572
PARTISA REVIEW
There are certain contexts in which one can no longer speak of oneself
as a subject. One cannot, for example, say "I am a wise and good man,"
without suggesting that one is nothing of the kind, because such predicates as
wisdom and goodness will not fit into any sentence starting with "I am."
Even Jesus had reservations about being called good (Matthew 19: 17).
Creation appears to be another of these contexts. We have previously sug–
gested that ordinary waking consciousness is not creative; the reason seems
to be that it is ego-centered. Keats speaks of the poet's "negative capability";
Blake calls himself the "secretary" of his poems; Eliot uses his well-known
figure of the catalyzer, indicating, like all the poets who have invoked Muses
and similar figures, that he is not the maker of the poem but simply the place
where it comes to being; Mallarme speaks of his vision as developing
"through what used to be me."
Montaigne, a writer unlikely to be accused of obsession, says:
I have no more made my book than my book has made me; a
book consubstantial with its author, concerned only with me, a vital
part of my life; not having an outside and alien concern like all other
books.
The concluding phrase we perhaps may view with some detachment: every
author regards his book as different from all other books. But the use of the
term "consubstantial," the term Luther uses for the relation of the elements
of the Eucharist to the body of Christ, could hardly tell us more clearly that
Montaigne, who seems the most personal and accessible of writers, is not
talking to us at all, even though he uses the convention of direct speech. He is
giving us his book instead of himself, or, more accurately, giving us his book,
which is both himselfand not himse\£
The discoverer of the principle that all verbal structures descend from
mythological origins was Vico, and Vico's axiom was
verum factum:
what is
true for us is what we have made. But the phrase is less simple than that
rendering of it may suggest. What is true for us is a creation in which we
have participated, whether we have been in on the making of it or on the
responding to it. We are accustomed to think, rather helplessly, of whatever
presents itself to us objectively as reality. But if we wake up in the morning
in a bedroom, everything we see around us that is real, in contrast to our
dreams, is a human creation, and whatever human beings have made human
beings can remake. I take it that is something of what Wallace Stevens
means by his "supreme fiction," the reality which is real because it is a cre–
ated fiction, and recognized to
be
such.
The type of identification we have been calling existential metaphor
may also be called, following Heidegger, "ecstatic." The word
ecstatic
means,
