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Notes on the critical relevance to Prynne of certain ideas and motives
formulated by Nietzsche


1.

There exist many opportunities for a technical declaration of
self-importance, many can be discovered in texts characterized partly by
the motive to determine visibly the substance and motives of other texts.
This motive is subject - often provocatively so, often with a fairly
mendacious indifference - to various kinds of critical scrutiny and
analysis, some of which are attained in a manner the text would seem
tacitly to favour, or to declare its support for outright. The visible
intention to arouse in readers (and especially in writing readers) a
particular response, the seeming necessity of which those readers can
imagine to have been conveyed to them by an author as a kind of reward for
clearsightedness, is an intention for which many critical readers have
always supposed themselves naturally to be searching; to suppose oneself
naturally indisposed to do such searching is an equally automatic and
conclusive decision, barely a decision at all.
        


2.

Choosing to determine that it is not a reader, but a 'site' of relevant
reaction towards which a text implies an oriented attitude, does not
necessarily imply anything radical about that text's capacity - it is not a
choice that reorganizes the potential significance of a decision to write;
rather it is an injunction, similar to other historical injunctions, to pay
somewhat idealistic attention to the world. The decision to legitimize
disregard for readers, inasmuch as 'readers' means largely determinable
groups of specific, named and classified individuals, in favour of a
supposed 'site', is a kind of politic catachresis: 'site' - in Barthes's
sense - is a metaphor for aversion, and as Nietzsche claims to believe
early on in his career, "the hardening and congealing of a metaphor
guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive
justification." More positive guarantees are always available to be
construed, there are other reactions which metaphors (such as 'site') can
be persuaded to undergo. Should these guarantees themselves be overtly
metaphoric, the value which they are designed to assert is involved in a
demand for faith. Jürgen Habermas questions the validity of such a demand
in two thoughtful remarks, one of which is directly responsive to
Nietzsche:
        
        Nietzsche so directed the gaze of his successors to the phenomena
of the extraordinary that they contemptuously glide over the practice
of everyday life as something derivative or inauthentic.
                                (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
XII.339)

The second remark is aimed at Heidegger, in whose "propositionally
contentless speech" Habermas detects the "illocutionary sense of demanding
resignation to fate." This leads to "a diffuse readiness to obey in
relation to an auratic but indeterminate authority." Habermas finds, that
the guarantees proposed reflexively by Nietzsche's and by Heidegger's
metaphors, cannot reconcile him to their implied or exposed directives, as
these guarantees are themselves characterized principally by a mode of
argument the perlocutionary quality of which is not sufficiently different
from that of the initial metaphors. Sufficiency is a problem, here,
because there is an inherent demand ("resignation to fate," "directed the
gaze"); these political demands are partly a consequence of what Habermas
might consider a more mere demand, that is, the metaphorically stimulated
demand to trust in the necessity and justification of a metaphor as such.
The crucial fact, which Habermas quietly avoids stating, but without which
his arguments are perhaps less compelling, is that the demand for faith is
not initially a demand at all; rather it is the arousal, within the reader,
of the disposition to react as if something were demanded of her. This
arousal can be more or less effective, more or less arousing. If it is
effective, the reader is faced with a recognisable order of choice - one in
which to reject is to assume polemically a relation to the 'demand' within
a possible argument that for this reason is determined to be dichotomized:
this is one choice. It is the state of arousal in which Jacques Derrida,
for example, sets about "associating with [the] great tasks" entailed in
questioning Nietzsche's demands concerning women in Beyond Good and Evil
section 231 . Also a reader can supply the demanded faith; that is, she
can assent to the necessity of a metaphor, despite its assertion of value
being itself metaphoric. Acknowledgment of arousal is also a choice. If
Habermas detects in Heidegger the demand that his readers resign to fate,
it is because he has made several decisions. He has chosen to acknowledge
the arousal of his ability to be demanded of; he has chosen to imagine that
arousal effective, in the general case (that is, for other people); he has
chosen to assume a polemical attitude of disagreement. Why? The answer to
this question with regard to the latest of his choices is provided by his
second choice - it is because of the 'general case' in which this arousal
might be effective, that he feels impelled to disagree in a polemic. That
is, he wishes to inhibit not the effectiveness of the arousal itself - not
the ability in readers to feel demanded of - but the ability of readers to
decide that they shall supply the faith demanded. Similarly, it is the
gaze of Nietzsche's successors that Habermas would redirect: this rather
than inhibiting the arousals in Nietzsche by claiming convincingly that
they produce, in fact, no real demand at all.
        Is there a demand for faith in Nietzsche's metaphorical guarantees?
 What are these guarantees? They are often simply vehemence. Nietzsche's
vehemence is peculiar and admirable. The figure of Zarathustra is
essentially vehemence incarnate, or a figure of vehemence incarnate; he is
Leibniz's dictum lent flesh and blood, "great motions always accompany
vehement feelings." It is precisely through the overt stylistic,
emphatically rhetorical exhibition of an 'auratic authority' (achieved,
Nietzsche believes, through his 'dithyramb') or "great health" as Nietzsche
would have it , that the refrain "thus spoke Zarathustra" attempts to
instigate a demand: it demands to be taken for a valid guarantee asserting
the necessary value of Zarathustra's specific, metaphorical pronouncements
. This is not a demand initially, but an arousal; however, the
effectiveness of this arousal produces, if permitted to do so, a strikingly
demanding demand. This is Nietzsche's intention. His demand must seem to
exclude the possibility of being made to enter a dichotomized argument by
interested counter-assertions, not so that no such counter-assertions are
provoked or so that none such can prevail within a chosen argument, but so
that he can constitute an encouraging basis for the transgressive
development of the ability to express commitment per se. It is not to
prevent readers from disagreeing, that Nietzsche creates the figure of
vehemence incarnate, but in order that a reader might someday disagree with
more startling and violent commitment than a text could otherwise
stimulate. Wild or outlandish claims are not sufficient to this end; it is
the extent to which one allows something to be demanded of oneself, to
which one feels compelled to realize that there is a demand which ought to
be recognized as such (Nietzsche would say, know your enemies): "every
pastis worthy to be condemned." Nietzsche believes in what he writes, of
course, and he believes that those who disagree are wrong; he has chosen to
exhibit the manner of this belief as demandingly as possible, in order that
a reader's capacity to choose - to agree or to disagree fully - is an
increased because less probable, less common capacity. "For this is our
height and our home" : Zarathustra exhorts his 'friends' to feel invited to
share his prospect; to deny such an invitation fully, or even, to ignore it
fully, is - so the text would hope - to obtain a dazzling new candour in
denial and ignorance. None of Zarathustra's great or wise men are
permitted to obtain this.
        J.H. Prynne's poetry is commonly thought to entail a demand for
faith. If that demand is in fact aroused, in a reader, it is commonly
thought to be uncommonly demanding; readers frequently find it necessary to
indulge a strange, one might almost say 'site specific', almost quietistic
modesty, in referring to Prynne's writing. It is a difficult poetry,
perhaps the most difficult, in certain respects, with which a reader
presently can be challenged. "My triumph is precisely the opposite of
Schopenhauer's: I say, "non legor, non legar."" So says Nietzsche: I am
not read, I will not be read. Readers of Prynne tend to remonstrate
gently, choosing to object to what is imagined to be a proclamation of the
same 'triumph', the same inversion of Schopenhauer's famous hopes; Prynne
is declared to be rebarbative, and suspected to have excited his own
rebarbativity in contempt of a perceived professionalism which his own
excitement does more to guarantee - or to proscribe - than to refute. The
most overt statement of this suspected attitude is Nietzsche's: "Whoever
knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader." If there is
one manner in which critics of Prynne, or those having a beguiled desire to
become such critics, should not address his work, it is in the manner
identified and indulged here: we should stop writing summaries, overviews,
tentative metacritiques, criticism of criticism that is itself hardly such
at all, we should invest a little more discontent in thinking about the
prospects of such respectful circumlocution. Not because it is not useful.
 And above all, we should expurgate in a sudden flash of speculative hubris
the belief - and even the suspicion - that Prynne's poetry sports an
inherent non legar; it may be that a generally satisfactory reading of Her
Weasels Wild Returning will in fact never occur, but I am convinced that we
should rather characterize this possibility as a shame, than as some
diffusely analogous commitment to egalitarianism . That is not to say that
I enjoy or esteem the poem less because I cannot provide such a reading,
but simply that I should rather orient my attention towards the hope of
stimulating my ability either to deny or to ignore this work fully ("Pick
your own cell for mean / further." ), than suffer partially either one or
both of those reactions - or their positive opposites - due to a
satisfactorily default pathos of critical distance .






3.

        "Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, the somber
thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man."
                (On the Genealogy of Morals, second essay, section 3, Basic
Writings p.498)

This flourish, characteristically contemptuous both of an effigial readerly
solemnity and of the desire for patient explication by which that solemnity
is imagined to be motivated, is a rather bluntly incisive access to a
critical concern common to both Nietzsche and Prynne. Tonic
disagreeableness is in Nietzsche, and in Prynne's poetry including and
following the coolly exacerbated Brass (1971), so pervasive as to
constitute almost a figurative structure to which expressed purposes and
discursive comments adhere almost immutably. To borrow a phrase from Paul
De Man, we might call this not an "aberrant form of [their] language but
the linguistic paradigm par excellence." De Man's point - concerning
'tropes' - is reserved for a fairly abstract application, but its
enthusiasm is readily transferred; in Nietzsche and in Prynne there is
advertised, with an uncommon success, a kind of cynical probity and
obstreperousness amongst series of ideas and sentiments which are shown to
be antagonistic. Or perhaps they are elected to be so. Perhaps, indeed,
the 'linguistic paradigm' of what I have called tonic disagreeableness
tilts the pen of these writers such that it requires an especial and
deliberate kind of temperance in order for it not to perforate the
possibility of an idea or sentiment even as it conceives of that
possibility (a peculiar instance of Prynne's "You could tell on a slant for
once" , discoloured by his "novice / assent availing ready" ).
        Nietzsche is quite open about his commitment to this tilting, he
invests his most opportune decisions in writing as its surety; "esteeming
itself is of all things the most estimable treasure" , and requires the
most estimable assent. Prynne's aversions are similarly fierce; their
irony is rarely destabilizing or obfuscatory, but amplifies itself rather
as a consequence than as redress of the acerbity of his ideas. From the
outset of Brass, there has been "ominous dullness" and "the same stormy
inconsequence" fashioned as a prospect in strictly allied enmity with both
his motives to write and with the range of motivated attitudes in his
writing. It is more than simply an awareness of the possibility of
producing something boring, or any approximate imperatives arising from
that humility; the inimical prospect is wholly enjoined to the products of
his aversion to it even after their production, it determines not only the
development of their intentions but their foresightful exasperation, the
substance and probability of their sentences, the density and apparent
remoteness of their vocabulary: Prynne is characterized, as is Nietzsche,
by a procreative exaltation of hostility. This appears most prominently
and, incidentally, most recently in For The Monogram (1997), any part of
which would alert a reader to this bondage to hostility. The ninth poem
(p.13) begins:


        Aiming always at united residue stifles down in pairs
               to misfit nutrition you saw it splicing its cuff
        under constant erasure, cutting out the bottom dish.

It is, quite ineluctably, an occasional privilege to be aiming so, even or
maybe even particularly when what is aimed at is a bathetic analogy to a
commercial aggregate demand , echoing the title of a likely multinational
corporation, and even when both this evasive 'residue' and the act of
'aiming' are perceived to behave in a manner described by a transitive verb
signifying discomfort or damage and stripped both of its transitivity and
its threat ('stifles down' releases the echoes 'hunker down', 'sidle down'
etc., also recall John Wilkinson's "Insight busying down to an imperative"
). The preparedness evoked here, its constancy and perverse specificity
("Aiming always at.."), imply that he who aims is at the outset distracted
by the task of aiming; his attention is coordinated or perhaps even
principally ordinated by an objective with which he is sufficiently
familiar to require that it be mentioned only with severe bathetic laconism
("united residue" did, after all, perplex Hume, for example, for a good
portion of his Treatise of Human Nature, and might be expected to arouse a
less contemptuous and passing description; it is a kind of "uneasiness"
that this "aiming" purports to alleviate. There is also a trace, here, of
Lukács's "totality that [cannot] simply be accepted", and which must
therefore be 'aimed at' ). Furthermore, it is "residue" that he aims to
unite, or at which, since it is united, he aims; the persuasions of
laconism and bathos compel each description to accept its necessary
denigratedness - residue must take the place of, say, 'ideas', 'motives',
'hopes', 'beliefs' or any other singular or plural item or items from which
it might have originated. The tilt towards the inimical requires this:
overtly minimalized candour is, as Beckett knew so well, a permission to
formulate a maximized compensation.
        What is this compensation? How is disagreeableness made tonic,
here specifically? How is this so in Nietzsche? The "best ally" is,
according at one point to Nietzsche, "the most unconscious, involuntary,
hidden and subterranean ally". He goes on, a few pages later, "what
meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the
will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?" In Nietzsche, as
in Prynne, a committed expression is made possible and necessary, its
magnitude is determined, by an equilibratory and justifying consciousness
of a hostile fact, or expression, of similar magnitude. There is a
balancing act intrinsic to their correctness, their assertiveness is
alloyed with and enabled by their (partly contrived) susceptibility: the
"subterranean ally" of a hostile or pessimistic attitude is exposed in the
consciously prepared text as an optimally problematic 'enemy'. Nietzsche
guarantees the spectacularity of what we might for a moment call his
'optimism', by ensuring that it is necessitated by a sufficiently
'pessimistic' setting. The possibility of this 'optimism' - similarly to
the possibility of Prynne's writing almost in toto - therefore depends for
its probability upon an active participation in the creation (a kind of
highly additive recognition) of inimical circumstances. Imagine Nietzsche
to have written Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, and
then to have written Zarathustra; the dependence of the latter work on the
former (and on the ramifications of its statements) is what promotes the
latter's brilliance, which in fact and quite apart from this expository
hypothesis is the second (and simultaneously the first) term in an
intensified feat of chiaroscuro. Prynne's laconism, its permutations in
obstructive and obtrusive syntax, alienating vocabularies, the refusal to
do other than 'smile' at "sudden real candour" : the magnificent rhetorical
success inhering in these types of disagreeableness, is a privilege made
possible by the extent to which they are genuinely disagreeable; that is,
the extent to which the magnitude of their demand provokes in a reader an
increased capacity to agree or to disagree, to recognize less tentatively
that the arousal of their ability to be demanded of could be newly
necessary.



4.

        Laconism is a strange word with which to describe Prynne's poetry.
It is an abundant poetry, exploring a range of syntactic and stylistic
permutations not previously seen in any other verse, and rarely giving the
impression that it depends unreservedly upon any histrionic silence or
brevity. Nietzsche can be short and pithy. He frequently suspends or
attenuates the development of an argument, signalling a loss of patience or
desire and repeating with that signal the demand that a reader have (or not
have) faith in his impatience, his indisposition, the indifference of the
matter in hand. What becomes clear in reading Prynne, is that laconism
itself has undergone a rather severe inflation of its means and, we might
be prompted to feel, of its significance. Her Weasels Wild Returning
begins:

        At lesiure for losing outward in a glazed toplight

This is its first line. It is not a complete sentence, the line enjambs
and the sentence continues for several lines. But it is, at least
momentarily, a complete sense; the continued sentence does nothing to
refute this inevitably: "in a glazed toplight / bringing milk in". Losing
outward is a common enough activity. People lose blood and tears, for
example, 'outward', though the adverb would be a bit picturesque and
superfluous were this the condition described. People also 'lose out',
this echo complicates (or tilts) the line slightly. There also occurs the
possibility that 'outward' is a substantivized adjective, modifying a
suppressed noun in the manner that 'outward' modifies 'form' in Young's
'The Force of Religion' ll.11-12: "but when the charms of mind / With
elegance of outward form are joined". This would be uncommon, but manages
to seem plausible, almost beginning to arouse the impression of a demand;
from here it is an easy step to think of 'outward' as a substantivized
adjective having mutated into an abstract noun, meaning (roughly) 'the
outward', 'my sense of a condition in the world towards which I am
basically oriented', 'that which is outside myself and which is the
necessary direction and locus of my perceptive acts'. To lose this
condition, this locus, or rather to be comfortably prepared for its loss,
perhaps in such a way that the anticipation of its loss is - either
sincerely or with defensive irony - imagined to be inconsequential: this is
the initial attitude or expectation presented in Her Weasels. This
attitude may occur "in a glazed toplight", or it may be the "losing" which
occurs there, or it may be "outward" which is lost into there; according to
the same construction one can lose oneself in a film or a book; but the
traces of "losing out" and "plight" ('top-light' does not ordinarily occur
without a hyphen) urge us to suspect that "losing" is not merely an
idiomatic exaggeration for this kind of temporary forgetfulness, but that
it steals an echo from that harmless suggestion and recovers its greater
sense of threat: as if I were to lose myself in a book, not to find again
what I had lost. "[A] glazed toplight" is tautologous: top-lights are
always glazed. They are windows in ceilings, designed to admit natural
light into a room. When I lose myself in a book, what I mean by that
expression is that my normal experience of self-awareness is arrested and
another sense is preferred, the preferred sense being a fantasy constituted
entirely by my interaction with this book and its specific contents,
placing me imaginatively among those contents as an imagined agent or
witness ("matched to a head" ). Were I to lose the condition or locus
towards which I am basically oriented in a "glazed toplight" (the material
constitution of which I have consciously noted, despite its obviousness,
and which therefore reflects my minor anxiety regarding its materiality per
se: "I wish to walk on that congealed-water ice" ), in a manner for which
"losing oneself in a book" is a gentle and discreet euphemism, it would be
with the syntactically / idiomatically inspired effect that this locus or
condition (which by its definition is incapable of being distinguished from
other loci excepting myself) became, within my experience of it,
constituted exclusively, or at best, principally, by a wholly common
domestic convenience behaving as a tacit metaphor for providential guidance
and for the contrived inaccessibility of nature. (Part of the sense of an
earlier Prynne line has itself suffered 'laconic' repetition, "A view is a
window / on the real data, not a separate copy / of that data" )
        Nietzsche, deigning for a moment to declare himself a theologian,
delivers the following, reasonably fascinating remark:

        it was God himself who at the end of his days' work lay down as a
serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he recuperated from being
God. - He had made everything too beautiful. - The devil is merely the
leisure of God on that seventh day.
                                        (Ecce Homo, Basic Writings p.767)

Rather than seize Adorno and Horkheimer's notion that leisure is a
continuation of work, we could prefer to think of this allegory of divine
leisure: that the relief from a positive and creative endeavour incurs a
'recuperative' damaging of the successes of that endeavour - that a success
can be "too beautiful" either to be importantly credible or to permit
future satisfaction. "At leisure", at the outset of Her Weasels, offers
itself up to roughly this apprehension; the 'laze' in the superfluous
"glazed" incites a pernicious redressal of a previously achieved sense of
"outward", recklessly converting an unsolipsistic orientation into a
fantasy extorted by a simple commodity's rather banal power of resemblance
.
        Every line in Prynne should submit to a more thorough interrogation
than this. But in passing, and by way of hinting that such a reading style
is by no means prescribed by these texts, I should also remark that the
whole sequence is concerned to expose a literary-historical product of
secularization (of the myth of the fall) and its diffuse applicability,
particularly in the chronology of varying application of the feminine
pronoun in English (to describe, for instance, nature, the earth, England,
the muses). Eve is its central character, or rather a remotely envisioned
Eve having been incidentally conflated with Prynne's sexual partner and
with other, inspecifically mentioned female characters. There is much talk
of procreation, pregnancy and childbirth, particularly in the second poem,
in which "anguish" (from the Latin angustia - narrowness, straitness)
revives its formerly frequent meaning as the pain experienced by a woman in
labour (see e.g. Jer.4:31, Psalm 48:6, Rev.12:2, or Isiah 14:8: "They shall
be in anguish as a woman that travaileth."); "the prospectus" is a
repulsive euphemism, as is "the overload bay" (the womb), and where "at a
stretch" describes quite vividly and with nonchalant dismissiveness the
painful moment at which the child emerges from the mother's vagina. The
vagina is described with an even more savagely discrepant euphemism on p.9,
in the last poem, as "option wrappers" (a financial term) - it is a penis
which is "too small to hold its blood within her option wrappers". Blood
commonly suggests, in the entire sequence, sexual arousal (a hedonistic
Adam might wish, wistfully, that he had been "more careful yet with my
blood still" (p.3)). She is "on the fade still branching to fall", "her
reflex [IS] nearer to take it" . 'Attending Her Aggregate, Detour' is
partly a seduction comedy, parched by the bitterest idiomatic mutations, as
when an unlikely and barely welcome erection is announced: "loaded entry
starvation gives over at last / these new particulate verticals", yet he
has been or will be told "a top limit / assigned".
        These liberate and presumptuous connections are not a bypass, the
magnitude of the demand remains unattenuated; either way, the choice to be
both aroused in my capacity as one of whom credulity is demanded, and to
extend speculatively the faith identified by that demand, is one which - as
soon as I engage anxiously in determining the correct process of reading -
I have already made.
        These poems are simultaneously laconic and periphrastic. Just as
Nietzsche curtails an argument, implying an 'impending' remainder in a
sudden yet calculated brevity, whilst at the same time delighting in the
substitute and complementary opportunity for rhetorical elaborateness, so
Prynne speeds up this effect: an immense scope of plausible and initiated
argumentative reference forms the very fabric of an immensely discursive
periphrasis (crippling the pertinence of Cowper's definitive remonstrance,
"Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ, / The substitute for genius, sense
and wit" ). Initiated arguments are crushed together, gently and
indefinitely oppressed, "Synoptic." (Her Weasels p.5). The effect of such
a compaction or simultaneity, of a lack of distance, of abandoning
Nietzsche's repressive 'complement' and 'substitute', is, as I hope to
show, critically partial to the exposure of an inevitable bathos.
        Hans Blumenberg, in attempting to determine the reality of what
might or ought to be meant by 'secularization', makes the following remark:
"There are forms of expression in which the surrender of substance, in
anticipation of its removal, takes on the appearance of a free decision."
This remark is readily appropriated. Prynne's abandonment of the rhythm of
substitution and complement - of an organized rhetoric in which argument
and style could be demonstrated to inform and determine rather than
indistinguishably to constitute each other - is, if we follow the
development of this tendency through the course of his published work, more
properly a surrender than an abandonment. The demand that a reader
discriminate between tacitly hierarchcized orders of discourse (aped
slogans and overt word-play to the rhetoric of polemical disbelief, for
example, in DOWN WHERE CHANGED, or THE OVAL WINDOW, for example), has
gradually been surrendered, as the plausibility of such discrimination has
been, to an increasing extent, encroached upon by the progressive
self-determination of verbal affects as bathos. In this sense, Prynne's
work has been compelled towards this compaction by an instrumental bathos,
a kind of delayed infection that, several years after a work's appearance,
begins (taking the form of an enlightened paranoia) to suppress the
non-bathetic relevance of its specific use of words relative to how those
words, or others, might be used with a severer economy. This suppression
is entirely relative to the anticipated results of Blumenberg's "free
decision" - that is, DOWN WHERE CHANGED is by no means objectively
bathetic. It is a masterpiece of critical awareness. But its relation to
a possible subsequent work is reflected in that later work - and in the
work from NOT-YOU onwards particularly - not by any willfully avant garde
experiment in superannuation, but by a kind of expropriation of its
credibility in which the earlier work's own rhetorical ambition anticipates
complicity. The non-bathetic relevance of an earlier work becomes
expropriated by and (exclusively) in its successor.
        This pattern would seem to be, indeed, almost inescapable now, for
Prynne. Luckily so, since there are no other writers in the world, to my
knowledge (since Beckett's death) who have been able to opt for this
ineluctable, asphyxiating, sublimely proprioceptive freedom.



5.

Prior to its elaboration in On The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche's "pathos
of difference" receives some initial attention in section 257 of Beyond
Good and Evil (the opening section of part nine: 'What is Noble'):

        Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained
difference between strata that other, more mysterious pathos
could not have grown up either - the craving for an ever new widening
of distances within the soul itself, the development of higher, rarer, more
        remote, further stretching, more comprehensive states
                                        (Basic Writings p.391)

The central section of this sentence, which in quoting I have excluded,
describes this pathos as a symptom of a metaphorically vertical 'distance'
between a "ruling caste" and their "subjects and instruments". Nietzsche's
promotion of the term is specific to its pseudo-political suggestiveness;
he invents it in order to delineate, after the manner of Rousseau but in a
quite alternate spirit , the social effects of (in one sense of Prynne's
words) "self difference" . "[E]nhancement of the type "man"" is the
natural imperative, revealed and made realisable by an awareness of this
pathos. Pathos is not pity, nor is it a persuasion to pity, for Nietzsche;
the Genealogy is resolute in maintaining the desirability of independence
from this affect, and rather looks toward the later exaltation (already
investigated in The Birth of Tragedy) of 'tragic pathos' as the
"self-overcoming of man", in a period cleansed of its "etiological blunder"
that is "mistrust of the instincts" for cruelty, immoral disregard and
hatred of all forms of ressentiment, ascetic or otherwise. This so called
'genealogy' is vehemently and incisively polemical, illuminating the
possibility of an understanding of societal evolution based not on an
accidental but on a contrived denaturalization of human instincts; the
exigencies of a common legality are argued to have arisen from the
suppression of noble barbaric impulses, from a compromise forced by the
strong upon the weak, leading to the compensatory "moral conceptual world"
. Pathos of distance is expressed, then, as a violent rather than a gentle
discrepancy, but one in which gentility is entailed as the violating
outcome. Nietzsche is quick to remind his reader (II.7) that pessimism is
a product of gentility and not of the original condition of violence before
or during the early period of legal compromise: "let me declare expressly
that in the days when mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on
earth was more cheerful than it is now that pessimists exist" (p.503). For
Nietzsche, it is the devolution of competitive violence into shame that
alerts men to the opportunity of expressing a resolutely negative attitude.
 The continued existence of a pathos of distance into our own denaturalized
period (which is, of course and avowedly, the real object of Nietzsche's
critical scrutiny) is itself in a 'denaturalized' form, one which seems
almost to have been inverted, in which the noble Nietzsche is confined, in
his ability to kick down his subjects and instruments, by meagre health,
unpopularity and a civic insignificance refuted merely by his own unheard
assertions of his future fame and influence.
        How does this material reality alter and inflict itself upon
Nietzsche's pathos of distance? It is a fairly fantastic, remote thought -
the half-blind Nietzsche forging values with his fists, printing them on
the visages of nearby 'slaves', kicking ignoble backsides and leaving the
imprint of a new legal compromise. It is an unnecessary thought, also.
But it serves, perhaps rather slyly, to amplify the noise of a slight
mutation in the relevance of this concept of distance. An "ingrained
difference between strata" is arguably a pointless idea, within a
capitalist democracy which accomodates such 'difference' as interpretable
data only when it is converted into privilege (money, intelligence,
well-being, nationality etc). The new concomitant term, replacing the
'prerogative' deriving from the power of those who are so vertically
different (who "look down", who are stronger), might - more plausibly - now
be license. Within the superlatively erect conception of Nietzsche's
original statement, the present terminological alterations and their
suggestiveness are symptomatic of what that original conception would, if
slightly more indifferent, recognize as bathos. The original conception is
thoroughly aesthetic in character, it claims as an a priori premise the
preference of any sensitive, apprehensive imagination for an anti-Christian
society, determined in its opposition by a system of values deriving from
what is perceived to be the antipodal and corrective behaviour of the
Greeks. The first and perhaps primary avowal of this expanded aestheticism
is in The Birth of Tragedy; opera is "the opposition dogma of the good man"
because, as with Christian moral behaviour, its "essential charm, and
therefore genesislies in the gratification of an altogether nonaesthetic
needThe "good primitive man" wants his rights: what paradisiacal
prospects!"
        Were the exaltation of an 'aesthetic need' the decision according
to which differences or privileges were currently described, the pathos of
distance would be seen to have mutated into a relative bathos of distance;
the "ingrained distance" or "self difference" experienced by a
self-regarding individual is reflected in his social behaviour with an
anxiety that could not properly be thought tragic without the concomitant
reduction of that attribute to a commonplace. This is why, when reading
Ibsen, for example, his characters' acts of defiance are felt not as
exhibitions of tragic responsibility, but as deeply conservative
exaltations of the will to religion.
To return to Blumenberg's remark: "the surrender of substance, in
anticipation of its removal, takes on the appearance of a free decision" -
what I mean by an 'inescapable pattern' in Prynne, is the recursive
anticipation of the 'removal' of non-bathetic relevance from his earlier
texts. The availability of former, less "difficult" texts (since that word
is so current in discussions of this author), and of the specific type of
candour with which they came to be written, is surrendered in each
subsequent - and consequent - text. "While thou didst keep thy Candor
undefil'd, / Deerely I lov'd thee", says Herrick 'To his Booke'; and Prynne
perhaps also to his. Recall two memorable, beautiful moments from two
poems in The White Stones, 'First Notes on Daylight' and 'Concerning
Quality, Again':

        The common world, how far we
go, the practical limits of daylight.
(The White Stones p.41)

For us, as beneath the falling water
  we draw breath,
  look at the sky.
(The White Stones p.54)

These lines are beaten into an effeteness wholly alien to their objective
character, when followed by "At leisure for losing outward in a glazed
toplight". Their temperance, the gradual delivery of their completed
comment, their completed and securely contingent idea, the admirable way in
which rhetorical interruptions complement their gradualness and allow us to
observe a gentle, apprehensive 'advance' in our relation to the
associations arising from "daylight" and "the sky" - all of this is tacitly
recollected in the line from Her Weasels Wild Returning, appearing there as
the trace of an aggregated permissiveness having been surrendered under
irresistable coercion. For Nietzsche, the fact of a bathos of distance is
one in strictly allied enmity with his maintained prospect of a new pathos
of distance; it acts as the latter's setting, its justification, the means
of its spectacularity. The opposite, or a nearly opposite attitude
determines Prynne's recent "difficulty". It is not in order that he might
relish the beguilement of his readers, that he might ward off 'mainstream'
attention, demonstrate some monstrously absorbent verbal capacity, or
secure for his work the misunderstanding which, as argued by Gertrude Stein
for instance , would guarantee its future comprehensibility; it is not
principally for any of these reasons that Prynne writes poetry that is
immediately so problematic to currently available reading efforts. He is
not interested in inspiring an inert faith where this faith might instead
mature into a rational trust, nor is he - in the manner of a petulant
exhibitionist - proclaiming his distaste for exegetical effort or heralding
its untimely death. There is an extent to which the project of the recent
work is to excavate itself of the classifiable coordinates of an obviously
human (or humane) voice, but this is symptomatic (as are these other
therapeutic readers' hypotheses) of its prior motivation to extort fully
the precise significance of the bathos of distance in all of its
appearances, and to comprise through that extortion the prospect of a
necessarily new purpose for "the heightened possibility of
system-violations" . That is - in Prynne's own words - for poetry itself.
Such an extortion is a reinvestment of probability in candour, in the
opportunity to trust in a revived appearance of that, albeit an (initially)
prevaricative and contorted candour; the "capital" for this reinvestment
"is reported to be quiet." Such a quiet can only be raised, by Prynne,
through and as the awareness of having proscribed the clamour of "reason,
seriousness, mastery over the affects, the somber thing called reflection,
all these prerogatives and showpieces of man" such that these touches of a
latter day, bureaucratic Midas are forced to reveal what is not proscribed
- that serene and violent self difference which is not bathetic, and from
which these touches are scattered at a bathetic distance.

("Miramur ex intervallo fallentia: Wee wonder at those things that deceive
us by distance." Montaigne, trans Florio, 'Of the Lame or Crippel' Essays
vol.iii.p.281)



6.

        A species comes to be, a type becomes fixed and strong, through the
fight with essentially constant unfavourable conditions.
        (Beyond Good and Evil section 262, Basic Writings p.400)


Nietzsche does everything but demand outright that the necessity of
"unfavourable conditions" ought to determine a national political program.
To have made this demand, however, would have required what Nietzsche might
have considered a too vulgar audacity. Amelioration is per se a kind of
disaster, or the drive to fatelessness from which a pandemic of reduced
values arises inevitably. For the reason that he maintains this
tenaciously oversightful belief, Nietzsche deplores the prospect of a
socialist system of government.
        The need to make an explicit recognition of an implied argument
seems, for Nietzsche, often to be tantamount to confessing a suspicion that
the act of implying might turn out to have been mere bombast. Perhaps for
this reason, he never recognizes explicitly that the necessity of
"unfavourable conditions" can be a wholly contrived necessity, just as
those conditions can themselves be contrived in order that the
aestheticized demand for an equilibratory positive statement might be
aroused. Despite his earlier call to arms, in which he proclaims that "we
must cast off both that conception of the world that inveighs against it
and that which glorifies it" , it is precisely in order that a new feat of
glorification can be achieved, that Nietzsche inveighs so persistently and
with such untempered aggression. This new feat is the opportunity for
self-commitment made available by the concept of "eternal recurrence".
        
        "[T]he idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of
affirmation that is at all attainable" - this is a slightly sophisticated
description. Eternal recurrence, the 'most difficult', 'most abysmal'
thought, ultimate expression of the indelible vanity of all truly positive
self-assessment, is not a formula of affirmation, but for it. That
Nietzsche explains this abysmal thought, in Ecce Homo, as itself
affirmative, rather than as an access to affirmation, is pure boastfulness.
 So terrifically derogatory a formulation can only require, according to
Nietzsche's logic of competitive contempt, that an affirmative formulation
of equivalent magnitude is purged of its otherwise necessary affectedness
and legitimized. Eternal recurrence is contrived as the necessary
legitimation of an unassailable confidence. It is through thinking this
most difficult thought that pessimism is resolved into an absurdity, once
and for all; or at least, that that resolution is always and
unconditionally available. This is what permits the most stubborn amor
fati, with which one can want "nothing to be different, not forward, not
backward, not in all eternity" , and in which that 'wanting' can be totally
- and not merely apparently - efficient: "the Yes-saying pathos par
excellence" .
        Crucial to this possibility is the realisation of an irrefutably
fundamental basis, a lower limit to unhappiness, a 'most difficult'
thought. (This is essentially different from Heidegger's most difficult
thoughts, and from what he, in his work on Nietzsche, imagines Nietzsche's
difficult thought to be. ) Without this, or should there be any suspicion
that the most difficult thought is in fact not so difficult after all,
Nietzsche is trapped with the interminable injunction to pessimism which
characterizes "all 'values'" as "lures that draw out the comedy without
bringing it closer to a solution" , and which dictates that "[t]he will to
overcome an affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several
other, affects."
Nothing could enable or, what's more, promote the probability of a
"counter-movement to nihilism" (Heidegger, p.93), other than the strongest
argument for a theoretic nihilism. The procedure aroused by this motive is
basically a variation of Descartes's, lampooned perhaps accidentally by
Diderot, "I would rather exist, even as an impudent argufier, than not
exist at all" - similarly, Nietzsche "would rather" (to toy for a moment
with his somewhat graver motives) construe for himself, and thereby for the
world, a legitimate counter-nihilism, even if this were to require the
contrivance of a belief perplexed with some ultimate difficulty, than
determine by default that every affirmative expression should be subject to
a decline into bathos and affectedness.
        What if this fundamentally unfavourable condition were itself to
seem, suddenly or through an additional pessimistic contrivance, to have
suffered that decline? What if the technics of aversion from argument were
so sophisticated, so self-aggrandizing, that it were merely a case of
"cutting out the bottom dish", to return to our quote from For The
Monogram? Of distorting the basic limit of difficulty such that it might
be described risibly - as a "bottom dish", for example - such that the
contrived reward (a counter-movement to nihilism, an 'unassailable
confidence') became itself perforated by the tilt of a disagreeable
rhetoric?

        Just a treat sod Heine you notice
        the base going down, try to whistle
        with a tooth broken.
                                        (Prynne, The Oval Window p.9)

Within the caulked masochism of such recursive distortion, where the field
of emotionally interested enquiry after a possible affirmation of life is
defined by a bathos of distance obtained by him whose interest constitutes
that field, is there any more credible perseverance than the attempt -
always to be refined - to extort the significance of that bathos of
distance such that it can be proscribed?


*

                                        I know that what
        you set under a minded shade tree is hit by first debate
and the air locks in, at a dab rack roaming the field.
(Her Weasels p.9)



Addendum: a particularly brief remark on time for a poem by J.H. Prynne



7.

"unschuldig ist alles Kleine an seiner Kleinheit!"

Kleinheit occasionally means the same as Beschränktheit: limitedness;
restrictedness. The availability of that sense amongst the senses of
Kleinheit seems to be emphasized, in Nietzsche's dictum, without a
consequent obtrusion of any distractive or unfitting argument: "everything
small is innocent of its smallness [or of its limitedness, or of its
restrictedness.]" Zarathustra's sadness yawns to him that "der kleine
Mensch" - the small man - recurs eternally . Events can be kleine; these
would be minor events. For Nietzsche, an accident is such a small, minor
event. Despite his distaste for (and perhaps fear of) anything so mere as
not to have been willed, Nietzsche comes to recognize that - in
'accordance' with his will to a pervasive involvement of will in life -
accidents ought not to be resented, but rather redeemed; this defensive
change of attitude, from the unflinching pronouncements of Human, All Too
Human (published 1878) to what is arguably a less irritable and less
narrowly polemical commitment, had been completed by the time he wrote part
three of Zarathustra:

        as creator, guessor of riddles, and redeemer of accidents, I taught
them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that
has been. To redeem what is past in man and to re-create all "it
was" until the will says, "Thus I willed it! Thus I shall will it" - this
I called redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption.


The need to redeem rather than to deem erroneous - and to deem absolutely
erroneous at that, given that he is speaking of past events - bears some
similarity to Stoic ratio; more important to my present interest, are the
power of what is interpreted as accidental to arouse anxiety, and the
powers and significance of argued imperatives deriving from (or possibly
constituting) that anxiety. Accidents are, as the elected objects of a
redemptive regard, necessarily innocent of their having been accidental.
This is Nietzsche's scheme of a necessary innocence. To a point, they are
also innocent (and this is a term expressing great contempt) of continuing
to be so; but what is now known to be accidental presently, ought presently
to be redeemed. The knowledge that something is accidental, whether
because it continues to be so or because it is so now originally, is
ideally the simultaneous will to redress. Ideally, such knowledge would
itself already be the initiation of a redemptive effort. But when
something is accidental, what might that something be? Is it important or
necessary that something ought itself to be worthy of having aroused such
an imperative? Or is the fact that something is (and/or "has been")
accidental, itself sufficent ground to require that something become the
specific object of the will to redeem? If this latter case is what
Nietzsche intends - and this seems likely, given that it is the more
rigorous of the two, and that it expresses the least contentment with
occasional overlooking - might not the interpretation 'accidental' turn out
to have been an advantage for something? Nietszche loves to overlook,
perhaps more even than he loves to forget; but his love, when he is loving
to overlook, does not characterize that overlooking such that it would
select an accident as the object to have been overlooked. What
specifically, of those things that have been and that continue to be
accidental, exerts most resistance to the redeemer? Is it something which
in itself determines the extent of that resistance, or is it the extent
(supposing for a moment that there can be differing extents) to which
something is interpreted to be accidental? Is this a meaningful
distinction? Several other questions suggest themselves immediately: one
with which to begin is, are the possible interpretations of resistance in
something itself and in the fact of something's being interpreted as
accidental, themselves either the actual cause of resistance, or of the
accident?
        Und Zarathustra blieb stehn und dachte nach. Endlich sagte er
betrübt: "Es ist A l l e s kleiner geworden!"



8.

Edmund Husserl wrote, in a 1905 critique of "Brentano's Theory Concerning
the Origin of Time,"

        the form of time is itself neither the content of time nor is it a
complex of new content added to the time-content in some fashion or
other.

He was concerned to refute Brentano's analysis, which, he believed, makes

        the intuitive temporal interval comprehensible solely through the
continuous gradation of new moments which somehow are pieced to or
melted away from those moments of content which constitute the
temporally localized objective entity [Gegenständliche].

Put crudely, Husserl accuses Brentano of describing the quality of what is
past as an inferior (because less vivid) quasi-repetition of what that
quality was when its objective entity was present . That is, were I to
have been scorched in the eye by a burning fingernail, my later
recollections of that event would have qualities which were gradations of
its original objective quality; the quality of that experience would not
have disappeared, but would be modified. The form of time is neither the
content of time nor is it a complex of new content: this English'd remark
can by an obvious and expedient appropriation be made to bear on the
question (if it is a question worth bearing upon), what are form and
content in poetry?
        The content of time is not its form; the content of poetry is also
a content of time, and one furthermore which is characterized explicitly by
referring. This content does not participate in the form of time, it is
not even the form of time as it is experienced in the acts of writing and
of reading a poem. Interpretation and composition occur, but occurrence
itself (for example, the occurrence or recurrence of ideas when reading) is
neither an interpretation nor a composition, regardless of whether those
ideas are themselves either interpreted, or composed in some sense roughly
like that propounded by Barthes. When reading a poem, I am not
reconstituting time formally, neither does the act of composing produce any
formal mutation in time, despite whichever mesmerism or reverie that that
commitment might occasionally permit (Exegi monumentum in the fixed order /
of time: by and by. ) More interesting than the use of Husserl's comment
to describe reading, is its application to writing and to the question: can
the content of poetry, which is in its being explicitly and immediately
referential, be referring to the form of time in any manner other than
accidentally?
        In poetry, which is frequently concerned to exhibit versions of
what a poet experiences as time and of what he feels about what it is that
he imagines he is experiencing, the question is perhaps automatically
downgraded and might be recast thus: how can a poem's contents refer to
lived experience of time, and are the most exact successes of its
references mostly or only accidental? We should deter our argument from
this downgrading, but be aware of its likelihood. What I mean by
accidental, here, is that the contents are inevitably experienced as part
of time, and that whatever order of effect they might produce is inevitably
successive; furthermore, explicit references to lived experience of time or
even to the inevitability of succession itself, even if those references
are recognisably imitative of a lived experience of succession and seem to
be concerned with exploiting or with enhancing it (think of Beckett or of
Messiaen), their invitation to apprehend a version of any such lived
experience cannot possibly arouse even a momentary identification with the
form of time or even with the form of time as it persists whilst that
version is interpreted. Yet the identity of that form is obvious and
thoroughly known to everyone. So fiercely obvious in fact that a reader's
(or a writer's) absolute knowledge of it cannot be suspended either by
writing or reading, and so every poem is an accidental reference to the
form of time. Not everything is such a reference, though everything
arouses that same knowledge constantly; we may live, work and understand
signs in a world which is a plenitude of signs, but not every sign refers
to the form of time accidentally: most are not so specific in referring to
allow one of their references to become significantly accidental, ein
kleiner Zufall. Poetry is innocent of its accidental reference to the
forms of time, lived or objective; if a cabbage, the ocean or a ten million
dollar pop song were found suddenly to be referring, accidentally, to
either form, I should think it entirely guilty of doing so. This would not
really be an authentic accident; rather it would be an argued accident,
probably with the design of accessing a reserve of complacent anxiety: is
Horatio not right, "'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so" ?
        Poetry is innocent, but content is not. It is the determination to
refer specifically - even if what is to be referred to is not actually
specified during composition or at any point in a poem's existence so far -
that makes what a writer does immediately valuable. This value, that is,
her care and as a possible supplement any reader's care, not to mention
(but to assume) any value intrinsic to the creation of specific references,
allows an accidental reference to the form of time to come about. An
accident makes sense as such only relative to what is interpreted as
determined. I do not mean to suggest that the rather too mere act of
writing a line or even a whole poem should be thought 'valuable' in any
sense to which money elects itself as a correlate, or to which acts of
interpersonal kindness, for example, should be compared; Nietzsche's
'revaluation of all values', which served indirectly as my starting point,
would already have provided for the onset of these analogues by insisting
vehemently that value ought essentially to be the justification of that
which is willed without accident (his additional qualification that the
user of this will ought to be a healthy, aristocratic young man, can now
only be further aestheticization - despite any 'genealogically' argued
necessity that this was and will now be the case - and need not concern me
here).
        One upshot of this line of argument is that poetry, at least with
respect to its accidental reference to the forms of lived and of objective
time, has no value. If it is innocent of this reference, it can offer no
instance of specifying upon which value ought to be set: the set value
falls directly to the earth and either shatters or is absorbed irredeemably
(as water in soil). And you say, so what. Poetry elects content as a
platform for value, and in this sense itself exists only as the opportunity
for and of that platform. "Poetry makes things happen" is therefore a
falsehood - even its less aggressively scrutinized connotations are likely
to be false: poetry does not 'allow' after the fashion of a valued
content's allowing, it does not promote the possibility of content, which
is after all already a recognised possibility, but merely characterizes the
reality of contents as opportune. Poetry is innocent of its accidental
reference to the form of time, because that reference is something of which
it shares in the possession, without itself having been specific to the end
of allowing what is possessed. That is to say, poetry takes part in
content and in content's accident, but does so roughly in the way that a
motivating voice inside my head takes part in the crimes I commit
physically: it characterizes a circumstance as opportune, and whilst it can
be taken into account or even held responsible for my actions, it cannot be
indicted. Only I can be indicted.
        Does this mean that there are two different accidents, two
distinguishable references to the form of time? The innocent reference of
poetry, and the uninnocent reference of content? This first question is at
first really two questions, and so is at first answered: yes and no. There
are indeed two distinguishable references to the form of time: that
incurred as an accident of specifying, and that which is promoted as a
direct or indirect but in any case potentially explicit act of specifying
about time, and which refers accidentally to the form of time. But the
accident of this second reference is essentially the same as that of the
first. It is only natural to recognize, when reading Horace's Carmina 2.14
or, say, Milton's 'On Time', that the poem's content is referring to a
lived experience of time; in fact, it is quite necessary to recognize this.
 But that reference is not at all to the form of time, which when supposed
as a "localized objective entity" is a reality in which time's contents can
be involved neither radically nor uninnocently. A poem's contents are
still and explicitly time's contents. So there is just one accident, and
it is possessed by poetry (which characterizes it) and by contents (which
allow and promote it); the ontological discretion of the form of time does
in fact make any other accidental references (to the form of time)
irrelevant, which is to say, it does not make them at all and sustains this
one accident as an accident only so that there are no others. Hence, the
accidental reference of one poem is the same as that of any other, or as
that of any painting or of any phenomenon whatsoever which is however
capable of allowing a significantly accidental reference.
        Given that this accident is a privilege common, potentially, to all
poems, the question of the value of their respective achievements in this
regard might be lain out: just how uninnocent is this particular content,
and how meaningfully does this content promote:

1. The invitation to regard its relative uninnocence as the incurrence of
a mimesis of redemption?
2. The spectacle of a resistance exerted against that mimesis of
redemption specifically?
3. The desire to keep any mimesis of redemption significantly separate
from the false integrity of a pervasive irony (that is, to resist a wholly
mitigating self-reflection, such as that suffered by Nietzsche's ascetic?)

A given content might promote any of these things meaningfully, without
requiring that its promoting be interpreted as a decision regarding their
necessity or obtrusiveness. Zarathustra's relative uninnocence, his right
to proclaim "thus I willed it," is primarily an invitation to regard that
'redemption' (or mimesis of redemption) as possible. This is why it is
love for man: it is a didactic promotion of choice, where choice had found
no access - it is an extension of and consequent re-valuing of choice. Not
the choice to do this or that: such a choice has already been promoted and
exists, albeit in newly sallow, newly contrived permutations. It is the
choice to have done or to have been doing this or that. "The will cannot
will backwards" (Zarathustra p.251): but the will can will Back. The
accidental reference of poetry and of contents to the form of time can
promote, by means of these promotions listed above and of other promotions,
neither understanding of nor involvement in the form of time; but if
acknowledged expertly, it can promote the choice of both.
 


9.














        Gauge at four the pan
        demic invasion, the
        integrity of false day.
        The bud rots with
        gentle glory, fluttered
        in chronicle. Vain
        to ask, you see all
        there is. Memory
        of curling and soon
        stalks in the land.
        It is unsullied and,
        despite this, the
        assuaged birds soar,
        as they must.















(J.H.Prynne, from INTO THE DAY 1972)
 


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