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What is this something more? Well, this is where the work of imagination comes in. Imagination has fallen out of favor in literary criticism in recent decades—probably because it came to be seen by many as part of a “romantic ideology” about literature. One need not inflate imagination into a god-like creative capacity, however, to acknowledge that it has long played a crucial role in our self-understanding. Imagination has to do with our capacity to have double vision—to see, as the poet William Blake put it, a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower. And this capacity for double vision correlates with a doubleness in reality itself. Since Aristotle, we have distinguished between being as actuality and being as possibility. There is no doubt that we act and we suffer bound to a world which is, in large part, not of our making. But that world is constituted by possibility as well as actuality. Imagination has to do with our capacity to see both. Because we must take initiative in exercising our imaginations, a measure of risky self-assertion is involved. This assertiveness can turn willful. We can seek to construe reality so as to make it conform to our desires. A mature imagination, however, is open and attentive to reality in both of its aspects. It is, as the poet John Keats has put it, “capable of being in the midst of uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without irritable reaching after fact or reason.” It is seriously playful.
Such imaginative thinking can be at odds with the kinds of critical, analytical reasoning that predominates in most academic disciplines today. We are perhaps most indebted to Descartes for this style of reasoning. He taught us to doubt appearances until we had arrived at something indubitable—the “I” which must “be” because it experiences itself as thinking. This “I” stands over against a world of extended substance and interrogates it, applying the same principle of methodical doubt to establish what is real and what is not. One’s capacity to be imaginative is limited, however, when one places oneself in such a critical, analytical posture. It’s as if Descartes’ “I think, therefore, I am” needs to be complemented by another acknowledgement: “We are born, and we shall die.” And we do not know our whence and whither. To realize our capacity for double vision, we must acknowledge our place as participants in a process of reality whose origins and ends are mysterious.
In his Nobel Lecture of 1980, the poet Czeslaw Milosz suggests that the “enigmatic impulse” which makes writers begin to write, and which keeps them writing—“leaving books behind as if they were dry snake skins”—is the “quest” for a “double vision” of “reality.” Such a double vision enables us to see the Earth both up close, in the inexhaustible richness of its concrete detail, and in its wholeness, its integrity. This is also the attitude that must be taken by those who would become interpreters of literary works. It is not enough to take a critical, analytical posture toward the products left behind or toward the conditions of their production and reception. The principal difference between the professionally competent teacher and one who helps students see the phoenix rising from the ashes may well be that the latter teacher brings his or her own quest for reality into the classroom. One can’t just adopt the posture of the learned expert and pass along the accumulated results of one’s inquiries. One has always to teach out of interpretive engagement; one has to come to know the students sitting in the classroom this time; one has to attend to their faces in hopes of seeing into their souls. Then one can hope that the students will awaken to their own quest for reality . . . that they will engage literature in search of the double vision it promises to make available . . . that they will themselves see the phoenix rise again.
To conclude, I would like to recite for you a poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens. It is entitled “Angel Surrounded by Paysans,” and in its thick, compact, endlessly suggestive way it is concerned with everything I have been talking about today. That is to say, it is a symbolic exploration of how language and interpretation work in the depths of the poetic process.
The poem has a dramatic structure. The first speaker is one of the paysans or countrymen, and he simply asks the question, “There is a welcome at the door to which no one comes?” The question suggests that the countrymen are hospitable folk, open and attentively waiting for any visitor who might arrive. But no such figure seems to be present. The angel responds immediately, however, suggesting that he is indeed there, but that the countrymen have not seen him. In the first part of his response, he demystifies himself for them, seeking to remove those clichéd notions about angelic messengers that may be impeding their vision. But he then utters the word “Yet,” and for the rest of the poem, he discloses to them why he is the necessary angel.
Angel Surrounded by Paysans
One of the countrymen:
There is
A welcome at the door to which no one comes?
The angel:
I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.
I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore
And live without a tepid aureole,
Or stars that follow me, not to attend,
But, of my being and its knowing, part.
I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not,
Myself, only half of a figure of a sort,
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?
In the end, teaching literature is, for me, a never-ending effort to help both my students and myself become like the countrymen. Together, we seek to be more open, attentive, and hospitable to that which would appear when we engage the literary work. The unfathomable miracle is that when teacher and student do achieve such an attitude, the necessary angel often does appear, and together we see and hear the earth again.
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