I found Clare Cavanagh's essay about the poetics of loss to be refreshing in its hope and humanity. I was particularly inspired by her refutal of Terry Eagleton’s critique of literature, literary discourse, and the humanities as disavowing reality and being complicit “with class-interested strategies of smoothing over historical conflict and contradictions with claims of natural and innate organization.” I recently finished Eagleton’s book Literary Theory: An Introduction, in which he argues that a liberal humanist approach to reading and teaching is weak because “it grossly overestimates [the] transformative power [of literature], considers it in isolation from any determining social context, and can formulate what it means by a ‘better person’ only in the most narrow and abstract of terms” (180). He saves a frustrating paradox for the last chapter of the book, where he frames everything that preceded it as “less an introduction than an obituary, and that we have ended by burying the object we sought to unearth” (italics mine). Like Cavanagh, I cannot help but think that there is joy and power in defining literature as a special object, that romance and idealism can be revolutionary and expansive. Eagleton operates under the assumption that there is no reality outside of ideology and politics. Though I agree with this to a certain extent, I take issue with its all-consuming nihilism. He advocates for a rhetorical approach to literary analysis as a means of reclaiming literature’s utility within a socially and historically constituted world. But where is the joy and beauty in that? This notion underestimates the mobilizing power of aesthetic consumption and appreciation. After all, as Cavanagh points out, the suspended, controlled nature of literary time (as written by a “mortal hand”) only makes sense “against the backdrop of a world in which bullets can’t be halted by rhymes and poetry’s ‘tiny eternities’ are quickly gobbled up by greedy time” (italics mine). In this way, literature is innately contextualized. Professors can and should make these connections all the more apparent with paired readings and interdisciplinary examples, but a work of literature, studied in relative isolation, still contains more than Eagleton gives it credit for.
Cavanagh, on the other hand, celebrates the imperfections of the craft, which are born out of (and come to represent and illuminate) the very limitations that inform the creative process, as well as human existence: “No merely human vessel can hope to contain once and for all a world that precedes us, exceeds us, and will finally outlast us... [The lyric form] can serve, though, as a perfect embodiment or enactment of the individual's ceaselessly renewed, joyous struggle to come to terms with a world that always lies slightly beyond his or her reach.” Eagleton’s nihilism is easy. What Miron Białoszewski accomplishes in his lyric “And Even, Even if They Take My Stove Away: My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy,” and Czesław Miłosz in her translation of it, is much harder, smarter, richer, and more conducive to “creative possibility” and “joyful failure.” Given the current political climate, I was also uplifted by Cavanagh’s radical inversion of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s thesis in “A Defence of Poetry” (1821): that writers, burdened with bleak wartime realities, become “their battered nation’s acknowledged legislators” (italics mine). No matter how seemingly bleak the reality is (“grey naked hole”), the writer is still able to build new forms, infused with “teleological warmth,” that destabilize, challenge, and/or liberate citizens from the moral absence and emptiness of that reality (“greynakedhole”).
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