The Challenge of Immanence

Charles Altieri's important book on postmodern poetry Enlarging the Temple presents a conundrum for the uninitiated. In this case...that's me. He insists that the poetry following modernism (which must inevitably be called "postmodernism") is marked by a shift away from symbolism and toward varieties of immanence. What makes this difficult is the very term "immanence." I've been throwing it around quite a bit, mainly because I've been trying to engage with Altieri's text. But the more time that goes by, the less sure I am that I have even a basic understanding of the word.

When I look up "immanence" (on that most trusted of resources: Wikipedia), I find the idea that the divine is manifested in the material world. I get the "material world" part; what I don't find in Altieri's description is a sense of the divine. Altieri seems to be only interested in the idea that things, including human beings, are in the world. At the risk of employing a Heideggerian term I don't understand, Altieri seems interested in being-in-the-world. He writes that "the proper mode of activity for the creative self is not the creation or interpretation of values but the labor of disclosure" (22). This disclosure involves reporting the experience of being-in-the-world. But whither divinity? Does disclosure avail one's self of some spiritual meaning?

These two questions hint at the crux of my problem. Immanence is typically contrasted with transcendence as its binary opposite. Transcendence is readily understood as spiritual, but how does immanence square the banal fact-ness of the world with a sense of divinity. In other words, I cannot help but smuggle in transcendence with immanence...if I want to hold to the definition I've been given. It seems I would be more comfortable jettisoning the "divinity" part of the definition in the same way that Altieri seems to.

But here, then, is the challenge. How can I overcome this desire to discard divinity from my understanding of mundane reality? That is, how can I conceive of reality as not mundane but divine? And what accounts for this resistence? Does my general lack of religious feeling cause me to bracket spirituality off in some transcendent realm while the immanent realm is merely a cold and scientific landscape? This is a super big problem. It is problematic especially because the poets in whom I am interested (Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell) seem to conceive of the world as inherently dangerous. Bishop, for instance, repeats the phrase "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear," and this clinical and barren sort of world of objects can drain the self of feeling (rather than offer a sort of spiritual transformation on its own). The poem attends to the objects of the world in that uniquely Bishopian way, carefully descriptive, but moving at the end to the pain involved with the real world:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If the postmodern poets that Altieri treats in Enlarging the Temple experience and disclose the fact of their immanence, Bishop surely does not. While hers is not a pessimistic poetry, neither is it a poetry satisfied by being a record of the world's presence.

Randall Jarrell and the Gap between Immanence and Transcendence

"A Country Life" by Randall Jarrell expresses concisely in one of its lines an overriding principle of Jarrell's work: "They are subdued to their own element." The poem examines the natural world in a location unfamiliar to the speaker. He wonders what the birds say when they speak. But he cannot ask the locals because he does not want to give himself away as an outsider.

This situation raises two crucial aspects of Jarrell's poetry. First, it broaches the subject of the physical world and its potential for human meaning. He describes the bird as a part of the concrete physical world, but also as an agent that might communicate something deeper:

The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."

The first of these lines is descriptive, conveying the world as it can be experienced by the senses. The second line introduces a relation to the world. The bird speaks of how the world is "directly" before us, or perhaps how he is responding to our presence "directly." In this second line, we understand the world not as a set of objects which may or may not be perceived, but a product of the act of perceiving. The gulf between these two lines, between the possibilities they raise, is the space within which Jarrell works.

The speaker reports that the local people, those who live within these elements, "know and they don't know." This is classic Jarrell. His work sometimes borders on confusion or senselessness because he so frequently proffers two contradictory contentions. But he's trying to get at the simultaneity of experience in and about the world. Another way of saying this is that he contemplates the distance between dumb immanence and communicative meaning. But asking those entrenched in the world to explain it "is dangerous":

Asked about it, who would not repent
Of all he ever did and never meant,
And think a life and its distresses,
Its random, clutched-for, homefelt blisses,
The circumstances of an accident?

For Jarrell, to ask for a definitive description of a mechanistic world is to threaten one with the recognition of the loss of free will. In this poem, immanence is antithetical to meaning. The importance of this point is emphasized when Jarrell raises the stakes in the final stanza, where death delivers the body to the clay. Death is a return to pure immanence; it is the inevitability of immanence.

But Jarrell insists on one of the other crucial aspects of his poetry: the continued dream of transcendence. He rarely argues for the possibility of transcendence, but he frequently examines our perpetual drive toward it. So even after the body is returned to the earth, a spiritual element remains:

After some words, the body is forsaken . . . .
The shadows lengthen, and a dreaming hope
Breathes, from the vague mound, Life;

This is a paradoxical turn, of course. While alive, the people could not explain the physical world because they would need to choose between immanence and transcendence, but after dying, they yearn for both. Jarrell suggests that we are caught between immanence and transcendence, and he, in fact, sees human existence as a breathless pause between the two. Only death seems to solve this dilemma, but at the cost of relinquishing both alternatives.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Immutability of the World

I’ve been thinking more about Charles Altieri’s contention that postmodern poetry is primarily about the need to express one’s experience of the world. He presents a compelling case that postmodern poetry, despite its incredible variety, is essentially unified by its immanentism. This poetry presents the fact of experience rather than the attempt to shape it into some kind of ordered, symbolic world. He writes that this “aesthetic mode reflects qualities of the mind engaging the world rather than structuring it into created orders (Enlarging the Temple 24-25). This is an argument about what poetry is capable of, and more importantly, it’s an argument about what the mind can do.

I tend to see the modernist tendency to create order as a sort of an anxious, almost hyperventilating, need for order. That is, it is more of a desperate wish than a comfortable and committed belief. In fact, this haunted quality is one of the things that most draws me to the modernists. It feels so very human (despite the “extinction of personality” that Eliot and others often claimed for their work).

This leads Altieri to the fascinating insight concerning the ego: “For the postmoderns, on the other hand, the ego is not a thing or a place for storing and ordering experiences; the ego is not a force transcending the flux of experience but an intense force deepening one’s participation in experience” (43). But what about those for whom this sort of participation is deeply disturbing? If one recognizes that the world cannot be structured as a result of one’s own will, then the self is at the mercy of the world.

It seems to me that Elizabeth Bishop writes at this juncture, wherein one recognizes the compelling power of the world and the futility of desire. Bishop’s “Little Exercise” is a good example of the forces at play. The poem describes a Florida thunderstorm: “It is raining there. The boulevard / and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack / are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.” The actions of the world are undeniable; they are written upon it. The storm cannot be avoided.

The poem closes with the introduction of the human being into this destructive world: “Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat / tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; / think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.” The man is equally subject to the world. But there’s a bit of backtracking, in two senses. First, Bishop suggests that he is “barely disturbed.” Though he must submit to the actions of the world, he nevertheless exists as a counterpoint to it. Though it buffets him, he can tune it out.

Second, Bishop does not tell the story as an experience. It is not (to use Altieri’s useful term) a “disclosure.” Instead, each image is a hypothesis. The poem instructs one to “think of someone”; the someone is putative, not real. The entire action of the poem takes place in the mind, in one’s imagination. The power of the imagination is a stay against the world’s power to compel.

Finally, the structure of the poem is a product of the poet’s power over her material. Bishop’s ideas about form run completely counter to Charles Olson. She exerts her will, not over her material, but over her presentation of the material. Bishop rejects the postmodern effort to rely on the transmission of experience. Instead, she recognizes the immutability of the world at the same time she refuses direct participation in it.