After Reading Hannah Arendt
[In the following essay, Donoghue relates "the profound, humane reflections" in Arendt's works to contemporary poetry, noting that he "had the disturbing impression that she had far more to say—more of humane relevance—than any ten contemporary poets."]
I first read Hannah Arendt in Partisan Review, a classic essay on Hitler's concentration camps. The essay was free from hysteria, violence, vituperation; there was only the violence within—Wallace Stevens's great phrase—animating the prose; no "rhetoric". I had not thought much about the camps; they were not part of my weather. I was eleven when the War started and no one took me aside to tell me about "original" guilt, categorical responsibility, and my share thereof. So after a few days or weeks the essay faded, I economized on emotional expenditure—Hiroshima Mon Amour is at least half-true—and went on my way, such as it was. Then after several years I read The Origins of Totalitarianism and now, very recently, The Human Condition. These books are operations performed upon the modern conscience in the hope, even now, of giving it a second chance. Perhaps if we could be made to see what we're doing, we might quit and begin again.
One of the most disturbing implications in Hannah Arendt's books is that there are facts, situations, events with which the human imagination cannot cope. I had always assumed that the imagination was good enough for anything, and I had been delighted by Stevens's picture of reality and the imagination in dynamic poise, the violence within grappling with that other violence which is its occasion, its challenge. Dynamic accord; reality and the imagination equal and inseparable. But Hannah Arendt is right; the human imagination is dazed by the reality of the concentration camps; it staggers, doubts its own evidence, lurches in torpor or hysteria. It cannot disclose the real.
I had always assumed that reality is "there", outside the self, a nexus of people, values, things, and events to be apprehended with faith and good-will by the senses, the intelligence, and the imagination. Growing up in a Christian context I acquired a dim but pervasive notion that human life is sacred, that nothing is trivial or absurd, that a modest object like a table is good for holding things and somehow "valid" because it brings people together. I had not thought much about it. I still adhere to this rough-and-ready notion of reality because I have not encountered a better one. But The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition document its practical failure in the modern world. "Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that it was real." He resents "everything given, even his own existence"; he resents the fact "that he is not the creator of the universe and himself". The self is now the only reality. Hence the beautiful dynamic poise of reality and the imagination is a delusion; the only reality is each man's transaction with himself.
I knew a little of this before reading Hannah Arendt, but I thought it a philosophical causerie rather than the glum, faithless axiom of our lives. I knew nothing of its connexion with totalitarianism, imperialism, anti-Semitism and the local motives which conspire with those realities. The evidence is beyond dispute. But what can we do? Most of Hannah Arendt's sentences are indicative rather than optative, but a certain persuasion is implicit: I shall describe it, adding a few marginal notes. We must try to dissolve our resentment and be grateful for the gift of life itself; we must re-establish human rights as rights to the human condition independent of any inborn human dignity; we must sponsor in ourselves and others attitudes of reverence, respect, volo ut sis, mutual responsibility. We must certify the revelatory character of human action, thought, choice, and sufferance. We must know what we are doing. We must think. (Perhaps thought would be enough; with good-will.)
Our occasion is literary. I remind myself of this with a certain embarrassment because while reading Hannah Arendt I had the disturbing impression that she had far more to say—more of humane relevance—than any ten contemporary poets. In comparison with her mind most of the literary minds on current exhibition seemed thin, slack, frivolous. This impression came more in sorrow and dismay than in anger. It may be faithless, even chimerical, but let it stand. At least our topic is clear: what is the relation—assuming some relation—between contemporary poetry and the profound, humane reflections of Hannah Arendt? If there is a moral circle of reference she is close to its centre. The easy answer is that of course several modern poets have written about such matters: Richard Eberhart, Karl Shapiro—lots of people. John Wain: remember that thing about Major Weatherley. Yes, this is fine, but obviously not the point. The record of modern poetry is inadequately given as x poems about Belsen plus y poems about Hungary plus z poems about Eichmann. We should rephrase the question: what is the function of poetry in a world dominated by mindless, automatic, aggressive, self-obsessed forces? Most poems are, deep down, essays in self-indulgence; this has probably always been true, and the amount of frivolous poetry in print today is great and will be greater; but good poems manage to get written and published. The function of these poems is probably the same as it has always been, except that the occasion is more urgent, and if they have any contribution to make to human survival then please hurry up. The first duty of the poet is to stay in office. His "office" is to keep the lines open, to hold fast to the imagination even if it should fail, even if it is not enough; to hold out against the lure of disintegration and mindlessness; to "show" that the real is not our invention; to re-build, so far as he may, a human community. Above all, to speak out for the value, the sacredness, of human life; life itself, from first to last, not just the moments in the rose-garden when the pool fills with light, but the whole thing. I once saw two aeroplanes crashing a hundred feet above the center of a small town in Ireland, and the event seemed significant, though I didn't know what it signified. I also saw a film-star named Carole Landis in the same town, and a few weeks later someone told me she had killed herself; and this, too, seemed significant and I didn't know what it signified. Significance can be black, white, red, or even colorless. Everybody stumbles into a rose-garden and sometimes the roses are black; and I didn't have enough faith or enough understanding to know that the stretches of time between spectacular deaths are also significant though they may often seem to Mr. Eliot and others (including me) the merest "waste sad time". Martin Buber knows this and speaks beautifully. The poet who makes the whole of time and place seem valid will probably change the course of history not at all; his entire work will not be as influential as Mr. Khrushchev's dearest whim. But Mr. Eliot was right: the poetry does not matter. Purify the source. The rest is not our business.
To test my dismay, after reading Hannah Arendt I read Elizabeth Bishop, a poet in whom the realities of Belsen, Buchenwald, Hungary, and Angola do not disclose themselves to the eye of the beholder. She has a poem about catching a fish and having certain thoughts and then letting the fish go. I had always enjoyed that poem, even though I was embarrassed by the gush of "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow" at the end. Reading it in a new "context of feeling", I find that the thoughts she has while holding on to the wretched fish are full of self-regard, claiming a wealth of tender insight denied to the rest of fishermen. On the other hand at least her fish is a fish and not some awful symbol; and I believe in those five pieces of fish-line, and I am delighted that they are five because that is what the count came to and not because five is some awful mystic number. And Miss Bishop's feeling, however girlish and self-aware, is generous. This is a messy report and I don't apologize for the mess. I didn't learn as much from Miss Bishop's poem as from Miss Arendt's observations on Disraeli; but if the world survives it will continue to need generous feeling, and Miss Bishop will help to make it human.
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