The Ritual of New Creation (17 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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BOOK: The Ritual of New Creation
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Page 59
And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis,
the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.
26
The figure of the reader is a familiar one in Stevens. He is the Emersonian scholar, poet or rabbi, whom Stevens describes, as Bloom points out, as "the figure of a man devoted in the extreme to scholarship, and at the same time making some use of it for human purposes."
27
Already in this quote from Stevens' letters, we can sense the tension between abstract knowledge and material use that symbolically charges the images of the poem, especially that of the large red man himself. If he is in this sense a rabbi, then he looks back to others in Stevens' poems, especially the "rose rabbi" who appears at the end of "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" (1918), pursuing "the origin and course / Of love."
28
In
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
(1942), the rabbi, "grown furious with the human wish,''
29
announces the messianic coming of the imagination's "major man" in his various forms. And in
The Auroras of Autumn
he is called upon to read "the phases of this difference," "an unhappy people in a happy world."
30
The rose rabbi or large red reader is thus a figure of imaginative desire who understands and shares in the inadequacy of the human condition, but at the same time studies a disinterested creation. The conjunction of the two states produces "the poem of life" inscribed on "the great blue tabulae." In reading the poem he has written (which is, self-reflexively, the poem by Stevens himself which we read), the large red man attempts to theurgically unite cosmic scholarship and human longing in accordance with "the outlines of being and its expressing, the syllables of its law." Indeed, the red man reading from the blue tabulae, the rabbi reading from the law, is in itself a symbol of theurgical union.
The ghosts that return for this reading also have appeared in Stevens before and, like the large red man, are caught up in the work's
 
Page 60
dialectic of symbolism. Their most important role prior to this one has been in the magnificent last canto of
Esthétique due Mal
(1944):
The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,
After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,
Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe
The green corn gleaming and experience
The minor of what we feel.
31
In "Large Red Man Reading" their desire gets the better of them, and the ghosts return from their metaphysical paradise, "the wilderness of stars," to experience the unstable union of "the literal characters" (literal meaning both material and abstractly textual). The ghosts are all metaphysical desire, which is, in the earlier poem, "the minor of what we feel." But as poignant as Stevens' lines may be, these dead cannot "step barefoot into reality,'' except in the symbolic sense of their coming back to life in the text. Even the pots and pans have more "reality" than they do, though strangely enough, these objects move in the opposite direction when the poet invokes them, becoming more ghostly and thus more symbolic. (Pots and pans in a Stevens poem are not the same objects as they are in a poem by Williams, his great contemporary and poetic complement.) As for the ghosts, they can find solace in symbolic language alone; only in the discourse of the poem can purely spiritual desire manifest itself in the material world.
Such
poesis
or "making" is akin to kabbalistic ritual, for as Scholem frequently notes, religious observance among the kabbalists is tranformed from rites of remembrance or sanctification to "ritual action [which] not only
represents,
but also
calls forth
this divine life manifested in concrete symbols."
32
And while it is unlikely that Stevens thinks of
his
poem as the same calling forth as performed by the magisterial reader and his purple (that is, kingly) tabulae, "Large Red Man Reading" still acts upon us as does a ritual: we are brought closer to "reality" by an act of the imagination; which is to say, we are provided with a deeper understanding of the interpenetrations of desire in human existence, learning why we are "an unhappy people in a happy world."
Moving from an exegesis of Stevens' poem to a metacritical consideration of this exegesis provides a further consideration of Scholem's relevance to literary criticism. Like Bloom, I must account for establishing what some would consider an arbitrary and willful
 
Page 61
correspondence between modern poetry and Kabbalah. Bloom's answer is psychoanalytic and rhetorical: the psychic stance of the kabbalists created a precedent followed by other literary traditions, producing "analogous images, tropes, psychic defenses, and revisionary ratios."
33
To this answer I would add the crucial historical element which Scholem uncovers in his analysis of authority and originality.
I have just proposed that the one important difference between Stevens and his large red man is that the former probably regards the theurgy of the latter as a "supreme fiction," a metaphor or symbol for psychic states with which we must contend in the here and now. The same is true for the mythic emanations and interpenetrations of spiritual and material worlds and their various plottings in kabbalistic texts: unlike Yeats or Robert Duncan, Stevens does not consider poems as incantations in the kabbalistic sense, despite the obvious propensity for visionary pronouncements in so much of his work. As he calmly states in "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" (1950), ''We say God and the imagination are one."
34
However, that the gestures in a poem like "Large Red Man Reading" may be seen as analogous to kabbalistic ideas demonstrates Scholem's dialectic of tradition and new creation. Scholem tell us that in their relationship to tradition, mystics such as the kabbalists "are always striving to put new wine into old bottles," since the outer form of belief or ritual is preserved while the inner content undergoes revision.
35
The same is true of Stevens and his poem. An uncanny feeling of authority hovers about such pieces; but if we step back from the text, placing between what Scholem calls "dialectical distanceidentification and distance together,"
36
we also become aware of the dissolution of this aura as the poem transforms itself into a novel utterance. It stands both within and apart from tradition; like the ghosts who can only find solace in the symbolic language of the tabulae, the poem can only find solace in itself as a verbal representation of traditional authority. But this, paradoxically, is its new power, a power of pathos to which we as modern readers respond.
Some may regard this view as nostalgic, a pure expression of living what Derrida labels "the necessity of interpretation as an exile." And perhaps it is true that, as Terry Eagleton puts it, tradition "is nothing other than a series of spasms or crises within class history itselfnot the scattered letters of an invisible word."
37
Nevertheless, nostalgia for such scattered letters is an ineluctable quality of literary criticism: like Stevens in
Esthétique du Mal,
we study the nostalgias, some of us with greater dialectical distance than others. Such are the kabbalistic insights which Scholem can provide.

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