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language may be , it is finally the last sign of the presence of identity and ,
if only through the act of composition, of a vestigial, irreducible, and
perhaps undesirable connection with experience. In his hermeticism, Joyce
is Modern ; Beckett is the beginning of something else . Another way of
seeing the reintroduction of the self in fiction is as an element of expressive
theory, an aspect of romantic theory. In an expressive theory I take it that
what is being expressed is not the self but a relation-that is, the self be–
comes important as a term in relation with another term: nature in
The
Prelude,
for example. The second term has to do with some conception of
reality , and the imagination becomes the means of uniting the self with
reality . However, this works only if there are two terms
to
unite, and it may
be that the hermeticism of the Moderns had
to
do with the loss of the second
term. I suspect that for most contemporary artists
(I
mean artists who are
aware of their contemporaneity) there is no conception of reality strong
enough to prevent an expressive approach from lapsing into solipsism.
Genet's brilliance was in sensing that the imagination could no longer unite
us with reality unless it invented it
to
begin with .
*
*
*
In a situation where the notion of reality is itself up in the air , a theory
of art that has to do with the illumination of reality will be seen to have
obvious deficiencies . Again, Sorrentino, in his highly intelligent Williams
essay, augments what is basically a mimetic theory with the theory of illumi–
nation. The novel not only "mirrors the processes of the real " but also
shows us its essence, reveals its "actuality." In other words, the novel does
not merely imitate, it illuminates: "the flash, the instant or cluster of mean–
ing" -illuminating what? For many of us writing now the flash of insight
reveals the void. The only kind of epiphany that can occur in the absence of
a second term would be a negative epiphany. The symbolists had various
conceptions of the absolute available through correspondences, and the
surrealists had the unconscious via depth imagery, but generally speaking
the notion of illumination seems like a doomed effort by the remnants of
religious sensibility to find meaning in a secularized reality. No wonder that
Narcissus was a compelling figure for the symbolists and their descendants .
In such circumstances what the lamp reveals is the mirror-or nothingness,
Ie
Neant.
Even for Joyce epiphany becomes inadequate as social reality, then
culture, as the second term, dissolves in language in
Finnegans Wake.
Still,
it seems to me that the idea of illumination has a certain kind of validity-as
long as it is clear that revelation does not come from some source beyond
ourselves, some essence that enables us to transcend our present state .
It
