To live is to defend a form.
- Hölderlin
I.
Let’s suppose the Enlightenment never happens.
I mean both the 18th-century one
and the broader one of Adorno/Horkheimer
(the one, that is, inaugurated by the Greeks –
Homer, the pre-Socratics, whoever –
in which reason gradually replaces myth).
Or let’s say this latter one’s attenuated
or not allowed to thoroughly “blossom”
(a word beloved by older art historians).
What do we get instead after Rome’s long decay?
Eons of uninterrupted stasis
like the one we got in our own “Middle Ages,”
only multiplied, indefinitely prolonged?
“Stasis, you call it. Ah, but whose stasis?
The one that’s presupposed by your Enlightenment –
the very thing you’re proposing to be rid of!”
Yes, yes…of course. But that’s part of the game.
We accept that it’s a false presupposition.
This is not historiographical science,
though perhaps a parallel impetus.
Our task is to roll back our presuppositions –
to locate them, that is, and to reassume them,
and to find out what they might have led to
if everything had turned out somewhat otherwise –
if various counts had been greater or smaller,
if the sun had come up a bit closer,
if the weather had been brighter or gloomier…
To restate what we’re…or I, rather, am after:
Despite our best attempts to escape it,
we have not yet emerged from the Enlightenment,
are still “under the aspect” of enlightenment.
And it’s an entirely open question
if it’s a thing with an exit once you’re in it.
(This is not in the least a trivial question…
could be our survival depends on it.)
Yet enlightenment is more than just an event
and is as much our self-understanding of it.
Although it’s too big a thing to escape,
this is not to say we can’t “pick away” at it.
For one thing, we can question as to origin
(where and when, precisely, did it happen?) –
aware, of course, of our act of presupposing
(although we “suspend” or “bracket” this awareness,
to borrow from phenomenology
one of Husserl’s central techniques – “epoche”…
“Our understanding of epoch is epochal,”
to coin a bad philosophical pun).
Once we have established a hypothetical
point at which we begin to “come into our own,”
we erect scaffolding and set up shop –
not precisely at that point, but prior to it
by a matter of a year, a decade, a reign…
“That’s what we call historical fiction!”
Yes, undeniably. But the big difference
is that we don’t attempt to fathom actual
history, what actually happened.
Rather, we envision how things might have turned out
under very slightly altered circumstances.
A repetition of our history,
in a way, yes – though that history repeated
minus the point at which it’s thought to have begun.
And this point is always shifting, of course.
For this very reason, our gesture of return
is provisional and must be now and again
repeated.
I’m attempting to unearth
the strategy that more or less unconsciously
both provided the inspiration and guided
the composition of this book of poems.
Of course, this strategy never really appears
anywhere in the book or is stated as such.
But it’s what at half a decade’s remove
seems to have been necessary for it to work –
for it to come together as a whole, I mean.
Not that it does come together fully…
but insofar as I managed to finish it.
“The technique of an absconding premise,” perhaps –
a premise or strategy that appears
only as an aftereffect of the reading
(of the writing, I should say…I’ve so few readers!).
II.
Sometime after I completed this book,
I got to thinking about the plague, the Black Death
of the 14th-century that wiped out two-thirds
of the European population.
I wondered, what if all that had never happened?
Wasn’t the Black Death a sort of kick in the pants
without which we’d still be where we were then?
For what happened in the century that followed?
For one thing, the saturation of land by men
and women came abruptly to an end,
along with the technological stagnation
it had bred. For another, the cities swelled up
as hordes of people arrived from the land
to avoid the likely prospect of starvation
on fields severely depleted of manpower.
This led to the rise of trade and urban
manufacture on an unprecedented scale.
Finally, new technologies were developed
so that agriculture would be reclaimed
and Europe not be deprived of Europeans…
Well, let’s pretend that the Black Death never happens
and feudal Europe keeps slumbering on
in “millennial stasis,” to give it a name.
Suppose that Europe by 1800 or so
has scarcely altered in five centuries.
Suppose that a catastrophe of similar
impact and devastation occurs in China –
a plague or some pestilential famine –
interrupting the proverbial timelessness
of Chinese civilization. Suppose, further,
that, after a century and a half
or so of recovery, the seeds are sown for
an intellectual and technological
revolution. The Chinese discover
that our lowly planet revolves about the sun.
They send out voyagers in search of an eastern
passage to the vast wealth of the Gold Goast
and accidentally discover the New World,
which they waste no time in proceeding to control,
pillage, administer and populate.
The Japanese, having kept ties with the Asian
mainland since their immigration centuries back,
gradually gain control of the seas
and promote an industrial revolution
which rapidly spreads to the Asian continent
(note that Japan is similarly placed
with respect to China and the Asian mainland
as Great Britain is to continental Europe).
This revolution results in Asian
colonization of half the rest of the world,
technological dispersion across the globe,
leading in turn to a population
explosion, frequent violent struggles between
wealth and labor, colonizer and colonized,
a series of devastating world wars,
the invention of a new form of weaponry
with the potential to annihilate human life
in a matter of seconds, a crisis
of ecology and its late recognition,
and an increasingly global economy
which claims as its center of reference
and privilege the technology streaming out
from the easternmost portion of the world atlas,
where once the Asian mainland slumbered on.
Suppose that I’m born in the 2400’s
in a remote backwater of, say, Germany
(where the Haas family would have remained
owing to the New World having been discovered
by East Asians rather than by Europeans).
Germany at this time…actually
there is no Germany as the whole of Europe
west of the Caucasus is united around
the turn of the 17th-century
and christened Romana…Romana at this time
is busy recovering from the upheaval
of the “Great Cultural Revolution”
which followed on the heels of a world-wide conflict
in which Romana played a secondary role,
the war having been fought principally
between the Allied Powers of China, Japan
and the New World on the one side and the Axis
Powers of India, Indochina
and Australia on the other (with Russia
sort of floundering back and forth between the two
as it did in the history we’ve known)…
a war now generally viewed as a result
of heavy reparations that were inflicted
upon Indochina by the victors
of the First World War. Romana has been severely
weakened during this century and the second
half of the last one due to corruption
of the languishing and incompetent Hapsburg
Dynasty, to attempts of the British to vie
in might with the powers of East Asia
through imperialist aggression in Europe,
and to the exhaustion of its population
by a prolonged civil war that went on
concurrently with the war against the British.
Millions of people lost their lives subsequently
in the catastrophic experiments
in land redistribution under “Great Helmsman”
Guiseppe Fodor. Romana is presently
at work reshaping its economy
to bring it into line with the capitalist
economies of East Asia in an effort
to bring prosperity to its people.
I am born into an impoverished peasant
family in the province of Prussia. While still
in adolescence I leave my parents
to join the wave of rural poor seeking urban
prosperity and live an abject existence
selling handicrafts to tourists in malls
that line the cluttered and bicycle-ridden streets
of Berlin. Wandering home, I pass Eastern-style
shopping malls that cater to Romana’s
young and burgeoning middle class – a class from which
I, having received no more than a minimum
of an education in a rural,
agrarian environment, am excluded.
In the windows I catch glimpses of popular
New World singers, athletes and movie stars
beaming from giant display TV’s which cause me
to think with envy about my New World cousins,
whose parents escaped Romana sometime
at the start of the Cultural Revolution
to seek a better life. If I were to meet them,
we probably couldn’t communicate,
as I’ve had no opportunity to study
Japanese (the New World language – the sea-faring
Japanese having been among the first
to colonize the New World), and as they’ve likely
lost any Revised Latin they may have picked up
from their parents in their earliest youth,
who, indeed, rarely spoke it as they were anxious
for their children to rapidly assimilate
in a society in which people
of European descent are a slight fraction.
Well, suppose none of this ever happens either.
Suppose instead that Europe and China
continue on in medieval stasis. Meanwhile
the brutal, half-civilized Aztecs, located
somewhere halfway down a landmass unknown
to either Europe or China, manage to come
under the spell of the ancient, mysterious
and largely forgotten Mayan peoples,
whose example provides a civilizing force
and whose knowledge and technology is passed down
to the Aztecs in fragments. The Aztecs
after a few centuries push their way northwards
into a climate more conducive to sustained
experiments in civilization
and cause the manifold northern tribes and peoples
to put an end to their nomadic ways of life.
The North American population
begins to grow and eventually reaches
a par with that of Europe or China circa
1350 AD. Now three major
Northern Hemisphere civilizations await
an epoch-making disaster like the Black Death
that will free them from their pre-enlightened
bondage to stasis and timelessness and fling them
forth into an unknown, modern futurity…
III.
I’ll admit it’s not much of a fiction.
I’ve doctored it up slightly from the prose version.
You can find it in my book, A Lehúsa Be.
These scenarios were first imagined
in the context of trying to locate myself
and my writing in terms of postmodernism.
I won’t go into any of that now,
except to discuss how it relates to Pages.
After having arrived through trial and error
at a workable 15-line stanza
with alternating ten and twelve-syllable lines,
I conceived, in late winter 1992,
of a long and possibly book-length poem
in unrhymed verse (my new rendition of “blank verse”)
that would represent something like a finale
to my passion of half a dozen years
for the writings of that malcontent Adorno –
the author with Horkheimer of Dialectic
of Enlightenment and many other
later and superior though less famous works.
In my initial drafts, I attempted to trace
the wanderings of a band of pilgrims
who for unknown reasons have lost their collective
memory. After I had reached four hundred lines,
feeling I’d gotten ahead of myself,
I put it aside, thinking I’d pick it back up
after allowing my conception to digest.
It took me five years to get back to it.
In the meanwhile, I had relocated halfway
around the world, fallen in love, gotten married,
found work, learned to speak Mandarin Chinese,
wrote short poems and studied the great English novels.
From a sober, somewhat seasoned reader’s standpoint,
transforming Adorno into fiction –
into verse fiction, no less – seemed problematic
at best. Still, I mostly liked what I had written
and thought how best I might continue on.
A few new elements began to intervene;
among them, my study of Shakespeare and Shakespeare
criticism, which yielded “the players” –
an itinerant band of roving performers;
also, my interest in Goethe’s Hauptwerk, Faust
(the prologue and the second part, chiefly…
also the Marlowe version of the Faust legend);
and finally, my ongoing fascination
with Terry Gilliam’s movie version
of the tales of Münchhausen, the famous German
braggart popularized in English by Raspe.
This gave me the figure of the Baron,
who apparently comes along and takes over,
sort of like Odysseus rescuing his men
from Circe, sirens, and oblivion…
The trouble is that the narrative went nowhere,
and I couldn’t manage to get beyond vignettes,
though these in themselves were interesting.
Eventually I dropped the original
conception altogether and distributed
the early, narrative stanzas throughout
the book evenly so as to make it appear
somewhat grander than a mere collection of poems,
though less than a Byronic tale in verse.
This abandonment of my earliest impulse
had to do in part with my shifting attitudes
towards Enlightenment (both for and against).
The Cold War was over, 9-11 hadn’t
yet disturbed our sense that things were turning out well.
My initial conception – reflecting,
I felt, a mindset still colored by the Cold War
(remembrance of the Holocaust, fear of the bomb…) –
was a bit too mitteleuropäisch
in its pessimism for an American
writer. In other words, it was imitative –
hard thought reduced to poetic posture –
and of a bleakness to which I couldn’t ascribe.
And my misgivings were present from the get-go
in a patently self-ironic tone
which I fancied married Adorno with Stevens.
Such a connection is there and needs to be made,
but irony’s not the way to do it.
It makes Adorno look like a bit of a clown –
which he is, in a way. But that’s too obvious.
He deserves better than Voltaire’s Leibniz.
Another problem – I was wrestling with technique.
Often the technical puzzles I set myself
attracted me more than my chosen theme
(particularly true in the rhyming stanzas).
I am no longer inclined to use a stanza
for purposes of large-scale narration.
I am still quite pleased reading through it, however,
and feel the stanzas hold up as poems in themselves,
now and then reaching out to each other
(as discussed in the “Monadology” sequence,
which was one of the last things to be completed).
But getting back to my little fiction…
Although it wasn’t written as part of Pages,
it strikes me now that it’s what I’d been looking for –
a peculiar frame of reference
that would have allowed me to tell such a story…
a story, in other words, in which everything
has been forgotten (or “unremembered”).
And instead of the Black Death, we get the Baron,
who turns the pilgrims into a band of players
and goads them into making history,
even if it’s but an enacted history.
For hasn’t the plague functioned for us in this way –
an event that woke us up to ourselves?
Not the event itself, but our awakening
to something, by something, which later we’d explain.
Did the Black Death ever really take place?
And, even if it did, isn’t it possible
that, if things had been only slightly otherwise,
we wouldn’t have noticed it had happened?
As I write in Pages (see “While We Were Sleeping”):
“No one knew when it had arrived, but there it was.
Perhaps it had begun to grow during
the diminishment of that other thing we’d known,
the loss of which we felt but hadn’t yet noticed.
It was like we’d just woken up to it.
You had your ideas about it, I had mine…”
I won’t waste anytime defending the rigor
of my hidden or absconding premise,
but will suggest that, like psychoanalysis,
which presupposes events that never “really
happened” but are effectual as myths
that ground the unconscious (the “symbolic order”),
fiction (modern fiction, at least) likewise depends
on such unconscious presuppositions.
Yet, in contrast to the myths of Freud and Lacan,
which deal with events that never “really” took place,
fiction configures the non-happening
of events that (we suppose) in fact did take place.
Precisely there – where they reappear in fiction,
where they redouble or “double over” –
are our presuppositions first made visible,
as in my tale of a “Chinese Enlightenment.”
In other words, you take away the plague,
but this doesn’t deprive you of Enlightenment.
Rather, it happens, but it happens in China.
And you do get millennial stasis,
but it happens on the other side of the globe
or is rudely interrupted by the Aztecs.
Erasmus in the figure of Chuang Tsu
and Frederick the Great in a latter-day Khan.
What does this mean? That we can’t think a world without
Enlightenment? Or without Kant’s question,
“What is Enlightenment?” Without the redoubling
of ancient sooth that Enlightenment deigns to be
and that it repeats in a second round
wherein our tales are swept as so many pages?
IV.
You are reading a second version of this book.
The first had 170
15-line stanzas – half rhyming, half unrhyming.
Their arrangement was particular and arcane.
Six years after the volume’s completion,
I find that I cannot let it remain as is.
Too much of it is of uncertain quality.
I’ve separated the ones I like best
and the ones that are thematically central
from those written for occasional purposes
and from those I have deemed inferior.
The former are grouped to the front of this essay –
and the latter, immediately following
(respectively, the “Inner” and “Outer
Pages” – a titular reference to Chuang Tsu,
whose classic work is comprised of like-named “chapters”).
Every seventh of the originals
or so I found inadequate altogether
and sadly banished them from the new edition.
I do plan to include them, however,
in an appendix to my poetic writings.
The reader may judge how fair were my exclusions,
which were often made on the sole basis
of a single world or phrase I’d come to dislike
(though in several cases I couldn’t fathom
what on earth it was I’d been getting at).
Anyway, I sincerely hope that you’ve enjoyed
this intermission. As the Chinese sign,
Blessings,
Andrew Gilchrist Haas
September 10th through
15th, 2004 –
Taipei and Shuang Xi
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