Similar mind-body dualisms pervade Stevens's writing: the possibility that a genius or spirit--like Lippmann's phantom or Rand's society, an "organism that possesses no physical form"--might transcend and intend an otherwise inhibiting physical world is wholly consonant with the utopic vision in "Insurance and Social Change" of a "perfect insurance" under whose aegis all wishes instantly become reality. More specifically, in "Surety and Fidelity Claims" , his only other surviving essay on insurance, Stevens imagines an insurance agent whose body vanishes into his work as a result of his ability to guarantee plans: the surety agent, who provides bonds guaranteeing the fulfillment of contracts, "finds it difficult sometimes to distinguish himself from the papers he handles and comes almost to believe that he and his papers constitute a single creature, consisting principally of hands and eyes: lots of hands and lots of eyes." 58 As pure interpersonal, communicative facility (with hands, eyes, and a body of text), Stevens's agent guarantees the elimination of chance and the fulfillment of contract by dispossessing himself of the bulk of his body. This is the panacea of national planning: a vision of the private imagination gone public, the beginnings of a truly collective agency enabled by minds acting and thinking together in spite of all physical demarcation.
It is, however, a panacea "The Idea of Order" will dismiss. The fourth stanza in particular makes clear that the difficulty of the question "Whose spirit is this?" is that bodies and voices designate the only recognizable markers of human identity and agency. Lippmann's public and Keynes's spirits are in the end impotently passive precisely because they are abstract entities. Likewise for Stevens, if spirit is completely disembodied, it becomes invisible and potentially manifold, difficult to identify and understand as a coherent intentional force. In the fourth stanza the speaker is thus unable to locate any origin for the cacophony of voices he hears--without any one body, spirit seems to transcend the sum of its sources:
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that . . .
["IO," 129]
What first promised to be a poetic event caused by one intentional agent goes on to emerge as a sublime and agentless natural event; "meaningless plungings" and "bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons" ("IO," 129) overcome the speaker in all their accidental grandeur, overwhelming his efforts to imagine one mind capable of serving as a cause for the tumult before him.
What follows at first seems a typical compensatory gesture designed to consolidate the autonomy and cognitive powers of the isolate and intentional mind. Almost inexplicably, the speaker now appears to accord the singer her constructive powers:
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
["IO," 129-30]
At first glance, these assertions seem successfully to mitigate the sublime excess to which the speaker just bore witness. Yet this is at best an ambivalent moment of compensation, for it insists upon the necessarily hermetic nature of the imaginative powers conceded the singer. The seemingly definitive claim "She was the single artificer of the world" is qualified by the enjambed phrase "In which she sang," suggesting that the world in which the singer sings is not necessarily the same as the world in which the speaker moves. The claim made in the stanza's final two lines similarly allows a world-constructing agency at the moment that it signals the singer's potential alienation by qualifying the parameters of her world. Indeed the qualifying "for her" looms large in a line that sets off the claim for world-making with the assertion of the social "we" speaking the poem: "Then we, / As we beheld her striding there alone, / Knew" (emphasis added). 59
The speaker does not know, however, who or what makes the order in the town, which stands in marked contrast to the natural setting of the first half of the poem. The singer having concluded her song, the speaker wants to know
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town . . .
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
["IO," 130]
Still searching for an agent--still, that is, unable to answer the question "Whose spirit is this?"--the speaker tentatively attributes agency to synthetic as opposed to natural phenomena, such that "the lights in the fishing boats" have "Mastered the night and portioned out the sea."
The rationalized and geometric nature of the civic displaces as well an expressive privacy that stands in opposition to the public of two that observes the singer. Subject to the sustained critical observation of two male viewers, it is her mind, not her body, that most forcefully registers the singer's isolation from the social, and her concomitant intimacy with the natural. Throughout the 1930s Stevens would dissociate the intentional mind from public order--he writes in "Adagia" that "The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself" ("A," 199; emphasis added). After noting that "The mind is not equal to the demands of oratory, poetry etc." ("A," 200), he goes on to declare that "Poetry is a cure of the mind" ("A," 201). Hence the prevalent critical conviction that in Stevens the mind is most suspect when it seeks to realize itself in a publicly apprehensible reality. 60 Poetry did not, as Frost's Tityrus suggests it should, rescue the private imagination from the public sphere so much as it rescued collective groups of persons existing in a public sphere from their commitment to the private imagination, and from their corollary belief that they could make life secure by somehow realizing in a social domain the worlds they collectively imagined.
The fifth stanza therefore concludes by confirming the incompatibility of the singer's song with the world to which the speaker and his companion return in the last stanza of the poem, a public world in which lights on fishing boats are the only identifiable traces of an agency that now, more than ever, seems to have no identifiable source. "Turning," in what looks to promise a quintessentially modernist act of poetic conversion, "Toward the town" ("IO," 130), the speaker turns toward a public sphere dominated by bodies open to experience but unable to direct the course of their world. Rather than getting rid of bodies, Stevens gets rid of minds; here too "People take the place of thoughts." It is not until the cryptic emergence of "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds" ("IO," 130) in the poem's last line that we begin to understand what this conversion promises.
In his landmark essay "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" , the linguist Benjamin Whorf proposes that hearing is the most notable of those "nonspatial" perceptions that are rendered "spatial" by "linguistic metaphorical system[s]." 61 This linguistic production of order is at times a risky business, for it contributes to "behavior evincing a false sense of security or an assumption that all will always go smoothly, and a lack of foreseeing and protecting ourselves against hazards" (LT, 154). The "indifference to the unexpectedness of life" (LT, 154) built into Standard Average European language groups motivates the essay, committed as it is to demonstrating that specified language patterns form the bedrock upon which individuals build their perceptual abilities and ultimately their behavior. 62
Whorf's first ideas on this topic were formed, he claimed, while working "in a field usually considered remote from linguistics" (LT, 135). That field was insurance, and the insurance company for which Whorf worked was Stevens's, the Hartford Fire and Indemnity Company. Whorf consequently published the findings that formed the basis for "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" in The Hartford Agent, the house journal that first carried Stevens's "Insurance and Social Change." In fact, it was while Stevens was vice president of Hartford that Whorf conducted experiments in how different phrases on fire-warning labels enabled individuals to perceive danger. Individuals anticipated future danger, Whorf insisted, through language, specifically through highly specified language patterns. Correctly phrased labels, reasoned Whorf, might thus key the individual into a perceptual mode adequate to the situation at hand, a mode meant to register the ghostly presence of risks that are themselves only fictions of the potential, inductions from past events. The warning label, then, was seen to function in a manner strikingly similar to the way the insurance company's proliferation of risk groups keyed individuals into potential dangers of which they were previously unaware; a person informed he is part of a given risk group, for example, will discover danger in actions and behaviors once thought to be harmless.
If warning labels represented one way specialized language systems enabled individuals to discover hazard in the world around them, Whorf reasoned that poetry was another (LT, 260). Stevens--still Whorf's boss when he made this suggestion--was of course himself concerned throughout his poetic career with how poetic language enabled individuals to refine their perceptions of an impersonal world they could not control. "Esthétique du Mal" , for example, is an attempt to generate an apparatus of perception for danger and pain in a world that has come to think of both in abstract and impersonal terms. "Life is a bitter aspic," the poem insists. "We are not at the center of a diamond." 63 Thus the third-person conditional claim in the poem "That he might suffer or that / He might die" is met with the compensatory suggestion that poetry might do more than simply smooth the edges of looming suffering and death. 64 Poetry, Stevens would claim in poem after poem, addressed the reality of pain and suffering by enhancing empirical perception; it was, he claimed in "The Man with the Blue Guitar" , "A composing of senses." 65
"The Idea of Order" ends with just such a composing of senses, with the cryptic emergence of "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds" from "[t]he maker's rage to order words of the sea" ("IO," 130). That the poem's demarcations have been ghostly throughout hardly needs reinforcing; moving from sea to town, the speaker remains unable to distinguish cause from effect. What is significant, however, is the insistence that "keener sounds" emerge precisely in his inability to distinguish between the two. Only in giving up the search for the origin and source of effects, the line suggests, do individuals begin to experience these same effects with heightened acuity, with an enhanced ability to distinguish, to refine, to classify. "Keener sounds" is in this respect the poem's true compensatory offering, a tendering of Whorfian logic--that poems, like all language systems, guard against chance by producing the awareness of risks--in the wake of the speaker's realization that he cannot locate the ultimate source of any order, either natural or synthetic.
But then who creates the order that does organize the town at the close of "The Idea of Order at Key West"? Who is the maker of which the final stanza speaks? Is he or she what Stevens calls elsewhere "a separate author, a different poet, / An accretion from ourselves, intelligent / Beyond intelligence, an artificial man"? 66 Is this "separate author" the "personality of the first plane" Stevens speaks of in "Insurance and Social Change"? Whorf would refer the ability of this personality to act "without stopping to think"--Stevens's essay is published in the company journal just two years earlier--to his efforts to personify language as a mass mind that legislated the actions of individuals. "It is as if the personal mind," he argues, "which selects words but is largely oblivious to pattern, were in the grip of a higher, far more intellectual mind, which has very little notion of houses and beds and soup kettles, but can systematize and mathematize on a scale and scope that no mathematician of the schools ever remotely approached" (LT, 257).
What matters most in "The Idea of Order" however is the simple fact that no human being within the poem can be this kind of separate author or different poet. Most of all, the author of the poem itself does not qualify. "[T]here are words / Better without an author, without a poet," Stevens writes in "The Creations of Sounds" . 67 Throughout his career Stevens would suggest that--like the solitary singer who cannot definitively be said to order her world--not even the poet could experience the meaning of the poem as willed or intended. Stevens notes in "Adagia" at this time that "a poem is like a natural object" ("A," 205) and that "It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem" ("A," 191). Thus Stevens invents the quintessential mystification of poetic authority, a mystification that formalizes the refusal of intentional agency thematized in "The Idea of Order" itself. "Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind," he writes; "It has to be a revelation of nature" ("A," 191). 68
By the seventh stanza of the poem, then, the frames collapse even the poet into an all-inclusive population marked by the impotency of the mind: "the maker's rage to order words of the sea" offers knowledge "of ourselves and of our origins" ("IO," 130) at the precise moment that the referent for "ourselves" and "maker" is expansively inclusive. The speaker, like those around him, like the poet himself, does not personally intend or otherwise cause the aggregation of this collectivity; in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," Stevens, in the process of rejecting public statuary in favor of continuous song, explains that this is the gift of public experience, "To discover an order . . . to find, / Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all" ("NT," 404). Indeed membership in this population group is defined by all those things individuals cannot impose upon the future, and by these criteria, the reader, like the author, is as much a member as any character in the poem.
But what exactly does it mean to claim that the poem itself has no maker? Stevens's poetry after the New Deal, as well as the New Critical theory his poetry was so influential in establishing, would answer this question head-on. His poetry staged the incapacity of intentional agency, and he maintained that their making and reception rehearsed the same: "The basis of criticism is not . . . the hidden intention of the writer" (L, 390), he writes in 1941. It would remain for the New Critics to theorize this quintessentially New Deal disavowal: "The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's," note W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in "The Intentional Fallacy"; "it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it." 69 Here again we see the insistence that poetry and criticism address themselves to the abdication of control, to the fatuity of the intentional. 70 Control and intention certainly are not recouped in Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Affective Fallacy," where the two make clear that the reader does not determine or cause the poem any more than the poet or critic. This seems to leave a vacuum: exactly who does intend or control the poem; exactly who is the maker of a poem? Having disqualified all the individual sources of agency that might make claim to that office, Wimsatt and Beardsley move, in a by now familiar fashion, to the necessarily impersonal mechanism of the public itself, claiming that "the poem belongs to the public." 71 What that public could finally be, and how a poem could actually belong to it, remains a concern, a question of literary theory on the one hand, and federal funding for the arts on the other.
Michael Szalay, currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan, is also a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. He is now finishing his book New Deal Modernism, which is about the relation between aesthetic and political forms of organization during the rise of the welfare state.
My thanks to Frances Ferguson, Allen Grossman, Walter Michaels, Jennifer Ashton, and Mark McGurl for their invaluable contributions to this essay.
1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Annual Message to the Congress," in The Court Disapproves, vol. 4 of The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Russell and Russell, 1938-50), 17.
2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Presidential Statement upon Signing the Social Security Act," in The Court Disapproves, 324.
3. Ibid.
4. Wallace Stevens, "Insurance and Social Change," in his Opus Posthumous, rev. ed. (New York: Knopf Publishers, 1989), 233; hereafter abreviated "ISC."
5. Wallace Stevens, "Adagia," in Opus Posthumous, 193; hereafter abbreviated "A."
6. Stanley Burnshaw, "Turmoil in the Middle Ground," New Masses, 1 October 1935, 41-42.
7. John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York: Scribners, 1938), ix. Stevens's poetry had been understood in these terms since at least the publication of Harmonium : in 1925 Gorham Munson argued that Stevens's poetry ignored the disturbing side of life, prering a line of criticism given its strongest expression in Yvor Winters, who sees Stevens's poetry as prim and hedonistic, an esthete's imaginative haven from the prosaic vagaries of life. Ransom, Munson, and Winters in this manner each deride a poetry fundamentally antagonistic to the social and the civic, and grant Stevens his poetic security only by sequestering his poetry from the reality that groups of persons collectively shared. See Gorham Munson, "The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens," Dial 79 (November 1925): 413-17; and Yvor Winters, "Wallace Stevens, or the Hedonist's Progress," reprinted in In Defense of Reason (Denver: Alan Swallow), 431-59.
8. Wallace Stevens, "The Irrational Element in Poetry," in Opus Posthumous, 229.
9. The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ed. John Gabriel Hunt (New York: Random House, 1995), 96; hereafter abbreviated FDR. Stevens parodies marxist attempts to plan the future when he has a Burnshaw-styled ideologue declare, "Everything is dead / Except the future" in the first stanza of "Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue" (Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 78).
10. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law, ed. Mark DeWolf Howe (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 76.
11. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 44; hereafter abbreviated CF. For other work concerned with the relation between class politics and literature during the 1930s, see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Avon, 1952); Marcus Klein, Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Eric Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-1939 (New York: St. Martins, 1986); Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Alan Filreis, Modernism from Left to Right: Wallace Stevens, The Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U. S. Proletarian Fictions, 1929-1941 (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
12. John Dos Passos, "The Writer as Technician," in American Writers' Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York: International Publishers Co., 1935), 79.
13. Richard Wright, "Personalism" , unpublished manuscript, Richard Wright papers, Schomberg Library, New York.
14. Richard Wright, Native Son and "How Bigger Was Born" (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 535; hereafter abbreviated N. See Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943 (New York: Little Brown, 1972) for an account of the Creative Writers' Project.
15. Robert Frost, "Build Soil, A Political Pastoral," in The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Latham (New York: Henry Holt, 1969), 34; hereafter abbreviated "BS."
16. Stanley Burnshaw recalls that he spent substantial time as an editor of the New Masses in frustrated attempts to decipher Robert Frost's poems, in the hope of discovering exactly what Frost thought of Roosevelt; see Stanley Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself (New York: George Braziller, 1986).
17. Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), 216.
18. See my "Inviolate Modernism: Stein, Hemingway, Tzara," Modern Language Quarterly 56 (December 1995): 457-85.
19. Of course Frost's Tityrus--like Frost himself--does not imagine there is much difference between working for the state and working for the university: he tells Meliboeus to "Join the United States and join the family-- / But not much in between unless a college" ("BS," 325). "I keep my eye on Congress, Meliboeus," notes Tityrus. "They're in the best position of us all / To know" ("BS," 317).
20. "Provide, Provide," in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Latham, 307.
21. For a discussion of the pronoun in pastoral, see the introduction to Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: From Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
22. Peter Cosgrove, "Snapshots of the Absolute: Mediamachia in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," American Literature 67 (June 1995): 329. Another critic uses this same antinomy when he describes Stevens responding to Social Security by "redoubl[ing] his rhetorical efforts to establish a private poetic that can reduce the anxiety occasioned by current history" (Joseph Harrington, "Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of National Insurance," American Literature 67 [1995]: 110). This reading is crucially incorrect for Stevens, as I will show.
23. François Ewald, "Insurance and Risk," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 203.
24. George Bernard Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1945), 109.
25. For Foucault's work on insurance and Social Security, see "Social Security" and "The Dangerous Individual," in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988).
26. Burnshaw, "Turmoil in the Middle Ground," 41, 42.
27. "Interview with Stanley Burnshaw," by Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, Wallace Stevens Journal 13 (fall 1989): 113.
28. The Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 293; Wallace Stevens, in The Letters 293; this volume is hereafter abbreviated L.
29. Nicholas Barr, The Economics of the Welfare State (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 111.
30. Robert Frost, quoted in Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself, 10.
31. Holmes, The Common Law, 77. In 1936, Jean-Pierre Maxence, mourning France's commitment to the welfare state, and its concomitant distance from the Axis powers, claimed, "While most countries of Europe are being led towards greatness and adventure, our leaders are inviting us to transform France into an insurance company" (Jean-Pierre Maxence, quoted in Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 17).
32. Josephine Herbst, The Rope of Gold (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 158, 33; emphasis in original. More recently, Daniel Defert has insisted that insurance is "a generalizable technology for rationalizing societies[,] . . . a re of social organization which far transcends the choice which some thinkers are currently putting to us between the alternatives of privatization and nationalization of security systems" (Daniel Defert, "'Popular Life' and Insurance Technology," in The Foucault Effect, ed. Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, 215).
33. Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What, 109, 114.
34. Frank Warren, Liberals and Communism: The Red Decade Revisited (1966; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 106.
35. Constructing a corporate-liberal alliance with big business, the state looked to stabilize the market by eliminating wasteful competition, ultimately allowing the president to endorse and supervise the cartelization of private industry. For the benchmark account of the NRA, see Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1966). See also Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960).
36. Rexford Tugwell, Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts (1933; New York: Arno, 1977) , 189. At this same time Talcott Parsons was asking, "Was 'society' only a conventional abstraction referring to the interaction of concrete individuals who are the sole real components of social existence, or was society a substantive reality to itself--sui generis--apart from the constituent individuals?" (Talcott Parsons, quoted in Howard Brick, "The Reformist Dimension of Talcott Parsons's Early Social Theory," in The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, ed. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 375).
37. Tugwell, Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts, 189.
38. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (1927; New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 67, 67, 93, and 93, respectively. Bruce Robbins has recently noted the "urgency" of confronting Lippmann's claims because he is speaking "from the right" (emphasis in original) (Bruce Robbins, introduction to The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], x). Lippmann's currency during the early New Deal is made clear by Carrol D. Clark, "The Concept of the Public," The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 13 (March 1933): 311-20. Not incidentally, Clark specifies Habermas's news-center coffee house as an insurance company, citing the maritime insurance center of Lloyd's Coffee House as one of the forerunners in the founding of the public sphere (316 n. 8). See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
39. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet, 1957), 953.
40. Ayn Rand, "What is Capitalism," in What is Capitalism (New York: Signet, 1966 ), 7.
41. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943; New York: Signet, 1993), 679.
42. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935), 90, 67.
43. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, vol. 7 of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (1936; Cambridge, U. K.: Macmillan, 1973), 13; hereafter abbreviated GT. From Keynes's perspective, national planning picked up on a faulty premise central to classical economics, namely that personified collectivities directed the course of the economy by entering into contracts with each other. Whereas classical economy was based on the idea that individual agents could never control the consequences of their actions on the economy as a whole, it had nonetheless relocated their agency to abstractions seen to possess the contract-making potential of persons. Thus while individual workers, and even individual unions, might never have the power to set their own wage levels, classical economy nonetheless held that there was a source of collective and intentional agency implicit in an aggregate of individual actions. "Labor" did in fact determine its wages, for the actions of every worker and union constituted the contract into which the abstract personification "labor" was invariably seen to enter. Keynes argued that there was no way to exert this kind of agency in the economy, however the agents themselves were conceived. He insisted that "there may exist no expedient by which labour as a whole can reduce its real wage to a given re by making revised money bargains with the entrepreneurs" (GT, 13).
44. Alan Brinkley explains that the introduction of Keynesian economics into the New Deal led to the belief that "the industrial economy was too large, too complex, too diverse; no single plan could encompass it all" (Alan Brinkley, "The New Deal and the Idea of the State," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Stephen Fraser and Gary Gerstle, 1989 [Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press], 93). The welfare state emerges most clearly in its contrast with the planned economy; as Robert E. Goddin points out,
The point of welfare state interventions is to remedy unplanned and unwelcome outcomes. The welfare state strives to produce a post-fisc[al] distribution of certain goods and services that is preferable to the pre-fisc[al] one. In a planned economy, by contrast, all outcomes are the outcomes of planning. Not all are necessarily intended or welcome outcomes, to be sure. But correcting planning errors is surely qualitatively different from correcting the market's unplanned perversities [Robert E. Goddin, "Reasons for Welfare: Economic, Sociological, and Political--but Ultimately Moral," in Responsibility, Rights, and Welfare: The Theory of the Welfare State, ed. J. Donald Moon (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), 21].
45. For a detailed discussion of the General Theory's relation to uncertainty, see chapter 5 in Athol Fitzgibbons, Keynes's Vision: A New Political Economy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
46. See Filreis, Modernism from Left to Right, 68-70, for a discussion of money and banking in Stevens's "Lions in Sweden."
47. Wallace Stevens, Owl's Clover, in Opus Posthumous, 82. James Longenbach also notes that Owl's Clover values the activity of making over the made (Longenbach, "Elizabeth Bishop's Social Conscience," ELH 62 [summer 1995]: 485 n. 20). For an analysis of the relation between Stevens and statuary, see Michael North, "The Noble Rider," in The Final Statue: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).
48. Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1955), 403; hereafter abbreviated "NT."
49. Anzia Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (New York: Scribners, 1950), 198.
50. Stevens, Owl's Clover, 75, 76.
51. John Maynard Keynes, "Art and the State," part 1, in The Listener, 26 August 1936, 372; hereafter abbreviated "AS."
52. For Keynes's role in the British Arts Council, see Eric White, The Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Davis and Poynter, 1975).
53. Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West," in Collected Poems, 129; hereafter abreviated "IO."
54. John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Jennifer Wick, "Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf and Keynes and Modern Markets," Novel 28 (fall 1994): 21.
55. Wallace Stevens, "Jacket Statement from Ideas of Order," in Opus Posthumous, 222.
56. The first two quotations are from The New York Times, 30 March 1935; the third is from The Philadelphia Enquirer, 30 March 1935. They are taken from clippings in an untitled notebook held at the Key West Public Library, Key West, Florida.
57. Elmer Davis, "New World Symphony, With a Few Sour Notes," Harpers Magazine 170 (May 1935): 642; hereafter abbreviated "NW."
58. Wallace Stevens, "Surety and Fidelity Claims," in Opus Posthumous, 239.
59. Burnshaw was suspicious of the poem for exactly this reason, and notes that before he wrote his infamous review he began to wonder "which world" it was that the singer actually made ("Interview with Stanley Burnshaw," 124). Harold Bloom sees the song as evidence of Stevens's interest in a transcendental order that is "not our own," but can be located "nowhere else" but in ourselves (Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate [Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press], 101). Despite his avowed interest in the topographical, J. Hillis Miller, like Bloom, has recently located the poem's order in the romantic imagination and voice of the singer, and not in the town toward which the speaker turns (Topographies [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995], 288. For a detailed analysis of Stevens's often hostile interest in romanticism during the 1930s, see Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left, 39-180.
60. Frank Lentricchia makes the same point in The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); see also Frank Dogget, Wallace Stevens: The Making of a Poem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Michael North and Walton Litz also make versions of this claim; see North, The Final Statue, 222; and Walton Litz, "Wallace Stevens's Defense of Poetry," in The Romantic and Modern: Revaluations of Literary Tradition, ed. George Bornstein (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).
61. Benjamin Whorf, "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language," in his Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. John Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 155; this volume is hereafter abbreviated LT.
62. Citing his mentor Edward Sapir, Whorf claims that "the cue to a certain line of behavior is often given by the analogies of the linguistic formula in which the situation is spoken of, and by which to some degree it is analyzed, classified, and allotted its place in that world which is 'to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group'" (LT, 136). This claim would find its way into college textbooks during the second half of the century, as anthropologists and psychologists debated the validity of a debased "Whorfian Hypothesis," most often simplified into the claim that Eskimos could see distinctions between different kinds of snow that English-language speakers could not, because Eskimos used more words to describe snow. Hence the notoriously post-structuralist conclusion always lurking in Whorf's work: reality is in the end a linguistic construct. In its most simplified version, then, the Whorfian Hypothesis suggests a striking similarity to a simplified but nonetheless critically popular version of Stevens, one that sees the poet committed to the proposition that reality, far from being a fixed constant, is instead constructed by imaginative paradigms hammered out in the forge of poetry.
63. Wallace Stevens, "Esthétique du Mal," in Collected Poems, 322.
64. Ibid.
65. Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar," in Collected Poems, 168.
66. Wallace Stevens, "The Creations of Sound," in Collected Poems, 311.
67. Ibid., 310.
68. Like a natural object, but not identical to one: Stevens writes to Richard Latimer at the start of 1935 that "while poems may very well occur, they had very much better be caused" (L, 274).
69. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 5.
70. It is therefore Stevens's proto-New Critical dogma, and not his job at Hartford, that leads Gerald Graff to claim that Stevens's poetry protects itself from "referential liabilities," the "risks of assertion" (Gerald Graff, Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma [Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1970], 25).
71. Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," 5.
.
A grammar is in need of little words.
--Gertrude Stein
If I'm not mistaken, Professor Lezra's narrative of the contradiction inherent in Stein's construction of herself alternately as a "public persona" and as a contingent self, posed "incidentally" in the immediacy of the act of writing, together with his analysis of the implications for subjective agency of the Steinian sentence, "Narrative is it for one," lead him to conclude that we cannot read How to Write after all. I want to refute this conclusion by offering two methods to circumvent the critical binds Lezra proposes: the first is to situate the texts of How to Write historically in the chronology of Stein's work, and the second is to provide a compositional context for the sentence Lezra isolates. I'll offer a reading of "Arthur A Grammar," the text Lezra finds "baffling" , in order to demonstrate a compositional approach to reading How to Write. Here I take issue with Lezra's method since, read compositionally, the line "Narrative is it for one" does not occur as an interruption to the discourse on grammar as he insists , but as an integral part of an interrogative series in which Stein compares the functions of grammar to those of vocabulary, explanation, description, and narrative. In order to answer whether grammar or the subject pre-poses the other, and before we can speculate about the allegorical readings of formal equations that might be implicated--grammar as the structure of identity, of resemblance, of marriage, of publication--we'll need to know first what the working practice of grammar is in the Steinian text. For this kind of inquiry, we have to understand the importance of Stein's compositional writing method. 1
Written after Stein's Cambridge and Oxford addresses in 1926 and before her 1934-35 lecture tour in America, the compositions collected in How to Write do not exemplify the crisis of writerly anxiety that awareness of an audience was to cause Stein. Prompted by writing the lecture "Composition as Explanation," Stein continued to write exercises on the properties and operations of language structure itself. How to Write collects some of these compositions written between 1927 and 1931 including "Sentences and Paragraphs," in which Stein questions whether the sentence can be made to carry the emotional valence ordinarily distributed in the paragraph, and "Arthur a Grammar," which circulates the question "What is grammar." 2 In my view, the texts of How to Write are best considered members of a series of experiments with language structure that begins with the composition "An Elucidation" written in 1923, followed by her lecture, "Composition as Explanation," and then the individual compositions of How to Write. In this series of investigations of both discursive operations and explanation, the texts before and after the lecture are the least constrained by the complications of self-presentation, and best exemplify Stein at work on open-ended explorations in the fundamental operations of writing.
Concern for identity based on recognition, with its thematics of historical time--memory and continuity--disrupted Stein's writing in the mid-1920s when she was invited to lecture at Cambridge and Oxford, and, again, famously, in the crisis after the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , when the fact that she had an audience made it difficult for Stein to write. Questions about the relation of identity and creativity recur and are critical to Stein's texts in the 1930s in particular--Four in America (1932-33), The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind , and Ida a Novel (1937-40). 3 The anxiety Stein felt at having agreed to explain her work, or at least to put herself in a position where such an account could be expected, erupts in the texts she was writing at the time she accepted the invitation to lecture in England. According to Ulla Dydo, a "shrill sound" interrupts the meditation of A Novel of Thank You when the speaker recalls that she has been asked to give
An address.
I am taking it for granted that you are very much interested in what I have written and why and because and because I am very likely to be remembered.
It happened that the one who was the heroine had been asked to go if it were not troubling her unduly was asked to come and if at that time there had been no use if at that time it had been of no use asking would it perhaps not be at all and more when there could be no difficulty might she not present herself. And if she might what would she say and what would she say when she was attentive. 4
Stein tried different methods to ameliorate this anxiety--to free her writing self from the narcissistic impositions of the autobiographical re. We can think of "Stanzas in Meditation," for example, the companion text she wrote concurrently with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as private compensation for the public exposure. And in The Geographical History of America we might consider the distinction Stein draws between Human Mind, the self freed of personal identity, historical time, and the source of creativity; and Human Nature, the self bound by the preoccupations and fears of personal identity and the source of personality, as Stein explaining to herself the relation to personal identity necessary for her to continue writing.
The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you and others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are not that when you are doing anything.  That is what makes school. 5
As readers of Stein we are faced with the problem of how to reconcile the explanations of her work that she gave in lectures and the elucidations in her work written as open-ended explorations in composition. Lezra rightly notes the collision between the perfective descriptions of writing projects in the lecture accounts and the infinitive state of self Stein posited as necessary for writing--a contradiction Stein was well aware of. The public lectures and experimental compositions are very different texts in their claims and style: in its experiments with the relation of examples and precepts, "An Elucidation," for instance, is an experimental text much more faithful in its working articulation of Stein's anti-substitutive theory of explanation than her lecture, "Composition as Explanation," where composition cannot entirely replace explanation because Stein has to use her own work as examples. As critics we must decide how to treat the texts written for an audience in our discussions of the experimental texts; we must devise critical approaches that do not impose the theoretical frame of the lectures onto the experimental texts, making the latter serve merely as examples for findings we expect rather than making our own, present-day discoveries.
And we have the related problem, which Lezra indicates when he notices the numbers of "Steins" proliferating, as to what stance to adopt before Stein's insistence that the autobiographical self can be suspended in its temporal concerns and memories, so that genuinely creative writing can be done: "nobody sees the human mind while it is being existing, and master-pieces well master-pieces may not be other than that that they do not exist as anybody seeing them and yet there they are." 6 For some readers, this proposal of an occlusion of the self is not desirable; for others, convinced of the "imbrication of the grammatical and the autobiographical" , it is not possible. There remains the question as to whether there is any reason to believe that this state of identity is importantly connected to creativity. Yet the suspension of identity based in recognition is, Stein assures us, commonplace, a habit we all share with writers of genius. In "What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them," she asserts, "At any moment when you are you you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you you are not for purposes of creating you." 7 As a procedural tactic, we can ask what we have to gain if we go along with Stein's proposition that this dismantling or suspension of autobiographical identity will disarm the assumptions of a self predicated on memory--the self, in other words, who feels sure she knows what grammar is, and who cannot "begin again." We can then investigate how "Arthur a Grammar" elucidates the question it repeats, by reading this "treatise in sound and sense" (HW, 70) word-for-word and compositionally--for the distribution of sense as an all-over effect of the exchanges, contradictions, and indeterminacy of grammar under investigation. Or, to borrow Wittgenstein's phrase, we read grammar as a subject of the text "that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement." 8 In order to give a reading of "Arthur a Grammar," I propose that we bracket Stein's retrospective teleological narratives of her compositional methods in lectures such as "Poetry and Grammar" from the infinitive state of self Stein invests with agency to experiment in the composition itself. 9 If we understand that Stein's impetus to stage a present-tense, contingent self was to enable a compositional form of inquiry, the results needn't cancel out our readerly agency since surely such agency does not depend altogether on narrative versions of the self.
As I've said, "Arthur a Grammar" is one in a series of writing exercises that begin by posing questions about language structure and its operations--vocabulary, grammar, sentences, paragraphs--and that investigate elements of literary discourse such as description and narrative. Some of these were published in 1931 with the title How to Write in the Plain Edition series edited by Alice Toklas. The titles in the collection reveal the playful and earnest tone Stein adopted toward her subject. In the sequence of composition these are: "Regular Regularly in Narrative," "Finally George a Vocabulary for Thinking," "Arthur a Grammar," "Sentences," "Saving the Sentence," "Sentences and Paragraphs," "A Grammarian," and "Forensics."
"Arthur a Grammar" begins with the sentence, "Successions of words are so agreeable," and immediately begins to test whether grammar is something more than or other than succession: "Are allow discover over cover an over coat. This is not a grammar." (HW, 43) Obviously, the syntax of the sample sentences in this inquiry puts Stein at risk of presupposing what she sets out to investigate--the nature of grammar. Therefore, Stein parses grammar self-reflexively by shifting among multiple articles and prepositional handles in a series of questions, examples, and tentative assertions across the text. Her method amounts to "auditioning" grammar in use (in Bruce Duffy's nice description of Wittgenstein's practice). 10
There is a series of statements that combines indexical and appositive operations in "of" constructions: "A grammar of appointment" (HW, 57); a series in which grammar predicates: "Consider grammar. Grammar makes merry related" (HW, 76), "Grammar makes a mother" (HW, 75); a series of identity propositions about grammar: "Grammar is the same as relative" (HW, 49), "Grammar is not grown" (HW, 58); and a series of statements formulated with the article "a": "What is Arthur a grammar. Arthur is a grammar. Arthur a grammar." (HW, 63) Varying prepositional phrasing and articles amounts to declining grammar's operations; that is, through repeated and multiple prepositional handles, Stein parses "grammar" as a singular noun, a collective noun, and as subject case through nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative cases. In particular, the use of articles results in a paradox in the way in which grammar emerges as a subject--"a grammar" is representative, exemplary, singular, and, simultaneously, one of many grammars. "Arthur a grammar" implies that there are others. And so there are: "Winifred a grammar. . . . Louis. A grammar. . . . Louisa a grammar. . . . Archie a grammar. Ernest William a grammar. . . . Alice a grammar." (HW, 86-93) This list combines fictive proper names with names for grammars (and suggests an imperative: "Bring me a grammar!"), which effectively compounds the subject cases possible for the word "grammar": subjective, objective, or possessive case. Thus far, we can consider the composition as a succession in grammars, a succession of grammars, a series of grammars named "Arthur" ("Every little Arthur"), and a series of "beginning again and again" to ask the question, "What is grammar."
By shifting back and forth to treat grammar as subject (performative agent) and as object, Stein opens up the composition to contradictory and startling definitions of grammar. Once begun, her catalog of grammatical operations and habits seems inexhaustible; the piece defines grammar as resemblance, preparation, strategy, design, expansion, etiquette, and addition. Definition by avalanche. "A grammar has been called a grammar of diagram. This is not to be selfish." "A grammar has been called a list of what is to be done with it." (HW, 56) "Grammar is occupied allowances." (HW, 74) "Grammar is how are you." (HW, 95)
Stein next considers the semantic implications of the formal relations grammar determines in the sentence. Since the principles of grammar repeat, regardless of differences in terms, does this lead to error? Does grammar flatten differences by treating individual words as markers to fill "parts of speech" slots in preestablished sentence sequence?
What is the difference between resemblance and grammar.
Think. What is the difference between resemblance and grammar.
Resemblance is not a thing to feel. Nor is grammar.
Resemblance to charging charging up hill but if there is plenty of time they will coarsen. There is no need of a hill in a flat country a city is a flat country there is no need of a hill in a city a city is a habit a habit of hyacinths wild hyacinths and a city all wild hyacinths have the same color and cannot have the same odor. To be disappointed in whatever is said although a great deal of it pleases.
What is the difference between resemblance and grammar. There is none. [HW, 59]
With this question about resemblance, Stein shifts from definitions of grammar to questions about its operations or uses. Does grammar require preparation time? "Whenever words come before the mind there is a mistake. This makes instant grammar." (HW, 66) What is grammar for? Is it something other than "a vocabulary for thinking"? "The question is if you have a vocabulary have you any need of grammar except for explanation that is the question, communication and direction repetition and intuition that is the question. Returned for grammar." (HW, 60) To explore the "need of grammar" Stein generates a series of grammar's operations and properties, then elaborates on the phonetic associations these propositions engender. Grammar continues to be linked to explanation: "Grammar makes a little boy explain that it was by the time he could not remember." (HW, 65) Grammar has designs on one's attention: "Grammar. It is very strange when the attention is very definitely designed the dropping of scissors is noisy." (HW, 68) It creates a two-fold illusion of an interior--grammar puts sentence components "in" order, and grammar itself is "in" the sentence: "There is a difference between grammar and a sentence this is grammar in a sentence I will agree to no map with which you may be dissatisfied and therefore beg you to point out what you regard as incorrect in the positions of the troops in my two sketches." (HW, 72) Grammar is useful: "A grammar loads hay on to a wagon" (HW, 66). Grammar imposes order, but it may miscarry: "Grammar may rain. It may thunder and it may lighten and electricity may give out may be out of order." (HW, 100) So, nothing to fear: "Grammar is in our power." (HW, 73)
As we can see with the pun on "reign/rain," words used to denote grammatical operations multiply their semantic resonance in a verbal surface composed of associations, puns, homonyms, and graphic look-alikes. The compositional charge of recurrent words with different senses gives the inquiry a narrative feel without developing a plot. And this method means that the analysis of grammar cannot be separated from the affective suggestions woven into the propositional trials. We do well to read as Marjorie Perloff advises, "literally as well as contextually," to catch the references to grammar (in often hilariously literal phrasings) as well as the references that imply the life lived is a context for grammar's uses. 11 For instance, Stein treats grammar literally as an operation that makes appointments of order and place for parts of speech within the sentence: "A grammar of appointment." (HW, 57) This leads to: "Grammar makes dates. Dates are a fruit that may be pressed together or may be lain in a box regularly still attached to a stem" (HW, 57). The word "dates" leads to thought of documents that require dates such as wills --"will well or need be time there when freight is dated articles might do" (HW, 45)--and to time spent together: "Hour our last hour glass" (HW, 49).
I'd like to close by returning to the form of the question "What is the difference between resemblance and grammar?" Throughout "Arthur a Grammar," Stein describes grammar as it differs from other discursive forms including succession, vocabulary, description, and explanation. The sentence Lezra quotes must be understood as one in this series of comparisons--in this instance a question about the relation between grammar and narrative: "Narrative is it for one. Narrative conceived and developed really only filling and so not connected with for grammar." (HW, 70) But, as Stein affirms, "a grammar is in need of little words" (HW, 73), so that to test the differences between grammar and narrative or grammar and description means to try out the effects of these discursive operations on sample words, phrases, and sentences. For example, to explore the relation between vocabulary and grammar ("if you have a vocabulary have you any need for grammar"), Stein writes sequences in which the "vocabulary" remains the same and grammar stands out as the difference: "Consider a house. . . . Consider. Hours in a house. A house held ours." (HW, 61) With different grammars, can these sentences be said to have the same vocabulary? Do they express the same sense? Grammatical structure may be identical although the meaning of sentences differ, or grammar may be different when meanings are congruent: "Critically. Good flour can make good bread is not the same as good flour does make good bread." (HW, 90) For Stein, as for Wittgenstein, the difference Frege identified between declarative and assertoric sentences is not a distinction that determines meaning. What difference does? I want to propose that one of the intriguing findings in "Arthur a Grammar" is that grammar can't be defined, finally, by a definition posed in the form of differentiation--"what is the difference between." I'll say more, but let me first review the expectations of explanation that we need to set aside.
With the language games that open Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein discredits the Augustinian picture theory of language acquisition and use--that words name objects, and that by "hear[ing] words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, [one] gradually learn[s] to understand what objects they signif[y]." 12 This concept of referentiality may lead us to expect explanations of meaning that take the form "The word 'grammar' signifies . . ." Or, we may be tempted by the form "'Grammar' is the name of a . . ." These models of explanation come about for two reasons according to Wittgenstein: an illusion of uniformity of function, or, more subtly, from noticing the differences of function between words, that is, noticing the analogy in the lack of analogy. Either way, through uniformity or difference of function, we've imposed uniformity on diverse types of expression and obscured the actual practice of our language use.
Likewise, in "Arthur a Grammar," the difference between grammar and other discursive forms won't tell us what grammar is because, in both sample sentences and in the series of propositions that cross the text, the uses of grammar depend on the play of difference and similarity in the construction of meaning. In each particular instance, grammar can be regarded as an imposition of structural resemblance, or as the medium that makes possible the recognition of difference-in-sameness. Since the text employs the word "grammar" as both subject and object, it effectively flattens the operations of second-order propositions; although we are continuously challenged to consider the difference between discursive forms X and Y, we realize that for each phrase we must sort likeness and difference between literal and rative uses of words. "Be very careful of having had a little longer in obliging whichever it was for. Forbidden." (HW, 66) "Forbidden" gets its effect by forcing us to notice that it is comprised of permissory words --"for" and "bidden"--yet, taken together, the meaning is prohibitory. But the word has compositional punch because of the shift in grammatical forms of "for" from the line before this.
Like Wittgenstein's philosophical method, Stein's treatise on grammar does not provide stable definitions but instead, enacts an alternate model of explanation, written according to Stein's principles of elucidation: that you do not know in advance the answer to what you set out to explain; that you put down each time what you know (which may require beginning again); that you include everything; that what you know is not a restatement of prior learning; and that what you want to know in composition is inseparable from how you live your life.
Although the pleasure of reading the text can't be paraphrased, "Arthur a Grammar" is a primer of grammar in which the repetition of naming functions and the cumulative effect of repeatedly asking "What is grammar" block the initial expectations writer and reader might bring to bear on grammar--that it orders, that it points indexically. Instead, "grammar" is its use in the text; it cannot be defined in second-order statements that displace individual statements of the text. As Stein puts it, "Grammar is restless and earned" (HW, 60). "Arthur a Grammar" is a text that traces an emotional trajectory from resistance to grammar to gratitude for its usefulness. It was written during a time of "coming to terms" for Stein, a review of her work and personal history, and is imbued throughout with repetition of the word "will" and has as a result a future-looking cast, as though making a will and making a grammar were preparations. Or, in Stein's words: "Living by reason by years or by now might make grammars" (HW, 86).
Linda Voris is a Ph. D. candidate in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is completing a study of Gertrude Stein's compositional tasks of the 1920s.
1. For another example of a compositional approach to Stein, see Charles Altieri's reading of the subject/object position reversals in the shifting uses of the words "some" and "one" in Stein's 1912 portrait of Picasso: "Stein's sentences must be treated as elements implicating a [more] comprehensive gravitational field, which can be observed only in the forces created as sentences engage one another" (Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 241). See also Peter Quartermain's "grammatical analysis" of "Sentences" (also in How to Write) in his Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21-43.
2. Gertrude Stein, "Arthur a Grammar," in How to Write, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (New York: Dover, 1975), 65; this volume hereafter abbreviated HW. Variations on this question form a series in the text: "What is grammar when they make it round and round" (HW, 62); "What is a grammar ordinarily" (HW, 63); "What is Arthur a grammar" (HW, 63).
3. The dates refer to composition; The Geographical History of America was published in 1936, Ida a Novel in 1940, and Four in America in 1947.
4. Gertrude Stein, quoted in Ulla Dydo, "Landscape is Not Grammar: Gertrude Stein in 1928," Raritan 7 (summer 1987): 97-113. I am indebted to Dydo's article for the historical context of "Arthur a Grammar."
5. Gertrude Stein, "What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them," reprinted in her Look At Me Now And Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1967), 146-47.
6. Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (New York: Random House, 1936), 146.
7. Stein, "What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them," 147.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1968), 92.
9. There are, of course, other tactics for treating the impingements of the autobiographical self on the writing. One can read biographical details, as Ulla Dydo does, as "centripetal" and "centrifugal" references to both the lived life and to word use in the composition ("Landscape is Not Grammar," 102). Dydo notes that Stein and Toklas made their wills in 1927-28, and therefore traces recurrences of the word "will" in "Arthur a Grammar." Or, even stickier, one can speculate about the influence in style and word choices that rereading earlier work for publication had on Stein's current work. While writing pieces of How to Write in 1927 and early 1928, Stein also corrected proofs for the collection Useful Knowledge, and prepared a manuscript of "A Village. Are You Ready Yet Not Yet. A Play in Four Acts" for Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler to publish. See The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913-1946, vol. 1, ed. Edward Burns (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 161-62.
10. Bruce Duffy, The World as I Found It (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1987), 7.
11. Perloff likens Stein's compositional method to Wittgenstein's proposition 122 that understanding "consists in 'seeing connexions'": "Such 'seeing as' or 'seeing something as something depends, I think, on our willingness to read Stein both literally as well as contextually, examining why she puts up a particular 'fence' or 'boundary line' around certain words and why others are excluded" (Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 92).
12. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2.
.
An organization of forms expresses a confluence of forces. . . . For example, if you clap a strong magnet beneath a plateful of iron filings, the energies in the magnet will proceed to organize form. It is only by applying a particular and subtle force that you can bring order and vitality and thence beauty into a plate of iron filings, which are otherwise as ugly as anything under heaven.
Ezra Pound
This is what Suprematism means to me--the dawn of an era in which the nucleus will move as a single force of anatomized energy and will expand within new, orbiting spatial systems. . . . I think that freedom can be attained only after our ideas about the organization of solids have been completely smashed. . . . There is only energy. Therefore everything is linked and at the same time separate in its own motion. . . . Expressing this dynamic functioning is the primary purpose of consciousness.
Kasimir Malevich 1
Recently I attended an extraordinary conference, "From Energy to Information," at the University of Texas at Austin. Scholars there did superb ground-breaking work showing how deeply modernist art was engaged in the issues and the themes developed by the sciences. But the very power of these presentations made me sufficiently anxious to want to address the dangers involved in this historical enterprise. On the most fundamental level, establishing scientific contexts for the arts raises the problem of just how we state the relationship between what seems to be the artist'ss intention and what we can say about the frameworks within which that intention is articulated? And that question requires our clearly addressing two closely related but importantly distinct issues: how such contexutalizing will change our interpretations of these writers and artists as historical agents, and how such a stance will modify our own perspectives as we try to evaluate what claims their work has on our present?
My fear on the first issue is that, simply because we can find analogies or because the artists and writers make vague claims about matters like the fourth dimension, we will go on to use our knowledge of the science to force strong thematic analogies on to the work. If we rely too directly on these invocations of science, we run the risk of underplaying the considerable uneasiness most of the modernists had about such dependencies. Were they fully to embrace science, they might have to accept both the impersonal subject positions cultivated by the sciences and the ideals of impersonal verification fundamental to their sense of community. But such commitments were not easy to correlate with the seductive appeal of the alienation-postures still underlying much modernist work or with the emphases on feeling and on constructive will that the artists and writers hoped might counter or dignify that alienation.
However liberating science's version of impersonal dehumanization might prove, artists almost always had to restore some aspects of the romantic values they were ostensively denying, as in Eliot's claim that only those who knew what it meant to suffer from personality would appreciate the impersonality he was calling for. And however exalting science's models of universalizing abstraction and its promise of progress, the arts had to restore the rative and exemplifying power of individual compositions as their instruments for realizing how nature's deep laws took effect. 2 So on the most general level I think we have to find a perspective for dealing with responses to science that float warily between two quite different positive appeals--the opportunity for specific thematic allegories drawn from ideas like "the fourth dimension" and the promise of an experimental method that would replace allegorizing entirely by giving access to realities that are immediately present in their abstract elemental force and hence do not depend at all on speculative interpretation.
One way the modernists handled their ambivalence in relation to such appeals was to explore possible allegiances with with more mystical versions of science, versions that Bruce Clarke shows were dangerously close to a scientism in which experimental method yields to allegorical procedures. 3 Therefore it is reasonable to examine just how deeply into their work such explorations went. But these invitations also bring with them a double problem. Not only do we have to be careful to connect the interest in science to the modernists' other basic concerns (especially with formal innovation), but we also have to worry about whether pursuing the scientific analogies will help us capture what to other artists and writers has seemed the most imaginatively vital features of their work. If we are not careful on this matter, the effort to contextualize the art within the parameters of modern science will end up reducing modernism to charming mystification. We will stress what was the least intensely invested and is the least intellectually challenging dimension of the art, in the process losing both what seemed most innovative at the time and what has the richest possibility for engaging contemporary imaginations.
In order to avoid these problems, even while learning from the efforts creating them, I will explore a way of acknowledging what the artists sought in their forays into science without forcing the art within the straitjacket imposed by the specific, historically dated scientific doctrines the modernists invoked. And I hope to develop a more general theoretical account of how the effort to find thematic analogies deeply misconceives the overall ambitions driving the artists' versions of formal experiment. By turning from the specific details of modern science to what seems the basic desire underlying the artists' use of such details, I hope we can keep foregrounded those aspects of their art that do not go gently into the dump that history keeps in wait for them. My model for specifying the terms of this desire will be Hegel's work on the concept of force. Using this model will not entail claiming that the modernists read Hegel, although Hegelian ideas are basic to some of the spiritualisms that fascinated them. Nor will I claim that the artists and writers had a coherent and articulate concept of force. I will use the concept of "force" to characterize how a substantial body of modernist art makes compelling and still vital imaginative structures out of their interests in quasi-spiritual claims about latent dynamism that we find in thinkers ranging from Bergson to Eddington. A short catalogue would point to Mondrian on "dymamic equilibrium," Malevich on the fourth and fifth dimensions as aspects of non-objective force, and the literary metaphors developed to adapt to the plastic tensions made popular by Cubism. All of these emphases share with the sciences a commitment to the most elemental dynamic building blocks of contemporary life, but they also insist on representing that dynamic dimension in ways more directly connected to the life of the mind than all but the most mystical and problematic of the prevailing scientific perspectives allowed.
Hence Hegel. Hegel on force enables us to address both problems I have been discussing--what modernists seek to make articulate and how we can best develop value languages for that work. The concept of force helps us get close to the artists' intentions because it keeps attention focussed on dynamic physical dimensions of affective life and because it demands a notion of the psyche in deep sympathetic vibration with the modernists' intense suspicions of humanist ideals. It is not a large leap from Hegel on force to the following sentiment by Nietzsche:
It is not all necessary to get rid of the "soul" . . . and thus to renounce of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses--as happens frequently to clumsy naturalists who can hardly touch on the "soul" without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul" and "soul as subjective multiplicity," and "soul as social structure of the drives and affects," want henceforth to have citizen's rights in science. 4
Even more important, relying on Hegel on force provides an overall methodological contrast to work straightforwardly elaborating analogues between modernist art and modern science. Rather than fit the art to science's explanatory schemas, we can explore the ways in which the concern for the dynamic actually modifies how works are constructed and relations to audiences envisioned. We cannot deal with force simply as an idea. We have to see how it is embodied, or how it affects ideals of embodiment. And that means treating the arts in roughly the same phenomenological fashion that Hegel demonstrates is necessary to talk about force at all in so far as force is engaged as an actual dimension of our experience. So critical work in this spirit has to shift its focus away from which ideas link the arts with science and toward the distinctive uses which the art works make of science in their specific modes of unfolding before audiences. Finally this connection to phenomenology will enable us to clarify how treating the works as appearances establishes an imaginative realm within which the artists' work can retain currency long after the specific sciences they allude to are at best remote footnotes in textbooks.
Hegel's basic treatment of "force" takes place early in his Phenomenology of Spirit as his means of establishing the inadequacy of any pure perception-based empiricism; then later in the Phenomenology he uses the same basic logic to criticize Enlightenment science's version of covering laws. But in order to show how his account will matter for us, I want first to set up an example that I will then keep central in my exposition. The example is Kasimir Malevich's Red Square Black Square--in part because the painting so dramatically sets something like force against something like the conditions of extensional empiricist description, and in part because we will have a strong example of how artists like Malevich melded idealist thinking into the quasi-scientific vocabulary that abstract painting was eager to appropriate.
In my Painterly Abstraction I make three basic points about Malevich's painting that bear repeating here. 5 First, it calls attention to the dialectic established by the painting's structure. The tilt of the smaller red square refuses subordination to the spatial frameworks imposed by the black square and by the frame. That negation then becomes a demand that the viewer bring to bear a second system of coordinates in which the tilt itself determines alignments within the painting. Attending to these coordinates then turns the surrounding white space into an active field helping to constitute an intricate balancing of both organizational principles in relation to now dynamic color, texture, and size contrasts. What could have been simple flat surfaces echoing each other becomes instead a dynamic field reconciling potential motion in several dimensions with an overall compositional harmony.
My other two points involve the thematic possibilities that these visual relations elicit. For example it is difficult not to treat Malevich's tilt as also a means of foregrounding the intricate ontology that his abstraction affords. On one level the world of sensation is reduced entirely to purely extensional flat colored surfaces. There is no illusion at all, except perhaps for the hints of depth set up by the relation of the two squares. Yet this reduction to pure visual matter also seems to sustain a powerful transcendental movement. It may be precisely as pure extensional surface without illusion that the painting produces the dynamic intensive balances that I will elaborate as a thematics of the tilt. Here abstraction literally marries the possibility of meaning to pure sensation and hence opens a realm of metaphoric possibilities based not on what the painting represents but on what its elements do.
My third claim offers specific ways to read those metaphoric possibilities. Minimally, Malevich is playing on the relation of art to life and mind to matter. This painting is so elemental that it could not be a found object; only mind could make it with such delicate balances of shape and color. These flat shapes are and are not simply objects, since within the painting, within the frames provided by art conventions, the shapes work as relationships and the relationships open metaphoric implications that do not displace but pervade the material elements. It seems as if intelligence literally inhabited these otherwise purely visual elements. In fact the material tilt here becomes a powerful emblem for the relation of art to life and of art to the representational traditions underlying this play of intelligence. In coming alive as a work of art, this conration literally enacts a tilt, both acknowledging and providing alternatives to the coordinates established by purely extensional seeing. Malevich's painting invites us to participate in a metaphorical dwelling within what it has reduced to purely extensional marks, so that painterly intelligence becomes simply the possibility of maintaining just such an imaginative space, reducing representation to marks in order to free intelligence from the confines of description and dramatic interpretation. Finally, because that intelligence makes its own place, the painting ultimately offers itself as a self-reflexive embodiment of all those features of our lives where the only difference between pure extensional matter and what we have called spirit is a simple tilt producing an irreducibly "non-objective" dynamics. What else makes my body and world into a subject's? And what else can define an ontology for the mysteries of loving and caring that seem very difficult to account for within standard Enlightenment principles. Tilting is a purposive but not rationalized model for how we inhabit extensional objects.
It should be easy now to see why it was so tempting for my Painterly Abstraction to treat the self-reflexive participation that such paintings invite in terms of thematics of agency. I thought this could capture the dynamic features of Malevich's ontology, but now that I have read Hegel I have a measure of how my own metaphoric register was severely limited by its anthropomorphic investments. Hegel's chapter on force in his Phenomenology of Spirit allows us to stay at a threshold where the human remains intricately caught up in what cannot be humanized. He accomplishes this by locating the non-objective in a very elemental but irreducible supplement to those extensional features that can be adequately handled by empirical description. 6 Hegel's preceding chapter had been devoted to the certainties of sense, and hence provided a picture of what his extensional knowledge could be. He turns to force in order to establish dialectical transitions between the world of pure perception and one in which awareness of the world proves inseparable from the intricacies of self-consciousness. Once that link is established the rest of the Phenomenology can go on to elaborate "what consciousness knows in knowing itself" (PS, 103). But Hegel's chapter on force does not quite yield to this faith in ultimate absolute knowledge. Instead Hegel focusses not on how consciousness knows itself but on how consciousness is solicited into attempting to situate itself within the world of appearances that its own activity renders incomplete and problematic. So on this level of Hegel's story there need be no talk of absolutes or even of the dialectical interplay of substance and spirit. Here Hegel offers only an account of those demands and embarrassments that both torment and fascinate consciousness as it seeks to articulate its fundamental relations to the sensual world.
Let me then take a few moments to trace the basic movements in Hegel's discussion of force so that the case can create intellectual resonances for Malevich's painting, while the painting provides a concrete image grounding the philosophy's abstract arguments. 7 For Hegel, our most elemental experience of force is as something whose effects are visible in or upon the objects of perception but which cannot be the simple object of our attention, since we cannot refer to the force within the same pictorial model we use to refer to the objects. As examples one might think of electricity or gravity or, more metaphorically, of desires and emotions. We can characterize force and even regulate it, but we cannot represent it as force except through abstract formulae. Therefore any description that wants to preserve the qualities that lead us to speak about force, without reducing these to static pictures, will have to vacillate between phenomenological and explanatory perspectives. Because force both invites and repels description, Hegel can use it as his means of shifting from the static unities that consciousness establishes to the constant differing from itself which is characteristic of self-consciousness. 8
Hegel begins his account of force by claiming that it becomes manifest as active resistance to the plenitude of universals put in place by perception. Perception depends on universals because it has to work within established categories, has to see something as only a positive identity (PS, 80). We perceive a light bulb as on or off. But suppose we begin to ask what produces that difference (or ask what makes us ask about that difference). We cannot answer such questions simply by observing. They move us from a world of objects perceived to one where perceptions are only appearances, only phenomena whose shape and effects depend on something that cannot be located entirely in the object. Awareness of force, then, makes it impossible simply to treat the object as an isolated, self-sufficient particular. Force acts upon the object, rendering it passive in relation to the being of some other reality. And in so doing it also opens the possibility that this object has kinship with other apparently independent objects. Once we grasp electricity as a force, even without understanding how that force works, we see that all light bulbs seem to work in the same way by responding to some general feature we now have to add to our sense of what counts as real.
Hegel insists on providing an ontology for these relational properties. Thus force is characterized as gathering "otherness itself, into itself" because it literally gets its identity as the substance of its differences from the universalizing thought perception relies on. Most philosophers would avoid the expression "otherness itself, into itself," because that gives a positive existence to what Hegel's account presents primarily as negative. But Hegel takes that risk because he wants to develop parallels between the force that we observe and the forces that are involved in our observing. If we try to understand what underlies the coming on and off of light bulbs at various moments, we have to see ourselves both negating and sublating any model of thinking bound only to the particular object. We have to hypothesize some supplemental factors, within and without. Yet our new account still has to preserve our direct awareness of the specific light bulb. Similarly, we find our relations to ourselves closely paralleling the relation we posit between object and force: we are driven by something we cannot picture, yet it is awareness of our subjection to that "something" which ultimately allows us to bring into one framework the differences our activity generates. We, in effect, are aspects of the turned on lights that have to recognize how through our observing we differ from the simple states from which we began.
Once the psyche enters, Hegel's account gets even more interesting, since there are at least three concrete ways in which the distinctions he generates to handle questions about force in the object world also clarify principles we need for talking about the psyche. First, once consciousness concerns itself with force, what had been objects that simply constitute a world become appearances beneath which some other factors are responsible for the manifest effects. Second, when appearances can no longer be treated adequately by the languages we apply to objects, there emerge questions about expression. What do the appearances make visible that is not suited to purely descriptive languages, and what then is the specific relation between the being that appears and these underlying factors now also part of the scene for consciousness? And third, trying to understand that relation between appearance and what underlies it creates often unresolveable concerns about which aspects of the expression are active, that is controlled by the mode of appearing, and which aspects show how the being is acted upon by some ancillary conditions. Active forces reveal the being for itself, eagerly "soliciting" what might complete it, while what seems passive requires our asking how one enters the role of being "solicited" as a being for another whose controlling presence we then have to speculate upon. 9 For example, if our light bulb were to dim, we might have to explain that dimming as caused by the specific condition of the light bulb, or its part in the home's specific electrical structures, or a symptom of some system-wide failure. Human dimming and brightening allows richer possibilities for talk of activity, but also requires more complex stories suspicion about the actual impact of the soliciting forces exercising their influence from without.
At this point in Hegel's exposition the interplay of active and passive becomes far too complex for me to track. But although we probably already have enough background to understand what Malevich is making of his nineteenth-century sources, I want to provide at least some of the flavor of that dialectic. If the light here dims too much, please just skip the next three paragraphs.
We have just seen that what seems active as force in relation to an object can also seem passive as an effect of some more comprehensive system. But, Hegel insists, there cannot be any simple one way relation between what he calls the comprehended and the comprehensive aspects of force. For we have to posit a force working through objects and a force working through mind, and we have to see that while mind organizes physical relations, it is these relations that both solicit and influence how the mind develops those organizations. In Hegel's terms, the notion of force "becomes actual through its duplication into two forces" (PS, 85)--one the grounding element and the other the manifest medium of the effect of that ground. Both phsyical and mental activities function as ground and as medium.
We can see the mind determined by the body or the mind giving purpose to what otherwise might give purpose to it. This duplicity then creates for each locus of activity the danger that it will seem to lose its particularity as force because its activity vanishes into the concepts we use to fix it or into the objects we use to trace its diminishment (such as spirit becoming only body). At the opposite pole each locus has the corresponding possibility of actively standing over against concepts or objects by managing to define its own expressive capacities. We can lose the phenomenology of electricity to purely general analyses or to specific accounts of what happens in particular objects; and we can lose the phenomenology of self-consciousness to the satisfactions of dwelling simply within the generalizations that are developed to explain how electricity works. Conversely there remains the capacity for expression to break through repression--either in sudden glimpses of why we are fascinated by electricity or why we are fascinated by our own processes of thinking on the topic. 10
Hegel's chapter's richest concrete speculations on this interplay of active and passive, phenomenological and structural, take place when he turns to discussing how attention to force leads necessarily to the positing of laws. Laws offer a mode of universalization quite different from those of perception, since a law is not simply a category for particular objects but a way of giving objectivity to relations among objects. Law is "the stable image of unstable appearance" (PS, 90). By postulating laws we produce sameness out of the play of difference. Even when the eye sees only differences, the mind can register underlying identities because of how the differences participate in the same structural necessities. Law, then, regularizes flux into deeper structures, and it creates the possibility that knowledge itself extends beyond appearances.
Law makes force one thing rather than many. But this unity is at best an incomplete one, because the concept of law is not sufficiently attuned to the variety that it organizes. 11 So the very unity law brings opens the way to further division. Spirit finds itself having to account not only for how law relates to its objects but also how it both creates and is created by subjects. Law seems the within of appearances, but its distance from what it claims to regularize also makes it an appearance through which we seek some other within. That within turns out to be another manifestation of force, since whatever seems to underly our attributions of lawfulness has the same dynamic and ungraspable relation to universals that force does in its simpler manifestations.
Now Hegel is ready to show what will be involved in consciousness becoming conscious of itself. There is one law that seems as if it can actually capture necessity because it makes the Kantian shift from what underlies objects to what underlies our experience of making sense of those objects. This law takes form as a generalizing of the very process of self-consciousness that is emerging--namely, "that like becomes unlike and unlike becomes like" (PS, 96). Whatever consciousness grasps it inverts, turning force into concept and law and casting those universals back into the play of forces that constantly solicit them. Such self-consciousness can have certainty of itself because of its capacity to provide form for force, and, through that, to feel its powers to make attributions about a "supersensible." Yet this "supersensible" need not be trapped in the same static world as Kant's transcendental reasoning because whatever force consciousness feels must remain tightly wound into the structure of appearance. Any other version of force called up by consciousness will soon be revealed as empty, or merely mystical because it will not be situated within what actually solicits consciousness. Reflecting on the relation between force and self-consciousness then leads us to realize that the supersensible is entirely immanent--not the other of appearance but an other within appearance that allows us to formulate the concept of "appearance qua appearance" (PS, 89). Rather than dwelling beneath appearances, the supersensible consists in the mind's simultaneous sense of its bondage to appearance and its freedom to bring our values and causes within a world that now on one level exists for consciousness, hence as appearance. 12
Hegels qua, in other words, is inseparable from Malevich's tilt. Consciousness feels itself as the point of transfer between appearance and appearance seen as appearance, and hence as involving complex relational dependencies on what makes appearance different from perception. And self-consciousness emerges as the awareness of the interplay of negative and reconstructive powers that enables us to appreciate those relational dependencies and treat them as complex balances. In one dimension the tilt is a simple occurence, almost a whimsical variation manifesting the simple force of change. But in the very process of registering that effect, the painting also establishes a supremely confident moment of self-consciousness both defining its capacity to engage new coordinates and coming to appreciate the overall relational structure that this gesture creates. Solicited by the shift from object to appearance, self-consciousness can explore its own soliciting powers, until they become their own opposite, mainfesting the painting's sense of being solicited by something that seems more capacious and structural within appearance than individual self-consciousness. What emerges as agency now is inseparable from a mediating process that such consciousness can no longer pretend to control, even though it cannot stop trying.
Providing an intellectual context for reading one Malevich painting does not a theory make. But it does offer one example of how we can interpret modernist work so as to acknowledge its interest in the spirit of science without turning it into a thematic analogue for specific scientific doctrines. Malevich uses a scientific atmosphere as a frame for an experience whose specific unfolding requires a quite different vocabulary and a quite different interpretive stance. I have tried to clarify the vocabulary; now I will turn to developing a few theoretical consequences that follow from emphasizing those dynamic aspects of the art works foregrounded by the concept of force. First, though, a brief caveat. Shifting to theory here will demand walking a delicate line between claiming that the concept of force can make a substantial difference in our discourses about the arts in general and isolating values distinctive to modernist experiments in the arts. But there is a reward for facing this problem, since this balancing act is one we will share with the modernists. They felt the need both to break from their heritage and to use that break as a means of revitalizing their heritage in the arts (or, as Hegel would have put it, to extend their heritage by negating it in ways that make articulate latent forces that in fact keep the heritage unified).
Let me, then, keep modernist abstract painting as my specific focus, but I will concentrate on issues sufficiently theoretical to suggest an overall perspective quite different from both classical and Kantian aesthetics and quite resistant to the thematizing of analogies, scientific or moral or social. Using the lens of what Hegel on force dramatizes in modernist abstraction, I hope to clarify how we locate expressivity in art, how art works can engage emotions in ways that complicate standard notions of subject-object relations, and, finally, how we understand the role of theory in these inquiries. But I cannot do this without presupposing my conclusions on the last of these topics. I will proceed under the assumption that one need not treat theory in the arts as high-level explanation but can instead approach it as oriented towards the phenomenological thickening of appearance so that we ultimately find the qua of appearance charged with intellectual resonance. Rather than place particulars within categories, this perspective uses generalization to suffuse those particulars with meanings that give self-consciousness both peace and substance.
My first claim is my most general, potentially least contentious, and probably most important. Hegel on force makes clear why any work of art, perhaps any particular we come to value, cannot be treated entirely in descriptive or pictorial terms. One must capture the tension between force and objects of perception, and consequently one must preserve the dynamic relation between appearance and some constitutive other to the object that emerges when it becomes seen as appearance. To do that theory has to introduce concerns for expressiveness, concerns which require attending to relations among what is hidden and what manifest, to the play of soliciting and solicited features, to the work of postulating universals or laws and the recognition of their limitations, and to the intricate ways that these various aspects fold into and out of one another.
Such concerns are basic to any theory of expressiveness. Hegel on force makes possible a distinctive theory because he deals with such elemental features of expressivity that we need not rely on specific psychological hypotheses. Perhaps more important, this focus on elements links Hegel to Levinasian concerns for an otherness fundamental to eliciting human responses (without requiring Levinasian conclusions). Expressivity is not simply a matter of how agency is deployed or emotions made manifest: expressivity remains a relational structure between something not stateable and necessarily incomplete efforts to frame what appearance manifests.
The best way to bring out the value of basing the analysis of expressivity on Hegel's treatment of force is to develop a contrast with the far more influential Kantian analysis of the immanence basic to the appearance (Schein) constituting aesthetic objects. For Kant art works matter because they are radically particular and yet give pleasure in a mode that can be called judgment because the pleasure appeals for universal assent. That radical particularity stems from "purposiveness without purpose," that is from marks of a shaping intelligence that cannot be successfully subsumed under any concepts, and hence that manifest a genius giving the rule to art. From Kant on, then, positive accounts of immanence in art works have emphasized the work that psychological or formal or interpretive intelligences do in giving shape to inchoate worlds. Such assumptions have bound theory to a fairly narrow range of evaluative principles like those stressing complexity or intricate unity, in part because the stress on formative intelligence makes it extremely difficult to talk directly about emotions or about how audiences are positioned and acted upon. Analogously, the Kantian line of argument entails treating all struggle that matters in a great work as part of the author's plan, rather than resistances from the material or from contradictions the author refuses to face.
There have been strong objections to this aspect of Kant, of course, but for the most part they derive from psychoanalytic criticism (that has trouble dealing with art as art) or from a rhetoric of common sense or from oppositional claims to expose the underlying contradictions. And all of these critiques continue to rely on the binaries Kant set up. Those binaries in turn make it difficult for theory to account for the emotional component of aesthetic experience because they force us to treat everything we cannot locate as specifiable formal properties within the object as necessarily elements attributable to entirely private subjective response. Similarly, when Kant's stress on authorial intelligence is challenged, it is done by reducing art works to semiotic weavings that critics fit into various allegories subordinating internal energies within the work to the critic's theoretical schema.
Concentrating on Hegel on force allows us a very different view of expressivity and the structure of emotions that expressivity elicits. From a Hegelian perspective, specific works can be seen as embodying an interplay between force and appearance that does not reduce force to intelligence, nature to either heteronomy or lawfulness, or response to already constituted empirical subjects. Instead expressiveness gets located in the processes that emerge as forces working within and against appearance. These processes retain their concreteness while taking on a suggestiveness that seems generalizable yet resistant to concepts. Such concreteness obviously can produce a wide variety of effects. But two effects seem to me especially worthy of notice because they have substantial implications for how we value the arts. Noam Gabo neatly summarized the first when he characterized the "absolute shapes" of abstract art as manifesting "all the properties of a real force having a positive and a negative direction." 13 Kantian aesthetics treats the object only as a positive structure, generating aesthetic value primarily by internal relations. Gabo's modernism, on the other hand, emphasizes the reality of the object as object so that we will attend not only what it asserts but to how that assertion is positioned in relation to what it rejects or sublates. Unlike concepts of form, those of force treat objects as embodying transitions between states, and hence as exemplifying actual struggle. Expression is also resistance; construction also vital negation working to justify negative processes like the act of abstraction itself.
Heidegger then adds a second aspect to this sense of how art works are active within the world. His entire aesthetic is based on Hegel's ideal of having appearance emerge qua appearance. Art works can have compelling immanence because "the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force." 14 In so far as the art manifests its powers as work, it establishes a "world," a "forever non-objective" concrete situation in which things "gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and their limits." "A work by being a work makes space for that spaciousness" by which "the world worlds" (PS, 45). What remains in excess of appearance does not become law but instead becomes a condition of activity inseparable from what the work makes manifest. Consequently it cannot suffice to "interpret" works of art. Interpretation must be kept in continual tension with an awareness of how the work maintains its "appearance," engaging through that an interplay of soliciting and solicited forces that refuse to settle into any one determinate entity for the imagination.
In an essay related to the present one, I try to build from this analysis a specific theory of expressivity in the arts. 15 But here I can only posit as my second basic claim a brief case that this approach to expressivity emphasizes both the affective life within the work and the possibility of our recasting the psychology by which we characterize that life. Let me use Pound's vorticist poem "Heather" as my example:
The black panther treads at my side,
And above my fingers
There float the petal-like flames
The milk-white girls
Unbend from the holly-trees,
And their snow white leopard
Watches to follow our trace. 16
First, if we concentrate on how art objects intensify Hegelian versions of force, we can see as part of their power their capacity to keep us fascinated by what remains an "other" to discursive intelligence, an "other" keeping intelligence dialectically aware of its own limitations and its own imperatives. Ultimately Malevich's painting remains an arrangement of shapes and colors that enter into relations evoking thought and even exemplifying certain powers of mind, yet these relations lose their vitality if they lose their concreteness or prove mere instances of some general law or perspective. And in Pound's poem almost all the effect depends on its keeping the ground of the contrast between the black panther and the white leopard just beyond the intellect, so that the sexual trace claimed by the end of the poem extends into strange necessities that in turn suggest entrance into disturbing psychological sites.
This otherness then has at least two important consequences. Minimally, such art does not allow self-sufficiency to any knowledge position satisfied by description and by subsuming particulars under generalizations. Responsiveness to art is also recognition that these knowledge positions must also be seen as themselves positioned by factors that cannot be entirely transparent to consciousness. On that basis, I think, we can then add the stronger claim that even within the processes of establishing knowledge claims we find an active negative, a non-objectivity that is not simply an aporia but an immediacy and silence which point beyond our practical sense of ourselves as agents. We experience intentionality as situated at a margin of sense where it is composed as much as it composes, and hence where we appreciate the imperative within art to break human images down into elemental factors not quite intelligible within the selves we compose for direct action. In this regard abstraction is the progenitor of Picasso's monster-artists and Surrealism's reconrations of agency in terms of body-parts.
My second claim about affect simply extends this sense of irreducible otherness to the domain of emotions evoked and constructed within the work of art. It is a commonplace to say that modernist emotions resist narrative organization, but we rarely get good accounts of why the quest for alternatives to narrative seemed so pressing a goal. If we focus on how force is established as resistance to appearance, we can explain the rejection of narrative as a refusal to treat powerful emotions as if they were something we could understand simply by placing them in developmental contexts. Emotions must be allowed their strangeness, their capacity to make demands on the intellect that the intellect cannot satisfy. And, more important, an adequate artistic rendering of the force of emotions must evoke different dimensions of self-consciousness than those that narrative calls upon. When we are confronted with emotional demands that do not easily contextualize, we are invited to appreciate the degree to which the life of the passions is not congruent with the grammars that arrange experience in terms of intellectual categories, especially categories based on sharp boundaries and on clear distinctions between active and passive or subject and object. Such force restores instead the complex grammar of "feel," with its intricate interrelations of active and passive elements.
Think again of Pound's trace or of Malevich's dynamic tilt. In one sense the feelings elicited are aspects of hyper-conscious attention to how particular elements are related. Yet this very intensity of consciousness is not easily attributed entirely to active agency--for either artist or audience--because of the degree to which we find ourselves literally "moved" by what partially comes to determine how our individual investments in the world get deployed. The force in art works sets up an intricate flow of traces and possible sources positioning the psyche as simultaneously deep in its absorption and transparent in its openness and manipulability. Even that understanding we do manage for representing how we are moved seems very close to an illusion or evasion that we create, as if we arrived at what we could contain in our representation because of forces impelling us to just this form of containment. The tear in appearances penetrates the psyche, so that emotion too has its fullness only by taking form within the work as emotion qua emotion. And that makes it dizzyingly difficult to say just who is it who responds to and as the locus of those emotions. Is it really my empirical ego that responds to the tilt or that feels itself deployed in the expression "our trace" that ends Pound's poem?
Finally, we arrive at my third and last general claim. This aesthetics of force changes our model for what is at stake in how art crosses other domains of life, and hence for the preferred roles interpretive theory can play. Here I ask you to recall the central passage of Pound's Canto II. 17 There Pound stages as "a breathing out of nothing" a theophany that embodies a pagan incarnation--not the word become flesh but the world become metamorphosed into the presence of the god. Then he turns to the effect this incarnation has on the one witness not caught up in violent blindness toward that god. All that character says is "I worship,/ I have seen what I have seen." Yet that is all he need say: what matters is not how he interprets the event but how his openness to the event modifies him. Force is not something added to details; rather it is the sense of demand built into the details, so that the effect is not something we reason to but something that provides a basis for the giving of reasons. Force is the dimension of experience where all the ladders start.
Correspondingly, theory seems most useful not for telling us what the witness should have seen but for fleshing out terms for what might be seen and how that seeing might have direct effects on further interpretations. Historically, such experiences require a Nietzschean hermeneutics and provide one measure for the importance of Nietzschean psychology, especially in relation to the issue of how modernism's relation to science might be interpreted. Using Pound as my example, I suggest that modernism in the arts gives considerable urgency to at least the negative side of Nietzsche's powerful contrast between the will to truth and the will to power. And in so doing such work makes clear what we lose if we ally the arts too closely to even what is best in the sciences. For each involves at bottom a quite different version of the will to power and consequently of what constitutes interpretive community.
Let me be schematic, even though careful distinctions are necessary. Nietzsche saw the dominant tendencies of his culture as manifestations of a will mired in epistemic commitments. Truth seemed the highest state that persons could achieve, and nobility involved making the sacrifices necessary to bind oneself to one's capacity for rational analysis, whether that be Kant's deontology or Bentham's empiricism. But when truth is so idealized the personal becomes its antagonist. All the most intense states of the individual person must be suppressed or repressed in order to align the individual to the normative power of rationalizing disciplines. Yet while these disciplines offered the power to deny such personal states, they lacked the power to comprehend them. The personal would always be the marginal, the disturbing, and the disruptive. Science itself cannot adequately explain the personal ambitions for power of its protagonists nor adequately direct public ambitions for the use of such power, at least insofar as the methods of science proved difficult to correlate with needs shaped by local traditions.
Recognizing the force of Nietzsche's criticisms here does not warrant embracing his own alternative. On the one hand, the same criticisms can be used simply to weaken what counts as "truth" so that we can use pragmatist stances that bring the will to power under social control. And one might also cite vague ideals of resistance or sentimental calls for response criticisms and other forms of subjectivism that complement but do not really change the normative structure of the will to truth. On the other hand, there is the constant danger of taking Nietzsche's own alternative too literally, so that the arts become emblems for a will to power that takes on the right to decide in our public practices what will count as "truth." Pound made that mistake. But the terms of his own epic vision need not lead in that direction. They require only that we recognize how desire sets the stage for what counts as truth, and hence that we devote our theorizing about the arts to speculations that flesh out what is involved in different kinds of loyalties. At stake is not so much how we decide among those loyalties as how fully we let those loyalties themselves make claims upon us that we can only express in the mode of witnessing.
Such witnessing involves a testimonial model of criticism. But such testimony is not based on identity politics or on any claims organized in terms of how our expressions might originate in specific experiences or conditions of victimage. The object of testimony is not who we are as empirical agents but who we become when we find ourselves moved to intensities that have no explicit grounding separable from the direct expression of loyalty--I have seen what I have seen, and I worship until some more powerful god comes along. Of course for an entire polity to live in accord with such intensities we have to keep art's way of being public from taking over recieved measures for deciding on rights and on justice. But we are only faithful to the most intense forces in the arts when we recognize with pain how thoroughly those concessions contradict the imaginative attitudes cultivated by the arts. And now science reenters my story--as the basic cause of that pain because for it witnessing only makes sense within a rationalizing discipline. Confronted by that demand, art's silences become socially ineffective, and historians rush into the opening void.
Charles Altieri teaches modern literature and literary theory at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge 1989), and his new book, Postmodernism Now, will appear in the fall (Penn State).
1. My epigraphs are from Ezra Pound, "Selections from The New Age," in Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, ed. Harriet Zinnes (New York: New Directions, 1980), 7; and Kasimir Malevich, "Futurism-Suprematism 1921, An Extract," in Kasimir Malevich 1878-1935, ed. Jeanne D'Anrea, (Los Angeles: Armand Hammer Museum, 1990), 177-78.
2. The relation of avant-garde constructivist movements towards Futurism seems to me a telling example of how the modernists tried to have the cachet of science without binding themselves to its specific theses. While all the artists acknowledged the importance of Futurism's commitments to the notions of energy and power basic to modern machine culture, they also labored to create substantial distance from the Futurists' direct pictorial relation to those social factors. Futurism might be only another version of impressionism, an art of surface appearances that would block access to deeper dimensions of feeling and of constructive intelligence for which art might provide modern witness. Here, for example, is Ezra Pound on this subject: "Futurism is descended from impressionism. It is, in so far as it is an art movement, a kind of accelerated impressionism. It is a spreading, or surface art, as opposed to vorticism, which is intensive. . . . Vorticism is an intensive art. I mean by this, that one is concerned with the relative intensity, or relative significance of different sorts of expression" (Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir [New York: New Directions, 1970], 90).
3. Bruce Clarke, "Models of Energy: Scientism in the Modern Cultural Field," unpublished book manuscript.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1966), 20.
5. Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: the contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); hereafter abbreviated PS.
7. I offer a passages from Malevich's prose to indicate how close his thinking on the tilt is to Hegel's fascination with aspects of phenomenal experience that cannot be contained within frameworks developed for dealing with the sensible world, and hence which allow us to speak about the "supersensible" without relying on any mystical claims. For Malevich everything I have been saying about the tilt can be summarized under the rubric "the spirit of non-objectivity."
"No more likenesses of reality," no idealistic images--nothing but a desert! But this desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective sensation which pervades everything. Even I was gripped by a kind of timidity bordering on fear when it came to leaving "the world of will and idea," in which I had lived and worked and in the reality of which I had believed. But blissful sense of liberating non-objectivity drew me forth into the "desert," where nothing is real except feeling . . . [his ellipses] and so feeling became the substance of my life.
(Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World, tr. Howard Dearstyne [Chicago: P. Theobald, 1959], 68.) I should add that this passage is cited by Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 289, as part of her effort to show that Malevich was influenced by discourse about that fourth dimension. I am persuaded that Malevich knew about the fourth dimension and used it as one metaphor for this ideal of "liberating non-objectivity." But from my perspective invoking the fourth dimension is simply one way of talking about some "other" to extensional understanding. For me, and I think for Malevich and Mondrian and Picasso, the specific metaphors used are less important than the underlying logic enabling one to characterize the tilt into non-objectivity. That task is better served by Hegel than by Ouspensky, if only because Hegel too sought to show how elaborate value structures could be based on a concrete version of the "supersensible" as simply what could not be handled adequately within languages devoted to the sensible.
8. In the following discussion I will not try to follow all the turns of Hegel's argument, especially when he gets into the complexities of contradictions between identity and non-identity and when he sets up his idealist ontology in which force and spirit prove identical. I want only to make clear, historically and analytically, how the general outlines of Hegel's thinking help clarify aspects of the concept of force that influence the arts and should inform theorizing about them.
9. Here is Hegel's most succinct formulation of how awareness of force modulates into self-consciousness:
This curtain of appearance hanging before the inner world is therefore drawn away and we have the inner being gazing into the inner world--the vision of the undifferentiated self-same being, which repels itself from itself, posits itself as an inner being containing different moments, but for which these moments are immediately not different--self-consciousness. [PS, 103]
This could be Malevich talking about how art's engagement with inner and outer aspects of experience leaves it simultaneously a thing and a non-thing, literal in more than one world.
10. Those speculations can become means by which the passive being restores the capacity to become a soliciting force, and then the ideas themselves become beings for it. These vacillations then admit endless twists and turns which I do not think are relevant here, although my gesture of dismissal of course makes them soliciting features for a deconstructionist argument.
11. This sentence is my attempt to make sense of the following Hegelian passage: "The soliciting force, e.g. is posited as a universal medium, and the one solicited, on the other hand, as Force driven back onto itself; or is it really the latter that is the soliciting force for the other and is what makes it a medium. . . . The external, soliciting Force appears as a universal medium, but only through its having been solicited by the other force to do so" . I am leaving out of my account Hegel's brilliant analysis of how law must undergo a splitting that parallels the one between soliciting and solicited force. We can state this tension in two ways. First, there is not one law but always many: the general law does not give a unity of specific laws but "leaves out their specific character." So the unifying law must always be supplemented by specific ones it cannot quite contain in their specificity. Hegel's example is the relation between the general law of attraction and any specific set of practical principles like the laws of electricity or of gravity , but I think even practical matters of jurisprudence manifest the same problem. The particular law is not clearly contained by any determinate chain from only one set of more comprehensive principles. And, second, as a consequence of this multiplicity of law, there is no stable way at this level for understanding where the necessity lies that the law attributes. Clearly the notion of Law gives consciousness self-certainty, since the positing of law makes it possible for reflective spirit to see itself producing unity for different manifestations of force. But law too has its solicited dimension as well as a soliciting one, so consciousness wobbles between seeing itself as the ultimate substance or seeing itself as completed in something beyond itself. Scholars may explain the world, or, as Daniel Dennet puts it, they may be mere sememes that libraries generate so as to reproduce themselves.
12. Once again Hegel's specific formulation deserves careful attention that I cannot give in my argument:
Infinity, or this absolute unrest of pure self-movement, in which whatever is determined in one way or another, e.g. as being, is rather the opposite of this determinateness, this no doubt has been from the start the soul of all that has gone before, but it is in the inner world that it has first freely and clearly shown itself. Appearance, or the play of forces, already displays it, but it is as 'explanation' that it first freely stands forth; and in being finally an object for consciousness, as that which it is, consciousness is thus self-consciousness. [PS, 101]
13. Naum Gabo, "The Realistic Manifesto," in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California, 1968), 336.
14. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in his Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harpper & Row), 1971), 45.
15. "The Concept of Force as a Frame for Modernist Art and Literature," boundary 2 25 : 125-55. This essay does not take up the issue of science but does use the Hegel and Malevich examples to make an argument about the limitations of modernist criticism based on thematic analyses of texts and contexts.
16. Ezra Pound, Personae, eds. Leah Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1993), 109.
17. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1987 [11th priting]), 6-10.
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"Bloomsbury"--you hear people say today, and it's not a compliment. Applied correctly and incorrectly to a number of persons of the highest individual distinction, as a collective noun it is used to express a complicated reaction, including envy and dislike. Never wholly admiration or praise. And this essay is an examination, an explanation--or an attempt to show the justice and the injustice of this.
Say "Bloomsbury" and then, on the Freud Game, only too often a string of words will follow, varying with the player: "The Intelligentsia in excelsis." "Oh, that lot," "those barren leaves." "N. B. G." [No Bloody Good], "faisandés," "awful warnings," "mental hermaphrodites," "brittle intellectuals," "that bunch." These applied to a group who, as individuals, are admitted to high distinction and a very real place in our national life. Yet, as a group, a picture-world follows them about, a popular film, of untidy res in shapeless, expensive tweeds and horn-rimmed glasses, or of dark women, unfashionably bobbed. A fragment, quite worthless, except as a "trailer" for a much more interesting picture. Or as light on the question--how a group of people, united by birth and training, who, after the War, made a startling bid--not in the arts only, but in most vital activities--to lead our culture, twenty years later should have come to stand for something that has not succeeded; that is felt at once to be equivocal and portentous, or as a simple-minded adversary would say: "no bon."
A quick answer leaps to mind--that it is only the common English shame and fear before the fact of intelligence, an attitude the press have been quick to exploit. Or the centrifugal forces in our culture trying to assert themselves against the centripetal, that constant rhythm which, as Lytton Strachey pointed out, for the first time since the early nineteenth century, has become dominant again.
What truth there may be in this is too obvious to need working out. In our time the public, the press, have always been like that. For the true meaning we must look deeper. For the cultural importance, or impotence of the group we call "Bloomsbury," for many reasons negative and positive, is of very great significance.
From about the year 1918, with the return of the Diaghilieff Ballet, the youth of England, starving for its lost education, turned again to the arts of peace. First there was the Ballet, with its appeal to them all, and the roar and leap of Prince Igor first thundered on the stage of the Coliseum, London at least became very much aware of this Bloomsbury group, who had made itself liaison-officer for this new wonder out of Russia, interpreters of its more "difficult" efforts to a starving world. 1
Perhaps, at that moment, those leaders of "Old Bloomsbury," Fry and Bell and Maynard Keynes, ceased for a moment to be protestant, mere critics of our ignorance and insularity, but with the Ballet for excuse, the production for their future productions, did for a moment lead our culture as a movement in the nation's ballet. For the élite only, but that, after all, is the way--or one way--this work gets done; and backed up by great ladies and great parties, splendidly and publicly done; so that ever since those short months remain in memory, charged with a power that those who have lived through them will never forget.
Also, at that same moment, unexpected but perfectly timed, came one of the earliest productions of Old Bloomsbury, one entrancing, brilliant and utterly unexpected work of art, the Eminent Victorians of Mr. Lytton Strachey.2
Always good at timing, that was their moment. Intelligent enough to associate themselves with the Ballet, strong enough to force down the public throat the new painting out of France; with Mr. Clive Bell's On Art for theory--the starting-point of a generation's discussions, they finished their first circumference, closed their first circle with a masterpiece of their own.3 They were now a ring, a magic ring, within which was gathered all that had been saved from the War--or as much as they thought worth saving; within whose circumference English creative ability could express itself again.
 Followed by the orgy of debunking which, with the tact of genius, Lytton Strachey saw how to head off; though he little saw what it was to lead us to.
With results which everyone might have expected and nobody did--so that everything of this new author's work was copied, except his learning, his intelligence, his wit, the essentials of his pure style; while his malice, his blind spots, his prejudices, his strange ignorance, his occasional sillinesses, these, to the discredit of our letters, have been put even to infamous use.
This certainly was one effect of his genius, the genius of Old Bloomsbury in its highest form. One aspect rather, for genius carries its own antiseptic, and there are other results from Lytton Strachey of which our letters can be glad. He took the triple tombstone, the old three-volume Life and Letters, smashed it to bits, and showed once and for all how to reassemble its fragments. Also, in the writing of history he illustrated the overwhelming importance of rhythm, design, a point of view, and above all, of scale.
So "Bloomsbury," "Old Bloomsbury," "Upper Bloomsbury" started off well, and in those early years admitted to their numbers--as Roger Fry said in 1922--one specimen from across the ocean, the new Englander, T. S. Eliot.
As Strachey said on Essex's choice of a bride, they "made an impeccable choice," the future poet of "The Waste Land," the one great poet of that generation (unless you count Edith Sitwell), the one poet of the group. Though here and later on, much later on, we come to the ways' crossing, the poet of Catholic Christianity.
This is not the place for an estimate of Eliot.
Another candidate who "passed" at the same time, by grace and election as well as birth, was Aldous Huxley--the Aldous Huxley of Leda and then of Antic Hay. A book that to many of us remains his best, with a tune to it and a pace, a design inherent in the action, as though there had passed into it something of the Ballet itself:
My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay.4
Meanwhile, what were the other writers of England, who had survived the war, writers and artists whose names were known, or who would soon be known? What were they making of it?