We're All In This Together

I believe it is important, on occasion, to say “we” in literary criticism. Here is an example: "We notice the high speed, the succession of concentrated images, each magnifying the original fancy" (Eliot, "Andrew Marvell"). There are only two alternatives to using "we" in these types of circumstances, and I find each of them unsatisfactory in some way. The first alternative is to withdraw “we” and substitute “human beings” or “subjects” or some equally vacuous word, but this drains away the notion that A) I, as the author, am implicated in the ideas I am discussing, and B) you, the reader, are included in the group of human beings similarly affected. “We” is a word that is particularly helpful in characterizing the nature of the critical endeavor. That is, this text lives in the moment your mind encounters my words. The critical text, like the literary one, is mutually constituted, and the word “we” fairly encompasses our relationship.

 

The second alternative is to remove the subject entirely. “Things occur” or “mistakes were made.” This type of usage negates our involvement in the world. Events become mechanistic. Cause and effect are set into motion by some mysterious force. Instead, I argue that “we” are active in the world, poets are active in their texts, and we are active in their interpretation. So, although it might go against some traditions of critical discourse, I believe we gain something useful in occasionally allowing the first-person plural into the text.

Platonism in Santayana's Poetic Theory

In Scepticism and Animal Faith, George Santayana conducts an interesting -- and revealing -- thought experiment. He undercuts what he sees as the overvaluation of the present.

"Memory presents many a scene which is not substantial, as is the world before me now: yet this now is fleeting, and the unsubstantiality which vitiates the past is in the act of invading the present. Is not the pre-eminence of the present, then, an illusion [. . .]?" (226)

Great question. The tangible now, although we can reach out and touch it, is ephemeral.  It will always give way to the succeeding moment.  The present is always in a state of departure. Conversely, memory -- though it is insubstantial -- is always with us.  According to Santayana's reversal, memory gains the upper-hand in "pre-eminence."  He follows this quote with the thought experiment of taking all present moments and considering them in an "equalized" and "eternal" form:

"is not [. . .] reality that panorama which all those presents would present when equalised and seen under the form of eternity?  Is not the invidious actuality of any part of things a mere appearance, and is not the substance of them all merely their truth?" (226-27)

I shouldn't overstate Santayana's basic theory, which is just a version of Platonism: there is some sort of eternal form underlying any particular instance of a thing.  Each thing we encounter in the world is an instantiation -- better or worse -- of the idea of that thing.  (This inelegant way of phrasing it seems to put the instantiated thing first again, but that's not the way Plato sees it).

In Santayana's formulation, the present gives up its temporal quality; it may be "seen under the form of eternity."  There is a luminous, spiritual quality to things because they contain eternity in themselves.

What I find interesting about this idea is it is rejected by both modernists and post-modernists. Post-modern American poets, as Charles Altieri cogently argues in Enlarging the Temple, consider the self as "immanent," unalterably in the world.  Moments are moments and cannot be eternalized.  But even modernist writers don't subscribe to his Platonism. Though I generally maintain that modernists strive for unity -- even if they have to construct it themselves out of obvious fragments -- I don't see them eternalizing or spiritualizing objects.

Instead, the modernist self takes on a self-authorizing ability, while the world we might experience in the present is, in some sense, rejected.  It is not that modernists do not see luminosity...it's that the subject itself is luminous.  The world, by contrast, must be rejected.  No west wind is going to transport the modernist subject; Grecian urns do not present eternalized beauty.  Modernism works by creating gaps, divergences, separations from the world.  Tiresias never touches another thing; instead, he observes the folly of sensuous contact.  Modernists sublimate desire in imaginative realms.  Santayana is unafraid of the world, for it represents the harmony one would see in an eternalized nature.  Modernists on conceive of harmony in terms of the unity of the self...which must be separated from the world.