Levinas might be thought a strange philosopher to use in a defence of poetry, since he has stated categorically that art can only be a ‘shadow’ that dimly represents reality. ‘The artist has given the statue a lifeless life, a derisory life which is not master of itself, a caricature of life.’ As representation, art remains wholly within the realm of perception, whereas criticism, or philosophy proper, is a superior discourse, because it remains conceptual. ‘The most lucid writer finds himself in the world bewitched by its images,’ whereas ‘the interpretation of criticism speaks in full self-possession, frankly, through concepts, which are like the muscles of the mind.’ Levinas' very rhetoric here, in this 1948 essay ‘Reality and Its Shadow’ (which had to carry an editorial disclaimer when first published in the flagship of literary commitment, Les Temps Modernes) reveals a bitterness about, perhaps even a sense of betrayal by, an activity which he warned was ‘not the supreme value of civilization ... having its place, but only a place, in man's happiness.’ But even this formulation suggests that there is a modest role for art; to recover art for Levinas' ethical project one needs to redefine art, not as stale representation of bewitching imagery, or as something without a conceptual dimension, but as something capable of being open to a dialogue with the other.
The face of the other, Levinas argues, presents an immediate,
non-negotiable, ethical demand, one that transforms an individual, as he or she
is obliged to respond and answer. This encounter is the foundational moment for
ethics, which, for Levinas, is ‘first philosophy’. He is not concerned to
define a particular morality or law, the theological or social codification of
these precepts, but of a basic ethical condition, which Derrida has
called ‘an Ethics of Ethics’, one embodied in actual interhuman situations. Levinas writes:
The proximity of the other is the face's meaning.... The other
becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for
me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into
question... It is the responsibility of a hostage which can be carried to the
point of being substituted for the other person and demands an infinite
subjection of subjectivity.
As proof,
and example, of the last point, of the essential asymmetricality of the
relationship between self and others, even when the other seems not to
reciprocate, or when the other has died and the individual persists as a
survivor (the analogy with the Jews after the Holocaust is intended), Levinas
is fond of quoting from an artwork, one he should condemn for its umbrageous
illusoriness rather than utilizing its conceptual acuity: Dostoyevsky's The
Brothers Karamazov. ‘We are all responsible for everyone else - but I am
more responsible than all the others’.
Tim Woods’ article ‘Memory and Ethics in Contemporary Poetry’
traces an important theoretical shift within the work of the British
discontents by theorizing a Levinasian ‘ethics of form’ to supplement the more
familiar ‘politics of form’. Woods, who has been active within this poetry,
argues
Language attesting to the ‘heard word’ of the other in sound,
becomes the basis for an ethical poetics....an ethics of the voice is attention
to what interrupts. That ‘alternative’ other is partly what much contemporary
British ... ‘experimental’ poetry is seeking; to release the Utopian other in
writing.
I shall
return to the interruptions of literary experimentation, to this interaction of
technique and ethics.
Woods’ use of ‘voice’ here instead of ‘face’ points to Levinas’
later thought, one partly caused by the linguistic turn his work took in the
1960s, whose result was the theory of Otherwise than Being, or Beyond
Essence of 1974. The central element of this pacifist ethics, for my
purposes, is the distinction between the saying and the said.
Levinas’ most fruitful remark for this ethics of form is contained
in a series of
assertions
made in a 1981 interview that draws on this pair of terms.
made in a 1981 interview that draws on this pair of terms.
Man can give himself in saying to the point of poetry - or he can
withdraw into the non-saying of lies. Language as saying is an ethical
openness to the other; as that which is said - reduced to a fixed
identity or synchronized presence - it is an ontological closure of the other.
Saying is
the call of, the call to, the other, and the fact of the need and obligation to
respond to, and become responsible for, the other, as Levinas had always
maintained. It is a quasi-transcendental state beyond being, yet it is also ‘a
performative doing’, as Simon Critchley puts it, ‘that cannot be reduced to a
constantive description’. It is the site and performance of ethics because of
this obligation to respond. It is public, yet it does not communicate anything
but the desire to communicate. Thus explained it seems like a philosophical
version of interhuman phatic communion that precedes, or in comfortable
circumstances replaces, actual informational communication. Indeed Levinas has
indicated that passing the time of day about the weather may embody such a
gesture. As Levinas explains: ‘Saying opens me to the other before saying what
is said.’ We cannot, as in his everyday example, but not reply (even with
silence). Yet importantly Levinas recognizes difference as a corollary of such
proximity, one which avoids the violence of assimilation, or even the need to
express unity with the other. Levinas' earlier sense of the individual as a
hostage, committed to response, as a permanent possible substitute for the
other, even as a sacrifice to the act of proximity, is re-introduced in this
linguistic recasting: saying is a metaphor for what cannot be said; saying
makes us into signs of significations without content. It is the gift of
openness that is the very ethicality Levinas posits. Yet this cannot be
painlessly achieved.
This saying can be defined apart from, but is not found other than
interwoven with, the said. There is a price to pay; for the saying to appear
it has to undergo a betrayal, a ‘subordination of the saying to the said’, to
the linguistic system, to ontology. As Robert Eaglestone explains:
It is impossible to say the saying because at the moment of saying
it becomes the said, betrayed by the concrete language which is the language of
ontology. The saying, which is unthematizable, impossible to delimit, becomes
limited, thematized, said.
Yet the
saying is what interrupts the said, ruptures the said. The saying ‘appears’ as
a knot catching in the thread of the said. This is its necessary condition of
falling into essence in language. Indeed, without this knottiness it would not
have its being or effectivity. However, ‘The said ... arises in the saying’. It is the point at which ‘clarity occurs, and
thought aims at themes’. The said and
the saying both support, yet react against, one another, hence the tragic
lifting towards poetry and the fateful thematizatation in ontological solidity.
The ‘otherwise than being’ which is found in the act of saying is ‘betrayed in
the said which dominates the saying which states it’.
This outline suggests that uncovering the saying in the said is
the task of philosophy; it seems to suggest, in an echo of Levinas’ early theory, that art would belong
to the realm of essences, ‘in which the said is reduced to a pure theme -, to absolute exposition’ ) and
that only criticism (by which he meant philosophy) could uncover the saying.
But it is Robert Eaglestone's argument, and Levinas' own belief, if we take
seriously the notion that ‘man can give himself in saying to the point of
poetry’ that the qualities of saying occur in art. Eaglestone reminds us that
‘the poem must interrupt in the name of the saying ... as literary texts, they
work as “prophecy”, fracturing the said.’ They must open to the other; they are
saying as well as said. Indeed he sees Levinas' own Otherwise than Being
structured as a literary work, ‘especially self-reflexive contemporary
postmodern poetry and prose’. It is
precisely its foregrounded artifice that makes it so, that attempts to keep the
saying, the interruption, open in the text we read. According to Eaglestone:
‘In his style of writing and choice of metaphors Levinas performatively
foregrounds language in order to disrupt the said’.
This description of Levinas’ literary practice recalls Woods’
similar assertion about the interruptive nature of the technical devices
of the British Poetry Revival and Linguistically Innovative Poetry. The
technically defamiliarising poetry that imposes such a task of dialogue on any
reader may indeed be a poetry of an open saying rather than of a closed
saidness. The the 1990s self-interruptive texts of Tom Raworth, with their lateral
shiftings, or the neologistically resistant materiality of Maggie O’Sullivan’s
poems, are works which court the refusal of a saidness that we might equate
with paraphrase and the empirical lyricism of the Movement Orthodoxy.
Writing as saying is ethical, processual, interhuman, dialogic in
Bakhtin’s sense. Writing as said is ontological and fixed, warlike; a closure
of the other, monologic in Bakhtian terms. This is why so much poetry of the
orthodoxy attempts what is arguably an irresponsible closure that is a violence
towards the possible agility and response of a reader. In less elevated terms
we might argue that it even insults the intelligence of the reader. As the
other of the writer is the reader, then the other of the text is the act of
reading and the reader in it, prolonging its saying.
There cannot be a poetry of pure saying; the saying must exist in
the said, as ghost to its host. A text in very physical terms needs to be
printed, the order of words (usually) fixed. The openness that is its gesture must
go hand in hand with some thematic or semantic fixity, however that is resisted
by delayed naturalization. For the saying to be witnessed at all, it must turn
into the said. We cannot know the saying from the said.
Conversely, there cannot be a poetry of the pure said, since only
the performance of saying could body forth the said, and as it does it both
supports and disrupts the said. The musical and metrical life of Movement
poetry, for example, cannot simply be argued away. However, one of the effects
of the deliberate will towards saidness in Movement verse is its
articulation in social terms, often extending into an invasive ontological
violence at the level of theme which might be called the attempt to articulate
the other; where the writer literally speaks the, in actuality, unknown
thoughts of another. It may be found in the use of the false consenual ‘we’ as
when Larkin informs his reader that ‘our’ love will survive ‘us’.
‘Saying makes signs to the other, but in this sign signifies the
very giving of signs,’ argues Levinas. Yet it is this openness that readers
find already in a number of writers (including Allen Fisher), an openness that
allows readers to find the necessity to enter the artifice, to articulate the
interruptions in the discourse, to enter into an active relationship with the
textual other. The text is a gift that may be brought to a thematized rest only
after having been given or taken to the point of poetry. The text and its
other, which is the act of reading, are brought together. When this poetry is
successful it is arguably able to articulate that saying in the said of the
dialogic performance of the book. A successful reading will be one that exposes
the saidness of the text to an openness of performance since saying, Critchley
reminds us, is a ‘performative doing’.
(Another way of valorising reading is to suggest that there must
exist a corollary of the interdependence of the saying and the said in a
reader’s act of reading, as against the reader’s sense of the read,
as the already read, the thematized said, completed. Indeed Derek Attridge
defines an act of innovative ‘reading as an attempt to respond to the otherness
of the other’, working performatively with the text and ‘working against the
mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which
can barely be heard’, in ways which remind us of the ethical asymmetricality a
reader must face with a text. (This is indeed a moment of osculation between The Poetry of Saying and The Meaning of Form.)
Terms from speech act theory, such as Critchley’s, are often used
to describe the relation between the saying and the said. Jill Robbins, for
example, echoes Critchley, and writes:
The Saying and the Said is a correlative relation ... that marks
the difference between a conative speech, oriented towards the addressee,
interlocutionary and ethical, and a speech oriented towards the referent, more
like a speaking about than a speaking to the other.
The necessity of saying arises before self-identity, and indeed
breaks up the sense of identity, emphasizes the approach of the undeniable
other, as a reader active with the devices left by the poem’s saying.
Interruption brings forth dialogue. In a text, where the face-to-face has been
replaced, the responsibility is more acute, from reader to writer, and from
writer to reader. As the author is responsible to the reader, then the reading
is responsible to the writing to preserve reading as an act of saying,
as the reader responds, participates in the text’s structural indeterminacies,
as it ruptures the said, interrupts by effects of defamiliarization, or
suspends like Forrest-Thomson’s good naturalization, through its textual
opacities. These preserve the saying in the said, since they compel the reader
to dwell on the devices of the utterance rather than reducing them, or closing
them, to dead paraphrasable fixities. They preserve reading as an activity,
resist closing it in a summary. Open works are, in a sense, always open books.
A reading which operates as a paraphrase
(and writing which works in collusion with such readings) is an appropriation
of, a fearful taming of, the otherness of the text. In Levinasian terms, it
judges the other in terms of the same; it closes. It attempts to be (or more
more colloquially we would say have) the last word. The relationship
with text is more ethical for not attempting this reduction, this
identification. It recognizes that the text maintains its differences as well
as its proximity, through its technical devices, its social dialogism.
Appropriation must be countered by distanciation. This is a necessary
recognition for both writers and readers in the textual dialogue of their acts
of saying (and reading) in attempting to minimize the thematizing of the said
(and of the read).
One must remain vigilant to the possibility that the concern that
writing may do violence to the other, possibly by a fake ‘saying’ that is
simply a gesturing of responsibility in the thematized language of the said.
Robbins, in her study of Levinas’ theoretic of literature, stresses, ‘We should
not take for granted that we know what we mean by the saying. This is precisely
what is seized upon by Levinas’s readers hoping to extend his positive
evaluations of art to an ethical poetics.’ 57
Both the technical and the social levels contribute to the effects
of making the point of poetry its saying, an interruption, and not its said. To
read is to be proximate to, to face alterity as distance, and be implored to answer,
as Bakhtin would say. To write of this work, or of any work, is also to attempt
to do justice to alterity and diversity.
(The rest is analysis: and that's the rest of the book.)
Ebook: www.liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com
My later project The Meaning of Form may be accessed here.
(The rest is analysis: and that's the rest of the book.)
Ebook: www.liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com
My later project The Meaning of Form may be accessed here.
 |
| Patricia Farrell's cover image for The Poetry of Saying, which I dubbed 'Otherwise Than Beings' |
