"Inventions of Farewell": The Non-Phenomenality of Death in Modernist Poetics

Abstract

Writing about death presents us with a phenomenological problem. Death is the experience that expires in its own happening. How, then, are we to write “about death,” without undermining its essence which rests, in part, in its very unknowability, in the fact of it being transcendent to consciousness? This thesis takes up the problematic of death itself—the unexperienced experience—as opposed to the death of the other, grief, or mourning. It explores how death is rendered in modernist, secular poetry which, firstly, is tasked with conceiving of death beyond stabilizing religious frameworks that grant us with a concept of what death could be, and secondly, is interested in the ends of language in grasping and transmitting metaphysical concepts. I outline two different approaches to this problem, each read through one poet: first, Wallace Stevens (American) and second, Yves Bonnefoy (French). I argue that in both cases, transcendence has not gone out of Stevens’ and Bonnefoy’s modern cosmologies. Instead, the phenomenological limit—our rootedness in the ground, in the finite, in our beingness—is what allows for metaphysical possibility, the pull of an elsewhere, of what extends beyond consciousness and our conceptual grasp. My exploration of each poet is formal (for Stevens, his use of the fragment allows for obscurity to run its course, and for Bonnefoy, his turn to prose poems is a marked turn away from the “‘fragmentariness’ that finds its end in death”), and it is conceptual. In my first chapter, I discuss Stevens’ late long poem “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” where he alerts us to the fact of his inability to render death outside of the imaginative act, allowing the obscure non-phenomenon of death to remain in obscurity (a Blanchotian concept I expand to refer to the obscurity death, not only the obscurity of 'dying'), thus enabling death to be itself. Writing “about” death, we see, is to create an imagined world (a world of images that cannot be externally validated and can only be taken up in the mind) because we cannot grasp death itself. The epistemological bound inherent to our being and earthly finitude is crucial for Stevens, as it is the site, and what makes possible, the imagination and a conception of a time and place outside of our own. Meanwhile, Bonnefoy does not explicitly make death the subject of his final collection of poetry "Ensemble encore," which is the focus of my second chapter. Rather, he engages in what I have termed a writing-toward-death, writing himself into a non-conceptual realm as if to approximate a sense of a realm posterior to consciousness. Bonnefoy simulates occupying the non-concept of death by working to recuperate presences (a concept significant to Bonnefoy as the imagination is significant to Stevens) from his early life that are of a pre-conceptual order, presence being the phenomenon itself, experienced yet unsubordinated by the intellect or distilled for our understanding. Nearing the end of life, he wishes to recover an originary state, perhaps a return to the nothing that is—as Heidegger tells us is crucial to the metaphysical question—the “original revelation.” Presence is also significant for its marking of non-presence, concerned with the Hegelian dialectic of the “here and now” that is essential for Bonnefoy, where Being, immediate and indeterminate, includes the Nothing within it.