The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (20 page)

It is the power of desire that binds us to other people. And for that reason, it is desire that is sacred. The desire to be part of a community is one thing, an important thing, but
desire
, of one individual for another, is a very different experience. Communal life, Proust is saying, no matter how desirable from the community’s point of view, to establish stability, identity and all the rest, is nowhere near as interesting, fulfilling, enchanting as the private experience of desire. Desire is particular, just as involuntary memory is particular. The insistence of desire, as Henry James and Proust and the established churches well recognized, is disruptive and dangerous, and that is why it becomes the basis of the sacred.

7

The Angel in Our Cheek

“A
fter one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” “The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God.” “The poet becomes ‘the priest of the invisible.’” Each of these statements was made by Wallace Stevens. “After I had found nothingness, I found beauty” (Stéphane Mallarmé). “We felt the possibility of a new religion, with poetic emotion as its essential quality” (Paul Valéry). “Poetry . . . is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos” (I. A. Richards). “What angel do you carry hidden in your cheek? / What perfect voice will tell the truths of wheat?” (Federico García Lorca).

As has already been emphasized, in the immediate wake of Nietzsche’s apocalyptic pronouncements the arts were regarded as important in a way that is no longer true in our own day. This is not to say that the arts are not important now, but that they were felt to be much more important then. Without imagining ourselves back into that epoch, many of the arguments in this part of the book will lack the force they appeared to possess at the time. Something will have been lost in the historical translation.

This was especially true of poetry. Now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, poetry is very much a minority interest, albeit of a very passionate minority. To an extent, it has always been a minority activity, but in late Victorian and Edwardian times, in the decades leading up to the First World War and during the war itself, there were those who had very big ambitions for poetry, who were convinced that it was the natu
ral heir to religion. For figures like Mallarmé and Valéry in France, for Stefan George and his circle in Germany, for Yeats and Wallace Stevens in the Anglophone countries, poetry was “the realization of a destiny” that brought into being a second, “higher” self, which offered an “enlarged world.” As Stevens put it:

Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place

Of empty heaven and its hymns.

GOD’S ORPHANS

But the place to start is with Mallarmé, because although he didn’t set out any specific views, in a specific work or a specific poem, about how to live without God, his entire approach shaped the way a whole raft of followers thought. Indeed, there are those, such as the historian of Symbolism Anna Balakian, who place Mallarmé on a level with Freud and Marx for the role he played in reshaping the way we think. Certainly, Mallarmé was a decisive influence on Valéry, Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in
Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness
(English edition 1988, French original two years earlier), places the poet centrally in the death-of-God narrative, at least in France. He explains what other influences were in operation at the time, and how they acted together on the mid-nineteenth-century sensibility. All the poets of the mid-century (in France, that is) were unbelievers, he says, though not without a nostalgia “for the reassuring symmetry of a God-ordered universe.” Many thought that the stature of poetry had been reduced—previously, a poem had been something providentially inspired: “The poet was only the trumpet; God supplied the breath. The post-Romantics, however, tended to view themselves as a ‘grotesque tin horn that echoes the discordant noises of Nature.’” They therefore established a quixotic elite with aristocratic and idealistic pretensions, and Mallarmé was “the nerve center” of this higher culture. In the days of faith, Sartre wrote, “the gift of poetry had been the
sign of the natural aristocrat . . . one was a poet by divine will. Inspiration was the secular term for Grace.”
1

But science had ravaged that view; it had destroyed the hierarchy among humans by showing that all forms of existence are equal. Moreover, and possibly worse, the second law of thermodynamics, published by Rudolf Clausius in 1854, had demonstrated that “nothing is created or destroyed” and that the universe would ultimately end in a heat death. This confirmed for many that a perfect God did not exist in nature, nor did he have the power to create.

Sartre therefore concluded that poets, more than anyone else, were “God’s orphans,” and even here Mallarmé stood out because his mother had died when he was five and his sister when he was fifteen, so that they “fused” together into a single absence—“absence” being the crucial term. There was, then, in Mallarmé’s life more than in anyone else’s, a “commanding absence,” or a “hovering absence,” as Sartre says elsewhere.
2
For Mallarmé, says Sartre, “his mother never stops dying,” and it left a “pathological gap in his ‘being-in-the-world.’” This was important for Sartre, who saw Mallarmé as the herald of the twentieth century and someone who, “[m]ore profoundly than Nietzsche, experienced the death of God. . . . At the very time Taylor conceived of mobilizing men so as to render their work more efficient, he mobilized language so as to assure the optimal yield from Words.”
I

And this helps put Mallarmé’s achievement in context. What he sought to do, in Anna Balakian’s words, was to construct or achieve a “semantic transcendentalism to compensate for the waning of metaphysical yearnings.”
4
If religions are found ineffective, as they clearly were for many people when Mallarmé was alive, “then language becomes the recourse, the mainstay . . . serving the imagination.” This is the basis for his famous dictum that the poet must no longer narrate, narrative implying continuity, a sequence that structures reality. Mallarmé sought something new, “a universe where nothing can be foreseen or determined in the natural context,” where, as Rilke would say later, “the interpreted world” (this world, here and now)
usurps “the place of heaven as the site of survival in an augmented parameter for the arts.” What this means, in effect, is that the poet does not seek representation, in the traditional way, but looks instead for “fresh presentation” at the “absolute moment in time” that can never again be duplicated. More, language in the new poetic sense “becomes a place of encounter for analogies that are to the enrichment of personality what an interlining is to a simple cloth garment”; images, ideas, are implicit rather than explicit, so that the reader shares a sense of achievement with the poet.
5
Implicitness was to be a feature of twentieth-century thought, as we shall see.

Mallarmé and his enthusiastic followers saw this as a method that highlighted human resistance to spiritual annihilation, the identification (but only hinted at) of “
les mots sans rides
,” “words [and therefore ideas, moments] without wrinkles,” the poetic communication of “the well of meaning,” because the well of meaning is inexhaustible, and is not linear “but rather a circular vortex in perpetual motion.”
6

A core aspect of this (and it would dominate much poetry of the twentieth century) is “naming”—naming the world around us, not introspection as such but naming the “redemptive features of an unconcerned universe”; naming, as he said in a famous quote, flowers “absent from all bouquets.” Naming, Mallarmé said more plainly, “does not evoke a return of any particular contour of which we have empirical knowledge and that is specifically recognisable to us in its natural environment.” Put another way, “The perception of the imperceptible occurs not through a distorting lens but by a rational adaptation to an unexpected linguistic association”: word seepage, as he also described it. This is, in effect, what Symbolism is, the creation of an “other” world, an “interspace,” which depends only on the powers of language and brings us intensely experienced moments in real time, here and now.
7
For Mallarmé, as he explicitly said, this approach would replace a theological teleology “with a much more practical vision of life on this planet.”
8
For him and his followers, poetry must rid itself of its narrative and mimetic traditions to create its own fiction, its own reality, “an ontology separate from theological perceptions.”
9

This is what his poems, such as “Hérodiade” and “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” seek to do—he saw them as part of a new “cohesive mentality”: a mentality of naming, but naming not just new contours but also new mys
teries, given that the world is inexhaustible and open-ended and because there is among humanity a universal desire for “the second chance,” the second chance not to waste the legacy we have inherited, not to settle just for the life we have lived thus far. The world consists, he said, of a pool of second chances, self-transcending promises we make to ourselves to struggle with fate to invent such things as “nonspecifiable spaces” or “indeterminable time perceptions,” to “divest nature of its decaying processes”; these are forms of imaginative naming that only language can bring about.

In these ways, Mallarmé sought nothing less than to re-ground, re-form, re-shape poetry for a secular world, maintaining its ambition. A whole raft of first-rate twentieth-century poets responded to his call.

PRAISE AND THE VERTICAL AXIS

Before we come to them, however, we need to consider the one man who could rival Mallarmé in his ambitions for poetry, a man who very nearly changed poets from, as Shelley famously put it, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” into political demagogues. This was the German Stefan George. The word “demagogue” is not too strong.

The eyes · narrow and only when they rule wide ·

Were illuminated from behind as if by candles ·

The pain from some old cruelty.

Etched in his cheeks.

His face fell steeply down from his dark hair

As if in princely terraces

Down to his chin · which only concealed

And was full of violence · that was deadly in hate.

Around the immobile lips there was the trace

Of conquered temptation ·

And gravely his brow carried

The noble curse like a chosen jewel.

This poem—vivid still in Robert Norton’s translation—is not by George but about him. Ernst Bertram, a poet and professor of literature and an authority on Nietzsche, called his poem “Portrait of a Master,” though he elsewhere characterized George as a “werewolf.”
10
That might be going a bit far, but there is no question that George did have an extraordinary career, as extraordinary as any poet in history; he was a man who carried the ethic of “art for art’s sake” further than anyone else, and who sought energetically to replace religion with poetry.

That extraordinary career began in the early 1890s when George—who had visited Mallarmé in Paris and had been accepted by that master’s circle—emerged as a lyric poet along the lines of the French Symbolists. Beginning with his poetry, as Norton, his biographer, says, “[t]o an extraordinary and perhaps even singular degree, George sought to submit every aspect of his life to his will. . . . His desire to control the perception others had of him was only one more form of the tendency toward radical self-invention that marked his entire life” (something that he shared with W. B. Yeats, though in a very different way).
11
Paradoxically, although he was scarcely seen outside the small coterie of about thirty followers, his influence spread steadily until it encompassed the entire German nation.

George found the Symbolists congenial, in particular their conviction that science had not improved the world but
impoverished
it, by reducing it to what could be measured and calculated, removing even the possibility of transcendental meaning. The Symbolists thought that nature was but a veneer, obscuring an invisible realm that was the real one; and one to which, moreover, the poet had privileged access. Norton again: “The words of a poem act, rather, as a kind of conduit, leading not to an appreciation of the things they describe, or even to a specific emotion they might evoke, but through an ultimately inexplicable alignment the poem makes possible a sort of spiritual attunement to the poet’s vision, and, ultimately, an encounter with what was variously called the ‘Idea,’ the ‘Infinite’ or the ‘Absolute.’ And it is the poet, and the poet alone, who can supply the medium enabling this encounter to occur.”
12

At this distance, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the idea of the poet having “privileged” access to anything at all goes against the whole ethos of the post-modern, post-colonial, democratic world, but
if we are to fully understand George’s aims and impact we have to think ourselves back into that time, when—as reiterated at the beginning of this chapter—art was felt to be far more important than it is now, and artists were looked upon in a different light. Four of George’s main collections of poems, for example, were published under revealing titles:
Hymns
,
Pilgrimages
,
The Year of the Soul
and
The Star of the Covenant.

George was intransigent in his view that art—and artists—took priority in life, even over life. This is shown nowhere more clearly than in a verse in
Hymns
about Fra Angelico, who in George’s view had appropriated his materials from the world he lived in:

He took the gold from holy chalices·

For blond hair the straw of ripening wheat·

The pink from children who draw with brick·

From the washerwoman at the stream the indigo.

Nature here is placed in the service of art and, implicitly at least, the artist is being positioned on the same level as God. Throughout the collection it is the accomplishment of the poet that is foregrounded. Part of the aim here, as elsewhere with the Symbolists, is to subdue and even overthrow the outside world, the physical world we inhabit, which is considered “irretrievably debased, tawdry and malignant” and which is to be replaced by the creations of this privileged group of initiates.

This privileged group also congregated around George via
Blätter für die Kunst
(Pages for Art), which was more than a journal but a standard-bearer to which George’s followers could rally and extend his message. This was all the more important because, early on and for some time afterward, his books of poems were printed in editions of very few copies (206 for
The Year of the Soul
), and distributed only to handpicked followers. This privileged view was not confined to George. Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote to him, confiding: “I am completely agreed with everything you say; I also have no concern for the ‘paper,’ nor for publicity, rather I am concerned solely about coming into contact with a
necessarily small
circle of people searching as I am and to get to know related works of art that are otherwise inaccessible [italics added].” To underscore their task, the jour
nal proclaimed that its central aim was to promote a “spiritual art”—
eine geistige Kunst
—“on the basis of the new sensibility and manner—an art for art.”
13