Will you feel the same way I do about this book? Can I even communicate to you exactly how I feel about it? And if I cannot, what does that say about the clarity with which I interpret my own thoughts and feelings? V. Joshua Adams writes of poets for whom these were not simply academic questions. Skeptical concerns of this kind—that what William James called the “ineffability” of mystic experience might be true for all experience—have been one of the distinctive features of modern philosophy since Hume and Kant, and of literature since the Romantic valorization of personal subjectivity.[1] But for Adams’s poets, the communicability of first-person consciousness became a question that was particularly moral as well as artistic, for a world that permanently closed off individuals from each other and from themselves seemed to doom any attempts at productive connection. This made their skepticism very different in tenor from the tranquil meditations of the ancients or the subjective idealism of Berkeley. The poets Adams treats view the questions above as sources of intense personal anxiety.
To quell their doubts, Adams argues, these poets decided to “experiment” with impersonality. His sense of impersonality is expansive and ambitious. He acknowledges the history of poetic aspirations toward various interpretations of that notion, a history that includes both the modernist reaction against the Romantic cult of personality and the impersonal ideal that was incipient in the Romantic movement itself (Keats’s “negative capability” and Coleridge’s vision of Shakespeare as the “myriad-minded” man, for example). He resists the idea, however, that we can understand impersonality as just a literary style characterized by detachment. Instead, impersonality is a “transformation of personhood” in such a way that the “boundaries between human beings, or between human beings and their world, have become permeable” (12). This might sound like the opening to a fairy tale, but Adams roots it in the skeptical concerns outlined above. The impersonal works he considers are especially writings that “aboli[sh] the distinction between first person and third person… [or] between literature and the self” (14). They alter the limits imposed by individual experience, by our personhood, and therefore are called impersonal.
In some ways, Adams has defined his paradigm into existence. If modern skepticism is about the limits of individual existence, and literary impersonality is any writing that transcends individual existence, then of course impersonality is a reaction to skepticism. But Adams takes his case one step further by arguing that the experiments in impersonality he examines “ironically undo themselves” as “a form of therapy, a reorientation toward the ordinary world” (14). In these works, the uncertainties of everyday life and the lack of philosophical closure about basic problems of human existence are, at least for a time, accepted.
This claim about the therapeutic aspect of modern poets’ impersonality represents the most original contribution of Adams’s theory, and also the source of its limitations. Its origins are in Wittgenstein by way of Stanley Cavell, whose The Claim of Reason (1979) and Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) hang precipitously over the book, occasionally threatening to overshadow it. Cavell saw Wittgenstein, but also Thoreau, Emerson, Coleridge, Shakespeare, and others, as dramatizing extreme doubt or estrangement in order to draw attention back to the familiar patterns of daily life and shared human interactions. Adams’s version of this idea, altered to fit his topic, can be put into three steps. First, anxiety. Modern poets feel skeptical doubts as a recurring intellectual problem. Second, experimentation. The poet performs a thought experiment within one of their works. What if, the work asks, the conditions that lead to those doubts could be altered? What would it look like to “abolish the distinctiveness of the first person” altogether? (20). Third, the unraveling. The attempt to imagine a world free (or freer) of psychological boundaries proves that such a world is either unattainable or strangely inhuman, to the extent that we might not actually want to attain it. The writer embeds this recognition into the experiment itself, and returns from it realizing that skeptical doubts are an unavoidable and even artistically productive part of life. Even if the causes of their skepticism cannot be dispelled, their anxiety is assuaged.
Adams’s five chapters each tackle a single author (Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill) and, typically, a single work in which such an experiment takes place. Some of these authors are familiar subjects for critics of impersonality, but Adams’s notion of therapeutic experiments separates him from classic treatments of the topic.[2] Adams also separates himself from Cavell (at least partially) by focusing on poetry. This brings to the fore the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, a conflict he defuses by combining modern philosophical debates about skepticism with close readings.
And indeed the charm of the poems does not fly even after extended contact with cold philosophy. The chapters on Eliot and Valéry demonstrate how productive Adams’s thesis can be when applied to the right subjects. Eliot, who was clearly obsessed with the incommunicability of subjective experience, had already indicated the therapeutic aspect of his impersonal stance in the famous admission that “only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”[3] So Adams does not need to work hard to convince us that the problem of other minds was a key concern for the man who wrote the “Game of Chess” episode of The Waste Land. But Adams is able to use the notion of experiments in impersonality to give a new reading of the Tiresias episode:
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit …[4]
Adams views Tiresias as a deliberately “extravagant” creation that dramatizes “the conditions Eliot imagined one would need to satisfy in order to have knowledge of other minds from the inside” (66). Faced with the skeptical worry that individuals cannot truly know other minds, Eliot creates someone whose knowledge of others is both “divine” (his gift of prophecy) and “naturalistic” (his lived experience as a man and a woman). In other words, Eliot attempts to dramatize the absolute certainty that skeptical thinking tends to demand. And yet Tiresias cannot be said to share the experience of the typist. He cannot suffer with her, but only foresuffer; the same authority that allows him to access a greater range of human experience prevents him from meaningfully sharing the experience of anyone else. The reflexive conclusion is that humans are unable to imagine conditions that would allow us to perfectly understand others’ feelings. Such wisdom is, as Yeats has it, “a something incompatible with life.”[5] But even if the experiment has shown that true knowledge of other minds is impossible, it has reinforced the importance of trying to understand them despite such limitations.
The notion of therapeutic experiments also helps us read Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, the “madman” (as the author called him) whose extreme dedication to living only within his own mind leaves him paranoid about any outward expressions of personality. While Adams is by no means the first critic to see Teste as largely ironic, the idea that Valéry personified and intensified his own skeptical doubts in order to convince himself of their ultimate impracticality feels definitive. Reading Skepticism and Impersonality, one gets the feeling that the critics who held Teste up as proof of the “autonomy of the thinking function” (Antonin Artaud) and the “grandeur” of holding on to the “supreme value of reason” (Lucien Goldmann) were like the Romantic critics of Don Quixote, triumphantly affirming the self-importance thoroughly mocked by the author.[6] Adams emphasizes the obvious humor of passages like the following, from the end of “La soirée avec Monsieur Teste”:
He was still talking: “I am thinking, and that disturbs nothing. I am alone. How comfortable solitude is! Nothing soft weighs on me. … The same reverie here as in the ship’s cabin, or at the Café Lambert. … If a Bertha’s arms take on importance, I am robbed—as by pain. … The one who talks to me, if he does not prove—that’s an enemy. I prefer the brilliance of the least fact that appears. I am being and seeing myself; seeing me see myself, and so forth. Let’s think very closely. Bah! one falls asleep on any subject. … Sleep prolongs any idea at all. …”
He was snoring softly. A little more softly, I took the candle and went out on tiptoe.[7]
The cumulative effect of these statements, as Adams points out, is to undermine the seriousness of any of them. “His contemplation doesn’t produce knowledge, but merely reproduces images of that contemplation,” in a humorous reworking of Augustine (“I am a being which knows and wills; I know both that I am and that I will; and I will both to be and to know”), while his attempt to think “very closely” puts him immediately to sleep (100).[8] We can see how the creation of Teste follows the three steps of a therapeutic experiment outlined above. Coming of age in fin-de-siècle France, Valéry becomes anxious about the mind’s relation to the self and the body, and the Cartesian roots of this problem. So, at a moment when he is “subject to strange excesses of consciousness of [his] self,” he performs a literary experiment: he imagines someone so intent on controlling their own mind that they have eliminated all outward displays of personality (79). The result is Teste, and Teste is ridiculous; finding him so, Adams suggests, Valéry may even have alleviated his own epistemological doubts. The therapy, at least for a time, might have worked. It also allows Valéry to achieve a greater level of psychological insight in the text. We might note, for example, how Teste’s self-mastery seems to demand acknowledgment from others: his dedication to impersonality becomes the defining mark of his personality. In this way Valéry’s experiment, like Eliot’s, is personally and publicly successful. At the same time he moderates his temptation toward extreme skepticism, he creates a work of art that has value and meaning for readers regardless of their skeptical orientation.
But the governing notions of skepticism and impersonality are less illuminating when the poets concerned are less explicitly philosophical. Adams does not claim that the logic of poetry is the same as the logic of philosophy. He instead says that poets can, through their poems, do the same work as philosophers, and often with greater economy and resonance. This means, however, that Adams must stretch to demonstrate the extent to which some poets make sense as skeptical philosophers. Take his discussion of Dickinson’s “It was not Death, for I stood up”:
It was not Death, for I stood up,
And all the Dead, lie down –
It was not Night, for all the Bells
Put out their Tongues, for Noon.[9]
For Adams, this is the moment Dickinson makes “an extreme appeal to impersonality” (51). Where the syllogistic logic of the opening demands the statement “I was not dead,” Dickinson imposes an It: “It was not Death.” In doing so, she “tries to turn something that is inalienably hers into something that is just as inalienably ours”; she moves from the first person into the third person in response to doubts about the communicability of her experience (43). Now, it is undeniably true that in making her emotional state an “It,” Dickinson creates some distance for analysis. It is not clear, however, how this represents an attempt to make that state “inalienably ours.” Grammatically, “It” does not take the place of a personal pronoun. Rather, the poet holds her feelings up at a poetic distance in order to create space for the more ambitious figurative language that characterizes the final stanzas. Such nearly clinical detachment was characteristic of Dickinson, and we need not see it as a “consolation” for the impossibility of complete self-disclosure (43). The element of a therapeutic experiment is missing, too: Dickinson’s description of her mental state might be experimental, but the experiment does not seem designed to analyze or expunge any particular mental anxiety.
Adams’s thesis is therefore somewhat limited in its scope, even when applied to the five writers he chooses to focus on. The chapters on Bishop and Merrill make this point even more clearly. While competent and interesting discussions of the poetic self (in Bishop’s case) and translation as a model for self-conceptualization (in Merrill’s), their connection to Adams’s central thesis is tangential at best. The difficulties only increase when one thinks of the full panoply of modern poets. Did Ezra Pound ever seek philosophical moderation and therapeutic satisfaction in his poetry, even in the roundabout way that Adams describes? Did Gertrude Stein? If Adams had framed the book as solely a philosophical study of Eliot and Valéry, this would not have been an issue. But insofar as Skepticism and Impersonality aspires to theorize a larger tendency in modern poetry, its argument proves unevenly applicable.
More generally, however, in making the notion of poetry as therapeutic into the analytical center of his book, Adams takes a significant risk. Following Cavell, he reads “philosophy as psychology,” and accordingly places authors’ personal skepticisms and emotional demands at the forefront of his interpretations (16). Is he thus making the same mistake Romantic critics like Hazlitt and De Quincey made by resolutely searching the author’s personal life to find the meaning of their work? Is his defense of poetry’s philosophical weight just a regressive look back to notions of poetry as only something that enables the reader “better to enjoy life, or better to endure it?”[10] Is he saying The Waste Land is just a self-help project?
To me, these concerns are overstated. But Adams does suggest that authorial intention is a critical component of understanding the communicative purposes of any text, and that the psychological motivations behind a work can clarify its stakes, even if they are not ultimately determinative in how we judge or value that work. In this regard, Skepticism and Impersonality prompts us to reconsider many ideas that are widely accepted in contemporary literary criticism, from the intentional fallacy and the death of the author to the notion of the artwork as a self-governing, autonomous form. It is significant, too, that Adams discerns a positive psychological motivation behind the works he considers: he posits authors as central actors in working through their own philosophical and psychological problems. Without limiting the degree to which their environments influenced and determined their actions, he emphasizes how the intellectual and cultural resources available to poets empowered them to create personally and publicly meaningful works. Even if the book’s arguments apply more neatly to some writers than to others, it is certainly bold in revisiting such foundational questions, and in prompting us to reassess the relationship between poetic, philosophical, and psychological thinking.
Notes:
[1] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 302.
[2] For one, see Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
[3] T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 43.
[4] T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 64, ellipsis in the original.
[5] W. B. Yeats, “Blood and the Moon,” in The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner, 1997), 242.
[6] For the Romantic valorization of Quixote, see John Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 43–53; and Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Cervantes meant for his knight to be “the most amusing madman in the world,” whose comic genesis lay in applying the absurdities of books of chivalry to his own life. Romantic critics like Schlegel, however, refused to view him as a farcical if loveable aberration. They saw in Quixote the state of the modern soul: a wandering, lone idealist forced to create his own self-sustaining systems of illusion. They gave Quixote the heroic status he always imagined for himself.
[7] Paul Valéry, Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 6: Monsieur Teste, ed. and trans. Jackson Mathews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 21, original ellipses.
[8] Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961), 318.
[9] Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 379.
[10] Samuel Johnson, Selected Works, eds. Robert DeMaria, Jr., Stephen Fix, and Howard D. Weinbrot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 366.