The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  What Durkheim and Proust share, according to Lewis, is not a concern with the individual’s relationship with God, but rather “the sacred power [that] bonds the individual to modern society and to its new gods.” These new sacred universal principles are, for Durkheim, such things as “Fatherland,” “Liberty,” “Reason” (especially powerful in France after the Enlightenment and the Revolution). While not denying these, Proust shows that les moments bienheureux are invariably individual, even solitary, but “each one opens up a portal to a whole social world.” In his book, Proust focuses on the painstaking reconstitution of a coherent self “from the competing impulses [desires] of an unconscious life.” Theodor Adorno emphasized that Proust was obsessed “with the concrete and the unique, with the taste of a madeleine or the color of the shoes of a lady worn at a certain party,” through which he shows that our most private self is not self-generating or isolated from society, “but rather begins its journey shaped by forces that precede and control it.”38

  The narrator shows, for instance, that to be admitted to Madame Verdurin’s “little clan,” you had to share her view that the pianist she had discovered was better than all others then available—her clan shows elements of a sect, admission to which requires full participation in its rituals and commitment to its beliefs. Madame Verdurin is even described as “an ‘ecclesiastical power’ who brooks no disagreement with her religion of art, in which Beethoven’s Ninth and the operas of Wagner are ‘the most sublime of prayers.’” Those of a critical disposition, the heretics, are scapegoated.

  Another feature of À la recherche is the narrator’s repeated experience of disillusionment, his discovery that the sacred rituals of the communities he joins turn out, invariably, to have no transcendent power; they are social forces, no more, and salvation, the bliss of les moments bienheureux, is the only transcendence on offer.

  Although critics thought that Proust made a religion of art, in fact he was arguing that both religion and art have social cohesion as their primary social function. “When the faithful believe that they are worshipping Wagner, Beethoven or Vinteuil, they are in fact worshipping the standards of the clan itself. . . . Specific works of art thus serve for the little clan something of the function that the totem does for Durkheim’s Australians.”39

  Proust is observing that, with the death of God, the death of a monotheistic Christian God, more primitive forms of religious ritual—totemism—may fill the gap. This is because humans like the experience of the sacred: “the modern sacred is still sacred.” But he is also saying that such experiences are essentially hollow: they offer no transcendence, but merely confirm our membership of communities. This may be no small thing, but it is not a big thing either; it is experienced, for the narrator, as a disappointment.

  And at this point Proust joins forces with Henry James. What the episodes of involuntary memory build up to in the book is the explanation of desire in the narrator. And he observes, and is drawn to, desire in others. It is the unconscious that explains desire, it is desire that enchants our world, desire that makes us feel “full” or “whole.” After the death of Albertine, the narrator muses on the afterlife. “Desire is powerful indeed; it engenders belief. . . . I began to believe in the immortality of the soul. But that did not suffice me. I required that, after my own death, I should find her again in her body, as though eternity were like life.” This echoes James: “Belief in an afterlife isn’t really a question of belief . . . it is on the other hand a question of desire.”40

  It is the power of desire that binds us to other people. And for that reason, it is desire that is sacred. The desire to be part of a community is one thing, an important thing, but desire, of one individual for another, is a very different experience. Communal life, Proust is saying, no matter how desirable from the community’s point of view, to establish stability, identity and all the rest, is nowhere near as interesting, fulfilling, enchanting as the private experience of desire. Desire is particular, just as involuntary memory is particular. The insistence of desire, as Henry James and Proust and the established churches well recognized, is disruptive and dangerous, and that is why it becomes the basis of the sacred.

  7

  The Angel in Our Cheek

  “A

  fter one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” “The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God.” “The poet becomes ‘the priest of the invisible.’” Each of these statements was made by Wallace Stevens. “After I had found nothingness, I found beauty” (Stéphane Mallarmé). “We felt the possibility of a new religion, with poetic emotion as its essential quality” (Paul Valéry). “Poetry . . . is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos” (I. A. Richards). “What angel do you carry hidden in your cheek? / What perfect voice will tell the truths of wheat?” (Federico García Lorca).

  As has already been emphasized, in the immediate wake of Nietzsche’s apocalyptic pronouncements the arts were regarded as important in a way that is no longer true in our own day. This is not to say that the arts are not important now, but that they were felt to be much more important then. Without imagining ourselves back into that epoch, many of the arguments in this part of the book will lack the force they appeared to possess at the time. Something will have been lost in the historical translation.

  This was especially true of poetry. Now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, poetry is very much a minority interest, albeit of a very passionate minority. To an extent, it has always been a minority activity, but in late Victorian and Edwardian times, in the decades leading up to the First World War and during the war itself, there were those who had very big ambitions for poetry, who were convinced that it was the natural heir to religion. For figures like Mallarmé and Valéry in France, for Stefan George and his circle in Germany, for Yeats and Wallace Stevens in the Anglophone countries, poetry was “the realization of a destiny” that brought into being a second, “higher” self, which offered an “enlarged world.” As Stevens put it:

  Poetry

  Exceeding music must take the place

  Of empty heaven and its hymns.

  GOD’S ORPHANS

  But the place to start is with Mallarmé, because although he didn’t set out any specific views, in a specific work or a specific poem, about how to live without God, his entire approach shaped the way a whole raft of followers thought. Indeed, there are those, such as the historian of Symbolism Anna Balakian, who place Mallarmé on a level with Freud and Marx for the role he played in reshaping the way we think. Certainly, Mallarmé was a decisive influence on Valéry, Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens.

  Jean-Paul Sartre, in Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness (English edition 1988, French original two years earlier), places the poet centrally in the death-of-God narrative, at least in France. He explains what other influences were in operation at the time, and how they acted together on the mid-nineteenth-century sensibility. All the poets of the mid-century (in France, that is) were unbelievers, he says, though not without a nostalgia “for the reassuring symmetry of a God-ordered universe.” Many thought that the stature of poetry had been reduced—previously, a poem had been something providentially inspired: “The poet was only the trumpet; God supplied the breath. The post-Romantics, however, tended to view themselves as a ‘grotesque tin horn that echoes the discordant noises of Nature.’” They therefore established a quixotic elite with aristocratic and idealistic pretensions, and Mallarmé was “the nerve center” of this higher culture. In the days of faith, Sartre wrote, “the gift of poetry had been the sign of the natural aristocrat . . . one was a poet by divine will. Inspiration was the secular term for Grace.”1

  But science had ravaged that view; it had destroyed the hierarchy among humans by showing that all forms of existence are equal. Moreover, and possibly worse, the second law of the
rmodynamics, published by Rudolf Clausius in 1854, had demonstrated that “nothing is created or destroyed” and that the universe would ultimately end in a heat death. This confirmed for many that a perfect God did not exist in nature, nor did he have the power to create.

  Sartre therefore concluded that poets, more than anyone else, were “God’s orphans,” and even here Mallarmé stood out because his mother had died when he was five and his sister when he was fifteen, so that they “fused” together into a single absence—“absence” being the crucial term. There was, then, in Mallarmé’s life more than in anyone else’s, a “commanding absence,” or a “hovering absence,” as Sartre says elsewhere.2 For Mallarmé, says Sartre, “his mother never stops dying,” and it left a “pathological gap in his ‘being-in-the-world.’” This was important for Sartre, who saw Mallarmé as the herald of the twentieth century and someone who, “[m]ore profoundly than Nietzsche, experienced the death of God. . . . At the very time Taylor conceived of mobilizing men so as to render their work more efficient, he mobilized language so as to assure the optimal yield from Words.”I

  And this helps put Mallarmé’s achievement in context. What he sought to do, in Anna Balakian’s words, was to construct or achieve a “semantic transcendentalism to compensate for the waning of metaphysical yearnings.”4 If religions are found ineffective, as they clearly were for many people when Mallarmé was alive, “then language becomes the recourse, the mainstay . . . serving the imagination.” This is the basis for his famous dictum that the poet must no longer narrate, narrative implying continuity, a sequence that structures reality. Mallarmé sought something new, “a universe where nothing can be foreseen or determined in the natural context,” where, as Rilke would say later, “the interpreted world” (this world, here and now) usurps “the place of heaven as the site of survival in an augmented parameter for the arts.” What this means, in effect, is that the poet does not seek representation, in the traditional way, but looks instead for “fresh presentation” at the “absolute moment in time” that can never again be duplicated. More, language in the new poetic sense “becomes a place of encounter for analogies that are to the enrichment of personality what an interlining is to a simple cloth garment”; images, ideas, are implicit rather than explicit, so that the reader shares a sense of achievement with the poet.5 Implicitness was to be a feature of twentieth-century thought, as we shall see.

  Mallarmé and his enthusiastic followers saw this as a method that highlighted human resistance to spiritual annihilation, the identification (but only hinted at) of “les mots sans rides,” “words [and therefore ideas, moments] without wrinkles,” the poetic communication of “the well of meaning,” because the well of meaning is inexhaustible, and is not linear “but rather a circular vortex in perpetual motion.”6

  A core aspect of this (and it would dominate much poetry of the twentieth century) is “naming”—naming the world around us, not introspection as such but naming the “redemptive features of an unconcerned universe”; naming, as he said in a famous quote, flowers “absent from all bouquets.” Naming, Mallarmé said more plainly, “does not evoke a return of any particular contour of which we have empirical knowledge and that is specifically recognisable to us in its natural environment.” Put another way, “The perception of the imperceptible occurs not through a distorting lens but by a rational adaptation to an unexpected linguistic association”: word seepage, as he also described it. This is, in effect, what Symbolism is, the creation of an “other” world, an “interspace,” which depends only on the powers of language and brings us intensely experienced moments in real time, here and now.7 For Mallarmé, as he explicitly said, this approach would replace a theological teleology “with a much more practical vision of life on this planet.”8 For him and his followers, poetry must rid itself of its narrative and mimetic traditions to create its own fiction, its own reality, “an ontology separate from theological perceptions.”9

  This is what his poems, such as “Hérodiade” and “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” seek to do—he saw them as part of a new “cohesive mentality”: a mentality of naming, but naming not just new contours but also new mysteries, given that the world is inexhaustible and open-ended and because there is among humanity a universal desire for “the second chance,” the second chance not to waste the legacy we have inherited, not to settle just for the life we have lived thus far. The world consists, he said, of a pool of second chances, self-transcending promises we make to ourselves to struggle with fate to invent such things as “nonspecifiable spaces” or “indeterminable time perceptions,” to “divest nature of its decaying processes”; these are forms of imaginative naming that only language can bring about.

  In these ways, Mallarmé sought nothing less than to re-ground, re-form, re-shape poetry for a secular world, maintaining its ambition. A whole raft of first-rate twentieth-century poets responded to his call.

  PRAISE AND THE VERTICAL AXIS

  Before we come to them, however, we need to consider the one man who could rival Mallarmé in his ambitions for poetry, a man who very nearly changed poets from, as Shelley famously put it, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” into political demagogues. This was the German Stefan George. The word “demagogue” is not too strong.

  The eyes · narrow and only when they rule wide ·

  Were illuminated from behind as if by candles ·

  The pain from some old cruelty.

  Etched in his cheeks.

  His face fell steeply down from his dark hair

  As if in princely terraces

  Down to his chin · which only concealed

  And was full of violence · that was deadly in hate.

  Around the immobile lips there was the trace

  Of conquered temptation ·

  And gravely his brow carried

  The noble curse like a chosen jewel.

  This poem—vivid still in Robert Norton’s translation—is not by George but about him. Ernst Bertram, a poet and professor of literature and an authority on Nietzsche, called his poem “Portrait of a Master,” though he elsewhere characterized George as a “werewolf.”10 That might be going a bit far, but there is no question that George did have an extraordinary career, as extraordinary as any poet in history; he was a man who carried the ethic of “art for art’s sake” further than anyone else, and who sought energetically to replace religion with poetry.

  That extraordinary career began in the early 1890s when George—who had visited Mallarmé in Paris and had been accepted by that master’s circle—emerged as a lyric poet along the lines of the French Symbolists. Beginning with his poetry, as Norton, his biographer, says, “[t]o an extraordinary and perhaps even singular degree, George sought to submit every aspect of his life to his will. . . . His desire to control the perception others had of him was only one more form of the tendency toward radical self-invention that marked his entire life” (something that he shared with W. B. Yeats, though in a very different way).11 Paradoxically, although he was scarcely seen outside the small coterie of about thirty followers, his influence spread steadily until it encompassed the entire German nation.

  George found the Symbolists congenial, in particular their conviction that science had not improved the world but impoverished it, by reducing it to what could be measured and calculated, removing even the possibility of transcendental meaning. The Symbolists thought that nature was but a veneer, obscuring an invisible realm that was the real one; and one to which, moreover, the poet had privileged access. Norton again: “The words of a poem act, rather, as a kind of conduit, leading not to an appreciation of the things they describe, or even to a specific emotion they might evoke, but through an ultimately inexplicable alignment the poem makes possible a sort of spiritual attunement to the poet’s vision, and, ultimately, an encounter with what was variously called the ‘Idea,’ the ‘Infinite’ or the ‘Absolute.’ And it is the poet, and the poet
alone, who can supply the medium enabling this encounter to occur.”12

  At this distance, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the idea of the poet having “privileged” access to anything at all goes against the whole ethos of the post-modern, post-colonial, democratic world, but if we are to fully understand George’s aims and impact we have to think ourselves back into that time, when—as reiterated at the beginning of this chapter—art was felt to be far more important than it is now, and artists were looked upon in a different light. Four of George’s main collections of poems, for example, were published under revealing titles: Hymns, Pilgrimages, The Year of the Soul and The Star of the Covenant.

  George was intransigent in his view that art—and artists—took priority in life, even over life. This is shown nowhere more clearly than in a verse in Hymns about Fra Angelico, who in George’s view had appropriated his materials from the world he lived in: