The Haunting of Jorge Luis Borges, or: Borges in the Kantian Tradition

Jorge Luis Borges, lauded everywhere as one of the greats of short fiction, rarely gets his due as an essayist.  But his essays can be every bit as intriguing as his stories—and, in fact, are haunted by the same suspicion that haunts his fiction: the suspicion that there is an order of some kind just beyond our reach, and an elusive significance always on the verge of manifestation.  Both of these suspicions emerge in the wake of Kantian and post-Kantian thought on the meaning of the beautiful.

Consider “The Wall and the Books,” in which Borges speculates about the motives of the Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti in ordering the building of the Great Wall and decreeing the burning of all books. Borges is, of course, aware of simple historical explanations for the phenomena.  “Historically,” writes Borges, “there is no mystery in the two measures…. he built the wall because walls were defenses; he burned the books because the opposition invoked them in order to extol former emperors.”  But that’s just too plodding and dull for a mind like that of Borges, who soon turns to questions about a larger meaning for the emperor’s actions.  Noting that those who were found preserving books were sentenced to work on the wall, Borges begins speculating:

Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, maybe Shih Huang Ti condemned those who worshipped the past to a work just as vast as the past, as stupid and useless. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: “Men love the past and I can do nothing against this love, nor can my executioners, but some time there will be a man who feels as I do, and he will destroy my wall, as I destroyed the books, and will erase my memory and will be my shadow and my mirror and will not be aware of it.” Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in the empire because he knew it was fragile and he destroyed the books because he understood they were sacred books, or rather books that taught that which the entire universe teaches or the consciousness of every man.

That’s a pretty freestyle set of hermeneutic principles Borges is employing, isn’t it?  “Perhaps it means this, perhaps that…”  But Borges isn’t much interested in precise or authoritative interpretation, here.  Rather, as he says a little later, he thinks it is likely that the grand idea of the wall and the burning of the books “touches us by, over and above, the conjectures it allows.”  The wall and the books are valuable to Borges precisely because they conjure possible interpretations: they seem meaningful, but render up no precise meaning.

Indeed, thinking about the wall and the books in this way leads Borges to conjecture that “we could infer that all practices have their virtue in themselves and not in some conjectural ‘content’” and that this emphasis on the form or pattern that hints, but only hints, at significance would be in accord with the thinking of Walter Pater, who “contended that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, which is nothing but form.”  Music, after all, is like mythology, or “certain twilights,” in that all of these things “try to tell us something… or want to tell us something.”  For Borges, this is an “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” and “is, perhaps, the aesthetic act.”

The idea of a pure form that does not connect to utility—the wall as metaphor, rather than as defense—haunts Borges, and pushes into his mind despite his grasp of simpler, more material explanations for the wall.  And the haunting is specific to the Kantian and post-Kantian eras, in that it was Kant who told us that the aesthetic experience involves a sense of “purposiveness without purpose”—of form with no necessary connection to function.  Moreover, it was Kant who spoke of genius as a capacity for creating images that function exactly like the wall and the books in Borges’ essay.  Here’s the relevant passage from Kant’s Critique of Judgment:

Genius is, in short, the faculty of presenting aesthetical Ideas; an aesthetical Idea being an intuition of the Imagination, to which no concept is adequate. And it is by the excitation of such ineffable Ideas that a great work of art affects us.

For Kant, the products of genius cannot be reduced to any single concept or meaning.  Rather, they give rise to a plethora of possible significances.  Both the notion of purposiveness without purpose and the notion of genius irreducible to concept lie behind Borges’ speculations about the wall and the books: Borges is fascinated by the possibility of something that can be “nothing but form,” and by the notion that a formal pattern “hints, but only hints, at significance.”  Borges mentions Benedetto Croce and Walter Pater in his essay—and neither figure would exist in recognizable form without Kant.  But another figure derived from the German Idealist tradition comes to mind in connection with Borges’ idea of the “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” as central to aesthetics: Carl Gustav Jung.  Jung, in his great essay “On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetry,” argues that the most significant forms of art give us not specific meanings per se, but  “a language pregnant with meanings, and images that are true symbols because they are ... bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore.”  Meaningfulness without meaning, we might say, is the gist of Jung’s theory, here: and it is certainly a theory in accord with Borges’ fascinations.

Borges' concern with pure form and “imminence of a revelation, which does not happen” informs his best-loved fiction every bit as much as it informs his essayistic thinking.  Consider “The Lottery of Babylon, ” in which all of the arbitrariness in the world just might be the result of a secret, carefully administered lottery—a pattern or form behind the apparent randomness of life, a purpose or meaning we can almost detect.  Or consider the famous “Library of Babel,” in which a vast library of books, each unique, combine to present all possible combinations of letters.  In this strange universe, men seek not only the revelation of meaning, but absolution through that revelation:

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness…. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary)…

The imminence of these most personal of revelations, though, never really manifests: “the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, ” we read, “can be computed as zero. ”

“The Garden of Forking Paths,” is perhaps the best example of Borgesian fiction haunted by Kantian aesthetics.  It is in this story that we see our protagonist escape from the anxieties of his situation—he is in a hostile country, pursued by an implacable foe—by contemplating a labyrinth created by an ancestor:

I have some understanding of labyrinths: not for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts’ui Pên who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced worldly power in order to write a novel that might be even more populous than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost. Thirteen years he dedicated to these heterogeneous tasks, but the hand of a stranger murdered him—and his novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth. Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . . . I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my destiny of one pursued.

The labyrinth, a structure purposive but without purpose, is an object of contemplation that lifts him above his self-protective anxieties, and takes him into a different state of mind.  Indeed, it takes him into something like disinterest, the condition in which we contemplate without thought of our ourselves and our needs—the very state Kant says we enter with aesthetic contemplation.

As it turns out, the labyrinth is not a physical maze, but a book—a seemingly incoherent book that, in fact, has a pattern to it.  But the pattern is infinite, and the full meaning of the book can never be made manifest: it is a text pregnant with meanings, a bridge thrown out to an unseen shore.

The ghost of pure form, of a purposiveness beyond purpose; and the haunting sense of a meaningfulness that refuses to resolve into definite meaning—these are the specters behind many of the lines Borges wrote, fiction and nonfiction alike.  They are, I think, the central principles of his aesthetics—and the product of a long tradition in Western philosophy.

Divinity Effects

…the tintinnabuli style — especially in the simple form in which it exists in “Für Alina” — consists of two lines. The melody, which proceeds mainly in steps up and down the scale, might be compared to a child tentatively walking. The second line underpins each note of the melody with a note from a harmonizing triad (the fundamental chord of Western music) that is positioned as close as possible to the note of the melody, but always below. You could imagine this accompaniment to be a mother with her hands outstretched to ensure her toddler doesn’t fall. Pärt grabbed my own hand with excitement. “This is the whole secret of tintinnabuli,” he exclaimed. “The two lines. One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say — it is not a joke, but also it is as a joke taken — that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving the sins.”

How can one invoke the idea of the divine in the various arts of our time? I’ve been thinking about this a bit since I read Mark Scroggins’ remarks on the deeply religious poetry of Peter O’Leary over at kulturindustrie.blogspot.com. And, as I think about the issue, I keep coming back to the remark quoted above, a remark made by the great composer Arvo Pärt when he was interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times. There are, of course, all kinds of ways of invoking or representing divinity, from the humble church mural of a blonde, blue-eyed Jesus to the vague, sterile glow of some New Age ball of light. But the one that intrigues me, and seems to find expression in a number of different art forms, is the one Pärt mentions: the presentation of something we can identify with, combined with the presentation of something larger that comprehends and forgives the thing with which we identify. This seems to me a particularly powerful way of giving an emotional impression of the presence of divinity (which, I hasten to add, is not the same thing as a proof or argument for divinity).

Here’s a good performance of “Für Alina”:



The piece is nothing like, say, the Dies irae section of Verdi’s Requiem, which gives us a big, scary sound representing the wrath of God. What we’re getting isn’t so much a representation of a being and his act as it is a representation of a relationship between two sounds. The piece isn’t program music by any means — the sort of thing where the chug-chug-chug of the strings represents a train, and the tweet of the flutes represents the train whistle — but you can hear the hesitant, yearning, broken steps that Pärt proposes we might identify with, and the other sound that shadows those steps, implying a force that both sympathizes with and transcends them.

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The effect that Pärt is going for has analogues in poetry. The piece that comes to mind for me is John Matthias’ long poem “A Compostella Diptych,” which follows the old pilgrim route across Spain to Santiago de Compostella. Although this isn’t the way Matthias divides it, one might think of “A Compostella Diptych” as a poem divided into three different parts: a long section, spanning most of the poem, and two short parts coming suddenly one after the other at the very end. The first part takes on the history of the pilgrim routes across France and Spain, a history that comes to suggest the history of the West. The long opening sections of the poem first present the people of the West on their pilgrimages over the centuries as a kind of unified historical subject bent on a single task of mutual significance. The pronoun “they” links many disparate people over the centuries into one subject, even as the poem’s musical incantations lull the reader into a sense of historical experience as a kind of rhythmic repetition:

Via Tolosona, Via Podiensis.
There among the tall and narrow cyresses,
the white sarcophagi of Arles

worn by centuries of wind & sun,
where Charlemagne’s lieutenants it was said
lay beside Servilius & Flavius

and coffins drifted down the Rhone
on narrow rafts to be unloaded by St. Victor’s monks,
they walked: Via Tolosona.

Via Podiensis…

The passage goes on, with the refrain of “Via Tolosona, Via Podiensis” recurring, even as the referent for the pronoun “they” continues to expand, including pilgrims from farther and farther afield, and separated by more and more centuries.

Running counter to the great binding-together of many peoples and many periods is a dissonance that comes in the depiction of the history of heretics in Spain and Provençe. After writing of the movement of the pilgrims as a kind of song, Matthias turns to the heretics, and tells us:

… there was another song — one sung inwardly
to a percussion of the jangling
manacles and fetters hanging on the branded

heretics who crawled the roads
on hands and knees and slept with lepers under
dark facades of abbeys

This song is a dissonance, an apparently inassimilable disruption of the cultural unity evoked by Matthias’ repetitions. And it too repeats, the jangling of manacles being heard for the destroyed Gnostics, the hunted and besieged Cathars, the victims of the Inquisition, the displaced peoples of the Napoleonic wars, the politically repressed Basques, and, after the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Moors, “the Jews [who] / hid their secret practices, and the Arabs [who hid] theirs.”

I find all of this fascinating, but the really exciting thing comes next, when harmony and dissonance come into contact with a third sonic entity — silence. It’s here that we begin to get an impression of eternity and of an embracing divinity. The harmony-dissonance dialectic of the poem’s long treatment of history comes to an abrupt end with the great munitions blast that opens the final section of the poem. The blast leads to a stunned silence that opens up a sense of ontological belonging. Our first clue to the special significance of the blast comes when we read that, when the blast shook the earth and caused the bells of faraway cathedrals to ring, “men / whose job it was to ring them stood / amazed” and “wondered if this thunder / and the ringing was in time for Vespers // or for Nones or if it was entirely out of time.” In the evocation of an event outside of time the aspect of eternity, and even divinity, suggests itself.

The history that had previously seemed riven by dissonance appears now as a whole from which nothing can be separated, and into which everything is gathered. Significantly, Matthias himself is included in this gathering:

Towards Pamplona, long long after all Navarre
was Spain, and after the end
of the Kingdom of Aragón, & after the end of the end,

I, John, walked with my wife Diana
down from the Somport Pass following the silence
that invited and received my song.

There is more at stake here than a sense of one’s place in history: as the last two lines of the second stanza above indicate, Matthias sees himself not only in relation to history, but in relation to the great silence that invites and receives his song.

The invitation and reception of the song are important, in that they imply that silence — the force that transcends the world and its dissonance — also sympathizes with us, the inhabitance of the dissonant and often cruel world. It’s an effect similar to what Arvo Pärt was after in “Für Alina.” In both pieces, we’re given something which we can identify (in Pärt, the melodic line that “is our reality, our sins,” in Matthias the invocation of history, in which he himself in included) and something that transcends yet sympathizes the thing with which we identify (in Pärt, “the other line” that is “forgiving the sins,” in Matthias, the silence that invites and receives his song).

[If you recognize the reading of Matthias’ poem above, then you’ve read chapter five of my book Laureates and Heretics, from which the reading is adapted. And I thank you for reading my book.]

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It’s not without interest, I think, to note that Arvo Pärt and John Matthias are both fundamentally Christian artists — Pärt being closely linked with Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Matthias being a man who (as he once told me) would have converted to Catholicism had he not been employed as a professor at the University of Notre Dame, where “to embrace the church would have been to embrace the state.” I say this isn’t without interest, because the central episode of Christianity, the crucifixion, seems to me to carry within it a relationship to divinity very much in keeping with the relationship invoked in “Für Alina” and “A Compostella Diptych.”

The moment of the crucifixion takes Jesus — who is both entirely divine, and, via the incarnation, entirely human — and gives him to us in his most suffering, human form, vulnerable to mortality, and even to a sense of isolation from divinity. I’m thinking, here, of the moment (presented in Matthew 27:46 and in Mark 15:24) where Jesus cries out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Here we have Jesus feeling himself abandoned by God — that is, by his own divine nature (okay, I know that the moment you offer an interpretation of a Christian gospel, you’re opening yourself up to being whacked on the head by a thousand interpretive tracts wielded by a horde consisting of a mingled mob of the hyper-learned, the ignorant, and the zealous — but I’ve always been inclined toward a reading of the passage consonant with that in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, where the phrase is taken as meaning something like Jesus feeling that his power or godhead has forsaken him). And then, after this dark moment of utter forsakenness, even faithlessness, comes the last moment on the cross, when Jesus cries out “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” — a reuniting with something that both transcends the suffering body on the cross, and at the same time is at one with it, via the mystery of the trinitarian unity of father, son, and spirit.

I’m sure other religious traditions have ways of expressing a similar transcendent-yet-sympathetic force. All I mean to point out in this section is that the invocation of divinity in two Christian artists, Pärt and Matthias, takes a form that, despite it’s lack of resemblance to traditional Christian iconography, is in sympathy with some of the central moments of that faith.

*

I suppose this is probably the place for me to point out that I’m no kind of Christian, nor am I affiliated with any religion. On my Facebook page I list my religious views as “Spinoza-ish,” in that I’ve long felt a vague intuition of the unity of all things, sometimes thinking of it in terms of Spinoza’s idea of substance, sometimes in terms of Schopenhauer’s notion of will. But I suppose that’s really more on an intuition about ontology, about the nature of being, than it is about religion as such. On religion, I’m often inclined to take the view of Ludwig Feuerbach — a fact which actually does bear on how I’d like to interpret the works by Pärt and Matthias about which I’ve been jabbering on.

Feuerbach was one of the “Young Hegelians,” the group of nineteenth century German philosophers who came of age in the shadow of Hegelian thought, but he took the ponderous master’s thoughts in more radical directions. The most radical part of his thinking came in the 1841 book The Essence of Christianity, where argued that religion “implied the projection by man of his own essential properties and powers into a transcendent sphere in such a way that they appeared before him in the shape of a divine being standing over and above himself.” He went on to say that “the divine thing is nothing else than the human being, or rather, human nature, purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective — i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being.” What all this means is that the properties we attribute to God are really our own properties, but we fool ourselves into thinking that they aren’t. Think about all those athletes who really push themselves, and call on God or Jesus to help them, and then attribute their success to divine intervention. In Feuerbach’s view (and mine, for what it’s worth) they aren’t really the recipients of supernatural aid — they’ve just managed to call upon reserves of strength within themselves that they didn’t know they had. I suppose it is psychologically important for people in extreme circumstances to think that the strength they are calling on comes from some divine elsewhere. I mean, if you’re running a marathon and you think you’ve already given it everything you have, and you aren’t going to win, you can call for additional strength beyond what you thought you had — but to do this you have believe that there’s something more to draw on, something beyond yourself. (This isn’t Feuerbach’s example, of course — he was very critical of how people get screwed over when they allow themselves to believe that their strength belongs not to them, but to a God whose priests stand between them and divinity).

What does any of this have to do with the way Pärt and Matthias invoke a sense of divinity by showing us something with which we can identify, then showing us something that both transcends and sympathizes with that thing? Ah! Glad you asked. Well, since I’ve already recycled some paragraphs from a book I wrote, I won’t feel too bad about recycling a passage from Jung that I mentioned not long ago in a post on comedy. It’s actually a passage from Anthony Storr’s comments on Jung, in which he quotes the Great Man. Here’s the deal: if, like Feuerbach, we think of the divine not as a supernatural force, but as a way of representing powers within ourselves while telling ourselves they belong to something outside ourselves, then we can think of Pärt and Matthias’ works as actually describing a psychological state, rather than a relation to the divine. Seen this way, what they’re describing, really, is a way of relation to our own experiences with a kind of distance, while still feeling those experiences intimately and deeply.

Here’s what Storr has to say:

Jung describes how some of his patients, faced with what appeared an insoluble conflict, solved it by “outgrowing” it, by developing “a new level of consciousness.” He writes: “Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening of his outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically on its own terms but faded out when faced with a new and stronger life urge.” The attainment of this new level of psychological development includes a certain degree of “detachment from one’s emotions. One certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it, yet at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the affect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say ‘I know that I suffer.’”

So: in Pärt’s “Für Alina” we have the melodic line that “is our reality, our sins” and the other line that “forgives those sins” — but seen psychogically, rather than religiously, we can say that the first line is connected to our own painful experiences, and that the experience of hearing that second line allows us to imagine a perspective that is in touch with those experiences, but also distant from them — we can sense our guilty, broken selves, but we can also imagine those selves from the outside, as objects, and therefore experience, along with our suffering, a distance from that suffering, an understanding of pain, rather than pain unaccompanied by understanding. Or in the case of Matthias, we can experience ourselves as parts of the immense, violence-ridden history of the world, but also see that world if from the outside. Or, for that matter, we can see the Jesus of the crucifixion as being fully in his torment on the cross, while simultaneously viewing himself from the transcendent perspective of the Father or the Holy Spirit — he is the son, suffering, but he is also connected to, even identical with, something that looks on the suffering from a distance, with infinite compassion. You get the idea.

*

Some of the greatest works of art actually manage to do Pärt and Matthias one better. In addition to showing us something with which we can identify, and a larger force that transcends and sympathizes with that thing, these artists add another element. They also show us how the feeling of a divine force is, in fact, an emanation of our own minds, a psychological fact such as that described by Storr and Jung. Wordsworth’s Prelude seems to me to be just such a work. I’m thinking of the famous “Blest the Infant Babe” passage from book two. Check it out:

Blest the infant Babe, 

(For with my best conjecture I would trace 

Our Being's earthly progress,) blest the Babe, 

Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep 

Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul 

Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye! 

For him, in one dear Presence, there exists 

A virtue which irradiates and exalts 

Objects through widest intercourse of sense. 

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed: 

Along his infant veins are interfused 

The gravitation and the filial bond 

Of nature that connect him with the world. 

Is there a flower, to which he points with hand 

Too weak to gather it, already love 

Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him 

Hath beautified that flower; already shades 

Of pity cast from inward tenderness 

Do fall around him upon aught that bears 

Unsightly marks of violence or harm. 

Emphatically such a Being lives,
Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail,
An inmate of this active universe: 

For, feeling has to him imparted power 

That through the growing faculties of sense 

Doth like an agent of the one great Mind 

Create, creator and receiver both, 

Working but in alliance with the works 

Which it beholds.--Such, verily, is the first
Poetic spirit of our human life,
By uniform control of after years,
In most, abated or suppressed; in some, 

Through every change of growth and of decay, 

Pre-eminent till death. 
From early days, 

Beginning not long after that first time 

In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch 

I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart, 

I have endeavoured to display the means 

Whereby this infant sensibility, 

Great birthright of our being, was in me
Augmented and sustained.

Here, we enter with the perspective of the baby (think of the baby as being like the melodic line in “Für Alina”), and feel, with that baby, a larger force, something greater than us and sympathetic to us (the mother — think of her as the other line in “Für Alina,” the line “forgiving our sins”). The infant, here, comes to see the whole world as radiating this kind of sympathy, as being charged with a life-force that cares for us. Wordsworth knows this is a matter of psychology, of the child transposing the mother’s love to the world. Having seen the world through the protective care of the mother, the child comes to think of the world as having the mother’s qualities of care and love. It’s a kind of transferal — Wordsworth knows this, yet he feels fortunate in being one of the few people whose psyches continue to function in this infantile way. That is: he feels himself in the world, with all of his pains and sufferings, but he also feels there is a larger perspective from which his troubles are sympathized with. He knows this is a matter of projection — sort of like the projection in Feuerbach, but here it is the mother’s qualities transferred to a kind of pantheistic divine world, not the individual’s own qualities transferred to an imagined divine creature. But that knowledge doesn’t prevent Wordsworth from feeling the way he feels. He just happens to know why he experiences this double perspective (as suffer and as sympathetic, transcendent force). To convey all this in a rich, sense-satisfying way — as opposed to the clumsy conceptual way I have for conveying it, via citation and explanation and tedious pedantic nattering — seems to me to be one of the great achievements of spiritually-oriented art.

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Since we’re talking about my specialty, tedious pedantic nattering, let me come to the final question of the tedious pedant: what shall we call this thing?. I mean, I don’t know of a term for the aesthetic move in which one gives the audience something with which they can identify, then invokes a larger force that transcends and sympathizes. I’d like to offer, as a possible term, a variation on a term of Roland Barthes’. Barthes once proposed a name for those moments in narrative that don’t seem to have any function in terms of establishing character, opening up lines of plot, or the like — those moments that seemed to have no function but to help establish a sense of reality for the scene (his examples include Flaubert’s mention of a barometer on the wall in the story “A Simple Heart” — it does nothing except make the house it is in feel like a real house). Barthes called these textual moments “reality effects.” I’d like to propose calling moments like those offered by Pärt and Matthias “divinity effects.”

Nasty, Brutish, & Short — but Funny: Hobbes on Comedy

The leaves are dying, people, but the semester itself refuses to die, sprouting new, snarling dragon-heads of academic minutia like the Hydra of Greek legend just when I think I've finally put the beast down.  What to do, in such a situation?  Grade the papers, correct the galley proofs, and haul oneself to the meetings?  Hardly.  My usual plan involves popping on my noise-cancelling headphones and listening to bootlegs of old Mitch Hedberg comedy shows.  Maybe it's because of this that I've been thinking a little about the theory of comedy.  Or maybe it's that I'm scheduled to speak in February on a panel about wit and contemporary poetry at the Louisville conference on literature since 1900 (Joyelle McSweeney will be there talking about Harryette Mullen, and Mike Theune will have something to say about wit and poetic form, so don't let my presence put you off coming).  Whatever the reason, I've been thinking about the nature of humor, and have been having bit of a disagreement with that most unlikely theorist of humor, Thomas Hobbes.

Most people who talk about humor theory seem to break the field down into three different areas: incongruity theory, relief theory, and superiority theory.  Incongruity theory is pretty much what you'd expect it to be: the idea that humor comes from strange, unexpected juxtaposition.  Kant is one of the bigwigs in this area, claiming, in The Critique of Judgment, "everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction)."  You know this sort of thing: since we’re talking about philosophers, let’s use an example involving that soft-handed tribe: Monty Python’s famous skit involving philosophers playing soccer:

You know: there’s no why to the juxtaposition: it’s just weird, inexplicable, and incongruous, and the understanding, questing for an explanation for the juxtaposition, can find no satisfaction.  I’m actually not sure the skit holds up all that well, since between the filming of the skit and our own time there’s been a considerable diminishing of the notion that crossing high-culture with pop-culture involves incongruity.  So if you didn’t laugh, you can blame postmodernity.  But you get the idea.

Much of Mikhail Bakhtin’s thinking about laughter also involves incongruity, albeit of a somewhat more specific kind: his famous notion (propagated by his best advocates, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White) being the idea of “transcoding” — of juxtaposing the high or sacred with the low or profane, especially when the low and profane involve bodily functions. 

Relief theory is probably best exemplified by Freud, who argued that humor involved violating social taboos, giving us a sense of relief by letting us say the unsayable.  Lenny Bruce-style profanity falls under this category, as do many gender or ethnicity jokes, which allow the presentation of forbidden stereotypes in the special context of comedy.  This sort of thing can, of course, go badly, badly wrong, as it did in Michael Richards’ career-ending n-word gaffe of 2006.  It’s because of the potential for it to go so badly wrong that I’m restraining myself from adding a couple of my favorite examples (one ending “but it’s always money with you people” and the other ending “no, man, I never found the head” and both bound to offend someone, that being the nature of taboo-shattering humor).

Thomas Hobbes looks at things differently: the author of Leviathan was the pioneer of the superiority theory of humor, which maintains that comedy and laughter are found in the “sudden glory” we feel when we experience “some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”  There are certainly plenty of instances when this is true.  I remember taking a bunch of my student on a field trip to Chicago’s Millennium Park (it was for a class on the art and literature of Chicago I was co-teaching with an art prof, and we were doing a unit on public sculpture).  A couple of students took advantage of the early-September heat to walk into the reflective pool of Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, a very postmodern, interactive piece of public art that encourages such things.  As the first student stood in the pool, she was blasted by one of the small jets of water that suddenly shoot up from the pool, getting pretty wet in the process.  Her friend thought this was hysterically funny — and it was, in a very Hobbesian way: suddenly, the observer, in her dryness and prudence, was superior to the soaked friend.  Just then, though, the laughing student got doused by one of the cascades that come from above, ending up much wetter than her pal, who hooted in appropriately Hobbesian derision at the fate of her hapless former mocker.  The unexpectedly superior position is the position from which we laugh.

Hobbes extends his theory a bit, too, saying that we can feel a “sudden eminency” not only with regard to others, but to our former selves: so, for example, if we were trudging along down a slippery, muddy hill, and suddenly started to slide down, but managed to maintain our balance and arrive quite suddenly at the end of the slippery slope, unsullied and no longer having to trudge tediously on, we’d laugh at our sudden unexpected superiority to our former position.

This is all well and good, but it’s far from exhaustive.  I’d like to propose an amendment to the Hobbesian theory, an amendment I’m deriving from two things that happened to my wife, Valerie, yesterday, both of which she found hilarious, and neither of which can quite be accommodated by the Hobbesian theory.

First, there’s the matter of Valerie’s morning commute.  She takes the mighty Metra train into Chicago every morning, but yesterday, due to some weird mechanical fiasco, the trains on her line were running very late.  She stood in the cold waiting for her train to arrive, but when it did, it didn’t stop.  Instead, in some attempt to get the commuter rails back on schedule, it blew by her at incredible speed, actually blowing her hat off her head.  This left her late and laughing at her predicament, with an emotion that could best be described as “well, fuck me, then.”  Something similar happened later in the day, when she returned home.  The sunroom in Stately Archambeau Manor is equipped with old-school blinds, the kind that roll down, and can be a bit temperamental, wanting to roll back up rather than stay where you’ve put them.  Valerie took a long time to carefully adjust and balance the blind so it would stay at the exact level she desired.  Then, as she turned her back and began to walk away, the blind rolled up at incredible speed, made a kind of Don Martin of Mad Magazine series of sound effects (FWAP FWAP FWAP, among others) and somehow, in defiance of the laws of God and physics, tore itself loose from its bearings, unrolling all the way to the floor like some kind of red carpet laid in front of a visiting dignitary, and finally cut loose from its roll altogether, drifting elegantly to the floor.  Shortly thereafter, the wooden roll itself dropped from the window, hitting the ground with a clunk and frightening the cat.

From my perch on the sofa this all seemed quite hilarious, in a strictly Hobbesian way: I hadn’t just invested my time in setting the blind just-so, so I was superior to She Whose Labors Had Come To Naught.  But Valerie laughed even harder than I did, once again feeling the humor of “well, fuck me, then.”

So here’s what I think was going on.  I think there’s a strange, pseudo-Hobbesian effect that comes into play when we experience a sudden sense of superiority not to someone else, and not to our former selves, but to ourselves in the present moment, a kind of doubled-consciousness.  Maybe the best way to get at it is to turn not to Hobbes, but to Jung.  Jung argued that one of the ways people deal successfully with difficult situations is to gain a certain detachment from their situation, without losing their sense of being within that situation.  Of the emotions produced by problematic situations Jung said “one certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it,” but, he continues, “at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the effect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say ‘I know that I suffer.’”  So there’s the part of you that is upset at having fallen on your ass into the mud, with everyone looking on and laughing.  But, if you are able to develop a little distance, and not just suffer, but watch yourself suffer, you participate in the same Hobbesian sense of superiority, and laugh along with the giggling observers.  Sure, you’re humiliated.  But you’re also aware of your humiliated self as if from the outside, and you feel superior to the humiliation even as you experience it: you play a kind of emotional chord, with one note of suffering and one of the “sudden glory” of Hobbesian superiority.

We might call this the “well, fuck me, then” effect.  And, as a habitual faller-out-of-hammocks and dropper-of-meatballs-down-the-front-of-my-shirt, I can assure you, developing the doubled consciousness of the “well, fuck me, then” effect is a skill well-worth having.  It even got me through the second half of a speech I was giving in front of several hundred people after my glorious academic robes had been shat upon by an errant seagull.

Roberto Bolaño and the Extravert Muse

There's something primal and pre-rational in the fear I've always had of heights. Picture a sweaty, trembly Archambeau trying hard not to look like he's freaking out, and you've successfully pictured me in any high structure or on the edge of any precipitous precipice. At the Tour Eiffel, on the cliffs of Dun Aengus, climbing a fire lookout back in Manitoba, or even in the upper floors of the Hesburgh Library at Notre Dame, I'd always feel like my lower intestine had been seized by something I can only describe as an icy, electrified demon-fist. It's always hazardous for me when people come to visit from Europe: invariably, they want to go up in one of Chicago's skyscrapers, and I gamely take them, but have learned to stick to the Hancock Center: it has a bar on the 95th floor, and one can steady one's nerves somewhat with a bucket-sized slug of bourbon. It's funny to see, I'm told, this gripping-of-handrails and gritting of teeth, but it really takes me to some bizarre, primal emergency state. Once, while we were visiting a colleague who lived on the 19th floor of a tall, narrow building with floor-to-ceiling windows, an ornithologist pal of mine mercilessly teased me about my queasiness (used as he was to lurking around in trees and the edges of ravines in his bird-watching escapades, it was hard for him to appreciate my crisis of confidence in high places). I like the guy, and we bust each other's chops all the time, but heights mess with my chi, people, and so messed-with was I just then that I pulled a very uncharacteristic move, hauling-off and knocking the poor guy into the wall to make him stop. Not cool, I know. But that's how freaked I get when I'm more than, say, a dozen stories up. (I think he forgave me, but I notice he doesn't ride elevators with me any more).

There are two exceptions to this sad and weird phenomenon, though: I'm in no way freaked out when I fly, and for some secret reason known only to the muses, I never get the icy demon-fist effect when I visit the offices of Poetry magazine. Since their current digs hover 18 floors up over Michigan Ave, with an open floor-plan and glass walls, this is a true surprise. And a welcome one, since I'd really rather not knock Don Share or Christian Wiman into the wall, even when they publish Jorie Graham. I'm sure Don and Christian had no sense of all this Tuesday, when the elevators whisked me up to their aerie for an interview about an article I wrote for the November issue. Insufficiently caffeinated, I think I sort of tanked at the interview, but the editor, I'm assured, is good at cleaning up one's mumblings for the podcast. Anyway, Don was kind enough to hook me up with an advance copy of next month's issue of Poetry, and I pawed through it on the train home, eagerly devouring a dozen or so pages of the great Chilean poet Roberto Bolaño in translation. I'd been reading the October issue on the way down, and something struck me about how different Bolaño was from the (very able) poets I'd been reading in the October issue. I couldn't quite put a name to it until I was almost at my stop, when the word finally leapt to my lips: "extravert!" I said, eyes wild with discovery, "Bolaño's a Jungian extravert!" The conductor's sidelong glance indicated that he either disagreed (holding deep-seated views on Bolaño and Jung at odds with my own), or that he thought it was weird to see a big beardy dude talking to himself on the Metra. Be that as it may, I really do think Jung's ideas are a good way to get at what's special about Bolaño, and at some of the limits of a lot of American poetry.

Jung is one of those guys whose work is more wide-ranging and various in actuality than it is in the popular perception. I mean, when most people think of Jung, they probably remember that he quarreled with Freud, that he said something about archetypes, and that Robert Bly more or less drowned his own chances of being taken seriously when he watered down Jungian ideas in his Iron John-era drum circles. I'm no expert, but when I was writing about the poetry of John Peck (a Jungian analyst by trade), I worked on getting my Jung chops up a bit. My favorite discovery was the essay "On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetry" (which runs some 20 very readable pages in Penguin's Portable Jung, if you want to check it out).

Long story short, Jung's argument is that there are two fundamental orientations a poet can take toward his or her creativity: introverted and extaverted. Like a lot of Jung's terms, these don't quite mean what they do in common parlance. And like any binaries, of course, the introvert-extravert split is pretty limited, but it makes for a good way to start drawing distinctions between different types of poetry. Jung's introvert poet isn't what you might think (the phrase conjures up some spindly, black-sweatered guy sort of hiding out behind the Emily Dickinson books in the library, hoping not to have to talk to anyone). Rather, he's a poet who identifies with his own creative process, seeing it as something he understands, consciously directs, and is generally on top of. It's a matter of knowing, or thinking that you know, what you're doing, of going about your poem-making deliberately. The artist thinks the art comes from inside himself and is under his control — so it is in this sense that he is "introvert" in orientation. Here's Jung on the idea of introvert writing:

There are literary works that spring wholly from the author's intention to produce a particular result. He submits his material to a definite treatment with a definite aim in view; he adds to it and subtracts from it, emphasizing one effect, toning down another, laying on a touch of color here, another there, all the time carefully considering the overall result and paying strict attention to the laws of form and style. He exercises the keenest judgment and chooses his words with complete freedom. His material is entirely subordinated to his artistic purpose, he wants to express this and nothing else. He is wholly at one with the creative process, no matter whether he has deliberately made himself its spearhead, as it were, or whether it has made him its instrument so completely that his intentions and his faculties are indistinguishable from the act of creation itself.

So this is a guy who doesn't think of the act of writing as a mystery, or the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, or a visit from the capricious muse. This isn't the guy who objects, in a creative writing class, to the idea of writing a poem as an assignment. This is a guy who believes in craft, in technique, and in setting out to nail an effect with care and precision. You can imagine him looking with approval at all those heavily marked-up pages they put next to interviews with writers in The Paris Review — "Ah!" he'd think, looking at an annotated, revised page, "there's a guy who knows what he's doing, and isn't afraid to park his ass in a chair and work!" (I remember the short fiction guru Lee K. Abbott actually saying this, once, when he came up to Lake Forest for a visit).

What Jung's describing here isn't so much poetry, or even the process of composition, but the attitude a poet takes toward his or her work — an attitude of deliberate, careful, conscientious control (an attitude we profs kind of hope our students will take toward the writing of their essays, if not necessarily in their poems). Of course, this could be a kind of false consciousness on the part of the poet: as Jung puts it later in his essay, "it might well be that the poet, while apparently ... producing what he consciously intends" nevertheless gets carried away by "an 'alien will,'" or force beyond his or her conscious intellect. The first example of this that comes to mind for me is actually one from visual art: I really believe Georgia O'Keefe meant it when she said she thought there was nothing sexual about her paintings of flowers. But something sexual clearly got expressed there — it just came from a part of herself that O'Keefe didn't let come to consciousness. So she thought of herself as a controlling, introvert artist, but something else was at work, too, something alien to her intentions.

Disclaimers about false consciousness aside, the attitude a poet takes toward his or her creative processs matters for Jung — not least because it will tend to have an effect on the kind of work the poet ends up creating. The introvert poet will give us "a conscious product shaped and designed to have the particular effect intended," a poem that will "nowhere overstep the limits of comprehension," and the effect of which will be "bounded by the author's intention and ... not extend beyond it." Let's set aside deconstructive notions of the inevitable failure of such intention-driven outcomes, since, in a way, they're just versions of Jung's idea of a secret alien force slipping in, O'Keefe-style, behind the controlling consciousness of the introvert artist. And let's see what a poem of this kind looks like. As my Metra North Line epiphany made clear to me the other day, a lot of the poems in Poetry magazine are of this type. Here's one from the October issue by Derek Sheffield (after all these years of blogging, I'm still not clear if quoting the whole poem is fair use — but since it's up on Poetry's web site, I'm hoping it's cool. If it's not, and you're Derek Sheffied, Don Share, Christian Wiman, or one of their phalanx of lawyers, let me know):

A Good Fish

Jerk that bitch, urges my guide,
and I give my shuddering pole
a jerk, hooking the throat
of the first steelhead of my life.
Reel 'em, he mutters and revs the motor.
I horse my pole and reel and horse.
The boat's mascot whines, her claws
clicking. Let it take some line.
My father, uncle, and cousin
are reeling. First fish! they shout,
and I shout, What a fighter!
A silver spine touches the air.
There, he points, a hen. And guess what?
She's gonna join the club,
somehow spotting in that glimpse
the smooth place along her back
where a fin had been snipped.
He leans over the gunwale, dips a net,
and scoops her into the boat.
She is thick with a wide band
of fiery scales, slap-
slapping the aluminum bottom.
Welcome to the club, he says,
and clobbers her once, and again,
and once more before she goes still.
A bleeder, he says, shaking his head
and handing her to me. I curl
a finger through a gill the way
you're supposed to, determined
not to let her slip and flop
back to the river, a blunder
I'd never live down. A good fist.
Fish, I mean. A good fish.

Okay! I mean, sure, the poem deals with an unconscious process — the way something apparently innocent, like fishing, is linked with some deeply primal stuff, like sex and violence. It even includes a rendition of a Freudian slip ("fist" for "fish"). But the way it deals with this process is clearly very deliberate, and all of the details push toward making the single point that fishing contains these primal things. I mean, if you wanted to show your students in a creative writing class how to establish a consistent pattern of gestures, you couldn't do much better than to aim them at this poem and ask them about the emotional undertones to each of the actions undertaken by the characters in this poem. Every time Sheffield has them handling a fish or fishing implement, it's either associated with violence, or with sex (or, really, more properly with masturbation — all that jerking, all those poles, and that fist at the end add up to an almost indecent image). It all looks very deliberate, and all points in the direction of a single, rather authoritative, interpretation. Even the Freudian slip, so carefully placed at the end, has the feel of deliberation and control. There's nothing in it that refuses to make sense, flirts with disaster, or seems troublingly unassimilable to an interpretive paradigm or sense of aesthetic wholeness.

The word for a poem like Sheffield's is, I think, accomplished. Or maybe skillful. Or fully-realized. All of which are legitimate terms of praise, especially when we think of how many poems aim at this sort of effect and miss by about three feet. In all this accomplishment, the poem sort of reminds me of nineteenth-century French academic painting: it shows the artist knows what he was doing. But along with this very real virtues comes a kind of limitation. Trying to describe that limitation, I fall back on a comment my dad made once, after we'd spent a day in the Louvre, among all those galleries of grand format state paintings. "What I saw," he said, looking wearily up over his espresso, "was a whole lot of technique, and not much else." That's too harsh as a statement about Sheffield's poem, but it gets at the weaknesses to which introvert art is prone. (I think it's not a coincidence, really, that Georgia O'Keefe's best work are those floral paintings where she's expressing all kinds of sexual stuff that her conscious mind denies is there — when she gets away from that, her work gets closer and closer to well-made kitsch).

The other pole of Jung's binary is inhabited by the extravert poet. Again, the term is misleading: I mean, doesn't it make you think of some kind of coffeehouse blowhard, cornering you by the big jar of biscotti and forcing you to hear his sub-Howl effusions while he rants, gesticulates, and tears at his Moses-length beard? But enough about my last poetry reading! That's not what Jung had in mind at all. By "extravert" Jung means the poet who thinks the source of his or her creativity lies outside of the conscious self, maybe even outside the self entirely. Instead of feeling like he's in control of the process of composition, he experiences the process as an urgency, a matter of being seized by forces beyond conscious control. This was very much the idea held about poets and rhapsodes in classical antiquity — remember Plato's "Ion," where the title character describes himself as being seized, in the poetic act, the way a piece of metal is seized by a magnet? It's like that. Spontaneous overflow, a visit by the muse or the daemon, a welling-up of We Know Not What that makes us grab the pen (or brush, or keyboard) and get something out. The poem seems to come from beyond, from something alien, from outside — hence "extravert," the other-oriented position. Jung puts it this way — with extravert creativity,

...works positively force themselves on the author; his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement. The work brings with it its own form. Anything [the poet] wants to add is rejected, and what he himself would like to reject is thrust back at him. While his conscious mind stands amazed and empty before this phenomenon, he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being.... Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or stands outside it...

Hollywood loves this idea of the artist (as a topic, not as a way of directing movies, for which it relies on a bunch of dependably careful introverts). I mean, think of Vincent van Gogh as played by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life, or Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock. These are depictions of artists who receive, rather than direct, the gift of creation. Or at least that's how the extravert artist sees him- or herself. He's gripped by something as primal as that icy, electrified demon fist that grips me in high places.

From Jung's point of view, what's really going on is that the artist has formed an autonomous complex within his or her psyche, an area of mind not fully unified with the rest of the personality. It wants to come out and find its expression, and does so by breaking through the filters of the conscious mind. It's a very Romantic sort of idea, and one that the champions of deliberate, introvert writing often look on with suspicion. Yvor Winters based his whole mature poetic on a rejection of this extravert sort of thing, arguing that people (Hart Crane, say) who engage in what Jung would call extravert creativity are unhinged, psychologically unintegrated, and quite possibly a danger to themselves (though one could argue Winters' own attempt to prune the wild antipodal gardens of the mind held their own dangers, to art and to psyche alike).

[Digression of interest only to people who love German Idealist philosophy: those of you who are deep, deep, deep into German philosophy will probably recognize the influence of Schiller on Jung's thinking. The categories extravert and introvert roughly correspond to Schiller's ideas of the naive and the sentimental, respectively — Jung even acknowledges the debt in his essay. I think this connection must have had something to do with my coming to think about Bolaño and Sheffield in these terms: the reason I was so groggy and impervious to caffeine during the interview for the Poetry podcast was that I'd been teaching a night class the previous evening — a seminar on Kant and Schiller for our grad students. So Schiller and Jung were percolating somewhere in the back of my head while I was reading the October and November issues of Poetry on the Metra.]

Anyway. Just as the introvert orientation to creativity had consequences for the products of creative action, so too does the extravert orientation affect the poem. With the extravert artist, says Jung, "we would expect a strangeness of form and of content, thoughts that can only be apprehended intuitively, a language pregnant with meanings, and images that are true symbols because they are ... bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore." This kind of stuff may lack the polish of careful, introvert poetry, but what is it Rimbaud says? "La musique savante manque à notre désir" ("sophisticated music falls short of our desire"). I mean, extravert poetry may be rough around the edges, but because of its sources in the repressed or unconscious areas of the psyche, it often comes out with a force, a freshness, and a surprising, even unsettling, set of insights or emotions.

One thinks of Surrealism here, of André Breton and automatic writing. (I wonder, sometimes, what Jung would have made of something like the Oulipo, or other forms of procedural writing, where the poet sets up an arbitrary series of conventions, then lets them produce a text that comes into being without his control. I imagine he'd see the creation of the rules for these procedures as very much an introvert's act, but the product as looking much like an extravert's poem). One thinks of Breton, but not necessarily of Poetry magazine. I mean, while a journal with such a long track record is bound to have published quite a few extravert works in its time, the reputation of the magazine is that of a venue for highly accomplished, but generally non-freaky, poetry.

That's why it was such a great thing to find the big spread of Roberto Bolaño's poetry in the November issue. I mean, Bolaño's work has all the hallmarks of the extravert poet: rapid juxtapositions, images that call out to us as significant without being reducible to a particular significance, a sense of urgency and of rapid, inspired composition, and all the rest of it. The connection to Breton isn't all that far-fetched, either: I remember that Benjamin Kunkel once described Bolaño in the London Review of Books as the co-founder of a "punk-Surrealist poetry movement called infrarrealismo." Consider, for example, "Soni," the NC-17-ish poem that opens the Bolaño section in Poetry:

Soni

I'm in a bar and someone's name is Soni
The floor is covered in ash       Like a bird
like a single bird two old men arrive
Archilochus and Anacreon and Simonides       Miserable
Mediterranean refugees       Don't ask me what I'm doing
here, just forget that I've been with a girl
who's pale and rich       Either way, I only remember blush
the word shame after the word hollow
Soni! Soni!       I laid back and rubbed
my penis over her waist       The dog barked in the street
below there was a theater and after coming
I thought "two theaters" and the void Archilochus and Anacreon
and Simonides sheathing their willow branches       Man
doesn't search for life, I said, I laid her back and
shoved the whole thing in       Something crunched between
the dog's ears       Crack!       We're lost
All that's left is for you to get sick, I said       And Soni
stepped away from the group       The light through dirty glass
rendered her like a God and the author
closed his eyes

Zowie. It's harder to say something about this poem than Derek Sheffield's, isn't it? We could start with the nonstandard punctuation (although after a passionate, eros-driven number like this, I feel like the King of the Nerds leading with punctuation). But it's significant! For one thing, it leaves those Greek names marooned, their status and significance not fully defined. Are they the two old men? But there's three of them. Are they the Mediterranean refugees? The geography works (Bolaño's writing this in Mexico City, thinking of Greece), but the syntax and punctuation leave it all a bit ambiguous. Some of images decode pretty well (two theaters? Sure: the real one outside, and the imaginary one where Bolaño — I take the speaker as him — and Soni just performed for one another). But others don't: like those two old men who arrive as a single bird. I'd bet Jung would consider this one of those images "pregnant with meaning," but not an image that had actually given birth to a defined meaning. Compared to Derek Sheffield's "A Good Fish," which masters the experience it describes, this poem's a tangle of undigested emotions. It's hard to sort out what Bolaño feels about his encounter with Soni, and what his feelings had to do with her wealth and paleness, sociological facts that seem to matter to Bolaño in ways too deeply buried to be comprehended (but not too deeply buried to be expressed). Do the sociological facts have something to do with the presence of Simonides and Archilochus, both of whom were social satirists? Maybe. But I'm still not sure why Anacreon's hanging around in this poem. Maybe it has to do with how he writes about intoxicating love — but who among those Greeks didn't? It's a tense little ball of the deeply felt and urgently expressed, too strange and opaque to pin down.

Jung saw work of this kind as important, because it was through extravert creativity that the least-understood elements of our experiences came to light. Truths arise from this kind of art that can't find articulation in any other form, and through contemplating these things we're eventually able to articulate them and integrate them into our self-understanding. It's not the sort of thing an introvert artist can do, really: his task is more a matter of reiterating, or working variations on, things we already know (saying "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed," as Alexander Pope put it — and what's Pope's neoclassicism but the distillation of introvert creativity?). It's also not the kind of thing that's easy to teach in an MFA seminar, which may be why we see comparatively little extravert poetry in our most prominent journals: after all, the most careerist, professionalized, outwardly-ambitious types of poets, the types who'd sweat to get into a brand-name journal, tend to come out of such programs. It's a shame, really, that there's an extravert-introvert imbalance in the big journals. But the generous Bolaño section in November's Poetry gives me hope that this can change.


(Valerie Archambeau offers her opinion of Roberto Bolaño)