A Discipline of Submission: Taste and Tension in Allen Tate and Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

A Discipline of Submission:Taste and Tension in Allen Tate and Paul Ricoeur Robert Vaughan There is nothing uniquely postmodern about wrestling with language's limitations, whether it is the poet or the critic doing the wrestling. Jacques Derrida admitted that "Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much," but such reservations long predated the theorists who came to prominence in the latter years of the twentieth century ("Force and Signification" 9). Samuel Taylor Coleridge had expressed similar doubts as the eighteenth came to a close. Though he may be remembered best for his belief in the secondary imagination's "esemplastic power" to render the divine intelligible for human consumption, he also conceded that words were only "shapings of the unregenerate mind; / Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break" ("Aeolian Harp" 27–28). He considered language "the sacred Fire in the Temple of Humanity" (Collected Letters III 522), but he knew that he could "not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within" ("Dejection" 115). What divides the romantic and the postmodern view is not so much a loss of faith in language's efficacy as it is a loss of faith in the nature of the reality language seeks to grasp. Is the poet a "carver," as Donald Davie posited, one who perceives "the form he wants . . . already present in the marble. . . . a reality which is . . . fully and undeniably out there" (111, 112)? Or has the "out there" really always been an "in there," as Jonathan Culler has said, "implicit knowledge that i myself have not brought to consciousness" (91)? whether "reality" is a realm of light glimmering down from the mouth of Plato's cave or only a solipsistic reflection of every writer's (and reader's) interior undiscovered country, what is certain is that it can only be charted linguistically, an expedition T. S. Eliot warned would be undertaken "[w]ith shabby [End Page 335] equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling" ("East Coker" 128). And if the poet acknowledges the limits of language, what is left for the critic? For more than half a century, literary theory's current has mostly flowed in an inescapable direction. The "imprecision of feeling" lamented by Eliot leaves us all in the same "general mess," demonstrating only that the bubbles' glitter does not find its source in any "sacred fire." Any "scriptor," said Barthes, simply accesses an "immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred" (147). If the poet strains to see something "beyond the picture" of his own reflection, as he does in Frost's "For Once, Then, Something," it is now the critic's task to demonstrate that what he thought he had glimpsed was not "[s]omething more of the depths," but only his own face "in the summer heaven godlike" (208). As Richard Rorty put it, The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. . . . The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. (5, 6) The "demythologizing" of language and its power was birthed in the Enlightenment, and the romantics who followed that era memorably railed against many of its advances. "Once we lived in what we saw," wrote Emerson in "Experience"; "now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. . . . Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast" (487). "Disenchantment" is the term the sociologist Max Weber would eventually use to describe the shift: The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the...