Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature

In modernism, as we have already seen, autonomy is a problem because it is no longer underwritten or legitimated by tradition, ‘by the conventions of an art’. Thus, the modernist artist ‘has continually to question the conventions upon which his art has depended’. From an Adornian perspective, the problem initially raised by Cavell’s essay–although it disappointingly disappears after the opening couple of pages–is the right one: modernist artworks put meaning on the agenda.

Having critically discredited the traditional claims of religion, can art become a therapy for religious desire? My view, which I discuss in with particular reference to Hegel’s, Lukács’s and Carl Schmitt’s critiques of romanticism, is that it cannot. What I see as the tragic quality of modernity resides in the fact that the form of our questions about the meaning and value of human life is still religious, but that we find the claims of religion increasingly incredible and hence move our faith elsewhere, into the aesthetic, the philosophical, the economic, or the political, without any of these spheres being able to provide the kind of response we require. Thus, therapy does not silence the critical voice, and, moreover, such a silence would not be therapeutic: after such knowledge, what forgiveness? But this does not mean that romanticism is redundant or uninteresting, it means rather that we have to expect less from the imagination and accustom ourselves to more minimal transfigurations of reality.

However, the second task of poetry is to give ‘to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it’. Beyond the critical function described above, we might describe this as the therapeutic task of poetry. To put in bluntly, poetry is ‘one of the enlargements of life’. One of Stevens’s most telling remarks, I believe, is the following: ‘After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.’ Poetry offers a possible form of redemption, a redemption that brings us back to the fictionality of the world as fictional, and which saves the sense of the world for us (and it goes without saying that only the world is saved: the realm of appearance, semblance and visibility). In Kermode’s words, poetry enables us to continue ‘living without God and finding it good, because of the survival of the power (i.e. the imagination) that once made him suffice’.

The task of poetry, then, is two-fold:

Poetry permits us to see fiction as fiction, to see the fictionality or contingency of the world. The world is what you make of it. Its fact is a factum: a deed, an act, an artifice. Such is the critical task of poetry, which we might think of in Kantian terms as analogous to the Copernican turn. This is perhaps what Stevens has in mind when he writes in the Adagia, ‘The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe it willingly.’

we might conclude that the spirit that was sought by the ‘we’ of the poem is that world-building creative power of imagination that makes a world in words, through poetry. World-experience is word-experience. But the genius of imagination only produces its world in a dialectical relation to reality, which is the base and its own genius. Hence Stevens’s philosophical position cannot be assimilated to linguistic idealism or anti-realism. The order of human meaning is produced by being always already out there among the ‘meaningless plungings’ of things, without which there would be no material for creation, no materia poetica, ‘makings of his self ‘ are ‘makings of the sun’. As Stevens’succinctly puts it, the task of poetry is ‘to touch with the imagination in respect to reality’.

Poetry returns us to reality, to what Stevens calls ‘The Plain Sense of Things’, to the plainness of the everyday, which I shall discuss below. And yet, poetry returns us to the ordinary as something extraordinary, strange and uncanny, as something transfigured through the power of imagination. In poetry we return to reality through the mediation of the imagination. That is to say, and here our problems begin, the reality to which the poet returns us is the real rendered unreal through imagination. As Stevens suggests hypothetic-ally, ‘If it should be true that reality exists | In the mind … it follows that | Real and unreal are two in one.’

In Stevens’s terms, poetry negotiates a dialectic between reality and the imagination, where the imagination must adhere to reality in order for the poet’s words to make any sense and to have any vitality. In the Adagia, Stevens writes, ‘Eventually an imaginary world is entirely without interest. But the imagination must also resist (Stevens’s word, not mine) the pressure of reality, it must respond to what Stevens calls, in The Necessary Angel, ‘the leaden time’ in which we find ourselves, what both Heidegger (following Hölderlin) and Wittgenstein, in surprisingly similar registers, refer to as the darkness or dearth (Dürftigkeit) of these times, as times not particularly hospitable to philosophy or poetry. And here one finds, as in the early German romantics and Nietzsche, a theory of poetic creation insistently linked to a philosophy of history and a critique of culture, a culture of nihilism.

a small digression here on the two master-words of Stevens’s poetics, imagination and reality. In one of his Athenaeum fragments, the early German romantic thinker Friedrich Schlegel writes, ‘No poetry, no reality’. We should keep this in mind when reading Stevens, particularly as he places himself very self-consciously within a romantic tradition of poetry and thinking, with its vast premise that art is the medium for attaining the fundamental ground of human life and that the world might be transformed in and through a great artwork. So, no poetry, no reality: that is, our experience of the real is dependent upon the work of the poetic imagination.

the world is overfull with meaning and we suffocate under the combined weight of the various narratives of redemption–whether they are religious, socio-economic, political, aesthetic or philosophical. What passes for the ordinary is cluttered with illusory narratives of redemption that conceal the very extraordinariness of the ordinary and the nature of its decay under conditions of nihilism. What Beckett’s work offers us, then, is a radical de-creation of these salvific narratives, a paring down or stripping away of the resorts of fable, the determinate negation of social meaning through the elevation of form, a syntax of weakness, an approach to meaninglessness as an achievement of the ordinary without the rose-tinted glasses of redemption, an acknowledgement of the finiteness of the finite and the limitedness of the human condition. Returning to the opening theme of this lecture, might not the very extraordinary ordinariness, the uncanny everydayness, of Beckett’s work be the source of its resistance to philosophical interpretation?

Solitude, emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness, silence–these are not the givens of Beckett’s characters, but their goal, their new heroic undertaking.
(MWM 156)
On Cavell’s reading, Beckett is not telling us that the universe is meaningless, rather meaninglessness is a task, an achievement, the achievement of the ordinary or the everyday.