Prefaces to the Diaphora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity 1557530041, 9781557530042

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DIAPHORA Rhetorics, Allegory, and tine Interpretation of Postmodernity

by Peter Carravetta

$29.50 The central concern of these eight studies and essays is the understanding and critique of culture at the shifty boundaries between the Modern and the Postmodern epochs. The author contends that what needs to be ad­ dressed is the very abyss, the “spacetime” between the Modern and the Postmodern worldviews, as well as the tension between aesthetics and ethics, critical discourse and the creative arts, in an effort to rethink multireferential processes of signification. The approach to this complex web is first exemplified in Nietzsche’s struggle with all-encompassing rhetorical structures such as we find in logic and aphorisms, and its resolution in figural construc­ tions; and subsequently in D’Annunzio’s turning of allegorical writing into the most fundamental form of human expression. This sets the stage for a critique of the Avant-garde tradition and its no longer sustainable idolatry of the signifier, irony, and aggressivity, traits that overspilled into Modernism. The keystone of the book is Carravetta’s notion of Diaphoristics, a theory of interpretation as dialogue. Diaphora, or difference, refers to the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy and signifies the movement between asymmetrical or heterogenous forms of discourse that have, both historically and speculatively, borne the transfer of meaning from one semantic/hermeneutic field to another. The author focuses on the necessary risk and duplicity of criticism and develops nonagonistic models based on figuration and rhetorical dynamics. In two other chapters, the author steps back to reassess, in terms of the diaphora, the diverging notions of Postmodernity by the continental philosophers Lyotard and Vattimo. The collection ends with an essay on the longoverdue conversation between Vico and Hei­ degger.

Prefaces to the Diaphora is recommended for scholars and students of critical theory, philosophy, comparative literature, and Italian studies.

PREFACES TO THE DIAPHORA

Prefa ces to the Dia phora Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity

by

Peter Carravetta

PURDUE UNIVERSITY PRESS West Lafayette, Indiana

Book and jacket designed by Russell ]. Merzdorf

Copyright 1991 by Purdue Research Foundation, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907. All rights reserved. Unless permission is granted, this material shall not be copied, reproduced, or coded for reproduction by any electrical, mechanical, or chemical processes, or combination thereof, now known or later developed. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carravetta, Peter. Prefaces to the diaphora : rhetorics, allegory, and the interpretation of postmodernity by Peter Carravetta. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-55753-004-1 (alk. paper) : 1. Literature, Modern—Philosophy. 2. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. 3. Hermeneutics. 4. Modernism (Literature) 5. Postmodernism (Literature) I. Title. PN49.C36 1990 80T.95—dc20 89-70239

Printed in the United States of America

for Gino Rizzo Tu m’hai con disiderio il cor disposto...

LEGENDA

The stimulus for investigation must start not with philosophies, but with issues and problems. E. Husserl

What remains constant in thinking is movement. M. Heidegger

Everything that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself. W. Blake

But Socrates, I have no way of telling you what I have in mind, for whatever proposition we put forward goes around and refuses to stay put where we establish it. Plato

Occorre anzitutto entrare freddamente nello stato d'animo di un'emergenza estrema, di un naufragio fra marosi, e qui comportarsi come il comandante di una nave, che vede prossima la rovina ma intanto pud ancora governare il suo bastimento ed e convinto che tutto potrebbe essere salvato. G. Colli

CONTENTS

Preface

*

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Irrgarten

xi

xvii

3

Part One: The Modern Declined 1. Before Zarathustra: Nietzsche through the Rhetoric of the Aphorism

13

2. From Ulysses to Zarathustra to Hermes: Fora Rereading

of D’Annunzio’s Maia

79

Part Two: Towards the Diaphora 3. The Wake of the Avant-Gardes: Culture, Postmodernity, Interpretation

133

4. About the Ancient Diaphora: Sketch of a Post-Modern Theory of Interpretation as Diaphoristies

16 9

Part Three: Post-Modern Perspectives 5. Jean-Frangois Lyotard: The Discourse of Modernity

and the Idea of Language 6. Gianni Vattimo and the Endfs) of Modernity

191 215

Conclusion: Towards a Study of Rhetorics and Hermeneutics in Vico and Heidegger

239

Notes

255

Bibliography

283

Index of Names

323

Index of Terms and Subjects

327

Plate Showing a Philosophical Debate between Ptolemy and Hermes

PREFACE

This collection of studies and essays explores several topics in contemporary literary culture in a comparative, interdisciplinary, and experimental perspective. The overarching concern, at times explicitly treated but oftener alluded to, is the possibility of a novel way of interpretation which reactivates, as a hermeneutic figura, the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Tra­ ditionally, the quarrel has been understood as the locus of an ineradicable conflict of interests, or of communication, between aesthetics and science, or between the poet and the philosopher­ critic caught in that web which nonetheless connects the so-called two cultures. However, elaborating some of the most radical critiques of the European tradition which have arisen with greater frequency during the last quarter of a century, and against the background of an epochal periodization—which comprises An­ cient, Modern (Modernism and the Avant-Gardes), and PostModern—what these chapters suggest is that perhaps the quarrel was never intended to be exclusively a quarrel, that, on the one hand, the real differences may lie elsewhere and, on the other, those we have inherited need to be reconceptualized or at the very least set in motion yet again. The word Diaphora, which in Ancient Greek stood for the "quarrel" or "contest" or, more correctly, the "specific difference" among species, though in Aristotle is made to coincide with final form, definition, and by implication essence, is here readapted to double as the umbrella notion for a difference predicated upon movement, exchange, and figuration. The part about figuration will be developed in terms of rhetorics and allegory, the part about movement and exchange is built right into the word, that is, dia: "in between," and phora/pherein: "bring across," "bear." The Diaphora then intends to signify a movement akin to a dialogue between and among forms of discourse that, though typically exclusive of one another, are here made to relate and transfer signification from one semantic/hermeneutic position to another. It therefore sets the present studies on the margins of, and undoubtedly resonant with, ontological hermeneutics, phe­ nomenology, deconstruction, discourse analysis, and rhetorics. By the same token, these "diaphoric" or "diaphoristic" readings will register only a distant echo of those forms of cultural critique which are rooted in, and can no longer be fully legitimated by, xi

•I XII

PREFACE

New Criticism, Idealism/Historicism, formalism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and structuralism. The specific areas of interest and concern here will gravitate towards historiography, rhetorics, allegory, mythography, the na­ ture and function of literature, and the possibility of a "philo­ sophical criticism." The actual chapters deal with the following. Chapter 1 explores an emblematic figure at the interface between the Modern and the Post-Modern. The study traces Nietzsche's discovery, development, and theorization of the aphorism, jux­ taposing his metacritical observations on language to the actual evolution of his rhetoric. His critique of philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic constructs goes as far as to reduce the discourse of knowledge to a pointism which overlaps with more canonical forms such as the motto, the proverb, the enigma, and the pensee, but which nonetheless speak to an abstract idea of essence and value. It will be argued that the aphorism is eternalizing and atemporal, and as such ultrameta-physical and alienating. Nietzsche in short will be compelled to explode into the allegorical mode, with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, so that he can reach an audience, recover the temporality of the utterance, and yet be critical and creative at the same time. This reading contrasts with the most authoritative views on the subject of Nietzsche's language, such as we have from Heidegger, Deleuze, Cacciari, LacouLabarthe, Derrida, Aiderman, Aiken, Kofman: it represents the prolegomenon to a new reading, presently in progress, of Nietzsche's masterpiece. What has been lacking all along is greater consideration for the linguistics and the rhetorics of allegory, and its links with a primordial disclosedness of thinking, with myth as pre-philosophic, pre-scientific utterance nevertheless capable of structuring and organizing the emulative speech of individuals within social groups. Chapter 2 is also basically the first part of a reinterpretation of D'Annunzio's long-overlooked masterpiece Maia (1903). D'An­ nunzio is perhaps the most problematical writer of the century, in Italy as well as in Europe. In part due to stereotyped views about decadence, misconstrued ideas on the nature of aesthetics and of his aesthetic in particular, and cultural prejudices against any author who meddles outside of art or who speaks of selfaffirmation (not to speak of his flirt with fascism), D'Annunzio

PREFACE

x/77

has been the thorn in the side of academic criticism, so much so that despite the obvious “greatness" of the writer, critics have always felt the compunction to qualify and explain in what "mi­ nor" ways he is still worthwhile reading. My view is that D'An­ nunzio is a much-explored but little-understood continent and that, if taken "seriously," he may become the key author of the turn of the century, and of the overcoming of Modernity. Among the miscast criticism, that he did not "understand" Nietzsche. Let him or her who "understands" Nietzsche thoroughly cast the first critical stone! The present study intends to show that the writer made a valid, appropriate, indeed revealing revision of Nietzsche in view of his own poetic evolution and in terms of the different conceptions of tradition, history, and language developed by the two authors. The analysis revolves around the notion of allegory developed by D'Annunzio, which recovers the historicalness of mythology, and the inescapable figuration of all discourse, two aspects which are at odds with the semioticized, permutable meta­ images of nineteenth- and twentieth-century allegorism we have been trained to be more comfortable with. Chapter 3 offers a critical overview of the tenets and the his­ torical importance of the avant-gardes, sets them within the broader context of literary Modernism and the Modern Epoch (post-Renaissance to the post-World War II period), and suggests several reasons why, for all intents and purposes, and despite some cogent arguments to the contrary, the avant-gardes are all but "dead." Hinted at (and developed in the other chapters as well) are also the reemergence of allegory and the preoccupation with the heteronomous, ethical-social possibilities of art. Subse­ quently, a brief theory and history of the Post-Modern is sketched, some current positions are critiqued, and my own version of Postmodernity is submitted. Chapter 4 is an esquisse of a theory of interpretation as dialogue which contains in nuce the gist of diaphoristics. It begins with some insurmountable dualisms and often troubling paradoxes which besiege criticisms old and new and suggests their possible resolution on the basis of an understanding of rhetorics which is not foreclosed to ontological, existential, and figurative instances. In doing so, criticism must accept the risks, indeed the constant betrayal, of its discourse, and look to the unreachable otherness

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or alterity of the text as the motive force of future history. The key trans-aesthetic issue centers on how to change rhetorical (political) agonism into dialogue, competitive play into pleasure and joy. Interpretation in short acknowledges the positivity and creativity of the interim space-time between the purely poetic and the absolutely philosophical. In doing so, it will always be open to the social, the ethical, and the interpersonal aspect of "doing culture." Chapter 5 looks at the most clearheaded critique of the discourse of Modernity by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. Deeply critical of the social and political implications of any and all gestures of rationalization and appropriation, libidinal, techno­ logical, and otherwise, Lyotard discloses the path to a philo­ sophical linguistics which is not unresponsive to some of the insights of analytical and pragmatic thought. His notion of differend is predicated upon the immanence of the uttered sentence which must of necessity establish a contrast, a situational twist in signification between speakers and whose underlying motive is political or power oriented. Lyotards idea of language refuses poetological and ontological explications unless they are seen as a string of utterances whose meaning can be established only within an allocated (socially determined) family of phrases and in sharp opposition to other, necessarily excluded families of phrases. Thus habitual notions of semantics, syntax, signification, as well as philosophy itself, are reconceptualized in terms of the politics of speech. Chapter 6 is a reading of the work of Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo in which some of the problematics raised in the preceding chapters are both confirmed and developed. Vattimo has been engaged in an unflinching critique of the "strong," logocentric discourse of Modernity and all of its reifying, fetishistic ratio­ nalities since his early writings on Heidegger, the avant-gardes, Nietzsche, and ontological hermeneutics. Sensitive to the dis­ courses of the human and social sciences as well as poetics and aesthetics, Vattimo has recently developed the notions of Verwin­ dung and weak ontology which disclose stimulating ways of dealing with and inhabiting the reality of the decline of the West. His own texts move in-between theory and practice, the philo­

PREFACE

xv

sophical and the rhetorical, the thought of difference and the inevitability of linguistic concrescence. The book ends with a reflection on some problems to be dealt with at some length in the future, tackling as it does the massimi sistemi of Heidegger and Vico. As both thinkers have informed to some degree all the preceding chapters, what is here attempted is a conjoining of the immense contribution each made to our understanding of language and interpretation. This is achieved, albeit in an as yet sketchy manner, by critiquing one through the other. In fact, if there is no doubt that Heidegger is the thinker of Postmodernity par excellence, the philosopher who revealed the maniacal illusions, indeed perversions, of metaphysics and technology, it is also true that during the last twenty-five years Vico has emerged as being endowed with an uncanny capacity to have already addressed, historical considerations aside, many of the problems faced by a culture, our culture, which has ex­ hausted both the linear, progressive, rational grounding in history, as well as the evolutionary, spiralic, spiritualistic belief in eman­ cipation and utopia. Now more than ever, then, a dialogue between Heidegger and Vico is to be established in order to pursue the exchange between being and history, poetry and thought, art and science. Coherently with the title, this last essay more than the rest is but a Preface to the Diaphora. Having to assemble these studies for publication made me aware of two things primarily. First, that more than what they prove or resolve, they retrospectively point to a host of other issues that need to be studied and explored further. Second, that most if not all should have been rewritten. I tried revising and updating, but it proved futile: it would have made a different book. Perhaps the variations in style, tone, and organization may gladden the few; more than that, perhaps the movement of a given prob­ lematic—for instance, the question of postmodern allegory, or the critique of irony—can be best appreciated by considering how it refracts in (apparently) unrelated contexts and stimulates further research: that would be a plus, what I or any critic can ever hope of obtaining from a book. This may further explain the title: these are but a gathering of introductions to a series of problems which concern our understanding of language and of interpreta­ tion. Prefaces to the Diaphora is then no more, but also no less,

xvi

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than a series of preliminary researches, some detailed, others more general, which await a full-fledged theoretical study. But as we are constantly unterweg zu something or other, there is no com­ pelling necessity to mortgage the future. What is sought in this book is an alternative to those approaches to the text which, confined to a predetermined number of metacritical moves during interpretation, end up confirming the Same at the expense of the Other.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I should like to acknowledge some debts I incurred in preparing this book for the press. First, I would like to thank all the friends and colleagues who have invited me to read a paper or submit an article for publication from which I eventually derived these chapters. They are, in more or less chronological order: Ileana Marculescu for inviting me to Cerisy-la-Salle in September 1983, where I read "About the Ancient Diaphora." Gary Hentzi for publishing the first part of the Lyotard article in Critical Texts, and David Wood for having me fly to the Lyotard symposium at the University of Warwick in January 1987. Paolo Valesio and Barbara Spackman for the D'Annunzio paper read at the Yale symposium on D'Annunzio in March 1987 (and for publishing a shorter version in Italian with the proceedings). Bela Egyad of Carleton University for my participation in the "Nietzsche: The Rhetoric of Nihilism" symposium held at Ottawa in September 1986. Charles Scott and Steve Watson for allowing me to read the Vico-Heidegger paper at the 1987 Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conference, a different version of which I also read, thanks to Sante Matteo, at the 1988 American As­ sociation for Italian Studies convention in Provo. I would like to thank all the editors of the books and journals in which some of these texts first appeared. Full bibliographical information follows below. Critical and philosophical work cannot be realized unless it is constantly verbalized, explained to and bounced off the friendly but no less severe judgment of persons with whom we come into contact. I am thinking of the responses to the papers as they were read on the various occasions listed above, as well as the more conversational and sporadic exchanges which occur in the most diverse environments, and often through letters or over the phone. I am very grateful for direct and indirect insights gained during the past few years from conversations with Robert Viscusi, Richard Palmer, Gianni Vattimo, Paolo Valesio, Tricia Collins, Richard Milazzo, John Paul Russo, Renate Holub, Thomas Harrison, Mar­ tino Oberto, Frank Rosengarten, Sophia lordanidou, Anthony Julian Tamburri, Joseph Buttigieg, Robert Innis, Mary Rawlinson, Raffaele Perrotta, Eugenio Mazzarella, Edith Wyschogrod, Robert Pierro, Edmund Jacobitti.

xvii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A note of appreciation for their trust, support, and stimulation is in order for the Queens College administration, specifically in the person of Dean of the Humanities John Reilly, and the faculty and chair in Romance Languages. Finally, I would like to express my feelings of gratitude and friendship to Anthony Julian Tamburri for first suggesting I submit the collection to Purdue University Press, and for encouraging me when I started racing against the ubiquitous deadline; to Djelal Kadir, chairman of the press editorial board, for useful suggestions concerning the structure of the book; to Purdue University Press for accepting my book for publication; to Grace Romeo and the word-processing team in Kiely Hall 248, Queens College, for the patient preparation of the finished manuscript; and to Jan Becker for her scrupulous copyediting, which eliminated many an imperfection. Dulcis in fundo, a special thought for Aeneas and Oriana, who have seen me through it all. The Introduction was read at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in March of 1987, bearing the title "Seven Frames Between Modernity and Post-Modernity." In revised form, and with the title "Philosophy as a Kind of Narration," it was read also at the 1989 International Association for Philosophy and Literature Annual Convention held at Emory University, Atlanta (GA), April 1989. Chapter 1—"Before Zarathustra”—was read (bearing the title "Limiting Experience: On the Nature of Aphorism") at the con­ ference "Nietzsche: The Rhetoric of Nihilism" held at Carleton University, Ottawa, September 26-28, 1986. Chapter 2—"From Ulysses to Zarathustra to Hermes"—was read in an early draft (and with a different title) at the symposium on "Gabriele D'Annunzio: His Writings, His Times" held at Yale University, New Haven (CT), March 26-28, 1987. A shorter ver­ sion, in Italian, appeared with the proceedings in D'Annunzio a Yale, edited by P. Valesio (Milano: Garzanti, 1989): 163-85. Chapter 3—"The Wake of the Avant-Gardes"—was read at the annual Mid-Hudson Modern Language Association Convention held at Marist College, Poughkeepsie (NY), December 1, 1985.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xix

Chapter 4—“About the Ancient Diaphora"—was read at the symposium on "La postmodernite en art et philosophic" held at Cerisy-la-Salle, September 4-10, 1983, and subsequently published with the proceedings in Krisis, Nos. 3-4 (1985): 112-27. Chapter 5—"Jean-Francois Lyotard"—is made up of two sepa­ rate pieces. The first, on The Postmodern Condition, is a touchedup version of a review article which appeared in Critical Texts 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1984): 24-27. The second part was originally read as a paper at the two-day conference "Judging Lyotard" held at the University of Warwick (UK), January 30-31, 1987, and is slated to appear with the proceedings in a volume edited by A. Benjamin and D. Wood, and published by Routledge. Chapter 6—"Gianni Vattimo"—was read at the American As­ sociation for Italian Studies Annual Convention held at the Uni­ versity of Lowell (MA), April 12, 1989. The Conclusion—"Vico and Heidegger"—was read in slightly modified form at different conferences: the Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy held at the University of Notre Dame (IN), October 15-17, 1987; and the American Association for Italian Studies Annual Convention held at Brigham Young University, Provo (UT), April 12-14, 1988. Permission to reproduce the following artworks is gratefully acknowledged: Jacket: Oxen and Wagon, Proto-Hittite. 2000-1800 B.C., bronze. Dallas Museum of Art, Irvin L. and Meryl P. Levy Endowment Fund. © 1985 Dallas Museum of Art. Page x: Plate Showing a Philosophical Debate between Ptolemy and Hermes, silver, 6-7th century A.D. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu. Page 2: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, An Allegory with Venus and Time. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London. Page 12: Goya, Idioma Universal. Courtesy, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Page 78: William Blake, The Ancient of Days. Courtesy, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Page 132: Giorgio de Chirico, The Great Metaphysician, oil on canvas, 1917, 41 Vs X 27V2". Collection, The Museum of Modern

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Art, New York. The Philip L. Goodwin Collection. Photograph © 1990 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Page 168: Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, oil on canvas, 1942, 76.2X144 cm, Friends of American Art Collection, 1942.51. . . © 1990 The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved. Page 190: Jimmy Ernst, A Time for Fear, oil on canvas, 1949, 237/sX20". Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Katherine Cornell Fund. Photograph © 1990 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Page 214: Wilfredo Lam, The Jungle, gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 1943, 7' lOVi" X 7'6Vz". Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Inter-American Fund. Photograph © 1990 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Page 238: Peter Blume, The Rock, oil on canvas, 1948, 109.2X91.4 cm, Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., 1956.338 ... © 1990 The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved. Page 254: Lucio Pozzi, The Migration, 1981. Photo by Jon Abbott. Reproduced with permission of Lucio Pozzi.

INTRODUCTION

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, An Allegory with Venus and Time

IRRGA R TEN

So the poet, the rhetorician, the philosopher, who thinks of a page as merely a page, and not as a field for the voice; who considers print to be simply print, and does not notice the notes it forms; whose style is disheveled and overcharged with energy or overrun with feeling, or whose frigid and compulsive orderings make the mouth dry; the author who is satisfied to see his words, as though at a distance like sheep on a hillside, and not as concepts coasting like clouds across his consciousness; such a writer will never enter, touch, or move the soul; never fill us with the feeling that he's seen the Forms, whether or not there are any; never give us that ride up the hill of Heaven as Plato has, or the sense that in accepting his words, we are accepting a vision. IAZ Gass

To talk about poetry is the most daring, difficult, at times ungrateful task; yet some, in despair, have reacted by saying that nothing is easier than writing/making poetry. It is in fact well known that more than a poet has held (Blake and Emerson come to mind)—correctly, to my way of seeing it—that the only way of talking about a poem, is with another poem. The very ancient— and dominating, and alienating—problematic of the adaequatio intellectus et rei is before us; I say problematic, for the intellectus usually ^problematically wanders in its uncertainties and sup­ positions, and the res remains just that, res, a thing. If I posit poetry as the object of my inquiry, it transforms itself in an unfathomable other, an amoeba, a flux, a field which I will forever attempt to capture, stop and fix onto a structure, a scaffolding, in other words, a thing. I will attempt to carve out its soul, to sculpt its substance with the tools of a langue, with the axioms of a Wissenschaft; to keep the thing within sight, and in the proper perspective, the monitoring and calibrating themselves have to become fixed, precise, a thing. And I will without the shadow of a doubt plunge, immediately after, in a very deep melancholy state, perhaps troubled and ultimately defeated, be­ cause this selfsame langue is infinitely variable, ever changing, never definite (or finite); because this Wissenschaft is never equal

3

4

INTRODUCTION

to itself in all places and for all times, and the idea of the True and of Truth have long since been abandoned to make room for terminally valid hypotheses. I am now in consternation, cha­ grined: I have lost my object, poetry is beyond me, it is an other, an unseen and unseeable other, untouched and untouchable. I can talk about poetry, I can say things about it, I can circle it, hover over it, and pretend I can lay claim to some knowledge and understanding that is vaguely approaching the object of inquiry. But I am saying nothing. I can say that poetry, in the variety of its coming into being, in its specific and peculiar ways of manifesting itself to me—what I would like to call its concretizations (from concrescere, to grow together into an object)—poetry has a thousand faces and thou­ sands of resonances and allusions; it rebounds to an unlimited number of plausible/possible significations; ultimately, poetry re­ calls meanings. What I have assimilated as the deep relationship between langue, as something pertaining to everybody, and pa­ role, as my only possibility to manifest my being and assure a consistency to my existence, is called forth. I must ascertain whether meaning is conferred to the langue because I proffer a parole, or whether my parole has meaning because the langue is replete with all possible meanings. Do I go to poetry, or does poetry come to me? At this point, the very notion of commu­ nication is questioned; criticism is nowhere to be found; art has just abandoned us; and the spirit of historical consciousness is knocking at the door. Of the unconscious I will not say much, since it has been and will be talking all along.

Let us recall some theses or hypotheses—or, better yet, some definitions—conceived in order to "explain" poetry, so that we may better understand how a discourse about poetry, or the talking of poetry, is necessarily bound to a discourse which articulates a dimension or horizon directed to an unspeakable elsewhere, and not to the alleged object of inquiry. Let us see what it is that pre-occupies us, or, better said, what will be occupying our thinking. We will not mention who fathered these offsprings, nor in which mother tongue did they first breathe; they are all inhabitants of the amniotic fluid of history! So we have: poetry is a dream; poetry is the marvelous; poetry adds

IFIRGARTEN

5

an instant of life to our existence; poetry is news that remains news; poetry vibrates between music and mathematics; poetry is everything that prose is, plus a, b, and c; poetry is the language of the unconscious; poetry is what gets lost in translation; poetry, inasmuch as it is language, is the house of being; poetry is the beautiful; poetry is truth; poetry is love; poetry is pure intuition; poetry is an arrow; poetry is silence; poetry is a place; poetry is; poetry. . . Conversely, we can rather easily satirize about all the subtleties devised by the scientistic tradition in order to arrive at the crux of the problem, by saying above all what something is not. Ergo we have: poetry is not the novel; nor is it a movie script, a travelogue, a comic strip, a treatise in botany, a missal, Nietzsche's laundry list, Gore Vidal's opinions concerning the fate and function of literature during the Nixon administration, and so on. The end result is not any different from what we said in the first series of definitions, except that this time we push our object ever further away from us; we corner it, we make it be something on the assumption that it cannot be some other thing. We are then forced to use images and metaphors and symbols and finally allegories; poetry is like the wayfarer who knows he is in a given place only because there is a particular oak tree, or a faraway hamlet, or a peculiar hillcrest, something that allows him to get his bearings, to have an idea of where he is and what and where the path he is traveling is leading him. He does not have to have a destination. He may be a nomad, or an exile, or a migrant. And he simply travels. But this path, often, leads to a blind alley. It becomes then useless to speak of poetry as though it were an object or a thing, for we would find ourselves speaking of what we wished poetry to be; we would unveil our methods of inquiry; we would evidence our conscious and unconscious epis­ temologies, our beliefs in a specific ontology. Ultimately, our own theory of poetry. Except that theory entails a spectator; and method, as we all know, a way, a path. Therefore, a seeing the path. The notion of perception, then, is fundamental, even before we attempt to deal with a logos of sorts. Yet even when we see the wall, when we play with a crystallized discourse, or when we fix our sight upon a dead and forgotten letter, there is little to be gained: there will be no guarantee, no compensation, and

6

INTRODUCTION

no acquittal—or, if you prefer, no absolution from our sins. After all is said and done, things, insofar as they are entities, insofar as they have the possibility of an ontic constitution, live—or do not live—in nothingness (Plato notwithstanding); things come forth to the light and they again vanish into nothingness, as Severino and, long before him, Parmenides have taught us. We ought perhaps to wait until we find out what the hypo­ thetical creatures that dwell within the bionic range of Antares, or the Crab nebula, have to say about poetry, or how they write it, before we can say anything at all. Are we not after all painfully aware of historical relativity and the lack of any absolutes? But until that day, what “links" one word to another in the poetic mode, what allows certain objects/constructs to be named poetry, appears to be the lived experience of language (as langage) in the manifold of an I-world rapport. Something vaguely human must perforce be there: poetry, to my knowledge, has never been created by the caribou of Alaska, nor is it an essential characteristic of the snows of the Kilimanjaro. My character is called Helios, and he will represent what his other presentifies: Helios exists only because he tends towards a complete communion with Humanus, the elusive essence, what in-sists, what is. Humanus, in a sort of absurd vision, is the surface of the mirror; Helios, on the other hand, can only be present, alternatively, on this and that side of the mirror. Helios can utilize words as discrete entities; they were bestowed upon him by the World so that he might articulate certain reflexes within the Community. Now a word—each word—is intuited and experienced by Helios as a thing/entity, and therefore as subject to laws and principles and modalities of signification which some­ how manage to diminish or destroy altogether the alterity of his own perception—and therefore of its correlative as expression. His life and his memory and his projects are narrowed down to a slight bunch of possible itineraries which are in turn confined to the prefabricated avenues and alleyways of the Community, that same Community that legislates over and determines those spaces and those roads and all available words (taken in the sense, obviously, of all signifying elements of the whole called langue). Helios knows, deep inside, that this langue is not his own, that

IRFlGARTEN

7

he is always on the outside of it, pressed against the wall, or, as Sartre once told us around 1947, too much inside of it, lost in a maze of curtains and byways and partitions seeking to say what he touches. Knowledge, of course, pertains to Others, is proper of the Present, is the trustee and the consignee of Presence, that is, of Power. But Helios is also the visible and invisible precipitate of single words; he is the sediment of long-gone encounters; he is a knot in the net that makes up and sustains the langue. Ultimately, he is a diffracting and specular element of the essence of this whole. After having walked so many paths, crossed so many roads, gained access to many more dwellings and realms, Helios begins to think in terms of roadness, of accessibility; he (self) perceives himself not as an entity as much as a dynamic, and correlating, vicissitude, in other words, as an Event (Ereignis), where being is conjugated in the gerund (cf. Ortega y Gasset), and the notion of belonging and appropriation (cf. Heidegger) become funda­ mental. In this perspective, Helios does at times effectively enclasp Humanus. Time is here experienced and lived as something that knows no Presence, unless it is played—at times dramatically, oftentimes not so dramatically—and integrated as a variable Dominant, or as a secondary consideration according to circum­ stances, the will, or the exigencies of other stylemes. The presence of things teaches Helios that he too is a thing—biological and otherwise. He captures the sense of thingness, and this allows him to understand, incredulously and regretfully, that his itiner­ aries are not limitless. If he adheres to the langue, if he follows and realizes its mandate, Helios will be destined to remain in­ organic upon the earth, today a lapillus, tomorrow, if we are to believe the Others, a cinderblock.

A vision haunts Helios. A foreboding of Death; a perception of the limitless horizon of Eternity. A desire to laugh, a desire to cast off the mask. A temptation for the illicit, for the unknown; a temptation to sin. A necessity to say, a need to unveil his own cosmos. Helios wants to strike a deal with Other's langue; he must have a contract, a deed. And from the Earth issues forth the World. Birth of the World. Before, as Helios, he had to bargain with homo sapiens loqui;

8

INTRODUCTION

Humanus, instead, is the destiny of homo loquens. Perception— imagination—is a word: World. Experience, what cannot be proven on Earth, must be wnveiled, must be unconcealed: it must have a word, it must name the World. Nothing is fixed, being (the gerund) is movement, it does things, it makes, it creates, technique, poetry, World.

Thus begins the erring along the reifying squares of the simu­ lacrum. Helios starts out by considering the space-time given to the senses, to the eye, to the voice. With great labor he theorizes his project, and gathers methodically the remains and the traces of the ciphers of his own assumed and/or adduced totality. Helios relates to the World as a concrete possibility between I and World, within a given Event, where both I and World co-exist (because One cannot be without the Other). Helios tends towards some­ thing, he aims at something: he wants the event to be structured and signified temporally. He departs, finally, towards the IRRGARTE.N, dead ends notwithstanding. He will know no limits other than those he himself inscribes, he will know no boundaries other than those designated by in­ dispensable bulwarks. Nomad Helios meets with a tribe in a clearing, and sits down by their fire. He participates to their rites, he plays their games. He wears the cloth of temporariness, of the attempt to forget, which is already announcing, implacable, that the order repeats itself, that going-back-to-these-things as an act of sheer remembering is a nullifying ordeal. He looks up at the moon, will deny its transcendent recurrence, then gets up, bids the company adieu, and looks elsewhere for his next bivouac. In a different oasis, the signs reveal patterns never before seen, and yet always feared to be there. His participation cannot be disinterested or peaceful, nor can long-dormant visceral emana­ tions remain in check. Furious and mad, cynical and tempera­ mental, Helios breaks everything up, wreaks havoc in the company and in this place he discharges a few devices and some ideas and perhaps a grapheme. The theoretician shuts himself up in terror: no more will he behold such sights; rather he will be found sighting other perspectives, he will be anxious over different perspectives. But Helios has had it with affectation, and has sent to hell and forever the promoters of systematicity.

IRRGARTEN

9

Helios returns to his habitual wanderings along the tides of the spontaneous, and lets himself be spoken by native sounds and by studied harmonies and by the noise of countless interferences; he clocks the beats and measures the echoes; he replies accordingly, his tune silencing the harp of the waterfall. And so by seen and forgotten lands, amidst memory-warping concerns and ever-urging memories, Helios opts for another road, for an ever-open path where recalling is omnipresent and desire boundless; where transcendentality compels him to get on with the journey, and immanence has put a stake through his pages. With so much courage—and such humility!—with the utmost awareness, a new voice issues forth pervading the calling and the memorizing; a new dance begins and frames a special space; a new song is heard; Helios lives another life, which is his own life: he's become humanus. Yet this road too leads to a blind alley, for there is no purifi­ cation. The word that in loving tones held this symbiosis has said all it had to say; its proper course is forever charted, its universe repeats and regenerates itself endlessly. Roaming once more and saying without knowing, reading is forever tardy, the prognosis fatally reserved.

The unconcealing is the originary yet second-time-around act that frees in us ourselves to ourselves, ever different and ever differently, in a repeating revealing motion against the infinite backdrops of totality. Each and every poem attests to this tension, to this going-through (dia-logos, wir sind Gesprache, etc.) that knows no end, because time has no end, because creation has no end. to stay a few minutes in tension debating whether the spirits wish to dialogue or whether they wish to recite themselves in/definitely in the vivifying flux of the presence which from nothingness ushers forth

PART ONE The Modern Declined

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