The Face of Glamour

I’ve seen a lot of them, lately: the bland, glamorous faces of models in advertisements for fashion and various luxurious commodities. They’re ubiquitous anyway, but my exposure has been amped up considerably by recent prolonged stays in airports and hotels, and a brief stint in hospital (I’m fine), where I’ve found myself leafing through glossy magazines.

The empty, blandly aloof gaze is everywhere in these magazines, in photo spreads as well as advertisements—a gaze we know from models on catwalks, too, a gaze so universally available that young people can mimic it effortlessly for the selfies they post on social media. But what lies behind that gaze? Why has it become the universal form of expression for glamorous images of human faces?

One possibility is that it exists to invite the viewer—that is, the potential consumer—in. As cool and off-putting as the expressionless face of the model may seem, it is, after all, an expression placed on the face of the consumer’s aspirational self. Whether the images appeal to the sexually objectifying male gaze is of secondary importance in most of the images, which exist to sell fragrances and clothing and accessories not to men but to women. The female viewer is, of course, expected to feel inferior to the woman in the image, but only because she has not yet acquired the product that (it is hollowly promised) will transform her, Cinderella-like, into the glamorous woman in the image. So a lack of expression could be a kind of invitation, a blankness or abstraction into which one is invited to project oneself.

The appeal of relative abstraction as a method of inviting the spectator to project his- or herself into an image is a well-established principle of graphic art. Scott McCloud, in his seminal study Understanding Comics, tells us “When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another,” however, “when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself…. The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled.” This has everything to do with the abstraction, the relative blankness, of the way characters are represented. We identify with the more abstracted features of the character, write McCloud, but

…on the other hand, no one expects audiences to identify with brick walls or landscapes, and indeed, backgrounds tend to be slightly more realistic. In some comics, this split is far more pronounced. The Belgian ‘clear-line’ style of Hergé’s Tintin combines very iconic [that is, abstracted] characters with unusually realistic backgrounds. This combination allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world. One set of lines to see. Another set of lines to be.

Certainly there is something to this, but it is equally true that, along with the pulling-in effect of the glamorous face, there is a pushing-away, a remoteness or aloofness. Roland Barthes, in his famous essay “The Face of Garbo,” gets something of the effect when he describes the blankness of Greta Garbo’s face in the film Queen Christina:

 …the make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster, protected by the surface of the color, not by its lineaments. Amid all this snow at once fragile and compact, the eyes alone, black like strange soft flesh, but not in the least expressive.

The abstraction of the face and the inexpressivity of the eyes elevated Garbo above the realm of ordinary mimesis: in Queen Christina she represented not a particular woman, in particular existential circumstances, but “offered to one's gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature,” a creature “descended form a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light.” Her remoteness is the remoteness of an ideal, and the blankness of the gaze is an important part of this removal from the sublunary world of particularity.

The blank gaze of the glamour model shows how she inhabits a purer, more ideal world than ours, a world beyond contingency and circumstance, a world where everything is sufficient unto itself. It repels us and our messy, flawed world—even as it provides a blank space into which we can project ourselves, as the consumers of the advertised products (and therefore as the inhabitants of the idealized world). John Berger, in the passages on envy in Ways of Seeing, describes exactly the self-sufficiency portrayed in the glamour model’s bland gaze:

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely on not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest—if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and others) of their power…. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. They look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.

There’s a reason the blank gaze has become the ubiquitous expression in advertisements for aspirational products: the combination of exclusion and potential inclusion, of aloofness and space for us to project ourselves, is a powerful vortex. And unless we enter some future mode of social organization in which social ratification is satisfied in more substantial ways than the promise that one will be envied if one buys what a particular glossy ad is selling, it’s a gaze to which we will continue to be subjected.

The Birth of the Death of the Author: Uncreative Writing circa 1968

We live in a great age of literary unoriginality.  It comes in many forms, from the mildly sordid and deceptive kind we've seen in prominent poetry plagiarism by C.J. Allen, Christian Ward, and David R. Morgan, to the highly-theorized and honest kind Kenneth Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff discuss in the context of poetry, to the grand claims for the novel-as-collage put forth  by David Shields.  Advocates of unoriginality should feel a certain satisfaction, then, in acknowledging that the idea of unoriginality is itself something quite long established, and that there is little new in our golden age of the unoriginal.

One could make a strong case for tracing the origins of contemporary unoriginality back to Roland Barthes' great essay of 1968, "The Death of the Author."  The essay seems to present us with a crime scene: the author has been killed.  Who did it?  Of course there is no real corpse, only the death of a certain idea of the author as a personality that can be referred to as the explanation of the text, the owner, the source, and the little god from whose head the poem or novel or essay sprung fully formed.  This figure, born with the rise of the modern bourgeois subject, was killed by a conspiracy of murders, chief among whom was Mallarme (his weapon: a belief that language was more important than the individual author), followed by Proust (wielding books in which the distinction between author and characters dissolved), and a gaggle of Surrealists (bristling with armaments, most of which had to do with the subconscious mind and the disempowering of the ego).  These conspirators were aided and abetted by modern linguists, who were happy to load their weapons with the latest munitions from the structuralist armories, including the explosive notion that the subject as not a person with agency so much as he was a mere function of linguistics.

When this gang had killed the author, Barthes tells us, they replaced him with a new figure more to their liking, someone Barthes calls the scriptor, whose only power is to mix and mingle pre-exising kinds of writing.  As the great conspiracy took hold, all the authors were killed and replaced with scriptors.  They looked the same, and had the same names, but they were entirely different creatures than the authors they replaced.  When we wanted an explanation of the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien the author, we looked to his life, saw his experiences in the first world war, and concluded that the terrifying battle scenes, pathos of comrades facing destruction, and sense of an overwhelming, continent-wide doom came from the author's own experience of war.  Not so when we looked at Tolkien the scriptor.  His novels made sense as the mingling of pre-existing modes of writing—as the coming-together of saga-literature, Norse mythology, Beowulf, and Victorian realism (no one in Norse mythology has to pack a lunch the way Tolkien's hobbits do).  The same process occurs across the canon of literature, as authors are replaced by scriptors: individual life-events cease to signify, and the Frankenstein-like stitching together of literary bits-and-pieces takes center stage.  All writing becomes rewriting, or even recycling, in the brave new world of the scriptor.

But what if the real crime scene here didn't involve a murder, but a theft?  What if Barthes weren't the originator of the modern idea of unoriginality?  What if he stole it from someone else?  I'm not talking about inheritance, here, although there is a long tradition of writing about the text as something the author doesn't create ex nihilo (think of Plato's Ion here, or Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent").  I'm talking about the possibility of flat-out robbery.

Consider the facts, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  Consider that in 1967, a year before the appearance of Mr. Barthes' essay, the novelist Italo Calvino wrote in a letter "For the critic, the author does not exist, only a certain number of writings exist."  Consider a later letter, in which he elaborated on the topic, saying "The living author, I believe, can never be taken into consideration.  To be able to study a writer, he must be dead, that is, if he is alive, he must be killed."  Consider, too, that Mr. Calvino knew Barthes—indeed, in the period leading up to Mr. Barthes' essay, Mr. Calvino was known to attend regularly Mr. Barthes' lectures in Paris.

It's intriguing to think of Barthes' grand theory of unoriginality being, itself, profoundly unoriginal.  Sadly, though, it's not so likely a case of theft as it seems at first glance.  When we look at the context of Calvino's remarks, it is clear that he's talking about the author as someone who is either ignored by scholars, who act as if he is already dead, or as a figure who disappoints readers after they've formed an image of him on the basis of his books.  His phrasing is as bold as Barthes'—and it is not inconceivable that the French critic pinched a good phrase from the Italian novelist—but his ideas are much more conventional.  Barthes' essay on the death of the author may present us with an exquisite irony: that there was considerable originality in the most powerful modern theory of the unoriginal.

Edgar Allan Poe and Bolaño’s Detectives

Poe was one of the greatest technicians of modern literature.  As Valéry pointed out, he was the first to attempt the scientific story, a modern cosmogony, the description of pathological phenomena.  These genres he regarded as exact products of a method for which he claimed universal validity.  In this very point Roberto Bolaño sided with him, and in Poe’s spirit he wrote “The time is not distant when it will be understood that a literature which refuses to make its way in brotherly concord with science and philosophy is a murderous and suicidal literature.  The detective story, the most momentous of Poe's technical achievements, was part of a literature that satisfied Bolaño’s postulate.  Its analysis constitutes part of the analysis of Bolaño’s own work, which has three of its decisive elements as disjecta membra: the victim and the scene of the crime, the murderer, the masses.  The fourth element is lacking—the one that permits the intellect to break through this emotion-laden atmosphere. Bolaño went without this because, given the structure of his instincts, it was impossible for him to identify with the successful detective.

Okay, I didn’t write that paragraph, not really.  And it isn’t really about Roberto Bolaño.  It’s a paragraph from Walter Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, with Baudelaire’s name changed to Bolaño, and a few other minor syntactical tweaks and omissions here and there.  The method is something I’ve ripped off from Benjamin Friedlander’s brilliant book of 2004, Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism.  In that book, Friedlander set out (in his words) to undertake “the creation of criticism through the strict recreation of an earlier critic's text (or, more precisely, through as strict a re-creation as the discrepancy between my source text and chosen topic would allow).” So the experiments in criticism consist of things like following the argument and phrasing of Jean Wahl’s A Short History of Existentialism to write a short history of language poetry.  Sometimes the criticism ended up saying things that Friedlander himself disagreed with, which is interesting: he’s really following Roland Barthes in erasing the author, and the author’s opinions, and replacing that figure with a “scriptor,” Barthes’ figure whose only power is to mingle different kinds of writing—in the case of Simulcast, the writing of Jean Wahl (and others) and the writing of the objects of criticism, like the language poets.

In the little paragraph above, where I hijack Benjamin to talk about Bolaño, I’ve done nothing near as bold as Friedlander does, because I actually agree entirely with the statement the paragraph makes about Bolaño.  I mean, the pervading atmosphere of Bolaño’s writing, from Nazi Literature in the Americas to The Savage Detectives, from The Romantic Dogs to Tres, and certainly in 2666 is a kind of noir desolation.  When there aren’t literally faced with victims and crime scenes, we’re still dealing with people who are in some way damaged, living in environments that reflect that damage.  The people we get to know in his work are always at odds with the great mass of people in society, and over everything there hangs a sense of a great wrong that has been done.  There’s never any real resolution, no true and satisfying success for any detective or searcher, though: in fact, there’s rarely anything specific at which one could aim one’s investigation. Bolaño is a writer of mood, and that mood is despair—the mood of an Edgar Allan Poe detective story without a detective to solve the crime.  I imagine this has to do with Bolaño’s generational experience: his is the generation of the Chilean revolution that failed, his is the generation of poets who could never come into the spotlight like their Latin American poetic predecessors had done, at least not in their lifetime.  He has a lot in common with an alienated outsider like Baudelaire, who could never quite find a social or political program into which he could channel his discontent for long.  I suppose that’s why when Benjamin nails it about Baudelaire, he nails it about Bolaño, too.

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.

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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.

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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.

*

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.”

Poetry/Not Poetry: Hopkins and Poe

What’s that you say? What? You’ll have to speak up: I’m trying to set the Samizdat temporal distortion teletype to the 1860s, and I keep on grinding the gears in the transmission. It’s making a hell of a noise. So: what? Oh! You’ve been reading my post from last July, about how the line dividing poetry from prose shifted in the early nineteenth century, and hasn’t really shifted back. You poor, sad person. I mean, this is how you spend your time? But I remember that post. I think the important bit was this:

I think we can say that something changed in the way we answered the question "how is poetry different from prose" right around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that, with some small modification, the new answer poets came up with at that time is still with us. This is Romanticism, people, nor are we out of it.

and maybe this:

“Poetry is always different from prose,” writes Roland Barthes, in Writing Degree Zero but in the classical period “this difference is not one of essence, it is one of quantity. It does not, therefore, jeopardize the unity of language, which is an article of classical dogma.” In other words, the classical or Augustan writer doesn’t grant poetry one of the rights that we moderns and postmoderns grant it: the right to follow rules significantly different from those governing discursive prose. It is more or less the same stuff, but with the added use of particular literary devices such as rhyme and meter. Think about it: Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man is more or less what it sounds like — a discursive, explanatory essay — it just happens to add versification. Even the title indicates a fundamental continuity between prose and poetry.

And then I sort of went on about how Coleridge saw poetry as involving a formal unity that was something an end in itself — that the poem was no longer paraphrasable, like prose. I think I quoted Colerdige’s essay on Shakespeare, where he said that in a true poem, the meaning cannot be paraphrased: “it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare… without making the author say something else, or something worse."

The point I was trying to make was that the idea of poetry became a kind of autonomy: the poem couldn’t be put at the service of conveying a meaning, because it couldn’t be paraphrased. Also, the the poem couldn’t be bound by compositional rules (as prose is), since it makes its own rules and defines its own formal harmony. I went on with this for a while, and then argued that a lot of our own poetics are a minor deviation from the Romantic position — we argue that the poem is autonomous, free of formal rules and free of particular meaning, but we tend to say this has to do with its discontinuity and disunity, rather than with its unity.

So. Is that all you wanted to talk about? No? You say you want further elaboration? Ah! Well, I’ve just been able to set the Samizdat temporal dislocation teletype to 1864. Unless it pops out of gear, we should be able to get some kind of Victorian feedback. Let’s see. Ah! We’ve got Gerard Manley Hopkins on the line. Let me check the tickertape for what he has to say…

Okay. So it looks like he sees poetry as falling into several different categories. “First and highest,” he says, there’s “poetry proper, the language of inspiration.” Set against this is something called Parnassian poetry. This is lesser stuff, and not inspired. “In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism, if you like.” Each poet will have a different idiom, but it is the simple fact that it is his or her idiom, the recognizable stock-in-trade kind of line in the oeuvre, that makes it Parnassian. It’s different from “poetry proper” because it seems to follow the author’s own rules of ordinary composition (think of Wordsworth’s meditative line, or Ashbery’s phrases-bumping-together, or Milton’s sublimity and inverted syntax, or what have you). “I believe that when a poet palls on us it is because of his Parnassian. We seem to have found out his secret,” or, in other words, his implicit system, his rules of composition — no matter how weird or arcane, we discover that “his poetry really does run in an intelligibly laid down path.”

This Parnassian mode is still better (because idiosyncratic) than what Hopkins calls the merely Delphic, which is simply plainspoken language put into verse. But true poetry, for Hopkins, eludes rules, even idiosyncratic ones. It stands free, autonomous, above explanation, as inspiration. What’s really interesting is (to borrow from and modify Barthes’ terms) the hyperdiscontinuity of language we find in Hopkins’ poetics. For him, it’s not just that real poetry is different from prose: it’s that real poetry is different from most of what we call poetry. I suppose we could see in this an intensification of the Romantic sense of poetry as distinct from prose by virtue of its various kinds of autonomy.

(We probably like to think we’re beyond such mystifications as the idea of inspired language, but an enormous amount of the writing about poetry now falls into a variant of this kind of thinking — it argues that poetry is beyond instrumentalism, disruptive of the rules of discourse, etc. So we’re walking down the same road walked by Coleridge, and later Hopkins. But I digress.)

Oh hell. The Samizdat teletype seems to have popped out of gear. Let me see if I can get it back…argh…ugh. Nope. Now it’s stuck in the 1840s. We’ll probably end up getting a transmission from Frederick William Faber or Caroline Clive or some other B-lister. Oh! Wait! We’ve got Edgar Allan Poe. Let me type in a question for him: “Hi Ed stop what makes a poem a poem stop just wondering stop Bob stop.” Wait for it… ah! The reply. He says he’s happy to discuss “the essentiality of what we call Poetry,” but we’ve got to be careful of what we mean:

…here, in the beginning, permit me to say a few words in regard to a somewhat peculiar principle, which, whether rightfully or wrongfully, has always had its influence in my own critical estimate of the poem. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.

I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient. That degree of excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all, cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any great length. After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags- fails- a revulsion ensues- and then the poem is, in effect and in fact, no longer such.

Okay. No one ever said Poe would be entirely coherent. I mean, he starts out talking about how a poem can’t be long, but then shifts on the fly to talking about how a reader can’t be attentive for long, which is a slightly different thing. Still and all, we get the general drift, and it’s a drift not too different from that of Hopkins: poetry is not like most other language. In fact, since the bulk of most long poems isn’t really poetry, real poetry isn’t like much of what passes under the name of poetry. There’s a real discontinuity between poetry and prose, and between poetry and much of what we call poetry.

But there’s more! It’s not just the case that poetry is defined by that post-Augustan discontinuity of language Barthes described: it’s also the case that poetry is autonomous. It’s free, for Poe, of any need to communicate any particular content, and exists as an end in itself. He begins by attacking anyone who sees a didactic use for poetry, then makes his point about autonomy:

It has been assumed, tacitly and avowedly, directly and indirectly, that the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth. Every poem, it is said, should inculcate a moral, and by this moral is the poetical merit of the work to be adjudged. We Americans especially have patronized this happy idea, and we Bostonians very especially have developed it in full. We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem's sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem's sake.

So there it is: the old Romantic line about autonomy and the discontinuity of language passes straight through the middle decades of the nineteenth century before arriving at the New Critical phase of the “heresy of paraphrase,” and then morphing into the “disjunction is poetic” world of elliptical poetry.

But I seem to have spilled my milkshake into the Samizdat temporal distortion teletype, and lost the connection to Poe. In fact, I seem to have gummed up the works pretty badly. I doubt we’ll be using the gizmo again.

Poetry/Not Poetry

Where do we draw the line between what is poetry and what isn't poetry? Or, more specifically, what makes a poem a poem? Ask a poet like Howard Nemerov, and you'll get a beautiful answer, in the form of a poem called "Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry":

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

It's nice (especially since it compliments poetry, making it fly, while prose merely falls), but in the end Nemerov's answer about the nature of poetry is evasive, offering little more than the "I'll know it when I see it" argument that people used to invoke in debates about pornography.

I don't really have a better way to answer the question, except to say that the only real way to answer anything is to quit looking for trans-historical, absolute truths and start rooting around in contexts, in the history of how a question has been answered, and the reasons those old answers made sense at the time. If we do this, I think we can say that something changed in the way we answered the question "how is poetry different from prose" right around the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that, with some small modification, the new answer poets came up with at that time is still with us. This is Romanticism, people, nor are we out of it.

One of my touchstones, when I want to think about pre-Romantic poetry in French or in English is a statement by Roland Barthes in his great, early study Writing Degree Zero. Here, he argues that for poets of the pre-Romantic period, there was a fundamental similarity between good poetry and good prose. “Poetry is always different from prose,” writes Barthes, but in the classical period “this difference is not one of essence, it is one of quantity. It does not, therefore, jeopardize the unity of language, which is an article of classical dogma.” In other words, the classical or Augustan writer doesn’t grant poetry one of the rights that we moderns and postmoderns grant it: the right to follow rules significantly different from those governing discursive prose. It is more or less the same stuff, but with the added use of particular literary devices such as rhyme and meter. Think about it: Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man is more or less what it sounds like — a discursive, explanatory essay — it just happens to add versification. Even the title indicates a fundamental continuity between prose and poetry. Prose and poetry are more or less up to the same sort of things: explaining, talking, arguing, narrating.

And why did people write poems? Many reasons, of course: but they tended to be the same sorts of reasons one writes prose: utilitarian ones. Often poetry was a courtly game, but all games have some purpose. In this case, it was to show one's wit and cleverness — sort of a peacock's tail thing, in that verse may have seemed useless, but it was a sign of health and desirability, therefore useful in securing a mate or some sort of payoff or privilege. Not that there weren't critics of the rewarding of such displays, like Lord Burleigh, who objected to Queen Elizabeth giving Edmund Spenser a hundred pounds in recognition of a poem, shouting "All for a song?!?" Sometimes there were market motives (remember Johnson's comment that no one but a blockhead ever wrote for any reason other than money?). Sometimes there were more elevated, socially concerned ideas — think of Sir Philip Sidney's argument that poetry presents us with ideal worlds and characters we can try to emulate, since the poet "goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done... Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden." The old John Donne wrote to save souls ("batter my heart, three-personed God!"), the young John Donne wrote to get laid ("For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love!"). So: personal advancement, money, getting the girl, social improvement, didacticism: there were a host of good, utilitarian, reasons to write a poem, just as there were a host of good, utilitarian reasons to write a piece of prose. Prose and poetry were close cousins formally (one just had extra verse elements), and close cousins in terms of their telos or purpose.

Then things got weird.

They got weird right around the time the Romantics hit the stage (not that this is a bad thing: indeed, it's the beginning of everything I most love in poetry). Suddenly, poetry wasn't more-or-less continuous with prose, or prose-plus-special-effects: there was what Barthes calls a "discontinuity of language." Poetry was reborn as something very different from prose, and different from verse, too.


Consider Coleridge's famous definition of poetry in the Biographia Literaria. Here, we learn that poetry, unlike prose, generates its own rules. We learn that the poem, unlike prose, looks inward upon itself, seeking a co-ordination of all parts to the whole. And we learn that the statement or use-value or telos of the poem is secondary to its formal composition. Poetry is strangely autonomous, being all about its formal wholeness, rather than any specific external purpose. Poetry, says Coleridge, is a kind of communication “opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species… it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." The organic harmony of the “legitimate poem,” Coleridge continues, necessitates that the parts

… support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts.

It is the fusing of all elements that is essential to the poetic work— so much so that Coleridge comes to include within the category of poetry all works, including those in prose, that reconcile all their diverse elements.

It almost doesn’t matter to Coleridge how such fusing is accomplished. Or, rather, it does matter, in that a particular form of the fusing must not be prescribed: “could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry” says Coleridge. This does not mean the work is arbitrary, though, merely that it must generate its own rules from within. Coleridge’s most elegant formulation of this principle comes in the essay “Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius,” where we read that “No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither is there any danger of this,” because “genius cannot be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes genius — the power of acting creatively under laws of its own creation." Such self-generated rules are, in fact, Coleridge’s famous “organic form,” arising from within each true aesthetic or poetic work.

This business of the poem’s autonomy, its inner, organic wholeness, and its fusing of disparate elements is familiar enough stuff to students of Romanticism. But it’s worth rehearsing in the present context because of what it implies for the meaning of poetry. Because of its intense organic fusing-together of all of its parts, the poem has what Coleridge, in his essay on Shakespeare’s genius, calls “untranslatableness.” In a true poem, the meaning cannot be paraphrased: “it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand,” says Coleridge, “than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare… without making the author say something else, or something worse." Indeed, the meaning, in the sense we usually reserve for that word as something comprehensible and cognizable, is irrelevant to the work’s status as a poem: the poem’s deepest meaning lies in its activity of bringing together apparently disparate elements.

One refraction of all this is the idea of the symbol. “Symbol” is a term that Coleridge uses inconsistently over the course of his career, but the important sense for the present context comes in a passage of The Statesman’s Manual where Coleridge tells us that, unlike the allegorical figure, the symbol is characterized “above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal." Unlike the allegory, with its one-to-one relation of sign and meaning, the symbol offers polyvalence and endless suggestive possibilities. Interpreting the symbolic work is an ongoing coming-toward and escaping-of full apprehension (think of Coleridge's own "Kubla Khan" here: it is pregnant with meaning, but you can't pin it down to any particular meaning). The symbolic work is certainly at a far remove from the simple, discursive statement of a particular meaning. As Coleridge states in an appendix to The Statesman’s Manual, “discursive understanding, which forms for itself general notions and terms of classification” can only give us “Clearness without Depth." Poetry, when it is symbolic, gives us depth without clarity. We can never quite say what it means, or what it proposes to accomplish in the world.

So poetry becomes a bit of an embarasment in a utilitarian society (and nineteenth century society was getting more and more utilitarian by the day). Poets were meant to chase mysterious symbols, and create organic wholes. The old laureate job or writing odes to the monarch became something of a joke, out of step with the new notion of what poems were all about. The poet isn't supposed to answer to any patron, or, for that matter, to try to make things happen (there were exceptions — consider Shelley's political rabble-rousing poems, but the general trend was toward organic form, symbol, autonomy of imagination, and all the rest). The poet became, in some sense, a figure outside of society. The poet's work was either a quiet withdrawal from bourgeois utilitarian society, or an angry rejection of it. Take your pick. Either way, poetry was different from prose in two respects: it played by different rules, and it was written for different reasons. All of this was new with Romanticism.

While these things may have started with Romanticism, they continued after the Romantic movement in new permutations and combinations. The French Symboliste movement (Mallarmé and company) was in some ways an intensification of the idea that the poem was beyond paraphrase (it should be like music), beyond utility, beyond the logic of means-and-ends. And, despite some of their anti-Romantic rhetoric, the American New Critics in the 20th century made huge intellectual investments in Coleridge's ideas: "The Heresy of Paraphrase" is a rehashing of Coleridge, and the New Critical ideas of irony and balance are just Coleridge's organic form revisited. The poem was about itself, about form, and not subordinate to anything else. (If the Romantics turned to the autonomy of art because they were critical of utilitarian values, the New Critics were a bit different: there's a real story to be told about how they saw the autonomous poem as an essential component of the autonomy of English as an academic discipline: if poems were essentially different from prose statements, they needed a special academic department. If they were like prose, they could be absorbed into history or sociology or whatever — this actually comes up in their correspondence with one another).

But we're past all that now, right? Well, no. In many ways, I think some of the most thoughtful poets of the last few decades have been practicing a kind of modified or inverted version of Romanticism. Think about elliptical poetry: so much of it is all about the lack of formal coherence that you think it'd be the farthest thing from Coleridge's organic form or its New Critical offshoot, the well-wrought urn. But the deliberate incoherence of elliptical poetry is really out to accomplish the same sorts of things Coleridge outlined. First of all, elliptical techniques are all about differentiating poetry from prose, about upholding what Barthes called "the discontinuity of lanuage." Poetry is different, we see, because it doesn't try for prose coherence. And in the deep ambiguities and incoherencies of elliptical verse, we're looking at effects similar to those Coleridge saw as belonging to the symbol: we avoid paraphrasable meaning, we escape the utilitatian logic of means-and-ends. Some see this as purely a matter of beauty, some see it as a critique of a society that relies on a logic of language to support its logic of power. Again, all of this is vey much in line with the general trend of thinking that runs from Coleridge through Mallarmé, and even through the New Critics.

So: where do we draw the line between poetry and not-poetry? Well, it seems that we've been doing it by insisting on poetry's autonomy, its freedom from use-value, its freedom from specific meaning. Poetry is poetry because it is unlike prose: it is more free, and stands somehow (we like to think) outside of the utilitarian world. That seems to be the best answer we've come up with in the two centuries since the poets left off praising popes and princes in exchange for patronage. I wonder: how long it will last? For now the old answer flies, but someday it, too, will fall.