Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Metalepsis: from world to world


I want to register a peculiar feeling I had when first bracing myself to write about poetry online. The feeling was one of defensiveness, or rather protectiveness. I am willing to let my judgments about “philosophers” as traditionally understood stand in the public square, and I can discuss them with passion but also with equanimity. Poetry is not like this for me. I want to say I have “learned more” from poets than from philosophers, but this is inexact; what I have learned, however, is of a deeper register, and I treasure it more, because it feels more constitutive of who I am.

In this poetry is akin to religion, and indeed one of Badiou’s grave criticisms of Heidegger’s “suturing” of philosophy to poetry is that it enables, or at least imagines, a return to a para-theological mode of thinking. Kierkegaard held that the “religious stage,” which he put after the ethical, could easily be taken for a regression to the aesthetic. Indeed, as far back as Plato the poetic and the religious are entwined for philosophy, and as is well known, the earliest art is religious art.

As most readers here will know, Socrates speaks of a “quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, a quarrel already ancient by the time he refers of it, almost two and a half millennia ago. I tend to read this not as creative license on Plato’s part, but as simple report. As long as there has been philosophy, it has striven with—and against—poetry. I have always felt—and I am not claiming any originality here—that this is one of the clues to the meaning of Plato, and via Plato, to that of philosophy per se. I say this in full cognizance of how, um, dated? naïve? silly? too-big notions of “the meaning of…” can seem. And maybe they should seem naïve or silly. But I think Plato meant quite intentionally to cultivate the sense of awe that such phrases give, and not for the cheap reasons of building up his reputation for having some kind of secret wisdom. Rather, the expectation of some payoff, some Beatific Vision, is part of philosophical pedagogy.

“Why did Plato banish the poets?” The cliché answer has always been: poets lie. The gods they speak of—Zeus, Hera, Hephaestus, Artemis—do not exist. Or if they do, if there are indeed gods, they cannot bear any resemblance to the cast of warmongering, capricious lechers and cuckolds in the myths; not if they really merit our worship, not if they are gods. One may note that this critique is alive and well in the all-too-current harangues of and against fundamentalists of all stripes, at least those who stake part of their will-to-power in the literal truth of some sacred text. The God who rains down fire on Sodom, who “tests” Abraham with the request for a human sacrifice, who bets that Satan cannot win Job no matter how many of his family are crushed by falling houses—do we need a Cambridge-educated biologist to make us admit that such a god strains both our credulity and fealty? The poets—whether of Greece, India, Egypt, or Israel—may tell us pleasing stories, or at any rate moving stories, but the objects of those stories are unreal, nonexistent. So goes the stock explanation of why Plato showed the poets the door.

I am going to argue in a way that will seem naïve, conflating the poetry of many ages. For the record, I do not think that there are no differences between how ancient listeners of Homer and modern readers of Frost apprehend(ed) poetry. Indeed, I have given a good deal of thinking to how ancient, medieval, and modern modes of reception diverge, and to how the ancient-medieval mode gave way. But for all that, poets themselves have always tended to view their history as more continuous than broken. Here I am concerned with poetry as experienced by poets, not by sociologically-minded historians or historically-minded sociologists.

With that caveat, I will explore a bit something that I said in my first post: that philosophy “takes the secret paths that go from world to world.” I want now to suggest a little more of what these worlds might mean, via two poems from the early 20th century.

There’s a well-known poem by Auden that sometimes goes by the name “Funeral Blues.” You may have seen it in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.

___________________________________
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
____________________________________

Note the slow outward spiral from domestic considerations (put the phone off the hook, keep the dog quiet) to public ones (the aeroplanes are summoned, the policemen and the “public doves” are recruited) to the sudden eruption of personal grief that takes in the whole world: “My north, my south, my east, my west,” a grief that overflows the house and the public square to flatly aver that the cosmos as a whole is now irrevocably without purpose. And yet, the language for this cosmic despair is once more domestic: “Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;” the apocalypse reduced to meaningless household chores. The despondent voice is almost frightening in its inconsolability.

What I am interested in (now) with this poem is this absolute character, its refusal and even incomprehension of the very idea of ever "feeling better." When you read this poem and enter into it, it brooks no disagreement. Within the world of the poem, it is simply true: Nothing now can ever come to any good. There is no disputing these lines; no chink for any “chin up, old man—time heals all wounds!” rejoinder to slip through—not while you are reading the poem. This is not because the poem only says its same sixteen lines over and over again; the question concerns not the poem as textual artifact but as lived experience. Nor is not simply because taste or decorum forbids it—after all, there is no actual speaker whose real emotions we need to consider. No, it is because this is a world of grief, and the rejoinder is not tactless but meaningless.

I sometimes find it frankly miraculous that I am capable of looking up from reading this evocation of the laying waste of a life and go about my business. How is this possible?

I don’t offer an explanation, but only a way of speaking, about this question. This is possible for us, I suggest, because we inhabit a different world from that of the speaker; we are able to enter that world, and also to leave it. Upon departure, the house lights come up, we hear the sound of the traffic or the clink of dishes in the café or the ring of the phone; but until then, we are effectively within that story, and obey its laws.

It is quite possible to remain “within” a poem, or any other work of art, well after reading it. Cinema, that pseudo-liturgy of our age, has the most noticeable such effect, but books still can hold sway over us. The claim of a work of scripture is not that it is a story of people two or three millennia ago, but that it is the story we are in now. This is precisely why Kierkegaard could say that the Religious stage was like a recapitulation of the Aesthetic. And it is why philosophy requires us to struggle with both poetry and with religion. For philosophy wants to free us to navigate between such worlds at will—to be really there when we are there, and to always know there are others.

The passing from world to world I will call, after a long line of rhetoreticians, metalepsis. If I claim not to coin this expression it’s because I think I am being faithful to a fundamental continuity of meaning. This isn’t to say I ignore the evolution of the term; but I assert that there’s a coherent development in its use. For Gerard Genette, metalepsis has to do with the passage between narrative levels (say, the nested narratives of the Thousand and One Nights), or even the way a narrative can refer to extra-narrative reality; for instance, the intrusion of the authorial “I” in Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, acknowledging the purely literary status of his characters. A work of literature can even fictively appropriate the “real world;” consider, for example, the moment in Barrie’s play Peter Pan when the audience is suddenly acknowledged and entreated to demonstrate its belief in fairies by clapping, in order to save Tinkerbell’s life.

For Quintillian, metalepsis (transumptio in Latin) is a kind of slipping from trope to trope; medieval and renaissance rhetoreticians used it to denote an extreme metaphor; George Puttenham mentions it in his Arte of English Poesie (1589) and calls it the “farfet,” as in far-fetched, and mentions that it is always impressive to women.

But go back far enough and you get to Aristotle, for whom metalepsis means “participation.” This is a very charged word. The other term for participation is methexis, and between the two of them these words inform the whole history of western thinking from Plato till Suarez at least. When I use the term participation, I have Aristotle and Plato in mind, but also the scholastics, and Levy-Bruhl. This is a matter for a post of its own. But for now I want to say simply that if participation is both a metaphysical and a literary trope, this is because “literature” is more than a matter of texts; it is a matter of thought.

It will be noted that I’m arguing for a kind of perspectivism, and I don’t want to wrap myself too tightly in Nietzsche’s mantle. But with due reference to him, I would say that we have here a case such as I spoke of before: when you read Auden’s poem, it also reads you. I will end with a different poem, at least as well known, to illustrate the point.

__________________________________
Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rainer Maria Rilke
(tr. Stephen Mitchell)

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
__________________________________

It doesn’t matter how many times I have read this, I feel the final lines like a physical shock:

…denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

The first few times, I almost jumped.

The poem makes tremendous claims for the power of art, as though there were an animistic force held by the broken piece of sculpture, a force that can compel you to admit the necessity of some radical alteration. The language, steeped in eros, is surprisingly even and balanced for all that. Note the subtlety with which its strange indirect para-syllogisms establish what it assumes, without ever asserting it. Thus: “his torso/is… suffused with brilliance… //[because] …Otherwise/the curved breast could not dazzle you so.” How indirectly it has gained our acquiescence—we are dazzled, before we even knew ourselves to be so. “Otherwise this stone would seem defaced,” meaning, it does not seem defaced. It is in fact unthinkable that it should seem defaced; the wholeness of the work of art suffuses it, holds it, overflows it; it “bursts like a star.” And here again, precisely as with Nietzsche’s abyss, it is not a passive object of our attention, but gazes back.

From its opening declaration of incapacity, “We cannot know,” to it’s final imperative, there is in the world of this poem no demurral possible. A quarrel with the poem can only happen from without it. It is not that one cannot argue with it, cannot set about to reconstruct the legendary head, or cheekily respond “Oh, must I indeed?” to its last five words. But to do this is in a decisive sense not to read the poem. Within its world, it is simply true: you must change your life. What this means is of course different depending on what “your life” is. It is silly to think that reading these lines by Rilke magically brings about long nights of introspection; I am not contending that this poem has a this-worldy effect of this sort, but that within the poem one recognizes the experience of encountering this imperative; and that, within this world, the experience is irrefutable, and gainsaying it, meaningless.

A great deal more could be said about both these poems, and I probably will say a bit of it in the future, but over-commentary, while it cannot kill the poem, discredits the critic.

9 comments:

  1. I very much enjoyed this piece too. Thank you Bryan. Rilke has also always been a favorite of mine. You are of course right, "You must change your life" is an extraordinary, even terrifying, line...

    For me, however, it is these lines from the 9th Elegy that were truly unforgettable:

    "Earth, is it not this that you want: to rise
    invisibly in us? – Is that not your dream,
    to be invisible, one day? – Earth! Invisible!
    What is your urgent command if not transformation?" Duino Elegies, 9.

    This notion that materiality (the solid Earth) wishes to 'speak', that is to rise in words, to become 'invisible' (like a spirit!) is perfectly marvelous. One is reminded of those paintings by El Greco, with the steeples of Toledo flickering their essences up to the heavens. In the disagreement between us, the friendly disagreement, regarding theory, the Poet is on your side.

    Even mute things dream of rising in words! Now, that is truly an audacity worthy of Homer! He reminded us, somewhere (I believe) towards the beginning of the Iliad, that there were heroes before those that died at the gates of Troy, but they had no poet, and therefore they were dead. Without the Poet even the greatest Hero would be forgotten! To this Rilke adds that without the Poet, even the greatest of Worlds would be forgotten! That is Audacity Itself! ...We will speak of our unforgettable Earth to Angels - and they will Listen!

    And it is only a short step to say that these Words are not only to be poetry, but they must be theory too! I will, however, leave you to take those steps...

    Religion and Poetry are as one in their Audacity; that I grant. However, the philosophers have never forgotten the humble virtue of Sophrosyne. ...But

    "We: the most ephemeral. Once,
    for each thing, only once. Once, and no more. And we too,
    once. Never again. But this
    once, to have been, though only once,
    to have been an earthly thing – seems irrevocable."

    this miracle of Being 'for but a moment' cries out for Audacity! - We really should never wonder that philosophy never rules any Reality...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't know that I understand the Duino Elegies well, though I have returned to them for many years now. Is he saying, for instance in the passage you cite, that things have a sort of teleological thrust towards being transformed from in-itself to phenomena, and thence into a sort of un-phenomenon, the invisible?

    "An audacity worthy of Homer," indeed. Of course, one could dismiss it as just gorgeous nonsense; I am tempted, myself, to the "yes, but important nonsense" line, but the danger is that it involves us in an infinite regress-- since to explain "important in what way?" just gives rise to more nonsense. This is why Wittgenstein's whistling has to stop at some point. As he later says, "explanations come to an end."

    If I could venture an object-oriented excursus, a sort of prose-poem (and one notion of philosophy-as-poetry is that it is just an extended prose poem), I might say that it not is merely human beings who serve as Rilke's "bees of the invisible;" there must be a sense in which every encounter, even, say, that between a solar flare and a too-close planet, or between a skateboard and the sidewalk, brings a kind of incipient transformation-- at least, from in-itself to phenomena, since (on, say, Harman's account, or Bryant's) the sidewalk does "encounter" a sort of phenomenal skateboard wheel---e.g. in some sense along the lines suggested by the article dy0genes suggested:
    http://fqxi.org/community/articles/display/122
    What Rilke seems to add is a further move, from "manifestation" (phenomena) to invisibility. As though what things "dreamed of" was not to be seen, but to have it known that what is seen is not what is essential.

    Now Rilke could certainly be critiqued as being anthropocentric here, naming this special task that human beings have alone out of all the universe. (Note that as soon as I say this, I am, by my own criteria, no longer reading the poem but arguing with it.) But --and here I trespass upon nonsense again-- I might rejoin that, it is none of our business with what "task" comets or manganese molecules or brine shrimp are "charged." If we want to extrapolate from Rilke's image, honoring the insight it "points to," we can say that this is our "calling," and we may well assume --precisely by virtue of carrying it out-- that other beings have theirs.

    OK, it's a fantasia, and not as gorgeously put as Rilke's, but I hope true to his spirit and to, as you put it, his audacity.

    You suggest: "And it is only a short step to say that these Words are not only to be poetry, but they must be theory too! I will, however, leave you to take those steps..."

    Do you not think Hegel already took that step? But with Nietzsche and Kojeve, the glory seems to go out of the claim

    ReplyDelete
  3. I was being provocative. You didn't bite. Good. Rilke does not seem to endorse a further step into theory at all. The 'Angel', after all, is not likely to be interested in our theories. Why? He isn't even interested in our feelings:
    ("...you
    can’t impress him with glories of feeling: in the universe,
    where he feels more deeply, you are a novice. So show
    him a simple thing...")
    one wonders how this Angel would be interested in our theories. Well, perhaps the Angel will sit still for a phenomenology that cries out in ecstasy: zu der Sachen selbst!

    But that is very nearly poetry, certainly not human history. The Angels, as depicted here by Rilke, would have no interest in that. Rilke's Angel is neither a Homeric God nor a philosophical god.

    In answer to your first question I think it is an example of the most poetic response to the World possible - to 'spiritualize' it. Is all 'spiritualization' gorgeous nonsense? ...Even Religion? ...Even speculative theory?

    Regarding your second paragraph I would say that, for Rilke, only people (and perhaps Angels) could be "bees of the invisible"; a solar-flare, planet, sidewalk and skateboard are, like heroes who died without renown, bereft of Words. They have no Poetry - and therefore they are dead. -Even while they exist. Without Angels or Poets, I mean without Words, there would only be silence...

    Properly speaking only beings with Words have tasks, besides that, there is only endless silence.

    The Poet, according to Rilke, must perform miracles: he is to make silence speak! Poetry and Religion are similar in this. You are right to put them together.

    Now, here is the difference between Rilke and Hegel. Rilke gives Words to beings that have no words; Hegel, Nietzsche and Kojeve use words to explain beings that already have words. (In between these two extremes there is the relation between humans and the higher animals.) But, as the Eleatic Stranger long ago indicated, the 'True King' (the philosopher) faces a problem no herdsman ever faces: the human animals he cares for believe they know how to do a better job then he does.

    There are three levels here:
    1. At the level of the Poet of 'nature', I mean of inarticulate things, there really is no problem: solar-flares, planets, sidewalks and even skateboards will not dispute what anyone says of them.
    2. At the level of the herdsman, there is no problem: the herdsman rules his herd without opposition.
    3. At the level of Philosophy there is a problem. Everyone thinks they know what is best for themselves.

    So, you see, the Poet faces no objections from nature. Again, this is like Religion. How? The Poet speaks of nature; the Religious speak of the Whole. In either case, the only objections they face come from other people. Nature does not dispute with the Poets; the Whole does not dispute with Religion.

    But with philosophy, with history, there is no end to disputes...

    So yes, Hegel (and, by extension, perhaps all philosophy), takes the step you say they do. Philosophical Responsibility requires it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I don't want to make is appear that I'm not interested in this thread. The peculiar feeling you have in writing about poetry rather than philosophy is reflected in this readers attitude towards a critique of something so personal. I will gladly read anything in this vein you wish to offer but I hope you see my relative silence as a gesture of respect and not disinterest.

    ReplyDelete
  5. dy0genes, you shd feel comfortable commenting or not. I've more to say on the "personal" dimension of poetry (& religion), eventually. I wanted to register that slightly defensive sense partly in the interests of full disclosure, but I was mainly disclosing to myself, in the spirit of the Delphic injunction.

    joe: yes, zu der Sachen selbst! hence, e.g., Speculative Realism. Wallace Stevens too will proclaim this Husserlilan dictum, "Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself."

    Or again, in "Of Mere Being:"

    You know then that is is not the reason
    That makes us happy or unhappy.
    The bird sings. Its feathers shine.


    I am ambivalent re. yr suggestion that "inarticulate things" "will not dispute what anyone says of them." There are two senses in which I think this can be questioned. Scientifically, experience does falsify our saying. (This despite our putting nature "to the rack," as Bacon says). However, in an "animistic" worldview too, there is a sense in which the things may dispute us--perhaps even more, for they are more expressly conceived of as possessing the capacity to communicate, and are frequently experienced as doing so.

    On the other hand, this very capacity attributed to things may also make those who experience them this way prone to hear things as more 'agreeable,' so to speak. Why? because they experience themselves and the 'more than human world' precisely as a community, and community implies a tremendous host of 'shared assumptions.' (I'm drawing here upon David Abram's important book The Spell of the Sensuous; Abram in my estimation is one of the two most important current readings of Husserl. (The other is Graham Harman.)) So it may be that in such an animistic register, the things, albeit 'articulate', may not be overly prone to dispute.

    On the other hand, this same dynamic can come into play scientifically as well. As Einstein said, "it is the theory that decides what we can observe."

    this only touches upon some of yr points. Re. yr take on poetry and religion, I can only say--"amen, but...." (But what else would I say?)

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm a fan of Wallace Stevens but I don't know his personal or intellectual history well enough to say if he was involved or reacting to the philosophy of this day. He has always struck me as a very philosophical poet, self consciously so. It's interesting to wonder to what extent these themes arise independently to thinkers in different fields or how much they are responding to each other. (or how much we humans just push everything into our own procrustean bed)

    The Idea of Order at Key West
    ....
    It was her voice that made
    The sky acutest at its vanishing.
    She measured to the hour its solitude.
    She was the single artificer of the world
    In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
    Whatever self it had, became the self
    That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
    As we beheld her striding there alone,
    Knew that there never was a world for her
    Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
    ...

    The singer, whom I assume to be the poet's muse, seems to be creating a world that goes beyond a simple idealism. "the sea, whatever self it had, became the self, that was her song". If the word weren't so burdened by pejorative connotation I'd call this correlationist. But I think Stevens is being very sophisticated about this. He has already been quoted in this thread as being sympathetic to a more objectcentric world.

    ReplyDelete
  7. the poem goes on:

    ...
    Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
    The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
    Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
    And of ourselves and of our origins,
    In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds

    As the risk of being a little too cute let me suggest that Stevens is offering us a theory of special relativity. "The rage to order words of the sea...and of ourselves and of our origins" is about a special human relation to the world. One in which we and the world participate together but that doesn't exhaust either of us. The world continues beyond us and enters into endless other relations. We don't know about those relations except as we observe them again in our further relations to the world. Most of course will never be observed. We also have relations to make that don't much concern the world, relations with each other.

    If I get him right, I think this is what Skholiast is getting at when he says metalepsis. Stevens slides between objectcentric and anthropocentric world views to give us additional perspectives. But when it comes right down to it we're human and need songs about our origins. There is nothing wrong with that as long as we remember the sea may be our mother but we are not its child. We need it but outside of our special relation it doesn't need us. Actually there is no reason you can't think it needs you. I just prefer not to.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I am unsure whether Stevens meant to refer to Husserl or not; but I know it enriches my reading of each of them to read them vis-a-vis each other. "Idea of Order at key West" is one of those poems that positively thrums with power. I've read Stevens over and over again for a quarter of a century and am no closer to really understanding him than I was at the beginning. "It was she, and not the sea we heard.//...Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew / it was the spirit that we sought and knew / That we should ask this often as she sang." My striving commitment is to not abandon this question as meaningless.

    I don't know whether there is a sense in which the sea "needs" us, as opposed to us being able to significantly impact it. Why would we use, or not use, the word "need" here? The asymmetry you mention ("the sea may be our mother but we are not its child") reminds me of something I read on Amod's blog very recently: "“You can be your students’ friend, but they can’t be your friend.” ...you can trust, rely on, depend on [your] guru, but the guru can’t depend on you." This might be a sort of "misfire" as Dawkins would say, but it strikes me that these sorts of asymmetries obtain all over the place. I don't believe in the denotative truth of Poseidon or Tethys, but is there some connotative truth about the sea or my relationship with it which I lose in tossing out the mythology?

    ReplyDelete