Healing Light Illuminates John Banville's New Novel

A review of mine appeared in The Plain Dealer this Sunday, October 28; here's the link to that review posted on the paper’s website: http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2012/11/john_banville_makes_ancient_li.html#incart_flyout_entertainment
My post here offers my fuller, original thoughts at about twice the length of the edited version appearing in the newspaper:

A Healing Light Illuminates John Banville’s New Novel Ancient Light.

Alex Cleave has turned sixty-five, an age when the siren song of memory can call with particular urgency. It is a memory of adolescence that fills the character’s mind in this brilliant new novel by award-winning Irish writer John Banville. During the summer Alex was fifteen, his best friend’s mother – Mrs. Gray – seduced him.

The extremity of the subject is complicated in John Banville’s new novel by telling the story from Alex’s doubly unreliable point of view, reflecting both the adolescent’s unsteady initiation into sex and the aging man’s searching yet nostalgic memories of youth.

After young Alex’s first encounter with Mrs. Gray, “the April day that I stepped out into was, of course, transfigured, was all flush and shiver and skimming light, in contrast to the sluggishness of my sated state.” The singing lyricism of memory is shadowed here by irony (“of course”). The disturbing yet compelling beauty of the novel is that it balances luminous prose with a darkly realistic sense of life’s fragilities and fatalities.

In the novel, a series of deaths confront Alex Cleave, including the “decade-long grief” resulting from the tragic and mysterious suicide of his adult daughter, Cass. His grief floods his consciousness, just as it haunts his wife Lydia, yet Alex also manages partly in defense to immerse himself in memories of his adolescent tryst with Mrs. Gray.

Ancient Light – Banville’s latest work after The Infinities, the Booker Prize winning The Sea, and the dark Benjamin Black mysteries – contains many flashes of comedy. Alex Cleave is a stage actor toward the end of his career (he had a disastrous on-stage breakdown ten years before; that experience and the discovery of his daughter’s suicide are narrated in Banville’s earlier novel Eclipse from 2001). To his delight, he has been offered a film role, in a docudrama, playing opposite the beautiful young star Dawn Devonport, “grave and grey-eyed, sweetly sad, omnivorously erotic.”

The mature Alex Cleave is as capable of delight as of profound self-criticism and is the source of the novel’s probing, humane comedy. Compassionate and ironically apologetic, Alex is always as open to life as he is alert to death’s power.

The role he plays in his film is that of the aging and corrupt academic Axel Vander. Even as Dawn, the young star, is seduced by him, she exposes him as a fake, an “old monster” with a fascist past and a false identity. (Vander is the subject of Banville’s Shroud from 2003; he is reminiscent of the disgraced literary theorist, the late Paul de Man.)

Ancient Light is, in any case, an independent work. Its tragicomic power arises from the collision between its plots – the headlong rush of Alex’s often bawdy evocation of being seduced as an adolescent by an older woman versus the developing possibility that the aging Alex may attempt to seduce the young actress. To do so would create a dangerous off-screen echo of their on-screen plot, and such a scenario would also be an inverted repetition of what happened to Alex at fifteen.

Even, as it happens, an incestuous repetition: Alex’s memories of his late daughter continually impinge on his meetings with Dawn, and in one of the novel’s sinister parallels the actress attempts suicide, echoing the daughter Cass’s suicide. Feeling himself become more and more “a thing of fragments,” Alex finds the example of Vander’s rapaciousness almost “overtaking” him. Then, an even more sinister parallel involves the suggestion that Cass was driven to suicide ten years before by the monstrous Axel Vander, whom Alex Cleave plays in the film.

Late in the novel, Alex writes, “But what, you will be asking, what happened” between him and Dawn? In unexpected ways, Alex holds his own against the looming tragic possibilities of the plot; he manages to refuse the pressure to descend to the lowest level or to act out the most destructive roles.

If we were to subtract Alex’s probing, mordant, and humane voice from the novel, the multiple parallels in its plotting could resemble a rather ornate maze, and Banville’s lush prose can verge on the overwritten, that of a “chap who writes like Walter Pater in a delirium.” The words are Alex’s about the screenwriter of the film he is in – known as JB.  Part of the comedy of John Banville’s novel, with its moments of intentional self-parody, is that it includes a self-mocking portrait of the novelist. And it is testimony to how fine a character Alex is that Banville’s surrogate JB remarkably befriends him toward the end of the novel; they are to go to California to attend an Axel Vander conference together.

By the ending of this brilliant novel, Alex discovers that he “was mistaken about everything,” above all about Mrs. Gray, and the plot reversals involving her are as stunning and moving as those in Julian Barnes’ recent The Sense of An Ending. Alex is a wonderfully living character, who honors the elegiac wisdom of Ancient Light, the light from the past, and it is that contingent, fragile, yet healing light which illuminates Banville’s tragicomic new novel: “all my dead are all alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.”

Beethoven xvii - on "Beethoven Hero"

There’s a sort of collision that occurs between two ways of understanding the impact of Beethoven’s music. One way is based on his amazing exploration of form and his implicit invitation to the performer to participate in the moment-to-moment unfolding of what can be made out of often a single motif (say, the pervasive exfoliations of the opening phrase of the Fifth Symphony: da da da DUM). Another way of framing our understanding of Beethoven’s music is based on the Romantic period’s ideas of the quest, of a heroic journey, and of subjective, organic growth. Both of the two conflicting approaches – the formal and the Romantic – are attempts, of course, at explaining the impact of Beethoven’s music: the impression of exploratory energy, of immense creative potential, and of the composer’s empowered mind and will.

This dominant impression of unleashed power leads some listeners to feel that certain works contain a sort of insufferable “pounding,” what Adorno identifies in Beethoven’s weakest works as a “Germanic, brutal, triumphal” emptiness. However, for his greatest works, what we hope to find are insights to convey and explain their wonderful impression of empowered creativity in the face of the collapse of the aristocratic frame and rationale which supported the great classical works of Mozart and Haydn. Especially in his middle period, Beethoven explored and experimented with the most basic building blocks of classical form, disassembling, playing with, subverting, and reassembling them with new, unprecedented power.

For both player and listener, what is the source of the sense of empowerment in his music? Scott Burnham presents the two approaches noted above in answering this question in his 1995 book Beethoven Hero.; as he does so, he explores the “musical values,” “institutional values,” and “cultural values” which shape our reception of Beethoven’s music. His main focus is on how listeners have understood the impact of the Third Symphony, the Eroica, and particularly the first movement. [Incidentally, I hope this blog entry is not too technical (for some not technical enough) or too abstruse, but it’s worth a try to engage Burnham’s argument.]

Typically, twentieth-century readings of that movement have centered on a formal analysis of “those aspects of Beethoven’s style which are particularly characteristic of his middle period” – i.e., the period also of the Appassionata and the Fifth Symphony, etc. (7-8):

“Those aspects…include the alternation of active downbeat-oriented sections with reactive upbeat-oriented sections, the liberation of thematic development to the extent that it may even take place during the initial exposition of the theme, and the polysemic formal significance of the opening section, understood as combining features of introduction, exposition, and development….Beethoven’s [main] theme remains, in a sense unconsummated: its urge to slide immediately away from E flat through chromatic alternation…never allows it to behave as a truly melodic theme…- in fact, it will have to wait until the coda before it is granted that sort of themehood….The fact that this theme must so submit in order to become more like a theme is unprecedented in musical discourse. This process establishes a new way in which music can be about a theme.”

In view of this extraordinary new approach to thematic development (the moment-to-moment momentum of its unfolding), as well, “it was this dimension of Beethoven’s style that was felt to be revolutionary and deeply engaging by his first critics; programmatic interpretations allowed them to address this specific aspect” by employing the (for them) contemporary Romantic idea of a “singularly obsessed hero fighting against a recalcitrant external world” (5). Romantic nineteenth-century as well as formalist twentieth-century understandings of Beethoven’s breakthrough respond, then, from different points of view to the power of the Third.

And yet, “the conjunction of Beethoven’s music with the ethical and mythical implications of the hero and his journey holds the entire reception history of this symphony in its sway….Even readings of mainstream formalism…share some features with the readings from which they claim to have distanced themselves….The overmastering coherence heard in works like the Eroica Symphony has both inspired the use of heroic metaphor and encouraged the coronation of such coherence as the ruling musical value of the formalist agenda” (27).

This core insight, which Burnham richly develops, operates also as he explores various theories and features of the Third as well as the Fifth Symphony and the Appassionata sonata, his commentary – say – on the role of the coda, or on Beethoven’s “radical revitalization of musical language, in which every peripheral detail becomes galvanized with significance, as part of a unitary and unmediated effusion” – in which “everything becomes melody” (quoting Wagner on Beethoven - 31); or, for another example, commentary on how “Beethoven treats harmonies like monoliths instead of playing cards, [so that] harmonic change assumes epic importance” (36). Finally, he writes, “Beethoven’s tonal form has become the destiny of music” (155).

Most delving among Burnham’s insights, though, is the response he develops to the idea of “presence and engagement in the Heroic style.” Early in his study, he is concerned with a sort of double consciousness we develop as we listen, a simultaneous experience of “enacting” the momentum of the creative, heroic journey and of self-consciously reflecting on it: being aware of it as an unfolding form.

First, remember that the Eroica Symphony’s main theme is continually curtailed (early on by the famous C sharp in bar 7) and is never fully realized until the coda of the first movement. “Hearing the coda as recapitulating the entire process of the movement brings into play a reflective dimension that goes beyond the enactment of narrative….[The music] can be said to effect the distancing narration of the genre of the epic, [so that] the acts of telling and enacting are merged” (23). [The tension between the epic form and the tragic drama is a concern of many twentieth century thinkers, including for example Raymond Williams and, as we saw in earlier posts, Adorno and Benjamin.] Burnham then links this idea of simultaneous narration and enactment to Hegel’s idea of self-consciousness: “this paradox of distance and identification is a secret of human consciousness” and “an expression of the conditions of selfhood.” By the end of his study, Burnham connects this idea to Goethe’s vision of the human, to “Goethezeit,” which integrate “ironic self-consciousness” and “the ethos of the self as hero” – together yielding both objectivity and subjectivity, simultaneously (146).

Many of the themes which these blog entries about Beethoven, Adorno, Hegel, the varieties of irony, etc., have tried to explore are, of course, at issue here, and they underlie Burnham’s delving account of Beethoven’s middle period music.

Notes on the modern period - 16 - on modern fiction

For information on my political novella about Israel plus “eight stories of the eighties,” please take a look at the page describing my new book Acts of Terror and Contrition – A Nuclear Fable. It’s available from Amazon.com (here's the link: Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable) or from the publisher (click on the cover image to the left).

In some of my first notes on the modern period, I tried to show that Romanticism’s idea of the self has deeply influenced the modern. From 1807 on, Hegel's concept of self-consciousness - as a force which can upend the stability of master-servant relations - resonated in much of the literature and thought of the Romantic period (and of course for later writers, too). Jane Austen’s heroines (as carefully controlled and "ironical" as their presentation is) exemplify the power of self-consciousness as a tool, sensibly utilized it was hoped, to modify rigid class behavior and social assumptions. Emma’s “self,” for example, grows in ambition and self-empowerment to the point that she does harm to others, all as part of her experience of learning to control the force of her character. By the 1850s and 60s, however, the range and force of novelistic self-consciousness and the behavior it stirs threaten to break the deepest social and human bonds, and the “self” of the protagonist grows monstrous in Madame Bovary and in Crime and Punishment.

From its origins, the novel form focuses on the growth and survival of the budding self as it encounters “reality,” engages its nurturing possibilities, and struggles with its blighting forces. As the novel fabricates its fictive beings, the form reveals itself as the very font and model of self-creation, and it naturally yields characters who are themselves self-fabricating. Finally, the peculiar grandeur of this world-rendering, self-creating form reveals the special power and ambition of its social origins in the bourgeoisie, with its own enormous capacity for growth.

A burgeoning enormity of self typifies the characters generated by the great modernist experiments in the novel. And modern authors are implicated in the process, for autobiographical material seems invariably to find its way into the modern masterpieces of the form. There is Marcel Proust’s creation of the autobiographical character and narrator Marcel, crucial among In Search of Lost Time’s core characters, whom Proust terms “giants in time” as they bestride his novel’s colossal, society-encompassing structure. A similar sort of gigantism marks Joyce’s ironic transformation of himself into the autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus, whose struggles and intellect dominate A Portrait and large parts of Ulysses (above all, the novel’s aesthetic structure and ambition); this is not even to mention the degree to which Joyce gives autobiographical qualities also to Leopold Bloom. There are, of course, other powerful examples: Woolf’s autobiographical fictions in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Mann’s self-implicating summa of western civilization in The Magic Mountain (let alone the autobiographical elements in Buddenbrooks), Conrad’s own Marlovian confrontation with European megalomania, Kafka’s K and Joseph K, Lawrence’s self-searching novels, etc.

For Proust and Joyce, the impulse to fabricate an autobiographical self in fiction arises from their larger ambition: to preserve, to encompass, and also to frame and judge a collapsing world - a disintegrating society and culture. These novelists create a novelistic world capable of encompassing a society grown monstrous on its fare of war, its economic expansions and collapse, and its imperial ambition to regulate human life. In the years just before and following World War One, modern society had become a murderous juggernaut, just as Joyce and Proust published their novels. The seemingly desperate audacity of the modern novel’s aims – the gigantism of its scale and characters – reflects the massive challenge of giving form to and finding signs of life in the enormity of modern life. Even a fundamentally decent figure like Joyce’s everyman Leopold Bloom must inhabit and confront the dimensions of Ulysses’ gigantism. Both modern history and modern fiction can resemble a steamroller which threatens to flatten lives into vast thinned-out representations of the human. In our new century, we participate in a similar experience of monstrosity. It is what we have as the condition of any affirmation in postmodernity. Images of self-destructive and unabated cancerous growth fill the byways and airways of all our activities, economic, political, “cultural,” and medical.

In the face of the rampant growth of self and society, the achievement of the proto-modern novels of Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, from the 1850s through the 1870s, is powerfully to engage the dilemma of remaining human – to maintain images of the human even as they undergo a radical redefinition, a simultaneous distension and flattening. The two novelists establish alternative yet equally essential strategies for modern novelists. The clinical realism of Flaubert’s sentences exactly renders characters’ lives; his realism establishes the precise nature and origin of a character’s situation, whether their self-blindnesses, their drowning in a world of things, or their yearning for vision. In Madame Bovary, for example, there is the great cinematic “country fair” scene, in which the rake Rudolf’s hackneyed phrases seducing the unappeasably needy Emma are exactingly paired with the official’s own empty conventional phrases announcing prizes for farm products: “‘Did I know I would accompany you?’ / ‘Seventy francs!’ / ‘A hundred times I tried to leave; yet I followed you and stayed.’ / ‘For manures!’” And the acid climax of this scene of self-aggrandizing public and private manipulations is the image of a final award-recipient: an old peasant woman gnarled and withered by fifty years of hard service and suffering walks forward – “Thus, a half century of servitude confronted these beaming bourgeois.”

At one point, Emma – herself now suffering from the consequences of her enormous appetite to consume things, both material and human – walks in the night, given over to a great aching bout of self-pity, having been rejected by one of her lovers whom she importuned for money. As she walks beneath the stars, Flaubert’s narrator – with a characteristic mix of irony and sympathy – writes as follows of her plea and, by extension, of the novel’s own exacting language in rendering her plea: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” Our language would fill the unfillable emptiness which is the life of the modern self, grown into a sort of enormity of nothingness, as its self-conscious, self-creating desires consume or, rather, exude extraordinary amounts of destructive energy. It is as if the bourgeois self had grown disproportionate and gigantic in its unquenchable imaginative needs and their impact on society. And the reverse is also true: the burgeoning gigantism of an increasingly destabilized modern society unleashes a distorted, alienated grasping and daring “as never before” in the self.

Emma Bovary’s night plea is only one among many examples of her alienated grasping for life, a grasping which Flaubert’s realism inevitably grounds in psychic emptiness. In contrast, Dostoyevsky renders a similar grasping and daring with quite different aims and techniques. In Crime and Punishment, the opening interior monologue emerges from the mind of Raskolnikov, a “student” character compounded of literate privilege and dire poverty. He is thinking of committing a murder, for his desperate and unmoored ego has grown to the point of contemplating an enormity, a violent breaking of the basic human ‘code;’ even his self-lacerating recriminations have the air of expansive self-dramatizations. These initial paragraphs of the novel draw us into the most dangerous ruminations of the psyche (Freud, of course, saw Dostoyevsky as a source and predecessor), and that psychological realism offers modern novelists a model for rendering the most submerged and potentially monstrous levels of the stream of consciousness.

Yet there is a still deeper point to Dostoyevsky’s explorations of his characters’ psyches. As they enter each other’s lives, these characters encounter a zone of contact, of fluid and unpredictable exchanges, which pressures and requires them to bare their feelings. In an extremity of such baring of self, each human being insinuates himself or herself into the life of the other in what is finally, for each self, a zone or process of creative freedom. In an example of such contact early in Crime and Punishment, there is Raskolnikov’s conversation with Marmeladov, who will stop at nothing in excoriating himself for his drunken exploitation of his daughter, Sonya (she later helps to succor the young protagonist). Here is Marmeladov in action, insinuating, violating boundaries, simultaneously blaspheming and crying out for human contact: “Why pity me, you say? Yes! There’s nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, and not pitied! But crucify, O judge, crucify, and having crucified, pity the man!...He will pity us who pitied everyone…And when He has finished with everyone, then He will say unto us, too, ‘You, too, come forth!’ He will say, ‘Come forth, my drunk ones, my weak ones, my shameless ones!’ And we will all come forth, without being ashamed, and stand there. And He will say, ‘Swine you are! Of the image of the beast and of his seal; but come, you, too!’” In this zone of contact, Dostoyevsky locates the unrestrained eruption of his characters’ egos; this is an ultimate model for the sort of psychological gigantism which modern novels render and confront.

Here are some links to the above mentioned books: Crime and Punishment (Paperback), Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics), In Search of Lost Time: Proust 6-pack (Proust Complete), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses.

My next post will (more briefly, I hope) attempt to explore work by a single modern novelist.

Notes on the Modern period - 3 - Precursors: Hegel's influence; Whitman, Dickinson, Chopin, Tennyson, Mallarme

In a recent session of the “Birth of the Modern” course I teach, we examined a few texts by precursors – a brief story by Kate Chopin, two excerpts from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Emily Dickinson’s “After Great Pain,” a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, and Baudelaire’s “To the Reader.” [On the photocopied pages were also a few mournful lines from Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears” and some lines from Mallarmé’s “At Gautier’s Grave.”] The point of these excerpts was to forecast the qualities of the modern shift in the rendering of consciousness (a far-reaching breakthrough particularly in the arts and the social sciences, akin to Kuhn’s idea of the “paradigm shift”).

We began with Americans, for this course takes place in Cleveland, Ohio. In Chopin’s 1894 story, “The Story of an Hour,” a married young woman hears of the accidental death of her husband and finds that after she weeps “with sudden, wild abandonment,” she must withdraw to her room. There, her mind fills with a burgeoning consciousness of what is occurring outside her window, “the tops of trees…all aquiver with the new spring life…[the] delicious breath of rain,…a distant song,…countless sparrows twittering in the eaves,…patches of blue sky.” Finally the sense of being “free” becomes clear to her, free to “live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending her….And yet she had loved him – sometimes….[Yet:] What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion, which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being.” She discovers an independent will and consciousness as a woman previously subject to the “will” which her loving husband “imposed” upon her with “blind persistence.”

Part of what is adumbrated here is the centuries-old history of progress for women’s rights; finally in 1920, of course, women in the United States gained the right to vote. As interesting as this prefiguring of the steps ahead is the accuracy of Chopin’s rendering of the woman’s consciousness, the sense in her of upwelling liberation and freedom. Certainly the abruptly bitter ending of the story suggests that her liberation cannot quite survive in the society of 1894 America, for the rumor of the husband’s death was false, and when he returns to their door, she dies at the threshold – of “heart disease.” But earlier, we had witnessed the emergence of her new-born consciousness and then her laying claim to an independent will and self-awareness transcending any negotiations with her husband and transfiguring the image of his “loving” will into her own “possession of self-assertion.”

A transfiguring self-awareness is given full voice in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” In the fourth poem, for example, he speaks of the streaming images of existence which “come to me days and nights and go from me again, / But they are not the Me myself.” A sort of flanneur, “watching and wondering” on a city street, he stands “both in and out of the game.” “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am.” The stream of listed images encompass his life and all he touches, including “some man or woman I love,” or the hallowed “leaf of grass no less than the journey-work of the stars,” or “the plutonic rocks,” or the “esculent roots” of some barbaric and prehistoric swamp. Yet for all the sensuous and gigantic capaciousness of his “incorporating” imagination, he maintains a distance, a core of self-awareness which is the site of freedom and liberated consciousness for him.

Both Whitman’s self-celebrating self-awareness and Chopin’s story of the wife’s discovery of her self-possessed prefigure modernity's exploration of the 'self,' of subjectivity, evident in the “stream of consciousness” novels of the period, in its self-conscious poetry, and in its developing philosophy of phenomenology. These developments are illuminated by at least a brief engagement of Hegel’s thought about the dialectical relations between master and servant in the “Phenomenology of the Spirit” (published in 1807), and of course Marx’s thinking is similarly illuminated. It is not that I see Chopin or Whitman or, more generally, modernity as Hegelian. [I remember once my questioning John Cage’s aleatory music of ‘chance’ sounds, to which my critical older brother replied in exasperation, “You’re so Hegelian.”] It’s rather that Hegel can help us understand some of the logic at work in modern explorations of consciousness.

Hegel’s paragraph 194 in the “On Masters and Servants” section of “Phenomenology” analyzes the way in which the subject who serves the master must introject a consciousness of the master’s ‘mentality’ and needs, in order to serve them successfully. And the servant also maintains his awareness as a subject “worker” (the term is used by Hegel and emphasized in Kojève’s commentary). In this way, the worker develops a critical self-consciousness about each role, becoming doubly aware as he comprehends or ‘psyches out’ both modes. But this double consciousness distances him from life; the resulting critical distance from immediate existence mirrors yet transcends the master’s ‘withering scrutiny’ and, more deeply, his centeredness on himself, his “being-for-itself.” The critical distance of double- or self-consciousness functions finally like the ‘ultimate master’ death in negating all that is not itself, subjecting all – including itself – to a deadly exposure. This simultaneously negating and empowering self-consciousness casts all into a state of doubt where “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness.” Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” will echo just this passage when he evokes the Bourgeoisie, which as it upturns the aristocratic order creates a world of constant expansion and continuous change; the working class is left broadly aware of the resulting exploitation, the dizzying chaos, and the death of order: “All that is solid melts into air, all this is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” The Phenomenology of Spirit (The Phenomenology of Mind)

Hegel’s own insistence on the idea of destabilization, on the negation at work in “self-consciousness,” that “absolute melting-away of everything stable,” is striking. Paradoxically joined together here are of the awareness of death (death of the “ordinary” self and of “ordinary” society) with the opening-up of creative potential achieved by self-consciousness with its capacity to see multiple perspectives and to use its critical distance in order to liberate a rich sense of possibility. It is as if the death of former selves leads to liberated new selves, new potentiality.

The confrontation with death in modern thought is evident in works that prefigure the modern. In Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century poem “To the Reader,” spiritual death yields an ennui, an apathy or boredom, that would “willingly annihilate the earth” as it “chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine.” Yet this form of death spurs a sort of self-lacerating “shriek,” the poem’s punishing intensity of address: “you – hypocrite Reader – my double – my brother!” Even Tennyson (and maybe especially he) is fixated on the destruction of a world, of ‘everything stable,’ and on the necessity to mourn for “the days that are no more” in language what is achingly vulnerable and continually polite. Two decades later, Mallarmé (“At Gautier’s Grave”) raises his “empty cup” in an “insane toast to nothingness, because the non-existent corridor gives hope,” for within that grave “nothingness questions the abolished man” and “shrieks” that the dead man’s evanescent poetry (“this toy”) “say what the earth was.” The point here is not merely that life is short, and art lasts; it is rather that death is a portal: a sort of gaping maw through which knowledge of what life might be yet speaks. This paradoxical melding of death and life is envisioned too by Emily Dickinson in her Civil War poems. For example, in 341, “After great pain,” she brings just such stark knowledge out of the experience of nothingness, of death and of mourning. Here she bares her knowledge in images of a snow-bound death (“First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go”) as well as of the chemical elements (“A Quartz contentment, like a stone – / This is the Hour of Lead”). [At some point, perhaps we’ll take a look at how Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” discerns various modes of death and models the insight that ‘death is a portal’ through which transfiguring knowledge might enter.] In any case, as World War I approached, needless to say, conceptions of how to confront and understand death were rather desperately needed.