Invisible Audiences: The Pathos of Vision in Charles Altieri's Late Poetics

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• Invisible AudiencesThe Pathos of Vision in Charles Altieri's Late Poetics
• Daniel T. O'Hara (bio)

Literature, Education, and Society: Bridging the Gap (2023) is the latest book by Charles Altieri. Altieri is the author of many important books that combine critical theory, modernist poetry, and often modern painting. Of these books, I think his very best are Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning (1981), Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (1989), and The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (2003). What ties his books together is his overarching thesis that European phenomenology and Anglo-American philosophy, working together, can illuminate the continuing contemporaneity of modernism and what once upon a time was called postmodernism. That is, modernity's most characteristic arts of poetry and painting, from the Renaissance to the present moment, continue to dominate the imagination of the age, whatever name it carries. The subtitle of this new book, "Bridging the Gap," pretty much explains Altieri's approach throughout his career.

I admire this approach, and have been pursuing it from the beginning of my own career when I first met Altieri at a "Defining Modernism" session of the MLA in the mid-1970s. These session spanned a number of years and were primarily proposed and moderated by William V. Spanos, a founding editor of boundary 2, a journal devoted to distinguishing postmodernism as Spanos understood it from modernism, a big issue at the time, even before Lyotard's work on postmodernism made its way into the American context. On this session's panel, Marjorie Perloff was speaking about William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say." I noticed that Charlie, as those who knew him called him, was scribbling furiously, as Perloff spoke, as he sat next to her on the panel. A few years later, his counter-reading of the poem appeared in print, demonstrating literally the idea of critical conversation. For me, Charlie has always been a leader in the furthering of that conversation. So, too, this new book proposes a poetics that indeed seeks to bridge the gaps, [End Page 169] some would now say the abysses, separating the institution of literature and literary study, higher education, and American society, despite the overlaps among them.

A hallmark of Altieri's poetics, throughout his career, has been Wallace Stevens's "Of Modern Poetry" (1942), and halfway into this short book it shows up again. Before discussing his use of the poem here, his reading of it, I want to highlight a portion of this famous poetry about poetry manifesto for my own purposes. Stevens argues at the heart of the poem that modern poetry, to be such, must construct a new stage, as the old one in the theater of the mind has been displaced, even as the old script of the world must be revised, written anew, on the new stage, within the new theater:

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly andWith meditation, speak the words that in the ear,In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the soundOf which, an invisible audience listens,Not to the play, but to itself, expressedIn an emotion as of two people, as of twoEmotions becoming one. The actor isA metaphysician in the dark, twangingAn instrument, twanging a wiry string that givesSounds passing through sudden rightnesses, whollyContaining the mind, below which it cannot descend,Beyond which it has not will to rise.

Stevens says "metaphysician," but if we adopt his lines to Altieri's work here and over his career, we can substitute "theorist," especially if we understand how Altieri hones Heidegger and Wittgenstein quotations to his purposes in this latest poetics, as well as more generally. The intentionality is the same as Stevens's, the becoming one thing of the gaping divisions of the mind: "It must / Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind." For Altieri, modernism, postmodernism, poetry, literature at large, painting, and all imaginative poetics share this central...