Reading and the Other: A Levinasian strategy for the text

A Levinasian poetic?

How might the ideas of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas be used practically in the reading of literary texts? He was, of course, an expert reader and interpreter in the Talmudic tradition, and studies such as those of Ira Stone have explored the literary and critical implications of his work in that area. Krzysztof Ziarek has considered Levinas within the broader context of phenomenological hermeneutics, and Jill Robbins has recently argued for the importance of a literary approach for the understanding of Levinas’s work as a whole.¹ But there is still little help for those who, impressed by the weight and power of Levinas’s thought, look to apply it practically to the reading of texts. In this paper I shall argue that his central ideas have a direct relevance to reading, and that they make possible the recognition of a deconstructive movement in the text that is more than a textual phenomenon. I shall seek to show, practically as well as theoretically, that he offers a way of recovering the engagement between text and what is not text, and of recognising how the approach of this other leaves its mark on the text, in the form of specific traces that are available to the reader.

But there is an initial problem, and that is the very possibility of a Levinasian poetic. As Robert Eaglestone has argued, there is a difficulty deeply rooted in the primary position of Levinas’s thought, which sees all totalising conceptual systems as founded in a denial of otherness.² A systematic poetic is such a totalising system, as far as literary texts are concerned. Eaglestone puts it this way: “as soon as a way of reading becomes a methodology, an orthodoxy or a totalising system, it loses its ability to interrupt, to fracture the said” (p. 65), and this interruption is the approach of the other. A systematic critical methodology is necessarily an exclusion of otherness, and otherness is what most concerns Levinas.

This might appear to be an insuperable difficulty, and strictly it is: no system will be able to organise the pervasive fracturing of systems which is the trace of otherness and the point of Levinas’s argument. But the difficulty for a possible Levinasian poetic is no different from that which Levinas himself acknowledges as applying to his philosophy as a whole. Put briefly: his project is to speak of what lies beyond thematisation and conceptualisation through themes and concepts, because they are the only tools we have. His “method” is to use those tools but to expect their breakdown, to encourage his readers to look for those points of breakdown as the points where we meet a true saying.

The same imperfect defence must be used for a Levinasian engagement with the literary text. To set out, as I do here, a Levinasian “strategy” is not to say that there is some derivable, systematic body of Levinasian textual theory that can be applied universally to texts according to some fixed methodology. That would, indeed, be a betrayal of Levinas. It is to say that, within and through the available language of themes and concepts, it is possible to point the reader to the kinds of fracturing and disruption that are the traces of otherness within all structures of comprehension, including literary texts. To call this a “strategy” is to suggest a degree of provisionality in face of the other that cannot be predicted, a way of approaching the text which recognises that neither the approach nor the text can be read simply as system.

Thematisation and otherness

The first step must be to identify those features of Levinas’s thought which relate most productively to the area of reading. My discussion therefore starts from his primary philosophical exploration of alterity and of the ethical, and it seeks to relate that exploration to the life of the literary text. It then seeks to identify what it might mean for the text to be the site of an encounter with alterity, and how this might be traceable within the text. In the final section, as a practical demonstration, the results of this discussion are applied to a poem by Wallace Stevens.

My starting-point is Levinas’s two primary texts: Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974).³ The first can be thought of as a narrative of what happens between the self of consciousness and the other. The second inscribes this narrative into an account of language, into an exploration of what happens between saying and the said. But the central structure of his thought remains recognisably the same: it traces the relationship between thematisation and otherness or alterity. In both discussions, what is at issue is the encounter between logos, the totalising thematisation that constructs a world of identifiable and nameable beings and essences, and what exceeds that but is nonetheless encountered, the unthematisable other, or the “otherwise than being.” Thematisation generates a world of concepts and identities, of repeatable categories organised within a linear temporality; it establishes a stable, structured, comprehended area that the self can possess and inhabit. This process takes place within language; and as language, thematisation organises a sharable world of reason and objective knowledge. But though thematisation is required for the creation of a common world, its involvement is with the self, which seeks to know itself in sameness and continuity. As an act of comprehension, of grasping or taking hold, thematisation seeks to assimilate whatever it meets to this same-self, so that the area of selfhood is extended. Thematisation creates a same-world elaborated by a same-self, a world of structures, connectivities and forms that has no place for alterity.

But alterity, the other, cannot finally be evaded. As the human other, it confronts the same-world of selfhood as the face of the one we meet, as the address of the other that calls forth our primary ethical responsibility. With the approach of the other the same-world of thematisation suffers a disruption, because the other is that which cannot be thematised, which cannot be inserted into the world of logos as category and identity or repeated in a temporality of reviewable memories. The other announces itself as a saying which undoes whatever form seeks to enclose it; alterity calls into question all comprehending form, including that of the literary text. At the same time the other as face, as address, calls on us for response; whether in speech or silence, we cannot but respond to that address. The other compels us to answer for ourselves.

Though the other disrupts the forms of thematisation, it does not abolish them; nor, in Levinas’s view, should it do so. He does not depreciate either thematisation, which in language creates our common human world, or the same-world of possessed selfhood, with is the world that we enjoy, that we live from. But he does point to the approach of the other and to the traces that it makes on that same-world; traces which will also be found in language and the literary text.

Language and otherness

Language, for Levinas, is the site both of thematisation and its disruption. Though language is the instrument of thematisation, in Totality and Infinity Levinas claims that it begins in alterity. For him the root act of language is not the naming of beings in their identities; rather it is founded in a primary alterity, a first saying, to which language is the response. The grounding act of language is interpellation (TI, p. 69); it is the address of the other which calls out as my response the first word of language: me voici, “here I am.” In that I open myself in responsibility to the need of the other. Only then does language go on to thematisation, to the construction of a common world of shared entities that meets the needs of the other and of myself. Though it thematises the inhabited, human world, language for Levinas begins as a signifying with no theme, as pure response which is also address.

Language and responsibility are born in the same moment of this first approach of alterity. Language is first a saying which answers the saying of the other. But it is also the said, the place of defined entities and essences; it is in language that being as essences and entities comes about. Again it is important to recognise that Levinas is not talking about some decline from the pure moment of alterity; for him language and thematisation are not a veiling of reality, a loss of truer being. For Levinas there is no truer being than that which is thematised in language, because being is exactly what comes about in thematisation. Language constructs for us the world of beings and makes possible all that we do with them, all that we enjoy as we live from them; language makes possible the self’s own world and the commonality of the world in which we meet the need of the other.

But in its construction of such a world, language must exclude or forget its own origin in the primary response to otherness. Though it can thematise all that is thematisable, it cannot comprehend that which, as Levinas says in Otherwise than Being, lies “on the hither side” of the said, of thematisation and predication (OB, p. 45); that which cannot be produced as being or essence. This radical otherness is the “otherwise than being”; it is that which is neither being nor not-being, which is not a knowable identity, which is not thematisable. Language cannot incorporate this “otherwise” because it grounds language; it is in an opening to this “otherwise” that language comes about. Radical alterity stands elsewhere than beings and essences and so defeats the thematising power of language.

This “otherwise” is the other and saying; and language cannot encompass them. Yet language may nevertheless be the site of the approach of saying and of the other. This is because speaking, saying, is what the other is for me; I encounter the other in address, it announces itself, it speaks. Because it presents itself in an act of interpellation and so calls language into being, the other has a relation to language that is prior to that of thematisation (though “prior” historicises that which, outside of thematisation and its linear construction of time, cannot be historicised). It is in this sense, of language’s first intimacy with alterity, that language can the thought of, as Simon Critchley has suggested, as unbound from the area of thematisation that it brings about.⁴

Temporality and otherness

But how can this unbinding, this openness to the other, show itself in language? Modes of temporality are here at the centre of Levinas’s argument. The world of the thematised, of the said, is marked by a sequential temporality of self-identical moments, the elements of which can be recuperated through reference or memory. This is the time both of science and of narrative, and it is reversible in the sense that thought can follow it either way, forwards or backwards. Only within such a time can there be thematisation, and it is this temporality which makes possible what we know as truth.

For Levinas in Totality and Infinity, the characteristic of such temporality is pastness (TI, p. 65). Whatever its grammatical tense, thematisation locates its objects in an area of already-existing definition; the categories that it employs always imply their prior existence. A simple thematising statement, such as “this is a tree,” can only be made if the concept “tree” is already available, or (as Levinas puts it in Otherwise than Being) “already said” (OB, p. 35). But this is also true of any new concept; to conceptualise is always an act of retrojection, of placing within the already said the concept that we create. Through such retrojection, the concept is secured in its self-identity, an identity which can function at any point in the temporal sequence. Pastness, in this sense, is the stability of thematisation and of language.

But the temporality of saying and of the other is different. When I encounter the face of the other and the other’s address, I encounter what resists this pastness, what refuses this retrojection and what insists on presence. The other and its saying cannot be included in the conceptualised narrative of history. I can indeed make a thematisation of otherness and so give it “pastness,” fix it within the already said; but its own temporality, the temporality of the first address, will have been lost, and otherness with it. The temporality of otherness stands outside history, sequence, narratability. It cannot be recovered as a possession of memory; it lacks the self-identity of known moments in time. What distinguishes the moment of the other’s approach is that it cannot be secured to some already said; it exists in a protension toward the future, toward my response and my responsibility.

Levinas points, then, to two temporalities, of thematisation and of the other. But he is not offering us alternatives; we cannot choose between them. For Levinas, consciousness lives in a “diachrony,” a doubleness of temporality, where the two touch. Consciousness deploys the thematisations of the already said and so lives in the memorable pastness of recuperable identities; but it is also aware that it can never be identical with those identities or even with the moment of its own experience, that it cannot hold to the identities of the past and is threatened by the otherness of the future. In its diachrony consciousness is caught in a web of paradox; it seeks to “recuperate the irreversible, coagulate the flow of time into a ‘something,’ thematise, ascribe a meaning;” but it also experiences “the impossibility of the dispersion of time to assemble itself in the present” (OB, pp 37, 38). But consciousness is not the only site of such temporal destabilisation. Diachrony will occur wherever thematisation is touched by saying, by the other; it is therefore to be expected that the thematisation which is art will also bear its trace.

Art and the modality of beings: nominalisation and verbalisation

But how would we recognise such traces if they occurred? Within the literary text, what might the approach of the other mean? It is best to begin by looking at Levinas’s understanding of art as a whole, and at how language relates to art. For him art, like science and philosophy, is thematisation; it is a mode of comprehending and forming, of bestowing identity. It works within the area of the said, of beings and essences. It has no privileged way of knowing, no special access to some “truer” level of reality. Its objects are thematisations, as are its materials: conceived form, identified textures and qualities, emotions, actions, ideas.

But though it does not stand outside thematisation, art deals with the thematised in a distinguishable way. In art themes are presented with a special purity and directness; that thematisation which is line, form or verbal image is made to stand forth with unusual clarity, in what Levinas refers to in the following passage as “absolute exposition.” Art exhibits its thematisations with a special nakedness, it invites a directness of gaze that other forms of thematisation do not incur. Further, within the language of thematisation Levinas identifies two aspects: the aspect of nominalisation, which prioritises the noun, and the aspect of verbalisation, which prioritises the verb. Verbalisation conveys beings not as substances but as modalities of being; this is true even of the verb to be within the predicative structure. Predication, for Levinas, is less a statement of identity (“A is B”) than an adverbial structure, telling us how A is (“A is-B”). Art is distinguishable in that, through the pure exposition of theme, it makes this modality, this “how” of being, resound:

Identical entities, things and qualities of things, begin to resound with their essence in a predicative proposition not as a result of psychological reflection about subjectivity and the temporality of sensation, but out of art. Art is the pre-eminent exhibition in which the said is reduced to a pure theme, to absolute exposition, even to shamelessness capable of holding all looks for which it is exclusively destined  Through art essence and temporality begin to resound with poetry and song. And the search for new forms, from which all art lives, keeps awake everywhere the verbs that are on the verge of lapsing into substantives. In painting, red reddens and green greens, forms are produced as contours and vacate with their vacuity as forms. In music sounds resound; in poems vocables, material of the said, no longer yield before what they evoke, but sing with their evocative powers. (OB, p. 40)

It is clear that for Levinas thematisation is no kind of abstraction, nor is art the disclosure of some truer being. Art stays within the area of the thematised, the already said; as Eaglestone puts it, “art makes the said resound but has no access to anything beyond that” (p. 154). Art is not the revealing of transcendence; its power is to display the verbality of the world that we inhabit through theme and concept. His most telling example is a reference to Xenakis’s Nomos Alpha for Unaccompanied Cello:

Music  bends the quality of the notes emitted into adverbs. Every quiddity becomes a modality, the strings and woods turn into sonority. What is taking place? Is a soul complaining or exulting in the depth of the sounds ? What misleading anthropomorphism or animism! The cello is a cello in the sonority that vibrates in its strings and its wood, even if it is already reverting into notes, into identities that settle into their natural places in gamuts from the acute to the grave, according to the different pitches. Thus the essence of the cello, a modality of essence, is temporalised in the work. (OB, p. 41)

Again it should be stressed that this is not some romantic revelation of hidden being. For Levinas, “a cello,” “the notes,” have no other being than their thematisations, which occur in language. Their essence is this thematisation: “the entity that appears identical in the light of time is its essence in the already said  essence qua essence and entities qua entities, are spoken” (OB, p. 37).

Art’s role, then, is to take the thematised, the already said, and to display it with a resonant purity and directness. At the same time art keeps awake the verbality of the theme, stops it sliding to the opposite pole of nominalised substantivity, thematises it as a “how” rather than as a “what.” Art celebrates our living in and from a world of shared thematisation and enjoyment. This is where art finds itself.

The other in the text: undoing the form

If language and art both inhabit the area of the thematised, what chance is there that the literary text can bear the trace of the other? First it needs to be recognised that an attempt to locate the other within the text is bound to fail; the other will not, for example, turn up in what might seem likely places, in character or dialogue. This is because identification and location are processes that can happen only within thematisation, and the other stands elsewhere. Only the thematised can have recognisable identity and a locatable place; and it is precisely Levinas’s point that neither the other nor saying can be thematised without losing their alterity.

All that can be said, therefore, is that the thematised structure which is the text will be interrupted, called in question, by the proximity of an other that finds no place within it. The “place” of the other, of saying, is this irruption, this dislocation; a diachronising of temporality, a calling to responsibility and response. Nothing new, in a thematised sense, arrives or is added; instead what is already there carries the traces of what it cannot include. Rather like a stellar system approached by a black hole, the text begins to deform in ways that cannot be explained from its own gravitational dynamics. The task for a Levinasian critical practice is to prepare to recognise these deformations so that they can be seen for what they are.

In so far as this process can be conceptualised, form and the undoing of form are the key. The act of comprehension, including the comprehension which is art, proposes form as its instrument; but at the approach of the other, form is, as Levinas puts it in Totality and Infinity, undone (TI, p. 66). He traces a dual process: on the one hand, the enforcement and rigidification of form, and on the other its dislocation. Though form may vary (and he stresses that the search for new form is always part of art), there is always implicit a degree of closure; form seeks to fix and contain its object in an act of structured comprehension. In Otherwise than Being Levinas makes the point in a way that brings it specially close to literature. He argues that even the is of language, the verbal predicate that sustains the modality of thematised entities, always threatens to lose its verbality and to congeal into a rigidity of form:

The verb to be  becomes a quasi structure and is thematised and shows itself like an entity. Phenomenality, essence, becomes a phenomenon, is fixed, assembled in a tale, is synchronised, presented, lends itself to a noun, receives a title. An entity or a configuration of entities emerge thematised and are identified in the synchronism of denomination (or in the unity of a tale that cannot be out of phase). They become history, are delivered over to writing, to books, in which the time of the narrative, without being reversed, recommences. They become states of affairs. (OB, p. 42)

Form congeals and becomes object-like, and consigns what it contains to the pastness of thematisation.

But the proximity of the other is the undoing of form. Whatever formal structure is directed toward it, the other it will always elude that structure and call it into question. Form is only “adequate” to the same, never to the other; it can never grasp the other and possess it. To the extent that it appears to do that, it must betray its own object; it makes what is other into what is same, by reducing it to what is already at home within the act of thematisation. In Totality and Infinity Levinas contrasts this reduction with the disruptive power of the other, seen here as the face: “form--incessantly betraying its own manifestation, congealing into a plastic form, for it is adequate to the same--alienates the exteriority of the other. The face is a living presence; it is expression. The life of expression consists in undoing the form in which the existent, exposed as a theme, is thereby dissimulated” (OB, p. 66). Form betrays otherness, but otherness undoes form; not through incoherence and confusion (those are categories of thematisation) but by deconstructing the temporal structure of the formed and the thematised, by moving from the pastness of what is already said to the diachrony of the moment of saying. By this the life of the other is recovered from its dissimulation into theme.

Tracing the other

If the literary text can bear traces of the other, those traces will fall broadly within this area of the undoing of form, the irruption into the text of what cannot be formed into secure comprehension. But this point can be made with greater precision, in such a way that it becomes a usable practical tool. In what follows, I shall be working outward from Levinas’s central ideas to suggest the describable ways in which literary form is undone, as a basis for a Levinasian strategy for the text.

The primary textual deformation is of the temporal structure. The temporality of the text, as an act of thematisation, is of the kind that thematisation always constructs: a mode of pastness, recuperable in memory, at our disposal. Thus we can always refer to the moment at which Macbeth murders Duncan; each repetition, in reading or enactment, makes it available to us again. If a literary text were to register the approach of the other, we should expect this temporality to be disrupted, the dominant pastness of the text to be broken in favour of what cannot be consigned to a precedent “state of affairs.” This will not be a matter of grammatical tense, but of a change in the relationship between the subjectivity of the text and its object, toward a position in which that consciousness cannot securely consign its object to the already said.

Since the thematised is the already said, this failure is a failure of thematisation. The object of the text will be incompletely thematised; and this will present itself as an excess of the object in relation to the literary form that seeks to comprehend it. This excess is not an avoidable incompleteness; it is not that the text has failed to include within its formed structure what might have been included, has neglected a remainder. Excess in this sense will be a trace of the not-includable because not-thematisable, a marking of the text by what exceeds it in radical alterity, but not as theme. It will be as though the order of the text were compromised by what, in the terms of the said, is “otherwise than being.”

Since for Levinas identity is founded in thematisation, this excess of the object over the resources of thematisation will show itself as a destabilisation of identity within the text. The encounter of theme with the other is not an encounter of two identities; it is the meeting of identity, of the theme that is repeatable and locatable, with what is neither of these. Under this pressure, the ability of the text to work with secure and knowable identities will be called into question; normally reliable self-identities may seem less firm, boundaries and distinctions less self-evident.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that for Levinas the ethical is primary: ethics, for him, is first philosophy. This is to say that he understands the grounding moment of language as a moment of the other’s saying; and this saying, this interpellation, is irreducibly ethical. It calls on me to answer for myself, and against that call I have no alibi. Even in refusal I make a response; my saying answers the saying of another. In terms of thematisation, nothing has been said; saying is a laying-bare to what cannot be consigned to the past, a nakedness toward the other in responsibility.

For Levinas, the strongest trace of the approach of the other is this precipitation into responsibility, this being called into question, being forced out of the secure pastness of thematisation into a saying that must answer for itself toward the unpossessable future. The text approached by the other will also suffer this projection into responsibility; instead of disposing of a known world, the text must answer for itself, but to that which cannot be addressed in the language of thematisation. What is at issue here might be described as the stance of the text; instead of being turned toward the same-world of the said, it has to face the unthematisable.

In so far as the stance of the text may be thought of as authorial position and point of view, this might be understood as the disruption of the position and point of view established by the author in the act of thematisation. Levinas himself uses the expression “point of view” to talk about the way in which thematisation seeks to comprehend its object. This comprehension is always from some perspective, since a perspective is required for that locating and identifying upon which thematisation depends. But it is the absence of such a point of view that distinguishes the approach of the other; faced by the other, there is no point of view which will enable us to control and comprehend what we encounter, nor do we require one to see what is before us. As Levinas puts it in Totality and Infinity, the other is the one who comes before us “without [our] having to disclose him from a ‘point of view’, in a borrowed light” (TI, p. 67). The disruption of point of view, the surrender of the “borrowed light” of chosen perspective, will be another trace of the approach of the other to the text.

An application: form and deformation

What follows is by way of an experiment. I chose Wallace Stevens’ poem “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm” at random, to test whether this developed Levinasian strategy can be made to work, whether the markers of the undoing of form, diachronic temporalisation, destabilisation of identities, excess, and responsibility, can actually be traced within the text.⁵ One poem does not make a poetic; but it may be enough to suggest that texts can reflect what Levinas would have understood as the approach of the other.

The first act of a poem is to project a form; this a poem shares with all texts that seek to comprehend their object. But a poem is a work of art; and the form of a work of art is, in Levinas’s view, also the means of making thematised essences resound, of verbalising them, of displaying thematised essences as modalities of being rather than as substantives. Stevens’ form works towards this second aim; the structure and pacing of the opening lines make his themes of silence, stillness, of the reader’s absorbed intentness resonant, so that they become vibrant, not as absences but as modalities of being:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. (1-4)

Stevens’ insistence here is on the texture of these objects and this experience; not what they are, but how they are for the consciousness that encounters them. In this the poem does what all art seeks to do: whilst remaining within the thematisable, it holds beings, essences and entities from inclining towards substantivity and fixity. Within the said, the primacy of nominalisation is relaxed in favour of the verbal and the adverbial; and this is the achievement of form, which displays, exposes these entities in such a way that their modalities become tangible to the reader.

But the primary trace of the proximity of the other, Levinas has suggested, is the undoing of form. Not of all form or of form in every respect; that would be for the text to leave the area of the thematised altogether. Some aspects of Stevens’ form remain intact and productive to the end of the poem; for example, the paced, paired lines, the assonance. But even here it is noticeable that the coincidence between line and syntax, which is strong at the outset, weakens markedly, and major syntactical breaks begin to fall within the line:

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there. (13-16)

The later part of the poem comes to feel restive rather than at rest.

The central formal feature of the poem, though, that which is established as its project at the outset, is the declarative statement, predication: “The house was quiet and the world was calm” (1). Through this the poem proposes a world that can be comprehended within predicative structure: a world of identities, “A is B.” This is its initial act of thematisation. Further: the predicative pattern that is set up is one of return. With the repetition of the first line we come to expect the return of predication, its return to itself; formally this is achieved through what seems, at first, to be the promise of a villanelle. We are dealing with a world in which identities are secure enough to be equated in predication, and where they are recoverable in patterns of repetition and return.

But as the poem advances these proposals of form break down; neither the hints of sonnet and villanelle, nor the predicative structure, are sustained. Levinas has argued that predication conveys a modality as much as it asserts an identity (how was the house? The house was-quiet). In the first four lines of this poem these modalities cross and interconnect. The book is an aspect of the modality of reader and of night, and they in turn are aspects of the modality of the book; nothing is simply itself, separate and distinguishable, and with that the formal project of the poem comes under threat, because predication is only possible if we take entities to be self-identical.

Nevertheless in the fourth line the normative formal structure reasserts itself in the repetition of the first line; and the condition of repetition, as Levinas argues, is a recoverable, memorable past. The temporality of thematisation has, apparently, been restored; and the expectation which is set up, of further return through a villanelle-like predictability, offers added reassurance. But this apparent promise is soon disappointed. Instead the poem moves from greater to lesser repeatability. The first repetition, full and immediate, is between the title and the first line: in the printed text, “THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM/ The house was quiet and the world was calm” (1). Nothing intervenes to disrupt. Only the visual shift from capitalisation hints at the impossibility of full coincidence. Then two lines intervene: repetition is deferred. Then the pattern fragments: line 10 promises a return to lines 1 and 4 but only gives us the first half: “The house was quiet because it had to be.” For the rest we have to wait to line 13, where the second half is displaced to the first half of the line and then inverted in the second half: “And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world ” Finally, in lines 15 and 16, the poem hastily recuperates “calm,” “summer,” “night,” and “reader” from lines 1 and 2, but the measured equations of the opening have collapsed into hurried conjunction with the empty universally equatable non-entity, “itself.”

Identity

This may sound like a critical attack on Stevens’ competence as a poet, but of course it is not. What is traced here, I would claim, is a formal deconstruction, an undoing of the form, of the kind that Levinas might expect from the proximity of the other. The occasion of this deformation becomes clearer as the poem moves towards its rhetorical object, which is “truth.” It thematises this object to the extent of giving it a name, of nominalisation; but it can give it no identity, no stability, no recuperability, despite falling back on the best efforts of predication to tell us what truth is:

The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there. (13-16)

The first attempt, through a qualifying clause, fails because the nominalisation itself turns out to be unstable: does “in which” refer to “world” or “the truth in a calm world”? There is no way of telling; once again, identities flow into each other. But whatever it is that has been nominalised, it disappears almost immediately into the pronoun “itself,” which almost ironically insists on a self-identity that the nominalisations of the poem have so far failed to sustain. And this in turn disappears into the thematisations of the last two lines. The reader is left to ask whether “calm” (and, for that matter, “summer” and “night”) is adjectival towards either “truth” or “truth in a calm world,” or whether “calm,” “summer,” “night,” and “reader” are the nominalisations into which truth disappears as adjectival towards them. The end of the poem insists on the self-identity that supports thematisation (the three-times repeated “itself”) but can tether this “itself” to no secure or distinguishable identity.

There is something at the end of this poem, towards which it moves rhetorically as though towards a gravitational centre, which it cannot nominalise or thematise, and which destabilises all the other nominalisations and thematisations, even of the most unproblematic kind. Having pursued whatever this is through the familiar thematisations offered (“calm,” “night,” “summer,” “reader”) it threatens to collapse them all. What is at issue here is the failure of predication. The form which the poem offers towards its object fails in the face of that object precisely because it is not an object, an item within thematisation. Form fails and so thematisation fails.

But the poem does not fail. In the very failure of its means, the poem makes present to the reader that which exceeds it, some other that it cannot contain. From thematisation it moves to saying. Another way of expressing this would be to say that by the end of the poem there is a powerful sense that its object exceeds its formal resources. Again, this is in no sense a failure of the poem; indeed, it is the poem’s achievement to bring about this sense of excess. It can only come through the conjunction of theme with the unthematisable and of form with the unformable. The success of the poem is the realisation of these conjunctions.

Temporality

Stevens’ poem begins in the pastness of thematisation; though we are intimately present with the objects and moment of the poem (the lines work to bring house, night, reader, book, calm, quiet close to us) we feel that we are being shown a settled world, an already established state of affairs. This is not because Stevens wants to place any of this at a historic distance, but because his is an act of thematisation, and his determined predication of identities necessarily falls within the already said. This pastness would even survive a change of tense to the present: “The house [is] quiet and the world [is] calm.” But what Stevens’ initial past tense does is to signal a change at the end of the poem: “And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, / In which there is no other meaning, itself / Is calm, itself is summer and night ” (13-15). These lines shift from the past tense through an ambiguous present of general statement that has little strictly temporal content (“In which there is no other meaning”) to an insistent present in lines 15 and 16. Immediately there is a loss of the settled world, the already said of the opening of the poem; in its place comes a struggle, Stevens’ engagement with the incommensurable object of the poem that eludes any settled state of affairs. The retrospective temporality of the poem turns into a diachrony, in which the struggle for already-existing identity continues (as, in thematisation, it must), but finds itself defeated by an insistent presence that refuses consignment to the past.

Answerability

At this point the stance of the authorial position changes, and with it that of the reader; from having been descriptive, an intimate onlooker on what is already there, it is forced to make its own statement; it must suddenly answer for itself. The poem ends not in descriptive predication but in something more like confession or appeal; the voice of the last lines is not the voice of an onlooker or describer but of one called to say what he can find it in himself to say: “The truth in a calm world, / In which there is no other meaning, itself / Is calm” (13-15). This not only disrupts the temporality of predication and description with that of address and invocation; it produces a further formal deformation. The “reader” in line 16 is and is not the reader of line 2. The first reader is held entirely within the poem’s act of thematisation. The second is that same reader; but it is also us. We are addressed, we are appealed to. The poem breaks its frame. It ends in the temporality of a suspension, a protension toward the answer that we, as readers, must now make for ourselves; it hovers and tips toward the futurity of a response. Alongside the affirmed, measured time of the poem’s opening, we have the labile time of consciousness as it is brought into question by the address of the other.

Conclusion: alterity and deconstruction

In looking for what might be the traces of the other within the text, words such as dislocation and destabilisation have been used; it is clear that we are in the area of a kind of deconstruction. The links between Levinas and Derrida, maintained over thirty years and continued to Derrida’s words at Levinas’s funeral, suggest that the connection is appropriate. But there is an important distinction to be made. For Derrida, deconstruction is a textual phenomenon; it occurs within and between texts. It is of the nature of the text that it finds itself decentered, deferred, displaced by the textuality out of which it arises and within which it exists. What there might be outside the text (and we can give no content to such a speculation) has no part in Derridean deconstruction. But for Levinas the deconstructive force is not textual; it is the approach of the other, of that which is not-text, not-thematisation. For him, as for Derrida, we can give no content to this (we cannot thematise it); but that there is such an approach is evidenced by the very deconstruction that we observe within the text. Finally this deconstruction, whether of text or of consciousness, is our only evidence of the other.

For Levinas, the logos, the logocentric language of thematisation, is deconstructed by alterity, by the other. But we should not take it that he is setting up some sacred or transcendental class of entities that have a higher or truer reality. It is not as though on one side of the line there was the vulnerable and deconstructable, and on the other the invulnerable and deconstructing. Firstly: our textual dealings with the other are thematisations, as in a discussion like the present. These thematisations--of the other, of saying--are as deconstructable as any, as subject to the approach of that to which they speciously appear to refer. Secondly: since construction is the mode of thematisation, the unthematisable “exists” in radical deconstruction. Deconstruction (to use the language of the said) is how it is. It has no privilege of pure, self-identical being (that is the ideal of thematisation). To encounter the other is to encounter the deconstructed.

Something, then, can be said, in the reading of a poem, for each of the traces that in Levinas’s thought announce the approach of the other. One poem does not make a poetic; but this exercise at least suggests that Levinas, even when he is not directly concerned with texts or with literature, does offer a practical basis for approaching the life of the text. If there is, as I have argued, an implicit positing in his work of an alternative deconstruction, not of the text by the text but of the text by the other, then in the traces of the other’s proximity there is a way out of the circle of textuality; not to the thematisation of the unthematisable or the textualisation of the non-textual, but to the text’s response to what is radically not itself.