Celestial Pantomime

...What I am trying to do is argue from . . . converging probabilities...

...He might perhaps want to argue that the difference goes all the way to the bottom...

...it is the Scholastics' 'per simile simile percipiens,' in Peirce's "The sense of a symbol is its translation into another symbol,' in Bachelard's 'L'image ne peut etre etudiee que par l'image,' and lastly, it is the guiding principle of Harold Bloom's critical achievement...

...Here is God's plenty, as I have said, and then some...

...Lawler here acknowledges the particularity of every example, and acknowledges also the difference made by the full context of a given example of enjambment or of any other of the technical features of poetry he explores...

...From Anaxagoras to Harold Bloom in a single sentence, and the claim that "one poem proves another" of course already alludes to Wallace Stevens's "A Primitive Like an Orb...

...The preconception justifying all this rapid lateral movement from example to example, often through the citation of four or five names in a single sentence, is given in an aphorism from Anaxagoras Lawler several times quotes: "Everything is everything...

...The sweep is breathtaking...

...coda of irony...

...This pleasure is experienced immediately in the encounter with the structure, but its precise significance can be critically assessed only through the mediation of the "plot," "narrative line," "dramatic situation" of the poem itself...

...He moves at ease within an encompassing context in which the reader may encounter a little bit of everything in a given paragraph...

...This passage will give the reader a good idea of the strengths (and weaknesses) of Lawler's methodological assumptions (which are not the same thing, of course, as that abundance, tact, and connoisseurship which I have praised and which I unreservedly admire...

...For Lawler this isomorphism counts most as evidence of the universality of human nature and of the force of the "original heuristic myth...

...His book is discrer ' polemical, hortatory, a work o! conversion, as any good book of this sort should be...

...As I have said, another critical temperament might want to explore the contextual particular ity more fully...

...The remarkable value of Celestial Pantomime is to have demonstrated so generously the still con tinuing productivity of one of these ten dencies when it exists in a form scarcely inhibited by the other.exists in a form scarcely inhibited by the other...

...Nor does Lawler wholly escape from this danger...

...Whether or not one regards the myth as "true," there is no doubt that either in its religious form or in its secularised version it has been a major influence on almost all Western poetry...

...The originality of Lawler's book lies in its detailed investigation, in the six central chapters, of a wealth of examples of such structures...

...Nevertheless, his rapid lateral movement from quotation to quotation, in his attempt to show that "everything is everything," does not allow him leisure or space to investigate just what difference that particularity and that contextual setting, in a given case, make...

...It is characteristic of Lawler's mind and of the assumptions of his book that in one of the places, a footnote, where this gnomic saying is cited, it is followed by four more examples of the "same thing...

...enjamb-ment...

...The structures express, of course, not only a person's glimpses of transcendence but also the hesitations, impediments, obduracies in the middle of the journey of descent and return...

...The reader wants occasionally to draw him up and to say, "Hey, wait a minue...

...The danger of operating on this principle is obvious: a flattening of all individuals into a bland critical ambience in which all cats are equally white or into a vague Jungianism in which all is archetype and all archetypes mean the same thing...

...prepositionalizing, refrains, journey motifs...

...Lawler is aware of this danger...

...Everything is not quite everything, whatever Anaxagoras said...

...Lawler is widely read...

...This conviction is a saving counter-point to his penchant for transcendence in the weak sense of allowing everything without qualification to be everything...

...mono-polysyllabic collisions and oscillatory imagery...

...What is original, or even extraordinary, about Lawler's book is not just the admirable abundance of the examples but the detailed exploration of the proposition that it is more by its verbal grain that poetry communicates its religious content than by way of any "lexical statement...

...One might express this by saying that Lawler sees man as incarnated in a body, in a physical world, and in the roughness of language...

...The principle that "in poetry only one poem proves another," says Lawler, is "rooted in a text of Anaxagoras I have already cited: 'Everything is everything...

...40-41), for example, move easily sideways from Yeats to Rilke to Stevens to Crashaw to Lu-cien Goldmann to Pascal to Gilbert Ryle to Merleau-Ponty to Donne to Pico della Mirandola to James Wright to Rupert Brooke, and the next page throws in Carew, Jonson, and Leonard B. Meyer (the musicologist) for good measure...

...For Lawler "the ultimate purpose of poetry is the employment of patterned ideas, images, and sounds, to communicate something about the patterns . . . ," but what the patterns communicate is, in the phrase he borrows from Wallace Stevens, the "central poem" or, in another phrase Lawler uses repeatedly, the "heuristic myth...

...Celes tial Pantomime is interwoven with an amazing range of apposite allu sions to secondary critical works, to philosophers, theologians, sociologists, anthropologists, scientists...

...The argument is the familiar one that it is human nature to find these patterns beautiful and that we find them beautiful because they are in resonance with the transcendent or, in Gerard Manley Hopkins's phrase, are in themselves, whatever content they express, "word of God, news of God...

...Recognition of the myth and allegiance to it is common enough...

...In various ways he more or less successfully guards against it: by his emphasis not on concept or even on "image," but on the nitty gritty or poetic texture: enjamb-ment, semicolons, parentheses, and so on...

...by his emphasis on the way poetry is about the long journey "home," that is, as much about the interferences of the urge toward unity by the recalcitrant particularity of language and of the human condition as about that unity itself...

...Those [six ] chapters treat of, in order: chiasm and parenthesis...

...The reader comes to understand en-jambment, or whatever, and the way it embodies some aspect of the "heuristic myth" by being shown examples in operation in case after case...

...Celestial Pantomime is, among other things, a marvelous miniature anthology of passages, citations, even complete poems...

...So it is the whole purpose of Lawler's book to argue...

...What is most distinctive, however, is Lawler's argument that this myth or "central poem" most incarnates itself, in poetry, in certain intimate or even technical aspects of pattern and form in verse...

...It is one of the best books I know on this topic-for its abundance, its wide range, its learning, its persuasive intelligence and wit...

...Lawler's strongest urge is toward the claim that each example is a version of the same archetype, the original matrix or die (as the word suggests) which forms all the examples and which makes them similar in form...

...There is a fundamental difference between what the Scholastics were saying and what Peirce was saying, and the difference goes all the way down to the bottom, down to the fundament in the thought of each kind of thinker, or, in Peirce's case, to the lack of ground...

...The conflict these days between these two tendencies of thought forms the life or liveliness of debate in literary studies and in the humanities generally...

...He is, in the best sense of the word, a connoisseur of poems...

...Nor are these readings presented in a purely literary vacuum...

...These are drawn from the whole range of Western literature, though especially from English and American poetry, and within that, especially from Renaissance poetry-Spenser, Herbert, Milton, Her-rick, and the rest-and from the poetry of Romanticism in England and America-Wordsworth, Dickinson, Hopkins, Charlotte Mew, Robinson Jef-fers, Stevens.'Lawler's intimate knowledge of the work of all these poets is impressive, as is his sympathy, taste, tact, his evident joy in quoting and discussing them...

...coda of reversal...

...Here is God's plenty, and literally so, since the plenitude of genuine poetry, for Lawler, finally belongs to God or obscurely expresses some intuition of "transcendence...

...Put most conventionally, the myth affirms that man has a sense of having come forth from unity, of dwelling halfway between unity and disunity, and of therefore wanting to return to unity, but to a unity which, precisely because it is attained by journeying through disunity, must somehow be a higher state than that originally remembered...

...Two characteristic pages (pp...

...That may sound forbiddingly technical, but in fact Lawler's book is lively and readable throughout, since his method is that of the presentation of abundant example through extensive citation, followed by discussion from the point of view of the topic of the chapter...

...By offering enough separate examples of, in this instance, a particular kind of enjambment, one is led to conclude that this structure seems to reflect some human reality, seems somehow to be congruent with what we think of as "human nature"-otherwise, there would be no basis for responding with pleasure to the structure in the first place...

...The best part of Celestial Pantomime, as of all such books, is Lawler's presentation of his way of reading all these poems, his journey through the country named English and American poetry, with some crossings over the borders into French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek...

...Lawler's "heuristic myth" is the universal journey of descent and return- ingressus, progressus, and regressus, or, as he more compendiously expresses it in a passage early in the book: The myth is rudimentary, and . . . in fact should be as congenial to a Stevensian fictionist as to a Freudian reductionist, and as congenial to someone who believes man's "soul" participates a personal God as to someone who believes man is nothing more than a portable and compendious sack of acids and enzymes...

...Someone may think he believes humans are sacks of acids and enzymes, but the force over him of the myth indicates otherwise...

...If that were the case, then the archetype would not be an original forming matrix but an induction from the particulars, something existing only as a projection from them...

...This is so because, for Lawler, all people are innately "believers," as the universality of the "myth" attests...

...Lawler's sensitivity to nuances of the myth and his ability to recognize varieties of it in so many writers through the centuries is far from common...

...This conviction is familiar enough...

...and by his insistence that each of his allusions or citations must be put back into its full individual context by the reader in order to be understood more completely...

...It appears, for example, as the central theme in Meyer Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism, as Lawler notes...

...The reader will see from this Lawler's bias and will see also what is mildly disingenuous about the initial claim that the myth is as much congenial to skeptics as to believers...

...Justus George Lawler I. Hillis Miller CELESTIAL PANTOMIME is a book on the way poetry may be seen as the formal expression of religious experience...