story. Introducing grace, the leading term of the Calvinist Augustine, allows Haverkamp to keep alive Benjamin’s praise of Shakespeare’s unique imaginative power to make the Christian work against and with the per­ 368

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sis­tent prob­lems of fate and ­will. Once more, though, he forgets Shakespearean in­de­pen­dence and mastery, the power of imaginative intelligence, and the possibility that it is the secular or worldly grace resident in the materiality of species itself even as it changes and lives in time. Cavell’s sense of the ending results from standing Hamlet against The Winter’s Tale. He preserves the essential framing and projective power of ­these plays’ spectacle-­like endings. He also stresses alternatives missed by Haverkamp. The primary issue is mimesis, or art as the power of imitation. He sees that imagination is the power moving imitation from childhood to art. Hamlet’s play within a play and Hamlet’s ending hold up a mirror. To understand Cavell’s contribution ­here, we must recall Aristotle’s concept that mimesis becomes art by d ­ oing its work in certain better ways. For Aristotle, t­hose pro­cesses ­were always anthropological, part of the question of the h ­ uman itself. Along the same lines of thought, Cavell pursues Hamlet’s worries regarding the play within the play that the actors might imitate badly. To perform badly is far worse than making a m ­ istake in imitation. Cavell intuits Hamlet’s lesson that imitating well is essential to being h ­ uman. To imitate badly or improperly makes the imitator a mere imitation of a h ­ uman, that is, in Cavell’s terms, an “abomination.” The prob­lem is always the becoming h ­ uman. Rosalind’s magic powers, Time’s trope of uncrystallized and in­de­pen­dent power—on t­ hese rest the possibility of the ­human as not abomination. Stevens developed this topic in his thinking of imagination’s opposition to the pressures of real­ity. Adorno worried the same issues in setting the essay against domination and forgetting. “To imitate, or represent—­that is, to participate in—­the species well is a condition of being h ­ uman” (Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 221). This is what Rembrandt does in giving the world Bathsheba. Cavell adds to the way Aristotle meant tragic action anthropologically to extend beyond the end of dramatic action. Rooted in the very mimetic power, which lies at the start of being ­human, art’s work never ends at its own bound­aries. Catharsis draws us into the realm of imitating well and invites the critic to the task of understanding and judging the act and its works. Moreover, as in Aristotle, with his difficult notion of catharsis, an ethical as well as anthropological obligation follows. Art asks us, in Hamlet’s terms, not only “to determine w ­ hether nature is breathing (still, again)—[but] asks us to be ­things affected by the question” (221). The point of uncrystallized intelligent imagination is that melancholy is only 369

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one attitude and one, as with Jaques, that Shakespeare teaches us should be moving on and away. Turning The Winter’s Tale ­toward Hermione reminds us that marriage persists even a­ fter the action’s end and with it all the po­liti­cal, gender, and ethical prob­lems inherent in tragic potential. Hence, melancholy looms in a moment of rebirth through penance and patience. It is not, of course, the only imaginative work to reward the patient and curious scrutiny on offer. Critics suspect that Schmitt failed to read and learn from artworks in genealogies from which he claimed his authority. We might also, and in a far more sympathetic way, object to Benjamin’s melancholic narratives, no ­matter how thick the means of their compilation. Cavell’s alternative to this melancholic story is not the last word on ­these questions, but Haverkamp believes Cavell’s argument is consequential enough to require refutation. He invokes something like the universality of the Augustinian vision to discredit Cavell’s view. This says l­ittle about Cavell and more about Haverkamp’s investment in melancholy. It is also evidence of something I have argued through this book. Augustinianism enables lines of tradition within which the parables of messianic thinking find a home. Their intent is to trou­ble or displace the secular notion of poiesis and set it within a story of anxiety-­ ridden abandoned finite life. To this, the only “proper” derivative attitude is melancholy. Cavell’s alternative to the melancholic attitude is hardly comedic or romantic. Meditating on the artwork’s play with the full field of experience in poetic imitation, he sees the near presence of terror as the condition that requires worldliness as an intellectual, po­liti­cal, and ethical position. Cavell says that revenge is “carry­ing the death of the world in us,” as we see in Leontes or Hamlet (Disowning Knowledge, 220). If this is true, then retelling the tragic stories as inescapable, as leaving us with the bleakness of ruin, is also to carry the death of the world in us. We have only the traces of ruin in our excavations if we do not dwell with the works that let us supersede them. “Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; / With them, forgive yourself” (Winter’s Tale, 5.1.5–6). Cavell leaves open the question of Leontes’s success in following this advice. As we see in Haverkamp’s Benjamin, melancholy is the attitude of nothingness, the trace of ruination, the weakness of imagination and intelligent curiosity. If we concede that frames for the world continue past t­ hese plays’ endings, then we can follow Cavell’s secular alternative: “The final scene of using in The Winter’s Tale 370

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shows what it may be to find in oneself the life of the world” (221). Empson’s theory of ambiguity influenced Cavell and Haverkamp, and we see that influence in the way Cavell reads Hermione’s final status. Cavell sees Hermione’s transformation as making two one (an echo of Aristophanes), a prob­lem that Leontes instrumentalized to induce tragic destruction. Nevertheless, she also makes one two, a much more arduous task, which establishes her as an in­de­pen­dent presence on whom Leontes is now dependent. Leontes learns his lesson of Hermione’s in­de­pen­dence, but ­there is more: “Hermione has learned, that ­there is a life beyond his, and that she can create a life beyond his and hers, and beyond plentitude and nothingness” (220). The sexual, ­legal, and metaphysical alternatives dissolve, leaving the uncrystallized power we have discussed, embodied again, as with Rosalind, in a ­woman victimized in both cases by ruling men. All this is what remains for us, beyond the frame of the play’s action, an act of imagination at work on us in the world. Paulina plays a key role in bringing about t­ hese transformations and projections. Her figural value overlays her mimetic function as a character in the dramatic action. She is a figure of agon, who intensifies qualities Rosalind displays as she directs her play to its end. Topically, Rosalind’s and Paulina’s agonistics direct the works’ vectors of force, the imaginative energies that direct the plays to specific endings. Given that the closing of dramatic action in ­these plays frames openings onto real­ity as well as onto ­imagined alternatives, the motives resident in t­ hese figures’ agonistics m ­ atter very much. Rosalind’s realistic and sometimes ironic sense of the natu­ral and social limits of pastoral or bucolic desire places the actions she summons and the emotions she satisfies within limits defined by finitude and custom. “Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (4.1.138–139). Even when she is most ready to consent to Orlando’s desires, she realizes that her own arousal defines the play of satisfaction: “for now I am in a holiday humour,” she tells Orlando, “and like enough to consent” (4.1.62–63). Rosalind’s uncrystallized wit is the mirror image of the figure of dianoia, the repre­sen­ta­tion of thought in verbal art, the device that enables character to convey a simulacrum of concepts’ movement. Paulina is much the same as Rosalind in her orchestration of the play’s conclusion. Of course, all characters for whom dianoia is a marked feature of their function within the larger artwork result from the tropes that 371

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represent the essay or play of mind. With Rosalind, ­these tropes imitating the motives and reflections of dianoia are very much to the fore and intensify our sense of her as a metonymy of poiesis. Paulina’s verbal wit takes second place to both her confrontations with power and her control of silence. In addition, in the final statue scene, Paulina echoes Rosalind and brings us back to an ­earlier version of her powers as she takes on the role of magician, too. What images does the imagination create as it takes flight on the momentum Paulina creates to move the play to its end? She preserves life by careful tending and more careful plotting. Hermione tells us this, when she explains to Perdita that Paulina brought her Apollo’s message that the lost might be found. Paulina is a technician, who conjures the means to preserve life across a long winter. In the play’s most power­ful moment, when marvel comes onstage, she commands the consequences of time; at first seeming to overcome death and finitude, she in fact overcomes the tragic fatality of willing to destroy the world by subduing it to the fate it seemingly imposes. “ ’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach / Strike all that look upon with marvel” (5.3.99–100). Paulina is the device by which art voices as one of its motives and deepest concerns the desire that life itself, so precious and power­ful, especially when grounded in love, could stand in the face of finitude and death to achieve beauty and joy. Yet no sooner does Shakespeare put this motif into play to evoke the emotions associated with the desire that underlies hope and belief than Paulina darkens the attitudes it has elicited. “Do not shun her,” she tells Leontes, “­Until you see her die again” (5.3.105–106). Paulina has set the stage for a scene, which plays as she planned it. Shakespeare puts vari­ous freighted motifs and allusions into other characters’ dialogue with her to make dense the texture of meaning, consequence, and experience associated with her figure. The general scene echoes Euripides’s Alcestis, and specific lines and gestures allude to par­tic­ul­ar ele­ments of the e­ arlier work. When Camillo demands of Paulina that she let Hermione speak, as if Paulina controlled her voice, she responds that Hermione may speak but “Mark a l­ittle while” (5.3.118). This line recalls Heracles as he tells Admetus that Alcestis cannot speak ­until ritually purified on her return from the dead. For Paulina, now aligned with the Heracles who fought death for a temporary reprieve for Alcestis, the moment parallel to ritual purification is Hermione’s speech to Perdita, itself a prayer invoking the gods and their grace. Hermione, 372

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predictably, asks for a story of the lost child returned. In this next-­to-final moment, as all the pressures of life, imagination, tradition, and art pre­sent themselves in creative motion, the play tropes on its own identity and calls for more tales. The play’s finale becomes a vestibule far more than a screen. It does not proj­ect a world of final sentiments and attitudes. It opens ­toward spaces of lived experience and imagination, enabled and burdened with its inheritances, its circumstances, and its natu­ral limits and capacities. The emblem for what leads down and through to the end of this vestibule is that word “tale.” Hermione asks for a life narrative from Perdita, a personal history or life writing, as it w ­ ere. We know, however, from the way this drama in general and this final scene in par­tic­u­lar play itself that a tale can never be personal alone. If done well as an imitation to elicit study and curiosity, a tale is merely one name for the complex poiesis that is love, life, and art—­the essential means to become h ­ uman while not a murderous abomination. ­These virtues projected into a made world counterpoise Paulina’a agonistics to the tragic “weddedness to nothingness” that Cavell saw at the heart of the tragic (220). Rather than melancholy as the dominant attitude in a culture and among its intellectuals, Paulina offers an attitude dif­fer­ent from and more mature than even Rosalind’s magical disposition. Paulina sets aside Hermione’s wish to hear Perdita’s story: “­There is time enough for that” (5.3.128). Nevertheless, why the deferral? “Lest they desire upon this push to trou­ble / Your joys with like relation” (5.3.129–130). Paulina defers the threatening return of darkness, of mourning melancholy that might come with a story of loss as well as gain. She is a ­widow, as she soon reminds us. Her husband’s grizzly death itself reminds us of nature’s indifferent needs as they ignore h ­ umans’ felt priority in the world. Paulina segregates herself from the “precious winners,” and she leaves them, for the moment, to their “exultation,” while “an old turtle” she creeps off to “some withered bough” (5.3.131–133). She ­will lament, while ­others celebrate in the moment she engineered. Leontes offers her renewal in the form of a new husband wed by sovereign consent. Fi­nally, he demands Paulina lead the party offstage into a ritual of recollection and confession, the aim of which is to restore, he tells us, what was once “dissevered” (5.3.155). The Arden editor notes that in Elizabethan En­glish, Paulina’s line “You precious winners” (5.3.131) could have been heard as “You precious winters.”64 As Leontes has Paulina lead the ensemble offstage to their winners’ tales 373

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of recompense, even in ­these moments of exultation, confession, and renewal, the inescapable presence of winter looms, not simply as in romance when fall follows spring but in a much more closely tied way, as interspersed realities, requiring complex and never-­settled attitudes. In fact, if ­there is one satisfactory mode, it is in the intermixture of art and criticism, of creativity and curiosity, which is the essential way to live and think such dense and rich h ­ uman experience. It is the poetic attitude, shadowed closely by its critical child, which alone together sustain the species. The melancholics have forgotten or betrayed poiesis, limiting it to the display of the unbearable, to use Haverkamp’s word (“Whispering,” 106). This specific view comes on Schmitt, and Benjamin, and attaches itself to life and imagination via Hamlet. Nevertheless, this bleakness about life, the inability to stand in the face of finitude’s complexities that this reflects, betrays the species’ fundamental quality of mimesis, of imagination as part of the answer to the h ­ uman question. The consequences of this inability have been dire for intellectual life; it does not have confidence that imagination can, in the h ­ ere and now, as in Rosalind or Paulina, achieve an albeit always ­limited victory in strug­gle. Bleakness and weakness live in the allegorical, in the infinite deferral of hope over a utopian horizon. Committed to ruin, it cannot see or accept the hard truths of limit, love, and beauty. Therefore, it impoverishes the h ­ uman, its capacities, and its challenges. It devalues its creations, their beauties, and their successes—­simply b ­ ecause none of them is a final, apocalyptic, erasure of the finitude that makes the secular world. It not only crystallizes the work of imagination in one key but condemns the imagination to the endless iteration of the same monotone. For the melancholics, bleakness is all.

Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” theorizes the relation between imitation as art and intellectual curiosity and criticism. He theorizes the actions of poiesis in art and criticism together. The essay and poetry share qualities of intelligent imagination. In his writing on the essay, Adorno enables a defense of poetry, an exploration of poiesis as an essential quality of the ­human species and as the means and special location for asking what the ­human is. The essay is a form of poiesis. The academic thesis and research article in the institutions of official culture are its antagonist. The capacities inherent in the essay form are essential ele­ments of being h ­ uman, the 374

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fate of which poses (and helps answer) the question of what the ­human is, how it is to be h ­ uman. Poiesis and essay manifest and enact the h ­ uman. The essay is a form of intelligent exploratory work in which the h ­ uman mind and imagination move through concepts as part of the pro­cesses of the historically ­human answering questions about itself. As such, the essay is a manifestation of the existence of the possibility for such thoughtful and imaginative work within the species precisely as an essential ele­ment in the species’ being, its inherent anthropology. The historicality of the ­human resides in the essay’s potentiality. It calls on the h ­ uman to be responsible to the qualities that alone enable proper reflection on and control of its own forms and actions in a habitat not its own. This anthropological and ethical insight requires a strong critique of intellectual work attached to the official culture, which dominates nature and forgets the forms of ­human life and their potentialities in experience and imagination. ­These powers demand, as Aristotle began to tell us, an obligation to intellectual virtues combined in art and criticism. The essay is the form most contrary to authoritative ways of speaking, the regularized discourses and disciplines at home in the acad­emy. Formalized, dynastic, and official forms of knowledge production have no obvious outside from which questions emerge about their responsibility or consequence. The essay is a form in which the intellectual virtues preserve themselves as an alternative to iteration. “In the realm of thought it is virtually the essay alone that has successfully raised doubts about the absolute privilege of method,” Adorno writes.65 Doubting discovers a brutal fact about what happens to intellect working within the systematized and official discourses, the place where crystallization has occurred. System, domination, and amnesia—­these arrest the very possibility of poiesis. They are the all-­too-­human pressures of the real, which correlate entirely with the traces of darkness in the stories of ruination. Repressing the essay is an action we can imagine Leontes taking to assert his own sovereign priority.66 The essay is a modest form. It finds satisfaction in fragments and humbly embraces the smallness of its ambitions. It is an attitude far from the arrogance b ­ ehind melancholy, ­behind the monotonous dissatisfaction with finitude and technical dominance. As a form, the essay has a lot in common with the sort of work Shakespeare’s plays do in opening frames and vestibules into life as experience, as the forum of imaginative play and intellectual curiosity. It strug­gles to preserve ­those qualities from systematic 375

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domination, from abandonment, and from willful ignorance. It opens the possibility of seeing ­human strug­gle lived collectively and individually in worlds that do not confirm the dreams ­humans have of a world that accommodates them. Most impor­tant, it knows that to ­settle into mourning and melancholia is to s­ ettle our strug­gles on the side of domination rather than love for the possibilities imagination offers, if only we would take the time to dwell with its works and accept their gifts as our own.67

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notes acknowl­e dgments index

Notes

1. The Path of Sorrows 1. Benedict Anderson, ­Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1993). Once Anderson ruled that nations are created as cultural artifacts and so brought into being by imagination’s pro­cesses, he opened the door on a long vestibule of closely placed doorways, each of which in turn opens a space for hermeneutic activity that reads almost all cultural production as allegorical of nation formation. For a clear example of this conjunction, see Robyn Fowler, “ ‘A New Canadian National Spirit’: Allegorical Miss Canada and the Occult Canadian State,” in Culture + the State: Critical Works from the Proceedings of the 2003 Conference at the University of Alberta, ed. James Gifford and Gabrielle E. M. Zezulka-­Mailloux, 40–52 (Edmonton: CRC Humanities Studio, 2003). See Partha Chatterjee’s review essay as well, “Anderson’s Utopia,” Diacritics 29, no.  4 (1999): 128–134. Anderson’s near neighbors include Julia Kristeva’s much-­cited theory of abjection as well as Judith Butler’s critical engagement with Freud and Kristeva. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Butler, Gender Trou­ble (New York: Routledge, 1990). 2. See, for example, Barbara Johnson, “Allegory and Psychoanalysis,” Journal of African American History 88 (2003): 66–70. For a sense of how recent critics have brought together the psychoanalytic and social historical interest in allegory, see Rita A. Faulkner, “Psychoanalysis and Anamnesis in the National Allegory of Nawal El Saadawi and Assia Djebar,” L’Esprit Créateur 48, no. 4 (2008): 69–80. 3. The Library of Congress cata­logues twenty book titles ­under the subject heading “allegory” between the 1936 publication of C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition and Angus Fletcher’s 1964 Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, while placing more than 200 in the period from 1964 to the rough pre­sent. The MLA International Bibliography lists 207 items treating allegory anywhere in their text between 1936 and 1964, whereas it lists over 4,300 items in the period since 1964. To be more precise, the MLA bibliographs 313 articles between 1960 and 1980 and 2,430 from 1980 through May 19, 2020. Similar numbers occur for “utopia” and “apocalypse” as search terms. Even allowing for the expansion of the US and world academies during the period from the 1960s, 379

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the growth in attention to topics such as allegory and utopia suggests a nearly obsessive, certainly a highly repetitive and normative, fascination with the topics. 4. Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 13–37. 5. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 6. According to the OED, a misprision is “a wrongful act or omission; spec. a misdemeanor or failure of duty by a public official” or “now usually: the crime of (deliberately) concealing one’s knowledge of a treasonable act or of a felony.” For the OED, ­these meanings produce the more general usage, “the mistaking of one t­ hing for another; a misunderstanding; a m ­ istake.” The active but implied work of judgment in all ­these usages emerges in the second definition: “Contempt, scorn; failure to appreciate or recognize the value of something. Usu. with of.” 7. Edward W. Said, “Traveling Theory,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 239. 8. Said, 239. 9. The Modern Language Association awarded Jameson its Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement in 2011. “Fredric Jameson to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award,” Duke ­Today, December  2011, https://­today​.­duke​.­edu​/­2011​/­12​ /­jamesonaward. In 2008, he won the Holberg International Memorial Prize, which more recently was awarded to Cass Sunstein (2018) and Stephen Greenblatt (2016). Holberg Prize, “Holberg Prize Laureates,” accessed May  19, 2020, https://­ holbergprisen​.­no​/­en​/­holbergprisen​/­prisvinnere. From the Modern Language Association, Jameson has also won the William Riley Parker Prize and the James Russel Lowell Prize. MLA, “Winners of MLA Prizes,” accessed May 19, 2020, https://­www​ .­mla​.­org​/­Resources​/­Career​/­MLA​-­Grants​-­and​-­Awards​/­Winners​-­of​-­MLA​-­Prizes. 10. Said, “Traveling Theory,” 239. 11. Richard Rorty’s successful ­career, especially among cultural studies and literary types, represents and solidifies this arrangement. One academic study makes some of ­these points especially by tying Rorty’s notion of conversation to the general utopian theory of hope. Elizabeth F. Cooke, “Rorty on Conversation as an Achievement of Hope,” Con­temporary Pragmatism 1, no. 1 (2004): 83–102. 12. Said, “Traveling Theory,” 239. 13. See Fredric Jameson, “On Interpretation,” in The Po­liti­cal Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 19, where Jameson insists on both the “urgency” of his proj­ect and the fact that “only” it reveals the vast unified metanarrative that subsumes all other narratives in history as well as all other interpretive narratives. 14. Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-­History,” trans. R. Hullot-­Kentor, in ­Things beyond Resemblance: Collective Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 252–269. 15. Theodor Adorno, “Text 3: Beethoven’s Late Style,” in “The Late Style (I),” in Beethoven: The Philosophy of ­Music, Fragments and Texts, ed. Rolf ­Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 125. 16. Adorno, 125. 380

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17. For a history of this distinction, see Gerald L. Bruns, “The Hermeneutics of Allegory and the History of Interpretation,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 4, no. 4 (1988): 384–395. 18. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 14–15. 19. Fletcher, Allegory, 3; Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 34–35. Research should examine the historical conjunction of Strauss’s work, revived by neoconservatives in the twenty-­ first ­ century with the consensus formation around allegorization as a master decoding among academic literary critics, whose work, collectively, stands for far more than internal academic talk. 20. See, for example, Zhang Longxi, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Lit­er­a­ture East and West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). I take this example to show two ­things: first, the influence of Jameson’s thinking about “national allegory” with its own example of Lu Xun; and second, how allegorization becomes the basis in concept and practice for reor­ga­niz­ing comparatism and perhaps world lit­er­a­ture. 21. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 130–148; Jameson, “Conclusion: The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology,” in Po­liti­cal Unconscious, 281–299; Jameson, “Utopianism a­ fter the End of Utopia,” in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 154–180, and in “Conclusion,” esp. 334–340; Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (2004): 35–54; and Jameson, Archaeologies of the F ­ uture: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 22. To recapture some of the context into which Jameson made his statements in defense of interpretation, recall that Northrop Frye, in The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957) sought a science of lit­er­a­ture beyond interpretation. Also see Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966); and Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), which asserts on the first page of its preface that interpretation does not “make out much of a case for criticism as an in­de­pen­dent mode of knowledge” (xiii). 23. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 89. 24. Cornel West, “Ta-­Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Strug­gle,” Guardian, December 17, 2017, https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­comment​ isfree​/­2017​/­dec​/­17​/­ta​-­nehisi​-­coates​-­neoliberal​-­black​-­struggle​-­cornel​-­west​?­CMP​ =­edit​_­2221. “Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable. What concerns me is his narrative of ‘defiance.’ ” See also Ta-­ Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015). “My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent ­toward chaos then concluded in a box” (28). In a word, their difference lies in their relative judgment on hope as a po­liti­cal and anthropological category. 25. See Big Think, “Cornel West: Hope Is Spiritual Armor against Modern Society’s Spiritual Warfare,” YouTube, July 27, 2017, https://­youtu​.­be​/­bbqGtw​-­Tlno. Significantly, West begins this lecture with a reflection on death. Precisely ­because death summons hope as its armor, it has a place in the nexus of melancholy, utopia, messianism, and allegory that this book works to displace. 381

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26. Jameson, “Utopianism,” 167, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 27. Gordon Teskey, “Irony, Allegory, and Metaphysical Decay,” PMLA 109, no. 3 (1994): 398. 28. Teskey, 399. 29. Fredric Jameson, “Introduction: Utopia Now,” in Archaeologies of the ­Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), xi–­xvi. 30. Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso Books, 2013). See also Mirowski, ed., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 31. Morton Bloomfield, “Allegory as Interpretation,” New Literary History 3, no. 2 (1972): 301. 32. Quintilian, Institute of Oratory, vol. 2, book 8, chapter 6, #53, trans. John Selby Watson (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891), 138. 33. Quintilian, #14, 127. 34. Classical rhetorical theory repeatedly links enigma to allegory as substance to the latter’s functional survival in rhe­toric. Filippo Andrei, “The Motto and the Enigma: Rhe­toric and Knowledge in the Sixth Day of the Decameron,” in Heliotropia: An Online Journal of Research to Boccaccio Scholars 10, no. 1 (2013), http://­scholarworks​.­umass​.­edu​/­heliotropia​/­vol10​/­iss1​/­2. 35. Quintilian, Institute of Oratory, #44, 135. 36. A danger inheres in this effort, one noted by Quintilian. When the allegory expresses or allegorist uncovers something quite contrary to what is meant, ­there is irony, “which our rhetoricians call illusion.” Quintilian, #54, 138. On Jameson’s use of “transcoding,” see The Po­liti­cal Unconscious, 25. 37. Among the many excellent treatments of this subject, see Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 109–122. 38. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 194, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. This work was first published in 1963 as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf Verlag). 39. Bloomfield, “Allegory as Interpretation,” 302. 40. Bloomfield, 302, citing Paul de Man, “Lyric and Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhe­toric of Con­temporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 185. 41. Bloomfield, 302. 42. Bloomfield, 303. 43. For a s­ imple version of this objection, see Michael Sandel, “What M ­ atters Is the Motive,” in Justice: What’s the Right ­Thing to Do (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 103–116. 44. Bloomfield, “Allegory as Interpretation,” 306. See Fletcher, Allegory, 95–96, for remarks on the historical association of allegory with Gnosticism and interpretation by closed or elite groups. 45. Bloomfield, “Allegory as Interpretation,” 308.

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46. Michael Löwy, “Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopia in Central Eu­ rope,” trans. Renée B. Larrier, New German Critique 20 (1980): 106. 47. Löwy, 105, citing Lucien Goldmann, “La démocratie économique et la création culturelle,” Épistémologie et philosophie politique (Paris: Éditions Denoël / Gonthier, 1978), 217. 48. “Le socialisme est precisément l’espoir de créer un jour une culture authentique dont la structure catégoriale soit suffisament vaste pour comprendre et intégrer toutes les creations culturelles du passé.” Goldmann, “Démocratie économique,” 223. Translation is mine. 49. Goldmann’s formulations suggest a link to American pragmatism that research that is more complete should explicate. See James Livingston, “Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What Is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity?,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2010): 32–77. They are not only conceptual links between pragmatism’s relentless commitments to hope, coping, and making the truth by h ­ uman action and belief but also a common sense that utopianism and pragmatism alike must embrace the nihilism of the moment, a belief that casts doubt on the merit of such practices as electoral politics as short of the rupture needed in the face of the current configuration of the commodity fetishism within late capital. 50. Löwy, “Jewish Messianism,” 105. 51. Jameson’s research differentiates between utopian claims and dismisses some as inauthentic. He calls such t­hings as the achievement of universal health care part of late capitalism’s “protean investment in a host of suspicious and equivocal ­ matters: liberal reforms and commercial pipedreams, the deceptive yet tempting swindles of the ­here and how, where Utopia serves as the mere lure and bait for ideology” (Archaeologies, 3). 52. John Berger’s scattered remarks on Rembrandt suggest something like the aesthetic within history that I w ­ ill describe, although I w ­ ill mark some impor­tant differences from Berger as well. John Berger, “Rembrandt (1609–1669),” in Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (London: Verso, 2015), 137–153. 53. Theodor Adorno, “Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics,” in Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 128. 54. Scholem’s writings had a profound influence on Edward Said, who first strongly recommended to me as a young scholar that I should study Scholem very carefully. Said’s difference from Jameson on m ­ atters of history and experience clarifies considering Scholem’s careful scholarship and his concern that Jewish messianism, even when secularized in Zionism, produced horrendous consequences along with impor­tant national achievements for Jews a­ fter the Holocaust. 55. Gershom Scholem, “­Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, trans. Michael A. Meyer and Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 7. Scholem originally presented this essay as a talk in 1959 and published it in Eranos Jahrbuch 28 (1959): 193–239. 56. We can develop this insight from Georges Canguihlem’s Darwinian understanding of the feedback mechanisms between concepts and built environment.

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Notions respond to the built as adaptive modes of understanding and action. The environment in turn feeds the effect of ­those thoughts, in secular form, back into the adaptive pro­cesses of ­human evolution, which include the development of concepts, the activities of thought. To think ruin in response to crisis effects the real into ruin as a secular fact that demands more adaptation, not iteration. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 125. 57. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 1–4. See also Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), for a discussion of the Memory Palace’s power as a device of cultural identification and extension. 58. See Cicero, De oratore, ii. 86. 59. ­Were ­there time, we might pursue this thought along the lines of erotic desire, hoping to place the intellectual cultural effort of such creations as the Memory Palace within the rubrics of love.

2. The ­Will to Destruction as the Basis of Allegory 1. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Repre­sen­ta­tion of Real­ity in Western Lit­er­a­ ture, trans. Willard Trask (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1953), 23, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. In Poetry against Torture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), I made the claim that now seems rather modest that Auerbach’s work on Dante showed that the Italian had created the historically ­human being (see esp. chap. 3). 3. Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel, 1903, oil, 127 cm × 254 cm, Helsinki, Finland, Ateneum; Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, oil transfer and watercolor on paper, 31.8 cm × 24.2 cm, Jerusalem, Israel Museum. I w ­ ill take up the figure of the angel in Chapter 6 and in Chapter 7’s discussion of Rembrandt’s The Archangel Leaves Tobias and His ­Family. 4. Detlev Claussen’s early chapters on the world that dissolved as Adorno emerged from childhood is an excellent introduction into the material conditions that made melancholy a seemingly natu­ral attitude among Eu­ro­pean intellectuals and artists who matured during the liberal ­orders in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth c­ entury. See Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 13–65. 5. In The New Science, Giambattista Vico teaches a lesson in ­human wisdom that applies h ­ ere and throughout this chapter. Vico tells us that passions, “buried in the body,” buffeted the “first men” so that we cannot access their imagination. Vico follows Tacitus, though, in saying that what­ever this primary imagination envisioned and embodied, it took it to be divine. The messianists among us see themselves in their aspirations and denigrations and cannot see their own mythic status and the primitivism of their works. Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 118. I ­will return to Vico in the context of the messianists’ per­sis­tently reductive characterization of historicism. 384

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6. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 392, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. I am not interested ­here in Klee’s work or its history and interpretation. More impor­ tant is Benjamin’s emblematic commentary that has made this angel an icon of leftist messianism and certain postsecular ambitions disguised within the rhe­toric of so-­ called secular messianism. 7. I mean, among o ­ thers, Carl Schmitt, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Bloch, and Gershom Scholem. 8. Paul de Man followed Benjamin in thinking about this opposition. See my discussion in Chapter 1. See also de Man, “The Rhe­toric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, 2nd  ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228, esp. part 1, “Allegory and Symbol.” De Man famously concludes his analytic survey of the issues with this remark: “The dialectical relationship between subject and object is no longer the central statement of romantic thought, but this dialectic is now located entirely in the temporal relationships that exist within a system of allegorical signs” (208). De Man goes on to describe the symbol as “a defensive strategy that tries to hide from this negative self-­knowledge” (208). I do agree with Benjamin and de Man on the symbol, but I am determined to show the defensive, mythic, and ruinous nature of the supposed insight brought by allegoresis in the ser­vice of esoteric messianism. 9. Quentin Meillassoux, ­After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), is a recent example of this kind of work. The ease with which it found followers and adapters speaks to the per­sis­tence of this line of thought. 10. Paul A. Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 248. 11. Plato, Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (New York: Penguin Classics, 1999), 46. 12. Jack Ben-­Levi, Lesley C. Jones, Simon Taylor, and Craig Houser, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, exhibition cata­logue, ISP Papers 3 (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1993). Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 13. See Tate Modern, “Art Term: Abject Art,” accessed April  21 2020, http://­www​.­tate​.­org​.­uk​/­art​/­art​-­terms​/­a​/­abject​-­art. 14. For a text that touches on this arrangement, one of many, see Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1993). 15. Aamir Mufti has taken the emergent discipline of “world lit­er­at­ ure,” ­after Pascale Casanova (The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004] and David Damrosch, What Is World Lit­er­a­ture? [Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2003]), as a recent instance of modernity’s mythical commodification of knowledge and culture. Mufti, “Introduction,” boundary 2, 39, no. 2 (2012): 71–74. 16. Charles Rosen, “The Ruins of Walter Benjamin,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 1977, accessed June 11, 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/​ articles/​1977/10/27/the-ruins-of-walter-benjamin/. 385

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17. A con­ve­nient marker for the shift to fash­ion­able Left Schmittianism might be the appearance of Gopal Balakrishnan’s The ­Enemy (London: Verso, 2002), written by a member of the editorial board of the New Left Review and a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches critical theory. 18. Often t­hese “Left” positions derive from mediations that correct Schmitt while preserving the terrain of his thinking. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 91, where Agamben also adduces Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Po­liti­cal Theology, rev. ed. (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957) and the enthusiastic support it received as cause for “some reflection,” a gesture that begs the question of why the engagement at all. (The MLA Bibliography lists 23 books dealing with Agamben since 1998 and 245 journal articles. This is a mea­sure of Agamben’s influence, in part as an extension of the very Schmitt from whose work he departs.) 19. Horst Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes,” trans. Melissa Thorson Hause and Jackson Bond, Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 247–266. See also Samuel Weber, “Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt,” Diacritics 22 (1992): 5–19. 20. Jacob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige fügung (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1987), 27, quoted in translation in Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt,” 250. 21. Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt,” 250. 22. See, for example, on the “Left,” Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); and on the “Right,” Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in Amer­i­ca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 23. See Tracy B. Strong, “Foreword: Dimensions of the New Debate around Carl Schmitt,” in The Concept of the Po­liti­cal, by Carl Schmitt, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ix–­xxvii. Strong points out that the Frankfurt School admired Schmitt even ­after he had joined the Nazis and that more recently on left and right, typified perhaps by the journal Telos, Schmitt has found an audience across self-­identified ideological lines. 24. Bredekamp, “From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt,” 251. 25. Bredekamp, 251. 26. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (New York: Telos, 2009), 59, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Telos has been a primary English-­language location for reintroducing Schmitt into academic discourse. See Telos 153 (Winter 2010), which the editors devoted to a discussion of their own publication of Schmitt’s book. The issue itself was edited by the same academics who introduced Schmitt’s book, David Pan (who is also the review editor of Telos) and Julia Reinhard Lupton. The volume contains an essay by another prominent professor, (University of Chicago) US academic critic, Eric Santner, whose own book The Royal Remains epitomizes the Schmittian relegitimation, especially in combination with the work of Eric Kantorowicz. See Santner, The Royal Remains: The ­People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. chap. 5. Among ­others, Julia Reinhard Lupton has blurbed this book. 386

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27. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 65. First published in 1963 as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf Verlag). 28. Edward  W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 34. 29. As one instance of the continuing effort to reestablish the virtuous consequences of an “enchanted” world, see Martin Harries, Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). See especially the power­ful pages on Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost to understand the per­sis­tent place of that scene as a trope in modern critical work. 30. Anselm Haverkamp points to an exchange of letters between Jacob Taubes and Schmitt apropos Schmitt’s attempts to refute or evade Hans Blumenberg’s critique of Schmitt’s infamous tract on “po­liti­cal theology.” This exchange makes clear that Schmitt worked with evidence and rhe­toric to satisfy motive, not knowledge. What mattered to Schmitt was “the con­temporary prob­lem situation,” that is, “The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.” In ordinary scholarly discourse, we might suspect Schmitt of organ­izing his work to desired ends and his rhe­toric to the evasion of serious criticism. See Haverkamp, “The End of Po­liti­cal Theology,” Law and Lit­er­a­ture 16, no. 3 (2004): 315. 31. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel on Tragedy, ed. Anne Paolucci and Henry Paolucci (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 83. 32. Hegel, 82, 83. 33. Hegel, 83. 34. Hegel, 83. 35. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 62, 63. 36. Adorno, 63. 37. Adorno, 63. 38. Adorno, 63. 39. If claims like t­ hese rested on evidence, they would crumble before counterexamples. The audience in Paris, January 1953, did not understand the action of En attendant Godot, but the play received mostly positive reviews and despite the occasional protest played to good crowds. Peter Hall, staging the first En­glish production, notoriously claimed not to understand much of the text as he prepared the play for London. Of course, we can make complex arguments claiming to show that the public sphere constrained Beckett even in the creation of this play, but the common sense stands: Godot did not launch circumscribed by a public sphere that constrained it, and despite the fact, the result was not mere scandal. 40. As a paradigm of such work, see Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 41. Benjamin scholarship treats catastrophe in his work and life along almost all imaginable lines. Almost all major secondary writings on Benjamin accept the theme. Among o ­ thers, see Irving Wohlfarth, “ ‘Männer aus der Fremd’: Walter Benjamin and the ‘German-­Jewish Parnassus,” New German Critique 70, Special Issue on Germans and Jews (Winter, 1997): 3–85, esp. 74. Shoshana Felman makes a basic point about the messianic origins of Benjamin’s obsession with imagining 387

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history as catastrophe, in “Benjamin’s Silence,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 211. “In Benjamin’s own view, history—­a line of catastrophe—is not a movement ­toward pro­gress but a movement ­toward (what Benjamin calls enigmatically) redemption.” Felman’s footnotes read like an interlinear commentary on this topic and its origins in Benjamin’s thinking. Christine Buci-­Glucksmann wrote importantly about the role of catastrophe and ­women in Benjamin, a topic to which I ­will return differently. See Buci-­Glucksmann, Walter Benjamin und die Utopie des Weiblichen (Hamburg: VSA-­Verlag, 1984), and in En­glish, “Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern,” Repre­sen­ta­tions 14 (1986): 220–229. 42. Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, April 13, 1933, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 39, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 43. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 43. Rabinbach makes exceptionally good use of Benjamin’s correspondence with Strauss over Zionism to show Benjamin’s original and final commitment to “liberal culture” and “the con­temporary intellectual literary-­Jew.” 44. See Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” New German Critique 40 (1987): 179–224, in which she shows that Benjamin’s messianic utopianism, allied with his commitment to allegoresis, stages an intellectual and writerly strug­gle to preserve “from the empty continuum of history which . . . ​is synonymous with catastrophe” “the utopian sediment of experience” (190). 45. Stanley Corngold and Michael Jennings, “Walter Benjamin / Gershom Scholem,” review of Briefwechsel 1933–1940, Interpretation: A Journal of Po­liti­cal Philosophy 12, nos. 2–3 (1984): 357–366. Corngold and Jennings comment on this remark in Scholem’s letter of April 13: “In an ultimately disturbing letter of 1933 he reveals the depth and staying power of his faith in unaided apocalypse” (361), and they then cite their own translation of this passage. Anson Rabinbach, in “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” New German Critique 34 (1985): 78–124, explicates the intellectual and cultural networks that led Benjamin to this position, which at times conflicted with differently materialist worldviews. “Language is the medium of redemption, but history the showplace of catastrophe” (121). 46. Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of M ­ usic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 126. 47. Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin,” trans. Lux Furtmüller, in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner  J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 194, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. For an easy sense of ­these terms, see Encyclopedia Britannica, which defines “halakhah” as “the totality of laws and ordinances that have evolved since biblical times to regulate religious observances and the daily life and conduct of the Jewish ­people.” The Haggadah, by contrast, is that part of Talmudic or rabbinical tradition that, as the Britannica says, includes the interpretations and expositions of scripture as well as ethical and theological teachings and even cultural knowledge that form part of living tradition. 48. Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, 388

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Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 541–542. Originally published in the Frank­furter Zeitung, November 1931. 49. See Sigrid Weigel, “Eros and Language: Benjamin’s Kraus Essay,” trans. Georgina Paul, in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Con­temporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 278–295, for its demonstration that in this essay, Benjamin supplemented his ­earlier theories of language by treating “the dimension of sexuality” (279). 50. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Eu­ ro­ pean Intelligent­sia,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Bullock, Eiland, and Smith, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 212, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 51. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf Verlag, 1974), 302: “Denn sie zu schreiben, wie sie geschrieben zu warden verlangt—­also nicht als Sammelwerk, zu dem die einzelnen ‘Fachleute,’ ein jeder auf seinem Gebiet ‘das Wissenswerteste ­beisteuren’—­, sondern als fundierte Schrift eines einzelnen, der aus innerer Nötigung heraus weiniger die Entwicklungsgeschichte also ein immer wieder erneutes ursprüngliches Aufleben der esoterischen Dichtung derstellte—so geschrieben ware sie eine jener gelehrten Bekenntnisschriften, die in jedem Jahrhundert su zählen sind.” 52. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London: Verso Books, 1999), 48. 53. Walter Benjamin, “Der Surrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europaischen Intelligenz,” Literarische Welt 5 (1929): 3–4, 6, 7–8. 54. Jameson, Brecht and Method, 49. 55. Benjamin, “Der Surrealismus,” 3–4. 56. See Rey Chow, “Walter Benjamin’s Love Affair with Death,” New German Critique 48 (1989): 63–86. 57. Benjamin, Origin of German Trauerspiel, 201. 58. Benjamin, 210. 59. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Speaking for the Humanities,” Occasion 1 (2009), http://­arcade​.­stanford​.­edu​/­journals​/­occasion​/­articles​/­speaking​-­humanities​ -­by​-­gayatri​-­chakravorty​-­spivak. 60. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 444–488, 444. 61. O. K. Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian,” Critical Inquiry 22, no.  2 (1996): 239–267, esp. 252. 62. Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter des irdischen Welt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1929). 63. Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 210. Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: New York Review Book, 2001), 60. 64. Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism” (1930), trans. Jerolf Wikoff, in Bullock, Eiland, and Smith, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 320. 65. See Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History,” 263. In this significant essay, the author makes an impor­tant error b ­ ecause of not considering the imaginative male vio­lence in the Minne. He misunderstands “Surrealism” as an account of how Breton and Nadja “jointly” “convert every­thing . . . ​into revolutionary 389

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experience.” The prob­lem is s­imple: what is the Nadja that collaborates with Breton in Benjamin’s account? Of course, all the Nadjas in t­hese writings are figures. What m ­ atters is the poetic and critical decision not only to distance poet / critic from ­woman but also to transform the beloved into lady so that chastity becomes the mechanism of po­liti­cal ecstasy. Benjamin’s move in this construction has grave critical and imaginative consequences precisely ­because of his power­ful recasting of the most ancient of traditions. 66. Susan Laxton, “The Guarantor of Chance: Surrealism’s Ludic Practices,” Papers of Surrealism 1 (2003), http://­www​.­surrealismcentre​.­ac​.­uk​/­papersofsurrealism​ /­journal1​/­index​.­htm. 67. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Bullock, Eiland, and Smith, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 437–438. 68. One could hypothesize that the error of this extension has advanced the anticriticism movement represented by Rita Felski and ­others. Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker, eds., Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

3. A Socratic Interlude 1. Plato, Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 36, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 3. John P. Anton, “The Agathon Interlude,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 37, no. 3 (1996): 201. 4. Anton, 210n5. 5. Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 6. Anton, “Agathon Interlude,” 210n5. 7. Hobbs, Plato and the Hero, 1. 8. Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1997), 643. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956– 1966), 1:295. 9. Frisbee Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 207. 10. Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium, 11. 11. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 168. 12. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 375. 13. Daniel Boyarin, “Deadly Dialogue: Thucydides with Plato,” Repre­sen­ta­ tions 117, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 62. The results of Boyarin’s research linking ­these writers and ­these topics lead us to see a major epistemic shift ­under way but developed in two antagonistic ways, with resulting differing hierarchies. ­Earlier in this 390

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chapter, I mentioned in passing that Socrates had permission to engage his elentics with Agathon ­because all other participants had made speeches. 14. Annette Lucia Giesecke, “Mapping Utopia: Homer’s Politics and the Birth of the Polis,” College Lit­er­a­ture 34, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 194–214. 15. Hannah Arendt, The ­Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 16, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 16. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 48. 17. Benjamin concluded his essay “Surrealism,” which we discussed in Chapter 2, with a reproduction of this notion with the Lukáscian suggestion that men should desire their vanguard leaders. 18. Euripides, Medea, in Medea and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 34, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 19. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Eu­ ro­ pean Intelligent­sia,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 210, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text; Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New York Review of Books), 60, originally published as Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 1929). 20. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). See also Paul A. Bové, Intellectuals in Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), esp. 257–261. 21. Frank Kermode, “Preface to the 1989 Edition,” in Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), xi—­xix, xvii. 22. Joseph A. Mazzeo, “Plato’s Eros and Dante’s Amore,” Traditio 12 (1956): 315–337. 23. Auerbach argued this point most powerfully in chapter 8 of Mimesis: The Repre­sen­ta­tion of Real­ity in Western Lit­er­a­ture, trans. Willard Trask (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1953). See also Gerhard Regn, “Double Authorship: Prophetic and Poetic Inspiration in Dante’s Paradise,” MLNV 122, no. 1 (2007): 167–185. 24. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 467. 25. Homer, 468. 26. Homer, 469. 27. Homer, 469. 28. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, 76–77. 29. See Emily Wilson, The Death of Socrates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), for a thorough survey of the historical and legendary circumstances of Socrates’s execution. 30. Plato, “The Apology,” in The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 40–43. 31. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 32. See Paul A. Bové, Destructive Poetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 111–115. 33. Hannah Arendt, “Søren Kierkegaard,” trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber, in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, 391

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ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994), 44–49. This article appeared  originally in German in the Frank­furter Zeitung 75–76 (January  29, 1932). 34. Edward W. Said, “On Lost C ­ auses,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 538. 35. We could call on writers who have very diverse beliefs to illustrate a consensus over the prob­lems caused by this tradition that makes so much abject and that, in the d ­ oing so, forms our intellectual life around a self-­fulfilling set of limitations. Antonio Gramsci would call this hegemony. Marilynne Robinson would insist that intellectual consensus misrepresents real­ ity and enables the worst of ­things, even in an oppositional mode. Robinson puts it this way: “Perhaps the worst ­thing about ideological thinking is that it implies a structure in and ­behind events, a history that is reiterative, with variations that cannot ultimately change the course of ­things and are therefore always trivial, no m ­ atter how much thought and ­labor goes into the making of them.” Robinson, What Are We ­Doing H ­ ere (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), xiii. Hegemony is now a basic term in critical discourse and a foundational concept pre­sent across Gramsci’s oeuvre. For a brief discussion, see Joseph A. Buttigieg, “Introduction,” Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), v. I, “Gramsci’s Method,” 42–64, 43, 63. 36. Rita Felski is an in­ter­est­ing case ­here. See Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), which has become the programmatic text for postcritical work. See also Felski and Elizabeth A. Anker, eds., Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), esp. the editors’ introduction, where critique morphs into criticism generally (5). We do not need to do complex analy­sis to see how the official culture or schematic of neoliberalism rewards intellectual support and makes an obvious charade of promised pro­gress. “Felski’s efforts to introduce a dif­fer­ent approach to studying the ties between works of lit­er­a­ture and the social world recently earned the prominent literary scholar a professorship at a Danish university and a grant amounting to approximately $4.2 million in support from the Danish National Research Foundation.” Lorenzo Perez, “UVA En­glish Professor Lands Large Danish Grant to Explore Lit­er­at­ure’s Social Use,” UVAToday, May  25, 2016, https://­news​.­virginia​.­edu​/­content​/­uva​-­english​ -­professor​-­lands​-­large​-­danish​-­grant​-­explore​-­literatures​-­social​-­use. We might consider this within the context of Danish austerity cuts to humanities in research universities. 37. See Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2008), 15–16. 38. Northrop Frye articulated a version of this same position. For a discussion, see Ronald T. Swigger, “Fictional Encylopedism and the Cognitive Value of Lit­er­a­ ture,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture Studies 12, no. 4 (1975): 351–366. 39. Charles Rosen, “The Ruins of Walter Benjamin,” New York Review of Books, October 1977, http://­www​.­nybooks​.­com​/­articles​/­archives​/­1977​/­oct​/­27​/­the​ -­ruins​-­of​-­walter​-­benjamin​/­​?­pagination​=f­ alse. Rosen helped set readers on a path to reject t­hose ele­ments of Benjamin’s work rooted in apocalyptic messianism when he noted in this early American review of The Origin of the German Trauerspiel

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that “politics and theology together are implicated in the Trauerspiel’s conception of history as catastrophe.” 40. Howard Eiland has edited a dossier of materials on Benjamin’s education in the traditions of Idealism and Neoidealism; see boundary 2, 45, no. 2 (May 2018). 41. Rosen, “Ruins of Walter Benjamin.” 42. Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 298, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 43. See note 36 above. 44. Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s “New Science” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 259. 45. Recall again Detlev Claussen’s superb brief discussion of the cultural crisis facing men such as Benjamin and Adorno. I discuss this in Chapter 1. See Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 13–65. 46. Rosen, “Ruins of Walter Benjamin.” 47. For discussion of t­ hese kabbalistic terms in allegorical criticism, see Harold Bloom, The Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 48. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 447, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 49. A separate critical essay is still to be written, not following Benjamin and Kraus in their paradoxical remake of the prostitute into the properly illuminating figure of capital and its sexual economy. The essay should discuss the consequences of their decision to narrate the figure in parallel support to w ­ omen’s enslavement. 50. The very context in which Benjamin launches this new step in his own antihumanism is impor­tant and worth pursuing. He situates Kraus’s interest in the posthuman next to Marx’s “treatment of the ‘Jewish question’ ” and asserts that their joint “reaction against the classical ideal of humanity” would “likely . . . ​become a confession of materialist humanism at the first opportunity” (“Karl Kraus,” 448). Interestingly, this is one sign of how we might follow the meditations on Kraus to similar conclusions about the revolutionary use of erotic desire as we find it in the “Surrealism” essay. 4. Wallace Stevens and the Confidence of Imagination 1. Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Real­ity and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951). In this chapter, I cite The Necessary Angel and other works by Stevens from Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1997). The quotation in the text is from p. 643. All further quotations from and references to Stevens’s poetry refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.

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2. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957), 319–320. 3. Stevens writing to Ronald Lane Latimer, November 5, 1935, in Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 293, hereafter referred to in the text as Letters. 4. By contrast, see the crisis of Eu­rope / end of history poetics instantiated by Guillaume Apollinaire in his discussion of the pogrom of poets. Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Alechinsky, Le poète assassiné (1916; repr., Paris: Éditions Fata Morgana, 2019). 5. Stevens’s play with second-­person forms of address appears at times in his poems; cf. “The Beginning,” where he speaks of “the first tutoyers of tragedy” (Collected, 368). 6. Michael North, “The Making of ‘Make It New,’ ” Guernica: A Magazine of Global Arts & Politics, August 15, 2013, https://­www​.­guernicamag​.­com​/­the​-­making​ -­of​-­making​-­it​-­new​/­. 7. Stevens is not advocating that manner be reiterated anew, which is Mannerism in its formal mode. See the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s remarkable 2003 exhibit Mannerism: Bronzino (1503–1572) and His Contemporaries. See especially Ross Finocchio, “Mannerism: Bronzino (1503–1572) and His Contemporaries,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), http://­www​.­metmuseum​.­org​/­toah​/­hd​/­zino​/­hd​_­zino​.­htm. 8. See, for example, Robert Frost, “Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue,” in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 102–111. Frost delivered a talk by this title at Amherst College in 1931. 9. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Keats: Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 210. All further quotations from and references to Keats’s poetry refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 10. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 41–62. The relation between young poet and older voice invites Bloom’s messianic Freudian machine to read this poem as a “scene of instruction,” properly understood as an Oedipal strug­gle. Bloom would read it as an allegory of such strug­gle. 11. A fuller discussion of this poem and its poetics would include an analy­sis of Stevens’s similarities to and differences from Valéry, whose name returns us to Adorno’s essay “Valéry Proust Museum” and Adorno’s discussions of “contradiction” as a necessary concept in this discussion of modern poetry and poetics. I w ­ ill discuss some of ­these issues ­later in Chapter 5 when I raise Adorno’s remark on poetry a­ fter Auschwitz. It is enough to say now that Stevens finds adequate resources in a tradition that is alive to him to mediate the creation of poetry that embraces its circumstances rather than theorizing them as catastrophically compelling a negative aesthetic. 12. Cf. A. J. Raymer, “Virgil and Words­worth,” Greece & Rome 9, no. 25 (1939): 13–25. 13. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 319–320.

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14. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 62 (I, ll. 520–528). All further quotations are from this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. Qualis apes aestate nova per florea rura exercet sub sole ­labor, cum gentis adultos educunt fetus, aut cum liquentia mella stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas, aut onera accipiunt venientum, aut agmine facto ignavom fucos pecus a praesepibus arcent: fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella.

15. Unfortunately, crude material forces veiled his accomplishment and made it hard to consider or appreciate the consequences of imagination in his poetry. In his essay on lyric poetry, Adorno had already discussed a transformation in the lyric from material to abstract, from classical to modern, and the challenge this posed to criticism’s sometimes brutalist misunderstanding of modern lyr­ics. Theodor Adorno, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” Telos 20 (1974): 56–71 (see esp. 40). 16. Stevens, from his Journal, May 23, 1899, in Letters, 26. 17. Wallace Stevens wrote this line at the back of his copy of H. P. Adams, The Life and Writing of Giambattista Vico (New York: Allen and Unwin, 1935). For a description of Stevens’s copy of this book, see Eleanor Cook, A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2007), 157. 18. Cf. Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 247n22, where Stewart also notices the link between this poem and the title of Vico’s masterwork. Our concerns are dif­fer­ent, but they intersect on the priority of poetry and poiesis. I find her account of making and unmaking as the condition of the artist as a figure of freedom suggestive and complementary to my rebuttal of the crisis tradition that makes art, artists, and ­humans abject, requiring the redemption by priestly masters. 19. It is not accidental that a leading theoretician of abjection has made Teresa of Avila the subject of a book. Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love: An ­Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Kristeva opens this novel with a reference to Bernini, the terms of which perfectly embody the conjoined modalities I have discussed: “The flung-­back face of a ­woman asleep, or perhaps she has already died of plea­sure, her open mouth the avid door to an empty body that fills before our eyes with a boiling of marble folds. . . . ​ You must recall that sculpture by Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa?” (3). 20. See, for example, Georgina Adam, “The Art Market: All Eyes on the Andy Index,” Financial Times, September 13, 2013, https://­www​.­ft​.­com​/­content​/­718e2e3e​ -­1acb​-­11e3​-­87da​-­00144feab7de. 21. Gianni Vattimo’s personal spiritual reawakening is normative in our era, which has revived certain antiquarian forms. His rediscovered Catholicism gives him a surprising authority in an age of both memoir writing and illiberal democracy. For long-­form reporting on this return, see Christopher de Bellaigue, “The Return of Religion,” Financial Times, March 30, 2018, https://­www​.­ft​.­com​/­content​/­82c174fe​ -­31cd​-­11e8​-­b5bf​-­23cb17fd1498. This essay is about a substantial exhibit at the

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British Museum, Living with Gods, which suggests “that our species has so strong a yearning for the divine, we might as well be called Homo religious.” We must also note the significant role played by a return to religion on the po­liti­cal right in Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca. Cf. J. Lester Feder, “This Is How Steven Bannon Sees the Entire World,” BuzzFeed News, November 16, 2016, https://­www​.­buzzfeed​.­com​/­lesterfeder​ /­this​ -­is​ -­how​ -­steve​ -­bannon​ -­sees​ -­the​ -­entire​ -­world​ ?­utm​ _­term​=​­.­nmYbBePDwP#​ .­fmDgLJVn8V. This article traces Bannon’s involvement with the rise of Christian nationalism and Catholic cultural identity on the Eu­ro­pean po­liti­cal right. See this 2014 video of Bannon’s remarks to the Third International Conference on H ­ uman Dignity: Dignitatis1, “Steven Bannon. Module 3—­Should Christians Impose Limits on Wealth Creation? (Sub FIN & ENG),” YouTube, July  29, 2014, https://­www​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­time​_­continue​=­159&v​=­FWXScQaZ2uI. 22. T. S. Eliot, “­Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943), 39, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 23. The relation between Eliot and Anglican practice, indeed, Anglican mysticism, is a commonplace of Eliot criticism. For a basic biographical discussion of Eliot’s interest in the village of L ­ ittle Gidding and its utopian Anglican community, see Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 263–266. 24. See William V. Spanos, “The Incarnation: The Sacramental Aesthetic,” in The Christian Tradition in Modern British Verse Drama: The Poetics of Sacramental Time (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 15–51. Spanos’s critical analy­sis culminates in a discussion of Eliot’s Christian plays that are, like The Four Quartets, postconversion texts. For some discussion of the importance of this body of critical scholarship to the study of high modernism, see Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), especially the chapter “Phenomenological and Existential Criticism,” esp. 145. 25. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” in T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 67. 26. Academic critics produce considerable historical and literary knowledge working on this continuum. The most impor­tant such scholar in the United States is Robert Alter. See, as an example, Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), revised and reprinted in 2011. 27. See Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy as a con­temporary literary imagination that moves between a harsh judgment of dystopian anthropocentrism on Earth and Mars to a utopian second chance on Mars alone. Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars appeared between 1992 and 1999 from Random House. 28. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in Critical Theory Since Plato, 3rd ed., ed. H ­ azard Adams and Leroy Searle (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), 188. 29. A slightly perverse reading would allow allegorists and utopists to claim Sidney as a pre­de­ces­sor. Fredric Jameson allegorizes con­temporary science fiction as the impossible provision of a utopian space in the genre of popu­lar fiction in terms that might gain authority from the last bit of Sidney’s claim. As I showed in Chapter 1, however, Jameson’s redemptive science fiction hardly goes hand in hand with nature ­ because it disembodies the ­ human and does away with sexual reproduction—­each of ­these per­sis­tent genealogical signs of the abject kenosis that allegorists require. 396

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30. For a glimpse at the irony of certain poets ­toward this constellation, see Hans Magnus Enzenberger, “Short History of the Bourgeoisie,” trans. Alasdair King, Times Literary Supplement, July 30, 2014, https://­www​.­the​-­tls​.­co​.­uk​/­articles​ /­public​/­short​-­history​-­of​-­the​-­bourgeoisie​/­. 31. In part, critical sympathy for Keats underestimates the result of Coleridge’s aspiration, namely, the complex real tensions of the often incomplete, which could open a new viewpoint on the Romantic fragment. Marjorie Levinson, in The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), makes an excellent effort to avoid allegorizing the form by analyzing the normative critical attitude ­toward works assigned to this canon. 32. Hannah Arendt said in 1946 that Benjamin’s suicide was like many ­others. Writing to Gertrud Jaspers on May 30, 1946, she wrote this of “the way it was.” Facing exile and emigration, the loss of a native language and culture, poverty and displacement, some p ­ eople drifted fatally: “This exhaustion, which often went along with a reluctance to make a big fuss, to summon so much concentration just for the sake of this ­little bit of life, that was surely the greatest danger we all faced. And it was the death of our best friend in Paris, Walter Benjamin. . . . ​This atmosphere of sauve qui peut . . . ​was dreadful, and suicide was the only noble gesture, if you even cared enough to want to perish nobly.” Arendt, Hannah Arendt / Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 40–41. 33. For examples of ­these tendencies, see Adam Kirsch, “Technology Is Taking Over En­glish Departments: The False Promise of the Digital Humanities,” New Republic, May  2, 2014; and Jordan Alexander Stein, “­After the ­Great American Novel,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2014, https://­lareviewofbooks​.­org​ /­review​/­great​-­american​-­novel. Somehow, Stein believes that Lawrence Buell, writing on the myth of the ­great American novel, practices criticism without judgment. 34. The motif of “coping” resonated throughout late twentieth-­century academic writing from the work of the American nationalist phi­los­o­pher Richard Rorty. I discussed the conjunction of Rorty’s ethnocentrism and his notion that language is a tool to “cope” with real­ity in “Left Conservatism, IV,” at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on January 31, 1998, published in Theory & Event 2, no. 3 (1998), https://­muse​.­jhu​.­edu​/­article​/­32514. “Therapeutic” gestures ­toward Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123– 152. Each of ­these influential motifs moved the acad­emy farther from the creative conjunction of criticism and poetry ­toward what the profession itself would call “the personalized normativities of neoliberal hegemonies.” 35. Frank Kermode, “Preface to the 1989 Edition,” in Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), xi—­xix, xvii.

5. Adorno 1. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 34, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Detlev Claussen points out that Adorno had planned for 397

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this 1949 article to give the title to the collection now known as Prisms. Claussen, Theodor Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 205. Adorno’s article appeared in 1949 in Festschrift fűr Leopold von Weise. 2. Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Notes to Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 46, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. According to Rolf Wiggershaus, in The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), Adorno gave the talk as “Poetry and Society” in 1951 on RIAS (508). Revisions followed, leading to the 1957 form we know as “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft.” I have not read the 1951 version of this paper, but the final version shows what must have been a rhetorical concern in the radio broadcast, that is, an audience of nonspecialists with a general sense of the purity and aesthetic detachment of poetry. The 1951 date allows me to adduce this talk and its evolution into the critical discussion around the late 1940s and early 1950s in this chapter. 3. Cf. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 130. 4. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Per­sis­tence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 9. 5. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Rolf Tidemann; trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 1:3–23. Adorno wrote the essay between 1954 and 1958. It first appeared in Adorno, Noten zur Literatur I (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1958), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. See also Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-­Kento and Fredric ­Will, New German Critique 32 (1984): 151–171, esp. unnumbered note, 151. 6. They document the close relation of poetry and the essay ­under the general sign of poiesis, a topic central to this book. 7. They share ­these stylistic qualities with Wallace Stevens and Rembrandt, standing for the highest achievements of cultural writing and art over and against which Plato set philosophy in a tradition that led to the messianism tied to a destructive aesthetic and a dangerous apocalyptic utopianism. 8. Just a brief note: Adorno’s style is differently difficult than Jameson’s mode. The latter is essentially tribal jargon, ingrown not primarily at the sentence level but at the outline level, which always already knows the movement it ­will follow across or near almost any topic or subject it throttles. In this sense, it is the difficulty of borders, ­because it requires assent as its shibboleth—­although assent to what is not always clear. 9. Questions about his relationships to Germany and to the United States give external form to ele­ments of his circumstances, and scholars have worried that theme to favorable effect. 10. Read, for example, the long paragraph from page 111 to 112 of Jameson’s Late Marxism as the worst (or best) example of what I mean. Jameson produces a miniature, a cameo of his formations scraped across an abstraction of Adorno’s life thinking. Characteristically, Jameson tells us without evidence what Adorno’s life means, what shape it has, confirmed by the assigned vectors of work that confirm 398

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Jameson’s own claims. Note the ­simple fact that this book on Adorno is titled Late Marxism, certainly a brand associated with Jamesonian talk and positionality. 11. George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 5, 53. 12. See Michael Rothberg, “­After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe,” New German Critique 72 (1997): 45–81. Rothberg, among many o ­ thers, notes Adorno’s per­sis­tent effort to elaborate his thinking in the last section of “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Rothberg is on to a critical point in his essay when he notes that Adorno’s readers s­ ettle for paraphrase or misquotation or, at best, partial quotation of his remarks on poetry and Auschwitz. See Rothberg, 46–47, including note 4. This paraphrasing and misquotation are not only essential to the allegorizer, whose work cannot pause over the exactness of language, but also fundamental to criticism such as Steiner’s or Jameson’s that must evade the consequences of Adorno’s ways of working. 13. See Jerry Fodor, Lot 2: The Language of Thought Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11, for a brief account of debate among con­ temporary academic phi­los­o­phers about the relative priority of thought in relation to action and truth. Fodor is an antipragmatist and heir of Descartes. I am not interested in settling Adorno’s place in terms of this debate. 14. To be deeply historical, to engage with the textured counterpoints of life lived in the midst of tendencies and conflicts, is far more essential to creative critical imagination than is the abstract command always to historicize, for that command, as we saw in Chapter  1, is merely a command to allegorize from a distance. 15. In Intellectuals in Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), I argued that Edward Said had not by then adequately grounded or explained the ground for his essential claim that criticism not only should but also could imagine alternative ­futures. Said, whose reading of Adorno clearly extended and developed over time, might have found the ground for his claim in this essay by Adorno. Indeed, Said derived the claim he asserted from Adorno. I maintain still that by the early 1980s, Said had not found a basis on which to establish the critic’s responsibility to imagine the ­future, but implicitly I must grant now that Adorno could well have been the strongest influence at that time. 16. See Russell Berman, “Adorno’s Politics,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 130, for a definitive comment on Adorno’s po­liti­cal value over and against dogmatists, populists, and decision-­makers all together. 17. Theodor Adorno, “Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time,” in Notes to Lit­er­a­ture, 217, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 18. “It was prob­ably in his The Destruction of Reason that the destruction of Lukács’ own reason manifested itself most crassly” (Adorno, 216). No doubt, it is to Adorno’s point that Lukács drafted this book in 1952 but could not publish it in German for several years. Lukács, Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter R. Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980); Lukács, Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1958). 19. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-­Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), here399

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after cited parenthetically in the text. This is volume 61 in the Theory and History of Lit­er­a­ture series edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-­Sasse. 20. Reading Kierkegaard and Adorno together creates ­either a narrative of historical continuity or a story of critical reflection. Kierkegaard and Adorno involve themselves with similar issues, concepts, and prob­lems ­because they inhabit a continuing nightmare of cap­i­tal­ist development; or Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard relativizes the Dane to immediate prob­lems of modernism and its consequences. For our purposes, ­there is no point to distinguishing such choices. 21. Concluding “Commitment,” Adorno writes of Benjamin’s Angelus Novus in clearly Kierkegaardian terms: “With enigmatic eyes, the machine angel forces the viewer to ask ­whether it proclaims complete disaster or the rescue hidden within it,” and in a sentence, Adorno gives us the inseparability of redemption from the active pro­cess of ruination. “It is, however, to use the words of Walter Benjamin, . . . ​ an angel that does not give but takes instead.” Adorno, “Commitment,” trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, in Can One Live A ­ fter Auschwitz?, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 94. 22. We might engage in extended analy­sis of the Commander in terms of “hauntology,” a currently fash­ion­able area of critical publication. This way of speaking appeared from Derrida’s Specters of Marx and, as I suggested in Chapter 4, from the preoccupation with tragedy, Trauerspiel, and especially Hamlet in the mythologies of Benjamin, Schmitt, and their heirs. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), esp. 49–76. 23. We should keep in mind that the religious and existential tinges attached to hope have a complex genealogy that always runs c­ ounter to the po­liti­cal and economic realities of power and order. The foundational text is Thucydides’s “The Melian Dialogue,” in The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 400–408. 24. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 29, no. 2 (Summer 1976): 242–275. On “the utopian moment” in Beethoven’s ­middle period in Adorno’s work, see Richard Leppert, “On Reading Adorno Hearing Schubert,” 19th-­Century M ­ usic 29, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 60. 25. Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, 247. 26. Georg Lukács, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” in Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 13. 27. See, for example, Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, trans. Herbert Arnold (New York: Other, 2013); note especially the presence of leather-­bound classics in the ­family libraries as a starting touchstone for this memoir. 28. In the US acad­emy especially, humanists found on offer and to some impor­ tant extent embraced major expressions of institutional demand to work within the “conversations” or to teach the controversies. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979); and Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992). Phi­los­o­phers’ elaborate debates about the status of Rorty’s arguments, especially the epistemological ones for and against, debating the range of vocabularies ­etc., are a classic case of looking away 400

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from the “light.” Graff’s title clearly circumscribes the possibilities of teaching as a form of education and thinking. 29. I use the word “conversation” h ­ ere as a reference to and dismissal of Richard Rorty’s pragmatist mode of philosophical adaptation to the given (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 170–171). 30. David Palumbo-­Liu, “Steven Salaita, Professor Fired for ‘Uncivil’ Tweets, Vindicated in Federal Court,” Nation, August 11, 2015, https://­www​.­thenation​.­com​ /­article​/­steven​-­salaita​-­professor​-­fired​-­for​-­uncivil​-­tweets​-­vindicated​-­in​-­federal​-­court​/­. 31. ­Virginia Woolf, To the Light­house (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1927), esp. 52–57. 32. In The Po­liti­cal Unconscious, Jameson clearly claims the exclusive ability to extend a comprehensive study of culture across the global spheres reached by capital and, historically, perhaps beyond to areas of the past that capital represents at best in highly mediated fashions. Jameson had claimed that since all texts can only come always already interpreted, reading a text mattered far less and was less pos­si­ble than reading the readings. Hence, Adorno’s immanent readings of texts such as Kafka or Beethoven would dis­appear in a wave of rereading the readings. This thesis made available the entire field of all commentary as its own subject m ­ atter and defined it as nearly infinite. Hence, we see the unique Jamesonian ability to proliferate books on all topics, genres, and periods as merely the application of normative and well-­worn assumptions and categories. At best, one finds t­here inventive application, and at worst one finds the comfort of being able to see that the theory allows one to expose all in a seemingly lucid way. Of course, from the start, this proliferating normativity occludes without legitimation the nature of the par­tic­ul­ar and substitutes, on the very postmodern model it claims to critique, the value of shallowness and mere historical traces. Without that practice, the work would require texture and hesitation, which are nowhere vis­i­ble in the assertive rather than demonstrative quality of the prose. 33. We need a thorough critical and historical analy­sis of the displacement of immanence from humanistic practice as a key to austerity politics and neoliberalism’s appropriation of what was the space of the humanities to the space of technocracy, the displacement of critical imagination by knowledge marked by positivist nostalgia. Franco Moretti specifically argues that distant reading is a condition of knowledge and aims to legitimate his claim along the liberal lines of anticanonical commitments within an acad­emy adjusting to po­liti­cally motivated disruptions that denigrate the critical act. Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 48. The “digital humanities” absorb but transcend Moretti’s humanistic conscience to insist that the digital humanities have a separate origin from the literary humanities. Ideologists see this as good or bad. See Shawna Ross, “In Praise of Overstating the Case: A Review of Franco Moretti,” Distant Reading,” dhq 8, no. 1 (2014), http://­www​.­digitalhumanities​.­org​/­dhq​/­vol​/­8​/­1​/­000171​/­000171​.­html. 34. In an essay that compares the attitudes of Proust’s and Valéry’s thoughts about museums, Adorno expresses their common discovery to which he lends his full assent: “Only what exists for its own sake, without regard to t­hose it is supposed to please, can fulfill its ­human end. Few ­things have contributed so greatly to dehumanization as has the universal h ­ uman belief that products of the mind are justified only so far as they exist for me—­the belief itself bears witness to the dominance of manipulative rationality.” Theodor Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” in Prisms, 182. 401

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35. Paul Krugman has recently written about the structure of the economics profession to display why the essay is an antithetical form to the published article and why it stands outside the formations in which the article or even more the prepublished piece creates subfields of specialized research. Krugman suggests that intellectuals need to work diagonally across the limits that ­these structures impose, a useful idea but one still dif­fer­ent from the essay in kind. Krugman, “Circles of Influence,” The Conscience of a Liberal (blog), New York Times, July 28, 2014, http://­nyti​.­ms​/­1o89O3n. 36. See, especially, Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 34: “Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. . . . ​ And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry t­ oday.” 37. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1943), 21, 219. 38. In Poetry against Torture (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2008), I reported on how Vico had conceptualized prob­lems like t­ hose that Adorno, a deep historical critic of subjectivity, confronts h ­ ere. Vico, as I showed, produced a contrast between pioneers and prospectors, naming ele­ments of subjectivity that exist inevitably and produce contrary results in the production of knowledge ­because of their differing relations to ­will and power. 39. Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of M ­ usic, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 123–137. 40. Montaigne’s image for this pro­cess is highly gendered, and it belongs to an unfortunate tradition that makes passive the female and active the formative and fertilizing male. 41. At several moments in Adorno’s writings of the 1950s especially, he sounds themes often found in the history of modern criticism. In this instance, Adorno’s emphasis on per­for­mance does not prefigure “performativity” as the cliché of post-­ Greenblattian 1980s criticism might suggest. Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), in which “per­for­mance” or a variation occurs at least fifty times. Rather, and much more profoundly and interestingly, it slides into contact with R. P. Blackmur, whose writings about criticism and the gestural nature of language offer resources to deepen Adorno ­here, and vice versa. Cf. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952); I draw on this work in my discussions of Wallace Stevens. Interestingly, in Edward Said, his pre­de­ces­sors, Blackmur and Adorno, touch. 42. Ruth Y. Y. Hung, “Imagination Sterilized: The Workings of the Global Spectacle,” boundary 2, 40, no. 3 (2013): 101–137. 43. I allude to Derrida following Nietz­sche and to Heidegger. For a while, some scholars tried to discover commonalities between Adorno and Derrida. While for most o ­ thers, the opposition between Adorno and Heidegger, whom Adorno loathed, stands out. See Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 49. Derrida, of course, knew the impossibility of escaping the trace of the concept, indeed, knew the trace as concept, but his work nonetheless shows a potential understanding of the concept as the prob­lem. 44. See, for example, the ubiquitous passive voice in Edward M. Stricker and Michael J. Zigmond, “Recovery of Feeding and Drinking by Rats ­after Intraven402

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tricular 6-­hydroxydopamine or Lateral Hypothalamic Lesions,” Science 182 (1973): 717–720. 45. Michel Foucault, “The ­Father’s ‘No,’ ” in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), esp. 79. 46. In fact, a newly tenured associate professor in my department in 2013 told a gifted doctoral student that she stood a better chance of employment if she made her writing more “banal.” 47. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Preface: Fashioning Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning,” in Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), xi–­xvii for the climate of the time. Greenblatt would establish the subjectivist character of the new historicism or cultural poetics by declaring “objectively” the impossibility of controlled self-­fashioning while making the atomistic subject, in this case his “own,” the license for what follows. This is an early work in the movement to critical narcissism in the acad­emy ­after theory. For some evidence of the expansive ubiquity of per­for­mance theory ­after the 1980s, see James C. Bulman, ed., Shakespeare, Theory and Per­for­mance (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), especially the essay “Acting Shakespeare in Postcolonial Space,” by Dennis Salter (113–132). 48. Greenblatt, Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning, ix. 49. Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 6–7. 50. Louis Menand, “Why Freud Survives,” New Yorker, August 28, 2017, https://­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­2017​/­08​/­28​/­why​-­freud​-­survives. 51. Judith Butler’s writing perfectly illustrates this real­ity. In Gender Trou­ble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), she traces the movement of critique, theorization, variation, and differentiation within a post-­ Freudian genealogy crossing the fundamental questions of gender and feminism. Her analy­sis could go on ad infinitum ­were she willing to continue the ­labor of analy­sis interminably. 6. An Interchapter 1. For some sense of the long and deep history of this kind of writing within Western Platonism, mysticism, and theology, see Christian Belin, “Pro­cess and Metamorphosis of the Image: Ambivalences of the Anagogic Movement in Dionysian Contemplation,” in Ut Picture Meditatio: The Meditative Art, 1500–1700, ed. Walter S. Melion, Ralph Dekoninck, and Agnès Guiderdoni-­Brusié (Turnout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 247–261. Benjamin is in­ter­est­ing for adapting ele­ments of this Christian mystical tradition about intelligibility beyond sense to the fragmentation of late style, which works with the shards that late style leaves exposed to intelligibility. 2. Readers w ­ ill point to scholarly commentaries on this moment in Benjamin for analyses of its value and place. Also, see Giorgio Agamben et al., who build elaborate theories and philosophies on it. 3. John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy,” in Keats: Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 220, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 403

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4. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 13, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 5. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), book 2, 26. 6. See Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1897). For a sample of the vast criticism along ­these lines, see Charles E. Prescott and Grace A. Giorgio, “Vampiric Affinities: Mina Harker and the Paradox of Femininity in Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula,’ ” Victorian Lit­er­a­ture and Culture 33, no. 2 (2005): 487–515, in which ­these opening sentences typify the work done along t­ hese lines: “­After Mina Harker awakens from Count Dracula’s vampiric embrace, she asks the men around her, but more pointedly herself, ‘What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have tried to walk in meekness and righ­teousness all my days?’ ” (Stoker, Dracula, 285). As Harker recounts this perverse seduction in her own words, however, she contradicts her e­ arlier disavowal: “Strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him” (284). 7. In its most extreme social form, capable of femicide and prone to po­liti­cal catastrophism, this trope appears in the incel movements of our time. 8. William Butler Yeats, “Leda and the Swan,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 212. 9. For a lengthy and detailed account of Western philosophy’s founding reliance on this subsumption, see Michel Foucault, Lectures on the ­Will to Know, 1970–1971, ed. Daniel Defert, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), esp. 15–16. Speaking of how Aristotle rehearses Plato’s theme, Foucault says, “The w ­ ill to know is not founded on anything other than the precondition of knowledge itself; to ensure that the desire to know is enveloped entirely within knowledge; to ensure that knowledge has already absorbed it from the start and that, on its first appearance, it thus gives it its place, its law, and the princi­ple of its movement. Plato satisfied this requirement through the myth of recollection: even before you know, even before you desire to know, you knew, you had already known.” 10. See William James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” in Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 95–113. For a critique of this pragmatist position that suggests its continuity with the prob­lems of melancholic intellectuals, see Paul A. Bové, “Giving Thought to Amer­i­ca: Intellect and The Education of Henry Adams,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1996): 80–108. 11. John Milton, “Il Penseroso,” in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 76. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957), 116–38, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 12. John Donne, “To Mr. E. G.,” in The Complete En­glish Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1971), 201–202. 13. See Davis  P. Harding, “Milton’s Bee-­Simile,” Journal of En­glish and Germanic Philology 60, no. 4 (1961): 664–669. In this extremely thorough and insightful discussion of Virgil’s Georgics as a source and influence on Milton, the author nonetheless omits Lucretius from the historical analy­sis. Harding sees

404

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Virgil’s bees in the Fourth Georgic as fully anthropomorphic, a possibility I argue Virgil alters in the first book of the Aeneid, as I discuss in Chapter 4 in this book. 14. Richard Jenkyns, Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History: Times, Names, and Places (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 312. 15. Jenkyns, 312. 16. Jenkyns, 312. 17. Jenkyns, 314. 18. Frye began to theorize the relation between lit­er­a­ture and the censor in the section, “Theory of Symbols,” which has significant remarks on anagogy. “The work of literary art is a myth, and unites the ritual and the dream. By d ­ oing so, it limits the dream: it makes it plausible and acceptable to a social waking consciousness. Thus as a moral fact of civilization, lit­er­at­ure embodies a good deal of the spirit which in the dream itself is called the censor.” Frye, “Theory of Symbols,” in The Anatomy of Criticism, 118. 19. See David Quint’s careful study of chiasmus in Virgil, a topic developed within the po­liti­cal history of Rome and the poetry. “Through chiasmus, Virgil si­ mul­ta­neously posits, undoes, and creates critical distance upon his epic’s aspirations to aesthetic totality.” Quint, “Virgil’s Double Cross: Chiasmus and the Aeneid,” American Journal of Philology 132 (2011): 273. 20. I use the word “complex” ­here rather than “complicated” ­because inherent in Stevens’s thinking is a theory of emergence, which simply means a theory of poetics that disallows external determination of poetic creation. More simply, attempts to account for poetry b ­ ecause of lower-­order circumstances of society or biology fail in the face of the work itself. 21. See Wallace Stevens to Henry Church, October 15, 1940, in Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 376. On December 27, 1940, Stevens agreed to give a lecture at Prince­ton ­because of Church’s negotiations with then-­dean Christian Gauss and Allen Tate. See the letter of that date to Henry Church, in Letters, 383. Stevens’s talk became “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” 22. Stevens to Hi Simons, July 8, 1941, in Letters, 392. 23. Stevens to Church, December 27, 1940, 383. 24. Stevens to Church, October 15, 1940, 377. 25. Stevens to Church, 378. 26. Stevens to Church, 378. 27. For an impor­tant instance of ­these pressures in the intellectual po­liti­cal scene, see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). From within the consensus of recent academic criticism, see the instance of Fredric Jameson, “Third-­World Lit­er­a­ture in the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Mirowski shows the creative work of rightist intellectuals intent on making the world. Jameson sets up the sanctity of pulp and disgraces ­those who are positioned as its antagonists. Critics then turn to the pulp as a place of utopian possibility, while the high intellectuals of Mont Pèlerin make the neoliberal order and its chaotic politics.

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28. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Real­ity and the Imagination, in Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1997), 660, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 29. The complicated story of Shostakovich’s fears of Stalin is widely known in outline. For an accessible account, see Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin, trans. Antonina W. Burns (New York: Knopf, 2004), esp. 129. “In his old age, he recalled, ‘Instead of repenting, I wrote the Fourth Symphony.’ ” Of course, the Fourth did not appear for some time, and the Fifth earned instant state approval. Christopher Burns, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Bibliography, vol. 2, ties Pasternak to Stalin and Shostakovich through Pravda’s articles condemning Lady Macbeth for “formalism” (117). Burns suggests that we cannot know if Stalin personally spared the life of Pasternak as a “denizen of heaven,” but Pasternak was allowed to live in peace, despite his “insular be­hav­ior” (143). 30. See Karl Löwith, “The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt,” in Martin Heidegger and Eu­ro­pean Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 37–69. 31. Luis Buñuel tells a story of viewing Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the W ­ ill with René Clair and Charlie Chaplin. Buñuel had agreed to edit ­Will: “Ideologically, of course, the films ­were horrific, but technically they ­were incredibly impressive.” Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (New York: Random House, 2013), 179. Buñuel reports that his abridged versions w ­ ere “widely shown, particularly to senators and consulates” (179). René Clair and Charlie Chaplin “rushed to see them and had totally dif­fer­ent reactions. ‘Never show them!’ Clair said, horrified by their power. ‘If you do, w ­ e’re lost.’ Chaplin, on the other hand, laughed, once so hard that he actually fell off his chair. Was he so amused ­because of The ­Great Dictator?” (180). Stevens’s work with comic genre and his thinking about comedy and laughter remain understudied. Fred Miller Robinson makes this remark in his study of comedy in modernist lit­er­a­ture: “Although Wallace Stevens is the most comic of all ­great modern poets . . . ,” he wrote l­ittle criticism on the topic but introduced the terms comedy and comic often in his poems. Fred Miller Robinson, The Comedy of Language: Studies in Modern Comic Lit­er­a­ture (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­ setts Press, 1980), 89. Not only do I agree entirely with Robinson on t­hese points, but also at this point in my argument, I want to align Stevens’s comic sense with the raucous tone of Chaplin. The target in both cases is the pompous and ridicu­lous, if violent and murderous, tyrant. In effect, I suggest that Stevens (and Chaplin) give the lie to Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument that laughter preempts thinking and destroys beauty (140). Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 112, where they wrote: “The triumph over beauty is completed by humor, the malicious plea­sure elicited by any successful deprivation.” 32. Kenneth J. Arrow, “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare,” Journal of Po­liti­cal Economy 58, no. 4 (1950): 328. 33. Arrow, 339. 34. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (New York: ­Free Press, 1951). 35. Stanley Burnshaw, “Turmoil in the ­Middle Ground,” New Masses, October 1935, 41–42. Burnshaw’s objections to Stevens’s poetry as aesthetically indulgent and lacking social consciousness began a per­sis­tent tradition of such 406

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objection to Stevens’s writing. I discuss the po­liti­cal critics of Stevens in more detail in Chapter 7. 36. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 221–254. 37. Cornel West, Race ­Matters (Boston: Beacon, 1993): “Even the critique of dominant paradigms in the Acad­emy are academic ones” (41). 38. Rita Felski, Uses of Lit­er­a­ture (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2008). Felski proselytizes for the individuating pro­cesses of neoliberal consumption and narcissism, definitive forms of the con­temporary “real.” The postcritical critic must “think through her own relationship to the text she is reading. Why has this work been chosen for interpretation? [Note the evasive passive voice.] How does it speak to me now? What is its value in the pre­sent?” (10). And so on. 39. Claudia Rankine, “The Art of Poetry No. 102,” Paris Review 219 (2016), https://­w ww​.­t heparisreview​.­o rg​ /­i nterviews​ /­6 905​ /­c laudia​ -­r ankine​ -­t he​ -­a rt​ -­o f​ -­poetry​-­no​-­102​-­claudia​-­rankine. All subsequent quotations are from this online source. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014). 40. For Horace, see Ars Poetica, ll. 333–334: “Poets wish to ­either benefit or delight us, or, at one and the same time, to speak words that are both plea­sure and useful for our lives.” Horace, Ars Poetica, in Horace for Students of Lit­er­a­ture: The “Ars Poetica” and Its Tradition, ed., and trans. O. B. Hardison Jr. and Leon Goldan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 17. 41. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), book 8, ll. 610–611, 208–209. 42. Homer, ll. 217, 241–242, 209. 43. Homer, ll. 649–651, 210. 44. Wallace Stevens, “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts under­neath the Willow,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1997), 63.

7. “The Auroras of Autumn” 1. Wallace Stevens to Charles Tomlinson, June 19, 1951, in The Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 719, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text; Stevens, Transport to Summer (1947, repr., New York: Knopf, 1951). 2. Wallace Stevens, “Credences of Summer,” in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 1997), 322. All further quotations from and references to Stevens’s poetry and prose refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation CP. 3. John Keats, “To Autumn,” in Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 219. All further quotations from and references to Keats’s poetry refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 4. Helen Vendler, “Are ­These the Poems to Remember?,” New York Review of Books, November 24, 2011, is testimony to Stevens’s canonical status and its decline. Vendler’s essay is a review of Rita Dove’s edition of The Penguin Anthology 407

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of 20th-­Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). Vendler’s and Dove’s defenders are repeating the critique of Stevens launched by Burnshaw in 1935. For a defense of Dove, see Jeremy Bass, “Shelf Life: Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th  ­ Century Poetry,” Nation, November  2, 2011, https://­www​ .­thenation​.­com​/­article​/­shelf​-­life​-­16​/­. I have discussed this sort of conflict between “art” and “sociology,” which is ­really a conflict over politics and poetry, throughout this book. In part, I have tried to dispel this simpleminded opposition by drawing Stevens and Rankine into dialog in Chapter 6. 5. Lucy Beckett, Wallace Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 174. 6. Beckett, 174–175. 7. Theodor Adorno, “Text 3: Beethoven’s Late Style,” in “The Late Style (I),” in Beethoven: The Philosophy of M ­ usic, Fragments and Texts, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 125. 8. Alan Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the ­Actual World (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1991), xviii–­xix. 9. Filreis, 280. Lucy Beckett discusses “The Sail of Ulysses” for several pages, to demonstrate that the poem produced impor­tant art through her characteristic analy­sis of language as the ­bearer of feeling and thought while searching for form as the resolution of conflict. She could not find the resolution and concludes that the topic was unpromising for Stevens. Along the way, however, she explores a full range of Stevensian work in this long soliloquy, naming not only passages that w ­ ere “too diffuse, . . . ​too obscurely abstract.” She also finds passages that best express Stevens’s “vision of humanity which had informed some of his best poetry.” She concludes her comparison of this poem with ­others in this way: “­There is one quality, however, which this poem has more strongly than any of ­those masterpieces, though most of them have it to some degree. This quality is, as it ­were, a double strength, the double strength that comes from the expression of a recognition of the pos­si­ble power of ­human love and ­human intelligence and the simultaneous demonstration of that power.” Beckett, Wallace Stevens, 207. Filreis’s method does not deal with imaginative effort en route b ­ ecause it requires that poetry function as document within the field of historicist and so­cio­log­i­cal frames. 10. Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 11. Filreis, Wallace Steven, 98–133. 12. The MLA Bibliography lists forty books published with “Wallace Stevens” in their title in the period from 1983 to 1999, while from 2000 to 2016, only sixteen books with such a title appeared. More impressionistically, books published in the e­ arlier period more likely came from major university presses. In the l­ater period, only one title appeared from Prince­ton and one from Cornell. This information in itself is merely suggestive, but the e­ arlier period also saw a wider range of more substantive results in Stevens research, at least in book form. The MLA Bibliography lists 152 peer-­reviewed journal articles with “Wallace Stevens” in the title in the ­earlier period; 147 appear in the bibliography for the ­later period. 13. See also Helen Vendler, “Stevens and the Lyric Speaker,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, ed. John N. Seios (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 133–148. Vendler notes that “Stevens’ use of the naked first-­person 408

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voice is relatively rare” (133). Moreover, she explains his use of the first-­person plural “as the sign of collective American reference” (133). 14. Ben Lerner, “Of Accumulation: The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley,” boundary 2, Fall 2008, 261, reviews The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) and The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975–2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) by studying Creeley’s relation to Stevens. Lerner ends his review with something like the boundary 2 position on t­hese writers, citing William Spanos’s dialogue with Creeley to conclude that the younger poet takes the occasionality of poetry more seriously than the elder does. Lerner’s final vision makes Creeley the poet who strongly develops the humanistic dimensions of Stevens’s aesthetic by dropping poetry into time. Lerner finds that Creeley delivers the ethical goods in his poetry, adapting Stevens’s reflexivity for a mea­sured ­human time “of being for ­others in ‘the com­pany of love.’ ” 15. Paul de Man, “The Rhe­toric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228. Originally published in Interpretation, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). 16. Vendler has found an analytic path that preempts the Burnshaw line on Stevens, which treats his work without the discrimination required to understand its particularity and difference from the ideologue’s desire for violently prescriptive forms of articulation. 17. Cf. Siobhan Phillips, “Wallace Stevens and the Mode of the Ordinary,” Twentieth C ­ entury Lit­er­a­ture 54, no. 1 (2008): 1–30. Phillips’s research aims to correct recently influential pragmatist theories for studying US writing. Pragmatist antipoetics is not a good model for understanding Stevens’s poetry. Phillips’s criticism of a pragmatist approach itself relies on the seemingly impossible-­to-­kill ideologically blind model of subjective individualism as the alternative to pragmatism and more Left models of historical reading. John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, like his pragmatist philosophy in general, manifests l­ittle concern with individual creativity. Stevens’s experiential artistry reinforces subjective power. Vendler’s conclusions are disappointing as far as they coalesce with such standard models of research and reading. Given the power of her work, the conclusion is frustrating and disappointing since her work points the way forward. 18. Eleanor Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Lit­er­at­ ure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 217. 19. Frank Doggett, “Wallace Stevens’ Secrecy of Words: A Note on Import in Poetry,” New ­England Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1958): 375–391; Harold Bloom, “The Central Man: Emerson, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens,” Mas­sa­chu­setts Review 7, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 23–42; Sharon Cameron, “ ‘The Sense against Calamity’: Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens,” ELH 43, no. 4 (1976): 584–603; Alan Filreis, “Still Life without Substance: Wallace Stevens and the Language of Agency,” Poetics ­Today 10, no. 2 (1989): 345–372; Siobhan Phillips, “Wallace Stevens and the Mode of the Ordinary,” Twentieth ­Century Lit­er­a­ture 54, no.  1 (2008): 1–30. 20. Frank Kermode, “Notes ­toward a Supreme Poetry,” New York Times, June 12, 1977, http://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­books​/­98​/­11​/­01​/­specials​/­bloom​-­stevens​.­html. 409

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21. Frank Kermode, “Wallace Stevens: Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut,” in An Appetite for Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 79, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 22. This is also Filreis’s basic claim about reading Stevens in relation to national and po­liti­cal circumstance. As far as I can see, no Stevens critic has combined the dif­fer­ent realms of circumstance marked by Heidegger on the one hand and the income tax on the other. Perhaps the ideological inclinations involved, consciously or not, in reading a major artist make such a synthesis impossible. 23. For one typical instance of critical objection to the term, see Cheryl Walker, “Feminist Literary Criticism and the Author,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (1990): 551–571. 24. Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2–8. Claussen summarizes Adorno’s attempt to get the term genius out from ­under the burdens of bourgeois concepts and cults. Adorno furiously objected not only to the commodification princi­ples that cultivated “genius” as the story of talent and strug­gle. He strenuously objected to concepts that subsumed the work beneath the subject: “ ‘The ele­ment of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition’ ” (3). On this topos, Stevens and Adorno are quite close together. 25. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 91–142. Heidegger presented this paper first as a lecture in 1946 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Rilke’s death, according to a note of Heidegger, who also said the paper underwent revision. See “References,” in Heidegger, xxiv. 26. For a bilingual “trot”-­like rendering of Hölderlin’s poem “Brod und Wein,” see Susan Ranson, “Brod und Wein; Bread and Wine,” German Lit­er­a­ture, accessed May 22, 2020, https://­sites​.­google​.­com​/­site​/­germanliterature​/­19th​-­century​/­hoelderlin​ /­brot​-­und​-­wein​-­bread​-­and​-­wine. The semiline ­there reads in En­glish, “What poets are for when times are hard.” 27. Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), xviii. The first edition of this book appeared in London in 1960. 28. The Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. James Mitchell (San Francisco: Irthuriel’s Spear, 2004), 13. 29. The lines should read, “see, now they vanish, / The f­aces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, / To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.” T. S. Eliot, “­Little Gidding,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, Collected and Uncollected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 206. 30. Eliot, 209. 31. Eliot, 208. 32. Eratasthenes and Hyginus, Constellation Myths, trans. Robin Hard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 59. 33. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Pro­gress (New York: Penguin, 2008), 20. 34. The adjacent long poem, “An Ordinary Eve­ning in New Haven” (CP, 397–417), brings the sacramental particularities of time and place into the symbolic world that one often associates with Emerson and transcendental vision410

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aries. Stevens has posed a stark contrast in his volume of poems The Auroras of Autumn, in which ­ these two long poems stand as the achievement of poetic lifetimes. 35. This is an old ambition of criticism, coming long before recent postcritical and postsecular movements in En­glish departments. Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 36. ­Behind this phrase lies the familiar biblical variations that appear in Psalm 104 and Isaiah 3. 37. Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest Romance,” in The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 13–35. 38. Bloom, 6. 39. See Wallace Stevens, from his Journal, May 23, 1899, in Letters, 26. 40. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957), 120, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 41. The founding example of this Emersonian trope applied to Stevens is in an early paper by Harold Bloom, “The Central Man,” hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 42. Kenneth Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Re­nais­sance, Wrightsman Lectures (New York: NYU Press, 1964), 141. 43. Paul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2008). 44. Eric L. Green, Katie Benner, and Robert Pear, “ ‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence u ­ nder Trump Administration,” New York Times, October 22, 2018, A1. 45. Justin D. Edwards, “Henry James’s ‘Alien’ New York: Gender and Race in The American Scene,” American Studies International 36, no. 1 (February 1998): 66–80. 46. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005). Frankfurt’s analy­sis when applied to the academic world recalls Adorno’s writings on the acad­emy as the keeper of official culture. Hence, Frankfurt stresses the fact that bullshit is a pretentious be­hav­ior aimed at acquiring status within a certifying clique as much as obscuring the difficulties of truth and complexity (see esp. 10). 47. It was just this fact that I showed in Chapter 3. We cannot understand the civilizational stakes in Socrates’s ambitions if we treat the relevant texts only from within the so-­called history of philosophy. Arendt speaks against this Socratic tradition from a historical vantage point outside that “history” but also as a firmly credentialed insider to the stories told. 48. The paper was published as a pamphlet by the Museum of Modern Art in 1951. 49. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 247. 50. Scholars ­will quickly point to Eliot’s close interest in Virgil. Eliot sets aside his admired Virgil in the name of his own Christian beliefs, which lead him to prefer Dante to his master. In this preference, we see a prefiguration of Northrop Frye’s decision to give anagogy over to the religious epic. For some evidence of how Eliot’s reader of Virgil diminishes him at the point where Chris­tian­ity emerges in 411

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Western poetry, see T. S. Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World,” in On Poetry and Poets, FSG Classics (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), esp. 137–147. In other words, Eliot’s comments on Virgil reveal that he is much closer to the melancholy transcendental allegorist who is the ­enemy of poetry in this volume. 51. Leonardo Da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting (1651), trans. John Francis Rigaud (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1835), 3. 52. Brian Merchant, “When AI Goes Full Jack Kerouac,” Atlantic, October 1 2018, https://­www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­technology​/­archive​/­2018​/­10​/­automated​-­on​-­the​ -­road​/­571345​/­. 53. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 27. 54. James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Strug­gle for Integrity” (1963), in The Cross of Redemption, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 50–58, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 55. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of Amer­ic­ a, 1998), 321, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 56. Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice,” in American Poetry: The Twentieth ­Century, vol. 1, ed. Robert Hass, John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff (New York: Library of Amer­i­ca, 2000), 132. 57. T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 84. 58. Fredric Jameson, “Third-­World Lit­er­a­ture in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. 59. As examples, see Joseph P. Strelka, ed., Anagogic Qualities of Lit­er­a­ture, Yearbook of Comparative Criticism 4 (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1971); Ronald L. Grimes, “Anagogy and Ritualization: Baptism in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Violent Bear It Away,’ ” Religion and Lit­er­a­ture 21, no. 1 (1989): 9–26; Edward Butscher, “Variations on a Summer Day,” Twentieth ­Century Lit­er­ a­ture 19, no. 3 (1973): 153–164. The last two of t­ hese typify a tendency to thematized anagogy as a vision vis­i­ble in the religious lit­er­a­ture. 60. Northrop Frye, “The Responsibilities of the Critic,” in “Centennial Issue: Responsibilities of the Critic,” MLN 91, no. 5 (1976): 812, 813. 61. Northrop Frye, Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 18, The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 168. 62. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 63. 63. Marshall McLuhan, “Pound, Eliot, and the Rhe­toric of The Waste Land,” New Literary History 10, no. 3 (1979): 557–580. 64. Edward W. Said and Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in ­Music and Society (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 182. 65. Eliot, Waste Land, 71. 66. William Words­worth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3 1802,” in The Poetical Works of Words­worth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 214. 67. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All t­hings came into being through him, and without him not one ­thing came into being.” “The Gospel of St. John,” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Ver412

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sion, 5th ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan, Marc Z. Brettler, Pheme Perkins, Carol A. Newsom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Kindle edition. 68. A thorough reading of Stevens’s per­sis­tent use of the angel as a figure would include not only a discussion of “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” the final poem of the volume The Auroras of Autumn, but a reading of Stevens’s relation to Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant [Le Paysan de Paris], trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994). 69. In The Iliad book 21, Apollo refuses to fight Poseidon b ­ ecause from the point of view of Olympian immortals, ­humans are worth no effort or care: God of the earthquake—­you’d think me hardly sane if I fought with you for the sake of wretched mortals . . . like leaves, no sooner flourishing, full of the sun’s fire, feeding on earth’s gifts, than they waste away and die. Stop. Call off this skirmish of ours at once— let ­these mortals fight themselves to death.

Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 535. 70. J. Douglas Kneale, “Romantic Aversions: Apostrophe Reconsidered,” ELH 58, no. 1 (1991): 141–165, esp. 150–151. It would be extremely in­ter­est­ing to cast this part of “Auroras” against Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” ­Because Whitman’s g­ rand apostrophes, addressed to the dead Abraham Lincoln, oscillate between summoning the dead and averting consciousness from loss, this poem is a forceful antecedent to Stevens’s use of the apostrophe h ­ ere. In addition, of course, Whitman’s four poems assembled u ­ nder the title “President Lincoln’s Burial Hymn” bring the divine forward as well as the now lost power of the ­father cast into ritual memory. Perhaps, as a reference to Milton’s “Lycidas” provides, Stevens learns his use of the apostrophe from the mournful genre of the elegy. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: The Library of Amer­ic­ a, 1992), 459. John Milton, “Lycidas,” in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), 120. 71. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. Harold Edgeworth Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), book 9, chapter  2, http://­www​ .­perseus​.­tufts​.­edu​/­hopper​/­text​?­doc​=­Quint​.­%20Inst​.­%209​.­2&lang​=­original. 72. Cf. OED, s.v. “buffoon, n.”: “Etymology: < French buffon, bouffon, < Italian buffone buffoon, < buffa a jest, connected with buffare to puff; Tommaseo and Bellini consider the sense of ‘jest’ to be developed from that of ‘puff of wind’, applied fig. to anything light and frivolous; ­others, e.g. Littré, refer it to the notion of puffing out the cheeks as a comic gesture. (In 17th cent. accented on first syllable.)” 73. Northrop Frye’s account, as I have discussed throughout, requires the culmination of the anagogic form in religious poetry: “They include . . . ​analogies of revelation: the epics of Dante and Milton and their counter­parts in the other modes” (Anatomy, 121). 74. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2003), 174. 75. Blackmur, “Examples of Wallace Stevens” (1931) and “Wallace Stevens: An Abstraction Blooded” (1943), in Language as Gesture (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 221–254. 413

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76. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, trans. Charles  S. Singleton (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1975), 378. Translated as, “As is the geometer who wholly applies himself to mea­sure the circle, and finds not, in pondering the princi­ple of which he is need, such was I at that new sight. I wished to see how the image conformed to the circle and how it has its place therein” (379). 77. Dante, 378. 78. Dante, 378–379. 79. Chapter 9 on Shakespeare explores some of the dialectic of love, consummation, and marriage. Desire need not culminate in mastery or domination b ­ ecause love takes its form in reversibility and in the separation of desire as love from desire as possession.

8. Rembrandt, Bathsheba, and the Textures of Art 1. Andy Warhol’s success in the market is a marker of the culture market’s discrediting the aesthetic values of Rembrandt’s ethical poiesis. Georgina Adam, “The Art Market: All Eyes on the Andy Index,” Financial Times, September 13, 2013, https://­www​.­ft​.­com​/­content​/­718e2e3e​-­1acb​-­11e3​-­87da​-­00144feab7de. “Andy Warhol has been called a ‘one-­man Dow Jones’—­a barometer of the health of the ­whole art market. The online site Artprice reckons he produced some 400,000 works—­a staggering number, and only pos­si­ble ­because of the multiples that he did (or sometimes did not) personally oversee. In 2012, sales of Warhol totaled almost $330 m at auction, according to Artprice, with an unknown amount sold through dealers. So t­here is plenty to go around.” Robert Hughes provides an acute and useful judgment on Warhol: “his paintings, tremendously stylish in their rough silkscreening, full of slips, mimicked the dissociation of gaze and empathy induced by the mass media: the banal punch of tabloid newsprint the visual jabber ad bright sleazy color of TV, the sense of glut and anesthesia caused by both. . . . ​ The rapid negligence of Warhol’s images parodied the way mass media replace the act of reading with that of scanning, a state of affairs anticipated by Ronald Firbank’s line in The Flower Beneath the Foot: ‘She read at such a pace . . . ​and when I asked her where she had learnt to read so quickly she replied, “On the screens of Cinemas.” ’ ” Hughes, “Andy Warhol,” in Nothing If Not Critical (New York: Knopf, 1991), 249. 2. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Ré­union des musées nationaux, 1990). Derrida takes up the Tobit story in a book that also discusses Rembrandt. He places considerable emphasis on the figure of Raphael in the story, especially about Rembrandt, but Derrida’s interest lies in the drawing Tobias Healing His ­Father’s Blindness, also in the Louvre. Derrida also engages Benjamin in this book. In general terms, it embodies the more gnostic modes, with ruination at their center, which the ­earlier chapters of this book would set aside. Moreover, Derrida believes the Archangel is prominent in his absence in Rembrandt, while I show the opposite is true. 3. José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analy­sis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 414

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4. Kenneth Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Re­nais­sance (New York: NYU Press, 1964), e.g., 70. Clark argued that with The Night Watch (1642), Rembrandt’s Baroque period ended, and his style culminated and changed. 5. Much has been written about the collapse of the acad­emy as the official home of a thriving humanities counterculture to the STEM fields. The acad­emy has noted its crisis, which results much of the time in bureaucratic responses. Jonathan Kramnick, “How the Jobs Crisis Has Transformed Faculty Hiring,” Chronicle of Higher Education 65, no. 3 (September 21, 2018), https://­www​.­chronicle​.­com​/­article​/­How​ -­the​-­Jobs​-­Crisis​-­Has​/­244324. 6. Mieke Bal, Reading “Rembrandt” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). For a more mundane sense of Rembrandt and the market, see Russel Shorto, “Rembrandt in the Blood,” New York Times Magazine, February  27, 2019, https://­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2019​/­02​/­27​/­magazine​/­rembrandt​-­jan​-­six​.­html. While Rembrandt holds his value, the value of Golden Age painting has declined, suggesting that his value might fall as well. Many collectors now come from newer money, especially in China. Older collectors who valued the masters are d ­ ying off. The masters’ works are “old.” T ­ here is at least a change in official culture: “­There have been declines, too, in relevant university programs and faculty posts, and in curator positions at museums. . . . ​‘Right now [says Matthew Teitelbaum, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston], ‘this is a narrowing field, where university programs are declining and teaching appointments are being left unfilled’ ” (Shorto, “Rembrandt in the Blood”). 7. Marcus Tullius Cicero, “Pro Roscio Amerino” (80 BCE), Chapter xxx, section 84, Perseus Digital Library, http://­www​.­perseus​.­tufts​.­edu​/­hopper​/­text​.­jsp​?­doc​ =­Perseus%3Atext%3A1999​.­04​.­0051%3Achapter%3DXXX%3Asection%3D84. 8. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3–92. 9. Vincent Van Gogh to Émile Bernard, c. 23 July 1888, in The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Penguin Classics, 1997), 377. Van Gogh could be referring to Baudelaire’s Spleen poem “Les Phares,” often translated as “Beacons” but called “Guiding Lights” by Richard Howard, who translates the relevant stanza: Rembrandt Sorry hospital echoing with sighs, adorned by one enormous crucifix, where tearful prayers rise from excrement and a sudden ray of winter sunlight falls;

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs de Mal, trans. Richard Howard (New York: David Godine, 1982), 16. In “The Painter in Modern Life,” Baudelaire makes no mention of Rembrandt. The scholarship points in dif­fer­ent directions on the issue that Van Gogh names. Richard Webb holds that Delacroix meant far more to Baudelaire than Rembrandt did. His study concludes, “as a visual critic, Baudelaire was not always perceptive.” Webb, “Terminology in the Salon Reviews of Charles Pierre Baudelaire,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 27, no. 2 (1993): 83. Alison McQueen approaches the question obliquely, concluding that Baudelaire’s admiration for the 415

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very dif­fer­ent Constantin Guy and Goya would allow his admiration for Rembrandt. This approach leaves open the question of ­whether McQueen accurately assesses both Baudelaire’s judgment of Goya and the parallels that might exist between him and his teacher, Rembrandt. McQueen, The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt: Reinventing an Old Master in Nineteenth-­Century France (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 96. 10. Van Gogh to Bernard, c. 23 July 1888, 377. T. J. Clark reviews the National Gallery’s exhibition, “Rembrandt: The Late Works,” and comes to conclusions quite similar to Van Gogh’s and distant from Baudelaire’s sense of Rembrandt. Cf. Clark, “World of ­Faces: Face to Face with Rembrandt,” LRB 36, no. 23 (December 4, 2014): 16–18. 11. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 50, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 12. Benjamin could well include this painting in the Baroque as he understood it. “­There has hardly been a lit­er­a­ture whose virtuosic illusionism more thoroughly expunged from its works that transfiguring lustrous appearance with which p ­ eople once sought, rightly, to define the essence of artistic formation.” Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 191. Benjamin’s conception of the Baroque opened the way for economistic and especially market centered thinking of art and writing during the early modern period. Critics have made major statements along t­ hese lines about Rembrandt. Cf. Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 13. Franz L. Neumann, Behemoth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942). As the modern po­liti­cal theorist William Scheuerman puts it, this book “offered long ago a powerfully damning analy­sis of Schmitt’s activities and influence in Nazi Germany,” beyond the “antisemitic diatribes.” Scheuerman, “Carl Schmitt and the Nazis,” German Politics & Society 23 (1991): 71. Scheuerman also discusses the academic rehabilitation of Schmitt, especially in the US university. 14. Rembrandt, The Beheading of John the Baptist (1640), Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum; Africans in Black and White, exhibition at the DuBois Institute, Harvard University, 2010. The Harvard Gazette took notice of this exhibition and the presence of Rembrandt in such a display. Its comments are useful and sentimental: “In Rembrandt’s e­ tching, a black boy, clutching the empty dish against his chest, is shown observing the killing itself. The boy’s humanity and innocence stand in sharp contrast to the brutality and aggressiveness of the executioner.” “Africans in Black & White,” Harvard Gazette, September 1, 2010, https://­news​ .­harvard​.­edu​/­gazette​/­story​/­2010​/­09​/­africans​-­in​-­black​-­white​/­ . See also Rembrandt, Two Africans (Two Moors) (1661), Mauritshuis, Amsterdam; Elmer Kolfin, “Rembrandt’s Africans,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part 1: Artists of the Re­nais­sance and Baroque, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 153. 15. The Metropolitan Museum of Art pre­sents the standard position on this body of work. See Walter Liedtke, “Landscape Painting in the Netherlands,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, December 2014, https://­www​.­metmuseum​.­org​/­toah​ /­hd​/­lpnd​/­hd​_­lpnd​.­htm. 416

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16. “Peint non pas à Rome comme l’indique une gravure de l’époque (par Schelte Bolswert) mais postérieurement au séjour de Rubens en Italie (1600–1608), sans doute vers 1614–1618, en combinant divers motifs romains plus ou moins exacts, vus et dessinés par lui sur place. L’influence italienne de Bril et du Titien joue ici dans la conception à la fois solide et lyrique du paysage.” The Louvre, “Petrus Paulus Rubens: Paysage avec les ruines de mont Palatin à Rome,” accessed April 29, 2020, http://­cartelfr​.­louvre​.­fr​/­cartelfr​/­visite​?­srv​=­car​_­not​_­frame&idNotice​=4 ­ 901. 17. Benjamin says ­little about comedy in this study of the Baroque. When he does, he discusses the German genre of the Lustspiel in relation to the Trauerspiel. He also extends the genre to Shakespeare, showing no anxiety about the local origins of genre and conventions. A patient reading of two or three pages on this topic would show that Benjamin describes his own c­ areer in the terms he uses to describe the relation of ­these genres. Relying on Novalis to understand the nature of this relation, which absorbs the relation of ­those opposites, comedy and tragedy, Benjamin says that “the figure of the comic schemer” reappears as outside the Trauerspiel only as an effect of the genre itself (Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 125–126). 18. John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (London: Verso Books, 2015), 143–144, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 19. Simon Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Knopf, 1999). Schama makes an extended case for how the young Rembrandt looked to Rubens to model a successful ­career. This long book on Rembrandt, 750 large-­format pages, has its own study of Rubens as an antechamber to Rembrandt. Significantly, Schama’s third chapter, given over to Rubens, called “Pietro Paolo,” to mark Rubens’s successful adaptation of the Italians, opens with the section “Painting in the Ruins,” which helps place Rubens on the Baroque terrain so extensively stylized by Benjamin. 20. K. Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Re­nais­sance, 60–61. 21. Hughes, “Andy Warhol,” 244. 22. Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, 88, where Alpers argues that Rembrandt found “freedom” from patronage in the market. He not only embraced but also advanced historically the alignment among his three loves, “his freedom, art, and money.” Alpers’s interest “lies in his originating investment in this system.” The so-­called New Historicism, associated with the journal Repre­sen­ta­tions, which Alpers cochaired at its founding (1983) with Stephen Greenblatt, helped move the study of art into an economistic frame, the influence of which remains despite the New Historicism’s loss of apparent status and influence. 23. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), esp. 8–25. Note as well how Jameson assigns Warhol specific value as a figure through whose work the age of late capital can or should be read. Jameson’s fatalistic description of such t­ hings as the loss of all affect, of all depth, promotes a consensus that discourages judgment about the realities it describes and minimizes the value of po­liti­cal action. Moreover, it makes of past works mere objects of cap­i­tal­ist contextualization and makes sympathy for ­those works into mere nostalgia. Remarkably, nowhere does this much-­quoted book make a case for the necessity of its own stories, preferring instead to rhetorize a seemingly oppositional position that assents to the necessary tragedy of decline while anticipating its transcendence in a utopia. 417

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24. Mark Fisher, Cap­i­tal­ist Realism: Is T ­ here No Alternative? (Ropley, UK: Zero Books, 2009); Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Cackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntol­ogy,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance M ­ usic Culture 5, no.  2 (2013): 42–55. This latter paper builds on Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as the nostalgic mode: “a nostalgia for all the ­futures that w ­ ere lost when culture’s modernist impetus succumbed to the terminal temporality of postmodernity” (45). Slight analy­sis brings t­hese remarks into line with my ­earlier discussions of Benjamin on ruination, Jameson’s adoption of a Brechtian—­that is, Jamesonian Benjamin—­and the consequent fatalism that follows on this correlation’s establishment. Fisher concludes with a faint echo of Benjaminian messianism, looking for the past for ­futures, the very possibility of which “our culture” has surrendered. 25. Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). If we take this book as exemplary of the “Critique of Mastery” in vari­ous forms of cultural studies fields, then we should return to Berger’s subtler, fuller, and less repetitive sense of master and mastery. Berger, like Van Gogh on Rembrandt, knows that masters are magicians as well as figures in the now well-­known dialectic inherited from Hegel. Mastery is the work of a magister just as writers often use alchemy, the transformation of nature, as an analog to art. Even this critique of mastery can dissemble in a masterful display of the recurring prob­lem. A postcolonial reading of the alchemic master is, of course, a version of remaking h ­ umans taken as nature in the nonwhite world. Such an account repeats the long-­established reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as marked by the colonization of the Ca­rib­bean. It is another example of the repetitive productivity of certain internally sustained “discourses” or “theories” that celebrate their own deadendedness with the play within the inescapable figures of mastery itself. Pointing eternally to the prob­lem—­rather than to the achievement as an assurance—is a repetitive trope that begins from the assumption that nothing creative for h ­ uman life or the habitat might result from the mastery of what is given. What is a critique of mastery but a weak attempt at such an overcoming, one that admits from the start its own iterability? Worst of all, such “critique of mastery” talk does not allow for the mastery of mastery in the double game that “masters” without influence achieve. The critique of mastery continues the recent tendency to indict such achievements with generalities made into false universals. 26. John W. Selfridge, Pablo Picasso (New York: Facts on File, 1994). By contrast, Rembrandt created “about 350 paintings, about 300 ­etchings, and more than 100 drawings.” Nina Siegal, “The Relevance of Rembrandt, 350 Years L ­ ater,” New York Times, March 3, 2019, AR18. 27. Michel Leiris, A Suite of 180 Drawings by Picasso (New York: Random House, 1954). 28. Rembrandt, dir. Alexander Korda (1936). See BFI, “Rembrandt (1936),” BFI Screenonline, accessed April 29, 2020, http://­www​.­screenonline​.­org​.­uk​/­film​/­id​ /­438853​/­index​.­html. “The film plots an archetypal story of the frustrated artist, misunderstood and fi­nally destitute. But the cliché is at least true of Rembrandt’s life.” BFI suggests that this film, starring Charles Laughton, was perhaps Korda’s best. He was disappointed by its relative failure. The entire BFI page is saturated with the image Berger refuses and wants to overcome.

418

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29. Eric Jan Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, trans. Diane Webb (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 100, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 30. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 34. 31. In Chapter 1, I showed that Jameson’s late invocation of science fiction belongs to the melancholy logic of ruination, which alienates action and humanity to history, setting it off in an over-­the-­horizon utopia postulated as the result of sci-fi pop art. No one should point to t­hese sci-fi writers as examples of Jameson attending to the actions of persons in history. Jameson is writing about some vaguely contoured “concept” rather than the ­human actions, experiences, and emotions alive in the creative works. Even if it w ­ ere true that such works, in this case, emerged from the exhaustion of imagination in its strug­gles with the real, the proper case to be made is that Jameson would then be writing about weak imaginations and should look elsewhere. The fundamental truth is that his account of sci-fi in this case is merely another self-­justifying assertion aiming to solidify a g­ rand account of history, capital, style, and so on—in other words, the life work of an officially well-­honored ­career. 32. K. Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Re­nais­sance, 180. Clark makes clear that Rembrandt would import gestures from Breughel to change the Italianate design of his engraving Christ and the Adulteress. 33. Clark, 12. 34. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. Joyce Crick (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 107. 35. Anselm Haverkamp, “Richard II, Bracton, and the End of Po­liti­cal Theology,” in Shakespearean Genealogies of Power (London: Routledge, 2011), 47–56. Haverkamp adds wonderfully to our understanding of Schmitt’s linking of tragedy to po­liti­cal theology and force of reconsideration with regard to Shakespeare’s po­ liti­ cal plays, counting Mea­sure for Mea­sure as one. Nonetheless, Haverkamp does not adduce the comic and romance genres in this context, although ­later in the book he writes importantly about The Winter’s Tale. 36. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Plea­sure and Narrative Cinema,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keywords (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1975). Berger’s Ways of Seeing offered a critique of artistic sexual reification of w ­ omen. Eric Jan Sluijter, in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, traces the historical opposition to the female nude for moral reasons—­nude ­women arouse and satisfy the men who gaze—­and then po­liti­cal reasons as ­women resisted their status as use objects in the marketplace. Renata Nina Aron, “What Does Misogyny Look Like,” New York Times, March 8, 2019, https://­nyti​.­ms​/­2UrXFyM. 37. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, “Networks of Remediation,” in ­Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 64–87. An older-­style defense of the female nude as an ideal form of exploration exists in Saunders Gill, The Nude: A New Perspective (New York: Harper and Row, 1989). 38. “Can the Female Nude Survive the #MeToo Era?,” ­Battle of Ideas Festival, Barbican, London, October  13, 2018, https://­www​.­battleofideas​.­org​.­uk​/­2018​ /­session​/­can​-­the​-­female​-­nude​-­survive​-­the​-­metoo​-­era​/­. On the universality of misogyny,

419

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see Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (London: Penguin, 2019). By the 1990s, feminist scholars set aside the often-­unquestioned authority of books such as Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1956). See Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992). 39. 2 Samuel 12:9, 14, in The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version, 4th ed., ed. Michael Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 461–462. ­Later quotations from the Bible are from this edition. 40. George G. Nicol, “The Alleged Rape of Bathsheba,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 73 (1997): 43–54. This article summarizes the debate over Bathsheba’s character and intelligence, concluding that she is “a clever and resourceful ­woman” who bathes near to David to entice him (43). 41. Clark, Nude, 1–27, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 42. Matthias Wivel, “The Rare Titian Drawing that the UK is Fighting to Keep,” Apollo: The International Art Magazine, November 16, 2016, https://­www​.­apollo​ -­magazine​.­com​/­rare​-­titian​-­drawing​-­uk​-­fighting​-­keep​/­​.­ “Careful consideration of the evidence demonstrates that Titian and his Venetian colleagues relied extensively upon drawing, albeit in dif­fer­ent and less systematic ways than their Central Italian contemporaries.” 43. Bal, Reading “Rembrandt,” 218. The quotation marks around the artist’s name show something of the weak nominalism in this sort of self-­enclosed work admired in the acad­emy. “Rembrandt” is undoubtedly a created object, produced by the stories academics tell about the purely represented quality of what “naïve” thinking once took as actually existing. Our sense of Rembrandt, as of our own work, results from intersecting practices, histories, language games, ­etc. Just as “the subject” is the effect of such intersections, so too is “Rembrandt” an effect. How many marks must we use to suspend the idea that t­ here is imaginative intelligence on offer in poiesis? 44. Clark, Nude, 339: “Rembrandt had gone out of his way to find the most deplorable body imaginable and emphasize its least attractive qualities.” Rembrandt’s ­etchings of Diana from the early 1630s illustrate how departure from the classical norms, combined with a naturalism reflecting the humility of finite life, produced nudes far from the classical ideals. Do ­these works also arouse erotic feeling in their objectifications of w ­ omen, especially? Or w ­ ere they ­counters to that possibility? That concerns underlies Clark’s conventional judgment on the beauty of ­women’s bodies in this tradition. 45. Hélène Cixous, “Le Rire de la Méduse,” L’Arc 61 (1975): 39–54. 46. Hélène Cixous, “Bathsheba or the Interior Bible,” trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, New Literary History 24, no. 4 (1993): 820, 822. 47. Robert Hughes, “Connoisseur of the Ordinary,” Guardian, February 10, 2006, https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­artanddesign​/­2006​/­feb​/­11​/­art. 48. T. J. Clark, “World of ­Faces,” 17, 18. 49. John Berger, “Rembrandt Now,” The Threepenny Review, no. 51 (Autumn 1992): 5. 50. Cixous, “Bathsheba or the Interior Bible,” 830. 51. T. J. Clark, “World of ­Faces,” 15. 52. Clark, 15. 420

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53. On this last point, see T. J. Clark’s refusal to allow Rembrandt to die in the normative Left accusation against capital and bourgeois society. “What needs explaining,” he writes, “is the strangeness, the recalcitrance, and at the same time the entire typicality, of his version of the creed” (Clark, 16). 54. Sluijter gives an excellent summary of Apelles’s canonical status in relation to the nude: “The special position which the female nude occupied as a highly regarded artistic phenomenon with the repre­sen­ta­tion of the ­human figure, must have been due to the fact that the benchmark of artistic excellence, the legendary art of Apelles—­the painter who, as Pliny stated had surpassed all the artists before him, as well as t­ hose coming a­ fter him—­was celebrated in par­tic­u­lar b ­ ecause of the repre­ sen­ta­tion of female beauty and grace” (Rembrandt and the Female Nude, 17). 55. Neha Kale, “Why Does a Female Nude Painted by a Female Artist Pose Such a Threat?,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 16, 2016. Kale edits the art magazine Value. In this article, she recounts how she “scoured textbooks for paintings of female bodies that ­weren’t a projection of male desire” and how her “search yielded nothing.” Australian censors removed a nude photo from the cover of Value’s August 2016 number. Lisa Yuskavage painted the original canvas, The Brood, an image of a pregnant female nude, which the Con­temporary Art Museum in St. Louis displayed in the first solo exhibition of her work, also in 2016. “Lisa Yuskavage at Con­temporary Art Museum,” Con­temporary Art Daily, March 31, 2016, http://­www​.­contemporaryartdaily​.­com​/­2016​/­03​/­lisa​-­yuskavage​-­at​-­contemporary​ -­art​-­museum​-­st​-­louis​/­. 56. Cf. R. A. Judy, Sentient Flesh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), which makes a sustained argument for the possibility of creative intellect in varied forms of life activity, especially t­hose involved in thinking and acting on the relation of the ­human to freedom. 57. T. J. Clark, “World of ­Faces,” 17. 58. Sarah Wilson, “Rembrandt, Genet, Derrida,” in Portraiture: Facing the subject (Critical Introductions to Art), ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1996), 203–216. 59. Jacques Lacan, “Jacques Lacan, Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ” in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John  P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 28–53. 60. Harry Berger Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italians (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Berger laments that several critics from Kenneth Clark to Alpers claim repre­sen­ta­tional status for the Bathsheba, whose subject is said to be thinking as ­people think. By contrast, he insists that what ­matters is the sitter’s clear disinterest in ­either the pose she assumes or the painter. Such normative violations suggest Rembrandt has staged a scene of absorption. This in­ ter­est­ing insight makes much of a first reduction. Kenneth Clark’s reading of the Bathsheba comes with a full knowledge of Picasso’s Suite of 180 Drawings, the remarkable art made from thinking of the pose, the model, and the painter. I miss a discussion of Picasso as relevant to this work of Rembrandt. 61. Chad Shomura, “Exploring the Promise of New Materialisms,” Lateral 6, no. 1 (2017), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­25158​/­L6​.­1​.­10. 62. Schama, Rembrandt’s Eyes, 551. 421

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63. Jean Genet, “Rembrandt’s Secret,” L’Express, September 4, 1958, quoted in T. J. Clark, “World of ­Faces,” 16. Cf. Jean Genet, What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet, trans. Randolph Hough (Madras, India: Hanuman Books, 1988), 53–79. 64. T. J. Clark, “World of ­Faces,” 15. 65. This is a corrective to Walter Benjamin’s influential attack on romantic aesthetics in Origin of the German Trauerspiel. “As a symbolic construct, the beautiful is supposed to pass smoothly over into the divine” (166). The Archangel Raphael’s dirty s­ oles are the first proof that within and a­ fter the Baroque, Benjamin’s assertion about the ladder from beauty to the divine is a ubiquitous, necessary, and failed effort to bridge the gap created by the post-­Renaissance is historically false. Furthermore, Rembrandt’s success in generating Bathsheba as beauty and h ­ uman proves ­there is no necessity to the historical narrative that has allegory emerge from Trauerspiel to persist into modernity. 66. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1959), 234. 67. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). In his preface, Cavell explains that he had a­ dopted “by instinct and training” a mode of philosophical defense against “defeat of claiming to possess some privileged access to or mea­sure of truth.” When he came to read Shakespeare, however, he became “aware of the liabilities and ­hazards of this course,” thereby embodying the perfect reader or audience for ­great works of art. He learned what Empson taught: he was “nowhere more needful of timely aid and encouragement” (ix). 68. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 19. 69. Empson, 20. 70. A.  E. Stallings, “Texture,” Poetry Foundation, September  18, 2007, https://­www​.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­harriet​/­2007​/­09​/­texture​-­56d34b7b5df70. 71. Roman Jakobson and Lawrence  G. Jones, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in “Th’Expence of Spirit” (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 32; John Crowe Ransom, “An Address to Kenneth Burke,” Kenyon Review 4, no.  2 (1942): 219–237; David Thompson, “Figure and Allegory in the ‘Commedia,” Dante Studies 90 (1972): 1–11; Northrop Frye, “The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism,” Daedalus 99, no. 2 (1970): “Gerard Manley Hopkins draws a distinction between a poet’s ‘overthought,’ or explicit meaning, and his ‘underthought,’ or texture of images and meta­phors. But in a writing culture a poet’s underthought, his meta­phorical or pictured meaning, tends to become the more impor­tant thought, and to some degree it even separates itself from the explicit statement” (287–288). 72. The artist Carrie May Weems often discusses the ten-­block area in Detroit where she was raised and where many musical artists lived. She spoke about t­ hese musicians’ shared acts of imaginative appropriation at the Car­ne­gie Library on March 21, 2019. She made similar remarks in a lecture at Emory University on April 8, 2019, in a talk titled, “A History of Violence-­Upheave.” Susan Carini, “Artist Carrie Mae Weems Visits Emory to ‘Think Together the Big Questions,’ ”

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Emory News Center, accessed April 29 2020, https://­news​.­emory​.­edu​/­stories​/­2019​ /­04​/­er​_­weems​_­lecture​/­campus​.­html.

9. “What Think You of Falling in Love?” 1. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 1.3.105–107. All subsequent references to this play are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers. The chapter title is from act 1, scene 2, line 25. 2. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 2.8.91–94. All subsequent references to this play are from this edition and I w ­ ill cite them parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers. 3. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, The Revised Oxford Translation, Bollingen Series 71, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1994), 2318. 4. Cynthia Freeland, “Plot Imitates Action: Aesthetic Evaluation and Moral Realism in Aristotle’s Poetics,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Rorty (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1992), 111–132. 5. Aristotle, Poetics, 2318. 6. Aristotle, 2318. 7. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 3–27. Derrida plays across the multiple meanings of “proper” (proper) across this essay. Rather than feel restricted by his play as if it ­were a negation, I feel enabled by its loosening of the term’s significations to affirm its uses throughout especially this chapter. I write this note to forestall objections to especially the proprietary sense of “proper” by ­those who resent owner­ship based on one economic formation alone. 8. Edward W. Said, “An Interview with Edward W. Said,” boundary 2, 20, no. 1 (1993): 4: “The idea of the anti-­dynastic intellectual is very impor­tant to me. . . . ​I stake a g­ reat deal on the question of d ­ oing something for oneself. It’s a form of in­de­pen­dence, I suppose, which (a) I cherish, and (b) I ­don’t think the kinds of works I write—­like this book, or Orientalism, or any of the other t­hings that I’ve written—­I ­don’t think they derive from formulas or concepts that can be handed on. They ­really derive from personal experience, and that’s something terribly impor­tant to me.” 9. William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 102,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Douglas Bush, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 1470. 10. I use the word “contain” h ­ ere knowing I could use other words such as “create,” “reproduce,” ­etc. For my purposes, it makes no difference. The issue is the presence of truth and experience, no m ­ atter their source and no m ­ atter their ideology or even the stability or instability of their semiotic arrangements. 11. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1974), 5.

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12. Empson, 138. 13. Empson, 138. 14. I am making no metaphysical claims for the imagination or its effects. On this point, I am firmly materialist and convinced by Darwin. Stephen Jay Gould, Ever since Darwin: Reflections in Natu­ral History (New York: Norton, 1977), esp. 25: “Love of the deity effect of organ­ization, oh you materialist! . . . ​Why is thought being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity a property of ­matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.” Gould quotes ­these lines from Darwin’s “Transmutation Notebooks” of 1838–1839. Materialism brings the h ­ uman back to humility. 15. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1959), 228. 16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Pro­gress of the Drama,” in Coleridge’s Essays & Other Lectures on Shakespeare & Some Other Old Poets & Dramatists (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), 25. 17. ­Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, introduction to The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. V ­ irginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 1–2, which rather predictably claims that ­there is no such t­hing as the lyric, that it is a construction of vari­ous discourses especially associated with the nineteenth-­century bourgeois world. The anthology accepts the Coleridgean caution that Sappho is not a lyric poet to be grouped with Yeats, but it keeps the term in circulation across an enormous range of materials, granting the differentiation of the term’s applications. Of course, the anthology mostly concerns the dif­fer­ent academic methodologies for dealing with the lyric. 18. Coleridge, “Pro­gress of the Drama,” 25. 19. Coleridge, 25. 20. Coleridge, 25–26. 21. Consider, for example, the new brand of “hydro-­criticism,” which assem­ bles sets of con­temporary academic concerns and topoi into a near totalizing narrative of global long histories of ­human actions across oceans and other bodies of ­water. Laura Winkiel, ed., “Hydro-­Criticism,” ELN 57, no. 1 (2019) . 22. I made this l­ater point in more detail in my discussion of Dante in Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the ­Human (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 40–56. 23. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 125. I began this argument with current forms of academic criticism in Chapter 1. 24. Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Between Men: En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 28–48. 25. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 287n20. 26. ­These lines foreshadow Lear’s address to Cordelia: “Come, let’s away to prison; / We two alone ­will sing like birds i’the cage.” William Shakespeare, King Lear (New York: Arden Shakespeare, 2007), 365 (act 5, scene 3, lines 8–9). 27. Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 37. 28. Poggioli, 41. 424

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29. Margaret Ferguson, “Hymeneal Instruction,” in Masculinities, Childhood, Vio­lence: Attending to Early Modern ­Women—­and Men: Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium, ed. Amy E. Leonard and Karen L. Nelson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 97–129. 30. Cf. Rembrandt, The Abduction of Ganymede (1635), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. 31. Shakespeare, As You Like It, 187nn121–122. 32. R. A. Judy, Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 33. Aparajita Mazumber, “Coleridge, Vishnu, and the Infinite,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture Studies 30, no. 1 (1993): 32–51. 34. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of Amer­ic­ a, 1997), 678. 35. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 234. 36. Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2017). 37. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1957), 287. 38. Frye, 289. 39. Ruth Y. Y. Hung, “Imagination Sterilized: The Workings of the Global Spectacle,” boundary 2, 43, no. 3 (2013): 101–137. 40. Ganymede’s fainting at the sight of Orlando’s blood is not a sign of Rosalind’s failed control. To think so would take Rosalind away from imagination and into the realm of realism. On this level, she faints by surprise, but the experience adds to the materials available for her play’s transformation of desired form into the culmination of her plans. 41. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 401. 42. Juliet Dusinberre, introduction to Shakespeare, As You Like It, 10. 43. Karl Erik Rosengren, “The Riddle of the Empty Cell,” Current Anthropology 17, no. 4 (1976): 667–685, esp. 677, a comment by William J. Goode on Rosengren’s paper. 44. In a realist mode adjusted to the demands of magical explanations, cf. V. S. Naipaul, Magic Seeds (New York: Knopf, 2004). For a fully developed and well-­ explained account of magic’s sources, see Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (New York: Everyman Books, 2011). 45. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 119. 46. Frye, 119. 47. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 163. 48. Benjamin, 163. 49. Dusinberre, introduction to Shakespeare, As You Like It, 36; Harold Jenkins, introduction to Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, ed. Harold Jenkins, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982), 1. Ann Thompson and Nell Taylor in their 2006 version of the Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet develop a more complex sense of dating based on several recent arguments about the play’s manuscript, per­ for­mance, and print history. According to t­ hese editors, a version of Hamlet might 425

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have existed as early as 1589, with the latest date sometime between 1600 and 1603. The best way to understand Hamlet is as the result of “a pro­cess of production which involves drafts of manuscripts, per­for­mances in dif­fer­ent venues, and the publication of a number of dif­fer­ent texts.” The lack of a “precise date” of composition adds to the prob­lem of the play but does not move it far, in its final stages, from As You Like It. Thompson and Taylor, introduction to Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 43–59. 50. Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 164. 51. Howard Eiland, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, xii. 52. Tracy  B. Strong wrote about this phenomenon, especially among “Left” scholars in “Dimensions of the New Debate around Carl Schmitt,” in The Concept of the Po­liti­cal, by Carl Schmitt, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ix–­xxvii. John P. McCormick also notes the importance of Tracy Strong’s essay as one of several “recent critical accounts of the seriousness, dangerousness, and pervasiveness of Schmitt’s influence in vari­ous con­temporary lit­er­a­tures.” John  P. McCormick, “Po­liti­cal Theory and Po­liti­cal Theology: The Second Wave of Carl Schmitt in En­glish,” Po­liti­cal Theory 26, no. 6 (1998): 848. 53. Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” Repre­sen­ta­ tions 83, no. 1 (2003): 67–96. Kahn concedes that Schmitt has seduced scholars into his arena with aesthetic and affective qualities that resemble t­hose offered by Adorno and Benjamin. This is an impor­tant critique of ­those who absorbed and circulated his authority, even with reservations. Moreover, Kahn makes an impor­ tant advance in the study of Schmitt’s unaware embrace of the aesthetic, devastatingly showing that he has no “sensitivity” to literary form, as a result of which his historical and metahistorical accounts collapse. “Schmitt’s insensitivity to literary form skews his reading of the foundational texts of the early modern period that are crucial to his genealogy of liberalism and the aesthetic” (69). Kahn’s examples of insensitivity are Leviathan and Hamlet. I add to this that Schmitt’s po­liti­cal and personal interests lead him to ignore the primacy of imaginative work and to an incomplete genealogy precisely b ­ ecause he must have the account he offers as the sole account. In other words, he acts in the worst of faith and does not commit innocent errors that “skew” his positions. 54. Coleridge, “Pro­gress of the Drama,” 25. 55. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 179, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. Cavell’s amateurism in discussing Shakespeare recalls Roland Barthes on love, of course, but it should also recall the ­great American poet-­critic R. P. Blackmur and his influence on Edward Said, in the latter’s objections to dynastic language. In 1935, Blackmur wrote, “Criticism, I take it, is the formal discourse of an amateur. When ­there is enough love and enough knowledge represented in the discourse it is a self-­sufficient but by no means an isolated art.” Blackmur, “A Critic’s Job of Work,” in Language as Gesture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 372. See also Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977). 56. Secondary writing on Cavell prioritizes “aesthetics” in reading and valuing his work. David La Rocca, “The Education of Grown-­Ups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 47, no. 2 (2013): 109–131. On Cavell on 426

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Shakespeare, see Gerald L. Bruns, “Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (1990): 612–632. 57. Áine Kelly, “ ‘A Radiant and Productive Atmosphere’: Encounters of Wallace Stevens and Stanley Cavell,” Journal of American Studies 46, no.  3 (2012): 681–694. 58. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Con­temporary (New York: Norton, 1964). Kott’s much-­read and influential book extended the tradition of Shakespeare’s plays as marks of existential truth leading to absurd theater by Beckett and o ­ thers. See page 72 as an example of the role Hamlet plays in what could appear as a mere Cold War narrative of nuclear anxiety. 59. Bradin Cormack, “Shakespeare’s Other Sovereignty,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2011): esp. 486: “I posit that the play may best be understood as a contribution to po­liti­cal philosophy in that it constitutes also a philosophical meditation on love and, through the language of love, on language itself.” 60. Richard Meek, “Ekphrasis in ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ ” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900, 46, no. 2 (2006): 389–414. 61. The central contribution to this revisionary trend in reading The Winter’s Tale is Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Hospitality and Risk in The Winter’s Tale,” in Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 161–185. Lupton’s reconsideration of the key term “dramatic action” in light of Arendt’s thinking on po­liti­cal action places Hermione within the public spaces of per­for­mance and spectacle, involving body and environment in such a way as to think the posttragic emergence of Hermione as a person. 62. Anselm Haverkamp, “A Whispering of Nothing: The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespearean Genealogies of Power (London: Routledge, 2011), 87–106, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 63. Haverkamp believes that Cavell’s failure to give Augustine a primary place in interpreting Shakespearean tragedy limits his understanding of fatality, the importance of memory, and the role of Chris­tian­ity in the play. H ­ ere we see another trace of Benjamin’s account of Hamlet over and against Schmitt’s. Haverkamp insists on Augustine ­because it gives him a Shakespeare whose tragedy emerges from an inescapable sense of the Fall. ­After T. S. Eliot, this is of course a surprisingly heroic and melancholy sense of ­things on Haverkamp’s part. 64. John Pitcher, introduction to The Winter’s Tale, writes, “We c­ an’t be certain, but ­there is ­every likelihood that inside ‘winters’ in Standard En­glish, Elizabethan playgoers would have heard ‘winners,’ ” 135. 65. Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Lit­er­a­ture, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann; trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 9. 66. The established forms of knowledge, method, and discourse correlate intellect with domination of nature and the economics of production. In our era, politics and finance have imposed the fetishization of machines, programs, data, and artificial intelligence, all of which together are an extreme instrumentalization of intellect intent on dominating nature, including the ­human. 67. I have kept in mind throughout this book my friend and colleague Jonathan Arac’s impor­tant understanding that “work” in such phrases as a “work of art” or a “literary work” is best taken as a verb. 427

Acknowl­edgments

I wrote most of this book during the two years, 2018 and 2019, that I spent in Wexford ­free of teaching and most ser­vice obligations. I benefited especially from a Faculty Fellowship in the university’s Humanities Center during the Fall 2019 term; ­there generous colleagues and regular seminars with diverse scholars working in several disciplines enriched my sense of the intellectual needs in this challenging time. I owe a special thanks to the Humanities Center staff for its support. I also thank my En­glish Department colleagues for allowing me time away from teaching. I thank especially then-­dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, N. John Cooper, for constant support. I extend gratitude for this continuing support to Kathleen Blee, now the Bettye and Ralph  E. Bailey Dean of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Without the constant support of the School of Arts and Sciences over many years, I could not have drafted this book or done my other editing, research, and writing. The school and its leadership demonstrate constant support for serious work in the humanities. Most impor­tant to my intellectual life and so to the writing of this book has been the private Republic of Letters created by my colleagues and friends associated with boundary 2. I remember William V. Spanos, who died in 2017, whose ethics created a college of serious minds debating. I joyfully acknowledge my ­great friend and comrade Joseph Buttigieg, who died in January 2019. I celebrate him for his lucidity, maturity, and conversation. His most impor­ tant advice was not to draft this book ­because our circumstances are worse than ­those Auerbach faced in the 1940s. The other bounders made so many valuable contributions to this book and my life that I fear to slight them. My friend and Pitt colleague Jonathan Arac, who was director of the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center while I was in residence, meticulously reviewed work in pro­gress at impor­tant moments in composition and supported me with advice and discussion. Bruce Robbins 429

A c k n o w l­e d g m e n ts

twice brought me to the Columbia University Seminar in Critical Theory to pre­sent work related to this proj­ect. I thank him for the chance to assess my ideas. Bruce’s review of my con­temporary book, Poetry against Torture, rightly pressed me on impor­tant ­matters. Stathis Gourgouris, who responded to my first pre­sen­ta­tion at the Columbia seminar, posed hard but sympathetic questions about poetry and poetics from within his own deep expertise. We have had good exchanges on ­these topics of mutual interest. Wlad Godzich’s thoughtful clarity and erudition have steadied and enriched my work ­toward what is this book. Our more than thirty-­five years of conversations and email exchanges have enriched my life and im­mensely influenced my thinking, while his intellectual character has set a high standard for t­ hose who might dare imitate it. Donald E. Pease is a stalwart friend who has helped on many fronts: he has encouraged my writing, created events at Dartmouth for pre­sen­ta­tions and seminars, and read with a critical sympathetic eye. He makes time in the busiest of schedules and thinks with rigorous sympathy. Aamir Mufti, the ­great student of Edward Said, has been a constant in thinking critically and philologically. His invitations to take part in events of high intellectual purpose have prompted much of my writing h ­ ere. To my other colleagues and friends associated with boundary 2, I give g­ reat thanks. To Colin Dayan for warmly receiving my pages on Stevens. To Hortense Spillers, who embodies the strong criticism of culture and politics this book aims to continue. To Daniel O’Hara, who has discussed Stevens with me for de­cades and read much of the book in pro­cess. Nancy Condee’s work on empire adds to my understanding of institutionalized power. To Michael Hays for years of wisdom, a special thanks. To R. A. (Ronald) Judy, whose deep thinking comes stimulatingly close to my own, thanks for learning and example. To Cornel West, whom I have so admired since we first sat together in Hamilton Hall, thanks for a comprehensive understanding of this book’s aims and nature. I hope t­ hose whom I do not mention ­will not feel neglected. Lindsay ­Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, has been a guiding presence throughout the writing of this book. He enabled it and helped me see it through to completion. He moved me past several hurdles with confident wisdom. Without him, this would be a far dif­fer­ent and, I am sure, lesser book. Meg Havran, the managing editor of boundary 2, far more a friend than coworker, as so often happens, carried a disproportionate share of journal work to let me concentrate on this book at critical times. I thank her. I also thank two extraordinary research assistants, Elina Zhang and Abigail Lind, excellent writers and readers, whose fine eye for style and detail saved me from many errors. 430

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Portions of Chapter 1 ­were first published as “Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory,” in the Field Day Review 6 (2010). Thanks to Seamus Deane for soliciting and approving the essay and to Joe Cleary, now at Yale, for shepherding me through a series of Dublin events that elicited the essay, a talk first given at the National Gallery of Ireland. My ­family tolerated my obsession with this proj­ect and generously gave me quiet and affection. Loving thanks to Carol M. Bové, who has for fifty years livened me to challenges I would often prefer to pass. Laura and José Bernardo reward my own affection with their deep love and patience. To the newest ­family member, who seems to us uniquely perfect, can ­there be adequate thanks for loving joy? I cannot specify the origins of this book in a time or space. But at a moment when many parts of the world are aflame or hunkered down or u ­ nder the boot of authoritarian repression, I think back on time spent a de­cade ago at the University of Hong Kong, where I wrote on many of the themes that dominate this book. I recall the enabling love of imagination in that place.

431

Index

abjection, 40, 87, 96, 100, 111, 189, 247; Kristeva, 39; secular, 63; Benjamin, 105, 126, 186; Stevens, 223, 279, 281 Achilles, 81, 92–94; Shield of, 27, 244, 346, 354 Adorno, Theodor, 5–6, 57–58, 68, 99, 135–137, 142, 147, 211, 222, 334, 340; on schema, 3, 24, 88, 98, 112–113, 205; “The Idea of Natu­ral History,” 5–6; Aesthetic Theory, 20, 28; on Goethe, 27; on Schmitt, 49–50, 54; “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 135, 138–140, 142–144, 146; “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 135, 138, 144, 146–147; “nach Auschwitz,” 135, 139, 143, 167, 221, 228, 261, 272; on Mörike, 136; on German classicism, 137; Jameson on, 137–138, 142, 148; on German Idealism, 141; on freedom, 145; on Lukács, 148–150, 158, 160; Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, 150–159; “The Essay as Form,” 158, 184, 374; on the essay as poiesis, 160–163, 168, 172–183, 184, 206, 374–375; on Spinoza, 169–170; on Beethoven and late style, 170–171, 246, 265; Montaigne and the essay, 170, 176–177; on late style, 218–219; official culture, 286, 298

“Adorno in the Stream of Time” (Jameson), 309–311 Aeneas, 87, 122, 264 Aeneid, The (Virgil), 82, 121–122, 194, 197, 245, 260, 268 Aeschylus, 47, 86, 194 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 20, 48 Agathon, and Socrates, 69–74, 76–77, 82, 84, 95, 211 Alcestis (Euripides), 196, 204, 291, 356, 372 Alcibiades, 73–78, 80, 82–85, 87–88, 90, 95 allegoresis, 193, 233, 239–242, 260, 273; definition, 6–7; Jameson on, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 221; irony and, 9–10; Benjamin on, 13, 18, 21, 106, 108, 152; Bloomfield on, 14–15, 18, 62; hope, 16; ruination and messianism, 23–24, 100, 109, 281, 290, 321; knowledge, 38; Scholem, 59; Vico on, 101; Adorno, 146–148, 153, 155, 161–162; Filreis, 220; melancholy, 245; Coleridge, 340, 358. See also allegorical utopianism allegorical utopianism, 4, 16, 22–23, 113 allegorization, 6, 9, 14–16, 59, 132, 222, 294, 351, 367. See also allegoresis

433

inde x

allegory, 1, 5, 24, 43, 122, 125, 193, 196, 217, 331; and apocalypse / ruination, 2, 202, 245, 284; Adorno on, 5–6, 173; Bloomfield on, 7, 11, 14–15; Jameson on, 7–10, 12; diegesis of hope, 10; Quintilian on, 13; Benjamin on, 13, 18–20, 22, 42, 62, 358; de Man on, 14, 221; and utopia, 16, 21; Frye on, 17; Scholem on, 21; and symbol, 23, 36; Rosen on, 103, 106; Vendler on, 223; Stevens, 234, 238–241, 246, 276; poem as, 242; Rembrandt, 289, 291, 294; Berger, 305 “Allegory as Interpretation” (Bloomfield), 11 anagogy, 235, 238, 240, 246–248, 262–264, 267, 269–270, 278, 280–281, 348, 352; poiesis, 82, 232–233, 261, 278, 302; secular, 113, 194, 261, 272, 279, 332; Frye, 121, 199, 246–248, 260–261, 355; poetic, 121, 248; mystical, 200; fundamentals, 249, 275; Stevens, 271, 286–287, 337, 340; Christian, 276; ­future, 301; Rembrandt, 320; Aristotle, 355 Anatomy of Criticism, The (Frye), 7–8, 121, 245–248, 260–262 Anderson, Benedict, 1 Angel (Benjamin), 36–37, 126, 152, 187, 192, 288, 293, 368 “Angelus Novus” (Benjamin), 185–186 Angelus Novus (Klee), 34, 285 Ansatzpunkt (Adorno), 43, 136–137 antifoundationalism, 3, 164 antihumanism, 68 Anton, John P., 70–72, 76 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom), 2 apocalypse, 2, 27, 57–59, 66, 106, 156, 189–190, 243, 249, 259, 263, 274, 285, 289, 295, 299, 329, 358, 368, 374. See also messianic Apollinaire, 125, 128 Apollodorus, 73 Appetite for Poetry, An (Kermode), 230

Aragon, Louis, 209 Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias’ F ­ amily, The (Rembrandt), 283–284, 291, 295 Arendt, Hannah, 78–82, 84–85, 88, 97, 99 Aristophanes, 69, 75–78, 95–96, 98, 101, 324, 371 Aristotle, 82, 262, 333–335, 338–341, 347, 349, 351, 354–356, 359–360, 365, 369, 375 Arrow, Kenneth, 203 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 68, 330, 332, 336, 338, 341; Rosalind, 349, 351, 354–356, 372; Cavell, 359–361, 370, 373; Coleridge, 359 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis, 15, 17, 25–33, 38, 63–64, 66, 89, 110, 115, 129, 132, 199, 294, 319, 325 Augustine, 18, 79, 368 Auroras of Autumn, 214, 218, 222, 257, 272 “Auroras of Autumn” (poem), 46, 126, 193, 199–200, 211, 214–215, 218, 226–227, 231–232, 233, 236, 239, 244–245, 250, 257, 260, 262, 265, 268, 269–272, 337, 341 Auschwitz, 125. See also “nach Auschwitz” Baldwin, James, 254–256 Barber, C. L., 338, 344, 350–351, 366 Baroque (style), 15, 17–20, 23, 31–32, 36, 42–44, 47, 109, 227, 284–286, 288–291, 293–294, 296–298, 303, 305–307, 316, 319, 335, 358, 362–363 Bate, Walter Jackson, 102 Bathsheba (character), 310–313, 315, 317–320, 324–332 Bathsheba at Her Bath (Rembrandt), 287–288, 290, 302–304, 309–311, 313–321, 322–327, 329–331, 334, 340, 351, 369 Baudelaire, Charles, 59, 65, 117, 251, 284, 288, 290, 367

434

inde x

Baudelairian, 19 Beckett, Lucy, 218–219, 222–223, 229 Beckett, Samuel, Endgame, 363 Beethoven, 5–6, 158, 170–171, 180, 246, 265 Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward, 9 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 4–5, 20, 36, 64, 68, 88–89, 91, 111, 125, 132, 136, 222, 245, 293, 366; on allegory, 13–14, 17; de Man on, 15; The Origin of German Trauerspiel, 18–20, 288, 294, 308; on baroque, 20, 284–285, 289, 291, 294, 319, 358, 362; Scholem and, 31, 38; messianism, 31, 128, 152; Lukás and, 38, 62, 158; Schmitt and, 40–46, 52, 54–56, 67–68, 169, 281, 308, 338, 343, 346, 350, 353, 357–359, 374; Scholem and, 56–59, 61, 65, 152–153; esoteric poetry, 60–61, 63; on Breton, 60, 65, 66, 89, 157; “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Eu­ro­pean Intelligent­sia,” 60, 204; Asja and, 63; Kierkagaard, 97; Rosen, 103, 105–106; on Goethe, 105; on Kraus, 107–109; essay form, 160; constellation, 173; Angel, 187; “Theory of Sovereignty,” 289–290; Berger on, 305, 315–316; Hamlet, 357, 363, 374; Haverkamp on, 368, 370 Berger, John, 296–297, 299–308, 315–316, 318–320, 322–326 Bildungsbürgertum, 161 Bildungsroman, 18, 37 Blackmur, R. P., 216, 269, 276, 336 Blake, William, 251, 268 Blinding of Samson, The (Rembrandt), 289 Bloom, Harold, 1, 102, 215, 220, 243, 245–247, 268; The Anxiety of Influence, 2; Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, 227 Bloomfield, Morton W., 7, 11, 14–15, 18 Boyarin, Daniel, 75, 77 Brecht, Bertolt, 58, 60–61

Bredakamp, Horst, 40–41 Breton, André, 60, 62–67, 89, 106, 108, 157 Bunyan, John, 234 Burnshaw, Stanley, 203, 241, 254 Calderón, 47, 284 Callicles, 72–75, 78, 83, 85 Canguilhem, Georges, 105 Caravaggio, 284 Carthage (city), 122, 264 catastrophe, 17, 21–22, 36; Scholem and Benjamim, 56–58, 152, 289–290, 294; Adorno, 157 Cavell, Stanley, 334–335, 359–363, 368–371, 373 Church, Henry, 198 Cicero, 286 Citizen: An American Lyric (Rankine), 206, 212 Cixous, Hélène, 315–316, 319 Clark, Kenneth, 246, 297, 300, 304, 307, 313–316, 318, 322 Clark, T. J., 318–320, 323–325 Claussen, Detley, 57 Coates, Ta-­Nehisi, 8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 72, 81, 101, 131, 224, 339–341, 348–349, 351, 358, 367 “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” (Words­worth), 267 conceptualization, 5, 62 “Connoisseur of Chaos” (Stevens), 125 Conrad, Joseph, 46, 255 constellation (Konstellation), 173, 175, 229, 232. See also Benjamin, Walter “Credences of Summer” (Stevens), 213–217 crisis critics, 30, 83, 169 crisis of Eu­rope, 31, 41, 43–44, 50, 66, 129 “Cultural Criticism and Society” (Adorno), 135, 138–140, 142–144, 146

435

inde x

Danae (Rembrandt), 309 Dante, 89, 91, 127, 132, 204, 231, 264, 271, 274, 276–278, 297, 301, 319, 325, 327, 329, 337, 351 David (character), 27, 310–312, 317, 321–322, 324, 327–329 Deleuze, Gilles, 70, 108 de Man, Paul, 1, 10, 14–15 Derrida, Jacques, 70, 112 Descartes, 45, 100–102, 104 dialectical image, 19 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The (Adorno), 138, 162 dialectics, 19–20, 140 Dido, 87, 264 digital humanities, 134, 220 Dionysian, 191, 204, 350 Diotima, 76–77, 80–96, 100, 102, 104–105, 112–113, 134, 156 Donne, John, 117, 192, 196 Dostoyevsky, 256 “Dove in the Belly, The” (Stevens), 225 Dusinberre, 335–336 Eiland, Howard, 358–359 Eliot, T. S., 129, 194, 220, 251–252, 264–265; The Four Quartets, 127, 231, 276; “­Little Gidding,” 128, 231; The Waste Land, 129, 132, 264; Kermode on, 230–231; “The Hollow Men,” 259; and Frye, 261 Elohist, 29–31, 33–34, 36, 68, 110, 221 Empson, William, 1, 229, 330, 332, 336–339, 361, 368 esoteric poetry, 60–61, 63. See also Benjamin, Walter “Essay as Form” (Adorno), 138, 146, 158, 160–162, 184, 205, 374 essay form, 88, 139, 160, 162, 164, 171, 175, 374. See also Adorno, Theodor “Esthétique du Mal” (Stevens), 229 Euripides, 70, 84–87, 97, 101 “Eve of St. Agnes, The” (Stevens), 117, 122

“farewell” (Stevens), 262, 268, 272, 275 fascism, 33, 56, 65, 107, 358 Filreis, Alan, 219–221, 241 “Fire and Ice” (Frost), 259, 263 Fletcher, Angus, 1, 6, 18 Foucault, Michel, 11, 38, 44, 163, 172, 179 Four Quartets, The (Eliot), 127, 231, 276 Frege, Gottlob, 108, 137 Freud, Sigmund, 46, 182, 218 Frost, Robert, 259 Fry, Roger, 251 Frye, Northrop, 1, 6, 113, 123, 247–249, 355; The Anatomy of Criticism, 7–8, 121, 245, 261–262; anagogic poetry, 191, 199, 260, 264; lyric, 194–195, 197; versus Stevens, 200; Bloom, 246; Baldwin, 255; “The Responsibilities of the Critic,” 261–262; Dante, 276; Green World, 351 Genet, Jean, 324 Georg, Stefan, 36, 59, 107 Georgics (Virgil), 121, 191, 196–197, 201–202, 242–243 German classicism, 136–137. See also Adorno, Theodor German Idealism, 109, 135, 141, 177, 306, 318 Gnosticism, 15, 190, 223. See also Bloomfield, Morton W. Goethe, 27–29, 33, 46, 59, 104–105, 158, 160, 168, 174, 206, 234 “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (Benjamin), 103–105 Goldmann, Lucien, 16 Good Samaritan (Rembrandt), 307 Hamlet (character), 42, 46–50, 52, 362–363, 370 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 351, 356–358, 363; Schmitt on, 30, 42, 44–46, 48–55, 67, 156, 291, 343, 346, 358; Hegel on, 436

inde x

47–48, 50; Stevens, 281; Cavell, 335, 360–362, 369; effect, 351; Benjamin, 353, 374; Haverkamp, 364–365, 368 Harmonium (Stevens), 115, 223, 273 Harridan, 276–279, 281–282 “Harridan” (Stevens), 276 Hausenstein, Wilhem, 294 Haverkamp, Anselm, 364–371, 374 Hegel, 50, 186–187, 189, 366; Schmitt on, 46, 49, 55; on Schiller, 47–48; on Hamlet, 50, 55; Kierkegaard on, 97, 109; Adorno on, 136–137, 144, 169 Heidegerrean, 141, 249 Heidegger, Martin, 150, 227–229, 266 hermeneutics, 11, 20, 24, 50, 185, 253 Herodias, The, 87 high modernism, 44, 128 historical materialism, 58 Historikerstreit, 10 Hobbs, Angela, 72–76, 84 Hofstadter, Albert, 228 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 227–229 “Hollow Men, The” (Eliot), 259 Homer (Homeric), 25, 27–31, 33, 81, 92–95, 101, 106, 132, 193, 210, 214, 224, 265, 268, 301, 331, 346, 366 Horace, 210 Hughes, Robert, 298, 315 ­Human Condition, The (Arendt), 78, 80 Hung, Ruth Y. Y., 177 Husserl, Edmund, 31, 41, 44 ideology critique, 147 “Imagination as Value” (Stevens), 228, 272 imaginative intellect, 287, 291, 305–306, 308, 320–322, 324, 347 Inferno, The (Dante), 276, 327 interpretation, 7–8, 10–12, 15–16, 18, 20, 26–32, 48, 74, 274–275, 318; tyranny of, 221 intoxication, 64, 204

“Introduction: Utopia Now,” 10 “It Must be Abstract” (Stevens), 239–240, 257 James, William, 191 Jameson, Fredric, 1, 3; theory of allegory, 7–10, 13, 175, 221, 359; “Utopianism ­after the End of Utopia,” 9; “Introduction to Utopia Now,” 10; Archaeologies of the ­Future, 11–12; “Adorno in the Stream of Time,” 137–138; The Po­liti­cal Unconscious, 137; on Adorno’s “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 138, 142–143, 161; Late Marxism, 148, 161 “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Under­ neath the Willow” (Stevens), 115, 118, 221 Jason (Homeric hero), 84–88, 91 Jena Romanticism, 161. See also Jameson, Fredric Jenkyns, Richard, 193–194, 196 Joyce, James, 115 Judaism, 26, 31 Kafka, Franz, 31, 38, 59, 65, 153, 159, 162 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 38, 49–50, 104, 136, 326 Keats, John, 34–35, 129, 131–132, 186–190, 200; “Ode on Melancholy,” 34–35, 126, 187–193, 195–196, 204, 225, 233; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 117; “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 122, “Ode on a Nightingale,” 132; “To Autumn,” 214, 233 kenosis, 39, 189, 247, 249 Kermode, Frank, 90, 102, 134, 226–231, 266, 360 Kierkegaard, Søren, 75, 97–99, 109, 150–160 Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Adorno), 150 437

inde x

Klee, Paul, 34, 156 Kraus, Karl, 50, 59, 65–66, 107–109 Kristeva, Julia, 39, 83 Lacan, Jacques, 321 “Large Red Man Reading” (Stevens), 224 late capital, 9, 16, 138, 305 Late Marxism (Jameson), 148, 161 late style, 5, 46, 57, 68, 170, 185, 218–219, 223, 265 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 119 Leninism, 41 Lewis, C. S., 1 “­Little Gidding” (Eliot), 127–128, 230–231 Löwy, Micahel, 15–16 Lucretian, 82, 106 Lukács, (Lukáscian), 140, 148–152, 158–160 Lurianic, 106 “Lycidas” (Milton), 126, 269 lyric poetry, 117, 119, 125, 135, 144–146, 162, 194–195, 211, 222, 345 Maimonides, 15 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 353–354 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 14, 345 “Man on the Dump, The” (Stevens), 125–126, 129, 131–134, 196, 224, 229, 279, 326, 361 Marxism, 10, 16, 41, 58, 109, 149, 240 mastery, 198, 226, 235–236, 257, 278, 301–304, 308, 313, 320, 324, 339, 350–352, 356, 366, 369 Mazzeo, Joseph A., 91 Medea (character), 85 Medea (Euripedes), 85–88 melancholy, 34–35, 58, 67, 102, 110, 205, 299, 342–343, 375; Jameson, 8; Benjamin, 42–44, 152, 185–186, 357–358, 363; allegoresis, 43, 245, 331; Schmitt, 46, 54–55, 68; Hamlet,

47, 55, 363–366, 369; Claussen, 57; ruination and, 71, 83, 222, 273, 279, 284, 297, 360; Aristophanes, 96; messianism, 100, 105; Keats, 132, 187–193, 195–196, 204, 233; Adorno, 157, 170, 182, 211, 265; Stevens, 200–202, 206, 223, 234–238, 241, 245; Rankine, 208; Amnesia, 209; Vendler, 224; structural, 302; utopian, 305; As You Like It, 352, 354–355, 373; “The Man on the Dump,” 125–127, 361; heroic, 368; Haverkamp, 368, 370; The Winter’s Tale, 370 melancholy amnesia, 209 memory palace, 23, 120, 123, 191, 196, 200–201, 235, 268 messianic, 3, 14, 16, 21–23, 27, 34, 38, 40, 43, 53, 58–60, 66–67, 100, 104–105, 109, 112–113, 150–152, 154, 156, 182, 211, 230, 285, 289, 294–295, 316, 329, 336, 351, 358, 370; hope, 326 messianism, 2, 8, 21, 39, 43, 58, 67, 100, 105, 128, 130, 190; Jewish, 15–16, 22, 31; esoteric, 36; secular, 38, 58, 89; utopian, 43, 128, 157, 288, 305, 321; apocalyptic, 57, 59; gnostic, 156 MeToo, 309 Milton, John, 117, 121–122, 187, 192–194, 196, 261, 264, 268, 271 Mirowski, Philip, 11 misprision, 2, 365 Mobility, 141–142, 207. See also Adorno, Theodor Modern, Tate, 39 modernity, 19, 36, 42–43, 49, 57, 67, 79, 113, 127–128, 141, 169, 176, 203, 231, 255, 265, 281, 288, 291, 294, 298–299, 315 “Monocle de Mon Oncle, Le” (Stevens), 225 Montaigne, Michel de, 170, 172, 174, 176–177

438

inde x

Mörike, Eduard, 135–136 Mozart, 114, 119 “Mozart, 1935” (Stevens), 114–115, 118–121, 126, 145–147, 239, 242 myth, 30, 42, 44, 46, 49–52, 55, 67, 72, 76, 78, 85, 89, 112, 120, 128, 130, 152–157, 181, 210, 228, 234, 260, 268, 270, 275, 291, 353, 366 “nach Auschwitz,” 135, 139, 143, 167, 221, 228, 261, 272 Nadja (character), 62–67, 89, 106–108, 157 Nadja (novel), 204 Nazism, 41, 57, 59, 144, 154, 221, 291 Necessary Angel (Stevens), 198, 209–210, 212, 228, 241, 270–271, 350 neoliberal, neoliberalism, 11, 21, 142, 146, 148, 305 “New Angel”, 187. See also Benjamin, Walter neopragmatists, 133 Nietz­sche, 20, 79, 129, 167, 363 “Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (Stevens), 72, 112, 198, 200–202, 206, 209, 211, 224, 242, 247, 271, 273, 278 nostos (nostoi), 11–12 Notes ­toward a Supreme Fiction” (Stevens), 227, 238, 248, 251, 257 nude, 286, 300–302, 309–310, 312–320, 325, 327–329 Nussbaum, Martha, 74–76, 80, 84 Obama, Barack, 8 “Ode on Melancholy” (Keats), 34–35, 126, 187–193, 195–196, 204, 225, 233 Odyssey (Homer), 92, 121, 210 “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun” (Stevens), 124–125, 131 “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (Adorno), 135, 138, 144, 146–147 On the Genealogy of Morals, 224

“Ordinary Eve­ning in New Haven” (Stevens), 227 Oresteia, The, 74, 86 Orientalism, 87 Origin of German Trauerspiel, The, 18, 42, 47, 62, 103, 162, 288, 294, 305, 308. See also Adorno, Theodor Orlando (character), 348–350, 354–355, 356, 371 Orpheus, 82, 193, 196, 204, 225, 267, 297, 301 Orwellian, 6 Ovid, 87, 354 Paradise Lost (Milton), 122, 187–188, 193, 245, 260, 269, 355 Paradiso (Dante), 91, 127, 231, 276 Patroclus, 92 Paul (character), 278–279, 282, 326, 349 Phillips, Adam, 182 Picasso, 251, 300–301, 304 “Planet on the ­Table, The” (Stevens), 224 Plato, 68–81, 83, 89–91, 95–97, 105–107, 112, 145, 158, 189, 191, 200–201, 211, 224, 236, 271, 320 Platonic realism, 103 Poetics (Aristotle), 352, 365 Poetry against Torture (Bové), 45 Poggioli, Renato, 345–346 poiesis, 2, 5–6, 27, 78, 96, 100–101, 117, 120, 174, 199, 249–250, 264, 343, 356, 358, 374; ­human, 18, 247, 264, 278, 299, 321–322, 329, 336, 375; degradation of, 34, 302; Arendt, 80; Virgil, 82, 121–123; men, 89; Vico, 102; Stevens, 112–113, 115, 124, 224–225, 232–234, 236, 244–247, 250, 253–257, 268, 271, 274, 279, 282, 350; the poet, 126, 209, 247, 275, 279; Sidney, 130–131; Adorno, 184, 206, 374; Keats, 188; Jenkyns, 193; as mimetic, 195; Aristotle, 195, 333–335, 338–339, 354; tyranny as threat to, 203; Rankine, 208–209;

439

inde x

poiesis (continued) as freedom, 210, 225, 279; anagogic, 261, 278, 302; Rembrandt, 296, 302, 319, 332; Berger, 305–306, 317, 324–326 Po­liti­cal Unconscious, The (Jameson), 7, 137 Pound, Ezra, 64, 116 primitivism, 51, 87 Pythagoras, 38, 91

Rosalind (character), 330, 332–333, 338, 342, 345–357, 362, 365, 369, 371–373, 374 Rosen, Charles, 103–106 Rubens, Peter Paul, 284, 289, 294, 298, 301, 310 ruins, 12, 14, 18, 21, 23, 39, 65, 67, 71, 92, 106, 108, 111–112, 118–119, 125, 128–129, 131–133, 154–156, 245, 290

Quilligan, Maureen, 6 Quintilian, 9, 13, 269 Rabelais, 295 Rankine, Claudia, 206–209 redemption, 17–18, 21–22, 24, 32–34, 37–38, 60, 100, 111–112, 126–127, 152, 156, 211, 222–223, 230, 239– 240, 243, 245, 277 Rembrandt, 17–18, 56, 68, 111, 129, 222, 246, 284–286, 300–301, 351, 355, 359, 361, 366; Bathsheba at Her Bath, 27, 287, 290, 302, 309–310, 313–319, 321–322, 326, 329–331, 334, 369; Slaughtered Ox, 39, 283; Stevens, 251; The Archangel Leaving Tobias’ ­Family, 283, 291, 295, 307; Van Gogh, 288, 318, 327; The Blinding of Samson, 289, 303; moving away from Baroque, 289–291, 298; secular humanism, 293; Berger on, 296–297, 299, 304–306, 316, 323–326; Picasso, 301; Clark (Kenneth), 304, 318, 320, 322; Self-­Portrait, 305; Sluijter, 309–311, 313–315, 318; the nude, 310–315, 322; Cixous, 315; Clark (T. J.), 318–320; Dante, 327; Empson, 330 Riddel, Joseph, 220 Rock, The (Stevens), 198, 218, 224 Romantic lyric, 117, 121, 236 Romantics, 18–19, 218

sacrifizio dell’intelletto, 150 Said, Edward W., 43, 57, 99, 141, 159; “Traveling Theory,” 3–4, 16; on Conrad, 46; “On Lost ­Causes,” 98; beginnings, 166–167, 176–177; Berger, 300 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 10 Schama, Simon, 290, 298, 322–323 Schiller, Friedrich, 28–30, 33, 47–50, 366 Schmitt, Carl, 31, 40, 152, 157, 168, 282, 289, 370; tragic motive, 49; Eu­ro­ pean spirit, 50–51. See also Benjamin, Walter; Hamlet Scholem, Gershom, 15, 17, 21–22, 31, 38, 44, 56–59, 61, 65, 152–153, “­Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea” (Scholem), 21 secular anagogy, 194, 261, 272, 279, 332 Self-­Portrait (painting, Rembrandt), 305 Serpens (constellation), 232, 235, 237, 244, 266 shadow, 68, 158, 228, 259, 321, 325 Shakespeare, William, 42, 51, 68, 111, 194, 251, 291, 296, 336–339, 343–344, 370, 375; Benjamin, 44; tragedy (Trauerspiel), 46, 55; The Winter’s Tale, 56, 68, 196, 330, 364–365, 371–372; Stevens, 113; Baldwin, 256–257; Hamlet, 291, 357–358, 362; As You Like It, 330, 332, 342–343, 347, 354–355; Barber, 338, 350–351; Coleridge, 339–341; Christianize, 353; Cavell, 359–361; Haverkamp, 366–368

440

inde x

Sheffield, Frisbee, 73 Sherman, Cindy, 39 Sidney, Philip, 129–131, 210 Simberg, Hugo, 34–35, 91, 96, 156, 247 Simonides, 22–23 Slaughtered Ox (Rembrandt), 39, 283 Sluijter, Eric Jan, 309–316, 318–319, 322–323 “Snow Man, The” (Stevens), 258 socialist realism, 148–150 Socrates, 63, 66, 87–88, 107, 206; Symposium, 69–73, 83–84, 95, 99, 152, 156, 190; Sheffield, 73; Alcibiades, 74–75, 82; The Clouds, 76–77; Callicles, 78; Arendt, 80–81, 101; Agathon, 82; Diotima, 86, 89–90, 92–94, 96; Kierkegaard, 97–98, 151; Benjamin, 106; execution, 320 Some Versions of Pastoral (Empson), 336 Spinoza, 169–170. See also Adorno, Theodor Stein, Leo, 251 Steiner, George, 139 Stevens, Wallace, 20, 56, 68, 111, 164, 171, 229, 233−243, 334, 336, 343–344, 349, 355, 366; Coleridge, 72, 101, 107, 359; “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” 72, 112, 200–202, 211, 242, 247, 271–273; Vico, 102, 124, 130–132; on poiesis as a species’ function, 112–113, 116, 120, 126, 130, 199–201, 210, 224, 253, 278; on poetry as anagogy, 113, 123, 260; “Mozart, 1935,” 114–116, 121, 126, 145–146, 239; “Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Under­neath the Willow,” 115, 211; Harmonium, 115, 223, 273; Keats, 117, 132–133, 251; Whitman, 119; Virgil, 121, 243, 267, 271–272; “Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun,” 125; “The Man on the Dump,” 125, 131, 133, 196, 229; “The Auroras of Autumn,” 126, 193, 211, 226,

244–245, 247, 250, 257, 260, 265–274, 276, 281, 302, 337; Eliot, 129, 251; secular imagination, 132, 158, 184, 200; Kermode, 134, 226–231; Adorno, 142, 171–172, 177, 184, 228; relation to essay, 169, 174–175, 184; on imagination as threat to itself, 175, 177, 233, 236, 357; The Necessary Angel, 198, 209, 228, 241, 270–271, 350; Auroras of Autumn, 198, 218; The Rock, 198, 218, 224; Auerbach, 199; on freedom from po­liti­cal pressure, 201–207, 209, 212, 242, 265, 369; Rankine, 206–207; Tomlinson, 213–214; “Credences of Summer,” 213–218; Bloom, 215, 227, 243, 245; Beckett (Lucy), 218–219; Filreis, 219–221; Vendler, 220–226; “The Dove in the Belly,” 225; “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” 225; “Imagination as Value,” 228, 272; “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” 229; “Notes ­toward a Supreme Fiction,” 238, 244, 247–248, 257; “It Must Be Abstract,” 239, 257; sensibility, 251–253; Baldwin, 254–256; Dante, 276–278; Paul, 279; Rembrandt, 286–287, 296–297, 301–302, 325, 331–332; Cavell, 360, 363 Strauss, Leo, 15, 41, 52 “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the Eu­ro­pean Intelligent­sia” (Benjamin), 38, 60–64, 66, 89, 91, 140, 158, 204–205 symbol (symbolists), 17–23, 36, 196, 221, 239, 257, 262 Taubes, Jacob, 40 telos, 103 Teskey, Gordon, 9 Thetis, 94 Thucydides, 74–75, 77–78, 82, 94, 97, 101 Titian, 300, 304, 313 “To Autumn” (Keats), 214

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Tomlinson, Charles, 213–214 totalitarianism, 11. See also Arendt, Hannah Tragedy, 33, 69–71, 73, 84, 247, 275, 345, 352, 366–367; Schiller, 30; Benjamin, 42, 54, 67, 169, 308, 338, 350, 363; Schmitt, 44, 52–56, 169, 291, 308, 338; Hegel, 46–49; Aristotle, 82; Athenian, 86; Stevens, 120, 271, 281; Eliot, 264; Hamlet, 351, 362–363; The Winter’s Tale, 360, 364–365; Haverkamp, 368 tribal agnostics, 7 utilitarianism, 15, 172 utopia, 2, 33, 39, 67, 77, 79, 80–81, 177, 191, 247, 249, 263, 302, 319, 328, 354, 357–358; allegorical, 7, 10, 16, 22–24, 34, 68, 71, 113, 127–128, 157; Jameson on, 7–13, 221; desire, 11, 145, 157, 209, 235, 240, 273–274, 374; Scholem on, 21; Socrates, 84, 101, 112; Eliot, 128; Adorno, 145, 150, 154–157, 170; as po­liti­cal re­sis­tance, 177; impossibility, 190; messianism, 128, 157, 288, 305, 321, 329; materialism, 331 “Utopianism ­after the End of Utopia” (Jameson), 9 Van Gogh, 288, 295–296, 301, 303, 308, 312, 314, 316, 318, 327, 359, 367 Vendler, Helen, 220–227 Verene, Donald, 104

Vico, 45–46, 100–102, 104–105, 112, 124, 129, 131–132, 173 Virgil, 122–123, 130, 193, 236, 242, 246, 260, 264, 282; on poiesis, 82; in Stevens, 115, 119, 121, 205, 251, 271–272, 274, 297, 301; Georgics, 121, 191, 196–197, 201–202, 242–243; Jenkyns on, 193–194; Aeneid, 245, 268; Dante, 329 Wahl, Jean, 221 Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Bloom), 227 Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Vendler), 220 Warhol, Andy, 298 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 128–129, 132, 264–265 ­Waters, Lindsey, 40 Weimar, 40–41 West, Cornel, 8 Whitman, Walt, 119, 214, 273 Wilson, Edmund, 14 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 56, 67–68, 196, 291, 330–332, 353, 356, 360–361, 363–366, 368–370 Woolf, ­Virginia, 165, 169 Words­worth, William, 117, 125, 194, 222, 267 Yates, Frances, 22–23 Yeats, William Buter, 36, 126, 190, 215, 217

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