Literature, Life, and Modernity

The claim of works of literature to represent truths about the world is, at best, peculiar. Most literary works are fictional. Authors spend their time and energies in thematizing, in developing attitudes toward subject matters, and in seeking formal power and coherence. There are no procedures in view that can arrive at results about matters independent of human subjects and attitudes. In contrast, a proof in mathematics ends by reaching its final line, where each line that is not an axiom is generated in explicit accord with a rule of inference that in principle anyone might follow. Reports of experimental results generated in a lab specify procedures that were followed in setting up equipment and carrying out tests. While they often also offer conjectural interpretations of results and suggestions for further work, they describe minimally a procedure that anyone might follow in order to achieve a like-enough result. Hence we can speak readily of objective evidence that a certain state of affairs can be produced thus and so. In statistical social science, one finds reports of results from questionnaires or other data about populations expressed in numerical terms. Under the assumption that a larger population will not be too different from a sample, one can draw conclusions about distributions of traits and tendencies of development. History undertakes to tell us what happened, and the claims of professional historians are supported with reference to primary sources, indicated in footnotes. In economics, one often finds abstract mathematical models that describe processes of income distribution or GNP growth, for example, that are supposed to occur underneath a confusing surface of extra variables that induce deviations from the model. Among these cognitive practices, literature is perhaps most like economics in giving a model of certain processes in the world. This is scant comfort, however, since whether the processes described by economic models really do occur, on the one hand, or are rather fairy tales invented by clever calculators, on the other, is itself a subject of more than a little dispute. Literary models, moreover, if that is what literary texts offer us, are in even worse shape, since they focus only on very small numbers of mostly made-up cases, and they lack even the potential of refinement through the incorporation of further data.

Instead of focusing on literature as a form of cognitive work, then, we might think of works of literature as aiming at producing a certain sort of pleasure. If we further suppose that all pleasures are subjective and rankable only in terms of duration and intensity, then the point of literary works would be exhausted in their consumption, and there is not much more to be said than this. As Bentham notoriously remarked, all other things being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.

This view is unsatisfying, however, in that the experience of reading a powerful literary work is not really much like the experience of eating an ice cream cone or wallowing in a warm bath. It takes some work to pay attention. It is not exactly fun at every instant. The pleasure, if that is the right word, seems not to have much to do with sensory processes but more with the work that the reader is doing. And surely writers are trying to do something that is both cognitively available to their audiences and cognitively significant. But then, again, works of literature do not offer us results that are much like those of mathematics, laboratory science, history, or statistical social science. So we are faced with a puzzle. We seem to learn something from reading literature, but we have trouble explaining exactly how or what we learn—at least when we are in the grip of a certain picture of knowledge as the methodologically correct achievement of a fact-stating result.

It is easy to suggest that there must be a third way—between the forms of knowledge that are available in other disciplines and mere, predominantly sensible pleasure—in which literature is significant. We can see that this suggestion makes sense when we contrast art in general with scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and decoration and entertainment, on the other. Art is somehow in the middle here. If we are offered too many “flat” facts by a particular work, we are likely to find it merely journalistic and to want more pleasure. If we are offered too much pleasure, we are likely to find the work either decorative or an escapist guilty pleasure, like the novels of Ian Fleming or Dan Brown, say. We want, at least sometimes, to work harder and to learn more than that. But just how can we do this? The mere postulation of a third way does not yet answer this question.

In their valuable comprehensive survey Truth, Fiction, and Literature, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen explore a number of ways of thinking about literature as a source of knowledge. Centrally, they consider the following three suggestions: (1) Literary works might help us to know “what it is like” to be (or to be in the situation of) a certain character, in the sense of “subjective knowledge” characterized by Thomas Nagel and worked out with regard to literature by Dorothy Walsh. Against this, Lamarque and Olsen object first that while we have experiences while reading, we mostly have our own experiences, not the experiences of Leda or Leopold Bloom, Yeats or Joyce. In particular, we mostly observe or imagine characters having experiences. And while we take an interest in this observation, we are not learning the felt qualia of, say, fried kidney for Leopold Bloom. Second, even if we did get some sense of what things are like for characters from reading literary fiction, it is strained, Lamarque and Olsen suggest, to describe what we get as learning something. There are no methods in view for accrediting or testing any knowledge claims, such as there are in the sciences, and much of what we might think we learn we must in fact already have known in order to understand what is going on: for example, that rape is a violent, terrifying, and world-altering experience.¹ Or (2) literary works might enable us to enrich our store of concepts, or they might modify our sense of the application conditions of concepts we already possess, as Catherine Wilson and D. Z. Phillips have suggested. Against this suggestion, Lamarque and Olsen object that while some literary works might help us to deploy new concepts or to refigure the conditions of their application, this is by no means necessary for a work to have literary value. Second, and more sharply, they suggest that some authors sometimes explore the same concepts and conditions of application in different works, so that when one reads a second work, for example, a later play by Ibsen, one may not learn anything new. But the later work nonetheless has literary value; hence learning about concepts and their application conditions is not necessary for literary value (378–386). Or (3) it might be that literary works help us to become better perceivers of the moral lives of persons and so better reasoners about what it is good or right to do when, as Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam have suggested. Against this suggestion, Lamarque and Olsen object first that improvement in moral reasoning is by no means brought about by all successful literary works, and, second, that having or furthering the correct valuational stance is not a necessary condition for literary value: we can and do value as successful works with whose stances and points of view we disagree (386–394).

One might suspect that there is something wrong here with Lamarque and Olsen’s “divide and dismiss” strategy. Perhaps what we get from reading literature is some mixture of subjective knowledge, improvement of our conceptual capacities, and moral insight. Lamarque and Olsen themselves offer the positive suggestion that literature “develops themes that are only vaguely felt or formulated in daily life and gives them a ‘ local habitation and a name’” (452).² “Giving a name” at least hints that some sort of cognitive achievement is on offer. Literary appreciation, they further remark, “constitutes its own form of insight, its own kind of interpretation of thematic concepts” (409). But this form of insight, they argue, is better construed as the cultivation of understanding than as the acquisition of knowledge of true propositions. “Literary works can contribute to the development and understanding of the deepest, most revered of a culture’s conceptions without advancing propositions, statements, or hypotheses about them” (22). “We can imagine, ponder, entertain thoughts, or speculate about something without any commitment to the truth of our ruminations” (11). Literary practice is best understood as an imaginative exploration of themes that is guided by the literary work, which undertakes “to develop in depth, through subject and form, a theme which is in some sense central to human concerns” (450).

But while this talk of understanding is a good start, it leaves us not so far beyond where we were before. Exactly what do we understand when we understand the theme of a literary work? How is this understanding related to, but different from, propositional knowledge either that the world is thus and so or that the author thought thus and so (itself just another fact about the world)? How is this understanding cultivated by the experience of the work itself? What does it mean to “develop a theme in depth”? What, if anything, makes such development valuable in human life?

John Gibson suggests that the important cognitive work of literature consists in “bringing into full view our standards of representation [and] our linguistic criteria for what the world is.”³ A literary work may show some phenomenon “just as it is” (61); for example, we may see the essence of racism in the figure of Iago (61–62). Shakespeare’s presentation of Iago “draws together at … a level of clarity and order everything we call racism” (63), thus making the shape of our concept available to us for acknowledgment. This suggestion too is a useful start. But what it fails so far to explain is how we can fail to know the criteria of some of our concepts and, hence, why we need to explore and acknowledge them. Surely we need already to have some pretty clear command of the concept of racism in order to understand Iago’s actions at all. What further dimensions of our concept, then, are subject to repression or forgetting, and how do the details of the presentation of Iago as a literary character activate these dimensions? What, exactly, is the cognitive import of having our concepts activated and somehow “filled in”?⁴

Gibson further suggests that a general reason why we turn to works of literature is that we are able there to “read the story of our shared form of life” (50). This is the suggestion we must pursue if we are to have any hope of unpacking the jointly cognitive and emotional work of acknowledging and working through that reading literature makes available to us. So what is the story of our form of life? This enormous question is one that will have to be faced if we are to make any progress here.

Part of that story is the playing out of a biologically engendered imperative to survive. We need to eat, sleep, protect ourselves, and procreate in order to survive as a species, and we are, so far, wired well enough for success in these endeavors. In the absence of extraordinary strength or speed, we have managed cope with our environments mostly through superior cunning. We are better at recognizing and manipulating more features of our environments than are members of other species. In particular, as concept-mongering creatures, we are able not only to see objects brutely, as it were, as members of kinds; we are also able to see them from a point of view, as this or that. For example, a stone may be recognized by us as a weapon, a piece of building material, or an implement for scratching or shaping. A fundamental part of learning language is developing this repertoire of seeing an object as something. We manage this achievement not simply through picking up on the individuals-just-sorted-into-natural-kinds that are present in our environment. Other animals do this as well, but they lack our conceptual repertoire. My dog responds to the sounds of squirrels but does not think of them as mammals or rodents or nut gatherers. We, however, manage feats like this by picking up not only on our environments brutely, but also by picking up on how other human subjects are interacting with our shared environment, by picking up on their points of view on things.⁵ Our having of a wide repertoire of concepts and application criteria, enabling manifold different responses to our environment, is not a matter only of matching inner idea or Platonic archetype or brain state with object. It is a matter of learning to see things within multiple and shifting contexts of engagement and use, a matter of catching on to a large number of things that are done or might be done, by others and by oneself, at once with objects and with words, within practical engagements. In coming to be masters of words that encode objects and events seen in one way or another, in relation to multiple contexts of engagement and possible response, we are neither machines nor the quasi-automatons of Wittgenstein’s language game (2) in Philosophical Investigations. Rather we are creatures who have become capable of a life of plastic attention—capable, that is, of culture.

The fact that we develop conceptual consciousness not only in relation to problems of biological survival but also in relation to cultural contexts of flexible attention and engagement brings with it certain distinctive burdens and possibilities. Not only is one trying to survive; one is also trying to play the game of attending according to concepts both with others and in competition with others to have one’s own point of view and way of playing the game recognized. Concepts and words, for all that they register features of our environments there to be registered, are also, in their lives within cultural contexts of shifting attention and engagement, both stable enough to permit communication and sharing of a point of view on things and tolerant of new uses as new contexts of attention and interest develop.⁶ Hence coming to language and conceptual consciousness brings with it uncertainties about how to go on from where we are or where one is. Am I playing the game in the right way? Is my conceptual performance such that it can and should be taken up by others? Do I really know what I’m doing?⁷ What are evident and exemplary fluency and command in making moves with words? Just who do I think I am, and am I right about that?

These questions are such that they cannot and do not arise at every moment; comprehensive skepticism is not a genuinely available stance in life. But they are also such that they can always arise at some point, at least in modernity, where manifestly different ways of life develop and make themselves present in awareness. As the Kantian tradition emphasizes, a life with concepts is a life in which questions of judgment are always potentially in view, and the fact of continuing responsibility in and for conceptual performance is unavoidable. (It would be a mistake to see our concepts as self-standing representational “entities” existing outside of circuits of mimesis and training.) R. G. Collingwood tells the following wonderful story about what it is like to come to conceptual consciousness and language, thus becoming a subject of and in culture:

A child throws its bonnet off its head and into the road with the exclamation “Hattiaw.” By comparison with the self-conscious cry discussed earlier in the present section, this represents a highly developed and sophisticated use of language. To begin with, consider the emotion involved. The child might remove its bonnet because it felt physically uncomfortable in it, hot or tickled or the like; but the satisfaction expressed by the cry of “Hattiaw” is not a merely psycho-physical pleasure like that of rubbing a fly off the nose. What is expressed is a sense of triumph, an emotion arising out of the possession of self-consciousness. The child is proving itself as good a man as its mother, who has previously taken its bonnet off with the words it is now imitating; better than its mother, because now she has put the bonnet on and wants it to stay on, so there is a conflict of wills in which the child feels himself victor.⁸

As this example shows, even very early on in our life as possessors of conceptual consciousness and self-consciousness, we bear distinctive emotions and attitudes toward our situations. We are capable of accepting, working through, and expressing these emotions, with a resulting sense of a certain kind of triumph, when our point of view is recognized by others through our performances. We are capable also of sullenly shirking our emotions, avoiding them, or otherwise failing to express them, with a consequent sense of disappointment, frustration, and failure, and, sometimes, with a further wish to escape or reject the burdens of the responsibility for expression. When this happens, we then suffer or merely undergo our emotions, as we remain stuck in the state of having what Spinoza calls an inadequate idea of an affection: we don’t know what is worth caring about; we take no delight in the investment of our energies in our performances, and confused, unexpressed feelings wash over us.⁹ Our actions are as much reactions as expressions of our selfhood. Philosophical skepticism and its intimate antagonist epistemological realism are both at bottom misbegotten intellectualized efforts to repudiate the situation and expressive possibilities of conceptual consciousness and self-consciousness by describing them away. (What Stanley Cavell calls the truth of skepticism is the fact that the skeptic, at least, registers a certain failure and disappointment that attach to these efforts.)¹⁰ More happily, however, there are also what Charles Altieri calls “the kinds of satisfactions that are available for agents simply because of the qualities of consciousness they bring to what they are feeling.”¹¹ We can do something with these qualities of consciousness. As Wordsworth argues in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” the poet, through thinking “long and deeply” in relation to our feelings, may uncover “what is really important to men,” with the result that, when this course of discovery is taken up and followed, “the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.”¹² Friedrich Hölderlin on infinite satisfaction¹³ and John Dewey on consummatory experience¹⁴ describe in quite similar terms the distinctive sorts of satisfactions open to us as human subjects. The achievement of further understanding coupled with strengthened and purified affections, with both understanding and affections then discharged in a dense, medium-specific performance of working through, in which a point of view is made manifest and recognition and like-mindedness are successfully solicited, is what I have elsewhere called the achievement of expressive freedom.¹⁵ It has, I think, some claim to be regarded as an immanent telos of human life, made both possible, partially, and valuable for us by our mysterious possession of conceptual consciousness and self-consciousness, developed and worked out in relation to public media of expression.

It is impossible to prove the correctness of this view according to the standards of proof that are held in place in the Cartesian tradition. (Those standards were specifically developed in order to block talk of the purposes of things.) But it remains nonetheless an articulation of what is going on in human life that may be unavoidable and illuminating. If it has any chance of being right, then Lamarque and Olsen are wrong when they remark that “mostly, we simply do not meet the grand themes in trivial daily life” (455). Yes and no. Yes, we do not meet them clearly formulated and perspicuously manifested there; there is too much muddle for that, and there are too many different circumstances in which lives are led for it to be just obvious that we are in pursuit of expressive freedom. But no, we do meet these themes there latently, to be acknowledged, as we come to see our lives as in part caught up in situ in the pursuit of expressive freedom, involving articulate clarity and wholeheartedness of interest in life.

Great writers, then, manage to achieve expressiveness: that is, to face up to and work through the emotions and attitudes that come with being a human subject, as those emotions and attitudes are given specific contours in specific situations. They make it manifest for themselves and for us how a specifically shaped emotion, mood, or feeling has been brought about in or by a situation and how, further, that emotion, mood, or feeling can be accepted as appropriate. As a result, the emotion, mood, or feeling is actively accepted, not passively suffered. Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes the achievement of poetic closure from the reader’s point of view in just these terms:

For the reader, that is to say, the poem itself is experienced as coherent, closed, and designed, as its parts form a self-completing whole. This experience is a function of form, but not of form alone. It occurs in part because the poet has succeeded in making sense of experience and emotion, has succeeded in working them through to achieve acceptance and composure. As Herrnstein Smith notes, “the experience of closure is the complex product of both formal and thematic elements” (40). This means that the poet has found, formally, words and structures to thematize, connect, and accept experiences and emotions that were initially burdensome, troubling, exhilarating, or provocative. She goes on to note that many contemporary poems, beginning with Eliot and reaching a high point in Robert Lowell, exhibit increasingly “dialectical-associative” thematic structure. “In much modern poetry,” she remarks, “the occasion for a poem is … likely to be the existence of an ultimately unresolvable process” (247). There is what she calls a “poetry of non-statement” (254) that takes both subjective-lyrical stream-of-consciousness guises and objectivist-imagist-language play guises. The reason for this development is that we have grown, appropriately, skeptical of the availability and livability of “they lived happily ever after.” Nineteenth-century novels, as both Henry James and David Lodge have mordantly remarked, seem to end only with marriage, death, or an inheritance. In contrast, we have grown suspicious of the availability and value of these kinds of closure in life, which seems to us to be more complicated than that. But even in the contemporary poetry of antistatement, the shape and feeling of a particular instance of perplexity are expressively worked through, at least when things go well. The writer and the reader afterward come to know and accept exactly how there are complexities of situation and feeling. As Herrnstein Smith puts it, “a poem allows us to know what we know, including our illusions and desires, by giving us the language in which to acknowledge it” (154). Such an achievement of acknowledgment is available and important for us just insofar as we are human subjects who attempt to lead lives actively, with senses of meaning and of appropriate responsiveness to events, unlike Nietzsche’s cows, who do little besides undergo their lives.¹⁷ Unlike other animals, we remember and anticipate incidents quite widely, together with an awareness of how incidents and things are seen by others from multiple points of view. And so we wonder: Who am I to see, remember, and anticipate things like this? To what extent are my point of view and emotions toward things apt and appropriate? Am I genuinely acting as a reasonable subject in seeing things and feeling as I do?

In the grip of a healthy empiricism, it is of course possible to find this talk of expressive freedom and of leading a life actively to be quite misplaced in relation to what is after all also a sheerly material situation. There is, again, nothing like a proof by Cartesian standards that expressive freedom is the immanent telos of human life. But what does it look like, according to this conception, when someone rejects it and denies that expressive freedom matters for us and that it is partially, but only partially, available to us through different actions in different settings? (It is possible to say anything.) The Humean-skeptical, Darwininan-naturalist insistence that we are nothing but natural beings who must simply cope with things and the Cartesian-Platonist insistence that absolute knowledge of our place in nature can guide us if we but somehow think aright both appear as hysteria-driven denials of what it is to be a finite, active being in time. “You ask me,” Nietzsche once wrote, “which of the philosophers’ traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egypticism. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it, sub specie aeterni—when they turn it into a mummy.”¹⁸ To deny that our lives are caught up in becoming and in possibilities of the achievement of expressive freedom in part, but only in part, in relation to it can look like an attempt to deny or kill human life because it is too painful.

Yet as Nietzsche also remarked, it can also sometimes happen—if and when we manage ourselves to work through and express our emotions in a dense, commanding performance, or if and when as readers if we follow and participate in the workings-through of others—that we are left with the sense, at least for a time, “that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.”¹⁹ In a late notebook entry, Nietzsche describes the authentic state, a state that may either occur in life or be “set up” in art, as the state

Within experience, a pattern can sometimes be discerned, partially and dimly, in our relations as subjects to things and events, and emotions, feelings, attitudes, and moods can be experienced and worked through as appropriate to that pattern. Discovery and exhilaration are mixed with a sense also of mystery and complexity in the face of a becoming, a life in time, that is not wholly masterable. For this reason, great endings, as Steven Winn remarks, “define and disappoint, frustrate and gratify. They confer meaning and confirm the structure of what’s come before—in a movie, a sonata, a work of fiction. But they also kill off pleasure, snap us out of the dream, and clamp down order on experience that we, as citizens of the modern world, believe to be open-ended, ambiguous, and unresolved.”²¹

This experience of an ending is like what Aristotle describes as the catharsis—at once the clarification and unburdening—of an emotion in relation to a situation. But, as Frank Kermode notes, whereas “for Aristotle the literary plot was analogous to the plot of the world in that both were eductions from the potency of matter,”²² which eductions are presided over purposively by divine intelligence, for us the sense of plot in life proceeds at least in part from our own “store of contrivances” (40), as we are driven by “a need to live by [a] pattern” (109). We half believe in these patterns, as we experience our lives within them and experience possibilities of clarification of our situation. And yet we remain also aware of our own role as contrivers, aware of the lack of a presiding pattern that is everywhere evident in human life and aware also of our own failures to live in perfect freedom and infinite satisfaction, in the face of the mysterious complexities of becoming. And so we tell stories and attempt to work through our emotions in relation to the particulars of changing situations, so that we can, as Kermode puts it, both “avoid the regress into [a] myth” of presiding purposiveness and yet preserve the sense that “the scene [of human significance] has not yet been finally and totally struck” (43). Fictions that find plots, so as to work through emotions in relation to situations and experiences, remain for us both “deeply distrusted,” since they are only our contrivances, and “humanly indispensable,” since only these contrivances can give us the sense of leading a life meaningfully and actively. They offer us a way, even the way, to cope with both anxiety at a sense of the pervasive contingency of things and bad faith in fixed, master supernatural plots we can no longer trust (151). They are our means of coping with “the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality” (133), between the sense that every life is a parable of each, with meaning to be found, and the sense that there are only material happenstance and subjective “preference having.”

That we may through producing and effectively receiving exemplary works of art come to a fuller, more animated, more ensouled life, beyond mere preference having, yet also as individuals free from submission to alien authority, is a major subject of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907; second part, 1908). The new poems in general and the Thing-poems in particular result significantly from Rilke’s responses to the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rilke worked as Rodin’s secretary in 1905 and 1906, he wrote a 1903 monograph and a 1907 lecture on Rodin, and the first volume of Neue Gedichte is dedicated to him.²³ Rodin’s influence is evident in the Neue Gedichte in two distinct ways. His sculptures provided for Rilke a model of an animated, all but living work of art. As Judith Ryan puts it, “In Rodin’s sculpture, the interplay of light between the various surfaces creates for Rilke the sense of something that continues to shape itself before the eye of the beholder,”²⁴ as though the sculpture were alive. Second, “Rodin’s ideal of persistent workmanship,”²⁵ his sense of the importance of patience and craft, makes itself felt in the tightly controlled formal structure of the poems. The effect of animation in the poems then arises from the way in which inspiration and living energy, ideals Rilke associated with Theodore de Banville,²⁶ are submitted to formal control, in order to construct a living whole.

In a famous sonnet appearing as the first poem of New Poems: Second Part, Rilke describes what it is like to come suddenly, from within one’s middle situation, between dead, foreign materiality and perfect transcendence, to a sense of possibilities of fuller animation.

ARCHAÏSCHER TORSO APOLLOS

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,

darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber

sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,

in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug

der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen

der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen

zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz

unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz

und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und brächte nicht aus allen seinen Rändern

aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,

die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.²⁷

This poem describes not simply an object but preeminently an experience of an object, an experience had by or available to a “we.” The poem embodies an effort to formulate and to work through an experience of perplexity, both for the speaker and for other subject-viewers, to whom and for whom the poet may speak. The statue fragment is characterized above all in terms of its effect on the speaker-viewer, in its overwhelming presence to a viewing consciousness. Within that experience, the fragment presents itself as having an inside, felt as a source of expressive and sexual power that is brought to fullness of presence in its outer surface. The formed surface glows (glüht), gleams (glänzt), blinds the viewer (dich blenden), and bears a smile (ein Lächeln) as a promise of responsive sexuality. Its parts are not detached or misplaced (entstellt); instead the stone glistens (flimmerte) in its translucent falling (durchsichtigem Sturz), as though everywhere breaking out of its borders (brächte aus allen seinen Rändern), as if seeing us from every part of itself. These verbs describe the presence of what is inner in what is outer, in a way that is typical in Rilke’s mature work. As Ryan puts it, “the exploration of the relation between inner and outer realities, an attempt to transfigure loss, and an understanding of the aesthetic as a phenomenon of displacement are all characteristic features … of Rilke’s later writing.”²⁸ The speaker’s gaze moves from (absent) head down the front of the torso, following the arc of the glowing surface from prowlike breast to curving loins to genitals. The image of a smile in the turn of the loins is drawn, Ryan notes, “from an essay by Mallarmé on Théodore de Banville, whom Mallarmé regards as the supreme lyric poet of his time.”²⁹ The image of the turned-back (zurückgeschraubt, as in a gas jet turned back from flickering in order to provide steady illumination) candelabra is, Ryan suggests, “a recollection of Mallarmé’s sonnet ‘Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire.’”³⁰ Together, these two images emphasize the presence of controlled, animating, procreative power showing itself in the statue’s surface. The statue fragment is intensely expressively present, so that it serves as a standing rebuke to us, who fail to bring our own personality, intelligence, and expressive and sexual powers to full embodied expression but instead live at second hand, palely under conventions that lack full life for us. Hence the fragment rebukes us for failing to be what we dimly feel we might be and ought to be as possessors of unexpressed inner intelligence and power: more fully animate, more fitly ensouled.

And yet the poem is itself a classical sonnet, with an octave rhyming abba cddc followed by a sestet rhyming eef gfg. In place of a classical turn or volta after the octave, however, there are two turns: in line 5, with a move into the subjunctive in order to clarify and deepen the initial sense of the fragment’s glowing, and then in line 14, with the sudden and brutal ascription of quasi-agentive sight to the fragment, issuing in a rebuke to the viewer-subject, who falls under its gaze and judgment. This rebuke, felt by the viewer-subject and addressed first to himself and thence to us, his readers, is startling. But the eef gfg scheme of the sestet houses this rebuke in a structure of strong formal coherence, giving a sense of appropriateness and closure to the experience. Through the tightly controlled form and images, the rebuke is earned by the experience as it is registered in the poem itself. The poem itself, that is to say, strikes us, through its form and images, as a composed, animated, ensouled whole. As Ryan notes, in the first poem, “Early Apollo,” of New Poems: First Part, Rilke himself equates the overwhelming effect of an Apollo statue with the overwhelming effect of poetry in general. “There is nothing in the head, the speaker says, ‘was verhindern könnte, daß der Glanz aller Gedichte uns fast tödlich träfe’ (which could prevent us from being almost fatally wounded by the radiance of the poems).”³¹ The poem both rebukes us, its readers, in the way that the fragment has rebuked the viewer-subject, and shows us concretely that the housing of expressive power in controlled surface is still possible and commanding for us, even after the loss of the older dispensations.

For the poet, and for us who follow and share in the poet’s experience, first of the fragment and then of the poem itself as constructed yet as it were living object, it thus remains possible for experience to mean something, possible to have an adequate idea of an affection, with full investment in one’s responses to things, at least in principle. The trouble is that we are mostly too half-hearted to take this possibility seriously, perhaps half-hearted because the late modern world is so thoroughgoingly complex and opaque. Forms of technological and social expertise multiply and diverge, so that it becomes harder to sustain a sense of how they do or might form a meaningful whole. They seem detached or misplaced (entstellt), and coping and compromise seem inevitably to displace the pursuit of wholeheartedness. It may be a part of wisdom simply to accept much of this, much of the time. And yet: formal coherence blended with original power is possible and compelling. This poem exists, and its force can be felt, perhaps at some time by many and often by some: you must change your life.

To be sure, this poem is in a way a fiction. It does not report a material reality that is independent of subjectivity and discerned through practices of measurement. Rather it tells a story about an experience and its significance, where the terms of significance involve a sense of emplotment and possibility in human life that are not simply given in tradition or simple sense experience. That sense of emplotment and possibility is itself felt, both by the poet initially and subsequently by us who follow the poet’s feeling and thinking, as shaped or contrived in human time, just as first the fragment and then the poem have been shaped or contrived: we, like the poet, must construct it. Yet this sense is also felt as inevitable, present, and altogether other than arbitrarily invented: it is commanded of us in our contrivings by something that makes itself manifest in the formal and thematic working through of experience. In this working through, both the emplotment of this experience and the relation of this particular emplotment to a larger emplotment of human life are both constructed and accepted as given, by the poet and by us. This half-constructed, half-given experience of emplotment does not, however, admit of being fully unpacked and generalized into a master plot of human life as such. Perhaps either the unanticipatedly other and new will inevitably disrupt any settled life policy; perhaps nature and passion are the always present unruly birthplaces of any civil order. No recipe for how one is to change one’s life so as to achieve expressive power is on offer. Instead the speaker (by the statue) and we (first by the statue, insofar as we share the we-position of the speaker, and then by the poem) are stopped and reminded that something better, we know not what, at least not in specific detail, haunts and draws us. The initial we-position of the speaker is both reinforced, insofar as anyone may take the statue and the poem as admonishment and provocation, and suspended, as the force of any injunction is felt by an individual viewer or reader bereft of any directions about how to follow it objectively and with others. A “we” is posed but also suspended as expressive intensity is urged on us as individuals, and modern life remains a scene of both banality and unparameterized possibility.

Perhaps we should not call what we get from deeply absorbing, cathartic, yet contingency-acknowledging workings through of experience knowledge. Even framing the issue about the role of literature in our lives in terms of knowledge as it is construed paradigmatically in the natural sciences expresses the theoretical philosopher’s characteristic bad faith in wanting everything circumscribed and life guided by rationally obligatory rules. Yet we cannot live as human persons without this literature; what we get from it is a sense of life in a human reality that is, if marked by brute contingency, not everywhere dominated by it. Achievement of the free, powerful, and coherent ordering of the materials of one’s life is possible—if not wholly and continuously, nonetheless occasionally and exemplarily. A form of life that needs a highly charged modernist reminder of this possibility is a form of life whose energies are in danger of flagging and whose preoccupations are less than fulfilling as they stand. A form of life that contains such reminders and contains readers capable of responding to them is a form of life in which hope remains alive as hope. Rilke may be taken to have known that his concluding injunction would be experienced as brutal, as difficult and all but unreceivable, and hence to have known that it is a wager that his writing can find or forge its audience. Against Rilke, perhaps it is right that, often, we should refuse the wager, as complexity, compromise, and common decency make cowards of us all. The brutalities of art’s claims on us in the modern world should not be flattened into comfortable niceties. Yet it is not clear either that they always are or should be refused. The rest is silence: I cannot live to hear the news from England.