BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
413
differently in the particular light directed upon it. Cormac McCarthy's
novel
Blood Meridian
deals with a gang of American mercenaries who, in
1849, sought out and scalped Apaches wherever they could find them.
The facts and persons have been well established by participants, wit–
nesses, and historians, but they have not been seen as McCarthy has
imagined them and found speech for them. That is his great achievement.
And surely literature, such as Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday" and "Animula"
and "La Figlia Che Piange," is especially tender towards values for which,
in the public world, it is hard to gain a hearing, all those feelings that have
sought their form in religion, myth, and ritual, those subjunctives of de–
sire, pluperfects of need.
I am emphasizing those respects in which literature stands aside from
the official purposes of modem culture, including those of the liberal
democratic state as commonly approved. Indeed, literature dissents from
some of the most cherished programs of Western thought and questions
their privilege. To be specific: literature does, as if on principle, what
Emmanuel Levinas has been claiming that Western philosophy should
have been doing all along but has not. According to Levinas, philosophy
should be concerned not with being or knowledge but with justice. His
pithiest sentence is: "Ethics precedes ontology." The primary considera–
tion is my relation to other people, my responsibility for each of them.
Levinas has often quoted, as a motto for this emphasis, the passage in
The
Brothers Karamazov
in which Alyosha says: "Weare all responsible for
everyone else, but I am more responsible than all the others." He has also
quoted a statement by the rabbi Israel Salanter: "My neighbor's material
needs are my spiritual needs."
It occurs to me that literature rather than philosophy is responsive to
Levinas's first philosophy of ethics. There are indeed writers who share
the philosophic project of knowledge as Levinas describes and attacks it.
It
is a delicate matter to refer to Wallace Stevens in this context, because
Stevens is such a moody poet that you can find virtually every philo–
sophic position - except Levinas's - expressed somewhere in his poetry.
He was not a philosopher, though he read a good deal of philosophy to
set his mind astir. One mood of his mind seemed to him just as engaging
as
another. But his stance was, more often than not, idealist. In "The Man
with the Blue Guitar" he writes of reducing the monster - reality - to
oneself. And further:
Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
