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8. Of Wisdom and Competence

Wesley Morris

I

I remember two demonstrations, two strategies of interpretation, that characterized literary criticism in the modern/postmodern age. The modernist approach was epitomized by Murray Krieger's brilliant reading of John Donne's "The Canonization." Postmodernism was equally well represented by Geoffrey Hartman's startling elucidation of W. B. Yeats's "Leda and the Swan." I was witness to Krieger's readings of Donne; Hartman's display was reported to me. Nonetheless, the two have remained bound together in my mind for the more than three decades that followed my entry into literary theory in the 1960s. Curiously, both interpretations rest on distinct perceptions of the singlemost important modernist metaphor: the ontological suggestiveness of the image of a "center." For Krieger, the poetic process is constitutive of a verbal structure organized by a central metaphor or complex of metaphors. The poem slows our progress as readers and thickens into "corporeality," into the uniqueness of an aesthetic experience. Hartman's approach is deconstructive of centers; the ontology of the poem's closed structure unravels in an atomic breakdown of metaphoric organization into metonymic seriality.

Krieger's interpretation of "The Canonization" focuses, appropriately, on the poem's central stanza, where the image of a "miraculous" transformation appears in the poem's complex metaphoric structure.

	Call us what you will, wee are made such by love;
	Call her one, mee another flye.
	We'are Tapers too, and at our own cost die,
	And wee in us find the' Eagle and the Dove,
― 137 ―
	The Phoenix ridle hath more wit
	By us, we two being one, are it.
	So to one neutral thing both sexes fit,
	Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
	Mysterious by this love.[1]

The poet's images move us from the trivial to the profound. We link the disparate items: "flye" and "Tapers" to "Eagle and Dove," then to "Phoenix." The "flye," of course, is a moth drawn to the heat of the candle by an irresistible desire that is self-destructive, and so, too, the candle consumes itself in its own burning. The "Eagle and Dove" are traditional masculine and feminine symbols joined here grammatically and figuratively and linked to the self-destructive flame of the "flye" and the "Taper," both in the momentariness of the passion of lovemaking and in the figurative union of two into one. Thus self-consuming desire is overwritten as sexual passion, and the lover and his mistress "die," joined as one in orgasmic pleasure, only to rise again to reawakened desire, like the legendary "Phoenix" whose five-hundred-year cycle of life and fiery death lends "mystery," mythic status, to all who "dye and rise the same," that is, to all lovers at all times.

The fourth stanza builds upon the extravagant claims of the third, elevating the lovers to the status of "legendary" figures, far above mere history ("Chronicle"), and rejecting the too-earthly image of "tombes" as unfit to preserve in remembrance their "mysterious" remains, electing instead those archetypal love poems, Renaissance "sonnets," which will sing in praise of the lovers just as "hymns" sing eternal praise to holy saints. Poetry, therefore, is a fitting monument to love's passion, "As well a well wrought urne becomes/The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes." And the profane lovers are linked irrevocably to the sacred stature of the blessed and immortal saints.

If the thrust of Krieger's reading of "The Canonization" is toward closure, self-referentiality, and "contextualism" in the sense of organic form, Hartman's reading of Yeats's outrageous sonnet deconstructs the organic. Here the sonnet, with its rigid boundaries and demand for economy and closure, is broken open by another sort of extravagance. The traditional 4-4-6 stanza form is designed to present a problem or perhaps ask a question in the initial octave, only to resolve the problem or answer the question in the final sestet. But Yeats violates this tradition, and the poem cracks in two in line eleven:

	And Agamemnon dead.
	Being so caught up,[2]

It is as though another line, a fifteenth, were struggling to enter the tightly guarded domain of fourteen. The sestet is almost, but not quite, a septet.

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The close rhyme scheme of the last stanza—e-f-g/e-f-g: "there," "tower," "up"/"air," "power," "drop"—has an extra, upstart non-rhyme: "dead." The hard midline period stop disrupts both traditional rhythms and rhymes that would lead us to a powerful closure. What is at stake here?

The poem's first stanza depicts a rape, and what issues from that violent event is a narrative of destruction and death. The questions raised in the second stanza are never answered, merely repeated in the final two lines. They are diminished by the vividness of "And Agamemnon dead." This half line reveals the consequences of that originary violence; it is a remarkable expression that collapses upon itself, repeats itself through the assonance of "Agamemnon dead," doubling the sounds: "A…a…n…n…d…d," tripling the "And" which initiates the phrase. Mythic meaningfulness, or even the eventfulness of legend/history, explode into echoing "linking" words prophesying unending conjunctions, limitless supplementation: "and…and…and…." Here the age of the postmodern has penetrated (violently?) the Idealism of the age of the modern.

II

There seemed a polarity in these two demonstrations during the emerging of postmodernism; that emergence was a triumph of various structuralisms over formalism, but a struggle for hegemony had radicalized critical methodologies into apparent oppositions. The differences between these two readings of poetry, like many cultural distinctions, had been legitimized by the era, by political and ethical confrontations driving theory in the 1970s and 1980s toward undecidables. In time, postmodernism revealed itself to be an extension of modernism, indeed, a valuable corrective. The postmodern era arose Phoenix-like from the dying embers of what modernism had become.

The political climate of the times redirected early-twentieth-century modernism's slide into avant-garde aestheticism by turning formalism away from modernist political ineffectuality and social unconcern. During the 1960s, modernism was purged of its Romantic sense of loss, its celebration of heroic failure and egocentric quests for subjectivity; in this reincarnation modernism had to abandon its self-indulgent obsession with the present moment. Postmodernism was one of the forces that enabled a neomodernism, but in so doing postmodernism failed to pursue the central ethical interest of authentic modernism: the belief that the primary obligation of all generations is what comes after the "now." In the extremity of its attack on the sacred "presence" of modernist formalism, the postmodern lost sight of its own time.

This postmodern reformation emerged against a background of shared phobic reactions. In the beginning, modernism had struggled to write itself out of history. The "drag" of the past, the illusions of memory, it seemed to

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modernists, threatened the purity of modernism's vision and the transcendental suggestiveness of its principal expressive device: the symbol. Postmodernism took up a similar antihistoricism, protecting the freeplay of its communicative device: the sign. At the heart of this retreat from history in both movements is modernism's failure to coexist with, and postmodernism's oversimplification of, technology. Technology is a specific way of knowing the world, a mastery of how things work rather than what things are. Technology orients thought toward pragmatism and functionalism and away from ontology and history; it diverts knowledge and wisdom toward information and competence. Postmodernism largely accepted the modernist reading that branded technology (from industrialization to artificial intelligence to genetic engineering) as dehumanizing. Modernism abhorred it; postmodernism embraced it. Both granted technology far too much force in the construction of social relationships.

In its countermove against technology, modernism gathered its finest images from nineteenth-century biology, from the humanization of form, from the mystique of organic life represented in the developmental marvels of the human body vitalized by a desire for wholeness. The consequent images of a unique and total individuality asserted modernism's uncompromising polarity to "the machine." On the other hand, postmodernism conceived of itself as coordinated with the invasion of the totalized modernist body by molecular chemistry; with the demystification, if not outright erasure, of the grandeur and mystique of the organic. Genetic codes and highly organized and controlled interactions of amino acids and paired bases revised the modernist imagination by demythologizing "life." Postmodern biology radically decentralized the modernist "subject," miniaturizing and distributing the productive and reproductive work of the modernist "whole" individual across a galaxy of billions of infinitely iterable cells managed and regulated by non-organic executive codes. The body was reimagined as a special kind of machine (a cyborg), and desire was rewritten as language itself or cultural encoding (a Symbolic Order).

Each biology produced its own specialized images or overdetermined buzz words. Modernism reveled in the suggestiveness of origins, growth, fulfillment, closure, independence, freedom, subjectivity, and identity. Postmodernism celebrated structure, repetition, clone, model, simulation, power relations, and difference. The language of modernism was insistently referential despite its protests to the contrary; the dream of the modern was a revelation of foundational organic being. The language of the postmodern was equally referential, regardless of Saussurian convention and arbitration; the project of postmodernism was a description of the ethical world.

Postmodernism drew part of its strength in this ethical reform project from an early-twentieth-century attack on formalism initially orchestrated by Marxian theorists. This Marxian critique was expressed in political terms,

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convicting modernism of abandoning its foundation in social engagement, of retreating from ethical responsibility and social commitment. Hampered by a plethora of internecine squabbles, and confronted by the powerful mythology of bourgeois individualism, Marxism had to fight its battles on too many fronts and failed to stem the modernist drift into formalist aestheticism. Marxism offered an alternative world but could not bring about a full swing of the theoretical pendulum. Nevertheless, it gave impetus to structuralism and, therefore, eventually to poststructuralism, which retained significant elements of the Marxian agenda. Yet to differentiate itself from the modern in the worldwide political crises of the 1960s, postmodernism, unlike Marxism, engaged its enemy in the language of form and not politics; postmodernism focused its assault on what it presumed to be modernism's strength. Unfortunately, postmodernism's antiformalist strategy irrevocably bound it to the very formalism it would destroy.

Modernism's strength, of course, was its greatest vulnerability. The humanist appeal of the organic metaphor proved to be dehumanizing, for the moderns troped their master tropes, creating a metaphor of metaphorics, articulating the rule that poetry is always about poetry rather than about the human condition. Organic form situated the aesthetic before the ethical and transformed originality and individuality into the banal. Errant modernism rarefied its formalist metaphors not only beyond experience and time but also outside the reach of language. Modernist metaphor was offered as an image of transcendental order, as liberation from a priori values and as therapy for a middle-class neurosis produced by a perceived collapse of traditional cultural values. By the time that Krieger, through what he called a new historicism, and other neomoderns initiated a return to modernism's post-Romantic, liberationist, one might even say democratic or revolutionary roots, formalism had become reactionary, characterized (somewhat unfairly, certainly, but effectively) as an elitist harangue against difference and a racist and sexist justification of identity, an apology for bourgeois resistance to cultural and political reform. What began as a radical challenge to the status quo, as a critique of certain Enlightenment repressions and exploitations, became an escapist disengagement from the world, a translation of the language of culture into the language of metaphysics. Each metaphor of this modernist paradigm echoed a Conradian cry of horror at the slightest touch of reality, as if "the real" contaminated the formal purity of the modernist dream.

But have we not simply learned to read modernism this way because postmodernism desired to write itself as the end of the modern? Is not the extremity of this metaphysics of the modernist metaphor a product of retrospective scapegoating? Must we read the dictum that poetry is about poetry narrowly, as a retreat from reality? These are difficult questions; for the moment it will suffice to note that modernism does not bear all the guilt, although

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it was certainly complicit in its own deformation. What is clear is that the deconstruction of modernist formalism, in the almost obsessive dismemberment of the organic metaphor, was an unforeseen trap for the postmodern. Blinded to the historical position of modernism by its own refusal of history, postmodernism also lost sight of its social and political grounding. It deconstructed modern formalism with a powerful critique that, ironically, imprisoned postmodernism within the same socially irresponsible formal logic that it shared with misdirected modernism. Deconstruction, so central to postmodern interpretation, hardened into an unproductive symbiosis with the modern.

Postmodernism, proposing its difference from the modern, argued that our recognition of an antimetaphysics embedded in all grand metaphysical schemata derived from our learning to read the postmodern way. Modernist aestheticism, according to this exposé, had blinded modernist thought to its unacknowledged metaphysical assumptions. Hence, quintessentially nonmetaphysical postmodernism established itself as "prior" to the modern, as a reality of the nonmetaphysical which was "already" embedded in the classical, Greek "origins" of modern Western thought, as a repressed vision "always" ready to reveal itself in the Western philosophies which derived from that originary tradition, especially in the modernist illusion of having escaped metaphysics. Yet this "always already" principle also lifts itself out of time and history into the banal, into the very "sameness" for which postmodernism condemned modernism. Deconstruction, despite its militant vitality and command of Western academia, declined into a rote practice, into repetitious critiques unveiling infinite identical aporias, into the emptiness of "and…and…and…." All language was about all language and, much as with deviant, ivory tower modernism, nothing could be said about actual lived experience. Exposing the fallacious logic of modernist metaphysical metaphors to Nietzschean scorn also deconstructed the timeless first principle of postmodernism, différance, allowing us a not so gentle fall back into time where we discover that historical differences are the only ones we have available to us. History appears to be the true counter to metaphysics.

III

The distinction between modernism and postmodernism is a genuinely historical one. Modernism can be understood only as that which gave rise to postmodernism, and modernism itself must be read as a moment in a history firmly grounded in what we know to be human experience. Of course, the term "modernism" is variously defined. In discourses of philosophy and history, the modern has its origins at least as far back as the Renaissance. But literary modernism is more recent, and it is that more limited perspective that reveals itself in literary imagination, in metaphor.

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Literary modernism emerges at the moment of the decline of the image of production and the fetishism of the product, in the age of the decline of individualism. In effect, literary modernism arose on a platform of intense antimodernism, on what was to be read as the crisis of the "self." The production-oriented industrial phase of capitalism, in order to develop highly centralized (monopolistic) institutions, had initiated a reformation of social relations, specifically an uprooting of labor; this produced a complete transformation of the "self" registered bodily, psychologically, and culturally (metaphorically). The strategy required the shift of metaphoric "centers" from local communities to independent "subjects" liberated from identity-conferring bonds with tradition or culture. Workers became mobile in order to go to the factories; labor-intensive production required relocation and urbanization. The metaphor of organic self-realization established a tradition-free individuality and translated readily into a fluid and plentiful workforce. The family and community were partly replaced by wage-alliances between worker and industry; in the words of an old union protest song, the newly discovered subject "owed his soul to the company store" and not to church, community, or home.

Such a strategy, of course, created unexpected difficulties. The organic metaphor suggested independence, self-centered wholeness, as in the Romantic image of the oak fully contained in the tiny acorn. Yet the uprooting and transplanting of the newly discovered organic individual was not problem-free. Uprooting was not always ecologically (socially) sound, for it removed the individual from its native environment without regard to its ability to adapt to new conditions. The projected allegiance of worker to industry was derailed by social bondings arranged according to economic class rather than community, and this gave vital strength to the oppositional strategies of labor unions. In the most highly industrialized nations, however, class identity was held in check by modernism itself, by the very image of individuality and subjectivity that defined bourgeois ideology. The rapid expansion of the middle class absorbed (in fact or fantasy) much of the potentially oppositional working class. At the same time, individualism deepened the inner life of the isolated subject. The metaphor that gave rise to the image of a liberating (bourgeois) individualism came to represent a lacking or "hollowness" at the center of alienated modern being. Desire as a force for both production and material consumption defined the modern self. Problematical individualism was ready for another transformation; modernism was generating the postmodern.

Production-centered individualism had produced very specific metaphoric expressions. The traditional distinction between human and nonhuman rested on an ancient dichotomy of the human and the monstrous which was always troubled by the metaphor of a half-human beast that transgressed primal boundaries, the terror of the Sphinx. The Western myths of

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Oedipus and Eden, as well as Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment, all persistently tested and reaffirmed the differences that defined the realm of the human. The image of Bottom, a man with the head of an ass cavorting across the stage of Shakespeare's festival comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, unmistakably marked the limits between the human and the nonhuman by heightening the differences between reason and magic, culture and nature, or the sacred and the profane. Shakespeare explained away the dream by associating it with the poet's imagination, with the very idea of the play itself:

	The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
	Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.
	And as imagination bodies forth
	The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
	Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
	A local habitation and a name.[3]

The airy nothingness of Bottom's difference, however, lost resonance in the industrialized urban world of centralized productivity. A new metaphorics arose, coordinated with the emergence of a new technology and an older mechanization; modernist human difference was determined by the otherness of the machine and not the animal. Modernism's reaction to the machine deepened the mystery of the individual, exploited the irrationality of unconscious drives, and resisted every form of materiality in the name of insubstantial subjectivity. Ironically, that which had formerly been excluded from the realm of the human (the image of Bottom with the head of an ass—the monstrous, the magical, the natural, the irrational) was now located deep within the unique individuality of the modern subject: in the imagination, as Shakespeare had it, but also in the destructive figures of the human unconscious.

This radical self-centering weakened class identity as well as the traditional sense of community, and it spread across a wide economic panorama. The portrait of modern loneliness ranged from the figure of a frightened bourgeois socialite like T. S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock to the "realistic" images of powerless women workers in sweatshops, underpaid laborers on assembly lines, and miners suffering from black lung disease. Scenes of urban decay dominated the wasteland sensibilities of moderns who clung to the tenuous self in weak protest against the modern industrial monster which threatened to transform organic form into mechanical action. The dislocated organic individual drawn to the industrial centers away from native local cultures had become too much of a replaceable part of a larger and dehumanizing mechanical process.

This social decentralization and alienation underwent a rapid and widespread intensification during the modern period, but even as this crisis of

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the self was playing itself out in modern literary metaphors, another decentering was under way. A post–World War I globalization was grounded in internationalization, which constituted a second-phase decentralization of industry itself, a redeployment that depended on technological development, on a move beyond the metaphorical oppositions of human versus machine. Modernism, of course, saw technology as a mere component of industrialization, but an emerging postmodernism understood that the new technology was a departure from machine culture as well as production-oriented capitalism. New metaphors would have to be developed to imagine this next reorganization of society and subjectivity. The actual heavy-work phases of manufacturing could be exported to areas of high unemployment and, therefore, of low wages and taxes. The sweatshops and mines were exported to third worlds where they were operated unseen. The assembly of final products could be relocated according to demands of marketing advantage, rather than in urban centers where production and consumption were locally managed. Industry itself, and not just its products, gradually became "portable," to borrow a term from Dickens's inimitable Wemmick. What made this possible, of course, were extraordinary developments in modes of rapid transportation and, particularly, communication. Industry no longer followed the centralizing model of locating itself near sources of raw materials or major shipping ports, and this allowed for repeated renegotiations of favorable economic contracts with local communities, negotiations driven by the ever present leverage of industrial free agency.

We need not see this decentralization of industrial production only in terms of physically moving a factory. Downsizing, mergers, takeovers, restructurings, and robotic manufacture also undermined collective labor power's goal of driving up wages and reforming working conditions. The era of labor unions ended. In the process, the emphasis on production with its metaphoric translation of the individual's organic self-productivity into labor value underwent a radical change. The old individual, with its centralized ego—its dualistic image of public and private, outer mask and inner essence—was reconstructed into a figure of multiple personalities, a schizophrenic plurality. The inner self was projected onto the surface mask and lost its mysterious essence. The new social drama staged not six characters in search of an author but one character with six or more emanations in need not of authorial direction but of games to play. Like Tom Stoppard's brilliant revision of Shakespeare's hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, identity was to be determined by a role performed either competently or poorly. This critical alteration rested on a necessary loss of the power of remembering: in this postmodern revision of Shakespeare's claim that all the world is a stage, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot remember where they were before the curtain rose, before the text, or even which identity is which.

Here we become aware of a shift from the metaphorics of creativity to the

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metaphorics of performance, from images of production to images of distribution. As both producer and consumer in this postmodern economic biosphere, the individual was forced to demonstrate an aptitude for learning and forgetting, for quickly adapting to new systems, for unhesitatingly changing identities as one might change hats according to the season or roles according to the script. The old image of wholeness was replaced by the image of schizoid disorders. Disorders became the order of the day. The metaphors of organic individuality which emphasized origins, presence, interiority, developmental subjectivity, coherent identity, historicism, responsibility, and judgment, all factors of memory and constituent of wisdom, gave way to orders of information, agency, plurality, and competence. Identity became a function of linking, of incessantly logging on/off; the "I" which centered gave way to the "and" which dispersed.

IV

Thus postmodernism represented a second order of decentering consequent upon modernism's decentering of community through the creation of an image of the self-centered modern subject. Until postmodernism, metaphor had situated subjectivity in relation to familiar reality, a movement designed to stabilize subjectivity. Yet this positioning of the subject was also capable of destabilizing reality. Metaphor might be subversive. It rested on the power of recognition or remembering, on a measure of change, development, or difference. Modernism deepened the image of subjectivity. Only the modern subject could decide to make it new; only a coherent self that recalls what has been the case could have the wisdom to make decisions for change. Postmodernism, on the other hand, in deconstructing the organic subject, substituted competence for wisdom, performance for decisionmaking. It read metaphor as repression of difference, insofar as difference was understood to be a rule rather than a reality. Postmodern metaphors situated subjectivity as belatedness, a play where characters had no past and recalled nothing. As with Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, improvisation within the rules, within the "text," was all there was of being alive.

It is clear now that modernism, despite its resounding rejection of tradition and history, was wedded to remembering. That which was new differentiated itself as a decision to be new, to depart from or project beyond the familiar. Metaphor lent itself to such action. Aristotle observed simply that metaphor was the talent of seeing sameness where others saw only difference; we might say this is the ability to recognize the new within the familiar. Metaphor disappears if it enters the familiar. There is in this a genius for change, a challenge to see the traditional in new ways, to choose to reform that which no longer addresses human needs. This is not to say that metaphor is revolutionary; difference is not always progressive and any change

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in the way we imagine familiar reality is subject to social ratification. But it is to argue that the force of metaphor is timely, and, consequently, there is a story of metaphor.

Krieger's reading of Donne, therefore, rests on a narrative of metaphoric strategies stretching from the Renaissance to the period marked by the modern/postmodern engagement. On the way to the emergence of modernism there is another very instructive moment worthy of notice, a specific critique of metaphor articulated by Dr. Johnson against what he called metaphysical conceit, the violent linking of heterogeneous ideas very much like those found in Donne's "The Canonization." A critique of this poem in Dr. Johnson's terms would accuse the poet of violating the decorum of that which is deemed "real," those metaphysically legitimized orders of difference that define familiar identities. More importantly, reading Dr. Johnson calls attention to the curious fact that the suppression of difference in metaphoric linkings can also be said to expose certain suppressions of speech and imagination by the legitimation of culturally sanctioned differences, by the rules of difference policed by the "truth" of the age. Such rules of difference rest on foundational assumptions about what things are, as well as what they are worth; Dr. Johnson's observations emerge out of familiar Enlightenment principles, from within the historical context of a specific ontology and ethics under the direction of Cartesian rules for clarity and distinctness, that which instinctively abhors ambiguity and paradox.

Yet one age's clarity is another's confusion, and the rules for linking or differentiating are historically unstable. Donne, and his contemporary "metaphysicals," appeared to be opening a door which Dr. Johnson perceived as dangerous on a cosmic as well as a social level, but which, for all its metaphysical implications, was historically located in its own context of cultural demands for specific images of clarity and distinctness, for familiar reality. Such a perception of writing as potentially subversive or repressive, as a powerful weapon for either the suppression or the affirmation of difference, has steadily maintained its force in Western thought from Plato to Lévi-Strauss, perhaps bolstered by an endemic Western weakness for metaphysics, but more immediately visible as a companion to the history of various cultural coercions of difference. It is this that lends a particularly sharp edge to Donne's poem, seen as an expression close to blasphemy, defying proper order by mingling the sacred and the profane. Yet Donne's poem is unseemly, not seamless. We understand Donne's poetic tropes to be openly outrageous, deliberately designed to evoke an appreciative outburst of laughter from his audience, perhaps a smiling, a clucking of tongues. It is a play of wit, as he named it himself, and this constitutes his defense against theological outrage, against even Dr. Johnson's critique. Donne did not challenge convention in his linking of lovers and saints; rather he affirmed the

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socially proper hierarchy of the great chain of being by means of the tooobvious, self-identified play of his foregrounded illegitimate linkings.

For the modern reader the stakes were different; the self-consuming artifice of Donne's wit (as well as the rationalist superiority of Dr. Johnson's critique) moved to a new register. Twentieth-century modernism, reflecting Matthew Arnold's powerful antimodernism, was troubled by a culture perceived to be devoid of beliefs, by a sense of fragmentation in human concerns, miscommunication in human desires, and deeply felt alienations from primary life sources. The thrust of modernist metaphor was toward the production of new orders that would shore up the fragmented world of the new age. Donne's influence on late-modern poetry, therefore, was not in his wit (moderns were driven by Arnoldian seriousness, not by laughter, a weakness readily exploited by postmodern gaiety), but rather in the formal extremities of his connectives, in the metaphoric technique which suggested that radical heterogeneities could be contained in a poetic illusion of a different order. Robert Penn Warren called this the necessity of "making peace with Mercutio," the necessity for the modern poet to embrace oppositional irony as a defense against the potentially destructive forces of modernist skepticism.^[4] In fact, this constituted a preemptive strike against postmodernism and the paratactic freeplay of "ands." The modern poet, Warren asserted, must have the courage of her metaphors. This courage was another sort of metaphysical conceit, an arrogance of linking, a daring of heterogeneity in the facing of recalcitrant reality or fragmented human experience, even against the self-deconstructive nature of language itself, while asserting, with clamoring skepticism and sometimes blatant irony, an impossible fiction of momentary harmony and unity—the merest "idea of order," according to Wallace Stevens.^[5]

Perhaps this explains the force of modern characters like Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, who talk and talk against the impossibility of self-expression, who talk and talk of things, and others, and ideas, and visions, and revisions in a futile quest for the single image or word or metaphor that will contain and order the resistant multiplicity of modern experience.

	After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
	After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
	And this, and so much more?—
	It is impossible to say just what I mean![6]

Prufrock endlessly names things until expression breaks down; it is a quest to overcome the power of "and," the deconstructive force of parataxis. The distance from Donne to this modernism is at once monumental and trivial. Donne's wit self-consciously deconstructs itself within the coercive rules of his relatively stable cultural images. Metaphoric joinings in modernism, on

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the other hand, rest on a background of highly conventional images of fragmentation, images of difference read as apocalyptic signs of cultural and ethical entropy: we need only recall Yeats's powerful modernist image: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"^[7]

To be sure, metaphysical conceit often functions as ersatz metaphysics; but as metaphoric expression it comes always trailing clouds of difference, not only the difference that has been suppressed in the metaphoric linking but also a difference in the orders metaphorically substituted for convention. Are all metaphors the same? Perhaps Eliot thought, in the spirit of "The Canonization," in an Arnoldian reading of Donne, that he could ontotheologize metaphor in his image of the "wheel" which "may turn and still/Be forever still"^[8]—the point of intersection between timelessness and time. But this is, at best, merely the evanescent glow of an unattainable unity, a Kantian pure idea which translates poorly as Crocean or Husserlian "expression." It is a sublime moment searching for a correlative real object which can present an image of the Idea. For Eliot there was always Prufrock, always the retreat from the "overwhelming question." Stevens, more the modernist antimetaphysician, consciously rewrote metaphysics as aesthetics; for Stevens the poet is a metaphysician in the dark strumming supreme fictions on a blue guitar, or is one among a modernist (or is it postmodernist?) band of pagan dancers celebrating in rhythmic harmonies an old chaos of the sun.^[9] Yeats retreated to his tower, which both protected him from the modern apocalypse where the "best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity,"^[10] and also provided him with the uncommitted yet critical perspective of the culturally disengaged avantgarde artist. There is more difference than identity in this little panorama of modernism.

So it is that Krieger emphasizes in Donne's metaphorical junctures not identity (the "now" or static presence) so much as movement, a shift (across a contradiction) from denial to affirmation located in the slide from random lists to virtual unities, the effect of which is a sleight of hand, the pen quicker than the eye. The suppression of differences resides beyond metaphor as the idea of order; what we perceive in the poem itself is the process by means of which we reach that idea. Krieger asks us to imagine that by line 6 of stanza 3 in Donne's "Canonization" ("we two, being one"), identity has been suggested. By line 8 of that stanza, the idea of a scholastic "proof" has been placed into circulation. Thus in stanza 4 all differences are linked under the idea that certain culturally specific laws of non-contradiction, of difference (the sacred and profane), have been temporarily (that is, temporally) suspended, united in the metaphoric structure of the poem.

Metaphor facilitates thought. Reality is imagined in the mind's intercourse with materiality; thought interacts with sensation in order to make

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sense, to constitute an idea of order. Metaphor is a deception of the eye very much like the illusion of motion made from the misperception of a successive series of still images, or it is the sensation of infinite colors shaded out of an impoverished palette of red, green, and blue pixels projected on a glowing screen. These are, one might argue, flaws of the mind, blindnesses, specific inabilities to see clearly what is right before our eyes, but such limitations enrich reality by allowing us to give shape, color, and texture to our world. Metaphor is the product of this same faulty "rage for order";^[11] it is a manner of speaking, a request for legitimation by means of familiarization. Cognition rests on re-cognition, and the world we inhabit comes always with some assembly required. Like peripheral vision, reality is fuzzy around the edges, faintly demarked at the borders of recognition, and it is from these extremes that revisions arise. These alterations in the fabric of life range between near affirmation and total revolution, and cognition is always personal no matter how invested we are in the commonality of reality. Metaphor reconfigures systems and tweaks worlds; it cannot do otherwise, for the very act of metaphorizing disrupts proper differences.

The sweeping charge of ontotheologism hurled by postmodernism against metaphor simply rarefies metaphor into identity with itself. It is, perhaps, the fate of modernism to be so misread, to be troped as a onedimensional suppression of differences. Yet Krieger's reading of Donne rests on the principle that identity cannot present itself without difference. Metaphor inscribes identity within difference, just as postmodernism would have it. Warren's "irony of Mercutio," and Krieger's insistence on corporeality, locate the affective force of metaphor in the making and unmaking of realities, and with each constitutive motion there is a concomitant repositioning of the perceptive subject. Metaphor fixes identity as a temporary point of view or judgment; it defines the self as engaged with reality, in a posture of critique or affirmation. Modernism, therefore, maintains a significant difference from postmodernism by representing difference in a double sense. Familiar differences are subjected to unifying metaphoric linking, yet they remain visible within the metaphoric process even while the new order differs from the reality we already inhabit. Identity always differs from an original difference, and metaphor is always a differing from difference.

The familiar reality of modernism rested on sanctioned dichotomies of self and other, inner and outer, experience and expression, the present and the past. Modern metaphor sought resolution of these conflicts in presence, poetry, inwardness, and subjectivity, in the repression of the "ands" which exposed the links of irreducible dualisms. Erasing "ands" collapsed oppositions into the poetic subject itself. Hartman's reading of Yeats with its deconstructive multiplication of "ands," like all postmodern critique, was situated historically within this modernism, as a reminder that the reality of difference was the ground of metaphoric linking. Lying within modernism,

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the postmodern woke modernism from its dogmatic slumber by shifting modern metaphor away from a lexicon of privileged symbols to a grammar of incessant conjunctions, from nouns to connectives, from words to phrases. But with this single task accomplished in the blink of an eye, postmodernism was left with no further windmills to charge, and the postmodern passed quickly into decline.

Yet modernism remains as an unfinished project. Without simply turning back, modernism is forced to retrace the history of its emergence in order to rediscover its future. That past is rooted in narratives of liberation; and, problematical as that source now appears, it nonetheless grounds the modernist project in its original ethical and political commitments. Postmodernism provided no platform for making moral choices, for commitment to action and beliefs; it relegated judgment, and, hence, justice, to the playfulness of Borges's Chinese novelist whose labyrinthine narrative of forking paths followed all possible plot divisions.^[12] Modernists were better served in this domain by the romantic Frost, whose wandering everyman pauses to reflect on life decisions that make "all the difference."^[13] Differences do not occur naturally; that which makes a difference is a matter of choosing, and choice occurs within time narrated as cultural history. At the level of play, Borges's image of infinite divisibility is no less liberating than Frost's stereotypical, lonely New Englander's individualism, yet it is Frost's image that makes choice a project for good or ill.

Judgment returns us always to the problematics of the subject. Modernist metaphor sought to represent the nature of this subjectivity, the image of an animal able to make promises, as Nietzsche ironically phrased it.^[14] It was a project that modernists thought both philosophy and ethics had failed to take up. The idea of choice for modernists was harsh; it depicted a lonely decision-maker undirected by a priori determinations. The full weight of responsibility came to rest on this individual, a powerful deterrent to haste and thoughtlessness. For all of its sentimentality, this idea of choice is not reactionary. Choice is a project for the future just as it is the consequence of experience, of remembering, and such a conception of choice demands something like the modernist individuality, a perspective which does not reside at the still point of the turning wheel but rather at the site of contact between ideas of order and sensations, the locus of reality.

V

In Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner's incomparable Rosa Coldfield tells of her youth, and of the South, and the Civil War, and of what remains of past events which still cause her shame and deep pain. As she tells her story she digresses for a moment in order to instruct her listener on the nature of remembering, a reflex action which she defines as neither story nor event.

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Once there was—Do you mark how the wisteria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity's myriad components? That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.—See how the sleeping outflung hand, touching the bedside candle, remembers pain, springs back and free while mind and brain sleep on and only make of this adjacent heat some trashy myth or reality's escape: or that same sleeping hand, in sensuous marriage with some dulcet surface, is transformed by that same sleeping brain and mind into that same figment-stuff warped out of all experience. Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that—but ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how to weep.^[15]

It is the body and not the mind that remembers pain and pleasure. The mind can only warp experience into myth, dreams, mere ideas or stories "for which," as Rosa says, "three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less" (166). Everything that is or has been or will be can be told, but life is remembered as pleasure and pain, not as event or tale. Memory is empty, but remembering is the lingering of experience, the tempering of sense as though pleasure and pain have written a message in a script burned into flesh. We say something is beautiful or ugly, kind or careless, good or evil as we say something is hot or cold, soft or harsh. Whatever stories we tell of good and evil, with whatever words we name specific differences, there is always the sense of pleasures and pains, the remembering of sensations which give corporeal foundations to our thoughts and expressions.

Why do we say that a phrase "makes sense"? Oddly, philosophy divided "sense" and "reference," making "sense" a function of language, of grammar, of grammatology, thereby casting "reference" outside the boundaries of "sense." But where? Into "nonsense"? But "sense" cannot be removed from sensation, from the world that envelops the body, from pleasure and pain. A phrase "makes sense" because it appeals to the body for validation—not the validity of logic, or mathematics, or cognition, or even authenticity or truth, but rather the validity signaled by the recognition of a human response. The power of ideas is in what touches us.

Modernism once agonized over this dissociation of sensibilities, at the division of feelings and thoughts, but modernism also thoughtlessly set about the destruction of the body while in pursuit of mind and consciousness. The end of mimesis was in the metaphysics of the subject. Postmodernism did not differ from modernism in this. To be sure, the postmodern also abandoned the mind, slowly, since it had to await the inhospitality of Derrida to rid it of Lévi-Strauss's uninvited guest, but this merely rewrote the solitary confinement of solipsism as the prison house of language. The denial of remembering is one of the conditions of the move from wisdom to competence,

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for wisdom is remembering in Faulkner's intuition of it. Wisdom decides what matters. This is not to say that we judge merely on vague feelings; rather, remembering our pleasures and pains locates wisdom at the level of lived experience, at the intersection of thought and consequences, in the play of recognition (what it feels like, not what it is) and concern (obligation, not fear).

In contemporary science fiction the image of disembodied intelligence—of body snatchers always cold, always cruel—rises to trouble our dreams. And we hear of the utopia of cyberspace, which is no space at all, devoid of sensations, a treasure of competencies that will do our remembering for us. Whether or not it will one day feed the hungry is yet to be proved. Knowledge is power, but one wonders if food and guns, starvation and dying, are therefore altogether archaic. Perhaps this doubt has always tugged at the sleeves of modernism, for we cannot read the dominant figures of modernist consciousness without acknowledging the eccentric challenges to the modern by those who profess to be realists, even materialists. And can we not see in Krieger's reading of Donne, in the metaphor of corporeality and the profanation of the sacred, can we not feel here the remembering of the body, of that which makes sense? In that dimension of the modern where form turns upon itself and calls attention to the process of composition, to making, to the act of writing, here something other than the rarefied subjectivity of self-consciousness appears. It is a reminder to remember, barely discernible in the ontic extravagance of New Critical theorizing, but a call for recognition of the world's body nonetheless. Mark Seltzer calls this "the becoming visible of writing" and sees in it a sociology as well as an ontology.^[16] Perhaps it is more accurately a politics and ethics. Seltzer finds it in realism; but it is not only there, for even in its total submersion into consciousness, the mind of modernism could not altogether forget the body.

The form of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! is an imitation of conversation, of storytelling. In the latter half of the novel much of this conversation takes place at night, in the dark, where seemingly disembodied voices float freely on the cold air. Yet here and there, often enough, the reader is reminded of the sensation of that coldness and of the intertwined acts of composition which comprise the story, the writing of the novel itself. Much of the dialogue centers on a legendary and mysterious murder that took place in Mississippi at the end of the Civil War. The narrators search for explanations, motives, and evidence, yet they have very little that is concrete. They have only stories, tales, mere words. Most of the narration comes from those born long after the events took place; no extended piece of narrative, except for that of Rosa Coldfield, comes from an eyewitness. It is she alone who can remember, but she cannot even testify to the reality of the body of the murdered man in the casket she helped carry to the site of its burial.

The conspicuous absence of the body in this story again draws us into the

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realm of language, into the patching together of bits of narration, the incessant linking of narrative "ands." Yet here also we are reminded on occasion, often enough, that at issue is the question of passions that underscore the questions of guilt or innocence, the matter of justice. Versions of the crime are constructed to make sense to the narrators, to evoke feelings of love and hatred that constitute the ground for making judgments, for revealing a "wrong" that otherwise can have no voice. These can only be sensed as grief and sorrow, joy and anger, within the range of possible sensations that give substance to all human concerns, good and evil.

Lest we forget this grounding as we are swept up into the play of storytelling, of language itself, Faulkner inserts a disruption into the narrative, the figure of a document, a letter presumably written by the murdered man to his fiancée (although these identities are deliberately left in doubt). It is not, however, the contents of the letter, what it says, or the remarkable play of its words, but the object itself that causes us to pause, for it is quintessentially a "becoming visible of writing." This is how the letter begins:

You will notice how I insult neither of us by claiming this to be a voice from the defeated even, let alone from the dead. In fact, if I were a philosopher I should deduce and derive a curious and apt commentary on the times and augur of the future from this letter which you now hold in your hands—a sheet of notepaper with, as you can see, the best of French watermarks dated seventy years ago, salvaged (stolen if you will) from the gutted mansion of a ruined aristocrat; and written upon in the best of stove polish manufactured not twelve months ago in a New England factory. (129)

The description reinforces the general thematics of this novel about the defeat of the South, but, more importantly, the letter trivializes postmodern absence. The letter makes writing sensational, an object we hold in our hands as we read. It presses against our palms and weighs on our muscles as we hold the book wherein this letter resides. It is an eternal presentation which does not make reality but rather guarantees that realities have been made, for such an object testifies in the place of an otherwise silent world occupied by bodies and electrified by sensations.

Just as the mind filters stimuli, words arrange experiences: sometimes into the familiar, directed by the coercive power of culturally legitimized differences everywhere present in language, and sometimes into improprieties wherein one begs to differ from familiar differences. So this filter gives us reality, that which is named and ordered, produced by the mind, constituted within language, and recognized by consciousness. Yet it is always merely "myth" or "figment-stuff warped out of all experience." And we understand this, need this, and regret it. The search for explanations, for evidence to convict, that motivates the telling of these linked stories of murder and hatred, love and honor, and the racism that ignites violence, has not been advanced very far by this letter, yet we now understand that these stories

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arise out of recognizable human concerns, sensational needs, inseparably merged with bodies as expressions of that which truly matters. The letter is a metaphor binding together that which postmodernism, by extending modernism, sought to divide: the elemental and immaterial alphabet that signifies insensible difference, and the material being of ink (or stove polish) and paper, visible manifestations of difference in plain black and white. This letter gives sensational representation to the thematic racial differences between black and white in the novel, differences that even when they cannot be seen still constitute a motive for murder and a revelation of violence in the social realities that lie at the heart of Faulkner's fictional exploration of the American South.

There is here an insistence on materiality in all language, a remembering of what is always before the text, the body that is reflected in the mirror image which even the power of the symbolic order cannot erase. It is not the ontic suggestiveness of all this that is significant, however. Sensation is the voice of the world's body speaking through our bodies. It is something like the brute materiality which sparked Sartrean nausea, or that which asks us to attend to its presence, to "listen" with all of our faculties of perception. We recognize sensation even in the absence of phrases; in pauses or silences of written texts we "sense" what might be said or what must be said just as powerfully as we hear the voice of one whose breath brushes our ears.

Modernism, stimulated by postmodernism, may bring us back to this realization someday. We find such a move in the philosophizing of a quintessential postmodernist like Lyotard, in the remarkable recuperation of Kant that grounds his politics in The Differend. It is a prelude to Lyotard's appropriation of Levinasian ethics, that interface between self and other that constitutes the basis of human judgment and, for Lyotard, the condition of rendering justice. Listen to this reading of Kant's "Transcendental Aesthetic," which shows itself as a remarkable (metaphoric?) linking of modern and postmodern. Here is a true engagement with the material world which speaks to us:

An unknown addressor speaks matter…to an addressee receptive to this idiom, and who therefore understands it, at least in the sense by which he or she is affected by it. What does the matter-phrase talk about, what is its referent? It does not yet have one. It is a sentimental phrase, the referential function is minor in it. What is important is its conative function, as Jakobson would have said.^[17]

A conversation wherein matter speaks? Yes, a message that registers on our sensations, an ontology that does not know its referent, but which necessitates the enlightening of a reality. Everything that "is" asks us to articulate our perceptions of it; we feel the presentation of the other, a cry, a demand to be recognized. So we must listen to our sensations and name and

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rename our worlds. An order of linkings, a conjunction of "ands," a ratification of differences is constructed which forms a familiar reality. This reality arises out of Lyotard's second phase of the conversation that matters. The addressee, the subject that receives the sensational message, then becomes the addressor, the naming subject:

This subject…addresses the phrase of space-time, the form phrase, to the unknown addressor of the first phrase, who thereby becomes an addressee. This phrase, as opposed to the matter phrase, is endowed with a referential function.^[18]

This response closes our engagement with the world that matters, the base for any reality, and is finally marked not by ontological counters but by political and ethical obligations. That which is conjoined by "ands" is ratified, sanctioned, and coerced into the reality we know and recognize. Yet what kind of a world can be built into that which we call "reality," that which will coerce differences and render judgments? How will we differ from difference should we encounter injustice, should we sense pain that calls for recognition and relief? These questions temper all language, philosophical and poetic. Here metaphor operates to differ from difference, not as a guarantee of the good, but as a reminder of our most fundamental human engagement with the corporeal substance of our world, a remembering that is located at the level of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, celebration and regret. The poem that asserts itself as an image of presence, in Krieger's terms, does not detach itself from what matters but turns us back to that sensational response which obligates us to justify reality. Can we say that justice is sentimental? Yes, as we say that justice invokes experience, wisdom and not competence. Knowledge rests on sensation, on the recognition and acknowledgment of consequences and responsibilities, not at the point of intersection between timelessness and time, but at the juncture of thought and concern.

NOTES

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